Despite the Oxford-based house producer's goofy moniker and preferred costuming (feathered wings, feathered headdresses, stegosaurus spines, etc.), Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs' pop-infused debut isn't incredibly showy.

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs: Trouble

Trouble

The name's a lark, kind of. When Oxford-based pop-infused house producer Orlando Higginbottom uploaded some rough demos to MySpace back in the pre-Soundcloud days of 2007, he attributed them to the rather ridiculous-sounding moniker of Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. His reasoning, as he told former Pitchfork contributor Philip Sherburne over at SPIN, was that he was looking for a name that "couldn't be cool, couldn't be put into some kind of scene that gets hip for six months and then falls out of fashion." Many discerning listeners still put plenty of stock into what artists call themselves, but in an age of music culture that favors layers of extra-musical imagery (or lack thereof) as key to an artist's narrative, such nomenclatural recklessness as Higginbottom's actually comes across as fairly brilliant.
The deeper joke: Despite the goofy name and Higginbottom's preferred costuming (huge feathered wings, huge feathered headdresses, stegosaurus spines, headgear that resembles glued-together mosquito nets), TEED's proper debut LP, Trouble, isn't incredibly showy. That much is obvious as soon as Higginbottom's voice drifts into his self-programmed rhythmic fray. If we're talking about octaves, he's got range-- his ability to slip into a soft falsetto is something that other mid-level electro-pop crooners should work hard to emulate-- but overall, he sounds shy and reserved vocally, in a way not totally dissimilar to fellow multitasking countryman Kwes. Trouble is Higginbottom's Polydor debut, but he's previously released music on Greco-Roman, the reliable label run by Hot Chip's Joe Goddard (who himself turned in an astounding remix of early single "Garden"). The connection makes sense, since TEED's approach to dance-pop, much like Goddard's main act, sounds especially everyguy. The project's live show provides plenty of evidence that the stuff pleases crowds, but you get the feeling that he's doing this for himself more than anyone else.
While Hot Chip's lyrical focus has turned toward a beatific and universal mindset, Higginbottom's subject matter is more introverted. Mostly he sings about girls-- about how they don't pay him much mind and about how much mind he pays them, with a few heart-on-sleeve pleas for mutual appreciation sprinkled throughout. Trouble's production is top-notch, with some sweaty club heartstoppers (the bouncing bass of "Solo", "Your Love"'s euphoric vocal-house vibes), but Higginbottom's work never really sounds sexy, precisely because he's not trying to make it so. Even though his guise has appeared on a Crosstown Rebels single, TEED ditches the sultry vibes of his contemporaries and embraces his inner nerd. "Household Goods" is an on-your-knees beg for attention directed toward someone preoccupied with someone else, but when all's said and done, Orlando's fairly noncommittal about the whole thing: "Give me a shot/ 'Cause I could be the dog to your bone/ Or something." On "Stronger", he delivers devotionally, "The feel I love in you is making me stronger," the kind of accidental play on words that spills out when you're keyed up on whatever's available-- or, when you're making hay out of a loveless situation by trying to siphon euphoria from future heartbreak.
Those sensitive, vaguely bookish tendencies definitely lend Trouble a distinctly indie pop appeal-- a Junior Boys for the sexually frustrated, perhaps, a comparison that builds steam when noticing the comparability between Higginbottom's vocals and those of Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan circa Last Exit. But anyone with a pocket-protector-protected heart knows that even nerds have wandering minds. Besides slightly overdoing it on track-by-track rhythmic similarities and sounds shaded with warm reds and blacks, Trouble is a hair or two too long, which makes it all the more ironic that some of its strongest moments take place when its creator is content to let his short hair down and escape to the comforts of his own mind. The vocal-skipping echoes of "Closer" move at their own pace, while "Shimmer" seems less concerned with a conclusion than finding a way to stick its head further into the clouds, as Higginbottom wistfully exhales, "If you mean it, if you mean it, if you really do/ Right on." The exclamation comes across more like a sigh, but feeling good often feels bad, too.


Read Scott Plagenhoef’s review of the album.

808s & Heartbreak

Poor Kanye West. The guy was already a ball of conflicts and contradictions—hand-wringing over his consumption one moment, boasting about his wealth the next. He’s someone as driven by ego as he is plagued by doubt—in other words, a wholly human pop star. This year, however, was particularly rough: He and his fiancée broke up, and his mother, Donda West—who alone raised Kanye from the age of three—died from complications after cosmetic surgery. Kanye blamed himself for his mother’s death, singling out his own vanity, wealth, and pursuit of glamour and celebrity. His response? He’s made 808s & Heartbreak, which as the title hints is an introspective, minimal electro-pop record steeped in regret, pain, and even more self-examination than a typical Kanye West album. And as you’ve no doubt heard, on 808s West sings everything through Auto-Tune rather than rapping, a decision that for some has made this record a non-starter.
The recent embrace of the common studio aid seems akin to pro wrestling saying, “Fuck it, this isn’t real” and making it more transparent and scripted (and successful). But vocal manipulation isn’t only the practice of radio-ready rap, of course—it’s been a signpost for “futuristic music” ever since Joe Meek heard “a New World” almost 50 years ago. In this decade, records like Radiohead’s Kid A/Amnesiac, the Knife’s Silent Shout, and Daft Punk’s Discovery were heralded in part for screwing with vocals; last year both Battles and Dan Deacon revived the old Alvin and the Chipmunks trick of shifting pitches and speeds; and Bon Iver’s forthcoming EP features a song sung through vocoder. And, lest we forget, Kanye West himself made his name as a producer in part thanks to his “chipmunk soul” vocal samples. So why is this approach, from this guy, now such a problem?
In part it’s because it's not what people want or expect from Kanye West. Stylized Auto-Tune seems to be on about every third song on top 40 radio these days, making West seem like an opportunist or a bandwagon-jumper. But Kanye has always been more of a master assimilator: He’s achieved in part because he’s used wealth and fame to explore the wider world—culturally and artistically—rather than shut himself off from it. If this guy was jumping on a radio fad here, we’d likely get an LP’s worth of “Put On”s, his summer hit and collaboration with Young Jeezy. Instead we get bedroom pop, quiet ruminations in which after staying up night after night pursuing and living the good life, Kanye wakes up to a cold, lonely dawn.
West’s singing is shaky, of course, which is in part why he leans on the Auto-Tune. But it functions here as a democratizer as much as a crutch, because like all Kanye West songs, these are primarily about the experience of Being Kanye West. These are expressions of the specific feelings of one guy; there is still, to West at least, more emotional nourishment to be wrung from song than speech, which certainly colored his decision here. But filtering these ideas through John Legend or Chris Martin or whomever would essentially kill the whole effect. This isn’t new: Kanye West’s music is about being a specific celebrity more than anyone’s since the solo works of John Lennon. Sure Eminem weaved biography into his songs but he also wore multiple faces and worked in and out of character when it suited him; West, on the other hand, is one of the few hip-hop artists without any pseudonyms, let alone characters.
Colleagues at Pitchfork have therefore wondered why this wasn’t a private record West made for himself, but again nothing he’s done is private, and that’s in part why he’s been so compelling. The album does, however, sound purposefully removed from the start. Opener “Say You Will” boasts one of the record’s biggest vocal lines but eventually runs out into a three-minute, table-setting outro—a patient, defeated-sounding collection of choral vocals and drum machines. (A similar trick is repeated, to much worse effect, later on “Bad News.”)
But the album is much larger and brasher than it would first appear—the closer it hews to a mix of sad-sack indie pop and elegant, monied Patrick Bateman commercial ’80s sounds, the better it works. The strings on “RoboCop,” the relatively busy sounds of “Street Lights,” the clapping drums on “Love Lockdown,” and the 909 and descending synth on “Coldest Winter” are among the sonic highlights, though even these are subtle. From West’s vocal delivery to the stuttering rhythms, the album reveals folds and layers on repeated listens where at first it seems almost horrifically one-note.
It’s no surprise that 808s is a bit of a grower: The record’s best songs—“Paranoid,” “Street Lights,” “Coldest Winter,” and “RoboCop”—are often its most dismal, with cavernous production giving the Auto-Tune vocals more of an echoing desolation than a pop sheen. By contrast, the more pop aspects of the album are where it relatively stumbles. “Heartless” and “Love Lockdown,” both very good songs, work surprisingly well on the car radio, but they’re second-tier Kanye West singles. And when the mood is broken up by outsiders or actual rapping, the results aren’t pretty: The two songs featuring superstar guests—“Amazing” with Jeezy and “See You in My Nightmares” with Lil Wayne—are also the proper LP’s low points.
In the end, whether you care to envelope yourself into West’s pain and self-torment largely depends on what you already think of the artist. He isn’t at his most eloquent here—raw emotion and rolling expressions of self-doubt don’t seem to be ripe for poetic expression (and, woof, the tacked-on “Pinocchio Story” is a WTF curiosity at best)—but very few songs, perhaps only “Welcome to Heartbreak,” ask you to care about specific rather than expressive language. For the most part, West’s pain is articulated in ways that, while borne from his experiences, can be easily translated to the listener’s. The kind of universality is a staple of great pop, but it’s also something that many indie-centric fans don’t find appealing.
That West’s ego is a roadblock has long been a lament to me, but I think it’s ultimately his strength. To twice paraphrase the wisdom of The Daily Show, the guy is aiming to be the biggest pop star in the world—he should feel bigger than us; too often, though, we instead ask for artists to be just like us or worse. West is endowed, however, with a sense of purpose and drive that pushes him to make records with Jon Brion, to crib from French house, to put on events rather than shows, to valorize art along with commerce at a time when major labels are circling the wagon and becoming stiflingly conservative, and to break out of his comfort zone when he wants to create a record as uncomfortable as 808s. Nobody else on a large scale is coming close to firing imaginations on this level, and if the guy wants to make a record for himself he’s earned the right to do it—even if the public ultimately prefers his big, brash summer jams more than blubbery Notwist-like bedsit indie. If you’re in the former camp, don’t worry: Kanye has claimed he’ll have another record out by June.


