For the album's fiftieth birthday, an impressive roster of artists, from Steve Gunn to Marissa Nadler to Jim O'Rourke, pay tribute to Dylan's Blonde on Blonde.

Various Artists: Blonde on Blonde Revisited

Blonde on Blonde Revisited

One of the most famous Dylanisms arose from a conversation with director Sam Peckinpah on the set of the 1973 movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. “Just be yourself,” Peckinpah suggested to a 32-year-old Bob Dylan who, by this point, had already been everything from folk messiah to rock Judas, who had received glowing reviews and miserable ones, who once stood as a pillar of New York authenticity and was now struggling to play the role of a mysterious stranger in a Western movie filmed in Durango, Mexico. Fittingly, Dylan snapped back to Peckinpah: “Which one?”
If Dylan’s 1966 double album Blonde on Blonde is generally viewed among his most iconic, it’s because it was his first album to show all the different Dylans in their best light, with appearances from the freewheeling folk singer from the early ‘60s all the way up to the weirdo bluesman he would later become. It’s not Dylan’s only album that plays genre and mood the way other artists use backup guitars, but it’s the one that made them all feel the most coherent, attractive, and maniacally unstoppable.
For the album’s fiftieth birthday, an impressive array of acts have gathered to pay homage to its thin, wild, multiple personality disorder. Blonde on Blonde Revisited is a worthy tribute, maintaining the album's original track order and flow while also showcasing the wide-ranging talents of the artists collected. Unfortunately, things don’t start off so hot. Malcolm Middleton’s monotonous Matrix-soundtrack-meets-hotel-lobby remake of “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35” at once drains all the brainless fun out of the original while making it sound even more brainless in the process (maybe not everybody must get stoned). Better is Thomas Cohen’s subtle, Britpop remake of “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine,” refitting Dylan's bluesy kiss-off with a jazzy, laid-back groove. As evidenced by last year’s fascinating Bootleg Series, however, most of the songs from this era had already been reinvented and torn apart multiple times before being released: the arrangements that Dylan landed on feel definitive for a reason. For the most part, despite the daring, experimental nature of the album proper, the songs that fare best here are also the ones that take the fewest obvious risks.
Steve Gunn’s thoughtful vocal performance in “Visions of Johanna” and Michael Chapman’s intricate guitar work in “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” are highlights: examples of artists paying homage to Dylan’s songs not through reinvention but through total reverence. Similarly, after contributing some of the most surprising performances on last month’s Day of the Dead, Phosphorescent shows up with a refreshingly stripped back take on “I Want You,” recalling the early Oldham-isms of Pride more than the underwater country of Muchacho. Elsewhere, Marissa Nadler’s austere (even for her) take on “Absolutely Sweet Marie” and Ryley Walker’s stunning “4th Time Around” both make strong cases for each artist’s particular style, illustrating how influential Dylan’s music was for a generation of folk artists hellbent on sounding more like themselves. Like the best of Dylan’s work, these performance sound like timeless standards and unanswerable riddles.
The real revelation here, though, is the closing number. As was the case on the original Blonde on Blonde, Jim O’Rourke’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” takes up the entirety of Side D (and even outlasts Dylan’s by two minutes). O’Rourke refines Dylan’s epic waltz into a gorgeous acoustic ballad– his hushed, emotive vocal recalling The Wild, The Innocent-era Springsteen in its quiet intensity. Calling back to the initial recording of the song, when Dylan’s band treated every chorus like a climax, assured that this must be the last one, O’Rourke inserts a series of found recordings of city streets, ringing phones, and passing cars between the verses. The opposite effect to the original’s eleven-minute runner’s high, these passages find the artist pausing to look out the window, overwhelmed by the task at hand and threatening to quit before coming back with more to say. It’s a fitting tribute to Dylan at a point in his career when he couldn’t even stand still for the duration of a photo shoot, when “being yourself” wasn’t an instruction to follow but an intuitive instinct. Blonde on Blonde Revisited, then, serves an album-length response to Dylan’s comeback. Why just be yourself when you can be all of yourselves, all at once?


Maybe the smartest thing about Laura Veirs' new children's album is that some of its tracks-- including a duet with the Decemberists' Colin Meloy-- aren't children's songs.

Tumble Bee

Maybe the smartest thing about Laura Veirs' new children's album, Tumble Bee, is that some of its tracks aren't even children's songs. Researching the rich history of American folk music for material she could interpret, Veirs cast a wide net to include not only tunes written expressly for kids, but any other compositions she felt could reasonably slot alongside the likes of "Little Lap Dog Lullaby" and "King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O". Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the way our 21st-century ears tend to hear anything written 50 or 100 or more years ago as comparatively quaint, songs as thematically disparate as the Civil War-era "Soldier's Joy" (here a duet with the Decemberists' Colin Meloy) and a calypso tune popularized by Harry Belafonte, "Jamaica Farewell", don't feel so out of place on a record aimed at little ones.
Then again, another thing many of these songs have in common is being really strange, and occasionally even quite dark. Listening to some of Veirs' cover choices makes you think of Greil Marcus' famous description of the folk material Bob Dylan and the Band mined in the late 1960s as capturing the "old, weird America." There's Woody Guthrie's "Why Oh Why", featuring such bizarre existential quandries as "Why can't a bird eat an elephant?" and "Why ain't my grandpa my grandma?" There's plenty more that's just flat-out macabre, like the title character of "The Fox" informing a pen of doomed ducks and geese that "a couple of you gonna grease my chin." Sure enough he keeps his promise, his whole family feasts on the fowl, and the song ends by gleefully pointing out that "the little ones chewed on the bones." Then there's "All the Pretty Little Horses" (also covered in recent years by Calexico and, earlier, Current 93 with Nick Cave), a superficially gentle (hear the percussive elements kindly mimicing jangling spurs) but deeply haunting African-American lullaby dating back to the days of slavery; many versions have neutered the song by altering its most harrowing lines, but Veirs retains them: "Way down yonder, down in the medder/ There's a poor little lambie/ Bees and the butterflies pecking at its eye/ Poor little thing cried 'Mammy.'"
The title track, a Karl Blau song, is also underlined by a grown-up recognition of disappointment and loss. The music may be jaunty, riding playful trumpets and sparkly keys, but the words and Veirs' fragile voice point to a more sobering reality. "She'll sting me as she longs to be free," Veirs sings of the titular insect. Tumble Bee is a welcome addition to contemporary children's music, not only because it's sufficiently involving to appeal to adults, but also because it further demonstrates that songs for kids don't have to be cloying or sanitized.


The first way to experience Liturgy’s The Ark Work is as a confounding mass of sound. Hearing it feels like watching someone's head split open, which might be an appropriate image for a band so concerned with annihilation and rebirth themes.

The Ark Work

The first way to experience Liturgy’s The Ark Work is as a confounding mass of sound. The band seems to have designed it that way: Along with the guitars and percussion, there are horns, strings, constantly hammering glockenspiel, even bagpipes, all blaring at once, like 11 open browser tabs autoplaying or a block of car alarms set off by a passing motorcycle. Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the band’s leading force and The Ark Work’s primary arranger, has talked in interviews about realizing the sound in his head; The Ark Work, he claims, is the closest he’s come to sharing it with us. The sound he's designed here feels purposefully too large, a pressurized force exploding out of confinement. Hearing it feels like watching someone's head split open, which might be an appropriate image for a band so concerned with themes of annihilation and rebirth.
The second way to experience The Ark Work is as a kind of aesthetic gauntlet, hurled with an audible clunk. Liturgy’s previous albums, 2009’s Renihilation and 2011’s Aesthethica, cast Hunt-Hendrix’s imposing ideas—which he has tried to clarify, perhaps comically, in a pair of perfectly inscrutable diagrams included with The Ark Work’s packaging—in songlike forms. The Ark Work is closer, in its 57-minute expanse and grandeur, to a symphony—something long and Germanic, maybe by Bruckner. Long sections of it hang stubbornly in place, pitched between bedlam and boredom, before surging over another exhilarating crag in the music’s development.
Recurring themes pop up, like alpine flowers dotting a mountainside. "Follow", the album’s first full track, begins with a chiming contrapuntal figure in the glockenspiels, led by pedal tones in the bass line. It has a fragile, otherworldly quality, which the band snuffs out briskly when it plunges in moments later. The theme resurfaces a few tracks later, on "Follow II", played by an organ, on "Haelegen", and then again on "Total War". Each time, it feels like a welcome space for contemplation amidst the chaos.
These moments provide navigable markers on what can frankly be an imposing, even dismaying listen. The Ark Work is harmonically rich, but very slow; to say that it moves is to point out that glass is technically a liquid. The most awe-inspiring payoffs occur after agonizing liftoff: On "Follow II", strings and horns lifts the music up, like pigeons on strings tied to a Mahlerian orchestra. The mass seems to hang an inch or two above ground, groaning and threatening to split open, before the seams burst and Hunt-Hendrix’s little voice spills out.
This sense of watching an impossible bulk lift skyward is the most thrilling sensation The Ark Work provides, and it happens two or three times across the album. In these moments, Hunt-Hendrix’s thrashing ambitions feel justified, and they position Liturgy not as descendants of black metal but of Swans, eager to chase exhilaration to punishing, Herculean extremes. The crazed energy of Ark’s best music feels indebted to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, and Hunt-Hendrix has more than a touch of Herzog’s maddening genius/genius madman dynamic about him. In both cases, the primary question haunting the project's edges is "Is this guy kidding?"
The Ark Work has another unfortunate Herzog parallel, and it’s a specific one: In order to enjoy the grand vision before you, you have to block the sometimes-irritating sound of the creator’s voice from your ears. On previous albums, Hunt-Hendrix screamed in a register that was both shocking and oddly delicate, like gift wrap tearing. On The Ark Work, he drones on a single note, with very little variation, for most of the time. It sounds deadening on first contact, and it doesn’t reveal much depth on repeated listens. He seems to be aiming for a trancelike, occult mood, and he has referenced the triplet flows of Three 6 Mafia as inspiration. The long incantatory passages of "Quetzalcoatl" and "Father Vorizen", which seem like his most direct attempts at applying this rhythm, offer a handy example of just how far a sound can travel from its origin.
That is a charitable way of saying that his vocals often border on unendurable. On "Father Vorizen", his droning is mostly tuneless and nearly rhythmless, a persistent hum that you find yourself wanting to swat away. Because it is competing with massive elements, his voice has been doubled up and set slightly to the side in the mix, making him sound less an entranced cult leader, stoking the flames, than someone mumbling in a corner. When he moans "The doors of perception will open and close/ Hope will exist in a problematic relationship with reason/ Libidinal energy will whirl round like a rattle rattling/ Hearts will be stopped bones will shatter shattering," on "Quetzalcoatl", the prevailing knock on Liturgy as a dog-and-pony show for Hunt-Hendrix’s half-baked musings feels uncomfortably close at hand.
It is an unfair judgment to pass on the glorious, rippling full-band unit, however: Greg Fox, one of the most intuitive, thrilling, and musical drummers of his generation, is back in the band, and his playing, as it did on Aesthethica, feels truer to the spirit of Hunt-Hendrix’s philosophy than any of his declarations. The band plays with tremendous power, verve, and energy, but the results feel leaden, even after dozens of listens. For all of its dense conceptual underpinnings, The Ark Work comes up curiously short on new ideas long before the album ends.  The stretch of music covering the album’s first five tracks—"Fanfare" to "Quetzalcoatl"—invokes awe, terror, confusion, joy, despair. At this point, however, The Ark Work is less than half over. Inevitably, some chair-squirming occurs. Fatigue sets in; interest ebbs. This is the flip side of grandeur: When you stretch it out far enough, it becomes difficult to distinguish from terminal boredom.


