Over the last decade, Warn Defever has recruited an ever-changing assembly line of musicians to flesh out his mad, perverse ...

His Name Is Alive: Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth

Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth

Over the last decade, Warn Defever has recruited an ever-changing assembly line of musicians to flesh out his mad, perverse fantasies under the His Name Is Alive moniker. All of his albums before 1996's Stars on ESP are out-of-print in the U.S., so it's hard to trace Defever (once Warren) back to his lo-fi goth-folk-ethnic-guitar-pop roots without paying over $20 for an import. What is available, therefore, is His Name Is Alive's evolutionary pattern over the past five years.
Stars on E.S.P. was a dreamy, occasionally psychedelic pop record, toying with everything from stripped acoustic folk-pop to a complete structural replication of "Good Vibrations"-- with a different melody and different lyrics altogether. It was also the last album to extensively feature the charmingly girlish Karin Oliver on lead vocals. 1998's Ft. Lake then subtly throttled fans with a full-on gutsy rock attack, although admittedly, it's nothing as fully straightforward as that; the entire record is peppered with synthesized oddities, not to mention a couple of trip-hop tracks to mix it up. Although Oliver made a few appearances on the record, soul vocalist Lovetta Pippen generally took the melodic reins. Then in '99, Defever had the gall to go off and release a solo record entitled I Want You to Live One Hundred Years, taking lo-fi to a new level by recording most of the old-timey yet original folk material to Edison wax cylinder.
On the latest outing, Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth, His Name Is Alive consists solely of Warn Defever and Lovetta Pippen. How do we know? Well, it's simple really; they're the only two people who have photos on resident 4AD graphic artist Vaughan Oliver's gorgeously fitting artwork, not to mention a terribly cheesy pun to cement the notion: "LOVE & WAR." The record opens with Pippen's characteristic croon, but if you weren't told this were His Name Is Alive, it would take a while to guess that this music spilled from Defever's warped mind. Three quarters of Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth consist of a time warp back to the mid-90s, when slow-jam R&B; was innocent and carefree, while the rest is a mix between sparse ballads and a couple hints at traditional blues.
Go back and read that again. No, wait, you don't have to. I'll just write it again: Carefree, mid-90s slow-jam R&B...; for which Warn Defever is responsible. Madness! Granted, it's not that much of a surprise that he's off doing something completely different. What is a surprise is that three years after a record of rootsy pop/rock, and only two years after a country-folk throwback, he's decided to take on Pippen for a collaboration and dive into a project of this particular genre. The curious thing is that they often succeed.
It's quite a shame, then, that not every track is up to par. Ironically enough, a song called "Nothing Special" opens the collection by squandering the album's best material in its first four minutes. Defever's sparse acoustic arrangements and drum machine beats, characteristic of most of the album's remainder, work best around a gorgeous melody such as this one. Pippen's subdued, harmonized laments in the priceless chorus come off as earnestly touching: "I've been in the storm so long/ Nothing special anymore/ Angel sings from another world/ That's all I hear anymore."
The only other success of this caliber comes later with "One Year", the previous version of which can be found in wax-cylinder folk-style on Defever's solo album. Truly funky wah-guitar, clavinet and reversed acoustic strumming are used to the track's advantage, making for a joyously indulgent breakdown in the coda. The rest of the R&B; excursions are pleasant enough, but as Pippen sang herself, nothing special. The melodies become a bit samey and, by the ending title track, appear somewhat hackneyed. The only other guilty pleasure of this dominant style is on the slightly over-long, slightly trip-hop "Write My Name in the Groove", in which Pippen sings, in a melody recalling Stars on E.S.P.'s more restrained moments, "If I'm quiet, I can hear your heart/ When I'm up on ya."
The two other notable moments on Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth are a true 12-bar blues homage, enigmatically titled "Karins Blues", and a decelerated, beatless, acoustic version of "Are We Still Married", originally penned for the 1992 HNIA record Home Is in Your Head. The latter is the most beautiful moment on the record, with gently plucked acoustic guitar weaving in and out of haunting piano chords and string accompaniment as Pippen lends true emotion to the record's best lyrics: "I'm kind of getting shot at/ I'm kind of getting hurt.../ This is your last life/ Take me where you want to go."
The ambition and daring that Warn Defever continually displays in his work, with His Name Is Alive and otherwise, is admirable. His willingness to plunge head-first into a foreign style shows his versatility and knowledge for creating authentic soundscapes of any kind, and his enthusiastic collaborative spirit is infectious as well. While I can't fully recommend Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth as an entirely successful release, I can fervently encourage a closer investigation into the rest of his brilliantly eccentric catalog, a look out for his upcoming work, and maybe even a second glance at this record just to see what he's up to now.


On her debut for Berlin’s Ostgut Ton label, the Spanish-born producer trades industrial techno for more unpredictable hybrids drawn from hyperpop, trip-hop, and IDM.

A World of Service

Silvia Jiménez Alvarez, better known as the Spanish-born, Berlin-based electronic musician Jasss, has hidden languages within her music. In a recent interview, Alvarez said of her debut on Ostgut Ton, “Every track, in some way, has to do with having feelings that you are unable to articulate.” Alvarez uses her music as a vehicle to understand miscommunication itself. In the process, the erstwhile techno DJ and producer has rearranged the typical tropes that people may have expected of her.
On Alvarez’ 2017 album Weightless, she delivered an industrial-techno hybrid with a wintry feel, but on A World of Service, she leaps into a whirlwind of contrasting genres. Noughties pop floats playfully into industrial techno; trance synths and trip-hop alternate with trap. Where Weightless was largely instrumental, here Alvarez uses her voice as a powerful tool. Its shifting states mimic the turbulence throughout, as genre experiments play out broader struggles with identity itself. A softer take on hyperpop, “Luis” highlights Alvarez’ heavily Auto-Tuned vocals, revealing a tender side to the record. Emo belter “Wish,” featuring gritty production from Planet Mu affiliate Ziúr, is the polar opposite: Alvarez belts over an angsty ’90s alt-rock riff, while on the similarly chaotic “Carmelo,” she sings in Spanish over drill’n’bass fuzz.
The album’s instrumental tracks are equally unpredictable. The hypnotic opener “Birds You Can Name” is built from glowing synthesizers reminiscent of the Knife’s mid-’00s work; the song’s bright, reassuring melody makes for a jarring contrast with the percussive blasts of “Camelo,” which follows. The atmospheric ballad “Vapor Dentro” flirts with ambient and IDM; of all the songs here, its hissing white noise and lurching beat come closest to her previous productions.
Alvarez’ genre-fluid experiments on A World of Service promise new avenues of exploration not only for herself; they also point to potential new directions for Ostgut Ton, the in-house label of Berlin’s Berghain nightclub, long associated with a particularly dark, intense strain of techno. By reworking established sounds in unexpected ways, Alvarez suggests that creative miscommunication can be liberating.

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On his 10th solo studio album, the Brooklyn-based underground rap vet unpacks emotional baggage and asks what—if anything—he’s willing to compromise for the sake of success.

To What End

As long as he can create how he wants, Oddisee has been content to exist on rap’s fringes. The Brooklyn-via-Washington, D.C. rapper-producer has treated his independent music career like a small business long before that became the norm, with pragmatic, athletically rapped songs and a busy touring schedule. You won’t find him hung up on industry cred: “Being overlooked did wonders for my esteem,” he says on 2015’s “Belong to the World,” one of several songs about the benefits of niche stardom. Even at his youngest and boldest, on albums like 2008’s 101 and 2009’s Mental Liberation, his boasts were tethered to the reality of his humble upbringing and D.C.-area surroundings. He went from merely making hip-hop cool again through pure boom-bap revivalism to boiling down politics, racism, and eventually, the comforts of family life to raps as terse and practical as the amorphous live-band production he’s slowly come to favor.
But the vigor of his early rap days lingers, powering a begrudging desire for respect. On “The Start of Something,” the intro to his 10th solo studio album To What End, Oddisee retraces his steps over a nearly 20-year career and gives himself a pep talk before the next sprint. “How I’m seen and how I’m heard is not the reason why I’m working,” he says, doubling down: “I’m going off, how to make a million without going soft.” For the first time, he sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as much as the listener. To What End goes beyond being raw and honest about life, society, or even hip-hop; it’s too busy dissecting the drive to do so in the first place.
Thematically, the album explores the nature of ambition and how far we’ll go to get what we want—a career, a relationship, peace of mind. As his work’s become more refined, Oddisee has embraced being the rap game Sidney Poitier, an everyman folding his own life experiences into flows that recall the wanderlust of Kendrick Lamar as much as the reverence of Little Brother. His writing was never withholding, but he’s rarely been this personal. Juxtaposed with the clean, peppy beats, his newfound openness makes some of these revelations uncomfortable, even jarring. “People Watching” is the most explicit of the bunch, taking an ax to forced politeness and ending with one of his bluntest confessions: “Became an entertainer as to hide in plain sight…Rhymes are without filter, in real life I keep it hush/I feel I’ve said enough, it’s time to step back on the mic.” But gentler moments cut the deepest. “Many Hats,” which was inspired by his first-ever therapy sessions, doesn’t shy away from talk of work burnout and panic attacks; “Choices” confronts the uphill battle of avoiding your parents’ mistakes. It’s not particularly theatrical, but it’s the closest we’ll get to seeing him on the ropes.
To What End isn’t all about unpacking emotional baggage. Oddisee finds balance in lighter scenes, stealing a moment to write a rap while his kids are asleep on “More to Go” and kicking references to Slick Rick, Insecure, and The Wire in a cipher with guest Toine Jameson on “Bartenders.” To What End boasts the most vocal features on any of his releases since 2013’s Tangible Dream—certainly it’s the only album in recent memory where Freeway’s gruff wisdom shares space with Phonte’s effortless truisms and Bilal’s jazzy moans. That variety also extends to the beats, a series of MIDI arrangements replayed by his band Good Company that nonetheless groove and thump in ways that transcend regular live-band hip-hop.
This method started as a curiosity on 2015’s The Good Fight and solidifies further on To What End. It’s a breezy, confident style that blurs the lines between analog and digital, modern and vintage. Disembodied voices are warped to sound like samples. The bass and synthetic keys on “Ghetto to Meadow” play double-dutch with a fast-paced drumline perfectly suited for Oddisee and Freeway’s brusque reflections on outrunning poverty. “Work to Do” and “Bogarde” dip into Raphael Saadiq-style funk and rattling go-go percussion, respectively, while “How Far,” “Bartenders,” and “People Watching” tweak Oddisee’s love for boom-bap with live embellishments. A handful of the beats skew generic—closing tracks “The Way,” with its sleepy Wreckx-N-Effect sample, and “Race,” in particular, play like car-commercial music—but To What End avoids defaulting to a rapper spitting with a backing band.
To What End doesn’t skirt around the anxiety that comes with being an artist in Oddisee’s position. He’s a sync licensing darling and a veteran of the indie touring scene who, in spite of himself, wouldn’t mind just a little more exposure, a little more clout. While he doesn’t have all the answers, he does stumble across one: How do you reconcile the drive to succeed on your own terms when your ear for music grows increasingly panoramic? You burrow deeper into yourself, hoping to be surprised by the next layer.


