The Berlin dub-techno icon reshuffles his trio’s lineup on its first album in six years. Alongside jazz drummer Heinrich Köbberling, Laurel Halo’s electric keys provide a surprising new focal point.

Dissent

Moritz von Oswald has never cared much for the spotlight. In the early 1990s, his duo Basic Channel, with Mark Ernestus—and their whack-a-mole-like series of aliases Maurizio, Quadrant, Cyrus, and Round One through Round Five—were notorious for their tight-lipped nature. It figures that the Berlin duo’s contribution to club music was to project a brash, ebullient genre like techno through dub, a musical style that speaks in shadows. When von Oswald and Ernestus finally got around to putting vocals in their music, in the ambient-dub group Rhythm & Sound, they remained in the background, fingers pressed to the mixing desk, while singers like Paul St. Hilaire and Cornell Campbell took the mic. Even in the trio that bears his name, von Oswald has kept his head down. In the group’s early years, all three players’ input—Max Loderbauer’s amorphous modular synthesizer, Sasu Ripatti’s metallic percussion, and von Oswald’s hazy electronic treatments—came together in a porous weave in which no one voice stood out; pull any thread, and the whole thing would come apart.
On the group’s last album, 2015’s Sounding Lines, Ripatti ceded his seat to Tony Allen, the legendary Afrobeat drummer, and not only did the group’s sound shift, but so did its center of gravity. Allen wasn’t the star, exactly, but his drumming came to the fore; whole universes of biomorphic detail sprang into being in the tiny slivers of space carved out by his crisply controlled timing. Led by Allen’s more muscular sticks, the group sloughed off some of the ambient fog of its first three studio albums, digging into meatier jazz-funk fusions. On the Trio’s first album in six years, a double lineup change reshuffles the deck yet again, and the result is a record unlike anything in the group’s catalog.
Previous albums from the Trio were not quite techno, nor dub, nor jazz; you might call them “fourth stream,” after Gunther Schuller’s so-called third-stream synthesis of jazz and classical. Dissent continues down that hybrid channel, but it is also the jazziest album the group has made. Some of that comes down to Heinrich Köbberling, who has the unenviable task of filling Allen’s seat behind the kit. (Allen, whom Brian Eno called “perhaps the greatest drummer who ever lived,” died in April 2020, at 79.) A member of the ECM-signed Julia Hülsmann Trio, Köbberling has a lighter, more glancing touch than Allen did: While von Oswald’s steady drum programming drives the groove forward, Köbberling traces its edges, toying with slight shifts in direction and intensity. In “Chapter 2,” he turns a syncopated cowbell pattern into a taut rubber band; in “Chapter 1,” a thick swirl of electric jazz that confirms von Oswald’s fondness for fusion-era Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, he focuses his energies on tight fills that tear across the perimeter like dust devils.
But the real surprise on this record is Laurel Halo. The American-born musician is one of the most versatile figures in experimental music, with a catalog encompassing otherworldly electronic pop, razor-sharp club cuts, digitally deconstructed piano etudes, and post-classical soundtrack work. But she has never sounded like this: Replacing Loderbauer’s spongy modular-synth tones with the bright colors of the Wurlitzer organ and Rhodes electric piano, she takes over the music’s tonal center, laying out blocky chords and laying into smooth, elliptical runs. The Moritz von Oswald Trio has typically preferred a tenebrous palette—charcoal, gunmetal, petrol—but in Halo’s hands, the midrange is awash in berries and opals and blood, glistening against the darkness of von Oswald’s sullen bass synths.
As on previous albums from the Trio, the overarching vibe remains murky and muddled, like a strong joint on top of a hangover on a humid, overcast day. But they cover more range than ever before, answering the stiff-jointed frug of chapters 1 and 2 (all 12 tracks are untitled) with the diaphanous ambience of “Chapter 3,” and balancing the cobwebbed dissonance of “Chapter 6” with the wide-open spaces of “Chapter 7,” in which rainforest recordings are mirrored by Köbberling’s own cicada-like castanets. And if the tempo sometimes seems reluctant to get on its feet, they slip into a sleek dance groove on “Chapter 5,” a graceful fusion of deep house and dub techno. Contrasted with the album’s preponderance of sour, coppery tastes, it’s an ice-cold glass of sparkling water.
“Chapter 5”’s supple rhythm and rich, consonant tones mark it as one of the most immediate and inviting things that von Oswald has done in years. But some of Dissent’s more abstract moments are almost as thrilling. Closing out the album with “Epilogue,” they seem to pull apart everything they’ve so carefully constructed over the preceding 71 minutes, stretching Halo’s keys like taffy over an elastic, Villalobos-esque beat of flickering hi-hats and ungainly lumps of tone. In moments like this, it becomes clear that the record’s chief pleasures are neither its rhythms nor its melodies but rather what happens in the spaces in between, where von Oswald’s dub techniques tug his players’ sounds out of their customary orbits. Tones stretch; drum hits collide. In the shadows, sparks fly.

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Sebadoh's first step from four-track aesthetics to well-crafted songs is one of the key documents of 1990s U.S. indie rock, and the original Sub Pop release is now augmented by Domino with a handful of live cuts and songs from Bubble and Scrape-era singles.

Sebadoh: Bubble and Scrape Deluxe Edition

Bubble and Scrape Deluxe Edition

Bubble and Scrape marked the point at which Sebadoh's aesthetic evolved from "quick, where's the four-track?" to reasonably well-crafted indie rock, arguably, the defining sound of that perpetually slippery genre. The band's previous full-length, the scabby, schizoid III will always have its partisans-- as will Lou Barlow and Eric Gaffney's early collections of sound collages and song scraps-- while casual fans typically gravitate to the post-Gaffney pop and polish of Bakesale. But this fourth official album, originally released in 1993, may be the band's holistic best. With actual arrangements, tracks longer than two minutes, and, partly courtesy of Bob Weston, reasonable production values (it's relative), B&S isn't as shiny and commercial (hey, I said it's relative!) as later records. Released on what was then the flannel-shirted nation's flagship label, Sub Pop, (on Domino in the UK), B&S is where Sebadoh began to sound like an actual band-- a sniping, self-mutilating three-headed hydra of a band. But a band nonetheless.

A handful of live cuts, including Necros' cover "Reject", several alternately worded album tracks, and other rarities augment Domino's deluxe re-release, along with three sets of (naturally) contradictory commentary. Fifteen years on, Barlow, Gaffney, and Jason Loewenstein are still performing their dysfunctional-family roles in the liners. Gaffney makes repeated credit-grabs; Barlow rationalizes Gaffney's exile from the band's fragile democracy; and Loewenstein offers what probably comes closest to verisimilitude in his account of Sebadoh's prickly dynamics. Welcome to the indie rock version of Rashomon.

Whatever the players' disputes, the original record is pretty fairly partitioned. Barlow is credited with seven tracks, Gaffney with five, and Loewenstein with four. Barlow's songs, though, were almost always the promotional focus (certainly after Sub Pop got the band on contract) and, for better or worse, became Sebadoh's defining sound. Album openers "Soul and Fire" and "Two Years Two Days" are prototypical: preternaturally melodic, verging on sing-song (I once heard someone refer to Barlow as a "tune machine," which exactly nails both the catchy genius and mechanical nature of his songwriting), and stacked with plangent guitar clang, flag-waving choruses, and 16-wheeler loads of romantic baggage.

Barlow named an actual track for girlfriend, then ex-girlfriend, then wife, Kathleen Bilius on III, but almost every song of this period directly or covertly negotiates that relationship's volatile power balance. Acoustic duet "Think (Let Tomorrow Bee)", boasts one of Barlow's most-affecting melodies, dexterously handling his signature subject ("Let tomorrow be/ I can't be so impatient/ Pushing every answer/ When there isn't any question"). As we learn from the reissue's extras, final studio takes emerged from much sappier drafts of high school poetry magazine fodder. The album version of "Soul and Fire" brims with self-esteem compared with Barlow's acoustic demo (one of the deluxe issue's few really intriguing add-ons). Like the most pathetic answering machine message you've ever heard, it swaps the original refrain "I think our love is coming to an end" for "call me if you ever want to see me again." The only thing missing is, "please pick up, I know you're there." Needless to say, Barlow's hurt/angry/sensitive/manipulative personality matrix worked like catnip on indie girls back in the day (not that I'd know anything about that).

He may have been reluctant to admit it, but Barlow was lucky to have a ballast in Gaffney, whose avant-garde impulses, skin-peeling screams, and unsentimental sentiments-- served up blunt and bruising on "Elixir is Zog", (Capricornnn rising!), "Emma Get Wild", and the hardcore via rockabilly of "No Way Out"-- dissipate any lingering self-pity fogging the windows. It's Loewenstein, though, who turns in the most surprising, most effective songs on B&S. "Happily Divided", a spare, dour, affectless folk-pop number is the best Barlow song Barlow never wrote. And the anthemic "Sister", with its incestuous insinuations and massive riffs, plays angry, cathartic id to "Soul and Fire"'s superego. Loewenstein also gets the last word when he pays thunderous tribute to band mascot/Northampton, Mass. scenester Mike Flood.

Plucked from the detritus of 90s independent music, B&S may noy be the generational touchstone of Slanted and Enchanted or Exile in Guyville (and if Liz was shadow boxing anything, it was exactly this strain of guy culture), but relegating it to the Indie Rock Era nostalgia ghetto, where a band's "cred" usually dictated the reception of its records isn't fair, either. These songs hold up just fine to repeated plays, particularly if you stack them next to today's Mac-enabled faux-low-fi. And if the bonuses to this reissue aren't exactly revelatory, the original album remains a critical document in the evolution of underground DIY. Don't listen to it for its historical value, though; listen to it because it's awesome.


The indie band’s remarkably self-assured 1999 debut showed them already in possession of the wry, morbid sensibility that would define them.