With his husky, sensitive baritone, this son of Canada’s Prairie Provinces mixes the tales of modern and historic wanderers on his second sterling album of traditional folk and country.

Songs of the Plains

The lessons of the road make poignant songwriting fodder. The highway’s combination of locomotion and seemingly boundless space offers a quiet interiority that other places cannot; with all that time and room, there’s little else to do but think. It’s as if the car window framing each vista were more mirror than postcard. This source of lasting revelations has inspired its own compendium of songs, from George Strait’s homeward-bound “Amarillo by Morning” to Miranda Lambert’s nomadic “Highway Vagabond.”
While Canadian singer-songwriter Colter Wall toured behind his 2017 self-titled debut, the road, as it often does, whispered thoughts of home—his native prairies, to be exact. Literally and figuratively between the steely metropolis of Toronto and the robust majesty of Vancouver, the Prairie Provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Wall’s native Saskatchewan are harder to define. Though Canada dwarfs the U.S. in landmass, the entire country has 3 million fewer people than California alone. Getting from town to town, from here to there, is a different kind of desolate, the beauty reinforced by a vast and varied emptiness.
Wall’s sophomore album, Songs of the Plains, uses the sounds of country icons like Waylon Jennings and George Jones as musical frames for the unfurled feel of those prairie stretches. Borrowing both the stylistic and storytelling genealogies of folk and traditional country, Wall extends a tip-of-the-hat to their golden fields. Two tracks portray the prairielands’ agrarian history through the eyes of the upstarts who settled that part of the country: “Saskatchewan in 1881” and the cover “Calgary Round-Up.” The latter focuses on Alberta’s famed Calgary Stampede, the annual rodeo and exhibition that dates to the city’s first agricultural fairs more than a century ago. Pedal steel and harmonica wind behind Wall’s husky baritone, winking at nostalgia but not giving over to it.
Songs of the Plains are the types of tales told around a crackling fire, those of homesickness (“Plain to See Plainsman”), blue-collar labor (“The Trains Are Gone”), and folk heroes writ large (“Wild Bill Hickok”). This is Wall’s attempt to put Canada more squarely into country’s storyline. He covers two cowboy traditionals, “Night Herding Song” and “Tying Knots in the Devil’s Tail,” singing the former almost entirely a cappella and shifting its original jaunt into something more somber, haunted. His yipping yodel resurfaces for his take on Billy Don Burns’ “Wild Dogs,” where it conjures the coyote’s howl.
Wall pushes in close against the untenanted space of the middle provinces, filling their geographic gaps with an intoxicating rasp. He sings with a serrated edge, his voice digging crevices rich with heartbreak, homeland, and heritage. “Sweetly taking his time/Drinking all the straight rye/Chasing it with red wine/Heavy on his troubled mind,” he offers on standout “Thinkin’ on a Woman,” the tale of a truck driver who finds little solace in the big-rig route that pulls him away from his paramour. Wall’s voice sustains every line’s third and fourth words, rattling the cage that holds the narrator back from what he wants. The driver’s frustration—targeted at himself, at circumstances binding him to this road—are palpable in Wall’s quavering breath.
Wall said recently that he appreciates atmospheric touches on songs, making his choice of producer Dave Cobb a natural fit. Cobb made Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music and Jason Isbell’s Southeastern, albums that succeeded in part on smart textural finishes. For “Night Herding Song,” Cobb made Wall sing into a microphone placed beside an actual campfire. During “The Trains Are Gone,” he underscores the absence of railroad work with a locomotive rhythm punctuated by the whistle-like echo of harmonica. Though the modern-day country of Cobb’s more famous collaborators seems indelibly bound to a certain stateside identity, Wall suggests an alternative: Sing the songs of the country you call home, even if it’s well beyond the 49th parallel.


Even on a brief EP, Yves Tumor’s prismatic world seems to get bigger as it mutates into certain conventions of goth rock, dream pop, and shoegaze.

The Asymptotical World EP

The music of Yves Tumor moves like something molting. At first, it cleaves to genre, taking recognizable shape—a loping bass line, a steady backbeat. And then the shape dulls. It starts to appear as a copy of itself, not a rock song but an imitation rendered from paling memory. And then the form splits, and from the split comes something glistening and new, in the same arrangement as the old, dulled thing but rawer and more perceptibly alive.
Across Tumor’s previous two albums, 2018’s Safe in the Hands of Love and 2020’s Heaven to a Tortured Mind, the artist plays in this sequence of writhing, shedding, and revealing. Songs skirt close to familiar forms and then bloom into grotesqueries. Often, Tumor deploys negative space to this effect. Take “Gospel for a New Century,” the lead single and opener from Tortured Mind, where a horn riff sampled from a 1978 Korean funk track rings out and abruptly cuts to silence, as if the sound waves produced by the instrument were suddenly and impossibly sucked back up into its bell, the air returned to the lungs of its player. The effect confounds the song’s sense of space, rendering it unstable, pocked with void.
On the new Asymptotical World EP, Tumor injects a similar mutation into certain conventions of goth rock, dream pop, and shoegaze. Squalling guitars tower and topple, straining toward great vertical heights and then spilling out toward the horizon. Songs like “Jackie,” a tight rumination on tortured love that ranks among Tumor’s most direct and immediately gripping songs, channel the fever dreams of late-’80s experimental rock bands from the UK, bearing traces of A.R. Kane and early My Bloody Valentine. As ever, dry humor and a subtle playfulness shine through the deadpan mood, showing in flourishes like “Jackie”’s bass drum hiccup and the phaser wobble in Tumor’s voice just before the climax of “Crushed Velvet.” “We can go wherever/I don’t have a favorite spot/I just wanna look you in the eye,” Tumor speak-sings against a post-punk bass throb on “Secrecy Is Incredibly Important to the Both of Them,” a blase romantic gesture that promptly swings around to sly dismissal: “How can I miss you/If you won’t go away?”
Throughout the record, Tumor eases ever more deeply into the role of prismatic bandleader, shifting readily from tone to tone while sustaining a core sense of authority. The lovelorn wail of “Jackie” calcifies into “Secrecy”’s bitterly cool asides, which then evaporate as unsure sighs on “...And Loyalty Is a Nuisance Child.” Across Asymptotical World’s six songs, Tumor plays a roster of characters gripped in various turmoils, acting them out in different postures, from sweltering and vulnerable to icy and impenetrable.
At the EP’s molten center is a guest appearance from the industrial noise duo NAKED, whose vocalist Agnes Gryczkowska streaks “Tuck” with glimpses of body horror. “I didn’t die for you,” she insists, “I feel myself/Growing big and hard inside you.” Her voice lifts in a conspiratorial whisper amid scattered, buried beats; it’s the only track on the EP that doesn’t foreground the rhythm section in the mix, and as such it feels boneless, amoebic, like it could at any point open its body and swallow its listener.
That is the steady promise of Tumor’s work, and its constant threat: that its strange, inverted intimacy might spill into the listener and turn the self alien. When you recognize the shape of a song but can’t fix its innards, can’t place its emotional register among your catalog of acceptable feelings, what does it do to you? What might meet you there? The Asymptotical World’s motions are recognizable; they come in familiar skin. Under the skin, something ill-fitting thrashes, trying to escape itself, inviting anyone in sight to do the same.

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DeForrest Brown Jr.’s most ambitious release yet is a 49-minute suite that brings together fractured, shuddering drum programming with spoken-word poetry, collage, and noise.