Perry Farrell started out as the most engaging guy who ever hit you up for change. It wasn't just ...

Strays

Perry Farrell started out as the most engaging guy who ever hit you up for change. It wasn't just his wiry, damaged looks and a voice that sounded like rent tissue; this guy had stories to tell, about what he saw on the streets, the drugs and hookers, the sound of gunshots and polyglot arguments. Then he'd get in his own head, and spill his wild theories-- sex is violence! Jesus enjoyed a good menage-a-trois every now and again! You can piss in the shower! On yourself!-- and fantasies about the mountains and deserts he'd probably never seen. If you drove in from the 'burbs and met this guy, he'd tell you things you'd never imagined-- but the whole time, he just wanted your money.
The three albums that Jane's Addiction cut, from their commercial breakthrough in '88 to their sudden breakup in '91, placed them solidly as one of the great bands of their time. Farrell partnered with star lead guitarist Dave Navarro-- a fellow metal drama queen-- and the stellar rhythm section of Stephen Perkins on drums and bassist Eric Avery: you could send them out on reconnaissance and know they'd come back. Not only did the band help start the "alternative rock" era and revive great hard rock on the major labels, but their fusion of metal, goth, punk-funk-grooves and art-rock showed a breadth and power close to none other than Led Zeppelin-- a band whose greatness they scraped with their artistic and commercial pinnacle, Ritual de lo Habitual.
And then it was over. Without dwelling on every solo project and spinoff band, you can argue that each new album was safer and duller than the one before. Farrell's Porno for Pyros made him tame and serviceable, as the one-time street threat became the professional concert promoter behind Lollapalooza. With his exotic electronica record Songs Yet to Be Sung, he'd finally made it out to the desert, even if he was too straight and cleaned-up to make anything of it. The others didn't fare much better, but aside from a one-off reunion tour (with Flea on bass), the band had been inactive for over a decade when they got back together-- with Chris Chaney replacing Avery-- to record Strays and revive Lollapalooza, which they're currently headlining. Again.
If you're an old fan you might stop cold when you hear the band's new sound. I'll just be direct here: Jane's Addiction have embraced the stainless steel of nu-metal. That said, the old band is recognizable-- Farrell even shouts "HERE WE GO!" to kick it off-- but now they're tight, clean and less dynamic; some tracks sound slick enough to fit in a movie about street-racing sports cars. And who thought Farrell's voice would fit the bold, basic hard rock of the single "Just Because"?
But let's assume none of that bugs you. They went modern, and sometimes they sound like the music your little brother listens to because he's still scared of your records-- but they still knock aside pretty much anything else on commercial rock radio today. The performances are ferocious. Farrell sounds completely committed, pushing more out of his voice than you'd think it could give him. Navarro's leads fly by so often he barely pauses to point them out. Producer Bob Ezrin (Kiss, Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd) deserves credit for catching (or generating) all the excitement in this date, even if the perfection is unnatural: the finishing touches are immaculate, from the light use of keyboards to the occasional choir and horn section, all layered barely above the surface.
"Hypersonic" is a dizzyingly tight piece of metalcraft that screeches to a giddy finish; "True Nature" and "Wrong Girl" echo the segues and moody sections of past Jane's tunes, while "Superhero", the most cussing (and probably my favorite) song, acts as traditional mid-album sass-swagger, with its catchiest hooks. They sequenced the most creative songs around the clichéd hard rock of "Price I Pay" and "To Match The Sun", but unfortunately, the album's strengths stop at its construction. Strays lacks what what made the band great in the first place: believable songs and lyrics. According to interviews, the band wrote this material in the studio, so it's not surprising that none of the songs sound like they were burning to be written-- or remembered.
The chorus of "Superhero" and the Zep-riffs of "Wrong Girl" don't excuse the forgettable hooks and by-the-numbers hard rock that fill most of the record. The problem isn't that they didn't write a new "Jane Says", it's that none of these songs can touch any of the material from the first three records. The dynamics-- the bass-led segues and sudden avalanches of sound, the hooks and stylistic extremes-- are simply absent. Strays boasts the band's career-worst dog, the ballad "Everybody's Friend", with an acoustic guitar part that won't be played in dorm rooms across America, and groaner lines like: "Men of peace/ Men of war/ Tell me, who knows more?" And that's more colorful than the kitchen magnet verse on the other songs. Still, as if knowing this, Farrell whizzes through and preferentially emphasizes the timbre of his voice over what he's saying: the lyrics have gotten wordier, yet none of them sound like they matter.
It's hard to go from the songs on Ritual that seemed torn from Farrell's guts to this one-dimensional writing, but to be fair, those comparisons ignore that twelve years have passed. Farrell's not the man he was-- and nobody wants to hear a fortysomething sing about living clean and studying the Torah. He's in a different life: he's done letting us live vicariously through his mania. Judging from Strays, he and the band aren't out to add to the significance of their earlier work; they take the momentous quality of their reunion momentum and aim for the ages. At least they want to rock. For a reunion cash-in, that's saying a lot.


