The Ontario band Dirty Nil's Higher Power offers punk with high-end production values meant for big rooms. However antisocial they may get, the music here is intended to be a communal experience.

Higher Power

As the name suggests, the Ontario band Dirty Nil are profoundly aware of their emptiness and impurity, and the only thing that rouses Luke Bentham and Dave Nardi out of their self-loathing is despising someone else even more. Maybe it was inspired by drinking alone in a dingy apartment, but Higher Power is punk with high-end production values, meant for big rooms. They’re professed classic rock fans and gear snobs and it shows, as Higher Power is an album that sounds like it expects to be paid for. However antisocial Dirty Nil get, the music is intended to be a communal experience.
They’re not really interested in the philosophical restrictions and elitism that often constitutes punk rock anyway. Dirty Nil released a 7” on skate-punk stronghold Fat Wreck Chords and played the Warped Tour—both tend to be a point of no return for bands deciding between a captive pop-punk audience and critical credibility. But it’s all rock'n'roll to Dirty Nil: They boast equal facility with PUP-style beer bongin’ with the devil ("No Weaknesses"), Dilly Dally’s knee-buckling dynamics ("Zombie Eyed"), and the hectoring sing-speak of tourmates Single Mothers and Greys. Higher Power serves as proof that the boundaries separating "indie," "pop punk" and "alt-rock" have collapsed as they’ve been drawn into closer quarters, and to send this point home, they do all of the above just within the first four tracks.
There isn’t really an original note here, but the massive hooks of "No Weaknesses" and "Zombie Eyed" are delivered with enough conviction that they end up sounding fresh anyway. As Higher Power progresses, Dirty Nil continue to expand their range, yet the sequencing makes it sound like a retreat. The satisfying brutality of "Fugue State" starts a run of three songs crammed into less than five minutes; the highs of Side A were bound to make Higher Power sound frontloaded anyway, but Side B practically vanishes before get-in-the-van anthem "Bury Me at the Rodeo Show" ends the record with the closest thing to a Dirty Nil love song.
Even when the music intentionally plays dumb, Bentham and Nardi are clever lyricists, and Higher Power could almost be a narrative concept record about salvation if you play it out of order. Throughout the album, Dirty Nil search for redemption in the usual places: sex ("Wrestle Yu to Husker Du"), drugs ("Zombie Eyed") and rock'n'roll. But they have too much fun with it all to even pretend that hitting rock bottom is actually a bad thing. "Friends in the Sky" aligns Bentham with Satan against Jesus, and it’s as close as he gets to divinity; later on, there’s no spiritual awakening, just an acceptance of what Bart Simpson called a "life of sin followed by the presto-change-o deathbed repentance." Bentham calls out to his higher power and admits, "And even though we never got along/ I’ll say I was wrong/ 'Cause you know we can be friends in the sky." Despite their protestations, only a true punk band would try to pull a fast one on God.


The Denver band’s debut is 19 minutes of galvanizing, accessible hardcore with a focus on queer community and uplift.

Be My Vengeance

Formed in 2021 with the goal of picking up where Dag Nasty and Faith left off, Destiny Bond make melodic hardcore that doesn’t sacrifice speed or authenticity. On their debut, Be My Vengeance, the Denver five-piece—comprised of singer Cloe Madonna Janzen, guitarists Emily Armitage and Amos Helvey, bassist Rio Wolf, and drummer Adam Croft—slash their way through galvanizing songs about fostering unity within their scene, reclaiming space for queer kids, and embracing your whole identity no matter what gets in the way. It’s 19 minutes of music that’s made to get stuck in your head.
Be My Vengeance is ripe with empathy and love. On “The Glow,” from which the album takes its title, Janzen sings like she’s lacing her fingers through yours: “Watch over me/I promise to watch over you.” Elsewhere, she speaks to the power of rejecting imposed social narratives, choosing family, and laying the foundations for one’s true home. Midway through “Harmony,” she tells a friend that scars represent healing and encourages them to practice forgiveness: “I hope there’s more love each new day you see/You’ll find all that you need.”
But don’t miss the fangs sheathed in Destiny Bond’s kind smile. Be My Vengeance barrels ahead with brute force thanks to the aggressive rhythm section, yet is full of little surprises: Croft’s last-second pattern change-up on “Mosaic,” the extended jam-turned-noise rock outro of closer “Harmony,” the open-chord guitar pluck and mid-song dip on “Kinetic.” “Pick yourself up off the floor, baby!” Janzen howls on the latter. “You’re taking on the world pound for fucking pound.” The song sounds like a garage rock record torn into pieces and reassembled by memory, all thick bass and distorted blues riffs, and she dances atop it with a type of defiant glee.
Be My Vengeance is a mix of polished and scrappy, the result of recording sessions that went south. The band tracked the majority of its instrumental parts with Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Jeff Rosenstock) at Oakland’s Atomic Garden last summer, but were forced to cancel studio time when three members came down with COVID-19. Once they recovered, Destiny Bond tapped Denver engineer Lucas Johannes to help them finish. The extra time encouraged them to add unexpected instruments from Johannes’ arsenal: mandolin, tambourine, shakers. But with Janzen’s voice still damaged from being sick, the recordings feel true to the harsh sound of classic hardcore in a VFW hall. Meanwhile, Armitage and Helvey’s guitars intertwine with slick production that heightens the album’s melodic songwriting, resulting in music that’s accessible even to those who don’t know their John Brannons from their John Josephs.
Destiny Bond are clear about how their lived experience informs their goal of cultivating a community fortified by love. “Blood Chokes,” a discordant song that’s harder and louder than any prior track, serves as their mission statement. Janzen first relays her experience of coming out as a trans woman to her parents before making a pact: “This is for all the trans kids/You’re mine, you’re mine/On my heart all the time.” Though her screams are scratchy and vociferous, the sincerity in her voice is comforting. “We will scream until we have been heard,” she adds later in “Worlds Unseen.” Be My Vengeance is catchy enough to keep that promise.


Rising Chicago DJ and house producer here also displays a considerable talent for creating experimental electronic music.

Kate Simko: Music From the Atom Smashers

Music From the Atom Smashers

Great science is full of intuitive leaps, but the producers of The Atom Smashers, a documentary about physicists at Fermilab, employed a strictly rational approach for the soundtrack: They sought out an electronic musician who already works in evanescent particles and focused beams. It doesn't downplay Kate Simko's considerable talents to say that she was born to make this score, although perhaps you could say that of any techno producer as steeped in ambient and modernist music as she. Music From the Atom Smashers simply gives her a template on which to do what she does: one that nudges her away from crisp dancefloor fare like "She Said", toward the mysterious realms of Steve Reich, Wolfgang Voigt, and Brian Eno.
In fact, almost half of the album expires before we hear the first real house track, "God Particle". This is the particle for which the physicists are searching, and appropriately, the song seethes on the verge of an epiphany, with a melodic feeling of anticipation and bass so elastic it seems to be trying to mutter a revelation. Only "Sociber", an intestinal tunnel with drums that whiz and ping, similarly threatens to move your body. On most of the album, Simko is instead more interested in moving your space-time continuum. It would be tautological to call this "pattern music," but it's certainly pattern-conscious. Outside of the dance tracks and the anomalous but excellent "The Creative Part", a Philip Glass-indebted composition for burnished ostinatos and piano sunbursts, Simko works in layered pulses, like she’s breaking billiards racks in slow motion. She makes you feel the weave, not the line.
A number of recurring motifs betray the record's soundtrack status: skittering palpitations, sifting shards of broken china, cosmic slide-whistles, shamanistic rattles, and striated rumbles roughing up bloops, snaps, crackles, and pops. A lot of Rice Krispies, to be sure, but Simko remembers to cut in plenty of fruit: warm blurs of melodica on the splintering dirge "Quiet Daydream", lingering symphonic chords on "Nature Surreal". More interesting than the sounds themselves are the intelligence and sensitivity of their deployment, the constant attention to weight, color, and direction. You never get the feeling that Simko cued up a few devices, hit record, and kicked back with a crossword puzzle. She hovers over the album, alert and meticulous, fitting a bass line with anti-gravity boots here, skewing the angle of a comet's tail there. As a result, the repetitive nature of the sounds subsides from your attention, as you marvel about how they penetrate sonic spaces you couldn't perceive until they were filled.


Mustard's latest full-length, 10 Summers: The Mixtape Vol. 1, is less star-studded than last year's 10 Summers, and less explosive than 2013's well-timed Ketchup tape. There's no need to overanalyze the tape's 17 passable-to-solid tracks; all you really need to do is dance to them a couple Mangoritas deep in a backyard.

