The Danish rock band Communions offer a familiar sound—vaguely Strokes-y, ’80s-inspired pop rock—but they do it well.

Blue

There’s something to be said for familiarity. Sometimes you just want a burger to taste exactly like the one you had last time, and Blue, the full-length debut by the Danish quartet Communions, announces its ingredients right away with opener “Come On, I’m Waiting.” Had the band added a signature Greg Hawkes-style keyboard line, it would have been even easier to imagine “Come On, I’m Waiting” as being by the Cars. Within a few measures, it’s clear that Communions aren’t trying to hide the well of styles they're drawing from.
If you’re already familiar with the band's previous EPs, you know that Communions alternate between shoegaze and the meat-and-potatoes pop-rock that the Strokes sold to the world as punk/post-punk revivalism. On Blue, the smokestack plumes of guitar have mostly been cleared away in favor of a stripped-down production style that cuts closer to the bone. Second track “Today,” in fact, starts with a serrated, airtight guitar riff reminiscent of the Strokes’ 2001 debut Is This It. The similarity is so apparent that Communions may as well have tattooed the album cover onto their foreheads.
By this point, one has to wonder if there’s anything left to say, musically speaking, when bands choose to go down this well-traveled road. And when you consider that acts like the Strokes and Interpol lifted so blatantly from Television in the first place, Communions risk the quality erosion that you get when you make a copy of a copy. Nevertheless, Blue’s skill rescues it. After the Strokes-style riff introduces “Today,” the song switches to a looser ’80s-pop atmosphere reminiscent of the Smiths’ “Ask.”
That looseness is crucial; even the album’s basic production retains an openness that’s inviting rather than confining. Other bands who mold themselves after these styles typically do so with a fervor that can be stifling, but Blue conveys the sense that the band simply enjoys this music. At times, Communions sound inspired, like they pushed themselves to write songs that at least show some character. At other times, the band can sound somewhat lazy, as if it didn’t push quite hard enough. Which side of that line the songs on this album fall depends on where you draw the line yourself. Either way, the music on Blue is always lovingly crafted, and the album’s lack of musical pretense makes for an enjoyable, if predictable listen. If Blue were a restaurant, it would be the kind of place you go to for consistency and tasteful decor when you’re not in the mood for something fancier or more adventurous.


It's been over half a decade since HEALTH released a studio album, and Death Magic is a bold, albeit occasionally jarring, step forward. The band finally embraces the pop impulses that seem to have always been lurking in their DNA.

Death Magic

One of the highlights of Nine Inch Nails' Lights in the Sky tour back in 2008 was the added pleasure of watching HEALTH—then a still relatively unknown bunch of L.A. noisemakers—manage to almost steal the show. Of all the acts that Trent Reznor picked to open dates on that tour, HEALTH seemed the like the most obvious heir apparent—a band using bizarro configurations of electronics and guitars to pummel the audience into submission. Theirs appeared to be a very Reznor-approved pursuit: technology employed in service of exploring some of the most base human impulses—to incite, to destroy, and to possibly cause deafness.
It says something about the nature of HEALTH's music that of their now six proper full-length releases, two are remix albums (2008's Disco and 2010's Disco2) and one is the soundtrack to a video game (2013's surprisingly excellent Max Payne 3). In fact, their music has often flourished best in remix form. Hearing the band's music stripped and reworked by the likes of Gold Panda, Crystal Castles, and CFCF (whose sinewy reworking of Get Color's "Before Tigers" remains a standout) shone a light on just what was frequently hidden underneath all of HEALTH's Boredoms-esque roar: namely vocalist Jacob Duzsik's feathery vocals and the band's nascent ear for melody. Given room to breathe, HEALTH's music reveals itself to be much more than "industrial disco"—it's also pop music.
It's been over half a decade since they released a studio album, and Death Magic is a bold, albeit occasionally jarring, step forward. In a recent Pitchfork interview the band happily extolled the virtues of Depeche Mode and Rihanna, all of which makes the outré pop leanings of Death Magic more understandable. Given the early singles teased from the album, there was every reason to think that Death Magic might just be business as usual—and in some ways it is. The first single,"New Coke", materialized via a music video that featured high-intensity blasts of rafter-shaking low-end (not to mention the most lovingly filmed slow-motion vomit shots ever captured in a music video). Similarly, "Men Today" is a riot of barely corralled tribal drums, overdriven synths, and unpredictable beats. The track is pristinely produced and appropriately mountain-sized (Andrew Dawson and Lars Stalfors contribute production duties throughout), but it's not exactly a radical reinvention. Once you dig deeper into the record, however, the dark clouds begin to part.
On Death Magic, the band finally embraces the pop impulses that seem to have always been lurking in their DNA. "Flesh World (UK)" comes swinging out of the gate like a house track—a dancefloor appropriate number with an appropriately grim chorus ("We die/ So what/ We're here") that only occasionally pauses to slam the listener face first into a wall of white noise before advising "Do all the drugs/ But don't hurt the ones you love." "Dark Enough" is a goth-pop power ballad in which Duzsik sings, "Does it make a difference if it's real?/ As long as I still say I love you?" It's the kind of sideways romantic admission that would have sounded out of place—or perhaps just totally unintelligible—on a previous HEALTH record.
The band's biggest and most shocking pop moment comes just halfway through on "Life"—a song that flirts with stadium-size pop sentiments that would not be out of place on mainstream radio or, say, playing during the closing credits of a teenage romantic comedy. To hear a band like HEALTH offer the sentiment—"Life is strange/ We die and we don't know why/ I don't know what I want but I know that I don't know what want/ Nobody does"—feels both exhilarating and perverse. Longtime fans and noise purists might balk, but it's refreshing. The more vulnerable, pop-friendly moments on "Life" and the sparkly "L.A. Looks"—in which Duzsik admits,"It's not love, but I still want you"—make for a much more dynamic and oddly compelling listen than just 45 minutes of synthetic squall.
Though they might bristle at the obvious comparison, it's hard not to notice the Reznorian qualities of Death Magic. With Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor married the formlessness of industrial music to radio-friendly pop melodies. The 12 tracks on Death Magic do much the same, neatly splitting the difference between exquisitely detailed bombast (more than anything they've done before, it's a record that demands a huge stereo system and/or an excellent set of headphones) and something more human. While they still don't have to worry about somehow getting accidentally swept up in the mainstream—a fate unlikely for a band still making scary songs about drugs and releasing vomit-soaked visuals—with Death Magic HEALTH wisely manage to sidestep the errors of so many other ostensibly "heavy" bands, who often chase after extremity to the point of becoming humorless cartoons. After a while, even unremitting noise and relentless nihilism becomes rote and, frankly, kind of boring. Without the occasional beam of light, it's hard to actually appreciate how dark—or how good—a band like HEALTH can actually be.


In Tuareg culture, women rarely play guitar; this Nigerien group breaks with that tradition. Their 2019 live recording captures them at a hypnotic high, far from home but in command of an eager, inviting spirit.

Les Filles de Illighadad: At Pioneer Works

At Pioneer Works

Who gets to be a guitar hero? Does it happen through volume, or tone, or shredding notes like so much confetti? What about those who exist outside of Western industries, whose courage is something more than a mighty riff coursing through electric currents? Enter Les Filles de Illighadad.
Led by Fatou Seidi Ghali, the group formed in Illighadad, a small village in central Niger populated by nomadic Tuareg people. They took on a utilitarian name (“the Daughters of Illighadad”), performing the music of their Saharan upbringing with an electric guitar. They made their way to Western ears through the boutique Sahel Sounds label, releasing 2016’s Les Filles de Illighadad and 2017’s Eghass Malan before touring the United States for the first time in the fall of 2019. Recorded on the Brooklyn stop of that run, At Pioneer Works documents the ensemble at a hypnotic high, far from home but well in command of an eager, inviting spirit.
Rather than chasing the Western canon, the group invests its energy in tende, Tuareg traditional music named for the goatskin drum central to its sound. It’s inherently communal, intended for socializing, celebrating, and healing; women have typically led the singing and drumming, but guitars were out of the equation. Even devoid of this context, recorded in a still brick room and relayed through wires nearly two years later, At Pioneer Works hums with vibrancy. The low rhythm of an askalabo—a partially submerged calabash—sets the tone, bobbing upward to meet a curling guitar part on “Surbajo.”
Ghali holds the distinction of being the first female Tuareg guitarist, having secreted away time with a guitar that her older brother had brought home. Her father told her that she should be looking after cows instead, as she recalled to the Guardian in 2019. But she taught herself to play, later recruiting her cousin Alamnou Akrouni and now Amaria Hamadalher—the second Tuareg woman to play guitar—to join her in the group. Another of Ghali’s brothers, Abdoulaye Madassane, joins Les Filles on the road and At Pioneer Works as a rhythm guitarist.
Les Filles thrive as equal partners alongside Ghali’s nimble leadership, setting the steady groove that act as her launchpad. As they return to some of the songs they’ve previously recorded (it’s a live album, after all), Ghali and company reinvigorate them with new energy. They draw out Eghass Malan’s “Inssegh Inssegh” into nine entrancing minutes, with Ghali chasing a sprightly melody in circles. The title track from the same album finds a new bounce on an urgent, focused rhythm.
Though Ghali’s electric-guitar tone gives Les Filles de Illighadad their definitive character, its presence never usurps the communal spirit of the music. “Irriganan” takes off at a gallop, and Ghali’s bright, knotty picking emerges ahead of the flurry of the women’s voices. Notes seem to spring off of one another on every song, each tightly wound coil bouncing and unspooling in directions that are delightful to follow. The women trade off in call and response, singing about love, meditation, and family. As their voices overlap, it feels easy to disappear among them.
Les Filles de Illighadad began when Fatou Seidi Ghali dared to chase her curiosity past the boundaries that other people set for her. The group’s music imagines longstanding traditions while channeling the enthusiasm of audacious, self-determined freedom. Not all heroes wear capes, but they might start a band on the edge of the desert from time to time.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The celebrity socialite’s alluringly empty 2006 debut gets a vinyl reissue. It’s a concept album whose concept is: What if Paris Hilton made an album?

