These guys eat ground glass. They're that nasty. You may like their music, but don't forget that they ...

Liars: They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top

These guys eat ground glass. They're that nasty. You may like their music, but don't forget that they hate you. You didn't do anything; they're just sick of your bullshit. And what're you gonna say back? The singer's a towering, lanky Australian named Angus-- that's Scottish for "Bubba"-- and the music's a gray nightmare of art-punk and noisy beats. It's vicious, but you can dance to it!
No matter how much buzz they draw-- appearing on the John Peel show, touring with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, having their debut re-released on Blast First-- the Liars will stay hostile and insidious. They make what I can only describe as cyborg junkyard rock. Guitarist Angus Hempell plays messy power chords and high-pitched, lobotomizingly zen-like guitar lines, but he also has a drum machine: dig "Mr. You're on Fire Mr.," where he sticks programmed fills where you'd expect guitar riffs. The lo-fi electronics and sound effects that pervade the album give it a rhythmic kick, but while other artists try to make samples sound human, the Liars work to sound hypnotically mechanical. On "Nothing Is Ever Lost or Can Be," they lurch and march-step to jerky high notes and tumbling drum fills.
Angus Andrews is impenetrable, showing the emotional range of a matchbook: he's either flat or flared. His sing/shouting switches from weary to angry and back again, and just try to make sense of the splintered, hostile lyrics he spits like rat poison: "They cut me up they cut me up they cut me up they cut me up they cut me up at the medical school."
It's up to bassist Pat Nature and Ron Albertson on "friendly drums" to reign in the noise, and Nature puts all the torque into the band: listen to "We Live NE of Compton," where the bassline kicks it into a killer dance-punk number; and to see his modest side, check out how his steady rumble keeps "Loose Nuts on the Veladrome" together while the rest of the band buzzes off in every direction. He's the reason it's impossible to write about this band without comparing them to Gang of Four-- that post-punk tendency to impale rage and noise on the sharp edge of a floor-beating rhythm.
But sticking with that would be too easy. Every time the Liars bust out a stone-cold party favorite, they answer it with a track that feels like sticking your head in a vice. "Tumbling Walls Buried Me in Debris" is disorientingly repetitive, with a sinking, introverted melody, zen-like chimes and an eerie beat that sounds like the delusion-sequence music from a P.O.W. film: Charlie's got us gagged and bound and tortured, and nobody gets out of here without a migraine.
I've played They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top a dozen times in the last couple days, and I get something different each time. Sometimes I find new sounds; sometimes I feel like I get less out of it with every listen. It's not clear where their tactics are going, whether it'll come together on the next album, or whether this fragmented style is the thing that makes them great. In fact, all that is clear is that it's rare that a band rocks this hard and still challenges you at every turn.
The last track is the final showdown. "This Dirt Makes Mud" is a drawn-out slide of grinding, throbbing rock with Andrews moaning and shouting while Hempell squeaks and squalls and Nature rumbles menacingly underneath. In direct opposition to the brief songs on the rest of the album, this is a rock epic, but here's the trick: the music doesn't stop. At roughly the moment any other song here would end, the band fades into a four-second loop, and once the machine's going, they take off and get a beer while it plays over, and over, and over, for more than twenty minutes. You can leave whenever you want, but then you're quitting before the album does. Maybe this is a statement, maybe they're killing time, and maybe it's just the sound of a band crawling up its own ass. But when's the last time a record dared you to blink first?


Stuck at home on lockdown, the London rapper returns to her long-running mixtape series with a gloomy, affecting meditation on self-reliance that feels as claustrophobic as a one-room apartment.

Drop 6 EP

Little Simz punctuated 2014 and 2015 with her Drops series: spontaneous, carefree mixtapes that established her as a curious and brave voice in UK rap. She used these Drops to open up with diaristic verses and work freely with collaborators from across the spectrum. Since releasing the last Drop in December 2015, she’s reached new heights. Her third album, 2019’s acclaimed GREY Area, was her brassiest, most daring, and most profound work yet. But this year, finding herself locked down in London, where she lives alone, Simbi Ajikawo decided to go back to her roots with Drop 6: a gloomy meditation that proves she’s still spontaneous and self-reliant, if no longer carefree.
Simz retains the confidence of GREY Area, opening the EP with an urgent running bassline and a lyric aligning herself with “Lauryn Hill back in the ’90s” (a comparison that has been bestowed upon her many times before). But this time, between the stripped-down drums and the metallic echo that haunts much of the record, a palpable feeling of loneliness surrounds her self-empowerment. As the EP loosens its pace, and more anxious thoughts creep into its fabric, you get the sense that these lines about self-confidence are not so much boasts as notes to herself. On Instagram, Simz talked about how she pushed through a crisis of confidence to finish the EP in April, while lockdown was sparking mental-health issues. Struggling against “all that self-doubt shit I never imagined thinking,” she notes, “I gassed myself up. There’s no one else here, I’m alone, I had to.”
In between lines celebrating her success, Simz gives the impression of an artist halted mid-stride. She’s elated to be at such a successful point in her career, but she faces the pressure of calculating her next move—and, more to the point, she’s locked down like the rest of us, confronting mortality as well as enforced solitude. The world of these songs feels as small as a one-bedroom apartment. Each consists of little more than drums, snaking bassline, and Simz’s flare of a voice, and most run for less than three minutes. The shuffling, spare “you should call mum” is a song for the quarantine era: “Crabs in a barrel, we all in this,” she spits, between slow-rolling choruses about sleepless nights and nap-filled days. This circling of the same sounds and themes is an extreme form of introspection from a notoriously introspective artist. Occasionally, it becomes too claustrophobic, as with the off-the-cuff “damn right,” on which Simz cruises steadily in one gear.
This confinement prevents the EP from reaching GREY Area’s heights, but Drop 6 still contains deeply affecting moments—particularly when Simz lands on cautious, conditional optimism. At the EP’s end, on “where’s my lighter,” she looks ahead to the future and her “next masterpiece” while keeping one fearful eye on the present. The EP’s final verse finishes mid-thought: “Breaking my back to make sure my family eats like...” That sense of uncertainty bleeds through every track—two of which have “might” in the title, including the most upbeat, with a hook that boasts, “I’ve got one life and I might just live it.” But it hits hardest on that piano-embellished final song, which is lifted by the smoky tendrils of London singer Alewya’s voice, and where Simz herself takes vocal leaps. Where the other songs are short and sharp, this one twists and turns through melancholia toward a lighter, softer promise that better days are still to come.


Toro Y Moi’s new album serves as further evidence that malleability is the project's most endearing quality. If What For? is Chaz Bundick’s "indie rock album," the "rock" part is a vestigial appendage: This is guitar music without abrasion or yearning.

What For?

Calling What For? a return to Chaz Bundick’s roots is accurate and also fairly misleading. The guitar-driven giddiness of "Empty Nesters" was a surprise whether or not you’ve heard June 2009, a collection of early Toro Y Moi recordings given a quiet, proper release in 2012. But at the very least, it provides precedent: before "Blessa", Bundick was sorting out what he wanted Toro Y Moi to be, and he wrote a number of classicist, lo-fi indie rock songs. Some of them kinda sounded like Weezer. (No, really.) That said, the past five years have seen Toro Y Moi change from a bedroom project to a tight, adventurous and successful touring band, so if What For? is Bundick revisiting his awkward phase, he’s doing so like a late bloomer confidently showing up to his high school reunion knowing just how well he’s aged.
Every Toro Y Moi release finds the band in transition, and so What For? might be seen as a regression in some ways; ditching guitar rock for electronics has become a sign of maturity for both listeners and artists, inverting the typical rockist trajectory. However, Bundick has always been canny about switching lanes: at the time, 2013’s Anything in Return felt like Toro Y Moi hitting its stride, making liquid and limber electro-acoustic dance-pop. Or, he sounded like a cuddly, plush Caribou, a role easier to accept in the absence of new Caribou music and the mutual artistic appreciation between Bundick and Dan Snaith. But then, Our Love threatened to make Toro Y Moi redundant and while Bundick’s Les Sins has run concurrent to his main gig, it's proven him to be an enthusiastic, earnest, and ultimately functional dance producer.
What For? then serves as further evidence that Toro Y Moi’s malleability is the project's most endearing quality. That and Bundick is something of a post-grad role model, having the ability to be flexible, amenable to change, and ultimately successful in all ventures without showing much struggle. There are a handful of new modes here: the Woods-y rusticity on "Ratcliff" and "Run Baby Run"’s pinwheel-eyed pop-rock would’ve been out of place on any prior release. But throughout, there’s revelation in the aesthetic familiarity Bundick has established: in particular, the globular harmonies, cushy production, and a pervasive dampness that either recalls the fog of his new home Berkeley or the humidity of his native South Carolina.
So if this is called Toro Y Moi’s "indie rock album," the "rock" part is a vestigial appendage: yes, the basis for pretty much everything here is a trad power trio set up and the synthesizers use tones that predate the '80s and will thus be called "organic." But this is guitar music without abrasion or yearning, and it’ll play just as well in the venues in which Underneath the Pine and An**ything in Return were suited for—rooftop parties, barbecues, apartment get-togethers.
And after his first three LPs were given counterintuitive deep winter release dates, What For? admits to Toro Y Moi’s music sounding best when the weather’s making you feel a bit more irresponsible than usual. So, even when the band shows vigor during the liftoff of "Empty Nesters", the quick pivots of "Buffalo", and the uptempo funk of "Spell It Out", nothing seems particularly pressing. Even as Bundick appears to have moved on from post-collegiate concerns to straight-up adult problems, What For? most oftens advocates tabling discussion until emotions have settled.
Which is to say that the pleasantry of Toro Y Moi might not be its most endearing quality, but it’s certainly the most enduring. The conversation should not end there—they’re pleasant, but so is Real Estate. So is Mac DeMarco. So is the War on Drugs. So is the vast majority of popular indie rock. And though these are Toro Y Moi’s peers, putting Bundick against them might seem unfair: he does not deal with Big Emotional Issues as directly as the aforementioned. The bigger problem is that What For? doesn’t address much of anything directly, and that’s an issue on a record which appears to make Bundick’s chops as a songwriter and a lyricist a focal point.
Befitting a guy best known for crafting a vibe, one can sense these songs are emotive and heartfelt. But close reading for confirmation shows thoughts that may have once conveyed relatable feelings forced against their will to become lyrics, i.e., "Let’s awaken and turn on our minds/ No one is waiting for you in this line." Either that or the persistent indifference tipped by the title of What For? becomes maddening whenever Bundick soft-sells waffles like, "It’s whatever you want to do" or, subsequently, "What is it you want to do?" So when he pleads, "do I need to spell it out," the answer is actually, "well, yes." Without any kind of emotional or sonic grain to grip, what were well-constructed, well-meaning songs minutes prior are reduced to placeholders in your memory—"the one with the clavinet," "the lead single," "the six-minute closer." The problem isn't that Bundick avoids confrontation or confession—most people do. But What For? is so passive it leaves your system the moment you’re done with it.