The Chicago rapper fills his debut with raps about...making it in rap. It’s rarely endearing or interesting.

Dragonfly

The Bandcamp bio of Chicago rapper Ajani Jones mentions that he dropped out of the University of Iowa to pursue his rap career, and you can feel him yearning to legitimize his choice in every bar of his debut. Unfortunately, that’s the empty core of Dragonfly. He raps about being really committed to rapping. It’s rarely endearing or interesting.
Rapping about making it in rap isn’t inherently boring. Rappers as different as A Tribe Called Quest, The Notorious B.I.G., Big Sean, and Open Mike Eagle have found fun ways to use their odd career paths as vehicles for storytelling, observations, and color. Ajani Jones doesn’t really tap into that lineage. Dragonfly is filled with half-baked struggle raps that don’t even aspire to smugness or myth-making. His narratives are so devoid of color and purpose that they make J. Cole’s leftover-lasagna come-up stories sound like Hannibal crossing the Alps.
Across the record, his lyrics are so vague they border on nonsensical. There are spells where it is utterly unclear what he is talking about, as on “3D,” where he raps, “It’s fame on the guillotine/And the blood is the love of the industry/Whoa.” It sounds like he’s interpreting a museum painting while stoned. On the song ironically titled “Lucid,” he says, “Feel like Wakandan/I’m just gonna tune in with my niggas/Ain’t got no space for no time limits.” I wish I knew what he meant by that.
Jones is clearly a student of the TDE school of introspective chill raps, where rapping relaxes the mind and frees it. The beats on Dragonfly largely have low BPMs and dulled percussion, accented by ribbons of synths that calmly flutter over the beats. Jones is comfortable with this airy template, and songs like “Dutchmasters” and “Quicksilver” play to his strengths. He’s whimsical when he’s at ease, and can stumble upon a decent image when he’s not overthinking. “Quicksilver” has a stretch where Jones begins “I could’ve been anything” and then recalls a drive-by shooting he saw as a kid. It’s a cutting sequence, and it illustrates the life he’s trying to escape through rap. Of course, it doesn’t last. Moments later, he is back to vague musings (“Everybody wanna go some place”). It’s disappointing, but also par for the course. Ajani Jones is a dreamer. Unfortunately, a dream is not a personality.


San Francisco's Jessica Pratt is a young songwriter with a decidedly old soul and a voice that balances spry sweetness with husky grit. Her songs feel lodged in some liminal realm between past and present, devoid of references that might place them in a historical moment.

Jessica Pratt

The mid-aughts freak-folk moment found artists and fans blurring the boundaries between past and present and seeking out kindred spirits across time, which made it an abundant season for folk reissues. Linda Perhacs' Parallelograms, Karen Dalton's In My Own Time, and Sibylle Baier's Colour Green, to name just a few, all got their long-delayed, much-deserved days in record store windows. And now, after an unhurried half-decade gestation period, 2012 felt like the year we started to hear the debut records from some of the young artists who scooped those reissues up.
One such record is Missouri native Angel Olsen's excellent debut LP Half Way Home. Her songs are struck through with poetic macabre ("I thought this time last year I'd be dead/ It's quite strange the thoughts that pop into your head") and showcase a tortured, warbling croon that sounds like Vashti Bunyan leading a seance to commune with Roy Orbison. San Francisco's Jessica Pratt calls upon similar influences but makes music that feels like a counterpoint to Olsen's. As with Baier, the simplicity and affectlessness of Pratt's tranquil tunes are precisely what make them so hypnotic. Anyone who appreciated the general idea behind The Milk-Eyed Mender but couldn't quite make peace with Joanna Newsom's divisive vocal quirks (or her love of obtuse, 10-dollar-and-change vocab words) might feel more at home in the plaintive, unadorned warmth of Pratt's debut LP.
Pratt is a young songwriter with a decidedly old soul and a voice that balances spry sweetness with husky grit. "Night Faces" has a weathered, world-weary vibe as she sings of shedding "a million tears trying to dig myself out all these years," while "Half Twain the Jesse" moves with an air of childlike curiosity. The songs themselves also feel lodged in some liminal realm between past and present, devoid of references that might place them in a historical moment. But their sepia tone never feels like a cheap gimmick; words like "brethren," "twain," and "bushel" roll off Pratt's tongue so naturally that you quickly become enveloped in the record's self-contained grammar. The effect is cumulative, lulling the listener into a tranquil, meditative space somewhere outside the interruptions of the modern world.
Pratt and her acoustic guitar are mostly unaccompanied, and there are occasional imperfections-- buzzing strings, the faint crack of her voice-- that add to its atmosphere of unvarnished intimacy. Her chord progressions are neither neat resolutions nor mournful elegies, which is to say that her songs traverse that vast, somewhat under-explored territory between happy and sad (except for "Titles Under Pressure", which revolves around a hook that goes "The next time, I'm stayin' away from this place/ I cannot make more mistakes"; that one's a heartbreaker.) Even when Pratt sings a line like "All the lights in my life are fading" on "Streets of Mine", there's a bright, resilient note or two that belie how dismal it looks on paper.
The last song on the album is a dim, crackling, live-recorded track called "Dreams", on which she's joined by a man whose voice sounds like a cross between Phil Elvrum and Fred Neil. It's subdued enough to keep the vibe enact, but his sudden presence reinforces what a quiet, private and secluded place Pratt's self-titled debut has been. Listeners who prefer their folk flashier or wrapped around memorable, poppy hooks might find Pratt's approach meandering or bland. But those with a more patient ear will find her a worthy and quietly distinct heir of Baier, Bunyan, and Dalton's homespun sound. "There was a time before us," she  murmurs on the lovely "Bushel Hyde", sounding like she's perhaps found a way to travel back there herself, picking up some of her forebears' weathered wisdom and weaving it into her own worldview.


Following the dense Six Cups of Rebel, Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's second album of 2012 offers a no-frills version of what the Norwegian producer does best: endlessly spiraling, cosmic dance music.

Smalhans

Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is not one for concise statements: The Norwegian space-disco producer once put out an album with a 30-minute lead track and then followed that release with a 45-minute cover of "Little Drummer Boy". But now comes the comparatively modest Smalhans, Lindstrøm's second release in 2012 following this past winter's Six Cups of Rebel. The latter was a wildly experimental record from an artist known for subtle shifts, so Smalhans will inevitably be heard as a back-to-basics effort. Even ignoring that the song titles draw from traditional Norwegian dishes (Lindstrøm told SPIN that "Ęg-gęd-ōsis" consists of "egg and sugar mixed together," which is as basic as you can get), the six tracks are no-frills versions of Lindstrøm doing what he does best: endlessly spiraling, cosmic dance that maintains an earthy humanity.
Occasionally, Lindstrøm's sense of comfort on Smalhans betrays him. The record's lead track and single, "Rà-àkõ-st", features a melody very close to "Further Into the Future", a cut from 2006's It's a Feedelity Affair. But most of the time he sounds like an accomplished master at work. Take "Fāār-i-kāāl", a six-and-a-half minute trip that builds an endless melodic ladder before letting the floor drop out to unveil weightless bliss. This sort of build-and-release-- taking an arpeggiated melody and pushing it as far as it can go, until it's about to burst at the seams-- is a Lindstrøm speciality. Smalhans reaffirms that no one does it better.
The album was mixed by Norwegian kindred spirit Todd Terje, and there are plans to release extend Terje edits of every song on the album as 12" singles. The pairing is timely. Terje's been in this game almost as long as Lindstrøm but 2012 has been very much his year. Following last year's gorgeous "Snooze 4 Love", the absolutely crushed-out-heavenly "Inspector Norse", from this year's solid It's the Arps EP, stands to be one of the best singles of the year in any genre. Lindstrøm teaming with him is a case of game recognizing game. But he shouldn't be worried: Smalhans is a reliably generous gesture from an artist that takes pleasure in indulging himself and his audience. If you found Six Cups to be a troubling detour, here's your chance to breathe easy again.


First proper solo album from the Kinks legend finds him flirting with confessional singer-songwriter material and tapping into the sounds of the Southern U.S.

