On his latest album, the Kentucky rapper addresses his demons head-on with startling bluntness and raw desperation.

I Never Felt Nun

There’s a wink of irony to the title of EST Gee’s latest album, I Never Felt Nun, which forms a loose trilogy with 2020’s I Dont Feel Nun and I Still Dont Feel Nun, in case you missed the point. The latest project from the Kentucky rapper often plays like a headfirst descent into his most despairing emotions and bleakest experiences. Where fellow Louisville native Jack Harlow, whose co-sign introduced Gee to a larger national audience, aspires toward the kind of pop-rap suited to Super Bowl halftime shows, Gee bleeds his heart out, peeling back the skin to reveal a darker reality in his native city. Alongside high-profile features for Future and Megan Thee Stallion, EST Gee has tapped into a larger network as a new recruit to Yo Gotti’s expanded CMG label—Gee’s relentless hustle and unvarnished emotionality makes for a natural fit alongside profound songwriters like Mozzy and ferocious spitters like 42 Dugg, with whom he released this year’s collaborative Last Ones Left.
Like his home state, Gee’s music sits at a stylistic Mason-Dixon Line, situated between the Bible and Rust Belts, deep fried and industrialized in equal measure. He equally channels the ferocious speed of current Michigan rap, the aching lyricism of Chicago drill, and the bluesy refrains of Southern crooners like Kevin Gates and Rod Wave. There’s a slight Southern twang to the production, with Zaytoven-esque organ trills on “Voices in My Head” and triumphant horns on album closer “The Realest,” a throwback to classic mixtape era trap that caps off with a Jeezy feature. The most surprising regional touch is the appearance from Machine Gun Kelly on “Death Around the Corner,” an unexpected reminder that, long before he was a pop star chasing the clout dragon, MGK was a rageful Ohio-bred Yelawolf knockoff who feuded with Eminem. It’s when he gets back to his roots that Kelly is at his most tolerable, with a more genuine energy than his alt-rock cosplay.
Gee’s delivery carries a sense of purposeful desperation, like he’s rapping not to tell a story or offer wisdom, but to keep breathing. On the opening of “Both Arms,” his gravelly flow is drier than jerky, and he frequently trails off and cracks like his voice is on the verge of giving out. The ad-libs underneath EST Gee’s bars are a non-stop current of mumbles and half-formed syllables, an uncanny counterpoint to his most precise raps that mimic a paranoid stream of thoughts. While others might numb the trauma with substances, Gee more often speaks of death and violence themselves as addictions, unable to imagine life without the bloodlust itself.
At times, bars alone can’t encapsulate the hurt, and Gee’s singing reveals a voice desperate to exorcize and express his emotions. The guitar riff on “Come Home” is emo-tinged, but Gee’s full-throated chorus sounds more like it was ghostwritten by bro-country troubadour Sam Hunt. The pain is obvious and the sentiments impassioned, but the central refrain—“When you come home/Just know I miss you/Like you missing me”—is Gee at his most melodic, suggesting a capacity for emotionally driven anthems beyond raw bars.
There’s a loose religiosity to the album’s themes, evident in titles like “Is Heaven for a Gangsta,” “Hell,” and “Bow and Say Grace.” But just like romance, faith can offer more fear and uncertainty than comfort: “Is there heaven for a shooter/Is there heaven for a mover?/Or was I born in hell and all this shit an illusion?” In his most vulnerable moment, on “Voices In My Head,” EST Gee sings to a friend who took his own life, and as he lies awake in bed praying for release, Gee admits to admiring the “bravery” of the act. Though rap has reached vast new emotional depths in the last decade, Gee’s confessionals are still startling in how bluntly they address the demons head-on. EST Gee’s lyricism doesn’t bring the catharsis of a therapy session or the removed vantage point of hindsight; I Never Felt Nun comes straight from the heart, hardened like armor.


Taking cues from Miles Davis’ electric period, the Spacebomb Records founder and Alabama sculptor join forces on a mesmerizing album rooted in improvisation, risk-taking, and unlikely musical chemistry.

Matthew E. White / Lonnie Holley: Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection

Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection

Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection invites direct comparison to one of the most inspired purple patches in modern musical history: Miles Davis’ electric period of the 1970s. The album’s genesis is bold to begin with: In 2018, keen to kick old songwriting habits, Matthew E. White went into the studio with his septet to record a series of improvisational sessions in the spirit of the hard-driving fusion that Davis pursued from 1969’s In A Silent Way to 1975’s Agharta. Inviting the Alabama sculptor and experimental musician Lonnie Holley to add his vocals to the mix was another audacious move, throwing further unpredictability into the works with Holley’s freeform melodies and spontaneous delivery.
Broken Mirror chiefly invites comparison to Davis’ towering 1970 double album Bitches Brew, a record frequently cited by musicians outside the jazz community but rarely recreated. And for good reason: Bitches Brew is so dense, complicated, and inspired that mimicking its white-heat aura feels like a fool’s errand. White’s septet cooks up a thick musical soup whose dense percussive tangles, driving guitar, and almost atonal keyboard stabs are clearly descended from Davis’ masterpiece. So is the record’s improvisational spirit, which relies on modes and gestures rather than chord changes and melodies.
Listening to Broken Mirror, much like its inspiration, requires a kind of recalibration of the musical mind. The record is both ultra-musical in its abundance of ideas and strangely unmusical in its rejection of song structure and repetition, producing a kind of spiraling voodoo funk that swings between gritty and astral. Holley’s vocals, both weathered and sweetly innocent, balance life experience with wonder, gravity with levity, and are ripe with the mesmeric power of understatement. He doesn’t so much sing as emote, hitting emotional targets rather than musical cues. Holley recorded his vocals in a series of first takes after White played him edits of the 2018 septet sessions, and it is striking how well they reflect the album’s various moods.
“This Here Jungle of Moderness/Composition 14,” with its anxious percussion and organ drones, feels like walking through a dirty city street in the sticky heat of midsummer, and Holley responds with lyrics that reflect the sensory overload of the modern megacity: “Big, big, big, big, big, big, big city all around me/Humans moving everywhere/To the global degree.” “I’m Not Tripping/Composition 8” starts off lighter in tone, resting on a synth line that burbles like boiling water, growing angrier and more chaotic as the layers pile on. Holley’s vocals reflect this evolution, moving from musings about energy to reflections on the overbearing nature of modern technology: “Computer technology management/To play our brains/You can’t program Her that way.” The only exception to this sympathetic fusion of music and words comes with the title track, whose punning title and rather hectoring lyrics about cellphones feel a little loose against the furious intensity of the title track—all jabbing percussion, unsettling bass drone, and skittish keyboard runs. The music is tough and hypnotic, an exorcism rather than a haunting.
But this is a small stumble in an album of strength, depth, and implausible symmetry. Holley’s vocals knock Broken Mirror half a stride out of Davis’ considerable shadow, the singer’s unique charm forging something genuinely new out of White’s inspired but retrospective musical work. Broken Mirror is a tribute to risk-taking and unlikely musical chemistry, an improbably fruitful fusion of unstable elements.

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Brooklyn trio follows the polarizing Creature Comforts with a record that's flighty, frustrating, and at times a little frigid, but intelligent and never lacking in momentum.

Broken Ear Record

This is music for hiking across an alkaloid wasteland, equipped with enough oxygen and dried food to last through several days trek through a nitrogen-saturated atmosphere. There is a metallic taste to the air, and the sun, even at high noon, obscured by layers of sooty gas and overstuffed rain clouds. Black Dice, even when trying to inject a little rhythmic propulsion into their mechanic-industrial commotion, come off brittle and oil-stained futuristic. To a degree, this is dirty music, though more in style than execution; competing pulses from synthesizers, drum machines and the odd, antiquated guitar (via loop or sample, of course) destroy what little firm ground on which there is to step, but the landscape described by the sound is sturdy, if in need of polish. In fact, it's hard to say whether or not the quasi-urbanized clang is actually futuristic, as when drums appear, they're decidedly "tribal". Nevertheless, it's an isolated wilderness put forth on Broken Ear Record: away from city noise, refinement and fellow travelers.
Brooklyn trio Black Dice are the most interesting "noise" band I know. Never content to inhabit one sonic guise for long, their track record for navigating unexplored areas of static, delay, distortion and bizarre, heavenly bits of electronic data is almost unparalleled among would-be contemporaries. They've landed on the spikiest stylistic beachheads in modernist rock, from splatter noise-core, electronic ambience, quasi-electro acoustic improv (EAI), death disco and now to what I would clumsily characterize as post-apocalyptic jungle-core-- and isn't that a mouthful? Consequently, as easy as it is to marvel at their ambition, it's sometimes tough to really settle into one of their records. There's always something a little uncomfortable about Black Dice-- but then they wouldn't be as interesting otherwise. Broken Ear Record, reportedly the result of the band needing more rhythmic material to play live, is no exception: It's flighty, frustrating, and at times a little frigid, but intelligent and never lacking in momentum.
The sounds used should seem familiar to fans of 2004's polarizing Creature Comforts, as many of its synth patches, guitar tones and delay effects are featured on Broken Ear Record. The muffled, horn-like call that opens "Snarly Yow" could easily have been found hidden inside one of Comforts' robotic tone poems, as could the scraped percussion or the bizarre vocal loop that adorns its outer edges. However, here, rather than revel in the chaos of a savage urban jungle, Black Dice quantize the beats and sprinkle kick drums strategically throughout the track. There are moments that pound, but most of the time, the piece is content to merely suggest pulse, using loops and even modest stretches with straightforward melody. Make no mistake, melody doesn't play quite the importance in this world it does even in, say, Boredoms/Vooredoms' music (BD's most obvious predecessors)-- but as with Broken Ear's efficient use of 4/4 drum stomp, a little goes a long way.
"Motorcycle" uses the elements of melody and industrial rhythm to best advantage, at times sounding like a clamorous update on the Indestructible Beat of Soweto. High pitched human barks bounce up from a chorus of thud-drums, and a buoyant guitar line I swear was lifted from Graceland carries the tune into regions previously too naked-faced "accessible" for Black Dice. Yes, there are machine gun hits at the end, and no, the relative upfrontness of the melodies never lulls me into thinking I'm listening to pop music, but I'm hooked nonetheless. Likewise, the single "Smiling Off" features vocal harmonies (!) and another thudding percussion cadence (more rollicking than primal this time), though withholding the payoff for several minutes while bass drone, static and an erratic siren battle for dominance, flailing blindly in a dark room. "Street Dude" allows this kind of battle to reign supreme, as stereophonic synth blare and a drowning chirp overwhelm the short-lived click-track beat.
There are no truly "calm" songs on Broken Ear Record, but there are occasions to catch your breath. "Heavy Manners" uses a looped, queasy guitar figure with muffled vocals similarly to Animal Collective in one of their acid-damaged moments. Even "ABA", at less than a minute, allows me to shake away the haze via anti-gravity synth dips and pops. Still, Black Dice have hardly compromised what sounds like a pure vision. Their insistence on change is the mark of a still vibrantly creative band, and while I could do with even more rhythmic focus, I can't argue their total dedication to Broken Ear's aesthetic. Jagged and ornery, but playful: this is music for treading dangerously.


