Crystal Fairy pits together At the Drive In’s Omar Rodríguez-López, Le Butcherettes’ Teri Gender Bender, and Melvins members Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover. Their sounds prove strikingly complementary.

Crystal Fairy

It’s always a good idea to approach supergroup-type projects with caution, no matter how enticing they might look on paper. After all, when artists from well-known bands come together, they face the near-impossible challenge of sounding enough like their main acts while also breaking new ground—and usually without much time to gel. The new group Crystal Fairy pits Melvins core members Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover alongside Le Butcherettes frontwoman Teri Gender Bender and Butcherettes collaborator/producer Omar Rodríguez-López, most famous as the driving force behind the Mars Volta and At the Drive In.
Crystal Fairy doesn’t put any new twists on the established sounds of Le Butcherettes or the Melvins, but it does prove the groups to be remarkably complementary. The quartet’s self-titled debut grafts Gender Bender’s dynamic vocal style onto the Melvin’s rhythmic trudge—apparent immediately on opener “Chiseler,” a quick-and-dirty uptempo riff rocker. Coming from such a creative bunch, the straightforward character of Crystal Fairy is surprising, but the strong, pre-existing rapport between its two pairs of players helps. After 30-plus years together, Osborne’s guitar riffs and Crover’s drumming are pretty much conjoined, while Rodríguez-López has helped upgrade Le Butcherettes’ scrappy neo-psychedelia into a vivid backdrop for Gender Bender’s outsized presence to roam free.
Crover and Osborne have worked with strong musical personalities before, including Jello Biafra, Mike Patton, and Lustmord. This time, though, Osborne may have found a long lost twin in Gender Bender. She comes across as more vulnerable and agitated, but Gender Bender also shares Osborne’s penchant for stagy, absurdist delivery. Here, she practically plays the role of Osborne’s alter-ego, only with a relish that charges the Melvins’ sound with an urgency it typically lacks. And by introducing a harmonic breadth the Melvins have never captured before, she brings new contours to their ongoing fascination with re-appropriating Sabbath, Kiss, and other classic rock tropes.
Gender Bender has a flash of mad inspiration on “Drugs on the Bus.” Her Farfisa part meanders spiderlike across the sludgy main riff, and when she wails about a woman who cuts her own eyes out in the climax, the mood intensifies starkly. She gets to channel her inner Jello Biafra on a cover of ’80s hardcore outfit Tales of Terror’s “Possession,” which recalls the springy cadence of the Dead Kennedys classic “California Über Alles.” And while the funereal riff that anchors “Moth Tongue” is indistinguishable from countless other Melvins tunes, Gender Bender scrapes the back of her throat on her high notes, allowing a glimpse of what the Melvins might sound like if fronted by the banshee wail of Rush’s Geddy Lee.
Crystal Fairy concludes on an anticlimactic note, as the final stop-start stutter of the short-fast “Vampire X-Mas” simply fails to resume when the band has set you up to expect that it will. It sounds intentional, but the track also leaves a lingering feeling that the album ends unresolved. That’s a minor quibble, though, after 40-minutes of hearing people play together with far greater affinity than anyone could have expected.


Toronto's David Psutka records as Egyptrixx, who helped define the atmospheric sound of London's Night Slugs label. His project Ceramic TL is a radical break: The beats are gone and the melodies have run dry. It's all atmosphere, heady as huffing aerosol.

Ceramic TL: Sign of the Cross Every Mile to the Border

Recording as Egyptrixx, Toronto's David Psutka helped to define the sound of London's Night Slugs label. His albums Bible Eyes and A/B Til Infinity took techno rhythms, gleaming synth melodies, and noxious ambient atmospheres and spun them into exciting new variants. His new project Ceramic TL represents a break with Egyptrixx's style: The beats are gone and the melodies have run dry; with an emphasis on buzzing drones and detuned bell tones, it's all atmosphere, and it is more noxious than ever, heady as huffing aerosol.
Sign of the Cross Every Mile to the Border is pitched as "seven meditations on optimism and faith through the prism of environmental cataclysm." It's a theme that might bring to mind his former labelmate Jam City's recent album Dream a Garden, which was described by its creator as an attempt to locate  beauty and healing in the fight against oppression. But the music couldn't be further away from Jam City's dreamy mood board, with its gauzy echoes of Scritti Politti and Prince and vintage 4AD. Psutka's '80s borrowings are limited to the suffocating cacophony of Glenn Branca's guitar symphonies and the persistent swoosh of digital phaser effects. His fondness for black metal is evident in the charred rumbling of a track like "Life on Earth," in which ringing bells melt together into an unbroken din and a low hum crackles like a burning bass amp. At the track's close, a car revs in the distance and the sound of wind and fire whips across the landscape, bringing the album's environmental themes to the fore.
The opening track, a burnished bell-tone whine, is remarkably similar to the stopped-watch loops of Thomas Brinkmann's What You Hear (Is What You Hear) and it scans as pure texture. The entire album, in fact, is almost entirely devoid of conventional musical or rhythmic events, preferring the static repetition of granular loops stretched to infinity. Ceramic TL—does that "TL" stand for "timeline"?—seems to be a project about taking a time-based medium and squeezing the life out of it, stopping it dead in its tracks and flattening it beyond recognition: music as roadkill, as flatline.
Where the music is austere, the track titles are positively Byzantine. "I Attached To and Pored Over Photos of Places I Loved That Were Reduced to Ash" is one; "I Often Wondered How the Group Would React When Eco-Apocalypse Finally Struck" is another. Some sound like they might be clippings from YA novels ("This Looks Just Like It, the Answer to My Prayers - I Thought My Life Was Over Until Two Years Later I Arrived"), but it's also possible to imagine them, not uncharitably, as Black Metal Cats captions. Of course, black metal itself is no stranger to florid iconography, and the deep purple of Psutka's prose, as faintly ridiculous as it may be, has the effect of doubling down on his theme, practically daring you not to meet the album on its own ambitious terms.
The final track, called simply "Clearing," is a welcome breath of fresh air after the labyrinthine path that has led up to it. Amid a fluttering of birdsong, an automobile's open-door chime beeps, the door slams, and a metallic chop of rotors, indicating sudden liftoff, flashes back to the zap and chug of Egyptrixx. Whether or not it suggests a return in the future to his more club-oriented work, who knows. But it makes a fitting finish for Ceramic TL's claustrophobic audio play, in which sound itself is dramatized as a life-or-death struggle for oxygen. And, at long last, Psutka's bet on "optimism and faith" pays off.


Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack for David Lynch’s 1992 “Twin Peaks” film Fire Walk With Me remains as enchanting and evocative as ever, and gets a long overdue vinyl reissue courtesy of Death Waltz.

Angelo Badalamenti: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me OST

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me OST

Despite a career that stretches back a half-century, Angelo Badalamenti’s arrangements for the likes of Nina Simone and Shirley Bassey as well as his soundtracks for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation never quite haunted the collective memory. (That is to say nothing of his forgotten turn at bouncy country music.) Instead, it was when he was brought in to coach Isabella Rossellini’s vocals on the set of 1986’s Blue Velvet that his profound collaboration with David Lynch began. Since then, Badalamenti’s distinctive blend of smoky jazz, ’50s pop, and three a.m. noir has seeped into pop culture. It’s easy to hear the hushed dark of his influence on an array of players, be they Nick Cave, the xx, Morphine, or Bohren & Der Club of Gore.
In providing themes that toggled between darkness and light on “Twin Peaks,” Badalamenti’s music slid into American prime time to lingering effect. But Lynch’s feature-length prequel box-office boondoggle Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (25 years on, the Metacritic score holds at 28) clouded over the composer’s work for that film. And while none of the themes are as instantaneously familiar as anything from the series, Badalamenti’s soundtrack remains as enchanting and evocative as ever, presented here in a long overdue vinyl reissue courtesy of the soundtrack fetishists at Death Waltz.
Badalamenti handles all the production, arrangements, and orchestrations; he plays keyboards, even contributing some gruff vocals to the set. Tucked into its 12 tracks are a curious array of players, from bassist Ron Carter and hard bop drummer Grady Tate to the voice most often associated with the man’s music, Julee Cruise. The nearly seven-minute main theme might not readily pair to images of Agent Cooper or Laura Palmer, but it’s brooding and melancholic in its own right. Badalamenti’s keyboard chords haunt in the distance as a muted trumpet lead, walking bassline, and barely grazed ride cymbal conjure dark and lonesome images of their own. For a solo turn at the synthesizer, Badalamenti moves through a spectrum of sadness, distress, love, and resolve on closer “The Voice of Love.”
An allergy towards all things Tom Waits-esque, and the jarring clang of “A Real Indication”—featuring growled lines from Badalamenti himself—are the only real disruptions to the otherwise crepuscular ambience of the album. “The Pink Room” serves up noir-ish instrumental rock, not unlike Chris Isaacs’ “Wicked Game” by way of early Bad Seeds. The composer himself returns to the microphone to lay down a murmur on the skin-crawling two minutes of “The Black Dog Runs at Night,” but the guest vocals are more effective. The legendary Jimmy Scott appears on the slow-moving piano ballad “Sycamore Trees”; the baritone sax and Mr. Scott’s astonishing countertenor twine in the darkness like two cigarettes left smoldering in an ashtray. And the gravity-free bliss that is Cruise’s voice returns to drift like a lone cloud across the hymn-like “Questions in a World of Blue.”
The gorgeous “Don’t Do Anything (I Wouldn’t Do)” evokes early ’60s Blue Note sessions, a gentle meld of piano trio and the hovering vibraphone lines of Jay Hoggard. On “Moving Through Time,” Hoggard’s languid lines mix with Badalamenti’s piano, Tate’s brushed drums, and the expressive bowed bass of Rufus Reid to easily make for the most stunning seven minutes of the soundtrack. Beyond being a revered soundtrack composer, Badalamenti is equally adept at just blending into the group as a player.


Toronto-based singer and producer PARTYNEXTDOOR recently signed with Drake's OVO Sound imprint, and his debut mixtape abounds with homespun beats that turn radio rap tropes inside out and easy melodicism.

