Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit an infamous 2007 DJ mix that helped transform dubstep from a bubbling scene to a global phenomenon.

FabricLive.37

In 2007, Parisian nouveau disco duo Justice turned in 44 minutes of sultry synth-rock for their contribution to Fabric’s hallowed FABRICLIVE DJ mixes. The series had debuted in 2001, borrowing its name from the London venue’s Friday club nights, which skewed toward drum’n’bass, breaks, and hip-hop. The franchise alternated monthly with a house and techno twin, fabric, that reflected its Saturday night lineups. Curated and commissioned by the club’s in-house label, the two strands operated as an extension of the Farringdon haunt outside of its labyrinthine HQ: In high-street record stores, car stereos, and adolescent bedrooms, the FABRICLIVE and fabric mix CDs gradually established something like a canonical picture of contemporary UK club culture, as determined by one of the world’s most recognizable clubbing brands.
Before Justice, FABRICLIVE mixes had been delivered by everyone from James Lavelle to John Peel, J Majik, James Murphy, and a number of other blokes whose names did or didn’t begin with “J”. But the French pair’s offering hadn’t, apparently, gone down so well with the folks at Fabric. The mix was rejected. Rumors as to why abounded in the forum-sphere, commenters freely wheeling out theories, substantiated or not, from beneath a cloak of online anonymity: The mix was too short; it didn’t fit the vibe; it was shit.
But for the series’ commissioners, there was little time to kill. December loomed, and a new release was needed. Two young upstarts from the burgeoning dubstep scene—25-year-old West Londoner Gary McCann, aka Caspa, and Rusko, the Yorkshire-born Christopher Mercer, aged 22—got the call. They were familiar faces in the club and the office, having signed a publishing deal with the label earlier in the year. And they were, crucially, considered reliable.
Caspa and Rusko were given three days to deliver their mix. They played a Halloween show in Sheffield on the weekend, put together a rough tracklist on the drive back to London, and, come Monday, were recording live from dubplate and vinyl in Fabric Room 3—a cramped space on the club’s mezzanine level, with the booth shrouded in Victorian brickwork. It was, in many ways, just like any other show—except the club was empty, it was 4 p.m., and the sound engineer wanted to be out by six in time for his tea. The final recording was mastered on Tuesday morning, burned to CD on Wednesday, and promo copies were in the post by Friday.
The unusual time pressure meant the tracklist was selected from a limited pot. Not just because there wasn’t the time to agonize over peaks, troughs, transitions, and breakdowns—all that journey stuff that DJs love to mythologize—but because there was no time to arrange licensing deals either: They had to pick songs they knew they could clear. As a result, 15 of the 29 tracks were by Caspa and Rusko themselves, and 17 were lifted from Caspa’s Dub Police and Sub Soldiers labels.
The fact that FABRICLIVE.37 would be Fabric’s first purely dubstep-focused mix carried an implicit responsibility to represent the scene as a whole. No easy task: By 2007, dubstep had coalesced from its initial pairing of dark garage and jungle into a recognizable style, and it was already beginning to mutate. Sub-shoots were spreading outward—first by word-of-mouth, then online—from London, where it had originated. There was the “purple” sound in Bristol, which elevated melody, color, and sci-fi synths; in Leeds, DJs put stacked dub reggae soundsystems through their paces in rickety community centers; specialist DJs like Youngsta and Hatcha had their own orbits, with producers honing their sounds to fit each selector’s style. The DNA of jump-up drum’n’bass—already derided as “clownstep” by more seasoned ravers—could be found in dubstep’s more aggressive iteration, later slapped with its own pejorative: brostep. Factions were forming, each with their own devoted advocates and critics.
Caspa and Rusko were flying the flag for their very own variant of the sound: loud, rude, and rowdy, with a dash of dub sensibility (Rusko styled his debut EP cover on photos of Haile Selassie). Even without the time constraints, FABRICLIVE.37 was never going to be a true representation of all that was dubstep. This was a Caspa and Rusko set, a near mirror of the show they’d played in Sheffield just days before. It was also a premonition of a cultural shift that would soon prioritize attention over everything: The listening equivalent of scrolling through social media, presented with an unending, increasingly bewildering stream of content designed to not just to shock or entertain you, but to keep you rolling your thumb back for more. In Silicon Valley a year earlier, Aza Raskin had first presented the concept of “infinite scroll,” later described as a “dopamine seeking reward loop” by behavioral psychologist Susan Weinschenk—and by Raskin as one of his biggest professional regrets. Now, hits are minted on TikTok. Scenes no longer crystallize on mix CDs.
Two other things happened around this time.
On July 1st, 2007, smoking in pubs, restaurants, and nightclubs became illegal in the UK. DJs found themselves contending with a new phenomenon: the smokers’ exodus. Playing more daring tunes now carried the added risk of half the dancefloor departing for a roll-up. For dubstep in particular, a sound that in its early days attracted a distinctly red-eyed crowd, this represented an especially significant shift.
A decade after the ban came into effect, drum‘n’bass kingpin Andy C—famed for his double drops and multi-deck mixing—recalled his approach of “pulling some bangers out” to keep people engaged and away from the smoking area. Caspa and Rusko’s barraging FABRICLIVE.37 mid-section complemented the fast-evolving attention economy approach: More, bigger, louder, faster, newer. Better? The jury was in the smoking area.
At the same time, in Cambodia, there were raids and clampdowns on the production of safrole oil—a key component in the production of MDMA. The resulting shortages caused an MDMA drought that dragged out for several years and was exploited by wily entrepreneurs who met the demand for uppers with an array of substitute chemical compounds, either stuffing them into pill presses and hoping people wouldn’t notice the lack of actual MDMA in their eccies (EU seizure data in 2009 revealed that most pills being necked at the time didn’t include any MDMA at all) or marketing them as something entirely new.
The big success story of this particular wave of pleasure innovation was mephedrone, or simply “drone.” Also known by a variety of tabloid-concocted names including M-CAT, White Magic, and Meow Meow—a nod to its chemical name as opposed to the fact it smells like cat piss—the drug’s popularity exploded in the UK. By 2010, it was the fourth most popular drug among clubbers in the country. Its white-powdered appearance, extreme moreishness, and attractive price point (at a tenner a gram, it was at least four times cheaper than the going rate of what was being sold as MDMA at the time) all contributed to the boom. The fact that it was also legal and very easy to come by made it appealing to those dabbling in their first tastes of adult freedom—which, for many, included going out to clubs and listening to exuberant dance music of the kind plied by Caspa and Rusko. Dubstep, born under a cloud of weed smoke, sounded different with a sprinkle of synthetic amphetamine.
In many ways, these conditions suited Caspa and Rusko’s blunt-force, humorous, adrenalized style. Their rowdy, juvenile appeal is perhaps best encapsulated by the soccer-chant horns of Rusko’s “Cockney Thug” and its repeated, context-free interjection of Alan Ford saying the word “fuck” in the thickest of East End accents (the tune was originally just called “FAK”). This was good, dumb fun. Even if its legacy has been more dumb than fun.
The rush to assemble the mix goes some way to explaining its truncated style. Tracks slam from drop to drop, with little by way of crossover, fade, or creative combination. Throughout the 20-track middle section, songs are flung in and jerked out after just a minute or so, each making way for something that sounded similar, perhaps familiar, but also totally different. It pulls you by the ears from one minute to the next; from the rumble of Cotti & ClueKid’s “Legacy,” to Caspa’s warped, underwater horns on “Big Headed Slags,” or Rusko’s various squealing synth experiments—gesticulating at the unbolted creativity and expansiveness that made dubstep such an appealing prospect in its early days, yet landing consistently on the same note over and over again.
Caspa and Rusko’s mix featured more tracks than any other FABRICLIVE release to date. This was a point noted proudly by the pair in interviews, presumably following the logic that bigger could also mean better and, maybe, more representative. But the cramped, attention-sucking mid-section ultimately masked the more musically interesting (and enduring) moments of the mix. These are found in its bookends: The soaring sax of L-Wiz’ “Girl From Codeine City,” Caspa’s Lin Wenzheng-sampling “Cockney Violin,” or ConQuest’s dubby, seven-minute closing meditation, “Forever.”
Their appointment to record Fabric’s first dubstep mix was not without controversy—few things in dubstep ever were, such was the protective zeal that many of its fans had inherited from the sometimes dogmatic drum’n’bass and garage scenes. Loefah, a key player in south London’s DMZ crew, known for their weighty, almost spiritual take on dubstep and its soundsystem roots, claimed in 2015 that the opportunity had been turned down by various people in the scene before Caspa and Rusko were brought on board. DMZ’s resident host, Sgt Pokes, writing under the “poax” pseudonym on Dubstepforum.com, reported similarly. Martin Clark, who was blogging and producing as Blackdown (as well as writing a monthly grime and dubstep column for Pitchfork), said he’d been lobbying for a dubstep contribution to Fabric’s mix series since the early noughties to no avail.
The influential pirates at Rinse FM had launched their own mix CD series in the same year, with Skream’s expansive Rinse:02 contribution preceding FABRICLIVE.37 by a matter of days. Tempa’s Dubstep Allstars showcases had been ticking over since 2004, with N-Type’s Volume 5, also released in 2007, among the best encapsulations of the genre’s broad tent. But these were still, mostly, underground interests. It was Fabric’s above-ground entry that arguably shifted the sound from young pretender to new contender and, for better or worse, would solidify a narrower interpretation of it in the popular consciousness.
The label arranged a whole day of international press for Caspa and Rusko. By the time the pair sat down for the day’s final engagement—a late-evening chat with veteran Rinse FM DJ Darkside for his GetDarker platform—Caspa said they’d done 31 interviews. The pair were excited, they said, for people to hear what they’d produced. A week later, the 8,000 people signed up to the club’s monthly FabricFirst subscription service would be among the first to experience it. FABRICLIVE.37 accelerated a singular version of dubstep into the mainstream; it placed an authoritative, globally recognized stamp on the genre’s spectrum. What Caspa and Rusko had produced, it turned out, was a spark to EDM’s strobe-lit explosion.
Within a couple of years, dubstep was the loudest, dirtiest word in global dance music. There were lots of DJs standing on desks in front of elaborate pyrotechnics displays and thousands of neck-swinging fans. Internet Explorer had a dubstep ad. The Weetabix one was worse. Some producers made hay turning out turgid, front-loaded remixes for major labels. Others slunk back to their underground communities, bitter, embarrassed even, at how quickly and easily commercial interests had swallowed their subculture. But dubstep’s moment in the zeitgeist was a boon to many in the community, too: UK-based events like SubDub expanded into international, festival-scale showcases of soundsystem culture; originators like Mala and Kode9 forged careers and nurtured labels in their own vision; it pushed others, like Loefah, Peverelist, and Pinch to explore rewarding new musical paths. Embossed CD tins, totems of Fabric’s releases, changed hands among intrigued young music fans—fans like Sherelle Thomas, the latest contributor to the new fabric presents mix series (which replaced the concurrent FABRICLIVE and fabric offerings) who pinpointed Caspa and Rusko’s mix as a key entry point to club culture.
Since its fated release, FABRICLIVE.37 has followed an arc that’s become typical of such flashpoint moments: Something that feels incredibly exciting to many and ominous to others, ages badly very quickly, and then, on reappraisal years later, reveals its true magnetic value. And there’s the realization that these are the things the mind clings to despite the attrition of daily life, in spite of the infinite scroll. Maybe that’s what Justice’s Gaspard and Xavier had in mind as they stitched together their own version of FABRICLIVE.37—plumbing ’70s disco hits and spandex rock, searching for those moments that move you to pause, breathe, and, gently, to no one in particular, whisper “FAK.”

Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here.


Sarah Davachi's minimalist work belongs to a tradition of deep, shimmering drone music. Play her music in a quiet room on good speakers and you can practically see the air moving around your head.

Vergers

Like a lot of minimalist art, Sarah Davachi’s music appears simple on the surface. Not a lot seems to happen, at least not in terms of melody, rhythm, or any of the usual categories of Western popular music: Her music consists mainly of long held tones. The real action is not found in the notes themselves but in their microtonal variations and the wealth of overtones, harmonics, and ghostly pulses produced by the friction between them. Her work belongs to a tradition of deep, shimmering drone music that includes Eliane Radigue, Kevin Drumm, Phill Niblock, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and Folke Rabe.
Despite its apparent restraint, Davachi’s music is also profoundly expressive. Her filters sweep back and forth in slow, deliberate, and often unpredictable movements that suggest the careful thought process that drives the hand behind them. The subtlest change can set in motion complicated chain reactions—ebbing and flowing, wheels turning within wheels. Play her music in a quiet room on good speakers and you can practically see the air moving around your head.
In part, this has to do with her tools. Davachi, who studied electronic music at Mills College, in Oakland, California, typically works with a mixture of acoustic and electronic sources, or even purely acoustic instruments. Her album All My Circles Run, from earlier this year, is a set of studies for overdubbed strings, voice, organ, and piano. On Vergers, she turns her attention to the EMS Synthi 100, an analog synthesizer from the early 1970s, and complements its unusually vibrant tone with almost imperceptible additions of voice and violin.
It is her most minimal album yet. Its three long tracks initially feel almost static; they evolve so stealthily that it's easy to find yourself adrift in the middle, wondering just how you got there. The opening “Gentle So Gentle,” nearly 22 minutes long, begins with a single octave, its tones wavering like heat mirages. A minute passes; then two. It takes a while to notice a pair of quiet background tones, glowing like street lights in fog. In time, it will come to feel like all seven notes of a minor scale are resonating in blurry unison. Timbres shift; tones fatten. For a spell, the sound resembles a piano whose sustain pedal has been held down. Then, a pair of clarinets. Fifteen minutes in, and the atmosphere turns celestial for its final passage. The piece begins on a different note than the one with which it began, and even though you probably won't notice it, that shift lends an extra element of tension. There is no resolution; it is a question with no answer, an imperative to keep moving.
Where “Gentle So Gentle” is shot through with light, “Ghosts and All” is charged with dread. Over buzzing pedal tones, thin, violin-like textures saw queasily back and forth, like a camera panning across a burned forest. It is as bleak as the grimmest doom metal. Once again, she proves herself a master manipulator of frequency, stacking up layers until even the root note is lost in the miasma, and you're left disoriented, unable to find your footing.
The third and final track, “In Staying,” uses similar strategies, but it's immediately distinguishable from its companions. (Proof that Davachi is not your average drone artist is her facility for evoking wildly different universes with such a modest set of tools.) The sound evokes church bells that have been frozen in mid-peal. New tones bleed into earshot, and the bells melt away. Now we are inside a glacier, perhaps; the time scale is unfathomably long. Inside the sound, made one with the all-encompassing hum, a million tiny vibrations collide. If timbre is one of Davachi’s primary materials, time is another—thus her all-enveloping matrix of infinite ripple—and with “In Staying,” she manages a feat that is nearly impossible in music: She makes time itself seem to stand stock still.


Twenty years ago, the German electronic musician Jan Jelinek’s tools were rustier, his loops lumpier, yet his vision for a transcendent music of digital failure was very much intact.

Personal Rock

The glitch has become so familiar that we rarely hear it for what it is: the audible trace of an error, a scab grown across a damaged set of data. Purposeful glitches proliferate in popular music, where they now constitute just one more utensil in a producer’s digital toolbox. You can hear them in Skrillex, Kanye, even Bon Iver and Low. The 17-year-old pop savant Billie Eilish, who currently has 14 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, has made her name with an ASMR-pricked sound that fizzes like seltzer, fueled by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of the crinkly sonics that, years before her birth, were the exclusive property of scowling avant-techno purists.
Back around the turn of the millennium, to craft music out of such scratchy, accidental sounds was novel. Oval’s Markus Popp is the most famous example of the phenomenon, for the way he turned the clicks and pops of skipping CDs into a meditative strain of ambient music. No less important was Jan Jelinek, who on his 2001 album Loop-finding-jazz-records utilized his sampler’s looping function to whip snippets of old jazz and soul records into crackly abstractions, chords turning cloudy over beats that bristled like porcupine quills. A new reissue of Jelinek’s Personal Rock, recorded under his Gramm alias, nudges us back two years earlier, when the German electronic musician’s tools were rustier, his loops lumpier, yet his vision for a transcendent music of digital failure—sifting through the rubble of 1s and 0s and coming up with fistfuls of opals—was very much intact.
Gramm was not Jelinek’s first project; the year before Personal Rock, he put out a pair of 12"s as Farben, an alias he continued to use sporadically until the early 2010s. Farben is German for “colors,” yet those initial records were resolutely greyscale, all shadow and pinprick. The monochrome palette persists on the Gramm album, but there’s a newfound richness to his tones; each track tends to be illuminated by a chord, or set of chords, that glows dully in the muck, deep hued against a dull backdrop, in the fashion of a Rothko painting.
Farben was grounded in the tropes and rituals of dance music: The records appeared on Klang Elektronik, a Frankfurt label known for rave-tested fare from artists like Acid Jesus, and the earliest material fleshed out its clicks and whirrs with the muscular sounds of classic drum machines. But with Personal Rock, Jelinek mostly left the nightclub behind, if not always intentionally. (“Often I’d get booked to play in clubs at peak time and it didn’t work at all,” he admitted to The Wire in 2012.) The sounds here are wispier, the beats more haphazard, the arrangements more or less indifferent to the demands of the dancing body.
Gramm is still situated within dance music’s broader traditions. Opener “Legends/Nugroove TM” references an iconic New York house label, and it’s a good bet that “St. Moritz” is a nod to Berlin’s Moritz von Oswald, of Basic Channel, Maurizio, Chain Reaction, et al.—a titan of minimal techno, without whose Spartan example Jelinek might never have carved out his own stripped-back lane. And occasionally, Gramm thumps away with abandon: “Ment,” streaked with a backwards tone that recalls the pre-Kompakt label Profan, surges ahead on a powerful, swift-moving kick drum. But the functionalism of the working DJ is clearly far from Jelinek’s mind. Personal Rock’s tempos are often slow, the percussion reduced to a sliver of light dissolving against a velvety backdrop. The central chord of “Siemens.Bioport” just hovers in space, an ill-formed blob against a beat composed of dust mites and fingernail clippings; the beat in “70gr” moves like a Roomba, bouncing from corner to corner as its intake valves choke on lint.
Perhaps most striking about Personal Rock, listening back after 20 years, is how lo-fi it sounds today. There’s a reason for that: The rudimentary gear Jelinek used didn’t allow for much in the way of fidelity. But that muddy quality is a far cry from the way this stuff was presented at the time, when glitch techno tended to be hailed as a harbinger of a brave new future. In retrospect, Jelinek’s debut album has almost as much in common with the burned-out shoegaze of a band like Flying Saucer Attack as it does the lab-coated discipline of Berlin’s Raster-Noton or the laser-like repetitions of Oval. Jelinek’s work on Personal Rock is murky, moody, and, above all, expressive in a way we don’t often expect of this era of electronic music. Where minimal techno was often noted for its rigidity, the rhythms on “Type Zwei,” the album’s standout track, recall Can’s Jaki Liebezeit in their liquid grace. Zero in on the movements of Jelinek’s shape-shifting glitches, and the drab specter of silicon falls by the wayside; instead, you might hear crickets, windshield wipers, lawn sprinklers. Like a lot of art lurking in the shadow of Y2K, glitch techno was often assumed to be cold and overly intellectualized—all head, no hips—but Personal Rock is a reminder of how soulful the era’s digital music could be.


The Austin band, which has cultivated an intense fan base while continuing to experiment, do so again here; this record finds band leader Britt Daniel and producer/drummer Jim Eno's tendencies toward studio-based devilry coming full-flower, each listen revealing craftsmen reveling in detail.

