On their first LP for Sub Pop, the Australian punk rockers Deaf Wish actively fly in the face of adhering to a singular sound. In many ways, Pain can be viewed as a diverse 30-minute history lesson of the last 40 years of proto-punk, punk, and alternative rock music.

Pain

On their first LP for Sub Pop, the Australian punk rockers Deaf Wish fly in the face of adhering to a singular sound. Instead, over 10 highly individualized tracks, the band veers across a diverse  spectrum, mixing the avant-garde with the melodic. In some ways, Pain can be considered a 30-minute history lesson of the last 40 years of proto-punk, punk, and alternative rock music.
Despite their relatively low profile, Deaf Wish have been recording and performing music for eight years and seem to have a handle on where their individual strengths lie. As a group, their approach to making music comes off as defiantly democratic, with each member given the opportunity to take hold of the microphone and exert their own measure of control. Considering this approach, it’s amazing how effectively they bring the varying tones and textures together.
On the opener, "The Whip", guitarist Jensen Tjhung steps up with a voice that sounds strikingly similar to Iggy Pop. He guides the band through the plodding funeral procession: over time it builds from a simple two-note riff and multi-layered vocal combination to a full-on hurricane with crashing cymbals and frenetic guitar scratchings fighting against each other to break out into the forefront. (Speaking of Iggy Pop, "The Whip" sounds like it has a fair amount of the song "We Will Fall", from the Stooges' 1969 self-titled debut, mixed into its DNA.)
The pace then accelerates with a one-two follow up of punk rock in the form of "Newness Again" and "They Know". There isn’t that much differentiation between the two songs. Both are played at warp speed and carry a heavy dose of manic anti-solo guitar parts threaded underneath; however, on the first, bassist Nick Pratt spits out vocal lines with a rapid, Johnny Rotten-esque fierceness, while on the latter, guitarist Sarah Hardiman moves the feeling into an opposite direction by bringing a degree of harmony and melody to the tornado of notes. It’s probably the definitive example on Pain of Deaf Wish’s built-in capability to alter the sound and feel of their music with a simple personnel swap.
That’s essentially the playbook for most of the album, with Pratt delivering hypersonic old-school punk rock like on the title track, a song that bears a striking resemblance to the Replacements’ classic "We’re Coming Out", Hardiman adding a measure of airiness like on the Sonic Youth-reminiscent "Sex Witch". Tjhung ties both ends together with a subversive, sneering pop affectation.
The formula holds out until you reach the penultimate track, "Dead Air", which is introduced by Hardiman with the disaffected line "In my heart there is only blood" before the band rages into a six-minute wall of guitar feedback and distortion. It’s an inferno of twisted sounds and whammy bar dive bombs cascading over plodding, melodic bass chord changes with no let up. There’s an urge to skip through it to get to the more traditionally framed album closer, "Calypso", but there’s something indefinably enigmatic about the intense soundscape that makes you weather the assault.
It’s evident that Deaf Wish can adopt just about any sound or style that they want to, and that’s what they seemingly tried to do on Pain. For many other bands, that approach could muddy the waters or create a convoluted listening experience, but this doesn’t happen here. They choose to be themselves—each one of them—and it works.


On their dark and impressionistic new album, the long-running Southern rock band turns their political anxiety inward.

The Unraveling

Venturing north for his 1964 presidential campaign, Alabama demagogue George Wallace gleefully shocked the intellectuals and hippies by quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation that Chicago was “the most segregated city in America.” The Drive-By Truckers abhor their home state’s former governor, but they do share his eye for contradiction. Their 2001 album Southern Rock Opera noted how Wallace ended his life of opportunism courting black voters, theatrically begging forgiveness: “Such is the duality of the Southern thing.” You can hear that duality in so much country music, where passion vies against duty in songs of strained devotion. Instead of reactionary fables, the Truckers have spent their career writing character studies, describing the serpentine routes Southern people cut through capitalism’s wreckage.
The group’s previous record, American Band, arrived alongside the 2016 election, its subjects bluntly topical: “Ramon Casiano” told the story of a Texas teenager murdered in 1931, whose killer later became a border patrol cop and NRA lobbyist. The Unraveling turns political anxiety inwards. The mood of mounting disaster recalls 2008’s Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, perhaps the greatest Drive-By Truckers album—released just after guitarist Jason Isbell left the band, with bassist Shonna Tucker's 2011 departure leaving founding members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley as the lone remaining songwriters. Aside from opening track “Rosemary with a Bible and a Gun,” which conveys a drifter’s flight with spiraling internal rhymes, there are no lingering portraits here. The new songs move like anguished monologues, probing for a source of horror, as if Hood and Cooley decided that narrative distance would amount to emotional abdication.
The Unraveling takes meticulous care with each mix. From “Rosemary” onwards, the vocals sit a touch lower than usual. Distorted electric washboard blares through “Babies in Cages,” a consuming echo, as Hood writes ICE detention centers into the Book of Revelation: “Standing in the darkness to answer for our sins/Children changing each other’s diapers in a pen.” His first image in “Thoughts and Prayers” is equally unnerving—gruesome stillness hovers over a mass shooting, screens aglow with news of the violence surrounding them. Hood falters after that, mocking the bromides applied to mass murder; there’s a moment of catharsis, some deserved disdain, but he ends up landing halfway between satire and jeremiad, dependent on the same hollowed-out language he criticizes.
A few disarming passages of The Unraveling reconsider the lyrical modes the Truckers have come to lean on. Mike Cooley was always the more conversational singer, an unhurried narrator; “Grievance Merchants” uses that style to expose the psyche of a far-right creep. Acid curdles Cooley’s wry voice as he mutters about “a conspiracy to water down his blood/And it’s all the fault of it, or them, or they.” The final track “Awaiting Resurrection” finds Hood overwhelmed by religious imagery, seeking some glimmer of illumination. He wonders whether he’ll get reincarnated as a dog, a bleak joke worthy of Leonard Cohen, the vaudeville penitent. Nearly nine minutes long, its empty spaces marked only by faint and shadowy instruments, “Awaiting Resurrection” bears little resemblance to the Southern rock that Drive-By Truckers long invoked. Heaven or hell, they each have their house bands—this could be the theme song for purgatory.
Back in 2015, Patterson Hood published an essay in the New York Times Magazine expressing the disgust he felt after seeing people wave the Confederate flag at a Drive-By Truckers concert. He urged them all to burn the old rag: “It is time for the South to—dare I say it?—rise up and show our nation what a beautiful place our region is, and what more it could become.” Condescending northerners would always say that the South needed to become like the rest of the country. George Wallace shocked them again when the 1960s lurched rightwards, piling up votes in some of their own enclaves. You can find a constituency for white identity politics and its gothic resentments all across America. On Southern Rock Opera Hood imagined the Devil, “who is also a Southerner,” brewing up sweet tea for his new tenant George. The Unraveling has the despair of a wish granted hideously wrong.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated when Shonna Tucker left the band. It has been updated to indicate that she left in 2011.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Balancing his characteristic humor with newfound vulnerability, Keef’s latest is a worthy capstone to a prolific year in which the Chicago rapper has resurrected his reputation and career.

Dedication

Keith Cozart has been known to the public as Chief Keef since 2012, when his first hit, “I Don’t Like,” vaulted him into the national consciousness. He was 16 years old then, and for many, he was inextricably linked with the crisis of gun violence in his native Chicago. The lightning to the thunder that was “I Don’t Like” was a WorldStar video of a kid excited that Keef, who had been sentenced to house arrest for unlawful use of a weapon, had been released—the first hint of the enthusiasm that would accompany the rapper’s initial rise. But Cozart is 22 now, and in industry terms, his arrival might as well have been a decade ago. His latest full-length, Dedication, is a testament to how much he’s grown—not necessarily as an artist (though that’s there too), but as a person. It’s a worthy capstone to a year in which Keef has released four solid-to-great solo projects, resurrecting his reputation and career.
Keef’s unconstructed approach to rap has earned him ferocious critics, in addition to those who would summarily dismiss him for being simply a bad influence, a media spectacle, or both. In his hometown paper’s good-faith review of his major label debut, Finally Rich, the writer Greg Kot asserted that Keef’s sole innovation had been to appear colder than any other contemporary gangster rapper, and dismissed his mumbled verses as “robotic, deadpan, stoned.” It was a fair assessment, if a stingy one. But five years later, with Keef matured and mellowed, it’s easier to listen to his current music and pick up on the charisma that caused one of his deeply passionate Chicago fans to threaten to beat the hell out of anyone questioning his reputation back in the day.
There are several indications of Keef’s growth on Dedication, but nostalgia is the principal element that unites the record’s grab bag of styles and approaches. It’s everywhere. Glimpses of his school days surface on “Keke Palmer,” where there’s an early reference to blue books; on “Text,” he recalls toting a BB gun in his lunch bag in second grade; and on the fearsome throwback “Glory Bridge,” he’s thinking about how fly he looked at school. In a recent interview, Snoop Dogg asks Keef what he loves the most about being from Chicago. The rapper, who has lived in California for the past several years, thinks for a moment, and then confesses to missing the city in its entirety.
It’s that willingness to admit to vulnerability, to having emotions other than fury, that keeps Dedication interesting throughout. Keef will never be a perfectionist. His verses are not compulsively crafted or alive with brilliant wordplay; they’re compelling mainly for their turns of phrase, for the sudden jokes or changes in perspective. His deadpan sense of humor remains well intact. The second verse of “Told Y’all” includes the immortal line, “Pull up in all white like a Nazi,” and there’s a funny couplet on “Keke Palmer”: “Hopped on yo shit and killed it, like ‘Whose song is this?’/All up in my DM, man, ‘Who mom is this?’” Keef admires Lil Wayne, and while he doesn’t share Weezy’s technical ability, he does share his role model’s gift for the unexpected left turn, the hilarious surprise.
Atlanta’s D. Rich produced more than half the songs on Dedication, with standout turns from StuntMan (“Keke Palmer,” “Text”) and Ness (“Glory Bridge”). In contrast to Thot Breaker and with the exception of the weirdly tender standout “Negro,” the record is decidedly drill, and on the imperial beats for “Mailbox,” “Cook,” “Get It,” and others, Keef teleports back to his old life. But while it’s not quite JAY-Z-on-American-Gangster-style reminiscence, even the more vividly violent songs here feel like they were made at a remove. “I passed the streets with flying colors” he boasts on “Bad,” another highlight, and the past tense is clearly intentional.
Though the record has some weak links, it’s cleverly sequenced to minimize mediocrities. It  opens with two fantastic singles, “Ticket” and “Keke Palmer,” and is backloaded with can’t-miss tracks including “Negro,” “Less Speed,” “Kills,” and “Told Y’all.” Along with a couple of appearances from the GBE rapper Tadoe, there are solid features from A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie and Lil Yachty, but they blend in so well that you barely notice how unusual it is for Keef to break with his traditional insularity and collaborate with artists outside his immediate circle. It’s just another sign of his newfound humility, a quality that comes with age—and one that, after this year, should make even the most ferocious anti-Keef partisans willing to give the 22-year-old’s music another chance.


