The London pop duo’s impulse to pare down seems admirable, but the songs can be monotonous.

Oh Wonder: No One Else Can Wear Your Crown

No One Else Can Wear Your Crown

On the best-known song to feature Oh Wonder, you can barely hear them. The London duo lilt under the chorus of Lil Uzi Vert’s “The Way Life Goes,” a sample that morphs their original track “Landslide” from a hazy flicker into a surging, snaking beat. It’s a reminder of what’s missing in a lot of Oh Wonder’s own music. They engineer delicate vocal electro-pop tracks, sleeker than bedroom pop, with an earnestness that separates them from algorithmic chillwave. On their latest album, No One Else Can Wear Your Crown, their elegant, muted production seems destined to be background noise; the stray lyrics that do catch the attention can be treacly. Each song is a pleasant listen that dissolves forgettably into the next.
This may be because the singers fail to translate their intentions. “Dust,” the album’s opener, is meant to represent “the state of the world and the craziness of capitalism,” the duo told Billboard. Instead, the lyrics sound like a hotboxed dorm room: “Don’t you think it’s kind of funny, the way we spin across the sun?” they sing. “We’re all made up of each other, from dust to dust to dust.” “Hallelujah” builds on yawning violins, ready to soundtrack Disney’s next princess movie: “There’s a crown, covered in glitter and gold/I’m going to wear it, whether you like it or not.” The cloying statements make you want to tune out, and the liquified pianos and fluttering drums don’t offer much interest, either.
That spareness is intentional: These songs aren’t hollowed out, but purposefully small. “We will write a song on the piano, take it into the studio, and then layer it up with as many as 200 sounds, strip it back to maybe 10 and that’s the finished album,” band member Josephine Vander Gucht once said of their songwriting process. The impulse to pare down seems admirable, but the songs can be monotonous—tightly constructed loops of synth and kick drums, skeletal pulses that brace flurries of light instruments. The record swishes from track to track, building the kind of soundscape most often associated with coffeeshops or lo-fi beats playlists. When the synthetic strings do break through, they can overpower the dominating quiet: “I Wish I Never Met You” and “Happy” suffer from similar onslaughts of violin.
The best moments of songwriting reach for nuance and maturity. “Happy” is a gauzy, piano-flecked ode to an ex’s new relationship: “It’s good to see you loved/Let’s call it even,” the duo coo. “Better Now” conjures concrete images to tell the story of a family member awaiting a difficult childbirth: a hospital vending machine, cups of cold coffee, the endless bleeps of machines. Oh Wonder’s musical project works when the simplicity of the writing matches the simplicity of the sound. When the former element tilts out of sync—gaudy, cliché lyrics about holding cards to chests and feeling “blindsided by love”—the record caves in on itself.


God Don’t Never Change is an 11-song ode to the great blues howler and gospel progenitor Blind Willie Johnson, including contributions from Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, and more.

Various Artists: God Don't Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson

What's the point of a tribute album? Is it to show how the influence of an icon has spread, seeping into and informing far-flung styles that then sprawl from the center like branches of a healthy family tree? Is it to use the star power of gathered singers and bands to raise the reputation of some underserved idol, giving a second chance to the perpetually overlooked? Or, more cynically, is it a label-based attempt to package together a potpourri of disparate artists and capitalize on their disconnected fanbases and that of the tribute subject?
God Don’t Never Change, an 11-song ode to the great blues howler and gospel progenitor Blind Willie Johnson, feels a little like all of those at once. Produced by tribute-compilation veteran Jeffrey Gaskill, powered by an ambitious crowdfunding campaign, and issued by roots imprint Alligator Records, God Don’t Never Change attempts to grapple with Johnson’s impact on popular artists and genre purists alike. Crossover giants such as Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, and Sinéad O’Connor share the tracklist with gospel- and blues-based acts, from the institutional Blind Boys of Alabama to North Mississippi Allstar leader Luther Dickinson. It is, as with almost all tribute records, an uneven listen. Still, it's a fine homage to Johnson’s brutally honest, occasionally inspirational songs that leaves some deep questions about how far his influence goes.
Many of these interpretations are excellent, reflecting music’s evolutionary arc since Johnson’s time and the idiosyncratic styles of these performers themselves. Waits, for instance, is perfect for "The Soul of a Man," a song that questions why we’re here and what "we" even are. Backed by childlike harmonies, parlor piano, and heavy handclaps, it's a joyful lecture delivered under the auspices of a sweltering summer revival. (His junkyard moan through "John the Revelator," however, is so melodramatic it seems glib.) And exalting above his ragged slide work and the dainty whistle of a fife, Dickinson sounds like the Delta doppelgänger of Devendra Banhart, his voice curling skyward. It’s an exquisite, personal update.
The real highlight arrives with Sinéad O’Connor’s "Trouble Will Soon Be Over," a song that’s a sermon about how the struggles of this life will sublimate into redemption when it’s over. O’Connor sings of death as sweet relief here, her resilient voice rising over a guitar line that drones more like the blues of West Africa than those of Johnson’s central Texas. That subtle transnational nod is a sharp tribute to the durability and relevance of these songs. Nearly a century after many of these numbers were written, we’re still grappling with the worries of Johnson’s world, which he articulated with such grace and aired with such grit.
That realization is a damning one for God Don’t Never Change, a collection that leaves so much on the table in terms of possibility. Many of these selections are too on-the-nose, kowtowing to Johnson’s legacy as though kneeling before his corpse at a wake. Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks simply redeliver "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning," while Maria McKee belts "Let Your Light Shine on Me" as an act of historical anachronism. God Don’t Never Change ends with the impression that there’s work to be done, interpretations yet left to hear. Johnson’s songs were often elliptical and vague; see, his largely instrumental masterpiece, "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground." But God Don’t Never Change never really opens itself up beyond obvious Americana. What does rap in 2016 have to say about Blind Willie Johnson? Or metal? Or a sample-driven producer? Plenty, I’d wager. It’s reflexive and naïve to think his influence ends here.
The paleness of the entire enterprise only exacerbates that feeling. Yes, the Blind Boys ease their way through the emotional turmoil of "Mother’s Children Have a Hard Time," but every other player of color here (and there are very few) is tucked into the background, like the hand-clapping Mike Mattison or the fife-adding Shardé Thomas. The only black-led act is the most polite and polished of the entire set, with Waits and O’Connor left to raise the set’s real ruckus. If the point of a tribute album is to show how an artist’s work has metastasized and impacted others, God Don’t Never Change allows a too narrow of a window for doing so.


An all-star cast pays tribute to the glam-rock icon, but their interpretations too often read angst and torpor in place of the singer’s pomp and frivolity.

Various Artists: *Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex *

During his brief, glorious early ’70s peak, it seemed that Marc Bolan could send seismic tremors through the universe with delectable nonchalance. He switched from Tolkien-esque freak folk to Chuck Berry boogie in the span of an album. On a whim, he dabbed some glitter on his cheekbones before a Top of the Pops performance that was—per Simon Reynolds’ Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy—“the spark that ignited the glam explosion.” His greatest singles feel tossed off with all the deliberation of a shake of his curly locks.
By comparison, the long fermenting Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex feels far more studied, pondered, and brooded over. Even with big names like Kesha, U2, Elton John, Father John Misty, Joan Jett, and Nick Cave swelling out this two-disc set, it sounds oddly anonymous. Overseen by pop music’s great magpie, the late Hal Willner, it follows in the producer’s style of pulling together an eclectic roster of talents to highlight nearly forgotten artists like Nino Rota, Kurt Weill, and Harold Arlen, proffering a gateway drug to curious listeners. He could dig deep for talent: A 1988 tribute to the music of vintage Disney films featured Tom Waits, the Replacements, and Sun Ra offering unorthodox takes on those intimately familiar songs. A Hal Willner compilation was, in the words of one estimation, “a place of scary, monumental meetings [that] Willner... made a career of turning into art.”
The “monumental meetings” underpinning Angelheaded Hipster had been underway for some time. Arriving almost five months after his death from COVID-19 complications, the set was first mentioned in a 2017 Times profile of Willner, with him in the studio with Marc Almond and Foetus’ J.G. Thirwell. The story finds Almond “worried” about the end results, but the former Soft Cell singer delivers a dramatic reading set against a backdrop of beatnik walking bassline, quivering strings, and outbursts of tango. Risk-taking, insouciant in its mashing of genre, this version of “Teenage Dream” is a classic Willner soundclash.
That daredevil spirit is in short order elsewhere. Hoping for “TiK ToK”-era Kesha to nail a frothy couplet like “I drive a Rolls-Royce/’Cuz it's good for my voice,” we instead get heavy-metal karaoke Kesha on the plodding and overwrought “Children of the Revolution.” Despite the teaming of two of the biggest dynasties in pop and rock, U2 and Sir Elton John (a pal of Bolan and early glam apostle) give a flaccid read of “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” Between Bono’s low-energy vocal and John’s piano serving as mere backdrop, they turn one of glam rock’s crunchiest singles into solemn porridge. The less said about Todd Rundgren and David Johansen’s contributions, the better.
The most intriguing wrinkle of the set is the influx of country, as on Lucinda Williams’ twangy take on “Life’s a Gas.” Joan Jett does “Jeepster” as a full-on honky-tonk number, with Jett delivering all the sexual menace of the kicker “I’m gonna suck ya!,” and King Khan keeps “I Love to Boogie” firmly in the roadhouse. Gentle interpretations like Devendra Banhart’s dreamy “Scenescof” and Gabby Moreno’s exotica-tinged “Beltane Walk” also add nuance to the man’s music. Emily Haines delivers a haunted “Ballrooms of Mars,” but the version is derailed by a baffling intrusion of Gustav Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War,” from The Planets.
But the oddest development of Angelheaded Hipster is that most of the 20-plus participants opt to inject angst and torpor into Bolan rather than revel in his pomp and frivolity. Beth Orton sings each syllable of “Hippy Gumbo” like she’s wringing out laundry. Nick Cave is well suited for the poignant ballad “Cosmic Dancer,” but where Bolan grows increasingly lithe and light as the song takes flight, Cave remains leaden in his delivery, singing the word “balloon” as if attaching an anvil to one. And how did Father John Misty pass up the chance to refer to himself in the third person? Instead he stays true to “Bolan likes to rock now” on a version of “Main Man” that’s more Jackson Browne than Bolan.
In the same Willner profile, he admits: “I don’t know what inspires people now. Do these last two generations have heroes? I’m not sure they do.” The packed roster shows that Bolan remains a hero to musicians and a tragic icon, dead before the age of 30. Sadly, Willner’s last great tribute album tells us little about its subject. Angelheaded Hipster suggests that digging into Bolan’s depths might ultimately be a fool's errand; the singer’s genius was in laying everything out on a coy, glittery surface, making it all sound so effortless.

