The score for this surprise Netflix hit about a religious community in rural Oregon revels in emotional indecision, asking you to choose the truth for yourself.

Brocker Way: Wild Wild Country (Original Score)

Wild Wild Country (Original Score)

Near-unanimous gushing for the recent Netflix documentary “Wild Wild Country” offered insight into our social curiosity for bitterly territorial showdowns. In the six-part series, a controversial Rajneeshpuram community flees India to make a new home on a massive ranch in rural Oregon in the 1980s, creating a clash of cultures on multiple levels. The local outcry and federal scrutiny that followed prompted lingering questions about how a supposed land of the free has historically treated those with an unexpected interpretation of that freedom. An unhurried series, “Wild Wild Country” is more interested in obsessively circling around truth than the cold violence of going for the neck of it.
In a documentary where dozens of unreliable narrators and lots of tricky secrets lurk in plain sight, there is a particular onus on nonverbal clues to point toward the truth. With a neo-Romantic impulse that revels in high drama, Brocker Way’s string-centric score for “Wild Wild Country” does this sort of indirect reporting. Way is the eldest brother of the documentary’s co-directors, Chapman and Maclain, a relationship that ostensibly afforded him a much closer perspective on the documentary’s production than most composers would get. Whereas film composers often receive a completed edit just before beginning work, Way composed as his brothers filmed. The 15 pieces gathered on Western Vinyl’s official score stem from hours of Way’s often-tense compositions for an electronically augmented 12-piece orchestra, conducted by fellow film composer Ali Helnwein.
Brocker’s score offers just half of the documentary’s music. With sensitive guidance from music supervisor and Secretly Canadian co-founder Chris Swanson, “Wild Wild Country” uses “downtempo Americana” by the likes of Bill Callahan and Damien Jurado to shape the Oregon landscape’s texture. Way’s work, meanwhile, maps the story’s more uneasy side. His strings often sound mired in feeling; during “An Adventure of My Life,” you get the sense they’re pushing through a blockade. There is a spirit of yearning and distrust here, as when the rhythms of “High Desert” jerk with jolting paranoia, urging you to look over your shoulder.
In the series, the score tends to supply a counter-narrative to what you see. In an early scene, when bemused Oregonians gawk at the Rajneeshpuram for wearing crimson and rolling out a red carpet on the sidewalk for their leader, the music plays neither into reverence nor ridicule. It instead introduces a creeping distance and prowling depth, pushing us not to gape at a foreign presence or believe a mystical promise but to consider how these ideas intersect. “The Guillotine” references Rajneesh leader Ma Anand Sheela’s provocation, “With every crown comes the guillotine.” But the piece doesn’t analyze the idea. It begins with disturbing plunks of woodblock and pizzicato strings, as though a stone has been dropped into a liquid that somehow silences the splash. Piano and violin wind around one another in loops. We are lodged inside a perplexing new system of unknown laws, the music asking us to ponder the mechanisms.
On its own, Way’s score gains power in this emotional triangulation. “Wild Wild Country” left questions unanswered, so the score feels like a souvenir of that uncertainty and the wariness it fostered. Removed from their concomitant plot points, these pieces convey “Wild Wild Country”’s narrative weight. If you need to sell someone on show’s the brutal tensions, you could play the searching, threatening “Be Grateful for This Beautiful Home” for them, rather than the trailer. Way’s orchestration puts you in the magnetic field of the seductive and suspicious. Likewise, even if you have no clue about the character who inspired “The New Man,” eerie electronics and a clicking rhythm suggest someone whose personality puts you on constant edge. A stressed, bending string pulls you in and pushes you away. This is a height of the outsider’s interest in cults—to see the attraction and be frightened at its sight.


The Indiana band supplies a sunny Midwestern take on nostalgic, shoegazey dream-pop.

Paradise EP

Wishy is the millionth band manifesting nostalgic misrememberings of the dreamier side of ’90s indie rock. Singer-songwriters and guitarists Nina Pitchkites and Kevin Krauter went to the same Indiana high school but reconnected later, when Pitchkites moved back to Indianapolis, bonding over the Sundays and My Bloody Valentine. After releasing a self-titled EP as Mana earlier this year, the band—rounded out by drummer Connor Host, bassist Mitch Collins, and third guitarist and vocalist Dimitri Morris—changed its name to Wishy, signed to Winspear, and gained a sunkissed sheen thanks to L.A. producer Ben Lumsdaine.
The Paradise EP is Wishy’s proper introduction, and the words one might use to describe it—“My Bloody Valentine Unplugged” or “The Cardigans getting more into The La’s”—may seem like simple, hyperbolic praise for music you’ve heard before. Still, Paradise captures a uniquely Midwest approach to shoegaze, in which one’s vision is directed not down toward one’s shoes but up and out, at quiet skies and isolated fields surrounding small towns and cities where you might go hours without seeing someone outside their car. Wishy don’t need to hide away their feelings under noise: Though Pitchkites and Krauter split songwriting duties, both emphasize the kind of dreamy topline melodies that invite you to hum along. One of Paradise’s best moments comes on the opening title track, when Krauter and Pitchkites switch off lead vocals while the other joins in near-perfect harmony. As the song builds up, Krauter’s guitar riffs kick in and become Wishy’s newest and most gleeful singer, like a child running free of its parents.
The rest of the EP showcases what makes each songwriter distinct. Pitchkites wrote “Donut,” a sledgehammer of sound in which her riffs and vocals match the pent-up frustration of the lyrics. She sees all the possibilities of the open road, but her crappy car can only get her nowhere in spurts. When she moans the final chorus lyric, “I’m speeding down HOV and huffing on gasoline,” the guitars and drums are too busy dancing around her wrecked daydream to notice. “Spinning” takes a slower, mellower route to getting lost, sounding a little like The Radio Dept. with a dancey drumbeat seemingly lifted from Krauter’s old band, Hoops.
If Pitchkites is the songwriter more likely to dive in and do snow angels in the dirt, Krauter is too busy watching the sunrises that add shades of pink and blue to the morning sky. In “Blank Time,” every few seconds bring some intricate new instrumentation or melody into the mix. It’s a busy song that shows off Krauter’s guitar playing and sounds like one of his solo songs—specifically “Patience,” from 2020, leaving the impression that Wishy could have instead written something fresher to take advantage of Pitchkites’ harmonies. “Too True” is more successful: The full band feels in sync as Krauter laments a past relationship and what gets lost when we move on for the right reasons. Or something like that—on a great gazepop track, lyrical meaning is secondary.
Up till now, Pitchkites’ and Krauter’s solo releases have relied on drum machines and songwriting that can be recorded and performed within a bedroom. Their dreamlike songwriting styles gel well together, but Wishy are now working on a larger canvas, directing their newfound chemistry and focus toward playing for crowds instead of bedroom walls. Compared to the sometimes mumbly Mana EP, Paradise is also the sound of letting your real-life drummer cook. This elevates Paradise from a solid collection of songs to a promising first statement that executes a familiar sound with excellence.


After years of label drama and leaked tracks that hinted at something great, the OutKast MC exceeds high expectations on his proper solo debut.

Big Boi: Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

Every great rap group has one MC who is-- possibly unfairly-- perceived to be slightly lesser than the other. DMC. Parrish Smith. Malice. Pimp C, at least up until he died. Big Boi's been on that list ever since André Benjamin started rocking pith helmets and neckerchiefs. Big Boi's not underrated, exactly; everyone who knows rap knows he's a great rapper. It's more that he's taken for granted. Virtually every OutKast review of the past decade and a half has posited Big Boi as the earthy, street-level anchor to André's spaced-out visionary, the guy responsible for securing the group's cred when André was trying to invent new colors. Expect Sir Lucious Left Foot to change those conversations. We haven't heard a major-label rap album this inventive, bizarre, joyous, and masterful in a long time, and it's almost impossible to imagine André putting out a solo album this strong anytime soon.
At this point, Big Boi has every right to indulge in the bitter-old-man invective that's tempted so many other rappers of his generation. Even though he's half of one of the most successful groups ever, Big Boi has had to go through years of release-date delays and label drama (some of the topical lyrics here sound like they were written years ago), until he finally left longtime home Jive just so he could release a damn solo album already. Label machinations kept André's voice from even appearing on Sir Lucious Left Foot-- heartbreaking when you think about André's jaw-dropping display on the early advance single "Royal Flush". But instead of letting these setbacks infect his music, Big Boi's made an album that explodes with ideas at every turn, that glides and twitches and mutates with delirious urgency.
Musically, the album drips with 1980s synth-funk signifiers. The keyboards glimmer as they roam, and talkboxes mutter and blurt. But these tracks aren't the stoned miasmas that someone like Dâm-Funk cranks out. Instead, they're itchy and fleet-footed. New melodic elements flit in and out of tracks just as you start to notice them, and there's a lot going on at any given moment. Consider, for example, album closer "Back Up Plan". The track, from old comrades Organized Noize, finds room for cheerleader chants, disembodied grunts, a weird little synth whistle, processed funk guitar, orchestra hits, frantic scratching, a lowdown wobbling bassline, and probably some other stuff that I'm missing-- and this is one of the most laid-back songs on the entire album.
Every once in a while, we'll get a nod toward some current trend, but these aren't market capitulations; they're more opportunities to play with what the kids are doing now. "Follow Us", for example, has a generic rock-dude chorus from Vonnegutt, and virtually any other rapper would've built a hackneyed half-rock song out of a chorus like that, but producer Salaam Remi instead piles bubbly synthetic melodies all over each other. And the robo-voices on "Shutterbugg" aren't airy Auto-Tune; they're more of a deep rumble that you can feel in your gut. "Tangerine" somehow simultaneously sounds like strip-club ass-shake material and Funkadelic covering Morricone. Looking at the production credits, it's surprising to see names like Scott Storch and Lil Jon-- hitmakers who don't really make hits anymore, and who haven't been all that interesting in a while. So Big Boi, then, is someone who encourages his collaborators' furthest-out ideas, and who knows what to do with those ideas when he gets them.
As a rapper, Big Boi is something else. He just does so many things with his voice and cadence, letting his words fall over the snares one moment and fighting upstream against the beat the next. He never falls into any particular pattern of delivery, instead using his flow to knock beats back and forth with relish. Sixteen years after the first OutKast album, he's still coming up with dizzy combinations of words: "My recitals are vital and maybe needed for survival," "The slickness that get your chick hit quick," "Stay sharp as broken glass, get busted on a smash/ When your ass cross paths with this half of the 'Kast." Even if he were saying nothing, the tumble of his words is a thing to behold.
But then, he's never saying nothing. Sir Lucious Left Foot is an album blissfully free of both old-man hectoring and drug-rap nihilism. A few times Big Boi brings up the idea that it's really not too smart to rap about selling crack all the time, but he doesn't dwell on it, and he confines most of his skepticism to awesomely worded asides ("Snow? That's for toboggans.") He's hard enough to tell you to get the South's dick up out your motherfucking mouth and draw blood with the command, but he's also clever enough to slide away from threats just as quickly. He spends a large chunk of the album talking about sex, sounding like a fired-up 11-year-old goofing off in the back of some sort of prodigy-level English class.
There's a lot more to like about Sir Lucious Left Foot. Some of the skits are actually pretty funny. The guests-- who range from masterful fast-rap newcomer Yelawolf to a stirringly gritty Jamie Foxx-- all turn in top-shelf performances. Old Dungeon Family associates Big Rube and Khujo Goodie make feel-good cameos that actually contribute to their songs. But the real story is the rap veteran who's done everything he could possibly do in the genre but who still finds new ways to have fun with it. Last year's best rap album came from Raekwon, another wily old vet who hit a serious late-career stride. But Raekwon did it by inhabiting his older styles, making a record that could've conceivably come out in 1996. On Sir Lucious Left Foot, Big Boi does something even more difficult: He gives us a great album that sounds nothing like any of the great albums he's already given us. From where I'm sitting, that's an even greater achievement.


