The latest EP from the Irish singer is a set of introspective, velvet-crushed balladry, as much a cohesive mood piece as a collection of individual songs.

The Sky is Bleeding EP

Biig Piig’s music has always had a certain informality. Since 2016, the Irish singer born Jessica Smyth has moved in short bursts: a prolific stream of singles and EPs. But there’s been a transience to the tunes, too. She has made rough cassette-tape hip-hop and slow jams, hazy music for the last gasps of a house party. She has dropped witty trinket-box raps, sometimes in Spanish—evidence of the years she spent growing up in Spain before moving to West London—while her writing focused on the conditions of young adulthood: heeding her mother’s advice (“Dinner’s Getting Cold”), kicking it with cigarettes and wine (“Perdida”), and sipping Hennessy next to the boombox (“Vice City”). Even the more serious songs had a sense of playfulness: Last year’s “Oh No” sounded like Smyth challenging herself to blend a Britney Spears chorus with a Radiohead-style guitar line.
Smyth’s outlook is more gloomy on her latest EP, The Sky Is Bleeding. Through these six songs, she favors quiet introspection, velvet-crushed slowcore, and new wave balladry. It’s muted and understated in texture and tempo. Her voice is no longer fluttering and soulful but smoky and hushed. This is weighty, well-crafted music, as much a cohesive mood piece as a collection of individual songs. Two years into her major label deal with RCA, you can hear Smyth moving on from her more casual approach, maturing into the role of an industry professional.
Take, for instance, “Drugs,” a highlight where Smyth plays with doomed allegories, like extinguishing flames and dancing with darkness, over a downbeat guitar line and trickling bass riff. On “Lavender,” an artist who previously captured the stoned wisdom you can only find at the end of the sesh seems scared of what the night might bring: “If I wasn’t so complacent, I just might/Wake up with a taste of the good time.” Whereas she once made being young sound fun, these songs are now littered with suffering and cynicism.
The mood is set in the torchy opener “Remedy,” with a lilting melody that conjures the image of a 1980s sports car cruising down a rain-streaked street at 3 a.m., lit only by neon light. Smyth only breaks the spell for the final song “American Beauty,” where a chugging guitar riff closes the EP with a little something for indie radio. The sullen turn in Smyth’s catalog makes for enjoyable chill-out material for the warming nights, but it occasionally downplays her personality and ability to capture the beautiful mess of young adulthood. For an artist who has spent her career zooming forward, it’s hard to say if she has found a long-term destination or merely the next stop on her journey.

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On her 14th album, the pop star teams with Stuart Price and rolls back the clock; her latest iteration is a pre-Madonna disco vixen, basking in a '70s musical style that she herself, among others, helped to morph and displace.

Confessions on a Dance Floor

Twenty years ago, Madonna was a postmodernist's dream. Her ability to transform herself from song to song and from album to album became a proclamation of self-nullifying empowerment, giving her the ability to create a stationary persona out of shifting identities. However, by the start of the 1990s, Madonna's transformations appeared more calculated as she aged and fell behind the curve, trying to predict the next dominant style instead of confidently setting it.
With Confessions on a Dance Floor, her 14th album, Madonna again reinvents herself, and it appears she's nearly lapped herself. Her latest iteration is a pre-Madonna (prima donna?) disco vixen, basking in a '70s musical style that she herself, among others, helped to morph and displace in the early '80s. Allowing her to accessorize creatively (love that wrap-around top), this new persona has the potential to be immensely entertaining, but there's something a little sad about it too. At 47 Madonna is playing the role of someone 25 years younger, and those retro space leotards and that feathered hair only make her look more mature and matronly, like your friend's mom dressed up embarrassingly for Halloween.
If the outfit depresses, the music on Confessions accomplishes the feat of making her sound young again. Kicking off the album, "Hung Up" is an impressive and enjoyable single, strong enough to have everyone trying to figure out if it's her best since "Ray of Light" or since "Like a Prayer". The main groove is lifted from ABBA's "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme (A Man After Midnight)", but used in such a way that it resembles a brilliant mash-up rather than a lazy sample. Credit is due Stuart Price of Les Rhythmes Digitales, who builds a warehouse-size wall of sound for Madonna's songs, allowing her to revel in the shameless mirrorballsiness of it all.
That collaboration stays strong over the first half of Confessions. On "Get Together", as Price's synths ebb and flow moodily, Madonna asks the eternal pop question, "Do you believe in love at first sight?", over a tripping vocal melody. The cascades of sound wash directly into "Sorry", setting up the song's panlingual apologies and shifting bass tectonics. These songs have a deceptive lyrical vacuity that hints at greater depths, but leaves them to the listener to consider. On the other hand, "Future Lovers" begins with similar escapism, as Madonna warmly exhorts, "Let's forget your life, forget your problems, administration, bills, and loans." But it's no simple call to the dancefloor: Over a prismatic vocal theme, she unequivocally equates music with spirituality, dancing with religious ritual.
This impressive momentum, unfortunately, is interrupted by "I Love New York", which stumbles over mad-glad-bad rhyme schemes and dumb-ass lyrics like "I don't like cities but I like New York/ Other cities make me feel like a dork." It sounds like a transparently targeted post-9/11 valentine to the Big Apple-- odd coming from an ex-pat. Inanities like "If you don't like my attitude/ Then you can eff off" are at least partly excused by Price's production, which builds from the beat up to incorporate rock elements that could be a nod to Brooklyn hipster dance punk.
Despite Price's best efforts to infuse these songs with motion and finesse, Confessions never quite reaches its earlier heights after "I Love New York". When Madonna actually starts confessing, the album loses its delicate balance between pop frivolity and spiritual gravity. "Now I can tell you about success, about fame," she intones at the end of "Let It Will Be", as if that's all she knows anymore. She proselytizes the Kabbalah on "Isaac", but despite the controversy that song has created, it's remarkable only for Price's two-note pendulum string sample and a hummed melody that could have been lifted from "Frozen".
The young Madonna pops up repeatedly on Confessions, a foil to her older self. "How High" plumbs the motives behind her headline- and crotch-grabbing behavior of yore, but it only reveals how deeply she has embedded herself into the establishment. The album title recalls her contentious relationship to Catholicism on "Papa Don't Preach" and "Like a Prayer", and that pop visionary subversiveness makes her reverence to the Kabbalah seem tame by comparison. There's no conflict between her and her new faith, so there's no journey. As Confessions weighs down with more of her personal baggage, the songs become, despite Price's inventive and mercurial production, less inviting and less danceable, as if Madonna wants the dance floor all to herself.


The Pac NW coughs up folksy, understated singer-songwriters by the coffeehouseful, but this Portland-based singer shouldn't become lost in that crowd.

Beasts of Seasons

The Pacific Northwest coughs up folksy, understated singer-songwriters by the coffeehouseful, which puts Portland-based Laura Gibson at risk of getting lost in the crowd. That would be a shame: Gibson has more to offer than vague descriptors like "folksy" and "understated" would suggest, and besides, her music is far better suited to a fireplace and a cup of warm apple cider than to your local Starbucks. Raised in a tiny coastal town, the soft-spoken songstress inched quietly into the scene in 2006 with If You Come to Greet Me, her refreshingly homespun if sometimes staid full-length debut. At first blush, the follow-up, Beasts of Seasons, doesn't appear to mark a significant departure from its predecessor. But unravel its seemingly rudimentary façade and you'll find an affecting study in contrasts from a songwriter a good deal more sophisticated than she's generally willing to let on.
At the core of this study is a thematic concept of Gibson's own design. She's divided the record roughly in half; "Communion Songs" comprise the first part, while the second is made up of "Funeral Songs". Yet the two ideas are hardly mutually exclusive, a notion Gibson makes evident in the opening song, seven and a half minutes of gently cascading majesty entitled "Shadows on Parade". Apart from evoking the passage of time, the song's central image-- "I will watch the shadows on parade"-- suggests the solitude, repose, and even isolation of the lonely and the waiting. With Gibson's "parade" description, however, the solitary activity of shadow-watching becomes something contrastingly communal and celebratory, a point underscored by the sample of a distant drum corps and crowd she and producer Tucker Martine (the Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, Mudhoney) use to close out the song. It's the first of many little moments on the record that illustrate Gibson's willingness to see an image through at a time when a lot of similar songwriters are content to settle for what "feels good" or "sounds good" and move along.
Shadow-watching gives way to other pensive activities as Beasts continues: reminiscence, daydreams, diary-like appeals to an unnamed "other", and the meditations on mortality that mark the "Funeral" half of the record. "If these bare walls could sing," Gibson begins on the transitional track "Funeral Songs"-- is she still watching and waiting for something even after the sunset has extinguished that parade of shadows? Indeed, a line about a body "swaying like a drunkard" and a trio of ruminations on Gibson's mother, father, and sister on closing track "Glory" are among the few moments where we're transported from Gibson's head to someplace outside. Yet for all of the singer's insularity, she never sounds alone on Beasts of Seasons, thanks to a mostly exquisite array of backing arrangements courtesy of a host of PDX luminaries, including Laura Veirs, labelmate Shelly Short, and members of the Decemberists, M. Ward's band, Menomena, and Norfolk & Western. "Spirited", easily the record's liveliest track, gets a boost from a chorus of "OOH-ooh-OOH"s and booming percussion-work that keep things moving at a steady cantor, while "Where Have All Your Good Words Gone?"'s fatalistic imagery rubs up against foreboding timpani rolls and chilly fiddle-playing that calls to mind Death bowing the buried to life in Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre.
As a singer, Gibson treats syllables with the same patience and loving precision a mosaic maker might put into cutting and arranging his/her tiles. It comes as little surprise, then, that words are a lyrical preoccupation of Gibson's throughout Beasts of Seasons. On "Come By Storm", the singer recalls how she "took great care with words," and, later, how she loses herself to them. "Spirited" finds her describing how "morning tends to... turn our words to smoke," while the aforementioned "Where Have All Your Good Words Gone?" has her grappling with the loss of a loved one by asking, "Where are all the pleasures from the timbre of your tongue?" Yet for all her talk of words, Gibson allows herself a fairly limited lexicon on Beasts of Seasons. If she knows some "good" ones like her sesquipedalian-prone onetime tourmate and fellow Portlander Colin Meloy, she wisely forgoes them in favor of repeated references to bodies and bones, trees and tongues, pictures, poems, and stories-- all of which lend the record a reflexivity that rewards repeat listens.


Reviving his dormant Micron Audio label, Detroit’s Sherard Ingram—also known as the chief architect of Urban Tribe—returns to the high-octane techno and electro that are his stock in trade.