10 Summers: The Mixtape Vol. 1

If there's been one constant in life since late 2011, when DJ Mustard got his big break via Tyga's sneaky crossover "Rack City", it's the comforting radio omnipresence of Mustard's sparse slaps and '90s-nodding ratchet&B. But four years may as well be 40, and the Mustardwave has long since crested. While the sound he pioneered has lingered well past the average trend life-cycle, "ratchet" as a buzzword has all but gone the way of the dodo; even the @DennysDiner social team has moved on to fleeker pastures.
If Mustard's latest full-length, 10 Summers: The Mixtape Vol. 1, sounds familiar, it's because it shares a title with his 2014 debut album. It's also because you've heard approximations of all these songs before, over and over, everywhere you go, for years. The central conceit of this mixtape series is that Mustard's dominance will ride out for a full decade, and if anyone could pull off that kind of endurance feat, it's the Dijon Don. But that claim's starting to feel like an empty gesture, even if it's not entirely unfeasible; does anyone really need that much Mustard on the beat?
To be fair, Mustardwave hitting critical mass was spurred on by opportunistic imitators as much as the producer himself. Aside from Omarion's still-buzzing 2014 single "Post to Be", the most Mustard-y Top 40 single right now is Jidenna's "Classic Man", which isn't actually his production at all: it's built around a sample from Iggy's "Fancy", the most high-profile, blatant Mustard rip-off to date. In other words, it's become impossible to tell the simulacra from the real deal. The Mustardwave singularity is upon us, and at this point, these beats may as well be self-replicating ad infinitum.
It's not that 10 Summers isn't good, per se. While it's significantly less star-studded than last year's album, and less explosive than 2013's well-timed Ketchup tape, the dip in quality isn't all that extreme. Besides, who wants to hate on low-stakes party music? There's no need to overanalyze the tape's 17 passable-to-solid tracks; all you really need to do is dance to them a couple Mangoritas deep in a backyard. But I want to believe Mustard has more up his sleeve than this: slight alterations of the same snaps, single-finger piano prods, and bassy synths, with a corral of just-fine Pushaz Ink rappers passing through. Even longtime muse YG's switched his style up post-My Krazy Life, with the Terrace Martin G-funk of "Twist My Fingaz".
YG doesn't show up at all on 10 Summers; the tape's highest-profile feature is the Game, which speaks volumes about the kinds of half-assed attempts at the zeitgeist here. There are a handful of pretty great guest spots, for what it's worth, mostly from L.A. locals. On "Trippin Off Hoes", Pushaz Ink affiliate and charming dirtbag RJ goes off like a bomb over the beat's guttural growl: "Gettin' rich though! She a trip though! Credit cards with somebody else info!" The track's only two minutes, but it doesn't need to be any longer; it's the type of efficient, mercenarial slapper Mustard redefined. "You Know It", the best rap song here, showcases buzzing Vallejo newcomer Nef the Pharaoh and houses the tape's best one-liner from relative unknown Big Mike: "On my money, I'm a opportunist/ Off my meds, I'm a orthodontist." But most of the project's first two-thirds passes in a forgettable blur, and if the overwhelming sense of facsimile wasn't enough, a rapper named DrakeO—DrakeO!—is prominently featured.
To be fair, Mustard's R&B production has easily outshined his rap production post-My Krazy Life, and 10 Summers is no different. Most of the tracks with any significant replay value here are the loose, wispy cabana R&B jams that comprise the tape's tail end. "Overdose", with TeeFlii, Iamsu!, and Choice, slides into an understated, liquid groove that draws from G-funk, yacht rock, and twinkly early-'00s Nelly ballads. "Ice Cream" channels the new jack slickness of Soul For Real's candy-coated raindrops. It's clear the guy still has ideas, and maybe he's saving the good ones for when the stakes are higher. Last week, he released "Why'd You Call?", a SoundCloud loosie featuring Makonnen and Ty Dolla $ign that exists somewhere between '80s electro and Based World, complete with Diplo-esque EDM breakdown. It's not necessarily the most inspired direction for Mustard, but at least he's venturing out of his comfort zone. That doesn't happen nearly enough on 10 Summers.


The constant and destructive waves of noise make this decisively a Merzbow record, but its cosmic mood and rhythms prove that Sun Ra lives in its DNA.

Strange City

Sun Ra’s presence on the latest Merzbow record is odd: blink and you might miss him completely, but squint and you can notice him almost everywhere. The only time it’s blatantly obvious that Masami Akita, the man behind noise legend Merzbow, is using Sun Ra’s recordings as source material comes in the first 10 seconds of Strange City. Opener “Livid Sun Loop” begins with overlapping saxophones and drums, but Akita quickly steamrolls those into a dense cacophony. For the rest of the album’s 103 minutes (66 on CD and 36 on LP, both titled Strange City but containing different music), he steadfastly maintains that busy din.
Yet focus your ears intensely on Strange City—preferably through headphones—and Sun Ra’s music peeks out through Merzbow’s noise wall. (The Ra estate gave Akita material from 1966’s The Magic City and 1967’s Strange Strings, which he remixed and treated while adding his own original sounds). Rattling drumbeats grow out of crackling static like weeds in a garden, bassy rhythms undulate beneath rolling roars like shifting tectonic plates, and pretty much every screech and squeal could pass for a wailing horn. Strange City is decisively a Merzbow record, but Sun Ra lives in its DNA.
Where Strange City stands in Merzbow’s massive discography is easier to suss out. Many of the strengths Akita has developed over roughly four decades of noise devotion are put to use here. He creates relentlessly forward-moving music with so much going on that it feels three-dimensional. During such lengthy tracks, your ears and brain accept and acclimate to Akita’s ruthless sounds, and his seemingly random noise eventually starts to feel normal.
Strange City is most successful on the two half-hour-plus tracks that make up the CD version. “Livid Sun Loop” is filled with destructive sounds and stabbing rhythms, but it also has a narrative arc developed through 32 minutes of sonic drilling. On “Granular Jazz Part 2,” Akita grapples most seriously with Sun Ra’s creative spirit. Devoted primarily to the trebly end of the spectrum, the piece subtly rides Ra’s rhythms while building a space-bound aura, a fitting way to grapple with an artist who claimed to come from Saturn.
The three tracks on the LP version of Strange City—all titled as parts of “Granular Jazz”—are less distinctive. In some places, Akita falls back on stock noise moves like firing-laser jolts and helicopter-style whirr. Something interesting happens on every piece, though, and the closer “Granular Jazz Part 4” is particularly fascinating due to its relative restraint. Surprisingly distant and subdued, it’s like Merzbow’s ballad of Sun Ra, an elegy for a virtual partner coming after 100 minutes of sonic boxing. You could call Strange City a Merzbow victory, but it couldn’t have happened without Sun Ra on his team.


The former múm frontwoman steps out with a set of airy, orchestral folk that resembles early Kate Bush or Joanna Newsom.

I Must Be the Devil

Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir has been a quiet fixture in Icelandic experimental pop for more than two decades. An Aaron and Bryce Dessner collaborator and a former member of múm, she specializes in wispy, orchestral folk that seems to be dissipating even as it reaches your ears. 14 years ago, Valtýsdóttir began recording her own album, I Must Be The Devil, largely composed of piano and vocals. The result is gentle, lovely, and meandering to a fault.
Valtýsdóttir has a striking voice, both childlike and elvish. It sounds distractingly similar to Joanna Newsom or early Kate Bush, but her similarities to these two orchestral pop titans pretty much stop and start right there. While Valtýsdóttir clearly admires their renfaire aesthetics and baroque, winding song structures, I Must Be The Devil is a far more subdued effort than, say, Ys or The Kick Inside.  It is also, unfortunately, much less interesting.
Take early single “Forever Love,” a thorny piano ballad. The piano meanders in and out, and Valtýsdóttir’s vocals take on an almost church-choir quality. Her lyrics are less important to the song than the pure sound of her voice, but focus on them and you nevertheless find yourself contemplating a slightly cringy forest-sex scenario: “In a frenzy/Saying what the fuck/The forest shields/That what other think/Our bodies naked/Are moving to the deep beat,” Valtýsdóttir sings. On “Heartly Matters,”Valtýsdóttir coos: “I do love/The way he sang/and I do love/The way we sounded.” There’s not much to hold onto here, and the music is weightless both in aura and content.
There are a few fully realized moments. “Star, Child” simmers in soft focus with the aid of velvety string flourishes. The album closer “Girl” is the record’s strongest offering. It gleams with compositional possibilities:  the nine-minute song slowly creeps up on its listener, a vast expanse dotted with strange futuristic sounds, like a field full of AI-powered fireflies. The pacing is unhurried; Valtýsdóttir takes plenty of time to get to the point, and for the most part, it is pleasant enough to be along for the ride. You could say that this sentiment carries over to the rest of the album, which proves to be truly pretty, but doesn’t demand much attention.


Wax Idols complete their transformation from sardonic post-punks to theatrical goth-rock storytellers on an album that dares to take pleasure in confronting death.

Happy Ending

Since their formation in 2011, Wax Idols have migrated from sardonic, hard-nosed post-punk territory to sweeping gothic melodrama. It’s not an unprecedented move: Listen to the Cure’s discography from Boys Don’t Cry to Disintegration, or Cocteau Twins’ from Garlands to Heaven or Las Vegas, and you’ll hear a similar evolution. Historically, goth rock tends to bloom over time; the longer a band lingers in the darkness, the more likely it is that compact, incisive social commentary will open up into lush, indulgent storytelling.
On their fourth album, Happy Ending, Wax Idols fully commit to their new aesthetic. Vocalist and bandleader Hether Fortune sings from the perspective of someone on the threshold between life and death; on some songs she’s about to die, while on others she’s just crossed over. By inhabiting this ghostly protagonist, she leads the group into their catchiest, most accessible period, where the hooks are big and the story arcs even bigger. Happy Ending is the first Wax Idols album that could easily be staged as a rock opera. Its boldness and dynamism lend the band a newly theatrical bent.
In true goth fashion, Fortune seems to draw the most energy from the darkest subjects. Although she wrote it in the aftermath of a brutal divorce, 2015’s American Tragic contained the purest pop hooks the band had ever recorded. Happy Ending furthers that trajectory, its melodies skewing more sweet than bitter. Vocally, this is a productive place for Fortune. While Wax Idols’ early albums No Future and Discipline + Desire caged her voice within a relatively narrow range, the new record lets her cut loose. “Oh God, I’m falling,” she howls on “Too Late.” On “Scream,” she belts out, "I’ll scream your name/With the only breath I have left,” elongating the chorus’ last two syllables for dramatic effect. Around her, drummer Rachel Travers, bassist Marisa Prietto, and multi-instrumentalist Peter Lightning whip up the band’s gloomy sound into a frenzy. The drums rain down fast and snare-heavy. The bass is full and round. The treble-rich guitars dance through their chords.
Wax Idols have long drawn comparisons to the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, but the vocal strategies Fortune deploys here hew closer to Incubus’ Brandon Boyd or even Bono—singers who tend to emote by opening their throats wide and letting it all fall out. That singing style can sound inherently optimistic, as though stretching one’s voice to its limits were an act of faith, so a propulsive dissonance emerges between the fatalistic words Fortune sings and the bombast with which she sings them. The inevitability of death looms large over the record, yet Fortune pitches her voice upward in triumph, as though death itself weren't enough to erase her.
Even “Crashing,” whose lyrics orbit a suicide, sounds more victorious than despondent. “This life was never sweet enough for me,” Fortune sings, in a way that makes it easy to imagine her with a fist in the air—this existence is inadequate, so time to move onto the next one. On “Mausoleum,” she beckons, “Put your head upon my shoulder/And slide with me through my own slice of hell.” Her word choice here—“slide”—suggests a fluid, freeing afterlife, a sluice to the next state of being rather than a loop of perpetual suffering.
By framing death not as a narrative-ending cataclysm but as a state of being that is potentially freer than life, Wax Idols cut a new facet on goth rock’s morbid fascinations. It’s rare that a band so fixated on the macabre gets to have so much fun; even Misfits’ raucous murder-fests asked you to identify with the killer, not the deceased. But Wax Idols tease out a liberatory streak in material where other acts might only find nihilism. The deaths they paint on Happy Ending don't inspire hopelessness. This isn’t a record transcribed from the raw edge of suicidal urges, and it doesn’t ask for direct sympathy with the desire to die. Instead, it shakes off the weight that accumulates around death when it is considered unspeakable. It confronts a culture that deals in death while refusing to acknowledge its reality. It lights up dark corners usually shadowed by fear, and in dancing inside the abyss, it grants permission to feel invincible.


