Warp mainstays and techno pioneers pivot slightly with an album of dark ambience and intriguing textures.

Oversteps

After more than two decades of recording together as Autechre, Sean Booth and Rob Brown can still create the aural equivalent of whiplash if they want to, or showcase a deep knowledge of dance music. The production duo's energetic 12-hour online radio broadcast from earlier this month-- joyfully tweeted about and linked to by fans-- was a massive, almost exhausting display of influences and favorites. Floating between Coil and Lord Quas, the mix inspired someone to crowdsource the track list on Google Docs.
Oversteps takes a much quieter approach, focusing on a smaller scale. Coming after 2008's Quaristice, a varied collection of shorter tracks that originated during live jam sessions, Oversteps leans toward some of the slower, more atmospheric aspects of albums like *Amber (*minus the metered pulse). After the album's initial 20 seconds of silence, the opener "r ess" slowly surfaces-- cold, distant synths arc overhead while broken, incomplete rhythms clatter and collide-- seemingly suggesting that steady beats aren't the main focus here.
Many tracks, such as "O=0" and "d-sho qub", do contain propulsive rhythms, and a slow funk and dull handclap seep through "Treale". But the textures are where things get interesting. Whether it's from tones floating in space or notes brushing up against each other in quiet but effective dischord, the ambience and atmospheres of Oversteps are haunting. "st epreo" expands and contorts with bass notes that seem bound to the rules of fluid dynamics. "Yuop" steadily builds and crests with ringing, grandiose synths. Sometimes, the lack of propulsion distracts, like on "pt2ph8". But the overlapping round of notes in "see on see" points to a clear design within the synthetic ether.
Autechre have evoked heavy moods while pushing the possibilities of production technology forward and broadening the vocabulary of electronic music. The famous video for their track "Gantz Graf" suggests as much, that they harnessed the grating sounds of a machine in the middle of a grand mal seizure. Oversteps finds them working in a comparatively less rigid fashion, almost organic compared to something like Confield. Focusing on creating tension and release within their compositions, they're still incorporating new designs, not merely repackaging the previous products.


A tighter, slicker, poppier sophomore album tries on every imaginable sound and style-- but none is as original or effective as the one they started with.

Odd Blood

When Yeasayer debuted in 2007 with All Hour Cymbals, they were a Brooklyn art-pop group intriguingly out of step with their peers. They carried an air of mystery and surprise, and at their best ("2080", "Sunrise") managed to make offbeat mysticism and off-kilter pop music seem attractive and exciting. They were basically a rootsy, classic rock-ish version of MGMT then. Their fate seemed doubly sealed by "Tightrope", their laser-focused and damn near best-in-show contribution to the all-star charity compilation Dark Was the Night.
Then they arguably topped that with "Ambling Alp", the pre-release single to sophomore album Odd Blood. "Alp" managed to retain the leftfield bona fides within an easy-to-love glassy pop sheen. That duality extended to the lyrics as well: The song is about infamous Italian boxer Primo Carnera, but in the chorus Chris Keating sang the kind of wholesome fatherly advice you might hear in a Shrek montage.
Like "Ambling Alp", Odd Blood itself should appeal to a lot of people: Yeasayer have made a potentially vanguard record using the full range of possibilities of software-based music to create what once would have been radio-friendly rock. The elastic "O.N.E." and the Tears for Fears-ish "I Remember" are successful mid-80s throwbacks, achieving the full potential hinted at on All Hour Cymbals and rivaling that album's best material. Opener "The Children" also works by tailoring their offbeat tendencies into a tightly packaged song. In much of the first half of the album, Yeasayer demonstrate a rare craftsmanship and consideration that's too often shoved under the rug in modern indie music. Their lyrics may not say much of anything, but their agile arrangements, sense of dynamics and pacing, and singer Chris Keating's expressive vocals communicate plenty.
The rest of the album suffers from a major identity crisis-- few of the various far-flung ideas it explores pan out, and most of them wind up overcooked. On the whole, the record alternates between a prog-rock version of 80s UK synth-pop (and those are the good songs) and dreadlocky alt-pop or yuppie-era world music imitations (aaaand... those are the bad ones). Songs like "Rome" or "Love Me Girl" aim for ambitious sprawl but just wind up muddy, while the ballads "Strange Reunions" and "Grizelda" seem plodding and congested. The more in need of editing the music gets, the weaker the lyrics become: "Mondegreen" is the worst offender, with Keating chanting "Everybody's talking about me and my baby makin' love 'til the morning light" ad nauseum over shamanistic electro-boogie. (But you knew that-- I mean, everybody's talking about it.)
Of course, Yeasayer aren't going anywhere: quality singles, inventive videos, and solid live performances go far. But it's hard to miss the pressure the band was under to deliver here-- it's nearly palpable in their overfed production and search for direction, and as a result, Odd Blood is a bit too much of not enough. I went back and listened to "Tightrope" again. It remains charming, human, and assured, winning your affection instead of trying to earn your respect. When Odd Blood succeeds, it does the same, but when it fails, it fails badly.


Singer/songwriter Margaret Glaspy's Emotions and Math is a collection of compact grunge-rock and breezy torch songs that variously recall Elliott Smith and Joni Mitchell.

Emotions and Math

Margaret Glaspy grew up playing fiddle and trombone and listening to early-’00’s Top 40 pop. She hung around in the Boston folk scene after briefly attending Berklee College of Music and eventually settled amongst New York’s singer-songwriter community. Along the way, Glaspy released a pair of EPs, beginning with Homeschool, a solo-acoustic offering that highlighted her compelling, nasally warble.
Several years later, Glaspy has arrived with her full-length debut Emotions and Math, a collection of compact grunge-rock and breezy torch songs that mark a decisive departure from the quiet, spare softness of her past recordings. After starting off singing meandering, exploratory folk (see the modernist recitation of “Know My Name/To Be Heard and Be Had”) on her debut Glaspy has developed a newfound knack for pop hooks and easy melodies.
If the songs on Emotions and Math, which follow conventional structures and hover in the two-three minute range, have polished over some of Glaspy’s intriguing eccentricities as a vocalist, they also show off her refined focus as a songwriter. On the ’90s-Liz Phair-indebted title track, Glaspy establishes herself as an uncanny chronicler of everyday neuroses, outsourcing her anxieties about a long distance relationship to the numbing tasks of calendar keeping and number crunching “the days ‘till you’re back.”
Two tracks later, she channels her anger inwards on the swaggering rocker “You and I,” blaming herself for letting a lackluster love linger too long: “Tonight I’m a little too turned on to talk about us,” she sings in front of a punchy guitar line. “Tomorrow I’ll be too turned off and won’t give a fuck.” Glaspy asserts her indifference with so much confidence that what might be a moment of despair instead scans as comforting, if not downright celebratory. It’s one of many instances on Emotions and Math in which Glaspy reserves her deepest empathy for her characters during their lowest moments, when their flaws are getting the best of them and their only sense of reassurance might be knowing that their peers are, more likely than not, fucking up just as mightily.
At their best, these songs share the self-scrutinizing intimacy of Elliott Smith and the imaginative melodic intonations of Joni Mitchell, two of Glaspy's most obvious influences.  Whether she’s writing from the point of view of a parent giving advice to their lonely child (“Parental Guidance”) or acting out imaginary conversations about her deepest insecurities (“You Don’t Want Me”), Glaspy is a lyricist who can toggle between distanced storytelling and open-hearted self-examination with equal ease.
Compiled from years worth of accumulated material, Emotions and Math suspends time and chronology as the 27-year-old songwriter navigates the dead ends, cheap promises and false starts of young adulthood. One minute, she’s stomping on the fading embers of a failed fling; the next, she’s pining for those very memories she just so happily surrendered. Glaspy toys with these emotional contradictions, juxtaposing nostalgia and angst against one another from song to song. As she puts it: “Why remember all the times I took forever to forget?”
That line is from “Memory Street,” the album’s centerpiece which finds Glaspy tiptoeing her way through remembrances of a failed relationship she’s worked hard to get over set to a slow-burning Neil Young & Crazy Horse groove. “When I get hungry for the mess we made,” she sings, indulging the cruel thrill and fulfillment in revisiting painful memories and past traumas, “I start walking down memory lane.” Whereas many songwriters might revel in the youthful abandon of such recklessness, Emotions and Math instead treats bad decisions and destructive impulses with compassionate clarity and heartfelt empathy. When Margaret Glaspy sings that she’s “a woman actin’ like a kid,” she presents the line not as critique but as consolation: it happens to the best of us.


On her second album, singer and songwriter Johanne Swanson is wiser, steadier, and more willing to explore. Her music now feels like an expression of emotional epiphanies.

Mirroring

Johanne Swanson’s debut album as Yohuna, Patientness, narrated her nomadic tendencies and countered their turbulence with evocative, delicate synth-pop. Now settled in Brooklyn, Swanson has a newfound grasp on stability, and her second album, Mirroring, demonstrates the personal growth she’s undergone between LP releases. Reaping the benefits of “a lot of time in therapy,” her music now feels like an expression of emotional epiphanies. More heterogeneous than the steady tranquility of Patientness, Mirroring allows Swanson to float between new aesthetics: Grand, shoegazey guitars and classical strings are a striking left turn, especially to those who’ve followed Yohuna since her early industrial-tinged EP, Revery.
In Swanson's words, Mirroring is “a metaphor for psychological projection,” and the title track takes a straightforward approach to the concept: “What’s you?/What do you see/And choose not to?” she sings, a tough-love invitation to evaluate (and maybe scrutinize) yourself through her lens. On the optimistic “Stranger,” she flips the idea, admiring the “calm confidence” of an elusive subject: “Strange how I’m your mirror.” Mirroring goes both ways; Swanson’s journey of self-discovery has enabled her to examine others’ traits in relation to her own. The wisdom she’s gained is palpable.
That’s evident in the album’s astute breakup songs, where Swanson explores shattered relationships from multiple angles. The well-wishing “Fades to Blue” realizes lessons from past lovers in her own “thank u, next”-style prose: “Thanks for showing me my truth/Not all pathways lead to you.” She reminisces fondly as she lets go (“I wish I wasn’t blacked out during our first kiss/I made my bed so you would come over and sit on it”), even as she regrets not having been entirely present in the moment. “Waiting” aches in a partner’s absence, asking, “When is the perfect day that doesn’t start with you?” On “Dead to Me,” the usually cordial Swanson sounds near furious as she recalls an inexcusable betrayal by someone she once held close. “Can’t consent when you withheld the truth/Yeah, you’re dead to me, too,” she sings, the drawn-out “too” implying the sting of mutual animosity.
Swanson wrote and co-produced every song here, but the additional performers include some familiar names: frequent (Sandy) Alex G collaborator Emily Yacina, Told Slant’s Felix Walworth, Foxes in Fiction’s Warren Hildebrand (founder of Swanson’s label, Orchid Tapes), and LVL UP’s Mike Caridi and Greg Rutkin, among others. Though Patientness was similarly a group effort, Mirroring sounds less cohesive in the latter half. “Mirroring” and “Dead to Me” feature piercing guitar whammies. The gentle strums on “Waiting” recall the hazy acoustics of Hovvdy or Elvis Depressedly, and “Stranger” gives way to a cello solo. Reverbed vocals in “Find a Quiet Place” are swallowed by a run of harp arpeggios, which, while stunning, feel rather out of place in the middle of an otherwise modern-sounding album. Rather than blending these ideas into a unique sound, Mirroring’s songs remain compartmentalized, giving the album as a whole an air of disarray. It feels especially ironic on a project that aims to illustrate how Swanson has found center. Still, her weighty lyricism and intellectual acuity testify to artistic maturation. Yohuna’s identity is still mutable, but on Mirroring, Johanne Swanson seems much more assured.


