Equal parts shimmering disco and dingy pub, with frequent surprisingly coherent stylistic asides, Nick Lowe's clever, fierce, and far-reaching 1978 album is re-released with a handful of well-chosen bonus tracks and some exquisite packaging.

Jesus of Cool

In Jesus of Cool's iconic cover image, Nick Lowe appears decked out in a smorgasbord of over-the-top rockstar getups. These images are perfectly considered, down to the facial hair stylings and thematically appropriate guitars-- but Lowe comes off goofy and unconvincing in every guise. The cover images are apt not for their evocation of "cool," but rather for their combination of impeccable artifice and raw, gawkish charm. Indeed, Jesus of Cool sounds more like the work of a crafty fan than that of a self-serious auteur.
Thankfully, Lowe's fandom was quite broad; Jesus of Cool is equal parts shimmering disco and dingy pub, with frequent surprisingly coherent stylistic asides. That this record came out in 1978 is nothing short of a small miracle; while punk rock and disco were battling it out in an all-too-familiar dialogue of authenticity and reactionism, Lowe cut the crap and made a clever, fierce, and far-reaching record. Chalk it up, perhaps, to the degree and nature of Lowe's experience; by the time he set about recording Jesus of Cool, Lowe was already a veteran of the decidedly more populist pub rock scene.
Though Jesus of Cool is technically his debut, Lowe was already the elder statesman and in-house producer for the fledgling Stiff Label, positioning himself as the clever and detached pop craftsman to protégé Elvis Costello's angsty, spittle-flecked firebrand. Fans of Costello's early records, or those of the Damned, will find the sonics of Jesus of Cool immediately familiar. Recorded largely on borrowed studio time at a variety of locations, Jesus of Cool covers a lot of ground fidelity-wise, but is aptly produced throughout. The album's more polished cuts are studio-immaculate, and its rockers are gritty and packed full of energy, demonstrating the production style that earned Lowe the nickname "Basher".
Lowe certainly knew well enough to avoid trying to make a straight-up pandering pop record, and his experience in the record business is written all over Jesus of Cool, in the words of songs like "Music for Money" and "Shake and Pop", and in the album's overall feel and conceit. These flip-offs at the record industry underscore the album's unerring ease and strength. Perhaps Lowe's deep familiarity with the ins and outs of the business cured him of the something-to-prove overzealousness that kills many records this ambitious. Indeed, Jesus of Cool comes across with little to no agenda; it draws from a wide and diverse pool of influences, but never in a way that seems showy or forced.
Backed by an all-star cast of friends and contemporaries, many of whom shared time with Lowe in pub rock legends Brinsley Schwarz, Lowe tries on many different vocal personas on Jesus, cooing the ballad "Tonight" and barking the new wave stomper "Music for Money". Early singles "So It Goes" and "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass" are highlights, remarkable for both their strength and for their disparity. "So It Goes" is driving, chiming melodic rock, while "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass" is piano-tickled disco-pop. The diversity of Jesus of Cool helps keep even its weaker tracks sounding unique and interesting; the slightly reggae-toned "No Reason" and dark, synthesized "36 Inches High" would be distracting detours on a more myopic record, but make perfect sense in this context.
Jesus of Cool has been sadly out of print for years, and Yep Roc's reissue is impeccable. The complex digipak fold-out is beautiful, and Will Birch's liner notes do a great job of explaining the record's origins without falling into hyperbole. The bonus tracks here are generally quite good as well, not surprising considering the singles-y feel of the album itself. "Rollers Show" and "They Called It Rock" (a reworking of "Shake and Pop" that lacks the album cut's gritty force) were both included on the U.S. release of Jesus of Cool (retitled Pure Pop for Now People for more sensitive U.S. audiences), and their inclusion here is welcome. Other highlights include an early version of Lowe's sole U.S. hit "Cruel to be Kind", the hilarious "I Love My Label", and a cover of Martha Sharp's "Born a Woman" from 1977's The Bowi EP.
As guitar pop music comes back into fashion among indie rockers, more and more albums are sounding like awkward and self-aware approximations of the very thing that Jesus of Cool does so effortlessly. In a sense, Lowe's unpretentious inclusiveness may have stopped Jesus of Cool just short of becoming a huge record in any one world; the album is far too unabashedly admiring of pop music to be seen as a punk rock classic, but too gritty and ramshackle to be considered a seminal new wave pop record. Thankfully, Jesus of Cool is a rarer thing still: a timeless and bullshit-free masterpiece.


Chairlift's second full-length album is a major creative leap from their first, but it doesn't so much reinvent their sound as refine it.

Something

Chairlift's second full-length, Something, is a major creative leap, but on a superficial level, it's not that different from their debut. They're still mining uncool and untapped corners of 1980s pop for inspiration, and singer Caroline Polachek has doubled down on a vocal style that alternates between joyfully expressive and charmingly deadpan. But the melodies are bolder, the arrangements have more snap and sparkle, and Polachek has thankfully moved beyond the first album's overly cerebral lyrics to embrace emotionally potent lines that explore the subtler dynamics of romantic relationships and the evolution of character.
Of course, Chairlift aren't exactly the same group that broke into the outskirts of the mainstream when their 2008 hit "Bruises" found its way into an Apple ad. Founding member Aaron Pfenning split with the group after his romantic relationship with Polachek ended. (He now has an atmospheric disco project called Rewards.) Now a duo, Polachek and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Wimberly have a different chemistry. Wimberly, a producer on several Das Racist tracks, excels at composing slick music that retains force and physicality, which suits Polachek's voice and melodies. As a result, Something is cleaner and more elegant, buffing their crisp electronic pop to an immaculate sheen.
Polachek's presence fades when the music gets too inert, but Chairlift turn that potential liability into a strength on two of Something's most beautiful tracks: On "Frigid Spring" and "Turning", she pushes her voice to a breathy, ethereal extreme. More often, though, her voice is lucid and assertive. She's excellent with subtle phrasing, selling wry lyrics without getting too smirky, and conveying infatuation without sounding overly elated. She's especially fond of Robert Smith-like exclamations, sometimes ending a key line with excited verbal punctuation. Her voice is technically proficient-- she sometimes recalls Fleetwood Mac's Christine McVie-- but her main strength lies in how clearly her personality comes across in these songs. Whether she's giving voice to a maniac in "Sidewalk Safari" or gushing with love in "I Belong in Your Arms", Polachek sounds totally comfortable and in control.
Though it's obvious that Polachek is often singing from the vantage point of characters (we'd obviously have heard about it if she actually ran someone down in her car), the emphasis on emotion and relationships is key to Something's success. It's notable that their debut's best song, "Bruises", was a straight-up love song, while the clunkiest tracks belabored conceits that felt self-consciously imposed on the music. The most resonant lines on Something are disarmingly direct: "If I gave you what you're asking for, you know you wouldn't want it anymore," "Does my love only count if it's proved?," "My heart is beating fast and I wish that I knew why." Polachek still indulges in high concept, but with more grace and nuance, as on "Amanaemonesia", where she meditates on the cultural and psychological power of healing rituals. She's even more successful on "Guilty as Charged", in which her verses lay out an elaborate trial metaphor that contrasts nicely with her cutting to the core of her character's emotional dilemma on the chorus.
The song on Something that gets me in the gut is "I Belong in Your Arms", a declaration of uncomplicated affection that makes the most of the band's embrace of faster tempos and open-hearted lyrics. Chairlift couldn't have pulled off a track like this back when they made pop music with scare quotes, footnotes, and caveats. But now that they've backed away from those defense mechanisms, they've allowed themselves to go all the way in expressing a powerful sentiment. There are many songs out there that echo the tone and message of "I Belong in Your Arms", but this one is no less joyous or affecting for lacking a unique concept. In cutting away their baggage and hang-ups, Chairlift have opened themselves up to writing truly great pop.


Having collaborated with the likes of Dev Hynes and Princess Nokia—and teaming with streetwear brand Supreme—the New York jazz ensemble Onyx Collective honor their city on these latest releases.

Onyx Collective : Lower East Suite Part One/Lower East Suite Part Two

Not long ago, Isaiah Barr met fellow musicians Austin Williamson and Josh Benitez in a jazz band program at York College in Jamaica, Queens. Like the rest of their bandmates, the saxophonist, drummer, and keyboardist came from different New York City high schools, and the York College Blue Notes band was offered to them as a networking platform and artistic incubator—an opportunity for serious, guided jamming. They ran with it. By 2014, with Williamson, Benitez, and others at his side, Barr founded Onyx Collective as a fluid and open-door ensemble of his own.
In the time since, the group has plastered themselves across the city as a ubiquitous and modular live jazz band. They’ve worked alongside rappers like Wiki and Princess Nokia and lent music to singers Dev Hynes and Nick Hakim. As a live act especially, Onyx Collective—sometimes as spare as that original trio, but often hovering around a half dozen—has become many things to many scenes. Now, a group of musicians that can’t sit still seem to be figuring out what it means to be a recorded band.
In 2016, teaming with the online radio platform KNOW-WAVE and the streetwear brand Supreme, Onyx Collective released a full-length debut of live recordings called Second Avenue Rundown. Their follow-up, their first music available digitally, is a series of three releases destined for the British label Big Dada, and so far they too have been conduits for the band’s traveling live act. The first two EPs, Lower East Suite Part One and Part Two, stitch together tracks recorded at a variety of locations across the city. The sleepily psychedelic “172 Forsyth St.” is named after the former KNOW-WAVE storefront radio station where Barr concretized and catalyzed the formation of Onyx Collective, and also where many of the Lower East Suite Part One songs were recorded. As a result, the first Lower East Suite EP—the better of the two—feels like a tributary time capsule to the band’s recent formation. Williamson’s drums sound tucked away in a corner, Barr’s guttural saxophone runs thicken the air and seem to bounce off the walls the louder he blows.
Many of the songs on both Lower East Suite EPs are referential pin drops somewhere or sometime specific in Manhattan. “97 Allen St.,” a shifty bebop track from Part Two, is representative of Onyx Collective’s free-flowing improvisation and named for the LES shop the Good Company, a space that sounds noisy and features moments of sidebar conversation, Barr’s frantic riffing reduced to background rambling. “Rush Hour,” recorded in the same room, is the most conceptually on-the-nose: honking sax stabs and an awkwardly gaiting rhythm effectively conjure the abrupt start-and-stop swelter of city traffic. For both better and worse, this stretch of tracks in particular—the first five from the second EP—feels especially like being in the room with the band. Even when he’s holding back, Williamson’s kit crashes over every song at this location, sometimes just so, but too often overzealously. On both “Steam Rooms” and “Skate Park,” you can almost hear him loosen his grip, and the space between strikes is both funky and refreshingly breathable, like someone has opened the door to allow the room some outside air. On the first EP, his drums have a lighter and less imposing touch.
Whether shaped by their location or permitted by it, Onyx Collective’s lasting charm is in their jam band fluidity. They often adopt an aggressive but playful bebop stance, whirling through changes with Williamson’s taps and splashes urging them forward. They can also channel their surroundings into serene cityscapes or quiet meditations, like on the final tracks of Part Two. (“Eyes Closed” sounds like closed-door respite, Barr finally tucking away from the city bustle into silence so that he can breathe deep and longingly into his sax, alone except for the faint, growing hum of a background bassline.) Elsewhere, they lean into funky jam sessions. “Mambo Pancakes” is a swampy salsa burner that juts out of the tracklist, Barr’s saxophone relegated not to solo duties as much as rhythmic core. “Fruit Stand” sounds like a dainty free jazz romp, a half volume lullaby next to some of the more boisterous jams.
Through it all, these tracklists feel less invested in fleshing out a linear live experience as they are in bottling up vignettes from the field. In that way, Onyx Collective sound like a group in motion, seeping into and out of spaces, self-leveling into place each time. For both better and worse, some of the tracks on the Lower East Suite EPs sound as much like the room as the band, the city as muse and canvas at once.


