The production on Unknown Mortal Orchestra's third album is so central it’s almost another character on the album, corroding and tripping out the instruments. Ruban Nielson's fastidious choices behind the boards are a large part of what makes Multi-Love a joy to listen to.

Multi-Love

Unknown Mortal Orchestra's music is like a game of hide-and-seek, revealing one thing only to bury another. Blink and you’ll miss the guitar in the beginning of Multi-Love’s "The World Is Crowded" because a burst of synths comes in and saturates the track to a pure white hum. If you don’t catch the anxieties and heartbreaks of polyamorous love, it’s because Ruban Nielson has compressed and phased his voice down to a thin analog texture. Falling for UMO is as easy as taking time to look for what Nielson conceals in his songs. It can be a vintage Crumar synth tangled in the mix, or him pondering if someone would listen to his "silly voice" on the last day of their life; a loose hi-hat on the off-beat subtly driving the verse into the chorus, or him thinking his wife’s love for him is her "fatal flaw."
For as tuned-in and specific as it is, Multi-Love is multivalent. Next to some baroque '60s beat music there’s a Zappa homage, propped up against a dance track you could find on a Giorgio Moroder record, followed by some pigeon-toed funk that you should probably do a bunch of drugs to. It’s a wunderkammer inside, cramped with hundreds of tiny gestures, musical and lyrical. Recall, this is a guy who’s obsessed with taking huge pop ideas, like "How Can You Luv Me" off his debut album, and turning them completely inward. That song could be a Bruno Mars No. 1 hit in the hands of a major label producer. But Nielson is a fussy gear-head who loves psychedelia, shredding on his guitar without a pick, and, well, making music to do a bunch of drugs to. All the pop songs are buried deep in the mossy soul of Multi-Love.
Nielson produced, mixed, and engineered the entirety of Multi-Love. Some back-end teams work hard to hide in the shadows and feel that if they do their job well, the listener won’t even notice any production. Nielson is the opposite of that. The production is so central it’s almost another character on the album, corroding and tripping out the instruments, and compressing drum tracks down so they can fit in the palm of your hand. At times it feels like you’re listening to the album with un-popped ears. Once in a while, on simpler songs like the mid-tempo "Stage or Screen" or the obtuse motown-soul of "Ur Life One Night", make this vintage sheen feel like a crutch rather than a purposeful tool.
Nielson's ear for how something should sound is unparalleled, and his fastidious choices behind the boards are a large part of what makes Multi-Love a joy to listen to. It's as if he tried to make Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times in secret, so as not to wake the kids upstairs—private celebrations and private exorcisms. The most outspoken Nielson gets is on "Can’t Keep Checking My Phone", a single worthy of Larry Levan’s crate at Paradise Garage as some one-off flamenco disco track stuck near the end of the set. Underneath the spacey dance party, Nielson lays out a bittersweet song about missing someone you love, while the other person you love is right by your side.
In a recent profile, Nielson said, "Think about the two most serious relationships in your life so far, and then experiencing them simultaneously." Polyamory is an emotionally and spiritually dense topic to approach on an album, and, for someone with a third-eye tattoo, Nielson mostly avoids speaking in hempy clichés. Save for some grand overtures on the title track that actually feel more expository than anything else, his laments about these two women in his life are as finely portioned as the music below it. He ropes his feelings under universal themes on "Extreme Wealth and Casual Cruelty". Who wouldn't want to abandon it all and start over again as "just strangers" without the strictures of money or society? It's a story as old as time, only in Nielson's case, it just happens to be star-triple-cross'd lovers.
This is Nielson's most accomplished album, though it's not his most direct, or brash, or explosive. Those are moods he mostly saves that for the closer, "Puzzles". The seven-minute song serves as a tacked-on coda with overdriven '70s hard rock guitar and Nielson stretching the capacity of his vocals to a bluesy peak. It will kill live, as will most of these songs which will bend into longer, louder psych forms in rock clubs. But "Puzzles" feels broad and out of place here, despite its charms. Maybe it's the "Electioneering" outlier of an album with such an evocative mood. I think there's more to be found in the horn part on the endlessly melodic "Necessary Evil", played by Nielson's father. It's soft as Muzak, a simple up-and-down melody with smooth swing rhythm. When Nielson coos the words "necessary evil," the horn line just shifts forward one beat in the measure, making it sound entirely different while actually staying the exact same. It's one small link in a long chain of moments strung together seamlessly and imbued with so much.


Daniel Lanois is a celebrated producer (Bob Dylan, U2, Brian Eno, Neil Young) who toggles between singer-songwriter fare and blurry, concept-driven soundscapes with his own music. His new album, Flesh & Machine, is an endlessly inventive ambient collection.

Flesh and Machine

A blast of frantic noise, "The End" is not the closer but the second song on Daniel Lanois’ new album, Flesh & Machine. Scribbles of distressed electric guitar and waves of distortion grate against scratchily arrhythmic drums, creating a sustained explosion of sound uninterrupted by lyrics or melody. It’s all static and tension, with no release until it fades into the more percussive "Sioux Lookout". Listening to "The End", it’s almost impossible not to be reminded of Lanois’ motorcycle crash four years ago, when he lost control of his bike in Los Angeles and ended up in the hospital with multiple broken bones. The song conveys the same sense of slowed time that most of us experience during an accident, a hyperawareness that allows you to take in every small detail. Such associations emphasize the song’s queasy friction: guitar strings against drum heads, bone against asphalt, flesh against machine.
A deft guitarist who gravitates toward the liquid sound of the pedal steel, Lanois plays the studio like it’s just one more instrument, which would be a cliché if he didn’t take the studio on the road with him and produce each show like it’s a new record. More than 30 years after getting his first credits—one of which was a Raffi album, no less—he has become one of the most recognizable names in the control room, collaborating closely with Brian Eno and twiddling knobs for Neil Young’s Le Noise, Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball, Willie Nelson’s Teatro, and nearly half of U2’s catalog (although not their most recent catastrophe). But Lanois is less well known as a solo artist, partly because one album per decade isn’t exactly prolific and partly because he has never settled on one particular sound or approach. Instead, he toggles between singer-songwriter fare (like 2003’s Shine) and blurry, concept-driven soundscapes (2005’s Belladonna).
Fortunately, Flesh & Machine is purely instrumental, with no lyrics to structure it too rigidly and no concept to hem Lanois. There’s an intriguing sense of entropy to these songs; rather than pristine, everything sounds weathered and worn. Like a robot detaching its limbs, "Tamboura Jah" actively disassembles itself as you listen, cut-and-pasting its constituent parts into new patterns. The mere act of holding together, though, gives the song its self-propulsion, as the cymbals and guitars reverberate against each other in unexpected ways. Of course Flesh & Machine is going to sound great, with each instrument calibrated either to pull you into Lanois’ sonic world or to shake you up once you get there.
Lanois creates some lovely sounds and moods on Flesh & Machine, but what really sets it apart from his other work is how he sets them against each other. The disembodied vocals on opener "Rocco" are pitched high to sound inhuman, lulling you a bit before the jarring conflagration of "The End". The album starts strong but picks up considerably on the second side, pitting the ethereal piano of "Iceland" with the raking-light nostalgia of "My First Love", which sounds like it’s stuck halfway between an old Floyd Cramer instrumental and the new Twin Peaks reboot. With its descending piano theme and bossa nova underpinning, it’s exactly the kind of song that would be on the jukebox at the Double R.
Flesh & Machine reaches its climax on "Aquatic", with its lurid pedal steel gliding like a shark around a reef. Lanois amplifies and exaggerates that lead instrument, not only lending it a supreme fluidity but also distorting its tone, like a microphone held too close to the mouth or an eye pressed right up to the TV screen. Yet, the effect is somehow delicate rather than noisy. It might seem like faint praise to call Flesh & Machine Lanois’ best and most realized solo album, but it’s also one of the best ambient records of 2014—an endlessly inventive collection of songs built on odd, often lurid sounds and textures, somehow rough and gentle at the same time.


The Safdie brothers’ Adam Sandler vehicle is replete with outsized personalities, but Oneohtrix Point Never’s anxiety-stoking score makes a confident bid for a supporting role in its own right.

Daniel Lopatin: Uncut Gems (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