On the latest installment of his mixtape series, the rapper/singer invites a truckload of guests to flip ’00s R&B hits.

Chixtape 5

The latest installment in Tory Lanez’s Chixtape series is another attempt to recreate the recent past. This time, the rapper/singer remakes early-’00s R&B hits alongside their original creators. As an anthropological exercise, it’s kind of fascinating. As music, it strains to hold your attention, pulling you back to old hits without doing much besides reminding you they existed.
Lanez tries to impose a narrative, using skits as exposition. The story offers a long-winded account of Lanez cheating on a woman who then pays a second woman to set Lanez up by seducing and then leaving him (why anyone would do this is unclear); the album somehow ends with Lanez claiming to be the victim, guilt-tripping the woman who was paid. None of this matters, except as an excuse to cram in more early-’00s references (“You know WASSUP!”, Lanez belches to his friend at one point, referencing the old Budweiser ad campaign.)
At over an hour long, the album suffers from sag and bloat. Each song loses momentum after the first minute, despite the endless parade of guest stars – Lil Wayne, Ludacris, Mario — popping by. Still, there are moments where the experiment almost works: “Jerry Sprunger,” a song constructed around T-Pain’s “I’m Sprung” featuring T-Pain himself, is a silky AutoTuned banger. “Beauty in the Benz,” a remix of Snoop Dogg and Pharrell’s “Beautiful,” unfolds around a mediocre Snoop verse, with enough twinkles in the production to make you bob your head reflexively.
The rare songs that don’t feature a prominent sample fit into the world Lanez has created: featureless, water-soluble R&B. Songs like “Broken Promises” are pretty enough on the surface to distract from the lyrics. “The Fargo Splash” snatches the “Oh!” refrain from Ludacris’s “Splash Waterfalls” and a few lines from the song, but it’s hampered by Lanez’s clumsy lyrics: “McDonald’s chicken fries, thick as thighs.” Ludacris one-ups him with the even-worse “Left the pussy on the deathbed/ Been killing the game since I was breastfed.”
This approach to women extends to the guests. Ashanti, who appears on the album cover, sounds stunning on the remake of “Foolish,” but Tory doesn’t give her the space to shine, cutting her off with his warbling. (It also bears noting that Chris Brown is on this album, chirping along to a new version of his song, “Take You Down.”)  Ultimately, despite the concept behind the album, or how much effort Lanez clearly went into creating it, it's hard to enjoy the music when the results are this puerile. The only reason the Chixtape series exists is to create decent songs out of once-great ones, and all of the prominent samples in the world can’t change that.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


On their riveting new album, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter-producer shifts from future-shocked electronic pop to a super-sized emotional bloodletting steeped in ’90s alternative.

softscars

When yeule uncorks their roar, it sounds like a full-body exorcism, like they’ve been waiting their entire life to let it out. Wrapped up in grungy angst, hurtling alongside rambunctious cymbal crashes, and shadowed by an exasperation with the empty promises of online life, these screams blare like klaxons on softscars opener “x w x,” signaling ruptures to come. This deck-clearing detonation of a song is prefaced by cascading piano lines tangled up in computerized static, a neat aural distillation of the art-school pop cyborg’s animating inquiry: Now that we’re all hopelessly tethered to technology in search of companionship, comfort, and control, what does it mean to be human? On softscars, their answer can be as annihilating as those shrieks, as playful as an #emovoice TikTok video, or as startling as a notification from a dead friend’s phone.
yeule first started toying around with music production as a young teenager in the early 2010s, after they saw a live video of Grimes on the internet and thought, “This fucking bitch does it all by herself… so I’m gonna try.” Over the last few years, the non-binary digital native broke out with a couple of future-shocked electronic pop albums in the mold of Grimes, Charli XCX, and Björk, collecting a cult of Discord and Twitch fans along the way. All the while they mostly sang in a hushed deadpan, wary of letting the real world encroach on their virtual existence. “I like to think I’m doing just fine/I like to search my symptoms online,” goes one memorable lyric from 2022’s Glitch Princess.
But on softscars, yeule dives headlong into this thing called humanity, tussling with all of the chaos that comes with it. The album’s title defiantly references old self-harm scars that linger on yeule’s body, tangible reminders of past traumas and what it took to overcome them. And a cloak of reverb is finally lifted from their voice, revealing an expressive range: They can sound winningly whiny or wistful or utterly broken in vocals that are often echoed by pitch-bent doppelgangers, like a chorus of Gollums calling in from a choppy line. They’re also looking to a much different, more retro realm for musical inspiration: alternative rock. The album, largely created by yeule alongside the exciting young producer Kin Leonn, delivers a vintage K-Rock playlist of corroded and gauzy styles, with souped-up dream-pop, emo, electro-folk, pop-punk, and grunge rushing by like fond teenage memories. Meanwhile, the 25 year old at its center continues to explore the infinite spaces between flesh and firmware, fantasy and reality, ones and zeroes.
And guess what? It turns out yeule is a very good rock star, a student of the game. In their youth, stifled by Singapore’s conservative society, they escaped into Smashing Pumpkins cassettes and bashed out Pixies songs as part of a band. They filled their 2021 covers album Nuclear War Post X with homespun takes on the Breeders, Big Thief, and the Velvet Underground, among others. When David Bowie died, a teenage yeule didn’t leave their room for a full week. That admiration resonates in their aesthetic bravado and alien otherness: They have cited Nintendo DS consoles and bottom-feeding deep-sea creatures as mood-board fodder for their ever-changing looks, which have recently hit upon a perfectly tattered midpoint between steampunk and cyberpunk, Mad Max: Fury Road and The Matrix.
Bowie can also be heard in softscars’ walloping emotion and the way yeule gives voice to today’s outcasts—Ziggy Stardust’s Gen-Z grandkids, dismantling gender normativity in the face of heightened violence and prejudice. Mix all that with a dramatic self-loathing streak that Billy Corgan, Thom Yorke, or Gerard Way could appreciate, plus hints of Courtney Love’s confrontational spin on sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, and even some of Avril Lavigne’s middle-finger insolence (yeule has called the famed mall-punk’s 2002 debut, Let Go, particularly formative), and you have someone who’s balling up decades of misfit energy into art that speaks to our uniquely AI-addled times.
Again and again, the album pulls off a delicate tightrope walk, balancing big, widespread feelings of modern disillusionment with harrowing personal details. On “software update,” a strung-out, meta power ballad that deserves to be met with a galaxy of swaying phone lights, yeule offers a micro autobiography that could work as a social-media bio for a blinkered generation. “25, traumatized, painting white on my eyes,” they sing sweetly, as if reading from a children’s book. “Handcuffs and hospitals are some things I despise.” The song references disordered eating, a condition that yeule still struggles with, along with white lines and grams, bruises and loss. It revolves around the idea of digital immortality. “When I leave my flesh, you can download my mind/And pick out the pretty parts for you,” they offer, lines that carry an extra heft considering that, as a lonely teenager existing mostly online, the idea of living on as a series of automated posts actually crossed yeule’s mind. “software update” crests with yeule’s version of an algorithmic arena-rock hook—“I love you baby,” they belt atop distorted guitar chimes, perhaps addressing their fans, their friends, their partner, themself, or all four.
Even at its darkest, though, softscars is a blast, its turbo-charged riffs and sticky melodies all but begging you to crank the volume up to levels that will require future ENT visits. And there are plenty of purely fun moments here too, like the excellently titled electro-rock headbanger “cyber meat.” On the song, yeule adopts an unmistakably emo singing style—nasal and bratty—that reads as a loving tribute to the genre. “Bite me, vampy/I taste just like candy,” they tease, sounding as if they were auditioning for a Hot Topic commercial circa 2003. “cyber meat” features production and guitar from Chris Greatti, who’s in Yves Tumor’s band, and it underlines the current trend of queer artists, including yeule, Yves, and Jane Remover, who are brilliantly putting their own spin on alt-rock and emo as they subvert those genres’ historically masculine associations.
For yeule, and so many others, the sounds that glint and crunch across softscars are inherently nostalgic, harkening to a turn-of-the-century era of blissed-out innocence, when a scratched-up copy of Nirvana’s In Utero could be the most important thing in the world, and the simple stomp of a fuzz pedal could send your serotonin levels off the charts. It was also an era before the internet as we know it, before social media and its attendant ills, when the web presented hopes of breaking down old ideas and binaries instead of reinforcing them. For an artist who was raised online to choose this time to start closing their tabs and turning their metaphorical 404 errors into badges of pride feels especially meaningful. And yet softscars isn’t as simple as a rejuvenating weekend in the countryside, or a Marshall stack ringing over the hilltops. In its clash of handcrafted distortion and digital anxieties, the album faces our blurry moment at the precipice of head-spinning technological advances with a laugh and a cry. “Art, artificially,” yeule sings at one particularly fizzy point, over chugging guitars and starry synths, “I wish I was special.” Don’t we all.


The louche UK singer returns with an album that thrusts ahead quickly and painlessly but leaves you itching to shower off its overpowering cologne the second it’s over.

