The intimate, elliptical solo debut from producer and former Vampire Weekender gorgeously traces the stories and sounds of his past.

Half-Light

While still in college, Rostam Batmanglij was experimenting with the pop and R&B possibilities of Auto-Tune—this was before T-Pain blew up, before 808s and Heartbreak, and way before Bon Iver’s dalliances with the vocal smearing effect. As the producer and musical leader behind Vampire Weekend, he spearheaded a nobrow sound that cheerfully destroyed barriers between genres and borders. Working behind the scenes with chart toppers like Charli XCX and Carly Rae Jepsen over the last few years, he added some idiosyncratic warmth to their songs, further collapsing bygone concepts of mainstream and underground. His personal identity as a queer, first-generation Iranian-American immigrant who came up through the largely straight and white world of indie rock only adds to his rep as a disruptive force for good. For the last decade, he’s offered signposts for artfully postmodern pop music, beckoning others to follow. This is why current vanguards Frank Ocean and Solange invited him to contribute to their most recent game-flipping albums. Rostam is a name you can trust. On Half-Light, that name is front and center for the first time.
Instead of providing another glimpse into smart-pop’s crystal ball, though, the album hovers over the past. He started writing one song more than 10 years ago, and a couple of others were originally released in 2011. There are several loving references to specific locales in Manhattan, though he moved from New York to Los Angeles in 2013. Many of the tracks here could have easily found homes on past projects, either an old album by Vampire Weekend, which he parted ways with last year, or his bubbling 2009 record with Ra Ra Riot’s Wes Miles as Discovery, or his gorgeous collaboration with former Walkmen howler Hamilton Leithauser, I Had a Dream That You Were Mine. In this spirit, Half-Light sometimes plays like an alternate-history greatest hits. Other times, it feels more like a collection of dusty B-sides.
Naturally, the biggest difference between this album and what’s come before is Rostam’s voice. Though he’s an undisputed studio genius, the 33-year-old hasn’t taken up lead vocals on that many recordings thus far. And in contrast to many of the bold and exacting singers he’s previously written with, Rostam’s delivery is often hushed, quivering, devastatingly intimate. There’s a mumbling quality to it that can be charming or cloying—a millennial whoop of one that is at times reminiscent of Chris Martin’s guileless early days. But he uses this tentativeness to his advantage on the twinkling “I Will See You Again” and the album’s ambling title track, where his vocals gingerly stretch out like a morning yawn.
Such a bleary image seems appropriate, since much of Half-Light takes place in a liminal space between night and day, dreams and reality, sex and love, a breakup and what’s next. Rostam invokes various levels of sunlight streaming into apartment windows throughout the record, and it often sounds like he’s not singing to a person, exactly, but rather the formless, dark silhouette of a person who’s just left the room. “Lo and behold, you were here now you’re gone,” he laments on “EOS,” a track that floats and surges like an arena anthem turned inside-out.
As he looks back musically, employing the harpsichord sixteenth notes, string arrangements, and hand-drum rhythms that have become his signature, along with some Middle Eastern flourishes he was exposed to as a child, he’s also remembering certain moments from his personal history. A dramatic autumn morning on 14th Street. Reading The New Yorker in bed while watching a partner paint. Holding someone close while considering the vastness of the ocean. His descriptions of these flashbacks can be elliptical, at times to the point of meaninglessness. But at their best, as on the chugging “Bike Dream,” a song about the bittersweet impossibilities of love, Rostam’s words are just abstract enough, like our most lasting memories.
The album’s naked vulnerabilities, second-guesses, pep talks, coming-of-age tales, and fleeting glimpses of heartache lead up to its final full song, “Gwan.” This is where Rostam moves into the present, offering the kind of wisdom and relief that only time can provide. “Sometimes I laugh when I think about how you know me,” he sings. He’s likely talking about a loved one, but the line could also apply to those who’ve followed his work so far, who got to the end of this worn photobook of an album along with him. Half-Light traces where he’s been so far, a typical theme for any solo debut. This is as understandable as it is slightly frustrating. Because all along, Rostam has never settled for anything close to typical.


On his first full-length for Drag City, the SF-based garage rocker slows down but doesn't mellow out while demonstrating growth as a songwriter along the way.

Goodbye Bread

Before Ty Segall recorded "Girlfriend", a gem from last year's Melted, he channeled sounds we don't normally associate with humans. Through polluted streams of distorted guitar, you could hear him convulse, spitting wordless sounds as a bubblegum drumbeat took hold. It was evil, it was scary, and it sounded like demons were controlling his organs and limbs. "Girlfriend" was a glorious blast of fuzz, here and gone in just over two minutes. It both demonstrated Segall's gift for economy as well as perfected the tone for his work since he left his Epsilons outfit to make music on his own. But Melted as a whole made loud and clear that he was capable of more than just dishing out hard-charging hooks at blazing speeds. He was uncovering an innate understanding for craft as well.
In Goodbye Bread, his first full-length for Drag City, Segall has embraced singer-songwriter craft wholeheartedly. While garage rock O.G.s like the Troggs and the Stooges continue to be an influence, Segall has turned in a relatively calm effort here, choosing to downshift into slower tempos and cleaner sounds, evoking instead the work of John Lennon, Neil Young, and Marc Bolan. Heavyweights. But what makes Goodbye Bread such a success is that we get an even keener sense of what a Ty Segall song sounds like and what that means. Jay Reatard, whose wild-child persona has often been linked to Segall since the former's passing last year, proved that it takes a little more to stand out in this sphere. The same dark energy that set "Girlfriend" in motion can be heard here in varying forms, whether in the enormous chorus of "My Head Explodes" (a head-bangers delight), the wheelie-popping solo that slices through "Comfortable Home (A True Story)", or the sweaty, shivering verses of "You Make The Sun Fry". Though Goodbye Bread rarely takes a direct route, the thrill becomes much more about the ride from start to finish, than the speed or force of impact.
He achieves this by playing around with notions of pace and structure, as shown by the opening title track. It's a strummy early statement that's altogether very different from what he's shared before. Segall's vocals no longer sound like they're broadcast from the bottom of a well, the guitars are warm and bright, and its melody is vibrant in a very simple, patient manner. "California Commercial" is a basher that plods along happily before taking flight on some tightly coordinated guitar lines in the homestretch. And take a look at the run times here and you'll see some welcome variety, too. At first listen, "I Am With You" seems a bit aimless over its four minutes, but the way Segall transitions from crescendo to detour to crescendo to left turn to mangy solo proves deliciously inventive upon closer listens.
Goodbye Bread is filled with such rich, breathtaking moments, and Segall, who plays every instrument here, sounds as though he's savoring every part of his process. On the slightly creepy "You Make the Sun Fry", there's joy in how he rhymes "love me still" with "your Coupe De Ville." Same goes for the way he locks together the chiming guitar licks that carry "I Can't Feel It" home and the thundrous drum fills that punctuate "My Head Explodes". It sounds like he's having a blast, excited with every sound and riff he finds, even as he slows down to zoom in on the details.


The Maryland rapper’s latest is an impossibly dense meditation on race, religion, identity, the cosmos, social media, you name it. It's executed with skill but is often tone deaf and heavy-handed.