After returning to solo status as a bandleader, Jilian Medford drops the spiky singing style that was her trademark, finding a softer delivery within the darkened corners of dream pop.

Crush Crusher

The premise of Crush Crusher, the second album by Ian Sweet, reads like the tagline for a Meg Ryan rom-com that will, as always, end well: “Jilian Medford is on her own… again.” After several years with a trio, the Ian Sweet founder went solo after her bandmates went misogynistic. This isn’t altogether unfamiliar territory for Medford, who began the band as a solo project while attending Berklee College of Music. Still, she sounds wary of how everything will turn out—her love life, her anxiety, her self-worth. Crush Crusher captures Ian Sweet during a growth spurt, and, in spite of some growing pains, Medford embraces the change, pushing herself as a singer, songwriter, and musician pursuing independence.
Until now, Ian Sweet’s trademark has been Medford’s spiky singing style. Her voice rocketed into squeaky bursts that were dramatic and playful, like a child being tickled. The sound carried the melodies on her 2014 debut and subsequently separated Ian Sweet from their peers on 2016’s Shapeshifter. Melodramatic guitars countered what could have been a crutch, and they fed off one another. Alone for Crush Crusher, Medford tries something different: a softer, breathier delivery that elongates in pools of reverb. Lyrically, the album is about insecurities and the burden of carrying a loved one’s feelings (see “Ugly/Bored” or “Borrowed Body”), but the straightforward way Medford sings about those subjects spotlights an increasing self-assurance that bolsters her words.
This shift in style, plus slimming the band from three to one, opened more space in these songs, which Medford fills with guitar amps. Inspired by the synth-heavy sway of Peter Gabriel and the gruffness of Crass, Ian Sweet veers here into the noisier side of dream pop, immediately seeking its darker corners. The riff-centric “Spit” gnarls its way through some of Medford’s best guitarwork, drifting toward Slint. “Crush Crusher” tries out electronic drum pads for a groove that recalls Autolux. These gloomy tones sometimes make the songs fade into one another like infinite shades of gray, especially when her voice recedes into the background. But when it’s front and center, as on “Hiding,” the two complement one another. With every reprise of “I forgot myself in you” during the chorus, Medford does the opposite, stepping into the spotlight and away from the shadows of her past.
Crush Crusher asks questions of and frets over transition: “Did you get out of your head to get into mine?” Medford sings in “Borrowed Body.” She doesn’t offer the answers because she’s still figuring them out. What makes Crush Crusher notable and compelling is the confidence she displays in spite of what she doesn’t know about now or the future. She pulls her softer singing style to the forefront. She struts from noisy indie rock into dream pop. She commits to change, even while admitting her faults.


After the complex structures of his quintet’s debut, the rising Brooklyn jazz musician strips down to a trio of bass, trombone, and gayageum to explore fluid arrangements and textural interplay.

Spider Season

If the New York jazz scene handed out Rookie of the Year awards, Nick Dunston would have been a top contender for 2019’s honors. At just 23 years old, the Brooklyn bassist spent the year logging live dates with avant-garde luminaries like Vijay Iyer, Mary Halvorson, and Tyshawn Sorey; landed a year-long fellowship at Roulette; and released his first album as a bandleader, Atlantic Extraction, which a rhapsodic JazzTimes review declared “the debut of the year.”
Though Dunston had already proven a qualified and prolific sideman, the album confirmed that his real talent lay in composition and arrangement. He has mentioned in interviews that as a teenager, he gravitated toward the complex arrangements of big-band jazz rather than the free-form shape of more improvisational styles. His structural inclinations were much in evidence on Atlantic Extraction: Fractured into 16 relatively short vignettes, the record embraced the modular nature of his quintet, shuffling players in and out of the studio to test as many combinations of performers and instruments as possible. Braxton-esque classical fusion stood shoulder to shoulder with winking forays into twangy bluegrass and no-wave skronk, bridged by interludes of loops cut and pasted from other tracks. It was a kaleidoscopic work, revealing genres within genres and overlapping ideas that blurred together as soon as you thought you’d grasped them.
Spider Season, Dunston’s stark sophomore record, inverts the formula. Scaling his band down to a trio featuring Kalia Vandever on trombone and DoYeon Kim on gayageum, a traditional Korean stringed instrument, Dunston relies on variations in technique rather than arrangement to maintain a state of flux. He often takes the lead on upright bass, lunging ahead of his colleagues to rattle off dense clusters of notes. But his improvisation is just as engaging when he takes a step back, sawing with his bow or toying with effects pedals to produce eerie drones. He’s fascinated by the diverse range of pitchless textures he and his bandmates can produce with their respective instruments, and Spider Season’s strongest tracks zero in on their atonal interplay.
On “Ficus Elastica,” Dunston and Kim fashion an unsettling collage out of scuttling fingers and the scrape of bow against bass, drawing attention to the severity of their playing before returning to the tonal sphere. Vandever’s trombone assumes a supporting role as the pair knot tense, sharply plucked phrases together; sustained notes soften the joints like cartilage. On the following track, “Pre-Nasal Tension,” Kim ad-libs wordless vocals atop ominous instrumentation, producing raspy, glottal creaks that remind listeners that the voice is also, in part, a stringed instrument. While the piece’s stream-of-consciousness structure verges on obscurity, players carve clear pathways through the chaos.
The 10-minute “Thousand-Year-Old Vampire” offers a revolving showcase of the band’s full creative arsenal. Dunston opens with a solo, swerving in and out of piercing registers and scrubbing at strings like he’s trying to snap them in two. His jagged, unaccompanied playing sounds like a slasher flick’s climactic scene, but Vandever’s somber trombone blasts rein him in. The two briefly tangle, bowed notes grinding against brass, with Vandever eventually coming out on top. Dunston returns to pizzicato as Kim enters the mix halfway through, and the band concludes in a flurry of quick melodic stabs and incidental rattling.
Offering a holistic overview of Dunston’s range, Atlantic Extraction might make for a more accessible entry point into his work, but Spider Season’s narrow focus reveals more about his tastes as a composer and improviser. By placing equal value on the musical and decidedly non-musical qualities of each instrument, the record maps out the shifting web of relationships between performers. Each scrape, thump, or screech has a tangible effect on the room’s energy. Even in a trio setting, Dunston’s curiosity creates a plethora of possibilities. No two songs of his ever sound alike.


This ’60s-loving London band, featuring former Veronica Falls member James Hoare, craft beguilingly simple, guitar-driven psych-pop. The new LP is a warm blanket of analog guitar and woolly harmony.

Foxhole

Looked at cynically, the Proper Ornaments is a great name for a band infatuated with their record collections—a group that decorates their spare little songs with only the most finely curated influences, like so many baubles on a tree. The Beatles’ White Album here, Pink Floyd’s Meddle there. The Beta Band here, Yo La Tengo there. The Velvet Underground everywhere.
But there’s no reason to be cynical about this London quartet. The Proper Ornaments are based primarily around the songwriting partnership of James Hoare (of Ultimate Painting and Veronica Falls) and Max Oscarnold. Unlike some of their ’60s-loving, vinyl-obsessed peers (Crystal Stilts, say, or looking back a little farther, Brian Jonestown Massacre), it’s possible to separate your appreciation of the Ornaments’ nifty influences from your appreciation of their songs. The pair craft beguilingly simple, guitar-driven psych-pop stitched together by gorgeous, laidback harmonies. Compared to their excellent 2014 album, Wooden Head, Foxhole turns down the six-string jangle and turns up the sad-sack vibes for a more intimate, lovelorn affair. This is a Sunday morning, lay-in-bed-’til-2 p.m. album—a big warm blanket of analog guitar and woolly harmony.
True, this kind of thing has been done many times before. But what’s remarkable about Foxhole is just how effortlessly the Proper Ornaments pull it off. (Of course, the band is well aware that making the effortful sound effortless was a major part of the Velvets’ mojo, too.) The Ornaments’ new focus on the piano smooths out the band’s rougher edges, giving songs like “Memories” and “Just a Dream” a seductively sad pallor. Hoare and Oscarnold’s sly guitar work remains the band’s centerpiece, however. On “The Frozen Stare” and “Cremated (Blown Away),” their supple electric guitars trade riffs like old friends at a bar.
The Ornaments take their time on Foxhole. Tunes built on layers of acoustic guitar, piano, and soft percussion unwind lazily, never drawing too much attention to themselves (see, in particular, “I Know You Know,” a dead ringer for a B-side from the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Stoned & Dethroned sessions). No one plays very hard, yet the melodies stick. As with Wooden Head, the Ornaments’ power lies in their restraint.
Despite all the comfy sounds, the band’s lyrical vision is chilly, dead-eyed, sinister. A near-suffocating sense of regret over lost love and good times past hangs over the entire record. On “Cremated,” Oscarnold longs to be turned to ash with his former lover, their remains dumped together in the same jar. The album title itself is a reference to the claustrophobic horrors of war: “Private, don’t speak/Don’t move at all/Keep your head down/In the foxhole,” Hoare sings on “Jeremy’s Song.”
All that gloom goes down easy, however. The Ornaments are rarely heavy-handed or solipsistic about their troubles. And anyway, it’s nostalgia—regret’s more hopeful, more sentimental cousin—that remains the record’s core concern. “See me in the back page of last year’s modern age,” Hoare sings on album standout “Back Pages,” positioning his band as both defiantly out of step with the status quo and dedicated to the ideals of an earlier, better time. The Ornaments are yet another in a long line of floppy-haired guitar bands flying the flag of a purer pop past, but they’re also, unmistakably, one of the better, least pretentious ones. Sometimes it pays to be grateful rather than cynical.