PARTYNEXTDOOR

This spring Drake picked up the first signee for his newly minted OVO Sound imprint in Toronto-based singer and producer PARTYNEXTDOOR. Like The Weeknd, who produced sporadic sessions as the Noise before a name change and a dollop of mystery sent his career into the stratosphere, and Frank Ocean, who toiled in obscurity as Def Jam songwriter Lonny Breaux prior to 2011’s Nostalgia, Ultra, PARTYNEXTDOOR had been making cheery EDM-infused R&B under his real name Jahron Brathwaite before starting with a clean slate. Brathwaite’s OVO acquisition was announced with an unassuming track drop on Drake’s October’s Very Own blog. The song, “Make a Mil”, found PARTYNEXTDOOR running through fleet verses of self-assured melodic rap with greater ease and range as a singer than his benefactor. His eponymous self-titled mixtape trades the doe-eyed sensitivity of the Jahron B. material for something closer in spirit to the villainous player chronicles of Ty Dolla $ign and the Weeknd.
The album’s chock full of strippers and drugs, and our narrator navigates a succession of dimly lit clubs and private afterparties with devilish gusto, informing the exotic dancing love interest of “Relax with Me” that, “Girl yo ass is so instrumental” and noting elsewhere that “Shawty silhouette look like a dollar sign”. All of this is carried out in a vocal delivery that fuses an R&B singer’s melodic finesse with the percussive wordplay of a rapper. In his lower register he’s a dead ringer for his boss; “Wus Good/Curious” invokes So Far Gone makeout cuts like “Houstatlantavegas”. When he draws his voice up into a high register word flurry on “Right Now” he essentially affects Meek Mill’s puppy dog yawp. If you close your eyes you might mistake “Tbh” and its oscillation between Brathwaite’s baritone and high tenor ranges for a lost Drake/Weeknd collaboration. Brathwaite’s a talented singer, but sometimes you get the impression he’s better at twisting and recapitulating sounds than inventing them. The inarguable triumph of PARTYNEXTDOOR is actually his production.
PARTYNEXTDOOR abounds with homespun beats that turn radio rap tropes inside out. “Make a Mil” and closer “Ballin’” both call in the foreboding 808s and the cricket chirp hi-hats of trap, but the former does it in service to a central melody played on what sounds like a Pan flute while the latter undercuts its cavernous low end with breathy flute notes that soak up all the menace. Mid-album highlight “Right Now” revolves around a breakneck synth figure, while “Break from Toronto” bastes otherwise unremarkable drum programming in a choice chop of Miguel’s “Girl with the Tattoo”. Throughout the album PARTYNEXTDOOR’s flair for off-the-wall musical flourishes (the clinking glasses and noirish sax on “Wild Bitches”, the drillbit synth sound that piledrives the kick hits home on “Wus Good/Curious”, the brashly synthetic horn section on the chorus of “Make a Mil”) and propensity to stash melodic elements in unexpected corners (see: the marimba melody of “Over Here” and the album’s tendency to pair hollow kick thuds with deep bass hits to give the effect of trunk-rattling drums) collude to buoy these songs through fitful moments of mimicry.
Jahron Brathwaite’s decision to ditch the mealy mouthed, saccharine dance pop to transmogrify into PARTYNEXTDOOR has been a shot in the arm. He’s got the ear of Drake at a time when the Toronto MC’s presence has solidified into dominance, and his versatility as a producer and songwriter means he could be put to great use in the OVO pop machine. PARTYNEXTDOOR occasionally works better as an audition for future work with Drake than an expression of Brathwaite’s own aspirations as an artist. But it’s also clear from the bedroom intimacy of the production and the demo-like quality of some of the one- and two-minute sketches that pepper the album between the more fully realized songs that PARTYNEXTDOOR is maybe just a sampler. It spends much of its brief running time wandering around Take Care’s wheelhouse churning out deft approximations of Drake and Noah “40” Shebib’s pet sounds, but some of it is used to strip their signature brand of confessional hip-hop/R&B fusion for parts to restructure it into something new.


The Kenyan artist’s new release is a stunning portrait of the electromagnetic sounds and hidden noises of his hometown. In its swelling electrical currents lies a thesis about the richness and drama of everyday sounds.

Natur

Every city has its own sound—literally. Beyond whatever music might get played there, every place on earth emits a set of frequencies that is completely unique. For Joseph Kamaru, these identities are as distinct as skylines. “Soundscapes reveal a lot about how people think and behave,” he recently told Resident Advisor. He notices them when he goes somewhere new and explores them in his music. Often, they make him think of his home city, Nairobi.
Kamaru moved to Berlin in 2020. Since then, he’s recorded over a dozen records that position him as a master of esoteric sound: a blend of ambient, drone, noise, and field recordings, defined by tactile sound design and an emotional palette that runs from haunting to serene. In 2022, he composed what would become As Nature, a live show inspired, as he put it in an email, by “the electromagnetic sounds and hidden noises in Nairobi that are so present that the inhabitants of the city become connected with them.” He played it again and again at experimental events across Europe, tweaking it until he formed an intense bond with the music. “I became it,” he says.
Natur, which arrives on the UK label Touch, is the album version of that performance. In its attempt to capture ineffable qualities of his home city, it is also a personal record. It is, like much of Kamaru’s music, subtly political as well, shifting the focus to an East African city in an art form dominated by Western bias. More than anything, though, it shows his unique way of hearing the world around him in extraordinary detail, and shaping those impressions into a surreal musical work.
A single, 52-minute piece, Natur bobs and weaves through crackling noise and balmy ambience. For Kamaru, the sound of Nairobi at night is all about electricity, from the hiss of open transformers to electrosmog—sounds inaudible to the naked ear but captured by Kamaru’s electromagnetic microphones—all set against a darkness deep enough to be broken by low-lit iPhone screens. In its calmer sections, Natur serves up whispers, birdsong, footfalls and muffled crowds, humid drones and barely-there melodic loops. In its more chaotic sections, frequencies wail, whoosh, and crash. Above all, they buzz. At times the album feels like a gallery of the countless distinct forms electrical buzzing can take.
Ambient as much of it is, the result is the opposite of background music. Natur is a voltaic odyssey, a ghost train rumbling, twisting and floating through this aural rendering of Nairobi at night. Kamaru has written about what he calls “activated listening,” a closely intentional form of listening that Natur demands of its listeners from its opening section, a swelling wave of electrical currents that crests just before it short-circuits. Perhaps because it took shape as a live performance, this is a dynamic, ever-evolving composition, one that moves through a sequence of scenes as distinct as they are abstract.
Take the passage about 15 minutes in, when a barrage of white-hot frequencies mercifully gives way to a haze of soothing, natural sounds. Kamaru follows this pattern for much of the record’s first half, swerving through a thicket of noise, then slipping, at just the right moment, into a stretch of relative serenity. After a while, the two modes blur together into something droning and hypnotic.
Every moment along this drifting path is bursting with vivid detail. Layered together or presented in turn, Kamaru’s sounds are carefully sculpted and lovingly displayed, artifacts of the invisible world his work explores. It’s usually hard to tell field recordings—presented as-is or embellished in the studio—apart from sounds entirely of his creation. Still, the record demonstrates something Kamaru senses more easily than the rest of us, which is the richness and drama of everyday sounds. Natur helps us hear what he hears.


On his second album, Vince Staples teams with producers like SOPHIE, Jimmy Edgar, and Flume on a collection of sleek club-rap bangers. But his eye for detail and observational skills remain intact.

Big Fish Theory

Vince Staples always has plenty to say, and he isn’t shy. Having taken on the entire
world and become something of an internet talking head, he’s now ready to figure out where, exactly, he fits into rap, and how rap fits into society at large. His sophomore album, Big Fish Theory, peers into the fishbowl of the fragile rap ecosystem and considers how “rappers are perceived and perceive themselves,” as he puts it. The result is a sleek rave-rap record that casually probes celebrity and class, a release that is half celebration of rap stardom and half critique of the often toxic culture it breeds. Staples is as clever as ever, but now the beats travel faster than his racing mind.
The driving force behind Big Fish Theory is tempo; Staples exudes manic energy, departing from the unnerving calm that marked earlier releases. In the run-up to the album, he referred to the project as futuristic, and even labeled it Afrofuturism for a while, though he later claimed he was trolling. But the record is truly progressive and unconventional—“When the Vince Staples is playing, it’s 2029, bro,” he said on Beats 1. “Vince Staples is coming once again with the brand new sound.” While the sound in question is mostly retrofitted dance music that slopes to suit rap cadences, there’s something radical in how swiftly and easily he scales these craggy bops with fractured verses. And there’s a certain boldness and adventurousness to following your weirdest project with your cheekiest one.
Summertime ‘06 was frequently grayscale and amelodic, an elaborate configuration of whale horns, discordant strings, and clanging, metallic rhythms. Big Fish Theory leans toward electronic club music (house and Detroit techno, especially), assembling an unlikely cabal of beatmakers including chief collaborator Zack Sekoff (a regular on the L.A. Beat scene), SOPHIE, Jimmy Edgar, GTA, and Flume, among others. The new album is smooth where Summertime ‘06 was jagged, foregoing the disquieting noise for something more functional, finding sophistication in streamlined motion, like an art installation set up in a nightclub. Even though the two albums are stylistically different and have conflicting agendas, Big Fish Theory feels like a natural progression. Amid the gleaming productions, he’s still exploring darkness.
Staples’ 2016 EP, Prima Donna, opened with a budding rap star dying by suicide before tracing the path that led him there, and Big Fish Theory further explores the theme. Amy Winehouse speaks in the opening seconds of “Alyssa Interlude” (via an excerpt from a 2006 interview), setting the tone: “I’m quite a self-destructive person, so I guess I keep giving myself material,” she concludes, a sobering look into her process. Winehouse has long been a source of inspiration for Staples (the documentary Amy was the initial spark for Prima Donna), and he has openly criticized the public’s treatment of the late singer. The symbiotic relationship and resulting tension between a tortured artist and their audience weighs heavy on Vince’s mind (See: the “Señorita” video or the Prima Donna short film). These weighty questions seep into Big Fish Theory, where he sneaks in outcries like “Propaganda, press pan the camera/Please don’t look at me in my face/Everybody might see my pain/Off the rail, might off myself.” Suicide comes up elsewhere on the record. There are references to Basquiat and he calls himself the new River Phoenix. Amid the partying and paper-chasing, there are flashes of darkness and melancholy: “How am I supposed to have a good time when death and destruction is all I see?”
There’s a chorus of other voices swirling around Staples on Big Fish Theory, but they mostly serve the larger sonic mosaic, echoing and amplifying Staples’ perspective. Guests generally appear in the margins, prove their usefulness, then vanish quickly—Damon Albarn sings for a few seconds, there are some hypeman-style vocals from A$AP Rocky, some garnishing R&B harmonies courtesy of Ray J, Kučka provides a quick interlude, Juicy J drops swag chants. They each play their roles well or at worst become part of the backdrop, aiding the general flow and texture of the album. But frequent collaborator Kilo Kish serves sort of secret weapon: her ability to move wispily through a song without disruption is key to several moments on the record, as on the entry on “Love Can Be…,” the softly, sweetly-sung coda on “Homage,” and the evaporating murmurs that lead “Crabs in a Bucket” into “Big Fish.” The biggest drop-in is Kendrick Lamar’s turn on the flossy “Yeah Right,” which delivers pyrotechnics as he and Vince dismantle tropes on rap’s inherent boastfulness.
Songs on Big Fish Theory don’t operate the way we’re accustomed to Vince Staples songs operating. Staples has long traded on incisive and detail-oriented reporting, centering his observations and occupying all space in the mind’s eye. He is known for writing heavy, plainspoken confessions packed with detail. Here, the songs run on high-powered verses that tumble and split to accommodate the current, and his rapping is noticeably fleeter and more efficient. For other rappers, adjusting to the new mode might be awkward, but Staples’ lyrical precision allows him to cover just as much ground in fewer steps. The economy of his language makes for pithy dialogue (On “745”: “Eyes can’t hide your hate for me/Maybe you was made for the Maybelline/Spent so much tryna park the car/Barely got a tip for the maître d’”) and sharp, first-glance impressions of those in his orbit, adding bite-sized nuggets like “paid a pretty penny for my peace of mind.” Each passing stanza is a marvel of concision.
Across 36 minutes, Vince Staples crams slinky disclosures on class and entitlement into infectious and eccentric club bangers. He leaves us with thoughts on fame’s corrupting influence and love’s power, all from a rising rap star who understands his reach and the limits of his celebrity. Big Fish Theory is a compact rap gem for dancing to or simply sitting with, an album that is as innovative as it is accessible; if not a glimpse into the future, then it’s at least an incisive look at the present. “This is Afrofuturism y’all can keep the other shit. We’re trying to get in the MoMA not your Camry,” Vince wrote, half-joking, in a since-deleted tweet. The funny thing is, Big Fish Theory might just be equipped for both.