Paris Hilton

Picture it: You’re standing in the outdoor area of a bar, elbow-to-elbow with your fellow revelers. As it used to be, the proximity is perfectly safe. You aren’t even thinking about it. The temperature is perfect: 75 or 82 or 90, whatever you like. You’re having such a good time, you don’t even realize it—inoculated by the privilege of being able to take such things for granted. Whatever song is playing—you weren’t paying much attention to it—ends and the vague reggae intro of Paris Hilton’s Top 20 hit from 2006, “Stars Are Blind,” slinks on. Now you’re paying attention. The night’s sparkle brightens.
The communal experience of a beloved pop song from yesteryear sounds so good right now. If you have any relationship with “Stars Are Blind,” the new vinyl reissue of Hilton’s first and, to date, only album might be the perfect serving of nostalgic comfort food. Go ahead and indulge: Pop music is a salve that can provide a respite from fixating on doom and even transcend the politics of its own creators. So, in the spirit of eating the rich—and looking back lovingly at any time other than the present—Paris is both an easy thing to tear into and a hard thing to deny. It is goofy and craven, ear candy and rotted commodity. It’s so simplistic that it could make you swear it’s a put-on, that it’s way savvier than it seems, that it’s so stridently bereft of having any there there that it must be intentional. “There,” Hilton mutters into your ears and smacks you over the head with maroon-and-blonde marbled vinyl containing an amalgamation of mid-aughts pop.
At the time of its release, Paris seemed like a lark—a trifling vanity project from someone who was making a mint off of merely existing. Deadpan and clipped, Hilton didn’t seem even particularly engaged or enthusiastic about doing that. Already a tabloid staple, reality TV star, and absorber of paparazzi flashbulbs, Hilton was trying on pop stardom like a new pair of Louboutins that she’d soon discard. Little did we know that a reggae rip-off of Lord Creator’s 1970 cut “Kingston Town” would become the most enduring relic of her public reign. It couldn’t be anything else. It’s not like people are going to turn to her memoir Confessions of an Heiress, or one of her box-office bombs (The Hottie and the Nottie, anyone?), or DreamCatchers hair extensions to remember Hilton’s heyday by. For all the space Hilton sucked up and never gave anything of substance back to, “Stars Are Blind,” made it sort of worth it.
There is something impressive in the synergy fueling Paris: A person who was famous for being famous turning to pop, a genre whose hits, it has been argued with data, tend to be popular because they’re popular. On the album, privilege is not merely flaunted; it is an adopted aesthetic. All over Paris, Hilton sings of her own appeal without any apparent impulse to illustrate or explain. Fat Joe and Jadakiss join her on “Fightin’ Over Me,” one of six tracks produced by Scott Storch just before he squandered $30 million in six months and his career effectively dried up. Neither Joe nor Jada put up much of a fight (Joe: “Yeah ma, you with the realest, how simple is that?”) despite Hilton’s insistence during the chorus, which is either deathly emphatic or creatively bankrupt: “Every time I turn around, the boys fightin’ over me/Every time I step out the house, they wanna fight over me/Maybe ’cause I’m hot to death, and I’m so, so, so sexy/All the boys, all the silly boys, they wanna fight over me.”
The persona Hilton adopts on the album is like a Sims version of herself: She pursues hot guys at the club, she gets pursued at the club, she loves, she bemoans, she says things like, “That’s hot!” and “I like attention!” in her whispery baby voice. There is something alluring about her deadpan—she’s so committed to its stillness that she might as well be meditating.
Paris is a concept album whose concept is: What if Paris Hilton made an album? With absolutely no surprises to offer, it’s a committed extension of her brand, an album as giant and empty and theoretically iconic as a deflated Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. It seems consciously blank, like an answer to an interview question Hilton hates but is too poised to ignore. Hilton has writing credits on five of its ten original songs. (The album’s 11th is a cover of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” which is redundant coming from someone who is clearly convinced that the answer of each and every listener is yes.)
“Excuse me for feeling,” she sings in “Stars,” and it’s like...yes! Exactly. It’s rare to detect her doing that. “Stars” is one of the few songs where her effort sounds convincing—during the second verse, she sings the word “be” so that it pours out of her mouth like cleavage from a dress. Elsewhere, Hilton’s voice sits somewhere between the doe-eyed wonder of Britney Spears and the vampy charisma of Gwen Stefani, with some of Janet Jackson’s muttering technique sprinkled in. She is by far lesser than each of these singers, though, and none of them are exactly powerhouses. In the synth ballad highlight “Heartbeat,” her voice presses on each note with the deliberation of a small child learning piano. It almost feels like a conscious statement on the extent to which pop can get away with being soulless. When she sings, “With you I feel the other half of my heartbeat,” the physiological shakiness of the metaphor doesn’t even register initially because her admission of half-heartedness makes so much sense. Her words are easy to take at face value.
“Heartbeat” starts as a soft-focus synth-based ringer for Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” before morphing into a retread of Stefani’s “Cool.” Dr. Luke handed Hilton a carbon copy of his “Since U Been Gone” with “Nothing in This World”—there’s also a taste of the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” in the chorus’ guitar riff. Some of the rockier songs, like the rumored Nicole Richie diss track “Jealousy,” play as though everything Hilton knows about grunge, she learned from Ashlee Simpson. With all the money in the world, most of the time Paris simply can’t summon more than cubic zirconia pop, an ersatz take on the genuine article.
Paris is a strange record of contradictions. It’s an exercise in noncommitment, an expression of indifference. Hilton emerged from this album a one-hit wonder, which is, all things considered, a fun thing to have under your belt when you have enough money that a career in music would never much affect your quality of life anyway. It’s not that she didn’t go for more in a spate of one-off singles released periodically in the nearly 14 years since Paris’ release (not to mention her seemingly fruitless signing to Cash Money in 2013). She also launched a successful career as a DJ, in which she claimed to receive more than $100,000 per gig. It is quite tempting to shit on Paris at a time when, in the words of the New York Times’ Amanda Hess, celebrity culture is burning as a result of a global crisis’ highlighting of the disparity between the haves and have nots. But so flagrant has been Hilton’s privilege all along that the resentment was always there for the taking. As a celebrity, her moderate musical success is more of a reinforcement of pop’s values than a problem she created. Stars are blind and also tone-deaf. After all, they’re people too.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Endlings is the collaboration of Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich with the New Mexico-based composer and noise artist Raven Chacon. Their self-titled album embraces abstraction.

Endlings

John Dieterich is best known as one-fourth of the daft art-pop outfit Deerhoof, though he’s also lent his impressionistic guitar thunder to albums by Colossamite and the Gorge Trio. For the project Endlings, Dieterich collaborates with composer and noise artist Raven Chacon—whose resume spans everything from KILT’s industrial sabotage to the multimedia collective Postcommodity, which presents work through an Indigenous lens.
Dieterich and Chacon first collaborated at the Albuquerque Experimental Music Festival in 2010, an improvised stew of torrid effects and unhinged guitars. Shortly after, Dieterich relocated from the Bay Area to Chacon’s native New Mexico. Endlings now bears little resemblance to that original performance. But they embrace abstraction.
At times, the duo surrenders themselves to a shuddering, violent minimalism, a sonic no-man’s land where it can be challenging to find or sustain one’s balance. At their harshest, they’re especially oblique: “I Make It Fall” crams dense, near-intelligible guitar scribbles into 73 seconds, “Legal Fiction” suggests a tuning fork tumbling in a gradually accelerating dryer. When the pendulum swings in the opposite direction, their results pulse with a no-fi glow that would have been right at home as interstitials on lost, ’90s outlier classics like Home’s Home X or Bügsküll’s Phantasies and Senseitions. On “Buried in Angels,” threshing effects and shrill whistles yield to sub-tropical waves of ukulele and keyboard.
Endlings is strongest when the band balances legibility with the ineffable. “Thought Signature” crumbles vocals over aqueous, bouncy keyboards. “The Devil’s in the Red Tail” pits watery guitar chords against Native American flutes. “Black Sabbatical” blends twin, turgid heavy metal riffs with claws, never losing sight of its hooks beneath the weight of compounding feedback and distortion. Every Endlings song offers a sneak peek into a distinct, unmoored sound world—one dizzyingly strange, free thread after another, genres turned inside out. With any hope, Dieterich and Chacon will be able to find the time and wherewithal to follow each strand to its end, wherever they may lead.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a wild slice of ’70s Dylan, an album whose air of magic and misdirection remains utterly unique in his catalog.

