Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 2000 album from one of the most famous and influential musicians in South Asian history, a spare, heart-rending, spiritually transcendent experience.

Raqs-e-Bismil

You’d think that one of the greatest vocalists of all time might have some notes for rising musicians. But as a judge on the 2012 reality singing competition Sur Kshetra, famed Pakistani Sufi singer Abida Parveen was often exceedingly neutral. When asked in an interview why she avoids sharing criticism despite being appointed as a judge, she responded with her typical wisdom: “Because it’s music, not war.” The journalist interviewing her followed up, asking who she hoped would win the competition. “I pray Allah makes a good decision. That’s all.”
Parveen’s humility and diplomacy are almost comical given her position as one of the most famous and influential musicians in South Asian history. When she was 5, her father chose her over her brothers to become his successor in their family practice of Sufi singing, and by the age of 23, she was named the official singer of Radio Pakistan, the national public broadcaster for radio in the country. Now 70 years old, Parveen, who is often referred to as “the queen of Sufi music,” has released over a hundred albums, received the Nishan-e-Imtiaz—Pakistan’s highest civilian award—and is credited with helping popularize Sufi music and culture among young people in South Asia and around the world.
Parveen’s modesty despite her immense success is part of her religion. She makes music in the tradition of Sufism, a mystical, philosophical expression of Islam that began in the 10th century. Sufism prioritizes spiritual purification, a divine, intoxicating connection with God, and a sense of humility that comes from prioritizing that connection above all earthly desires. In interviews, Parveen often deemphasizes her importance as a person, instead positioning her performances as a means for communing with God. “The truth doesn’t need to be told,” she said in an interview in 2001. “It can only be experienced. Remember, I’m not performing. He is singing through me. It is His song, and it sings by itself.”
Sufism also specifically deprioritizes the role of the singer in music-making. The Sufi practice of sama’—listening to music with the intention of achieving closeness to God—instead privileges the listener. The concept of sama’ has inspired artistic movements across the globe from Turkey’s whirling dervishes to Morocco’s Gnaoua music, which has had an outsized influence on jazz greats in the West like Ornette Coleman and Pharoah Sanders, to name just a couple.
On stage, when Parveen channels the greatness of God, she transforms completely. She sometimes hallucinates while on stage, or brings the audience to tears by singing just a few notes. Nowhere is her singular vocal talent clearer than on her excellent 2000 album Raqs-e-Bismil. The album title translates to “Dance of the Wounded,” and on the record, Parveen conveys burning desire and yearning for God through the subtleties of her singing: the poise with which she delivers a single note, the husky, smoldering tone of her voice, her interplay between precision and fervor. She’s often compared to Nina Simone, whose shows have been described as “having the aura of sacramental rites.” The two artists sing with such dynamism and heart that when you listen to them, you feel transported beyond the limitations of your body and individual perceptions and into a spiritual realm of infinite possibility.
Even though Parveen is such a prolific artist, Raqs-e-Bismil remains one of her most critically acclaimed and impactful albums because of the beauty of the lyrics and how eloquently she delivers them. She also refers to it as her fusion album, undoubtedly among her most sonically adventurous. The arrangements are sparse—often just tabla, strings, and synth—but cohesive, inky, and foreboding. It’s an album fraught with tension: between the earthly and the divine, the beauty of her voice and the devastation of her words, the stylized Urdu and the more colloquial folk language she oscillates between, and the foundations in South Asian classical music and Western influences.
At the time of its release, international audiences were primed to hear it. Western listeners had become increasingly familiar with South Asian Sufi music over the latter half of the 19th century. Qawwali, the most well-known form of Sufi music from South Asia, had been practiced since the 13th century, but started to be used in Indian film music beginning in the 1940s. In 1975, The Sabri Brothers played at Carnegie Hall, the first qawwali musicians to perform in the United States. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan went on to experiment with the form and collaborate with a number of Western artists including Peter Gabriel, Eddie Vedder, and Michael Brook. His and Brook’s collaborative album, Night Song, was nominated for a Grammy for Best World Music Album in 1997.
When Khan died in 1997, Abida Parveen was seen as his successor, especially in Western media. But as an assessment on Parveen’s talent, defining her as a successor to Khan felt inadequate. She was more his peer than his pupil—she had been singing for four decades when he died— not to mention the two artists also have entirely different musical approaches. Khan’s famous qawwali performances engross the listener in a cacophony of sound. The music generally begins with slow, rhythmic instrumental interludes and meditative vocals, but the performers use hand claps and lively calls and responses between the lead singer and a backing chorus to build to a frenetic climax over the course of 10 to 30 minutes. Parveen specializes in kafi, a sparser, more repetitive form of South Asian music that features only one singer and pulls from regional folk traditions in Sindh and Punjab. Qawwali creates a sense of orchestral grandeur, while kafi focuses on the effect and emotion of the individual singer. It’s the difference between walking through a garden in full bloom and observing the singular beauty of a wildflower.
On Raqs-e-Bismil, she sings kafi as well as ghazal, a third form of South Asian poetry defined by rhyming couplets and highly stylized Urdu language. All forms of Sufi music aspire to remind the listener of the ecstasy of communing with God, but ghazal and kafi do so by emphasizing lyricism and introspection over the fervor incited in qawwali. Raqs-e-Bismil pushes the solitary, contemplative mood to almost unbearably heart-wrenching levels. On Parveen’s album Janaan, released the same year, a bright bamboo flute trill or cascading synth blip sprinkle the mix with whimsy and color. On Raqs-e-Bismil, the arrangements are far more meditative and entrancing. Even compared to other releases like 1997’s Humsafar or 2000’s Ho Jamalo, where the instrumentation is pared back, Raqs-e-Bismil sounds much more lush, cohesive, and immersive. The boisterous spontaneity of those other arrangements is replaced with poised, expansive synth and tabla notes that fill the room like fog.
For the arrangements and lyrical selections on Raqs-e-Bismil, Parveen worked with composer and filmmaker Muzaffar Ali, a collaborator who was just as committed to Sufi mysticism as she was. While working on these compositions, Ali traveled to India’s northern mountainous region and let the natural beauty there inspire him. In his autobiography, he speaks emphatically about this period in his life, and the arrangements that came from it. “I saw in the mountains around me, in the magnificent trees that embraced these mountains, emitting a fragrance as the rains lashed to loosen their embrace,” he wrote. “The mythology became poetry, and poetry became rhythm, and the rhythm, a melody. Each ghazal I chose and composed gripped the soul…They came alive in the monsoon mist rising from the Naini Lake...Poetry is a bridge that helps you cross oceans and mountains. I was doing that in Raqs-e-Bismil.” While driving from the mountains of India down to the capital of New Delhi, he got into a car accident maiming his thumb so badly he had to have skin grafted from his thigh to fix the injury. This experience, he says, is how “pain entered the ghazals of Raqs-e-Bismil.”
It’s an incredibly dramatic account of his life and creative process, but there would be no Raqs-e-Bismil without that kind of emotion. There’s a profound vulnerability to this music because the audience hears Parveen in the middle of her quest. Her devotional practice is ongoing, incomplete, and constantly transforming, and yet she invites us to bear witness to her attempt. As much as she sees herself as a vessel for God, she inevitably evokes the sublime through the prism of the earthly. There will always be the performer, the microphone, the ego, the fallibility that contrasts with the pristine ideal she evokes. And when you as the listener experience the ecstasy that she describes, you have to hold it next to the other realities of your own life: the buzz of your air conditioner, the grocery list you’ve started making in your head, the itch of a mosquito bite. These oppositional experiences don’t deter from one another but rather make both feel more accessible, more intertwined, and more understandable.
Parveen takes many paths towards holiness. There are songs of denial and songs of joy on Raqs-e-Bismil. On “Zahid Ne,” she sings, “The preacher has not yet seen the essence of my faith/He has not witnessed the tresses that hide the beauty of your face.” She briefly enters a frenzied state of unity with God, then defines God as everything that is inaccessible to her. There are fleeting moments of fluorescent ecstasy too, especially in the two kafi songs on the album: “Roshan Jamaal-e-Yaar” revels in a lover’s charm and captivating gaze, comparing it to divine beauty. And though “Ji Chahe” speaks of self-destruction—of losing your sense of self like a moth burning up in a flame—the understanding is that this transformation would be a welcome spell of euphoria.
The writing on many of the ghazals is elliptical, attempting to write around the concept of God, or to define him in terms of what he isn’t. On opener “Yaar Ko Hamne Ja Baja Dekha,” Parveen describes her lover as a series of opposites: sometimes he is hidden, sometimes he is apparent. Sometimes he is a king descending from the throne, other times a poor man carrying his water. Indirect writing often only vaguely gestures at emotion, but on Raqs-e-Bismil, the slipperiness and opacity of Parveen’s interactions with God contrasts with her deep desire for closeness. She is constantly searching, lamenting, and struggling to grasp onto a sense of unity that she knows is achievable but can’t always experience.
In Parveen’s voice, these heady lyrics move from the realm of the intellect to the heart. The emotional range she shows on “Zahid Ne” alone is astounding: She repeats the same melody over and over but changes her delivery every time she returns to a phrase. She is alternately patient, nostalgic, all-knowing, and desperate. The reverb on her voice adds a sense of resonant fullness and poignancy that is buoyed by a gentle tabla beat that progresses steadily and patiently, like the footsteps of a hiker who has found their rhythm halfway through their ascent. Listening to words bloom from Parveen’s voice, I’m reminded of the concept of sonder: the realization that every person you pass on the street has as full a life as your own. Similarly, each word Parveen sings evokes entire universes. Within the span of a single word, it’s easy to imagine the spark of first love, or birth and death of a cosmos.
Parveen generally takes an anti-identitarian stance. She is one of very few professionally singing Sufi women, but she sees herself less as an icon or a source of inspiration than a vessel through which God’s words can be heard. And yet, some of the 21st century’s most innovative artists find inspiration in her work. Pakistani American musician Arooj Aftab reverently cites an encounter with her and Björk lists her as one of her favorite musicians, having recently played her music at a DJ set in Brooklyn. Trans artist Lyra Pramuk relates to her quote about how Parveen feels when she performs: “I’m not a man or a woman, I’m a vehicle for passion.”
Perhaps what these experimental musicians admire about Parveen is less her acclaim or any particular skill she has as a singer, but rather the patience and tenacity she exhibits in her pursuit of transcendence. Going for something greater than yourself is a motivation to keep honing your craft, refining your spiritual practice, tempering your ego. It is the most human desire. In art-making and spiritual practice, perfection is impossible: It’s the act of reaching that is so inspiring.