The sisters Quin here craft a record reminiscent of 1980s power-pop, rounded with bubbly keyboard squeals and songs about relationships. Chris Walla (Death Cab for Cutie) serves as co-producer.

The Con

Tegan and Sara should no longer be mistaken for tampon rock, a comparison only fair because of the company they kept. Now the 26-year-olds have much more in common with 1980s power-pop, rounded with bubbly keyboard squeals, and they do this sound better than either Avril Lavigne or, say, Liz Phair. Some weird choices, however-- vocally, instrumentally, and otherwise-- mar their latest album, The Con. Yet the record's most interesting bits-- a keen sense of melody-- disappear too quickly and can't carry the album over its production bumps. The edgiest thing about the sisters Quin continues to be their haircuts.
The duo's 2004 album So Jealous had great moments, too. "Walking with a Ghost", a song later covered by the White Stripes, was perhaps its finest, if only because it showed how Tegan and Sara can add depth to heartache through keen observation. Such examples are everywhere on The Con: "When I jerk away from holding hands with you/ I know these habits hurt important parts of you," they sing on "Back in Your Head", a song that boasts the album's best keyboard lines. Lyrically, there are as many turds as gems though, and they usually appear within five words of the word "heart." "I want to draw you a floorplan of my head and heart/ I want to give directions, helpful hints, what you’ll be looking for," Sara pleads on "Floorplan". Maybe they should have called it "No Exit". It sounds like a rush of emotion, but flows awkwardly. There's an earnestness they'd do well to drop-- if they know love's a sham, and know the sham's a sham, then sing about that already-- but they don't. I can only imagine that co-producer Chris Walla (Death Cab for Cutie) contributed to the problem.
Tegan's songs are conventional, so they rely on embellishment-- like the Phil Collins-esque drums on "Are You Ten Years Ago"-- to make them more interesting. Her lyrical indugences can also be difficult to swallow. "Hop a Plane" does better for Tegan, because the line she repeats here is catchy enough to stay pleasurable over each iteration. Sara, who has the more strident voice of the two, writes their more complex songs. "Knife Going In"'s instruments drift out of tune, which gives it a seasick, disconnected quality. "Relief Next to Me" thumps like wet newspaper though, her weak similes never building up to a satisfying payoff: a big chorus, a cute melody. "Relief" gets one thing right though: When Sara sings about things "in the dark", you get the feeling that, for much of their young, female audience anyway, they can serve as a beacon.


Frisbee collects recordings the Chilean/German producer made for its label between 1998 and 2001.

Salvador

Another month, another Ricardo Villalobos review. Some of you are already grinding your teeth as you jump on the nearest forum to bitch that Pitchfork's getting as shamelessly obsessed with Villalobos as we are (were?) with Kompakt, to the exclusion of all of Detroit's True Greats, or the UK's Unheralded Heroes of Hardcore, or perhaps simply those bedroom producers toiling away on limited-run CDRs that will surely show us all how it's truly done. That's ok. We're used to it, and none of that makes talking about Villalobos any less interesting, or indeed necessary. You'd be wise to soak up everything you can get your hands on by the prolific and mildly infamous Chilean/German producer and DJ, because for more than a decade he's been subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) redefining what dance music, minimal house, and techno can do and be. Part of the reason there's so much crap "minimal" out there is because Villalobos has been making such absolutely original releases for so long. People want to cop that shit, because it's one of the few newly blazed trails in electronic music. Despite the minimal backlash, there's still plenty of room to swing a machete through the leftover underbrush. But in the meantime, chasing Villalobos' prints through the fetid swamp is more than enough to occupy our time.
All of which makes Salvador a particularly interesting Villalobos release, since it compiles recordings that date back five to eight years, when they originally appeared on Frankfurt's Frisbee Tracks label. This isn't the Villalobos of 2006, veering off into electro-acoustic free techno across a slew of 20-minute-plus drum tracks burned to CD-R and intended for his own DJ sets only. (He played me a few of them in Berlin and at MUTEK, and while they're more floor-oriented than the mind-melting Achso, they're hardly less freaky; indeed, in may ways, they're the rawest snapshot of Villalobos' creative progress yet, as they sound mostly improvised and unedited, full of toggling downbeats, seasick modulations, and unresolved rhythmic collisions. Each one feels like coming up and coming down all at once, which given Ricardo's recreational proclivities might make sense. According to Villalobos, he's including at least one of his private-edition drum tracks in his upcoming Fabric mix, so fear not: You'll hear 'em eventually.) No, this is Villalobos finding his way out of the classic minimal techno of a decade ago, and forging towards the voice that has increasingly become unmistakably his own.
When I asked him why he chose to release Salvador, he explained that Frisbee owns the copyright on all his tracks for the label, released between 1998 and 2001. "There was no possibility of me saying no," he said. "I asked them to send me the finished tracklisting, and in the end I found it to be a kind of snapshot of what I had done, of where I come from. That music was much more obvious, much easier to understand." His music today, he went on, reveals itself more slowly, over time. "But when I was younger, I received a stimulus, an input, and I directly routed it to the track itself. And that stimulus was nightlife, the party."
Salvador is Villalobos' most straightforward release in many years. ("Que Belle Epoque 2006" has been remastered, but the other tracks are in their original versions.) But this hardly makes it less engaging. "Que Belle Epoque" is a 13-minute churn built on bizarrely syncopated synthetic congas and a hypnotic ostinato synth. As it evolves, a heart-rending vocal melody comes up like the sun over the Atacama Desert, with little flute riffs following like vapor trails. In many ways, the track isn't at all different from Villalobos' current DJ tools; it's meant to be mixed, above all, creating a trance state in which off-beat handclaps continually yank you deeper into the vortex.
The CD's seven remaining tracks proceed in a similar manner; "Tempura" is a clattering, percussive workout that really would only come to life in the context of a DJ set (though it still makes for pretty gripping listening at home). The spacious "Suesse Cheques" finds him holding back on the boom-tick til over halfway through its seven-minute length, instead exploring pure drum sound and room tone. "Unflug" and "Lugom-IX" hear him attempting to graft Detroit synthesizers to his characteristic, Latin polyrhythms; where they sound crude, the minimal house groover "Lazer@Present" absolutely triumphs, a miracle of shoomping two-note chords, ever-morphing drum patterns, and a kick that drops out and sneaks back in when you least expect it.
For good measure, the CD also contains Villalobos' mix of Señor Coconut's "Electrolatino" (originally released on the Frisbee sister imprint Multicolor), and it's something else entirely. Well, yes and no: The synthesizers do something you've never quite heard in a Villalobos track, bleeding like Rorschach spots all over the low end, while a metronomic cowbell nags like a guilty conscience. In between those two poles, though, Villalobos' nimble patterns go soaring once again, exploring every angle of flight and pocket of air, where all that is solid melts into rhythm, and all that is rhythm melts into infinity.


Jlin's debut album Dark Energy felt like a keyhole peek into bedroom producer Jerrilynn Patton's mind. It was a record for the individual, more at home for solo listening than in a club setting. Her new EP, Free Fall, comes off like a tribute to the sounds that brought her to where she is, and it creates the kind of thrills that only she can provide.

