On their fifth album, the Detroit post-punk band recruits a woodwind section for its most expansive statement yet.

Ultimate Success Today

The first four Protomartyr albums offered a compendium of America’s collective grief: unending wars, gentrification, the opioid epidemic, white supremacy, patriarchal hegemony—all our greatest hits. The fifth, Ultimate Success Today, appears to address our current twin crises: the global pandemic and the plague of police brutality in America. Will the apocalypse be “a foreign disease washed upon the beach,” frontman Joe Casey asks on “Processed By the Boys,” in his familiar wavering croon, or “a riot in the streets?”
But the album was written more than a year before this particular boiling pot overflowed, and Casey told Aquarium Drunkard that he had ICE in mind when he wrote the song. As usual, his lyrics report from a grim reality that isn’t confined to any particular moment in history. The titular “boys” could be buzz-cut behemoths in Punisher patches, Silicon Valley billionaires, legislators whistling dixie as they withhold health care and stimulus payments, or perhaps all of the above: Casey’s dystopia is the capitalistic system we suffer under until we’re ground to a nub.
Protomartyr has mastered telling this story through a noisy, claustrophobic style of post-punk. But on the band’s latest, most ambitious-sounding release, the band gets expansive. Recorded in a cavernous former church in upstate New York and co-produced by the band and David Tolomei (Girlpool, Beach House), Protomartyr strikes a balance on Ultimate Success Today, using familiar techniques—throbbing basslines, reverb-drenched guitar, syncopated drums, Casey’s droll delivery—but wading into deeper and murkier territory. After experimenting with some sparse bass clarinet, viola, and cello on 2018’s Consolation EP at the behest of collaborator Kelley Deal, the band took a dive into the woodwind section of the orchestra for the ensuing LP.
But this isn’t Protomartyr—now with bonus free jazz!, even though there is at least one woodwind instrument on every track from jazz musicians Jemeel Moondoc (alto saxophone) and Izaak Mills (saxophone, bass clarinet, flute) and with improvisor Fred Lonberg-Holm contributing cello to more than half of the songs. Moondoc’s deft improvisations on the haunting “Tranquilizer” boost the song’s swelling chorus, and Lonberg-Holm’s cello abrades the surface alongside Greg Ahee’s Sister-era Sonic Youth guitars. Moondoc doubles the melody line on verses in “The Aphorist,” replacing what might’ve been a synthesizer on previous records with a much warmer sound. On “June 21,” Half Waif’s Nandi Rose fuses her tranquil lilt with Casey’s baritone sing-speak to peel back the facade of a serene summer scene.
Casey has made a name for himself as a lyricist, and his lyrics are, as ever, dense with historical, literary, and mythological references. His “yellow Zephyr on blocks” on “June 21” refers to the Ford car (and perhaps Detroit auto industry at large), as his narrator feels the lowness of what is supposed to be a cheerful time of year. But a zephyr—named for Zephyros, the god of the west wind in Greek mythology—is a term for a gentle spring or summer breeze used to symbolize happiness and love, however fleeting. It’s blowing through city blocks, but can’t reach him through the “windows rust shut.”
But it gets darker. On “Worm in Heaven,” the album’s closer, Mills extends a sorrowful note for 30 seconds, setting the stage for the most purely beautiful and crushingly hopeless tune in the band’s discography, one in which Casey turns his crisis inward, imagining missing a chance at grace in life and “cleaning the gilded gutters,” in death. “Remember me, how I lived. I was frightened, always frightened,” he sings, the guitar melting away and ceding to Mills, before second guessing that he ever existed at all. It’s bleak, even for a guy who once wrote a song about the Flint water crisis as inspired by an 18th-century book called The Anatomy of Melancholy. Casey, having already plumbed the depths of sorrow, still has room to go deeper as Protomartyr’s sound continues to become much richer and more rewarding.

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Coming seven years after his debut, the North Carolina EDM producer’s second album alternates between euphoric pop and muted ambient work, exploring the difficulty of finding fulfillment and lasting peace.

Nurture

Porter Robinson’s music has often treasured escapism. Whether making ecstatic dance or cinematic pop, the producer has long imagined his work as a portal to other realms, as if, through enough head-spinning drops and intricate synth programming, he could create a better world. His debut full-length album, 2014’s Worlds, was explicitly about the transportive power of fiction, the way that art can take us into an “imaginary universe.” And in the video for his Madeon collaboration “Shelter,” a father creates a bright, beautiful simulation for his daughter to live in while the real world around her crumbles and burns. It’s a sentimental idea, but a powerful one. In a lonely world, who couldn’t use an escape?
But seven years of creative blocks, self-doubt, and mental-health struggles have altered Robinson’s perspective. His second album Nurture explores the difficulty of finding fulfillment and plumbs the joyful realization that the world he wanted to create was always right in front of him. The album’s tagline underscores its aims succinctly: “Everything we need is already here.”
Robinson sings with a newfound clarity on Nurture, writing directly about his struggles and the ecstatic realizations that have come from hard times. “Look at the Sky,” the first vocal track after an ambient piano-led opener, is a ballad of hard-won optimism. Over the kaleidoscopic chirps of a handful of interlocking synth parts, he sings affirmations, looking ahead to a better future. “Look at the sky, I’m still here,” he sings with quiet confidence. “I’ll be alive next year. I can make something good.”
This disposition runs through the record. On “Musician,” Robinson mulls the difficulty of making art during tough times, flickering between despair and reassurance: “I just can't stop, I'm sorry,” he sings, then: “I can feel a new day dawning.” Nurture feels careful to mirror the twists and turns of his headspace. There’s murky, tone-setting ambient pieces (“Lifelike”), blissed-out digital shoegaze (the Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs collaboration “Unfold”), and anxious electronic collages (“dullscythe”) all interspersed between euphoric pop songs like “Get Your Wish” and “Something Comforting.” Even when a song is bright and buoyant, there’s a restlessness beneath, a sense that the feeling he’s describing might only last for a moment—that any solid comfort might just slip through your fingers.
Across the record, Robinson distorts, pitch-shifts, and otherwise mutates his vocals, which is meant to add a layer of what he calls “corruption and artificiality” to the songs. The technique introduces a note of lingering doubt into songs about beauty and hope. On the closing track “Trying to Feel Alive,” he emerges from the fog with the realization that struggle gives life its color in the first place. “Maybe I don’t really need to feel satisfied,” he sings. “Maybe it's a gift that I spend all this time just trying to feel alive.”

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a marvel of spiritual jazz, an album overflowing with transcendence, harmony, and grief.