The title sequence of the new Safdie brothers film, Uncut Gems, brings the moviegoer along a CGI-assisted journey through light-years of celestial mist before the camera recedes into footage from a probe deep inside Adam Sandler’s ass. Watching the opening credits fade over shots of protagonist Howie Ratner’s colon—pink and ribbed, like an aquatic worm—is bearing witness to an act that is in the macro graceful and in the micro grotesque, a confusing alloy found often in the work of the music of electronic musician, sound designer, and auteur Daniel Lopatin, usually known as Oneohtrix Point Never.
Lopatin has long blended sincerity and absurdity, the ratio of which varies dramatically per project. There was the score he did for the Safdie Brothers’ 2017 film Good Time, a one-night-in-New-York wreckage play upon which Lopatin’s sound design lavishes the serenity of being trapped in a hot elevator. There was 2010’s unimpeachable Eccojams Vol 1, under the nom de plume Chuck Person—an enormously goofy, surprisingly moving chopped-and-screwed tape of customer-support muzak and pop cheese that would predate the vaporwave hurricane by at least two years. Last year’s prolix and lore-ridden Age Of featured a track that served as his “proof of concept” for how he would score an entirely made-up Pixar story.
But there is plenty real about Uncut Gems, a movie filled with big, avian men who are always yelling at one another. This is par for the brothers Safdie, who seem to love making films about antiheroes run amok in Manhattan at maximum volume. Stark and tweaky under overcast skies, Midtown’s diamond district here acts as mayhem’s gate: a world in which sweaty bookies and graying heavies take meetings and hostages in the backs of hired cars, and promises should have been fulfilled yesterday. For our hero Howie, every opportunity is a potentially profitable one, be it a scheme to auction off a rare opal for 10 times its price, or the chance to make quick money off Kevin Garnett’s championship ring on an hours-long loan. Naturally, the peripatetic lifestyle of a gambler is bipolar—all zeniths and nadirs, the former leading directly and inevitably to the latter.
Manic as the source material may be, Lopatin’s score remains entirely surprising, which doesn’t mean shocking, per se. It’s more that it has a large blast radius in the movie, itself a funny character in an ensemble of unintentionally funny characters. Lopatin is brazenly and consistently there, replete with a choral ensemble classically trained in a cappella Renaissance music and a handful of co-conspirators (the unholy Gatekeeper among them) who beef up each scene with the baroquely doofy polysynth dressings that could only belong under Lopatin’s baton.
The sound design drapes heavily around the necks of everyone in the film. Sometimes, Lopatin’s work is mixed so loudly that I laughed out loud. (Consider a scene in which Howie, trudging a long hallway with two bloody plugs of tissue in his nostrils and a faraway look in his eyes, has an electric sax-ridden fugue blasting like a frat initiation.) At other times, the music offers a kind of counterpoint. Where there is chaos, the score might get unusually soft; where there is sex, the tones scan saccharine; where there is heartbreak, Lopatin’s troupe treats misery like a punchline. (There’s a great scene in which Ratner’s girlfriend, played perfectly by Julia Fox, storms past a long line of club-goers immediately after sort of cheating on Ratner with the Weeknd. Here, the score—and the track in question, titled “Fuck You Howard”—sounds as if a Nordic boating team was asked to contribute vocals to Animal Crossing theme music.)
Soundtracking will always call into question the way that noise can make an image feel more glib, or more concerted; how audio can apply pressure, release a valve, inspire hysteria, dread, or joy within a scene. The idea of anxiety-making via carefully orchestrated synthwork is not new, but the Safdie brothers and Lopatin seem to have gotten the art down to a science. Some of the stabbingly angular ways in which the soundtrack dispenses somatic terror can feel like a savvy interpretation of “anxiety reappraisal,” a fashionable stress-management method that asks one to reframe anxiety-producing events as exciting ones. Thinking calm thoughts during panic only seems to exacerbate things; loud and low-BPM music during a screaming match does not a soothing scene make. This isn’t to say that the score doesn’t summon disquiet through more traditional ways: “Windows”—which smacks obviously of percussionist and contributor Eli Keszler, a man who has seemingly spent his life mimicking the beautiful and complex skitter of rainwater on various roofs—lends a runaway scene on a helicopter the nervy vim necessary to set off the film’s final 20 minutes of cardio.
High or low octane, it’s satisfying to situate Lopatin and the Safdies as part of a greater legacy of director-and-musician duets formed and calcified during the 1970s and 1980s. These films—the plots of which revolved around male antiheroes locked in doomed quests to resolve their poor choices—were scored by either proggy Germans (Goblin, Tangerine Dream), glistering Italians (Sensation’s Fix, Giorgio Moroder), or spectral Greeks (Vangelis), adding new, freaky, new-age dimensions to the portrayal of male misery. “It's so strange that that became the sound of men reflecting on their nature,” Lopatin said in the wake of Good Time. The fact that the Safdie brothers have found kinship in Lopatin, and the fact that this becomes the new sound of men who refuse to look inward, does the rare work of riffing on a tradition and catapulting it into canon.
Midway through the film, woeful Howie is faced with a moment of reckoning disguised as an ultimatum. “You really put me in a bad position,” says a foe, threatening him with a fresher hell than the one he endured the day prior. Lopatin, like Howie, is a man indebted to the absurdity of circumstance. Bad decisions upon good decisions, orientations upon re-orientations—the two work in a fractal pas de deux, hunting for the hardest payoff per scene, per moment, per any opportunity presented. Ashes to ashes, nebula to butthole, what else can one do?

Buy: Rough Trade
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No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani releases her first solo-- er, "collaborative"-- album Love Angel Music Baby, with assistance from Andre 3000, Dr. Dre, Eve, and the ubiquitous Linda Perry, among others.

Love Angel Music Baby

Gwen Stefani should stick to making bum flaps. Not quite a skirt, not quite a dish rag, the Stefani bum flap dangles off the guts of our divorced aunts and 12-year-old mall-slut daughters, the ones who steal Livestrong bracelets and dry-hump public schoolkids in Pac Sun dressing rooms. Bum flaps are these people's stars and stripes. Not all of us want to salute this flag, but it exists, and it gives America something else to believe in-- and it's not nearly as expensive as a valium addiction or Kaplan SAT course.
As widely predicted, 35-year old singer/fashionista Stefani has temporarily given up No Doubt to fully embrace a high-pop lifestyle with nary a pierced tongue in-cheek. The metamorphosis began with her Eve and Dr. Dre collaboration on 2001's killer single "Let Me Blow Ya Mind", and is completed here with her solo debut Love Angel Music Baby, a spineless, starfucked advertisement for her high-end clothing line.
Obviously, we can't expect 12 more cuts as personal or urgent as debut single "What You Waiting For", Stefani's slick self-steeling kick in the pitch-corrected plaids, and one of the best electro songs this year-- especially when the pop star openly PRs that she didn't "really see [LAMB] as a 'solo' record in the typical sense... The idea was to be open and let my ego shut up and sit over in the corner and make something great based on a concept." If Stefani wants to sacrifice her identity, that's fine, but hot Christ, she's working with everyone from Andre 3000 to the Neptunes to New Order to Dr. Dre here. So why isn't LAMB bigger, better, faster, more? Is it the scourge of 4 Non Blondes' Linda Perry, who coaxed Stefani into finishing the solo project and all but forced her back into the studio because Perry reportedly only "had a brief window of time available"? What's going on?
In fairness, one of the Andre tracks, "Bubble Pop Electric", isn't half-bad, a brave Prince-goes-Stray Cats doowop shuffle with a great hook and an Andre-as-Johnny Vulture gentleman boyfriend cameo. The track is silly and fun, and probably exactly what Stefani et al., wanted out of LAMB. Which is what makes Andre's second contribution, "Long Way to Go", so perplexing: The maudlin MLK Jr. samples and the duet's pointed appeal to interracial dating ("We've got a long way to go!/ It's beyond Martin Luthur/ Upgrade computer") feel out of place on an otherwise carefree album boasting lines like, "You know you are my treasure chest," and, "We got hydroponic love/ And we smoke it."
And another thing about Stefani's treasure chests-- not to mention, "We climbed all the way from the bottom to the top"; the Eve- and Dre- and Tevye-powered camp-hop "Rich Girl"; "I only want to fly first class desires (you're my limousine)"; "We're luxurious like Egyptian cotton"; "If I was a wealthy girl/ I'd get me four Harajuku girls to inspire me"; the unintentionally offensive orientalist fetishism, "Now we get to lay back"; "Ch-Ching Ch-Ching-- we're loaded and we're not going to blow it"; the soulless Nellee Hooper 90s R&B; vanity affair "Luxurious"; and the rest of LAMB's zombied buy-LAMB-clothing mantras and transparent Hollywood Dream bullshit-- the Joker's free-money parade through Gotham City was a much more entertaining display of wealth, and he had Prince, not just Wendy & Lisa.
Elsewhere on LAMB, the Neptunes shit out a Queen pastiche called "Hollaback Girl", which has about as much club potential as a 13-year old with a milk moustache and his dad's ID. For "The Real Thing", co-producers and co-players New Order unbizarrify, unlove, and untriangulate "Bizarre Love Triangle" just enough that the millions of people who heard about New Order on Karaoke Revolution won't notice the similarities right away. Seriously, anyone remotely involved with "The Real Thing" should find a stray dog and let it bite him.
So, final tally: LAMB has one mega-hit, one okay song, three stillborns, and seven full-fledged embarrassments. For Stefani, fashion has officially come first; to her credit, these songs are the slickest, shiniest, bum-flappiest failures of the year.


The N.Y. noise-punk quart's debut LP is an unabashedly grim collection, one that conjures the dystopian futurism of an early David Cronenberg film delivered with merciless brute force.

The Horror

If the hardest thing for a new rock band to do is be original, then the second hardest is to be scary. Most artists deploying horror-movie imagery and shock tactics inevitably succumb to campy theatricality (as seen in everyone from Marilyn Manson to the earliest iteration of the Horrors), or are quick to explain it away as just a ruse (e.g., Odd Future saying they're just joshin' with all that rape-and-murder business), and lest we forget that the most well-worn metaphor used to describe death metal invokes a character from Sesame Street. But the songs that have startled me the most-- Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop", Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds' "Hard-On for Love", the Jesus Lizard's "Killer McHann"-- are unnerving to me not so much for their overt aggression as their matter-of-fact realism, where the line between singer and subject is blurred, and sound and fury coalesce into a vivid, very real portrait of violent psychosis.
New York foursome Pop. 1280 are not shy about showing their hand-- they take their name from a Jim Thompson crime novel about a killer cop, and they've given their first full-length album the self-explanatory title of The Horror. Pop. 1280 wallow in the same pool of pigfuck sloppy seconds as East Coast contemporaries Pissed Jeans and the Men, but where those bands respectively soften their blows (somewhat) with wry observations about domesticity and knowing classic-rock references, Pop. 1280 offer no such salve. If the ray-gunned synth-punk stylings of the band's debut 2010 EP, The Grid, suggested a certain fondness for cheeky, B-movie thrills, The Horror is a far more traumatic experience, conjuring all the dystopian futurism of an early David Cronenberg film, but delivered with merciless, medieval brute force. The first words we hear on the album are "two dogs fucking"; it proves to be The Horror's most romantic lyric.
Band co-founders Chris Bug and Ivan Lip recorded The Horror with a different drummer and keyboardist from The Grid, and the difference is immediately palpable-- rather than provide a clear separation of bass, synths, and Lip's Birthday Party-esque guitar scrapes, the three elements are often compacted into one monolithic, doomy frequency that hangs over the record like a cloud of black smoke. But new drummer Zach Ziemann does a fine job of pushing the proverbial boulder up the mountain. For all its oppressive heaviness, The Horror has energy and verve to spare: "Bodies in the Dunes" sets its apocalyptic death-toll imagery to a heart-racing tribal stomp that doesn't relent for five minutes, while "New Electronix" sounds like a summit between 1990s Touch and Go greats Brainiac and Girls Against Boys. Ironically, when Bug starts shouting out explicit dance-move instructions ("Hips to the right/ And hips to the left!") on "Nature Boy", the song's convulsing groove slows to a sludgy grind, making his directives sound less like an invitation to shimmy than militaristic orders shouted at some poor captive trapped at the bottom of a well.
Bug isn't the most dynamic vocalist-- sounding not unlike Liars' Angus Andrew played at 16 rpm-- but for a band as harsh as this, he need not display a range of emotions so long as he convincingly conveys the right ones: grim and grimmer. And it's The Horror's dirgey digressions that actually best showcase his cold-blooded character, whether shaming a submissive subject into acting like a dog on "Beg Like a Human", or taking no small amount of glee in describing the agonizing process of dying by the noose on "Hang Em' High". In a world this bleak, the best you can hope for is a quick, easy death, and yet even then Pop. 1280 won't let you off that easy-- as Bug cautions us at the outset, "Life after death is a painful life." But he can rest assured that, with an album as unabashedly grim and unforgiving as The Horror, he needn't have to worry about being granted eternal salvation.