French artist Neige finally fits all his component parts-- arching atmospherics, celestial melodies, suffocating roars-- into one dynamic metal record.

Écailles de Lune

Écailles de Lune, the second LP from romantic black metallurgists Alcest, is the most fully realized effort to date from its frontman and lone constant Neige. The spindly Frenchman has been a member of a half-dozen bands, from the brittle Peste Noire to the wildly and willfully diverse coed quartet Amesoeurs. Since 2005, Neige has been releasing music as Alcest that ranges from the black metal of 2005 EP Le Secret to the Red House Painters-via-Justin Broadrick 2007 LP, Souvenirs d'un Autre Monde. Now, he's finally fit all of his component parts-- arching atmospherics, celestial melodies, suffocating roars-- into one record. At last, Neige has made an album that plays like one.
At a time when both legitimately heavy bands like Wolves in the Throne Room and Liturgy and electronic acts like Ben Frost and Fuck Buttons are using black metal ideas to build something bigger, Neige lands one of the most cohesive, well-considered experiments yet. He peels apart the layers of black metal-- lacerated vocals, relentless rhythms, overtone-rich guitars-- and applies them to disparate structures and sounds.
On "Percées de Lumière", the rhythm supplies a pace that's nearly krautrock, while the guitars revolve around a minor riff that suggests Slint. So, of course, the metal shifts to the vocals. Neige generally sings gracefully and carefully, but here he screams in black-metal horror. "Écailles de Lune [Part I]", on the other hand, even sounds like a toughened mix of M83 and Sigur Rós, with guitars saturating every space and Neige's voice floating like Jónsi Birgisson's once did. Beneath the surface, however, the militant pacing of drummer Winterhalter and the increasingly sinister note selections of Neige presage something heavier. For the final two minutes, they rage like Scandinavian lords in a high-dollar studio. Thanks to the methodical if subtle way that song develops, moving from staggering rock to twinkling atmospherics to something altogether more intense, it doesn't seem out of place. The same holds for "Part II", which erupts quickly into a brutal rush only to burn itself out, dissolving into a ghastly drone that builds and collapses twice more. The line between the tormented and the gorgeous blurs into an imagined boundary-- tedious to find, delightful to miss.
Several reviews of Écailles de Lune have criticized the album's brevity, noting that, though its six tracks clock in just shy of 42 minutes, "Percées de Lumière" appeared on a limited-edition split last year, while the 108-second instrumental, "Abysses", doesn't warrant mention as a "song." That's an unfortunate dismissal, especially because "Abysses" is as vital as anything else here. Like the best of Alcest's output, it's a ghastly but beautiful hum. Neither an admonition nor an invitation, neither noise nor new age, it confirms the newfound patience and purpose of Neige, who's made an album that's more enchanting than even these last few years of promise have suggested.


After months of waiting, and several tentative release dates, Amnesiac finally hit store shelves last Tuesday. Since last October, we ...

Amnesiac

After months of waiting, and several tentative release dates, Amnesiac finally hit store shelves last Tuesday. Since last October, we've been hearing that this album, recorded during the same sessions as last year's wildly experimental Kid A, would serve as a return to the band's mid-90's roots. Now we come to find it was all a lie.
Not that it gets me down. As far as I'm concerned, Kid A is Radiohead's defining achievement. A total departure from the conventional rock formats of OK Computer and The Bends, Kid A drew from far more abstract and obscure influences than its predecessors. Whereas previous outings captured echoes of U2 and Pink Floyd, Kid A took what it could use from the Talking Heads, Can, Talk Talk, and modern-day IDM artists, and combined it with Radiohead's irrepressible originality and sparkling, alien production. Whether you liked the end result or not, the fact that they had the balls to challenge mainstream insipidness with such heroic creativity was admirable.
That said, Amnesiac is about as close to The Bends as Miss Cleo is to Jamaican. And within the first ten seconds of its opening track, "Packt like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box," the band crushes that rumor like a bug in the ground. Sparse, clanging percussion evokes abandoned swingsets. Keyboards whir to sonorous life, humming resonantly. Guitars are curiously marked absent. Production-wise, the track could have nestled cozily alongside Kid A's strangest moments, yet its melody is stunningly more infectious than even that album's height of accessibility, "Optimistic." Amidst chattering synths and twisted metal, Thom Yorke casually insists that he's "a reasonable man," and politely intones the album's most quoted lyric: "Get off my case."
The clattering, confrontational "Packt" segues awkwardly into "Pyramid Song," a sweeping piano-and-strings ballad, whose unusual timing is difficult to nail down until Phil Selway's live drums give perspective on the punchdrunk rhythm. Yorke croons some of his most poetic lyrics since "No Surprises," inspired by passages from Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. Amidst swelling orchestration and Satie-esque piano chords, Yorke croons a dream-like scenario in which he's visited by black-eyed angels, and his past and future loves.
4/4 traditionalists will take an immediate liking to the very OK Computer-ish "Dollars and Cents," whose lyrical content is strikingly similar to the anti-government, anti-corporate themes expressed on the 1997 classic. Jonny Greenwood's minimal, warped guitarwork and distant string arrangements float celestially over brother Colin's menacing basslines and Selway's delicate drumming. "Knives Out" is another OK Computer-style reverbathon, replete with strummed acoustics, chiming electrics, and a not-too-tasteful rehashing of a prominent guitar line from "Paranoid Android." Great melody. However, they've fucking used it before. The song also loses points for containing the line, "Shove it in your mouth." Really, Thom.
Similarly disappointing is "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors." Powered by a gritty industrial beat, the song's intentional abstractness, for the first time ever, seems forced and caricatured. Thom's MacinYorke vocal treatments never seemed terribly groundbreaking, and here, the gimmick has gone utterly limp. Yorke's lyrical content is also at its most unchallenging, as he educates us on the many varieties of doors that exist, over oafish, programmed beats worthy of a Cleopatra Records sampler. Elsewhere, "Hunting Bears" is a two-minute instrumental clip of aimless guitar noodling that shoots for Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack but comes off as a cutrate Wish You Were Here outtake. A track like this is meant to segue into a related piece of music; instead, we're flung headfirst into the completely dissimilar "Like Spinning Plates."
If nothing else, Radiohead have always realized the emotional impact of a stunning album closer, and Amnesiac offers two. Sitting side by side, "Like Spinning Plates" and "Life in a Glasshouse" are so vastly superior to the album's other tracks that the album's few misteps are easily forgiven. "Spinning Plates," while a much better fit for Kid A, is nonetheless one of Radiohead's most affecting tracks to date. It opens with a digitally simulated "spinning" sound, disorienting reversed keyboard, and subtle keyboard pings. The song hits its peak when Yorke's indecipherable backwards vocals unexpectedly revert to traditional forward singing during the mournful climax, "And this just feels like/ Spinning plates/ My body's floating down a muddy river."
But if "Like Spinning Plates" would have been a fitting apex for Kid A, "Life in a Glasshouse" is entirely suited to the eclectic Amnesiac. Rather than creating a unique, Frankensteinian amalgamation from fragments of other genres, Radiohead instead target a style of music that hasn't been touched for decades: Edison-era big band. In the process of adapting the archaic jazz sound to polyrhythmic piano chords and rock lyricism, Radiohead touch upon an incredibly unique sound that could potentially inspire an entirely new genre.
"Glasshouse" is most easily (and most often) likened to a New Orleans funeral dirge-- probably because it's not far off the mark. Largely inspired by Louis Armstrong's "St James Infirmary," this track is the least like the others on Amnesiac, and easily the record's winning moment. When, amidst rueful trombone, tumbling clarinet, and the crushingly emotive trumpet of longtime BBC session musician Humphrey Lyttelton, Yorke insists, "Of course I'd like to sit around and chat/ Of course I'd like to stay and chew the fat," and follows it with a minute of wailing "only, only, only... there's someone listening in," the intensity is indescribable.
Despite the heights attained by much of Amnesiac, I prefer Kid A for a number of reasons. Quality aside, the questionable sequencing of Amnesiac does little to hush the argument that the record is merely a thinly veiled b-sides compilation; Kid A played out as a cohesive whole that evoked panic and paranoia as well as surrealism and disorientation. Still, Amnesiac's highlights were undeniably worth the wait, and easily overcome its occasional patchiness. Now if you'll pardon me, I have to go untie DiCrescenzo.


Picking up where his DJ-Kicks mix left off, the L.A. funk auteur’s newest release explores peace and love through body-rock.

STFU II EP

The neon music that soundtracked the late-aughts Los Angeles club scene has become a global force. But while luminaries like Flying Lotus and Thundercat are recognized for influencing rap and jazz, the maestro of the Funkmosphere party in Culver City, Damon Riddick, gets less credit for bringing the synthesized sounds of the late ’70s and ’80s back to popular music. Years before Daft Punk made “Moroder,” Dâm-Funk was spinning tributes to the Troutman family, helping to make Afrofuturism the future once again.
Toeachizown, Dâm-Funk’s five-LP opus, is now a decade old; it’s been four years since the triple album Invite the Light. Riddick has pivoted from prolificacy to restraint, appropriate for a musician in the latter half of his 40s. These days, he often speaks through others, working with fellow Angelenos like Nite Jewel or arranging tasteful setlists like that of his strong DJ-Kicks entry. Even his new record, STFU II, 38 minutes of new music, gets modest billing: It’s an EP, not an LP, and a sequel to boot.
And it’s a modest release, as Dâm eases into cruise-control over the course of six five-minute-plus tracks (and one 54-second interlude called “Inhale, Exhale”). Moreso than the free EP STFU, STFU II picks up where DJ-Kicks left off: Its pleasures, are in steady, buoyant build; peace and love through body-rock. Nothing is too frantic or heavy, and when the bass appears, it’s as soothing as it is booming.
The first standout is the second single, “Compos Mentis,” and like all the best tracks on the EP, it’s elevated by a synth odyssey that overtakes a repetitious beat. About three minutes in, Dâm extends a stepladder of bass leading up to a land of dreamy pastel synths and fluttering keys, a Balearic overworld in the clouds. If that sounds good, you may also enjoy “Deeper,” on which Dâm throws together a loop worthy of Floating Points or the Field, then overtakes it with an extraordinary extended synthesizer solo, rising slowly in the mix until everything else is background.
Other tracks, though no less pleasant, disappear without leaving much of an impression. Closer “On Code” is the most traditional, G-funk brightened by sun-ray synths. A light-stepping bass shuffles through the opening half of “Ladera Heights,” named for the airport-adjacent neighborhood where Dâm-Funk moved once he started playing parties internationally. Soon enough, though, a well-behaved synth moves the proceedings skyward.
Artists’ promotional statements are often misleading, when not pure gibberish, but Dâm’s advice about how to experience STFU II offers as much insight into the record as anything else: “Just lay back, take a deep breath, stay outta trouble and simply ‘glyde’ for a while,” he writes, referring to his label, Glydezone. STFU II is music for relaxation. It’s a long way from the fierce energetic groove that characterized those Funkmosphere nights on Venice Boulevard. You might find that a bit dispiriting, and while you wouldn’t be wrong, you’d be missing the point. We should all hope to age this well.