The Roots' latest is also their leanest and most stylistically cohesive LP to date. Guests include Joanna Newsom, Dirty Projectors, Phonte, Blu, and Jim James.

How I Got Over

Above everything else that defines them, the Roots are capital-P Professionals. That's why they're perfect for their "Late Night" job. They don't fit there because, as critics would say, they're easily digestible; they fit because they're versatile and consistently operate at a high level. They're encyclopedic music scholars who're proud of their chops but don't flash them at the expense of an accessible hook. They never compromise, even though they're refined enough to help set the standards for grown-man class in hip-hop. And it's possible to listen to their last few albums without being reminded they're big-idea concept records, even though their themes leave an impression fairly quickly.
So after all the delays and discarded material (whatever happened to that "Peaches En Regalia" cover?), How I Got Over has emerged as a particularly efficient album. It's the Roots' shortest (a lean 42 and a half minutes), one of their most lyrically straightforward, and a work of strong stylistic cohesion. A decade's worth of personnel changes notwithstanding, it's clear that this is the same braintrust that made "The Next Movement" sound so vibrant 11 years ago; the two most prominent instrumental components remain ?uestlove's in-the-pocket drumming and the Ahmad Jamal/Donny Hathaway resonance of Kamal Gray's keyboards. And on the mic, Black Thought maintains his usual level-headed authority, continuing to come across at his best like a down-to-earth version of Rakim.
But what makes How I Got Over work is its sense of purpose. After the jaw-clenching stress rap of their last two excellent Def Jam releases, Game Theory and Rising Down, this record operates as a slow-build mission statement on how to overcome. Everything hinges on the title track, a stirring anthem built from a congas-and-organ backbone that sounds like a funkier, livelier inversion of Steely Dan's "Do It Again". As a showcase for Dice Raw and Black Thought's unexpectedly tender singing voices-- as well as the latter MC's ability to elevate simple sentiments with his delivery-- it feels like the group's usual rigorous standards being met. But it isn't exactly an accurate indication of how the album itself turns out sounding.
Instead, it's a pivot point, where everything before its halfway-mark appearance is the tunnel and everything afterwards is the light. How I Got Over is sequenced with a distinct idea of mood progression, changing from defeated, malaise-stricken piano-ballad dirges to defiant statements of survival and resilience. Black Thought's tough lamentations on early tracks "Walk Alone" and "Radio Daze" pick up where the more introspective moments of Rising Down left off. And even if he pushes a few metaphors past the breaking point or coasts on stating the obvious for a line or two, he doesn't suffer from a lack of relatability.
Once "How I Got Over" breaks through the first half's well-crafted melancholy and transitions into its more resolute second half, the sound shifts from glowing downtempo neo-soul to something more energized. "Right On" pits Joanna Newsom's lilting voice and harp against one of the most commanding drum breaks on the album; John Legend is artfully deployed as both a ghostly sample (the cathedral-sized "Doin' It Again") and an intense live vocalist ("The Fire"); "Web 20/20" upends the minimalist snare-driven charge of its Tipping Point namesake and mutates it into a jury-rigged, elastic-ricochet revamp of snap music. Black Thought ups his mood over the course of things as well, and by the time they reach the record's unlikely final hook-- "Hustla"'s Auto-Tuned crying-baby-- he's turning struggles into strengths for the sake of his next generation.
A lot has been made of the indie rock collaborations on this album, particularly the appearances by Newsom, the Monsters of Folk on "Dear God 2.0", and the wordless a cappella chorus from Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian, and Haley Dekle of the Dirty Projectors on the intro track "A Peace of Light". But their crossover efforts land firmly on the Roots' side of the equation, integrating into their Soulquarian aesthetic instead of nudging them the other way. Meanwhile, the guest MCs do just as much to round out How I Got Over's personality. The recurring satellite members that bolstered the ranks on Rising Down reprise their roles here (an on-fire Dice Raw, the low-key sharpness of Truck North and P.O.R.N., the obligatory show-stealing Peedi Peedi appearance). "Right On" and "Hustla" make for a couple of good showcases for promising Philly-via-ATL up-and-comer STS, who's molded his semi-drawl into an agile flow. And there's a couple of fine verses from Little Brother's Phonte and some absolute revelations from L.A. phenom Blu, both of whom sound vital even when they spend most of their time describing their anxiety.
How I Got Over has its title for a reason. It alludes to the gospel standard popularized by Clara Ward, and has a similarly spiritual-minded cast to it as its namesake's tribute to the power of belief in helping people reach the promised land. Maybe it's not as explicitly religious, but it regularly alludes to some form of higher power, whether it's God or a more secular sense of things that are simply out of civilization's control. And that's the compelling thing about the Roots on this album: They're not afraid to show humility and frustration when confronted with struggle, operating on the same level of humanity as the people who listen to it. For all the Roots' tight professionalism and clockwork consistency, for all their late-night TV exposure and their status as alt-rap icons, they're not superhuman. But the fact that they know this, that they can make a whole album about coming to terms with it-- that makes them powerful.


George Fest: A Night to Celebrate the Music of George Harrison is a live double album with the ramshackle, collaborative warmth of a Traveling Wilburys set. It features contributions from Britt Daniel of Spoon, Brian Wilson, the Flaming Lips, Brandon Flowers of the Killers, George's son Dhani, and many more.

Various Artists: George Fest: A Night to Celebrate the Music of George Harrison

Team George—now that’s a fierce genus of Beatlemaniac. They’ve inspected and cast aside the iconoclast cool of John, girded themselves against the snug, romantic haze of Paul. (A basic lack of sociopathy steers them from Ringo trutherism.) Harrison’s tribe is possessive because he, along with Bowie and Morrissey, was one of rock’s great shepherds of outsiders—a gentle mascot for those who also feel a bit too curious, a little too sensitive when held to bright lights. His consistent relegation to second-tier creative status inside the Beatles—one of the most famous yet undermined faces in the world, plunked courtside next to two massive egos—gave his songwriting a special undertow of empathy that his bandmates never touched. Those who identify with his dark-horse journey are a motley, loyal breed.
A similar reverence runs through George Fest: A Night to Celebrate the Music of George Harrison, a live double album with the ramshackle, collaborative warmth of a Traveling Wilburys set. Taped at L.A.’s Fonda Theatre in September 2014, the evening cribs together a varied roster—including Brian Wilson, the Flaming Lips, Norah Jones, Britt Daniel of Spoon, Brandon Flowers of the Killers, and Harrison’s dopplegänger son, Dhani Harrison—for campfire spins on familiar Beatles and solo fare. It’s an amiable, unofficial sort of sequel to The Concert for George, which was held at Royal Albert Hall in 2002 with Paul and Ringo, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, and Billy Preston—but this time, it’s staffed largely with Dhani’s peers. (He co-produced the charity event, which will also be released on DVD.)
Like most tributes, it’s not a particularly exploratory evening, but the parish is earnest. Song allotments are logical, and most artists hew closely to Harrison’s vocal cadences and cryptic guitars. Britt Daniel lends some yowling panache to "I Me Mine" (off Let It Be) and the underrated folk singer/model Karen Elson adds a reedy quaver through "I’d Have You Anytime," the delicate opening of Harrison’s stellar triple album All Things Must Pass (and a bromantic ode to Bob Dylan). Norah Jones, daughter of one of Harrison’s most influential collaborators, the late sitarist Ravi Shankar—and a lovely voice who never quite gets her due for melodic winsomeness—adds subtle inversions to "Something," an evening standout. Dhani Harrison, a truly uncanny vocal and visual heir, spurs on some of the night’s liveliest moments with the White Album eccentricity "Savoy Truffle" and the more contemplative solo missive "Let It Down."  Those not following along on the tracklist might furrow their brows to the billowing chorus of "What Is Life"—that is, indeed, "Weird Al" Yankovic, crooning the euphoric All Things Must Pass hit utterly straight, not even tweaking the lyrics into "Hobbit Strife" or anything.
The evening’s highlight, not least for rarity: Brian Wilson, tackling Harrison’s contentious classic "My Sweet Lord," with support from fellow Beach Boy Al Jardine, Ann Wilson of Heart, and others. It’s fair to say Wilson wouldn’t have his legacy today without Harrison and the Beatles—his watershed Pet Sounds was an attempt to outshine their Rubber Soul, and the friendly ensuing arms race beget Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Smile sessions. There’s welcome ardor in Wilson’s scratchy delivery; he sounds more enlivened than in many other recent projects, including much of his last studio album and the Beach Boys’ 50th anniversary tour. (As he recalls boyishly in the film’s trailer, of a moment several decades prior, "When I heard ‘My Sweet Lord,’ I just about croaked!")
There are a few stumbles—Cold War Kids’ yodeling, slack delivery of "Taxman" sounds borderline drunk, and the Black Ryder’s "Isn’t It a Pity" is a bit static for such an elegy. No one touches "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," a surprising omission; maybe Dhani is sick of hearing it mangled every time he pops into Guitar Center. But as an act of low-impact celebration, George Fest is a fine affair. More noise for the Quiet Beatle is welcome anytime.