DJ Stingray 313: Molecular Level Solutions EP

Molecular Level

“This music started around futurism,” Sherard Ingram told DJ Mag back in 2018. He was talking about the type of Detroit electro that Gerald Donald and the late, much-missed James Stinson had synthesized as Drexciya. But Ingram could also have been talking about the shapeshifting techno he made alongside Carl Craig, Anthony “Shake” Shakir, and others as the collective Urban Tribe, who spent the turn of the last century releasing increasingly explosive tracks on labels like Mo Wax, Rephlex, and Mahogani Music—the latter run by Moodymann, who taught Ingram how to DJ in the early 1980s. Or the dozens of releases of his own, after Drexcyia waved him in as their tour DJ and anointed him Drexycian DJ Stingray. Those tracks apply a scientific rigor to rhythm, distilling histories of Black music into politically minded dancefloor fuel. Over the last 30 years, Ingram has earned his place in history by staying on the move.
This year, Ingram—now known as DJ Stingray 313—has revived his Micron Audio label, with plans to reissue his storming 2012 album F.T.N.W.O. This is no nostalgia act, though. While Ingram could coast on his reputation, the label marks its relaunch with a new EP, Molecular Level Solutions, that kicks into instant overdrive.
“Bioplastics” feels streamlined yet integrates a massive number of components, from a kick drum that kicks up clouds of smoke to little melodies spattering like rain on a windshield. It passes through a few wind tunnels and peels off into the distance. Detroit techno has a long history with transportation, but Stingray here sounds uncommonly revved up.
Things get even rougher for “Carbon Neutral Fuels,” in which great clouds of dub techno ignite. Cymbals burst in hisses of white noise that sound positively iridescent. Two-thirds in, everything burns up and only a brutal kind of rattle remains. I had the very good fortune of hearing this on a very loud soundsystem on a hot summer afternoon a few months ago; it felt like the air inverted around me. “Construction Materials From Organic Waste” takes that rattle and hammers it into a teetering, vertiginous power station. It just works. Ingram once told The Wire that, while working in Detroit’s famed Buy Rite record store, he had an argument with Gerald Donald over an early Drexcyia song’s unusual arrangement, which made it tough to mix. The next day, James Stinson came in and they had the same argument. Stingray’s productions don’t have the uncanny funk Drexcyia’s oddness enabled. But a long faith in rationality has served him well: It takes discipline to sound this unhinged.
Closer “Enzymatic Detergents” rinses the EP in some tightly controlled reverb and delay, just enough to imply that things could go on forever. Its limber five minutes could easily work themselves into 10. But he shuts it down and moves on, right on time. Today, in a world where prospects seem so dim that even pessimism feels Pollyanna-ish, Stingray offers brutal beacons of hope. The future arrives each time you play it.

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On his latest double album, the Vallejo vet remains free-flowing, wise, hilarious, and unstoppable.

Practice Makes Paper

On record and in conversation, E-40 remains the same—free-flowing, wise, hilarious, and unstoppable. Ever since he emerged from Vallejo, California in the 1980s, he has churned out high-quality albums with ease. And yes, some of the 26 tracks on Practice Makes Paper, his 24th or 26th  solo release, depending on how you keep count, are merely average, or at worst, trite. But nothing this man does is half-baked, and the most surprising thing about the latest multi-volume addition to an already-intimidating discography is that most of the songs are actually pretty good.
The sprawling double album is E-40’s follow-up to 2018’s lean, 38-minute The Gift of Gab. While that record kept a laser focus on the funk-influenced sounds 40 does best, Paper is considerably more ambitious, inviting artists from across the map to get hyphy. The guest list is dizzying: There are certified stars like Migos’ Quavo, Wiz Khalifa, Rick Ross, and TDE’s ScHoolboy Q, but also Houston City Council candidate Scarface. The West Coast is well-represented, with G-Eazy, Ty Dolla $ign, Iamsu! from HBK, and the 20-year-old Compton MC Roddy Ricch, but so is Detroit (Tee Grizzley, Payroll Giovanni, and Sada Baby) and New York (Fabolous, Method Man, & A$AP Ferg).
Some of these collaborations bear ripe fruit. Payroll Giovanni’s stone-cold verse on “I Come From The Game” evokes E-40 compadre Too $hort. “Chase the Money,” (produced by... ChaseTheMoney) shows 40 flipping a Migos flow harder than his guest Quavo. On “I Don’t Like Em,” 40 recruits Bay area MCs Cousin Fik & Laroo to channel Chief Keef and Silky Johnson’s love for hating over a trapped-out G-funk beat.
Despite featuring dozens of different producers, the record is remarkably consistent. The most egregious misstep, “1 Question,” is a saccharine Chris Brown/Rick Ross/Jeremih collaboration that never should have been. “Bet You Didn’t Know” could’ve been a cute moment for E-40 to drop knowledge on youngsters were it not plagued by the only beat on the record that makes him sound old.
But it’s 40’s lyrical gifts that make him special. He understands the evolving nature of language and communication like few others, with constantly updated references that connect him with each new generation of rap fans. He fires off hysterical one-liners with aplomb (“Knock his tooth out, make ’em look like a cook at the Waffle House,” from “Another One”) and references his mentions (“Don’t @ Me”) and memes (“Make a hater cry like a Jordan meme,” he raps on “Imma Find Out”) with the same comfort with which he doles out sarcastic financial advice (“Should I buy it off the lot or should I lease and write it off?/Or pay cash like a rapper and watch the value decrease?” he muses on “In the Struggle”).
There have been plenty of legendary MCs who never figured out how to maintain relevance through middle age, awkwardly surfing trends or losing touch with reality completely. But 40 has persevered by staying within himself. “I make sure I don’t outdate myself,” he told Ebro on his Beats 1 show. “I stay within my jurisdiction, and whatnot, but I’m also me.” With dozens of albums under his belt, E-40 has had a lot of practice. It’s rarely perfect, but few others can make it sound as joyful.


Male Bonding's surprise-released third LP is another album about wounds that won’t heal. But at its best it brings a wizened new perspective to those same themes.

Headache

If time heals all wounds, as anybody who has ever suffered heartbreak has been reassured, that’s scant comfort when time won't move. On Male Bonding’s 2010 debut Nothing Hurts, a high watermark of the era’s fuzz-punk boom, the London trio stared at the clock, wondering when, exactly, the healing was supposed to begin. “Year’s not long,” singer/guitarist John Arthur Webb repeated to himself on the band’s breakthrough song, unconvincingly—because in the wake of trauma, a year is an eternity. On the band’s fuming third album Headache, Webb stops straining to find a bright side and just leans into the misery. Opener “Wrench” begins by laying out the kind of worst-case scenario that even the most dejected scorned lovers try to resist considering: What if 15 years pass and you still don’t feel any fucking better about things?
It’s been five years since Male Bonding’s last album, Endless Nothing, though it just as well could have been 15, given how off the radar they’ve been lately. At some point after that record, they split from Sub Pop, the label that aided their swift rise, and ceased touring. Their social media accounts sat dark for more than a year before they surprise-released Headache, and at this point even its existence does little to clarify whether they have or haven’t broken up. Releasing a new album for free, with no promotion or any live shows to support it, is the type of thing a band does when they’re over. The no-frills Facebook post announcing the record reads like a farewell note: “Have our third album for free—see ya.”
Was another Male Bonding record necessary after all these years? The band’s debut so effectively laid out their formula—fizzy hooks, neurotic tempos, 1990 production values—that there wasn’t much room to improve on it. Endless Nothing faced the same burden justifying itself, too, and good as it was, that album didn’t add much to their legacy, either. But then again, in the post-No Age age, where this kind of purist noise-rock generates a fraction of the interest it did just a half decade ago, Male Bonding have fallen so far from the public consciousness that they barely have a legacy to protect. There was nothing to lose by giving it another stab.
Perhaps the best thing about Headache, then, is the reminder that this band even existed in the first place, but the album stands on its own merits, too. Since the band once touted the youthful fallacy that nothing ever changes, there’s a curious poignance in hearing how they’ve aged—and, to be sure, they have aged. They’ve grown angrier, crankier and, fittingly, grungier. The boyish harmonies of Nothing Hurts are mostly gone; the band can still turn a hook, but they aren’t nearly as sweet or nimble as the old ones. There used to be something vaguely anti-gravitational about the band’s songs, a lightness, but these tunes hang low to the ground, collecting dirt.
What hasn’t changed is the emotional charge. If anything, Webb’s conviction comes across more pointedly than ever. “Why does this keep happening? I cannot feel the way I want to feel,” he shudders over helter-skelter guitars on “What’s Wrong?” On “Chipping Away,” a sloppy, half-finished sketch of a song, he curses his writer’s block, blaming it on his inability to move on from an estranged ex, but he saves his harshest accusation for the Dinosaur Jr.-heavy “I Would Say”: “Why did you leave when I needed help?”
So on the surface, Headache is another album about wounds that won’t heal. But at its best it brings a wizened new perspective to those same themes. It’s also about growing older and, for all the wear, still feeling like yourself, something that anybody who's been shocked to discover that they connect as deeply with In Utero in their 30s as they did as a teen can relate to. Sometimes there’s comfort in feeling sad, simply because it can remind us of times when we were younger and felt the same. Judging from these cloudy songs, Webb needs all the comfort he can get. “What deserts me cannot hurt me,” he sings on the closer “Out to Sea,” but once again, he’s deluding himself. It already has.


Reinvigorated with a whole host of new members, the metal outfit prove there's plenty of life left in their road-trip rock.