After a so-so LP for dance powerhouse Ultra, Jennifer Lee's TOKiMONSTA project returns with a self-released EP that, at its best, reinforces her capable beatmaking abilities.

Desiderium

Jennifer Lee has never lacked for inventiveness. With a background in classical piano, the L.A. producer who works as TOKiMONSTA is adept at doling out earworm melodies to ground even her most nebulous beats, but what makes her best tracks stand out is the ability to evoke her own freewheeling, stoner charm while wielding a heavy sonic arsenal. Her 2010 debut Midnight Menu was a solid example of the woozy, cosmic glitch-hop that countless West Coast DJs and producers have mined from Flying Lotus’ near-inescapable sphere of influence—and sure enough, infectious cuts like “Gamble” and “Cheese Smoothie” injected that sound with an undeniable stomp that piqued the interest of the Brainfeeder mastermind himself, who signed Lee as the label's first female artist for her follow-up EP Creature Dreams.
Anchored by jazzy, innovative beat patterns, the dubby, refined weirdness of Creature Dreams proved far more compelling than last year's Haruki Murakami-inspired Half Shadows, her first full-length for massive dance label Ultra. The industry upgrade heralded a shift in Lee’s sound, broadening her distinctive bedroom beats into a grab bag of pop and disco-based hooks and meandering slow-step jams, enlisting a roster of contributing vocalists that included NYC's MNDR and hip-hop legend Kool Keith to varied success.
Lee’s latest, the mini-LP Desiderium, also serves as the launching pad for her new label Young Art. The Arama-featuring “Drive” is a chugging dance track that doesn’t do much to distance itself from its Half Shadows counterparts, but things improve on "Realla", when Lee ratchets up a fleet of distant air horns and a slow-stepping beat that offsets California vocalist Anderson Paak's mostly frivolous contribution. “Open Air” is in a similar vein with a more suitable vocal offering from fellow Californian Joyce Wrice, whose soulful pipes meet Lee’s energetic groove with more balance. Still, none of the three vocal-assisted tracks tread any ground Lee hasn’t already covered to better effect on previous EPs.
While Desiderium isn’t a particularly formidable entry in Lee’s discography, it isn’t without merit. Highlight “Dusty Stars” dances around a looped sample of Aaliyah’s “Miss You” with odd, interesting time signatures and a catchily stuttering beat; “Steal My Attention” is similarly satisfying, using a repetitious chorus that recalls Midnight Menu’s most club-ready jams, while closer “Sakamoto’s Spring”, with a piano backing track reminiscent of the song’s eponymous Japanese composer (whom she collaborated with two years ago on a protest song condemning the reopening of the Ōi nuclear power plant in Japan), is a sprightly counterpoint to some of the album’s more routine embellishments. The highlights on Desiderium prove that, vocal-assisted lowlights be damned, Lee’s beatmaking abilities are still considerable.


On its first album in seven years, the Detroit punk band balances grid-like rigidity with the sense that everything is about to fall apart.

Overground

In the seven years since Tyvek’s last album, the Detroit punks went digging through their archive. They reissued a rare 2009 cassette and put out a live album where they dusted off and ripped through some of their earliest songs. Among those deep cuts was 2007’s “Future Junk,” an evergreen gem where Kevin Boyer screams about the daily grind of driving up and down the John C. Lodge Freeway. Tyvek return to the Lodge on “M-39,” a standout banger from their wild fifth album, Overground. Over a cascading and crunchy guitar riff, amid a blanket of unrelenting cymbal smashes, Boyer’s trademark blunt and unflashy vocal performance helps transform the freeway into a psychedelic colony chiseled into cement. He twists the same handful of words into knots so that when he eventually utters the phrase “writ large on the Lodge,” it lands like a punchline.
Boyer offers landmarks and clues, but otherwise his imagery feels like a puzzle with half the pieces sucked up into the vacuum. The guitar sound is choppy and rigid as ever, and there’s a relentlessness to the sequencing that’s been there for the last two or three Tyvek albums. Each song spills rapidly into the next, and rarely does the band ease up. “Return to Format” and “Rhythm / Pattern” are ramshackle as Boyer spits his words percussively while the band careens behind him. There’s a moment on “Going Through My Things” when he appears to suddenly recite the tag of an old shirt: “LOW tumble dry, LOW tumble dry, LOW,” he shouts in the approximate rhythm of a dryer’s spinning drum. Tyvek excel at this strange balance between grid-like rigidity and the sense that everything could fall apart at any moment.
While Tyvek have always been a revolving door of contributors (Boyer notwithstanding), the current incarnation has been steady for a few years now. It’s palpable just how much they’ve locked in with each other. Boyer and Shelley Salant are both on guitar, and many songs reward a close listen for their intertwining, jam-forward leads. The rhythm section is strong, which is expected for two Southeast Michigan DIY scene bosses in their own right, bassist Alex Glendening (Deadbeat Beat) and drummer Fred Thomas (too many bands to list). The most obvious new ingredient is Emily Roll, Salant’s bandmate in the art-punk trio XV. Their saxophone folds in effortlessly, never dominating with an overwhelming skronk or longform voyage. Roll mirrors the pointed and staccato nature of the guitars—a blurt here, a couple supplemental notes there. It’s a new texture and a lightly sour contrast to the main hook. Right in step with Boyer’s songwriting, it’s the most exciting kind of disorienting.
Those are welcome variations on Tyvek’s template, but the final song slows down into unprecedented territory. The band spread out across the seven-minute title track while Boyer offers a subdued spoken-word poem that shares DNA with “The Gift.” Roll’s saxophone adds echoing, ambient jazz atmosphere and the rest of the instruments meander gently. Meanwhile, Boyer half-mutters about his grim surroundings: “How did we get here and more importantly how do we get out?” Those are two of many questions on Overground, though for the most part, Boyer’s interrogations go hand-in-hand with the band’s driving, scattered punk intensity. He cringes at the past in “What Were We Thinking” and prods the tenets of capitalism on “What’s It For” as the band rips through its tried and true attack. When Boyer stops lingering on tense questions and starts wondering about a way out, their collective toil completely melts in favor of something simple and beautiful.


The second album from the Chicago singer-songwriter Jess Shoman brings in the band for a noise-country-ish sound that both spotlights and strengthens their vocals.

Tenci: A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing

A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing

Jess Shoman’s 2020 debut album as Tenci, My Heart Is an Open Field, was an indie-folk record that pulled you into an entirely empty space. It moved in slow, cyclical waltzes, bleeding with the unrushed freedom that follows a forfeiture of hope. Shoman and their bandmates stamped the songs with echoes of clomps and clacks rattling into an open room, and they frequently repeated passages several times just to see how it would feel. All of this drizzled around Shoman as they sang in brief snippets as surrendered as “I can’t pretend I’m not a dog tied to a porch” in a voice like warped wood. The album sounded, often sonically and occasionally lyrically, like it was made at the bottom of a well—an image that Shoman returns to repeatedly on Tenci’s fuller, more hopeful second album, A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing.
My Heart was Shoman’s breakout moment as a songwriter, and A Swollen River is foremost a triumph for Tenci, the band. Even though Shoman was almost always accompanied on My Heart, whether by light drumming, woodwind accents, or near-unrecognizable sounds, the album felt solitary through and through; now, Shoman sounds reinforced. Their three bandmates—bassist Isabel Reidy, multi-instrumentalist Curtis Oren, and drummer Joseph Farago—have formed a taut circle and cultivated a noise-country-ish sound that both spotlights and strengthens the vocals. The band sounds remarkably in sync with each step and turn, exhibiting the chemistry of a quartet with rare innate telepathy. Shoman, meanwhile, alternates between serenely reflective and totally vicious. “I’m as quiet as can be,” they rasp on “Be,” and then growls the last word again: “be.” What follows is a captivating sax solo from Oren that perfectly matches Shoman’s messy contemplations on their own visibility or lack thereof in the eyes of another.
Reidy, Oren, and Farago hang back as often as they step forth, resisting the easy “folk artist’s ‘full band’ sophomore album” trap and allowing Shoman’s talent for harnessing silence to flourish and grow. The band’s discretion paired with Shoman’s gift for commanding attention toward an isolated word or phrase recalls some of the defining indie-folk artists of the ‘90s, like Bill Callahan and Chan Marshall. On the mostly acoustic “Great Big Elephant,” which sounds like it was recorded on a remote driveway and follows “Be” with brilliant contrast, the accompanying touch is barely detectable yet just enough to add a sense of grandeur. Even when the band inches towards eerie-nursery-rhyme territory for a couple of consecutive songs in the album’s middle section, they still manage to hypnotize, so that the impending fireworks explode even louder.
And when those arrive, they don’t hold back. On the epic “Sour Cherries,” the band slowly crescendos to a droning, discordant hailstorm, while Shoman breaks out one of their best moves: meditating on a few words over and over in a rotation of voices ranging from anodyne to demonic. “Love is sour cherries,” they repeatedly sing, each time finding a different emphasis and character: “Love is sour cherries/Love is sour cherrries/Love is sour.” The song kicks off a string of highlights to conclude the album, peaking with the guitar-squeal-rich “Two Cups”—a soaring, charmingly odd self-affirmation that feels like the album’s nucleus, and one of Tenci’s best songs yet—then dismounting with the Polaroid-like “Memories,” a pocket-sized folk tune laid over a medley of home recordings from Shoman’s childhood. As Shoman sings about holding onto their memories, behind them is their father pushing them on a swing, their mother warning her children about bugs as they stick their hands in a tree, and Shoman as a child trying to read a birthday card from their grandparents in Spanish. With an increased brightness and confidence in their voice, surrounded by family chosen and unchosen, Shoman has never sounded less alone.


