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 explore the rise of Cash Money on Juvenile’s 1998 classic 400 Degreez.

400 Degreez

There’s a title card, but within seconds, the setting is unmistakable:
Magnolia Housing Projects

	New Orleans

You see the rows of buildings stretching out toward the horizon, seemingly vacant and endless. A hard cut and suddenly, the frame fills with action: Juvenile in the foreground, perched over a puddle, a sea of Magnolia residents waving their arms behind him, hanging from balconies, poking curious heads out of windows. That’s you with that big-body Benz, ha?
You see Juve shirtless, shimmering with sweat; he’s grimacing in front of convertibles; he’s showing off his gold fronts in jarring close-up; he’s rapping animatedly—skinnier than you expect, all elbows and sharp angles—in front of a mural bearing the projects’ official name, C.J. Peete; he’s dancing around a porch while the family that lives there sits motionless; he’s mugging in a hallway next to Baby and Mannie Fresh; he’s shadowboxing.
The rest of Magnolia pops to life, either in eerily real tracking shots or in static frames that might as well be portraits. Kids jump on cast-off mattresses. Women in church clothes pose soberly—so do EMTs, with arms crossed in front of their ambulance. Magnolians get chased and cuffed and clutched by their fathers. There are roller skaters and pickup basketball games. A man on crutches hobbles down a street lit only by that ambulance’s siren lights; a boy feeds a piece of deli meat to a dog; money is counted and blurs until the bills are indistinguishable.
This is “Ha,” one of the most singularly brilliant rap songs of the 1990s. It’s been interpolated by people who win Pulitzers and bitten by countless young rappers, either in their formative periods or when they fly a little too close to the sun. Its video, directed by Marc Klasfeld, is genuinely stunning—spare but stylized, high art from self-consciously low production budgets, a four-minute blueprint for the rap videos that would come after the massive budgets from the Hype Williams era evaporated. There are no yachts. The whole thing takes place in and around Magnolia, where Klasfeld and his team set up camp for three days. Juve claimed that “all the drug dealers shut down” to accommodate production.
Even today, “Ha” sounds like it’s from the future, except when it sounds like it’s from the lobby of your building. Juve is sly and sarcastic, writing in the second person, ribbing you about child-support payments and switching to Reeboks and finally figuring out how to use your triple-beam. Juve laughs and sneers and, occasionally, commiserates. It’s a writing exercise. It’s also the platonic ideal of a rap song: mean, minimal, funny, foreign. Mannie’s beat is a rattling, electronic taunt, and its coda, which could have easily anchored another hit song, is free and acrobatic and full of bounce.
But underneath the grit and grinning was a mission statement. “Ha” announced to America that Cash Money Records, a New Orleans label that had made a well-timed pivot to rap, would be taking over in the new millennium. Universal had agreed, in a historically lucrative deal, to throw its weight behind the smaller label, and Cash Money countered with Juve’s third record, 400 Degreez. It’s a masterpiece—swaggering but paranoid, pained but free. It’s the sweatiest, funkiest parts of New Orleans culture packaged for export, and it would go on to become one of the most consequential rap records of its era and the next.
Long before the Universal deal, Cash Money was a shoestring operation founded by a pair of brothers, Bryan and Ronald Williams. (You know Bryan as Baby or Birdman; if you know Ronald, you know him as Slim.) At first, it was a label for bounce music, the tight, energetic genre built on bass and various chops of the “Dragnet” theme. And it’s impossible to talk about bounce and rap in New Orleans without talking, first, about Mannie Fresh. Byron Thomas was the son of a DJ who gave his son instruments and hardware before he knew what to do with them; when Byron heard Afrika Bambaataa’s electro-futurist “Planet Rock,” the gear started to make sense. He adopted the name Mannie Fresh and embarked on a career DJing and producing that would make him one of the most acutely influential producers in the history of Southern music.
From his earliest drafts, Mannie’s beats were deliriously danceable; soon, they were also punishing. He was able to flit between bounce and rap (and marry the two), but as Cash Money moved fully into hip-hop, he became the chief architect of its sound. Musically, he was Cash Money. It was one of his beats for a U.N.L.V. song called “Drag ’Em in the River,” that first attracted the attention of a young rapper who had been going by the name Juvenile.
Juve was born Terius Grey in March of 1975 and spent much of his formative years in those Magnolia Projects in Uptown New Orleans. While he was still in his teens, Juve had a foot in the city’s rap and bounce music scenes. With basically no recorded music, he was playing a near-endless string of raucous live shows, marching from spot to spot, hole-in-the-wall bar to high school parking lot, rapping for anyone who would listen. It worked. According to Mannie, people in the city would know the lyrics to Juve’s songs before they were ever released, simply from seeing him tear down tiny venues over and over again; his debut single, a collaboration with DJ Jimi called “Bounce for the Juvenile,” was exhibit A.
Before Cash Money, Juve—on wax, at least—wasn’t the unmistakable presence he would become. But when he linked with Mannie, the evolution came rapidly. The pair had been orbiting one another for a while, but operating in slightly different circles. They finally, officially, met at a bus stop, where Mannie asked Juve to rap. He did: song after song after song. The contract came through almost immediately. By the end of 1997, Mannie had produced (and Cash Money had issued) two albums with Juvenile in a starring role, a solo record called Solja Rags and Get It How U Live!!, an album by the Hot Boys, Cash Money’s supergroup that paired Juve with B.G., Turk, and a young rapper named Lil Wayne. Juve had just turned 22 when that first Hot Boys album dropped, but he was the oldest member of the group—barely out of his adolescence but forced into a grizzled, world-weary role.
You could hear it in his voice. Starting on Solja Rags, Juve became one of the most distinctive rappers imaginable, his delivery evoking the blues but nimble enough to navigate whatever stuttering, gridless drums Mannie used to challenge him. When he was cursing Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, he sounded as if he could be 18 or 58, smirking on a porch somewhere.
By the beginning of ’98, Cash Money and its artists were accruing power throughout Louisiana and the rest of the South. The title track from Juve’s album had been a local hit. B.G.’s album sold 25,000 copies; the Hot Boys tripled that. In March, Baby and Slim signed that infamous distribution deal with Universal, the terms of which quickly took on the qualities of myth: a three-year contract with a $2 million advance annually, a $1.5 million credit on each of up to six albums each year, and an 80/20 profit split in favor of Cash Money. The deal had largely been centered on the Big Tymers—Mannie’s collaboration with Baby—but as soon as the ink was dry, Mannie insisted that Universal push Juvenile to the foreground.
Cash Money was then operating like a factory: Mannie would cook up beat after beat and hook after hook, and artists would be in various studio rooms writing, trying out ideas, with all efforts dedicated to whoever’s album was next on the docket. But as Juvenile became the label’s flagship artist, and as everyone’s focus turned to forging his new album, the process changed in two key ways. For one, the raps often came before the music. There are moments on 400 Degreez when Juve stops a verse at 14 bars or runs past the usual 16. Juve hadn’t learned, or wasn’t bothering to count out his bars; he would simply tell Mannie what and how he was going to rap, then let the producer build a beat around him. As Mannie recalled in 2014, “400 Degreez was already wrote, I just had to put music to it.”
The second divergence from Mannie’s usual process is that, unlike the other rappers on the label, Juve would bring his own hooks to the songs rather than let them be mapped out by the producer. As specific and streetwise as he was, those years winning over NOLA crowds honed his sense for how to manipulate a room. That knack for pop makes the album jell; it lets him float through songs like “Ghetto Children” and stuff melodies into the verses on “Gone Ride With Me” and “Follow Me Now.” (The latter song, in particular, is an absolute joy; the way he opens with a syncopated “I want me a—mil/To see just how it—feel” throws your shoulders into motion immediately.) Juve had long been toying with these parts of his toolkit, but on 400 Degreez he grew into a different rapper entirely, one more in command of his skillset and with a more innate feel for where each song could take him, musically. On the intro, Mannie says this is the new record from “the dude that brung you ‘Put up your “Solja Rag,”’ referencing that lighter, thinner proto-“Ha” from the year before. But Juve wasn’t the same dude—he was a little older, a little better in tune with the bounce.
Which is good, because when Juve forgets to smile, 400 Degreez can turn incredibly grim. It’s an album about what it’s like to be baptized in fire and the ways you need to be resourceful in order to survive—not to escape Hollywood shootouts, but to grit your teeth and keep creditors off your back, to keep from getting carjacked by kids who are bored and lashing out. On “Ghetto Children,” Juve raps: “I got bills to pay/I can’t be playing with you jokers.” On “Run for It,” Wayne is itching to jump out of trees and attack his enemies, but Juve writes about how he’d rather see the violence on TV. He’s seen and done enough to know how scarring it’s all been but can’t sit back and reflect without worrying. On “Gone Ride With Me,” the goal isn’t a big-body Benz, it’s rent money.
That paranoia—about kids who are ready to knock him off, about cops, about acts of God—seeps into the album’s crevices. Juve’s songwriting is, at its resting state, playful, buoyant, full of asides and knowing advice; he is in control. So when things seem out of his grasp (see his opening verse on “Off Top”), the record becomes not just frantic, but desperate, even hopeless. This feeling comes only in brief spurts, but compared to the poise that Juve usually trafficks in, it rattles the calm. “Ha” aside, Juve is most captivating when he’s at his most urgent, like on the title track: “You see me? I eat, sleep, shit, and talk rap/You seen that ’98 Mercedes on TV? I bought that/I had some felony charges—I fought that/Been sent to no return but still was brought back.” And even on “Ha,” the chorus casts the song as something more existential: “You know what it is/To make nothing outta something.”
And sometimes the joy and id and Gothic fear all blur into one. Near the end of the sessions for 400 Degreez, Mannie and Juve got the idea to resurrect one of those songs that had been a reliable concert staple in New Orleans, but had never been properly recorded, one that Juve had been rapping to the “Paid in Full” loop. The title might not have been stylized yet, but it was the early skeleton of what would eventually become “Back That Azz Up.”
That skeleton nearly shared its name with DJ Jubilee’s Jackson 5-sampling hit from the same period in 2003, Jubilee would sue Juvenile, Cash Money, and Universal, and lose. But Mannie sensed that Juve’s version was the one. It just needed the right beat. “[I knew] if we put 808 drums under this with the bounce, we got the hood,” the producer told Complex in 2012. But “we got to get white America too, how do we do that?”
The answer was strings. In the video, two men emerge from the fog like specters, one in a wheelchair, both slinging violins. That’s the song’s slow, morbid intro, a call for bodies to report to the dancefloor not just from the bar or the booths, but from beyond the grave. The men disappear and are replaced by Juve, in a white tee, who leans toward the camera and fires one of the most famous warning shots in all of rap’s history: “Cash Money Records taking over for the nine-nine and the two-thousand.” Then the 808s.
That video became inescapable on MTV. It served, along with “Ha,” B.G.’s “Bling Bling,” Wayne’s “Tha Block Is Hot,” and the Hot Boys’ “I Need a Hot Girl,” as the takeover. Despite being a last-minute addition to the album, “Azz” in particular distilled the label’s vision into a single song. It’s a rave in a haunted mansion: the song’s bass (and baseness) warp and contort its ornate flourishes. It’s the maximalist endpoint of that bounce-rap fusion. Wayne’s ad-libs-on-steroids cameo earmarks him as an obvious future star. And Juvenile raps like getting his partner to bend over is a matter of life and death, which it very obviously is.
400 Degreez is too idiosyncratic to have sprung from the minds of anyone but Juve and Mannie, but they didn’t seal themselves off from the rest of Cash Money. Nearly half the album’s songs feature some combination of the Hot Boys. One of the more interesting payoffs of this is that you get to catch the other three members at various stages in their development: that “Run for It” verse is jarring for how clearly Wayne patterned his flow after Juve’s, but B.G., who wrestles the formless posse cut “U.P.T.” into his own hands, is already a practiced star.
The best group song—and the album’s single greatest moment outside of those tentpole singles—is the anxious, defiant, unbelievably goofy “Flossin’ Season.” B.G. flashes a watch that you can see from a block away; Wayne sounds fully formed for once. Two different men compare their stunting to Evel Knievel; you can practically hear Baby arguing with an auto-body shop about how many PlayStations can realistically fit inside a Hummer. But it’s the principals who make the song transcend. Mannie’s beat and the urgency in Juve’s voice give “Flossin’ Season” its relentless forward motion—the quality that makes a song about watches sound like a matter of family honor. When Juve can’t make it to the bar without being hit on, it seems like the “Odyssey”; Mannie brags, in order, that he has: a burgundy jet, cities named after him; a big dick, a million dollars, and a Nissan Pathfinder; a half a mil riding on the Lakers; a Lexus that comes out in two years (it’s parked by the projects) and a motorcycle that comes out in 12 (it has the Batman fins); and a ring that Liberace can’t afford. Come over here and give a millionaire a hug.
There are traces of Universal’s handwringing, and signs that the label’s priorities got crossed during production. Words like “homicide” and “pistol” are occasionally censored, but they left in embarrassing errors: in the liner notes and on the CD itself, Mannie Fresh is credited as “Manny” Fresh. Fortunately, as on previous Cash Money releases, the art was handled by the legendarily gaudy Houston design firm Pen & Pixel. There’s Juvenile: propped up among the flames like Frankenstein’s monster. There are models pacing through a library. The “z” in Degreez has two vertical lines through it, as in “$.” But the album was a massive commercial success. It reached No. 9 on the Billboard 200—peaking in September 1999, almost a year after its release, due to the sustained strength of “Back That Azz Up”—and, in 2011, was certified quadruple platinum.
On a less quantifiable level, it helped Southern rap pierce the mainstream. It was the tip of the spear that preceded the region’s rule over the 2000s and 2010s. (Of course, that shine would be mostly reserved for Atlanta; even when Cash Money’s last, best hope finally made it, Lil Wayne fled his ravaged New Orleans for Miami.) JAY-Z, who was red hot following that year’s Vol 2: Hard Knock Life, tried to grapple with “Ha” on one of its two remixes, but despite being near his technical peak, he couldn’t find the right bounce to really sell his verse. In a way, that foreshadowed the next decade and a half for New York: trying to keep up with the South, but unable to match its first step.
But for Juve himself, things were never this good again. A few years later, he left Cash Money, claiming—as many artists have since—that Baby and Slim weren’t paying him anything near what he was owed. Both B.G. and Turk were sentenced to long terms in prison. Wayne, perhaps improbably, became the best rapper on the planet before realizing that he, too, was getting robbed. Mannie left the label. In 2005, Juve’s home was destroyed by Katrina; in 2008, his 4-year-old daughter and his daughter’s mother were murdered. Even his biggest commercial success was blackened by death: In 2004, a year before the hurricane, “Slow Motion” got Cash Money its first No. 1 hit in part because the song became a de facto tribute for Soulja Slim, who was murdered the day before Thanksgiving 2003 in the front yard of the house he bought for his mother.
Rap moves so fast that it can be difficult to pin down a new style’s influences beyond its most immediate predecessors. But what Juvenile and Mannie Fresh were doing in 1998 is part of the DNA for much of modern hip-hop, from the way Juve would bake melodies into his verses to the way Mannie blueprinted so much of our current sample-free production. 400 Degreez looms large over the genre, the way Juve’s sunglassed face lurks above the burning blocks on the album cover. It’s a strange, inimitable collage, full of fear and fire, unmistakably New Orleans and unrelentingly inventive.