Destroyer

Like a bitchin’ phoenix airbrushed on the side of a tricked-out ’78 Dodge B200 van, Black Mountain is a band always in the process of being reborn. Turnover has been almost constant in the metal outfit’s 15-year history, with each album boasting a slightly different lineup. Founding members Joshua Wells and Amber Webber left the group in 2016, shortly after the release of their fourth album, handily titled IV. That leaves frontman/chief songwriter Stephen McBean and keyboard player Jeremy Schmidt as the sole founding members, and that makes it all the more tempting to label this something like a solo project, one whose mission is to realize one man’s vision of heavy rock in the new millennium. But the remarkable thing is how much Black Mountain remains a band, how vital each member’s contributions are. What in the early 2010s looked like it might be a one-note project has pulled out of the skid to redefine itself and its relationship to crunch and riff.
Conceived and sequenced as a soundtrack to an epic desert road trip, Destroyer introduces a new gang of Black Mountaineers, most of whom are actually replacing Webber. That includes one singer, Rachel Fannan of Sleepy Sun, and three drummers: Adam Bulgasem of Dommengang, Kliph Scurlock formerly of the Flaming Lips, and Kid Millions from Oneida. Their version of the band has a lot less boogie but a lot more swamp, a lot more Frank Frazetta fantasy, a lot more majestic doom. As on IV, Jeremy Schmidt stands out as a co-writer and arranger, and his synths taunt McBean’s sludgy guitars, adding friction to the gnashing opener “Future Shade” and dystopian menace to “Closer to the Edge.”
As befits a band that imagines a Ballard-esque tower block as “the loneliest cock in the sky,” this version of Black Mountain have a healthy sense of the ridiculous, which is food of the gods where heavy guitars roam. McBean can deliver a line like, “One thousand horses form in a Flying V” with no smirk of irony and no Darkness-style in-joke. On one of the album’s gnarliest moments, he ends “Pretty Little Lazies” with a coda of menacing, tortured la la la’s, each one sounding more regurgitated than sung, his voice distorted with metal poisoning, like Zardoz puking up an arsenal of assault rifles.
Together, this iteration of Black Mountain allows the songs to take on new shapes: “Horns Arising” opens with a robotic voice delivering apocalyptic lyrics, breaks down into an ambient section that borrows liberally from Schmidt’s Beyond the Black Rainbow soundtrack, and finally ends with a fanfare that tries to raise the dead out of hell. It’s all the more bracing for being so unpredictable. Unfortunately, some of that energizing ridiculousness leaks out of Destroyer by its second side. The most memorable thing about “Boogie Lover” is its title, and “Licensed to Drive” goes nowhere but at least breaks the speed limit getting there. Just when it sounds like they’ve run out of gas, “FD 72” actually manages to keep this hotrod between the ditches. Wherever Black Mountain are headed, they’re not out of road yet.


The first full-length album from the British songwriter and producer Kyle Molleson is dark and dissonant, electronic rock that captures the thrum of cities and the solitude of the country.

Loud Patterns

Makeness is the name of a hilly ridge located south of Edinburgh, near the stone-barn studio where Kyle Molleson records his music. Certainly, the fact that the studio belongs to his father makes it an attractive (and presumably cost-effective) destination, but then Molleson is naturally at home in isolated spaces. Though he’s now based in London (following an extended stint in Leeds), he spent the first 11 years of his life growing up on a tiny island in the Scottish highlands, raised in a family of folk musicians. The dark, dissonant electronic rock he creates as Makeness bears little relation to those fife-band roots, but it is nonetheless emblematic of an artist who has spent his life adapting from rural to urban spaces and back again. Claustrophobic and expansive in equal measure, Makeness’ mélange of trembling melodies and strobe-lit intensity suggests a sheltered soul being exposed to inner-city life for the first time and absorbing the shocks to his system.
Loud Patterns isn’t just Molleson’s first full-length release as Makeness, it’s his first to make his vocals the central compositional feature after flirting with pop forms on two largely instrumental EPs. Molleson cites Caribou’s Swim as a transformative influence, in terms of demonstrating how concise songwriting and electronic experimentation can co-exist. Certainly, there are parallels to be drawn between Dan Snaith’s evolution and Molleson’s own: Makeness has followed Caribou’s path from hermetic solo studio savant to rock-band ringleader, and the two share a similarly soft, vaporous vocal style that infuses their productions with a vulnerable human core. But if the two artists work from similar blueprints, they use very different materials to realize their visions—where Caribou orbits the intersection of psychedelia and house, Makeness builds robust songs out of industrial and techno inputs.
Loud Patterns’ opening title track sets a tense, suffocating mood that rarely relents over the course of the album. “It’s a mess, but I’ve been told there’s no way out,” Molleson sings obliquely yet ominously—and, as such, he delights in piling on disorienting textures to give the impression of walls closing in. Throughout Loud Patterns, Molleson takes great care to build up his rhythmic motifs, only to do everything in his power to destabilize their foundations: He subjects the taut techno throb of “Gold Star” to a sustained laser-beam synth attack as if trying to blow up a boss-level spaceship in a videogame, while the 4/4 thrust of the instrumental “Rough Moss” is gradually overcome by blasts of distortion and brain-scrambling oscillations.
Though Molleson’s vocals are the most prominent feature of Loud Patterns, he’s not one for in-depth lyrical narratives—be it the haunted “Day Old Death” or the atypically playful bounce of “14 Drops,” he opts for minimalist phrasing and repeated incantations as if mimicking the looped vocal snippets on classic house records. But his melodic graces are given more room to flourish on “Stepping Out of Sync,” whose smooth chorus hook and luminous synths suggest Rhye’s sultry soul given a Junior Boys remix. Fitting for an album that frequently channels the foreboding atmosphere of Mezzanine-era Massive Attack, Loud Patterns yields a “Teardrop” to call its own in “Who Am I to Follow Love,” a tropical pop reprieve with a soothing guest vocal from Nancy Andersen of London indie-R&B group Babeheaven.
But for all the songwriting strides Molleson makes on Loud Patterns, the album’s carefully sculpted beatscapes ultimately result in a reactionary act of noise. The closing “Motorcycle Idling” is a most unsubtle display of truth in advertising, with a thundering barrage of distorted electronics that approximates the engine rev of a chopper. Molleson has said he enjoys recording out in the country because he doesn’t have to worry about pissing off any neighbors, and “Motorcycle Idling” is the most devious, gratuitous exercise of that freedom, with all the queasy undercurrents bubbling up throughout the record being unleashed in a dam-burst of woofer-blasting anarchy. Sometimes the best way to capture the clamor and chaos of the big city is to head out to the sticks.


The defining strength of the Oakland-based artist’s debut album is its mood: an overarching melancholy that shadows everything like heavy storm clouds.

Hyaline

Maria BC is a classically trained vocalist, a dexterous guitarist, and a songwriter with an innate gift for vast, stately melodies, but the defining strength of their music is the mood: an overarching melancholy that shadows everything like heavy storm clouds. The Oakland-based artist’s debut EP, Devil’s Rain, arrived in the dead of winter 2021, and its five songs—consisting entirely of electric guitar and vocals, recorded alone in their apartment, hushed so as not to disturb their roommates—had the feeling of a stripped-back demos collection from a 1980s dream-pop band. Ghostly and spare, the songs let you imagine how they might bloom if they were cleared of cobwebs and brought into the light.
Their full-length debut, Hyaline, doesn’t expand their approach. Instead, Maria BC further deconstructs and twists the music to feel even more vaporous. In the most fleshed-out songs, like the breathtaking “The Only Thing,” their voice and guitar are accompanied by distant whirring, layered harmonies, and clattering percussion—never quite reaching the peaks of a pop song but showing hints of what would be the emotional climax. “I find I can’t think back so far/Fogging up windows of cars,” they sing in the chorus, describing the limits of memory and offering a visual representation of how these songs feel: familiar and opaque, distant and bittersweet.
The abstract approach, ironically, brings us closer to the spirit of the music, helping the songs stick in your head. Maria BC has a knack for wordless hooks—the operatic ahs in “April,” the inquisitive huhs of “Rerun”—and they gravitate toward textures that reward a good pair of headphones: panting and whispers, clicks and scratches, amplifier fuzz and room tone. And while the lyrics are rarely the focal point and sometimes indecipherable, the strongest ones resonate without building to anything approaching a narrative. In “Good Before,” their depiction of an internal transformation is mirrored by a few key images: a locust swarm, the drift of stars, “traveling alone when the trees stretch dark in the morning light.”
Hyaline is a beautiful record, but these lines allude to an undercurrent of horror—the quality that, along with their subtly catchy songcraft, distinguishes Maria BC from other artists making dreamy ambient pop in the shadow of Grouper and Cocteau Twins. Occasionally, they outright summon ghosts. The clipped, orchestral stabs in “Keepsakes” suggest a scary film score, while their low, quivering vocals in “The Big Train” have the unnerving quality of someone either about to break into tears or a primal scream. As with the spectral performances on Devil’s Rain, Maria BC recorded Hyaline alone in their apartment. The difference is these songs refuse to stay still: They drift through the halls, restless and disoriented, drawing your attention to the unfilled space around them.
Accordingly, there are very few guests. Some friends add backing vocals and rhythmic accompaniment; their father plays organ. The latter appearance speaks to some of Maria BC’s formative memories, taking comfort in the communal intensity of church music. Sometimes, the hymn-like quality of their songs and the tragic, almost gothic delivery recalls the work of Sarah McLachlan in the ’90s, particularly her Fumbling Towards Ecstasy highlight “Fear,” whose stark opening verse is sung nearly a cappella in the highest reaches of her falsetto before the full arrangement kicks in. (Like McLachlan during this period, you can imagine Maria BC’s music, with its scene-setting lyrics and sweeping melodies, lending itself well to dance remixes.) For now, however, the solitude is the point, and the homespun setting is inextricable from the compositions. “I remember starting to write songs as a way of keeping myself company,” Maria BC explained of their earliest inspiration. On Hyaline, they push this inclination a step further, writing songs so the rest of us can close our eyes and brush up against them, to stand among them ourselves.


Blackalicious' Chief Xcel and Gift of Gab are among the most diligent and reverent technicians in hip-hop, so it feels ...

The Craft

Blackalicious' Chief Xcel and Gift of Gab are among the most diligent and reverent technicians in hip-hop, so it feels oddly appropriate that their third album, The Craft, should bear such a workmanlike title. Painstakingly detail-oriented and lyrically dense, the record is another labor of love that puts as much emphasis on the labor as on the love. With an ambitious expanse that falls somewhere between the eclectic sprawl of 2000's Nia and the more-streamlined funk of 2002's Blazing Arrow, it appears as if every square inch of The Craft has been fussed over to such an extent that Blackalicious's calculated risks and controlled experiments can sometimes make the album seem more science project than artwork.
Following the release of Blazing Arrow, both group members spent time with other projects-- Gift of Gab with his 2004 solo album 4th Dimensional Rocketships Going Up and Xcel with his underappreciated Lateef and the Chief collaboration Maroons: Ambush. And evidently this time apart allowed the two to approach their partnership rejuvenated and ready for some serious woodshedding, as they reportedly recorded dozens of tracks before pruning down to these relatively lean 14 songs. Despite this strenuous editing process, however, The Craft can remain a frustratingly uneven listen. Brimming with confidence, the duo plows through ideas both familiar and novel. Fans of the group's previous work-- and of Solesides/Quannum-related material in general-- will find treats within The Craft's many folds, but its irregular terrain will likely prevent consensus about which tracks represent the peaks and which the troughs.
The most noteworthy change to Blackalicious' sound is a pronounced increase of live instrumentation. On paper, the extensive use of live drums, guitars, and strings might seem a nod toward creating more conventional songs, but in practice this blend has unquestionably resulted in some of the weirdest tracks of the group's career. Xcel integrates the instruments so seamlessly into his samples that it's often difficult to pinpoint what's what. On opener "World of Vibrations" the mix segues abruptly from the song's daffy, almost Joe Meek-like chorus into a sultry breakdown of rippling guitars, impassioned female vocals, and shimmering dub effects; it's an interlude as beguiling as it is unexpected.
Much more straightforward is "Powers", the album's effervescent first single. With its bouncy layers of new-wave guitars, strange Manfred Mann keyboards, and Go! Team exclamations, this track resembles an outtake from a failed hip-hop Broadway revue, but is salvaged by Gift's adroit melodic work on the verses and Xcel's rubber-limbed production. Even better are adventurous tracks like "Side to Side", which features Lateef and Pigeon John exchanging verses with Gift of Gab over a loony, oboe-fed sway, the unrelenting pound of "Egosonic War Drums", or the bracing prison reform drama "The Fall and Rise of Elliott Brown", which is fortified by Xcel's well-doctored horn samples.
Throughout the album Gift of Gab showcases his still-astonishing verbal dexterity and enunciation, chiseling every syllable into the pavement despite rarely breaking from a full sprint. But if you've tired of his "I still think abstract/ Stay metaphysical/ And challenge what is really real" act in the past, it's unlikely that anything here will alter your viewpoint, particularly on tracks like "Rhythm Sticks" where he resorts to the tired riff of spelling out the name Blackalicious. ("...A is for the absolute that dwells everywhere you can't see/ C is for creating...") Such missteps aside, Gabby is at his most persuasive when he slows down a bit and lets the game come to him, especially on autobiographical numbers like "My Pen & Pad" or the set-closing title track. And though these numbers must overcome some threadbare "This ain't music, it's my life" clichés, there can be little doubting the emotional heft in Gift's delivery, or in the inspired connections that Blackalicious manage to discover whenever they're hard at work together.