Other People's Lives

The well-respected Englishman of 1960s pop has spent much of his recent years in a place he once called "the land of the ice cream and apple pie, guns and the Wild West." With air travel in disarray after 9/11, Ray Davies took his stranded American tour on the anywhere American road. During some of the recording of Other People's Lives, improbably the ex-Kink's first proper solo album-- his 1985 soundtrack LP Return to Waterloo and VH1-inspiring 1998 one-man-show The Storyteller each included previously released material-- he lived in New Orleans. The resulting record cleverly mires Davies' observational English cynicism in the turbid bayou of organ-flecked rocking-chair rock and the American confessional singer-songwriter convention.
Now age 62, Davies shares the mortality obsession heard in the latter work of similarly graying singer/songwriters like Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, and the late Johnny Cash. At its best, Other People's Lives hints that Davies' sunset years may not, contra "Waterloo", be paradise, as on scratchy-throated shitstorm wake "After the Fall", scalding breakup/suicide ballad "All She Wrote", and soulful, incongruously lonely hidden track "Thanksgiving Day", also the lead single. As with Morrissey-- the Oscar Wilde to Davies' less flamboyantly uppercrust-crumbling George Bernard Shaw-- Davies' enduring voice and wordplay belie their faceless session backing, here primarily acoustic guitar jangle and past-date swamp-rock smolder. The moaning feedback and bass throb of importunate opener "Things Are Gonna Change" find their analogue on the title track of Moz's 1997 Maladjusted.
Yet at times Davies matures backward, trading the Kinks' tergiversating sophistication for rash generalization. Yup, he's gone native in curmudgeon country. Davies rails against the "continual quest for the fountain youth" in "Run Away From Time", lambastes dedicated followers of fashion in "Stand Up Comic", and complains about that perpetual foe of fogeys and famous dudes alike, the Fourth Estate, on the cliché-mongering title track-- "Can't believe what I just read/ Excuse me, I just vomited." Stoned wailer "The Getaway (Lonesome Train)" alludes to "Sunny Afternoon", Big Easy poverty shockah "The Tourist" namedrops "La Vida Loca", but both staid productions could benefit from brother Dave's sibling-rival guitar crunch.
Other People's Lives is not without its ostensible character songs, which nonetheless suggest the title may be a cunning misnomer. The Village Green music hall of "Next Door Neighbor" purports to tell of Joneses, Smiths, and Browns, but published interviews indicate the song's events-- running off with an Essex blonde, smashing a TV through a window-- happened instead to our humble narrator. Similarly, the evocative "Creatures of Little Faith" adopts a biblical scope for its title and refrain, but depicts petty relationship jealousy with the detail of someone who's stared into its lurid green eyes. Where many singer/songwriters manipulate the first-person specific to convey a false sense of intimacy, Davies uses the third person and generality to distance his songs from their presumed subjects-- and thus imbues them with particularly true-ringing verisimilitude, which by the way tastes just like cherry cola.


The fifth album from the singular songwriter is her greatest to date. From the music to her emotions, Mitski has the power to make the complex seem dazzlingly clear.

Be the Cowboy

Before picking up a guitar for 2014’s Bury Me at Makeout Creek, Mitski Miyawaki’s instrument of choice was the piano. She played it on the two records she created as a studio composition major in college, where she was backed by a gigantic student orchestra. Once again behind the keys, her fifth album, Be the Cowboy, displays Mitski’s knowledge of song structure and her ability to bend any idea to her will. These 14 complex compositions warp the pop textbook into something more knotty and internal, creating a unique zone where the 27-year-old thrives: She’s never sounded so large, even in the record’s quietest moments.
In this way, Be the Cowboy radiates assurance. Whereas 2016’s Puberty 2 was drenched in distortion, here, Mitski and her longtime producer Patrick Hyland avoid the sound almost entirely. When the fuzzy drone does appear, it is purposeful, like on opener “Geyser,” where it interrupts a haze of organ and strings to announce a violent eruption of desire. Without the guitar and her typically doubled vocals, she allows herself to crack; for the first time, she seems fully content with the vulnerability.
Mitski is a peerless excavator of her own anxieties, infatuations, and ugliness and she examines them all through the lens of fame. She appears on the record’s cover wearing a white floral swim cap and heavy lipstick, a pair of tweezers honing in on a stray eyelash, symbolizing both a desire for control and the acknowledgment that such concerns can ultimately be futile. At the end of the video for the disco-pop banger “Nobody,” the camera pans back to reveal her to be another performer under the studio lights. She’s candid about how making music can be as depleting as it is fulfilling. “I gave too much of my heart tonight/Can you come to where I’m staying and/Make some extra love/That I can save till to tomorrow’s show,” she pleads on the jagged “Remember My Name.”
And with fame comes a fantastic loneliness. Be the Cowboy delves into that harrowing moment in the vanity mirror when you realize what others see does not match your reflection. How can they think you are so big when you are actually so small? The solitude inside “Nobody” feels so comically inescapable that it is almost worth celebrating; she rolls the word around in her mouth, relishing the universe of possibilities within its emptiness. On the jangly and vaguely country “Lonesome Love,” Mitski slyly delivers the record’s heaviest hitting line: “Cause nobody butters me up like you, and/Nobody fucks me like me.” Even if Mitski channels an exaggerated aspect of herself or performing a character—in interviews she has described a woman whose icy exterior hides the vast cosmos of her internal passions—she commits herself to capture the truth of each role.
But these complexities only emphasize the point Mitski returns to on each of her records: love is manifold. Romance is all consuming and breathtaking; intimacy can be a cycle of toxic stillness. Be the Cowboy is a definitive statement on the myth of perfection. She can stretch to the heavens and sink into the ground. She can be everything at once, again and again. “I thought I’d traveled a long way/But I had circled the same old sin,” she gravely bellows on “A Horse Named Cold Air.” To the two elderly subjects of the devastating closer “Two Slow Dancers,” all those complexities can be relieved beneath the glow of a disco ball. In the album’s last breaths, the spotlight slowly fades from Mitski. She might be exhausted, but she is insatiable.


On her giddy rush of a debut, Australia’s Alex Lahey offers a remarkably focused set of sing-along choruses, punk-pop dynamics, and casually witty observations about relationships.

I Love You Like a Brother

Few sentences in the English language may inspire a rollercoaster of youthful emotion like the title of Alex Lahey’s debut album, I Love You Like a Brother. It isn’t hard to picture some fresh-faced admirer, at first jubilant (“She loves me!”) and then utterly crestfallen (“…like a brother”). But the Melbourne artist’s song of the same name cleverly goes someplace that’s both less predictable and flatly literal: “I Love You Like a Brother” is a Ramones-blitzed bop about growing up enough to become friends with, well, her actual brother. But it’s not only that: With lines like “You don’t like sports and I don’t like dresses/Luckily for us our parents got the message,” it’s also about defying gender norms. Peppy, charming, and—here’s a word that comes up a lot in discussion of Lahey’s music—fun, the song is thankfully not at all like kissing your sister.
These types of dualities, right in front of your face yet delightfully unexpected, are an area where Lahey excels. “You Don’t Think You Like People Like Me,” from last year’s B-Grade University EP, was a stomping quiet-loud account of rejection that was too specific, too self-deprecating, and ultimately too euphoric to reject. So no one did: She won a crucial grant, competed her way to an Australian festival slot, and by earlier this year had signed with U.S. indie Dead Oceans, amid a daunting international touring schedule with bands like Tegan and Sara. I Love You Like a Brother is a remarkably focused set of sing-along choruses, punk-pop dynamics, and casually witty observations about relationships. If it never quite matches the breathlessness of that first impression, it confirms the 24-year-old music-degree dropout belongs on her globe-trotting trajectory.
Lahey is still best at dissecting relationships with at least a whiff of dysfunction about them. The midtempo “Backpack” again takes a familiar topic—a lover who always has one foot out the door—and captures it in an evocative new way: “It’s hard for me to put my arms around you when your backpack’s on,” Lahey sings on the yearning choruses, between verses stuffed with short-story detail. Almost as good, and perhaps more marketable, is recent single “I Haven’t Been Taking Care of Myself,” a sleek descendant of the Strokes’ “Last Nite” where an unwholesome rock’n’roll lifestyle, with its real-life side effects of drunken behavior and a few extra pounds, may explain “why you don’t love me as much.” Between discovering “you’re just a bit of a dick” on “Awkward Exchange,” casting a skeptical eye toward a lover’s Barbarella poster on “Lotto in Reverse,” or admiring a lovely western town despite a painful breakup there on “Perth Traumatic Stress Disorder,” Lahey brightly sugarcoats enough different hues of romantic ennui for a bag of tropical Skittles.
The songs on I Love You Like a Brother usually arrive as a giddy rush, so when relationships are going well, there’s a risk of exuberance overload. “Every Day’s the Weekend” is celebratory down to its clapping and backing shouts, but Lahey keeps it all from going too far, keenly monitoring the uncertainties of new love even as she encourages jumping in: “My hands are cold, but my feet are not,” she exults. The musical palette widens on “I Want U,” with sweeping strings and a surf-tinged guitar hook, recalling 1960s girl groups along with 2000s revivalists like the Pipettes. “Let’s Call It a Day” is a boozy kiss-off that veers from the Drifters shimmy to Paramore stadium anthem—just when it seems like it may be overshadowed by better breakup songs, a barbed line like “I kinda like you but I don’t like you/You like yourself too much” has a million everyday applications.
In early September, a national vote began in Australia on whether to allow same-sex marriage. Perhaps the starkest indication of Lahey’s knack for in-plain-sight subtlety, and a sign of how her music could continue to grow on further albums, is I Love You Like a Brother’s finale, a strummy drum-machine ballad called “There’s No Money.” Amid reflections on millennial economic malaise, she quietly asserts: “We can’t marry even if we want to.” Lahey has acknowledged the line refers to the marriage debate in her home country, but she has a way of weaving such issues into the fabric of an entire vividly-described life. “It’s never really been something I’ve felt I have to address in a song or had to unpack,” she told the NME. “I think everyone’s experience of their sexuality should be that way.” Lahey’s songs thrive on idiosyncrasies, not generalities, so it makes sense that sexuality for her would be one part of a person’s character, not the full portrait. Still, while the singer’s first full-length is consistently likable, it is most lovable at its especially individual turns.