The Queens rapper’s latest album, produced in full by Mono En Stereo, offers few surprises but features plenty of charmingly diaristic, relatable songs that contrast sharply with mainstream rap.

Rich

Homeboy Sandman raps like no one is listening. After more than 15 years in the industry, the dependable Queens emcee has arrived at a songwriting practice that sounds more like journaling than performing for an audience. He’s issued a steady stream of EPs and albums over the last few years, all of them seemingly low stakes, though their quality has been consistent. At the turn of the millennium, Sandman’s rapping could sound a little labored, but in the years since, he’s aged gracefully in the game. He sounds content, grounded, and at peace with his place in the rap landscape—a wise voice in a young person’s genre.
Rich is an album-length collaboration with New York producer Mono En Stereo, known for his work with Prodigy, De La Soul, and Action Bronson. His beats fit Sandman like a glove. The production is summery, largely mid-tempo, and sample-based, lending a timeless quality to the songs. This languid pace works well for Sandman, who these days seems more focused on weaving yarns than dazzling with technique. His bars are elegant in their simplicity and his writing is diaristic and relatable; observations about the mundane are punctuated by occasional musings on the profound. He comes across like an everyman sage, someone searching for enlightenment in the big questions as well as the smallest of actions.
The aptly titled “Off the Rip” provides a representative sample: Over a shuffling, brushed snare beat and a wandering organ line, Sandman prods the corners of his mind at an unhurried pace. He gives himself a mini pep talk as the song starts, insists that doing dishes by hand “is the best way,” expresses an interest in opening a wildlife refuge, and maintains that he is trying to bring his listeners closer to God. It may not be a freestyle in the formal sense, but Sandman’s precise, on-beat rapping unspools with stream-of-consciousness effortlessness.
Only a handful of songs shake the album out of its resting pace, but they tend to be highlights. “Then We Broke Up” uses a funk loop as a springboard for a wholesome and unusually mature breakup anthem. There’s no hurt or resentment here, just the warm glow of cherished memories and the knowledge that even good things come to an end. “Bop” flips a flute-heavy sample into a jerky, chirpy beat, over which Sandman boasts about his mic skills. The instrumental for album closer “Who Are You?” is made of little more than rolling drum fills and stray piano notes; as Sandman calmly navigates the waves, he telegraphs an unshakeable confidence.
In an era where rap albums routinely run 90 minutes or longer and sound engineered for stadiums and strip clubs, Rich is a breath of fresh air. The album clocks in at under 27 minutes, none of the breezy songs overstay their welcome, and Sandman sounds more conversational than performative. There are no guests or conceptual aspirations, just beats and bars. This is rap music for lazy Sundays, backyard cookouts, and aimless drives. There may not be much to distinguish Rich from Sandman’s seemingly endless stream of recent releases, and the banal subject matter—like groceries and grocery shopping, a recurring motif—can sometimes feel a bit on the nose. But Sandman seems to have chosen a niche to fill, and he’s clearly focused on consistency over novelty. When it comes to underground rap veterans who have remained both prolific and reliable, Homeboy Sandman doesn’t have much in the way of competition.


The Flying Lotus-co-produced second solo album by virtuoso bassist Stephen Bruner is an endearing blend of plainspoken nonchalance and almost limitless musical eccentricity. Bruner channels rich, often complex music through an engagingly human voice.

Apocalypse

The idea of the instrumental virtuoso has fallen out of favor in some underground music circles. This prejudice is usually based around the idea that anyone who has that much invested in the technical aspects of their preferred instrument has gotten so far up their super-muso ass that there's no emotional engagement in the music itself. Bass maestro Stephen Bruner's found a few ways to avoid that fate: cultivating a sessionman's versatility equally suited to gigs with both Erykah Badu and Suicidal Tendencies, aligning himself with the artsy but down-to-earth Brainfeeder community, and, as Thundercat, putting out solo work that, from the outset of 2011's The Golden Age of Apocalypse, used his chops almost exclusively for a feeling of fidgety joy.
But what's really made Thundercat interesting over the last few years, and what gives his new Flying Lotus-co-produced album Apocalypse such a kick, is the sense that he's completely divorced his music from any sort of pretense. He doesn't put up some kind of esoteric barrier between the vision of a serious artiste and an unwitting audience that supposedly needs to be schooled on what true musicianship is. He's more dealing with a simple set of ideas, emotions, sentiments, and experiences, elaborated upon in a surprising way. At his best, Thundercat has reversed the evolutionary process where technology, experimentation, and crossover made music more complicated-- instead taking prog and fusion as a starting point to be whittled down, rather than a destination to be built up to.
Apocalypse gets immediate real quick. Opener “Tenfold” takes off with the sort of astral-jazz keyboards you might hear on a Lonnie Liston Smith interlude filtered through the TONTO synthesizer. But the real pulse is an insistent pounding, chord-blurring 1-2-3-4 hardcore rumble that offsets Bruner's see-saw falsetto, tersely belting out sonic prayers two or three words at a time. It sets the precedent for an album that brings its catchiest tendencies to the forefront and lets the virtuosic stuff in through side channels. What comes up as a whole is this odd but endearing blend of plainspoken nonchalance and almost limitless musical eccentricity.
If that means Thundercat's music feels a little more traditionally song-oriented than before, he's found a way to keep that unpredictable energy of his intact, filtering it through familiar forms of indie R&B (the Mono/Poly coproduced “Heartbreaks + Setbacks”), electronified soul-folk (“Tron Song”, which feels like Terry Callier gone glitch), and bristling, burbling old-school boogie funk (the straightforwardly danceable “Oh Sheit it's X”). The moments of ramped-up rhythmic hustle remain a prominent feature; the shivery rollercoaster arpeggios and hand-cranked forward motion of “The Life Aquatic” and “Seven” have the feel of some enterprising knob-tweaker attempting to electronically retrofit the Minutemen's anxious energy for a Detroit dancefloor. But everything falls together in a way that settles into a steady groove that stays easy to follow and sink into.
The catalyst for this is that Thundercat's voice is more prominent and freewheeling now, as much of a driving factor in every song it appears in as the music backing him up. Where he falls short (but not very) in melodic range, he makes up for in stylistic variance: he's longing and frustrated in “Heartbreaks + Setbacks”, velvety and dance-drunk on “Oh Sheit it's X”, sky-gazingly ruminative on “Lotus and the Jondy”, warmly intense and motivational on “Special Stage”. More than ever, it feels like he's writing the instrumentation to fit his voice rather than substitute for or distract from it. And for a series of songs split with a dichotomy of channelling rich, often complex music through an engagingly human voice, the messages are unmistakeable.
The OutRun arcade sunniness of “Special Stage” is a key example: the song's message couldn't be more straightforward but the juxtaposition of simple lyrics and complicated music is the whole point. While there's little that seems quotable on paper, little touches of goofiness and first-thing-that-comes-to-mind spontaneity-- the delivery of his “Your purse is nice, baby, is it leather/ Or could it be suede” pickup line on “Oh Sheit it's X”, or the trip-out “straight up seein' goblins” borderline non-sequitir on “Lotus and the Jondy”-- make him the relatable gravitational center in the midst of a busy intersection of sound.
While much of its musical direction is based on Thundercat's collaborative brainstorming with Flying Lotus, the emotional core of Apocalypse rests either explicitly or implicitly under the shadow of the late Austin Peralta, the Brainfeeder musician and keyboardist/pianist on many of the songs on Golden Age of the Apocalypse. While there are specifically direct nods to his untimely passing-- most prominently on the elegaic closing suite “A Message for Austin/Praise the Lord/Enter the Void”-- the idea that Peralta's influence and memory runs through the entirety of this album's lifeblood makes a lot of sense. In some way or another, everything on Apocalypse is about taking stock, figuring yourself out, and making sure that the people that mean something to you know that they do. That it arrives through the conduit of somebody who has an elaborate means to express this, but knows when and how to keep things simple? That's how you translate virtuosity into something that hits you right in the heart.


Pushing his versatility, ear for production, and lyricism in new directions, Vince Staples' hot streak continues.

Prima Donna

Lest you worry that critical acclaim and fame have brightened his outlook, Vince Staples opens the *Prima Donna *EP with a grainy recording of him singing “This Little Light of Mine,” cut short by the sound of a gunshot. Staples barely mumbles the song under his breath, making you lean in close to the speaker; the gunshot that punctuates the track might make you jump out of your seat. This intro provides a handy metaphor for how Staples operates as an artist: He draws you in with vital music, then hits you with the ugly reality. He’s clear on at least this much from the outset on Prima Donna—if you’re here for an uplift, you’ve come to the wrong place.
On his debut full-length, Summertime ’06, Staples proved that he was not just a great rapper but a great album artist, crafting an immersive sound that transcended its production credits. Despite the impressive array of producers who worked on the album (No I.D., Clams Casino, DJ Dahi, Mikky Ekko), Summertime’s feel was uniform, a creaky, humid canvas on which Staples painted his morally ambiguous street tales. Still, while Staples might have just cemented his aesthetic, he’s already looking beyond it. Far from an effortless victory lap, Prima Donna finds the rapper veering off in a number of different directions in search of new sounds to bend to his will.
No I.D. and DJ Dahi return to produce the bulk of Prima Donna’s tracks, though their mandate this time around seems to be sonic experimentation. “Smile” is practically a rap-rock song: fuzzed-out bass, a steady guitar upstroke, an unapologetic solo in its midsection. “Pimp Hand” sounds like a heart monitor wired up to a trunk full of muffled subwoofers. “Loco” matches Staples’ breathless narration of his descent into madness with shrill glissandos; more importantly, it contains some of the EP’s most richly evocative lyrics (“I’m in the black Benz speeding with my black skin gleaming” is a whole poem in a single line).
As much as No I.D. and Dahi push past their own boundaries here, Prima Donna’s two most adventurous beats come courtesy of James Blake. While the English musician has occasionally flashed a deft hand as a hip-hop producer, we’ve never heard anything quite like these instrumentals from him. “Big Time” sounds both airy and dense, cobbling together Atari buzzes, snares that sound like money counters, and stray whirring noises. Atop all of this, Blake slowly piles up layers of skittering drum tracks until the whole thing wobbles like a Jenga tower. Staples raps furiously atop this beat, sketching out a dark counterpoint to Drake’s carefree YOLO meme (“You never know when you gon’ catch a case/Never know when you gon’ catch an eye”) before a plaintive chiptune melody creeps in.
And then there’s “War Ready,” the EP’s strongest cut and one of the most striking songs either man has had a hand in. Blake kicks off the track by flipping a chopped up sample of André 3000’s final bars from “ATLiens” over a bed of bubbling sounds. The song then segues to a skeletal arrangement that consists of little more than a single synth line laid over a steady click-clack beat—an instrumental so sparse it makes the Neptunes sound like maximalists. All the better, though, to fully appreciate Staples’ lyrics, which are as devastating here as they’ve ever been. Expanding on an idea from his Clams Casino collaboration “All Nite” (“My people ready for war”), Staples reaches back into the history of oppression to draw parallels with the present: “County jail bus, slave ship, same shit/A wise man once said/That a black man better off dead/So I’m war ready”. When he delivers the line, “Turned the African into the nigga then they hung him,” it lands with the same impact as that gunshot in the intro.
Hopelessness has always been a throughline in Staples work but Prima Donna puts a finer point on that feeling, both in its songs and interstitial spoken word bits. Staples repeatedly tells us that he’s fed up, he’s tired, he feels like giving up. And can you blame him, an artist who has spent his career cataloging the brokenness around him? On Summertime, Staples studied his own city as a microcosm of America, but here he zooms out even further, inviting you to see the bigger picture. At his best, Vince Staples is an artist who stares hard truths dead in the eye. On Prima Donna, he dares us to do the same.