The Irish band’s unrelenting third album, made with an arcade of pedals and processors, surges with electricity. Inside all of its noise is an indignant, surreal mania that gives it a twisted pop soul.

Most Normal

There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments on Most Normal, the audacious third album by Ireland’s Gilla Band. Occasionally they come from Dara Kiely’s riled-up lyrics: “I can’t wear hats I just get slagged,” he chants over Adam Faulkner’s drilled snares on “Bin Liner Fashion.” On “Backwash,” he declares “no one looks cool around a wasp” in a matter-of-fact sneer, though the real punchline is the sickly, warp-speed gargle of noise that follows, which gives the feel of swerving down the twistiest slide at the waterpark on a flume of sewage.
But perhaps the funniest moment comes at the start of “Almost Soon.” On an album where Gilla Band became studio rats determined to push every sound to a mutant extreme, here is Most Normal’s lone immediately identifiable guitar. Not only that, guitarist Alan Duggan plays straightforward chiming chords, and in a tone that immediately suggests the ebullient cockiness of Is This It-era Strokes. Though three of Gilla Band cop to being in a teenage Strokes rip-off band, the four-piece (completed by bassist Daniel Fox) could not exist any further from that kind of rock orthodoxy. And sure enough, within 40 seconds, Kiely is howling “I’ll brain you!” and Faulkner’s tidy beat suddenly sounds like he’s whipping static. By the time the song ends, Gilla Band are spinning up clouds of outer-planetary ash.
Most Normal is Gilla Band’s third album in eight years. Despite a slight catalog, they’ve become one of the most influential bands of their generation in the British and Irish Isles—not least at home in Ireland, where the likes of Fontaines D.C. and the Murder Capital followed in their frenzied (and putatively post-punk) wake. “It’s nuts watching it ’cause they’re all like rock stars now,” Duggan said recently. “And we’re still fucking, er, very much not. Which is fine.” It’s also the point. From their breakout song—a distinctly condemned cover of techno producer Blawan’s “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?”—Gilla Band (fka Girl Band) refused to act like a rock band (pretty much the smartest thing any outfit of that ilk can do today). Their distance from mainstream success gave them the space to hone their brutal and exhilarating approach.
After releasing their discomfiting 2015 debut, Holding Hands With Jamie, Gilla Band canceled tours so that Kiely could prioritize a mental health emergency. They spent two years writing the 2019 follow-up The Talkies, happy enough to let people assume the group had disbanded as they toiled in private on a masterpiece of panic and deconstruction. Once the pandemic limited touring, their rehearsal space became a refuge where they could hang out, get drunk, and push extremes, working with zero concern for how they would ever play their third album live. And Most Normal is unmistakably lab work. Instrumental phrases repeat across the record at varying levels of degradation, from full pelt to ghostly apparition. A stridently contemporary record that couldn’t have been made without an arcade of pedals and processors, not to mention a forensic intent, it bears comparison to two charred albums that Low have made with BJ Burton, although it shares as much DNA with Yeezus’ precisely warped abrasion or Earl Sweatshirt’s hallucinatory Some Rap Songs. Crucially, despite Gilla Band persistently writing and reinventing—an easy way to make things stodgy—it also breathes vigorously, making the gap between man and machine imperceptible.
The Talkies started with an unsettling close-mic’d recording of Kiely having an anxiety attack; elsewhere in the album, he moaned and retched, stuck out on a limb from the band. On Most Normal, the music and those uncontrollable psychological realities heave as an awesome whole. Opener “The Gum” sounds like a violent death buffering. After the gnashing conclusion to “Backwash,” in which Kiely’s voice fragments like a shack in a tornado, comes “Gushie,” a dazed instrumental tundra that seems to track the cortisol ebbing away; standout “The Weirds” emanates from a similar haze into a renewed jolt of mania, heralded by heady slashes of guitar and a berzerk beat. Their whacked-out signal-to-noise ratio occasionally blips like a mind faltering and snapping back to; as the album reaches its end, it seemingly starts to asphyxiate. Many songs flow directly from one to the other—the terminal velocity of “Bin Liner Fashion,” with its atmosphere-penetrating scream, snaps into the furious processed howl of “Capgras”—denying their captive audience respite. Not only do Kiely and the band seethe as one, Most Normal exerts a possessive physicality on the listener. “I never killed before and I’ll never kill again,” Kiely rants on “The Weirds”; yet Gilla Band’s obliterating catharsis provides a good surrogate release for wringing necks.
Despite the album’s slippery flow, it is anything but formless. The Talkies was a conceptual album in part. Inspired by the looseness of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, it featured repeat motifs in the key of A; Kiely omitted pronouns, wishing to avoid any connotations brought on by use of “I” or “you,” and one song, “Aibohphobia,” gleefully fired symmetrical sentences at anyone suffering with a fear of palindromes. It created an air of resistance, Gilla Band choosing to backflip rather than walk. But Most Normal is a direct attack that hits like chugging gas from the nozzle. It’s not only thanks to its mauling noise, but the antic and insistent cadence of Kiely’s delivery. “I spent allllll my money on shit clothes, shit clothes,” he declaims in a lumbering sneer at the outset of “Eight Fivers,” a steady metronome amid swathes of interference. (The references to clothes, he has said, relate to his childhood shame at not being able to afford better ones.) The squall often rises to meet this tormented conductor, and his repeated phrases and internal rhymes give the album a twisted pop soul, no matter how nonsensical the words: “It became a muscle/A hustle to be a Jack Russell/Whose head was deaf and once again/Binged the Big Brother box set,” Kiely observes on the zooming “Backwash.” Most Normal teems with these inexplicable earworms, which bury in and leave you idly crooning “who’s in love with the balding earwig?” like it’s some Top 40 kiss-off.
Mostly, Kiely’s lyrics are a spray of indignant surreality. Some of them have the logic of sleep-talk: You can picture rushing to record a dozing friend as they drool “I’m the fastest man in the class/Wearing a big massive face,” as Kiely does on the slurred “Red Polo Neck.” The fish and wasps that festered in the lyrics of Gilla Band’s first two albums wriggle through here, as do an array of destitute characters bewildered by normal life. You could dig to uncover a seam of thoughts about aging—the point where Kiely “stopped being cute”; how he “got slow too fast”—although the album’s non-specific, all-encompassing state of turmoil feels like the more pressing concern.
It comes to a head on closer “Post Ryan.” To a queasy drone and an unsparing beat lifted from A Flock of Seagulls’ “I Ran (So Far Away),” Kiely abandons his parade of wasps and weirdos to spill his guts about being in a perpetual state of recovery from mental ill-health: “Took it all for granted/Gonna end up homeless/I hid behind the surreal/I‘m a bit too much,” he chants. He self-flagellates—on a song where the distortion pares back, he’s “just the same prick”—and reveals his powerlessness in the face of doctors using unintelligible “big words,” not to mention the tides of depression that fix him back in bed. “Oh no, not again,” Kiely wails, sarcasm his only defense. He concludes with another of his spiraling cadences: “Basically, I get inevitable depression when I do nothing,” he repeats, then the music stops dead. For a brief moment, Gilla Band reveal the necessity of their invention; otherwise, they leave us to simply behold its power.


When a rosy-faced tot tumbles off a seesaw, whacking his precious head on the playground turf, each\n\ subsequent moment ...

Stellastarr

When a rosy-faced tot tumbles off a seesaw, whacking his precious head on the playground turf, each subsequent moment is heavy with the threat of total apocalypse: his face will start to crumple, tiny pink mouth stretching open, eyes fluttering and nostrils rearing, sticky fingers clamping down on blades of grass. Onlookers will pause in thick silence, uneasy, leaning forward just a bit, waiting to see if what follows is a spit-riddled giggle or a belly-flipping scream. Stellastarr frontman Shawn Christensen's voice has come to exist in that exact same purgatory, his deep, gut-borne howl flitting effortlessly from cautious whisper to full-on bellow, sometimes sinister, sometimes loving, always pulsing with the threat of complete breakdown. The unpredictability of the situation is what makes it impossible; the prickly volatility is what makes it riveting.
Stellastarr is the Brooklyn-born band's first full-length (duly preceded by 2002's three-song Somewhere Across Forever EP) and, with a dressed-in-black swagger reminiscent of fellow New York based art-punks Television and vocals reminiscent of 70s David Byrne, it's an apt portrait of what New York City has always been stupidly good at generating: thorny post-punk guitars, wild, undulating vocals, and plenty of cigarette-enhanced Lou Reed sneers. Boston enters the picture as well: The Pixies serve as one of Stellastarr's more obvious parent figures; the hollow boy/girl vocal exchanges on "Jenny" are classic Francis/Deal. Add this to the fact that this record was produced by Boston-based producer Tim O'Heir, who manned the decks for so many of the city's alterna-rock icons (Morphine, Juliana Hatfield, Dinosaur Jr.), and it's not too difficult to see how that early 90s college-rock aura could have seeped into these songs.
The band is young, though, and this being their debut album, they have some growing to do. Their most noticeable weakness is the blatancy of their influences-- an easily acquitted misgiving, considering the disc's strengths. In backing up Christensen's caterwauling, bassist Amanda Tannen, guitarist Michael Jurin, and drummer/keyboardist Arthur Kremer nobly transcend most art-school clichés (admirable, with three Pratt alumni present), pushing out dark, danceable new-wave that wiggles-in-neon like it's 1985. Opener "In the Walls" opens harmlessly enough, teaming pulsing video-game synths with Christensen's blank, creepy chanting; seconds later, the band kicks up and Christensen releases his open-mouthed howl, soaking the room with huge, dramatic screams.
The breathless, guitar-driven "Jenny" is the perfect opportunity to holler "Jenny!" as much as you ever wanted, a sinister homage to being screwed and screwed-up that showcases Christensen's peaceable-one-second, crackers-the-next vocal stylings (dude says "motherfucker" like he really means it!). The bouncing, elastic "My Coco" is tough to follow, and Stellastarr starts to sag a bit in the middle before winding down, unceremoniously, with "Pulp Song", a track that-- cleverly?-- sounds kinda like a Pulp song. Stellastarr's bold, cinematic sprawl demands a certain kind of tolerance, and might require a few listens before you're able to fully adjust to its dramatics, but Christensen is, in the end, an oddly convincing leader, and, if nothing else, you'll at least be stuck to your headphones trying to guess his next move.


Now best known as a reality star from "Love & Hip Hop," K. Michelle proves on her new release she's more than just two dimensional. More Issues Than Vogue is contemporary R&B at its best.

