The former Mac DeMarco guitarist shifts to tepid synths and limp beats on his fourth album, a pastiche of references beyond his reach.

Helium

Is it possible to evaluate art without making some assumptions about an artist’s intentions? The imperfect aesthetics of indie rock offer a case study: Is the production “lo-fi” or a result of incompetent recording? Is the musicianship loose or lazy? Are those off-key vocals subversive, or can this person just not sing? This conundrum becomes particularly acute when discussing self-styled slacker figurehead Mac DeMarco and his “jizz jazz” acolytes, typified by a veneer of unctuous production that replicates the pallid soft-core of an American Apparel photo shoot. This includes Homeshake, the popular project of former DeMarco guitarist Peter Sagar. That associative context made it easier to appreciate Homeshake’s previous albums of offbeat, gag-filled psych-pop. But on Helium, his fourth, he trades guitars for synths and scrubbed-up production while citing experimental influences. That question about intent becomes pointed: Does Helium aspire to do anything more than replicate and compound the boredom that inspired it?
As may be expected from a guy whose previous albums were titled In the Shower and Midnight Snack, Sagar owns the inconsequence of his music. Nearly every song on Helium thrums on an ambient social anxiety and a refrigerator-hum kind of chill, quintessential elements of a millennial online persona. “Everyone I know lives in my cell phone,” he speak-sings on the album’s very first line. Elsewhere, the lyrics read like sativa-enhanced observations on technology and extroverted introversion, the kind of stuff minor celebrities pass off as insight to the tune of a thousand retweets.
Sagar forays into styles that are, by design, somewhat boring: smooth jazz, quiet storm, hold Muzak, stuff that is so antithetical to counterculture that it almost becomes avant-garde. The doddering synths and dashed drums of Helium should be familiar to anyone who passed through the altered zones of experimental R&B in the early 2010s. Where How to Dress Well and Autre Ne Veut revealed themselves as powerhouse vocalists the moment they got a budget to match their vision, Sagar only works in signifiers. The bass slap of “Like Mariah” is a @Seinfeld2000 gag translated to song, divorced from the rhythm and friction of funk; the song itself is a one-note joke about having a five-octave range and, lol, how weird that would be. The drum sample of “Just Like My” appropriates New Jack Swing in the most obvious way, swapping out timeless songwriting for Sagar’s best shower falsetto.
What’s more, Helium is supposedly influenced by the experimental textures of Visible Cloaks, footwork pioneer DJ Rashad, and next-generation footwork warper Jlin. But maybe he’s just reading The Wire? Helium moves with the numbing pace of a stubborn hangover, and its drums have the grain and snap of limp celery. The alleged impact of Young Thug, one of the most inventive and unpredictable vocalists of the 21st century, on these inert melodies is anyone’s guess. The lyrics, Sagar says, were inspired by a Murakami binge—while the narrators do share a general displacement, he lacks any sense of the surreal.
The sheer lethargy of Helium at least creates, under anything less than the slightest scrutiny, a coherent experience that can be praised as a “vibe.” And numbers don’t lie—several Homeshake songs have amassed more than 10 million Spotify streams, a testament to the benefits of blending in with any permutation of “Chill” or “Indie” playlists. After all, they are built to satisfy requests like one Sagar makes here. “I need something medium,” he sings, underscoring how the paralyzing malaise of Helium can’t even get him there anymore.


The “120 Minutes” revivalists trade manic exuberance for panicked agitation on a debut album that applies their infectious brand of motorik jangle rock to lovelorn ruminations and geopolitical laments.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Hope Downs

Hope Downs

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are either the world’s most meandering pop band or its most efficient jam band. Either way, for their purposes, jamming is as much a lyrical strategy as musical one. Over the course of two excellent EPs, the Melbourne quintet has mastered an adrenalized, infectious brand of motorik jangle rock that’s both warmly nostalgic and thrillingly unpredictable. The band’s three alternating singer-guitarists—Tom Russo, Fran Keaney, and Joe White—load their songs with fragmented narratives, overlapping dialogue, and impressionistic detail. Although the literal meaning of their lyrics isn’t always easy to discern, the internal dramas that play out in each track are deeply felt, and the jokes always land. RBCF may careen like a runaway locomotive, but they’ve decked out each car with its own distinct decor and unique cast of characters.
The band sustains that brisk momentum throughout its full-length debut, Hope Downs—although, at 10 songs and 35 minutes, the album is only slightly longer than the EPs that preceded it. Rolling Blackouts are still harnessing their strengths as erudite tunesmiths and freewheeling rock’n’rollers, and the past few years of steady touring have transformed them into a crack live act. Hope Downs feeds off that onstage intensity: “An Air Conditioned Man” kicks off the record like a car chase joined already in progress, with Russo and White’s chiming guitar lines slowly unraveling into dueling solos, while drummer Marcel Tussie trips up the steady backbeat with destabilizing fills. As the song hits a fever pitch, Keaney’s lovelorn ruminations give way to a detached, spoken-word denouement, with Russo emerging like a voice inside Keaney’s head to amplify his torment. “You walk past the wall you first kissed her against/How could you forget,” Russo intones. “Did it ever matter in the first place?” His languorous drawl has a sedative effect on the song, which—like the pent-up desire it chronicles—flames out into a smoky apparition of its former self.
Rolling Blackouts songs have always been fueled by a jittery energy; though Keaney is billed as the band’s acoustic guitarist, he’s more like a second percussionist, his ceaseless strums propelling the songs with bongo-like fury. As “An Air Conditioned Man” vividly illustrates, however, Hope Downs radiates panicked agitation more than manic exuberance. Sure, the band continues to function as an ’80s college-rock fantasy camp: “Talking Straight” packs in all the post-punk propulsion, needling jangle, and crestfallen harmonies of an I.R.S.-era R.E.M. classic, while “Bellarine” practically begs you to sing the Go-Betweens’ “Was There Anything I Could Do?” over its opening riff. But RBCF are hardly operating in a blissful record-collector bubble. On “Mainland,” they put their own privilege under the microscope, with Russo recounting a recent trip to his ancestors’ homeland near Sicily, where bathers enjoyed postcard-perfect waters not far from where refugees were swimming for their lives. The beautifully downcast “Cappuccino City” paints an immersive yet damning portrait of café culture, singing of “FM on the stereo/Belgians in the Congo” as he subtly threads the needle between simple Western pleasures and colonialist violence.
Thirty years ago, RBCF’s brand of alternative rock would have made them ripe for crossover fame. But these days, their “120 Minutes”-era sound has been pushed to the margins—and not just of the pop charts. Even within the realm of contemporary indie, the band is a glorious anomaly. Sophisticated and subversive in equal measure, their staccato sing-alongs come on pristine and precise, then unspool in surprising directions as decorum gives way to abandon. Rolling Blackouts may occupy an empty playground on the modern rock landscape, but that gives them the freedom to run wild in that wide open space, inventing their own games and making up the rules as they go.


Collaborating with producer Lynyn, the chameleonic Chicago musician offers a toned-down vision of his exuberant experimental pop.

Are You Happy EP

As he’s cycled through hip-hop, math rock, and jazz, Nnamdi Ogbonnaya, a.k.a. NNAMDÏ, has always exuded zany energy. On his newest EP, Are You Happy, he tones things down. He and Lynyn, aka Conor Mackey, his bandmate in the experimental jazz group Monobody, began writing these songs in 2020 as a way to find happiness during “a time of introspection when things were generally bleak.” This goal gives the EP its title, but the music lingers longest at its most melancholy. It feels a little foggier than the irreverent NNAMDÏ we’re used to, as if the attempt to manifest musical joy uncovered its own form of dismay.
Most NNAMDÏ albums are self-produced, but Lynyn produced Are You Happy in its entirety, locating a zippy, Auto-Tune-heavy sound at a novel intersection of IDM, late-2010s Charli XCX, and 808s & Heartbreak. Vocal manipulation is nothing new for NNAMDÏ; his 2017 breakthrough DROOL featured near-constant pitch-shifting, and 2020’s BRAT pushed the formula, leaping between rumbling lows and helium highs. The vocal tricks went hand-in-hand with NNAMDÏ’s shapeshifting melodic and production choices, but they’re less effective amid Lynyn’s brisk, streamlined breakbeats and early-morning tones. As the silken electronics of “Doing Too Much” accelerate into double-time, NNAMDÏ’s Auto-Tuned falsetto struggles to keep up. A brief moment of clarity arrives in the second verse, but this too yields to effect-laden vocals that are all but swallowed by the hefty percussion.
Lynyn’s production best elevates NNAMDÏ when his lyrics and delivery lean gloomier. “Are you happy at all? ’Cause I’ve seen you smiling, and I want to feel whatever you feel,” he sings on “Barely Reason for a Smile.” Lynyn adds a layer of brooding synths, deftly connecting the sentiment—darkness feels that much darker when you can’t find the light—with the sound. On “Backseat,” NNAMDÏ appears so eager to depart for a better life that any potential consequences don’t even register: “Hop in the backseat/Where you wanna ride to?/I can take you anywhere,” he sings, his voice descending from high to mid-range as fluttering synths brighten his fantasies. It’s an open invitation to join him wherever he goes, and the double-time, non-Auto-Tuned raps that follow are just as enticing.
As Are You Happy draws to a close, a guest verse from fellow Chicago musician and longtime NNAMDÏ associate Sen Morimoto illustrates why Lynyn’s production isn’t always the right fit for NNAMDÏ’s voice. Even as the oversized synths of “You Don’t Know” glitch and wobble, Morimoto’s verse sounds crystal clear. When he asks, “Why do I feel gaslit when the whites ask if I’m half white?” the question practically jumps out of the mix, his nonplussed delivery cutting through the hyperactive production like a diamond. NNAMDÏ’s voice, by contrast, oscillates almost as ballistically as the music—usually a big part of his charm, but here his words sink in somewhat indistinctly. On Are You Happy, it’s his most downcast and least eccentric vocals that feel paradoxically convincing.

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In his score to LeSean Thomas’ anime series about a Black samurai in medieval Japan, the Los Angeles musician aligns his visual obsessions with his wide-ranging musical instincts.

