Inspired by a documentary about the opioid crisis, the pop singer and songwriter dreams up a fictionalized shoreline town where decadence is fueled by deep-rooted melancholia.

Cape God

The glassine synthpop Allie Hughes crafts as Allie X often serves as a Trojan horse for the eccentric personas she invents. A classically trained singer, Hughes prefers characters and costumes, often donning bug-eyed sunglasses while performing songs that relish or wallow in being the outsider. On 2018’s Super Sunset, she vivisected life in image-obsessed L.A. through different female archetypes, resulting in a deft if interchangeable set that favored effervescent, ’80s-inspired pop. On its spirited follow-up, Cape God, Hughes heads to the East Coast for a more striking emotional reckoning, abandoning past alter egos and inserting herself in the troubles of a gloomy, fictionalized shoreline town.
Cape God was inspired by Heroin: Cape Cod USA, a harrowing 2015 HBO documentary about the effects of the opioid crisis on young people living in the seemingly idyllic Massachusetts vacation destination. The horrors of addiction surface in oblique ways here, but Hughes largely uses the documentary’s subjects as ciphers to reflect on memories of the inner turmoil she experienced growing up between Ontario and northwest Michigan. Cape God’s grim fables play out like a TV drama about debauched teens set to springy Max Martin-style production, setting stories of suburban excess to gothy synthpop and dramatic ballads.
The album’s fatalistic streak is familiar but compelling: Hughes dreams up a place where decadence is fueled by deep-rooted melancholia. She gets blackout drunk over handclaps and heavy synths on “Life of the Party,” where the propulsive backdrop feels at odds with the disturbing details: “Even when I nodded out,” she deadpans, “I was center of the action.” That kind of unflinching look at the abuse and depression borne of suburban ennui is a potent creative source for Hughes and makes for some of her most exciting work. “June Gloom” depicts the cold isolation of depression through fizzy electropop, and the swooning “Susie Save Your Love” zooms in on a main character who’s “too drunk to drive” and pining after a guy who doesn’t reciprocate. “Susie” is an especially bright highlight that features Mitski on vocals, though the two harmonize so closely that her appearance becomes almost anonymous.
When Hughes tries out more rote pop songs, Cape God can get a little dry. “Love Me Wrong” employs an acoustic guitar, a choir, and a sleepy-sounding Troye Sivan to sing about double-edged romance, but the belabored song comes off like an underwritten B-side. The self-effacing “Devil I Know” and “Regulars” are the most anodyne of the bunch, with similar plucked guitar lines and repetitive choruses—and worse, they’re sequenced back to back.
Still, the sad world of Cape God is an alluring one, and Hughes’ vocal range is its unequivocal linchpin. She shoots off staccato spoken word on the ironic “Super Duper Party People,” hopscotches over drums with a featherlight touch on the catchy “Sarah Come Home,” and drops to a smoky lower register on the cinematic “Madame X.” The latter song is where she makes the clearest gesture at the grim, all-consuming power of addiction: “Take my money, my self respect,” she sings over a swell of strings. “You fill me up with your emptiness and it’s the first thing I’ve ever felt.” It’s a despairing note, but it’s also one of Hughes’ starkest—a vivid rendering that establishes Cape God as the strongest concept in her catalog to date.


On her new album, Alicia Keys inhabits the personae of multiple characters but still doesn't tell us much about herself.

HERE

Alicia Keys is a creature of habit when it comes to her music. With “Piano and I,” the first track on her hugely successful debut album Songs in A Minor, she started the tradition of opening her albums with a clearly marked intro. Although the format varied—wordless classical compositions, piano-backed spoken-word pieces, a short poem—these intros generally served two purposes: reminding us of her piano chops and elucidating her state of mind during the recording process. If you study a person’s habits enough, a picture of who they are should start to emerge. Yet HERE, Keys’ sixth studio album, does little to further our understanding of who Keys is.
“The Beginning (Interlude),” HERE’s opener, sets the scene for the album to work as a series of extended metaphors. So when Keys says “I’m the musical to the project fables/I’m the words scratched out on the record label/I’m the wind when the record spins/I’m the dramatic static before the song begins,” you don’t need to take it literally. Instead, by personifying hip-hop, she is performing the first of several shifts in narrative perspective.
It helps to take this into consideration early on, so that it’s not entirely confusing when Keys starts singing from the perspective of a 29-year-old addict on “Illusion of Bliss.” Or on “Kill Your Mama,” where she takes on the role of spokesperson for all of Mother Earth’s wayward children, piling the platitudes onto a simple guitar melody: “Is there any savin’ us/We’ve become so dangerous/Is there any change in us/Even for the sake of love.”
Still, this is an Alicia Keys record, and it wouldn’t be wrong to expect her to devote time to herself. There are only three tracks on which you could safely guess that she is giving any insight into her world. “Work on It” is a look just beneath the surface at a relationship that takes, well, work— but the intrigue is lacking, even with production from the usually unflappable Pharrell Williams. “Girl Can’t Be Herself” is surely the anthem for her makeup-free movement and, by her own admission, a tool for working through some of the insecurities that she tackles in the lyrics. “Blended Family (What You Do For Love)” rolls along as an earnest-but-slightly-awkward song about the dynamic within her home, before getting completely sabotaged by a throwaway verse from guest A$AP Rocky.
HERE is punctuated with interludes that feature recordings of candid discussions between Keys and her friends including, reportedly, Nas. It seems unjust that these brief appearances spark more curiosity about the speakers than the songs that refer directly to the artist with top billing, and the rest of the tracks do little to address this balance—at least from a lyrical standpoint.
To her credit, she flexes some surprising dexterity, moving easily between ballads and more uptempo beats and varying her delivery to occasionally take on a rapper’s cadence, for example on “The Gospel.” She’s probably not about to rebrand herself as a spitter, but the piano melody textured by a stuttering drum pattern works well. The drum programming comes courtesy of Harold Lilly, while songwriting and production duties fell largely to Mark Batson and Swizz Beatz, who left no traces of his signature sound. Along with Keys the four form a production group called The ILLuminaries, and they prove on several occasions how the hivemind approach to beatmaking can pay off.
The rhythms on HERE represent a departure from her previous efforts and indicate a willingness to experiment with her sound but the lyrics, which rarely betray a sense of adventure, cancel out most of this good work. While it might not mean much in the age of streaming, there is something particularly confounding about the decision to relegate the most exciting lead single (“In Common”) to a bonus track on the deluxe edition, when the rest of the album didn’t quite follow through on the song’s promise. Alicia Keys has worked hard to build up enough name recognition; she can tick off multiple successes after several years in the game; she has earned the right to throw caution to the wind. It’s hard to shake the feeling that this record was a missed opportunity to do so.


The Kills' latest retreats from Midnight Boom's dancefloor directives in an attempt to broaden their palette, with mixed results.

Blood Pressures

There's a cute little joke lurking in the background of Alfonso Cuarón's otherwise bleak dystopian thriller Children of Men. The film is set in the year 2027, and at one point a deejay overheard on a car radio introduces "a blast from the past all the way back to 2003," before spinning the Kills' country-blues serenade "Wait". Even if 2003 was only eight years ago, for the Kills, it might as well be 24, given how far Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince have been able to push the limited parameters of their guitar/drum-machine set-up and develop an identity increasingly distinct from their formative junior-Royal-Trux roots.
But even as the Kills have gone from covering Captain Beefheart on their debut 2002 EP, Black Rooster, to teaming up with Spank Rock producer XXXChange for 2008's electro-fied Midnight Boom, Mosshart and Hince have always conveyed a sense of anxiety and nervous energy through their music. And the duo's lusty performances eagerly play up the ambiguity of their platonic partnership. It's a quality that defines them as much as Mosshart's feverish moan, Hince's hand-slashing guitar riffs, and the synthetic beats-- just Google "the Kills + sexual tension." And even though the will-they/won't-they question has been definitively tilted toward the latter, that doesn't mean the Kills can't continue to summon that frisson through roleplay. But on Blood Pressures, there's a creeping sense that their individual preoccupations outside the band-- Mosshart as Jack White's feisty foil in the Dead Weather; Hince as the paparazzi-hounded fiancé of the world's most famous supermodel-- has diffused some of that intensity, as the duo attempts to evolve its dynamic.
Sonically, Blood Pressures retreats from Midnight Boom's dancefloor directives and energized, in-the-pocket pop. The new album feels at once a return to the Kills' beatbox-blues origins as well an attempt to broaden their palette with more sensitive, intimate turns. Notwithstanding the motorik garage-rock of "Heart Is a Beating Drum" and brash, big-beat stomp "Nail in My Coffin", this album will present Hince and Mosshart with fewer opportunities to stare each other down suggestively on stage in predatory, fuck-or-fight fashion. Whether it's the swampy reggae groove of "Satellite", the clock-punching blues-rock prowl "Damned if She Do", or the mid-album tandem of Hince's Lennon-esque reverie "Wild Charms" and Mosshart's slow-simmering answer track "DNA", there's an overarching sense of restraint and resignation that's disappointing in light of how fearless and adrenalized the band sounded on Midnight Boom.
On that album's standout moments (the desperation of "Last Day of Magic", the spiky outbursts of "Tape Song"), you could hear Mosshart really pushing herself to project a more passionate persona from behind the Kills' ultra-cool, cigarette-smoky pose. By contrast, Blood Pressures' would-be emotional centerpiece The Last Goodbye" is a maudlin piano ballad that feels oddly disaffected, with Mosshart singing in an overly poised, uncharacteristically lower register as if trying to channel some aging-diva caricature. A far better barometer of the Kills' maturation is the more understated but infinitely more affecting "Baby Says", a melancholic Mosshart/Hince duet set to a steady backbeat, ideal for filling in the awkward silences on a couples-retreat road trip gone bad. In other words, it's precisely the sort of interstate love song that the golden-oldies DJs of 2027 will be all over.


The promising Seattle composer and songwriter's handmade orchestral pop record features David Byrne, tropicalia legend Caetano Veloso, Deerhoof's Greg Saunier, Wilco's Nels Cline, and Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think, among others.