Over the last six months, the Flushing native made the leap from promising character to one of the most hilarious and creative writers in rap. On Blue Chips, he's eminently quotable and savagely funny.

Action Bronson / Party Supplies: Blue Chips

Blue Chips

You can't catch Action Bronson crushed out heavenly. He's smoking savage out of Sarasota, twisting joints just like a contortionist. He's not hitting Poughkeepsie crispy chicken, he's devouring roasted bone marrow spread onto lightly toasted rosemary bread-- drizzled with vinaigrette. He's not lampin' in the throne with Wonder Woman bracelets and King Tut hats. He's swaddled in suede loin cloths and knee-length leather jackets. Meaning: He is not Ghostface Killah. After all, Tony Starks never laid out in the Galapagos, eating tacos, higher than an opera note (that we know).
The Ghostface similarity is the arrière-pensée precluding people from joining the Bronsolino bandwagon. But Bronson doesn't ask for his French to be pardoned. He speaks Polish out in London, with a face just like a young John F. Kennedy. Bronson is Homer Simpson staring into the mirror and seeing a chiseled Adonis. But it's not true self-delusion. 5'7", 260, ginger-bearded, bowling ball-built, Bronson has the swaggering confidence of the original overweight lover, Heavy D. He blends that with epicurean inclinations-- a dirty sex and esoteric food obsession suggestive of Henry Miller scripting episodes of No Reservations for Anthony Bourdain. Sautee the intricate rat-a-tat patterns of Kool G Rap, the stoned perversion of the Beatnuts, and the super-fly vivid laser eye-guide specifics of Ghostface and... bon appétit.
But when the 27-year old of Albanian ancestry uploaded "Shiraz" and "Imported Goods" to YouTube two years ago, the Flushing native was little more than a Ghostface manqué, a chubby, Knicks Jersey-sporting, blunt smoking chef, spitting slang over formalist soul loops and break beats. There was promise but the only thing that made truly set him apart from the crowded field of New York revivalists was his ability to articulate the differences between Canadian bacon and prosciutto. Admittedly, that's not entirely different from what he does now. But at some point over the last six months, Bronson made the leap. He went from promising character whose music always seemed on the brink of making you turn it off in favor of Supreme Clientele, to one of the most hilarious and creative writers in rap.
What's weird is that he did this by becoming even more like Ghostface Killah, going so far as to sample "Apollo Kids" on "Tapas". Rather than mimic Ghostface's trademark vocal exaggerations, Blue Chips-era Bronson mines from the same concepts that made Ghost great: bodega slang, sleazy narratives, childhood flashbacks, and bizarre allusions. Sculptures of Bronson's body are out in Nagano, he smuggles cheese in baby bags, sometimes his only friends are drugs and cannoli.
Take "Hookers at the Point", a triptych of pimp, ho, and john, interwoven with samples from the 2002 documentary of the same title. There have been a million songs that cover similar terrain, but Bronson boasts his own brand of gonzo humor, subtle pathos, and specificity. He raps from all three perspectives, taking special glee in his absurd portrait of Silk, aka Montel (one "L"), a pinky-ringed, Henny-swilling pimp, sporting lizard-skin boots and green suits, with "eight bitches look like they straight from the Alaskan blizzard."
The most harrowing cut might be "Thug Love Story 2012", where Bronson spins a tale of "young love/ But we thought it was eternity/ Raw sex/Never thought about paternity." It ends up with diapers being flung and assault and battery charges being beat. Bronson's New York is one of loud arguments keeping entire apartments awake, exotic smells seeping out into hallways, thick accents and thin walls, the tug-of-war between assimilation and the preservation of old world roots. It is what a Weegee photograph would look like now.
Should you be searching for them, there are flaws to be found on Blue Chips. It's fair to say that Bronson's influences could be synthesized more. The audio fidelity is about what you'd expect it would be when samples were lifted straight off of YouTube after searching stoned for phrases like "100 Acre Burgundy Carpet". You could also cavil that the project is too retro-minded. Originally conceived as a 1980s throwback (and taking its name from a 1990s Nick Nolte college basketball film), producer Party Supplies rifles through familiar beat breaks and Cyrus Neville, the Flamingos, and Frank Zappa samples. To futurists, it might sound too traditionally New York. Then again, A$AP Rocky got shit for not sounding enough like New York. There is no winning.
Blue Chips works so well because it's as tailor-made to Bronson as the leather Jodeci suit he invokes. The album's structured structureless-ness plays to Bronson's strengths. It has the loose off-the-cuff spontaneity that lends to its playful vibe. Bronson fucks up no fewer than three times on "9-24-11", but keeps recording. Nor are there any real attempts at hooks. Bronson's goals are minimal and fully realized: Make eminently quotable East Coast rap, and be savagely funny.
Think of Bronson as less throwback, more raw Queens charmer, scheming in the tradition of old working class New York: the fast-talking cabbies with the Noo Yawk patois, porno theaters, immigrant waiters, and bizarre late-night public-access programs. Blue Chips spits back the striving native son as white Queens rapper, weaned on old WWF and NWA, the Doc Gooden Mets, Wu-Tang, and fistfuls of baklava. Under the influence of fly shit, puffing hibiscus, chilling eating lamb brain.


Over a 10-year recording career, the Queens rapper has diversified his bonds and spread himself thin musically. Still, he remains a captivating figure on his most eclectic album yet.

Only For Dolphins

When Action Bronson emerged a decade ago, he was hailed as a paragon of formalist East Coast hip-hop: a buddha-sized trash-talker who kicked loquacious rhymes, toked on breakbeats, and paid tribute to New York tacos. But recent years have seen Bronson embrace something akin to Dame Dash’s octopus business strategy: keep eight revenue streams open at all times. These days, he moonlights as an author, has his own cooking show on Vice, pops up in movies like The Irishman, and dabbles in art. Beneath his growing celebrity remains a rapper, albeit one whose dedication to the form may be diluting as he spreads himself across multiple interests.
Given Bronson’s expanding outlook, it seems suitable that Only For Dolphins is his most eclectic album yet. Once infatuated by the eternal truths of boom-bap, he now boasts a more diversified palette that includes 1960s Brazilian pop, Latin funk, lounge jazz, and reggae. If nothing else, the album is a triumph of Bronson’s omnivorous musical taste, starting with the self-produced opener “Capoeira”—one of the best instrumentals he has ever spit over. Sampling the intro to I.N.D.’s obscure 1981 sophisti-pop number “Into New Dimensions,” the beat evokes memories of Operation: Doomsday-era DOOM, tempting Bronson to detail various adventures: sniffing coke off mirrors, jumping in a Jacuzzi with “12 freaks,” and cruising around in his beamer listening to Gerald Levert.
Conversely, closer “Hard Target” places Bronson on stage in an underground jazz club, delivering a monologue on his achievements in the publishing industry and the diminishing effects of weed on his brain. A pianist tinkles in the background as the percussionist sprinkles in some natty little drum fills. Then there is a song like “Shredder,” a two-minute potboiler draped in the midnight noir sounds of somber saxophone lines, a prominent bassline, and shimmering keys. Perhaps taking influence from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ arch-nemesis Oroku Saki, Bronson describes a night in the life of a villain. When in form, his worldbuilding remains sharp and vivid.
It’s when you peer in closer that the cracks start to appear. There’s evidence that Bronson’s rapping has lost significant velocity, even compared to his relatively well-rapped last album White Bronco. Yes, the man who was moved to apologize to Ghostface Killah for claiming, “He’s not rapping like this no more” just ain’t rapping like that no more. This reduced emphasis on cannonade bars is why many of the better songs are the slower jams—“Hard Target,” “Shredder,” the swooning strings of “Vega”—but such is the lack of urgency on tracks like “Cliff Hanger”—you can picture Bronson studiously reading from his book of rhymes in the booth.
It’s enticing to accept Bronson’s slowing flow as design rather than fading skills. Yet “C12H16N2” hints at a world-weariness that perhaps is evident in his voice: “I got older and I realized there was no heroes/Don’t even talk to me unless you’re talking more zeroes.” This lethargy is present in the writing throughout. Bronson can still be more imaginative than almost every other rapper, but here his idiosyncratic humor, kaleidoscopic use of pop culture references, and culinary fantasies aren’t as consistently gripping or eccentric as they once were. The hook from “Latin Grammys,” for instance, sees Bronson feebly brag about his promiscuity, something he’s done many times before with more inspiration. He still raps about food, but bars like, “Me and my brother go together just like lamb and rice” (“Mongolia”) feel static from a star who once claimed that ginger ale and hot sauce were the two things he lived by.
Despite these flaws, Bronson is a captivating personality. Only For Dolphins may not be vintage Bronsolino, but it’s still a display of why so many entities outside of music want a piece of him. Where the artist goes from here is not an unusual question to pose after the release of an album, but in Bronson’s case, it’s reasonable to query whether the recording studio is a destination in the short-to-medium term or whether he’ll instead find that his other interests offer a warmer embrace.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Two of Van Morrison's essential early albums have been given deluxe reissues, with unreleased takes and alternate versions. Astral Weeks remains a singular item in his catalog, and indeed in pop music as a whole. His Band and the Street Choir stands as something of a counter, a record all about the rough and tumble joy of living.

