The reissued compilation from the great American folk and gospel singer is a generous introduction to a historically muted view of Black life in the South.

Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers: Get in Union

Get in Union

Before her death in 1984, Bessie Jones’ employment included stints as a domestic worker, a cook, and a laundress. Her life’s work, however, was as a teacher whose medium was song. Growing up in the Gullah-Geechee traditions of rural Georgia, she absorbed music through her family. In adulthood, she doted on the children in her community by teaching them the stories, games, and spiritual music she’d inherited—history that was theirs, too. When she met folklorist Alan Lomax on his journey through the American South in 1959, she saw a way to broadcast her lessons to further reaches.
The Gullah-Geechee culture coalesced from the mix of enslaved West African people living in the remote sea islands of Georgia and South Carolina, which Lomax first documented in 1935 (Zora Neale Hurston accompanied him). He met Jones when he returned two decades later, recording her several more times throughout the 1960s at her request. In 2014, Tompkins Square issued the compilation Get in Union on CD as a primer on Jones’ work, sourcing the material from the Alan Lomax Archive at the Association for Cultural Equity. Curator Nathan Salsburg has updated the collection with nine more recordings, making the lot available digitally for the first time on Bandcamp. Now at 60 tracks, Get In Union is a generous introduction to a historically muted view of Black life in the South.
Jones took up with a cohort that in 1963 became known as the Georgia Sea Island Singers. Though their work was as a de facto collective, her assured voice naturally commanded the foreground. Their music was likewise communal, rising from the oral tradition of Black spirituals. (Jones’ direct line to the material was her grandfather, Jet Sampson, who had been enslaved and brought West with his brothers in 1843.) The group’s sense of interpersonal communion translated easily as they sang about Biblical tales and heavenly salvation. Some of the recordings on Get in Union feature fife, drum, and banjo, bringing a friendly pick-up-band mood to songs like “Beulah Land,” “O Mary Don’t You Weep,” and “O Day.”
One element central to Gullah-Geechee religious practices was the ring shout, a type of percussive devotional music that developed among enslaved people in the Western Hemisphere. Banned from using drums, worshippers clapped, shuffled, and stomped to keep a syncopated rhythm. Get in Union provides sterling examples of the form. “Moses Don’t Get Lost” gallops toward freedom, while “Walk Daniel” and “Adam in the Garden” transmit a similarly pressing charge to keep moving. Jones and her colleagues didn’t have to answer to recording contracts or managers, because the music had always been intended for themselves: to encourage, reassure, entertain, and heal. The songs had already been around for decades—even centuries—before Lomax arrived, and Jones would’ve continued to sing them whether he was around to roll tape or not.
Jones’ unaccompanied singing across Get in Union is intimate and feels almost private, captured by the state-of-the-art recording equipment that Lomax had lugged through the Lowcountry's ultrafine gray silt. She speaks to straight living on “Plumb the Line” and “This Train Is a Clean Train,” kind but clear-eyed reminders to aim for righteousness. “Go Wash in That Beautiful Stream,” on the other hand, feels like a lullaby. Jones’ softer singing brings a staggering weight to the 87-second recording. Her genuine faith can stir even the stiff non-believers, affected through her passionate voice and the music's history as a tool of liberation for enslaved people.
Black women and their work have long been sidelined, written out of their own stories by malice as often as careless neglect. To wit, Jones’ voice endures in the mainstream imagination as a Moby sample: the call-and-response of her song “Sometimes” is the foundation to his “Honey.” The Gullah-Geechee have continued to weather their own storms, protecting their history while battling the avarice of real-estate developers transforming their familial agricultural lands into luxury golf resorts. The mid-’90s Nickelodeon sitcom Gullah Gullah Island and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (which heavily informed the visual aesthetics of Lemonade) have both brought versions of Gullah-Geechee culture to American screens since Jones’ death, but her perspective touches its taproot.
Jones kept singing her whole life because she recognized her testimony as a guard against the erasure of her people and their experiences. She never enjoyed mainstream celebrity, but she leveraged her Lomax connection to broadcast her message at the Poor Peoples’ March on Washington, the Newport Folk Festival, Jimmy Carter’s presidential inauguration, and now into the 21st Century. Her singing catapulted her history lessons beyond her rural enclave to audiences who might have never heard her people’s stories otherwise. Get in Union is as much a map as a music album, pointing those who listen toward a more unified understanding of Black American experiences.


Tom Krell teams with collaborators like Jack Antonoff and dancehall producer Dre Skull on his most polished album yet. But it turns out the professional sheen doesn't suit him.

Care

Over the course of his last few albums, Tom Krell, the singer behind How to Dress Well, charted a heady course, elevating pop accessibility, R&B crooning, and a dash of electronic experimentation into high art. With his intellectual bona fides established by his never-quite-finished philosophy dissertation and his canny tendency of praising contemporary rappers and 18th century theorists in conversation, Krell was able to brand his viscerally pleasurable music as both “smart” and “cool.” By the time the smoldering, show-stopping “What Is This Heart?” came out in 2014, he had become a poster boy for alternative R&B at a time when critics were not quite as united against the term as they are (I hope) now.
Krell’s seeming intelligence, combined with his curiosity and talent, inspired a generosity in his listeners, a willingness to read great meaning into ostensibly simple lyrics. It’s an attitude that you can see play out in the Genius annotations of the single “Repeat Pleasure” from “What Is This Heart?” The song’s first verse ends with the lyric, “Without your neck to kiss, I was thrown to the night.” Here’s the Talmudic interpretation: “Krell plays with the conventional pop love song’s themes of undying love and eternal happiness in love by recognizing the night of love; loneliness.”
That statement is not wrong, and its generosity is not misplaced. On the contrary, it demonstrates an attitude that should be extended to more musicians, regardless of how much philosophy they’ve studied. There is a lot going on in the Michael Jackson-aping “Repeat Pleasure,” a single that combines thoughtfulness and danceability in a way that presages many of the better songs on Care, Krell’s new album and his fourth full-length as How to Dress Well. The new record contains plenty of lyrics that seem basic to the point of banality, but which our trust in Krell often allows us to recognize as filled with well-considered ideas about the risks and challenges of love, of one’s self and of others.
Take “Can’t You Tell,” the stunner that opens the album. On first listen, it’s nothing more than an enthusiastic sex jam, beginning with the lyrics: “Wanna lay you down and take you right there, take you right there, can’t you tell?” If this were a song by another artist, you might not think twice about the words. But with How to Dress Well we linger, and the lyrics reveal depth: “Take you right there” can be read in two ways, the first passionate and threatening, the other tender and devotional, the two ideas either linked or opposed. And that strange, lingering lyric “can’t you tell?,” signals a kind of plea for connection and consent, emphasized soon afterward when Krell seems to halfway retreat: “Yea I want it,” he enthuses, before insisting, “But I want it when you want it, baby.”
As layered as they can be, these ideas about sex (which are ideas about power, attraction, and respect) wouldn't be as rich were it not for the music bolstering them. As on “What Is This Heart?,” Krell’s voice remains front and center throughout most of Care, which he executive produced with help from guitar-pop maestro Jack Antonoff and the dancehall mastermind Dre Skull, as well as the experimental Canadian musicians Kara-Lis Coverdale and Michael Silver (CFCF). Working with a team of diverse collaborators seems to have allowed Krell to indulge his tendency for rich sonic experimentation while making the most direct music of his career.
This combination of adventurousness and immediacy yields one particularly extraordinary song. “Salt Song,” the track that directly follows “Can’t You Tell,” is a masterpiece, one of the best songs that Krell has made. Produced by Skull, it’s an immaculately structured, near seven-minute pop odyssey about self-care, happiness, and risk that includes a panoply of musical elements that you’d think would repel each other: mournful cello, a ludicrously self-satisfied whistle encasing the vocal melody and a stormy mosh pit of a coda that will be soundtracking the ecstatic ends of Saturday night parties for months if not years to come. The song accomplishes what the best pop does, disguising its own complexity even as the excitement of its many thrills keeps it interesting after half a hundred listens.
Opening as it does with those two songs, as well as the good-but-not-great second single “What’s Up,” Care seems to be carving out territory as a record on par with “What Is This Heart?”, less obviously ambitious but way more fun. And then, Care’s first single, “Lost Youth / Lost You” lands with a dull thud, casting a pall over the rest of the album. The track, produced in part by Antonoff, is almost a full minute shorter than “Salt Song” but it feels infinitely longer with its plodding, faux-insightful chorus about the heart’s confusion and its head-scratching musical decisions; an unearned guitar solo mid-track is made even more miserable when Krell decides to sing over it. It takes a truly empty song to turn a generous listener into a miser, and on Care, “Lost Youth/ Lost You” is that song.
The track is intended to signify a narrative shift from excitement and lust to heartbreak, but it overplays that transition and derails the album, partly because Care’s back half is significantly spottier than its opening numbers, with several of the elements that hurt “Lost Youth / Lost You” showing up repeatedly. Sly, jokey lyrics suddenly come across as blustering, or obnoxiously self-absorbed, while slow-burners including “Burning Up,” “Made a Lifetime,” and “They’ll Take Everything You Have” feel perfunctory. Either their lyrics genuinely lack the intellectual sheen of earlier tracks or we’ve lost our willingness to read meaning into their simplicity.
The odd semi-collapse of Care serves as a reminder of just how fragile an album can be, how vulnerable even the most talented artists are to stumbling over elements like song sequencing, which many might dismiss as a secondary concern. When we listen closely, our perceptions of an artist can change on a dime. And because pop music can be so direct, it’s subject to harsh evaluations: It can be easy to tell when a pop song has missed its mark.
Krell has succeeded in making the simplest, most direct album of his career. But that places him in direct competition with pop music proper, and because Care arrives at a point when many mainstream artists are making such remarkable music, it’s no longer quite as easy to accept on its face the distinction Krell made two years ago, between being pop and being populist. There’s no reason to evaluate him separately from the rest of the pack. Though several of the songs on Care are extraordinary, others are superficial, failing to deliver on the depth that has been such an essential part of How to Dress Well’s appeal. Pop can’t soar if its carrying dead weight, and there’s simply too much of that here for Care to succeed.


This is supposedly the final chapter for Phonte and Pooh's often divisive group, self-proclaimed keepers of the true hip-hop flame.