The Rick Rubin-produced 13, featuring Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave drummer Brad Wilk, is the first Black Sabbath album to involve more than two original members since 1983's Ozzy-less Born Again. That it isn't an out-of-touch embarrassment is a surprise. That it's cohesive, engaging, and even fun is a near-shock.

13

The current Black Sabbath reunion has been star-crossed almost from the start. Original members Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward staged a splashy press conference in November 2011 to announce a tour and a Rick Rubin-produced album, but the mood quickly soured. Subsequent months brought a lymphoma diagnosis for guitarist and sole consistent member Iommi, a contract dispute involving drummer Ward, high-profile gigs with a fill-in behind the kit, and, finally, the eyebrow-raising news that the comeback LP-- the first full studio record to involve more than two members of Sabbath 1.0 since 1983's Ozzy-less Born Again-- would feature Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave drummer Brad Wilk. The peanut gallery snarked; fans despaired.
That 13 isn't an out-of-touch embarrassment is a surprise. That it's cohesive, engaging, and even fun is a near-shock. As with most Rubin ventures, the goal from the outset was to help the band recapture their original mojo, the chemistry that made their initial 1970-78 run so brilliant. Does 13 measure up to classics such as Paranoid and Vol. 4? Of course not. No amount of good intention could recapture the black magic of the band's narcotically enhanced glory days, and while Wilk's performance is sturdy enough, no sub could eclipse Ward, one of the most distinctive rock drummers of the last 40 years and the engine behind Sabbath's signature sludge-blues cadences. But 13 does offer many of the primal joys that helped immortalize Sabbath in the first place, while documenting the spark that still unites Osbourne, Iommi, and Butler, all three of whom sound about as vital here as anyone could've hoped.
The record's greatest strength is how well it captures the apocalyptic trudge that Sabbath nailed from the very first downbeat of their 1970 debut. The doomy passages in the first two tracks, "End of the Beginning" and "God Is Dead?", sound stupendously heavy. This isn't just a result of 13's raw production values; it's also that the band is clearly grasping for the same dire emotions (soul-deep malaise, reaper-fearing horror) that fueled their early work, emotions that from the mid-'80s on-- as Iommi carried on under the Sabbath banner with a Wiki-nightmare's worth of collaborators-- have shared album space with less weighty, more pedestrian hard rock. As Iommi, Butler, and Wilk lurch through the titanic riff of "End of the Beginning", with Ozzy sneering, "Reeeeeee-animation of the sequence," it's clear that a legacy is being reclaimed. Osbourne, for one, may have squandered any remaining mystique when he opted for reality-TV stardom, but he proves here that he still wields an eerie power at the mic.
The album doesn't fixate on crawling gloom. Early Sabbath is often portrayed as monolithic, but the band's 1970-78 discography was as eclectic in its way as the canons of the Beatles or Zeppelin. On 13, the band salutes fans with obvious allusions to some of their early outside-the-box classics: sassy midtempo groover "Loner" and the faintly cheesy yet improbably moving ballad "Zeitgeist" recall "N.I.B." and "Planet Caravan", respectively. And the sliding-panel, multi-movement structures of "Age of Reason" and "End of the Beginning" serve as a reminder that the original Sabbath explored their own outlandish brand of progressive rock on later LPs such as 1975's Sabotage. Aside from "God Is Dead?", with its plodding, laborious verses, the album's many long tracks feel brisk and hooky.
As sturdy as 13's songs are, the album's signature feature might be its pervasive jamminess. Sabbath were never much for the drawn-out grandstanding of Zeppelin, but they did begin life as a blues band on the nightly grind. The group flaunts those roots constantly on 13, in the process spotlighting the partnership that's always been Sabbath's heart and soul: the Iommi/Butler tandem. During triumphant instrumental breakdowns in "End of the Beginning" and "God Is Dead?", the guitarist and bassist braid together like a heavy-metal Garcia and Lesh, forming a single mercurial mass. Iommi indulges in his share of well-deserved guitar-heroism throughout the record-- most notably on the exuberantly bluesy "Damaged Soul"-- but with Butler shadowing him, these so-called solos feel more like hive-mind communions. It doesn't hurt that the bass tone on 13 is extraordinary-- one of the fattest and most gut-churning that Butler has achieved on record.
Offsetting that blood-brother harmony is the odd man out behind the kit. The stiff unaccompanied drum intro to "Age of Reason" is just one of many reminders here that Wilk comes from an entirely different school, not to mention generation, than his collaborators. While Rage Against the Machine owed Iommi a significant debt in the riff department, that band's rhythmic orientation had far more to do with crisp funk than blues-based hard rock. (To find a truly sympathetic sub for 13, Rubin and the band might have looked to the contemporary doom-metal demimonde, home of drummers like Eyehategod's Joey LaCaze, who specialize in the grimy ooze that powered early Sabbath.) Often, as on the triplet-feel verse section of "Live Forever", Wilk sounds like he's trying hard not to mess up. And he doesn't, exactly, but something is lost in the effort. Bill Ward's genius was that he never seemed to care about meeting an objective standard of precision. The early Sabbath drum tracks are riddled with what could technically be described as flubs; they also feature some of the most exhilaratingly earthy percussion rock'n'roll has ever seen.
To be fair, Wilk's appearance was always framed as a sideman gig. (The press materials for 13 diplomatically state that the band were "joined at the sessions" by the drummer.) And there are moments, such as on the sinister strut that opens "Dear Father", where Wilk achieves a real chemistry with his elders. Details aside, though, Ward's absence from 13 shouldn't be glossed over. His shaggy, intuitive swing may have been less commanding than the brontosaurus whomp of John Bonham, but it was no less integral to his band's signature sound. Sabbath has at times weathered their countless personnel shifts gracefully; for example, the lineup featuring late vocal great Ronnie James Dio, eventually billed under the name Heaven & Hell, attained its own special brand of dark majesty. Yet the fact that a full-on original-members reunion was promised and then retracted lends 13 a whiff of the consolation prize.
In the end, 13 isn't what every Sabbath die-hard dreamed it might be: a true pick-up-where-they-left-off comeback for the group's founding quartet. But the record does belong in the view of every metalhead-- not just because such a seminal band still deserves obligatory props, but because, imperfections aside, the record embodies the kernel of the original Sabbath idea. That chilling crawl, that low-slung death-blues groove that seemed to come out of nowhere back in 1970, persists here in all its ominous potency, sounding out like an admonition of a genre that's grown increasingly overcalculated and gridlike during the ensuing 40 years, trading tortured humanity for robotic precision. Though fans may resent Black Sabbath for not resolving their personal differences more gracefully, one can't deny the pull of that existential outcry as channeled into what we now know as heavy metal. Their frames might be rusted, but these iron men still walk.


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 a surreal, transcendental work by a giant of the American avant-garde.