The 22-year old producer's promising sample-heavy EP features fuzzy beats drenched in colorful noise and is another reminder of the way hip-hop and electronic dance music continue to aggressively flirt with each other.

Last Words

The incessant, excellent juvenilia of the WEDIDIT collective (on their website the call number is 911-420-6969) is accompanied in their music by the tolerant millenial's standard answer to which genres he likes. These guys-- producers Shlohmo, R.L. Grime, and Jonwayne, amongst others-- dig (nearly) everything, from chart pop to the Seattle sigh of Elliott Smith, from Timbaland's early aughts production to the agro-rap of Three 6 Mafia and Waka Flocka Flame.
The 22-year old producer Ryan Hemsworth's new EP, Last Words, is another sterling release from the collective, and while it's too scattered to be considered truly excellent, it's another reminder of the way hip-hop and electronic dance music continue to flirt with each other aggressively, like two high school freshmen who have the whole talking-to-each-other thing down and are just starting to reach that exalted next level.
Hemsworth has a history of making beats for such offbeat rap acts as Deniro Farrar and Main Attraktionz, and his work on Last Words skews close to the sounds he's employed in the past.  Though firmly influenced by the fuzzy, webby thud of Clams Casino, Hemsworth has a welcome tendency to drench his soundscapes in rainbow noise like his idol Hudson Mohawke, colorful bits of sound engaging the listener like a light show for purp-heads in a narcotic stupor.
Second track "Colour & Movement", though it's the least danceable of everything here, is particularly impressive. Building around a sample from the German band Notwist, Hemsworth sets up a droning masterpiece, punctuated by schizoid drum machines and followed by an ominous minor keyboard loop which sounds a hell of a lot like "Black and Yellow".
"The Happy Mask Shop",  starts in the same drone sphere as "Colour & Movement", but takes off quickly when Timbaland-like drum machines are added, and drops sound out two-thirds of the way through to make way for the eerie harmonizing of a chorus of lady phantoms. It's haunting, elegant, and heavy, a song to be played in a cathedral that was converted into a nightclub and still hasn't been fully exorcized.
Every so often, Hemsworth gets overly enthusiastic and flips a sample unnecessarily. Even if opener "Charly Wingate" is clearly a tribute to the now forever-incarcerated Max B, the song's use of his ad-libs distracts from what would otherwise be a perfect dance track. But for the most part, the allusions are seamless, as on "Slurring", where Waka's offhand comment on his less-than-sober state from "15th and the 1st" becomes the basis for a maximalist, warped club track, which builds expertly, reaching a peak without ever becoming exhausting or frantic. This is perhaps Hemsworth's principal skill: managing tracks all the way through and avoiding tedium and redundancy.
A set of uniformly solid beats like these also serves as a base upon which other producers can build. The strongest showing comes from Supreme Cuts, whose heady version of "Overthinking" stuffs the original with a whole new set of sounds, obscenely amplifying the highs to create the best club track on the album. But don't count out Baauer, whose already rapidly ascending profile should be boosted even further by his work on "Slurring", as he too converts something that was sitting on the rap-dance margins into a full-on rave track, with massive drum cycles and the undeniable shudder of uncut adrenaline.
The cloudy, purple sound that Hemsworth is working with here has graduated in the past year, as laid-back producers like Shlohmo and more aggressive ones like Rustie compete for the same space. Hemsworth, though not quite in the same category as those guys, marries the two mindsets. In the process he produces an EP that that gives the impression of being greedily, beautifully excessive, while in actuality remains more poised and controlled than something this fun has any right to be.


Paris-based composer and experimental music legend Rhys Chatham's second 3xCD box set for Table of the Elements, Guitar Trio is My Life!, collects 10 live performances of various ensembles performing his most famous work. Among those featured are members of Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Hüsker Dü, as well as Fog and Final Fantasy.

Rhys Chatham & His Guitar Trio All-Stars: Guitar Trio Is My Life!

Guitar Trio Is My Life!

If the most pure rock'n'roll is all about excess, emancipation, and sexuality, then 55-year-old Parisian composer Rhys Chatham makes Mick Jagger seem like a Sunday school teacher: Chatham's second 3xCD box set for Table of the Elements, Guitar Trio is My Life!, collects 10 performances from Chatham's 2007 14-city North American tour. Every night, Chatham and a different ensemble of musicians performed his most famous work, 1977's "Guitar Trio", twice. It's about time: For too long, Chatham's massed guitars have been a footnote to those of the more famous Glenn Branca. But Branca--- like Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, Swans' Michael Gira and Jonathan Kane, and the Modern Lovers' Ernie Brooks, many of whom appear here-- was an early student of and member in Chatham's New York ensembles. This exhausting, exhilarating collection, though, should confirm both Chatham and "Guitar Trio" as staples in the rock and 20th cenury composition canons. At the very least, from the first E note to the last E chord three hours later, it proves that Chatham-- also significant for his curatorial role at New York's The Kitchen in the 70s and in the establishment of No Wave later that decade-- fucking rocks.
The "Guitar Trio" score is deceptively simple: "In this century, it has never taken more than an hour to teach 'Guitar Trio' to everyone's satisfaction and comfort level," Chatham wrote in the score notes circulated for the 2007 tour documented by Guitar Trio Is My Life! "So please don't worry about anything." Several guitar players gather around a drummer and an electric bassist. Their amps are clean, loud, and high on treble. The drummer counts off, and Chatham strums an open low E string, his rhythm a bit like a jumpy 60s Brit Invasion tune. The drummer plays a cantering, steady rhythm restricted to the hi-hat. One by one, Chatham signals each guitarist to join. The bassist enters. After several minutes, Chatham begins strumming the top three strings and then signals each guitarist to do the same. Later, Chatham begins strumming all six strings, fretting only the second string to B. Eventually everyone stops playing except the drummer, still using only hi-hat, and Chatham, again playing one string. The entire process repeats, and it's generally a bit briefer the second time around. The music fades out with a final chord played on a conclusive downbeat. Chatham announces the ensemble, bows, turns to his band, and starts again in the exact same way. Except this time, the drummer is given use of his full kit, especially the snare and kick drums. The only previous version of "Guitar Trio" (available on the long-since out-of-print 2002 box set An Angel Moves Too Fast to See and on the 2006 disc Die Donnergötter) was eight minutes long (first cycle only). The shortest take on Guitar Trio Is My Life! is the second Brooklyn cycle, which ends after 16 driving minutes.
But the "Guitar Trio" sound is surprisingly dynamic: Chatham does not specify when any given player should play above any given fret or for what length of time. Such inherent indeterminacy means that what begins as a stately, strummed guitar pattern begins to mutate and grow into surprising shapes. This variety of sounds builds cumulatively into a thick swath of high and low overtones bouncing off of each other like long-lost kin at a crowded family reunion. All of the sounds are made from the same E string or E chord, but none of them are exactly the same. By the time "Guitar Trio" hits its six-string segment, it's as thick as a furious blizzard. When the notes really come down, it's beautiful and overwhelming.
Still, 10 versions of the same 16-to-30 minute piece of music? Boring, right? Perhaps were it not for the musicians included here-- from members of Tortoise, Sonic Youth, and Thee Silver Mt. Zion to an unknown but incredible Buffalo drummer named Jim Abramson, who gloriously mauls his 21 minutes of Table of the Elements time on Disc One. "Guitar Trio" ingests individual talents and funnels them into a composition loose enough for new ideas but tough enough to test physical and mental limits: On the full-drum version from Toronto, then, you get a six-piece string section (including Final Fantasy's Owen Pallet), thickening the guitar sound into a viscous smear. But after the one-string turnaround, it sounds like Chatham's worn them out. Same for Tortoise's John McEntire, who turns in the best brass-only drumming with his Chicago performance, riding his hi-hat with impeccable time and finesse. But he gets lost inside the nine-guitar storm on the full-kit version, unlike improvisational heavyweight and Collections of Colonies of Bees drummer Jon Mueller. Like he does on this year's solo drum Table of the Elements release Metals, Mueller rattles speakers from the frame. His kick drum and heavy snare slap fearlessly. They lash at the six guitars like the only way out is revenge. Same for Ernie Brooks' bristling bass pops on the second set from Brooklyn: With a rhythmic sense that sounds like whiplash must feel, he folds his own aesthetic beneath Chatham's masterful umbrella work.
When considered alongside Chatham's statement that he can teach anyone this piece in an hour, such variety is exhilarating. "Guitar Trio" was composed after Chatham, then a New York composer taking a somewhat academic approach to minimalism, saw the Ramones play CBGB. Their music shocked him into redirecting his sonic approach within his own pre-existing ideas. The result is glorious, one-chord, electro-orchestral, garage-band minimalism. Anyone can learn this music. Anyone can play this music. Anyone can enjoy this music, rhythmically and tonally electrified as it is. This is a popular inroad for both understanding and participating in sound fields generally relegated to academia. "Guitar Trio" suggests infinite possibilities for this music, for all music, really: If you can combine basic "punk" ideas with basic "classical" ideas to create something that will forever alter the shape of both memes (see Sonic Youth and Glenn Branca), what can't you do?