Everybody

The Martian author Andy Weir’s 2009 short story The Egg, originally published online, is a sci-fi tale about rebirth, reciprocity, and evolution. When a man is killed in a car accident, he meets a god-like figure in limbo who tells him of his fate and that he is to be reincarnated. The man subsequently learns that not only is time an illusion, but he is the entire universe, and a continuous sequence of deaths and rebirths is all part of a maturation process: The whole universe is an egg, and when it’s fully grown it’ll ascend to the next level of consciousness.
Maryland rapper Logic’s new album, Everybody, is a strangely faithful adaptation of the short story with an emphasis on the endless cycle of reincarnations that’d eventually—hypothetically—cause everyone to be different incarnations of the same person. He weaves his own struggles with race and religion into a complex, panoramic view of humanity, seeking a unified theory of equality, not just for his mortal coil but for the cosmos. If this seems convoluted that’s because it is: Weir’s story was meant as a fanciful (albeit thoughtful) work of fiction, not an intersectional parable. “Every time you victimized someone you were victimizing yourself,” the short story goes. “Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself.” This is Everybody’s central conceit: We are all the same, and every misdeed hurts the human race equally. Logic gets even more literal in the subtext, drawing parallels between this life force balance and his mixed-race heritage. Herein, an existential crisis unfolds.
Never mind the fact that the concept is completely unoriginal, even on a superficial level; Everybody unravels Weir’s tightly coiled micro universe into a nonsensical sprawl. Give an extremely verbose rapper a heady short story and watch it come undone. It operates on a colossal scale, and yet somehow still ends up being myopic.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, whose last major foray into rap was to wage war with flat Earth truther B.o.B, plays God on Everybody. Logic chooses to name the man in his musical adaptation “Atom,” and when he’s not rapping as Logic, he’s rapping from the perspective of a past life. These winking gestures mixing science and religion are insufferable when paired with meditations on racial inequity and social anxiety, constantly raising the stakes until they mean nothing. Not only is it easy to see the seams in this tangled ideological tapestry, they’re constantly fraying.
Logic’s Everybody is the latest in a string of recent rap releases that consider race and perception—Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN., J. Cole’s 4 Your Eyez Only, and Joey Bada$$’s All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ among them. But unlike those records, which are self-aware and mindful of their surroundings, this is nearly clueless and without subtlety. His raps, even at their most technical, are all empty loops regurgitating predictable talking points, at times mixing messages. Fake deep aphorisms (“Everybody looking for the meaning of life through a cell phone screen!”) share space with half-witted indictments of student loan policies and flex culture. He addresses mental health and wellness on “1-800-273-8255” and “Anziety,” which is admirable, but there are no real revelations or comforts to be found in either. A song like Kendrick Lamar’s “u,” for example, which really bears out the weight of depression and self-doubt, reveals Logic's takes to be entirely without substance.
For a significant portion of the album, Logic stakes a claim to his blackness with receipts, citing his great-grandfather the slave, his cousin Keisha, and saying “nigga” a few times. None of these race raps do anything meaningful. They say very little about the mechanics of racism and they say next to nothing insightful about being black in America. He spends more time denouncing rioters than killer cops on “America.” Trump gets a single bar of disapproval but Kanye gets several for meeting with him. Logic’s calls for civic action seem woefully ignorant to how oppression and white supremacy work—from the role of private prisons and redistricting to stop and frisks. To that end, not once does he consider how being white-passing could skew his perception of what it means to be black. He never even probes what it might mean when people assume that he’s white; either he refuses to engage thoughtfully here or he’s simply irresponsible. This isn’t just lazy, it’s messy. It's the #AllLivesMatter of rap albums.
Aside from its more sociopolitical shortcomings, Everybody refuses to stop and evaluate why it exists in the first place. A lot has been made of Logic’s technical skill, but it can’t really be considered proficiency if it isn’t efficient. Seconds after Killer Mike delivers an impassioned speech on anti-black tyranny (“Confess”), Logic is criticizing web activists and the social media gratification matrix with the nuance of a 4chan thread (“Killing Spree”). “Take It Back” is a six-minute song with only two minutes of raps. Several tracks have long, preachy monologues appended to them. The same verse fragments are continuously rearranged on “AfricAryaN” for no reason, and with winding effect. The song is 12-minutes long.
If you manage to get to the end of “AfricAryaN,” it pans outward to reveal a shared universe where—oh shit—the album’s contents turns out to be merely walking music for the space travelers who dictated the narrative flow on Logic’s last album, The Incredible True Story. The extra layer feels like an even greater slight to the heavy topics discussed within; the further out we venture, the further the issues get pushed into the margins. A final uncredited verse from J. Cole, who is also biracial, unravels the album’s entire cyclical concept: “I’ve been through it before/Can only share with you what I know/To be true, but at the same time, I’ll never be you/And you’ll never be me,” he raps. He seems to know what Logic doesn’t: Equality without identity is merely inactivity. The weight of our experiences shapes us. It is only once we understand why it’s okay to be different that there can be empathy—and change.


Nick Cave's schizophrenic and sloppy mid-life crisis project, Grinderman, returns with another album of feral urges and ferocious guitar work.

Grinderman 2

What is it about dirty old men, anyway? In 2007, Nick Cave gave up the ghost of youth, declaring an out-and-out midlife crisis with Grinderman, a brilliant, crude, stripped-down quartet. Made up of members of his Bad Seeds, the nascent group's self-titled debut was naked about its grotesqueries, as Cave futzed with a guitar for the first time, wailed about the "No Pussy Blues", and sucked in his gut with hopes of getting laid.
It was an inspired late-career move for the then 50-year-old, invigorating and recalibrating the piano-affixed, doom-saying troubadour. Critics fell over themselves proclaiming the return of the former Birthday Party frontman's skuzzy side. A year later you could hear the punk reverberations in 2008's Bad Seeds album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! But Grinderman, though fierce and often hilarious, weren't exactly a great band. Young bands-- no matter how old-- have to learn new tricks, and this one had to find interesting ways to be messy. Grinderman 2 is a sequel of sorts, but mostly an improvement. The band has widened their sound and sexual pursuits, but also poked around at the edges of decrepitude. What does life look like on the other side of crisis?
Well, it's schizophrenic and sloppy. Those feral urges are still there; consider the album cover's lupine avatar. But Cave and the band-- who typically improvise structure and lyrics-- have kept the themes consistent across nine songs. And they're not terribly different from what interests him on albums with the Bad Seeds: God, Death, and America are gospel. But sexual filialness-- Cave seems to be calling himself "Daddy" and yowling at his child-lover a lot here-- takes an uncomfortable precedence. "Worm Tamer" and "Heathen Child" are almost comically lascivious. "I stick my fingers in your biscuit jar/ And crush all your gingerbread men," he moans, aping Howlin' Wolf on "Kitchenette", one of the album's best songs. And later, "What has that husband of yours ever given to you?/ Oprah Winfrey on a plasma screen." That's a great line, the sort of insinuating thing that might get Cave into bed with a frustrated housewife, but it's also miserably desperate, self-deprecating stuff.
Cave has been leading a full life lately, finishing his second novel in 2009, composing scores for John Hillcoat's films, and writing a few screenplays of his own. But he has rarely been as experimental and unafraid as he is here. The pastoral "Palaces of Montezuma" is a "We Didn't Start the Fire" for heroin addicts, haunted by visions of Miles Davis, Marilyn Monroe, JFK, and "a custard-colored super-dream of Ali McGraw and Steve McQueen." It's unhinged and unerringly beautiful. So often, Cave is wise about the state of it all; he seems to know he's on the wrong side of things-- life, love, fear-- but he won't give up the fight.
Like much of Cave's work, there is an ominous sense of dread always creeping. But unlike previous work, there's a speed and intensity to Grinderman 2 unheard before. From the chugging build of "Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man" through the psych-haze of "Bellringer Blues", there are few opportunities to catch your breath. "Evil" even lurches toward death metal. "What I Know" is a rare and tender respite from the fury; it's a plaintive ballad to precocity, process, and nothing. "Oh I know, yeah I know," Cave intones, never quite revealing what it is. There isn't much to the song-- a stray, buzzing crackle; a far-off wordless melody; a quietly strummed guitar. It's just a simple moment in a savage life.


On his debut, the suddenly inescapable singer goes looking for a mashup of Texas rap, pop-punk, and R&B original enough to match his fashion sense.

Teezo Touchdown: How Do You Sleep at Night?

How Do You Sleep at Night?