More Issues Than Vogue

K. Michelle always entertains through the surprising experimentations in her music, promising something else is up her sleeve. On More Issues Than Vogue, Michelle's third album, the performer and musician delivers her most affecting, skillful, and innovative record yet. Diving deep into the best elements of traditional R&B, sing-song pop, rap, and further out sounds, Michelle makes the best argument for herself as artist, and she succeeds. The first few moments of standout track “If It Ain’t Love,” are, interestingly, K. Michelle’s attempt at country. This wouldn’t be her first turn in the genre. Originally hailing from Memphis, she has performed covers of country hits like Carrie Underwood’s “I Know You Won’t.” In early March, Michelle told Essence she’s currently pursuing her own country EP.
“My ultimate goal is to be completely free and have freedom, which I think I’ve achieved,” she explained. “I’ve thought about ‘Oh, this will be my last album,’ but I really want to do the country EP.” Listeners also heard glimmers of this on 2014’s instantly memorable “God I Get It,” from Anybody Wanna Buy a Heart? and this trend continues on her latest.
On “If It Ain’t Love,” she gives listeners a classic, addictive throwback love song filled with that country twang (in both the guitar and in Michelle’s peculiar intonation) that sounds immediately familiar upon the first listen. “It’s crazy, amazing, we fucked it up/ If it ain’t love, I don’t know what is,” she sings in the chorus. Laced with her signature fire, it is a moment that begs to be sung at the top of one’s lungs. Songs like “If It Ain’t Love,” effectively serve as a litmus test. Fueled with a beautiful melody, cinematic strings and chewable, universal lyrics, the track should (and hopefully) does translate to audiences who might not have heard of K. Michelle outside of "Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta" and "Love & Hip Hop: New York," or even at all. It is that good.
Like on “If It Ain’t it Love,” Michelle surprises again on “Mindful.” Featuring T-Pain, the track is a too-short and perfect groove (it clocks in under two minutes) featuring the vocalist flexing her rap skills. “Who the fuck told y’all hoes to open up … I’m coming straight from the gut,” she spits, and that same rapid fire confidence pierces the track.
It's a definitive statement both for the song and for Michelle as a performer. That "freedom" she spoke about earlier this year is here and real. Unafraid to push herself beyond the limitations and expectations of her as a creative, Michelle shines. She no longer asks that you take her seriously. Instead she demands it and rightfully so. It's now a matter as to whether or not audiences will come onboard. Hopefully they will.


Forgoing the scrappy charm of Psychic Chasms, Alan Palomo's sophomore album-- recorded mostly alone in Finland in the dead of winter-- chronicles the Texas-raised musician's solitary longing and heartsickness with a commitment to tighter, wide-reaching songcraft.

Era Extraña

Some people laugh at chillwave precisely because so many of its practitioners lack a sense of humor. But Alan Palomo is an exception. In 2009, the Texas-raised musician's Neon Indian project debuted with the excellent Psychic Chasms. Like a lot of young musicians, the then-21-year-old Palomo was inspired by Ariel Pink, and he certainly shared that art-pop oddball's sense of irreverence. Below the static and sneakily intricate synth patterns, Psychic Chasms was a funny, playful record, with goofy, drugged-out moments exemplified by song titles like "Laughing Gas".
As the buzz around Psychic Chasms increased, the narrative shifted. Neon Indian attained a surprising level of popularity that was bolstered by a rocking, party-ready live show, drawing in fans of populist acts like Passion Pit and MGMT. After that raised profile, Neon Indian's second album, Era Extraña, shows a commitment to tighter, wide-reaching songcraft and appeal. The production value is at a higher level, with additional mixing by big-name studio guy Dave Fridmann (the Flaming Lips, MGMT), who forgoes his usual noise-bombing style for a more subtle approach. Those drawn to Psychic Chasms' warped view of pop or outré work like the difficult, abstract EP with the Flaming Lips last year may be disappointed; Era Extraña instead builds on Neon Indian's one-off single with Green Label Sound last year, the straightforward "Sleep Paralysist".
Reflecting the shift, there's an increased focus on streamlined melodies; the vocal gasps and moans that streaked previous highs like "Terminally Chill" are still here, just not as suffocating. The wordless chorus of "Hex Girlfriend" is all but set to rock a festival stage or two, while "Halogen (I Could Be a Shadow)" is a rush of life-affirming, upwards-moving melodic optimism. The music itself is intricate and accomplished, with dizzying layers of synth arrangements and stray sounds crammed into even the most big-tent cuts-- we're talking rocket-ship noises, phone conversations, lasers, and visceral video-game samples. Despite the kitchen-sink arrangements, the results are taut and defined. Palomo is anything but sloppy and he seems focused on the album as a unified whole: one of his finest songs yet, the melancholy, remix-ready "Arcade Blues", was given bonus-track status because he felt it didn't fit in with Era Extraña's overriding themes.
Era Extraña is partly about love. It may not be "breakup album," in the strictest sense, but the record sounds romantic and lovesick and looks toward sounds that bring these feelings to mind, from the sugary crunch of Isn't Anything-era My Bloody Valentine ("The Blindside Kiss") to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark ("Fallout"). The feel of Era Extraña is expansive and lonely, like someone staring at the night sky in solitude (he recorded the bulk of it solo in Helsinki, Finland during the dead of winter, where, according to a recent Pitchfork interview, he was often on the verge of losing his shit mentally.)
Another topic touched on in that interview was the album's sense of longing, and "Future Sick" conveys the feeling of growing older in a world that's growing faster than you are. Palomo bemoans having to look towards past the present under seasick synths, singing mid-volume under his own creation's drunken abstraction and promising to "wake when things start to get peculiar".
Palomo feels more comfortable when looking to the past than turning his gaze to the uncertain future. While Era Extraña still contains the familiar warm glow of old television sets and half-remembered memories of the 1980s, Palomo is more than adept when utilizing short-term memory to evoke some of modern indie's more memorable 2000s-era fashions. The insistent pulse of "Suns Irrupt" is reminiscent of LCD Soundsystem's "Someone Great", "Halogen (I Could Be a Shadow)" is the near-double of M83's teenage epic "Kim and Jessie", and the sweetly lackadaisical verse structure of "Polish Girl" recalls the similarly unspooling inner monologue that runs through Stars' "Reunion". Coincidentally, those three songs of the not-so-distant past all deal with the loss of something-- a friend, youth, and irresponsible love, respectively. Amidst the bleepy synths and swooning melodies, Palomo's simply attempting not to lose himself, as he sighs through processed vocal effects on "Suns Irrupt": "Gone/ But I'm waiting to be someone." Two albums in, he remains a compelling songwriter. The scrappy charm of Psychic Chasms was hugely appealing from the jump and its brilliant initial flash faded just slightly over time. This is a far more serious record than its predecessor, but Palomo isn't always as assured in rendering the darker material.


The eleventh album from prolific ambient artist Scott Morgan maps a more human, and less quantifiable, concept: life’s resistance to dark and destructive forces.

Monument Builders

Scott Morgan’s trajectory as Loscil, the moniker under which he produces his solo work, seems more befitting of a biologist than an ambient music veteran. Over the past sixteen years, Morgan has shaped his electronic sound around subjects like subatomic particles (Triple Point), shadowy ocean depths (Submers), shore life (First Narrows), and the traits of airborne substances (Plume). Even the intention behind his free-flowing arrangements is scientific, as Morgan has often acknowledged his aim to recreate the properties of water in music. But where his previous albums have aspired, almost methodically, to map the movement and texture of wave energy, Monument Builders, Morgan’s eleventh album, maps a more human, and less quantifiable, concept: life’s resistance to dark and destructive forces.
Extending the notions of community that were brought to a head on his recent EP for Greta—a charity album to raise money for a friend's child diagnosed with bone cancer—Morgan now charts the progression of life from the arid wasteland of “Drained Lake” to the first tiny sprouts of growth in “Weeds.” Monument Builders is a highly visual album, a mosaic of images depicting construction, erasure, devastation, redemption, and transformation. The sounds of micro-cassette recorders, decrepit samples, and grinding chains of percussion evoke a strong sense of place, the same way fuzz on a vintage videotape evokes age. “Red Tide,” with its layered percussive onslaught and brass like steaming train whistles, announces the rising of the sea, just as the cascading pianos of “Deceiver” very nearly resembles rain falling after a thunderstorm.
As is typical in his work, Morgan uses the first four songs of the album to mount tension. Darkness lingers in the title track, which builds around a single quivering note. The anticipation culminates in “Straw Dogs,” a menacing track with screeching horns, named in honor of anti-humanist philosopher John Gray’s book of the same name, which speaks to the dangers of placing humanity at the center of the universe. The ominous edge behind the compositions would seem to indicate that Morgan subscribes to Gray’s ideas about our own propensity for geological and social destruction. But the album’s three remaining songs suggest something slightly more optimistic.
“Deceiver,” with its weepy, penitent piano, eventually gives way to a high-pitch wailing that expresses acute feelings of grief. Gray’s philosophy seems to appear again  in “Anthropocene”—the name for our current geological epoch, marked by harmful human centrality—and the song’s pulsating, intense bass line drives our guilt and grief through moments of self-reflection, mourning, and change. By the time we arrive at “Weeds,” the album’s final song, we are ready to confront punishment. Only we discover, from a murmur-like flicker of synth notes, that what awaits us are the sounds of human voices crying out from the dark. Among our distress and destruction, Morgan concludes, hopefully, that life persists.
In this way, Monument Builders is oddly reminiscent of “Directive,” one of Robert Frost’s last poems, which also advances ideas of survival and endurance. Much like with Builders, in “Directive” we follow a guide through a place of decay and dissolution. At the end of our journey, our guide says to us, “Here are your waters and your watering place./Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” Scott Morgan has made a career of showing us waters and watering places. With Monument Builders, we are finally invited to drink.


The Brooklyn-based pop polymath writes, performs, records, mixes, and engineers her most ambitious and electrifying collection of songs to date.

