Like 2012's Centipede Hz, Painting With is a bright, epileptically busy piece of music that crams every element of Animal Collective's sound into a landscape without depth or recess. It feels, more than anything, like a kind of construction project: Each sound meticulously built and only faintly familiar, each second crammed with doodads, as though the band was worried either they or their audience might get bored.

Painting With

Despite its futuristic sheen, Animal Collective's music has always evoked a primitive kind of purity. Early on they wore masks—a gesture that connected them not only to the lucid dreams of playtime but to traditions of shamanism and present-day Mardi Gras, where people hide their faces not to disguise their natures but reveal them. Their songs morphed and rambled and writhed with the liveness of kimchi or kombucha, less finished product than something that fermented and evolved as you listened. Onstage, they looked more like astronauts than musicians; on record, they sounded less like musicians than cavemen, or lost wolves howling for an impossible moon: Modern guys seeking a spiritual basement deep below the civilized self.
Like most seekers, they get made fun of a lot. It's actually hard to think of music whose bad reputation is more disproportionately out of balance with its good intentions than Animal Collective's without dipping into Christian radio or trip-hop. Whether the jokes—which are mostly about drum circles, jam bands and shakily understood allusions to "shrooms"—are onto something or just contaminated by the tellers' own personal fears is in the eye of the beholder; suffice it to say that I agree with Nietzsche when he said that it is man alone who suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
No doubt said jokers will be happy to hear that the band prepared for their new album, Painting With, by bringing baby pools into the studio and projecting dinosaurs on the wall. Like 2012's Centipede Hz, Painting With is a bright, epileptically busy piece of music that crams every element of the band's sound into a landscape without depth or recess. Instead of the aquatic lullabies of Merriweather Post Pavilion or the naturalism of Sung Tongs, we get something like a 1980s Frank Stella or one of Jeff Koons' balloon dogs: Rad, synthetic and ready to jump directly into your face.
Depth and hiddenness become metaphors here. Watching the rockets' red glare over Baghdad in April, 2003, I was ready for an album like Here Comes the Indian, whose nightmarish volatility reminded me that whatever evil men do starts in the heart; after the 2008 election I vibed unapologetically with the optimism of "My Girls," which sounded like Peter Pan taking the wheel and telling the Darling children everything was going to be all right.
Now, values and messages that once seemed implicit in the band's music—love, freedom, the general idea that modern life is an interesting but fucked-up endeavor from which something very dear has been lost—are stitched right into the sleeves of their windbreakers. "Where's the bridge that's gonna take me home?" goes the coda of Painting With's giddy opening song, "FloriDada." "The bridge that someone's fighting over / That bridge that someone's paying for / A bridge so old so let it go." Seconds earlier, they sample the "Wipe Out," just to make sure you know they come in peace and packed all the toys. Even the title "FloriDada," has the quality of a joke explained. Though it pains me to say it, there are times that Painting With feels less like Animal Collective than Animal Collective: the Ride.
In the absence of a less effable genius, there's always elbow grease. Painting With feels, more than anything, like a kind of construction project: Each sound meticulously built and only faintly familiar, each second crammed with doodads, as though the band was worried either they or their audience might get bored. The human voice, which in the past has given their music not just a so-called human element but a devotional, almost religious glow, has been reduced to a party trick, with Avey Tare and Panda Bear trading syllables like two anxious Globetrotters. The album's best songs—"Golden Gal," "Recycling"—aren't just highlights, they're breathers.
As someone who has no hangups about admitting that this band changed not only how I think about music but how I thought about life, it's easy to wonder if Painting With and Centipede Hz signal an ending, or at least a consequential lull. Fifteen years is longer than most bands last, let alone great ones. Part of Animal Collective's image—or my image of them, at least—entailed fantasy of three to four guys sacrificing themselves at the foot of their loop pedals to conjure some other, bigger, more powerful god. Now, they're parents living in different zip codes and riding the festival circuit. Panda Bear's solo albums are more interesting than they've ever been and Avey Tare has kept busy, but the time that they were a bellwether for the horizon of independent music seems in ebb. Old heads will tell you that the most exciting part of seeing them live was hearing songs months, sometimes years before they came out on record: I, for example, remember being in the basement of a sushi restaurant in Charlottesville, Virginia, watching Feels before anyone knew it existed, or wading through Webster Hall to a gorgeous, slowly dawning song they later called "Banshee Beat." The feeling of that moment is hard to describe, but it was something like standing in the light of a secret. Times change, life intervenes. Painting With was the first time the band jumped right into the studio. Work can be scheduled, magic can't.
Correction (2/16/16 2:04 p.m.): This review previously described hearing the album Sung Tongs at a concert in Charlottesville. The album in question is Feels.


The big personalities of both Quavo and Travis Scott are muted on their collaboration, one that feels lethargic even for a victory lap.

Travis Scott / Quavo: Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho

Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho

Last year’s palatable string of album-length collaborations from the South featured Future and Young Thug dropping Super Slimey as a welcome surprise following their cold war, while Offset, 21 Savage, and Metro Boomin’s Without Warning was a Halloween gorefest that transcended its gimmick. Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho—Travis Scott and Quavo’s much ballyhooed team-up—was slated to be just as formidable, if only because the duo’s working relationship goes back longer than most of their contemporaries.
Quavo has been appearing on Travis’ projects since his 2014 mixtape Days Before Rodeo. Their big payoff came on the Young Thug-featuring jewel “Pick Up the Phone,” with Travis returning the favor by hopping on Culture’s oddly majestic “Kelly Price.” The two highlights didn’t place the stars on equal footing, but using Travis’ gothic bent to ornament Quavo’s colorful presence was a solid formula. That dynamic, combined with the sheer momentum of their careers, gave some confidence in the possibilities of Huncho Jack, which was teased all throughout last year. But instead of being the trap-and-Auto-Tune “Auld Lang Syne” it ought to be by its December release, Huncho Jack is lethargic even for a victory lap. The potential is squandered on a 41-minute runthrough that rarely feels much more than extracurricular.
Quavo and Travis don’t carry themselves as pals who’ve been working together for years. Rather, they have about the same amount of chemistry as two strangers attempting to draw some pleasantries out of dead air. Quavo features work best when the surrounding cast and production mirror his natural effervescence. But here, he’s on autopilot, slowing himself down to match Travis’ staid presence, which creates some uncharacteristic clunkers; on “Eye 2 Eye,” Quavo chants, “Real nigga, I/We see eye to eye” with the clumsy precision of a samurai who hasn’t realized his sword is no longer sharp. Meanwhile, Travis too frequently settles for throwing echoes and ad-libs at Quavo, which is unfortunate because his “It’s lit” signature is an acquired taste at best. They pop up like nervous ticks to ruin possible hits on the slithering “Dubai Shit” and the rugged “Motorcycle Patches,” adding irritation with every appearance
Joint projects often work best when the collaborators complement each other in ways that accentuate their abilities. Without Warning was compelling because 21 Savage’s deadpan voice was a catapult for Offset’s acrobatics. On his albums, Travis covers his shortcomings by curating and cloaking himself in this kind of nocturnal sensibility, like a kid wearing a cape. But Huncho Jack’s star co-billing casts him as more of a frontman, where the spotlight continuously highlights his mediocre rhyming. That he’s shooting banalities like, “Jump out this bitch: pogo, yeah” and, “Take that bar, no 3G” with lackadaisical delivery also shows a plain lack of ambition.
Huncho Jack’s saving grace is often the supporting players. Offset and Quavo are joyously vain in their shared verse on “Dubai Shit,” and Takeoff provides some welcome relief on “Eye 2 Eye” (“Flip it like it’s Five Guys, I’m Tupac, get all eyes”). But like any Travis Scott album, it’s the sterling production that carries the project. The beats are as elegant as they are variegated, kicking off with Buddah Bless’ Otis Redding chop on “Modern Slavery” and veering into unexpected oceanic keys that add emotional depth to “Huncho Jack” and the crystalline “Saint Laurent Mask,” which both feature Mike Dean’s touch. In a fatal irony, Huncho Jack’s liveliness tends to come from everywhere except Quavo and Travis Scott. The protean energy that buoy their respective works are sadly absent.


Her first album since 2012 is a reflective, characteristically elegant session, surveying the singer’s advancing years in calm repose.

Personne d’autre

With her first album in six years, the characteristically elegant Personne d’autre, Françoise Hardy finds herself among the last surviving icons of a certain kind of French pop. Her tone of absent-minded infatuation is tangled up in Parisian iconography; her voice tells us about France in the way Marilyn Monroe’s walk tells us about America. Hardy, too, makes her talent seem effortless, though her longevity hasn’t come by chance. Rather than courting fame, she’s spent the last half-century collaborating sparingly and shunning lucrative indulgences like touring and the services of Serge Gainsbourg, whose dream of a full-length behind their 1968 collaboration “Comment te dire adieu” she declined to fulfill. What she won instead was license to write her own history.
To many Anglophones, that history is largely unrecognized, which is a shame. Across Hardy’s 30 or so albums are intermittent flashes of brilliance, defying the received wisdom of a steady post-’60s decline. Her spare, haunting 1971 LP, La Question, might be the first truly personal Françoise Hardy record; 1973’s Message Personnel contains baroque-pop triumphs like “L’amour en privé.” As recently as 1996, Hardy was resetting the bar with Le Danger, which casually invented adult-contemporary space rock—appropriate, given that she’d begun moonlighting in astrology literature—but landed with a commercial thud.
Personne d’autre (Nobody Else in English) is the latest in a string of minor releases that form an epilogue to the 74-year-old singer’s legacy. On these 12 mortality-facing songs, there are moments when her breath thins to a wisp, circulating through the tasteful tapestries of songs like “Le Large” (translated here as “Sail Away”) and the Michel Berger cover “Seras-tu là” (“Will You Be There”). When she sings to a lost loved one, on “You’re My Home,” that “I would fight every day/Just to show you I am strong,” the calm in her voice doesn’t conceal the weight of the effort.
Hardy survived a major health crisis after her last album, 2012’s L’Amour Fou, and on the new LP she surveys her advancing years in repose, without the macabre flourish of, say, Jacques Brel’s curtain call, Les Marquises. Written and recorded with Erick Benzi (once a composer for Céline Dion), it’s a reflective session in sound and subject. Their formula offers few surprises—a saccharine tribute to Hardy’s husband Jacques Dutronc, “Train Spécial,” ticks the armchair-nostalgia boxes—though Hardy occasionally finds a niche to make her own.
Take “Dors mon ange” (“Sleep, My Angel”), Hardy’s adaptation of a 2005 obscurity by Poets of the Fall, a broody Finnish clan given to overwrought, minor-key proclamations. Apparently deeming their lyrics insufficiently melodramatic (“Let your dreams flood in/Like waves of sweet fire,” goes the original chorus) this version adds another shroud of gloom. “She screams, “I’m so afraid,’” Hardy sings in French, as the song’s apparently suicidal subject, “‘The machine races out of control/And it’s going to hurt.’”
This blunt narrative ought to sound contrived, but Hardy’s gift for delicate phrasing is defiantly alluring. She conveys sympathy in every word, like a benevolent monarch surveying a faded empire, and sings in the plainspoken yet luminous way that she’s made iconic. It’s as if she’s saying, this is simply the way things are, and they’re quite beautiful enough.