On the list of things to know about Beaumont, Texas native Teezo Touchdown, it may take a while before you get to the songs. The nails he wears woven into his braids weigh, supposedly, 15 pounds. His style, composed of leather, denim, football pads, and oversized clothing, has made him a fashion-world favorite, affiliated with Telfar, Marc Jacobs, Moncler, and more. He communicates in odd ways: sticky notes with feel-good messages and announcements, elaborate Instagram skits full of alter egos and zany plots. And the celebrity co-signs keep rolling in: from Janelle Monáe and Madonna; from Tyler, the Creator, who said, “That kid’s an alien in the best way possible”; and from Drake, who was so moved that he broke character in an Instagram post to praise Teezo’s new debut album How Do You Sleep at Night? as “some of the best music ever.”
To Teezo’s credit, he doesn’t deny that up until now, his fusion of Texas rap, nostalgic pop-punk, and funky R&B paired with clever and memeable music videos (in the clip for the sleepy acoustic guitar ballad “I’m Just a Fan,” he stands surrounded by portable fans and spins his arms while nails tinkle like windchimes) has come secondary to everything else. “No one really knew me for the music, and music, to me, is my foundation,” the 30 year old said in an interview. How Do You Sleep at Night? is a debut tasked with making music the point, rather than a brand extension. He attempts this by imitating Weezer rap-rock, The Love Below soul, and 2000s pop radio, a genre mash-up that isn’t as offbeat as it wants to be. Most of all, it’s too sanitized, too impersonal, too cliché, to be a statement.
There’s a Teezo Touchdown snippet that has floated around YouTube and SoundCloud for a while, in which he sing-raps on a beat that could have been on Finally Rich: “Meeting with my PR team/They tellin’ me to keep it clean/No more songs about sex and codeine.” Luckily for them, How Do You Sleep at Night? has the edge of the Jonas Brothers. When he does sing about sex on “UUHH,” it’s uncomfortable. Not because it’s subliminal—some of the sexiest songs of all time get there without straight-up admitting I want to fuck—but because it’s as if he’s confused about how sex is supposed to work, like he might giggle if you said “dick.” The most angsty he gets is “Daddy Mama Drama,” where he hurls bleeped-out “I fucking hate you”s at his parents. On “Mood Swings,” he tries to open up about his inner blues on some played-out funk (just listen to the Victoria Monét album instead), but undercuts it with an overly cutesy hook that features the “weees” you would hear pushing a child on a swing. The lyrics are hard-hitting, too: “It seems when I step out of my dreams/Everything melts like ice cream.” Sure.
What Teezo has going for him is an elastic singing voice that slides nicely into the R&B lane. His melodies are shaky and occasionally crack, but the imperfections feel so much rawer than his sterilized pop and rock adventures. His speak-sing glide on “I Don’t Think U C Me” is smooth as hell, channeling a little of that Brent Faiyaz sauce. If you can get through the miserably upbeat first half of “Too Easy,” the breakdown into smoky coos with chatter of missed DMs feels like a sweeter homage to those old Drake R&B switch-ups. The stretched-out falsetto of “You Thought” is catchier than any of the softball pop hooks. Too bad his rapping feels like an afterthought: In the past he has called Lil’ Flip “dang near my favorite rapper” and has invoked Speaker Knockerz on a throwaway single, which is way more interesting than acting like Sum 41 is cool.
It’s clear that, like Lil Yachty’s psych-rock experiment Let’s Start Here. (which Teezo featured on), How Do You Sleep at Night? is targeted at young teenagers hearing certain sounds and experiencing certain emotions for the first time. Yet his feelings are so timid: never that sad, or that mad. In moments when the emotions could possibly get more difficult he censors them, prioritizing his image. “Impossible,” produced by Justin Raisen and SADPONY (who also contributed to Yachty’s album), is a guitar-driven believe-in-yourself anthem where Teezo lays out uplifting anecdotes: What if Basquiat didn’t paint because his parents said not to, or if Ali stopped boxing because he lost? On “Familiarity,” he croons about ignoring parental doubts to chase a dream. Why is he describing life like a Disney sports movie? It’s all so simplified, not only selling short teeangers’ ability to handle more complex emotions (hello, Olivia Rodrigo) but making Teezo look like a generic corporate vessel, genre-hopping to distract from the hollowness.


The restless singer-songwriter’s wanderlust leads him to find poetic beauty in the country’s ugly truths, even as he confronts the idea that there’s more at stake than ever.

Anthropocene

Peter Oren aces first impressions. On each of the two albums he has released during the past two years, the young singer-songwriter with a voice like polished oak and an obsession with life on the road has started off with some stunning traveler’s snapshot, a poignant clipping cut from his weathered scrapbook.
In 2016, for the promising debut Living by the Light, Oren detailed a one-night stand spent beneath the stars of the mystic Olympic Peninsula, where the mountains melt into the sea. He met a fellow traveler on the shore, fell hard and fast, then moved alone down Highway 101. Likewise, the sometimes-staggering Anthropocene, Oren’s first for the esteemed Western Vinyl, begins with a temporary break in motion. He’s fighting for a summer night’s sleep in the back of a pickup truck at a rest stop in middle America, when he gives up and hits the road well before dawn. By headlight, he ponders declarative religious billboards and hyperbolic late-night radio, his eyes fatigued from white-line fever until roadside crosses become “blades unsheathed/And stabbed into a back.” “Burden of Proof” is a masterful moment, a “Turn the Page” reprise fueled by absolute existential despair.
Though born in Indiana, Oren seems to have spent much of his adult life in a state of self-selecting exile, writing songs that reflect time spent beneath bridges or deep in the woods, apart from society even when not away from it. Like kindred spirit Julie Byrne, Oren uses his travels as a way to understand his own place in the world. For a songwriter who marvels at the sights of his country while fretting about its fate, then, “Burden of Proof” is a perfect opening gambit, finding poetically rendered beauty in ugly truth. Also like Byrne, Oren’s voice is so compelling that you can lose track of what he’s saying. Dignified and proud like later Bill Callahan, but with the rough Midwestern edge of Justin Vernon during his folk-rock salad days, Oren’s voice is a miracle of mixed feelings—brooding but sensitive, tired but resolute, exasperated but energized.
That voice is deservedly the musical centerpiece of Anthropocene, a record that, like its predecessor, is given flesh by a wide cast of accomplished collaborators, such as Wilco drummer and tasteful producer Ken Coomer and flashy Sturgill Simpson guitarist Laur Joamets. They muster moaning cosmic country during “Canary in a Mine,” a subtle send-up of industrial labor, and crackling country rock during the softly sneering “Chain of Command.” It’s a backdrop that’s more functional than imaginative, an open canvas simply suited to Oren’s voice.
Though Living by the Light brimmed with the poignant details and keen analysis of an opinionated storyteller, Oren seemed judgmental and even snide during its most jejune moments. He lampooned the flag-flying Tea Partier, the business class, and those who have chosen subdivision safety—soft targets for an obviously sharp mind, who seemed to be roaming the country to confirm his opinions more than test them. On Anthropocene, however, Oren has started to ask harder questions of himself and his own relationship to a society that, in his estimation, is teetering on collapse.
The title track presents a mission statement of sorts, as Oren wonders what exactly he’s supposed to do as the world falls apart. He mentions the possibilities of revolutionary action and idyllic escape but lands on a less self-serving question: “Where do I need to be?” The clenched-jaw “Throw Down” is a call to arms for a budding revolutionary, a plea to “make your grandkids proud” by getting off the sidelines and into the fray of what will become history, to wield “Maalox and Molotovs” as needed. It seems he’s trying to convince himself, too—to remind himself that there’s more at stake these days than the wanderlust of nights spent beneath the stars. “How long will we wait for change?/How long will we wait in vain?” he repeats over a growling electric guitar, the exasperation in his voice suggesting he has no answer.
For nine songs, Oren examines the idea of end times from multiple angles. For him, the anguish of a failed relationship (“River and Stone”) is part and parcel with environmental ruin (“New Gardens”) and imperial conquests (“Falling Water”). They all stem from human fallibility, from our collective need to own something else. For the finale, however, he throws up his hands and confesses that all his pondering and poetry and deep singing is too little, too late. “So welcome to this record/And goodbye to this world” he croons, mournful strings slipping like a noose around his notes. “May a new one soon unfurl.” It is a moment of abject sadness, but there’s a glimmer of hope implicit in the pessimism: If we’re all fucked anyway, you just do the best you can, whether that’s inciting a revolution or merely making a record that wishes for one.


Conceptually, Max Richter's *The Blue Notebooks*\-- German-born composer mixes contemporary classical compositions with electronic elements in a dreamscapy journalogue featuring excerpts from Kafka's *The Blue Octavo Notebooks* as narrated by Tilda Swinton-- reads like a relentlessly precious endeavor, as new age music for grad students, the sort of record that sagely pats you on the back for being smart enough to seek it out. And yet in practice, despite the fact that it is exactly as outlined above, Kafka quotes and all, there is absolutely nothing exclusive or contrived-feeling about it. In fact, not only is Richter's second album one

