Three discs' worth of new Prince material-- one credited to his new protégé Bria Valente-- sold only online or through Target. Yikes.

Prince / Bria Valente: Lotusflow3r / MPLSound / Elixer

Lotusflow3r / MPLSound / Elixer

For several days, Lotusflow3r/MPLSound sat on my hard drive, daring me to click play. I finally acquiesced, knowing this review was due, and suddenly realized how much my relationship with Prince has changed over the past 20 years. His rise to success, beginning with 1979's Prince, pretty much mirrored my pre-adolescent development as a music fan. By 1987's Sign O' the Times, I was ripping the cellophane off the cassingles when barely out of the store, hoping to soak up a little of that Princely aura even if it would be hours before I'd be near my tape deck.
Like many who came of age when each new Prince album expanded our conception of pop, I've already struggled through plenty of self-cannibalized sketches and ever-more-mawkish ballads and unsuccessful experiments to locate the canon-worthy songs lurking in his decade-plus of hubristic over-production. I know a jumble of decent tunes, lackluster jams, and outright dreck invariably awaits on any Tuesday morning bearing a new Prince album. This time around, and in several key ways, we get a partial throwback to the Prince records I greedily inhaled as a tween. (For one thing I bought a physical copy at a chain department store, something I haven't regularly done since I could drive.) That added a little twist to my distress when I realized that, at age 31, I was actually kind of dreading my first play of a new Prince album. It's a future the 12-year-old me would not have wanted to reach.
Assessing a new Prince album all but demands forced objectivity and willfully ignoring his first decade as a recording artist. Want to look like an idiot? Write a screed lamenting the fact that an artist has failed to consistently entertain, let alone surprise or enlighten, for over 30 years. But what's left, once you choose the road of sane detachment, other than a review that can be summed up as "predictably imperfect, your mileage may vary"? Hence my low-level dread. So here's my hardly original thesis, which many could have guessed even before clicking: Don't buy this album unless you're willing to do the work of winnowing it down to the tracks you find enjoyable/passable. Two new Prince albums (plus a third disc we'll get to in a minute) for the price of one might as well come with a giant sparkly sticker that reads "For Obsessive Amateur Editors Only." Filler on a 21st century Prince album? Do purple pontiffs leave paisley piles in the Minnesota woods?
Lotusflow3r is mostly neutral funk-rock. When I say "funk-rock," I don't mean the taut, digitally enhanced amalgam Prince invented/perfected in the 1980s. I mean the looser variety, amenable to extended onstage takes, that friend and foe alike would describe as "organic," albeit with very different inflections. It's a sound that works best when he observes three important guidelines: 1) He restrains the stock guitar heroics (has anyone's instrumental creativity been more effectively hampered by being repeatedly declared the last great virtuoso?), 2) He keeps the tempos club-friendly (or at least friendly in the context of old-school weekend at the 40-and-over spot), and 3) He remembers his faux rivalry with fellow funkateer Morris Day was more productive than his imagined rivalry with musically ignorant young folks.
But when I say "neutral," unfortunately I mean pretty much exactly what you probably think I mean. The only track with an immediately memorable hook is his cover of "Crimson and Clover", which would be sadder if he hadn't been obscuring his preternatural catchiness for some time now. On Lotusflow3r, as on all of his albums since he became a classicist by intent and a live workhorse out of necessity, Prince mistakenly assumes instrumental prowess to be of primary importance to anyone other than online guitar-tab traders, while also displaying an unflattering and near-constant need to prove he can hang with the multi-cultural heroes who shaped his worldview. There's no need to genuflect when you've long since been admitted to the pantheon.
If Lotusflow3r is generic and too-reverential modern day muso Prince, then MPLSound is either crass or delusional. It's crass if it's a conceptual cash-grab, Prince bald-facedly pastiching his own 80s sound as a profitable parlor game. Times being vice-tight, presumably even for those with the renewable resource of a deep catalog of hall-of-fame hits, dusting off the drum machine makes a certain sad sense, and a by-numbers ballad like "Here" sounds undeniably better backed by its twee little keyboard hook than, like, a flute. It's delusional if he's serious, because it means he thinks these flimsy self-homages wouldn't sound anemic next to tunes from Purple Rain or Parade, which you can at least write off as the kind of perception-free baloney we expect from geniuses of his stripe.
Either way, MPLSound is (surprise) momentarily enjoyable and completely inessential, happy to provoke Palovian responses since the hard work of honestly juicing your head, heart, or hips is antithetical to the whole idea. Sure, you can still sieve off a few decent tracks for your "Prince in the Aughts" playlist; the Camille redux of "Dance 4 Me" is my personal choice, if only because he tries to shoehorn in all of the sex/religion/androgyne clichés. But while I'd pick electro-funk Prince over jazz-funk Prince every day of the week, the proximity of Lotusflow3r makes the pleasures of MPLSound feel even more hollow, like it's merely a spoonful of synth-driven sugar designed to sell naysayers on the non-electronic new stuff Prince wants you to cherish as much as the old faves.
Elixer, the aforemetioned third disc, is actually by newcomer Bria Valente, who should at least be happy she's been able to piggyback her way to bad reviews in national publications, rather than languishing in the promo bin purgatory to which she'd be consigned if her producer was a cousin with a copy of Pro Tools. Elixer runs the gamut of bland-but-classy R&B, from antiseptic slow jams to rote dance-pop, slick as you'd expect and completely failing to suggest what bunched Prince's panties when he initially discovered Valente. Many of Prince's pet projects have been little more than ventriloquist's dummies-- excepting skilled musicians like Sheila E. or irrepressible lunatics like Morris Day, the master hasn't had much patience for personality-driven showboats-- but any trace of weirdness or wit or actual eroticism has seemingly been purged from Valente's performance at Jehovah's request, which reflects worse on egomaniacal producer than nominal artiste in this case. Like some depressing footnote to the whole Lotusflow3r/MPLSound experience, Elixer sparked my final sad realization about my current relationship with Prince and his product: Who knew I'd one day get wistful for the vacuous but honestly carnal fluff of "Sex Shooter"?


With a playful sound incorporating surreal vocals and mallet instruments, the electronic duo captures a spirit of childlike wonder.

Ashbalkum

Ever since the Seoul-based electronic musicians Uman Therma (aka Sala) and Yetsuby (aka Manda) were introduced by a mutual friend in 2018, the two—known collectively as Salamanda—have been crafting a finely detailed world together. Their name comes from a drawing of a salamander that Therma made, and they titled their 2019 debut single “Our Lair”—a gentle sketch for pulsing pads and synthesized pan flute—as a nod to the imaginary amphibian’s home. They released eight more singles in their first year, fleshing out the atmospheric contours of their musical universe with elements of ambient, classical minimalism, and Japanese kankyō ongaku, and their world-building has gotten more fanciful from there. They framed their first EP, 2020’s Glass Cage, which they released in the early months of the pandemic, as an allegory of a bird in an invisible cage; their 2021 album Sphere was inspired by bulbous shapes—“like boiled tomatoes or planet Earth, or maybe bubbles,” Sala has said.
The common threads running through all their music so far have been its playful spirit, whimsical mood, and faintly psychedelic air, and ashbalkum, released on the New York/Mexico City label Human Pitch, makes good on all those qualities. Its 10 tracks are built around mallet instruments, pitter-pat drums, and softly rounded synths, as luminous and smooth to the touch as a handful of beach glass. Hiroshi Yoshimura’s meditative soundscaping is an obvious touchstone; so are the lilting, dancefloor-adjacent rhythms of ambient-techno fellow travelers like Leif and Human Pitch co-founder Tristan Arp.
Salamanda have a simple sound that they twist into a pleasing array of configurations. The opening “Overdose” is minimalist dub techno stitched together out of raindrops and sighs; “Melting Hazard” spins vibraphones and cooing voices into cotton candy-like tufts; “Rumble Bumble” loops thrumming hand drum and what might be a vocal sample from a vintage ethnographic record into a loosely woven funk. There are no major shifts from the sound of their previous recordings, but they’ve emphasized their pointillistic tendencies in subtle but important ways: They favor crisp, cleanly delineated sounds that are suggestive of sticks hitting small, hard objects—woodblocks, chimes, xylophone—and every sound seems to float in a bubble of negative space.
The most noticeable difference between ashbalkum and its predecessors lies in the album’s use of vocals. Virtually every track features some kind of voice, though there’s not a single identifiable word uttered on the whole record; instead, track after track is festooned with ribbons of cooing and chirping: the trim oohs of “Melting Hazard”; the sped-up hiccups of “Coconut Warrior,” which suggests a Boards of Canada cover band helmed by highly intelligent rodents; the pastel curlicues of “Living Hazard,” which might be an a cappella choir rubbing wineglass rims. All these curiously treated voices—plus the feline meow of “Mad Cat Party (feat. Ringo the Cat)”—help reinforce a naive sensibility that culminates in the children’s voices and music-box plunk of the closing “Catching Tails.” Like Aphex Twin and Nobukazu Takemura, Salamanda intuit the ways that electronic music’s lysergic tendencies can be re-routed to capture a spirit of childlike wonder. The album’s title is an invented word riffing on a Korean phrase meaning, roughly, “Ah, fuck, it’s a dream.” But in ashbalkum’s world, there are no rude awakenings; every track leads deeper into a state of surrealistic bliss.


Dave Portner’s latest solo excursion stakes out a middle ground between the exterior and interior, between direct melodies and the oblique music they float on.