The New York trumpeter and bandleader’s second album is darker, denser, and more experimental than its predecessor, but no less resonant.

jaimie branch: FLY or DIE II: bird dogs of paradise

FLY or DIE II: bird dogs of paradise

On November 6, 2018, trumpeter Jaimie Branch was onstage in Paris, France, screeching out the blues with her quartet. The music was more somber than the jam-based jazz that marked the New York native’s impressive debut album, 2017’s Fly or Die. At the same time, voters in the United States shuttled to the polls for midterm elections. The music was a plea for them to do the right thing. “The blues we played was far from where it got to on the album,” Branch writes in the liner notes of her second record, Fly or Die II: bird dogs of paradise. “But the sentiment remained: It’s a prayer for amerikkka…” In its finished form, the 11-minute “prayer for amerikkka pt 1 & 2”—positioned near the beginning of Fly or Die II—is the album’s centerpiece; its plodding rhythm and searing real talk sets a forceful tone. “We got a bunch of wide-eyed racists!” Branch declares in the song’s first segment, “and they think they run this shit.”
With thunderous trumpet wails and airy, sometimes deconstructed arrangements, Fly or Die introduced Branch as a powerful bandleader in the New York and Chicago avant-jazz scenes. Released through International Anthem (the same label that’s put out stellar projects from Makaya McCraven, Irreversible Entanglements, Damon Locks’ Black Monument Ensemble, Angel Bat Dawid, and Ben LaMar Gay), Fly or Die arrived seemingly out of nowhere and became one of 2017’s most acclaimed jazz albums. Centered on triumphant, hard-charging backbeats that oscillated between Chicago- and New Orleans-style jazz, it was a far brighter album than this one. While Fly or Die II is darker, denser, and more experimental than its predecessor, it’s no less resonant.
Branch sings on this record—on “prayer for amerikkka pt 1 & 2” and “love song”—marking the first time she’s used her actual voice on her solo music. Don’t expect her to start singing old Nancy Wilson covers; her voice—part raspy alto, part full-throated wail—is best suited for punk rock and takes some getting used to. She’s a gifted trumpet player who doesn’t need vocals to convey strong emotions, and to fans of her previous work, a track like “love song,” which concludes Fly or Die II, can feel weird on first pass. In keeping with the album’s theme, its sarcastic ode to “assholes and clowns” appears aimed at apathetic politicians, though Branch keeps the lyrics open-ended enough to apply to pretty much anyone worthy of such distinction.
Fly or Die II is expressly influenced by the political climate. In the second half of  “prayer for amerikkka,” after the beat quickens to a stampeding mix of Spanish jazz, Branch tells the story of a teenaged Central American girl who seeks asylum in the United States. Liner notes detail her journey: She’s separated from her family at the border and deported to El Salvador, where she’s beaten and sexually assaulted. Three years later, she seeks asylum in the U.S. once again, only to be held in a cage in Texas. “She was only 19, they crossed over at dawn,” Branch sings. “Now her mother and brothers are safe in Chicago and she’s all alone.” Coupled with a surging instrumental—courtesy of Branch, cellist Lester St. Louis, double bassist Jason Ajemian, and drummer Chad Taylor—the song lumbers toward you, as if the border agents were coming for you next.
The theme continues on “twenty-three n me, jupiter redux,” a moody, shape-shifting composition that conjures doom and panic through dark synth chords, crashing cymbals, and sporadic trumpet blasts. A pronounced marching beat breaks down into frenetic free jazz, churning up an urgent blend of drum taps and loud horns—the sound of the sky falling. Yet Fly or Die II grows more optimistic as it plays, and by the time “nuevo roquero estéreo” rolls around, the album veers to a festive style of Chicago jazz, where the beat locks into a two-stepping rhythm as Branch’s horn soars above it. The eight-minute “nuevo” is the album’s most pop-focused track, a bright spot peering through the overcast. This isn’t the album you play if things are going well; Fly or Die II leans into the exasperation of life in a country that elevates assholes, clowns, and wide-eyed racists to positions of power.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Eleven years since their last album and nine since keyboardist Carey Lander’s death, the beloved Scottish indie-poppers return with an appealing balance of fond memories and fresh energy.

Camera Obscura: Look to the East, Look to the West

Look to the East, Look to the West

The industrialization of nostalgia has grown so tedious that the comeback of an old favorite can elicit as much malaise as excitement these days. But news of Camera Obscura’s impending return stirred something hot and fluttery even in cycle-hardened indie-rock hearts. Stereogum “literally squealed,” as did I, as did probably anyone who followed the most loveable band in twee from around 2000 to 2015, a run cut short by the untimely death of keyboardist Carey Lander. How else could we express our feelings about music that, even at its saddest, had brought such unique delight—for reasons that, given its unpretentious style, were so hard to put into words?
It took years to fathom someone sitting in for Lander, in which time Campbell also had a child. But reuniting in 2019 at the behest of Belle and Sebastian was a most fitting rebirth: In 2001, Stuart Murdoch had produced Camera Obscura’s debut, Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi. Indie fans were already gaga for one Glaswegian band with shy boy-girl vocals, old-fashioned pop underpinnings, and zesty, testy lyrics, and they were thrilled to get another one right from the source. Underachievers Please Try Harder, from 2003, perfected their style—plainspoken, sardonic, deliciously heartbroken; bookish rather than self-consciously literary; and marked by subtle strains of postwar Americana, which flourished on 2006’s Let’s Get Out of This Country, a clear turning point. John Henderson, who sang a lot on the first two records, left the band, and Campbell took center stage. Over two more albums, her lilting, aching songs carried the band’s relatability over into a color-drenched land of high fidelity, where it flushed with big studio strings and horns, embracing bubblegum rock, orchestral pop, beach music, and, especially, country and western from the altars of Patsy, Tammy, and Dolly.
There were many reasons to be optimistic about Look to the East, Look to the West, the Scottish band’s first album in 11 years. They had gone out in top form on 2013’s Desire Lines, which I slightly underrated then but grew to adore. Key creators of their ferny, silvery sound were still in place—including McKeeve, bassist Gavin Dunbar, and drummer Lee Thomson—and Lander’s former role was ably taken up by Donna Maciocia. But the emotional charge in anticipation of the new album came from the fact that their story had been left unfinished so suddenly and cruelly. This wasn’t a comeback; it was catharsis, and the only question was whether or not time had faded Tracyanne Campbell's gifts: her rumpled-classic songwriting, unerring instinct for melodic embellishment, and the long green meadows of her voice.
The record’s opening moments seem designed to allay those concerns straightaway. On “Liberty Print,” Campbell unleashes a tiered, fountaining run and then starts stringing out her fluted phrases like soft pearls. Wafting on a bed of sparkling doo-wop, they sound instantly familiar and washed in fond associations, but the hissing drum machine is something new, and the band finds a similar balance of good memories and fresh energies on each song. Guitar leads and bass-led grooves are more prominent, and each member seems to have more space to breathe and shine. The worst you could say about any prior Camera Obscura album was that it had highs so blinding they threw a slight shade on other great tunes—the “French Navy” conundrum. But their latest is their most consistent yet, and it stands among their best.
Look to the East, Look to the West, which reunites the band with two-time producer Jari Haapalainen, clears away the orchestral elements to make room for both more electronic textures—drum machines, quirky or period guitar effects—and a deeper country palette of piano, pedal steel, and starry Hammond organ. Sometimes things are as simple as the lead single, “Big Love,” a bounding, winsome slice of California country rock, but “Only a Dream” swaps the band’s usual guitar reverb for a tremolo delay that ripples with concentric rings, recalling the spacey gardens of the similarly named Cranberries song. A pair of stunners called “Sleepwalking” and “Sugar Almond,” the latter written to Lander, make you wonder why Campbell doesn’t do solo piano ballads more often, with such an ideally structured but expressive voice for it.
“Denon” seems to be concocted from the baroque pop of Pet Sounds and the Christine McVie side of Fleetwood Mac, that agile, tripping-along sense of melody. It evinces—alongside “We’re Gonna Make It in a Man’s World,” cowritten with Maciocia—what it’s tempting to call a newfound sense of confidence: “Hey, it’s all right if you find me trite,” Campbell sings. “The lines on my face are clear and in sight.” But really, though it might fly under the radar because of all the charming postures and mooning over sailors, she’s always talked this way. The chorus of the first song on her first record laid it down: “I know where I stand/I don’t need you to hold my hand.” That sense of no-nonsense centeredness amid the painful confusion of life and love has always been Camera Obscura’s heart, and it still beats here.
Campbell is a distinctive lyricist in the way she goes wandering through effective cliches, striking  images, slices of life, and funny demotic phrases, and just as casually turns up stand-alone lines that you never forget along the way. My favorite ever is “Now my door has swollen from the rain,” from “Books Written for Girls.” The line that stands out here is in “Baby Huey (Hard Times),” one of the best and most adventurous new looks, a stretchy electro-pop taffy in the vein of the Blow’s classic “True Affection.” Over a gently switching acoustic guitar, Campbell sings, “The chaos of summer has died,” seeming to enfold everything that has been irrevocably lost while awakening to everything still to be found, in the autumn and winter of life, when the proportions of things grow clearer. Look to the East, Look to the West reminds us of better times while making it possible to believe the best is yet to come.
Correction: An earlier version misidentified Kenny McKeeve as the principal singer on the band’s first two records.


Two dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers unite for a sharp, mellow, and only a little greasy slice of hip-hop.