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French-British producer Jean Cousin draws despair and wonder from within the vast unfeeling of digital communication.

Mise En Abyme

“You are, and will always be, your depression,” intones a computer-synthesized voice on Joni Void's song “Deep Impression.” It's the exact opposite of what you'll hear in therapy, where the goal, more or less, is to separate what you feel and what you are, so that you might more easily bear the former. But there is value, and humor, in naming the wrong thing, the deep and abiding fear, especially when you force a robot to speak it.
Mise En Abyme, the second album Jean Cousin has released as Joni Void, liquefies many of the jagged edges jutting up from 2017's Selfless. The Montreal-based producer still collages—the album is constructed from sound sources both intimate, like home movies, and nonspecific, like dial tones—but the rocky, queasy slosh that characterized the project's debut abates. Selfless sounded like it was gnashing its teeth, a fantasyland of tension and bruxism. Mise En Abyme subsumes that anxiety into a series of songs that court despair and wonder with equal fervor.
Vocals abound on the album's first side, giving the ear something to grip even when they add more texture than narrative. "Dysfunctional Helper" layers a wordless melody sung by Ayuko Goto (also known as Noah, who appeared on Selfless) over a squeaking industrial beat, emphasizing the sanctuary that the voice and the act of singing, even idly, can create in the mind. The percussion suggests urban chaos, while the voice induces calm. "Lov-Ender" braids samples of Montreal musician YlangYlang's voice into psychedelic polyrhythms. Both songs find their beat over time, rather than being led by it. Human noise directs the machine sound, instead of the other way around.
The most striking vocal moments on Mise En Abyme come during "Abusers," a song featuring the voice of Montreal-based experimental harpist Sarah Pagé. She sings diffusely, like Goto and Debard, but approximates words that can't quite be made out. Consonants border vowels, daring the ear to tease out language, but language doesn't come. Pagé's performance grows more agitated over her gentle accompaniment until it peaks in a ragged scream, a non-verbal middle finger to the pervasive trend of using women's voices as set dressing in electronic music. She refuses to be pleasant decoration; she strains against the song until she breaks open its mold.
If the record's first half concerns vocal communication, side B stages its breakdown. On "No Reply," Joni Void samples answering machine messages, dial-up modems, and the unmistakable glitchy static old cell phones used to cast across nearby speakers just before receiving a call or text. These are obsolete sounds of anticipation and disappointment, sounds heard playing phone tag on a landline or picking up the receiver while someone else in the house tried to connect to the internet. Maybe they sound like alien noise to someone who's only known one millennium, but Joni Void doesn't aim for nostalgia here; "No Reply" doesn't fetishize these sounds, but attempts to locate the self within their milieu, pinging old memories and tracing them forward to the present. What bodily response does a busy tone prompt? What old tension or melancholy does it dredge up in the nervous system?
Cousin’s own voice appears on "Voix Sans Issue," a piece that spills vocal notes into a Shepard tone swoop, but it's that text-to-speech track "Deep Impression" where the producer's presence is most acutely felt. There's something deeply funny about loading lyrics into a Vocaloid; Joni Void's words rhyme like they're meant to be rapped, and yet a simple voice program cannot rap, cannot place extra emphasis on given words or swing them around the beat. The computerized performance is clumsy, lacking spontaneity and specificity, yet it remains vulnerable, a frank confession of pain distanced by ventriloquism.
Within the robotic monologue, Joni Void preempts this very review: "I don't have time for you critics/Whatever you think of this song/It's absolutely wrong… You're giving a rating to my suffering." I am, and I'm sorry. Here we are in hell, a place where we offer our traumas to advertising companies and hope we reap enough reward to pay rent. But between the measurements of technocrats, there is still space, I think, for genuine communication. There's the chance to hear data transformed into music and feel music ring in the body, where the trackers can't yet reach. There is still experience that can't be atomized and analyzed, however slippery it may be even to those feeling it. Mise En Abyme hunts that sensation of flux and liminality, unearthing warmth in a landscape of paranoia.


Gone is Gone is a power trio made of key members from Mastodon, Queens of the Stone Age, and the recently reactivated At the Drive-In.

Gone is Gone

“It’s not a supergroup!” is the “it’s not a tumor!” of the rock world—a denial delivered instinctively and vociferously whenever preeminent players band together. In the case of Gone Is Gone, you have members of three of this millennium’s most significant crossover bands in the realm of metal, hard rock and post-hardcore: bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders of Mastodon, guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen of Queens of the Stone Age, and drummer Tony Hajjar of the recently reactivated At the Drive-In. Perhaps they’re not the most marquee members of their respective units, but in terms of collective experience and strength, they’ve certainly earned the right to wear capes.
But in advance interviews, Gone Is Gone predictably downplay any such self-aggrandizing descriptors—for them, this group is simply an opportunity for some old pals to finally make music together free of deadline pressure and promo-cycle demands. Gone Is Gone is the long-gestating byproduct of Hajjar’s day job composing video-game and movie-trailer themes with keyboardist/guitarist Mike Zarin. (Perhaps you’ve blown up a city in Splinter Cell: Blacklist to one of their dystopian synthscapes.) When the duo invited Van Leeuwen to embellish some pieces they had been working on, they saw the potential to turn the project into a proper band. But while Sanders was actually the last piece of the puzzle to be placed, his imposing presence sets the angst-ridden tone for the band’s debut mini-LP.
In Mastodon, Sanders is one of three vocalists fighting for space, and on that band’s most recent records, he’s been winning. So while Gone Is Gone’s soundtrack origins may lend it a different, more atmospheric feel than a Mastodon record, it’s a logical extension of the accessible, artfully rendered alt-metal Sanders’ main band has been inching toward in recent years. Essentially, Gone Is Gone’s relationship to Mastodon is akin to that of A Perfect Circle to Tool, or Audioslave to Soundgarden and Rage Against the Machine. In other words, it’s easy enough to identify the pedigree involved, but everything is more meticulous and controlled—and, ultimately, too willing to play by the modern-rock radio playbook.
Sanders, naturally, doesn’t scream with the same guttural intensity he did 15 years ago, but his vocal cords nonetheless bear the battle scars of someone who has been screaming for 15 years. And while the opening “Violescent” shows he’s still most at home growling atop plutonium-grade riffage, his voice is made more pliable through Van Leeuwen’s mercurial, Cure-like guitar ripples and destabilizing solos (like the shortwave-frequencied fretwork that drives the song to its earthquaking climax). But without a Brent Hinds to out-shout, or a more tuneful foil like Brann Dailor to gild the melodies, Sanders’ voice strains as he tries to push pained power ballads like “Starlight” and “This Chapter” into the stratosphere. The songs only achieve true lift-off when Sanders frees himself of that burden and the band flex their instrumental muscle on the crescendoing codas.
Gone Is Gone boasts other such jolts of exhilaration—like the industrialized throb of “Praying From the Danger” or the berserker mid-section of “One Divided.” But that’s ultimately all they are: fleeting, pulse-boosting moments that inevitably recede into the album’s morose, monochromatic mood. The attention to texture and narrative devices (in the form of two ambient, spoken-word interludes) suggests the principals have designs to make GIG more than just another gig. But while they’ve successfully siphoned the musical and conceptual heft of their source bands, they’ve forsaken their mastery of momentum. In lieu of Mastodon’s restless, village-pillaging gallop, QOTSA’s motorik charge, or At the Drive-In’s convulsive energy, the songs here mostly chug along in a mid-tempo, dubwise gait that keeps the chaos contained even as the levels shoot into the red. For all the champion horsepower in their stable, Gone Is Gone just never really gets going.


After eight albums of solid if predictable psych-folk, Woods shake up their pastoral sound a bit, introducing notes of reggae and African jazz.

Woods: City Sun Eater in the River of Light

City Sun Eater in the River of Light

After eight albums of solid, if ever-more-predictable, psych-folk in about as many years, do Woods have anything new to offer? The band answers that question before anybody can ask it on City Sun Eater in the River of Light, which opens with the most surprising departure of their entire discography: “Sun City Creeps,” a detour into reggae and African jazz, complete with island horns, trebly guitars and the loose, first-take feel of an early Studio One session. It’s a knockout song, even before the pace quickens during its jammy payoff stretch, yet the group adopts these tropical sounds so naturally that it never feels like they’re showing off. You can count on one hand the number of American rock bands that could tastefully pull off this sort of stylistic gambit—Calexico; maybe My Morning Jacket. Turns out Woods is one of them.
An opener like that stirs real excitement, and the assurance that the band hasn’t grown complacent is particularly well-timed, coming as it does after 2014’s With Light and With Love, a characteristically enjoyable but familiar-on-arrival LP that left even many Woods loyalists longing for a shakeup. To be sure, City Sun Eater isn’t a complete reinvention, either—it’s largely rooted in the same '60s pop and druggy Americana that’s defined all the band's records—but periodic shadings of reggae give the record a character of its own. Dubby organs lead “Can’t See At All,” which breathes like a classic Lee Perry track. Some moaning backing vocals are tracked so closely they sound like a wailing electronic gizmo, exactly the kind of lo-fi studio trickery that dub producers played with on their early efforts. Stately horns add gravity to the bongo-guided “The Take,” another number that patiently builds to a tweaked-out climax.
All of those tracks work because they’re never played as straight genre experiments; they all sound first and foremost like Woods songs, even when they draw from a different vocabulary than any that came before. And like all of Woods’ recent albums, City Sun Eater is generously packed with pop songs, too. With its delirious wah-wah guitars, closer “Hollow Home” imagines what a George Harrison cover of “Just Like Heaven” might have sounded like (utterly joyous, as expected). The song most guaranteed to make audiences twirl in the mud at their live shows, “Politics of Free” pairs the album’s pluckiest guitars and cheeriest tempo with a parade of uplifting aphorisms: “Find the time to separate your work life from relief/ Constellations in the summer sky/ In a world of shit/ Let’s tune out.”
For most acts, “Politics” would be the clear single, but Woods have never been much of a singles band. They don’t have much to gain from them, since singer Jeremy Earl’s thin voice still makes them a hard sell for wider audiences. On the group's scrappy early efforts it was easy to write off that untrained voice as part of the group’s rumpled charm, but as their albums have grown more deliberate, his anemic falsetto has become more of a nuisance—it’s the only one-note instrument in an act that otherwise wrings so much nuance out of all the other ones. Nine albums in, Woods are still turning out great tunes while tapping new muses, and that’s worth celebrating. But how great would it be if they had a singer who could really do them justice?