Cows on Hourglass Pond

Dave Portner’s music swings between extremes. On the one hand, there’s the kinetic overload of Animal Collective records like Strawberry Jam, Merriweather Post Pavilion, and Centipede Hz—fast, colorful cars on a curvy road, their windshields bug-spattered Rorschach blots. On the other, an array of murkier, more mysterious sounds and moods, like the reverent hush of Campfire Songs or the ruminant narcosis of Down There, Portner’s first solo album as Avey Tare. His work can sometimes be so private that it borders on the indecipherable: One early album was meant to be played backward.
This fundamental opposition translates to a tension between his extroverted tendencies and more resolutely interior modes. Avey Tare’s last solo album, 2017’s Eucalyptus, was keyed to nature yet felt claustrophobic, a world away from the sun-baked hillsides that inspired it: If it was a hike, it was a mountain path at dusk, when the trail markers begin disappearing into darkness. Last year, Animal Collective’s Tangerine Reef, an audiovisual album about coral ecosystems, was even more amorphous. But with Cows on Hourglass Pond, Portner comes back up for air and stakes out a middle position.
The album begins on an unexpected note: “What’s the Goodside?” is built around an honest-to-goodness dub-techno beat, the kind of thing you might have expected to hear back when Portner and his bandmate Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear, were talking up their fondness for Kompakt and Basic Channel. Nothing in Animal Collective’s songs ever came all that close to the actual sound of their German inspirations, but the synth-heavy shuffle of “What’s the Goodside?” sure does, with a moody sub-bass wallop that’s a dead ringer for the pulse of Berlin basement clubs circa 1993. But “What’s the Goodside?” isn’t only dub techno; the song’s muddy electronic loops are overlaid with multitracked guitars and lilting vocal melodies, yielding a strange amalgam of ambient and folk. “We’re getting old now,” Portner sings, his voice garbled with effects, but, despite the subdued pace, this is the opposite of slowing down in middle age. With an arrangement that bushwhacks its way from shadowy thickets to startling clarity, “What’s the Goodside?” feels like a statement of purpose, a way of announcing that he still has new terrain to explore.
The rest of the album largely follows the template established on the opening song, with strummy, jangly guitars wreathed in soft synths and electronic effects. This is far from Avey Tare at his most outgoing, but the melodies are more direct than they were on Eucalyptus, even when the underlying chords scrape at oblique angles. The dissonant guitars of “Eyes on Eyes” might be surf music transposed for an unfamiliar tonal system, yet Portner’s rising-and-falling vocal melody has a bewitching immediacy. The electric/acoustic mixture of “K.C. Yours” evokes the hazy tones of vintage Flying Saucer Attack, but it’s one of the straight-up catchiest songs that Portner has written in ages. The relative tunefulness of these songs gives Portner plenty to work with as a singer, too: He whispers more often than he bellows, and he broadly explores a wide range of timbres along with the nuances of his registers. Whether yelping or mumbling, Avey Tare occasionally gets stuck on autopilot, but here he sounds like he’s trying out new things and, crucially, having fun.
The album sags a little toward the end. Slow and relatively beatless, “Our Little Chapter” and “Taken Boy” don’t so much drift as simply hang there, like fog that stubbornly refuses to burn off; “Remember Mayan,” which follows, is more sprightly, but its ad-hoc spiritualism (“Remember Mayan?/Future is being right now/Angels came pouring down”) feels hokey. These lyrical lapses dog the album when it gestures at profundity without quite getting there (or, conversely, toys with the nonsensical without fully committing). Portner is better when he zeroes in on more specific imagery. “Saturdays (Again),” a hooky song about nostalgia and ritual, rattles off tokens of domesticity like a Norman Rockwell fever dream, while “K.C. Yours” is a sci-fi premonition whose premise (“That was the year/I slept with the robot/And so I thought that was the worst we’d seen yet”) it’s practically begging for its own Netflix series.
“K.C. Yours” points up one of Cows on Hourglass Pond’s best qualities: its sense of humor. Portner doesn’t always get a lot of credit for his wit, but it’s in ample supply here. Just take the closing “HORS_,” an equine-themed song whose title is ostensibly inspired by the two-person basketball game. As Portner strums his acoustic and reels off free-associative lyrics about four-legged beasts, he’s accompanied by an unmistakable clip-clop rhythm. It’s part classic-rock chestnut, part novelty song, and once it reaches its ambiguous climax—“I am old story,” or maybe “I am horse story,” or maybe even both—the song steadily breaks apart, falsetto vocal harmonies and rhythmic loops dissolving into a spray of white noise. Even—especially?—on an album where Portner pursues a middle path between his opposing instincts, the disappearing act feels perfectly in character.


Hailu Mergia was once the keyboardist for Walias Band, whose 1977 recording "Muziqawi Silt" is a defining piece of Ethiopia's musical history. Walias broke up in the early 80s after a trip to the U.S., where Mergia stayed. A few years later, he made this album, merging the sounds of his youth with modern technology, making for striking, unusual results.

Hailu Mergia: Hailu Mergia and His Classical Instrument

In 1977, Walias Band recorded a darkly bobbing funk instrumental with an ominous horn theme called “Muziqawi Silt”. It was a couple years after the overthrow of Haile Selassie by Mengistu Haile Mariam, and Mengistu’s Derg government had applied the brakes to Addis Ababa’s nightlife, making it much harder for a working band to make a living. Music was still being made in abundance, though, and cassettes ultimately made it a lot easier to duplicate and distribute it. “Muziqawi Silt” surfaced in collector circles in the U.S. and Europe in the 90s and was canonized by a 2003 Ethiopiques volume, and it’s since become one of the tiny handful of songs that non-Ethiopians use as a gateway into the country’s music. Antibalas even covered it.
Hailu Mergia was the keyboardist for Walias Band. His organ playing is one of the only things a lot of people know about Ethiopian music. Walias Band was more important than just that one track, though. When the band arrived on the scene, the typical arrangement was for the venue-- usually a hotel-- to provide a band with instruments. Walias broke that mold by buying their own and working out contracts with the venues they played. In the early 80s, during a tour of the United States, Mergia and a few other members decided not to return home. That was the end of the band, but they’d made their mark back home.
A few years after moving to the U.S., Mergia decided to record an album that merged the sounds of his youth with modern technology. Working alone, he assembled a drum machine, a Rhodes piano, a Yamaha DX7, and his accordion, and got to work arranging old Ethiopian songs for this mostly modern palette. The results are striking and unusual. If Cluster had been from Ethiopia instead of Germany, this is probably about what they would have sounded like. Mergia uses the Yamaha to make his buzzy bass lines, fills in chords and texture with the Rhodes, and then solos over the top, alternately on the accordion or the Yamaha DX7, in an inimitably Ethiopian style. The sound is spare and unaffected, the drum programming never deviating during any song, though he sometimes augments the rhythmic push with vocals halfway between beatboxing and chanting.
In addition to the fluttering modal melodies, there are other distinctly Ethiopian signatures running through the music, particularly in the triple meters and three-against-four rhythms of the songs. “Belew Beduby” stomps along on a swaying polyrhythm on a par with anything you’ll hear from early 70s Addis, while “Hebo Lale” modifies that beat a bit for more of a boogie feel, aided by a faster tempo. At the other end of the spectrum, “Sewnetuwa” drifts along on an almost eight-bit-sounding bass line, with Yamaha DX7 and accordion dueling on top.
The overall effect of the album is difficult to describe. The music is simple and straightforward, accomplished but not showy. It feels at once rural, nostalgic, and futuristic. Replace the drum machine with people clapping, and you’d be a hair’s breadth from an ethnographic recording. Drum machines and synthesizers are common ingredients of Ethiopian pop music today, but not in the same way they’re used here. Perhaps one of the things that sets this apart from other Ethiopian pop music is the fact that it was made in solitude, and specifically out of longing for a vanished past. It’s introverted in a way very little other music from the country is. It’s also not quite like anything else you’ve ever heard.


Equally indebted to no wave and dance, the Manchester, England-based trio’s debut EP walks a fine line between violent and groovy.

... EP

The music of Mandy, Indiana is war all the time. Bullets fly on “Bottle Episode” and daggers are stared on “Nike of Samothrace.” Frontperson Valentine Caulfield snarls her French-language lyrics with a tone of pent-up rage that sounds like your unnervingly quiet goth cousin finally letting loose; Scott Fair’s noisy yet melodic industrial-pop production carries the percussive heft of Battles and the ear-splitting drone of HEALTH. Drummer Liam Stewart, a former touring member of LoneLady, rounds out the band, and his percussion walks the same line between violent and groovy. The resulting … EP is a deft balance of harsh and playful, danceable and transfixing.
Much of Mandy, Indiana’s power lies in Caulfield’s shapeshifting, hammer-to-the-head vocals. Amid the formless noise and swelling synths of “Nike of Samothrace,” her adrenaline skyrockets as she attempts to dissuade a second, silent character—maybe a creepy man at last call—from following her home at night. “J’suis une grande fille, je sais où je vais, j’me perdrai pas” (“I’m a big girl, I know where I’m going, I won’t get lost”), she says, speaking in fits and starts, as if running out of time to choose between fight or flight. Her rapid cadence ricochets off the music to emphasize the situational terror. Atop the sixteenth-note, coldwave throb of “Alien 3,” Caulfield describes unburdening herself of someone else’s apathy: “Tu t’en fous/J’ai plus envie d’être à genoux” (“You don’t care/I won’t live on my knees anymore”). Delivering her incantations in a high, barbed register with hardly any lilt to her voice, she sounds like a lower-fidelity Florence Shaw of Dry Cleaning. When the music briefly explodes with rubbery percussion and flayed drones, Mandy, Indiana wordlessly suggest freedom.
The trio’s music is combative in its dissonance and just-above-midtempo stomp, but there’s liberation in the arrangements. These songs are even-keeled yet ramshackle, equally indebted to no wave and dance, bound to get your heart rate up to mosh pace. The slight hiss on the recordings emphasizes these strengths, especially on highlight “Bottle Episode,” where Caulfield’s voice gnashes through descriptions of bullets tearing apart soldiers’ bodies. The imagery is horrifying, but Caulfield’s snippy growl and Fair’s white-hot synths make the song oddly fun. “Sous le feu et sous les balles/Les hommes dansent quasiment” (“As the bullets hit them, the men dance, almost”), Caulfield snaps over the garish howls and sinister pulse. The darkest end comes with deliverance.
The EP ends with two remixes that fall near-perfectly in line with the trio’s scything musical vision. Daniel Avery locates a drone that’s just a minor element of “Alien 3” and makes it a key focus, pushing the track’s noise-to-melody ratio in the harsher direction of “Bottle Episode” and “Nike of Samothrace” while sussing out its dance undercurrents. Club Eat puts the pedal to the metal on “Nike of Samothrace” and reimagines it as “Blue Monday” for the Working Class Woman crowd, speeding up the tempo to adapt Mandy, Indiana’s militaristic percussion for steely, nameless warehouse raves. As Caulfield’s manipulated vocals zip by, they retain their anxious energy right up to her parting blow: “Tu fais le malin à emmerder les filles dans la rue (You think you’re so clever harassing girls on the street),” she snaps. “Mais tu t’attends pas à ce qu’elles aient une lame dans leur poche, c’est ça? (But you don’t expect them to have a knife in their pocket, do you?)”

Buy: Rough Trade
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Stepping away from the overt historicism of previous recordings, the guitarist opts for a subtler—but just as expressive—investigation of folk and blues.