Speaker Music: Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry

Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry

When DeForrest Brown Jr. says, “Make techno Black again,” it is meant both as a reminder of a historical fact—dance music is Black music—and a rejection of a widespread misconception. To many around the world, techno is the stuff of legend and fodder for memes: a lifestyle accessory reducible to a four-on-the-floor beat, a gram of MDMA, and a bottle of Club Mate. Brown Jr., who also records as Speaker Music, has made it his mission to expose this whitewashed caricature of techno as a lie.
In panels, lectures, and his forthcoming book Assembling a Black Counter Culture, Brown Jr., illustrates the ways that techno, invented in Detroit in the mid-1980s, represents the lived experience of Black people under specific historical circumstances. A kind of sonic archaeologist, Brown Jr. strips away techno’s layers to unearth the artifacts of urban planning, labor relations, race riots, the Great Migration, and Jim Crow before that. Digging far enough down, he finds the centuries-old songs of enslaved people who picked cotton on Southern plantations—a “communal rhythm” that would be replicated on the Ford Motor Company assembly lines manned by their descendants, a rhythm that would fuel Detroit’s two greatest cultural exports, Motown and techno. “It’s all this one sound of trauma and bodily agitation that comes out in various forms,” Brown Jr. told Pitchfork contributor Joshua Minsoo Kim in his newsletter Tone Glow. “When I think about Black music and being here from 1619 to the present, I see a long line of traumatic screams.”
Brown Jr.’s musical output stays true to this expressive legacy while expanding what “techno” might mean sonically. Since December, he has put out two albums of long-form experimental electronic music and an EP, Percussive Therapy, of psychedelic beat music. Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry is his most ambitious release yet: a 49-minute suite that brings together fractured, shuddering drum programming with spoken-word poetry, collage, and noise. It does not much outwardly resemble the sleek pulses and iridescent chords of the classic Detroit techno he often invokes; it’s angrier, more turbulent, as committed to formlessness as symmetry. In a PDF booklet that accompanies the digital release, he invokes the poet Amiri Baraka’s Fire Music movement, which linked grassroots community organizing with the radical jazz of musicians like Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler; more than any particular musical lexicon, what Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry draws from those artists is the desire to push beyond established forms.
The backbone of the album is a machine rhythm that runs almost without pause from start to finish: a thrashing groove that pairs booming kicks and toms with jagged hi-hats. Bass and treble trade off like the flash-bang symphony of a thunderstorm. The beat is repetitive but unpredictable; it feels deliberately agitated. Over this buckling frame he drapes a succession of sounds and ideas. In “Techno Is a Liberation Technology,” the New York producer AceMo’s processed trumpet bobs and weaves, contributing to the churning atmosphere. In “Black Secret Technology Is a Traumatically Manufactured and Exported Good Necessitated by 300 Years of Unaccounted for White Supremacist Savagery in the Founding of the United States,” the beat seesaws across the stereo field above icy drones. In “A Genre Study of Black Male Death and Dying,” free-jazz drums are spun through violent pitch-shifting algorithms while a police scanner chirps and sputters over the top.
Although the album plays out as a single, unbroken piece, the most powerful track is the first, “Amerikkka’s Bay,” in which the 18-year-old writer Maia Sanaa recites a chilling poem about Black victims murdered by police: “No more dinner nights and movies with her daddy, kisses from her mommy, dreams of who she would be. He might remember the doll that laid next to her, how it too had 6 bullets lodged into it.” Her reading snaps Brown Jr.’s unstable beats into focus and provides essential context for what will follow. Sanaa’s piece also appears in the accompanying PDF booklet, alongside a collection of poetry and essays that ground Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry in the current moment. An essay by Brown Jr. links the COVID-19 pandemic, with its disproportionate effects on communities of color, to broader systemic inequalities and the failure of “White American utopianism,” a failure previously laid bare in the ruins of post-industrial Detroit. Critic Ryan Clarke captures the unrest of 2020 even more succinctly: “Riots are the voice of the unheard and percussion is the frequency.”
Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry is not an easy listen. The disjointed repetition—a beat that stops and starts, starts and stops, over and over—is jarring. The rhythm jitters in place, yet it doesn’t vary across the album; it just drops out for short passages before kicking in again. (It is remarkably similar to the rhythms deployed on Percussive Therapy.) But surely that irregular repetition is part of the point. The beat’s insistently disorienting qualities short-circuit the music’s entertainment value; a track like “African American Disillusionment With Northern Democracy Continues to Smolder in Every Negro Who Has Settled Up North After Knowing Life in the South,” with its nightly news anchors discussing white agitators at Black-led protests, is unlikely to soundtrack a Friday-night dance party. The goal is to provoke, to disturb.
With its long, unbroken stretch of repetitive-yet-not-repeating beats, over which jazz samples, news segments, and police scanners are painted like scenes, Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry plays with linear time in unsettling ways. It often feels less like music than like some other medium—like, say, doomscrolling the timeline, or following a horizontal mural that unrolls new scenes of horror and resilience without end. In the liner notes to 1965’s The New Wave in Jazz, a compilation featuring Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and John Coltrane that was recorded a month after Malcom X’s assassination, Amiri Baraka wrote that the album was “heavy evidence that something is really happening.” Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry is a similar form of evidence: Its scroll-like shape is a seismograph of these turbulent, hopeful times.

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Presented as a sprawling three-hour epic, the composer’s drone piece for guitar, cello, and sine wave oscillators seeks new rhythms within the interminable sweep of pandemic time.

Does Spring Hide Its Joy

Listen closely to the numerous “lockdown albums” released in the past couple of years, and you might hear shared among them the tacit understanding that the cultural reckoning is still unfinished—that anything that attempts to capture what it’s been like to live through this pandemic would be inherently incomplete, and escapism is preferred anyway. The spring of 2020 echoes constantly, but silently.
Does Spring Hide Its Joy, a newly released longform drone piece by electroacoustic composer Kali Malone performed on sine wave oscillators alongside cellist Lucy Railton and Sunn O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley, was conceived during those haunted months nearly three years ago. Malone didn’t set out to make art that reflects the broader pandemic experience. Instead, she created a musical framework in which to explore the evolving mindspace provoked by its blunted whiplash, giving the listener space to imprint (or release) their own emotions and memories and homing in on the illusory properties of time. “Unmarked by the familiar milestones of life, the days and months dripped by, instinctively blending with no end in sight,” she explains in an accompanying statement. “Playing this music for hours on end was a profound way to digest the countless life transitions and hold time together.” The piece is performed in 60-90 minute instances, but each performance is different, allowing for an ever-shifting relationship to the material and its genesis.
Endurance is a longstanding element of Malone’s music, but Does Spring Hide Its Joy makes it a central component. Each of the three presentations of the piece featured on this release are an hour long (subdivided into 20-minute movements), and, anchored by a shared tonic drone, they easily melt into one sprawling three-hour epic. The music breathes in slow motion, with massive exhalations of bass ceding to stretches of quiet consonance before the next yawning gasp. Change is omnipresent and can be dramatic, but there’s a veneer of stillness that makes listening feel like observing the swirl of a nebula; the spectacle exists on a scale that’s difficult to grasp in one sitting. The most effective way to ground oneself in the piece is to be with the music as it exists in the moment, listening for incremental shifts as they unfold.
What Malone describes as “hold[ing] time together” involves a process of letting go of traditional musical demarcations of time and forming new ones. Drone music is often perceived to lack rhythm, but Does Spring Hide Its Joy is abundant with it, just on different scales than many listeners might be used to. You can mark time with the moments when Railton runs out of bow and changes direction, which don’t occur at regular intervals. The constant ebb and flow of volume, intensity, and dissonance, which takes place in cycles of dozens of minutes, offers another rhythmic viewpoint. But the most fascinating occurs on a much smaller spectrum of time: As the trio builds up microtonal harmonies, warbling beats caused by harmonic interference contract and expand as the frequencies fall in and out of phase with one another. Depending where the listener’s attention rests, clock time, geological time, and quantum time each become observable.
Creating music this precise and harmonically dense requires superhuman concentration, and it’s clear from these recordings how closely the three musicians are listening and reacting to one another. Rather than conjure impressions of solitude, the spontaneous decisions the trio makes—to dig into coarse dissonance, to let the glorious simplicity of an open fifth ring out, to fade into oblivion—speak to the joys of building something collectively. In a recent interview with Bandcamp, Malone discussed how working on a score by Pauline Oliveros, the composer and Deep Listening pioneer whose methods were championed in 2020 as a balm for isolation, has affected how she thinks about working within and composing for an ensemble. Out of the singular nature of sustained tones emerge entire worlds of sound that arise from each member of the trio understanding not only their own role, but how to mold their contributions around the distinct personalities of their collaborators.
There’s something utopian about music driven by an attention to understanding those around you, music that pushes listeners to expand their understanding of how time is experienced and demarcated. In a period of upheaval, letting go of expectations of how things should be, beginning with how music should move or present itself, can be a powerful step toward reimagining the future. Rejecting escapism and celebrating invention, Does Spring Hide Its Joy is equally compelling and uncompromising. The music and the feeling of being absorbed in it is its own reward. Just beneath the surface of Malone’s composition lies an alternate path forward: one that is malleable, defined by change and the mysterious complexities of sound.


The Washington, D.C. band’s second album is dense with ambiguities, sacrificing their debut’s quotable one-liners in favor of character sketches about the everyday banality of evil.