On its third album, the Philadelphia quartet hones the studio techniques—as well as the knowledge of when to hold back—required to do justice to the group’s adventurous spirit.

Nicks and Grazes

What is psychedelic music? The question has followed Palm since their beginnings in the college-town basements of Upstate New York, and has been thoroughly documented on albums like 2015’s Trading Basics and 2018’s Rock Island. With little formal knowledge of how to play their instruments when they first formed, the quartet—now based in Philadelphia, and made up of Eve Alpert, Kasra Kurt, Gerasimos Livitsanos, and Hugo Stanley—has followed the art-school impulse to question assumptions about how rock music is structured, building an alien system of its own. Showing a reluctance to be boxed into any single genre, the group has retained an openness to the possibilities of sound at its most elemental, using music technologies in strange and unorthodox ways that feel broadly in tune with the psychedelic moment of the 1960s. Palm tap into a cosmic excess bound up in the elaborate vocal effects and electronically treated guitars that are slathered across their albums, reclaiming psychedelic music as more than just a dorm-room backdrop for getting stoned. Their third studio album, Nicks and Grazes is dizzying and complex without losing sight of the progressive rigor that has guided the band since its beginnings.
To listen to Palm is to observe patterns in a foreign language, waiting for a logic to emerge. On Trading Basics, they seemed to consciously embrace a history of experimental tropes, grounding their music in a noise-rock lineage. Yet with each release, they’ve taken steps to replace this scaffolding with a new foundation of their own, with varying degrees of success. Recorded just two days after the release of Trading Basics, 2017’s Shadow Expert EP incorporated new studio techniques that built on the tight-knit feeling of the group, ping-ponging across stereophonic space as if to mimic dialogue and dialing in effect pedals with more precision than their earlier lo-fi efforts. But the endless changes and sustained hyperactivity made for a difficult listen, a feeling that would continue on their 2018 album Rock Island. Roughly four years later, Palm have finally developed the studio techniques and conscious sense of restraint needed to do justice to this adventurous spirit, creating an album that’s precise and exacting as it approaches new terrain.
Their organizing principles are as unconventional as ever. Babbling synths and wind chimes give way to controlled chaos on “Touch and Go,” as corkscrew guitars offset Stanley’s propulsive drumming. While they’ve long been invested in outlandish recording techniques, Palm now seem set on building out a studio sound that contributes to the forward motion of the project. In most cases, this means the addition of new electronic elements, like the metallic samples and synth pads deployed throughout “Touch and Go,” or the thumping synth bass on “Feathers.” The latter track is built entirely around the instrument, smoothed over with a soft counter-melody from Alpert before erupting with electrifying drums. Yet even as they approach something ostensibly similar to dance music, they can’t help but sound like a more realized version of themselves.
For many bands, the idea of a polished studio album has become synonymous with the big-budget techniques of the 1960s and ’70s, but Palm are rarely, if ever, nostalgic. Noise and art rock were always points of departure for defining a sound of their own, and while their use of steel-drum samples has long felt like a nod to the global diasporic genres they’re inspired by, the band has never set out to make the next great calypso record. The best comparison might be to the studio recordings of Yellow Magic Orchestra and their lasting influence on Japanese synth pop, but even then, the band is much more interested in melody than acts like Sympathy Nervous or R.N.A.-ORGANISM ever were. Decisions about arrangement and studio techniques emerge naturally from the band’s increasingly focused interest in sound design, establishing the central axis around which the album revolves.
Firmly uninterested in recreating the sounds of any historical era, Palm instead construct their own alternative to the studio-as-instrument philosophy of this midcentury period. Songs like “Away Kit” and “Tumbleboy”—a track which first appeared on Kurt’s split release with Ada Babar from 2017—feel like logical next steps for a group already so committed to rethinking how the band and the instrument should function. Roughly halfway through the ambient interlude “And Chairs,” a small voice asks listeners to follow them in guided meditation. “Just listen to what you can hear, you and your surroundings,” they say. Like this interlude, Nicks and Grazes asks us to reconsider foundational ideas about what music is, how it works, and what we expect of it at every step of the production process. It’s a totalizing vision for the band as an artistic unit, one that organically builds on everything they’ve done so far.


Placing its faith in the healing power of animals and Auto-Tune, Alex Giannascoli’s most hopeful record stands out for its grounded patience and moments of sharp lyrical simplicity.

God Save the Animals

In his later life, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida trained his critical lens away from abstract conceptions of human language and toward his pet cat. How should he feel about returning his cat’s gaze? Should he feel ashamed to let his cat see him nude, vulnerable, on the toilet? If animals cannot express a moral code—if they don’t know that nudity is shameful—are they simply amoral? To Derrida, that’s the wrong question—it’s not whether animals can think, but rather if they can feel. Throughout his enigmatic discography, Alex Giannascoli, who performs as Alex G, has teased out these same thorny issues. On 2012’s Trick, his dog Rosie communicates with just her eyes. Two years later, on DSU, his dog Harvey “doesn’t understand what big boys do,” but Alex loves him anyway. And while the Philadelphia musician is adamant that his songs are not all about dogs, the animals in his life are proxies for his uneasy sense of good and evil. On his latest album, God Save the Animals, he wrings strange beauty from our non-human companions, grappling with innocence and its discontents through their saucer-eyed stares.
In a catalog littered with inscrutable poetics, God Save the Animals stands out for its moments of sharp lyrical simplicity. Rather than sketching out ideas through the barest of sentence fragments, Giannascoli writes with a sense of grounded patience, digging deeper and fleshing out the characters in his stories with extended conversations and commitments. Though his writing has always toed the line between autobiography and autofiction, on God Save the Animals it seems as though the players in his stories—fictional or not—are growing wiser with time. Over the stunning melodies of “Miracles,” he reaches into a whispy falsetto as he considers starting a family. In the past he might have given into despair, but now he warms to the idea: “After all,” he admits, “there’s no way up from apathy.” Across the album, his sense of responsibility is strengthened by the test of time: “You can believe in me,” he sings, warbled, on “Cross the Sea.” “Now you sit with me/I keep you safe,” he reassures on “Ain’t It Easy.” It’s a cautious calmness, interrupted by pitch-shifted vocals and ominous whispers. But even the alien voices lean into comfort rather than their usual eeriness, as on “Cross the Sea”’s repetitions of “I’ll take care of you.”
And then there are the animals. References to pets are more oblique here; names are scarce. But it’s not hard to find man’s best friend peeking out from between the lines. On “Mission,” the bleary-eyed pride of “I did good, I stayed out of the kitchen/I did good, I kept it on track” sounds like the confession of a weary but determined bloodhound. “Runner,” a stunning song about an endlessly reliable companion, tosses off the heartbreaking line, “They hit you with the rolled-up magazine,” a chastisement much more reminiscent of a pet than a human. Does he mean to imply that a person is being scolded like a dog? And if not, what does it mean that we brutalize dogs so casually? The purposely vague subjects on God Save the Animals—whose perspective is portrayed on “Cross the Sea” when he sings, “You see how I make you smile/You put your foot down and I run wild”?—blur the lines between animal and human motivations. There’s a shared ethics built from that ambiguity. Animals, Giannascoli suggests, can definitely feel—fear, loyalty, dignity—even if they cannot quite grasp the need to be saved.
Giannascoli has said that he sees himself more as a producer than a traditional singer-songwriter, and God Save the Animals encapsulates both the folksy quietude of Rocket and the ominous creep of Beach Music. Subtle instrumental embellishments elevate the record: the radiance of a Rhodes piano on “Early Morning Waiting,” the twang of banjo on “Forgive,” and the sharp percussive snap on “Headroom Piano” (named for the renowned Philadelphia studio where the song was recorded). “Runner” builds a simple guitar riff into a warm and gorgeous folk-rock anthem, a rootsy kind of alternative rock in the style of Wilco or the Wallflowers. The song stands out because it stands alone, uniquely straightforward and confident through its verses, gaining momentum without undercutting its earnestness.
There are still lurking surprises: The clear-eyed harmonies and pristine guitar make it all the more gratifying to hear Giannascoli veer off course as he confesses, “I have done a couple bad things,” louder each time, until it’s an unintelligible scream. On “No Bitterness,” he combines his penchant for vocal processing and electronic production with delicate finger-picked guitar and soft drums. Halfway through, the guitars give way to a breakbeat, fueling a hyperpop ballad that works despite its contradictions because of his commitment to being both sweet and maddening at once. If the sounds are blown out, as on “Blessing,” or if room tone leaks in, like on the intro to “No Bitterness,” it feels intentional, not accidental.
It would be facile to call an album with God in its name a religious body of work. An explicit mention of Jesus feels like a half-joke; there are no direct references to churches or holy books. But God Save the Animals does feel like a liturgy of sorts, one that encapsulates Giannascoli’s belief in the healing power of animals and Auto-Tune. It’s also by far his most hopeful record, the dark shadow of early death largely absent from his lyrics. There’s a sense of looking into the future rather than mourning the past: “Forgive yesterday, I choose today,” he sings on the contemplative closer “Forgive.” His voice heaves, as if on the verge of tears, and it sounds like faith.


The iconic songwriter offers a selection of tunes from across his catalog, performed live in his house and recorded with an iPad. It sounds as starkly homemade as you’d expect.