The West Coast rapper’s first release since his incarceration is profile-raising look at his rise to folk hero status, culled mostly from scattered loosies released online from 2016 to 2018.

Free Drakeo

After spending almost the entirety of 2017 at Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles for unlawful possession of a firearm, one of the West Coast’s most exciting and innovative rappers, Drakeo the Ruler, was arrested again in early 2018, due to an alleged connection to a 2016 concert shooting. The Los Angeles District Attorney’s office has come after Drakeo’s entire Stinc Team crew with trumped-up conspiracy charges, the kind that were written into law in order to prosecute mobsters but are now mostly used as a loophole to go after rappers with alleged gang connections. Though Drakeo was found not guilty of murder and attempted murder, he remains behind bars; despite the acquittal, the District Attorney’s office has decided to refile several conspiracy-related charges in what’s clearly become an institutional vendetta against an artist who hasn’t been afraid to speak out and push back with the platform he has. Free Drakeo is Drakeo’s first project since 2017’s Cold Devil, as well as the first since his horrific and seemingly endless incarceration began.
The album is culled mostly from scattered loosies, released online from 2016 to 2018. The criminal case has only raised his profile—the album opens with a long supercut of “Free Drakeo” shout-outs from the past two years, before Drakeo directly addresses the intermingling of fame and severe misfortune on “Crime Stoppers,” the only entirely new studio recording on the album (“Crime Stoppers made me famous”). Free Drakeo is bookended by two freestyles, delivered over the phone from prison, that express the kind of self-reflection Drakeo has been forced to do during his time in solitary: “Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill/The type of books a nigga read only in jail.”
The compilation charts the evolution of his career in reverse, from something of a nationally-recognized folk hero, to the reigning monarch of his hometown scene, to a lesser-known local favorite itching to break out. The oldest track included is the song responsible for that breakout is “Mr. Get Dough,” a piano-driven Mustard production, featuring Choice & RJMrLa. The track is very of its time, only a few degrees away from 2 Chainz’s 2012 track “I’m Different,” with a club-friendly nursery rhyme rhythm that could be played by Tom Hanks jumping on a giant keyboard.
Since then, Drakeo’s flow has developed a twisty complexity, the kind of hurried wordiness preferred by the current wave of rappers coming out of both California and Detroit, from Blueface to BabyTron. He’s racked up co-signing remixes from artists across the country—Shy Glizzy, Lil Yachty, Danny Brown—but this is Drakeo’s first full-length project to feature recruits from outside his home region on the roster: Maxo Kream turns in a verse on “Crime Stoppers,” and the Bay Area is represented by SOB X RBE on “I Could Never” and Yatta on “Fuck Being Humble.” It’s not surprising to hear Drakeo link up with Detroit natives like Rio Da Yung OG on “Black Holocaust” and BandGang Javar on “Touchin”—Detroit is maybe the only other place producing rappers precise and technically proficient enough to keep up with Drakeo bar-for-bar.
His delivery is in the tradition of E-40 and Suga Free, but Drakeo lacks their colorful bounce and cartoonishness—his voice is a little more monotone, with a sandpapered edge that makes the playfulness of his rhymes hard to catch on the first listen. Drakeo’s immaculately packaged bars are more “magical realist” in their writing, imaginative and expressionist with the choice of analogies but still cloaked in grit: “I’m not with all that sneak dissing/Chopper rippin’ off limbs and all type of teeth missing/Grim reaper, street sweeper, boy, I'm knee-deep in/Green and red beams like I got these for Christmas.”
Free Drakeo is practical in purpose, packaged together to satiate an emerging desire for more music from Drakeo and to assert his continued presence in the marketplace. But it’s also politically motivated, an album that exists as much to raise awareness about Stinc Team’s continued persecution as it does to turn uncollected singles into a streamable commodity. Drakeo is, after all, effectively a political prisoner, the latest example to be made by a carceral society intent on exacting the cruelest revenge against Black men who find success on their own terms. Though it might not offer much fresh material for the already initiated, Free Drakeo has value as a rallying cry, a call to action not just on the part of Drakeo, but of every incarcerated individual in this country who doesn’t have a microphone or streaming platform to reach us from.


"Heroes" is the second installment of David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy. The trilogy, and "Heroes" in particular, show all the signs of an artist growing up, shaking off the trappings of capitalist ego and success, and searching for a soul instead. It often sounds as if Bowie is conducting chaos, smashing objects together to discover scarily beautiful new shapes.