Coup de Grace

So you’ve managed to get into a decent party in Hollywood, the bar is open, the company is starry, life seems fantastic—then suddenly you see a familiar face in the corner. It’s that guy. The voice in your head panics. Oh god, what’s he doing here? This is the Miles Kane effect: Nobody ever asked for him, but he keeps showing up. Perhaps the Liverpool thing is exotic in L.A.? One man’s Scouse hanger-on is another’s future McCartney, apparently. Kane has bristled at the notion that he’s riding the coattails of his best mate, Arctic Monkeys henchman Alex Turner. But it still stands, even if it can be benched at this juncture because he’s found someone else to exploit.
Turner is off celebrating the success of his band’s sixth album, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, which sounds closer than ever to his and Kane’s side project, the Last Shadow Puppets, and may imply the end of that frolic. Kane is cast asunder. He’s in crisis. What’s a lad in a world without the other lads? His third LP finds him mooching off the reputation of another post-MySpace British bard, Jamie T. Kane’s new collaborator has, bewilderingly, co-written Coup de Grace, an album that was five years in the offing but only two weeks in the making.
It sounds like it, too, thrusting ahead quickly and painlessly, yet leaving you itching to shower off its overpowering cologne the second it’s over. “Keep it simple and real and you can’t go wrong,” Kane tweeted recently. But Coup de Grace often sounds so rushed as to be crass. Listening to “Loaded” (which was written with Lana Del Rey after an encounter at a show—again, how?), I initially misheard a lyric as “Fuck you like a monkey with my makeup running.” The true line begins, “Funky like a monkey.” That was a mild relief at first, but then my heart sank further upon realizing that the former could as easily have made the cut. Kane recently revealed that Del Rey’s talent took him by surprise, which tells you everything you need to know about how he sizes up women.
Kane’s M.O. has been to wear his scoundrel reputation on his sleeve and thus get away with it. But for all his crimes on Coup de Grace, there’s one line so blindly idiotic it beggars belief: In “Silverscreen,” he imagines his lover being pursued by a Ryan Gosling type. This makes him cross. So he shouts, “Two-faced Johnny, hotel lobby/I won’t go up without you.” Now, cast your mind back to the last time Kane was promoting a record, the Last Shadow Puppets’ 2016 album Everything You’ve Come to Expect, when he propositioned a woman journalist. “So, what else are you guys doing today?” she asked, wrapping up. “Do you want to go upstairs?” Kane replied. He later apologized for his “ill-judged” comment. But since then, he’s backpedaled. “All I can say about it is it was a joke that didn’t get understood,” he insisted in a post-Weinstein interview. “It got me down.” Poor Miles, still dogged by a fruitless advance.
The crux of Kane’s problem seems to be that, somewhere along the way, someone told the 32-year-old he was hilarious. His attempt at a lovelorn lament, “Killing the Joke,” contains the line: “Since you’ve been gone, I’ve left the TV on, let the milk go sour, let the bills pile up/But I know I’m a funny guy.” Yet Kane invites ridicule more often than his wit elicits anything like laughter. “You always look away as they crucify me,” he sings on “Loaded,” criticizing an ex for failing to rescue him. “This is my Adele album,” he’s offered, unconvincingly. Inspired by the end of an year-and-a-half long relationship, he invokes some stylistic role models: Marc Bolan (“Crying on My Guitar”), the Damned (“Coup de Grace”), and—allegedly—the Fall. If only Mark E. Smith, who once vowed he’d get an injunction against Franz Ferdinand for citing the Fall as an influence, were alive to conjure an appropriate insult.
The problem with Kane’s emulation of past performers is that he remains a tourist lost in his time warp, lacking the originality and vocal grit to elevate fandom into innovation. He is (as I’ve said before) a karaoke Rod Stewart. His scream on the chorus of “Cry on My Guitar” is nasal and strained, like he's sucking words through a stubbed cigarette. The song’s lyrics are so lazy in their retromania, they might as well have been written by an algorithm. “I cry upon the strings of my guitar,” he rasps, “and everybody tells me that it’s sh-la-la-la-la oh yeah.” One hopes Coup de Grace really is Kane’s parting shot.


This mostly unknown early '80s record from Japan has been absent from conversation for the past 30 years. Now, it  is reissued and ready to blow your mind. With mesh of Japanese and Armenian sounds, Mariah's unforgettable melodies walk the fine line they all but invented between its authors’ musical heritages.

Utakata no Hibi

Throughout its long, slow journey west, Mariah’s Utakata no Hibi has been an album without context. After a dormant period at home among Japan’s vinyl geek underground, the 1983 record began to spread farther in 2008, when the tastemaking Scottish DJ duo Optimo shared a cut online. That song, "Shinzo no Tobira", which they first heard in a Tokyo record store, has since earned a cult following worldwide for the ethereal lines it traces between Asian and Middle Eastern tonalities, folklorish Armenian lyrics, and futuristic Japanese synthpop leads. Its soundscapes are like those once dreamt by Brians Eno and Wilson. But for all the love "Shinzo" and its parent album have found in tiny nightclubs and Internet testimonials, surprisingly little has been asked or answered about its origins. It's almost as though Utakata—now reissued by Palto Flats—has at last arrived on our shores not simply through a crate digger’s time warp, but from some other world altogether.
Or maybe a few of them: As befits an album that owes its broader discovery to a Shinjuku record store called Eurasia, Utakata’s plainspoken lyrics are sung in alternating Armenian and Japanese. In this regard—and most others—the record bears no resemblance to Mariah’s previous five, wherein a revolving door of popular Tokyo session men dabbled in everything from prog rock to jazz funk. By 1983, the project was being led by Yasuaki Shimizu, a relentlessly exploratory musician best known for the saxophone takes on Bach’s Cello Suites he would later record in both Japanese mines and Italian palazzos. His brilliant solo outing from the previous year, Kakashi, is Utakata’s only obvious relative. But that earlier work’s East-meets-West patchwork of genres, moods, and scales feels much more cut and dry than the seamless marvel Shimizu would soon create. Given how difficult it remains to find a fair comparison for any of Utakata’s seven songs, let alone synthesize the picture they form together, it’s an album that has well earned its reputation as an elusive classic.
The long tally of pleasant surprises begins with opener "Sokokara…" ("From Here…"), in which slash-and-burn no wave guitar and a frantically overloaded player piano somehow only add to the springtime optimism suggested by the song’s marching beat, blossoming synths, and Shimizu’s skyward warble. "Hana Ga Saitara" ("Were Flowers to Bloom") is a more eloquent draft of the dubbed out, sax-led post-punk that was then beginning to bubble up in England rock clubs, here powered by brass skronk and proto-techno synths. And "Fujiyu Na Nezumi" takes the British nursery rhyme "Three Blind Mice" and translates it into Japanese, Armenian, and a poetic syntax of spare bass, sustained synths, and simple percussion—indicating not so much the album’s sense of humor as the childlike wonder animating its every move. Mixer and engineer Seigen Ono would later work the boards for artists like John Zorn, Arto Lindsay, and King Crimson, but the way he focuses Shimizu’s playtime ruckus of international instrumentation and production techniques remains the accomplishment of his career.
Utakata’s most impressive feat of synthesis, however, lies in its coupling of East Asian and Middle Eastern sounds. The most explicit instance occurs in early highlight "Shisen" ("A Vision"), which weds gorgeous piano pentatonics and koto court music with Armenian vocalist Julie Fowell’s mesmerizing mantra, "Our eyes as one." When the lone, cavernous drum and piercing sine waves enter, the effect is devastating. The twinning effect is at its subtle best on the famously DJ-friendly "Shinzo no Tobira" ("My Life Is Big") that first got Optimo’s attention, where unforgettable melody walks the fine line it all but invents between its authors’ musical heritages.
In 2015, it remains a rare and enchanting thing to hear a piece of convergence culture this effortless—which, after all, may be one reason Utakata still sounds so otherworldly. Another could be the fact that the album owes its existence to a creative moment in Japanese pop that remains virtually unknown to the English-speaking world. Thanks to '80s electronic pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra’s continued chart success and the glory days of the Japanese economy, the mainstream entered a renaissance of open-mindedness and ludicrous recording budgets, producing an abundance of records that answer Shimizu’s sonic adventures with ones every bit as bold and compelling. Maybe Utakata belongs, then, not to some wondrous alternate history, but a real one we’re just beginning to uncover.


Owen is the new miracle drug for the treatment of chronic insomnia. The FDA has begun testing it as anal ...

Owen

Owen is the new miracle drug for the treatment of chronic insomnia. The FDA has begun testing it as anal ternative general anesthesia for certain surgical procedures. Law enforcement officials have suggested using it to subdue anti-globalization protesters at this summer's WTO rally. I'm saying Owen's debut album is going to put you to sleep here, people!
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. As I grow older, sleep is quickly becoming one of my favorite activities, and an album that assists me in the process can hold a very special place in my collection. Sedative qualities don't have to equal boring; it can also mean the music is just pleasant or comforting. At the end of a long, hard day, I like nothing more than putting a CD in my stereo and gently drifting off to sleep, something that's hard to do with the Ramones or Jay-Z on.
Owen, by the way, is not a guy named Owen, but the solo project of one Mike Kinsella, indie-rock journeyman formerly/currently of American Football, Joan of Arc, and Owls. Why Kinsella would name his one-man band Owen rather than, say, Mike, is a mystery, though I like to think that it's in tribute to mid-80s Red Sox shortstop Spike Owen. Not likely, but a nice scenario.
Kinsella pulls off his musical sandman act by primarily utilizing that most sleepy of instruments, the acoustic guitar. Eschewing chord strumming for delicate, dreamy finger-picking, Owen's songs generally sit on a central riff repeated for the three- or four-minute duration, lulling the listener into a hypnotic state. Kinsella's just-above-a-whisper vocals also soothe the ear, a million miles away from the throaty yelp of his brother Tim and generally avoiding typical verse-chorus structure or melody.
If this all sounds like an unplugged version of American Football, you're mostly right. But the setting is considerably more intimate on Owen, without Kinsella's earlier vehicle's spiraling guitar epics and octopus drumming. Also gone is the post-breakup open wound nature of American Football's lyrics, the raw honesty of which could provoke weeping fits or retching, depending on one's tolerance for emoting. Instead, Owen's themes are considerably less traumatic, if not exactly sunshine and lollipops (one song is called "Declaration of Incompetence"). And when drums-- organic or programmed-- are added into the mix, they're sedate and simple, keeping the tunes from floating off into space without disrupting the relaxed tone. The other instrumental flourishes Kinsella adds to the mix-- vibraphone, organ, strings-- similarly add depth and color to his compositions without becoming a distraction.
The combination works best on the album closer, "Think About It," which progresses patiently through three distinct movements over its seven-minute run time. Many of the tracks are seamlessly blended into one another, maintaining the warm, drowsy glow with brief instrumental passages. "Accidentally" serves as the strongest of these, as Kinsella slowly overdubs more and more guitars playing complimenting themes until the song builds into a soft, cushy pillow of... zzzzzzzz...
Whoa. Sorry about that.
Given the above description, it'd be easy to categorize Owen as mope-core, or slow-core, or curl-up-in-the-fetal-position-and-have-a-good-cry-core. Correct, too; Kinsella invites the comparison himself by not too subtly mimicking the Red House Painters on "Places to Go." But while Owen adds little to the genre's customary sound, one has to admit he does it well by not letting the tortoise-like pace get too monotonous.
Obviously then, if this kind of subdued, contemplative music makes you want to kick someone in the groin, Owen should not be placed on your to-buy list. But if you're more receptive to sad white guys making music in their bedroom, or if your prescription for Valium is running out, it might be for you. Just don't operate any heavy machinery during use.