The Canadian power-pop supergroup's latest full-length is its most consistent, confident, and best album to date.

Twin Cinema

Of all the genres that roam the indie rock biosphere, the one that probably gets cut the most slack is power pop, which eschews influences that peaked in the past three decades, moves within a sonic range between the Ramones and Beach Boys, and whose bands are aware there's a loyal audience waiting to lap up their derivative, harmony-laden, verse-chorus-verse songs. Existing against this dire backdrop makes the New Pornographers look even more singular. It's almost unfair, in a way, given that the Pornographers aren't so much a band as a Davis Cup team of Canada's finest indie singer-songwriters, captained by veteran Carl Newman. When Newman, Destroyer's Dan Bejar, and Neko Case first got together (with, it should be noted, other random Canadians) to record Mass Romantic, it seemed to be a goofy, feverish one-off, like a boozy weekend that accidentally birthed an indie pop classic. When the LP became arguably bigger than any of their individual endeavors, the three reunited for Electric Version, but couldn't keep the momentum rolling, suggesting the project's magic was fleeting.
Twin Cinema doesn't just rebut that notion, it renders it ludicrous. With more developed ideas than Mass Romantic and a more cohesive sound than Electric Version, it's their most consistent, confident, and best album to date. Newman is once again at the wheel for the majority of the LP, furthering the notion that the New Pornographers are just Zumpano with added starpower. But this time Newman folds in the more mature sound he pursued whilst under the name A.C., focusing more on rich, Joe Jackson-style piano than arcade keyboards, and getting a lot of mileage out of the ebow. Newman's characteristic pop gems are present and accounted for ("Sing Me Spanish Techno", "Use It"), but most thrilling are the moments where he expands his sound, be it the disorienting, cyclical chorus of "Falling Through Your Clothes" or the shrilly upper-register, surprisingly funky "Three or Four".
It's a small disappointment that Neko Case's internal vocoder isn't applied to another rave-up, but Newman directs her well through two ballads, the off-kilter "The Bones of an Idol" and the wistful "These Are the Fables". Even Bejar contributes tracks that actually sound like they were recorded with the rest of the band in the room. "Jackie, Dressed in Cobras" may or may not revive the character from his Mass Romantic highlight, but it's a perfect integration of Bejar's acrid vocals into the more hyper Pornographer sound, the corners softened by Case's Children's Workshop harmonies and Newman's piano punctuations.
Yet in the upset of the year, it's drummer Kurt Dahle who practically steals Twin Cinema's show. On prior NP efforts the drums were almost an afterthought. Here the percussion is pushed to the front of the mix, and Dahle's swing and crash put tracks like "The Jessica Numbers" and "The Bleeding Heart Show" over the top. The eight-armed drumming that fills every corner of "Use It", or The Soft Bulletin-esque drum-bash coda to "These Are the Fables" allow Newman to continue his indulgence with the Who (reference "35 in the Shade" with "Boris the Spider"), nicking "Armenia City in the Sky" for the more astral portions of "Stacked Crooked".
The added rhythmic complexity is just one way in which the New Pornographers successfully tweak established formulas and set themselves apart. Sure, at their core, the songs of Twin Cinema have that catchy, melodic something that forces me to reach repeatedly for the p-word, but for Newman & co., instant hummability isn't the endpoint but the foundation. Whether it's weaving in opaque, double-meaning lyrics or sneaking a horn part way deep in the mix, the compositions on Twin Cinema are immediate yet multi-layered. They'd be great in their own right, but by comparison to the plagiaristic, closed-minded, infinitely repeating world of power pop, it's all the more special an accomplishment.


After a viral sample made her feathery vocals famous, the singer-songwriter arrives on her own terms with a debut that flits effortlessly between guitar-based soul, alt-pop, and R&B.

time machine

Early last year, Fousheé went viral on TikTok by sheer coincidence. In 2019, the New Jersey singer-songwriter—who’d been playing gigs in New York for years and had a short-lived stint on The Voice—recorded a fluttering vocal for a royalty-free sample pack that became the backdrop of Flatbush rapper Sleepy Hallow’s inescapable “Deep End Freestyle.” Fousheé didn’t know about the song until it had begun to rack up millions of views. She took to TikTok to identify herself and rally users’ support to secure a feature credit, granting her exposure to a massive new audience, followed by a record deal with RCA. Now Fousheé is taking advantage of the moment on her own terms with time machine, a debut album that flits effortlessly between guitar-based soul, alt-pop, and R&B. Despite some tepid moments, Fousheé’s skillful vocal delivery and coolly collected personality shine through.
time machine’s pensive frame of mind comes through in its warm, ever-present lead guitar, whether quietly fingerpicked on the fed-up “I don’t love you no more” or lighting “my slime” with rosy chords. Fousheé picked up the instrument after a recent move to Los Angeles, and it has become a reliable partner for her satiny voice. The delicate “my slime” is an especially striking example, using light-footed acoustic guitar and airy backing vocals to disguise lovelorn turmoil. “I would rather be with no one,” she sings in a heady falsetto, before quickly flipping her line of thought: “You make me want to be with someone.” On “candy grapes,” she and Steve Lacy noodle back and forth for seven and a half minutes. The guitars and vocals are loose and rambling (halfway through a melody, Lacy pauses singing to correct it), and eventually the song drifts into a long, wailing guitar solo beneath Fousheé whistle-tone improvisations. It’s indulgent, but the energy is potent, like peeking into a studio occupied by two talented friends.
The album nods to Fousheé’s 1970s and ’80s influences to mixed effect. She delivers a straightforward vocal performance on a cover of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” paying faithful tribute to Martin Gore’s fragility and torment without adding much, either. She interpolates Carole King with more success on “2 L8,” lifting the chorus from “It’s Too Late” before veering between rapped and sung verses of her own over a ping-ponging beat. Here, the nostalgia feels more personal and gratifying, especially in the memorable kiss-offs that dot her lyrics: “For my sanity I’ll never fall in love again,” she raps, with a spiteful shrug. “I changed your name to ‘Don’t pick up the fucking phone again.’”
That deft balance between Fousheé’s whispery, enticing flow and her aching falsetto is time machine’s greatest asset. She includes her version of “deep end” early on the album, an extended cut that creates a full song around the hopscotching chorus. Recorded at her home, made of little more than a wobbling beat and a trembling guitar line, “deep end” strips down to focus on her breezy vocal switch-ups. time machine doesn’t always flex that same level of agile melody and clever songwriting, but Fousheé’s clear talent nonetheless makes it worth the trip.

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When No New York was issued in 1978, it should have been fair warning to anyone within earshot that punk ...