On his solo debut, the California garage-rock multi-instrumentalist and Ty Segall collaborator concocts a collection of wistful, psychedelic pop that pits lush and layered arrangements against needle-pinning power chords. Like Segall, Cronin brings a young energy to classic rock sounds.

Mikal Cronin

Just out of college, Mikal Cronin already has a proven record at garage-rock bashing. As bassist and singer for the Moonhearts (formerly Charle & the Moonhearts), he spent his dorm-dwelling years releasing a sporadic string of fuzz-infused surf-rock tunes. More notably, he's the Waylon Jennings to Ty Segall's Buddy Holly-- a collaborator and sideman who sometimes fills the bass chair in the psych-rock upstart's live band. Friends since high school, they've released a split LP, Reverse Shark Attack, and a handful of singles. But it's Segall-- among the most prolific voices in the thoroughly prolific San Francisco garage scene-- who tends to get the top billing.
On his eponymous debut, Mikal Cronin proves he can hold his own. It's an album of wistful, psychedelic pop that pits lush and layered arrangements against needle-pinning power chords. Like Segall's latest, Goodbye Bread, Cronin's solo turn finds him dialing back his thrashier impulses in order to clear space for singer-songwriter-style introspection. But when the curtain of lysergic gristle is pulled aside, it turns out that they're not the same person, after all. Even when he goes all Neil Young, Segall still retains an affable beach-dude demeanor. Cronin turns out to be the more vulnerable voice-- Elliott Smith in throwback dress, minus the self-loathing. And, like Smith, he has an ear for arrangements.
Album opener "Is It Alright" pivots from Beach Boys-worthy harmonies to chugging chords to jangling acoustic guitars before, finally, spinning off into an outro that sounds like Jethro Tull gone hardcore punk. It's no so much that Cronin knows how to effectively layer instruments (though he does) or collage disparate ideas together (though he does), but that he knows how to use dynamics to his advantage. On "Gone" he works soft-to-loud changes, dropping the bridge down to a whisper before bounding back up for a final, climactic freak-out. At the end of "Again and Again", Cronin drops out the rhythm section, rebuilding the song over a gentle falsetto melody.
Cronin's music owes a heavy debt to 1960s pop, mostly T. Rex and the Beatles (the sax outro on "Apathy" is weirdly reminiscent of the Beatles "Hey Jude"), but his tunes aren't precious period reconstructions. They're delivered with the gritty, gnarly abandon of a Black Flag fan trying to come to terms with their parents' record collection. Like Segall, Cronin brings a young energy to classic rock sounds because, well, he's actually young.
In interviews, Cronin has explained that the bulk of the album was written during the twilight months of his college career, when he was lonely and stressed and taking refuge in his tape recorder. Not exactly as trying a set of circumstances as, say, Tupac recording "Me Against the World", but a sensitive time, for sure. It's a transition that marks the end of structured life and the onset of a long-postponed adulthood, when you're too young and too old at the same time. Cronin nails that mood perfectly, with songs that are frustrated and energetic but flagged with uncertainty and doubt. The songs kick hardest when those melancholy sentiments collide with his crunching, chugging psychedelic urges-- when the volume is blasting in both the amps and the emotions.


Thurston Moore’s new solo LP evokes the hippie leanings that were always at the heart of Sonic Youth. With some of his most joyous lyrics to date, Moore uses outer aggression to achieve inner bliss.

Thurston Moore: Rock n Roll Consciousness

Rock n Roll Consciousness

Though they personified the squall and squalor of 1980s Manhattan, Sonic Youth’s hearts always belonged to 1960s California. Starting with 1985’s Bad Moon Rising, Golden State roots both literal (see: Kim Gordon’s Los Angeles upbringing) and figurative (Lee Ranaldo’s Deadhead past) began to deeply entangle themselves in their knotty guitar gnarl. But where the Manson-inspired maelstrom of “Death Valley ’69” seemed to add another gallon of piss onto the grave of the hippie dream, the content and iconography of Sonic Youth’s subsequent work suggested they were secretly mourning it.
The inner-sleeve artwork for 1986’s EVOL found Thurston Moore posing like a flower child with a sitar, while a scrawled crucifix insignia—emblazoned with the words “Sonic Life”—evoked the DIY religiosity of West Coast free-love cults. And with 1987’s Sister, Sonic Youth produced the most Californian album in their canon, from the desecrated Disneyland photo on the cover to the specific geographic references, not to mention the song that proved to be the closest Gordon and Moore would ever get to their own “I Got You Babe.” After flirting with mainstream success in the early 1990s, Sonic Youth more or less carried themselves as a post-punk Grateful Dead, becoming a modern paragon of hippie-era artistic freedom but without the incense, hacky sacks, and wavy-arm dancing.
This summer marks the 30th anniversary of Sister, but in lieu of a big deluxe reissue campaign, Moore has surfaced with a solo record that similarly exhibits outer aggression as a means to achieve inner bliss. While Moore’s most recent work has seen him unleash his latent activist streak, Rock n Roll Consciousness uses its noisy guitar jams as battering rams to access more intimate, spiritual modes of expression. The title is no misnomer—on Rock n Roll Consciousness, Moore is consciously rocking, with the returning cast of guitarist James Sedwards, My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe, and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley further solidifying the groundwork they laid on 2014’s The Best Day. But that sturdy foundation gives Moore the confidence to let his head float evermore freely into the clouds, atop some of the most joyous, optimistic lyrics he’s ever sung.
Rock n Roll Consciousness is an album about love—if not an album of love songs per se. Moore isn’t singing to his girlfriend here—he’s addressing mythical goddesses and the mystique of big cities at night and the changing of the seasons. Like The Best Day, the new record features lyrical contributions from London poet Radio Radieux, whose cosmic vocabulary—with its references to “the prophetess,” “peyote walkers,” “magic drums,” and “vibration love”—allows Moore to mine the ecstatic without losing his ageless, dead-cool drawl.
But if the album’s lyrics project a certain youthful idealism, musically, Moore and co. proudly dig their worn-out Converse heels into an indie-is-the-new-dad-rock ethos that trades in Sonic Youth’s abstract extremes for a tougher, more propulsive thrust. It’s more meat-and-potatoes, sure, but it’s really choice grass-fed beef with yam flan. “Exalted” unfurls like the Feelies playing at 16 rpm, before Sedwards starts channeling J Mascis channeling Eddie Hazel on what sounds like a meditative rendition of Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane.” This melancholic reverie is rudely interrupted by a doom-metal drone that hits like a flaming gong crash, blazing the trail for Moore’s star-struck vocal to finally come in just before the eight-minute mark. “Aphrodite,” meanwhile, feels like an entire song spun out of the staccato, pin-pricked climax to “Marquee Moon,” until Googe’s hypnotic bass breakdown goads Moore and Sedwards to engage in some wah-wah warfare.
Where The Best Day proffered a somewhat uneven mix of extended odysseys and rough-hewn sketches, Rock n Roll Consciousness is much more cohesive and smoothly sequenced. Its five tracks (averaging eight minutes a piece) feel like carefully plotted epics rather than improvised excursions; the revved-up 10-minute thriller “Turn On,” in particular, is packed with hairpin twists and turns. But Moore can also reach euphoric peaks through a more direct route. “Cusp”—a cloud-parting ode to the coming of spring—is six-and-a-half sustained minutes of shimmering jangle and steady, shuffling rhythm. The song is simultaneously frantic and soothing; like a jogging-on-the-spot exercise, the surroundings may not change, but by the end, your heart is pounding and you feel light-headed. It’s the moment where this album’s core philosophies achieve their purest physical manifestation. As Moore would attest, rock’n’roll—like love itself—should instill a higher state of consciousness, while at the same time make you feel like you’re losing it.


A song-by-song "reimagining" of Black Flag's Damaged, the excellent new album by Dirty Projectors is, more importantly, the work of a band that is restructuring rock on a compositional level rather than a sonic one.