The third album from the Detroit collective is an exceptional melding of hardcore, noise, and pop. Abstract concepts aside, the Armed makes thunderous and discordant music move with great finesse.

ULTRAPOP

Attending one of the Armed’s shows has meant reckoning with a giant swamp man lugging a card table through the pit. The Detroit-based heavy music brigade got Tommy Wiseau for a music video; their audition tape to become the new lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots featured a shocking amount of hammered dulcimer. When they put out a song called “FT. FRANK TURNER,” the UK singer-songwriter was left wondering how the band got its hands on his unreleased and uncleared vocals. When the Armed did give interviews, they offered the full performance-art treatment—vague identities, elaborately staged locations, an apparently accidental claim that Kurt Ballou of Converge was their puppet master. The questions piled high, concrete answers remained elusive, and—if the performative antics didn’t threaten to overshadow the music—their records were largely left to speak for themselves.
The band avoided transparent authorship on 2018’s Only Love, which married screaming hardcore with synthesizers and melodic pop hooks. Their new album ULTRAPOP is once again filled with maximal and muscular pop bruisers, but this time, the Armed inch away from concept-driven anonymity. The exhilarating lead single “All Futures” arrived with a video that shows how their music comes to sound so impossibly massive: There they are, eight of the members credited as the current lineup, immaculately shredded and sweating it out in a recording studio as they perform their best song to date. Adam Vallely stands front and center, singing about glad-handing capitalist “sacks of shit” before two of his guitar-wielding bandmates start screaming “all futures—destruction” alongside him. Cara Drolshagen shrieks an affirmative and chaotic “yeah yeah yeah yeah,” just across from Clark Huge, a professional bodybuilder whose keyboard-mashing injects a twee melodic hook into the chaotic whorl. Urian Hackney, drummer and descendant of the family Death, is the pummeling centerpiece, making manifest the song’s omen of destruction with force and dexterity.
It takes a village to create ULTRAPOP’s barrage of feedback, guitar solos, twinkling synthesizers, overwhelming percussion, and screams, and the eight-person lineup in that video isn’t even everyone who goes here. At least 19 musicians contributed to the album and its countless layers of noise; melodic and textural details are crammed into every nook. You’ll have to strain to pick out performances by prominent contributors, but it’s undeniable that their work elevates ULTRAPOP. Guitarist Chris Slorach of METZ, now a full-on member of the Armed, is in the mix throughout, and you could swear that the signature jagged and distorted METZ guitar sound introduces “A Life So Wonderful.” Ballou’s guitar lends an explosive, trudging outro to the otherwise fast-paced and nimble “Where Man Knows Want.” Queens of the Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen plays lead guitar amid the cascading synthesizer breakdown of “Real Folk Blues,” and the album’s final song, “The Music Becomes a Skull,” is defined by the typically imposing voice of Mark Lanegan.
That final track is a bookend counterpart to album opener “Ultrapop,” mirroring its equal parts delicate dream-pop synth melody and harsh blasts of noise. That’s the band’s consistent secret weapon: Like a heavyweight gracefully sailing off the top rope, the Armed’s gift is how they can make such thunderous and discordant music move with finesse. When their sound is at its most excessive—like Converge drummer Ben Koller’s relentless, suffocating percussion on “A Life So Wonderful,” or the full-on shriek that opens “Real Folk Blues”—the band knows how to pull back and find balance and patience elsewhere. Even on songs like “Bad Selection” that lean harder on restraint and coldness, they eventually land an explosive outro and deliver a sing-along “hallelujah.” If ULTRAPOP’s feedback and belligerence are the window dressing, the album’s value appears when they build tension around a hook that ratchets up the adrenaline. It’s the moment when the entire band stops playing for a second on “An Iteration” so they can emphasize that the song’s “young white savior” bro “did it again, did it again, did it again.”
Lyrics like these reveal the general conceptual thrust behind ULTRAPOP—references to unchecked entitlement, greed, digital facades, and being the “actor,” for example. Some hardbound “scripture” came with 100 limited-edition copies of the album, and maybe if you shell out enough money on Discogs, you can attempt to parse their intentions more deeply. When asked about the term “ultrapop” on writer Dan Ozzi’s Substack podcast, Vallely explained the band’s frustration with the “cosplay” and “stagnation” of heavy music. Technology, he claimed, has democratized previously subversive music to the point where everything ought to just be called pop. “Maybe you’re not as hardcore or edgy as you think you are because you can get a Black Flag T-shirt at Target,” he said.
In a pandemic that’s killed off cramped basement shows, hardcore is a subculture with no physical real estate. It’s an awkward moment to be attempting to reach new audiences by circumventing the formula, or calling out these supposed “cosplayers” who have no place to play (or shove or spit). That Black Flag example also hits a little different coming from dudes who, like Henry Rollins before them, have published their fitness routines. ULTRAPOP was spurred by the impulse to critique, but it doesn’t feel antagonistic of the greater canon of heavy music. Their elaborate and very loud efforts to build tension, achieve overwhelming catharsis, and write their most memorable melodies yet feels more like a conversation with a medium they love. It doesn’t hurt that their newfound transparency makes the music feel refreshingly human and relatable. Gains-obsessed beefcakes prodding the tropes and social expectations of heavy music by making an extremely heavy album is the Armed doing what the Armed do best—leading with their performative instincts. That’s commitment to the bit.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Belgian-Caribbean musician’s breakout EP, co-produced by Soulwax, channels Guadeloupean influences into striking, playful electro pop with a sly sense of humor.

Zandoli EP

The Belgium-based French-Caribbean musician Charlotte Adigéry often records using the moniker WWWater, stripping conventional song structures for parts to form a dizzying, minimalist take on electropop. Anchored by her soft, mutable voice, Adigéry’s music can assume blue shades one moment and fiery passion the next, whether delivered in English or her native French. On Zandoli, Adigéry’s second EP under her given name, she takes the same vitalizing qualities of those early, exploratory song sketches as WWWater and buffs them into high gloss. Co-produced with perennial indie-dance duo Soulwax and shot through with a global sensibility, Zandoli is an energizing and uncompromising EP that draws on electronica, dance music, and pop while existing entirely within its own frisky, curious world.
Adigéry said last year that the opening “Paténipat,” the EP’s first single, is a rhythmic call to arms for finding strength in despair, a way to “throw off all the ballast, all the stuff that in the end don’t matter.” The charging backdrop reflects that essence: At a winding and wiry six minutes, the track is a glowering, house-infused exercise in tension control. The chorus, derived from the Caribbean mnemonic “zandoli pa té ni pat” (“the gecko didn’t have any legs”), is crafted to evoke the call-and-response style of the Guadeloupean gwo ka music of Adigéry’s ancestors. The result is equal parts jarring and captivating in its curves and stop-and-start composition, with Adigéry’s coolly collected deadpan vocals keeping listeners both mentally transported and physically moving.
Soulwax’s production throughout Zandoli is in lockstep with the quirks and strengths of Adigéry’s voice, recalling the Belgian producers’ remix work pulling apart songs by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Warpaint. The pop-minded “High Lights” particularly fits the Soulwax mold: It’s a danceable, playful treatise on hair care and loving wigs that doubles as an artful indictment of those who would shame Adigéry for it. Her voice floats along in a dulcet tone until the chorus, in which she lets loose in plain, joyous terms, like she’s arrived at her own surprise birthday party: “I know I shouldn’t do it but/I love synthetic wigs a lot!”
Elsewhere, Zandoli engages with a full spectrum of sexual activities and attitudes. “Cursed and Cussed” explores kink over trip-hop breakbeats: “Squeaking leather/Skin on skin/Latex singing songs of sin,” she sings in a terse spoken-word delivery. Adigéry’s liquid, singsong affectations contradict the song’s masochistic core: “God punishes/I beg for more.” “B B C,” meanwhile, uses a Goldfrapp-indebted synth line and layered chants in service of barbed commentary on racial fetishism and sex tourism. “Takes two to tango/Fetish untangled/Libido gigolo,” she intones over a pattering drum machine: “If you’re good, I’ll take you home.” The song captures the perspective of both jane and gigolo in an unnerving power play that Adigéry pulls off with menacing poise.
A diverse spread of influences runs through Zandoli’s club-minded sphere: the Knife’s razor-sharp precision and mathy electronica; Neneh Cherry’s convention-smashing electro; Santigold’s forward-thinking, global pop. (In an example of perfect synergy, Cherry tapped Adigéry for an opening slot on her tour this year.) But Adigéry processes the music of her inspirations, collaborators, and ancestors on Zandoli from a unique point of view, delivered in a hypnotizing voice that can’t and won’t be easily shaken.


M. Ward's More Rain is the kind of record you put on when the day is soaked with gloom and dimness, the one you listen to when you’re loafing so hard that you can barely bring yourself to flip the record, much less leave the house and brave the elements.