Free Fall EP

Jlin's debut album Dark Energy felt like a keyhole peek into a bedroom producer's mind. In the broad array of vocal and synth samples, off-beat time signatures that varied from song to song, and even within the song itself, the conjunction of tens of ideas competing for dominance, you could hear a singular aesthetic being forged. One can imagine Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) spent hours crafting the music in a way that spoke to her.
On her new EP, Free Fall, this same excitement is still at work, though not in a manner as excitingly weird as Dark Energy. Dark Energy was a record for the individual, feeling more at home for solo listening than in a club setting*. Free Fall* feels like a tribute to the sounds that brought her to where she is. It is critical that these tracks are gathered on a single EP; it's not that they don't have a place in her larger oeuvre, but they also feel distinctly familiar in a way that Dark Energy did not. But because Patton is still smarter than almost any of her peers, it means that Free Fall creates the kind of thrills that only she can provide. The EP builds to peaks that grip the heart in a joyful vice; the listener will feel both excited and overwhelmed and unsure which emotion to embrace over the other.
Certain songs elicit this feeling more than others. "Eu4ria", like the aptly named "Guantanamo" from her debut, layers piercing screams and yells to create a horror-laden universe in three minutes. The track also sounds connected to Dark Energy closer "Abnormal Restriction", as definitive a statement about Patton's musical identity as you'll get. Populated with samples of Faye Dunaway's turn as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, "Abnormal Restriction" added a blood-freezing exclamation point to the end of the album. "Eu4ria" is lighter; Patton sampled an iconic phrase from the original film version of Stephen King's Carrie. "They're all gonna laugh at you," Carrie's mother yelled to her daughter in the film. Here, the phrase is interspersed in a frenetic beat that transforms it from a cry of anger and desperation to one of defiance.
"I Am the Queen" and "BuZilla" are two biting pieces of footwork that don't let up and shouldn't. It's not the sometimes lovely structural sonics of classic Chicago South Side footwork. Instead, like the EP itself, the tracks push things into weirder realms of aural storytelling in a matter of minutes. "BuZilla" reuses the phrase "live and let die." The longer one listens to the track, the more it feels like a call that refuses to wait for a response. Whatever happens will happen. Patton will continue to create regardless. It's an aggressive and focused answer to her "genre." Whereas Dark Energy was fueled by a personal, cinematic vision of doom, Free Fall is an invigorating wash of sounds, a collection of ideas that meld together the past with Patton's present to form another hard-won and potent artistic statement.


The consistent indie rock journeyman makes one of the best records of his career with production assistance from Richard Swift.

Saint Bartlett

It's hard to find an entrance point into Damien Jurado's discography. You could start from the beginning, 1997's Waters Ave. S., but that record is filled with the sort of angsty, electric Pac NW indie-rock that is largely uncharacteristic of his catalogue as a whole. You could start with his first folk-leaning LP, 1999's Rehearsals for Departure, which has one of the best and most tender songs he's written, "Eyes For Windows", or 2002's comparatively upbeat I Break Chairs, but there's not much to make either stand out from the pack. If nothing else, Jurado has been oddly cursed by his own consistency.
Produced by the increasingly ubiquitous Richard Swift, Saint Bartlett, Jurado's ninth record is, finally, a striking departure. So much so that only the sound of his voice keeps you from thinking this could be the work of someone else. The change is noticeable right off the bat, announced by the lushly stringed baroque pop of "Cloudy Shoes", and it continues throughout, with meditations on 1950s girl-group balladry, thorny Neil Young-esque guitar rock, and cavernous chamber-pop.
Swift deserves a fair amount of credit for the reinvention that's on display here, and his ear for instrumentation does wonders for these songs. The woodblock percussion that backs "Arkansas" gives the tune a slight ramshackle bent, while Swift applies the perfect amount of guitar fuzz to turn "Wallingford" into a gentle stomper. Most impressively, the application of subtle space in "Kalama" lends a new gravitas to Jurado's voice, effectively making him bigger than his own sound.
Despite Swift's major contributions, Saint Bartlett is still very much a Damien Jurado album. His best work has always been marked with heartache and desolation, and it's a testament to his strengths that even on Saint Bartlett's most upbeat songs, he manages to convey feelings of loneliness and loss. It helps here that he's still working within his lyrical wheelhouse. The mood on Saint Bartlett ranges from bitter to desperate and back again. Mostly, though, Jurado claims ownership of Saint Bartlett's achievements simply by turning in his strongest songwriting to date. Even the straightforward folk cuts here have more potentcy, especially on haunting "Beacon Hill".
The songs on Saint Bartlett would be considered an achievement for any artist-- but the fact that they come 13 years into a career makes the album even more of a triumph. Maybe the record's accessibility and lushness could lead to a bigger audience for Jurado, but in any case, it's a welcome surprise from a journeyman so dependable he risked being forgotten.


Phil Cook, Megafaun member and orbiter of Justin Vernon's universe, turns in a passionate solo album forged out of love for Southern blues and raggedy Blue Ridge folk. He's preaching and, like any good missionary, his fervor is infectious.

Southland Mission

Phil Cook’s second solo album opens with an expression of the truest contentment. But first, "Ain’t It Sweet" spends a full minute stretching out: A steady guitar chug beckons a Wurlitzer’s gap-tooth whistle; low fiddle dips around skittish piano notes, before everything whips to a gentle crest. Only then do Cook, his brother and Megafaun bandmate Brad, and Justin Vernon blast the title, exalting like sunflowers at dawn—or a rural bar band toasting a lock-in. The sweetness is Cook’s comfort in knowing that, ultimately, he and his wife will lie together in the ground. He’s not singing about heaven, but turns the gothic foreboding of death-do-us-part into radiant, secular gospel: "Well we’re wide awake then we’re dead and gone/ But we find a way just to carry on."
That’s the stuff, right there—not that carrying on is as simple as just saying so; Cook spends much of Southland Mission attempting to find the way, just as the path to this he record was its own calling. "It had to come out of me," he has said. "I didn’t realize it had to come out of me, but it had to." A decade ago, Cook moved his family from Wisconsin—where he was a member of Bon Iver’s orbit—to North Carolina, lured by the music of the Delta, Bayou, and Appalachia. He played gorgeous, doleful folk rock in Megafaun, complemented the cohorts of Matthew E. White and Hiss Golden Messenger, acted as bandleader for the Blind Boys of Alabama, and produced for Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray. In 2011 he released Hungry Mother Blues, a low-key solo instrumental record that chased Ry Cooder and John Fahey. Southland Mission is a more full-bodied commitment. Whether simple banjo fare, outlaw stompers, or reeling strut, each one of Cook’s modes is an easy and infectious exertion. And like any good missionary, Cook’s fervor is infectious.
Although Southland Mission is studiously steeped in tradition, it wears it lightly. Recorded in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the warmth of the Durham, N.C. community behind the record (the likes of Matt McCaughan, Mountain Man’s Amelia Meath) beams through as its own kind of congregation, though there’s occasionally a homespun gospel duo here, too, in the golden tones of Sophie Blak and Jeanne Jolly. They’re crucial to the record’s two-part centerpiece: chastising Cook for procrastinating on "Sitting on a Fence Too Long" before coming to "Lowly Road", a bluesy spiritual reckoning, which ends with a call-and-response as the duo welcome him home. Like Hiss Golden Messenger’s Lateness of Dancers, Southland Mission handles doubt with the possibility of redemption, reinforced by the record’s persistent, joyous uplift.
Cook navigates the extremes of the squeezed middle class on Southland Mission, staring down what it looks like to fight or flee. "1922" is a cover of a Charlie Parr song about the Piedmont musician’s parents’ Depression-era experiences, where "ain’t it sweet" becomes "ain’t that the way it is." Fed up of giving all his money to the government, a boy leaves his dead end job, gets beat up in a new town, and, dead broke, has no choice but to go back home: "Times are hard here and I can’t roam/ But I ain’t got nothing more." Every verse ends with Cook addressing some "boys," like it’s a tale of bar stool bravado, though choice is never treated as an act of heroism on Southland Mission. "Nothing sacred, nothing saved/ Get your ass on the morning train or get the hell out the way," he sings on "Great Tide", an empathetic epic that swings between tender moments and brisk, reeling jubilation.
Ultimately, choosing to stay and stoke life’s intimacies wins out over fleeing. "Anybody Else", a duet with Frazey Ford, sees Cook resisting easy reassurances in favor of a deep and nourishing love. "Gone" is a parable about how you might as well give it all you’ve got when you can’t take anything with you. To have is not necessarily to hold, and when possession is transient, belonging is all you have. Southland Mission lights up tradition with rare and overt joy and palpable gratitude. It’s an open invitation from a man who’s found home. Say yes.


Pianist R. Andrew Lee has rocketed to prominence in modern and contemporary classical music thanks to his curator's attention to pieces in need of greater hearing. His latest release, a 25-minute recording of Jay Batzner's composition "as if to each other…", shows off Lee's skill at playing electro-acoustic work.

as if to each other...

In recent years, pianist R. Andrew Lee has rocketed to prominence in the world of modern and contemporary classical music, thanks to his sterling technique as well as his curator's attention to pieces in need of greater hearing. In 2013, Lee brought us the first professional recording of Dennis Johnson's long-lost, 1959 work November—a five-hour-plus minimalist breakthrough that inspired La Monte Young (and by extension, composers such as Terry Riley and Philip Glass). Lee has also recorded post-minimalist touchstones by the likes of composer and early Village Voice critic Tom Johnson, and Wandelweiser-collective member Eva-Maria Houben.
Long-duration pieces that employ repetition (and sometimes outright silence) have given a sense of unity to Lee's discography, thus far. And while his latest release, a 25-minute recording of Jay Batzner's composition "as if to each other…", doesn't exactly shatter that brand, it does show off Lee's skill at playing electro-acoustic works. After progressing through five gorgeous minutes of attractive (and contemplative-feeling) arpeggiated chords—in which top notes are constantly changing, and roving around the piano's upper reaches—Batzner's composition introduces a wisp of prepared electronics.
Here's where plenty of well-meaning contemporary classical pieces torpedo themselves (often by sounding cheap or hidebound enough to be confused with rejected haunted-house soundtracks). Batzner's tones clear the initial sniff-test, simply by being well-judged. But his compositional instincts are also strong: up until the entrance of the electronics, slower-moving notes in the piano's lower registers have been alternating with more active, higher-pitched chords. The electronic field enters the picture right after Lee simultaneously strikes both extremes of the keyboard for the first time. Along with the resonant echo of the collision, the electronics create an icy, austere beauty.
The piece's middle section luxuriates in the immersive blurring of acoustics and electronics. By the sixteenth minute, we hear overlapping, tinny samples of Lee's playing, which creates a feedback loop, as everything builds into a peak and slowly dies away.
It can be difficult for a musician not to become subservient to the media requirements of a piece like this one, but Lee's playing is never just a helpmate; his interpretive choices sound explicably human throughout. Likewise, this release—the first professional, solo-composer recording of Batzner's work—reflects Lee's ongoing, admirable desire to champion works that haven't yet had the chance to reach icon status.