Rise Above

Dave Longstreth, like a lot of visionaries, is so full of bright ideas he can barely keep his shit together. Part of the problem is that he's indiscriminate about what he eats: Gustav Mahler, reggaetón, Malian guitar music, Cole Porter, band members. He's helmed a different roster of musicians for each Dirty Projectors album, and each album has had its own agenda. "Jolly Jolly Jolly Ego", from 2005's The Getty Address, plays like a parade of his fetishes: dissonant folk, looped bassoons, a rhythm track sounding like it was lifted from an R. Kelly record, and Longstreth in the middle, throttling his poor falsetto with vibrations violent enough to knock a drinking glass off a table.
After five or so years of cherrypicking from large groups of musicians, he's streamlined to a rock quartet, and they actually seem to matter to him in ways he can't shake: touring guitarist Amber Coffman and drummer Brian McOmber play on Rise Above; bassist and vocalist Angel Deradoorian hadn't joined yet, but has since been filling the parts played here by Nat Baldwin and Susanna Waiche. Hearing the band rip through material from last year's New Attitude EP on a recent Daytrotter session was like watching the glass slipper slide on.
While Longstreth's initial albums were mostly string-backed folk, he's now given himself up to rhythm-- in his words, his compositions have become more "horizontal" than "vertical." The horizontal's great for dancing-- an opportunity that arises a few times here-- but verticality is still the source of the songs' tensions. Coffman and Waiche's coos stack harmonies with Longstreth's bleat like little car wrecks, and even though the guitars move like a West African dance band or math rock, the songs seem propelled by the constant resolutions of notes rather than the beats themselves.
Then again, it's the combo-- a synthesis of heavy rhythms with an addiction to delicacy and ornament-- that makes Longstreth an innovative, paradoxical writer. "Spray Paint (The Walls)" is half-Soundgarden, half-Outkast. Some of this record sounds like Phish and some of it sounds like the Police. There's a verse in Esperanto. When Longstreth strides into the singer-songwriter spotlight, he's so determined to express himself he forgets the idea is to share, instead employing melisma that's so brutal it's almost embarrassing. And he sounds like he's having fun! And that's scary. Rise Above is serious, somewhat inhuman stuff, which is possibly why the band never smiles onstage: Longstreth, wide-eyed and focused, hair like wild grass; Deradoorian and Coffman looking eerily cornfed, as blank as backup singers in Mullholland Drive, their hands responsible for a completely different set of rhythms than their voices; McOmber a pair of arms occasionally rising above the wall.
But newfound focus from the band brings newfound exhaustion for listeners. For all his supposed messiness, Longstreth is actually really brittle and anal-retentive. That the album has a concept-- a song-by-song "reimagining" of Black Flag's Damaged-- scarcely matters to the listener, although it seems good for Longstreth: It gives the illusion of an anchor. He recently told me that it was his attempt at making a "New York album: angular, austere, obsessed with authenticity, like New York bands supposedly are." The assumptions seem off, but he probably hit the mark. They're consumed with cultural appropriation and aesthetic polyamory-- a post-pop-art idea of authenticity. Rise Above is so concerned about its polyrhythmic arrangements and precision that it can be suffocating on full listens. And though Longstreth tries to find color and protest in a bunch of songs about hating everyone's face and wanting to die, it's almost an afterthought-- unsurprisingly, the album's most bracing moment comes during the break in "Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie", when Coffman and Waiche volley oh's and ah's without an English word in sight.
Rise Above will drop plenty of jaws, and, like Deerhoof, Dirty Projectors are restructuring rock on a compositional level rather than a sonic one. To murder a cliché, whatever unfurls from Longstreth's brain next isn't anyone's guess-- Rise Above, for all its fastidiousness and minor drawbacks, finally displays the perfect counterargument to the portrait of him as another nutso college dropout: It displays a pattern.


*Ruminations *is a record like none other in Conor Oberst’s catalog, stunning for how utterly alone he sounds.

Ruminations

Conor Oberst’s music has never sounded lonely. Yes, he’s done catatonically despondent, inconsolable, dejected, maniacal—it's a lot to handle, and yet he’s always been surrounded by friends both local and legendary who believe in his vision, underscoring his status as one of the 21st century’s most mercurial and charismatic songwriters. Arriving almost a month after a comprehensive Bright Eyes boxed set that feels like a headstone for the band, Ruminations is a record like none other in Oberst’s catalog—stunning for how utterly alone he sounds. This is obvious in a technical sense, as there are no goddamn timpani rolls, no boys to keep strummin’ those guitars, just Oberst on harmonica, acoustic and piano with ten songs written during an Omaha winter and recorded in 48 hours. Plenty of folk artists make records like that. But there’s also a loneliness in Ruminations that’s far rare and disturbing—the loneliness one feels after taking stock and wondering if they have a friend left in the world.
“When it came time to stand with him, you scattered with the rats,” Oberst spits on “You All Loved Him Once,” a song whose title alone would create an uncomfortable subtext on any of his albums. Most fans assume any Oberst lyric written in the first person has to be about Conor Oberst and he’s acknowledged the “weird betrayal” they express when he fails to meet their expectations. Such was the case on 2014’s Upside Down Mountain, one of his more mildly received LPs. But many wouldn’t even acknowledge its existence to begin with—in late 2013, an anonymous post in XOJane’s comments section metastasized into a serious rape allegation against Oberst that was exposed as a fabrication; but only after a libel suit that quantified the damage to his career and reputation at $1 million (which would have been donated to charity). Oberst had the complaint dismissed after his accuser recanted and apologized, even though his name couldn't truly be cleared; the rash of articles that presumed his guilt are still easy to find and treat his innocence like a minor factual clarification.
Oberst does not address this situation directly on Ruminations. He comes close on its opener, imagining himself back in Omaha, sweating through his suit in a courtroom: “It’s a bad dream, I have it seven times a week/No, it’s not me/But I’m the one who has to die.” The title of this song is “Tachycardia,” which hints at the personal issues Oberst does directly address going forward, mostly the medical and mental maladies that popped up after he moved back to Omaha with his wife—Oberst talks about his blood pressure, therapy, “alkaline produce,” suicidal ideation and a cerebral cyst that sunk his tour behind Desaparecidos’ flamethrowing agit-punk reunion LP Payola.
Ruminations is Oberst’s most emotionally legible work since Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, also defined by its similarly cloistered worldview and sonic cohesion. Juxtaposed with the stately, worldly and universally beloved I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, Digital Ash felt like an “everything must go” clearance of songwriting tropes that sustained Bright Eyes up to 2005 and hadn’t returned since—drugs, casual sex, familial disappointment, mistrust of religion. These all come back in very startling ways on Ruminations, but more importantly, there’s the return of that quaver; the unsteady, hypothermic warble that made him a generational icon during his heyday and had all but disappeared on his more recent recordings.
Whereas it was once a very powerful affectation, Oberst sounds genuinely unsettled now—enough so that longtime engineer Mike Mogis told Vulture he was “a little worried” when he heard the demos, and on “Counting Sheep,” Oberst mentions the death of two children before intoning, “I hope it was slow, hope it was painful.” The names are redacted and it’s more disturbing for shifting the focus to the why of Oberst’s lyric rather than the who. Before “Counting Sheep” even gets to that point, it’s already an uncomfortably realistic document of insomnia, Oberst playing its stumbling chords with all thumbs, “gun in my mouth, trying to sleep/everything ends, everything has to.”
Because Mogis is involved, Ruminations isn’t lo-fi by any means, but it’s raw. There isn’t a delicately played note here and Oberst’s performance lends a palpable urgency to Ruminations that had been missing from his most recent work, perhaps at the expense of ambition. Ruminations at least makes good on its promise, trying to find connections between Oberst’s latter-day obsession with escaping the mythical construct of Conor Oberst and his prior obsession with living that construct.
“I don’t want to feel stuck baby, I just want to get drunk before noon,” Oberst casually announces on “Barbary Coast (Later)”; he also imagines himself as Paul Gauguin and John Muir, only to realize he’s not a painter or the outdoorsy type. He's still Conor Oberst, and throughout Ruminations, day-drunk surrealism is punctured by what he's best at: lacerating assessments of himself. They’re some of the most brutal he’s allowed himself in a decade: “Something dies when a star is born/I spread my anger like Agent Orange/I was indiscriminate,” Oberst sings on “Next of Kin,” preceded by a devastating portrait of a widower and the man who had to deliver the bad news. And yet, for all of the individual potency of the verses in “Next of Kin,” like much of Ruminations, the loose conceptual bundling doesn’t allow it the same knee-buckling thrust of similarly composed narratives like “Nothing Gets Crossed Out” or “Waste of Paint.”
“You All Loved Him Once” almost gets there. A song before it, Oberst admits, “I met Lou Reed and Patti Smith/It didn’t make me feel different,” and he spends six verses probing the inevitable disillusion and futility of hero worship. Unless you assume Conor Oberst affords himself the same grandiose self-belief as Kanye West, it seems that half of “You All Loved Him Once” at most, could be considered autobiographical. Some of it is almost certainly about Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama, or even just a friend who’s gotten too successful. But towards the end, some lines ring just too painfully true: “The more and more was put on him, he tried his best to take it on...you all loved him once/now he is gone”, he sings, and rather than making Oberst sound entitled, he comes off as someone legitimately disillusioned after an unimaginably awful public ordeal. But in the very next song, he’s gone off to an Irish pub in the East Village, trying to find a friend who’ll drink with him until they get kicked out. He's still Conor Oberst, after all.


Three years on from In Ghost Colours, Cut Copy return with a powerful new album that's less about anthems and more about movements and transitions.

Zonoscope

Cut Copy are Australian, and it's summer in Australia right now. So if it feels a little weird listening to an album of euphoric, starry-eyed dance-rock on earbuds while you're scraping snow-grit off your windshield, keep in mind: Somewhere in the world, someone is probably road-tripping to a swimming hole with this album playing, or eating a popsicle, or playing catch with their dogs while it blasts out of a car stereo or nearby boombox. By the time summer arrives for those of us in the northern hemisphere, we'll know these songs by heart and be able to sing along loudly.
Back when this group released 2004's Bright Like Neon Love, the idea of backing dazed, introverted indie pop with a utopian house thump was still relatively novel. And though that sound has since inspired legions of followers and copycats, still no one does it quite like Cut Copy themselves. 2008's steamrolling In Ghost Colours was an album of anthems; tracks like "Hearts on Fire" and "Lights and Music" were transcendent pop that stuck in heads for days. But Zonoscope is something different. It's an album-album that puts serious work into movements and transitions, and it works best when you hear it all in one chunk. That doesn't mean it's Cut Copy's OK Computer; it just means that the group has put more work into building a vast, rolling landscape rather than a series of peaks.
Zonoscope opens with a blast of woozy ecstasy in the form of "Need You Now", the sort of track where you don't even realize how much tension the group has built up until they release it, and ends with "Sun God", a marathon 15-minute groove that slowly morphs into a tranced-out Giorgio Moroder thud. In between those two tracks, Cut Copy build a long-form piece of work that moves between genres and ideas and moods without ever sacrificing its dancefloor momentum.
"Take Me Over" works in a bouncy hook from Fleetwood Mac's mid-80s party-staple "Everywhere" and gives a sly nod to their countrymen Men at Work, turning down-moments into playful exercises in irresistible cheeseball melody. "Where I'm Going" is a twinkly, faraway sigh of a song that could pass for Washed Out if it wasn't for the titanic Gary Glitter drum-stomp powering it. And "Pharaohs & Pyramids" may be the greatest thing here; it uses the band's melodic gifts and the sense of yearning in frontman Dan Whitford's voice and applies them to a classic Chicago house anthem, deploying its keyboard blips, synth-strings, and programmed cowbells at the exact right moments, building into a climactic cresting swoop.
Compared to the last two albums, Zonoscope has precious little guitar crunch, which makes it hard to even call Cut Copy a dance-rock band anymore. And that's for the best-- not just because that combination seems like a less thrilling prospect in 2011 than perhaps it once did, but also because Cut Copy have the architecture of dance music down perfectly and the confidence to execute the genre's moves with absolute precision. Even in the dead of winter, Zonoscope does its job beautifully. Imagine how it'll sound when you don't have to layer up to go outside.