Oh come on, it's just *Pet Sounds*. Despite the fact that two or three generations of music fans will secretly believe you have no soul if you don't announce your allegiance to it, despite that you probably already own it (in some cases, two or three times over-- if I could only remember where I put my 24-carat gold CD version), or that you may even have written an article for Pitchfork years ago making fun of anyone who dared criticize it, well, that's no reason to feel any pressure to make sure it's displayed prominently for guests, or worry

The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds: 40th Anniversary

Pet Sounds: 40th Anniversary

Oh come on, it's just Pet Sounds. Despite the fact that two or three generations of music fans will secretly believe you have no soul if you don't announce your allegiance to it, despite that you probably already own it (in some cases, two or three times over-- if I could only remember where I put my 24-carat gold CD version), or that you may even have written an article for Pitchfork years ago making fun of anyone who dared criticize it, well, that's no reason to feel any pressure to make sure it's displayed prominently for guests, or worry that you haven't met your monthly "God Only Knows" listening quota.
Despite (or because of) the "pressure" to adopt pro-Pet Sounds stances in today's high-powered world of hanging out with your friends or staying home and getting high whilst listening to "Let's Go Away for Awhile", I'd wager most people are only too happy not to discuss the merits of the oft-oft-reported Beach Boys masterpiece. Certainly, regardless of what I write here, the impact and "influence" of the record will have been in turn hardly influenced at all. I can't even get my dad to talk about Pet Sounds anymore.
This isn't so bad. Beyond my personal preference for the records immediately following Pet Sounds (1967's Smiley Smile to 1971's Surf's Up in particular), I'd argue the actual sound of much modern music purportedly influenced by the Beach Boys is closer in execution to what the band did in the wake of Pet Sounds (and for that matter, Smile). "Influence" is a loaded concept here, because there's no foolproof way to measure how someone might channel inspiration from a single record, Pet Sounds or otherwise; however, much more certain is the feeling that very few musicians are making active decisions to "try to top Pet Sounds." In this light, just as with other perennially lauded pop/rock records, Pet Sounds is as much tautology as musical document. (Interestingly, this also seems to have been Brian Wilson's attitude beginning in mid-1967.)
Forty years after release, then, while the album's initially disappointing (at least to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys) chart showing has been vindicated by a perpetual reservoir of new fans and adoring critics - not to mention still being commercially viable enough to support recent live productions and similarly perpetual ways of reissuing the music-- talking about the music, or how the music makes you feel isn't much easier than it was in 1966. Very famous people waste no time in offering testimonials to Pet Sounds' greatness, but (probably wisely) stick to short statements about how important the record was to them as artists and musicians, or just how beautiful its music is.
Pet Sounds was made during the period in 1965-66 when Brian stopped touring with his band, preferring to stay home and work on tracks. His decision to work with lyricist Tony Asher for most of the songs freed him further to focus on music. This not only translated to backing tracks of considerably more nuance and subtlety than even Brian's recent apexes "California Girls" and the Beach Boys Today! LP, both from 1965, but similarly well-crafted chord progressions and choral arrangements. Almost predictably, as the deserved praise for the vocal arrangements may never wane, I've heard more fine things said about the instrumental tracks recently than any other aspect of the record. In any case, the technical achievements of the record (only given further support by the stereo issue of the record in the late 90s) have tended to overshadow the emotional and spiritual ones, at least in my lifetime.
This anniversary issue of Pet Sounds, including both the mono and stereo version of the record, and a bonus DVD with several documentary features, surround sound mixes and promo clips, will be of immediate interest to longtime fans for obvious reasons (of which "collecting" isn't necessarily the least important). In particular, the "Pet Stories" feature, with recent interviews with Brian, Asher, session drummer and Beach Boy pal Hal Blaine, and even an illuminating cameo from Elvis Costello, sheds light not only on the original sessions and song origins, but on all concerned parties' attitudes about the music now. Also very cool is the footage of Brian and famed Beatles producer George Martin listening to the original tracks; at one point, Martin twists a few knobs and Brian is convinced he’s finally perfected Pet Sounds!
Also included in the set, of course, is the album; mono and stereo mixes of Pet Sounds, recapping the tracklist from the 1999 CD issue. The most famous songs-- "God Only Knows", "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "Sloop John B", "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)", "Caroline No"-- are no less gorgeous than they have always been. The hymnal aspect of many of these songs seems no less pronounced, and the general air of deeply heartfelt love, graciousness and the uncertainty that any of it will be returned are still affecting to the point of distraction. Currently, there is a minor surge in support for the record's two instrumentals "Let's Go Away for Awhile" and the title track, though later efforts like "Diamond Head" and the quasi-instrumental "Fall Breaks Into Winter" (not to mention its parent track, "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" from the Smile sessions) seem both more idiosyncratic and intrinsically interesting to me.
As it happens, Brian's instrumental arrangements for the album, while again justly praised (especially by other musicians), were related to concurrent productions by Juan Garcia Esquivel, Les Baxter, Martin Denny, and a host of other exotica producers, in both the kinds of instruments used, and the stylistic appropriation of, say, percussion and string instruments from other countries. In fact, Brian was the only one of these people not producing music in stereo at the time, which might explain why it took so long for bands (and not just the Stereolab kind) to borrow as much from his instrumental tracks as from his vocal ones, which cut through mono mixes much more effortlessly than the backing tracks.
So, the unfair question is: Do you love Pet Sounds enough to buy it again? Before you answer, here's a fairer one: How often do you need help recalling the emotions Pet Sounds provokes inside you? If you haven't lived with the record day in and day out, chances are, it's still a pretty fresh experience, and I'd recommend this set with absolutely no reservations. However, if the music is practically family to you already, I'd say check out the DVD stuff when you can, keep your current version, and watch the album's effects wind and rewind their way through lives and cultures in the meantime.


With their reputation as one of America's most formidable live acts wholly assured, Thee Oh Sees explore the possibilities of the studio and more lustrous modes of psychedelia on Putrifiers II. It's a convenient gateway into the garage rock vets' dense discography.

Putrifiers II

At this past July's Pitchfork Music Festival, the scheduling gods played a cruel joke on fans of fuzzed-out San Francisco garage-rock by placing scene vets Thee Oh Sees and their prodigal-son pal Ty Segall on competing stages with overlapping set times. The irony was not lost on Thee Oh Sees' frontman John Dwyer, who, despite getting their show off to a righteously arse-kicking start, jokingly begged to the crowd after three songs "don't leave!" as Segall's set time approached. This simple, self-deprecating plea effectively delineated the difference between these two like-minded, furiously prolific acts.
Segall, after all, is in the midst of a banner year that's seen him release two albums-- including his best to date, Slaughterhouse-- with a third on the way, and he's still young enough that his whimsical, impulsive approach to recording forms a media-friendly narrative of the punk wunderkind realizing his true potential. On the other hand, Thee Oh Sees are the latest, albeit the most durable, in a long, 15-year lineage of Dwyer-helmed projects, and one whose consistency-- in terms of both quantity and quality-- makes for a somewhat less sexy story. Dude releases a shit-ton of records because, after all these years in the game, he's still restless and resourceful.
That said, Putrifiers II is Thee Oh Sees' first album of 2012, which is a weird statement to be typing considering that we're well into September. (Though given the band's ceaseless output, it's not too far-fetched to imagine that a Putrifiers I was recorded and scrapped somewhere along the way.) Thee Oh Sees' records have more or less charted the band's evolution from Dwyer's solitary psych-pop project to brute-force hypno-punkers. Now, with their reputation as one of America's most redoubtable live acts wholly assured, Thee Oh Sees use Putrifiers II to explore the possibilities of the studio and more lustrous modes of psychedelia. It's not exactly uncharted territory for Dwyer and company, but where Thee Oh Sees are prone to segregating their more refined pop sensibilities from their gonzo-rock rave-ups (as their two 2011 releases, Castlemania and Carrion Crawler/The Dream, respectively illustrate), Putrifiers II reconciles these two modes, providing a more complete, elaborate picture of this band's many capabilities and strengths.
Which is to say: If the sheer enormity of Thee Oh Sees' dense discography has proven too forbidding for you to delve into, Putrifiers II is a convenient summary/gateway, opening with a killer shot of the band's patented echo-drenched fuzz-punk delirium ("Wax Face") and closing with a baroque, string-swept lullaby ("Wicked Park"), while traversing all points in between. But even as Putrifiers II turns more melodic and mellow, broadening the band's sonic scope with strings and woodwinds, it retains the nervy irreverence: With its shrieking cello line and opium-den ambience, "So Nice" unabashedly kneels before the shiny leather boots of the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs" and, as such, becomes a knowing allegory for the master/slave dynamic that plays out in the original.
If the drawn-out title-track dirge and the moonlight-strolling "Will We Be Scared?" (the sort of warped, revisionist 50s-style ballad Bradford Cox has made his stock-in-trade) threaten to curb the mid-album momentum, they prove to be effective calm-before-the-storm set-ups to the mighty "Lupine Dominus", which manages to condense everything that is great about Thee Oh Sees into three thrilling minutes: Dwyer and Brigid Dawson's eerily androgynous harmonies cooing a disarmingly childlike melody, and a car-crash tangle of guitar/organ noise, all hitched to a steely Krautrock pulse. It feels like the sort of song that, after so many years of exploratory recordings, could very well define the true sound of Thee Oh Sees. Or it's the sort of peak moment that could give Dwyer reason to tear it all down and radically redefine his band once again. At the very least, we know it likely won't be long before we find out.


Ex-Blur frontman Damon Albarn ditches the idea of writing pop songs a cartoon band might front and makes one of his most gorgeous pop records in years.