Warp reissues Aphex Twin's the 1995 HAB EP and 12" together as one eight-track package.

Hangable Auto Bulb

In a recent Mojo feature on Bob Dylan's 100 greatest songs, Frank Black talked about his attraction to "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again". What Black loves about the song above all are the drum fills at the end of each verse. This is where Black looks for the most powerful emotions on Blonde on Blonde, and he says that those fills can have him close to tears. Black's response popped out for me because the idea of "emotional" drumming resonates and yet you don't see mentioned often. Rare is the music where the percussion does this sort of lifting, but when it happens, the effect is striking.
Richard D. James' single greatest talent may be his ability to program drums that convey feeling. He's always had a gift for melody and texture, obviously, but how these components work against his drums is what I'm always listening for. Which is, perhaps, why I've never much rated Selected Ambient Works Vol. II. To me it sounds like only half the Aphex Twin picture.
In 1995, James' music was climbing along a Moore's Law curve, one release after the next filled with strange and adventurous sound that made the future of electronic music seem terribly exciting. In October, a few months after the release of I Care Because You Do, Warp put out two limited vinyl singles titled "Hangable Auto Bulb". These 12-inches featured James' first experiments in pairing his unusual melodies with stuttering, chopped, jungle-influenced drum programming, which wound up defining his sound in the second half the 1990s. Both releases were limited and have been widely sought by collectors since; 10 years later Warp has released both together on CD.
James was fond of percussion that didn't even pretend to sound like real drums. The spastic taps going through the title track sound like a pair of scissors banging on a metal desk, with no timbral body to speak of. But the failure to reference proper instruments (or even previous digital approximations) gives an extra squeeze of the "alien" quality noted by so many attempting to describe James' style. Then on "Wabby Legs" the drums are constantly sent into a roll so fast they are transformed into another kind of instrument, a highly tactile buzz that seems to breathe. When this sound duets with a real or imaginary thumb piano as the track comes to a close, another aesthetic plateau is reached and the music's place in time becomes fuzzy.
"Custodian Discount" is the only track that makes obvious use of "bass" part of the drum'n'bass equation, with a huge balloon of low-end bouncing between the finely cut beats. In general James was too obsessed with balance to let the bass dominate. The swooning, half-sick synth lines that overlap on "Laughable Butane Bob" hint at the classical sensibility that would be tweaked and brightened on The Richard D. James Album the following year, while "Every Day" brings the tunefulness even further forward with a hypnotic distorted synth "singing" lead. Everything here is memorable and at eight tracks over 34 minutes Hangable Auto Bulb leaves you wanting more.
Compared to how hectic James and others would get with the drill'n'bass template, Hangable Auto Bulb is very restrained-- serene, even-- despite beats that can never stop twitching. The drums throughout seem strangely alive, full of energy but fallible, ready to take off at the slightest provocation. That tension, between the otherworldly yet effortlessly tuneful melodies purring along beneath drums that constantly struggle to frame them, is what the ensuing era of James' music is all about, and Hangable Auto Bulb is a hell of an intro.


MGMT's third album finds them far from the colossal hooks of early smashes like "Kids" and "Time to Pretend", and experimenting in a different way from 2010's Congratuations. With Dave Fridmann at the helm once again, the studio trickery is at an all-time high.

MGMT

You’ve probably heard it more times than “Time to Pretend” by now: the story of MGMT vs. Oracular Spectacular. The duo’s 2007 debut stands as one of recent history's rare game-changing (read: replicable) pop-rock records and its success caught everyone off guard, most of all MGMT themselves. Paralyzed by songs they had the misfortune of disliking more than anyone else, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser responded in 2010 with Congratulations, a well-meaning, overstuffed, and reactionary record of big ambitions that were only vaguely defined. It didn’t yield a hit, but Congratulations gave them something more valuable going forward: moral high ground. Of course, to follow them on their new path, you needed to believe that “Time to Pretend”, “Kids” and “Electric Feel” would prove to be MGMT’s “Creep” or “She Don’t Use Jelly”, an unrepresentative, fluke hit that allowed them to become stealth operatives for uncompromising art-rock in the compromised major label system.
The most important part of is this narrative is believing that MGMT are victimized by Oracular’s commercial success, a success they won’t repeat because hardly anyone will. If MGMT achieves only half of Oracular's platinum sales, it'll still be one of the top 30 or so sellers in 2013. But judging from the once again well-meaning, overstuffed, and reactionary MGMT, they’ll never make a truly weirder album than their debut either. Their original, guileless mishmash of gonzo storytelling, imperious pomp-rock, and day-glo synthesizers was the work of people who had no choice but to stay true to their ideals, as they had no pretensions or even any real clue of how it would stick. That spirit gave way to a self-conscious, scare-quotes “weirdness” indicative of artists trying to micromanage what you think about them.
And as with Congratulations, there are just enough moments of cohesion to counteract the latter impulse. Though it’s impossible to know what MGMT’s goals were, “Alien Days” at least feels like the most successful alignment of their supposedly divergent impulses towards prog’s complexity and pop’s pleasure. At first hearing, “Alien Days” feels unnecessarily fussy in both composition and production: you get actual child (not childlike) vocals, distorted drum breaks, and what sounds like the use of all 12 major chords within the span of thirty seconds. But once you get a sense of the labyrinthine structure, every strange turn ends up being the right one, each melodic resolution a small, substantial and lasting surprise, like continually finding a dollar in your jeans.
But the “Mystery Disease” referenced on the third track might just be MGMT's allergic reaction to anything resembling a straightforward pop song.Like most of the non-singles from Oracular, “Introspection” is derived from the ornate pastoralia of Kinks and Bowie and then handed off to producer Dave Fridmann to turn it all pixellated and paisley. But it plays out as a four-and-a-half-minute distraction, with all kinds of “What’s this button do?” knob-twiddling-- windshield-wiper stereo panning, perpetually increasing distortion that drowns out the chorus, tremolo effects. “Mystery Disease” bears a sleek glam melody that gets slathered in nasal flange effects and set to booming breakbeats; here, MGMT all of a sudden reveals themselves a late-90s connection between kinda proggy UK bands like Mansun and Doves, studio geeks whose rare pop songs are similarly their most beloved moments. At least on “Your Life Is a Lie”, the production serves the purpose of the lyrics, as VanWyngarden takes your perceptions through a hall of mirrors before abruptly stopping at two minutes, leaving you more confused than before.
That all happens during the first half of MGMT and in a likely nod to their vinyl-era heroes, Side B becomes a figurative record flip. With the exception of the shuffling goof "Plenty of Girls in the Sea", the band does away with any semblance of verse-chorus structure after its most accessible moment (“Your Life Is a Lie”), letting you know this is the real MGMT. And in fairness, the second half of MGMT shows you what they’ve been all along: a centrist indie rock band on a major label, only now you have to believe those two circles overlap way less than MGMT are letting on. The “weirdness” is just a matter of relativity at best, and at worst, a clever marketing ploy to curry critical favor to hedge against its commercial prospects. If you still think KROQ is seeking to add deep cuts from MGMT to its playlist, then yes, the likes of “Astro-Mancy” will sound awfully bizarre slotting in between bands like Bastille and Imagine Dragons, two examples of acts whose synth-spiked, genre-straddling electro-pop is somehow nominally “indie” thanks to MGMT.
But for all of their talk of going off the deep end, MGMT ultimately takes on a less flattering image, of a band wading in the indie mainstream. Hermetically sealed echo chamber “A Good Sadness” is a wallflower’s idea of space disco and indistinguishable from most anything on the most recent Bear in Heaven album, except MGMT eliminate any sort of consistent rhythmic locomotion. While Youth Lagoon’s Wondrous Bughouse upped the ante for bong-rip phaser effects, Trevor Powers uses them to support and accent luminous and legible mediations on cosmic circumstances; closer “An Orphan of Fortune” wilfully sinks into impenetrable goo. All of this gassy, overproduced stuff should make “Plenty of Girls in the Sea” sound revelatory, but it’s nothing but context, i.e., “see, we could totally write simple pop songs if we wanted to.” But if they think a Bee Gees groove in 6/4 time or an origin story about doing blow and marrying models were simple pop songs rather than some of the strangest hits of the past decade, we're dealing with resentments too deep-rooted to be fixed over the span of two albums.
Still, it’s easy to root for MGMT. Their LateNightTales compilation is fun as hell and their deferential, deflective tone suggests that they envy not only the creative freedom of Radiohead and Flaming Lips, but also their ability to serve as guides towards the eccentric influences who never shared their commercial luck. And when you see their Letterman performance of “Your Life Is a Lie”, it feels like the definitive version, as the multimedia format gives MGMT a better ability to convey the mischief and exuberance that their self-titled so badly needs. Because on MGMT, being weird is serious business, their ideas of prog are regressive, their psychedelia draws into its own dark recesses rather than transporting or illuminating, self-indulgence posing as artistic martyrdom. In other words, it’s not MGMT vs. Oracular Spectacular; if anything’s holding MGMT back, it’s themselves.


Atlanta singer/rapper Future-- who has scored guest verses from Drake and T.I.-- is currently wearing the city's pop-rap crown. Instead of milking his underground hits dry, his newest mixtape provides a breeding ground for new ones.