Yasuke

Midnight movies and anime have long played a crucial role in Flying Lotus’ aesthetic universe. Now, between the recently established film division of his Brainfeeder label, numerous scoring projects, and his foray into directing with the animated feature Kuso, the artist born Steven Ellison is increasingly making his mark on film as well as music. It’s a natural development for an artist who cites the influence of Shinya Tsukamoto’s grimy cyberpunk body-horror nightmare Tetsuo: The Iron Man as often as he does any given musician. The man did get his start composing Adult Swim bumpers, after all.
Ellison recently contributed original music to two anime productions: a Blade Runner 2049 anime prequel short and the series Carole & Tuesday. He makes his full-length anime scoring debut with Yasuke, a new Netflix series, animated by Japan’s MAPPA studio, that spins a wild cosmic yarn from the mysterious historical case of a real-life Black samurai during the much-romanticized shogunate era. Though the protagonist is based on an actual figure from the 16th century, the show is not limited to a medieval milieu: The action is charged with superpowered mecha, sojourns through time, trippy battle sequences, and sinister Catholic priests. Credit Yasuke creator LeSean Thomas, who made an early name for himself at Adult Swim—just like Flying Lotus—with these innovations before relocating to South Korea and eventually Japan. Thomas is much like the hero of his show: a self-starting, singularly driven individual who has carved out a new space for himself in a country and industry he is not native to.
Ellison is rendered as a samurai on the cover of the Yasuke soundtrack, though his sunglasses are as much Blade as medieval knight. It’s hard not to take that image as a metaphor: Like a samurai, Ellison is constantly testing himself and honing his skills. In a recent interview, he describes his emotional connection to the story of Yasuke, both as someone who has felt like an outsider in various worlds—a hip-hop producer and electronic DJ branching out into jazz, a musician making movies, a fan of David Lynch working with David Lynch—and more specifically because of his own experiences in Japan as a Black man. An intense and prolific collaborator, Ellison is far from being a lone ronin, but his style remains his own. His first few records as Flying Lotus are firmly part of the Los Angeles beat scene: a swirl of psychedelic drum patterns, fusion jazz bass lines, and the chirps and clicks of video game soundtracks. Soon, he’d flesh out that base pattern into something even more cosmic and expansive—truly maximalist works inspired by progressive rock and spiritual jazz. Yasuke strips down many of those familiar references and molds them into a more minimalist form. Though tracks like “Your Lord” incorporate sparse strings, flutes, and wooden percussion meant to evoke East Asian musical traditions, Ellison is careful to avoid falling prey to the tropes common to Western stereotypes of Japanese music.
Ellison said that he wanted to break with what one might expect from an anime score by a producer with roots in hip-hop, offering a counterpoint to explicitly beat-driven soundtracks like RZA’s Afro Samurai or the cult favorite Samurai Champloo, created by regular Flying Lotus collaborator Shinichirō Watanabe and with a soundtrack by the late lo-fi beats progenitor Nujabes. These shows use hip-hop as a way to break with anime tradition, whereas Yasuke pays homage to scoring conventions while also incorporating the occasional trap drum or mind-bending synthesizer effect. Ellison’s cues don’t overwhelm or outshine the show’s visuals; his synth-driven riffs are often comfortable hanging out on the margins, a series of undulating tones grounding the emotional movement of a scene.
As his profile has grown, Ellison’s albums have come to include more vocal features—2019’s Flamagra put Denzel Curry and David Lynch back to back—but the guests sometimes distract from the complexity and creativity of his actual compositions. Scoring, however, gives his work room to breathe. Right-hand man Thundercat’s falsetto is cast as the lead in the protagonist’s theme, “Black Gold,” a moment of dreamy reflection in a show frequently filled with kinetic action. Regular collaborator Niki Randa adds an angelic tenor to the stringed introspection of “Hiding in the Shadows” and the trip-hop of “Between Memories.”
There’s often a self-consciously vintage sound to Flying Lotus’ cues, from bubbling Moog tones reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Perrey and Wendy Carlos on “Shoreline Sus” to Vangelis and John Carpenter-type beats on “Pain and Blood” and “War Lords.” Though much of Yasuke is shaped by synthesizers, it’s only appropriate that drums begin to dominate during battle sequences, like the pounding tablas and timpanis of “Fighting Without Honor,” a flurry of jangly percussion that rings out as skilled warriors stand their ground. Ellison circles around hip-hop in his score and sometimes steps away from it entirely, but here and there he embraces it: “Mind Flight” climaxes with trap hi-hats, and “Survivors” is a boom-bap cut destined for YouTube rainy-day study playlists. The lone rap verse comes from Denzel Curry on “African Samurai,” who asserts himself over a sparse, trembling beat.
Taken into consideration alongside Ellison’s own growing body of animated work, Yasuke illuminates the kinship between Flying Lotus’ musical and visual instincts. Just as Thomas synthesizes sci-fi mecha and paperback fantasy with Japanese medieval history, Ellison’s universe is constructed out of jazz riffs, new-age synthesizer noodling, hip-hop drums, and the sounds of the many, many anime he’s ingested over the years, all coming together into one cohesive frame. In Yasuke’s self-consciously hybrid genre approach, Ellison finds himself well matched with a like-minded visual artist who dreams up new worlds and alternate timelines. Flying Lotus ultimately asks us to consider electronic music in similarly fantastical terms: Why limit yourself to one style or school of sound when an infinitude of timbres and textures is at your fingertips?

Buy: Rough Trade
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Glaswegian DJ Jackmaster is best known for his ability to traverse genres, decades and moods in a few sweaty hours, and the prestigious DJ-Kicks series is an ideal format for his talents.

DJ-Kicks

Glaswegian DJ Jackmaster (a.k.a Jack Revill) is best known for his ability to traverse genres, decades, and moods in a few sweaty hours. In one set he might jump from Hudson Mohawke to Anthony Shakir to Prince; an extended house jam might morph into crisp techno; those 808s or 909s you’re hearing could be a crate digger’s treasure or a soon-to-be chart topper. With Jackmaster, the *what’s next? *and *who’s that? *are part of the adventure. He’s a DJ’s DJ and a crowd pleaser, but not one before the other.
Jackmaster is also famous for what he is not: a composer. At a time when “producer” and “DJ” are nearly synonymous, Revill’s emphasis on purely DJing is almost quaint—but also refreshing. He knows his job is to curate, mix, and recontextualize other people’s records, not make his own music, and he’s good at it. A side-effect is that releases with Jackmaster’s name attached have more significance than they might for another artist, for whom a mix might be seen as an afterthought to their LPs or singles. So, for Jackmaster, an entry in the prestigious DJ-Kicks series provides an opportunity for listeners to get a taste of what he offers in a live setting, albeit with more time for him to tinker and refine. This is as much of a Jackmaster record as we’re ever likely to get.
Because Revill isn’t a producer, he’s had to build his fan base almost entirely by working in front of an audience. He plays a lot—some 200 times in a year, he’s said—and started in his teens. Today, Jackmaster remains a fixture at Numbers, the label he helps run and which has thrown an influential party for more than a decade. (The label has released music from SOPHIE, Rustie, SBTRKT, and Jamie xx, to name a few.) He’s the sort of name that is equally comfortable at festivals like the EDM-leaning Ultra or London's fabric, where you might find him on a bill with Ricardo Villalobos. At 30, Jackmaster isn’t old by any means, but he’s a veteran who can keep jaded audiences thirsty for the unexpected, and he brings that experience to his official releases.
Like his live shows, Jackmaster’s DJ-Kicks selections are an eclectic, precise, and unflaggingly propulsive collection of old and new. Revill has said the album should been read as a love letter to the music of Detroit, Chicago, and Glasgow and it’s true that *DJ-Kicks *may be Jackmaster’s most streamlined release to date. (He’s also said that it’s a look back at his early days as a straight-forward techno DJ.)
The record takes its time heating up with a mood-setting, scene-stealing cut from 1080p staple LNRDCROY before heading off to the races with an exclusive, deftly-edited vocal-driven track from Denis Sulta called “MSNJ”—already a club hit in advance of the mix. Other up-front winners include Massimiliano Pagliara’s “I Am Running All My Drum Machines At Once And Dancing,” whose title is an accurate description of its contents: it slides seamlessly into Chicago house legend Mike Dunn’s early ’90s cut “A Groove.” Another exclusive—Alcatraz Harry’s “Ode To Frankfurt”—is a fun and funky house track.
Jackmaster saves the highest highs for the third of the mix, building to his finale slowly and assuredly. A fantastic, exclusive Tessela cut, “Up (Demo Version),” is paired with Riccardo Villalobos’ “Logohitz,” for a bit of driving techno. It’s Jackmaster at his best—a combination of the new and now with a beloved mainstay. The album ends with a three-punch denouement starting with Underground Resistance co-founder Robert Hood’s “The Pace,” then a trip to mid-’90s Detroit with Overmow’s “Convulsions,” and, finally, Pom Pom, who closes the mix breathlessly and beautifully with “POM POM 18 B2.”
According to Jackmaster, putting together *DJ-Kicks *was marred by near disaster. Assembly started in a rush while DJing on a cruise, was set back by a lost hard drive, and took four or five complete revisions before he was happy with it. Listening to the record today, however, none of those seams show. Jackmaster lets his choices breathe and doesn’t hurry from cut to cut for the sake of covering more ground, even as tracks pool together and reform anew. A fun way to listen to the record might be to read the release dates of the tracks—’90s, ’00s, ’10s—as they fly by. It's the sort of fluidity that house and techno heads appreciate and dancefloors thrive on, something you don’t often notice until it's *not *happening or too awkwardly executed to ignore. With Jackmaster, laser-focused competency becomes its own sort of thrill.


Kansas City producer Huerco S.'s second album is ambient music through and through—though it’s informed by a memory of club music, which hangs over it like a ringing in the ears.