El León

In a rap underground filled with larger-than-life neo-noir capos and bruised anti-heroes cut from the cloth of Roc Marciano and Ka, a rapper like CRIMEAPPLE stands out from the pack. The Colombian-born, Hackensack, New Jersey-raised MC isn’t as outrageous as Westside Gunn or Action Bronson, but his references and frequent jumps between rapping in Spanish and English give his bars a more subdued grace. He’s not above the occasional showy display—he once compared his wallet to the chunky figures painted by artist Fernando Botero—but he takes more pride in direct flexes when he’s not focusing on the struggles that led to the riches.
In the opening seconds of “El Léon”—the title track of his collaborative album with producer Preservation—he relishes traveling often enough for custom agents to recognize him. But amid the talk of swapping Jaguars at the dealership and coming from the dirt, the simplest boast hits the hardest: “Lil’ homie, I own shit.” Throughout El Léon, bittersweet anecdotes like these are matched with tawny sample loops that have the worldly poise of a high-end travel show.
For his part, Preservation rises to a different challenge while working with CRIMEAPPLE. Most of the beats the New York-based producer has created since 2015’s Days with Dr. Yen Lo have put a minimalist spin on the gritty New York sound. But as opposed to his 2020 Eastern Medicine, Western Illness and 2022’s billy woods teamup Aethiopes, El Léon keeps things a bit more traditional. Strange, off-kilter samples—from guitar twangs and sour horn fills to merengue rhythms—are folded into more rigid shapes that suit CRIMEAPPLE’s generally less adventurous flows. Songs like “Don’t Mention It” and “Vida Mantequilla” march closer in line with his work on Yasiin Bey’s The Ecstatic or as a member of the rap quartet Sonic Sum. Even the more outrê stuff—the pitter-patter drums and organs on “Paw Prints in the Sand” or the tambourine and deep piano stabs that power lead single “Hunting Methods”—splits the difference between Black Sunday-era Cypress Hill and the hotboxing expansiveness of his most recent work. Preservation sacrifices a bit of his eccentricity to meet CRIMEAPPLE at his more mellow level, but it’s a worthy tradeoff.
CRIMEAPPLE may not be the flashiest rapper, but his technique and perspective keep his bars sharp. He often plays close to the rhythm of the beat but will occasionally speed his tempo up, especially when he switches between languages. This happens several times on the title track, where threats, slang, and stories of “spending purple paper” are smushed into compact bars. His opening quotables can also be as unpredictable as his language-switching. On “Vida Mantequilla,” he whispers “I’ve never had a White Claw in my life,” ethering the alcoholic seltzer before joking about a date who was built like a Nachos BellGrande from Taco Bell. Without an over-the-top voice or personality, the color in his writing pops more, like the side character in a movie who’s later revealed to be the villain. Even at their most boisterous, Pres’ beats keep things lively without overwhelming CRIMEAPPLE’s presence—he sounds comfortable sifting through the blaring horns on “Don’t Mention It” and the shrieking violin streaks on “Melena Dorada.”
Comfort is a crucial part of the appeal of El Léon. Neither CRIMEAPPLE nor Pres push each other to new heights, and CRIMEAPPLE’s talk of spoils and cigarillos with Exxon Valdez-levels of gas are a snug fit. But things get a bit deeper on the closing tracks “Quanto Te Quiero” and “Bulevar.” Here, CRIMEAPPLE pulls the New Era and hoodie back completely, delving into his relationship with his mother and overcoming the “rent-controlled living” of his youth. He’s as tender and thoughtful when thinking about how his mother raised him and his three siblings on a shoestring budget as he is when he’s counting his blessings after a life of bristling at his father’s drug habit. Combined with Preservation’s mournful mood music, it’s a somber note to end the album on. But El Léon is allegedly the first part in a trilogy of albums coming from the duo this year, a hefty cosign from Preservation that CRIMEAPPLE earns. If this is the start, consider these kindred spirits warmed up.

Manteca Music / Mon Dieu Music / RRC Music Co.


Tunde Olaniran, the jarringly multitalented artist from Flint, Mich., sings and raps in about a dozen different voices. This, combined with his equally startling flexibility with genre, makes his debut album Transgressor feel like it was recorded by a dissonant, flourishing collective, rather than a man from Flint, an LGBTQ activist with a day job at Planned Parenthood, whose only vocal training is choir practice to boot.

Transgressor

Tunde Olaniran, the jarringly multitalented artist from Flint, Mich., is a one-man band minus the instruments. Often described as a rapper, he's just as much a singer, and his skill in both arenas is prodigious. When he sings, he vaults between octaves, sliding from tragicomic fluttery falsetto to a luxuriant R&B tenor to a taut, imperious belt; rapping, he flips from wild Danny Brown shriek, herby Big Sean bounce, and a Father-ish benzo disaffectation. All told, Olaniran's got at least a dozen voices, and he moves between them without any sign of conscious effort—or any seeming consciousness that what he's doing is quite so wild. And this, combined with his equally startling flexibility with genre, makes Olaniran's debut album Transgressor feel like it was recorded by a dissonant, flourishing collective, rather than a man from Flint, an LGBTQ activist with a day job at Planned Parenthood, whose only vocal training is choir practice to boot.
Born to a Nigerian Christian immigrant father and an atheist, Socialist union organizer mother, Olaniran was discovered by the Berlin-based producer Phon.O off a MySpace track in 2008. He toured Europe briefly, stopping in the cities where he'd lived when his father was in the military. Since then, he's been a mainstay of and bridge between the scrappy Flint and Detroit musical scenes—he's hands-on to the point of designing costumes for his backup dancers and choreographing their routines—and his collaborators now are steadfastly local. On 2014's Yung Archetype, his under-hyped idea factory of an EP, Olaniran brought on Detroit R&B singer James Linck; Transgressor features even more Motor City, including the raucous kitsch-punk act Flint Eastwood, the cross-racial hip-hop buddy duo Passalacqua, and Invincible, a female rapper who's Jewish and queer.
His interest in genre and identity is central enough that it inspired both his album and EP titles, and he's built an experimental, leftist, theatrically artistic, streetwise pop debut, as close to Dirty Projectors as it is to Yeezus as it is to some dystopian alley-cat cabaret. His sound is pastiche reaching for synthesis, falling short when it lacks a sense of stakes. Olaniran's assets are so plentiful that he tosses them around almost forgetfully: without a clear aesthetic target, his shape-shifting can feel haphazard or unedited. But, when he is motivated by a clear sense of intention—when the disparate elements in each track stand out at right angles, subvert each other, throw each other into relief—the album glows.
This intention, like everything about Olaniran, takes wildly varying forms. He's a conscious writer, to begin with. His bouncy rap track "Diamonds", with its singsong, arch delivery and a first verse that name-checks Taco Bell, could sound like Das Racist roleplay on a careless first listen; one more time, and it's a painfully astute inhabitation of a story about the slow, mundane, systematic disenfranchisement of the American poor. His activism is out front, too, on "Everyone's Missing", a beautiful and spooky lament in which Olaniran sound like a prophet on the chorus, a radio crooner on the bridge hook, and then five different rappers on a verse that ramps up with the line "It mocks me when I'm wishful/ Grab my guts by the fistful"—"it" here being both hope and death by police—and then tosses off, "MLK was respectable/ Still gunned down in that motel."
But Olaniran's even better when he's elbowing people aesthetically rather than via commentary. There's a lot of new space ready to be claimed in R&B right now, and he's as sonically progressive as he is in verse. His punky, flamboyant, radical edge is immensely satisfying when it's got a tough, pretty melody to play against, and some of the best moments of the album come from TV on the Radio-esque, flag-waving, desperate, deeply-felt rock toplines. On the standout "Let Me Go", his generous hook unfurls down in spirals: "Once upon a time, I was yours, you were mine/ And you had me hook, line and sinker." The track's not about romance, but about Olaniran's father (who happened to give him a name that translates, remarkably, to "The spirit of the father is gone but will return again to bring back the wealth that was granted to your family.") The whole thing's tough and bombastic, as big as Funeral, as punk as hell.
Olaniran leans on melody again to great effect on "Up & Down", another song with an unexpected subject—his fluctuating weight—that distorts his harmony while spare apocalyptic trap drums build in the back. There's 808s aplenty on Transgressor; Olaniran uses a lot of what the kids are into, to occasionally flat effect. There's an exact Hudson Mohawke facsimile in the highly catchy if somewhat "Reading Rainbow"-esque single "Namesake", and at multiple points on the album, the progression is metronome-regular: there goes the trap clap, the skitter, the stomping wobbly synth. But, just as often (on the swinging, grimy "Run to the Gun" and the dance track "KYBM", for example), Olaniran uses these elements flexibly and exactly right.
Transgressor is an exceptional, aggressive, and incendiary album, in which Olaniran's idiosyncrasy feels alternately revelatory and in need of editing. He's in search of his own idiom. But when he's building—and he is building—his songs feel truly architectural: beautiful, strange structures that bomb themselves at regular intervals; rattling drives through some wild country where subversion is introduced as startling and naturally as landscape—each shift a turn around a mountain that suddenly looms.


Acoustic guitarist Daniel Bachman's second self-titled album is his most thoughtful release to date, filled with mindful reflection, confident patience, and a sense of ecological awareness.

Daniel Bachman

Fingerpicked acoustic guitar is a hit-or-miss proposition: When it works, the rolling, repetitive figures it produces can be hypnotic. But it’s easy for even a great player to drift into auto-pilot. The antidote seems pretty simple—pause, stretch, slow, or otherwise disrupt your habits—but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Muscle memory is hard to kick.
In all of his work so far, guitarist Daniel Bachman has avoided the traps of robotic fingerpicking. But on Daniel Bachman—his eighth solo album, and second self-titled one—he does so with a new level of sophistication. It’s his most thoughtful release to date, filled with mindful reflection and confident patience. Even during his snappiest songs, Bachman takes time to consider where he is and where he’s going. When his pace starts to rush, he pulls back, ringing out a long chord or even stopping completely to avoid just going with the flow.
The two clearest examples are the tracks that open each side of Daniel Bachman, both called “Brightleaf Blues.” In each, he uses sustained tones rather than flurries of string-picking to build atmosphere. The first half of the album’s opener is a high-pitched drone, followed by gradual strums and plucks that are more about exploration than exposition. Drone is the also backbone of the second “Brightleaf Blues,” humming in the background as Bachman feels his way through open-ended guitar figures. He achieves the same effect without drone in “A Dog Named Pepper,” progressing and retreating at intervals so well-timed they seem elemental, as if his fingers were guided by the moon and the tides.
An album of only halting, measured music would likely make Bachman’s thoughtful playing seem flat, so he wisely includes some tunes made in a more traditional early-blues style. The raga-like “The Flower Tree,” the twangy “Wine and Peanuts,” and the chord-bending “Watermelon Slices on a Blue Bordered Plate” all fit this bill well, creating lively swing while still allowing Bachman room to contemplate and reset.
Most song titles on Daniel Bachman include images from nature, suggesting this album is environmentally aware—not in the eco-activist sense, but in the sense of Bachman taking stock of his surroundings. He’s almost literally stopping to smell the roses, and the result is an album about growth and development, about the virtues of taking your time rather than the crutch of constantly sprinting forward. In the process, it advances Bachman’s oeuvre significantly.


Pledging allegiance to fuzz, this power-pop barrage squares off against heartache, disappointment, and sleepless nights—and survives.