Van Morrison: Astral Weeks / His Band and the Street Choir

Van Morrison released Astral Weeks in November 1968, not even 18 months after cracking the Billboard Top 10 with "Brown Eyed Girl". Much of the ebullience of "Brown Eyed Girl" derives from its AM-radio friendly arrangement, a sound encouraged by Bert Berns, the head of Van's label Bang. Berns was determined to get the record on the charts because that's where the money was, so the single sounded peppier than its lyric, a disconnect Morrison later noted. An undercurrent of melancholy desire runs through "Brown Eyed Girl"—Van pines for a moment as it's passing—and Astral Weeks brings that yearning to the forefront as it ventures into the slipstream of memories, dreams, and regret.
Generalized longing—for a lover or a friend, for a certain time or place, for a younger version of yourself—is one of the defining elements of Astral Weeks, an album where spirituality, mysticism, and death intertwine on a vast expanding plane. It is youthful and old, the first flowering of expanded consciousness, one not yet tarnished by either tragedy or cynicism but impeded by an encroaching sense of mortality. Death flows through the album but doom doesn't cloud each moment. Rather, this music comes from the perspective of a young man realizing everything he has will erode, an awareness arriving while the wonder of life has yet to fade. Morrison doesn't dwell upon such sadness so much as he brushes upon them, a sensibility mirrored in his open-ended songs—compositions that largely evade traditional structure in favor of a boundless ballad, one stripped of story but following an interior emotional narrative. There's reason why both its creator and admirers so often call Astral Weeks poetry: it has its own internal language.
Other singer/songwriters wound up using Astral Weeks as a primary text, either discovering their own voice in its viaducts or wallowing in its detours, but nobody has approached its soft, untethered spirituality, not even Van Morrison himself. In a way, Morrison's occasional disregard for the record helped fuel its cult, suggesting he tapped into a vein that frightened even him (this is a common thread among cult albums, where audiences choose to live eternally within a few dark months of an artist's life; see also Big Star's Third or Weezer's Pinkerton). Certainly, Astral Weeks seems to exist in a separate dimension from the rest of Van Morrison's catalog, its supple, soft-focus jazz-folk lacking the deeper R&B grooves of so many of his records, while its songs are often absent on compilations (tellingly, there's not a single song from it on the artist-endorsed 2007 compilation, Still on Top—The Greatest Hits). All of which underscores its separateness, playing into the myths that Astral Weeks is a record out of time and place.
But even this, the most mystical album in the classic rock canon, has prosaic beginnings. Although it gives the illusion that it was written as a piece, several of its songs were composed years earlier ("Ballerina" dates from 1966, when Them recorded a prescient version of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"), with Morrison recording two of the songs—"Beside You" and "Madame George"—for Bang Records during a day-long 1967 session designed to deliver all 36 songs he owed the label. This patchwork assemblage wasn't an accident. Part of the condition for Morrison's departure from the imprint dictated that he record two Bang-era songs for his Warner debut and, if Morrison released a single in 1968, half of the copyright would belong to Berns' publishing company. Morrison had radio-friendly material at the ready—"Domino", the lead single from the subsequent His Band and the Street Choir, was kicking around in '68—but he deliberately saved these songs for a later date, choosing contemplative compositions that were frankly uncommercial. Critics and Morrison himself would occasionally lament the album's lack of promotion but that underselling seems a deliberate tactic: there were no singles by design and both the artist and Warner would benefit financially if the hits arrived somewhere down the road.
Hence, Astral Weeks is a bit of conventional artist building by Warner, a label known for being artist-friendly. Where Bang sought to shoehorn Morrison into the confines of AM radio, Warner's Mo Ostin and Joe Smith indulged their new signing, teaming him with producer Lewis Merenstein, who recruited a band of jazz players led by bassist Richard Davis, a veteran of out sessions by Andrew Hill (he played on every one of the pianist's pivotal mid-'60s Blue Note titles) and Eric Dolphy, but also straighter sessions by Brother Jack McDuff and Lou Donaldson. Modern Jazz Quartet drummer Connie Kay came next, along with guitarist Jay Berliner and vibraphonist/percussionist Warren Smith Jr., both veterans of sessions with Charles Mingus, and the group simply followed the lead of Morrison, who was playing the songs while sequestered in his separate booth. Three days—just two longer than the Bang copyright dump—was all that was needed to finish the record, with four songs completed the first day of the session. Morrison later told NPR in 2009 "That was that performance on those days" and, in a way, that's all that needs to be said about the record: it is musicians, previously unknown to each other, discovering a shared vernacular, stumbling upon something transcendent that no party attempted to conjure again.
Astral Weeks is defined by Morrison's transient collaborations, not only between the musicians in the studio but producer Merenstein. So distinct is its atmosphere, it's easy to assume this is the work of a lone auteur who crafted the compositions and arrangements, but Merenstein is the one who sequenced the album, imposing the designations "In the Beginning" and "Afterwards" to the two sides, thereby strengthening the illusion that this is a song cycle. He's also the one who directed the orchestrations and chose to clip "Slim Slow Slider" so the album shudders to a halt, the dream coming to a conclusion with a start.
The long-rumored complete version of "Slim Slow Slider" is one of four bonus tracks added to Warner's new remastered and expanded reissue of Astral Weeks; the other three include a longer version of "Ballerina" and alternate takes on "Beside You" and "Madame George", the latter with no orchestration and heavy vibes, offering a muted variation on the original. "Slim Slow Slider" does feel different in its lengthier incarnation, where it now glides to a gentler conclusion with Morrison trading lines with John Payne's saxophone, an effect that lends a slightly hopeful edge to an otherwise harrowing song. Perhaps this is closer to the author's intent—when Morrison performed Astral Weeks live at the Hollywood Bowl in 2009 he inserted the song in the middle of the set, softening its impact—or perhaps not; as Van says, either album is nothing more than a snapshot of a moment, the way those songs were performed on that day by that singer. This essential ephemera means this longer version of "Slim Slow Slider", along with its companion alternate takes, are mere grace notes to an album that ultimately can not be illuminated, only experienced.
His Band and the Street Choir, the other Van Morrison album receiving an expanded treatment in this inaugural series of deluxe reissues, stands as something of a counter to the heady Astral Weeks: it is all about the rough and tumble joy of living. Delivered almost immediately after the breakthrough of Moondance—that record came out in January 1970, His Band arrived in November of that year—His Band and the Street Choir is the first of Morrison's albums where the production is credited entirely to the man himself. He elbowed Merenstein aside during the recording of Moondance when the producer sought to bring in the Astral Weeks band for a second round—the veteran retained an executive producer credit—and Morrison labored over that album, recording for three months and work-shopping material in the studio.
**His Band and the Street Choir bore a similarly lengthy creative process but the album gives an illusion of buoyant immediacy thanks in no small part to its heavy R&B kick. Where Moondance traded in jazz—even its liveliest moment was named after a Duke Ellington song—His Band and the Street Choir relied on soul and gospel, using folk almost as an accent. "I'll Be Your Lover, Too" and "Virgo Clowns" almost offer respites from the raucous rhythms of "Domino", "Blue Money", and "Call Me Up in Dreamland", songs that sound joyous no matter what their topic (and, in the case of the two singles, they're likely about separation and nude modeling, not exactly rousing topics). When Morrison claimed Astral Weeks sounded "samey" in latter-day interviews, he had a point: it was variations on a theme, whereas His Band and the Street Choir shoehorns celebration, sweet melancholy, and reflection into 12 songs. Perhaps this doesn't make for a spiritually transcendent record but it is an album of sustenance, providing sustained pleasures for times of joy and sorrow.