Eclectic UK band locates an emotional center amidst their mathematically arranged dance punk elements.

Total Life Forever

Within the first seconds of Total Life Forever opener "Blue Blood", it becomes clear that Foals have taken a leap. Front and center, between tick-tocking guitars, frontman Yannis Philippakis begins to sing. When Foals' debut, Antidotes, sent the UK press into hyperbolic fits three years ago, Philippakis boasted what Pitchfork's Tom Ewing perfectly described as a "blank bark"-- one faceless particle amidst many mathematically arranged dance-punk elements. Philippakis was often indecipherable in a way that encapsulated those problems Foals' music suffered from as a whole: Their songs were fussy, calculating, and impenetrable, despite a ton of hooks. They could knock you down and they could make you glitch out, but finding an emotional connection was a challenge. In Total Life Forever, the Oxford quintet have not only opened up themselves and their sound, they've done so without abandoning the path that put them on the tips of tongues from the beginning.
They started by turning their songs inside out. Each of Antidotes' tracks was vacuum-sealed and tightly-packed, little space to be enjoyed between every pinballing polyrhythm and guitar figure. Though Foals were wise to add layers of horns and other muscles to the mix, it was difficult to feel as though there was any place to hang out within the song as a listener. At every turn, Total Life Forever is inviting. Much more alive than earlier efforts, it's an album with a complexion that constantly changes with time. When Philippakis' voice is first introduced in "Blue Blood", it's done with cavernous levels of reverb, his thin, delicate falsetto distant and sweet enough to recall My Morning Jacket's Jim James. The rest of the band quickly begin to do its thing with fewer rules: There's a much looser, much funkier feeling at work here, the poppy skronk of "Miami" or Chili Peppered licks of the titular track two early examples at work.
The album's second half doesn't fare so well, drowning at times in aqueous atmospherics. Single "This Orient" begins with some fizzy vocal textures and snare cracks only to morph into leftover Bloc Party. "Alabaster" doesn't boast any of the energy one could find in "After Glow" and closer "What Remains", both of which make devastating use of their song structures. But those missteps sound simply like growing pains. Without doubt, the record's finest moment is sprawling early blog hit "Spanish Sahara". Foals' music has frequently felt monumental in scope, often at the expense of the listener. But the way this one song in particular blooms, from its first traces of guitar melody to tear-jerking coda six minutes later, garners more goosebumps with every listen. It sounds exactly like what they set out to accomplish, done fluidly and organically. And in there, from the first few seconds to the very last, is a clear pulse. It's not difficult to find.


Though the fourth and best album by the New York black metal re-constructors Krallice is the band's shortest to date, it is also their most relentless and unforgiving. It's a daunting, rewarding hour that calls for complete immersion.

Years Past Matter

Don't be surprised if, at least at first, the latest and best album by New York black metal re-constructers Krallice sounds like a blur. Though Years Past Matter is the band's shortest record to date, it is also their most relentless and unforgiving, comprising six tracks of impossibly choreographed and dense four-part motion. In light of their propensity for 10-plus-minute spans, Krallice have previously experimented with ways to ease ingestion of these monstrosities, employing an antiphonal, long-short-long tracklist for 2009's Dimensional Bleedthrough and both starting and ending 2011's otherwise monolithic Diotima with relatively brief pieces. But for the most part, Years Past Matter starts, lashes ahead for a dozen minutes at a time, and then, after a 16-minute closer that might be Krallice's most demanding and glorious piece of music yet, ends. Sure, there are a few relative breaks in the roil, like the two minutes of guitar haze that lead out of "IIIIIIII" or the doom-suggestive interlude before the album's triumphant close. But for the most part, Years Past Matter is arrogant and unapologetic-- a daunting, rewarding hour that calls for complete immersion.
In recent years, when it's come to bending black metal, plenty of acts have focused on the auxiliary instrumentation, whether that's the keyboard layers they add to the pieces, the digital beats that supplant or subsidize their drums, or the extra electronics and textures that might subdivide their songs. But Krallice are, at least in terms of personnel, a traditional four-piece, with two guitarists (Mick Barr and Colin Marston), a bassist (Nicholas McMaster), a drummer (Lev Weinstein), and two vocalists (Barr and McMaster) who approach their screams with equal gusto but very different tones. What separates Krallice, though, is their audacity and exactitude, meaning that they generally not only trot past the 10-minute mark but also do so with songs where every bit seems rigorously composed, where nothing seems arbitrary or extraneous.
They've never sounded as comprehensive and confident as they do on Years Past Matter. Album opener "IIIIIII", for instance, moves in fits and starts, droning, then roaring, then washing out, then galloping ahead-- all in about the first 80 seconds. The four members are synced so well and completely; McMaster's bass doesn't sit still waiting for the guitars or drums to chance, and the guitars act more like complements than competitors. Listening to Years Past Matter is almost like listening to the Flaming Lips' Zaireeka, where all four discs (or members, as it were) are meant to be heard at once, though it can be just as fascinating to try and isolate just one sound. If every band is supposed to write around its weakest link, by this point, it's probably best to quit calling Krallice a band. They show no such weakness.
Four albums in, what might now be most impressive about Krallice is how selflessly the quartet seems to write and render these songs. If you're just glancing at the track lengths, you might anticipate protratced solos or, at the very least, spotlights and showcases for Barr and Marston, two of the best guitarists working right now. But even when they're furthest out in front-- as on the back half of "IIIIIIIII", with their guitars in flinty dialogue and occasionally in dead-ahead harmony-- McMaster and Weinstein aren't sitting passively, waiting for their turn to come. They push and pull at the rhythm, as though to force the guitars one way or the other; in fact, one of the best guitar passages here, about seven minutes into "IIIIIIIII", stems from the sort of roller coaster Weinstein and McMaster create and the way Barr and Marston are able to dip down with it and zip back toward the crest without distraction.
All of those assets-- the complexity and precision, the density and cooperation, the rigor and the delivery-- coalesce perfectly during "IIIIIIIIIIII", a 16-minute epic that finds Krallice pushing past the limitations of anything they've ever done. Aside from a short section near the beginning, this closer is largely instrumental, built on a short, flicking riff that Marston and Barr stretch, contract, and subsequently spin into the strangest shapes. Led by Weinstein's versatility, the song's pieces seem to form a cycle of interconnected circles, where each section capitalizes on repetition and variation before shifting seamlessly into the next one. Krallice have never sounded so ecstatic before, so perfectly delirious with the strength of their own designs. Like all of Years Past Matter, its finale is great on first listen and increasingly tremendous on repeat. It's strange to admit it, but when this 16-minute beast snaps shut, I generally just play it again, giving the blur one more chance to blossom into clarity.


The debut from grime’s rising star is a mixed bag but still peppered with hits, inviting elements of dancehall, pop, trap, and garage to the same house party.

AJ Tracey

Let us remember London in the early 2000s, a special place and time, when the city’s pirate radio stations blasted out street tunes that seemed to form a forcefield around the tower blocks, protecting them from the horrors of Loaded magazine, post-Britpop indie, and New Labour. Out of the underground swaggered Craig David and Ms. Dynamite, genuine 21st-century British superstars whose debut albums shunned the UK garage sounds they’d built their reputation on and looked instead to contemporary American soul. Cut to a decade-and-a-half later and Skepta, a right honorable lord of grime, mixed local street sounds with transatlantic influences on his 2016 album Konichiwa. Like Ms. Dynamite, he was rewarded with a Mercury Music Prize. This is the way things have been done.
So what now of AJ Tracey? Straight out of West London, the 24-year-old has spent the last few years assembling a large youth following, championing Jeremy Corbyn in a volatile political era, and asserting his position as the next big-ticket British rapper with punchy quotables over battering grime beats. As is tradition, Tracey’s self-titled debut album is a veritable smorgasbord of local and international sounds, inviting elements of dancehall, pop, trap, and garage to the same house party. It’s also one of the most strangely sequenced albums of recent memory. Not only does Tracey opt to bookend it with relatively low-key tracks—“Plan B” features a mild synth flutter and muted flows, while “Wifey Riddim 3” is a harmless summer holiday pop song about girls—he takes the odd decision to line-up all the bangers next to each other over the record’s second half.
This, unsurprisingly, is AJ Tracey’s best section. A song called “Horror Flick” is always going to be easy pickings for a rapper with a flow that could tear down a tenement block. In this movie, Tracey is no transparent apparition, spitting instead with monstrous presence. His themes through this portion of the album rarely expand beyond cash, success, and throwing threats at unspecified enemies. Still, hearing him in full force over the murky keys and rat-tat-tat hi-hats of “Doing It,” and the steady pummeling drum machines of the Giggs-assisted “Nothing But Net” is enough to make you wish he had just cut 10 grime hits and called it a day.
It’s through the opening half that things are much stickier. There are highlights: “Necklace” sees Tracey team up with rising New York rapper Jay Critch over a beat that works acoustic guitar plucks into a melodic Auto-Tune-drenched number. On the other end of the spectrum, the generic dancehall of “Butterflies” and Young Thug pastiche “Psych Out!” minimize Tracey’s strengths by calibrating his voice into a half-tuneful croon. “Jackpot” places him in a Las Vegas casino but there’s little in the way of compelling detail from the man who once gloriously touted his touring scheduled with brags about playing Belgium twice and flying to Bordeaux “for a slice of the cheese.”
The best surprise is “Ladbroke Groove,” a tribute to Tracey’s home street that simultaneously pays homage to the classic garage sounds he grew up on. Strutting into two-step heaven, Tracey ensures the album links the UK urban music’s past and present. Which of the mixed bag of styles deployed on AJ Tracey will be further investigated in the future remains a mystery. What is clear is that he has talent and star power for days—talents that could have been better showcased here.


Inspired by the cosmos, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner addresses life on Earth. Her voice shines over melancholic arrangements, evoking Pacific Northwest indie rock as much as shoegaze.