Vinyl reissues of six albums from the late Jack Rose further solidify his place as a brilliant steel string guitar innovator.

Jack Rose: Red Horse, White Mule / Opium Musick / Raag Manifestos / Jack Rose / I Do Play Rock and Roll / Dr. Ragtime and His Pals

The fiery, pastoral steel-string guitar music of Jack Rose first entered the national consciousness in the mid 2000s, as part of a return-to-roots movement sometimes called “New Weird America.” If you were to ask Rose, however, he’d have likely told you there wasn’t much “new” about what he was doing. Rose’s inspiration came largely from pre-war American music: country blues, ragtime, and jazz. But his work never took on the tone of an archivist or academic: his guitar playing always sounded alive and in the moment. In his self-penned liner notes for his sophomore album, Opium Musick, Rose poked fun at himself. Writing under an acronymic pen name and paying homage to the tradition of steel-string albums with satirically self-important liner notes (see John Fahey and Leo Kottke), Rose invented an origin story in which an aged sensae urged him “not to let the ragtime die and to bring it into the 21st century.” Even early in his career, Rose was self-aware in his self-mythologizing, illustrating both a strong sense of humor and a defiant sense of purpose.
“A lot of people, when they view old-time music, they view it as gentle or nostalgic, which I don’t get at all,” Rose said around the release of Golden Apples of the Sun, a scene-establishing compilation for the “New Weird”/freak-folk moment, on which he was included among acts like Antony and the Johnsons, Joanna Newsom, and Vashti Bunyan. “It was totally bizarre sounding to me, and messed up,” he added. Throughout his too-short career and across his nine excellent solo albums, the Virginia-born, Philadelphia-based guitarist made a living out of bizarre sounding, messed-up, old-time music. Six of his albums have been reissued on vinyl by the VHF and Three Lobed labels, and they are each eye-opening testaments to his gift. Collecting his earliest recordings as a solo guitarist through some of his final collaborations before his tragic death in 2009 at the age of 39, these records illustrate Rose’s artistic mastery and his influence on the future of the genre.
On his 2002 debut, Red Horse, White Mule, the self-taught Rose already harbored an acute awareness of the possibilities of his instrument. In the opening “Red Horse,” he plays with a sprawling musicality and insistent rhythm, thumbing a steady picking pattern that picks up in intensity and speed as the track goes on. By the next song, a cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” he’s using his slide to create an eerie buzz, calling back to his heavy, droning work with the improv group Pelt in the ’90s and forecasting the wilder compositions to come. Red Horse is a distinctive, if nascent, work—the sound an artist falling in love with his instrument and attempting to put all he knows on tape. Even just one album in, Rose had already created a signature sound and style, and there was a ghostly presence lurking throughout.
John Fahey’s solo guitar compositions cast a heavy shadow on anyone approaching the steel string guitar in a solo context. But, of all the guitar soli artists to emerge over the last two decades, Jack Rose is the one who followed most closely in Fahey’s footsteps. Like Fahey, Rose’s thoroughly researched and lived-in Americana hinted at a deep understanding of the nation’s history. Even his more psychedelic moments unfolded with a penchant for stark realism. His music was beautiful and familiar, without ever feeling predictable or cliched. The sonic similarities between the two guitarists can be effectively boiled down to a melodic sensibility that Glenn Jones called, in the excellent live DVD The Things That We Used to Do, a “resolutely anti-sentimental approach” (Rose puts it more bluntly: he doesn’t play any “pussy chords”). Rose’s music was a distinct turn away from the acoustic guitar’s more romantic qualities. It makes sense that he was ideologically opposed to the New Age-leaning acts like William Ackerman on the Windham Hill label and the more melodic recordings of Kottke.
As he developed as a guitarist, Rose would carve out his own niche. If Red Horse illustrated the myriad possibilities of his instrument, then its follow-up, Opium Musick, was a more intricate portrait of the artist behind the music. In the time between Red Horse and Opium Musick, Rose’s obsession with ragtime intensified, lending him a brighter and more dynamic picking style. The album also marks the moment when Rose’s interest in Indian sitar music and ragas blossomed, particularly with on the opening “Yaman Blues,” which features tanpura played by Pelt’s Mike Gangloff. “Linden Avenue Stomp” is another collaborative track, this time with Glenn Jones. Aside from becoming one of many new folk standards in Rose’s catalog, it is also the most Fahey-influenced track on the album, not to mention, one named for the house where Fahey cut most of his records (The title, however, marks another apocryphal moment in folk music: the street was actually called Linhurst Ave, but the duo thought “Linden” sounded more poetic).
Raag Manifestos from 2004 was an even more ambitious collection than its predecessor, a diverse and comprehensive record that transcends its odds-and-ends structure. Originally released as a tour-only CD-R, compiling material from various singles and compilations, Manifestos is a sprawling work that feels like a summary of Rose’s discography to that point. Across its seven tracks, Rose plays both steel and 12-string guitar with a newfound confidence, from the intense, lo-fi rumblings of “Hart Crane’s Old Boyfriends” and “Black Pearls From the River” (a composition also recorded by Pelt) to the quiet, bucolic fingerpicking in “Road.” Manifestos was a breakthrough for Rose, but it was also the jumping-off point that led to his greatest work.
The following year saw the release of Kensington Blues, an album that remains Rose’s most essential release and the one that defines his career to this day (although it is not included in either of these reissues). Rose himself referred to Kensington as a “really hard record to live up to,” while also speaking of the pleasure he took in hearing other guitarists cover its songs, hinting at the communal drive that fueled Rose’s later recordings. Jack Rose, the 2006 follow-up to Kensington Blues, marks another attempt on his part to make a deeper connection. Its songs are shorter and more melodic. Tracks like “St. Louis Blues” and “Miss May’s Place” are sprightly and sweet, even catchy, and the album’s most sprawling composition, the stunning “Spirits in the House,” is less meandering than Rose’s previous epics. “When I’m working on my solo material I obsess over every little detail,” Rose told an interview in 2009, “It basically takes over my life.” “Spirits in the House” is a composition that displays Rose’s obsessive tendencies; it is his single most gorgeous recording, and a marker of how far he had come since his debut.
The latter two releases in the reissue series—the live album I Do Play Rock and Roll and the collaborative Dr. Ragtime and His Pals, both released in 2008—each reveal completely different sides of Rose. Rock and Roll is one of his true masterpieces, but it could not have come from more humble beginnings. Culled from Rose’s archive of live recordings, after he agreed (while hungover) to release a new record, Rock and Roll actually offers Rose’s most adventurous compositions and highlights the wide potential he had left to explore. “Calais to Dover,” which appeared in a slightly condensed version on Kensington Blues, opens the album with a stately precision. Meanwhile, the closing “Sundogs” presents Rose as something of a provocateur—grinding his slide against the fretboard to create an incessant, noisy drone. The nearly half-hour track is an unabridged recording of a performance in Kutztown, Penn., that reportedly left his audience speechless. With the brief but gorgeous “Cathedral et Chartres” sandwiched between the two tracks, Rock and Roll could run at the risk of sounding tossed-off, but it makes for a visceral listen. For many fans, it is the quintessential Rose album: gorgeous, inspired, and deeply confrontational.
Comparatively, Dr. Ragtime and His Pals is simply a good time. Make no mistake, even though Jack Rose’s records can be cerebral and intimate, they are by no means insular affairs: there is palpable joy in his looser numbers, and a gripping physicality to his heavier work. Throughout Rose's records, you hear him huff and hum behind his guitar, further blurring the line between studio and live recordings. Even so, with its euphoric reimagining of Rose’s key tracks, Dr. Ragtime is the most human record he ever released. It finds Rose surrounded by an army of collaborators, from long-time friend and influence Glenn Jones to up-and-coming banjo player Nathan Bowles (who carries Rose’s torch to this day, particularly on the excellent Whole & Cloven). Regarding the following year’s similarly collaborative Jack Rose & The Black Twig Pickers LP, Rose gushed that he was finally “playing the music [he] loved as a kid,” and you hear that excitement throughout this record.
While his album with the Black Twig Pickers further developed Rose’s skill as a collaborator and his final release, 2010’s Luck in the Valley, took Rock and Roll’s intimate compositions to even headier territory, his 2008 releases serve as a fitting summation of Rose’s career. They represent an artist deeply committed to his craft and embedded within a community that still bears his mark today, making his influence more visible than ever. In conversation with Glenn Jones in 2008, Rose spoke fondly of his friend’s music, complementing Jones’ strength as a storyteller and his scope as a composer. He speaks particularly highly of one song from Jones’ debut album, though he couldn't remember its name (the song, as it turns out, was named for Rose). Ever averse to sentimentality, Jack Rose made records that showcased Americana as something to be explored and the blues as something to be lived, creating a vital body of work that will likely be rediscovered and fallen in love with the more time passes.