Composed

The Seattle composer and songwriter Jherek Bischoff had a dilemma: He wanted to make an orchestral pop record but, like most people, lacked an orchestra. Decidedly unlike most people, however, he remedied this by building one himself. Throwing some rudimentary recording equipment in his backpack, he visited a handful of musician friends in their homes, re-recording them as they played dozens of parts, and then mixed the painstakingly assembled piecemeal results into the majestic 70-piece outfit he could never afford during mixing. Listening to Composed with this task in mind is like imagining someone filling an Olympic-sized pool with an eye dropper: the mind balks, both at the enormity of the undertaking and at the disposition of the person behind it.
Composed had to get made. But you would have gathered this from the album's first six minutes without a shred of context anyway: Opening with a gorgeously sobbing piece of string writing reminiscent of Samuel Barber's "Adagio For Strings" as fanfare, the orchestra slides into a groove, tropical and breezy. And then who should wander into view but David Byrne, in loosened-tie, silver-fox mode, crooning a quizzical love song to the disparate parts of his beloved's face. Not bad for an opening number.
Composed is a succession of these head-turning walk-ons. No sooner has Byrne ambled offstage than Tropicália legend Caetano Veloso has sauntered on, for "The Secret of the Machines", stepping lightly with his reedy voice over an orchestral landscape that veers from Disney rainbows to a moat filled with snapping jaws. Greg Saunier of Deerhoof appears on Composed also, as do Nels Cline, Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think, and many others. It's an ensemble affair. Folk singer Dawn McCarthy drops by to sing a cheery number titled "Insomnia, Death and the Sea". Each artist contributed their own lyrics to Bischoff's compositions, lending the album the feel of a busy, semi-staged opera.
Bischoff arranges the songs around his guests like thick little jungles, symphonic interludes sprouting like overgrowth. On the surface, Composed feels like a successor to records like Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest and St. Vincent's Actor, chamber-pop records that drip with ornament. But it's to Van Dyke Parks, the granddaddy of unclassifiable, absurdly ambitious art-song cycles, that Composed owes the most. Like Parks, Bischoff's music swims around in a deep pool of references: a bassoon pops up, in "Secret of the Machines", quoting the opening of The Rite of Spring, and ragtime, bossa nova, and more flit airily through the arrangements. "Young and Lovely", featuring Zac Pennington of Bischoff's former band Parenthetical Girls, indulges in a broad, slurpy cabaret melody for its chorus that feels like Parks reincarnate.
If Composed doesn't resonate as deeply as it should, this debt might be part of the reason. Bischoff is a hugely talented composer, with sky-high ambitions. He is also still in the process of announcing his voice. Many of the big ideas on Composed still feel borrowed, from Parks and from others, but you can hear Bischoff busily whittling away at their edges so that he can eventually own them. The multiple guest vocalists, meanwhile, keep things lively while also preventing a through-line from developing. Composed is a good album. Someday Bischoff will likely make a great one.


Produced entirely by Navy Blue, the New York rapper’s latest is one of his greatest. A wise and angry Wiki reveals what it’s like to come of age in the city: the way it shapes, hardens, prematurely ages you.

Half God

Kids grow up fast in New York City. Pre-teens ride the trains alone, shuttling between school and the park and home. You learn to spot scammers, junkies, tourists, and cops from a mile away. From the time you learn to speak, you’re exposed to languages from around the world. The streets are more than just a thoroughfare for cars and trucks, they’re a fire hydrant water park, a street cart restaurant, a living room for old men playing dominoes, a nightclub with perreo, nutcrackers, and no cover. A New Yorker can live several lifetimes before they ever turn 18.
Few rappers reflect this spirit quite like Patrick Morales, the 27-year-old Irish and Puerto Rican MC better known as Wiki. His latest album, Half God, is a record about what it’s like to come of age in New York: the way it shapes, hardens, prematurely ages you. Produced in its entirety by Navy Blue—the skateboarder/model turned prolific producer/MC born Sage Elsesser—the record captures the varied tempos of city life in colorful vignettes. A warbling guitar loop soundtracks a contemplative smoke session on “Roof”; the stuttering soul samples on “Can’t Do This Alone” stroll with Wiki and Navy Blue through city streets; hi-hats crunch and snares snap on “The Business,” as Wiki spews vitriol at the gentrifiers changing his home into something unrecognizable.
Gentrification looms like a specter over the entire album. Born on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and living on the Lower East Side, Wiki has watched the city’s grit be slowly washed away, its quirky characters and storefronts pushed out in favor of chain stores and bottomless mimosas. Near his downtown apartment, where Chinatown and the LES meet, abuelitas push grocery carts past old Chinese men smoking cigarettes on stoops, and young Asian kids walk to school to the tune of car stereos blasting Latin music. But interlopers threaten the vibe, and Wiki’s anger permeates much of Half God. Everyone understands New York attracts people from everywhere; Wiki just can’t understand why the most privileged of them are so selfish. On “New Truths,” he rails against college kids unable to empathize with the less fortunate. On “The Business,” he chastises NIMBY transplants: “What I can’t understand and get through to me is/After all the schooling you did, don’t know what community is?”
An old soul at 27, Wiki may have come up as a hard-partying dirtbag, but he’s clearly mellowed out and wised up in the decade since that first Ratking EP. In the years since he went solo, his influences have become more focused, his pen sharpened against anyone disrespecting his idea of hip-hop, or his hometown. On Half God, months of pandemic isolation lead him to even deeper introspection, considering the role that performing has on both his wallet and his mental health, and what kind of legacy he might leave to his hypothetical children. Being cooped up inside drove him a little nuts, but also confirmed the human need to connect. Perhaps the most interesting sign of his maturity is a willingness to be emotionally vulnerable. He long avoided promiscuous boasts in favor of monogamy raps; on “Never Fall Off” he takes it one step further, narrating the joys of a budding courtship with a giddy earnestness not often found on rap records.
His sharp tongue and self-reflection put him in good company among his peers, several of whom appear and feel right at home on Half God. Wiki and Earl Sweatshirt—Elsesser’s childhood friend and frequent collaborator—vibrate at the same frequency on “All I Need.” Wiki’s last solo album, Oofie, already felt spiritually aligned with Earl’s 2019 LP Some Rap Songs, and in their mid-20s, the pair already feel like elder statesmen. Plenty of the beats on Half God feel like they could have appeared on past MIKE releases, which were occasionally peppered with Navy Blue beats. And few humans embody New York more than Queens rapper and durag legend Remy Banks, who brings supreme confidence and gravitas to the Daniel Dumile nod “Gas Face,” which inspires Wiki’s morbid ruminations on how much more popular he might be if he were dead: “Is that the only time you can find me on your mind?/For you to really know I was fly, jeez/Post up old pics on IG/Then sign me/My dead body/Even when dead lotta money to make off me.”
Wiki’s wit and skill as an MC have never been in question, and on Half God, he seems to finally believe it himself. He’s less concerned with flexing his chops than painting pictures and telling stories; he’s wise enough to really know himself and confident enough to reveal it. “Is my fate sealed, is it definite?/Or can I make an appeal/A second attempt/Is it healing me when I feel the medicine?/What’s real and what is relevant?” he raps on “Home.” Free of insecure braggadocio, we’re left with the clearest image of himself. But the most remarkable thing about Half God may just be how well Navy Blue’s beats suit Wiki’s style, tone, and spirit; the hypnotic loops warp and snap back into focus alongside stream-of-consciousness flows, simple but sophisticated.
Wiki has always wielded his considerable talent to paint cityscapes with words, but with Elsesser’s production, they become transportive. From the first track, sirens swirl around piano loops and cymbal crescendos, and street noise weaves in between beats and bars, triggering the senses. You can almost smell the meat on the grill as Wiki’s akhi hooks up his spicy chicken sandwich, or feel the breeze across his rooftop as people march like ants on the street below. New York City has long been a character in rap. But Half God is the story of how that character has shaped our protagonist, a young man immersed and in love with its spirit, holding on loosely to an ever-evolving community in which he sees his own reflection.

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On her new album, Madonna attempts to take on the mantle of What Madonna Means To Us In 2015. Rebel Heart finds her recoiling and resigning from it, refusing it, examining her own history and crushing it under her boot heel.

Rebel Heart

It’s difficult to take Madonna at face value. She is on her third generation of pop iconhood, after all, and her work comes freighted with decades of discussions about sexuality, appropriation, and whether what she is doing is "shocking" or "fake" or "appropriate." In the run-up to Rebel Heart, a series of bad-press flare-ups—myriad Instagram-based controversies, comparing her album leak to rape—suggested that maybe Madonna had slipped from our reality entirely. Yet, the surprise of Rebel Heart, her 13th album, is its groundedness, its centering of the Real Madonna in the mix.
In a way, Rebel Heart fits squarely into a growing canon that also includes Björk’s Vulnicura, Kim Gordon’s new memoir and the autobiography of Slits guitarist Viv Albertine: female artists of a certain age making mature, candid work about divorce, and the rediscovery of the artistic self that follows in the wake of the rupture of their domestic life. Rebel Heart, like Vulnicura, digs in on the vertiginous aftermath (most spectacularly on "Living for Love" and "HeartBreakCity"), and finds steadiness in the pure loves of children, the bedrock of self, and spiritualism. As is traditional Madonna™, her lyrics reach for top-shelf Catholicism, conflating spiritual and sexual salvation in a way that never makes entirely clear whether the supplication is being offered at the foot of Christ or a bedmate.
On the absolution-seeking "Devil Pray", she sings about the futility of escaping pain and recites a garbage head’s shopping list of street drugs that offer brief relief—including, but not limited to, sniffing glue. As she chants "Save my soul/ Devil’s here to fool ya" a bed of throaty, orgasmic samples rises in the mix, a hundred tiny Madonna-voices in coital abyss. It is a strange, tender, comical thing, this Madonna song that cites huffing and invokes the presence of "Lucifer." But ultimately, it’s a boring stadium-throb lite-EDM song about seeking sobriety and/or big-G God. It’s also a Madonna-doing-Madonna cliche, which is too often the downfall of Rebel Heart.
The good news is that most of the time, Madonna-doing-Madonna seems in on the joke. There’s the masterfully campy "Bitch I’m Madonna", and then the 50 Shades of What-the-Actual-Fuck of "S.E.X.", which goes from trad break-you-off/come-inside talk to mentions of "chopsticks," a "dental chair," a "golden shower" and raw meat as erotic objects in a voice that sounds like she’s calling on her Creepy Frog phone while wearing a zipped fetish mask. On "Holy Water" she draws a comparison reminiscent of Lana Del Rey and Pepsi-Cola.
The deep production team on Rebel Heart—Ariel Rechtshaid and Diplo in particular—have previously done work referencing classic '80s Madonna, and seemingly have a good sense of what suits her voice and still-evolving mature-era aesthetic. The soulful diva house of "Living for Love" sounds like it should have been the single off the Mary J. Blige London Sessions album, complete with celestial gospel chorus and piano 8s. It kicks off the album and serves as its thesis—Madonna as triumphant (yet vulnerable) phoenix from the flame, seeking good love and God, raving in the dawn after the darkness. Much of the 14-track domestic commercial version (as well as crushingly long 25-track super deluxe version) mines the same territory.
When she’s not hammering self-help maxims in the breakup zone, she is ordering the pop cosmos around her, much like she’s been doing since approximately 1985. "Bitch I’m Madonna" is a fantastic argument that the Sophie, Nicki Minaj, Diplo & Madonna album should come out, like, tomorrow and save everyone’s summer. It’s corny and glorious, its Nicki verse the most energizing 26 seconds of the album—and it’s also a convincing plea for big-tent EDM to get weird. On the surface it’s essentially the most artful Kesha song anyone’s ever made, but grows progressively more warped and bubblegum until it falls apart amid seizing saw synths. It’s Madonna as cartoon diva, but then it’s piggybacked by the pained ballad flipside: On "Joan of Arc" she opens up, as much as any ultra famous pop performer can in four minutes, about how hard it is to be the public Madonna, followed by paparazzi and dissected by trolls online. "Just hold me while I cry my eyes out," she sings.
It’s a curious cocktail, one that makes it seem like she is actively taking on the mantle of What Madonna Means To Us In 2015. Rebel Heart finds her recoiling and resigning from it, refusing it, fucking with us, examining her own history and playfully crushing it under her boot heel. Yet, while some songs never quite make their point, others drill down on bad ones. The cringe-inducing "Body Shop"—wherein Madonna takes a body-as-a-car metaphor into mortifying territory that makes you wish for an Auto Wrecker: "You can polish the headlights/ You can smooth out the fender." (Bon Scott is probably spinning in his grave like a rotisserie chicken.) With songs like that sandwiched between unabashed bangers and tenderhearted treacle, and constant codeswitching from Madonna the character to Madonna the human being, Rebel Heart grows confusing and irreconcilably uneven as it progresses. As valiantly as the album tries, it’s hard to hit reset on the Madonna we’ve known and loved, after 30 years of campaigning for our hearts and minds.