Creature Comforts

When No New York was issued in 1978, it should have been fair warning to anyone within earshot that punk would not be confined to fashion statements or cathartic brattiness. Featuring four bands from Manhattan's lower East Side, the Brian Eno-assembled compilation highlighted an artistic spirit far removed from the "pretty vacant" methodology of punk's first wave; as it happened, the sprawling, confrontational noise put forth by DNA, The Contortions, Mars, and Teenage Jesus & The Jerks resembled nothing so much as similar output by UK second-wave outfits like John Lydon's Public Image Limited or Cleveland-based archetypical post-punks Pere Ubu. That is, their "confrontation" came not so much in the physical power of the music (though it could be abrasive, to say the least) but in the conviction and often awkward, raw execution of their brand of expression.
No-wave was as much art-rock as it was punk, and despite its failure to break into the mainstream, its ideals were permanently stamped onto scores of musicians afterwards. Taking direct cues from the short movement, bands like Sonic Youth and Swans continued the often dark, grating sonic template of no-wave, and ventured even further into conceptual grounds normally associated with modern classical composition or performance art. In some ways, no-wave's successors were merely continuing a long standing New York tradition of eclecticism and the post-modern in rock that had been initiated in the 60s by The Velvet Underground and influenced by composers La Monte Young, Tony Conrad and Terry Riley. However, in the 80s, alongside a budding (and often antagonistic) American hardcore scene and wildly creative strands of post-punk all over the world, what stylistic benchmarks had been attributed to no-wave shattered into countless strands of noise, electronic music and the otherwise indescribable.
Almost three decades after the fact, New York's art-punks seem to have come full circle-- though the landscape of the rock press has not. Liars have been butchered in most mainstream music rags for making "unlistenable" music on their latest album, which, to my ears, sounds more like a tribute to art-damaged post-punk and no-wave circa 1982 than any kind of radical change in direction. Likewise, Sightings and Black Dice draw from noise, experimental punk and perennial New York faves-from-Japan High Rise and Fushitsusha. Not surprisingly, they get fewer Spin props than more melodically stable NYC outfits like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or The Strokes (both of whom also happen to draw on the early 80s post-punk for inspiration, albeit "new-" rather than "no-" wave).
However, Black Dice, like the best of the original wave of avant-rockers, have yet to lapse into redundant hero worship or watered-down stylistic approximations. Depending on how you feel about perpetual forward motion, the Brooklyn trio (formerly a quartet, now minus drummer Hisham Bharoocha) could be admirably ambitious or maddeningly flighty; thus far, they've established a pattern on their full-lengths of abandoning the previous album's sonic palette for something drastically different. Their earliest releases could veer from spiky, violent impressionism to what Pitchfork's Brendan Reid described as "anti music" in his review of 2001's Cold Hands. When the band moved to the ultra-hip DFA label for 2002's Beaches and Canyons, one might have expected them to dabble in electroclash-- which they sort-of did on the "Cone Toaster" 12-inch, only to immediately switch gears on the hazy, ambient Miles of Smiles EP earlier this year.
Creature Comforts is Black Dice's fourth full-length, and second for DFA. Lo and behold, it doesn't sound like anything else they've released. This record is made from pedals, delay, computers, solemn guitar arpeggios, loops, robot jungle sounds and cosmic ambience. It's almost completely divorced from any strand of rock (or even punk), yet sits comfortably alongside fellow New York trippers Suicide and English provocateurs Throbbing Gristle. There are percussive moments, but no real beats; there are noisy moments, but it's hardly a "noise" record; much of it seems improvised, yet for the most part the album proceeds in a linear fashion, as if one long, strange story is unfolding. Black Dice, apparently unconcerned with establishing their noise-rock niche with peers Wolf Eyes or Lightning Bolt, are content to follow their muse as a matter of practice.
The brief opener "Cloud Pleaser" begins with a simple, folkish guitar line (oddly reminiscent of Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl"), and adds electronic bongos, a dash of xylophone and light buzzing sounds hard-panned to the left and right. The subtly insistent pulse established by the small, electronic orchestra gives the piece a tropical edge even as the sounds suggest a piecemeal, post-apocalyptic Salvation Army setup. "Treetops" takes re-orchestrates that pulse with a ping-pong generator drum and distorted space bubbles. Throughout Creature Comforts, impressions of the jungle-- be they animal calls or tribal pound-- shape the soundscape. The end of "Creature" overflows with a wild, nocturnal frenzy using live percussion to accentuate the desperate, red-eyed cries of assorted robo-beasts jumping and flying about the mix.
The 15-minute centerpiece "Skeleton" rises slowly, with a slightly warped guitar figure, looped over more jungle percussion and unidentifiable humming calls (a human voice?). Like much of the rest of Creature Comforts, "Skeleton" features a surprisingly small number of instrumental elements. Black Dice uses them in a way that not only takes advantage of their skill manipulating electronic sound, but also unifies the album's otherwise disparate segments. The piece glides through several sections of propulsive ambience, each morphing into the next, and when the hi-hat pitter-patter emerges from a collage of looped guitars, the effect is as if stepping out of the jungle into an oasis, even if only for a short moment.
I probably shouldn't be surprised to hear such striking moments of clarity. Black Dice, living up to their track record of ever-diligent experimentation and the embrace of change, as well as a vibrant backdrop of New York pandemonium, have delivered one of this year's most interesting records and proved that you don't have to be noisy to make beautiful noise.


Nobody 2 is on the more unruly end of the musical spectrum for Chief Keef, and his most poorly curated project since 2013’s Bang 2.

Nobody 2

It’s inevitably saddening to watch rappers who once risked international crossover success become gradually regarded as more marginal, release by release. In 2012—Chief Keef’s breakout year—the particulars of the then-teenage, Chicago-reared rapper’s music was as much under scrutiny as his sudden, controversial rise. These days, only stories of career self-sabotage, and legal or financial missteps (most recently, his suspension from his record deal with hologram and online television entrepreneur Alki David’s multipurpose entertainment corporation FilmOn) make for major headlines. The unlikely regional and viral success of "Faneto"—a fiery, rhythmically deranged 2014 mixtape track—was comparatively little commented upon, despite around 60 million cumulative YouTube views, a lengthy paper trail of virality, a 10-minute remix featuring the biggest names in his hometown’s hip-hop scene, and even a Drake cover.
Admittedly, there's a top-heavy static-to-signal ratio on Keef’s mixtapes of the past two years. His default ritual—long days and nights in the studio with his in-house production team—results in plenty of appealing, distinctively styled rap songs, but filling his increasingly frequent projects out to between 15 and 20 tracks necessarily makes for redundancy. The Keef devotee must be prepared to rifle through his tapes, scouting for the buried handful of standalone hits. It’s to be expected, really: The over-saturation business model is the profitable and logical choice for a modern street rapper with a diehard fan base.
Releases like December’s Nobody 2 evidence the downside of this approach. The tape is both on the more unruly end of the musical spectrum for Keef, and his most poorly curated project since 2013’s Bang 2. That’s not to say it's uninteresting. It is, at least, full of inimitable and decidedly bonkers beats from notoriously prickly executive producer 12 Million (formerly 12Hunna), who also masterminded its predecessor—last December’s meditative, AutoTune-drenched Nobody—and is threatening a third installment this month. On songs like "Phone" and "Sex With Me," most elements of the drum loops lag queasily behind the tempo. "Andale," even more extremely, plays out like some untested gear-operated machine lurching into motion and chugging unsteadily along, obscuring twinkling synth constellations in the background. One of 12 Million's hallmarks is his invasive snare patterns, in which wildly backfiring trails of delay become more important that the actual on-the-beat hits themselves. Keef’s terse phrasing holds everything together, demarcating time stylishly, if sometimes to little additional effect.
Keef songs like "Mirror" function like levels of early Nintendo games—not because of the actual bleep-bloop sonic likeness, but because of the mileage they get from the deceptively complex overlap of a handful of miniature, mechanistic moving parts. Keef’s vocal take sounds as assembled from tiny scraps as the beat itself, but packs in just enough in the way of conversational one-liners to lend the track cohesion ("I think you need a chair/ Waiting on me to fail/ You say you seen some money/ N*gga, tell me where/ Is it over there/ Or is it in here?") "Mirror" is enough to make one go cross-eyed after focusing in too hard on any of its particular irregular elements, but falls together perfectly after pulling back and zoning out a bit.
But though 12 Million’s work on this tape is his most compelling to date, Keef, unfortunately, is less present than ever. On tracks like "Sex With Me," he murmurs nearly inaudibly in the background for the better part of the song—more a sound effect than anything else. On the appropriately titled, delay-riddled "In the Stu," it sounds like he’s set foot in the booth without even an embryonic idea or plan of attack. Sometimes, as on the distorted jeremiad of a pre-chorus on "Tony Hawk," he's nearly incomprehensible.
Nobody 2 is a far cry from the more lyrically clever and emotionally charged Sorry 4 the Weight, and *Bang 3’*s diplomatic songwriting and sonic clarity. This is chilly, uninviting music, implicitly and explicitly about isolation. "I feel like I need to separate myself from hip-hop, don’t let nobody come around me, don’t let nobody learn from me," Keef intones menacingly on the album’s central skit. A few years into his still-influential career, nobody quite sounds like Chief Keef in rap music. But if he doesn’t let anyone push him to complicate his now-time-tested vision, his songs may never expand back into being something more than fringe experiments, and even the interest those hold may, after a healthy amount of reiteration, wane for good.


The Philadelphia group’s metal-tinged style channels the physicality of a hardcore show with propulsive rhythms, call-and-response vocals, and floor-punching breakdowns.

...So Unknown

A hardcore show is an intensely physical experience: The kick drum’s shotgun blast to your chest, the locomotive action of distorted guitars driving a crowd into action, the guttural growls of a vocalist cutting their heart out and holding it up for all to see. Philadelphia’s Jesus Piece are masters of this energy: They wield their metallic brand of hardcore with punishing ferocity, delivering breakdowns engineered to coordinate the mosh pit’s chaotic energy. Their latest LP, So Unknown, is more fuel for that fire, a cathartic record colored by industrial-grade distortion and rhythms designed to compel bodies into motion.
Jesus Piece’s talent lies in the way they experiment with the fundamentals of a relatively static genre. Across its 28-minute runtime, So Unknown arranges energetic bursts in intervals that mirror the rhythms and movement of a hardcore show, with tempo changes that slow things down just enough to let you catch your breath before accelerating into head-splitting quarter-note triplets that teeter on the edge of chaos.
Jesus Piece tend to get tagged as metallic hardcore or metalcore, as well as more nuanced variations of the same: beatdown hardcore, hardcore groove metal, “more hardcore than metal.” They boast a unique mix of aggressive East Coast grooves and call-and-response vocals, offsetting metal’s melodic and theatrical tendencies with hardcore’s propulsive energy. Virtuoso drummer Luis Aponte wields punishing kicks, machine-gun snares, and funky, syncopated grooves with equal aplomb.
Much of their energy lies in the breakdowns—the part of the song where the arrangement is stripped to its essential elements to better suit moshers. Despite the tendency for contemporary bands to dress them up with flourishes or flashy solos, Jesus Piece properly break things down, coalescing behind a single beat or riff that concentrates all of their energy for maximum floor-punching impact.
The band draws its name from hip-hop slang for jewelry with Christian symbols, iconography typically used in heavy music as a foil for anti-religious or anti-authority sentiments. The music’s ties to hip-hop are tenuous at best; though Aponte and bassist Anthony Marinaro’s penchant for beats tinged with funk may inspire bobbing heads, the name mostly signifies their desire to distance themselves from metal cliches. (“We didn’t want a stupid metal sounding name,” vocalist Aaron Heard says.) Heard’s lyrics focus on themes of alienation, self-loathing, and violence as a tool for liberation, yet they’re not totally devoid of hope. “Gates of Horn” uses a classic trope from Greek literature to explore the veracity of our dreams, and in “Silver Lining,” Heard clings to paternal love as a way of coping with life’s bleak moments. But Heard’s screams seek to draw others in rather than push them away; even a cry like “Fuck the bullshit!” feels like a call to the band’s comrades in arms.
For a group that started as a “straight-up death-metal band,” Jesus Piece have found a sweet spot between the groove and the violence of music genetically engineered for the pit. Hardcore will never sound or feel as satisfying on record as it does coming from a stage, and experienced from within the pit, enveloped in the release of sweaty rage and other explosive emotional detritus. But the songs have to come from somewhere, and So Unknown, which bottles that rage and passion with a bit of funk, is a decent place to start.