Plastic Beach

Forget the cartoon characters. Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett's animated misfits have always been mainly interesting as a concept, and on much of the third Gorillaz album, Plastic Beach, it feels like Albarn and co. are ditching the idea of writing pop songs a cartoon band might front anyway. The one-time Blur frontman has transcended some of the post-modern artifice of this project, and created the group's most affecting and uniquely inviting album. Joke's over, Gorillaz are real.
So why make this a Gorillaz album in the first place? It wasn't meant to be one. Hewlett, the celebrated Tank Girl co-creator, told The Observer last July, "Gorillaz now to us is not like four animated characters anymore-- it's more like an organization of people doing new projects." The project was to be called Carousel, presented by, but not performed by, Gorillaz. It never panned out. So Albarn devised Plastic Beach, a loose enviromental-song cycle warning against disposability. It's a noble conceit, if a transient one.
Along with a typically diverse band of collaborators, Albarn dips into Krautrock, funk, and dubstep, as well as the weary, more melodic music he's been perfecting for much of last decade-- sort of an electronic take on baroque pop. Albarn also sounds more comfortable as a leader here than he has in some time. On the standout "On Melancholy Hill", he recalls the swooning strains of one of his heroes, Scott Walker. And when he shares or cedes vocals, he has the good sense to turn things over to luminaries like Lou Reed (magnificently dry-throated on "Some Kind of Nature") and Bobby Womack (good on first single "Stylo", better on the twangy "Cloud of Unknowing"), while effortlessly integrating them into the sound.
Handling most of the production himself, Albarn has reversed the good fortune of the first two Gorillaz albums. With Dan the Automator on their 2001 self-titled debut and Danger Mouse on 2005's Demon Days, the group was adept at fusing giddy pop with hip-hop, inserting De La Soul, Del the Funky Homosapien, or a yippy Miho Hatori into some of their best songs ("Clint Eastwood", "Dirty Harry", "Feel Good Inc.", "19-2000"). Those songs crashed in from all places with little mind to sequence or balance, and the result was two fairly unfocused records saved by some decent alt-rap.
On Plastic Beach, things are the other way around. The rap moments here feel almost needlessly idiosyncratic amidst the lusher treatments. Snoop Dogg's appearance on "Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach" is an incongruous introduction to an album that has nothing to do with Snoop Dogg. De La repeat themselves on the faux jingle "Superfast Jellyfish". Grime MCs Kano and Bashy compellingly play pass-the-baton on "White Flag", but only after disrupting an absorbing intro and outro by the Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music. Only on "Sweepstakes" is Mos Def able to assimilate into the production.
Albarn is more natural when working in the kind of ornate Village Green Preservation Society-style pop that dominates Plastic Beach. His collaborations with Little Dragon, "Empire Ants" and "To Binge" are two of the most arresting things here-- they're airy, elusive, and amazingly beautiful. It's been years since Albarn has written anything as blatantly gorgeous. If he had to work past the animated pretense to rediscover it, all the better. Why be a cartoon when you can be a real person?


The rapper’s second greatest hits compilation collects some nice singles, but mostly feels like the portrait of a wayward artist who’s spent the last 13 years going in every direction.

Curtain Call 2

In his prime, controversy was Eminem’s secret sauce. As a white rapper with bottle-blonde hair and boy-band looks who liked to joke about indoctrinating children with antisocial thoughts, Slim Shady was the straw man onto which square America projected its most deranged insecurities about the fragility of its youth. He was so good at his job that by the time he dropped Relapse—his 2009 comeback record following years of heavy pharmaceutical use—his most violent bars now just felt like the work of an institutionally entrenched artist playing the hits. After all, millennials who’d listened to Eminem’s early records in middle school were by then in various stages of young adulthood, and most of us turned out fine.
So as he entered his second decade of fame, Eminem adopted a new identity: an extremely famous, super-intense dude who rapped really complicated raps. But beyond this basic foundation, he became a chimera, his body of work an assemblage of often disparate personas, subject matter, and sounds. At times, he’s chased trends and tried to reinsert himself into the zeitgeist; at others, he’s retreated inwards, reflecting on his legacy or finding yet another way to recreate past selves. That his music lacks perspective or personality beyond the fact that listeners immediately know that it’s Eminem rapping hasn’t hampered him from becoming the best-selling singles artist of all time, and it certainly hasn’t kept him from continuing to be a reliable hitmaker. But these qualities make Curtain Call 2, a double-disc compilation of his post-comeback greatest hits, feel like a portrait of an artist who’s spent the past 13 years going in every direction.
Eminem has made some great music during this era—tracks like Revival’s “Offended,” an off-kilter lyrical workout over a tightly wound Charles Bradley loop; his guest spot on Nas’ “EPMD 2,” in which he delivers a reverent ode to the golden age of hip-hop; Relapse’s “Deja Vu” which combines the fearless inventory-taking of 12 Step programs with blistering internal rhymes. There’s probably a Spotify playlist out there that’s scrounged up the best of Em’s latter-day catalog and uses it to make a case that, despite one lackluster album after another, Eminem is still capable of reminding us why we used to stan the guy who coined the term “stan.”
But rather than panning for gold in the mud, Curtain Call 2 contents itself with being a damningly accurate reflection of what Eminem’s been up to lately. He gives us goopy pop songs like “Lighters” and “Nowhere Fast,” and maudlin deconstructions of toxic relationships like “Love the Way You Lie” and “Headlights.” There are anthems for personal uplift and/or weightlifting (“Not Afraid,” “Cinderella Man,” and “Phenomenal”) and the Rick Rubin and DJ Khalil-enabled dalliances with rap-rock (“Berzerk,” “Won’t Back Down”). It’s topped off with a song about killing people (“3 a.m.”) and one about how tough it is to be Eminem (“Walk on Water”), with some r/hiphopheads-baiting fast rap (“Rap God,” “Godzilla”) thrown in for good measure. Listening to 34 tracks of this stuff in a row—especially considering that Eminem was one of the last major rappers to cut overtly homophobic language out of his rhyme book—is a grim experience. By the time Ed Sheeran shows up on Disc 2, his vocals feel like the sweet release of death.
In his best work, Eminem ushered listeners into his world and forced them to engage with his music on terms that he set. He could “murder a rhyme, one word at a time,” or interrupt a string of “vile, venomous, volatile” invective to make a bunch of chainsaw noises. He cultivated a sense that everything he did was a dart shot into the eye of a culture industry that decried him while profiting off his infamy. Though post-comeback Em was never going to be the cultural firebrand he once was, there was no reason he needed to let go of his auteurist vision. Yet after the relatively insular Relapse, he increasingly farmed out hooks to a rotating group of singers with varying abilities to not make his own voice sound like nails on a chalkboard by comparison. He also stopped rapping over instrumentals custom-tailored for him by either Dr. Dre or longtime collaborators the Bass Brothers, instead leaning on his own productions or sourcing tracks from whichever beatmakers the rest of the industry was using at the time. This all had the effect of making Eminem sound generic, and it coincided with the accelerating pace of his raps, creating more opportunities to toss dreadful puns and abject filler into his songs.
Despite showcasing some of Eminem’s stylistic growing pains, Curtain Call 2 isn’t completely lined with duds. “Godzilla” has always been a jam, in part due to Em’s vocal chemistry with his posthumous guest Juice WRLD, but also because it’s a song where Eminem actually sounds like he’s having fun. “Fast Lane,” off Eminem’s Hell: The Sequel EP with Royce Da 5'9'', approaches the standard of quality that the duo established for themselves the first time around. Now that it’s a few years removed from radio ubiquity, “The Monster” finally has room to luxuriate in its massive Rihanna-driven hook. As for the new material on here, it’s fine. Eminem raps way harder on “The King and I” than seems necessary for a track originally featured on the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s movie about Elvis, yet it’s nice to hear him actively engaging with an artist with whom he’s drawn pointed comparisons over the years. And if you can ignore its Bored Ape Yacht Club tie-in music video, his reunion with Snoop Dogg on “From the D 2 the LBC” offers one of Eminem’s best self-produced beats in years, as well as an opportunity to hear two legends try to out-rap each other.
In an illuminating 2017 interview with Vulture, Eminem admitted that at times he’s vexed by his own audience, attempting to “give them the old Eminem” only to feel that his fans believe “he’s too old to be rapping about that kind of shit.” (By now, he’s so many years past his cultural peak that he recently admitted that he literally forgot about Dre.) As he’s aged, Eminem has further disappeared into his craft, putting together verses so intricate that rapping along with them is almost physically impossible. Where he once deployed his skill strategically, he now uses it as an end unto itself. Take “Rap God,” whose Max Headroom-indebted music video currently sits at just under 1.3 billion YouTube views. The song set a Guinness World Record for the most number of words contained in a hit single, cramming 1,560 of them into approximately six minutes. You don’t have to know the slightest thing about hip-hop in order to understand that what he’s doing in the track is astonishing, but “Rap God” is less a work of art and more a piece of content you consume because of the sheer fact that it exists, like a TikTok of a dude expertly navigating the world’s longest parkour course.
It says a lot about Eminem’s run in the 2010s that he sounded most on-task in “Killshot,” a diss track against Machine Gun Kelly, of all people—and it’s equally telling that though Em won the battle by lyrically grinding the Cleveland upstart into a pulp, all the once and future king of pop-punk had to do to win the war was rap “his fuckin’ beard is weird” and then stick out his tongue like a demonic Bart Simpson. When Eminem released the first Curtain Call in 2005, it was a fitting victory lap for a guy who’d spent the better part of six years reshaping American culture. The hits lining Curtain Call 2, meanwhile, feel more like that same rapper running up the score just because he could. Eminem turns 50 in October, and as he enters the next stage of his career, he’s more than earned the right to be himself in his music. If at this point his listening public has only the haziest sense of who he actually is, that could prove to be an asset. Perhaps when he releases Curtain Call 3, it will tell the story of how we got to know Eminem all over again.


The third installment in McCartney’s home-recorded series is less adventurous and revelatory than its eponymous predecessors, but still contains moments of genuine wonder and weirdness.