T-Pain’s first album in six years cashes in on the good graces he’s received in the interim, but also retreads vastly familiar territory that is more fun than illuminating.

Oblivion

It’s somewhat unbelievable that T-Pain would ever feel the need to reintroduce himself, but here we are. Six years removed from his last proper album, he opens Oblivion in grand fashion, kicking open the casket at his own funeral. He offers his gratitude to loyal fans and fuck-yous to those who wrote him off—all before he settles into his lead verse with a succinct reminder of his resume: “I hit the Billboards with a baseball bat.”
The charismatic “rappa ternt sanga” dropped his debut single “I’m Sprung” in 2005, setting off the Midas touch era of T-Pain. His signature Auto-Tuned voice landed in the the Hot 100 over 30 times in a five-year period, and everyone from Kanye West to Black Eyed Peas adopted their own renditions. It feels like a musical lifetime has passed since then, but nostalgia and excitement still follow him wherever he goes. The wave crested with his 2014 Tiny Desk concert when a portion of the world learned T-Pain can actually sing without digital assistance. The moment spawned a brief acoustic tour this year and, probably, a glimmer of hope that Oblivion would follow suit. Instead, it finds him channeling the ghosts of past. Nearly every song sounds like it could've been a smash several years ago which is, both, admirable and disappointing.
On the one hand, his ability to churn out earworms remains untarnished. The selection is everything T-Pain does best: intoxicating computerized crooning mixed with gratuitous sex and flash. On the other, there’s the admittedly unreasonable expectation that one of Rap&B’s most influential artists would hint at the genre’s next horizon or, at the very least, his own. While there may be a few seeds here, Oblivion settles mostly in his established wheelhouse. Songs like “Straight” and “2 Fine” are low-stakes affairs that find T-Pain playing around with his assorted vocals, flows, and ad-libs—it’s genuinely fun. But his ingenuity shines brightest on the Mr. Talkbox-assisted standout “May I.” Running like two passionate robots serenading a jazz lounge, it is the peak use of a computer to make the voice an instrument unto itself—nearly eight minutes of finesse that only T-Pain could pull off.
Oblivion’s most unexpected feature is its mix of sub-genres that T-Pain chameleons himself into perfectly. From trap rap (“Goal Line”) to Latin-flavored pop (“No Rush”) to the percussive lands of go-go (“Cee Cee From DC”), it’s almost like a best-of but with all new music. In his grasp, the respective genres end up sounding poppier rather than like true interpretations, but it's nice to hear an artist push his own creative boundaries—even if the source material is a bit watered down. There’s a masterpiece somewhere in the colors of all these disparate sounds if only it were trimmed just a bit more.
As such, Oblivion feels like a “business decision” album: it’s a casual affair that frees him from his label obligation to RCA. It isn’t exactly phoned in, but T-Pain has more in his tank than what he shows here, even though the tracks that reflect his past eras display his versatility and allow for optimistic glimpses of a career resurgence. The free-spirited energy that earned him ubiquity a decade ago remains intact despite his fall from glory. This album reflects the best of what we know of him, but the unknown remains the most intriguing. Projected ambitions aside, this release typifies just how ahead of his time he was and how much those melodic blurred lines influenced the generations that followed—sing-raps can‘t be fully attributed to him, but he certainly played a substantial part. The genre fluidity he shows here helped lay the foundation for artists to come. And even in a landscape that outgrew him or outran him or both, Oblivion T-Pain sounds like a teacher who still feels welcome in his own classroom, and he’s owed at least that.


The Twilight Sad: Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters

Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters

The first time you hear the Twilight Sad, a four-piece band from just outside Glasgow, they already sound familiar. It's like they've been around a while, even though their debut EP only came out last September. You might think of Arab Strap's Aiden Moffett when hearing singer James Graham because he's got a feel for concrete imagery and does nothing to hide his thick Scottish accent. Shoegaze comes to mind because guitarist Andy MacFarlane favors billowy curtains of white noise that dominate the sound field. And, as Pitchfork writer Marc Hogan has already pointed out, the Twilight Sad sometimes bring to mind U2, with their shared fondness for huge choruses that occasionally verge on histrionic.
All that said, the Twilight Sad are pushing these familiar elements in some unexpected and exciting directions. Graham may sound a bit like Moffett but he doesn't sing about getting wrecked in the pub while trying to forget. His focus is primarily the concerns of adolescence, and he even narrows it down to a specific age. In the first line of the key track "That Summer, at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy", Graham sings "...14, and you know..." and you want to stop him right there. (Fourteen. Yes, we know how awful it can be.) But what follows is a portrait of a miserable kid that's both touching and cathartic. Graham sounds angry, with sarcastic barbs about a "loving mother" and a "lovely home," but "That Summer..." is anything but a tantrum. He's got about four different levels to his voice in the song, from a calm articulation to a throat-shredding wail, but he's never so clouded by rage that he forgets the details.
And the details are what make the track, and the album, so compelling. The song titles suggest a writer trying to find the profound in the mundane, and in that way they remind me a bit of the Clientele, even though the tone couldn't be more different. There's lots of weather, elements like earth and fire. There are train rides and long walks to nowhere that offer plenty of time to think. "Last Year's Rain Didn't Fall Quite So Hard" reads one, and the structure, a canon of Graham's multi-tracked voice swirling around a single piano chord that sounds like the opening of the Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for My Man", reflects the sadness streaked with hope. In "Walking for Two Hours", Graham sings about being "so far from home" as bass drum, crash cymbal, and guitar strums merge into a tightly coiled implosion that drives the loneliness home.
The shifts in volume, though not exactly surprising, are crucial. Peter Katis and the band produced, and the sonic arc they construct tracks the lyrics beautifully. There's a "big moment" on most songs where the music gets ridiculously loud and the guitar distortion crowds almost everything out. There is, of course, no trick in this sort of surge; a couple clicks on a floor pedal is all it takes. But the Twilight Sad know how to use dynamic range to advance the plot.
With songs so direct and the band's hearts on their sleeves, the music's debt to shoegaze only goes so far. Instead of tying the overdriven fuzz to a blissed-out sense of surrender to noise, the Twilight Sad uses the guitar as another kind of yell. The instrumental title track closing the record touches on My Bloody Valentine's "glide" guitar drone, but the almost martial drumming, with the snare seemingly vibrated by the guitar amp, keeps the track intimate and grounded. And when the band gets ethereal, it's in a loose, folky way, as with the braid of ringing guitar sounding during the coda of "Talking With Fireworks/ Here, It Never Snowed." Regular use of accordion, also played by MacFarlane, imparts an appropriately street-level earthiness to the sound.
As exhilarating as Fourteen Autumns is at its most anthemic, the vividness of the lyrical themes ultimately carries the record over. If one were to consider only the widescreen sound while scanning the titles, you might think the Twilight Sad were overwrought and sappy, another example of a band overly concerned with childhood, too young to know how good they really had it. But that's not the way these songs come across at all. The Twilight Sad approach the darker side of growing up with consideration and dignity, and manage to maintain a proper perspective. "As my bones grew, they did hurt/ They hurt really bad," an angst-filled songwriter from another generation once sang; the Twilight Sad do a tremendous job of remembering that ache.


The Harlem veteran’s long-promised collaboration with producer A-Trak is a laid-back shot of charisma.

