On their first album in nearly 30 years, the Paisley Underground group reintroduce some of what made their 1982 debut—atmospheric rock music veering between noise and subtlety—so compelling.

The Dream Syndicate: How Did I Find Myself Here?

How Did I Find Myself Here?

“The past is easier to bend/I found a way to slow it down,” sings the Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn on “The Circle.” It’s a fiery rock song from How Did I Find Myself Here?, the 1980s post-punk band’s first new album in nearly 30 years. In the context of the Dream Syndicate’s career, the “past” is referenced in a number of ways on this record: the atmospheric, guitar-focused rock that veered between noise and subtlety; Wynn’s moody and angsty, enigmatic lyrics that evoke noir cinema and literature; and a penchant for extended instrumental jamming. Even How Did I Find Myself Here?’s minimalist cover art design is a throwback to the group’s outstanding debut from 1982, The Days of Wine and Roses.
Maybe Wynn was asking himself the new album’s titular question five years ago, when he first resurrected his long-dormant group. When the Dream Syndicate originally emerged in the early ’80s, they defined Los Angeles’ Paisley Underground, a music scene that paid homage to the Velvet Underground as well as 1960s pop and psychedelic groups. The Dream Syndicate caused a stir thanks to the critical acclaim of their debut (they were featured in Rolling Stone at one point). Yet The Days of Wine and Roses was a hard act to follow, as their subsequent albums steered toward an almost mainstream roots-influenced direction, similar to that of R.E.M. and Neil Young. With some personnel changes—notably the departures of founding members Kendra Smith and Karl Precoda—and a lack of commercial success, the group broke up after 1988’s somewhat downbeat Ghost Stories.
During the long hiatus, the Dream Syndicate’s stature has grown thanks to The Days of Wine and Roses, which still sounds timeless 35 years later and has been reissued twice; the group’s music has been held in high esteem from members of such bands as Wilco, Yo La Tengo, Dinosaur Jr., and Japandroids. In 2012, Wynn reformed the Dream Syndicate for some shows with himself and drummer Dennis Duck from the original lineup; bassist Mark Walton, who appeared on the later Syndicate records; and guitarist Jason Victor, a longtime collaborator on Wynn's solo projects.
The fact that this lineup—joined by keyboardist Chris Cacavas—took their time to record a new album at least shows a determination to make this reunion feel like it was done with good intentions. Thus, fans may be buoyed at how the new record recalls some elements of the band’s peak circa ’82, as evident on a couple of the moody rockers: the turbulent and punk-driven “The Circle”; the exhilarating “Out of My Head,” with its sheets of bruising and abrasive guitar; and “80 West,” a dark road tale seemingly inspired by a 1950s crime pulp novel. The familiarity also applies to the group’s reflective side, such as the melancholic “Like Mary,” a song that actually dates back 35 years ago from a band rehearsal and is now revisited for this album.
But the track on How Did I Find Myself Here? that finds the Dream Syndicate really reaching back to their past is closer “Kendra’s Dream.” It is sung by Kendra Smith, the band’s original bass player, and it marks the first time her voice has appeared on a Dream Syndicate recording in 35 years, having left the band after The Days of Wine and Roses (her exquisite vocal on “Too Little Too Late” remains one of the high points on the debut album). This surrealistic stream-of-consciousness work, with Smith’s voice now sounding deeper, incorporates ambient-like textures. It’s a different side of the band and yet a fitting conclusion to the record.
How Did I Find Myself Here? isn’t entirely a nostalgia exercise. It wisely branches out a bit musically and lyrically: The opening tracks “Filter Me Through You” and “Glide” are uncharacteristically soulful and upbeat. And like “Kendra’s Dream,” the 11-minute-plus title song represents a stylistic departure with its slow and trippy mix of funk, jazz, and Stax-influenced R&B. That track echoes such previous epics like “John Coltrane Stereo Blues” and “The Days of Wine and Roses” where the band members really show their musical chops.
Having not appeared on a Dream Syndicate studio record together since ’88, Wynn, Duck, and Walton sound revitalized on this album, with a similar energy to that expended on “Out of My Head” and “80 West.” Victor, the relative newbie in this lineup, channels the spirits of his predecessors Karl Precoda and Paul Cutler with his own version of the serrated guitar playing that has been a key part of the band’s sound. While certainly not on the level of The Days of Wine and Roses, this reunion record could be considered that debut’s rightful follow-up, at least in spirit. If the the Dream Syndicate ended their career the first time on an unfinished note, then How Did I Find Myself Here? perhaps opens up, after three decades, a hopeful new chapter.


On her latest LP, Sallie Ford distills her retro rock sound and introduces a confessional lyrical approach. Soul Sick lands somewhere between between a ’50s sock hop and last call in a rockabilly bar.

Soul Sick

A retro streak runs through most of the music of Sallie Ford, both solo and with her former Portland, Oregon band the Sound Outside. But it’s never been quite as pronounced as on her latest album. Soul Sick is Ford’s second LP since the Sound Outside split at the end of 2013, and it’s a distillation in many ways, as if Ford ran her songs through a rock’n’roll evaporator to remove any extraneous elements. The result is a vintage sound that falls somewhere between a 1950s sock hop and last call in a disreputable rockabilly bar.
Soul Sick’s 11 lean tunes are full of raucous, trebly guitars and a toughness imparted by Ford’s raw voice. Her vocals are a distinctive blend of rugged and plaintive, and something of a calling card, one of those attributes that draws listeners in or turns them off. Either way, Ford knows her strengths as a singer, and she maximizes them here. She lets her voice ring out on “Screw Up” over a thrumming Farfisa, or conveys an itchy sense of urgency on “Get Out,” or captures the anxiety of teen angst on “Failure.”
Despite the jumped-up, hip-shaking music, Soul Sick is not a good-time album. Ford is deceptively self-lacerating, and she’s by turns angry and forlorn throughout. Though she sings plenty about behaving badly, a classic rock’n’roll subject, Ford’s lyrics are anachronistic. With their stark, personal tone, these songs amount to a latter-day form of confessional songwriting that simply wasn’t done in the musical periods she draws from. Her dissatisfaction sometimes veers from restless exasperation, as on the full-throated “Get Out,” to something closer to wallowing in her anguish.
Ford sings with jumpy force on “Loneliness Is Power,” but the lyrics read as if she’s trying to convince herself that the title is true. She beats herself up on “Romanticized Catastrophe” for letting negative emotions run rampant, a sentiment at odds with the doo-wop-esque backing vocals, which Dion and the Belmonts would have coveted. And she’s on the verge of falling apart completely on “Unraveling,” a torchy slow-burner that Ford sings in a brawny falsetto over tremolo guitars and a subtle, muted horn section.
Though she rarely sounds at ease on Soul Sick, the blustery gusto with which Ford and her band tear through the songs turns her discomfort into catharsis. Even when her lyrics verge on self-pitying (“Hurts So Bad,” say), Ford sounds like she is determined to exorcise her demons with a guitar and a tom-tom beat. Her energetic thrashing is infectious, like an open invitation to dance away your own pain. Loneliness may be power, but there’s strength in numbers.


In a mix for Berlin nightclub Tresor’s mix series, the Hamburg DJ doles out more than two hours of industrial-tinged techno and electro, all delivered with her typically punishing panache.

Kern Vol. 5

Kern Vol. 5 is not a subtle record. That’s not Helena Hauff’s style. The German DJ didn’t earn her accolades by playing it safe. True to her roots—Hauff got her start as a resident at Hamburg’s grungy (and much loved) Golden Pudel Club—she prefers to smash things up, usually with a blistering mix of hard-edged electro, industrial, techno, acid, and post-punk that’s light on nuance, heavy on distortion, and devastatingly effective on the dancefloor.
As a producer, Hauff has distilled her bleak vision into numerous cassettes, EPs, and a couple of albums, the most recent being 2018’s Qualm, on Ninja Tune. Yet it’s in the DJ booth that she truly thrives, cutting an imposing, often leather-clad figure while holding court with a box of scuzzy vinyl, a take-no-bullshit attitude, and a cigarette permanently jutting out the side of her mouth. Over the past decade, she’s dropped plenty of mixes online, but Kern Vol. 5 is the first time she’s linked up with vaunted Berlin techno institution Tresor, whose Kern series has previously featured iconoclasts like DJ Hell, Objekt, and DJ Stingray.
Though Kern Vol. 5 clocks in at 132 minutes, the mix comes barreling out of the gate and screams along at 150 bpm for the next two hours. It’s an intense (and occasionally punishing) listen, although Hauff explained in a recent interview with The Face that the long runtime was due in part to the logistical challenges of life as an all-vinyl DJ: “I had to get the [unreleased] tracks pressed onto dubplates—but then I realised that I’d picked a lot of mad tracks that are really difficult to mix, so it ended up being really, really long.”
Hauff is known as a digger, with an ear for corroded machine rhythms that rivals that of celebrated reissue outposts like Dark Entries, Minimal Wave, and Mannequin, and Kern Vol. 5 is populated with obscure gems like “City of Boom,” a dynamic 2004 cut from Detroit duo DJ Godfather & DJ Starski, and “Intellectual Killer,” a snarling bit of nosebleed-inducing gabber from Australian outfit Nasenbluten—their name, in fact, is German for “nosebleed”—that samples ’90s horrorcore rap trio Gravediggaz and contains the colorful lyric, “Roping up the devils/Have ’em hanging from my testicles.” The mix’s dominant sound, however, is electro, and though Hauff pulls more or less equally from new and old tunes, she tends to favor an industrial-tinged variant of the genre that relies heavily on gnarled synths, viciously snapping syncopations, and a sci-fi sound palette.
Like most mix compilations, Kern Vol. 5 features a handful of exclusive tracks—all of which appear as part of a triple-vinyl package that also includes select cuts from the mix—including the nightmarish “Segment 3,” which Hauff cooked up herself alongside Greek artist Morah. Arriving in the set’s relentless middle section, it has all the warmth of a threshing machine, but it’s only a few songs later that Hauff begins to lighten things up. The tempo stays high, but she gradually swaps out industrial crunch for cosmic swirl—think Creme Organization instead of Bunker Records—and hits a high note with the pairing of “Starless Night,” a soaring exclusive from veteran French producer Umwelt, and “Pinwheel,” an acid-licked epic from Shinra.
Despite the mix’s (slightly) more melodic turn in the closing 40 minutes, Kern Vol. 5 isn’t for the faint of heart; it’s definitely not a soothing quarantine companion. Hauff has always been the sort of DJ who’s more likely to deliver a kick to the ribs than a pat on the head, and she’s stuck to her rowdy impulses here. Running her gauntlet isn’t easy, but it is invigorating, and with clubs and festivals on indefinite pause around the globe, Kern Vol. 5 is a welcome reminder of just how thrilling a good battering on the dancefloor can be.