McCartney III

There are many Paul McCartney albums, but only a precious few get to call themselves McCartney albums. McCartney III is the surprise third entry in a series that began with his 1970 solo debut McCartney and seemed to end with 1980’s McCartney II, two dramatically different records born of dramatically different circumstances that were nonetheless united by a DIY methodology. Unlike the other records in Macca’s solo discography, these were true one-man-band efforts, clearinghouses for the rough song sketches and home-recording experiments he’d never bring to his proper releases. And both were flawed-yet-fascinating portraits of a perfectionist embracing the purity of imperfection. So the appearance of that roman numeral in the title of McCartney III is loaded with significance, a promising indication that what we’re getting here is the man, not the myth. This is especially exciting news for that generation of fans who hold “Temporary Secretary” in a greater esteem than Sgt. Pepper’s.
The novelty of McCartney and McCartney II had a lot to do with the context in which they appeared: the former was a purposefully ramshackle response to the studio-sculpted grandeur of the Beatles, the latter a synth-shocked antidote to the arena-rock bombast of Wings. But while they were solitary efforts, those records were still plugged into the sounds and conversations of their times. McCartney was rooted in the agrarian, anti-psych aesthetic of contemporary groups like the Band, while McCartney II showed Macca having a go at the new wave and early electronic music seeping into the mainstream. On these albums, McCartney wasn’t so much the all-knowing auteur as a sponge soaking up the prevailing styles of the day and squeezing them out, without a care if he made a mess.
McCartney III, however, has no such guiding principle—other than the fact it arrives in a year when McCartney, like many of us, was stuck at home with a whole lot of extra time on his overly sanitized hands. Following a decade where he actively pursued modern-pop relevance through collaborations with Mark Ronson, Ryan Tedder, and Kanye West and Rihanna, McCartney III finds its maker shacked up at his Sussex farmhouse, tuning out the radio to indulge his every scatterbrained whim. With no desire to engage with the contemporary musical landscape or absorb new influences, McCartney III is less adventurous and revelatory than its eponymous predecessors. Mostly, it reiterates his well-established fondness for acoustic ditties, ruminative piano ballads, and hot-rod rockers. And yet it still offers intriguing evidence that, even when sticking to his usual lane, a septuagenarian multi-millionaire pop star comfortably ensconced in his rural estate can still get up to some pretty weird shit when no one’s looking.
The opening “Long Tailed Winter Bird” is the perfect microcosm of everything that’s both inspired and indulgent about this project. Armed with a needling, Celtic-tinged, folk-blues acoustic refrain, McCartney coolly ratchets up the tension, locking into a distorted guitar break while mischievously cooing “do you, do do do you miss me?” It’s a rare treat to hear him lean into something so gritty and tense, but the song is ultimately all warm-up with little payoff—“Long Tailed Winter Bird” flies in circles for over five minutes, always teasing that it’s about to grow into something more peculiar and powerful, yet never quite getting there.
Still, “Long Tailed Winter Bird” is practically “Yesterday” compared to the album’s eight-minute centerpiece “Deep Deep Feeling,” which tries to recreate the mesmerizing sprawl of McCartney II-era oddities like “Secret Friend,” but with more belabored results. Starting out as a torch song about the disorienting effects of love, the track is slowly deconstructed through a random barrage of ominous orchestration, disembodied harmonies, sputtering cod-reggae rhythms, and guitar squeals that sound like they drifted in from a Dire Straits record. But this would-be descent into madness is outfitted with a safety net, too self-consciously “crazy” to feel strange. A similar fate befalls the similarly titled “Deep Down,” another addition to the growing canon of exceedingly horny late-career Paul McCartney songs that essentially gives “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” an ‘80s synth-funk makeover but rides it out for three times as long.
As was the case with the first two McCartneys, III’s eccentricities are best put to use when they’re supporting Macca’s endearing melodies rather than corrupting them. Fortunately, McCartney III has enough radiant moments to outweigh its stumbles. “Find My Way” betrays a very 2020 sense of unease—“You never used to be afraid of days like these/But now you’re overwhelmed by your anxieties”—but offers a pick-me-up in the form of “Savoy Truffle”-style buzzing brass, playful noodling, and a breezy, drum loop that could’ve been pulled from Beck’s bag of tricks. With its glammy, Super Furry Animals-scaled sweep, “Seize the Day” is even more explicit in its optimist’s mission. In an age of cruelty-is-the-point politics, an innocent platitude like “It’s still alright to be nice” practically sounds like fighting words.
As much as the legend of the McCartney series is rooted in its off-kilter sensibility, its most resonant moments remain the simplest and most heartfelt. McCartney III honors that tradition with “The Kiss of Venus,” a romantic lullaby playfully delivered in his higher register and sprinkled with harpsichord pixie dust, but underpinned by a warning not to get too lost in love: “If the world begins to shake/Will something have to break/We have to stay awake.” And on the album’s closer, “Winter Bird/When Winter Comes,” we get a startling reminder that McCartney’s genius doesn’t merely lie in his talent for orchestrating side-long suites, but in his seemingly effortless ability to dash off a casual acoustic sing-along about farm animals and make it feel both instantly familiar and mythical. “When winter comes, and food is scarce/We’ll warn our toes to stay indoors,” he sings of his critters’ annual hibernation ritual, while also calmly bracing us for what’s shaping up to be some dark months. Now more than ever, the McCartney series isn’t simply a sketchbook dump for its maker—it’s a sneaky vent for some of his most unifying impulses.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With festival-ready hooks and trap-inspired production, Lykke Li delivers another record about an unraveling romance and the fraught sexuality of its final moments with diminishing returns.

so sad so sexy

Every track on Lykke Li’s last album, I Never Learn, was a torch song of generous proportions, a thorough sweeping-up of the singer’s shattered heart with reflectively grand production. On so sad so sexy, she immediately extinguishes the flame. “If you like the feeling of a hard rain falling,” she lilts on the opening track in a delicate, descending staccato, “I have a seaful/I can give you an ocean.” Hope springs anew in this refurbished world, but it is not warm; Li’s light voice is pitch-shifted into metallic strips on the song, braided into frosty harmonies over a cybernetic trap-pop beat produced by Rostam. It’s dark dressing for a glimpse of promise, reflective of that hard-fought moment, post-heartbreak, when we assert our abundances, the ones we carry away even with our heads bowed. But there is violence here, too: Li wants a love that feels torrential, isn’t there danger in trying to flood the empty spaces in someone else?
Many of Li’s gifts, including her distressed brand of longing, are on display in so sad so sexy. The hooks are still broad, primed for festival stages with more downcast pop hues. In the four years since the Swedish singer released I Never Learn, she lost her mother and became one herself. But as the title of so sad so sexy suggests, the album is singularly focused. This is another record about an unraveling romance and the fraught sexuality of its final moments. Its glum synths should provide more fodder for the “sad pop” label that has dogged Li for a decade (however reductive and sexist the idea of a female pop star bearing large emotions may be). so sad so sexy may sound like the tagline of a gritty Zoolander reboot, but it is entirely in keeping with the self-seriousness Li has always shown; it is a worthy and even old-fashioned stance that passions needn’t be diluted with irony or self-effacement. But even so, Li cuts a rigidly sober figure for a pop singer.
Trap beats update Li’s heartburn all throughout so sad. Jeff Bhasker, a former producer for Kanye and Rihanna (and partner to Li and father to her child), shows the heaviest hand in the tracks he co-produces. In particular, the slinking “deep end” dices up Li’s much-employed vocal reverb so lines like, “I’m in it, swimming in it/I wasn’t gonna love you, now I’m so fucking deep” land like shrugs, not sobs. The alienation ballad “two nights” piles on the piano and hi-hats before wafting over to the rapper Aminé for a bafflingly Seussian verse (“I’m never bummy or scummy/You’re paranoid like a bunny,” he argues helplessly). Trap, also, seems to bring out inexplicable impulses in Li, too; in the daydreaming “jaguars in the air,” she doesn’t explain this odd visual beyond a blanket escapism: “Vacation forever, baby/I know we gon’ make it someday,” she trills before tirelessly repeating the title to little effect.
All this 808 bass grounds Li’s voice, but it makes for a dull canvas. It peppers nearly every song, amplifying when her lyrics slide from intuitive to broad to cliché. Li surely pulls from awful memories to sing that breakup sex is “so sad, so sexy”—hardly a lie, but not a particularly insightful read, either. She has been far shrewder before, like on her second record, 2011’s Wounded Rhymes, which offered drama in the delivery of beguilingly intimate scenes. Here, she has some similarly pensive moments, but more lines feel glossy and unformed to the point of parody. “Baby don’t you cry/Sex money feelings die/Ladies on my right/Sex money feelings die,” she sings on, yes, “sex money feelings die,” a sullen goth cousin to Lorde’s “Homemade Dynamite.” You can’t argue the truth of being “better alone than lonely here with you,” but there is little here in the songwriting to lift it above a tired sentiment.
The flip side of universal heartbreak, Li knows—as this pain continues to ballast her career—is that personal injury can scan as generic. On so sad, her traumas are too often muted by abstraction and unspecificity. Li is clearly an artist of stormy passions—four albums in, she still seeks the flood of love before she reaches for the life preserver. But by experiencing that same torrent of emotions again and again, it is beginning to lose its impact.


Beyoncé is on a roll. Her latest, another “visual album” with corresponding videos in the mold of her 2013 self-titled set, renders infidelity and reconciliation with a cinematic vividness.