Huerco S.: For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)

The Kansas City producer Huerco S. put out his first release in 2012, when he was just 21 years old, and though its structures loosely hewed to the tenets of house and techno, he hadn’t yet spent much time in dance clubs. It was a fantasy of club music, a perspective schooled by records and YouTube and hearsay, and whatever it lacked in polish, it more than made up for in its suggestiveness. Like a secret whispered in your ear while standing too close to the sound system, it was all the more exciting for the parts of the transmission that were garbled, or simply lost, on their journey from his machines to our ears.
Ironically, as his profile has risen, especially in Europe, and he has logged plenty of late nights in the kind of clubs Kansas City could barely dream of, he has progressively removed the elements that define house and techno—the steady kick drum, the rat-a-tat hi-hats, the body-moving bassline. On his debut album, 2013’s Colonial Patterns, the most exciting tracks were the ones that seemed the most unkempt and overgrown: Instead of techno's reliable, rectilinear grid, his structures followed mossier geometries, like paving stones forced aside by weeds, or a trellis sagging under the weight of rampant morning glory. Now, on his second album, the weeds have won. For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) is ambient music through and through—though it’s informed by a memory of club music, which hangs over it like a ringing in the ears.
There are no drums or percussion on any of the album’s nine tracks, just soft tendrils of synthesizer, submerged pulses, and tape hiss smeared on in thick, buttery swirls. The album opens with a soft, rose-tinted chord and it never gets much more abrasive than that. Many of the tracks on his last album felt like sketches—the kernel of an idea, abandoned quickly. The same sensibility holds here, but even the simplest idea is stretched across a much bigger frame, to six or seven or even eight minutes. That’s important; you need the time to sink into these things. After a spell, you can’t say whether you've been listening to a given piece for two or 20 minutes.
The music doesn’t do much; it doesn’t develop or even evolve. It just twists slowly in place, like wind chimes. In fact, it’s often hard to imagine that any of these patterns were played by hand at all; they feel aleatory, as though generated by arcane processes, like the movements of swallows over an open field, or the molecular behavior of melting ice. And though nothing here is completely randomized—this is still loop-based music, not noise—that sense of instability has a curious effect; the music never sounds quite the same way twice, and as sentimental as a track like “Promises of Fertility” or “Lifeblook (Naïve Melody)” might be, it’s virtually impossible to fix them in your mind, even while listening.
In places, Huerco S. seems to be nodding to systems musicians—experimental composers who use generative processes to create the work—and folding their ideas back into a more soothingly repetitive framework. The drifting “Hear Me Out” recalls the burnished bell tones of Oval’s 94diskont; the smeared and indistinct qualities of the album’s palette suggests the influence of Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room,” a 1969 composition for voice and magnetic tape that dissolved the physical world into a spectral hum. On the opening “A Sea of Love,” you can just barely make out the outline of the patiently looping synthesizer melody; its contours are all but worn away, and you almost wonder if there’ll be anything left of it in another dozen listens.
That’s absurd, of course. This isn’t a dubplate, or a record made of ice; it’s a piece of wax and a bundle of 1s and 0s, and it'll stay this way as long as there are playback devices to play it on. But part of the album's magic is the way that Huerco S., after the fashion of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, has captured a feeling of fragility, of things flaking to dust before our very eyes and ears.
There’s only one thing to break the reverie, and that’s the musician's curious habit of finishing his songs by simply cutting them off in mid-swirl. It happens again and again, on “On the Embankment,” “Marked for Life,” “Cubist Camouflage,” “Promises of Fertility”—all of the record’s C- and D-side tracks but one, in fact. It’s a strange tactic: Here you are, blissfully immersed in this amniotic bubble of sound, and then—nothing, just a silence so abrupt it feels like waking up on cold cement. He does it so often that it has to mean something. The closest that I can figure is it’s a way of acknowledging that these objects of trans-human beauty could easily go on forever; to fade out would be a kind of illusion, a lie. By cutting them off in mid-stream, and sacrificing the experience in the process, Huerco S. is simply living up to a purist ideal. I’m not sure it works, ultimately, but you've got to admire his gumption. It’s a kind of tough love, essentially—a hard-headed approach absolutely in keeping with the history of Midwestern techno, no matter how downy the music itself. And anyway, there’s always the repeat button.


A posthumous album showcases the late Atlanta rapper’s head-spinning dexterity without attempting anything more than that, both grounded and limited by its avoidance of the usual pomp.

In Bank We Trust

When Trentavious White, better known as the rapper Bankroll Fresh, was murdered on March 4, 2016, at Atlanta’s Street Execs studio, modern hip-hop’s capital city lost one of its most innovative stylists and authentic storytellers. Even in a city where new talent seemed to emerge daily, Bankroll’s peak was short. “Hot Boy,” his breakout hit, dropped in fall 2014, only 18 months before his death. Yet Bankroll was notably connected, and respected: he was a collaborator of 2 Chainz and Future, close friends with Zaytoven and Metro Boomin’, and he gave Jeezy his last hit, the thunderous “All There,” which owed its success to Bankroll’s sound. Before Migos and Young Thug asserted control of Atlanta, Bankroll was on his way to creating a lane of his own, linking micro-generations of Atlanta trap: Travis Porter’s club-ready bounce, T.I.’s menacing swagger, and frequent collaborator Gucci Mane’s warbly wordplay.
A hardened, husky-voiced trap rapper, whose stories of life in Atlanta’s Zone 3 rang of pain and paranoia, Bankroll was blessed with the dexterity to switch between myriad flows and invent new ones seemingly on the spot; his go to ad-lib, fittingly, was “switch it up!” “ESPN,” a highlight from his best tape, 2015’s Life of a Hot Boy, has Bankroll approaching the beat from its side, rapping offbeat so forcefully that it creates its own pocket. He delighted in exploiting a beat’s open spaces: On the mesmerizing “Fuck is You Sayin,” released the same year, the rhymes tumble out of Bankroll as if involuntarily, like he’s on the verge of sputtering out. He rapped with the control and violence of a deranged puppet master, prefacing the irreverent, rhythm-warping flows of rappers like Lil Baby, Gunna, and Valee, and helping to set the stage for 21 Savage’s deadpan menace to break out into the mainstream.
Bankroll’s rise and untimely crash happened so fast that he never got to release his debut album. In its place, after years of delays, we get In Bank We Trust, a collection of hard-hitting loosies, a feast of dizzying rhyme schemes and mournful trap synths that showcases Bankroll’s talent but never attempts anything more than that. In Bank We Trust isn’t a sappy, exploitative posthumous tribute, but a no-frills reminder of Bankroll’s gripping artistry.
The record starts out blisteringly hot, punctuated by the brooding “Extra” and the regal “Quarter Million,” which starts with Bankroll nearly screaming, “I pull the trigger like MacGyver! Young nigga ballin, I got the eye of the tiger!” He changes gears three different times on the riot-starting “Right On,” and stretches and snaps his flow like a rubber band on the astounding opener “Mind Body Soul.” The beats, handled mostly by Atlanta stalwarts D. Rich and Shawty Fresh, are often bombastic, but they’re also dated and rudimentary, the stuff of mid-decade Gucci Mane tapes. Yet Bankroll still makes magic here, commanding trap numbers like “Feel Me,” the Boosie-featuring “Million Up,” and the highlight “Playin Wit a Check” with murderous precision.
In Bank We trust is both grounded and limited by its avoidance of the outsized glitz and ambition that often accompany posthumous albums. It’s difficult not to imagine what a Zaytoven and Metro Boomin-helmed project, or an album featuring any grouping of Bankroll’s long list of admirers, would have sounded like instead. But there’s something fitting about the lack of pomp. This is a rapper who, despite his ridiculous talent, didn’t seem intent on making it as a rapper. “I want the fortune, motherfuck the fame,” he raps to begin the album. Industry acceptance and household-name status weren’t part of the plan. Listeners loved Bankroll because of the gritty authenticity that radiated from every verse, and his undeniable dedication to his people.
As an album, In Bank We Trust is somewhat less than the sum of its mostly strong parts; it’s a tantalizing, yet unorganized and unrefined, look at a remarkable rapper. But it does what it needs to do, which is to allow Bankroll to continue sharing his life, despite its early end. “Tell em your story, bankroll fresh...” Erykah Badu tweeted two months before his death. Thankfully, that story isn't over quite yet.


Assisted by Jeff Parker, Tomeka Reid, and Makaya McCraven, the Chicago drummer pays tribute to his late brother with an innovative fusion of jazz composition and spoken-word memorial.

The Weather Up There

The Weather Up There, drummer Jeremy Cunningham’s second album as a bandleader, is part of a lineage of jazz that uses diverse musical forms to contemplate death and bereavement. Grief, to cite a famous example, prompted Alice Coltrane to turn to the tamboura and oud after the death of her husband, John. More recently, it led the pianist Kenny Werner to mix orchestra and choir on No Beginning, No End, and trumpeter Dave Douglas to synthesize bluegrass, traditional hymns, and Sibelius on Be Still. After suffering a loss, jazz history suggests, musicians look beyond their immediate surroundings, as though seeking beauty in parts of the world they might have missed before.
In 2008, Cunningham was a straight-ahead player in his native Cincinnati, almost finished with college and hoping to enroll at the Manhattan School of Music. His younger brother Andrew was playing video games at home when two men, carrying AK-47s, broke down the door. Having mistaken Andrew for his roommate, Tyler, they beat Andrew with their gun butts and robbed the house. Tyler, who was in the shower, managed to run across the lawn and call for help; the two men shot and killed Andrew.
In shock, Cunningham bombed his graduate school audition and moved to Chicago, where straight-ahead became another color in a wide musical palette. Over the course of the next decade, he became close with some of the city’s most forward-thinking virtuosos: guitarist Jeff Parker, cellist Tomeka Reid, and drummer Makaya McCraven, all of whom play on The Weather Up There.
The record is cut with the voices of family and friends from back home, who recount his brother’s murder. The emotionally complex interplay between these spoken samples and the shifting ambiance of Cunningham’s jazz fusion makes for a story of mourning that simultaneously illuminates the strangeness of life after tragedy. Opener “Sleep” begins with elegiac OP-1 synthesizer textures as Cunningham’s aunt describes a dream about Andrew. “All of my dreams from people who have died,” she says, the song slipping into Reid’s sentimental strings and Josh Johnson’s saxophone swells, “all take place in my kitchen, for some reason.” The music’s doleful mood breaks abruptly. The exuberant half-note pulses that begin “1985” evoke the pop of “Bennie and the Jets” or “Super Rich Kids,” and then Cunningham and his collaborators loosen their playing styles to match Parker’s guitar heroics: a light skein of feedback and a couple solos.
With Parker producing, alongside New Breed bandmate Paul Bryan, the album’s construction is imbued with a sensitive, meticulous studio wizardry. That’s particularly true of “Elegy,” a harrowing voice collage: Recordings Cunningham made of his Cincinnati community—his sister, his ex-girlfriend, his brother’s best friend—speak with each other about Andrew, join together like a choir, and discuss the need for gun control. They’re accompanied by the “drum choir” Cunninghman formed to play on the track, an assemblage of Chicago percussion talent whose potentially climactic inclusion on the album he idiosyncratically buries under his hometown’s memories of tragedy.
The spoken sections ground Cunningham’s vision in its subject matter, distinguishing his unique way of processing grief; it’s impossible to mistake the album’s sorrowful origins. The Weather Up There is taut and well-sequenced enough to occasionally risk becoming background music, but its long monologues snap the listener to attention. They grate with their unmusicality, and sometimes delve too deep into exposition about that awful night in 2008. They also allow for a record of dualities that plucks the listener out of the march of ordinary habit and into the pain of another, before revealing the many ways that life can become new again. Daily concerns seem to fall away during Cunningham’s collective emotional journey—even the act of criticism itself.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This assemblage of strange outtakes and demos—including what may be the first demo of "Space Oddity"—find Bowie in his tentative folkie phase, about to blast off.