Power Chords

The portrait of Mike Krol that graces the cover of his fourth album, Power Chords, could pass for a stock photo of any musician noodling alone on the guitar in a bedroom. Except Krol is sporting a black eye, a fat lip, and bloodied fingers. After listening to the record, you may be amazed he emerged with just a few bumps and bruises. Power Chords is among the most visceral and violent documents of heartache, disappointment, and sleepless nights in recent rock memory. Krol relives the details of broken relationships with muses both real and figurative, as if trapped in his own nightmarish version of Groundhog Day. Heads bang against walls. Hearts get stabbed. Ambulances are called. And yet, it’s also one of the most exuberant, energizing, and fun albums you’ll hear all year, maximizing both sides of the power-pop equation.
Krol has long fused cotton-candied melodies to pedal-pushing overdrive in a way that harkens back to the late-2000s bubble-punk of Jay Reatard, Smith Westerns, and King Tuff. But on Power Chords, Krol’s unwavering allegiance to fuzz feels less a function of practical necessity and more a requisite aesthetic enhancement for these 11 songs. Omnipresent distortion is the rusty blade that allows him to open up and bleed, to deliver each self-flagellating lyric as if shouting into the last functioning payphone in town.
At 33 minutes, Power Chords is about twice as long as the typical Mike Krol record, but it’s also his tightest and most frenzied work yet. Where past releases wandered into whimsical psychedelic balladry and meditative piano experiments, Power Chords commits to the woofer-blowing promise of its title with evangelical zeal. The record, Krol says, is his raucous reaction to a career-stalling bout of self-doubt and soul searching that followed his 2015 Merge debut, Turkey. It’s an attempt to reconnect with the primal pleasures of making an unholy racket, and “What’s the Rhythm” provides the perfect demonstration of this therapeutic mission. The verses present an unflinching portrait of emotional paralysis, but the killer chorus is instantly invigorating, like an adrenaline shot jabbed into the chest.
Even as Power Chords cruises in the red, Krol is constantly changing course. The careening “Little Drama” sounds like it could’ve been salvaged from Dave Grohl’s early Foo Fighters demos, but just when it seems like Krol is losing control, he shrewdly locks into a tambourine-rattled backbeat. “Nothing to Yell About,” meanwhile, belongs to an alternate universe where the Strokes never made it out of the Lower East Side, burrowed deeper underground, and started dabbling in space-rock freakouts. And with “Arrow in My Heart,” Krol drifts toward bona fide balladry, with a slow-motion T. Rex strut that strips away Marc Bolan’s cosmic jive to deliver brutal truth. “You shot that thing at me/And then you watched me bleed,” he sings to some unnamed adversary, “but then, when I come after you, I’ll let you know that I ain’t through.” Sure, a life in rock’n’roll has left Krol battered. But the resolute look in his eyes seems to say: Is that all you got?


Xaviersobased comes for the stoner party-rap crown on a mixtape that’s improvisatory, totally zooted, and New York through and through.

Keep It Goin Xav

Once you hear Xaviersobased, you’ll want to argue about Xaviersobased. Indifference is not an option because his music turns casual rap convos into First Take. Possibly it’s because you think his glazed vocals—sometimes pitch-shifted, sometimes layered so thick that they’re mystically fused together—absolutely suck. In some cases it may turn you into the kind of hip-hop conservative you used to make fun of.
Alternatively, maybe, you’ll see the light, and go on and on, like I do, about how it’s a borderline spiritual experience, one that will have you standing around with crowds of teenagers and skaters after midnight, below underpasses, at warehouse shows with unpronounceable names on the bill, or at more standard venues (where maybe you’ll get caught in a riot, or end up posted up next to a furry), just to listen to this babyface Upper West Side 20 year old’s blur of blown-out, totally zooted dance rap.
Two years ago, I was initiated into Xavier’s prolific and overwhelming churn of mixtapes and SoundCloud loosies with the self-produced “Crisp Dubs,” a lagging, rebooting single that spices up a sample from the soundtrack of an online porno gaming series. It’s so boundless that it had me convinced that I had just stumbled into the coolest shit and instantly bonded with anyone who felt the same, which is what underground rap is all about in a way. Hardly anything else in his catalog is quite like “Crisp Dubs” but it set the precedent for a style that pulls from so many different corners of popular and underground rap and online and regional cultures that pretty much nothing feels off limits. He can rap “Slap the shit out of a old nigga if he classist,” or a zillion iterations of “Two bad hoes in the trap tryna’ fuck me.” He can reimagine lost subgenres of New York or make a beat that feels like he hacked into Soulja Boy’s old GarageBand account. All for the purpose of making party rap that is infused with the DNA of party rap that came before it.
Xavier’s first (and surely not last) mixtape of the year, Keep It Goin Xav, is a bottle-popping celebration. Sprinkled with clips from his interview with the tape’s host DJ Rennessy—which are mostly annoying because Rennessy lacks the identifiable charisma of memorable mixtape hosts—it’s essentially a look-at-how-far-I’ve-come project. It’s nowhere near as humorless as that sounds, though, because the music is vibrant, improvisatory, and fun as hell. In a way, it’s of a lineage with so much of the 21st century’s great hangout rap made by those below legal drinking age, from the skater’s anthems to the bedroom-made rapalongs to the Magic City soundtracks.
If you were to single out a specific lodestar or two, it would be Keef and Lil B (“Based” is in his name). He’s well-versed in both. On “KeepItGoin,” he revives an early Keef flow to talk his shit about wearing a Goth Money Records T-shirt and chilling, as the stuttering instrumental goes nutty. The sped-up second half of “FanOut” is so swagged out it could revive the cooking dance on its own. He’s even got the BasedGod tendency for a why did he just say that moment. I’m thinking of when he rattles off, “White bitch yeah she playin’ with my hair” so casually amid all the chaos of “Finna Go Ot.”
The mixtape is less interesting when it slows down to the point that it would clear out a party and send everyone outside for a smoke break. Consider the half-assed “Google,” where he just seems overly stoned, or “Get High,” which is a pretty unimaginative glimpse at getting fucked up. It’s not that way for long. All the clipping and distortion of “This Far” is what it would probably sound like to record next to a jet engine. The clouded Auto-Tune croons of “UToldMeIWasAFuckUpGirl” have a gentle groove and the hypnotic effect of Duwap Kaine melodies. With “On My Own,” he shows that he can reinterpret the present with as much subtlety as the past, putting a dreamy twist on the handclaps and dancefloor commands of Milwaukee low-end.
But for all of the outside influences swirling around on Keep It Goin Xav, it’s New York rap through and through. Where you’re from is part of the story of a rapper—those roots alone can turn a cliché into part of a narrative, even if it’s unintentional. In the amorphous world of internet rap, artists often thread together so many different influences that the music turns muddled and anonymous. Xavier doesn’t have that problem. His music has a tinge of the fly, hustler anthems that might be the city’s greatest export since the cheese slice—it makes sense that he grew up a couple subway stops from Harlem.
For instance: “Special” premiered on New York’s current home for freestyles, On the Radar. You could picture lines like “Fuck the rap game I think they tryna’ ban me” rapped by French on an episode of Cocaine City when he was beefing with Jim Jones. Even “KlkMiHijo,” which producer Cj808 turns into a grand ATL trap build-up fit for a Gucci tape, uses Rennessy’s intro to set the tone. Finally doing his job as the host, he shouts all the girls in Dyckman, before Xavier digs out a slurred melody with a little Max B sauce. Not often is music this off the walls also this grounded. In or out, that’s what makes Xaviersobased worth fighting over.


The Japanese band Number Girl gained a cult following in the '90s for their unhinged, melodic guitar rock, which took cues from Western groups like Hüsker Dü, the Pixies, and the Stooges, among others. Their albums for EMI Music Japan, recently reissued on vinyl, captured the pre-millennial tension of the times, balancing anxiety for tomorrow with a sweet nostalgia for the past.