Alice Coltrane: Journey in Satchidananda

Journey in Satchidananda

Alice Coltrane’s daughter Sita Michelle once recalled a morning when she was lying in bed before school. She awoke to the sound of a beautiful harp and thought, “If heaven is like this, then I’ll be certainly ready to welcome it when I get my chance.” The story goes that John Coltrane had ordered that harp, but died before it could arrive. Since Alice’s career as a bandleader took off in the years after John’s death, and her practice centered around this silvery new instrument, it’s tempting to see the harp as the gift that he left her to perpetuate their shared musical legacy.
But Alice was not Orpheus, and John was not Apollo. To suggest that the harp itself began her career would be to deny the intensity of her talent and do wrong by every wife whose legacy has been yoked to her husband’s. Though their influences dovetail, their oeuvres remain separate, and within the spectacular and emotional Journey in Satchidananda, the knot at the heart of Alice Coltrane’s harp story starts to unfold.
Born Alice McLeod in the Detroit summer of 1937, she was a talent from the start, playing piano and organ in her local Baptist church. Because the music she would go on to make is so cosmic, so beatific, it’s easy to mistake Alice Coltrane for somebody without rigorous musical training. But she performed classical piano at concerts around Detroit in her teens. In 1960, she moved to Paris and took up jazz under the mentorship of pianist Bud Powell. By the following year, she was performing as the intermission pianist at the Blue Note in Paris.
The first man Alice Coltrane married delivered her, in a way, to the second. She wedded jazz vocalist Kenny “Pancho” Hagood in 1960, but almost as soon as she conceived their child, their relationship deteriorated due to his heroin abuse and she returned to America. With their daughter Sita Michelle in tow, Alice arrived in Detroit later that year and her career as a professional musician began in earnest. She gigged around Detroit, eventually joining Terry Gibbs’ quartet on the piano. She was a sought-after improviser, notable for her commitment to trance-like playing that transcended the rhythms her bandleader established. While playing a New York show with Gibbs’ band in 1962, she met John Coltrane on a shared bill at Metropole. The following year Alice abruptly quit Gibbs’ band, telling him that she was going to marry John. John and Alice had three children together.
John died of liver cancer in 1967. He left Alice bereft, or whatever word is stronger than “bereft.” She couldn’t sleep and she saw visions; she lost weight. In the depths of her grief, Alice had visited a man named Swami Satchidananda, a guru who had spoken to the crowds at Woodstock, and become his disciple. His advice and spiritual guidance soothed her spirit.
Coltrane was by this stage deeply engaged with matters of the spirit. Her compositions began to bend psychedelically to musical traditions around the world, but remained flavored by the bebop environment of her Detroit youth. She recorded Journey in Satchidananda, named for her spiritual adviser Swami Satchidananda, in 1970. All of Coltrane’s early albums bear witness to her exploration of mythology and religion, particularly from Egypt and India, the latter of which she visited several times in the 1970s. But it’s Journey in Satchidananda that pays full tribute to the transformation that she underwent in the late 1960s—as a human being and artist.
As that crystalline harp makes so immediately clear, this is a record as much about the soul as it is about skilled orchestration. The clue is in the title: it’s a journey. Coltrane takes us across uncharted territory in jazz composition, drawing from multiple cultures and diverse instruments, but she also shows us emotion in motion. Because she refuses to stay in one key, instead treating the album’s themes as a set of recurring melodic shapes, the very texture of Journey is defined by transition, process, and flow. Its music has no beginning or end. Instead, as the first bars of the opening track demonstrate, Coltrane is working with the principle of looping and transcendence.
You should listen to Journey beginning to end while lying on the ground with your eyes closed, because those are the best conditions for performing the kind of visualization that Alice Coltrane’s liner notes request: “Anyone listening to this selection should try to envision himself floating on an ocean of Satchinandaji’s love,” she wrote, “which is literally carrying countless devotees across the vicissitudes and stormy blasts of life to the other shore.”
And so I spread myself out over the floor of my apartment until I felt like a conduit between the earth below and the universe above. The record opens with three droning tamboura notes, anchoring the title track. The three-note phrase looped around, holding me inside it, while a soft and well-assured bassline spread out beneath. Then Alice enters. Within the theme played on the tamboura—a long-necked string drone instrument with an almost reedy timbre—her harp sounds like a sprite, or a child set free after a long confinement. It dances upwards and downwards unselfconsciously, as if nobody is watching. With my eyes closed, it sounded like a beam of light on water.
When the legendary free jazz pioneer Pharoah Sanders joins, his saxophone melody could go anywhere, since Cecil McBee’s bass is so steady (McBee by this time had played with Miles Davis, Yusef Lateef, and Freddie Hubbard). On this track as on the next four, dissonance is a place to visit but not to stay. Every top melody is an exploration, but Coltrane’s orchestration always provides a stable and repetitive place of return. That drone-and-bass texture comes from McBee and the tamboura, played by a musician credited only as “Tulsi,” while at the other end of the register Sanders’ sax and Vishnu Wood’s oud join Coltrane’s harp in a kind of sparkling, freeform dance.
The orchestration is broad and deep, unmistakably influenced by Coltrane’s interest in South Asian tradition. Nothing as boring as chord progressions governs Journey. Instead, like John, Alice worked in the modal style, discarding functional harmony in favor of freely-chosen chords around a root note. The album’s harmony references Indian scales and other non-diatonic series, but mostly it runs off its own themes, like that opening three-note drone. Melodies wander across the record from instrument to instrument, and track to track. They recur, alter, and they play.
On track two, “Shiva Loka,” Alice’s harp grows stronger, unfurling into an own entity with its own character. The track is named for a goddess, the Dissolver of Creation. The three-note circle from track one is now a sonorous base, its resonance becoming thicker and more lively. The bells speed up and scatter over the music’s surface. The pulse is thicker too, taking us off the beat and into a real rhythm. It’s hard to dance while lying on the ground, but “Shiva Loka” makes that possible.
The groove continues in “Stopover Bombay,” a train rocking on its tracks. It’s only on “Something about John Coltrane” that things quiet down. Coltrane switches over to piano and it falls like rain, patterning the space with cool irregularity. When Sanders’ sax beings to scream, you hardly know whether he is laughing or crying. It’s a track animated by intense emotion that takes you in every direction there is. As it drew to a close, I felt as if I had been returned unharmed through a storm, back to the circle of tamboura that had protected me from the start.
In the final track, the live-recorded “Isis and Osiris,” we finally meet Alice’s sadness. Over 11 committed minutes, Vishnu Wood gives us an oud melody that sounds trapped inside the minor scale. The oud’s sound is sharp but resonant. He sobs and he trills, taking the record’s grief to a conclusive pitch. Then everything goes quiet, and the journey is over.
In the long moment before I peeled myself off the floor, I felt the spirit of Coltrane still touched by grief. It’s so hard to describe—to put into the language of words, rather than of sound—but among the record’s abundant mix of emotion, you can hear pain. There is no Journey without John; no Satchidananda without the Swami; no Swami without the grief. Instead of a binary split between music and life, or husband and wife, this record reveals that all these elements of Alice Coltrane’s life existed for her in an all-encompassing divine flow. His name may have cast a shadow over hers, but Alice Coltrane was not trying to escape it.
When I finally opened my eyes, a beam of sunshine flooded through my apartment. Like the cascading harp at the center of the album, the sunbeam seemed to say to me that art is the only thing that exists beyond death. Shadows don’t exist without light. Each defines the other. Alice Coltrane made Journey in Satchidananda from an in-between place, amid the unlocatable flow of different emotions, different lives, different traditions. Coltrane’s music is a journey, this record says, and a destination all of its own.


The contemporary-classical sextet have played with Bon Iver, Björk, Grizzly Bear, Sufjan Stevens, and Arcade Fire. Their first LP slots compositions from Annie Clark, Shara Worden, and Son Lux alongside young-composer colleagues.

yMusic, Beautiful Mechanical

If you're an indie rocker in need of chamber instruments, odds are you'll end up hiring a member of yMusic. The quietly ubiquitous sextet has spent its three-year existence amassing cross-genre collaborations like so many passport stamps: you've heard them, wittingly or not, playing with Bon Iver, Björk, Grizzly Bear, Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, the National, Vampire Weekend-- you get the idea. But they also perform as a more traditional contemporary-classical ensemble, and on Beautiful Mechanical, their first proper full-length, they mix up the two worlds, slotting compositions from St. Vincent's Annie Clark and Son Lux alongside new works from young composer colleagues. The album's existence is a feat of networking savvy and determination-- it was funded via Kickstarter page-- but the music itself is sadly hit-or-miss, underlining a melancholy truth about bridging genre divides: It results in empty press-release fodder as often as it produces luminous, surprising new music.
Son Lux's titular work, "Beautiful Mechanical", lands somewhere blankly in the middle. Son Lux is no dabbler: He studied composition at Indiana University. But his work is somehow both antic and utterly frozen-- its gestures twitter away in different corners of the compositional space without engaging thematically. The work, which does some sly things with missing beats and rhythmic emphases, is technically assured, but it feels like the sort of forgettable, frictionless, minimalist sketch you can currently hear too many of at downtown-NYC new-music concerts.
Annie Clark fares significantly better. In fact, her piece, "Proven Badlands", might be the most beguiling and multi-layered composition on the album. On the basis of it alone, Clark could easily slip outside of her indie rock clubhouse entirely for an album's worth of chamber-music miniatures. "Badlands" begins with a swan-necked glide of a bassoon line, a thrice-digested memory of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue". Cello and flute hop lightly into the frame. Then, the instruments clear out a space for an unexpected finger-picked acoustic guitar. Interesting things keep happening: A muted trumpet calls out a yearning tritone, the sharp, ear-troubling interval found at the heart of West Side Story. Bugling horns erupt into a locked-in pattern, an arch almost-quote from some lost big-band record. The work is a lively jumble of jazzy-French flavors, strongly suggesting that Clark's education in the classical canon made a little extra time for Debussy, Milhaud, and other jazz-age cosmopolitans.
Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond also shows up to hand yMusic two sketches-- one vaguely Eastern, one vaguely African. Both are spry bundles of tiny noises. Worden's rich singing voice, which lit last year's Penelope, isn't here, but her pieces are imbued with the same lamplight glow. They are minor, but lively. Sarah Kirkland Snider, the composer of Penelope, revisits its agitated sound world with "Daughter of the Waves", a nine-minute swirl of muted anxiety. Judd Greenstein's "Clearing, Dawn, Dance" starts with a loping figure in the woodwinds and sends it rippling expertly outward through the ensemble, like small bobbing boats in a wake-- tracking its movement and hearing how Greenstein obscures it proves absorbing listening all on its own.
yMusic are part of a resourceful, engaged cluster of young classical musicians who are furiously networking a full-blown scene into existence. Collectively, they represent the movement's best qualities: broad-minded, ambitious, eagerly collaborative. However, Beautiful Mechanical also hints at some of the still-growing scene's nagging limitations: As exciting as all this activity is to behold, the marketing heat it generates carries over into its music only about half of the time. There are delightful moments scattered throughout, but the overall impression is of a small box of baubles, modest and lovely but inessential.


Over seven tracks that span 80 minutes, the expansive, looping, shifting synths and rhythms of Bajas Fresh mark the trio’s most diverse and ambitious record.

Bajas Fresh

Cooper Crain once crystallized the Bitchin Bajas ethos with a simple question: “If you find a good loop that can hold its own musically, then why not use it?” That philosophy has served his group well for going on seven years, and has recently proven just as effective in collaboration. Through work with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Natural Information Society, Olivia Wyatt, and Haley Fohr’s Jackie Lynn, Bitchin Bajas expanded their sound and prodded their partners to do the same. Credit the trio’s knack for finding good loops and knowing how to use them.
In particular, Bitchin Bajas know how to use a good loop for a long time. It’s easy enough to let a cycle grind away forever, hoping that repetition alone will entrance listeners. It’s also tempting to get too proactive and force sonic variety from a loop, as a pre-emptive stab at fending off boredom. Bitchin Bajas excel at finding midpoints between those default poles. They trust their loops to grow naturally but can also shift textures and vary moods to avoid predictability.
That’s why Bitchin Bajas’ music sounds best in extended durations. Their last full-length album, 2014’s self-titled two-disc set, stretched eight pieces across 77 minutes. The trio paid pretty obvious homage to their minimalist heroes—Terry Riley in particular—but lived up to that inspiration by carving their own way through familiar-sounding synth cycles and drones. On their follow-up, Bajas Fresh, Bitchin Bajas continue in long-form mode, filling 80 minutes with just seven tracks—including their longest to date, the 23-minute and 3-second “2303.” But this one is less about homage than exploration. Though no track is a radical departure, Bajas Fresh is the group’s most diverse and ambitious record so far.
Part of that diversity comes from wider instrumentation. Five guests are credited on Bajas Fresh—including veteran Ghost guitarist Masaki Batoh—and each track has its own distinct tone and atmosphere. Perhaps this expanding sonic horizon is a byproduct of recent collaborations, but Crain, Rob Frye, and Daniel Quinlivan have also widened their field of vision naturally over their discography. The more music they’ve made together, the more comfortable they’ve gotten with introducing new elements into their sturdy approach.
The best example might be the one song on Bajas Fresh that the trio didn’t write themselves. Their cover of “Angels and Demons at Play,” the title track from a Sun Ra album, takes the original’s bubbling rhythm and massages it into a meditation, turning Marshall Allen’s soaring flute into a slo-mo flutter. This transformation from jazz swing to minimalist loop is remarkably smooth, and that kind of easy confidence permeates all of Bitchin Bajas. It’s in all the rotations of “Jammu,” the field-recording-like rattling of “Yonaguni,” and the calm horn sounds of “Chokayo.” Even during “2303,” the record’s longest and most drone-heavy track, the band’s assuredness keeps everything in constant motion.
For a long record full of long songs, Bajas Fresh has a remarkably distinct flow. The group balances tension and relaxation with the timing of a master storyteller. It’s a talent Bitchin Bajas has shown on previous records, but here they’ve perfected it, instilling direction and purpose into what could easily be aimlessly pleasant music. “It’s not abstract sound at all,” Crain explained when chatting with Haley Fohr in 2015. “I would hope if our music was ever portrayed as a painting of what we heard, it would be a beautiful picture, not an abstract or messy image.” Crain’s hopes are realized on Bajas Fresh, an album worth hanging on your wall and staring at for a long time.