Another tentative comeback album from the 90s giant, Mixed Race's best moments look back to Tricky's bleak peak-period work.

Mixed Race

The frustrating thing about being a Tricky fan is that he's a guy who knows damn well where his talents lie, and yet he chooses to ignore them. The list of things Tricky does poorly (rock, house, singer-songwriter pop, ska, disco, etc.) is much longer than the list of things he does well (which basically amounts to the sound he invented and perfected on the music he released between 1995 and 1999). For 10 years, he's refused to accept that an inimitable style can be a strength as much a limitation, a foundation to build from rather than something to reject as predictable. His music's suffered horribly thanks to many, many failed attempts to show off a versatility that just isn't there.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Tricky decided to ditch his dank, anxiety-ridden, and reputation-making brand of UK hip-hop. Critics had been carping that he'd devolved to pastiching himself on records like 1998's Angels With Dirty Faces. Fans wondered if his relentlessly bleak sound had anywhere left to go. Stretching the formula might not have been such a bad idea. Unfortunately Tricky's reinvention was a little more scorched-earth than anyone expected. On 2001's execrable Blowback and 2003's ever-so-slightly-less-awful Vulnerable, he flipped both middle fingers at his audience while running straight into the worst music of his career, a sad stew of lazily executed alt-rock and dance-pop clichés. Tricky had often been blasted for having a one-note sound, but these failed attempts at schizoid genre-mixing proved that at least he'd really believed in that one note.
On 2008's Knowle West Boy and the new Mixed Race, the two tentative comeback albums he's released since the Blowback/Vulnerable fiasco, the standout tracks continue to look back to Tricky's bleaker (and better) 90s records. His music sounds as visceral and committed as ever when he's working with materials he's mastered: hip-hop, dub, urban dread. And a few Mixed Race tracks do give up the goods: The ravaged voice that sounds both sexy and sinister; the oppressive atmosphere he can still conjure effortlessly; the way his slow, bleary rapping meshes so beautifully with low-key female vocalists. On opener "Every Day", he adds a new and blessedly subtle country blues vibe, and it suggests that, hey, maybe he really can expand his music without totally ditching what makes it special.
But no, he'd still rather try his hand at spacey Kompakt-esque techno-disco ("Really Real") or Middle Eastern music ("Hakim"), even though the evidence suggests he's got very little feel for either. And those are the album's more successful stabs at style hopping. There's also the anemic riff on Daft Punk ("Kingston Logic") and the lifeless hip-house track he flogs with a big cheesy hunk of Henry Mancini's "Peter Gunn Theme" ("Murder Weapon"). True, these missteps aren't as embarrassing as the ones on Blowback or Vulnerable. For one thing, there's no Alanis Morissette collaboration, and Tricky seems to have at least accepted that his music only works when he goes for darkness, eeriness, creepiness, whatever. But his attempts at rock or club music invariably have the touchy-feely quality of a dabbler who's moved out of his comfort zone but lacks the craft or confidence to pull it off. At this point, he's released enough terrible-to-mediocre records that releasing a strong ten-track album in the vein of his old stuff wouldn't be blasted as backpedaling. It'd be hailed as a return to form from the long-suffering. Until he realizes that, we'll continue to get albums like Mixed Race: Mostly a failure, but with enough glimmers of a true comeback to tease fans into checking out the next one.


The sixth album from Ian Svenonius’ rock group Chain and the Gang could be his sharpest set of ironic arguments yet. Svenonius’ hot-wired backing band whips his clever tunes into tornados.

Experimental Music

Irony can be too ironic. Pile it on thick and it can blur meaning, or become a fake cover for meaninglessness. This has never been a problem for Ian Svenonius. As a singer and songwriter, he’s often an ironist, but his lyrics have clear, pithy messages, with few extraneous musings or puzzling tangents. Whether he sincerely believes his messages remains an open question, and that gray area deepens his often-simple songs. But what his words are about is rarely a matter of confusion.
Experimental Music, the sixth album by Svenonius’ group Chain and the Gang, could be his sharpest set of ironic arguments yet. Every track has a solid thesis that Svenonius explicates through laser-focused verses and bold choruses. Most of his theses are small, clever tweaks of clichés that rebuke conventional wisdom. In some cases, these inversions are just fun novelties. In “Temporary Insanity,” Svenonius flips the meaning of impermanence: “I’m temporarily insane since I don’t know when... In the daytime I’m a nutcase/At night I’m a mental disgrace/Been this way my whole life.”
But more often, the songs on Experimental Music use simple subversion for broader profundity. By changing just one word in a historical adage, Svenonius turns “Rome” from a song about ancient times into an anthem for action during dire political eras. “Rome wasn't burnt in a day...It took a lot of time; people had to bring their fire,” Svenonius insists. “It took persistence, it took resistance.” Though the song was written before the 2016 election, it’s easy to hear it as a contemporary call to arms—“It’s time to take a match!/It’s time to return!”—and a reminder that even our current empire can be conquered if we stick to it.
As Svenonius fans the flames, these fires are lit by one of the hottest Chain and the Gang lineups so far. He’s always treated the group like a small-scale version of Mark E. Smith’s the Fall, enlisting whomever can bring the proper racket to his primal tunes. But this configuration might be his platonic ideal. The six-piece band features vital players from Detroit’s current underground, including Fred Thomas and Shelley Salant of Tyvek, and Danny Kroha of the Gories. Recording live to four-track tape, they whip Svenonius’ tunes into tornados, their banged-out beats and red-bleeding solos forging classic garage-punk in the vein of the Oblivians or Billy Childish’s Thee Headcoats (a direction hinted at on June’s Best of Crime Rock, a reworking of previous Chain songs by a different lineup).
The music this lineup cranks out is so hot-wired that Svenonius can easily mine it for ironic tensions. Take the title track, one of the funniest things Chain and the Gang has ever done. Svenonius treats the avant-garde like a teen idol—“Experimental music made me feel so free/Walking down the beach with my baby”—as the band doles out peppy 1950s pop. There are some obvious punchlines, like when Svenonius calls out “it goes like this!” and keyboardist Amber Fellows responds with a solo barely deviating from the base melody. Yet praising experimental music’s rejection of the marketplace clearly falls in line with Svenonius’ political stances. Is he celebrating or mocking? At best, he does both with equal conviction, resolving opposites by fully committing to both sides.
Still, Svenonius can also pick a team, and throughout Experimental Music he sides with outcasts and nonconformists. In “The Logic of the Night”—heard previously in a mellower mode on Best of Crime Rock—he pits day-job drones against dark-dwelling subversives. Meanwhile, during “I Hate Winners,” he proudly assumes the mantle of loser: “I promise you baby I’ll only lose/I’ll never win, I’m not one of them.” And over the rolling piano notes of “Don’t Make Me Dream,” Svenonius rejects the entire concept of ambition. “They said you can be anything you wanna be,” he sings with a skeptical snarl. “But I don’t wanna, no don’t make me dream.”
The most moving track on Experimental Music turns all his irony into real emotion. On “Don’t Scare the Ghost Away,” Svenonius encounters a ghost who’s frightened of him, a victim of chronic depression who killed himself and his family. “Now he stalks the Earth trying to hold on to that pain for eternity,” Svenonius sings. “I tried to get near to say, ‘It’s ok’/But when I got too close, that ghost went away.” It’s a rare sentimental note, and it feels sincere, despite being about someone who doesn’t actually exist. Which is pretty ironic, if you think about it.


The Portland power-pop artist covers a set of previously unreleased Jon Brion recordings that showcases the producer/composer’s underrated songwriting chops.