When the Chemical Brothers are on top of their game, it's hard for anyone in their genre to touch ...

Come with Us

When the Chemical Brothers are on top of their game, it's hard for anyone in their genre to touch them. In those moments, their sound threatens to go completely over the top, the massive beats and electronic squelches ripping through the speakers like they're about to physically jump out into your living room. Back in '97, I would drive around listening to "Block Rockin' Beats," unable to feel like anything but a bad motherfucker. I might have only been behind the wheel of a Jetta, but that's not the issue.
Of course, a good way to judge a Chemical Brothers album is via the ego-inflation factor. If you're feeling like Al Capone with a fat bank roll and a baseball bat, the Brothers are achieving the desired effect; if you feel like you're shopping for designer footwear, things have veered horribly off-course. The fact is, the Chemical Brothers' greatest strength lies in their ability to lay down irresistibly fat basslines and breakbeats that would make Bootsy Collins' fingers bleed. A good Chemical Brothers track should bulldoze any form of criticism simply because it's a strictly visceral experience-- you press play and send the frontal cortex to its room to play with blocks for a while.
The big question going into Come with Us was whether they'd come out Kung-Fu fighting or serve up another batch of watered-down techno beats like those dished out on their previous album, Surrender. I wanted to see them rely less on guest cameos (almost invariably a bad sign)-- Bernard Sumner and Hope Sandoval should stay as far away from the studio as possible, preferably with a 300-pound bouncer with a pit bull screening the door-- and they generally do. Sure, Beth Orton and Richard Ashcroft managed to get their fingers in the pie, but some of these tracks also return to what the Chemical Brothers do best. In the end, it's a mixed bag.
Come with Us flies out of the gates unexpectedly with its first three tracks, immediately dragging the listener through a relentless torrent of beats and sonic energy. The title track, with its agitated, looped strings, undulating waves of syrupy keyboards, shouts, and strong backbeat, is reminiscent of the Beastie Boys at their most raucous; "It Began in Afrika" is a rapid, heart-pounding conga workout that distills the quick reflexes and primal urges of a cheetah hunt under a deadpan voice repeating, "It Began In Afrika-ka-ka"; and "Galazy Bounce" features a repeated call-and-response sample over tight, driving slap-bass funk. None of this is a thought-provoking music in the slightest, and I wouldn't want it any other way. These tracks are purely functional-- all speed, sweat and clenched muscle-- and, as convenient packets of immediate party energy, they succeed admirably well.
Of course, it's when the Chemical Brothers deviate from their role as Big Beat deities that problems arise. "Star Guitar" apparently substitutes for the missing Sumner track-- it's slight, but not nearly as vapid as "Hoops," the song that follows it. Honestly, none of the remaining material returns to the quality of the first three cuts, though "My Elastic Eye" and "Denmark" do manage to turn up the heat a bit. But there's not much to be said about the Orton ("The State We're In") and Ashcroft ("The Test") numbers, other than that they're both about as middle-of-the-road as you might expect they'd be. "The Test," for example, sounds like a weak companion piece to the Simple Minds' "(Don't You) Forget About Me," and Orton's admittedly seductive vocals aren't nearly enough to rescue an inherently bad song.
Yep, Come with Us is another let down, no two ways about it. And all because Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons seem confused about where they'd like to go. There are certain things they do very well, yet they don't seem to be content with being pigeonholed as one-dimensional. Unfortunately, one-dimensional is about the only thing they can pull off convincingly.


Kristin Hayter’s latest is an intense and frightening religious inquiry, incorporating traditional Appalachian instruments and samples from televangelist sermons.

Sinner Get Ready

For her latest album as Lingua Ignota, Kristin Hayter burrowed deep into the landscape of rural Pennsylvania. Though the exact location of its genesis is not clear, Sinner Get Ready is crafted from Appalachian folk instruments and mired in the region’s traditional religious fervor. Interspersed with clips from televangelist sermons, this music examines the duality of blind devotion. Like so much of Hayter’s work, the record is also a text of discomfort; it was created during lockdown, following months of excruciating pain due to a spinal surgery. Even the instruments she worked with presented a unique challenge: The classically trained musician taught herself to play banjo and cello, stoking their sounds to ignite a torrid mythology.
On her previous Lingua Ignota album, 2019’s Caligula, Hayter invoked Satan himself, commanding him to “fortify” her in a quest for retribution. It was an expulsion of personal trauma—a blistering tribute to oppressed women. For that album, Hayter enlisted members of the Body, Uniform, and Full of Hell, subjecting her operatic melodies to corrosive distortion and electronic manipulation. On Sinner Get Ready, Hayter confronts the inverse of Caligula, both formally and thematically. She forgoes digital processing for simpler tools: menacing organ, an animal-skin drum, penny whistle. Hayter either subverts these instruments or leans into their ecclesiastical implications. The result, as those who’ve encountered the full-tilt of religious fanaticism know, are just as frightening.
Hayter does not call upon the devil on Sinner Get Ready, but her portrayal of God is ruthless. Like the Jehovah of the Old Testament, or the deities of ancient Greece, he is a vengeful, violent presence. On “Many Hands,” over a dirge of bowed zither and scraped guitar strings, Hayter shifts between the perspective of this severe being and a submissive devotee. “Upon your pale pale body I will put many hands,” she sings, recounting the word of God. “And rough, rough fingers for every hole you have.” The song builds into a percussive clatter, a hailstorm of cymbals and castanets and bells that Hayter sourced from nearby antique stores. The din collides with her multi-tracked vocals, which ebb and rise like the rhythmic call-and-response of a fiery church service. In a lull between vibrant bursts of harmony, Hayter stretches her voice above the creeping drone. “The Lord spat and held me by my neck,” she cries. “I would die for you, he wept.” It is a striking image: to be seized by something so powerful and reckless.
Hayter continues this exploration in “Repent Now Confess Now,” an ambling ballad led by spare piano and surges of cello. She assumes the role of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, reminding congregants that “this body is not your home.” “The surgeon’s precision is nothing,” she sings. “No wound as sharp as the will of God.” But as much as Sinner Get Ready claws at the concept of an all-powerful entity, it also points a sharpened fingernail at the dangerously pious. “The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata” opens with a clip of CNN’s Gary Tuchman interviewing Ohio churchgoers about the risks of gathering during the COVID-19 outbreak. When asked if she is concerned about getting sick, one woman responds, “No. I’m covered in Jesus’ blood.”
These spoken segments burble beneath the surface, never overshadowing the music. Instead, they magnify a subtle kind of terror. In “The Sacred Linament of Judgement,” we hear televangelist Jimmy Swaggart apologize to his followers for sexual improprieties. Before he can complete his speech, an audience member shouts “Get off the stage!” with blood-curdling ire. At the beginning of “Man Is Like a Spring Flower,” Hayter places a recording of the sex worker who brought Swaggart’s indiscretions to light. Yet Hayter’s deep respect for devotional music, as performed in “The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata,” recontextualizes her harsh depictions of piety: the grand, major key hymnal is an ode to paradise found. Soaring over braided woodwinds and plucked mandolins, Hayter’s voice attempts to transcend pains of the flesh. She sings of a delusion—but a lovely one. Unlike the spiteful divinity that stalks these songs, Hayter’s music is full of reverence and empathy for our most challenging task: to be human.

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The pop crooner’s third album is at times freer, queerer, and more enlivening than anything Sam Smith has done before, and yet too cautious to make what could’ve been a career-defining leap.

