Bryson Tiller’s sophomore album leans heavily on ’90s R&B samples. It sounds luxurious, but Tiller’s come-up narrative and good-guy pose are starting to lose their power.

True to Self

Bryson Tiller knows his origin story. Since the breakthrough success of his 2015 debut album, *Trapsoul, *the Kentucky-born R&B singer remains committed to that come-up narrative. He worked at Papa John’s, threw a song on SoundCloud that grabbed Drake’s attention, turned down the offer to sign to OVO, and instead signed with RCA and ended up with two Top 40 hits (“Don’t” and “Exchange”). *True to Self, *Tiller’s sophomore album, which was surprised-released a month early, tries to offer new dimensions to that story arc while reconstructing the dividing lines between R&B and every other genre.
Over the last year, Tiller’s R&B peers PARTYNEXTDOOR and Tory Lanez tried to find new roots in dancehall, and the Weeknd went further into the pop machine. On *True to Self, *Tiller isn’t so much of a globalist. Instead, on “In Check,” he samples Brandy’s mid-’90s hit “Missing You,” then further gambles by putting samples on the album from Faith Evans, Ice Cube, Mary J. Blige, and Tweet. The album’s credits read like a ’90s old-school station in much the same way ’70s and ’80s funk and soul provided the backbone of hip-hop and R&B two decades ago.
More precisely, Tiller’s roots can be found in Bobby Brown or the post-new jack swing machismo of Jodeci, rather than the buttoned-up slickness of a Boyz II Men or Babyface. “Don’t Get Too High,” an early album highlight, uses an uncredited Travis Scott sample from his 2014 song “Backyard,” as Tiller talks down to a former fling, “Woah, you make me feel how I make other bitches feel/Like you be cool without or with me here.” There is just the slightest hint of self-awareness that shows Tiller can see through his own nonsense.
Before the lines of R&B and rap fully blurred, a rapper on an R&B song would bluntly state its emotional themes, while the singer would only offer hints. Tiller’s generation has streamlined the workflow, so he turns on a dime from the struggling ex-boyfriend to an aggressive rap star. But it’s Tiller’s pettiness, rather than romance, that drives True to Self, as he adjusts to the trappings of fame. “Somethin Tells Me” hinges on that tension as a bedroom drama morphs into a lament on the grief caused by fame and success. Tiller reveals little more about these privileged concerns than Drake has already done over the last decade—in fact, he sounds the most comfortable at the shallow end of the emotional pool.
The 1998 SWV hit “Rain” is sampled on the opening interlude of *True to Self *to try and establish a new tone for Tiller’s world. Rain is a powerful trope in R&B: Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” video, the raindrops on Trey Songz’s 2010 album Passion, Pain & Pleasure, New Edition’s late ’80s hit “Can You Stand The Rain,” and Prince’s classic “Purple Rain.” Rain stands for emotional change and vulnerability and *True to Self *tries its best to follow through on that idea. Except, he struggles to let his guard down, and ironically, operates best when he keeps it up. Tiller comes off not as the passionate lover, but as the sappy everyman—too bland and full of tropes to be the new hero pouring his heart out in a thunderstorm. Maybe that's why his personal narrative that he holds so close feels wrung dry.


The Northampton, Mass. quartet Potty Mouth are among a crop of bands expanding the idea of "pop-punk" in 2013. Their debut LP, Hell Bent, inches the feminist punk quartet towards more profound songwriting than last year's great Sun Damage EP.

Hell Bent

Potty Mouth don't shake the foundation of guitar rock, but they do inject it with attitude, playing the Ladyfest-aligned basement scene while also transcending it. Dreamt up at women's-only Smith College, in Northampton, Mass., bassist Ally Einbinder and drummer Victoria Mandanas had already played the punk scene, allowing Potty Mouth a driving energy, while Phoebe Harris, also a visual artist, didn't own a guitar. Abby Weems, a recent high school grad, fronts the band with deceptively simple lyrical play-- her Liz Phair-style monotone is clear and literal, underscoring the direct quality of their pop-punk poetry. At times the guitars weave like early ramshackle post-punk, but Potty Mouth's upbeat surf fuzz could be likened to any number of fast, barebones 70s and 90s punk bands who were learning as they went. You could imagine them covering Buzzcocks, Jawbreaker, or maybe Excuse 17.
With that, Potty Mouth are among a crop of bands expanding the idea of "pop-punk" in 2013-- see Don Giovanni and Salinas Records' back catalogues for other recent examples-- disassociating the mind-numbing skate-and-weed culture that has often surrounded that descriptor. The difference was well exemplified this spring, when Potty Mouth and the likeminded Aye Nako played within the bright gallery walls of New York's New Museum.
Hell Bent inches Potty Mouth towards more profound songwriting than last year's great Sun Damage EP. The lyrics focus primarily on the many facets of what it means to be young-- desire to ditch smalltown life, irresponsible choices that bring on "The Spins," feeling infinite-- but what makes Hell Bent such a glorious Rookie-era superlative of feminist punk today is the sense of confidence and personal conviction Potty Mouth's songs conjure. This appears most strongly as Hell Bent opens and closes. "The Gap", which references the unconventional post-high school gap year, is about searching for more than you've been handed and believing in yourself. The slow-building closer "The Better End", shout-sung by guitarist Phoebe Harris, reconciles a bitter breakup ("Go ahead/ Kiss your friend") while feeling assertive in walking away: "Here's the thing/ I'm the best," Harris screams, "I know it's hard/ To digest."
More often than not, though, the songs on Hell Bent center on confusion, uncertainty, and frustration within contexts like friendship, identity, or dreaming. "Damage" charges forward with the grey melancholy and earnestness of early emo, as Weems grapples with feeling helpless in a dire situation. On "Sleep Talk", she fears what might seep into her subconscious at night-- "I have this feeling that I'll wake up and wanna talk to you"-- coasting over one of the record's best hooks. "Shithead", meanwhile, is an angsty reprieve, as Weems hollers funny disses at a seemingly boy-crazed ex-friend-- "You're possessed by a dick/ And your mind's in a ditch"-- like fellow Western Mass resident Kim Gordon's suggestion on Sonic Youth classic "Becuz", but entirely unkind, and largely unforgiving.
“Black and Studs” is the best Potty Mouth song yet-- a commentary on searching for your own essence within a punk subculture where individuals still tend to conform in certain ways. "What happened to you to make you wear black and studs?" Weems sings, before turning this exceedingly catchy question onto herself, with airy echoes harmonized underneath. Although "Black and Studs" is the band's only song to get critical on punk politics, it feels like a potent extension of an overarching idea that guides Potty Mouth-- in interviews, they've been vocal about the values they aim to incorporate into the makeup of their band, as well as the ageism and sexism they've faced. In doing so, Potty Mouth have functioned under the golden rule of writing songs in relatively simple structures while keeping the narrative of their band strong.
Potty Mouth also hail from an exciting moment for smart guitar rock in their collegiate hometown-- along with Speedy Ortiz (spot frontwoman Sadie Dupuis in the video for "The Spins") and California X, they're doing a fine job romanticizing Northampton, leaving 20-somethings everywhere wondering if they'd not be better off enrolling in Amherst's grad school and plugging in without looking back. Hell Bent, while elemental, sounds sincere and grounded but free-- a self-assured debut of principled pop-punk that leaves room for growth.


On his new EP, Vic Mensa opens up like never before, airing his mistakes and fears.

There’s Alot Going On

Vic Mensa went very quickly from playing in a band with his friends to crawling on national television with Kanye West to signing to Jay Z’s label. Until now, he hasn’t had much time to take it all into account. On There’s Alot Going On—remarkably, just the Chicago rapper’s third solo release—he finally catches up. The results brim with pain, anger, and confusion, but there’s also plenty of confidence and ambition. Throughout the EP, which is the best and boldest thing he’s made so far, he airs out his mistakes and fears, adding depth to well-produced, invigorating music.
Mensa has consistently been the second-highest-profile member of SaveMoney—the Chicago collective that boasts Donnie Trumpet, Joey Purp, Towkio, and most prominently, Chance the Rapper. At first, he followed closely in Chance’s footsteps, with his 2013 mixtape INNANETAPE often sounding like a knockoff Acid Rap. But he spent 2014 exploring the intersection of house music and hip-hop, resulting in the excellent “Down on My Luck” and plenty of SoundCloud gems. By 2015, he had taken a sharp left-turn toward post-Yeezus aggro-rap. He was definitely not Chance Lite anymore, but his music lacked personality, with high profile collabs (“U Mad” with Kanye and “No Chill” with Skrillex) and aesthetic taking precedence over substance. He seemed like a second-in-command in search of a role to embody: Was he an ODB or a Beanie Sigel or an A$AP Ferg?
With There’s Alot Going On, you can hear him settling into himself, and he opens up like never before.* *The first track “Dynasty” pairs boasts with a beautiful grandiose instrumental, before the affair gets immediately darker. “16 Shots” is dedicated to Laquan McDonald, the 17-year-old Chicagoan who was shot to death by a city police officer on a highway in 2014. It’s an appropriately angry song with distressing imagery, like a little girl—young enough to have braces—being forcefully shoved to the street by cops. No matter how many listens, the song’s ending will always be sickening and unbearable, as one of the McDonald family’s lawyers, Jeffrey Neslund, describes the murder in plain detail, with just the hum of a bass making it even more ominous. “16 Shots” is not the EP’s best song, but it is its clearest, setting the mood for the entire record.
“Danger” and “New Bae” showcase Mensa as a gifted pop artist. The songs are thunderous yet reserved, allowing his vocals to hold as much weight as the beats. Standout “Liquor Locker,” with a surprising but welcome uncredited Ty Dolla $ign feature, is a cry for help disguised as a smooth acoustic come-on. Mensa doesn’t just want D’USSÉ (a Jay Z favorite), he needs it to free himself from pain, and just wants a partner in his escape. Ty$, meanwhile, is similarly desperate: He promises the best sex ever, but seems to be unable to stand.
The closing title track is a stark admission of depression, addiction, physical abuse, and entitlement. Mensa sings a very pretty hook (“Know I never die/We live forever in my mind/And I sanctify/We live forever, still that life”), but it’s more of a diary entry than functional rap song: For the most part, he ditches any discernible rhyme scheme and punning. But again, it’s a necessary moment for Mensa, as a person and an artist, and has a captivating narrative arc. “There’s Alot Going On” is the most vital song on the EP. It leaves no stone unturned, no minute unrecalled. Vic Mensa likely will no longer ignore his past, as he had on many faceless songs in the past couple of years; he can finally grow toward a promising future.