Odds Against Tomorrow

Malleability is built into the character of American traditional music. Rooted in oral storytelling, foundational songs like the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Oh Shenandoah” have been known by several names and attached to various meanings and ideologies over the decades. The former has had multiple lives since it emerged as a popular tune in the mid 1800s: Pete Seeger anthemized it as “Solidarity Forever,” which guitarist Bill Orcutt recorded on his 2013 album A History of Every One, offering one of the most radical takes on the melody in its nearly two-century lifespan. Orcutt takes the elasticity inherent in folk music and augments it with avant-garde jazz and free improvisation, two other distinctly American forms. A dialogue between these traditions has formed the basis of Orcutt’s solo albums over the past decade, as he has recorded lacerated versions of “Star Spangled Banner,” “Nearer My God to Thee,” “Black Betty,” and other well-worn songs.
Odds Against Tomorrow, Orcutt’s latest solo LP, steps away from overt renditions of popular melodies and returns to a subtler investigation of folk and blues. The raw melancholy lurking in the shadows of recordings by pioneers like Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Charley Patton also hangs heavy over Orcutt’s original compositions. On his early solo releases, most notably A New Way to Pay Old Debts, from 2009, and the follow-up EP Way Down South, his mournful themes were punctuated by spasms of pentatonic runs and extemporaneous howling, giving the music a wild, unrestrained nature. By contrast, Orcutt’s playing on Odds Against Tomorrow is notably restrained and frequently threatens beauty. While earlier LPs felt like spontaneous outpourings, this album feels worked over, informed by lessons learned from the iconic composers he has spent the past half-decade recontextualizing.
One of the most notable indicators of this approach is Orcutt’s use of multitracking on three songs, a first in his solo career. On the title track, he traces an understated chord progression in the left channel, allowing the song’s fractured melodic line to dissolve and reconstitute itself in the right, peaking in a wailing, single-note outburst. Rather than boxing the songs into a distinctive harmonic path, the technique allows Orcutt to indulge in more intricately crafted solos, dexterously flying up and down the neck of his four-string electric guitar. If his early work channeled Ornette Coleman in its ability to imply complex changes without their constant, explicit presence, this new technique brings him closer to the conventional electric blues pantheon.
Despite these increasingly polyphonic excursions, Odds Against Tomorrow is defined largely by a considered quietude. The one cover on the album, an arrangement of Henry Mancini’s “Moon River,” feels enveloped by negative space, serenely picked with a slight tremolo effect. Album closer “Man Dies” is two minutes of a sentimental, unadorned melody that ends with the buzz of an amplifier decaying into nothingness. Orcutt’s slow transformation from antagonistic abstractionist to wistful minimalist has had many detours, and he continues to explore torrential exuberance in his collaborative work, especially with free-jazz drummer Chris Corsano. But on Odds Against Tomorrow he has found a way to settle down without settling into complacency. The album retains the core elements of his best work, and his restless, postmodern exploration of the American lexicon, while refining what makes those qualities potent. Refusing to repeat himself, he takes tradition as a living thing, blazing new trails to familiar vistas.


Soundwalk Collective is an electronic group featuring vocals by Patti Smith and percussion by her daughter, Jesse. Here, they use field-recordings from Ibiza to rework the poetry of Nico.

Soundwalk Collective / Patti Smith / Jesse Paris Smith: Killer Road

Killer Road

Christa Päffgen—the singer, songwriter, actress, poet, model, and proto-goth icon known as Nico—died in 1988 on a grassy mountain road in Ibiza, on a bicycle ride into a nearby town to buy weed. After an accident, she died of a massive brain hemorrhage. It’s the type of event that spurs reflection on the nature of mortality. And now it has inspired a dense new work by New York and Berlin-based electronic group Soundwalk Collective, featuring vocals by Patti Smith, and found and self-constructed percussion from her daughter, Jesse Paris Smith.
To create field recordings, Soundwalk’s Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli, and Kamran Sadeghi actually visited Ibiza, which is not particularly surprising. The group is known for finding the sounds they use the hard way; a 2012 work took them on a journey through the Amazon to collect source material from Peruvian shamans, for example. Their uncanny, intimate naturescapes on Killer Road create a sense of reality heightened enough to come back around to seeming artificial. Their source material—rustling tall grass, birds clustering and bickering in the trees, flies beginning to swarm, crickets humming—are smudged with delay, reverb, and crackling overdrive. The effect is the aural equivalent of a hazy, mirage-like film flashback. It feels like an appropriate methodology for a work which is attempting to re-enact a lost moment—to create something living and mutable from hearsay and police reports.
If it’s not already apparent, this is, in no way, a covers album or even standard-issue “tribute,” to its great credit. Patti detaches Nico’s poems—the reason the German actress became involved in music in the first place—from their original musical settings. The words are sourced from throughout Nico’s discography, from 1968’s formative The Marble Index to two potent texts off her final, industrial-tinged album, 1985’s Camera Obscura. “Fearfully in Danger” is the only moment where Smith slips into full-bodied song, but even then, her melody is not Nico’s. Her vocals—glottal, pitchy, with an assertive, bluesy twang—are swallowed up by the album’s fitting centerpiece: a long blare from Nico’s own trademark harmonium. (The instrument was the first direct connection between Smith and Nico: Smith rescued it from on a pawn shop in 1978).
In a 2013 interview discussing the forthcoming Killer Road, Smith pinpointed the common theme she senses in Nico’s writing, and what appealed to her about the project: the focus on the idea of “the inner voice.” There are, throughout this work, dominant phrases—“A true story wants to be mine/The story is telling a true lie,” “The honesty that lies to you,” “The hours since I saw you last/Have left me in an unknown past”—which suggest that the narrator’s deepest feelings and impressions are often not manifested in direct thought. Rather, they emanate in unpredictable, often destructive ways. In murder ballad “My Heart Is Empty,” Nico’s narrator and victim maintain a relationship of surface-level declarations, before the former’s true feelings arise in one culminating, brutal act. The rumbling drone chording of Soundwalk’s modular synth arsenal boils over, threatening to drown everything out. Smith compellingly exploits the peculiarities of her larynx, sliding between a sibilant whisper and quiet, foreboding speech as the narrator’s thoughts flit in and out of clarity.
It’s moments like these that work best, when the project ceases to be what many news headlines framed it as—Patti Smith reciting Nico poems over ambient music—and becomes a unified piece, where every part interacts with the text in a meaningful, just-less-than-literal way. The effect can be sonically absorbing, if not as emotionally compelling as its creators might have hoped. It comes across like a chilling ASMR experiment mixed with something by Robert Ashley or Steven “Jesse” Bernstein. When Smith detaches from the scenery (“Fearfully in Danger,” the gothic nursery rhyming of “I Will Be Seven,” the more straightforward “My Only Child”) the effect is more similar to Nico’s own vocal performances, but makes for less cohesive music overall. One can imagine the project’s subject would have ultimately preferred the more understated tracks, concerted in their muted menace—focused on the task of creating a cinematic impression of the unknowable.


Though they work in the field of doom metal, this Rhode Island-based duo add gospel choirs, harsh noise, and industrial rock to their terrific second LP.

The Body: All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood

The Body are drummer Lee Buford and guitarist Chip King, two robust, bearded Arkansas boys living in Providence, R.I. In press photos, they brandish automatic weapons, some of which are triumphantly splayed on the table that stretches across the gatefold package of their second album, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood. Buford and King cite Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara, and Charles Manson as influences, and, in 2005, they turned Body Count's "Copkiller" and M.D.C.'s "Dead Cops" into sludgy voids on a 7" single. They've appeared on stage wearing potato sacks and nooses, and the cover of All the Waters showcases the pair dressed like ancient hooded Chinese soldiers.
This is probably where you roll your eyes and check out, figuring that these would-be metal/ hardcore/ noise/ whatever tough guys will never sound as bothered on tape as they might appear on paper. Well, you're wrong: Like the best of Eyehategod or Bastard Noise, All the Waters is the rare album that feels truly dangerous. As it crushes and collides doom metal, harsh noise, industrial rock, and gospel singing into one mean mess, it seems to obey no rules but its own. The result is a singular, explosive masterpiece and one of the year's essential heavy exploits-- even if, at turns, it sends you cowering.
All the Waters is an album of detours and surprises. You'll see the Body mostly referred to as a doom metal duo, but don't hang too many notions on that reductive nail. Rather, All the Waters is played by 32 people, including the 13-member Assembly of Light Choir and a score of folks who earn credit not only for keyboards, drums, and viola for but also for noise, sousaphone, and drum programming. Two of these seven tracks begin with slow, controlled, Earth-like riffs-- that is, quintessential, doom metal. Both evolve quickly. "Even Saints Knew Their Hour of Failure and Loss" corrodes its repetitive riff with a piercing din; the choir's gorgeous chant tugs upward against the low-hanging load. Everything disappears except for Buford's drums, a circle of snares and cymbals wrapping the distant chime of a church bell. King's lacerating squeal cuts in, quoting Yeats: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born?" It's music that has more to do with Current 93 than Earth, more with provocation than perfection.
Indeed, after a few dozen listens, the Body's risks and adventures still shock me. Almost uniformly, they deliver songs into chaos. The album begins, after all, with four minutes of beautiful choral singing. The Assembly of Light Choir offers a wordless hymn, harmonies rising and falling, melodies wrapping around one another like the cotton strands of some imagined heaven. Eventually, a voice slips from the flock, her line dropping into a mournful gospel quaver. The rest of the choir follows, their voices dragging and slinking, as if covered with the shadow of an unnamed malice on the horizon. When that beast arrives-- noise swells, shattering drums, monolithic slabs of guitar-- it's the sound of something beautiful being obliterated. Similarly, "A Curse" starts as a ruptured dance number that, a few minutes later, is an arrhythmic, atonal wasteland. "Empty Hearth" begins with a sample of a church group (taken from the strange Sounds of American Doomsday Cults album) offering a prayer; by track's end, their recitation has been chopped and screwed until it sounds like strangles and gasps.
On paper, All the Waters is a grim record, as lyrics outline the failure of science, nature, man, gods, and prophets in pithy bursts. But unless you're reading along, you'll never know any of this. King's strained, unintelligible voice seems constantly at the brink of being swallowed by the sounds around him. Those sounds are troubling enough, recorded and mixed so that the guitars and drums always feel like they're too loud for the equipment and room meant to contain them. The record itself is a smartly designed simulacrum for the lyrics, recreating the sense of impending darkness by creating a sound that swallows itself. The young indie rock bands now using cheap microphones and analog hiss to shape their songs are often criticized for obscuring shabby songs with shabby sounds. The best of those bands, however, use production to reinforce their ideas and give them an extra bit of depth. The Body does just that here, letting rough-and-tumble production add even more anxiety and trouble to seven songs that were bothered as is. Smart choice: All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood is the seldom collapse-of-the-world record that's actually as disturbing as it wants to be.