The Times EP

Neil Young’s live audiences this year have included a cat, several dogs, a barnyard of disinterested poultry, and Daryl Hannah. The actor, Young’s wife and quarantine partner, is also the in-house cinematographer for the Fireside Sessions, an endearingly homemade series of performance videos shot on an iPad in and around their Colorado home. These brief sets, uploaded to Neil Young Archives, Young’s personal website and idiosyncratic high-resolution streaming platform, effectively constitute his touring for the year. That makes The Times, which documents a July Fireside Sessions performance of topical and socially conscious songs from across Young’s vast catalog, something like his newest live release.
The iPad’s rudimentary digital recording capabilities give The Times a lo-fi but distinctly modern starkness that stands in contrast to Young’s longstanding fixation on sound quality and love of vintage (and expensive) analog gear. The raw sound, mixed and mastered to the fullest extent possible, carries a certain populist immediacy, capturing Young’s voice through the same consumer-level technology available to everybody else. After Young’s 50-plus years making records, The Times is a new kind of homegrown.
Listening to The Times feels a bit like checking in on a cool older relative’s social media feed to affirm they haven’t gone QAnon-level bananas during quarantine. Young mercifully has not. The collection’s two songs that he hasn’t previously released are “Lookin’ for a Leader 2020,” which updates 2006’s “Lookin’ for a Leader” with lyrics about Black Lives Matter, and a cover of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Though both affirm Young’s commitment to righteousness, neither hit particularly hard as music. “The Times” feels too vague, and “Lookin’ For A Leader 2020” too specific. Both are easier to appreciate as emotional windows into Young than statements unto themselves.
“Ohio,” Young’s 1970 protest song about the National Guard’s murder of four Kent State students that year, hits harder. A half-century later, as it becomes increasingly clear that “four dead in Ohio” is a tiny sliver of unceasing state-enacted violence on American citizenry, the song is as painful and real as ever. “Alabama,” originally released on 1972’s Harvest, is nearly as powerful. Young’s solo acoustic version plays like a black-and-white photograph next to the full-color harmonies by Stephen Stills and David Crosby on the original. Unlike the more aggressive “Southern Man,” also included here, “Alabama” is more imagistic than prescriptive, with “banjos playing through the broken/glass windows down in Alabama” before the white robes of the Klan flash by—a haunting open-ended quality that lends itself to the stripped-down treatment. The Times’ version of “Southern Man,” merely a smaller-sounding take on an otherwise powerful classic rock song, doesn’t transform itself in quite the same way.
Young is releasing The Times through his longtime label Reprise, and via an exclusive streaming deal with Amazon Music. Still, the EP's ramshackle documentary spirit is in line with the Neil Young Archives project, where the performance was first broadcast, and it feels most genuinely political when considered in that context. What began as a quest for high-resolution audio via the much-punchlined Pono player eventually resulted in Young’s own independent, self-updated platform, a full-service site for his music, writing, and videos. And if he loosened his anti-corporate stance by partnering with Amazon on The Times, he holds it strongly at the Archives. He recently announced he would be removing the option for users to log in via Facebook and Google (“Facebook is screwing with our election,” he wrote), further cutting off his corner of the internet from its dominant navigation platforms.
Young has said he chose to release The Times via Amazon “because no one delivers better sound to the masses,” and it’s possible to read some willful perversity into his decision to give them an EP he recorded on an iPad in less than an hour. Whether a sellout move, an ironic statement, or just another example of Young’s decades-long zig-zag through pop music, The Times feels genuine and unforced—an organic expression of whatever he was feeling at the time, in all its weirdness and contradiction. In other words, it’s prime Neil Young.

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The Dallas-based producer and musician sings an ode to the dissected self on their fully-formed debut EP, a metallic amalgam of trip-hop and electronic soul.

Jupiter’s Purse

Dallas-based producer and singer MATTIE draws on electronic, soul, and hip-hop to carve out a woozy, nocturnal space to live. Their debut EP, Jupiter’s Purse, is co-produced by fellow Texas native Black Taffy, whose beats reinforce MATTIE’s voice in hazy, trip-hop-inflected architecture. Beguiling and menacing at once, Jupiter’s Purse announces an artist whose music braces with unreleased tension, keeping you balanced on the edge of volcanic emotion.
The five songs on Jupiter’s Purse are from the point of view of Mhuv, a character MATTIE uses to explore the duality of the self. The process of coming into their own is in constant flux across the EP, full of uncertainties and doubt that spider out into uneasy, eerie songs. The lurching beat and trembling bells on “Cellfish” form a chilling backdrop for MATTIE’s elongated vowels: “Why can’t I admit that I’ve been cell fish?/Why won’t I tell the truth?” On “Human Thing,” which sounds as though it were delivered by a pleading cyborg, they dial into the conflict of using money to maintain a strong sense of self, indicting an omnipresent culture of commodification: “It’s consuming us, I am a witness!” they conclude, voice cracking into a gasp.
MATTIE and Black Taffy form a unique bond here, as the latter amplifies MATTIE’s hefty alto voice with an unsteady mix of electronic and hip-hop music. Murky synth melodies and washes of string and woodwind samples dot these songs like constellations, with each diffuse element grounded by MATTIE’s commanding, charismatic pull, transmuted and pitch-shifted at will. Their voice filters into a gurgle of feedback on “Out This Bitch,” where MATTIE’s enunciation swiftly changes as they shift further into an anti-establishment mindset: “This world ain’t got nothing for us/Maybe that’s why it bores us/It was before your skin, that black that black that black…” they chant, the word “black” filtered out into a kaleidoscopic echo and a source of vital, ancestral strength.
MATTIE embraces self-dissection throughout the EP, using nervous howls and shrugged-off boasts to express their own inherent validity. On “Cloudts,” the EP’s centerpiece, they create an alien lullaby that shuttles by with a shimmering string sample that sounds ripped out of a Disney movie and dragged through the dirt. Though MATTIE generally uses their music to examine feeling uncomfortable in one’s own skin, here they allow a concession to a more hopeful future. “I didn’t know that rocks were valuable,” they sing over static pops and a glowering melody. “But I am a diamond and let me find out.” That image—a jewel glinting through chipped-away stone—is an appropriate one for Jupiter’s Purse, where even the most off-kilter moment is one of beauty.


The funky and hypnotic fourth album from the Canadian trio coats a suite of warped synth-pop grooves in the lead singer’s slow-talking sleaze.

Zap the Planet

Steven Lind, the singer for the Canadian trio Freak Heat Waves, has the kind of voice you might expect to hear from a talking turtle in a children’s movie. He drawls his words in a cartoonishly low monotone, elongating the last syllable of each line beyond reason (“prove it’s good,” in the song “Let It Go,” becomes “Prooove/It’s gooooood-uh”). In a normal band, a voice like this might seem to be a liability. But on their fourth album, Zap the Planet, Freak Heat Waves dispense with any illusions of the ordinary, concocting a suite of warped synth-pop grooves coated in Lind’s slow-talking sleaze.
It’s their best album to date, if not exactly the sound Freak Heat Waves first became known for. The trio emerged from the Midwestern Canadian prairies a decade ago, amassing a small following in Canada’s art-punk scene and soon performing alongside better-known peers like Preoccupations (then Viet Cong) and Odonis Odonis, with whom they share a label. Following some well-received cassettes, the band’s self-titled debut arrived in 2012, co-produced by the late Christopher Reimer of Women and sharing more than a passing likeness with that band’s serrated post-punk temperament.
On more recent albums, particularly 2018’s Beyond XXXL, Freak Heat Waves veered in the direction of goth rock and synth-heavy industrial. But the songs were often sludgy and a bit muddled, as though the band sought to mimic the texture of their singer’s vocals. Zap the Planet succeeds because of the odd tension between Lind’s dour delivery and the brightest, most exuberant grooves of the band’s career—a trick of contrast that their fellow countryman Leonard Cohen perfected on I’m Your Man. Tellingly, the least compelling tracks here are the two instrumentals, including opener “Off Axis,” a pleasant but perfunctory soundcheck of assorted synth textures. It’s not bad, but sounds like a mere warm-up for what’s to come.
The album apparently owes its vintage electro sound to the band’s increasing interest in analog synths and early MIDI technology. The result is an uncommonly funky and hypnotic album. Fizzy, dueling layers of synths lead the way on highlights like “Busted” and “I’m Zapped”; the tempos are crisper and the production clearer than before, all the better to foreground Lind’s devilish croon. On the album’s centerpiece, “Dripping Visions,” he’s at his best, brooding over an unsettling encounter as the band stacks drum machines and live percussion on top of each other to maximize the pulsating groove. The group sought an arrangement that would be “as groovy as it was off-putting,” and surely succeeded.
Freak Heat Waves’ affinity for sci-fi futurism has been a recurring element—the band routinely cites dystopian films like Robocop and A Clockwork Orange as influences and once described their 2015 song “Design of Success” (which is briefly sampled on Zap the Planet’s “Let It Go”) as a “strange and sexy look into an alien nightclub.” That aesthetic takes over on “I’m Zapped,” in which Lind narrates his descent into some peculiar, perhaps supernatural addiction: “It’s messing with my head/Zapped on my mattress/Zapped on my toilet.” Lyrically, it’s the kind of cheekily paranoid punk song you might expect to find on an early Cramps album.
Yet the record’s title flips it into an active verb—Zap the Planet. It’s a small gesture that crystalizes this band’s implicit mission of making the world a little freakier. Freak Heat Waves remain largely unknown to American audiences, but this album makes a convincing case for making their acquaintance.

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As with all of his best work, the D.C. rapper’s latest finds him grappling with trauma, haunted by the specter of death at every turn.

Covered N Blood

In cities like Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles, a rapper can achieve overnight success, flipping a viral single into 15 minutes of fame or more. In Washington D.C., the runway to stardom has always seemed longer. Artists like Wale and GoldLink spent years toiling in obscurity before their regional goodwill boiled over into the mainstream, while others, like Fat Trel and Tabi Bonney, stalled out despite considerable buzz. None, though, have been tipped as the District’s next breakout star for longer than Shy Glizzy. The southeast D.C. native has been making waves since at least 2012, when he jacked two of Chief Keef’s most iconic beats for his “3Milli” diss; in the following years, he scored minor hits with “Awwsome” and the morbid gospel anthem, “Funeral,” one of 2014’s best rap songs. Glizzy's presumed tipping point came with his acrobatic, show-stopping verse on Goldlink’s surprise 2017 hit “Crew”. But even with that platinum-selling single under his belt, he has remained perennially on the cusp, forever D.C.’s next big thing.
Why hasn’t Shy Glizzy’s career taken off? You could chalk it up to poor timing or bad luck, though there’s also the matter of Glizzy’s voice—a piercing, nasal croak—and his tendency to pulverize words into a slurry before they leave his mouth. There’s no other rapper working who sounds quite like him, but considering the success of unconventional vocalists like Young Thug and Lil Uzi Vert, Glizzy’s moment may have finally arrived. Both of those stars appeared on Glizzy’s debut album—last year’s aptly-titled Fully Loaded—alongside a laundry list of ascendant celebrities, including Gunna, NBA YoungBoy and Smokepurpp. Just a few months later, Glizzy is back with the comparatively pared-back Covered ‘N’ Blood. Clocking in at just 38 minutes and two features, the album feels tighter, more personal, and closer to home than the splashy record that preceded it.
Where Fully Loaded was sleek, understated and occasionally a little sleepy, Covered ‘N’ Blood returns to Glizzy’s comfort zone: deeply pained street rap anchored by minor-key instrumentals and slippery vocal melodies. “Big Dipper” offers a representative sample: Glizzy opens the contemplative, piano-heavy track with the couplet, “I swear there’s too much pain here for one young nigga/Them niggas ain’t got aim, they just like to pull the trigger.” NBA YoungBoy returns for “Bang Bang,” wherein Glizzy compares the paint job of a car to eggnog, dines on “grouper with the head on” and builds a sticky hook out of a tragedy: "Ring ring, I just got a fed call/You know that must mean somebody is dead and gone” (both Glizzy’s collaborator Lor Scoota and close associate 30 Glizzy were gunned down in Baltimore in recent years). Covered ‘N’ Blood’s catchiest song, “Demons,” sounds like it was precision-tooled for car speakers, loud volumes and hot D.C. summers: the track consists of little more than a buzzing bassline, a blocky drum pattern and a distant string sample. It’s one of the most outright fun songs Glizzy has written and yet, even here, the chorus hints at an ever-lurking darkness: “I cut the lights off in my house and I see fucking demons.”
It’s only been a few weeks since the death of Nipsey Hussle, but somehow, Glizzy has already managed to pay tribute to the rapper on record. On “Ridin Down Slauson,” Glizzy rolls down the main drag in Hussle’s beloved Crenshaw neighborhood; struggling to find meaning in yet another senseless death, Glizzy reaffirms his commitment to his craft (“I do this for every young nigga in the hood”). As has been widely noted, Hussle’s legacy runs deeper than rap—his agenda of black ownership and self-determination redefined success for those who looked up to him. “I hope more people can learn from his example, being entrepreneurs and moving differently out here,” Glizzy said of Hussle in a recent interview. "I feel similar to Nipsey because I’ve always stayed around my people, stayed independent and everyone in the game wanted to sign me, just like Nipsey.” Shy Glizzy might not yet be a household name but on Covered ‘N’ Blood, he continues to soldier on, seeking success on his own terms.