In his industrial techno guise Vatican Shadow, Dominick Fernow (aka Prurient) explores some of his most simultaneously bleak and clubby music yet.

Vatican Shadow: Media in the Service of Terror

Media in the Service of Terror

Dominick Fernow, the musician behind Prurient and a whole host of other noise and electronic projects, has insisted that art should be about asking questions, not necessarily finding answers, and that's especially true with Vatican Shadow, his industrial techno outfit. Political figures and conflict are referenced in album design and song titles, but the music isn't political per se, working instead as a meditation on the labyrinth of politics. His insistence on this principle, in a time where we're asking the same questions over and over with little, if any, progress, may be more incendiary than the fact he's used Nidal Hasan on the covers of four releases. It's vital for Media In The Service of Terror, his latest album, and it validates this principle by providing an attention to structure and consistency not always prevalent in this guise.
Media carries a lot more of the overarching darkness from Games Have Rules, his collaboration with Function, and the ambient tracks from his six-tape set Death Is Unity With God. It's Fernow's slickest work as Vatican Shadow; gone are the haphazard percussion sounds and the hazy production qualities that matched his dedication to the tape format. “Ziad Jarrah Studied Mathematics” opens the album with lush, nocturnal synths that sound as home on a black metal album's intro as they do on here. Under a bassy current lies small peaks that ebb and flow without totally dominating, like some sort of inverted organ. There are metallic drops, but they're buried in echo, not brought to the front.
Remember Your Black Day, what Fernow considers Vatican Shadow's full-length debut (he does not see Ghosts of Chechnya or Kneel Before Religious Icons as albums) didn't quite nail his gift for making cohesion out of disunity, a huge part of Prurient's major albums, and while some of the songs were among Vatican Shadow's best, it also felt somewhat directionless. Media is carried by the chokehold ambiance rather than the beats themselves, an inversion of what one expects from “dance” music, and ultimately what makes the record come together. Deep synths plunge “Take Vows” into Lustmord-gone-dub territory, pulsating ever so slightly. “Wherever There Is Money There Is Unforgiveness” reintroduces explosive beat clashes, and like in “Mathematics,” their bombast is sanded down and consumed by the clinical, cold spread. Media does not wear you down by sheer force; it's more interested in instilling consciousness you might be doing your damnedest to repress.
There isn't an outright banger here like “Enter Paradise” from Remember. Media still has a galvanizing track in “More of the Same,” simultaneously one of his clubbiest and bleakest tracks. Three minutes in the melody finally enters, and as brittle as it is, it provides the late charge to elevate it from beat workout to a righteous dance track. The melody is prime Fernow, imbued with an iciness prevalent in his more synth-reliant pieces. Like Prurient's “You Show Great Spirit,” when his focus on Vatican Shadow bled most into his main project, it's equally appealing whether you know how fucked things are within or not. It's the romantic gloom of New Order, driven by a Discharge-like cynicism, both ruled by Fernow's distinct touch for making decay sublime.
The set ends with two remixes of “Same” (suffixed “Tunisia”—the cover image is taken from a memorial following last year's Sousse attacks) and “Vows,” (“The Inevitable Bitterness Of Life”) both of which place more emphasis on rhythm while maintaining the suffocating atmosphere. “Tunisa” is more immediate, arriving at the main melody quicker, making it feel even more on the brink of collapse. The remixes represent the cyclical nature of struggle, here and abroad—even with slight change, for better or worse, shit feels like nothing's changed. Fernow's pretty tight-lipped about what Vatican Shadow really means, so it's not clear if that's his real aim. With the repetitiveness so crucial to dance music, even his esoteric variety, it's all too appropriate.


On their eighth album, the Canadian new wave torchbearers interrogate their career and mourn the death of a kind of rockstar success even as they celebrate their achievement of it.