Spying Through a Keyhole

Until the heat death of the planet, some of us will never stop seeking out David Bowie rarities, because nothing feels quite as good as communing with him. And if any artist can escape the sad trap of diminished-return posthumous releases—the same gluttonous estate mindset that insists any time Jimi Hendrix sneezed, it deserves a pressing—it’s the Starman, whose innovations and recalibrations were so often two steps ahead of the rest. In the three years since he died, Bowie’s catalog has been expanded modestly in comparison with other departed rock greats—a handful of live sets, unreleased experiments, and collected eccentricities; this has yielded shocking, empathetic peeks into his most troubled era (Cracked Actor (Live Los Angeles ’74)’s live pyrotechnics), victory laps in front of enormous crowds (Glastonbury 2000), and a bittersweet coda to Blackstar (No Plan).
The latest offering is an assemblage of strange outtakes and demos. Spying Through a Keyhole collects nine late-1960s tracks, smattering them across four 7” singles for no terribly clear purpose. (A boomer collector enticement, perhaps, since Parlophone released them digitally last winter?) Written circa “Space Oddity,” which will turn 50 this June, the tracks nestle in the long-haired, bucolic folkie vibe Bowie batted around in his early career, the era when he still went by Davie Jones and, shortly after, warbled about “The Laughing Gnome” to a wholly disinterested populace. Even for demos, they’re surprisingly rough, in a way that only sometimes breeds intimacy; most often, he bashes around on an acoustic guitar, both his verve and falsetto well into the red.
Though Bowie’s folk period is ignored today by all but his diehards, it does offer some insight into the man’s mind, and Keyhole adds several moments to that discussion. “Mother Grey,” a cheery dash of singsong twee, nods towards the pleasantly shambolic harmonies of the Beatles’ “Two of Us,” interspersed with the requisitive agrarian imagery: leafy surroundings, cozy kitchens cluttered with pots and pans. Young Bowie bids farewell to this hearth, twitching out of the beat a few times on his guitar before a brash, boxcar harmonica solo. Its b-side is even more evocative: “In the Heat of the Morning” is an extremely rough draft of a song that will be more familiar to fans, as Bowie and Tony Visconti eventually smoothed it out enough that Bowie performed it on the BBC in 1967. Remarkably, this one has a pristine, prophetic fingerprint: Bowie fiddles around with the same vertiginous vocal jumps that will reprise in “Ziggy Stardust” in 1972. But here, he’s still far from that psychedelic bombast; in the demo, he strums his guitar with the blithe zeal of Meg White at a drum kit, nudging it out of tune as he yelps, in flashes of that rebellious wit to come, “Señorita sway, dance with me before their frozen eyes.”
The best song of Keyhole is, itself, workshopped in rapid succession: “Angel Angel Grubby Face,” a rarity that, according to Thin White Duke fan lore, once almost saw release when Bowie was on Deram Records. Here it appears twice, in two demos. The first take is the keeper: a kooky little sojourn with slightly marble-mouthed delivery, strummed primly to suggest austere society and frilly collars. But no polite trappings can disguise how plainly strange the song is: No matter however gently he coos it, “Angel angel grubby face/I love you” is not high on the seduction scale. The second, later demo of “Angel” is more polished, with stronger, murmured vocals and defter fingerpicking, but it’s the earlier version that feels more attuned to Bowie’s spirit—the winking subversion, the wisp of true human connection hiding inside the arch refrain.
Keyhole also boasts two demos of “Space Oddity”—one just a snippet, though, according to its accompanying press, quite possibly the first one ever recorded. Though plenty of demos have surfaced over the decades, this one could very possibly stand up to its promise; its vocals are timorous enough that Bowie seems to be asking, to himself and to the microphone, “What are we about to do here?” The string section and the folk warble will vanish by the time Major Tom officially lifts off, but here’s they’re a fascinatingly clear bridge between an artist’s polite past and his boundless future.
Elements of the final “Space Oddity” single sneak into the second demo, the first with Bowie’s longtime guitarist John ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson: There’s a gothic chill to the instrumentation, and a deadpan in Bowie’s tone. (Mission control’s dispassionate countdown first appears here, too.) There are cracks in Bowie’s voice, the kind he’d intentionally wield to great effect later, and strange, leaking synth tones; he sings fatalist lines that “I think my time on earth is nearly through” that will soon be scrapped, before a much more calamitous acoustic guitar climax. And is that Morse code at the end? There was so much pouring out of this man’s mind—but as Keyhole proves, quite well, he wasn’t born a revolutionary. Bowie put in his miles.


*For Emma, Forever Ago*\-- Bon Iver's 2007 debut LP-- was nearly eclipsed by its own (endlessly repeated) mythology. Famously: Singer and songwriter Justin Vernon curled up in a "remote northern Wisconsin cabin" for three epic, torturous months of post-heartbreak introspection/catharsis, writing the songs which would ultimately comprise his first solo album. *For Emma* was self-released by Vernon before being picked up by Jagjaguwar and afforded a proper launch; grateful listeners swooned and shivered, circling the record like kids around a bonfire. *For Emma* became synonymous with dark winter ennui: the musical translation of earth's cruelest season.

By the end of 2008,

Blood Bank EP

For Emma, Forever Ago-- Bon Iver's 2007 debut LP-- was nearly eclipsed by its own (endlessly repeated) mythology. Famously: Singer and songwriter Justin Vernon curled up in a "remote northern Wisconsin cabin" for three epic, torturous months of post-heartbreak introspection/catharsis, writing the songs which would ultimately comprise his first solo album. For Emma was self-released by Vernon before being picked up by Jagjaguwar and afforded a proper launch; grateful listeners swooned and shivered, circling the record like kids around a bonfire. For Emma became synonymous with dark winter ennui: the musical translation of earth's cruelest season.
By the end of 2008, Bon Iver-- along with similarly bearded, folk-minded acts like Fleet Foxes-- became emblematic of a new, woodsier trend in indie rock. Although it boasted its own brand of (presumably unintentional) theater, For Emma was frequently cited as an antidote of sorts to Auto-Tuned, vocoder-laden pop. It seems particularly skewering, then, that Bon Iver's four-song follow-up-- the Blood Bank EP-- closes with a long, a cappella folk song wherein Vernon's voice is so aggressively filtered through a vocoder that you're likely to back off the stereo and double-check the contents of your drink.
Recorded in four different locations at varying times (from December 2006 through June 2008, in an assortment of apartments, roads, hunting lodges, and studios), Blood Bank's A-side ("Blood Bank", "Beach Baby") is considerably less jarring than its second half, although neither feels unprecedented-- while Vernon wrote these songs to be played with a band (unlike on For Emma, Vernon's got two steady backers here), the EP is still imbued with all the intimacy and desperation that made For Emma so beloved.
"Blood Bank" opens with prodding acoustic strums and a series of hushed "oohs" (unmistakably reminiscent of Iron and Wine's lo-fi debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle), before Vernon begins: "I met you at the blood bank, we were looking at the bags," he explains, tossing off the kind of opening sentence most aspiring novelists spend their whole lives praying for. "Beach Baby", with its steel guitar and stomach-punching lyrics ("When you're out, tell your lucky one to know that you'll leave/ But don't you lock when you're fleeing, I'd like not to hear keys") feels spare and fleeting, disappearing into the runout groove before you realize it's over.
"Babys" features a prickly, unrelenting keyboard riff and a curiously zoological refrain ("Summer comes, to multiply!") but "Woods" is the most intriguing cut here: For armchairists prone to detached psychoanalysis, For Emma's legend might suggest that Vernon has a penchant for escapism, and there's no easier way to eschew the crags of your own voice than by piling on studio effects. Vocoder isn't exactly a shack in the mountains, but, when employed to excess, it's about as close as a vocalist can get to going off-grid. Still, "Woods" feels like more of a formal experiment than an emotional one, and the results are oddly and unexpectedly stunning. Vernon's folksinger-in-a-cabin origins might not be exceptional, but "Woods" sort of is-- it's disorienting and delicate, a mix of Vernon's staunchly organic vocals and otherworldly effects, punctuated, on occasion, by sharp, falsetto howls. It's the kind of thing that sounds hideous on paper, but eventually coalesces in practice; ironically, the Auto-Tune serves as more of a muddler than a safety net, and without it, it's hard to know if "Woods" would feel so intoxicating.
Blood Bank certainly dispels concerns that Vernon's accomplishment was somehow environmental-- that For Emma's poetic circumstances, and not its contents, were responsible for its success. Blood Bank is still a wintry record-- there's snow on the cover, and lyrics about snow, and, if you listen on vinyl, the metaphorical snow of hissing surface noise-- but Bon Iver is hardly a seasonal taste.


The Oakland rapper’s quarantine album is meant to portray a radically different artist. More often, he just finds new ways to telegraph the same stories he’s told all along.

