The first album Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy made together, 2014's Friend of Mine (released under the name DJ Dodger Stadium), perfectly replicated the melancholy-tinged, ecstatic mood of vintage house and techno. For Stand Up and Speak, the pair have rethought nearly every aspect of their collaboration, from the overall sonic identity all the way down to the way it was recorded.

Stand Up and Speak

The first album Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy made together, 2014’s Friend of Mine (released under the name DJ Dodger Stadium), so perfectly replicated not only the sound of vintage house and techno but its particular melancholy-tinged, ecstatic mood that they probably could have passed it off as a long-lost classic if they’d felt like it. So it’s commendable that on their second album, the duo (now going by the slightly less confusing moniker DJDS) decided to chuck the proven formula and try something new.
For Stand Up and Speak, the pair have rethought nearly every aspect of their collaboration, from the overall sonic identity all the way down to the way it was recorded. Instead of mining old records for samples like they did so effectively on Friend, they created nearly every element on Speak from scratch, going as far as hiring vocalists off Craigslist and recording live instruments.
Leaning on organic sounds and performances that aren’t computer-controlled gives the album a warmer feel throughout. The streaks of heartbrokenness that ran through Friend have mostly been scrubbed away and replaced by a more uplifting mood. There’s a hint of sadness in the chopped-up vocal melody that "In the Flames" revolves around, but it’s more than sufficiently offset by the nimble, burbling bassline behind it. The penultimate track "I Don’t Love You" is as much of a breakup anthem as the title suggests, but it’s less the "wallow in your own misery" type and more the "get out to the club and dance it off" kind, building over its succinct three-and-a-half minutes to an emotional and sonic climax that’s downright triumphal.
The pair also seem to have shifted their influences from club culture’s earliest, most underground days to the period shortly thereafter where it first began to make inroads into the pop mainstream—less Paradise Garage and more "Club MTV." References to late-'80s/early-'90s club pop and vocal house abound. Sometimes it’s explicit, like the vocal loop, syncopated synth-tambourine, and brightly digital-sounding piano riff that underpin the hooky "You Don’t Have to Be Alone." Sometimes it’s more subtle, just a touch of breakbeat on the snare parts and a hint of the same exultant mood that groups from Deee-Lite to Black Box rode to surprising crossover success.
Unfortunately, the pair’s willingness to mess with a proven formula doesn’t translate into a more satisfying experience. For every "You Don’t Have to Be Alone' or "I Don’t Love You"—instantly memorable anthems that pretty much every type of dance DJ could find room for in their sets—Speak offers one or two tracks that just don’t generate a spark. And unlike Friend, which still stands up as a solid front-to-back listen, their use and reuse of the same few production techniques—most noticeably two-bar vocal loops and snare rolls—gives the album the feel of a couple great singles packaged with the half-baked demos that led up to their creation. Speak isn’t exactly a step forward or a step back, but more to the side, onto a new path with plenty of potential, as well as room for future improvements.


Exquisitely compiled yet baldly functional mix from the Ghostly International star.

Fabric 27

Audion is Matthew Dear's alias for raw, sawtooth techno. Audion tracks lack the micro-edit punchiness of his work as Jabberjaw, are beefier than his barely inflected percussion clinics under the False moniker, and are missing the glitch-pop hooks of the stuff he releases under the name his parents gave him. Suckfish, the Audion album, is all about basslines that have been rubbed down with coarse sandpaper and spiraling arpeggios that make people strip off their shirts on the dancefloor but get irritating when parked on your hinder for 70 minutes.
Audion doesn't quite have the brand name appeal of the Matthew Dear stuff, which crossed over to indie kids on the back of Dear's wet, fey vocals and the hiccoughing funny noises that pass for hooks in the world of microhouse. This is probably why the marquee for Fabric 27 is so unwieldy. Anyone expecting the hummable end of the Dear-ly spectrum will be disappointed as Fabric 27 is neither happy nor sad, angry nor euphoric, ugly nor pretty. Fabric 27 is baldly functional in a way that makes you question what that function is, at least when removed from the club and reformatted for the living room, the iPod, whatever.
Techno has been pumping out music that could be derided as pointless off the floor since it was first declared passe in the early 1990s. The difference is that the marketing of techno has shifted from, well, not being marketed at all to being written up in places like, say, I dunno, Pitchfork. The slick packaging and widespread dissemination of the Fabric series is designed to appeal to people outside the techno cognoscenti. Some Fabric mixes-- Michael Mayer's springs immediately to mind-- are guaranteed to find a wide-ranging audience with their equally wide-ranging track selection, shifts in tempo, and petty indulgences like hooks and vocals and overt melodies.
I'm sure heard on a club soundsystem, with sub-bass rearranging your body chemistry, Fabric 27 would work. (An hour plus isn't really enough time for hypnosis to take control.) It's itching, rippling minimalist muzak, beats bobbing in a lagoon of bass mucous. If you're not listening very closely, the tracks will slink by unnoticed, transitioning from one burbling minimal workout to the next. Like the Ivan Smagghe Fabric mix from 2005, Dear's mix will be embraced by people who think looking for possible variations in a seemingly unceasing, unchanging matte black bottom end the most enthralling thing in the world. Everyone else will just hear a same-y techno mix.
Maybe the fault lies in Dear cutting up two or three tracks into a new whole. This is what DJs have been doing since disco, and as long as Jeff Mills is still alive I wouldn't write it off in a techno context. But Mills' multi-turntable hacking has a fury and drive utterly lacking in what I'll be succinct and call the post-Ableton/Hawtin era. Instead of butt-bumping chops and delirious edits with the frayed edges still visible, you get three minimal techno tracks that sound like...a single minimal techno track. This smooth, toothless mixing may be technically impressive but it's also pretty boring.
Techno purists are probably grimacing at the mere mention of "functional" as a pejorative. Maybe instead of your beanbag chair or on the stairmaster, you need to listen to it on the highway wreathed in fog at 5 a.m. Some old techno sawhorses still hold, I guess.


Originally formed as a cover band/side-project by longtime friends (and Louisville punk scene veterans) Catherine Ann Irwin and Janet ...

Old Paint

Originally formed as a cover band/side-project by longtime friends (and Louisville punk scene veterans) Catherine Ann Irwin and Janet Beveridge Bean, Freakwater was renowned for its strict adherence to bare-bones Appalachian musical forms. Their first couple of releases helped jumpstart the alt-country movement in the early 90s, boasting little more than the cheaply recorded acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies of the two frontwomen, augmented by sparing use of stand-up bass, pedal steel, dobro, and other stylistically appropriate instruments. But this stark, almost severe attention to form was not merely an academic exercise. There was a bucket-load of heart-wrenching humanity there, too.
A lot of that is due to Irwin herself. Other performers have mined this uber-authentic vein from a certain distance, gingerly handling traditional themes (salvation, drunkenness, poverty) and song-structures like sacred library texts to be presented as if under glass. By contrast, Irwin comes across as the genuine article-- a musically homely, inexpert oddball, the updated embodiment of the tragic eccentrics that have always populated this kind of musical landscape. It never sounds like she had to study how to sing or write this way. Her songs and her singing sound convincingly lived-in.
Also contributing to the human factor is the car-wreck compelling, between-the-lines story that is related solely through the interplay of the two women's voices. Countless other long-standing vocal duos have rung the harmony bell with more crystalline clarity, but few have wrestled so explicitly to define a real-world relationship in song. This subtext allows Bean and Irwin to transcend their vocal limitations and gives the music an emotional, in-the-room immediacy that is simply not available to more accomplished practitioners.
Old Paint, originally released in 1996, was Freakwater's high-water mark as a going concern. For the second time, it paired them with madwoman-in-the-attic production specialist Brad Wood, who was still basking in the afterglow of his work with Liz Phair. Bassist Dave Gay was now permanently on board as the third band member, and steel player Bob Egan, who would later spend some time in Jeff Tweedy's revolving door, was on hand to provide the color commentary. Bean and Irwin were more than ready, with an album's worth of supremely evocative original songs-- for the first time, the few, well-chosen covers on a Freakwater album were there to lend context to the original songs, and not the other way around.
The first lines of Old Paint's opening "Gravity" announce Freakwater's worldview quite clearly: "I wasn't drinking to forget/ I was drinking to remember/ How I once might have looked through the eyes of a stranger." A couple of songs later, on "Gone to Stay", things have only gotten worse, as Irwin sings, mournful but clear-eyed, "There's nothing so sure as a razor blade above your wrist." By "Hero/Heroine", the situation is downright hopeless, with some nasty Stones-ish slide work and bleary observations like, "Everyone who gets drunk will not write a good book." There are some moments of redemption as well, from the jet-black humor that propels the buoyant "Waitress Song" to the heavenly cello that levitates the haunting cover of Loudon Wainwright's "Out of This World".
So much discussion about bands like Freakwater hinges on questions of authenticity. As Old Paint demonstrates, that's pretty much missing the point. Specific styles of music are important, of course, because they carry certain traditions across generational lines. But on a personal level, they're really just empty vehicles. No musician can get anything of substance from a particular musical style-- it's what the musicians bring of themselves that matters. On Old Paint, Bean and Irwin gave so generously of themselves that style and substance became virtually indistinguishable, and that's an achievement worth drinking to remember.


The genial Louisville rapper doesn’t have much of an identity, but he has a natural, low-stakes charm.