The Seduction of Kansas

In early 2017, precisely one week after the presidential inauguration, the Washington, D.C. band Priests released their debut album Nothing Feels Natural. The fear and frustration then gripping half the nation was the backdrop for their indelible first impression: a readymade context for alternately hooky and abrasive guitar songs like “JJ” and “Pink White House.” At the time, they were heralded as if they had conceived, written, and recorded a record in a matter of weeks, rather than months or years. In the face of a corrupt regime, punk bands were going to be great again, and Priests had the fortune and misfortune to be mistaken for one.
Two years on, Priests appear ready for a realignment. Their second album is called The Seduction of Kansas, which is snappier than its inspiration, historian Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. They’re still politically conscious agitators, and this time, they want to be clear that they’re taking the long view. Don’t expect a treatise on middle America’s rightward creep, though; geographic Kansas is a distant, metaphorical concern on these songs. The state that receives the most attention is Texas, where the band—minus original bassist Taylor Mulitz, who’s replaced on record by Nothing Feels Natural collaborator Janel Leppin—recorded with producer John Congleton. Perhaps to memorialize the experience, they’ve compressed the region’s geologic and political history into the two compact verses of closer “Texas Instruments.”
Priests’ limited palette of sounds likewise allows The Seduction of Kansas to strike a more restrained tone. “I’m Clean” and “Ice Cream” strip surf rock for parts; new touring bassist Alexandra Tyson’s knotted bass is a highlight of the title track, where bandleader Katie Alice Greer sings of “a drawn-out charismatic parody of what a country used to be.” Kansas is inherently political music, powered by the same oblique fury that made U.S. Girls so compelling. These songs are dense with ambiguities, sacrificing the debut’s quotable first-person one-liners in favor of character sketches and scenarios that prompt more questions than they answer. At the same time, they’re uncomfortably realistic, sprinkled with everyday banality-of-evil references: Augusto Pinochet, the Koch Brothers, Applebee’s. The most straightforward song, “Good Time Charlie,” recounts the United States’ arming of the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, with vivid lyrics inspired by Mike Nichols’ 2007 film Charlie Wilson’s War.
Not every track requires such complicated footnotes. On the searing opener “Jesus’ Son,” Greer lets loose a thrilling guttural sneer, indicting American exceptionalism and militarization: “The day I walked on water, the shrapnel ricocheted/Said, ‘Baby give it to me, Savior I’m how the West was won.’” The unnerving “Control Freak” calls upon Dorothy, the quintessential Kansan, slipping the thinnest veil of fiction over a protagonist in the grips of paternalistic mania. “You’re out of the woods, Dorothy/I’m your control freak/I’m your ‘no place like home’/Bedsheets tucking you to sleep,” Greer sings, as hair-raising reverbed chords spin out into a demented boogie.
Though the album’s characters marinate in a toxic brew of fear, normalization, and lies, its aesthetics have more in common with conceptual art. These songs toy coolly with the power of the gaze, at turns demanding attention and deflecting it: “It’s your movie/You wrote starred and directed it/I may only be your muse/But I’m necessary,” goes the closing chant of “68 Screen,” the feminist assertion of a disenfranchised actress. Meanwhile, on digital-only track “Not Perceived,” Greer instructs, “I’m uneasy about anything that might perceive me/Keep your eyes closed.” This is the sound of a band working to privilege interpretation and subjectivity, concepts that cause otherwise reasonable people’s eyes to glaze over. Priests happen to be doing it just as mainstream attitudes about the value of the humanities approach a nadir; no wonder onlookers tend to assume that art must be done at society, rather than in it.
Like some of its more theoretic inspirations, The Seduction of Kansas runs the risk of being seen as shallow, self-important, and a little nihilistic. It’s a critique almost invited by a title like “Youtube Sartre,” a scratchy, brutalist song with the simultaneously existentialist and didactic chorus, “Don’t believe yourself to be/A virtuous thief/Or virtuous about anything.” Too urgent to ignore, too pretentious to easily love, The Seduction of Kansas winds up feeling both high-concept and kind of hollow, whether inherently or in natural reflection of its subject matter—because what, in the long view, is more morally and intellectually bankrupt than American empire?


The purported final album from the chart-topping hip-hop collective chronicles their rise and accelerated decline through the lens of a mercurial Svengali.

The Family

They weren’t going to live in the frat house forever. From virtually the moment iridescence topped the album charts—capping Brockhampton’s ascent from modest message-board origins—frontman Kevin Abstract promised the end was nigh. “This is going to be over in a few albums,” he told GQ in 2019. “But that’s okay. It’s still a family.” In early 2022, the group canceled an international tour and went on “indefinite hiatus”; at Coachella, they teased a forthcoming “final album,” sporting letterman jackets stitched with the epigraph “All Good Things Must Come to an End!”
The Family is the album foretold at Coachella, though a package of shelved recordings, TM, arrived hours later, earning the distinction—for now, anyway—of being the final Brockhampton release. In terms of personnel, The Family is effectively a Kevin Abstract solo project: Bearface and associate Boylife split production duties, but Abstract’s is the lone voice on nearly all 17 tracks. The record has a calculated fishbowl quality, chronicling the group’s rise and accelerated decline through the lens of a mercurial Svengali. It’s a victory lap with a slightly bitter aftertaste, like champagne left uncorked in a trashed hotel suite.
With most of the group in absentia, The Family retains Brockhampton’s prismatic framework. Taking stock of their improbable stardom, Abstract sketches a series of brief retrospectives full of contradictory and ambivalent sentiments. In Abstract’s telling, Brockhampton’s journey was the thrill of a lifetime, and also a decade-long slog of recording and touring. “All That,” an upbeat interpolation of TLC’s All That theme, depicts the group’s meteoric rise in a panoramic blur. The song’s succession of images—hungry stomachs, disaffected co-stars—makes for a Hollywood cautionary tale, yet the stakes are relatively low. The squabbling bandmates make up in the end; Abstract, at least, is bound for bigger and better things. As a showcase of his one-man-band talent—the nasally ’90s flows on “All That,” the staccato bars of “The Family,” the easy harmonies of “My American Life”—The Family glimpses any number of possible futures.
Some of Abstract’s criticism is directed at himself, albeit with tongue in cheek. On “Good Time,” he cheers the group’s demise like it’s the last day of school, admitting his “toxic” cravings for attention and validation. It’s a poignant realization: The appetites that fueled Abstract’s viral fame made him, by his own account, a bit of a monster. He leans into the persona on the title track, reenacting his most domineering moments: “I don’t feel guilty from wakin’ you up when you sleep/I don’t feel guilty from cuttin’ your verse from this beat/I don’t feel guilty for heat you caught from my tweets/Dead projects I teased from my lack of empathy.” Some revelations feel predictable, others too inside-baseball, but Abstract’s attempt to construct a warts-and-all profile makes The Family his most ambitious conceit to date.
Supposing The Family is, in fact, the group’s swan song, we may as well perform a postmortem: What did Brockhampton mean? The specter of Kanye West looms large across their catalog (the band members met on the fan forum KanyeToThe), and The Family is no exception. “Good Time” and “Boyband” borrow the sped-up sampling technique of Kanye’s early production catalog, the cozy chipmunk-soul sound that defined the mid-2000s. Other elements—the pulsing layers of “Gold Teeth,” Abstract’s grandiosity tempered by self-deprecating humor—feel cribbed from the Yeezus era. As West’s discography is reduced to context for his public meltdowns, Brockhampton’s homage points to the resonance of his best work, and its unprecedented spread among internet communities.
As it happens, West wasn’t even Brockhampton’s most ignominious influence. Their residential incubator model was inspired by Abstract’s reverence for Mark Zuckerberg; Shia LaBeouf, since disgraced, acted as a mentor. To their credit, Brockhampton distanced themselves from other sordid associations, dismissing rapper Ameer Vann after accusations of sexual misconduct. There was a Breakfast Club charm about the unlikely collective—a union of listless chatroom lurkers who, for want of anything better to do, became a chart-topping rap group.
If their formulation as a queer, multi-racial, shapeshifting artists’ colony seemed radical, they’d probably scoff at the notion. Brockhampton never sought a soapbox, but their why-not inclusivity (why shouldn’t a rap group have an in-house app developer?) helped them chart a path around hip-hop’s reverential spaces. And yet none of their affectations—the rags-to-riches mythos, the body paint, the brand synergy—would have landed if the music wasn’t good. The post-iridescence records distilled their frenetic energy into a more technical, melodic palette, maintaining coming-of-age gravitas with fewer motivational platitudes. An epitaph fit for a gravestone: Brockhampton was greater than the sum of its parts.


The Olympia punks’ second album presents a chiming, inventive take on post-punk that's shot through with sly humor, madcap time signatures, and wild abandon.

Collected Acknowledgements

Olympia’s Table Sugar enter a venerable lineage of art-school punks who turned their lack of technical skill into the ultimate virtue: a remarkably original perspective. The band took shape on the hallowed ground of Evergreen State College in 2014, and the current lineup—Pascal, Ella, Aidan, and Jenna—learned to play together through intuition. They gave themselves a perfectly Warholian name: a cheap, everyday product that is sneakily addictive. In one self-authored biography, Table Sugar quote 1970s soft-rock band the Archies and write, “music is hot. and when sugar is hot it turns to syrup. and we’ll stick 2 u.” After a few listens, you can’t shake Table Sugar off.
The wondrous, minimal music of Collected Acknowledgments—a 12-minute 12”, the band’s second LP but first on vinyl—recalls the collectivist energy and grooving resourcefulness of late 1970s post-punk à la Delta 5. At times, too, there are pinches of the brash spark of local predecessors like Bratmobile. But Table Sugar’s humor, madcap time signatures, and general oddity (the organ lines help) feel most akin to contemporaries like Palberta in the Northeast or the recent Indiana punk milieu of the Coneheads and CCTV. Chiming and clanging, Table Sugar are nominally post-punk in style, but the only “post-” you’ll imagine in a Table Sugar song is the hyper-charged, sour-sweet second that just passed you by. This is a thrilling band, the punk equivalent of stopping to smell flowers before yanking out a fistful for a friend.
Table Sugar’s scrappy songs move forward in inventive ways. On “Baby Yaga”—named for the mythological deformed woman—one tactic is to crescendo in volume, getting louder with each intriguing line: “Thought she was talking/She’s only singing/Isn’t that something?” The buzzing, cascading opener “Dog D-Log” is a small spectacle of optimism and joy and sunflower seeds, explosive as fireworks or streamers, like a breeze through a window. “I love limes/And I like lemons/I wanna get into someone’s heaven!” is an unusual and brilliant opening phrase, beguiling and funny and serious at once. The lead vocals have the dual composure and excitement of two exclamation points augmented by a space (yes !!). There are hardly any choruses in these punk-rock joyride tunes, and ideas jump ahead too fast to worry over mistakes. Across Collected Acknowledgments, Table Sugar sprint and scamper at the edges of their celebratory songs, passing the melody around like a volleyball. It is fantastic fun. There’s a palpable sense of discovery, curiosity, and abandon.
The personality of Collected Acknowledgments bursts from all sides. The thrumming, operatically titled “Carmen” speeds and slows like halted traffic; the slightly absurd, 25-second coda “Hot Cola” indeed has a warm effervescence. On “Susan,” less than a minute long, the whole band sounds as if it is hopping in unison while shouting out associative beat poetry. Right at the center is the wiry, rocketing “No Es Nada (Ver. 3),” which seems to describe a situation of sinister uncertainty, but they poke holes in it. “He had a funny/Cigarette!” Pascal shouts, wittily antagonizing each syllable of the smoke.
In the penultimate track, “Million Places”—a bit spacious for Table Sugar, at two minutes and 32 seconds—the band epitomizes its youthful, anarchic spirit (“Take a month to keep a 20 in your wallet/The true joy true love/The million places yeah”) as if describing the price one pays for creative freedom. It feels like a self-reflection right at the edge of the world being yours, and that sense of promise runs throughout Table Sugar’s inquisitive sound. Collected Acknowledgments is captivating in the best sense: For a dozen minutes, this tiny 12” is capable of convincing you that things are actually OK—all you need to do is look from another angle, hear the world in a different way.