Following 2016’s archival dives into early electronic music, the UK duo marries eerie abstraction to the club-ready rhythms of their Testpressing series with newfound fury.

Passion

In 2018, what else can possibly be done to those six seconds of the “Amen” break? Since it already powers thousands of songs, Demdike Stare have gone right ahead and plunged it into a white-noise hell of punishing frequencies and speaker-blistering bass. When that instantly recognizable, indefatigable snare rush comes in on “At It Again,” bubbling up like something out of Loveless’ pool of lava, it truly feels like an amen moment.
This isn’t the first time that the duo of Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker has taken something well worn and borderline cliché, stripped it for parts, and cast it into a visceral new light. The last entry in their Testpressing series saw them set Soul II Soul’s chestnut “Back to Life” against a backdrop of industrial clamor and metatarsal-snapping 2-step on “Patchwork.” That series of 12”s unified the group’s central dichotomy, bringing the horror-film ambience of their early albums in parallel with the cutting edge of modern dance music. And those combined sensibilities carried over to 2016’s thrilling Wonderland, proving they could bring dance and dread together for a devastating new amalgam.
Passion continues along that same trajectory, though it feels less like an album and more like a DJ double-pack perfect for a club that’s in the midst of being bulldozed. It veers between rubble-strewn breakbeats and outright noise, between overwhelming distortion and Bluetooth headphones flickering on and off. Shards of grime, garage, jungle, and batida can be found amid the debris, but never in sizable chunks, so thoroughly do Demdike mince their rhythms.
There’s a killer house kick underneath the many layers of “Cracked,” only it’s scattered like spilled mercury, futile to try and get a steady grip on. “Caps Have Gone” bears the gunshot bass of Equiknoxx (themselves signed to their DDS label) before the track dissolves into a shimmering mist at the midway point. The dancehall beat soon whiplashes back into earshot, with Canty and Whittaker playing jai alai with the drums. “Know Where to Start” taps the iciness of early ’00s grime and the sickly glow of fluorescent lights.
Between Wonderland and Passion, Canty and Whittaker were granted access to the archives of France’s pioneering INA-GRM studio and those of the Italian collective Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Like those early explorers of the nascent possibilities of electronic sound, Demdike know that the results can be both dreamy and nightmarish, ethereal and dense. For all of the kinetic drum programming on Passion, the duo still make plenty of room for eerie abstraction. Nearing the four-minute mark of “Pile Up,” astral noise overtakes the stuttering steppers riddim, shooting the track towards the nearest pulsar. “Dilation” is downright dreamy, an orchestral theme in search of a film. And the garbled voices, queasy sine waves, and pinging static of “You People Are Fucked” feel both human and alien. Even without a heavyweight beat in earshot, Demdike Stare can still haunt the club.


The Chicago rapper’s latest project as his alter-ego named Swervo is all velocity. He delivers some of his starkest verses like a steamroller, almost completely desensitized.

Swervo

G Herbo is always riding with a gun. The reasons vary—he may be worried about getting caught slipping at a stoplight, or he may be pulling up, firing into a crowd of his enemies, and clearing the scene as a first strike—but it is his ultimate deterrent: an opening salvo and a last line of defense.
Guns have also left him feeling vulnerable and paranoid, and this contradiction is something his rawest music mines for emotional depth with great effect. His burly voice and surly disposition can be easily betrayed by a haunting memory welling up from beneath all that bravado. His debut album, 2017’s Humble Beast, carved soul-wrenching admissions out from inside of intense gunfights, considering the various ramifications of gun violence. The follow-up, a collaboration with 808 Mafia co-founder Southside called Swervo, is far less interested in weighing the cost of taking a life on the soul or how lingering impulses gradually evolve into learned behaviors. It speeds into action with little regard for consequences. Rapped from the perspective of an alter ego described as “the opposite of G Herbo,” Swervo is a turn away from his more writerly work. (“I’m kind of dumbing it down a bit as an artist,” he’s said.) Herbo has never really been one for nuance, but these are among his starkest verses, almost completely desensitized. “Give a fuck ‘bout where you from/All them trill niggas with us/Everybody got a gun, pussies still will get hit up,” he summarizes on “Huh.” This time around, as Swervo, he’s driving fast and shooting first and worrying about the rest later.
This daredevil approach to gunplay and cadences makes him seem unbreakable, but the longer the album goes on, the more it wears on you. Where Humble Beast was measured, its pacing merely an impetus for its dynamic, narrative-focused city surveying, Swervo is all velocity. He delivers high-powered, stampeding stanzas looking to bum-rush you before you even know what happened. There are no characters as lived-in as Malcolm; no ruinous portraits of inner-city life as penetrating as those on “Red Snow.” The flows hurtle forward with Herbo bobbing so hard that he sometimes ends up riding against the grain. Even inward-looking deliberations of personal motivation like “Some Nights” and a headstone-counting troop salute like “That’s How I Grew Up” are handled in haste.
G Herbo is a rapper of great consistency and limited range—his greatest strengths are also some of his most glaring weaknesses: He is clear in his writing and constant in his intensity. When functioning on all cylinders he can be a tank, but when he’s not careful, he can steamroll the listener and flatten out his ideas. But here, despite the sometimes careening ahead without finesse, he’s effective. The songs on Swervo are largely of the same genealogy as the exhilarating “Who Run It?” a viral Three 6 Mafia radio freestyle turned street hit single, repurposed into the album’s closer. In those three minutes, he’s irrepressible, springing forth from the triumphant horns, a scene with all the pomp of an explosive walk away after an action sequence. “FoReal,” “Huh,” and the title track each take their own interpretations of the freestyle’s breathless tremors and charged jounce. None match it but all utilize his force.
As his (deliberately) least thoughtful work, Swervo is strongest when Herbo plays up the heel turn and tinkers with his bulldozing flows. He trades declarations with fellow drill architect Chief Keef on the obvious standout “Catch Up,” staggering his cadences and building with each exchange. His raps start out decompressed on “Pac n Dre” then inflate, then explode. One of the benefits of playing a role is you playing against type, and on a song like the Juice WRLD-featuring “Honestly,” he ventures into droning singsong, relishing this freedom. These rousing tracks very much seem like repercussion-free, risk-seeking joyrides.
But even on Swervo, the real-life violence still persists. On the touching “Letter,” penned for his unborn son, he vows that his children will never have to “thug to survive”; they won’t worry about death lurking around every corner, an attempt to rectify the anxieties of his own childhood, as told in the album’s opening seconds: “Scared I wasn’t gon’ make it home some nights/Wondering am I gon’ be a homicide.” In his songs, shadows are cast over the entire city, a darkness through which unfeeling men creep and rob others of loved ones. “Long live that nigga Zack TV, heard he had a daughter/The police here ain’t solving murders, this ain’t Law & Order,” he raps to close out “Bonjour,” remembering a local vlogger who was shot and killed in Chicago. It’s no wonder Herbo can’t stop moving, and why he won’t put the gun down.


A trilogy of reissues tells the story of a brilliant, unconventional, yet luckless British Invasion band let down by an industry that didn’t know what to do with them.

The Zombies: *The Zombies / I Love You / R.I.P. *

The Zombies / I Love You / R.I.P.