The South Side producer infuses footwork’s intricate syncopations with the romance of R&B; in the process, he underscores the shared lineage with Chicago house.

Signals in My Head

Footwork isn’t just dance music, it’s meant for competition. At roller rinks, raves, and other functions on Chicago’s South and West Sides, DJs cue up tracks with syncopated layers of percussion to mirror the rapid movements of battling dancers. (At this rate, expect to see footworking in the 2032 Olympic Games, if the Games still exist by then.) But on Signals in My Head, veteran footworker DJ Manny downplays the competitive aspect of the music in favor of a romantic tone inspired by R&B.
Manuel Gaines learned to footwork from his older brother in middle school, started producing tracks on FruityLoops as a high-school freshman, and co-founded footwork crew/label Teklife with pioneers DJ Spinn and the late DJ Rashad as a teenager after meeting them at a roller rink. Beyond his production, Manny was known as one of the best dancers of a generation, once noted for dominating a battle with a track of his own making, just a few hours after recording it. But that competitive streak isn’t exclusionary: He’s just as likely to bring a newcomer into the fold with a friendly introduction.
It’s a big summer for footwork. RP Boo’s upcoming Established! blends samples from Dr. Dre and Phil Collins into complex rhythms, while Jana Rush’s Painful Enlightenment pushes into more abstract, jazz-like territory, and dance crew the Era light up downtown every night with a gigantic public-art installation. Though Manny is younger than these originators, his latest album takes footwork back to its roots. Manny calls Signals in My Head an “R&B love type album”; that translates to an emphasis on the ecstasy that footwork shares with other genres of Black Midwestern dance music while maintaining the signature 160bpm tempo and rhythmic sophistication. This theme was possibly inspired by his new home in Brooklyn with his romantic partner and fellow musician SUCIA!—he did include one of her tracks in his recent BBC guest mix—but then, love (or lust) has often been part of his music. (When South Side Weekly asked what first attracted him to footwork, Manny joked, “It got me girls.”)
The best tracks on the album evoke the thrill of a new romance. On the title track, the kick and snare respond to each other, first as quarter notes then more rapid patterns, like a flirtation carried out on MPC pads. Album opener “Never Was Ah Hoe” draws out more than 45 seconds of synths and hand drums before any bass kicks in, building tension by withholding the longed-for sub-bass.
Sometimes the romance theme is literal, using the vocabulary of love songs. The sampled vocals on “All I Need” switch from whispers to soulful vamping to declare, “Your love is all I need” and “It’s what I want.” It’s a simple message, but it’s effective, and Manny’s production adds rhythmic nuance by alternating between uptempo and half-time cadences accentuated with 808 triplets. (This is an album with two separate songs titled “You All I Need” and “All I Need,” to really drive the point home.)
Manny’s vocal samples are often less about the words than the tone. It takes a few repetitions of the syrupy sweet vocals on “U Want It,” reminiscent of Manny’s fellow South Sider Jeremih, to notice he’s singing about money, not a lover. The purrs on “Never Was Ah Hoe” are sensual enough that the vocalist’s actual past is irrelevant.
Manny’s renewed focus on the romantic side of footwork links the music to its origins in Chicago house. The gospel vocals on “Wants My Body,” full of lust and self-confidence, would fit on a vintage Frankie Knuckles track, but the near-religious fervor is amplified by the syncopated drums. “You All I Need” and “That Thang” bounce along with swung, splashing hi-hats on the off beat, a house-music signature.
The album only drags when it abandons the love theme, loose as it is. The full four-on-the-floor pound of “Club GTA” is too aggressive, and the high synth whines orbiting the upper register create the claustrophobic feeling of an overcrowded dancefloor. “At First Site” closes the album with dramatic synth pads and a keening lead melody, evoking a spooky 16-bit video game. It’s a fine track, but a strange note to end on.
As with most footwork records, the strength of Manny’s album may ultimately lie in how well dancers can move to it. But the romantic glow that infuses Signals in My Head suggests your technical skills don’t matter, as long as you’re dancing with the right partner.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Though the Flint rapper’s latest falls slightly short of his previous mixtape, he’s still capable of delivering dumbly witty punchlines and sex-obsessed theatrics.

Ninja Warrior

Flint, Michigan wouldn't be one of the hottest scenes in rap without “Coochie,” “Coochie World,” “Coochie Scout,” a mixtape titled Coochie Land, and Coochie Man, the floor-humping alter ego of YN Jay. Through horny punchline-based vignettes, overpowering ad-libs, and sexually frustrated grunts that sound closer to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall than anything we’re used to hearing in a rap song, Jay has been putting his own spin on the sound of Flint rap since early last year. This seems like a stunt that should have gone briefly viral and faded away, and it probably would have if YN Jay’s theatrics weren’t secondary to the music itself.
YN Jay’s first mixtape of the year, Ninja Warrior generates countless questions. Why is there a Naruto theme but the tape begins with a snippet from The Warriors and ends with a clip from Kung Fu Panda? Why does he tirelessly brag about the sex position where he whips a leg in the air like a jockey lifting themselves onto a horse? Is there a reason why he keeps barking? YN Jay heavily pants, growls, and breathes during the opening seconds of “Oh My Gawd,” and the line that follows is, “I just seen a badass bitch lookin’ at me in the club!” If you haven’t realized yet, YN Jay is obsessed with sex, and even the slightest possibility of it makes him lose his mind like a dog with rabies.
The way he relentlessly fantasizes about asses like a middle schooler who just found their first porn site is part of his charm, but it’s a convenient smokescreen. His music is actually about how well he’s able to use the foundation of Flint rap to build this raunchy fever dream. On “Elevator Music,” Jay and fellow local star Louie Ray use the conversational back-and-forth style—which has produced some of their city’s best songs like “Movie” and “Arguing”—to boast about their sexcapades: Jay and this one girl were so wild that they broke a California king bed, and Louie reminisces about the smell of booty.
“Kakashi” has the fast-paced drums and breezy delivery that sounds like the older kid on the block telling you a tall tale—both of which have become synonymous with the Flint rap scene. But it’s how Jay manipulates the flow that makes it feel so fresh. It takes him multiple tries to get his anecdote right about creeping with another man's girlfriend, but there are no second takes—well, at least it doesn’t feel as if there are—because Jay flourishes in those unplanned split seconds.
It’s impossible not to compare Ninja Warrior to YN Jay’s 2020 explosion, and when you do, the mixtape slightly underwhelms. There is no moment as jaw-droppingly funny as the sound effect of an ass clapping on “Coochie;” the handful of Michigan-style Marc Boomin instrumentals are familiar and fine, but feel like B-versions of the frenetic Enrgy beats that have backdropped Jay’s regional hits of the past. And his punchlines are still dumbly witty, but not like the time when he exclaimed, “How the fuck you thick wit no ass?!” on “Austin Powers.” Still, there’s no shame in that—Jay set the bar high for himself. As long as he continues to embrace the brisk drum patterns and casual flows of his city, the music will remain more than a gimmick.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


On his best album in decades, the most famous man in metal reaches again for big hooks and big statements, with help from new friends like Post Malone.

Ordinary Man

Since the mid-’90s, Ozzy Osbourne has been so famous he only needed to show up. In 1996, by then years removed from his last great album, he launched the annual metal circus that borrowed his name. He soon became an early star of reality television, a lovably mumbling patriarch in a family of salacious misfits. He no longer needed to strive to make great music; he just had to be on time for an annual summer of sets and, like, get really bummed about jogging on his birthday.
Despite becoming a global brand, Osbourne’s solo records have always been surprisingly audacious, as if the man most synonymous with heavy metal itself still had something to prove. And so it goes with Ordinary Man, his first LP in a decade and his finest in two. Produced and co-written by Andrew Watt, the name behind recent pop hits by Cardi B and Justin Bieber, and featuring a murderers’ row of veteran hired guns like Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, Ordinary Man is an enormous record. Full of gospel roars, symphonic swells, and massive hooks, the music cuts between doom, pop-punk, and even a little hair metal. Even as Osbourne, now 71 and recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, croons “When I speak my final words/What will it feel like,” he sounds as ambitious as he’s been for half a century.
Osbourne has often flirted with trends without actually chasing them. For 1995’s Ozzmosis, he mined the same sad soulfulness as one of his acolytes, Chris Cornell, whose own more tensile version of Osbourne’s yearning voice made him a superstar. And 2010’s Scream—his most recent studio album, as uneven as a season of The Osbournes—reimagined him for audiences that loved Disturbed or alternative rock. (Aiming for Foo Fighters, he only got close to Collective Soul.) For Ordinary Man, Osbourne and his coterie of co-writers pursue a more conceptual trend: the playlist. These 11 songs feel like a loose mixtape, flitting among a half-dozen moods and motifs in what feels like a methodical quest for streaming placement.
For most of Ordinary Man, that approach provides inspiration for the restless Osbourne. As unlikely as it seems, “Under the Graveyard” is one of the most memorable doom spirituals ever from the singer who practically invented them, the lamentations of a lost soul coiling into a triumphant chorus. Half a plea for the release of death and half a reckoning with the solitude he imagines it will entail, it is a paean to perpetual dissatisfaction—with sobriety or indulgence, life or death, heaven or hell.
Despite the shadow of age, disease, and mortality, there’s childlike glee here, too. “It’s a Raid,” a thrashing hardcore tirade about state surveillance featuring Post Malone, explodes in an ecstasy of rebellion. The irrepressible boast “Straight to Hell” is delightful, if only because of the way Osbourne rhymes “celebrate” with his vow to make you “defecate.” Resist all you’d like, but it’s hard not to smile when he mutters “I’m on the menu/Are you hungry?” like some impudent schoolboy during “Eat Me.” Mining the bluesy sway of Down and a dozen other Sabbath-loving Southerners, the band matches this bravado line by line.
But the lack of focus means that the misses—when Osbourne aims for “November Rain” grandeur or “Iron Man” menace, for instance—are flagrant. A duet with Elton John, the title track is a maudlin ballad about surviving the excesses of fame only to realize you’re going to die, anyway. “I don’t wanna say goodbye/When I do you’ll be all right,” Sir Elton solemnly swears. Pompous and overwrought, the song is so self-serious it mostly makes you glad you’re not a frail old rock star, too, anticipating your own eulogies. “Scary Little Green Men”—a paranoid tantrum about how the aliens are creeping into your mind, bro—awkwardly seesaws between Foreigner-style rhapsodizing and Motörhead-lite browbeating. Noncommittal and unconvincing, this is Ozzy, desperate for topical #content.
That quest for relevance highlights the deepest issue with Ordinary Man, the feeling that haunts you even as you enjoy it. Osbourne has struggled with intelligibility for decades, but he somehow sounds like he’s 25 here, flying and diving inside his historic range like the drinks and drugs never happened. You can’t help but remember the way Rick Rubin captured Johnny Cash or Joe Henry showcased Solomon Burke, showing the wrinkles inside their legendary voices during their final years. Ordinary Man instead feels like a preemptive holographic interpretation of Ozzy, a digital patchwork of his voice standing in for the real thing. He sings about decades of hard living and the nearness of death, but his voice bears no evidence of that wear and tear. Yes, Ozzy sounds great, but that sound leaves you wondering, once again, if he had to show up at all.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