Japanese Breakfast: Soft Sounds From Another Planet

Soft Sounds From Another Planet

Michelle Zauner’s first album as Japanese Breakfast, 2016’s Psychopomp, was a meditation on grief in the wake of her mother’s death from cancer, as well as a raw portrayal of sexuality and heartache. That these subjects could coexist in the same space isn’t unusual (death and sex often mix, especially at the edge of human experience), but Zauner’s gift for connecting specific details to simple metaphor was uniquely affecting. “The dog’s confused/She just paces ‘round all day/She’s sniffing at your empty room,” she sang on “In Heaven.” Then, on “Jane Cum”: “Soulless animal keep feeding on my meat/All my tiny bones between your teeth.”
While Psychopomp focused on the most intimate human experiences, her new album, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, uses big guitars and melancholic arrangements to address life on Earth, but it calls upon the cosmos for its perspective. Zauner has said that Soft Sounds... began as a concept album—“a science fiction musical”—but the idea never panned out. Still, there’s a sheen to the project that suggests the initial inspiration made it into the album’s production (there are wordless, atmospheric interludes), as well as numerous references to other worlds.
“Machinist,” the first single, is the biggest leap forward in terms of sound and one of the album’s best songs. The song begins with the voice of a woman speaking to a computer: “Was it always this way and I just couldn’t see it?,” she asks, falling for her digital lover. Then, in a whirl of keyboards and Auto-Tune, the track explodes as a kind of new age disco anthem. “I just wanted it all,” she sings.
On the title track, Zauner looks to the heavens for help with a self-destructive partner. “I wish I could keep you from abusing yourself for no reason at all,” she sings. Though Zauner searches to other worlds for help, the only answer she gets is reverb. (I'm reminded of a Calvin & Hobbes strips when Calvin screams to the abyss.) On “Boyish,” an old song repurposed from her days in the rock band Little Big League, Zauner brings things back down to earth. “I can’t get you off my mind, I can’t get you off in general,” goes the instantly iconic chorus, now backed by a melody that would make Roy Orbison grin. The sentiment encapsulates Zauner’s sensibilities: uncomfortably personal, unpretentiously profound.
Nowhere has Zauner’s approach ever been clearer than when the band opened for the newly-reunited Slowdive earlier this year. It was a pairing that at once justified early comparisons between Japanese Breakfast and shoegaze greats, but also inadvertently highlighted the differences between the two groups. Where Slowdive set their vocals back in the mix, their voices just another thread in a tapestry of sound, that is not Zauner’s way. Instead, Zauner and co-producer Craig Hendrix make sure the words are never lost in the mix, but rather driving it. As much as shoegaze and C86 bands, Zauner’s music evokes the Pacific Northwest indie rock that Zauner grew up with in Oregon before moving to Philly; “Road Head” rings with the strip-mall mythologizing of Built to Spill’s “Car,” and there’s a hint of Modest Mouse’s “Sleepwalking” on torch songs like “Boyish.”
As with Psychopomp, the album’s most powerful moments come when Zauner examines seeming contradictions that actually aren’t or shouldn’t be. The opening track, “Diving Woman,” flirts with domesticity as a way to normalize her life. “I want to be a woman of regimen,” she sings, “A bride in her home state/A diving woman of Jeju-do.” Jeju is an island in Zauner’s native South Korea with a traditionally matriarchal society, where female free divers were the breadwinners and heads of household. Here, Zauner has reimagined an age-old trope on her own terms. For the album, she told Out, “I create my own experiences and communities that are largely rooted with queer people, women, non-binary people, all different races.”
With “The Body Is a Blade,” Zauner’s fascination with duality comes across most pointedly. “The body is a blade that moves while your brain is writhing/Knuckled under pain, you mourn but your blood is flowing,” she sings. Though Zauner is still grieving, her body has its own ideas. And even as Japanese Breakfast turn to the stars, Zauner’s best moments are rooted in the here and now.


Third album from the meticulous French band finds its members loosening their ties, unbuttoning their cuffs, and coming across as the soft-rock Strokes.

It's Never Been Like That

Maybe it's the French heritage, or their collaborations with new-age dabblers Air, but Phoenix has proven itself a band in touch enough with its feminine side to embrace the dulcet tones and oxymoronic world of soft rock. With production as crisp as a Frito and singer Thomas Mars' mercury croon, the group has assembled two brilliant singles ("If I Ever Feel Better" and "Everything Is Everything") that could slot into the playlists of hipsters and receptionists alike. Yet Phoenix haven't quite been able to stretch their minty-fresh sound over the length of an album, with too much of both Alphabetical and United floating off into the atmosphere.
The approach of It's Never Been Like That reflects an awareness of this shortcoming, as the band seeks a more consistent sound through mimicking the sloppier styles of those uncouth Americans-- in particular the Strokes. Loosening their ties and unbuttoning their cuffs, Phoenix put on their best slouch, slathering the album with messy, naturalistic guitar playing completely at odds with their usual robotic aesthetic. This earnest attempt at a costume change fails...but at the same time creates the uncomfortable dynamic that makes it Phoenix's best album.
For all the effort made to un-slick their sound, Phoenix just can't keep their OCD meticulousness at bay, utilizing all that slapdash guitar as a cued sonic preset no different from familiar tools like the string-synth and disco-bass. Maybe that modular usage sounds like a bad thing, but instead the interplay between lazy strumming and everything-in-its-right-place arrangements effectively rewrites the history of the garage-rock revival, drawing a line between "Last Nite" and Tom Petty and erasing the denial that "Maps" was the biggest song that scene's brief heyday produced. The tools in "Consolation Prizes" and "Second to None" may be the same, but replacing studied ennui with a breezy joie de vivre prevents the pop essence from being overly diluted by rumpled poses.
Here the band improves on its usual success rate by depositing not one, but two showstopper tracks. "Long Distance Call" embodies the disconnect between shamble and sheen better than anything else on the album, with the band alternately stomping the gas and the brake to lurch between their easy-listening older material and the happily polluted new image. "Courtesy Laughs" highlights the record's second half with a simple chord progression made transcendent by its metronome rhythm. Both tracks still could have remained middle-quartile indie pop without the carefully calibrated cool of Mars' vocals, operating at conversation-level volume and casually, smoothly hitting his marks without protracted strain even when enthusiastically incanting the album's title.
At under 40 minutes long, It's Never Been Like That is pretty much a sprint, though even at this short distance the band starts to sound a bit dehydrated on both five-minute instrumental "North" and the over-long "Sometimes in a Fall". But through most of the record, Phoenix marks out their territory in the sparsely-attended arena of new soft-rock and demonstrating the genre's compatibility with indie tropes. Dentists sick of REO Speedwagon ballads send their sincere thanks.


The second album from the OVO R&B duo wades into the thick fog of heartbreak but stays grounded by the delicate and powerful voice of Daniel Daley and the shadowy, cinematic beats of Ninteen85.

Morning After

For dvsn, the duo of singer Daniel Daley and producer Nineteen85 signed to Drake’s OVO label, dark clouds started to form near the end of their excellent debut on a song called “Hallucinations.” On an album steeped in the glow of new love, the track found Daley wrestling with intense heartbreak: “Tryna rewind till we’re back where we started … seeing you when you aren’t there.” Then there was “Another One,” which spoke more directly: “Never did I think I’d lose your love,” Daley concedes. “The hell was I thinking of?”
Morning After is a heartbreak record that extends that narrative, yet the album feels murkier than its predecessor and colder to the ear. It depicts a period of ambiguity, that on-again/off-again cycle of hooking up and breaking up, where it’s better to move on but the passion is too intense. Daley examines the ups and downs of a failed romance, lamenting his own faults and shortcomings along the way, while looking for some sort of resolution—not just with the woman, but with himself. It’s unclear if he ever finds it.
Daley is blessed with one of those rich tenor and falsetto voices that is built to convey pain and torment. It’s sturdy enough to channel classic R&B vibes of, say, Lenny Williams, but has the right production touches on it to feel right at home in the present. On “Nuh Time / Tek Time” in particular, he boils over in a rare bout of frustration. “You make it hard to trust you,” he quips. “Right now you talking crazy/First marriage, then babies?/Then text me, you hate me?!” The coiled drama of his voice and the production creates a love story for the Instagram age, a gut-wrenching tale in the era of swipe left and double-tap validation. Somehow, he captures the essence of R&B pillars like Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite (the singer’s 1999 cut “Fortunate” is sampled for “P.O.V.”) and Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, splitting the difference between them without leaning too heavily on either one.
While the dvsn brand is mostly associated with the silver-throated Daley, Nineteen85 is equally vital to the group’s overall effect. He mixes pop, modern bounce, and hip-hop, to create sparse beats that could work just as well beneath their label boss’ jilted bleeding heart rhymes. Yet on Morning After, the music feels shadowy and cinematic, unfolding in a fog of downtempo electro-soul. As it plays, you can almost see Daley’s story unfold like a melodrama.  “We know music opens the door to the unknown,” they said. “Your mind automatically starts to fill in the blanks and create what you would want to see while listening to our music.”
To that end, Morning After challenges listeners to assemble their own puzzle, pull fragments from it, and draw their own conclusions. Trust, aloneness, insecurity, hundreds of nights worth of feelings: dvsn puts them all in the air for you to grab at any moment. There’s an air of mystery surrounding the group, which can make it tough to get a bead on exactly what they’re aiming for. Yet in an era where one’s personality takes precedence over the music they create, there’s something refreshing about art being presented without frills. For dvsn, this only adds to the intrigue, drawing you into the music even if the intended recipient is unclear. Though the overall story behind Morning After is vastly relatable, it feels a bit too cryptic in certain spots, and songs like “Don’t Choose” and “You Do” meander without adding much to the arc. But even the down moments add to the album’s meditative vibe—the isolation is palpable and the despair is too real. In dvsn’s world, old flames burn slow.