A 1974 recording from a largely forgotten downtown artist loft space captures some fierce players putting their talents toward a questing, incandescent strain of jazz.

Valley of Search

In 1974, after Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins slagged their fellow Berklee alum David S. Ware in newsprint, a few musician friends residing at a little-known artist loft space at 501 Canal Street goaded Giddins with mimeographed posters. If he really wanted to hear what was happening in downtown jazz, they taunted, he should visit the building’s first-floor performance space. Giddins took the bait and caught reedsman Alan Braufman’s band, writing a positive review that noted the group’s “kaleidoscopic densities.”
By the early 1970s, those incandescent strains of jazz, as exemplified by John Coltrane, were in sharp decline. While plugged-in fusion acts were topping the charts, forward-thinking players practicing “black creative music” were no longer drawing bar-friendly crowds to clubs. For players and fans who deemed such music “as serious as your life” (a phrase subsequently used as the title of Valerie Wilmer’s excellent book about that era) they began to gravitate toward downtown loft spaces like Ornette Coleman’s spot on Prince Street, Sam  and Bea Rivers’ Studio Rivbea on Bond Street, and late Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali’s own Ali’s Alley. But there’s little documentation of what was cooking at 501 Canal Street save for the lone record credited to Braufman, 1975’s Valley of Search.
There’s nothing to suggest that Valley of Search, the second release on the revered India Navigation label, attained grail status among collectors or was heavily in demand, and Braufman never released an album as leader again; there are no canonical drum breaks fetishized by latter-day beat producers, though Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden did slot “Rainbow Warriors” in his Just Jam set in 2013. But with players like Kamasi Washington, Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia, and Makaya McCraven initiating a groundswell of interest beyond the confines of the jazz community, the moment is ripe for rediscoveries.
While the sleeve denotes nine selections, Valley of Search really moves as two sidelong suites. Across these large-scale pieces, the first takeaway might be that Braufman is often eclipsed by his excellent sidemen. That’s no knock against him: The album features one of the 1970s’ most formidable bassists in Cecil McBee, a nimble and foundation-deep heavyweight who could be both lyrical and primal as he held down the low end for Pharoah Sanders, Jackie Mclean, Andrew Hill, and Charles Lloyd. The extra percussion and whistles that add to the din come from Ralph Williams, a future collaborator of Wadada Leo Smith.
Making Valley of Search especially noteworthy for jazz historians is an early appearance from Gene Ashton, known today as Cooper-Moore, who continually adds curious new textures throughout the session. Soon after the recording, Ashton decamped to Virginia, but he reemerged in the late 1980s as one of the most electric and eclectic players on the downtown scene, playing with artists like William Parker and Susie Ibarra. Here, he shows flashes of his multifaceted genius and acts as a catalyst for the album’s unique energy. His dulcimer playing gives opener “Rainbow Warriors” its uncanny African folk edge; his chanting of the Bahá’í prayer “God sufficeth all things above all things” leads to a fiery outburst from the band; his dense, choppy piano chords power the climactic “Love Is for Real.”
Braufman’s alto and flute provide the emotional resonance on the album’s final two pieces. His careening, drunken playing on “Little Nabil’s March” is a fine foil to the lurching martial beat behind him. On “Destiny,” he and his band muster a lucidity that is perhaps not as dense as Valley of Search’s other chaotic peaks but quite evocative, drawing on the roiling emotions of something like John Coltrane’s “Alabama,” luminous and sorrowful at once. It verifies Giddins’ impressions in that early press clip and reveals Braufman’s sense of the kaleidoscopic.


American Wrestlers is the home-recorded project of Gary McClure, and his album boasts some of the virtues of his circa-2011 Fat Possum labelmates: the dog-eared alt-rock melodies of Yuck; the lo-fi, low-end thump of Youth Lagoon; the oddball psych odysseys of Unknown Mortal Orchestra.

American Wrestlers

Using a drum machine to replicate a live backing band tends to have the opposite effect, making solo home recorders sound even more isolated. Case in point, American Wrestlers’ self-titled debut. As of now, it’s Gary McClure’s project and his alone, but the songs won’t require a lot of maintenance to be ready for the road: guitars, bass, piano and vocals are layered about the same way they would have if American Wrestlers were just four guys in a cheap studio. But there’s always that rigid, so on-the-beat-it’s-actually-off thwack of a snare, a bass drum that sounds like a blown subwoofer and the occasional hint of McClure hitting the power switch on the thing—all reminders that American Wrestlers is McClure starting a rock band with his imaginary friends.
Until about a month ago, American Wrestlers was in fact a pointedly anonymous project, an attention-seeking tactic that went out of fashion right about the time Burial went public.  The music feels a few steps behind the times as well, but that's a major component of its charm. Perhaps coincidentally, the album shares some of the best qualities of Fat Possum's major 2011 releases: the dog-eared alt-rock melodies of Yuck’s debut; the lo-fi, low-end thump of Youth Lagoon’s The Year of Hibernation; the (also formerly incognito) Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s oddball psych odysseys.
Regardless of the promo-cycle theatrics, the songs themselves tend to make strong first impressions. McClure leads songs off with breezy guitar leads, memorable titles become indelible lyrics, choruses make satisfying, expected leaps. And despite its disheveled exterior, McClure’s lyrics generate positive energy out of bad vibes: "There’s No One Crying Over Me Either" and "I Can Do No Wrong" respectively turn self-pity and a lack of introspection into superpowers.
There’s no simple genre tag for American Wrestlers, though singles "Kelly" and "I Can Do No Wrong" imagine an alternate history where Phoenix started their career as Tascam 4-trackers. The grubby production appears to be a product of necessity, the natural result of McClure’s rudimentary equipment and skills rather than an allegiance to lo-fi aesthetics, but it still lends American Wrestlers a distinct character: The 12-string sparkle of "I Can Do No Wrong" gets toned down just enough to not be blinding. And had the singles been given a properly sync-ready production, you might already be tired of hearing them from a commercial for macrobrews or luxury sedans.
The highlights of American Wrestlers reveal themselves immediately, but elsewhere on the record McClure demonstrates a curious ability to bury concise hooks in otherwise-doughy or unfinished songs. The contrast between the southern rock lead of "Holy" and its passages of National-esque piano is intriguing on first exposure; it is not enough intrigue to sustain a six-minute song on its own. "Wild Yonder" evokes the ear-turning pitter-patter of Sparklehorse’s balladry and would’ve served as a nice shift in tone had it been three minutes, but it goes on for nearly twice that long.
This pattern repeats itself on the album's Side B, when "Kelly" is followed by "Left" and "Cheapshot", 18 minutes of music that you can hear straining for "epic" but fail to generate any real volume dynamics or textural motion. These shots at a bigger sound only end up fully demonstrating the limitations of McClure’s compositional methods.
It's in these moments where it occurs to you that the biggest problem with a solo project is that there's no one there to tell you "no." At some point during the ponderous stretches of "Wild Yonder" or "Cheapshot" or "Left", perhaps McClure would've noticed someone else in the band starting to drift off or suggested that maybe he should get to the chorus more quickly. "I Can Do No Wrong" may be a highlight on American Wrestlers, but the title sentiment is his project's Achilles heel.


The songwriter Sophie Allison has built a following with her Bandcamp bedroom recordings, but on this new record, she upgrades to a full band, giving her mournful songs a little extra drive.

Collection

For any songwriter with an achy heart and some basic recording software, Bandcamp has become a bit like what LiveJournal was a half generation ago: a network of sensitive souls, broadcasting feelings they would never share in person. Of course, most of these songwriters never find much of an audience, but Soccer Mommy’s Sophie Allison is among the relative few who have built a real following through the site. For the last couple of years, she’s provided listeners a play-by-play as she’s internalized the rejection of one unrequited love after another over a series of lonesome EPs with titles like songs from my bedroom and songs for the recently sad.
Allison’s voice has the same captivatingly mournful quality as naturals like Julie Doiron and Elliott Smith, so she’s well suited for this territory. Increasingly, though, she’s begun pushing back against her reputation for “sad girl music,” both in interviews and in the studio, where the upgrade to a full band has given her songs a little extra drive. Her latest release and first for Fat Possum, Collection catalogs that shift, reworking six tracks from her Bandcamp recordings and packaging them with a pair of new songs, “Out Worn” and “Allison.” For every mopey track, there are one or two peppy ones.
She doesn’t overdo it. An occasional stab of synthesizer is the closest these songs come to pomp, and the production is still scruffy around the edges, hi-fi only by the standards of her early self-recordings. But the improved fidelity lets her words and voice come across clearer than they did from the bedroom, revealing how much more elegant Allison’s wordplay is than it can seem at first blush, and her gift for detailing conflict with the economy of a young adult novel. Every song introduces an untenable situation, with Allison stuck in a rut, questioning a relationship, or hung up on an unavailable crush.
She’s especially prone to that last scenario. After a cute stranger brushes against her on the street on “Try,” she’s consumed by the fantasies that flood her brain. On the similarly light and jangly “Benadryl Dreams,” those kinds of fantasies wear her down as she curses the unknowing object of her desire with the album’s best line: “You’ve been spending all your time living on the backsides of my eyes.” And on the sobering “3 AM at a Party,” she casts herself as that most enduring of romantic movie archetypes: the best friend that the oblivious guy really ought to be with. “I wish you never got your heart so broke,” she sings, “I wish you didn’t sleep with her when you were drunk.” Here Allison doesn’t even allow herself to get her hopes up. “You deserve better yet you’ll never see,” she laments.
Especially on Collection’s more riff-centric tunes, Allison can’t help but invite comparisons to Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, another sharp, personable songwriter who got her start self-recording dreamy music in her bedroom. But where Duterte has fleshed out that very common sound into something completely her own—her latest, Everybody Works, is an expansive, nostalgic imagining of a pop album distinguished by some spectacularly creative productive choices—Allison isn’t there yet. She hasn’t figured out how to take full advantage of the studio, or how to create a sense of place with her music now that she’s left the bedroom behind. She’s got the songs, but she’s still piecing together a vision.
There are signs she’ll get there, though. The record’s best tune is one of the new ones, “Out Worn,” a DTMFA (“dump the motherfucker already”) anthem where she plays to the crowd like never before. Its proud chorus hits like an awakening: “I’m sick of living in the eye of a storm,” Allison sings, her voice suddenly flushed with determination. “I want the feeling of being admired/You only taught me to be out worn.” The only song on Collection with a clear resolution, it feels like a turning point: The moment she vowed to stop being a passive player in her own songs and started taking action. If it’s a sign of what’s to come, it’s an exciting one.