"Heroes"

[Ed. Note: In light of David Bowie's passing, Pitchfork commissioned reviews of several of his classic albums.]
Even before David Bowie stepped foot in Berlin's grandiose Meistersaal concert hall, the room had soaked up its fair share of history. Since its opening in 1912, the wood-lined space had played host to chamber music recitals, Expressionist art galleries, and Nazi banquets, becoming a symbol of the German capital's artistic—and political—alliances across the 20th century. The hall's checkered past, as well as its wide-open acoustics, certainly offered a rich backdrop for the recording of "Heroes" in the summer of 1977.
But by then, the Meistersaal was part of Hansa Studios, a facility that felt more like a relic than a destination. Thirty years after much of Berlin was bombed to rubble during World War II, the pillars that marked the studio's exterior were still ripped by bulletholes, its highest windows filled with bricks. Whereas it was once the epitome of the city's cultural vanguard, in '77, the locale was perhaps best known for its proximity to the Berlin Wall—the imposing, barbed-wire-laced structure that turned West Berlin into an island of capitalism amidst East Germany's communist regime during the Cold War. The Wall was erected to stop East Berliners from fleeing into the city's relatively prosperous other half and by the late '70s had been built up to include a no-man's land watched by armed guards in turrets who were ordered to shoot. This area was called the "death strip," for good reason—at least 100 would-be border crossers were killed during the Wall's stand, including an 18-year-old man who was shot dead amid a barrage of 91 bullets just months before Bowie began his work on "Heroes".
All of which is to say: West Berlin was a dangerous and spooky place to make an album in 1977. And that's exactly what Bowie wanted. After falling into hedonistic rock'n'roll clichés in mid-'70s Los Angeles—a place he later called "the most vile piss-pot in the world"—he set his sights on Berlin as a spartan antidote. And though "Heroes" is the second part of his Berlin Trilogy, it's actually the only one of the three that he fully recorded in the city. "Every afternoon I'd sit down at that desk and see three Russian Red Guards looking at us with binoculars, with their Sten guns over their shoulders," the album's producer, Tony Visconti, once recalled. "Everything said we shouldn't be making a record here." All of the manic paranoia and jarring juxtapositions surrounding Hansa bled into the music, which often sounds as if Bowie is conducting chaos, smashing objects together to discover scarily beautiful new shapes.
Those contrasts begin with the album's personnel. For "Heroes", the then-30-year-old enlisted many of the same players that showed up on its predecessor, Low, once again balancing out the effortless groove-based rock stylings of drummer Dennis Davis, bassist George Murray, and guitarist Carlos Alomar, with Bowie's own idiosyncratic work across various instruments along with the heady synth wizardry of Brian Eno, who took on an expanded role. Part Little Richard boogie, part krautrock shuffle, the unlikely stylistic combination hints at man's evolution with technology while throwing off sparks of sweat. Also like Low, the album is broken into two contrasting sides, with the vocal tracks on the front and the back made up of mostly moody instrumentals.
But setting "Heroes" apart was the crucial addition of King Crimson guitar god Robert Fripp, who sprayed his signature metallic tone all over many of the album's most memorable moments. According to legend, Fripp recorded all of his parts in one six-hour burst of wiry bliss and feedback, often just soloing over tracks he was hearing for the first time. That spontaneity—most of the album's jam-based backing rhythm tracks were also recorded quickly, over just two days—is part of what makes "Heroes" live and breathe to this day. It's an album that is constantly morphing, never static. As Fripp's guitar is shooting electrical shocks, Bowie is bleating saxophone blasts, and Eno is summoning sonic storm clouds that pass as soon as they arrive.
And then there are the vocals. "Heroes" contains some of Bowie's greatest vocal performances, fearless takes in which he pushes his voice to wrenching emotional states that often teeter on the edge of sanity. There's tension here, too, because while Bowie is clearly putting all of himself into the microphone like never before, he would often have no idea what he was actually going to sing until actually stepping up to record, a technique borrowed from his frequent collaborator at the time, Iggy Pop. What came out was a Burroughsian stream of consciousness that suggests elements of Bowie's personal travails—involving alcoholism, a crumbling marriage, and business woes—while also sounding abstract and shadowy. He deals with previous alter egos on "Beauty and the Beast," which could be read as a kind of apology for the ill-advised, coke-fueled fantasies of fascism he was peddling just a couple of years before. He muddles sleep and death, dreams and waking life. On the iconic title track, he undercuts the song's would-be heroism by placing its title in quotes; rather than bending over backwards to elevate his own myth, "Heroes" puts everyday courage on a pedestal. It's an immortal track all about fleeting wonders.
The album's contradictory nature went beyond Berlin and its spitballing creation, too. "Heroes" was released on October 14, 1977, just two weeks before the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks and a few months after the Clash's self-titled debut LP. So as punk was whirling into a frenzy, Bowie's TV appearances around the time of "Heroes" doubled as acts of stoic defiance. On the Dutch program "TopPop," for example, he looked nonchalant in a smart blazer, button-up shirt, and leg warmers, effortlessly crooning the title track like Sinatra in his prime. During the song's swirling bridge, he steps away from the microphone, lights up a cigarette, and stares into the middle distance—the face of calm in an era of turmoil.
He repeated this trick on Italian television, turning the doomsaying instrumental "Sense of Doubt" into an ominous art film in which he oversees a duel between a piano and a synthesizer. To this day, the video feels dangerous, unsettling. A marketing slogan for "Heroes" boasted, "There's Old Wave, there's New Wave and there's David Bowie," which still rings true, especially in light of such performances. With the kids coming up from behind, Bowie used his experience to carve out a different kind of future.
The Berlin Trilogy, and "Heroes" in particular, show all the signs of an artist growing up, shaking off the trappings of capitalist ego and success, and searching for a soul instead. Of course, Bowie's ego was a magnificent thing at its height, but he also understood its insatiability—how it would kill him if he did not kill it. And even in his dressed-down "Heroes" garb—bomber jacket, tousled short hair, jeans—he couldn't escape his own magnetism; in fact, seeing how cool Bowie looked without all the makeup and costumes could make him seem even more untouchable. At 30, he was content with his art, happy to explore humankind's existential struggles while living in a divided, war-torn city. Berlin gave him perspective and compassion. It allowed him to be small. To let his guard down and his mind wander. To begin to come to terms with his own mortality. "We'll do anything in our power to stay alive. There's a feeling that the average lifespan should be longer than it is. I disagree," Bowie told Melody Maker in October '77. "I mean, we've never lived so long. Not so very long ago no one lived passed the age of 40. And we're still not happy with 70. What are we after exactly? There's just too much ego involved. And who wants to drag their old decaying frame around until they are 90, just to assert their ego? I don't, certainly."


The much-hyped, Jack White-feted Alabama garage band's debut finally arrives a significant amount of time after its completion, working to their benefit and detriment.

Boys & Girls

Alabama Shakes' lead singer, guitarist and primary songwriter Brittany Howard began cobbling her band together in high school mostly just for the sake of having a band. It certainly wasn't with the notion of breaking into her hometown's music scene-- in Athens, Ala., there's not much of one to break into. So she and her friends Steve Johnson, Zac Cockrell, and Heath Fogg made do playing cover-band gigs in dive bars, occasionally slipping their raggedy garage-soul originals in among the Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, and eventually making enough to warrant some studio time up in Nashville early last year. Those sessions produced the 11 tracks of Alabama Shakes' debut LP, Boys & Girls, which they shopped around for a while and finally released on ATO (Rough Trade in the UK) this week.
Things are now moving fast: The band has hit the late-night TV circuit, they followed Fiona Apple's headlining slot at NPR's big SXSW showcase last month, their upcoming shows are almost entirely sold-out, and they've been booked as openers for Jack White's spring solo tour.
Of course, because Alabama Shakes boast these fairly aw-shucks origins, lyrics that seem deeply felt, multiple sonic reference points predating 1975, an affinity for analog, and more than one guitar, by default they've been thrown like chum into the shark tank that is "real music," where fans and critics with false memories of rock's pure and noble past-- and others with aversions to earnest craft both feigned and actual-- gnash out their differences.
But engaging with these paranoid extremes bypasses the whole middle swath of the matter-- the weird, beautiful part, where all the blood and guts are. Here's what seems real enough to me: Boys & Girls is a solid debut, really good but not earth-shifting, a record clearly (blessedly) recorded before anyone much cared who they were or weren't, possibly even before they were entirely sure themselves.
The album is largely confessional-- not in the singer/songwritery sense, but in that it's riddled with admissions that probably wouldn't have been made by any other means, words that feel lighter sung than spoken. Album opener and lead single "Hold On", its central guitar riff ribboning and pooling like slow-poured honey, is the first of many tracks where it's not entirely clear if Howard is singing to, about, or as herself, God, or some boy as she rips through the chorus: "Yeah, you got to wait/ But I don't want to wait!" "I feel so homesick/ Where is my home?" Howard wonders on "Rise to the Sun" before the song dips into a coda of timorous guitar and crashing drums. On the shadowy, fingersnapped "Goin' to the Party" she sings about running around town, getting wasted, and taking care of some drunk boy; when she woozily coos, "gotta take me back now, I'm still somebody's daughter," she sounds half-annoyed and half-comforted in that very particular way that comes from being young and restless and knowing there's someone waiting up for you, but at least there's someone waiting up for you.
Howard's pain feels raw, but like it won't always be-- as if once these first scrapes heal, her skin will be good and tough, but right now they smart like hell. "Heartbreaker" is staggering, gut-punched, a shiny organ weeping and straining away as she laments, "Oh, I wanted to grow old with you/ You told me so, but then you go/ How was I supposed to know?" But later on the slow-boiling "Be Mine" she's regained her footing-- she's direct, nearly petulant: "If they wanna fight/ They done started fucking with the wrong heart." Three minutes in the song shifts focus to a single demand, Howard crowing and screaming, "Be my baby, be my baby!" over and over as the band spins out, crashing and bumping, then circles back home as she loosens into a string of cries and hoots.
Live, Howard often plants her feet flat onstage before bellowing out a line, as if bracing herself against the force of what's to come, and it's easy to imagine her doing that in the studio, too. Most of the time there's a payoff, but sometimes the build-up dwarfs the delivery, her voice coming out thinner and tighter than you'd expect; maybe she needs a vocal coach, or just a little more time to work out exactly how those pipes of hers like best to blow. For now, though, flashes of more contemporary analogs (Macy Gray, Amy Winehouse) swirled in among the more obvious classic-soul vocal touchstones keep her Janis Joplin tendencies from curdling into "Jackie Jormp-Jomp".
Boys & Girls was recorded live in the studio, but the power of the band's stage show hasn't fully carried over-- at times their delivery also seems thin and tight. Perhaps it's a matter of timing, the number and profile and intensity of the gigs the band has played in recent months solidifying their groove to a degree that outstrips what they were capable of throwing down on tape this time last year. Or maybe it's the production-- a little muddled, and not always in the cozy, old-school way they may have been going for. So many bands get churned out of the hype machine seeming either too fully formed or too ephemeral to get attached to, but Alabama Shakes have sparked, in me at least, a degree of ownership, and one that urges, "work with Jack White." Maybe sometime this summer, after the tour, he could work his analog-only magic and coax some big, crunching, whalloping mess out of them--something to ensure they get to stick around for a while, and on their own terms: weird, sweaty, desirous.


Twelve albums in, the duo enlists Beck to help synthesize their many interests into a record that feels lively, fresh, and colorful.