Love Goes

In the music video for their surprisingly vibrant single “How Do You Sleep?” Sam Smith, usually the purveyor of masochistic melodrama and sexless shmaltz, blossoms into someone new. Surrounded by half-naked dancers, the British superstar writhes, snarls, and moves their body with coquettish sensuality. It culminates in a hypnotizing choreography sequence where Smith and their dancers mime sleep while, staring deep into the camera, they slowly rock their hips. It’s uncanny, playful, and sexy. Moments later, Smith lets a smile loose, running their hands over their head in what looks like utter ecstasy.
“How Do You Sleep?” was a revelatory moment for a pop star who, save for their breakout song, had relied on a stale combination of mopey piano, campy gospel choir, and self-flagellating heartbreak; it’s a formula that made them famous, but the songs increasingly blended together. The video gave hope that Smith, who came out as nonbinary and changed their pronouns a few months after the single’s release, was proud to embrace their queerness and was finally moving past their typical, buttoned-up schlock.
Love Goes, Smith’s third album, unfortunately fails to deliver on the promise of “How Do You Sleep?” The album is clumsily split in two, with no regard to sequencing; it begins with a collection of bubbling, at times electric songs spanning melodic funk, pulsing deep-house, and mid-tempo pop, before abruptly veering to five messy ballads that would be better delivered via Hallmark card. As bonus tracks, if the album wasn’t unbalanced enough, Love Goes tacks on six promotional singles after the ballads, like the hugely successful, Normani-assisted “Dancing with a Stranger,” the theatrical Demi Lovato team-up “I’m Ready,” and the Calvin Harris-produced club hit “Promises.” Replacing these songs, which would have fit well on Love Goes, with boilerplate Smith ballads with titles like “For the Lover That I Lost” and “Breaking Hearts” feels like a calculated, and ultimately ineffectual, attempt to keep the fans of Smith’s earlier records engaged despite Smith’s attempts at exploring new sounds. The result is an unbalanced and frustrating album, one that is at times freer, queerer, and more enlivening than anything Smith’s done before, and yet too cautious to make what could’ve been a career-defining leap.
The Smith we meet on Love Goes’s first half is, thankfully, missing much of the self-pity that made In the Lonely Hour and The Thrill of It All so difficult to empathize with (perhaps because Love Goes was based on the disintegration of Smith’s first real relationship, instead of on the heartbreak of unrequited love; their songwriting has improved as a result). Single “Diamonds” is an absolute smash—melodic and morose, but pulsing with resistance and joy, it’s a dancefloor-filling breakup anthem that is actually believable. It’s remarkable how much better Smith sounds over quality pop production; their voice, with its ridiculously elastic range, is an instant gut-punch, a wrecking ball of emotional devastation that conveys feeling all on its own. On “Another One,” a deliciously petty yet disarming message to an ex who moved on, Smith reunites with Disclosure’s Guy Lawrence over pulsing 808 drums and twinkling synths that echo Robyn. The best, cheekiest writing comes on the infectious “So Serious,” which finds Smith acknowledging their addiction to emotional theatrics. “The second that I’m happy and I’m fine,” they sigh, “Suddenly there’s violins and movie scenes and/Crying rivers in the streets and/God I don’t know why, I get so serious sometimes.”
“Dance (’Til You Love Someone Else),” also produced by Lawrence, is Smith’s attempt at a ’90s house song. Lawrence and co-producer Two Inch Punch nail the reverberating melodrama of classic heartbreak-on-the-dancefloor epics, while Smith, sidestepping mere imitation, uses the force of the instrumental to howl, wounded and brazen and determined. It’s no “Show Me Love,” but the track nonetheless captures the intangible experience of losing yourself on a sweaty dancefloor at a gay club, where dancing, for a moment, is enough to get over an ex.
“Dance” is the final highlight; Love Goes sputters right after. The next four songs all begin with somber piano, as if Smith, and their label, suddenly remembered the commercial tidal wave that was “Stay With Me.” Thankfully, Smith and their collaborators have rid themselves of their uncomfortable reliance on the sound of Black choirs, but the result is just as cringeworthy. Two songs after laughing at their own predisposition for melodrama, Smith laments how “while you were busy breaking hearts/I was busy breaking,” on the nearly unlistenable “Breaking Hearts.” Any hope of artistic evolution implodes on “Love Goes,” an overstuffed collaboration with the British singer/producer Labrinth that is one part Sam Smith karaoke and two parts amateur GarageBand clusterfuck, with competing instrumental layers fighting it out for supreme, headache-inducing dominance. It builds without consequence until a sudden explosion of timpani drums and horns; the BPM accelerates and a faux-hip-hop beat drops, as if Flume drank two bottles of Chenin blanc and tried to produce the rest.
Listening to Smith fresh out of high school, it was as if a vortex had swallowed the pain of my coming out, rejection, and self-discovery, and spit it back in my face. Yet its impact dulled with each listen. The loneliness and self-pity of Smith’s music has never evolved beyond generalized mushiness, and as a result fails to truly capture the nuance and complication of adulthood and queerness, heartbreak and redemption. It’s one-size-fits-all musical masochism that, in attempting to touch the masses, really touches no one. It works spectacularly to sell records. But when put up against the stuff of real life, or the wrenching emotional artistry of stars like Adele or Frank Ocean—musicians who construct entire worlds out of their experience and feeling—it quickly disintegrates. For a brief moment last summer, swaying their hips and reaching for the sky, Smith seemed ready to leave the formula behind, to reveal something new about themselves, to maybe, even, show us a way to look at our own pain. And then the piano started playing.

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The German experimental musician Antye Greie pays tribute to 16 Russian dissidents, putting cut-up vocals, electronic sound, and collective practice in the service of feminist revolution.

Dissidentova

A great cloud of rough-hewn glossolalia is torn into glitches before drifting into an unsettled calm. “Fire my heart with song,” intones a woman’s voice, launching Dissidentova, the latest album from experimental electronic musician Antye Greie, “and hear one who like you to the fairer sex belongs.”
The author of these words is Princess Ekaterina Urusova, the 18th-century Russian poet; the speaker is Katia Reshetnikova, a sound artist in 21st-century Moscow, who casts her voice across a field of birdsong and insect chatter recorded in the remote Russian village of her grandmother. It’s a place that the critic Dasha Birukova, the author of Dissidentova’s essential liner notes, describes as being virtually unchanged since Ekaterina’s time. In her poem, the princess invokes her muses; in her recording, Reshetnikova invokes both princess and grandmother; in her notes, Birukova explicates Greie’s role in bringing the three women together, across media and millennia.
Over the course of the next hour or so, Greie finds fuel in the work of many more women, living and dead, fair and brutal. They speak in voices shadowed by reverb, or stutter in digital cut-ups, or drawl over unctuous electro. Sometimes, like a time-travelling Alan Lomax, Greie presents the recordings as documentation of what’s disappearing; sometimes she filters and phases them into charismatic sirens. She’s rarely precious about the sources, but—in a time when anyone with a Voice Memo app can be a field recordist, and anyone on Facebook a curator—Greie stands apart as an artist who is unusually respectful, centering in her maelstroms the meaning of what’s being said, and who’s saying it, and why.
Born in East Germany and now based in Finland but seemingly most at home online, Greie got her start in the minimal-techno scene of the early 1990s. Her records in the group Laub and as AGF proved to the clicks’n’cuts boys’ club that a woman’s voice could do more than just sing the hook: It was raw material every bit as captivating as skipping CDs, plastic-surgery samples, tone-arm manipulations, or generative synthesis. Her work innovated in vocal processing and charmed with a mysterious, glowing warmth. But soon Greie radicalized in both form and content, abandoning traditional songwriting and turning to notions of how to organize noise—and other people. In 2014, she released the epochal “Nerdgirls” mix, an invigorating hour of more than 50 female electronic producers, and helped start the female:pressure network of female, transgender, and non-binary electronic and digital artists.
Meanwhile, she instituted a series of albums utilizing not just voice but language itself, fitting ancient and contemporary Japanese, Finnish, and German texts into frames of sculpted sound. In February 2017, Greie performed at a festival in Moscow and, like Ekarterina, found her heart fired up by Russian songs. Many prominent artists, Greie says, were resistant to participating in the project, given their “problematic political connections.” But Greie is nothing if not persistent, as demonstrated by Dissidentova’s 16 tributes to Russian women, including a radio broadcaster during the siege of Leningrad, a journalist murdered for her investigations into military operations in Chechnya, and Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.
It sounds heady, and it is, although in both sound and mood Dissidentova album is no more difficult than records by fellow travelers like Coil, Laurie Anderson, Moor Mother, Holly Herndon, or even Zola Jesus (though none of them ever could have gotten as much mileage as Greie does out of the excruciating croaking of an old Russian oven door). “Marina Tsvetaeva 1892-1941” ft. Gbaidulina offers rumbles of barely submerged rage while Greie spits out a poem by the titular Silver Age poet Tsvetaeva. The track ferociously (and, depressingly, in timely fashion) ends: “To your mad world, there is one answer. One. One answer: To refuse. To refuse. I refuse.” It’s perhaps just a remix short (how about one by Octo Octa?) of an anthem. So is the riot of “Emma Goldman 1869-1940” ft. AGF, in which a multiplicity of Greies conjures up the famed anarchist with a gleeful, “If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution!” Which is just to say that this is an album of inspirations, not references—sparks, not embers; audio bombs, not audiobooks.
“Anna Gorenko (Carp) 1972-1999” ft. Olga Nosova is a full-on clarion assault. “Let us go down to the void!” wrote the young poet Gorenko, a firebrand along the lines of Kathy Acker and Kathleen Hanna, while the percussionist Nosova and Greie carve tunnels of space for the words within tectonic plates of screeching and groaning noise, just to prove it can be done. As a voice says at the track’s conclusion: “Wow, construction machine near Kremlin, beautiful sound!” Indeed. Dissidentova is weary, and joyful, and wary of joy, and a fine example of what resistance might sound like—revealing and reveling in the endless ugliness of the world men build, and the beauty of feminist rebellions against it.


Hard punk from Florida doesn’t get much bloodier than this—22 minutes of loud, incredibly catchy songs that revel in mythological and contemporary scum and violence.

Disciples of Blood

Orlando’s Golden Pelicans have a fake origin story—one about working as the house band for a local, now-defunct gang of weed dealers—but that narrative isn’t required to understand their scummy universe. Their early singles and first two LPs on drummer Rich Evans’ unstoppable Total Punk imprint—2014’s Golden Pelicans and 2015’s Oldest Ride, Longest Line—are the works of a band who paired classic hard rock’s beefy earworms with hardcore’s abrasive screams. One of their signature songs is about pissin’ in a puddle of puke, and in another one, they’re chained to a dumpster.
Erik Grincewicz is their frontman—a bearded balding dude who doesn’t hesitate to soak a crowd in beer. He leads the charge with his abrasive, ultra-hoarse voice, which is both an unstable force and a riveting focal point. Guitarist Scott Barnes is the muscle, emboldening their overall attack with chugging heft and undeniable hooks. It’s Barnes’ sick guitar solos that push Golden Pelicans into that rare echelon of contemporary punk bands whose technical ability matches their guttural aggression.
Disciples of Blood is Golden Pelicans’ first long-player on a non-Total Punk label; this time they handed the reins to Goner Records. Once again, the balance between Grincewicz’s rough vocals and Barnes’ massive guitar sound is keyed in perfectly. “Smell the Lightning” is a prime example—the introductory guitar has this polished, seemingly expensive sound pulled from hard rock hits from the tail end of the ’70s. Then, Grincewicz’s near-gargled scream shoots through Barnes’ hook with a line about getting fried on his own supply. They balance precision and blunt force, and the results are extremely satisfying.
Narratively, it’s an album that oscillates between a violent present and a brutal mythological past. At one point, they’re frantically running from some compromising announcement by a Byzantine cleric, and Grincewicz sounds unhinged as he sings about “blood on the Bosphorus/Black sails on Aegean Sea.” When they’re not playing Russian roulette, they’re reflecting on what it’s like to get turned to stone by Medusa. Mythology in rock music is a tough needle to thread—most attempts come out bloated and corny. With a concise, heavy delivery, Golden Pelicans never run into that problem. Between the destruction-filled album covers Mac Blackout made for all three of their albums, Grincewicz’s unrivaled voice, and the guitar heroics, the band sells ancient war tactics as authoritatively as they sell contemporary vomit.
One of the defining statements of the album the black comedy of “It Ain’t Psychedelic (Till You Kill Someone).” After one of their most upbeat intros on record, Grincewicz enters as the devil on your shoulder, insisting that any floaty, pleasant psychedelic experience isn’t going to cut it. Then there’s the title track, and while “Disciples of Blood” sounds like another lofty mythological reference, it’s really a story about slobs sticking up for themselves. Of course, the disciples in question chug beers and are baptized in piss, because that’s Golden Pelicans’ aesthetic. It’s an endlessly replayable album at 22 minutes, and it’s one that demands to be heard loud. They’re rock songs that revel in scum and violence—catchy, heavy music that makes you want to shove your friends and scream along. Sometimes, evil can be fun.