LeftBack

I never thought this would be the case, but I kinda feel bad for Little Brother. Their caricatures of hip-hop boogeymen were never going to change anyone's mind about, say, DipSet, but the rush to caricature them as the backpacker fun police instead of talented rappers almost certainly resulted in people slagging off worthy projects like Foreign Exchange, the Chittlin' Circuit, and, oddly enough, their mixtape with DJ Drama.
To their credit, Little Brother have gone to lengths to make things right themselves. The key lyric on LeftBack, Little Brother's presumably final studio album is, "Not mad at the radio/ 'Cause I don't know what's on it." There is a subtle yet important shift in tone here: On albums past, this message might've been meant as a boast. On LeftBack, Little Brother acknowledge that rather than being defined by their perceived opposition, they're but one of many options.
Little Brother were always pretty entertaining when they weren't burdening themselves with hip-hop's salvation, but ultimately your enjoyment of LeftBack can boil down to whether you care about Phonte and Pooh debating if they can leave the game alone when it doesn't need them. Even on the triumphant career retrospective "Curtain Call", the two can't help but live with regret, blaming The Minstrel Show's commercial failure on listeners not appreciating "the real on the reel."
More than ever, Little Brother appear to be a two sides to one group; duality informs nearly the entirety of LeftBack. There's almost an even split between "for the love" rap ciphers with peers like Truck North and Khrysis, and "for your love" relationship songs. Big Pooh comes off like the guy who's most intent on pursuing a new solo career, but he continues to be casually outshined by Phonte, whose nonchalance deflates even his corniest rhymes ("not being Cam'ron-ish, I mean diplomatic"). And while Phonte is trying to establish himself as viable outside of his collaborations, he constantly questions his commitment-- he appreciates what "the kids" are doing, but admits, "one day I was playin' my old shit like 'who the fuck is this, I kinda miss this dude.'"
But even those of us who don't have an issue with their subject matter have been subjected to increasingly monochromatic listening experiences. Used to be you could blame that on 9th Wonder, but even with other producers, Phonte and Pooh seem incapable of rapping over something other than mostly interchangeable soul backdrops with papery drums that split the difference between handclaps and snares. Phonte raps, "fuck if I'm goin' to be doin' this shit when I'm 60," but Little Brother were always well-suited to the mindset of rap as easy-listening.
In the end, the finality of LeftBack sticks with you more than anything, because unlike many rappers promising the same thing, Little Brother seem like they really mean it-- not to mention that a three-way Twitter beef with 9th Wonder over a disputed beat really felt like the final coffin nail, appropriate for a group whose narrative took place almost entirely on the Internet. But if LeftBack really is the end for Little Brother, it's a fitting epitaph for a likeable act who just could never seem to get out of their own way.


Over the last four years, Matt Cutler has steadily established himself as one of dance music’s most exciting producers. The follow up to 2012's excellent Galaxy Garden finds him both expanding his sound and returning to his roots.

Reality Testing

Over the last four years, Matt Cutler has steadily established himself as one of dance music’s most exciting producers. The Nottingham-based artist is a master of indulgence, jamming his tracks with jagged, aggressive rhythms and glistening melodies. Cutler draws heavily from rave music’s more explicitly colorful side, embracing the all-out intensity of breakbeat techno and hardcore’s effervescent steamroll; like many of his contemporaries, he was barely old enough to ride a bike when those strains of dance music emerged the first time around, so his work as Lone is essentially a reconstruction, an alternate version of the past put together by someone who wasn’t around to experience the sound's genesis.
Cutler sidesteps claims of misplaced nostalgia through sheer inventiveness. After working in earnest near the end of the 2000s, he first caught a larger audience’s ear with 2010’s kaleidoscopic Emerald Fantasy Tracks, released on his own Magic Wire imprint. An eight-track collection that felt less like a unified whole and more like a collection of singles, Emerald Fantasy Tracks gave a brighter tint to to the dazzling grit of techno luminaries like Underground Resistance. Resurrected European techno label R&S took notice and signed Cutler, and two years later he released what stands as his magnum opus, Galaxy Garden. It was a massive achievement and also startling in its originality. Upon its release, Cutler told The Stool Pigeon that the record was “influenced by nothing," and although rave music loomed larger than ever in his sound, the comment made some sense. Galaxy Garden is one of those records that truly feels boundless, a head trip that practically overflowed with beatific melodies and inviting textures. (It’s unsurprising that, in the same year, Glasgow's Rustie tapped Cutler to contribute a new track to his era-defining contribution to BBC’s Essential Mix series; maximalism is a central tenet to the Lone sound.)
One of the decade’s singular electronic records, Galaxy Garden was a thrilling document that made you wonder where Cutler would take his sound next. Reality Testing turns out to be both a left turn and a back-to-basics move. Largely abandoning rave’s warp-speed tempos and sensual overload, Reality Testing finds Cutler shifting his focus to the dusty hip-hop grooves of auteurs like J Dilla and Madlib, two artists regularly name-checked by European dance producers as formative influences. Cutler’s no exception: his early work drew from those artists’ loping knock as much as it did from the hazy electronic music of Boards of Canada, with 2009’s Ecstasy & Friends (released on Actress’ continually ahead-of-the-curve Werk Discs imprint) being the last time he explored those sounds so thoroughly.
Depending on the your relationship Cutler’s earlier music, the shift in focus on Reality Testing can prove initially disappointing—there’s no shortage of producers currently attempting to hardwire hip-hop motifs to Boards of Canada’s iridescent glow, and he's covered some of this ground before. It might take a few listens to get on Cutler’s current wavelength, but approaching Reality Testing with an open mind yields great rewards. It’s one of his most assured and confident efforts and it provides a perfect gateway into the Lone sound.
I've heard comparisons between Reality Testing’s more explicitly hip-hop-influenced cuts and the work of Wolverhampton producer Stephen Wilkinson’s Bibio project. The two artists operate in different lanes—Wilkinson’s more predisposed to song-based structures, whereas Cutler derives his energy from dance’s lack of set definitions—but the similarities are there. “Restless City” is all tumbling claps and record-skipping sounds, with a few needle-drop effects to add a sense of halting texture; “2 Is 8” sounds deliciously retro, with vocal samples occasionally intruding on the track’s knocking drums and steam-pipe melody that resembles an alternate take on the “Sesame Street” theme. “Meeker Warm Energy” oozes West Coast lackadaisical vibes, with honeyed static slathering a Dilla-aping beat; early single “Airglow Fires” takes the hat-tipping a step further by calling back to the vocal sample from Dilla’s Donuts neck-whipper “The Twister (Huh, What)”, speeding up the easygoing tempo and covering the thing in chunky chords reminiscent of Detroit techno.
The sounds of early-gen Detroit dance music is Reality Testing’s other main influence; the hollow chords that anchor “Aurora Northern Quarter” bring to mind Derrick May, and “Vengeance Video” is the album’s most straightforward house cut, a patiently skipping tune that benefits from a loopy synth entering at the halfway point. Another of Cutler’s frequent touchstones, the clean sparkle of new age, is all over Reality Testing. Although the embrace of new age in dance music has become a common trend among young producers, few apply those textures as effectively as Cutler does. Wind chimes enter and exit—opener “First Born Seconds” is literally two minutes of swarming, spa-ready drone—while closer “Cutched Under” calls back to the downtempo glory of the Anneka-featuring Galaxy Garden capper “Spirals”, melding warm tones to the type of marching percussion that overtook Bristol’s bass sound circa 2010.
Cutler’s ear melody takes center stage on Reality Testing. His touch is distinctive and generous—the Lone remix of Radiohead’s The King of Limbs cut “Feral” wrung benevolence out of that album’s most abstract, slight track—and here his jams run free, from the delectable yo-yo synth line that crashes through the head-nod of “Meeker Warm Energy” to the sparkling pan pipes that whirl around the speedy house motifs of “Begin to Begin”. Similar to kindred spirit and Cologne producer Motor City Drum Ensemble, Cutler proves most effective at applying personal dabs of melody to his own vision of the past.
Reality Testing is Cutler’s easiest listen—you can imagine this music playing over coffee shop speakers as much as you could put a rapper on top of it—and as such it may seem less innovative when placed up against his previous two full-lengths. It’s more spare than the dense Galaxy Garden, but it’s also a few minutes longer than that album, and by comparison its relatively placid back half blurs together a little more than the acid-infused pyrotechnics of its predecessors's losing cuts. Regardless, Reality Testing stands as one of the year's best, most luxuriant, and accomplished electronic albums, more proof that when it comes to forging a new future out of what’s already taken place, Cutler remains at the top of his game.


The Vietnamese experimental trio’s debut album offers a breakneck onslaught of disparate styles and moods. The sounds can be thrillingly haphazard, but the vision is unmistakably focused.