Sunderland band shares a family tree with Futureheads and Maxïmo Park but plays buzzing indie pop rather than herky-jerky post-punk.

Field Music

By now, the beaches of Sunderland, England, must be redolent with post-punk herky-jerky. To be sure, native sons Field Music have much in common with the Mackems that came before-- not least their members, who include one former Futurehead plus a current Maxïmo Park drummer-- but rather than assail us with angularity, the region's latest exports aptly prefer prettiness. Indeed, "You're So Pretty", their 12-song, 38-minute debut's art-pop finale, is the album's best track, and also its buzzing, ornamented, just-too-brief-enough synecdoche.
That song, like the album's other epiphanies, is a sparkling construct of whirring guitars, eccentric percussion, windmill-tilting bass, and Andrew Moore's piano embellishments. Dual lead vocalists Peter and David Brewis swap quixotic, often-falsetto harmonies as indebted to Pet Sounds as to "Hounds of Love". The lyrics tend toward the commonplace, which if not beside the point pretty much is the point: "You're so pretty/ I could talk to you all night", chime the Brothers Brewis, their sweet-nothings granted the wings of soaring melody.
Second single "You Can Decide" is the band's most immediately compelling track, with copious oohing, spastic handclaps, and eloquently stuttering chorus: "So if you know, you know, you know/ Let me." "Got to Write a Letter" benefits from slippery acoustic guitars and fairly sharp wordplay, though none as adroit as "I've given up thinking" from the album's rare sad song, the still-sun-dappled "Like When You Meet Someone Else". Opener "If Only the Moon Were Up" introduces a smattering of Revolver horn oompahs and GeoHa guitarisms ca. Abbey Road. I still say stupendous first single "Shorter Shorter" was, true to its name, the latter album's flip-side shortened, haunted and harried by imminent mortality. Meanwhile, the band's self-consciously complex, maximalist arrangements and Sparks- or even Yes-like vocal heights call up that suddenly-not-dirty (if prefixed with "hyper") word: prog. I'm just saying.
After their first two singles, it's hard not to be let down by good-enoughs like the ambitious, briefly cacophonous "Tell Me Keep Me", string-laden "Luck Is a Fine Thing", and staccato, saxophone-blearing "17". More ephemeral than Clor, more cerebral than the Rakes, Field Music has, like the Magic Numbers, fashioned a distinctive voice and near-perfect arrangements, but the songs hint at greatness nearly as often as they achieve it. Pretty is pretty nice, but the promise of true beauty makes tough critics of us all.


Bing & Ruth is a project led by pianist and composer David Moore, who’s been working in a variety of avant-classical mediums for a decade now. This gorgeous new album is heavy, trippy, and surprisingly tactile.

Bing & Ruth: Tomorrow Was the Golden Age

Tomorrow Was the Golden Age

Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, the beautiful second LP from Bing & Ruth, isn’t “ambient music.” You wouldn’t be at fault for thinking as much, though: at first approach, the New York City ensemble’s music is the kind that seems to do the most when you’re not paying attention to it, a series of swells and rustling melodic passages that unfurl patiently. At times, it sounds quite sparse, with just a central melody orbited by distant tones; Bing & Ruth have clearly taken their time on these recordings, but by no means is this “slow” music meant for background listening. Instead, Tomorrow Was the Golden Age teems with life the same way an inanimate city skyline is filled with people unseen to the naked eye. This music moves, almost constantly, and even when Bing & Ruth are seemingly sitting still, their gears are whirring, however silently, on a different plane.
The project is anchored by pianist and composer David Moore, who’s been working in a variety of avant-classical mediums for a decade now (you can preview a variety of his smaller releases on his Bandcamp page). Bing & Ruth’s first album, the 2010 LP City Lake, was reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens’ own classical diversions, a series of bright pieces that occasionally employed the human voice in tandem with chamber-ensemble arrangements. The debut was a relatively straightforward release, but Tomorrow Was the Golden Age isn’t; aided by the addition of a tape delay tech, the record’s nine compositions take on a trippy, halo-effect shape, every sonic abstraction and bent tone radiating a strange, benevolent glow. For a suite that could be called “minimalist,” Tomorrow Was the Golden Age proves surprisingly tactile, a shifting variety of textures that move from mossy to feather-delicate.
For Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, Bing & Ruth narrowed down their ensemble—two upright bassists, two clarinets, a cellist, the tape-delay tech, and Moore on piano—but while City Lake had a larger scope, this new record feels heavier by design. Credit is due to clarinetists Jeremy Viner and Patrick Breiner, whose bent notes are integral to this record’s many complexities; on opening track “Warble”, they add a sense of dread to Moore’s rustling, overlapping piano figures, aiding greatly in the subtle melodic shifts taking place. On “Reflector”, their instruments sound like ghosts heaving deep sighs in the wind, pushing and sustaining against a decaying piano.
“Reflector” is one of a few moments on Tomorrow Was the Golden Age where the melody that’s explored, deconstructed, and lingered-upon ends up sticking with you long after the track is over. The sense of humanity found in these compositions, and the broad range of emotions they convey—longing, contemplation, muted joy, confusion, a quiet but deeply felt ecstasy—go a long way to make Tomorrow Was the Golden Age accessible. At times, you can hear the New York trappings in Bing & Ruth’s music—conceivably, this music could soundtrack busy city streets, or the metropolitan sprawl’s dawn-hour emptiness. But Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, one of the finest left-field releases of the year, transcends geography, inviting you to close your eyes and build your own richly detailed world.


The corrido icon’s charisma shines on this sprawling double album, but La Doble P’s pop-star turn is less convincing.

ÉXODO

Let’s start with the Edgar mullet: the haircut that has kids all across Mexico walking into barbershops and demanding the “Peso Pluma.” This is just one of the idiosyncrasies that has made Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija the man of the moment in mainstream Spanish-language music. There is the expensive jewelry and designer clothing—Richard Mille watches, Christian Dior shoes, Maison Margiela jackets—that he regularly namechecks in his songs. There is his lanky physique. And then there is his voice: a scratchy, sometimes grating croak or rasp, depending on his mood. That singular voice sings about lots of things: popping bottles of Dom, carrying bricks of coke, assassinating enemies, hooking up with Russian models. You know, an average Tuesday.
Over the last year, the 25-year-old Mexican singer of Lebanese descent has racked up a list of chart and streaming records as long as a CVS receipt, ushering música mexicana to unprecedented commercial heights. ÉXODO, his fourth studio album, is a victory lap of sorts; the LP celebrates how far the movement has come, with Pluma taking homies, cousins, and fellow trailblazers like Natanael Cano, Junior H, Tito Double P, and Eslabon Armado along for the ride. But the album is also a bona fide attempt to cement Peso Pluma’s versatility—and the longevity it promises—in the industry. ÉXODO confirms he’s one of the most charismatic corrido performers of our time, but as for his ability to shapeshift across genres and flows, Peso Pluma the pop star still has some convincing to do.
The crackle of Peso’s voice is the molten core of ÉXODO. Its peculiarity is a blessing, but in some moments, it can also be a curse. His coarse growl is especially effective on the bare-knuckle norteño “La People II,” which seems to be written from the perspective of Joel Enrique “El 19” Sandoval Romero, a sicario and security chief for the Sinaloa cartel who was arrested by the Mexican government in 2014. Pluma and his guests snarl viciously as they recount tales of battling police officers, the national guard, and the military to protect their bosses (ostensibly Ovidio Guzmán López, a high-ranking leader of the Sinaloa cartel and the son of El Chapo) from capture. Peso assumes the voice of El 19, asking his associates to take care of his “land, his family, and his parents,” presumably while he’s locked up.
The debate about artists’ roles in glamorizing narco culture didn’t start with—and won’t end with—Peso Pluma. Too often, narcocorrido stars have become ideological scapegoats for the federal government’s failure to curb violence; other times, artists have denied they have any sociocultural impact at all. The discourse is fraught, but one thing is certain: Pluma excels when he performs the mythos of narco culture, no holds barred. It places him firmly within the genealogy of his forebears, like his late idols Chalino Sánchez and Ariel Camacho, who showed a similar talent for passionate storytelling, even as they romanticized narratives of murder and revenge. La Doble P reimagines that tradition on “Put Em in the Fridge,” a cold corrido-trap beat built on a blaring horn loop. He tries on a squeaky but bellicose cadence for size, bragging with Cardi B about moving kilos and calling on shooters to put their enemies on ice. Cardi’s gift for rapping athletically in both Dominican Spanish and English makes her a natural collaborator here; the pair goes bar for bar in a thrilling, peacocking display. It’s also a sublime example of Pluma’s talent for redefining his musical heritage for the present day.
Sometimes, Peso’s vocal left turns are electrifying; other times, he struggles to hit the mark. On the eminently catchy “Bruce Wayne,” he likens himself to the superhero billionaire with gravelly self-assurance, only to switch into biting, Pusha T-style raps two minutes in. On “Me Activo,” he shifts his voice into a serenade-like tone reminiscent of his performance on Kali Uchis’ “Igual Que un Ángel.” But elsewhere, the elasticity of Peso’s voice is less convincing. Despite a superb Ric Flair sample, the ballad “Ice” suffers from the more abrasive, nasally textures of Peso’s voice when he strains to reach a higher register.
It’s particularly tough to hear La Doble P struggle in his ventures outside of corridos tumbados. That’s not to say he isn’t capable of adapting successfully. Take the single “Bellakeo,” a sexy reggaeton entanglement with a drilling dembow riddim that contains spiritual echoes of Plan B. But ÉXODO is littered with unfortunate miscalculations. “Gimme a Second,” with Rich the Kid, feels like a throwaway B-side from the already middling Future and Metro Boomin album; Pluma’s appearance starts off strong with a low, sinister bridge, but then he forcefully tries to squeeze his squeaky voice into one of Atlanta’s distinctive flows. “Pa No Pensar,” an emo trap ballad with corrido undertones, boasts a grippingly morose vocal performance, but it’s marred by cookie-cutter lines about overindulging in alcohol and weed to escape reality (I’ll stay for Quavo saying “This good mota,” though). And, “Peso Completo,” with the reggaeton legend Arcángel, falls into the trap of pure mimesis. Though the artists share a trademark rasp, one of Arcángel’s creative tics is artful over-enunciation; Pluma straight up apes that technique here, resulting in a poorly executed facsimile.
The idea of flaunting his versatility is admirable. But that message might have been more efficiently conveyed if ÉXODO didn’t frequently feel like a slog. The first eight tracks are nearly indistinguishable, coalescing into a lyrical and melodic blur of tololoche strums, money, and women. Even if the album format has been downgraded in the streaming era, ÉXODO works neither as a coherent LP nor as a no-skips playlist. Like many other major pop albums of the 2020s, it would have benefited from a careful edit and a more varied track order.
But when Peso Pluma decides to shine, he’s radiant. “Vino Tinto,” with Natanael Cano and Gabito Ballesteros, is a graduate-level seminar in the corrido tumbado form. All three singers push their voices to the limit: They bellow, they growl, and they harmonize, transmitting the yearning and suffering that undergirds the best corridos—even if they are talking about drinking red wine and waiting for the molly to hit, not your local folk hero’s war battles. When Peso belts out “Ando relax,” he elongates and then punctuates the “a,” as if his vibeyness is some supernatural force rising from within. It’s the corrido prince at his most magnetic, capturing all the style’s thorny contradictions in a single breath.