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

Prior to the release of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, online buzz suggested Spoon's sixth record was a grower, a distinction also conferred upon the Austin band's two previous albums, each more experimental (and at times alienating) than its predecessor. That optimistic adjective-- which incorporates both the listener's failure to quickly grasp a record as well as a hope to eventually do so-- feels exceedingly appropriate for Spoon, who have cultivated an intense fan base while continuing to experiment (the frequent comparisons to Wilco are indeed apt in this case).
A large contingent of Spoon's following has come from Britt Daniel's continual knack for, as he sang on 1998's "Metal Detektor", making "the sound of getting kicked when you're down." If any song were to be the quintessential Spoon pop single, then, the radiant, Jon Brion-produced "The Underdog", a Cliff's Notes encapsulation of Spoon's earnest compassion for the fucked-over, is it. With a three-piece brass fanfare, "Underdog" is a battle cry against succumbing to mediocrity masquerading as a middle finger to the standard-bearers: The lyric "Get free from the middle man" could also read: "Get free from the middle, man." Likewise, the slinky "Don't You Evah" (a cover of an unreleased song by former tourmates the Natural History) affirms Spoon's trend toward emotional trusses for the fairer sex, recalling Gimme Fiction's "They Never Got You" and Kill the Moonlight's "Don't Let It Get You Down". A different directive occurs on opener "Don't Make Me a Target", however, which revisits the obscurantist personal politicizing that many thought marked *Fiction'*s "My Mathematical Mind". With a few well-chosen phrases-- "Here come a man from the star...Beating his drum...Nuclear dicks with their dialect drawls," both victim and perpetrator become crystal clear.
Ga Ga travels past in a flash-- at 36 minutes, it returns to the brief runtime that Fiction well surpassed-- but leaves plenty of reasons to revisit. Daniel and drummer Jim Eno's tendencies toward studio-based devilry come full-flower here, each listen revealing craftsmen reveling in detail. What in lesser hands could be extra-textual gobbledygook instead feels the product of studio freestyling, something to which the murky mixing-board wizardry of Jamaican dub is an obvious precursor. Penultimate song "Finer Feelings" is one bit of proof, its wide-open guitars-- straight from Sandinista!-- augmented with a sampled toast from (Clash collaborator) Mikey Dread's "Industrial Spy". With the addition of echoed ambiance from a Brussels fair field recording, "Feelings" acquires the aura of a surreal Kingston sound system.
Earlier, "Evah"'s introduction dips into the self-referentiality the band flirted with on Fiction, featuring a diced-up, looped Daniel asking Eno to record his studio talkback. Two songs later, all manner of discordance enters and exits the reverb-heavy mix of the appropriately titled "Eddie's Ragga", which developed from a jam session with Eddie Robert of Daniel-produced Austinites I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. Ga Ga's most intriguing sonic creation, however, is the song which takes the dub influence in the furthest direction: "The Ghost of You Lingers". A return to Moonlight's spooky sonic variegation, "Ghost"'s pounding, echoed piano feels like a merged memory of the jabbed guitar from "Small Stakes" with "Paper Tiger"'s moody expressionism. Daniel's unmistakable voice is a distant, gothic wail here, as he mourns his missing love with characteristic jargon: "We put on a clinic/ If you were here would you calm me down or settle the score."
Daniel's gift for non-mawkish romanticism results in both Ga Ga's best moments, and three of the best songs the band has yet create. Especially on Girls Can Tell, Spoon's always flirted with straight-up blue-eyed soul, and "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb" is their full-on take-off of Elvis Costello's Motown M.O. on Get Happy! (perhaps purposefully, then, the album's bonus disc is titled Get Nice!). Backed by an irresistible Holland-Dozier-Holland gospel-pop-stomp, "Cherry Bomb" re-imagines the heart/sleeve cliché as a vivid bicep tattoo, as Daniel implores his love to three-point-turn and chill out. Ga Ga's real bang happens at its close, however, with the one-two send-off of "Feelings" and "Black Like Me". The former, which ostensibly documents a Memphis-based isolation, features a handclap-accompanied chorus as energized and unremittingly hopeful as Daniel's ever been: "Sometimes I think that I'll find a love/ One that's gonna change my heart/ I'll find it in Commercial Appeal/ And then this heartache'll get chased away."
"Black"'s melodic melancholy-- backed by a weeping piano/guitar motif that recalls Let it Bleed-- is simply gorgeous. Has Daniel ever written a lyric more crushing in its confused simplicity than "I'm in need of someone to take care of me tonight"? Rather than attempt to relate with someone who's already taken leave, he splits, and so, apparently, does his mind. During the internalized call-and-response that follows, he appeals: "All the weird kids up front/ Tell me what you know you want." Thus, at the end of his emotional rope, he crosses the fourth wall and reveals the aching coda as a mutually lived performance.
With Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon have once again found a gray area between the poles of pop accessibility and untested studio theorizing, modifying a formula that has grown to feel familiar even as it wanders, and refusing to square the circle while doing so. Through whatever process they use, the band has also managed to create yet another wonderfully singular indie rock record, unafraid of unfettered passion or self-sabotage, and which affirms a shrouded, hybrid style as unquestionably theirs. Perhaps it is fitting to refer to Ga Ga, and Spoon albums on the whole, as growers, then, but with a different definition: one that takes into account the bands continual, and continually rewarding, approach to creative maturation.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the alternative titans’ 1993 album, where Billy Corgan discovered the larger-than-life sound that would reshape rock for decades to come.