With terse existential inquiries and sun-faded samples, the full-length collaboration between the London rapper and the Brooklyn producer sounds at home on two continents.

The Corner: Vol. 1

New York City and London share history, slang, and connections as cultural and African diasporic hubs, and for decades, hip-hop has strengthened the bond. Early stars like Slick Rick and the late MF DOOM were born in greater London but launched careers in New York (and underwent heinous immigration struggles). Today, rap’s ongoing cultural exchange can be seen in the relationships between stars like A$AP Rocky and Skepta, and in the proliferation of New York drill music influenced by London’s scene, which drew its own influence from Chicago. And, as in New York, London’s busy underground rap landscape is preoccupied with a warm and insular sound that stretches pensive raps around warped, sample-based beats. It’s within this framework that London rapper Jadasea and Brooklyn producer Laron find common ground.
Jadasea has been crafting prickly and contemplative raps since at least 2013, but he’s made his greatest impression as an affiliate of New York-via-London rapper MIKE; their 2020 single “Regrets” was a showcase for Jada’s bruised but grateful presence. Meanwhile, Laron cut his teeth producing airy beats with booming low end for artists like XXXTentacion and Rich the Kid, becoming an in-house producer for Brooklyn rapper Jay Critch. Similar to adventurous New York-area beatmakers like Tony Seltzer, Laron has a taste for grainy, sun-bleached samples that straddle hip-hop’s past and future. A few years ago, he sent Jadasea a pack of beats “out the blue.” Eventually, they made The Corner: Vol. 1, Jadasea’s second release on MIKE’s label 10k and a solid, if overlong, collection of heady inquiries into self-enlightenment.
On paper, Jadasea brings little that’s new to the tried-and-true world of understated pain rap. But his voice—or at least the way it’s layered—sets him apart. Many artists in this lane, particularly MIKE circa 2017, pride themselves on muddy, unmixed vocals that become another texture in a sea of sound, a reason to lean in close and absorb every word. Jada achieves a similar effect with a relatively clean vocal mix and a mid-range tone like Slowthai on melatonin. His voice projects confidence, even if his terse, melancholic writing style is not far removed from peers like Tony Bontana or John Glacier. Jada’s raps on the MIKE-featuring “Peace Out” land with force and conviction, thudding their way into the pockets of Laron’s soulful organ samples: “I stayed with it, never ever left my place/Just sayin’, man they tryna test my faith.”
He keeps up this delicate dance for 26 tracks. On “Grimey Blimey” and “Heaven High,” he’s absorbing life lessons from dangerous nights out and fostering future friendships across the world. “Holding On” is a mini-biography that chronicles how his come-up has kept him inspired. Jadasea’s writing isn’t especially detail-oriented, but shifts in his voice fill in the blanks: Take his punchy delivery of bars about perseverance on “Scurry” or the reserved, sage-like way he speaks his mind on “Getting By.” His ability to bring you to emotional states of being, as opposed to physical places, is one of his strengths. But assured delivery can’t always carry an album this long, and stretches of The Corner: Vol. 1 blur together. Though it never becomes unpleasant, Jadasea’s range as a performer isn’t yet as vast as his thoughts.
Laron’s beats, however, get a lot of mileage out of their faded samples. Shades of turn-of-the-century hip-hop production blend seamlessly with more modern touches that keep Jada on his toes. Synths, handclaps, and bolts of guitar set off chipmunked vocal snippets on “Tony Yayo” and “The Ropes”; the sour jazz of “Cheers” recalls Standing on the Corner if they dug around in a pack of Pi’erre Bourne drum kits. There are exquisitely straightforward quiet storm flips (“Murky”), triumphant horns laid across skittering 808s (“Main Contender”), and bare-bones breakbeats (“Oh Dear”). Laron plays every card with ease, bringing just the right tweak or flourish to keep Jada’s words flowing like silk. And though his presence is not yet charismatic enough to hold attention for the length of an episode of Top Boy, Jadasea has the skill to cut through Laron’s deft samplework. Their transcontinental linkup isn’t just proof they’re an engaging duo: It’s another example of London and New York’s natural bond.


Encased in swirls of dream-pop production, Katherine Paul’s second album represents a softer, more subtle sort of resistance.

Black Belt Eagle Scout: At the Party With My Brown Friends

At the Party With My Brown Friends

The backdrop of Black Belt Eagle Scout’s video for “Run It to Ya” is, crucially, a prom, and not a protest. Katherine Paul picks flowers, strums her guitar, and croons, her voice blurred and dreamy, while swaying against a wall of balloons. The visual is unmistakably queer, and unmistakably indigenous, but it represents a softer, more subtle sort of resistance. Rather than curl into a closed fist, her hand takes the hand of another pretty girl and leads her out to the dance floor.
Paul is among the many indigenous artists to garner hard-won and long-overdue recognition from white outlets and tastemakers in recent years. Indigenous artists have taken home Canada’s prestigious Polaris Music Prize four times in the past five years, and the Indigenous Music Countdown, founded by David McLeod in 1998 as a small-scale weekly broadcast, now airs worldwide on satellite radio. Upon signing to Saddle Creek, Paul was eager to use her new platform in service of her community: “Getting signed to a record label and getting a publicist and booking agent—those are privileges that I could take advantage of to try and do good indigenous work.” The work of her debut, Mother of My Children, written during the resistance at Standing Rock, was to steel her loved ones for struggle. At the Party With My Brown Friends, by contrast, concerns itself not with work, but with play and rest.
This is not to say that Paul has made an apolitical record. She is mindful, on opening track “At the Party,” of white audiences, the sort who might marvel at the mere existence of an indigenous woman holding an electric guitar. “How is it real, how is it real,” she sings, “when you don’t even notice it?” Later, on “I Said I Wouldn’t Write This Song,” she takes note of “eyes, staring right at you,” crying “tears filled with joy/And hindrance, too.” Paul is aware of the complex, and often contradictory, priorities that present themselves to her as an artist: to make herself visible, but resist tokenization; to educate the public, but weather the fragility and hostility of their responses.
Still, her first priority is to give indigenous listeners a space to love and care for themselves without white spectatorship. From the hazy, low-lit prom of “Run It to Ya,” to the sweet morning-after of “Half Colored Hair,” Paul floats through a small, safe world of her own creation. Her songs are encased in soft, vague swirls of dream-pop production—the influence, in particular, of Japanese Breakfast, is deeply felt—and she gives no thought to anyone outside this serene bubble, devoting herself instead to everything she sees and feels within it. There is a grey day at the beach, in the Pacific Northwest, with a close friend. There is a bed, and a girl, and sheets “gleaming from the two of us.” There are dreams, too many to count, which recur from song to song, until the listener loses track of what is and isn’t true in Paul’s portrait of her own reality.
Especially touching is the record’s gorgeous closer, “You’re Me and I’m You,” sung from Paul to her mother, like a lullaby in reverse. “I am the one, the one she loves,” she sings, “No matter what my heart becomes.” Paul is free, so long as she sings, to draw no lines around who she is and what she loves. She is the daughter of her mother. She is the girlfriend of her girlfriend. She is the heiress of Geneviève Castrée and Courtney Love and Carrie Brownstein, a worthy ascendant in a long tradition of Pacific Northwest rock which, for too long, has excluded indigenous women. She makes no apologies, feels no inadequacy. Over the course of the album, this near-hour spent in the presence of the people she loves, she is reminded that she is equal to any challenge which may befall her. “You like flowers?” she sings, to a brown-eyed girl, on “Run It to Ya.” “I pick flowers.”

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Absorbing influences from the natural world and working with collaborators like Lido Pimienta, the Colombian group pushes its habitual electro-tropicalia sound into new terrain.

Deja

When Bomba Estéreo began recording their sixth album in January 2020, Colombians were in the midst of violent protests sparked by strikes against political corruption and dissatisfaction with President Iván Duque Márquez’s government. The anger from students and indigenous activists alike had been simmering for a while: “What matters to us, more than the virus or anything else, is the future of Colombia,” Maria Alejandra Vega, a university student in Bogotá, told a reporter. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, in a small beach town, Bomba Estéreo were also working to reshape their future. Flying in a tight-knit group of collaborators, including Colombian-Canadian singer-songwriter Lido Pimienta, Bomba Estéreo sought refuge in the natural world and created Deja, a concept album foregrounding the environment as a means by which we can heal ourselves politically, socially, and spiritually.
The resulting work is the band’s most earnest to date. When Deja invites us to the dancefloor, Bomba Estéreo ask that we proceed with a conscience. In 2020, Bomba Estereo’s founder Simón Mejía starred in Sonic Forest, a documentary in defense of coastal Colombia’s Afro-Colombian and Indigenous populations. Mejía also released a solo album, Mirla, under the moniker Monte, which inserted nature recordings within instrumental tracks. As Bomba Estéreo absorbed themselves in the land around them, Deja took shape, pushing the group’s habitual electro-tropicalia into different terrain. Drawing influences from marimba, Colombian folk, champeta, and Afrobeats, their sound isn’t necessarily new, but it’s bigger than ever. The most obvious example is “Conexión Total,” a collaboration with Nigerian star Yemi Alade. As Liliana Saumet and Alade riff back and forth about the joys of being fully present, they are carried by Efraín Cuadrado’s gaita (also known as a kuisi), which adds a dazzlingly bright sound to the synths and club-ready rhythm.
Although environmentalism has long played a role in Bomba Estéreo’s music, they’ve never sounded more spiritually attuned, even if it isn’t always effective. Album opener “Agua” begins with a call for the four elements: “Agua/Tierra/Aire/Fuego,” Saumet sings, in a fashion reminiscent of bullerengue, an Afro-Colombian oral tradition. The refrain fits the album’s division into sections dedicated to water, earth, air, and fire, but it still comes off a little hokey. Similarly, the title track relies on ecotherapy-inspired positive affirmations in the attempt to make grand statements about human disconnection, but the uninspiring EDM melody does nothing to lift the lyrics off the ground.
The second half of Deja is more convincingly aligned with their vision. “Tamborero” is a rhapsodic celebration of Colombia’s percussive prowess. On “Tierra,” Saumet sings elegiacally of the earth’s imminent demise; the marimba melody is so sweet, you almost forget how devastating it all is. And on album closer “Mamo Manuel Nieves (Sierra Nevada de Santa Maria),” they pass the mic to an indigenous shaman of the Kogi community. Saumet and Mejía had just finished an old ritual known as a pagamento, or “payment” to the land, when they invited Nieves into the studio to record a message for the world. The largely spoken-word track is a fresh and timely addition to an album of global bangers; it sits in a space similar to Mejía’s solo work, drawing upon samples of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta’s ferocious winds and birds. For a band that consistently invokes tropical indigenous aesthetics, it’s important to see them centering local collaborators’ voices.
Activism and collective healing are at the heart of Deja, and even if Bomba Estéreo’s fusion of lithe beats and weighty themes doesn’t always work, Saumet is a compelling presence throughout. As she opens “Ahora,” surrounded by the sounds of the rainforest, she offers a mantra for anyone struggling: “I am here. I am sitting in the right place, at the right moment, at the right time. Let your heart open.” It’s a simple meditation on seeking balance, and the song that follows, a lilting fusion of synths and guitar set to a cumbia rhythm, drives the point home: They’ve found answers in the world around them.