The cartoonist and drummer for the post-punk quintet Pottery explores gently lysergic visions on his psych-pop solo albums.

Paul Jacobs: Pink Dogs on the Green Grass

Pink Dogs on the Green Grass

Paul Jacobs’ cartoon world is constantly expanding. Since uprooting himself from the border city of Windsor, Ontario to the perpetually buzzing Montreal music scene, his hand-drawn animations and hallucinatory illustrations have graced the covers of multiple albums per year. As the drummer of post-punk quintet Pottery, Jacobs is the engine behind yelpy extended jams that sound equally at home on a nightclub dancefloor or at a psych festival. Yet it’s solo albums like Pink Dogs on the Green Grass where Jacobs’ soft-focus, lysergic visions truly bloom.
Before moving to Windsor, Jacobs grew up in the even smaller town of Leamington, a city recently making headlines for drug busts and lockdown non-compliances. At age 4, he started playing drums in the church where his mom worked as a cleaner, but could only find hardcore and death metal groups to join in the sparse local scene. By necessity, Jacobs first emerged in the early 2010s as a one-man band, stomping out echo-drenched garage-rock reminiscent of Thee Oh Sees. As Jacobs’ discography grew, so did his songwriting ambitions, with 2016’s Pictures, Movies & Apartments providing an early glimpse at a tuneful side under smears of no-fi shoegaze.
Now that Jacobs has reinvented himself as a psych-pop troubadour, the simplest comparisons are probably Kurt Vile’s pretty daze and White Fence’s trippy haze, but it’s Cass McCombs he has namechecked as an enduring inspiration. Pink Dogs on the Green Grass bursts at the seams with twinkly keys, acoustic jangle, and clopping bongos, accentuating its sly hooks with sounds from a Summer of Love revival. Winnowing down 40 half-finished demos to 13 overstuffed songs, Jacobs handed the album off to mastering engineer Oliver Ackermann from A Place to Bury Strangers, a band that has made a career out of finding the sweet spot within squalls of noise.
Jacobs’ lyrics drift between banal observations and an oddball cast of characters, pushing his songs into surreal realms. The bongo-propelled “Christopher Robbins” reimagines the Air America author as a boss writing his paychecks. Moody standout “Cherry” is Jacobs’ tribute to the color red, while “Most Delicious Drink” is his ode to a beverage “that you wish would last forever.” Midway through spoken-word groover “Dancing With the Devil,” he stops to shop for “that brand new pair of shoes I had my eye on,” before his voice becomes garbled like crank-call auteur Longmont Potion Castle.
“Half Rich Loner” is the album’s closest hint at autobiography, with first-person lyrics describing the defeated thoughts of a middle-class working stiff who harbors artistic ambitions. As the song choogles on a single guitar note, Jacobs waxes depressedly: “This town has got me under some sort of spell/I was the half rich no good for nothing/Never amount to anything, never going to make it.” But is it really so bad to build new worlds on his lonesome if there’s no one else around? “When I’m not feeling music I can spend a lot of time drawing,” Jacobs has said. “When I was younger I definitely spent most of my time building skate ramps and stuff like that. It’s all the same, to just create and not trap yourself in your own head.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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The guitarist’s latest album features almost nothing but the sweet sounds of his instrument. You’ll know within its opening notes whether this music is for you—and if it is, you’ll feel instantly at home.

Third

The best modern guitar albums do one of two things: They either change the way you think about the instrument or brilliantly reinforce what you already know. Artists who take cues from avant-garde music, like Daniel Bachman and Sarah Louise, are often behind works that fall into the former category. They use the guitar less for its melodic potential than as a conduit to new atmospheres—to echo and drone and crescendo. The second category leads to more accessible triumphs, and it’s in this territory that Louisville native Nathan Salsburg reigns. There’s nothing really to get on his records; their thrill is in hearing something so gorgeous and intuitive executed with new energy.
In a field crowded with talent, Salsburg stands out for his quiet gift for melody and his deep connection to the past. (He currently serves as curator of the Alan Lomax Archive at the Association for Cultural Equity.) His two previous solo albums are open, autumnal, and pristine. As I’ve moved into new apartments, his records have been the ones I’ve consistently played first; they have a purifying effect, like burning sage. With the plainly titled Third, Salsburg has made his purest, sweetest music yet, which is a notable achievement. The record runs 35 minutes and features almost nothing but the sound of his guitar: no overdubs or guests, no mid-album experiments, no singing. You will know within the opening notes of “Timoney’s” whether this music is for you—and if it is, you will feel instantly at home.
Salsburg’s songwriting works in increments. Flowing in repetitive, ascending waves, his melodies are fluttering and lyrical and hammered-on like limericks. It’s a sound that’s equally unadorned and intricate—bountiful, with not a thought wasted. As an accompanist, Salsburg has made this style equally compatible with Joan Shelley’s spacious odes to serenity and with the wordy thought spirals on the last Weather Station album. But in his own compositions, adding lyrics would feel redundant. He can conjure dramatic shifts in tone with just a pregnant pause of his right hand. In multi-part songs like “Ruby's Freilach/Low Spirits” and the elliptical “Exilic Excursions,” you can practically feel the deep inhale before he picks up and changes direction.
Listening to Third, it’s possible to imagine these songs unfolding as one uninterrupted breath, like he pressed “record” and didn’t stop until the mood passed. The album’s production, crystal clear and close, adds to this immediacy. In songs like the beatific “Walls of the World,” the artist he most reminds me of is Windham Hill founder William Ackerman, a guitarist whose music is so serene and soothing that he’s sometimes credited with founding the New Age genre. Yet on Third, this breeziness belies the intricacy with which each song is composed. “Planxty Davis,” a new arrangement of a traditional Irish folk song, fits in seamlessly with his own material. Brief closer “Offering”—which features the album’s sole foreign sound, a recurring rush of noise that could be a passing car or a distant wave—surges with such familiarity that you could imagine it blossoming into a classic-rock ballad. He touches on modern influences and music as ancient as the instrument itself, but Salsburg’s greatest skill is his ability to make his playing sound like a sudden thought he’s sharing just with you.


Manipulator represents the inevitable pause from Ty Segall's usual breakneck pace, its 17-song, double-album sprawl the product of an unprecedented (for him) 14-month writing process. The extra attention to detail is felt on every song here.

Manipulator

Since popping the cork on his career back in 2008, Ty Segall has become synonymous with the word “prolific.” But unlike so many artists who commit their every passing whim to tape, in Segall’s case, it’s not just an impulsive quirk or random data dump—it’s the very engine that pushes him to greater heights. Whether it’s the sad-eyed garage-rock of the 2011 LP Goodbye Bread, the scorching psych-punk of Slaughterhouse from 2012*,* or the acoustic stoner reveries of last year’s Sleeper, the increasingly narrow windows between Segall’s discrete releases seemingly inspire him to knuckle down and fully inhabit a specific aesthetic before conquering the next one. It’s hard to feel overwhelmed by the vast amount of material he releases, because each new album has revealed a different facet of both his sound and personality, and built up anticipation for where he might go next.
With Manipulator, Segall arrives at his own personal promised land, the place where all the divergent paths he’s travelled intersect. As Segall has revealed in interviews, Manipulator represents the inevitable pause from his usual breakneck pace, its 17-song, double-album sprawl the product of an unprecedented (for him) 14-month writing process. You can feel that extra attention to detail on every song here: In sharp contrast to his previous album-to-album (or, in the case of 2012’s grab-bag Twins, track-to-track) stylistic shifts, the songs of Manipulator represent a perfect melting-pot synthesis of Segall’s many sonic signatures, as if each component—from the British Invasion-inspired melodies to the glam-rock affectations to the berserker guitar solos—was carefully measured out in beakers and test tubes before being mixed together. “He’s going to make a movie/ Of his entire life,” Segall sings on the gritty acoustic groover “Green Belly”, and even if he’s not referring directly to Manipulator’s career-spanning breadth, he certainly embraces auteur theory here, playing pretty much all of the instruments himself. (His trusty Ty Segall Band appears together on just one track.)
Manipulator sticks within a clearly demarcated comfort zone—i.e., the turn-of-the-’70s classic-rock canon spanning The Who Sell Out to Raw Power—but manages to touch upon every significant development in rock ‘n’ roll during that period. Want string-swept Bolan-esque serenades? Meet “The Singer”. A glitter-smeared proto-punk face-melter? Check “It's Over”. Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds mod-rock romps? Keep it real with “The Faker”. Ornate Forever Changes-worthy psych-folk? You can’t beat “The Clock”. A Grand Funk'd boogie that yields a drum-banging breakdown just like the one on Rod Stewart’s version of the Temptations’ “(I Know) I’m Losing You”? Get your fill with “Feel”. But perhaps the most pervasive influence of all is David Bowie circa The Man Who Sold the World—not just in Segall’s fanciful, faux-Brit diction (a quality he shares with his equally effete pal Tim Presley, aka White Fence), but in the way he welds electric shredding to percussive acoustic underpinnings, with the stripped-down strut of “Tall Skinny Lady” and “The Clock” bringing to mind the Bowie/Ronson match-ups on “Black Country Rock” and “Width of a Circle”.
And yet, even though his musical frame of reference is fixated upon an era that began 20 years before he was born, Segall is very much consumed by modern problems. As to be expected from someone who hasn’t updated their Twitter account in three months, Manipulator takes a skeptical view of technocracy, its lyrics dotted with allusions to surveillance, privacy invasion, identity theft, and TV addiction. In this light, the album’s acoustic/electric symbiosis feels emblematic of the tug-of-war between old-world authenticity and new-world convenience playing out in Segall’s head. (As if the aforementioned “Feel” doesn’t make his preference for IRL connections explicit enough, he answers it with another song called “The Feels”.) Of course, like any tried ‘n’ true garage-rocker, Segall still has girl trouble on his mind—but, in this case, it’s trouble with a girl addicted to her devices named, natch, “Susie Thumb”.
With its fuzzed-out Kinksian hooks, “Susie Thumb” is an obvious choice for Manipulator’s lead single—and, really, they could all be singles here. But that’s a comment on both Segall’s consistent craftsmanship and the songs’ very similar sense of scale, the latter of which ultimately prevents Manipulator from becoming the career-crowning milestone its protracted gestation period suggested. Manipulator may be 50 percent longer than the average Ty Segall record, but it doesn’t always make the case that it had to be. The issue isn’t song quality so much as a flattened topography: Whether they emphasize regal violins or squealing leads, the tunes here are pitched at the same cruising altitude and rarely upset their steady, maraca-massaged choogle. As such, Manipulator feels less like an epic Side-A-to-Side-D journey and more like an hour-long CD that would benefit from some editing (particularly when the songs start to feel like dopplegangers of one another—see: “The Crawler” vs. “It’s Over”). As his red-hot, silver-lipsticked recent appearance on Conan proved, Segall is ready for prime time. However, the ample generosity of Manipulator highlights the cruel paradox of showbiz: When you give the people everything they want, you can’t leave them wanting more.