Number Girl: School Girl Distortional Addict/Sappukei/Num-Heavymetallic

As the 1990s crawled to a close, the Japanese music industry—and the nation as a whole—was at a crossroads. The economy held strong and Japan had fostered a "cool" image globally, reflected in the slick Eurodance-inspired songs being exported across the continent and the jet-setting sampledelica of Shibuya-kei, highlighted by genre heavyweights Cornelius and Pizzicato Five who landed on U.S. imprint Matador Records. Yet as 2000 came into view, the mood started to change, as what many now label the "Lost Decade" came of age and music sales peaked in 1999, in decline ever since.
Amidst all this pre-millennial tension, a quartet reared on distortion called Number Girl landed on major label EMI Music Japan and spiked the nation’s rock scene for good. They played fast and abrasive music prone to sudden tempo changes, with guitarist and lead vocalist Shutoku Mukai’s snarled vocals adding extra force and honesty to their feedback-bludgeoned songs. This wasn’t—and still isn’t—the easiest route to goofy TV interviews and massive festival scream-alongs in Japan, but from 1999 until disbanding in 2002, Number Girl left a deep impression on domestic listeners and carved out a cult following abroad. Universal Music Japan is reissuing the group’s three major-label albums this month, a trio of work still looming large over the country’s rock scene and among the best music to come out of the country in recent memory.
Mukai formed Number Girl in 1995, but his initial lineup dissolved quickly. He reached out to other musicians in Fukuoka—a city resting far south from the glitz of Tokyo—and found guitarist Hisako Tabuchi, bassist Kentaro Nakao, and drummer Ahito Inazawa. The four, all in their early twenties, drew inspiration from 1980s American indie, taking cues from Hüsker Dü and Pixies among others, and sometimes nodded to their influence via lyrics or song titles ("Iggy Pop Fan Club"). Number Girl offered glimpses of what they would become across two self-released cassette tapes and their 1997 indie debut School GirlBye Bye: Mukai’s larynx-ripping singing, Tabuchi’s commanding guitar solos, and a lyrical fixation on adolescence. Yet in these early years, they turned to the records their idols made like CliffsNotes, leaning too much on replication rather than finding their own sound.
After moving to Tokyo in 1998, the band snagged more attention for their live shows, leading to EMI scooping them up in 1999. That summer, they broke through with School Girl Distortional Addict, a frantic 36-minute affair pairing pummeling noise with the catchiest melodies Number Girl ever laid down. Despite major label backing,Distortional Addict sounds raw, several songs opening with tape hiss and screamed countdowns, like they were coming straight from the cramped clubs Number Girl normally played. From opener "Touch"'s pound to "Tenkousei"'s guitar blitz, the songs here hit hard, even before Mukai’s voice tumbled in and added extra unpredictability.
Although Number Girl still wore their sonic influences proudly—the second song here is called "Pixie Dü"—they had evolved from kids imitating their favorite CDs into a group confident enough to get their own voice out into the scrum. Distortional Addict zooms in on the teenage experience the band’s members weren’t far removed from, echoed in the album artwork and the video for lead single/album highlight "Toumei Shoujo." The songs could sound angry, but were never self-loathing or cynical. Rather, they captured the confusion of leaving childhood behind and the uncertainty that follows. The characters roaming these songs grapple with the fear of mortality (on the shrapnel-sharp "Sakura No Dance") to the recurring desire to chase one’s dream (a reflection of Number Girl’s own decision to leave the comforts of Fukuoka for Tokyo). Yet Mukai’s songwriting made room for other viewpoints, too. "Nichijou Ni Ikiru Shoujo" starts as a punk-friendly mosher, but eventually everything stops and it turns into a half-speed meditation on what leading an "everyday life" entails.
Distortional Addict also tapped into pre-millennial anxiety, a tension that popped up frequently in other Japanese pop culture in 1999. It was there in the novel Battle Royale (which, like Distortional Addict, focused on teenagers) and in fellow Fukuoka artist (and deep fan of Tabuchi and her attention-demanding playing) Sheena Ringo’s popular debut album released just before Number Girl's. Distortional Addict, though, captured the vibe better than the rest, balancing anxiety about tomorrow with a sweet nostalgia for the past.
That sweetness all but vanished on the following year’s Sappukei, wherein adulthood’s ugly realities pushed youth away. The band had attracted a large fanbase in Japan, but also caught the ear of longtime Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips producer David Fridmann, who stepped on to produce Number Girl’s much-anticipated follow-up (and their final album). The overall sound didn’t change radically, as the songs still mostly power ahead with a few sudden shifts in speed (and a lot of fierce solos courtesy of Tabuchi), but everything sounds grimier. Fitting, given Mukai’s sudden shift to singing about the ugly parts of urban living. Whatever optimism snuck into their previous material was snuffed out here.
Number Girl could still write a battering number, but Sappukei (translation: "Tastelessness") also found Mukai simply screaming more. When done right, it hit hard, like on the push-pull guitar surge of "Zegen Vs Undercover," but elsewhere it just upped the volume without adding impact. Sappukei found Number Girl experimenting a touch more, but ultimately comes off like a transitional piece for a band starting to get restless with their sound, but not ready to throw caution totally away.
They got weird on 2002’s Num-Heavymetallic, a gleefully confrontational set from a band who easily could have by then coasted on a solid fan base. The title track opens with the sound of Mukai screaming frantically from far away before he switches abruptly into the traditional Japanese enka style of singing, while his bandmates show they can sound just as heavy at a narcotized pace. That’s followed up by "Num-Ami-Dabutz," a lurching number constantly buzz-sawed in half by Tabuchi’s guitar. Mukai breaks into a spoken-word that gave his bleak outlook on urban life a hypnotic quality. It’s a high point in the band’s history, and definitely a favorite when trying to figure out the most bizarre song to ever crash the Japanese singles chart.
Nothing else on the album approached the wildness of those two songs, but the rest of Num-Heavymetallic highlighted the outfit’s growing interest in more fragmentary compositions. Some experiments worked better than others—"Frustration in My Blood" is the point where Number Girl could get too aggro—and overall it doesn’t feel coherent. That was the point though—by 2002, all the artists who had captured the uneasy feeling of the new millennium a few years prior were moving on to new territory. Num-Heavymetallic ended up being Number Girl’s last collection, as bassist Nakao opted to step away, and the other three decided to stop the band rather than replace him. They all went on to new, successful projects, highlighted by Mukai and Matsushita’s Zazen Boys outfit, which continued down the wonky road their final album hinted at.
Ultimately, these vinyl reissues exist to capitalize on Japan’s current LP trend, and the only added feature—a Fridmann remastering of all three—feels unnecessary, as the often hissy sound added to these album’s charm. But they mostly feel strange because Number Girl’s music remains so visible, both in a literal sense (these have already been released as special edition CDs multiple times) and in a more abstract way. Few Japanese bands have proven to be as influential as Number Girl, with festival-headliners such as Asian Kung-Fu Generation and rising groups like tricot claiming them as primary influences. But even more important are the countless bands wailing away in small live houses in Fukuoka and in Tokyo’s Koenji neighborhood and in any small countryside town, because of these four, not to mention the non-Japanese listeners seeking something different, who hunted the group’s material down through Soulseek or shady message boards before YouTube became reliable. They came to prominence at a time when many felt anxious about the future, but Number Girl carried the same torch held by their U.S. indie idols and showed a whole new generation of kids in Japan they could make any music that they wanted.


Formed in the wake of Talulah Gosh, the indie-pop group Heavenly released four studio albums, but this new singles collection shows that their most magical work existed in smaller formats.

Heavenly: A Bout De Heavenly: The Singles

A Bout De Heavenly: The Singles

One evening in 1986, Oxford economics student Amelia Fletcher approached a stranger at a concert and asked her if she wanted to be in a band. In this girl’s Pastels badge she recognized kinship, community, and shared taste. At the time, Elizabeth Price, an art student who would later win Britain’s splashy Turner Prize, had no idea how to sing or play an instrument. No matter. The music Fletcher and Price would create as part of a group they named Talulah Gosh did not prioritize formal skill. Combining C86 jangle with girl-group swooning, Talulah Gosh’s songs were gloriously scrappy. As if to emphasize the band’s informality, they never released a proper full-length; two years after forming, with a handful of singles to their name, Talulah Gosh dissolved. After briefly toying with the idea of solo pop stardom, in 1989, Fletcher started a new band called Heavenly.
During their seven years of existence, Heavenly released four studio albums, but a recent singles collection, A Bout De Heavenly, makes the case that some of their most magical work existed in smaller formats. At first, Heavenly might have appeared to be a continuation of Talulah Gosh under a different name. After all, the two bands shared nearly identical lineups: Fletcher, her brother Mathew, Peter Momtchiloff, and Robert Pursey (a few years later they were joined by Cathy Rogers). But as suggested by the project’s early singles, “I Fell in Love Last Night” and “Our Love is Heavenly,” Heavenly would (for the most part) iron the punk wrinkles out of their songs. Built around upbeat melodies, ’60s pop harmonies, and a staunchly optimistic view of love (purely romantic, rarely sexual), these new songs were tighter than any of Talulah Gosh’s offerings. It was only fitting that Heavenly would sign to Sarah Records, the beloved Bristol label known for releasing music made by introspective wallflowers.
Like other Sarah bands, Heavenly’s style—both music and aesthetic—was polarizing. In its earliest days, indie pop was a parallel movement to punk. Both scenes touted the belief that anyone could make music on their own terms, that mistakes were something to be celebrated. But punk was associated with fearlessness, or at least the facade of that confidence. So maybe if you identified with the punk spirit but weren’t angling for anarchy, you became an indie pop kid. Instead of wearing a T-shirt held together with safety pins, you rocked anoraks and cardigans; you were probably a bit dweeby.
Critics reviled indie poppers for their “shambling” songs about crushes and heartache, grade school outfits, and embrace of “girly” qualities like sensitivity or softness. In Heavenly’s case, the criticism easily and often veered towards sexism. In a particularly cruel review of the band’s 1992 album, Le Jardin De Heavenly, Melody Maker writer Simon Price accused Fletcher of spending “her entire adult life pretending she doesn’t menstruate,” painted her bandmates as developmentally challenged, and used a variety of other lazy insults to describe the group as infantile. (A much more interesting criticism of indie pop could have been about the scene’s overwhelming whiteness, a point that was unlikely to be explored by the majority-white music press.)
So while it’s true that Heavenly songs often framed the world through a childlike lense, their choice to do so was likely not rooted in a desire to escape or regress. “I spent from age 13 to age 17 trying to act like I was 25 and trying to prove to boys I knew all about sex and I didn’t and trying to prove I was cool and no one could hurt me when they could,” Fletched explained in a 1995 article about cuddlecore. “At 18, I thought 'fuck it, I don’t care anymore. I’m just gonna be what I feel like being.’”
In retrospect, it seems like Heavenly’s critics were too preoccupied with twee to consider the darkness that lurked in the shadows of Heavenly’s songs. In the early singles featured on A Bout De Heavenly, these glimmers of pain tend to arrive as a result of heartbreak: “I’m Not Scared of You” aches with betrayal, while “Wrap My Arms Around Him” struggles to move past a manipulative relationship. On the other end of the spectrum, 1991’s chipper “Escort Crash on Marston Street” imagines the entire band’s death or injury in a horrific car crash. But as Fletcher cheerily notes, “The kids are happy/With no more boring Heavenly tunes.”
Beginning with Le Jardin De Heavenly, Heavenly’s records were distributed in the U.S. by K, the Olympia, Washington-based label run by Calvin Johnson, whose own band, Beat Happening, faced similar criticisms about amateurism. Through their connection with K and friendships with bands like Bratmobile and Huggy Bear, Heavenly were exposed to the burgeoning riot grrrl movement, whose feminist, DIY spirit struck a chord with Fletcher. Quickly, Heavenly’s songs began to incorporate more nuanced narratives about sexual politics and gender roles. On the fiery “Atta Girl,” Fletcher and Rogers offer overlapping perspectives on smothering, unrealistic relationships. “No, I could never live up to all your dreams/I don’t have to be cute right through,” an exasperated Fletcher shouts early on. Like Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl,” the bubbly “P.U.N.K. Girl” pays tribute to a complicated female figure whose honesty and insularity can be misinterpreted as off-putting.
But the most poignant of these tracks would turn out to be a B-side called “Hearts and Crosses.” The song follows a young woman named Melanie as she imagines how the companionship and affection of “some cool boy” could “make things right.” Melanie’s excitement is sugar-coated by bouncy keys, zippy bursts of guitar, and Mathew’s delightfully all-over-the-place drumming. But like it so easily can in real life, the narrative turns on a dime and suddenly, Melanie’s fantasy becomes a nightmarish depiction of date rape. “It was all so different from in her dream,” Fletcher murmurs as her pep collapses into a traumatized monotone. “He never smiled, he never whispered/He bit her hard, but never kissed her.” Heavenly follows this anecdote with a chaotically joyful keyboard solo; a casual listener could be forgiven for missing the horror. Arguably, “Hearts and Crosses” is the band’s best song. Inarguably, it’s a powerful example that pop music—even at its most outwardly precious—can be a vehicle for addressing issues like sexual assault.
While the band’s subsequent record, 1994’s The Decline and Fall of Heavenly, continued to explore these ideas, their fourth and final album, 1996’s Operation Heavenly, embraced a goofiness unseen since the Talulah days. With a more straightforward rock sound, “Trophy Girlfriend” and “Space Manatee” nod more towards Britpop than twee, despite references to rocket ships and granny dresses. For a moment, the world seemed like Heavenly’s oyster.
Sadly, Heavenly’s course ended in tragedy. Right before the release of Operation Heavenly, drummer Mathew Fletcher took his own life. Continuing to make new music under the Heavenly moniker felt wrong, so the group eventually reconvened under the name Marine Research, which later evolved into Tender Trap. These days, Fletcher and Pursey continue to make music together as a couple under the name the Catenary Wires. While the sound itself has shifted into more laid-back territory, the communal desire to explore the world through music that inspired Talulah Gosh back in the ’80s remains.