Desire

[Scene 1: West Village, New York City, 1975. A legendary songwriter, mid-30s, is surveying the neighborhood where he cut his teeth a decade before. A violinist, younger and without his star status, but striking, with long dark hair and mysterious poise, enters stage right.]
The passerby was Scarlet Rivera, a previously unknown musician whose hypnotic violin became the signature sound of Bob Dylan’s newly minted touring group, the Rolling Thunder Revue, and his gestational new album, Desire. Naturally, Dylan—world historic genius, generational icon, and general weirdo—pulled over his car, resolved to ask her just exactly what her deal was. For an artist so concerned with myth, this chance encounter must have been irresistible. Was she phantom, muse, or curse? Was she really named Scarlet Rivera? “I meet witchy women. I wish they’d leave me alone,” he told Jonathan Cott, in a 1978 Rolling Stone interview, not stopping to consider the possibility that the feeling was mutual. Not long after the album came out, she vanished from his life and the public eye.
As with so much Dylan lore—from the fabled teenage eye contact with Buddy Holly to the arrest in Springsteen’s childhood neighborhood—it seems too unlikely to be true, and too preposterously random to invent. It’s of a piece with the world of Desire, where what’s real and what’s weird are largely indistinguishable.
Dylan’s previous record, the precision-controlled display of omniscient superego that was 1975’s Blood on the Tracks, had set an impossibly high standard for its follow-up. In response, Desire was a fantasia of grave injustices and grave robberies, exotic and dangerous locales, broiling days and fleeting gestures in the face of grim destiny. Its nine songs spread out over 56 minutes, co-mingling protest folk, travelogue tunes, throwback country, and sideways klezmer, all comprising one peculiar episode in the baffling sweep of his career. Blood on the Tracks was a document of personal and romantic trauma that traced an outline around a generation who prized individual freedoms to the point of self-annihilating alienation. Desire is about getting stoned and strange and trying to forget about all of that.
Desire is not a subtle album, and it does not commence on a subtle note. “Hurricane”—an audacious eight-and-a-half minute recounting of the 1966 arrest and conviction of the middleweight boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter on charges of triple homicide—begins with the interweaving and insinuating strains of Dylan’s acoustic guitar and Rivera’s violin. One of seven songs on Desire co-authored with the playwright Jacques Levy, it employs stage directions to set its scenery: “Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night/Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall.” Intentional or not, the effect of the dramaturgy is to suggest a not-strictly-speaking-literal recounting of events, introducing the queasy sensation that we are being carried along by storytellers whose commitment to the facts is secondary to their impulse to thrill and desperation to deliver a higher truth.
Indeed, Dylan and Levy take considerable liberties with Carter’s biography and the case against him. He was never the “number one contender for the middleweight crown”; by the time of his arrest, he was circling boxing’s drain toward journeyman status. Neither did his long history of violence outside the ring comport with the beatific “Buddha” portrayed in the lyrics. Still, the song is one of Dylan’s greatest. The story’s grim particulars take root in your imagination: the ultra-violent crime, the summer heat and police lights, the racist cops and all-white jury sealing his fate. The band rolls along, a runaway sea of conga fills and furious energy. By the end no reasonable person could doubt Carter’s innocence, questionable though it may be.
Desire follows one epic with another: “Isis,” a bluesy slow-burn odyssey that considers the relative plusses and minuses of stealing from the dead for a living, like Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” by way of Leonard Cohen’s early frozen-song landscapes. Its account of a two-man grift gone wrong and the women caught in between post-dates Humphrey Bogart and pre-dates Better Call Saul, making for a perfect mid-point in that continuum of heroic losers.
Then the weirdness starts in earnest. “One More Cup of Coffee” and “Oh, Sister” are solemn and prayerful, filled with Old Testament dread and the echoes of an antiquity reaching further back still. “One More Cup of Coffee” seems to describe the morning after a confused night of romance, the narrator asking his erstwhile paramour for a shot of caffeine before he disappears into “the valley below.” “Oh, Sister” is one of several tracks on Desire sung in haunting harmony with Emmylou Harris. With its passionate interpolation of sibling and spiritual mandates, it’s one part Freudian fever dream and one part plea for familial oneness—Neutral Milk Hotel invented in four gorgeously unsettling minutes. “Oh sister, when I come to lie in your arms,” goes the first verse, “You should not treat me like a stranger.” I’m no psychologist, but it’s clear Dylan is dissociating here. The music’s leisurely grandeur only heightens the creeping horror.
[Scene 2: Marin County, CA, 1987. The legendary songwriter, now at a commercial and creative low point, rehearses with an iconic group from his 1960s heyday for a joint tour.]
The union of Dylan and the Grateful Dead was auspicious, but the context was strange. Riding an improbable wave of commercial excitement following their MTV hit “Touch of Grey,” the Dead were playing to the largest crowds of their career. Following a run of desultory ’80s-era albums, Dylan was decidedly not. Without the Dead as his backing band, there was no chance he would be playing stadiums at this dysfunctional juncture. During practices, the Dead requested old Dylan songs they might want to try their hands at playing. Dylan, for once in his life, wasn’t in much of a position to refuse. Preposterously, perfectly, and for all to hear on 1989’s live LP Dylan & The Dead, Jerry Garcia requests “Joey.”
A straggling Gemini-twin to “Hurricane,” Desire’s most indulgent composition whinges on interminably and borderline incomprehensibly about the gangland slaying of an objectively psychotic mafia figure named Joey Gallo. Dylan famously coined the aspirational phrase “to live outside the law you must be honest,” a formulation that “Joey” undermines in every way possible. If you wanted to make the case for “Joey” as his worst song, you might begin with the demented portrayal of Gallo as some manner of saint, whose ahistorical indulgences might be more persuasive had Dylan bothered to string them together with a shred of narrative logic. You might move on to the torpid melody, one of the least memorable he’s ever written. But hey, at least it’s 11 minutes long. The twist is, in the nimble, gleefully amoral hands of the Grateful Dead, this dismal composition became supple and agreeable. Somehow the Dead brought “Joey” back to life. There’s your graverobbers right there.
Desire’s final third leans further into Dylan’s obsessions with love, death, ecstasy, and the liminal spaces between. “Hot chili peppers in the blistering sun!” he exclaims on the opening line of “Romance in Durango,” a legitimately goose-skin inducing Tex-Mex boogie replete with the thrill of adventure and the promise of violence, an invigorating update to his 1973 soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Its lyrics cross the distance between total fantasy and something like a true accounting of events. By the time of the lead cowboy’s inevitable sacrifice-by-desperado, he is so discombobulated that he begins interrogating the libretto itself: "Was it my hand that held the gun?” and “Can it be that I am slain?”
“Black Diamond Bay,” another long story song on an album full of them, is remarkably tuneful, ruefully ominous, and utterly batshit. I have been listening to it for two decades, and I still have no clue what is happening. There is a Greek man, a woman in a Panama hat, a soldier, a tiny man, a volcano. Portends of suicide and disaster percolate: scheming gamblers and sunken islands, betrayals and broken bonds, the kind of Book of Revelation stuff Dylan would get into full-time soon enough. Through some mysterious alchemy, its incoherence yields real beauty, abetted by an incredibly committed performance from his ace backing band—led by bassist Rob Stoner, another musician who figured prominently in Dylan’s career and then seemed to disappear. Try to grasp the details of “Black Diamond Bay,” or just let the imagery carry you away. Like everything on Desire, it’s all misdirection and magic anyway.
[Scene 3: Columbia Records recording studio, midtown Manhattan, 1975. An estranged wife watches her husband sing the song that he thinks will make all the difference. Will it matter?]
Album closer “Sara” is by orders of magnitude the most explicitly biographical song the notoriously private Dylan has ever released. He recounts in forensic detail the fraying of his union to Sara Lownds, his longtime wife and the mother of his children. Even by the contemporary standards of full-frontal psychic nudity, its oversharing is extremely uncomfortable. He conjures their babies playing on the beach. He marinates in his own mythology: “Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writin’ ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you,” name-checking the sprawling closer of 1966’s Blonde on Blonde. He howls her name again and again: “Sara, Sara/Whatever made you want to change your mind?” Talk about blood on the tracks.
Still, as the song winds its pleading way to its conclusion, something feels off. After Dylan has spent the past fifty minutes recasting “Hurricane” Carter as a man of peace and Joey Gallo as a populist immigrant hero, it’s hard not to wonder what duplicity lies in this depiction of the Dylan-Lownds partnership. The story goes that Dylan held off recording Desire’s final track until his estranged wife could be present at the session, a last gambit for reconciliation. Apparently, she gave no reaction at all as it was recorded. Their divorce became official shortly after.
Desire was a hit, even briefly reaching No. 1 on the US Billboard album charts, and serving as the soundtrack of the wooly second leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, as it evolved from an ersatz-folk revival medicine show into a mesmerizing quasi-gothic hellscape. From there, the head trips for Dylan’s audience would proceed in whiplash succession: the tarot-glitz of Street Legal and subsequent Vegas-style live shows, the should-have-seen-it-coming shock of his evangelical years, the drift from his vision in the 1980s, the improbable return as the mustache-twirling Nobel laureate of the new millennium. Were they arbitrary scenes or some part of a connected whole?
He would never make another record like it—its circumstances being unrepeatable seemingly by design—but in some ways Desire is the most explicit manifestation of the central literary irony of Dylan’s career: that the consummate barometer of social and cultural authenticity can’t be trusted with the facts about anything, least of all himself. Perhaps his true desire is to reduce real life to a kind of theater: a zero-sum contest between his sublime powers of expression and the vexing limitations and grinding tedium that more often than not constitute existence. Asked about the song “Sara” in the same 1978 interview in which he complained about witchy women, Dylan struggled to parse what he’d written three years before about his own wife: “Was it the real Sara, or the Sara in the dream? I still don’t know.” For a second there, it sounds like he’s telling the truth.


With more straightforward performances and compositions, the album has its flat spots, but it hints that Bertelmann might have as much to say as his piano does.

A Different Forest

Feel free to read this sentence a couple of times if you need to: A decade before he became an experimental piano auteur called Hauschka, Volker Bertelmann played keys in a hip-hop group called God’s Favorite Dog. It was sort of a German PM Dawn, to judge from this TV performance of their song “Lake of Life.” In the clip, you can sometimes glimpse Bertelmann’s familiar floppy-haired visage behind the “Boy Meets World” extra rocking on the tambo.
It’s not a short or straight path from there to the Sony Classical label, where Bertelmann, with his new LP, joins the Olympian line of Bernstein and Boulez. But there is a subtle through line. While inching into the classical sphere, Bertelmann never stopped “dipping [his] toes in the lake of life.” This is to say that he renders broad, grand concepts as acute, confined miniatures, more attuned to weft than heft, and he plays like a blade skimming froth off the surface of existence—notably on pop-and-house-inflected fan favorites Ferndorf and Salon des Amateurs.
A Different Forest keeps with Bertelmann’s habit of crushingly literal titles (see also: Foreign Landscapes, Abandoned City). It has a very general concept about nature and civilization, as you might infer from such less-than-imaginative titles as “Hike” and, yes, “Another Hike.” But in truth, he’s burying the lede: This is a significant course change. It should have been called The Unprepared Piano, a counterpoint to the record that put him on the new music map and the process that has sustained him since. Now, rather than altering his piano’s strings and hammers with wood, metal, and paper, and using electronic effects to create ambient, dance, and orchestral timbres, his playing is mostly unadorned by interventions. The resulting album has its flat spots, but at its best, it hints that Bertelmann might have as much to say as his piano does.
The record opens with the perfectly lovely and predictable neoclassical lobby music of “Hike,” almost an etude, with tasteful left-hand chords dusking a plain interval cycling up and down. “Dew and Spiderwebs” is freer and deeper, as Bertelmann draws whorled lines across a darkly pulsing understructure. His pianism is confident throughout, especially on “Urban Forest,” where he rolls out smooth, glittering pavements and embellishes them with diegetic city sounds, and “Hands in the Anthill,” a Mozartian maze of little triumphs, with passages of showy, flowing speed. But several tracks (“Curious,” “Ghosts”) rely on the tug of well-worn harmonic shapes and the weaving of legato lines to entrance rather than ideate, persuade, or startle.
The standouts have more substance, musically and visually. The wide, soft, shining curves of “Skating Through the Woods” conjure its scene without being too literal. A granular texture at large in “Daybreak over Covent Garden” lends it a rogue subjectivity that is absent in the tautly plaited sound worlds elsewhere. But the album’s low-key best composition is profound, coming from a composer more given to zest.
“Talking to My Father” is a somber, nostalgic rumination that exemplifies the narrative potential of solo piano. Bertelmann, who often prefers to follow patterns down rabbit holes, instead gently wrestles with and develops a rich theme, moving through passages of clarity and uncertainty, joy and regret, and ending with a somehow-knowing denouement. It has the arc of a long, complex conversation, and it’s the best indication here that Bertelmann isn’t just cropping up in the top-tier classical world. He might have the vision to stay there.