Private Parts

Robert Ashley’s Private Parts has a plot, but you wouldn’t know it. The 1978 LP, which would later serve as the foundation for the composer’s seven-part televised opera Perfect Lives, discusses at length the inner workings of two characters, a man and a woman, anonymous to us and perhaps even to each other. Words flood its 40-plus minute runtime, circling meaning but never arriving at a conclusion. What’s explored by Ashley, in his drawling monologues, seems to be everything that isn’t happening—an inversion that slinks and dances among the shadows. We are privy to his subjects’ fidgety obsessions, tics of behavior, heady ruminations and psychic detritus, but narrative, insight, or meaning remain as elusive as a not-quite-remembered dream. Private Parts is built on emptiness. It is startling just how riveting that emptiness can be.
Ashley was famous for his voice, an unhurried and boldly confident mumble; Private Parts was, in a way, his vocal debut. A few years prior, the composer had released the In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women, in which his speech is modulated and sliced up to dizzying effect, but on Private Parts, he assumed a role he would reprise for the rest of his career: the bemused and louche narrator of the cosmic-sardonic. Already in his late 40s, Ashely had kept active throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s directing the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, organizing the ONCE Festival of New Music in Ann Arbor, and collaborating with fellow unclassifiables Alvin Lucier, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma in the Sonic Arts Union. However, his recorded output was scarce and, for many, alienatingly confrontational. A rare 1968 release of “The Wolfman” is a quarter hour of migraine-mimicking din, while 1972’s landmark “Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon” describes ambiguously consensual oral sex with the thousand-yard stare delivery of a trauma survivor.
In Private Parts, however, Ashley discovered his true calling. These earlier punkish outings were notable, but the development of his televised opera spurred his creativity to unprecedented heights. Most of his work that followed—not only Perfect Lives but 1979’s Automatic Writing, 1985’s Atalanta (Acts of God), 1998’s Your Money My Life Goodbye—would build on the foundation laid by Private Parts. It was uncharted territory, and Ashley seized on the idea an entirely new form. “I put pieces in television format because I believe that’s really the only possibility for music,” he said in an interview. “We don’t have any tradition… We stay at home and watch television.” That his works traded in a kind of surrealism which would fly over the heads of all but the most dedicated audiences seemed not to bother him. “American television people are stupid,” he commented bluntly.
The album is structured into two episode-length pieces. At just over 20 minutes each—presumably, he was anticipating commercial breaks—there are still no suitably satisfying points at which to pause. Ashley is liberal, or perhaps literal, with the idea of opera. If an opera requires a theatrical setting, high drama, and rafters-directed singing, he doesn’t come close. But if it’s a medium built on a mixture of music, characters, spoken word, singing, set design, well, what else could it be?
Besides, the semantic nitpicking is rendered moot once you hear the music. It all comes back to that drawl. Ashley’s opera sounds like a stoned burnout reading the phone book, and yet it’s mesmerizing. Backed by the winding keyboard runs of avant-garde composer “Blue” Gene Tyranny and surname-shirking Kris’ percolating tabla, the anti-narrative of Private Parts exudes a steady gravitational pull. Small clusters of lines might suggest a direction, but Ashley keeps dodging any linear path.
On the A-side, “The Park” opens with the man: “He took himself seriously. Motel rooms had lost their punch for him. He opened up his bags.” We could be in the moody opening of a noir film. Then comes this detail: “There were two and inside those two, there were two more.” Already the looping, loping syntax trips us up, moving the story forward just vaguely enough that it starts to slip away. Perhaps Ashley was offering consolation for the rabbit hole to come with the next obfuscating line: “It’s not an easy situation. But there was something like abandon in the air.”
What the hell is happening? And what, if anything, is going to happen next? You sense clarity around the corner, that at any moment he will pull together the pile-up of disparate thoughts. But if he ever gets around to it, the lulling monotony of his delivery makes it almost certain you’ll miss the reveal. In the background, the keyboards float aimlessly while the tabla putters away—everything simmers, neither climactic nor cooling. The feel is closest to a spectacularly off-kilter lounge act, or of elevator music made by DMT enthusiasts.
Parallels can be found scattered across the post-war new music scene: John Cage’s text pieces like “Lecture on Nothing” certainly laid a groundwork, offering a template for good-natured, cerebral pranksterism. Ashley’s technique of writing vocal parts around the patterns of everyday speech echoes the early tape pieces of Steve Reich and the murmuring Greek chorus in Philip Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach” (ditto for his emphasis on trance-inducing musical structures). But Ashley had a balmy aesthetic all his own—his strangeness, though more extreme in many ways than his forebears, also seemed more relaxed.
Tyranny and Kris do as much of the legwork as Ashley by avoiding the traditional gestures of experimental music. (Ashley famously rejected the term experimental music outright, despite his associations with it. “Composition is anything but experimental,” he wrote. “It is the epitome of expertise.”) You might expect them to shade his prose with ominous clouds of dissonance, perhaps following his phrases with tightly orchestrated accents of free improv-inspired thwacks and skronks. Instead, they evoke the uncanny by keeping things bucolic and harmonious. Like a faucet left on, they just go, pouring out notes and phrases without end. They lean into new age’s welcoming eddies, yet there are trace amounts of menace detectable in their accompaniment. It’s not in the notes they play so much as the alien quality in the way they play them. Imagine a primitive algorithm attempting to emulate easy listening, droning on for no one in particular for hours on end.
It would be difficult for first or fifth-time listeners to distinguish between the A and B-sides in a blind listening test. Both move with the same placid stoicism, never giving the game away. Yet something about the B-side’s “The Backyard” hits just a little harder. Maybe it’s the lists, calculations, and appraisals. Starting with a meditative scan of the subject’s consciousness, Ashley then catalogs things she never thinks about, what she does, doesn’t do, and how her mind moves and operates (sort of). One of the most entrancing moments is built around the assertion that “Forty-two or forty and twenty is always sixty-two or sixty” which opens a chasm of price points and arithmetic that hooks into your brain and won’t let go. Why does the idea that “fourteen dollars and twenty-eight cents is more attractive than fourteen dollars” leap out from this miasma? Ashley answers immediately: “It’s just that way.”
If this all sounds maddeningly opaque, it is. But its strangeness is matched only by its visceral impact, and you can hear its effect on a generation of avant-garde seekers: Laurie Anderson’s deadpan excisions of American life owe a debt, while Throbbing Gristle’s “Hamburger Lady” from the same year feels like a scorched earth counterpart. The entire no wave scene, only a year or two behind Private Parts, reveled in a similar collision of high-art seriousness and low-brow shoddiness, while Brian Eno would tread the related terrain of surreal, syrupy American with David Byrne on the Talking Heads’ 1980 album Remain in Light and the pair’s 1981 collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
I’m not sure there’s an “ah-ha!” moment that the cleverest listeners are privy to. Close readings and intensive analyses of the larger piece Perfect Lives only reveal how impenetrable it really is. Reaching for an authoritative understanding might trace a structure and story, but the story that Private Parts would eventually belong to sits back at a mirage-like distance, and, according to Ashley, is built out of fragments, “some of which make sense, and others not so much.” It stands cooly unfettered, revealing almost nothing yet offering so much to parse through. Ashley himself once described modern life as “a blizzard of nuance, so dense that the main form is lost.” That sounds about right.
But another quote sticks out. Writing about the opera’s origin, fellow composer Alvin Lucier tells of a night drive through Ohio with Ashley, his account hinting at the dreamy infinity contained in the album. Stopping at a roadhouse, they came upon a group. “There was a row of men and women sitting at the bar talking to each other very seriously. It seemed to me that none of the occupants was married because they were having such interesting conversations… When we stopped at the same roadhouse on our way back, the scene was exactly the same. Here were these lives going on and on. It felt timeless.”


French Montana is poised to end 2012 as one of the year's hottest rappers. Mac & Cheese 3, featuring Diddy, Fat Joe, Rick Ross, Prodigy, Trina, Fabolous, Mac Miller, Wale, and others, is his most high-profile mixtape to date.

Mac & Cheese 3

Any way you slice it, French Montana is poised to end 2012 as one of the year's hottest rappers. (See "Pop That", the etymology of "fanute," "Stay Schemin'", sharing his "Versace silk swag" with the offices of GQ.) But I still have no idea what a great French Montana song sounds like. Don't get me wrong, I'm responsible for more than a few of the 25 million YouTube views granted to "Pop That". But much like his mentor Max B, French Montana's qualities as a rapper-- a marble-mouthed, sing-song flow that toggles between clear-eyed observation and heavy-lidded confession-- hardly translate on paper or in a boardroom. At this point he has more record deals than actual records, so the question remains: "What do you do with this guy?" Mac & Cheese 3 is French Montana's most high-profile mixtape to date and proof that no one else really seems to know the answer.
Or, that the answer is "everything." The roster of Mac & Cheese 3 is astounding on multiple levels, the first of which is that it would be utterly absurd even on a record that needed to justify the $9.99 expenditure. It might be the most heavily A&R'ed mixtape ever made. There really is no precedent for this mumble-goes-mainstream sort of blockbuster, at least not until the Duplass brothers get to direct the next Die Hard movie or something. What really stands out above all is how it assumes that French Montana is either the most malleable rapper alive or that he simply does not matter.
Witness him trading bars with past-their-prime NYC rappers like Fat Joe, Prodigy, and Fabolous, who says "teach me how to Douglas" on "Dance Move", an event that should not go undocumented. Or, maybe he's more of a XXL Freshman 10 type, so here's some Mac Miller, Tyga, and Wale features! Or, hey, we're getting the Bad Boy band back together! Not quite, Diddy and Ma$e show up separately and the latter appears promising to bring you "soup and orange juice if you’re really sick" on a track that borders on condoning sexual assault ("Grownups"). Another event that should not go undocumented. Or maybe French is a Slip-N-Slide rapper! Rick Ross would've shown up regardless, but Trina ends up stealing the show on "Tic Toc", partly because she contributes an awesome verse, partly because she adds contrast to a mixtape whose depressing sexual politics suggests that "Pop That"'s views on women were its biggest selling point.
"Ocho Cinco" sets the tone in terms of its features and its deadening misogyny. The second track on Mac & Cheese 3 features the following: perpetually ignored NYC mixtape space-filler Red Café, Everlast/Yelawolf hybrid MGK, Chief Keef producer Young Chop, and Diddy, who has apparently signed several of these guys. What exactly could unify this crew? Here's the group chant of a hook: "Told that bitch give me head, Ocho Cinco!" I mean, I've heard worse and having seen just enough SportsCenter and Real Housewives of Atlanta, I get the joke. It's still a joke that uses an episode of domestic violence as a means of demanding oral sex. "Ocho Cinco" is then followed by a skit which is 30 seconds of minor variations on threats to "beat my baby moms up" for listening to a French Montana tape. Needless to say, it's played for laughs.
Weirdly, through all of this, French remains kinda likeable if not remotely admirable. For all of its repulsiveness, "Pop That" felt more like the talk of a high school locker room than a conversation between high rollers in bottle service and, at its best, Mac & Cheese 3 retains that giddy vulgarity. Though he's obviously a spiritual descendent of Max B, I tend to hear Gucci Mane in how his slack delivery can obscure his clever wordplay or Noreaga in that his generally knucklehead demeanor can make the occasional but very real instances of resonance feel like they've been created against their own will.
And you have to at least appreciate the wealth of production here. Harry Fraud gave French his first solo hit ("Shot Caller") and is something of a kindred spirit in that he's a similarly hot name without an identifiable "trick." On Mac & Cheese 3, his uptempo, soul-infused beats prove to be complementary, utilizing recognizable samples ranging from Florence & the Machine ("Intro") to the original source material of Jay-Z's "D'evils" ("State of Mind") and Ice Cube's "Today Was a Good Day" ("Triple Double"). But once again, overzealous matchmaking sinks Mac & Cheese; access to a couple of Young Chop beats would be an unquestionable coup for French Montana if he actually sounded at home on them. As is, it's strange to hear a grown man following what were likely instructions to sound as much like Chief Keef as possible, and the only real difference between "Love Sosa" and "Devil Want My Soul" is that the latter is a minute and a half longer.
And trust, Mac & Cheese 3 did not need any sort of extra padding. If its fantasy football approach to team building is a remnant of the cash-flush late 90s, its CD-maxing length is as well, yet Mac & Cheese 3 never settles into a groove. French Montana simply blends in and is only as entertaining as his surroundings. When J. Cole turns up with a surprisingly slick verse and Rick Ross demands that his kids see him buried like a pharaoh, "Diamonds" makes the ridiculous enterprise seem worthwhile. When immeasurably duller guys like Ace Hood and Chinx Drugs and Mac Miller show up, Mac & Cheese 3 feels like it might never end. Even after spending more than an hour with a French Montana mixtape, you get no closer to figuring out what to do with him. It's appropriate he's so closely associated with a made up word-- like "fanute" French remains ill-defined, and you sorta just know when it's being used correctly.