Gucci Mane and Zaytoven give a quick five-song salute that recaptures a few sparks of their former fire.

GucTiggy EP

The rapper-producer bond is at the center of rap symbiosis, but it’s a balance that’s difficult to maintain. Gucci Mane and Zaytoven have embodied that balance for over a decade now. It was Zaytoven who convinced Gucci to start rapping in his basement in the early 2000s, and the connection between the two was instantaneous: “Me and Gucci had a chemistry,” he told The Fader for their oral history of the storied street rapper. “Wherever he went or whoever he teamed up with, I was rocking with him.” The pair has been prolific, releasing hundreds of songs and forging modern trap music in their image. In addition to producing EA Sportscenter, which kickstarted Gucci’s strongest stretch in 2008, and appearing on several mixtapes throughout his career, Zaytoven is the only producer credited on all nine of Gucci’s studio albums. It isn’t an exaggeration to say they changed rap, in sound and disposition.
But time changes everything, and the two aren’t the tag-team they once were. They’ve both strayed from their storied partnership in recent years, in part because of Gucci’s prison stint, but also just due to outright growth and progression. Zaytoven produced the middle work in Future’s rehabilitating mixtape trilogy, Beast Mode, along with hits like Migos’ breakout single “Versace,” and Gucci has worked with a host of producers including Mike WiLL Made-It and Metro Boomin, two guys heavily indebted to his influence who have gone on to shape the current rap landscape. Gucci and Zaytoven always existed outside of each other, but these days they’re no longer defined by it. Their latest joint EP, GucTiggy, is a salute to the decade-plus they’ve spent redefining rap and a testament to their fellowship. Gucci puts it plainly on “GucTiggy Vol. 3:” “Zay, that's my vato, yeah, yeah, that's my Preemo.”
Likely recorded in the six days of sessions that created Everybody Looking, which was primarily produced by Zaytoven and Mike WiLL, GucTiggy is just as rushed as the album and even less polished. But this project isn’t meant to be some great, standalone work, an Everybody Looking companion piece, or even as an informal introduction to the upcoming Woptober project. It’s simply a token of a longstanding, working friendship. The production value is somewhat fitting, almost reminiscent of those early mixtapes that made them staples on the underground and Datpiff circuits. These songs are trinkets, collectibles for longtime fans and disposable Gucci-Zay ephemera for their rap scrapbook. If Everybody Looking was Gucci Mane and Zaytoven rediscovering their rhythm, this is their opportunity to smell the roses.
Still, Gucci is shaking the prison rust off with every flow, working his way back into rapping shape, and even when he isn’t at his full power he’s a formidable presence. On “GucTiggy Vol. 2 (Woptober),” he chugs along steadily, letting his momentum build line by line. By “GucTiggy Vol. 4,” he’s capturing glints of past glory with gems like “I’m so Marilyn Manson, I’m so heinously handsome/I’m more dangerous than famous, I’ll take your grandson for ransom.” Zaytoven is about as dependable as they come, and he lines heavy 808 bass with prickly synths and accenting keys. Things are starting to come together, and on GucTiggy they build back a bit more of the chemistry lost to time served with each breath and keystroke. “I ain’t got not partners, I’m my own partner,” Gucci raps in the opening bar of “GucTiggy Vol. 1,” undoubtedly a swipe at a former comrade like Waka Flocka Flame. But such a bar overlooks his man behind the boards.


All cognac and white linen, the Virginia R&B musician’s debut album is steeped in quiet storm and beefed up with crisp drums and booming production: a sophisticated, seductive mix.

Lady Lady

It doesn’t take long to reach the heart of Masego’s debut full-length album, Lady Lady. It’s a meditation on women, strong women: those loved and lost, some who’ve taught him hard lessons along the way, others who haven’t entered his life yet. Through real and imagined narratives, the singer navigates the nuances of black romance, celebrating the bliss and uncertainty it brings. He honors the southern charm of women from his native Newport News, Virginia, the sexiness of a late-night dance on the beach. He’s also a young man who wants to parlay for a little bit. “Wanna use my fame and lay wit a model,” he quips on “Lavish Lullaby,” one of various standouts from the new album.
Lady Lady soundtracks the evening, when the sun shifts along the horizon and the air begins to cool. All cognac and white linen, it’s the record you play just after the storm, as the steam billows from the concrete and the nightlife is beginning to pick up. The album also delves into the dichotomy of Masego himself: the good dude, the bleeding-heart romantic, the burgeoning talent wrestling with his own ego. His music is sophisticated, steeped in 1980s quiet-storm R&B with hints of smooth jazz along the fringes. He calls it “trap house jazz,” a retro-futuristic mix of booming bass drums and staggered rap cadences made for open-air festivals and adult-contemporary radio. Masego is an old soul who, at the age of 25, can evoke the sweet tenderness of Stevie Wonder and the gritty shit talk of Anderson .Paak. He caters to both crowds, crafting a sound that pulls in black music’s past and present in equal measure.
Long before this album, Masego released an assortment of tracks and EPs on Bandcamp that included everything from repurposed Stevie songs to tropically themed bounce beats dedicated to his roots in Kingston, Jamaica. Though the song quality varied from track to track, one could hear Masego inching toward the fleshed-out arrangements he creates now. It showcased his ambition: Masego handled almost everything himself—singing, producing, and arranging each tune. He taught himself how to play piano, saxophone, drums, bass, and guitar in high school, then started posting his original work on SoundCloud.
There was no grand breakthrough moment for Masego; the notoriety he’s achieved to this point is the result of steady gains made over the past five years. But if he did get a major assist, it was around 2016, when the renowned producer DJ Jazzy Jeff cosigned Masego and started working with him. He later released a well-received compilation of demos called Loose Thoughts, which—despite all the music he’d dropped—was dubbed a proper introduction to Masego’s full creative range.
Featuring vocalists SiR and Tiffany Gouché, producer Sounwave, and singer/composer French Kiwi Juice (aka FKJ), Lady Lady offers a wide-ranging glimpse into Masego’s different interactions with the stronger sex. On “I Had a Vision,” he lauds their strength and independence, then on “Black Love,” a gorgeous ballad near album’s end, Masego envisions his wedding day, singing to his potential bride on the altar. The writing is poetic, evoking a head-in-the-clouds motif that recalls Stevie classics like “Knocks Me Off My Feet” and “With Each Beat of My Heart.” To that end, though, Masego skews too close to his influences in certain spots, and on interlude “24 Hr. Relationship,” he lifts a scene from The Love Below half of OutKast’s 2003 double disc, recreating it almost line for line here. On an album meant to establish Masego as a standalone entity, its inclusion feels like a misstep, though it doesn’t diminish the record’s overall flow. In the end, Lady Lady is a grand coming-of-age record that displays the playful and reflective halves of Masego, illuminating his versatile nature with the promise of more to come.


The pop singer hits a soft reset on her second album, which isn’t a revelation, but it has the tinge of a project made with love and devotion.

The Pains of Growing

Alessia Cara was nearly drowned by a record contract. She would have had good company down there: The music industry is a watery grave for people in her position—one hot song, a firestorm of interest, and zero leverage. After her cool-eyed hit “Here,” she disappeared almost entirely into Def Jam, like a dollar into a wind tunnel. She put out EPs with prefab songs that sounded intended for Bebe Rexha or Taylor Swift or anyone who agreed to record them. Her name and voice appeared on them, but nothing else did. It looked like “Alessia Cara,” as a fresh voice in pop music, had been thoroughly strip-mined.
She has not escaped Def Jam, but she must have convinced them to leave her alone at some point. Maybe it was her appearance on Logic’s massive hit “1-800-273-8255” that convinced them to let her breathe, or maybe it was Disney’s Moana, but her second album, The Pains of Growing, is full of pop songs that feel grounded in a perspective. The person on The Pains Of Growing isn’t the moody teenager of 2015’s “Here,” but it is, recognizably, a person, one with specific aches, lusts, and irritations. The album isn’t a revelation but it has the tinge of a project made with love and devotion, a feeling that had more or less evaporated from Cara’s music.
The production picks sounds from off the big pop song sale rack—the neat little boom and click of the drums on the single, “Not Today” comes marked down courtesy of Lorde’s “Royals,” and the clipped guitars remind you that you streamed the Haim album recently. Cara’s vocals, sleepy and warm, gaze up at an Amy Winehouse poster. But the song cocks a wry eyebrow right at you. Cara’s lyrics step through a well-worn set up (”Someday I’ll forget the day he left/But surely not today”), funny and still singular enough for her to work in a line as weird as “I’ll be acquainted with my jollities,” which sounds like it comes from the forgotten third verse of some old Christmas carol.
Another highlight, “Trust My Lonely” approaches heartbreak from the opposite side.The titular hook—the song has two, each memorable enough for its own song—is, “Don’t you know that you’re no good for me?/I gotta trust my lonely.” “I gotta trust my lonely”—the phrasing is a little maddening in a good way—part marketing slogan, part trending topic, somehow still winsome.
A few songs here feel like homework assignments done en route to arrive at a better song: “All We Know” opens with the sound of a guitar line so brazenly lifted from the xx that you could be forgiven for checking your phone to see what album is playing. The would-be anthem “7 Days” takes a game stab at media criticism, but if you don’t trip over the lyric “Oh, Mr. man upstairs,” you probably won’t make it past “Oh, the land of poor taste/The spectacle of cut and paste.” These songs are stumbles, though, not faceplants, and they mostly ring hollow because Cara herself doesn’t sound as invested in them.
She is at her most winning when she sounds like she is having fun: On “Nintendo Games,” she compares a difficult relationship to…well, Nintendo games, with this hilarious complaint: “This is taking longer than ‘Zelda.’” Then, she tells the guy she’d rather be playing “Mario Kart.” On “Wherever I Live,” she offers a dispatch from a series of shit hotels, places where she hears reruns of “Friends” playing through the wall and imagines a knocking at her door:  “I’m going crazy, and this toilet’s rusted/Food came but I don’t trust it.” The song is just her voice and a guitar, the simplest music she’s made yet, and it is so endearing it tugs at your shirt sleeve to get you to love it. “Girl Next Door” has the same arrangement, and has a similar freshness. “I rock my soul on both sleeves of my t-shirt,” she declares on the hook—a little hokey, maybe, but honest and refreshing. It’s the first moment she has sounded truly free since she first got our attention.