The Blue Notebooks

Conceptually, Max Richter's The Blue Notebooks-- German-born composer mixes contemporary classical compositions with electronic elements in a dreamscapy journalogue featuring excerpts from Kafka's The Blue Octavo Notebooks as narrated by Tilda Swinton-- reads like a relentlessly precious endeavor, as new age music for grad students, the sort of record that sagely pats you on the back for being smart enough to seek it out. And yet in practice, despite the fact that it is exactly as outlined above, Kafka quotes and all, there is absolutely nothing exclusive or contrived-feeling about it. In fact, not only is Richter's second album one of the finest of the last six months, it is also one of the most affecting and universal contemporary classical records in recent memory.
But how to describe music that relies so completely on seeming familiar? Richter may fancy himself in a class with Philip Glass, Brian Eno and Steve Reich (indeed, his hyperattenuated sense of minimalism owes to all three), but unlike his influences, he's not remotely interested in subverting the traditional rules of composition. Short of one very beautiful moment that plunges an electronic sublow bassline into a deep sea of harpsichords and violas (see: the literally perfect "Shadow Journal"), there is nothing here to suggest that Richter is concerned with anything other than melody and economy. It's a formula he singlemindedly exploits with staggering effectiveness for the balance of the album's 40+ minutes.
Constituted mainly of sparse pieces that lean on string quartets and pianos in equal measure, The Blue Notebooks is a case study in direct, minor-key melody. Each of the piano pieces "Horizon Variations", "Vladimir's Blues" and "Written in the Sky" establish strong melodic motifs in under two minutes, all the while resisting additional orchestration. Elsewhere, Richter's string suites are similarly striking; "On the Nature of Daylight" coaxes a stunning rise out of gently provincial arrangements while the comparatively epic penultimate track "The Trees" boasts an extended introductory sequence for what is probably the album's closest brush with grandiosity. Richter's slightly less traditional pieces also resound; both the underwater choral hymnal "Iconography" and the stately organ piece "Organum" echo the spiritual ambience that characterized his work for Future Sound of London.
If, however, there is one piece that fires The Blue Notebooks off into the stratosphere, it's the aforementioned "Shadow Journal". Featuring a lone viola, some burbling electronics, a harpsichord and a subterranean bassline, it establishes a simple, keening melody and then gently pulls it wide, like warm string taffy, across its eight minutes. The fourth track on the record, it is nonetheless its centerpiece, and on a larger scale, possibly a gigantic beacon for composers searching for useful ways to introduce dance music's visceral, body-jarring qualities into the classical sphere.
But make no mistake, this is not Richter's electronic/classical crossover, nor it is really his concept record. In fact, with songs that similarly forgo the temptations of complexity and choice so as to preserve their core ideas, it's perhaps better thought of as his four-track demo, his lo-fi recording jaunt. It's Max Richter testing himself to see what he can produce under restraint. Turns out it's more than he might have otherwise.


Blending technical metal and hardcore, the ambitious DEP try to avoid being pulled in too many stylistic directions.

The Dillinger Escape Plan: Option Paralysis

Option Paralysis

Technical metal and hardcore scratch very different itches, despite sharing many of the same root-level obsessions (speed, aggression, you know the drill). One's fixated on a maniacal instrumental proficiency; the other strips rock down to a core of primitive blare. Dillinger Escape Plan's 1999 debut, Calculating Infinity, was a game-changing (and copycat-spawning) album because DEP excelled at both halves of the equation. Not the easiest thing to manage. DEP spun arrangements to shame metal's biggest control freaks, but executed them with a raw energy that suggested the whole thing might splutter into instrument-flinging chaos at any second.
So it goes on the typically overwhelming (in many senses) Option Paralysis, but as with the band's previous two albums, the new one's not entirely successful. Unlike the frighteningly focused Infinity, DEP's 21st century records pull in too many stylistic directions, sometimes to the detriment of what the band does best. Infinity was unrepeatable. Radical lineup shifts-- and the restlessness common to genre-mixers-- meant a change in direction was inevitable. 2004's Miss Machine and 2007's Ire Works offered an ever-broadening sound that kinda-sorta skirted crossover-friendliness, a sometimes awkward mash of traditional, melodic rock and hideous shrieking and bashing. Option Paralysis continues in that vein for better or worse.
When DEP stick to the sound they perfected on Infinity, they're the only mathcore band left standing that still matters, and there are plenty of blinding moments on Option Paralysis. For instance the way "Good Neighbor" shifts unexpectedly and almost imperceptibly mid-song, from jagged spasms of ultra-tricky death metal drumming to thundering, straight-ahead, old-school hardcore. You're left fumbling to figure out how the hell the band pulled it off and too jacked-up on adrenaline to really care. That's the draw of DEP at their best. They certainly provide enough brain-scrambling fodder for the count-the-time-changes crowd. In two and a half minutes, "Endless Endings" cuts from power metal histrionics to funk-metal groove to grindcore splatter with a fluidity that sounds like DEP's playing with samples rather than playing in real time.
But sudden eruptions of emotive crooning feel out of place. The icky mix of cocktail piano and emo melodrama on "Widower" is a major offender. It's not just that the inevitable math-y freakout derails the song's sense of momentum. It's also that DEP's notion of what constitutes "pop" is so damn corny. Forget Faith No More, the most frequent point of comparison. Without Mike Patton's sense of the absurd to undercut the pomp, this shit sounds like Foreigner with an affinity for blast beats. DEP don't need to worry about "softening up" or (gack) "selling out." They need to worry about the fact that 3/4ths of Option Paralysis is astounding and 1/4th is plain cringeworthy. They might be better off sticking to the devil they know, rather than trying to become the first tech-math-metal-core-whatever band to land on Now That's What I Call Music.


The Memphis rap duo reunites for an impressive sequel that’s as natural and effortless as an old friendship.

Young Dolph / Key Glock: Dum and Dummer 2

Dum and Dummer 2

Like any writing partnership or wrestling tag-team, rap duos are tacit strategic agreements as much as they are a genuine collaboration. An 8Ball & MJG or Method Man & Redman is once-in-a-generation; it can be hard not to focus exclusively on yourself in an industry that’s so often driven and defined by individualist hustle. When Young Dolph and Key Glock united for 2019’s Dum and Dummer—more of a rigorous sparring match than the goofball antics its titular nod to Harry & Lloyd might indicate—it could have just been a one-off affair, a notch in the belt of a trap veteran and a boost to the resumé of an upstart, but its sequel, Dum and Dummer 2, solidifies the Memphis rappers as one of the most in-sync alliances in the genre today.
Young Dolph cut his teeth during the peak of DatPiff and LiveMixtapes, DJ Holliday and Trap-A-Holics, when physical street mixtapes were still a somewhat substantial economy for Southern rappers—an affiliate of the 1017 universe, Dolph owed more to Gucci Mane than Three 6 Mafia or other mainstream Memphis artists. His persona is both dealer and consumer, a single-minded distributor of product and mover of weight who is also an unapologetic stoner, minus the drug-rug, bongwater-soaked corniness of a Wiz Khalifa. Dolph is slick, sarcastic, and charismatic, a consummate professional who could blow dense clouds but still keep a clear head, like Gordon Gekko if he got down with grass. Over time, he’s developed not just as a business executive but as a frequently heartfelt songwriter and social commentator, like on 2018’s “Black Queen,” a piano ballad about his mother.
On “Somethin’ Else,” Dolph compares his reign in Memphis to the rule of the controversial revolutionary and political theorist Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Most famously the inspiration for the moniker of New York MC Tragedy Khadafi, he’s even something of a thought leader—when XXXTentacion died, Waka Flocka Flame posted a screenshot of their final text exchanges, which included Waka texting X a PDF of Qaddafi’s Mao-inspired The Green Book. Like so many revolutionaries of the Global South, Qaddafi was despised in the West and eventually deposed because he fought to build a nation that could support itself instead of being subject to an empire. It may seem a stretch, but the comparison isn’t entirely unearned; while pretty much every other rapper of Dolph’s stature and weight class is a vassal of the major label machine, the self-crowned King of Memphis runs his own Paper Route Empire on independent terms.
Dolph was shouldered with the responsibility of providing for his younger siblings as a teenager, his singular dedication to the game driven by the knowledge that others depended on him. That sense of family shows in Dolph’s relationship with Glock, who’s just a little over a decade his junior—the hook of “RAIN RAIN” feels like the now not-quite-young Dolph bestowing his wisdom. Their collaboration could have just been Dolph taking the new generation under his wing, but Glock isn’t just shadowing big brother at work. The duo has equal ownership in their company; both tapes are evenly distributed between duets and solo tracks. Dolph has more of a boisterous cartoonishness to his voice while Glock’s has a dry-ice edge, but the two effortlessly weave in and out of each other’s flows on tracks like “Buddy Love,” riffing and finishing each other’s sentences.
“Aspen” is a euphoric paean to bag-getting, with twinkling keys and organ swells accompanying Dolph’s reminisces of a luxurious vacation in the land of legalization. His ad-libs are boastful and hilarious but also informative—he gleefully shouts out “Aspen (Colorado)” and “Aston (Martin),” just in case you weren’t sure. Dolph has worked for the right to relax, but Key Glock is still knives-out and carving out a reputation, pledging allegiance to a cut-throat life on “In GLOCK we trust”: “Even way before Corona, we been masked up.” Glock and Dolph repeat the last word of lines on “Penguins” with a razor-sharp exactness, mimicking the driving drums that undergird the beats.
The production, largely handled by Paper Route Empire righthand man Bandplay, is tastefully decadent. Ethereal and angelic voices wait in the wings of “What u see is what u get,” and laser blasts appropriately attack the beat of the video game-themed “Cheat Code.” Bandplay’s beats are always sturdy, driven by slabs of bass and menacing piano loops, but he’s stylistically adept even if the foundations are often built from shared elements.
While the first Dum and Dummer drew from the Farrelly Brothers, this album’s cover looks to the brain-dead law-breaking of Beavis and Butt-Head as inspiration. Dolph & Glock fashion themselves in the image of pop culture dunces even if at the same time they’re poised, extravagant, and immaculate—there’s a casualness to their rapport and respective flows that never announces itself too much. For all their boasts and success, they’re still stoners stuck in the couch cushions, puff-puff-passing bars back and forth as easily as they share the blunt. Neither rapper bogarts their moment; Dolph is confident enough in his reign that he’s comfortable ceding some of his territory to a padawan, and Glock is secure enough in his own skillset to go toe-to-toe with someone whose music he likely grew up on. Smokers might be known for overstaying their welcome, but even at 20 tracks, you feel like you could hang out with Dolph and Glock even longer; Dum & Dummer 2 is as effortless as an old friendship.