Fueled by controlled fury and unfathomable sorrow, Camae Ayewa’s latest album of Afrofuturist collage traces the traumatic legacy of European colonialism.

The Great Bailout

Across eight albums, Moor Mother—aka Camae Ayewa—has bore witness to history’s sins, threading connections between past, present, and future in a sensory overload fusing industrial noise, “witch rap,” and free jazz. “Going to see Emmett Till out his casket/Beaten to death with a hatchet/For whistlin’ at white girls,” she rapped on 2016’s Fetish Bones. On 2020’s Circuit City, she traced the racial disparities fueling the housing crisis. And on 2022’s Jazz Codes, she documented the erasure of Black genres in an attempt to rescue them from institutional amnesia.
On The Great Bailout, Moor Mother interrogates the knotty relationship between Europe and Africa, confronting the enduring legacy of colonialism. Journeying back to the 19th century, she shines a spotlight on Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833—a perverse form of reparations that compensated former slave owners, to the tune of £20 million. The enslaved people in the British Caribbean received nothing; rather, they were subjected to a four-year transition period, during which they were forced to work without pay. The Guardian called it “the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009”. Funded by British taxpayers across generations, the debt was only repaid in 2015.
By grounding The Great Bailout in the bedrock of British colonialism, Ayewa unearths an overlooked narrative of slavery, one often eclipsed by tales of American enslavement. Simultaneously, she connects the dispersed voices of the African diaspora by mapping out the far-reaching echoes of European imperialism, and joining forces with peers like British Iraqi soprano Alya Al-Sultani. Lines like “Who’s without citizenship?” and “Who’s still burning?” offer reminders of history’s grip on today’s crises, whether in Palestine, Sudan, or along the the Mexican-American border.
Unfathomable sorrow and controlled fury give the album its shape. On the opening “GUILTY,” Lonnie Holley sings over Raia Was’ siren calls, “We watched the slave ships being unloaded,” as harpist Mary Lattimore plucks out gossamer melodies; Moor Mother’s voice rises in the mix, whispering “Guilty, guilty,” before turning to an accusation: “Paying the crimes off/Did you pay off the trauma?” Built from sputtering drum machines, jazz horns, and queasy electronic tones, The Great Bailout is a disorienting hall of mirrors with no exit in sight. Every uneven loop and distorted blast amplifies the feeling of being trapped in a Dutch angle. Much like Moor Mother’s Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, The Great Bailout revels in discomfort. “ALL THE MONEY” suggests an illbient take on a Jordan Peele thriller, and the glitch-corrupted “LIVERPOOL WINS,” co-produced with Wolf Eyes’ Aaron Dilloway, feels like waking into a nightmare.
The journey through “COMPENSATED EMANCIPATION,” co-produced with noise musician C. Spencer Yeh, is particularly jarring. Gravelly drones conjure dystopian atmospheres shot through with Kyle Kidd’s gospel cries. “At any moment, they’ll be coming around,” Moor Mother hisses, oscillating between rage and panic, before a choking silence gives way to the opening chimes of “DEATH BY LONGITUDE.” The penultimate track, “SOUTH SEA,” serves as a purging ritual. Amid the mournful, wordless singing of Angel Bat Dawid and Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty, Moor Mother intones a meditation on history and suffering. She evokes the image of slave ships, of institutionalized death, of cruelty beyond measure. “We in the present are constantly injecting ourselves into the past,” she says, her voice firm and unforgiving. “The gaze of history shapes it. Crystallizes it. Collapses it upon the linear timeline. How do we keep ourselves tethered to the narrative? When and where do the ancestors speak for themselves?” The Great Bailout does not pose answers to those questions, but by asking them, it keeps history alive, and reclaims liberation from the slaveholders and their descendants, whose legacy ties itself up in knots to evade accountability.


Surrounded

Forget about the records for a second. You know them, and you know they're amazing. What I want to ask is this: Is there any other artist in the world who isn't dead, 25 years past their prime, or bankrupt that has released, re-released, re-mastered, re-issued, re-packaged, re-bundled and re-offended more than Björk? It's ridiculous, it really is. But it's not until you trundle through the pages and pages of her back catalog that you realize just how brazen she's been. Back when people still bought CD singles, she was one of the worst offenders; not content with being a proponent of the standard two-part CD5 set (remember those?), she'd frequently roll out triple-disc releases, and issue them in packaging purposely made to feel incomplete unless you had them all. Then, inevitably, three months later she'd release a Ugandan Maxi-EP of the same single with most (but not all) of those B-sides plus a rare Fluke/Alec Empire/Mark Bell re-edit and it'd be robbery with a smile all over again. It would have been faster just to burn my money.
In this decade, Björk's release schedule has ballooned from excessive to patently opportunistic. Since 2000, she's augmented her usual stream of full-lengths, CD singles, DVD singles, 12" singles, bobbleheads, pudding spoons, and pogs with (deep breath): the Cambridge, MTV Unplugged and Live at Shepherd's Bush DVDs; the Inside Björk documentary DVD; four separate live CDs spanning Debut, Post, Homogenic, and Vespertine; the Vessel, Later With Jools Holland, and Miniscule DVDs; three additional iterations of her 1999 video omnibus Volumen (Volumen+, Greatest Hits: Volumen 1993-2003, and Volumen II); Livebox, a repackaging of those four aforementioned live CDs with a bonus DVD thrown in for kicks; the Live at Royal Opera House DVD; the 6xCD Family Tree box, which contained a sum total of 90 minutes of rare and unreleased material spread out across five mini 3" CDs as well as a best-of compilation; a single-disc Greatest Hits compilation with a completely different tracklisting; the Medulla Videos DVD; a Medulla documentary DVD; the Live DVD Archives and Live Television DVD Archives boxes and, probably the piece de resistance and ultimate harbinger of her total and utter lack of quality control, the 20-track Army Of Me: Remixes and Covers, on which Patrick Wolf and 19 musicians you've never heard of offered their unique and highly fast-forwardable interpretations of "Army of Me". That's right. One CD with the same song 20 times in a row. (It sold at full price.)
Where to go from there? Surely not into hiatus-- not when there's royalties to be made. Instead we get Surrounded, a 7xCD box containing DualDisc remasters of each Björk full-length. Don't get too excited: The remasters don't extend to the regular CD audio portions of each disc (which are heard here exactly as they are on their original pressings), but rather, to new Dolby 5.1 and DTS Surround Sound mixes. Then, presumably in an effort to further infuriate those who've dropped a small fortune on the Volumens, Björk's gone and parceled all her videos across the DVD portions of each album as well. What you end up with are seven full-lengths containing CD mixes, 5.1 mixes and videos from each era. And since Vespertine and Medulla have previously been released in 5.1 iterations, not even the surround stuff is entirely new.
One last thing about Surrounded merits mention: It is, of course, packaged beautifully. Like most of Björk's stuff, there's a real fetishization of the physical artifact at play here. That makes sense: If you're going to cash in on variations on a theme, you may as well elevate those variations to the stuff of high art. If the Ramones were the ultimate working-class band, Björk's the ultimate art director's crush. But despite the presentation, do you really need to drop $100 on this? Probably not. And even if you did, you'd kick yourself for it eventually, 'cause she's pretty much guaranteed to come back with another one that's bigger and better in a few years' time anyway. Built in obsolence-- it's not just for hardware anymore. And they wonder why people stopped buying CDs.


The scrappy indie-punk band reissues its beloved and long-out-of-print first album.

Sunchokes

Had Carmen Perry known her haphazardly formed rock band was fated to gain widespread attention, she might’ve chosen a better name than Sports. The quartet quietly self-released their debut full-length, Sunchokes, just for the hell of it; this was 2014, when Perry and her bandmates Catherine Dwyer, Benji Dossetter, and James Karlin were all still enrolled at their liberal arts college in Ohio. They expected little more from the album than a time capsule to share with friends, but instead, Sunchokes spread by word of mouth until it caught the ear of Father/Daughter, the label that would release Sports’ next album, All of Something, a year later. But that celebratory moment ended up being anticlimactic: Sports broke up shortly after. Dossetter pursued medical school and Karlin relocated to Arizona, while Perry and Dwyer moved to Philadelphia together. Sports never toured All of Something, and had no plans to make music together ever again.
That is, until last year, when Sports returned with a new lineup, a new album, and new name to differentiate them from the Oklahoma synth-pop trio they were often mistaken for. Slow Buzz marked the first record for Remember Sports as they exist today, with their current lineup of Perry, Dwyer, guitarist Jack Washburn, and drummer Connor Perry. The updated name pokes fun at the band’s jinxed past, but it has a new resonance now that Father/Daughter has reissued a remastered deluxe edition of Sunchokes to commemorate its fifth anniversary. It’s a timestamp to testify how far Remember Sports have come, but also a salute to their beginnings that made them beloved in the first place.
Remember Sports make punky indie pop, combining scrappy guitar shredding with Perry’s brazen vocals, which often border on flat-out yelling. They’re most immediately reminiscent of Camp Cope’s Georgia McDonald, fiercely evocative and angrily bereft. Sunchokes showed her in a more lovelorn place: “I’m always wishing you good luck when you’re gone/And I keep trying to fit in with you where I don’t belong,” she admits on “When Morning Comes.” “When did you stop missing me?” she inquires on “Liked You Best,” before confessing that it took “three long years” to stop missing her subject on the title track. She’s self-deprecating, calling herself a jerk and arguing that she’s not worth getting attached to, but even her most crude put-downs are wrapped up with a tongue-in-cheek spunk that confirm she doesn’t need your pity. “So what if I’m lazy?/I like it that way,” she asserts on “Clean Jeans,” following it up with a kiss-off to flame all Instagram gym rats: “I could be at crossfit like you/But I’d rather be dead!”
But it’s impossible to talk about the origins of Remember Sports without mentioning Addie Pray, Perry’s solo project. This reissue includes five original recordings of Addie Pray songs that would later be fleshed out for Sunchokes or All of Something. The best of these—and most emotionally revealing—is “Get Bummed Out,” an ode to a romantic interest she’s trying to get over before they’ve even made it official. She originally uploaded the track to Bandcamp in 2012, and there’s a clear shift in her sentiments between this and the gutsier Sunchokes: “I’m in love with how you make me feel like I’m not so alone,” she sings, suggesting she might be more smitten with the idea of the relationship than the person.
The final moments of “Get Bummed Out” bring forth one of Remember Sports’ best lyrics: “Just make a mess of me, I’ll always clean it up,” Perry confides, as her solo acoustic guitar goes silent. Stark moments like these remind us why we listen to indie pop: Music made without the intention of necessarily being heard can yield the type of songwriting that needs to be heard most.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Lush, heady, and shot through with an undercurrent of wistful contemplation, producer Brian Piñeyro’s “deep reggaetón” sound can’t be called lo-fi anymore.