The Brooklyn producer’s heavily abstracted ambient music offers a choice between deep listening or blissful distraction. It’s equally gratifying either way.

Camo

Ben Bondy is an expert purveyor of diaphanous ambience and he’s never short on wares. In the past two years the Brooklynite released nearly a dozen albums, all of them essential comforts bearing subtle moods and gentle demeanors, dubby pulses and blissed-out reveries. From time to time, he’s gracefully ventured into peripheral territories like downtempo or IDM, and his collaborations have extended his sonic boundaries further: the Blessed Kitty, with Pontiac Streator and Ulla, features vocals, while his stint with producer uon as xphresh includes a celestial breakbeat. Camo outpaces his previous work in effortless fashion, and it’s largely because its seven tracks are so frictionless, showcasing the most self-effacing, unassuming soundscapes of his career.
Opener “Pandøer” sets the bar high: Imagine 1980s Gigi Masin without the rhythmic gridlock or softly anchoring piano melodies. It’s pure drift, with Bondy using reverberating guitars and static to lend an amorphous structure to the haze. It has an uncanny resemblance to deep breathing exercises, and regardless of where you’re at either physically or mentally, it places you in a therapeutic zone. “Pool” lands somewhere between the sparse romanticism of the Durutti Column and the most elemental of Mark McGuire’s nostalgic psychedelia. It’s not reliant on melody, finding contentment in the faintest hint of pop sensibility. This allure of mere suggestion is key. Camo is neither self-important nor excessively inviting; it simply exists.
Many artists and writers have discussed the difference between hearing and listening, and they often pedestalize the latter when doing so, asserting that it’s always and unequivocally the nobler act. That’s understandable; there’s value in learning to listen more closely. But in our desire to be more thoughtful, there’s been unnecessary blowback against passivity, where “unfocused” music listening is equated with the ostensible mindlessness of mood playlists and the “lo-fi beats” phenomenon. Camo shakes up such notions, allowing one to move freely between both registers and finding joy either way. Tracks with field recordings, like “Conté” and “I Thought You’d Look Away,” are impressive in this regard. The former threads the iconic call of the mourning dove through coiling guitar melodies as a periodic reminder of presence. The latter, meshed with the alternating sounds of a tennis rally, is equally poetic. There’s interplay between quotidian noises and the music surrounding them, but even a casual listen still feels like absorbing the splendor of a sunny afternoon.
Camo is compellingly nondescript; it never feels like Bondy’s prescribing an obvious method for digesting his songs. Take “Omni Field,” an unpretentious flurry of ambient detritus, where the undulating sounds of dub techno arrive as vapor. The swells of cracked field recordings and bubbling synths are too shapeless to be all-consuming, but the results offer the unexpected allure of hearing flecks of sound gestate. Bondy’s secret is approaching liminality not as conduit or provocative end point but as something beguilingly uncertain. It’s this recalibration of expectations that makes Camo a marvel—Bondy sells ephemerality as something irresistible.

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Michael Mayer’s technique as a DJ is impeccable, and his personality bursts from the decks. His latest mix CD gathers obscure house tracks and other oddities, reflecting his restless tastes.

DJ-Kicks

Making a compelling DJ mix isn’t rocket science. Just play a selection of songs no other DJ would come up with, in a way that no other DJ would play them, while finessing the pacing and transitions. Still, hitting all those points is key. Nail the technical bits but flub the selection, and what have you got? A convincing argument in favor of outsourcing your job to a computer. A killer set of songs put together without the DJ’s sleight-of-hand, meanwhile, is just a playlist.
Michael Mayer, however, is a natural. His technique is impeccable, and his personality bursts from the decks. In many ways, he’s his own stiffest competition, because he raised the bar so high, so early in his career. His first mix CD, 1998’s Neuhouse, wasn’t just an introduction to the then-nascent sound of Cologne techno. It was an argument in favor of a different way of imagining dance music: steely yet emotive, minimalist yet expansive, linear but always game for an entertaining detour. Most importantly, it convincingly compressed an entire night’s worth of moods into 73 fleeting minutes, a trick that has become a hallmark of Mayer’s mixes.
With 2002’s Immer, rightly heralded as a techno classic, he pretty much perfected his aesthetic, one he has built upon on subsequent mixes: deft, surprising, and stylish, equal parts trickster and sensitive soul. The conventional wisdom tends to consider Immer Mayer’s masterpiece, and it’s true that it nails an elusive vibe in a way that few mixes can. Still, all of his mixes confirm the originality and restlessness of Mayer’s tastes. There’s Fabric 13’s gonzo, peak-time flair; Immer 2’s insouciant disco edge; and Immer 3’s procession of goth-tinged torch songs.
DJ-Kicks is Mayer’s first commercially released mix since 2010’s Immer 3. Dance music has changed a lot since then: Mix CDs don’t enjoy the same status they once did, largely having been replaced by SoundCloud, and Mayer’s brand of controlled eclecticism has become more common. Techno fans are far less suspicious of melody, and of pleasure, than they once were. (It’s strange to think how audacious it felt for him to drop Westbam and Nena’s piano-house anthem “Oldschool, Baby” on 2003’s Fabric 13; that kind of winking rave nostalgia is everywhere these days.) But the new set is clearly cut from the same cloth as its predecessors. It is quiet in places and raucous in others; its selections are sometimes intuitive and sometimes wildly idiosyncratic, but its forward motion is always fluid. Leaning mostly on fairly obscure house tracks from the last several years, it also reaches back and gathers up some real oddities—a Marc Almond feature remixed to hi-NRG heaven by Röyskopp; a 2004 remix by Basement Jaxx’s Simon Ratcliffe of Throbbing Gristle’s 1979 song “Hot on the Heels of Love”—to carve out a unique corner of the dancefloor.
As always, he begins with a rapturous soft launch: an ambient sketch for trombone and Rhodes keyboard by Peter Zummo, a onetime collaborator of Arthur Russell, followed by Mayer’s dreamy “The Horn Conspiracy,” which teases pitter-pat congas out of a fog of muted horns and reverb. He builds on the creeping drama with Bvoice, Anrilov, and Danilov’s “Papa’s Groove (dOP & Masomenos Remix),” a Franco-Russian affair full of brushed percussion, Ethio-jazz-inspired flute, and a murky, Russian-language monologue. Mutado Pintado’s spoken-word vocals in SAVE!’s “The Darkness (I:Cube Remix)” create a sort of subliminal through-line into the next section of the mix, a four-track segment of vaguely new wave-ish flavors. This is probably the set’s most inspired passage. SAVE!’s phased and flanged guitar lead gives way to the slide guitar of Justus Köhncke’s cover of Michael Rother’s “Feuerland”; CSS’s electroclashy “Honey (Michael Mayer Remix)” and Alter Ego’s Gary Numan tribute “Gary” round out what amounts to a treatise on the enduring power of the 1980s.
One of Mayer’s specialties is the transition that is both seamless and abrupt—that is, a dramatic change in mood where the groove barely flinches—and he uses that trick several times, to brilliant effect. The segue into his ’80s-inspired mini-mix is as clean as the twist in a Möbius strip, and following “Gary,” the energy imperceptibly shifts once again. This time it plunges us into a long passage of peak-time disco: soaring voices and synths, chugging arpeggios, synthesized Philly strings. A Prins Thomas remix of Lionheart Brothers’ “The Drift” wrenches an eight-minute crescendo out of the set’s throbbing midsection; Röyksopp’s gooey mix of Mekon’s “Please Stay,” featuring a heavily vocoded Marc Almond, is as unabashedly excessive as any record that ever graced Mayer’s platters.
After that giddy peak, the comedown, and we’re back on familiar, wistful terrain. Chris & Cosey’s remix of Death in Vegas’ “Consequences of Love” applies a bright streak of melody late in the set. After the ambient false ending of Idioma’s “Landscapes,” Moderat’s remix of Jon Hopkins’ “Abandon Window” surges to a heart-in-mouth climax and rapid denouement, setting us gently down like a mother bird depositing her chick in the nest.
It’s a euphoric listen, and for a while there, an exhausting one. The opening third might make for a wonderful breakfast companion, but by the time he hits that Prins Thomas space elevator, you may wish you hadn’t had a second cup of coffee. It’s true that the set’s ambitious scope reflects the way Mayer’s style of playing has evolved in the seven years since his last mix CD. In 2012 and 2013, touring Mantasy, he played 20 all-nighters in his favorite clubs around the world, often playing for eight or 10 hours at a stretch, and even now, it’s rare that he’ll play fewer than three hours. At this month’s 4GB festival in Tbilisi, Georgia, he put in an incredible 17-and-a-half hours behind the decks. That sounds insane, but Mayer’s wide-ranging tastes and narrative sensibility really require a wide canvas to thrive (clearly lots of energy drinks, too). On DJ-Kicks, attempting to squeeze all those peaks and valleys into the length of a single aluminum disc, he finally runs up against the limits of the form. Should the medium survive long enough for Mayer to turn in another commercial mix—would Immer 4 be too much to ask for?—the solution is simple: Stretch out to two or even three CDs. If any DJ can hold our attention that long, he can.


These six cerebral, spiky songs extract something touching and tragic from the mundanity of social media and social anxiety.