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The latest collaboration from Luca Mortellaro and Seth Horvitz is a vision of techno as a luminous fog, conjuring vivid imagery with the most stone-faced drones.

Plasma

Luca Mortellaro and Seth Horvitz share roots in techno, but both artists long ago pushed into more esoteric realms. Since founding the Berlin label Stroboscopic Artefacts in 2009, Mortellaro—aka Lucy—has specialized in a shadowy, mystical style evoking ancient rituals and crumbling ruins. Their last solo album, 2016’s Self Mythology, offered a vision of techno as archaeological dig, tracing sooty rhythms outlined beneath centuries of rubble. Horvitz’ Rrose project, on the other hand, oscillates between high tech and the higher plane: Its piercing frequencies and sharp pivots resemble the balletic movements of lasers, while the slippery glissandi and cascading levels of rhythmic detail suggest the dazzling geometry ascribed to DMT trips and near-death experiences.
Lucy and Rrose first collaborated in 2016 with The Lotus Eaters EP, and they formalized their partnership as Lotus Eater with 2018’s Desatura. Perhaps it’s the contrast between their approaches—earth vs. air, fire vs. water—that makes their union sound so eerily dematerialized. Despite its ambient overtones, their debut album maintained at least a notional link to dance music in its rounded kick drums and pinging arpeggios. But on Plasma, there are no hard surfaces, no angles or edges, no impacts at all: It’s still techno, but the beats and even most of the bass have evaporated. What’s left is only a luminous fog, the ghost of a pulse strobing at its gaseous core.
Plasma descends from Porter Ricks’ Biokinetics and Plastikman’s Consumed, landmarks of ’90s minimalist techno that privileged grain over groove, yet its microtonal dimension shares more in common with avant-garde composers like La Monte Young or Folke Rabe. Where club techno favors immediate payoffs, one juicy serotonin burst at a time, Lucy and Rrose are playing the long game here: Very little actually happens in any of these pieces, and what does, happens very slowly. There are no melodies, no hooks, no mile markers; to listen to these pieces is to be swept along in their inexorable flow.
The palette consists largely of buzzing tungsten and bowed metal accented by the occasional leaky faucet. Still, for all the outward paucity of their materials, Lotus Eater conjure some remarkably vivid imagery with the most stone-faced drones. In a single track, a cluster of humming frequencies might morph from a fistful of loam—black, sparkling, tactile, alive—into a blast of dry ice, an alarm clock raging, a jet engine at full roar. Try as you might, you’re never quite sure how you’ve gotten from one point to the next; Lotus Eater’s patient fades and filter sweeps imbue these transmogrifications with something like a feeling of inevitability, no matter how bewildering their evolution may appear.
While there are no conventional drums, a hint of techno lingers, like a grave rubbing, in the music’s muted throb, which dully and dutifully trudges in time with dance music’s steadfast four-to-the-floor cadence. This submerged rhythm is the organizing principle around which their teeming worlds of microscopic detail snap together, like metal filings around a magnet. But the duo’s psychedelic intensity is most perceptible in a pair of tracks on the album’s back half, “Intracluster” and “The End of Words,” where even the faintest trace of rhythm is snuffed out. Both are constructed from innumerable layers of vibration that buzz and rattle out of sync with each other, stacked like layers of a pyramid—from bassy throb and midrange crackle all the way up to a rapid-fire shimmer that scrapes the upper edge of the audible threshold. In the absence of musical events, you begin to imagine riff-like shapes materializing in the slightest repeated flicker of tone, like mirages bubbling up from the sizzling tarmac. In this, Lotus Eater prove themselves master illusionists: They use electricity to play tricks on your mind, and the results are both thrilling and a little scary.


Cherry and the Swedish free jazz ensemble achieve a rare feat with the product of a four-day jam; a covers record that's both deeply personal for both parties, and possessed of a fleeting magic.

The Thing / Neneh Cherry: The Cherry Thing

The Cherry Thing

When she released her 1989 debut album, the club-friendly, socially conscious, and magnetically charismatic Raw Like Sushi, there were early indicators that Neneh Cherry was embarking upon a career of coloring outside the lines. Two decades later, it feels much less important to mention that the album-- which featured the immortally cool, often-imitated, never-duplicated hit single "Buffalo Stance"-- earned her a Brit Award for Best International Solo Artist than it does to tell you that she had the award melted down and made into jewelry, some of which she gave to her fellow nominees. "I gave Jazzie B a piece," she explained later, "Because Soul II Soul kicked ass that year."
Then again, there were even earlier indicators. Cherry was raised by her stepfather, free jazz pioneer Don Cherry, and her upbringing was as unconventional, well-connected and precociously musical as you'd imagine. From an early age, she and her siblings accompanied Cherry on the tour bus, hanging out with Ornette Coleman and any other jazz legends who happened to be around (age four: "[Miles Davis] lifted me up on his lap... and I sat on his snakeskin suit"). At 14, she toured as a backup singer for tribal punk firebrands the Slits; two years later, she formed a punk group of her own, Rip Rig + Panic. Cherry's subsequent solo output was, predictably, unpredictable: three records that blended hip-hop, trip-hop, be-bop with spirited, genre-agnostic abandon. Her disinterest in more conventional pop success relegated her to one-hit-wonder status in the U.S., but, as the more adventurous fans who followed her through the 90s know, it freed her up to graze more interesting territory.
And Cherry's collaborators on her first full-length in 16 years are wild horses in their own right. The freewheeling, punk-influenced Scandanavian jazz trio the Thing (named for a Don Cherry song) are to avant-garde jazz what Nico Muhly basically is to classical music: preternaturally talented upstarts with respect on their highbrow home turf but also plenty of indie cred by association. The Thing have jammed with Thurston Moore and Jim O'Rourke, and they've got some exhilaratingly knotty PJ Harvey, White Stripes, and Lightning Bolt covers in their repertoire.
So, somehow, The Cherry Thing, the album that the free-spirited pop star and the impish free jazz ensemble made together, is not the indulgent, impenetrable mess that you might expect; just the opposite, actually. It's a remarkably well-defined, cohesive, and above all things inviting listen, and at eight tracks it feels neither slight nor needlessly sprawling. Consisting almost entirely of covers and concocted from an unpretentious, no-frills sonic palette, The Cherry Thing is an exercise of the freedom you can invent within certain limits. Can you create new sensations from well-worn material? Is anything so sacred that you can't melt it down into jewelry?
Naturally, the covers included on the album are as genre-agnostic as the artists who chose them. There's a Stooges classic, an Ornette Coleman track, a song from Madvillainy, and, sparking with raw, electric energy (every track was recorded in a single take), each one is a live wire. Cherry's loose but rhythmically agile vocals wrestle with Mats Gustaffson's wild saxophone riffs; they occasionally convene to share the melody (as on one of two originals, Gustaffson's "Sudden Moment"). More often, they dance around each other in spasms of controlled chaos. Paal Nilssen-Love on drums and Ingebright Haker-Flaten on the double bass keep things grounded. There's something especially earthy-sounding about their rhythm section and Haker-Flaten's playing in particular, as though he were plucking not strings but vines strung up between trees. As all of these dynamic moving parts try their best to step in time, their terrific, lurching take on the Stooges' "Dirt" has the deliberate, menacing stomp of a 10-foot swamp monster learning how to walk.
Veering from low, jazzy trills to sharp spoken word, Cherry's vocals are phenomenally expressive: On the cover of Madvillain's "Accordian", she sounds like Billie Holiday at a poetry slam. The original "Accordian" fades out shy of two minutes, and Doom's surreal imagery, clock-tick beat and here-and-then-it's-gone duration give it the hazy magic of a naptime dream. The Cherry Thing's "Accordian"-- utterly transformed-- is three times as long, as though that clock's been chucked out of the room. Cherry tiptoes on, off, and around the beat, reveling in every line. "Keep your glory, gold, and glitter," she wrenches first into a chorus, then into a mantra.
Cherry is recording a solo album that's slated for release later in the year, and although she and the Thing are playing a few shows together this summer, it's likely The Cherry Thing will be a one-off: a solid souvenir of what sounds like a pretty fun four-day jam. Still, more than just a forgettable pit stop in two wildly careening careers, The Cherry Thing captures some kind of fleeting magic. It's also something of a paradox: a deeply personal covers album. The ghost of the players' shared past, Don Cherry (who died of cancer in 1995), wrote one of the most inspired songs on the album, "Golden Heart". For the Thing and Neneh both, it's a tribute to the man who got them started on the wild, uncharted career arcs they're still inventing as they go. As the track subsides, she's crooning his words back to him: "You live with me in the golden heart."