U Wasn’t There

You won’t see Cam’ron jacking trends or chasing clout these days. Forget recruiting Fivio Foreign to administer the drill treatment—Cam’s still laying down records that feel half art installation, half in-joke. He’s not going to clip his rhythmically complex bars to introduce more languid melodies when he can drop classic Cam diction by rhyming “lump sum” with “yum yum.” He’s settled into life as a rap veteran by eschewing what’s in vogue to make music that feels designed to please exactly one person: Cameron Giles himself. Though his output has slowed, he’s still tremendously fun when he raises his head above the purple parapet.
U Wasn’t There, Cam’s first full-length since 2019’s joyous Purple Haze 2, is a joint project with beatmaker A-Trak after their promised Federal Reserve EP failed to materialize. A few of these songs have likely been on A-Trak’s hard drive in various forms for a while: The pair’s 2014 single “Dipshits,” featuring Juelz Santana and some Just Blaze & the Blazettes drums, helps to pad out a still-lean 27-minute runtime. But the out-of-time nature of the production means the record doesn’t feel past its sell-by date.
A-Trak has been a useful ambassador of old forms in the past—a turntable champion who was once recruited as a Jam Master Jay surrogate to help Run-D.M.C. hawk Adidas. Here, his role is to deliver pitched-up soul sample-leaning beats to one of the greatest rappers to ever flow over pitched-up soul sample-leaning beats. A chipmunk’d vocal loop squawks the title of single “All I Really Wanted,” to which Cam responds with his list of rap game fundamentals: “Money, cars, clothes, hood respect.” The triumphant brass of “Ghetto Prophets,” co-produced by DJ Khalil and Lakim, resuscitates a form of orchestral street rap from the 2000s—think “Cam’s gon’ give it to ya!”
His writing is still sharp, funny, naturally ridiculous. The “Hard Knock Life”-esque piano line of “Cheers” gives it a relaxed, back-in-the-day vibe, yet Cam eschews nostalgia to complain about a girl correcting him for liking too many of her social media snaps. “I liked the picture ’cause I liked the picture,” he objects. On “All I Really Wanted,” Cam delivers a typically unconventional warning to potential hostiles: “Dying’ll make you way more famous than your publicist.” There’s no overhanging concept or deeper intent to U Wasn’t There’s boasts and threats: It’s just a pure shot of charisma.
The laid-back nature of the album invites Cam to consider some career highlights. On “What You Do,” he remembers challenging Fox News on their own platform, revealing his famously inflexible anti-snitching rules to Anderson Cooper, beefing with Nas, and purchasing some of the most opulent pink items ever conceived. He also uses the song to repeat boorish claims about Monica Lewinsky, probably the album’s nadir. And while we already knew that Cam’s voice is showing signs of weathering, it’s still a vital instrument. His increasingly heavy vocal style hangs over the hot, crunchy reggae of “Dipset Acrylics,” leaning into a half-patois and stuffing vibrant wordplay, internal rhyme patterns, and a nod to old collaborator Kanye West into a bar like, “You superficial, I’m super-official/Coupe to coupe, still I be on the stoop with a pistol/And I got it, who need meth, I’m still moving the crystal.”
Then there’s the presence of Damon Dash, who serves as one of the album’s executive producers. On “Dame Skit,” he leans back in his chair and takes stock of his three-decade journey with Cam: “We had dreams and we made ’em come true. And now we have more dreams—there is no ceiling, the sky is the limit.” There’s nothing revolutionary about this all-time great egoist gassing himself up, but it’s comforting to hear Dame (51) and Cam (46) still dreaming, still focused. It underlines the warm feeling of familiarity that U Wasn’t There elicits. “We looking overseas,” says Dame. “Or rather, over galaxies.”


The drummer builds on the transnational foundations of his last ambitious album, making the case for global citizenship and international solidarity through culture-spanning music.

Phoenix Rise

On last year’s Wild Wild East—Sunny Jain’s first album for Smithsonian Folkways—the Red Baraat bandleader recast the quintessential American cowboy in the image of the immigrant, a tribute to the courage and tenacity it takes to uproot yourself and build a new life in a new country. Drawing from disparate influences, Jain wove together an audacious soundtrack for this multi-cultural reboot of one of America’s most cherished myths. On his follow-up release, Phoenix Rise, he builds on those transnational foundations to make a new case for global citizenship and international solidarity, once popular ideas that have fallen out of fashion in these times of resurgent nationalism.
Written and recorded against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and the turbulent end to the Trump era, Phoenix Rise is breathtaking in the sweep of its ambition, spanning continents and centuries of musical tradition. The list of collaborators is impressive and diverse, a multicultural constellation of talent from the worlds of jazz, hip-hop, soul, rock, Punjabi folk, Hindustani classical, Zimbabwean mbira, and even kathak dance.
When it clicks, Phoenix Rise’s combination of technical brilliance and grand concept is electric. The compositions whirl their way through a multitude of sounds and genres, performing head-spinning feats of musical acrobatics with grace. On the title track, Jain’s trademark dhol holds down a steady rhythm as Lauren Sevian’s free-form saxophone unfurls in smoky spirals that circle gently rising vocals. A minute in, the rhythm picks up pace as Marc Carey’s discordant keys add an element of conflict and tension to the mix. The track then quickly builds up to a fire-and-brimstone crescendo, the long-awaited moment of spiritual renewal that is at the heart of the record.
Written in solidarity with the global LGBTQIA community, “Pride in Rhythm” is a jungle-paced percussive piece that offers a fresh take on a classic Asian Underground staple. Vijay Iyer’s oddly sinister synth lines snake their way through the rhythmic maelstrom thrown up by the dhol and mridangam. The aggressive machismo of the dhol is offset by a rhythmic structure that evokes the expressive grace and beauty in motion of kathak dance, weaving endless permutations and combinations over a repetitive rhythmic motif.
Another highlight is “Where Is Home?, written while vocalist Shilpa Ananth was temporarily stranded in Dubai on her way home to New York from India. Joe Russo’s drums and John Falsetto’s glittering mbira lock in together and provide a foundation of Ananth’s Tamil vocals that drip with longing and melancholy. It's a powerful meditation on community and belonging, elevated by the emotive power of Ananth’s voice.
But, as on Wild Wild East, Jain’s lofty aims can occasionally be too much weight for the songs to bear. Perhaps the worst offender in this regard is opener and lead single “Heroes,” an ode to ordinary people all around the world fighting for social, economic, and environmental justice. The song starts off promisingly, with the mbira and drums setting a bright, jaunty tempo matched by Tawanda Mapanda’s smooth tenor saxophone. But the trouble starts when John Falsetto’s lilting shona vocals give way to Malik Work’s well-meaning but painfully on-the-nose rhymes. Clunkers like “every activist that be activating out in the streets” only serve to highlight the awkwardness of the lyrics, like a student activist proclaiming their ideals with such straight-faced earnestness that it’s hard to take them seriously.
Its dense web of transcultural collaborations makes Phoenix Rise a thrilling, unpredictable ride, but occasionally Jain overdoes it, stuffing the tracks so full of twists and turns that they sometimes feel disorienting, even claustrophobic (although the songs are short enough that the feeling quickly passes). “Say It” features Arooj Aftab singing “Black Lives Matter, say it” in Urdu, a mantra she repeats over and over, a plaintive invocation of our shared humanity. Initially, Jain’s amphetamine rhythm and Bubby Lewis’s electric bass add a jittery edge to the track that complements the meditative beauty of Aftab’s vocals. But he keeps adding on layers of keys, violin, and dhol that by the time the bass solo comes in, I find myself wishing some of Aftab’s minimalism had rubbed off on Jain.
Still, Phoenix Rise succeeds far more often than it stumbles, offering up a treasure trove of pleasures both cerebral and emotional. My favorite moment of the album is when the frantic chaos of “Wild Wild East (Recharged)” gives way to “Hai Apna Dil,” a re-work of a 1958 Bollywood song about unrequited love. Jain enlists his wife, Sapana Shah, to play the duff, while their two daughters sing in lightly accented Hindi. The song invokes both the joyful campfire sing-along and the evergreen South Asian tradition of embarrassing your kids by making them perform at family gatherings. In an album full of songs about fighting the good fight, “Hai Apna Dil” is an important reminder of what we’re all fighting for—a world full of warmth, community, and camaraderie.
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Writing for a five-person group with vocalist Amirtha Kidambi at its center, the composer-guitarist finds fresh inspiration slipping between diverse genres and songwriting modes.

Code Girl

Mary Halvorson’s ambition has followed a clear trajectory. On albums designed as showcases for her own tunes, the experimental guitarist has steadily added additional instrumentalists to her crew, beginning with a power trio, early in her career, and winding up with a group of eight players on 2016’s Away With You. As Halvorson has developed her skill as an arranger, her varied interests in jazz, rock, and other styles have found new ways to interact. When all her influences click into place, the result is like little else, in any genre. The pileup of melody often feels luxuriously imaginative, instead of complicated for its own sake.
Even after some unexpected moves, such as her solo covers album, it’s always seemed reasonable to expect this bandleader to keep fielding ever larger groups. But it turns out that increasing the number of chairs on stage isn’t Halvorson’s only strategy for pushing herself. Her latest record, Code Girl, introduces a new band of the same name, and this time, she’s back to writing for only five players. Drummer Tomas Fujiwara and bassist Michael Formanek are longtime collaborators. Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, usually heard playing on the Blue Note label, is a more recent associate. But more than any other member of the group, it’s vocalist Amirtha Kidambi who helps Code Girl feel like a fresh aesthetic zone for the guitarist.
The singer’s creative practice is impressive in its range. Trained in the South Indian Carnatic tradition, Kidambi is an artist you might also find interpreting a Nina Simone song as part of a contemporary opera festival’s takeover of a New York City mall. Elder Ones, a fiery and focused group that Kidambi leads, has an incantatory power that distinguishes it within New York’s improv-noise community. She is a perfect fit for Halvorson’s arrangements, which often thrive on internal contrasts. When the leader’s guitar progressions turn ominous, in the final minutes of “My Mind I Find in Time,” Kidambi unleashes some galvanizing melisma that slices through the gloom.
She can also blend into the group. “The Unexpected Natural Phenomenon” starts out in mournful melodic territory that Kidambi observes with chill solemnity, but when Halvorson lets rip with some wild lines, the vocalist follows with finely controlled yowls and raspy vocalizations that fit the new mood of abandon. And before a field of grungy distortion hits, during “Possibility of Lightning,” the group’s initial, sprightly approach is matched by some of Kidambi’s most playful phrasing.
The potential of the entire ensemble seems to fire Halvorson’s imagination. Over the course of this double album, she pursues a few songwriting modes that are new to her catalog. The mordant balladry of “Accurate Hit” is a sound Kim Deal could love. The opening stomp of “Drop the Needle” aligns with the world of new-classical groups like the Bang on a Can All-Stars, or Buke and Gase.
There’s also plenty of the improvisational intensity that fans of modern jazz have come to expect from a Halvorson project. In his solo during “Pretty Mountain,” Akinmusire ventures some harsh textures on his trumpet while managing to keep Halvorson’s melody in view. And no matter the number of twists each song proposes, the rhythm section sounds as brilliant with the guitarist as they do in Thumbscrew, their collaborative trio.
Halvorson’s lyrics manage the difficult task of wearing Beat poetry’s influence without seeming like a pale imitation. Crucially, ambiguity doesn’t seem like a placeholder for absent meaning. There are often clearly identifiable emotional stakes here, even when the narrative particulars are obscured. The first song of the album turns noticeably on the line, “Status is an obstacle”—a phrase that might come easily to someone whose career has taken off over the last decade. But in a group, and on an album, that goes by the name Code Girl, words aren’t meant to say everything. The pleasure of this kind of text comes from the way it invites active listening as a means of interpretation.


This set from Rhino Handmade augments the former Big Star member's posthumous collection of solo material with an extra disc of alternate versions and mixes.