Sweet Princess EP

On “Goodnight,” the opening track of South London post-punk quartet Dry Cleaning’s debut EP Sweet Princess, vocalist Florence Shaw performs the role of digital archaeologist, pasting together a series of absurd comments mined from YouTube videos. The words link into a demented chain of paper dolls, muttering lines like, “During what was probably the longest two and a half months of my life after a near-death experience... the only thing that kept me going was Saw 2.”
Dry Cleaning brings together longtime friends bassist Lewis Maynard, drummer Nick Buxton, and guitarist Tom Dowse. In late 2017, they recruited Shaw, an artist, university lecturer, and photo researcher, as the group’s singer. Though never a performer, she’d always kept lists—neuroses, daily annoyances, advertising copy—with the idea to one day use them in her drawings. Her excavations became the starting point for Sweet Princess, six cerebral, spiky songs that extract something touching and tragic from the mundanity of social media and social anxiety.
“Followed by another porn account on Instagram,” Shaw notes dryly on “Conversation,” a song about dating and the painful task of interacting with a person you resent yourself for wanting to impress. On “New Job,” a sing-song tribute to a couple called Jimmy and Olga—the kind you might imagine scratched into a bathroom stall or a school desk—transforms into a spoken list of anxieties: conversational missed connections, overstepped boundaries, desperate attempts to grasp something in common.
Stripped of context, collected fragments like, “Who’s the Pride of Britain?/Michelle blasts Mark/I was shot in the head by my kid,” mean little. But the things that strike Shaw’s fancy, that prove silly or strange enough to warrant pulling out a pen, betray what she values. Spliced together and set to tight, unpolished guitars, “Traditional Fish”’s recollections of signage and newsstands offer a grimy reflection of mundane British life as written in tabloid headlines.
Enter Meghan Markle. From the Sex Pistols to the Specials, British punks have long rallied against their heads of state. But over spirals of guitar that conjure memories of the Raincoats or the B-52’s, first single “Magic of Meghan” offers a staccato accounting of Markle’s graces. The Duchess of Sussex is illustrated as if she’s a young guidance counsellor who lets Shaw call her by her first name, or a friend from school she admires from afar. On the day of Markle’s engagement, we learn, Shaw was moving out after a breakup. The way she writes about Markle is almost like fan fiction: a morsel of celebrity bent and manipulated until it forms a new narrative specific to its author. It’s so endearing that it could almost stand to be a touch more critical of, you know, the monarchy.
Like empty bottles melted down and repurposed as stained glass, Dry Cleaning’s assembled observations capture the distortion of life on and off the internet, of spewing our deepest emotions into an anonymous void but biting our tongue when we encounter a real person. Type what you really feel, then close the tab and delete your history—maybe Florence Shaw will find it.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the incendiary, hell-bent debut from the Los Angeles punk band who used blues and rockabilly to paint a depraved portrait of a young artist in their purest state.

Fire of Love

London punk turned pub rock into protest music; New York punk reframed noise as art. But compared to those more celebrated first-wave scenes, L.A. punk was both more traditionalist and transgressive, the sound of faded glamour degenerating into fuck-it-all nihilism. Home to both the celebrity-industrial complex and the second-largest homeless population in the country, Los Angeles has always been the city that represents the folly of the American Dream, a place where happiness is manufactured for the big screen and hope goes to die under the sun. And by the late 1970s, the tension between the fantasy of L.A. and its reality had reached a breaking point. As local punk patriarch John Doe of X once put it, L.A. back then “looked like something between Roger Corman and Tennesee Williams. One of the Os in [the] ‘Hollywood’ [sign] had fallen down. It was in total decay.”
The natural response to living in a desperate, dangerous town is to make desperate, dangerous music. While the Germs and Black Flag pulverized punk into hardcore, bands like X and the Blasters approached punk as a rescue mission, by forging a spiritual connection with the primal hoots and howls of ’50s-jukebox oldies. And then there was the Gun Club, whose ringleader, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, looked so far back into the past—to the emotional bloodletting of Depression-era blues—that he wound up seeing the future, opening up a trail that indie rockers and roots artists would travel for decades to come. But what makes the Gun Club’s 1981 debut, Fire of Love, so timeless isn’t just that it set the stage for outlaw eccentrics like the Pixies, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and the White Stripes (while providing Nick Cave with his post-Birthday Party roadmap into the swamp). It’s an eternally captivating portrait of a young artist in their purest state—hungry, drunk on attitude, and committed to their vision to the point of seeming supernaturally possessed.
Pierce wasn’t the most obvious candidate for punk sainthood; at heart, he was more of a studious fanboy than a natural frontman. Born to an American father and Mexican mother, Pierce was raised in the working-class east L.A. community of El Monte before relocating to the Valley suburb of Granada Hills—“the Los Angeles that nobody ever bothers with,” as he called it. A voracious reader and record collector, Pierce became the teenage president of the Blondie fan club and worked the counter at Bomp Records, before making vagabond journeys to New York, New Orleans, and Jamaica. (His time in Jamaica dovetailed with a reggae obsession that saw him review records for L.A. scene bible Slash under the pen name Ranking Jeffrey Lea.) His own musical pursuits were equally impulsive: Upon dissolving his short-lived art-pop outfit Red Lights, Pierce formed a new band with fellow Chicano Brian Tristan after the two attended a Pere Ubu show at the Whiskey A Go-Go in 1979, initially using it as a vehicle to indulge their mutual love of soul and reggae.
That band was initially known as the Creeping Ritual, before Black Flag/Circle Jerks singer Keith Morris suggested a switch to the Gun Club. (In return, Pierce gifted Morris the lyrics to the title track for the Jerks’ 1980 debut, Group Sex.) But the name wasn’t the only thing that had changed. Through friendships with local record-collecting zine-maker Phast Phreddie Patterson and ex-Canned Heat singer Bob Hite, Pierce immersed himself in the blues, embracing it as both the original outsider’s music and as a strategic device to distinguish the Gun Club from his punk peers more clearly beholden to a ’60s-garage/Stooges lineage. “Anything before the ’60s can be fascinating, because so much time has passed,” he explained in a 1982 interview. “The ’60s just completely demolished everybody’s minds, and so people aren’t really aware of most of the musical forms before then … there’s more fresh and wild ideas going on there.”
Today, the concept of punks playing the blues may not seem so radical in a world where Jack White oversees a commercial empire and the Black Keys play arenas, but in 1980, no self-respecting aesthete would touch the stuff. After all, classic rock’s fealty to American blues—and all the machismo and 17-minute guitar solos it engendered—was a big part of the reason punk happened. But in his essay that accompanies Blixa Sound’s 40th-anniversary reissue of the album, drummer Terry Graham observes: “My half-drunk opinion was that Jeff loved and hated the blues, but his love/hate was the alchemy that transformed an age-old hindrance into a brand new advantage.”
Key to this transformation was Tristan’s slide guitar, which yields some of Fire of Love’s bedrock riffs. But the guitarist didn’t stick around to see it through. With the Gun Club still playing to mostly empty rooms in L.A., Tristan accepted an offer to replace Bryan Gregory in the far more popular Cramps (where he became forever known as Kid Congo Powers). The loss of his co-founding partner presented an early indication that the Gun Club wasn’t going to be some tight-knit gang, but a fluid entity that would regularly reinvent itself in response to Pierce’s ever-changing whims. (As Graham says in the 2006 documentary Ghost on the Highway: “[Pierce] was just simply going to stuff his head with knowledge, express that knowledge somehow, and it just didn’t make any difference who was behind him, who was with him doing it, or who was in front of him watching him do it.”)
Tristan’s defection to the Cramps also provided a useful yardstick for measuring what made the Gun Club so singular. Pierce didn’t fit into any established punk archetypes: He wasn’t your typical leather-clad tough guy, he wasn’t a goth, he wasn’t some greasy coiffed, rockabilly revivalist. Though fond of performance-art provocation—like an early gig where he dressed up in Colonel Sanders garb and beat on a Bible with a chain—he didn’t have the lithe physique or cool stage-stalking presence of a Lux Interior. With his bottle-blonde hair and surplus-store assemblage of army coats, jackboots, and sabertooth necklaces, he looked less like Debbie Harry’s little brother and more like the drummer for an aspiring hair-metal band.
But Pierce had a big mouth and possessed a disarming, mercurial singing voice that was feral and fearful in equal measure. Most crucially, unlike the Cramps, Pierce channeled rock’n’roll’s primordial ooze free of camp or kitsch. Gun Club songs didn’t exist inside some imaginary B-movie, but in the darkest chapters of American history and the most depraved recesses of the male id. And that sense of psychological torment defines Fire of Love as much as any slide-guitar riff or desert-storming backbeat.
By 1981, Pierce had locked in a lineup featuring Graham and bassist Rob Ritter (both of L.A. punk mainstays the Bags) and rockabilly enthusiast Ward Dotson on guitar. Culled from two quickie sessions done on the cheap, Fire of Love is a masterpiece of thriftiness and expediency. On their smash-and-grab reclamation of Robert Johnson’s “Preachin’ Blues”—renamed “Preaching the Blues”—the band isn’t so much upgrading the genre for the hardcore era as trying to bash through their repertoire before getting the boot from the studio. The rhythm section pounds the ground so furiously, they practically start to glide across it.
Fire of Love’s crackling live-in-the-studio energy (complete with Pierce’s audible bandleader direction) and natural reverb create a late-night atmosphere every bit as thick and intoxicating as the most ostentatious rock opera. And for all of the album’s raw, cinéma-vérité qualities, Pierce crafts his lyrics with a painterly touch, constructing a netherworld that channels westerns and old-time religion one moment, porno mags and dive-bar bathroom graffiti the next.
Pierce doesn’t so much sing the blues as mainline them, pushing his nervous energy into more outrageous—and, at times, troubling—displays of bravado. He delivers his signature rave-ups “Sex Beat” and “She’s Like Heroin to Me” like someone who’d pick a fight with the biggest guy in the room even though he knows he’ll get his ass kicked. And while “Jack on Fire” is a comparatively laid-back walking blues, its breathless lyrical procession of Southern Gothic imagery, voodoo mysticism, and snuff-film depravity goads Pierce into one of his most gripping, magnetic performances.
Then, of course, there’s the searing centerpiece “For the Love of Ivy.” The song not only showcases the Gun Club at peak blues-punk fury, but also displays a command of silence, space, and tension that evokes L.A.’s original prophets of doom, the Doors. Part hat-tip to the 1968 Sidney Poitier film For Love of Ivy, part love letter to the Cramps’ untouchably cool guitarist, “For the Love of Ivy” teeters on the precipice where sexual desire descends into murderous bloodlust, with Pierce unleashing some of the most unsettling screams this side of Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop.” If it were the only song Pierce had ever released, “For the Love of Ivy” would still make him a legend. After all these years, each lyric-capping cry of “Hell!” still feels like a fresh jump-scare.
In plumbing the depths of evil, “For the Love of Ivy” also betrays Pierce’s tendency to lose himself in his crackpot characters—which, in this case, means uttering a particularly ugly line about his deranged protagonist “hunting for n*****s down in the dark.” (A similarly disturbing phrase turns up in the cowpunk odyssey “Black Train.”) Saying the N-word was something of a taboo sport among otherwise progressive old-school punks, whether they were using it as an expression of outcast solidarity or holding a mirror up to society’s ugliest impulses or shoving it back in the racists’ faces. Still, its appearance in “Ivy” was and remains especially jarring coming from an artist who devoted so much of his life to studying and celebrating Black music and who, as a biracial man himself, was no stranger to feeling like a second-class citizen in his own country. For Pierce, the process of mining America’s musical past also meant dredging up the historical social tensions that shaped it. Committing to the bit meant occasionally employing the vile vernacular of the rednecks he caricatured. (That Fire of Love came from an era when punks like Pierce felt like they had poetic license to use such language is ultimately the only thing that dates the record.)
Of course, Pierce didn’t need to use racial slurs to alienate people. The same maniacal zeal that attracted musicians into his orbit was also the very thing that drove them away. Though Fire of Love made the Gun Club a hot property in post-punk circles—particularly in New York and Europe—its lineup didn’t even survive the making of the band’s second record, Miami. Ritter walked out of the sessions and Dotson followed suit after they wrapped. (Dotson was so traumatized by his experience working with Pierce, he would later admit that, years after his departure, he still harbored a deep-seated desire to whack him with a golf club.) From there, the Gun Club’s music would turn more artful and cinematic—even acquiring a dream-pop shimmer on 1987’s Robin Guthrie-produced Mother Juno—but their internal dysfunction only intensified, as Pierce’s control-freak tendencies and worsening substance abuse problems would see him cycle through a procession of players before he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1996 at 37.
While Pierce never stopped expanding his vision for the Gun Club over the course of his career, it was never more focused than on Fire of Love. And nowhere is his maniacal self-belief more deeply felt than on “Fire Spirit,” a snarling rocker that functions as his own personal—and eerily prophetic—theme song. “I can see clearly/From my diamond eyes,” he declares off the top, “I’m going to the mountain with the fire spirit/No one will accept all of me/So the fire… will stop.” Personal demons may have extinguished Pierce’s flame far too soon, but each time a needle drops on Fire of Love, it burns anew.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Martin Courtney's songwriting adjusts to a revamped band lineup, while together they continue to perfect the singular, warm, and reliable Real Estate sound.