Only You Can See It

Emily Reo’s 2009 debut Minha Gatinha may have been lo-fi, but it didn’t obscure the Brooklyn artist's keen sense for contagious hooks. Her 2013 LP Olive Juice found Reo peeking out from behind the fog of reverb; her intentions as a songwriter seemed more defined, but there was still the sense of something eager to burst through. On her new album Only You Can See It, Reo has shattered all inhibitions. Here she paints in bright and bold brushstrokes, presenting her most ambitious and electrifying collection of songs to date.
Only You Can See It is a massive, far-reaching body of work that has all of the dimensions and sparkle of a finely cut diamond. “Strawberry” is an undeniable rallying cry for any woman who’s had to put up with pedantic male naysayers (spoiler alert: all of us).“Your eyes close when you talk about champagne,” she sneers, a precise putdown that brings to mind Rob Lowe’s sleazy TV producer “educating” Cassandra on the fraudulence of sparkling white wine in Wayne's World. We’ve all met that guy.  “My eyes roll back so far I see my brain/And there is so much you try to explain that I don’t wanna know,” Reo groans.
Reo is masterful at rendering an entire scene with just a few words, a skill she likely honed as a visual artist. Her phrasing is brief but evocative, allowing us to taste “cinnamon cherry” Septembers and experience the physical manifestations of anxiety: “Braiding silk on my spine/Face burned in flickering light.” And then there’s “Charlie,” the most devastating song ever written about a cat. Reo lost the titular kitty a few summers ago to a rare disease, and the images she’s summoned from his ashes are truly haunting. She sings about “hair on the carpet” and “healing old scratches,” depicting the physical presence that often outlives the ones we lose. “When the bulb burns out the glass stays warm,” Reo laments. I’m not crying. You’re crying.
What is perhaps most gratifying about Only You Can See It is that it is Reo’s vision in toto. She wrote, produced, mixed, engineered, and recorded the album, and she performed a number of the instruments credited. What results is a record in the spirit of Grimes’ Art Angels—a sprawling opus from a pop polymath. It couldn’t be more fitting that the image of a butterfly surfaces on Reo’s song “Fleur,” as her evolution has very much mirrored one.


On his debut solo album, the Linkin Park rapper and producer mourns the death of his bandmate Chester Bennington but never translates that grief into candid lyrics or inspired songwriting.

Post Traumatic

On October 27, 2017, three months after the suicide of their bandmate Chester Bennington, the surviving members of Linkin Park played a tribute concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Backed by a slew of musicians, the group marched through its catalog with trademark fury, angst, and earnestness. The live-streamed recording of the show flits between shots of the performers, the crowd, and an unused mic stand dedicated to Bennington, but it’s hard not to focus on rapper and producer Mike Shinoda. His cues seem to lead every song, his voice introduces most guests, his smile cuts through the tragedy underlying the event. In Bennington’s absence, Shinoda had become the de facto leader of Linkin Park.
“Looking for an Answer,” a grief-stricken song he debuted at that show, wrestles with that sudden responsibility. “There’s an emptiness tonight/A hole that wasn’t there before,” he murmured to the hushed crowd while playing glum piano chords alone on stage. It was a vulnerable moment within an otherwise steely showcase, with Shinoda suspending the night’s this-wouldn’t-be-possible-without-you tone to briefly just be a broken human. That grief animates Post Traumatic. Stepping away from Linkin Park for the first time since his mid-2000s rap project Fort Minor, Shinoda emerges as a solo act. “At its core, grief is a personal, intimate experience. As such, this is not Linkin Park, nor is it Fort Minor—it’s just me,” he wrote on the release date of Post Traumatic EP, the album’s three-song embryo. This glum backdrop gives Shinoda an opportunity to bare his soul, to detail what’s crawling in his skin for once. It never happens.
Post Traumatic is impersonal and distant. “Somebody else defined me/Cannot put the past behind me/Do I even have a decision?/Feeling like I’m living in a story already written,” Shinoda laments on “Place to Start.” He is likely dredging up ugly but real resentment about the long shadow Bennington’s well-known struggles with depression and anxiety cast over the group—and his own role in shaping that reputation. But these clumsy lyrics could also be referring to a label exec or another bandmate or his wedding photographer. The subject feels obvious, but as Shinoda slips into even vaguer self-loathing (“Pointing fingers at villains, but I’m a villain myself”), his sullen noodling grows ever less substantive, an issue compounded by his static vocals. He struggles to speak candidly.
“Over Again,” which revisits the tribute concert, is slightly more concrete. In a rare sharp moment, Shinoda describes the catch-22 of practicing songs that he co-wrote with the person he’s mourning: “We rehearsed it for a month/I’m not worried ’bout the set/I get tackled by the grief at times that I would least expect,” he raps. It’s a frank and bleak admission: Bennington’s voice is the fulcrum of Linkin Park’s music. Every run-through, every bridge, every song is now marred by his absence. But the refrain—“You say goodbye over and over and over again”—makes the sentiment thuddingly redundant. And “Over Again” still suffers from coyness: Before he settles on the peril of rehearsals,  Shinoda skips over the likely difficult discussions that led him and his four remaining bandmates, whose grief remains nebulous on Post Traumatic, to hold the tribute.
The allusions on “Ghosts” are similarly indistinct. “This is not about you and me/I can’t bring back what it used to be,” Shinoda sings, continuing his long tradition of overreliance on pronouns (see: “They point the finger at me again”). Attempting to fill in the blanks grows frustrating. Shinoda’s misery is all silhouettes, shadows, and darkness, with no characters, no people.
When his words aren’t failing him, Shinoda is betrayed by his ear. With few exceptions,  Post Traumatic’s default sound bed is bottomless caverns of bass and snares. In contrast to the busyness of his Linkin Park production, the aesthetic here is spare and frictionless, full of scuzzy synths and dawdling keys that echo into the abyss. So little else happens that you can keep count of the few variations: “Promises I Cant Keep” and “Watching as I Fall” feature some dubby flourishes; “I.O.U.”  has a siren; an electric guitar chugs along on “Make It Up as I Go.”
The product of all this stasis is an endless supply of dead air, a problem Shinoda tries to address by frequently adopting Auto-Tune and other vocal effects to texturize his voice. That is an exercise in futility, too: His clunky flex raps and flat crooning remain lifeless. “You’re the opposite of stars, like rats spelled backwards,” he raps on “Lift Off.” I don’t think that’s how opposites work.
It’s jarring to hear Shinoda struggle with such fundamental elements of songwriting. In their heyday, Linkin Park were a triumph of both economy and excess. A turntablist, a rapper, a bassist, a drummer, a guitarist, and a rager should have been the setup to a glorious bar joke, but they found a way to harmonize. And although they became a punchline, for Linkin Park’s fans, the joke was on the people who were too stiff to embrace the band’s schlocky but fun pageantry.
Throughout Post Traumatic, you can sense how unmoored Shinoda is without that spectacle. His chest doesn’t puff out as far as it did on Fort Minor. His compositions don’t detonate like his best work for Linkin Park. His bandmates aren’t there to lift him up when he falls short. He sounds abandoned.


The Queens rapper’s ninth album is full of the dizzyingly technical wordplay he’s made his trademark.

Dusty

To hear Homeboy Sandman tell it, he’s in a great place now, contented and spinning raps for the pure joy of it. The Queens-bred rapper’s ninth album, Dusty, is his first on Mello Music Group since parting with Stones Throw, and he’s said that it is his most uninhibited release, one in which he allows parts of himself he’s kept in check to “flourish and surface.” But what mostly comes through on Dusty is what he’s already communicated, over and over again—he’s a technically accomplished rapper, and...well, that’s about it. If you’re looking for someone who will cram words like “hypotenuse” into verses, this is the album for you.
It must be mentioned as a baseline: Homeboy Sandman is good at rapping. But it’s the kind of good that treats words as a means to an end; that end being proving he’s good at rapping. It’s an empty loop, exacerbated by the fact that he isn’t rapping about much of anything else in particular, save for the weaklings who aren’t measuring up the standards he’s setting. “I don’t wanna be associated with these dudes/Take a peek inside the dossier of a recluse/Who ain’t gonna pretend a serving size is a teaspoon,” he raps on “Far Out,” without going any further out. He’s far from done clearing his throat: “The difference between you and me/Could fill the sun and earth, moon and sea,” he spits on “Live and Breathe.”
His only other discernible interest is sex, and on “Pussy” he turns his pursuit of it into a Seussian rhyme: “I love it more than rapping or eating/I love it more than napping or reading.” “Wondering Why,” which is just a string of rapped hypothetical questions, was executed more effectively by Jadakiss in 2004. One question Sandman never asks himself, but should’ve: What, exactly, is the point of all this?
On any of Sandman’s songs, there are moments that can make you marvel at the wit of his wordplay or the detailed arrangement of his raps themselves, their sequence and structure. Every now and then, he’ll articulate an idea perfectly: “I deal in the absolutes/Exact as a science/One synapse at a time’s how I spend my whole life/It’s a spirit thing/It’s in here/It keeps me from hearing things” (“Always”). Or he’ll strike a nice balance between his left and right brain: “Greatest look since dinosaurs and the protozoa/Greatest hooks since southpaw Rocky Balboa,” he raps on “Yes Iyah.” Over a diverse selection of traditionalist beats by longtime collaborator Mono En Stereo (formerly El RTNC), Sandman is always engaged, but he’s rarely engaging.
Sandman clearly thinks of himself as a peerless writer and rapper. But as pure-bars showcases go, it is less personal than Young M.A’s Herstory in the Making, less colorful than super-producer team-ups from Danny Brown and Freddie Gibbs. He’s not as thoughtful as MIKE or MAVI. His more immediate peers, guys like Quelle Chris (who appears on this album) and billy woods (who he’s taking on tour), use their lyrical acumen to put finer points on big ideas, and don’t sacrifice any of their outsider cachet doing so. Rap albums don’t need overarching concepts, but they do need ideas, and it’s unclear if Sandman has any of his own worth sharing on Dusty.


Tink’s first release since leaving Timbaland’s label is a declaration of freedom that leans away from the personal touch of her best work.

Pain & Pleasure EP

Two years ago, Tink opened the fourth edition of her flagship Winter’s Diary mixtape series with a sketch in which a fictional therapist discussed her case: “Client seems very disturbed, extremely emotional at times/Seems to be a lot of pressure/A lot of pressure on her shoulders.” It had only been a year at that point since the Chicago rapper and singer’s debut album, Think Tink, was delayed for the first time, but the tape suggested deeper anxieties than the frustratingly common Nevruary 31st release dates that affect many promising new artists.
Think Tink never arrived, of course, and her alliance with Timbaland, who had once anointed her as the second coming of Aaliyah, turned out to be a doomed one. There is an unmistakable disconnect between the slick hybrids of pop, R&B, and hip-hop on Tink’s earlier, self-released work and the two singles she put out after signing with Epic Records via the producer’s Mosley Music Group imprint in 2014 (the hokey “Ratchet Commandments” and the Aaliyah-sampling “Million”). When she was finally released from that deal late last year, she posted a selfie on Instagram with the caption #FreeAtLast.
The question on Pain & Pleasure, Tink’s first release since then, is what she wants to do with that freedom. In a way, she has always been free: Her well-curated, confessional sound is her own, and she has been pushing it independently since she was a teenager. Pain & Pleasure deals in familiar textures, but there are no rap tracks, and the lyrics lean away from the personal. Opener “On to the Next One” has a title that perhaps hints at her exodus from the major-label system, but it’s about a dude. The same goes for “M.I.a.,” which is not about her 2017 break from music and social media, but instead is a slippery ode to vacation sex.
Without the deeply personal touch of Tink’s best work, some of the lyrics on the track, and elsewhere on the EP, are a bit clumsy. “Housekeeping saying keep it down/Going at it and we hella loud” is prosaic, while a line like “I’ma let him beat it like a gun charge” is just awkward. “Signs” is likewise lyrically uneven, as Tink lists the bad qualities a guy takes from each of the 12 star signs, awkwardly cobbling together “What’s your sign?” taxonomy with the red flags (or signs) that someone is bad for you. Worst of all is the moment when she sings that a guy’s bedroom aptitude is so good it “feels like a paycheck” on “Get You Home.”
The departures Tink takes on Pain & Pleasure aren’t necessarily terribly worrisome: In January, she released the breathy, skittering single “Breakin’ Me,” which plays well to her traditional strengths. With Winter’s Diary 5 on the way, she’s going to need to do more of that, and less hiding in plain sight.