The dizzying new album from Suicide’s Martin Rev is 34 tracks long, and highlights his playful streak—an underdeveloped mix of noise, new age, bossa nova, rock’n’roll, and more.

Demolition 9

Martin Rev’s first album in seven-plus years introduces itself with a blast of noise that’s bound to make even the most masochistic listeners leap for the volume button. Beyond abrasive, the sound throbs and quivers as layers of ear-piercing frequencies overlap for an excruciating 45 seconds. Let’s hope that military interrogators never get their hands on this piece of music, titled “Stickball,” because it’s by no means a stretch to say you could torture someone with it.
As co-founder of the venerated experimental duo Suicide, Rev is of course no stranger to challenging his audience. He is also clearly more than just a noisenik, having proven his ability to carve form out of chaos over and over since the early 1970s. There’s random noise and then there’s Rev’s brand of noise: “Stickball” is actually quite carefully arranged. The vague outline of a drum pattern begins to materialize within its wash of booming static, but it takes a special kind of perseverance to appreciate it.
Perhaps opening the album on an unlistenable note was Rev’s way of weeding people out, but it’s a curious decision. Demolition 9 contains some of Rev’s most straightforwardly musical work, and for most of its 34 tracks, Rev pulls back the curtain to reveal the composer that he is at heart. He did the same on his last album, 2009’s Stigmata (a heartfelt tribute to his late spouse), except there he stuck to an orchestral style. With Demolition 9, Rev runs free across a dizzying grab bag of genres.
Try to ingest this album in a single sitting and you might literally find yourself dizzy from its nonstop hairpin turns. “Stickball” leads into the gentle choral stylings of “Salve Dominus”—a piece that couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to what came before it, and the first of many examples where Rev makes no attempt to conceal the fact that he’s courting beautiful sounds. From there, he delves into new age, bossa nova, ambient soundscapes, traditional rock’n’roll, and more noise with a glee that approaches the zaniness of a cartoon score.
Rev’s playful streak is evident going all the way back to his eponymous 1980 solo debut. It was there in Suicide, too; it just wasn’t as easy to make out. If you watch recent live clips, he seems to relish his role as a kind of musical trickster figure. So it follows that some of the new album’s transitions are laugh-out-loud funny. And on tunes like “My Street,” Rev exposes how lighthearted his irreverence has become by playing a 1960s girl group-styled melody on a distorted guitar with a tone so cutting it sounds like a blowtorch. Imagine Phil Spector producing an early industrial/power electronics act.
There’s definitely a method to the madness here. And to be fair, at least half a dozen tracks showcase Rev’s unique gift for turning abrasion and spartan beats into art. But “Stickball” epitomizes this album’s central problem: the pattern in the noise never comes to fruition. Later, Rev reintroduces the same harsh tones on “Into the Blue,” basically a repeat of “Stickball” with a more defined live drumkit. But rather than letting the drums emerge gradually, Rev breaks the idea into two separate shards of glass, almost as if daring you to either step on them or steer clear.
Rev doesn’t give anything on this album time to develop; he simply introduces each motif and then drops it for the next idea. With most of the tracks clocking-in at under two minutes, Demolition 9 gets aimless and exhausting very quickly. It didn’t have to be that way. Had Rev taken some care to group the individual vignettes together by similarity of style, the music could have had an arc and played like a series of suites. Even the face-scraping “Stickball” could have felt rewarding with some proper setup.
Without any attention to flow, Demolition 9 sounds like a person rummaging through drawers, reading off unrelated pages from separate notebooks. The experience is not without its charms. Rev makes for a lovable eccentric, but at this point, he has nothing to prove by making his music more difficult than it needs to be. Hiding in the cracks of Demolition 9, there’s an album that speaks to Rev’s musical range. To find that album, though, listeners will have to come up with a coherent track sequence on their own.


The soundtrack institution of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross return to their well of ominousness and employ an array of techniques to convey anxiety, impending danger, and discomfort.

Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: Bird Box (Abridged) Original Score

Bird Box (Abridged) Original Score

Starting with 2008’s sprawling collection of instrumental work Ghosts I-IV (released under the Nine Inch Nails aegis) and accelerating with 2010’s Oscar-winning score for David Fincher’s The Social Network, the instrumental side of Trent Reznor has effectively shared equal billing with the more traditional industrial rock that made him a superstar. Never one for half measures, Reznor clearly sees the film-soundtrack work done alongside his longtime composing partner Atticus Ross as a chance to flex. “We aim for these to play like albums that take you on a journey and can exist as companion pieces to the films and as their own separate works,” Reznor wrote recently. He’s not kidding: The duo’s score for Fincher’s 2011 film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for instance, is 15 minutes longer than the movie itself.
In announcing the release of Bird Box, the score for Netflix’s treacly Sandra Bullock survival-horror film of the same name, Reznor described it as a way of presenting the audience with “a significant amount of music and conceptual sound” that didn’t make the film’s final cut. Even then, that “Abridged” parenthetical in the title points toward “a more expansive” version of the album due later this year. It’s just as well since what Reznor and Ross have created is better than the movie they created it for. It does exactly what good soundtracks are capable of doing, and what they expressly intend for it to do: Emerge as a rewarding experience in its own right.
Songs like the subtly intimidating “Hand Covers Bruise” and the melancholy “Soft Trees Break the Fall” from Reznor and Ross’s breakthrough Social Network score still set the template for much of what’s going on here, using gentle keyboard-based melodies to establish an emotional baseline, while adding varying degrees of electronic noise to ratchet up the ominousness or relief depending on the needs of the moment. Album opener “Outside,” for example, charts a 12-minute course from quiet piano exercise to carrion-insect buzzing, with a gap inserted at the halfway point as if to say, “OK, time for the scary shit to start.” Later tracks “A Hidden Moment” and “Last Thing Left” find the pair in full grownup lullaby mode, twirling and twinkling their way through Reznor’s unmistakable melodic signatures.
But despite its familiar sonic hallmarks, Bird Box is not the work of one-trick ponies. You’d never mistake this album for, say, the Reznor/Ross soundtrack to Jonah Hill’s coming-of-age film mid90s from 2018, which provides a neat apples-to-apples comparison. The companion EP for that movie is all major-key optimism; it sounds a lot like looking at the partly-sunny sky on the album cover feels. Bird Box, by contrast, employs an array of techniques to convey anxiety, impending danger, and the sense that safety and happiness are never guaranteed—subject matter that suits a Nine Inch Nails lyric sheet just as well as a Netflix fright flick.
Odd time signatures on “Outside,” “Sleep Deprivation,” and “And It Keeps On Coming” leave the listener waiting for a resolution that never arrives. The crescendoing repetition of “Undercurrents,” the record’s most unnerving track, positively screams mounting horror even if you don’t know it accompanies the literal end of the world in the actual movie. And there’s a hook shared by “Careful What You Wish For” and “Close Encounters” best described as the sound of a broken record player skipping somewhere else in a deserted building you’ve entered but can’t get out of. Throughout the album, there’s a sense of maddeningly slow forward momentum, of heading someplace but never arriving. It works if you’ve seen the movie or not.
Despite nearly identical running times, you’re unlikely to give Bird Box a casual afternoon spin the way you might with The Social Network. (Unless you’re the kind of person who owns approximately 33 hours of Trent Reznor music with half a dozen playlists arranging the work by mood. Ahem.) It’s not as easy a listen, and the songcraft is far less direct. Still, nearly a decade deep into a sideline in the soundtrack business that’s become a second full-time gig—and nearly three decades into Nine Inch Nails as a going concern—Reznor and Ross are finding new ways to draw their listeners in, then make them uncomfortable once they get there.


Strut offers a richly researched and smartly sequenced compilation of all of Sun Ra's singles, offering a compelling and unique look at the cosmic jazz innovator’s genius.