Donald Glover’s final album under this moniker features eclectic and adventurous rap and R&B, but the big swings never really connect.

Childish Gambino: Bando Stone and the New World

Bando Stone and the New World

When I was 14, I was introduced to Childish Gambino through his 2010 mixtapes I Am Just a Rapper and I Am Just a Rapper 2. This was when he was a sitcom star first and a rapper second, rapping with a glut of pop culture references, getting off punchline after punchline in a congested voice that made him sound like Urkel doing Da Drought 3. I liked them because they were satire, or maybe not, and maybe that was the point. If anything, the mixtapes were endearingly corny, nerdy, and goofy—he played with a rap character he was forming and hinted at the racial insecurities that would make 2011’s Camp a pop-rap disaster.
All these years later, Childish Gambino is merely a side project of Donald Glover, who has worked tirelessly to shift the perception of himself from nerdy, goofy, and insecure Black artist to a cool, layered, and serious Black artist. I think of his 2018 New Yorker profile in which he said, “I learn fast—I figured out the algorithm,” and described his “superpower” as getting people to believe whatever he wanted them to about him if he tried hard enough.
He did try and it worked. “Awaken, My Love!” from 2016 was essentially his Parliament-meets-Maxwell funk project. It’s nowhere near as soulful or groovy as he wanted it to be (I’ll give it up for “Riot,” though), but it did infuse his music with the stamp of Blackness he was thirsty for. Then there was the song and video for “This Is America,” more vague and less radical than its reputation, but it instantly gave his songs the aura of importance. And, oh yeah, there’s this television show he created called Atlanta, one of the best shows of the 21st century, the thing that makes good on his desire to make exceptional Black art. Through dark comedy and the hyperlocal lens of his hometown, the show blurs the lines between persona and reality, a thought he was veering toward on the 2013 project Because the Internet. And yet the greatest achievement of Atlanta is much more straightforward: It was funny as hell.
There’s not much of a sense of humor on Bando Stone and the New World, billed as Donald Glover’s final album as Childish Gambino. The reason he gave The New York Times? “It’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.” You can feel that in how he seems burdened with the pressure of living up to the perception he has molded for himself. It’s a strained album that so badly wants to end the Childish Gambino experiment with a bang, that wants to be a middle finger to everyone who ever thought he didn’t have the range to pull off whatever he set his sights on, that wants to be the kind of vulnerable record that lasts because a new generation of teenagers see themselves in his music. That’s fine and all. Atlanta had similar ambitions baked in. But also, the best episodes featured something you had never seen before in your life, and it was exciting to watch Donald and his writers’ room subvert the expectations of TV. Meanwhile, Bando Stone and the New World is a familiar slog, and the swings feel algorithmic rather than experimental.
Think of all of the albums over the last decade or so that have shaped the identities of teenagers, or at least teenagers who buy records off the end-caps at Urban Outfitters: Bando Stone extracts a little bit of that sauce while sounding nowhere near as compelling as the originals. Yeezus is one, of course, not a big surprise considering that Gambino has always worshiped the showmanship, contradictions, and music of Kanye. Here, his throbbing, glitchy, pitch-shifting intro “H3@RT$ W3RE M3@NT T0 F7¥” with a chant of “Everybody Satan and I’m G-O-D” aims for the provocativeness of Ye’s 2013 heat check, but it’s more like one of the joyless, angry blasts of noise you’ll find on Donda. Then, like some of SZA’s SOS, he does the pop-punk nostalgia thing on “Running Around,” but instead of raging like she did, it’s more unbearably cutesy in the vein of Teezo Touchdown. I can’t forget “Got to Be,” a chaotic sample-heavy mashup that brings to mind the mayhem of JPEGMAFIA, though his crate digging would be more adventurous than weaving together the Prodigy and Uncle Luke.
Of the spiritual raids going on here, the most effective is Frank Ocean’s style of R&B. That could be because the album is covered with the fingerprints of Michael Uzowuru, a megastar whisperer who once loomed around the Odd Future camp and was behind a few of Frank’s most memorable songs, including “Chanel” and “Nights.” Uzowuru has production credits on the seven-minute “No Excuses” (along with Glover and his longtime collaborator Ludwig Göransson) and it has this slow-mo jazziness that feels like lightweight Fela Kuti that meshes well with Gambino’s sweet, cloudy Blonde-esque croons. He pulls it off well enough—I’ve liked his voice since the 106 & Park–era R&B hums he hit at the end of his Sway freestyle in 2013. I’d say the same for “Steps Beach” (co-produced by Steve Lacy), which is fuzzy lyrically but his swooning falsetto is incredibly romantic. His singing goes off the rails when he steps outside of this zone, specifically the theatrical “Lithonia.” The album is supposed to be a soundtrack for a film that he hasn’t released yet, so maybe “Lithonia” will make more sense inside a different narrative arc, though that won’t change that his full-throated belts make him sound like Troy Bolton.
Gambino doesn’t even sound like he’s having that much fun trying on all these new hats; the main point just seems to be that range = greatness. A few moments say otherwise, like the high-pitched flexing mode Amaarae and Flo Milli put him onto on “Talk My Shit” or the intergalactic vibe out with Yeat on “Cruisin’.” He does have some heavier thoughts bubbling, such as fatherhood and aging on “Dadvocate” and “Can You Feel Me.” Both are incredibly earnest moments from an artist whose earnestness is always up for debate.
But maybe that’s the problem. It’s hard to grasp who Childish Gambino is supposed to be. So even when he’s genuine, I have a little bit of skepticism on my mind. That’s always what kept me at a distance from Gambino’s music, constantly wondering What does he want to get out of this? The only thing that stops me from doing that is when the project is just so great that I forget about that question entirely, like Atlanta was and how Bando Stone and the New World isn’t. Still, there is one song from the album I’ve been stuck on: “Yoshinoya,” one of the few straight-up rap tracks. It has some of that goofball cheesiness that marked the I Am Just a Rapper series. In the second verse he mentions his Chick-fil-A order, calls out the “old heads” who clown his “short shorts and PRO-Keds”, and criticizes cosplaying rappers. He doesn’t usually write verses that silly anymore, but it feels right. Because even for how radically his music has morphed over the years, the blustering smart-ass still feels like the closest I ever got to knowing Childish Gambino.


Darkside, Nicolás Jaar’s partnership with guitarist Dave Harrington, follow their recent reimagination of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories with a fascinating, endlessly explorable debut. Psychic is translucent and dense, electrified and organic, holding a form while constantly being prodded into new shapes.

Psychic

Nicolás Jaar would likely take offense with the same old dutiful recitation of his credentials—you know, the Chilean-born, Brown-educated electronic wunderkind, Clown & Sunset label head, serious artiste behind BBC’s Essential Mix of 2012, musical cubes, and a five-hour MoMA performance in a geodesic dome. In our interview from earlier this year, Jaar wanted to shed his past reputation, and that’s fair enough. Who doesn’t hope to be seen as a different person at 23 than they were at 21? But that's the kind of C.V. you only play down if you're worried about being called an elitist or running for public office. That might not be so far off the mark in regards to Darkside, Jaar’s partnership with guitarist Dave Harrington. The name alone triggers an automatic word association with an album owned by over 50 million people and recognized by nearly everyone who’s made it to 10th grade. The prismatic, black-lit aura of their fascinating, endlessly explorable debut Psychic doesn’t try to stop anyone from making that connection and if you spot Jaar’s stated influences of Can and Richie Hawtin, that’s fine too: Rarely has a record held such appeal for the high-minded while welcoming the simply high-minded.
Though a logical extension of the prog-dance fusion explored on Darkside’s self-titled EP from 2011, it makes their curious reimagination of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories from a few months back feel like their true debut. Upon initially hearing it, one could easily think of Daftside as an academic work rather than something meant for listening pleasure—a foment of the bubbling resentment towards the original’s Gatsby-esque confluence of ostentatious extravagance and genuine, if self-serving, benevolence; it was a hell of a party that left a lot of up-and-coming producers feeling like they were locked out of East Egg. However, Psychic and Daftside have the same essential goal, guided equally by artistic reverence and crackpot scheming. And that aim is to emulsify the disparate record industry obsessions that dominated right before the advent of the compact disc: opulent disco and ornate prog-rock, yacht-pop and astral funk, the former of each almost exclusively singles mediums, the latter beholden to the LP and all sounding like the sole province of bearded, flamboyantly lapeled millionaires.
On the gargantuan opening gambit of “Golden Arrow,” Darkside spend 11 minutes misremembering the ground rules for music neither of them were alive to hear the first time around. The heartbeat pulse serving a baseline for those distant, whirring synthesizers and hollowed-out drones is pure space-rock, but the gorgeous overlay of sighing cello and digital disintegration is not. When the beat finally drops after about four minutes, it’s a slack and stumbling disco interloper—high on pot, not blow. Those palm-muted funk guitars have After Dark bloodshot tincture, but that label would never allow this much modernist, bit-crushing babble in their proudly purist Italo, let alone that undulating synth bass. And then, Harrington’s falsetto takes off like an apparitional Gibb brother and... are we sure this isn’t disco? Do these guys have any clue what they’re doing?
Thankfully, the answer is “hell no”—they have a plan, but no ground rules or precedents; Darkside aren’t recreating anything. The subliminal bass shadowing Jaar’s vocals on the confounding, starched-shirt blues of “Paper Trails” has its own gravitational pull, it only exists in music made by Nico Jaar. Nor is there a session player capable of conjuring the panglobal percussion that morphs throughout “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen,” the impossibly lush layering of cymbals, snares, bells, and claps joining the hands of church choirs, marching bands, and Buddhist monks. Even Harrington’s rudimentary, blues box guitar soloing gives Psychic crucial, humanist grounding—those slowhand Dire Straits leads are the last thing you’d expect a forward-thinking electronic musician to incorporate into their mission statement, but amongst all the retro-futurist discovery, it’s the sound of rediscovery, similar to the reclamation of saxophones on Destroyer’s Kaputt or Bon Iver’s electric-piano vindication of “Beth/Rest.”
Psychic is rife with extraterrestrial atmosphere and alien texture, but it never strays into pure ambience. Bust out the beanbag chair if you want, but in a record that fits an incredible amount of music into a compact 45 minutes, the silences are moments of active listening, too. “Sitra” initially registers as a necessary comedown from the stern demands of “Golden Arrow” until it pans completely in the left stereo channel. Darkside anticipate the very moment right before the disorientation of the unbalanced mix would be unnecessarily confrontational and drop you right into “Heart”, a traipse down the yellow brick road set to unsettling tribal drums. And just when you think it's getting kind personal on its one narrative (“Paper Trails”), the album drifts off into staticky calm.
That tranquil moment gets blown open thirty seconds later by “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen” and that’s just the first half of Psychic coming to a close. Side B only gets weirder as it hews more closely to Jaar’s associations with proper dance music. Up to this point, “space disco” typically meant one thing—airy, pretty, generally envisioning a brighter, cleaner future. “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen” and “Freak, Go Home” imagine what dance music could spring up from our future lunar cities if they’re every bit the dense, intimidating, metal monstrosities they are here on earth, teeming with both life and decay, flesh and rust. The most innovative and intriguing sounds on Psychic are almost entirely dedicated to its rhythm section—panned tambourines whizzing through “Paper Trails,” gooey snares on the hot-buttered closer “Metatron,” “Freak, Go Home”’s constant fluidity between acoustic and digital percussion. Though Psychic is the kind of immense and immersive experience typically described as “monolithic”, Jaar and Harrington ensure it’s more like the bubble gracing its cover—translucent and dense, electrified and organic, holding a form while constantly being prodded into new shapes.
When a record spends this much time reveling in pure sound, it’s understandable to ask, “Where’s the humanity?” The most instantly memorable lyric comes on “Paper Trails”, when Jaar intones “I want a house to live in/Baby to take care of,” though in that voice of his, you never expect him to mean exactly what he says. Psychic doesn’t talk a whole lot about its feelings; true to its title, it’s not looking for a heart-to-heart so much as a telepathic exchange. And in trying to read Jaar and Harrington’s minds, you might think a little differently about things you already know, which can be just as important as being moved. Though the psychedelic density and classic rock touchstones of Psychic are ostensibly a negation of Jaar’s breakthrough, the quizzical, minimalist Space Is Only Noise, reconsider his intimidating biography and all of a sudden, Darkside makes a ton of sense, establishing connections between listeners and genres rather than pronouncing differences—people dance to Ricardo Villalobos, start record labels because they want to make music with their friends and, yes, Ivy League kids like to get stoned and listen to Pink Floyd. At least for the duration of Psychic, everything under the sun is in tune.