Two decades later, Metallica reunite with the San Francisco Symphony for a chiefly fans-only document that adds more needless orchestration to already orchestral metal songs.

Metallica / San Francisco Symphony: S&M2

S&M2

For the first 11 minutes, Metallica’s S&M2 is almost completely indistinguishable from its predecessor. There’s the slow fade-in on the sound of applause and the ominous opening arpeggio of “The Ecstasy of Gold,” the soaring Ennio Morricone film cue that has opened Metallica concerts since 1983. Next, the furious instrumental “The Call of Ktulu,” with a string section whipping at the band like crosswinds battering a ship. You might check to make sure you didn’t load up the original S&M, a 1999 live album documenting a pair of collaborative concerts with the San Francisco Symphony, which opens with the same one-two punch. But you’ll be relieved to reach track three, a majestically blown-out rendition of the 1984 classic “For Whom The Bell Tolls”—not that it didn’t appear in essentially the same arrangement on S&M, but on that album it was track 14.
So it goes with much of S&M2, recorded live with the San Francisco Symphony in September 2019. Of the 20 pieces of music here, more than half appeared in a similar form more than two decades ago on the first S&M. One of the new tracks consists of the orchestra playing a movement from Prokofiev’s “Scythian Suite”—introduced by SFS music director Michael Tilson Thomas earnestly explaining why the piece reminds him of heavy metal—without Metallica’s involvement at all. It is difficult to fathom for whom this album is an exciting prospect. In a different speech, also left on the record for no clear reason, drummer Lars Ulrich spends a minute and a half shouting out the members of the Metallica Club in attendance at the show (“I see our Polish friends over here…”), emphasizing the notion that this is for fans only. But any fan deep enough to be interested in S&M2 has surely heard S&M already.
For attendees of the concerts themselves, who may have loved the original S&M, the setlist similarities were probably not a problem. But as a recorded statement, S&M2 is eerie, almost pathological in its attempts to recreate an album that was never a major entry in Metallica’s canon in the first place. If you’ve got a thing for self-punishment and too much time on your hands, listen to dueling versions of a particular song from the two albums and try to spot the differences. My favorite is “The Memory Remains”: same line of lyrics dropped for the crowd to fill in, same weird grunted backing vocals, different hilarious ad-lib from James Hetfield to introduce Kirk Hammett’s guitar solo: he used to say Ahhh, suck it!, and now he’s going with Misterrrrr Hammett! When the crowd sings the song’s central melody like a football chant over an extended orchestral outro, I wondered if they’re singing so confidently because they heard the crowd do the same thing on the first album.
If these were 20 of the hardest-ripping Metallica performances ever put to tape, it wouldn’t matter so much that we’ve heard most of this stuff before. But that is not generally the case. The album suffers from the same primary problem that plagued the original S&M: Metallica’s best songs, intricate and ambitious though they may be, are not actually well suited for the additional orchestrating they get here, precisely because they are plenty symphonic already. When a guitar player like Kirk Hammett is shredding a multipart solo, you don’t want to hear a delicate countermelody in the second bassoons. The band, especially Ulrich, has occasional trouble keeping time with the orchestra, which is understandable. Reconciling a rock band’s internal timekeeping with an orchestra’s external conductor is probably difficult, but that doesn’t make it sound any smoother when Ulrich seems to change tempos every other measure on “The Day That Never Comes” and “Moth Into Flame,” two of the newer cuts included here. Hetfield makes the puzzling choice to deliver many lyrics with the arch theatricality of a carnival barker or Disney villain, heightening the sense that you are not hearing a rock concert, but a lousy production of Metallica: The Musical.
The album’s greatest moment by far is “(Anesthesia) - Pulling Teeth,” a solo originally performed by founding Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, who died in a bus crash in 1986. On S&M2, it is performed on electric upright bass by Scott Pingel, the San Francisco Symphony’s principal bassist. To begin, he plays “Anesthesia” like the symphonic musician he is, bowing cleanly and gracefully, drawing out the bootleg-Baroque sensibility of Burton’s arpeggios. (If you weren’t paying close attention, you might think you were hearing a Bach cello suite.) Then, he kicks on distortion and wah-wah pedals, and begins digging into the strings like his life depends on it. Though it’s the sound of only one instrument, the rumble that ensues is somehow more immense than all the ensemble performances we’ve heard so far. It is a poignant tribute to Burton, but also a “classical” reimagining of Metallica’s music that goes beyond the most obvious possibilities of what such a fusion might mean. For a few minutes, S&M2 is as heavy as Kill ’Em All or Ride the Lightning. Then the band comes back in.

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The omnivorous Japanese band’s Sub Pop debut exudes a newfound sense of serenity, even as they remain committed to exuberant self-love.

WINK

The Japanese quartet CHAI excavate joy from every crevice of life: a ping pong match, a box of donuts, the moles on your face—nothing is spared from their ecstatic gaze. Their first two releases, 2019’s PUNK and 2017’s PINK, radiated positivity and playfulness, while also challenging the pressure they felt as young Japanese women to be seen as cute all the time. At their live performances, they wore avante-garde matching outfits and performed effusive, blocky choreography, and their songs channeled the same energy: loud affirmations and saccharine hooks that erupted from hectic arrangements and kinetic riffs.
But last year, when the pandemic forced them to stop touring and stay in, CHAI slowed down, adopted new hobbies like pottery and a dog-themed Instagram account, and decided to make the kind of music they enjoy listening to at home. The band members exchanged music via Zoom, worked for the first time with outside producers (Mndsgn and YMCK), and listened to a lot of rap and R&B. They’ve cited Mac Miller’s gingerly optimistic song “Good News” as inspiration for their songwriting, and the influence is clear: WINK exudes a newfound sense of confident serenity, even as the band remains committed to exuberant self-love.
Compared to past CHAI songs, these sound less like mandates or inspirational anthems than daydreams, light-filled messages of sweetness and support. “Donuts Mind If I Do” opens the album in a haze of synth and layered vocals that convey an immediate sense of ease. The way the band sings, “Hello, hello, would you like/Any donuts, sugar?” feels casual, as if they’d simply stumbled upon a tray of free desserts. On “Nobody Knows We Are Fun,” CHAI chant, “Go! Go! Go! Everybody wake up now! Have fun!” On past albums, they would have shouted the words over a caffeinated drumline, yelling in the face of anyone who dared to doubt their capacity for a good time. Here, the vocals sound transmitted from the bottom of the ocean. The album even includes a lullaby, “Wish Upon a Star,” a slinky, minimalist ballad written as a sleep balm for band member Kana.
Though their delivery has mellowed, CHAI maintain the unwavering commitment to self-love and community that makes their music so endearing. On PUNK, they celebrated the virtues of curly hair, having lots of friends, and eating lollipops, dumplings, and beef. On WINK, food—a symbol of beauty, desire, and more abstract concepts like longing and confidence—is the primary motif of their joy. The body becomes a site of pleasure and curiosity on “Maybe Chocolate Chips,” where moles decorate the skin not as flaws but as sugary treasures. The sensual love song “Karaage” envisions the members of the band as a meal of fried chicken waiting to be eaten. On “It’s Vitamin C,” CHAI ask, “What’s good for you? What’s good for me?” and find their answer in “yummy kiwi fruit/yummy orange juice.” Consume enough healthy fruit, they say, and no mistake can hold you back. In domestic spaces, women are often expected to cook as a means of caring for others, but rarely are they encouraged to take the same pleasure in eating. It’s affirming to see these four women so explicitly link the love they feel for themselves to the foods they enjoy.
The mood on WINK is more consistently pleasant than memorable, and it’s hard not to miss the frenetic energy of CHAI’s first two albums. When the hazy mood occasionally breaks—like the rage punctuated by slippery synth blips in “END” and the 8-bit video game sounds of “PING PONG!”—it’s a welcome change of pace. Still, there is something thrillingly strange about hearing a band find fulfillment in the sheen of a glazed donut, or longing in the salty succulence of a salmon ball. It’s easy to get protective over your happiness, especially when it feels fleeting or hard-earned. But CHAI generously extend their wonder-filled perspective to anyone who will listen. In turn, they ask us to find our own joy, wherever and whenever we can.

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Three years after a brush with the YouTube algorithm turned him unexpectedly into a minor indie-pop star, Nicolas Muñoz still sounds unsure about what to do next.