Rắn Cạp Đuôi: Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế

Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế

In 2018, the members of the Rắn Cạp Đuôi collective invited musicians to come and improvise with them for 48 hours nonstop. Since they’re virtually the only experimental act in Ho Chi Minh City, the event served as a way to connect with others and create new music. This durational exercise was akin to how the group, which currently consists of Phạm Thế Vũ, Đỗ Tấn Sĩ, and Zach Sch, makes music: In a tiny shack located in the mountains, the players record countless hours of material that Sch later edits and stitches together.
Historically, Vietnam hasn’t ever had a sizable number of active avant-garde musicians, and those in the 21st century—from Đại Lâm Linh to Sound Awakener to the late Vu Nhat Tan—were never as internet-minded as the self-proclaimed “meme club” that is Rắn Cạp Đuôi, who favor titles like “linus tech tips (>ω^).” Their influences include artists with largely “online” fanbases, from hyperpop to James Ferraro, but they’ve also cited the importance of Chino Amobi, a producer whose industrial post-club fantasias mirror the kaleidoscopic collages on Rắn Cạp Đuôi’s official debut album, Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế.
In its best moments, the album delivers a breakneck onslaught of wonders. “Eri Eri Eri Eri Eri Rema Rema Rema Rema Rema” repeatedly stops and starts, its cavalcade of warped vocal samples and head-spinning sound effects echoing the plunderphonic madness of Giant Claw. That it traverses so many moods—spectral terror, fluttering power ambient, funhouse beat flagellations—without losing steam points to the group’s astute sense of pacing. “Distant People” has a similarly large number of tonal shifts, but it can be hard to register everything that happens, given its sensory evolution. The song starts with lo-fi aquatics before displacing its calm into a flurry of electronic twinkles. As a faint SOPHIE-like synth conjures a brooding atmosphere, the whole thing collapses into a looping beat adorned with frenetic synths. The through line is the track’s introspective nature, which is akin to feeling serenity amid whirlwinding chaos. This juxtaposition is at the heart of Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế, whose title proves especially apt: It translates to “sleeping through the apocalypse.”
Until this point, such thrillingly haphazard music was never the defining feature of Rắn Cạp Đuôi’s work. Throughout the past half-decade, they’ve released a multitude of albums and one-off tracks, both together and solo, all highly varied in sound. There’ve been no-wave freak-outs and post-Mark McGuire guitar epics, vocal-based ambience and electroacoustic curios. The concrete and amalgamated vision that defines Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế, realized in part with Berlin producer Ziúr, marks a new beginning for the group, and that this record is billed as the trio’s debut is an understandable maneuver. Such a proclivity for reinvention feels like a central tenet of the collective, and is even represented in their name: Rắn Cạp Đuôi translates literally to “snake bites tail,” a visual depiction of the ouroboros, a symbol of renewal.
Like other contemporary experimental acts from Asia, including Senyawa, Gabber Modus Operandi, and Otay:onii, Rắn Cạp Đuôi incorporate aspects of traditional culture into their music. On “Mực nang,” triumphant percussion and chanting lead into an all-consuming drone. The sound of a ghastly voice hovers above it, though, as if telegraphing that the spirit of such music permeates the band’s contemporary practices. When I hear that, and the manipulated Viet-pop on crystalline standout “Aztec Glue,” and then the Vietnamese voices on radiant industrial closer “Đme giựt mồng,” I’m filled with a nourishing sense of possibility for what “Asian music” can mean. Westerners have often described certain acts to me as “Asian” only when they strictly adhere to traditional forms of music, implying that anything that “sounds contemporary” or “sounds Western” is merely an approximation of a style not belonging to them. At only 27 minutes, Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế is a dense and disorienting spectacle, but also an inspiring declaration: It suggests that “Asian music” can be anything and everything, all at once.

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The Ontario producer turns to a deep bench of guests—Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, Pylon’s Vanessa Briscoe Hay—for a debut album steeped in krautrock’s murky throb.

Thyrsis of Etna

Thyrsis of Etna is Nyles Miszczyk’s debut album, but the Ontario producer has been working behind the scenes for more than a decade, producing leftfield hip-hop and retro new wave and working as the in-house engineer at Toronto’s Royal Mountain Records, where Alvvays got their start. Miszczyk brings a producer’s mentality to his album: All 16 tracks feature a different singer. These guests range from indie heroes Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab and Vanessa Briscoe Hay of Pylon to fellow Toronto artists and labelmates and even a Nigerian rapper, Nai. But he ties it all together with a cohesive sound informed by krautrock’s motorik thump and sparkling melodies.
The majority of these tracks are short—only one of them breaches the three-minute mark—which, compounded with Miszczyk’s insistent rhythms, gives the album plenty of thrust and flow. Between Laetitia Sadier’s dulcet voice and the song’s propulsive bassline, opener “In the Dark” feels like a lost cut from Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements, while the dirge-like “Runaway, I Age” offers a meditative respite before the nervous arpeggios and relentless groove of “The Garden.” Miszczyk covers plenty of territory, from the synth-punk thriller “Immediate Needs,” with its echo of Suicide, to the jangly indie pop of “Lunar Days,” yet they slot together like puzzle pieces.
But the uniformity of the album’s palette—track after track swims in buzzing organs and analog delay—turns stale in album’s the second half. The warbly voice of Colin Lloyd Tucker, who once sang with the Go-Betweens and Kate Bush, disappears into the murk of “New for Old.” And while “On Zuma Beach” hints at the intimacy of a Radiohead demo—singer Corey Hernden even sounds like Thom Yorke—the song’s muted bass feels curiously noncommittal, as if it couldn’t be coaxed out of the shadows.
Given the album’s revolving door of singers, Thyrsis of Etna plays a little like a hip-hop producer’s beat tape. And while his guest vocalists don’t always make the most illuminating guides to Miszczyk’s maze-like terrain—a jumble of non-sequiturs and disconnected images, the lyrics on many songs feel like placeholders for more engaging songwriting—their voices lend texture to his gravelly analog synths, tape-warped effects, and hazy psychedelia, rounding out his retro-futurist universal with a crucial sense of human presence.


The irreverent Detroit rapper’s latest album reaches toward seriousness with traditional song structures and slower, more menacing production.

6

BabyTron likes to goof around. On his early scam raps, he bragged about wheeling and dealing with Russian gangsters on Telegram and punching holes in walls like Dragon Ball Super villain Lord Beerus. He spit over an instrumental with 21 beat changes and, after getting arrested this year, released an EP with his mugshot as the cover, poorly photoshopped to make him look like Super Mario. His casual silliness is one of his most distinct qualities; not many rappers could work quick-witted bars about drug money over the Donkey Kong Country theme, coming off like a Gen-Z answer to Papoose.
After joining last year’s XXL Freshman class, Tron is now making songs for blockbusters. So following the lead of January’s Bin Reaper 3: New Testament, which boasted big-name features from Lil Yachty, Cordae and Rico Nasty, his latest project 6 plunges further into Serious Album territory. Here, the beats are slower and less colorful; in place of kooky pop culture samples from Harry Potter and The Bernie Mac Show is more menacing and grayscale production. There are still plenty of irreverent punchlines (“No veggies on my hibachi, already smoked lots of broccoli”), but the album feels more deliberate.
Take opener “100 Bars,” a word-game endurance test in the vein of Blackalicious’ “Alphabet Aerobics” or The Game’s “300 Bars & Runnin’.” The angle? Tron ascends from 1 to 100 with quips about everything from fighting with grown adults (“Why you tryna beef with me, like ain't you thirty-nine?”) to his dazzling jewelry (“Chain know like eighty-three dance moves, this bitch Sada [Baby]”). But this time, he’s not barreling through the beat, instead taking his time to stunt. He’ll pause the count to whisper an aside or simply let out a “skrrt!” There’s a sense of relish across 6 that’s missing from other Tron projects.
Several cuts feature hooks, a first for Tron. On “Russian Roulette,” he channels the rush of the gun game into a droning chant—“Russian roulette, spin the barrel, point it at yo head/It’s either ‘click’ and you straight or [gunshot], you dead”—that gives the song structure. But his refrains can also drag the momentum, sounding like half-baked placeholders for a better verse. The chorus on “Slo-Mo” is drably delivered and written, redeemed only slightly by a clever comparison between the jewels on his wrist and a Sno-Cone. The hook for “Mush Smush” comes off stilted and repetitive.
Half the fun of a Tron song is following all of the ridiculous images he conjures. On “Eobard Thwane,” he dunks on a hater for having a truck that looks like Mater from Cars before flexing his $6,000 Marni sweater. But this time, his writing has a darker undercurrent. Closing track “Letters” is a series of short confessionals: “It fucked me up that you ain't 'round to catch a jack/It fucked me up that you ain't 'round to catch a flight,” he raps to a dead friend, a twinge of melancholy in his voice. It isn’t exactly Nas’ “One Love,” but this is the most vulnerable Tron has ever been on record. His attempts to dig deeper into himself are a welcome change; he still has a ways to go before he hits the next level.


Mount Kimbie harness their command of detail—plus star turns from King Krule and James Blake—on a rhythm-driven album that feels less like electronic music and more like the work of a full band.

Love What Survives

From the jump, Mount Kimbie have been contrarian. The duo of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos may have chosen a handle that suggests a towering geological formation, but they quip that it merely signifies “a place inside all of us where buses arrive on time.” They began their career on the heels of dubstep, but instead of the drop, they favored drips, blips, and hiccups. Such smallness becomes Mount Kimbie, so much so that Maker’s recent production credit on JAY-Z’s 4:44 is for a song in which the sound of breathing sometimes overshadows the rapper himself. Mount Kimbie’s most ubiquitous two seconds, thus far in their career, might be the thrumming snippet of guitar strings that buzzes behind Chance the Rapper and Justin Bieber’s “Juke Jam,” sampled from their own Crooks & Lovers song “Adriatic.” Four years after their Warp debut, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, Maker now lives in Los Angeles while Campos is still in London. But despite swapping files across thousands of miles, they feel like a real live band bashing out their third album, Love What Survives.
While previous Mount Kimbie albums could bring to mind the meticulous and effervescent electronic music of Boards of Canada, Four Tet, and the like, Love What Survives churns and buzzes like post-punk or krautrock. Mixing circuitry and sweat, their drum machines stumble about like a hyperactive if unlearned drummer. Feeding back like overdriven guitars, the Korg MS-20 and Korg Delta synths that Maker and Campos used exclusively on the album elicit metallic tones reminiscent of plucked kalimbas, conjuring any number of Rough Trade bands from the early 1980s that moved from guitar-centered punk toward more exotic timbres. This jammy, hands-on approach gives instrumental tracks like “Audition” and “Delta” a rough-hewn urgency; they sound like they were hammered out by the band at their squat rather than fussed over on a computer screen.
Adding to that full-band feel is the stable of vocalists Mount Kimbie prominently feature here, including King Krule, Micachu, and their longtime colleague, James Blake. After the striking electronic amalgams they made with King Krule on Cold Spring—the standout tracks “You Took Your Time” and “Meter, Pale, Tone”—Mount Kimbie seethe and roar behind him on the roiling “Blue Train Lines.” Peals of feedback, wobbling bass, and relentless hi-hats sizzle around Archy Marshall’s strangulated growl as he reels off seedy images of razorblades, popping veins, and dead bodies. The song’s watery, inchoate elements don’t quite coalesce until the midpoint, when a furious drumbeat snaps the din into sharp focus and it all goes speeding toward a seething climax. Marshall’s performance is so visceral and intense that it’s hard not to imagine him thrashing on the floor of a mosh pit by the song’s end.
A garbled guitar riff commingles with a throbbing bass figure worthy of the Fall’s early sides on “You Look Certain (I’m Not So Sure),” another highlight. The churning motorik beat is deftly offset by Andrea Balency, the band’s live vocalist, whose multi-tracked voice conjures the curious delivery—monotone yet strangely compelling—that Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen affected during their band’s prime.
Mount Kimbie reunite with James Blake for two of the album’s most off-kilter tracks. “We Go Home Together” is a drunken mix of looped laughter and church organ that turns melodramatic and before abruptly dissolving, some two minutes in; Blake’s tone is more caterwaul than nuanced complement. More successful is the closing “How We Got By,” which also flits between chest-heaving release and slow-decay minimalism. “When I get it wrong/I really get it wrong,” murmurs Blake, exploring a lower register than we’re used to hearing from him; as the song nears its close, the duo drapes his harmonized voice over hesitant piano and understated bass pulse, sounding both opulent and restrained.
But the album’s most stunning vocal turn comes from Micachu on “Marilyn,” which might prove to be the most disarming song in either artist’s oeuvre. Built on an arpeggiated thumb-piano figure and a tapped ride cymbal that swings loosely over the rhythmic grid, it sounds like a lost Arthur Russell song that the Raincoats never got to record for Odyshape. Mica Levi’s deceptively flat intonation bears just enough vibrato that when the horns and melodica enter, the song turns ruminative and redemptive at once. It’s that kind of subtle detail that makes Love What Survives feel all the more substantial. The duo’s music was always full of the small details, but they now conspire toward something bigger.