Streetz Calling

As the epicenter of popular rap music, Atlanta is known as the birthplace and the machine for most of this generation's major gangster stars. But in its own way, Atlanta is also something like the L.A. of the black music industry, a place where pure, unadulterated pop and club music grows and mutates, and sometimes interacts with the mainstream, like when T.I.'s derided "Whatever You Like" became his biggest hit ever. For the most part, though, the purest of Atlanta pop-rap is an underground phenomenon followed feverishly by teens, young adults, and adults who wish they were still young adults (as engrossingly chronicled by Michael Schmelling, Kelefa Sanneh, and Will Welch in their book Atlanta) and whose stars burn quick and fast. D4L and Soulja Boy and Shawty Lo and Yung L.A. have all more or less come and gone, but there are always guys ready to fill the space, if only for six or 12 months. Every high school class has its own heroes.
Future, an Atlanta born and bred singer/rapper, is currently wearing the crown, and if he doesn't prove to have a longer shelf life than most, his star will have maybe burned the brightest. You may know his voice from the hook and second verse of "Racks" (on racks on racks), one of the biggest club hits of the early year, or from "Tony Montana", his current underground smash that features him rapping in a ridiculous voice that's a very rough approximation of that of the movie character. But this is often ridiculous and very rough music, and Future pulls it off well; the song is one of the most fun tracks of the year. Peers are now starting to attach themselves to the guy with the hot hand, too: Drake blessed Future with a verse for the "Tony Montana" remix, and with the remix to "Magic" (his other underground smash), Future somehow secured T.I.'s most recent "first verse since being released from jail."
Streetz Calling is his most recent mixtape, and to give you an idea of how quickly these things move, none of the aforementioned songs appears. Instead of milking his hits dry, Future is presumably providing a breeding ground for new ones. He's so far basically come as close as anyone to perfecting this thread of ringtone pop, where singing and rapping are practically the same thing, and conversing 100% through Auto-Tune doesn't mean you still can't talk about how you used to sell drugs. It would almost feel antiquated if Future weren't amassing hits, or if he weren't bringing some subtle new dimensions to the micro-genre. His near-complete integration of singing and rapping comes off as something born out of genuine inspiration, and less like a decision made because he's just not very good at rapping (like Yung L.A.) or seemingly bored by the entire idea of it (paging Soulja Boy). He's smooth enough on "Unconditional Love" to recall the time when Lil Wayne's Auto-Tune experiments were kind of romantic, and gritty enough on "Never Be the Same" to evoke dancehall singers who have used Auto-Tune to accentuate their pain.
There are tracks here that hew closer to rap music, and though some lose his identity in the process, others highlight his ability to move closer to either pole and still make good music. "Power of That P", especially, is the work of someone full of ideas, as Future riffs on the letter, tying in everything from "promethazine" to "petroleum" to "Peru." On "E" he works fine over a muted brassy beat next to Trouble, one of the city's most promising goon rappers, and on "The Way it Go" he sounds right at home over Zaytoven's candy-coated keyboard funk. He's at his best when the amalgamation of rap and pop is more pronounced, but he's good enough when deciding to indulge his gangster impulses.
Future works as prolifically as most artists need to these days, and a number of his tracks, including, say, a third on Streetz Calling, keep it moving without making any sort of impression. It's par for the course for the style of music he's trafficking in and for the way the game is played now, but Future's batting average is notable, and as more of his tracks become hits (however minor), his ability begins to speak for itself. This is pop music before it happens, and Future seems equipped to outlast many of the artists that paved a path for him.


On this 4xLP set-- soon to be reissued as a 2xCD-- the British duo continue spelunking through a dank netherworld. More focused than 2010's Tryptych, Elemental conveys a sense of mystery that goes beyond affect.

Elemental Parts 1 & 2

The British duo Demdike Stare continue grimly spelunking through a dank, anxious netherworld on Elemental, their first new music in over a year. Their sound hasn't changed significantly in the interim: Dark, ambient drones tangle with scraps of post-punk and library music, while strains of dubstep and techno settle like pathogens in the bloodstream. If "dark" was the organizing principle of their last album, as Mike Powell said of Tryptych, then "darker" is their current M.O.-- murkier, more oppressive, and more intense.
Suffused in cavernous reverb and distortion, Demdike Stare's hammered pianos and grinding, stunted rhythms conjure a kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape. Samples of exotic drums and unfamiliar string instruments are pitched so low that the waveforms seem to fray about the edges. Whatever doesn't decompose is thrown into shuddering, mechanical motion; I'm left with the image of giant machines tilling toxic soil, spitting up shrapnel from battles long lost and forgotten.
Almost uniformly slow, sooty, and diffuse, the record can be disorienting; the more you listen, the more individual tracks blur together. Barring a few elegiac passages, there are few melodies to latch on to, and the record's structure feels almost labyrinthine. Tracks may meander through several distinct phases with little regard for a conventional narrative arc; some simply hover, digging in like a bad trip, until they break in a burst of chorus. Elements flit in and out of earshot according to inscrutable whim, and scattered lock grooves have the potential to fuck up your whole sense of time: I spent 10 minutes lost in a loop before I realized I needed to pick up the needle.
There are pieces of recognizable musical codes scattered throughout-- twanging strings lifted from dusty Ocora samplers, techno's steady kick drum, the uneasy rumble of Nurse With Wound and SPK. Ragged synthesizers strafe across the spectrum like strobe lights in a British field, ca. 1989. In its more harmonic passages, the record's trapped-in-a-submarine atmosphere sounds directly inspired by Seefeel's great 1995 album Succour. The hand-soldered experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop bubble up in squealing sine waves and erratic oscillations; those analog strokes are some of the freest sounds on the record, suggesting lines of flight up and away from a potter's field strewn with mouldering recordings of yore.
Two songs explicitly engage with current modes of club music: "Mnemosyne" follows Shackleton's experiments in fourth world dubstep, with ululations laid over square-wave bass blurts and cracking snares, while "Ishmael's Intent" taps into the ominous, ethno-techno vibe of William Bennett's Cut Hands project.
There's a lot of this kind of thing around at the moment-- in addition to Cut Hands, this particular field of gloomy, ethno-infected, post-industrial techno includes Demdike Stare's label-mates Andy Stott, G.H., Raime, and the rest of the Blackest Ever Black label, Ancient Methods, Ekoplekz, and the clockwork kalimba meltdowns of Harmonious Thelonious and the Durian Brothers-- and it's legitimate to ask what elevates Elemental above mere mannerism or fashion. (Now that Tiësto's peddling triangle t-shirts, we can probably agree that the isosceles' hipster moment is over, but the current fascination with esoteric, sepulchral music and imagery shows little sign of abating.)
Beyond the pervasive sense of doom, which is only reinforced by titles like "Mephisto's Lament" and "In the Wake of Chronos", the whole album package feels like a tribute to limited-edition fetish products of 1980s industrial music. While a 2xCD reissue featuring an altered tracklisting is due later in the year, the album is currently out as a lavish, quadruple-gatefold, 4xLP set, with the individual discs colored four different shades of purple: chrysanthemum, violet, rose, and iris. (The first two pieces were included with the gatefold cover, now sold out; the second will be available for purchase separately. It's blatant collector bait, but it's hard to deny that it's a stunning piece of work.)
The music itself, though, is plenty compelling all on its own. More focused than Tryptych, Elemental hones in on its mood and conveys a genuine sense of mystery that goes way beyond mere affect. Part of it, I think, has to do with the fact that you never know quite what you're hearing. Is that a foghorn or a Moog? A chorus of reeds or a bees' nest? Where did those drums come from? Does it matter? The sound lingers in between the representational and the abstract, and that ambiguity-- that impurity-- only increases its expressive dimensions. At several points, Demdike Stare's album sounds uncannily like Chris Watson's recently released El Tren Fantasma, a sound portrait of a Mexican railway in its last month of operation. Blurring the lines between documentary, music, and noise, and between life and technology, Watson's chronicle turned the real phantasmal. Demdike Stare do the opposite, conjuring a vivid fantasy world out of audio salvage and crusty circuitry.


Pacific Northwestern punks Naomi Punk's second LP is a tough, grimy album made by three young men who sound like they could use more "outside time" in their lives. This is a band with a narrow idea of what it wants to do and a firm confidence in doing it.

Television Man

Television Man is a tough, grimy album made by three young men who sound like they could use more "outside time" in their lives. Its province is the damp basement, the dirty aquarium, dreamy half-places of strange light and no easy egress. No surprise that Naomi Punk are from the Pacific Northwest, a region legendarily devoid of sun but graced with persistent, almost prehistoric lushness—somewhere that feels both forbidding and overgrown at the same time.
This is a band with a narrow idea of what it wants to do and a firm confidence in doing it. Most of Television's songs—and most the songs on 2012's The Feeling, for that matter—are slow and grunge-like, anchored by vaguely radioactive-sounding guitars and vocals mumbled to the point of unintelligibility. They are heavy and romantic but sour end-to-end, the ballads of a teenage swamp thing preening in the dark.
They're also unexpectedly pretty, filled with twists of melody and structure far more sophisticated than they need to be to fly in the realms of punk and underground rock. Even on my fourth and fifth listen, I couldn't see all the way to the end of "Television Man" or "Linoleum Tryst #19", which have the psychedelic quality of a yawn that peels open to yet some improbably bigger yawn, stretching for a resolution always just out of reach.
In that respect, one obvious touchstone is Nirvana, who among other feats wrote noisy, guitar-based rock songs around chord changes so beautiful and labyrinthine that on first listen they somehow seem wrong. (If you haven't listened to "Lithium" in the past year, treat yourself.) At root, this is basic but deceptively simple stuff about the way two chords can sit next to each other like two familiar flavors paired in some revelatory way. The wit is not in the ingredients, per se, but in the contrast between them.
My introduction to Naomi Punk was through Parquet Courts' 2013 mixtape, which has continued to serve as a reliable map of underground bands marrying the simplicity and aggression of punk with the opacity of "art," by which I generally mean "things that aren't obvious." Television isn't an album I listen to all the time—I value a positive outlook on life—but when I do listen to it, I savor it by the minute. Its style is limited, but the band manages to spread out within it, discovering their own idiosyncratic little vocabulary without ever exhausting it. And at bottom, that's what I find so attractive about the album: Despite its dimness and introversion, it always suggests a horizon.


Susanna (sans her Magical Orchestra) tackles another slate of cover songs comprising unlikely selections from Tom Petty, Thin Lizzy, ABBA, and more. Will Oldham duets on several tracks, including a version of his Bonnie "Prince" Billy song "Joy and Jubilee".