RLYR features Pelican guitarist Trevor Shelley de Brauw, Locrian percussionist Steve Hess, and Russian Circles bassist Colin DeKuiper. Their debut is forty minutes of uncommonly optimistic post-rock.

Delayer

RLYR began by accident. In 2013, Pelican guitarist Trevor Shelley de Brauw and Locrian percussionist Steve Hess, both mainstays within the fertile fringes of Chicago’s rock scene, received an invitation to travel two hours north to Milwaukee and debut as an improvisational duo. Despite their geographic and stylistic proximity, Hess and de Brauw had never played together before, so they practiced, soon discovering the festival’s ask had been a fortuitous one—their approaches clicked, and they wanted to continue. Traces of songs emerged from the informal rehearsals, so they decided to build from an exploratory duo to a power trio, recruiting former Russian Circles bassist and busy band member at large, Colin DeKuiper. Less than three years later, Delayer—the band’s radiant four-song, forty-minute start—funnels the distortion and power of its members’ pedigrees into post-rock that is positively cheery. At its best, Delayer offers a smile and demands, quite loudly, that you share it.
Each piece of RLYR, pronounced “Relayer,” boasts a high-volume past. Pelican, for instance, is the very emblem of instrumental post-metal, long led by de Brauw’s burly, refined riffs. Russian Circles belong in that same conversation. And since Hess enlisted in Locrian a half-decade ago, that trio has become one of extreme metal’s most fascinating bands, taking the kinds of textural and thematic chances that push them to and against the genre’s often-obdurate edges.
These extremes of heaviness and dynamics remain intact on Delayer. The guitar and bass that slash between Hess’ big-bottom beats throughout “Reconductor” carry the weight of doom metal; a mid-song escalation even delivers an instrumental acknowledgement of the recent thrash revival. “Delayer,” a four-minute span of rhythm-less bedlam, recalls a more primitive take on the sophisticated din of Locrian, in which tendrils of synthesizer and guitar, manipulated drums and mangled vocals spin into complex musical webs. And you could write a stoner metal opus from one small sample of the 23-minute “Descent of the Night Bison,” where DeKuiper and de Brauw fight beneath a tough shell of amplifier crackle. As the song pivots toward climax, Hess flirts with a blast beat.
But that’s just Delayer’s surly surface, the necessary vestiges of musicians who have made their reputations in or at least around metal. By and large, these songs glow from the core, built with an underlying, unabashed sense of optimism. Something about the repetition of “Slipstream Summer,” for instance, suggests the blues; the riff and rhythm constantly wrap around themselves, stuck in a cycle from which they can’t slip free. Late in the song, though, de Brauw punches through a veil of low, murky roar, the high notes of his guitar becoming the sunlight suddenly breaking through storm clouds. And the churning “Reconductor” soundtracks some heroic feat, a victory obtained against all odds. You may find yourself cheering along.
Delayer, or four songs by a rock ’n’ metal power trio, isn’t a monumental achievement, nor does it aim to be. These forty minutes simply feel good, their ecstatic embrace of electricity and pounded drums occasionally conjuring some action movie’s apogee. But the real coup is a more subtle one. This sort of dude-driven post-rock and post-metal is so often the domain of the dour, with moods as low as the tunings. Like Collections of Colonies of Bees’ most masterful moments almost a decade ago, though, Delayer suggests a victory not over abject depression but over relative contentment. It’s more liftoff than life raft, a reflection of good times rather than a reckoning of the bad ones. This is uncommonly optimistic post-rock, then, deliberately using the strength of the style’s sound to summon something more than temporary fury.


On his third album—the first part of a projected trilogy—the singer-songwriter retains all his theatrical intensity while shifting his focus to songs about love, a subject he once spurned.

And I Have Been

For the better part of a decade, Benjamin Clementine has been a hostage to his own narrative: the North London boy who taught himself piano by listening to classical radio; the wayward teen who fled to Paris, slept rough, and busked as a means of survival. If you skim through interviews from 2014—before Clementine secured the Mercury Prize for his debut album, At Least for Now—you can see that the musician has long been wary of his own bio. On his third full-length, And I Have Been, Clementine comes to terms with his identity and all of the experiences that shaped it over time. These songs were written at home in the mountains of Ojai, California, but they still sound like they’re curling through Parisian corridors; Clementine is finally at peace with the lingering past. Still impossible to pigeonhole, his hybrid of classical, chamber pop, baroque, and jazz is as thrilling as ever, while the newly stripped-back arrangements heighten the intimacy of a songwriter seeing himself clearly.
Clementine has referred to And I Have Been as his “light” album. It is the first of three parts, which will, he says, get progressively darker—the third chapter may be his final record. It’s hard to envision Clementine writing anything frothy, and his latest work is only “light” compared with the high melodrama of At Least for Now and 2017’s I Tell a Fly. And I Have Been retains Clementine’s theatrical intensity; his voice stretches from robust, oaky lows to highs that crackle like an electrical storm. But in a surprising turn, he succumbs to a musical inevitability: maneuvering his gale-force instrument to sing about love. Clementine once spurned the subject, noting that his songs had more to say than, “Baby, I want to have you.” But his recent role as a husband and father has made the trope inescapable. He married singer-songwriter Flo Morrissey in 2018, and the couple have two young children together. These experiences may have pushed Clementine to write his very first pop songs.
“Auxiliary” is a snapshot of pandemic parenthood, starring Clementine as the unlikely optimist. “I see our world is up in flames,” he sings, sprightly piano and acoustic guitar cresting underneath. But the forecast has a silver lining: “We will survive/Takes you and I/To make our child smile.” On the vamping, neo-blues “Lovelustreman,” Clementine allows himself to enjoy the cliches he once snubbed: “Everything I do is all for you/Believe, you’re my number one.” For an artist who looks to William Blake for inspiration more than Lennon and McCartney, a man who makes up words and penned an entire dictionary with personalized definitions, “Auxiliary” and “Lovelustreman” can feel less lyrically exciting than prior work. But they seem to be an indication that Clementine is loosening up, and occasionally indulging instinct over intellect.
Though Clementine exalts domesticity, being a father at times stirred up his own childhood trauma. He found himself confronted with his history, and for the first time, he embraced it. On the dark waltz “Genesis,” which Clementine has said is about the “constant denial” of his roots, he accepts being “trapped in free”—unsettling shorthand for the past staining the present. In his dry, velvety tenor, he condemns and celebrates this lineage; it exists “no matter where we go,” and ebbs like “settling tides.” It may recede for a while, but the return is unavoidable. In the parallel “Gypsy, BC,” the narrator speaks to a nomad repeating an endless cycle. “Try to go wherever you wanna go/But you’re not free,” Clementine sings, as geyser strings settle over piano. In the song’s final third, he seals his own fate: “Just in case you forget/Gypsy’s been always you.” It’s Clementine’s way of welcoming his shadow, knowing that it is blotted behind every step.
Despite Clementine’s insistence that this is his “light” album, on And I Have Been he grapples with nothing less than life’s cyclical nature. On “Delighted,” he lobs a ball upward and then watches gravity snatch it back down. “We lean, we learn, we earn, we turn, we burn/Then start again” he observes. Violin and a multi-tracked soprano surge in the background. The strings nearly clot the song with their filigree, but they are tempered by Clementine’s earthy, rust-worn voice. At times these cycles are indicated in a song title. “Atonement” points to an inglorious deed; “Residue” suggests the untidy object that came before. The latter is home to one of Clementine’s best lines: “Gluttony ain’t good/Sadness is food… Sadness is wine.” Both metaphors convey the delicious indulgence of depression. But it’s the minimal piano ballad “Copening” that presents Clementine humbly “howling home,” an image that renders the pain and pleasure of shuffling back to where you came from. Upon returning, Clementine entertains the phantoms of his past. They drink to the future.


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 debut album from Mase, an icon of the shiny suit era who turned the Bad Boy throne into a recliner.