At the peak of British Invasion fever, a quintet of bookish St. Albans teens intimated that the future of the UK “beat music” craze might sound less like the hyperactive R&B that made screaming Beatles fans so ecstatic and more like the stuff entrancing hipsters at the coffee shop. The Zombies’ first two singles, the noirish jazz-fusion psychodramas “She’s Not There” and “Tell Her No,” hit the Billboard top 10, making them instant stars—even bigger in the U.S. than the UK. “The Beatles had just broken America wide open, and there we were to trot along behind,” lead songwriter Rod Argent recalled. But lasting fame was not to be: After spending the next two years trying and failing to duplicate that success with little support from their label, Decca (the same company that infamously declined to sign the Beatles), they took an advance from CBS and holed up in Abbey Road Studios—in the hours that the Beatles weren’t recording Sgt. Pepper—to record their magnum opus, 1968’s Odessey and Oracle. Poorly promoted, the album tanked on both sides of the Atlantic, and Argent dissolved the band.
A year later, when Odessey single “Time of the Season” shot surprisingly up the American charts, Zombies lead singer Colin Blunstone was back in England selling insurance, and Argent had formed a new band, simply called Argent. Americans who tried to see the band on tour in 1969 came away even more addled when a dodgy American company sent two impostor bands on the road to perform as the Zombies, one of which included two future members of ZZ Top. Meanwhile, UK music fans were treated to a newly recorded version of “She’s Not There” by someone called Neil MacArthur, who was actually Blunstone. The Zombies were the band that wasn’t there: too far ahead of the curve at the start of their career, and too far behind it four years later.
For two decades after their dissolution, the Zombies’ were remembered mostly for their three classic singles: The first were two key historical markers of the British Invasion, the last a groovy reminder of the 1960s’ hippie-dominated denouement. The record industry’s non-stop cycles of reissues and remasters patched together the band’s legacy: Rhino’s 1987 CD reissue of Odessey and Oracle helped solidify the album’s rightful status as a psych-pop classic—Rolling Stone called it “a dazzling pop fantasia ripe for rediscovery” —and the 4xCD 1997 box set Zombie Heaven provided a long overdue and illuminating career retrospective for the rest of the band’s output. In 2019, Varese Sarabande re-compiled their recordings into a 5xLP vinyl set, and the same company has now repackaged much of the same material as individual albums—their self-titled 1965 debut, 1966’s I Love You, and R.I.P., which was recorded by Argent and White in late 1968 and soon shelved. Those who already own Zombie Heaven or the vinyl set, or anyone seeking new information about the band or alternate takes, will be disappointed in these spartan, low-budget reissues, each of which has already been re-released as Record Store Day exclusives. Essential they are not, but they do offer an opportunity to re-approach one of the strangest trajectories in rock history: the singles-and-filler first album, the second LP sold only in Europe and Japan, and the unreleased final album, recorded mostly without the lead singer in the wake of the group’s dissolution. Together, they trace the arc of an incredibly talented group that was done a significant disservice by an industry that could’ve made them stars in their own time.
The Zombies were formed in 1961 by Argent, who’d grown up listening to Stravinsky and Bartok before being bowled over by Elvis Presley and then jazz pianists Bill Evans and Jimmy Smith. Keen on the electric piano, Argent recruited some St. Albans pals—White, Blunstone, drummer Hugh Grundy, and guitarist Paul Atkinson—to start playing R&B covers at art schools and music halls around the city. Argent’s classical and jazz-informed piano approach instantly distinguished them, and Blunstone’s downy tenor—discovered during an early practice, when Argent pushed him to the front—proved the group’s secret weapon, capable of grinding out a cover of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say,” then slipping into George Gershwin’s tranquil “Summertime.” In April 1964, the same month that the Beatles held down the top 5 spots on the Billboard Hot 100, the Zombies won a local songwriting competition, which led to a Decca contract and the opportunity to cut “Summertime” and three originals: White’s Beatles-influenced “You Make Me Feel Good” and rumbling surf-rocker “It’s Alright With Me,” and a new Argent-penned track called “She’s Not There.” The band considered “Summertime” for their lead single, but wisely settled on Argent’s composition as their public debut.
George Harrison was an early fan, raving about “She’s Not There” on the British music show Juke Box Jury, and with good reason. Like the rest of the British Invasion groups, the Zombies started with the blues—Argent borrowed a key lyric from John Lee Hooker’s “No One Told Me”—but added several twists. First, there was Blunstone’s calm, Chet Baker-esque croon, which seemed to belie the anxieties of Argent’s lyrics: was a woman merely ghosting him, or might she actually be a ghost? As Argent winds his Hohner pianet through White’s deep bassline and Grundy’s stilted drumming, which reels toward a hard hit on the fourth beat of each measure like a detective drugged by an evasive suspect, “She’s Not There” dials in on the uncanny unknown. The pre-chorus shifts into major-key panic mode and Grundy locks into a 4/4, setting the stage for Blunstone to soar up to a high A for the shrieking, unresolved climax.
Immediately, Decca sent the group off on a UK tour opening for Dionne Warwick, whose magnificent 1964 Bacharach/David collaboration inspired the band’s follow-up single, “Tell Her No.” Dialing back the dynamic extremes of “She’s Not There,” Argent created a song that brought rock ’n’ roll into dialogue with the moment’s most bewitching pop tunes: Warwick’s “Walk on By” and “A House Is Not A Home,” along with 1965’s Grammy-winning Record of the Year, “The Girl From Ipanema.” Blunstone’s vocal is at its most lustrous and vulnerable on “Tell Her No,” especially when he emerges out of the staccato chorus to coo, “Don’t hurt me now”—aimed not toward the woman of his dreams, but anyone else who might submit to her numinous charms. Few bands have ever started a career with as much out-of-the-box success—they were a rock band, first and foremost, but their skill with rueful, spooky melodrama suggested that they were destined for something much stranger.
Decca packaged the two originals with their version of “Summertime” onto 1965’s The Zombies (issued as Begin Here in the UK, with a different tracklist), along with White’s “Alright,” a few lesser originals and a handful of covers. A good version of the Miracles’ live medley connecting “You Really Got a Hold on Me” to Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me” is balanced out by serviceable takes on Muddy Waters’ “Got My Mojo Workin’” and Solomon Burke’s “Can’t Nobody Love You.” From the moment that “She’s Not There” hit #3 on Billboard, Decca shot the band out of a touring cannon, and they wouldn’t land for another two and a half years. When they weren’t recording sets for American music shows like “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig,” they were shlepping their own gear into and out of venues on city-to-city package tours like Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars. They followed “Tell Her No” with four singles in 1965 alone, each of which peaked at a lower spot on the Hot 100 than its predecessor. The circular logic of the record business took over from there: Without a hit single, Decca wouldn’t foot the bill for album recording sessions.
Perhaps because they assumed that the Zombies had outlived their profitability in the States, Decca released the 1966 singles and B-sides compilation I Love You only through the label’s Dutch and Japanese divisions. This is a shame, because I Love You actually holds together quite well as an album, and shows that the Zombies had grown significantly as songwriters and instrumentalists. It opens with the short, mostly a cappella “The Way I Feel Inside,” a lovely showcase for Blunstone’s maturing voice, which segues into the singer’s first self-penned recording, the lush and dreamy ballad “How We Were Before.” White was coming into his own as well: His “You Make Me Feel Good” and “Don’t Go Away” are no less intoxicating for their obvious Beatles influence—he even nods directly to John Lennon with a few languid “ohhhhh” phrasings on the former. The Motown-flavored rave-up “Is This the Dream” and “Whenever You’re Ready,” which contains a potent Blunstone vocal and Argent solo, fizzled commercially in the U.S., as did the buttoned-up garage rock of Argent’s “Indication,” which Argent ended with a quasi-psychedelic organ solo—a major no-no for Top 40 DJs with quick trigger fingers. Perhaps Argent was ready to hop aboard the psych-rock train, if given the chance—or maybe he and the band were finished trying to meet the market on its own terms.
By mid 1967, the Zombies had come to realize just how much touring revenue they were losing to their management, and how little they’d been able to grow as recording artists by working with the same producer on every single. Finished with their Decca contract, Argent and White were eager to test their mettle in a heady new post-Revolver era, and they signed a one-off contract with CBS to record and produce Odessey and Oracle at Abbey Road. Argent and White’s songs were magnificent, but Blunstone had soured on the music business—Argent had to coax him through “Time of the Season” measure by measure—and when the band learned that the Odessey songs were nearly impossible to pull off live, they called it quits, playing their last show in December 1967.
While Blunstone went back to hawking insurance, Grundy took a job at a car lot, and Atkinson started training to become a computer programmer, Argent and White formed their own production company and recruited a few other players—the core of what would become Argent—to join them in the studio. Sessions from mid-December 1968 yielded the final single billed to the Zombies, the stately White composition “Imagine the Swan.” Revealing the prog-rock bedrock underlying Odessey, “Swan” borrows the chord sequence from Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” and the intricate harmonies of the Mamas and the Papas, topped with a mannered-yet-brassy Argent vocal that, in retrospect, sounds a lot like a young Freddie Mercury. Backed with the rococo instrumental “Conversation Off Floral Street,” the single hit the market and flopped. The Zombies were dead.
Or were they? Fittingly for a band that seemed to haunt the rock establishment even while it was a going concern, Argent and White concocted a post-mortem Zombies LP titled R.I.P. that would not see the light of day for decades. During the same December sessions that produced the final Zombies single, they cut Argent’s jaunty “She Loves the Way They Love Her,” White’s flute-and-harpsichord-haunted “Smokey Day,” and Argent’s mid-tempo ballad “I Could Spend the Day,” with a stately ascending melody anticipating the sound of British arena prog. Along with the new recordings, the duo resurrected a handful of tracks from a few years earlier, adding vocal and string overdubs to Argent’s “If It Don’t Work Out” (given to Dusty Springfield in 1965) and White’s magnificent “I’ll Call You Mine,” perhaps the band’s most flawless pure pop single, which had been collecting dust on a studio shelf for more than two years. Toward the end of Side A came the band’s other great lost work, the gothic acoustic “Girl Help Me,” with a stuttering rhythm and perfectly arranged harmonies that suggested the band knew exactly how to build on the foundation of “She’s Not There” and “Tell Her No,” but never got the chance. While the newer recordings occupied Side A of R.I.P., the polished-up early tracks were saved for Side B, giving the album a strange Benjamin Button vibe—as you listened, the band aged backwards. By all accounts, R.I.P. was ready for retail, but Argent shelved it to focus on his new band, which released its first album in 1970. Cold comfort for sure, but R.I.P. is one of the era’s great lost albums.
The Zombies got their official industry due in 2019, when the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs inducted the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The choice of Hoffs—who started out in L.A.’s Paisley Underground scene in the ’80s—was a commemoration of Odessey and Oracle’s impact on multiple generations of psychedelic pop bands. But such institutions are, by their very nature, bound to misrepresent careers like the Zombies’, focusing on the high points instead of the truth of a frustrating, mismanaged five-year existence. In their time and beyond, the Zombies are the rare Hall of Fame inductees who were viewed as a cult band for the majority of their time together. In a way, that makes this latest crop of reissues, which wrongly presents them as an album-centric band for their entire career, as strangely appropriate as it is inessential.

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Buy:
The Zombies: Rough Trade
I Love You: Rough Trade
R.I.P: Rough Trade
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Though best remembered for its biggest hit, the UK singer’s eponymous 2006 debut remains unmatched in the weighty simplicity of its stories of love pursued and lost.

Corinne Bailey Rae

In another life, Corinne Bailey Rae would have been the type of artist whom Berry Gordy’s Motown committed to honing and presenting to the world—a luminescent talent and disciplined artist deeply aware of what moved her. This artistic confidence is unmistakable on the singer-songwriter’s eponymous 2006 debut, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year with a reissue and a bonus track, “Another Rainy Day.” Across the pond, far from the musical hub of Detroit, Rae took melodies reminiscent of Tammi Terrell and the simmering passion of Florence Ballard to spin the tales of a Black girl from Leeds. Over a decade later, Corinne Bailey Rae remains unmatched in the weighty simplicity of its stories of love pursued and lost, of a person adrift but hopeful.
With 12 smooth jams that do double time as ballads depending on the mood, the album showcased Rae not only as a vocalist, but also as an enviably candid writer. The sparse strings of lead single “Like a Star” weave in effortlessly as Rae confesses what new love has done to her. “Just like a song in my heart/Just like oil on my hands,” she sings, evoking the inexplicable bliss of attraction while making tangible love’s capacity to leave marks on our bodies. If the character Janie from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God had a soundtrack for her early days loving and seducing Tea Cake—the man she’d later run away with—it would be this song. The video, with its soft close-ups of Rae’s face interspersed with clips of a lapping river and bucolic forest, shows that often when falling, the only thing that can bring you down to earth is nature, a gift more overwhelming than your own growing emotions.
“Put Your Records On,” with its sun-kissed biking girls and endless, tree-lined roads, made a lullaby out of wellness long before it became a billion-dollar industry. Frolicking through fields and chasing ribbons, Rae was at its center, telling Black women it was not only worth it to escape, but that it was a kind of bliss, attainable for a sisterhood or a party of one. The smash hit didn’t just suggest stepping back and unplugging; it lightly commanded that listeners dwell in simple pleasures for their own spiritual health. Rae once again displayed her knack for adding color and texture to her universe, recalling a summer that “came like cinnamon,” and which met travellers dressed in “sapphire and faded jeans.”
This was the track that catapulted Rae to fame, and the song that continues to be the most beloved and well-known in her oeuvre, but there are other equally captivating and detailed songs on her debut, including the solemn “Till It Happens to You.” In contrast to the rest of the album, this track wallows in moody reflection as she ponders a relationship broken beyond repair. “Used to feel like May/I used to hear those violins playing our strings like a symphony,” she croons, sounding like a blues veteran who’s been through the ringer. “Ooo, love, I’m a fool to believe in you/’Cause I don’t know/No, I don’t know/Anymore.” A heartbreak is painful, but sometimes what hurts most is not knowing what comes after the split. Where do you put the love? A part of that answer lies in “Choux Pastry Heart,” where heartache folds into itself and becomes something that moves as you do. Rae projects the persona of someone who is weathered and resigned, a hopeless romantic who leaned further into love even as the hurt made her “cry so much I had to leave.”
The misty-eyed haze lifts on songs like “Call Me When You Get This,” “Breathless,” and “I’d Like To,” which are filled with promise and tentative new beginnings. Rae’s voice skips and twirls through relationships in bloom, but it’s when she veers from the fully formed worlds in her storytelling to broad observations that the album falters. “Don’t you know that patience is a virtue/And life is a waiting game,” from “Seasons Change,” are hollow beatitudes. “Butterfly” attempts to harness the metamorphosis that occurs as we grow from childhood to adulthood, but relies too heavily on clichés of rebirth. Though Rae occasionally leans on such well-worn phrases, her own insight remains the crux of the record. The fullness of her musical vision vibrates in the tenderly crafted moments, making the stumbles feel more like stopovers than interruptions.
Many artists chase timelessness, looking to nostalgia as a peg on which to hang their contemporary work. Corinne Bailey Rae offered a different way forward. Black women artists in the mid-2000s were often siloed into pop and expected to engineer endless chart-toppers; the artistic range of singers like Macy Gray, India.Arie, and Kelis did little to quell those expectations. Rae built on their hard-won autonomy, and set a model for a new generation of performers like Cleo Sol and Mahalia. Like the ride she took on “Put Your Records On,” Corinne Bailey Rae was a trip through the trails of her own life. If others tagged along that was fine by her—so long as the music still soothed her own soul.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Atlanta legend’s latest continues his consistent streak of mostly-good, sometimes-awkward new material.