Flower of Evil

There's a certain amount of hubris inherent in every covers record. Surely many if not most begin quite innocently, like a fan letter to a favorite act. But the implication is still that the singer or band thinks that they can bring something new to someone else's song or performance. Perhaps they feel that they can even make the song better. The fact that this rarely happens apparently deters no one. "Playing covers... is not the same as, say, recording your favorite songs of all time," elaborated Norwegian singer Susanna Wallumrod when an interviewer from The Guardian asked about her propensity toward re-imagining the songs of others. "That wouldn't be interesting. It is about trying to make good music of your own."
Truth be told, Susanna's strategy to date has largely been about making someone else's good music her own. Susanna and the Magical Orchestra's first album, 2004's List of Lights and Buoys, featured a couple of covers, including a morphine-slow take on Dolly Parton's "Jolene". But 2006's Melody Mountain was comprised of nothing but covers, including such ringers as "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and the umpteenth recording of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah". These less adventurous selections were offered along with more eclectic stabs at the likes of AC/DC, Prince, and, um, KISS. And 1980s KISS, no less (though if you want to pick a song to make better, you couldn't do much better-- which is to say worse-- than "Crazy, Crazy Nights").
In 2007, Wallumrod-- sans former Jaga Jazzist keyboardist Morten Qvenild, aka the Magical Orchestra-- emerged with the album of originals Sonata Mix Dwarf Cosmos. But she's back to her old tricks with her second solo disc Flower of Evil, another collection of radically rearranged covers. Well, mostly covers. Susanna slips a couple of originals onto this disc, too, but "Goodbye" and "Wild Is the Will" tend to blend right in, so thoroughly does Susanna adapt each chosen song to her particularly despondent milieu of dramatic piano and spare accompaniment by pals Helge Sten and Pål Hausken.
Frankly, it's hard to tell what we're meant to take away from Wallumrod's introductory take on Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak", no matter how heartbreaking she makes it, especially when she's backed by the master of malleable sincerity himself, Mr. Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Will Oldham turns up again later as duet partner on Badfinger's "Without You", and his own "Joy and Jubilee" gets the Susanna treatment, too. It's a great fit, brittle and beautiful in all the right places, getting to the heart of Oldham's song in a way that the elusive songwriter himself sometimes disallows.
A few other tracks prove apt fits as well, particularly Sandy Denny's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes", Roy Harper's "Forever", and Nico's "Janitor of Lunacy", songs you'd think couldn't get any more melancholy or morose...until they do. Black Sabbath's ballad "Changes" especially benefits from its new setting, not to mention Susanna's female touch, as does Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More", plucked from its 80s trappings and remade as a funereal hymn. Fresh readings of Prince's forgotten Lovesexy track "Dance On" and ABBA's "Lay All Your Love on Me" highlight the strength of lyrics too often subsumed by each respective original song's ace production, even if in the latter case, the original Eurodisco trumps Susanna's Eurodirge.
Yet whether you're Chan Marshall, Mark Kozelek, or Susanna, when a cover goes beyond mere interpretation to outright reinvention, it does raise a question: If you're going to radically change a song until it's virtually unrecognizable, why not go all the way, write new lyrics, and call it something else? Revisiting Lou Reed's Transformer nugget "Vicious" as a piano ballad or "Can't Shake Loose" (a solo hit for ABBA's Agnetha Fältskog) as chamber gloom unfortunately further amplifies the perils and pointlessness of this kind of novelty.
Sure, recontextualizing songs can sometimes reveal something new about the source material. At least that's what the most gifted interpreters accomplish. But in Susanna's case, more often than not, the literal meaning of the lyrics is left intact after all else has been jettisoned. With every track projected through the same spectrum of depression, sadness, and misery, the song becomes unimportant and we're left only with her affected, ultimately monochromatic approach. As morbidly effective, thoroughly gorgeous, and sometimes wrenching as the results may be, in the end Susanna simply doesn't own these songs. She smothers and snuffs them out like a candle.


This surreal, distortion-heavy power-pop album, reissued on vinyl, stands among the best of the late-’90s Elephant 6 output.

Are You Sleepy

Scott Spillane has a glorious beard. Just spectacular, this thing. The beard conveys wisdom, mystery; it derails interviews, inspires Wikipedia edit wars. Amidst the coterie of oddballs known to the world as Elephant 6, Spillane has always stood out, even to those who might not know his name. It’s hardly just the facial hair: Spillane is the horn player for Neutral Milk Hotel, and really, for all of Elephant 6, lending his time-distending, stately-yet-sloppy touch and fondness for atypical instrumentation—euphonium, flugelhorn, that sort of thing—to any E6 record that would have him. Like Jeff Mangum’s heart-stopping bleat or Julian Koster’s swooning saw, it’s impossible to imagine the sound of Elephant 6 without him.
But this truncated version of the Spillane story—horn guy, has beard, knows Jeff—leaves out one crucial bullet point: Spillane not only played with some of the best of Elephant 6, for a brief time, he helmed one of the collective’s finest bands. Spillane came up in Ruston, Louisiana, alongside Mangum, Apples in Stereo pixie-stickler Robert Schneider, and merry Olivia Tremor Control prankster Will Cullen Hart. And right at the peak of E6’s powers, Spillane, his NMH compatriot Jeremy Barnes, late guitarist Will Westbrook, and fellow E6 mainstay John D’Azzo released Are You Sleepy?, the first of two LPs as the Gerbils. Where 2001’s The Battle of Electricity is pleasantly anodyne, 1998’s Are You Sleepy? is anything but: It’s a roughed-up, fuzzed-out, in-the-red power-pop album with proggy ambitions and some deep-fried weirdness just beneath the surface. While not a full-bore classic, it stands among the best of the second-tier E6 offerings, a longtime fan favorite recently reissued on vinyl for the first time in 20 years.
The first thing anybody notices about Are You Sleepy? is Spillane’s voice—he may look like a backwoods dope farmer, but he sings like a cartoon bumblebee. Warm and warbly in the Daniel Johnston mold, his falsetto cuts straight through all the gnarled lo-fi static around him. While most Elephant 6 records attempted to transcend their home-taped origins, Are You Sleepy? is a lo-fi record in every sense, every level screaming hot, every seam undisguised.
Compared with the world-building wonder of classics like Aeroplane, Sleepy? can feel a little one-note: catchy but a tad on the sweet side. Listen closer, and you’ll hear Spillane’s not afraid to mix in a little sour: “Sunshine Soul” likens a budding romance to a cup full of spiders, and “Crayon Box” turns a missed ride to a nearby Portastatic gig into a full-on existential crisis. There’s a semi-surreal, Southern gothic vibe to many lyrics, and much of Are You Sleepy? is written on the body: a lot of knees and lips, teeth and tongues. Quite a few songs trace a kind of fly-on-the-wall longing: the feeling of going unnoticed, of fraying connections with your small circle, of departures both temporary and permanent.
Smack in the middle of Sleepy is “Wet Host,” a five-and-a-half-minute ambient noise collage that separates the record into two distinct halves.The second takes a midnight-dark turn on “Walnuts,” where Spillane recalls a sudden reemergence of “childhood dreams and violent screams” as his syrupy voice overruns with bile. You’d be hard pressed to call Sleepy? an angry record, but it’s got more than a few moments like these, where Spillane’s good-natured facade betrays a kind of uncontrolled bitterness.
Sleepy is best when it lets these stranger impulses seep into the songs, and at its worst when self-indulgence starts to crowd out the songs themselves. The choppy “Ted Doesn’t Mind” devolves into a horny street preacher/”Convoy” routine that’s funny approximately once, and as intermissions go, “Wet Host” would be just as effective at half its length. But these flickers of excess are short-lived. Twenty years on, Are You Sleepy? still feels like the razor blade in the apple.


Five years after his breakthrough mixtape, the former upstart has become a veteran. On his second album in eight months, the rough edges give way to the assured pleasures of an expert in his zone.

200% Galcher

100% Galcher was not just a phenomenon; it was the end—and the beginning—of an era. Released five years ago, on a low-key British electronic-music blog called Blowing Up the Workshop, the mixtape made the then-unknown Galcher Lustwerk into an underground house superstar. Without the help of our present-day streaming ecosystem, the Ohio-bred, New York-based producer went quietly viral, as word of his smoky hip-house songs passed between inboxes. He crafted a document that not only captured the shape of deep house to come but enabled him to cross over in a way few artists in his world ever do. His beautiful, scratchy baritone and the scuffed-up beats surrounding every purr were a magical combo that resonated with clubgoers and headphone listeners alike.
In 2018, Galcher is a known commodity—a veteran, even. Whatever sense of mystery he evoked when he emerged has dispersed, and his aesthetic, alluring as it still is, has become well defined. 200% Galcher, his sophomore album, attempts to capture the magic of his very first release, but it feels less like some diamond in the rough and more like just another extremely pleasant release from a very talented producer.
The big picture of Galcher’s music—the dreamy stoner mood; the sonorous, almost lullaby-like party poems of his lyrics—has mostly remained the same, but the details have sharpened quite a bit. After his 2017 debut album, Dark Bliss, it was evident that the roughness of his earlier work was going to be absent going forward: The edges were sanded down, the grime on the camera lens wiped away. If there is a log line for 200% Galcher, it’s that his deep house gets even deeper.
The music on the new album is tailor-made for hotboxed bedrooms and bodies sinking into couch cushions. The mood is set on the opener, “Wristbands,” an unhurried eight-minute track with one hell of an electric bassline strut and extra-crispy drum-machine beats. He’s relegated his somnambulant voice to the background, his whispered sweet nothings just there for atmosphere. From the get-go, the instrumentation is immediately more vivid and defined than in his previous work; it pops in a way that dispels some of the haziness and feels more emotive as a result.
The sashaying basslines, on “Wristbands” and elsewhere, impart a dose of swagger, and the jazziness is much more pronounced throughout. Lustwerk was a saxophone player in his youth, and that instrument plays an important role on some of the best songs here. The strongest track, “Blue Lotus,” is essentially a jam session, with taut drumming, wide and lazy synth lines, bluesy keys, and wandering saxophone solo. There’s little to “Blue Lotus” that feels synthetic, and that more natural, lived-in sound is a path Galcher should pursue further in the future. Still, his voice is still a star—on “Life” his seductive play-by-play (“Go get out the house go and get a spouse/Go and get aroused hit another house/Buy another house”) turns domestic bliss into something sexier.
But even though 200% Galcher hones in on the producer’s almost cartoonishly smooth aesthetic with ease, pockets of the album feel forgettable. Each song hits the same relaxed note, and after a while, listening to 10 variations on the same shuffling, downcast beat can lull anyone into sleepiness. It’s a fine-tuned consistency that wasn’t present on 100% Galcher: The pacing of that mixtape left room for surprises, and its druggy fun was spontaneous and youthful. With 200% Galcher the compositions are tighter and the songwriting stronger, but the panache is replaced with precision. There is a seamless locomotion here, a workman-like craft that one only gets with experience. It’s a mature statement from a maturing artist, but one that doesn’t quite strike the same spark of invention. But perhaps he no longer needs to blast open doors in house music—his legacy as an innovator is set. What 200% Galcher makes clear is that no one does that thing quite as well as Galcher Lustwerk.