Planet Mu's new releases from 20-year-old rising talent DJ Nate and comparative veteran DJ Roc put a spotlight on the emerging sounds of juke.

DJ Nate / DJ Roc: Da Trak Genious / The Crack Capone

Da Trak Genious / The Crack Capone

Juke has been bubbling up in the Chicago area for the better part of the past decade, but its roots are deeper in the past. The combination of repetitious pop and hip-hop samples, jackhammering polyrhythmic beats, and faster-than-fast BPMs owes something to Miami bass and ghetto house, which emerged in Chicago and Detroit in the early 1990s. The accompanying dance is derived from jit, which itself owes debts to both traditional African dancing and the jitterbug. The legacy is obscure, but it's there.
Juke is starting to establish roots in the present, too. Salem frequently feature thudding footwork figures in their tracks, as does London's label-of-the-moment Night Slugs, who just released Girl Unit's footwork-indebted single "Wut". UK dubstep artist Addison Groove offered a sparser, cleaner take on the sound with his "Footcrab" single-- and, hell, even the relentless slam of Kanye West's "All of the Lights" carries a trace of footwork's genetics.
The growing fascination with footwork's compositional tics has also brought an equal interest in its raw materials, which is where UK electronic label Planet Mu comes in. In the past few months, they've put out a scene-spanning footwork compilation, Bangs and Works, as well as full-lengths from 20-year-old rising talent DJ Nate and comparative veteran DJ Roc, Da Trak Genious and The Crack Capone, respectively. Despite their difference in age, Nate and Roc's full-lengths share a few similarities: Both excel when working in juke's sonic braggadocio (Nate's "Footwurk Homicide", Roc's "They Can't Fuck Wit Me") and downtempo mood-setters (Roc's mesmerizing rework of Robin Thicke's "Lost Without U"). Both records are of a slightly patience-testing length (Da Trak Genious is a psychosis-inducing 70 minutes long). And, in a quality that applies to the scene as a whole, the tracks succeed in proportion to the quality of their samples.
Roc's The Crack Capone is the more enjoyable full-length. Roc favors cohesive musicality above all else, [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| an attribute that ties into his background in the more colorful Chicago juke sound. The "Crack" in the album title refers not to the drug but to Roc's production style, which favors tightly edited rhythms and snapping track structures. That sense of tightness makes The Crack Capone a frequently invigorating, accessible listen, whether taking on percolating forms of UK bass (album closer "Break it Down") or vibrant blasts of melody (the one-two punch of the Willie Hutch-sampling "Get Buck Jones" and "Gun Smoke").
If Roc is fixated primarily on melody, then Nate's focus is more texture-based. Da Trak Genious is a tough front-to-back listen, and not just because it's so damn long; many of the tracks turn their pop-fixated samples into abstractions, repeating figures endlessly until they become hypnotically broken mantras. The result can be almost psychedelic at times; when he lets the source material breathe a little, as on the Dreamgirls-biting "You're Gonna Luv Me" or the Lil Wayne-sampling "Let Da Beat Build", the results are more immediate but ultimately less interesting. Still, it's heartening that Nate, Roc, and other artists working in the genre don't seem overly invested in any one template, and it'll be interesting to see where the scene's talents take their sound next.


TK

GUTS

Twenty seconds into the music video for her hit single “good 4 u,” Olivia Rodrigo sits in front of two casting directors, partially obscured behind white text that reminds the viewer what we’re about to see is not real life, but a production: “Starring Olivia Rodrigo.” The song is a deliriously petty pop-punk retort to an ex who moved on a little too fast, and though this offense makes him basically “a damn sociopath” in her book, she’s the one gleefully acting like a psycho. Scowling on camera, she is the imperious head cheerleader slamming twerps into lockers, throwing hissy fits while applying mascara and setting her bedroom aflame. The inspiration behind the song—an indifferent ex—is pretty ordinary. But Rodrigo, pop star and veteran performer, knows how to turn the ritual humiliations of girlhood into dazzling, over-the-top spectacles. The world’s a stage, and she’s gonna put on a fucking show.
Guts, her uproarious second album, is a collection of bratty rocker-chick anthems and soul-searching ballads that could slot into the soundtrack of any classic high school flick, from 10 Things I Hate About You to this year’s ludicrous queer sex comedy Bottoms. While it might seem tailored to zoomers, several generations will hear the music of their youth: from Blondie and Toni Basil, to Hole and Letters to Cleo, to Avril Lavigne and the Veronicas, to the more recent Lorde. Rodrigo faces a familiar cast of antagonists: shitty boys, social anxiety, bad self-image, and competitive obsessions with other beautiful women. On the pop-punk freakout “ballad of a homeschooled girl,” she spirals over her various party faux pas—smashing glasses, blabbing too much—and wonders, once again, why a girl can’t catch a break. She might as well have called the album Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen: “Everything I do is tragic/Every guy I like is gay,” she sighs exasperatedly, a theater girl to her core.
Rodrigo might be a self-proclaimed “goody two-shoes,” but she’s not interested in playing the perfect little angel. On “all-american bitch”—an epithet borrowed from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem—she reckons with the impossible expectations young girls face: to be sexy and virginal, selfless and ambitious, and no matter what, to be always grateful. She sarcastically inhabits the archetype of the ideal woman, highlighting its ridiculousness: “I am light as a feather and stiff as a board,” she sings over twinkly guitar, the halo hovering over the perfectly-coiffed hair she curled with Coke bottles. But soon her plastic smile starts to melt into a grimace, and on the chorus, she wilds out, putting on her best dirtbag All-American Rejects sneer.
Instead of having “class and integrity like a goddamn Kennedy,” she’s fucking up tremendously, waking up in her ex’s bed with a hangover and a million missed texts demanding to know why she’s disappeared from Find My Friends. On Sour Rodrigo called out a former flame for his cruelty; here she winces at the degree to which she is to blame—a chronic self-sabotager who simply cannot get well. “Jesus what was I even doing?” she questions on the Kelly Clarkson-meets-Two Door Cinema Club romp “love is embarrassing,” aghast at how she reassured a lousy guy she was dating over his ex getting a new boyfriend. Rest assured: Even a Grammy Award-winning superstar with it-girl friends and a Vogue cover will still get trampled over by a “weird second-string loser not worth mentioning.”
But Rodrigo makes acting stupidly sound so fun you wonder what’s the point of being smart. The insouciant, rip-roaring highlight “bad idea right?” might as well be an advertisement for reckless behavior, following Rodrigo as she sneaks to an ill-advised hook-up, probably with the same loser. She hears the voice of reason—“I should probably, probably not!”—but drowns it out with a chorus of blah blah blahs, narrating the escapade with Kesha-level irreverence. “Can’t two people reconnect?” she chirps, feigning innocence to her friends. “I tripped and fell into his bed!” It’s a testament to the thrills of delusion, how, with a little alcohol and a bruised enough ego, your ex who’s a 6 on a good day can momentarily resemble the divine creation of Michelangelo. You might regret your shenanigans in the morning, but whatever. “Fuck it, it’s fine,” she dismisses.
Guts is so spunky and bitingly charismatic that its few lows feel like a shame. Counterbalancing the album’s ruthless zingers are the platitudes of treacly ballads like “logical,” on which Rodrigo tries to show her romantic irrationality with a grade-school mathematics demonstration. The album’s more somber offerings are not always bad on their own, but amid songs that showcase such ripened self-awareness, they can feel stuck in the past, content to repeat the same wounded, wide-eyed disbelief of “drivers license.” “the grudge” even has the same pulsing piano and sky-scraping vocals. And the gap between party songs and melancholic confessionals is more stark than on an ostensible forebear like Melodrama, creating a greater sense of disjuncture. But not all attempts at earnestness land poorly: “pretty isn’t pretty” is an iridescent mid-tempo pop-rocker with beautiful, twisting vocals. It has the crystalline satisfactions of an Alvvays song.
Listening to the lesser ballads creates a deeper appreciation for the innovations of “vampire,” Guts’ withering lead single about a parasitic older man who descended upon Rodrigo for her youth and status. At first the singer is just a static figure at the piano, tormented by his betrayal and her own naïveté. But instead of staying in this funereal mode, she and producer Dan Nigro slowly accelerate the tempo, creating a climatic rock opera that whirls through new settings as if to recreate the disorientation of a toxic love affair. The song’s vampire-themed concept is a little trite—a Twilight fan simply can’t help herself—but she roughens it up with her word choices, among them the brilliant little insult “fame-fucker.” Rodrigo kicked off the last album with the declaration “I want it to be, like, messy”—and throughout Guts, she and Nigro demonstrate an admirable willingness to ruffle the order, always down for an instrument switch-up, loopy spoken ad-lib, or surprise guitar solo.
But back to this fame-fucker: He’s the subject of the album’s bona fide smash, a topsy-turvy rap-rock heater called “get him back!” With a bored, over-it attitude, Rodrigo recalls the saga of their relationship, how he’d make passes at her friends but then whisk her away to Paris to cover for his indiscretions. She’s probably done with him, right? Well, not exactly. “I am my father’s daughter, I said maybe I can fix him,” she chants, slyly nodding to her therapist dad. The title cleverly reflects all the emotions rattling in her head, how in one moment she wants to demolish his car and in the next she just wants to make out. “I want sweet revenge/I want him again,” she sings in a rousing chorus that demands to be shouted everywhere: in the gymnasium, at the tailgate, while you’re in a ski mask egging a house. She may not be the ideal role model, but the best main characters never are.