Independent rap vet Young Dolph trades bars with fellow Memphis native Key Glock on an album that channels the city’s iconic sound.

Dum and Dummer

In a rap industry kudzu’d with major-label plants, Memphis native Young Dolph has somehow remained a true independent. The man born Adolph Thornton, Jr. is now more than a dozen mixtapes, studio albums, and EPs deep into his rap career, almost all of it released and distributed by his own Paper Route Empire label.
Fellow Memphis rapper Key Glock, meanwhile, has just three mixtapes to his name. He is younger, and his solo work doesn’t announce itself with the same authority as Dolph’s. Nevertheless, he’s a dependable sidekick, and on Dum and Dummer he trades bars with his elder about the weight of their chains and their weed consumption. There’s not much else going on in Dum and Dummer, but there doesn’t need to be: Their shared charisma is enough.
All the beats are courtesy of producer BandPlay, who adds new colors to Dolph’s palette. There are stabbing, Psycho-like strings on “If I Ever,” and the looping guitars on “1 Hell of a Life” scream “Lil Peep / XXXTentacion Type Beat.” Dolph’s songwriting range has expanded along with his sound, allowing darkness to creep in at the edges. On “Black Locs,” he raps about wearing the eponymous shades so he “can’t see nobody” and taking drugs to “hide the pain that’s inside.”
Key’s six solo tracks are a younger man’s songs, Dolph’s endlessly listenable drawl replaced by rhymes that are clearer in delivery but simpler in construction. Most of Key’s songs are celebrations of himself—“Like Key” is about how “there ain’t another like me”—but his more emotionally inflected songs, like “Monster,” don’t reach Dolph’s depths of self-loathing and despair. Instead, they are classic bootstraps parables: “I came out the slums, I’m the one that made it happen/Now I’m gettin’ back ends, I used to get them bags in.”
It’s that same self-sufficiency that built Memphis rap and made it so appealing to outsiders. Because West Tennessee was ignored by the industry for so long, it became—like Houston, New Orleans, and pretty much every other major metropolitan area in the Southeastern United States—its own alternate universe, one that Three 6 Mafia and associates assembled out of Satanic verses, clouds of weed smoke, and horror-movie soundtracks.
Dolph and Glock place themselves in the lineage of Southern rap greats—on opening track “III,” they readily compare themselves to UGK and Three 6—but their music is classic, not nostalgic. The duo doesn’t need to plunder samples from rare Kingpin Skinny Pimp songs to evoke the aura of the 901; the city and its iconic sound is in their veins.


French power trio Aluk Todolo have used the basic instruments and fundamental techniques of hard rock and metal to pursue what may seem a musical unicorn—hyperkinetic, heavy instrumental music that’s meditative and absorbing. Voix feels meditative like Sunn O))) or Bardo Pond, Ash Ra Tempel or even Les Rallizes Dénudés. This is, as intended, music meant for submission.

Voix

During the last decade, the French power trio Aluk Todolo have used the basic instruments and fundamental techniques of hard rock and metal to pursue what may seem a musical unicorn—hyperkinetic, heavy instrumental music that’s meditative and absorbing. That is, they hope to produce a trance for the listener through sheer activity, with shifting rhythms and repeating riffs forming a sort of blanket of busyness.
In interviews and press releases, the former black metal dudes often speak about mysteries and mysticism, summonings and spirits, submitting to the music and sealing off the world. Maybe that sounds like mumbo jumbo or even sonic snake oil. But on Voix—the best and most incisive album the band has yet made—that last bit actually happens. Their carefully coordinated commotion becomes overwhelming and atmospheric somehow, a cocoon of activity. Not in nature but in effect, Voix feels meditative like Sunn O))) or Bardo Pond, Ash Ra Tempel or even Les Rallizes Dénudés. This is, as intended, music meant for submission.
The 43-minute Voix zigs and zags through six untitled, interlocking, and loud pieces. The songs are separated by, at most, a tension-ratcheting full rest, though many slide right into the next through beats that don’t shift and melodies that don’t stop. This maintains the athletic trio’s momentum but also the listener’s state of mind—you hang in this space with them, waiting for the next wave. Aluk Todolo achieve this fugue state by keeping up a sense of constant motion, even when they’re indulging in repetition. During the back half of the second piece, for instance, drummer Antoine Hadjioannou and bassist Matthieu Canaguier march dead ahead with the insistence of something like heavy metal krautrock. But some element is always morphing. Here, it is guitarist Shantidas Riedacker, dancing with his instrument and amplifier and sculpting several sheets of low-level feedback into a rainbow of musical grays.
More often, though, the trio slyly slips between disparate parts, webbing together separate elements with skills that suggest an interest in the symphony and perhaps the Grateful Dead. There is so much going on in these songs, with so many icons and influences distilled into each moment. But at their best, Aluk Todolo force you not to think about what they’ve heard in the past and what you may be hearing now. You notice the specific choices and changes less than the music’s overall embrace and intensity.
Voix will, no doubt, appeal to fans of Sannhet’s Revisionist, the 2015 album that best positioned itself at the restless, roiling intersection of heavy metal tenacity and post-rock sweep. Voix shares many of the same tones and feelings, and the French trio can be every bit as thrilling and heavy as their American counterparts. But there is an essential distinction: Where Sannhet’s music seems like a soundtrack to the city, where busily interconnecting parts score the machinations of some place that never sleeps, Aluk Todolo somehow offers a shield from much the same, a place to hide out while the band takes care of the busy work. How they do that, exactly, remains a little mysterious—maybe it’s those radiant, circular drones that sneak between the beats or the judicious repetition in certain parts. Either way, Aluk Todolo creeps closer to its goal of turning the combined swagger of rock and metal inside out without losing its essence than ever before on Voix. This band works hard so you don’t have to.


Chicago rapper Tree has his sights set on lean, ATL-esque club records here but, perhaps despite himself, Trap Genius’ songs always come out in his own highly specific style.

Trap Genius

Almost from the moment his digitally warped sampling approach, elastic 808 loops, and gruff, elliptical delivery began garnering him critical attention in 2012, Chicago rapper and producer Tree has been attempting to reframe the conversation surrounding his music. Trillin’, the follow-up to his lauded, self-produced Sunday School mixtape, felt like a direct challenge to those pigeonholing him as some kind of "outsider" artist: The EP took his home city’s drill music for a spin, featuring regimented, hard-nosed rapping over standard-issue production from a third party. His latest full-length solo release, Trap Genius, is in the same lineage, offering a newly straightforward take on Southern-fried street rap.
Tree has his sights set on lean, ATL-esque club records here but, perhaps despite himself, Trap Genius’ songs always come out in his own highly specific style. His ragged but tuneful baritone recalls Howlin’ Wolf more than Jeezy, and, as always, it lends his songs a weighty, soulful quality. He supersedes and reframes beats better than he rides them, especially when they’re not his own.
The primary "trap" signifier is Tree's rigid, triplet-ized flow, which these days is put to use by everyone from unofficial patent owners Migos to trend-hopping chart-toppers like Drake and Big Sean. Tree’s take on it, however, is far from conventional. He's not by nature a nimble rapper—he raps fast, but never treads lightly—and on tracks like "Betta Than Eva" and "Red Yella", a lengthy set of "Versace" triplets creates something of a bull-in-a-china-shop effect. Tree careens across the beat like a heavy projectile, papering over negative space and integrating bluesy inflections, sometimes singing from the gut in a nod to gospel.
The prevailing tone of the songs is celebratory, finding Tree enjoying the spoils of his labor as a rapper; he’s not offering the perspective of a gangbanger, but of an entrepreneur who proudly "got [money] without ever touching the 'cane." However, the ghosts of the lifestyle he grew up in—and his friends who are still caught up in it—lurk in the corners of his verses, and in the newscasts, cop radio dialogs, and field recordings of arrests that break up the tape. But these often faceless figures are side characters. For them, the money in which the rap-famous Tree revels ("Money the only thing matters at this point") is a curse ("All the money in the world couldn’t save a homie") that clouds judgment. One of the album’s standout images is of a friend "sitting in county for weeks contained/ Dreaming of being free and broke."
This best-friend/worst-enemy dichotomy is central to plenty of dope-boy rap, but the picture Tree paints is more complicated and is filled with contradictory perspectives. The cloud-rappy "New or Leins" even finds him telling the story of a woman looking for love in all the wrong places, visiting cheating boyfriends in jail. The panoramic approach is inspired, even when the shifts in vantage are abrupt, and the subjects underdeveloped.
Tree tends to linger between the cracks that define and politicize genres, themes, and flows, pitting them against each other in games of his own creation. He hears something that’s popular, figures out what people love about it, and then flips it at market price. The inclination is evidence of an omnivorous love of music, not an interest on cashing in on trends. What inspired him initially is always sublimated into his own sound; it’s "soul trap" even without the original beats to which the term usually refers. With no production from Tree, Trap Genius might not seem like a good way to get to know him as an artist, but all of his strengths are here, including his unique sense of rhythm, melody, storytelling, and economy.


The preeminent songwriter and personality of New Weird America moves to Reprise without losing any of his eclecticism or quirk.