Jazz fusion, chamber pop, modern classical—if your awareness of Hornsby stops at the lite-FM radio dial, prepare to be disoriented.

Absolute Zero

Sometime in the last decade, Bruce Hornsby nearly became hip. Give the credit (or blame) to Justin Vernon: After the man behind Bon Iver cited Hornsby as a formative influence, the pianist wound up playing the Eaux Claires Music & Arts Festival in 2016, mingling with The National, Phosphorescent, Jenny Lewis, and Will Oldham. Today, you can hear Hornsby’s influence in the work of wildly popular rock bands like The War on Drugs. For anyone who only associated the pianist with ‘80s heartland rock hits like “The Way It Is,” “Mandolin Rain,” and “The Valley Road,” his indie-rock renaissance might have seemed a little surreal.
Truth be told, Hornsby abandoned Adult Contemporary Rock almost the minute he hit the charts. In 1990—the last year he was a presence on Album Rock radio—he replaced the deceased Brent Mydland in the Grateful Dead, revealing both his jam-band roots and his extensive classically trained chops. Those elements won over a dedicated audience that sustained Hornsby through fallow years, allowing him to experiment with everything from bluegrass to jazz, usually with the support of his band the Noisemakers.
Although a few members of the Noisemakers play on this record, Absolute Zero is officially his first solo album since Spirit Trail, released way back in 1998. Hornsby seizes the opportunity for reinvention, packing Absolute Zero with everything from chamber pop to jazz fusion and modern classical. All of his myriad musical interests are explored here, usually with the assistance of collaborators. Vernon co-writes “Cast-Off”; Jerry Garcia’s old lyricist Robert Hunter pens lyrics for “Take You There (Misty).” Fusion legend Jack DeJohnette lends some asymmetrical rhythms to several tracks. The result is destined to confound anyone whose awareness of Hornsby stops at the lite-FM radio dial.
The DNA of these songs came from a series of discarded and reworked cues Hornsby wrote for the Netflix serialization of Spike Lee’s 1986 feature She’s Gotta Have It. It’s not the only evidence of Hornsby’s resourcefulness: For the album's title track, he repurposed a DeJohnette rhythm track recorded back in 2007 for Camp Meeting, a trio album between the drummer, pianist and bassist Christian McBride. “Echolocation” is dressed with spooky Appalachian stringed instruments and rumbles by on a backwoods thump, while “Never In This House” is the kind of stately ballad that could’ve graced any one of his records since 1986.
This elusiveness, a sly synthesis of past and present as well as acoustic and synthetic instruments, is the key to Hornsby’s music and why it endures. Listen closely to his big hits with The Range, and it’s clear that the rhythms are all electronic; even “Mandolin Rain,” whose very title conveys acoustic purity, rolls along to the crisp snap of a drum machine. From the outset of his career, Hornsby embraced modernity, which means the real difference with Absolute Zero is that he’s no longer exclusively interested in writing pop songs.
Melody remains essential to his music, but it’s threaded within dazzling cloistered chords and majestically eerie string arrangements. The lyrics are fractured and elliptical in a way that recalls Van Dyke Parks,  borrowing imagery from science fiction and the natural world to evoke emotional disconnect. It is heady material, and in other hands it might seem overwrought or awkward. But Hornsby plays with elegance, at ease with both his traces of hipness and essential squareness. It's a confidence that arrives with both comfort and age and it's what unifies all the disparate elements of Absolute Zero, shaping the album into a testament to the full range of Hornsby’s gifts.


Kurt Vile collaborator Steve Gunn was paired with transgressive folk-rock explorer Mike Cooper for the most recent installment of RVNG Intl.'s FRKWYS series. The seven-song result might feel at first like a grab bag, as the pair moves between a number of styles, techniques, and instruments, but Cantos de Lisboa isn’t nearly as sporadic or assorted as it initially seems.

Steve Gunn / Mike Cooper: Cantos de Lisboa

Cantos de Lisboa

Steve Gunn hadn’t been born by the time Mike Cooper decided he was done with folk-rock. After becoming one of Britain’s brightest young blues pickers and declining an invitation to join the then-fledgling Rolling Stones in the early 60s, Cooper made a string of singer-songwriter records for the British label Pye. That relationship both climaxed and closed in 1972, with the release of Cooper’s outlandish The Machine Gun Co.—the last in a series of three transgressive folk-rock explorations, where blooming free jazz and spiraling psychedelics disrupted any simple, sing-and-strum notions. Cooper lost his record contract and, during the next four decades, let his musical investigation and imagination run amuck. He still played the blues, yes, but he also mined electroacoustic improvisation and Hawaiian music, operatic composition and Brion Gysin-like cut-ups. Folk-rock? Nope. Cooper bequeathed that mantle long ago, only for it to be taken up in recent years by the young Gunn and scores of his peers. Once again, they’ve worked to expand the sounds that such a drab term might entail, picking up the antagonism that once made Cooper an outcast.
But late last year, despite the four decades and the ocean that separates them, Cooper and Gunn rendezvoused in a Portugal airport, launching 10 days of shows and a retreat in a Lisbon studio. The partnership came as a commission from RVNG Intl., the New York-based label that has issued a string of similar one-off encounters—Blues Control, meet Laraaji; Emeralds, meet Alan Howarth—as the aptly named FRKWYS series during the last five years. The edict was simple: Make some new music, and attempt to sort it into a record.
The seven-song result, Cantos de Lisboa, might feel at first like a grab bag, as the pair moves freely between a number of styles, techniques, and instruments. They’re both best known for their intimate voices and their intricate picking, but they sing very little here and surround their guitars with a host of distractions. While they begin with twin forlorn guitars on opener “Saudade Do Santos-o-Vehlo”, they shift to scraped gongs and scrambled electronics for “Song for Charlie”, or at least most of it. “Pony Blues” showcases two dexterous players, winding through lithe licks with the agility of the Shetlands of which Cooper sings. The focus of “Saramago”, though, is that of outré players, with scraped strings and manipulated notes, ruptured harmonics and dissonant strums suggesting the acoustic improvisations of Derek Bailey and Eugene Chadbourne.
Restless, career-long collaborators on their own, Gunn and Cooper twirl across the electrostatic cello lines of Helena Espvall during “Pena Panorama”. Gunn sings at the end, offering up a bucolic refrain about perseverance. It’s the closest the album comes to the folk-rock that serves as Cooper and Gunn respective calling card, but that most accessible bit comes bound to four minutes of impish abstraction—fitting symbols for both careers.
Beyond the sonics, though, Cantos de Lisboa isn’t nearly as sporadic or assorted as it might seem. In a brief introductory essay, Cooper notes that he and Gunn attended a concert in a Fado club while in Lisbon. The spirit of that wonderfully sad music pervades and links these numbers. It’s at times obvious; drifting invocation “Saudade Do Santos-o-Vehlo” takes its name from saudade, the emotional essence that bands Fado together. But you can hear that same doubt lingering inside “The Enchanted Moura”, a brief and bristling cut that creeps with uncertainty. Cooper, who lives in Rome, and Gunn, from Philadelphia, seem to offer a multilingual celebration of the blues—not as a musical style, but as a condition bound to the sounds of more than the Mississippi Delta or the Brits who salvaged that music. A feeling holds Cantos de Lisboa together where its music cannot.
Results of forced, paid-for collaborations like those on FRKWYS or the dormant In the Fishtank can be spotty, plagued by outside expectations and prevailing legacy. A curator hears something connecting two artists or ensembles on record, but in person, those aspects don’t sync into serendipity to make new music worth hearing. Within both series, examples of ideas that worked on paper and fizzled in person abound. But Cantos feels more like the start of a spark than a sample of a bankrupt idea. Gunn, 37, is an active collaborator, sure, from supporting songwriter Kurt Vile to exploring arid blues with drummer John Truscinski. He hasn’t had the time or the space to plunder far-flung genres and idioms the same way Cooper has. Here, the elder feels like the guide, leading an able and adaptive acolyte into moments that extend Gunn’s previous grasp. Cantos makes you want to know how far he will eventually go. There’s nothing quite as wild and discursive in Gunn’s catalogue as “Lampedusa 2013”, for instance, an abrasive philippic that might pass for Current 93. It’s one of this set’s most surprising and exciting bits, a moment that mostly makes you hope there’s more to come.


The Canadian composer’s first new material since the 2016 rediscovery of his 1986 LP Keyboard Fantasies is a joyous, hope-filled showcase of his singular voice and healing vision.