Autechre albums, like Stanley Kubrick films, are the substance of critics' nightmares. For all of his artistry, Kubrick occasionally dropped ...

Confield

Autechre albums, like Stanley Kubrick films, are the substance of critics' nightmares. For all of his artistry, Kubrick occasionally dropped bombs like Barry Lyndon, a film that bored audiences at its debut and never gained relevance with time. All directors can claim their share of failures, but Kubrick's affinity for intellectual understatement often masked the initial appeal of his work, making it difficult for audiences to separate the wheat from the chaff when his movies first came out.
Only the passage of time distinguished the strokes of cinematic brilliance from their clumsy, hollow counterparts; but reviewers, bound to deadlines, never got to enjoy the benefit of hindsight. Instead, they resorted to blind guesses, issued sharply divided reviews, and crossed their fingers in hopes that, when the smoke eventually cleared, the future would prove them right.
So imagine my anxiety when I discovered I had only a week to come to terms with Autechre's new long-player, Confield. The group's oeuvre includes equal measures of visionary genius and uninspired tripe. While LP5 and Tri Repetae++ remind us that Rob Brown and Sean Booth have access to a talent matched by only a handful of contemporary electronic producers, Amber and Chiastic Slide suggest that this access is inconsistent, fleeting and out of their control.
To further complicate things, Confield catches the pair in the most abstract, difficult period of their nine-year recording career. I've had the album for just over a week now, and must confess I'm still not certain I have a firm grasp on it. But I've given the songs enough effort and attention (headphones and speakers, stoned and sober, and several times without pause from beginning to end) to draw a few early conclusions. And it pleases me to announce that they're resoundingly favorable.
Confield picks up where its predecessor, the four-track Peel Session 2 EP, left off-- splicing the ambient, non-musical styles of artists like Kit Clayton and Phthalocyanine into Autechre's more structured syntheses. Booth and Brown exercise a meticulous economy of melody on this disc, so much so that many of the tracks cease to resemble proper songs.
They have instead assembled an album of ordered soundscapes-- nine methodically arranged pieces that rely largely on repetition of textural, dissonant and atonal sounds to construct a variety of aural climates. Think EP7 without the hooks. Think early Tetsu Inoue, with twice the depth and a penchant for foundry sounds. Now welcome to Confield, where the local time is the tomorrow.
My first listen to this album required a great deal of toil and patience-- desperately listening for rhythms, trends, bits of melodic resolution and a general sense of cohesion. I made the mistake of launching straight into "Bine," the sixth track, which discouraged me because it had none of those things. In retrospect, I should have started where Autechre wanted me to: with "VI Scose Poise," the album's opener.
Though one of Confield's least satisfying pieces, the first track offers a roadmap for the material that follows. Booth and Brown employ techniques in this song that recur more subtly in later tracks, and the opener becomes a means by which to understand some of the disc's more challenging material. The song is, in a sense, a metaphor for the record at large: patterns emerge from the discord; cacophonous droning wells up in tense knots, then dissipates with the appearance of three-note melodic bursts; the sonic hellstorm relents in scattered moments of clarity, but never recesses for long. Just as the melodies begin to acquire complexity, the song comes to an abrupt close, dropping the listener once again onto foreign soil.
"Cfern," which follows, comes out swinging with a disjointed barrage of elastic snares. Languid synth pads churn out a stagnant stew of dissonant notes, in which the clicks become burps and the cuts become bubbles. "Pen Expers," next on the playlist, ups the tempo with a spastic drill-n-bass joint whose vacuum-navigated drums and reversed string hits evoke imagery of liposuction.
Confield carries on like this until the final note-- each song establishes a personality distinct from the rest, cautiously balancing musicality with chaos. The latter half of the disc actually surpasses the former. The subtle funk of "Parhelic Triangle," the record's apogee, reminisces of "Acroyear2" from LP5. A brooding, troglodytic bassline chugs through a spectral landscape of chimes, bells and railroad crossings, while the violent sounds of a threshing machine keep the pace. "Lentic Catachresis" closes the show with a blistering exercise in drum programming. Booth and Brown wind the beats progressively tighter, capping the album with a thick lid of percussive sound.
Many long-time Autechre enthusiasts will feel alienated by the pair's latest release. It's not Tri Repetae++, but it's unlikely that Booth and Brown will ever revisit the trademark sound that brought them fame. For those willing to take these times in stride, Confield promises elegant production, accessibility in moderation, and one of the most enveloping, thought-provoking listening experiences to come forth from leftfield this year. You just have to reach for it.


As the Cleveland band returns to Electrical Audio at full force, they retain their penchant for rueful concision and world-weary chronicles of pandemic existence.

The Shadow I Remember

On their seventh album, Cloud Nothings remind us that personal shit persists during a pandemic—that lockdowns give us longer periods to chew over what becomes harder to swallow. As tuneful as ever, The Shadow I Remember presents the Cleveland quartet not as fighters or complacent survivors but as chroniclers, telling fragmented stories about chronic malaise and nights as dark as northern winters.
Thanks to engineer Steve Albini and their faith in a narrowing gyre of noise, Cloud Nothings could’ve released three-quarters of The Shadow I Remember at the peak of their early-2010s ubiquity. But what began as questioning has hardened into doubt. Immune to self-pity or the cynicism that is a curdled form of sentimentality, singer-guitarist Dylan Baldi finds the world testing his patience—the mess is permanent, as a grim title on The Black Hole Understands notes. “Does anybody living out there really need me?” he howls in “Am I Something.” Opener “Oslo” wonders, “Am I at the end/Or will there be another change?” Baldi presents these verses as questions, not wisdom. His and guitarist Chris Brown’s six-string crosstalk keeps a dialogue open; drummer Jayson Gerycz and bassist T.J. Duke’s rhythms rumble and thrash, impatient and surly.
Expect no left turns on The Shadow I Remember. Seven months after Baldi and Gerycz assembled The Black Hole Understands in isolation, Cloud Nothings have regained their full line-up but retained their penchant for rueful concision. Elaborations like Last Building Burning’s 10-minute “Dissolution” or even Attack on Memory’s eight-minute “Wasted Days” are gone. Rather, like the old pros they are, Cloud Nothings fold experiments into their post-punk formalism: the looped guitar arpeggio in “A Longer Moon” may evoke similar textures in a Mission of Burma track, but it slaps like Rush’s “Spirit of Radio.” The new filigrees offer pleasures previously denied in this most ascetic of bands: When Ohmme’s Macie Stewart sings the second half of the chorus of “Nothing Without You,” you can practically see Baldi’s shit-eating grin, a levity he and Brown swiftly dispel with a series of pulverizing riffs.
But every time I play The Shadow I Remember I return to “Sound of Alarm.” Propelled by a nagging, needling fuzz hook, it centers on the declaration, “I need to make time for me.” Gerycz’s thunderous interjection breaks the line into discrete Hemingway-esque halves; Baldi pauses as if to get out of the way. When work and leisure dissolve into empty space, it’s easy to imagine Cloud Nothings anticipating our anxiety with something like 2012’s on-the-nose “No Future/No Past.” But The Shadow I Remember understands the thrill, too.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Newly reprinted on vinyl, this collab between Jneiro Jarel and the elusive MC features remixes from Thom Yorke, Beck, and more. It remains one of the best releases to feature DOOM’s name this decade.

Bookhead EP

*Key to the Kuffs *has aged into excellence in the nearly five years since it first came out. It can still feel a little weird hearing MF DOOM with a couple MPH off his fastball, but that only puts more stink on his trick pitches—like his how’d-he-rhyme-that internals and a thematic villainy that’s never felt more at home on some off-the-grid corner of the Deep Web. And while Jneiro Jarel never went as far afield as Madlib or subverted classic hip-hop and R&B like DOOM’s own production did, his beats weren’t afraid to be at least a bit unnerving—just a notch below the potential to be an Organized Noize for the West Coast bass crowd.
It might’ve been the *Butter Edition *that made it a bit clearer: Released a year after the original August 2012 pressing of Key to the Kuffs, the limited edition expanded reissue tacked on a bonus disc with four outtake tracks and five remixes that brought in some serious indie-crossover star power. That disc got another limited run on its own as a 12” picture disc half a year after that, and while it wasn’t exactly impossible to find, it seems like it nearly slipped through the cracks. That release, the *Bookhead *EP, is getting another lease on life from Lex Records. It’s not really any different from the *Butter Edition *bonus/2013 12” that came out a few years back, but it deserves another go-round as one of the best releases to feature DOOM’s name this decade.
As a short but potent dose of hook-free haranguing, the title track has aged into a strong fan-favorite deep cut with one of the better JJ beats to come from that whole collection. DOOM rapping about escaping from the grind by losing himself in reading (”From the mean streets of the ‘Can I get a dollar, dude?’/Above measure, the singular pleasure of solitude”) would be a pretty good public library PSA if Jarel’s beat didn’t lurk like the synthesized soundtrack to leafing through the poetry books of Aleister Crowley. “Pause Tape” is a little less focused, featuring DOOM at his most thematically free-associative (“Quicker than a sleight of hand, like, damn/Telepathy and telekinesis, faster than Instagram”). It’s also one of two tracks (along with the quickie “The Signs”) where Jarel has enough time on the mic to turn his workmanlike voice around a few unlikely turns of phrase (”Never compromise, keep it real/Never peek at you/Rolling through the jungle/Glowing eyes like a kinkajou”). Then there’s “Viberian Son,” the counterpart to the “Part II” instrumental that showed up on Key to the Kuffs. DOOM’s verse is practically a cameo, but his lines about talking to your kids instead of hitting them register more memorable than Del the Funky Homosapien’s scattershot phrases.
”Bookhead” aside, and no slight to Jarel, the major draw here is the collection of remixes that fill out the EP’s later stretch. The indie/art-rock contributions ramp up DOOM’s griminess in oblique ways without losing sight of the fact that the tracks are supposed to knock. Dave Sitek collabed with Jarel on one of the better remixes on 2010’s *Gazzillion Ear *EP, and that formula pays off again with the Sitek remix of “Rhymin Slang.” More a customization than a transformation, it pares back the synth riff that made the original seethe and foregrounds the tape-hiss low end and adds some more expressive drum kicks and a brief Latin percussion breakdown that gives the UK-banished DOOM a postcard from New York. Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke turn the unlikely target “Retarded Fren” into a lurching chamber music nerve-rattler that toes the orchestral line between suspense-thriller score and “Looney Tunes” gag. And the plinky, clunky robot piano funk of Beck’s take on “Banished” is Exhibit Q of what he could do if he decided his *Midnite Vultures *mode was more worth resurrecting than Sea Change.
That said, the two most fascinating remixes are the ones that inspire what-ifs, coming from two acts known for putting distinctive fingerprints on their production work for rap artists. BADBADNOTGOOD have done more thrilling work in recent years than their remix for “Guv’nor,” but it still fits DOOM’s more diabolical side. And “Bookfiend,” the title cut reworked by Clams Casino, gives us a glimpse at the villain in Jack Kirby mechanized Day-Glo environs, cloud rap where the atmosphere’s laced with crackling cosmic rays. Either one of these acts could make for a revelatory full-length collab with DOOM, new frontiers for a vet who feels weathered by experience without necessarily feeling straight-up old. For now, we’ve got one-offs like the ones on this EP to keep us guessing—which is what DOOM does best, anyways.