With their true Norwegian black metal days behind them and nothing left to prove, the longrunning duo trumpet their joyful debt to classic heavy metal.

Old Star

Norwegian metal duo Darkthrone’s career has been a long, strange trip, one that’s always hinged upon the relationship between two rock’n’roll obsessives from Kolbotn. The band’s sound has morphed from the grating, lo-fi black metal barbarism that won them international acclaim in the 1990s into a looser, black metal/punk vibe that debuted on 2006’s The Cult Is Alive and injected new life into their career. Since then, they’ve ditched their more abrasive tendencies in favor of a sonic mish-mash that trumpets the duo’s joyful debt to classic heavy metal to the rafters.
Darkthrone’s 18th album, Old Star—which perennial mouthpiece Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell has described as the band’s “most ’80s album so far”—is a celebration of their storied past, produced by Ted “Nocturno Culto” Skjellum in his own Necrohell 2 Studios and polished by veteran knob-twiddlers Sanford Parker’s mix and Jack Control’s mastering job. Both members of Darkthrone share vocal, guitar, and bass duties (with Fenriz also putting in time on the drums), and over the years, they have forged the kind of bond most musicians can only dream about. This new album is in line with what fans of the band’s more recent (as in, post-2006) material have come to expect, but with a new twist—namely, the outsized impact that traditional doom bands like Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus seem to have had on the songwriting. Darkthrone still stand firmly in the heavy metal (with a dash of punk) camp, but they’ve definitely got a soft spot for old-school gloom.
There’s a melodic strain running through Old Star, particularly on tracks like the delectably doomy “Alp Man” (which suits Nocturno Culto’s breathy rasp) and the up-tempo “Duke of Gloat” (two of several delightfully nonsensical titles on this release. What is an “alp man”? We’ll never know!). “Duke of Gloat” is also the only track on Old Star that could convincingly be labeled “black metal”; despite Darkthrone’s roots in the second wave, their status as genre godfathers, and the designation on their label’s promo materials, the duo’s true Norwegian black metal days are long over. However, with its icy, mid-tempo malevolence and Satanic bent, this song is a thrilling reminder of past evils.
“The Hardship of the Scots,” on the other hand, is pure Celtic Frost worship, with a twist—as metal site Last Rites astutely noted, the song’s main riff is a fairly blatant homage to AC/DC’s “Let Me Put My Love Into You.” Darkthrone and Fenriz in particular seem to delight in sneaking references to other beloved bands into their music, lyrics, and album artwork, and while it isn’t quite as apparent as on albums like F.O.A.D. or Circle the Wagons, Old Star is no exception. That rock’n’roll influence serves them well in the more rollicking moments of songs like “I Muffle Your Inner Choir,” and on upbeat album closer “The Key Is Inside the Wall,” and keeps things from getting too serious. All in all, they’ve come a long way from Ravishing Grimness.
Fenriz firmly cemented his status as heavy metal’s timelessly cool, occasionally goofy uncle years ago, and has only settled more comfortably into the role as he and his counterpart have reached the upper reaches of both metal legend and middle age. Over three decades into their career, neither of them have anything left to prove, or anyone left to impress. The band didn’t even bother sending out promos for Old Star, preferring that journalists and industry types hear the new record at the same time as fans, because Darkthrone doesn’t need the hype, or advance accolades. They don’t need to worry about festival slots or booking headlining tours, because they don’t play live; as Fenriz proudly proclaimed on the 2010 track “I Am the Working Class,” they both have day jobs (and live in a country with a high standard of living and robust social safety net), so album sales aren’t a pressing concern.
At this point, one gets the distinct impression that, unlike so many other elder headbangers who keep on churning out new material and touring themselves into the ground—because, hey, the mortgage payment is due and the kids gotta eat—Fenriz and Nocturno Culto are just doing this for fun. Darkthrone keeps pumping out albums a full 25 years after their best-known records dropped, simply because the two dudes in the band sincerely, obsessively love heavy metal, and like making music together. It shows an impressive commitment to both their friendship and to rock’n’roll, and, for all their warts and spikes and grunts, there’s something almost sweet about that.


With spine-tingling whispers and cavernous synths, the San Francisco-based sound artist traces the ghostly shores of her past.

Dog Dreams (개꿈)

The title of Lucy Liyou’s second album, Dog Dreams (개꿈), comes from an elastic Korean concept of the fleeting nonsensical visions we have, whether they’re quaint reveries or ghoulish fears. Liyou’s new record considers both with gut-wrenching clarity, meditating on recurring dreams and memories of sexual violence. Where previous records deployed type-to-text skits, aggressive industrial sampling, and pig noises, Dog Dreams (개꿈) brings Liyou’s pleading, sonorous voice to the fore. Floating between Korean and English, her maximalist compositions create beautifully textured worlds to guide us through the possibility of connection and repair.
In a 2020 interview with Tone Glow that touches on her gender identity, Liyou discussed the “personal, caring, and loving” idea of 언니 (unnie), or older sister, in opposition to the “impersonal, idolizing, competitive” concept of 형님 (hyungnim), or older brother. These compositions reckon with both sides of the coin, blending confessional lyrics with opaque instrumentation and field recordings. On the standout “April in Paris,” Liyou takes the month of new growth as a muse, drawing on the jazz standard of the same title for a discussion of cemeteries and assault against a rhythmic backdrop of static. “I can be everything/A son/A daughter/Spring,” she sings, ushering in a season of possibility as Andrew Weathers’ guitars and synths coo behind her. At times these quiet, direct moments feel like a reward for the cluttering murmur of lips and ruffling paper, carefully built with co-producer Nick Zanca. The minimalist content of Liyou’s lyrics against such vast soundscapes allow the production to shine.
Later in the song Liyou samples an archival interview with Mariah Carey, who’s asked if her life parallels the story of Cinderella. “I think the way it happened is very fairy tale-esque,” Carey replies. There’s a reductive trans narrative to be drawn from such a statement about outward transformation, but Liyou’s work sidesteps it. She’s not alone: Peers and fellow trans musicians like Rachika Nayar and Issei Herr have similarly found a home in the cloaking mutability of experimental music. “I think it’s important to have trans narratives and trans ideas and stories that don’t always just touch up on how important it is to reach that gender euphoria,” Liyou said in a recent interview with Our Culture. Her instrumental landscapes confound simplistic narratives of representation.
The seductive quality of Dog Dreams (개꿈) comes from the way it seamlessly blends dissonant pieces of life into a symphony of tiny noises. Across these landscapes feelings arise and evaporate amid bells, amorphous guitars, and repurposed radio interviews. On the title track, galactic synths and brash programming roll together create an oceanic sense of depth. Liyou employs a chorus of distorted staccato voices to harmonize alongside her like a deconstructed, gored-up parody of a pop song until she cuts to silence. The ebbing nature of the track creates an eerie lullaby, sweetly longing one minute and disorienting the next. On “Fold the Horse (종이 접기)” Liyou channels Klein, surrounding a cautionary tale of a fortune teller with squeaks and hints of ASMR before an organ-like synth ushers in her final supplication for love. After all, anything is possible—but in a dog dream, one can never be too sure.
Correction: This review has been updated to correct translations for the Korean terms 언니 (unnie) and 형님 (hyungnim). Also, Klein is not the head of American Dreams; their label ijn inc released Lucy Liyou’s previous album.


On a dozen songs that transcend stereotypes of women in country music, this supergroup explores love, politics, and family.