Siamese Dream

When Billy Corgan was 9 years old, he stuck his head in the speakers to get closer to the terrible, godlike sound emerging from them. The record on the turntable was Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality, but the frightening sound wasn’t coming from Ozzy Osbourne, who sounded as panicked and awestruck singing on record as young Corgan felt sitting listening. Tony Iommi’s roaring guitar sounded inhuman, like the primeval source of all childlike terror and wonder. Yet it sat obediently on its haunches behind Osbourne, whose frail voice, doubled up onto itself, seemed to restrain it. Corgan needed to feel that sound rumble inside his skull. He couldn’t get close enough.
By the time Corgan and his bandmates in the Smashing Pumpkins checked into Triclops Sound Studio to record 1993’s Siamese Dream, he’d been chasing that sound for more than a decade. Over the years, the album has come to be known largely for the tiresome and oft-repeated strife that surrounded its creation—Corgan’s emotional volatility and autocratic leadership, bassist D’arcy Wretzky and rhythm guitarist James Iha’s romantic entanglement and breakup, Jimmy Chamberlin’s struggle with addiction. But the real story of Siamese Dream is the story of a sound. Judging by its lingering resonance 30 years later, it might be the single most iconic sound produced in the alternative rock era, one where everything transmuted into an idealized version of itself. “The thing about recording is, the essentials really are basic,” Corgan told Creem in 1994. “Drums sound like drums, guitars like guitars. So they have to be embellished, and that’s what I enjoy the most, the things you can do so that a drum sounds like something more than a drum, or a guitar sounds like something more than a guitar.”
Corgan was devoted to making an album that would ring in your ears like it was the only sound that had ever been made, one that would blast into your cranium like the platonic idea of every rock record you remembered hearing in your youth. One early clue for that sound came from Kevin Shields, the leading force behind the totemic shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine, in whose guitar manipulations Corgan heard glimmers of his own dreamed music: “Just playing these big chords with 7ths and 9ths but blasting the shit out of them through Marshalls,” he said years later, the wonder still palpable in his voice. He and Iha mimicked those lush wavelike tones, but they played in the style they’d learned imitating the gods of cornfed FM radio rock—they stacked the guitars in octaves, and instead of using the whammy bar to induce vertigo, as Shields did, they relied on good old-fashioned string bends, making the guitars mewl in pain.
Another cornerstone of their sound came when Corgan and Iha heard a band called Catherine playing its guitars through Electro-Harmonix Big Muff pedals. They brought the pedals to producer Butch Vig, who scoffed, saying they were impossible to record. But Corgan was adamant, and he and Iha stacked guitar overdubs, one on top of the other, tuning them to brighter or deeper frequencies, until they spread out like an irradiated sunrise. The sound swallowed everything, including Chamberlin’s ride cymbals, and everything in the mix existed to serve it. It had a heavy, dark bottom and a bright top, with Corgan’s tiny keening wail surfing along it, like a child riding in a barrel over an ocean.
This was a sound that rewarded an obsessive mindset, and by the time the record label dispatched someone to the studio to record a quick promotional interview, the band was already thoroughly miserable. No one remembers the sessions fondly: “They were not necessarily a happy bunch of campers,” Vig told the Chicago Sun-Times. Facing the cameras, Wretzky, Chamberlin, and Iha were doleful, meek, silent. When the interviewer, sensing an opening, asked, “What keeps a band together?” they collapsed into shrill, manic laughter, the only shared moment of levity.
Leaving the band behind, Corgan gave the guy a bashful tour of all the gear he’d assembled in pursuit of the album’s sound. Gesturing half-heartedly at multiple guitars, all meant to capture different tones, he held up various pedals and described their effects (“Imagine screaming your guts out,” he said helpfully of the Mu-Tron BiPhase); he pointed to a Mellotron in the corner and unzipped a case containing a sitar, gamely attempting a hangdog, apathetic air. This was the demeanor of rock’s antiheroes of the day, like Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder—you were supposed to appear bewildered and aggrieved in the face of public attention, to mumble answers like excuses.
But you can tell from Corgan’s hunched shoulders and shy demeanor that he knew, deep in the bones of his gangly 6'3" frame, that all of this stuff amounted to a confession of sorts. The pervasive stereotype of the early-’90s rocker was that of the slacker, but slackers didn’t collect Mellotrons and sitars. Corgan was inviting the world into his childhood bedroom, and it was filled with posters of all the old, embarrassing rock bands he was meant to have left in his youth: bands like Queen, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin, yes, but also bands that didn’t even have the benefit of having Satan, drugs, or sex on their side: Rush, ELO, Boston.
To a degree that overwhelmed and defined him, Corgan craved rock-god grandeur, fame, adulation, redemptive heavy-metal thunder. Growing up in a series of broken homes around Chicago, with a drug-dealer musician father and a mentally unstable mother, Corgan was entranced by anyone willing to adopt a larger-than-life persona to escape their circumstances. He watched the scrappy tough-guy wrestler Dick the Bruiser will himself to folk-hero status on flickering televisions, and he was drawn to heavy-metal bands that made theme music for a more vivid and less disappointing world. “As long as I can remember, since I was a little kid, I wanted to be famous,” he recollected to Rolling Stone. “My myth was rock god-dom. I saw that as a means to become one who has no pain.” Any time a guitar swooped into an arrangement like a comic-book hero coming down from the mountain to save the villagers, Corgan found solace. When he was nine, he’d stuck his head into the speakers, and now he was going to curl up inside them forever.
In the first 30 seconds of Siamese Dream’s first track, “Cherub Rock,” Corgan laid all these furtive childhood dreams bare. The song proceeds with the showy deliberation of an opening argument, or a magician’s trick. After two playful introductory snare rolls from Chamberlin, the equivalent of a spotlight on a closed curtain, Corgan strums that pulsating octave riff. He’s joined first by Iha, then Wretzky, both doubling him, while Chamberlin builds steadily. Then Corgan stomps the distortion pedal, and those guitars, the summation of his dreams, blot out everything, just as they did in his childhood memory of Sabbath. This was guitar music as an obliterating wave, one that Corgan summoned as if it could wash away all his childhood scars, petty grievances, personal failures, and inescapable weaknesses.
The song’s central riff, he would later reveal, was stolen, more or less wholesale, from the Canadian prog band Rush—specifically the breakdown at 3:55 in the song “By-Tor and the Snow Dog.” Nobody in the alternative era but Corgan would have had the impulse to imitate Rush, a name other alternative rockers teased each other with—as in, “Fuck, you guys sound like Rush now,” a real note that Mudhoney’s Mark Arm sent to the members of Soundgarden after they released 1991’s Badmotorfinger. Corgan insisted that “Cherub Rock” be the album’s first single, and must have relished the irony of watching Gen-X kids moshing to a song that was influenced by the least cool of his many uncool heroes.
Guitar rock, still the law of the land on MTV and in popular culture, was in a curious place at the beginning of the new decade. The distinctions between ’90s “alternative” rock and ’70s and ’80s “dinosaur” rock were nebulous, when you got down to it: “We play loud hard-rock guitars, yes, but not those loud hard-rock guitars” is a thin line to walk, which meant the borders were ever more rigorously patrolled. The very idea that you might strike an unironic guitar-hero pose, that you could peel off a wailing solo, was so rife with sociopolitical portent that it is impossible to imagine now. Liking the band Queen, for instance—in the tortured psychic arena of the early-’90s alternative-rock explosion, liking the band Queen was an intriguing enough position for Corgan to answer several interview questions about it.
He was more than happy to oblige. From the outset, Corgan relished his role as the outsider in a community meant to welcome the self-described outcasts. He made all the wrong moves, and drew attention to their wrongness: Instead of refusing a major-label contract to record for Greg Ginn’s SST, like his colleagues in Soundgarden, Corgan signed the Smashing Pumpkins to Caroline, releasing their 1991 debut, Gish, on an “indie” label that was really a subsidiary of Richard Branson’s Virgin Records. Instead of tipping his hat to the punk bands of the previous decade, he namechecked Tom Scholz, the stonecutting studio perfectionist behind the FM rock project Boston. He understood, instinctively, that cool was not a currency that guaranteed immortality. Mere humans concerned themselves with cool, a consolation prize for their pitifully short lifespans. Did Ronnie James Dio care about cool? Did Ozzy?
And yet, to his ever-expanding chagrin, Corgan himself was not a rock god. He was a regular human, and a particularly thin-skinned one who cared deeply about what people thought of him, and told them so publicly, in mortifying detail. “You hurt me,” he pouted infamously to Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil, in Soundgarden’s 1994 SPIN profile. “You hurt me deeply in my heart.”
It didn’t take long for Corgan’s reputation as a punching bag and mouthpiece to establish itself: Like the wrestlers he grew up idolizing, he couldn’t resist a chance to grab the microphone and deliver a good heel speech. He started out by ridiculing the city that he came from—“Chicago is a dead music town,” he proclaimed to the Spiral Scratch zine in 1992. “[We’ve] got eight thousand Replacements, and two thousand Hüsker Dü’s. Nobody cares”—and soon moved on to his colleagues in the ascendant alternative boom. Whether it was Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam, or, most famously, Kurt Cobain, he barely let an interview go by without mentioning one of his bêtes noires.
Soon, he had acquired the reputation of being the pain in the ass at the office party, the “not here to make friends” reality-show contestant, and his colleagues began sniping back at him, freely. Out of all the people who skewered him in the press in the ’90s—and it became something of a sport—perhaps no one took measure of him so empathetically, or nailed him as shrewdly, as his ex-girlfriend, Courtney Love: “People that Billy’s jealous of, he’s particularly vicious about,” she told SPIN. “And those are the only people he’s jealous of, really—people that are successful, that have archetypes. He’s faceless—he doesn’t have a place. He thinks he’s going to be Roger Waters, which is probably true… He’s the only one among them who can write a catchy song… but what makes him so depressed is that he has no cultural significance.”
It was a toxic stew of all of these resentments and unprocessed childhood traumas that Corgan brought to bear on the writing of Siamese Dream. Never has an album more grandiose been inspired by such a niggling concern as what the local scenesters might think of your new music. But that anxiety drove Corgan—or so he told scores of reporters—past the point of despair, straight into suicidal ideation, and out again. “I’m like the fugitive… running from the one-armed indie-rock community,” he joked to Michael Azerrad in Rolling Stone in October 1993. “If I continued on the path I was on, which was being overly conscious and worried what the indie-rock hierarchy was going to think of our new album, we were going to fail,” Corgan told Azerrad. “I don’t have the proper indie credentials,” he fretted to The Los Angeles Times. “I didn’t play in some seminal band where five people bought the record. I wasn’t a roadie... that kind of rags-to-riches story.”
As cris de couer go, “I wasn’t a roadie” might prompt more giggles than sympathy. But his anguish was real, and as he started trying to write material for Siamese Dream, he sunk into a depression so deep he came scarily close, he later revealed, to taking his own life. One night, he decided that he was either going to go through with it or “get used to it, work, and live, and be happy.” Instead, he wrote a song about the lowest he’d ever felt, and gave it an ironic chorus. “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known/Can’t wait for tomorrow, I might not have that long,” he sang, his voice a coo instead of a howl.
By 1993, alternative rock had already earned its reputation for excessive self-pity and pained bellowing. The “loud-quiet-loud” formula—clean tones for the verses, stomp the pedal for distortion at the chorus—was clear to even casual radio listeners. Yet “Today” felt like a celebration. When Corgan sang about bottoming out, he did so over music that sounded like a sunrise. When other grunge outfits hit the pedal, the guitars usually dragged the song into the muck, thrashing. But Corgan’s songs, from the outset, rose on glittering wings. Somehow the heavier his music grew, the lighter he got.
His lyrics, just like his interview quotes, are always about the punishing crucible of self-belief. They were a hair’s breadth from the Christian rock of the same period, even though at the time of Siamese Dream, he had renounced his Catholic childhood faith. But the lyrics were all religious catechism, barely disguised—tongues and shame, crowns of thorns, “God sleeps in bliss,” “I torch my soul to show the world I am pure deep inside my heart.” Corgan’s songs shared with Christian rock a naked yearning for transcendence that could make the sincerity-avoidant squirm: “When I came to a line that made me cringe with embarrassment, that’s the one I would use,” he said of his writing process for Siamese Dream. It worked for him.
This was another way in which Corgan differed from his contemporaries: He had no protecting veil of irony to hide behind. He was the kind of guy who could name a song “Hummer” and profess zero awareness of the word’s sexual connotations. On “Luna,” he sings with no trace of irony or embarrassment about singing “moon-songs to your babies.” “If you really listen to my record, you’ll know that I’m a real wimp, and a hopeless romantic,” he told SPIN. This guilelessness was his Achilles heel and his gift. He could stumble upon a lyric that would pierce like a five-year-old’s unanswerable question: “Happiness will make you wonder/Will I feel okay?"
It also allowed him to write “Disarm,” a ballad with no precedents for an “alternative” band. Even within a songwriting climate that encouraged bloodletting, only Corgan sang something as bald-faced as “Cut that little child/Inside of me and such a part of you,” a line so uncomfortably direct it led to a temporary and ill-advised ban from the BBC. It was also a daringly soft, melodramatic song, full of the kind of flowery and fluttering gestures that no one else in the small scene had even tried.
Despite a few surface provocations to heavy metal’s machismo, “alternative” was still largely masculine, defined by heavy, menacing sounds and bellowing vocals. Pearl Jam had dared to soften up on Vs. with rough acoustic strummers like “Daughter,” and Kurt Cobain threw a cello into Nirvana’s discordant sound for In Utero, but Corgan arranged “Disarm” like he was furnishing the drawing room in an 18th-century castle: a string arrangement, church bells, a tympani. The result had more in common with Kate Bush than Soundgarden, and Corgan leaned into the whine in his voice, which tended to elude easy gender coding. Whining, as Sasha Geffen noted in 2020’s Glitter Up the Dark, a survey of pop music’s history of gender transgression, is “gender neutral.”
It was this softness, underpinning all the noise, that made the Pumpkins special. “I send a heart to all my dearies/When your life is so, so dreary/Dream,” Corgan whispered on “Mayonaise,” his phrasing straight out of a Victorian children’s novel, as the guitars bloomed overhead. His voice barely cuts through, just like Ozzy on the Sabbath records, but he doesn’t sound overwhelmed by the sound; he sounds swaddled in it. “I just want to be me/And when I can, I will,” he declares, not a master of reality but a refugee from it.
The two words most often used to describe the Pumpkins were “fluid” and “powerful.” Those two adjectives found their locus in Chamberlin’s drumming, which transformed the band’s songs into rivers. His touch was light—he rarely broke a stick on tour—and his idols weren’t the usual Godzilla stompers like Bonham and Moon, but jazz and swing players like Gene Krupa, Elvin Jones, David Garibaldi. He understood that true ferocity required as much delicacy as muscle. Whenever Iha and Corgan bent a string, he’d play a fill, turning each squeal into a hairpin turn. Chamberlin crafted his drum parts along with Corgan’s rhythm guitar, which meant you could hear the song’s melody in just his isolated drum track, and which infused the songs with a swaying, gentle cadence. Corgan liked to complain about his bandmates, but in Chamberlin, Corgan found a musician at whom he could throw everything—all his imperious demands for perfection, all his wildest ideas for where his music might go—and be rewarded.
Siamese Dream was a breakout success for the Pumpkins, eventually going 4x platinum. Suddenly, Corgan was a spokesperson, no longer sniping from the sidelines but uncomfortably the equal of his peers. The band headlined Lollapalooza, which Corgan was vocal about hating. He griped about not being “the cute one,” relegated to standing in the back on the band’s magazine covers. He carped ceaselessly about Iha and Wretzky, calling his band “these people I care about very much yet they continue to keep failing me.” He professed boredom with rock’n’roll, professed misery at its trappings. The minute Corgan left the studio or the stage, his dreamland vanished, and he sounded like a man who had crawled across the desert toward a mythical fountain only to taste saltwater. Corgan grimaced, wiped his mouth, and was left unsatisfied.
He already had his eye on the next horizon: a double album. His generation’s answer to The Wall. Only he could do it, he was convinced. Surely that would slake his thirst. “Nobody’s got the balls to take the pretentious ‘how dare you?’ move,” he said. “If I’m going to do it, now’s the fucking time. I’m already starting to hear minor grumblings about mortgages and stuff. It won’t be long before I start having children. Now is the fucking moment.” Better to exist in the dreamland, where perfect sounds could be made, and manipulated. On “Cherub Rock,” he howled “Let me out” from inside that sound, but he was barely audible—already a rat in a cage. Then he closed his mouth, and the guitar solo arced up from the center of the song. It was the purest sound of yearning he’s ever captured—a single high D, streaking like a flare gun into the night.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan


One of the first non-grunge bands on Sub Pop showed just how malleable underground pop could be; a quarter-century later, their debut remains a bracing, brazen showcase of rock minimalism.