In Mind

When Real Estate named their last album Atlas, it was likely done both in earnest and irony. “It’s a subtle landscape where I come from,” sang Martin Courtney, as he traced the anxieties contained within the sidewalks, horizons, clocks, and shadows of his suburban hometown. The New Jersey band captured the way that a few square miles can feel like the whole world, but also intensify feelings of isolation. Their softly woven guitars had never sounded more wistful, the perfect accompaniment to Courtney’s ruminations of the divide between post-adolescent uncertainty and watching his life codify into an adulthood that millennials like him were never meant to achieve. He was so overawed by the sight of his wife next to him, and fearful of time slipping away, that you half-worried about how his temperate constitution would handle any truly earth-shattering change.
As it happened, Real Estate experienced something like that when founding guitarist Matt Mondanile left to pursue his Ducktails project. The split was seemingly acrimonious, though the details seemed less relevant than the matter of what it would do to their sound. Mondanile’s spacey style gave Real Estate’s compact universe a layer of fantasy and teased out the sweetness in Courtney’s flat tones. They replaced him with Julian Lynch, re-enlisted Matt Kallman on keys, and went off to L.A. to record. For a reliable band like Real Estate, these are dramatic transformations. But In Mind, the outcome of this revamp, picks up pretty much where they left off, Lynch’s guitar and Alex Bleeker’s bass swishing like windshield wipers around Courtney’s suburban koans.
Throughout In Mind, Courtney explores his sensitive relationship to his surroundings. “The laughing brook that ran right through this town/Slowed to a smile when the mercury went down,” he coos on “Stained Glass.” Plotting the progress from Atlas to the familiar and comforting In Mind is a similarly nuanced process. In the past, Real Estate’s sound hung like a sweet, gormless open mouth, but Lynch’s tougher guitar tone is a little more hard-bitten and yowling. He and Kallman team up on the intro to “Stained Glass,” knitting a baroque cascade that owes some to the Byrds’ energized arpeggiations. “Two Arrows” starts as a drowsy plod, the effects on Courtney’s voice mimicking the slippery space between sleep and consciousness, but then sidles into a respectful jam, one guitar pinging high, the other disintegrating with each careening phrase. Just as fuzz and hysteria threaten to overtake the whole thing, it ends abruptly in a rare moment of humor (and a neat Beatles tribute).
If you like Real Estate best when they’re trading in smaller gestures, these moves may seem treacherous, but by and large they crackle with electricity. The frame is fuller here, harking back to the mid-’90s production of bands like Teenage Fanclub, Jellyfish, and on the dreamy bossa nova fizz of “Time,” the High Llamas. This newfound density gives In Mind a claustrophobic atmosphere that mirrors Courtney’s myopic state of mind. Since Atlas, he’s become a father of two, working from home in Beacon, NY. Any self-employed person will recognize his queasy familiarity with his surroundings: the subtle changes that occur as dusk sets in, the comings and goings of local wildlife, the disorientating similarity of different sounds. “Was it the rain/Or a southbound train/That woke me up last night?” he wonders amid the starry swoop of the unfortunately titled “Holding Pattern.” At once reassuring and stifling, these details give a better sense of Courtney’s anxiety than his more literal lyrics on the subject.
Of course, one person’s quiet profundity is another’s cruise control. “What this is/Is not real life/At least it isn’t boring,” he sings on “Holding Pattern.” For Courtney, his well of lyrics about wistful cul-de-sac malaise never seems to dry up, though the subject starts to grow tired across the record. Likewise, when they wander from the beaten path they end up with “Diamond Eyes,” an Alex Bleeker song and In Mind’s only total misfire. In the vein of a Pete Seeger fable, or the Grateful Dead writing Sunday school jams, it’s so far outside their suburban comfort zone that it sounds like they’ve been brainwashed by a benevolent cult. “It’s a time to be humble/It’s a time to be free/It’s a time to raise our voices loud and not go quietly,” Bleeker sings, like Mr. Rosso on “Freaks and Geeks” trying to inspire his burnout students to protest peacefully.
In stark contrast, Real Estate's limitations become their greatest strengths. “Serve the Song” is a warped, wandering introvert’s lament. “The chorus only interrupts/I sing to serve the song,” Courtney sings, in a sort of peaceful Quaker hymnal and insight into the band’s MO. His touching, quiet shock at the disparity between his past and present hasn’t dimmed, as the family man looks back at the slacker and feels an imperceptible connection. “I cannot recall/Where I was at all/But I know what I heard/When I wrote those words/Green river still runs/Under that same sun/I never saw the source/But I know the course,” he sings on “Same Sun,” as impish, quizzical guitar chimes play up his bemusement.
Real Estate seemingly have no greater ambition than to perfect this one thing they do so well. While they live firmly in the middle of the road, they’re also dramatic outliers: neither explicit nor artful, two modes innovated by indie-rock when it had started to seem less relevant than ever. Unlike the effortless Atlas, In Mind exposes a trace of tension between form and content. For all Courtney’s synchronicity with his home environment, he sometimes sounds like he’s spinning his wheels rather than exploring the new contours of the recalibrated band.

Correction: An earlier version of this review attributed the song “Diamond Eyes” to Martin Courtney.


In two long, bassy, zoned-out compositions, the genre-defying saxophonist strains against the formal restrictions of drone music.

Chimæra I

In his career as a soloist, Colin Stetson hasn’t redefined the saxophone so much as he has reinvented the saxophonist. His circular breathing technique, aided by a regimen of yoga and cardio, allows him to unleash seemingly endless waves of sound. By combining this technique with a series of contact mics placed around his instrument and on his throat, he has turned himself into a one-man band who, through extreme exertion and stamina, can simultaneously produce clacking percussion, thundering bass, and plangent melody. On a series of career-defining albums, Stetson performed the rare feat of establishing himself firmly outside of genre categories. Then, somewhat miraculously, he was able to translate his unique sound to the big screen. For his next trick, Stetson has confined himself within the formally restrictive boundaries of drone.
This is unmistakably a drone record, as Stetson deploys his saxophone in two bassy, zoned-out 20-plus-minute compositions. The thrill, and the frustration, of Chimæra I is watching as he strains against the confines of the genre. Stetson is not covering new ground so much as he is exploring territory already pioneered by Éliane Radigue, mapped by Pauline Oliveros, tamed by Stars of the Lid, and graffitied by Yellow Swans. Still, he welcomes drone’s limits as something to push back against: A genre defined by long, dense tracks presents itself as a challenge to a musician singularly invested in sustained physical performance. A drone produced by a tape loop, a synthesizer, or a guitar may be impressive; one produced by a saxophone is extraordinary.
Chimæra I is cinematic in scope, its two sides evoking windswept post-apocalyptic vistas. Their titles refer to the multi-headed guard dogs of Greek myth, Orthrus and Cerberus, whose chimerical monstrosity is indicative of each track’s harrowing atmosphere. “Orthrus” is the more timbrally exciting of the two, with shuddering creaks and groans that phase across one another. A third of the way into the song, thunderous roars arch over top as if something has been awoken within the cavern of sound. In a career that includes multiple landmark horror movie scores, this is some of the most frightening music Stetson has yet produced. “Cerberus” trades in unease rather than unfettered terror: Long shifting tones overlap and coalesce in a minimalist drone, as if the dust is settling after the tumult of the first side. If “Orthrus” aggressively piles up growling pulses, “Cerberus” smooths them out and carefully layers them. Despite their different approaches, the two tracks share an oppressive sense of claustrophobia.
It is a testament to Stetson’s stature as an instrumentalist that we expect to see him transcend classification with ease. In any other artist’s repertoire, Chimæra I would assuredly be a highlight—assuming it were possible for another musician to pull off its staggering physicality. In Stetson’s intimidating discography, though, the album feels like an experiment with limitations, an accomplished painter limiting themselves to blues and grays. In its dogged pursuit of one mood, the album forgoes much of what makes Stetson exciting: the fluttering pirouettes of melody that complement his pummeling low end, the acrobatic percussion that he kneads out of his saxophone’s keys, the surprising references to gospel music that humanize his mechanical prowess. As if gazing at a massive monotone mural, the listener is simultaneously overwhelmed and wistful for the artist’s expansive palette.