The Highwomen

At the start of their powerful self-titled debut, the Highwomen—four leading women, banded together from distant corners of the country-music universe—go for the genre’s androgenic throat. “I was a Highwoman/And a mother from my youth,” sings Brandi Carlile, who helped recruit the quartet after fellow singer Amanda Shires realized how few women rank as modern country stars. It is a rewrite of “Highwayman,” of course, a composite sketch of the fabled spirit of valiant men. Written by country hit machine Jimmy Webb, the tune gave the collective of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings their collective name, The Highwaymen, in the mid-’80s.
For some, rewriting “Highwayman” may be an act of sacrilege, tantamount to, say, riffing on “The Star-Spangled Banner” or goofing on “Stairway to Heaven.” But Shires and Carlile rewrote it with Webb’s blessing, turning its four macho verses into remembrances from persecuted women—a Honduran immigrant, a Salem witch, a Freedom Rider, a pioneer preacher—and testimonials to their immortal temerity. “We are the Highwomen/We sing a story still untold,” everyone sings in the chorus, fashioning a mission statement into magnetic harmony. “We carry the sons you can only hold.” It is at once better than its classic original and a brilliant gambit, at once illustrating the genre’s gender gap and rushing to fill it once and for all.
The membership of the Highwomen is a marvel alone, an effort to reach across the aisles of country and then out of them. Maren Morris is the quartet’s exuberant star, having channeled the magnetism of early hits like “My Church” into a city-slick, chart-climbing bauble with Zedd and a second album, Girl, that unapologetically offers her up as a stadium-sized star if the world will have her. Carlile, meanwhile, is the adult-contemporary crossover dissident, as whip-smart as she is poignant. She has inched her way towards the spotlight over the years, and on last year’s enormous By The Way, I Forgive You, it found her. Shires has deep country bona fides; a fiddle-playing mystic, she sings like Emmylou Harris and writes like Van Morrison. And Hemby is one of her generation's Jimmy Webbs, a prolific hitmaker who co-wrote Kacey Musgraves’ “Butterflies” and Lady Gaga’s A Star Is Born standards. The Highwomen’s collective résumé quietly says that a woman’s place in country music is, well, anywhere.
These dozen songs pull all those perspectives toward the center. Country music has tended to reduce women to stereotypes, like the doe-eyed lover or the vengeful ex-lover or the sassy sex symbol. But The Highwomen contains and welcomes multitudes, reflected by “Crowded Table,” an ode to the value of intersectionality and solidarity that calls back to the folk revivalism of Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. (To that end, Yola, a black, English-born country-soul singer sings the title track's early verse about being a Freedom Rider, hurtling over a half-dozen expectations at once.)
During “Old Soul,” Morris gracefully embodies a woman who has given herself over to domestic duties and reasonable responsibilities but daydreams about escaping into the life of a “wild child for a day.” Playful and political, the irrepressible “Redesigning Women” alternately invokes Paula Deen and Rosie the Riveter, or the impulse to buy too many shoes and rear a generation sparking a social revolution. Motherhood is both deeply meaningful (tenderly voiced by Hemby on the swaying “My Only Child”) and sporadically annoying (as on “My Name Can’t Be Mama,” a modern honky-tonk ringer fit for Dolly Parton).
Love looks different here than the standard country conception, too. During “Loose Change,” Morris sings about a dude who doesn’t appreciate her value and her quest to leave him romantically bankrupt; Carlile and Shires arrive in the chorus, a unified posse you’d be a fool to fuck with. But the album’s centerpiece and wrecking ball is “If She Ever Leaves Me,” written by Shires with her husband and the band’s guitarist, Jason Isbell, for Carlile, who married another woman before it was even legal stateside. It is, on the surface, a sardonic kiss-off for a man hitting on her wife, a piece of you’re-not-her-type perfection anchored by the quip, “That’s too much cologne/She likes perfume.” The song’s real power, though, is its vulnerability, expressed through Carlile’s confession that she’s not the best partner, but she’s trying all the time. The Highwomen is a safe space for all kinds of honesty.
The Highwomen have expressed a rebellious kinship with their predecessors in The Highwaymen. “Wanting to do things their own way is what we’re sort of trying to mime,” Shires told The New York Times of the connection. But in the ’80s, The Highwaymen were aging outlaw gods, banding together after the initial glow of their own careers had dimmed; between the awkward drum machines and a Bob Seger cover, you could hear them fumbling with questions of relevance and senescence. The Highwomen, however, are now at the height of their respective powers and part of a larger cultural push, as vital as any four stars might be. The Highwaymen have often been called country’s best supergroup, but the Highwomen are better. They do here what the men never could—stretch the notions of what country can and must become.
Correction: An original version of this review misidentified the singer of a line in the title track.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On the Internet's third album, which features guest spots from Janelle Monáe, Vic Mensa, and Tyler, the Creator, Syd tha Kyd comes into her own as a writer. The band's purposeful instrumentation clears room to showcase her words, and she has a war story for every stage of love and loss.

Ego Death

The renewed critical interest in soul and R&B music that sprung up around the rise of Miguel, Frank Ocean, and the like over the last four years has helped award some much-deserved prestige on the form after years of undue neglect, but the push broke as much as it fixed. The music commands more respect now, but the accolades are disproportionately showered on a boy’s club of talented, offbeat songwriters circuitously linked together under the banner of "alternative R&B" by little else than the fact they all had very good albums out the same year. "Alt-R&B" isn’t just circuitous, though; it’s not real. Cordoning off and lionizing an alternative quadrant of R&B dismisses gifted but traditional singers like K. Michelle as plebeian, and worse, it carries the subtle insinuation that this music can’t be—and hasn’t always been—delightfully weird.
California soul collective the Internet frequently weather the alternative R&B tag, but hopefully their new album Ego Death will help shake the descriptor. It made sense around the group’s 2011 debut Purple Naked Ladies, a quiet collaboration between Odd Future affiliates Syd tha Kyd and Jet Age of Tomorrow architect Matt Martians. On Purple, Syd stepped out of her role as Odd Future’s house engineer into that of singer-songwriter for a batch of quirky, sometimes-crass tunes about the peaks and pitfalls of love and sex. Since then, Syd and Matt have expanded the project into a fully functional band. While the arrangements grew more accomplished between Purple and 2013’s Feel Good, the songwriting lagged, sultry and intimate, if, at times, not much else. Syd comes into her own as a writer on Ego Death, and the band steps up and reins Feel Good’s jazz-chords-for-jazz-chords’-sake extravagance into tight, hooky hip-hop soul.
Ego Death is both spare and quietly musical, its crisp low end anchored in hip-hop as the rest of the band coolly branches out into jazz, funk, and rock. Think of it as an offspring of early neo-soul pillars like Groove Theory and Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, bedroomy but also lush and progressive. Ego Death is leagues too studiously retro to fit anyone’s idea of "alternative," but it’s still plenty odd. These songs frequently take hard, unexpected turns: Opener "Get Away" is a tribal bass and percussion stomp in the verses (twice as sinister live) but gossamer and pretty around the choruses. "Gabby"’s hip-hop strut melts into a psychedelic waltz-timed coda adorned with pretty, wordless melodies from Janelle Monáe. "Girl", the album’s Kaytranada-assisted centerpiece, hangs spectral keys over thick, heavy bass until the groove trails off into a spacey interlude. Ego Death’s short cuts get straight to the point, while the longer ones tease out instrumental sections without coming apart at the seams.
The economic, purposeful instrumentation clears ample room to showcase Syd’s writing, and she’s got a war story here for every stage of love and loss: "Special Affair" and "Go With It" are horned-up player’s anthems ("Fuck what’s in your phone, I wanna take you home."), while "Get Away" and "Under Control" beg a suspicious lover to stop nagging about girls she’s not cheating with. "Girl" is the big syrupy cohabitation ballad, the song couples will hug and sway through at the live show, but "Partners in Crime Part Three" raises the stakes, testing our duo’s mettle with a Thelma & Louise police chase. Syd taunts an old flame on "Just Sayin/I Tried", chanting "You fucked up," but ultimately coming to peace with the break because she did everything in her power to stop it. Parsing Syd’s lyrics can feel like eavesdropping on a lover’s quarrel in a restaurant; she’s adept at tackling complex matters of the heart in a voice that’s both relatable and conversational. The Internet’s songs have always felt like scenes of salaciousness happening just out of earshot. Ego Death finally pulls us into the maelstrom.


Cleaner, sharper, and stronger than the quartet's excellent 2009 self-titled debut, Days is like a single idea divided into simple statements. No note feels wasted, and nothing happens at the wrong time or in the wrong place.

Days

For a mix of songs made at different times, Real Estate's self-titled 2009 debut was impressively consistent. Given how well the New Jersey band fused disparate moments, you had to figure they could reach even greater heights were they to craft their next set all at once. They did just that last winter, and the result is indeed a step forward. Cleaner, sharper, and just plain stronger, Days is like a single idea divided into simple statements-- a suite of subtle variations on a theme.
Its coherence sounds remarkably effortless, as if stringing together catchy gems is as easy as, in the words of one song, "floating on an inner tube in the sun." Interestingly, Real Estate actually acknowledge this sense of ease. The opener is bluntly titled "Easy", and references to carefree simplicity abound. As singer/guitarist Martin Courtney puts it, "If it takes all summer long/ Just to write one simple song/ There's too much to focus on/ Clearly there is something wrong." But the band's celebration of the uncomplicated is less about how Days was written than about the beauty of life seen in retrospect, especially young life in small towns.
Like the stirring scenes of suburban Texas in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, these songs find meaning in daily mundanities-- in houses and gardens, phone lines and street lights, names carved in trees and leaves pressed by footsteps. "All those wasted miles/ All those aimless drives through green aisles," sings Courtney wistfully. "Our careless lifestyle, it was not so unwise." That sentiment was evident on the band's debut, but here they've honed it to its essence.
The music bears a simplicity to match. These aren't minimal songs by any means, but the layers of cycling guitar, rolling rhythm, and gentle echo are always understated, more about conveying feeling than showing off the band's considerable chops. There's also a smooth efficiency in these rich tunes. No note feels wasted, and nothing happens at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Much of this precision comes from guitarist Matt Mondanile, whose nimble playing adds color to each song's shape. It's most noticeable in the insistent "It's Real", but I'm even more taken with his sonic smoke rings in "Out of Tune", and how his shimmering guitar evokes sunrays mingling through branches and sparkling off pools.
That idyllic tone permeates Days, and in lesser hands could deprive it of tension or variety. But Real Estate have such a knack for classic-sounding melody that every song quickly engages on a musical gut level. It's a quality their music shares with the jangly hooks of early R.E.M., the breeziness of later Pavement, and the garage twang of the Fresh & Onlys. But their closest kin are New Jersey forefathers the Feelies. That group's undying ability to mine repeated chords and Zen phrases is matched best by the album's closer, "All the Same", a looping study of how night and day are merely sides of the same coin. Lasting over seven minutes, it might be Real Estate's first epic. But it's as subtle and unassuming as anything on Days-- more evidence from this band that great music doesn't have to sound hard to make, even if it is.


A mix CD comprised of new Villalobos productions, Fabric 36 is in the unenviable position of both having to deliver the arc of a great DJ mix and to stand as the first multi-track collection of material from the Chilean producer in over a year. In both cases it can be judged a triumph.