John Darnielle explores the humanity of wizards, sports legends, Ozzy Osbourne, and other folk heroes and beacons of hope.

The Mountain Goats: In League With Dragons

In League With Dragons

“Old wizards and old athletes are the same,” John Darnielle said during a Facebook live stream at the headquarters of Wizards of the Coast, the game company that owns Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. He was there to announce the latest record from the Mountain Goats, In League With Dragons, and his rhetoric was appropriately fanciful: “They were once magic,” he offered by way of explanation.
He roughly meant that fallen wizards and washed-up athletes shared the same mythological powers; they once stood in as folk heroes and beacons of hope. Their might came not only from their skills, but their lore, stories that blurred the line between the possible and the absurd. On In League With Dragons, Darnielle gives credence to these fantasies, stepping into the minds of the athletes, rockstars, and wizards who offer escape from reality.
But despite its title and the winged green monster on the record’s album art, In League With Dragons is light on mythical beasts; only four songs here come from the original wizard musical Darnielle was writing. Instead, he fills the record with the subjects of his own escapist fantasies. “Doc Gooden” depicts the former Mets pitcher recounting his glory days: “When my name was everywhere/None of you were there.” On “Passiac 1975,” Darnielle sings from the perspective of his own personal wizard, Ozzy Osbourne. In what is possibly the gentlest song about The Prince of Darkness, we hear about the less glamorous moments in the life of Ozzy: “In a Holiday Inn by a nameless river/Renew the assault on my lungs and my liver.” Over the years, Darnielle has excelled at exploiting fallibility and irony for humor, and that shines through on the chorus, delivered in his best “We Are The World” voice: “Tell the crowd, tell the world/I want everyone to get high.”
The record occasionally delves into the arcane, as Mountain Goats records can. “Younger” cloaks an exploration of middle-aged disillusionment under an extended D&D-battle metaphor. “Possum By Night” is sung through the eyes of the titular marsupial. It plays out as any Mountain Goats song about a possum should: “All you parasites, climb aboard/All you vagabonds, praise the Lord,” Darnielle sings, backed by a quiet piano. I found it hilarious and heartbreaking; casual fans may, understandably, find it strange and skippable.
Balancing out these moments are fan-service Easter Eggs like “Going Invisible 2,” a continuation of Get Lonely B-side “Going Invisible.”  It has the same resigned catharsis as their classic material, and you can easily picture a crowd singalong of the refrain: “I'm gonna burn it all down today/And sweep all the ashes away.”
Darnielle has increasingly distanced himself from those scrappy, acoustic recordings, adding in a full band, and, on the Mountain Goats’ last record, ridding himself of the guitar completely. Here, producer Owen Pallett adds orchestral flourishes, wind instruments, and delicate finger-picked guitar, resulting in one of the Mountain Goats’ most wide-ranging records: “Waylon Jennings Live!” is a full-blown country song, complete with moaning electric guitar, washboards, and shakers, while “An Antidote For Strychnine” is scored like a noir film. In Pallett’s hands, Darnielle’s voice contorts into heretofore-unheard shapes: On “Clemency for the Wizard King”  he approaches “Scarborough Fair” levels of falsetto. Together, these songs function like the cast recording of a musical—each builds on what came before while also establishing its own world.
The Mountain Goats are in an enviable position. They have the trust of their audience and feel comfortable departing from their core sound. “I finally don’t feel quite so insecure,” Darnielle said in a recent Vanity Fair interview. It’s evident in the conviction in his voice as he sings about a fictional, fantastical kingdom. At some point, about a decade ago, the Mountain Goats stopped making records rooted in workaday reality; but the beauty in a Mountain Goats record is that reality pokes through whatever costumes you put on it. “It's so hard to get revenge/The human element drags you down,” he sings on the title track. Even cloaked in wizard’s garb, Darnielle can’t hide his essential humanity.


A new collection of the Swedish composer’s early experiments on Fender Rhodes, synthesizers, and magnetic tape shines a long overdue spotlight on an unsung electronic pioneer.

Catherine Christer Hennix: Selected Early Keyboard Works

Selected Early Keyboard Works

Ten years ago, followers of drone, experimental electronic music, and minimalism might have noticed that something was amiss with the canon: Most of the big names there were men, with very few women or people of color represented. But recent reissues have sought to present a broader portrait of late-20th-century minimalism, one that ventures beyond La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and others of their ilk. From a long overdue reappraisal of the gay black composer Julius Eastman to crucial overviews of Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, and Mary Jane Leach, such reissues have presented a far more diverse set of artists plotting new courses amid the sine waves.
Swedish polymath Catherine Christer Hennix is a composer, philosopher, writer, mathematician, and visual artist who has benefited from such a reassessment. Despite the fact that she has been working since the late 1960s and mingled with Young and Riley, it wasn’t until 2010 that a recorded version of her bewildering 1976 drone work “The Electric Harpsichord” was finally made available. This year alone saw her first solo museum exhibition in over 40 years, Traversée du Fantasme, at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam; a retrospective archival show of her visual work at the Empty Gallery in Hong Kong; as well as two volumes of her writing, capped now by this two-disc set of previously unheard pieces drawn from rehearsal tapes made during the 10-day Dream Music Festival in 1976.
Exploring different corners of Hennix’s soundworld, Selected Early Keyboard Works shows that she wasn’t always just exploring fathoms-deep drones. Far removed from the scale of her just-intonation ensemble, the Deontic Miracle, these works document her work with a Fender Rhodes and sine-wave drone. The first half of the set presents 43 minutes of a piece entitled “Mode nouvelle des modalités” and it finds Hennix far from the world of her friend, colleague, and sometime collaborator La Monte Young and more taken with the quicksilver early electronics of Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the hands of most players of that era (think Lonnie Liston Smith, Herbie Hancock, or Stevie Wonder the Fender Rhodes created floating, placid tones, but Hennix quickly breaks them into shards and jags, rupturing the mood often to propel herself into strange new realms. On the second half of the composition, more space appears between Hennix’s gestures so that the sounds seem to float like space debris in zero gravity.
The 13-minute “Equal Temperament Fender Mix” is charming, worthy of comparison to the early electronic keyboard works of Terry Riley, right down to Hennix deploying her own tape-delay system to create multiple layers of bubbling sound. This should come as no surprise: The Swedish were some of the earliest audiences to embrace Riley’s revolutionary approach to improv and composition.
The sparkling and unnerving 18-minute highlight “The Well-Tuned Marimba” is closely related to Hennix’s drone piece from that same year, “The Electric Harpsichord,” and might be the more intriguing composition, folding together Hennix’s Yamaha keyboard, sine-wave generator, and the sheng, a traditional Chinese polyphonic reed instrument, whose wheezing overtones add a preternatural buzz to the skin-prickling electronic layers. While some of the most revered minimalist composers and compositions present a calm exterior, these newly discovered efforts of Hennix show us a disquieting—and welcome—new wrinkle to those serene surfaces.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the essential 1986 debut from the vibrant and visceral Rhode Island indie rock band, the first American group signed to 4AD.