Recording on the same boombox that launched his career, John Darnielle returns to his lo-fi roots for an album of alienation, ancient pagans, and making it through the year together.

The Mountain Goats: Songs for Pierre Chuvin

Songs for Pierre Chuvin

John Darnielle’s music has arrived so steadily and with such consistency that the changes the Mountain Goats have undergone can feel secondary to his own growth as a writer. Over the last three decades, a project with the loneliest of origins—a man at home with an acoustic guitar, a primitive tape recorder, and a pinched, inimitable voice—has grown into a full band with their own distinctive and expanding sound. Their albums from the past 10 years have seen an increased focus on the musicians around him: longtime bassist Peter Hughes, drummer Jon Wurster, multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, and collaborators that have ranged from a men’s choir to a metal producer, a symphony orchestra and a horn section. You could imagine a trajectory in which Darnielle blends deeper into this foreground, exploring how each new embellishment affects the cadence of his rich, referential storytelling.
This was the plan as recently as a month ago, when the quartet gathered to work on the follow-up to 2019’s lush In League With Dragons. But as the effects of COVID-19 made it impossible to continue recording together, and as the material Darnielle prepared began to feel at odds with the escalating news cycle, he returned home and changed plans. In his bedroom, during 90-minute breaks away from his family, he wrote one new song a day, all inspired by A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, a dense text published in 1990 by the French historian Pierre Chuvin. For the sake of immediacy—and maybe familiarity—he recorded each song on the Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox that documented his earliest compositions.
This very boombox, purchased in the late ’80s, served as Darnielle’s first essential collaborator, its harsh, unrelenting whirr once inseparable from his songwriting. It was so integral that a portion of his devoted fan base felt betrayed when he signed to 4AD after 2002’s classic All Hail West Texas and took to professional studios, adopted cleaner textures, and, eventually, recruited a band. For this contingent of fans, his new album, Songs for Pierre Chuvin, might signal a long-awaited return to form; it is a brief but thoughtful collection marked by old-school production, deep allusions to his songbook, and performances that could be placed among those early pillars. Yet it doesn’t feel like pandering. Despite the familiar sound and old-world setting (4th and 5th century, to be exact), these songs never look back for too long. They feel like another step forward.
Over the years, Darnielle has become increasingly adept at summarizing the disparate worldviews of his characters in catchy, unlikely refrains. As with everything he puts to tape, there are a couple here that you could sing along with by the time the second verse starts. The chorus of the opening song, “Aulon Raid,” sets the tone: “We will deeeeal with you/Me and my paaaa-gan crew.” These observations from a collapsing society are at turns hopeful, wistful, and enraged. Alone, Darnielle takes audible delight in finding the right backdrop for each story, from the Casio hum of “The Wooded Hills Along the Black Sea” to the terse grind of “Until Olympius Returns.” Even if you have never been a member of a small community fearing extinction—say, ancient pagans at the hands of Christians, or lo-fi purists bemoaning a more polished technique—his words ring with righteous purpose.
Amid the social distancing and mass cancellations of the past month, I had already been thinking about Darnielle’s music. His catalog is filled with odes to the small communities we build for ourselves: the divine congregations at rock concerts (“Satanic Messiah”) and wrestling matches (2015’s Beat the Champ); among people with similar dependencies (2004’s We Shall All Be Healed) and fashion choices (2017’s Goths). He has also written from pockets of deep isolation. His quiet 2006 album Get Lonely is devoted entirely to this subject, with an opening track that spends its runtime contemplating the inherent danger of leaving the house. Pierre Chuvin finds its place among these desperate stories. “Return the peace you took from me/Give me back my community,” he sings late in the album. In another song, a character casts a skeptical eye from his hillside exile: “Sometimes forget there’s cities down there,” he chants in a matter-of-fact verse, his tone somewhere between self-sufficiency and total alienation.
In moments like these, Darnielle’s writing feels newly political and wide-reaching, a comforting shift from the more insular narratives of his last few concept albums. But he closes the record with a nod to his own mythology. On the climactic “Exegetic Chains,” Darnielle expresses gratitude for the faithful grind of his boombox and repurposes the chorus of his signature song: “Make it through this year,” he urges in a near-whisper, “if it kills us outright.” It’s the echo of a message that’s often shouted through tears at the end of his shows: a personal mantra turned outward, an old prayer sung like intimate advice. This, he suggests, is how we might get by. When he started writing songs, recording to tape was a necessity: a quick, inexpensive way to document his thoughts. Now it’s a gesture of faith. The proceeds from this release go to his bandmates and crew, the people who count on his work for income. The initial run sold out in minutes; it’s currently in its third pressing. He wants to make sure the people who need it can hear it, that they can hold it in their hands.


PUP's second album is a glorious half-hour of redlining guitars and pile-on group chants that turn self-loathing and self-deprecation into a sort of superpower.

The Dream is Over

On a surface level, PUP’s second album is this year’s Celebration Rock or The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us: a half hour of capital-R Rock music, nothing but glorious redlining guitars and pile-on group chants that should be banned in cars for safety purposes. It’s deeply unfashionable and equally vital-sounding, the everyman/Superman appeal of all three enhanced by the setbacks in their origin story. Every review of The Dream is Over is obligated to mention the inspiration behind the album title—after literally shredding his vocal cords, Stefan Babcock was told by a doctor, “the dream is over.” The irony is that Babcock would’ve told you the same thing at any point in the past two years if he never set foot in the office. While Beach Slang and Japandroids use rock music to promise salvation for drunk and aimless weirdos, after playing upwards of 400 shows behind their 2014 self-titled, PUP can only write what they know—which is why the first song is “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will”. Ask Beach Slang if they relate.
Babcock’s homicidal thoughts are countered by panicked, massed vocals that double as restraining orders—“WHY CAN’T WE JUST GET ALONG?” “WHY CAN’T EVERYBODY JUST CHILL?!??” Notice that there’s never any threat to turn the damn van around or just break up. Judging by their insane touring regimen and adrenalized music, this a band that believes it can power through anything by sheer force of will. But even if being in PUP sounds like a living nightmare for Babcock, it’s all he’s got. Gig or no gig, he’s waking up most mornings on the floor with more apologies than dollars in the bank, coming to the same conclusion over and over again: that voice in my head telling me I’m a loser was right all along.
But, as Patrick Stickles once sang, that’s OK. “Now that you’ve finally figured me out/I can go home and rest easier now,” Babcock brays on “Doubts,” one of the many songs on The Dream is Over which retells an involuntary romantic/vocational break up. “What am I supposed to do now?” he asks and it’s not a rhetorical question; The Dream is Over is weirdly pragmatic about hitting bottom. It’s heartening to see PUP’s realm become more mature, mindful and socially conscious, but being constantly broke, hungover and miserable fucking sucks and there’s no way around it.  There’s a “don’t fight it, feel it,” philosophy to PUP’s music, validating these emotions with an unapologetically nasty record that lets you work out all of your angst in a safe place.
Babcock yells, “I’ve been blessed with this shit luck,” a sentiment that typically traces back to the Replacements, the patron saints of lovable loser punk. But Babcock’s misery has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with decisions (“And I’m sick and tired of blacking out on my carpet/And waking up all on my own/So I brought you home") and PUP’s music is more based in hyper-aggressive post-hardcore and skate-punk. Babcock’s vocals are clean, yelpy and sing-song melodic, justifying PUP's brief spell on the Warped Tour, but the music takes after the precise assault of Drive Like Jehu in the gymnastic chorus of “Doubts,” Pixies at their most manic (“Sleep in the Heat”), and the hectoring bass assaults of Mclusky (“Old Wounds”). There’s enough self-deprecation to ensure that The Dream is Over never sounds hateful, but the physical violence of the “Reservoir” and “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will” videos isn’t entirely played for laughs. Someone is going to get hurt here.
It’s all very effective because the ultimate message is “misery loves company.” Though a far more accomplished and tuneful record than their debut, The Dream Is Over feels just as much a preview for PUP’s live show. Whereas most music of this sort never tries to sound like more than a couple guys in a room, PUP’s approach is so over-the-top that it can sound as CGI’d as any chart-pop; you have to see it in person just to find out if they can really pull this off. Can they really nail the heart-stopping segue between “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You” and “DVP”?  How can anyone play as melodically and as fast as they do on “DVP”? On every single chorus, the four members of PUP sound like 4000, is that really how it comes off in a room or is it because they rightfully expect everyone in the crowd to shout along? Frankly, the energy and intensity that’s channeled into the first half of The Dream is Over feels utterly impossible, especially given the subject matter.
But even at 31 minutes, Babcock’s relentless self-loathing can go from intoxicating to simply toxic; it’s fitting that “My Life is Over and I Couldn’t Be Happier” and “Can’t Win” are immediately followed by a song called “Familiar Patterns.” Babcock finally steps out of himself on the closing “Pine Point.” Inspired by the 2011 interactive web documentary Welcome to Pine Point, Babcock looks back and remembers his brother dying in a drunken car crash, walks around the abandoned Northwest Territories mining town and sees Pine Point as a fate far worse than death or even his current situation ("Imagine if your hometown never changed" goes the tagline). As a sort of pop-punk Greek chorus, the band repeats “I hope you know what you’re doing” over anxious minor chords, cautionary advice that had about as much impact on them as “the dream is over.” They’ve tried so hard and got so far only to find out in the end, it doesn’t even matter.  So the only thing to do is keep moving—if that tour didn’t kill PUP, nothing will.


Deerhunter make a record about the joy of early music discovery, and in revisiting that youthful enthusiasm, they brilliantly rekindle it.