On their fifth album, the Go! Team look to the Motor City for their 1960s fix; they’re as boisterous as ever, but their nostalgia doesn’t dip far beneath the surface of their inspirations.

Semicircle

Nearly two decades and five albums along, the ear-ringing sugar buzz that energized a generation of previously fun-averse indie fans still hums through the Go! Team. Helmed by Brighton’s Ian Parton, the Go! Team suggested that there was a place where meticulous beatmakers like the Avalanches could find common cause with JV cheerleaders. But as the decade wore on, they seemed unable to move far beyond Thunder, Lightning, Strike, their 2004 debut. The original version of the band dissolved and 2015’s The Scene Between found Parton scaling things back to just himself.
With Semicircle, Parton again opens up the project’s parameters, even bringing back the rapper Ninja and original guitarist Sam Dook. Rather than replicate the group chants that made their songs so boisterous, Parton instead made a pilgrimage to the Motor City and enlisted the Detroit Youth Choir to sing backup on the album. Across Semicircle’s 12 tracks, a sense of time slippage occurs: In 2018, the Go! Team sound much like they did back in 2004, all while retaining a fervent enthusiasm for the sounds of the 1960s. The album teems with girl-group bubblegum, giddy cheers, and peppy drums reminiscent of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. “The Answer’s No - Now What’s the Question” could be mistaken for a cut from the One Kiss Can Lead to Another box set. But this isn’t exactly fresh terrain; Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, and Frankie Rose all mined the same seam, often to edgier effect, in the mid 2000s.
Not that Parton doesn’t add a few new wrinkles to the template. On the rowdy “All the Way Live,” one of the album’s standouts, he sets a rap lifted from a 1983 single against a bright backdrop of marching drums, clanging bells, and shout-along chorus. And Ninja’s return for “She’s Got Guns” finds the rapper matching the swagger of the old-school beat. But when Parton returns to ’60s tropes, they go stale. Having band members shout out their astrological signs on “Semicircle Song” feels quaint in an age of social-media oversharing. The dusty AM pop fluff of “Chico’s Radical Decade” is anything but.
Exuberance and positivity, qualities sorely in need these days, have been the Go! Team’s defining characteristics since their debut. And opener “Mayday,” with its shouts and Morse-code tattoos, delivers a much-needed shot of adrenaline, though a san of the lyrics reveal it’s not about an actual state of emergency, just a girl with “only a heartache to hold me tight.” Which isn’t to say that all pop pleasures need align themselves with the issues of the day, but it sounds willfully heedless for Parton—himself operating under the cloud of a pending Brexit—to decamp to Middle America and then make his hired locals shout “Mayday!” After five albums, it’s nostalgic sleight-of-hand for the Go! Team to continually look back on the sounds of the ’60s yet still tune out the underlying noise of that radical decade.


Today we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of Christopher Wallace with a review of his 1994 debut Ready to Die, an unparalleled piece of rap history.

Ready to Die

New York City doesn’t sell drugs anymore. Sure, there are bike messengers that peddle weed packed in plastic jars and Russian mobsters who launder money through Coney Island auto-shops, but the kind of trap-house, dope-boy, Robin Hood archetype that still carries in cities like Atlanta has been wiped clean from tri-state folklore. This is undoubtedly a good thing—entrepreneurial city teens today hustle fashion trends to ogling editors instead of baggies to scraggly addicts. But the shift has fossilized a certain kind of rap album, like The Notorious B.I.G.’s debut Ready to Die, released in 1994. The lawlessness it describes—robberies at gunpoint on the A train, open-air hand-to-hand crack deals on Fulton St., shootouts with the NYPD—land unfathomably to most New Yorkers today. Young transplants and natives alike would rather hear old tall tales than experience anything near it firsthand; distinct from nostalgia, it's more like moving into a home where a murder occurred. The thrill is a combination of fear and gall, rooted in the security that the scene will likely never repeat itself.
But there may be something habitual in New York’s craned gaze backward. Note that B.I.G. opened Ready to Die by complaining about changes in the city around him over 20 years ago. Even then, the album was a reflection: an over-the-top, fisheye union address of the city’s waning crack era, and a reeling admission that something must have gone terribly wrong for it to have happened. Its intro maps B.I.G’s life against the sounds of various eras—’70s “Superfly,” ‘80s “Top Billin’,” and ‘90s Doggystyle—before the 21-year-old launches into “Things Done Changed,” an opening monologue that sets the chaotic scene. Life used to be about funny hairstyles, curbside games, and lounging at barbecues, he says, but “Turn your pagers to 1993,” and the story has taken an inexplicably dark turn. It goes unmentioned here, but hip-hop’s region of choice had changed too: New York’s first generation of rap inventors had given way to the West Coast, so it’s Dr. Dre’s voice we hear between verses, dispatching from Compton. “Things done changed on this side,” the sample declares, a savvy appropriation that characterized a rise in violence across coasts, and a shift in sound that B.I.G. hoped to correct.
In 1992, “a whole lot of niggas want[ed] Big to make a demo tape.” He’d been battling around Fulton St since he was 13, and was known in Bedford-Stuyvesant as a force, in music and otherwise. The demo he recorded, “Microphone Murderer,” along with a few other cuts, made it’s way to The Source’s Unsigned Hype column, then influential in hip-hop’s walled off media environment, and then to Bad Boy, where Sean “Puffy” Combs would sign him. But as the demo’s opening line specified, it was only at the nudging of his close friends that he pursued music—B.I.G. was splitting time between Brooklyn and Raleigh, where he’d set up a profitable drug operation. When his record advance didn’t land quickly enough, he went back to N.C. to pick up the slack, and Puffy called him, alternately begging and demanding the rapper stop hustling and return to New York, devoted to music for good. The day that he left, the Raleigh house he’d operated out of was raided by police officers.
What made Christopher Wallace pop-palatable amid such a gruesome backdrop was his humor, personality, and wit. He was a gruff, neurotic alternative to the ice-cool Snoop Dogg: if Snoop had bitches in the living room till six in the morning, B.I.G. was getting paged at 5:46, wiping cold out his eye. If Cali crossed over with low-rider funk from Parliament, New York would ride on block-party boogie from Mtume. And if taut flows were giving way to languid hooks, B.I.G. would tighten everyone back up. “Unbelievable” was the antithesis of “Juicy,” a love-letter to underground rap radio shows like Stretch & Bobbito, and to anyone with an oversized Land Cruiser (another change to consider—New Yorkers used to drive). “Those that rushes my clutches get put on crutches, get smoked like dutches, from the master”; you can hear the roots of “punchline rap” forming in Big’s puns and internal rhyme, and the ironic turns of phrase that kids like Cam’ron would intensify years later: “‘I thought he was wack!’—Oh come, come, now, why y’all so dumb now?”
At the time, the album was praised for its honest portrayal of the drug dealer’s internal conflicts, as opposed to sunny glorification of gang violence imported from L.A. Songs like “Everyday Struggle” and “Suicidal Thoughts” showed Big’s depth, frequent references to his mother showed his rearing, and casual dropping of words like “placenta” showed his coy love of language. B.I.G. was a smart kid that had (or liked) to do dumb things, the record suggested, itself a comment on the how genius gets sharpened when faced with obstacles, and an affirmation of rap as a platform for such genius to be realized, and monetized.
Despite its author’s youth, *Ready To Die *shows its age with its production. The beats already paled in comparison to the high-definition score of Life After Death, B.I.G.’s follow up album, and the tinny drums and swampy samples on tracks like “Me and My Bitch” and “Respect” probably played better on cassette than they do on Apple Music. At the time of the album’s release, more nimble producers were doing interesting work on neighboring albums—one could say Illmatic dried everyone in New York up of their best material. The major tracks on Ready to Die had to be heavy-handed, and the filler was just an excuse to hear Big keep rapping. “Big Poppa” was inseparable from Ron Isley’s “Between the Sheets” and snuck in a trendy, post-regional synth line that would perk up West Coast ears. The “One More Chance” remix became a smash crossover hit; the original included on the album is expectedly disposable. Even strong exhibitions of songwriting like “The What” or “Gimme the Loot”—one a duet with Method Man, the other with himself—are weighed down by loops from Easy Mo Bee, a dated producer who Puffy might’ve been smart to have axed shortly after.
Which brings us to the true triumph in Ready to Die—Sean Combs, who’s been able to spot a dollar hidden in the most unlikely places ever since, finds proof-of-concept for New York hip-pop that can carry from street corners to school dances, with the right sonic contexts, visual branding, and occasional ad-libs, a formula he’d apply to Mase, Shyne, and his own material thereafter. The sounds may have shifted, but the thesis remains: drug dealers have stories for days, and Americans want to hear them. We revere the salesman more than the politician, and B.I.G. could sell the hell out of the life he lived. Maybe not all that much has changed after all.