Singles

How do you pin down Sun Ra? The cosmic jazzman laid down so much music it would take a warehouse of full-time historians working round-the-clock hours to figure it all out. Albums were often hastily assembled from his prolific sessions, packaged with DIY artwork and sold at gigs for quick cash. Thousands of hours of unheard recordings are rumored to exist. Maybe he stacked boxes of magnetic tape on far-away planets too, such was his connection to the stars.
If it’s even possible to traverse the vast Sun Ra universe on board a single starship, then Strut Records’ new compilation Singles: The Definitive 45s Collection offers a compellingly sturdy vessel.  It’s a 65-track set of 7-inch fragments of the celestial god, sent to earth to help us map out details of his galaxy that the albums could not. There are no wasted motions here: Each flat, wax disc represented another bright star in the constellation Ra.
The name of his birth certificate read Herman Poole Blount. Born in Alabama in 1914, the mysterious musician showed up in Chicago in 1946 with little more to his name than a jail record picked up for refusing to fight in World War II for ethical reasons. The jazz scene was primed for revolution and Blount moved to a different beat, driven by a journey to Saturn he claimed he made years earlier while in deep spiritual concentration.
The star man would later take up the name Sun Ra, form his ever-changing band the Arkestra, and spend a lifetime teaching the world Afrofuturism, a complex ideology of Black nationalism, Egyptian myth, scientific discovery, science fiction movies and the other-worldly fashion choices he’d flaunt on-stage. Forget “Disco 2000”; Sun Ra was envisioning to the paranoid blips and beeps of “Disco 2021” some 30 years before Pulp showed up. He mastered the electro squiggles of “Planet Rock” prior to the birth of hip-hop, and forged his own form of analogue cyberpunk as Philip K. Dick sat as his typewriter laying out his own dark vision of the future. Singles preserves all that for future generations.
It’s said when you watch classic movies like Citizen Kane today, it’s important to bare in mind that these movies were writing the rules of filmmaking that we now take for granted. Sun Ra’s music somehow doesn’t require that kind of explanation. As soon as the needle drops, it sounds like scripture—a key testament that formed a building block of a half-century of music. Everyone from George Clinton to OutKast read from The Book of Ra.
And yet, on paper the project seems an odd prospect. Sun Ra was a lot of things—pianist, bluesman, bandleader, arranger, interstellar poet, multiverse traveller—but he’s never been accused of being a singles artist. Because of the format, Singles eschews his lengthier wigouts for shorter vignettes. You might not get the 20-minute avant-garde virtuosity of “Space Is the Place,” but you do get jaunty holiday jingle “It’s Christmas Time.” That might seem less crucial, but when grappling with Ra’s slippery legacy, nothing here feels disposable.
For the fanatics, *Singles *will offer little they’ve not heard before. While the original 45 versions of a lot of these songs, many of which were released on Ra’s own El Saturn Records, are rare (or, in some cases, completely lost), they’ve all cropped up in other places, including a similar-but-less-expansive compilation put out by Evidence Records in 1996. Still, there’s undoubted power in hearing Ra’s career laid out like this.
Arranged chronologically (or as close to it as possible—Ra wasn’t exactly pedantic when it came to labeling his sessions) and with about half the songs recorded during his 1950s Chicago period, Singles captures the genesis of his forward-thinking space-bop. Fittingly, the opening two tracks, “I Am an Instrument” and “I Am Strange,” both spoken-word numbers, predict his metaphysical interests. “I belong to one who is more than a musician/He is an artist,” he says on the former. His voice is tuned low and grave, as though foreshadowing a seismic event.
Whether he’s envisioning a playful, pamphlet-utopian version of the city on the Lieber-Stoller-esque “Chicago USA” or mixing experimental rhythms with dense and fractured chants on “Spaceship Lullaby” (both recorded with the Nu Sounds, an important precursor to the Arkestra), it’s thrilling to hear Ra connect Chicago’s timeless jazz scene to his increasingly wild tinkerings. Even the earliest material on* Singles *is the sound of a bandleader confidently wielding his arsenal for maximum purpose.
It’s not just Ra that gets shine. Singles captures The Arkestra at their finest. John Gilmore, a chief lieutenant in the group for almost 40 years, blusters with his tenor saxophone on the peppy “Soft Talk,” recorded in his first few years alongside Ra. The gentle horn riff of “Space Loneliness”—from 1960, Ra’s final year in Chicago—pulls you towards the void of the outer cosmos before blissful and delicate solos from Phil Cohran (cornet) and Marshall Allen (alto sax) chime in.
Given the nature of the format, Singles also showcases Ra’s pop instincts. Whether it’s the smooth doo-wop of “Daddy’s Gonna Tell You Know Lie” (of which there are two versions), the wild-man energy of singer Yochanan on blistering R&B number “Hot Skillet Momma,” or Hattie Randolph’s sweet rendition of jazz standard “Round Midnight,” it’s a thrill to hear Ra carve out lean jukebox jams. On “Bye Bye,” the sweet harmonies of the Cosmic Rays are drowned out by short, sharp skewering of double bass that tears through the final few seconds. Recorded a decade before George Martin was doing that sort of thing, it confirms that even in the pop realm, Ra was a daring futurist.
The later work sees Ra fully exploring the outer realms of his own talent. “Disco 2021” sounds like an android’s fever dream. A doomed but dinky organ holds hands with a Gilmore-led wind quartet on the ugly-beautiful “Outer Space Plateau.” Ra incorporates a Moog synth into “The Perfect Man”; probably recorded in mid-1973, he deploys a bluesy horn riff as the bedrock before running wild with the synthetic instrument. It’s a strange mismatch, but “The Perfect Man” feels like a rare link between dapper nightclub blues and the space-bound sounds of new wave, disco and early hip-hop. The song encapsulates Sun Ra’s freewheeling, alien brilliance.
The London-based Strut Records has long been prolific in unearthing and reissuing old music and has gotten pretty damn good at it. The three-disc CD and LP releases of Singles: The Definitive 45s Collection includes a lot of the trimmings you might expect: rare photos, artwork, sleeve notes and an interview with El Saturn Records founder Alton Abraham. There’s also detailed track-by-track and session notes by project compiler Paul Griffiths that you’ll open up a lot as you grapple with this set. Strut is experienced in dusting off old recordings, so the remasters sound crisp—particularly when played back-to-back with versions that cropped up on other compilations—but without suffocating that rich 45rpm flavor.
In addition to the CD and digital releases, Strut is putting out 20 cuts from the collection in two 45s box sets (Volume 1 released this month, Volume 2 released in March 2017) in a limited 500 copies run for the dedicated looking to fully immerse in the spirit of their original releases. For newcomers here for spiritual guidance, broaching Sun Ra’s seismic life work can be daunting. To penetrate the outer atmosphere and splash down into an unknown world; to crawl into a mind of a man with the power to transport his consciousness across our solar system. Singles offers a wide-ranging but accessible route to his unearthly sounds.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a globetrotting fantasia on the Nintendo 64 that remains the high-water mark for video game music.