Everything’s Strange Here

G-Eazy named his last album after an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, to suggest he’s tortured and well-read; he used one of its songs to rap about flushing condoms down the toilet, to suggest that his sexual partners plot to steal his semen. Throughout his decade-long career, the Oakland artist has sought to differentiate himself among white frat rappers by clinging to a self-serious, hamfisted darkness. He brags about parties, then wheezes that they’re killing him. He wallows in the gilded hallmarks of celebrity, usually finding a way to also complain about his exes. It’s a boring schtick.
In quarantine, G-Eazy has had “the fortunate opportunity to self-reflect, grow and evolve,” as he wrote on Instagram. He’s covered David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and the xx; he’s been learning piano over FaceTime. On his new album, Everything’s Strange Here, we’re meant to hear a radically different Gerald Earl Gillum, one who’s mostly abandoned rap in favor of singing. More often, though, he just finds new ways to telegraph the same stories he’s told all along.
Everything’s Strange Here oozes melodrama to the point of parody. It opens with a cover of a Beck song used in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and progresses to crawling ballads about coke baggies with “trouble packed inside.” “Life is suffering, oh yes, I know,” G-Eazy wails on “Every Night of the Year,” a five-minute exercise in clumsy writing (“About me/They’ll reminisce”) and gnarled, synth-bathed guitar. “My mind is in a fight against the time that I have left,” he rasps on “Nostalgia Cycle.” G-Eazy isn’t a terrible singer, though the effects-heavy production seems to purposefully obscure his voice. And even though these are still soggy odes to crushed pills and the dangers of anonymous sex, they’re exponentially more interesting than his usual material.
Out of this mush of hotboxed platitudes and theatrical existentialism emerges one of the best songs G-Eazy’s ever made. “Free Porn Cheap Drugs” isn’t profound or even particularly pleasant—his voice is a nasally scratch—but it condenses all the faux noir and dilute sadness into one stark, impactful statement. “Desensitize and just let go,” he sings. “No bright screens, no place to go.” It sounds like acceptance, a rare plea for emotional connection that doesn’t arrive tucked between brags. This is the G-Eazy who could be a genuinely intriguing artist: contemplative and remorseful, but not morose.
Unfortunately, maybe inevitably, the album swings back into claustrophobic pettiness. After nine tracks without any rapping, the final song begins with a classic G-Eazy grunt, followed by the announcement, “Talking about my crazy-ass ex.” It descends into a twitchy, bitter rant about a “selfish” ex-girlfriend, but the character is so common in G-Eazy’s music that the specifics are almost irrelevant. Even in this new, softer soundscape, he paints women as spiteful and conniving. “You turned me into a monster,” he moans on “Back to What You Knew.” “You keep acting like you’re perfect, but the smile that you wear is too fake,” he complains on “In the Middle.” Words like these pierce the album’s gloss, breaking the illusion that, at age 31, G-Eazy has shifted and grown. Everything’s Strange Here winds up sounding like another caricature of the women he can’t stop condemning: shiny and novel at first, but ultimately corrosive.

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Vince Staples, Danny Brown, Kelela, and Pusha T all star on the fifth album from Damon Albarn’s cartoon crew, another gloomy party playlist for the end of the world.

Humanz

In the spring of 2016, Damon Albarn tells Pusha T to picture, if he would, an album that envisioned Donald Trump winning the presidency. Albarn was working on new Gorillaz material, the first in six years, and he had been squinting at the man brandishing his shriveled claws at his Republican challengers and bragging about his dick size and imagining him in charge of the free world. “When it really happened,” Pusha T said, “I was like, ‘Wait a minute…I started wondering like, what type of crystal ball did this guy have?”
It’s a funny little anecdote, considering how closely the fifth studio album from Gorillaz resembles its predecessors in tone, style, and mood. The cartoon-band project of Albarn and Jamie Hewlett has evolved into a surprising little institution by relying on a sturdy formula: Return every few years with an album loaded up with au courant guests and a doomsday vibe that fits whatever disaster is currently dominating the headlines. Post-9/11 panic? Great Recession malaise? Trumpian discontent? Gorillaz have a song for that somewhere. Hitting play on a Spotify blender of Gorillaz will take you across eras, continents, genres—Bobby Womack will show up, as will Lou Reed and Ibrahim Ferrer and Tina Weymouth. But somehow, it will all sound like the inside of the same suburban-mall Gamestop, circa 2000. Damon Albarn’s vague ideas about societal passivity and dystopia feel roughly the same now as they did around the release of the first Gorillaz album, and they will probably feel the same in 2028, when President Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is running for reelection.
As usual, the guest list on Humanz promises untold riches—Vince Staples, Danny Brown, Kelela, Pusha T, Mavis Staples, D.R.A.M., and Jehnny Beth from Savages—on which the music doesn’t deliver. No matter the rotating cast, Gorillaz tracks come in a few basic colors and flavors: A stew of fat drums, gloomy synth patches, crooned and muttered hooks from Albarn in the background. With this reliable frame, every guest ends up smeared with Gorillaz makeup and bearing a whiff of Suicide Squad-style corporate menace.
Humanz mostly feels like a playlist as a result, with each song acting as a self-contained referendum on how this particular guest fares in Gorillaz World. Vince Staples sprints his way through “Ascension” without finding much traction in his surroundings. The joy and weightlessness that Popcaan brings so naturally to his usual guest spots is extinguished by the the drizzly murk of “Saturnz Barz.” De La Soul, who showed up on Gorillaz’s 2005 hit “Feel Good, Inc.” and on Plastic Beach, are jostled by a clomping, inelegant beat on “Momentz” that gives them none of the room to sound effortless or funny or wry or observant. They sound lost in the middle of the wrong party.
“The wrong party” or “the right party” is a useful Gorillaz rubric. Grace Jones is at the wrong party on “Charger,” which introduces you to a wriggling little two-note worm of a guitar lick before Jones shows up to mutter a few words. Neither she, nor Albarn, nor that wiggling guitar, seem to have thought of much else to hold your attention. Danny Brown and Kelela are at home on the clanking synth-popper “Submission,” pitching in measured jolts of wistfulness and pop-eyed panic. The Chicago legend Peven Everett sounds fantastic on “Strobelite,” spilling effortless warmth all over the track. Singer and rapper and Virginia ham D.R.A.M. is at the right party, pitching in stacked, breathy multipart harmonies behind Albarn’s lead vocal, on “Andromeda.”
But the sneaky star of that song is the streaking comet-trail synth that repeatedly claims center stage. It sounds thick and wispy all at once, a lovingly rendered globule of sound so dazzling it turns everything around it superfluous. Guests may come and go, but Albarn’s menagerie of pawn-shop synth gear remains the reason the party exists. The most powerful and heartfelt moment on all of Humanz comes when all the humans disappear, and Albarn is left to himself to croon sadly to his machines: “Busted and Blue” could have been a song on the last Blur album. It explores similar feelings of glassy-eyed melancholy and resignation. And most importantly, it sounds gorgeous, full of digitized finger snaps that spiral out like space junk drifting across the atmosphere. The synth washes here feel like orchestral string sections, and as the emotion intensifies the flimsy Gorillaz pretense burns off again, as it does on every Gorillaz album: All the masks and cameos aside, this still feels like a Damon Albarn solo project, a place for him to treat the studio like the welcoming arms of oblivion, and for us to join him.


On her well-formed debut EP, Harriette Pilbeam's version of dream pop is more pop than dream.

Sugar & Spice EP

New artists don’t get much time to carve out an identity anymore. So it’s either fortunate or canny that Harriette Pilbeam—an Australian bassist and singer-songwriter who records as Hatchie—opens Sugar & Spice with a song that captures her aesthetic even before the vocals kick in. Like most of the record, “Sure” is a wide-eyed appeal to a lover that alternates between drowsy verses and honeyed choruses. The intro foregrounds an acoustic guitar melody that definitely recalls the riff on “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer. But first, Pilbeam efficiently codes the track as dream pop, opening with a buzz of feedback so short as to be almost imperceptible before diving in with a chiming bassline.
Hatchie’s version of dream pop is more pop than dream, using the airy vocals and coruscating guitars of her 4AD heroes in service of giddy love songs with massive hooks. This synthesis yielded her debut single, “Try,” which became a surprise hit on Australian radio station Triple J before appearing on the EP. Over guitar jangle and glittery bursts of synth, she reckons with a romance that has devolved into sinking feelings and sleepless nights. But just before Pilbeam resigns herself to conscious uncoupling, she starts ramping up to an exultant chorus: “I know you wanna try/I can feel it in your sigh.” In the context of relationship talk, the word “try” is about as sexy as couples therapy, yet Hatchie makes it sound like an adventure.
Most pop songs about love fall at one extreme on the timeline from infatuation to breakup, but Sugar & Spice obsesses over everything in between. On the title track, a tart guitar-and-drum passage cuts the sweetness of Pilbeam’s high-pitched vocals, as she worries that someone she’s still mad about seems to be losing interest, then dares him to soothe her uncertainty. As she does in the chorus of “Try,” Pilbeam underlines that sudden shift from anxiety to hopefulness with a vocal melody so addictive it almost feels malicious. If a similar attempt at an earworm on “Sugar & Spice” doesn’t land with the same ecstatic force, blame the hackneyed refrain: “You don’t call me ‘baby’ anymore.”
Pilbeam switches up her formula on the EP’s best track, “Sleep.” A sunshower of keyboard anchors the melody. The chorus swoops in before the 15-second mark, stacking the vocals in paper-thin layers. It’s an inspired production choice that makes the song immersive and weightless at once, setting precisely the right mood for a fantasy about meeting a sleeping lover in a dream and coaxing out of them all the things they’ve left unsaid in waking life.
When it comes to writing breathless love songs with hooks that rival those of alt-pop idols like Carly Rae Jepsen and Sky Ferreira—both of whom she’s cited as influences—Pilbeam is a prodigy. She recorded “Try” in college. Now, after releasing a debut EP on which three out of five tracks strongly resemble one another in style and subject matter, her challenge is to vary her songwriting without losing the infectiousness of her early singles or the dreamy tangles of guitar and bass that might have convinced Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins to remix “Sure.”
Her lyrics can sound like an afterthought. Sugar & Spice is as cliché-ridden as its title, all dreams, stars, and pregnant sighs. “I don’t think I’ve that many interesting life experiences yet,” Pilbeam recently told Pitchfork, explaining that she was in her first serious relationship (her boyfriend, Joe Agius, is her guitarist) and still needs to work on “how poetic my writing is as opposed to just explaining how I feel.”
This self-awareness is a good sign, but Pilbeam sounds more distinctive when she’s leaning into bluntness than when she’s reaching for the rarefied heights of poetry. Although it isn’t Hatchie’s most memorable song, the unadorned honesty of closing track “Bad Guy” is exhilarating: “I’m backwards/And I feel stupid/Watching you back away,” she sings. For the first time on Sugar & Spice, the realness of the lyrics resonates with the same force as the music. Sometimes heavenly sounds are most potent paired with words that tether them to the unpoetic push and pull of life on Earth.


The first album from the breakout star of New Jersey club rap isn’t quite the revelation its title suggests, but his breakneck sound remains intoxicating.