Troper Sings Brion

“Why finish a song when you can start a new one?” Jon Brion once quipped to the New York Times Magazine. It was 2003, and he was wrapping work on Fiona Apple’s as-yet unnamed third record. Once that was complete, he told the interviewer, he would focus on his own music. A couple years prior, he had self-released his solo debut, Meaningless. The album featured his unshowy mastery of vintage instruments and a compositional sense indebted to the legendary singer/songwriters of ’70s Los Angeles: the exact qualities that had made Brion an in-demand session player, writer, and producer. But his label declined to put it out. Some combination of that experience, his perfectionism, and a steady stream of outside work kept him from ever releasing a follow-up.
But new Brion material did appear, in a sense. In 2006, a collection of his demos hit the blogopshere. They were purportedly recorded in 1991 and 1995, before and after he moved to Los Angeles. A loose and lo-fi set of earnest, harmonically sophisticated pop-rock, the demos were revelatory to devotees of what Brion himself termed “unpopular pop.” Portland musician Mo Troper—who first encountered Brion via his hired-gun guitar on Jellyfish’s 1993 cult LP Spilt Milk—is one of those devotees. His latest album, Troper Sings Brion, is a tribute with a twist: These are all songs that Brion never officially released. Troper’s recent output has tended toward deconstruction: 90-second doses of pitch-shifted and saturated power-pop. But here, he plays things mostly straight. Like Harry Nilsson did on the LP that this album’s title and Emma Parry’s cover art riff on, Troper puts his idiosyncrasies in service of the material. In doing so, he posits Jon Brion not as a composer or vibes merchant, but as an L.A. songwriter of the first order.
Troper comes out swinging with “Into the Atlantic,” Brion’s sardonic tour of the recording-industry hellscape. There’s no demo recording of this song available, just a few stripped-down live bootlegs, so Troper weaves a pocket symphony around Brion’s quarter-note piano: Harp, Mellotron, and squeezebox dip in and out of the mix. The result would fit snugly on a record by Aimee Mann, who fought the same label battles as Brion in the ‘90s, sometimes alongside him. Here, the song’s ambivalence about its own fate makes it the ideal intro for a set of unreleased tunes: “And when it's time to baptize your own baby/Never mind that dorsal fin/And throw the little morsel in.”
Troper Sings Brion teems with ambivalence, whether it’s toward the recording industry or a romantic relationship. (After enough listens, the two subjects start to blur.) The phenomenal “Love of My Life (So Far)” is another track that Troper arranged based on an old bootleg. He transforms it as uptempo, intricate power-pop without a single seam showing. He applies his trademark vocal varispeed until he’s dancing on the ceiling, luxuriating in Brion’s lyrical switchbacks and internal rhyme. “Love is great when there's no restraint/And it's not for the faint of heart,” he sighs. It’s followed by “Any Other Way,” a buzzy recessional about the embrace of suffering. “When it's words that I hope for/You've got nothing to say,” Troper sings, doodling little Brian May-style figures, “And I wouldn't have it any other way.” He sounds like he’s on a parade float.
It’s not the kind of pose Troper typically hits. On 2022’s MTV, he jammed his power-pop formalism into an overloaded circuit, resulting in a blown-out bedroom-indie record that veered from aching intimacy to prickly distance: Nilsson and Newman, fighting over the steering wheel. But Brion’s compositions permit Troper some patience. And in return, he brings an immediacy to these decades-old songs. Not that this bargain always pays off. The dour “Not Ready Yet” was a slog when Eels first recorded it for 1996’s Beautiful Freak (which Brion co-produced). Troper’s seven-minute version—still shorter and less splenetic than Brion’s demo—ends up stuck in the same tar pit as its predecessors. And while the torch song “Through With You” has its charms (particularly the hesitant piano, like he’s sight-reading the chords), the bridge—which ends on the line “I hear you don’t like men”—feels like a transplant from a darker character study.
But elsewhere, that patience is rewarded. “Stop the World” replaces the demo’s New Age electric piano with acoustic guitar, transplanting Brion’s gorgeous topline into a campfire ballad that could be a Figure 8 B-side. Troper’s version of “No One Can Hurt Me,” originally released in 1994 by Brion’s short-lived band the Grays, takes Brion’s psychedelic guitar motif as license for power balladry, tracking a dual-guitar solo that rocks sincerely. It’s these excursions that make his returns to home base—the lovestruck jangle-pop of “Citgo Sign,” the glee-club Beach Boys homage “Pray for Rain”—that much richer. Just like Brion, the prolific Troper knows the joy of starting a new song. But finishing some is pretty great, too.


YYYs- and blogger-approved Montreal band finally has its muscular 2006 EP issued in the States.

Land of Talk: Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP

Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP

They don't make many bands like Pretty Girls Make Graves anymore. The Seattle quintet probably stopped being cool in a trendy sense around the time I got turned onto them, a bit after 2003's The New Romance. As great as that record was, it showed a band mellowing and growing up in a way that made their frantic 2002 debut, Good Health, sound even better. Third album Elan Vital was even more mature, and now, this June, one of indie rock's best-named groups is set to break up. And I think I'm starting to go bald. Pretty fucking depressing.
But still not as depressing as all the limp indie pop copyists filling the Pitchfork mailbox. Good thing there's Montreal trio Land of Talk to keep rocking out in PGMG's harried post-hardcore idiom. Frontwoman Elizabeth Powell's smoldering, harmonically complex fretwork and assured vocals help distinguish Land of Talk from the multi-layered massiveness of their city's best-known indie collectives. Instead, think Toronto's Tokyo Police Club with less treble and no handclaps, the Strokes, or sci-fi. Originally released in Canada last year, Land of Talk's blogger-beloved debut mini-album should finally hit U.S. stores like an unseasonably hot North wind.
While the Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP is a muscular record with gut-level riffs and fist-pumping choruses, it gets there anything but directly; you know you like it long before you know why. See, it's tough to know what Powell's saying half the time, and her guitar-playing overloads on melody so that it ends up communicating mostly mood-- in a year without Marnie Stern and Charlotte Hatherley, her chops might've been the story. The rest of the band stands out most clearly when the songs downshift from urgent release to tense restraint: drummer Bucky Wheaton's portentous cymbal falls and bassist Chris McCarron's undulating groove on finale "Street Wheels", for example.
More often, Land of Talk storm ahead with the night at their heels, escaping lethargic beginnings on "Sea Foam" and getting buffeted by wind sound effects on "Breaxxbaxx". Somehow Powell finds a way to balance early Cat Power fragility and PJ Harvey volatility; whether mumbling indecipherably or singing about "fuckin' around," girls who "still piss their pants," or the dangers of drinking when already tired, she's always in command. Hard to believe she used to sing in a whispery pop group called Ele_K*. Then again, if Alanis Morissette taught us anything, it's that Canada is a land of reinvention. As PGMG's Andrea Zollo once observed, "When I turn it up loud/ Yeah, nothing else matters."


On his poignant second album, the multitalented singer-songwriter gives voice to the self-doubts that manifest in the wee hours of the morning.

A Change in Diet

In an interview from 2017, a 23-year-old Elliot Moss told Billboard he liked to work “after the world’s gone to bed.” On A Change in Diet, his second full-length album, the multitalented singer-songwriter gives voice to the creeping whispers of self-doubt that show up unannounced in the wee hours of the morning. Moss makes subdued electro-pop with a deceptively dark, almost despondent, bent — music that leans into the stark reality of those late-night ruminations, when the world seems dark and dreary and even the most innocuous details take on a foreboding significance.
For Moss, letting his mind wander is an opportunity to reflect on relationships, both past and present. On “Bodyintoshapes,” Moss repeats the titular refrain over softly pulsing synths, addressing a significant other he can’t get out of his head. “My mind is a razor,” Moss sighs, “and you’re looking like a thread.” The lyrics occasionally deviate into broad ambiguities or the platitudes of bad spoken-word poetry, as on album opener “July 4th” (“You and I, we’re a couple of fireworks/Falling from the sky”). But when the writing is specific, it’s often sharp and deftly evocative, particularly when Moss draws from personal memory, as on the plaintive, sparsely produced “A Change in Diner”: “We order coffee in a loud diner/Fitting words in between plates/And we brace/Wondering who'll be the one to stay.”
If the album suffers from any overarching issue, it’s a sense of sameness: Moss wrote and produced each song, and it sometimes seems like he’s not pushing himself far enough. Tracks build towards a climax that never materializes, often ending abruptly or tapering off lamely. Moss’ singing voice is pleasant enough, but not particularly strong, and he makes little effort to test its limits, preferring to rely on standard vocal processing tricks and his formidable ear for production. Moss’ other stylistic experiments fall a bit flat, like on “Smile in the Rain,'' a folkish indie anthem that sounds like a track from a completely different album.
But on the standout “Silver + Gold,” all of Moss’ considerable talents coalesce around a richly textured beat and soulful, straightforward lyrics (“Before us, I took a wrong turn down the wrong road/I closed my eyes and I gave up control”). Moss enjoyed a well-deserved bump in popularity in 2015 when a dance video set to his song “Slip” went viral, and he understands the power of thoughtfully produced visuals. In the video for “Silver + Gold” (Moss has a co-directing credit), he makes clear the themes of lost innocence and longing for simpler times he hints at on the album: in the final shot, a young man sheds his ski mask after breaking into his childhood home and grabs a miniature toy plane from his closet for one exultant last hurrah around the neighborhood. “I gave up control, I gave up control,” Moss croons repeatedly, as the camera pans to the character running through the streets in slo-mo and synths in the background settle down to a shimmer. He sounds like he’s comforting himself, finding solace in loosening up and letting the chips fall where they may. For better or for worse, he sounds resigned to his fate.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The prog metal band’s fifth album is exactly what you’d expect from a project over a decade in the making: a more mature, sometimes exciting collection that feels both overworked and undercooked.