On the Bay Area electronic musician’s second solo album, the minutest vibrations are as expressive as the most sweeping gesture. Its mood exquisitely balances melancholy and hope.

Star Core

The Macro-Cymatic Visual Music Instrument is a synesthete’s dream. Built by Marielle V. Jakobsons, the device translates musical vibrations into moving images using LEDs and a shallow trough of water; as sound waves stir the illuminated liquid, a video camera picks up the play of motion and texture. The invisible is made thrillingly visible as the faintest vibrations are transformed into richly dynamic fields of fluid movement, a constant flux of shadows and highlights that would surely make 4AD designer Vaughan Oliver swoon. And while they may recall the liquid projections of the 1960s, these visuals are more than just psychedelic window dressing; by turning vibrations into visual representations, they offer hints as to the inner mechanics of sound. They return music to the physical world, to the level of math and measurement, without losing sight of abstraction, emotion, or mysticism.
That idea of stripping things to their essence goes to the heart of Star Core, the Bay Area musician’s second solo album under her own name. (She used the Macro-Cymatic to create a video for the album track “White Sparks.”) Made principally with synthesizer, violin, flute, fretless electric bass, and voice, it is an album where the minutest vibrations are as expressive as the most sweeping gesture, where microtones signify at the same level as melodies. But this isn’t minimalism, really; it uses those minutiae as building blocks for a much broader musical vision, one tugged between meditative stasis and quietly ecstatic reveries.
Much of Jakobsons’ work, both solo and in the duo Date Palms and other groups, has deftly balanced drones with rootsier strands of American music. Her new album continues in that direction, folding together Eastern ragas with hints of Henry Flynt’s hillbilly minimalism along with fleeting traces of blues and even doom metal. It might be the most melodic thing she’s done; she even sings here. On the opening “White Sparks,” chanted vocals invoking the sun and the moon lend to the music’s ritual feel; elsewhere, her voice adds wordless breath to shimmering harmonic fields, reinforcing the human scale of her vast desert vistas.
She favors fifths and sevenths and seconds, intervals that lend themselves to powerful sensations of tension and release. Jakobsons’ melodies, like the sweeping violins of “Star Core” and “Rising Light” and the flutes of “The Beginning Is the End,” are at once deeply intuitive and faintly exotic, fusing a distant, hard-to-place longing with déjà vu. (Perhaps that déjà vu has to do with the fact that her string melodies at times sound uncannily like those of Echo and the Bunnymen; on “Star Core,” it’s as though she has stripped away the British band’s rock trappings to reveal the molten ambient core that was lurking in their music all along.) Her pulsing layers of synthesizer often recall Emeralds in full bliss-out mode, and in places, her vision of rock-based ambient music even brings to mind Hugo Largo, a woefully underrated New York band that was affiliated with Brian Eno’s Opal label in the late ’80s.
Unlike drone music that draws its power from duration, stretching out to 10 or 12 or 20 minutes, Jakobsons takes a more efficient approach to trance states: These songs average around five minutes long, and the music is stronger and more potent for it. She is interested in drone less as a fait accompli than as a kind of moving target. Never static, her songs are always evolving, albeit often imperceptibly, and their outward simplicity hides their deep structural complexity. But all that heavy lifting is on Jakobsons; we listeners get to simply lie back and dissolve into the music, savoring its uniquely nuanced mood, which lands halfway between melancholy and hope. It’s an exquisite balancing act, and one that—particularly now, and particularly in America—feels like as true a musical statement as you could ask for.


Any record being released with a moderate amount of hype will almost invariably owe its success to one of three ...

Black on Both Sides

Any record being released with a moderate amount of hype will almost invariably owe its success to one of three things:
1. Recklessly irresponsible critics whose ideas of "good" and "bad" have been irreparably damaged by years of exposure to loads and loads of shitty music.
2. Slimy publicist types that aren't afraid to trade a little fellatio for a winning review.
3. The protecting hand of Yahweh.
This goes a long way toward explaining the large majority of popular culture. But every once in a while, an album will make its way through reviewer after reviewer, deservedly earning absurdly high marks with nary a scratch. Such is the story with hip-hop's messiah of '99, Mos Def, and his solo debut, Black on Both Sides.
But, in a sea of lousy, burnt-out critics, why should you believe me? For starters, nobody serviced me to write this. Not since the emergence of A Tribe Called Quest and Q-Tip (who makes a brief guest appearance here on Mr. Nigga") has hip-hop seen an MC as intelligent, as lyrically proficient, and as baby-butt smooth as Mos Def.
If you heard Def's previous outings with Black Star, you probably saw this coming. If you didn't, it's clearly time to put Ol' Dirty on that shelf reserved for insane, materialist misogynists, and repent. With artists like this finally getting the respect they deserve, we could be entering a new era of hip-hop. Think about it. When was the last time you heard an MC drop a line like, "Mind over matter and soul before flesh"? When was the last time you heard somebody rap about the global economic and environmental consequences of first-world corporate waste and subsequent aquatic pollution? When was the last time you heard a hip-hopper sing competently over a phat-ass beat about the white appropriation of black art forms? Or end a song appropriately with a Bad Brains-influenced rockout, where both the drums and bass are played by the same guy?
Mos Def. The man does it all-- addressing serious socio-political issues while remaining positive and affirmative from start to finish. Inspiring, no? The current state of punk and independent rock could stand to learn a thing or two from this man.
True, Black on Both Sides isn't flawless. If you don't like Tribe-style laidback beats, you may have a more difficult time getting into this. Mos Def's singing on tracks like "Climb" and "Umi Says" is a bit hard to stomach, too. And then there's the matter of his sporadic introductory speeches, which occasionally sound like the pseudo-prophetic ramblings of a guy who might benefit from one less hit from the bong. But this, honestly, is nit-picking. Because when the beat drops and Def starts spitting his meticulously- crafted lyrics, you realize it's entirely possible that he truly is prophetic-- that he was meant to be kicking the rhymes, and that we were meant to listen.


With anthemic hardcore hooks and unabashed lyrics about the power of love, the Toronto band’s latest album radiates fired-up joy.

One Day

Since their 2006 debut, Fucked Up have fearlessly merged the ferocity of hardcore punk and the grandiosity of prog-rock. Anchoring their ever-evolving sound is Damian Abraham’s throat-rending bark, barreling through immaculately layered rock riffage laden with anthemic hooks and symphonic arrangements. Their outsized ambition gave us the 2011 rock opera David Comes to Life, its maximalist 2018 sequel Dose Your Dreams, and the long-running experimental Zodiac series, which follows their most outré flights of fancy into drone, ambient, and psychedelic territory. The Toronto band’s new album, One Day, is another in a long line of beautiful contradictions, a quick and self-consciously small record that still feels like a towering statement.
After the conceptual and stylistic indulgence of Dose Your Dreams and last year’s Year of the Horse—two sprawling, willfully eclectic double albums with byzantine narratives involving wizards and interdimensional odysseys—One Day narrows both sound and scope. Like 2014’s Glass Boys, it’s a compact, relatively straightforward rock record that’s very much about the real world. The pendulum has again swung from the arty tendencies of guitarist Mike Haliechuk and drummer Jonah Falco toward frontman Abraham’s more earthly concerns: While the band’s growler-in-chief took a backseat on Dose Your Dreams, ceding creative control to Haliechuk and Falco and questioning his future in the band, Abraham is back for blood on One Day, singing on almost every track and contributing his own lyrics for the first time since Glass Boys.
Even at their simplest Fucked Up can’t turn down a good conceptual framework. Each band member wrote and recorded their contributions to One Day within a 24-hour window, and the ticking clock extends to the lyrics as Abraham and Haliechuk question their place as aging punks in a rapidly changing world. “My song is of time and memory/What we forget when we change the story,” Abraham sings on the Haliechuk-penned opener “Found,” laying out the album’s primary preoccupation: what we remember, or don’t, as history marches forward. The band’s old DIY haunts in Toronto have been replaced by condos and pot shops. Indigenous people have been displaced and killed to make room for highways and “temples of police and landlords to worship money.” “The whole world is fucked,” Abraham shouts on “Broken Little Boys,” a song lamenting generational cycles of toxic masculinity. Everyone, from Fucked Up to God himself—the original broken little boy, they theorize—is culpable.
For all of the justified hand-wringing over the State of Things, Fucked Up aren’t pessimists at heart. There’s still comfort to be found in the present, little moments that stretch out into infinity. “When suddenly you look at me/You opened up eternity,” Abraham sings on the effervescently power-poppy title track. “What could you do in just one day?/Fall in love, spend your time away.” On “Cicada,” an ode to fallen friends, a humble insect’s song becomes a lasting symbol of remembrance. And on the album closer “Roar,” written by Abraham, his trademark roar presides over another paean to the time-stopping power of love that’s admirably unafraid to sound cheesy: “When it gets too tough/And when you need to shut off/I’m still there standing with you and in the end that’s all we need.”
The only respite is to live in the present, and fortunately One Day kicks plenty of ass on a moment-to-moment level. The album’s biggest and brightest melodies hit with the urgency of Fucked Up’s early days as a hardcore band: “Found” begins with a scream from Abraham and immediately launches into a hard-charging guitar riff, dissolving into wordless vocal melody as the song draws to a close. “Lords of Kensington” introduces Abraham’s inimitable yell to ’90s alt-rock and transcendently chiming post-rock guitars, while the Haliechuk-sung “Cicada” sounds uncannily like Fucked Up covering Sugar. You wouldn’t guess that hooks this huge were written and recorded in the span of one day, but whether it was a conscious decision or a result of self-imposed constraints, One Day sounds eminently direct. Unlike Dose Your Dreams, there are no spoken-word interludes or psychedelic zone-outs. Every second radiates fired-up joy.
While it might seem like a minor entry in the band’s catalog, One Day also represents Fucked Up’s attempt to liberate themselves from long and laborious recording sessions and the existential weight of making a new Fucked Up album. By this point, lofty concepts and genre experimentation are integral parts of the band’s DNA. But there’s also value in immediacy, simplicity, and spontaneity, and on One Day, Fucked Up sound freer and more purely happy to be making music together than they have in years.


They’ve abandoned the crude wit of their debut, but the Seattle band’s fourth album still maintains the closeness of hanging out with friends in your living room.