Machine Entertainment Group / Winter’s Diary


They may still be stuck in their apartments, false nostalgia, or dead-end service gigs, but the upstart Seattle emo band’s revelation of a second album goes places.

Floral Tattoo: You Can Never Have a Long Enough Head Start

“I haven’t left this room in 14 days,” goes the key line in Floral Tattoo’s most popular song to date. “14 Days” was also the most uplifting song on the Seattle band’s 2018 debut, Approaching Bearable, which should give you an idea of its overall emotional tenor. At least frontperson Alex Anderson was willing to entertain the possibility of breaking free from the feedback loop—the one where the only relief from memories of childhood bullying, the confusion of gender transition, and a demoralizing job at McDonald’s (“Death by Minimum Wage”) was filling up a journal with unflinchingly miserable lyrics. “I wanna write songs that evoke feelings of adventure! I want to write songs that make you want to fall in love!” Anderson cried, while their diaristic lyrics underscored a subtle, purposeful belief that they themselves were too far gone for any of that.
Two years later, Anderson and co-songwriter Gwen Power are still stuck in their apartments, false nostalgia, or dead-end service gigs, but Floral Tattoo’s revelation of a second album goes places: a Minneapolis punk flophouse filled with Twin/Tone vinyl, a college radio station in 1980s Boston or Athens, an mp3 blog in 2008, a five-band Philly gig in 2009 capped by a 10-minute Snowing set. They call their work “music for sad trans people who grew up at the dawn of the digital age,” but You Can Never Have a Long Enough Head Start is willing to conceive of real moments of happiness, albeit only attainable off the grid. The album opens with “(foreward),” a manifesto for queer revolution, and twice invokes Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as anti-capitalist antiheroes, Floral Tattoo’s own Bonnie and Clyde. “She” is every bit as exclamatory as a Los Campesinos!/Against Me! hybrid should be, while the surging acoustic strums of “Leaving” evoke the Cure singles that counterbalanced their monolithic despair with fleeting exuberance. Likewise, as soon we catch a glimpse of Power and Anderson laughing and whooping over the possibility of ditching their possessions and living in a bus headed nowhere, they follow it with a one-minute burst of folk-punk nihilism called “Don’t Try Things.”
In a less fraught moment, this conceptual scope and post-emo shape-shifting might have resulted in something along the lines of Harmlessness or Goodness, albums whose utopian aspirations can feel sadly naive in light of Floral Tattoo’s 2020 reality. They’re a band with big ideas, coloring their feel-bad rainbow with bells, spoken word, melodica, euphonium, and an interpolation of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” But they’re still recording in their apartment, and the lo-fi production that covers everything in a gritty, gray vapor takes on metaphorical heft. With a bigger budget, “Oar House” could’ve fully actualized a majestic rising tide of Pacific Northwest dreamo. But would that really serve a song that commiserates about cleaning toilets? The pixelated distortion of “Oar House” gives it a properly sickly pallor, as if staring through stifled tears at the Puget Sound or driving a shitty car to work with a hangover.
It would be nice to say that Anderson and Power have transmuted their substantial and justifiable anguish into transcendance, and while You Can Never Get Too Much of a Head Start is already one of the year’s first word-of-mouth successes, it’d be a lie to call it a triumph. “The Art of Moving On” and  “(my life fell apart this year)” end the album with a rousing, shitfaced salvo of no-fi pub-punk, a rare instance of modern emo that aspires more to The Airing of Grievances than The Monitor. But Floral Tattoo are never subtle, and the titles say it all: If this sounds euphoric, it’s the euphoria of truly hitting bottom, of finding freedom in the knowledge that things can only get better because they can’t get any worse.


Ishmael Butler of Digable Planets has a very promising new solo project and he's out of the gate with two fine EPs.

Shabazz Palaces: Of Light / Shabazz Palaces

Of Light / Shabazz Palaces

The most shocking thing about Pitchfork staff writer Tom Breihan's interview with Palaceer Lazaro, the otherwise press-evasive figurehead of Seattle outré-rap project Shabazz Palaces, wasn't that the interview actually took place-- it was that Lazaro still wanted to operate under a shroud of mystery. An unnecessary shroud, at that; Lazaro is actually Ishmael "Butterfly" Butler of the 1990's Native Tongues-leaning collective Digable Planets-- and, later, of the more pessimistically inclined group Cherrywine.
Lazaro's approach is a refreshing change-- leading with your work instead of your persona; asking fans to interpret it rather than provide them answers. It's clear that he wants his art to be taken seriously, and based on his output so far it certainly will. Shabazz Palaces' first two mini-albums, Of Light and its self-titled follow-up, are almost as paradoxical as the project's identity politics. Lazaro occasionally spits conscious verses about struggling and corruption, but he's also not afraid to go all hardhead and talk tough.  His lyrical subjects can be quotidian, frequently focusing on food and hanging out; his song titles, however, are frequently so long-winded that including all of them in full here would break any sensible editor's word count. The beats are dense and, at times, haunted; at the same time, this shit would sound great booming out of passing car windows.
That is especially true of Shabazz Palaces, which acts as a dark, challenging foil to Of Light's relative playfulness. The beats here take equal cues from the blown-out sci-fi dystopia of Company Flow, the harsh static antagonism of Anti-Pop Consortium and Dälek, and Los Angeles' Brainfeeder collective's head-swimming ganja burn. Impeccable reference points-- and the way they're synthesized is impressive-- but these abstract beats have never been easy to convincingly rap over. But Lazaro handles it with intensity on every track here, moving with the rhythm no matter how irregular it may be.
The chameleonic role Lazaro plays within these compositions is aided by his grizzled, gruff voice, which sounds worlds away from the smoother vocals he displayed with Digable Planets or Cherrywine. It could be assumed that this noticeable change was brought on by years of toiling under the radar of hip-hop's fickle hype machine. It's easy to compare Ishmael Butler's artistic transformation into Palaceer Lazaro to Zev Love X's transformation to MF Doom: Both started out in earnest-talking early 90s collectives, and once the optimism ran dry, they laid low before reemerging as wizened, idiosyncratic, and enigmatic.
Of course, reemergence doesn't always guarantee eternal success, as Doom's ever-unspooling narrative shows. Hopefully, Palaceer Lazaro-- oh, fuck it, call him Ishmael-- takes full and careful advantage of the second chance he's been offered (after all, they do come rare in the hip-hop world).  Right now, though, this is his moment, and he's owning it.


Teen Suicide is the old band of Sam Ray, whose other projects include Ricky Eat Acid and Julia Brown. He resurrected the band for a 26-track blowout of an album that is constantly absorbing and equal parts astonishing and frustrating.

Teen Suicide: It's the Big Joyous Celebration

It's the Big Joyous Celebration

If you couldn't tell from the title or its 26 tracks or 69-minute length, It's the Big Joyous Celebration, Let's Stir the Honeypot is A) a glorious communal blowout and B) goddamn mess. Its intentions are messy: Sam Ray resurrected his old band by popular demand (vis-à-vis his other projects Ricky Eat Acid and Julia Brown) and will be touring throughout the spring, yet they are also calling it their last will and testament. Its presentation signifies wild ambition, but Ray appears more interested in capturing fleeting bits of casual brilliance than making good on grandiose designs. The ugliest song is called "Beauty," one of the prettiest is "Neighborhood Drug Dealer." It's constantly absorbing and equal parts astonishing and frustrating. It's a party you can hear from down the block and yet still requires a password at the door.
Ray's ascent as an indie/DIY auteur has been propelled by his prolificity and his equally active desire to circumvent any barrier between him and his listeners. This personality (or persona) is  as crucial to full appreciation of Celebration as the music. As he shows with his projects outside of Teen Suicide, Ray is direct, omnivorous and unpredictable: Celebration feints at stop-start post-punk, patches in some nifty acoustic progressions on loan from Alex G's Beach Music, flirts with psychedelia and throws out some jazz noodling as well. And this is just the first song.
At their core, Teen Suicide is the most "indie rock" of Ray's projects and in that form, they write poignant song-sketches that can traffic in sarcasm ("it's not art unless you laugh, one of these days I'm gonna laugh") and have a poignant sweetness ("Falling Out of Love With Me"). But the lo-fi recording quality serving as Celebration's binding agent has a far greater effect the further Teen Suicide get away from guitars. The resplendent piano rolls of "I Don't Think It's Too Late" and "The Stomach of the Earth" are slightly scuffed and distorted, like a tear-stained take on the Range's recent emotronica. "My Little World" touches on Aphex Twin's early ambient work, while the crackle surrounding the harps and strings on  "V.I.P." carry the haunted-house eeriness of the Caretaker's Victrola memory experiments. It's hard to think of any album, probably ever, that managed to sound like these three and Sparklehorse in the same hour.
His use of tape manipulation and sampled orchestral bric-a-brac dutifully marked in the treasure map-like credits (Girlpool, Elvis Depressedly, Alex G, Porches, Owen Pallett and more) put him in the lineage of Elephant 6, Microphones or early Saddle Creek. But Teen Suicide's crucial novelty lies in how they connect modern forms of communication and dissemination—it's a celebration of how Bandcamp and Soundcloud can allow songs to be released in an instant while constantly mutating (this was not invented by The Life of Pablo) and, of course, any form of social media.
Most of the lyrics appear to be trimmed to fit for maximum impact within a character limit and even if they're not necessarily about him, Ray takes advantage of the presumption that songwriting is an autobiographical mode. As a result, the listener is inclined to relate to the person going through the harrowing narratives here. They all read like casual conversations, but the kind you can only have when the speaker has a total lack of a filter and a complete trust in the person on the other end. Some of his best lines are brazen provocations ("depression is a construct"); many sound like jokes but are devastating insights about drug abuse and suicidal ideation. Most importantly, they're very, very quotable. Witness the best of the lot: "Pavement were an OK band/but you don't gotta sound like them."
This isn’t some kind of Kill Yr Idols mission statement—Celebration has enough ’90s indie rock in its genes to suggest that Ray thinks Pavement were at least OK. But most of  Ray’s colleagues in Orchid Tapes or Run For Cover  or any of the leading figures in post-emo are developing intensely dedicated, often young fanbases without the previously established means of generating sustainable indie rock success or the previously established canonical influences.  The bands they sometimes remind me of—Bright Eyes circa Fevers & Mirrors, for instance—won only begrudging respect from older listeners at the time it was released. The directness with which it speaks to its audience makes it easy to imagine Celebration inspiring a lot of its younger listeners to start a band. For anyone else, it’s just an inspiring testament to indie rock’s continued vitality.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article erroneously referred to another Sam Ray project as Julian Brown. That band is in fact named Julia Brown.