Club Godfather

Any song backed by the iconic triple kick drum of a Jersey club beat is designed to test your speed and precision, and Newark rapper Bandmanrill is at the forefront of a new strain thriving in the Garden State. He’s far from the only East Coast spitter to embrace rapping over club music—the Philly and Baltimore club rap scenes are equally rich and adventurous—but his precise balance of breathless energy and swaggering cool has helped his voice rise to the top of the young subgenre. Early singles like “Heartbroken” and “I Am Newark” were propelled by his crisp chest-beating and tales of short-lived romance as much as their respective rhythmic pulses, a unique meld that’s helped Bandman focus the spotlight of TikTok and YouTube’s recent obsession with dance music back onto one of its cultural hubs.
While Jersey club and house music are in Bandman’s blood—his father is a club DJ—he’s not trying to limit himself. During a recent visit to On the Radar Radio, he revealed that his earliest songs had a melodic bent similar to New York stalwarts A Boogie Wit da Hoodie or Lil Tjay, and that his first foray into club rap came from a playful home studio session. He’s become as preoccupied with showing his range as he is with showing his history: “It’s a lotta talent in Jersey outside of rapping on club beats, but at the end of the day, that’s what we known for. It’s always gon’ be there regardless, so why not?” That isn’t to say Club Godfather, Bandman’s first full-length mixtape and Warner debut, is some massive stylistic shift. The vast majority of these songs move to the pulse of Jersey club, just with glossier production in the vein of the prestige rap coming from his neighbors in New York. Tracks like “Influence” and “Piano” scan as standard club rap made to sound a touch more expensive, like a velour jacket over a plain tee. The handful of experiments across Godfather are a mixed bag, but the breakneck sound Bandman made his name on remains intoxicating.
Much of the exuberance comes from frequent collaborator MCVertt, who’s credited on nearly half the album and many of Bandman’s most popular songs to date. It’s a solid formula, and the most memorable examples seesaw between maximal and minimal renditions. “Bouncin’” is an early album highlight built around nothing more than a sped-up trumpet sample and drum loop. Its zany, stripped-back canvas gives Bandman and guest rapper NLE Choppa room to devour a beat that sounds equally fit to soundtrack a block party or a Scooby-Doo chase. Two collaborations with Bronx rapper Sha EK (“Jiggy in Jersey,” Who You Touch”) take a more maximal approach, mixing in the moody accents and rumbling bass of New York drill. Club rap and drill share similar structure and content but differ in rhythm and texture: Club music skews bright and peppy, while drill seethes beneath menacing grooves. Bandman and EK’s blend of the two feels natural, and their respective breathy delivery and slick talk form a lethal yin-yang—they cram more excitement into the 108 seconds of “Who You Touch” than many rappers coax out of entire albums.
Godfather trips over itself when it takes a few abrupt left turns. Mid-album cut “Don’t Mix” abandons club music for a stab at pain-rap balladry that lands like a forgotten Polo G deep cut. If Bandman wants to continue expanding, he should stick with ideas like “Beautiful Diamonds,” which gleams with pianos and a shimmering vocal sample from Yoyis’ 2021 song “Diamond Eyes” that sounds airlifted from the stadium-ready EDM of the 2010s. The song feels ready to derail at any moment, but a subdued kick drum grounds Bandman in the rhythm as he celebrates victory against the odds. The touch of melody he brings to the second verse (“I told my niggas we next/We gon’ stack up this money and flex”) does more to sell the line than the writing, and the armor of his self-belief holds the song together.
Up to this point, Bandman has been known as a singles artist. Viral hits have minted many a star, but even the most confident spitters can hit a brick wall when it’s album time. Club Godfather isn’t quite the revelation its title suggests and half the tracklist is made up of previously released, albeit very enjoyable, songs. But its best tracks are unnervingly catchy—and Bandman, who’s effectively a pioneer of a subgenre that has yet to truly take off, has more than enough skill and presence to carry them. He’s not here to change your life or make you think too hard; he just wants to see if you can keep up.


Oh Sees leader John Dwyer indulges his jammiest tendencies alongside a new cast of powerhouse players, channeling a distinctly 1970s sort of communal exploration.

Bent Arcana

John Dwyer likes to keep Discogs editors busy. Over the last couple of decades, the Oh Sees guitarist and bandleader has founded a string of often short-lived projects—Pink and Brown, Damaged Bug, Zeigenbock Kopf—while also turning out a steady stream of music with his best-known group (which might also be written as Thee Oh Sees, or OSees, or OCS, depending on whim, day of the week, phase of the moon, and so on). You get the sense that Dwyer’s slippery approach to identity is guided by his puckish streak, but there’s a method, too: Each new name offers an opportunity to view his firecracker creativity from a fresh angle.
So it is with Bent Arcana, which is shorthand for the band’s official name: Ryan Sawyer, Peter Kerlin, Kyp Malone, Brad Caulkins, Tom Dolas, Marcos Rodriguez, Laena “Geronimo” Myers-Ionita, Joce Soubiran, Andres Renteria, and John Dwyer. Recent Oh Sees records have augmented the group’s garage-punk attack with a looser, jammier sensibility, and now Dwyer is going all in, assembling a sprawling ensemble drawn from the worlds of jazz and avant-garde improvisation. It doesn’t quite feel right to call it a “supergroup”—that suggests a certain level of name recognition, and the closest you get here to star material is TV On The Radio’s Kyp Malone, holding it down on modular synth. The lineup favors underground heads, all apparently selected for their technical mastery and taste for live experimentation: Brooklyn drummer-for-hire Ryan Sawyer, Sunwatchers bassist Peter Kerlin, saxophonists Joce Soubiran and Brad Caulkins, and violinist Laena “Geronimo” Myers-Ionita. Bent Arcana is Dwyer’s way to break free from the shackles of songcraft and lose himself in the ocean of group creativity.
The six tracks of Bent Arcana’s self-titled debut are excerpted from five days of extended improvisation at Dwyer’s own Stu-Stu-Studio recording space. The mood is freeform and exploratory in a distinctly 1970s vein: think electric Miles Davis, the furiously complex jazz fusion of Mahavishnu Orchestra, and the funkier end of krautrock. If you heard much of this music blind, you’d struggle to date it. Hitting play on “Misanthrope Gets Lunch” feels like being dropped in midway through some long-lost Can live performance: a “Mother Sky”-style drumbeat rises and falls, feints and tumbles, as plectrums scrape along strings and a modular synth chokes out clouds of static.
Though Dwyer calls Bent Arcana “frenetic” in his liner notes for the album, it generally lacks the pugilistic attitude of much of his work. Opening track “The Gate” is swampy and restrained, with drums set to a low simmer, and snakish guitar and saxophone keeping loose and low. Perhaps it’s the title, but “Outré Sorcellerie” has a whiff of the occult; its shadowy improv will be familiar to fans of the influential Euro-jazz label ECM, as a lonely saxophone weaves through a gloomy antechamber of chimes and bass.
Though Bent Arcana can sag in its less propulsive moments, the band generally hits the right ratio between eerie investigation and chunky jams. A highlight in the latter style is “Oblivion Sigil,” 11 minutes of bass-and-drums shuffle with Dwyer adding the occasional acrobatic guitar scrawl. The record’s most melodically memorable moment comes in “Mimi,” a gorgeous but disappointingly brief saxophone duet, over in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 84 seconds.
Dwyer has hinted this might be the first chapter in a series of releases dedicated to this off-the-cuff approach. You wouldn’t want his new band to nudge out his more song-powered releases, but given his exceptional work rate, there’s probably not much danger of that. Though Bent Arcana is certainly an ensemble effort, it also stands as an example of yet another style that Dwyer’s more or less nailed. If you’re going to dispense with songwriting, here’s the best way to do it—assemble a band of extraordinary players, hit on a groove, and follow it wherever it takes you.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly referred to the band as Bent Arcana. Bent Arcana is shorthand for the group, which is  named after all of its members.

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Delivering his most interesting work in years, the UK techno producer throws convention to the winds while indulging a dark sense of humor that feeds off the preposterous and the grotesque.

Woke Up Right Handed EP

If a certain punk band hadn’t gotten there first, then Anarchy in the UK would have made an excellent alternative title for Woke Up Right Handed, the third EP this year—and the first for UK super-indie XL—from British post-dubstep survivor Blawan. Woke Up Right Handed doesn’t so much ignore the rules of electronic music as stumble around blissfully unaware of their existence, the kind of record that plumps for a parabolic curve when asked to choose between left and right. The result, happily, is Blawan’s most interesting work in years, a return to the turbulent spirit of the Brandy-sampling “Getting Me Down” or the comedy tech-horror of “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?” after years of largely furrowed-brow techno.
Like “Bodies,” Woke Up Right Handed is, at its best, a surprisingly funny record, employing a dark humor that feeds off the preposterous and the grotesque. “Under Belly,” the EP’s standout track, is techno re-tooled for maximum nervous laughter, sporting a thoroughly ridiculous, steel-clad electronic shape that collywobbles around like an iron slug in a jelly. To compound matters, this is set to an electronic rhythm closer to the twist than to Tiësto and carried by a bassline forged of volcanic rumbles. The song’s charred-metal sculpture will be familiar to fans of Blawan’s 2018 debut album, Wet Will Always Dry (a record that also featured a killer hook, on “Careless”), or his more recent Soft Waahls EP. But Wet Will Always Dry largely played out within the 4/4 strictures of techno, a shadow that the more adventurous Soft Waahls also couldn’t quite escape. On “Under Belly” the brakes are firmly off: There is scant pattern to the song, an almost total disregard for dancefloor convention, and little separation between musical elements. It’s like a techno record that has been rescued from a lava flow.
There’s nothing quite as outlandish on the rest of this EP, but Blawan’s mischievous spirit rules throughout. Both “Close the Cycle” and “Gosk” sport riffs that could, in other hands (or perhaps in Blawan’s own, were he feeling less impish) become the kind of sledgehammer ear-worm motifs that translate into lucrative Ibiza club residencies. But Blawan treats them with the disdain of minor irritations. The tightly wound electronic coil that powers through “Gosk” is scattered to the wind by a bizarre mechanical scurrying and a snare drum for whom repetition is just a word in the dictionary, while the thick, serpentine riff of “Close the Cycle” refuses to sit still in the mix, its inconstant, boggy squelch as treacherous as quicksand.
“Close the Cycle,” in particular, feels like a work of deliberate obfuscation. The song features a vocal from Blawan, whose catchy rhythmic patterns and half-submerged words never quite converge into recognizable phrases, leaving the enthusiastic listener off balance. “Blika,” which opens the EP, is similar. What does “Blika” mean, anyway? And what is the other phrase Blawan solemnly intones over the song’s flinty, crab-like beat? We may never know. But perhaps uncertainty is the perfect response to this deliciously amorphous EP. Like any good anarchic work, Woke Up Right Handed stands for subversion over structure and diversion over devoir.

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The DBTs return, focusing on the songwriting of Patterson Hood and refreshingly reconnecting with the macabre and darker corners of the American psyche.