Confetti

Jack Harlow is from Louisville, Kentucky, but without the defiant “I’m a Kentucky boy til’ death” shoutout on 2018 breakout “Sundown,” you wouldn’t know it. His fourth full-length project in just as many years, Confetti sounds like it could be made by any 21-year-old that grew up with access to Hot 97: He reflects on driving around his city listening to The Blueprint on CD and raps over samples of Usher’s “U Don’t Have to Call” and Trey Songz’s “I Invented Sex.” His music has no identity. But he has a natural charm and energy that helps you overlook the fact that you’ve heard countless albums like this before, just by different names.
Prior to Confetti, Jack Harlow’s big singles were 2017’s “Dark Knight” and the aforementioned “Sundown.” The self-confident bounce of the former earned him his current record deal with DJ Drama and Don Cannon’s Lil Uzi Vert-cursed Generation Now label. The more polished “Sundown” boasts a Neptunes-influenced beat from his frequent collaborator 2forwOyNE that complements his low-key swagger.  Both songs balance a light, teen-movie party atmosphere with warm reflections on his hometown.
This is Jack Harlow’s sweet spot, and when he remains there, he cranks out enjoyable DJ-set filler. Album intro “Ghost” is upbeat enough to ignore Harlow’s painful one-liners (“I got all the whipper-snappers and the lil’ rascals”) while serving as a reminder that DJ Drama’s “Gangsta Grillz” tag is timeless. On later tracks like “Heavy Hitter,” Harlow’s natural charisma elevates typical first-record-deal topics like dating women who use him to build their LinkedIn connections. The light-spirited “Walk in the Park” would’ve made sense on the back half of an Aminé or KYLE project.
But like so many emerging rappers, Jack Harlow seems to think that for his music to take the next step, he has to sing. On the Da Honorable C.N.O.T.E-produced “Sunday Night,” his fun-loving personality is lost in the minute he opens his mouth: “I know that a ‘you up’ text would be fucked up, but I’d be lying if I told you I ain’t wanna,” he sings weakly. He talks about relationships so impersonally that he might just be reciting the plot of the last television series he binged. His vocals suck the life out of his coming-of-age reflections on “Goin Back Down,” and his Louisville tales only come to life when he connects with his hometown hero Bryson Tiller for the sappy duet “Thru the Night.”
Jack Harlow’s music is harmless. If you come across any of Confetti’s standouts on a Spotify playlist, you won’t be moved to complain or click over to his artist page. At his best, he can make above-average slappers like “Heavy Hitter” and “Ghost,” and that’s enough to keep him afloat. Well, that’s until the next Jack Harlow comes around, with a new name, representing another underappreciated city, and then we can have this conversation all over again.


On an often chilly album full of unexpected collaborations and smeared with apocalyptic terror, the 80-year-old art-rock legend grapples with the need for human connection.

Mercy

When an icon returns after a lengthy absence, it’s tempting to feel a kind of condescending compassion. My god, one might think, he’s still doing it at 80. And when he returns in the enviable company of bright young(er) things, it’s tempting to feel cynical: Look who’s trying to stay current. Spare all that for John Cale. He who, in co-founding the Velvet Underground, built the bridge between European art music and American rock’n’roll with his inimitable viola drone; who managed to corral early iterations of the Stooges, Patti Smith, the Modern Lovers, and Nico into the studio and keep them there long enough to capture on tape all their world-changing energies; who introduced Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” to Jeff Buckley, and after him, vicariously, to a deluge of lessor idol tryouts; who has himself released more than three dozen albums of chamber pop, post-punk, post-rock, and beyond, on his own and in collaboration with fellow icons, arguably more famous than him (frenemies Lou Reed and Brian Eno, gurus like La Monte Young), whom he often shows up—John Cale doesn’t need your charity.
In a 60-year career full of unexpected twists, Cale arrives with another: MERCY, an album informed by R&B and smeared with dream-pop haze and orchestral rumblings of apocalyptic terror. Yes, there’s a dream team of collaborators that reads like a festival main stage: Weyes Blood, Sylvan Esso, Animal Collective, Dev Hynes, and Tei Shi. Electronic producers Actress, Laurel Halo, TOKiMONSTA, and Seven Davis Jr. offer avant-cred. Fat White Family also appear. None stand a chance of upstaging Cale, and none try. MERCY is Cale’s album alone, haunted and reckoning with a turbulent past that, day by day, looks more peaceful than the future.
His voice remains unmistakable, a walnut burl with cracks in the grain. The stentorian register that Cale used to wield with authority is absent. Chart the distance between its apotheosis, 1973’s classic “Paris 1919,” and MERCY standout “Time Stands Still.” In both songs, Europe has collapsed (this time, it’s “sinking in the mud”), and in both, the Church comes to save the day. Fifty years ago, Cale could imagine himself as the religious force. “I’m the church/And I’ve come/To claim you with my iron drum,” he sang, his voice like cold steel. Today, he just mourns the church’s “savagery” in a voice wafting through a cathedral of Sylvan Esso’s echoes and murmurs. The drums are uncertain, doubling back like leather heels approaching and retreating on a hard stone floor. Only in the bridge does that old voice return, and instead of enlightenment, there’s environmental chaos. Roses battle poppies for the sun, and “monsoons (are) happening everywhere, even in your own backyard.” Vanishing footsteps signify love and loss in the gorgeous “Noise of You”; Cale, suspended in blankets of synths and vintage keys the exact color of a dusk snowstorm, longs to hear them once again. “Was so long, long ago,” he hollers. A string section flutters tremendously, a scarf that could form a noose.
On MERCY, memory is treacherous. “Not the End of the World” sparkles with a reassuring grandeur, but each time his processed, multi-tracked voice repeats the title, it feels more like a lie. Incendiary “The Legal Status of Ice” raises a bitter toast to polar bears stranded on an iceberg; Cale intones, “Ding dong, the witch is dead,” over a tundra of frosty guitars and cracking drums, and the witch might well be us. In other moments, it’s the past that’s bewitching. “Night Crawling” stumbles around with neo-soul swagger, getting nowhere (relatively, for this very downtempo collection) fast. “I can’t even tell when you’re putting me on/We’ve played that game before,” he chants, trapped in a loop of looking back to reconfirm he’s still trapped in a loop. Centerpiece “Everlasting Days” starts out elegiac, and then Avey Tare and Panda Bear join Cale in dismantling the entire idea of a requiem. Breakbeats remind you they’re named for destruction, words shatter into mere syllables, and the motives behind the making of amends are thrown like snapped branches into a bonfire of historical proportions. It’s brutal.
Warmth is rare. “I Know You’re Happy” attempts a kind of late-Motown bop, but flops rather elegantly into first recriminations and then earnest desperation. In the luminous “Moonstruck (Nico’s Song),” he tells his old collaborator, “I have come to make my peace,” as soft synth pads echo her old harmonium wheeze. One wonders what Nico, who made some of the world’s most beautiful songs while embracing some very ugly politics, would think of Cale calling her “a moonstruck junkie lady, staring at your feet.” Or what another doomed icon, Marilyn Monroe, would think of his ode to her, the seven-minute “Marilyn Monroe’s Legs (Beauty Elsewhere),” which sets numerological and phenomenological musings against a shivering screen of bleeps, rustles, and moans. It’s more Cronenberg than Warhol, but at least not as creepy as Andrew Dominik’s recent Blonde.
Somehow, though, alienation isn’t all. MERCY is a revelation of the need to connect. It’s a need that doesn’t waver as one ages, as the deaths of your loved ones hasten. Cale utterly embraces that need’s every facet. In the title track, Laurel Halo’s remarkable sound design ballasts Cale’s plea for someone to “lift me up,” an act of generosity in a song about hoping for one. In a pair of the album’s most devastating songs, Cale’s old pal the piano comes out: For a moment, it’s there in the bluesy intro to “Story of Blood,” a crisp, dizzying duet with Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering, which suddenly bursts into some heavenly headspace between SZA and Slowdive. Cale rages against those betrayed by their bodies. “Bring them with me into the light,” he and Mering sing to each other, shouldering a burden built for two. And when the soul fails, connection is a mortal issue. “Out Your Window” closes the album with, mostly, Cale at the piano, invoking Paris 1919. For all its complexities, MERCY ends with Cale vowing to save a troubled friend’s life. “If you jump,” he promises, “I will break your fall.” Not stop, not catch, but break. Cale’s here, once again and for now, still not making things easy on anyone.


Newly mixed reissue of the modern classic-- an experimental electronic record that uses digital bits to refract and bend ideas about warmth in pop music-- features two bonus cuts, including a previously unreleased track.

Endless Summer

Revisiting Christian Fennesz' 2001 album Endless Summer six years later brings to mind one of my favorite single lines from a critic. In 1963, film writer/maker Jonas Mekas asserted in his Village Voice column that 8mm film, including amateur footage rediscovered and presented in a different context, was the future of the medium. He mentioned reels with sunsets casually shot in Arizona by vacationing New Yorkers and said that "time is laying a veil of poetry over them."
That notion kept running through my head while returning to this record, despite the different context. Time has indeed laid a veil of poetry Endless Summer, not that it needed it. It's aged very well, but there's more going on hearing it in 2007 than just revisiting a good record. From the beginning, this album was about memory, decay, and reference; it wondered how deeply an original idea could become distorted and still retain its content. Fennesz used digital bits to refract and bend ideas about warmth in pop music, and his work has been mellowing in history's dark cellar. Which is to say, *Endless Summer * sounds even better now.
It also sounds very 2001 somehow, and not just because it basically soundtracked the second half of that insane year for me. There's something almost naïve going on in some of these tracks, despite the music's careful construction. For all the guitar/computer interface we've heard since, nothing has sounded as naked as the simply strummed chords of the title track. They sway in front and force you to hear the strings and body in a new way because of their presence on an experimental record issued by Mego. Fennesz had it down conceptually. He borrowed the chords from the Sandals' 1964 instrumental "Theme From the Endless Summer" and immersed the changes in 10 feet of crashing water, a wall of prickly sound that drives your face into a sharp layer of broken seashells. And that is the entry point.
Even when the guitars hang back a bit and let the processing provide most of the texture, there is still song structure and melody. The opening "Made in Hongkong" serves as a transition from the world of his previous record, the striking but comparatively challenging Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56' 37" Minus Sixteen Degrees 51' 08", meeting that blizzard of noise halfway with rolling chords and bits of a tune and then carrying the heavy stuff into this warmer, more welcoming place. "A Year in a Minute" is a canny exercise in stasis, pointing to film drama in a drone piece that seems to shoot beams of sound toward the sky like a rotating klieg light. "Caecilia" is as nakedly pretty as Fennesz has allowed his music to get to date, all delicate quivers, the feeling of excited nervousness made into sound. And then there are the few merely good moments that keep the original Endless Summer from perfection. The CD-skipping exercise "Before I Leave" is pleasant but insubstantial, and the static-heavy, organ-driven 10-minute closer "Happy Audio" is terrific but seems to come from a slightly different disc.
I'm not crazy about the idea of reissuing records in a new edition only a few years after they first come out, even if the album in question is a "classic" like this one. Fennesz, it seems, knew what he was doing when he designed his original track list, and the two new bonus tracks here won't add much to the legacy. "Badminton Girl", originally released in 2001 on a Fat Cat split, is quite nice but sounds a bit like a sketch for "Made in Hongkong", without the constant sense of change. The previously unreleased "Endless" is of even less consequence, consisting of just a quiet hum without much in the way of mood.
No matter, Endless Summer still works fantastically well and if this reissue allows a few new people to enjoy it, all the better. It wasn't just Fennesz' artistic breakthrough, but the breakthrough for a new style of electronic music that found a way to channel the latest developments in software into something that worked the way music has always worked and had appeal beyond just the genre heads. It was also Pitchfork's No. 2 album of 2001, which is sort of amazing. The only downside is that it set the bar too high, to a place none of the many followers since have managed to clear.