Back from pandemic-induced hiatus, the Florida-based band fuses urgent post-hardcore with softer strains of shoegaze and grunge to unlock a new power of restraint.

Deep Sage

Gouge Away’s new album is a resurrection. Since forming in Fort Lauderdale in the early 2010s, the quartet has generated throat-mulching noise rock and shattered fragments of hardcore, imbuing every note with an intensity that felt impressively unsustainable—like the sound of a band destined to burn out and implode sooner rather than later. Their first album was titled , Dies, like a clause in the headline of a newspaper obituary: It seemed to suggest they were doomed from the start.
When the onset of the pandemic forced the band to pause writing its third album, Deep Sage, the gloomy prophecy nearly came true. Vocalist Christina Michelle stepped back from the band to “focus on [her] personal life” and moved to Portland, Oregon. Other bandmates departed Florida for different parts of the country and began to accept that their songs-in-progress might never see the light of day.
But as time passed, absence and distance papered over old disagreements and Gouge Away found that they missed each other. In 2022, they revisited the dormant project with fresh eyes—eager again to make something that felt new. The resulting songs are daringly restrained for a band best known for its frayed emotions and unrelenting extremity. These qualities are present in Deep Sage, but the new album also exhibits striking contrasts, embracing relatively softer, melodic sounds—gravity-defying shoegaze, gloomy grunge—alongside the urgent post-hardcore refractions Gouge Away have offered since their earliest days.
Their 2018 record Burnt Sugar—recorded with Jeremy Bolm (of Touché Amoré) and Jack Shirley (who’s produced for Deafheaven, Loma Prieta, and more)—represented the band’s first attempt to weave these more sedate sounds into desperate, distressed songs. Deep Sage, recorded again with Shirley, digs deeper to explore sounds that previous work only hinted at. There are songs like “Idealized,” where the melodies wriggle and squirm like the off-balance ’90s post-hardcore collected in Numero Group box sets. The stumbling, blistering “Newtau” recalls the labyrinthine riffs of David Pajo, if he were recording in an active blast furnace. Closer “Dallas,” a loving tribute to a lost friend, churns through the foamy melodies of lower-fi shoegaze, allowing space for Michelle’s voice to fall to a delicate hush instead of her usual pinched scream.
When heavy bands branch out, it sometimes comes at the expense of their previous crushing chaos, but Gouge Away pursue new directions primarily in service of increasing their overall intensity. When they launch into the seasick hardcore riffs of “Spaced Out” or the queasy AmRep fuzz of “The Sharpening” (which features some of Michelle’s most unsettled vocals across any of the bands’ records to date) the impact is felt more directly because of the quieter moments: Each of Michelle’s shredded screams arrives with the hair-raising jolt of a jump scare. It's a new trick for Gouge Away, and an effective one—they force you to let your guard down for a moment, and then they shove your face straight back into the concrete.


For his second album on J. Cole’s imprint, Cozz is beginning to build his own style while finding how to maneuver between the boisterous and introspective.

Effected

The explosive 2014 breakout single, “Dreams,” by Los Angeles rapper Cozz, caught everyone’s attention due to its go-for-broke desperation: If this rap shit doesn’t work out, boy, who’s to say what he'll succumb to. Based on the strength of that song, J. Cole signed Cozz to his aptly named Dreamville imprint. After four years of grinding and putting out various projects, cut to Cozz spitting a few bars from the chorus of “Dreams” on “That’s the Thing,” a track from his second studio album, Effected. This time, though, the urgency is gone, replaced with a nervous complacency. Cozz offers an update on trying to get paid and be known before acknowledging his true reality: “I’m just tryna maintain.”
Effected is Cozz’s third project since being signed to Dreamville, but it’s the 24-year-old’s most significant: He mixes skits, big-name features (Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Curren$y), and high-concept self-examinations (the five-minute “Demons N Distractions”). Anthems like “Dreams” notwithstanding, Cozz has always been drawn to ominous and spacious instrumentals that allow his emphatic, articulate flow plenty of room to vent. On Effected, he commits more than ever to this pared-down sound, and while he’s better than Cole at sliding between the boisterous and the introspective, he’s still working on finding the right balance.
Cole himself only shows up once, producing and rapping on late-album highlight “Zendaya” (which flips a pretty incredible Ivan Lins sample), but his influence is felt throughout: Songs like “My Love,” “Bout It,” and the first half of “Demons N Distractions” feature Cole’s signature half-groaned, singalong hooks. But while they more or less work for Cole, they fall short for Cozz. Unlike his more melodically inclined mentor, Cozz is a go-for-the-jugular rapper, relying on a steady stream of patient, snarling rhymes whose sheer forcefulness snap you to attention.
The album’s producers, led by Cozz’s longtime partner Meez, bring a practiced but somewhat one-dimensional take on jazzy, head-nodding instrumentals that often do more to harness Cozz than liberate him. These are beats that sound smarter than they really are—saxophone samples and slow-crawling bass abound, but very few of the more pensive beats stick out after a few listens, and the more lackluster ones force the charismatic, quick-witted Cozz to over-exert where Cole would’ve simply navel-gazed. The song where he lusts after women of a certain age, “Freaky 45,” and the Kendrick-featuring “Hustla’s Story” are two examples of the types of locked-in grooves that add color to Cozz’s storytelling rather than stripping it down. “Hustla’s Story,” a slow-burning and perceptive assessment of urban life’s many traps—addiction, prostitution, absent parents—reawakens his gift for narrative, and brings along a Section.80-sounding Kendrick for the ride. But Cozz also steps up to rope the listener in with a combination of zeal and detail: “This probably your uncle’s song/Probably your big brother’s song/Your father or your mother’s song/I understand your circumstance,” he spits, convincingly positioning himself as an all-seeing everyman.
Cozz is capable of tearing up pretty much any track he hops on, but he’s most fun over beats that match his bristling intensity. He flows with confrontational swagger atop TDE producer Tae Beast’s eerie bounce on “Van Ness” and proves he’s capable of ditching his more “conscious” sound on the somewhat gimmicky but undeniably hard “Ignorant Confidence.” On the title track, featuring the album’s most explicitly West Coast sound, Cozz shows off his depth, switching nimbly between different mental states—vulnerable, defensive, paranoid, confident. Over a sinister, creeping groove reminiscent of Dogg Pound-era Kurupt, Cozz is assured and revealing: “I guess I gotta write my problems down, because in my lifetime/Ain’t no one in my eyesight that I can trust with my lifeline.” Cozz, it figures, is the most honest man he knows, the only person he can confide in. He’s precocious enough to examine himself and the dynamics affecting him, but still too young, or too inexperienced, to articulate a distinct artistic vision. Still, his fever dreams of riches are well within reach, and Effected is a confident step toward turning what used to be fantasy into cold, hard reality.


At last available digitally, these quietly revolutionary albums still break one of music’s deepest-held genre orthodoxies.

Ray Charles: Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music Volumes 1 & 2

More than a half-century later, the premise of Ray Charles’ two-volume Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music—that is, an established R&B star makes a record of country hits—might yet inspire a spit take from the uninitiated. Alas, the uninitiated have long remained uninitiated, since these groundbreaking albums have been reissued infrequently since their 1962 release. But a remastered Concord set, which includes vinyl and CD reprints of both albums, marks the first time these landmarks are available as downloads and streams. Maybe having them available outside of distorted YouTube rips will, 57 years later, affirm Charles’ rightful status as a country music pioneer.
Building off a string of hits with Atlantic and an ABC-Paramount contract with a “full artistic freedom” clause, Charles was finally able to record the music he’d been listening to since he was a self-described country boy growing up in Greenville, FL., a town of around 900 near the Georgia border. Back then, he would tune into the Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night. That period provided direct inspiration for the first Modern Sounds and its hastily assembled sequel, recorded in the wake of its predecessor’s explosive success. Charles put his golden touch on two dozen of the biggest country songs of the day. “I think a lot of the hillbilly music is wonderful,” he told Billboard, starting his campaign to record such tunes in 1959. “I think I could do a good job with the right hillbilly song today. If you really have the ability, that’s what counts.”
Despite several subsequent counterexamples, from Charley Pride to Darius Rucker, the idea that a black singer could attain mainstream success singing country music still challenges one of the deepest-held genre orthodoxies. “A rhythm-and-blues singer, at least when I was coming up, was typecast, much like an actor,” Charles wrote in his 1978 autobiography. “Even today I’m called ‘Ray Charles, the blues singer,’ or ‘Ray Charles, the soul singer.’ And this is after 20 years of singing damn near everything!” Charles approached the album with what would turn out to be necessary defiance, as he faced skepticism from his label and the industry at large. Even though the albums contain some of Charles’ most enduring singles, they are still more accepted as Ray Charles songs than disclaimer-free country. When Modern Sounds was first released, the charts refused to track this music as country; the Grammys nominated these very clearly named albums in rhythm & blues categories.
Still, these arrangements played off the perceived tension of Charles’ foray into Nashville territory. Half the songs were recorded in Los Angeles, with Charles backed by lush strings and a straight-laced choir to build a poppier take on the pervasive Nashville Sound. In New York, a swinging big band more familiar to those who were already Charles fans supported the other half. The end result is seamless, showing just how wide a gap Charles’ voice could bridge. String-backed ballad “I Can’t Stop Loving You” is a larger-than-life song that toes the line of pure schlock with lyrical hyperbole and musical gloss. But a gentle, insistent country shuffle and Charles’ endless capacity for relatable sorrow (perhaps country music’s most enduring hallmark) ground it. Buried in the album’s B-side because producer Sid Feller thought it was the weakest track, the song became the biggest hit of Charles’ career.
Charles’ mix of polish and pure emotion has proven nearly impossible to match, from weepy orchestral tunes like “You Don’t Know Me” (maybe the most convincing description of life in the friend zone ever recorded) to brassy up-tempo numbers, like Hank Williams’ “Hey, Good Lookin’.” But making something infallibly bright and genuine, rich and timeless was a secondary achievement. More importantly, he proved that the connection he heard between country’s twang and R&B’s groove wasn’t a fatal distinction but simply a matter of interpretation. Charles exposed how inane it is to draw a hard line between two genres that shared an ancestor—the United States’ original hybrid, the blues.
You can go through and parse which parts of every record sound more like Nashville, which parts sound more like soul. “You Are My Sunshine” relies on the same hip-swiveling call-and-response that Motown would soon make ubiquitous. “Born to Lose” uses barely any swing outside of Charles’ voice, readying it for the honky-tonk. But that kind of dissection misses the point—that this music is accessible to him, too, a black man. In the end, Charles didn’t just fit in; he revolutionized the genre by sparking a rush of Nashville/pop crossover acts.
This music remains a tribute to and rejoinder of the futile divisions we so often take for granted. Charles made headlines promoting the album with integrated shows throughout the South, refusing to perform in segregated venues. “Both whites and Negroes alike have attended the same dance and actually danced together at Charles concerts,” wrote the Chicago Daily Defender in November 1962 of Charles’ shows in Memphis and St. Louis. “There is no race problem when he plays.” It’s proof of Charles’ enduring yet still-aspirational achievement on these albums: unity.