Rilo Kiley

Before she was one of the most beloved singer-songwriters of her era, Jenny Lewis was best known for her role as redhead girl scout Hannah Nefler in the 1989 film Troop Beverly Hills. While she was able to indulge in some of the trappings of child stardom, Lewis’ youth was anything but glamorous: She carried an immense pressure as her family’s breadwinner, which was made all the more difficult by her mother’s struggles with addiction. In the mid-’90s, when a teenage Lewis met Blake Sennett, a fellow young actor with credits on Salute Your Shorts and Boy Meets World, they recognized each other as kindred spirits, both disillusioned with showbiz and its associated pressures. “I was incredibly depressed, having grown up doing one thing and suddenly finding myself not interested in that,” Lewis told Spin in 2007. “I really had no idea what I was going to do with my life.”
For both Lewis and Sennett, music was an opportunity to explore creative autonomy; for the first time, they were pursuing their own visions rather than acting out someone else's dreams. (As Lewis’ sister recently told Pitchfork, “I think she didn’t want to be saying other people’s words anymore.”) Lewis and Sennett sat down to write songs together and soon were playing casual shows in their friends’ living rooms; later, they started dating. Somewhere along the way, the band formalized under the name Rilo Kiley. Sennett recruited his high school buddy Pierre “Duke” de Reeder to play bass and Dave Rock to play drums, a role that Jason Boesel later settled into.
In January 1998, Rilo Kiley played their first show at a Silverlake nightclub called Spaceland. If they were nervous, it didn’t show. “Between songs they were charming, smart and funny,” recalls The Kids in the Hall comedian Dave Foley, who happened to catch the set. “During songs they were brilliant.” Smitten, he offered to pay for a demo recording, which the band accepted. Many of the songs from the Foley-funded session would go on to form Rilo Kiley’s self-titled 1999 debut (later released with a slightly altered tracklist as The Initial Friend EP).
For two songwriters who grew up surrounded by Hollywood fakery, Sennett and Lewis’ songwriting is immediately, remarkably unselfconscious. Their twangy indie rock songs avoid flowery language in favor of conversational observations and winking wordplay. “I should’ve known/With a boy like you/Your middle name is always/I’d always love you,” Lewis swoons on a synth-pop ditty called—obviously—“Always.” Same deal with “I’ll be in your car/I locked the keys in your car/I’ll be in your car for now” off “85.” Perhaps there are more poetic ways of expressing these sentiments—of fateful infatuation, of resolve—but the directness of Rilo Kiley’s storytelling aims straight for the heart.
Lewis’ emotional candor, along with the band’s association with Conor Oberst and Omaha label Saddle Creek, have led some to describe Rilo Kiley as emo, a genre most commonly linked to whiny, vaguely ill-looking white boys. There are arguments to be made for both sides of the emo-or-aren’t-they question, but it is incontestable that Lewis’ capacity for vulnerability spoke to countless young women. Her expressions of sadness could take many shapes—wry, morbid, exhausted—but were always excruciatingly self-aware and sharp. “I’ve been a mess for some time now/I get what I deserve,” Lewis sings on “85.” “For someone who leaves a lot behind/I can do better.” On the pop-punk-lite “Glendora,” Lewis describes her own exploitation at the hands of a cruel boy who uses her for sex and a distraction from suburban malaise. “You know I always like to play the victim,” she sings plainly. “And would you fuck me? Because I’d fuck me.” It’s a disarming line, and “Glendora” lays the contradictions of womanhood out on the table, a whole bundle of flaws and strengths tied up in one complicated package. “When I sit down to write a song, there is no filter,” Lewis told ELLE years later. “I’m not trying to write for anyone or anything specifically. It’s just trying to capture a little piece of your soul—even if it’s a really ugly part.”
Though Rilo Kiley is rooted in indie rock, it’s clear that the band had not yet found their sound. The Sennett-led cut “Asshole” is broken up by turntable scratching and samples while Lewis straight-up yodels on “Gravity.” On “Teenage Love Song,” an aching Patsy Cline-indebted ballad, Lewis two-steps her way towards the tortured melodrama of a broken heart. “Oh Davey, why did you leave me/All alone when we went all the way?” she belts like a gale-force wind roaring through Nashville. “But maybe someday Davey/We’ll be together for more than a day.”
And then there’s “The Frug.” Despite the fact that they were unsigned, Rilo Kiley’s music made its way into the hands of director Morgan J. Freeman, who included two of the band’s songs in his 1998 film Desert Blue. Freeman’s video for “The Frug” landed the band on MTV’s alternative program 120 Minutes. It was a bit weird for everyone. As Sennett recalled in 2001, “It’s pretty random to see the most independent of independent bands on MTV.” Filled with handclaps and doo-wop harmonies, “The Frug” is one of Rilo Kiley’s sugariest songs and is unlike anything else on Rilo Kiley. As the song patiently explains, Lewis can do the Frug. She can also do the Robocop and the Freddie. She cannot do the Smurf. But this groovy laundry list gives way to a declaration of strength and empowerment: “I can take my clothes off/I cannot fall in love/You will never see my eyes/I will not call you back.”
After the release of Rilo Kiley—sold exclusively at their shows—the band spent the next few years searching for a label before signing with Seattle’s Barsuk and releasing their proper debut, 2001’s Take Offs and Landings. That same year, Lewis and Sennett split and songwriting responsibilities started to shift over to Lewis. Rilo Kiley’s final record and major-label debut, the sleek and divisive Under the Blacklight, came out in 2007. By that point, Lewis and Sennett were both branching out with side projects (Lewis’ solo work, Sennett’s band the Elected) and interviews with the group from that time suggest that Lewis’ independent success drove something of a wedge between the pair. When asked about the status of Rilo Kiley in 2011, Sennett said that if the band were a human, “he’s probably laying on his back in a morgue with a tag on his toe.” A few years later, Lewis drove the final nail into the coffin and confirmed that Rilo Kiley was no more. Since then, with only a 2013 rarities set to tide fans over, the band has existed as a treasured manifesto on how to live a truthful, if imperfect, life. If the breakup was a song, Lewis would probably point out that it was better that way.

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The Norwegian trumpeter’s ninth album feels like an opaque and ambient jazz album you can walk right into. Truly, his instrument always seems on the verge of speaking.

Towards Language

Arve Henriksen makes jazz for people who like ambient music. This might sound like an unintentional insult—the Norwegian trumpeter is well trained and celebrated in jazz circles, and he often performs among Scandinavia’s most prominent younger players, such as Christian Wallumrød—but it’s also hard to deny. Towards Language, Henriksen’s ninth album under his own name, begins with a slumbrous murmur of bass and an unfurling trumpet theme, and this mesmeric register never wavers throughout the album. The melancholy saunter of Henriksen’s lines is isolated and sculpted by glimmering, whirring atmospheres full of emptiness and portent. Testing different ways to contrast eloquent material and enigmatic medium, the record plays like some lost collaboration between Wynton Marsalis and Brian Eno circa Ambient 4: On Land.
Henriksen’s long association with free-improv supergroup Supersilent and its influential label, Rune Grammofon, were his gateways to esteem in circles beyond jazz. But he has earned his wider attention with a trumpet tone so communicative it’s almost psychic, which he has described as being modeled on the breathy, insinuating timbre of a wooden flute. *Towards Language *would be the perfect album title imaginable for Henriksen if he hadn’t already made one called Chiaroscuro. Sometimes augmented by his ethereal vocalizations, his instrument always seems on the verge of speaking, writing a smoky legato calligraphy on the air. If the language is obscure, the emotions are instantly legible—romantic seclusion, piercing beauty, and a steadfast determination.
Henriksen is joined by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré, two old friends who’ve appeared on some of his greatest albums (Chiaroscuro, Cartography, Places of Worship), as well as the ECM-affiliated jazz guitarist Eivind Aarset. Together they gin up brooding, minimalist chamber music in which the simplest melodies whisper of unfathomable depths of feeling. The outstanding “Groundswell” is a dusky jungle seething with hidden birds and snakes, slow trap claps, and lapping waves of mysterious tonality, before Henriksen fills it up with his leafy curlicues and looping vines. “Demarcation Line” is a showpiece for his signature physics, how he swoons from interval to interval and bends pitches so sweetly it almost cuts.
*Towards Language *is also infused with a deep sense of history, like an excavation standing open in layers. It’s both personal—the atmosphere of “Hibernal” is tuned by a rusty harbor-bell clank, a device heard as far back as 2007’s Strjon, which suits Henriksen’s noir-ish style so well—and cultural. Album closer “Paridae,” turns a traditional song in the Kven language of Henriksen’s ancestral northern Norway (sung by Anna Maria Friman of Trio Mediaeval) into a waterfall leading to another world. Henriksen creates the feeling of an opaque jazz album you can walk right into, all timbre and feel instead of time and modality, the edges and angles sublimated into aching curves. You don’t need to be able to identify a head melody or count off arcane rhythms, but only to know the way you feel when you see fog slowly seeping through a valley, or smoke curling off a cigarette in the lonesome glow of a streetlight.


Stereolab's third album, the hardest-rocking and most hypnotic music the band ever set to tape, is the closest they came to replicating the jet-engine roar of their live shows.