The Ones Ahead

The world has never been noisier. For people who grew up uncertain of being heard—and for people of color, queer people, and, most especially, Black trans folks, who grew up certain of being deliberately misunderstood, even silenced—not all the noise is good. But for more than half a century, Beverly Glenn-Copeland has been offering an alternate tuning.
His first two albums fused personal poetics to avant-jazz-folk; he spent the next 15 years or so split between playing in the house band of a beloved children’s television show and living deep in rural Canada, where his soundtrack was the woods. Meanwhile, the universe was feeding him songs through what he calls the Universal Broadcasting System. He made an album of them, 1986’s spellbinding, DX7-driven Keyboard Fantasies, whose mysteries found receptive ears when Invisible City Editions reissued it some three decades later. His groovy album Primal Prayer, originally released under the artist name Phynix in 2004, was reissued. There was also a reverent documentary, a career-spanning compilation, a live album documenting the astonishing strength of his versatile voice, a remix album proving few could better his originals, a Polaris Prize. His echoes were everywhere, old and ever new.
The Ones Ahead is the first album of new material since all this happened. It’s a remarkably assured statement of purpose. Crafted in collaboration with music director John Herberman, with chart arrangements by Carlie Howell and performances by Howell and other members of Indigo Rising, who back Glenn-Copeland on his rapturous live shows, the album is largely a staging ground for his vision and his voice.
And what a voice. “Harbour (Song for Elizabeth)” makes a warm bed of fretless bass and crisp, resonant piano. He confesses to his wife, “My heart aches/When your tears flow.” His vibrato is a blanket that stretches as he sings, then rumples as he sinks into a lower register: “But then spring breaks/And that’s all I know.” Love, queer love, is a force of nature. “Love Takes All” is darker, bolder. Drums rumble, a guitar slides like rain down trees. “What was grand or small,” he proclaims, as the word grand sounds like it’s stretching his throat into canyons, “love just takes it all.” Doesn’t it just. Doesn’t love just require everything to last.
Here, like Kate Bush in her Aerial days, Glenn-Copeland threads the quotidian and the mystical into knots. They secure him in “Lakeland Angel” as he and the titular siren trade serenades; the couple need each other, and tend to that need as simply as a hand splaying out across a keyboard, forming chords. The ties to Christian mysticism or Narnia LARPing might be a little too tight, for some, on “Prince Caspian’s Dream,” with its washes of cymbals and whistles. But these days, it might be forgiven to slip into dreaming of other worlds while dreaming up better versions of this one. One might, in the middle of a backlash summer in which friends are losing loved ones and enduring violence and wondering just how bad things might get still, experience a loneliness forgiven by Glenn-Copeland’s voice. Or at least I felt I was, while listening.
Elsewhere, Glenn-Copeland builds homes for himself and his loved ones in rhythm. Opener “Africa Calling” brings it home with call-and-response murmurings, lusciously recorded rustling percussion, and some lovely, bittersweet jazz piano toward the end. “Stand Anthem” is a rabble-rouser: A strident march begins, a dignified melody follows, and Glenn-Copeland leads a chorus towards action, articulating modern ills with confrontational earnestness. “People of the Loon” is more surreal, but no less committed to refusing cynicism. When I talked to him in 2020, he told a story of kayaking on a silent lake, and suddenly being surrounded by a circle of dancing birds. This song is itself a circle of mallet instruments, drums, streams of strings. “Come a little bit closer,” he and his group chant, “for each there must be room.” Like the best psychedelic visions, it’s a little silly, a little scary, equal parts pagan poetry and political organizing. (Get your samplers ready.)
The title track waltzes in with a gentle appeal for personal agency and collective responsibility intertwined with an almost biblical prophecy. “’Neath the starfields burnin’/I see the ones, I see the ones ahead/Circlin’ on the river,” he sings. “This world is our combined imagination/Your life, a personal creation.” Listen to other stories, then make up your own. In the astonishing closer, “No Other,” Glenn-Copeland refuses to accept the alienation this lousy world wants for him, for us. “I am a child of this world,” he proclaims. Amid martial drums and in marital bliss, and there’s that damn whistle again, he hears those who came before and he foresees us following his lead. It sounds turbulent and so sincere.
It’s deeply moving to witness Glenn-Copeland survive, to watch the next generations find their freedom in him. When the spotlight found him, it felt, in part, one of those rare moments when a true genius—a Black, Canadian trans man in his seventies who made one of the best electronic records of the 20th Century, who could coo like Billie Holiday and croon like Frank Sinatra and command like Buffy Saint-Marie and run like Beyoncé and probably even, if he wanted to, rip your soul in half like Diamanda Galás but instead chose to heal it like nobody else—was finally getting his due. Beverly Glenn-Copeland is an unprecedented talent who reminds us that each of us is rare. There’s so much more to hear, so many more of us to listen to. The Universal Broadcasting System is still switched on.


Warren’s complex, unwinding melodies shine on her latest album, and while the concept views love through an astrological lens, the lyrics expose life’s crushing banality.

Gemini II

Johanna Warren sometimes seems like a psychic medium moonlighting as a songwriter. The Portland native makes dreamy folk music that sparkles and sprawls with new age flourishes and crystal shop percussion, inspired by tarot cards, metaphysics, and the monastic teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. Even beyond her recorded work, Warren comes off like a person radiating with cosmic wisdom to the point that it starts leaking outward, seemingly unprompted. In an interview at SXSW last year, she offered this advice: “If you just make yourself really bright and shiny, everything around you becomes a reflective surface that shines back at you.” (The question she’s responding to—“How’s your South By experience so far?”).
Gemini II is the second album Johanna Warren has composed about a relationship (with a Gemini), and it mirrors its predecessor. Both feature nine interlinked songs, with Warren playing a wide variety of instruments including guitar, flute, mellotron, and synths. While the concept views love through an astrological lens, her lyrics expose life’s crushing banality—the things that make us look to the stars for answers in the first place. In “Cause or Effect,” she sings to a protagonist left bored and self-conscious when everyone at the party steps out for a smoke. “You got nothing else to do/Your phone is broken,” she sings as a rush of harmony enters, as if to mock the weight of such unglamorous ennui.
While recording prolifically as a solo artist, Warren has also developed a career accompanying folks like Julie Byrne and Iron & Wine, acts who’ve gained notoriety for just how unaccompanied their music sounds. You get the sense that Warren’s become a sought-after collaborator not for her ability to blend into the background but for her knowledge of exactly how to complement a song while maintaining its sense of solitude, tapping into an inherent aura. This skill makes the relatively brief Gemini II feel dynamic and sweeping and its songs consistently surprising.
In the moody opener, “Hopelessness Has Done Nothing For Me,” Warren textures a date night pep talk with gothic cobwebs of piano and guitar. When the drums kick in, they conjure the rush of road-trip indie rock, a subtle gust of familiarity and momentum. More straightforward songs like the strum-along ballad “Boundaries” also move in strange ways. With a melody that finds the middle ground between Red House Painters’ Songs for a Blue Guitar and Taylor Swift’s Speak Now, Warren breaks in and out of character, injecting its sense of calm with conversational asides. You are unlikely to hear a more beautiful song that also includes the phrase, “so fucking stoked.”
Both as a guitarist and a vocalist, Warren has a knack for complex, unwinding melodies. The subtle “Mine to Take,” with its weary double-tracked vocals, taps into the mystical Laurel Canyon sound of Judee Sill. British folk serves as an inspiration for the more ambitious compositions: the hypnotic “inreverse” and the closing “Was It Heaven.” Wise and stately, these songs provide the album’s major moments of resolution. “I hope you’ll fly again,” Warren sings in the closing lines of “Was It Heaven.” “With you, I was infinitely lost.” As the departing sentiment of her Gemini saga, it offers a sense of peace, but Warren knows most journeys don’t end so clean. We never stop searching for answers: It’s what keeps all our most trusted songwriters—and psychics—in business.


Lindsey Jordan’s exquisite second album documents love in all stages, but mostly in disrepair. She takes on a larger and poppier sound while keeping her songwriting dazzlingly sharp and passionate.

Valentine

Lindsey Jordan’s second album as Snail Mail is for anyone who’s been bloodied by Cupid’s arrow. Offered up by a self-professed but seemingly unlucky romantic, Valentine documents love in all stages, but mostly in disrepair. Its palette extends beyond pinks and reds: There’s the envious green of seeing an old love with someone new, the consuming black of bottoming out, and, occasionally, the clear blue of weightless bliss, however fleeting. Throughout, Jordan adheres to the credo that she first announced as a rhetorical question—“Is there any better feeling than coming clean?”—on Lush, the searing debut that turned her from a suburban teenager with wicked guitar chops into a beloved indie frontwoman.
Jordan, now 22, says she fielded 15 different label offers while she was still in high school. After signing with Matador and releasing Lush in 2018, she became a public figure and a magnet for parasocial attachment, drawing hordes of fans who saw themselves in her queerness and keen sensitivity. Amid this whirlpool of attention, Jordan found that her personal boundaries were too permeable; the overexposure caused enough harm to land her in rehab last year, an experience she mentions offhandedly once on Valentine. Afterwards, she handed her social media accounts to an assistant and hired a media trainer to help her deflect prying journalists. “Those parasitic cameras, don’t they stop to stare at you?” she sings over a foreboding synth in Valentine’s opening bars, pointing to the parts of success that give her pause.
But now that she has patched the holes from which her personal life seeped out into the public, her music, more than ever, functions as the release valve. The title track and lead single sounds like the inevitable eruption: Jordan blows up the chorus with an impassioned wail (“Why’d you wanna erase me, darling valentine?”) and surging guitar, her loudness proof that she will not be erased, damn it. Valentine retains the exquisite vulnerability that made Snail Mail’s first record so compelling, but Jordan’s sound is more forceful, her touchstones more varied, her writing more toned. On Lush, she explored the expressive but limited possibilities of a three-piece rock band; on Valentine, along with co-producer Brad Cook (Indigo De Souza, Waxahatchee), she flirts with pop—sharpening her hooks, reaching for the synths and strings. Where parts of Lush revealed themselves slowly, saving their secrets for intent listening, Valentine is more immediate, grabbing your gaze and refusing to let go for 32 straight minutes.
Swept up in the early-pandemic migration that sent scores of twentysomethings back to their parents’ homes, Jordan wrote much of Valentine on the floor of her childhood bedroom, the same place that she penned her early songs of longing and languishing. Now as then, love is an all-consuming force in her music, but she writes with a deeper understanding of its destructive potential and a willingness to articulate it in arresting terms. Romance and alcohol are twin toxins on Valentine, each amplifying the other’s damaging effects, each informing Jordan’s perspective on the other. “You wanna leave a stain, like a relapse does,” she sings to a ruinous former flame on “Ben Franklin.” On “Headlock,”she’s mid-bender and missing an ex, “drinking just to taste her mouth.” A wordless murmur of stacked, sighing harmonies breathes relief into the song, only to be followed by the album’s darkest material, a wrenching admission of suicidal ideation.
Valentine takes us fearlessly to these extremes. “I have a really hard time writing from any place other than complete honesty within myself,” Jordan said recently, noting the lasting impact of her childhood compulsion to confess. But talking about music strictly in terms of confession often erases the skill that undergirds it, particularly when that skill belongs to young women. To confess is to tell, yet conventional wisdom says it’s better to show; Jordan does both, painting vivid images and annotating them with earnest declarations. In a haze of thudding percussion and distortion on “Automate,” we find her unsteady at a party, fumbling to kiss a stranger and pretend it’s someone else. “I’ll never find another love like this,” she laments, a recurring sentiment in her music. On “Mia,” she walks us down Broadway and spots an ex preening on the way to her new partner’s apartment. “Lost love so strange,” Jordan warbles over orchestral swells, an assessment that feels profound in her gripping voice, always straining and seamed.
Some of Valentine’s best moments come when Jordan’s textures are as bold as her emotions. “Ben Franklin” is an infectious highlight; come for the sturdy bass groove and the delicious irony of “Got money/I don’t care about sex” in the verse; stay for Jordan’s bratty delivery of “huh, honey?,” her melody doubled by wiggling synth and backed up with guest vocals from Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield on the chorus. The slinky “Forever (Sailing)” brings trip-hop atmospherics to a tale of betrayal, borrowing its chorus from a 1979 song by the Swedish pop singer Madleen Kane. “Doesn’t obsession just become me?” Jordan sings knowingly here, handing down her thesis statement.
Obsession has its upsides; resist its pull and you’ll miss delirious highs. “Light Blue,” a cozy daydream of close-mic’d acoustic guitar and glowing strings that stands apart as Valentine’s only unburdened love song, contains this tingling admission of affection: “I wanna wake up early every day/Just to be awake in the same world as you.” Though something of an outlier in both its simplicity and its sentiment, this song is a smart addition to the set—it demonstrates what’s at stake when Jordan sings about love that she’d die for.
But obsession—whether you’re on the giving or receiving end—is also exhausting. On the same song, Jordan offers her partner a choice. “We can sail the ocean blue,” she sings, then gets real: “Or just lie down.” She shows a similar tendency toward rest in about half the songs on the album, most memorably on the delicate “c. et. al.”: “Even with a job that keeps me moving/Most days I just wanna lie down.” Jordan is hardly the first young star to write about the toll of her chosen path; Clairo, Jordan’s friend and an artist who is often spoken about in the same breath, did it on her own sophomore effort this year. But what’s exciting here is that fatigue has not muted Jordan or tamped her growth; instead of lying down, she shakes it off and keeps moving, chasing big sounds and big feelings. Even when she’s exhausted, Jordan is exuberant.