This live album is an intense, electric, and sometimes uncanny exhibition of Archy Marshall’s ability to reimagine his songs on stage.

King Krule: You Heat Me Up, You Cool Me Down

You Heat Me Up, You Cool Me Down

Pieced together from the three shows King Krule managed to play in 2020 before COVID rolled in—a couple in Paris, including one for Jehnny Beth’s Echoes program, and one in Amsterdam—You Heat Me Up, You Cool Me Down is a live album that hints at what could have been. Featuring performances in support of last year’s Man Alive!, the set offers an exhibition of Archy Marshall’s ability to reimagine his songs in a live setting. It also captures the unique transfer of energy between performer and audience that can only happen with a stage and a sticky floor.
This isn’t Marshall’s first live album—that was Live on the Moon, in 2018—but it is the only one he’s released after being forced to cancel an intercontinental tour, so it’s safe to say that it’s carrying a little extra weight. The setlist offers a fairly even spread of tracks from Man Alive! and 2017’s excellent The OOZ, along with a handful of crowd pleasers from his 2013 debut 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, making for something of a greatest-hits trawl. On stage, these songs take on a new exuberance and intensity. The sludgy guitars of “Stoned Again” and the unhinged sax on “Comet Face” pack a kick that’s absent on the studio recordings; the bass is puffed up throughout, offering thick, grippy hooks for Marshall’s drawled vocals to hang off.
The performances are intense and electric: Slouched verses set up a dizzying slingshot effect for the moments, as on “Alone, Omen 3” or “Rock Bottom,” when Marshall opts to soar into a chorus. Frenzied interplay with his regular five-piece touring band—featuring sax, keys, bass, guitar, and drums—opens dynamic space for Marshall’s psychedelic songwriting, defined by its twisted structures and occasional apoplectic outbursts. “Half Man Half Shark” elides its indie-disco strictures with an added dose of aggression, and comes out better for it. “Alone, Omen 3” rends its pop chops in favor of funky delay pedals and UFO synth effects; it’s brilliantly, magnetically delirious.
Crowd noises are wheeled in at odd intervals, often to provide an illusion of continuity between the stitched recordings. The feeling is uncanny, a reminder that it’s still a bit weird to hear music being played live and loud at the moment. There’s polite applause for the most part—and one excitable guy shouting out “How you doing, Archy?” after “Stoned Again”—until the closing performance of “Easy Easy.” All of a sudden, you’re thrown into the throng, ensconced in the familiar buzz of anticipation and friendly boos when Marshall announces, so nonchalantly you could miss it, that this is the last song. Here, the adoring mass is conjured perfectly, singing back the bridge as it builds, before being drowned out—despite their loudest efforts—by the wall of guitars and grit-strained vocals.
It’s a moment tinged with the familiar, sinking realization that the show is nearly over and the comedown is about to begin. What’s a live album for, if not to stir exactly this fervent mix of feelings? And, of course, to provide the option of pressing play and repeating the experience all over again.

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The Portland duo Golden Retriever have created their own musical language using bass clarinet and a modular synth rig. Rotations expands their sound, adding 10 classical musicians to the mix.

Rotations

For nearly 10 years, the Portland, Ore. duo Golden Retriever has maintained a rigid approach to experimental composition. Jonathan Sielaff’s bass clarinet and Matt Carlson’s modular synth rig comprise just about the entirety of their sound, along with some basic effects and computer editing used to enhance each improvisational performance. By developing their music within the limitations of a self-imposed binary system, Golden Retriever has created their own language and made it readily translatable to an array of motifs. But for the majority of the group’s career, they’ve preferred ambiguity and their own instincts over any clearly defined structure.
The 2014 album Seer used this peculiar vocabulary for Golden Retriever’s most coherent yet varied music yet. Encompassing free jazz, kosmische, early ambient, new age, and musique concrète, the record expressed a remarkable range of ideas with an unusual sense of clarity. Continuing this gradual evolution, Rotations rips a handful of pages out of the Golden Retriever rule book. The duo’s third record for Thrill Jockey expands on every aspect of their sound, most notably by adding 10 classical musicians to their ranks. After receiving a grant from Portland’s Regional Arts & Culture Council to write and perform new work locally, Carlson and Sielaff methodically carved out their unique take on chamber music. The process found them blending their time-tested practice of sparse improvisation with more traditional notation and arrangement, subsequently performing the pieces live with an ensemble in October 2015. Almost two years later, the recordings of those commissioned works stand among Golden Retriever’s best and most accessible music.
Despite the influx of instrumentation, minimalism remains a key tenet of Rotations, as does freeform structure and a tendency for the avant-garde. In fact, the accompanying musicians—including the Mousai Remix String Quartet and players on piano, woodwinds, percussion, pipe organ, and French horn—sometimes simply fill out the peripheries around Carlson’s electronics and Sielaff’s treated clarinet. The quiet subtleties and complex layering of the augmented arrangements can create a hallucinatory effect. On the more elaborate songs, such as “Pelagic Tremor” and “Tessellation,” the tonal identities of, say, a sustained flute note, a sine wave, and an organ’s drone become blurred, if not utterly indistinguishable. “Thirty-Six Stratagems” brings chaos and dissonance to the fore, with its only easily identifiable sound as the tumbling, knotty percussion. Even while making a turn towards formalism, Golden Retriever remain as inventive as ever.
Rotations is also richly emotional. From the reflective piano figures that drive “A Kind of Leaving” to the trembling resonance of “Thread of Light,” feelings akin to the pianist Harold Budd’s glowing minimalism emerge. Elsewhere, the influence of experimental composers Éliane Radigue and Laurie Spiegel can be felt in the thoughtful, unfurling intricacies. Nestled between beauty, sadness, confusion, and grace, these six pieces share a common ground and grow from it, which is integral to how Rotations makes such an impression. Whether it’s with the modern classical closer “Sunsight,” perhaps the album’s most consonant and traditional music, or the meditative tone poem “Tessellation,” Golden Retriever communicate a shared humanity above their personal skill, innovation, or ambition. And it only betters the music when they do so with a vocabulary meant for everyone to understand.


Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist Alessandro Cortini has been a member of Nine Inch Nails since the late 2000s and is also part of the small-world subculture of analog and modular synths. His second album for Hospital Productions, the label run by Prurient’s Dominick Fernow, is organic and propulsive, eerie and claustrophobic.

Risveglio

If you dabble in the small-world subculture of analog and modular synths, Alessandro Cortini is difficult to avoid. The Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist posts on the message boards, appears in the documentaries, and turns up at conventions repping for popular modular designers like Make Noise and Verbos. A member of Nine Inch Nails since the late 2000s, he’s earned a certain amount of mainstream alt-rock visibility, but there’s a substantial portion of his audience that likely found out about him by watching YouTube videos in which he monkeys around electronic unobtanium like the Buchla 700. He’s a gearhead’s musician.
His solo synthesizer records only reinforce that role. Cortini has a knack for making esoteric instruments like modular synthesizers seem cool and approachable. If you’re coming to electronic music via post-rock or even from film soundtracks, Cortini's music is easy to connect with. His compositions are spare and repetitive, but also melodic—employing warbly cyclical melodies that sometimes recall John Carpenter’s early '80s film scores or the work of Boards of Canada. Though he's often in proximity to instruments that epitomize electronic music's squealing id, Cortini's solo music is pretty dialed in.
Risveglio is Cortini’s second full-length for Hospital Productions, the label run by Prurient’s Dominick Fernow. Like its predecessor, Sonno, the album was composed while on tour using a portable studio setup. On that album Cortini used only one instrument, the Roland MC-202—a monophonic synthesizer/sequencer. Here, he expands the palate, adding a second element, the Roland TB-303. Both of these synths were heavily used in dance music during the '80s and '90s, particularly the TB-303, which provided the unmistakable squelchy bass sound that defined acid house. However, you will hardly recognize either of them on Risveglio.
In these songs, Cortini sets up static patterns that are gradually tweaked and mutated, using effect pedals (delay, reverb) to create a sense of development. The constant motion and shifting textures of sequenced synthesizer music (think Manuel Gottsching's "E2-E4") often make it feel fluid and watery. This is not exactly the case with Risveglio. It’s organic and propulsive, but the sound is eerie and claustrophobic rather than shimmery and ebullient. Cortini may have recorded it in a hotel room, but "Lotta" sounds like it was put to tape in an underground bunker.
In a genre where compositions are frequently driven by density and accumulation (both in terms of sound and of hardware), Cortini’s music is notable for its economy. Because of the instruments involved, no song can involve more than two active melodies at one time. Complex chords and harmony are not possible. These limitations make the music easily identifiable and distinctive. And despite the noise and murk, it's easy to listen to—once you're a minute into one of Risveglio's songs, you pretty much know what it is and where it's going. It's music that is alien and strange, but also familiar.


The proudly campy hyperpop singer’s debut is vibrant and ridiculous, for better or worse.