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Instead of nerding out or having any kind of fun, a host of pop stars turn in a dour, stone-faced compilation inspired by the ubiquitous fantasy saga.

Various Artists: For the Throne (Music Inspired by the HBO Series Game of Thrones)

“Game of Thrones” has a way of turning everyday citizens into dragon-repping dweebs who, for instance, wouldn’t think twice about dropping serious coin in order to shout “bum-bum ba-da bum-bum” in a basketball arena while an orchestra plays the TV show’s theme song. Untold thousands did just that across the last few years, as part of the continent-spanning “Game of Thrones” Live Concert Experience tour (tagline: “MUSIC IS COMING”). Even rappers, indie rockers, and pop stars who hinge their careers on being cooly above-it-all aren’t immune. Since the fantasy saga first aired in 2011, everyone from the National to Big Boi to Ed Sheeran has pledged their fealty in some form or another.
With For the Throne—which includes 14 songs inspired by “Game of Thrones,” none featured in the actual show—a host of additional musicians from across the pop spectrum add their names to that list. But instead of using this synergistic platform to have a little fun with the bloodiest, horniest, soapiest epic of our time, For the Throne is annoyingly dour and stone-faced. If this album were a character on “Game of Thrones,” it would be unceremoniously stabbed to death within five minutes.
For the Throne was steered in large part by Grammy-nominated hitmaker Ricky Reed, who served as an executive producer and helped write and record more than half of the album. Known for his work with acts like Maroon 5, Meghan Trainor, and Phantogram, Reed has proven himself in the music industry by churning out the sort of bright, soul-adjacent pop that so often serves as ambient capitalist lube. He’s an odd fit for a project based on “Game of Thrones,” a show defined by existential dread, gallows humor, and the canny subversion of mythic tropes. But he’s also musically amenable to his surroundings. So most of For the Throne ends up in a greyscale dead zone, sounding like a simulacra of moodiness to be algorithmically filtered in with all the other sad pop currently weighing down charts and playlists.
This means country-pop star Maren Morris and dance-pop star Ellie Goulding are miscast as brooders wallowing about sold souls and hollow crowns. (For a more believably ominous recent hit about the spectre of absolute queendom, try Billie Eilish’s “you should see me in a crown.”) Reed has marginally better luck when he works in some slick soul touches on sync-core faves X Ambassadors’ “Baptize Me,” which also highlights guest vocalist Jacob Banks’ deep rasp, and “X Factor” winner James Arthur’s barn-stomp ballad “From the Grave,” though both would likely make more sense in a reboot of Disney’s Sword in the Stone than the incest-laden, quasi-medieval apocalypse allegory at hand. “From the Grave” is a long-distance love song seemingly sung from the perspective of Jon Snow, the reluctant hero who was once magically resurrected. But it’s actually more fun to think of lines like “Bury me and lock me in/I’ll find a way to rise again” as something growled out by a skeletal wight, the evil zombies of the “Thrones” universe. Undead flesh eaters have feelings too, right?
In an interview with Billboard, Reed mentioned that he purposefully didn’t include too many obvious references to “Thrones” on the album. “These artists are all cool and they don’t want to say corny shit,” he said. “They want to make songs that stand on their own.” One problem: Pretty much all of these songs do not stand on their own. Also, the whole idea of an album inspired by “Game of Thrones” is inherently goofy—so why not really own it by showing off your Westerosian bona fides?! On this front, credit is due to Joey Bada$$, who lets his nerd flag fly on the A$AP Rocky collaboration “Too Many Gods” with footnote-friendly bars including, “Playing with fire but I’m no Targaryen,” and, “Bit the flow harder than Valyrian Steel.” (The lines could have found a place in Coldplay’s “Game of Thrones: The Musical” send-up from 2015, which is entirely more enjoyable than this album.) The Weeknd tries to trace Jon Snow’s plight in a limp, fake-Yeezus-style track with SZA and Travis Scott, “Power Is Power,” but his verse ultimately comes off more like just another huffy ode to the singer’s own pop star persecution complex. Elsewhere, the songs on For the Throne are so vague that you have to wonder if certain artists have ever even sat through one full episode of the show.
There are moments when the music here comes close to matching the shadowy “Game of Thrones” mood millions have fallen for. “Me Traicionaste,” by the strikingly original Spanish singer Rosalía, offers a dark, piercing sensuality. The song could feasibly soundtrack a murderous betrayal in a Dornish brothel, though its spell is ruined by a pointless, 18-second verse from Peruvian singer A.Chal, who barges in with: “I take my time when I see her coming/I poke her face, but it’s no cards.” The late emo-rap icon Lil Peep, who was apparently a big “Thrones” fan, delivers a deranged hook that lives up to the show’s unflinching violence. “Stick that needle in my eye, just lost my peace of mind,” he bleats, sounding like one of teenage assassin Arya Stark’s pitiful victims. But these moments are rare, and they only serve to highlight what this strange artifact of monoculture runoff could have been.


Often in doom, the impulse can be to turn up and drown out, treating the song mostly as a reason for amplifier massages. On their third album, the fascinating Salt Lake City band SubRosa—two violins, three vocalists, bass, drums, and guitar—are more meticulous than that, treating each number like its own opera.