The Discwoman co-founder’s keen understanding of space and dynamics makes just a few overlapping rhythms and melodies feel unexpectedly expansive.

RIVEN

Emma Burgess-Olson—the New York producer best known as UMFANG—has often emphasized the self-imposed limitations on her work. When she designs artwork for her albums and flyers, she often limits herself to the rudimentary tools pre-installed on her computer, rather than using something more powerful, like Photoshop. As she’s become one of New York’s most respected producers of both techno tracks and more obtuse experiments, she’s often forced herself to make music under similar constraints.
Most of UMFANG’s 2017 album Symbolic Use of Light, for example, was made with a single drum machine that she bought off a friend for $50. She pitched up basslines from the device to make piercing lead melodies, finding a surprising lushness in her stripped-down setup. Even when she isn’t explicitly making records with a single piece of gear, her work is marked by stylistic restraint. Though she shirks ornamentation and excess, there’s a sort of sleight of hand embedded in her process. If she didn’t tell you, you might not notice that she’s working with such a limited palette. Her keen understanding of space and dynamics makes just a few overlapping rhythms and melodies feel unexpectedly expansive.
Burgess-Olson hasn’t explained the specifics of the creation of RIVEN, the first release on her new label Thanks for Enlightening Me, but its eight tracks evince a similar philosophy. None are especially busy; it’s rare to hear more than a few layers of instrumentation going at once. Often, she’ll zero in on just a sound or two, letting them loop and mutate, and figuring out what feelings present themselves in the meditative repetition. “Rubber” is built around a single, spare synth phrase that echoes delicately as a percussive bass part thrums in the far distance. The song doesn’t change much after its oozy intro, but had she given in to the temptation to add more, its fragile beauty could have easily been shattered.
This discipline isn’t necessarily a surprising approach for a producer schooled on techno, a genre that’s often austere by design. What makes RIVEN special is how diverse it manages to be, even with its relatively sparse parts. The record opens with an ambient yawn called “Flare,” which quickly gives way to prismatic keygen funk (“Glass Escalator”), dubby refractions (“2 Body Beat”), overcast techno (“Riven”), slowly unfolding kosmische (“Rubber”), and even ghostly approximations of grime instrumentals (“Baby Blue”). The tracks can be long and elliptical, but they don’t settle into a mood for longer than a song or two, which gives the record an ecstatic energy despite its low-key arrangements.
UMFANG has shown this kind of range before, dipping into skeletal experimentation on records like Riffs and more straightforward floor-fillers on albums like OK, but she’s never tried out this many different sounds on one record. In that way, RIVEN feels like a testing ground for new ideas and forms that she wants to bring into the fold of the broader UMFANG project. Yet the relative minimalism of each piece lends the record a comforting uniformity. It’s like opening a sketchbook and seeing still lifes of all sorts of objects, each rendered in the same style: simple, stark, and elegant.


On her quietly confident debut, this soulful Chicago singer-songwriter offers portraits of intimacy and songs about the need for self-love.

Alone at Last

Tasha makes wondrous, gentle soul that advocates for self-care. But the music of the Chicago singer-songwriter is radically different from Dove beauty campaigns or expensive Goop product guides, where ideas of empowerment are preached with no mention of the struggle it takes to get there or the fact that real self-care is more than a marketing ploy. Instead, on her incisive seven-song debut, Alone at Last, she reimagines the world as loving and safe while exploring the hurt and anguish inherent in navigating our society, especially as a queer black woman. She positions self-care as a remedy to oppression, not as a crass money-making tool.
Tasha is a poet, activist, and musician who has worked with organizations like Black Youth Project 100, a nationwide group built in part on “political education using a Black queer feminist lens.” Her 2016 EP, Divine Love, focused on self-love and political activism, inspired in part by her work with the Black Youth Project. For Alone at Last, she picks up near where she left off: “Sometimes I’m afraid that if I die/Everyone will be too tired to remember my name,” she says during the still, spoken-word opener “Take Care.” She contrasts images of unknotted curls, warm water, and bubbles on her nose with jarring lines about the inevitability of pain and loss. For her, self-care means preparing to meet injustices in order to honor and protect those injured by them. That starts with the individual. “When the next deaths come, because they will,” she speaks, “we will have vigor enough to remember their names.”
This acknowledgement of the dark realities of a racist, sexist, homophobic world—and Tasha’s celebration of joy in spite of it—is Alone at Last’s unifying idea. On “Kind of Love,” a song about the thrill of falling for someone, Tasha sees the act itself as political, a way to find “stillness in a world on fire and bodies without hurt.” She imagines radiant utopias where black people can exist free of harm during “New Place,” singing, “Hurry, before they see that we’re leaving/Don’t worry, haven’t you noticed you haven’t been breathing?” And on the stunning “Lullaby,” Tasha reassures black girls that she understands too well “how much it hurts/To always prove your worth.” She urges them to “keep your magic to yourself.”
During “New Place” and “Lullaby,” Tasha’s layered vocals create an angelic cushion for her words; her simple, pick-and-strum guitar lines foster a sense of intimacy. Tasha’s voice and her deliberate words are foregrounded above these choral orchestrations and meandering beats. Like amber, her voice is mellow and luminous, adding to the music’s feeling of comfort in the face of all this anxiety. The subtly psychedelic instrumentals and warped vocals during “Something About This Girl” alter the pace and tone, adding depth and texture. Still, there is more room for variation and experimentation here, other ways to animate these conflicting feelings. In this sense, Alone at Last feels like the debut it is. But with lines as beautiful on the page as they are on the track, like “What’s the word for falling into someone else’s sigh,” it is exciting enough to imagine the shapes Tasha’s songs may soon take.
These are “bed songs,” Tasha has said, sweet and tender tunes to which you could drift asleep. Beds—in particular, her bed—show up numerous times, representing dreaminess and safety, a holy place where Tasha is “alone at last with space to cry.” But this is not mere escapism, songs about forgetting the world outside. Tasha reminds the listener again and again why rest is necessary, how the fight for equality or even existence requires tremendous energy and care.


Meek Mill's major label debut, featuring Drake, Rick Ross, Mary J. Blige, Nas, Trey Songz, Wale, and others, is an album that's distinct in voice and sound, one that plays to the Philadelphia rapper's strengths.

Dreams and Nightmares

Rappers who come up through the mixtape circuit have two choices when it comes time for their major label debuts. On the one hand, they can try to please their core fanbase by sticking to their established sound. The downside of this approach is that it may stunt their ability to grab a larger audience. (It also leaves them open to accusations of asking fans to pay for a record that is basically a well-mastered mixtape.) The other option is to go full pop and embrace the new collaborators and sounds that a big budget has to offer, a path associated with disrespected sellouts (B.o.B.), MCs mired in self-loathing (Lupe Fiasco), and rappers that tried to go pop and failed anyway (Wale's first act).
There are exceptions. Artists like Drake and J. Cole have made better, more accessible versions of the early songs that first got them buzz, and Nicki Minaj plays both sides of the field. Waka Flocka Flame was smart enough to capitalize on his timing simply by turning a proposed mixtape into a debut album, and, most recently, Kendrick Lamar used his unwavering artistic vision to essentially subvert this game entirely. But this is still a thin line for artists to walk, one so difficult that good-to-great major label rap debuts now feel like a minor miracle.
So maybe Dreams and Nightmares is something to celebrate, even though it's imperfect. After navigating that push-pull, Meek Mill has emerged with an album that is distinct in both voice and sound and also plays to his strengths. It is tense and dramatic, with variations of piano constituting the bedrock of the album and Meek rapping passionately even by his own standards.
His music channels pain, anger, empathy, and glee into a wave that hits immediately and forcefully, especially on the album's first two songs. On the opening title track, he raps unabated for nearly four minutes, tracing lines from his come-up in Philly to strip clubs in Miami and back, over a beat that morphs into menace halfway through. It's a track that best distills Meek's singularity; hurt oozes from his voice and words, illustrating rap's literal and spiritual roots.
Rap is often about contradiction, of wanting to stay humble and true while still stunting. Sneering talking heads and confused elitists use that struggle as a weapon against the music: How can this music, and these artists, be taken seriously when they brag about throwing money at strippers? The genius of Meek's music is that he embodies, fleshes out, and answers the rapper's dilemma.
Struggle and triumph, are palpable and plainly articulated in his music, and it makes the best of Dreams and Nightmares (including "In God We Trust" and "Believe It") feel eminently vital. He is as much a truth-teller as lyricist, and this singular viewpoint and delivery have both been carried over from his mixtapes. It extends to "Traumatized", a track where Meek addresses his father's killer while illustrating exactly how treacherous his upbringing was for him and those around him. Where some rappers coast, Meek's mere existence feels earned.
Unfortunately, the album loses steam with a quarter of the way to go. "Tony Story Pt. 2" is the follow-up to the stunning storytelling track from Dreamchasers, but this version lacks its precision and is bogged down by a chintzy Boi-1da beat. "Who You're Around", featuring Mary J. Blige, marks the point where the album becomes syrupy and maudlin. Some songs that appear earlier on the album ("Maybach Curtains", "Young Kings") borrow the orchestral bloat of Rick Ross, and could've been replaced by up-tempo bangers à la "House Party" or "Burn" on which Meek has made his name.
Still, Meek has made the move from mixtapes to the majors with a solid vision. Whether he can maintain or strengthen that in the future is an open question, but this is music that immediately hits emotionally and physically while lingering in your thoughts long after you turn it off. Dreams and Nightmares is the type of thing rap will always need, even when it's in flawed form*.*


On their sixth album Transgender Dysphoria Blues, Laura Jane Grace and Against Me! draw a hard line between “identity” and “ideology.” Produced by Grace and put out on her own label Total Treble, the band splits the difference from old and new into a compact sound that skews more Sex Pistols than Foo Fighters.