Manos

Barely a month before the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, every independent band in the Pacific Northwest seemed to converge on Olympia, Wash., for a six-day event dreamed up by K Records’ Calvin Johnson and former label co-owner Candice Pedersen, the International Pop Underground Convention. Johnson and Pedersen wanted to showcase and support the breadth and depth of regional talent with concerts, parties, picnics, and even a Planet of the Apes marathon. Embracing DIY culture and rejecting corporate involvement, the convocation helped crystallize the burgeoning indie ethos and gave a megaphone to riot grrrls and queercore bands alike, including Heavens to Betsy and Bikini Kill. More generally, those six days in Olympia made an implicit underground idea explicit: Anyone could make viable, exciting punk with whatever resources they had on hand, even if it was two people playing guitar and drums, like the Spinanes.
Guitarist/vocalist Rebecca Gates and drummer Scott Plouf played a short set on International Pop’s first night as part of a 15-band bill of female-fronted acts called “Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now.” They weren’t the only duo—Heavens to Betsy, with Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer, made their debut that night—but their performance epitomized the idea of what could be done with such limited means, a concept they would soon explore on a series of singles for IMP Records. They signed to Sub Pop, becoming one of the label’s first non-grunge acts, to issue their debut full-length, Manos, in late 1993. Manos became the first independently released album to top the college radio charts, which shows just how crucial a role the Spinanes and the scene they represented played at a pivotal point in underground music. A quarter-century later, it is back in print, providing a welcome reminder of the core principles of that moment.
Manos is musically austere to the point of seeming conservative; after 25 years, that’s perhaps what remains most exciting about it. Gates’ insistence on replicating the band’s live sound in the studio overrode the possibilities of post-production, although she and Plouf did add some judicious overdubs. Musically and conceptually, Manos sounds immediate and purposeful. This is a band paring underground rock down to its essentials and then trimming it just a little more; what they keep and what they jettison makes for a bracing, often brazen listen, even at a time when “selling out” no longer connotes the mortal sin it once did.
This spartan approach means Gates and Plouf have to do more with their respective instruments, to be more inventive and sensitive in how they play off each other. On “Noel, Jonah, and Me,” Gates’ intricate riff splits the difference between lead and rhythm guitar, while Plouf punctuates her understated vocals with nervy snare interjections. “You’re twisting to feel,” Gates sings, but she and Plouf sound like they’re untangling indie rock to speak—and feel—more directly. They elaborate on that idea throughout these dozen songs, showing all the different things they could do with this lineup: the bright classic-rock riffing of “Grand Prize,” the quiet dirge of “Shellburn,” the jittery dance punk of “I Love That Party with the Monkey Kitty.”
The Spinanes’ subsequent records were less anchored to this minimal approach, giving them more gradients of sound if not necessarily more shades of emotion. Plouf split in 1996 to become the full-time drummer in Built to Spill, and Gates retired the Spinanes name three years later, releasing sporadic solo material. For its 25th anniversary, Manos traveled from the west coast to the east, from Sub Pop to Merge. Along the way, it gained a few bonus tracks. The live versions of “Epiphany” and “Manos” are the most intriguing, as they demonstrate just how closely this debut album reflected their live sound. Recorded in 1994 at Yoyo A Go Go, an Olympia festival inspired by the International Pop Underground Convention, “Manos” is a flurry of angry guitar strums and thundering drums. Gates and Plouf sound like they’re playing at each other rather than with each other. It may make you long for more live material, but a stripped-down reissue is only appropriate for such a stripped-down record, made by two people who proved just how malleable underground pop can be.


Mica Levi's second album proper is forged from absence, dissonance, flat surfaces, and sharp edges-- a brave and tricky step down a path that terminates somewhere more elemental and holistic than "experimental pop music."

Never

At this point, "experimental pop music" is hardly novel. The ongoing marriage of accessible songwriting and capital-A Artistry may very well be both a cause and a symptom of that which was once called indie rock's growing popularity. On a purely aesthetic level, Micachu and the Shapes could stand among this generation's most lauded arty pop purveyors. But with this, their second album proper (following last year's one-off collaboration with the London Sinfonietta, Chopped and Screwed), the band has doubled down on something genuinely different, defiantly cold, and intentionally withholding.
These qualities were certainly present on the band's 2009 debut, Jewellery, but they were tempered by much more discernibly "pop" moments. The album was chock full of strange noises and unconventional structures, but these were masterfully interwoven with catchy melodies and conventionally exhilarating rhythms. This time around, it's all but impossible to hear the band's cacophonous sonic treatments and counterintuitive structures as things that are being done to a batch of songs-- they are the songs. One can hardly picture the three humans in the band actually playing this music, and it's hard to tell a treated guitar from a vacuum cleaner or a drum kit from some clangorous but impossible-to-visualize percussive texture.
In keeping with the album's title, Never is uncompromising and direct. While both of Micachu's albums feel like the work of impossibly cool, perpetually unimpressed British art students, this attitude is the brilliant, bloodless core of Never. The whiffs of boredom and casual disdain that passed through Jewellery no longer read as a crack at style. In some ways, it's easier to approach Never as a single piece of music than as a collection of unrelated songs. There are no clear points of entry here, nothing that stands out quite as strongly as Jewellery's "Calculator" or "Wrong". Mica Levi's melodies are minimal and straightforward, but Never finds them constantly obfuscated and/or disrupted. Would-be memorable vocal lines are mumbled, manipulated, and cut off. Entire songs seem imperceptibly to slow down or lurch forward. This is decidedly uneasy listening, in an unerringly precise and purposeful way.
None of which is to say that Never is without nuance or subtlety. The theatrical call-and-response of "Ok" may be sincerely expressing the importance of directly communicating one's emotions, or dryly, brutally lampooning it. The most conventionally pretty segment of Never is a spare, 47-second set piece with flutes and bird sounds that concludes, "I want to jump into the white sky/ But I never try." It is extremely rare to hear music that is so clever, but so thoroughly disinterested in drawing attention to its own cleverness.
In the grand tradition of art that willfully denies conventional pleasures, Never has a bit of trouble fully realizing its unconventional ones. It is nearly impossible to get anything from Never stuck in your head; the album's ideas and execution are so closely intertwined that it practically ceases to exist when you aren't actually listening to it. It is a singular object forged from absence, dissonance, flat surfaces, and sharp edges-- a brave and tricky step down a path that terminates somewhere more elemental and holistic than "experimental pop music" or "catchy experimental music."


On the debut LP from his band Sumerlands, producer Arthur Rizk (Title Fight, Prurient) establishes himself as a keen student of early ’80s American metal and a songwriting behemoth in his own right.

Sumerlands

What’s the common link between Title Fight, Prurient, and Power Trip? Producer Arthur Rizk, now an in-demand name for what Kurt Ballou calls achieving the maximum amount of Satan. Rizk’s status as the underground producer du jour somewhat obscures the fact that he is also a keen student of early ’80s American metal, making work comparable to his masters. In Rizk’s own band Sumerlands, the guitarist has teamed up with former Hour of 13 vocalist Phil Swanson, drummer Justin DeTore of Magic Circle, guitarist John Powers, and bassist Brad Raub (Raub also plays with Rizk in crossover group War Hungry). Sumerlands’ 2014 demo hinted at a worthy update of classic American power/speed metal; with their self-titled debut full-length, Rizk establishes himself as a metal songwriting behemoth.
Rizk’s most notable productions come from bands who understand how melody can make aggression sound fuller. This is why he’s as comfortable working with shoegaze-obsessed hardcore dudes like Title Fight as he is with Dom Fernow, a master of faltering beauty. Rizk’s ability to hone in on melodies from other bands translates to his own guitar work, drawing especially from Jake E. Lee, Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist after Randy Rhoads’ death and before Zakk Wylde’s tenure. Lee bridged the gap between Rhoads’ virtuosity and Wylde’s tougher approach, and Rizk imagines Lee unburdened by Ozzy’s need for radio play.
“Seventh Seal” opens bursting with jubilant leads, and Swanson comes out charging, grabbing Rizk’s rhythm and bending it at his will. Rizk's changes and DeTore’s stomp are relentless in their catchiness, the stuff guitar hero dreams and European metal festival chants are made of. It’s flashy and tasteful, packing enough to be memorable without going into overload. The two tracks that follow, “The Guardian” and “Timelash,” are bombastic in a different way, with Rizk giving more space to Swanson. He carries the rhythms, and by upping the theatricality just a bit, Rizk’s guitar basks and becomes sneakily majestic. Rizk’s production also serves Sumerlands well, providing a sound as punchy as his rhythms and solos. If there’s one thing no one should miss about the ’80s, it’s albums marred by thin production.
Sumerlands builds upon the pre-thrash days, when metal hadn’t absorbed hardcore into its DNA, and yet was still exiting the ’70s with lightspeed. That era has gotten some due thanks to bands like In Solitude and Christian Mistress, but Sumerlands aren’t quite as focused on the comparatively elegant NWOBHM. The album is more influenced by Manilla Road’s Midwestern Viking dreams; a vision as big as, but also contrasting, boring wheat fields. “Blind” and “Spiral Infinite” are rife with speed and aggression, but they don’t come from a punky place. It’s heartier, working-class strength meets liberating curiosity. Energy doesn’t always mean fast. This contrasts with many of DeTore’s other metal projects, which still have hints of his hardcore upbringing.
Still, this is not a slick prog-metal affair. Swanson’s voice contains confidence, with a weight that suggests he’s seen some shit. “The Guardian” and “Blind” show his natural ability to ramp himself into a hysteria, just enough so he can return from the other side in one piece. He doesn’t go for piercing highs because Rizk’s wizardry is enough of a high for him—and us.
Swanson and Rizk’s chemistry is the heart of Sumerlands’ power: it’s both reverent and ageless. Metal has a weird relationship with age: its technical and physical demands favor younger players, but it’s dominated by old dudes, and even the ones that keep with new bands hold the ’80s as the apex. Aging gracefully is nearly impossible: Metallica’s relevance, for example, has long outpaced their ability to recreate their classics live. Sumerlands isn’t a record for old fans looking to relive their youth, nor is it a placeholder for younger fans with knowledge gaps. It’s an exceptional record, and the barrier to entry isn’t age. It’s whether you can surrender yourself to Rizk’s charm as the new American Heavy Metal Master.