Ohio Players

Like many couples in a long-term relationship, the Black Keys decided to look outside their union for inspiration when it came time to record Ohio Players, the band’s twelfth album. No strangers to extracurricular collaborations—guitarist/vocalist Dan Auerbach practically lives at his Easy Eye Sound, producing records for Robert Finley, Hermanos Gutiérrez, Marcus King, Early James, and Shannon and the Clams in the last few years—the band hasn’t brought additional musicians into the studio since reviving their partnership in 2019 with “Let’s Rock”, a back-to-basics platter that seemed to reject the psychedelic haze engulfing 2014’s Turn Blue.
Turn Blue, like so many of the albums the Black Keys released on Nonesuch between 2008 and 2014, was co-produced by Danger Mouse, a collaborator who helped Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney move far beyond the band’s grimy garage-blues roots. After working with Danger Mouse, the Black Keys prized production—the tactical, physical sound of a record—as much as the song itself, an aesthetic that carries through to Ohio Players. Pointedly avoiding the expansive exploration of their Obama-era albums, the Black Keys instead rely on the bag of tricks they’ve developed over their career intent on creating interesting juxtapositions from familiar sounds.
Sonically speaking, there’s nothing about Ohio Players that feels unexpected. It’s a bustling concoction of fuzz-speckled riffs, funky rhythms, sweet harmonies, tart hooks, and spectral keyboards, the kinds of refurbished retro-rock that are not only the band’s stock in trade but Auerbach’s signature as a producer. Even the presence of rappers Lil Noid and Juicy J on “Candy and Her Friends” and “Paper Crown” recalls Blakroc, the duo’s 2009 excursion into rap-rock, yet the fact that Black Keys have explicitly carved space for hip-hop on Ohio Players goes a long way in explaining why the album doesn’t feel like a retread. Instead of siloing their interests, the group synthesizes them, making a record that feels lively, fresh, and colorful.
To that end, Beck is the crucial collaborator on Ohio Players. Half of the album’s fourteen songs bear a Beck co-writing credit and his presence is felt throughout, whether it’s his lead vocals on “Paper Crown” or how the very sound of the record is pitched halfway between the dense collage of Odelay and the vibrant neo-soul of Midnite Vultures. The Black Keys may follow Beck’s genre-bending lead—the lithe “Candy and Her Friends” bears his imprint but it’s the only song Auerbach and Carney wrote on their own—but they never give the impression of an ironic distance. There’s a reason why a sumptuous cover of William Bell’s slow-burning Stax classic “I Forgot to Be Your Lover” resides smack dab in the middle of Ohio Players: Underneath all the stylish clamor, the Black Keys remain anchored in classic soul.
Nevertheless, the blueprint they’ve sketched with Beck allows the Black Keys to freely play with genre throughout Ohio Players. Dan the Automator flips the throwback vibe of “Beautiful People (Stay High)” upside down by relying on cut-up horns and nagging tambourines. Chintzy organ and garish saxophones give “You’ll Pay” the air of a lost ’60s Nugget, an attitude accentuated by the ’60s sensibilities of Noel Gallagher, the song’s co-writer. Gallagher helps sharpen the Black Keys’ pop attack on “Only Love Matters” and also does his best George Harrison impression with the sighing guitar lines he threads through “On the Game,” one of the best ballads the Black Keys have ever cut. The other important contributor to Ohio Players is Greg Cartwright, the leader of the late garage rock titans Reigning Sound, who helps Auerbach and Carney reconnect with their grubby roots on the relentless “Please Me (Till I’m Satisfied)” and “Read Em and Weep,” which refashions surf for the landlocked Midwest.
While it’s easy to distinguish what each collaborator brings to the table, Ohio Players isn’t disjointed: it’s as coherent as a curated jukebox. All that credit goes to the Black Keys who, after 23 years together, know themselves well enough to know how to accentuate their strengths by choosing the right musician for the right song, confident that they’ll wind up with a record that sounds unmistakably like themselves.


Roberto Carlos Lange eases back into the groove with a gorgeous, delicately rendered album. It’s got space-age synths, wistful romance, and the breeziest vibe in town.

Phasor

In a short film about the making of Phasor, Roberto Carlos Lange’s eighth album as Helado Negro, the multi-instrumentalist songwriter says that “slow clouds and soft heat became symbols of long hikes through the mountains, and the noise for these songs.” His environmental inspiration ripples through nine beautiful tracks with a faint and visceral touch—like the effect of clean country air in your lungs that, almost without notice, gives you more energy than usual.
Lange’s specific temperament is a boon in a turbulent culture; his music reflects a gentle soul who encourages slowness and contemplation. But love has always been the message with Lange, an experimenter under the guise of a traditionalist, whose work in English and Español has snuck a folk songwriter’s sensibility into twinkling electronic cut-ups and field recordings. Phasor uses blank space a bit more liberally than 2021’s Far In, and here his expressions of affection feel as organic as the scenery he strives to capture. “And I’ll go outside, looking at the moon way too long,” he harmonizes with the pianist Opal Hoyt on “Best for You and Me,” his melancholic tone vague and aimed heavenward. On “I Just Want to Wake Up With You,” Lange captures one of the simplest moments of intimacy—a nice morning rise with your nearest and dearest—inside a cascade of rhythmic squelches.
The inciting moment for Phasor came in 2019 when Lange spent five hours with the Sal-Mar, a large-scale, one-of-a-kind synthesizer constructed in 1969 by the contemporary-classical composer Salvatore Martirano, who had the idea to use spare supercomputer parts to make an interactive “composing machine.” In Lange’s time interacting with the instrument at the University of Illinois, where it resides, he wrote sounds that bubble up in the crevices of Phasor, conveying ideas through simplicity and repetition whether lyrically or melodically. With the Sal-Mar’s sequencing employed in such a human and heartfelt album, it provokes some interesting thoughts about numbers, fractals, the nature of matter, the great interconnectivity of all beings, et cetera.
It seems significant that album opener, “LFO,” or Lupe Finds Oliveros, is a tribute to electronic composition icon Pauline Oliveros and Lupe Lopez, an original wiring technician for Fender amplifiers known in at least one corner of the internet as “the goddess of soldering.” The concept is literal—the reverb is centered alongside spacy sound snippets—but also posits music as a form of transcendental escape. “Un policía me pegó me dejó por muerto/Y le dije/¿Quién eres tú?” he sings stridently, and then: “¡Y ya sé quien soy!” Who is this cop beating him down, he asks, but at least Lange knows his own self. He then escapes into what sounds like a chopped-up mariachi sample, light cacophony with the echoes of a phasor, the guitar pedal that’s best known as the dub reggae sound. (“I don’t own one,” he admitted in a recent bio, “but I did try to emulate that sound where I can on the record.”)
But let’s not get lost in the oscillators. There may be a lot of theory, artistic experimentation, and new forms of inquiry on this album, but typical of Lange’s work, it’s carried by pure beauty, the sort of diaphanous songwriting that makes the noise of everyday life fall away. His confidence in his songwriting over eight albums and 15 years allows for these loftier ideas to float through the songs but never overpower them—or even present as a central theme if you’re not in the academic mood. “Out There” is a propulsive groove with a tinge of ’70s Brazilian jazz, fleshed out with vibraphones, Moog rhythm, and Pinson Chanselle’s featherweight touch on percussion.
Another standout, “Wish You Could Be Here,” hovers in a multihued electronic atmosphere as Lange hits his raspy lower register: “Streets flood with your love/Cars flowing down like mud/Sun barely under clouds/Heat so soft it sounds like.” His words are authoritative but impressionistic—this music wants nothing but to catch the vibe of a somnambulist summer afternoon. “BLISS IN ONE CONTINUOUS MOMENT,” he writes in Phasor’s liner notes. “LET IT BE YOU.” Heaven is within and lives in those you love, and on Phasor, Lange, never complacent, is determined to find it. “Donde quieres ir/Giraré mundos/Para estar allí,” he coos in the starry-eyed closing ballad “Es Una Fantasía.” Where do you want to go? He’ll move worlds to get there.


With a long list of guest vocalists, Moby’s latest more melancholy album is lush but feels anemic and minor compared to some of his best work.

Moby: Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt

Moby’s last two albums, 2016’s These Systems Are Failing and 2017’s More Fast Songs About the Apocalypse, blazed with the sort of righteous fury you might expect to surround the election of the United States’ 45th president. Those bookending spats of electroclash tapped into a broader anxiety gnawing at many Americans: that late capitalism is gasping its last and when it goes down, it’ll take a whole lot of us down with it. Even the most politically minded electronic musicians are more or less powerless to stop those systems from failing, but for the first time in his solo career (or at least since 1996’s Animal Rights), Moby exercised the catharsis of making angry punk songs about the sorry state of the world. So what happens after catharsis? Rather than funnel more rage, Moby’s latest record, the cloyingly titled Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt, collapses into the melancholy that’s left behind when the adrenaline runs out and the world remains terrible.
Moby once more takes up the techniques he’s honed since his 1999 breakthrough Play launched him to previously unfathomable fame. Instead of tapping his breakbeat hardcore roots for a third time in a row, he falls back on slow, soulful guest vocals treating the new recordings as though they were distant transmissions from an analog past. Using the grit and breathiness of performances from singers Raquel Rodriguez, Julie Mintz, Mindy Jones, Apollo Jane, and Brie O’Bannon, he tailors his guitar, drum, and synthesizer compositions to the organic quality in each vocal loop. When he sings himself, he compresses and dilutes his voice to the point that it, too, sounds like an unearthed artifact drifting through time. This set of aesthetic principles, used liberally across most of Moby’s albums, may never lose its soothing quality.
There’s great beauty in songs built around old things, as hits like “Porcelain” and “Natural Blues” (both built around samples from an Alan Lomax collection of field recordings) proved nearly twenty years ago. Though Everything Was Beautiful incorporates original recordings, not samples, the mournful voices and turntablist beats on songs like “The Sorrow Tree” and “A Dark Cloud Is Coming” seem to hover eerily out of orbit. One song, “Like a Motherless Child,” borrows a refrain from a blues spiritual dating back to the era of American slavery. These displaced words help illuminate the album’s central themes of disillusionment, fear, and abjection: Human suffering is a permanent fixture that can be qualified by a particular political climate, but it has never been birthed by one. That a wealthy, white, male musician would repurpose songs written to bring comfort to black Americans during slavery of course reiterates the colonialist bent that has long haunted Moby’s music, though on this album, unlike Play, at least the vocalists have been paid.
The songs that center on Moby’s voice tend to have less power, not because of the quality of his singing, which remains poignantly unvarnished, but because of the circuitousness of his lyrics. Clunky rhymes and peculiar phrasings abound. “Don’t know my needs, don’t know my way, sir/I had my face, no way to face her,” Moby half-raps on “Like a Motherless Child.” On “The Tired and the Hurt,” he dares to imagine utopia but doesn’t get much further than, “There was hope and endless dreams/There was love and no dying.” More often than not, he employs the vocal tone used on Play’s “The Sky Is Broken,” whose bare instrumentation justified his mumblecore delivery. Against these fuller backdrops, Moby’s murmuring can sound anemic, a flimsy delivery system for words that aren’t really saying anything new.
It could be that the childlike verbiage here is intentional, that Moby’s awkward stutterings intend to illustrate each person’s complete powerlessness against the inevitability of their pain. Certainly, Everything Was Beautiful is the most vulnerable album Moby has made in years, one that doesn’t shy away from desolation and also acknowledges that, within helplessness, beauty can arise. That’s the dynamic that has made Moby’s most moving tracks work: the impulse to luxuriate in despair, to find the lushness in it, rather than shut it down and shove it away. He does that well on Everything Was Beautiful, but he’s already done it better.