Chris Bell: I Am the Cosmos [Deluxe Edition]

I Am the Cosmos [Deluxe Edition]

History is written by the winners, but in the case of Big Star it's the losers-- the quiet obsessives, the hopeless romantics "in love with that song" (to quote Paul Westerberg)-- who kept the band's legacy alive under the threat of perpetual obscurity. Certainly Big Star itself (current iteration aside) didn't really last long enough to bask in any belated good will. Alex Chilton's writing partner Chris Bell was gone by the time the band released its second album, 1974's Radio City, and by the next year Chilton had essentially pulled the plug on the group, leaving behind a few loose ends later collected as the once-abandoned, later-resuscitated masterpiece Third/Sister Lovers.
Bell died in a car accident not long after that album's eventual 1978 release. Prone to serious depression and chemical indulgence, he began fitfully working on solo material as soon as he exited Big Star (though he reportedly participated in at least some of the Radio City sessions), and if there was every reason to expect good things from him, Big Star's own bad luck was indication enough he'd have just as much trouble getting people to hear it. In fact, it wasn't until Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers showed up on shelves (however haphazardly) that Bell made his solo bow: the single "I Am the Cosmos" backed with "You and Your Sister", songs coincidentally (or not) steeped in the same sense of sadness and loss that marked Big Star's swan song.
That's all most heard of Bell's solo work until 1992, when Rykodisc compiled his extant studio material on I Am the Cosmos, which fittingly showed up alongside a spiffy definitive reissue of the scattershot Third/Sister Lovers and followed some renewed interest in Bell's writing (This Mortal Coil covered both "I Am the Cosmos" and "You and Your Sister" on 1991's Blood, the latter song sung by then-Breeders Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly). It turned out that Bell, between demo sessions, working in his parents' restaurant, gigging around Europe with various pick-up bands, and dealing with his ongoing depression, had amassed more than enough strong material to make him a cult hero, almost akin to an American analog of Nick Drake, another struggling songwriter lost too soon but unearthed and embraced later (thanks, in no small part, to his own reissues).
Granted, Bell never got his Volkswagen moment, and admittedly he remains on the cultier end of the cult act spectrum. Case in point: while Big Star gets its own four-disc Rhino boxed set, an expanded reissue of Bell's I Am the Cosmos gets relegated to Rhino's Handmade imprint. It's there for people to buy it, but only if they know where to look first. In some ways it's almost fitting that, finally given his moment in the spotlight, he's stationed just left of the bright beam, still illuminated but not totally out of the shadows, either.
But seeing as the original CD issue of I Am the Cosmos was, by necessity, cobbled together from Bell's remains, what, exactly, was left in the vaults? The new reissue features the original album (as such) on the first disc, 12 songs presented in a slightly re-sequenced order. To call most of these songs "down" would be as unjustly reductive as calling Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers "depressing." It may be true on one level, but it fails to get at the soulful essence that makes Bell so special.
Back in Big Star, Chilton and Bell shared a "Chilton/Bell" writing credit, but that was as illusory as "Lennon/McCartney." Away from Big Star, Bell's solo work proves him Chilton's equal, or at least equally inclined toward a sort of melancholy but melodic proto power-pop (the "pop" part echoing the Beatles, of course, but with the emphasis on "power," at least in terms of the emotions it contains and evokes). Here, "Better Save Yourself" hangs heavy and haggard, and Bell's vocals on "Look Up" are downright heartbreaking, giving songs such as it, "Though I Know She Lies" and "There Was a Light" the same sense of shaky, tragic inevitability that pervades Third/Sister Lovers. "Speed of Sound", "Get Away", "I Got Kinda Lost", and "Make a Scene" surely could have found a place in Big Star's oeuvre, too, given their due in the studio.
The second disc is where the barrel scraping begins, but to the set's credit, much of what's included-- 15 tracks, all but two previously unreleased-- actually helps expand the history of Bell and Big Star. Yes, the bulk comprises alternate versions and mixes (including a version of "Get Away" featuring Chilton on guitar), but as with the rarities on Big Star's box, the different perspective proves an invaluable annex to the band's limited catalog (just as fleeting captures of Bell's slow, Southern drawl of a speaking voice proves a fascinating contrast to his sharp, British Invasion-inflected singing voice). Fleshing out the still oddly incomplete Big Star portrait are a few tracks from Bell's pre-Big Star bands Icewater and Rock City (whose early version of "My Life Is Right", essentially the same as Big Star's version, underscores Bell's talents), subsequent collaborations with Memphis scene fixtures Keith Sykes and Nancy Byran, and a sleepy solo instrumental, "Clacton Rag".
"There were cool things all over Chris' tapes," said Ardent Studios engineer Adam Hill recently in the Memphis Flyer, referring to "Clacton Rag". "I found one thing they weren't initially gonna put on the Cosmos reissue, this acoustic guitar demo that theoretically could've been cut anytime, although I think it dates to the mid- or late-70s. No vocals, just pure Chris." Considering that Bell's tragically limited life and output precludes a fuller portrait, this edition of I Am the Cosmos comes closest to capturing "just pure Chris" as we're likely ever going to get.


As he explores the banalities and oddities of tour, Kristian Matsson seeks answers to a bigger question: How best should he move through the landscape of his life?

The Tallest Man on Earth: I Love You. It’s a Fever Dream.

I Love You. It's a Fever Dream.

Last summer, Kristian Matsson lamented that steady touring had slowed the arrival of I Love You. It’s a Fever Dream., his fifth album as the Tallest Man on Earth. “I can’t write good stuff on tour,” he complained. “I can’t write about life on a tour bus.” Ironically, Fever Dream arrives as a focused and frequently lovely rumination on life lived on a tour bus. Songs unfold in hotel bars, on open roads, beneath vast blue bowls of rural sky. The rhythms of perpetual travel pulse beneath acoustic melodies that lie somewhere between Dylan and Sufjan—a few gentle, a few forceful. With depth and delicacy, Matsson explores the banalities and oddities of tour, like the phenomenon of performing for an adoring audience to whom you are a stranger.
If Matsson’s last album, 2015’s Dark Bird Is Home, was a sharp, urgent diegesis of divorce, Fever Dream represents the dull aftermath of separation. How, he asks, should he now move through the landscape of his life? Is it best to remain in familiar places, where painful reminders mingle with the comforting residue of what once was? Or is the answer terra incognita, where familiarity can neither sting nor console?
Matsson engages with these questions on each of Fever Dream’s 10 songs. He turns his history over and over in his hands, and he relays his findings, tactile and intangible. The record is rich with observations of the world beyond his windows. “Hotel Bar” spans from Brooklyn to southern Africa, where he imagines himself as a cheetah, scaling a “shaky tree” in search of friends on the savannah. Sometimes, he is trapped beneath the sky; sometimes, he imagines, he is the sky. He stumbles through a featureless dark on “There’s a Girl,” and recedes “deep into the forest” on “I’m a Stranger Now,” wondering if anyone else feels “just like a map of where you’ve been.” To end a partnership is, in effect, to depart from the home you made in another person. The daily churn of the tour bus only compounds the problem. Constant travel makes real the emotional disorientation of divorce.
We hear, too, of the less perceptible effects of this lifestyle. On the stand-out “I’m a Stranger Now,” Matsson sings of himself as such; on the following song, he becomes a ghost, expanding the anonymity of road life past alienation and towards something more like death. “Why do the hours disappear when I speak so loving of where I have been?” he sings on “Waiting for My Ghost.” Even in his present, he seems captive to fond recollections of the past. He yearns, more than anything, “for my ghost to return”; failing that, he hopes to learn from his suffering. On “There’s a Girl,” he aches for a new love to liberate him: “She will find me in the dark, where I used to stumble/And then I won’t be there no more.” The slippage in tenses is an impressive lyrical feint, gliding from future to past to the final, subtle admission that he is still, presently, in the dark.
Matsson’s music mirrors his lyrical themes. Though he remains devoted to sparse arrangements of guitar, banjo, and harmonica, these songs begin to veer into more adventurous territory. “Hotel Bar” introduces a horn section, and “The Running Styles of New York” is bookended by momentary blips of electronics. These new elements are deployed sparingly and selectively, a sprinkle of salt to draw new flavor from familiar sound. Tempos vary, too, from raucous stomping to slow, plaintive fingerpicking—as if he’s stretching, sprinting, growing fatigued, slowing down. As in his words, he wrestles with the question of where to go, and how quickly.
Listening to Fever Dream recalls Joanna Newsom’s observation about the moment she decided to marry Andy Samberg. “It was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life,” she said. “The idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose.” Real love, she said, “contains death inside of it,” and death, in turn, “contains love inside of it.” Divorce is not death, but it is a weighty loss—of home, of partnership, of personal identity—that must, somehow, be borne. On Fever Dream, Matsson awakes to a world that has re-formed seamlessly around his loss. The task of laying down roots, of building a new, stable identity, seems unfathomable when the very architecture of his life is one of impermanence. Perhaps Matsson isn’t up to writing about life on a tour bus; perhaps the spinning wheels below make him seasick. But he has written about life on a tour bus, and in so doing, located the love contained within.


The methodical arrangements and uncomfortably close whispers of the experimental French musician, poet, and visual artist bring us further inside her surreal world.

Félicia Atkinson: The Flower and the Vessel

The Flower and the Vessel

On Félicia Atkinson’s 2017 solo album Hand to Hand, she said, “I wanted to make sounds like cacti, with water and secrets inside.” She succeeded: Pairing almost unnervingly intimate whispers with heavily abstracted synthetic tones, the album guarded a vivid interior life beneath its prickly exterior.
But as Atkinson began recording the music that would become The Flower and the Vessel, her perception of the relationship between inner and outer realms began to shift. She was pregnant at the time, and she found herself feeling estranged twice over, caught between her surroundings and the new life growing inside her. In hotel rooms at night, as she composed on her laptop and murmured voice memos into her phone, she asked, “What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?”
The Flower and the Vessel is Atkinson’s answer to that question. It is, she says, “a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy.” The music carries within it the idea of form coming into being; it moves away from the freeform drift of her previous albums and glides toward a nascent kind of order.
Though the album uses sumptuous sounds like a Fender Rhodes, marimba, and vibraphone, its essence remains pensive and sometimes unsettling. Many of the record’s hushed, interwoven elements guard their identities. Contrasting rhythms form a lattice of complementary pulses: On the ominous centerpiece “You Have to Have Eyes,” a deep boat-engine throb mixes in with rapid-fire insect oscillations, creaking doors, and a voice looped like lapping waves. “You had to have eyes in the back of your head,” she murmurs, her voice turned strange and glassy by digital distortion.
As always, there are Atkinson’s uncomfortably close whispers—lips practically brushing the mic, the grain of her voice rendered in molecular detail. She slips between English and French, and though the meaning of her words is not always apparent, the tone of her voice lends a dead-of-night intensity that renders the music’s pockets of silence all the more potent. It is as though you were locked in urgent conversation with her, or even eavesdropping on her very thoughts. But the invasive nature of the tactic—“Whispering is a way to get inside your ear,” she has said—puts an ominous, alienating spin on what we normally think of as an intimate sound.
With many of her texts repurposed from found sources, the precise meaning of most of these songs remains hidden. In “Shirley to Shirley,” she reads excerpts from a conversation between the artists Shirley Kaneda and Shirley Jaffe in Bomb Magazine in an electronically processed voice. In “Un Ovale Vert,” she reads a portion of one of David Antin’s improvised “talk poems” and then, in French, intones images from her own visual art (“a white ball, a green oval”). She is fascinated by the way ideas pass from medium to medium; the methodical way she arranges her sounds is almost painterly. (She also cites ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, as an influence on the album’s careful sense of balance and proportion.)
The album closes with “Des Pierres,” an 18-minute collaboration with Stephen O’Malley, of Sunn O))), which threads Atkinson’s whispers through nebulous clouds of milky drones and guitar feedback. She calls it an “open reading” of a history of images in stone—that is, the accidental “landscapes” found in gems and geodes—written by the French literary critic Roger Caillois. It’s a characteristically erudite reference, but its presence can be traced throughout the music: the guitars roiling like cloudy agate or glistening like an expanse of obsidian. Again, Atkinson returns to the idea of inside (the crystalline image revealed in a cross-section) versus outside (the rock’s nubby exterior). In the album’s opening track, she whispers a poem to her unborn child, meditating on the way that her voice travels through her body to her baby’s ears, and here, at the album’s end, she plunges us deep into that amniotic world.