Derretirse EP

The mid-2000s were banner years for reggaetón—particularly in Miami, where the fledgling sound, a Latin American take on dancehall reggae’s dembow riddim, could be heard booming from cars up and down the avenues. One of the people who picked up on the lurching kick drums and syncopated snares as they dopplered down the block was Brian Piñeyro. As soon as he heard it, Piñeyro told Pitchfork, he realized he wanted to make music that sounded like that, but to “recontextualize” it, make it his own. Eventually he moved to New York, where he became a fixture of the city’s underground electronic community, and as he began developing his voice, crafting nuanced lo-fi house and techno under aliases like DJ Wey, Deejay Xanax, and Luis, reggaetón’s telltale syncopation snuck into his productions alongside house grooves and slow-motion jungle breaks. One project in particular came to embody his “deep reggaetón” sound: DJ Python, a name whose serpentine connotations are a good fit for Piñeyro’s slinky, sidewinding grooves.
Unlike some other producers working under a reptilian moniker, there’s nothing threatening or venomous about DJ Python’s music, and the six-track Derretirse EP, the follow-up to his 2017 album Dulce Compañía, is Piñeyro’s warmest and most inviting record yet. (Its title translates as “to thaw” or “to melt.”) Reggaetón is having another moment right now, as part of the broader urbano movement, but DJ Python’s music sounds nothing like the luxe beats favored by Bad Bunny or Ozuna. Piñeyro remains rooted in the muffled drum machines and foggy synths of underground house and techno; the music on Derretirse is all instrumental, too, save perhaps for a strange, hard-to-identify sound that goes wriggling through “Cuando”—it sounds a little bit like a heavily vocoded scrap of speech or possibly jaw harp, but it could be anything, really. That ambiguity is part and parcel of the DJ Python aesthetic. Instead of using well-defined, declarative sounds to project emotion outward, he deploys nebulous elements in ways that draw the listener in.
His pacing is just as seductive. This is Piñeyro’s slowest record yet: Where most of 2016’s ¡Estéreo Bomba! Vol. 1 and Dulce Compañía bubbled along near house music’s lower limit, the tempos on Derretirse take a precipitous dive. At the same time, the dembow influence is as pronounced as it’s ever been. In “Tímbrame,” loping snares perforate a foggy expanse of synth pads and bell tones; in “Cuando,” handclaps take up the backbeat pulses, answered by echoing claps that lend a hint of the “Diwali” riddim. Sometimes, the dembow groove is mostly implied: In “Pq Cq,” the album’s spacious closing track, overdriven kick drums and rippling castanets carve out space where dembow’s accents would normally fall.
Still, despite the record’s languid energy—“I like calm shit,” Piñeyro once told Resident Advisor—this is no garden-variety chill. It’s lush and heady, and shot through with an undercurrent of wistful contemplation, but none of it sounds like an exercise in presets, whether musical or emotional: In “Espero,” muted rave stabs sing a doleful melody against guitar-like plucks and machine-like chirps—a strange jumble of expressive cues that somehow just works.
What’s clear from moments like these is how far Piñeyro’s production chops have come; this stuff can’t be called lo-fi anymore. That’s especially true on “Be Si To,” a clattering highlight. Metallic, scrap-heap drums that leave a ringing in the ears are balanced by enveloping synth pads and bass so deep you can only feel it. This full-spectrum array of frequency and texture is held together by a no-frills synth melody that sounds like a filtered dial tone, but is expressive–lyrical, even—in a way that’s unusual for this kind of subterranean club cut. As it bumbles away, one finger on the keyboard, it occasionally rises or falls in pitch before returning to its ostinato foundation. It sounds a bit like a car stereo whipping past—an echo, maybe, of the sensation that captivated a young Piñeyro all those years ago.


The UK mystery duo’s new EP is a more playful affair than Icons, more explicit in its internet-brained aesthetics—yet a little less exciting, too.

lil spirits

In a dance-music scene deep in the throes of Y2K nostalgia, Two Shell have managed to ride the zeitgeist without being too obvious about it. Sure, the styles that the mysteriously masked UK duo pluck from are all very much in fashion: the racing drums of jungle, the synthetic rush of hyperpop, the cybernetic throb of techno. But for all of their trollish online lore-building, the music itself has never felt gimmicky. Last year’s Icons EP was a glitched-out slab of slippery grooves and headphone-candy sound design that required zero knowledge of their cryptic personae to appreciate. Two Shell have occasionally earned comparisons to the conceptual genre exercises of PC Music, but they’re as functional a dancefloor companion as any of the festival-crowd-filling UK club acts to which they’re often likened.
On lil spirits, Two Shell lean further into the internet-brained aesthetic they’ve developed through their various extra-musical stunts, dialing up the helium-ballooned vocals, bubblegum basslines, and digital intimacy in their lyrics. As on last year’s heavenly single “home,” lil spirits’ notification pings and chatroom-crush admissions mimic the dopamine hit of opening your phone to a flirty smiley face. It’s an all-around cuter affair than Icons, more explicitly streamlined in its hyperpop aesthetics, but a little less exciting in turn.
Like Icons, lil spirits feels caught in an endless shapeshift; tracks mutate from one gelatinous bassline to the next, governed by an inscrutable logic. The opening “i m e s s a g e” is the most straightforward workout of the bunch, bouncing on a squishy, dribbling groove as text-to-speech vocals swirl, singing of communication breakdown. “I don’t really know how to talk about it,” the TTS awkwardly enunciates, its cybernetic vocals shifting and riding along like an artificial MC vamping over the beat. On the slower “mind_dᴉlɟ,” the ping-ponging rhythm drops out halfway through to reveal a digital narrator calling itself the Mind Flipper, who guides the song through a bitcrushed tunnel of sounds before a clipping microhouse outro. Just when the song regains momentum, everything cuts to black—“Disk full,” says a robotic voice, and it’s as funny as it is frustrating.
The sparkly “love him” is one of the most directly SOPHIE-indebted productions the duo has crafted yet, topping its hyperactive, sped-up synths with cellular beeps and chopped-up vocals recalling Eiffel 65. A buzz-sawing tone clinches the absurdity, ushering the song toward its conclusion with a ridiculously plonked-out melody; it’s as if an elementary schooler started hammering away on their dad’s collection of expensive analog synths. “bluefairy” splinters into even more directions, its moody, aquatic front end giving way to a manic sequence of cheerleading vocals. “Entering hyperspeed,” announces a gentlemanly British voice, before deciding it’s time to go to the supermarket. The effect isn’t far off from watching a corecore video compilation: The song’s introspective aura is slowly swallowed whole by a constant slideshow of cascading thoughts.
Two Shell clearly have a lot of ideas circling in their heads—possibly too many. On lil spirits, it often sounds as if the two musicians are getting in their own way, swapping out rhythms before they have a chance to fully develop, relying too hard on cheekiness to carry the weight. If the relatively straight-faced Icons downplayed Two Shell’s antics, lil spirits does the opposite: Although the duo’s well-rounded sound design gets a chance to shine, too often the actual beats take a backseat to the hijinks. Two Shell can’t quite figure out how to make their sugary club experiments and crowd-igniting instincts play nice, and they often seem more concerned with playing pranks than with making tracks that actually work on a dancefloor. The results are still entertaining, but they can’t help but play like a file that crashed halfway through downloading.


Agitations finds Lotic at his least accessible, most grating, and perhaps not coincidentally, his most ambitious and stirring. This is miles away from the dance floor, but for all the mixtape’s disorienting ruptures and serrated edges, it again reveals Lotic as a sly, playful producer.

Agitations

The 30-minute mixtape Agitations finds producer Lotic (aka J'Kerian Morgan) at his least accessible, most grating, and perhaps not coincidentally, his most ambitious and stirring. "Agitations was born out of the frustrations that come with touring... and feeling increasingly out of touch with club culture and with the music industry in general," Morgan said in preface to his latest release. Accordingly, the music distances itself from the cyclical payoffs and rhythmic underpinnings of the dance floor. This is miles away from anything that could be considered "club culture." There’s something acutely alien about the tracks Morgan constructs, as if the producer is dealing in a musical language that's yet to fully emerge.
Throughout Agitations, Lotic's signature spidery sound design is subjected to further mangling via a series of violent jump-cuts and jarring bursts of noise. The arrangements treat sounds and themes like raw materials in need of repurposing: Each unit is contorted, smashed, and remade, either splintering into abstraction or writhing in glitchy tumult. Yet, for all the mixtape’s disorienting ruptures and serrated edges, Agitations, much like 2014's Damsel in Distress and this year’s Heterocetera EP, again reveals Lotic as a sly, playful producer. On Heterocetera, Lotic sampled the ballroom standard "The Ha Dance" by Masters at Work, reshaping it radically, and he alludes to this same sample again here in the opening moments of *"*Carried". This version sounds pared-down and pixelated, a mutation of a mutation, and it's a microcosm of Agitations' tendency to tease out strange turns in familiar currencies.
Agitations might not be conventional dance music, but it remains both fiercely visceral and highly visual. It lacks Damsel in Distress' mastery of cultural memory, and Heterocetera's propulsive push-and-pull, but more than makes up for it in raw dynamism; a dogged, thrilling futurism hinged on brute energy, angularity, and unremitting disquiet. Moving in dense, unstable clusters, the mixtape can be taken as a celebration of frustration, liberation, and chaos, a means for Morgan to work through the restlessness and anxiety he's faced of late. For an artist who's consistently latched onto and forged a style as imaginative as any in the electronic underground, Agitations shows Lotic pushing still further ahead.


The UK dubstep producer's first long-form release since her 2010 Hyperdub debut is an entirely different beast: I Make Lists reaches far beyond the London scene to the global club underground.