Fear Inoculum

Tool are just King Crimson in Joker makeup. They thrive in an enormously popular world of polyrhythms and prurience; of Jungian philosophy and Bill Hicks memes; of pewter dragon statues with orbs in their mouths and guys telling you that DMT is actually a chemical in your brain. Forged in the mad-at-my-dad fires of ’90s post-grunge and nu-metal, the progressive metal quartet has sustained a decades-long career on equal parts technical precision and psychedelic bullshit. Their multi-part songs are loosely about embracing pain, grief, desire, transgression, until all your chakras are open and you know exactly why the pieces fit. They’ve been a punchline for years.
But ever since hiding a song at track 69 of their 1993 debut album, Tool have always been sort of in on the joke. A song on their second album Ænima dramatically recited the recipe for weed cookies in German, they have pulled many exhausting April Fool’s jokes on their fans, including one that claimed they were in a horrible bus accident and one that stated the famously apostatical lead singer Maynard James Keenan had quit the band and found Jesus. It’s just that these edgy, twisted, “funny” parts of Tool are empirically stupid. Sure, Keenan has a versatile, emotive voice that granted Tool an audience beyond metalheads. But what he’s actually singing about is and has always been the province of pseudo-spiritual stoners and gamer intellectualism. You see, “Forty Six & 2” is about the Jungian concept of the shadow, and “Rosetta Stoned” is about tripping out and seeing aliens. His trickster humor has curdled of late, culminating in Keenan writing a song in response to a bad Yelp review about his winery.
In recent years, Keenan has spoken to the press far more about his Arizona winery than Tool’s music. (Keenan is a very serious winemaker who, nevertheless, named his vineyard after a pubic wig.) Recording sessions for the band’s fifth album, Fear Inoculum, revolved around his grape harvesting schedule. His wine, his other bands Puscifer and A Perfect Circle, and his restless and enigmatic nature are, in part, the reasons behind the 13-year break between now and Tool’s previous album, 10,000 Days, a gap made almost mythic by the band’s absence from streaming services until earlier this year. The band’s discography roared back into the digital marketplace, smashing Billboard records in the process. Fear Inoculum arrives at a moment of high demand for Tool’s music, filling a vacuum they themselves created.
If there’s one thing that the 86 minutes of Fear Inoculum provides, it is the sound of four people making long, complicated songs together. There are hardly any overdubs, production flourishes, or additional instrumentation, just Keenan’s delicate howl, bassist Justin Chancellor, guitarist Adam Jones, and one of the most lauded drummers in modern rock, Danny Carey. The stripped-down purity of sound here means that everything hangs on the songs themselves, all of which run over 10 minutes, save for a few ambient interludes and a palate-cleansing, nearly five-minute Carey drum solo backed by a giant custom synth. You get what is expected of an album over a decade in the making: a more mature, sometimes exciting collection that feels both overworked and undercooked.
It is hard to parse the difference between which choices here are wise (Keenan taking a back seat to showcase the interplay of the band more) and which are stale (for all the band’s rhythmic exploration, they couldn’t find one new harmonic mode to play in?). One of Tool’s problems on Fear Inoculum is that, with few exceptions, the songs feel static and brittle. They don’t have the live-wire feel of 1996’s Ænima or 2001’s Lateralus, the album that Fear Inoculum sounds most in thrall to. Songs like the opening title track feel long because they exist in protracted straight lines of mechanical riffs, as if assembled through an instruction manual. The hybridization that made Tool so popular on the radio in the late ’90s has rusted: They are part stoner metal, part prog rock, part mainstream metal, all working in ignorance and opposition to each other.
Things do come together a few times. The 15-minute closer “7empest” brings the biggest fireworks from Carey and Jones, the two undoubted stars of the album, adding alluring melody and texture to these bloated epics. But the highlight far and away is “Invincible,” with Keenan singing a revealing refrain about a struggle to “remain relevant” and “consequential.” It feels vulnerable in a new way, a lyric that finally doesn’t come from a defensive, get-off-my-lawn stance. And yet there’s still that Morrissey-level smugness when looking back at his glory years: “The things we’ve done/Caligula would grin.” That line lands poorly in light of a 2018 allegation from a woman on Twitter who claimed Keenan sexually assaulted her in 2000 when she was 17, an accusation that Keenan has denied.
“Invincible” builds to a climax where all the polymeter comes together in a mezzo unison that feels like “Forty Six & 2” with a mute on it. The fact that the ending of “Invincible” doesn’t try to kick you in the ribs points to the larger issue: When Tool think they are using time as a psychedelic additive, it comes off as simple riff-repetition from a band that sounds tired. The stoners of Sleep or the experimentalists of Sumac own this lane of daring, hypnotic metal songs because they bring stakes; you hear people moving in on the instruments and ripping out the notes. Save for  Jones’ slide guitar solo, the 23 minutes that make up “Descending” and “Culling Voices” feel so barren and overwrought, you can practically see the band sitting on cushioned stools in the studio, quietly counting out the meter with polite head-nods.
What does the third decade look like for a band whose hit singles include “Prison Sex” and “Stinkfist”? It looks like an aging quartet betting on being calculating and precise, carefully reining things in and keeping everything familiar. Fear Inoculum could have come out any time in the last 13 years, or even the last 20 years. Above all, Fear Inoculum pays homage to Tool itself, a long-delayed encore that has fans racing back to the arena. In a recent interview, Keenan said that one of the main reasons this album took 13 years to make was fear, crippling self-doubt, and constant second-guessing. There’s no joke there, just a bit of self-reflective honesty, which is the one thing that helps keeps this hulking record afloat.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their first full-length for Rough Trade, the clattering duo Sleaford Mods remain bards of a Great Britain that is not in fact great, but sloppy, self-important, and wholly lacking in taste.

ENGLiSH TAPAS

English cuisine is hardly the horror show that it was in the 1970s—the British Isles are no longer a Michelin Star free zone—but the title of Sleaford Mods’ new album still raises a smile of recognition. For ENGLiSH TAPAS, they’ve upsized from Nottingham imprint Harbinger Sound to one of the most storied independent labels in history, Rough Trade. But vocalist Jason Williamson and producer Andrew Fearn still keep their gaze fixed in the direction of the discount aisle, bards of a Great Britain that is not in fact great, but sloppy, shallow, self-important, and wholly lacking in taste.
When Sleaford Mods broke out around 2013, Britain was in the grip of austerity, an economic philosophy applied by the Conservative-led government that seemed to inform both the duo’s downtrodden lyrical content and the pared-back clatter of their music. Those days, though, feel insipid compared to 2017’s geopolitical realities, this slow mudslide into state-sanctioned cruelty and small-minded authoritarianism. ENGLiSH TAPAS contains a few fleeting references to the state we are in, like nods to Brexit in “Cuddly” and “Dull.” A breathless rockabilly lurch, titled “Carlton Touts,” finds Williamson mock-mourning the dislodged elites that his lyrics once vilified: “Bring back the neolibs, I’m sorry/I didn’t fucking mean to pray for anarch-eh!” But it would be an overstatement to call this Sleaford Mods’ Brexit LP. Instead, ENGLiSH TAPAS mostly finds Williamson further honing the contours of his singular East Midlands vernacular, with special attention paid to the lifestyles of the tragic and washed-up modern male unable to meet even the low expectations that have been set for him.
“Army Nights” sets the tone, a bumptious opener sending up the special brand of idiocy that occurs in mess halls, stag dos, locker rooms—any place that men congregate without women. Elsewhere, Williamson returns over and over to the topic of alcohol and substance abuse—specifically, to the impulse to get out of one’s mind as a way of ignoring the misery of existence. “Messy Anywhere” is a lads-on-the-town chant that ironically undercuts itself at every stride. “Drayton Manored”—rhymed with “spannered,” meaning “extremely drunk”—is a lurid tale of home drinking, punctuated by the occasional taxi journey to restock, which Fearn mischievously illustrates with a supermarket checkout bleep. Williamson doesn’t hold back in his writing—quite the opposite. But he is never merciless, and his character sketches are shot through with a been-there wisdom, a sense of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I.
Williams is often typecast as a ranter, but ENGLiSH TAPAS is at least as funny as it is angry. Words erupt out of him with stray lines that stick: “Ya so dead in the head you got a job-facing life” (“Messy Anywhere”); “Car crash into the void of the Magna Carta” (“Snout”); “I had an organic chicken it was shit” (“Cuddly”). “Carlton Touts” boasts a chorus that somehow crams four good jokes into as many lines. But for all the humor, there is a palpable sense of desperation, a yawning emptiness that lies just beneath the surface. “Time Sands” muses on the drudgery of existence, the “quiet hell/Of cigarettes and trains and plastic and bad brains,” while “Dull” is utterly chilling, its dubby murk evoking cold English suffering as bleak as anything on PiL’s Metal Box.
Has success changed these perennial underdogs? A little, perhaps. “Just Like We Do” is one of the weaker tracks here, a swipe at experimental music snobs who hate the Mods just ‘cos they’re famous (although Williamson does have the grace to acknowledge that he “used to be one of ‘em”). But there remains an essential morality that runs throughout Sleaford Mods’ music, a reflexive siding with the oppressed. The album’s lead single “B.H.S.” addresses the disgraced tycoon Philip Green, who asset-stripped the department store he owned and fled to the Med leaving his staff without pensions. Williamson and Fearn conduct it as a jerky chicken dance, the sort of thing Pan’s People might have jigged around to on an old “Top of the Pops.”
Sleaford Mods remain literally unique. By turns, ENGLiSH TAPAS reminds you of acts as remote as Happy Mondays, Pet Shop Boys, and Crass, while never sounding anything like any of them. The closing “I Feel So Wrong” finds Williamson switching things up, his scattershot rant softening into a lightly weathered croon. It harkens back to some of the stylistic departures on 2015’s Key Markets—probably Sleaford Mods’ high-water mark to date, a record that opened up a few avenues that remain unexplored here. Still, if ENGLiSH TAPAS at times veers towards formula, it’s at least Sleaford Mods’ own formula, and one that continues to serve them well.


The Australian singer-songwriter’s new album is a collection of hooky, blistering break-up anthems.