The Australian bedroom-pop artist’s third album demonstrates that her attention to how her songs start, end, and connect has never been keener or better controlled.

solipsisters

The internet can be a lonely place, but Katie Dey treats it like a one-way transmitter to other people feeling trapped in their homes, heads, or bodies. On her debut asdfasdf, the Melbourne songwriter shot her fragmented voice out of her isolated world and right into your own. Her heavily pitch-shifted coo on songs like “don’t be scared” and “fear o the dark” made the words difficult to understand, but the ineffability of the feelings was clear. If her vocals sometimes sounded more electrical than human, they also reminded you that, hey, brains run on electricity. On the new solipsisters, Dey moves closer to the mic than ever before, revealing the powerful lyricist hidden in plain sight.
For all the scrambled sonics running through her music, Dey has proven a knack for careful pacing. Asdfasdf kicked in like a generator, building to an energetic peak on “Unkillable,” while 2016’s Flood Network staggered its songs with short interludes running from “(f1)” to “(f8).” solipsisters pushes off gently with “waves,” pairing crashing water and crumbling, distorted pulses that flow seamlessly into the title track. “solipsisting” builds with warm drums that swoop and crack in the air, and rather than ending after its ascendent climax, it simply floats in the immaculate atmosphere. Dey’s voice slides into textural fog, where acoustic guitars and synths tie loose knots that recall Feels-era Animal Collective, whose songs seemed to curiously wander past their logical conclusions. Dey’s attention to how her songs start, end, and connect has never been keener or better controlled.
As seamlessly as “solipsisting” sneaks into view, “stuck” snaps to attention with crisp piano lines and pristine drums. “I was born inside this body and I’m stuck there/I’m a storm inside a rotting false construction,” Dey sings with surprising clarity. Her words, shared in a lyric sheet for the first time, nestle their sharp edges inside candy-coated sounds and unexpected details. “stuck” amplifies her strengths without losing the homespun intimacy that made her work so special, like when she punctuates a soaring chorus with a soft, throat-clearing cough.
solipsisters’ suite-like uniformity and more balanced mix are a departure from the chaotic highs and lows of Dey’s early work, allowing the songs to support and play off one another. Repeated references to shells and waves ripple from the stunning centerpiece, “shell,” where Dey opens a reflection on her own voice with the line, “My soul sings in higher octaves than my larynx will allow.” In a recent interview, she explained that her virtuosic pitch-shifting was not only an artistic decision, but “a way of relieving dysphoria and making my own music more palatable for me to listen to so that it didn't upset me—like putting an Instagram filter on your face.” Over flourishes of drums and glowing synths, she finds melody and poetry in knotty phrases like, “Morphing esophageal practices hardening the lumps up in my throat/My heart throbs in impossible rhythms my head could never erode.” It’s transcendent enough to illuminate even the album’s darkest passages.
In that same interview, Dey explained of solipsisters: “There’s a lot of ‘you’ and ‘me’ and ‘we,’ but it’s really all just about me, because I was so totally alone while I was writing these songs. You end up talking to yourself a lot if you’re isolated.” The album’s depictions of disconnection and depression are not easy to hear, even when surrounded by sounds that are, but in writing so passionately and honestly, Dey has initiated a powerful act of communion. If she’s reached you, she’s already made you feel less alone.


The long-awaited follow-up to 2002's Fantastic Damage is more textured and melodic than its predecessor, but El-P's production is still amongst the most jarring in hip-hop and here the Def Jux rapper's themes and shading remain pitched to black, haunted by the prospect of a dystopian near-future.

I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead

Fantastic Damage, El-P's solo debut, was one of the first great albums released in post-9/11 America. It was tense and paranoid, and El-P seemed to be peering over his shoulder at the gathering storm. The album's production, blending waves of cacophony over broken rhythms, was similarly bleak. And while Fan Dam didn't anticipate everything-- who, aside from perhaps Donald Rumsfeld, could've foreseen the sanctification of torture as a tool of "freedom"-- it did give form to our own feelings of dread and helplessness.
Though I'll Sleep When You're Dead is (slightly) more textured and melodic than its predecessor, El-P's production is still amongst the most jarring in hip-hop, and his themes and shading remain pitched to black, haunted by the prospect of a dystopian near-future: Cigarettes are extinguished on wet palms, prisoners are raped before execution, and El-P-- our crazed, sometimes indecipherable narrator-- sticks his head out of a hoopde, screaming "freedom is mine." In this world, as in ours, we're coasting in the fast lane "with doom and disease." Like El-Producto says, "The whole design got my mind crying."
"Tasmanian Pain Coaster", the album's first track, kicks off with a sample from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. "Do you think that if you were falling in space that you would slow down after a while or go faster and faster?" the first voice (Moira Kelley's Donna Hayward) asks. "Faster and faster," heroine Laura Palmer replies. "For a long time, you wouldn't feel anything. And you'd burst into fire, forever."
El-P spends 13 tracks exploring the freefalling fatalism of that quote. America is ablaze and El-P is fucked up from the floor up: "Why should I be sober when God is so clearly dusted out his mind?" the rapper asks on "Smithereens". The reply never comes, and he stumbles along like Rory Cochrane, too dazed to be angry or to put all the pieces together. On "Drive", he talks of a kid who "fuel injected a speed ball," before later admitting with a wink "my triple-A card has one too many initials."
The album works best at these moments, when it's sneering into the abyss and spitting out gallows humor. "I stood up for the God's of ore mining/ In a military humvee with no bullet-proof siding," El-P raps on "Drive". Afterwards, a distant voice chimes in, "sorry about that, guys" as robotic backing vocals emerge from a miasma of corrosive, clunky rhythms to provide a mocking refrain of sorts. Elsewhere, lead-single "Smithereens" begins with a snippet of what could be a sunny, Bob Dorough track, before a voice interjects, "Bring me the dramatic intro machine," and squishy horror synths introduce one of El-P's most caustic songs to date.
But perhaps the most explicit instance of the album's dark humor comes at the end of "Habeas Corpses", which imagines El-P and guest rapper Cage as workers aboard a futuristic prison ship. Their task is to "facilitate the end" for the incarcerated. (From the gunshots sprinkled throughout, it's easy to imagine what that would entail.) "It's almost romantic," Cage comments, but El-P doesn't share the enthusiasm. He's fallen in love with prisoner #247681Z, and his job is suddenly full of contradiction and nuance. He tries to escape, but of course escape is illusionary and temporary.
"Habeas Corpus" is similar in spirit to Fantastic Damage's "Stepfather Factory", and provides a makeshift metaphor for our own country's desire for vindication and liberation. But, as the song fades, El-P is unwilling to cop to his own seriousness, and the track fades with him and Cage laughing off the drama they've just conjured.
The jaded pose is a good look for El, and when the album tries to emote, such as on "The Overly Dramatic Truth", it falls flat on its face. The song is full of cringe-worthy lines such as "you deserve the ignorance and bliss that I wish I still had," and is too emo for its own good. But when El-P sticks to what he knows-- chronicling the grime -I'll Sleep When You're Dead is every bit as good as its predecessor. It's a scary, difficult album, but one well suited for our times.


With the assistance of fellow Chicagoans Chance the Rapper, Saba, and Kweku Collins, R&B artist Jamila Woods makes vital, resonant protest music that sounds like a children’s playground.

HEAVN

It’s hard to tell if Jamila Woods’ solo debut HEAVN could have (or would have) been made without the renewed scrutiny of America’s deeply entrenched racism that has crystallized in the aftermath of the August 2014 killing of Mike Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. As part of M&O—a duo formed with fellow Chicagoan Owen Hill—Woods released two full-length projects before the phrase “black lives matter” became a national argument, a hash tag, or a movement. The group’s pair of self-released albums—The Joy (2012) and Almost Us (2014)—were softly adventurous mixes of acoustic soul, alternative pop, and folksy hip-hop that gamboled around the subjects of love, art, the art of love, and the love of art. A sample hook, from Chance the Rapper went: “Love won’t you fall asleep in my arms/While I read you these poems/That I wrote you so long ago.”
M&O showcased many things: smart production, masterful arrangements, a willingness to follow melody and tune above and beyond genre or format. The music was all soft and tender, songs of unity with no anger; the type of songs that would feel like escapism at a time when the rhetoric churned from the mini-complexes of presidential candidates, pop stars, and social media micro celebrities alike was ever-sharpening and often unforgiving. But Woods—who in addition to being a vocalist serves as Associate Artistic Director of the non-profit youth organization Young Chicago Authors—has emerged as a proponent of social justice; the kind of voice that doesn’t stay silent or shy away from the troubles of the world. And, on HEAVN she delves deep into the calamity of now and emerges with songs of freedom and meaning.
As with her previous work, Woods utilizes what’s functional—clapping games, lullabies, Paula Cole, headlines, statistics—to make music that defies categorization but not meaning. The result is unmistakable: HEAVN is protest music that sounds like a children’s playground. Every song here is resilient and steadfast without being angry and militant; almost each tune is a jingle. Produced largely by a coterie of ascendant Chicago stars—Peter Cottontale, oddCouple, Kweku Collins, Saba, and more—the tracks come off as if they’ve been cooked at a high temperature until all of the indignation has evaporated, leaving behind only hope and a rising strong vulnerability.
On “Blk Girl Soldier,” Woods champions freedom fighters, feminists, and writers as being “déjà vu of Tubman,” noting that even a young black girl “scares the government.” There are piercing claims and lamentations—“We go missing by the hundreds;” “They want us in kitchen/Kill our sons with lynchings/We get loud about it/Oh, now we’re the bitches;” “Look at what they did to my sister/Last century, last week/They make her hate her own skin, treat her like a sin”—all presented without rancor or rage. The most defiant thing about the song is Woods’ defiance of the baser emotions during such audacious level-headed truth-speaking. The theme is one of defense in the face of oppression, not vengeance. It’s a “Black Lives Matter (Too)” treatise, not an “(Only) Black Lives Matter” one.
The messages are made easier by Wood’s phrasing and voice—she’s light on the heavy points, her vocals sweet even when delivering bitter truths. She presents herself as an introvert who’d wistfully “rather spend my days alone on my pillow” as opposed to someone railing against the injustice of the world. On “LSD” she’s dedicated to her hometown in the face of inequity and coldness: “I will never leave you,” she sings. “I’m everything you made me/Even when you break me down.” Chance the Rapper’s characteristically dense verse—with shots at Spike Lee, observations of violence, and notes of gentrification— accounted for, it’s all of the sentiments of Kanye West’s “Homecoming,” but with less bombast and self-mythology.
Even when she’s singing about the personal and seemingly romantic, Wood’s experience still seems to presented through the filter of her place in larger society. On “Lonely Lonely” she may be talking to a potential lover when she sings, “Don’t take from me my quiet/Don’t take from me my tears/Don’t take from me me trials/Don’t take from me my fears”—but she embodies her full self as a woman in a world that wants its women to remain silent and its Blacks complacent as to never address the realities of patriarchy and white supremacy. On the title track, she’s ready to for undying love, but links it her ancestors lost to the Middle Passage: “They’re dancing in the deepest ocean/See? Not even death could stop them.”
Filled with personal memories, affirmations of self, and gazes of society’s racial strife, HEAVN is a singular mix of clear-eyed optimism and Black girl magic. On the opener, “Bubbles,” Woods sings of shyness, hesitation, and self-care, noting “how many different oils we know/to turn our skins from brown to gold”—making it metaphor about both beauty and protection. This rumination on isolation, journey, and transformation—which pops up throughout the album—comes full circle on the closer, “Way Up” where she sings, “I’m an alien from inner space” as a declaration that simultaneously reads as individual and universal. “Just ’cause I’m born here/Don't mean I’m from here,” she asserts because she knows that HEAVN is about a climate in which she doesn’t belong. It’s a climate in which none of us belong, but it’s also the only one that could produce an album filled with this particular tenor of hope in the face of despair.