Throwing Muses

“A living song is dirty, a dead one clean.” So goes one of Kristin Hersh’s many theories of music. If this is the theory, then her band’s 1986 debut, Throwing Muses, is the proof. Songs tear themselves apart and reattach at odd angles. Hersh, without warning, will snarl out a line in a guttural roar otherwise reserved for metal singers. Guitarist and vocalist Tanya Donelly will play a line out of step with the rest of the arrangement, sweeten that which you would not expect to be sweetened, or invite in some ghosts with a whispered vocal beneath the track. Bassist Leslie Langston will design lines like labyrinths. David Narcizo’s precision drumming acts as rivets under strain, holding the song together but barely. The songs themselves are precocious yet visceral, about life in all its grime. Love is a battlefield rendered in gory closeups. Sex is likened to a pigeon crushed under a car tire. The music is alive, and it is dirty.
Following the Muses in the early years, the dirt might not have been immediately apparent. Hersh and Donelly were step-sisters who grew up in musical families—each received a guitar from the other’s father. Around age 14, they started a band with two classmates at Rogers High School in Newport, Rhode Island with bassist Elaine Adamedes and drummer Becca Blumen. (Narcizo and Langston would join later.) The band’s early songs were less rock than lo-fi new wave, running on tinkly Casio and teenage enthusiasm, but they had the bones of Throwing Muses: Hersh and Donelly’s sugary harmonies, the scrappy confidence of a band. Originally named the Muses, the band added the “Throwing” as a reference to a passage Hersh had read by philosopher Martin Heidegger (they’d later distance themselves from it after learning about Heidegger’s entanglement with Nazism).
Everything was proceeding rather normally as high-school bands go; a profile in The Cowl, a Providence college paper, quotes Narcizo as looking forward to the summer and “a chance to define ourselves”: a fifth member, a synth, more percussion. But shortly thereafter, a 16-year-old Hersh was hit by a car while biking. Her head was severely injured, and she recalls hallucinating songs ever since: songs made of trauma and teeth, whose voice was the demonic roar Hersh would be known for on record and stage. She wrote most of these in a ramshackle apartment she called the Doghouse, in a frenzy of deteriorating health. “I can’t even remember what it was like to hear a song that didn’t grab my face and shout at it,” she recalled in her 2010 memoir Rat Girl. “Must’ve been soothing. But this is electrifying.”
At the urging of producer Gary Smith, who would later shepherd the Pixies to fame, the band moved to Boston and became regulars in the burgeoning college-rock circuit there. Two interviewers from a Rhode Island School of Design campus magazine introduced the Muses to the Cocteau Twins and suggested they contact their label, the legendary British outfit 4AD. Awestruck with the sound of dream pop—“It was like heaven music,” Donelly recalls—Throwing Muses sent some early demos to co-founder Ivo Watts-Russell. Watts-Russell, reminded of Nick Cave’s the Birthday Party, struck up a cross-pond pas-de-deux with the Muses, talking about anything and everything besides signing them because, as he’d mention ruefully, 4AD didn’t sign American bands. But soon, the pretense was dropped, the Muses were indeed signed, college-rock producer Gil Norton was assigned to work with them, and everything began.
Not that everything went smoothly. Throwing Muses is an idiosyncratic and uncopyable debut, but it’s also the product of internal and external tension. To make the album cohere, Watts-Russell nixed most of the goofier material and Americana tracks from the band’s repertoire. Hellspawn songs don’t always translate to full-band arrangements—Narcizo often found himself simply drumming along to the lead line, Langston wrote basslines that turned the arrangement into a thatch, then Donelly found herself, as Hersh recalls, “fitting parts over the mesh.” The resulting cassette of demos was surprisingly straightforward, but Norton was still tasked to pump the songs up, smooth them over—especially noticeable on the intro to “Vicky’s Box,” jangly and thick with sound compared to its cassette counterpart. This was new to the band—even the studio Watts-Russell rented was plush and disorienting compared to the band’s upbringing in communes and college crash pads.
Hersh, meanwhile, had become pregnant with her first child, Dylan, while still working through severe PTSD from her bicycle crash. She was diagnosed with what at the time was called manic depression. While this didn’t stop the recording sessions—“I think it’s against the law to fire a band just because it’s pregnant,” Hersh recalled Langston saying—she held back during vocal takes, terrified that summoning the songs’ full demonic roar might somehow get through to her unborn child. She stopped taking the lithium she’d been prescribed since the tremors it gave her made it too hard to play guitar. The result was a protracted recording process and a seemingly endless amount of takes. At one point the band was nearly kicked out of the studio to make way for Deep Purple.
A more fundamental tension was Tanya Donelly’s role in the band. She was as prolific a songwriter as Hersh—as late as 1991’s The Real Ramona, she was still working through her teenage backlog of demos—but during the Muses’ early years, she’d only have one to a handful of songs per album. The press tended to see more resentment there than truly existed. Despite Hersh and Donelly’s images of being less and more poppy, respectively, Donelly was actually the more introverted of the two, at least when it came to interviews. She’s said the distribution of songs on the Muses albums was more a matter of logistics than feeling sidelined. Donelly wrote her demos as herself, instead of envisioning them as Throwing Muses tracks (unlike the songs she’d write for her 1993 debut with Belly, which she’d envisioned as the next Breeders album but couldn’t get cut). She has one track on Throwing Muses, “Green,” a tribute to a first love who died young. The song shows early signs of her surreal imagery: one’s memories coalescing into bodice-ripping form (“Then there were candles, and a phoenix burnt my bed”), and the pivotal line, “Kneel in my ashes, kneading them,” an uncannily striking metaphor for one’s first consuming love. The tempo is that of piecing together a morning after: two repetitive tick-tock guitar figures, drumbeats like tiptoes, finding their way to emotion. Langston’s bass plays the other party: loping along beneath the track, in its own cool, unconcerned world.
Dirty alive music gets you a certain sort of reaction. Fans attached to them hard, sometimes with the kind of obsession we’d call parasocial these days. Critics were intrigued and impressed but at a loss as to who to compare the band to—X, early R.E.M., the Raincoats, and the Slits were common reference points. Even while praising them, writers would comment on how “cryptic” the songs were, leaving it there in a self-fulfilling shrug, or remark that the music felt untrained or “unlearned.” Sometimes this aligns accidentally to reality: In most interviews, Hersh insists that she channels songs, or is possessed by them, rather than deliberately writing; when her father tried to teach her guitar, she preferred to make up her own chords.
But Donelly was a more deliberate songwriter, and her songs sound fully formed from the earliest bedroom demos. Narcizo was plucked out of marching band to join the Muses, and you can hear it in how he executes every swerve and about-face with precision. Langston’s famously knotty basslines came from her extensive background in California bands—jazz, funk, reggae, acid rock—and she was especially irked by the suggestion that the band was “untrained.” “You know how hard it is to play this way? Try it sometime!” Hersh’s memoir quotes her. “There aren’t any lessons to teach you how to do this.” To this day Hersh’s work plays up lead bass, perhaps inspired by Langston’s groundwork.
The lyrics, too, confounded listeners who expected straightforward punk polemic or spicy confessionals. (This included Norton; “Please stop listening to the lyrics,” Hersh eventually told him, after he’d prodded at the proper names and homosexuality references in “Vicky’s Box.”) But Hersh is a singular vocalist and writer, and her lyrics are straightforward once you know what they’re about. Much was made by early reviewers of “Hate My Way” and its brash salvo of an intro (“I could be a smack freak and hate society/I could hate God and blame Dad…”). As Hersh wrote in her memoir, the lyrics aren’t hers. They paraphrase a kid on campus who’d handed her a pamphlet and buttonholed her for a lecture: “We as a species have yet to rise above the church and take responsibility for our own actions. For example, say you’re a smack freak…” Hersh sets this to a guitar riff hammered at the tempo of a toddler’s stomped foot, with periodic pauses after each makes-you-think-huh? chant.
What follows is a gentle elegy—but the gentle part, as usual, is the part Hersh remembers as “a piece of Doghouse evil.” With the shift in tempo comes a shift in perspective, back to Hersh: “I make you into a song/I can’t rise above the church,” she sings, less mocking and more resigned. The track is suffused with wistfulness, with trying to explain just how bad things are and knowing that it isn’t going to work. The lyrics put Hersh in conversation with her bandmates—the line “My pillow screams too, but so does my kitchen, and water and my shoes, and the road” is likely a response to an earlier demo by Donelly, “Raise the Roses” (“I hear my pillow screaming, find him”). Trying to find anyone, anything, whose turmoil matches her own, she lands on James Oliver Huberty, a mass shooter who killed 21 people at a McDonald’s in 1984. While some of Throwing Muses’ subject matter has become less transgressive over the years, this if anything has become more; imagine anyone in 2022, after hundreds more such shooters, writing a song comparing herself to one.
Throwing Muses is full of tracks about this uncrossable distance. “So many people want to talk/They look in the mirror and see themselves,” Hersh and Donelly sing on “Call Me”—the implication being, what if you see someone else? The lyrics are full of Lovecraftian invocations of unspecified approaching doom, and the vocals border on voice-acting: snarling out warnings, punctuating lines with dramatic sighs, wilting at the end. For all the studio soft-focus Norton applied to the songs between cassette and debut, Hersh’s vocal delivery is largely the same, crucially fierce. To take one line: “Peter said, thanks for letting me ho-ho!ld you, calling me moonshine.” So much is said in one line: the snarling of the dude’s name; that ho-ho! in the middle like a crowing cartoon Falstaff; the subtext that this guy, like many men you encounter as a rock band of teenage girls, might not be entirely savory. The outro, a lilting recollection of loneliness, is one of the Muses’ most musically straightforward moments, and all the more so when you realize that when Hersh sings “Call me,” she means this: Call her something, anything that makes sense.
These questions of identity suffuse the album, as you’d expect from a record written by high schoolers. But unlike other teenage coming-of-age stories, there’s no clean resolution. “I’m losing my person,” Hersh sings in “America,” meaning herself. She writes secondary characters as kindred spirits: the young gay man outrunning his looming identities in “Vicky’s Box,” the titular rabbit of “Rabbit’s Dying,” expiring amid the Muses’ sludgiest arrangement. “Fear” is a meta-song: starting in medias res punctuated by car sirens, quoting the intro to “Call Me” and what would later become the guitar loop of The Real Ramona’s “Hook in Her Head.” Once again, as the song gets quiet, it gets mean. Donelly narrates, in sotto voce, the process of Hersh’s Doghouse songs creeping up through the body, “up to your face, up to your cheeks,” like a twisted meditation ritual to obliterate yourself through sound. While Donelly keeps going, unmovable, Hersh’s vocal goes wordless then erupts into a seething roar: the song’s true voice, severed from words.
In spite of, or maybe because of its singularity, Throwing Muses was bound to be somewhat obscure. 4AD labelmates such as Lush’s Miki Berenyi praised the band to no end, but their influence was otherwise indirect, through connections: Donelly would join the Breeders for their debut Pod, and Hersh would record with Michael Stipe and become acquainted with Mary Margaret O’Hara. The Muses got further traction through the Boston rock scene; Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead recalled seeing them in his teens and remarking that Boston “was so much cooler.” But Throwing Muses was never released in the United States until 1998, when Warner’s Rykodisc bundled it and its demo cassette into the two-CD compilation In a Doghouse compilation. Neither the original nor the compilation appear on major streaming services, so while the album isn’t exactly hard to find, it’s cut off from the algorithmic apparatus connecting, among others, future musicians with their future influences. Throwing Muses was always a submerged kind of album anyway: the primordial well from which myths emerge.


"Headphones on. The mind- altering fungi has turned your brain cells to glowing embers. You lie on your back, looking ...