I Make Lists EP

There is a sample of Ikonika clearing her throat about a minute and a half into the London producer's I Make Lists EP, her first long-form release since debut album Contact, Love, Want, Have on Hyperdub in 2010. It's a let's-get-down-to-business kind of throat clearing, an aural rolling back of the sleeves before things kick off. And Ikonika really does kick off on I Make Lists. It's an entirely different beast from Contact, Love, Want, Have, which was a highly personal knitting together of her experience growing up on video games and R&B pop, getting into metal and becoming a drummer, and embracing-- and being embraced by-- the then wholly south-London dubstep scene.
Born from memories and echoes of garage, dub, and drum'n'bass, dubstep was the first anti-genre genre and, it can and has been argued, lost its way by becoming a genre. That rigidity is something Ikonika has always been wary of; her music is acutely aware of the limitations of borders. As if to make a point, I Make Lists reaches beyond the London scene to the global club underground she has become a crucial part of over the last couple of years, both as a DJ and owner of the Hum + Buzz label she runs with partner Optimum, releasing records by New York-via-Chicago's Brenmar and Sydney's Dro Carey.
Flight lines, lasers, and firework trails criss-cross throughout the record; it is bold, ballsy and high on adrenaline. There is plenty of acid, funk, gnarly bass, and yet more evidence of Ikonika's wily way with melody and synths that scissor-kick like hyperactive, high-pitched Middle Eastern rhythms. There is a sense that this is a record that would go off in Tel Aviv, in Cape Town, in Mexico City, in Buenos Aires. It also has a kinship with Kingdom's Fade to Mind label in New York as well as with Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990's Night Slugs in London, both proponents of this most borderless of new club music. Most of all, I Make Lists feels free.
Ikonika lives on the outskirts of London, minutes from Heathrow, and it's this proximity to escape, to worlds beyond your own, that throbs strongest on I Make Lists. The album artwork is an aubergine sky filled with paper airplane-like flying objects, fantasy versions of the crafts that cut across the skyline above the purpose-built studio in the garden of her house. Continuing the theme, closing track "PR812" is named after a Philippine Airlines flight that was hijacked back in 2000 by a perpetrator who robbed passengers at gunpoint before, incredibly, making his escape by parachute. It's also the most sensually electric track on the record: taut, mournful, and ever-reaching. Which leads us back to the throat-clearing, because ultimately, for all its thrills and spills, I Make Lists is the sound of Ikonika getting ready for her next move.


Latest from Kieran Hebden is a mini-album that leans toward 4/4 techno, but, as usual, he seems less interested in developing genres than in absorbing their tropes into his own hermetic sound world.

Ringer

As Four Tet, Kieran Hebden has been a chameleonic interpreter of genres. Using a cut-up and collage approach, he's bent folk music, jazz, and hip-hop into impossible shapes; each time we seem to draw a bead on his style, whether it's folktronica, instrumental hip-hop, or IDM, Hebden neatly steps out of the crosshairs to leave us firing at thin air. In fact, his music is best understood according to practice. From the folky samples of Pause to the laptop bobbins of Rounds to the free-jazzy squalls of his collaborations with drummer Steve Reid, Hebden has seemed less interested in developing genres than in absorbing their tropes into his own hermetic sound world. What distinguishes Four Tet's albums isn't so much the kind of music he appropriates as how he uses it, and in this he's been fairly consistent: He snips and smears until his sources all but vanish into his crisp polyrhythms.
On his superlative album Rounds, Hebden's music did indeed seem round: It moved in great languid whorls, always closing in on itself. The song "Spirit Fingers", which fluttered and darted like a hummingbird, was an exception. In retrospect, "Spirit Fingers" seems to presage the four-song "mini-album" Ringer, which is as well-served by its title as Rounds was. Here, Hebden can no longer be meaningfully compared to Prefuse 73, as the album's dialed-down cut-ups and continuous rhythms render it too smoove for IDM.
At four songs, Ringer is economical, but the diversity within its half-hour run time makes it surprisingly robust as well. This is meant to be Hebden's techno-based album, with flashes of Afrobeat and krautrock. You'll catch whiffs of the former in the sidewinding percussion of "Wing Body Wing", and of the latter in the buried pulsation of "Swimmer" (not to mention 8-bit techno in the pixelated sprays of the title track). But as always, Hebden's latest is most interesting at the level of theme-- Ringer is about concealment and revelation, and it gains a great deal of tension in its quick juxtapositions of the two.
There is something tantalizing about these four tracks, which, at times, seems to verge on the lascivious. The title track thrums for ten hotwired minutes, but there's a sense of something being held back; the loping house beat it implies never actually appears. One of its sub-melodies comes into view measure by measure, showing a little more of its progression each time, like a hem creeping slowly up a thigh. This isn't the Four Tet who shoves shunts into his rhythms; "Ringer" unfolds with inexorable logic. But it's a logic parallel to the one we might normally expect, which exhorts a track like this to eventually break into a climactic clearing.
If "Ringer" flirts with the thwarted epiphany, then "Ribbons" (by my reckoning, the album's highlight) makes up for the tease by enacting the moment of revelation over and over, rooting itself in the ecstatic experience. Hebden punches trills into the seething percussion at various speeds and durations, sometimes slow and wet, sometimes quick and ringing; sometimes discretely separated, sometimes truncated and overlapped. It's the sound of a series of beaded curtains being thrown back, divulging more curtains: all revelation, nothing revealed.
After the flirtatious "Ribbons", Hebden pulls back coyly with the hypnotic "Swimmer": A wavering monotone surrounds it, exposing bits of gargling synths and holding back any sort of release until the halfway point, when the percussion suddenly snakes through the monotone like ivy. The closing track, "Wing Body Wing", is slightly less interesting than the others; its emphasis on bare-naked percussion makes it sound like half of a Sound of Silver-era LCD Soundsystem track. The rhythms are adroit, but seem to long for something more. Nevertheless, "Wing Body Wing" is the only time when the album's strategic omissions dilute its impact rather than bolstering it.


The Waterfall, My Morning Jacket's seventh album, is less a return to form than to spirit, reaffirming what an exciting rock band MMJ can be when they’re at their most generous, curious and restless.

The Waterfall

"I'm getting so tired of trying to always be nice," Jim James laments on "Big Decisions", the first single from My Morning Jacket's seventh LP The Waterfall. It's a surprising line from James, a guy responsible for a nearly weeklong music festival in Mexico named One Big Holiday. If there was a mean bone in his body, we haven't seen it before—My Morning Jacket lyrics are mostly praise and posi-vibes, feeling wonderful about a wonderful higher power for giving wonderful men the most wonderful voices. On "Big Decisions", James pushes back on the weight of a lopsided relationship, and the mundane, everyday struggle is charged with everything that has made My Morning Jacket one of the most likeable major American rock bands of the 21st century—reverberating Flying V guitars, James’ expansive rebel yell, explosive harmonies and reverb capable of canvassing the entirety of Manchester, Tenn. and beyond. Even if James is reasserting himself in an atypically selfish way, it sounds like a triumph big enough for everyone to share.
Since My Morning Jacket abandoned the grain silo on their 2005 masterwork, their albums have followed a similar format: reverb or no reverb, James’ saintly voice can redeem anything, so no song idea was too strange as long as it could still work at Bonnaroo. On that level, The Waterfall does little you haven’t already heard from My Morning Jacket; they just regain the quality control that abandoned them on Evil Urges and ditch the damage control that pervaded Circuital. "Believe (Nobody Knows)" feels precision-engineered for the express purpose of opening My Morning Jacket's live show for the next two years: a big, windmilled chord anticipates every low-register repetition of the title in the prechorus, preparing for when James lets the final "BELIIIIIIIIIEVE" rip an octave higher. And that’s where the Klieg lights inevitably hit, as does the same recognizable liftoff from "Wordless Chorus" and "Mahgeetah", a feeling that the possibilities of life itself are limitless, not just the range of My Morning Jacket. You can’t fake something like "Believe (Nobody Knows)" if you haven’t played in front of tens of thousands of festival goers.
Then again, few found fault with the first ten minutes of Evil Urges and Circuital; the measure of a My Morning Jacket album is their success at doing what’s not expected of them. Compared to "Highly Suspicious" or "Holdin’ on to Black Metal", the risks here are more manageable, the results far more successful: there’s "Compound Fracture", which tails off into a coda of keyboard flutter and falsetto after flaunting Chvrches electronic stomp and Some Girls strut. "Get the Point" delivers James’ most biting lyrics to date within a McCartney-esque acoustic ditty ("I'm trying to tell you plainly how I'm feeling day to day/ And I'm so sorry now that you ain't feeling the same way"). The electronic cut-and-paste of "Spring (Among the Living)" is a sleek, modernist iPad compared to "Cobra"’s bulky, retro ENIAC, while Eastern modes poking through "Like a River" and "Tropics (Erase Traces)" scent the chillout tent with lavender incense rather than the usual weed smoke. It reaffirms that MMJ are one of the most exciting American rock bands going when they’re at their most generous, curious and restless, as they are here.
But "Big Decisions" puts the focus squarely on a new place for an MMJ record: the lyrics. The song, and the album as a whole, gives Jim James The Person center stage for what feels like the first time, instead of just The Voice of Jim James. As on record, James has been open with the big picture while skimping on the details—after 15 or so years of giving his all on stage, he’s left just as much off it, and here he is at 37, nearly crippled by workplace injuries, spent from partying and wondering aloud in Rolling Stone, "what have I done wrong in every relationship I've been in until now?"
There are legitimate personal stakes here and The Waterfall allows for James to express some uncharacteristic negativity without dwelling on it. For a record of spiritual and romantic reckoning, it’s remarkably level-headed and pragmatic. James sweetly coos over Chi-Lites psych-soul, "It’s a thin line/ Between love and wasting my time", clearly assessing a broken situation to which he mends on "Get the Point": "Daydreaming of leaving/ I only had to do it." He wishes his ex the best of luck and then immediately celebrates the exhilarating, frightening rush of single living on "Spring (Among the Living)"—during each rambling guitar solo, you can picture James right-swiping to his heart’s content.
For many, Jim James is basically synonymous with My Morning Jacket, so it’s justifiable to find parallels in the rejuvenation of each—My Morning Jacket has another album on the way some time next year. It’s welcome news for the band's fans, but maybe a bit disappointing considering how a predetermined release schedule usually results in two very good albums in place of one great one, and The Waterfall gets close to greatness. With a little troubleshooting, it might have matched At Dawn's cohesion or Z's dazzling diversity: The misty-eyed reflection of "Only Memories Remain" cycles back to a breakup narrative on Side B that otherwise feels like it was put on shuffle, and The Waterfall stalls the most during the usually incendiary guitar workouts. But this is Jim James accepting where he and My Morning Jacket are at the moment: a bit older, a bit broken, more skeptical but very much among the living.