Wachito Rico

If social media is good for one thing, it’s making people famous very quickly. No longer must artists claw their way through arenas of authenticity and endure demands that they conform to the tastes of the powerful. No more do they need the co-signs of a thousand petty tyrants at record labels here and nightclubs there. Musicians in the age of social media need only engage with raw consumer demand, and in that freedom they’ll find something real, and share it with us listeners. Or so we’d hope.
Boy Pablo's video for “Everytime” went crazy on Youtube, and it's easy to see why: skater boys smirking in streetwear on the banks of a drifting river in Norwegian twilight. At the end, there’s a dog on a boat. It's a vibe; people, young people especially, go nuts for that sort of thing. When Nicolas Muñoz, the Chilean-Norwegian 21-year-old behind Boy Pablo, released the Soy Pablo EP tens of millions of views later in 2018, it was full of more songs like “Everytime.” The mopey, dopey lyrics retained their winking melodrama, but the novelty wore off.
In Boy Pablo’s debut full-length, Wachito Rico, Muñoz dips back into the same rapidly-depleting well: Stratocasters jangle, synth pads yawn, major seventh chords are tossed out with abandon. The album is filled with nearly indistinguishable third-hand indie-pop songs, with titles like “i hope she loves me back,” “hey girl” and “leave me alone!” Sadboys should at least be able to convincingly sound sad, but Wachito Rico can’t transcend the emotional blankness lurking beneath its zeitgeisty sound. Boy Pablo’s previous discography revolved around unrequited pining, and on this record, he finally gets the girl. But Muñoz can’t seem to come up with anything more interesting to say about the object of his affection than that she’s hot (“Honey”) and he likes hanging out with her (“Nowadays”).
Muñoz’s big brothers in the indie-pop frat house have their respective charms. Alongside the irony and bawdiness, Mac DeMarco offers thoughtfulness and fun; there is a beating heart beneath Real Estate’s wistfulness, and their lush guitar sounds are crafted with care. Even Two Door Cinema Club sound like they sincerely want something. Boy Pablo, meanwhile, seem to have transmuted DeMarco’s mischief into pure condescension for their young audience, and sonically copied Real Estate’s whole fucking flow, word-for-word, bar-for-bar. In the times he attempts to prove he has more to offer than mere virality, Muñoz manages to disrupt the monotony only briefly, mostly by pushing new Latin-American influences to the fore. “Te Vas / Don’t Leave” builds from Spanish guitar and voice to a production of synths and artificial strings, and Muñoz finally pushes himself, approaching something like conviction.
How much is fair to expect from a young indie-pop band? Who should really be blamed for an album like Wachito Rico? Mr. Muñoz, who is frankly too young to sound this jaded? The YouTube algorithm? Mac Demarco, for not raising his failsons strictly enough? Maybe it’s all of us who have humored this type of indie for too long. Social media has truncated the path from the bedroom to the festival stage. We can continue to hope that the absence of the stodgy, gatekept spaces that used to lie between will allow for shocking, unruly artistry. Wachito Rico, though, is a warning against complacency: Bored boys, with a few synth presets, can still stumble their way to stardom.

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Channeling sugar-rush synths and bracing noise, the Philadelphia producer continues his quest to make pop music stranger and more head-spinning—and to test listeners’ ability to follow the twists and turns.

Year of the Orc EP

Christopher Taylor’s vision of pop music embraces extremes. The Philadelphia producer and songwriter has made room in his albums as Body Meat for sugar-rush synth programming and bracing noise; kaleidoscopic vocal melodies and teeth-chattering percussive contortions; ecstatic dancefloor revelations and existential despair. It’s chaotic, overwhelming stuff, which is part of the point. Taylor has said his music is deliberately meant to test the limits of pop, along with his audience’s ability to keep up with all the twists and turns. “How loose can I go with this idea?” He wondered in an interview. “And how far can I push it until people start jumping off?”
Body Meat’s Year of the Orc EP seems designed to underscore this philosophy, continuing Taylor’s push to make pop music stranger, more head-spinning, even a little uglier. Slamming together disparate genres and disjointed melodies, and ignoring assumed rules of song structure, Year of the Orc asks a lot of listeners, but there’s just enough that feels familiar to grasp onto amidst the sea of noise. Taylor is an avowed fan of trap, Timbaland’s post-millennium pop experiments, and the heart-skipping rhythms of Portuguese dance label Príncipe Discos. Tracks like “This Is Something” sound like all of these things at once, and none of them at all. Bubbly Auto-Tuned melodies burst over delirious collages of jittery samples, blistered synth lines, and overlapping, hopscotching rhythms. Listening can feel jarring, like you’ve left tracks playing in a few different browser tabs at once.
It’s fitting music for the muddled headspaces and anxiety spirals that Taylor describes. A lot of his vocals get clouded out in the haze of vocal effects and stuttery electronic experimentation, but what does poke through echoes the tumult of the production. The opening “Twigs” is impressionistic and unsettling, full of abandoned half-thoughts and elliptical mantras. Through a cloudy arrangement, Taylor murmurs about “scream[ing] at the void and the vortex,” a tone-setting thought for much of what follows. Even on the relatively optimistic-sounding “4700”—which marries yearning R&B vocals to slivered rhythmic contortions that’d sound at home on a Brooklyn flex track—Taylor sings about suffering and mortality. “This Is Something” traces spiderwebs of worry over an instrumental that sputters in unpredictable fits and starts.
There’s a lot of pain in these songs, but part of what makes Body Meat’s music so compelling is that he makes a lot of room for tranquility, too. Amid the turbulent production there’s also “Stand By,” a digital funk love song as tender and romantic as any of Brent Faiyaz’s sleepy ballads. On “Ghost,” the distorted chorale that ends the EP, Taylor sings of finding renewal in loss. “I see a new self but I breathe just the same,” he sighs.
That track features the ambient composer Laraaji, who has often preached that peace is always around us, even in the midst of turmoil. “Right where we are is a whole ocean of peace, perfection, oneness, eternity,” he said in an interview last year. That philosophy sounds paradoxically in tune with Body Meat’s music. On Year of the Orc, Taylor trudges through the chaos, echoing the absurdity of a troubled world, yet somehow he finds stillness. It’s a bold aim for a musician who purports to make pop music. He dreams big and invites you to join him in his reveries.

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The latest from Toronto's self-professed hardcore purists animates eleven songs in a style that, what with its limited vocabulary, usually lends itself to sets of four or five.

Machine Response

In the early to mid-2000s, Fucked Up and Career Suicide were cousin groups in the Toronto punk scene. They performed together and shared members Jonah Falco and Mike Haliechuk, and each sounded inspired by the lurch and throttle of 1980s American hardcore. But Career Suicide skewed bratty (sampling punk sendup Repo Man) where Fucked Up went didactic (sampling anti-fascist speeches). And on albums released in 2006, their paths sharply diverged: Fucked Up’s expansive Hidden World foreshadowed the musical ingenuity and conceptual bombast to come, while Career Suicide’s reverent hardcore sounded more bracingly combustible than ever on Attempted Suicide.
Machine Response, Career Suicide’s first release since 2008 (aside from a prelude EP of the same name that appeared late last year), shows the rewards of their craftsman-like commitment to a familiar form—hardcore not as a template to expand, or as a style to flee, but as a sort of aspirational ideal. That means the songs are punchy and concise, animated by Falco’s blocky riffs and Martin Farkas’ breathless bark. And it means that though the album careens in expected ways, its delight is akin to watching the staged implosion of a skyscraper: spectacular for its expenditure of energy in the service of wreckage, and no less impressive for occurring right on schedule.
Unusually stirring hardcore is more often ramshackle, the result of expression outpacing skill. Experienced players, meanwhile, frequently sacrifice individual personality to cultivate a sense of imposing might; that’s why so much self-consciously extreme hardcore sounds so antiseptic. Machine Response, however, slots into neither category. The band members manage to give highlights such as “Tighten the Screws” and “Break Away” a palpable groove, to swing despite inhospitably brisk tempos. They animate eleven songs in a style that, what with its limited vocabulary, usually lends itself to sets of four or five.
It’s a somewhat contradictory position: exercise creative invention, but mind the strictures of what Machine Response’s promotional material calls “purist hardcore.” Not all of the songs adhere: A bleating horn on the mid-tempo “Taking You With Me” evokes Rocket From the Crypt, while the sauntering gait and singsong refrain of “No Walls, No Curtains” sound indebted to late-1970s punk. They don’t undermine the album, just the band’s professed purity. For Falco, who writes the music, it’s tempting to view Career Suicide’s formal conservatism as a respite from the mercurial whims of Fucked Up.
Still, in certain circles, a new Career Suicide is more exciting than a new Fucked Up album. (Farkas supposed, in a recent interview, that the bands hardly share listeners anymore.) This has a lot to do with how critics tacitly devalue hardcore. The style is appreciated, even fetishized, as a background from which bands progress and deemed noteworthy once left behind. It's a paternalistic idea keeps hardcore locked in the past and illegitimate in the present. Career Suicide’s Machine Response is one brazen rebuttal to all of that, a swaggering wager on a simple style’s enduring, essential thrills.


No Stairway is an album comprised solely of manipulated field recordings taken from a Guitar Center, and that somehow doesn't even make it unique—there are two such projects currently floating around. For his part, Danny Greenwald, working under the name Glassine, took samples from a couple of stores and produced a glimmering, soothing album from the results.