Fabric 36

Though he conjures an instantly recognizable atmosphere from the moment his records begin to play, a new release by house/techno producer Ricardo Villalobos is also characterized by a slight apprehension in those seconds before you drop the stylus, as you wonder if you're going to walk away feeling like you've actually been had. Villalobos' sparest stretches of pure rhythm can be frustratingly opaque while still daring you to give the record just one more spin; even those who've called him a genius (like me) sometimes worry they're not in on some inscrutable gag. But where last December's "Fizheuer Zieheuer" single intoxicated (or irritated… see, I still can't decide) by stretching just a handful of parts across 37 minutes, the hour-plus Fabric 36 brims with the piled-up (and pilled-up) rhythmic layering that characterizes Villalobos at his most intriguing.
Fabric 36 is Villalobos' ravenously awaited mix CD, and it just happens to be blended entirely from his own new productions and remixes. These cut-and-paste percussion clinics would be already straining with detail as stand-alone tracks, but their interlocking beats become ever more complex in the virtuoso way Villalobos meshes them, as when the opening electronic tones of "Groove 1880" sprout acoustic cymbal accents and jazz snares nine minutes later during "Moongomery". The hyper-percussive top end of the mix is perpetually bustling, too: Peppering his tracks with preverbal hiccups, askew extraneous rhythms, and halting half-melodies is one of Villalobos' favorite (and most effective) tricks throughout Fabric 36-- both for keeping the listener engaged and for lending his music its trademark uneasy quality. Phantom voices are layered into bad-trip swirls on "Organic Tranceplant" and "Fumiyandric 2". Strange sizzling noises flare up during an otherwise austere drum track. Fabric 36 constantly slips and slides around multiple percussive pulses, yet remains utterly sensual.
If the snapping tick-tock of "Farenzer House" or the bouncy full-vocal cut "4 Wheel Drive" suggest the Villalobos of old-- standard electro-house with a case of the shivers and sniffles-- then the rumbling "Andruic and Japan" is the most audacious example yet of the Chilean producer's freehand approach to disassembling techno's grid. Over 12 minutes long, it drops thunderous bursts of arrhythmic wooden percussion over autistic percolation, shattering the mix's momentum. But slowly, Villalobos reconfigures those skull-crushing mallets back into the almighty 4/4. That (often nearly undetectable) hand ordering things is what keeps Fabric 36 from turning into flurry of spooky sound effects and aimless drum loops. Villalobos' barely-there melodies (like the descending deep-house organ hum in "Prevorent") and unerringly steady tempo float you downriver as swarms of beats circle overhead. It's that gentle but unyielding push that keeps even his most outré moments-- the woozy soccer stadium chant "Premier Encuentro Latino-Americano" bleeding into "Chropuspel Zündung", Villalobos smearing the cacophony of a sampled crowd into a jumbo jet roar-- from wrecking not only your head but your equilibrium.
Thanks to Villalobos' cheekily narcissistic tracklist, Fabric 36 is in the unenviable position of both having to deliver the arc of a great DJ mix and to stand as the first multi-track collection of mostly new Villalobos material in more than a year. In both cases, it can be judged a triumph, a controlled burst of rangy productivity that offers a full-spectrum look at Villalobos' various obsessions (the power of percussion, haunted house vibeology, dub science applied to Latin swing and Germanic snap, minimalism vs. maximalism). The ebb and flow of a heterogeneous DJ set makes it easier listening than the often grindingly static repetitions of 2004's Thé Au Harem D'Archimède, while it still offers moments so polyrhythmic that they make that earlier record sound downright ingratiating. Technically, it's just stunning-- the most alchemical digital-into-analog (and vice versa) home-listening DJ mix I've heard in years. And if you've ever felt on the wrong end of Villalobos' formalist stunts-- if you have a love/hate relationship with his mix of the engrossing and exasperating-- you can take comfort in the fact that while Fabric 36 is hardly pop, it repays your undivided attention from the first listen.


On his debut solo album, Tom Petty’s economical, thoughtful songwriting gelled with Jeff Lynne’s restrained production. They crafted a laid-back sound but kept the tension of heartland rock‘n’roll.

Full Moon Fever

Part of the reason Tom Petty’s passing earlier this month felt so profound was his unofficial status as the mortar of classic-rock radio. The Florida-born, Malibu-haunting music lifer had top billing on a slew of songs that served as the glue between your Stones and Beatles chestnuts—the spitfire chronicle of lovers’ wariness “Refugee,” the sparkle of “The Waiting.” The format’s parameters had already been well-established by the time Full Moon Fever—the first album credited to Petty without his longtime musical pals the Heartbreakers—came out in the spring of 1989. But as soon as its first single, the laid-back yet steadfast “I Won’t Back Down,” was released, the rule book was rewritten.
Full Moon Fever came out of a most Southern Californian set of circumstances. In November 1987, Petty—then coming off his seventh album as frontman of the Heartbreakers, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), as well as a May 1987 arson attack on his house—had a chance encounter with Jeff Lynne, the songwriter and maximalist producer behind Electric Light Orchestra, at a traffic light (“just before the Thrifty [Drug Store],” he told SPIN in 1989) that, as it happened, was located near where they lived. Lynne was just off producing George Harrison’s Cloud Nine, the 1987 album that spawned the surprise MTV hit “Got My Mind Set on You,” and was at work on Brian Wilson’s “Let It Shine.” ”Around Christmas that year, I wrote a couple of songs and showed them to [Lynne], and he had a few suggestions, which really improved them,” Petty told The Chicago Tribune in 1989. “So we ended up going over to [Heartbreakers guitarist] Mike Campbell’s house and putting them down in his studio… by then I was already having too much fun and I didn’t want to stop and go back to doing nothing, so I kept convincing Jeff song by song to do one more, and then finally hooked him into finishing the whole album.”
Even at its most urgent, Full Moon Fever has a laid-back feel. Petty’s sardonic observations, delivered in his wizened drawl, coast on loose-limbed riffs that were largely written with the rhythm guitar parts at the forefront of Petty and Lynne’s collective mind. Every song was written on 12-string or 6-string acoustic guitars. Petty told The Boston Globe in 1989: “I wanted to experiment with the art of rhythm guitar. Jeff and I feel that acoustic guitars can be rock’n’roll instruments, not just folk instruments.”
The sun-soaked chords that open the sprawl-dwelling and regretful “Free Fallin’” set the album’s tone. They tug the action along while Petty, half-sly and half-wistful, recounts the wounds suffered by a young woman who was focused on Elvis and horses before the allure of the bad boy creeps into her life. On the chorus, his voice cracks into a “free!” that sounds liberated, but it almost immediately skids into a descending “fa-lli-ing” that reveals the more alarming aspects of being unmoored, an uneasiness that persists even as the churning bridge rises up. The rest of Full Moon Fever balances that tension beautifully. Lynne’s restrained production and Petty’s economical, thoughtful songwriting combine into a sneakily powerful collection of songs.
Full Moon Fever is billed as Petty’s “first solo record,” although it’s not a clean break from the Heartbreakers—keyboardist Benmont Tench and bassist Howie Epstein have brief cameos, Campbell has a co-writing credit on the new wave-tinged “Love Is a Long Road” and laid down the insistent riff that propels “Runnin’ Down a Dream.” That song’s journey toward being history’s most chilled-out jock jam rides on Campbell’s blistering skill, both on the song’s signature riff and on the pyrotechnic playing that closes it out. Petty’s meditative, rueful vocal acts as a knowing counterpoint, its descriptions of frantically driving around in search of “somethin’ good waitin’ down this road” winds around Campbell’s forward momentum.
The lyrics are often minimalist, packing a punch with the subtle detailing that made Petty’s earlier work appealing to arena-sized crowds. “Yer So Bad” opens with an of-its-moment observation about a woman whose romantic trajectory veers, unfortunately, from a money-laden yuppie to a swinging singer, with Petty unable to “decide which is worse.” “A Face in the Crowd” is all atmospherics, Petty’s murmured refrain and the crystal-gilded guitars giving a rainy-day feel to its full-hearted, yet sparsely told tale of having someone parachute “out of a dream, out of the sky” and into his life.
Petty’s love of rock—specifically, his belief in its power to unite—permeates his catalog, but on Full Moon Fever it especially shines. There are references to Elvis and Del Shannon dotting the lyrics, a nod to Buddy Holly in the form of the smoothed-out rave-up “The Apartment Song,” and a reverent cover of the Byrds’ chiming 1965 single “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better,” which either kicks off Side Two of the album or follows the Petty-narrated pause that the singer helpfully inserted for CD listeners who might not get full experience of actually sitting with an album, paying attention to its nuances instead of letting it burble in the background. But it’s not an entirely besotted romance: “Zombie Zoo,” a drowsy kids-these-days lament, was inspired by Petty meeting punks who haunted a club night of the same name—Petty’s portrayal of the white-lipstick “little freak[s]” is a bit condescending (“It’s so hard to be careful, so easy to be led/Somewhere beyond the pavement/You’ll find the living dead,” he notes)—the first fissures in the rock generation gap that would eventually become fodder for his public persona.
MCA Records, Petty’s label at the time, initially rejected Full Moon Fever; once it did come out, it spawned five singles that reached the Hot 100 and sold five million copies. “I waited awhile, until the top regime at the record company changed,” he told Esquire in 2006, echoing the steely-eyed Full Moon Fever smash “I Won’t Back Down,” which uses backing vocals from Lynne, Epstein, and Harrison (Petty and Lynne’s eventual bandmate in the Traveling Wilburys) to bolster Petty’s case for staying steadfast in his beliefs.
But the damage to the label-artist relationship had already been done, and Petty signed with Warner Bros. in a deal that wouldn’t become common knowledge until two years after it was signed. Full Moon Fever, in a twist that made the early executive apathy toward it become a setup for poetic justice, became one of the late 20th century’s most storied rock albums, a stripped-down, yet richly realized presentation of the man behind the stadium-headlining star.


Soul Jazz Records’ companion to the Tate Modern’s exhibition of black art from the 1960s traces pivotal developments in funk, soul, jazz, and spoken word that still resonate through popular music today.