Against Me!: Transgender Dysphoria Blues

Transgender Dysphoria Blues

It’s been easy to disagree about the fluid and often conflicting ideology of Against Me! over the years. They were born to the Gainesville, Fla., scene as anarcho-punks, wearing black and fully DIY; NOFX's Fat Mike offered the band some money and off they went to his Fat Wreck label, a farm league for the majors where bands could slug Bro Hymns to the kids at Warped Tour. Then Sire offered them even more money so they went up to a major, effectively jettisoning any remaining Reinventing Axl Rose ideologues. And finally in 2010, lead singer Laura Jane Grace (who was then known as Tom Gabel) sang her mea culpa/kiss-off to all those who cried “sell outs,” to those who would go to Against Me! shows and stand there with a middle finger in the air in silent protest wearing studded vests and liberty spikes. She sang on “I Was a Teenage Anarchist” with her own middle finger to the crowd: “You want me to surrender my identity/ I was a teenage anarchist/ The revolution was a lie.”
But identity is a different thing entirely—it's what houses ideology, where ideology goes to gather agency and dig roots. In a rare act, Laura Jane Grace and Against Me! draw a hard line between these concepts with their sixth studio album Transgender Dysphoria Blues. It’s almost kismet for a band who’s been lambasted for not committing to their ideologies to make an album about a real identity crisis. Grace came out as transgender in 2012, and started writing these songs around that period. They were built out from raw acoustic folk punk into 10 songs of slapdash glam punk that carry great urgency, even those songs that don’t directly concern Grace’s journey. She makes all that cis punk sound limp in comparison.
Good news for early adopters of the band: all that Butch Vig lacquer from their last two albums has mostly been scraped off. The record even opens with a little cowpunk shuffle on the title track to firmly mark a departure from the arena stylings of New Wave and White Crosses. Produced by Grace and put out on her own label Total Treble, the band splits the difference between old and new into a compact sound that skews more Sex Pistols than Foo Fighters. It’s comparatively gaunt for Against Me! as of late, but it yields the stage to Grace’s voice, which has never sounded better.
The aggression peaks right at the top, when years of suppression meet the rage in her voice with lines like, “You’ve got no cunt in your strut/ You’ve got no hips to shake” and “They just see a faggot.” It escalates soon after on “Drinking With the Jocks”, where Grace dissembles with and dismantles misogynistic bro culture in about two minutes flat. She sings, “There will always be a difference between me and you” with a little diva flip, the perfect inflection for the album’s key pull-quote.
For every “fuck you” there is an equal and opposite “fuck me,” where all the anger that’s on the surface of the album starts to crack and reveal deap-seated anxiety flowing underneath. Consider that Grace may, as she's discussed, undergo plastic surgery to be who she wants to be, in addition to taking treatments of estrogen, progesterone, and Spironolactone all while confronting stigmas and thwarting skeptics along the way. While never too overtly stated, displacement and shame color Grace’s growl, especially on the MySpace username as song title “FuckMyLife666”, which incidentally reconnects the band with Fat Mike, who plays bass on the track. It really cuts to hear Grace sing from the judgmental third person: “Chipped nail polish and a barbed wire dress/ Is your mother proud of your eyelashes?” Later in the song, she submits another competitor for Tagline of the Album: “There's a brave new world that's raging inside of me.”
If only Grace could rest her big black margiela boots on these singular moments, these battle cries for trans culture. The songs themselves are never as daring as Grace herself throughout Transgender Dysphoria Blues. You can feel her breath on your face, taking on the jocks, death (on the acoustic “Two Coffins”), major label execs (“Black Me Out”), and even Osama Bin Laden. She sometimes spirals into the verbose and clunky lyricism that has followed her around her entire career, as on “Dead Friend”, whose words seem untimely ripped from someone still in the gangly throes of grief.
In detours from the title topic, Grace’s anger is scrawled too hard and too sloppy on the page—see “Osama Bin Laden as the Crucified Christ”. Any of the song’s grander metaphors are lost behind the jingoistic chorus, “You’re gonna hang like Benito from the Esso rafters/ Hang like Clara with her skull caved in.” The eye-for-an-eye, boot-in-yer-ass simile is some distance from throwing shade at Robert McNamera on White Crosses. It’s easy to look past occasionally ineffectual production, staid song arrangements, and static guitar riffs when Grace—as she discovers herself on the album—is anything but ineffectual, staid, or static. But when she addresses politics or mortality, the record falls flat and lapses into gawky extremes.
If Transgender Dysphoria Blues was wholly focused on transgender dysphoria blues, it would push aside so much of what Against Me! has built through the years; even in their shortcomings, they remain who they are. But it's fitting that there are facets of the album that refuse to cohere, that don't quite fit right, that flail about in its too-eager execution. These welts are ultimately part of Grace's journey to the depths of self-discovery, and the journey to Against Me!'s true sound, all while playing to the theme of transformation. Punk has always been about disruption of order, and this new revolution that Laura Jane Grace leads doesn't surrender her identity, it reclaims it. This revolution is no lie at all.


As Snoop cruises on into his Cool Uncle entrepreneur phase, the title of his very enjoyable 15th studio album, Neva Left, is, nevertheless, pretty accurate.

Neva Left

Like frat parties and Razor scooters, rapping is for the young. Braggadocio, especially when it’s based on how many girls you’re fucking, guns you’re holding, and pounds of coke you’re moving, doesn't look good on older men. And just like a dad trying to hold court in his old football locker room, it comes off as desperate to keep reliving your glory days or, even worse, rap like you’re still on the come-up when it’s well-reported you’ve been tucked away in a mansion for years. With varying degrees of success, rappers nearing middle age have tried to talk about wives and art collections and other facets of adulting, but few of their longtime fans want to be reminded that they’re not 22 anymore. If rap is your means of artistic expression and your way to make a living, what’s a rapper nearing middle age to do?
Snoop Dogg is one of the lucky ones. He’s savvy, maneuvering his career with shows like “Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood” and the endearing documentary series “Coach Snoop” so that his image now reflects a family man who has been married nearly 20 years and is a compassionate role model for the kids in his peewee football league. He adopted Wiz Khalifa early in the fellow weed aficionado’s career, re-upping his relevance and sealing his status as a legend with a new generation. With the launch of his cannabis-centered lifestyle site Merry Jane in fall 2015, he shifted from stoner to a champion of legalized marijuana. He’s so universally adored that Kylie Jenner hasn’t been excoriated for using “Kylizzlemynizzl,” a riff on his popular slang, as her Snapchat name.
Despite those endeavors, the title of his very enjoyable latest album, Neva Left, is accurate. Snoop Dogg really hasn’t ever taken a break from music. In fact, he’s been something of a machine, cranking out almost two dozen records in as many years since the 1993 debut of his bona fide classic Doggystyle.
Happily, on Neva Left, Snoop hasn’t become a grumpy old man, nor is he trying to keep up with the kids. Snoop’s gift is two-pronged: a penchant for always dropping into the pocket and his low, smoky growl of a voice, which curls and stretches words in such a distinctive way no one has ever mimicked it successfully. “Trash Bags”—produced by Atlanta-based Musik MajorX, featuring an Uncle Luke sample and K Camp’s pleasingly detached hook—is the closest Snoop comes to trying on a new style. “Lavender,” produced by BADBADNOTGOOD and Kaytranada, is a gorgeously trippy track, but it’s the foreign entity in a game of “one of these things is not like the other.” Mostly, though, Snoop keeps the features and production within his era—Battlecat, Rick Rock, Devin the Dude, Too $hort.
And why not? It might not always be on trend, but on his 15th studio album, Snoop sounds in great shape and like he’s having the time of his life. “Moment I Feared” features him slipping into double time as nimbly as any young whippersnapper, and just try not to get “Swivel” stuck in your head. Lots of nods to classic records—J-Massive’s “Bacc in da Dayz” samples “Check the Rhime,” “Promise You This” interpolates Too $hort’s (or One Way’s, depending on how you look at it) “Don’t Fight the Feeling”—let old fans reminisce and new ones discover.
Snoop’s other strategy is simply pointing out the obvious instead of trying to be the cool dad, acknowledging his age and offering advice like the OG he is. On “Go On,” an instant cruising classic that indulges his abiding love for slick ’80s R&B, he mentions riding bikes with his grandson in the park. The one dent in his armor is hitting on a girl literally young enough to be his daughter on the fun, degrading (some things haven’t changed) bop “Toss It”: “She say she went to school with my young son … told me that her daddy was a Eight Tray Crip, I did time with the nigga.”
Still, letting go of the good ol’ days is harder the older you get. On “Neva Left,” the album opener, the first words out of Snoop’s mouth are, “I gang bang to the fullest.” The last are shout outs to Crip sets across L.A. and Long Beach. Like Bruce Springsteen sings on “Glory Days,” “I hope when I get old I don’t sit around thinking about it—but I probably will.”


Written almost entirely in French, the Parisian artist’s quietly imaginative new album pursues a sonic and lyrical interiority that doesn’t always translate to great pop.