The L.A.-based beatmaker follow's last year's album, Bad Vibes, with a brief and beautiful three-song EP that shows an expanding mastery of sound manipulation.

Vacation EP

With last year's excellent Bad Vibes, L.A. producer Shlohmo showed just how far the Brainfeeder template of abstract instrumental hip-hop could be stretched-- to gossamer, almost transparent extremes. An hour-long, shifting soundscape sketched out with broken drum machines, meandering guitar picking, and hushed vocals, it was as if Mount Kimbie were let loose in the wilderness of Southern California, all scorching sun and and dried, burned landscapes. The soft and pseudo-naturalistic direction was a sharp left-turn for Henry Laufer, who had mostly made synth- and sample-heavy takes on distorted hip-hop before then. He continues down that moss-grown path with the Vacation EP, a more focused and confident take on Bad Vibes' landscape paintings.
Opener "The Way U Do" is firmly in the Shlohmo style: dripping water, those familiar percussive rimshots (taken far outside their house music context), and a slippery sense of time, as if Laufer can't help but let his beats slide out of order every single bar. But the song's strengths lie in its melody: Pairing a distorted riff with an extended vocal sample, Laufer plays a sort of virtuoso conductor with his faceless vocalist, stretching out melisma into twirling, elongated lines and elegant loops, distorting it so it sounds fluid and constant like a guitar solo. Mixed in with the dragging-feet bassline and moping percussion, the emphasis here is on searing pain and heart-tugging emotion, nicely expanding on Bad Vibes' often detached prettiness.
The meek and plaintive "wen uuu" further ratchets up the percussion, but this time it's a bumpy zig-zag of makeshift drums leaving just enough room for a different kind of vocal sampling. Chopping up vocal syllables into fine pieces, the song finds its own beauty in a synchronized jerky stutter, occasionally climaxing in those sublime moments of beauty (the titular "when you" vocal) that mark the best of Shlohmo's recent work. "Rained the Whole Time" rounds things off a little more business-as-usual, a Bad Vibes holdover of bluesy guitar rubbing against knotted basslines and rattling drums.
Vacation is an ideal stop-gap EP, taking the sound of the album it follows and tightening it up just a little bit, closing the story as it were on Bad Vibes' holistic journey. You won't find a gentler, more ruminative take on Brainfeeder-style beats anywhere, and for someone whose work used to sound charmingly homemade, the processing mastery here is impressive. The EP packs a lot of power into a mere three tracks.


There’s a suffocating seriousness that runs through the singer and producer’s fourth album, one that bogs down genuine moments of levity and love.

Assume Form

James Blake has always been a confessional singer-songwriter—consider the days where he sang about siblings who would not speak to him, or the “I can’t believe this, you don’t wanna see me” that opened 2016’s The Colour in Anything. But Assume Form is something else, something like a great unburdening. We are not 30 seconds into the record and he is already peeling off the layers to bare all his innermost thoughts: “Know I may have gone through the motions my whole life,” he sings at us, before we have even gotten a chance to find our footing in this surfeit of feeling that is oh so exquisitely soundtracked by a barely there drumbeat and a delicate piano figure.
Blake’s last album was billed as a kind of coming up for air. After the darkness of his self-titled debut and 2013’s Overgrown, new love had let the light in and buoyed his spirits. That now looks like a merely transitory stage on the path to the grand transformation he has undergone on Assume Form. He is a new man here, changed by love—something we learn again and again, as he examines every centimeter of his ego, every corner of the vertiginous ecstasy and insecurity of true love at last. On that opening title track, he confides, “I will be touchable/I will be reachable,” sounding like he is repeating instructions a couples counselor once gave him. Even goopier is the line “I thought sex was at my pace, but I was wrong.” There’s something weirdly clinical about his treatment of romance; instead of rose petals, there’s the pulpy taste of a wooden tongue depressor.
There are moments of genuine sweetness, like the closing “Lullaby for My Insomniac.” It is a promise to keep his sleepless partner company until the dawn, voiced in airy, multi-tracked vocal harmonies and framed by church organ: “I’ll stay up too/I’d rather see everything/As a blur tomorrow/If you do.” The sentiment is sketched with the fine-tipped economy of a pencil drawing; the arrangement sounds like it might have been written by Arvo Pärt. Musically, as a kind of ambient-chamber-gospel music, it captures the essence of Blake’s songwriting in a way he has never done before. It’s perfect.
There are some jokes, too: In “Tell Them,” a slinky trap number with a co-production from Metro Boomin, he admits, “In the snakepit so long I put posters up”—a delightful image and a keen contrast with the opulent surroundings: Arabesque melodic accents, flamenco handclaps, and a breathy guest verse from a soulful and sandpapery Moses Sumney. And in the heartbroken “Don’t Miss It,” when he sings, “Everything is about me/I am the most important thing” it’s an altogether welcome moment of self-deprecation. Although, here in the penultimate song, some 40 minutes into the most solipsistic album of his career—the word “I” appears in the album’s lyric sheet 136 times—it may be a case of too little too late.
Because mostly, Assume Form is aggressively pastel and suffocatingly serious. He has lost the playful sense of surprise that guided his falsetto’s agile twists and turns on his debut. He doesn’t so much explore his upper register as just perch there. His keyboards are draped in reverb; strings and vocal harmonies are strewn about his sentimental tableaux like so many gilded lilies. It’s a lot to take. I suppose there are those who will find inspiration in a song like the doo-wop-infused “Can’t Believe the Way We Flow,” but I can’t help but find something off-puttingly performative and voyeuristic in its romantic rapture; it feels like watching a couple slow-dance in a mirror.
There is the skeleton of a different, more interesting album lurking beneath the surface. In recent years, having moved on from the hermetic dubstep and thrillingly experimental atmospheres of his early EPs, Blake has become unexpectedly ubiquitous in the bold-font pop landscape. He has guested with, and written and produced for, Beyoncé, JAY-Z, Frank Ocean, Kendrick Lamar, Vince Staples, André 3000, Travis Scott, and Ab-Soul and Anderson .Paak, along with artists like Mount Kimbie and Oneohtrix Point Never, who share roots in his own underground electronic milieu.
The vehement interiority of his own music makes him an unlikely collaborator, though it’s easy to see why so many artists want to work with him: Despite his history crafting boundary-breaking electronic music, most use him as a kind of human preset, a metonym for broad-strokes melancholy. But on Assume Form, a few choice collaborators help draw him back out of himself. Travis Scott’s Auto-Tuned croon adds dimension to the meditative sound of the Metro Boomin-assisted “Mile High,” a druggy reverie imbued with the stillness of an Edward Hopper painting, a portrait of two people who can’t tear their gazes away from each other: “Watch the fan as it spins/In my arms wrapped in/Don’t know where you start/And where I begin,” sings Blake, deep in the zone.
”Barefoot in the Park,” featuring the Spanish electro-flamenco singer Rosalía, is less successful—her own breathy warble is the song’s best feature, while the tropical IDM beat and rising-and-falling melody are largely forgettable. But “Where’s the Catch,” with André 3000, is one of the album’s highlights—the rare instance where Blake’s ethereal coo and dandelion-tuft melodies are anchored by the bass throb of his earliest work. That framing gives him license to roam more freely: “Where’s the catch,” Blake snarls, sounding almost feline as he paces warily around his own contentment. Doubt becomes him.
”OK, all right now, this may be a little bit heady,” warns André as he intros his guest spot: “You know, I hate heady-ass verses. But I wrote this shit, so here we go.” It is not, in fact, a particularly heady verse, at least not in the sense that “heady” might mean “pretentious” or “self-absorbed”; it’s a Jacob’s ladder of alliteration and free-associative wordplay, a dizzying leap of pure pleasure. But André’s self-aware humor embodies a lightness of spirit that’s too often absent from Assume Form, and the unfettered, unpredictable way his verse pours out of him only underscores the stilted, belabored qualities of Blake’s own creation, as heavy as molasses in midwinter. In an album ostensibly all about the freedom to be oneself that love bestows, Blake sounds hamstrung by old habits, trapped in a musical cage of his own making. For an album all about flow, Assume Form is maddeningly stagnant.


The debut album by Hand Habits—aka Albany D.I.Y. stalwart Meg Duffy—is a joyous, open-ended study in vulnerability.