After successful tours with Dan Deacon and Girl Talk, White Williams issues a debut album layered with impeccable influences-- including Roxy Music, Beck, and T. Rex-- and a sense of calculated disaffection.

Smoke

Getting the full picture of Joe Williams' debut LP Smoke means making your way past the horrifically gaudy cover image to the production credits inside. There, after Williams' own writer/composer/engineer listing, is the name of the cover model, followed by credits for hair, makeup, "hookah prop design," and of course, "art." Williams, it is made clear, rolls as thick as the exhalant that gives his debut its name.
That aesthetic emphasis has landed Williams an opening gig for the recent electro-populist double-bill of Girl Talk and Dan Deacon. But while his tourmates get sweaty with the crowd as they tap away at their electronics, Williams keeps a cool distance. His songs are thin and languorous, with impeccable influences and the sort of calculated disaffection that comes from an MFA in design and a good weed connection. His attitude and vocal timbre have earned him comparisons to Beck, and that's more than fair: As glassy, nonchalant dance music, Smoke could be Midnite Vultures Redux: Something for the Blunted.
Mostly, though, Williams is a groove-obssesser working through his influences, and doing it with enough restraint and creativity to work them into his songs, leaving the showiness to his cover models. Smoke’s signposts form a coherent musical worldview: "In the Club" is T. Rex's "The Motivator" at 16 rpm, "Going Down" and "Route to Palm" work in the 1970s West African guitar colorations that Dirty Projectors, Vampire Weekend, and Islands have been exploring lately, "New Violence" hurtles forward with a motorik bassline, and opener "Headlines" plays like a bubblegum version of Brian Eno's "Baby's on Fire". Even the umpteenth barely-augmented cover of "I Want Candy" feels like a distillation of the record's love for veneers.
Smoke's fondness of surfaces doesn't stop at the level of rhythmic appropriation, though; Williams takes an observational approach to lyricism that recalls early Roxy Music's tongue-in-cheek take on the glamourous life. In "Headlines", he crafts a series of slow motion scenester dioramas like "Climb all you can/ It's a killer stake/ We'll hang from the branches/ While the mayor dances/ In the headlines." "In the Club" tightens its focus, observing, "Trashy dancing baby got inside for free/ She's got the basement wrist/ She do the snow-blow twist." Like his predecessors, Williams doesn't distinguish much between style and peril; the middle of Smoke features "New Violence", "Going Down", and "Danger", which view impending menace as a necessity for sophistication.
Williams' ostensible depthlessness, like that of his forebears, is itself only a façade, and Smoke offers plenty to discover across repeated listens-- particularly the way in which he tweaks his own voice, melting and reshaping it like the models' Technicolor "tears" on the album cover. This tendency toward sonic self-mutilation underscores the most appealing aspect of Williams' persona: Underneath the mannerisms is a shy kid, too timid to force his will on his audience in the manner of his tour mates, content to watch and comment from the margins. Appropriately, then, a streak of dark nostalgia murmurs just beneath the glitzy exterior of "The Shadow". Williams remembers "driving toward collisions in our heads," "burning buildings and the rivals that we had," and "wailing widows and the moments that we bled," and in the process giving some context to that hard-to-forget cover image: fashionable high culture as a sad, grotesque fantasy.


Here's an album that begs for vinyl, although not for the reason you might think. Certainly, My Morning Jacket's worn-in rock 'n' roll-- its starchy guitar riffs and Jim James' other-end-of-a-long-tunnel vocals-- seems tailor-made for the intimate crackle of a dusty turntable. But the concisely titled *Z*, the band's fourth full-length, needs to be flipped over: It has two distinct sides. Granted, most albums still rely on the two-sided format the same way most movies still rely on the three-act plot, adhering to it almost subconsciously. But I'm not entirely sure My Morning Jacket intended such a dramatic difference between

Z

Here's an album that begs for vinyl, although not for the reason you might think. Certainly, My Morning Jacket's worn-in rock 'n' roll-- its starchy guitar riffs and Jim James' other-end-of-a-long-tunnel vocals-- seems tailor-made for the intimate crackle of a dusty turntable. But the concisely titled Z, the band's fourth full-length, needs to be flipped over: It has two distinct sides. Granted, most albums still rely on the two-sided format the same way most movies still rely on the three-act plot, adhering to it almost subconsciously. But I'm not entirely sure My Morning Jacket intended such a dramatic difference between these two half Zs.
As Side One begins, the presence of producer John Leckie (of Radiohead, Stone Roses, and, er, Kula Shaker fame) is immediately evident. "Wordless Chorus" launches Z with a hardscrabble sound that recalls their earlier material, suggesting that the brighter production and looser, jambandier approach of It Still Moveswas a slight detour. There are more keyboards on these songs, courtesy of new member Bo Koster, and more confident experimentation-- a little reggae, a little r&b, even a little ambient. Defiantly flaunting their rural eccentricities, My Morning Jacket once again recall the earliest of early R.E.M., before you could understand Stipe's mumbling, back when the Georgia foursome defined themselves by claiming a birthright to kudzu-covered mythology. It's not really My Morning Jacket's sound that suggests this comparison, but their willingness to let the music retain its mystery despite the risk of seeming obscure or evasive.
So Z abandons the Skynyrdisms of It Still Moves, but that album's lessons remain intact: Compared to those on previous albums, these tracks have more guitar crunch and tighter song structures. Even single "Off the Record", with its driving reggae rhythms and James' lively performance, foregoes a dueling-guitar climax in favor of an unraveling outro that sounds like Air noir. "Wordless Chorus" hinges on just what its title suggests: Jim James singing aaahs and ohhhs between verses as the band rocks around him. It's as if the entire album, not just this song, could be stripped of literal meaning, as if everything My Morning Jacket needs to say can be communicated exclusively through sound. And it works, especially at the end of "Wordless Chorus", when James breaks into a rapturous r&b yowl that recalls the Passion of the Prince.
But My Morning Jacket does have something to say. Zis a spiritual album-- or at least Side One is-- with references to religion and a few barely veiled allusions to Jesus Christ himself. "Religion should appeal to the hearts of the young," James sings on "Gideon", and guess who the bouncy "What a Wonderful Man" is about. Here's a hint: "He was leading us through the dark/ He was saying that love goes on." Even that title itself suggests an omega to some unknown alpha-- sex or death or both. These hints at larger meanings infuse the songs with a weird sense of questing adventure, as if the band is revealing its secrets only to present even more riddles.
Side Two, however, loses much of the strange steam that fuels Side One, struggling to find its momentum and bringing the album back to reality with pedestrian problems like pacing. Following "Off the Record", "Into the Woods" breaks that spell, making everything that comes after it sound a little pale and less immediate. A dark-carnival organ sets the sideshow stage for James to sing about burning kittens and babies in blenders, and the overly literal production inserts a me-oww and a wahhh into the mix, Spike Jones-style. It sounds markedly better when the band comes in halfway through, but the song still dawdles to a conclusion. As if to apologize for "Into the Woods", "Anytime" is straightforward rock, enlivened by a pogoing guitar riff and James singing himself ragged. Disregarding its low-lying bass and piano lines, "Lay Low" rises to a blandly grandstanding jam as if on autopilot, but "Knot Comes Loose" ambles along on Koster's fluttering piano rhythms.
Fortunately, Z ends with the intense, simmering "Dondante". Backed only by a casually insistent rhythm section and a barely-there guitar, James sings as if in ecstasy, before the song explodes unexpectedly into a big, desperate chorus that sounds quintessentially My Morning Jacket. Then the song simply fades out-- but extremely slowly-- into several seconds of still silence. I like to think that the vinyl edition would loop that silence like Sgt. Pepper's, posing an answer to the album's question: What comes after Z?


This is an album by the Black Keys called “Let’s Rock.” That's what it does.

“Let’s Rock”

When the Black Keys look back, they won’t have regrets about striking while the iron was hot. After the mammoth success of their sixth album Brothers, which polished the band’s raw blues-rock enough for the radio, the duo raced out two more albums, including 2011’s even slicker El Camino. They headlined arenas and festivals, touring ceaselessly while licensing their music to seemingly any brand interested—which, for a time, felt like all of them. They were ubiquitous, and their sound became so permanently embedded in the airwaves that casual listeners may not have noticed they’ve been gone.
The duo’s new “Let’s Rock” follows their last effort Turn Blue by five years, the longest gap of their career. As the band tells it, they burned out, though during their time off Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney both continued making music at their typically relentless clip, just not with each other. Carney produced records for Michelle Branch, Tobias Jesso Jr., Wild Belle, and others, while Auerbach helmed records by the Pretenders and Cage the Elephant and dropped a leisurely solo album.
For some bands, that time apart might have yielded an epiphany that reshaped their approach. But the Black Keys have never much valued change. They’re focused, workmanlike, and committed to what works. As a result, “Let’s Rock” plays exactly like the record they might have rushed out right after Turn Blue.
This time, they are working without Danger Mouse, the producer whose modern/retro fusion helped prime the band for their crossover. His fingerprints in particular were all over the psychedelic hodgepodge of Turn Blue and its kitchen-sink strings and keyboards. “Let’s Rock,” in turn, opts for a streamlined approach: just Auerbach, Carney, a pair of backing vocalists (Ashley Wilcoxson and Leisa Hans) and as many overdubs as it takes to get the job done.
In truth, Danger Mouse’s window dressings neither added nor detracted all that much from the band’s sound. His absence leaves more room for riffs, and “Let’s Rock” doesn’t skimp on them. “Shine a Little Light” kicks off with a torrent of brawling guitars, the embodiment of those old speaker ads with the guy in a chair blowing away his living room. “Lo/Hi,” about reckless thrills and brutal comedowns, is even more undeniable, pure leather-jacketed swagger.
Most of “Let’s Rock” hits its mark, but sometimes the band cribs so overtly from their influences that it feels like cheating off of a test. The guitars on “Walk Across the Water” ape the suave glide of T. Rex’s “Jeepster," while “Sit Around and Miss You” lifts its lick so shamelessly from Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You” that it’s hard to hear it without picturing Michael Madsen slicing off a dude’s ear. Elsewhere the influences are subtler—shades of Steely Dan in the amplified soft-rock of “Breaking Down,” a hint of the Isley Brothers in the nimble lick of “Tell Me Lies.”
If none of those reference points are especially hip, that seems to be by design. “Let’s Rock” feels like a deliberate retreat from the limelight, where the Black Keys were always an odd fit anyway. Ambitious? No. Effective? Swish. Just as the album art for Brothers, with its matter-of-fact text, downplayed expectations, “Let’s Rock” is upfront about its meat-and-potatoes aspirations. This is an album by the Black Keys called “Let’s Rock.” It does.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On this impressive record, the UK producer's haunted sound evokes faded memories, ghostly auras, and dream states but also remains grounded and forceful.