The Answer Is Always Yes

Alex Lahey made her mark with 2017’s “Every Day’s the Weekend,” a sublime surf-rock ode to calling in sick and making out all day. The mood is buoyant, caution-to-the-wind; still, at the chorus, seconds before letting out a millennial whoop, she wonders aloud: “Are you leaving me?” Two years later, on 2019’s Best of Luck Club, she appeared smitten with a Pontiac-maintenance expert named Isabella, begging the girl, “Don’t you run out on me.” Even at her most joyful, Lahey was the poet laureate of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
This time it did. On the blistering breakup album The Answer Is Always Yes, Lahey is “a bit fucked up,” “drained,” with “blood filling [her] mouth”—and that’s just the first song. Isabella is evidently no longer in the picture, as indicated by the venomous lead single “Congratulations,” a reflection on a real-life annus horribilis in which not one but two of Lahey’s exes got married. She writes about indulging in ill-advised coping mechanisms and takes an ”unscripted vacation” at her mom’s place. The general vibe is best summarized by the Real Housewives’ Dorinda Medley: “I’ll tell ya how I’m doing: not well, bitch!”
Lahey’s fury is most convincing on “You’ll Never Get Your Money Back,” three minutes of power-pop perfection where she seethes over the indignity of an ex who mooches off her Netflix and still owes her rent. But along with the costs of moving out and splitting up belongings, the breakup saddles Lahey with spiritual debt. The slow-burn ballad “Permanent” spells out her newfound pessimism toward love: “Don’t want to get used to this/In case it’s something that I’ll miss.” And the gutting recollection of queer teen isolation on the grim, goth “They Wouldn’t Let Me In” lends real poignancy to the album’s bitter breakup anthems. Suppose you come out and suffer exclusion from group chats and school dances in hopes of one day marrying a woman. Then she dumps you. Goes on to marry some other woman. What was all that struggle for?
Sometimes the writing on The Answer Is Always Yes is more generic than you’d expect from Lahey. “I let you fake it ’cause I can’t take it,” she sings on the tepid “On the Way Down.” What’s more, her prior work can tower over these new songs; “Shit Talkin’” tries to milk mosh-pit catharsis from the familiar paranoia of “Do my friends hate me, or do I just need sleep?” but it simply doesn’t beat 2019’s “I Don’t Get Invited to Parties Anymore.” But Lahey’s gift for imagery shines on songs like the hazy acoustic trip “The Sky Is Melting,” a rowdy story of misadventure: She spars with a deadbeat pal while high on melted weed gummies, trading conspiracy theories and belting out corny yacht rock before vomiting into a ravine. As she contemplates the world through “eyes wider than dinner plates,” the texture of her unraveling is palpable, disquieting.
Closer “The Answer Is Always Yes” sets an equally skillful scene: Lahey’s sucking on a vape pen in the backseat of a car, on her way to her parents’ house for that aforementioned vacation. It’s a world-weary shrug of a song: better to have loved and lost, nothing ventured, etc. All that’s left is the meager assurance that tomorrow might be better: No, your friends don’t hate you. Yes, you need to sleep. Even when the second pillow’s vacant.


Mike Ladd's contribution to Thirsty Ear's Blue Series takes its title from and is inspired by the writings of Petrine Archer-Straw.

Negrophilia

Mike Ladd is one of contemporary hip-hop's great innovators, even though he often either operates on the very fringes of the genre or leaves it completely. He has a warm, versatile voice, and impressive flow, but more importantly, he has a lot of ideas. There are times when Ladd's vision and reach are so broad that his music can't quite keep up with it, but he's skilled enough to consistently produce satisfying albums-- twice creating absolutely brilliant ones: Welcome to the Afterfuture and Majesticons' Beauty Party.
Listening to Ladd, it's clear that unifying concepts-- such as the underground vs. mainstream rivalry/soap opera of the Infesticons and Majesticons projects-- are important to him, and his first entry in Thirsty Ear's Blue Series is no exception. Negrophilia takes its title from and is inspired by the writings of Petrine Archer-Straw, who wrote a boom with the same name (subtitled Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s). Her tome expounded upon the Paris art world's embrace of black American and African ex-pats-- and its co-option of their art and culture, which played heavily into Art Deco, cubism (earlier in the century), and Euro-jazz.
Now, if most artists were to say their album was influenced by a particular work of non-fiction, you might notice the influence in one song or a title or the cover art, but Ladd is serious. He weaves examinations of the book's themes-- as well as civil rights-related sound clips and references to both military and cultural imperialism and conflations of early 20th Century European art and modern American pop stars ("Brancusi sculpting Beyonce in Gold lame/ Blond negress")-- into his open-ended, heavily chopped and diced songs. The musical approach\xD0heavy improvisation revisited, reconfigured and reconstituted into dense sound collages yields plenty of interesting moments, but it also unfortunately marginalizes Ladd's rapping and also opens the door to passages that grow unfocused or cluttered.
Ladd does have a crack band at his disposal, with drummer Guillermo E. Brown (a frequent David S. Ware collaborator) helping to shape the record through editing and electronics, Vijay Iyer adding keyboards, winds by Andrew Lamb, Roy Campbell on trumpet, and Bruce Grant on tape loops. They set a promising tone with "Fieldwork (the Ethnographer's Daughter)", opening with dry hand percussion and acoustic guitar to simulate a field recording and settling on an ominous groove for Ladd to drop a few lines over, manipulating his voice even as it's attacked from all sides by squirming loops and fluttering woodwinds and horn. "Shake It" runs away with the show, though, with its off-kilter, lurching beat, outbursts of sax and trumpet and Ladd's tense flow.
"Worldwide Shrinkwrap (Contact Zones)" comes close to the glory of "Shake It", but questionable vocal processing-- including annoying pitch-shifting-- keeps it from getting there. That's indicative of the problems with the album's weaker tracks-- they wander through lengthy passages of wet noodle electro-jazz. Fortunately, the LP also has luxurious instrumental sections, such as the remarkable bassoon and trumpet duel of "Back at Ya," or Iyer's piano meditation and Campbell's dusty solo on "Sam and Milli Dine Out".
It's a shame that the disc isn't more laserly in its focus, because its best moments are stellar and exhilarating. We know from history that Ladd is very capable of making instrumentals that feel like they're going somewhere, so it's something of a mystery as to why he gets such mixed results here, but even great musicians aren't fail-proof.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 album, a sorrowful and prescient appraisal of the Black experience.

Pieces of a Man

In 1971, Gil Scott-Heron observed the gradual demise of a man in his neighborhood who was driven over the brink after being let go from his job without warning. What came of Scott-Heron bearing witness to that unraveling is “Pieces of a Man.” For the song, Scott-Heron replaced the neighbor with a fictitious account of his own father: Before this downward spiral, he appears to be a decent person with a solid grip on life. As the story progresses, different encounters with the man suggest that he’s wearing thin from misfortune. Scott-Heron’s melodies grow more and more agonizing as he watches his father, his neighbor, his fellow man become a shell of their former selves.
Twenty-six years after the song was written, New York City hip-hop renaissance man Bobbito Garcia interviewed Scott-Heron at his apartment for Vibe. Discussing a few standouts from his catalog, Scott-Heron, 47 years old at the time, said that he listened to “Pieces of a Man” every morning in order to clear his mind. He elaborated on the ritual: “Everywhere I’ve traveled, [people outside the U.S.] are concerned about Black Americans cause we’re still not welcome in the U.S. and we’re still here—standing. I put that in my music. You’re living where people obstacle everything you do. So if a man survives and comes back the next morning, then God bless, brother, and good morning to you.”
The album that song belonged to, 1971’s Pieces of a Man, was Scott-Heron’s first go at championing that resilience through music. The year before, he released Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, a live poetry album featuring congas and some sparse singing. It housed the original spoken-word version of his most well-known song, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” where, through a staggering number of 1960s pop-culture references, he cautioned fellow Black Americans that sitting idle and settling for scraps wasn’t gonna bring about any meaningful change.
Small Talk also called out Black people who thought their fashionable displays of Afrocentrism gave them license to look down on “common folk.” It comically lamented the U.S. government for pumping millions into a moon landing instead of the well-being of its Black population. And it gave Scott-Heron the space to express that no level of liberal outlook from white people would wipe away their centuries of wrongdoing—or his right to be angry. Its power rested in Scott-Heron’s candid criticism of his country and the frustration of realizing that change was hard to come by. Pieces of a Man shares this urgent appraisal of the Black experience, but it draws mainly on pain and sorrow rather than rage.
The album’s title track masterfully peels back the layers of a person’s psyche through strife and that attention to detail is mirrored throughout the remaining songs. A full band—led by Scott-Heron’s career-long collaborator Brian Jackson—brought something out in his poetry that congas alone couldn’t quite achieve. “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” feels like an intergenerational biography of someone who fled their cookie-cutter hometown for a big city, haunted by the trauma that resurfaces when they go back to visit. Like much of Scott-Heron’s early work, it also centers the experiences of people dealing with addiction, flipping the script on those who are quick to judge: “You keep saying, kick it, quit it, kick it, quit it. God, but did you ever try/To turn your sick soul inside out. So that the world, so that the world. Can watch you die?” On “Lady Day and John Coltrane,” he sings the praises of two jazz deities whose music can soothe the grave realities of life. Jackson’s piano and Ron Carter’s bass, when given time to exist without vocals, emphasize the grief in Scott-Heron’s cries of a downtrodden existence on “A Sign of the Ages.”
The feelings expressed on Pieces of a Man are those of someone processing grief in real time. Scott-Heron spent his formative years watching the assassinations of Black American liberation fighters. Less than two years before the album was released, the 21-year-old activist and Black Panther Party deputy chairman Fred Hampton was murdered in his sleep by Chicago police. Hampton was just two years older than Scott-Heron and, like the singer, had the heart to not only hold the U.S. accountable for its crimes against its Black citizens in his work, but to take an active part in building the world that he wanted to live in (the message Scott-Heron was pushing in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”). Scott-Heron is also grieving the deterioration of the people who are still hanging on here. The influx of soldiers returning home from the Vietnam War to empty promises of upward mobility and new heroin addictions was also taking a toll on Black communities at this time. Years before his own struggles became apparent, tales of addiction were already a fixture in Scott-Heron’s music. The pain-filled melodies in Pieces of a Man are a response to feeling like the world is caving in on you.
Though Scott-Heron’s music dealt chiefly with the woes of American imperialism and oppression, he was part of a class of artists across the African diaspora who were growing tired with their nations’ politics and human rights policies. Down in Jamaica, Bob Marley and Wailers’ music became increasingly political in the early ’70s, in comparison to the easygoing ska they made in the ’60s. The island’s independence from Britain in 1962 did little to change the lives of its majority Black citizens and as political turmoil took shape, songs like “Get Up, Stand Up,” “400 Years,” and “Burnin and Lootin’” became the soundtrack of unrest and violence. At the same time, the Nigerian songwriter Fela Kuti, after years of studying and performing abroad—and familiarizing himself with Black American liberation movements like the Panthers in California—returned to his country to use his music as a tool to criticize the Nigerian military and governmental corruption that followed a three-year civil war. A few years later in South Africa, jazz pioneer Hugh Masekela released “Soweto Blues,” a tribute to children murdered by local police at a protest against the apartheid government’s institution of Afrikaans as the official language of schools. Masekela would continue to position himself as a leading artistic voice for the anti-apartheid struggle for the rest of his career.
This global Black frequency formed symbiotic relationships between artists who knew that they deserved better. Following in the footsteps of Black leaders across the diaspora who pushed for freedom and independence from colonial powers in the 1960s, their collective shouts suggested that the respective struggles they faced were microcosms of a larger, worldwide issue with white supremacist structures. But what those artists had in their work was what we’ve been conditioned to believe is the most effective way to inspire a revolution through music—grandiose rallying cries composed of chants, horns, or thumping drums (conventions that hold decades later in, for example, Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright”). It’s the type of music you can see yourself marching to battle to, chest swelled with emotion. Even Scott-Heron’s celebrated 1973 album Winter in America was a conceptual, straightforward attempt at assessing the country's political climate and its effects on Black people. Pieces of a Man stands out because its approach is more existential: Scott-Heron details the ways that he, and those he’s observed, are coping in an unkind world that was unkind to their elders, and would surely be unkind to their unborn children. It’s Scott-Heron taking in the horror he’s witnessed across decades of his young life, morbidly staring at the casualties of those battles.
There are flashes of optimism when Gil Scott-Heron looks to the future, though. On “Save the Children,” accompanied by Hubert Laws’ buoyant flute, he sings of taking an active role in changing Black people’s reality before innocent youth have to grow up to the same bullshit. “Or Down You Fall” is a personal pick-me-up that cautions against stagnation. He presents his most poignant set of questions on “I Think I’ll Call It Morning,” a song about intentionally claiming good days for yourself. There, Scott-Heron posits: “Why should I survive on sadness? And tell myself I’ve got to be alone? Why should I subscribe to this world’s madness? Knowing that I’ve got to live on.” Even at his most unsure, Scott-Heron knew that this fight wasn’t just for right now. “Revolution isn’t an overnight thing,” he said in an interview with Players magazine (sometimes called the Black Playboy of its time) in 1975. “Like some people jumped up in the ’60s and said: ‘Revolution,’ and then in the next three or four years it didn’t happen, everybody said: ‘Naa, there ain’t no revolution.’ Revolution is a constantly building process, a constantly developing process.”
Pieces of a Man is a young Scott-Heron coming to terms with his world, disappointed in how unfair it is, scoffing at people who choose distraction over contribution to solving the issues, and admitting a genuine fear of what we’ll leave to the children we’re raising. Because the majority of our most adored anti-establishment music has been characterized by force and rage, hearing an artist exhibit their vulnerability to that ongoing assault through sadness is an illuminating experience. Anger is one of humankind’s most easily accessible emotions. And in American culture, it’s especially acceptable as a social device for men to establish and maintain their dominance—over enemies and their own families, equally. But anger is often linked to depression and suppressed feelings of sadness. On Pieces of a Man, while markedly painful to witness at times, Gil Scott-Heron’s election to process that unhappiness is a step in the right direction of destigmatizing what it means to publicly shed our skin. It teaches the listener, the activist, and the fighter that there’s ample space for every emotion. And it’s often in those moments of uncomfortable exposure that we go on to grow into better versions of ourselves.