Mars Audiac Quintet

The sound is a long straight desert road. It’s a nursery rhyme that can bench press a city bus. It is a hundred-gallon jar of honey, a diamond-tipped jackhammer, a mouthful of pyrite Pop Rocks. Stereolab’s early records had toyed with all sorts of humble stuff—jangling guitars and poky home organs, French yé-yé and 1960s kitsch—but on 1994’s Mars Audiac Quintet, they achieved something closer to transubstantiation, converting familiar materials into something sublime.
What’s funny is that on paper, at least, they had barely altered their formula. As they had since the beginning, Stereolab drew liberally from Neu!’s monochord chug and motorik pulse, Suicide’s coruscating Farfisa buzz, and the Velvet Underground’s holy modal drone, topping it all with sweet, sing-song vocal harmonies descended straight from ’60s bubblegum pop. But on Mars Audiac Quintet, those materials came together in a synesthete’s dream, a perfect merger of color and heft—a sound so chunky, so tangible, you could practically feel it in the palm of your hand.
Stereolab—the brain trust of Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier, surrounded by a fluctuating cast of collaborators (on Mars Audiac Quintet, they were actually a sextet assisted by a handful of studio musicians)—had surfed into the popular consciousness atop the easy-listening revival’s cresting wave. Their first few EPs and debut LP, Peng!, infused overdriven indie pop with mid-century camp and moon-shot optimism; by 1996’s John McEntire-produced Emperor Tomato Ketchup, they would begin pushing into new frontiers, twisting their sound into odd time signatures and exploring increasingly intricate arrangements. Dots and Loops, widely considered their masterpiece, is the pinnacle of their mature phase; when most people think of Stereolab, that record’s kinks and quirks are probably what first come to mind. Mars Audiac Quintet marked the end of their early years, the triumphant capstone to the run of albums stretching through Peng!, the singles comp Switched On, and Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements. Mars Audiac Quintet is the hardest-rocking music Stereolab ever set to tape; it is the closest they ever came to replicating the jet-engine roar of their live shows.
It is also their most hypnotic record, and there is no contradiction in that. Like Neu! and the Velvets before them, Stereolab taught a new generation the power of hammering away at the same chord until sparks flew and stones bled. “We’re about repetition, a riff, a chord, two or three notes going round and round,” Gane told Melody Maker in 1991. The goal, said Sadier, was “the trance.” On Mars Audiac Quintet, they drop straight into it, like a hypnotist snapping his fingers; the zone-out is practically instantaneous. “Three-Dee Melodie” is just three chords, one-note bassline, and methodical drumbeat; the voices of Sadier and Mary Hansen—the group’s second vocalist from 1992 until 2002, when she was killed cycling in London—circle each other in graceful counterpoint. Yet within those tight quarters, something like infinity opens up.
Stereolab had been playing with similar ideas for a while; on the Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements centerpiece “Jenny Ondioline,” they had drawn out their trance-inducing churn into 18 minutes of cotton-candy oblivion. But there’s something newly enveloping about the sound of “Three-Dee Melodie,” and the rest of Mars Audiac Quintet, that stands apart. Those bright, buzzing organs and Moogs, with their endless stacks of overtones, loom like gleaming skyscrapers; Andy Ramsay’s drum fills map a labyrinthine path atop the linear groove, a succession of trap doors and detours that always lead back into that endless tunnel.
The structure of the album is itself often maze-like; for all the captivating stasis of their most repetitive songs, they are also fond of sideways feints. The Neu!-inspired “Nihilist Assault Group” lays down four minutes of metronomic pulse and shimmer, stumbles across a false ending of gurgling oscillators, and then slips back into a groove that sounds nearly identical to the original—just ever so slightly different, as though you’d been abducted by aliens and deposited in an almost perfect simulation. Something similar happens on “Outer Accelerator,” another kraut-like standout, as the song abruptly fades into a wah-wah-streaked freakout jam unrelated to what preceded it, but complementary nonetheless. (Yo La Tengo fans may recognize the bassline here for its reappearance in Yo La Tengo’s “Moby Octopad”; given that the two bands toured together in 1995, it’s not hard to imagine that the latter song is an homage to the former.)
In liner notes to Mars Audiac Quintet’s recent remasters, Gane says that the original idea for the album was for every track to have exactly the same, barely modulating three-chord shape—“actually a single chord with two finger movements on top”—though the idea ran out of steam after five songs. Still, they got plenty of mileage out of it. “Transona Five” lumbers like one of T. Rex’s glam-rock stompers, while the Steve Reich-inspired “Anamorphose” puts Sean O’Hagan’s horn arrangements to spellbinding use, spinning off counterpoint after counterpoint and conjuring the interlocking gears of a perpetual motion machine.
Many of the album’s best songs—“Wow and Flutter,” “Anamorphose,” “Nihilist Assault Group,” “Outer Accelerator”—capture this sort of energy, stamping out recurring patterns with near-industrial precision. (Perhaps it’s not surprising that Gane was a Throbbing Gristle fan; rather than that group’s smokestacks and death camps, though, Stereolab’s Technicolor vision of heavy industry hews closer to the fanciful machinery of Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory.) What Stereolab held in common with their post-rock peers was the subversion of rock’s traditional hierarchies: The guitar is demoted from its usual lead role and relegated to texture and timekeeping; Moog and Farfisa ooze to the foreground, not so much hogging the spotlight as flooding the whole damn stage; the bass, pushed high in the mix, is less part of the rhythm section than a kind of thickening agent to hold it all together.
Even Sadier’s lead vocals resist sounding like rock vocals. If the rock canon imagines its singers as heroic figures, their voices like torches leading bravely onward, Sadier refused to play that role; her high, cool voice is more like a light rising from within her bandmates’ protective exoskeleton, suffusing it all in soft glow. Twinned with Hansen’s often wordless la-di-das, her singing was frequently all but indecipherable. The liberties she took with phrasing (singing “Need to examine/Uncritical times,” she stressed the final syllable of “examine” and drew out a long “i” sound to rhyme with “time”) could leave listeners without a lyric sheet adrift. But her Marxist critique is as trenchant as ever on Mars Audiac Quintet, and every now and then a refrain will float to the surface (“We can’t avoid dying”), a lullaby to raise the hairs on your neck.
In a voice about as threatening as strawberry milk, Sadier sings of military inscription, moral panics, censorship, autocracy; many of her songs seem even more timely now than they did then. “Transporte Sans Bouger” is a prescient look at the psychic damage wreaked by the internet, long before anyone had dreamed of social media; “Outer Accelerator” is directly applicable to the sorry state of representative democracy in 2019. And “Ping Pong” is as perfect a pop song about capitalism and the military-industrial complex that you will ever hear, with a refrain so catchy it can inspire the unlikeliest of singalongs:

Bigger slump and bigger wars
And a smaller recovery
Huger slump and greater wars
And a shallower recovery

A quarter-century later, Stereolab’s fatalistic protest music looks to have been remarkably on the nose. But what Mars Audiac Quintet offered was more important than a simple political program. It made good on the promise of alternative music in unusually physical terms, using repetition and volume as architectural tools to construct songs that doubled as a kind of refuge. The title “Transporte Sans Bouger” translates as “Traveling Without Moving,” and in the context of the song, it refers to the disquieting specter of telepresence, to a “sickness of the senses” where no one knows their neighbor and loneliness is a pandemic. You don’t need to be extremely online to feel the familiar force of that observation today, when there are millions more people online than in 1994. (In the crushing isolation sweepstakes, the people of the Bill Clinton/John Major years had it relatively easy.) But Stereolab’s first landmark album facilitates another kind of traveling without moving: a whirlwind sound that could—and still can, and does—wrap you up and carry you away.

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On their second full-length, the Hudson duo continue to skate their own electric rail between prog and post-punk. A great sense of speed and combustion thrums through the music, which is offset by Arone Dyer's engaging, limber vocal performance.

General Dome

Being on the Dessner brothers' label helped Buke and Gase's 2010 debut Riposte get around, but even more intriguing was the appealing story built into the scrambled music. Beyond their much talked-about modified instruments, they forswore looping pedals at a time when everyone was pretty sick of looping pedals, putting emphasis on their creative chops. Their names were Arone and Aron, for god's sake. You couldn't dream up a more tempting lede, and it was covered to death by the time of the transitional Function Falls EP, where "Gass" was respelled for phonetic clarity. Their second full-length album, General Dome, feels like a testing ground to see whether Buke and Gase have the aptitude to hold that attention.
They continue to skate their own electric rail between the decorations of prog rock and the cold metallic contours of post-punk. The higher-voiced buke still mainly sings nervy, leaping leads while the snarling gase drives the low end. But some circumstantial changes have had a surprisingly meaningful impact. After Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York in 2011, Dyer took up motorcycling and replaced her wooden buke with a heavy-duty one made of salvaged automotive steel. Consequently, a new sense of speed and combustion thrums through the music. Majestic opener "Houdini Crush" is like a huge engine revving up, then riding wisps of shapely ambient tone. It's intricately structured, with cryptic moods contained in a shuddering shoegaze framework. But it feels like a pop song thanks to Dyer's engaging vocal performance. She can swing limberly between a Karen O yelp and a huskier croon, sounding just like Victoria Legrand when she breathes extra syllables through the word "inside."
Most of Buke and Gase's songs are built this way-- incidents and gestures swirling around a theme, above an unstable thud. They're difficult to navigate. Songs peak early to make way for extended elaborations, like the scratchy funk guitar lurching from the jungle rhythms of the title track, mighty and unresolved. It doesn't end; the big gears just catch and whir to a halt as if suddenly unplugged. The same thing happens at the end of "Hard Times", where their pointed interplay is suddenly sweetened as the buke echoes the vocal line. That sweetness is at odds with the violence and depravity that flickers discreetly through the lyrics, which are often deformed by Dyer's rubbery enunciation. The imagery can be compelling or perplexing if you focus on it, but the curious silhouette of her voice commands more attention.
Finely wrought moments are plentiful: Check out when Dyer's voice seamlessly rounds off into a gase lead on the explosively bouncy "Hiccup", or when the blocky descent of "Split Like a Lip, No Blood on the Beard" slips into a dreamy skid, like a car losing traction on ice. But no amount of ingenuity on the duo's part can keep their limited palette from feeling constricted by the end. The bare-bones foot percussion, though resourceful, levels many songs to the same oblivious stomp. The thrilling onward surge of the melodies gradually comes to seem like a search for some vital mortar, a place to alight other than the grungy groove. My ears just get worn out by all the airless staccato, longing for more open chords or smooth continuous tones. But overall, General Dome's rewards are equal to its considerable demands, proving that there's more to Buke and Gase than a good story.


The UK producer arranges classic dance tropes into a roadmap of euphoric self-actualization, creating some of the year’s giddiest, most assured electronic music.

For You

All the best club music rests on the thrill of combustion. Fusing opposing elements and watching sparks fly is what keeps dance culture alive and kicking today, even when there appears to be limited fresh ground to break. London-based, Doncaster-born India Jordan is, alongside compatriots Finn and Anz, part of a new alliance of DJ-producers who can zip between any number of rave-ish genres without blinking. Having grown up in South Yorkshire on the most x-treme fare clubland had to offer, that sense of kinesis never left Jordan, even as the 29-year-old producer siphons and smooths it into different avenues. For You, their second EP, is a testament to this instinct, fusing drum’n’bass, filter disco, breakbeat, and reflecting-pool synth shimmer into some of the giddiest, most assured electronic music of 2020.
India Jordan initially established themself on the British club circuit as a promoter of ambient nights and one-time president of Hull University’s DJ Society. 2019’s DNT STP MY LV was their first full record, though it was rinsed so hard by tastemaker jocks that it felt happily lived in by the time the year wound to a close. Jordan’s song titles typically speak to an act of movement, forever shuffling, warping, leaving, and traveling through. For You shifts along the axis, now concerned with arriving and becoming. It is an overtly queer record, even if it doesn’t explode with pride on the surface. The “you” in the title refers to Jordan; rooted and at peace in inclusive East London, they came out as nonbinary just before Christmas last year—revealed on Instagram with a chipper, quintessentially Yorkshire sense of humor—and present themself as a work in progress.
Jordan makes this lack of fixed definition work to their advantage. The opulent flourish of French touch and the chemical twang of drum’n’bass usually stand in high contrast to one another, but within the EP, Jordan makes them feel like two sides of the same rhapsodic coin. For You’s middle tracks are the hardest to throw a genre lasso around, yet might make the handiest transition tools in a DJ’s hands. Both glide forward as if carried by a jetstream, linear in structure though anything but trad in construction. “Rave City” is a soup of subdued breaks and smeared effects that suggest a dancefloor could be nearby while feeling wholly apart from it. The arpeggiated ripples on “Emotional Melodical” hit like a wonderful rainbow refracting off a chandelier, or taking a trip to the aquarium on acid.
Jordan allows moments of earned catharsis at the close. The headstrong “Dear Nan King” is a thank you to Tipping the Velvet, a tale of female lovers that drew complaints from puritanical Middle England when broadcast by the BBC in the 2000s. Twenty years removed, Jordan threads samples from the TV drama that sparked their sexual awakening through raging Reese basslines and thunderclap percussion, life and death snare-rushing before their eyes. And on the soaring “Westbourne Avenue,” Jordan casts back to student days in Hull, a place where friendships were formed but gates were guarded by recalcitrant men in the D&B scene. The song is a composite of the EP’s various moods, pummelling and beautiful, reaching for the ecstatic while being cleansed by a flamethrower.
The passion in Jordan’s music pays off most spectacularly on the opening one-two punch, a pair that would demand inclusion on any rundown of filter house’s greatest hits. They recall the glory era when Alan Braxe & Fred Falke, Joey Negro, and Bob Sinclar ruled the MTV Dance playlists and charts alike. “I’m Waiting (Just 4 U)” comes first, a ritzy whirl of mirror balls and chromatic LEDs. It elegantly tees up “For You,” an accelerated second stage which utilizes the same vocal sample as its predecessor—this time clipped, mechanical and insistent. We’re cruising now: The tension ratchets as “for” and “you” bounce back and forth, energy increasingly chaotic, sweet harmony in the thrum of human bodies. A filter sweep draws back the velvet curtain and reveals that the soft disco essence of “I’m Waiting” sample was resting there inside this tougher, more technoid track all along, before a kick thumps in and pandemonium breaks loose. Taken together, the songs are proof that you don’t need a star budget to make Stardust-sized bangers.
For You arrives with live events in suspended animation, a quirk of fate that might stymie its evident crossover potential. These six tunes should be perfect fodder for long summer nights that stretch ’til dawn, but will instead be judged soberly and with appropriate care, rather than becoming fond memories of an ecstasy honeymoon. For a roadmap of self-actualization, perhaps this is no bad thing—and when we’re released back into the wild, these songs will feel all the more celebratory. The animating idea behind For You is that the music is India Jordan’s gift to themself. The fun part is, it lifts the rest of us too.