Dagger Paths

If there's any space left between micro-genres like witch house/drag, hauntology, hypnagogic pop/chillwave, and drone-step, Matthew Barnes has found it. Forest Swords, the UK producer's one-man project, conjures many ideas associated with those tags-- faded memories, ghostly auras, dream states. His music sometimes feels built from allusions and reference points, but the connections to sources are so elusive that Dagger Paths sounds singular first and evocative of something else second.
For me, that "something else" is often another artist who has snuck into a stylistic crevice, Mark Nelson, the Labradford member who works solo as Pan American. Like Nelson, Barnes is adept at picking simple rhythms and sounds, repeating them at a pace both languid and insistent, and folding in texture and volume until each piece becomes sneakily dense. Both also prefer wiry, reverb-heavy guitars, which charge their songs like lightning inside a cloud. But where Pan American can sometimes softly float away, Forest Swords is rarely hazy or indistinct. Most of Barnes' sounds are clear-- take opener "Miarches" whose echoes are big and bold, less like drifting fog than brisk wind.
That boldness comes partially from Barnes' interest in techno, hip-hop, and R&B. Those influences give him a strong sense of beat and a knack for forceful bass lines. The R&B strain in particular lurks in the background of everything here-- but in case you miss it among the reflecting guitars and rumbling beats, Barnes makes it explicit in an abstract take on Aaliyah's "If Your Girl Only Knew". Prioritizing bass over beat, letting every sound decay and dissolve, Barnes crafts a dying echo of the original, as if he hoped to erase it from his memory *Eternal Sunshine-*style.
What sticks in my mind after listening to Dagger Paths is its visual nature. When I get wrapped up in one of Barnes' tracks, I picture shadowy figures, found filmstrips, or TV movies fuzzed by tape wear. Barnes' videos are actually clearer and simpler than that (though "The Light" is almost exactly what I imagined), but they all use old footage to reflect the music's sense of dislocation. But it would be wrong to peg Barnes to one set of images or sounds-- my guess is he can do a lot more, and his new single, "Rattling Cage", has a dubby, Sun Araw vibe. As long as he keeps making music this blurrily evocative and vividly pictorial, any direction he takes will be the right one.


On an album whose title translates as “Consistent Fantasy Is Reality,” the Turkish singer pursues distant dreams of freedom in a fusion of contemporary rock and Turkish folk.

Gaye Su Akyol: İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir

İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir

“Consistent fantasy is reality/There is death and this is a dream/Let my woes pour into yours/Hey shake it, life is rock ‘n’ roll.” So purrs the Turkish singer Gaye Su Akyol on the title track of her latest album, her voice honeyed and weary. Nurturing rock ‘n’ roll fantasies in her home country is a fraught proposition; the Eurasian nation dominates headlines more for its geopolitical standing and dismal human-rights record than its rock output, which makes Su Akyol’s music feel all the more vital. Over the past four years, she has positioned herself as one of the scene’s luminaries, alongside acts like Ayyuka and Büyük Ev Ablukada. Her visually arresting presence elicits comparison to Björk, and her approach lies in melding her home’s musical heritage to a wide array of rock stylings.
Her third album in five years, İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir crackles with a live energy that stems from the 18 months of touring following its predecessor, 2016’s Hologram Ĭmparatorluğu. Producing the album with longtime guitarist Ali Güçlü Şimşek, Su Akyol is in firm command of her powers, adding a few more electronic textures to push to new heights. The opening title track begins with the kind of vintage squelching electronics that led Andy Votel, the Gaslamp Killer and, most famously, J Dilla to plunder similarly sumptuous Turkish grooves. It then bursts into a percussion-heavy stomp full of synth blats and heavily phased guitar that serve as opulent backdrop for the singer. Her voice is a mesmerizing thing, deep and plummy enough to shake trees and stir hearts.
Earmarks of Su Akyol’s previous albums remain present. There are folk instruments like the oud, bağlama, and cümbüş that situate acoustic songs like “Bağrımızda Taş” and “Boşluk Ve Sonsuzluk” in Turkey’s past. Şimşek’s whizz-bang Dick Dale shredding on rollicking numbers like “Laziko” beams in like surf music from a distant star. Against the synth bass on the slinky “Bir Yaralı Kuştum,” his double-time picking and wah pedal work deepen the song’s pliant groove. But then there’s the flare of flamenco that gives a dramatic kick to “Şahmeran.”
Even when the album slows things down to a crawl, Su Akyol and band cast a spell. A syrupy and dubbed-out drum machine kick on the brooding and sluggish “Gölgenle Bir Başıma” gives it all the dread of a Massive Attack production. The song (which translates as “All Alone With Your Shadow”) paints a portrait of drought, heartbreak, and grief in poetic lyrics poetic that elude facile understanding.
Su Akyol’s previous album translated as “Hologram Empire,” and İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir offers another such surreal edict: “Consistent Fantasy Is Reality.” Working in a country where the oppression of free expression is standard operating procedure, Su Akyol’s music seems like a post-1984 coping mechanism, where only in fantasy can freedom be truly felt. Or, as her artist statement puts it: “We need to create a counter reality in order to challenge organized evil and the horrible reality it creates, and the strongest option here is ‘consistent dreaming.’” The album deploys cagey metaphors to mask greater critiques, but a powerful line from “Halimiz İtten Beter” shifts from the language of hope and dreams and instead gives voice to those too-real moments of desolation: “I gave up on existence and held on to absence.”


Full of chaotic beats and cringe-worthy lyrics, the debut studio album from Jaden Smith is a paranoid fantasy that mixes new age thinking with apocalyptic rhetoric.

SYRE

Jaden Smith once said he thought it was an honor to be called “crazy.” It was his way of explaining the pseudo-philosophical babble spewing from his Twitter feed—a mix of stoned thoughts and even more stoned thoughts. Of Hollywood’s millennial generation of stars, he is among the funniest and most vexing. He’s a film and television actor, fashion designer, water-bottle company entrepreneur, and rapper whose pantheon of icons includes Kanye West and Silicon Valley tech-billionaire Elon Musk. In his music and his life, he’s a prankster and exhbitionist—showing up to public events in a Batman costume, or offering bits and pieces of his recently-shorn dreads as gifts on a talk show.
For as long as Smith has been a public figure, he has played up the thin, almost invisible line between being a hoax and being completely serious—he tries to be as transgressive and misunderstood as a Duchamp or John Waters. Still, Smith earnestly wants his art to be given the credit he thinks it deserves because he really does consider it revolutionary. He calls SYRE, his debut studio album, a “love letter to the world.” The 19-year old says this record is “very honest,” a Rosetta Stone that only people from the future may understand.
All of the sophistic ideas, musings, and pretensions that Smith has trafficked in are present, quite loudly, on SYRE. From its opening moment, he’s talking about the biblical story of creation, referencing the myth of Icarus, calling out crooked cops selling “crap,” and drowning his sorrows at the club. The opener, “B,” is part-one of the four-part song “BLUE.” On it, his sister Willow recites a sermon about the creation of man and the powers of Nyquil. Xylophone plinks meet church choruses, exploding electric guitars, and finally colossal bass drums, as Smith barrels into the track showing up haters and trying to get back with his girl. It’s incredible: it sounds like he’s trying too hard while at the same time not trying hard enough
A minute later, on “L,” he raps, almost too hilarious to be believed: “Girl I’m Martin Luther, Martin Luther King/Life is hard, I’m Kamasutra-ing.” On “U,” he somehow tops himself, delivering the second most cringe-worthy line of the year: “Man I’m artichokin’/I can’t breathe, that’s the art of chokin’.” The most cringe-worthy line of the year, appearing a few songs later on “Hope,” is actually shocking—Jaden endorses 9/11 trutherism: “Look, Fahrenheit 451/Building seven wasn’t hit and there’s more shit to come/The Pentagon is on a run.” It’s legitimately upsetting and speaks volumes to how careless Smith is on this album.
It would be generous to call this kind of songcraft scatterbrained. Smith refuses to stand still, shifting from sound to sound and thought to thought restlessly: Trap, stadium rock, John Mayer-like acoustic guitar licks, and sputtering noise can all appear in the frame of a single song. He cites Frank Ocean’s Blonde and West’s The Life of Pablo as primary influences here, which says more about his misplaced ambition that the actual sonics and content of the album. The beats are mostly helmed by Norwegian rapper Lido as well as members from Jaden’s MSFTsrep collective, which, in Smith’s own words, is “dedicated to supporting and waking up the population of planet earth.” The crisp sound of the production is the album’s one saving grace. It sounds top-shelf, as well it should since this album was three years in the making. While there are some musical highlights—like the 8-bit ambience of the Ricky Eat Acid-produced title-track—the album is constantly in pursuit of a voice it never finds.
Which highlight Smith’s writing, some of the worst in rap this year. His lyrics are crass and half-baked and insulting to one’s intelligence. He bungles his way through a world of luxury hotels (“I’m at the SOHO House/If you wanna come through”), conspiracy theories (“The Illuminati’s real, that’s the deal”), and uneducated wokeness  in a way that is so artless, it becomes its own hollow kind of performance art. To spend an hour in Smith’s world is to be subject to a paranoid fantasy that mixes new age thinking with apocalyptic rhetoric. If you’re into this kind of thing, you might be better off drinking a cold pressed juice and watching a marathon of “Ancient Aliens.” It will be better for you than SYRE ever could be.