Charli’s best full-length project since Pop 2 is a canny embrace of modern and vintage pop styles by one of its most sincere students.

Crash

In 2022, Charli XCX is bigger and brasher, styled like a vixen from an old Russ Meyer flick, snarling and mashing her foot into the floor on Saturday Night Live, singing hooks that slap you with fistfuls of neon goo. On the album art for Crash, she hangs on a windshield as if she leaped there from the road, cut and bleeding and ready to fight. “I’m high voltage, self-destructive, end it all so legendary,” she sings on the album opener, charging up over a new jack swing beat and a distorted guitar with vocals that could whip up a small tornado. It’s cute to be a baddie, but it’s really fun to be bad.
Crash marks the end of a five-album deal Charli signed with Atlantic when she was 16, a 13-year engagement that has often seemed more trouble than it was worth; she says the label has delayed her releases and tried to manipulate her image. (“If you want a puppet, just go and get yourself a puppet,” she once recalled telling her bosses.) Crash has a serious point to make about how ruthlessly major labels can treat the young, female stars that line their shareholders’ pockets. But in the album’s visuals, Charli spectacularizes her personal struggles with a knowing wink and more than a little camp, like Lady Gaga bleeding out at the VMAs while flashbulbs click.
So forget the idea of a lackluster project to close out contractual obligations—Charli makes every second of Crash count. The album has the range of a greatest-hits compilation, with kinetic pop-funk and textured dream-pop as well as banging Eurodance and post-internet glitch, but the new sounds she explores are built on a focused distillation of her own music’s wild pendulum swings. It’s as if the goth-in-training of True Romance, hell-raising brat of Sucker, fembot of Pop 2, and unfiltered sharer of how i’m feeling now got together for one last blowout.
Charli’s collaboration-focused mixtapes proved she was among the best curators in modern pop. On Crash, she cashes in the chips she acquired as a Top 40 songwriter, mobilizing a cast of the industry’s most reliable hitmakers and circling back to past collaborators who she was early to spotlight. A bid for pop excellence doesn’t get much better than calling up Rami Yacoub, the co-producer of “…Baby One More Time,” who co-wrote the phenomenal, Cameo-inspired “Lightning.” Producer Ariel Rechtshaid brings the song to life with flamenco-inspired nylon guitar noodling and the most delightfully ’80s thing of all, orchestra hits. “Tell me what you want and I’ma give it to ya/Like lightning,” Charli sings, a cheeky nod to the stereotype of pop stars as factory workers churning out radio fodder, in a pummeling chorus scientifically designed to destroy your favorite Friday night footwear.
Like her late collaborator SOPHIE, who famously licensed “Lemonade” to McDonald’s, Charli is fascinated with pop as product. “I’m interested in the concept of selling out,” she tweeted in 2020. Take her snark with a pinch of salt—she has executive-produced all her projects since 2014’s Sucker—but on Crash she draws freely from commercial hits, with sly references to a sweet escape and the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” a song Charli covered in early live shows, as well as audacious samples. “Used to Know Me” is a hair-tossing Pride party anthem that interpolates Robin S., while the Rina Sawayama collaboration “Beg for You” flagrantly rips September’s much-memed “Cry for You,” and thanks to an airy post-chorus, as well as harp plucks that recall both millennium-era Darkchild productions and Erika de Casier, feels as in tune with the textures of today’s forward-thinking pop as much as it is a love letter to the classics.
That duality is what makes Crash so effective. Charli has said she wanted to make a major label record, to serve “main pop girl.” But her music has too many sharp edges for many of Crash’s songs to frictionlessly fit on to Top 40 playlists, and the album is all the better for it. “Baby” is a retro-futuristic dance-pop confection that imagines the sound of Yaz making a city pop record in 1983, while “Every Rule,” produced by A. G. Cook and Oneohtrix Point Never, is an unexpectedly tender swan song to a snuffed-out love affair, where bright synths scuttle like a beetle through safety-orange paint. When Charli does experiment with radio-friendly styles, it’s with a wry twist. “Yuck” is a cynical older sister to “Kiss Me More”—a song that itself incorporated elements of Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical”—in which Charli nods to pop’s sensual side but is repulsed by storybook seduction. “All these butterflies make me sick,” she sneers of some mushy would-be Casanova over strutting pop-funk. As the ’90s teen queen she played in “Fancy” might say: Ugh, as if!
Charli’s previous music created fissures and disruptions within pop, but Crash’s best moments come close to perfecting it. “Constant Repeat” is a carefree trancey soufflé that catches flight with pitch-shifting vocals that swoop through different layers of the atmosphere. Produced by Lotus IV, it’s as addictive as his and Charli’s previous link-up, “Gone,” and then some. “Got me on repeat,” Charli sings as the song closes, her voice surrounded with coos and glittering fragments of chatter, adding an intoxicating sparkle to a song that already appears lit from within.
Joyful moments feel particularly victorious given that Charli has recently spoken of feeling disillusioned and burned out. If she seemed, for a time, to be stuck on the hyperpop color wheel of doom, Crash is how it feels to take a sledgehammer to the screen and look around with eyes wide open. Despite a couple of slightly weaker moments (oddly, the album’s lead singles), Crash is Charli’s best full-length project since Pop 2, a canny embrace of modern and vintage pop styles by one of its most sincere students. It sets a bar for creative mainstream pop: the ruthless, intoxicating dream factory that can chew you up and spit you out and leave you coming back for more.


The three most recent Led Zeppelin reissues, comprising Led Zeppelin IV, Houses of the Holy, and Physical Graffiti, find the band at the height of their imperial phase.

Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin IV/Houses of the Holy/Physical Graffiti