With throwback beats and baroque pop embellishments, J. Lo’s first solo album in 10 years chronicles a real-life fairy tale that threatens to overpower the music.

This Is Me…Now

Did you hear about the two Hollywood megastars who got engaged, broke up in the shadow of a notorious workplace accident, and then, 20 years and several partners later, finally got hitched? If you somehow missed it, Jennifer Lopez is going to tell you in detail. This Is Me…Now, her first solo album in 10 years, is a coda to 2002’s This Is Me…Then, her third most commercially successful album. Lopez co-wrote and released that record amid the first iteration of her high-profile relationship with handsome Bostonian Ben Affleck. This Is Me…Now is the culmination of Bennifer, the sequel, irresistible to tabloids and hopeless romantics, maybe in that order. “When I was a girl they’d ask me what I’d be/A woman in love is what I grew up wantin’ to be,” Lopez sings, rather depressingly, on the title track.
The album, and its accompanying $20 million movie, unfolds like one of J.Lo’s romcoms: Two former lovers, adrift, spend years searching for the right person, before reuniting with the wisdom of age and experience. The movie loosely follows the Taíno legend of Alida, the daughter of a Taíno chief who falls in forbidden love with Taroo, a Carib boy, on the eve of her arranged marriage; the god Yukiyú turns them into a red flower and a hummingbird, respectively. (The light pop joint “Hummingbird” bisects the album, though it doesn’t quite engage the mythology enough to be readily meaningful.) J.Lo is lovestruck as fuck, this album posits, though it is self-aware about its melodrama. “Mad in Love,” a mid-tempo R&B track, opens with a flute and string section out of a 1950s romance, nodding to This Is Me…Now’s Hollywood love story. Otherworldly harps, celestas, and violins weave through beats and production of a mid-2000s vintage, supplying a baroque quality that embellishes J.Lo’s own lovelorn legend.
Across eight previous studio albums, a cache of hits like 2001’s “I’m Real” and 2011’s “On the Floor,” a Super Bowl performance and a presidential inauguration, J.Lo’s voice is notoriously serviceable, airy and light with a very specific range. A major appeal of her pop stardom is that the one-time Fly Girl is consistently dazzling on the dancefloor and, at 54, she appears athletic, taut, cool as ever. She’s advanced her music career through will and sheer charisma, of which she has gobs—we’re talking about a woman who had many of us out here wearing newsboy caps and cargo knickers in the early ’00s. She is an all-around entertainer, a fashion icon, and an often-great actor to boot. (Most will cite Hustlers, Selena, and Out of Sight; I’ll agree with J.Lo that she deserved an Oscar nod for El Cantante.) And so the thinness of the voice has often been beside the point, if not a boon to her early career—a stand-in for her Bronx regularness on tracks like “Jenny From the Block.”
What Lopez has had in abundance, though, is terrific hooks: “All I Have,” “Still,” and the cultural touchstone (complete with Ben cameo) “Jenny,” from This Is Me… Then. She serves some of that here, too: “To Be Yours” includes one of Now’s catchier hooks, with J.Lo asserting her love in a chatty alto. “not.going.anywhere.” falls precisely within her pop oeuvre, light and primed for choreo, with a chill rap interlude and a purposeful throwback beat. (And, in case you forgot who this album is about, an intro by Ben Affleck.) Her voice is stronger than ever, honed on a succession of recent pop-reggaeton singles like “Cambia al Paso” and “Pa Ti,” though those styles are sorely missed on Now (even though everyone knows Ben speaks Spanish!). So “This Time Around” stands out for its synth marimbas and trunk-slapping woofers, and for the moment when the Nuyorican we know and love jumps out: “This time around, we gon’ make it real/We don’t give a fuck ’bout how they feel,” she sings vehemently.
This Is Me…Now is a multimedia memoir, meant to explore Lopez’s past relationship difficulties (“Rebound,” “Broken Like Me”) but more prominently displaying her fairy-tale perfect ending. If your friend were doing this, you might sit them down for a serious chat; evidently some of Lopez’s friends did. No detail is spared, if embellished. Do you need to know that the couple changed into their wedding outfits in the Vegas chapel bathroom? “Midnight Trip to Vegas” has you covered with a Chris Isaak sample and a lute, a sound that lands somewhere between Final Fantasy VII and an unexpectedly popping Renaissance Faire. “Dear Ben, Pt. II,” co-written by Raye, improves on the original with a grounded harp and even a little vibrato. I guess if your business is already on blast, there’s no harm in globally projecting your album-length love letter to your husband, but after a certain point the specificity is entirely too much. The lyric “said you love my body but it’s still my face” is cute; by the time she sings “slippin’ inside of me” on “Greatest Love Story Never Told,” the vivid imagery it conjures is unfortunately permanent.
That’s This Is Me…Now’s biggest issue: the narrative threatens to, and does, overtake the music. While the songs might be fun and even better with choreography, the Disney Princess angle becomes tiresome, and then cloying, especially from a woman who has notoriously worked her ass off to achieve her level of renown. “Hearts and Flowers” tries to mitigate that—it’s a boom-bap song about her dedication to the grind that somewhat awkwardly calls back to “Jenny From the Block”—but as her childhood dream apparently forecast, being in love with Ben Affleck is the primary focus. As a synergistic mythmaking effort, the album is certainly doing its job; as music to soundtrack your actual life, well, it’s about time lute pop got its shine.


A stirring composite of choral hymns, progressive rock, and free jazz, the Brooklyn composer’s suite presents a fluid cycle of matter as sound.

Sediments We Move

Before composing the seven-part suite Sediments We Move, Charlotte Greve mapped it out. The German-born, Brooklyn-based composer, singer, and saxophonist scribbled and sketched shapes, schematics, and musical charts. She plotted the album song-by-song, listing out each track’s core instruments, audible accents, and “tempo/vibe.” In her stack of notes and doodles, Greve pursued a philosophy of sediment, attempting to translate its various physical states into musical composition. Recorded with Greve’s band Wood River and the Berlin choir Cantus Domus, Sediments We Move carries an air of obsession, every measure committed to the theme.
By definition, sediment is matter transported by wind or water and deposited back to earth. Over time, it may accumulate on the ocean floor, or consolidate into microscopic tiers of rock. Greve is intrigued by these phases, as well as the incremental change between them. She conveys the transformation with fluctuating tempos and a blend of genres. A stirring composite of choral hymns, progressive rock, and free jazz, Sediments We Move is rich in detail but never overwrought. Instead, it presents a fluid cycle of matter as sound: building, dissipating, and crystalizing once again.
Greve was driven by the reality that any object is a collection of particles, capable of gathering and dispersing. She considered the construct of family: how it is a whole, but also made up of interconnected yet individual members. In conversations with her grandmother, she noted the intergenerational similarities between relatives. Greve eventually enlisted her older brother, Julius Greve, to pen lyrics for Sediments We Move, maintaining the theme of family in a literal sense. The knowledge of this process makes the songs more tactile. You can imagine their construction—experience the layers as they accumulate, like the sediments that inspired Greve.
Her interpretation of the sedimentary process is formal; though many of the instrumental parts are structurally simple, they layer to form grand obelisks of sound. Remarkably, the album credits list only five types of instruments: saxophone, synthesizer, guitar, bass, and drums. Greve’s lithe voice and alto often curve along the surface, but Cantus Domus’ massive, spectral melodies provide the most drama. The choir constantly changes shape: On “Part IV,” their vowels are elongated and their frictionless harmonies glide through the atmosphere. Greve’s saxophone ripples in the foreground, anchoring their voices to terra firma. On “Part V,” the choir fractures into dizzying, staccato measures, their incessant “la la las” buzzing like hornets. Neither state is permanent; what once was rock will again become silt.
Sediments We Move is more interested in transition than discrete forms. “Think of layers as always present but not always visible in their entirety,” Greve wrote on one page of her notebook. At times, the album’s faint layers are masked by heartier sounds: jagged guitar, pummeling drums, synthesizer sheen. But occasionally, Greve peels back these elements to reveal underlying activity. Toward the end of “Part III,” the choir and rhythm section become sluggish and eventually cut out altogether. What’s left is a nest of whispers, rustling like restless insects. Have they been there all along, hissing obscure messages? The words are only intelligible with the aid of a lyric sheet: “Molten crust, inner core, a salted rain drop.” The consonants stack up, light and crisp. Even Greve’s leanest passages contain strata to sift through.
The album completes its own cycle: The first and final parts are carried by the divine melodies of Cantus Domus. In “Part I,” the sopranos sing: “The sediment forms, no matter what, what matters….” (The repetition of the word “matter” feels like an inside joke.) At the end of “Part VI,” male vocalists join in a velvety lower register: “As sediments, we move,” they repeat. It’s as if the same particles have drifted down the album and, in this low, tranquil place, come momentarily to rest.