Dead Bees on a Cake

"Headphones on. The mind- altering fungi has turned your brain cells to glowing embers. You lie on your back, looking past a gathering of treetops in the bamboo forest. But the trees aren't really trees; they're actually large wind instruments growing out of the ground. Mother Nature controls the valves and blows a light, steady stream of air up from the earth's core, and through a copse of tree- woodwinds. Now there's a huge multi- layered drone backing up the high notes of harmonizing hummingbirds, while wood- nymphs whistle along. Wolves give digeridoo howls. Woodpeckers tap out their staccato percussion, a chorus of crickets chirp their accompaniment, and a rhythmically- inclined panda bear pounds on hollow tree stumps in the distance. All the sounds are in perfect unison like some vast aboriginal orchestra. But this is no ordinary trip, you're experiencing David Sylvian's organically- grown multiform sound- universe."
--Excerpt from my upcoming novel, "Mushroom Clouds in My Mind, Man"
Alright, nevermind the Kerouac-ian bullshit. But you get the idea. I mean, Dead Bees on a Cake isn't exactly akin to the incidental soundtrack music of some boring nature film made by Gorp- chomping hippie conservationists. There's a certain rare meld of both primal and postmodern compositional sense being applied here. Sylvian blends his different ethnic influences seamlessly, in a manner that shames the trendy world- beat affectations making appearances on so many British and American songwriters' albums. And sure, sometimes Sylvian's only a pan flute coo or zither- pluck away from officially crossing into Windham Hill territory, and joining the lifetime opening- for- Kitaro circuit. But hey.
Having been a member of synth- rock pioneers Japan, I guess it seems only natural that Sylvian would eventually record with someone authentically Japanese. Good thing he decided to work with arranging/ composing genius Ryuichi Sakamoto, and not, say, Yoko Ono or nasty ol' Yamatsuka Eye. Dead Bees on a Cake is nothing less than a continuation of Sylvian's eclectic series of genre- hopping solo albums-- the best of which is probably his first major collaborative effort with Sakamoto, 1984's Brilliant Trees.
When you're like Sylvian-- able to attract the likes of Robert Fripp (who plays on 1993's God's Monkey), Bill Frisell, and Talvin Singh and have them function as your sidemen-- you know you've finally become that semi- obscure but critically- acclaimed rock enigma you've always dreamed of becoming, right? Even Marc Ribot decides to contribute some inimitable guitar work on this latest album, miraculously tearing himself away from his busy schedule playing with every single musician in New York City.
Dead Bees leads off with the spare, soul- drenched "I Surrender," and gives some foreshadowing of what's to come. Ribot's traditional jazz octave- playing shares space with abbreviated flugelhorn parts, flute, and tape- looped guitar ornamentation (the funk- inflected churn of "God Man" suggests Mitchell Froom could have had his busy paws on the mixing board at some point, although there's no documented proof). But in many cases, just a guitar and vocals are apparently enough to satisfy Sylvian. For instance, on "Dobro #1," Bill Frisell handles the dobro duties while Sylvian simply sings. Or you may get an arrangement like the one on "Pollen Path," consisting of slide guitar, samples, drums, and Sakamoto on "insects."
Each track comes together in the sense that no one instrument or effect is ever really featured over another-- and that includes Sylvian's low, breathy vocals. His vocal cadences fit snugly around whatever instrumentation happens to be floating about. The songs also benefit from Sakamoto's arranging expertise, in that he seems to know exactly where and when to add the odd orchestral quirk, appropriate sound snippets, or coordinate a string or brass arrangement.
Sylvian's intrepid, near- subliminal use of samples proves to be an approach far beyond the grasp of most shameless sample- happy "progressive" groups. He extracts bits and pieces from the Mahavishnu Orchestra, John Cage, John Lee Hooker and Charles Brown's 1946 Cash Box award- winning single "Driftin' Blues," slowly and subtly interspersing the sampled contents into a song's framework. "Driftin' Blues" and samples of Hooker's "I'm Wanderin'" serve as the ostensible basis for Sylvian's unorthodox interpretation of simple blues on "Midnight Sun." Pretty heady stuff it is, especially compared to the output of millions of musically- illiterate con-men who steal huge chunks of old Motown hits or spy- movie themes and add a trip-hop beat, just before insisting that the result be hailed as serious work of art.
Talvin Singh makes an indispensable contribution, conjuring up some spicy raga rhythms on "Krishna Blue" and "All My Mother's Names." The latter transports you to an ambient never- neverland where Singh's Zen- like tabla beats become one with the throbbing of your eardrums and Ribot's guitar becomes the stuff of personification, as it unleashes primal screams and experiences fits of electronic epilepsy. Other extra- terrestrial sound samples fade in and out, and before long, you find yourself spinning out of control in something resembling the opening credits of "The Twilight Zone." (Wave to the giant E=MC2 figure as it floats by! There it goes!)
Sadly, Dead Bees on a Cake will most likely be received like every other David Sylvian solo project-- that is, with uniform indifference in America and a maybe few eyebrow raisings in Europe. True, for die- hard Japan fans expecting another Gentlemen Take Polaroids, or Adolescent Sex, this may at first sound to you like stuff you'd only listen to during an Oriental massage or a Calgon bath. But don't be fooled. Sylvian's lyrics are poetic and rarely dull, and the album's unmistakably advanced musical vision makes it pretty tough to dismiss as mere new age pap.


In his debut full-length, the UK producer puts his idiosyncratic stamp on a variety of club styles, folding in the voices of his family members to add emotional resonance.

Still Slipping Vol. 1

Peter O’Grady’s family has long played an important role in his career as Joy Orbison. His cousin Leighann introduced him to drum’n’bass and UK garage at a young age, while he credits his uncle, jungle legend Ray Keith, with fostering his nascent interest in dance music. On Still Slipping Vol. 1, O’Grady’s first full-length release—arriving more than a decade after his debut 12"—he weaves his family into the fabric of the record. Voice notes from his parents, sister, uncles, cousins, and Aunt Helen transform Still Slipping Vol. 1 into one of the most quietly moving dance music records of the year, while a playful sense of humor keeps O’Grady’s familiar mischievous streak in play.
O’Grady has, in many ways, been here before. His 2019 Slipping EP featured his grandmother on the cover, while his track “w/ Dad” sampled his father reminiscing about a nameless child. Still Slipping Vol. 1 takes this tendency and runs with it over 14 tracks that showcase O’Grady’s cosmopolitan production technique at its very best. O’Grady calls this “a soul record,” and it certainly feels like a lot of heart has gone into it. Stylistically, though, it runs closer to the many tendrils of the UK bass continuum to which O’Grady has put his name. “swag w/ kav” rides a beat with shades of 2-step garage; “better” is a scuba-deep house number, reminiscent of UK veteran Charles Webster; “layer 6” skirts around the airier moments of drum’n’bass, and “runnersz,” with its melodic sub-bass and twinkling synths, is close enough to what used to be known as post-dubstep, back in the days when Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo” blew up in UK clubs. It’s the kind of music where you can hear shades of everything but few conclusive traces of any one style, blending four decades of dance music with a lightness of touch that may surprise those more familiar with the corrosive techno bangers of Joy O’s hookups with fellow UK producer Boddika.
In the age of COVID, when many people haven’t seen their extended families in months, lacing a record with domestic chatter might seem like a sentimental cheat code, a shortcut to emotional depth that isn’t necessarily earned. But O’Grady employs a melodic finesse throughout that equals the best tracks in his catalog—amplifying, enhancing, and sometimes undercutting the ambiance of familiar chitchat. “better,” with singer Léa Sen, has a topline of exquisite tenderness, while slo-mo electro number “froth sipping” contains a synth pattern reminiscent of Orbital’s euphoric melancholy, if the latter were sunk beneath gently moving water. Throughout, O’Grady uses deep, melodic bass tones whose embrace is as warm and comforting as a fresh towel after a cold swim.
“froth sipping” also displays the strand of knowing—and often pretty funny—meta-commentary that runs through Still Slipping. The song ends with O’Grady’s mother proclaiming, presumably about his own music, “There’s something in it that you can latch onto, because it’s got… not a melody, but something you can almost hum to”—the sort of vaguely sympathetic evaluation that will be familiar to anyone who has shared their avant-garde musical adventures with well-meaning family members. At the end of “sparko,” meanwhile, an unimpressed voice declares, “The second you just change the language to ‘mixtape,’ nobody cares,” which is pretty droll for a release that is marketed as a mixtape, rather than an album, for no discernible reason. Sadness has a place too, among the world of familiar reminiscence: “in drink” starts with O’Grady’s mother talking about her own parents getting “into drink” before fading away into mournful chords and a distressed house beat.
Not many producers would wait 12 years to release their full-length debut, then have the nerve to filet it with self-deprecating jokes, wry commentary, and family misfortune. But it is precisely these touches that make Still Slipping Vol. 1 such a compelling record. O’Grady’s wonky melodic craft and slyly self-referential humor invite comparisons to Aphex Twin, signaling O’Grady’s continuing journey beyond the limits of merely functional club music. Rarely is electronic music so utterly human as on Still Slipping, its emotional draw as reassuringly complex as a grand family reunion.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Arctic Monkeys’ daring sixth album is a left-turn if ever there was one, but the way Alex Turner swaps witty sleaze for absurdist suave makes it a totally bemusing and fascinating listen.

Arctic Monkeys: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

Alex Turner wrote Arctic Monkeys’ sixth album in Los Angeles on an upright piano in his spare room. As it took shape, he christened his makeshift studio the Lunar Surface, after the theory that Stanley Kubrick faked the Apollo moon landing on a soundstage. When Turner assembled his bandmates, they were alarmed to find he’d applied this concept literally: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a song suite documenting a futuristic moon colony and the exodus that spawned it, told by an assortment of unreliable narrators who can sometimes barely string a sentence together. After 2013’s wildly successful AM, Turner is now writing lyrics in an entirely new idiom, swapping witty sleaze for absurdist suave.
Against the odds, the resulting LP finds the former street poet at his most visionary: material only he could write, performed with a charm and bravado that only he could pull off. He veers from croons to falsetto, splicing together hyperrealist satire, sham biography, and interstellar escapism. Glints of social commentary yield to the whims of his narrators—forgetful, distractible oddballs and drunk egomaniacs who have no right to be so captivating.
At a studio in an old Parisian mansion, the band dreamed up an alluring retro-futurist backdrop for Turner’s inventions. Harpsichords, vintage keyboards, and space-age synths are cobwebbed together. The music borrows from that mid-’70s moment when the Walker Brothers resembled an avant-garde funeral band, while Turner sings drolly surreal one-liners and play-acts as a vanquished lounge singer. To round off the lunar alienation, he spliced his studio renditions with the raw, eccentric vocal demos he’d been recording at home.
The results of this experiment will divide, delight, bemuse, and bewilder various factions of their sizable fan base, particularly disciples of its bluesy predecessor. No singles teed up Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, and for good reason: Barely anything here invites casual consumption. There is plenty that actively resists it, and that’s probably the point.
Turner, who is 32, has lately immersed himself in a pair of books often cited as shorthand for our modern condition: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Unlike Father John Misty, another acolyte of this pop-philosophical literature, Turner threads their ideas into quiet storms of insinuation rather than didactic frenzies. “Everybody’s on a barge floating down the endless stream of great TV,” he riffs on “Star Treatment,” one of his sassier nods to our current predicament—what Wallace called the “strange objectless unease” of immersion in visual media.
Turner later references Postman’s “information-action ratio,” the idea that our access to endless information has created a harmful international consciousness: In deciding what to care about, we are paralyzed by choice, and so care a little about everything, rather than a lot about what’s important. On “Four Out of Five,” the “Information-Action Ratio” is the name of a rooftop taqueria in Turner’s rapidly gentrifying moon colony. This is one of his pet topics, how consumerism can co-opt a salient critique and use it to sell you new stuff. Whether or not he’d accept the term, he’s descended into a kind of capitalist ennui, borne out in a sharp line crooned on “Batphone”: “I launch my fragrance called Integrity/I sell the fact that I can’t be bought.”
Even Turner’s trademark nostalgia, once fixed on ice-cream vans and “trackie bottoms tucked in socks,” gets a top-down reinvention. On album highlight “Star Treatment,” he glams up like David Bowie descending on a lunar wedding. After recalling a time when he “just wanted to be one of the Strokes,” Turner drifts into a romantic fantasy about an ex and re-emerges in their back seat, a ghost in the rear-view mirror, before taking an elevator down to Earth to resume his “make-believe residency” as a “lounge singer shimmer.” In an age of hyper-communication and rolling-news anxiety, it’s intriguing to hear Turner in this hallucinogenic state, oscillating between abstraction and narrative. His first-person encounters are inscrutable free-association, yet the absurdities ring true. It’s not until you’re lured into his headspace that this dissonant poetry begins to align with our dissonant reality.
That dissonance reappears in Turner’s fixation on worlds-within-worlds, the way one story can collapse into another. It’s a component of his ruptured reality, traceable to any number of preoccupations—fluid truth in the fake-news era, the wonderland of L.A., the distorting effects of celebrity or cocaine. Those same lines between reality and representation are unravelling in his Lunar Surface home-studio analogy, in the songs-within-songs of “Star Treatment,” “Science Fiction,” and “The Ultracheese,” and in the hand-carved model of a hotel-casino on the record’s cover, which Turner likens to the scaled-down replicas that hotels display in their own lobbies. He has the air of a lounge-lizard Borges, a meticulous analyst with the gloriously caddish spirit of Serge Gainsbourg, John Cooper Clarke, and Jarvis Cocker rolled into one.
Perhaps the great mystery of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is not its knotty themes or cryptic lyrics but what’s motivating Turner. With the keys to the most lucrative and well-oiled indie-rock band around, he’s regenerated Arctic Monkeys in service of a delirious and artful satire directed at the foundations of modern society. This is not an act of protest: Implicated in its sprawl are gentrification, consumerism, and media consumption, but rather than address these meaty topics, he strafes around them, admiring their transformation in the laboratory of his word tricks. In the end, his helpless struggle for meaning is what makes him relatable. For all this record’s hubris, the long-touted “generational voice” that is Alex Turner has never sounded more real, or more himself.