What Will We Be

Within one five-month span during 2004, Devendra Banhart-- a hirsute, multilingual, 23-year-old enigma with a wanderer's tale to tell and a sprawling, intriguing debut to his name-- released two 16-song albums: the near-flawless Rejoicing in the Hands and its less cohesive though memorable follow-up, Niño Rojo. He sang about human fragility and little yellow spiders, about old folk songs and with old folk singers, about the beauty of beards and the wealth of the world. With a versatile warble and a graceful touch to the guitar, Banhart seemed slightly manic yet strangely endearing, the rare eccentric who could turn the lightest of larks into irresistible bits of tunes. That winter, the magazine Harp likened him to Van Morrison, John Lennon, and Jeff Buckley, saying he possessed "a deeper connection to the cosmos than most of us share." By year's end, Banhart had emerged as the preeminent songwriter and personality of what was generally dubbed New Weird America, or freak-folk. He was bound, it seemed, for some bigger glory.
Banhart pursued that career in the most expected fashion: In 2005, he left Young God Records and Michael Gira, the small independent label and producer that had served as his guide, for XL, an international imprint of the label group that controls 4AD, Matador, and Rough Trade. Two subsequently guest-heavy records followed and looked to expand beyond those fundamental early works. Disjointed psychedelia concerned with seahorses, nothing tunes about Chinese children, smeared ballads about the war, the Beatles, and the slow burn of memory: Altogether inconsistent but often interesting, those albums seemed to find Banhart pursuing a global vernacular he'd yet to define. His audience grew, certainly, but, with these experiments, real fame still seemed beyond his grasp. He began dating a Hollywood starlet, hired Neil Young's manager, Elliot Roberts, and landed a big-time booking agent. A spotty supergroup with some friends and a New York rockstar followed, as did a bit role in a teenage romance and songs doled out to soundtracks and commercials. And, earlier this year, he signed to Reprise Records, home to Young, among many others-- a platform, it would seem, for [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| that bigger glory.
So one might assume that now is the time for Banhart to complete that cliché ascendance-- to make a levelheaded album of straightforward songs that stands a chance of selling. Well, maybe next time...
At first glance, What Will We Be-- Banhart's sixth album and his first for Reprise-- does feel a bit like the kind of record that might break him to an audience on the right side of an FM dial or using WiFi at Starbucks. "16th & Valencia, Roxy Music", after all, is an agile, escapist folk-disco rave about "ridin' six white horses" and "free dancin'." "Rats" is a Led Zeppelin-baiting anthem with a midsection about, again, dancing, kissing, and general merriment. And from the bright-eyed opener "Can't Help But Smiling" through the whispered, pale country boogie of "Goin Back", the album's first quarter offers a rather sunny, upbeat initiation. Banhart's writing seems normalized, too: "Love is the only thing truly worth needing," he posits at one point. "Every kiss that we miss is another life we don't live," at another. Love, drinks, drugs, colloquialisms, creation myths: What Will We Be could be a great big common lawn for aged hippies, album-rock veterans, and college-rock kids alike.
But across its 14 tracks and 50 minutes, What Will We Be again sounds like Banhart's attempt to prove he can take risks and sound interesting without his acoustic guitar. A mess of scrambled styles that ostracizes more often than it charms, at least one-third of this record plays like a batch of covers cribbed from one of those Putamayo world-music collections at Whole Foods. "Angelika" veers left from its Brazilian-cum-bluegrass lilt to show it can samba and Banhart can twist and yowl in Spanish. "Foolin'" splices reggae with the Beatles and succeeds in sounding just slightly less milquetoast than Eric Clapton's turn at island music. Meanwhile, first single "Baby" gets goofy about romance (which makes you say "holy moly" and feel like a bow-tied kangaroo, apparently) over a flimsy highlife trot.
And every time Banhart lands something genuinely agreeable, he finds a way to hamstring it: "Walilamdzi", one of the most wistful tunes in Banhart's catalog, is a simple fingerpicked reverie. Sung in the mostly lost language of Northern California's Pit River Indians, though, it comes with an inherently off-putting defense. And it's not enough that "The First Song for B" is the latest in a series of sublime Banhart piano ballads. No, it meanders into the acoustic morass "The Last Song for B", where Banhart listlessly intones, "A movement/ Attunement/ A new dream/ Beyond dream." Who knew it was so easy to sound more vague than Akron/Family?
In 2004, Banhart sang, "It's like finding home in an old folk song/ That you've never ever heard/ Still you know every word/ And, for sure, you can sing along." And that's how those early records felt-- familiar yet foreign, as if Banhart had found and reshaped something we didn't know we'd lost. Favorable reviews of What Will We Be will likely toss off adjectives like multicultural or eclectic and epithets like polyglot or plunderer. "He's only exploring," they'll say. But Banhart's third album of unhinged stylistic exploration feels more like a reach than a quest-- a timid attempt to distract with a grab bag of forms rather than to engage any one idea with vigor and innovation. We're left with songs afraid to stake interesting artistic claims ("Goin Back" puts the Flying Burrito Brothers in an autoclave) or defend them (see the needlessly circuitous "Chin Chin & Muck Muck") for very long. More focused on offering Banhart's international and oddball bona fides than crafting songs that feel at all like home, What Will We Be finds Banhart in need of direction and editing. Or, as Banhart sings on that awful dance tune of his, "We don't know what to do." Here's hoping that, someday soon, he may figure it out.


The Chicago band’s new album balances punk aggression and Sisyphean striving, so wide and claustrophobic that it leaves you disoriented.

Malign Hex

Chicago’s Meat Wave is punk directness personified—in the slab-heavy weight of their name, the often two-syllable punch of their choruses (“Work force/Join now/Toll-free/Call now!”), and the clear line connecting them to post-hardcore heroes Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes. In an awed 2018 essay for Talkhouse, Meat Wave frontman Chris Sutter describes Hot Snakes’ Jericho Sirens in high-octane language—“flesh-searing,” “steel-melting.” Then Sutter says something interesting: He’d like to hear their music “played by an orchestra.” If it seems odd to compare a concerto to face-melting post-hardcore, then Meat Wave’s latest LP, Malign Hex, makes his meaning clear. The music is beautifully savage and hard-hitting, but within it lies a neurotic self-confinement—each song a vessel for repetitive structures that sprawl as far as it takes to make the point. The black-hole punk of Malign Hex tunnels into itself, so wide and claustrophobic that it leaves you disoriented.
Meat Wave have operated since 2011, rising alongside Chicago scene contemporaries like Ganser, Melkbelly, and Dehd, among some of the most interesting bands in American post-punk. Malign Hex, the band’s first studio album in five years, is grim garage punk buoyed by a math-y Polvo sensibility and alloyed with the intimate fury of early Protomartyr. The titular hex refers to the burden of family lineage; the tracklist’s encroaching darkness mirrors the inevitability of that curse. Everywhere Malign Hex’s characters turn, they meet stagnation, “wading in a waveless tide” or “steering through the slime” or reckoning within “a maze malign that never ends,” and the instrumentals strive hypnotically alongside them. “Complaint” is a rollicking, panicked spiral; “Merchandise Mart” bristles like an alley cat, its narrator trapped under the banal consumerist shadow of the titular Chicago landmark. The sudden sparseness of the lullaby-like closer “Malign” is as sharp as a temperature drop; a low-voiced Sutter utters no words but “malign” and “malign hex,” but the dread in his lament is as clear as if he’d screamed it.
Sometimes the songs ride too close to their inspirations; great as they are, “10k” and “Ridiculous Car” ring almost identical to the jackknife tempos of Hot Snakes’ Audit in Progress. And when there’s too much repetition without catharsis, as in the lumbering sprawl of “Jim’s Teeth,” the lapse in pace lends the album an uneven quality. But in its self-stymied fury, Malign Hex still offers something uniquely, viscerally raw.
There’s an accidental meta quality to the album’s themes of recursion and confinement. Although Malign Hex is Meat Wave’s first LP since 2017’s The Incessant, it was recorded in 2019, then delayed by the pandemic. When you pair it against the warmer, brighter EP Volcano Park, recorded 2020 and released 2021, the amber-vitrified nature of the material is apparent. Compressed under the weight of distorted time, the new album’s comparative darkness takes on a grim glow, like a surreal premonition of the psychological maze in which the characters on Malign Hex find themselves trapped. But though Malign Hex has been stuck in time for three years, the songs feel novel, challengingly complex without ever compromising Meat Wave’s blunt punk philosophy.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Trail of Dead’s second album, a keystone in the aggressive indie-rock boon of the late ’90s.