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Hyperdub 10.2 represents the second of four compilations documenting the label's first decade, focusing on the label's self-professed R&B offerings. Tracks from Burial, the late DJ Rashad, Jessy Lanza, and Kode9 make appearances, as does Ghostface Killah.

Hyperdub 10.2

One of the most persistent trends to emerge from the dubstep diaspora has been a growing interest with American R&B—specifically, the turn-of-century eccentricities turned in by Timbaland, the Neptunes, and their acolytes. It was always in the style's DNA: dubstep forebears and 2-step monkey-patched glossy house tunes, with the type of ornate syncopations that Timbaland improbably turned into chart-topping pop. Somewhat inevitably, the interest in the productions fostered interest in the vocalists. Zomby's Aaliyah-jacking "Float", from 2008, is one of the earlier examples, and Jacques Greene's "Another Girl" seemed to put a point on the vogue in early 2011.
Hyperdub, intentionally or not, has served as one incubator of this style in its admirable quest to foster urban club music. Hyperdub 10.2 represents the second of four compilations documenting the label's first decade (but largely displaying its most recent five years). Focusing on the label's self-professed R&B offerings (the first volume having showcased the label's club music), 10.2 mixes new offerings from Kode9, Cooly G, and Jessy Lanza with older tracks from Burial, DJ Rashad, and Terror Danjah. A mixed bag, stylistically, 10.2's tracks are bound by rustling vocals, lights-low tempos, and sultry arrangements.
Having grown fond of sampling vocals from R&B divas, the UK underground took the next logical step and began singing themselves. Acts like Katy B and AlunaGeorge represent a generation for whom Aaliyah and Amerie typify pop normalcy, a generation who watched the avant-garde crystalize into the mainstream. So there are large swaths of 10.2 that, in 2014 (or, frankly, 2004), scan as fairly catholic takes on minimal, electro R&B.
This is where the material falters, at once hewing too closely to R&B's sonic template while pulling its emotional punches. Cooly G's "Obsessed" details an infatuation but censors itself: "Looking at me/ Watching me/ Wanna f--- me". Jessy Lanza's "5785021" turns a phone number into a chorus, tightroping the line between coy and corny. On tracks such as Terror Danjah's "You Make Me Feel" and Morgan Zarate's "Pusher Taker", the vocal performances struggle to keep pace with the tricky, intriguing productions. Too often, dubby reflections and breathy whispering are substituted for more traditional melisma and inflection; the effect isn't seduction, but apprehension.
10.2 fares better when it engages R&B on more ephemeral terms. Burial's inky transmissions dissolve the late-night, call-in loneliness of Quiet Storm R&B. The Inga Copeland tracks that bookend the album—first with Dean Blunt and then Kode9—are intoxicating, her flatlining, anti-diva voice bristling against seasick arrangements, the finest marriage of the label's avant-garde instincts with pop forms. DJ Rashad's "Only One" skirts the R&B conversation entirely: it's the rare footwork track that trades freneticism for tenderness. DVA's "Just Vybe" features Fatima, the best, most idiosyncratic singer on 10.2; she offers up a tart melody that feels like a proper UK take on welterweight R&B. Its charm exposes how labored and earnest much of 10.2 is.
Electronic music's interest in R&B mirrors a more general trend in underground music, one that has recently extended further into the past, touching most recently on Jam & Lewis' glassy funk (Kelela's Cut 4 Me mixtape being the most prominent example). But it's safe to say that, as yet, the songwriting and vocal components of the genre have failed to inspire the same unbridled creativity as the productions. Hyperdub's relationship to the form is less developed and less guided than their stewardship of footwork or UK club music, and it leaves 10.2 in the lurch, lacking clear purpose. At times it feels like dabbling, on the part of both the label and the artists (see Ghostface's bolted-on guest appearance on Morgan Zarate's "Sticks & Stones"). There's enough flair on 10.2 to justify further exploration, but it's premature to label this "future R&B" when its participants seem so uneasy with the genre's past.


The debut album from the Midwestern pow wow singer is arresting and unruly, centering his remarkable voice amid blasts of digital distortion, field recordings, and unrelenting rhythms.

Niineta

“No chants,” the title of the fierce and propulsive fifth track on Joe Rainey’s debut album Niineta, carries a double meaning. On one hand, it can be interpreted as a defensive posture, taken on behalf of pow wow singers like him against any outsider who might paint their musical tradition as simplistic by labeling it “chanting” as opposed to singing. But the phrase also has a more playful origin—adopted as a homonym, Rainey has said, for the catchphrase and theme song of Vince McMahon, the love-to-hate-him chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment: no chance. As in, you’ve got no chance in hell.
The double entendre is emblematic of Rainey’s sensibility: a member of the Red Lake Ojibwe people raised not on the Red Lake Reservation but 270 miles south, in Minneapolis, whose upbringing involved Ojibwe culture and pro wrestling both, and whose musical resume thus far includes stints in several celebrated pow wow ensembles—known as drums, a term that for the Ojibwe refers to the percussion instrument as well as the groups of singers who congregate around it—and guest spots on albums by Chance the Rapper and Bon Iver. Niineta is at once rooted in tradition and deeply idiosyncratic, fusing pow wow melodies with the timbres and rhythms of the 21st-century city: techno, industrial, hip-hop, dub, noise.
Listeners unfamiliar with pow wow could do worse for a starting point than Rainey’s own SoundCloud page, where he hosts the field recordings he has been making of intertribal competitions and other performances since he was eight years old. Even without the avant-garde accouterments of Niineta, it is arresting, unruly music. Accompanied only by each other and the insistent beating of the drum, singers weave wordlessly in and out of unison and counterpoint, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes baleful, conveying the meaning of a given song—which may involve honoring deceased relatives, celebrating tribal pride, or simply encouraging bystanders to dance—without verbal language. The emphasis on movement, and the steady rhythmic pulse, make pow wow a surprisingly natural fit for integration with the club, as Rainey and producer Andrew Broder demonstrate on Niineta, turning the pounding of a rawhide drum head into an unrelenting four-on-the-floor throb.
Rainey’s remarkably flexible voice sits at Niineta’s center, alternately consoling and foreboding, sometimes deep and gravelly and others high and androgynous. Backed by ascending strings on “b.e. son,” he sounds strong but weary, like he’s encouraging comrades in the midst of battle. At the end of “easy on the cide,” he breaks from a croon into a yelp, sounding, for a moment, a little like Young Thug. Broder’s production, punctuating magisterial instrumental arrangements with explosive digital distortion, recalls recent albums by Bon Iver and Low—another star in Rainey’s midwestern constellation of past collaborators—as well as Kanye West’s Yeezus. Like those artists, Rainey and Broder have no fealty to any particular recording fidelity, freely mixing the hiss and grain of iPhone voice memos with the blistering high definition of contemporary electronic music, treating the capture of the sound itself as one more malleable and expressive element of their work.
They sample liberally from Rainey’s library of pow wow recordings, a choice that enriches Niineta on multiple levels. Most obviously, it opens up the music to other voices, simulating the sort of togetherness—“that pow wow feeling,” as Rainey has called it—that might arise from a traditional performance. But they also adhere to the surface qualities of those field recordings, leaving the samples rough around the edges and highlighting the marginalia of a given performance as much as the music itself. They make room for stray sounds: introductory speeches from the singers, whoops of approval for the audience. As an outsider to Ojibwe culture, live recordings like Rainey’s might be the closest one ever comes to a genuine pow wow; Niineta both enshrines and subverts these recordings, asserting the power and presence of the singers while reminding us that an encounter mediated by earbuds or laptop speakers is still miles away from the real thing.
More than its glitchy digital production, Niineta’s greatest departure from traditional pow wow singing may be its use of chord changes to underpin its melodies. Songs like “bezhigo” and “ch 1222” are full of dramatic shifts that would be near-impossible in pow wow’s customary drum-and-voices setup, contextualizing Rainey’s vocal lines in a way that may make their emotional contours more legible to listeners who are accustomed to music with roots in Europe. Amid the clamor of “easy on the cide,” there are moments that feel as stately and triumphant as a power ballad. At first, I was mildly suspicious of this gilding, wondering whether it flattened the music’s impact, dressing it up as something else. I still prefer the album’s more percussion-driven tracks, like “no chants” and “phil’s offering,” which seem, to me, to allow Rainey’s melodies more freedom to wander where they will. But upon further listening, I came to view the adoption of European-style harmony as its own sort of subversion. Rainey has emphasized in interviews and press materials that Niineta is not intended to speak for Ojibwe music at large, but rather, to vocalize the perspective of one musician who “[wasn’t] from the rez, but [was] repping them.” If you grew up with one foot in a culture that has historically ignored you, stolen from you, attempted to eradicate you—why not take a few of their tricks for yourself?


With joyful house beats and emotive production, producer Joe Thornalley’s latest EP offers a more approachable side of his sound.

Like a Good Old Friend EP

In tarot, the flame-licked Tower card represents a mercurial period of upheaval and personal transformation. After producer and experimental artist Vegyn moved from London to Los Angeles last fall, the foreboding card became a regular appearance in his deck. The heavy symbolism seemed to fit. The producer born Joe Thornalley was battling depression and seeking to exorcise it by pushing his lopsided, woozy electronic music in uncomfortable directions—and the burning Tower suggested the process wouldn’t be easy. But though the cover of his new Like a Good Old Friend EP pays homage to the card, the music channels its volatile energy into a more approachable side of Vegyn’s sound, with joyful house beats and emotive production that gives way to some of his catchiest melodies yet.
Like a Good Old Friend has a clearer throughline than 2019’s glitchy Only Diamonds Cut Diamonds or the sprawling, 71-track Text While Driving If You Want to Meet God. The EP’s pensive works were born out of improvisation at the piano, an instrument that Vegyn picked up during quarantine. The strategy leads to winding songs that melt imperceptibly into different forms; on “Mushroom Abolitionist,” London artist Duval Timothy’s strings braid with Vegyn’s luminous keys for a searching, blissed-out highlight that cycles through uplifting moods. Timothy adds a similarly light touch to “Sometimes I Feel Like I’m Ruining Songs,” where snatches of conversations flit between a propulsive house beat and dancing keys. Together, the songs feel like processed nostalgia, served up with the same scratchy yearning as someone like Burial.
That sentimental impulse proves double-edged for Vegyn, who occasionally relies more on mood than melody. The cinematic title track ambles along a shuffling beat and keys until Owen Pallett quietly arrives with strings, but the song’s moving parts are too aimless to settle on anything memorable. The drifting, beatless “So Much Time - So Little Time” encounters a similar fate, with London artist John Glacier’s voice chopped up over introspective guitar noodling. It’s meditative, but the empty space renders it airless.
Like a Good Old Friend allows Vegyn to stretch his limbs and try a more wistful approach, which often suits his off-kilter stylings. His production choices are still unexpected and sharp, maintaining the self-assurance that’s turned him into a hotly tipped collaborator for artists like Frank Ocean, JPEGMAFIA, and Travis Scott. He’s at his best on “I See You Sometimes,” crunching East London rapper Jeshi’s shrugged-off rhymes through layers of distortion over a stuttering beat that sounds submerged in water. “I don’t know where I’m goin’ to/But I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Jeshi intones, incidentally giving voice to Vegyn’s free-wheeling methodology.