No Stairway

No Stairway is an album comprised solely of manipulated field recordings taken from a Guitar Center, and that somehow doesn't even make it unique. There are two such projects currently floating around, both by artists who seem not to have heard of each other before beginning their work. Noah Wall, who has been a conceptual artist since the late '90s, garnered some notice earlier this year for his project Live at Guitar Center, which he recorded by surreptitiously wandering and capturing sounds in his local Guitar Center, archiving the furtive soloing and jamming of the customers testing amps, plinking at keyboards, fumbling out drum rolls. It was a noisy, blasting mess, and purposefully so, meant to evoke the sort of public-space cacophony that could make any agoraphobe tense up.
Danny Greenwald, working under the name Glassine, arrived at the same idea, completing his project a full year before Noah Wall's was released. He took his samples from two Guitar Centers, one in Brooklyn and another in Baltimore, where he lives and works, and produced a glimmering, soothing album from the results, with the jokey title No Stairway. The coincidence is remarkable, and Patient Sounds, the label issuing No Stairway on cassette, noted the remarkable fact of the two projects' coexistence in its press release.
But apart from the freaky timing, the two albums feel mostly like a testament to the sneaky centrality of a place like Guitar Center to much of young American musical life. For millions of instrument-playing kids, Guitar Center was a sort of local YMCA, an imperfect but important testing ground for life pursuits and passions. If Noah Wall's project felt a bit like an encroaching panic attack in a mall, Greenwald's feels like the dream of someone who fell asleep in the food court bench. It is murmuring, mostly soothing, verging on ambient. Greenwald is a composer, and he treats the samples he has collected as clay, conscripting them into a different context than they came from.
Truthfully, you can learn nothing about the nature of Guitar Center, or what it's like to spend time there, from listening to Greenwald's album, and that is a good thing. You can squint at the deep, hollow knocks of percussion on a track like "Human Shield" and imagine they came from amps being plugged in, microphones being clumsily brushed. But to do so seems to miss the point of listening entirely. This is an album to dilate the senses, not sharpen them. No Stairway is woozy and dreamlike, a collection of undulant and wordless pieces that pulse gently in free space. If the album has a genre, it would be somewhere between experimental dub—those reverberant percussive hits can't help but evoke sound-system associations—and new age. The fact that all of these sounds were compacted out of an unruly stream of data is impressive, and even a little bewildering, but the knowledge proves unnecessary.
The revelation of No Stairway turns out to be hearing how Greenwald coaxes these scuffs and shuffles so that they bloom quietly into pop songs. "Hornet With a Halo" and "Sunruse Bench" have lovelorn, sighing melodies, and sound like what Caribou might be doing if he worked in lo-fi cassettes. The radiant ripple of keyboards on "Human Shield" turn out to be several layers of sound stacked on top of each other, some patched through old synths and played again and some looped. It is a remarkable simulation, built painstakingly from a thousand scraps, but it rings out in space as simple and immediate as a hand pressed down on keys. The major-key melodies are warm, generous, and refracted through a fisheye-lens mix so that they feel slightly love-drunk. If you've ever closed your eyes in a room full of family and friends, letting the chatter blur so that you sense the surrounding goodwill more than you pick out the words, then No Stairway will have an uncannily familiar feel.
Like many late-'90s big-box music retailers—Sam Goody, Tower Records—Guitar Center is a relic of a different, largely pre-Internet commercial era. Wandering into one today, you feel the same sense of impending economic doom you get from pushing open the glass doors of a Best Buy or Radio Shack. It has been in grave financial trouble for years, and is on pace to die a slow, ignominious death. Projects like Greenwald and Wall's, then, provide a slight redemptive note to the timeline, quiet reminders that millions of music-loving souls passed through those big doors at one point or another.


After many years spent experimenting with arcane, home-built electronic devices, the Portuguese musician returns to his guitar for a gorgeous ambient suite informed by drone music and vintage jazz.

Spectral Evolution

Rafael Toral has returned to Earth. The jet plane on the cover of his 1994 debut, Sound Mind Sound Body, signaled his skyward trajectory, and he spent the rest of the decade surfing on clouds of guitar. Each new release dissolved a bit more of Brian Eno’s long ambient tones into My Bloody Valentine’s rapturous haze until Toral’s sound faded into the stratosphere. Toral knew he had escaped gravity: The last sound on 2001’s Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance was grainy background noise from a Space Shuttle webcast. He had gone as high as the guitar could take him.
To survive out there untethered to his instrument, Toral founded his own Space Program, a rigorous 13-year project that required inventing his own devices: glove-controlled sine-wave generator, light-controlled portable amplifier, electrode-controlled oscillator. He wanted to combine jazz with electronic music without borrowing from either tradition—as he put it, “making music from scratch.” Daunted by his own ambition, Toral felt his way through this concept like he was navigating a cathedral blindfolded. He didn’t initially perform his new music in public for fear of baffling his audiences, he said, since “it was impossible to demonstrate that each [instrument] is like the tip of one among many networked icebergs.” Still, he worked with enviable discipline, performing Space Solos and in Space Quartets and Space Collectives, honing his craft across a growing constellation of releases until his audience understood the scale of the enterprise.
The Space Program ended in 2017 when Toral decided to combine his ambient guitar work with the improvisational tactics he had developed with his own instruments. Spectral Evolution is the result. Toral’s machines chirp, croon, and howl over a base of shifting guitar hum, responding to one another like extraterrestrial species. The whole 12-part suite unfurls like a gorgeous symphony, as if the entire Space Program only served as preparation for translating a work of cosmic complexity into a language we humans could understand.
The album is a chiasmus, the second half mirroring the first. Fold it down the middle and each section meets its counterpart: “Changes” and “Changes Reprise,” “Descending” and “Ascending,” “First Short Space” and “Second Short Space.” This structure develops organically across the record’s 47 minutes, as song-like forms emerge from, and dissolve into, ambient lulls. The “First Long Space” is a slow drift that would fit squarely into Toral’s 1990s discography if it weren’t for the electronics soloing over top. From this harmonic bed arises the crescendo of centerpiece “Fifths Twice,” which again makes way for electronic devices to flutter and buzz over the “Second Long Space.” Tides of guitar are pulled across the record again and again by the retreating celestial bodies of Space Program instruments.
Toral has said that “Everything in the Space Program is jazz… except the music.” He labeled his improvisational system “post-free jazz electronic music,” an attempt at imagining how free jazz would have developed from the late 1960s had the pianos and trumpets been replaced by Theremins and oscillators. But he believed that his invented instruments moved too freely and unpredictably across the frequency spectrum to operate in standard Western tuning. Spectral Evolution conquers this impasse, deploying jazz changes that he previously thought were impossible. “Changes” takes up chord progressions from George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” which evolve slowly in the background as Space Program instruments compete like frantic soloists over top. “Take the Train” is based on Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” and features an instrument startlingly like a trumpet, playing not only in tune but with a melodically inventive style. Still, neither of these jazz standards are recognizable; their changes simply inform the album’s dense harmonic backdrop. Spectral Evolution’s relationship to jazz is something like that of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie to the hustle and bustle of New York City itself: a beautifully austere abstraction formed from an alien perspective.
That perspective is hard-earned. After 13 years in space, Toral returns with knowledge gained from a near-vacuum, gathered only through experimentation and close observation of his strange instruments. If the Space Program consisted of transmissions from the cosmos, Spectral Evolution is an explosive re-entry into the atmosphere, a homecoming announced with a blindingly brilliant streak across the sky.


Working with a grab bag of producers, the once-hyperlocal rapper serves up cold lines that lack the pizazz of his best work—at least until an old favorite returns.

White Bronco

Witnessing Action Bronson’s grass-roots rise felt like watching a beloved food cart get wildly popular. Back in 2010, Bronson was an aspiring rapper from Flushing, Queens. He turned culinary references learned during his days as a chef into braggadocio fodder. Why boast about cash and cars, after all, when you can assert superiority by rapping about pairing roasted bone marrow with lightly toasted rosemary bread, all drizzled with the appropriate vinaigrette? With his knack for outlandish phrases (like casually describing himself as “heavy bearded like I’m Jesus”), the rapper’s charisma soon endeared him to an audience broader than the underground heads who leapt at early tracks like “Shiraz” and “Imported Goods.” Those songs’ lo-fi videos starred Bronson himself, puttering around his neighborhood to buy olives and prosciutto from Arthur Avenue. He become an indigenous flavor with exotic appeal.
Bronson is now a world-recognized brand. Identified by his fantastical ginger beard and penchant for shorts in all seasons, he claims a couple of TV shows on the Vice network, a cookbook, and a role in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming The Irishman. Brooklyn eateries name menu items for him. As with any successful franchise, though, scaling up can risk diluting your appeal, even if the packaging gets slicker. The 26-minute White Bronco, Bronson’s ninth full-length project, largely lacks the piquancy and depth that made him matter.
White Bronco opens with “Dr. Kimble” and a sleazy, guitar-wrestling beat from one of Bronson’s longtime cohorts, Harry Fraud. Bronson’s flow is silky and laid-back, with little pizzazz to the lines: “I cop cars and crash ’em/Next day the same thing/Next day Beijing.” Bronson might be jetting around the world, but the details of the itinerary are less evocative than when he was dropping by neighborhood delis and dropping hometown lines: “Straight from Flushing/Where the birds are hanging dead in the window.”
Unlike earlier albums that benefited from Bronson pairing with one producer—like his 2011 studio debut Dr. Lecter with Tommy Mas, or Blue Chips with Party Supplies—the potluck approach here gives White Bronco an uneven feel. Daringer’s slinky title track—which also features Bronson’s in-house band, the Special Victims Unit—jars against Samiyam’s psyche-rock sinew on “Telemundo.” Knxwledge’s soulful, string-infused work for “Picasso’s Ear” belongs on an entirely different album than the synth-layered electro of Fraud’s “Swerve on Em,” which includes a throwaway verse from A$AP Rocky. This mix does does little to elicit instant-vintage rhymes. On “Telemundo,” for instance, Bronson treads water with lines like, “About to get this paper like Judge Judy/Told my baby, ‘Come do me’/All these drugs just run through me.” They lack the humor and flair of a guy who has bragged about installing a Jacuzzi on the 7 train and using lion’s neck as a secret ingredient.
Tellingly, White Bronco’s punchiest moment comes when Bronson is reunited with Party Supplies, a producer who’s said they have collaborated by searching YouTube for phrases like “a 100-acre burgundy carpet” until unearthing a quirky gem to loop. Party Supplies’ beats have a scuzzy immediacy, as if he’s just stumbled across something to sample and is in thrall to that feeling of discovery. Based around a spunky take on “Tramp,” the short “Irishman Freestyle” has Bronson snobbishly informing us, “Don’t drink gin and tonic/Only natural wine, to be honest.” A few lines later he is “butt naked with the Uzi on Broadway,” telling the gawkers, “My haircut is like Dominican folk art.” This is the absurd, laugh-out-loud stuff that takes you back to the essence of Bronson—and offers an acute reminder of the old flavor missing from much of White Bronco.


The Columbus, Ohio-based musician approaches fingerstyle guitar with first-take energy and unassuming home-recorded production.