Formentera

In 2003, Metric arrived with a bitter look in the rearview mirror. “Dead disco/Dead funk/Dead rock and roll/Remodel/Everything has been done,” spat Emily Haines on “Dead Disco,” one of the band’s first Canadian radio hits. By this time, they had already gone through music label hell. First, they had accepted a short development deal with Warner Bros. in 2000 that resulted in a demo called Mainstream EP and their supposed first album Grow Up and Blow Away, then had moved to indie label Restless to release the album in 2001, only then for that label to be sold that year to another label called Ryko Corp., which led to that album going unreleased for the next six years. (Ryko Corp. was then bought by Warner Music Group in 2005.) It took a whole new label (Everloving), and a whole new album, for Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? to finally be released as Metric’s debut. They were, understandably, a bit jaded about the whole thing.
Now, almost 20 years later, the band have become Canadian indie rock icons, all while continuing to play savvily on romantic nostalgia for the “old world underground” that could still afford to be picky about “selling out.” They’ve also put their money where their mouth is, starting their own label Metric Music International (MMI) in the process of working on 2009’s Fantasies while turning down a couple of multimillion dollar offers from the majors in the process. For those following in their footsteps, though, the patchwork approach to artist development and financial support has only intensified since the early ’00s, when the music industry was still flush with cash and willing to take risks on talent, and weren’t themselves beholden to the star-heavy economics of streaming. Not only is it harder to say “our band could be your life,” it’s harder for most bands to support their own lives, let alone to turn their career into a cause, or statement of values. It’s into this increasingly precarious space that Metric’s eighth album, Formentera, arrives, echoing the memes about frivolous spending in the aughts that disguised the ever-growing distance between young adults and home ownership. On Formentera, Metric are fixated on the swift, silent retraction of the ladder that allowed them to ascend, and the foreignness to new listeners of the path they took to get to that elder status.
“Doomscroller,” the more than 10-minute krautrock-lite opener, is the main attraction here. Anchored by a rippling bassline that erupts with bursts of noise and supported by a gently sung paean to the “salt of the earth underpaid to serve and scrub the toilet” and their struggle against the “ruling class trickl[ing] piss from champagne glasses,” the song takes a class struggle subtext and renders it as bolded and underlined text. This newfound intensity extends to the rest of the album, drawing on tools like funk-rock bass fuzz and double-time drum sections to heighten a sense of ever-present agitation. “False Dichotomy” weaves new wave fuzz with a squiggly synth line that sounds like it could be ripped straight from Prince’s “Delirious.” It revels in the contradictions of rock stardom, which ostensibly rebels against conformity but often creates its own consumerist traps right along the way: “Show me something that can’t be bought/It’s harder than I would have thought,” Haines sings in a menacing but celebratory tone.
“Oh Please” fully compresses all this raw energy into a strutting, sparkling dance-rock gem, rapid-firing imagery in the vein of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” and the 1975’s “Love It If We Made It” with a completely incomprehensible reference to Slim Shady sandwiched next to “wildfires underperform xenophobes.” The structure of the song once again invokes the “doomscroller” archetype, even as the chorus zooms out and takes a look at the sudden self-consciousness of the person doing the doomscrolling: ”I thought this was just what everyone did/I thought this was just how everyone lived.”
The gravity of these thematic commitments might mislead one into thinking that Metric have decided to go full Rage Against the Machine. But when you peel back the layers of social commentary, the songs on Formentera are mostly characterized by an irrepressible sense of grace and appreciation for the unnamed “you” they’re directed at—whether it’s a lover, a friend, or the listener themselves. The coda to “Doomscroller” reassures that “whatever you do, either way we’re gonna love you” and the closing track “Paths in the Sky” finds solace in the imagery of a friend taking you out to a bar to listen to your latest “brutal news.” At its best, the album squares that clear-eyed view of the present with sincere faith in people and our capacity to love and support each other.
It doesn’t all quite land. In a saggy middle section, synth-smeared ballads like “Enemies of the Ocean” and the title track meander through wistful recollections of past glories with a raised eyebrow, like a more existential Drake. These tracks, like Haines’ references to the band’s “golden cage,” sour some of the lyrical themes without quite managing to find the right synth tones or chiming guitar melodies to recapture Balearic-rock crossovers like New Order’s classic Technique or, more recently, Cut Copy’s In Ghost Colours. But with the glow of “Doomscroller” acting as a foil, even those lesser songs still manage to productively contribute to that contradictory posture of solidarity-oriented striving that suffuses Formentera.
Above all, Metric find meaning in the sober assessment of their own increasingly rare success story. On the stop-start anthem “I Will Never Settle,” Haines is at her most autobiographical, somehow pulling off the trick of directly expressing the band’s new raison d’etre without sounding sloganeering: “We belong to another time…” croons Haines with a palpable sense of yearning, “but if they don’t care about it/do you still care about it?” Throughout Formentera, the band sincerely mourns the death of a kind of rockstar ambition they achieved, even as they gesture at, and brush up against, its limitations.


On her third album, Kaya Wilkins’ arrangements have finally caught up with her free-roaming mind; the music has gathered weight and mass, bringing her distinctive insights into focus.

Okay Kaya: SAP

Kaya Wilkins opens her third album as Okay Kaya with an arrestingly odd image: “Like a newborn building/I take up space.” Beyond the strangeness of the comparison, there is also a troubling Frankensteinian composite in the juxtaposition of “newborn” and “building,” a dissonance that grows more disturbing as she elaborates: She’s covered in scaffolding, she blots out the sky, people scurry nervously beneath her. As metaphors go, it’s labored, but Wilkins uses the music to show us what it means. As she sings, “Come into my metal arms,” in stepwise ascending harmony, cymbals shudder and crash, deep bass resounding beneath her while synthesizers, courtesy of Nick Hakim, creak and whine. The music acquires a sense of scale, and suddenly Wilkins is the building, erecting herself right before us.
On previous albums, Wilkins wrote about her emotions with similar titanic wonder, as if mapping the surface of an alien planet via probe, but the music often failed to keep pace. Her lyrics aimed for the defamiliarizing gaze of the filmmaker John Wilson, creator of the cult HBO Max hit How To, with whom she recently conducted a podcast interview and who, it turns out, shares her belief in the thematic possibilities inherent in scaffolding. Wilson and Wilkins are spiritual siblings, with Wilkins singing patiently to you about your cerebrospinal fluid the same way Wilson stammers earnestly about the importance of plastic on furniture, both toeing the line between charming and cloying.
Until now, Okay Kaya records have often felt like a compelling viewpoint in search of a sound, but on SAP, Wilkins’ arrangements have finally caught up to her free-roaming mind. Tapping into a wide range of collaborators, from Hakim to Adam Green, Deem Spencer, and Eli Keszler, the music on SAP is bold and sinuous, full of unexpected intrusions like the synthesized tuba that blurts on “mood personified into Object” or the depth-charge pulse on “Inside of a Plum,” which resounds right after Wilkins dreamily compares her orgasm to “scuba diving in space.” There is more happening, in all corners of her songs, than before, and as she keeps trying new things, the music gathers weight and mass, bringing her strange insights into focus.
Take the mordantly funny “Jazzercise,” in which Wilkins’ impersonation of a chipper fitness instructor (“Spandex, Lycra, every day”) quickly veers into alarming territory—“Did you know/Without the ego/There is no narrative/Just being here and having been”—as the Casio-preset funk of the backing track burbles away, oblivious to her existential panic. It’s clever and incisive, and she would never have quite been able to pull off something like it on her comparatively sleepy earlier records. Here, as in the processed stacked harmonies on “Pathologically Yours,” Wilkins touches some of the playfulness of early Laurie Anderson, a hallowed touchstone she’s never been anywhere near before.
You can tell Wilkins is emboldened by this new freedom from her decision to assay something as audacious as “Jolene From Her Perspective,” which is just what the title says. Not only does she have the gall to chide Dolly Parton—“Dolly, Dolly, Dolly/I could never take one human being from another”—she sidles up next to her and purrs in her ear: “Don’t you know I think you’re heaven sent/I can’t believe we’re arguing about some man/That’s so silly, in fact I’d rather talk about you and me.” The audacity of it is charming and disarming: “I know you cheated too,” she coos. The nerve!
There are dark moments—on “Origin Story,” she confronts her ambivalence about her father in the most graphic terms (“I am scum/I am cum…/Wish I came from no one”)—but it turns out the the more fun Wilkins dares to have on record, the better and more distinctive she sounds. “In Regards to Your Tweet” is an invitation for a lover to “sleep on me” (“I don’t mind it/It’s like a weighted blanket”), its simple guitar figure enlivened by a plasticky 1980s R&B groove, drifting far behind in the mix. It’s a complementary noise, a car passing by her window, perhaps, but it creates the kind of shared loneliness that has often emanated from bedroom pop, which by its nature twines together impulses for communion and isolation. Someone, somewhere, that distant groove suggests, might be dancing along to this music with Wilkins, if even only from within the solace of their own minds.


Following on the Curtis Lane EP, the Denver-based singer and producer releases his full-length debut, and it mixes ethereal choir-like vocals and minimal R&B with currents of rumbling post-dubstep. But the allusions to modern trends are so well-realized that it creates a slightly numbing impression of pastiche.