Woptober II

Since re-emerging transformed from prison as a chiseled, healthy-living Adonis, Gucci Mane’s major projects have included an extra layer of gloss and a few unlikely commercial compromises. In the last year he’s teamed up with Bruno Mars and Justin Bieber on songs that boxed Gucci into a pillow-soft style that predictably didn’t showcase his strengths. It’s easy to envision the conference call with label executives that led to these cuts: “You present like a star now, Gucci. It’s time to get out in front with those radio singles.”
But these cuddly aberrations aside, Gucci has largely stayed loyal to his established sound. Woptober II is no more a natural sequel to the original 2016 mixtape than any other Gucci project; the title probably just means it happened to drop this month. Like most of his recent records, it’s another collection of mostly very good Gucci Mane songs, marred by occasional awkward bits.
Though still relentlessly paced (this is his second album of the year, following Delusions of Grandeur), Gucci’s output has come a long way from the low-quality data dumps he delivered while he was away, presumably just to keep new music flowing. His trademark swollen southern drawl has been remodeled as something more precise. On “Time to Move,” he moves effortlessly from a menacing whisper to a spiky flow as he recalls tales of waking up in new Bugatti and lies told on the witness stand.
Woptober II’s best moments are when Gucci has company. On “Bucking the System,” his voice is slow and hypnotic before Kevin Gates blows through the track, the yin-and-yang flows accentuating the duo’s chemistry. And on “Richer Than Errybody,” Gucci teams up with rising players YoungBoy Never Broke Again and DaBaby, sounding just as fit and uncompromising as his youthful collaborators.
There are silly moments. “Big Booty,” featuring Megan Thee Stallion, summons the spirit of 2 Live Crew. It’s a track that would have fallen flat even five years ago, when Nicki Minaj and Jennifer Lopez were causing a mini-revival in these kind of Miami bass-inspired ass anthems. And sleazy raps aside, it’s fair to say that Gucci regularly underperforms lyrically on Woptober II. The low point comes on “Tootsies,” when he tosses off a poorly considered jab at Kanye West’s mental health issues.
As for the beats, Gucci’s go-to team of star producers (London on da Track, Zaytoven, Southside, Da Honorable C.N.O.T.E, and more) mostly serve up archetypal Trap God instrumentals without ever distinguishing themselves. J. White Did It (of “Bodak Yellow” fame) encapsulates the malaise on “Move Me,” which leans on the old Dragnet theme tune like an out-of-shape distance runner sagging against a wall. It’s a reminder that one of Gucci’s stronger recent projects, Droptopwop, benefitted from being overseen by producer Metro Boomin, who tied everything together while keeping the rapper’s worst proclivities in check.


On her second solo album, the former Destiny's Child singer mostly eschews balladry, melisma, and clean pop, instead delivering a tight, energetic set heavy on upbeat numbers and funk affectations.

B’Day

According to most reasonable criteria, Beyoncé's second album B'Day is a success, outpacing her solo debut Dangerously in Love. Here, Beyoncé delivers precisely what many listeners have always wanted from her: a short, tight, and energetic set that's heavy on upbeat numbers and funk affectations, and light on the balladry and melisma.
B'Day captures the r&b singer at her warmest and most in-the-moment: There's a certain ramshackle messiness to these grooves, elliptically orbiting the classic pop song in a manner more reminiscent of Amerie's "1 Thing" than Beyoncé's sonically similar "Crazy in Love". Beyoncé sounds more relaxed as a singer, expanding on the Tina Turner resemblances she's been toying with recently, her performances growing ever-more instinctive and unpredictable in their appropriations of soul hollering. Most radically, the siren-assisted caterwaul of second single "Ring the Alarm" sounds genuinely (and marvelously) incoherent, her voice thrillingly sharp with anxiety and paranoia.
Remaining in soul mama character throughout, her newfound expressiveness fits so hand-in-glove with Richcraft or Neptunes-style funk drum patterns and surging horns that even when she departs from this style sonically-- such as on the percussive, Diwali-esque jam "Get Me Bodied", or the stiffly blaring "Upgrade U"-- the shift feels negligible, and you can still hear the ghosts of horn sections. Beyoncé's lyrics are also funnier and more idiosyncratic than ever: "I can do for you what Martin did for the people," she boasts on "Upgrade U"'s extreme makeover hard-sell, and I suspect she knows she's the only r&b singer who could deliver the line with a straight face.
So far so good, but what prevents this from being the classic pop album the above would suggest is that, well, Beyoncé simply isn't making classic pop anymore. By resolving the criticisms of her earlier work (too strident, too deliberate, too driven) Beyoncé has weakened her perfect pop technique. B'Day lacks the precision with which her earlier hits were crafted-- the alluring poise of "Baby Boy" is nowhere in evidence, and the glittering impregnability of the great Destiny's Child singles feels even more distant. B'Day sounds like an entire album of third and fourth singles, which is still better than an album of filler, but in a genre so overwhelmingly defined by its hit singles, a "Crazy in Love" or a "Baby Boy" can punch above its weight-- the consistency of "Déjà Vu" in this regard becomes a double-edged sword.
Most of all, though, Beyoncé just sounds too real here: It was her pitch-perfect plasticity which gave much of her earlier work its majestic aura, as if she had transcended ordinary goals in a narcissistic drive for perfection. Having voluntarily stepped down from her pedestal, she now struggles to inspire the same sense of awe: Her songs emote as intensely as before, but their emotions are all too human.
Ironically perhaps, this switch delivers its biggest pay-off, and B'Day's best song, with the ballad-of-sorts "Irreplaceable". It's as if, having lost the Midas touch of gleaming pop perfection, Beyoncé has opened up the possibility of stumbling on brilliance by accident. "You must not know 'bout me/ I can have another you in a minute/ Matter-fact he'll be here in a minute," she boasts to a swiftly exiting lover, in a hopelessly unconvincing attempt at callous indifference. Before, Beyoncé's approach to heartbreak was always literal, her voice and her words declaiming her feelings with a studied earnestness that at times was difficult to believe, let alone connect with. "Irreplaceable" is the first song in which Beyoncé lies to herself, and the way her voice perfectly betrays that lie (revealing a giveaway tremble in the stiff upper lip of the lyrics) simultaneously renders it her most sophisticated and her most honest performance to date.


The Philadelphia musician’s first record under her own name eschews the blown-out euphoria of her band Hop Along, but her voice remains an instrument of rare expressive power.