Hand Habits: Wildly Idle (Humble Before the Void)

Wildly Idle (Humble Before the Void)

Hand Habits’ debut LP, Wildly Idle (Humble Before the Void), evokes a striking image, that of submitting oneself to an expansive unknown with arms outstretched. It’s a feeling Meg Duffy, the singer-songwriter behind this project, knows well; the upstate New York native once packed up everything and moved to Los Angeles to become the guitarist for Kevin Morby. Before that, she’d experimented as Hand Habits around the Albany D.I.Y. scene and, in 2014, released Small Shifts, a 10-inch split with Avi Buffalo’s Sheridan Riley.
It is with an earthly reverence that Duffy attends to her music. When Duffy plays with Morby, she’s a calm and grounded presence, shredding with natural ease, often with eyes closed. Here, her meditations are never rushed and the record rumbles along patiently. Duffy recorded Wildly Idle herself between the Catskills and Los Angeles with assistance from Riley, Quilt’s Keven Lareau, and M. Geddes Gengras. Rather than feeling pigeonholed by the sonic stereotypes of either locale (woodsy vs. hi-fi), Wildly Idle sounds birthed from exploration and experimentation.
Like her main influences, Grouper and Phil Elverum, Duffy understands that songs are “evolving, living things,” as the latter musician once said. One gets the sense that Duffy’s songs are so thoroughly composed that they could fly off on their own. “Actress” is overflowing with minutiae like the shaking of maracas, gentle guitars, and a moment when all these fizz into dissolution. “Now isn’t it just like me?/I’m cracking up out of the blue,” she asks after this break, with a hint of levity. Indeed, on Wildly Idle, Duffy displays a joy in opening herself up. Part of submission is admitting one’s own vulnerability and reliance on the intangible, which Duffy does many times here. “I don’t want no one else/It’s better to believe in something/Bigger than ourselves,” she sings on opener “Flower Glass.”
Three poems (“scenes,” per Duffy), are scattered throughout the record and are read by their authors: Kayla Ephros, Catherine Pond, and Lucy Blagg. Beneath their distorted voices, Duffy warps her instruments into haunting, ethereal atmospheres. Each poem purposefully addresses one of the motifs Duffy confronts on Wildly Idle: “Greater LA” probes the metropolis’ inherent despair, “Cowboy” subverts gender roles, and “Time Hole” questions the rapid pace of contemporary life. Like Jenny Hval’s collaborations with writer Annie Bielski, these additions work to minimize the distinction between poetry and song.
Listening to Wildly Idle (Humble Before the Void) reminds me of a line from Eve Babitz’s collection Slow Days, Fast Company: “I’ve been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I’ve loved and the ideas I’ve embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand it.” Duffy sings of romances come and gone without ever sounding jaded or spiteful; future love promises a mystery, a sensuality that’s open like the road. “I just wanna be a bad boy/Baby in your arms tonight,” she murmurs at one point, with an Elvis-like softness. There’s a hope here that the unknown contains more positivities than anxieties. The final words on the album are “I’m gonna grow,” and there’s every reason to believe it’s a promise Duffy will keep.


The Italian composer recruits Parquet Courts and Karen O to pay tribute to the Italian city’s hedonistic 1980s heyday.

MILANO

“There was a sensation that everything was possible,” the fashion journalist Renata Molho has written of Milan in the 1980s. Money flowed, parties raged, and the streets were filled with glamorous foreigners. “It was a very superficial atmosphere, but it was vibrant,” Molho writes. That description goes to to the heart of the Italian composer Daniele Luppi’s MILANO. Luppi achieved his renown in Los Angeles, where he has worked as an arranger for artists like Gnarls Barkley and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but his own work harks back to his home country. Rome, his 2011 collaboration with Danger Mouse, was a soundtrack to an imaginary spaghetti western featuring high-profile guests like Jack White and Nora Jones. Now MILANO pays tribute to another bygone era in another city, one where he reveled as a teenager in the early 1980s.
In much the same way that utilizing White and Jones to evoke Ennio Morricone’s heyday didn’t make much sense on paper but somehow worked out on Rome, Luppi now recruits New Yorkers Parquet Courts and Karen O to pay tribute to the city nicknamed “Milano da bere” (or “drinking Milan”) due to its excesses. That city shared more than a few parallels with New York City—like Keith Haring’s floor-to-ceiling decoration of Milan’s Fiorucci store, for one thing—so it makes sense that Luppi’s album-length ode to that time and place also recalls the nascent sound of NYC punk.
Across MILANO’s frisky nine songs and half-hour run time, I’d be hard-pressed to identify Luppi’s fingerprints, aside from some bell chimes here and some sax squalls there. But when the pairing of Parquet Courts and Karen O is this inspired, who wouldn’t be inclined to step back and just let the sparks fly? Much in the way that one of the delights of HBO’s “The Deuce” is simply seeing James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal strut the mean streets of 1970s New York, hearing Andrew Savage and O voice the album’s many wound-up and desperate narrators is thrilling in its own right.
Parquet Courts nail a sound somewhere between late Velvet Underground, the Modern Lovers, and the Feelies (with a hearty nod to Pavement’s prime slack): gritty and seedy, bleary but somehow still bright-eyed. Savage’s jaded delivery on “Soul and Cigarette” evokes Lou Reed most explicitly, flatly singing of a “bloodthirsty saint with the soul of a whore” as the band shuffles behind him, a glint of glockenspiel brightening the corners of the song. Chimes and handclaps give a bit of bounce to “Mount Napoleon,” though the lyrics reveal a fraying underneath: nosebleeds and the wish for “a rock” (not, presumably, of the Cartier variety). Later, the band ventures into the detuned twang of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, and the skronking horns on “Café Flesh” tip a hat to New York’s no wave heritage.
On the songs that showcase O, the Courts’ sound ramps up, suggesting a cocktail of Benzedrine, espresso, and overflowing ashtrays. The nervy guitar jangle and bouncing bass of “Talisa” revamps VU’s “Real Good Time Together” into the perfect springboard for O, who pouts, mewls, and doot-doots across the ode to former model Talisa Soto. Post-punk wiriness underpins “The Golden Ones,” where the spindly guitars and throbbing basslines snap against O’s pouty come-on: “With me and you/The pleasure is all yours.”
“Memphis Blues Again” slyly name-checks a Bob Dylan song, and Savage’s voice frays as it exhausts its rhymes, while the band nails the anxious air of early Fall sides. The Fall comes to mind again when the groove tightens into a stomp on standout “Flush,” in which O plays her most petulant and assured character on the album, sneering and strutting over the beat as she yelps like Mark E. Smith recast as a fashionista.
Luppi’s name may never cross your mind during playback of MILANO; rather than display his talents as composer and arranger, he lets his casting and talent booking do all the talking. But O’s delivery throughout would certainly be enough to catch Molho’s attention. Like the city in its ’80s golden age, MILANO is superficial, vibrant, and full of possibility.


Kristina Esfandiari and her band move from the darkness to light on their second album, taking liberally from post-rock, grunge, and doom to tell a tale equally inspired by a childhood brush with death and Paradise Lost.

Celestial Blues

For King Woman founder Kristina Esfandiari, the darkness is the point, and everything else is negotiable. That impulse has given rise to Miserable’s doomgaze dirges, Dalmatian’s damned hip-hop, Sugar High’s unsettling R&B, and NGHTCRWLR’s industrial mutations; it has allowed each of her many projects room to fully develop without succumbing to an overstuffed kitchen-sink mindset. On the Jack Shirley produced Celestial Blues, King Woman’s sophomore full-length for Relapse Records, doom metal is a bit player in Esfandiari’s perpetually expanding musical universe, dominated here by post-rock’s dynamic shifts, shoegaze’s woozy walls of distortion, and grunge’s prickly depressive weight. The riffs are still as heavy as a church tower, but Esfandiari tamps down the more aggressive aspects of King Woman’s earlier work here, turning towards the light instead for an exploration of the apocalypse, religious trauma, and life after death.
Inspired by a childhood near-death experience, Celestial Blues evolved into a meditation on spiritual warfare, personal rebirth, and paradise lost. Slowly unfurling to somber chimes and Esfandiari’s throaty murmur, the title track contains a sing-song lyricism that seems simple, but weighs heavily. “I want to ascend until we collide/I want to crash my heart into the divine,” Esfandiari croons into the abyss, setting the tone for the album’s overarching message of defiance. Though the record is best enjoyed in one sitting, obvious standouts pierce through its thick, inviting blitz. “Morning Star” takes the guise of a dreamy Satanic lullaby, the massive-sounding “Coil” verges on the ecstatic, while the pleasantly disorienting choral gymnastics of “Golgotha” mask its bloody, self-sacrificial subject matter.
Esfandiari is firmly at the helm, and her lived experience of surviving an early life steeped in religious fundamentalism is what drives the story forward. Whether she’s spinning secrets in a husky whisper or dipping into a slurred murmur, her languorous vocals take center stage throughout the proceedings, even when her bandmates, guitarist Peter Arensdorf and drummer Joseph Raygoza, muscle their way into a deserved spotlight (as on the propulsive second half of “Morning Star” or in the doomsday leads of “Psychic Wound”). King Woman also continues to dip its toes into doom metal’s primordial slurry when the mood strikes and the riff fits, diving headfirst into a satisfying post-doom ooze on the macabre “Boghz,” which also sees Esfandiari explore the creepiest contours of her eminently pliable voice. Closer “Paradise Lost,” takes inspiration from John Milton’s epic poem, but eschews the original’s ornate prose in favor of stark, nakedly personal lyrics and the album’s most delicate, reverent vocal performance. After seemingly letting the listener down easy, it leaves them alone with their thoughts—perhaps the cruelest fate of all.
Celestial Blues is an exploration of spiritual healing and survival that’s been shellacked in a veneer of grungy malaise, heavy post-rock, and blissed-out darkness, wrapped up in Biblical allegory and set ablaze. King Woman’s ability to outdo themselves continues apace, and the bar continues to rise each time Esfandiari sheds her skin anew. She is living proof that once you’ve already made it through hell, the only path forward is up.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Michael Milosh, the Toronto-based singer/producer who fronts Rhye, has been releasing his own music for nearly a decade. If you discovered Milosh via Rhye, don’t expect to hear his unmistakeable voice surrounded by the same kind of silky soul on this chilly solo offering.