Matthew J. Rolin

In the 60-some years since John Fahey christened his self-taught approach to fingerstyle guitar “American Primitive,” generations of new players have aspired to the mesh of rustic mystery and technical excellence he brought to his surrealistic country blues. Columbus, Ohio-based guitarist Matthew J. Rolin, however, was already deep into his own take on the sound before he heard of Fahey. Inspired by later refractions of Fahey’s influence rather than the original source, Rolin’s crooked path to solo guitar bypassed the rural affect and music-school stuffiness of many fingerstyle disciples. His work transfigures American Primitive’s backwoods vibes into something decidedly DIY.
Rolin’s exploration of folk guitar began in experimental circles. In addition to his solo work, he’s collaborated with Detroit noise band Wolf Eyes and performs alongside dulcimer player Jen Powers in the pensive electro-acoustic improv group Rolin/Powers Duo. His self-titled album is his third proper full-length, joining two slightly more polished sessions that swim amid a Bandcamp page filled with phone-recorded live jams and one-off cassette releases. While his new release is Rolin’s most fully-realized work to date, it maintains his raw first-take energy and unassuming home-recorded production.
The moving “One Day I Will Be Free” opens the album with organ drones and field recordings of distant sirens and rushing traffic that give way to a wash of acoustic 12-string. Ringing chord clusters fade in and out of intricate fingerpicking, cycling through phrases of free sprawl and doleful melodic figures that build into an immersive meditation. The song wanders reflectively for 11 and a half minutes, but it comes off less like a contemplative creekside stroll than a haggard walk home after missing the last bus.
Much of the album lives in similar emotional territory, tempering joy with frustration. Other than the occasional found sound snippet, a tambourine on “Cold Rooms,” and Jen Gelineau’s violin scratches on finale “Blue Columbus Moon,” Rolin’s solitary guitar is almost always the only instrument. The blare of a passing jet all but overpowers the music in the beginning of “Two Fourteen”; once that interruption fades, a bath of muddy tape delay drowns increasingly discordant playing. The competition of pretty acoustic guitars with noisy disruptions recalls Joan of Arc’s early experiments dismantling folk music. While Rolin hardly qualifies as emo, he shares a distinctly midwestern melancholy. Restless, dissatisfied melodies swaddled in tape hiss make even his brightest compositions sound weary.
While the rainy spirit and homespun quality of Rolin’s music separates him from more academic fingerstyle contemporaries, he can’t quite be classified with other unplugged noise dudes, either. There are echoes of Bill Orcutt’s shattered blues in the dizzy rumble of “Rivets” and a stripped-down reading of Ryley Walker’s freefalling astral pop on “Neverendingness,” but Rolin’s songs never ramp up or even attempt to launch. Instead, they trudge steadily forward. A soft argument between hope and defeat runs through the album, and Rolin presents it with the calm resolve of someone who’s probably sat alone with an acoustic guitar as the first of five acts at a basement gig. Unconcerned with virtuosic technique or reincarnating the ghosts of past guitar heroes, Rolin’s overcast instrumentals convey the reality of his own encounters with folk blues.


Panda Bear's Crosswords EP consists of one song from this year's Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper remixed, an updated version of a bonus track from 2012's Tomboy, and three songs from the Grim Reaper sessions that didn’t make the cut.

Crosswords EP

Ever since his proper debut, 2004’s mostly forgotten (but still quite good) Young Prayer, Noah Lennox’s solo work has followed relatively narrow parameters. Where his first record was acoustic and much of it was recorded live in a room, his music since has mostly consisted of him singing over loops, constructing songs from other songs. The fact that the backing tracks mostly consist of processed samples gives Lennox a wide palette to work with, and he’s able to keep his music varied by how he approaches texture and arrangement. He’s also good at making music in this format, no question. But there are limitations to the approach, in terms of dynamics and song structure—the amount of empty space and variations in terms of volume are kept to a minimum, and when Lennox’s melodies are less engaging, his songs tend to bleed together.
Melody was decidedly not a problem on Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper—in fact, it was the most tuneful Panda Bear album, filled with songs that felt familiar because they sounded like classics that somehow also managed to be surprising. But the Crosswords EP, consisting of one song from Grim Reaper remixed, an updated version of a bonus track from 2012's Tomboy, and three songs from the Grim Reaper sessions that didn’t make the cut, isn’t up to the same standard. It’s reasonably pretty and it’s always welcome to hear new material in this style, but songs like "No Man’s Land" and "Jabberwocky" don’t stand out in a catalog that is by now pretty extensive; there’s never a moment where you stop breathing for a second to zero in on the way Lennox skips up an interval, no tunes that won’t leave your head. These are solid and enjoyable tracks in Panda Bear’s style, and hearing them here, untethered from an album that has more of an arc, they never become much more than that.
When working as Panda Bear, Lennox essentially makes comfort-food music, songs that come off as gentle and created with care that bring warm feelings, so it feels wrong to use the word "comfortable" in a pejorative sense when discussing his work. But the five songs on the Crosswords EP sound like tracks that come easily to him, songs he knows how to make without stretching himself. The most distinctive is the closer "Cosplay" whose lyrics, oddly enough, mostly consist of Lennox singing variations of "Marijuana makes my day." Live versions of it floated around last year, and it’s been stripped of some of its initial samples but still retains an appealing bubbly texture. Even though the words are goofy and obvious (has any Panda Bear fan ever thought otherwise?), it’s the one place where the album stops being good background music and makes you take notice.


Save for a few intimate highlights, Ben Gibbard continues to move in lockstep with his band's bigger, bolder, more arena-ready sound.

The Blue EP

2018’s Thank You For Today was Death Cab For Cutie’s first album completely divorced from guitarist/producer Chris Walla and the first where they didn’t really try anything new. Offering proficiency and easy nostalgia over emotional investment, it was a safe-bet vote for fan service over the flawed experiments of Kintsugi and Codes and Keys. On its best (or at least its most familiar) moments, longtime fans could close their eyes and briefly forget that “Black Sun” ever happened.
The dullest Death Cab single in their history by a wide margin, “Black Sun” was the band’s attempt to endear themselves to KROQ neighbors Muse and Imagine Dragons, inflating their lyrics with meaningless portent and their arrangements with blown-out solos and production befitting a guy named Rich Costey. The disconnect with Gibbard’s bashful vocals made “Black Sun” the equivalent of a Duplass brother donning a CGI-sculpted muscle suit for a Marvel movie.
And yet on The Blue EP, Gibbard seems to have taken the commercial reception of “Black Sun” as a mandate for more of the same. Where he used to find indirect ways to sneak brute force into his writing, here he moves in lockstep with the band’s bolder sound, writing in the biggest and broadest strokes. A rock band gets big enough and they eventually write a song like “Before the Bombs,” which pits an anonymous couple against some unspecified atrocity in an unnamed part of the world.  What is “the only thing” the bombs couldn’t take away from the doomed lovers? I’ll give you one guess.
Meanwhile, “Kids in ’99” offers a retelling of the Olympic Pipeline Explosion in their hometown of Bellingham, Washington. It has an obvious precedent in “Grapevine Fires,” a highlight from 2008’s Narrow Stairs, their last near-great album. But where the latter slowly smoldered, “Kids in ’99” leaves little room for Gibbard to expand beyond a disappointingly dispassionate, literal rendering of the event—he’s “thinking ’bout those kids back in ’99” without ever indicating what he thought, or why. “Man in Blue” is more in line with Thank You For Today, melodically sweet and lyrically inert and proof their robust sound isn’t going anywhere, regardless of who’s behind the boards. (They produced this one themselves.)
Every Death Cab EP contributes at least something essential to their catalog, and “To the Ground” nearly compensates for the rest of Blue’s flaws. Death Cab have long been fixated on Krautrock, a style of music that relieves Gibbard from having to be the focal point for a band that’s basically just him in the public eye. So it’s surprising that “To the Ground” contains some of his most vivid lyrics since Transatlanticism, as he watches a totalled car become one with the earth: “Down in the charred remains/Stripped the chassis clean/And the bramble grew through the frame/’Til it swallowed everything.”  “Blue Bloods” is likewise a best-case scenario for late-period Death Cab, reconciling the underrated mean streak of Gibbard’s work on Barsuk with his current budget: “All these East Coast blue bloods that come out west/And I watch them argue about who loved you the best,” Gibbard sings, his thoughts “tied together like boulders with a piece of twine.” It’s a nice metaphor for a concept that never quite holds, and a tease at the ever-elusive “return to form.” Could Death Cab For Cutie make a whole album like this if Gibbard really wanted to?
But you know who doesn’t seem to miss old Death Cab For Cutie? Ben Gibbard. He sobered up in 2011 and took up “ultrarunning,” and now he’s a magnetic presence in peak physical shape leading a hit parade on stage after years of being an inessential live act even during their artistic peak. He can ignore Codes and Keys altogether. He’s been on a Chance the Rapper album. “Northern Lights” might recall the band’s glory days about as much as Silversun Pickups do Smashing Pumpkins, but it gets regular spins on alt-rock radio because it’s the new Death Cab For Cutie single. If Gibbard can’t or won’t access the emotional stakes that might help Death Cab’s new music transcend mere brand stewardship, I don’t blame him.

Buy: Rough Trade
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J Mascis' second proper solo album suggests that the Dinosaur Jr. frontman's entering a new, quieter phase in his career, as his work with the acoustic guitar receives an increased amount of attention. Pall Jenkins of the Black Heart Procession, Ken Maiuri, and Mark Mulcahy join him on this quiet collection of tunes.