Culled from singles for DFA and Paw Tracks, as well as five cuts from an EP released simultaneously with Load Blown, the Brooklyn band's fourth official LP is really more a singles collection than an album but it hangs together well regardless.

Load Blown

Officially, Load Blown is the fourth album by Brooklyn's Black Dice. But since it contains the band's final single for DFA (a three-track 12"), their first for Paw Tracks (a two-song 12"), and five cuts from an EP released simultaneously with Load Blown, it's really more a singles collection than an album. That may seem like trivial semantics, and these 10 tracks hang together well regardless. But the fact that they were created separately and originally intended for individual consumption gives Load Blown more immediacy and straight-up power than any previous Black Dice full-length.
Nearly every cut here gets right to the point, jumping into simple rhythmic and sonic ideas with little delay, then grinding away devoutly at those basic elements, adding accents and building momentum along the way. There are few stretches of the kind of wandering exposition heard on other Black Dice records, which usually cropped up when the band pushed a track past the 10-minute mark. Those moments often produced inspired music, and surely the band hasn't abandoned them. But it's fun to hear Black Dice go straight for the jugular throughout the aptly-titled Load Blown, and hit the mark every time.
In that sense, the album sounds like an expansion of band member Eric Copeland's recent solo effort for Paw Tracks, Hermaphrodite. That record built sunny loops from bouncing rhythms and semi-melodies, and so does Load Blown, with a wider, more open sonic palette. "Kokomo" uses repeated yelps and street-shaking bass bombs to lead a round of sonic jumping jacks, while "Toka Toka" weaves chirping squiggles into dancing circles, akin to the cartoon-ish audio experiments of Raymond Scott. Such bright-eyed swing is something Black Dice began to drive toward on their last album, 2005's Broken Ear Record. Here, however, almost every second is fueled by buoyant, even catchy energy.
Not that Load Blown is a delirious joy-fest, but even its darker pieces have an insistent pulse. The cutting beat of the hip-hop-ish "Gore" gets crashing and abrasive, but still hypnotizes. Later, the album's noisiest track, "Bottom Feeder", creates a shiny rainbow out of harsh blasts and babbling vocals. But the best tracks, like the skipping "Drool" and the vocal beat-box collage "Manoman", constantly sway and rise, recreating the head rush of a childhood ride on a schoolyard see-saw.
Despite the shift toward a more immediate brand of sonic invention, Load Blown is no radical departure. It's simply a new take on Black Dice's idiosyncratic mix, where attention to detail, openness to possibility, and intuitive senses of rhythm and timing all collide. Four albums and 10 years into their career, the band continues to pursue the detailed tweaks and disciplined practices required to master a craft, and Load Blown confirms they're well on their way to some kind of creative black belt.


Steely Dan entered the ’80s with something elegant and arid—immaculately conceived malaise-age bachelor-pad music. In these songs, everyone’s alone, or together in a way that’s worse than being alone.

Gaucho

A man flees west, pursued by saxophones. That’s how Steely Dan’s Gaucho starts, with “Babylon Sisters,” a foreboding melody that creeps into the room like toxic fog, and a lyric about a guy in a car en route to a three-way. While the horn section keeps rupturing the mood the keyboards are trying to set, the narrator spins stick-with-me-baby fantasies of California leisure and hedonism for his female companion(s). There may be no more perfectly yacht-rock tercet in the Dan canon than, “We’ll jog with show folk on the sand/Drink kirschwasser from a shell/San Francisco show-and-tell.” But even the singer doesn’t believe the sales pitch. By the end of the verse he’s talking to himself, or maybe he has been all along. “It’s cheap but it’s not free,” he says. “And that love’s not a game for three/And I’m not what I used to be.” Meanwhile, Randy Brecker’s muted trumpet dances around him, mocking his pain the way only a muted trumpet can.
Good times! Is it any wonder Gaucho—the seventh Steely Dan album, and the last one Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would make together until the year 2000—is the one even some hardcore Danimals find it tough to fully cozy up to? The almost pathologically overdetermined production is elegant, arid, a little forbidding, and every last tinkling chime sounds like it took 12 days to mix, because chances are it did. And underneath that compulsive craftsmanship, that marble-slick surface, there’s decay, disillusionment, a gnawing sadness. But that’s what’s great about Gaucho. It takes the animating artistic tension of Steely Dan—their need to make flawless-sounding records lionizing inveterately human fuckups—to its logical endpoint.
It’s their most obviously L.A. record, so of course they made it in New York, after spending years out West making music so steeped in New York iconography it practically sweated hot-dog-cart water. And it’s also the most end-of-the-’70s record ever made, 38 minutes of immaculately conceived malaise-age bachelor-pad music by which to greet the cold dawn of the Reagan era. The characters in these songs have taken an era of self-expression and self-indulgence as far as they can. They’re free to do and be whatever and whoever they want, but all that severance of obligation has done is isolate them from other people.
The only character who’s having any kind of communal fun is the coke dealer on “Glamour Profession,” who makes calls from a basketball star’s car phone and takes meetings over Mr. Chow dumplings with “Jive Miguel…from Bogotá.” Everyone else is lost out there in the haze, having mutually demeaning sex or reaching for human connection in angry, possessive, usually futile ways. “Gaucho” and “My Rival” are both about relationships into which some threatening/alluring interloper has driven a wedge; both “Hey Nineteen” and “Babylon Sisters” are about older guys who chase younger women and wind up feeling older than ever. Things fall apart, the center does not hold, there’s a gaucho in the living room and he won’t leave, and it’s getting hard to act like everything’s mellow.
“The Cuervo Gold/The fine Colombian/Make tonight a wonderful thing,” sings the narrator of “Hey Nineteen,” and then he sings it again, as if that’ll make it true. The narrator of the bouncy, Michael McDonald-enhanced “Time Out of Mind” seems to be in a pretty good mood, but it’s only because he knows he’s going to go somewhere later and smoke heroin until L.A. morphs into Lhasa. Everyone’s alone, or together in a way that’s worse than being alone; every lyric is a one-sided dialogue.
There’s a precisely calibrated mix of empathy and irony in the way the Dan observe these poor devils, these sinners in the grip of a checked-out God— Becker, perfectly, called it “a sneer and a tear.” This is, at points, a very funny record—particularly the title track, whose unfolding absurdity builds to the moment where the narrator, having caught his lover holding hands with a bodacious cowboy in a spangled leather poncho, cries out, “Would you care to explain?” in high dudgeon worthy of Frasier Crane.
When Becker and Fagen started making this music, it was 1978, and they were coming off the platinum-selling Aja, the biggest hit they’d ever had. They briefly toyed with the idea of putting together a band and touring—a form of strenuous exercise they’d given up years earlier—but instead they went back to work on new music, and didn’t emerge from the studio until late 1980. One of the first tracks they finished was “The Second Arrangement,” a blithe kiss-off from an unapologetic Jaguar-driving lothario whose faithlessness is suddenly fashionable. You can find the song on YouTube in various states of completion—a piano demo with Fagen trying a shaky falsetto on the chorus, a polished instrumental, a bootlegged-sounding full-band version whose discoid thwack evokes a waterlogged “Get Lucky”—but you won’t find it on Gaucho. After an assistant engineer accidentally erased a large chunk of the master tape, Becker and Fagen tried for a while to recreate the track, then gave up on it entirely. It wasn’t the only good song they discarded during the sessions—even with all the king’s sidemen at their disposal, they couldn’t capture “The Bear” or the surreal colonialist fever-dream “Kulee Baba” either—but it might have been the best song on the album if it had survived. They replaced it with the merely-very-good “Third World Man,” a retooled track left over from the Aja sessions, featuring a downhearted soliloquy of a guitar solo by Larry Carlton, who was reportedly surprised to discover he’d played on Gaucho.
Fagen later described the “Second Arrangement” debacle to Rolling Stone correspondent Robert Palmer as “one of the most serious emotional setbacks we’ve had in the studio.” There are less-auspicious ways to begin work on a record. But maybe Gaucho was destined to go awry no matter what. By shrinking themselves to a two-man unit (plus longtime producer Gary Katz and engineer Roger Nichols) and forsaking the road, Becker and Fagen had cut down on the entropy to which even moderately successful rock bands usually succumb, but during the course of the Gaucho sessions, they were dealing with a range of high-class problems, from a court battle with MCA Records (who’d just absorbed the Dan’s old label ABC, and believed the final album the band owed that label was now contractually theirs) to Becker’s burgeoning heroin addiction, which made him an inconstant contributor to the band’s creative process. He played some guitar and bass on three songs, but as the sessions wore on, he was busy going through hell.
In January 1980, Becker’s girlfriend Karen Stanley, who Becker later said had struggled with depression, died of what may have been an intentional overdose in Becker’s apartment. Then, in April of that year, while walking on a New York street, Becker was hit by a taxi cab. He spent seven months in a cast with a fractured tibia and was effectively sidelined from the studio for most of the three laborious months it took to mix Gaucho. Mixing was Becker’s forte; Fagen was left to muddle through. During a visit to the studio in summer 1980, Palmer watched him sit with Katz and Nichols, “inhaling a cigarette in spasmodic gulps” while endlessly retooling the fade-out at the end of “Babylon Sisters,” eventually spending four hours fiddling with fifty seconds of music.
Of the nearly 40 consummate studio pros whose work at the Gaucho sessions made the final cut, the player with the heaviest footprint belongs to “Wendel,” a Paleolithic 12-bit sampling unit designed and built by Nichols, deployed by Becker and Fagen to impose a drum-machine-like consistency on the work of live drummers like Steve Gadd and Rick Marotta. “In the ’80s,” Becker told Mojo years later, “hand-crafted, hand-played music was being overtaken by this increasingly mechanical, perfectionist machine music, and we were just trying to get there first. They had all these disco records that were just whack-whack, so perfect, the beat never fluctuated, and we didn’t see why we couldn’t have that too, except playing this incredibly complicated music…It seemed like a good idea.”
Of course, the computerized micro-tweaking of live instrumentation is now as commonplace a part of pop-music production as reverb, but back then the option to program with real drum hits was tantamount to magic, especially for two guys who’d spent much of their professional lives being just a tiny bit disappointed by some of the finest session musicians on the planet. But Wendel was also a bit of a prickly collaborator. “[E]ven the most minute event,” the band wrote in the liner notes to a 2000 reissue of Gaucho, “had to be programmed in the gnarly and unforgiving 8085 Assembly Language, in which all relevant parameters needed to be described in its baffling hexagesimal-base numerical system, which ultimately became the only language Roger Nichols spoke or understood, at least for a time.”
The Dan’s commitment to the path of most resistance paid off. “Hey Nineteen” cracked the Top 10, and the album went platinum. Even Wendel got a plaque. Then in 1981, Becker and Fagen took an 11-year break from working together as Steely Dan. It’s probably a coincidence that this album about breakups and estrangements and encroaching age and the corrosive effects of hard drugs on human fellowship immediately preceded the not-drug-unrelated suspension of a longstanding creative partnership between two guys who were just entering their 30s. But we’re talking about Steely Dan here, not Fleetwood Mac—if they ever wrote about themselves, they’d never be uncool enough to admit it. It’s probably better to think of this as a loose concept album about people with a higher-than-average chance of dying in an accident involving downers and a hot tub, but one whose content couldn’t help but mirror the struggles in its makers’ lives. It might not be the best of Steely Dan albums, but it’s definitely the most Steely Dan of the Steely Dan albums. Becker and Fagen are too smart not to know ideals like perfection and grace are for opium dreamers, but can’t help reaching for them anyway.