Jetlag

Last fall, “The Fall” seemed to appear out of nowhere, a tantalizing, faceless wisp of sultry R&B without a bio blurb’s worth of context. As details slowly congealed leading up to the release of Rhye’s excellent debut album Woman this past March, many listeners were introduced to Michael Milosh, the man—and yes, many were reluctant to believe, that’s totally a dude—who was effortlessly braiding his voice through Robin Hannibal’s silky tracks. Milosh has been producing and releasing his own music for nearly a decade via L.A.’s Plug Research, a label with an aesthetic of high-polish adult contempo grooves personified by the Toronto transplant. That same voice is in peak form on Jetlag, but if you discovered Milosh via Rhye, don’t expect to hear it surrounded by the same kind of sultry soul. Left to his own devices, Milosh prefers chillier confines.
First, a word on that voice, which—stay with me here—reminds me of no less than Michael McDonald, in a specific and positive way. The two evoke different types of soul—McDonald’s furry baritone is a simulacrum of church-trained 60s and 70s belters while Milosh’s lithe countertenor owes much more to the hushed tones of Quiet Storm legends Sade and Anita Baker—but they’re equally transfixing, in a way that suggests an uncannily human android programmed to the “soul” setting. Each voice doesn’t sound like the product of training as much as something that automatically emanated the first time they set themselves to try and sing. Much in the same manner that McDonald manifested his alien instrument as a radiant background production cog on Steely Dan’s infinitely layered productions, Milosh prefers to highlight the otherworldly affects of his voice. At several points on Jetlag, he ceases singing words and simply weaves his wordless croon amidst the other ProTool layers, creating the sensation that you’re driving past his voice as it sits on the side of a highway at night. Milosh’s skill in twisting and stretching his voice is his greatest gift as an artist. The way he and Hannibal gently interweave layers of these feather-light sighs at the start of “Major Minor Love", for instance, is a highlight of the Rhye LP.
Milosh’s crisp electronic soundscapes work mainly as contrast, immaculate bedding designed to melt away as his warm voice slithers in. At his best on Jetlag, Milosh builds up his tracks in the simple interest of pulling them back to let the vocal take over. The first minute of “Hear in You” is a perfect example of this. The first minute of the song is pieced together from the Junior Boys/Apparat template of chilly electro-pop, but merely serves as walk-on music for the dramatic reveal of the track’s simple hook, on which Milosh stretches a syllable—the “ohhh” at the end of “know”—at just the right time, for just the right duration, and repeats it over and over. The effect is a specific kind of listening pleasure, of the late-90s/early 2000s post-Portishead/Massive Attack moment, when groups like Zero 7 and Morcheeba boiled off trip-hop’s sense of danger, leaving it with a glut of sticky mood. When songs from that “chillout” moment of electro-R&B are done well—like Zero 7’s shimmering “Destiny,” say—they nail a perfect middleground between passion and propriety. “Hear in You” finds itself in that orbit, as does “Don’t Call It”, on which Milosh dips into his more gutsy lower register amidst what sounds like an adult-contempo remake of Radiohead’s Amnesiac.
The passion and yearning of “Destiny” was of a particular sort, Sia Furler opening the song by admitting to watching porn in her hotel dressing gown. This style of longing for human contact to counteract the cold, sterilized distance of travel is all over Jetlag, recalling another turn-of-the-century groove-based album: Thievery Corporation’s The Mirror Conspiracy, a cosmopolitan soundtrack for a specific kind of jetsetting rich guy—“Smooth Operator”s trust-funded step-son. Jetlag draws from this DNA, though Milosh evokes a starker, more purposefully mundane scenario: a design firm executive coldly shuffling a leatherbound portfolio through people movers in stark-white airports, and glassily staring into the near distance. It’s impossible for Milosh’s voice not to signify desire, and Jetlag is an album on which the glow of intimate passions arises from immaculate interior design.


LA electronic duo Youth Code infuse their hellish soundscapes with elements of melodic coldwave, charging power electronics, and even hardcore. The result, the band's self-titled debut,  is both uncompromising and consuming.

Youth Code

In recent years, electronic musicians have invested a good deal of energy into excavating lesser known sub-genres and revitalizing them in contemporary ways. But while you could easily tag dozens of different acts under everything from darkwave to acid house to trip-hop, real-life couple Sara Taylor and Ryan George, aka Los Angeles' Youth Code, are one of only a precious few reviving industrial-thrashed electronic body music. Though they're not shy about their influences-- everything from Skinny Puppy to Wax Trax! Records are evident touchstones of inspiration for the confrontational music the pair make-- it doesn't make them genre purists. On their self-titled full-length debut, Youth Code infuse their hellish soundscapes with elements of melodic coldwave, charging power electronics, and even hardcore. The result is both uncompromising and consuming, suggesting the "body" in their EBM was formed in an early Cronenberg film: Disfigured, mutant, and grossly compelling.
Youth Code have only being recording for a little over a year, but their chops suggest the work of a more informed and consistent outfit. Chalk it up to studious ears and hard work: Taylor works as a tour manager, George has bummed around in various different punk and hardcore bands, and both eschew the constrictions of "scenes" while committing themselves to DIY ethics. A recent list the pair drummed-up for self-titled magazine, titled "Youth Code's Top Ten Industrial Songs That Have Nothing To Do With Nine Inch Nails," showcased their curious blend of influences and disinterest in convention. A cassette released last December translated those ideas well, despite sounding uncomfortably shrill thanks to its homemade quality (three of those tracks have been re-recorded for the LP). With Youth Code, everything is about depth, the corroded atmospheres and indelicate but fierce percussive elements. Though it's short, it's a brutal listen, like being brained with a fire extinguisher in the middle of a nitrous hit. Exhausting, surely, but there's a propulsion and a warped tunefulness on display that keeps you on your toes, even if Taylor and George didn't intend that to be taken literally.
For as violent and caustic as Youth Code is, there's also balance. Their hardware sounds rusted and cranky, but the variety of sounds the two are able to conjure-- gunshot snare cracks, boiler room clankings, rubbery synths, metal-on-metal-- keeps the slavish 4/4 tempos engaging. And while it's no one's idea of a traditional dance record, there's no denying that Taylor and George are beat freaks, keeping rhythms insistent and corporeal. The strobe-lit highlight "Carried Mask"'s elevated heart rate and ping-ponging synths sounds like something a Crystal Castles fan could relate to, while "What Is the Answer" is almost like some kind of demented funk exercise. Everything here taps into a sort of dystopian feel, like a Satanic reimagining of Brad Fiedel's Terminator 2 score, all skulls and twisted metal and flames as far as the eye can see.
If this all seems a little over-the-top, it's because it is-- Youth Code don't really do subtle, but their full commitment to these theatrics is what makes the music work. Opener "Let the Sky Burn" is a harrowing introduction, complimented by George's putrid, strangulated screams and spoken word snippets from downer newscasts ("We have an obligation to every last victim of this illegal aggression, because all this carnage has been done in our name," a woman vows, making everything about the track-- right down to its title-- chillingly timely). Still, Youth Code isn't completely impervious to familiar trappings. Thanks to those rigid tempos, monotony is bound to set in. And though repetition is part of its hammering appeal, things eventually begin to grey a bit as the record moves on, losing the punch of the pure blacks and neon reds of the first half. And though those spoken word samples that pepper the album do more obstructing than enhancing, there's no hampering Youth Code's intentions. "I love pop music but at the end of the day I know we're not going to write a fucking pop record," Taylor recently told I Die You Die. "So it has to be raw and fucked up."


Sadistic is the only way to describe it-- a conscious effort toward slapping away all the little hands clamoring for ...

They Were Wrong So We Drowned

Sadistic is the only way to describe it-- a conscious effort toward slapping away all the little hands clamoring for more of They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top's antagonistic punk-funk. After winning enough early praise to make most lesser bands blush and acquiesce to the demands of a fanbase craving more of the same, Liars hinted that they were not in the business of catering to expectations. You want the battery (acid)-powered post-punk that drove all the Williamsburg hipsters wild in 2001? You want the brittle aggression of their debut? Well, you'll get wind-up toy funeral dirges and oblique, numbing sound collages, and you'll like it! ...Or leave it. It seems Liars don't much care either way.
Liars know why their debut won them instant acclaim. It's no accident that They Were Wrong So We Drowned bears so little resemblance to their debut. Circumstance plays a part-- the old want-ad rhythm section hightailed it prior to recording, leaving longtime associate Julian Gross to take over on drums-- but more importantly, to Liars, they've beaten dance-punk at its own game and are ready to move on. So maybe masochism is a better way to describe what's going on here-- what else could cause a band to willfully alienate their supporters? Independent music isn't exactly the easiest racket in town, after all, even if you're blessed with almost instant celebrity (relatively speaking). But to walk away from your clearest, most accessible shot at success, to dare any fairweather trend-riders to keep listening after the wave has crested-- well, you have to be more than ready for a backlash; you need to want to savor it.
If I'm treating a lukewarm reception for this album among Liars fans as a foregone conclusion, forgive me; the fact is, We Were Wrong is such an entirely different creature than They Threw Us All in a Trench that I envision widespread strife caused by its polarizing force, street-team members fighting turf wars, brother against brother. I envision the faithful losing faith, while simultaneously, former detractors, uh, tracting by the dozens in response to such a reversal. Older tracks like "Everyday Is a Child with Teeth" only hint at the screeching atonality, or the formlessness, of "If You're a Wizard, Then Why Do You Wear Glasses", or the overwhelming boredom of "Read the Book That Wrote Itself". These tracks aren't so much unwelcome as they are completely, utterly baffling in context. Nothing Liars have done in the past will provide listeners with an adequate transition to these anti-songs.
For better or worse, though, nebulous, arrhythmic atmospherics comprise a significant portion of the album. When Liars remove the formal structure of songs and descend into carnival experimentalism, they do so not with the precision of intent, but with a punk vibe-- the sound of people attacking instruments with a desire to play that far outstrips any overt talent. Though the band has challenged listeners with this album, their intent doesn't seem as much like a desire to overtly alienate their audience as to embrace their artistic freedom.
Contrary to what some have claimed, They Were Wrong is listenable, and intentionally so: the band frequently finds ways to successfully straddle the fence between form and noise ("They Don't Want Your Corn They Want Your Kids", and the brain-stealing chant of "Broken Witch", among others), though most of the time, it's admittedly impenetrable and alienating. I'll be honest: I count myself among those turned off by the shift of focus. But isn't Liars' obvious intention not to pander to their fans' expectations-- even when it results in abrasive, half-formed lab disasters-- deserving of respect? Even laudable?
They can be commended, to a degree, but "there's no talent to obscurity" as your old pal Chris Ott once said; when it comes to music, it's not hard to not be popular. A lot of this experimentation is simply in the name of narrative-- a rumination on the nature of witchcraft and the sordid politics surrounding the Salem witch trials-- which makes the decision to show preference to such intensely esoteric structures even more questionable. Although a little S&M; makes a good backdrop for the twisted subject matter of black magick and bedevilment, etc., Angus Andrews' vocals and lyrics are, as a constant, a complete non-factor. As such, the "concept" isn't any more apparent than the songwriting, conveying more in mood and implication than any substance. So as it stands, Liars mostly abandon their jittery dance blasts to highly mixed effect, to tell a tale that just gets lost in their deep, dark woods.
But they don't even totally see that through-- the album is undercut, so to speak, by two songs capable of going toe-to-toe with anything Liars have done to date. "We Fenced Other Houses with the Bones of Our Own" is nothing but nervous electronics and the steady, dooming pulse of a bass drum counting down the moments until "kingdom come" amidst a steady chant that echoes the numbing opening verse of "Grown Men Don't Just Fall in the River, Just Like That", before sliding cleanly into "They Don't Want Your Corn". It only paves the way for the eventual, epic assault of "Hold Hands and It Will Happen Anyway"; as the denouement to this story arc, the ritual concludes, the Earth splits, cracks, and erupts with hellfire and the rotten scent of sulfur as, for one brief moment, Liars summon up some of the (immensely entertaining) demons that infested their first album. The remarkable cacophony is fantastic as a stand-alone song, and does its part to bolster the minor sense of story, but only weakens the album as a whole by confronting its flaws head-on. In the end, the flash-in-the-pan excellence of that track sums up They Were Wrong perfectly: An entire album of exposition is not justified by one moment of revelation, but if nothing else, I can respect their intentions.