With Led Zeppelin, there was no break-in period, no "early phase" where they figured out what kind of band they wanted to be. They were fully formed from the first repetition of the "Good Times Bad Times" riff, and they powered along through their first half-dozen albums crushing everything in their path. Zep never had their Sgt. Pepper's, their Exile, their Who's Next, because every album was more or less that good—for a while, anyway. This was a band that knew the music it wanted to make and executed it with ruthless precision. The second trio of Led Zeppelin reissues (the fourth album and Houses of the Holy came out last fall, Physical Graffiti this week) found the band inhabiting what Neil Tennant once described (and Tom Ewing fleshed out) as their "imperial phase." Riding on their massive initial success, and pushed even further by the game-changing success of "Stairway to Heaven", everything they tried during these years somehow worked.
If you grew up on classic rock radio, you sometimes felt like you were listening to Led Zeppelin's fourth album on shuffle. It has eight songs, all of them are huge, and one, "Stairway to Heaven", frequently lingers near the top of lists of the Greatest Rock Songs of All Time. Given its place in culture, IV can seem like an album of moments more than songs. Individual parts have been selected, cropped, amplified, and dropped into both songs by other artists and into our collective unconscious. Every song has two or three sections that are instantly identifiable and always seem to be playing somewhere nearby. The circular guitar figure in "Black Dog"; the chiming mandolin in "Going to California"; Bonham's cymbal bashing on "Rock and Roll". It's hard to hear "When the Levee Breaks", by now, and not think of hip-hop. If Led Zeppelin's music formed the DNA of anything that could remotely be called "hard rock," IV is a petri dish overflowing with stem cells. The debut was darker and moodier, II was heavier, and III was prettier, but the fourth album is a triumph of form meeting function.
"Stairway to Heaven" is so ubiquitous that it cycles through phases of deep reverence and self-parody, and the movement between these two poles is so rapid it all becomes a blur. This happens both for individual listeners (I'm going to guess the very young still discover this song and have their idea of what a rock song can be expanded considerably) and on the level of mass culture. It's both a marker of religion and an instant punchline, a singularity that sucks in a world of experience and observation and jeering laughter and sincere tears and compacts it all into an infinitely dense point. Like many who both love it and hate it, I pretty much never need to hear it again. But "Stairway" aside, IV is their least weird album. It's basically their stab at perfection, and they get there, but this band was always at its most interesting at the margins, when they had the possibility of failure.
By 1973, Zeppelin's only competition for Biggest Band in the World was the Stones, who were losing their hunger. Later that year, the Stones would put out Goat's Head Soup, beginning a period of drift they wouldn't return from until 1978's Some Girls. The field was clear, with the '60s starting to recede in the rearview, but punk was still a couple of years away, Zeppelin didn't waste the opportunity. Houses of the Holy, their fifth album in four years, takes the most powerful moments of the fourth album and amplifies them, and also adds some oddball experiments that flesh out the Led Zeppelin story.
They are most in the zone on "Over the Hills and Far Away", which is on a very short list of best songs Zep ever wrote, which is to say that it's among the best rock songs ever written. Everything they ever did well—pastoral beauty, crunchy riffs, stop/start changes, monster drum grooves—could be found on this single track. "The Ocean" features what could be Jimmy Page's single greatest riff. "The Rain Song" is a masterful study in the power of guitar tone, both for its full acoustic strumming and the electric guitar work that has always evoked the weather of its title. John Paul Jones' gorgeous Mellotron passage is one of the definitive uses of that strange instrument. And "No Quarter" is a disorienting bad-vibes epic, archetypal of the '70s, capturing the bleak interiority of a certain kind of drug experience.
Houses of the Holy is a perfectly reasonable choice for best Zeppelin LP, even if it had signs that the band couldn't last forever. "The Song Remains the Same" is the first sign of Robert Plant using a more pinched sound for his upper register, adapting to that gradually disappearing top octave by contorting his vocals into a strange squeal. By the last two Zeppelin records this would be his default approach when singing in this range. "The Crunge" is a sour version of funk, a weirdly fascinating half-song complete with a groaner of a James Brown joke. John Bonham supposedly disliked "D'yer Mak'er" so much he refused to write an interesting drum part, sticking instead with the first shuffle beat that came to mind. It was Zeppelin's stab at reggae, and though they never try to breathe any space or light into the mix, it's impossible to dismiss the song's easy catchiness, its affection for doo-wop melody, the motion of Page's spindly guitar.
Houses of the Holy might be Zeppelin's most impressive album on a purely sonic level, and this particular remaster reinforces that notion. The best remastering jobs always offer a subtle improvement—a touch of EQing here, a bit more volume there without overdoing it. Taken together, they hopefully offer more detail, and these versions make the grade. The bonus discs, however, continue to be disappointing. From one angle, there's actually something admirable about how little Led Zeppelin left in the vaults. It was a testament to their brutal efficiency as a rock machine. But aside from the live set released with the debut, the bonus discs so far have been the definition of "fans only."
They are mostly filled with "alternate mixes," which is a strange concept. Mixes freeze in time a single moment that is the end result of many individual decisions; they document fader settings. Alternate mixes showing what could have happened are literally infinite; all these mixes are said to have been created while the album was being mixed, and there is no reason to doubt that, but the truth is Page could just as easily make an "alternate mix" of any one of these songs this morning and no one would know the difference. The fact that a mandolin was briefly considered to be slightly louder for a given sound is basically a stray fact and nothing more. All it provides is a chance to hear familiar performances in familiar songs in a way that sounds slightly unfamiliar.
Among the first six records, aside from III, Physical Graffiti suffers least from overfamiliarity. It's Led Zeppelin's White Album, the one they made when they were at their creative peak and had a million ideas, but were also under a tremendous amount of strain and saw the end starting to come into focus. It's also, to my ears, their best album, even if it's not as unified or complete as some of what had come before. Why their best? First of all, there's more of it. The previous two albums were awesome, but each had just eight songs; Physical Graffiti has 15. It's math—when you are talking about songs from this period of the band, that makes it roughly twice as good.
But Physical Graffiti is Zeppelin's best album ultimately because it felt like a culmination. In some senses it was literally so, since its tracks had been recorded over the course of the previous few years and, in some cases, were leftovers from the previous few records. (The best of the new material was still too much for a single record, so they went back to unreleased songs and decided to flesh out a full 2xLP. The songs are all over the place, but the band makes it all work together.)
Iconic riffs abound—"Custard Pie", "The Wanton Song", and "Houses of the Holy" alone have more hooks than most rock bands manage in a career—but here they are just the beginning of the story. "In My Time of Dying" is Zeppelin's ultimate blues deconstruction, mixing the open-chord slide of acoustic Delta blues with electric heaviness and extending the whole thing past 11 minutes. Pastoral instrumentals had been in the mix for Zeppelin since the first album's "Black Mountainside", but Page never managed another one as beautiful as "Bron-Yr-Aur", a crushingly brief two minutes of guitar bliss that every rock kid who picked up an acoustic guitar in the next 10 years dreamed of playing. And their non-Western dabbling crested with "Kashmir". But Physical Graffiti's greatest strength is its looseness and general sense of playfulness. Here and there, Zeppelin showed comfort with pop. The bounce of "Trampled Under Foot" owes everything to Stevie Wonder; "Down By the Seaside" has an easeful lilt; and "Night Flight" twinkles with a bright optimism.
The song I returned to most here is also the simplest—"Boogie With Stu", an interpolation of Ritchie Valens' "Ooh My Head" (his mother gets a songwriting credit). It makes me think of what blues and early rock'n'roll meant to a certain generation of young men growing up in England during the 1950s and '60s. You hear one story after another about lives being changed by a rock'n'roll record. In a famous quote, John Lennon summed up his musical taste to Jann Wenner in a 1971 Rolling Stone interview: "Sounds like 'Wop Bop a Loo Bop'. I like rock and roll, man, I don't like much else."
When the members of Led Zeppelin get together with famed session pianist/long-time pal Ian Stewart on "Boogie With Stu", you can hear five people who speak the same language. It's drunk on the joy of the discovery. Whatever else they have going on in their lives, they can sit down and play a chugging 12-bar song and have a fucking ball, because they remember when they first heard a song like this as kids and realized that song was a portal to another world. On Physical Graffiti, the end point of Led Zeppelin's incomparable initial run, they are living deep inside that new world, still finding new things to discover, taking it all in.


On a new EP, the Texas indie-pop duo refines its approach with striking details and emotional tension.

Billboard for My Feelings EP

Hovvdy’s music has a mysterious depth. On the surface, the Texas duo makes cheery folk-pop with acoustic guitars, grand piano, crackling drums, and vocal melodies as soothing as a weighted blanket. Charlie Martin and Will Taylor’s early work veered toward nostalgia-bait minimalism, remnant of Duster or a lo-fi Weezer, with lyrics that latched onto love and longing and letting go of the past because they were, regrettably, growing up. On last year’s True Love, they embraced their emergence into adulthood by reflecting on parenting, marriage, and memory. As immaculate as the music sounded, and as earnest as the lyrics were, their “Life Is Good” ethos wore thin. Could it all really be so pleasant?
Their new four-song EP, Billboard for My Feelings, adds new wrinkles to their work, building upon the template of True Love and homing in on their deceptively sophisticated sound. It’s not that they’re taking bigger risks or straying from their preferred themes. Instead, they’ve refined their approach by leaning into their most playful inclinations, prioritizing texture and melody over narrative stability, broadening their simple yet spacious arrangements with small, striking details: a guitar pluck here, a string stab there, a wide-bodied backing vocal that bleeds into a bit-crushed tom. Like walking through the woods and finding a creek just deep enough to swim, their music is filled with unexpected moments that encourage you to stop moving, sit back, and take it all in.
Reunited with producer Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Bon Iver) and multi-instrumentalist Bennett Littlejohn, Hovvdy expand their compositions with strings and keys and the occasional banjo, the tension rising and falling with the subtle addition or subtraction of an instrument. “Everything” opens with a reversed string loop before paring back to chugging acoustic guitar and Taylor’s gentle crooning. Amid the twinkling arrangement, he senses that certain doors have closed in his life: “Before the sun leaves/Go outside and dream/About the places that I’ve heard of/I won’t live to see.” There’s an optimism to his words, a realization that the world in this moment may be as expansive as it ever will be.
Emotional incongruities weave throughout the EP, imbuing each song with an unresolvable tension. “Hide,” a mesmerizing highlight whose syrupy cadence and tempo sound like little else in Hovvdy’s discography, describes sleepless nights and self-doubt, little devastations that arise despite our best efforts to guard against them. And even though Hovvdy still aim for good times and deep connection, they now acknowledge that sorrow and uncertainty can creep into even the most joyful experiences. On True Love, the duo seemed intent on shutting out these thoughts, holding greater space for gratitude, empathy, and forgiveness. But the emotional ambiguity of Billboard for My Feelings gives way to a richer, more complicated set of perspectives, communicating through melody what’s too elusive to say otherwise.


One of the decade's best metal and post-hardcore bands finish the 2000s with one of its best records.

Axe to Fall

Converge are this generation's Black Flag. This generation might not remember Black Flag, so here's a refresher. In the early 1980s, Black Flag and peers like Bad Brains and Minor Threat took punk beyond "three chords and the truth." The result was hardcore punk. It was deliberately ugly and harsh; Clash-fetishizing critics have mostly ignored it. Black Flag epitomized DIY-- they booked their own shows, handed out their own flyers, rehearsed with military discipline, and put out records on guitarist Greg Ginn's label, SST. Despite shifting lineups, their mission never wavered: to destroy.
Destruction isn't Converge's agenda. They differ from Black Flag in that aspect: They build things up, not tear them down. But they can do so because of Black Flag's groundwork. Black Flag made it okay to fight cops, to fight fans, and to do what punk always promised but rarely did: be oneself. The band was both explosive and implosive. It was destined to end.
Converge have learned from Black Flag's mistakes. They work as a team and have taken DIY to new levels. Singer Jacob Bannon runs the Deathwish, Inc. label and does artwork for Converge and other bands. Guitarist Kurt Ballou runs a recording studio and has become this generation's Steve Albini. Bassist Nate Newton and drummer Ben Koller have made waves with other bands like Doomriders and Cave In. Together, they whip up a catharsis matched by few. They play hard and wear their hearts on their sleeves. As a result, kids in droves wear Converge on their sleeves. (The band's Twitter handle is "convergecult.") No other current punk band's imagery is as iconic. The face on the cover of 2001's Jane Doe, the hand on the cover of 2004's You Fail Me-- they are the Black Flag bars of today.
The band wasn't always so potent. It took a few albums to work through a wiry hybrid of mathcore and metal. Jane Doe was Converge's watershed, honing their sound to a lean, abrasive essence. Over You Fail Me and 2006's No Heroes, it expanded to include slower, abstract sludge. Black Flag went through a similar transformation. Their landmark album My War was equal parts lightning and Black Sabbath. Axe to Fall is Converge's My War.
The album is, to quote The Exorcist and Pantera, a vulgar display of power. Bannon's howl is exfoliating. His lyrics aren't hard to parse: "I need to learn to love me"; "No longer feel anyone/ No longer fear anything." Basic stuff, but it reaches deep and pulls no punches. Ballou's guitar dials up the crackle of Metallica's Kill 'Em All. It gallops, shoots electric arcs, dives down to subterranean depths. Ballou mines the upper register more than ever before, turning leads into leitmotifs. The frenzied pull-offs in "Dark Horse" are pure Kirk Hammett; the supercharged chug of "Reap What You Sow" recalls the fire of early Megadeth. Ballou isn't really playing metal-- his band is too short-haired and quirky for that-- but he's out-metalling 99% of metal bands today. The title track rotates through thrash beats, blastbeats, and d-beats like a race car driver shifting gears. It's fast, greasy, and loud as a motherfucker.
Axe to Fall isn't all axes, though. It's also anvils and stone pillows and beds of fallen leaves. The record is perfectly sequenced. It starts with three seamless barnburners, then settles into smooth toggling between slow and fast. The slow numbers likely won't get live airing-- kids prefer speed-- but they're amazing constructions of texture and friction. Near the end, piano and glockenspiel make like Tom Waits and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. They're elegiac and haunting, an inversion of the napalm death that preceded them. A huge array of guests help out, representing acts like Disfear, 108, Genghis Tron, and Neurosis. They are too many to list, but the bottom line is, they work. Whether they're yelling, singing, or laying down leads, they fit their songs. And that in itself is fitting.