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After a seven-year absence from rap, Mr. Lif returns with a sharp technical marvel of an album, and a meditation on all that’s brought him here.

Don't Look Down

Mr. Lif was a corner piece of the Definitive Jux puzzle, as important to its cause as co-founder El-P, Cannibal Ox, or Aesop Rock. The Bostonian nonconformist took an analytical approach to writing that attempted to drill home on-the-nose messages. His debut album, I Phantom, remains one of Def Jux’s seminal achievements and it is still his best work to date, a concept album on how black people are disenfranchised by the American system. He has always been equal parts revolutionary and educator, finding his way through carefully-articulated syllabic mazes in search of hard truths. He doubled-down on this in his last two albums, the surging class evaluation Mo’ Mega and its heavy-handed followup I Heard It Today. After a seven-year absence from rap, he has returned with Don’t Look Down, his first album on Mello Music Group, a sharp technical marvel and a meditation on all that’s brought him here. This is a record of the weary lecturer, one who has long been fighting the good fight with little to show for it. But Mr. Lif doesn’t ever wonder if it was all really worth it; he merely acknowledges the cost.
Unlike past sanctimonious lyrical displays, which read like condensed civics seminars, these raps are riddled with mentions of missed opportunities and internal self-doubt, and they’re delivered with a dryness that only enhances the candor. The what-ifs  here are personal, not historical or conspiratorial. “Well I’m sitting at my table now, hands crossed, blast off/ Thinking ‘bout some opportunities that I had passed on/ Hindsight is 20/20, thinking isn’t helping any/ Drinking will just serve to end me/ Progress, am I making any?” he raps on “Everyday We Pray.” It's a peek into the exhaustion of the lifelong renegade: When your life’s work is beating your head against the walls of the political establishment, it’s natural to wonder if it has actually done any good.
Lif has sought to use his career to explain complex ideas to strangers, yet he’s spent just as much time making basic ideas complicated. “The goal is to search deeper and go smarter and think harder,” he raps on “Let Go,” but overthinking has always been one of his weaknesses. Don’t Look Down keeps things relatively simple, opting for narratives and wordplay that are far more approachable. What ties the whole experience together is his cautious optimism, along with his still-firm belief that struggle builds character. Don’t Look Down openly acknowledges doubt but never succumbs to it, instead using it as a balance for self-righteousness. There aren’t any regrets, only lessons learned. The emotional (and literal) centerpiece for the album is “A Better Day,” which opens with a snippet of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” In it, Mr. Lif  uses the full arsenal—his lyrical dexterity, his reflexive flow, and his observant eye—to paint a vibrant picture in broad strokes.
And yet the best moments on the album are the free-wheelers, records that aren’t anchored by any weighty concepts, allowing him to just be the proficient rapper that he is. On “World Renowned,” the fun-loving energy of Del the Funky Homosapien rubs off, and over a skipping loop it sounds like both tag-team partners are having a good time. Lif snuggles into the undulating wave on the Edan-produced “Whizdom,” which billows around him. The best of these is “Mission Accomplished,” which reunites the Perceptionists and finds the two emcees finishing each other’s syllabic yarns in call-and-response. It’s in the moments when he isn’t tethered to any belief system that Mr. Lif sounds most liberated.


Always one for gender subversion, the Toronto songwriter invites a cast of men to sing her songs, resulting in some of the project’s most deviously playful music ever.

Exit

In the late 1990s, Toronto musician Liz Hysen began to use the alias Picastro to distance herself from assumptions about singing-and-songwriting women at the dawn of the Lilith Fair era. Hysen’s hushed, spectral songs tapped more into the stewing undercurrents of slowcore and post-rock than traditional folk, anyway. By the time she released Picastro’s first proper album, 2002’s Red Your Blues, the project had become a full band, one whose revolving cast of local mavericks (including, for a spell, Owen Pallett) reflected her music’s mercurial quality. Even as her tensely strummed missives acquired a more expansive sweep on two mid-2000s releases for Polyvinyl, Hysen’s voice remained at the core of Picastro, the resolute center of increasingly calamitous environs.
Hysen has long resisted autobiographical interpretations of her writing, and she’s often sung from a male perspective to emphasize that these songs are stories, not confessionals. On the appropriately titled Exit, Picastro’s first album in five years, she largely steps away from the microphone to let others do the singing, farming out most of the album’s eight tracks to a predominantly male cast of guest singers culled from her Toronto peer group and beyond. And instead of simply applying their voices to Hysen’s songs, the singers push their personalities to eccentric extremes, driving Picastro toward their most tumultuous, unpredictable, and deviously playful music to date.
Hysen, for instance, has Great Lake Swimmers leader Tony Dekker perform his best imitation of her on the opening “Mirror Age,” his honeyed voice proving the subtlest salve to lyrics that blur the line between relationships and addiction: “I don’t feel much of anything/All because of you.” But Hysen’s acoustic finger-picks ultimately rally Matthew Ramolo’s sunbeam synths, Nick Storring’s trembling cello, and Germaine Liu’s clattering percussion through a series of turbulent ascensions and peaceful plateaus toward an ecstatic rekindling of the senses. Unlike most post-rock outfits, Picastro aren’t interested in working themselves up into volcanic crescendos; instead, they conjure those early moments of a windstorm, where the dead leaves and street debris start to coalesce into circular patterns, though everything could drift off at any moment.
These songs move slowly, often following a similar path from calm to chaos. Still, each singer makes the songs their own, like a parade of guests taking turns house-sitting the same abode and rearranging the furniture to their liking. “From Come the Speak” oozes gothic dread, with Irish raconteur Adrian Crowley’s sinister moan suggesting the grimmest of reapers. On “Blue Neck,” Xiu Xiu founder Jamie Stewart’s muffled, trembling delivery embodies the anxious nature of a song that starts out like an acoustic doom dirge before getting swept up in a torrent of cosmic klezmer. Even the album’s quietest track judders with mischief and unrest: The album’s only female guest, Alexandra MacKenzie (aka electro-pop agitator Petra Glynt), absolutely devours the early, Thurston Moore-sung Sonic Youth standard “(She’s in a) Bad Mood.” Swapping the guitar-charged throb for a piano-based dronescape, MacKenzie displaces Moore’s icy cool with a haunted theatricality, reframing his ominous diagnosis as an apocalyptic clarion call.
But Exit’s unsettled essence doesn’t always serve such a dark vision. On the closing “This Be My Fortune,” Hysen teams with Chris Cummings, the art-pop auteur who calls himself Marker Starling (fka Mantler), for a track that qualifies as a romantic duet by Picastro standards. Granted, it’s the sort of romantic duet where they seal their pact by harmoniously singing the chorus of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” as if they were serenading each other with “Islands in the Stream” at a karaoke bar. But a synth-flushed swirl dramatically uproots the song like a tornado swallowing a home, a moment that feels as liberating as it is arresting. Where Picastro was once a means for Hysen to sidestep stereotypes, with Exit, she’s now successfully redefined what it means to be Picastro at all.


The Berlin-based artist’s first full-length solo release in over a decade is a stylish, sexy record where not much happens.

Change

Just over a decade ago, Annika Henderson debuted with an album that was riveting, freaky, and lo-fi in an almost extreme way. Anika sounded aqueous, like it was recorded in a nightclub bathroom on a tape-deck found in the garbage. After the release of Anika, Henderson further explored the limits of lo-fi on a 2013 EP and later joined the art rock supergroup Exploded View, where her velvety alto ping-ponged off drums and synthesizers. Her first full-length solo record since her debut, Change is just as sparse as her past work, but it’s slicker and less urgent. What once seemed like abrasive, outsider minimalism now sounds slightly anemic.
Change is a sexy record where not much happens. Time moves slowly. The emphasis on these songs tends to be Henderson’s chilly, cosmic voice. She sounds similar to Nico, and a more contemporary analog would be fellow Berliner Molly Nilsson, or Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr. On “Critical,” synthesizers bob like a little wooden boat. Henderson steers the ship; her voice is clear and stoic, expansive in its ability to conjure feelings of longing and loneliness. Like her best work, this song makes you feel like you’re alone with her in a quiet and intensely intimate space. She can make it feel like she’s staring at you.
These songs gain their power from subtle textural flourishes. Henderson’s lyrics are like a little lemon zest sprinkled on a really nice cut of fish. When done well, they enhance the experience, but not in a particularly noticeable way. The title track is gorgeously modulated, krauty and languorous. The words are like vignettes; they filter through the song like slats of light in a coral reef. But when Henderson struggles with her lyrics, her choices can seem a bit goofy, a touch too dramatic. On “Rights,” she sings aimlessly about power and “raucous screams.” It’s meant to incite passion, but instead it rinses over you. The arrangements are so sparse that you’re forced to engage directly with her words, which are often absent of connective tissue.
Anika’s songs are soft, ambient, dreamy. But they also feel like they could be much bigger, compositionally. It can sound like pop music, but instead of bursting and blooming and moving through peaks and valleys, Change flatlines. In the past, Henderson has gone weird and raw: Change is pleasant and breezy, a cozy place where she can explore the outer limits of her voice. Listening can feel like walking into one of those gallery shows with just three sculptures, where everyone is wearing a tweed jacket and a pair of mustard-colored slacks. It sounds cool, and you feel cool listening to it—but that’s about as much as you feel.

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This digital-exclusive album from the Berlin-based Kenyan artist sounds blank and unrevealing but opens up to reveal a wealth of detail. It’s prickly, insidious, and at times grueling.