The duo depicts moments of great longing and melancholy on their sensual and gloomy new album.

Venus in Leo

In the wake of bassist and founding member Sean Stewart’s passing in 2010, HTRK’s sound changed considerably. The now-duo shed the cold, industrial leanings of their earlier releases for a more overtly sensual approach, something that could soundtrack moments of intimacy or ennui, or both.
HTRK explores these same rich themes on Venus in Leo, but the mood is suffocated by melancholy. If the steely electronics of Work (work, work) recalled Antoine D’Agata’s alluringly grotesque photography, Venus in Leo suggests those same photos shot in broad daylight, all obscurity and mystery erased. HTRK are at their most vulnerable here, sounding in desperate need of sating desires before they are paralyzed  by listlessness and disappointment.
On opener “Into the Drama,” Jonnine Standish’s vocals are equal parts disaffected and fatigued as she contemplates her obsessive tendencies. “And you dance me to the edge of romance/And you called and I heard/I hang onto every word,” she sings over the nonchalant strumming of an acoustic guitar. Her craving for physical contact is palpable on “Mentions,” a track that details everyday experiences with beauty counter workers (“The touch of your hand to my face/And the way that you’re talkin’ softly/It’s not enough attention for me”) and social media (“Even with another mention/You should’ve made a difference by now"), and how both prove insufficient. Even on the woozy cover of Missy Elliott’s “Hit ’Em Wit Da Hee,” Standish highlights specific lyrics—like the evocative “slurp me swiftly”—to highlight her yearning.
More than any other HTRK album, Venus in Leo is filled with anguish. It looms over “New Year’s Day,” where Standish confesses her fears about the upcoming year: “I’ve got a sinking feeling I’m gonna do the wrong thing, eventually.” On “New Year’s Eve,” she recalls a failed teenage romance and broods on how it has come to define her. For Standish, her memories are a remorseless window into the person she is today, and the one she thinks she’s destined to be forever. As such, Venus in Leo is an album for those who feel doomed to a repeating cycle of failed loves and dashed hopes, for when one’s existence can resemble the fading apparitions that adorn the album cover. “I could be free somehow,” Standish sings on “Dying of Jealousy.” That sense of freedom—tangible yet unattainable—makes Venus in Leo as harrowing as it is intimate.


Local Natives have a familiar sound-- rustic vocals, harmonies, clattering percussion-- but songwriting skill and youthful energy mark their striking debut.

Gorilla Manor

Gorilla Manor, the debut album from L.A.'s Local Natives, features rustic and yearning vocals, three-part harmonies, clattering percussion, wiggly guitar leads, euphoric chanting, and a Talking Heads cover. In short, the Silver Lake quintet have followed indie rock's major players in recent years-- they knew how to dress for success in 2010. Great for them-- now, what's in it for you? Plenty as it turns out.
Local Natives have already gained a foothold in parts of Europe-- their album has received attention in the UK and they graced the cover of Scandinavia's Sonic magazine late last year-- at home in L.A., and online. With good reason too: Advance singles "Airplanes" and "Sun Hands" recalled elements of Dodos or the Fleet Foxes. The best comparison perhaps is that they're sort of a West Coast Grizzly Bear-- right down to naming an album after the location in which it was recorded. Yet whereas Grizzly Bear's Yellow House is a cozy, isolated New England seaside shack, Local Natives' Gorilla Manor is a squalid Orange County party pad.
At first listen that seems off-- the chops and compositional sense here are the most immediately impressive part of the album. But dig deeper and you realize Local Natives never lose sight of the pleasures of being a youthful rock band-- right down to themes of wanderlust and discovery. "Oh, to see it with my own eyes," goes to the central lyrics to album opener "Wide Eyes". This inquisitiveness and quest for self-knowledge may as well be the record's life-affirming and open-armed thesis statement.
Indeed, this optimism relishes experience and finds opportunity where others may see obstacles: Garage rocker "Camera Talk" initially reads like a harried travelogue ("We're running through the aisles/ Of the churches still in style"), but the [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| band still comes off like they're living the dream-- " [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| And even though I can't be sure/ Memory tells me that these times are worth working for."  "Airplanes" is a tribute to one of the bandmember's pilot grandfather, and while the counterpoints of strings and piano are buoyant enough it's the evocative images (chopsticks from his time spent in Japan, a well-thumbed encyclopedia) that indicate his life was well-lived.
But even where the lyrics get more obtuse (a Skype exchange with an ex is likened to a "Cubism Dream"), there's almost always a strong pulse running through the busy, precise compositions: "Shape Shifter", for example, is about impressionistic themes of self-reckoning but the sentiment is also reflected in the song's arrangement. At certain points, it's Gorilla Manor's sludgiest track; at others, it's the most quicksilver and agile. The strings and harmonies of the glacial "Cards & Quarters" and "Who Knows, Who Cares?" are gorgeous, but drum rolls and washes of cymbal hint at imminent collapse. Only closer "Sticky Thread" offers calm.
So while the record's second half dials back the tempo, stuck in its midsection is a cover of the Talking Heads, hardly a band that would be considered "loose." "Warning Sign" isn't the most canonical of their songs, but taking it on is an audacious decision for a band that would be wise to let the comparisons come to them first. They retain the elasticity of the bassline and the general verse-chorus structure, but that's about it: David Byrne's pinprick vocals are treated with melodic contour and supple harmonies, the breakdown veers from nervous to joyfully emphatic, and the guitars soften around the edges. Whether it's "better" than the original is besides the point-- at least for four minutes, Local Natives take ownership of it, fully integrating what might have been an incompatible hard left turn into the record's seamless whole. True, we tend to bow at novelty and innovation, but Gorilla Manor proves to be a refreshing reminder of the pleasures of synthesis.


The indie pop veterans’ sixth album fuses the laid-back sound of 1990s soft rock with pedal steel and countrypolitan filigree. It’s lean, clean—and a little sleepy.

Daniel

For Real Estate’s sixth album, the New Jersey jangle-pop quintet decamped to Nashville’s legendary RCA Studio A, the epicenter of country music’s post-war shift out of its rougher, twangier roots designed to accommodate large vocal and instrumental ensembles. For a band that’s slowly been broadening its sound, it’s an ideal venue. But as intriguing as the notion of “Martin Courtney goes countrypolitan” is, Real Estate’s relocation was less concerned with the musical possibilities than the symbolic ones. Studio A has made pop crossover dreams come true; so has producer Daniel Tashian, a Grammy winner for his work on Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour. Unlike Golden Hour, there’s no disco excursion on Daniel—they already pulled off that trick on 2020’s The Main Thing—but it’s the cleanest and leanest album they’ve ever made.
As such, Daniel may seem like a sort of retreat. The Main Thing was intended to be Real Estate’s statement album, but as with so many pandemic-era projects, the lack of an accompanying tour made it an unfinished argument. Left to his own devices, Courtney recorded a solo project that tacked away from extended arrangements and jazzy sophistipop. Some of that was out of necessity (he tracked the bulk of the instrumentation on his own); some of it was the lower expectations for an album that wouldn’t be played live any time soon. And some of it was the pleasure of writing an indie-pop song like “Corncob,” which put pedal steel to a gorgeous melody that recalled the Shins at their most magisterial. Daniel carries that pleasure forward, pedal steel rig in tow.
There’s an urgency to these songs, even at their lightest. On “Haunted World,” Real Estate snap from AM country gold into chiming choruses with the efficiency and feel of a crack studio group; guest musician Justin Schipper’s pedal steel curls around Matt Kallman’s soft-rock keyboard fills like cigar smoke. The ill-at-ease “Market Street” shuffles R.E.M. albums like playing cards—from a high-stepping, almost four-on-the-floor clip that would be at home on Green or Document, Julian Lynch draws a snarling guitar line out of “Ignoreland.” According to press materials, the band wrote Daniel with “’90s soft-rock radio” in mind, which presumably means adult alternative instead of, I don’t know, Richard Marx. “I hear a song there inside my head,” Courtney sings on the bright-eyed lead single “Water Underground.” “Can’t lose it yet, try to make it stay.” The chorus suggests that the song may be “There She Goes.”
But for all Real Estate’s attention to detail—I’m particularly fond of drummer Sammi Niss’ syncopations on “Freeze Brain” and “You Are Here,” which recall the sampled loops that littered Triple A radio in the ’90s—there’s still a sense of incompletion, that in the push to make a particular kind of record, something has been forgotten. As a pop album, Daniel has little room for the jammy excursions of 2021’s Half a Human EP, which at its best suggested a chicken-fried Popol Vuh. But surely they could’ve broken off some of that for, say, the suspended instrumental break of “Haunted World,” which sounds like a roomful of musicians staring at each other, waiting for someone to jump. And the rest could’ve gone to bassist Alex Bleeker’s customary showcase, the cosmic-country trifle “Victoria.” Draped in steel and dotted with crypticisms (“Your consultant has gone out to sea”), it lasts long enough to conjure the idea of a college-rock Flatlanders before evaporating.
The band’s other lodestar during recording was Automatic for the People: a collection of reveries on memory and mortality that—like so much R.E.M. did—is filled with wonder and mystery. Real Estate can do the former, always could, but the latter proves elusive. Some lines here feel like placeholder dialogue that made it to post-production; they land so flat that in aggregate, it feels like a deadpan bit: “Meanwhile on Market Street/Things are happening to some degree,” “We sit in furnished rooms/Listen to Harvest Moon,” “The day becomes the night.” It’s not pop directness so much as straight reportage. (In the classic suburban tradition, Real Estate were always better at listing anxieties than examining them.) The effect is like having beers in your neighbor’s garage. You say goodnight, the door comes down; by the time you’re home you forgot what you talked about. Still, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good hang.
The architects of the Nashville Sound—the people who built and staffed Studio A—reached the suburbs by transplanting the perceived realness of hillbilly music into a pillowy pop container. At their best, the resulting records were glossy and gorgeous: everyday emotions pumped up until they could fill a stadium. Daniel conjures some moments that feel almost as big: the existential skitter of “Airdrop,” the hopeful power-pop pulse of “Flowers.” Real Estate already had the suburbs on lock. In trying to recover their essence on Music Row, 15 years on, it seems they’re not taking that connection for granted.