Christine and the Queens: Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)

Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)

The conceptual territory of Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue), the latest Christine and the Queens album, starts with the Bible, with the story of the Archangel Michael and his quest for dragons and meaning. Then it goes mid-century. Here’s Gena Rowlands in the John Cassavetes film Opening Night, seeing ghosts, lighting up a smoke in a robe. Then it goes into the real and explicitly autobiographical, exploring the grief of losing a parent, the realization that you’re trans, and the refusal to conform to anyone’s expectations about what that looks like. The artist now goes by Redcar, a new name that comes from something like an omen: After his mother’s death, he kept seeing red cars over and over and over again.
That’s a lot of ground to cover in just under an hour of music. And for his entire career, Redcar has made pop that is both effervescent and conceptually rich. The electric, dazzling, Madonna-esque jams of 2018’s Chris made you want to dance on top of the FAO Schwarz piano in glittery loafers. La vita nuova, an EP from 2020, was chilled out, introspective, dreamy, drawing on a Dante Alighieri text of the same name as its conceptual underpinning. There’s a lot that’s captivating on paper about this latest high-concept pop album, one that’s thorny and invested in both sonic and lyrical interiority. It is a quiet record, written almost entirely in French, more interested in intimacy and honesty than in being accessible to English-language audiences. It’s also littered with images of angels, rebirth, and living your life anti-mimetically. All of that is really exciting. But things don’t fully mesh. Some of that interiority feels tedious, and that conceptual rigor comes across almost flat.
Redcar les adorables étoiles was mixed by producer Mike Dean, who has worked with Beyoncé and Frank Ocean on their best records. Dean is a fitting creative partner for Redcar, who has seemed on the verge of becoming a pop star for a few years now. His influence on the record is subtle, and Redcar is at his best when he’s at his loosest, musing and free-associating. Like on “Ma bien aimée bye-bye,” where crystalline production lends itself to walls of synths and a looped guitar line. Meanwhile, Redcar sings about a beloved, a wife, and being together until they die. He sounds like he’s sulking over a cigarette and a whiskey on the rocks. Or on “Mémoire des ailes,” where the synths grow brighter, dipping into the territory of Soft Cell B-sides and spoken interludes. “Come on, stay outside, let’s play a game I’ll teach you,” he sings like a mantra, a rare English interlude.
But much of the rest of the record feels indistinct, so cohesive it’s almost homogenous. And none of it really captures that purported conceptual richness. “Je te vois enfin,” the album’s lead single and hypothetically biggest track, feels generic. Against big synth hooks and strobing drum machines, Redcar snarls about questing for a woman by a stream (that’s not figurative: “Elle m’attendait près du ruisseau pour me parler,” he sings, which translates to something like “She was waiting by the stream to speak with me”). It should be electrifying. It has all the parts of a song that should make you want to dance, but it is weirdly monotonous. On “Tu sais ce qu’il me faut,” we hear him lapse into guttural shrieks over a smoky arpeggiated synth. It’s more cabaret than avant-garde pop, and while cabaret can be fun and fertile territory for experimentation, the song just sounds kind of unfinished.
Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) is a transitional album. It’s in the title: Redcar is a prologue to a bigger record, also made with Dean and set to arrive next year. Hardly surprising, then, that it is intended to be softer, more understated, a preliminary introduction of new material to be fully realized at a later date. But Redcar is an artist who treats all of his records as art objects that demand equal weight and respect. And in his earlier work, even the most subdued songs glow with possibility. Redcar, on the other hand, is a frustrating listen from a brilliantly talented artist. For all of its angels and prophecies and mid-century decadence, what we are left with is a very quiet collection of songs with all the weight of ephemera.


Signed to David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, and responsible for making Yeasayer's Anand Wilder excited about guitar again, the 25-year-old New Jersey musician Steve Marion offers plenty of vivid, lively playing on his latest album as Delicate Steve.

Positive Force

Cartoons and kids' films always promised that behind the walls, under the floorboards, beneath a city, exist perfect miniature worlds more wonderful than our own. To promote his new record, Delicate Steve-- aka 25-year old guitarist Steve Marion-- hid play-buttons around Brooklyn and Manhattan for people to plug their headphones into and hear Positive Force ahead of release; hook up to one at Valentino Pier to hear Steve's chandelier psychedelia, and you might believe you'd just jacked into the heart of a secret world powered by raw joy. Though Marion's real-life existence seems equally paradisiacal: He hails from New Jersey, where he's part of the Smallboypants collective, most of whom play in his live band. He's signed to David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, spends his time taking 100-mile bike rides, playing basketball, or hanging out with his sonic brothers in Fang Island-- who, it transpires, run "a cheese van" in New York, and named their truffle oil-infused grilled sandwich after him: Anyone for the $10 "Delicate Cheese"? Positive Force sounds a little like what might happen if you sent Fang Island's hyperactive music on an Eastern detox retreat-- though letting them hang onto the cheese's sentiment, if not its harder to digest aspects.
In a recent interview, Yeasayer's Anand Wilder said that Delicate Steve's music-- they're old touring buddies-- had made him excited about the guitar again, and it's a shame that he didn't incorporate more of Steve's vivid, lively playing into the limp Fragrant World. Marion is one of those rare guitarists whose instrument sings in the place of vocals: Positive Force is predominantly instrumental, but you'll hear him take a breath at the very beginning to introduce his second voice. The combination of mic-ing up his Telecaster's strings and an amp, then blending the two together, sounds crystalline and futuristic, gently boisterous and squirty. His guitar sings like George Harrison's guitar reanimated, Dustin Wong's post-Ponytail solo releases, the most melodic moments from Swing Lo Magellan, and the effects on Julia Holter's marvelous collaboration with Jib Kidder from earlier this year. It often wheezes like old fairground organs, and beams with an open-heartedness you'll recognize from the 80s sitcom theme tunes that instantly tell you happiness is on the way, like "Charles in Charge" and "It's Your Move".
The songs here resolve beautifully, but never predictably, with more attention paid to their structure than on Marion's first LP, Wondervisions. The cooing "Two Lovers" trickles like two tributaries, one shallow and one deep, flowing against each other before achieving confluence in a babbling whirlpool. The conversation between the blooming bass and sleek vocalizing on "Big Time Receiver" seems like the responsible voices of parents idly keeping an eye on the miniature, skittering ticks and itches dancing around them. Standout track "Wally Wilder" is the theme to Midnight Cowboy by way of Animal Collective, harking back to the early-1970s trend for harmonica melodies to replace vocals, the perfect example of which would be the wondrous "Groovin' With Mr. Bloe". The sound of birdsong and the feel of a balmy, sun-dappled garden glows throughout.
If there's anything wrong with Positive Force, it's that it's better suited as background music than bearing up to intense listening; while the guitar lines on most of the songs here are deliciously difficult to whistle, they're all essentially fairly similar. And only "Redeemer" and the title track manage to reiterate the terrifically strong opening salvo of "Ramona Reborn" and "Wally Wilder". But for a strong run at a rapidly forming philosophy of positive vibes and inspiringly innovative playing, it's hard to want to pick holes in a record that more than lives up to its title.


On their first album in seven years, the experimental guitarist and lutist craft surprisingly accessible and candid instrumentals from esoteric topics.

Jozef van Wissem / Jim Jarmusch: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil

An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil

You might struggle to conjure a more esoteric scenario for an album than the one that underpins An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil, the fourth record of largely instrumental duets from experimental lutist Jozef van Wissem and textural guitarist and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. On this hazy suite of seven pieces, the pair ruminates on the apocalyptic visions of religious poet and painter William Blake and the divisive ideas of foundational occultist Helena Blavatsky. Named for a particularly wondrous Blake passage, the finale, “When the Sun Rises Do You Not See a Round Disc of Fire,” fades toward silence as a robotic voice reads a paragraph from Godfrey Higgins’ 19th-century tome Anacalypsis. The sun (“in early times… believed to be the creator… the first object of adoration”) is the grand thread running through world religions, the clipped monologue offers, words pushed against one another as if racing to share this forgotten wisdom. This all plays out, mind you, alongside an electric guitar that treats riffs like mere suggestions and a Renaissance instrument manipulated here until it becomes a mirage.
Against most odds, An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil, the duo’s first album in seven years, is a remarkably conversational work, playing out as an alternately heated and convivial exchange between two rapacious minds and thoughtful players. Until that concluding excerpt, the philosophical underpinnings of An Attempt linger in the background, less required reading than
atmospheric context. With the lute and acoustic guitar intertwined into impossibly knotted patterns, “The Unclouded Day” suggests a slow walk through a verdant garden on a cloudy day, two old friends sharing their respective beliefs and enthusiasms—their senses of right and wrong, maybe, or abiding aesthetic preferences. During “The Two Paths,” Jarmusch and van Wissem perform a musical tug of war, Jarmusch’s compressed growl of electric feedback pulling against van Wissem’s pensive lute line, and vice versa. By the end, you sense that they’ve had an impact on each other, with the lute prancing beyond the melody just as the guitar hum starts to refine its amoeboid creep. The distinct sides draw toward one another, the rare debate that prompts reconsideration.
Key to this surprising esprit is just how offhand these recordings sound, as if we’re listening in on their composition in real time. Both Jarmusch and van Wissem play multiple instruments here—bare-bones drums, ghostly electronics, haunting synthesizers—but these pieces feel like lightly edited first takes, as frank as the conversations they suggest. Opener “Concerning the White Horse” is a spectacularly impressionistic version of latter-day Earth. Jarmusch replaces the sharp edges of Dylan Carlson’s blues with the color fade of a Mark Rothko sunrise, while Van Wissem’s bass drum swaps Adrienne Davies’ peerless finesse for a primal insistence. The piece scans like an idea they captured as they teased it out. Even that literary finale moves like an untempered tide of phosphorescence, guitars and electronics funneled into one wide, radiant smear. With theatrical readings by Tilda Swinton and multiple tracks that floated beyond the 10-minute mark, their Sacred Bones debut, 2012’s The Mystery of Heaven, often felt fussy; they have smartly foregrounded the energy of their dialogue.
Separately, as a duo, or with other outfits, claims of novelty have perpetually dogged van Wissem and Jarmusch. One, after all, is a prolific lute player who composes in palindromes and upends classical mores, a veritable plucking punchline; the other is an insistently independent auteur who, at times, has seemed interested in a sort of subdued Southern Lord cosplay. But after their extended absence, the pair has found a more fitting framework, singular in feeling but fluid in execution. An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil allows us within that realm, an accessible wonder spun from obscure considerations.