More Constant Than the Gods

“Fat of the Ram”—the pugnacious and swirling fourth track on the new album from fascinating Salt Lake City doom metal band SubRosa—is a folk song. Never mind the weighty guitars that hang like thick shadows or the forceful drums that punch through them. Forget the enraged voices that bellow the lyrics and the slide guitar line that closes tight like a noose, too. Instead, listen to what Rebecca Vernon has to sing: She sets a scene of accepted and quiet suffering, where lakes go septic and unhappiness gets swept under the rug. Dreams are dreamt only in the privacy of homes and otherwise suppressed. The rich lords expect to be left alone, to be given time to “anoint themselves in their finest.” Vernon ends with a glimpse of possible redemption, a Plato’s Cave moment where the narrator intuits life outside of the town’s shadowy desolation. This is the lament of a layperson holding onto the distant promise of hope, a tune not unlike one that Harry Smith might’ve collected.
This isn’t surprising for SubRosa. On 2011’s No Help for the Mighty Ones, the band covered the morose, damned-to-hell Scottish ballad “The House Carpenter”, a song Vernon admits she first heard through Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. But that was just an eerie a cappella interpretation. “Fat of the Ram”, like the rest of More Constant than the Gods, is an exceptionally articulated full-band assault, arranged to give each song and story beneath it maximum impact. Often in doom, the impulse can be to turn up and drown out, treating the song mostly as a reason for amplifier massages. (To wit, see the recent Windhand LP, Soma.) This quintet—two violins, three vocalists, bass, drums and Vernon’s wonderful guitar—are much more meticulous than that, treating each number like its own opera rather than an excuse for an onslaught. Combined with Vernon’s uncommonly keen ear for hooks (however dark-hearted they may be) and the band’s grand sense of dynamics, that approach keeps More Constant than the Gods moving throughout its 68 minutes. It’s too active and involving to become a slog or a bore. Instead, it’s one of the year’s most exhilarating heavy metal records.
The members of SubRosa seem to understand these songs and what Vernon is trying to communicate with them, as if she workshopped the lyrics in front of them. The playing is never too deep or too wide, always moving in service of her meaning. The irritation and insurrection written into “Fat of the Ram”, for instance, shows up in the music, with its start-and-stop lashes of sound directed at the blindly content townsfolk and their scheming leaders. “Everywhere I look/ all I see is famine,” Vernon sings at one point, her voice suddenly downshifting into droll scorn. The music slows into a formless blur behind her, underlining the desperation in her observation. It’s Leadbelly kicked forward several decades. Likewise, “The Usher” opens with a duet above a twinkling bed of noise, Vernon trading lines with the gentle-voiced Jason McFarland as a violin etches curlicues against the din. The band finally lunges forward in unison, affixing their heaviness to a surprisingly forward tempo. This is a love song to the dark and to mortality, so SubRosa afford it a sinister romanticism. Bright violin leads peeking out through the down-tuned glumness, and the feeling is terrifying but warm.
The spirit doesn’t dovetail with the song only in these epics. Each of Constant’s six tracks either ignores or approaches the 10-minute mark, except for the seven-minute “Cosey Mo”, practically making it a radio single. SubRosa lend the tale of immortal grievances and obsessions appropriate drama. The strings are essential here. In the chorus, the violins of Sarah Pendleton and Kim Pack surge behind the guitars and vocals, helping to brand the refrain into memory. During a slinking little midsection, they trace pizzicato patterns around the gathering storm of Vernon’s voice. Finally, as the coda crests, they mirror and then fight against Vernon’s riff, reflecting the unresolved tension of the song’s quest to avenge or at least vindicate a death. Though “Cosey Mo” is the record’s shortest and most immediate song, it’s not the only one capable of planting a hook. “Affliction” turns its imprecation into an indelible if understated chorus. “Ghosts of a Dead Empire”, a send-up of missions for purity and perfection, doesn’t necessarily have a refrain, but its conclusion is memorable and haunting. Vernon’s tune moves evenly with the blown-out riff, matched by harmonies and the emphatic wallop of the rhythm section. It’s a moment of post-metal triumph, with splendor and volume spiraling into one radiant climax.
SubRosa’s first two albums were strong testaments from a doom band with an interesting lineup and manifest interests outside of metal. On More Constant than the Gods, they’ve not only managed to synthesize those enthusiasms but to do so while this strange tangle of musicians works together—unselfishly and with complete subservience to the bigger picture of song, statement, and album. There’s folk storytelling and alt-rock worthy choruses, doom intensity and classical grandeur. It’s hard not to be caught up in the incredible power of SubRosa’s sounds and the wide-screen permanence of their songs.


Though they are on the garage-rock-leaning Siltbreeze imprint, Blues Control opt for a more expansive blend of instrumental, machine-tinged psychedelic rock.

Local Flavor

One of the many scuzzy-sounding bands toiling in and around New York City at the moment, Blues Control is the Queens-based duo of Russ Waterhouse and Lea Cho. Unlike most of their peers operating in some form of lo-fi punk, Blues Control have their sights on a more expansive sound, a kind of homespun blend of instrumental, machine-tinged psychedelic rock. Though stylistically dissimilar, they do share these acts' affinity for stripped-down, hissy sonics, making the band a sensible fit at boutique noise-pop imprint Siltbreeze. Local Flavor, their second full-length and first for the label, is an ambitious offering, a half-hour ride through murky textures built from electronics and traditional instrumentation.
Blues Control are not a pop band (far from it, in fact), and they don't seem especially concerned about hooks or melody. While the four songs on Local Flavor-- which strung together, comprise one gradually expanding instrumental piece-- may not find much of an audience outside of committed fans of noise and drone, the album's grainy assemblage of submerged mood music could represent a welcome addition to the latter's record collection.
Local Flavor's tracks are built simply, usually on a foundation of Cho's keyboards or a modest drum-machine pitter-patter, on top of which Waterhouse embellishes with expressive guitar playing and additional electronics. With trumpet assistance from recent It Guy Kurt Vile, opener "Good Morning" is the most straightforward track, a lo-fi reimagining of the sludgy psych-rock perfected by Californians Comets on Fire, but it's the slower, dub-tinged pieces here that work best. The album's two best cuts are its last-- the gurgling "Tangier" and extended outro "On Through the Night"-- and on these Cho and Waterhouse home in on a dark, disquieting tone. Here, the music sounds like it's bubbling up from and evil underground, a burial place that holds the secrets of past atrocities.
Though they succeed in sketching these gloomy portraits, there's a detachment about these songs that feels at odds with their other aim, which is creating a feeling of druggy ambience. The best ambient music envelops its listener, and Local Flavor ultimately lacks that sense of inhabitability. (I will say that I find this true of most guitar acts attempting a similar style; this music is difficult to build organically-- part of the reason so many of the finest ambient records are electronic.) It does seem Blues Control might benefit from grander sonics, since it's even harder to make something truly hum out of basic instrumentation. Still, in a scene with too much overlap, one has to commend the band for working far outside the status quo, even if Local Flavor feels like an album that a few will love and a larger majority will find head-scratchingly opaque.


On Horse Feathers’ sixth album, their introverted persona has thawed, revealing a surprising affinity for the joy of Stax-era and country-fried soul.

Appreciation

Slowly, glacially, Horse Feathers’ music has turned outward. What began as Oregon songwriter Justin Ringle and violinist Peter Broderick’s hermetic take on Appalachian folk eventually blossomed out with the addition of a larger string ensemble. It became the quintessential sound of the band. Yet even when the group lightened the mood with electric guitars and lively percussion on 2014’s So It Is With Us, it was hard to shake the feeling that they were still singing primarily to themselves. But on Appreciation, Horse Feathers’ sixth full-length, that introverted persona has thawed, revealing a surprising affinity for the joy of both Stax-era soul and the country-fried sound of Doug Sahm and the Flying Burrito Brothers. While the looser grooves can deflate the tension, they also frame Ringle’s world-weariness in terms that are directed, finally, at us.
Horse Feathers’ transition to a full band is by no means novel among the folk revivalists who got their start in the aughts; Steve Gunn, Vetiver, and Devendra Banhart have followed similar trajectories. Yet unlike those artists, Horse Feathers have undergone a grand re-shuffling as well as an expansion. While the strings sometimes flutter a bit listlessly, they generally compliment J. Tom Hnatow’s basslines and Robby Cosenza’s spritely percussion. On single “Don't Mean to Pry,” violins arc overhead, reinforcing Cosenza’s lithe patterns. Later, standout track “Faultline Wall” utilizes glissandos with similar economy, accentuating the song’s underlying menace.
What’s most intriguing about Appreciation is just how well the fulsome songs suit Ringle’s voice. The jauntier the tune, the more he embraces a more sensual approach to his singing: We get flashes of John Fogerty, Sturgill Simpson’s rebel yell and, nestled in the melodies of “Born in Love,” a fully unexpected oooh that would make Josh Tillman proud. For the first time, he sounds like he’s actually having fun.
That doesn’t mean that he has abandoned his trademark cynicism. The strongest songs on Appreciation expand on the Springsteen-style populism that has long lurked in Ringle’s music. Songs here ring out with accounts of economic disenfranchisement and helplessness: “It’s not the drinking, but the worry that does you in,” he sings in the opening track, “Without Applause.” “Faultline Wall” delivers a bleak tale of the environmental and occupational hazards of mining and “Evictions” sums up the nightmare of West Coast gentrification, yet does so over a smoky waltz that leaves us unsure what mood Ringle is shooting for. Though the extroverted mood throughout Appreciation can feel a bit unsteady, closing track “On the Rise” drops the drums in favor of a string-centric arrangement that is, once again, quintessential Horse Feathers. But Justin Ringle delivers its optimistic titular lyric with newfound assertiveness; as a result, although deeply personal, it could just as easily allude to the unexpected success his band has found by finally embracing their own accessibility.


The Baton Rouge-based rapper Boosie returns from a jail sentence he began in 2010 with a new deal with Atlantic and his sixth studio album. Touch Down 2 Cause Hell is unremittingly intense, proving Boosie isn't content to rest on his reputation as a modern-day southern rap legend.