Troubled Paradise

In the world of 24-year-old glitch-pop artist Slayyyter, the Juicy Couture lockets sway to the booming bass, celebrities from 2004 are ancient deities, and when you sing along, you should sound like Britney. In 2018, between shifts as a salon receptionist, the Missouri native began posting tracks on SoundCloud with help from Ayesha Erotica, a prolific hyperpop producer who scrubbed her work from the internet in 2018. Their music was half-joking and brashly sexual, stuffing lyrics about white Jeeps, kissing strangers, and feeling “daddy as fuck” between burping bass and synth flourishes sharp enough to pop a White Claw. Slayyyter’s SoundCloud singles coalesced into the self-released 2019 mixtape Slayyyter, a deep-fried pop delicacy that landed her on Charli XCX’s tour. She seemed poised for a breakthrough—but when offensive old tweets resurfaced in early 2020, fans weren’t so sure she deserved it.
Troubled Paradise, Slayyyter’s full-length debut, seeks to recapture some of that flagging momentum. The album is vibrant and ridiculous, its lyrics silly and captivating (“All these vegan bitches want beef!”), but even at its most high-fructose and helium-inflated, the music can’t conceal its own shallowness. Still, it tries hard, sometimes scrounging up flashes of gold. The title track is Slayyyter’s shot at soaring, heart-pounding electropop, and although its four-minute length feels gratuitous, the bittersweet lovesickness is locked in. “Throatzillaaa” is a sultry blowjob anthem (hear me out); Slayyyter sounds completely serious as she declares in bubble-bath Auto-Tune, “Baby, let me swallow them kids.” Funny, hooky, and over-the-top sex-positive, it’s a prime example of her ability to deliver tackiness with endearing nonchalance.
Slayyyter was an early adopter of the internet’s current preoccupation with 2000s-era bimbos and relishes in that kind of camp. She treats pop-culture excess with the reverence of a historian, mentioning Nickelodeon’s Timmy Turner in the same line where she talks about doing coke. Far from the detached femmebot you might imagine singing these songs, Slayyyter’s face and body are constantly present: slithering out of a hellishly pink tanning bed on her mixtape cover, or moaning against the greenscreen in the orange desert of her “Cowboys” video. Her tabloid-ready outfits and hyper-saturated music videos are impossible to separate from her music—they all inform each other.
But that audacious image and sound haven’t advanced any further than where she left them on Slayyyter. Songs like the unpleasantly frizzy “Over This!” and the monotonous “Dog House,” an uninspired copycat of Azealia Banks’ “212,” sound like they could have been B-sides from the earlier tape. Slayyyter doesn’t lean into her persona the way Lana Del Rey does, or shift it into something multidimensional and theatric like Dorian Electra, either. It’s just kind of... there.
When she first debuted on SoundCloud, “hyperpop” hadn’t yet become a genre movement. Slayyyter channeled the most maligned hot girls of 2008 with grimy glitz and neon glare, her own attempt to mold the gushy, processed sound of PC Music back towards something resembling the mainstream. It’s an artistic trajectory shared with artists like Bladee, Poppy, and Kim Petras, but Slayyyter—unfiltered, unpolished, and proudly, performatively trashy—was different enough to distinguish herself from other hyperpop disciples with Hot 100 aspirations. Perhaps they were afraid to be truly crude, to whip out the velour track pants and soak them at the wet T-shirt contest. Slayyyter knew how to turn grossness into glamour, or at the very least, into the best song for crushing blue raspberry vodka shots with six of your closest The Real World fans.
More recently, as pop culture reevaluates its relationship to the Courtney Stoddens and Megan Foxes of the world, Slayyyter’s teeny bikinis and hair flips aren’t quite enough to make her appear more interesting than other Y2K-loving hyperpop acts. Projects like Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now draw on hyperpop’s capacity for emotional depth and play, using the genre’s characteristic lack of restraint as a vehicle to explore personal truths. Slayyyter has trouble getting there; her jabs at vulnerability never make it past stiff cliché (“I don’t want to think/Pour another drink”). Her star quality has supernova potential if she just allowed herself to dig deeper—bimbos have brains, too.

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On an 81-minute double album, the EGOT singer-songwriter enlists an impressive roster of guests to help bring more fun—and funk—to his music than he has in years.

Legend

These days, John Legend’s reputation lies as much in network television as it does in music, but his status as a ubiquitous, EGOTing, family-friendly singer of inspirational R&B tunes isn’t entirely fair to the range of his discography. On his 2004 debut Get Lifted, a boisterous proof-of-concept for Kanye West’s G.O.O.D Music label, the former choir director and pianist gave equal space to tender ballads and odes to philandering, painting himself as a neo-soul casanova who could make infidelity sound downright spiritual. Over time, Legend’s more earnest archetype won out; his deeply personal single “Ordinary People,” inspired by his parents marrying and divorcing twice, became a commercial and critical success. Later, he landed a spot on wedding playlists for eternity with “All of Me,” thus completing his transformation into a representative for domestic bliss.
His latest album, Legend, is not a complete 180 back to the playboy territory he once dabbled in, even if his shirtless pose on the cover may suggest so. But it does bring more fun and funk into Legend’s music than he has during the past decade. Part of that lightness can be attributed to the album’s length: At 81 minutes and 24 songs, this is a proper double LP, and the added space gives Legend the opportunity to stretch his limbs and tap into more playful modes he may have usually cast off in favor of his doting family-man image. This, of course, can lead to some repetition—if one horny track called “Waterslide” wasn’t enough for you, there’s another called “Splash”—but the whole thing flies by with such carefree ease that it never feels overstuffed.
Legend’s previous album, 2020’s Bigger Love, made some misguided attempts at bringing pop energy to his schtick. Legend, executive produced with Ryan Tedder, settles on a pop-funk sound better suited to his sensibilities: timeless, genial, and a pleasant contrast from his usual tear-jerkers. Suave tracks like “Guy Like Me” and “Strawberry Blush”—the latter recorded with Anderson .Paak collaborators Free Nationals —would fit right at home at a birthday party or barbecue alongside recent material from Beyoncé and Silk Sonic. And just like .Paak and Bruno Mars’ collaboration, Legend instinctively understands the potential in hamming it up with retro style. “You” could be a direct descendant of Roger Troutman’s 1987 electro love song “I Want to Be Your Man,” talkbox and all. Seeing this side to Legend isn’t exactly a revelation, but it’s refreshing to hear him loosen up his tightly controlled persona with these songs, especially when he ascends to roller-rink glory on lead single “All She Wanna Do” (appearing twice here, with and without Saweetie).
The impressive roster of collaborators—Rapsody, Rick Ross, Amber Mark, Jhene Aiko, Ty Dolla $ign—helps push Legend out of his comfort zone, particularly in his vocals. In the gospel-influenced slow jam “Love,” with Jazmine Sullivan, both singers soar over bare-bones cymbals and a venerable horn section, paying homage to Legend’s church roots. On opener “Rounds,” Legend complements Ross’ luxury raps (“Pickin' rose pedals in Anisa, France/Pink peacocks roamin' at the mansion”) with a buttery-smooth drawl, punctuated by the occasional Prince-like yelp.
Although a talented songwriter, Legend is not a memorable lyricist, and he can falter when attempting to write a catchy pop hook. (“She’s sooooo dope/Wanna be her dope fiend/She shows me what dope means,” he spells out on “Dope.”) The second half of the album returns largely to devotional anthems, and while there are some interesting production choices here and there, like the reggae beat on “I Want You to Know,” hearing them all bundled together feels like an admission that, even while dipping his toes into other moods and genres, Legend feels obligated to keep returning to the same sound that propelled his biggest hits. It’s a reminder that, no matter the window dressing, he always gravitates towards his foremost appeal: a simplicity that can easily translate into universalism.


Featuring contributions from Lemmy, a pair of Hot 100 hits, and a newly vulnerable outlook, this peak from the rock star’s solo career gets a 30th anniversary reissue.

No More Tears

When Ozzy Osbourne started recording No More Tears, he had just completed a court-ordered stint in rehab, the result of a grim night in 1989 where he blacked out and assaulted his wife and manager, Sharon. She later dropped the charges against him, but this was clearly rock bottom, and for the first time in his substance-addled life, the 41-year-old singer committed to recovery. No More Tears was the first album he made sober. (He now admits that while he was off booze, he was still abusing prescription pills.) It was also a chance to prove his relevancy at a time when his tabloid persona was overshadowing his musical output. On a new deluxe edition released in celebration of its 30th anniversary, No More Tears still sounds like Osbourne’s high water mark as a solo artist.
The reckoning in Osbourne’s personal life shows up all over the music. A decade removed from the wildness of Blizzard of Ozz, he sounds like a man who very much wants to keep his crazy train from going off the rails. “I can’t take this alone/Don’t leave me on my own tonight,” he pleads on “S.I.N.,” the desperation straining his voice. The shambling “A.V.H.” has the pangs of withdrawal, while the power ballad “Time After Time” considers a splintered long-term relationship that sounds a lot like his own. On the stunning closing track, “Road to Nowhere,” Osbourne eulogizes his former self with humility and gravitas: “I was looking back on my life/And all the things I’ve done to me/I’m still looking for the answers/I’m still searching for the key.” For the first time in his career, the famously reckless singer sounds like he understands the consequences to his actions.
Of course, No More Tears is still an Ozzy Osbourne album, and it’s a brilliant one for how well it balances its lesson-learning and vulnerability with thrilling bravado. Unlike his 1970s albums with Black Sabbath, an immortal run that was burdened with nothing less than the invention of heavy metal, Osbourne’s solo work has always been a place where he could be a pop singer. No More Tears yielded a pair of Hot 100 hits in the epic, orchestral title track and the lighters-aloft tearjerker, “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” Osbourne sells that song’s sweetly simple sentiment—he’s got a mama, and he’s coming home to her—with a depth of feeling that only the greatest pop balladeers can hit.
A hallmark of Osbourne’s solo work is the presence of a virtuosic guitarist beside him. Randy Rhoads, with his electrifying playing on Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, was a co-star and true equal, and after Rhoads’ death in a plane crash in 1982, Osbourne made a point of keeping a shredder in his employ. Zakk Wylde first stepped in for 1988’s No Rest for the Wicked, and on No More Tears, he joined the pantheon of great rock sidemen. Wylde can shred with the best of them, but his earthier, blues-rooted style helped define the sound of the albums he worked on with Osbourne. Without his twangy licks, “Mama, I’m Coming Home” would fall flat, and his contributions as a songwriter helped make No More Tears the most consistent solo record of Osbourne’s solo career.
The late Lemmy Kilmister was also a crucial contributor to No More Tears. The Motörhead frontman co-wrote four of its best songs: “I Don’t Want to Change the World,” “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” “Desire,” and “Hellraiser.” Apart from “Hellraiser,” which Motörhead also recorded for March ör Die, these were songs that Lemmy couldn’t get away with at his main gig, whose whiskey-soaked rumble didn’t exactly lend itself to soaring pop hooks and tender acoustic balladry. Motörhead is both celebrated and criticized for their adherence to a single primordial style, but Lemmy’s work on No More Tears proves that he was a canny, versatile songwriter who had the good sense to play to his strengths.
The demos and bonus tracks on this new edition aren’t especially enlightening, but the live material, taken from a pair of shows in 1992, is essential. That ’92 run was cheekily dubbed No More Tours, as a burned-out Osbourne stared down another endless cycle of performances and decided he didn’t have it in him anymore. “I’d been on the road for 25 years, pretty much,” he wrote in his 2009 memoir, I Am Ozzy. “I was like a mouse on a wheel: album, tour, album, tour, album, tour, album, tour. I mean, I’d buy all these houses, and I’d never fucking live in them.” Of course, he un-retired just a few years later, but you can hear in these recordings the deep gratitude he felt toward his fans on what he thinks will be his last time singing to them. On nearly every song, Osbourne ad-libs an “I love you!” between verses. He sounds like a man who understands how precious it is to get a second chance.