You Are All I See

Though no sound suits every taste, the harp has to be one of the most inoffensive instruments in existence, which is why we aren't greeted in heaven by angels with marimbas. Active Child's Pat Grossi makes free with the harp's transfiguring power on his new album, and it's not the only thing stacking the deck in his favor. You Are All I See is full of stuff that almost everybody likes, or seems to, right now: epic electronic landscapes, monastically minimal R&B, and currents of rumbling post-dubstep sound design. Grossi's strong yet ethereal voice-- its corners neatly squared by a childhood spent in choirs-- masses and hovers, imparting an elevated piety to the music. The slick, timely aesthetic is appealing, but works at slight odds with the timelessness Grossi cultivates.
If you enjoyed how harps and beats entwined in a glittery haze on Active Child's Curtis Lane EP, you'll enjoy You Are All I See, which is similar but runs on finer gears. The EP's fairly rigid boundary between dance numbers and atmospheric ones has become much more porous, creating a subtler flow that carries us smoothly from the frosty soul and coiled percussion of "Hanging On" to the expansive art-pop of "High Priestess" and "See Thru Eyes", where jagged but spare synthetic drums and holographic tone colors make Grossi's voice seem to tower even higher. It all sounds like the work of someone whose computer expertise is catching up with his instrumental chops.
With this welcome refinement of style comes a minor downside, namely, that it feels overly familiar. This isn't to say that Grossi is ripping anyone off-- at a time when music is so instantly responsive to its own immediate context, his recombinant approach is routine. But on You Are All I See, craft edges out personality. The allusions to modern trends are so well-realized that it at least creates a slightly numbing impression of opportunistic pastiche, even if the similarities were unintentional. If you enjoyed the experimental soft-pop moods of Bon Iver's recent album and are looking for more spiritually glamorous music, step right up. Pacesetter How to Dress Well, who mines a vein similar to Grossi's but more ghostly, guests on the excellent "Playing House", while "Hanging On" sounds like a heartfelt synthesis of "Lady Luck", "The Boy Is Mine", and "Pony". To top it off, "Way Too Fast" and "Shield & Sword" both have the prayerful, hollowed out turbulence of James Blake. With a figurative dugout like that, it's hard to go wrong in 2011.
Nothing wrong with a low-stakes success if it sounds this good. But it's odd when a record that puts such a high premium on the personal feels so formal and emotionally opaque. Grossi's lyrics about longing and engulfing isolation have been polished to the point where they are immaculately vague, and sometimes, precious. They project plenty of emotional grandiosity. What's missed are more specific details, which might have led to something more relatable. As it stands, the sound of Grossi's voice is much more eloquent and moving than his words. Taken together, You Are All I See still can't help but feel like an old cathedral-- easy to admire in awe, but somehow cold and remote; hard to really make your own.


On their fourth album proper, Cuddle Magic dive into the pop side of chamber pop with more fluency and confidence than they've ever shown in the past.

Ashes/Axis

Individual members of the chamber pop group Cuddle Magic have worked with the likes of Beyoncé, Amanda Palmer, and Okkervil River. But for better or worse Cuddle Magic have never come across as pop-music natives. Their conservatory training always shows through in the combination of complex structures, bright harmonies, and snappy humor that has defined their sound. Ashes/Axis marks a major turning point. The proper follow-up to 2012’s Info Nympho (following a 2014 full-length collaboration with toy pianist Phyllis Chen and pianist Ran Blake), Ashes/Axis captures Cuddle Magic diving into the “pop” side of “chamber pop” with more fluency and confidence than they’ve ever shown in the past. Right off the bat, the smooth, spit-shined mix by Bryce Goggin (Pavement, Atony and the Johnsons) contrasts dramatically with the dusty immediacy of the band's previous records. From the fat, synthetic groove of leadoff track “Slow Rider” onward, they've traded the primarily acoustic instrumentation of past work for gurgling, bottom-heavy synths and electronic drumbeats.
On Let It Be You, last year’s collaboration between Cuddle Magic bandleader Benjamin Lazar Davis and Joan As Policewoman, Lazar Davis went for the commercial jugular with an audacious turn at arena-ready bubblegum R&B. In some ways, Ashes/Axis behaves as a companion piece to that album. Like Let It Be You, several of the songs have a basis in intertwined Ghanaian rhythmic patterns. And it’s obvious that Let It Be You's bassy thump was still in Lazar Davis’ ear when he sat with Goggin to run the original studio tracks for Ashes/Axis through post-production effects.
But Lazar Davis’ bandmates bring such strong presence to the table that they offset the exaggerated, sweaty-handkerchief affectations that nearly turned Let It Be You into a caricature. Though Lazar Davis remains the principal songwriter, Cuddle Magic’s fellow multi-instrumentalists Christopher McDonald and Alec Spiegelman also contributed songs, as did guest co-writers like Bridget Kearney of Lake Street Dive and Lip Talk’s Sarah K. Pedinotti. With all those hands on deck, it's no surprise that Ashes/Axis contains more layers, both musically and thematically. And Kristin Slipp’s vocals, whether she sings lead or backup, serve as a kind of backbone that binds the album together.
Where Joan Wasser opted to keep pace with Lazar Davis’ playful melodramatics on Let It Be You, Slipp’s more reserved style conveys an infinitely wider range of emotions. If you go back to the Info Nympho track “Hoarders,” she invests the line “Shit/that/fills/our/homes/is/too/hea-/-vy/to/move/and/so/we/leave/it” (a veiled reference to feeling trapped in a relationship) with a lingering resentment that belies the tune’s quirkiness. On Ashes/Axis, Slipp approaches her vocal parts like an actress with a healthy aversion to overstatement. Once again, she laces the music with faint traces of woe, bringing a sense of everyday believability to the songs even when the lyrics aren’t explicitly clear.
When Slipp harmonizes with McDonald on the line "give me the keys / to your condo" on the new tune "Getaway," her voice supplies an extra touch of mournfulness to an already melancholy mood. Easily the most haunting and atmosphere-heavy Cuddle Magic song to date, the song percolates with detail. Throughout the whole album, Lazar Davis and Goggin find creative ways to vary the balance between natural sounds and effects. On "Getaway," they filter a helium-pitched Slipp vocal (that's not actually pitched-up) to mimic violin strumming. And when they turn McDonald and Slipp's vocals into spectral blurs of reverb at the beginning and end of the tune, the music causes goosebumps, scaling breathtaking heights the band has never attempted before.
Strangely enough, Cuddle Magic’s move to a chillier, more digitized palette actually adds dimension to the songs. By reaching outside their comfort zone, they bring the content of the songs to the foreground. Which is not to say the band has lost its organic flavor. On the contrary: at the end of the quasi-title track, “The First Hippie on the Moon, Pt. I,” for example, the music unravels as all of the instruments simply collapse into chaos. At that moment, Cuddle Magic land surprisingly close to a rock band, closing its set out in a heap of smoldering noise. By that point, though, the band’s transformation into a formidable pop act is already complete.


The Spanish superstar’s third album is a showcase for Rosalía’s exceptional range. It aspires to stretch itself out across genres and play with form, and attains exactly what it sets out to achieve.