Chastity Belt

Chastity Belt were roughly 100 miles from Asheville, North Carolina when lead vocalist Julia Shapiro reached her breaking point. Just before touring their last album, 2017’s I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone, Shapiro split up with her long-term partner and had a possibly cancerous portion of her thyroid removed. She toughed it out on the road for about a month, when her bandmates—guitarist Lydia Lund, bassist Annie Truscott, and drummer Gretchen Grimm—collectively decided it was time to hit pause. So, the Seattle indie rockers cancelled the remainder of the tour, simply citing “health concerns,” and Shapiro sought comfort by driving two hours east to stay with an Asheville friend. Shapiro was experiencing an existential dilemma of sorts: “I had a lot of questions going through my mind,” she explained. “‘Should I be doing something else with my life? What else could I do?’”
Shapiro relays this anecdote on “Rav-4,” a highlight from Chastity Belt’s self-titled fourth album. “Fooled them all, then hit a wall/Lay in Kate’s bed, it’s true what she said/That giving up can take some guts,” she sings. “Lost my mind and much more, but who’s keeping score?” The rest of Chastity Belt reveals some of the “much more” Shapiro feels is vanishing: her ambition, her hopefulness, and maybe most of all, herself. But even when Shapiro was at her lowest, Chastity Belt never seriously considered calling it quits; their friendship has been going strong for over a decade now, and their combined force feels more evocative and pointed than ever. They’ve long abandoned the crude wit of their 2013 debut, but Chastity Belt still maintains that closeness of hanging out with friends in your living room, engrossed by each others’ ruminations until the wee hours of the morning.
Friendship is a recurring theme on Chastity Belt, from “Rav-4”’s Kate to “Elena”—named after the pseudonymous Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, whose most well-known works centered around the companionship of women as their rural Neapolitan town collapsed at their feet. Chastity Belt seem to liken their own emotional turmoil to Ferrante’s ruins: “Changed all your plans to line up with his/Hanging onto every word he says/Measured your self worth/By his judgements,” Shapiro sings, an eerie retrospective after the collegiate tribulations of No Regerts and the whatever-forever demeanor of 2015’s Time to Go Home.
This heightened self-awareness also presents itself in tracks like “Effort,” where Grimm envisions an immaculate version of herself while seeking refuge in a new relationship—perhaps in an attempt to avoid facing her own insecurities. “Running for cover, into another/It’s not what I need, but it seems to be what I want,” Shapiro sings. “I could be perfect, I could exist/Just how you need me to be in this moment.” Chastity Belt’s lyrics have always been clever, but here they attain a sort of nonchalant wisdom. “Been counting on someone, but I counted wrong/So now I’m feeling pretty dumb,” goes one particularly jarring line of “Half-Hearted,” before reaching a resolution in closer “Pissed Pants”: “Now I’m obsessing over endings/And all the things that are holding me back/You said, so casually, ‘Everything just works out.’” Chastity Belt’s best lyrics are just as casual and profound.
The album was co-produced by Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, resulting in Chastity Belt at their dreamiest and most tranquil. As far as their Pacific Northwest predecessors go, there’s little evidence of their livelier original inspirations like Sleater-Kinney and Autoclave, instead leaning on hushed Elliott Smith-ish delivery, lush reverb, and traces of strings. The album’s lethargy can feel tedious, a little lacking in contrast; most of its songs stroll past at similar tempos and volumes, rarely culminating in moments that could be considered “big.” But Shapiro has something to say, and Chastity Belt is largely confessional; her words are the focus here, and these simple, serene landscapes are a fitting backdrop to hear her loud and clear.

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Welcome to the frat-rap perpetrator’s wokeness parade.

Flowers on the Weekend

Asher Roth soundtracked a generation of sweaty basements’ Thirsty Thursdays; now he stuffs his songs with asides about Senate reform and garbled philosophical platitudes. “If heaven closed its gates and hell was broke/And all you had was every day you woke/Would you be hella woke?” he asks on his new album’s first track. If you answered yes, you’re in for a treat—welcome to Asher Roth’s wokeness parade, where he fumbles towards opinions on: gluten consumption, baby boomers, climate change, marijuana decriminalization, the American healthcare system, and mortgage interest rates. “I think there’s too many men,” he announces on the cringely titled “Cher in Chernobyl,” a stubbornly unself-aware bid at feminism from the guy whose most rousing commitment to gender equality used to be chanting that he loved women just as much as he loved drinking. Even the album title is a self-congratulatory bastardization of gender politics—Asher Roth’s girlfriend brings him flowers, we learn on the title track. Please clap.
Maybe we should credit Roth for attempting growth at all. Nearly every album of his since Asleep in the Bread Aisle has both tried to inch away from and capitulated to the formula that launched his career: half-baked rhymes about Banker’s Club and keg stands, belched over  wobbly bass. If Asher Roth didn’t create frat rap, he at least directly inspired a new strain of it—Sammy Adams, best known for a thrashing song that rhymed “Vegas” and “Jager,” got a record deal after remixing “I Love College.” Hoodie Allen grunted diatribes about sororities over drum kicks and now tours across campuses. The grunting, pastel-shorts aesthetics of frat rap have burbled beyond colleges. Lil Dicky has a TV show and a billboard in Times Square; weeks ago, two TikTok stars apparently paid some ungodly amount of money to mercenary producers to manufacture a “diss track,” their sneers and intonations carved in Roth’s image. Roth’s legacy, with all its thoughtless misogyny and beer-bong coveting, is the reason he can get Lil Yachty to come gurgle a guest verse a decade after “I Love College.” But it’s also why his new political posing, however well-intentioned it may be, is so hard to take seriously.
“I’m every shared experience/I’m serious, I’m kidding,” Roth raps on the album’s opener, which doesn’t do much to clarify whether the album is an earnest proclamation of the rapper’s politics or one long, excruciating bit. Either way, Flowers’ most firm commitment is to bludgeoning language and logic. “I’ve had to learn to relent/To relearn how to vent/Scent is certainly concerning/Gotta learn to ascend,” Roth babbles at one point; “Got gluten in your doo doo,” he warbles at another. On “Back of the Classroom,” an attempt to appease whoever’s skipping through the album until they hear a college reference, his frenetic flow is a dead ringer for Hoodie Allen’s, a kind of snake-eats-tail moment of frat-rap synchronicity.
The production alternates between grating open-mic-night theatrics—clanging cymbals, cloying bursts of trumpet, audible whoops—and plodding drums. Saxophones bleat; a ukulele plunks along. “Dark Chocolate” emerges out of this murk, a total surprise of contorting guitar riffs and reverberating synths in which Asher Roth strains for a falsetto and doesn’t rap once. The song seems like his take on Tame Impala, and while the track isn’t entirely unpleasant, it’s jarringly out of place, like a church organ rolled on stage at a Pitbull concert.
Throughout the album, Asher Roth goes out of his way to reference his age. He groans that his back hurts. He moans that he’s been “doing this” for so long. At 34, he could have believably crammed the record with canned, beer-sloshed party stories; it’s telling of Asher, or maybe of the world right now, that his brags center on reading about private prisons, not on sex or shots or drugs. Still, these songs are frictionless and forgettable. You almost want him to have gotten his wish—to stay in college forever, where at least he could pretend to have fun.


The first compilation from electronic Bangkok label More Rice is a solid collection of chugging dancefloor weaponry from South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and beyond.

Harvest Vol. 1

Over the past decade, underground club circuits around East and Southeast Asia have grown from a collection of fragmented markets to an integrated community that’s dedicated to supporting local talents. Projects such as bilateral DJ exchanges and regionally-focused record labels such as More Rice, based in Bangkok, have gone a long way in building cross-border relations and generating a larger Asian fanbase. Some of the fruits of this labor are presented on a new compilation from More Rice, 14 tracks of chugging dancefloor weaponry from South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and beyond.
Harvest Vol.1 isn’t lacking energy, but most tracks are complex slow-burners that make for ideal transitions in a DJ set or deep listening sessions. Take the stand-out “Mirarboles” from up-and-coming Seoul producer Mogwaa, a classically-trained musician whose latest EP dropped earlier this year on More Rice. Mogwaa finds a sweet spot on the synth-funk hook with escalating chords that add a sense of drama, but he also plays around with it, laying the melody with warped effects and hints of squelching acid towards the end. Equally fluid are the lopsided peals of “At The End of Time,” a joint effort by producer Lustbass and drum duo The Hernandez Brothers, both of whom hail from the Philippines. The song is hypnotic, mirroring the meditative energy of Javanese gamelan, a departure from the Hernandez Brothers’ usual funkadelic maneuvers.
An effortlessly steady pace is perhaps Harvest’s biggest strength. Introspective house cuts are interspersed with syncopated beats and bassy rollers to produce a harmonious listening experience from start to finish. The first half of Harvest is generally easy listening but that quickly changes when the prolific artist known as Similiarobjects, a heavy-hitter in Manila’s electronic scene, goes down a twisting rabbit hole on “Analogmigraine.” The track gives off a sense of calm despite flurries of tightly-packaged beats and it’s the perfect primer for Karachi-based Rudoh’s “Mo Money,” a breaks-heavy mid-tempo joint that gracefully incorporates snippets of UKG and sudden tempo changes.
Despite these highlights, Harvest has pockets of weakness that make it drag on a bit longer than it should. “Still Life” by Filipino artist Saint Guel and “Bang Sue Junction” from Bangkok’s Sarayu, one of the More Rice co-founders, both fall prey to repetitive basslines that sound like fillers to hide gaps in composition. Meanwhile, other tracks such as Snad’s “Put It In My Parenthesis” and “Ham” by Tokyo producer Spanglemann start off compelling but lack sufficient dynamism to justify their six-minute stay.
If Harvest seeks to represent a wide spectrum of pan-Asian club music, it could benefit from more stylistic boldness. Genre hybrids are emanating left-and-right in electronic hotspots such as Indonesia and India amid a rising ratio of producers to DJs so there’s no shortage of fresh four-to-the-floor patterns. Still, the fact that Harvest connects the dots between multiple countries makes it stand out from other geographically-oriented compilations across East, South and Southeast Asia that aren’t as wide-ranging. Examples of the latter include the India-centric Kaala Khatta - Flavours Of The East, the all-Indonesian Moda Equator, and the Shenzhen-specific Dragon Bass EP1: Made in Shenzhen. More labels in the region should follow Harvest’s ambitious scope, paving the way for emerging Asian talents to reach wider audiences.

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