The New York-based Colombian rock band updates its powerful live chops with careful studio experimentation, balancing  psychedelic sounds with a sense of sociopolitical urgency.

IRÉ

Combo Chimbita’s music is often called psychedelic, and for good reason. The New York-based Colombian rock quartet’s guitars are subsumed in delay, their synths sprawl, and Caroline Oliveros’ piercing vibrato is almost always cloaked in reverb. The p-word can have unflattering connotations, denoting music tailored for altered consciousness or meant to soundtrack journeys peripheral to the songs themselves. But Combo Chimbita’s performances demand your undivided attention. Their energy can be so intense that it’s nearly exhausting. They show the palpable focus of a band intent upon playing a new world into being, if only for a moment.
Combo Chimbita are a transfixing live act with dynamic players, and their third album, IRÉ, faithfully captures the band’s powerful presence—even the overwhelming intensity of Oliveros’ voice, which imbues every word with a metaphysical drama. IRÉ sounds more polished than previous releases; Oliveros’ voice is colossal, surrounded by ghostly, swirling harmonies. They have sometimes seemed hesitant to record anything in the studio that can’t be recreated on stage, but they’re gradually overcoming that hesitation. In an interview for their previous record, Ahomale, the band discussed learning to use the studio as an instrument, and you can hear that approach continue to creep into the songwriting on IRÉ, whether it’s the subtle multi-tracking of Oliveros’ voice on “Oya” or the flash of Prince of Queens’ modular synths on “La Perla.” It’s in the moments that Combo Chimbita allow themselves to experiment—when Prince of Queens’ electronically pitched-down voice thunders at the end of “Memoria,” or when Oliveros’ echoing cry is transformed into a sorrowful counterpoint in the frenetic chorus of “Mujer Jaguar”—that IRÉ feels most transportive.
Since Ahomale’s release in 2019, Combo Chimbita have been motivated by an increased sense of sociopolitical urgency. On IRÉ, the band claims inspiration from Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 along with Afro-Indigenous spirituality and storytelling, including Oliveros’ own study of bullerengue, a Colombian drumming tradition; in their music videos for the album, they have sought community with queer and trans artists of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. These gestures toward a sprawling but connected Afro-Indigenous future are evident in the music—the band folds in new influences from other Afro-diasporic sounds across IRÉ, like dub on “Indiferencia,” while “Memoria” is built around a dusty loop that sounds like an homage to New York boom-bap hip-hop.
What is often called psychedelia in Combo Chimbita’s music might more accurately be identified as a conscious and considered approach to innovation. They pull earnestly from deep wells, and the weight of representing all that energy is apparent in their swirling modulations. The future seen from the present seems like a dream. On IRÉ, Combo Chimbita don’t just herald the coming of this future; they usher it into existence, note by electrifying note.

Buy: Rough Trade


On his corrosive fifth album, the rapper takes aim at several targets and whiffs spectacularly. His verbose, tryhard technique is a tired formula he employs without flow, direction, or meaning.

No Shame

Hopsin—the California rapper whose constricting flows and humorless turns suck all the fun out of rapping—made his reputation appealing to the angstier corners of the internet, inhabited by rap moralists and “alternative thinkers”—those who earnestly think Tech N9ne is Peak Underground Rap. His new album, No Shame, is a bitter, petulant response to recent setbacks and mistakes: the collapse of his Funk Volume label, the souring of personal and professional relationships, and losing custody of his son after pleading guilty to assault. But he refuses to back down. “I built this empire off rebellion/Niggas seem to have a problem with what I be sellin’,” he raps on “Panorama City,” a song using a “California Love” sample as a Thug Life signifier. When given the chance to explain himself, he doubles down on the worst aspects of an irritating persona.
No Shame is a misfired revenge stunt. He takes aim at several targets and whiffs spectacularly, producing the worst album of his career, filled with tryhard wordplay and defamation that verges on abuse. “This album is backlash for somebody else. This album is pretty much just karma for people who have screwed me over or done something wrong to me,” he told Tim Westwood. Those people are his former business partner, manager, and Funk Volume co-founder, Damien Ritter, and his ex-girlfriend, who Hopsin was arrested for assaulting in Australia last year. The barbs he has for Ritter are boring enough, but those reserved for his ex are particularly dark.
Hopsin leaves no room for interpretation: He uses No Shame (and the press tour promoting it) to get back at the mother of his child, to damage her any way he can: “I fuckin’ hate this bitch, her name could sit on a grave/Only reason she ain’t dead is ‘cause my kid on the way/The bitch is pregnant and she strippin’, dodgin’ minimum wage/She done kick me down, locked me up, and spit on my face,” he raps, enraged on “All Your Fault (Remix).” This is a rapper using the full weight of his musical machine to discredit a woman he pled guilty to assaulting. And even for all his attempts to disgrace and humiliate her, smearing her with slut-shaming tactics and leveraging the entire force of his fan base against her, he still comes off looking much worse.
Hopsin takes pride in his writing, making fun of “mumble rappers” and those he perceives to be lesser lyricists, but his ideas are always articulated in the most corrosive ways possible; his set-ups and images are awkward, distasteful, and off-putting. Creepiness is an important part of his aesthetic—the colored contact lenses, deranged rambler rhyme mechanics (a la Eminem), and so-sinister-they’re-campy performances are all tools he uses to paint himself as a rap iconoclast. But even he pushes the limits of likability on No Shame. Slim Shady is his patron saint, and “Rap God” is his scripture. All of his defining principles originate there, only executed without grace or guile. Even his horrible, vitriolic anti-ex tirades are cribbed right from the “Kim” playbook.  Rage isn’t a substitute for artistry.
He’ll rap nonsense for the sake of the scheme (”Napalm in my dang palm/I’m a dark villain like Blade, Spawn, or Akon with a cape on”). His scenes are insipid. His phrasings are either basic and unsophisticated or simply unnatural, playing up the phonetics as a distraction. “Evil and purgin’, I am more deceiving in person/Screamin’ and cursin’, fuck the world with penis insertions/I’ma feel this way until the day I’m leavin’ this Earth, man,” he raps on “Witch Doctor.” You can almost hear him asking himself, “what rhymes with this?” making raps purposelessly denser with complete disregard for syntax.
The songs that aren’t vehicles for his hatred are pointless exercises, each an elaborate convolution. Most Hopsin verses are assembled the same way, with choppy, rapid-fire cadences of multisyllabic filler. Every diphthong and accent ricochets off the next, creating the illusion of mastery when really, it’s less complex than letting an algorithm generate raps from scratch. There’s no value in craftsmanship alone; there has to be flow, direction, and meaning. “Rap monster, Black Mamba/You can’t run from the wrath I’ve been asked to cast on ya/To all the haters who been keepin’ up with my every move/Here’s my penis to latch on/I’m the only MC in this wack genre,” he raps, following his technicality-first formula.
And if there was any doubt that he’s detrimentally a creature of habit, he’s now nine songs deep in an “Ill Mind of Hopsin” series that ran out of ideas four songs ago. Things get even more unpleasant when Hopsin takes detours. On “Happy Ending,” he raps about getting off at a massage parlor in a terrible mock accent, mimicking the masseuse for the hook: “If you no say nothing, I can give you sucky-sucky.” It would be one thing if the song was just crude or offensive or unlistenable, but it’s a trifecta.
There aren’t any moments of remorse or thoughtfulness on No Shame, but there are a few moments of reflection. “I don’t like Marcus, I don’t like Hopsin/I am ashamed of them both,” he raps on “Marcus’ Gospel” before concluding, “I made my bed, I’ma lay in it.” These bars would have you believe Hopsin has learned from his mistakes. But No Shame proves otherwise. The album rebukes any and all responsibility for his current predicament, shifting blame onto others. And in an attempt to weaponize his raps against his adversaries, he exposes his deepest flaws. His album is a reminder that shame is a productive and even necessary thing, keeping us from further making fools of ourselves.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Fishmans’ 1996 masterpiece, a landmark of Japanese rock that fits a lifetime of aspirations and daydreams into a single 35-minute composition.