California native Morgan Delt is a homegrown musician whose debut evades convenient pigeonholing. The collection is a carefully built mosaic of jangly power pop, fuzzed out martian rock, and did-it-myself B-movie soundtracking that dissolves into a melted mess.

Morgan Delt

Our world is an impossibly and perhaps unnecessarily connected one, a place where household cats have Instagram feeds and most details of a life turn up after a deep Googling. No matter how much one attempts to stay off the grid, eventually something comes up. For example: The second page of Google results for “Morgan Delt” includes a character page for Morgan Delt, the protagonist of an obscure 1966 Vanessa Redgrave-starring film called Morgan—A Suitable Case of Treatment. Wikipedia describes him as “a failed irresponsible leftist artist” who’s obsessed with Karl Marx and gorillas; a characteristic quote from IMDB is something like, “[places skeleton on bed] Man is born to sorrow…”
If this is not California native Morgan Delt’s chosen pseudonym, it’s awfully telling of an interesting upbringing. He’s a homegrown musician whose debut self-titled album (which includes much of an earlier limited-edition cassette release) evades convenient pigeonholing. There’s the deal with the name, and then there's this: In one of the few interviews with Delt, the interviewer asks him to explain a song called "Barbarian Kings". "I did have a story in mind with that song," he responds. "I don't want to say too much about it though because what people imagine is usually more interesting. Your version is better!"
So, let's go ahead and imagine. In this album it’s easy to hear a band like the Byrds, who dabbled with jingle-jangle proto-power pop, fuzzed out martian rock, genteel country lament, and more during a five-year stretch in which members were swapped in and out depending on the mood. Rather than split time between such distinct states, Delt takes his armloads of sources—beyond the Byrds, you might describe the field of influence as sunny and stoned—and blends them into a variegated, melted mess. The result is a carefully built and naturalistic mosaic—you can hear the influences dissolving into each other even as the resulting sounds are crisp and memorable, rather than the half-baked invention of someone with a killer record collection. Listen to the taped-together percussion on opener "Make My Grey Brain Green", which rides a scratchy bass line and flowers into something like the moment when Dorothy's black-and-white world goes RGB. There's the Morricone-meets-Jodorowsky acid drone of "Barbarian Kings", the cyclical wobble of “Little Zombies”, the way "Chakra Sharks" rattles and crashes through a hornet’s nest of guitars into a wailing refrain of "Bye bye, farewell." Throughout the album there’s a heightened, eerie quality to his vocals; the feeling is something like an asylum patient waving to a car as it recedes over the horizon.
That's what I hear, at least. The whole album is so impressionistic and free-floating that you'll likely hear something else, as Delt intended. Projecting where he might go from here, it's not difficult to think of a band like Tame Impala, who temper spacey sprawl with more accessible songwriting. Future development doesn't have to be the point, of course; this album is fully-formed from first listen and begs return trips. There's another interaction from that interview that seems relevant: Asked if he believes in God, Delt simply replies, "No." If the faithless create their own meaning rather than wait for divine guidance, consider this an album that forces you to create your own attachments and associations. Even so, the artist is always present, elevating Morgan Delt from a wispy whatever into a clear statement of intent: It might not be obvious what you're supposed to hear, but you're going to hear something.


The eclectic new album from French DJ and producer Joakim is unified only in its consistent oddity. He avoids conventional song structures, drawing inspiration from new age, funk, and krautrock.

Samurai

For much of his career, the French producer/DJ Joakim has primed his audience for jarring stylistic switches. Scan his wide-ranging credit list: This is a man who has helped mix Cassius’ dance music as well as a tribute to atmospheric soundtrack master John Carpenter, who has reworked both Tiga’s lurid house and J.J. Cale’s adult contemporary. He’s covered William Onyeabor in addition to Neil Young. But despite Joakim’s mutability, the 40-year-old has always returned to a home base in the neighborhood of disco and rock on his recordings, grounding his capricious tendencies with a groove or a backbeat.
However, Joakim’s latest trick is to mostly abandon any expectation of straightforward dance-rock on Samurai. Some precedent for this could be cobbled together from his past albums’ subtler moments, which were occasionally overshadowed by overtly adrenaline-boosting tracks. These include the gurgling synth ramp-up “Chapter 1,” which kicked off 2014’s Tropics of Love, and especially “Peter Pan Over the Bronx,” “Palo Alto,” and “Tanabata,” three songs that defined the whimsical side of 2007’s Monsters & Silly Songs. Other clues about *Samurai’*s origins were provided by Joakim himself, who put together a Soundcloud mixtape of his influences, which he said “range from new age to yacht rock, from ’80s synth-based funk to Japanese electronic avant-garde, from krautrock to futuristic dystopian electronic music.”
Accordingly, the producer frequently avoids conventional song structures on Samurai. So don’t show up looking for the reassuring waves of most house or techno, or the comfort of verse-chorus-verse pop. There’s not much singing on the album, and the vocals are often hard to make out. This music is placid, uninterested in using speed as an easy gimmick to get your attention. Instead, dodges and destabilizations are common.
In “Mind Bent,” the synths level up slowly—imagine stretching and pulling Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness” to the consistency of taffy—and a long tail of drums clatters and knocks about. This builds suspense, but Joakim never delivers a payoff. “Cannibale Pastorale” is filled with blipping, chirping noises, like a pack of gossiping dolphins or chattering R2-D2s. These begin to acquire a beauty of their own after a while, but then Joakim interjects a crass barrage of drums, souring the song’s peaceful qualities.
Though Samurai can sometimes feel like an art-school exercise in unpredictability, the majority of the music is easy on the ears. And it never stays in one place for long, so anything grating soon passes you by. There are rivulets of watery saxophone, and a handful of cheerful, bass-popping funk riffs that could have introduced segments on a local news channel in the ’80s. There are claps of distant thunder, bird sounds, and genial, wildly unthreatening metallic noises that suggest wind chimes and dinner gongs. Freed from the desire to make people move, Joakim put together a record that’s unified in its oddity.


On his 13th studio album, Tricky translates newfound contentment into songs that fail to live up to the risk-taking example of his early work.