Lemonade

On her sixth solo album, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter starts rolling mid-scene: She’s just realized that her husband is cheating on her. The surrounding context is familiar to anyone who follows popular culture. Beyoncé and Jay-Z are the most famous musical couple on the planet, and Beyoncé in particular is in a great place. With 2013’s Beyoncé, MJ-level talent met pop-perfectionism in a moment that defined album-cycle disruption; moreover, it was a victory lap Bey took as pop feminism’s reigning goddess. Jay-Z, on the other hand, is a rapper who used to rap brilliantly and sometimes still sounds good when he really tries, but his music has become secondary. Over the course of their eight-year marriage and long courtship before that, Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s private relationship seemed to play out in song, in concert, and of course, in the tabloids. But Beyoncé’s “smile pretty and give no interviews” approach to public relations over the last couple of years, combined with “the elevator incident” and subsequent speculation about the state of their marriage, and followed by their public makeup (see: VMAs 2014, On the Run Tour), has suggested that something has changed, but that Beyoncé would prefer we not know the specifics.
Lemonade shatters this theory. If the album is to be considered a document of some kind of truth, emotional or otherwise, then it seems Beyoncé was saving the juicy details for her own story. Because nothing she does is an accident, let’s assume she understands that any song she puts her name on will be perceived as being about her own very public relationship. So what we think we know about her marriage after listening is the result of Beyoncé wanting us to think that. With its slate of accompanying videos, Lemonade is billed as Beyonce’s second “visual album.” But here that voyeuristic feeling manifests while listening rather than viewing, given the high visibility of Bey and Jay. The songwriting is littered with scenes that seem positively cinematic, so it helps that you can imagine these characters living them: Beyoncé smelling another woman’s scent on Jay-Z, her pacing their penthouse in the middle of the night before leaving a note and disappearing with Blue. Lemonade is a film as well, yet the album itself feels like a movie.
It’s not until the record's second half that you realize Lemonade has a happy ending. At first you might think that Bey is using the album to announce her divorce from Jay’s cheating ass. Because she doesn’t scold, “Don’t you ever do that to me again”—she drags her very famous, seemingly powerful husband publicly, in the process giving the world a modern-day “Respect” in “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” On the “7/11”-style banger “Sorry,” she turns his side-chicks into memes, which will inevitably become “better call Becky with the good hair” sweatshirts that Beyoncé can sell for $60 a pop. Best revenge is your paper.
If you’ve ever been cheated on by someone who thought you’d be too stupid or naive to notice, you will find the first half of Lemonade incredibly satisfying. If you have ears and love brilliant production and hooks that stick, you'll likely arrive at the same conclusion. The run from “Hold Up” to “6 Inch” contains some of Beyoncé’s strongest work—ever, period—and a bit of that has to do with her clap-back prowess. The increasingly signature cadence, patois, and all-around attitude on Lemonade speaks to her status as the hip-hop pop star—but this being Bey, she doesn’t stop there. Via the album’s highly specific samples and features by artists like Jack White and James Blake, Lemonade proves Beyoncé to also be a new kind of post-genre pop star. (Let us remember a time, not very long ago, when Bey and Jay attending a Grizzly Bear show with Solange made headlines.)
Both of these attributes—a methodical rapper’s flow, an open-eared listener’s frame of reference—meet on the slowed-down stunner “Hold Up,” where Beyoncé borrows an iconic Karen O turn of phrase via Ezra Koenig, a touch of Jamaican flavor via Diplo (again), and a plucky Andy Williams sample to fight for her man while chiding him for doing this to her (!), of all people. From there, Bey’s just like, “fuck it—big mistake, huge” and gets (Tidal co-owner) Jack White to join her in dueting over a psychedelic soul jam and a Zeppelin sample as she scowls, “Watch my fat ass twist, boy, as I bounce to the next dick, boy.” As she accuses her husband of not being man enough to handle all of her multitudes, fury frays her voice. Even on an album stacked with some of Beyoncé’s best recorded vocal performances to date, “Don’t Hurt Yourself” has her belting to a whole other dimension—specifically, that of Janis Joplin and late-’60s Tina Turner. This won’t be the last time Bey dips into the classic vinyl on Lemonade, either: see “Freedom,” which manages to both: A) speak poignantly to Civil Rights as much as personal plight, B) sound like an Adidas commercial; this means it’s the logical choice for next single, assuming Beyoncé is still releasing those.
Bey’s genre-hopping doesn’t always sound quite as transcendent as “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” however. Though certainly memorable (not least because it finds her name-checking the Second Amendment), “Daddy Lessons”—where a country guitar-line meets New Orleans brass in service of her Southern roots—is the least interesting chapter sonically, though the parallels it draws between Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s own cheating father still make it crucial in the context of Lemonade’s narrative. It’s hard to see how Beyoncé could have done without any of these scenes to tell the story (not even “Formation” in the end-credits), and though the specific sounds may not be as forward-thinking as those of her 2013 self-titled, there are clear reasons for every musical treatment she has made here. Lemonade is a stunning album, one that sees her exploring sounds she never has before. It also voices a rarely seen concept, that of the album-length ode to infidelity. Even stranger, it doesn’t double as an album-length ode to breaking up.
Yes, after Beyoncé makes nearly half an album’s worth of glorious rage songs directed at an unfaithful partner, she gives it a little time and remembers that she was raised to value hard work and spirituality. And so, she can’t give up on her marriage, the same one she spent her last two albums (mostly) celebrating. Beyoncé even kind of sells it, surmising with a tear-inducing sincerity on relaxed-fit soul jam “All Night” that “nothing real can be threatened.” It’s an easy platitude to make, but it’s also an extremely Beyoncé way of looking at things. For a perfectionist who controls her image meticulously, Beyoncé is obsessed with the notion of realness. That’s the biggest selling point of an album like Lemonade, but there’s a quality to it that also invites skepticism: That desire to basically art-direct your own sobbing self-portrait to make sure your mascara smears in the most perfectly disheveled way. But who cares what’s “real” when the music delivers a truth you can use.


Illegal Art, home of Girl Talk, celebrates sampling pioneer Steinski, who took hip-hop's tradition of reformatting existing material and made it a postmodern funhouse.

Steinski: What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective

The more you think about it, the more ironically fitting it is that one of the biggest watershed moments in hip-hop history-- the controversy over sample rights and sonic appropriation-- was made by a 32-year-old TV commercial producer. Steve Stein was far from a dilettante; as one half of the megamix-specialist duo Double Dee and Steinski, he was already deep enough into the embryonic genre to change the game with his first release, 1983's epochal sample-slayer "Lesson 1 (The Payoff Mix)". A track they put together for a remix contest (which they won handily), "The Payoff Mix" was a rework of G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid's "Play That Beat Mr. DJ" that didn't just wrap the Tommy Boy electro joint around the appropriate references to "Rock It" and "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life", but threw in all kinds of Casablanca soundbites and dance instructor lessons and Little Richard vocals, too. Never mind that they weren't virtuoso DJs and actually put the whole thing together using an 8-track recorder and a tape deck; this took hip-hop's tradition of reformatting existing material and made it a postmodern funhouse.
For a generation raised on the 30-second educational mini-films of "Sesame Street" and the fleeting stimulus of channel surfing, Steinski's own recipe for ricocheting attention spans was a natural fit: lay down a beat, switch it up a bunch of times to keep things jumping, weave in a bunch of thematic, sometimes smart-assed clips of TV news voice-overs or political speeches, and damn the lawyers. It was already well-known how legally dicey and largely unreleaseable his music was back in March 1986, when critic Robert Christgau wrote a Village Voice article referring to this music with the headline "Great Dance Records You Can't Buy", but he got right to the heart of Steinski's soundbite technique when he dubbed him "a perpetually disillusioned optimist who still assumes that the sounds and images rippling through the American consciousness are, forget copyright, every American's birthright."
Not long afterwards, Steinski would release "The Motorcade Sped On", a dance record about the JFK assassination that was difficult to get into the American consciousness-- unless said American was able to subscribe to the NME, where it was given away as a flexidisc. In fact, with most of Steinski's material previously only available in bootleg form, the 2xCD best-of What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective does a great service in collecting all his prime material in one place-- not just the bulk of his solo work, but the entirety of his 2002 BBC/Solid Steel rough mix Nothing to Fear, widely considered one of the best mixes of the last several years.
Nothing to Fear might be the surprise highlight of this collection, even accounting for all the classic stuff on the first disc. It's nice to hear Steinski do his thing for more than just a few minutes at a time, and at just under an hour, it's got a lot of crazy notions, elbow-ribbing and sharp gags packed into its running time, even as it maintains a deep focus on also acting as something danceable. The recognizable (Blackalicious' "Swan Lake"; Nelly's "Country Grammar"; De La Soul's "The Art of Getting Jumped") segues easily into the arcane; there'll be a number of times you'll hear a naggingly familiar yet unplaceable old-school b-boy break, and it might wind up driving you nuts. It's all bolstered by a succession of punchlines and soundbites that nudge each other out of the way even as they create a multi-generational stream of consciousness: there's Glengarry Glen Ross, "Rocky & Bullwinkle", and Groucho Marx; there's preachers, comedians, and a self-aware drop of Louis Farrakhan exclaiming to the attendees of Jack the Rapper's 1980 convention that "white people are in the business of mind control"; there's foley-room clips of "Star Trek" sound effects and pratfall bone fractures; there are recontextualized koans and truisms: "this is a special magic," "wait a minute-- are you guys actually gonna go through with this thing?", "the airwaves are sacred." Steinski doesn't shy away from his elder statesman status on this mix (one semi-appalled ident: "he's old enough to be my father!"), but the old-school-meets-new-school feeling makes his early-fifties age irrelevant; so much gets thrown at you through this mix that its allegiance to any kind of specific signifiers-- coasts, styles, eras, generations, anything deeper than "hip-hop in general"-- is practically nil.
A greater insight into Steinski's style and sonic identity is, of course, available on the first disc, ranging from straight-up b-boy anthems into unnerving, borderline avant-garde looks into some of America's bleakest moments. By 1985 Steinski and his partner Double Dee had crafted two additional "Lessons" to augment "The Payoff Mix". "Lesson 2 (James Brown Mix)" is self-explanatory: At a time when the 808 still ruled rap production, it was an unusual and prescient idea to string together a track interweaving some traditional hip-hop touchstones ("Apache", "Double Dutch Bus") with a number of different fragments from several of James Brown's funk hits; all that remained was for the Bomb Squad to perfect the science. "Lesson 3 (History of Hip Hop)"-- from 1985; talk about your unfinished story-- cements the historical import of the genre's breakbeat aspect via a smartly hijacked JFK quote ("the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans"), a nod to Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" and go-to breakbeats like Dennis Coffey's "Scorpio" and Herman Kelly & Life's "Dance to the Drummer's Beat". And the two reunion tracks that Double Dee and Steinski made together after over a decade apart-- 1998's hyperactive, elastic, almost completely transformative old-school funk-party remix of Bambaataa's "Jazzy Sensation" and 1999's quick-cutting, label-spanning ultramix "Voice Mail (Sugar Hill Suite)"-- reveal a certain giddiness over being able to work with classic material again.
But while there's plenty of strength in his later material-- the velvet scuzz of Coldcut-collaborative phone-sex pastiche "I'm Wild About That Thing", the sinister bop-funk of "Vox Apostolica", "Ain't No Thing", which expertly stitches together selections from Stones Throw's The Third Unheard: Connecticut Hip-Hop 1979-1983 comp-- Steinski's most daring work is in controversy-courting, culture-jamming political needling. The juxtaposition of as-it-happens news clips with pop debris in "The Motorcade Sped On"-- the intro to "The Tonight Show", the first note of the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night", and the cowbell of the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women" slowed to a slump-shouldered skulk-- is tasteless in theory, but the sense of panic and confusion that Steinski puts together through repetition and multi-layered, often-clashing sounds manages to give it an unnerving gravity. 1992's "It's Up to You (Television Mix)" builds on a catchy loop of the Jackson 5's "It's Great to Be Here" and creates one of the few anti-Gulf War protest songs of the era, transforming Bush's speech into a pop hook ("Regrettably, we now believe/ That only force will make him leave") and interspersing quotes from Jello Biafra ("don't hate the media, become the media!") and Mario Savio's famous 1964 address to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
And then there's the last track, the previously-unreleased "Number Three on Flight Eleven", which weaves audio of Betty Ong's cell phone call from United Flight 11 on 9/11 into an unsettling, ambient Eno-esque dirge-- the only track on this compilation that's legitimately difficult to listen to. "Lesson 2" answered this collection's titular question with a quote from Fab 5 Freddy's "Change the Beat" ("this stuff is really fresh"), but it's also deep. And probably illegal, too, but that just makes it an essential crime.


The two urbano superstars bro down over trap and dembow beats on a goofy but incredibly fun summertime album.