Long Season

The prospect of making an album with only one gargantuan song was one of those tossed-off comments that seemed like a joke. But when Shinji Sato put forth the idea, he was following a trajectory that defined his life: dream big, and see it through to completion. Long Season, the 1996 magnum opus of Japanese rock band Fishmans, was a radical proposition: take an existing track—the group’s six-minute single “Season”—and turn it into a dreamlike suite that elevates their gentle psych-pop to symphonic proportions. “When we made [Something in the Air], I hated having each song separated from the next,” Sato said of their previous full-length. “Why not just make it one song?”
No longer bound by single-digit runtimes, the band crafted a record that was massive in scope but suffused with everyday warmth. A mesmerizing piano motif and rocksteady bassline set the foundation while Sato’s bright and guileless voice floats above. He sounds friendly, like an affectionate drunk filling a room with positive energy, playfully stretching syllables and delivering them with easygoing charm. When he doesn’t sing, the rest of the instrumentation gets to breathe, expand, and sometimes go haywire. Crucially, Long Season does not sound like a jam session; each passage is a self-contained world of sound that serves the drifting, daydream logic of the overall piece.
Sato, Fishmans’ vocalist, guitarist, and charismatic leader, showed signs of the sort of ambition and tenacity needed to pull off a grand-scale project like Long Season from a young age. He was already a known presence at Meiji Gakuin University’s Song Writes Club when drummer Kin-ichi Motegi attended an event for new students. Motegi was stunned: “From the moment he started singing, [Sato] had an aura on another level.” Soon, the two started jamming together, and in 1987 they started a band, joined eventually by guitarist Kensuke Ojima, keyboardist Hakase-Sun, and bassist Yuzuru Kashiwabara.
Considering the sweeping art-pop of their greatest album, Fishmans had something of an inauspicious beginning: They were a reggae band. Japanese artists had been exploring reggae for more than a decade by the early 1990s, but their vocalists had a more professional style than Sato’s scrappy and childlike delivery. Fishmans’ debut, 1991’s Chappie, Don’t Cry, flopped commercially and critically, and a follow-up single, which doubled as the theme for a short-lived television show, didn’t fare much better. One journalist accused the band of having “no reggae soul.”
Early in his career, Sato had written down his goals, many of which involved success in the music business and his social life. He wanted money, he wanted people to hear his songs, he wanted popularity with girls. After their debut LP and early singles failed to make them stars, Sato and the rest of the band began to lose their faith in the industry. Fishmans had to make a decision: Would they focus on more TV tie-ins to help with sales, or pursue artistic freedom? They agreed on the latter. Suddenly, Sato had a new direction in life. “I don’t want to make it big,” he wrote in his journal. “Media interferes with creative activities. There’s a lot we should be doing in the Japanese music scene.”
Over their next several albums, Fishmans came into their own, balancing pop appeal with daring studio experiments, and eventually arriving at the wide-ranging approach to genre—dub, psychedelia, lounge, funk, jangle—that defined the Tokyo scene now known as Shibuya-kei. As Fishmans became more musically ambitious, Sato became a more demanding leader. The band, which still wasn’t making much money, began losing members. Ojima departed after 1993’s Neo Yankees’ Holiday, and Hakase after the following year’s Orange, both feeling overwhelmed by Sato’s exacting style. Things began to turn in 1995 when they signed to Polydor, which agreed to finance a private studio for the band in exchange for three new albums in two years, a much faster pace than the band was used to. The combination of pressure and space to work was a fruitful one: The three studio albums Fishmans released on Polydor, including Long Season, were the best of their career.
“That album was a work that expressed one world with eight songs,” drummer Motegi once said of 1996’s Something in the Air, the first of Fishmans’ Polydor albums. “So we thought that we could express the world of eight songs with just one.” Sato suggested expanding upon “Season,” a 1996 single already filled with ideas: There’s a lush string arrangement from new member Honzi, record scratching, homey organ chords, and two passages where Sato coos like a baby bird. Sato had only recently gotten his driver’s license, and was taking lyrical inspiration from riding around town. He sings about traveling from one end of Tokyo to the other, feeling happy but lonely, being in a dream state but also dazed by cold medication. He paints these images in relatable terms, highlighting the richness and peculiarities of simply existing. It was the perfect song to transform into an album-length composition.
Long Season begins with what sounds like a stone plunging into water, a familiar noise that anticipates the record’s immersive atmosphere. The song’s first section is built on a slowly grooving bassline and repeating piano arpeggios, a hypnotic swell with intermittent flourishes: music box, violin, moody synthesizer. After four minutes—and the brief but thrilling fakeout of a drum fill—the backbeat and vocals finally arrive. There are melodic yelps and wails, soft moments of storytelling and inquisitive questioning. “What is that song you’re humming?” he asks in a disarming moment of genuine interest. To hear it in a song whose world so gently opens up to you feels like the precursor to a heart-to-heart.
Sato wanted to capture the “flow of time in our mind” and how, for example, we may “suddenly [remember] something from 15 years ago.” Take the unexpected introduction of harmonized vocals eight minutes in. It sounds like a children’s choir singing in the distance, and as it slowly fades away, a music box starts twinkling to transport us further into the past. The album continually evolves in this way, gliding from one scene to the next. At one point, Sato keeps singing “driving…” as Motegi plays a drum roll. It has the quietly cinematic energy of a road trip. The repetition serves both as a conduit for fond remembrance and a reminder to keep moving.
Sato wrote most of Fishmans’ songs and the rest of the band actualized his ideas. He had high standards, but didn’t want to give specific instructions for what the other members should do. This dynamic was especially significant for Long Season, which features numerous guest musicians: singers like UA and MariMari, guitarist Taiji Sato, and percussionist Asa-Chang. The latter contributes a long passage of improvised tabla played alongside other percussive noises, including Motegi’s drums; the two instruments are meant to sound like they’re fighting one another. Long Season was composed with these kinds of abstract directions; for example, Sato wrote that he wanted the song to have a “sunset scene.”
The guests who recorded their contributions didn’t quite know how their parts would fit into the larger composition, which was stitched together from four different sections. Sound engineer ZAK was especially dedicated to ensuring the final product was unimpeachable. He was the one who suggested the water sounds, which dot the album during its improvisatory percussion sequence. His presence is also there in the track’s coherency. Around 21 minutes in, the familiar strains of guitar strums provide slow preparation for the intro’s reprise. Reverse tape effects symbolize this return, and when Kashiwabara’s bassline swoops in, it sounds like we’ve snapped back to reality.
Sato wanted each live performance of Long Season to be unique. During Fishmans’ December 1996 concert at Akasaka Blitz, the band members sound like they’re trading off solos during Long Season, from guitar to drums to steelpan. The piece is more stripped-down than the studio version, and its minimalist bent allows for a deeper appreciation for each individual instrument. Two years later, Fishmans performed an affecting rendition of the track at the same venue. Two-thirds of the way in, vocalists start happily chanting “Get round in the season!” as if encouraging the audience to cherish this moment. Shortly after, everyone drops out of the song except for Sato. He strums his guitar and sings in a moment of intimacy: “The two of us driving at dusk… halfway dreaming.” When the band enters again, everything feels a little more magical.
That 1998 concert was Sato’s last. He had escalating respiratory problems, and used oxygen sprays throughout the tour. Less than three months after this show, he passed away at the age of 33. “You don’t have to make compromises in your work, but it is important to be grateful and humble,” he said in his final months. Sato never got to witness the growing popularity of his band—their songs have millions of plays on streaming services, and last year, the surviving members of Fishmans staged the Long Season 2023 tour. In the ’90s, Sato didn’t believe that people would understand his music, and knew some would be turned off by Long Season’s length. Still, he pressed forward. “I believe I’m making music that can change somebody’s life,” he once said. “I’ll keep doing my best so it reaches that someone.”
Ultimately, Sato saw himself as an ordinary person and amateur musician. “I’m not a good guitar player,” he confessed, “but Fishmans’ songs need my guitar, so I play.” His singing made that devotion even clearer. Throughout Long Season, his voice is filled with a whimsical curiosity, and a freedom to intone in whatever manner he finds appropriate. At its best, his singing sounds like the natural overflow of being swept up by the music. This intuitive quality is imperative to how, despite its demanding length, Long Season is a comforting listen—it is never too academic or outré, and its pleasures are always within reach. It mirrors the way that Sato understood life: as a dream you can create and get lost inside.


New set from the Analog Africa reissue label joins the ranks of the most essential African funk compilations, partly by covering ground no one else has walked on, but mostly just for relentlessly kicking ass for over an hour.

Various Artists: African Scream Contest: Raw & Psychedelic Sounds From Benin & Togo 70s

If you're a fan of classic music from the African continent, you're living in rich times. Interest in the music outside of the communities it was made in is at an all-time high, and there is a new crop of intrepid reissue labels willing to put in enormous amounts of time and energy to bring this music to a whole new set of waiting ears. These are not the fly-by-night exploito outfits of old-- Popular African Music, Sound Way, Analog Africa, the newly resurrected Strut, and Graeme Counsel's recent series of African music projects on Stern's/Syllart do it the right way, tracking down the original masters when available, finding the artists, and making sure they get paid.
Analog Africa's Samy Ben Redjeb already had loads of cred for the way he handled his two previous releases, which featured Zimbabwe's Hallelujah Chicken Run Band and Green Arrows, respectively. He traveled to Zimbabwe and spent time with the creators, digging deep into their stories and emerging with great-sounding, informative compilations that thoroughly introduced the listener to both the music and the musicians. African Scream Contest moves a few thousand miles northwest to Benin and Togo, two chimney-shaped former French colonies (Togo was a German colony until WWI) squeezed between West Africa's Anglophone giants, Ghana and Nigeria.
These are small countries, usually overshadowed by their neighbors in international affairs but nonetheless culturally and musically rich, and both have experienced the numbingly common ailments of former European colonies to varying degrees. Most of Francophone Africa fell heavily under the sway of Congolese rumba in the 1960s and 70s, or developed heavily Cubanized forms of their own-- Senegal, Guinea, and Mali in particular developed their own sounds parallel to rumba. Benin and Togo were certainly not exempt from rumba's charms, but they were also caught in the highlife crossfire between Ghana and Nigeria, and the funk and soul sounds imported in massive quantities to those countries in the 60s and 70s inevitably found their way across the borders.
There's even a case to be made that Afrobeat developed just as much in Cotonou, Benin, as it did in Lagos, Nigeria. Ignace de Souza & His Melody Aces were pulling in rock elements as early as 1962, and there's plenty of funk in his work with the Black Santiagos-- if you can find a copy, Original Music's long out-of-print Ignace de Souza compilation, the Great Unknowns, Vol. 1, is wall-to-wall brilliant. Benin had an amazing surfeit of excellent bands by the early 70s, and Redjeb tracked down many members, a touch-and-go process he describes vividly in the liners, which function as both educational piece and travelogue.
The kings of the Cotonou scene were Orchestre Poly-Rythmo (there are innumerable variations on their name; the most complete is Tout Puissant Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou Dahomey). Though Redjeb makes an admirable attempt to offer as much variety as possible, Poly-Rythmo still shows up three times, once on its own and twice as a backing band. The band recorded in all kinds of styles-- check Popular African Music's Reminiscin' in Tempo disc for their highlife sound, and Sound Way's Kings of Benin Urban Groove for their funk side-- but these three all feature a particularly wicked high-speed groove that they were the first to perfect. Their "Gbeti Madjro" is stunningly funky, with a few head-spinning passages where the band strips back to just guitar, bass and drums as if to say "even at our most skeletal, we are twice as powerful as anyone else."
The quality of the recordings is excellent, and the remastering brings out the depth in each one, but the character of the sound is about as raw funk gets. Togo's Roger Damawuzan (sometimes spelled Damahouzon) has all the screaming charisma of early-70s James Brown, and his "Wait for Me" balances his gruff vocal with a cool, mellow guitar riff and burbling bass. The horns and guitar sound utterly Memphis, but the cracking drums are all West Africa. His countrymen, Napo de Mi Amor et Ses Black Devil's, turn in a burning, organ-led Afrobeat tune that recalls the style of some of their Ghanaian colleagues.
Back in Benin, Orchestre Super Jheevs des Paillotes come closest to matching Poly-Rythmo's breakneck Afrofunk groove on the amazing "Ye Nan Lon An", which swivels around an Afrobeat backbeat with a breathtaking guitar part that earns pride of place ahead of the vocals in the mix and makes that upside-down engineering decision sound completely logical. It's counterintuitive moves like this that make African funk such a constant joy to discover, and there are plenty more on this disc. But beyond that, there's just a uniqueness to these musicians' take on funk and Afrobeat that's magnetic. Dig the garage rock organ flipping out over the funk beat of El Rego et Ses Commandos' "Se Na Min". Try not to dance to Picoby Band d'Abomey's outrageously raw and rhythmic "Mi Ma Kpe Dji". If you're into funky African music you won't be able to resist them.
African Scream Contest easily joins the ranks of the most essential African funk compilations, partly by covering ground no one else has walked on, but mostly just for relentlessly kicking ass for over an hour. This is some of the best funk ever recorded anywhere, and it ranges from quick blasts of hyperspeed groove like Le Super Borgou de Parakou's "Congolaise Benin Ye" to the ruminative Fela-style Afrobeat of Vincent Ahehehinnou and Les Volcans' spicy Afro-Cuban workout. Whether you've been hunting down El Rego 45s on eBay for years or just heard and loved your first Fela reissue, this disc is emphatically for you.