ununiform

The album of domestic bliss is notoriously difficult to pull off. We may wish our musical idols long and happy lives, but the shameful reality is that we generally prefer to hear the fruits of their struggles rather than their reflections on happiness. It comes as a particular surprise that ununiform, the 13th studio album from the British rapper Tricky, is billed as “a journey into happiness and contentment.” This, after all, is a musician whose debut album, Maxinquaye—a record he would later describe as his “fuck you to the world”—was inspired by his late mother, while his second official album, a record shot through with creeping dread and panic, lived up to its title, Pre-Millennium Tension.
It turns out that Tricky’s idea of happiness is rather different from the run of the mill, tied up both with the acceptance of death and the pursuit of financial freedom. References to death run throughout ununiform, notably on “Dark Days” and “When We Die,” and the album is the first in many years that Tricky hasn’t recorded quickly to pay off a debt. The result is 13 songs where gothic lyrical themes adorn ponderous electronic beats and spectral guitars, and Tricky’s own past features heavily. Martina Topley-Bird, whose eerily angelic voice had such an impact on those brilliant early Tricky albums, returns to add vocals to “When We Die,” while Tricky has referred to “The Only Way” as “Hell Is Round the Corner, Part 2.”
Tricky has more than earned the right to revisit his own past. He is better placed than anyone else to do it: His brilliantly recognizable voice—a guttural, catch-in-the-throat whisper that frequently sounds close to tears—means that no one else can do Tricky quite like Tricky does. And it is a joy to hear his contrasting interplay with Topley-Bird resurrected on “When We Die,” by some distance the best song on the album, and a hugely moving reflection on mortality.
The problem is that the production on ununiform struggles to match the raw, naive ingenuity of Tricky’s early music, instead suggesting the rather basic electronic beats of 2014’s Adrian Thaws. Tricky used to make music like no one else, whether that’s because he didn’t understand the fundamentals of production or simply refused to bow to its conventions. Mark Saunders, who produced Maxinquaye with Tricky, described his experience as “think of how to make a record, then forget everything you've learned.” ununiform, however, fails to live up to its convention-busting title, with production that is more likely to raise a shrug of the shoulders than a gasp of incredulity.
“Armor” could be the work of mid-2000s Goldfrapp (whose singer, Alison Goldfrapp, contributed vocals to Maxinquaye) or any of the glammy electro-pop acts who trailed in their wake, while the EDM-ish shuffle of “Same As It Ever Was” would raise few eyebrows if your younger cousin knocked it out in an early Ableton production session. Elsewhere, the specter of the xx—a band who, to be fair, would probably have been described as “post-Tricky” had they emerged in the late ’90s—looms large in the sparse guitar lines of “New Stole” or “Wait For Signal.”
At worst, Tricky doesn’t just sound uninspired, he sounds downright conventional. His cover of Hole’s “Doll Parts” (renamed “Doll”) is the absolute nadir: Tricky has a history of recording transformative cover versions, from the Cure’s “Lovecats” to Britney Spears’ “Piece of Me,” that re-write the internal logic of the song. But “Doll” is horribly misjudged, swapping the original’s splenetic rage for pretty-in-pink, wine-bar soul. “It’s Your Day,” meanwhile, uses the seemingly original tactic of employing a Kazakhstani rapper, Scriptonite, only to iron out any irregularities under an indistinct trap beat. The chorus, too, is painfully thin, with lines like, “It’s your day/Today/We’re here/We stay,” dragged out to imply a kind of significance that simply isn’t there.
For all this, ununiform is far from a lost cause. The lolloping “Bang Boogie” proves that Tricky can still program a head-nodding beat, and “New Stole” is transformed into a fine example of baroque electronic pop by a fantastically insouciant vocal performance from Tricky protégé Francesca Belmonte. But the best songs on ununiform are those where Tricky consciously relives his distant past: namely the tenderly haunting “When We Die” and “The Only Way,” a song whose billowing strings and jazzy piano licks suggest Tricky teaming up with Air for a supper-club career retrospective. These songs raise the intriguing idea of Tricky in his Paul McCartney / Tom Jones / Elvis Presley years, offering largely faithful, prettified takes on the music of his early period. It’s an unashamedly retro move, but it seems to suit Tricky well in his third decade as a musician. ununiform may come nowhere near to the jaw-dropping impact of those early Tricky albums. But buried deep in his 13th studio release, Tricky may just have sown the seeds of a new musical contentment.


Senegal’s legendary Orchestra Baobab return with their first record in a decade—a tribute to the group’s longtime member Ndiouga Dieng, who passed away late last year.

Orchestra Baobab: Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng

Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng

When a new nightclub opened in Dakar, Senegal in 1970, its owners had prudence in naming the spot Baobab Club, after one of the world’s longest living trees. Members of the country’s famous Star Band broke off and settled in as the new club’s house band, and much like their namesake, Orchestra Baobab has enjoyed a similar longevity, now nearing the half-century mark. Percussionists Balla Sidibe and Mountaga Koite, bassist Charlie Ndiaye, and saxophonist Issa Cissoko have kept the core of the group intact ever since. (Though the group disbanded from 1987-2001 and only reunited at the instance of fellow Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour and World Circuit producer Nick Gold.)
Masters of Senegalese pop and mbalax, Cuban rhumbas, American jazz, and more during their heyday, their return in the 21st century was a welcome one. They were lauded as heroes, having the likes of Youssou N’Dour and Buena Vista All-Stars’ Ibrahim Ferrer lend their voices to the group’s comeback album—not to mention Dave Matthews and Trey Anastasio making a documentary about their pilgrimage to Africa to jam with them. Ten years after their last album, 2007’s Made in Dakar, Baobab returns with a tribute to the group’s longtime griot Ndiouga Dieng, who passed away late last year.
Opener “Foulo” shows the legendary group’s prowess in a manner that sounds effortless and unfussy. A rhumba beat gets bolstered with horn lines that gently lilt upwards and then corkscrew down with purpose, thanks to the two saxophones of Cissoko and Thierno Koite. Amid the group’s longtime movements, newly added kora player Abdouleye Cissoko nimbly matches the group’s balance, being buoyant and rhythmically durable at once. His kora—brought in to occupy the space left by guitarist Barthelemy Attisso, who is now a lawyer in Togo—then takes the lead on “Fayinkounko,” dovetailing with the timbales and bright guitar lines. On “Alekouma,” the kora opens with a blinding run, before slowing to provide a gentle shimmer to a ballad about fallen warriors, the lines a poetic nod to the passing of Dieng.
In 1979, potent Baobab vocalist Thione Seck left the fold of the group for superstardom of his own. Some 35 years later, Seck rejoins his old bandmates here, lending his telltale growl and plea to the slinking groove of “Sey.” In just a few reverberant notes, Benin guitarist Rene Sowatche (another new addition to the group) finds enough wiggle room amid the percussion and brass to suggest vast cosmic space.
Deep into their career, Dieng at times reveals the advanced stage of its players. The songs are taken a step slower, the rhumbas show a consideration for the pulse as well as the spaces between them, and the themes in some manner or another touch upon mortality. The easeful meter of “Caravana” gets punctuated by Balla Sidibe’s mournful lines, which are about an unmarried village woman whose death means a burial without ceremony in the bush. As the song draws towards its conclusion, Sidibe reminds us of a truth no matter our tongue or country: “Beauty cannot stop you dying/Success cannot stop you dying/Nobody knows their destiny/Death doesn't warn us.” But rather than wallow in such morass, it makes the rhythms of the group feel even airier in their joyful acceptance and defiance.


Information overload and its discontents inspire a guitar-heavy solo album that sounds more like a classic My Morning Jacket record than anything James’ band has released in the past 15 years.

Uniform Distortion

Roots music is, by definition, tethered to the land. It’s a naturalistic sound born of dust and dirt, and it’s a style that a young Jim James fully embodied when he emerged in 1999 as the frontman of Kentucky heartbreakers My Morning Jacket. But in the two decades since then, James’ approach to roots music has become less about preserving certain sepia-toned agrarian aesthetics and more about emulating what actual plant roots do with patient nurturing: They blossom into splendorous flora, sprouting toward the sky in unpredictable shapes and directions. As a result, the restlessly ambitious My Morning Jacket and James’ own increasingly prolific solo career have both flourished, yielding a dense thicket of work that becomes ever more difficult to disentangle as both acts continue to branch out.
But on his third solo album of original material, James prunes away the excess foliage. Pulling an abrupt 180 from the cinematic future-soul of his previous release, 2016’s Eternally Even, he conceived Uniform Distortion as a quick-and-dirty affair. The album finds James fronting a power trio, supported by old pals Seth Kauffman on bass and Dave Givan on drums, and capturing the action with all the corroded fidelity of a cassette bootleg of a live radio session. (The only embellishment comes in the form of alternately soothing and sassy backing vocals from L.A. harmony-folk trio Dear Lemon Trees.) After several years of studio-sculpted experimentation both within and without his main band, James has reclaimed the electric guitar like a lost superpower, making Uniform Distortion closer in spirit to a quintessential My Morning Jacket record than anything that band has actually released in the past 15 years. This is great news for anyone who, back in 2003, was hoping James’ band would become a 21st-century .38 Special, not an American Radiohead.
Uniform Distortion isn’t a simple back-to-basics move, however. Like any sentient being with a smartphone in 2018, James has been feeling overwhelmed by the daily avalanche of information at our thumb-tips, and the coarsening discourse that surrounds it. As he revealed on the podcast “Celebration Rock,” he even went off the grid for a week-long silent retreat in the Northern California woods to clear his head. The album’s front cover, a photo taken from ’70s eco-bible The Last Whole Earth Catalog, presents a this-is-your-brain-on-internet diagnosis—but the music within has a decidedly different tone from the grave, politicized prophecies of Eternally Even. Instead, James embraces simplicity and levity.
While the new album’s deliberately muddy mix foregrounds his squealing leads—taking them to beard-scorching extremes—the most telling sound that pervades this record is laughter. There is James, nearly flubbing the second chorus of the boisterous roadhouse rocker “You Get to Rome” due to a giggling fit, and launching into the Replacements-like chugger “Yes to Everything” with a throaty chortle. When he’s not audibly cracking up, he exploits his full vocal range to comic effect: “Too Be Good to Be True” may be modeled after a ’50s breakup ballad, but it’s hard not to smile when James drops into a bassy, Bowser-worthy serenade.
At times, irreverence can get the best of him: “Out of Time” doesn’t survive its impulsive transition from breezy freeway cruiser to sludgy stoner-metal jam, while the bluesy grind “No Use Waiting” is saddled with a goofy, Zappa-esque spoken-word hook. But Uniform Distortion is a deceptively lighthearted affair, as it taps into the doubt and discontent fueling all the carefree kicks. “Just a Fool” may roll in on a flatbed of boogielicious guitar licks, but it’s a drinking song that longs for a world where we don’t need the bottle to make it through the day. And while the melancholic power-pop missive “Over and Over” may not be a cover of the MC5 classic of the same name, it’s very much a spiritual successor, updating the original’s references to Vietnam and factory-worker unrest with allusions to drone strikes and building walls as it swaps out Rob Tyner’s incendiary rage for James’ weary resignation.
Uniform Distortion abounds with displays of James’ fiery fretwork, but he rarely wields his other signature weapon—that angelic croon that trembles with vulnerability yet can soar high enough to rattle satellites. In the fleeting moments when it does surface, the effect is doubly stunning. Atop the mesmerizing Crazy Horse drift of “No Secrets,” James uses that sky-high coo to summon mounting waves of guitar discord, as the song cycles through its lone verse and chorus with ever-increasing intensity. And in the beautifully crestfallen “Throwback,” a knowing title and a wistful lyrical hook—“When we were young”—serve a song that sounds exactly like the sort of stargazing backwoods elegy James would’ve written when he was young.
Since those early days, James has refused to be pigeonholed as the shaggy-haired Southern-rock revivalist many assumed him to be. Uniform Distortion shows he can easily revert to that mode when the mood strikes, but in this case, he’s conjuring the past as a means to take stock of our current condition. When he sings, “Throw back Thursday to the way that it was,” he’s yearning for a less complicated, more enriching way of life that can’t so easily be accessed through an Instagram hashtag. The ache in his voice says it all: This isn’t about nostalgia, it’s a cry for help.