The Big To-Do

On their first two albums (1998's Gangstabilly and 1999's Pizza Deliverance), the Drive-By Truckers were supreme redneck jokesters, specializing in scabrous white-trash vignettes owing more to Southern Gothic fiction (Flannery O'Connor, Barry Hannah) than any sub-Mason-Dixon stand-up hacks. As the band matured and its de facto frontman Patterson Hood started writing songs that were weightier and more universal in sentiment, however, its more darkly off-kilter early work came to be generally viewed as juvenilia, the dicking around these guys did before they grew up into real artists. That would be a mistake, because songs like "18 Wheels of Love", "Bulldozers and Dirt", and "Zoloft" were wickedly clever and deeply revealing slices of Southern life that hold relatable truths for all listeners regardless of region. That said, it's a refreshing surprise that the group's latest album, The Big To-Do, finds Hood reconnecting with the macabre, with grim twists and booze-fueled mayhem, and with the dark corners of the American psyche.
The album begins morbidly with "Daddy Learned to Fly", its whining riff propelling the first-person reflections of a young boy whose father has died. It's a colorful kind of morbidity, however, as we learn the boy has been eased into an acceptance of loss by the creative lie that his father is perpetually flying the friendly skies. Weighing the most deadly serious facts of life against a highly skewed sense of irreverence has always been one of DBT's greatest feats, and it's a balancing act the group maintains throughout the album's raucous first half-- on the booze-fueled bottoming-out of "Fourth Night of My Drinking", the small-town sex scandal of the portentously delivered "The Wig He Made Her Wear", and the nasty little slice of backwater intrigue called "Drag the Lake Charlie".
It's a damn good thing Hood drops some of his gravitas, too, because his partner in crime, Mike Cooley (aka the Trucker you've always been able to rely on for witty shit-kickers) inexplicably contributes only three songs out of The Big To-Do's 13. Two of the three are great, as "Birthday Boy" offers up the musings of a savvy stripper while "Get Downtown" provides a shaggy snapshot of no-account losers outfitted to a shucking Chuck Berry groove. Still, that leaves quite a heavy burden on Hood's shoulders, even after you account for a couple of very nice turns from bassist Shonna Tucker, who was a bit of a weak link on Creation's Dark but who chills the blood here on the heartrending, hymnlike "You Got Another", then sets it racing again on the full-throated "(It's Gonna Be) I Told You So".
To his credit, Hood's restored mischievousness manages to carry the album for quite some time, but he starts to falter along the record's back stretch. "This Fucking Job" and "After the Scene Dies" are sonically torqued-up and admirably pissed-off, but their respective gripes against occupational drudgery and the death of the rock'n'roll dream represent well-trodden ground for this songwriter. The Big To-Do then proceeds to bow out rather unceremoniously with the relative whimpers of "Santa Fe", "The Flying Wallendas", and Cooley's sweet but tepid "Eyes Like Glue". The Truckers demonstrated with 2008's Brighter Than Creation's Dark that they don't need non-stop yuks and grotesqueries to reach greatness, but the best moments of The Big To-Do nonetheless offer tantalizing proof that these guys still possess fascinatingly warped minds when they feel like showing 'em off.


On their second post-reunion album, the shoegaze band sound emboldened, merrily tinkering with their legacy.

This Is Not a Safe Place

If you listen closely to This Is Not a Safe Place, Ride’s second post-reunion album, you can hear the exact moment when they stop caring what people think. It happens 16 seconds into the first track “R.I.D.E.”: the shuffling drums pause, the swirling guitar effect abates, and a voice solemnly intones the band’s name into the silence, like a hip-hop producer testing a calling card on their first BeatStars upload. It’s strange, funny, and unexpected, an out-of-the-blue, well-actually-why-not experiment that suggests a band entirely at peace with their place in the world.
This same happily adventurous spirit runs through the best of This Is Not a Safe Place. The band has variously described it as a guitar album and a work inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Behind both of these not-particularly-illuminating descriptions lies an emboldened album by an emboldened band, one that seems to  realize that people genuinely like them after all these years, giving them license to merrily tinker with their legacy.
London producer and DJ Erol Alkan, who produced 2017’s Weather Diaries, is back on board, but This Is Not a Safe Place feels considerably more natural than its predecessor, which felt like the work of a band that felt like it had to change, rather than one that really wanted to. This Is Not a Safe Place easily encapsulates everything from juddering guitar assaults (the very Swervedriver “Kill Switch”) to Byrds-ian jangle pop (“Future Love”) and acoustic laments about the internet (“Dial Up”). Strangest of all is “Repetition,” which sounds uncannily like the work of the Human League, made all the better by lyrics that seemingly thumb noses at fans who want Ride to knock out “Drive Blind”-style guitar fuzz until they keel over on their own amps. “Repetition” sounds—in the very best way—like a song knocked together in five minutes of spare studio time with inspiration flowing and the pressure off. “Dial Up,” meanwhile, cleverly intertwines a synth line among its acoustic guitars, the undulating electronic tones adding to the song’s overall effect rather than tearing the listener’s attention away.
This Is Not a Safe Place may not quite have the consistency of Slowdive’s self-titled fourth album—still the benchmark for reformed shoegaze acts—but it gives Ride the start of a very listenable post-reformation playlist. You wonder, though, what might have been had the album maintained its early zip. “Kill Switch,” for all its noise, lacks a notable melody, while “Clouds of Saint Marie” and “Eternal Recurrence” feel a little wan. “In This Room,” meanwhile, is almost a great song, its wistful melody stretched thin over eight and a half minutes.  This Is Not a Safe Place is not, in the end, the classic Ride Mark 2 release that its first three songs so casually tease. But it has enough joy, verve and invention to suggest that Ride could get there one day.

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While the brooding pop singer can’t always shake the anodyne songwriting that plagued her past work, III is still Banks’ best album to date.

III

In 2013, Jillian Banks emerged as a poster girl for brooding, twilight-hours pop. She made all the right moves for an artist working in the burgeoning “alternative R&B” space: She committed to a monochromatic aesthetic, linked up with trendy collaborators, and commissioned Hype Machine-ready remixes. It worked, to an extent. Following a stint opening for the Weeknd, Banks became a relatively well-known name. Yet despite impressive stream counts, even her biggest singles weren’t quite enough to push her over the edge. Her signature sound relied on cookie-cutter production and “indie-pop voice” that weren’t hard to find elsewhere. With her latest album, III, Banks seems eager to reestablish her footing and take greater creative risks. While she can’t always shake the anodyne songwriting that plagued her past work, it’s still her best album to date.
Other than Banks herself, the most prominent presence on III is producer and Bon Iver collaborator BJ Burton, who produces or co-produces 10 of the album’s 13 tracks. He brings his unique bag of tricks—the Messina vocal harmonizer technique popularized on 22, A Million, the apocalyptic distortion that defined Low’s Double Negative. Paired with Banks’ voice, these strategies work wonders, and album opener “Till Now” sets the tone with liberal doses of both. A song like “Stroke” may lack lyrical finesse—“Say it’s hard to breathe inside my ocean/I give you the deep, but you’re still floating”—but flanked by Burton’s growling fuzz, Banks stands confident, smirking as waves of low-end crash around her.
On its face, lead single “Gimme” is another haughty banger about unfulfilled lust. But where on past albums it may have sounded lifeless, Banks’ voice sears through “Gimme” like twisted metal. Hudson Mohawke’s speaker-busting drums and bass blasts undergird a syncopated synth line reminiscent of Justin Timberlake’s classic “My Love.” Ballad “Hawaiian Mazes” strikes a diaristic tone against a melancholy backdrop of piano and old-world string trills, courtesy of Frank Ocean musical director Buddy Ross. “Telling me why you left and then complain you’re alone and I don’t know why,” Banks cries at the song’s apex. Though her lyrics can be as stilted as ever (“I tried my best to follow, but you moving too fast on ya daddy long legs”), the stream-of-consciousness style works far better than more playlist-ready fare.
When Banks does attempt the latter, she stumbles. The lone collaboration, “Look What You’re Doing to Me,” featuring Francis and the Lights, fails to extract a memorable melody from either party. “Alaska” half-heartedly pursues a pseudo-dancehall vibe that never finds its rhythm, while “If We Were Made of Water” tries to rebottle the quivering magic of “Warm Water,” Banks’ similarly aquatic 2013 breakout single. When she sings, “Maybe if you say it again, change some words around, maybe I’ll believe you then,” she’s also speaking on behalf of her listeners.
The most interesting moments on III tap into life experiences beyond doomed relationships. On “The Fall,” a sharp-tongued critique of the music industry co-written with Miguel, Banks adopts the perspective of a record company bigwig and attacks herself viciously, painting a picture of gaslighting and sexualization that scans all too familiar. It’s not her best vocal performance—Banks can sound brittle through Auto-Tune, and rap-singing isn’t her forte—but it’s one of the only times we glimpse the real Jillian Banks, ostensibly the driving force behind all these songs. Seven years after her debut, III brings the overblown excitement around her career to an official close. With the death of that hype, she’s finally delivered a record that gives her room to expand.

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Light in the Attic keeps up its winning streak, reissuing one of the most underrated albums of the 1960s, as well as rate work from the uncompromising Monks.