Emily’s D+Evolution marks a radical shift in the style of upright bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding. The Grammy Award-winning artist reemerges from a two-year hiatus with a rock/funk hybrid that brings Prince and Janelle Monae to mind.

Emily’s D+Evolution

In 2011, Esperanza Spalding ruined what was expected to be a grand coronation for Justin Bieber. The teen star was supposed to waltz into the Grammys, collect his "Best New Artist" trophy and dance triumphantly into the sunset. But instead, that award went to Spalding, the affable bassist with a bright smile and big Afro. In response, her Wikipedia page was vandalized, and the Recording Academy soon changed its rules, making it tougher for indie acts like Spalding to reach Grammy-level recognition.
The irony of this little episode is that Spalding never seemed to crave mainstream validation in the first place. She has established herself as an understated force in contemporary jazz and soul, skillfully walking the line between genres—just her and a trusty upright bass—crafting art that resonates with the older guard while maintaining a youthful exuberance. She’s performed for the Obamas at the White House and, in the summer of 2011, I saw her perform at the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia, Pa. There, she put fluid spins on Michael Jackson’s "I Can’t Help It" and the Weather Report’s "Predator," playing electric bass with ?uestlove on drums. No matter where she plays, she projects the sort of self-contained ease that suggests she'd be equally content to play the local open mic. Following the release of 2012’s Radio Music Society, Spalding retreated to her native Portland, Ore., to de-stress from music industry pressures. She took two years off to reconnect with her creative voice and regain some form of sanity.
On Emily’s D+Evolution, she’s reemerged emboldened. "See this pretty girl, watch this pretty girl flow," Spalding asserts boldly at the top of "Good Lava," the first track and mission statement. Using a dissonant guitar riff, thumping drums, and lurching time signature, it almost feels like a dare to stick around. The album has the feel of a nervy gauntlet throw, seething with the sort of ferocity that only comes from time spent alone, far away from the limelight. These are exuberant, confrontational songs, amplified in the same sort of rock/funk hybrid style that brings Prince and Janelle Monae to mind. Gone is the Afro, replaced with long braids, wide-rimmed glasses, and ornate outfits.
Like other hugely popular musicians before her who felt commercial pressures beginning to stunt their growth, Spalding has found an alter ego to speak to her more extroverted, creative side. Spalding sings through a muse named Emily, her middle name, though her reasons for doing so aren’t clear-cut. As a character, Emily wants you to buck the system, to fight for peace and tranquility. She wants you to reconnect with your spiritual center, to avoid facades. Emily "is a spirit, or a being, or an aspect who I met, or became aware of," Spalding recently told NPR. "I recognize that my job … is to be her arms and ears and voice and body." As a child, Spalding was curious about acting and created scenarios using movement and dance. So "in a sense," the musician recalled, "I see it as a flashlight into the future."
The theatrical D+Evolution plays like the culmination of those childhood performances. Spalding's voice retains its warmth and nuance, but she’s thrown herself into these songs with a new gusto. Each song has its own identity, from the unbroken spoken-word flow preceding "Ebony and Ivy," the fist-pumping call-and-response of "Funk the Fear," and the opera-infused histrionics of "I Want It Now." Recorded in front of a small studio audience in Los Angeles, you can almost see Spalding act out these songs as the band—comprised of guitarist and Christian Scott collaborator Matthew Stevens, producer/drummer Karriem Riggins, and others—create thick textures that provide plenty of space for her.
People will likely call this art-rock or performance art, but D+Evolution advocates an almost indescribable ethos. There are cues from Thundercat and Flying Lotus here, as well as nods to folk-rock, funk, and prog. Listening to "Judas" or "Rest In Pleasure," you could imagine an alternate universe where the Dirty Projectors explored jazz fusion without too much effort, and the exuberant vocal whoops and dense arrangements won't faze tUnE-yArDs listeners. The harmonic language remains rooted in jazz, but like Emily herself, the music doesn’t seem to be "from" anywhere: It seems most concerned with establishing space, creating room for possibility. Even the more conventional songs like "One," "Noble Nobles" and "Unconditional Love" feel expansive and rich.
This aesthetic, which doesn’t have a zip code, dovetails with the album’s overarching theme of personal freedom. On these songs, Spalding shrugs at societal constraints, urging you to "live your life" on the chorus of "Funk the Fear" and shed preconceived notions of who we're supposed to be. On "One," she embraces emotion with brave uncertainty: "I’m not lacking in love," she sings, "not haunted by its pain … of romance, life’s given me enough, I can’t complain." The lyrics are elusive at first, darting behind fast-moving songs and delivered in impressionistic, conversational bursts that recall the delivery of Joni Mitchell. But the fearless generosity behind them communicates itself loud and clear, and it's a spirit that animates the entire album. With it, Spalding has once again redefined an already singular career, dictating a vision entirely on her own terms.


The 17-year-old Queens rapper went viral off a certified hit, but his debut project is repetitive and uninspired.

We Love You Tecca

Lil Tecca turned 17 just days before releasing his debut project We Love You Tecca, and unlike other teen rappers who have bounded up the charts in recent years, he looks his age. He’s not 17 in Riverdale casting years. He presents as an actual high schooler, complete with braces and glasses that look straight off of a CVS rack—a pointed departure break from the outsized stylist budgets and Manic Panic color palettes of rap’s biggest, youngest stars. That’s about where the distinction from his peers ends, though. Tecca’s look may be unique, but his sound isn’t.
The Queens-born rapper rhymes in the melodic patter of New York sing-rap phenom A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, with a flow that splits the difference between Chief Keef’s gruff irritability and Gunna’s glycerin slickness. He’s got a strong voice and natural instincts, and although his flow is completely secondhand, it’s precisely pitched to the moment, especially when his songs glower their way into Juice WRLD incel-rap territory. That rapper looms especially large over We Love You Tecca. Juice WRLD’s producers Nick Mira and Taz Taylor helmed Tecca’s breakthrough hit “Ransom,” and he contributes the album’s only guest feature, on a remix of that track.
Tecca’s success story has played like a smaller scale echo of Lil Nas X’s, another internet-savvy young rapper who built a listenership online too big for major labels to ignore. After millions of streams on SoundCloud and a viral video for “Ransom” on the taste-making YouTube channel Lyrical Lemonade, Tecca inked a deal with Republic Records, making him labelmates with Drake and Ariana Grande. His rise may not have stirred an all-consuming debate about genre classifications or resuscitated Billy Ray Cyrus’s career, but it’s always impressive seeing an artist so young cut through the industry’s yellow tape so quickly. Some rappers grind their whole lives for their moment. Tecca netted his between Xbox Live sessions.
Still, he could benefit from putting a little more work in. It’s not for nothing that Tecca harps about guarding his flow on “Ransom,” because throughout We Love You Tecca he clings to it like a tennis player trying to fake his way into the pros with only one serve. That flow sounds fantastic on “Ransom,” and even better as it figure-skates through the tuneful “Shots.” But Tecca wears it into the ground over the course of the album’s repetitious 40 minutes, especially in its second half, as his tracks bleed into one endless rewrite of each other.
Tecca’s most glaring deficit, though, is how indifferent his lyrics are. His songwriting consists entirely of repeating genre tropes he’s absorbed through osmosis. “I got twin Glocks, turn you to a dancer,” he threatens on “Ransom,” but annotating on his lyrics on Genius, he concedes that’s a fabrication (”I don’t have no straps for nobody,” he writes). That’s not a problem in and of itself, but some conviction or imagination is, and Tecca doesn’t even bother to disguise how empty his recycled boasts are. In his Genius footnotes for the lyric “She know I got the Fendi, Prada when I hit Milan,” he admits he doesn’t wear designer clothes, either. “Just fitting what works together,” he comments. “I have never been to Europe or nothing.”
Even great rappers cut corners and lean on filler sometimes, and even the best ones repeat themselves. But the reward of rap music in the quantity over quality age is those little glimmers of inspiration that somehow work their way into even the most mechanical exercises: the unexpected punchlines, the uncharted trains of thought, the WTF moments, the zigs that come where there should be a zag. Those are the moments that make the redundancy worthwhile. We Love You Tecca doesn’t offer many of them.