Leslie Bear’s second album could be about any ordinary American suburb, but the emotion behind her airy dream-pop makes it entirely personal.

Means to Me

Leslie Bear’s second album as Long Beard is a narrative of home, albeit a nebulous one; across the 10 songs on Means to Me, the New Jersey dream-pop musician never refers to her town by name. She doesn’t illustrate tree-lined streets, or her favorite hangout spots, or the house she grew up in. The only landmark she cites is the local CVS, outside which she had her first kiss. On paper, this could be a record about any ordinary American suburb.
The four years since Bear’s debut, Sleepwalker, have taken her all around the country: She quit her corporate job and toured with Japanese Breakfast before returning to her native New Brunswick to earn a computer science degree at Rutgers. She’s not referencing home as a place, but rather home as a feeling—or a lack thereof. Bear isn’t as concerned about winding up in New Brunswick again as she is about the disorientation caused by her time away. She’s grappling with the bittersweet nostalgia and alienation of migrating in reverse. Although the geographical setting of Means to Me is ambiguous, the closeness Bear conveys makes it entirely personal.
Like her contemporaries Hatchie and Jay Som, Long Beard builds her music from wistful vocals and jangly guitars. On Sleepwalker, the dreamy effects often reverberated to the point of oblivion. Means to Me finds more stable footing: Bear’s enunciations are clearer, her instrumentation more active and forward-moving. Highlights like “Getting By,” “Sweetheart,” and the title track are tethered by steady percussion while still maintaining her celestial, atmospheric aura. The lucidity makes Bear’s anecdotes easier to grasp: Her high school sweetheart is now married, and as she resettles in this anonymous town, she finds her surroundings plagued with reminders of a love that dissipated a decade ago.
Means to Me can feel one-dimensional, so preoccupied with the opinions of others—people whom Bear’s narrator hasn’t seen in years—that there’s hardly any room for catharsis or self-reflection. “Aren’t you better off without me rooted in your town?” she echoes on “Snow Globe.” “Still hoping you would talk to me/Through the colder months of fall/But you never called,” goes opener “Countless.” “I don’t know why I come/Just to see if you’ll have me,” she wonders in “Monarch.” Depleted, she likens her heart to an “empty bottle.” She writes about feelings of uncertainty and rejection but rarely goes deeper, offering little insight to her own growth and never explaining why she returned home in the first place.
But in its layered textures and unguarded lyricism, Means to Me testifies to Bear’s upward trajectory as a writer and musician. Though she doesn’t give much clarity to her intentions, her emotions are transparent. She’s endured the kind of upheaval that could easily distort someone’s identity, yet hers is surprisingly apparent as she recalls these lovelorn memories. Patiently channeling pain and turmoil into airy, gorgeous dream-pop, she makes a nameless location—somewhere that might be almost anywhere—feel intimate and particular.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The London singer-songwriter, formerly of Goat Girl, teams with producer Joel Burton and a host of musicians on a sharply observed, sumptuously arranged album of idiosyncratic folk.

Giant Palm

Naima Bock begins “Every Morning,” the stunning third track from her debut solo album, Giant Palm, in conversation with herself. The song’s first lines arrive in call-and-response, with a group of backing vocalists cast as the nagging doubts inside the singer’s head, voicing their interrogations in spectacularly rich harmony. Bock’s responses are comparatively understated. We gather that we’re in the aftermath of some sort of breakup, seemingly initiated by the singer herself. Her responsibility for the split doesn’t lessen her grief, an apparent contradiction that her plainspoken lines acknowledge without apologizing for. “Hello, darling,” the chorus of voices begins. “Yes, I’m mourning,” Bock answers.
Are you crying?
Every morning
Is it for them?
So it is
But you left them
So be it
By the end of the exchange, Bock’s voice has begun to merge with the others. They soar upward together when they reach the line about leaving, with one soprano in the backing ensemble seeming particularly determined to burst through the clouds. Even after repeated listens, this moment comes as a minor shock, the melody’s sudden ascent suggesting a certain exultation about the departure that mingles unspoken with the sorrow of the lyrics. Later, a three-word refrain, set to a slightly flattened version of the same ascending melody, deepens the ambiguity at the song’s heart: “I lie sometimes.”
Working in collaboration with arranger Joel Burton and over 30 instrumentalists, Bock recorded Giant Palm after a period of retreat from making music in public, having departed the buzzy London post-punk band Goat Girl in favor of a quieter life off the road. She continued writing songs but had no particular plans to make an album until Burton convinced her to collaborate. It was a fortuitous union. Burton’s contributions to Giant Palm—a kaleidoscopic array of orchestral instruments and electronics—are so significant that the pair considered coming up with a new band name rather than releasing it as a Bock solo album.
Bock, who is of Brazilian and Greek heritage and spent time living in Brazil as a child, might have eventually released a remarkable album even without Burton’s intervention. Her songwriting pairs terse observations with audacious melodic turns, conveying ideas that the words on the page only hint at. She has clear power as a singer but rarely overemotes, favoring a restrained and vernacular style that evokes bossa nova singers like Astrud Gilberto and Nara Leão on one hand and UK folk revivalists like Shirley Collins and Bert Jansch on the other. (In addition to performing her own material, Bock is also a member of Broadside Hacks, a collective of young London musicians who aim to revitalize traditional English music for a new generation, much the way Collins, Jansch, and their ilk did decades before them.) It’s easy to imagine a version of Giant Palm featuring just Bock’s voice and guitar—or a more straightforward folk-rock band—that’s plenty stirring on its own.
Instead, Bock and Burton called in favors with every crack musician in their contacts lists and labored to ensure that Giant Palm sounds very little like the average singer-songwriter album. The swooning strings are reminiscent of Jim O’Rourke’s orchestral-pop masterpiece Eureka (another singer who is allergic to bombast, incidentally); the vocal harmonies and proudly fussy touches of flute and soprano sax recall the Zombies’ classic psych nugget Odeyssey and Oracle; the eerie electronic ambience of “Dim Dum” suggests Radiohead and Robert Fripp; the juxtaposition of folky modal melody and jazzy rhythm section on “Toll” bring to mind Pentangle and Astral Weeks. Despite these divergent points of historical reference, Giant Palm is a holistic and distinctly contemporary work, always rooted in the landscape of the present, never coming across as postmodern pastiche.
Bock is a deeply idiosyncratic songwriter, and Burton is thoroughly attuned to her peculiarities. As “Natural” winds down, Bock warns a prospective partner of her tendency to get sick of the people she lives with, but leaves open the possibility that she will love them anyway. Just as you settle into this happy ending, she twists it again: “There’s no point in pushing through/If we grow our separate ways.” The last word lands on a chord utterly foreign to the gliding progression that’s carried the song so far, jarring and sour and spelling doom, its dissonance heightened by the sudden appearance of tightly clustered woodwinds. On “Enter the House,” another tale of domestic discord, she pleads with someone to commit to her or let her go. The coda revisits the conceit of “Every Morning,” with lead and backup vocals representing the two sides of a dueling consciousness. “I hear a voice calling out to me/It cries ‘Come home, Nai,’” Bock sings. “You can’t go home,” the singers behind her answer, the peppiness of their melody seeming to mock her for ever thinking she could. What began as a straight-ahead country-folk tune ends as something far stranger.
Giant Palm is a breakup album of sorts, though the natures of the partnerships are not always clear. “Campervan,” at least, nods in the direction of Goat Girl: “Looking for a campervan/Looking for a different band,” goes its lurching waltz-time refrain. Bock is particularly adept at capturing a mixture of crushing sadness and bubbling excitement that can arise from striking out on your own, with neither feeling ever ruling out the possibility of the other. The path she chooses is one of quiet self-possession, mirroring the controlled burn of her singing voice. She elucidates it most vividly on the magisterial title track. “Life’s giant palm lifts me to the sky/And for a while I forget that I cannot fly/So I float high, high above it all,” she sings, a rising synth line further evoking her climb.
“Campervan” espouses a similar sentiment: “In wind and rain I’ll find my birth/And when I can I’ll go alone/In silence I will make my home.” The song, too, finds a home in silence, with a pause for breath before each chorus that lasts just long enough to seem slightly unreasonable, a deliberate and unsettling incursion on the otherwise placid atmosphere. You can practically see Bock in those moments, alone at the mic or eyeing the players assembled around her, gathering her strength and waiting for the music to propel her skyward again.