The 90s dance titans follow their best album in years with the soundtrack to an action film.

Hanna OST

Hanna is a film about a "badass survivalist girl"; the Chemical Brothers have never seemed particularly badass, but it's fair to count them as survivalist, both because last year's Further was their best record in ages and they're the only act from the late-90s electronica boom making music anyone would want to listen to. The Chems are known for welding techno beats to a distinctly rock aesthetic, and for much of the past 10 years they have functioned exactly like a rock band: standard album-tour-relax schedule, few collaborations, monster festival-headliner gigs. (And they can refer to themselves as "superstar DJs" all they like, but their last widely available DJ mix came out in 1998.) For fans of the Brothers, Hanna represents the shockingly rare opportunity to hear a work by the duo whose intentions fall outside their longtime M.O. of making techno for rock fans.
I haven't seen Hanna; it appears to be a thriller set in Eastern Europe with a young female protagonist-- gifted in the art of action-- who eludes a ruthless intelligence operative. Digitized techno mysticism has been a go-to soundtrack of choice for this genre ever since The Bourne Identity rubber-stamped Moby's "Extreme Ways" as the perfect mix of heady paranoia, Euro style, and kicking things. The Chems-- with their widescreen sound, relentless bravado, and sturdy belief in entertainment-as-art-- are well suited for this kind of work.
Hanna sounds a lot like a standard Chemical Brothers album-- [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| saturated, acidic keyboards; thundering drums; styles and signifiers used to bludgeon-- but with a bit more room to breathe. The band isn't deft enough to avoid the mewling vocals and tinkly music-box of the repeated "Hanna's Theme" (pathos: noted) but it's also not deft enough to apply any subtlety or grace to the Eastern scales and pulsing 2-4 beat of "Escape 700", which is kind of the point. This is a band accustomed to soundtracking a light show that would put most stadium rock bands to shame; the chances of them easing off the gas or thinking too hard about the marriage of music and cinema were slim.
The soundtrack offers some of the hard-charging thrills the Chems avoided on Further, and it does so in an environment in which the onus of excitement isn't placed solely on the duo. This results in some terribly limp interstitial "atmospheres"-- the Chems have never had the stomach for this kind of track; they sometimes seem bored (I am)-- but they add welcome contrast to their car-chase songs. Hanna aims for mystery and portent, a slight but welcome tonal shift from the band's urban, galactic edginess. The louche grooves of "Car Chase (Arp Worship)" are a bad fit for the steadily gaining tension they refer to, but its beefy synthesizer roundhouse is the album's most head-nodding moment. They can't help but pepper "The Devil Is in the Beats" with the type of goofily serious vocal nonsense ("Rock the beat!") they've always traded in.
Hanna mostly wins in the sea of Hollywood action soundtracks, but it's marginal as a Chemical Brothers album (I prefer it to their dry, overstuffed mid-decade works). The Chems have rarely acknowledged anything outside their own blinding neon aesthetic, which is to say that not only would the Chems never know they were in a creative rut, they would be unlikely to believe in ruts. Hanna doesn't represent anything more than a slight change-up from a group used to throwing fastballs.


Michael Azzerad's *Our Band Could Be Your Life*\-- a book of profiles of 1980s bands who grew up and out of hardcore punk-- makes the polemical decision to cut each chapter off at the moment if and when each band signed to a major label. On the one hand, this is understandable. Between roughly 1986 and 1991, American indie bands began being sucked into the maw of WEA/Sony/Megahyperglobochemcorp at quick clip. But before Nirvanania found CEOs courting such obvious hit makers as Daniel Johnston and the Jesus Lizard, this was less a cultural given than a leap into the dark

Dinosaur Jr.: Green Mind / Where You Been / J Mascis Live at CBGB's: The First Acoustic Show

Michael Azzerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life-- a book of profiles of 1980s bands who grew up and out of hardcore punk-- makes the polemical decision to cut each chapter off at the moment if and when each band signed to a major label. On the one hand, this is understandable. Between roughly 1986 and 1991, American indie bands began being sucked into the maw of WEA/Sony/Megahyperglobochemcorp at quick clip. But before Nirvanania found CEOs courting such obvious hit makers as Daniel Johnston and the Jesus Lizard, this was less a cultural given than a leap into the dark for both band and label alike. Azzerad's decision is problematic, however, because it ignores the thorny realities of what happened when each band engaged with the major label machinery-- whether it imploded (like Hüsker Dü) or thrived (like Sonic Youth).
Dinosaur Jr.-- featured in one of Our Band's most entertaining chapters-- imploded when they were still on an indie. And now majorhyperglobochemcorp Rhino reissues Dino's first two albums after they signed to Sire/Warner Bros. at the turn of the 90s-- Green Mind and Where You Been?-- as well as a previously unreleased acoustic solo set from the same period by Dino frontman J Mascis. (The preceding records, Dinosaur, You're Living All Over Me and Bug, were reissued last year by Merge.) The two reissues add a handful of bonus tracks-- singles, live takes, stuff from the vault, none particularly revelatory-- as well as typically erudite liner notes from Byron Coley. Green Mind was recorded mostly by Mascis after the original Dinosaur Jr. shook itself fitfully apart following Bug and he had played through a series of temporary lineups. Original bassist Lou Barlow had already formed Sebadoh and would spend the next decade or so badmouthing Mascis in print. Original drummer Murph only plays on three songs. But the music is just a step on from where Dino had arrived at on Bug: ripcord solos, waves of feedback, jetties of New Order/Cure-style jangle, and Mascis' slack yowl delivering lyrics utterly bewildered by human contact. Opener "The Wagon" snarls with nearly as much pop hookcraft and gnarly guitar spizz as Bug's opener "Freak Scene". But throughout the album, Mascis' solos become more controlled bursts of classic rock, less spirals off the dirt track into the ditch of fuzz and mud. Inspirational verse: "There's a way I feel right now/ Wish you'd help me, don't know how/ We're all nuts, so who helps who/ Some help when no one's got a clue." Inspirational song title: "Puke + Cry".
Where You Been was released in 1993, the high grunge moment. It's a bit cleaner than the earlier recordings and somehow also a little less jangly and a bit more, well, grungy. Mascis' guitar is now a Ouija board channeling the King Biscuit Flower Hour heroes of his youth. Recorded with a full band-- bassist Mike Johnson and drummer Murph-- the record has a "three dudes in a room" beefiness that was somewhat lacking on Green Mind. The guitar on "Out There" snarls and the vocal is one of the Mascis' most plaintive. His voice actually improved with age, his youthful cracked mewl deepening into a cosmic yawn-- even if the vocal on "Not the Same" is so high, nasally, and lonesome that it probably still owes Neil Young royalties a decade later. Speaking of nasally: "Start Choppin" was the closest thing the band ever got to a hit until the modern rock staple "Feel the Pain" a year later, and no one can ever say Dino lacked a sense of humor when they hear that ridiculous falsetto note on the chorus. "What Else Is New" adds a pretty string section outro as if the band hadn't been doing pretty since the beginning. When it comes to early 90s major label guitar albums, you could do a lot worse than Where You Been and as someone who lost his Columbia House-purchased copy when he went to college, I was glad to revisit it.
Your enjoyment of J Mascis Live at CBGB's will be dependent on how much you enjoy his voice, his guitar playing, and his songs minus the fuzz. (And, in the case of "What Else Is New", the strings.) The set stretches back to "Repulsion" off the first Dino album and up to material from the about-to-be-released Where You Been, as well as Skynyrd and Wipers covers by request. For someone who claims to have never played a solo show before, Mascis' voice and guitar are in fine form throughout, and for someone with a reputation as a grump, he's got a good line in personable stage patter. Still, even without bonus tracks it's strictly for fans only. The other two reissues, however, are recommended to anyone too young to have heard them the first time around or anyone who wrote off the band's post-SST work. Or maybe just to anyone who thinks being an autistic depressive can always be improved by a really kick ass guitar solo.


These folklorists and singers take an audacious step forward on album three, subtly pushing at what folk music sounds like and what it can do.