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With her new record as This Is the Kit, singer-songwriter Kate Stables offers a collection of sparse folk that takes on the mysteries of mortality with a wizened sigh.

Moonshine Freeze

A ramshackle energy propels Moonshine Freeze, the latest from Kate Stables’ folk project This Is the Kit. With rootsy arrangements of banjo, horns, and gentle percussion, it retains the intimacy of its well-loved predecessor, 2015’s Bashed Out. But it also offers the Paris-based songwriter’s loosest, wildest music to date, exploring a fruitful middle ground between the morbid and the profound. Through 11 songs that range from slow-burning mood pieces to riotous anthems, she maintains a sing-songy falsetto even as she assesses human nature in its most violent forms. “People want blood,” she repeats in “Easy on the Thieves,” “and blood is what they’ve got.”
The songs on Moonshine Freeze focus on characters awaiting hard consequences, sometimes gaining wisdom from the experience but more often lingering in dissonance. In the deceptively calm “Bullet Proof,” Stables coaches herself in the third-person (“There are things to learn here, Kate”) as her banjo flutters with the persistent trill of birdsong. She seems more interested, however, in pinpointing where things went wrong than explaining how they can get better, opening the album with a fatalistic sigh of relief. The title track is another highlight, with a buzzing, psychedelic groove. Backed by an army of bobbing horns, Stables meditates on impermanence, as her tightly layered vocals begin to drift apart. “This is the natural order of things,” she sings with a devilish chill, “Change sets in.”
Stables has evolved as a storyteller, writing in surprising, cryptic ways. Her words often seem boiled down to just bare essentials. The chorus of “Riddled With Ticks” alternately reassures (“I know what is true”) and threatens (“I will fight you”). In “Solid Grease,” she refines her process to just six words: “Things get said/Things get don’t.” With many of its songs assuming the form of chants or intonations, Moonshine Freeze feels proudly out of step with time. Stables largely eschews traditional song structures for a more intuitive logic, mirroring the in-between states her words invoke. The rousing ghost story of “Hotter Colder” jitters and jolts in sudden bursts, elevating the sparse track into the album’s boldest moment, even making room for a climactic saxophone solo.
Producer John Parish lends Moonshine Freeze the same starkness he’s developed through his work with PJ Harvey. In “Easy on the Thieves,” humdrum backing vocals add an ominous inevitability to Stables’ words, while “Two Pence Piece” rattles with soulful, gothic Americana. After producing Bashed Out, the National’s Aaron Dessner also helps deepen the texture, with guitar playing as natural and melodic as wind chimes. Even in its busiest moments, the album has a soothing effect. Its rough charms begin to feel like an acceptance of a world in disarray, refining its chaos into compact moments of beauty. “Probability wise, one of us has to die,” Stables tells a loved one in “All Written Out in Numbers,” “But by the same reckoning, it will be fine.” Moonshine Freeze explores all the tension between those two realizations, knowing that’s precisely where life happens.


On his second full-length, the UK producer crafts an instrumental LP that is a powerful mix of warped and disorienting melodies and clattering beats.

Emerald Fantasy Tracks

In 2009, UK bedroom producer Matt Cutler, who makes music as Lone, put out a record called Ecstasy & Friends that now sounds oddly prescient. Released on Actress' Werk Discs, the record contained a wide range of in-vogue sonic elements: humid Dilla-stepped beats, filmic vocal samples, and the beatific tape-warp wooziness of Boards of Canada. Cutler's creation was a stylistic cousin to Bibio, another BoC acolyte with an ear for Dilla. But it was also rough around the edges and disjointed. Ecstasy was a forward-thinking record, but also one that wasn't fully realized, so it's not too surprising that it didn't really catch on.
Cutler's follow-up, Emerald Fantasy Tracks, doesn't suffer from the same underdeveloped tendencies. Issued on his own Magic Wire Recordings imprint, the record represents a clean break from his past. Were it not for the name on the album cover, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was made by an entirely different artist. The sticky tropical atmosphere and knack for sentimental melodies are still there, but gone are the loping, static-riddled boom-bap beats. Instead, Culter offers jackknifing tempos and clattering 808s that recall 1990s breakbeat techno at its giddiest (think Underground Resistance's "Jupiter Jazz"), all of which adds up to an album that is dense but immediately engaging.
You get the feeling that Cutler has inhaled 15 years' worth of dance music in the year since his last full-length. This is no history lesson, though-- the music has too much of an emotional pull for that, as Cutler puts his ear for BoC's pitch-drunk melodies to good use. He has a weird knack for arranging clusters of sound to make them feel slow, unstable, and psychedelic. So the perceived speed of neck-whipped cuts like "Aquamarine" and the album's prismatic highlight, "Petrcane Beach Track", feel oddly off, even while the BPMs stay firmly in place. It's a trick that he puts to use carefully, and its application is disorienting in the most blissful sense.
It's that care and attention to detail that makes Emerald Fantasy Tracks more of an album and less of a grouping of similar cuts. The pacing is sharp, from the album's percolating, Eastern-influenced midsection to the downtempo, affecting closer "The Birds Don't Fly This High". Tech-y enough for beatheads but with a direct melodic sense that will appeal to even the most casual of electronic music observers, Emerald Fantasy Tracks is just as thrilling and sensual as the album title suggests, transcending nostalgia and instead drawing a drum-programmed path straight to the human heart.


The Nebraska guitarist and songwriter strips his music to its raw, noisy core, revealing how his favorite records might have sounded when they were still being hammered out in rehearsal.

Staunch Honey

For music obsessives, there comes a time when, having burnt yourself out on the classics, you immerse yourself in ephemera. You may turn to scratchy bootlegs of live shows, expensive box sets of alternate takes, or unauthorized collections of outtakes, passed down by fellow travellers. While less polished than the music that brought you to an artist’s work in the first place, these hidden gems offer a different and equally important thrill: They feel like your own.
Nebraska songwriter David Nance has internalized this behavior like few working artists. He has a habit of covering beloved albums in their entirety, but his own music is where he really puts his fandom to the test. He draws unabashedly from classic rock touchstones like the Allman Brothers and Crazy Horse, the Stones and the Stooges, the Dead and the Basement Tapes. But instead of reaching for their crowd-pleasing heights, he strips his music to its raw, noisy core. At their best, his songs reveal how his favorite records might have sounded when they were still being hammered out in rehearsal.
Nance’s latest studio album, Staunch Honey, features the sharpest and most distinctive songwriting of his career, but the sound remains gloriously unrefined. According to a press release, he reworked the material three times before settling on these renditions: recorded at home, directly to tape, with just a few appearances from collaborators like guitarist Jim Schroeder and drummer Kevin Donahue. (Thus it’s billed as a solo album, as opposed to 2018’s Peaced and Slightly Pulverised, released as the David Nance Group.)
The homespun feel of the album gives it a psychedelic, outsider charm, like if Ariel Pink’s early work had been inspired by jam bands and Southern rock instead of ’60s novelty songs and jingles. Like Pink, Nance is a deceptively traditional songwriter, banding together clever hooks and catchy riffs that play with an uncanny familiarity. As a self-producer, he complements this gift: “This Side of the Moon” begins with a whispered refrain rising deep within the mix, like he’s cuing the band, while the first chorus of “July Sunrise” trails off with a wordless coda, as if he’s still workshopping the melody.
Other highlights, like “Gentle Traitor” and “My Love, the Dark and I,” are warbly studio concoctions, sketches of songs that seem in danger of dissipating into tape hiss. Nance drawls through their fuzzy arrangements in a deep, grungy voice, maintaining the mood rather than expressing any specific emotion. It is partially why his lyrics, when you can make them out, seem primed to sing along with even when you have no idea what he’s talking about: “The worst part about seeing you this evening,” he sings in “Save Me Some Tears,” “is horseflies soaking in my ice tea.”
For such a warped, solitary album, Staunch Honey seems designed for open spaces. On a recent live album, recorded for a socially distant iteration of Gonerfest, the music comes alive, played by a band laughing and cracking jokes, extending solos and jamming out, encouraged by a small group of people hearing it all for the first time. “This is making my year,” Nance announces near the end, before admitting, “Not a hard bar to pass.” While the songs on Staunch Honey feel like breakthroughs, it’s living proof that their real journey is just beginning.

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