The first rapper on Jack White’s label, known mostly for the publicity stunts in his past, loves conceptual art, ’90s hip-hop, and grand statements

Pure Beauty

SHIRT is living in the shadow of a publicity stunt. Back in 2014, the New York City spitter mocked up a fake New York Times website including a purported article that lauded his music in grandiloquent terms. The ruse spread across the Internet, but ultimately backfired. He became a poster boy for the struggle rapper movement—that is, up-and-coming MCs so desperate for attention that they’ll attempt any gimmick to secure column inches and blog mentions.
Self-inflicted though it was, this labelling was unfair to SHIRT. He’s a bright writer who’s blessed with a husky voice, and he relays his robust flow in commanding and ear-catching ways. Besides, in SHIRT’s world, the New York Times prank wasn’t a cheap shot, but a high-minded homage to the poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s controversial ideas on the artistic use of repurposed information. Since then, he’s continued to promote his work with a performance artist’s mentality. In 2016, he eschewed the Internet altogether to premiere “Summer Not Coming” by driving an F-150 truck through New York City while blasting the song all day. More recently, SHIRT re-enacted conceptual artist David Hammons’ famed 1983 attempt to sell snowballs on a New York City block corner. Back on Twitter, he posted a photo that seems to get to the essence of how he sees himself as not merely an MC, but an artist with loftier, extramusical goals. In the photo, a faceless mannequin’s head wears a do-rag, with a single line of commentary: “Do-rag in the MOMA—it’s my time.”
Pure Beauty, SHIRT’s first album since signing with Jack White’s Third Man Records, shares that interest in elevating the experience of listening to him rap into something bigger. On the project’s jump-off single, “Flight Home,” SHIRT rhymes over bruising synth lines and viscerally thudding kick drums from Dutch EDM producer and DJ San Holo. He compares himself to the Lox rapper Sheek Louch on a quest to cop Picasso paintings, pivots to address a verse to “all the immigrants and refugees,” and ends his tirade with the declaration, “This rap shit still a sport to me/Kaepernick jersey on, that’s a hero of mine/Stand for something that you zero in on.” The song is accompanied by a video in which SHIRT raps atop a truck emblazoned with giant Nike and Adidas logos—painted on by hand, then left unblurred in the video, even though (as a press release proudly notes) the companies were not consulted on their use. The visual gambit falls uneasily between a critique of hip-hop’s relationship with corporate sportswear brands and, once again, a flimsy attempt to muster up attention. Pure Beauty plays out in a similar fashion, committing wholly to neither SHIRT’s appealing raw rap chops nor his grander concepts.
The songs that bookend the tracklist drive this point home. The album opens with “Snowbeach,” titled in reference to the sought-after Polo Ralph Lauren jacket made iconic by Raekwon in the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Can It All Be So Simple” video. SHIRT and his guest Chase chisel weighty lines into producer Ricky Dubs’ low-slung, bluesy beat, with the host threatening, “I could run up in this gallery with the mask on.” He has the same sort of street-smart, razor-sharp flow that Rae himself perfected on the fabled Purple Tape, and the song emerges as the album’s most concrete demonstration of SHIRT as a beast with bars who’s also self-aware enough to spit, “Most my music not streaming like I’m Prince!”
But then the 11-track album ends with “Mise En Abyme,” a near-eight-minute recording of the French artist Marie Matusz talking about the creative process. If you keep going, you’ll eventually find a scant two-part rap from SHIRT hidden two-thirds of the way through the song. But it’s a frustrating listen even once, despite the hypnotic, celestial beat from Steel Tipped Dove. For his closing lines, SHIRT raps, “Parties in pyramids, left my tag on the wall/Beats echo off the stone, I be repping for y’all.” It’s a solid point—sometimes there’s more value in leaving a legacy in the physical foundation than the artistic ether.


Setting aside his penchant for elaborate concept records, the UK producer zeroes in on what makes his productions so singular, balancing immaculate sound design with compelling club rhythms.

Rare, Forever

Leon Vynehall loves a good story. Back in 2014, the UK artist’s breakthrough mini-LP, Music for the Uninvited, was rooted in childhood memories of the mixtapes his mother used to play in the car, while 2016’s Rojus drew parallels between a night of partying and the mating rituals of tropical birds. Two years later, he went fully conceptual with Nothing Is Still, a beautiful album that folded in elements of ambient and classical while recounting the tale of his grandparents’ emigration to New York in the 1960s. The self-described “multimedia experience” also included a series of short films and a novella.
His latest full-length takes a notably different path. Rare, Forever has no grand narrative or elaborate backstory. Speaking about the album, Vynehall has said, “I wanted to write purely from the standpoint of free expression: whatever came to me is what I’d go with.” Yet Rare, Forever isn’t some sort of rudderless mish-mash. After a decade in electronic music, Vynehall sounds more confident than ever before, and while a few Easter eggs—including an ouroboros-like sigil and a mysterious character/entity named Velvet—have been scattered across the new LP and its artwork, the record is primarily a potent showcase of his talents.
Rare, Forever opens with the forlorn strings of “Ecce! Ego!,” signaling that the orchestral pomp of Nothing Is Still hasn’t been discarded completely, but as the record unfolds, it quickly becomes clear that the LP’s contents owe a lot more to smoky jazz clubs and noisy DIY spaces than the symphony hall. With its lush strings, “Farewell! Magnus Gabbro” is perhaps the most “classical” track on the album, but the song’s hovering distortion and elongated tones sound more like something a William Basinski/Kevin Shields collab might have cooked up. Vynehall happily dirties up his sound across Rare, Forever, and while the record won’t ever be mistaken for a Hospital Productions release, it does contain tracks like “In>Pin,” which runs a disjointed spoken-word collage through a labyrinth of angular skronk, and “Worm (& Closer & Closer),” a poignantly scratchy, gravel-voiced update on UK street soul. “Alichea Vella Amor” continues down this soulful path, pairing tape hiss and a hypnotic vocal loop with searching saxophones, and moody album closer “All I See You, Velvet Brown” is even jazzier, its late-night horns eventually giving way to a textured bath of haunted static and thoughtful prose (borrowed from poet Will Ritson’s “Harbouring”).
Despite these forays beyond the confines of the club, Vynehall has always had a knack for crafting tastefully anthemic house music, and his latest album is bound to be celebrated as his return to the dancefloor. The lively “Snakeskin ∞ Has-Been” is sharper and darker than old favorites like “It’s Just (House of Dupree)” and “Blush,” but the song’s whirring rhythms have obvious big-room appeal. The manically chirping “Dumbo” is even heavier, with burly rhythms that nod to both the contemporary hard-drum circuit and the carnivalesque spirit of old UK funky bangers like Roska’s “Squark.” But it’s “Mothra” that provides the LP’s most obvious hands-in-the-air moment: A little more than halfway through, the track goes practically silent, drops a dramatic vocal snippet, and then swings back into its confident strut. It’s a trick right out of the post-dubstep playbook that brings to mind Joy Orbison’s most gratifying work.
Even without any overarching narrative, Rare, Forever still feels like a triumph. At its core, the LP is a straight-up flex, the work of an artist who has learned to distill his many influences and experiments into a coherent, singular vision, and Vynehall himself is the protagonist of this particular tale. (It’s telling that he opens the record with “Ecce! Ego!,” which literally means “Behold! Me!” in Latin.) There are few producers in the electronic music realm who can capably translate the “here’s some tracks I made” approach into a compelling album—folks like Floating Points and Four Tet come to mind—and it appears that Vynehall is ready to be welcomed into that cohort, perhaps with glorious album centerpiece “An Exhale” as his coronation theme. Combining the beatless trance of artists like Barker with the woozy melodies of M83, it’s both jubilant and pensive, like looking out at nature’s expanse after trekking up a mountain. After making his own proverbial climb in recent years, Vynehall can rightly sit back and take in the view.

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The Swedish composer sidelines the gothic pop of previous releases in favor of lush and sorrowful wordless soundscapes, performed entirely on the pipe organ of a local church.

All Thoughts Fly

In the 16th century, the Italian arts patron Pier Francesco Orsini commissioned a statuary park in the town of Bomarzo as he was mourning the death of his wife. Sacro Bosco, dedicated in her memory, features a collection of stone monsters, including the Roman underworld god Orcus, his eyes wide and mouth open in terror. The park’s haunting beauty captivated the Swedish musician Anna von Hausswolff, whose fifth album, All Thoughts Fly, is titled after an inscription on the Orcus statue’s mouth. Unlike her song-based previous albums, All Thoughts Fly is instrumental, performed entirely on pipe organ. Its lush soundscapes find transcendence in the eerie and the sorrowful, much like Sacro Bosco itself.
The pipe organ has been an important element in von Hausswolff’s gothic pop across four previous albums, which sometimes sounded like the fantasy all-star band Kate Bush and the Bad Seeds. “The Marble Eye,” a lone solo organ piece from 2018’s Dead Magic, now sounds like a test run for All Thoughts Fly, which surrounds the listener with the organ’s funereal tone. Von Hausswolff recorded it in a church in her Gothenburg hometown, on a painstaking replica of a baroque-era instrument. Her dissonant drones, flurrying melodies, and uncanny, almost electronic-sounding effects guide listeners on a bleak ambient journey through an abandoned castle at dusk.
Von Hausswolff uses the organ’s full expressive range, exploring new sides of the instrument on each song without ever disrupting All Thoughts Fly’s essential solemnity. “Persefone,” a simple dirge, sounds like Stars of the Lid performing at a funeral procession. The title track allows some light to come in, using repeated overlapping rhythmic figures to create a dreamlike land akin to Terry Riley’s minimalist classic A Rainbow in Curved Air. When it finally ends, 12-plus minutes in, it feels like coming out on the other side of a crying fit: pure release.
On “Sacro Bosco,” von Hausswolff recreates Orsini’s garden with her instrument. High notes wail of impending doom, while a low growl seems to signify Orcus’ voice, outlasting the song’s ornate textures just as the statue has endured through centuries. It’s the heaviest moment on an undeniably heavy album—one that that fits right in with the metal-oriented catalog of Southern Lord Records, despite little resemblance to labelmates like Power Trip and Sleep.
The voiceless hymns of All Thoughts Fly don’t leave you longing for the singing of von Hausswolff’s previous albums. No turn of phrase could match the tension she creates with the call-and-response buildup of “Theatre of Nature,” as her melodies converse heatedly with each other. She allows the organ to sing for itself: songs of love and loss, decay and eternal life.

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The Chicago rapper and producer Chris Crack  built his reputation as a solo artist off of a couple of infectious and irreverent mixtapes. His latest, Public Domain 4, is an extended, lightly psychedelic tour through backseat smoke sessions, liquor store lines, and other peoples' girlfriends' bedrooms. Featuring Tree and Vic Spencer.