Various Artists: Soul of a Nation — Afro-Centric Visions in the Age of Black Power: Underground Jazz, Street Funk, & the Roots of Rap 1968-79

By the summer of 1968, both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated, and America’s inner cities burned in enraged response. But like seeds in the ground, the messages of both X and King had taken root with the era’s artists and musicians and were blooming throughout the culture. As the Tate Modern’s recent Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power exhibition attests, a profound movement was taking shape both visually and musically. And while the potent visual works of Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, and Barkley Hendricks may not have filtered through to the mainstream during that era, the music that arose alongside it became an undeniable cultural force.
Soul Jazz’s 13-track companion to this long-overdue exhibit shows that while the revolution may not have been televised, it nevertheless spread like a fire across jazz, soul, spoken word, gospel, funk, and pop. One can look at artists like Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, and “The Tonight Show” house band the Roots (who used Bearden’s art for 2014’s ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin) and see a direct lineage back to the art and music presented here. Musically, it was a heady and fecund time for music that empowers, inspires, and uplifts, and Soul Jazz’s curation here is impressive. The example of John Coltrane, James Brown, and Aretha Franklin runs implicitly throughout, as does that of the black church, but the compilation largely draws on lesser-known music from a wide array of labels (many of them artist-run imprints) and presents a message that remains powerful today.
The most obvious selection is the most well-known: Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which, despite the well-trodden appropriation of the phrase, still astounds decades later. For those resigned to the weathered sound of Scott-Heron’s voice during his precipitous decline, hearing him full of vim and vinegar here, rapping about “a white tornado, white lightning, or white people” is thrilling, as is his ability to twist slogans into a message of defiance.
From there, different narratives emerge, such as the embrace of pan-Africanism. “These are African rhythms/Passed down to us from the ancient spirits/Feel the spirit!/A unifying force.” So intones Oneness of Juju, an American group that drew on Afrocentric chants and rhythms, fusing them with Afro-Cuban percussion and pop-friendly R&B song structures. Years on from their polyrhythmic “African Rhythms,” included here, their 1981 disco single “Every Way But Loose” would get spun at the Paradise Garage, showing how the ancients could also boogie. Former Ornette Coleman trumpeter Don Cherry joined forces with the West African group Mandingo Griot Society in the 1970s, presenting a percolating forerunner of world beat and fusion. Jazz vibraphonist Roy Ayers’ “Red, Black & Green” harks back to the pan-African flag that Marcus Garvey hoisted back in 1920, its message now set to a glistening vibraphone funk groove. And a heavy tribal drum throbs underneath the poem “Strong Men” by spoken-word artist David McKnight.
The set also shows a shift in African-American jazz in the late 1960s and early ’70s, as artists wrested control from major labels and instead pressed their music up under the model of self-determined black businesses. Chicago’s Phil Cohran, who spent time as a member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra and taught Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White, released his musical homage to Malcolm X on his own Zulu Records. In Detroit, trombonist Phil Ranelin and fellow musicians established the Tribe label to release their collective output as well as a quarterly magazine. And while Horace Tapscott didn’t found his own imprint, the Nimbus West label was started in order to properly document the music from this unheralded pianist and composer. Tapscott’s “Desert Fairy Princess” is the longest track here and one of the most beguiling: a loose-limbed large-ensemble piece winding from swing to abstraction with ease.
It’s purported that Duke Edwards at one time played percussion in Sun Ra’s Arkestra, but the only album under his own name is a stirring hybrid of spoken word, free jazz, and gospel that asks, Is It Too Late? Across its pensive and mournful 10 minutes, Edwards’ soliloquy looks to the fraught future, and his throat trembles as he wonders what became of the world he once knew. What good is mankind’s progress, Edwards asks, if we lose the little thing called “love our fellow man”? No answer is forthcoming, but as Soul of a Nation reveals, it remains a question vital for a society to ask.


The Australian singer and actor is blessed with a commanding and magnetic voice. Over these soul ballads and torch songs, she holds nothing back—for better or worse.

Ramona

Ramona, the third album from Melbourne belter Grace Cummings, feels at first like a possible masterpiece, a new apogee in the pantheon of tormented soul. Across its 11 allusion-rich character studies and screeds of lovelorn retribution, Cummings renders every moment with unmitigated emotional intensity, as though every feeling were the last one that would ever matter. Hear her grow, for instance, from long-faced tenderness at the start of “A Precious Thing” to an operatic mercenary howling about love. “But it’s nothing I care about,” she roars like Diamanda Galás on a Disney ride designed by Dante. Or witness the cracks in her voice as she surges beyond an Amy Winehouse coo during “Something Going ’Round,” testaments to the self-doubt ingrained in this opening love letter. Built by a band that has clearly studied the Wrecking Crew’s glories, and gilded with strings and harp, Ramona holds a singular and mighty voice in a spectacularly grand frame, not unlike Rufus Wainwright’s Want One or Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising.
But you know that friend who you love seeing for an hour every once in a while, who shares everything new about their life in an exhilarating but exhausting torrent? That could be Ramona after repeated spins, when Cummings’ lack of restraint, combined with the band’s hidebound insistence on repeating sounds that are often 60 years old, becomes too taxing to take for very long. After self-producing her first two records, Cummings linked with Topanga Canyon vintage king and session ace Jonathan Wilson, who freed her to focus on not holding back. That is commendable, but it results in an album that has the dynamic range and limited application of a strong flashlight. You recognize its incredible power, but you’d do best not to stare into the source for very long.
Cummings is not shy about courting legendary company. After all, the protagonist of “Ramona,” a smoldering pseudo-goth number that ultimately flames into a full torch song, is borrowed from Bob Dylan. (She summons him again for the number’s finale, with sneering repetition that mirrors “Just Like a Woman.”) There’s a bit of Johnny Cash’s “Cry, Cry, Cry,” toward the end of “Everybody’s Somebody,” which borrows the sound of Memphis’ Stax rather than its Sun to impugn a wayward partner. She lifts from Townes Van Zandt during “Without You,” where she again flips Dylan lines twice. There are glimpses of Nick Cave and Nancy Sinatra and, in the album’s closing verse, Cummings quotes standards from Dylan, Neil Young, and George Harrison, like some thrift-store magpie. The band, led by Wilson and multi-instrumentalist Drew Erickson, responds in kind, stitching clear threads of Radiohead, Phil Spector, Hal Blaine, and Chris Isaak into these songs.
As with Ramona itself, these references first seem remarkable, the group’s audacity commendable. An homage to “Wicked Game” as a preamble to “Common Man,” Cummings’ romantic cowboy portrait? Those impossibly tense strings that Radiohead favor as a bed for “Work Today (And Tomorrow),” a fiery ballad about the endurance of modern survival? Cool! But it soon becomes clear how gestural this all is—that Cummings, Wilson, and company are a crew that will repeatedly point to the classics they love without finding new depth for them. There’s not a sound or story here you haven’t heard done better elsewhere.
So we’re left, then, with Cummings’ voice—a truly dazzling instrument, with the heft of Nina Simone’s and the height of Angel Olsen’s—to carry Ramona anywhere else. And goddamn, can she sing. That growl toward the back of “Help Is On Its Way,” that bluesy scorn at the middle of “Everybody’s Somebody,” that hall-filling howl leading out of “On and On”: She is a consummate technician with an enormous range and an identifiable grain. In those moments, Ramona still lands like the masterpiece it initially resembles. But it overpowers these rather skeletal songs and, over very little time, overwhelms the listener, too.
Ramona is perfectly emblematic of the sort of singer-songwriter record that seems to be creeping into ubiquity and that Wilson tends to specialize in—big and unabashed, where every sentiment appears illuminated by massive stage lights. (Cummings, for what it’s worth, is also an actor, which you can sense as Ramona starts to wear you down.) Subtlety, intricacy, and delicacy are horse-traded for bombast. Is this a symptom of streaming and the attention economy, where it takes a little oomph to rise above the background hum? Or is it instead a symptom of songwriters trying to add something new to a form two or three times older than they are and deciding that the simplest way to fake it is to crank the volume? In either case, chockablock with theater-kid gusto and references to aged idols, Ramona’s instant magnetism slowly starts to seem like just a dream, a vacuum, a scheme.


The star beatmaker reunites with past collaborators like Earl Sweatshirt, billy woods, and Larry June on a breezy new EP.

Flying High EP

The Alchemist has churned out steely boom-bap and psychedelic loops for icons across three generations of hip-hop and helped pioneer the one-producer/one-rapper mixtape wave of the 2010s. He’s Eminem’s tour DJ, worked on the score to a Grand Theft Auto game, and has his own production master class. But his most impressive accomplishment has to be ALC Records, the independent label he founded in 2004 that’s home to his solo discography, whether that be one-off collabs with underground royalty or compilations packaged like deli sandwiches. It’s boutique indie rap at its finest, the ALC label serving as a seal of quality assurance.
Not every ALC project is high stakes, though. Take Flying High, the latest in a long line of EPs where rappers spar over Alchemist’s unvarnished loops. It fits the mold of earlier projects like 2018’s Bread and 2021’s This Thing of Ours while retaining a breezy atmosphere: a space for rhymers in Alchemist’s orbit to unspool for the fun of it. He’s made full projects with half of the guests featured here, and it’s appealing to hear them try out different variations on the Alchemist sound. Opener “RIP Tracy” flutters on a warm, simmering bed of violins, bass, and vocal hums while Earl Sweatshirt anxiously blends Ghostface and Jordan Peele references; billy woods cuts through the steam with deadpan humor (“I’m just a regular guy/Put designer jeans on one leg at a time”). The meandering stagger-step of this beat is a far cry from the dubby sway of the trio’s previous collaboration, “Falling Out the Sky,” from Armand Hammer’s 2021 album Haram, but their slippery styles adapt well.
Every guest gets space to stretch and show out. MIKE and Sideshow sound right at home on “Bless,” where nightclub piano and occasional streaks of electric guitar anchor stories of family history and high-school bathroom brawls. Compared to the airy production on MIKE and Alchemist’s Tommy Hilfiger-sponsored One More EP with Wiki from last year, it’s somber but peaceful. Closing track “Midnight Oil” sounds like it was made with guests Larry June and Jay Worthy in mind—its luxurious, wavy sound could’ve easily fit on a deluxe edition of June and Alchemist’s recent album The Great Escape. The weakest link is Kansas rapper T.F, who opens “Trouble Man” with a verse that feels formless next to the exceptional Boldy James feature on the back end (“Slappin’ all this bass, I show you why they call me B.B. King”).
None of these songs sound like demos or leftovers, but Flying High doesn’t reach for the stars, either. This is an exhibition bout for the MCs—the pairings are solid but unsurprising—and, like most Alchemist solo projects, it concludes with instrumental versions of each song. Some float (“RIP Tracy”) and some seethe (“Trouble Man”) but all share a casual, humid saunter, like they’re on their way to the swanky pool party in Boogie Nights. Flying High isn’t supposed to be life-changing, but most rappers and producers would be lucky to flaunt this level of skill in their downtime.