The Monks: Black Monk Time / The Early Years (1964-1965)

Alright, my name's Gary
Let's go, it's beat time, it's hop time, it's monk time!
On paper, it's hard to imagine a couplet that looks less like an opener for one of the best albums of the 1960s. When you hear it barked out by Monks lead vocalist Gary Burger over an otherworldly groove, though, it's an unlikely call to arms, and an immediate auditory stamp for one of the most strikingly original bands of the mid-60s. The band's sole studio album, released only in Germany in March 1966, has since become something of a legend, hailed as a precursor to punk and krautrock, and exerting influence far beyond its modest initial sales. Obscurities that routinely bathe in glowing praise naturally engender skepticism among people who haven't yet heard them, and often that skepticism is healthy. In the case of the Monks, though, all the praise is true: in 1966, Black Monk Time was beyond the cutting edge, and today it's easy to hear what made it so innovative and challenging.
The Monks were five Americans living in West Germany. They came there as G.I.s, stationed near Heidelberg in the southwestern Baden-Württemberg region, and the Monks began life inauspiciously as the 5 Torquays, a run-of-the-mill beat group that covered Chuck Berry and the latest English groups, drawing good local crowds. When their time in the Army was up, they stayed, but beneath the conventional exterior of the Torquays lay a group hungry to experiment and break the mold of beat music. They accidentally discovered guitar feedback during a rehearsal, and made it a part of their sound, to the dismay of club owners and some patrons. Their apparent willingness to experiment brought them to the attention of two German ad executives, Walther Niemann and Karl Remy, who the band took on as managers, and who would fundamentally reshape the band's image and sound.
You know we don't like the Army
What army?
Who cares what army?
Why do you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam?
Mad Viet Cong!
My brother died in Vietnam
James Bond, who was he?
Stop it, stop it, I don't like it!
It's too loud for my ears!
It's this sequence of lines from "Monk Time" that drives home just what a different game Black Monk Time is. After his call to arms, Burger's demented vocal runs through a whithering critique of war, sealing it with a curt dismissal of James Bond, who at the time was the biggest movie hero in the world. It not only decries violence, but the glorification and fetishization of violence, and Larry Clark's brutal organ interjection is waved off with a couplet that swiftly co-opts critics of the band's new, chaotic sound. One of the things that makes "Monk Time" one of the all-time great album openers is how completely it distills the band and its music. The stomping, repetitive bass and drum groove, the splatter of fuzz guitar, the six-string electric banjo hammering out percussive chords, the flailing vocals and loud organ outbursts exemplify the band's confrontational, rhythm-based sound. This is not flower power-- it's rage inspired by senselessness and tempered with humor.
Perhaps paradoxically, what makes the Monks' attack on war and the military so effective is the military discipline they applied to the band. On stage and off, they wore monks' robes with noose neck ties and cut their hair in the traditional monks' tonsure, and their music has a rare precision for something so wild. The group shouts of "Shut up! Don't cry!" on "Shut Up" are in lock-step, and they nail the complex, interlocking rhythm of "Complication." All the members sang, and the backing vocals alternately back Burger with drawn-out chants and sudden, shouted responses. "Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy" combines a children's rhyme with a savage rhythmic attack.
As doggedly out-there as they could be, the Monks did possess some pop sense-- this music, unique and strange as it is, is entirely approachable, and the band's final recordings, made after Polygram panicked and told them to produce more commercial material, are deranged pop songs that the band genuinely seems to have fun with. "I Can't Get Over You" is like a cartoon version of pop music, with weird falsetto harmonies and a big, rubbery bassline, while "He Went Down to the Sea" has a tribal Beach Boys quality, with its hard drumming, harmonies and glockenspiel. These and a few others are added to Light in the Attic's reissue of the album, as they were to Infinite Zero's long out-of-print 1994 reissue.
On the other side of the band's brief career, The Early Years is a collection of the band's early demos, made as they felt their way toward the sound of Black Monk Time, along with a 45 made in 1964 when they were still the Torquays. It has a different running order, but contains the same tracks as Omplatten's out-of-print Five Upstart Americans compilation from 1999. LiTA's two reissues are meant to function as a combined package, and Kevin "Sipreano" Howes' detailed liner notes are written as one piece, split across both discs. The material heard here is good, though anyone new to the Monks should probably make sure they love Black Monk Time before picking it up, the same way you would with any band's demos. One of the interesting things about the demos is how clearly the band's vision had already crystalized-- the recording is structured something like a musical mass, with little churchy organ interludes from Larry Clark and a bit of banter from Burger. For a fan, to hear them honing their rhythmic attack is gratifying-- their sound was no accident.
The Monks' music sounds so inevitable on Black Monk Time that it's easy to forget how unlikely the band's story is. For these five guys to find each other in the Army and subsequently devote themselves so fully to such a unique sound, and for two advertising executives to find them and push them to get weirder-- well, there's a reason that even with every incredible change in popular music during the 60s, there's only one Monks. Their one album was revolutionary, but sparked no revolution, due to circumstances beyond the band's control. They wandered back home and got real jobs, played in other bands, and Burger even became mayor of Turtle River, Minnesota. All these years later, you have a chance to hear what they did together again. Don't miss out.


Raime’s Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead, together with percussionist Valentina Magaletti, swap their customary electronics for muscular, guitar-driven sounds influenced by bands like Slint and Unwound.

Moot!

In pop music, the 1980s remain inescapable, but in the electronic realm, the 1990s currently reign supreme. The sounds of trance, jungle, garage, and IDM have all experienced a major resurgence in recent years; somehow things have reached a point where even electronica is being reevaluated and the average club kid often looks like an extra from The Fifth Element.
Moin’s debut album, Moot!, is heavily indebted to the ’90s as well. But instead of mining of classic Aphex Twin and Goldie records for inspiration, the UK outfit—which consists of Raime’s Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead along with percussionist and longtime collaborator Valentina Magaletti, who’s also logged time in the group Tomaga—dives deep into post-punk and post-hardcore, worshipping at the altar of bands like Slint, Shellac, and Unwound.
With its brawny riffs and jagged guitars, the largely instrumental Moot! brilliantly hearkens back to a time when labels like Dischord and Touch & Go were at the top of the indie-rock heap. It’s a direction that Andrews and Halstead have hinted at before, both with their initial Moin outings on Blackest Ever Black—which were released with little fanfare in 2012 and 2013—and again on 2016’s Tooth, by Raime. That LP infused the group’s usual low-end sonics with elements of muscular Albini-core, but Moot! tilts the balance heavily toward the latter. Although they haven’t abandoned electronics altogether, the guitar is now clearly front and center, as is Magaletti’s percussion, which gives the album a thrillingly organic feel.
For anyone who’s seen Raime in concert during the past few years, the thundering grooves of Moot! will likely ring familiar. Magaletti, who also provided drum sounds for both Raime LPs, has been part of the group’s touring lineup for several years now, and live recording techniques featured prominently in the new album’s creation. Moot! is a scrappy, stripped-down effort, but the general lack of polish does nothing to diminish the album’s power. The spiky “Lungs” sounds like something the Jesus Lizard might have cooked up (minus David Yow’s vocals), and the taut basslines of album highlight “Crappy Dreams Count” channel Fugazi. Songs like “I Can’t Help but Melt” and LP closer “It’s Never Goodbye”—the latter could be a lost track from Spiderland—slow things down, embracing the dirge while sprinkling a bit of psychedelia into the mix, but Moin’s intensity never wanes.
Thirty years ago, indie rock was rife with records that sounded like Moot!, and the bands of that era inspired successive waves of followers. But today, an album like this, coming from a context like Moin’s, feels radical. Most of the band’s peers put their guitars down a long time ago, and AD 93 isn’t known as a hub for post-punk experiments, but none of that matters once the sinewy, distortion-licked chords of LP opener “No to Gods, No to Sunsets” kick in. With its incantation-like vocals, the song also brings to mind the moody ambiance of groups like Three Mile Pilot, and that nightmarish spirit spills over into the feverishly chugging “Right Is Alright, Wrong Is to Belong,” another highlight.
Moot! is steeped in the past, but its appeal isn’t limited to its nostalgia factor. In a time when the electronic-music landscape has been flooded with precision-crafted DJ tools, escapist bouts of narcotic abstraction, and awkward pop-crossover attempts, Moin have taken a different route: plowing straight ahead, cranking their amps, and greeting listeners with a swift kick to the chest. It’s jarring, but it’s also an exhilarating reminder of just how powerful live music—and live post-punk in particular—can be, even in 2021. After a year-plus of life without concerts, Moot! is anything but.

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The Swedish quartet’s seventh album glows with carefree, mosaic pop arrangements. They sound looser and freer than ever.

Slugs of Love

Over nearly three decades, Swedish quartet Little Dragon has preserved a refined sense of style. Collectively, bassist Fredrik Wallin, keyboardist Håkan Wirenstrand, drummer Erik Bodin, and singer-songwriter Yukimi Nagano put a light spin on easygoing digital soul and electronic pop, Nagano’s distinctive, acrobatic voice conjuring brisk coolness and intense yearning alike. It’s a recipe they’ve accompanied with an extensive list of inventive, high-profile collaborations, including unexpected names like Kaytranada and De La Soul. On their seventh album Slugs of Love, the band provides another serving of danceable pop-soul and R&B, this time infused with an unwavering sense of optimism. Continuing the playful whimsy heard on their 2020 tour de force New Me, Same Us, here Little Dragon strengthen their elastic sound with wry lightheartedness and lean adjustments, injecting new verve into their songwriting in the process.
Slugs of Love delights in a carefree, mosaic approach. The band dials into a familiar mid-tempo sweet spot on “Frisco” and “Tumbling Dice,” both of which easily slot into their catalog of subdued bops; the latter conjures ’90s nostalgia, with a shuffling drum beat and an elated synth melody that feels lifted from a forgotten video game soundtrack. The band lets loose in other ways too, recontextualizing their typically polished sound: Nagano channels Donna Summer on the thumping throwback “Disco Dangerous,” letting her voice bend into a rapturous coo against loopy bass lines, while the centerpiece “Gold” carries an irresistible pulse that recalls Robyn at her most emotive peaks. The variation works in their favor, as on the tender opener “Amöban.” In a honeyed voice, Nagano admits to being a “neurotic mess” who is anxious about “sharing a song, a poem, a painting” with someone new. Working with a minimalist technique, they balance a simple slide whistle with a drum that knocks like a heartbeat, adding a gentle touch to Nagano’s vulnerability.
The themes of “Amöban” recall Little Dragon’s own trajectory as a band happy to remain on the fringes of mainstream fame; in this relaxed, more comfortable spot, they can experiment at will. “Is success winning a Grammy, or is success putting out music, or is success a feeling, or is it having one person at a show be moved for the rest of their lives?” Nagano acknowledged in a 2020 interview. Here, Little Dragon seem less concerned with existential career problems, instead leaning into the rush of romance and friendship. “Don’t spiral down into worries that visit you,” Nagano encourages during the chipper “Stay,” which recruits Atlanta rapper JID over delicate squiggles and harmonies that linger like a sunbeam. The title track, with a brief saxophone interlude that adds lush jazz textures to its motorik drum beat, casts slugs as a metaphor for indulging in obsessive pleasure, a surrealistic choice that typifies the record’s sense of humor and insistence on finding joy and ecstasy where you can. “Have a feast at the table/Slimy dream maker,” Nagano croons. “Be forever a craver.”
Occasionally, Slugs of Love meanders off course; “Lily’s Call” relies on a dramatic, prolonged buildup with no payoff. “Glow,” featuring a brief appearance from Damon Albarn, is an oneiric, bland ballad with listless oscillating synths and undulating bass, an odd outcome considering Little Dragon provided what is arguably one of Gorillaz’ most unforgettable guest features a decade ago. But the album rebounds on its celestial closing track, “Easy Falling,” a plush comedown that breezes by on gentle guitar and Nagano’s leisurely melodies. Like the album’s best songs, it offers a worthwhile escape with understated grace.