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On their sophomore album, the London trio animate songs about the complexity of memory and the promise of dreams with playful production choices and moments of bedlam.

Time ‘n’ Place

You may think time travel is only the stuff of sci-fi novels and films starring Jake Gyllenhaal, but the human brain has its own way of manipulating time. Episodic memory allows us to recall the setting of a memory, the contextual shell for that moment in life. The brain can resurrect a past that has seemingly seeped its way into the walls of spaces like an old school or bedroom. A bricks-and-mortar embodiment of a person’s youth, a childhood home can be an episodic jackpot. Last year, Kero Kero Bonito singer Sarah Midori Perry learned this the hard way when her suburban home on Japan’s Hokkaido island was demolished. That personal casualty ripples through her London trio’s sophomore album, Time ‘n’ Place, where memorial phantoms flow through a mix of upbeat rhythms and opalescent synths. “It’s funny how physical us humans are,” Perry coyly sings.
Kero Kero Bonito broke out in 2016 with Bonito Generation, an album of synthpop so effervescent it felt like the sonic embodiment of watermelon Pop Rocks. The members have since recast themselves with typical band roles—guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, augmenting their sequencers and synthesizers. Time ‘n’ Place is much more turbulent than its predecessor, even if it’s more conceptually grounded. “Only Acting,” for instance, leads with a drum pad beat and synths that writhe like Silly String. What begins as spunky dance-pop soon bursts into distortion-heavy rock, reflecting the performance anxiety of Perry’s lyrics. “I thought I was only acting/But I felt exactly like it was all for real,” she chimes. The song deteriorates into laser beam synths and jagged guitar squeals, Perry roaring as though possessed. Everything returns to chipper normalcy for one verse, before the song skips again and again like a scuffed CD.
The most exciting moments on Time ‘n’ Place come when the production takes these sorts of left turns, when the recordings fizzle or crack with distortion as though an alternate reality were coming into focus. KKB disrupt songs with surprising video game melodies and distortion bombs wired with manipulated vocals. Closer “Rest Stop” ends with Perry’s voice wrapped in uneasy static, ominous groans and machine gun sounds skittering in the distance. “When we walk among the clouds/Hold your neighbor close/As the trumpets echo ’round/You don’t want to be—,” she sings, cut off before she can divulge her conclusion. The secret haunts the album’s end; maybe there wasn’t enough time, or maybe her own memory is starting to waste away.
Kero Kero Bonito bounce between bouts of chaos and the absolute cheeriness of pure pop, a sensation that suggests they are tinkering with those wild old memories, trying to reconcile them with reality. When they aren’t looking for escape on tracks like “Outside” and “Flyway,” KKB transform their current world, whether perceiving a garbage dump as a sacred communal watering hole (“Dump”) or exploring the lucid dream world where your surroundings bend to your will (“Make Believe”). These songs reach for the braid of hope that you can make your own reality.
The conceptual infrastructure of Time ‘n’ Place is often captivating. But more often than not, the songs don’t hold up their end of the bargain, with structures that do little to emphasize the smarts of the ideas themselves. The content is memorable, but the melodies aren’t. Still, stronger and more diverse than their debut, Time ‘n’ Place aspirationally conjures a world that won’t be so easy to detest, one where magic and memory intertwine.


UK producer Mark Pritchard's Under the Sun is deeply atmospheric and richly impressionistic. Key vocal features from Thom Yorke, Linda Perhacs, Bibio, and others give the album its sense of movement.

Under the Sun

When Mark Pritchard first released "?," that question mark made perfect sense. It was 2009, and the track—six somber minutes of gelatinous, pitch-black drones and a doleful, harpsichord-like synth melody—didn't sound like anything else he had ever done. And that's saying something, because Pritchard has done a lot: Between his time in iconic early-'90s groups like Global Communication, Jedi Knights, and Reload, plus an array of solo aliases including Harmonic 313 and Troubleman, the UK producer made ambient, electro, house, acid, instrumental hip-hop, and broken beat, among other styles and hybrids. Not long after "?" appeared as the A-side of a 10" single (the B-side cut, "The Hologram," sounded more like a lost Mo Wax instrumental from the mid '90s), he embarked upon his career's wildly prolific second act, making dancehall, grime, footwork, trap, ragga-jungle, and throwback rave tunes in the duo Africa Hitech and under his own name. Throughout it all, "?" felt like an outlier among outliers; in an oeuvre full of left turns, it was the only one that didn't seemed to have steered him full circle.
Seven years later, that stray puzzle piece falls into place as the opening track on Under the Sun. "?" has always had a liminal feel to it—a number of DJs, including the Gaslamp Killer, Manuel Tur, and Oneman, have used it to open mixtapes, and a few more have closed out their mixes with it—and here it also plays a scene-setting role, establishing the base notes of one of the most curious and idiosyncratic records in Pritchard's catalog. For the most part devoid of drums, Under the Sun is loosely ambient in feel, but it's a world away from the lushly psychedelic chillout-room tropes of Global Communication. Many of its tracks feel like soundtrack cues, and its blippy analog palette often suggests the influence of Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. There are nods to Boards of Canada, particularly in the vocoded recitation of colors in "Hi Red," the shortest of a number of sketch-like, interstitial cuts. But the album's most unusual aspect, and its unifying thread, are the thin, quavering synthesizer patches suggestive of flute and clarinet and recorder, which, playing quiet, contrapuntal melodies, imbue the album with an almost medieval air.
Against this atmospheric backdrop, a few key vocal features help give the album its shape and sense of movement. The first, immediately following the ambient intro of "?," is the Bibio-sung "Give It Your Choir," which pairs chiming synth parts with richly colored vocal harmonies that whirl like the beads in a kaleidoscope. For much of the warm, woozy "Beautiful People," Thom Yorke's voice is processed nearly beyond recognition, and even when the effects are stripped away, it sounds like he's singing through clenched teeth, his words reduced to something like pure tone. But the odd phrases that sneak through ("Angels stroke your head," "I can't go back") reinforce the song's dream-like logic, forever on the verge of pulling into focus. "The Blinds Cage" also bobs on the surface of consciousness, as Anti-Pop Consortium's Beans narrates a stream-of-consciousness report from the border between life and death over a blippy backdrop of electronic abstractions.
In the album's centerpiece, "You Wash My Soul," the folksinger Linda Perhacs is accompanied by delicately plucked acoustic guitar as she sings mournfully of elemental forces and spiritual connections. At once chilly and pastoral, it's evocative of a strain of gothic folk that stretches back through Jarboe, Current 93, and Nick Drake; it's the polar opposite of "Infrared," a nervous synth'n'roll number that's reminiscent of Suicide. On paper, the two songs might not seem to have much to do with each other, but part of the beauty of the album is how it pulls such contrasting moods together into a coherent whole.
Deeply atmospheric and richly impressionistic, Under the Sun is an easy album to disappear into. Alternating short sketches with long, immersive tracks like the sumptuously droning "EMS," and balancing emotional vocal tracks with more abstracted moodpieces, it never feels scattered; instead, each piece leads into the next, like the segments of a maze. I put it on for an hour-long perambulation through the city and found myself cozily cocooned in its folds. I was surprised, when I finally took my headphones off, to be confronted with the lively din of an outdoor café I had been idly watching for 15 minutes; it felt as though I had been zapped back to the heart of the city, transported from a faraway place that was green and warm and ancient. The only question was how music so simple, and almost naïve, had done such a thorough job of erasing the traces of the modern world around me.


This collection-- the first of two Sally Shapiro remix sets this year-- is an accomplished, occasionally revelatory recasting of Disco Romance's synth-pop by some of contemporary electronic music's most capable hands, including Junior Boys, Lindstrøm, and the Juan MacLean.