More Rain

M. Ward has admitted that the whole point of More Rain was to be the sort of thing to listen to when the weather is shit. As such, he's made a collection that attempts to persistently and gently wash away the negativity from, well, everything. The opening minute of pattering rain sets the mood as Ward dives headfirst into a collection of songs trying to square the big-picture ugliness of the world with its tiny details of everyday beauty.
The album works best when he leans all the way into his sleepy, slouchy songs. These songs might be the result of hours of careful, precise attention, but they feel magnificent in their decadent laziness: It is indeed the kind of record you put on when the day is soaked in gloom and dimness; you listen to when you’re loafing so hard that you can barely bring yourself to flip the record, much less leave the house and brave the elements.
More Rain can’t reasonably be called a folk record, even with its acoustic underpinnings, but Ward does wield some folk elements to his benefit. Pedal steel—forever underrated and unfairly dismissed as a pop-country prop—occasionally lilts into the mix, with mandolin popping up, too. Album opener "Pirate Dial" is a mellow, patient folk-pop number that serves as the album’s high point.  On "Girl from Conejo Valley," those eight strings stand in contrast with a sliding synth line, making for an unexpected complement.
There are moments, though, when these textures become overwhelming. More Rain feels smothering in its intimacy at times, like a thick down pillow pressed to your face. The mixes are so close, the reverb so heavy, and the tones so richly warm, that Ward leaves little breathing room within his songs. Staying inside on a rainy day usually starts out pleasant and slowly grows claustrophobic, and so it goes with More Rain.
And while the instrumentation can often feel like too much, Ward’s flat lyrics feel like too little. "Slow Driving Man" starts with "This is a song about a slow driving man/And I’m about to sing it just as slow as I can." He proceeds to do just that. The cloying pattern of "Doo wop"s, "sha la la la"s, and "yip yip"'s on "Little Baby" don’t do much good, either.
Ward rallies for the closing track "I’m Going Higher," which slides in at the end of More Rain as a gospel tune disguised as a rock song. It’s solid, but resounds with the album’s over-arching theme of being a little too on the nose. The rain is gone and now there’s sunshine, praise the Lord! Though it’s mostly a pleasant record, there’s not much from it that sticks around long after listening—for all the talk of deluge, More Rain manages to wash itself away.
Correction: The original version of this review failed to identify the song "You're So Good To Me" as a Beach Boys cover.


There is so much depth to Faye Webster’s dazzling fourth album. It strikes a perfect balance between classic country stoicism and the sound of the saddest person you follow on social media.

I Know I’m Funny haha

I was listening to Faye Webster speak from her home in Atlanta on the “How Long Gone” podcast about how she used to be something of a youth tennis star, how she doesn’t smoke weed but loves canned gin cocktails, how she practices yo-yo tricks while listening to EDM from a video game soundtrack. It was frothy and off-the-cuff, sketching a portrait of a down-home 23-year-old singer-songwriter whose rise to indie notoriety was boosted when her song “Better Distractions” landed on Barack Obama’s annual year-end playlist. (She sounded more concerned about a shipment of Pokémon cards that needed to arrive before she went on tour.) And then, during the interview, she would occasionally say, “I’m crying.” She’d say it when something was funny, the same way people type “I’m crying” when something is funny. But Webster said it dryly, with a kind of clinical detachment. She was neither laughing nor crying.
This really captures the way Webster approaches her songwriting. Laughter and tears, boredom and loneliness, scummy landlords and Linkin Park, they all have the same density in her songs. Every moment on her fourth album, I Know I’m Funny haha, floats by at the same meaningless speed, the air so thick and humid that lines don’t land, they just slowly disappear. In the world of Webster’s lolling indie country and twangy R&B, comedy and tragedy are indistinguishable. Saying “I’m crying” out loud could scan as a wry adoption of online argot, winking at a feeling but a little afraid of it, how if you text a friend something really honest you might take out a little “haha” as an insurance policy.
But because Webster is such a wise and interesting lyricist, and because she peppers her songs with five-word phrases that could plot an entire novel, there’s so much more to I Know I’m Funny haha than its wan title might suggest. Scenes and feelings are rendered so simply and matter-of-factly that sometimes it’s like Webster is singing back the minutes of a meeting. Good days bleed into bad and back into good—she’s crying in a good way, she’s laughing because she’s just been hurt, and honestly who can tell the difference anymore? With Webster’s downy voice and a pedal-steel player named Matt “Pistol” Stoessel who almost steals the show, the album strikes a perfect balance between classic country stoicism and the sound of the saddest person you follow on social media.
All of the same pieces were in place on 2019’s Atlanta Millionaires Club, an album as glacially paced and melancholy as this. But there’s a brighter twinkle to the songs, a looser grip on where they go and how they work, more space for the band and the orchestration. “In a Good Way” takes a minute-and-a-half walk in the middle just to simmer in a ’90s nu-soul groove; the title track doesn’t even have a chorus; “Kind Of” ends on a three-minute vamp with the precise vibe of a Key West bar band playing a bossa nova tune at sunset. Webster nods to fellow Atlantan Rich Homie Quan, singing on the chorus about feeling some type of way, but, again, taking out a little “kind of” as insurance. It’s a song that’s speechless, trepidatious, almost incredulous about falling in love, and still it stretches out as if she never wants whatever feeling this is to end.
Webster is an assassin who comes out of the shadows with something witheringly funny or totally devastating. And because this album comes pre-packaged with a hammock and warm breeze, it’s hard to do anything but smile when she delivers the blow. On the title track, Webster talks to her partner about his pretty sister in that loving but condescending way couples talk about each other’s siblings. “I made her laugh one time at dinner,” she sings. “She said I’m funny and then I thanked her/But I know I’m funny haha.” You see the whole spectrum of her personality in that one line—polite, sensitive, arrogant, actually funny—especially in the staccato way she sings “haha.” She elevates a forgettable phrase we all type all of the time into a moment that defines her character as a songwriter.
There is, in fact, a great deal of crying on the record. There is one good cry (“In a Good Way”) but for the most part, it’s rough. She cries so much it hurts, asks herself if she’ll stop crying for once, cries for no reason, thinks that she might just sit around and cry. None of those lines are sad in and of themselves, but they create the vulnerable atmosphere for Webster to detail the absurd magnitude of her sadness: “There’s a difference between lonely and lonesome/But I’m both all the time,” she sings, ever the grammarian. But Webster’s great gift as a young saint of the bummer jam is how she captures emptiness. She absolutely owns the void that swallows all feeling, that nothingness through which all emotion must travel. One line from “A Stranger” says it all: “You know, I used to love getting bored/But now, without you, I have so much time to think there’s nothing to think about anymore.”
Yet the record never sinks into a dirge or sounds anemic. It is full and stoned and beautiful the entire time. The mood reminds me of smoky old Billie Holiday tunes, or the sunny stroll of a João Gilberto record, or the twilight magic of classic pedal-steel-driven songs like “Harvest Moon” or “Sleep Walk.” The band does a remarkable job of giving subtle little flourishes just a second or two to shine. The way Webster trills between two notes on the chorus of “Sometimes” and the strings follow her in unison; the way the piano ascends and the pedal steel descends at the end of “Better Distractions”; the way Webster drops the line, “There’s so much going on/My grandmother’s dead” in “A Dream With a Baseball Player,” a song about a teenage crush on Atlanta Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr. I Know I’m Funny haha is full of this delicious texture. It might come off a little shallow, but it reveals its great depth at its own unconcerned pace. It’s probably one of the best records of the year lol.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Detroit producer and vocalist leads a brief, unvarnished tour of his home city, allowing sounds and samples to function as landmarks in a woozy deep-house landscape.

American Spirit EP

John FM recognizes what’s come before him. As a protégé of the enigmatic Omar S, the Detroit-based producer and vocalist is well aware of his city’s triumphs and tribulations, and keen to preserve the spirit of self-reliance and community that animates its techno. “There’s a clear divide between those from ‘new Detroit’ and ‘old Detroit,’” he told Resident Advisor in 2016. “This is a gritty place that’s getting an involuntary facelift.” By documenting life in the city, John FM records the concrete presence of the places and people that made him. Starting with an incantatory sample of a man singing (“We have the wisdom and the knowledge to take you high-yuh/We burn the wicked with a real hot, hot, hot hot, hot hot fi-yuh”), his American Spirit EP might seem as if it’s here to cleanse souls, but it simply wants to observe them, uniting fractured points of view through John FM’s own distinct voice. Originally self-released on Bandcamp in 2020 and reissued this year by XL, American Spirit provides a brief tour of a changing city in minor key, letting sounds and samples function as landmarks. By fragmenting his influences, John FM creates possible futures out of present difficulties.
Though the EP is rooted in deep house, its dancefloor-ready beats are augmented by hints of club clatter and reverb’d vocalizations. Over the synth swells and blown-out low-end bass of “Lockjaw (7 Deadly Winnin’),” John FM and collaborator L trade verses about casual sex and drugs, each outdoing the other’s nonchalance. It’s self-aware sin talk played for comedy. Album opener “February” comes closest to a straight deep house song: Transitioning smoothly from rain-drenched a cappella to throbbing bass, it creates heat through the friction of its interlocking parts. Beneath the drums, John FM ponders a romantic dilemma: “Say you got it together but you’re in a bind/Can’t imagine the perfect pairing/But trifectas won’t do.” It’s an ironic sentiment sung with the earnestness of someone who’s been waiting for their lover to make a decision.
John FM records what he sees and refuses to look away. “Holster” starts off with a horn solo slowly surrounded by shaky percussion, until John FM’s voice comes in, capturing the moment that a shooting occurs at a party. As the ground beneath him rumbles, John FM doubles his vocals, creating an apocalyptic-sounding choir: “Say your prayers tonight/But say your prayers outside,” he sings. When the horn returns, blasting back and forth until it’s incinerated at the last moment, you feel as if the camera is zooming out to reveal a scene of people grieving. On the astonishing “Forever,” strings enter and disappear as John FM pleads for the world’s destruction, chronicling a succession of tragedies that have led him to deep depression: the death of a friend, time spent locked up, feelings of insanity. But once the strings drop out of the mix, he sings, “I don’t wanna die/I wanna live forever.” His voice is gently altered, and he sounds both vulnerable and resilient. It’s at moments like these where the project makes complete sense and you feel the overwhelming nature of his fight.
American Spirit takes on problems at human scale. Throughout, John FM looks at the ways individuals try to escape domination. Even when he is dejected, he is resolute. The forces of economic underdevelopment, state oppression, and personal animus are present, but they exist in tandem with the power of community, a force that can be heard in the music. Without engaging in pastiche, John FM pays homage to past music formed out of these tensions, while also seeking new pathways of expression. Through his music, he demonstrates that though we are molded by forces out of our control, we can continuously reshape our experiences. He may be exhausted, but he’s not resigned.

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The excellent debut of Soundcloud superstar Kaytranada features many collaborators (Syd! Anderson .Paak!) and many drums. He excels at chopping samples, but his colorful sound is never derivative.