American Intelligence, Detroit house music producer Theo Parrish’s first album since 2007, is a two-hour collection with 10 of its 15 tracks approaching or breaking the 10-minute barrier. Within it, Parrish embraces the paradox of the title: indulgent and defiant, serious and cheeky, political yet intent on getting your dead ass to move.

American Intelligence

There’s always something of a contrarian streak to Detroit dance music producer Theo Parrish that can also come across as purist, crotchety, fussbudgety. When he first began releasing music in 1996, Parrish and peers like Kenny Dixon Jr., Marcellus Pittman, Rick Wilhite, Andrés, and more did dance music that was not quite in step with the scene. Instead of futurism and the whirring machinations that informed Detroit’s sleekest export, techno, they preferred house’s slightly slower pulse, their tracks infused with their parents and grandparents’ record collections. Swells of church organ, the coos of R&B, jazz’s swing, funk’s rhythmic gunk—some half-century’s worth of African-American music—teemed just beneath the kick drum.
But as house music tightened and grew sleeker, Parrish's tracks loosened and turned viscous. He began dropping disco edits and when edits began to flood the market soon after, his grew uglier. Deep house all the rage now? Well then, Parrish's most recent mix is comprised entirely out of charged 1970’s free jazz. He’s as renowned for not giving you what you want in a DJ set as he is for delivering both the headiest and dankest dance music of the last 20 years.
He gives you all you can handle with American Intelligence, a title that with each passing news day feels more and more like an oxymoron. It’s his first album since 2007 and the end result is a massive listen, a two-hour collection (or else a slightly trimmed triple LP), with 10 of its 15 tracks approaching or breaking the 10-minute barrier. Within it, Parrish embraces the paradox of the title: indulgent and defiant, serious and cheeky, political yet intent on getting your dead ass to move. The man is musically generous, even if a copy in the shop might set you back $50.
The album opens with a subliminal bass tone that will set your subwoofer to trembling. He then carefully drips in closed hi-hats, a snare just a millimeter too fast, a ride cymbal that splatters like a circuit in a rain puddle, all of it embellishing a heart-quickening throb. Parrish then takes his sweet fucking time to whisper to his fellow countrymen: "Where’s your drive? Has it died?" He then answers himself: "It keeps me alive."
Throughout the length of this album, Parrish keeps to the sparest of rhythmic sounds. And as he put it in a recent interview, that was his intent: "What I try to get to is that part of everybody that is childlike and is simple, it goes to the rhythm, the repetition. The idea of a handclap that keeps happening over and over again is the most-simple thing that can happen and is something everybody can do and relate to." He’s the Alice Waters of dance music, turning a handful of fresh ingredients into a feast. Often the rhythm tracks are erected out of little more than a live kick drum, tom, snare, hi-hat, dashes of other hand percussion (bells, rattles), with pads adding a bit more heft. Out of such Spartan percussion, he mesmerizes, to where introducing a new element 5-6 minutes deep suddenly turns revelatory. Some six minutes amongst the echoing bloops and zagging keys of "Tympanic Warfare", the drums start to sizzle and what once seemed abstract and not fully sketched out now feels solid.
The length of tracks slows down AI at some points, while some of the keyboard figures seem to echo melodies found elsewhere, which to newcomers might get misread as sameness. As rapturous as the beatless R&B exhalations of vocalist Ideeyah are on "Ah", it would have been more effective and sublime at five minutes instead of 10. "Helmut Lampshade" turns into a jazz fusion robot run amok. The highway patrol dialogue on "Welcome Back" is a throwaway track, but there’s little doubt it’s rooted in the ugliest of truths about American racism, underscoring the political that is always just beneath the surface of Parrish's music and discourse.
The track well worth wading through is the 13 glorious minutes of "Be In Yo Self". Built from a shuffling cymbal that slowly gathers momentum, aspects of the track are smooth enough to scan as nu-jazz yet it still feels rooted and raw. Guitarist Duminie DePorres delivers a snaking Phil Upchurch-type guitar line as Ideeyah hums and harmonizes with herself, singing ad nauseam: "Being yourself shouldn’t have a downside."
As Parrish explained in the aforementioned interview, the song is "almost kind of like a spiritual. It's a chant." Midway through, the shift comes not from a new rhythmic element, but a lyrical one: "Hey suga, would you dance a little bit closer to me?" It’s deep, not so much in the house sense, but in an emotional way, an honest request to his betrothed. It’s Parrish at his most disarming, and coming as it does in his broad discography, it’s a most agreeable sound.


This batch of reissues chronicling M83's first three albums measures the artistic progression of Anthony Gonzales. They chart the project's progression towards the kind of big tent, feelings-forward electro-rock hybrid that has become the base stock of most popular indie acts.

M83: M83 / Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts / Before the Dawn Heals Us Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts Remixes & B-Sides EP / Before the Dawn Heals Us Remixes & B-Sides EP

It’s hard to imagine a project better suited for the age of enormous festival gigs and indie auteur-focused action movie soundtracks than M83. In the 13 years since Anthony Gonzalez and then-collaborator Nicolas Fromageau released the project’s first, self-titled record, the kind of big tent, feelings-forward electro-rock hybrid that they made has become, in some permutation, the base stock of most popular indie acts. While My Bloody Valentine were—and remain—a good point of reference for M83’s sonic textures, Arcade Fire are perhaps a better touchpoint for their overall approach: lead with emotions telegraphed big and wide enough to fill a stadium, and let the guitars and synthesizers fall into place around them.
This trilogy of reissues beautifully tracks the evolution of Gonzalez’s work from student film, to limited-release, to blockbuster. It also marks a very clear progression from an accessible, emotional electronic music project to what Brandon Stosuy aptly described as “high-concept emo embossed with glittery snow angels.” The story of these three records is not that of Gonzalez filling his music with progressively more embellishment, but rather of Gonzalez learning how to reorganize the core of his musical vision around that embellishment. The glass baubles of M83 became the rhinestone earrings of Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, which became the crystal chandeliers of Before the Dawn Heals Us.
Sure enough, M83’s self-titled debut album is their stateliest and most deliberate work. The album’s song titles point further towards an emo narrative, but the music itself only hints at this kind of heavy-handed heartstring-tugging; for better or worse, this is M83 introducing themselves as an electronic project with strong emotional undercurrents, and not much deeper than that.
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is a transitional record that bridges the gap between M83’s relatively understated beginnings and their bombastic recent output. Listening back 11 years later, it’s notable how messy Dead Cities is; though it still operates in something that resembles an electronic music paradigm, much of its energy is crowded into the upper-midrange frequencies that usually pile up when layering distorted electric guitars. A synthesizer-heavy crescendo is often followed by a bigger, heavier crescendo, with more sounds and ideas piled on even if there isn’t really room for them. Dead Cities makes its case through sheer scale and force of will, constantly running up against the limitations of its own construction. It's dramatic music embroiled in its own internal drama, and it succeeds on slightly different terms from any subsequent M83 record.
Nowhere is this particular formula better articulated than “Run Into Flowers”, the debut single from Dead Cities and one of the most achingly, incessantly beautiful songs Gonzalez has ever released. It layers buzzing synthesizers, dramatic synthesized strings, humming synthesizers, gently sung vocals, and even more synthesizers to create a vast, overpowering swell that starts big and only seems to grow bigger. “0078h” builds to a dizzying crescendo, as beats collapse over themselves and synthesized voices ping-pong unintelligibly like a computer struggling with its own sentience. Even the bleepy and bloopy “Cyborg” builds to a satisfyingly organic conclusion that honors its part-human, part-robot namesake.
And indeed, it’s that human element, in the form of the human voice, that comes to greater prominence post-Dead Cities. Before the Dawn Heals Us marks a number of notable changes from its predecessor, including the departure of Fromageau and the reworking of the M83’s aesthetic from tasteful electronic minimalism to broad-stroke "Miami Vice" expressionism. To whatever extent Dead Cities seemed corny when compared to other electronic albums, Before the Dawn Heals Us is corny and overstated by nearly any measure. But on Before the Dawn Heals Us, Gonzalez actually makes room for all the bombast of his songs. The single “Don’t Save Us From the Flames” finds Gonzalez embracing not just the energy of rock music, but also its dynamics. The drums—or, rather, “drums”—protrude forcefully, rather than getting swallowed up in synthesizers and static. There's a clear and appreciable distinction between lead synths and synth pads. Verses pull back, choruses kick forward.
And then there are the vocalists—including, fittingly, actress Kate Moran—who are cast more like players in a movie than singers on an album. From “Can’t Stop”, which sounds like one of those '70s soft rock infomercials pitched up and put on a loop, to “Car Chase Terror”, which narrates pretty much the exact scenario its title describes via a woman’s voice over the phone, each of the best songs on Before the Dawn Heals Us not only find a unique voice, but also a unique way of situating it. Insofar as Dead Cities evokes people, places, and things through sound and texture, Before the Dawn Heals Us puts those people, places, and things front and center in a very literal way.
Sure enough, the remixes included in the bonus EPs are instructive primarily because they tease out these individual elements, lay them out in a more linear fashion, and give them room to express themselves in a less frantic and busy context. One gets the sense that, when presented sequentially, each of the instrumental tracks in a single M83 song could fill up an entire record. The B-sides included here fall predictably short, largely because they seem to lack the over-the-top commitment of their album counterparts. These songs are, for sure, host to their own subtle charms—but subtlety is not Gonzalez’s strong suit, nor is it what this kind of music calls for. M83's records certainly don’t fall apart under close scrutiny, and they don’t ask for such scrutiny, either. Instead, they ask that you suspend just a little bit of critical disbelief, and let yourself get carried away.


Zombie armies, mortal standoffs, gravesite robberies: On their ecstatic second album, the Rochester metal band has fun with death.