Harlem World

Mase floats skyward wearing golden goggles and a shiny suit that looks like a tricked-out air traffic control vest. His rise through an ultramodern wind tunnel feels remarkably symbolic as Kelly Price lip-syncs Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out” on a monitor behind him. He’s wearing the same diamond-studded Jesus piece the Notorious B.I.G. had on when he was murdered. As he swaggers through the futuristic Hype Williams-directed music video for 1997’s “Mo Money, Mo Problems,” histories are being rewritten in real-time; the nature of rap as an epic retail commodity is growing. It is a eulogy and a coronation all at once. It is Bad Boy rising from the ashes.
This was how Sean “Puffy” Combs, marketing extraordinaire, formally introduced a rebranded Mason Betha to the world. Despite guest starring on a No. 1 single months prior, this was Mase’s coming out party, the official induction of Bad Boy’s next star. For several years, Betha had been a foot soldier on the insular Harlem rap scene snarling about returning fire in shootouts, infrared beams, and slug-filled foes coughing up blood. Now he was nearly nonchalant, rapping about Dolce tube socks and putting his name on blimps. The transformation into a flashy ladykiller was Puff’s idea. “I was Murda, P. Diddy made me pretty,” Mase joked on a song called “Lookin’ at Me.”
The transformation worked brilliantly and made Mase and Puff arguably more popular than any rappers before them, but it also raised questions about the value of style over substance among a classicist rap community that had just lost two icons to gun violence, the first Tupac Shakur, the other in their own camp. Puff, the man who’d brought hip-hop Biggie Smalls, one of its greatest ever rappers, was suddenly being pegged as an arbiter of bad taste, with Mase his steward in flamboyant emptiness. Initially seen as a sycophant riding Puff’s coattails, and then as an unworthy successor to Biggie, Mase was nearly defiant in his self-belief: “You don’t like me? Bet against me,” he rapped casually on “Niggaz Wanna Act.” That effortless confidence and poise defines his debut album, Harlem World, one of the best rap albums to be almost shamelessly commercial. It was the peak of the shiny suit era, sparking the short-lived jiggy rap phenomenon of the late ’90s.
Mason Bethea was a New Yorker born in the South. Perhaps that’s why he seemed to do everything on his own time, why he talked slower than the big city rappers he grew up with. The youngest of six children, he was delivered almost two months early in Jacksonville, Florida, and he and his mother fled an abusive father, showing up unannounced to live with an uncle in Harlem. Unscheduled arrivals became a hallmark of his life. “I guess from the very beginning I was coming onto the scene before people were ready to see me,” he says in his 2001 pseudo memoir, Revelations: There’s a Light After the Lime. After leading the basketball team to the PSAL Finals his senior year at Manhattan Center High School, Betha and teammate Cameron Giles had dreams of going to the NBA, but when Betha was forced to repeat his senior year—which meant a year without playing ball—the friends picked up rap as a hobby. From the beginning, they were opposites. Cam was the fire; Mase was preternaturally chill.
As amateur rappers in Harlem going by Killa Cam and Murda Mase, the two immersed themselves in the corner scene, rapping around town at gambling spots and after games at Rucker Park. They joined a rap crew called Children of the Corn, founded in 1993 by a far more serious Harlem rapper named Big L. They were managed by an assertive Manhattan Center student named Damon Dash, but he was really courting L, who was known around town as the best rapper in the borough. (Some years later, Dame’s Roc-A-Fella Records would chase Big L again until his death in 1999.) The crew was primarily rapping about being young and menacing with Mase playing the coolest head. Cam was all action (“I’m a cat with nine lives but every day I risk em.”) Big L was the first in the group to catch a break when his Lifestylez ov da Poor and Dangerous single “M.V.P.” started gaining traction in New York. But a few months later, the Notorious B.I.G. released a “One More Chance” remix with the same DeBarge sample and all but killed L’s momentum. As Big L’s major career sputtered, Murda Mase kept rapping on 139th and Lenox, in front of a 24-hour chicken spot. It was a connection to Biggie that would soon give him his chance to become Harlem’s biggest star.
Betha’s twin sister introduced him to Cudda Love, Biggie’s road manager, in 1996. After hearing a Murda Mase tape, Cudda went up to SUNY Purchase, where Betha was going to school, to inquire about his level of commitment to rap. “‘I already know you’re nice,’” Mase remembers him saying, “‘I just need to know if you want to make money?’” The relationship started paying dividends almost immediately. After only a few weeks, Cudda took Betha to audition for Biggie on a freezing New York City sidewalk out front of the Apollo theater. Biggie was impressed and wanted to put Murda Mase in the newly debuted Brooklyn group Junior M.A.F.I.A., but Cudda had other ideas: he sold his Acura to buy a pair of plane tickets to Atlanta for the colossal annual rap convention, Jack the Rapper’s Family Affair. Mase was so broke at the time that he was sharing a one-bedroom apartment and splitting White Castle burgers, but Cudda, knowing the man needed to look the part, let Mase borrow a silk Versace shirt with flamboyant colors, and Mase spent his last dime on Versace pants and shoes to complete the look. “Somebody’s going to notice me,” he remembers thinking.
The convention afterparty was at the Hard Rock, and when he failed to woo producer Jermaine Dupri outside the venue, Cudda finagled an opportunity for Betha to try and impress Puff on the dancefloor. “You rap like that all the time? That slow?” Mase remembers Puff asking him, intrigued. “I liked his style,” Combs told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. “His personality stood out. The sound of his voice. He sounded like me.” When Mase got back to New York, he was Bad Boy. Only a few weeks later, he was reunited with Biggie, this time as teammates, on the “Only You” remix. There was a dollar sign in his name now. Puff showed him the money (allegedly $250,000, $50k upfront, outbidding Heavy D at Uptown Records, Tommy Boy Records, and his old friend Dame Dash at Roc-A-Fella) and he planned to make good on his investment. “I’m the newest member of the Bad Boy team/And I’ma bring this nigga Puff mad more cream,” Mase pledged on “Take What’s Yours.” “With hooks galore, leave the city shook for sure/And I’ma take ‘em back where Biggie took ‘em before.”
Mase quickly made good on his promise. Puff was anxious to put his talents to use across the Bad Boy roster, and basically every record they cut together from 1996 to the summer of ‘97 hit. In the wake of Biggie’s death in March of 1997, Mase was suddenly thrust into a new role as replacement headliner. He was constantly fielding questions about inheriting the Bad Boy throne. His response was to turn that throne into a recliner. The album was wholly self-aware; chock full of jams and conscious of it. Mase wanted to take his insular Harlem world global, and he did, rolling out a red carpet from Lenox Ave. into suburban households across the country.
Harlem World is larger than life. Mase had a buttery touch when in his groove, as if having an out-of-body experience watching himself churn out hits. “Why do what most do? Do what you ’posed to/Make hot jams y’all, sell bicoastal/If you want a hit you can let me coach you/Money back on anything that got my vocals,” he rapped on rhetorical opener “Do You Wanna Get $?” And while it’s safe to say Puff Daddy wasn’t a good rapper and was, in fact, simply just an executive masquerading as a showman, no such claim could be made about Mase. His flows were as silky, or as plush, or as golden as the material world furnishing his songs. He made the realm of luxury feel quaint.
Part of the credit is owed to Puff, his ace in-house production team the Hitmen, and other rising beatmakers like the Neptunes, Dame Grease, and Jermaine Dupri who, to paraphrase Combs on the uber-jiggy “Feel So Good,” flipped hits from the ’80s and made ’em sound so crazy. They spun Isaac Hayes, Teena Marie, New Edition, Curtis Mayfield, and Michael Jackson into satiny soundbeds Mase would sprawl out in. Talk of Puff during the late ’90s often found a way back to Berry Gordy shaping the sound of Motown; the Bad Boy exec had a similar genius for putting everyone in a position to succeed. No Way Out remains his crowning achievement as a producer, but across Harlem World he makes Mase look like rap Hugh Hefner.
Mase was underrated in his ability to make extravagant things seem quotidian. He had TVs in the headrests of his red Lex years before Xzibit was kitting out cars on “Pimp My Ride.” He preferred his money in yen because the Japanese didn’t tax him, and if you had something to ask him you could send him a fax. Rappers had been rich before but they’d rarely been thriftless. Mase was Scrooge McDuck diving into a vault of coins and finding his wealth exhausting. “It’s like y’all be talkin’ funny/I don’t understand the language of people with short money,” he rapped on “Feel So Good” over a Kool & the Gang sample that sounded like strolling the Las Vegas Strip at night. To listen to his music was to be vicariously untouchable.
But Harlem World was wrongly depicted as lyrically limited and uninvolved, as well as far removed from the street rap deemed of and for the culture, emblematic of a transitional period when rap’s reach had, to the disdain of some hardcore fans, become a “Seinfeld” joke. It was too above ground, too kitsch, too expensive. The album was often ostentatious, to be sure, largely materialistic and definitely profit-oriented, but certainly not without its hood charms and never unaware of where it came from. Mase’s raps weren’t dense or heavy with double-entendre, but there was plenty of subtly tricky rapping worked into his flexible cadences. And for all the talk of excess, Mase pulled grit and grind rappers like DMX, 8Ball, and MJG into his orbit, made space for the shriek raps of Busta Rhymes, and matched the finesse of early mafioso JAY-Z. He was just as likely to shit talk as he was to flex. Everything circled back to the ubiquity he’d achieved as a Bad Boy poster child, but it still all began with Murda in Harlem.
Almost overnight, Mase set up shop on the Billboard charts as if it was a label requirement. From Biggie’s death through the summer of 1998, all Mase did was make hit records: After handing Puff No. 1 and No. 2 smash hits, “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” and “Been Around the World,” respectively, and then bringing things to a head with his zeitgeist-shifting appearance on “Mo Money, Mo Problems,” Harlem World produced three Top 10 singles of its own. The album, which hit stores in October, was double platinum by December. He collected four plaques from the RIAA and was nominated for the same Grammy twice. The only rappers who had bigger years than he did were … Biggie and Puff.
The short-lived Jiggy Rap Era—which included Jay-Z’s In My Lifetime, Vol. 1, peaked with Will Smith’s Big Willie Style, and concluded with the rise of DMX in 1998—has been primarily remembered with contempt, along with the Ringtone Rap that would take hold a decade later. But Harlem World remains the sleekest rap album about becoming super famous. It set precedents for decades of posh rap consumerism. It is flagrantly commodified, proud of it, but not lesser for it.
Somewhere along the line, Mase grew weary of the fame, which was reflected in his music. He lost his love for rap and retired live on Hot 97 weeks before the release of his 1999 sophomore album Double Up. He became a pastor. He briefly returned to give rap another go in 2004 but was never the same. The magic was gone. As Kanye put it on “Devil in a New Dress”: “Don’t leave while you’re hot, that’s how Mase screwed up.”
But Mase’s legacy lives on in every rags-to-mega-riches story that’s become standard in rap; in the flows co-opted by everyone from Drake to Pusha T; in wannabe rap moguls naming their imprint after $200,000 luxury cars; in Jesus pieces as a rite of passage. So much of what rap has become can be traced back to those shiny suits blinged out in that wind tunnel. As Mase floats, an entire genre hangs in the balance.