99.9%

There’s a particularly touching moment in a recent FADER profile of the Montreal-based producer Kaytranada. Kay, whose real name is Louis Kevin Celestin, moved from Haiti to Canada with his family when he was an infant, and his father retains a strong sense of national pride. When Kaytranada plays his dad a song from his debut album, 99.9%, the music sparks a rush of patriotic excitement. “Now I understand that he didn’t forget Haiti!” his father exclaims. “You can feel it!”
It’s possible to guess at the characteristics Kay’s father had in mind. Among Haitian music’s distinct features is an insistent focus on complex rhythms, many of them imported from African music and Dominican merengue, as well as a more general willingness to incorporate various countries’ homegrown styles into a cohesive whole. The genre-defying stew of funk, soul, R&B, and beat and dance music that Kaytranada has cooked up on 99.9% nods back at that heritage of percussion-driven synthesis.
Kay first made his name as a Soundcloud standout and dance DJ, but he has the mentality of a musico-archaeologist, digging past yesterday’s obvious pop gems to unearth the overlooked. In its sonic diversity, his album is reminiscent of Madlib’s crate-digging dynamism, but unlike a lot of instrumental hip-hop (or the house artists he’s sometimes grouped with), Kay’s beats are not at all rigid or predictable. His drums are configured strangely, bending, shifting, doubling back. With those rhythms, and his own custom-made synths, the 23-year-old shows himself to be a strong-willed studio auteur on a mix of instrumental and lyric-based tracks.
Several standout drummers were recruited for the record, including Karriem Riggins and Alexander Sowinski of the Toronto jazz outfit BADBADNOTGOOD, but even the tracks that don’t feature a guest percussionist are studded with polyrhythms. The chillwave synths that kick off the album opener, “Track Uno,” prop up restless rhythms that morph several times throughout the song. They drive it forward into the Riggins feature “Bus Ride,” and the momentum never lets up.
Kay’s inventive percussion keeps the album upbeat, but it’s often a dreamy, mellow listen, perhaps a result of the producer’s effort to broaden perceptions of his capabilities. Many of the featured collaborators, including Phonte, Syd, and Anderson .Paak, are hip-hop adjacent artists who have refused to be constrained by the dogmas of the genre, something that seems to have inspired Kay. Syd and Phonte in particular, have helped to define a contemporary, melodic take on funk, combining soul, R&B, and a dash of electronica. Their features, “One Too Many” and “You’re the One,” on which Kay showcases his love for warmly shimmering synths, are two of the album’s strongest.
Only four of the album’s fifteen tracks do not feature a guest, but even without any company, Kaytranada displays plenty of range. His most impressive solo cut is “Lite Spots,” a rework of the Brazilian singer Gal Costa’s 1973 track, “Pontos De Luz.” Kay takes advantage of the abrupt shifts in tempo in Costa’s original vocal, assembling a circle of handclaps and other percussive quirks to maximize the song’s potential as a house party special.
Even on his collaborations with more traditional hip-hop and R&B artists, Kaytranada rarely reaches for the radio, avoiding formulaic structures. His track with AlunaGeorge, “Together,” is almost all hook, with an energized central verse from the D.C. rapper GoldLink. On the Vic Mensa feature, “Drive Me Crazy,” the outro takes up almost half the track’s running time. It’s long been clear that Kay thinks of vocals as just another musical element, which helps him to make even the most unmemorable guest performances function as dependable instruments. (Also clear: his lack of interest in lyrics, the only generic aspect of 99.9%, and the one element that doesn’t bear traces of his close attention.)
There are two other features on 99.9% that should not escape mention. Anderson .Paak’s contribution, “Glowed Up,” is a two-part suite that make use of the Oxnard artist’s skills as a rapper and a singer respectively, emphasizing just how much Kay can accomplish with a similarly creative collaborator. The other is extra-musical: The album’s cover, painted by the globetrotting Spanish artist Ricardo Cavolo, is warm, colorful and psychedelic, as perfect a match for the record’s sound as any of its tracks. (Cavolo also contributed animated sketches for each track, which can be found on Instagram.)
Kaytranada picked Cavolo out personally, of course, just one more example of his painstaking focus on nearly every detail. Though his credentials are those of an artist who came of age in a digital era, his album is replete with the qualities that we associate with the analogue. It echoes the warm, melodic funk of golden*-*era Stevie Wonder far more closely than, say, the flatscreen sheen of Drake’s VIEWS, revealing the increasing uselessness of the word “digital” as a descriptor. There’s certainly nothing programmed about Kaytranada’s approach. His record’s name is meant to suggest a certain sense of incompleteness, but it’s one of the most well-edited, coherent debuts to emerge in recent memory.


The South London producer/singer's latest album is consistently, deceptively understated. But its juxtaposition of complex drum patterns, slow-motion melodies, and heavily floating basslines makes it feel completely immersive.

Playin' Me

When Cooly G released "Narst" b/w "Love Dub", her first single for Hyperdub back in 2009, there was an intriguing what-next dichotomy between the A and B sides. "Narst" was a banger, UK funky's rhythms strongarmed into grimier territory, where dense kicks steamrolled the snares and digital strings ratcheted up the pull between tension and exhilaration. "Love Dub Refix" found a wildly different use for that bass/percussion interplay: the drums clicked into delicate but elaborate motion beneath that wall of low-end, and it was topped off with a fluid, phased Fender Rhodes and Cooly G's own voice intoning declarations of heart-struck disconnect a'la neo-soul ("must be love… without you"). Either way, she was headed towards something that would take advantage of bass music's increasing genre flexibility, and do it in ways that rewarded close listening and dancefloor physicality at the same time.
Playin' Me is the culmination of a couple of years' work since that '09 single, and what the lead-up singles hinted at-- the '86 Prince-via-Kode9 flourishes of 2010's "Up in My Head"; the slow-boiling crest of the following year's microhouse-tinged "Landscapes"-- is elaborated on even further. When she goes back through the lineage of her sound, from funky to dubstep to garage to drum'n'bass, she digs all the way back to the groundswell of synthesized, post-disco R&B to give it a common thread. The first notes on the album belong to the sort of watery funk guitar lick that could've belonged to the solo on a '77 Brothers Johnson record, isolated as an emphatic refrain that would fit well on the intro of a '95 Faith Evans single, and then built around for a dramatic, looming melodic theme that is as good as anything else this year for idealizing what post-dubstep is capable of in a pop-friendly sense. "He Said I Said" is the track in question, and it's bristling with intimacy and anxiety alike-- but it also sets a precedent for how rhythm is deployed on Playin' Me, vividly developing the tense euphoria and spacious fluidity of that first single.
The vibe of the album is consistently, deceptively understated, intricacy taking priority over immediacy. But by the halfway point, the juxtaposition of complex drum patterns, slow-motion melodies, and heavily floating basslines makes this album's woozy intensity feel completely immersive. The way it passes through all sorts of different stylistic contexts makes it one of those records where its personality's better defined by its moods than any genre affiliations. "Sunshine" scans a bit like the more reggae and 2 Tone-indebted elements that made Skream! one of dubstep's biggest early crossover LPs, and its lovers-rock swoon fits well. Pushing things closer to a denser rhythmic focus lets her approach house and funky from multiple angles simultaneously, to invigorating effect; check the frenetic but clockwork-smooth collaboration with Baltimore house vet Karizma on "It's Serious" for proof. And when she lets minor-key menace creep in like it does on "What Airtime", it's bracing to hear her use those billowy atmospheric flourishes for something that rides on concentrated unease. The big trick in a lot of these tracks is this sly dynamic at work with the way she mixes her songs: if you want to really get a good sense of how she lets the snares play against each other, you need to push the volume up into the red. At that point, the bass will flood even more of your ear-space, while still sounding more warm than abrasive-- it doesn't rattle subwoofers, it melts them.
Fittingly enough, her vocals match the nuances of her production-- melodic but not really melismatic, evocative without shutting out the possibility of some elusive subtext. In a few of the songs-- "Trying", "It's Serious", "Playin' Me"-- her voice is scarce enough to pass for the skeletal remnants of stripped-away vocals in vintage dub versions, allusive flashes of context overwhelmed by the sound system. In others, she's more direct: the deliveries of "anticipation, waiting… explosiooooon" in "Sunshine" and "you want me, I want yoooooou" in "Come Into My Room" are unashamedly sensual, but in a way that feels more like a deep internal monologue than a performance for an audience. She also somehow pulls off covering Coldplay's 2000 single "Trouble" by siphoning out all the maudlin Britpop grandeur and replacing it with a vocal that scans a lot more like genuine regret-- though those glitchy, skittering drums have nearly as much to do with it. It's the damnedest thing: Cooly G's music is spare, subtle, often quiet, filled with breathable patches of between-the-beats negative space, and yet there's so much happening beneath the surface that it doesn't really scan as sedate. This is music that knocks you over with a feather.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1980s rock blockbuster: the bold, brilliant, and misunderstood apex of Bruce Springsteen’s imperial era.

Born in the U.S.A.