Following on their stirring full-length debut, The Spoils, Zola Jesus return with a terrific EP that applies their gothic drama to more immediate songs.

Stridulum EP

Zola Jesus didn't need to clean up to stand apart from the lo-fi horde-- they already had Nika Danilova's voice, which tends to cut through a track and leave an indelible impression no matter how it's recorded. Whether it's wordless yowling, an extended cover of "Somebody to Love", or something as disarming as The Spoils' "Clay Bodies", her singing has a way of sticking in your memory. Even so, the Stridulum EP represents a large stride forward, not just in production quality, but in the band's focus. Heard next to their gauzy beginnings, these six synth-driven tracks sound surprisingly clear, even poppy. Whether this cleaner sound is here to stay or not, the emotions behind the music are just as heavy, and this self-contained EP is the perfect place for the band to try something different.
Danilova still belts out the lyrics from behind layers of cavernous reverb and the overall sound remains dramatic and foreboding. And though there are moments here where the foundation rumbles and the sound is disorienting, recording quality has nothing to do with it. Instead, Zola Jesus are more inclined to shake up the atmosphere with dissonance, like the whirring that disrupts the otherwise calming "Trust Me" or the ominous chamber-of-souls hissing at the end of "Night". Still, these hints of abstraction haunt the margins of more direct songs where hooky verses and memorable choruses are the norm.
The tracks on Stridulum follow a pattern that opener "Night" nails at the start: They build from minimal but insistent beats and simple melodies into crescendos where the synthesizer tones, sampled incidental noise, and layered vocals merge into a stirring whole. Danilova leans on immediate, familiar phrases here: "At the end of the night, we'll be together again"; "When you're lost, know I'll be around"; "It's not easy to fall in love"; "I can't stand to see you this way". The lyrics are visceral, and swooning chords and always-operatic vocals multiply the effect. Zola Jesus may be experimenting in more earnest and accessible pop here, but the charged theatrical mood is just as overwhelming.
Zola Jesus' brooding, gothic vibe probably isn't going anywhere, nor is their willingness to experiment with the sonics and constraints of their songs. But Stridulum's immediately striking cover art hints at the depth of the band's ambition: Their personality is still here, but there's more thought in the composition and the presentation. So rather than cleaning up and getting ready for a close-up, the EP feels more like a lateral move, in the best possible way-- there's no guessing what comes next.


Offering 12 songs in 21 minutes, the metal band refines its sound, creating an unsettled atmosphere littered with strange and memorable moments.

Full of Hell: Garden of Burning Apparitions

Garden of Burning Apparitions

Full of Hell exist in a constant churn. On Garden of Burning Apparitions, the metal band’s fifth non-collaborative full-length, they break down elements of grindcore, noise, hardcore, death metal, and industrial music so the sounds may be reconstituted into something uglier, more barbed, and more enigmatic. Their previous album, 2019’s excellent Weeping Choir, seemed to balance the totality of extreme music on a sharp pinhead as it teetered through moments of incredible dissonance without abandoning the stomps and hooks of the band’s hardcore roots. Vocalist Dylan Walker said that those songs covered “every little area that we wanted to be ever since we started the band,” so it’s not a surprise that Garden feels like a refinement of the same sound, pulling them to greater, if somewhat less accessible, heights.
On its surface, Garden of Burning Apparitions sounds incredibly unsettled. These songs feel tugged into place, one part jerked into sync with the next: The lengthiest section of the opening “Guided Blight”’s 58 seconds is Walker’s opening scream. And if it’s tempting to think of the barrage of sounds as a form of collage, it’s also clear that every moment has been given an incredible amount of thought. “Murmuring Foul Spring” moves from dishwater murk to bright blasts from drummer David Bland, the rest of the group playing so tight that it’s impossible to tell if the production is chopped by some kind of stroboscopic effect; the hardcore payoff in the closing moments ends so quickly that you’re left with your fist awkwardly in the air. Elsewhere, “Urchin Thrones” is crowned by Sam DiGristine’s saxophone, which he first uses as a traditional backing layer, playing a broad and blank sheet of sound. But when guitarist Spencer Hazard sprints away, he follows, doubling his lead as they flirt with atonality. It’s a strange, even frightening moment that lasts all of three seconds: a sudden shift proving that nothing is safe in these songs.
Garden is littered with these small but memorable moments: the slide whistle of feedback that ushers out “Asphyxiant Blessing,” or the spectral moaning that flits through the otherwise straightforward bridge of “Reeking Tunnels,” or the way closer “Celestial Hierarch” ends in an acid-etched loop that mimics the heartbeat-thump of a locked groove on vinyl. The album’s concision—12 songs in 21 minutes—means every moment counts, and Full of Hell uses every bit of space they afford themselves to get their message across.
Absent a song like “Armory of Obsidian Glass,” Weeping Choir’s sludgy six-minute centerpiece, Garden offers no place to rest. The closest thing to a break is “Derelict Satellite,” a hailstorm of noise that crowns the album’s opening third. Walker’s vocals are buried deep in the distance, barely audible behind a shredded curtain of rattling chain mail. The album moves through eardrum-shredding dissonance, rattling blast beats, and lurching riffs so rapidly that it’s difficult to clock exactly what’s happening as it’s happening. But there are so many ideas, so many nooks in its corners, that the swiftness creates a sense of desperation: a desire to hold on to it, even as it’s being swept away.

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The austere trio has profoundly warped its slowcore sound to create an ambitious, modern wonder of an album, an exploration of the song as an imperfect conduit of feeling.

Double Negative

It is a flabbergasting coincidence that Low’s 12th album ended up sharing its name with one of the most absurd moments of Donald Trump’s summer. In July, about a month after the band announced their album, Trump publicly backpedaled from a comment he’d made which seemed to indicate to Russian President Vladimir Putin that, unlike the CIA and FBI and the remainder of the intelligence agencies, he didn’t believe Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’” went Trump’s revision. “Sort of a double negative.”
This might not even be worth mentioning if the Midwest’s premier slowcore ensemble hadn’t crafted their astounding new album, Double Negative, as a scowling and shellshocked response to Trump’s America. In a recent Wire cover story, guitarist and vocalist Alan Sparhawk said Trump’s administration prompted him to question “humanity, logic, modern society” and he’s quoted as referring to Trump as “that prick” onstage. And now, the album’s title is imbued with further meaning, a reiteration of the worst president at his worst. The serendipity adds to, but is hardly the extent of, the considerable wonder of an album in which a career indie band manages to warp their sound profoundly while retaining the soul of their art. Double Negative defies expectations yet makes perfect sense.
This record would knock listeners on their asses coming from any band at any time, but it is extraordinary that Low is doing such challenging, relevant work 25 years into their career. Long gone are the days when the group could dumbfound with just a handful of sounds: the splat of a snare; guitar, and bass that sounded suspended in codeine; Sparhawk’s perma-mourn; the heavenly Mimi Parker on halo. The prevailing slowcore sound of their first half-dozen albums cast Low’s musical identity in metal, to borrow an image from 2001’s landmark Things We Lost in the Fire, so much so that one could have easily overlooked the slow expansion of their sound over the last decade and a half.
The work on Double Negative, while often sounding completely radical in its own right, isn’t uncharacteristic, per se. It taps into the band’s wanderlust, its generous melodic sensibility, its considerable aptitude in creating atmosphere, not just in the abstract but in the realm of drone. The album is like a discovery of a new mutation of still-recognizable DNA. And finally this new strain of sound isn’t just bold for Low; it’s just plain bold.
No 11-song statement has functioned quite like this, though you’re likely to be reminded of snatches and scraps of other artists in the band’s pivot and ensuing textures—William Basinski’s tactile nature and exercises in disintegration, Throbbing Gristle’s thicker, full-bodied moments, My Bloody Valentine’s degradation celebration, the organized chaos of Björk’s Homogenic. This is a leap forward from its vaguely predictive source, a la Radiohead’s Kid A.
The band recorded Double Negative over the past two years with producer BJ Burton at Justin Vernon’s April Base studio in Wisconsin. Burton, who wrote and played on Bon Iver’s own makeover record, 2016’s 22, A Million, has made clear that he has a knack for helping steer a band into the logical unknown. Their previous collaboration with Burton, 2015’s glitchy-around-the-edges Ones and Sixes, only hinted at what was to come. Double Negative is nothing but edges. It is an album with noise coming out of its wounds. It conjures the exact inverse of the sort beautifying restoration work done on the soundtracks of vintage films to remove thumps, hums, and crackles. Here thumps, hums, and crackles are piled on and the results are rarely short of stunning.
On the surface, Double Negative may appear to be a collection of songs that were composed and then dismantled, a sort of electronic-indie answer to prefab distressed jeans. This seems particularly so on tracks like opener “Quorum,” which feels like it’s being run over by square tires with snow chains, and “Tempest,” which is filtered to the point of sounding as if it’s playing from a needle on a turntable that’s collecting toxic sludge. But apparently, the process was much more integrated than merely building up to break down—the band would show up with rough sketches of songs and then hammer them out with Burton. In the process, the line between performer and producer was scribbled out in static.
Collectively, Low and Burton take an egalitarian approach. Creation and decay intertwine and texture is as crucial as melody. At times, Low’s already oblique lyrics are obscured by distortion; at others, vocals are sampled and contorted into alien sound transmissions, courtesy of keyboardist/bassist/synth-manipulator Steve Garrington. The composition is dynamic and riveting—“Always Trying to Work It Out” is gentle, classic Low, smoldering under reverb until it splits in half and pours out even more static—midway through, the song sounds like it’s frying. And then boom: a muffled bass drum rumbles and it all pulls together just as it had before it fell apart. Additionally, many of the songs here extend way beyond their verses and choruses to ambient codas that are every bit as assured as the more conventional structures that lead to them. “The Son, the Sun,” is only ambience. Haunted by what sounds like moderate wind passing over a mic, while a distant synth echoes and coalesces with wordless, reverberating vocals, it’s a three-and-a-half minute shiver.
For something so consistently thrilling, Double Negative is deathly grim. Noise slurps and laps away at melodies with a diseased tongue. What sounds like a monster trapped in a box provides rhythm on “Poor Sucker.” On “Dancing and Fire,” Sparhawk moans, “It’s not the end, it’s just the end of hope,” a seeming rebuke to the title of Low’s 1994 debut album, I Could Live in Hope.
“Dancing and Fire” is one of the few songs with completely intelligible vocals on a record filled with voices under siege, obscured and buried as if to render in a way beyond words the current administration’s attack on speech. There’s a sort of strobe effect on “Dancing and Blood,” as though Parker’s vocal is playing off a cassette that warped after being left on a car’s dashboard in the summertime. Anxiety—from getting lost in all the noise, of not being heard, of even perhaps adding to that noise—runs rampant on Double Negative, which works just as well as music as it does conceptual art: Here is an album-long exploration of the song as an imperfect conduit of feeling. On such shaky ground, three songs here strive for permanence in their titles—“Always Up,” “Always Trying to Work It Out,” and “Rome (Always in the Dark).” The tragedy is implicit and enduring.
We are in a climate where art is judged for its politics as much as (if not more than) its aesthetics, where people look at entertainment like they do voters: You’re either part of the problem, or the solution. Making a socially conscious album might seem like an obvious move, but Low present something far more visceral than protest music, a body of work that doesn’t dictate but is more interested in a despair that galvanizes and paralyzes. The political and aesthetic here, in fact, are impossible to separate. Double Negative’s sheer audacity, its lack of easy answers and its risk of alienating longtime fans, rules out any notion that this is some sort of cheap bandwagon-jumping or pretentious wokeness. At times there’s even a chilling pragmatism—caked in fuzz and to a double-time pulse that honks at a (relatively) brisk 103 BPM, Sparhawk and Parker sing on the album’s ultimate track, “Disarray,” “Before it falls into total disarray/You’ll have to learn to live a different way.” Their radical revision of their sound doesn’t provide a model, merely an impressionistic expression of how that might feel. That the song sails out on Low’s most enduring trademark—Sparhawk and Parker’s intertwined harmonies—suggests not everything has to be lost in the fire.