The rapper’s eighth solo album is a stroll down memory lane, summoning the ‘90s boom bap aesthetics he grew up on. It’s a nostalgic trip that further cements his witty, introspective, and singular style.

Open Mike Eagle: Component System With the Auto Reverse

Component System With the Auto Reverse

For music fans of a certain age, the home stereo was more than just a convenient way to listen to music: It was a recording studio, a pressing plant, and a portal to other worlds. All-in-one component systems, the affordable stereos that contained all the pieces of a hi-fi system in one compact black box—an amplifier, AM/FM tuner, CD player, dual-cassette deck, and often an equalizer—minted myriad amateur engineers in the ’90s, democratizing access to the tools needed to record, duplicate, and listen to mixtapes.
As a kid, the rapper Open Mike Eagle used one of those component systems to craft mixtapes spliced together from radio recordings. Replete with commercials and DJ monologues woven between his favorite songs, the tapes were the soundtrack of his youth, the score for countless bus rides across Chicago’s South Side. It was one of those tapes, cobbled together from broadcasts on the local college radio station WHPK Chicago, that inspired Eagle’s latest LP, Component System With the Auto-Reverse. The record is a nostalgic trip through the rapper’s musical genesis and an exploration of the psyche of an artist who recently lost his wife, his job, and some of his closest friends. If 2020’s Anime, Trauma, and Divorce was an unflinching examination of all that he’d lost, this album answers the question of what remains.
In rediscovering his old mixtapes, Eagle finds that he’s the same man he’s always been: a whip-smart comic with acerbic wit, a “grown man with toddler habits” (a quality that he gets from his father), and an old school hip-hop head who can rap his butt off, but can’t dance. He has long written from a comedian’s POV, and on this album, he once again leverages a bittersweet sense of humor to soothe his painful awareness of the world’s absurdity. His cleverness requires a certain degree of pop culture literacy, and some of his references—like 2Pac’s curious collaboration with smooth, sensitive ‘90s R&B crooner Jon B—might feel ancient to a zoomer. But these are the bars of a middle-aged man who still shares memes (“Who Among Us is mega sus?” he asks on “i’ll fight you”); they are tightly packed nerd raps from a dad who’s quick-witted enough to keep up with his adolescent son.
The songs here reflect both his embrace of Los Angeles (“crenshaw and homeland”) and his Chicago roots (“79th and stony island”); after college, the rapper left his hometown and has since toiled in the headier spaces of L.A.’s hip-hop underground. There is also plenty of room for poignant introspection (“the song with the secret name”) and unabashed fandom of hip-hop greats (“for DOOM”). His choice of collaborators feels less like clout-boosting streaming bait and more like homies who can rap well, which makes for a laid-back cipher vibe that reveals the album’s raw but carefully considered aesthetic. Its most frequent guests are Video Dave and Still Rift, two rappers with backpacker flows and few credits that don’t involve Eagle. But even when he operates with more well-known entities like New York’s acid-tongued duo Armand Hammer, he shows he can coalesce disparate styles.
The pace and tone of the album ebbs and flows—too clunky to be mixed by a DJ, but still sequenced with intention. On “burner account,” the aforementioned collaboration with Armand Hammer, the three MCs meet each other halfway between Eagle’s self-deprecating one-liners and billy woods and ELUCID’s vivid imagery. It amounts to a tongue-in-cheek spoof of Griselda Records’ trafficking raps, one that somehow feels more reverential than derisive.
In the process of building Component System With the Auto Reverse, Eagle originally pulled samples from a tape featuring a rant from a WHPK DJ. On it, the host waxed philosophical about Diamond D, the New York producer and MC who co-founded the infamous Diggin’ In the Crates crew, home to Big L, Fat Joe, and Showbiz & AG. Eagle has spoken at length about his veneration of the East Coast legend, and although the recording didn’t make the final cut of the album, it was the impetus for his exploration of the Uptown rap scene, which has informed his own aesthetic since childhood. It’s all the more momentous that Diamond D has production credits here on three tracks, and even a guest verse on the album closer. Like DITC, part of Eagle’s genius lies not just in lyrical skill or head-bobbing beats, but a strong sense of self—an identity shaped by communities as unique as those who survived them.
Component System With the Auto Reverse sits at the geographical and spiritual nexus of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, tracing a map of people and places that have shaped Eagle’s experience with hip-hop. To that end, Component System’s coda “cd only bonus track” closes the loop on Eagle’s stroll down memory lane, with a beat and a verse from one of the New York heroes that sent him on the path away from Chicago in the first place. On his last LP, Eagle was riddled with self-doubt. But by looking even further in the rear view, through all the years, all the bars, and all the trauma, he seems to have returned to his original sense of self. Even as he grows, he’s always been exactly who he is supposed to be.


ryan loves it and he likes mmlp too so he's all sonning me now with this 'well ethan yes ...