Halcyon Digest

Halcyon Digest is a record about the joy of music discovery, the thrill of listening for the first time to a potential future favorite, and that sense of boundless possibility when you're still innocent of indie-mainstream politics and your personal canon is far from set. In revisiting that youthful enthusiasm, Deerhunter brilliantly rekindle it, and the result meets Microcastle/Weird Era (Cont.) as the band's most exhilarating work to date. Whether those halcyon days were real or just idealized doesn't matter. With producer Ben Allen, who lent a bass-heavy sheen to Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, these four guys-- lead singer Bradford Cox, singer/guitarist Lockett Pundt, bass player Josh Fauver, and drummer Moses Archuleta-- have created a seamless album of startling emotional clarity.
Deerhunter have never lacked ambition. 2007 breakout Cryptograms came as two discrete halves: one front-loaded with ambient drifts and clanging post-punk aggression, the other blasting off into sunny psych-pop. Microcastle turned out to be a sprawling, ghostly amusement park of a double album, with violence and frail beauty never far from each other. And then there are all those EPs, side projects, and rarities. In blog posts and interviews, Cox has shown himself to be a music lover of the highest order, almost a platonic ideal of the artist as fan.
This record marks a distinctly different approach for the band, more streamlined and stripped down, and in its sparest moments, it echoes the stark intimacy and one-take effortlessness of records like Neil Young's Tonight's the Night or Chris Bell's I Am the Cosmos. Fans of the band's earlier stuff may understandably miss some of the old electric-guitar squall, but Halcyon Digest's expanded instrumental palette-- acoustic guitar, electronic percussion, banjo, autoharp, harmonica, vocal harmonies, and saxophone (!)-- creates endless depths of intricacy and nuance to explore in headphones.
In the past, Deerhunter's gift for garbled sonics and Cox's stream-of-consciousness methods made it easy to downplay the group's lyrical ability. That's not the case here. Whether by Pundt, who sings lead on two of Halcyon Digest's best songs, or Cox, Deerhunter's songwriting congeals into a style all its own, with lyrics moved front-and-center. The words fit perfectly together, down to the most trivial minutia: Cox asking, "Did you stick with me?" at the start of garage-pop fist-pumper "Memory Boy", right after the track people are most likely to skip (funny!), or Pundt mentioning a "marching band" on another uptempo proto-anthem, "Fountain Stairs", as Bill Oglesby's sax first appears.
The topical ground covered here is inspired, too: "Revival", a sort of Southern gothic folk-rock baptism, embraces religion. "I'm saved, I'm saved!" Cox exalts, "I felt his presence heal me." Recorded to four-track, "Basement Scene" "dream[s] a little dream" that soon turns nightmarish: "I don't wanna get old" quickly becomes "I wanna get old" as Cox weighs the alternative. And first single "Helicopter" is a beautifully watery electro-acoustic farewell that uses a tragic Dennis Cooper story about a Russian prostitute (graciously reprinted in the liner notes) to support its emotional bleakness.
Then there's seven-and-a-half-minute finale "He Would Have Laughed", dedicated to Jay Reatard, the Memphis garage rocker who died last winter of drug-related causes at age 29. Its lyrics are the most cryptic on Halcyon Digest-- full sentences are rarely formed before Cox closes them off with his usual crisp consonants. A simple acoustic guitar riff repeats as other percussion elements and electronic tones pan across the track, occasionally joined by the full band. Cox admits to growing "bored as I get older," and then goes into a dream-- "I lived on a farm, yeah/ I never lived on a farm"-- until he finally all but asks, "Where are your friends tonight?" The track cuts off unexpectedly mid-note.
Deerhunter unveiled their new album by asking fans to print out a vintage DIY-style poster, photocopy it, and tape it up all over town. In the last couple of weeks, band members have participated in all-night online chats with some of their most devoted fans. We'll never be able to parse every lyric or tease out every technical intricacy-- though somebody will probably try-- but that is what Halcyon Digest is all about: nostalgia not for an era, not for antiquated technology, but for a feeling of excitement, of connection, of that dumb obsession that makes life worth living no matter how horrible it gets. And then sharing that feeling with somebody else who'll start the cycle all over again.


With his trailblazing Trap Lord days behind him, the brash former A$AP affiliate returns with a fun, familiar album that is content to chase trends instead of set them.

Floor Seats II

On his 2013 mixtape-turned-debut-album Trap Lord, A$AP Ferg was ahead of his time. Even among the region-defying ranks of his (apparently former) A$AP Mob affiliates, Ferg’s debut stood out as truly weird. His voice and bravado were unmistakably New York, but singles “Shabba” and “Work” pulled as much from Lex Luger’s maximalist aesthetic as they did from Dipset’s uptown swagger, forecasting the stranglehold Atlanta trap would have on rap for the rest of the 2010s. Seven years later, on his latest project Floor Seats II, Ferg’s music no longer sounds avant-garde.
In his defense, Ferg has settled into a comfortable rhythm since 2017’s lively but low-stakes Still Striving mixtape. His insistence on familiarity tracks within our current cultural climate. The coronavirus is still raging across the world, with the United States in particular still struggling with its first wave. Ferg recently told Complex that Floor Seats II is “music to take people’s minds elsewhere, and off what’s happening in the state of the world right now.” The project’s loose concept is geared around sitting courtside at a basketball game, with its loaded tracklist representing the celebrities you might see at a game The Knicks would currently be losing at The Garden if it were open. If anything, it makes me miss the scent of beer and rage that floats from The Garden into Penn Station below every game night.
The concept doesn’t really suit the boisterous nature of Ferg’s music, which can make you feel like you’re milly-rocking at the top of the George Washington Bridge at its best. If there’s one thing Floor Seats II doesn’t lack, it’s energy. You can feel the velocity of songs like “Dennis Rodman” and “In It,” with Ferg’s flows lighting him up like the Human Torch; even his trademark barking and cooing adlibs happen faster. On “Move Ya Hips,” he feeds off of Nicki Minaj and MadeinTYO’s energy, building on his established chemistry with Minaj without recreating their 2017 hit “Plain Jane.”
Ferg takes a few risks on Floor Seats II, and some pan out better than others. The penultimate song “Hectic,” co-produced by TGUT and Ferg himself, opens with a glitchy electronic beat before a mid-song switch reveals a tribal stomp that sounds like Clipse’s “Grindin’” in a wind tunnel. Ferg transitions effortlessly into a verse calling American racism to task: “I lost battles for my peace/Take those shackles off our feet/And we got diamonds in our teeth/But we’re still a nigga to the police.” Ferg’s passionate story of his come up and his claim to the A$AP legacy on closing song “Big A$AP” is softened by a posh piano run almost as silly as the one on Kendrick Lamar and Mary J. Blige’s infamous duet “Now Or Never.” Both “No Ceilings” and “Aussie Freaks” are anchored by Brooklyn drill beats, and while Ferg gives it his all, it would be a stretch to say he sounds natural over this skittering production. It’s one of the few times Ferg has chased a trend instead of trying to set one.
Even with the added variety, Floor Seats II often cedes too much time to its guests. Tyga dominates the first half of “Dennis Rodman” with a forgettable verse before Ferg blows him out of the water on the back half. The flex of inviting Diddy to monologue over “Hectic” isn’t worth listening to his motivational-meme posturing in between verses. Ferg works well with guests, which is why this project exists, but not when they start eating into the runtime.
On the hook for “Value,” Ferg briefly resurrects his Trap Lord persona. It briefly provokes nostalgia for the moment when invisible chains and random merch giveaways on Twitter were the height of cool, when putting Waka Flocka Flame and B-Real on the same album was considered fresh and forward-thinking. This is not that time. Floor Seats II is a fun but familiar distraction where Ferg seems content to ride the wave, for better and for worse.

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A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA


The ambient dream-pop duo’s fourth album is split between fragile vocal meditations and instrumentals as delicate as origami cranes.

You’ll Never Get to Heaven: Wave Your Moonlight Hat for the Snowfall Train

You’ll Never Get to Heaven’s lucid dream-pop rarely coalesces into recognizable shapes. “We are intuitively drawn to music that occupies a space between intimacy and distance,” says Chuck Blazevic, who shares the duo with his partner, the classically trained pianist, violinist, and vocalist Alice Hansen. Across four releases in just under a decade, the London, Ontario-based couple have developed a strain of ambient songcraft as instrumentally sophisticated as it is hazily mysterious. On Wave Your Moonlight Hat for the Snowfall Train, they replace the drum machine pulse of 2017’s Images with a shimmering, vaporous sound. Inspired by the beatless, delay-drenched free jazz arrangements of Phil Yost’s 1967 LP Bent City (whose closing song provides the new album’s title), this softly atmospheric cycle feels both tenderly tactile and forever out of reach.
From the start, YNGTH’s music has been intentionally incomplete. In a 2014 interview, Nova Scotian experimental musician and Divorce label founder Darcy Spidle recalled receiving the duo’s 2012 debut as a demo. When Spidle heard the sketchy, unfinished bedroom recordings of breath-on-glass pop, he offered to release the record as-is. Hansen has compared the origins of YNGTH to Leyland Kirby’s hauntological project The Caretaker: building songs with symphonic jazz samples from a bygone era to linger eternally in a ghost-filled ballroom.
With a patient process that requires three or four years between releases, YNGTH have continually tweaked their time-suspending formula. The 2014 EP Adorn paid direct tribute to the duo’s influences with a cover of Cluster and Eno’s “By This River,” followed by a solo piano performance of Erik Satie’s “Enfantillages Pittoresques: Berceuse.” On Images—released by Maryland label Yellow K the year after Japanese Breakfast’s debut—YNGTH found a sputtering propulsion that resembled synth-pop, allowing Hansen’s soft, wistful vocal melodies to be tugged forward by analog and electronic beats. Wave Your Moonlight Hat continues their use of chiming metallophone percussion (also a feature of Blazevic’s solo project Slow Attack Ensemble), but in comparison to the duo’s previous output, it feels weightless.
The eight songs of Wave Your Moonlight Hat are split between fragile vocal meditations and instrumentals as delicate as origami cranes. With poetic economy of words, Hansen uses natural imagery (a setting sun, a creeping dawn) and sound elements (an infinite echo dancing in and out of phase) to evoke spiraling emotions that never quite come into focus. On “Eye, Soul and Hand,” she lowers her voice to a muffled ASMR whisper, making it almost impossible to discern some of the album’s most affecting lyrics: “Fear is a pale gray shadow, and now that you’re gone it takes its form.” Even if she doesn’t reveal specifics, the world weighs heavy as it disintegrates around her.
On previous releases, Blazevic has earned attention for his use of the Monome, a grid-based control panel of blinking squares that requires the user to define its function. For these songs, his primary tool is the fretless bass, which glides between grooves and punctuates Hansen’s vocal hooks with twinkling harmonics like Jaco Pastorius. Wave Your Moonlight Hat’s other core instruments include marimba and the watery, Grouper-like pianos that bob to the surface on closer “Predawn Visions.” The final effect is like Julee Cruise produced by Ivo Watts-Russell, or Elizabeth Fraser produced by Angelo Badalamenti. Four releases in, You’ll Never Get to Heaven have crafted a sound that is comforting and familiar but never predictable.

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