Tied to a Star

Ever since Dinosaur Jr. reconvened nearly a decade ago, J Mascis has favored his Martin almost as much as his Jazzmaster. In fact, if you don’t count reissues of the band’s 1980s albums, his acoustic output has nearly matched the three full-band albums that each justified the reunion and then some. Released in 2006, Live at CBGB’s: The First Acoustic Show made stripping down for a legendary venue sound suitably punk, even if it remains the textbook definition of “For Fans Only.” Much more essential is Several Shades of Why from 2011, Mascis' first true solo album of new material, which featured mainly just Mascis and his Martin. It’s a quiet, gorgeous collection of fragile indie folk tunes made all the more powerful by his wounded-old-man croak, his dexterous picking, and his overall sense of restraint. And now there’s Tied to a Star, which picks up more or less where Several Shades of Why left off*.*
In other words, we may be entering a new chapter in Mascis’ career, one where the Martin and the Jazzmaster receive equal play. This isn’t, thank god, a case of an aging musician making a last-ditch stab at mainstream success by turning self-consciously serious; these albums are still too weird for that. On the other hand, his acoustic material does sound relatively limited, as Mascis is not quite as expressive on the acoustic as he is on the electric. When he plugs in, he can bend notes into a language that is both new and familiar, conjugating active verbs from punk and metal, translating concrete nouns from blues and folk. He’s one of the few guitar gods whose technical prowess never sounds like an end in itself, but simply a means of getting his point across. Which is not to say that he doesn’t occasionally showboat, but that he showboats with great purpose.
When he unplugs, however, Mascis can be a little less communicative and compelling. Several Shades of Why worked because the setting emphasized his vocals and lyrics, both of which are occasionally drowned out by Dinosaur Jr.’s infamous din. Moreover, his playing showed a different approach to the instrument, as though he had relearned the guitar and devised new strategies to put his songs across. As a result, the music balanced a potent world-weariness with a new creative spark, and the songs succeeded precisely because they weren’t adequate vessels for the emotions he was trying to exorcise. It was a lovely, lonely album full of delicate melodies and tenderhearted, albeit somewhat elusive, sentiments.
By contrast, Tied to a Star lacks some of that album’s sense of discovery and precariousness. It’s much more confident and cagier, which may have to do with the fact that this isn’t strictly a Mascis solo record. He corralled a loose backing band for a four-man acoustic jam, including Pall Jenkins of the Black Heart Procession, Ken Maiuri, and Mark Mulcahy. Instead of lonely, quiet folk, we too often get strummy chumminess, which places Star uncomfortably close to ‘90s jam-band territory. The opening chords of “Every Morning” have a bouncy insistency that portends a Sister Hazel song, while the instrumental “Drifter” churns a vaguely Middle Eastern groove that might emanate from post-Jar of Flies alt-rock radio.
Fortunately, there’s more to Tied to a Star than those questionable touchstones. Most of these songs hit the same vein as Why, framing Mascis’ singing and playing as idiosyncratic rather than anonymous. In fact, the best moments are those when he ditches the band altogether. “Come Down” underscores his gentle intro with a looming wall of distortion, as though reluctant to let the listener get too comfortable. Opener “Me Again” and “Stumble” showcase Mascis’ wounded-old-man vocals and especially his strong falsetto, serving as a good reminder that his voice has somehow gotten better with age. Over a quiet, spryly picked guitar theme, his voice meshes well with Marshall’s on “Wide Awake”, conjuring a lonely, late-night mood: two lovers on opposite ends of the telephone line. Only the intrusive crash cymbal on the bridge breaks the spell, but the song recovers on Mascis’ fluid guitar solo—which is played on electric, for what that’s worth.
In fact, almost all of the solos are electrified, which shows just how limited the Mascis + Martin set-up can be. He’s a figure of such towering goodwill in the indie world that it’s tempting to excuse or explain away his missteps. Certainly, Tied to a Star stumbles whenever the band sit in on a song, but his cohorts aren’t necessarily to blame. What’s truly disappointing about this uneven album is the fact that they could find no other mode of playing together besides the old, the familiar, and the unwelcome. There’s nothing embarrassing here, just a few miscalculations amid some typically strong material, but Mascis has proven that he can muster more joyous ingenuity and imagination than he does on Tied to a Star.


The Chicago psych-rock band Axis:Sova indulge a fever for propulsion on Motor Earth, pairing thick waves of scuzzy guitar with the mechanized pulse of a tinny Roland drum machine.

Motor Earth

The first thing you’ll notice about Axis: Sova’s Motor Earth is a curious juxtaposition: the sound of a full-fledged psych-rock band playing alongside a tinny drum machine—raw, arena-sized power paired with pint-sized snares and kicks. The sonic contrast wasn’t always so conspicuous. Last year’s Early Surf relied on a drum machine too, but the record was an experimental solo affair—frontman Brett Sova wailing away on his fuzz-damaged guitar as he wandered through a handful of hazy, half-formed ideas laid down on a Tascam 8-track cassette recorder. Amid all that lo-fi murk, the drum machine made sense: just something to keep time while Sova futzed around with his guitar pedals.
For Motor Earth—Axis’ second album for Ty Segall’s Drag City imprint God? Records—Sova assembled an actual band, including touring buddies Tim Kaiser on guitar and Tyson Thurston on bass, and significantly improved the production quality, ditching tape hiss for a sharper, beefier sound. Sova also turned in a batch of more or less identifiable verse-chorus pop songs; the band’s unremitting racket now makes room for a few solid hooks. Even Sova’s voice, largely an afterthought on Early Surf, has emerged as a real melodic weapon.
So why not get a proper drummer? It’s a valid question, and yet it overlooks the Chicago band’s primary appeal (at least in its current iteration): mechanized, unthinking propulsion—an attribute that rock bands, guitar-based and not, have used to great effect over the decades, from Suicide to the Kills. And anyway, Axis: Sova with a regular kit would be just another Hawkwind nostalgia band. Sova thinks his greatest asset is his beloved ’73 Telecaster, but it’s that Roland Rhythm Arranger pulsing underneath.
Which is not to say that he’s a slouch with a wah-wah pedal—Sova didn’t name his band after Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love for nothing. He and Kaiser have a hell of a good time on opener “Love Identity,” tag teaming on glammed-out T. Rex riffage and molten Sonic Youth klang for a fever-dreamy eight minutes. Motor Earth never tops that track’s ebullient first few minutes—listening to Early Surf, who would have ever thought you could sing along to these guys?—but they certainly try. “Violent Yellow” packs an album’s worth of guitar moves into a hot little mess of teenage paranoia and lust. And “(Like an) Intruder” is the record’s most giddily propulsive moment: the Stooges riding shotgun on a Suicide track. “Treat me like an intruder,” Sova begs, in a clear homage to Iggy Pop’s indelible line: “Now I wanna be your dog.”
There’s a flip side to Sova and Kaiser’s six-string obsession: Motor Earth is one of the few guitar-nerd records in recent memory that would be better served with the instruments set lower in the mix. The guitars so dominate the rhythm section that it sometimes sounds like Sova and Kaiser are playing along to a Roland drum machine app on an iPad. Maybe unavoidably, Motor Earth is a one-note affair. Axis plug in and ride the scuzz-rock train for an unwavering 41 minutes. When the band wants to change things up, they simply ditch the pretense of songwriting altogether, drench the proceedings in acid feedback, and keep the train roaring down the track.
And yet the record’s pleasures are no less potent for their blunt simplicity. Listening to closer “Routine Machine” you get the uncanny sensation that Sova and co. wrote the song in real time as they recorded it. As if the boys simply pressed play on the drum machine, grabbed their guitars, picked out a Sabbath riff or two, and kept layering vocal melodies on top of each other until everything fell into place—or fell gloriously apart, depending on your point of view.


Dave Porter’s latest album as Avey Tare is ambitious and inspiring. His painful, deeply personal, and intimate songs never are in constant search for new sounds and emotions.

Eucalyptus

Whether out of a creative need to one-up themselves or a conscious effort to hold on to the wider audience they’d built up in the wake of Merriweather Post Pavilion, each of Animal Collective’s last few LPs have been busier, zanier, and more eager to awe the last. By last year’s Painting With, all that forced jubilation had begun to sound cloying or even pandering, which, ironically, is the last thing anybody wants from this band. That may explain why increasingly some of the best Animal Collective music has come not from their group efforts but from their many side projects.
Recorded with Animal Collective part-timer Josh Dibb, Avey Tare’s Eucalyptus could never be accused of pandering—no album as slack and rickety as this has sights on the masses—yet in some ways it embodies a romantic ideal that’s nearly as sure-fire as Merriweather’s imagining of a perfect pop album: the reclusive, personal record, written seemingly with no expectation that anybody will even hear it. That it’s steeped in pain and heartbreak only further heightens its mystique. Dave Portner’s last solo album as Avey Tare, Down There, had its share of sorrows, too, but that album was unmistakably a studio creation, an efficient 35 minutes of tunes and rhythms. Eucalyptus is near twice the length but has less to prove. Unafraid to meander, it finds a golden ratio between inspiration and indifference.
Like this spring’s Meeting of the Waters EP, the album pivots away from the synapse-frying maximalism of recent Animal Collective releases and returns to the primal spirit of the group’s formative records. On Waters, Portner and Brian “Geologist” Weitz took the live-in-the-wild aesthetic of those early albums to new extremes, recording it near the Amazon River, where the rustling rainforest served as a sort of incidental backing band. Eucalyptus’ origins aren’t nearly so dramatic. As Portner tells it, he wrote the bulk of the album in his bedroom in 2014, sapping inspiration per usual from his surroundings, in this case, the rugged terrain of California’s Big Sur mountains.
Even from the bedroom, Portner finds ways to convey the sounds of nature, but here they’re staged and artificial. The porcelain-fragile “Selection of a Place” first appeared as a “Rio Negro Version” on the Waters EP, set to a backdrop of cooing birds and chirping insects. With no wildlife to provide the white noise, for the Eucalyptus version Portner turns to electronics to replicate that hiss, closing the track with a blare of digitized bird calls. Similarly on “Coral Lords,” a treatise on marine ecology with the fidelity of a ham radio broadcast, a whoosh of dead-air static stands in for the sound of rushing water.
Though its songs are lightly augmented with overdubs and outside voices, as well as the faintest outlines of orchestrations from Eyvind Kang, Eucalyptus retains its air of bedroom intimacy. The joyful standout “Jackson 5” feels like a shoebox diorama of the full-blown carnival that Animal Collective might have built it into, and it’s all the more affable for it. Likewise, the cattle-ranch country romp “Ms. Secret” downplays its inherent audacity, with Portner keeping a straight face as he adopts a ridiculous loose-jawed drawl. The album’s riskiest vocal performance, though, belongs to “PJ,” where he imagines an encounter with a departed friend. “Was on a beach and met PJ/But he died on a winter’s day,” Portner warbles, in the high, fluttery voice of a villager from an old Casper cartoon, shell-shocked by their brush with the beyond. He sells both emotions, the lurid giddiness of sharing a ghost tale, and the very real grief of losing someone you love.
The sense of loss is even more overt on Eucalyptus’ closing track, and the one that cements the record as an uncharacteristically personal work, “When You Left Me.” Portner even directs its closing verse at himself. “Gonna say that I’m thankful that all the years passed away/Avey, give me wisdom of your many years to come/Hear me even though I’m distances away,” he sings, echoing the hopes of any romantic who’s longed to preserve their bond with an ex. Life usually doesn’t work out that way, yet nonetheless there’s an optimism underlying Portner’s account of separated lovers who still have a lot to learn from each other. “Wanna bask in your ritual, finding the perfect day,” he repeats, pleadingly, turning it into a mantra that brings Eucalyptus full circle. How poetic that an album that devotes so much time to searching and seeking concludes with a vow to continue doing exactly that.