Remix Romance Vol. 1

When Sweden's Sally Shapiro introduced herself in 2006 with near-perfect single "I'll Be By Your Side", she had no other discography, posed for no photographs except those taken by people she already knew, and gave no interviews. We knew her only by her bashful vocals and producer Johan Agebjörn's vintage Italo-disco production. Listeners could fill in the gaps of persona for themselves, unmediated by stylists, publicists, or the crumbling corporate edifices that have only lately wised up enough to start buying out your blogosphere. Like most great pop music, the song was able to make huge numbers of people each feel like it was just for us.
As great as Shapiro's full-length debut Disco Romance turned out to be, both in its original 2006 form and last year's souped-up U.S. release, I'll admit I was leery about the prospect of a remix album. Would Remix Romance Vol. 1, like so many remix compilations before it, be little more than an attempt to strike while the fire was hot? To cash in on Shapiro's recent internet renown without the hassle of bulking up her slim song catalog? I worried the idea would stretch way too thin the songs of an artist whose appeal lies at least partly in shy understatement.
Sometimes I think too much about things. Remix Romance Vol. 1 is an accomplished, occasionally revelatory recasting of Disco Romance's synth-pop by some of contemporary electronic music's most capable hands. The fragile melodies and melancholic lyrics of the original songs mostly survive the remixing process, but here they're dressed up in shiny disco (Toronto duo the Cansecos' "Hold Me So Tight", with its funky Gloria Gaynor bass lines), pulsating techno (Hamburg producer Tensnake's grand, Booka Shade-esque "I'll Be By Your Side"), or even quirky keytar-and-cowbell electro-pop (Toronto duo Woodhands' "Anorak Christmas"). The famously reticent Shapiro has finally come into the open in recent months, conducting a few interviews and appearing in public for a string of recent DJ gigs; Remix Romance is the sound of her coming-out party.
Even the most dramatically altered remixes here still keep enough of the source material's lonesome charm, just changing the scope from pop's concise three-minute single to dance music's vast 12"-ready sprawl. An 11-minute "Time to Let Go" by Norway's Lindstrøm holds up after hours of listening, transforming the title phrase to dancefloor mantra while fluid guitars, synths, and house beats percolate gradually into a cosmic disco epic; Shapiro could be reading the phone book as she whispers in French, but it still wouldn't diminish the hypnotic effect. DFA's the Juan MacLean gets a co-writing credit for his "I Know You're My Love", which combines shimmering, angelic choruses with the analogue synth arpeggios of the classic Italo that appeared on the influential Mixed Up in the Hague compilation. And the ever-dependable Canadians of Junior Boys transform U.S. Disco Romance bonus cut "Jackie Jackie (Spend This Winter With Me)" into pensive, shadowy "Jackie Junior", with squiggly horn and synth fragments playing out atop a rubbery sawtooth bass line.
Remix Romance Vol. 1 isn't always as breathtaking as those three tracks, but it's constantly uncovering new sides to Shapiro's songs. I've criticized Toronto instrumental rockers Holy Fuck's remix of Radiohead's "Nude" for adding little but drums and smeary textures to the original, but they flesh out "Find My Soul" with some metallic squeals and R.E.M.-esque minor-key acoustic guitar jangle, and their live drumming brings Shapiro from some fantasy 1980s European disco to the present day's beer-smelling but very real rock clubs. Norway's Skatebård nearly beats Agebjörn at his own game with the vocoders, snow-frosted synths, and whimsical whistles of "He Keeps Me Alive"; Sweden's Between Interval re-imagines rain-drenched "Sleep in My Arms" as a serene, ambient space walk. Sure, absence makes the heart grow fonder, but Remix Romance Vol. 1 reaffirms that Shapiro's music is the type you can live with day in and day out. You know, a lasting romance.


The Brisbane guitar-pop trio infuses conversational vocals with deep emotional resonance on a sophomore album that spotlights the refreshing contributions of drummer Riley Jones.

We’re Not Talking

Speak-singing is the enemy of strict choirmasters and the refuge of wannabe frontpersons too nervous to sing for real. Formally known as sprechgesang, a German word coined in the 1900s to describe the expressionist vocal technique used in operas, speak-singing has since shown up in practically every genre of popular music. And no matter how often it’s used, whether by Jonathan Richman or Courtney Barnett, it retains its imperfect charm, allowing each artist’s unique inflections to warp the notes that carry their words. Brisbane guitar-pop trio the Goon Sax have figured out how to maintain that looseness while injecting emotion into a technique that can flatten feelings. Their sophomore album, We’re Not Talking, feels refreshingly candid because of it.
In the two years since the Goon Sax released their debut album, Up to Anything, all three members—guitarist Louis Forster, guitarist James Harrison, and drummer Riley Jones—graduated from high school. Now, at 19, they’ve entered an era of maturation, in which reason and experience start to overtake inquisitiveness and wonder but can’t altogether supplant them. We’re Not Talking rides those lingering waves of adolescence. While the Goon Sax used to write hyper-specific vignettes, their new songs sound a little more vague and feel a little more relatable, whether they’re about bottling up emotions in a movie theater or losing a loved one’s number on your phone. There to enrich the stories are instruments like castanets, strings, and horns—all new to the band and each used sparingly, to emphasize the moods behind their words.
The vocals on these songs have the effect of a good story being told for the first time, all kinetic energy and disjointed phrasing. The fact that all three members share vocal duties reinforces that conversational element. On the piano ballad “Now You Pretend,” a deep sense of longing lines the edge of Harrison’s mellow baritone. Throughout We’re Not Talking, the band’s complex inflections give their words an air of ambiguity. In “Love Lost,” multi-tracked vocals radiate passion despite the flat vocal tones, making for a spirited trudge that matches the song’s story about wallowing in romantic isolation. Listening to the Goon Sax, you get the sense that they’re reliving real, vital moments that their hearts are still tied to. Harrison’s muddled enunciation suggests that he’s working his way through the emotions he’s describing, and you can’t help but feel it, too.
Jones’ voice, as both a singer and a songwriter, surfaces for the first time on this album. Her contributions seem to have been crucial to the band’s evolution, increasing the complexity of their harmonies, but also adding a female perspective that complements Forster’s and Harrison’s narratives. She adds levity to songs that would otherwise plod, like “Losing Myself,” which is weighed down by chunky guitar riffs until her glossy voice skates in on the chorus, and “We Can’t Win,” whose metronomic rigidity finally starts to give way when her melodies kick in. When she takes lead vocals on “Strange Light,” the album’s most gutting track, her frail voice heightens its themes of paralyzing fear and lack of direction.
Bolstered by Jones’ increased visibility and a newly varied instrumental palette, We’re Not Talking stands as proof that speak-singing still has some life left in it for a new generation of indie rockers. And the band seems to understand that: The most stirring example of their novel formula—emotional depth + conversational delivery—kicks off the album on “Make Time 4 Love.” As trumpets cascade and vocal harmonies warm up, Forster issues a series of exhausted ruminations that belie the band members’ young age: “I give in/I won’t outrun the train/And I can’t understand/Why you’re still trying.” The Goon Sax have already learned how to roll with life’s punches—and that new state of mind has certainly given them plenty to discuss.


Trent Reznor returns with yet another digital record; The Slip is a free download that, unlike the sprawling loss-leader Ghosts I-IV, consists of fully realized songs. Pretty good ones, too.

The Slip

Remember how frustrating it was when Nine Inch Nails would make us wait four to six years between albums? That trend, it appears, has entered the rearview mirror stage, along with the label messes and rehab stints that helped cause those interminable gaps. Consider the new math after The Slip hit hard drives as a free download last Monday: over the last three years, Trent Reznor's released as many full-length records of new material (four) as he did during the first decade of his recorded existence. Since Pretty Hate Machine, the concept behind Reznor's work with Nine Inch Nails has been blunt and straightforward: dystopian techno-metal forged from the fusion of man and machine. But since last year's Year Zero, which came bundled with an alternate-reality video game and high-concept pre-release marketing schedule, and including Ghosts I-IV, which mimicked Radiohead's lossy-leader gimmick, Reznor has slowly emerged as a new sort of cyborg: an artist wholly immersed in the newest digital trends for the distribution and promotion of his music. Like a more magnanimous Radiohead, Reznor's called into question the major-label reserve clause for established, profitable musicians by not just coming up with a new way to monetize music, but just giving it away for free, no strings attached. Instead of "tip-jar," it's "this one's on me."
Unlike its most immediate predecessors, The Slip comes packaged with a crucial difference: the music itself is more satisfying than the sui generis marketing scheme. Reznor's unique capacity to commingle raging industrial bangers with ballads and ambient instrumental passages appears in its best form since The Downward Spiral, and here gains much of the focus and restraint that many remember used to be his calling card. At just under 44 minutes, The Slip is Reznor's shortest full-length since Machine, and it indexes many of his most appealing qualities as a songwriter and album sequencer. His former label Interscope still retains the rights to issue a Nine Inch Nails greatest-hits set, but The Slip plays like Reznor's own minor retrospective, fleshed out with plenty of present-day ruminations.
First single "Discipline" eschews a typically monstrous chorus for an airtight industrial disco grind ventilated by an airy piano and falsetto cooing. It's another solid pop song about constraint from the guy who, following Prince, brought kinky sex odes to strip-mall bars. This sort of control is of a different stripe than in the past, though: When Reznor asks, "Is my viciousness losing ground?", it comes from a long-established and now label-free artist trying to reflexively reassert his position in the pop landscape, on his own terms. One of the pitfalls of perfectionism and digital production is endless tinkering and shapeless experimentation, and "Discipline" evinces Reznor's desire for some sort of framework, lest he get too comfortable cranking out 4-LP instrumental opuses from here on out. In relative terms, "I need your discipline/ I need your help" is sure a long way from the nearly 20-year-old "Head Like a Hole" refrain "I'd rather die/ Than give you control".
Studio hermeticism is still isolation, though, and "Discipline" gives way to "Echoplex", in which Reznor's attention is taken by the sound of his voice reverberating throughout the studio. After a quick swipe at those who've insisted he's passed his sell-by date: "I'm safe in here/ Irrelevant/ Just like they said," he casts his tomb as a seductive, slow-torture chamber, cooing: "My voice just echoes off these walls." "1,000,000"-- with any luck, the album's second single-- reappropriates the "Hurt" lyric "a million miles away" from the context of heroin addiction isolation to a more recent sort of reality-remove, occasioned by a period of declining fortunes for major labels. This sort of self-referentiality seems designed to clarify that Reznor has moved from a self-destructive form of addiction to another, hopefully more productive one.
While I doubt The Slip recording process resembled this (although that would be awesome), the liner notes do hint toward a possible shift in method. Session drummer Josh Freese is accompanied by longtime associate Robin Finck (back after a profoundly unproductive period as Slash's replacement in Guns 'n Roses), and keyboardist Alessandro Cortini, and all are listed in the credits as co-performers. I have no idea how much trap-work Freese does on the album itself, but the mixture of live and machined drumming is The Slip's most appealing sonic quality. It's not a totally new thing, of course-- Dave Grohl played on much of With Teeth-- but here, Reznor strives specifically for, and occasionally hits, the sort of room-mic'd aura that made a song like "March of the Pigs" such a visceral experience. The riff-metal on "Discipline", "1,000,000", "Head Down", and "Demon Seed" can't compete with the best of the 1989-94 era, but it's clear that Reznor's assessing the best of his peak period through the filter of his post-Fragile activity, and producing some solid songs in the process.
The hard-hitting first half of The Slip gives way to a second marked by a more patient form of rumination, beginning with the plangent "Lights in the Sky", on which Reznor unearths the decaying piano from the Tate Mansion for a song that, like Radiohead's "Weird Fishes", finds macabre, romantic pleasure in drowning. "Lights" seamlessly blends into the seven-and-a-half minute ambient piece "Corona Radiata", which ascends to a noise-filled post-rock crescendo before abruptly cutting to the evocatively-titled "The Four of Us Are Dying". Reznor's fondness for instrumental passages on his albums goes back to Broken, but this 12-minute stretch, more than a quarter of The Slip's runtime and the obvious product of post-Ghost compositional confidence, is the only lag in the album's overall flow. It's much easier to listen to these pieces in the context of a traditional Nine Inch Nails album, to be sure, but the pulsing rhythm of "Dying" is nonetheless welcome after "Corona", a lengthy indulgence not quite earned.
The title of "Dying" is a nerdy reference from Reznor to this Twilight Zone" episode, in which Archie Hammer, a low-life mug, possesses the ability to change his face at will and assume the personalities of the recently deceased. The title is its own spoiler, really, but the episode is more than just an ending; it's a 24-minute meditation on the public performance of identity, and the frightening ramifications that can happen when none of them have any bearing in reality. It's the sort of lesson that Reznor seems to be learning publicly, and occasionally painfully. The Slip, then, allows him to do just that: shift between and reflect upon his various artistic and personal personae, without fear of reprisal. Instead of a symbolic death, The Slip feels much more like a possible rebirth.