Undeath: It’s Time… To Rise From the Grave

It’s Time… To Rise From the Grave

Undeath don’t fear the future. And why should they worry when they’re so fixated on our collectively inevitable end? The second album from this young crew of old-school death metal diehards, It’s Time… To Rise From the Grave is so swept up in necromania it’s sometimes hard to tell exactly who is in peril or already perished: you, them, or everyone in the world who isn’t enlisted in the militia of undead bionic mercenaries they amass during an uproarious mid-record tandem. Chandeliers of bone and feasts of flesh, zombie uprisings and pillaged cemeteries: Rise From the Grave is an ecstatic celebration of the fetid and the dead, an extraordinary rendering of the ordinary place where we all eventually arrive. Undeath have so much fun with their necrotic obsessions it’s hard not to listen and be grateful you’re not there yet.
Nearly 40 years ago, Undeath would have been the subject of senatorial scrutiny, members of the prurient-and-satanic cadre that Tipper Gore and her Parents Music Resource Center vilified before Congress. But the Rochester quintet is now able to sprint without worry down the controversial and bloody-minded path that its New York forebears in Cannibal Corpse—or the string of Florida predecessors like Morbid Angel, Death, and Deicide that ultimately drew them south—arduously bushwhacked decades ago.
Despite the stylistic leaps and bounds within death metal in the generation since, Undeath follow those bygone formulas, from album covers depicting fantastical murders and desecrated graveyards to ghoulish scenes forever-grunted over belligerent riffs and relentless drums. There are splenetic solos, eerie electronic intros, and rubber-band bass rumbles. This isn’t the future but, instead, a reinvigorated past. If you have even a marginally informed stereotype of the way primitive death metal sounds or feels, it probably resembles Undeath and Rise From the Grave.
But unlike their sometimes hilariously self-serious inspirations, Undeath grew up online— “internet music nerds” and “overweight gamers from Upstate New York,” as they put it in recent interviews. The most brutal underground death metal and the most addictive mainstream pop, then, were only a click apart, a lesson they incorporate into these 10 wonderfully gnarly and memorable barrages. Undeath aren’t just grinding away, attempting to sound tough or inventive or necessarily hidebound: They’re here to bask in a wonderfully ridiculous taboo—having fun by exaggerating the horrors of death, making it seem more wicked and harrowing than it already is. “It’s about having a good time with us,” admitted vocalist Alexander Jones in Spin, “reveling in this admittedly silly thing…death metal.”
“Head Splattered in Seven Ways,” to wit, details an absurdist armed standoff between two dudes. All the death-metal hallmarks are present—vocals so violent you can practically hear the larynx rip, massive riffs that crash down in waves, cymbals that dance over tides of blast beats. As Jones demands answers from his victim, he repeats, “Tell me the truth,” the band making space for a refrain so barbed you may hum along the second time he coughs it up, even if this is the only death metal song you’ve ever heard.
Or there’s “Necrobionics,” the first of those two tunes about the mounting zombie army. The band is as agile as it is aggressive, with righteous guitarists Jared Welch and Kyle Beam stuffing a symphony of melodrama into their compact riffs. Jones perches above it all like some pop-star gargoyle, squealing “Piles of death/Corpses en masse.” He sells this ludicrous hook by treating each syllable like the opposite side of a melodic seesaw, a trick he might have learned from Rihanna’s “Umbrella” or any number of arena-sized anthems. Either way, it sticks, and it’s possible to imagine audiences not clad only in black shouting it back at Undeath.
This approachability is bigger than hooks. Beam is an intuitively crafty songwriter, tapping simple linguistic tools—alliteration, internal rhyme, rhythmic variety—to magnetize these morbid tales before they even reach the chorus. You get the narrative, even if you don’t understand every word. The band also wedges their own little mementos into these tracks. Bassist Tommy Wall (alongside Welch, new to Undeath for this LP) opens the record with a rumbling line that catches much like the start of the Breeders’ “Cannonball.” The buzzsaw riff of “The Funeral Within,” pushed to a devilish pace by drummer Matt Browning, is nearly as memorable as Jones’ chanted refrain, a rollercoaster of four rhyming lines about mortal sin and rotten skin. Undeath are here to have and supply a good time.
It’s fair to wonder why Undeath—who do very little that hasn’t been done for decades in death metal, no matter the oomph and conviction with which they do it—warrant either a big record deal or the sort of consensus accolades they’re enjoying, present paean included. At least in part, Undeath simply have the good luck of bad times. Their goofy, gory cemetery fantasies serve as welcome pressure-release valves for these fraught days. Undeath are playing games with death, the thing so many of us spend so much of our lives fretting. “Tissue from the brain was dead but is now alive,” Jones barks during “Enhancing the Dead,” the second of those two songs about an army of weaponized zombies. That’s also how It’s Time… To Rise From the Grave might make you feel—a little less worried about dying and a little more alive, at least for these 36 gleeful minutes.


The pop-R&B singer’s long-awaited debut follows a line from crippling self-doubt to pure confidence, adopting a glossy and funky vibe fortified by her exceptional voice and songwriting.

Three Dimensions Deep

Over the past six years, Amber Mark has crafted consistent pop-R&B music with tasteful, glossy precision. The New York artist’s first two EPs, 2017’s 3:33 AM and 2018’s breakthrough Conexão, examined themes of grief and love through lithe R&B, pop, dance, and bossa nova, melding different sounds into one elegant, rhythmic blend. She separated herself from her peers by leaning into stormy, overwhelming emotion, whether swimming through a monsoon of tears on an undulating ballad or demanding equal footing in a relationship over a jubilant house beat.
Mark’s impressive, husky voice suits her genre-hopping music, which hit a stride in 2020 on her quarantine-made covers series that allowed her to stretch her legs and experiment, especially in its more offbeat, cheeky exercises (see: her house-infused, unexpectedly delightful spin on Sisqó’s “Thong Song”). That set serves as a playful aperitif for Three Dimensions Deep, Mark’s polished, long-awaited debut. Moving smoothly between R&B, funk, and pop, the fully realized album foregrounds Mark’s vocals and songwriting, scrutinizing her self-doubt as a way to cast it out and build self-confidence.
The album is structured in three acts mapping Mark’s journey at different stages: identifying her own insecurities, working through the messy parts of self-discovery, and finally reaching a solid sense of self-worth. Three Dimensions Deep’s secondary, figurative throughline is inspired by Mark’s love of sci-fi and interest in heady astrophysics theories, a theme that pops up through celestial metaphors in her lyrics that amplify human concerns to galactic size. In Mark’s world, romance hurtles her to another planet, kisses are astronomical, and searching for her place in the world is posed as an all-consuming, cosmic question.
Mark makes the concept work, using it as a loose framework for plush, tightly produced songs whose subjects range from tossing men in the trash to battling dark nights of the soul. “Trying to see where life leads, where the future lies/Anxiety all of me keeping me up at night,” she admits on “One” over a chopped-up blues sample and knocking beats. The concession feels honest, with Mark taking stock of the uncertainty of her future and emerging freshly determined to take control of it. “On & On” describes another battle with self-doubt over a stomping drumbeat and sumptuous strings, making the mental slump of questioning one’s worth sound refreshingly comforting. She uses the occasional astral image, like looking up into the night sky, to illuminate small junctures of uncertainty and distance.
Mark tempers the album’s vulnerable moments with upbeat songs that traipse through sultry nights out and scenes from her love life. Early highlight “Most Men” unspools slowly, as organ chords give way to a laidback beat at the halfway point and Mark immortalizes the one true commandment when it comes to dating: “Most men are garbage.” Later, she moves on from terrible exes on the seductive “Softly,” which loops the guitar melody from Craig David’s 2000 song “Rendezvous” into a throbbing R&B backdrop for the heated tension she feels with a potential partner. Mark co-produced or engineered over half of the album’s 17 tracks and makes her fingerprints known, shifting easily from velvety, percussive R&B (“Worth It”) to sleek pop-funk (“Darkside”). Small details—a slight key change, stacked murmured vocals, luxuriant extended outros—work like choice accessories on Mark’s signature, memorable style.
As on her previous EPs, Mark’s dynamic voice imbues the album with its most emotive, surprising turns. On the sauntering “What It Is,” she stretches her vowels over cascading, layered vocals and a scorching guitar solo. Later she adopts a conversational flow to indulge in a glitzy lifestyle on “Foreign Things,” and strikes a smoky, melancholy tone during “On & On.” The depth and dexterity make for one of the album’s most engaging qualities; even when Mark reaches for an obvious lyric, as on the arguably outdated chorus of “FOMO” or the neutral-to-a-fault “Competition,” her rich, varied performance transforms the occasional errant choice into an opportunity for another compelling vocal phrasing.
Energetic, lush, and measured, Three Dimensions Deep is a cohesive debut from Mark that doesn’t lose sight of the bespoke sound that she’s developed over the years. Here, Mark’s music accomplishes its goal of making the pursuit of figuring out who you are, what you stand for, and how you can make it through the world feel as immense as a meteor cratering into the moon. But that kind of outsize passion feels exceptionally true to life, especially as rendered in Mark’s capable hands.

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A vinyl reissue of the atmospheric guitar score for Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film reveals a spare and intuitive performance unlike anything else Neil Young has recorded.