OASIS

As Alejandro “Sky” Ramirez wrote J Balvin’s verse on “Un Peso”—a standout on his new collaborative album with Puerto Rico’s Bad Bunny—the Colombian musician recalled an old song from the Argentinian rock band Los Enanitos Verdes that his family used to drink and party to back in his hometown of Medellín. Their 1994 hit “Lamento Boliviano” was drenched in self-medication and singer/bassist Marciano Cantero’s romantic pathos offered the kind of lyrics that get screamed back at you when sung to packed stadiums: “Y yo estoy aquí, borracho y loco (And here I am, drunk and crazy)/Y mi corazón idiota, siempre brillará” (And my idiot heart, always shining). For J Balvin, Sky flipped part of the original hook to turn Balvin from the heartbroken to the heartbreaker: “Y tu corazón idiota siempre me extrañará” (“And your idiot heart will always miss me”). Over the course of a single day, what began as a half-serious gag—what if we got Cantero in the booth?—ended with a phone call from the Argentine asking for stems. “It was kind of a joke in the studio,” Sky told Rolling Stone. “But they take the jokes very seriously.”
“Un Peso” captures the appeal of Oasis; frothy music made by serious talents. The reigning princes of urbano spend much of the album’s 31-minute runtime promoting tropical hedonist pursuits: too-tiny bikinis, excessive alcohol consumption, ostentatious displays of wealth, and unprotected sex. They bro down over dembow beats and pack as many dancing women as possible into their music videos. It’s goofy, but incredibly fun—a soundtrack for beach BBQs and ad hoc fire-hydrant water parks, summer vibes made manifest.
The risk of not taking yourself too seriously is that plenty of the lyrics reveal themselves to be cringe-worthy upon close inspection—“Voy pa’ adentro como Pelé (¡Gol!),” or, “I’m going inside you like Pelé (Goal!),” Balvin sings on “Mojaita”—and much of the record can best be described as ’manos being ’manos. When Bad Bunny sings lines like “Ese booty es un paraíso como Bora Bora” (“The booty is a paradise like Bora Bora”), you can almost hear him smirk. It’s par for the course for the handful of the duo’s pre-Oasis collaborations, and whether you find this charming or gross likely hinges on your capacity for the crassness prevalent in much of urban music of any language.
Of the two stars, it’s the 25-year-old Bad Bunny whose voice looms largest on Oasis. His nasal Auto-Tune croon christens every song he appears on, regardless of the style he’s working with. The 34-year-old Balvin, ever the chameleonic wave-rider, is more content to go with the flow. Balvin verses can often feel like guest features on his own records—look no further than Beyoncé’s star turn on the “Mi Gente” remix—or as in the case of “Un Peso,” are sometimes written by someone else.
To be fair, few can do the sadboi vibes quite like el conejo malo. Bad Bunny has mastered the moody lament, soundtracking the comedown from the club in addition to the perreo anthems. The latest example is Oasis standout “La Cancion,” a jazzy, romantic ode that slows down the classic dembow riddim and showcases a lonely trumpet reverberating within the arrangement’s ample negative space—a production choice directed by Bad Bunny himself. It’s reggaetón, it’s romantic, and it’s jazzy, combining familiar elements into something fresh and new.
Most of the production is handled by Sky and his mentor Marco “Tainy” Masís, the legendary Puerto Rican reggaetón producer who helmed much of Bad Bunny’s phenomenal X100PRE and J Balvin’s Vibras. The production crew seamlessly weave together acoustic elements (“Yo Le Llego”’s upright bass, “Un Peso”’s ukulele, “La Cancion”’s trumpet), trap-style synthesizers, and dembow beats into a coherent pan-Latin aesthetic. This is the sound of the new urbano latino.
Bunny and Balvin even tip their cap to Africa—the original source of nearly all the sounds miscegenating on Oasis—tapping Nigerian Afrobeat all-star Mr. Eazi for “Como Un Bebé,” their take on a “Banku” bop, the smoothed-out signature style Eazi named after the heavy Ghanian comfort food. It’s a fitting end to a record devoted to celebrating good times, a healing balm providing temporary relief from the violence and oppression that they’ve addressed in their communities. When Bad Bunny implores us to “Baila pa' mí” (“Dance with me”), we comply, powerless to resist.


For Vol. 8 of RVNG's FRKWYS series, New York's Blues Control teamed with Brian Eno-associated zither player Laraaji for a collaborative LP that moves from disco to cascading kalimba, weightless ambiance, and gurgling noise.

FRKWYS Vol. 8

In Father James Martin's recent book, Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life, he notes that some of Jesus' parables had a wry sense of humor underlying them, albeit the context (crucial for any comic) has been lost over centuries of translations. But if you think of it, a camel squeezing through a needle's eye is Monty Python-level absurd. The New Age artist Laraaji (born Edward Larry Gordon) understands such a spiritual dichotomy, offering workshops not just in deep listening but also in deep laughter. His blog even summarizes his skill-set as so: "Celestial Music Performances and Seriously Playful Laughter Workshops."
For most music fans, Laraaji remains best known for recording an ambient album with Brian Eno after the latter happened upon the artist improvising on zither in Washington Square Park. The resultant record, Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, catapulted Laraaji into the upper echelons of that then-nascent genre, even if albums like 1978's Celestial Vibration (reissued by Soul Jazz) and 1987's Essence/ Universe transcend all musical nametags, vitamin stores, lucid dreaming practices, and crystal healing sessions to send its listeners up into the ether.
And like other similarly inclined noisemakers (including but not limited to Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never, White Rainbow, and Hatchback), when New York's Blues Control began to explore psychedelic music from the chakra-relaxing end of the musical spectrum, it led them directly to Laraaji's back catalog. Similarly inclined to melodic improvisation, percussive playing, hazy instrument treatments, and sprawling soundscapes-- as evidenced on previous albums like Local Flavor and*"Puff"*-- it makes a strange sort of sense that Blues Control would reach out to Laraaji for a collaborative album released as part of the RVNG label's ongoing FRKWYS series.
Sonically, it makes for an exquisite follow-up to the previous entry. Recorded in an upstate studio over the course of a single winter's day, the four tracks that constitute the LP (not to mention the sprawling bonus tracks available via digital download and-- in a nod to the New Age genre-- cassette) feel of a piece. Blues Control's telltale murk is evident from the start of "Awakening Day", somehow discombobulating and evocative, full of echoing percussion and effervescent melodies from Russ Waterhouse's six-string and Lea Cho's electric keyboard. It actually takes a while before Laraaji's strummed zither rises to the surface, only to have the elegant track slowly dissolve into sounds of running water and trickling percussion.
Laraaji's effects-laden strings kick off the 11-minute exploration "Light Ships", as do his bellowing vocal improvisations. Piano and zither ebb and rise like oceanic tides, but soon that deep voice of Laraaji's turns into echoing laughter. Another belly laugh emanates from Laraaji on the half-hour bonus track "Somebody Scream", and there's also a chuckle as the droning closer "Freeflow" fades from view. From where does such mirth arise? There are no definite answers, but surely the body-moving drum shuffle that leads into "City of Love" will startle more than a few listeners as the collaboration somehow moves from Earl Young-worthy Philly disco into cascading kalimba and weightless ambiance into the sort of noise gurgle that Blues Control are expert at. Across the four tracks though, it soon becomes hard to distinguish the two separate entities at play, which by this point is to be expected. As the FRKWYS series continues to make evident, the perceived generation gap between bustling avant-garde noise musicians and their more steadfast New Age elder statesmen is-- funnily enough-- narrow indeed.


Recorded live in Chicago and then rearranged in the drummer/producer’s studio, Highly Rare channels an electric night of raw improv into a shapeshifting form halfway between hip-hop and free jazz.

Highly Rare

Two winters ago, Danny’s Tavern cheated death. The bar on Chicago’s North Side seemed doomed for demolition; headlines called it official, and event organizers spread word of formal farewells. It was saved at the 11th hour by an outpouring of public testimonial and an owner’s promise to fix its deteriorating roof. Playing out in the year before the iconic nearby venue Double Door was shuttered, it was a major victory for Chicago music. A winter night at Danny’s can feel like stepping into a long-exposure photograph: The place glows, both by spare candlelight and from the memory of all the music its walls and dancefloors have soaked up in the past three decades. Tucked into the middle of a quiet residential block, it rarely hosts live-band performances, yet it’s a premier place to listen.
All of this is essential context for the new mixtape by the Chicago drummer and producer Makaya McCraven. Recorded at the bar on a below-freezing night last November, 12 days after a nightmarish presidential election, Highly Rare finds McCraven and his band leaning into the winter night to deftly explore sanctuary, silence, and a looming sense that the roof might be caving in on all of us.
McCraven is a beat architect whose craft is threefold. He’s a drummer and bandleader first, but his voice doesn’t really materialize until after sounds are laid to tape—in this case, a Tascam four-track. As a producer, McCraven sifts through, chops up, and reassembles the improvisations of his own band, which here comprises three fellow top-talent players from the local recording company International Anthem. Manipulating their spontaneous takes, he transforms the improvised raw material into a carefully edited statement made out of free-form parts.
The finished product is somehow both more rhythmic and elusive than its origins. Highly Rare finds a dark aisle between free jazz and hip-hop and traverses it restlessly, breaking down the division between the two forms. On “Above & Beyond,” the record’s foremost feet-mover, Nick Mazzarella’s alto sax jumps between precisely inflected phrases and throaty wails into the void. The next track, “Venus Rising,” begins with McCraven’s skittering drumbeat quietly underscoring bleary-eyed groans from Mazzarella’s sax and Ben LaMar Gay’s cornet—then slowly wakes up, hoists itself up via Junius Paul’s bass, and snowballs into anxious chaos until the room spins.
McCraven’s touch isn’t limited to his arrangements, as he loops and shifts pieces around; it’s also audible in the finishing touches he puts on these sounds. His window-rattling beats sound magnetically attracted to the lo-fi nakedness layered on top of them. “Left Fields” grows from a thin-sounding seed of Gay chanting in circles over his own diddley bow, stretching out over 11 and a half minutes and eventually latching onto a booming four-on-the-floor infrastructure. Though the components were his to begin with, it’s as if McCraven is building music out of found objects—objects not planned in their particulars, but borne of the perfect environment, process, and night.
Night, above all, lights the way for Highly Rare. A track entitled “Icy Lightning” features Gay repeatedly calling out the titular phrase, which in its taunting cadence can easily be heard as a more ominous “I see lightning.” It’s a curiously fitting moment. McCraven moves confidently through a bleak landscape on Highly Rare, confronting nightmares by having fun in their face, toying with rhythmic conventions and taunting them with his gifts.