The Social Experiment members reintroduce themselves as earnest singer-songwriters, but their post-genre mashup production produces more vibes than actual songs.

Intellexual

It’s hard to pinpoint where Nico Segal and Nate Fox went wrong with Intellexual, but it certainly didn’t stop at the name. Producers and instrumentalists by trade, the pair have made an album that sounds like misting truffle oil on plain pasta and serving it with a chef’s kiss. To listen to Intellexual—their official debut after years of behind-the-scenes collaborations—is to poke at something hollow, and the duo’s recent press run confirms the bullshit: “For Intellexual it wasn’t just about a song being good, it was more so, What is intellexual about it?” Segal told Billboard. “How do I make it intellexual? How does this song get executed in an intellexual way?” Later in the same interview, he declares that the song he’s “most proud of” is the one called “Overthinking.”
Segal (formerly known as Donnie Trumpet) and Fox have built a pedigree through their close work with Chance the Rapper on Coloring Book and as members of the Social Experiment. You can hear moments on Intellexual where they’ve lifted their own fingerprints from those sessions and smudged them onto a blank slate. Their production is elaborate, but the songs are vapid. And though Intellexual is framed as an earnest singer-songwriter record, these are not so much songs as vibes.
Across a dozen tracks, Segal and Fox corral a group of semi-familiar vocalists like Knox Fortune, Vic Mensa, and Raury. But instead of training a spotlight on their stars, they overdirect them with ham-fisted production. “Roxstar” takes a half-baked Knox Fortune song and obscures his personality, leaving no meat on the bones but plenty of garnish. Segal’s trumpet swells up in a triumphant flutter, background vocalists riff endlessly, everything except the piano drops out, something twinkles, nothing happens. “Times have changed/I think it’s strange/We’d stay the same,” Fortune sings. The chorus delivers another clunker in his pretty falsetto: “The things that make us right/Sometimes make us wrong.”
“Like I Feel,” a direct echo of Segal and Fox’s gorgeous Social Experiment vamp “Pass the Vibes,” from Surf, is even more of a shell of a song. Surf was dense and soulful, and there, “Pass the Vibes” felt like an exhale. “Like I Feel” has no purpose and nothing to tether it down, just a pretty moment and a repeated phrase: “When you feel like I feel, you feel good.” The calculated new-age samba of “Boca” sets lower stakes and fares better, even if it amounts to intricate background music, easy listening with extra flavor.
There are bigger and more obvious missteps on Intellexual—Vic Mensa makes an ineffectual appearance, Segal and Fox croon corny and nonsensical lyrics at every turn—but it’s the post-genre mashup production that sinks the ship. At best Intellexual is quaint; at worst it’s unsubtle and full of itself. It’s the sound of two talented musicians stumbling over their own chops, doing too much and too little in the same motion.


The British singer and beatmaker’s largely self-produced debut album is a pleasant, frictionless listen that benefits from his obvious chops but is held back by his risk-averse tendencies.

Geography

You might be slow to warm to Tom Misch. You might look at his pretty, symmetrical face and listen to his pretty, sweet voice and think to yourself: Haven’t we seen this before? Do we really need another blue-eyed prince of soul? After all, Misch may sing Dilla’s praises now, but in five years, when Brexit finally goes through, there’s no telling how he’ll have changed. Maybe he’ll pull a “Man of the Derbyshire Woods”-type routine, adopt a rural accent, and take up fox hunting.
But Misch, who’s been releasing music through SoundCloud since 2011, is no British Timberlake (and he’s from South London, not Derbyshire). If you need an American analogue, think Mayer Hawthorne: Misch is another shy, beat-loving polymath raised in the temple of Dilla and Madlib who sidestepped to R&B once he realized that people enjoyed hearing his voice. (No falsetto though.) His debut album, Geography, the vast majority of which he produced himself, also carries echoes of Craig David and Jamie Woon. With its mild, coffee-house buzz and flat musical minimalism, the record is mostly in the tradition of contemporary British R&B, though a handful of instrumental tracks speak to the singer’s origin story as a lo-fi SoundCloud producer.
At their best, Hawthorne and David are strong songwriters, and Misch, who started singing over the past several years, is still working to acquire that skill. But the first proper song on Geography, “Lost in Paris,” is a gem that showcases the best of what he can do. It’s a simple song about the end of a relationship, but it refreshes itself constantly, with Misch bringing in a new element every eight bars or so. The final addition is a verse from the rapper GoldLink, who has been ubiquitous lately yet still hasn’t worn out his welcome. His comfort with Misch (the two have worked together previously) allows him to treat his verse as a punctuation mark, and it turns the song into an outright jam. It wouldn’t be surprising if “Lost in Paris” were to become the modest hit that introduces Misch to American ears.
That introduction will likely be frictionless, given the dreamy appeal of Misch’s voice (and looks) and the almost total lack of frisson in his music. Geography has little interest in sex, and he is finicky about other types of relationships as well. (The ballad “Man Like You” seems to hint at greater depth, but it’s a Patrick Watson cover.) It’s an overridingly pleasant listen, but that pleasantness is too often maintained by featureless production and other manifestations of Misch’s risk-averse instincts.
“Movie,” a ballad that opens with his sister Polly performing a classic film-inspired monologue, is a good example. It filters a past romance through the vocabulary of communications technology, with verses that recall love letters and texts and a chorus about vintage movies. (Oh and if you’re tempted to bring up “Lost in Paris,” which does seem romantically inclined, be warned: The relationship it explores is one between Misch and a lost hard drive.) Meanwhile Misch’s music, which is informed by the increasingly conservative online beat scene as well as his classical upbringing and jazz education, is often unadventurous, though his chops are obvious. His funkless, tediously faithful instrumental cover of “Isn’t She Lovely” spells the issue out clearly without using any words at all.
Misch shares some of the Luddite qualities that made backpackers of the last decade such a bore, but he doesn’t necessarily come off as boring—just timid, and there’s plenty of room for him to grow. In an interview last year, he said that his chief influences were John Mayer and Robert Glasper, and while the Mayer name-drop may be a worrisome sign to some, both of those artists had modest, crowd-pleasing debut albums before they became more technically adventurous. And like Misch himself, Geography is not as easy to write off as it initially appears. Songs including “Lost in Paris,” “Cos I Love You,” and the sparkling “Disco Yes” are stickier than you’d expect, and Misch’s expertise with jazz guitar offsets his modest arrangements. He said while making the album that he felt “like I’m still at the stage where I have to kind of prove before I can just make what I really want to make.” But if the best songs here are indicators of the kind of fun, bubbly music he really wants to make, he could do with less proving and more letting letting loose.


On his debut solo album, the Oakland experimental musician utilizes custom-built software systems that allow him to navigate around disability, with electrifying results.

Dax Pierson: Nerve Bumps (A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction)

Difference isn’t definition, but it can be context. So here’s a bit of what sets the new album from Oakland’s revered Dax Pierson apart: While sounding in no way retro, it nods to the techno/jazz/experimental fusion released in the 1990s by labels like Planet Mu and Submerge. Nerve Bumps’ nine tracks include one that lasts barely a minute and another that’s nearly 12, and both are fully formed at the length they should be. The album’s acidic squiggles, soft yet sharped-edged pads, and bouncy rhythms are familiar—but they combine in unusual ways.
Stylistically, the music is free of obvious biographical clues. But the personal can be contextual, too. Dax Pierson spent the early 2000s as a keyboard virtuoso in Anticon heroes Subtle and post-whatever Themselves/the Notwist side project 13&God, and then the confounding Can-related project Malcolm Mooney and the Tenth Planet. Pierson was one of the few Black and queer people in those various spaces. In 2005, he was touring with Subtle when their van hit some ice and flipped over; his seatbelt malfunctioned. He was partially paralyzed from foot to fingertip. He spent a decade recovering. In 2019, he released Live in Oakland, which makes music from the concrete circumstances of his disability. Condescending doctors appear as vocalists while his wheelchair makes the beat.
Nerve Bumps, released through San Francisco’s vital Dark Entries Records and the Ratskin Records collective, Oakland’s hub for “decolonial experimental music,” pushes things further. As Pierson recovered, technology progressed. The iPad arrived, and he devised a rig of them and apps to manifest what many producers twiddling the knobs of their Euroracks rarely manage. The organ tones and fuzzy envelopes of “For 2_24” vibrate at frequencies closer to Op Art than ambient. Opener “Adhesion” gets things moving in Detroit-inflected 7/8 techno pushing through ominous arpeggios, upended by interludes of footwork and orchestral stabs. It jumps suddenly into “For the Angels,” a kind of Bardo that shimmers and shakes, crystallizing into a funk that, in turn, cuts with little warning into the vocal workout of “Snap.” That brief snarl of Pierson’s whispers and vows signals a flow with a mind of its own.
There are referents: “Keflex,” named for an antibiotic, tangles what sound like guitars tangling around what sound like Linn drums, for a healthy reminder that Prince was a Cocteau Twins fan. It also grinds as heavy as anything unearthed by, say, Long Island Electrical Systems. The coldwave of “Catch” warms itself by the fire of blown-out snares that occasionally shoot off sparks of trap-ish hi-hats. “I Slay the Pain” is aptly named: Percussion at the top end pays tribute to that finger-snap sound that’s still the queen of gay house, with a deeper-than-deep bass and healing piano chords. “NOTHING FKS U HRDR THN TM” closes up with six minutes of interstellar travel into a clearing Angelo Badalamenti might recognize, and so might Lee “Scratch” Perry, and so might KMRU—a circle of Black techno and jazz and dub traditions made new.
For the album’s name, Pierson borrowed a quote from choreographer Martha Graham, whose work did its own kind of refashioning and reconceptualizing of what the body could do. “No artist is pleased,” she once said. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” Pierson has marched past other producers who’ve disappeared up their own DAWs. His work is divinely queer, from its sound to the cover surrounding it, a painting by his partner Chuck Nanney. He makes body music for different kinds of bodies. When the clubs reopen, they should all be welcomed.

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