Neil Young: Dead Man Original Soundtrack

Dead Man Original Soundtrack

A few months before Jimi Hendrix unfurled the guitar fireworks of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, Neil Young played a hypnotic one-note guitar break inside “Cinnamon Girl,” the opening track on 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Even if Young’s style never approached minimalism in the classical sense, the very idea—an anti-solo solo—conjured a textural universe that Young has been exploring ever since, most often in live jams with Crazy Horse.
But it took more than two decades for Young himself to make an album of solo electric guitar music, his 1996 soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. In a catalog that has ranged from the 1982 vocoder-touched Trans to the 2003 eco-rock opera Greendale, Dead Man remains the only release of its kind. A new reissue returns the spotlight to arguably the most satisfying oddity of Young’s half-century career, too committed to be dismissed as a novelty.
Young creates a vocabulary of sound as if he’d been improvising movie scores for decades—a landscape of stark, expressive solo guitar to match Jarmusch’s psychedelic black-and-white Western. With the tracks unnamed on their original release, the high fidelity Neil Young Archives site now titles the half-dozen instrumentals as “Dead Man, No. 1” through “Dead Man, No. 6,” plus “Organ Solo.” They alternate with another half-dozen dialogue-based tracks, Young’s guitar pushed to the background while bits of the movie come up, largely featuring Johnny Depp, who reads the poetry of William Blake. Though they provide an emotional structure for the music and are unquestionably atmospheric sound-art, they’d be buzzkills even without Johnny Depp, interrupting perhaps the purest guitar playing of Young’s discography. (These buzzkills, of course, can be bypassed on mediums other than vinyl.)
Young’s closest companion to Dead Man, perhaps even a prequel of sorts, is 1991’s Arc, a 35-minute extended edit of Crazy Horse’s live feedback jams. While Arc might be louder, Dead Man is perhaps even further out, pushing beyond songs and rhythms and noise, and building from the new logic of the world beyond. On “Dead Man, No. 1,” Young’s guitar scratches a fluttering, almost-steady pulse while muted chords flicker, disappearing before they can resonate and reveal themselves. It ends with a 30-second melodic coda that sounds like what the narrator of Young’s 1975 “Albuquerque” might be hearing in their head driving through the New Mexican desert.
Each of Dead Man’s tracks offers subtly different strategies, from the dream swirl of “Organ Solo” to the sustained ghost tones and scandalously indulgent two-note solo of “Dead Man, No. 6.” The centerpiece is the 14-and-a-half minute “Dead Man, No. 5,” filled indelibly with Young’s favorite gestures as a guitarist: aching chord voicings, fuzztones, and spiky colors that open into broader fields of sound as ideas return and change shape.
The form of these compositions remains ambiguous, give or take moments when notes begin to connect into melodic fragments that sound viscerally like Young, accidental shards of musical personality on display. For an artist so famously committed to spontaneity and chasing idiosyncratic muses, including making films of his own, it’s authentically shocking that the now 73-year-old Young has never gone further down this path. The seven fully instrumental tracks of Dead Man are Neil Young at his purest, like a rare electronic voice phenomenon recording of Young’s musical spirit as it rumbles and bends and intersects with the material plane.


After two previous albums together, the rock trio version of the Mountain Goats now sound like a properly developed unit that plays with nuance and purpose.

All Eternals Deck

It seems a stretch to call John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats an embattled bandleader. After all, from the outside, he's been releasing albums for one of the most respected large independent labels in the world, 4AD, since 2002*. The New Yorker* has called him one of the greatest living lyricists, and Spin slapped his praises on its cover just last week. He's recently wowed the late-night circuit, sold out three consecutive nights at the Bowery Ballroom, and released his latest album, the masterstroke All Eternals Deck, on Merge Records, the independent label located within walking distance of his North Carolina home that landed a major Grammy last month. That's not bad for a writer who used to howl and strum into the microphone of his Panasonic boombox and opine that a real songwriter wasn't a career-oriented songwriter.
But in 2002-- when Darnielle made the leap to 4AD and, more saliently, into a proper studio with an ensemble of backing musicians-- his zealous fans started talking about his music as though it were foreign policy. Some loved the new adventurousness and accessibility, apparent from the great bloom of Mountain Goats fans during the last decade. But there are those who insist that the only real Mountain Goats is the atavistic Mountain Goats, the static-y, crackly, mildly manic stuff that Darnielle made mostly alone for more than a decade. To wit, the Mountain Goats forums, which Darnielle hosts on his own website, are a minefield of hot-blooded criticism about the band's rock music, lobbed not by online trolls but by those who might spend hundreds to track down Darnielle's earliest, most primitive releases. After the band released "Damn These Vampires", the positive jam that opens All Eternals Deck, Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster told me the vile was so rich he simply stopped reading the boards.
This matters now because, despite the fan fusillade, Darnielle has pressed on with his rock band, crafting and sharpening his skills and charisma as a frontman. Paradoxically passionate but controlled, uncompromising but instantly likable, All Eternals Deck is a certain career highlight for Darnielle. And, like many of the most memorable Mountain Goats songs, it's also about survival, or battling back from very dark places to "follow the light." Indeed, most every song here holds some key to the future, some talisman meant for perseverance. During "Damn These Vampires" and "Beautiful Gas Mask", it's didactic, warm advice. Occasionally, however, it's a reflection on the past, when some rocky relationship made more sense, when the world seemed framed by more favorable horizons. The poignant "Age of Kings", for instance, reminisces about a wasted love that once suggested a divine blessing. But just as the strings turn anxious, Darnielle remembers the time he might have fixed it all; his regret feels less like self-pity, though, and more like a future lesson.
All Eternals Deck is officially the third album for the rock band the Mountain Goats, or the trio of Darnielle, longtime bassist Peter Hughes, and Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster. On 2009's The Life of the World to Come, though, Wurster and Hughes felt more like plainspoken accompaniment, simply keeping time and stretching the sound around Darnielle when not sitting out nearly half a dozen tunes. After four years of live practice, they now sound like a properly developed unit that's comfortable with its ideas and approaches. There are no ham-fisted reggae rubs or overreaching rock moments; instead, the band simply plays with nuance and purpose, elaborating the lyrics by first understanding them.
Darnielle replaces his rhythm section twice here, and the success of both songs suggests that the evolution of the Mountain Goats doesn't stop with a rock trio. "Outer Scorpion Squadron" should forever quell the gripe that Darnielle can't sing. Above an economical string section, Darnielle speaks of survival with grace and delicacy. The record's one great experiment, mid-album curveball "High Hawk Season", swaps the rhythm section for a harmonizing trio known as the North Mountain Singers. Though Darnielle plays acoustic guitar, they treat the song like an a cappella ensemble would, adding bass and texture against his lead line. A call to power, it's one of Darnielle's pinnacles as both a bandleader and songwriter, and a revelatory break from his past. "Who's going to stand his ground, and who's going to blink?" he sings, as though winking to his detractors.
Three songs on All Eternals Deck lift directly from the lives of veteran American actors-- Charles Bronson, Judy Garland, and her daughter, Liza Minnelli. In each instance, we see a star in peril, whether it's Garland during the overdose in London that killed her or tough-guy Bronson trying to hold it together for one more feature. In both cases, Darnielle invokes their birthplace, their cradle of innocence, again using the past as a catalyst for perseverance. On "Sourdoire Valley Song", Darnielle smartly cuts the other way by referencing the Olduvai Gorge, the Tanzanian ravine sometimes referenced as the birthplace of mankind. An old man struggles and dies, and the world turns. Our struggles, the implication goes, are forever and for everyone-- stars, successful songwriters, ancient hominids thought to be extinct. Even if it means you "crawl 'til dawn on hands and knees," though, you keep going if you can. Lucky for us, the rock band the Mountain Goats have done just that.


The solo debut from Heather Trost, formerly of A Hawk and a Hacksaw, recalls atmospheric pop à la Broadcast and Stereolab. Trost is accompanied by members of Neutral Milk Hotel, Deerhoof, and more.

Agistri

Heather Trost’s solo debut Agistri feels built to soundtrack stop-motion animation, a riot of flower petals and pinned butterflies fluttering across the frame. As half of the global trad-folk-inspired A Hawk and a Hacksaw with Neutral Milk Hotel drummer Jeremy Barnes, the two channeled a rustic acoustic otherworld with a committed zeal. And while that band made plenty use of Trost’s violins and Barnes’ percussion, drum kits disappeared entirely from the Hawk and a Hacksaw vocabulary. But on Agistri, Trost’s music sounds timeless in a different way, building miniature haunted worlds in the vocabulary of European space pop—unflashy motorik beats layered with art school swirl—as it might be found on an LP hiding in a secondhand shop somewhere deep on the continent.
With its mysterious-sounding cadence and refrain, the album-opening title cut could equally be part of an eerie soundtrack from the 1970s. It also picks up threads from Broadcast and Stereolab in the 1990s, both playful and haunted in equal turns. Just as much about mood as melody, Agistri finds Trost accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Barnes, Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich, and Drake Hardin and Rosie Hutchinson of Mammal Eggs. Finding a home in space age swing and piles of analog-sounding synths, flutes, and strings, Trost spans from the instrumental library music groove of “Abiquiu” to a cover of Harry Nilsson’s familiar “Me and My Arrow” as if arranged by Magical Mystery Tour-era George Martin. Agistri works from a dense palette that’s either vintage or cloned in a vat.
A sense of adventure connects the album’s far reaches, and establishes a space where lyrics feel secondary. “Plastic Flowers” is guided by a rolling organ and an abstract vocal arrangement that recalls the circus-world fun of ye olde Elephant 6 Recording Company, with which Jeremy Barnes has long been associated via Neutral Milk Hotel. Returning to drums for that band’s reunion tours—and more recently for several albums on his and Trost’s LM Dupli-Cation—Barnes likewise occupies the kit with great personality here. Rarely defaulting to grooves, even during the Brazilian feels of “Abiquiu,” his drums find paths of their own without overwhelming Trost’s songs, half-songs, and atmospheres. On “Bloodmoon,” layers of melody spread over multiple keyboards, as a sense of movement threads across the song’s three minutes. Barnes’ drums ride comparably low in the mix, his fills often feeling more like conversational tics than dramatic flourishes.
Though rich, the songs sometimes seem to function more as sound-worlds to slip into, ready for further exploration. Having also played with Beirut, Josephine Foster, and on Thor Harris’ luminous Thor & Friends, Trost’s solo turn is both awaited and worthwhile, cool and cosmopolitan throughout. On the penultimate “Real Me/Real You,” a percussive bassline (or perhaps melodic drum figure) appears in the song’s intro—a sound that’s not vintage at all but palpably of the present, or even of the present's version of the future. As the song breaks down to a vocal arrangement over a squelching keyboard and rises to its chorus, one might hope it’s Heather Trost’s version of the future, too.


The reggaeton stalwart and Latin trap pioneer embraces contemporary pop and hip-hop sounds on an uneven album that is at its most interesting when it verges into soul, salsa, and other novel styles.