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Injecting blastbeats and mosh-worthy riffs with classic soul and reggae samples, the Los Angeles hardcore band’s debut insists on a complex and irreducible vision of Blackness.

A New Tomorrow

Zulu have no time to waste. In the five-second gap after “Africa,” the reverent orchestral introduction of their debut album A New Tomorrow, but before the forceful drop-tuned power chord buzz of “For Sista Humphrey,” the Los Angeles-based powerviolence quintet raises a quick question: “Ayo, it’s Zulu in this bitch, what y’all niggas on?” The music drives forward, anchored by drummer Christine Cadette and bassist Satchel Brown, who back a chugging riff played by guitarists Braxton Marcellous and Dez Yusuf. Then comes a death metal growl from vocalist Anaiah Lei, and the band’s full-length debut A New Tomorrow takes off on a trajectory that cannot be predicted or contained.
Lei is a multi-instrumentalist who got his start as a teenager alongside brother Mikaiah Lei in the indie rock band the Bots and went to play in California punk bands DARE and Culture Abuse. He founded Zulu in 2018. Two early EPs, 2019’s Our Day Will Come and 2020’s My People… Hold On, solidified the band’s signature style: blastbeats and mosh-worthy grooves injected with samples of classic soul and reggae artists who sing of fortifying Black community. If the EPs were experimental studies, then A New Tomorrow holds nothing back, sounding confident and all-encompassing. The record has a mind and a memory that examines all angles of Black legacy while working to define the future without fear or strife.
In a recent interview with NPR, Lei expressed disinterest in writing lyrics that only address suffering. “When people think about the pain of exclusion, they think about Black people. And then we end up getting tokenized one way or another,” he said. A New Tomorrow confronts prejudice, alienation, and anger on its own terms. “52 Fatal Strikes,” updated from Our Day Will Come, is two-stepping hardcore that speaks of racial injustice: “I’ve done nothing/I just exist/Don’t front/I know you wanna kill me.” The lyrics are forward and fluffless, even on softer tracks like “Crème de Cassis,” a spoken-word critique of a nation that fixates on Black people’s pain without providing space to celebrate their resiliency. “Why must I only share our struggle/When our Blackness is so much more?” asks vocalist Aleisia Miller over piano accompaniment by Precious Tucker. “We’re favored by the sun from the moment we’re created.”
The dynamic force of powerviolence isn’t the loudest part of A New Tomorrow: It’s the way the album juxtaposes the sludge and the shrieks with songs performed in styles popularized by Black people. At times it is poignant and reverent, like the tearful little prayers of the layered voices that ask “Must I only share my pain?” on the mid-album interlude of the same title. Zulu are at their most confrontational in this mode, revealing vulnerability while daring hardcore purists to try to enforce a distinction between Lei’s guttural roar of protest on “Music to Driveby” and the sampled croon of Curtis Mayfield that follows. By refusing to be flattened, Zulu make clear that working within genre lines is far less meaningful than a commitment to the history of Black music, Black love, and Black might.
A New Tomorrow is a record surrounded by infinity mirrors, seeing the traumas of Black people  for generations past and present while choosing to rejoice in the rich culture that has sustained the soul and spirit of its communities. With their debut, Zulu position themselves firmly within that legacy, reifying the connection between icons like Mayfield and Nina Simone and peers like Soul Glo’s Pierce Jordan, who appears alongside Playytime’s Obioma Ugonna on “Where I’m From.” “Won’t ask for what’s mine/I’m anointed,” they howl. At the heart of A New Tomorrow is the purest form of joy and unwavering strength. In her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston writes, “No, I do not weep for the world. I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” A New Tomorrow trades the oyster knife for brutal guitars, double-kick drums, and hands cupped around a microphone. For Zulu, joy is heritage and heritage is resistance.


Shaped around a loose narrative, the Birmingham drill rapper’s debut album paints an immersive picture of everyday brutality with gripping beats and detailed imagery.

Provisional License

M1llionz knows to listen to his mother. “Mum said” forms a recurring refrain throughout Provisional License, the Birmingham drill rapper’s debut album, as he repeats his mother’s advice on everything from commitment and settling down (“Mum said bitches ain’t going anywhere,” on “Hometown”) to feeding your ambition (“Mum said surround yourself with winners,” on the title track). These interjections represent an appeal to the one authority M1llionz recognizes. They also form a bridge between domestic comfort and a brutal outside world that most will never witness. It’s a world that M1llionz conjures with greater skill and precision than any other rapper working out of the UK today.
Provisional License is shaped around a loose narrative. M1llionz assumes the protagonist’s role on a risky trip up the motorway with a suspicious package in the footwell and a female partner in the passenger seat. They’re pulled over by police, but M1llionz—driving without a full license—speeds off rather than stepping out of the car for a search. The near-miss gives him flashbacks to time spent imprisoned, where his thoughts consume him.
M1llionz uses small brushstrokes to paint expansive, immersive pictures. Apparently banal observations scale up to striking vistas: He scrapes toothpaste remnants from a flattened Colgate tube (“Intro”), and he hides a SIM card under his foreskin to avoid detection on “Jail Brain.” A groan at the prospect of having to find a drill to replace the phony registration plates on a stolen car (“the sticky plates falling off of the dinger”) upends clichés of glamorized gangsterism on “Pedestrian.” On “Bando Spot,” he playfully interpolates 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop”; but where 50 thrives on lyrical euphemism, M1llionz only trades in the most acute details: ANPR cameras, delivery charges, and crumbs of cocaine scraped from the sides of a crack pot. These dashes of color elevate his songs from an otherwise familiar drill canvas of skippy hi-hats and sliding 808s. (That being said, M1llionz also has a knack for picking gripping beats: The stuttering kicks on “Badnis” and the moody mid-point switch-up on “Intro” are two examples of this facility.)
Elsewhere, he grounds his street occupation in the language of the boardroom—to sometimes comic effect. “The last yute resigned, now I’ve got no staff,” he bemoans on “Badnis”; last year, with his blockbuster call-to-arms “Lagga,” he became the first rapper to slip the phrase “statutory sick pay” into a song about slinging crack. His testimony merges worlds, highlighting the invisible lines that separate communities in the UK’s modern cities, where million-pound mortgaged homes tower alongside terraces, and the down and out shelter in the doorways of steel-and-glass monuments to global capital.
Inventive flows and the disarming lilt of his West Midlands accent give M1llionz further distinction. He raps like a veteran racing driver: calm and completely in tune with his vehicle. His multi-syllables create rushing run-ons, his hard consonants stamp full stops, and sometimes, like on “Regular Bag,” he flows for so long you wonder whether he’ll pass out for lack of oxygen. It amps up the stakes, making his stories more immediate. And on an increasingly busy starting grid, it’s this mastery of his tools that sets M1llionz apart. An open road awaits.
Buy: Rough Trade
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After an extended search for inspiration, the New Zealand singer/songwriter uses color and newly adventurous song structures to explore definitions and limits of freedom.