Public Domain 4

Chris Crack has been angling for prominence in the many-tentacled Chicago underground hip-hop scene for a few years now, and these days, the rapper and producer is playing local support for acts like Slick Rick, Mystikal, and Can Ox. Crack built his reputation as a solo artist off of a couple of infectious and irreverent mixtapes—2013's Kitchen in the Bassment, last year's Kickin' It Wit TW, and a couple of collaborative projects with noted "soultrap" architect Tree—which set up the basic parameters of his style: wall-to-wall soul samples (and maybe not much else), a cutting, nasal delivery, and bars that sound as spontaneous as they are aggressive. Like like-minded fellow Chicago MC and frequent collaborator Vic Spencer, Crack pumps out constant musical product—an overwhelming amount of loose, often-hookless rap songs. It's hard to keep up with and organize; songs are tweeted only once, and downloads come with no artist tags and different titles.
From his freestyling strings of verse, to the unimpeded, personable directness of his delivery, to the au naturale quality of his production, Crack's music is intended as comfort food. He's not aiming for perfection from song to song, but to access and inhabit a specific atmosphere and posture consistently: His own. On every level, this is music that is about just living, moving forward and getting by, told from the perspective of a proverbial Lothario and party-hunting nomad, loose in the city at night.
Public Domain 4—which is, despite his constant SoundCloud one-offs, Crack's first full-length project of this year—feels like an apt and well-rounded representation of his personality. The title is a tribute to the legendary series of mixtapes by Harlem icon Max B (Crack even channels Bigavell directly in his detuned hook for the Tree and Spencer-featuring "Again"). The tape is a strikingly smooth listen—an extended, lightly psychedelic tour through backseat smoke sessions, liquor store lines, and other peoples' girlfriends' bedrooms. Crack juggles snaking, off-the-dome flows with more regulated, motormouth patterns: Southern-styled flows you can set your watch to. The vinyl-treated backdrop (coming mostly courtesy of Crack's extra-talented affiliate and soul buff Tmthy Trtl) either lies back to give the rapper space, or feeds his fire.
For the most part, Crack manages to be engaging without locking into clear narratives or hitting on much in the way of revelatory wisdom. The best moments come when he edits his goofiness a bit to arrive at sharper, more quotable lines: "I kick it colder than a snowblower/ Chi-town, mid-December with my Colt open/ With no shoes, Devin the Dude on Pandora/ Rays feeling my aura, I be worse than a Taurus." (Indeed, Crack himself could reasonably turn up on that station, as a modern-day RIYL.)
Crack's music works best if you kick back with it, tune in and out, half-following trains of thought and embracing the diversions. He appreciates fine liquor, Willie Hutch, and good conversation, and he's not too big to rhyme "Jacuzzi" with "booty." Imagine you're shooting the shit with an old friend—your most low-maintenance one. These raps have nothing profound or "new" to offer in their particulars, but the music in sum seems to embody how one might always prefer life to always be. In actuality, unfortunately (to paraphrase a noted self-help writer), it's 90% maintenance, 5% grief, and only 5% that Chris Crack sort of vibe. So ride the wave while you can.


Covering his prime years as Stax Records’ ace in the hole, this four-disc set presents Hayes as a complex, compelling bandleader, producer, and songwriter who reshaped the dimensions of soul.

Isaac Hayes: The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976)

The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976)

In the late 1960s Isaac Hayes helped save Stax Records. After its considerable success earlier in the decade, the Memphis record label hit hard times that almost destroyed its modest empire. In December 1967 Otis Redding—the label’s biggest act and one of the most popular R&B singers in the world—was killed in a plane crash alongside most of the Bar-Kays. In April 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, converting what had been a hideout and meeting place for the house musicians into a symbol of the nation’s escalating racial tensions. Meanwhile, Stax’s owners had been renegotiating the label’s contract with Atlantic Records, which had distributed nearly every Stax release; they were horrified to discover a clause that gave ownership of the entire back catalog, along with control of its second biggest act, Sam & Dave, to Atlantic. Stax had no funds and no way to get funds. One of the biggest success stories of the decade looked like it might meet an ignominious end—just another indie gobbled up by the New York giants strengthening their grasp on the market.
Instead, Al Bell—Stax’s African-American president and co-owner—concocted an ambitious plan. He would create “an instant catalog by releasing nearly 30 albums and singles simultaneously,” writes Robert Gordon in the liner notes to the electrifying Isaac Hayes box set The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976). Among them were records by Booker T. & the MGs, Eddie Floyd, and Rufus Thomas as well as Hot Buttered Soul, the curious second solo album by Stax pianist, songwriter, arranger, producer, and now singer Isaac Hayes. He had come to the company as a keyboard player in Floyd Newman’s band, eventually teaming up with a local kid named David Porter to write some of the biggest soul hits of the decade, including “B-A-B-Y” for Carla Thomas and “Hold On I’m Coming” and “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby” for Sam & Dave. He’d already recorded a solo album, Presenting Isaac Hayes, which had gone nowhere, but the label gave him full artistic control for a follow-up.
Hot Buttered Soul is an odd record, but at the time it must have sounded almost aggressively unmarketable: four songs spread over two sides, only one of which was credited to Hayes himself. Side one opens with a 12-minute psych-soul cover of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk On By,” and side two closes with an epic cover of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” prefaced with several minutes of Hayes just talking. It sounded like nothing Stax had ever released, and under normal circumstances it might not have even been released. But Stax was desperate for product—any product—that might keep the company alive.
Hot Buttered Soul marked a turning point for Stax, for Hayes, and for American popular music. Selling more than one million copies, it dominated the pop, jazz, R&B, and easy listening charts for more than a year. It also established Hayes as one of the biggest artists of the era: an exemplar of black sophistication and masculinity, a figure who rejected the fashions of the decade as too staid but embraced the pop songs of the ’60s as the scaffolding for his R&B experiments. Hayes was an outsize figure: bald yet bearded, his muscular frame accentuated by tight pants and chainmail vests. When he accepted his Oscar for “Theme from Shaft,” he stood at the podium in a blue tuxedo with a fuzzy collar and oversize bowtie.
His musical and sartorial flamboyance has at times overshadowed his legacy in the decades following his heyday. To subsequent generations he is a punchline (“They say that Shaft is a bad motherf—” “Shut yo mouth!”) or perhaps a trendy sample source (particularly for 1990s trip-hop). Others may know him as Chef from “South Park”  or simply as another name on a long list of celebrity Scientologists. Even more than the recent reissues of Hayes’ records, The Spirit of Memphis presents him as an endlessly complex and compelling artist, one who mixed genres freely and viewed soul music as a vehicle for mind-bogglingly ambitious gambits. Hayes spent the first years of his career learning the rules of pop songcraft, then spent the rest of his life exploding them.
That trajectory lends The Spirit of Memphis a unique narrative thrust that distinguishes it from so many single-artist box sets. It opens with a disc of songs predating his solo career, when he was playing in the house band, producing records, and writing songs for nearly every Stax artist. Porter was the lyric guy, while Hayes wrote the arrangements. Because he had no formal musical training and could not read or write music, he talked the musicians through their individual parts and directed the band while recording. The grooves on Floyd Newman’s “Sassy” and Booker T. & the MGs’ “Boot-Leg” have lost none of their elasticity over the last half-century, and “I’ll Run Your Hurt Away” shows how sensitive Hayes was with singers; rather than try to compete with Ruby Johnson’s sublime vocals, the piano and horns provide a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, underscoring every growl and whisper.
Hayes’ velvety baritone may be his most recognizable instrument, but it doesn’t show up until three songs into the second disc, which collects his singles for Stax subsidiaries Volt and Enterprise. Even then, he mostly moans and beatboxes his way through “Precious, Precious,” off Presenting Isaac Hayes. According to the liner notes, the album was recorded while Hayes and the MGs were drunk on celebratory champagne, which lends the songs their slightly askew sensibility. The second disc portrays him as an artist with an ear for luxuriant and witty arrangements. The Bacharach-David hit “The Look of Love” becomes a crushed-velvet boudoir jam, somehow both macho and gentle. “Theme from Shaft” builds itself from the ground up, starting with a hi-hat rhythm and adding wakka-chikka guitar, bass, strings, and flute. Each instrument subtly ratchets up the tension and colors in the cinematic universe of Gordon Parks’ blaxploitation film.
If the organizing principle falls apart on the third disc, that’s fine, because the music attains its own force, its own momentum. In addition to more covers—including songs byAl Green, Jerry Butler, the Moonglows, and of course Bacharach-David—there’s a short live set that was recorded in Chicago but sounds like Vegas. Perhaps even more enticing is a handful of studio jams on the fourth disc, including a rambling deconstruction of Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” and the notorious half-hour detonation of “Do Your Thing.” That song, which appears on the Shaft soundtrack in an extremely abbreviated version, shape-shifts almost constantly, mutating from an R&B stomp into a film score into a psych-rock exploration into something like a free-jazz foray. Hayes and his band stretch the song until it snaps, then keep on playing for another twenty minutes to see what lies beyond the melody and lyrics.
The Spirit of Memphis stops in 1976, the year after Stax declared bankruptcy and Hayes signed with Polydor amid accusations that Stax had withheld royalties. He never hit the same heights again (although 1995’s Branded is a fine late-career peak), but he did remain a constant presence in pop culture until his death in 2008. Living up to its title, “Do Your Thing” is a fitting climax for The Spirit of Memphis, as it reveals Hayes to be a an artist who saw soul as a world-devouring music: one that could not only speak to African American desires and aspirations, but could swallow up any other sound and be molded into any shape he could dream up.


The fingerstyle experimentalist’s new album bends guitar, mouth bow, field recordings, and electronic detritus into vast tapestries of pliant drone.