All four members of the Districts are under 21 and they play bar-friendly rock with the irreverence and impatience of kids who still have to get drunk in the parking lot. Replacing classic rock and blues with mannish-boy punk vigor, their debut LP, produced by John Congleton, is full of energy and ambition.

A Flourish and a Spoil

The Districts’ appeal lies in how you can call them a "rock band" and have a typically vague term mean something specific. Or, maybe, they’re a throwback to the last time "rock band" meant something. All four members are under 21 years old and they play bar-friendly rawk with the irreverence and impatience of kids who still have to get drunk in the parking lot, replacing the classic rock and blues with mannish-boy punk vigor. They’re from Lititz, Penn., a town whose closest metro area is Lancaster, but they evoke New York in 2002, which itself evoked New York during a non-specific time in the late-'70s; think "Welcome to New York" with Taylor Swift swapped out for Julian Casablancas and Hamilton Leithauser and Paul Banks, a fantastical guided tour of art-damaged, post-punk, Koch-era NYC minus the clear and present danger. They’re a "the + plural noun" band. For those who felt the "New Rock Revolution" was exactly what its name promised rather than a revival of old aesthetics, the Districts' A Flourish and a Spoil signifies a restoration of order. For everyone else who simply likes rock bands, it's actually kinda quaint.
They're hardly the only ones who fit this description, but the Districts have significant advantages over their contemporaries. For one thing, they leave something to the imagination. It’s rare for the Districts to hit a specific reference point; the chalkdust guitars and laggard tempo of "Chlorine" recall the magisterial mope of early Walkmen, but otherwise, A Flourish and a Spoil is the first half of the past decade in "rock bands," wadded up and spitballed. Rollicking opener "4th & Roebling" in particular establishes itself as the meeting point in a drunken Transatlantic exchange between the loose-lipped pub crawling of the Libertines and Arctic Monkeys and their more tight-jeaned American counterparts. And unlike, say, Drowners or Catfish and the Bottlemen, Rob Grote doesn’t revert to flippant, soft misogyny as the most effective way of conveying "attitude."
Rather, he’s someone just removed from high school and parental supervision, grappling with how to live with one’s self and with another person. Grote’s subject matter is mostly what one might expect from a band of teens in a small town, which is to say, drinking, girls and getting the fuck out of that town. Classicist imagery abounds: in "4th & Roebling", he waits by a train station, wine is drank, used as metaphor and personified; "Suburban Smell" looks towards the high school gridiron as a spiritual void.
In these songs, the Districts’ youthful energy and belief manifests in effort—while the band trudges dutifully behind him, Grote furrows his brow and intently scratches out his thoughts with the intent of giving everyday occurrences some true gravitas. Unfortunately, his logorrhea muddles his perspective, as the transition from feelings to lyrics lessens the impact of his words rather than deepening their resonance. Clichés are jumbled and reconstituted, and in turn sound both banal and strained—"We’d crack mothers’ backs just by walking the street," "There are sixteen homes on every street/ They all of course lie in the neatest rows." It’s a shame that Grote doesn’t trust the impact of observation; "Bold" is one of the few times he lets the situation speak for itself, noting, "My brother’s not home/ He’s learning war in fatigues" as a reflection on the triviality of his worries about the dishes and whether or not he’s capable of loving.
Or, the main issue with the Districts is that they just haven't found a way to channel their energy and ambition into memorable hooks. John Congleton produces and similar to his work on Cloud Nothings’ Here and Nowhere Else, he stays out of the way, capturing a raucous, live-room sound. But whereas Dylan Baldi uses velocity and distortion to counterbalance his facility with songcraft, plodding tempo, wavering melody, and gritted ambience is all the Districts have. The few bits of trickery show a band still unsure of itself in the studio—a wobbly flange effect on Grote’s vocals in "Hounds" and the puttering drum machines on "Bold" emphasize A Flourish and a Spoil's time-stamped experience by touching on Dave Fridmann’s obtrusive production work with the Flaming Lips and Phantom Planet.
All of which makes "Suburban Smell" a purposeful outlier in a number of ways. It’s a brief acoustic number where Grote shows his age; he’s not the road dog or barfly in prior songs, but rather the kid getting stoned in his basement while the rest of his class goes to parties and football games, the sum of which he calls, "the retard dance." It’s easy to call out Grote for lack of sensitivity. But while "Suburban Smell" may stink of piss and vinegar platitude, it’s the rare time when you truly know where Grote’s coming from, where the Districts are a "millennial" band in age and disposition rather than "millennial" in simply sounding like they could’ve scored some MTV2 play at the turn of Y2K.


This live set captures the former Big Star frontman for a 1999 one-off in Memphis, where he serves up a feast of soul-music staples backed by the city’s legendary Hi Rhythm Section.

Alex Chilton / Hi Rhythm Section: Boogie Shoes: Live on Beale Street

Boogie Shoes: Live on Beale Street

You could call Boogie Shoes a homecoming of sorts. A native son of Memphis, Alex Chilton adopted New Orleans as his new home in 1982—with typically perverse logic, the Big Star leader headed to the famously decadent city to get sober, a gambit that paid off—but his connection to the birthplace of rock’n’soul remained strong. When Memphis promoter David Less summoned him in the fall of 1999 to play Fredstock, a charity show for the ailing Fred Ford, a Memphis musical fixture who co-founded the Beale Street Music Festival in 1977, Chilton heeded the call, albeit reluctantly.
As Less recounts in the liner notes for Boogie Shoes, an archival release of that October 7, 1999 set at the New Daisy Theatre, Chilton needed some convincing to return to Memphis. He claimed, absurdly, that there were no musicians in town he could play with. That’s when Less played a trump card: Chilton would be backed by the Hi Rhythm Section. The house band of Memphis’ Hi Records—featuring the Hodges brothers, guitarist Mabon “Teenie,” keyboardist Charles, and bassist Leroy; drummer Howard Grimes; and keyboardist Archie “Hubie” Mitchell, aka Archie Turner—had played on era-defining hits by Al Green and Ann Peebles. The opportunity to sing a set of classic soul covers with such an illustrious outfit proved irresistible to Chilton. Twenty-two years later, his joy at sharing the stage with them is apparent on every one of Boogie Shoes’ 10 rousing tracks.
Chilton was no stranger to R&B. He cut his teeth as a teenage soul singer fronting the Box Tops in the 1960s, growling with a rasp that owed no small debt to Ray Charles. He’d leave this affectation behind as he fronted the legendary power-pop outfit Big Star, eventually developing a laconic drawl that served him well whether he was slumming as a solo act in punk clubs or playing fairs with a reunited Box Tops. The Fred Ford charity show gave Chilton a chance to apply his vocal tricks to a set of R&B warhorses, their familiarity helping to draw attention to his eccentricities. Chilton avoids soul clichés. He bends melodies, making sure they’re recognizable while landing slightly off-center. He rolls the lyrics around in his mouth, delivering phrases as if they’re punchlines to in-jokes. He sings with humor but without a trace of irony; throughout Boogie Shoes, he seems as if he’s on the verge of breaking out in a grin or a smirk.
Acting as the bandleader—he never rehearsed with the Hi Rhythm Section, and just called out songs onstage—Chilton sticks to material he and the audience know by heart. Occasionally, he hauls out songs associated with Memphis, chief among them “634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.),” a 1966 hit for Wilson Pickett whose subtitle became the nickname for the city’s legendary Stax Records. Chilton’s Boogie Shoes setlist is notable for how many different styles of ’60s R&B he and the Hi Rhythm Section tackle. They salute Motown by covering the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go,” pay tribute to New Orleans by playing Fats Domino’s rollicking “Hello Josephine,” dabble in rock’n’roll with Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene,” and even reconfigure KC & the Sunshine Band’s disco classic “Boogie Shoes” as Southern-fried soul.
What ties it all together is the Hi Rhythm Section: They play each of these selections as if they emanated from the heart of Memphis, anchoring the oldies with a cool, supple groove that conveys the sound of the city. The Hi Rhythm Section were among the best musicians Memphis ever produced, reason enough for a wayward son like Chilton to come back home for a night. The chemistry between the singer and the band makes Boogie Shoes something more than a good time. No other Alex Chilton record captures the often cantankerous singer sounding so relaxed, or in such high spirits.

Buy: Rough Trade
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