As the release of Born in the U.S.A. approached in spring 1984—and with it, one of the greatest commercial ascents in the history of popular music—Bruce Springsteen was feeling apprehensive. It wasn’t because of “Dancing in the Dark,” which he added last-minute after his manager convinced him to write one more surefire attempt at a hit. It wasn’t because of the title track, a booming anthem whose chorus could be misinterpreted as a rallying cry for Reagan-era jingoism. And it wasn’t because of the cover art, a photograph by Annie Leibovitz that could be mistaken for a man urinating on an American flag. It was because of a song called “No Surrender,” and, in particular, its final verse:

Now on the street tonight the lights grow dim
The walls of my room are closing in
There’s a war outside still raging
You say it ain’t ours anymore to win
I want to sleep beneath peaceful skies in my lover’s bed
With a wide open country in my eyes
And these romantic dreams in my head

Something felt off as he sang these words. Who could be so blindly optimistic? During the tour for Born in the U.S.A., which spanned 16 months and brought the E Street Band to the biggest audiences they had ever played, Springsteen tried retooling the driving arrangement as a tender acoustic ballad; he rewrote the verse and changed his delivery. By the end of the run, it only appeared sporadically in setlists. “It was a song I was uncomfortable with,” he wrote years later. “You don’t hold out and triumph all the time in life. You compromise, you suffer defeat; you slip into life’s gray areas.”
So how did it wind up on the album? It wasn’t for a lack of material. Most casual fans know that as Springsteen was in the process of piecing together this full-band masterpiece, he first recorded an entirely different one: 1982’s solo acoustic Nebraska, originally intended as demos for the follow-up to 1980’s The River. But there was more where that came from. Before he landed on the dozen songs that would comprise his bestselling album, Springsteen continued down Nebraska’s folky path with story-song outtakes like “Shut Out the Light”; he worked with the band on epics like “This Hard Land” and straight-ahead rockers like “Murder Incorporated.” He wrote a goofy song about having his story told in a TV movie and a strange, apocalyptic one about the KKK. He is estimated to have recorded somewhere between 50 and 100 songs, hoping to amass enough material for one cohesive record.
In his early 30s, and a decade into his recording career, this was a period of introspection and desperate searching. For the first time after an album release, Springsteen didn’t go on tour for Nebraska. Instead, he went on vacation, taking a cross-country road trip with a friend. The type of open-road escape he sang about so convincingly, however, ended up being an emotional breaking point. As the trip took him from Jersey, through the South, and eventually to a new home he had purchased in the Hollywood Hills, Springsteen found himself crushed by waves of hopelessness and debilitating depression: collapsing in tears, feeling isolated, losing touch with whatever momentum had kept him burning down the road all this time.
In response, he sought therapy. He also went to the gym. A lot. “I was a big fan of meaningless, repetitive behavior,” he reflected in Peter Ames Carlin’s biography Bruce. “And what’s more meaningless than lifting a heavy object and then putting it down in the same place that you found it?” Weightlifting suited him, and gradually, the scrawny, scruffy misfit from the Jersey boardwalk started looking a bit more like the lead in an action film—someone who could feasibly play a hunky car mechanic in a music video, and, you know, have his ass photographed on an album cover.
The culture around Springsteen’s music was also shifting. MTV had evolved into a legitimate arm of the music industry, and Springsteen’s new look helped him gain traction in an image-centric medium. Meanwhile, vinyl had given way to cassettes, which were now ceding to compact discs. (Upon release, Born in the U.S.A. was advertised as the first CD manufactured in the United States; previous releases were mostly Japanese imports.) Adapting to the new technology, pop radio gravitated toward electronic strands of dance music, an innovation that Springsteen found inspiring. One song on the album, “Cover Me,” was something he originally wrote for Donna Summer, and you can hear her influence in his fiery, percussive delivery. (“She could really sing,” he wrote, “and I disliked the veiled racism of the anti-disco movement.”)
Because of its monocultural success, the ’80s gloss of Born in the U.S.A. can be somewhat overstated. It is a pristine and precise record whose synth pads, massive drums, and front-and-center vocals represent the defining qualities of the decade’s mainstream rock production. But listening to it now, I am struck by how physical, how alive the music sounds. Most of the songs were recorded live by the band in just a few takes, with Springsteen shouting cues, whooping and hollering off mic. And the writing, which blends the detailed narratives of Nebraska with the tighter pop structures of The River, is as thoughtful and emotional as any of his less polished material.
It is the sound of the E Street Band, then, that makes this feel uniquely like pop music. Roy Bittan’s synth is particularly effective—a thick humidity against the train-track momentum of “I’m on Fire,” and a taught fuse serving as a secondary bass line in “Dancing in the Dark.” Drummer Max Weinberg often takes center stage, calling the shots during the turnarounds in “Glory Days” and the title track with snare hits that match the energy of Springsteen’s prolonged runner’s high. He leads the band with such a locked-in sense of motion that, in the fadeout codas to songs like “Cover Me” and “Dancing in the Dark,” their backing tracks can feel a little like electronic music. It’s a sound that 21st-century bands like the War on Drugs would reinterpret as a kind of psychedelia, and that dance producer Arthur Baker capitalized on at the time with a fascinating series of club remixes.
After the willfully unmarketable Nebraska, Springsteen’s commercial reinvention thrilled the label executives, who are reported to have risen from their seats to dance during the playback sessions. (One said—upon hearing single after single, each better than the last and all mixed by Bob Clearmountain to sound tailor-made for radio—he might have actually pissed his pants.) It was also a windfall for Jon Landau, the music critic-turned-manager whose career-long belief in the life-saving power of rock music was gratified by these aspirational songs, some of which were actually about the life-saving power of rock music. Springsteen himself, already viewing his career with the analytic lens of a critic, couldn’t help but notice what this shift represented. “I was fascinated by people who had become a voice for their moment,” he would later say. “I don’t know if I felt I had a capacity for it or just willed my way in that direction, but it was something I was interested in.”
There was one person who wasn’t so interested. It was E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt, a man with rare access to the inner workings of the artist’s brain. The pair united as like-minded outcasts growing up in New Jersey, where they bonded at battles of the bands and spent countless nights in each other’s homes, side-stepping their intimidating fathers and evangelizing the records they loved. As they embarked on their careers together, Van Zandt is often credited with helping his pal lighten up a little: arranging the ecstatic horn parts on Born to Run, suggesting the title track’s iconic riff be transposed into a major key, and helming the party-in-my-garage production on The River.
A co-producer on Born in the U.S.A., Van Zandt brings the same sense of uplift to these songs. The most joyful moment comes in “Darlington County.” When Van Zandt honks his way through the vocal harmonies—“He don’t work and he don’t get paid”—Springsteen starts to laugh: Boy, does that sound ugly, you hear him think, it’s perfect. Same goes for the mandolin part in “Glory Days,” which Van Zandt recorded impromptu into a vocal mic so that it couldn’t be edited out without scrapping the entire take.
Fitting for an album that buries its anxiety beneath a bright veneer, these moments coincided with a new tension between the two. Recording under the name Little Steven, Van Zandt was completing his own album, ambitiously titled Voice of America, and its raw sound and spirit of protest felt at odds with the commercial intent of Springsteen’s latest music. Van Zandt floated the idea of promoting their albums together on a joint tour—I love imagining the response to this proposition—and confessed to feeling a bit undervalued. Sensing a crossroads, and by now well-acquainted with his friend’s stubborn self-reliance, Van Zandt quit the band.
While Springsteen stood his ground, he wasn’t as confident as he might have seemed. With an overabundance of material, he extended his creative process beyond the inner circle, inviting friends into his home to pore over the multitude of tapes and piece together a tracklist while he went out for runs or waited patiently at the kitchen table. His engineer, Chuck Plotkin, went so far as to present an acetate copy of the record he envisioned. Landau wrote a five-page letter justifying his preferred sequence. Eventually, Springsteen took some of their advice, ignored a lot of it, and turned in his completed album.
He played it for Van Zandt, who was not a fan of “Dancing in the Dark.” The lyrics—so self-conscious, so vulnerable—were anathema to his image of rock’n’roll heaven, where everyone’s young and beautiful, forever strutting. And don’t get him started on the production. Still, his main concern was “No Surrender,” his favorite song, which was nowhere to be found. The hope, the romance, the guitars—that’s the whole point of what we do! At the eleventh hour, Springsteen slotted the song back into the tracklist, right at the start of Side B.
If this operation sounds haphazard for a noted perfectionist like Springsteen, it kind of was. To this day, he speaks about Born in the U.S.A. with a sense of discomfort. The bookending songs—the title track and “My Hometown,” the only explicitly political material that made the cut—are what he’s proudest of. “The rest of the album,” he writes, “contains a group of songs about which I’ve always had some ambivalence…. [It] really didn’t flesh out like I had hoped it would.”
But while the recordings span several years of sessions, plagued with interpersonal struggle and self-doubt, bouncing between genre and mood, built on creative compromise and commercial aspiration, overexposed and eternally misunderstood, there’s really not a dull moment. With its grab-bag nature, the whole thing explodes like an encore run—when the lights are up and there’s nothing left to play but the hits; when fatigue converts into a kind of euphoria and the energy builds until it seems a little dangerous.
That’s how “No Surrender” earns its place; the optimism is hard-won, doomed to be short-lived. “You say you’re tired and you just want to close your eyes,” he sings against the rhythm, “and follow your dreams down.” But down where? If you were to place a compass in the wide open country of this album, down is where the arrow would constantly point. It’s in the opening lyric (“Born down in a dead man’s town”), and it’s the next move for the couple in the closing “My Hometown,” who plan on packing up the family, “maybe heading south.” It’s where all the signposts of security—work, marriage, community—send the narrator of “Downbound Train,” and it’s a syllable that gets stretched into a slapstick, rockabilly hiccup in the chorus of “I’m Goin’ Down.” For many of the characters in these songs, down becomes homebase: the direction you’re cautioned to ignore when you’re at the top; the inevitable crash after any high.
The momentary bliss of “No Surrender” is followed on the tracklist by “Bobby Jean,” and while Springsteen has never explicitly confirmed its inspiration, fans have long seen it as his farewell to Van Zandt. Like all his writing about friendship, “Bobby Jean” flirts with the language of love songs—the gender is intentionally ambiguous—and, paired with a bittersweet piano melody, the sentiment is so heartbroken and earnest that it feels almost childlike. The crucial lyric arrives just before the last verse, and it’s a simple but effective choice of words: “Now there ain’t nobody, nowhere, nohow/Gonna ever understand me the way you did.” Not love me, not know me, but understand me. It’s a rare quality in a companion—especially in adulthood—and it’s a hard thing to let go of when you find it.
There would be more goodbyes to come. Within the next five years, Springsteen would file for divorce from his first wife, the actress Julianne Phillips; fire the E Street Band after the tour for 1987’s mostly solo Tunnel of Love; leave his home in New Jersey to raise a family in Los Angeles with bandmate Patti Scialfa; and ultimately attempt to shed his celebrity identity, retreating from the mainstream and confessing to feeling “‘Bruced’ out” after the attention and mania that Born in the U.S.A. introduced to his life.
Little Steven’s Voice of America, meanwhile, released a month before Born in the U.S.A., was a flop. It instantly became a footnote to an album that has now gone 15 times platinum in the U.S., prominently featured on lists of the bestselling releases of all time. But that didn’t deter Van Zandt. He kept touring, recording solo music, and making a few sizable contributions to radio, television, and world politics before eventually rejoining the E Street Band in the ’90s. “It seems that what keeps people human is their ability to keep dreaming about things,” Springsteen whispered from the stage during a show in Toronto, early in the tour for Born in the U.S.A. “It seems like when you lose that...” His voice trails off. “This is for Little Steven.... He’s one of my best dreaming partners.” The band leaves the stage and Springsteen plays the opening notes of “No Surrender.” Alone and at the apex of his fame, he gazes toward the massive crowd and dreams of where he’s been.