Likewise

Frances Quinlan has spent the past 10 years unleashing an indie-rock shout so ecstatic and alive that it seems to tear into the limits of singing whenever it appears. You will never hear someone holler with such grace and exactitude as Quinlan, in 2012, exploding the final moments of her band Hop Along’s second album, Get Disowned, as if her life, and perhaps the lives of countless others, depended on it. Scratching at the reaches of her power on a syllabic level—“Me-te-or, MAKE me YOUNG”—her rave-up crests and falls like the chart of a haywire heart monitor, as if she is wishing on a star not for herself, but for all of us. Her empathy is delivered with so much force that it could induce vertigo.
Quinlan started Hop Along solo as a teenager in 2004. As a child, she dreamed of writing short stories; she learned to sing from a woman in a castle in New Jersey. Behind the mic, Quinlan summons the high-and-wild electricity of freak folk à la Joanna Newsom, if powered by the shout-along catharsis of emo and grounded by the every-person storytelling of folk in general. When Hop Along solidified into a loud Philadelphia rock band in 2010, Quinlan’s voice scaled with it, perhaps to be heard above such maximal volume. She composed her first record under her own name, Likewise, with the intention of keeping her songs—which, in Hop Along, are arranged collectively—“closer to their original forms.”
Likewise is more minimal and elegant than any Hop Along record. There’s a lightness to the instrumentation as Quinlan broadens her sound to include synthesizers, strings, jaunty piano, the glittery clack of programmed beats, and harp from Mary Lattimore. Its highlights are two songs that Quinlan has said were first recorded but not used for Hop Along’s 2018 album Bark Your Head Off, Dog, called “A Secret” and “Went to LA”; she wrote Likewise around them. In both, you can hear the brittle surfaces of her acoustic strumming—like the cover art she painted, it feels unusually tactile—as well as unsentimental jolts of resilience. Her melodies wander inquisitively and move forward in unconventional ways. Quinlan also finds original nuances in her voice, like the sense of flight in how she sings an elongated “aaa” in “A Secret,” or the cleverly sputtered “no” that hangs off the edge of a chorus to “Your Reply.” Where previously her performances felt breathless, here there’s room to breathe.
Quinlan’s Hop Along lyrics typically narrate the possibly unheard stories of regular people (a waitress, an abused child, a huge family inhabiting a tiny apartment) in near-journalistic detail. Her project can feel like an exercise in exploding the ego, in effacing the “I” in favor of selfless curiosity and compassion for the world. This writerly flair lives on here: “I know it isn’t fair/Stories struggle for air,” she sings on the solemn “Lean,” and on “Now That I’m Back,” she details the gnarly profile of a woman who had a roach surgically removed from the inside of her skull, “and one night, ate Raid-seasoned spaghetti.”
But on Likewise, Quinlan more often presents these observations as fragments. The death of Czech author Bohumil Hrabal, who fell from a window (the details vary, she sings, “depending on the website”), makes its way into “Your Reply,” like a stray reflection in a diary before she continues on towards the personal. Filled with words that shouldn’t make sense in pop music—“wheelbarrow,” “orangutan,” “lemmings,” “cannibal” and “cannibalistic” both—her songs marvel in the obliqueness of language. “Somebody wrote ‘tender’/In the novel’s margins,” she sings on “Your Reply,” which really is peak Frances Quinlan.
It can be difficult to pinpoint just what Quinlan’s songs on Likewise might be about in a linear or narrative sense. But through her Dylanesque collages of dialogue, literary references, interiority, and mundanity, these central frictions emerge: between a scream and a lull, confession and abstraction, the poetic and the colloquial—ultimately, between people failing to communicate. “There just doesn’t seem to be much room for a reply,” she sings on “Your Reply.” “You were mid-sentence when I had to interrupt you in order to relate,” goes “Detroit Lake.” There’s something profound in how the album starts with “Piltdown Man,” a clinical reflection on an archaeologist, and concludes with an open-hearted appeal: “Now that I’m back/We should try again to talk.” The whole of Likewise—maybe of Quinlan’s catalogue—seems to probe this universal dilemma: our struggle to reach each other, to speak honestly and unguardedly.
Likewise’s nine songs often eschew the blown-out euphoria of Hop Along—even its synth-pop cover of Built to Spill’s eternally arresting “Carry the Zero” sounds a bit tempered. But the album draws you close with repeat listens. At its center is the miraculous, ferociously strummed “Went to LA,” which contains enough spark and awe to power a record twice as long. In her lyrics, Quinlan again negotiates the private and the public, pivoting from statements of personal desperation to pure exposition (“The owner of the laundromat gave me a ride home/She said she saw me come in alone”). As she carves, line by line, into the exquisite breaks of her singing, she finds clarity. “Oh the humiliation of having been/Perfectly understood,” she intones, giving way to a transcendent refrain—“Heaven is a second chance”—and clenching her words into screams before letting them free. These are felt lessons in vulnerability, and perhaps in the “self-preservation” she also sings of. In telling the stories of other people, Quinlan created one for herself; in the cracks of her colossal voice, it’s already a legend.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The second album from the pop crooner uses the same method that made his debut such a commercial success. His spectacular voice doles out feelings in terms everyone can understand.

The Thrill of It All

Sam Smith is an old soul with an easily bruised heart. He’s looking for radiant, cinematic love, the kind that springs from a meet-cute at the supermarket when you reach for a can of soup and happen to bump into the man of your dreams. He knows what it’s like to yearn for someone who barely notices you’re alive. He’s well acquainted with romantic desperation, the kind of pitiable state where you betray everything you believe in because you’re just so lonely. And he became one of this decade’s biggest pop stars because he was willing to take all of those desires, no matter how embarrassing, and lay them out in terms everyone can understand.
When you become this successful this fast—2014’s In the Lonely Hour has moved over four million units in the U.S. alone—there’s no sense in reinventing the wheel. His new album, The Thrill of It All, leans on the same strengths that made In the Lonely Hour one of this decade’s most successful debuts. His voice is an ocean liner that can turn on a dime; his ballads are built around mournful piano melodies and fleshed out with choral arrangements; he doles out feelings in bushels.
It’s a formula that remains commercially unimpeachable—lead single “Too Good at Goodbyes” has lingered around the Billboard Top 10 since its release—but it can be exhausting, especially over the course of an entire album. His specific brand of sadness is dark and sticky like molasses, and decent songs get snared. One of two collaborations with the writer/producer Malay, “Say It First” deftly apes the moody, spacey sound of the xx but drags itself down with hopeless neediness. And while “Midnight Train” sounds a little—OK, a lot—like a slow-motion version of Radiohead’s “Creep,” Smith ruins it by agonizing over leaving a relationship that isn’t working: “Am I a monster? What will your family think of me?” You wish the characters in these songs would show themselves a little more respect.
There are a few welcome beams of light. Smith is an Amy Winehouse devotee—he was tweeting context-free lines from “Wake Up Alone” just a few weeks ago, so you know it’s real—and you get the feeling he’d love to make an album as frank and true as Back to Black. Spare bonus track “Nothing Left for You” summons the same genuine rage that made the pissy “I’ve Told You Now” a highlight on In the Lonely Hour. And you can actually imagine Winehouse rolling like a thunderstorm over songs like “One Last Song” and “Baby, You Make Me Crazy,” which leans on a slice of Kool & the Gang’s sunny instrumental “Breeze & Soul.” These aren’t happy songs by any stretch of the imagination: “One Last Song” is a kiss-off to the man who haunted In the Lonely Hour, and Smith hammers “Baby, You Make Me Crazy” home by mewling in that dusky falsetto: “Why’d you have to fill my heart with sorrow?” “I call them ’dance and cry’ songs,” Smith told Rolling Stone. “I love songs like that.” Call them whatever you want; these are the warmest, most radiant songs in his catalog. There’s joy in them, or at the very least a light at the end of the tunnel.
The Thrill of It All even features a few songs that leave heartbreak in the rear-view mirror. They aren’t all successful, but they’re interesting experiments for someone whose bread and butter is romantic dissatisfaction. “Too Good at Goodbyes” may sound like a goopier version of Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain,” but it’s a snapshot of someone who’s grown up enough to step past hopeless wallowing. Learning to harden your heart doesn’t feel good, but it’s a necessary move in a cruel world. “Pray” is a limp collaboration with a past-his-prime Timbaland, but its premise is fascinating given its singer’s notorious naivete: Where do you turn when you just can’t ignore what’s going on in the world around you? (Smith wrote the song after spending five days in Mosul, Iraq with the charity War Child.) And “HIM,” on which Smith inhabits the shoes of a gay child in the South struggling to reconcile his religious upbringing and his sexual orientation, is even more intriguing. It’s an explicit coming-out song, and that’s a surprising choice for someone who consciously avoided gender pronouns on In the Lonely Hour so straight people could find themselves in his songs too. It may come off a little like Costco-brand Perfume Genius, but it’s a start.
That’s a fair way to describe The Thrill of It All as a whole: it’s a start, or at least a fresh one. The last few years haven’t been kind to Smith from a PR perspective; he’s developed a nasty habit of jamming his foot into his mouth. He said apps like Tinder and Grindr are “ruining romance,” alienating fans who use them because they’re anxious or don’t feel safe trying to meet people; he discovered racism one night in London and couldn’t believe how unhelpful the police were; he drank too much at the Oscars, misspoke, and got raked over the coals the next day. In short, he seems like a well-meaning, guileless person, one whose music reconciles with being held as a person of prominence and one of the most famous gay people on the planet. “I’m not the most eloquent person,” said Smith in an empathetic profile in The New York Times. “I didn’t get the best grades in school. I mean, I’m just good at singing.”


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the subversive 1984 debut from the UK synth-pop group, an exquisite-sounding album that snuck an ode to amyl nitrate and orgasms onto pop charts around the world.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Welcome to the Pleasuredome