The instruments of war have always been percussion. I'm not referring to tanks, battlerams and firearms, but musical instruments ...

XTRMNTR

The instruments of war have always been percussion. I'm not referring to tanks, battlerams and firearms, but musical instruments. Granted, the incessant thunder and crack of explosives is percussive, albeit erratic. The quick history lesson on the Bicentennial quarter reminds us that suckers with snares kept the beat of destruction. Tolkien's trolls thumped skin timpanis. Genghis had gongs. War has rhythm. I was reminded of this at the two most exhilarating concerts I've seen. Last weekend, a pogo bacchanal erupted in a cramped club. Clothes were shed and azzes were backed up on an altar with a $6 cover. Six months ago, a crowd stomped dust and flicked cigarette ash off the floor of Chicago's Metro as three drummers locked into a primal groove. Revolution starts with a dance that the stuttering chugs of guitar can't provide. Funk, not volume, pulls people to the streets.
Primal Scream have always understood the power of a groove and a lyrical grenade. Their entire career reaches a melting point on the raw, caustic XTRMNTR. With this album, Primal Scream point their finger at multinationals and conservatives, and forewarn the fate of Pentheus.
XTRMNTR's sound lies somewhere between the kraut-loving Chemical Brothers and latter-era Fugazi. Recent recruits Mani from the Stone Roses and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine up the ante. Mani's gritty, nasty basslines form the coral of Primal Scream's gunmetal grey and apocalyptic orange reef. The title track bounces guitar freakout sparks across congealed grease of bass. "Swastika Eyes" races on high-velocity loops like the soundtrack to a behemoth final boss in a spaceshooter video game. Primal frontman Bobby Gillespie seems to see himself as the little "Gradius" ship facing the myriad-howitzer monster of the WTO, NATO, and whatever other "The Man" organization you can name.
XTRMNTR's lyrics are sparse and terse, but Gillespie spits bullets like, "You've got the money, I've got the soul," and, "Tell you the truth/ The truth about you/ The truth about you?/ You've been true." Even when his delivery is awkward (i.e. like an aging white Brit trying to flow, as in the former examples), it's barked as if sincerity has locked his jaw like rabies. It's hard to disagree with sentiments like "Kill All Hippies." Even the music mirrors the anti-superfluidity, anti-nostalgic, anti-bucolicness, anti-bathos lyrics. The vehicle is stripped and the skeleton spiked. Like the vowel-less title on the cover, XTRMNTR is all corners and crunch.
Typically, electronic-rock fusion falls flat for smelling too much like silicon and solder. XTRMNTR defies such classification thanks to the brilliance of Kevin Shields. This is the man who crafted one of the most sonically incredible records of all time, and his work here proves his skills have not diminished. "MBV Arkestra" drifts in hypnotic rhythms. Shields mixes countless tracks of accelerated drums into a thick snakecharm. Layer upon layer of sandstorm guitars and horns sweep over the shifting dunes of beats. The song feels like a drugged-up rush through a packed Punjabi streetmarket. People, it's My Bloody Valentine! On "Accelerator" Shields pushes the volume to an exploding point like gravity pulling an MC5 song back into the atmosphere. White flames flare off charred drums as strings turn to magma. Elsewhere, his influence is felt, like on the wargame instrumentals of "Blood Money" and "Shoot Speed/Kill Light".
The album has its shortcomings. "Keep Your Faith" and "Insect Royalty" dip a bit too much into the more sentimental song-based style of the last record, Vanishing Point, and "Swastika Eyes" needs no reprise. But the fighting spirit keeps Primal Scream ahead of the pack. Gillespie now sports post-lice hair and mysterious face scratches. He's a battered veteran who's making up for some horrible moments in the past. Rest assured, Rod Stewart will not be able to cover anything from XTRMNTR.
Some still sadly associate Primal Scream with their baggy rock days. Yet few other bands evolve this deep into their career, let alone care. At some point in the mid-90s, Primal Scream woke up and realized they'd made a mistake. Their new political agenda digests much easier than bands like Rage Against the Machine who market their entire career off such stances. In the end, Primal Scream understood that under all of the rants there has to lie a steady throb of rump-shaking war.


This collaboration between Italy’s ambient techno artist Donato Dozzy and Rome-based vocalist Anna Caragnano focuses on the sound of Caragnano’s effervescent and honed voice, which is thie only instrument on display. Dozzy finds fascinating ways to mirror, multiply and fracture Caragnano’s flexible voice across nine tracks.

Anna Caragnano / Donato Dozzy: Sintetizzatrice

Sintetizzatrice

One might be forgiven for anticipating that this collaboration between Italy’s ambient techno demiurge Donato Dozzy and Rome-based vocalist Anna Caragnano would be equal parts Dozzy and Caragnano, with his productions coursing beneath garlands of her voice. But Sintetizzatrice thrills in inverting such expectations. Imagine if Andy Stott’s Faith in Strangers drew upon only Alison Skidmore’s voice and you have an idea of what Dozzy and Caragnano are up to here. There’s not a throb, kick or ambient wash to be heard, no hardware to spot. Caragnano’s effervescent and honed voice is the only instrument at work, providing stratospheric highs and low end, with Dozzy deploying an array of strategies and processing to mirror, multiply, and fracture Caragnano’s flexible voice across these nine tracks.
“Introduzione” begins with Caragnano surrounded by multitudes of herself, a solo performer on a subway car soon crammed with chattering commuters jostling for space. While it sets the stage for what will follow, it’s one of Sintetizzatrice’s least interesting moments. But once Caragnano’s utterance “rain” on “Starcloud” begins to sound through the space, soon surrounded with innumerable echoes of herself, we enter two-and-a-half minutes of rarefied space, Caragnano’s every hum and sigh transmogrified into a heavenly body.
Dozzy finds myriad ways to recast Caragnano. “Luci” brings to mind the likes of Grouper, Julia Holter and Julianna Barwick. Dozzy takes the gossamer thread of a single breath at the start of “Fraledune,” loops it until it becomes as expansive as a choir and then once that mass of sound is built, teases an even high sonority out of it. He moves Caragnano to the other end of the register for “Parallelo,” favoring deep resonant tones, as if she is sounding from the bottom of a well. Another small mouth sound is used to approximate a thump on “Parola,” which leads into the traditional Italian folk of “Festa (A Mottola).”
Myself, I prefer Caragnano when she’s less tangible and earthly, more cloudy and ineffable, as she is uttering “love without sound.” About the only complaint to level at Sintetizzatrice is its brevity. The body-erasing moments collected here don't even break the half-hour mark, which is a shame, because the sound of Caragnano’s brief sighs stretched towards infinity is a wonderful sound in which to luxuriate.


On his solo album, the London producer cloaks his self-doubt in deceptively danceable electronic beats that fuse elements of rap, pop, and UK bass in unexpected ways.

Salvador

Until now, Sega Bodega, aka Salvador Navarette, has tended to work on the sidelines. He co-runs the label NUXXE with Coucou Chloe, Shygirl, and Oklou; he’s been busy producing for singers like London’s Cosima; and he contributed sound design to Brooke Candy’s ambitious PornHub film I Love You.
On 2018’s self*care, Sega Bodega’s last sizeable solo release, he was bright, brash, lashing outwards; on Salvador, his debut album, he has grown up and also grown more unsure of himself. Shedding the hard shell of youthful self-confidence, he has become lost and self-doubting—an all-too-recognisable condition of one’s mid-twenties. Having titled Salvador after himself, he embarks upon a far more personal project than his previous ones. It’s a raw album, emotionally and psychologically, and it masks sincerity with production that is hard and experimental. Utilizing a production style similar to his work on Shygirl’s recent single “BB”—overdriven rhythms inspired by rap, R&B, and UK bass; vocals processed to disorienting extremes—Navarette deliberately cloaks his self-contradiction and ugly thoughts with deceptively danceable electronic beats. The album is a trippy descent into Sega Bodega’s dark side.
In his lyrics, Navarette delves into the destructive patterns we allow ourselves to fall into in the name of self-preservation. This comes to the fore on lead single “U Suck.” Upon first listen, it’s the album’s most unsparing song (“I don’t mean to be rude but honestly/Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.../I can list the ways you suck/You suck, you suck, you suck”). But his singing is soft rather than accusatory, the chords gentle; the major-key outro is so subtle that it’s easy to miss the final twist: “Sometimes you don’t see it but I love you.” Pitched up, his vocals are childlike and coy, shying away from a truth that is hard to acknowledge.
The album, as a whole, is better than its singles. “U Got the Fever” is a swirling dreamscape that switches to double time, mimicking the compelling anxiety of a codependent love affair. “Heaven Knows” flicks easily between major and minor chords, mirroring the lyrics’ conflation of pleasure and pain (“Keep your hands around my neck/Cut me with glass”). “Masochism” contrasts harsh beats with soft, closely recorded vocals. Layered on top of each other, the vocals create the sense of an inner dialogue that, combined with the pulsing, fast-strummed guitar towards the end of the track, show an unhealthy cycle beginning again.
Navarette’s keen ear for pop and rock blends well with his electronic experiments. The short “Know (Interlude)” is the only place he allows himself to let loose with more abrasive beats; the album’s last two songs “Calvin” and “11 Kuvasz in Snow,” are led by piano melodies—an unexpected choice, given the way the rest of the album foregrounds such an aggressively digital palette. The piano suggests a newfound vulnerability, as if he’s finally dropping his guard and letting in both his listeners and the “you” addressed in most of his lyrics.
If self*care showed someone in youthful fluctuation, searching for his identity, Salvador is a self-portrait of an artist in turmoil. What makes the record click is that it feels relatable, yet entirely on Sega Bodega’s terms: ambitious, lonely, and aching for intimacy.