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In an engrossing 87-minute piece in which cello and percussion circle each other through passages of sweetness and strife, the American composer explores the daily experience of intimacy.

Sarah Hennies: The Reinvention of Romance

The Reinvention of Romance

Love can be overpowering. That’s the side of it we most frequently hear in song—less so the slow process of building trust, or the gentle practice of persistent gratitude. Grand statements supersede the steady work of maintenance, with its more intricate drama. Percussionist Sarah Hennies offers a different perspective on The Reinvention of Romance, a new composition for cello and percussion that elegantly represents the give and take of two individuals in a relationship. The players cyclically find each other and drift apart over the course of the piece’s 87 minutes, moving through passages of sweetness, awkwardness, and unity.
Hennies’ music is intimate, immersive, and often unusually empathetic. One of her most impactful works, Contralto, features trans women speaking and singing in lower registers. It is a moving account of dysphoria, making connections between sound and experiences of gender and self. Often Hennies’ recordings feature instruments and other sound sources captured at extremely close range, placing the listener next to or inside of them in the sonic landscape. The Reinvention of Romance does this to powerful effect; you can hear the granularity of the bow on cello strings, the clarity of a mallet hitting the xylophone. The crispness of the recording has the effect of personifying the instrumental parts, turning them into characters in Hennies’ carefully plotted drama.
Listening to The Reinvention of Romance requires a great amount of patience. Its narrative arc is slow to unfold; the tonal palette is limited to plucked or bowed cello, rounded mallet tones, the screech of bowed metal, and a smattering of percussive clatter. The musicians trade off playing drones and pulses across a series of repetitive patterns, each lasting between 15 to 20 minutes, separated by stretches of silence. At times metallic percussive tones dance nimbly around stretches of grinding cello, and at others the thrum of sporadic low-end cello pizzicato punctuates the biting ring of horse hair on steel. Some configurations cause strife, yet even in the piece’s most disorienting moments, the instruments seem to be closely attuned to one another, playful and mimetic.
Seeing the contours of an intimate relationship in the way these unadorned sounds push and pull against each other requires an imaginative leap, and a fair amount of trust in the composer, but Hennies has a talent for making the abstract approachable. Once the romantic frame is in place, it becomes easy to see the core tenets of the piece—patience, the inexorable meshing of difficulty and beauty, the power of circumstance and change—as commentary on the daily experience of intimacy. Hennies utilizes space and silence to conjure a sense of intensity; it’s as if the two voices are drawn together instinctively, returning to one another again and again after periods of separation, searching for common ground. She draws the ear to the dynamic between the two players by emphasizing minute differences in tone. When those two voices are the only sonic elements for an hour and a half, each change in how they relate to one another becomes monumental.
In the final 15 minutes of the composition, the cello and mallet percussion finally meet, ringing out simultaneous long tones. They are not in unison, however, or even in consonant harmony, and just as the passage seems to reach a climax, they begin to fade very slowly. There is no satisfying ending, and no real resolution. As the final, lonely silence sets in after the piece’s conclusion, we’re left with the poignancy of the struggle to find one another and the inherent value in that journey.


The Los Angeles-based harpist’s songs remain characteristically serene and steeped in nostalgia, though guests like the Cure’s Lol Tolhurst and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell add nuance to her sound.

Goodbye, Hotel Arkada

Listening to a Mary Lattimore album is like flipping through a scrapbook full of yellowing photographs. For the Los Angeles-based harpist, no moment is too trivial to capture in music: the lone deer she saw in the woods during a residency stay, the Wawa from a road trip. On albums like 2017’s Collected Pieces and 2020’s Silver Ladders she codified her style, transforming stories from her travels into wistful odes meant to evoke the feeling of a resurfaced memory. With Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, she invites an array of collaborators to help craft pensive songs that grow out of moments past. While her instrument’s luminous tone remains the music’s defining characteristic, she embraces a darker mood than before.
Goodbye, Hotel Arkada takes its name from a formerly grand hotel on the Croatian island of Hvar where Lattimore once roamed the empty hallways, imagining the majesty of its glory days. She later learned from a friend that the place had been gutted and modernized, and the news prompted this album-length tribute to faded grace. Not all her inspirations are as somber as her often stately music might suggest, however: “And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me” was inspired by a childhood encounter with an actor in a life-sized Big Bird costume, while “Music for Applying Shimmering Eye Shadow,” which she wrote as pre-show music for green-room rituals, grew out of an investigation in the theoretical sound of space.
Despite the range of her inspirations, Lattimore’s music is uniformly moody and slightly ambiguous. She plays at a leisurely pace and cloaks each pluck in reverb, giving the feeling that her music is floating. Her melodies often favor the high, twinkling pitches of her instrument; they sway rather than leap, transmitting a feeling of reverence. And as they repeat, they expand, crescendoing with each reiteration. On “Arrivederci,” which Lattimore wrote after being fired from a gig, former Cure keyboardist Lol Tolhurst’s synths add murkiness, bass notes swelling underneath Lattimore’s slow lament. The lilting phrases of closer “Yesterday’s Parties” feel dreamy at first, but as the song grows, Samara Lubelski’s flickering violin riffs cut across airy vocals from Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, stirring a little bit of chaos into the soothing lullaby.
Yet even in moments where a melody becomes turbulent, Lattimore’s compositions can feel relentlessly pretty. Her music avoids disorder; she carefully weaves sweet passages together and always ends with an upbeat tone. But with “Blender in a Blender,” Lattimore allows for some frayed edges. When writing the track, she recalled a conversation in which she and a friend wondered what sorts of physical objects could be put in a blender. Glow sticks, iPhones; could even a blender be blended? Her harp feels its featheriest here, soaring above Roy Montgomery’s hazy guitar. But then, after a moment of silence, Montgomery’s guitar returns with force, churning in a distorted blur. It’s a refreshing reminder that despite her music’s nostalgic cast, it doesn’t have to be bogged down by it. It can make room for humor, too.


On his sepia-toned second album, the Buffalo rapper looks back on a troubled upbringing while sometimes dipping into cliche.

From the Cradle to the Game

Westside Gunn’s activities as a rapper, A&R, fashionista, and wrestling fan are well-documented, but within the Griselda family, Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher have quietly been putting in work. Since its founding in 2016, Benny’s Black Soprano Family label has ballooned into a seven-man unit. The collective’s standout has always been Buffalo rapper Heem, a straightforward storyteller with a nimble and commanding voice. He’s more of a parallel to artists like Boldy James or Styles P than Benny: a street soldier with eyes in the back of his head, preoccupied with stark details that put you in the thick of the action.
His second album From the Cradle to the Game works from some of the oldest templates in rap history: rags to riches, make momma proud, put on for the homies, never forget where you came from. Heem spent his youth in one of Buffalo’s roughest areas, and every song on From the Cradle looks back at grisly moments from his teenage years. Take opener “Reasonable Doubt,” where he reflects on a crime that almost ended his career before it began, or “Cocaine County” which details his experience at the mixing bowl with unnerving specificity, from the sound the fork makes to the flip phones used to make the deal. “I’m the one who went to war, you never shot nothin’/BSF stand for: ‘you’d better stop frontin’,” he raps on the thumping “Radio Raheem, judging anyone who’d fake hardship for attention. Heem can be a guarded and tough presence, but any time spent above ground is a blessing; he seems grateful for the possibility of one day being able to swap “crack money for some real estate and businesses.”
Some songs—like the Tyrie Hames-produced “Picture Me Rollin” and the Marc Spano-produced “Same Ole G”—fall into bland Roc-A-Fella worship, while others deploy the same crunchy mid-tempo stomp that you hear from most Griselda affiliates. Specific flourishes keep the album from lulling: Take the mandolin strings and vocal sample Hames adds to “Mamie Lee” or the soulful minimalism of Jansport J’s work on “Long Way Home,” both of which suit Heem’s traditionalist style.
What Heem brings to the table, and what From the Cradle excels at more than anything, is highlighting the conflicting emotions he’s felt while on the road from nothing to something. He seamlessly shifts between remorseless and wounded, hard-nosed and contemplative, and the cracks in his voice naturally emphasize his struggles. Having money, jewelry, and drop-tops is all well and good, but is it worth the sleepless nights and memories of lost friends he describes on “Tears of Blood”? The more he leans into this dichotomy, the more potent his music becomes. Even at his most familiar, it’s easy to see why Heem has become the Black Soprano Family’s right-hand man.


The Black Keys' seventh album features Danger Mouse's strongest production work for the group and a mood that's frivolous, fun, and unabashedly corny.