Touch Down 2 Cause Hell

Torrence "Boosie Badazz" Hatch is a Southern rap legend. Everyone seeking to understand the current rap landscape should know this. After his cousin Young Bleed (yup, the "How Ya Do Dat" Young Bleed of No Limit Records fame) helped him sign with the late Pimp C's Trill Entertainment in 2001, Boosie released a series of mixtapes and albums that set his career on fire. Through the combination of his unique voice (imagine a frog on helium getting bear-hugged by a bodybuilder), his gargantuan output, his so-raw-it's-kinda-uncomfortable level of honesty, and his never-ending traditional chitlin' circuit tour of small town clubs and hood spots, he amassed the (some would say blasphemous) moniker of the "Tupac of the South." His legacy is heard in everyone from Meek Mill to Starlito to fellow Baton Rouge resident Kevin Gates, despite being only 32 years of age. This is the man who helped popularize the term "ratchet", for God's sake. (Seahawks fans, take note: He's also responsible for making "Beast Mode" a thing, a fact that Marshawn Lynch readily admits.)
Boosie went to jail in 2010 facing first-degree murder and conspiracy charges, and after a brief fear that he might be sentenced to death, he finished up his sentence early last year. He returned to a new world, where mundane things like iPhone tech seemed foreign and new. After his Life After Deathrow mixtape in October, he's back with his sixth studio album, a new deal with Atlantic Records, and a renewed vigor.
A rapper with that pedigree could have phoned in this record, content to rest on his reputation. Instead, Touch Down 2 Cause Hell is unremittingly intense from the cover image to the sharpened guest appearances. The established stars who appear on this record—T.I., Jeezy, and Rick Ross—manage to sound better than they have in years ("Spoil You", "Mercy on My Soul" and "Drop Top Music", respectively), all flawlessly executing that whole effortlessly charismatic "I'm happy, sex is pretty nice, and money is great" thing that they do. Boosie also scores appearances from younger voices like J. Cole, Young Thug, and Rich Homie Quan (aka The Artists Formerly Known as Rich Gang) who all appear, with middling results. Not surprisingly, longtime collaborator and former Trill Ent. labelmate Webbie appears, and listeners new to Boosie can get a taste of their raunchy chemistry, which powered projects like 2003's classic album Ghetto Stories and street hits like "On That Level".
In a way, the album plays out like a classic gangster-movie script. A man serves some time, comes home, and proceeds to restore his world to the way things were before he went away. Boosie jumps in with vigor, opening the album with a brief "Minor setback for a major comeback" line before absolutely rapping his ass off on the Black Metaphor-produced "Intro - Get 'Em Boosie". After the reintroduction, he lays waste to the pretenders who have popped up while he was in jail (on "No Juice" and "Hip Hop Hooray"), laments those who are no longer here (on the Keyshia Cole-assisted "Black Heaven"), opines on love ("She Don't Love Me"), and even manages to have some fun. For the most part, though, it's all business.
The record isn't the home run Boosie probably needs. It could stand to be trimmed a bit and while the producers—a mostly solid lineup of London on Da Track, Kane Beatz, J Reid and fellow Louisianans Kenoe (Nicki's "Beez in the Trap") and Mouse on tha Track (the longtime Boosie/Webbie collaborator who made "Wipe Me Down")—all put in decent work, nothing leaps out or creates any urgency, which is troubling since the last thing Boosie—a man who managed to avoid the popular-sound ambulance chase that comes with a long-term major rap career— wants to do after so many years away is waste any time.


Almost 22 years after My Bloody Valentine's last album, Kevin Shields has completed this stunning followup. What My Bloody Valentine have done is take the precise toolkit of Loveless and made another album with it, one that is stranger and darker and even harder to pin down.

m b v

"When can we hear some new material?," someone asked Kevin Shields in an AOL chat interview published by the San Francisco zine Cool Beans!. "Definitely sometime this year or I'm dead..." he answered, later driving the point home with, "I really am dead if I don't get my record out this year. Nobody's threatening me, BTW I just have to."
That chat took place exactly 16 years ago tomorrow and Kevin Shields is still alive. And now, almost 22 years after My Bloody Valentine's last album, Loveless, we finally have that record. For those of us whose relationship to music and maybe even the act of hearing has been changed by Loveless, it's hard to believe. I'd grown comfortable with the idea that there would never be another My Bloody Valentine album. Even as recently as two months ago, I figured it would never happen. "But he said it was mastered," people said to me. The last time a master of an MBV album was completed it took four years for it to come out. And that was music that had already been released. An alleged master of a new release? Plenty of time to pull the plug. But no, it happened, by surprise, last Saturday night. And many 403 errors later, we finally have this thing on our hard drives. mbv. 2013. This Is Our Bloody Valentine.
Like a few people I know, I was initially afraid to listen, but there was no need to be. My Bloody Valentine have taken the precise toolkit of Loveless-- layered Fender Jaguar guitars made woozy through pedals and tremolo, hushed androgynous vocals way down in the mix-- and made another album with it, one that is stranger and darker and even harder to pin down. Where Loveless felt effortless, mbv strains, pushing at its boundaries with a sense of pensive gloom. If the guy spending all those years in the studio felt trapped by the experience, like the walls might be closing in and that he was dead if he didn't finish, the music here reflects it. mbv is an album of density with very little air or light. But it doesn't forgo the human touches that have made this band so special.
The nine-song mbv can be divided into thirds and the first three-song section, consisting of "She Found Now", "Only Tomorrow", and "Who Sees You", finds Shields exploring the untapped textural possibilities of the guitar. The last several years have been bad ones for the instrument. In independent music circles, the guitar has become synonymous with regression, a symbol used to evoke something from the past. And that might seem at first equally true here, since the tone of Shields' guitar is so clearly connected to the sounds he pioneered two decades ago. But no one believes more deeply than Kevin Shields in the expressive power of the processed guitar, and the music here turns out to be more about feeling than style.
"She Found Now" is an opener of daring subtlety, a ballad in the vein of "Sometimes" that consists mostly of deep strumming and Shields' singing in a tone near a whisper. There's a bit of percussion, a few more layers of distortion, but no announcement of anything earth-shattering or even particularly different. It's My Bloody Valentine making the kind of noises they invented and perfected. As the chords cycle through in the following "Only Tomorrow", Shields sets up a situation where the repetition and familiarity lulls you into a kind of trance and small gestures hit with great force. On "Only Tomorrow" that spine-tingling moment is a dead simple screeching high-end refrain that repeats toward the end, while on the following "Who Sees You", it's a section halfway through where a rush of trebly chords coats the entire song in another layer of textured fuzz. When it comes to Shields and guitars, the small details do a tremendous amount of work.
The second trio of songs feature the lead vocals of My Bloody Valentine singer/guitarist Bilinda Butcher. The push and pull of her singing next to Shields' is, along with the wavy "glide guitar" effect, My Bloody Valentine's other defining characteristic. Their voices are the essence of the the band's strangely androgynous and non-specific sensuality. "Is This and Yes" is just Butcher's voice and an unusual organ pattern that hangs in space at the end of the progression and never resolves itself; "New You" is the only track on the record that sounds even remotely like a single, and it shows that Shields' melodic impulses have not left him.
In another sense, "New You" points out how much has changed since MBV last released a full-length. In 1991, they were still a pop band, the kind that made videos and appeared on magazine covers and were on a fashionable record label. As such, there was at least some pressure for them to fit in, for their music to have context in the popular music landscape. So they released singles and probably hoped they'd become hits. Even if "Soon" had, as Brian Eno stated at the time, set a "new standard," that didn't change that fact that it was in fact still pop. But those days are gone. My Bloody Valentine fit in exactly nowhere and the commercial expectations of a release like mbv are minimal. Whatever the cause, mbv is the weirdest album My Bloody Valentine have made by some margin. Some of the record's otherworldly quality is up to frequency range. There's very little on this album in the treble range but there's endless detail in the bass and mid, which makes the record feel more closed in and insular. But some of it is in the arc of the record.
Through the 1990s Kevin Shields often talked about jungle, what it meant to him, and how some of the ideas behind it were making their way into a new My Bloody Valentine album. He was not alone in this, but mixing drum'n'bass' whooshing walls of percussion with oceanic shoegaze seemed a natural pairing (it was so natural, in fact, that artists like Third Eye Foundation beat Shields to the punch). Whether or not the final three songs on mbv are related to Shields' experiments of that time, on mbv, where Shields presumably had time to make the drum parts he wanted, it's clear that he doesn't really hear percussion the way most of us do. Drums are mostly distant, often muddy, serving as an underpinning or textural contrast to the guitar instead of driving the rhythm on their own. In this sense they mirror the 8-bit snatches of sound caught by crude samplers in the 90s. But since Isn't Anything, drums have been down on the list of concerns for MBV, which is one way the final third is so surprising and ultimately powerful.
"In Another Way", another Butcher lead, begins to tilt the balance between noise and melodic beauty as the tempo increases, and by the following instrumental "Nothing Is" the mood has changed considerably. A track of heavy bass drums and pounding guitar, it feels militaristic and even a touch grim, with just faint glimmers of beauty inside the barrage. And then by the final "Wonder 2" the album has become something else. This is MBV's version of an album-closing "L.A. Blues"-like Stooges freak-out, where they stop worrying about structure and fill every inch of tape with noise. The heavy flanging evokes choppers buzzing overhead, and somehow, through it all, there are wispy voices, buried and being shoved around by the din. It's a disquieting end. Where Loveless, despite its complexity, sounded as natural as breathing, mbv sounds like the product of great effort, of meticulous work to get every sound in place. And that exertion is especially apparent in the final third, as Shields tries and ultimately succeeds in taking the project somewhere it's never gone. All this work gives mbv its own quality, simultaneously intimate and detached.
Like its predecessor, mbv feels like an album in part about love, but it approaches the grandest of human emotions from an unusual angle. Kurt Cobain, another iconic songwriter of the 1990s who never got a chance to grow old and figure out how to maintain his creativity in the wake of game-changing masterpieces, had a song called "Aneurysm" and it had a refrain that went, "Love you so much, makes me sick." That's how My Bloody Valentine's deeply destabilizing queasiness, amplified here to a frightening degree, has always struck me: There's a rush of feeling inside their music so intense it creates a kind of paralysis. Music swirls and moves in and out of phase, voices float by, half memory and half anticipation, and you're never quite sure how all the parts fit together. You get lost in it, and if you're wired a certain way that mixture of desire and confusion is easy to map on to the wider world. For 22 years, the only way to get there was through Loveless and its associated EPs; now there's another path, one many of us never expected to find. That it's this successful in spite of it all is something we never had a right to expect.