Daniel Bachman: When the Roses Come Again

When the Roses Come Again

“Recording is something I’m not terribly excited about,” Daniel Bachman admitted in 2017. “Things never come out the way I’d like them to.” The Fredericksburg, Virginia, fingerstyle prodigy had been making records for eight years at that point, beginning when he was just 19. But he’d been touring for even longer, since shortly after having his head “split open” by discovering John Fahey and Jack Rose at the tender age of 16. The music that Bachman plays—folk, ragtime, and blues, much of it very old—is a conversation between past and present, writer and interpreter, performer and audience. It’s a living thing. It’s easy to see how he might feel that sealing it off in the studio was a surefire way to see it die on the vine. But in recent years, Bachman has found a new approach to recording, approaching the studio as an instrument in its own right. Old yarn, new loom: On albums like Axacan, The Morning Star, and Almanac Behind, he wove folk and bluegrass together with bells, field recordings, and staticky scraps of radio into vast tapestries of pliant drone.
Bachman continues that method on When the Roses Come Again, though to call its place of origin a “studio” might be a stretch. He recorded the album on his laptop during a week’s worth of improvisations, eight hours a day, in a cabin where he worked as a carpenter’s assistant. He built or modified many of the instruments he used. He fashioned an Appalachian mouth bow, a single-stringed instrument of African origin, and de-fretted a banjo; he also availed himself of sound-making apps on his phone. Yet the overall feel is less turbulent than on the sprawling Axacan or the apocalyptic Almanac Behind. The focus has returned to the sounds of his guitar and banjo, which weave, snakelike, through shimmering fields of harmonium and electronic squeal.
Like all of Bachman’s work, When the Roses Come Again is all instrumental. In contrast to the dazzling pickwork of his early albums, much of the playing is tentative and muted, warily teasing out halting melodies from the greater tangle. There are no real songs to speak of—just scenes, which flow together as seamlessly as fields glimpsed from the window of a moving train. The album is clearly meant to be experienced as a single piece of music, and the pacing is immaculate. Introductory passages of pentatonic riffs and electronic pedal tones give way to gravelly mouth bowing and cascading sheets of feedback; noisy peaks ease off into spidery banjo and guitar. The recording’s fidelity sounds like a tape that’s been rescued from a truck at the bottom of a lake; the mix of drone and noise suggests a lineage with Henry Flynt, Tony Conrad, Flying Saucer Attack, and Wolf Eyes. (The mouth bowing, meanwhile, had me thinking about Tuvan throat singing and Attila Csihar’s work with Sunn O))).) Halfway through, the album rises to a feverish climax of squeaking and rattling—could there be a jackhammer in the mix?—that sounds like someone playing banjo along to a beaten-up copy of Metal Machine Music.
When the Roses Come Again feels like a companion to The Morning Star and Almanac Behind, the third record in a loose trilogy. Both of those albums were preoccupied with cyclical movements: The Morning Star, informed by the chaos of the Trump presidency, took cues from the 24-hour news cycle; Almanac Behind, a response to the climate emergency, depicted natural cycles being thrown out of joint. (Almanac Behind was even designed to be playable in an unbroken loop.) When the Roses Come Again zooms out to consider the cosmic cycle of existence. In a note accompanying the release, Bachman writes of his interest in capturing “the spiritual machinery” of birth, death, and rebirth: the seasonal course of his garden, the “churning of centuries” within his own family.
As is often the case in Bachman’s music, the album’s deeper conceptual meaning is never made obvious, but the songs’ titles may be a hint. Each one—“Neath the Shadow, Down the Meadow”; “Leaves Lying on Each Side”; “By the River, Flowers Shiver (Fading Dying in Their Pride),” etc.—is taken from the lyrics of an old bluegrass song, “When the Roses Come Again,” which the Carter Family wrote and first recorded in 1933. The titles follow more or less the order of the lines in the original song, and, much like the album’s song breaks, their relationship to the music might appear arbitrary. But those dying flowers and budding blossoms suit the album’s cyclical give and take. The meaning of the Carter Family’s song is ambiguous; a tale of a sorrowful leavetaking, it could be interpreted as a love song, but it is also heavy with deathly foreboding. It contains traces of Christian allegory, but also fainter fragments of much older, wilder ways of marking time. The song’s lyrics offer something like a spiritual scaffolding for Bachman’s questing melodies and unruly drones—a way of making sense of squalling vacillations that even their creator may not completely understand.


The former grime wunderkind's third record features his most Americanized production yet and a Yank-luring guest turn from Houston rappers UGK; shame it's not for sale in U.S. stores.

Maths + English

The back cover of the new Dizzee Rascal CD is a rear shot of the onetime grime wunderkind flipping the bird over his shoulder. Note the number of fingers raised: One, the American-style middle finger, rather than the "V" more traditionally associated with obscene hand gestures in the UK. Whether or not it's an acknowledgment of his American audience, however, is almost irrelevant: Stateside fans can't walk into Target or Best Buy and look at the back cover firsthand. XL has limited American sales to digital distributors. That they made this decision for Dizzee's crucial third album, Maths + English-- a record that features his most Americanized production yet and a Yank-luring guest turn from Houston rappers UGK-- is a bit perplexing. Even if this decision turns out not to be a significant constraint on his American sales (or, let's go crazy here, somehow improves them), it says a lot about XL's lack of faith in the U.S. market for grime's international ambassador: Given how the notoriously fickle audience back home has gotten tired of waiting three years for the followup to Showtime and has gravitated towards the dubstep of Burial and Skream, Dizzee's best prospects for an expanded fanbase may well be across the pond.
Given his career arc, it's not impossible to see a precedent for a potential American breakthrough. With Boy in Da Corner as his scene's import-buzz breakthrough album, Showtime the self-conscious more-of-the-same-but-bigger effort, and now Maths + English as his post-genre American-mythos statement, Dizzee could very well be doing for hip-hop what many UK artists have done for rock: Reinvent its British adaptations on American terms and vice-versa. First single "Sirens" supposedly started as a KoRn pastiche, but it finished as the ungodly offspring of "Straight Outta Compton" and "99 Problems" (with a bit of Chemical-née-Dust Brothers' "Song to the Siren" thrown in). And album opener "World Outside" offers turbocharged ambiance, glassy percussive clinks, subwoofer-stressing bass, and a chorus that ends "There's a world outside of the ghetto, and I want you to see it/ I can see it, I can see it, I can see it."
It's easy to wonder if Dizzee is talking about more than one type of ghetto. You could hardly call the album on the whole "grime" without a qualifier or two, and only one track has a direct and uncontaminated lineage to his solo career's origins five years back: The belligerent touch-tone chirps of last track "U Can't Tell Me Nuffin", which shows up long after anyone who bothers to listen to the record in sequence will have discovered he's not making Boy in Da Corner anymore. And while it's impossible for any album where Dizzee's East London dialect figures prominently to be fully Americanized, there's a lot for the States to latch onto.
"Pussyole (Old Skool)" is the personification of this particular trans-Atlantic exchange: While the chorus hinges on a derisive term seldom heard in the States (at least past the second syllable), the beat is so instantly recognizable as the backbone of a beloved circa-88 club-rap smash that early leaks were described as riding the "It Takes Two" beat. (In a neat production twist, it also incorporates the sample source that was used in the intro to "It Takes Two", Galactic Force Band's 1978 astro-disco obscurity "Space Dust", but features an entirely different, more propulsive section of the original song.) There's other, newer-school forays into Southern turf: The spare, punchy post-No Limit synth strings and drum machine beats of "Hardback (Industry)", which sounds like it could've easily fit somewhere on Ludacris' Back for the First Time, the Timbaland slickness of flosser's anthem "Bubbles" and 2-step b-girl club banger "Flex", and the aforementioned UGK summit "Where's Da G's", which pulls off the admirable feat of sounding like grime when Dizzee's on the mic and Southern bounce/g-funk during Bun B and Pimp C's verses. The tail end of the album has its share of fellow Brits mopping things up guest-wise-- Lily Allen dominates the grating music-hall pseudo-ska "Wanna Be", while the Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner turns in a decent performance warbling the chorus of "Temptation"-- but they don't set the tenor like the album's club-rap front half does.
The other major change in Dizzee's music-- some might say concession-- is his lyrical approach, which does less to cloak his rudimentary rhymes with busy pachinko-machine production and double-time verses. This is hardly a fault; like the circa-87 incarnations of Schoolly D or KRS-One, Dizzee's strength lies in the ability to wring ferocity out of uncluttered, straightforward verses. He shines when he gets philosophical about the police's role in the community on "Excuse Me Please", recounting the sickness and unease that came when robbing a couple on "Sirens", and seething with frustrated disappointment over the duplicity of an ex-friend (a maybe/maybe-not allusion to former Roll Deep mentor Wiley) on "Pussyole", but even the more well-worn hip hop subjects-- paranoia, phonies, how to survive the music industry-- flow viciously in a manner that's just about as good as anybody alive when it comes to completing the sound of a production. It works in a way that can't properly be evoked by just quoting lyrics; transcribing Dizzee's verses would be like printing the guitar tabs for "Theme From Shaft", reducing a point-blank gut-punch of a sound to its deceptively simple base elements. You could try, of course, and that'd make a track like "Suck My Dick" look like imbecilic bullshit -- "I don't give a shit who likes it/ I don't give a shit who don't/ Don't tell me to change my fuckin' attitude because I won't" -- but you'd miss the exaggerated schoolyard nyeah-nyeah inflections, the Lemmy-bassline cadence, and the sense of adolescent mischievousness that keeps it from becoming a self-serious, tiresome fuck-you tirade. You'd also miss the fact that those lines are accompanied by a bar of "Yankee Doodle Dandy"-- he could be catering to American sensibilities on this album, but he's not caving into them.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ first film score, a groundbreaking collaboration that gave The Social Network its icy, unsettling tone.

Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: The Social Network

The Social Network

David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network opens with the wound that drove Mark Zuckerberg to create the largest social network and media company in human history. As the camera pans across the rooftops of Harvard University, Zuckerberg jogs past smiling students to his dorm, where he is grimly determined to create something, anything, that will get his mind off of being savagely dumped by his girlfriend, Erica Albright.
The scene has become so iconic it hardly matters the whole thing is ersatz. First off, the Harvard of the film is Johns Hopkins—the university refused to grant Fincher filming privileges. Mark Zuckerberg is of course Jesse Eisenberg, playing a character written by Aaron Sorkin, who’d never used Facebook before writing his screenplay and who based his portrait entirely around one book, Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires. And Erica Albright—the girl who delivers the immortal line, “It’ll be because you’re an asshole”—never existed. Zuckerberg has protested in interviews that he built Facebook simply because he “liked building things.”
But if the film has settled into a cultural parable—Facebook as revenge of the jilted nerd—it’s in large part because of this scene, which is when we hear the first notes of the film’s score. An upright piano, luminous and recorded very closely, plays a simple figure, reminiscent of Brian Eno’s “1/1” from Music for Airports, or perhaps Eno’s startup music for Windows 95. Backed by the busy chatter of tremolo strings, the piano theme drifts through the noise like a ghost. It’s dark, light, winsome, menacing— the film’s entire world telescoped down and reduced into 40 burbling seconds. Then, just as the camera pans up to the dorm, a deep, dark synth note resounds, glaring out at you with yellow eyes. At this precise moment, the credits reveal the composers’ names: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
The Social Network represented a pinnacle for everyone involved: For Sorkin, who had created The West Wing and churned out some high-profile screenplays (A Few Good Men, The American President) but hadn’t been given his A-list moment in the sun. For David Fincher, who had already redefined American movies at least twice but hadn’t yet been handed the reins to a prime piece of Oscar bait. For Justin Timberlake, whose impish grin and Satanic cuteness personified the emerging Silicon Valley rock-star ethos and expanded his portfolio into “movie star.” For Eisenberg, whose performance inverted the usual karaoke-style rules of biopics: He sounded nothing like the real Zuckerberg, but his is probably the face most people see when they imagine Facebook’s creation.
No one, however, had their career trajectory altered so completely as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The Social Network only won three Oscars: Best Adapted Screenplay, for Sorkin’s magnificent contraption of a script, Best Film Editing, and Best Score. It was Reznor and Ross’ first-ever score, and they nailed the majority of it the first time they sat down to work.
When Fincher asked Reznor if he wanted to work together, he blanched at first and said no. Reznor had just come off of touring with Nine Inch Nails, had just gotten married, had never scored a film before. Uncertain of his ability to tackle a new discipline, he approached his friend and longtime collaborator Ross, who encouraged him, and then the pair started bouncing sounds back and forth in the studio and sending files to Fincher. They were unsure if the music they were making would be too harsh, too dark. They made about 16 tracks, each between three-and-a-half to eight minutes long.
The sketches they sent Fincher were meant as a mood board, a sampler. “Hand Covers Bruise,” that tremolo-and-piano track that wound up serving as the film’s de facto theme, was track seven on the playlist, and neither Reznor or Ross attached much significance to it. But Fincher’s sound editor Ren Klyce took those cues and populated the movie with them; the first draft became the score. When Fincher brought Reznor and Ross to screen a rough cut and those piano notes wafted out over the credits, Reznor got goosebumps.
Fincher knew exactly what he wanted when he hired Reznor. Without the music, the film shrugs off its shadows and shifts into a standard Sorkin workplace dramedy. There would be no menacing undertones to the increasingly ridiculous saga of the Winklevoss twins, clinging to their vision of “Harvard Connect,” pursuing Mark Zuckerberg across campus and then through the courts, stopping in for a chat with Larry Summers. On paper, the movie is chatty, funny, frothy, observant—Reznor described the 40-minute rough cut he saw, with rock songs temped in, as “kind of feel good, John Hughes-ish.” The music is Blade Runner, The Shining; the sound of one young Harvard nerd inventing dystopia in his head.
At all moments, you can peek under the music and see the alternate film—antic, weightless—playing beneath it. When Divya Narendra (played by Max Minghella) discovers that Zuckerberg, the shrimpy programmer he hired to build his Harvard Connect website, has launched Facebook, he falls backward out of his chair during an a capella rehearsal—a patented touch of Sorkin screwball. But as he jogs out into the night, a nightmarish sound enters the track, a melted scream straight out of György Ligeti’s “Lontano.” The tone clusters were generated not with string sections, but with an analog synth called a Swarmatron, which generates peeling skin-from-flesh glissandi that make you forget you are essentially watching one Harvard kid jogging in a dinner jacket.
Likewise, when Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) and Zuckerberg are seduced by a pair of (probably mythical) Facebook groupies, the screen fills with a positively evil din, clotted and blaring and full of inhuman shrieks, turning the transparently silly scene into something like a pagan ritual. Even in the airier tunes, like the aptly titled “Intriguing Possibilities,” those dark bass notes keep chugging throughout, suggesting that there’s always somebody, somewhere, that might not be too thrilled with what all these intriguing possibilities represent for them. Try to imagine the famous boat race without Reznor and Ross’s infernal retooling of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” beneath it. The creeping dread that pervades the movie, the intimations of existential rot, only exist in The Social Network because Reznor and Ross put them there.
The Social Network OST was the birth of Reznor’s third act: His film scoring career, which went on to more or less define the tone of the next decade, began when David Fincher took a flier on him. It’s a credit to Reznor and Ross’ partnership that in all the work they’ve done together since—recreating the sound of a 1930s Bernard Herrmann orchestral score for Mank; the tranquil idyll of their work on mid90s—they’ve never quite visited this sound world again. The closest they came was in the music they composed for the Pixar film Soul, specifically the scenes set in the Great Before. Tellingly, the dramatic milieu is cheerily blank, bright, officious, manipulative—purgatory as Silicon Valley campus.
If Eno’s famous line about ambient music was that it was “ignorable as it is interesting,” Reznor and Ross explored the flipside of the coin, making music just busy enough to be stimulating. If you worked at a desk wearing headphones at some point in the past decade, you are familiar with that point in the morning when your mind and fingers race while the rest of you atrophies, an edge that signifies the pleasant rush of the morning is about to curdle. Pieces like “In Motion” feel like tasting that dread, and playing it while working is delightfully perverse, like partaking in the thing that you know is complicit in killing you. One of the titles here does all the interpretive work for you: “The Gentle Hum of Anxiety.” Eno made music for airports; The Social Network OST is Music for Shared Workspaces.
The “Hand Covers Bruise” piano theme reappears twice on the soundtrack, each time sounding diluted and further away. Onscreen, it serves as a sort of leitmotif for whatever human and decent qualities might be swimming around inside the Zuckerberg character—whenever those piano notes resurface, they mark another melancholy signpost in his downward moral trajectory. One of them is during the famous cross-examination scene (“Do I have your full attention?”). Just as Zuckerberg’s eyes turn into darkened slits and he unleashes the full measure of his dry contempt, that deep bass synth note resounds again
The dark synthesizer note underneath the piano figure tells us everything we need to know about the story after the story of The Social Network. The film is a relic from an era when people still mostly used Facebook to reconnect with their exes, to look at pictures of their high school friends’ kids. Nobody was talking, yet, about how social media use contributed to increased depression, anxiety, and above all, loneliness. As of July 2010, Facebook’s user base was 500 million—still larger than the populations of the United States, Mexico, and France combined, but not yet eclipsing the number of adherents to Christianity, as it does today. Facebook was merely a fabulously successful company, and we observed billionaires in our cultural midst with awe and bemusement, a bunch of little Charles Foster Kanes pining away for their little Rosebuds. Compared to what Facebook (now Meta) has become, Fincher’s portrait looks so quaint it’s practically sepia-toned.
But the music’s icy grip foretells developments lying just around the corner. In 2011, shortly after Fincher’s film was released, Zuckerberg went to the Federal Election Commission and asked for “an exemption to rules requiring the source of funding for political ads be revealed.” The music knows about the Cambridge Analytica scandals, and about January 6th, which was incited and stoked chiefly on Facebook. That deep synth note is the sound of militia members actively recruiting for, organizing, and executing the storming of the Capitol entirely on Facebook, even posting pictures and streaming the event live there. And it’s the sound I hear whenever I watch the real Zuckerberg, saucer-eyed and vacant instead of narrow-eyed and contemptuous, testify once again in front of a group of performatively angry senators before reporting back to Facebook headquarters.
The Social Network misses all of this, focusing on the corporate hurly-burly of who owns what, who screwed over who. In the final scene, Rashida Jones—a plucky junior partner—tenderly delivers the movie’s final verdict on Zuckerberg (“You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.”). She departs, and then, as Zuckerberg turns to his laptop, pulls up the Facebook profile of the apocryphal Erica Albright, and requests to be her “Friend,” the strains of the Beatles’ “Baby You’re a Rich Man” play. The truest version of the movie would have closed on a Reznor cue—blank, pistoning, uneasy, both wide-open and completely empty.


A new reissue of the ill-fated shoegazers’ 1998 album reminds us that even as their fortunes were fading, they remained undeterred in their pursuit of psychedelic bliss.