El Camino

It behooves us to take 90 seconds here and figure out how this band got so popular and enduring. The Black Keys were born in the teeth of the early-aughts "Rock Is Back!" movement, wherein a cadre of uncouth garage-y bands all named The ______s saved us from the terrorists and/or the Backstreet Boys. Eventual result: deserved ignominy (the Vines), undeserved ignominy (the Hives), bewildered near-implosion (the Strokes), and bewildering total implosion (the White Stripes). The years have not been kind.
You didn't figure the Keys as sole survivors and mainstream lifers when The Big Come Up emerged in 2002 and offered a walking rockist orgasm: two gawky white dudes from Akron, Ohio, drums and surly guitar and burning-oatmeal-mouthed yawps of not terribly articulate romantic frustration, all powering cartoonishly virile garage-blues jams of prison-phone-call fidelity and sentiment. Ridiculous and kind of awesome. (This assumes racially uneasy cultural appropriation is no longer an issue for you, but if so, feel free to evoke the Blueshammer scene in the Ghost World movie and the hell with it.)
And so. They named their second album Thickfreakness; they recorded their third album in an abandoned tire factory and named it Rubber Factory. For a while there, they always did confoundingly well in critics' polls, as though they were every single rock scribe's seventh-favorite band. They evolved incredibly slowly-- you can enjoy their early work tremendously and never retain five consecutive seconds of it beyond their cover of "Have Love Will Travel". Danger Mouse got involved as a producer, to the immediately evident benefit of no one. Coupla daffy side projects in there somewhere. (BlakRoc!) Ah yes, and they got their music in a shitload of ads, from Victoria's Secret to Zales to American Express to Subaru, like just so much capitalism, to the extent that they went on The Colbert Report with Vampire Weekend and clowned themselves about it.
By which time they'd broken through. Last year's Brothers, their sixth album, had wit and pop charm and a minor hit in "Tighten Up" (and unremitting bloat, but ah), and thus came the Spin cover, the Saturday Night Live appearances, the Grammys. And now we greet El Camino, their best and (not coincidentally) goofiest album, a veritable frat-worthy "Pimp 'n' Ho" party in which T. Rex has somehow been tricked into serving as house band. The riffs are glam-nasty, the lyrics sublimely knuckleheaded, the basslines nimble and bombastic, the mood frivolous and fun and unabashedly corny. It's way shorter than Brothers, too. Sweet cars, witchy women, "Gold on the Ceiling." A bizarre attempt to philosophically combine the videos for "Sabotage" and "Legs". The fine line between a tricked-out GTO and "GTFO."
Danger Mouse figured it out, for one thing. He unnecessarily arted up 2008's Attack & Release (plus the hit off Brothers), and his angelic-choir/space-glockenspiel Super Mario Galaxy fantasias still distract-- everything's a goddamn spaghetti western with this guy. But Camino's sonic frills are mercifully few, content to stick your head right in Patrick Carney's bass drum as he stomps through the caveman jam "Hell of a Season" with virtuosic anti-virtuosity, or revel in the machine-gun surge of Dan Auerbach's gong-banging guitar on surging opener "Lonely Boy". It's a shame Rock Band is no longer a thing. "Gold on the Ceiling" is just filthy, like George Thorogood scoring porn, all raunchy organ and licentious handclaps and chorus help from ladies attempting to sound like the sorts of ladies Steely Dan loved to write songs about. "I wanna buy some time/ But don't have a dime," goes the raucous one called "Money Maker". Better cash some Subaru checks.
The lyrics! The lyrics are hilarious. Great advice, via Brothers: "Well, you can watch her strut/ But keep your mouth shut." God bless Auerbach for ignoring it, and, amid the keening/crunching stomp of "Run Right Back", dropping some serious knowledge: "Well she's a special thing/ She doesn't read too much, oh/ But there's no doubt/ She's written about." Which is really just a prelude to the miraculous five-word sequence that is "Finest exterior/ She's so superior," which, Jesus. Show me the CARFAX, Romeo. Your emotional climax is "Little Black Submarines", which starts acoustic and pathos-ridden: "A broken heart is blind," goes the biologically suspect refrain. But then, hosanna, the distortion kicks in, the riff from "Mary Jane's Last Dance" is lifted wholesale, and suddenly we are rocking, Carney and Auerbach in call-and-response/attack-and-release napalm mode, back in the rubber factory in spirit if not tax bracket.
Yes, well. Consider El Camino the aural equivalent of one of those Chrysler "Imported from Detroit" ads where a $47,000 car slowly rolls through one of the most devastated cities in America, a sign for 8 Mile Road glimpsed through tinted windows: the finest in luxury grit. Seedy, escapist camp, crass but expert, so expert. That they're the true victors of the 2000s garage explosion is no shock at all. Rock came back. Commerce never left.


The Brooklyn indie-pop duo’s second LP plays like the cloud-covered foil to an endless California summer.

Don’t Wait for a Sign

Like Sarah, Factory, or Sacred Bones, Oakland’s Slumberland is the sort of boutique record label that assumes its own persona. Each entry, usually no longer than half an hour, is sewn into its patchwork gestalt, producing its own variant on the Slumberland formula: cute, fuzzy, and young at heart. As the label enters its 33rd year, founder Mike Schulman has ushered in a recent surge of activity, tapping the Bay Area’s wellspring of indie-pop talent to press a steady stream of revived acts, pseudo-supergroups, and scene veterans. New York City duo Jeanines are the odd band out among this latest batch of releases. Their second album, Don’t Wait for a Sign, is Slumberland’s lone East Coast offering of 2022 thus far, and they’re relative newcomers to the imprint’s inner circle. Bassist, guitarist, and drummer Jed Smith has performed in a few bands like My Teenage Stride over the past two decades, but Jeanines is the first serious project for singer and guitarist Alicia Hyman.
Speaking to Chickfactor, Hyman offered a brief summary of the band’s two-step creative process: She writes “sad folk songs” in her apartment, and sends them over to Smith, who “turns them into indie pop gems.” Since their self-titled 2019 debut, each party has refined their respective craft. Hyman’s chord progressions have grown more complex, providing a sturdier framework to drive her ruminative vocals into higher registers, while Smith has mostly shelved the trebly twee-punk timbres in favor of flower-power pastiche. On a macro level, the band’s vision is realized and tasteful, but its individual elements blur where they once blended. Like an impressionist painting, it’s most impressive as an aesthetic statement—pay too close attention and the album fractures into a collection of textured brushstrokes, some brilliant, some less so.
Both devout students of 1960s pop, Hyman and Smith are acutely aware of the effect echo can have on a song’s emotional resonance. The new record is shrouded in damp clouds of reverb, with faint impressions of its jangling guitars sneaking through like the sun behind an overcast sky. The same muggy treatment that elevated the Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” from catchy folk-rock strummer to bittersweet anthem is slathered across the album like sunblock.
Don’t Wait for a Sign gels when the instrumentals take a step back, putting emphasis on the rubbery qualities of Hyman’s voice. Though delivered with a detached sigh, the chorus of “Any Day Now” bounces off of its minor chord progression like a rubber ball, stretching and warping in midair before concluding with a droll “la la la la la” cribbed from the Magnetic Fields’ playbook. Each verse on “Who’s in the Dark” sounds like its own hook, extracting pure pop syrup from a gloomy British folk palette. It’s not as punky and peppy as many of the band’s labelmates, but it works as the cloud-covered East Coast foil to Slumberland’s endless California summer.
Jeanines falter when they attempt to fit in with their peers. Fueled by clean, shimmery rhythm guitar, the record’s title track is an invitation to “wash away those worry lines, you still have a lot of time”—an encouraging sentiment, but one that sounds more Archies than Another Sunny Day. The song turns out undercooked compared to its neighbors, bound to a simpler instrumental that stifles Hyman’s usual melodic zeal. “Gotta Go” suffers an oversaturation of charm, repeating its title over staccato chords and metronomic snares. It’s the peak of Smith’s retromania, generously layering Hyman’s vocals atop an instrumental that wouldn’t feel out of place in the intro to a vintage cartoon variety show. Though under a minute long, it feels like dead weight on an otherwise succinct album.
Like many of the Sarah Records bands and ’60s bubblegum pop artists they look to for guidance, Jeanines are distinguished by towering peaks surrounded by pleasant but interchangeable filler. When confined to a 7" record like 2020’s Things Change EP, they thrive, urgently cramming as many hooks, harmonies, and symphonic flourishes as they can fit. There’s nothing on Don’t Wait for a Sign that quite holds up to immaculate slivers of pop like “Everyone Should Be Warned” or “Been in the Dark,” which benefit from baroque touches like Smith’s Mellotron or a Hyman violin solo. The solid foundation of moody songcraft on their two LPs is ripe for development. Shaking their minimalist DIY ethos in favor of more lavish impulses may be just what Jeanines need to truly transcend their influences.


Long Live the Pimp is the worst of Pimp C's posthumous output. The production hews too closely to modern trends for Pimp's voice, and the posthumous verses here sound uncharacteristically sleepy and subdued. Maybe it's time to leave well enough alone.

Long Live The Pimp

Pimp C was far from one-dimensional as an artist, but through a tortuous life, and now death, he's been reduced to a cred signpost. Drake showed up on the first posthumous Pimp C release, 2010's The Naked Soul of Sweet Jones, seemingly just to name-check Houston strip clubs*.* "RIP Pimp C" is now as much a given as a hip-hop salutation as "RIP Biggie" or "RIP 2 Pac" or "Free Max B". Almost a decade after he passed, we're on posthumous record #3, and you start to wonder if we're officially scraping the barrel.
Compared to The Naked Soul of Sweet Jones, which at least featured producers Pimp C worked with in life and was rooted in the country-rap sound, 2011's lesser Still Pimping, Long Live the Pimp is the worst of his posthumous output. This is partly due to the uncharacteristically sleepy and subdued verses from Chad Butler himself, but it's not helped out by the production either. Instead of the country-inspired bounce of Pimp's own productions, a lot of Long Live the Pimp works a dank, marching-band percussion rhythm associated with Juicy J's late-career resurgence, more "Bandz a Make Her Dance" than "Sippin on Some Syrup".
In fact, Juicy J oversaw production on several of these songs, and his fingerprints are all over the album. "Payday" sounds like something from this year's 100% Juice. The two collaborated often and were representatives for their own regional scenes, but the songs here are discomfiting because they sound too obviously inspired by current trends, an ill fit for a voice so closely aligned with a singular aesthetic. Ty Dolla $ign is a great artist, but you can't pair one of his hooks with a Pimp C verse any more than you can digitally insert John Candy into Krampus.
And the overt tributes to Pimp's  sound—church organs and wah-wah guitars—sound flimsy as well, the Diet Coke version of country rap tunes. "Trill" is nice enough, with three professional verses from three signature Houston voices—Slim Thug, ESG, and Lil Keke. But everyone sounds careful and reverent, on their best behavior. The Lil Wayne, A$AP Rocky, Juicy J, and Nas features fall predictably flat (though "Friends" works a TLC-inspired hook as well as it can), but something like "Bitch Get Down" with Bun B and 8 Ball & MJG or "Twerk Something" with T.I. should have been home runs. They all feel too tasteful to really be essential, not at all a proper tribute to Pimp's spirit.
Pre-release hype pegs Long Live the Pimp as the culmination of what Pimp C was working on toward the end of his life. But it makes you wonder—why did it take eight years for this stuff to see the light of day? Maybe the best verses he left behind have already been used on UGK's final album, 2009's UGK 4 Life, and two other posthumous solo records. Pimp C's work is in good hands (I don't see any Duets: The Final Chapter-type fiascos in the future) but maybe it's time to leave well enough alone.