Welcome to the Pleasuredome

Think of the flush that must have crept over Mike Read’s face the moment he realized that when Frankie sang “come,” they meant cum. Pupils and capillaries dilated, he must have scanned the lyrics printed on the sleeve of “Relax” and read the word “suck” as if for the first time in his life. By the time the BBC 1 Radio DJ declared the song “obscene” on air, “Relax” had already become a mainstay on his station—contemporary estimates say it played 70 to 100 times in six weeks—extolling the pleasures of gay sex to some thousands of unsuspecting listeners. Eleven days into 1984, “Relax” fluttered to No. 6 on the UK charts. Yanked from airplay, it soared to the top by the end of the month.
The tale of Read’s sudden panic quickly grew. Before long, he hadn’t just declined to play the single on his hit countdown show; he had dragged the needle off the disc halfway through its runtime and banned it on the spot. Depending on who’s telling the story, he also either flung the record against the wall or snapped it over his knee. For his part, Read claims he wasn’t all that bothered; he simply ran out of airtime. But he will concede that he noticed some “vile words” and a “simulated phallus” printed on the cover, and he did indeed pronounce the whole thing obscene.
While he didn’t have the authority to ban “Relax” from broadcast himself, Read’s declaration made its way up the chain, scandalizing BBC executives as it went. Apparently, it had never occurred to them that “come” meant anything other than showing up. “The group seemed to confirm [the lyrics] as referring to fellatio and ejaculation, which are not exactly subjects which I think are appropriate for broadcasting on the radio,” said Derek Chinnery, BBC 1 Controller, two weeks after Read’s proclamation. “We could have said there is a dual meaning to this song, that it was a kind of nonsense lyric about relaxing. But when the performers themselves confirmed that it was referring to these sexual aberrations then it didn’t seem to me appropriate that we should play it at all.” That day, the BBC learned a key lesson: If you don’t know what a song is about, it’s probably about sex. And if you’re certain a song is about nothing, it’s definitely about sex.
“Relax,” the crown jewel in Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s debut album, Welcome to the Pleasuredome, went largely unnoticed for the first three months after its release in the fall of 1983. An irresistible performance on the Top of the Pops’ 20th-anniversary show catapulted the single into public consciousness: Lead singer Holly Johnson vamped along to its pre-recorded studio glitz dressed in leather and flagging piss, while his co-vocalist Paul Rutherford—the handsome clone to Johnson’s charismatic scamp—danced as if he had just stumbled into the eighth discotheque of the night. The BBC fracas cemented the song’s illicit appeal. Everything that was supposed to nip a music career in the bud—politics, overproduction, overt homosexuality, censorship—only poured fuel on Frankie’s fire.
The band spent months frothing up clubs in their native Liverpool, cultivating a leather-and-chains look they swore owed more to Mad Max’s road warriors than any particular fetish scene. “We really had to hit hard to get off the streets … to create a reaction, especially in Liverpool because there’s so many bands,” Johnson told NME. “To stand out we had to give it loads, loads of sex because that was the easiest and quickest shocker to get attention.” They revved into gear in February 1983, when they snagged a slot on the music TV program The Tube. Wearing mesh crop tops, they banged out an embryonic rendition of “Relax,” then a bare-bones funk ditty that interpolated the Lady in the Radiator song from Eraserhead.
Among their viewers was producer Trevor Horn, the studio wizard behind era-defining hits like the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” and Yes’ “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” He had just launched a new label called Zang Tuum Tumb with his wife Jill Sinclair, former NME writer Paul Morley, and fellow producer Gary Langan. A few weeks later, Horn heard a more developed version of “Relax” on David “Kid” Jensen’s Radio 1 show. Impressed, he started calling around to sign Frankie. They had the spark; he had the finesse that could coax it into an inferno.
ZTT’s parent company, Island Records, had previously passed up a chance to add Frankie to their roster, claiming, ambiguously, “They don’t have the right image.” Horn and Morley, meanwhile, saw a path to the promised land paved in leather. On both sides of the Atlantic, listeners hungered for an electronic sound that overpowered the senses. In the first few years of the decade, New York acts like Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel, and Afrika Bambaataa dreamed up electro tracks that heralded cyborg futures, while in San Francisco, Sylvester and Patrick Cowley pitched disco into a new, accelerated lane. Aesthetically glamorous, sexually ambiguous bands like Culture Club, Soft Cell, and Eurythmics were taking the new audiovisual arena of MTV by storm, ushering in what would be dubbed the second British Invasion. But where Boy George and Marc Almond tended to dodge direct questions about their personal sexualities, Frankie’s two vocalists left the closet far behind. (The rest of the band—Brian Nash, Peter Gill, and Mark O’Toole, collectively known as “the lads”—were straight.)
”[Horn] thought the gay thing was the most dangerous thing about us, but he loved that,” said Rutherford. Morley agreed it was ZTT’s job to inflame Frankie’s most scandalous appeal: “What a record company should do is exaggerate the raw material of its artists; most companies remove or reduce it.”
For months, Frankie and Horn worked “Relax” from a libidinal sketch into an erotic phantasmagoria. Horn had at his disposal a Fairlight CMI, the nascent digital audio workstation newly favored by Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, and Peter Gabriel. “He was one of about three people in England who owned and knew how to use a Fairlight computer synthesizer,” said Rutherford. The machine enabled precise visual sequencing; you could etch melodies and rhythmic patterns directly on the screen with a light pen. It was also the first commercially available digital sampler that could record sounds directly into the machine and play them back at any pitch on the keyboard.
Working with a slew of session musicians, Horn teased layers and layers of outré sound out of the Fairlight—a deliciously sleazy three-note bass strut, candied digital horns, a constellation of syncopated percussion—all building toward a crescendo he called “the orgasm effect.” “I imagined it was dawn, Holly had climbed to the top of a mosque, held his arms in the air and called all of these hordes forward to have sex with him,” he said. “I put a huge orgasm in the middle, the biggest orgasm anybody had ever been had by anybody.”
It worked. “Relax” satisfied listeners starving for sound that walloped them more than it washed over them. It also sent the competition scrambling. Early synth advocate Gary Numan said the single “plunged me into a pit of despair. The production was so good, the sounds so classy, that it seemed to move the entire recording business up a gear—we were all left floundering, trying to catch up.”
While Horn and the band toiled away on Frankie’s sound, Morley began crafting an equally infectious media campaign. Riffing on Katharine Hamnett’s “Choose Life” design (a reference to Buddhism, not abortion), he penned a sequence of enigmatic slogans and printed them on blank white T-shirts in big, black letters: Frankie say relax. Frankie say war! Hide yourself. Frankie say arm the unemployed. Morley himself liked to wear a T-shirt that said, “Propaganda will give you the truth.” In interviews, he was equally prone to sloganeering: “I condemned [manipulation] when it was done badly. Great manipulation I adore.” By the summer of ’84, the shirts were everywhere—a fad, sure, but also a prescient bit of agitprop. Ubiquitous directives with no clear authority behind them might make you wonder about your susceptibility to authority’s tools in general.
Frankie’s second single, the anti-war rumble “Two Tribes,” debuted at No. 1 in June 1984. With Frankiemania at a fever pitch, the natural next step was to let the band play across an album’s length—and with their prefab grandiosity, it only made sense that their debut LP would sprawl across two discs, an opulent oasis in the midst of Thatcherite austerity. Despite their cultural hold, Frankie still had a lot to prove. Naysayers claimed they were too polished, too glossy; all style, no substance; industry puppets lending their pretty faces to Horn’s studio indulgence.
“We get a lot of interviews where people say, ‘We hear that you can’t play your instruments and that you were totally created by Trevor Horn,’” complained Johnson. “It’s so tedious for us, and it makes us resent the record company, which is not a healthy situation. ZTT didn’t go out of their way to deny the rumors, because it’s to their advantage for people to believe that they are wondrous Svengalis.”
Welcome to the Pleasuredome would only further polarize their reception. Released at the end of October 1984, it boasted tauter versions of “Relax” and “Two Tribes” than the luxuriant 12" mixes that had been ringing out in clubs all summer. Its title track, meanwhile, swelled to a tumescent 14 minutes, rooted in a shuddering bass groove: a glimmering showcase of Horn’s studio prowess and a hearty welcome indeed.
A clutch of cover songs deepened the band’s complex love affair with the United States. They had never visited the country, but its cultural stranglehold fascinated them; they named themselves after an advertisement for Frank Sinatra’s first film role, while Johnson took his given name from Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn. Frankie raced through Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” at 157 BPM, faithfully took on Dionne Warwick’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” and sprawled across a hi-NRG version of Edwin Starr’s “War,” where they tasked a Ronald Reagan impressionist with reading both a Hitler quote about beauty and a meditation on revolutionary love by Marxist thinker David Cooper. (Cooper also wrote the mock-posh dissection of what an orgasm really is on the footnote track “Tag.”) Rather than a direct protest against imperial brutality, Frankie’s “War” seemed to blare a warning about the evolving nature of power in an era where cable television advertised both the threat of nuclear armageddon and a spread of convenient options for escaping its attendant stress. A seasoned actor sat in the White House and the news became just another product for the masses to consume.
While some were quick to label Pleasuredome an instant masterpiece, for certain critics, the glaze over Frankie’s political and literary convictions cracked on impact. Creem pronounced it a “put-on and a con, a flim-flam scam of a sham, a hip hype calculated solely to separate as much money as possible from as many people as possible as fast as possible before all the young rubes wake up and realize they’ve been fleeced.” Record called it “stagey and sophomoric,” reiterating the suspicion that Frankie were no more than “puppets for ZTT masterminds.” They had a right to be skeptical; half the sounds on the album poured out of a machine that had only been on the market for five years, and Horn was one of only a few producers who knew how to deploy it to its full potential. If you took the measure of a band by how long they spent wrangling their own gear, Frankie fell short—no more than a handful of pinballs bouncing around ZTT’s brilliant machine.
It’s true that there are oceans between that first scrappy Tube performance and the sumptuous opera that unfurled inside Pleasuredome. But Johnson’s electricity—his knowing poise, the twinkle in his eye, the ripples in his voice—surges through Pleasuredome’s entire lifespan, from demo to marquee. He’s as much in love with the camera on the Tube spot as he is in the first Bacchanalian video for “Relax,” which, among other delights, shows him soaking up a golden shower in a subterranean fetish club. (Naturally, the clip was also banned from the BBC and never cleared to air on MTV.) Listen to the way he trills his Rs on the word “erect” in “Welcome to the Pleasuredome,” or the vibrato he relishes for measures on end on “Black Night White Light,” and any thought of his emptiness shrivels up. Only a music press that discounted the power of performance itself—that shunted voice, presence, and attitude off to the side in favor of technical dexterity—would dare call him a puppet.
The same media preoccupied with who played which instruments in the studio also harbored a phobia of pleasure itself, especially in combination with politics. But against a dreary backdrop of privatization, plague, deprivation, and shame, what choice did Frankie have but to dazzle? Their politics were in their citations of revolutionary figures and also gleamed across “Krisco Kisses,” a paean to fisting: “You fit me like a glove, my love/You fit me like a glove!”
Pleasuredome rang out into the years that followed, emblematizing the ’80s and loosening the way for bands like Erasure, who would carry a similar torch into the rave years. The album turned out to be the apex of Frankie’s short-lived career. They followed it in 1986 with Liverpool, which flopped, and disbanded in the wake of intra-band aesthetic conflict and legal scuffles with ZTT—a by-the-books demise. But for a season, Frankie Goes to Hollywood pierced through the clouds on the back of the most thunderous orgasm anyone had ever heard.
It didn’t take long for the sex and the thrill of the music to evaporate from collective memory. By the fall of ’84, parody T-shirts poked fun at the sheer ubiquity of Morley’s originals: Who give a Sh!t what Frankie say?, they read. By 1997, a Frankie Say Relax shirt prompted uproarious canned laughter all by itself on an episode of Friends—a symbol of a bygone media obsession. Four years later, Zoolander laundered “Relax” into a gag of its own. Once a scandal and a threat, the song deflated into the non-referential gibberish the BBC had first assumed it to be. Frankie’s eroticism, formerly a tidal force, trickled away into sterile nostalgia.
But this story isn’t only about sex. Pleasuredome culminates in Frankie’s left-turn third single, an undanceable ballad the label marketed as a Christmas song, complete with a Nativity pageant video. On “The Power of Love,” the band swan-dives into total, unblemished sincerity: no cheek, no wink. From the depths, Johnson sings of real, obliterating love, the kind of love that atomizes and rearranges reality, the kind of love that has nothing to do with property, propriety, or ownership, and everything to do with surrender. He calls it “death-defying.” What a gift that “The Power of Love” came about more than a full decade before the dawn of Auto-Tune. You can hear Johnson striving for these notes; landing flat, hearing his failure, and correcting; hoisting himself up microtone by microtone to each sublime plateau.
Frankie arrived in a splash of scandal, pressurizing dancefloors with euphoric club mixes. With “The Power of Love,” they also insisted that sexual and spiritual ecstasies need not be mutually exclusive. Far from it—they feed each other. Slipping a fist into your beloved could be a more fervent act of love than slipping on a ring before God. Instances of mind-wiping abandon crystallize into the highest devotion: love unbound by time or space. Pleasure, from music or sex or both, didn’t trivialize true feeling. It bored a hole into the heart of it.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.