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: Madonna

Madonna

Superstar producer-turned-Interscope Records impresario Jimmy Iovine didn’t discover ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead in a club, or through college radio, or in a stack of demos. He found out about the Austin, Texas enfants terribles in the same place a lot of people discovered new bands before the internet: the magazine section at a Borders bookstore. But those mundane circumstances say a lot about Trail of Dead’s peculiar situation back at the turn of the millennium.
While the band’s second record, Madonna, had received a wide North American release through Merge, their combustible art-punk was received more warmly in Europe—and upon flipping through an import copy of NME, Iovine became fascinated with this unknown American band who looked like a demonic Beatles and were developing a fearsome reputation for their unhinged live show. “It was the best magazine I ever bought,” he would later tell the L.A. Times in 2001, after signing Trail of Dead to a major-label deal, underwritten with his personal commitment to support their long-term development. “I don’t care how long it takes,” he said. “We’ll sit there and let them do their thing. They have the talent.”
The one thing I’ll always have in common with the 13th richest power broker in Hollywood is that, like him, I had also become obsessed with Madonna, and was willing to go to great lengths to indulge my fandom. In March of 2001, I traveled 1,500 miles from Toronto to see Trail of Dead play in Austin for 15 minutes, at what was supposed to be their triumphant homecoming show at South by Southwest. By the time they took the stage, the bar’s back-patio area was vibrating with anticipation, and Trail of Dead uncorked that festering energy with a new song that, about a year later, we’d recognize as “It Was There That I Saw You,” the titanic lead-off track from their Interscope debut, Source Tags & Codes.
But the moment of glory was short-lived: Jason Reece had busted his kick drum in the middle of the song, leading to a sheepish request for another act on the bill to loan them a replacement. When no one stepped forward to help, Reece tried to make do by placing a small rack tom on the floor in front of his kick pedal—a savvy bit of MacGyvering, but one that effectively forced the band to play this hyped-up show with one hand tied behind their back.
Four songs in, Trail of Dead teed up Madonna’s cataclysmic showstopper “A Perfect Teenhood,” which seemed like a weird choice to drop so early, because it’s the sort of song that only makes sense as a set-closer. But that’s what it was: Even before singer Conrad Keely could fire off the song’s infamous, machine-gunned procession of “fuck you”s, Reece was hoofing his makeshift kit into the crowd, while Keely tossed his guitar aside to tear down the venue’s beer-sponsor signage, narrowly escaping the clutches of some seriously pissed-off bouncers. (Guitarist Kevin Allen, meanwhile, picked up one of the many beer bottles tossed onstage and used it to coax more ungodly noise from his instrument as if nothing was amiss.) Once the chaos subsided, I wasn’t sure if I had just witnessed the worst or greatest rock‘n’roll show I’ve ever seen.
On the one hand, the band’s SXSW massacre could be seen as an impulsive, heat-of-the-moment response to a frustrating technical setback; on the other, it was precisely what the crowd came to see. Whatever national attention Trail of Dead had acquired at the time came largely through their first television appearance in 2000 on the USA Network program Farmclub. Launched by Iovine with Universal CEO Doug Morris, Farmclub was an early attempt by major-label execs to muscle in on the nascent, post-Napster digital-music landscape: it was part online-music portal for unsigned bands, part old-school variety show—or, more accurately, paid Universal infomercial—featuring live performances and couch cameos from Iovine’s rock-star pals. After getting a pep talk from Bono, Trail of Dead performed a particularly rangy version of “Richter Scale Madness” from their 1998 self-titled debut, while the show’s poor go-go dancers tried to keep their rhythm to the sound of a drum kit being destroyed.
Reece later admitted those Farmclub shenanigans were staged—as avowed fans of the Who, Trail of Dead were simply using their moment in the spotlight to plot their very own Smothers Brothers spectacle. But if instrument-smashing has come to be seen as an unnecessarily wasteful act of rock-star excess (heartland troubadour John Hiatt was calling that shit out back in ’93), it remained the most accurate means for Trail of Dead to communicate the emotional tumult and manic ferocity coursing through their early records.
All of Trail of Dead’s sonic signatures were already in full effect on their 1998 self-titled debut: the gliding Daydream Nation guitar jams, the rapid-fire tom rolls that sound like you’re being besieged by an overhead warplane, the throat-shredding vocals from Keely and Reece (who also routinely traded positions on guitar and drums). The band clearly had grand ambitions, but was constricted by murky, low-budget production (not to mention limited distribution—the record was among the final releases on Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey’s Trance Syndicate label before it went under). Madonna was another shoestring operation, recorded by Spoon producer Mike McCarthy during his off-hours before the group had finalized or received an advance from their Merge deal. But in every possible aspect—sound quality, songwriting, sequencing, visceral power, dramatic impact—Madonna represented a super-sized upgrade.
Now that the Strokes/Stripes garage-rock renaissance of the early 2000s has been officially canonized, it’s completely overshadowed the preceding golden age of less retro, more aggro bands who were reanimating rock’n’roll in the late ‘90s. Trail of Dead belonged to a loose aggregate of kindred spirits that included At the Drive In, the (International) Noise Conspiracy, Rye Coalition, Hot Snakes, Les Savy Fav, the Icarus Line, and the Blood Brothers—bands whose music was rooted in post-hardcore abrasion, but who had enough swaggering attitude and appreciation for old-school showmanship to court audiences beyond misanthropic punk kids. With Madonna, however, Trail of Dead distanced themselves from the pack. If their debut positioned them as devout, guitar-stabbing students of Sonic Youth, Unwound, and Fugazi, Madonna revealed they were more philosophically in tune with bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Jane’s Addiction, and Nine Inch Nails—groups that carried the torch for the lavishly packaged classic-rock magnum opus into the ‘90s.
Survey a random group of Trail of Dead fans about the band’s greatest album, and the widely celebrated Source Tags & Codes will likely emerge as the consensus pick. But Madonna is like the Revolver to Source Tags’ Sgt. Pepper’s—it captures the thrilling moments of transformation that precede the more formalized masterpiece. Madonna was released in October of 1999, a time when the ugly specters of Columbine and Woodstock ’99 loomed in our collective psyche just as Manson and Altamont did 30 years prior. And with news programs devoting vast blocks of airtime to Y2K-bug prognosticators and survivalists loading up their cellars with non-perishable food items, the media was intent on making you feel paranoid even if you were fairly certain your purple iMac would boot up just fine on January 1st.
As such, Madonna acquired all the grim gravitas of a proper fin-de-siècle soundtrack, a seamless song cycle that both channeled the unbearable pent-up tension of the era and released it through moments of scorched-earth anarchy. But for all its timestamped qualities, Madonna is ultimately fueled by universal, eternal anxieties and grievances: the searing salvo “Mistakes and Regrets” renders romantic longing as an apocalyptic event, while “Totally Natural” rails at a world where celebrity is forever valued over art. (Though the latter was reportedly inspired by, of all things, Keanu Reeves’ moonlighting stint in his alt-rock band Dogstar, Keely’s murderous contempt can easily be redirected to Instagram influencers who score lucrative book deals.)
“Totally Natural” wrote the playbook that countless other Trail of Dead songs would follow: a flash of hardcore ultraviolence that quickly flames out, only to slowly reignite and burn even brighter. It also signals Trail of Dead’s own metamorphosis over the course of Madonna, where the discord gradually gives way to disarming, piano-gilded balladry (“Clair de Lune”) and multi-part, Wall-sized suites (the “Up From Redemption”/“Aged Dolls”/“The Day the Air Turned Blue” sequence on side two). The band’s debut album showed they could handle more delicate material—particularly the eight-minute shoegaze reverie “Novena Without Faith”—but here, they were no longer expressing their most tender feelings in hushed whispers. And unlike Trail of Dead’s subsequent adventures in prog, Madonna’s most elaborate gestures are still executed with a scrappy intensity. This is the sound of a band storming the castle before they became comfortably ensconced within it.
One reason why Madonna flows so smoothly through its peaks and valleys is that the singers’ roles had yet to codify. From Source Tags onward, Keely would become the resident art-rock architect responsible for the band’s most melodically sophisticated turns, while Reece would deflate the pomp with jugular-bursting displays of fury. But on Madonna, they’re more accomplices than foils, harnessing the album’s careening momentum through performances that teeter between vicious and vulnerable. And for further evidence of a band firing on all cylinders, consider that Trail of Dead’s two principal songwriters weren’t even responsible for Madonna’s centerpiece track.
Bassist Neil Busch’s lead-vocal turns with Trail of Dead can be counted on one hand (he left the band in 2004), but on their early records, he was a crucial cool counterpoint to Keely and Reece’s more volatile personalities, bringing balance to the band’s dichotomous musical universe. With “Mark David Chapman,” Busch delivers an arresting chorus-free anthem that meditates on punk’s empowering kill-your-idols philosophy and the heinous actions of those who’ve taken those words to their literal extreme. (And, fitting for a band that’s always tried to reconcile classic-rock mythology with indie pragmatism, the song sounds just like Sonic Youth’s “Schizophrenia” as interpreted by a young Rod Stewart.) By invoking the name of John Lennon’s assassin, Trail of Dead seemed to be issuing themselves a warning that the pursuit of rock sainthood comes with unwanted consequences.
Of course, that didn’t stop them from shooting for the moon and beyond on later records, even after Iovine stopped returning their calls, but on Madonna, the most epic moment is also the most unforgiving. The album climaxes with “A Perfect Teenhood,” which is at once an over-the-top caricature of an anti-authoritarian teen-angst punk rant, and the platonic ideal of an anti-authoritarian teen-angst punk rant. Emerging from the foreboding piano interlude “The Day the Air Turned Blue,” the track is prefaced by the sound of idle chit-chat in a crowded bar, the patrons blissfully oblivious to the onslaught that’s to come—an eerie invocation of the benign moments that occur before disaster suddenly strikes. What follows is essentially a 90-second hardcore rager that’s stretched out to over three times that length, thanks in large part to an extended, endlessly crashing finale showered in enough “fuck you”s to turn the song into the indie-rock “Killing in the Name.”
Alas, the world didn’t come to an end on January 1, 2000. But as media-fuelled hysteria over a predicted computer apocalypse has given way to legitimate fears of an actual environmental one, Madonna still sounds as ominous and unsettling as ever. When “A Perfect Teenhood” enters meltdown mode, it’s like being trapped inside of a Biblical plague—it’s the sound of crumbling earth, mass panic, and fire raining down from the sky. Smashing your instruments is the only way to make the terror stop.


The master of the micro-song goes power pop on an ambitious release whose songs slide along the spectrum from sadness to madness, capturing Molina’s grief over a lost love.

Kill the Lights

You could listen to Tony Molina’s 2013 solo debut, Dissed and Dismissed, in less time than it takes to boil a pot of pasta. Follow it up with the same year’s Six Tracks EP and 2016’s Confront the Truth, and you’d still be hard-pressed to have your meal plated before all three records were done. To say Molina is a fan of brevity would be a gross understatement—this is a guy who covered a Guided by Voices song that was originally 59 seconds long and made it even shorter. His expediency isn’t merely reflected in his 10-minute albums, however. It’s also evident in his restless artistic exploration, which has seen him vacillate between hardcore and pop-focused bands for the better part of two decades, and make dramatic strides over the course of a short solo discography.
With Dissed and Dismissed, Molina conjured images of Weezer locked in the garage with the car running, desperate to blast their way through the Blue Album before they choked on the fumes. Later, on Confront the Truth, he ricocheted in the opposite direction, condensing the aesthetic breadth of the White Album to seven-inch proportions. But on Kill the Lights, he strikes a happy medium between intimacy and urgency, crafting a splendorous power-pop pastorale that channels Big Star ballads, DreamWorks-era Elliott Smith, and post-grunge Teenage Fanclub.
Where past masters of the micro-song often gave the impression that they were drawing from a bottomless well of inspired scraps, Molina’s compositions sound like the result of painstaking refinement. (As the two-year gap between his records shows, his style of concision takes time.) Unlike Bob Pollard’s madcap collages of fragmented tunes, Molina’s albums feel similar to movie trailers that allow you to discern the overall narrative arc of a film by showing you just a few brief, discrete scenes. On Kill the Lights, he makes gestures toward a classic-rock concept album—complete with an overarching theme, recurring motifs, and an instrumental outro titled “Outro”—while remaining faithful to the lean schematics of hardcore.
There are 10 songs on Kill the Lights, and all of them find Molina in some stage of grief over a lost love, sliding along the spectrum from sadness to madness. But he renders his grayscale moods with a varied, vibrant palette. Lead track “Nothing I Can Say” crystallizes the moment of breakup in deceptively joyous jangle-pop, as if to open the album with its own sardonic theme song. Acoustic serenades like “Now That She’s Gone” and “When She Leaves,” by contrast, are gorgeous and ghostly in equal measure, using their sweet Rubber Soul melodies as balms to numb the intense pain chronicled within. And at nearly two and a half minutes, “Look Inside Your Mind/Losin’ Touch” is the album’s musical and cathartic peak, alternating between serene prog-folk passages and dramatic guitar-solo ascensions.
That rare moment of indulgence makes this album the first Molina solo release to creep just past the quarter-hour mark, and the other conventionally scaled tunes here—like the swooning “Jasper’s Theme”—reinforce the notion that he’s tiring of his reputation as a quick-hit artist. But while Molina teases more elaborate arrangements, the embellishments sometimes have the paradoxical effect of making a song feel incomplete. On the quietly devastating “Wrong Town,” Molina contemplates relocating to a new zip code to avoid running into his ex, but the soothing synth tone that takes over in the last 15 seconds introduces a hint of optimism that’s never contextualized. And winding down the XO-worthy “Afraid to Go Outside” just as it settles into its heavenly church-organ groove simply feels cruel. It’s clear Molina has grand ambitions here. But by confining them to a flyer-sized canvas, Kill the Lights becomes his first record that will have you not just marveling at everything Molina can pack into a 60-second song, but also lamenting what he might be leaving out.