Anna & Elizabeth: The Invisible Comes to Us

The Invisible Comes to Us

Nearly halfway through “Jeano,” the ruminative opening track on the third album by folklorists and folksingers Anna & Elizabeth, there is a quiet burst of chirruping birds. They don’t sound like real birds; more like a sample of birds looped into the music, reinforcing the song’s burbling outdoor ambience. It’s both naturalistic and blatantly synthetic, which may be the whole point. “Jeano” is about yearning for the impossible—a lover’s return from the bloody battlefield, a world untainted by war—and that piped-in birdsong, evoking someplace long ago and far away, only increases the sense of loss. It’s as much of a transporting daydream as the lyrics of the chorus: “If I were Queen of France or still better Pope of Rome/I’d have no fighting men abroad, nor weeping maids at home.”
Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle are fascinated by such curious sounds, and they’ve filled The Invisible Comes to Us with drones and loops, sequencers and synthesizers, post-rock woodwinds and migraine distortion. Working with producer and multi-instrumentalist Benjamin Lazar Davis (Okkervil River, Cuddle Magic), they set “Virginia Rambler,” a tale of sexual treachery, to a needling drumbeat that gradually turns itself inside out, as though leading the singers into the deep woods. “Irish Patriot” opens with a shimmer of sound like sunlight through bare trees, then adds a flutter of saxophone and a cacophony of distorted voices. Deconstructing and then reconstructing itself, the song has the feel of journey and arrival, subtly enacting the theme of the lyrics.
Coming after their self-titled 2015 effort, which set Anna & Elizabeth’s voices in an almost entirely acoustic setting, the wider, weirder palette of The Invisible Comes to Us is much more audacious, subtly pushing at what folk music sounds like and what it can do. They’re not the first artists to marry the old and the new or to insist that the electronic might sound right at home with the acoustic. Rather, they’re part of a larger wave of folk acts like House and Land in North Carolina, Lankum in Dublin, Stick in the Wheel in London, even Bon Iver up in Eau Claire—all of whom are reframing old folk music for the present moment. Like those groups, Anna & Elizabeth don’t write songs so much as they unearth them, researching old compositions in dusty songbooks and academic collections—in this case, the archives of song collector Helen Hartness Flanders, housed at Middlebury College in Vermont.
Moreover, they insist that these old songs can hold an array of sounds, that the arrhythmic skronk of a saxophone or the Doppler rhythm of a sequencer might sound as natural as the crunch of dead leaves underfoot or the chirp of birds overhead. Anna & Elizabeth’s most extreme experiment is “By the Shore,” a cut-and-paste collage of spliced voices, spoken incantations, and excerpted noise (and one of several songs on The Invisible Comes to Us whose lyrics feature roaming men and pining women). It’s exhilarating to hear a folk song chopped and screwed, fragmented like a Laurie Anderson composition, ripped and torn at the seams, even if this particular arrangement is ostentatious by design, too showy on an album that makes such subtle and sophisticated use of sound.
The Invisible Comes to Us ends right where it begins: Closer “Margaret” is built on an excerpt from Flanders’ field recording of a Vermont woman named Margaret Shipman singing “Jeano” circa 1940. It certainly sounds 80 years old, with all the ambient hisses and scratches that old 78s accrue with age. Whether those are native to the recording or whether they were added later with the organ and guitar is beside the point. What matters is the singer and her husky, tender, graceful voice echoing through the decades. It’s a surprisingly poignant moment, exploring the mysteries of the past and the unchanged realities of the present.


Featuring his eternal hit “Boom Boom,” the blues legend’s 1962 classic gets an anniversary reissue that showcases how rock’n’roll took shape around his timeless, elemental boogie.

John Lee Hooker: Burnin’ (Expanded Edition)

Burnin’ (Expanded Edition)

Burnin’ upends many myths orbiting John Lee Hooker, one of the iconic blues musicians of the 20th century. Whether you know either his name or his records, you know his heavy-footed boogie, a rollicking rhythm absorbed and assimilated by such acolytes as George Thorogood and ZZ Top, who once faced a lawsuit from the copyright holder of Hooker’s 1948 breakthrough hit “Boogie Chillen,” claiming the Texas trio ripped off Hooker with their 1973 single “La Grange.”
ZZ Top won the lawsuit with the court claiming that the rhythm is in the public domain, a ruling that in a perverse way proves how deeply entrenched Hooker’s music is in popular music: It’s impossible to imagine rock’n’roll would sound without him. Hooker’s boogie is so endless, it not only survives long after his death but seemed to exist prior to “Boogie Chillen.” Critics picked up on this eternal essence early in Hooker’s career. Charles Shaar Murray, the author of the definitive John Lee Hooker biography Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American 20th Century, cites the French blues critic Jacques Lemetre as the first to describe the bluesman as “one of the most primitive (from a musical point of view) and, I would say, one of the most African of blues singers” back in 1964, a framing that’s echoed through the years.
Calling Hooker’s music primitive obscures a crucial trait, one as essential to understanding his art as his slippery sense of timing: He was a modernist, not a traditionalist. He wasn’t anchored to his birth state of Mississippi: He hightailed it up north as soon as he could, settling in Detroit where he played an electrified update of Delta blues for factory workers in the 1940s. “Boogie Chillen” captured how Hooker played not for a rural audience but for city folk: He bent the bars of a blues vamp, extending the groove to gin up the energy in the room. He didn’t sing laments; he played dance music.
This essential distinction comes into sharp relief on 1962’s Burnin’, a record released in the thick of the folk-blues revolution. In Boogie Man, Murray argues that the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival—the one headlined by Muddy Waters, in a performance distilled on a Chess LP that year—is the point where blues was formally accepted by the “(mainly white) jazz and folk establishments, and its passing as the indigenous voice of the ghetto.” Hooker was hardly above pandering to this trend. Vee-Jay released an album called The Folk Lore of John Lee Hooker in 1961 and he’d later issue an installment in Chess’ ongoing The Real Folk Blues series in 1966. This isn’t a reflection of Hooker's folk roots—indeed, when Riverside approached him to record an album dedicated to Lead Belly, it became clear the bluesman didn’t know the subject of his intended tribute—but rather how he’d go wherever the audience went.
To an extent, that's what happened with Burnin’, the fourth album he released on Vee-Jay. Unlike its Windy City rival Chess, Vee-Jay wasn’t primarily known for blues. They specialized in harmony groups, gospel, jazz, and soul, finally landing a major blues artist when the lackadaisical bluesman Jimmy Reed started racking up big hits for the label in the late 1950s. Reed opened the door for Hooker, whose rambling 1958 hit “I Love You Honey” and lazy 1960 stroll “No Shoes” both demonstrate a clear debt. That’s not the case with Burnin’. For this session, Vee-Jay hired a group of Detroit musicians who were toiling away at the various imprints helmed by Berry Gordy, Jr., the impresario who was working hard to keep his Motown label afloat in the early ’60s.
Many years later, these musicians would be called the Funk Brothers, a group immortalized in the 2002 documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown, but back in 1961 they were struggling to make ends meet, so they were happy to head to Chicago to make a bit more money than they would in Detroit. Hooker had a connection to the Funk Brothers through Joe Hunter, a pianist who worked the same Motor City circuit as Hooker. This familiarity let Hooker ease into the rhythms laid down by drummer Benny Benjamin and bassist James Jamerson. The grooves were streamlined when compared to the idiosyncratic beat Hooker played on his own, but they felt vibrant and vital, pitched halfway between contemporary R&B and the dwindling urban blues market.
On this 60th anniversary reissue, Burnin’ has been remastered by Kevin Gray from the original analog tapes; there’s an audiophile vinyl edition of the stereo mix, along with a CD that has both stereo and mono mixes, plus an alternate of the lively shuffle “Thelma.” Listening now, it’s striking how mid-century modern the album seems. Jamerson and Benjamin keep the beat bouncing, Hunter decorates the margins with runs that also push the rhythm, and guitarist Larry Veeder adds texture and color to Hooker’s bedrock boogie, while Hank Cosby and Andrew “Mike” Terry punctuate riffs, rhythms, and melodies with their greasy saxophone. All the extra instrumentation doesn’t allow Hooker to burrow deep into his grooves, a loss that doesn’t seem especially painful while Burnin’ spins. These club-tested musicians allow Hooker to take such unexpected detours as vamping on the riff to the Champs’ “Tequila” on “Keep Your Hands to Yourself (She's Mine),” which in turn allows him to sing about all manners of eccentricities: He gripes about women processing their hair, swears he’s about to turn over a new leaf now that it’s 1962, implores a paramour “Let’s Make It,” then runs down a list of his domestic needs on “Drug Store Woman,” claiming he’d rather have bathwater waiting than a woman “wearing lipstick and powder, her hair all fixed up.”
Anchoring the whole affair is “Boom Boom,” which wasn’t merely his last big hit—it was arguably his greatest. The Funk Brothers help keep his three-chord stomp lean, so slinky and hooky that it reads not as backwoods blues but downtown pop. “Boom Boom” became his only crossover Billboard hit—it peaked at 60, compared to 16 on the R&B chart—eventually making its way to both the Grammy Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a position assisted by its embrace by such British Invasion blues-rockers as the Animals and the Yardbirds. ZZ Top surely heard it too: With its “aw-haw-haw-haw” refrain, it’s more clearly an antecedent to “La Grange” than “Boogie Chillen” itself. As pivotal as “Boom Boom” is, Burnin’ isn't merely a single surrounded by agreeable also-rans. The Funk Brothers helped Hooker hone into his modernity, letting him play off contemporary trends in a way that accentuates how he always existed within the moment, letting the times take shape around his elemental boogie.


Jaded, nihilistic, and heavy: Dylan Baldi leads his band into one of the most self-immolating and intense albums of his career.

Last Building Burning

On their last album, 2017’s Life Without Sound, Cloud Nothings dialed back the rage and softened their bite. It’s not as if they went full R.E.M. circa Around the Sun or anything; it still delivered the riffs, and frontman Dylan Baldi’s songwriting was typically sharp, but the performances were strangely flat compared to its feverish predecessors. Where the guitars previously would have erupted, they merely preened and sparkled. It was Cloud Nothings’ one album since becoming a bona fide band that never quite achieved liftoff.
Life Without Sound fundamentally misunderstood what makes Cloud Nothings such a rare commodity: that tremendous full-throated release their loudest, fastest songs provide. Without that catharsis, they’re just another solid guitar-rock band. That said, Cloud Nothings have always been one of the most adaptive bands in their scene, and on their pressure cooker of a fifth album, Last Building Burning, they rebound with a magnificent course correction. Volume and fury? Sure, they can do that. Still, they meet the demand with almost passive-aggressive relish.
In spirit, Last Building Burning marks a return to the self-immolating intensity of their 2012 breakthrough Attack on Memory, yet it’s even more jaded than that record was. On Life Without Sound, Baldi dared to offer something constructive, an earnest commentary on our divided world and the value of looking beyond our self-imposed bubbles, but it didn’t resonate. So here, he takes a more nihilistic approach, retreating back into his head and indulging his ugliest thoughts. On “So Right So Clean,” he cuts down a partner’s ambition with a brusque “I wish I could believe in your dream,” singing as if choking up tufts of barbed wire. “Nothing’s gonna change!” he barks on “Offer an End,” another track fogged by thick coats of murk.
As always, Baldi is one of indie rock’s great sloganeers, a lyricist with a gift for mantras that read like they’ve been inked across two fists. “They won’t remember my name/I’ll be alone in my shame!” he repeats on “In Shame,” hammering the hook until his failure sounds like a triumph. And while the album interrupts its fleet pacing for one 11-minute goliath, “Dissolution,” the real showstopper is quickie “Leave Him Now,” where Baldi bluntly implores a friend to leave an abusive relationship before things get worse. “You gotta go right now/Or never at all,” he pleas. If ever a voice were equipped to sell the stakes, it’s his.
The track is Cloud Nothings at their best: direct, visceral, vulnerable. It hits in the gut and rings in the head, striking that golden ratio of ferocity and tunefulness that this band does best. It would be a waste for them to mellow out when they still have music like this in them.