Koji Kondo: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Ever since those four notes guided enemies down the screen in 1978’s Space Invaders, video game music has remained one of the most commonly heard sounds across the world. Yet there is a disconnect between its outsize popularity and its critical recognition. Game soundtracks rarely pad out year-end lists or are regularly reviewed in music magazines, let alone considered as credible listening options outright. The soundtrack for Ocarina of Time, the fifth edition of The Legend of Zelda—a flagship series for Nintendo that inspires such slavish devotion, both Robin Williams’ daughter and Seth Rogen’s spaniel share its name—was so full of creativity and color and wonder that it presented the most convincing possible case to argue game music belongs in the canon.
The score, composed by Nintendo’s in-house MVP Koji Kondo, was the first that truly thrived outside of its originating medium, a game centered around an ancient flute-like instrument. It quickly took on a second life as open-source material, where it was enjoyed, adapted, and shared. An entire generation grew up around the explosive popularity of the game in the late 1990s, which explains why mash-up producers feel compelled to slap Clipse over “Lost Woods,” or why countless symphonic orchestras tour their own reinterpretations, and why a genre named Zeldawave exists at all.
From the stirring opening screen to the weepy final credits, the music that flows through Ocarina of Time was a generational Rosetta Stone, encompassing Gregorian chants, Arabic scales, harp, flamenco, dark ambience, and at least one rip-off of Gustav Holst’s The Planets—an unforced and generous way to transmit those sounds into the homes of millions. In the 21 years since its release, Kondo’s score remains the one component of the game that has not dated, even as every facet of the industry has advanced by orders of magnitude. By eschewing what was or wasn’t in vogue, Kondo instead hit upon timelessness.
Koji Kondo understood the medium of video game music better than anyone. A young fan of regional jazz fusion acts Casiopea and Sadao Watanabe, as well as the grandiose prog of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, he rolled out the Osaka School of Arts in 1984 and straight into a job at his first and only company, Nintendo. He was part of their inaugural wave of sound technicians, hired at a time when the blocky tones pumping out of arcade machines served little purpose beyond luring quarters; a ubiquitous but characterless wavelength, ripe for someone to stamp their imprint.
Although the Nintendo Entertainment System was able to play only three notes simultaneously, his score for 1985’s Super Mario Brothers was a revelation: Pixelated fish fluttered along to the rhythm of watery waltzes; the Underworld was a melody-devoid inversion of the Overworld; and you always seemed to be falling down crevices or spoing!-ing off enemy heads pleasingly in time with the music. Variables in how the game functioned were limited, which allowed Kondo to work with Nintendo’s still-small team to compose a soundtrack that existed as an invisible master hand, guiding player movement along while remaining catchy enough to be something that will be hummed or strummed along to until oceans burn.
Kondo was gifted a chance to set the parameters of a compositional practice in its infancy. Attempting to make game music diaristic was a dead end. Even Ennio Morricone’s finest film scores existed for situations that you could come across in everyday life, more or less: Binaries of love and hate, comfort and danger, hope and despair, played out with human bodies and recognizable locations. There never could be a relatable analog for Zelda’s elfin hero, Link, strafing around the belly of a whale king or being hounded by flaming skulls, so why bother? Repetition was equally a double-edged sword to master. Get it wrong, and you’re subjecting the listener to a banal ditty over and over and over. Get it right, and you’re creating something familiar to millions yet indelibly personal to the player. By the mid-’90s, Kondo was so accomplished with working through the challenges of constrained composition that the Super Nintendo’s successor, a 64-bit machine with the capacity to replicate sound significantly closer to actual music, might have seemed like letting the rest of the industry start on easy mode.
If Nintendo 64, which hit the market in the summer of 1996, broke the stratosphere of what 3D gaming could achieve with its launch title, Super Mario 64, 1998’s Ocarina of Time was the first successful attempt to stick a moon landing. Released with just 39 days left on the calendar, it still became the biggest seller of the year, besting an impressive class of ’98 that contained Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life, Banjo-Kazooie, and StarCraft. An instant hall-of-famer, Ocarina of Time improved on just about everything that came before it: immense scope, absorbing lore, dynamic storytelling, elaborate presentation—and music.
Kondo now faced an entirely new challenge to make his vision pay off. The N64’s audio fidelity and internal memory were terrible. To add embellishments to a track, you might need to bargain with coders to discreetly leave one part of the map with the uneven texture of cobblestones. Worse still, the industry was undergoing a kind of reverse automation in lockstep with upscaling technology, replacing machines and machine-capable composers for actual musicians. Compare Yasunori Mitsuda and Akira Yamaoka’s acclaimed soundtracks for 1995’s Chrono Trigger on the Super Nintendo and 2001’s Silent Hill 2 on the PlayStation 2, and the changes feel chasmic. The synthetic twinkle of the former is unmistakably tied to the 16-bit period, but the scratchy, layered textures of the latter break free from those associated tropes, and into an age of CD-quality sound design.
Initially, Kondo resisted morphing his beloved bleep-and-bloop game music into real life music. So he rebelled by keeping things unreal. He would spend days rifling through global curios in Kyoto’s record stores before merging his finds into combinations that broke with chronology, geography, and anthropology—combinations that couldn’t plausibly be found outside of a console. Vocal from as far back as 1990 about the changes sweeping through his profession, Kondo eventually embraced them, forging links to the past and casting forward imagined futures.
The sheer size of Ocarina of Time was unprecedented, which gave Kondo the freedom to let his imagination roam. As the game was being coded, he would build out his compositions from the trickle of development updates, tracing rhythms from Post-it Notes littered over his keyboard about woodland mazes and collapsing castles and Death Mountains. He waited for fitting motifs to drop into his brain, often while he was in the bath. Progress was generally fluid, nothing like the 18 months spent hacking away on 1990’s Super Mario World.
Sometimes, what was called for was pretty obvious. Glassy tones fit the “Ice Cavern,” gladiatorial horns and crashing timpani rolls gave dramatic flair to a “Boss Battle,” and a plaintive twang greets you at the “Lon Lon Ranch,” the kind of snoozy town-that-time-forgot vibe that comes off like Beck B-sides fed through a machine learning algorithm. Kondo also boldly ditched Zelda’s iconic main theme, broadly regarded as his standout work, for the very first time. This could have resulted in open revolt amongst diehards but for two majestic new pieces inserted in its place: The rousing “Hyrule Field,” which follows you throughout the game’s central area, stayed fresh by utilizing an adaptive mechanism that told the game’s internal engine to cleanly cycle between eight-bar segments with open chords, depending on whether you were in danger, resting, or in full flow on horseback. Then there’s the tender “Title Theme” greeting you as soon as the N64 loads up: drifting chords, spare keyboard rolls, one quivering ocarina, and clip-clopping hooves as Link’s horse, Epona, strides across the screen.
Other times, Kondo would need to conjure diegetic music that Link and other characters in the game respond to. Twelve of the game’s themes are based around just five notes—re, fa, la, ti and the higher-octave re—simple enough to map onto the instrument in Link’s hands, but resonant enough to occupy a permanent space in your amygdala. Concision was key; so long as your N64 was on, the loops could replay endlessly. Many of the tracks on the officially released score that accompanied Ocarina of Time landed between only 30 and 70 seconds. Striking a balance between complexity and simplicity, Kondo deepened the range of expression while keeping it elemental. “Song of Storms” is so maddeningly catchy it drives a windmill operator in the game to actual madness, ruining his life.
What was particularly arresting about Ocarina of Time was its very un-Nintendo embrace of darkness. Here was a game you brought neighborhood friends round to share, curtains drawn, watching and listening intently—not just because it was expansive and fun and un-put-downable, but because this thing was off its axis. Characters age and die, clay zombies rise up to choke you, and dungeons full of enslaved prisoners spiral like M.C. Escher paintings. All along, the music gets progressively more claustrophobic and forbidding. For once, negative space on audio tracks seemed like artistic license rather than technical limitation. When night falls, the music tapers off completely, leaving you exposed to the elements with nothing more than a bone chill for company.
Capturing this psychological turmoil in a way that connected to a broad audience pushed Kondo harder than before. The scorched earth of “Dodongo’s Cavern” is evoked through a miasmic mood piece that creeps like noxious fumes preceding a pyroclastic flow—but with Trent Reznor scoring the blockbuster first-person shooter Quake back in 1996, this sort of unsettling soundscape wasn’t exactly new. Kondo’s fascination with arcane instrumentation rarely heard in general, let alone in games, gave him the edge. An Armenian duduk snakes through the musty, grim “Spirit Temple,” marimbas pace around the climactic battle against Ganondorf—set against leaden drums in a 23/16 time signature that looks bizarre on paper, they represent the lithe movement you need to overcome a dominating but cumbersome final boss—while the rattling percussion and ephemeral hollering of “Forest Temple” respectively came from Indonesian angklung and a sample pack named Zero-G Ethnic Flavours.
Kondo’s curiosity did, however, lead to one of the larger controversies in Nintendo’s history. Rapt with excitement over an exotic chant he had likely picked up while browsing discount bins for audio travelogues, Kondo did not realize it was أَذَان (adhan), the Islamic call to prayer. He layered the sacred verses throughout the “Fire Temple” for atmosphere, and given the fractional Muslim population inside Japan’s cloistered society, no local testers picked it up. Corrected revisions of the game, with a more generic male choir in place, were rushed to stores as soon as the passage was caught, but stands as a lone blot on the company’s customarily sparkling copybook.
Ocarina of Time was to be Kondo’s last full soundtrack. He was responsible for most of 1999’s Majora’s Mask, drawing inspiration from Chinese opera in line with its mask-based aesthetic, but had a much-diminished role when it came to the Gaelic sea shanties of 2002’s The Wind Waker. He remains in charge of Nintendo’s music department, but as a composer, Ocarina of Time was his way of leaving it all out on a field that was in the process of being aggressively returned. Nintendo’s latter-day scores for Zelda and Mario skew more orchestral, but so do most big-budget titles now. They lack Kondo’s uncanny ability to bind feelings of happiness and sadness into an immediately nostalgic whole, so that your first listen feels like your thousandth.
A remake of Ocarina of Time in 2011 roused Kondo, like a great gatekeeper awoken by a sense of duty. He preached the necessity of continuity, giving employees strict instructions to stick as closely as possible to the original, watching out for fractional differences in tempo and timing that would ruin the malleability of the score. Tampering with the leitmotifs twinned with environments and characters was a cardinal sin: nothing could be worse than jeopardizing fond memories. Even basic SFX had to be recreated to transmit the feel of the N64 era on the handheld 3DS, despite the newer hardware being wired completely differently. Heads were scratched over a revamped “Title Theme” that Kondo kept rejecting, before his young team clocked that the N64’s characteristic reverb, used to mask the harsh compression, had been scrubbed. The opening ocarina no longer drifted into view from a far-off forest, but was front-loaded and far too clean in the mix. Once derided, the N64’s drawbacks were now cherished, imperfections to stimulate a flutter of butterflies in the gut.
One of Nintendo’s greatest strengths—or follies, depending on what stage of the deleterious decline/miraculous revival cycle the company finds itself in—is having the confidence to reach for intangible qualities of magic and the sublime in an earnest and uncynical fashion. They remain the lovable dad of the industry, corny and often eye-clawingly frustrating, but self-aware enough to make good on it. Kondo’s scores are the connective tissue in Nintendo’s enormous body of work, like Joe Hisaishi’s for Studio Ghibli films. His particular gift was to not just create music matched to gameplay, but to grasp the way sound folds itself into our surroundings, creating associations forged and never forgotten.
The central conceit of Ocarina of Time’s story is the ability to toggle between adult and kid versions of Link, warping between the bleak morass of adulthood and an era of innocence, with only flickers of the hellscape to come. This is not a luxury afforded to us in reality. Yet Nintendo do their best to bridge the divide all the same, striving to make kids feel like adults and make adults feel like kids again. No game soundtrack before or since has brought that to bear quite like Ocarina of Time, leaving an emotional response that lingers long after the system shuts down.


As a mainstay of Warp Records, Clark returns with a more accessible, more human album that still reinforces his outré techno dreams and arpeggiated fantasies.

Death Peak

Clark is a torchbearer for his label, Warp, a former vanguard that outlasted its own revolution to become an immutable status quo. He and labelmate Bibio interviewed each other for The Quietus in 2009 for the label’s twentieth anniversary, and Clark offhandedly related a creation myth for his music: “There was so much rave stuff you’d listen to and you could imagine bobbing about to it, but [Black Dog] just had more depth and layers of feelings to it.” Presumably, he meant Bytes, from Warp’s genre-defining early-nineties compilation series, Artificial Intelligence. He spent the next fifteen years imprinting his MPC jams, analog synths, and samples of his drumming and acoustic guitar onto the sound.
Still, synthesizing a neat developmental arc for Clark is an exercise in meaningless distinction. His nine albums touch on many varieties of techno in no particular order. In fact, disorder is his medium. Instead of measuring their relative pH levels of jungle and garage, it’s best to assess each album this way: Is it More Clark or Less Clark than the last one? More Clark means manic and malfunctioning; Less Clark means accessible and coherent. His best records, like 2006’s Body Riddle and 2014’s Clark, are More Clark and Less Clark at once, balancing detailed, chaotic sonic events in impregnable forms (a.k.a. Just Enough Clark). His weakest records, clustered in a slump between those milestones, tend to be way More Clark than a person could handle. But isn’t too vivid a voice about the mildest flaw an artist can have?
Death Peak is Clark’s first record that’s almost completely Less Clark. While it doesn’t have quite the artistic heft of his self-titled album, the bright, punched-out shapes are more fun to listen to, with an emotional accessibility that makes me imagine a kind of post-rave Eluvium. Don’t worry, it’s still Clark enough: as usual, his tracks sound like jittery, rusted iron machines that somehow produce long rainbows of melody, and there are many moments when the tracks cling to the edge of control. “Hoova,” where burned curls of distortion eddy around colossal drums, is eventually seized by a mad, accelerating whir that, just when it seems about to explode, expertly disperses. “Slap Drones” is technically aggressive and emotionally dry, the kind of thing Clark has sometimes filled whole albums with, and “Un U.K.” gets lost in ten minutes of lovely channel surfing, but he had the courtesy to put it at the end. But more often, there’s nothing cerebral about these arpeggiated fantasies, lushly produced, full of tones that pulse in soft colors.
Clark, whose wilder cyborg music courts post-human themes, also integrates the human voice more thoroughly than ever before. He relies on a chorus of what kind of sounds like Oompa Loompas in Mordor—a little silly, a little evil, and quite grand. But there’s never a sense of a single human speaker; the voices simply clad the well-made grooves with warming polyphony and rhythmic accents. Still, their usage is very songful, especially on the radiant “Peak Magnetic,” which feels effortless in flight even when a turbine engine cranks up inside its sparkling trills.
Too bad Clark already used Body Riddle as the title of his supreme head record, because Death Peak is some of the most engaging body music he’s ever made. From the infinite boogie of “Butterfly Prowler,” where all the shifts and drops land right where they belong, to the show-stopping “Catastrophe Anthem,” which sounds like someone taught an A.I. Colin Stetson and blew it up to M83-size, it's a multicolored flood of effortless release and actual human feelings, an assuredly musical record that continues a modern streak of Peak Clark.