The Eminem Show

ryan loves it and he likes mmlp too so he's all sonning me now with this 'well ethan yes perhaps i'd allow you to give the marshall mathers lp a 10.0, i mean that particular record was perfect, but not this one' yeah well you were busy talking about at the motherfucking drive in back then so let me redeem your godawful site now. jeez unless he went back on his dumb-ass 'policy' theres a nine dot one up there but i promise you 'the eminem show' is really a ten, know that
oh my darling eminem! how i love you marshall, spittin shiny massive magnetic acrostics to fit the thrillest rhyme style ever invented (ugh yeah i'm trying not to explain his quote unquote flow in those meaningless autechre words like architectural and labyrinthine but SHIT) but yeah although em's lyrics arent usually quotably evocative for rock reviews like wu or jay here i'm not even going to try, you have to hear him spit at it live or on record
that said he's playing the same old marshall vs shady real-or-fake game as usual (stage-y red curtain album cover referencing 'smarmy' faux-soul masterpiece lexicon of love!?!) and its as interesting and complex as it ever was but that wasnt what i came to the shady table for in the first place and you know all about it anyway from spin so lets pretend not to care
instead
let me tell a story
this one time i was listening to eminem, and
haha no
he's complicated you know
eminem i mean
but no no no this is more than usual like he pukes up the nastiest song about mother mathers ever but loves hailie lots and meanwhile metamorphasizes into a grown-ass woman 'on the rag and ovulating' making us listen to queen and aerosmith and and AND THEN him and dre have been 'fucking with hats off' all along!! (after this ahem revelation dre deadpans 'suck it, marshall')
uh
in a normal pfork review there would be some more bullshit here all like 'ha ha he makes fun of that stupid trl but he's on it!!' or like 'his rapping style is a direct copy of gab from blackalicious' like yeah dude timbaland is biting aphex twins white ass too haha i dunno fuck it here are some more bullshit things about the actual record like right on schedule pfork review style
ahem
track one
white america
after a tender orchestral prelude (lexicon of love again) these like big silver jets fly overhead and lame linkin park riffs rev up and eminem 'finally' addresses the race issue telling us a bunch of shit we already knew about in his labored 'the way i am' style (with only a marginally better chorus than that grr)
haha later he gets crunk and actually says 'whodi' on the bounciriffic everlast-dreams-about-the-big-tymers 'superman'!! (fake southern accents are the new black italiano you know)
also on hailies song he sings and its not great but like better than mos def
first in a series - people your fake indie ass will mention in a lame rock critic attempt to legitimize eminem: screamin' jay hawkins
'business' is cartoon-beat chase scene batman & robin like all the early singles but this time he's actually talking about batman and robin!! (a running theme of the entire record for some wonderful reason)
i adore the plasticky genital mutilation pornography and hilarious cronenberg AIDS horrors of 'drips' and anxiously await the obie trice record
but more than that i love hailie jade on 'my dad's gone crazy' which is like this saccharine-sweetened lemon incest gone faggy (eminem may have finally torn down the old gangsta wont-touches of mama and jesus off the wall to beat the shit out them both but dude still loves his baby girl!)
and the sleazy disco of 'without me'
'the press' wet dream like bobby and whitney'!
'cleaning out my closet' takes the childhood hell of 'all i've got is you' and turns all that emotional vunerability into righteous articulated fury at his 'goin though public housin systems, victim of munchausens syndrome'(!!) mama.
hey
a thought
eminem is gay
proof:
the him fucking dre thing
dyeing your hair and wearing earrings thing from the aerosmith song
or hailie being 'the only lady he adores'
sleazy disco
little eric and erica
dre is batman and he's the burt ward robin
etc
okay at this point i'm just gonna put in shit to see if ryan will really not edit this like he said so like if you're reading this sentence then wow i really got an unedited review on pfork
haha i bet he cuts my columbine refs
uh in conclusion....
Ryanpitch4k : ethan, i'm gonna edit it anyway, you're lucky i'm gonna go over it with you
et HAN P2 3 : lets not be some fucking review factory ryan
Ryanpitch4k : ethan you know as well as i do that it IS a factory, which is why it gets no respect from industry/"real" journalists
but later...
Ryanpitch4k : what? ok, i'm an indie pussy. i consider the music i listen to "above" and "better than" pop music. that's MY opinion
and then....
Ryanpitch4k : look, ethan, you know what? i just have a feeling we're not going to agree about this. i think it's fine for us to not agree, but i don't think you would like changes i would want to make. you're really incredibly high-maintenence as reviewers go, and i'm not completely sure it's even worth it
and yes finally....
Ryanpitch4k : ethan you act like i don't know what you're capable of
et HAN P2 3 : but what would be the worst that could happen
et HAN P2 3 : what am i capable of??
Ryanpitch4k : you'll get away with anything you can
Ryanpitch4k : the more you get away with the happier you are
eminem is great!!


Fit Me In is a compact and efficient EP that offers a glimpse of Frankie Cosmos' work with all-electronic instrumentation. These songs are little glimpses into her fully realized universe, less verse-chorus-verse pop confections than open-ended, contemporary poetic constructions that don't stop where the recording ends.

Fit Me In EP

Frankie Cosmos (aka Greta Kline) writes songs that are as close to one gets to a pure hybrid of pop and poetry. Her acknowledgment of Frank O'Hara as a significant influence makes a good deal of sense; like O'Hara, her work is both personal and abstract, economical, and infused with humanity, "between two persons" rather than a communication between listener and artist. For those concerned with Kline's overtly twee aesthetic, worried that an overdose of saccharine will blot out any other subtle flavoring, her work contains self-deprecation and displacement in good countermeasure. The balance of sweet and salty feels not just purposeful but realistic.
Fit Me In, a compact and efficient EP portending a more fleshed-out full-band LP in 2016, is an experiment in what Kline's songwriting would sound like given nearly all electronic instrumentation. A collaboration with frequent musical partner Aaron Maine of Porches, Fit Me In is more in line with Kline's prolific home recordings than a full indie pop record like Zentropy (opener "Korean Food" appeared first on 2013's self-released Daddy Cool). Drum machine and synth-heavy, this is true bedroom pop—so intimate as to show the rumpled coverlet and the minute, ancient, nearly unnoticeable stains on the carpet. As is Kline's wont, these songs are little glimpses into her fully realized universe, less verse-chorus-verse pop confections than open-ended, contemporary poetic constructions that don't stop where the recording ends. Like poetry, they require reading and interpretation and us to be engaged as listeners, in communication with Cosmos; art that exists "between two persons" requires dialogue.
"Young" in particular is arch and sly, a response to media commentary that would seek to cast Kline as a fresh-faced ingenue, a character in a box rather than a real, complicated young woman. "I heard about being young/ But I'm not sure how it's done.../ Something about fun," she sings. You can interpret me, she seems to be saying, and I'll interpret you right back. In "O Contest Winner", she boasts "No need for a retest/ I know I'm a genius," tongue firmly in cheek, again pushing against others' expectations of her and her work. Such bragging is usually the province of hip-hop, and to hear it in delicate indie pop context could feel self-conscious or appropriative, but in Kline's subtle delivery it sounds both sincere and welcome, both a refutation of the idea that female artists must always minimize their senses of self-worth and an awareness of the sheer absurdity of any declaration of ego.
"Korean Food" and "Sand" are both tender etchings of the everyday nature of real love, a theme Kline excels at exploring; her version of love is not grand or epic, not forced into any particular narrative arc. She finds love in moment-to-moment minutiae, in the smallest pleasures and least valued rituals, without weighting those moments too heavily: "And touch all the books outside the Strand/ Their oldest pages soft like sand."
There's a reason we're captivated as a society by well-written diaries—at their best, sketches of others' lives as they live them allow us chances to slow down, to connect and to understand one another that we rarely encounter in a highly relational world. Greta Kline is a master at the art of the musical diary—never confessional in a way that feels exploitative and lurid, but tender, intimate, and real nonetheless. We're fortunate she keeps letting us into her world in this way.


Ex-"Degrassi" star finds new levels of fame as a rapper via a mixtape complaining about his previous level of fame. Major labels drool; Lil Wayne guests.

So Far Gone

On the one hand, it’s heartening that something like this can still happen: Relative unknown creates mixtape with a few friends and uploads it to the Internet, and then, within a few months, he’s maybe/possibly dating Rihanna and fielding seven-figure offers from broke major labels. Except, in this case, the relative unknown in question was a star on the Canadian teeny-drama “Degrassi: The Next Generation”, and the friends in question are Lil Wayne and Trey Songz and Chris Paul. Even weirder, the main overarching theme of Drake’s So Far Gone seems to be the stresses and travails of fame, even if he recorded the damn thing when he wasn’t famous in any meaningful way. And now the tape has made him good and famous for real. I don’t know how this kind of thing happens; I just watch it.
Drake’s calling card has become “Best I Ever Had”, a likable, breezy summery pop song that’s managed to ascend to Hot 97 omnipresence without any sort of label backing, a very serious achievement. It’s a Nerf-heavy declaration of lust with a nice sentiment behind it, Drake telling the song’s second-person subject that she’s prettiest with no makeup, that she’s the fucking best lay he ever had. It also contains the one and only slick punchline Drake offers on the whole hour-plus mixtape: “When my album drops, bitches’ll buy it for the picture/And niggas’ll buy it, too, and claim they got it for they sister.”
See, Drake’s not a great rapper. His delivery manages to convey confidence at pretty much all times, but it’s still halting and awkward. Half the time, his lines barely even make sense: “I never get attracted to fans/ Cuz an eager beaver could be the collapse of a dam”—huh? And even if the tape is mostly crammed with emo soul-baring, he still comes up with lines like this: “My delivery just got me buzzing like the pizza man.” Ugh. In his four appearances on the tape, Lil Wayne just annihilates Drake. This wouldn’t be news, except we’re talking about circa-2009 syrup-fried Wayne here, and it’s rarer and rarer that he gets the better of anyone on a song.
And yet So Far Gone still scans as one of the most compulsively listenable mixtapes of a great year for mixtapes. Blame Kanye. Drake isn’t just a post-Kanye artist; he’s a post-808s and Heartbreak artist, possibly the first. On that album, Kanye drifted lazily from rapping to singing over a bed of rippling lush-but-sparse electro that still gets better every time I hear it. Drake does much the same thing on So Far Gone. He’s a singer/rapper in the Missy Elliott mode, and he even pays Missy tribute by swiping the beat from her “Friendly Skies” for “Bria’s Interlude”. When he swings from rapping to buttery teen-idol singing, it feels organic and effortless, like he’s just doing whatever makes the most sense at any given moment.
Musically, Drake favors a very specific sort of sugary but spacious electro-soul; nearly every track makes heavy use of organ sustain and sparse heartbeat drums. He uses tracks from Swede-pop types like Lykke Li and Peter Bjorn and John, the sort of thing that seems forced and gimmicky when most rappers do it. In Drake’s hands, though, those songs make sense in close proximity to, say, Jay-Z’s “Ignorant Shit” or Kanye’s “Say You Will”. And it helps that he actually interacts with his source material. With “Little Bit”, Drake doesn’t simply rap over Lykke Li’s original. Instead, he structures it like a duet, he and Lykke slowly circling each other and admitting their crushed-out feelings. It’s cute. My favorite track on the tape is the DJ Screw tribute “November 18th”, wherein Drake pulls off something that I’ve never heard any actual Houstonians manage (sorry, Big Moe): He turns Screw’s slow, woozy sound into loverman R&B. The lyrical conceit is goofy as hell (“Tonight I’ll just fuck you like we’re in Houston”—slow, get it?), but Drake’s angelic falsetto floats beautifully over the smeared-streetlights track, and it just sounds right.
And then there’s all that price-of-fame stuff. Again, blame Kanye, because somehow this comes out sounding slippery and interesting rather than petulant and unbearable. See, Drake’s figured out that the way to brag backhandedly—to brag without bragging—is to complain about all the awesome shit that you get to endure. So here he is on “The Calm”: “Look what I became, tryna make a name/ All my first dates are interrupted by my fame.” Other rappers talk big about getting mobbed every time I hit the mall; Drake complains about those masses making his candlelit dinners a little bit more awkward. Or: “My mother embarrassed to pull my Phantom out, so I park about five houses down.” You learn he has a Phantom, and you also learn that it’s the source of some family strife that doesn’t even make sense. Crafty. And now that Drake is really, truly famous, he should really have some shit to complain about.