On his third proper Bing & Ruth album, and first for 4AD, David Moore’s electroacoustic minimalism carries its strongest emotional tug. It’s his earthiest and most distinctive record yet.

No Home of the Mind

Bing & Ruth’s music exists in the cracks between. Project leader David Moore has a degree in music and his earlier compositions, found on the 2010 album City Lake, can have the air of the conservatory. So it makes some sense to slot his work in with contemporary classical. But the era of classical music Moore most frequently evokes—the trance-inducing minimalism of the 1960s and ’70s—has at times been filed as new age. And divisions between *that *genre and the more critically acceptable sphere of “ambient,” a word that sometimes describes Bing & Ruth, have always been porous. Beyond these labels, Bing & Ruth is also hard to pin functionally. Moore’s pieces can feel formal, less like “environments” and more like compositions that need to be tracked carefully over their duration to be understood. Though he’s made music for an ensemble that includes woodwinds and strings, Moore also includes processed tapes and production choices that smudge the lines between acoustic and electronic music.
On City Lake and 2014’s Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, Moore’s music evoked the best of what had come before him—Philip Glass’ repetition, the emotional shading of Max Richter, Eluvium’s comfort with rock dynamics—but he’s steadily grown into a sound that feels all his own. No Home of the Mind, his third proper album and first for 4AD, is his most distinctive record yet. His working group is still here, but the arrangements on *No Home *feature Moore’s piano much more prominently, and it’s a more focused record. If City Lake and Tomorrow sometimes found him moving between established styles, demonstrating wide-ranging mastery because he can, the new album stays focused on wringing as much feeling as possible out of narrower terrain. And No Home of the Mind is the earthiest Bing & Ruth record yet. You can smell the sweat that went into it.
One of Moore’s composition signatures is to turn the piano into a drone instrument. Using rapid clusters of repeating notes, Moore creates piano figures that hang in space like clouds of slowly shifting sound, not unlike passages of La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano or the work of Young acolytes like Michael Harrison. Where the latter two artists are known for using the piano as a tool for overtones via specialized tuning, Moore creates piano-based drones that serve as the basis for his ensemble pieces. The other instruments’ parts exist in relationship to what he’s doing at the keyboard, offering contrasting textures and leading through varying shifts in mood and tone. It’s almost as if all the separate parts come together into a single instrument, one that is “played” collectively by the Bing & Ruth ensemble.
“Starwood Choker” starts the album sounding like a continuation of the last Bing & Ruth record’s criss-crossing tapestries of sound. But the record really begins to reveal itself on “As Much as Possible,” which finds Moore in the realm of “solo piano with ambient treatments” à la Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s The Pearl. Moore’s chord voicings suggest both gospel music and the spare “furniture music” of Satie. As he moves between modes, extremely subtle bits of tension are introduced, built, and then released, while yawning chasms of drone from the ensemble drift in and out beneath. “As Much as Possible” is Moore’s most tender and affecting piece yet, a filmic work that evokes haunting images on its own.
Throughout the rest of No Home, the piano moves between heavy drone (“Form Takes”), achingly spare and meditative ballads (“To All It”), and pieces that explore how much can be done with simple repetition (“The How of It Sped”). The tracks flow one into the next, which accentuates the connections between them and makes No Home feel like a single massive piece, carefully mapping every inch of its defined terrain. Moore is so gifted at teasing out emotion, it seems inevitable that there will be many film and television scores in his future, if he chooses to go that route. If that happens, No Home of the Mind will be remembered as his breakthrough, the place where all the pieces from earlier records snapped into place.


The Toronto singer’s album is a country and gospel-infused meditation on death and mourning that flickers between the broadly universal and the devastatingly personal.

Angels of Death

Death is resilient, clingy as ivy. When the funeral ends and everyone goes home, it remains, like an unwanted house guest. Death’s branches have long framed the Toronto musician Jennifer Castle’s work. This time, she says, “I wanted to try to put it in my center vision.” But death’s rude presence belies the album’s charming and often breezy qualities. Themes of loss, confusion, and frustration meet burning country and gospel-inspired anthems and sparse, piano-driven ballads. Throughout, she effortlessly conveys the conflicting emotions that accompany loss. Angels of Death exhumes death’s many forms with tenderness, narrating the often inarticulate core of grief—from pain and emptiness to the memories and hovering apparitions.
Album opener “Tomorrow’s Mourning” spotlights the chrysalis that envelops those consumed by death. Her voice a reflection over meandering piano chords, Castle testifies to the universality of mourning. The bare-bones album opener is a sound preamble to what follows. “Crying Shame” is a gospel-influenced howler that showcases the power and range of Castle’s affecting voice. It’s also driven by piano, but with force and precision. Rather than pulling back to capture the full panorama of loss, it hones in on a specific moment. It frames each line in the stanza, each instance within that moment, with regret. “It’s a shame,” she sings at the start of each line. “It’s just a crying shame.”
In the album’s highlight, “Texas,” Castle holds a magnifying glass up to her own experiences. “I go down to Texas/To kiss my grandmother goodbye,” she sings over bouncing acoustic guitar and percussion, before honing on the devastating detail: Her grandmother probably doesn’t remember, because “she forgets things.” It’s an example of Castle’s skill at taking a personal detail—traveling from a big city to a rural nowhere for a heavy and final farewell—and transforming it into something universal. At least that’s how it felt as the song joined me on a similar trip, from Los Angeles to Evansville, Indiana, where my own grandmother was dying from cancer.
Along the way, Castle offers glimmers of the way death affects the creative process itself. “Rose Waterfalls” explores the absurd timing of inspiration—how a muse is never there when you need her—over a pedal steel and twangy electric guitar. The album is divided into two acts, each ending in a reprise titled “We Always Change,” led by warbling slide guitar and flashing strings. That song creates a natural demarcation between the stages of grief, from the rough goings of shock, pain, anger, and depression to the upturn that comes with reconstruction and acceptance. “If you turn into a tree/I will sway/I will sway with you,” begins the second reprise. The song’s first instance is an instrumental, meanwhile, underscoring the idea that it’s difficult to summon words when flooded with darkness.
Angels of Death is not the stuff of support groups or self-help paperbacks, though. It’s a collection of probing reflections over music that gets directly at the heart, without trying too hard to do so. Castle cites Joan Didion’s tragic memior The Year of Magical Thinking as a source of inspiration, which seems fitting. Confusion and devastation ring clearly throughout Angels of Death, via simple, everyday details—like her depiction of a midnight drive—that are relatable and poignant. With Angels of Death, Castle confronts death’s forms with the clarity of a scholar and the reverence of an empath. It’s a meditation on something we never desire but always receive.


The debut EP from Los Angeles-based ambient folk musician Helen Ballentine is short but captivating. Even without specific details, her words are deeply felt.

Skullcrusher EP

Skullcrusher, the ambient folk project of Los Angeles-based, New York State-raised musician Helen Ballentine, is soft and subtle. Her lyrics are intimate, and when she sings it feels as if she is making unsparing eye contact. While the acoustic confessionalism of her debut EP Skullcrusher isn’t terribly original, it is nonetheless lovely, captivating, and quietly devastating.
It’s tempting to lump Ballentine’s music in with that of Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, but spiritually Skullcrusher is closer to Phil Elverum’s work as the Microphones, with its tendency towards spectral ambiance and steak tartare-level rawness. Opener “Places/Plans” showcases Ballentine’s multi-tracked vocals alongside a simple acoustic guitar chord progression. “Do you think that I’m going places?” she asks with a tinge of irony, following the question with another more heartbreaking: “Does it matter if I’m a really good friend? That I’m there when you call and when your shows end?” The words are straightforward and to the point. With the exception of an overdubbed synthesizer that glows softly as old headlights, the arrangements are sparse.
Ballentine writes about first loves burdened by discomfort and paralyzing uncertainty. On the brief “Two Weeks in December,” she sings about a first encounter with a romantic prospect that eventually turned sour. “I looked cool rolling cigarettes/You were fooled by my jokes/I was too/I didn’t know you,” she sings sadly. You can practically hear her hands move up and down the neck of her guitar, creaking like wooden floorboards. The vast empty spaces between her words can make it sound as though Ballentine is pausing to omit identifying details as she reads directly from a diary. First kisses and first dates often lie, she seems to say, and the versions of ourselves we present to potential partners aren’t entirely real.
Skullcrusher is just a sketch. The EP is less than 15 minutes long; you could grab a glass of water and make your bed and have made it most of the way through these four songs. But “Trace,” a song that feels like the final embrace at the end of a relationship far past its sell-by date, shows Ballentine inching towards something more fleshed out. “When you come over/You don’t ask me how my day went,” she sings in a moment of stasis, before banjos, synthesizers, and bleary-eyed guitars triumphantly coalesce. She questions what it means to stay, and whether or not things will fall apart the second she gets up to leave. But instead of retreating into the shadows of uncertainty and unhappiness, Ballentine takes flight. There are no identifying details to cling to here—just shades of feeling so strikingly familiar that Ballentine might as well be singing about you.

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