Ares

Of all the artists making trap en español today, Arcángel is arguably the best suited to trace its evolution. 2007’s “El Pistolón,” a product of his partnership with De La Ghetto that features the reggaeton duo Yaga y Mackie, is widely considered to be the first Latin trap track. He’s also got a verse on “La Ocasión,” from 2016, the instant-classic posse cut with Ozuna, Anuel AA, and De La Ghetto that took the sound worldwide. In between, he cut a bunch of reggaeton records, making a name for himself in Puerto Rico, the island that birthed the genre.
Trap en español may be rooted in mimicry, borrowing from the 21st century’s most commercially viable form of urban music, but in its early days as a movement in New York City clubs—which predate “La Ocasión”—that mimicry was merely a key to pass through the gates into the highest echelon of pop. The first DJs and producers knew their crowds loved rap and trap, even if they didn’t understand any of the lyrics, so early remixes brought Latin audiences into the sounds of the moment. Up-and-coming artists shifted their aesthetics to ride the wave, but the ones who stood out always brought their own flavor—the Dominicans in New York, with their ever-shifting Spanglish slang that defies reproduction; the Puerto Rican romanticos on the island, teaching Drake what it really means to be a sensitive thug.
Arcángel is no different. While his early career is rooted firmly in reggaeton, it was his collaborative Latin trap bangers that raised his profile and kept him at the crest of the wave. Now that he’s got your attention, he’s ready for you to hear exactly the music he’s always wanted to make. With his latest LP, Ares, he mostly abandons reggaeton and the dembow riddim in favor of sludgy trap beats and contemporary pop. He was truthful when he told Apple Music, “If you listen to the lyrics on this album, it’s totally different… I’m saying stuff that I’ve never said before.” It’s just that this development isn’t as positive as he may believe.
Ares has its share of cringey moments: “Los 3,” with its incantation, “I know you wanna suck this dick,” might sound bad until you try to parse the inexplicable juxtaposition on “En Su Boca” (In Your Mouth). On the latter track, Arcángel brags about the money he spent on his daughter’s birthday in the same breath that he tells anyone who steps to him to—once again—suck his dick: “Gasté doce en mi sortija (bling, bling)/Y veinticuatro en el cumple 'e mi hija (oh, yeah)/To' el que me tire me chupa la pija ('pérate).”
They’re not the only inclusions that feel superfluous. At 18 tracks and 64 minutes, Ares is a bit bloated, and would have likely benefited from more judicious sequencing. Much of the production is rooted in the standard trap palate of rolling bass, tinny 808 hi-hats, and Auto-Tuned croon; this is a departure from Arcángel’s previous, reggaeton-centric albums, sure, but a muscle already well toned through countless singles and guest features. Yet Ares is most interesting when it steps outside the trap—even when it ultimately misses the mark.
Arcángel has always excelled at adapting his style to fit his collaborators, and on Ares they’re few in number but carefully selected. Bad Bunny (“Original”) and J Balvin (“Corte, Porte, y Elegancia”) are two of the biggest names in Latin pop’s mainstream; Canadian rap&B artist Tory Lanez (“Victoria”), who has embraced urbano artists, has a forthcoming Spanish-language LP with features from the likes of Ozuna. “Original” is a highlight, all pulsing bass, snare claps, and Bad Bunny’s sexy soul-robot vocals—to the extent that the track feels like it should be credited to Bad Bunny featuring Arcángel. This ability to shift styles is Arcángel’s strength, and has made for some memorable posse cuts in recent years.
“Corte, Porte, y Elegancia,” unfortunately, is not one of them. It finds Arcángel attempting a mind meld with Colombian chameleon J Balvin, the reggaetonero turned full-on pop star who flexed his range on his latest LP, Vibras. It’s a difficult feat to pull off, especially amid a tracklist jam-packed with slow-burn trap; when the bouncy disco-funk guitar slides in on “Corte,” the album’s sixth track, the hard left turn is disorienting.
But this experimentation does bear some fruit. The record’s strongest track is “Un Vacilon (Young Maleo),” a tribute to Puerto Rican salsa legend Ismael Rivera, a.k.a. “Maleo.” It samples arguably his most iconic composition, “El Nazareno,” an ode to black Jesus that tells the tale of a man who has a vision of Christ while getting down at a party. The sample is transcendent, and it gets to the heart of why dance music like reggaeton can feel so powerful. When you can bridge the gap between the ancestors and their descendants, you can find God, even in the club.
At its best, Ares achieves this magnificence; at its worst, the album is undeniably cringe-worthy. But it’s the closest we’ve come so far to hearing what Arcángel really sounds like—and when he pushes the envelope, the results are anything but boring.


An exhaustively comprehensive 11-disc box set explores a defining work by the classic rock band alongside the ambitious, shelved concept album that would become Pete Townshend's white whale.

The Who: Who’s Next : Life House (Super Deluxe)

Who’s Next : Life House (Super Deluxe)

At the beginning of the 1970s, the Who wanted to become the Greatest Band In The World. Their 1969 rock opera, Tommy, had vaulted them from theaters into arenas. Explosive performances at Woodstock and Monterey Pop were captured on film for everyone to see, and then they released Live at Leeds, the decibel-shattering record that cemented their legacy as the band heard blaring at full volume from the car stereos of every self-respecting rock’n’roll fan, from the stoners to the nerds. They had worked tirelessly for years to get to this very spot, but as soon as they did, the connection with their fans suffered due to larger venues and higher ticket prices. Reflecting in a 1971 Melody Maker column, Pete Townshend wrote, “At rock concerts you can achieve those rare moments where both group and audience forget themselves and become completely ego-less. The most precious moments of my life are on the stage when all is one.”
This unflagging belief in the bond between the Who and their followers drove Townshend’s work on the songs that ended up on Who’s Next. Its genesis, development, and creation are extensively chronicled in Who’s Next | Life House, an 11-CD box set that beautifully communicates the spirit of the original project by opening up the vaults and inviting everybody inside.
This anniversary release presents a remastered version of the original album, two discs of demos, two discs of working studio sessions, a disc of singles and outtakes, two different live concerts from 1971, and finally, a Blu-ray containing the original album and bonus tracks in Dolby Atmos and 5.1. It’s accompanied by extensive liner notes from Townshend along with longtime Who archivists Matt Kent and Andy Neill and a graphic novel that tells the story of Life House: the ambitious, never-completed concept album that inspired Who’s Next. This is the appropriate level of gravitas for a project that has always been Townshend’s great white whale, a lost epic that he has revisited multiple times, trying to finally get it right. (When Townshend launched his own website in 1999, there was a whole section for Life House, leading to a self-released 6-CD box set titled Lifehouse Chronicles, which sold out immediately.)
The plot of Life House details a dystopic vision of the destruction of planet Earth, a militaristic regime that puts the population into virtual reality suits, and the existence of a central Grid controlled by mega-corporations. Rock’n’roll is banned because it will over-stimulate the Grid, and rebellion comes in the form of those who escaped and make it to the Life House, where each audience member would perform their own individual “note,” and after which they would achieve, yes, perfect harmony and ascend to Nirvana. Now that you can buy virtual reality headsets in a vending machine at the airport, this all sounds less fantastical than it did in the ’60s, but the complexity of this attempt at a coherent summary of the plot is symptomatic of why this box set, half a century later, is probably the closest Townshend will come to his vision being realized.
The detailed liner notes chronicle every painful step and misstep trying to manifest Townshend’s sci-fi dreamworld, accompanied by recordings that reinforce the story. When you listen to the first attempt to record the Life House songs in New York with manager Kit Lambert and compare them to the second attempt with producer Glyn Johns in London, it’s clear why Townshend called off the New York sessions after a week and called in Johns, his friend and the producer of the hour, to start all over again. Johns helped them sort through all of the Life House material and crucially, convinced Townshend that the project should be pared down to a single album for commercial reasons. Whether or not you agree with that decision, the difference in sonic clarity and energy between the Olympic tapes and the ones in New York is remarkable: It’s not hyperbole to suggest that music history would have been much different had this decision not been made.
Cutting the record to a single disc meant that some of the best songs didn’t make it onto the album. Fan favorites like “Pure and Easy,” “The Seeker,” “Naked Eye,” and “Let’s See Action” were setlist regulars for decades and could have survived without being part of a storyline. Their absence makes one contemplate why Who’s Next included bassist John Entwistle’s “My Wife,” a banal lament about domestic life, or “Love Ain’t For Keeping,” a flimsy treatise on relationships, over these gems that are among the band’s best work in this era—or any other, for that matter. On the other hand, it’s clear why other demos, such as “Greyhound Girl” and “Mary,” didn’t make the cut; they’re gorgeous but they’re too intrinsically linked to the storyline.
Another vital element of this set is the opportunity to explore Townshend’s original demos. The demo of “Baba O’Riley” sits in opposition to the heart-stopping anthem that ultimately opened the album. As Roger Daltrey delivers it, “Baba” is larger than life; in contrast, the demo is a ballad, plaintive and searching, on the edge of desperation but full of hope. The dominating instrumentation is piano with a sharp undercutting guitar melody line full of the kind of angular attack that could only be Townshend. Hearing the evolution of the songs and the insight into Townshend’s intricate process is a sharp contrast with the power and immediacy of the Who, which was loud, sweaty, and overwhelming. But the members were always so locked together it felt like magic.
The transformation of the new material is illustrated by the two live recordings from 1971. The impromptu show, recorded at the Young Vic during the recording of the album, is more like expanded rehearsal in front of a live audience. The other performance is from the second night of a stand at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium, which rumbles and vibrates with more power and confidence. The Who’s Next songs aren’t so new anymore, and although Tommy gets more space on the setlist, “Baba O’Riley” still gives you goosebumps, and there’s a moment in “Naked Eye,” after Daltrey finishes the first verse, when the guitars and Keith Moon’s drums exquisitely crash into each other, and you’ll wish they’d figured out how to get it on the album. Everlasting quibbles like these may shed some light on why Townshend still considers Who’s Next to have been a “compromise album,” compared to his original concept. And with this massive investigation into the project, you get the sense that he could finally quell his endless devotion to revisiting it—but don’t bet on it.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Usher’s 2004 album, a jam-packed icon of R&B and one of the most flawless executions of mythmaking in pop.