The restless R&B auteur offers one of her most captivating statements, a deeply spiritual collection produced by Madlib.

Seeds

If you're given the task of trying to parse all the guises, collaborations, phases, and detours of Georgia Anne Muldrow's relatively young, relentless career as a singer and composer, well, good luck. This is an artist whose spirit of independence has scattered her presence over as many contexts as her psychedelic, jazz-inflected neo-soul sensibility can carry her-- an R&B auteur with a 24/7 omnipresence. You might've heard her on a Stones Throw compilation, or building the lush melodic backbone of Mos Def's The Ecstatic track "Roses", or forming a mutual-muse partnership with the off-kilter but sincere g-funk crooner Dudley Perkins, or sweetening up albums by Oddisee or Shawn Lee or Oh No. If you're lucky, you've pulled up a couple of her albums, weathering occasional bouts of formative inconsistency to savor the Nina Simone-indebted gems off releases like Kings Ballad or Owed to Mama Rickie. Defining her solely through any individual one of those works is clearly incomplete, but taking in the big picture of her output reveals more about her restless creative evolution than any easy synopsis.
Seeds is another left-field deviation in Muldrow's career: it's one of her most captivating and immediate front-to-back statements of purpose as a singer, but it's also the first album where she's handed over all the production duties to somebody else. That this somebody else is Madlib is a good hook, and his most prominent R&B production job prior to this one-- two excellent songs on Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War-- makes for an optimistic precedent. It's one he fills with a relatively understated smoothness, rolling out his more classic-soul-influenced side to subtle effect. This isn't the Madlib of Firesign Theatre clips, damaged-filmstrip horns, and resin-caked surface hiss; it's the one that put the buttery Stacy Epps feature "Eye" on Madvillainy and rode the bliss of Roy Ayers' slow jam "DC City" on Quasimoto's "Seasons Change". The beats on Seeds are characteristically weathered, peppered with abrupt truncated loops and instilled with a familiar sense of hard-wrought excavation. But they still come at you head-on with no tricks or punchlines, whether they lift cues from stretched-taut funk ("Kali Yuga") or sleek vintage drum machine R&B ("Best Love"). They help make the album click, but they don't take over the spotlight.
That gives Muldrow a comfortable space to do what makes her so compelling: grab a simple phrase, mull it over, turn it into a mantra-like refrain, and bend it from every melodic angle she can find. Seeds has a wide theme of existential reflection-- hoping for a better environment for our children (the environmentally conscious title track), wondering how our legacies will be remembered ("Wind"), and finding a sense of communal identity and pride through the birth of a child ("The Birth of Petey Wheatstraw"). It's deeply spiritual, not in some superficial hippy-dip way, but in the sense of someone working through profound ideas of worry and praise. She's an evocative wordsmith when she wants to be, like when she's referring to the state of hesitant apprehension as "kneecap jelly" in the resilient self-sufficiency anthem of the same name. But taking a simple observation or a plain truth and breathing her own life into it makes her lyrics a solid means to a stronger end, simple sayings ("you and me, we can make a difference if we try"; "original man divine") given a third (and fourth) dimension through her voice. She lets slip a few slyly showoffy vocal tricks, like the simultaneously full-throated and quiet interjections of a couple mid-chorus cathartic screams in "Kali Yuga", that fall somewhere between the paired thrills of "because I want to" and "because I can." And through the refined multi-tracking that boosts her signal, there's this dense, rich, self-call-and-response room-of-mirrors trickery that amplifies the recursive contemplation of her words and the open emotions behind them. If it seems like she's in love with the sound of her own voice, hey, why not? It's easy to love.


Featuring members of Blood Incantation, the avant-garde black metal band blends industrial and electronic elements into a seamless whole.

Promethean Pathology

Throughout its four decades of existence, black metal has had a tense relationship with technology. The genre’s principal obsessions have always been the world, the flesh, and the devil—a medieval ideology to match its medieval aesthetics, with little apparent interest in the trappings of modernity. A typical black metal photo shoot features a band standing deep in the forest, miles from the decadence of civilization. Even the production quality of much of the genre’s foundational work seems to suggest a suspicion of machines; in black metal doctrine, a ragged, hissing four-track recording is more richly prized than a cleanly articulated mix.
By rejecting that technophobic lineage, the digitized assault of Denver’s Lykotonon isn’t just refreshing—it’s transgressive. On their debut album, Promethean Pathology, they splice the instinctual atavism of black metal with cold industrial rhythms and pulsing electronics. There’s precedent for this blend of genres, most notably on the self-titled Thorns album from 2001. That project, led by onetime Mayhem guitarist Snorre Ruch, transformed second-wave black metal into something you might hear at 4 a.m. in a goth club. In the early ’90s, Ruch was as committed to the insular Norwegian scene as anybody, but by the new millennium he had developed an interest in electronic instrumentation and an ear for the dance floor.
Lykotonon push the sound Ruch pioneered on Thorns even further from black metal’s core, letting their industrial and electronic impulses take over entire songs. The glitchy, wobbling “Apeiron” is ostensibly an interlude, wedged between the crushing “Wrested From Solace” and “Psychosocratic,” but the sheer seismic weight it throws around in its scant two minutes helps it transcend that status. Two tracks later, “The Primal Principle” emerges from a cloud of woozy electronics to deliver a kind of industrial black metal highlight reel: robotic vocoder, skittering percussion, mechanized guitar riffing, a distorted Altered States sample, and other assorted bleeps and bloops.
Elsewhere on the album, Lykotonon let their more traditional black metal side reign. “The Apocryphal Self” is a fiery epic with towering, melodic riffs, while “That Which Stares in Kind” builds to a lightless climax of blasting drums and depraved, howling vocals. Both songs offer plenty of synths and samples, but they play a supporting role whenever flesh-and-blood terror takes center stage. Too often, bands who look outside this genre to augment their sound write black metal songs and then tack on the foreign elements like Halloween-store cobwebs. Whether they’re the main event or a cannily deployed counterpoint, the industrial and electronic components on Promethean Pathology always feel thoroughly incorporated.
The musicians in Lykotonon perform pseudonymously, but they’ve confirmed that they share members with fellow Colorado heavy hitters Wayfarer, Stormkeep, and Blood Incantation. The Blood Incantation connection makes immediate sense, especially considering their recent analog synth-based ambient release, Timewave Zero. The erstwhile death metallers are no strangers to the vast worlds of sound and texture that become available to a heavy band when they engage with the broader world of electronic music. Lykotonon have picked up the torch and used it to light a path into the digital beyond.