Glim

KMRU’s 2020 album Peel was a formidable addition to the long list of great electronic albums released on the Editions Mego label. The shadowy six-track release established the Nairobi-born, Berlin-based artist (aka Joseph Kamaru) as one of ambient music’s most exciting young talents almost overnight. But though he’s only been releasing music for a little over five years, Peel was just one point in the arc of a prolific career that includes fiery collaborations, ambitious meditations on colonial violence, and cryptic Bandcamp exclusives that arrive with little context. Glim is the latest and one of the longest of the latter, its intentions hidden behind a smattering of cryptic one-word track titles and an eerie photograph from Berlin’s Claudia Mock showing reeds along a shoreline that can only be faintly glimpsed in the darkness.
That photo is the most useful key to unlocking the depths of Glim: The ocean may look blank and lifeless from above, but it conceals countless ecosystems. Likewise, though Glim sounds at first like an austere experiment in pure drone, the mix is permeated with human sounds that may escape the ear on a first listen. The sound of kids playing on opening track “motley” is easy to pick out—less so the snap of a camera about a minute and a half in, or the sound of a car revving on “line.” Kamaru has never been showy with field recordings; he weaves them into the fabric of his music rather than using everyday sounds as readymade signifiers, but he’s said he’s “very intentional when I record and why I’m recording the space.” Knowing there’s an intent behind Kamaru’s choice of source material, no matter how obscure, deepens the intrigue.
In opposition to the vast, rainy desolation of Peel or the soothing sounds of last year’s Epoch, Glim is prickly and ominous, rarely deviating from minor keys. Kamaru likes bit-crushed distortion that makes his music sound like it’s echoing out of the busted speakers of a Game Boy Advance, and he likes drones that are damaged or serrated in some way. The interference on “strain” might prompt listeners to check their headphones; on “its,” a speeding and slowing oscillator warps the linear sense of time implied by the piece’s impassive, glacial progress. Rather than the contented bliss Kamaru summoned on Epoch, Glim offers bleak, even menacing soundscapes that bristle with the possibility of danger, as though a predator lurked nearby, unseen.
Glim sounds monolithic at first yet opens up to reveal cracks and details. Played in the background, the music’s complexity will probably be lost as the sounds of everyday life blend with the field recordings in the mix. More focused effort is required to pick up on all the details, but giving Glim your undivided attention can be a grueling experience. It’s too unnerving to allow you to sink back and get lost. It’s not texturally detailed enough to provide any kind of psychedelic brain massage. And given its length—12 tracks in 56 minutes, all fading in and out as if at random—it never sustains a mood for long. Glim is like an abstract painting that rewards being looked at from all angles, but no matter how much you squint, its secrets remain just out of sight.


On his second solo album for Drag City, the Philadelphia guitarist continues to develop his singular style, incorporating tape loops, taishōgoto, and hurdy-gurdy into his sculptural approach.

Through a Room

It has become de rigueur to describe Philadelphia guitarist Bill Nace as an inveterate collaborator, and with good reason. Until his 2020 solo album Both, most of Nace’s high-profile releases were in duos or trios with longtime friends like Chris Corsano and John Truscinski, out-music legends like Joe McPhee and Thurston Moore, or surprising connections like Susan Alcorn or Graham Lambkin. His long-running group with Kim Gordon, Body/Head, has itself featured occasional third members like Michael Morley and Aaron Dilloway. If a listener encountered Nace’s bristling, shapeshifting guitar on a recording from the 2000s or 2010s, it was likely in company with noisemakers of a very high pedigree.
This is only part of Nace’s story, however. Dotted throughout his discography are solo recordings from 2006’s Solo Guitar to this year’s PM/FM, released on cassette or lathe-cut vinyl in short runs on his own Open Mouth imprint or noise labels like Throne Heap. These outings—usually brief and difficult to find—provide a glimpse into a lesser-known history of Nace as a guitarist, from the wild, feedback-driven chaos of his early years to the more varied approach he has mastered recently. They show Nace’s artistic trajectory with other musicians to be intertwined with his experiments as a soloist, with techniques generated in one arena snaking their way into the other.
Nace’s recent efforts for Drag City have offered more polished takes on his experimental work for smaller labels, refining his blend of improvisation and composition. On Through a Room, he builds on the sculptural approach of Both, incorporating tape loops as well as instruments like the taishōgoto and hurdy-gurdy. Not that you’d necessarily know—each sound is drenched in enough reverb and static to obliterate its origin. For Nace, the relevant musical unit is not the note or the chord but the burst of noise. Having produced towering blocks of vibration, he rearranges them into structures based more on their inherent timbral quality than any notion of traditional songcraft. Walls of distortion are decorated with filigree traceries of treble as if to guide the eye across a Brutalist facade. Co-producer Cooper Crain, of Bitchin’ Bajas, deserves credit here for helping to realize Nace’s blueprints by recording and editing his tracks, as he did on Both.
Nace approaches the guitar as an object to be explored as much as an instrument to be played. In addition to fingerpicking and strumming, he uses bits of wood or metal to generate a spectrum of tones that, with practice, he can manipulate with precision. Once he has perfected a technique it may be redeployed, as in the resonant metallic sawing that first appeared on PM/FM and now makes up “When Orange.” Some tracks have a clear precedent in the world of noise, as in the Dilloway-inspired tape warp of “Outro” or the granular grinding of “Les Echos (Piece for Tuba),” which would fit wonderfully on a Load Records compilation. Others are unclassifiable. On “Ann,” Nace apparently wants to recreate a nature recording, complete with squawking birds and chittering monkeys. Across its eight minutes, the listener is guided through a darkening jungle where ominous echoes bound overhead. Nace achieves a remarkable variety across the album, but his distinctive guitar sound is always identifiably his.
Nace’s body of work with improvisatory duos and trios is vast and enviably good, a testament to his adaptability to a range of contexts and performers. On his own, meanwhile, he is steadily honing a singular personal style. With Both, it was exciting to see an underground lifer finally getting his due; Through a Room confirms Nace’s inquisitive spirit and formidable skills.


The New York duo's debut EP sounds uncannily familiar-- a little tweaking and they could be Lana Del Rey, Poliça, or even Florence-- lingering in a much-mined seam of clichéd teenage misery. But somehow, it works, MS MR racheting up the rapture to near-thunderstorm levels.

Candy Bar Creep Show

It's hard to know what to make of New York duo MS MR at first. Partly it's deliberate. Like more and more would-be breakout acts, they've been as generous with biographical details as eyedroppers are with water, down to their photographss and names: Lizzy Plapinger of boutique pop label Neon Gold is the MS, and Max Hershenow her corresponding MR. Partly it's because the context around them swirls as thick as their music's atmospherics. They've been associated with Tumblr primarily on grounds of using it, which can lose you an hour or so among their Addams Family screencaps and photographed pills, but it's meaningless when it comes to the music. Distribution methods and single-art tastes don't constitute a genre.
Everything on Candy Bar Creep Show, MS MR's first proper EP, has been released before. (Yes, via Tumblr.) But that's not the only reason these songs sound instantly familiar. The bands they've been compared to are somewhat more telling, although none fits exactly. A little more sashay and they'd be Poliça; more rapture and they'd be Florence; throw in some trolling and they'd be Lana. Their closest analogue, in fact, might be Toni Halliday's solo project Chatelaine, even if "Bones" didn't so closely echo their "Broken Bones". Every song is steeped in gloom, yet not so much as to sully their hooks. Plapinger's vocals are shaded brittle, confident, or spooky as is called for. She'll turn a folk curtsy for a sparrow metaphor, strut her melisma through a verse like the Sugababes' Siobhan Donaghy, or give up words entirely; the one commonality is that they're always a shade too vulnerable, too clear in a busy mix, or too hesitant where she'd otherwise be belting. She's the figure lit like a spotlight amid the dusk, lost but compelling.
This effect works best when the lyrics merit such illumination, as on "Hurricane", the band's breakout and the most fully formed track here. The strings are churning up something, specifically a relationship wrecked out of fear. "Welcome to the inner workings of my mind, so dark and foul I can't disguise," Plapinger sings, and if it's melodramatic, the fog of reverb certainly backs her up. There's more levity on "Ash Tree Lane", a march set to brass and a wordless hook that'd be exuberant in any other context, but then Plapinger gets to singing again about plagues and wrong choices, eventually cutting the whole thing off with a gasp after--again-- "my mind's a mess." "Bones" isn't as strong; the pile of fractured guitar and strings works well enough, but it's unclear whether "dark twisted fantasy" is a Kanye reference (or whether it'd be preferable if so), and the lyrical admission "marinate in misery like a girl of only 17" doesn't excuse the clichés of teenage misery: empty churches, broken dreams paired with silent screams, madness paired with sadness.
A good way to tell whether a group's succeeding on style or substance is to see how they handle a concept that could be bigger than them. On Candy Bar Creep Show, that's "Dark Doo Wop", a title that might as well have been kept on reserve behind glass labeled "Break in Case of Aesthetic Drought". The throughline is simple, a mainstay of pop through the ages: This world is gonna burn, so you might as well stick around. It's simple enough to execute, too; all you need are a few diffident doo-wops and coquetry on "that's my man," and as for the part where the world burn, burn, burns, the juxtaposition's obvious on its own. But it only works if it's delivered with a preacher's passion, or at least with Skeeter Davis' pathos. MS MR deliver, ratcheting up the rapture to near-thunderstorm levels: seething percussion, steely vocals, and a sonic fog that buries any lingering pleasantries.


The debut from the young Atlanta rapper is a low-stakes cool-girl joyride that hits best when it’s laid back.