Olympic Girls

Though extended spans between albums from a beloved musician can be worrisome or even infuriating for fans, it can be a sign of necessary inspiration, too. Such is the case for New Zealand singer/songwriter Hollie Fullbrook, who has released records under the name Tiny Ruins since 2010. Four years ago, after the exhaustive touring cycle behind 2014’s already heavy-hearted Brightly Painted One, Fullbrook felt depleted and numb. “I remember just being like, ‘I’m empty. I’m completely empty,’” she says. “It took a few months to find stuff that I was excited about again.” After foraging for a new creative fix, Fullbrook seems to have found something special: Olympic Girls, the third Tiny Ruins album, embraces lyrical nuance and compositional evolution in compelling fashion.
From the circus-like melodies of “One Million Flowers” to the fractured luminosity of “Holograms,” these 11 tracks take curious turns down hidden paths, especially relative to the more straightforward, muted folk of Tiny Ruins’ past. Fullbrook’s voice is silvery, with a controlled grain, the texture imparting a sense of trust as she guides us through muddied trails of melancholy and bright grottos of psychedelia. One of her initial inspirations when writing these songs was a book of Van Gogh paintings. Compelled by his large brushstrokes and lush colors, her lyrics are replete with motion and vivid imagery—flowers “dash for the natural light” during “One Million Flowers,” while a woman rushes through the doors of a blue laundrette on “My Love Leda.”
Fullbrook uses these colors to express quests for freedom. White walls symbolize oppressive austerity on “School of Design,” for instance, Fullbrook detailing an empty institution that sits too perfectly manicured and still. The feeling urges her to “Bust through the ceiling/Raise glass to the sky.” Fingerpicked guitars descend over her vocals like a drizzle of rain; climbing vibraphone scales impart eeriness. Fullbrook seeks the hue of a chaotic impulse.
She captures similar luster and energy on the title track, a surprising and poignant confession from an ex-prisoner. “You only had your Olympic girls/The frosted sheen of leotard twirls/Running revolt and winning gold,” she sings, conjuring athleticism in Technicolor. The song comes from an exchange Fullbrook had with a man during a 13-hour bus ride from Dallas to Chicago when she was a teenager. He watched the Olympics on TV with fellow inmates “before being led back to the cells,” she remembers. The image captures a painful irony—watching the freedom of pure athleticism while being bound behind bars. Fullbrook smartly pairs this tale with music that seems to bloom—from a tender acoustic start to a gilded electric beauty and, finally, into a liberating moment that suggests some fancy Vampire Weekend outburst.
Fullbrook consistently explores the definition of liberty through varied perspectives here. “Bounty” reverses the previous liberty/imprisonment dichotomy, as a protagonist awaits inevitable capture. During closer “Cold Enough to Climb,” Fullbrook sings in a languid drawl about a “smoker pink” sky and a seven-hour car ride. In her mind, she settles inside the crevices of another’s arms—for a moment, at least, free from pain. Sometimes these songs are wistful; other times, they fight outcomes as inevitable as death itself (“I saw the grim reaper/And I gave him the slip”). Set to music that looks toward new horizons, Olympic Girls is a gentle study into freedom’s precariousness. The quest can be exhausting and frustrating, but, here, Tiny Ruins relish its brief embrace.


After two albums of instrumental guitar pieces that drew comparisons to steel-string greats, William Tyler tries for a completely different musical atmosphere: that of a standard-issue rock band playing live in a room. Among the three tracks are a Michael Rother cover, providing an unusual  kraut-country hybrid.

Lost Colony

Nashville guitarist and composer William Tyler’s new 12” Lost Colony marks a significant departure from his two solo albums, both of which were collections of sparely orchestrated, virtuoso guitar instrumentals. His debut, 2010’s Behold the Spirit, was a workbook’s worth of tricky exercises in rapid-fire fingerpicking, cluttered harmonies, and expansive open tunings. With the help of song titles like “Terrace of the Leper King” and “The Cult of the Peacock Angel”, the comparisons to John Fahey rolled in. On his follow-up, Impossible Truth, Tyler rebelled modestly against that designation, peppering the album with bristlier psych-Americana pieces for electric guitar and drones. Now, across Lost Colony’s three tracks, the guitarist seeks to capture a completely different musical atmosphere: that of a standard-issue rock band playing live in a room.
The main attraction on the EP is the first track, the 13-minute “Whole New Dude". It's essentially two movements punctuated by a recurring string of overdriven electric guitar chords which conjure up the image of hurtling towards a Midwestern skyline on an open, mildly potholed highway. The interest of the track is mostly in the changing rhythmic emphases of Tyler’s finger-picking against Jamin Orrall’s unwavering, muscular drumbeat. Tyler switches between a few basic riffs, which he plays in a cyclical progression like a regimented Indian raga. Though it’s extraordinarily involved playing, the band runs the arrangement down like they do it a few times every day, and the ritualistic nature of their performance gives the song a compellingly static, meditative quality.
The EP’s second track, “We Can't Go Home Again”, is also on Impossible Truth. There, it's an acoustic guitar solo redolent of the English folk scene of the late 1960s/early 1970s, building in intensity as Tyler adds increasingly detailed ornamentations and internal melodies. Lost Colony’s full-band retake sounds more like a jangly Big Star instrumental augmented by steel guitar swells. It's easy to see why Tyler decided that this version was worth a separate release—the arrangement transforms the character of the song entirely, but it also doesn’t add anything to it. Instead, the full-throttle treatment obscures some of the finer points of the guitar playing and reduces the piece’s dynamic range. If the original was a beacon of clarity after Impossible Truth’s comparatively sludgy first half, it feels inconsequential on Lost Colony, an intermission between two pieces with more inventive musical aims.
The second of these is an odd, playful cover of “Karusell”, a model kraut-shuffle from Neu! founder Michael Rother’s 1977 album Flammende Herzen. The appeal of Rother’s original is its compressed, streamlined flatness—the modesty of the grainy synth, lightly chugging rhythm guitar, and dry, muted drumkit. But the ornate details count in Tyler's version. The ping-ponging delay and fuzz on the guitar build up until the band fades out still blaring, the "carousel" spinning out of control in a way that the original never does.
On the whole, Tyler’s move toward a full ensemble feels inspired. It is gratifying to see such a gifted artist broadening his palette to accommodate new influences. If Lost Colony is a testing ground for ideas for a new full-length ensemble effort, it's an auspicious beginning. But it remains to be seen whether an entire album of kraut-country—Tyler has hinted at the idea—or even a record without solo guitar will play to his well-tested strengths for subtlety and complexity.


On his 32nd studio album, Elvis Costello treats the traditional rock quartet as the ideal medium for delicacy, concision, wit, and the occasional harangue.

Elvis Costello / The Imposters: The Boy Named If

The Boy Named If

Consider Elvis Costello as the musical equivalent of the Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges’ term for “one of the points in space that contain all other points.” George Jones, Allen Toussaint, Stax, and classical music, sure; also, ABBA and Dusty Springfield. Costello’s monstrous appetite for genre has occasionally led him to believe he has mastered every genre. But his own instincts can get in the way: A punnery as dense as zircon has often interfered with the simple pleasure of a band as tight as the Imposters (aka the Attractions, with bassist Davey Faragher replacing Bruce Thomas in 2001), especially when Steve Nieve’s array of keyboards wheezed and squealed, mocking Costello’s objects of derision.
Costello fans will find many delights in The Boy Named If. For one, his 32nd studio album sounds smashing. Sebastian Krys’ mix stresses the textures of acoustic instruments without walloping listeners; Costello’s guitar, as restless as a child at a symphony even on solid albums like When I Was Cruel and Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, burrows right between Faragher’s bass and Nieve’s keyboards, enunciating hook after hook. A book written and illustrated by Costello himself accompanies the deluxe edition, but one needn’t own it to understand how the album unfolds as a series of scabrous vignettes recorded during the pandemic. The mood is splenetic, but not maliciously so, like an old codger telling decades-old dirty jokes for an imagined audience. Toughening his early gusto with decades of those genre experiments, Elvis-as-Aleph treats the trad rock quartet as the ideal medium for delicacy, concision, wit, and the occasional harangue.
An artist recording since the dawn of punk must regard new material as a set of points containing all other points. “The Death of Magic Thinking” sports the deathless Bo Diddley rhythm with which he experimented on 1981’s “Lover’s Walk.” Echoes of Spike’s song-length conceit “God’s Comic” reverberate on “Trick Out the Truth,” as approximate to the garrulous Costello of yore as the album gets. Listeners might even hear bits of 1991’s Paul McCartney co-write “So Like Candy” in the aggressive ballad “My Most Beautiful Mistake,” not to mention “Brilliant Mistake,” the 1986 quasi-country chestnut where Costello revealed his attempts at ridicule as a species of self-ridicule.
Costello has tinkered for decades with a paradox: He’s most delightful when disillusionment is the subject of his formal obsessions; he’s happiest playing a cynic who needs talking off a ledge (he names one new song “Magnificent Hurt,” of course). The superbly titled “The Death of Magic Thinking,” given added resonance by arriving mere weeks after Joan Didion’s death, wastes not a second: Pete Thomas kicks up a churn on percussion that’s almost as much a lead instrument as Costello’s stun guitar, while the singer admits how his muse—a “machine that can turn ink stains into words”—requires the “spark” of frustration, sexual and otherwise. Sometimes, anyway. “The Man You Love to Hate,” one of The Boy Named If’s more plodding moments, has Costello huffing and puffing like Laurence Olivier’s fourth-rate vaudevillian in The Entertainer.
The Boy Named If has at least two classics: “The Death of Magic Thinking,” certainly, and a ballad called “Paint the Red Rose Blue,” its strong melody sung with impressive plaintiveness. Perhaps “The Difference,” a rocker based on Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War, with a repeated “do ya know?” hook hounded by Nieve’s embellishments. That’s three more than on near-misses like the Roots collaboration Wise Up Ghost. Competing with a back catalog as mighty as Costello’s repertoire must suck—“history repeats the old conceits,” he acknowledged long ago. But to don “Elvis Costello” drag and record work as vital The Boy Named If after four decades shouldn’t impress this deeply. Convincing audiences that role playing is an expression of self has been Costello’s subtle lesson all along.

Buy: Rough Trade
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