99th Dream

The story of Swervedriver is the story of ’90s alternative rock as told in four acts. There was the buzz-building debut, 1991’s Raise, which put the Oxford band at the crest of the first shoegaze wave alongside Creation labelmates My Bloody Valentine and Ride. There was the flirtation with American major-label crossover success on 1993’s Mezcal Head, which saw them touring with Smashing Pumpkins at their Siamese Dream pinnacle. Then there was the big swing for Britpop glory on 1995’s Ejector Seat Reservation, which failed to impress the bean counters: A&M declined to release it in the U.S., prompting Creation to drop the band in the UK. As if that wasn’t dispiriting enough, in 1997 the band would get picked up by another American major, DGC, only to get dumped before they could release a record with them. So for their fourth album, 99th Dream, Swervedriver joined the ranks of former ’90s hopefuls who were forced to make a return trip to indieville. They self-released the record on their own Sonic Wave Discs imprint in the UK and through Zero Hour in the U.S.; a band that once called Oasis and Soundgarden labelmates was now rubbing shoulders with college-rock survivors like Steve Wynn and proggy misfits like Space Needle.
By the time of 99th Dream’s release in 1998, Swervedriver were positioned outside not just the major-label ecosystem, but virtually every alt-rock movement. Most of their shoegazer peers from the dawn of the decade had broken up (or entered their eternal hibernation phase); grunge was dead and gone; the Britpop bubble had burst; and fans of left-field guitar bands were delving into post-rock or exploring electronic music. So on 99th Dream, Swervedriver committed to simply being the truest version of themselves: a band whose effects-pedal fetishism was matched by its affinity for sundazed melodies. And while they may not have envisioned 99th Dream as a swan song, the album’s wistfully nostalgic lyrics and comedown vibe made it the most existential in their catalog. “I’m not waiting for the world,” singer-guitarist Adam Franklin declared on the anthemic Beatles-’68 reverie “She Weaves a Tender Trap”; months later, Swervedriver broke up.
When stacked against Swervedriver’s previous releases, 99th Dream largely abandons the artsy ambitions and widescreen production of Ejector Seat Reservation for a more back-to-basics approach, but retains the melodic finesse they had honed over the years. The opening track functions as a microcosm of their career up: The “Misirlou”-like intro provides a loud echo of the trash-Americana fascinations that fueled Swervedriver’s earliest work, but that frantic high-octane fanfare gives way to a rhapsodic, gently swaying sing-along bathed in waves of wah-wah. 99th Dream may have marked Swervedriver’s return to the underground, but in their heads, they were still playing a sundown set at Glastonbury.
And who knows: With more robust label support and better timing, 99th Dream’s crown jewel, “These Times,” could’ve been Swervedriver’s “Live Forever.” The song initially appeared as a rough ’n’ ready rave-up on a 1997 DGC promo that made the media rounds right before the band got dropped. But in advance of 99th Dream’s proper release, the song was retooled with a cleaner, steadier treatment more befitting of its reflective lyrics. Franklin’s no stranger to quoting his favorite artists in song—from the Creation to Burt Bacharach—but in this case, the references take on a more poignant, personal dimension. When he sings, “We drank all your wine/With the Stooges high and a Bunnymen-style,” he could be reminiscing about a first date spent getting drunk and listening to records, or his band’s own halcyon days.
Even when Swervedriver went nuclear on their early records, Franklin always kept his cool as a vocalist, and by 99th Dream, the band’s sound had fully adapted to his zen wavelength. Once a group that tried to approximate the roar of a hotwired Mustang peeling down an interstate, the Swervedriver heard on 99th Dream were more about (as the title track puts it) “space travel rock’n’roll”—specifically that moment where the rockets detach and the pod is left to float. Following a taut opening stretch featuring some of the most accessible, easygoing songs in the Swervedriver canon, 99th Dream drifts into the outer cosmos with “Electric 77,” which begins as a woozy ballad before Franklin and guitar foil Jimmy Hartridge unleash their full noise-pedal arsenal. Appropriately, it’s a song about an exploding spaceship called Stellar Caprice, a name repurposed as the title for an instrumental sequel, which turns their signature squall into lounge jazz with flamenco flourishes.
While this outre mid-album suite seems to have a warping effect on the songs that follow (like the Dalí-clock desert-psych vibes of “In My Time”), 99th Dream’s closer, “Behind the Scenes of the Sounds and Times,” places Swervedriver’s melodic and exploratory instincts in perfect harmony once again, yielding a seven-minute thriller that forges the missing link between Daydream Nation and Definitely Maybe. For many years, this song was presumed to be the final Swervedriver track on the final Swervedriver album, the perfect cap to a roller-coaster career. Of course, that perception changed once Swervedriver returned to the stage in 2008 and started releasing albums again in the 2010s. Still, 99th Dream has retained a underdog status in the Swervedriver discography. It’s always been the least visible of Swervedriver’s ’90s releases, no thanks to its lack of major-label distribution, proudly out-of-step aesthetic, and the fact that the band didn’t even survive its promotional cycle. It’s also the only Swervedriver that’s been heretofore unavailable on streaming services.
But this handsome three-disc reissue reminds us that, even as their fortunes were fading, Swervedriver remained highly industrious, never wavering in their quest for psychedelic rapture. While 99th Dream might’ve sounded conventional to former shoegaze heads who were getting their minds blown by Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, this new edition includes a blistering live set—recorded that year at New York’s Mercury Lounge—where the band toughens up the newer material p to hold its own against sturdy warhorses like “Sandblasted.” At this stage in the game, Swervedriver were essentially playing to the die-hards, so they could afford to get semi-hits like “Duel” out of the way early and climax with sprawling, enthralling versions of deep cuts like “Kill the Superheroes” and “Duress.” As the latter gets sucked into its fuzz-blasted abyss, Franklin starts ad-libbing Bowie’s “Golden Years.” “Don’t let me hear you say/Life’s taking you nowhere,” he repeats—no doubt a useful self-help mantra for a band that had been beaten down by the industry and was summoning the strength to carry on.
But if the Mercury Lounge recording captures one of shoegaze’s most powerful bands in its ear-damaging element, the complementary collection of non-album singles, demos, and outtakes might convince you that Swervedriver actually aren’t a shoegaze band at all, at least in the modern sense of the term. They were more like a ’60s psych-rock act armed with ’90s guitar gear. Right up to the end of their initial run, they were still seeking out novel ways to thread pop hooks into trippy textures, yielding the flower-powered flashbacks of “Butterfly,” the musically blissful/lyrically spiteful “Straight Thru Your Heart” (aka the 1998 B-side “Hate Yr Kind”), and the amusing sing-speak oddity “Canvey Island Baby,” which imagines Jarvis Cocker getting sorted for E’s and whizz and joining the Stone Roses in response. The latter song would turn up in more subdued form and with a completely different lyrical structure on Franklin’s 2007 debut, Bolts of Melody, and fellow 99th Dream castaway “Carousel City” would also enjoy a second life on 2010’s I Could Sleep for a Thousand Years, making the bonus-disc portion of this set a bridge between Swervedriver Mk I and Franklin’s subsequent solo endeavors. Taken as a whole, this repackaging of 99th Dream transforms the record from a neglected emblem of Swervedriver’s demise into a towering monument—not just to their well-acknowledged interstellar guitar overdrive, but to their chronically underrated craftsmanship.


Paying tribute to the late bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik in a 2022 live recording, this European jazz quartet turns an understated 1961 single into a thundering, hourlong rave-up.

Wood Blues

On a cold spring night in 2022, the jazz quartet أحمد [Ahmed] set up at one end of the long, narrow warehouse space of Glasgow’s industrial-chic Glue Factory. Their muse and namesake Ahmed Abdul-Malik was there in spirit. The setlist consisted of only one song: the late jazz musician’s “Oud Blues,” which runs to about four minutes in the original 1961 version. By the time أحمد [Ahmed] finished with it, they had been playing for nearly an hour.
Wood Blues is a recording of that phenomenal performance—at once a cover song, an avant-garde improv session, and a driving, swinging jazz concert. أحمد [Ahmed] have been honing the conceit for a decade: Every show, they choose an Abdul-Malik composition and turn it inside out. Pianist Pat Thomas discovered the little-known bassist and oudist in the 1980s and immediately recognized his significance. Born Jonathan Tim, Jr. in Brooklyn to immigrant parents, Abdul-Malik changed his name to assert his Islamic identity and Sudanese lineage. His family was from the Caribbean, not Sudan, but he reached back further, reclaiming his diasporic African heritage. As a bandleader, Abdul-Malik incorporated Arabic instruments—qanun, darbuka, a violin tuned to fourths and fifths—into his ensembles. His late ’50s and early ’60s albums like Jazz Sahara and East Meets West ushered in the new form of modal jazz alongside landmark recordings by Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
Thomas wanted to revive Abdul-Malik’s music, to turn a footnote into a headline. Saxophonist Seymour Wright shared his interest and joined Thomas’s trio اسم [ISM], with bassist Joel Grip and drummer Antonin Gerbal, to form أحمد [Ahmed]. Together, they’re something of a supergroup, each player a star in a different constellation of the European improvised music scene. They only perform live, with no practice or advance planning. But from their separate cities—Thomas and Wright in London, Grip in Berlin, Gerbal in Paris—they’re always thinking about Abdul-Malik. When they play one of his songs, all that thinking comes out in a torrent of sound.
Wood Blues is at once thrillingly violent and fervently faithful in its transformations of Abdul-Malik’s material, altering the original beyond recognition yet keeping its spirit alive. The recording begins with the audience chattering as Grip plays the walking bassline of “Oud Blues.” Thomas adds melodic piano flourishes and Gerbal lays down a shuffling beat. Wright supports with short percussive clicks from his saxophone, then extends those clicks into bursts, trading licks with Thomas, who bangs on the keys with increasing force. There’s a shift in the room as the audience goes quiet. Piano and sax merge into a single pummeling attack. Gerbal keeps time with a steady tom-tom pulse, and Grip carries the melody through the fray. The moment can’t last long, and soon the band is propelled by a frantic rhythm, Thomas pounding the piano, Wright blowing with frightening power, the crowd now shouting, screaming, dancing.
The keys to أحمد [Ahmed] are repetition and movement. Everybody plays at once through the whole concert, and everyone repeats themselves. But variations drive the music ineluctably forward. Gerbal and Grip lock into a swinging beat, responding to one another with a sort of ESP honed over more than a decade as a rhythm section. Thomas plays clusters instead of chords, dropping blocks of sound like a hammer on an anvil. Wright offers blasts of notes rather than flowing solos, a message in frenzied, honking Morse code that urges the others onward. By the end of the hour, they’ve moved through jazz, blues, and discordant free improv to arrive somewhere entirely unfamiliar.
All this leads them into some strange territory on Wood Blues. At times, Thomas turns his hands over and strikes the keyboard with his fists, causing the body of the piano to resonate like a bass drum. On his more daring excursions, Wright makes his saxophone into a vocoder, or a car alarm, or Woody Woodpecker. Gerbal’s drums can sound like an avalanche of crockery. Yet somehow the album always grooves, never losing sight of Abdul-Malik’s original composition in all the chaos. In the end, this is a celebration of “Oud Blues,” not simply an excuse to test their limits.
After the concert, Thomas is spent. Gerbal is soaked in sweat. Grip’s hands are bleeding. Wright is unable to speak, with lips and tongue like jelly. Soon each player will head home, not to see one another until it’s time to do it all again. But they’ll continue to think about this night, and this song, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik, plotting new courses through jazz and its hidden histories.