PRINCESS POP THAT

If you ever wanted to live a day in the life of an Atlanta cool girl just listen to an Anycia song. That’s been the appeal since last summer when the grainy snippet for “So What” lifted her from a life of partying and working odd jobs (bottle service, babysitter, hair stylist) to a life of partying and rapping. Produced by ATL underground gatekeeper Popstar Benny, the addictive “So What” features Anycia’s raspy-voiced, flirty-with-an-attitude raps over a beat that tosses Ciara’s hook on Field Mob’s hit of the same name into the pluggnb blender. The short visual added to the dreamy seductiveness, as Anycia and her clique—including fellow overnight sensation Karrahbooo—get drunk and turn up poolside; the handheld feel of a GoPro making it seem as if you just stumbled into a random Tuesday night of hers.
Less than a year later, Anycia is on a Flo Milli album, coasting in a vintage muscle car with Latto, and teaming up with proven music industry hitmaker Jetsonmade for her debut album PRINCESS POP THAT. Compared to “So What,” which sounds like it was made on the fly as the video suggests, the album is more buttoned up, but the sense that you’re riding shotgun with her through all the drama and excitement of being poppin’ in Atlanta is kept intact.
The more laid back, the better. Cruising over the generic yet smooth g-funk groove of “Bad Weather,” trickling in little details like “I’m in the Lamb’ tryna’ put my lashes on.” On “Nene’s Prayer,” wishing the worst on an ex (“I hope your barber push your shit back/I hope you get up out the car and then your phone crack”) over one of those breezy beats a Detroit rapper uses when they want to be a family man all of a sudden. Her relaxed, monotone recalls a wide array of hangout flows: The haze of Dom Kennedy, the easygoing stunting of Tony Shhnow, when Gucci or 50 do some sweet talking.
But a delivery as low-key as Anycia’s relies so heavily on beats. They have to be a vibe, or else her same-y flow can wash over you. Jetsonmade is not the guy for that. The South Carolina native is a malleable, trusted hand, who is decent at booming, minimalist instrumentals that give big personalities the space to do their thing. That worked just fine on DaBaby’s “Suge” or Jack Harlow’s “Whats Poppin,” big hits that I would not lose any sleep if we left them in the pre-COVID days forever. But with Anycia, too much weight is on his production, and it’s too dry and derivative to handle that. (It’s worth noting that all of his beats have three or four other producers credited, but his producer tag gets the star treatment.) For example, the steel-drum bounce of “Call” just makes me want to fire up the summer anthems on Trapnificent. Jetson’s mid-aughts trap revival on “Back Outside” is solid, but is blown out of the water by other recent beats in the same lane such as Baby Kia’s “Od Crashin’” or JT’s “Okay.” On paper Anycia and Cash Cobain seem like a good match because they both are masters of sexually charged, locally-minded, lifestyle rap, but it’s not dirty enough and the airy instrumental lacks the sauce.
When the beat is right, Anycia is a fun rapper. “I fuck yo’ nigga to Detroit-type beats,” she jokes on “Type Beat,” over a thudding, serviceable instrumental by Jetson and his team. (Only thing worse than getting cheated on, is getting cheated on while a Teejayx6-type beat is on in the background.) She’s outshined by the punchier Karrahbooo on their bouncy back-and-forth “Splash Brothers,” but Anycia’s insults are still venomous. The album standout is “BRB,” a lush single where everything in town seems to be getting on her nerves; the girls copying her, the guys in her messages: “Blowin’ up my phone I know yo’ baby mama whack.” It’s the perfect Anycia song: Low-stakes, short enough to be a snippet, rapped as if she’s unimpressed, possibly even burdened, by her Atlanta cool girl status.


The Australian singer-songwriter’s fourth album has the directness of a collection of demos. Barnett sounds characteristically laconic; she’s at her best when she lets her guitar take the lead.

Courtney Barnett: Things Take Time, Take Time

Things Take Time, Take Time

When Courtney Barnett takes a solo in the last half of “Turning Green,” it evokes the two-note grubbiness of guitarist Pete Shelley’s work on the Buzzcocks’ “Boredom.” Barnett’s songs depend on moments when she trusts her instrument to become more than an extension of herself: Her guitar work functions as a pungent second voice, more demonstrative than the Daria-style talk-sing in which she’s most comfortable. Things Take Time, Take Time doesn’t have enough of these moments. Wedded to the percussion-and-singer-plus-accompanist format, Barnett sounds marooned. It’s her least interesting album.
Accompanied by Stella Mozgawa on percussion and additional instruments, Barnett offers 10 songs with the directness of demos. On “Oh the Night,” the simplicity of Mozgawa’s plonkety piano line complements Barnett’s insistence on back-to-basics, and also her tight budget for question marks: “It takes a little time for me to show how I really feel/Won’t you meet me somewhere in the middle.” It’s characteristic of Barnett that her line readings avoid any hint of pleading. On her debut, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, and the excellent follow-up Tell Me How You Really Feel, Barnett gave her angst the same attention she did origami, and she lingered on cityscapes as a means of toughening her anecdotes. “Watching all the movies/Drinking all the smoothies,” from “An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in New York),” remains a favorite. Hell, sometimes the city was so alive she stayed in her room to avoid it.
Things Take Time’s lead single, “Rae Street,” portends an ominous development: The storefronts and garbage trucks and other phenomena of urban life don’t excite this heir to Jonathan Richman like they once did. “Time is money/And money is no man’s friend,” she advises, but to make the lyric stick would require the kind of vocal commitment that her laconic sensibility regards with suspicion. Amiably blank gets you only so far. “If I Don't Hear From You Tonight" and “Sunfair Showdown” show Barnett’s strengths: riffs and toplines married to a wryness as chronic as a scowl. On others, the barren melodic landscapes expose the loss of bassist Bones Sloane and percussionist Dave Mudie, never mind second guitarist Dan Luscombe. The sparkling hook on “Here’s the Thing” calls for the kind of instrumental embellishment she and Mozgawa can’t provide alone. Things Take Time settles on a midtempo churn that isn’t up to the speed of Barnett’s wit; the slowest songs sprout weeds.
Still, I’m glad Barnett hasn’t written sequels to “Depreston” or “Walkin’ on Eggshells.” If Things Take Time, Take Time sounds tentative, it’s the tentativeness of a febrile imagination working out its next steps; she’ll be back. Besides, it works half the time. “Take It Day by Day” hits quivering bullseyes with each garnish: handclaps here, bass syncopation there. Then it shuts up in less than two minutes. Pithiness suits her, especially when offering unsolicited advice. We need artists who write lines like, “Don’t stick that knife in the toaster.” The album’s strongest songs evince an attitude best described in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Bight”: awful but cheerful.

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At last, the band’s 10th album restores their creative momentum. If the songs don’t feel as lived-in, at least they unlock the repressed memory of what it was like to be deeply moved by Death Cab for Cutie.

Asphalt Meadows

These days Ben Gibbard is often seen as synonymous with his band, which itself is often synonymous with an entire moment in aughts pop culture. Gibbard has been admirably candid about the personal turmoil he suffered while creating Death Cab for Cutie’s most beloved music, in contrast to the sobriety and equilibrium he experiences now—challenging fans to consider what they miss about “the old Death Cab.” But the existential burden of being in a massively popular band with dwindling acclaim has lightened over the past three years. Gibbard was one of the first artists to embrace quarantine livestreaming in early 2020, airing 22 “Live From Home” episodes where he revisited deep cuts from early LPs like We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes. The outward commitment to fan service proves clever cover for Death Cab for Cutie to make the kind of record they’ve strived for since the departure of guitarist and producer Chris Walla in 2014: a restoration of their creative momentum when a mere “return to form” would have sufficed.
Though life in quarantine informs the bulk of Asphalt Meadows, nothing is as direct as Gibbard’s 2020 solo track “Life in Quarantine”—what could be? If the “Live From Home” project didn’t produce any essential solo material, its goodwill carries over to the opening of Asphalt Meadows, lending humanity to lines that might otherwise read as generalities: “These nights, I don’t know how I survive,” “I am learning to let go of everything I tried to hold.” After nearly a year of letting fans inside his house, Gibbard grants himself permission to be the main character of his own music. It’s a marked contrast to everything Death Cab has done since 2011’s Codes and Keys, the band’s weakest album according to Gibbard and also the one most closely associated with his personal life.
The introductory duo of “I Don’t Know How I Survive” and “Roman Candles” position Asphalt Meadows as a clean break from the slick competence of Kintsugi and Thank You for Today. The former teases itself as the kind of Silly Putty funk-pop that shared space with their 2010s singles “Northern Lights” and “Black Sun” on New Indie playlists before rupturing into the loudest guitar buzz ever heard on a Death Cab for Cutie album. A flurry of martial drum rolls breaks through the fuzz bass exhaust on “Roman Candles,” reflecting on how long Death Cab have been described as “indie rock” and never rawked before.
It’s tempting to grant the bulk of credit to producer John Congleton, whose CV immediately resituates Asphalt Meadows into a flattering lineage of cerebral, populist indie rock. It’s a canny pairing—Congleton’s taste for textural, handcrafted intricacy and judicious distortion isn’t all that different than Walla’s studio approach, and Congleton likewise understands the importance of feel in Death Cab for Cutie’s music; past songs could’ve relocated you to the back of a gray subcompact or a tomblike Seattle apartment even if they were instrumentals. Whereas Kintsugi and Thank You for Today sounded primped for alt-rock radio, Asphalt Meadows goes places: The Canadian prairie basks in a warm, amber glow on “Wheat Like Waves,” and eerie sampledelia mirrors the collaging of digital memories on “Fragments From the Decade.” The despondent title track stares blankly upon urban bustle, recreating the sound of being stuck on the I-10 even better than the Death Cab songs explicitly written about Los Angeles.
Still, you don’t do guest spots with Chance the Rapper and Noah Cyrus without picking up a few things. “I’ll Never Give Up on You” neatly resolves Gibbard’s public stances on clean living and politics over a concussive electro-pop stomp more suited to close out a Mission Impossible movie than a Death Cab for Cutie album. It’s an allowable indulgence on a record that mostly satisfies through course correction. “Here to Forever” and “Pepper” are pleasant exemplars of the band’s new default mode, exchanging the ocean spray of the Pacific Northwest for the silvery cool of New Order and the Cure, verses flecked with quintessential Gibbardisms in contrast to the broad and occasionally blasé hooks (“Kiss me just this one last time/Tell me that you once were mine”).
Likewise, while Gibbard returns to familiar images throughout the more cinematic tracks—analog maps, endless highways, ’80s pop playing on a busted car stereo—they don’t feel as lived in or lived through. Inevitably, he’s writing at a degree of remove from the stoned and starving road trippers on “Rand McNally” and “Wheat Like Waves”; anyone who’s been listening to Death Cab for the past 20 years is in the same position. But if Asphalt Meadows doesn’t amplify the stakes of forty-something romantic misunderstandings the way “A Movie Script Ending” or “Title and Registration” did in college, it at least unlocks the repressed memory of what it was like to be deeply moved by Death Cab for Cutie songs.
Yet Asphalt Meadows’ fuzzy glow of nostalgia is outshone by the halo effect of “Foxglove Through the Clearcut.” Though Gibbard’s lyrics are frequently conversational—written in complete sentences that stretch melodic containment to its breaking point—this is the first time he’s actually talking. In a bemused, cosmic mutter akin to Aaron Weiss or, more likely, Cassandra Jenkins’ “Hard Drive,” he accompanies a man of enormous ideas and few words. They ponder eternity, the grim jest of mankind, and the limits of manifest destiny. “He said he’d driven all the way across America/And when he got to thе edge, therе was nowhere left to go,” Gibbard recites, as if to say: Tell me more. Where previous Death Cab epics would edge toward the vast unknown and stop short, “Foxglove Through the Clearcut” bursts into unrepentant post-rock fireworks, creating a late-career masterwork that might finally knock “Bixby Canyon Bridge” or “Transatlanticism” out of their roles as set-closers. Death Cab have made plenty of great songs in the past decade, but “Foxglove Through the Clearcut” stands alone as proof of what Gibbard has worked so long to accomplish: The scope of Death Cab is so much bigger than anyone, including himself, could imagine.