Confessions

In 2004, Usher wasn’t yet committed to the idea of marriage, a point he made repeatedly during the press cycle for his fourth album, Confessions, marketed as his most personal project to date. In interviews, he told the same story about his breakup with TLC’s Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas, seven years his senior: He’d cheated on her; she’d been pressuring him to settle down; arguments led to fissures, and they eventually split. Chilli hinted at infidelity on the radio but declined to elaborate on the relationship to Vibe or contribute to what she called a “PR move.” Usher said he didn’t view the album as a stunt, even though it was. He described Confessions as autofiction and let the public run with the rumors, which, of course, they did.
But the deception worked on multiple levels. In constructing the narrative around Confessions, Usher omitted certain facts. While it was true that he wasn’t entirely sold on marriage, he told Rolling Stone in 2004 that he did once buy Chilli a 10-karat diamond ring and proposed to her in the most R&B way: in the middle of sex. He said he co-wrote the album’s core breakup ballad, “Burn,” while he and Chilli were still together. A decade later, executive producer Jermaine Dupri said the song was indeed about her but admitted Confessions wasn’t just Usher’s experience, rather a compilation of its male creators’ infractions, promoted as one man’s expunging of sins. The album’s most salacious track, “Confessions Pt. II,” a saga about creeping and getting another woman pregnant, was based on Dupri’s life, not Usher’s. “We wanted the media to ask us questions,” the producer told Vibe in 2014, comparing their artistic license to that of Michael Jackson. “Nobody knows who the fuck Billie Jean is. We’re still looking for her.”
Usher understood that much of a great pop album is simply telling a good story. He had the catalog, choreography, angelic falsetto, and winning grin necessary to be a star. Everyone in America knew the term “Yeah!” not just as an everyday affirmation but as a club smash. But to be worthy of the Michael Jackson-level prestige he coveted, Usher needed a man-in-the-mirror moment. He played up the cheating angle and the rumors and was seemingly forthright about the subject of his ex; and because it worked, he copied that storytelling formula for his subsequent album releases, albeit with less moving results: For 2008’s Here I Stand, he milked his marriage to Tameka Foster for material, and then he made their divorce fodder for his 2010 album Raymond v. Raymond. The ability to draft a persuasive narrative around a project is a skill music fans both scrutinize and take for granted, but the greatest pop stars—Janet Jackson, Taylor Swift, Drake—know how to master the art of packaging. It’s a craft to turn reality into convenient truth, and it’s special when the material transcends the machine. On Confessions, the stars align in Usher’s favor: He had a breakup to cope with and an album to make, and the dramatic backdrop gave him the most compelling work of his career.
And so the truth hardly mattered. Usher spent much of 2004 dethroning himself on the pop chart, earning four No. 1 hits and reaping the benefits of binding his love life to his music. Confessions sold a million copies in its first week at a time when illegal file-sharing had labels frantic over the fate of the industry. Usher thrived between two very different eras of pop—the contemporary R&B rush of 2001 and the hybrid R&B of the 2010s, when Drake unleashed his inner lothario and assumed his role as the charts’ new lover boy. Confessions dropped just three months after Rolling Stone crowned former *NSYNC frontman Justin Timberlake their New King of Pop for siphoning Black music into his solo debut. Though millennial pop had turned swiftly toward boy bands and Britney Spears, one of the top five highest-selling albums of the 2000s is Confessions, a record that sits alongside Boyz II Men and TLC as the only R&B albums to be certified diamond for selling 10 million units. Usher’s coming-of-age story gave R&B the sort of widespread appreciation the genre struggled to recreate in the decades that followed. “So many people are interested in R&B,” he said in 2004, after selling platinum in a week. “I feel like it is the base of everything. I want to make it more prominent.”
Up until that year, Usher was a king in training, a heartthrob with washboard abs, a protégé of Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds’ legendary LaFace Records. Usher Raymond IV, a former choir boy, had started out performing in talent shows in his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee before his mother moved the family to Atlanta. At 14, he auditioned for L.A. Reid, singing “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men; Reid signed Usher to LaFace that day. The label put him to work recording his debut in a hedonistic environment with Sean “Puffy” Combs (Usher mentioned seeing at least one orgy) and producers like Jodeci’s DeVante Swing. Having launched his career with adult love songs, Usher was ahead of his peers at 15, singing, “Can you get wit’ it/It’s like that/It’s only a sexual thing,” on his 1994 self-titled debut. He had the tender pedigree of a Tevin Campbell, but he was an old soul who embraced a level of showmanship that could veer toward hokey. He skated across stages with the grace of a swan, and he was charming and shameless enough to pull off tricks like dropping his pants mid-pop-lock to reveal his boxers. More important, he was technically gifted and unmatched as a dancer.
While the dexterous moves set him up as a natural heir apparent to MJ, Usher modeled his soul music after the likes of Stevie Wonder, Sam Cooke, and Marvin Gaye. “They’re all great emotional singers who used their experiences in life for the music,” Usher said in a 2004 interview. “You live, you learn and you can sing about it.” Confessions is his portrait of a man contemplating his own deceit and trying to sing his way out of it in under an hour and a half. Star producers like Dupri, Bryan-Michael Cox, Just Blaze, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis create layers of moonlit soul and slow jams that sound like bodies gliding over satin. Yet Confessions didn’t come across as the type of artificial growth many artists try to muster up to prove the worthiness of a new record. Usher really did have something to say—as in, he was actually confessing; it’s just that there were fifty-leven people in the booth with him.
Building on the party-life mood of his third album, 8701, Confessions treats vulnerability as a rite of passage to true partnership and sex as an act linked to lies. The storyline is solidified in “Confessions Pt. II,” a musical telenovela that holds the album’s core thesis about living with a guilty conscience. Usher weighs the options of honesty or silence and talks himself through choosing the former, rationalizing that, “If I’m gonna tell it, then I gotta tell it all.” He cycles through hurt and regret for the love he let go, offering hints of remorse that give the album dimension. The Just Blaze track “Throwback,” which samples Dionne Warwick’s “You’re Gonna Need Me,” finds Usher in a loop of distress over the former love of his life: “Heartbroken when you left my world/Man, I wish I would’ve kept my girl.” But on “Truth Hurts,” he treats a partner like a plaintiff (“I got reason to believe/That you been fooling around…”) and then admits to being driven into suspicion by his own infidelity.
Usher established himself as a hitmaker with 1997’s “Nice & Slow,” a ballad of pure libido. He went No. 1 again with 8701’s charismatic lead single “U Remind Me,” which won him his first Grammy, and then “U Got It Bad.” For his fourth album, he wanted another slow-tempo setup, but “Yeah!” was just the explosion Confessions needed leading up to its release. In Atlanta, Lil Jon was signal-boosting crunk by shouting at the same decibel as a drill instructor, and Usher’s new label, Arista, was looking for a club single. “Yeah!”—with Usher’s smooth narration, Lil Jon’s shrill adlibs, and Ludacris playing the inappropriate wingman—spent 12 consecutive weeks at No. 1. Usher was reluctant to even record it. He preferred the sensitive centerpiece “Burn,” a ballad co-produced by Dupri and Cox that opens with a dramatic swoosh, then a cradle of solemn chords. “Let it burn” was the final, indefinite stage of grief: “I know I made a mistake/Now it’s too late,” Usher sings. “I know she ain’t coming back.” His tone is rich with vitality, lust, or dejection as needed. As Dupri told Complex in 2014, “That’s what it feels like to me when I listen to the song, like somebody’s crying.”
Of Confessions’ original 17 tracks (the deluxe version adds four new titles, including the doe-eyed Alicia Keys duet “My Boo”), the less celebrated songs aren’t so much filler as they are hidden treats obscured by the album’s most transcendent moments. Few sounds are more disarming than an Usher falsetto, at its most melting on songs like “Can U Handle It?” (which Robin Thicke co-wrote) and “Do It to Me,” among a handful of after-hours cuts that find him trapped between temptation and partnership; “Simple Things” is a syrupy lecture on the value of listening to women’s needs. The album’s latter half propels the narrative, turning Usher’s inner monologue into soulful pep talks. On “That’s What It’s Made For,” he worries about the consequences of having unprotected sex (the baby from “Confessions Pt. II”?) singing, “I slipped up, slipped in.” The track opens with Usher declaring, over stealthy keys, “Listen, I got a story to tell.”
In 2020, Usher is still in the business of selling transparency. In a September interview promoting his single “Bad Habits,” a song about being bad at love, he talked about the benefits of therapy and cited Confessions as an inflection point in both his career and personal life. “At the end, can you judge me for being direct with you, the person whom I have to be in this relationship with?” he says, addressing a fictional partner, but maybe also his fans. “I’m gonna let you know who I am. And in the end, you choose to stay or you choose to leave. But you’re gonna know who I am.” For him, honesty ushered in growth and success, and it led to one of the most flawless executions of mythmaking in pop.

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David Pajo's latest album as Papa M is wistful and poignant, like all his work. But it ultimately feels hopeful rather than weary, upbeat rather than defeated.

Highway Songs

Pretty much every project David Pajo has participated in—the pioneering post-rock of Slint and Tortoise, his winding instrumentals and downbeat folk as Papa M and Pajo, the blunt heavy metal of Dead Child—has made a virtue of stylistic consistency. Once you’ve heard the few first notes of a Pajo album, you know what you’re in for, and that commitment to cohesion has always been a strength.
All of which makes Highway Songs a risky record. For the first time, Pajo has relaxed his directorial control—“I just would let the songs go on tangents and run wherever they want,” he said recently—and mixed styles rather than picking one. He opens with a lumbering metal jam, switches to an Autechre-like electronic collage, then shifts to soundtrack-worthy guitar accompanied by a sharp drum-machine beat. The rest of the ride on Highway Songs is just as enjoyably bumpy, as contrasting styles continually butt up against each other with little in the way of smoothed-out segues.
What makes it all work is Pajo’s patience in constructing a song. Everything here truly unfolds, gradually moving from an initial idea—a riff, a beat, a simple melody—into a multi-layered composition. You can almost hear him working through the tunes as he’s making them, which gives them an intimate feel. Lots of Pajo’s best music—particularly Papa M’s Whatever, Mortal, and his self-titled Pajo LP—bears this kind of private, homemade aura, enhanced by a voice that’s always on the verge of a whisper.
In the case of Highway Songs, the music is literally homemade, recorded while Pajo was cooped up in his Los Angeles apartment recovering from a motorcycle accident that almost cost him a leg. It’s been a rough past few years for him: in early 2015 he attempted suicide, which he’s been forthcoming about since. You can hear some of that pain and struggle in Highway Songs—take the somber, cautious strains of the acoustic guitar essay “DLVD”—but it would be unfair to say this album is more emotional than any of his others. He’s always infused his music with a wistful, poignant tone, and he’s still great at that.
Besides, Highway Songs ultimately feels hopeful rather than weary, upbeat rather than defeated. There’s optimism in the sunny strums of “Walking On Coronado,” the chugging riffs of “Green Holler,” and the nursery rhyme of closer “Little Girl,” the only song on which Pajo sings. The lyrics are taken from a songbook Pajo found, but they could’ve easily been custom-written for Highway Songs: “Little girl,  teach me to laugh again...to wonder why again.” At this point in his well-travelled career Pajo doesn’t need to learn anything new, but it’s great to hear that he still wants to anyway.