The Detroit rap stalwart makes hard-hitting music with no frills. His latest project basks in the idea that an album this regionally specific can still have nationwide appeal.

Rich Off Pints 3

About a decade ago, Icewear Vezzo took a trip to New York to pass around his bubbling Michigan street hit “Dancin.” Featuring the star of the Detroit crew Team Eastside, Peezy, the single was rooted heavily in local tradition—slick punchlines and a funky piano-driven beat. When he played the song for record labels and radio stations around town, the collective response was confusion: It was “as if that shit was the worst shit they ever heard in their life,” he remembered. Years later, the sound of Icewear Vezzo and Detroit rap in general isn’t much different, but the way it’s received is. From Florida to Texas, from Philly to Louisville and even France, Michigan rap’s influence is everywhere.
Raised on Detroit’s East Side, Icewear Vezzo has been a constant in the scene ever since his music blew up in the city’s strip clubs in the early 2010s. His songs are straight-up with no frills: The hard-hitting beats and vivid lyrics attempt to give you a glimpse at the life of a Detroit high roller every time out. You wouldn’t be wrong to say he makes the same song over and over again, but that one song is pretty damn good.
Rich Off Pints 3, the finale to Vezzo’s recent trilogy about living like the bits of Paid in Full where it’s all good vibes, is predictable yet satisfying. He makes bread, throws it at the strip club, blows a bag on cars and jewelry, gets his family right, causes a little havoc, and makes some more. It sounds pretty sweet. Vezzo isn’t saying anything that hasn’t been said before on “Ace of Spades,” rapping over an instrumental so low and ominous that it resembles the Jaws theme, but it works because of how confidently he says it: “Throw the money up until the club empty/Pill poppin’ nigga, keep my gun with me.” Opener “F Blocc” is another standout, full of sleek whooshing ad-libs and disappointment toward everyone not hustling as successfully as he is. Vezzo’s also got a flair for the dramatic. “Took some penitentiary chances for this new Richie,” he raps on “On My Own,” like he’s in a one-last-job heist movie.
The beats, though, are fairly routine. The brooding pianos and pummeling drums aren’t ever bad, but sometimes I’m convinced he types “Icewear Vezzo type beat” into YouTube and clicks download without even listening. The sound is a bit more old school Detroit than the faster, kinetic instrumentals popularized with the emergence of the Flint scene, and I do wish he would mix it up occasionally. But he’s such a good and efficient rapper that it hardly matters. I’ve heard variations of “The 6” beat a couple hundred times, but that doesn’t make the punchlines any less effective.
Variety isn’t exactly the point of Rich Off Pints 3. Vezzo is basking in the idea that he can make an album that sounds this regionally specific while still having nationwide appeal. When major rap stars like Lil Baby, Lil Durk, and G Herbo pop in for solid runs, Vezzo never shaves off the edges of his local style to make them more comfortable. It’s a sign of how far Michigan rap has come. On his next trip to New York, he’ll be welcomed with open arms.


On her first full-length, Karima Walker fuses structured folk songs with abstracted sound art to create an uncanny Americana.

Hands in Our Names

Karima Walker began releasing simple pastorals around a half decade ago, but quickly her songs morphed into something stranger. Inspired by her discovery of boundary-pushing composers like Éliane Radigue and Pauline Oliveros, she’s taken to fusing her structured folk songs with abstract sound art. It’s something others have attempted before—think Will Oldham’s recent collaboration with the drone duo Bitchin Bajas or some of Charalambides’ warped spirituals—but this Arizona-based songwriter’s fusion feels particularly alien. Unearthly drones collide with slowly scrawled acoustics. Electronics overwhelm spectral hymns. Looped vocals and slivered field recordings lend an unsettled feeling to her work, which sounds born both of earth and stratosphere, here and hereafter.
Walker’s first full-length, Hands in Our Names, was conceived in the New Mexico desert. A few hours away from her Tucson home, she ventured to a remote house nestled in the midst of a grassy plain—the sort of Southwest residence that lets you see miles into the distance. (Crucially, she didn’t have cell service.) It was there that Walker worked on much of Hands in Our Names, which was released on tape in 2016, but has now been resequenced and remastered for vinyl. In so much as you can sense Walker’s need to get out of her usual world, Hands in Our Names illustrates what she does best as a composer: She looks at the familiar from different angles, and stares intently at everything until it feels new again.
Opener “Holy Blanket” starts with a whisper, a wind through trees or a rolling stream, rustling through lo-fi gear. It sounds like a voice memo, an environmental memory stowed away for better days, but it slowly gives way to a strummed electric guitar and her voice, singing impressionistically about watching cosmic phenomena somewhere over the mountains. The track lasts just over a minute and a half before receding back into sumptuous layers of static. It’s a trick she employs throughout the record—moving between naturalistic sampling, to familiar-feeling folk songs, then ending on something harsh and cold. Similarly, the record’s title track weaponizes her voice in a sort of digitalist round. The piece swells and crackles as more and more layers build into a spiderweb of parts, until it’s a wall of noise.
One of the record’s best moments is the narco-drone folk of “St. Ignacio.” Walker starts by approximating the snowbound gloom of the Kranky stable, but her dedication to emotional openness and wonderfully lightheaded vocal runs lends an unusual lushness to the proceedings. The track flowers as it goes on in unexpected ways—and the feeling’s something like stumbling upon a jungle in the arctic, or a beach on the moon. When Walker was recently asked in an interview to distill Hands in Our Names to a single word, she called it merely “terrestrial.” And sure, she made it in the desert. But with her uncanny Americana, it’s as if Walker’s experimental inclinations have allowed her to explore some previously unplumbed liminal space on the horizon, somewhere between sand and sky.


With his latest record, the onetime teen prodigy reemerges as the face of a new sound and scene that blurs the line between avant-garde jazz and hip-hop.

Some Rap Songs

If the title of Earl Sweatshirt’s long-awaited third studio album feels like he’s underselling it, it’s because he is. He’s intentionally reducing the magnitude of an offering from one of the most lauded artists of the decade from a grand gesture to a gift with no wrapping. The rapper born Thebe Kgositsile’s worst enemy is—and has always been—our collective expectations and the entitlement that comes along with them.
It’s always been Earl versus the world. Fame found him at the age of 16, making him an internet sensation, then a meme, then an enigma, and finally, an icon. For an introverted kid who knew he could rap but was reluctant to accept the exposure and invasions of privacy that came with being a bona fide pop culture phenomenon, it’s been an uncomfortable evolution. Voracious fans threatened to consume not just his music but his personal life too. That same entitlement caused the “FREE EARL” campaign to mutate from eager appreciation to scary obsession and stoked fans’ demand for music during the three years since his last album—even as he was mourning his father’s death earlier this year. Rather than bask in the attention, he recoiled from it, setting himself apart from peers who maintain relevance through carefully strategized ubiquity. As he receded from the spotlight, his mystique grew—as did fans’ desire to hear him to do what he does best.
His followers tend to come in two flavors: those who gravitate to Earl, the spitter—the guy who dazzles with multisyllabic couplets and clever similes; and those come for Earl, the relatable mope—an avatar for their own emotional pain. But on Some Rap Songs listeners are challenged to take him not in parts but as a whole, in the form he is in now: a poet philosopher who is also the face of an emerging sound and scene.
Earl has always been a reflection of the collaborators around him. His first tape, Earl, and his official debut, Doris, rest squarely in the Odd Future canon. His second album, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, established Earl’s identity as a man apart from the then dissolving crew and saw him working with East Coast rappers also dealing with dark emotions and budding rap careers in New Jersey’s Da$h and New York City’s Wiki. Now, on Some Rap Songs, the 24-year-old has become the OG to a vanguard of younger artists who are blurring the lines between avant-garde jazz and hip-hop.
The world created by Earl and his new cohorts—including up-and-coming NYC rappers Medhane and MIKE, producer-rapper Sixpress, aka Adé Hakim, of the Bronx collective Slums, and Gio Escobar, frontman for genre-bending ensemble Standing on the Corner—is based on abstraction, where form is secondary to mood. It’s where the concept of Blackness is radical and the practices of soul-searching are channelled through a lo-fi sound replete with off-kilter loops, samples that get chopped beyond recognition, and audio clips that feel both random and apropos.
Take first single “Nowhere2go,” produced by Darryl Johnson and Adé Hakim, which rides a jittery beat replete with stuttering loops, warped vocal samples, and loose percussion. The instrumental lands somewhere between disorienting and soothing, and it is the oddly perfect backdrop for a matter-of-fact Earl as he deadpans a heavy revelation about himself: “I think... I spent my whole life depressed/Only thing on my mind was death/Didn’t know if my time was next.”
The project is distinctly rough around the edges, to great effect; there’s the sound of dust popping off vinyl and cassette hiss throughout. With these imperfections, Earl and company tap into the same sort of illegible, yet undeniable, feeling jazz musicians capture in slurred notes. The cross-influence between Earl and his cohorts is evident in his vocals too. On the Navy Blue–produced “The Bends,” Earl flexes what feels like a MIKE-like monotone to get off his stream-of-consciousness raps. That is, until you realize that MIKE’s own delivery is influenced by Earl. This is symbiosis, not thievery.
If the fact that Earl is a product of his circle of friends is the explicit story being told here, the implicit one is that he is a product of his parents. Though most of the album was written before the death of his father, South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, in January of this year, his presence looms in a way it hasn’t on past Earl projects. Resentment and laments of abandonment are replaced with acceptance and embrace. “My momma used to say she see my father in me/I said I was not offended,” he raps on “Azucar,” showing signs of reconciliation but only after acknowledging how the women in his life held him down during the bad times. “My cushion was a bosom on bad days/It’s not a Black woman I can’t thank.”
On “Playing Possum,” we hear a cobbled together duet composed of recordings of his mother, Cheryl Harris, thanking Earl and describing him as a “cultural worker” in a keynote speech interwoven with his dad reciting an excerpt of a poem called “Anguish Longer Than Sorrow.” Taken altogether, the track is a letter from a loving son honoring his progenitors, a letter that his father did not get to hear before his death. Then, on penultimate song “Peanuts,” Earl grapples with his grief over a slow and out-of-tune piano sample and shouts out his uncle, African jazz legend Hugh Masekela, who passed away shortly after his father. The mourning gives way to catharsis on the Masekela-sampling finale. At the very end of the album, the second-hand guitars begin to wobble before glitching into silence. His uncle and father are gone, but Earl is still here, carrying on their artistic legacy—and, with the help of his collaborators, building his own.