The Swedish trio follows its newfound pop success with more pronounced nods to left-field and international influences.

Living Thing

It was the whistle heard around the world. You heard Peter Bjorn and John's breakthrough single "Young Folks" on "Grey's Anatomy". You heard it on the in-house muzak system while waiting in line to order at McDonald's. You heard it every time your co-worker in a neighboring cubicle deigned to whistle while they worked. But while making their unwitting entry into the North American mainstream with 2006's Writer's Block, the Swedish trio of Peter Morén, Björn Yttling, and John Eriksson used their busy interview schedule to talk up far less populist inspirations: the minimalist post-punk of Young Marble Giants, the rhythmic jazz of the Ethiopiques series, and other Other Music-recommended curios.
That this follow-up album bears more pronounced nods to PB&J's left-field and international influences could easily be interpreted as a reactionary riposte to their sudden pop success (also known as "pulling an In Utero"). But it also constitutes a perfectly logical next step in a career that's seen the band quickly evolve from a traditional Beatlesque retro-rock trio to adventurous producers of cosmopolitan pop music on Writer's Block. The deconstructionist ethic of Living Thing comes as even less of a surprise when you consider how the band's interim activities have played to the extremities of their sound: There was a digital-only album of texturally rich instrumentals (last year's Seaside Rock) and a stripped-down acoustic solo album from de facto frontman Morén, while Yttling became the go-to producer for veteran acts looking for some extra pop polish (Primal Scream). However, the fact that an album like Living Thing was to be expected from Peter Bjorn and John doesn't make it feel like any less of a letdown.
You could call Living Thing PB&J's companion to super-fan Kanye West's 808 and Heartbreaks, where a deliberate over-reliance on drum-machine beats and bleats is exploited to illustrate the emotional unrest and stagnation conveyed in the lyrics. The tension peaks early on with Morén's "It Don't Move Me", a diatribe against sentimentalism ostensibly directed at an ex-lover ("forget photos and letters... you don't move me no more"), but which could easily be about his band's own ubiquity-- it can't be a coincidence that the song plays like a virtual rewrite of "Young Folks" (ascending chorus and all) but with the bongos and whistles relinquished in favor of a hand-clapped electro-funk backing track and deep piano tones. However, if PB&J are committed to keep moving forward, they're doing so at a snail's pace-- whether it's the oversold optimism of Eriksson's twee-pop opener "The Feeling" or Yttling's half-baked stoner-rock dirge "I'm Losing My Mind", the sense of ennui and longing they're trying to express is all too accurately reflected by sputtering rhythms that rarely gain any traction or momentum.
The skeletal production is in turn matched by nursery-rhyme hooks that tenuously toe the line between endearingly naïve and amateurishly underdeveloped: The shantytown chant of "Nothing to Worry About" finds PB&J ably adapting to a post-"Paper Planes" pop landscape, but its clunky chorus line ("Do this thing/ This type of thing/ Put a little money in this type of thing") feels too self-consciously vague to make you want to join the song's kiddie choir. Likewise, the garish provocations of "Lay It Down" ("Hey, shut the fuck up, boy/ You are starting to piss me off") clash awkwardly with the song's congenial snap-along sway. And when the band settles nicely into the relaxed juju groove of the title track, it forgets to write a proper chorus-- so it just crams in a hurried rewrite of the one featured in the superior ELO song of the same name.
Not surprisingly, Living Thing fares best when the songs don't draw too much attention to their simplicity and lay off the gimmickry: the late-1980s U2/Gabriel slow burn of "Just the Past" (complete with lighter-waving fade-out); the tropical doo wop of "Stay This Way"; the Kraftwerkian post-coital glow of closer "Last Night". But there's a noticeable deficit of swoon-worthy climaxes to complement these meditative turns. Compared to the widescreen splendor of Writer's Block, Living Thing sounds like a noble but flawed attempt by Peter Bjorn and John to test the fortitude of their songwriting using the most barren and broken of arrangements. But more often that not, it sounds like they settled on the drum-machine presets first, with the lyrics and melodies thrown on top as afterthoughts. After hearing Yttling repeatedly declare, "I'm losing my mind/ That's why I ain't fine" for the umpteenth time, it's hard to shake the nagging feeling that Peter Bjorn and John applied the Writer's Block title to the wrong album.


On his proper full-length debut, the mixtape veteran and Jim Jones ghostwriter tempers street-rap hardness with glimmers of emotional nuance.

Vigilante Season

Cam'ron's meandering 2006 Jay-Z diss "You Gotta Love It" did little to threaten hip-hop's biggest star. But it did have memorable lines about Jigga's newfound love for chancletas, and, more significantly, announced the arrival of Max B, an ex-con rapper with the gift for a gripping melody. Max went on to much under-the-radar creative success. His widely credited ghostwriting for Jim Jones produced some of the latter's biggest hits, and helped Jones' second LP land on the Billboard top 10. He was the musical mastermind behind underground Harlem super-group Byrdgang. And Max's succession of solo mixtapes, from Million Dollar Baby Radio to Coke Wave to Quarantine, established the rapper as a major talent. His style was gritty and unrefined, yet retained immediate pop instincts. Vigilante Season doesn't move too far afield from his mixtape work, despite being his first official solo LP. This is a mixed blessing. For his fanbase, it includes better sound quality, no DJ drops, and several missing pieces from a career that was cut too short. But while it has some great moments, it doesn't stand above some of his better tapes, and may be an uneven entry point for those not steeped in the Biggaveli mythos.
But flawed as Vigilante Season is, investing time in Max's world can be rewarding. Like the biggest rappers of the past few years-- think Gucci, Drake, even Soulja Boy-- Max fills a space that, a decade ago, would have been occupied by producers. He is as much songwriter as rapper, and musically, Max is an old soul. This is most evident on one of the album's best moments, the sublime "Where Do I Go (BBQ Music)", which features dual choruses, one of which interpolates Cherrelle and Alexander O'Neal's 1985 R&B classic "Saturday Love". His ear for memorable hooks, sung in a grungy slur, gives his music a hazy, intoxicated quality. Max's lyrics don't have the opulent imagery of Gucci or the poetic minimalism of a rapper like the Jacka. But like both artists, his raps sound cool, with an effortless detachment that disguises musical precision.
His lyrics provide a rough, if familiar, street-rap character sketch, with all the rags-to-riches tales and illegal business that image implies. One of Max's particular innovations was to give late-00s New York a more universal appeal, taking an every-thug street-prophet template and coloring it with the melodicism of classic West Coast or Midwest (think Bone Thugs-N-Harmony) gangster rap. Some of this material would be tedious in most rappers' hands. It is pro-forma street music, and brutality and misogyny are a part of its fabric. His work is engaging not in spite of this-- your mileage may vary for obvious reasons-- but because he manages to suffuse this ugliness with an undercurrent of nuanced emotion. There is no redemption in his words themselves, and little sense of the pain underlying it all. Instead, the record's druggy, mournful tone and melancholy songcraft provide a contrasting canvas for Max's cool remove. In this contradiction, his detachment provides balance, raising the emotional stakes. Max is an actor in a drama larger than himself, an unreliable narrator in a chaotic world. In the tension between song and rapper lies the music's power and truth.
The production throughout-- the bulk courtesy of Harlem producer Dame Grease-- sounds dirty and dilapidated, yet remains open to smooth pop songcraft. His beats are tense and compressed, but tackle a range of moods, from the ambiguous nausea of "White Lines" to the wistfulness of "You Won't Go". Compared with the freewheeling, capricious atmosphere of the now-classic Coke Wave mixtape, Max's lyrics are shot through with bitterness. His frequent target is Jim Jones, who managed to swindle Max out of his publishing in exchange for bail money. This tone, though understandable, makes Vigilante Season a limited introduction to Max's work, but it does add a further dimension to one of this era's most underrated rap artists.