Motomami

On Rosalía’s Saturday Night Live debut in March, she sang her pop-bachata hit “La Fama” while wearing a sequoia-sized puffer jacket and beaded mantilla. It was a strikingly dramatic look for a song trembling with betrayal, and it was immediately memed for its resemblance to a quilted comforter and shower mat (the resulting virality was, perhaps, part of the point). But the streetwear-meets-Catalonian tradition look was also a visual cue to her current mindset as a musician releasing her third album: to finesse the gap between classical and contemporary in a big and brazen fashion, with humor and cojones.
Theoretically, a wide-open, globalist approach is not so different from the Spanish superstar’s astounding second album, El Mal Querer, where her electronic take on flamenco shot her to international renown. Because of flamenco’s relative scarcity in the pop world, and because her interpretation of a centuries-old Romani art form was so futuristic, she was regarded as something of a miracle, a performer with a singular gift whose interior was just out of reach. Since its 2018 release, she’s toured the world, covered major fashion magazines, and collaborated with stars like J Balvin, James Blake, and the Weeknd. But on MOTOMAMI, her 16-track follow-up to El Mal Querer, she sounds preternaturally at ease within her talent and finally ready to let us in.
The trappings of fame and a new major label have, in some unlikely ways, freed her to loosen her impulses, and what results is a collage of styles and experimentation that could be messy on paper but is threaded together by her artistic fortitude. She toys with minimalist dembows (“La Combi Versace,” with Dominican star Tokischa), Auto-Tuned dirges, spirited champeta, juiced-up electro, bachata, and glitchy Björkian ballads, with help from an eclectic range of co-producers like Tainy, El Guincho, Michael Uzowuru, Sky Rompiendo, and Pharrell. There may be some more commercial tracks in here—including “La Fama,” a song with the Weeknd about how fame sucks that ironically made her more famous—but overall the vision is clear and the influences cohere. La Rosalía is a musician’s musician, and there’s so much more to her than the austere flamenco singer, powerfully warbling from 13th-century texts.
MOTOMAMI opens with “Saoko,” a smattering of free-jazz drums and a nasty synth bassline that serves as a “tribute” to Wisin y Daddy Yankee’s 2004 single “Saoco.” It’s a disclaimer that she’s swerving freely between lanes: She bears down on the refrains “Yo me transformo” and “Fuck el estilo,” and frankly, kinda eats up the beat, doing her best reggaetonera with a butterfly-grilled sneer. More significantly, it’s a bold statement out the gate—she’s become a kind of problematic fave for many Latinxs, particularly for her experiments in genres like dembow and reggaeton at a time when their Afro-Caribbean roots, long excoriated by racist and classist critiques, have been either erased or subsumed by the popularity of white Latinos. The specter of Spanish colonialism runs painfully deep, and the question has been: What does it mean when a white Catalan woman working in traditionally Afro-Latinx genres attains worldwide acclaim in ways the originators—and her Black contemporaries—have not?
For MOTOMAMI’s part, it seems that Rosalía has done her homework and pays tribute wherever she can. She has Kawasaki-zoomed into the 21st century, reminding us that she is still a 28 year old in 2022, a prolific denizen of TikTok whose interest in familiar tropes—fast cars, flossing, thot shit—is neither of her interest in the art of flamenco, nor divorced from it. She references faith in God as much as the corporeal desires of a powerful woman, and approaches sex with nearly as much gravity as she does lost love and emotion. Over here she’s sampling Burial; over there she’s rapping, “Bish, me creo Dapper Dan.” Rosalía wants us to know she’s an idiosyncratic bad b, and she’s also out here trying to have some goddamn fun.
MOTOMAMI is packed with references to the genres in which she dabbles—among her many namedrops are Willie Colón, Fania Records, the reggaeton duo Plan B, and her friend Frank Ocean, with whom she’s collaborated on music not yet released. On “Bulería,” the album’s lone straight flamenco song, she shirks stylistic expectations and cites her influences like she’s crossing herself: “Yo soy muy mía/Que Dios bendiga a Pastori y Mercé/A la Lil’ Kim, a Tego y a M.I.A.” M.I.A. might be the holy ghost in this triumvirate (Kim and Tego can decide who’s the Father amongst themselves)—MOTOMAMI’s minimalist raps are playful and swaggy, and she’s having a blast with reggaeton-tinged electro like it’s 2005. Little brag tracks like “Chicken Teriyaki” (co-written with her partner Rauw Alejandro) and the deceptively sing-songy, feminist “Bizcochito” aren’t the most substantial bangers, but you can’t belt your face off all the time.
And yet, that voice! That ebullient voice. Her pristine soprano tone is one thing, but it wouldn’t be nearly as impactful if it weren’t for the power she wields behind it. On “Candy,” her mournful qualities are in pure, transcendent form, as she delivers a dembow dirge for a lost love who still lingers in her mind. This same emotional evocation lends itself to the unexpectedly dirty “Hentai,” an intimate ballad named after triple-X manga, in which she coos about riding her man’s “pistola” with all the dainty aplomb of Audrey Hepburn doing “Moon River.” Elsewhere, she’s a bit less cheeky: An unexpected high point comes when she puts her spin on “Delirio de Grandeza,” by the great Cuban salsero Justo Betancourt. Not only does she emote it like the greatest of singers in the Latin American tradition, she sneaks in a Soulja Boy sample from the Vistoso Bosses’ 2009 gem “Delirious.”
It feels rare to hear an album that’s so experimental, that aspires to stretch itself out across genres and play with form, and that attains exactly what it sets out to achieve. Rosalía was already a formidable singer, but here she also sounds like she learned that with global superstardom comes the freedom to set her own agenda. On the album’s stunning final lines, she sings nearly a cappella: “Solo hay riesgo si hay algo que perder/Las llamas son bonitas porque no tienen orden/Y el fuego es bonito porque todo lo rompe.” There’s only risk if there’s something to lose, she says. MOTOMAMI is an ante up.


For his first proper solo release, Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt uses a synthesizer to turn tiny sounds and gradual shifts into something larger.

Tragedy & Geometry

The music of Cleveland trio Emeralds is pretty wide, both in the range of sounds and instruments they use, and the expansive feel of their New Age-tinted creations. For his first proper solo release (after a handful of low-run cassettes and CD-Rs), Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt took a step in the opposite direction. As he told the website Stool Pigeon, Tragedy & Geometry "came from just wanting to spend time with one instrument and really exploring all the possibilities of sound you can get from that."
The instrument in question is synthesizer, and the music Hauschildt makes with it is like Emeralds in miniature. He focuses on small, basic patterns that produce two kinds of songs-- slow, drifting drones and pulsing, minimalist loops. The effect can be as big and spacious as anything his group does, but Hauschildt always starts from a base of simplicity. Each track is an exercise in turning tiny sounds and gradual shifts into something large.
The lack of obvious variety could make Tragedy & Geometry sound generic, but Hauschildt's devout tack actually gives the album a distinct personality. Choose any single track, and reference points quickly come to mind-- Tangerine Dream, Steve Reich, and various half-remembered foreign film scores and PBS-doc soundtracks. But listen in sequence, and Hauschildt's consistent way with this kind of sound becomes clear, in a starry-eyed mix of small swells and planetarium-friendly wonder. At times the music can get sentimental and even sappy, but it's never heavy-handed. In Hauschildt's songs, emotion feels closer to a happy accident than an overarching intention.
This comes across strongest in Tragedy & Geometry's best cut, "Music for a Moiré Pattern". At 11 minutes, it's by far the album's longest piece, but it's no grand epic. Though its sparkly loops crest into some moving crescendos, its core is simple repetition and the fascinating patterns it creates. Throughout, Hauschildt deftly treads the fine line between guiding his instrument and letting its cyclical mechanisms do the work. You get the sense that he's basically happy to get out of his own way-- a common goal with anything this mantra-like-- and is as awed by the hypnotic aspects of overlapping synths as the emotional ones. Maybe that's the key to Tragedy & Geometry's sneaky power-- by letting his synths tell tales instead of forcing them to, Hauschildt finds stories bigger than his own.


Pusha T’s solo career post-Clipse has often seemed rudderless but he's found his spot on his major label debut thanks to help from Kanye West. While Kanye never utters a word here, the sound and scope of the record are unmistakably his, and Pusha T's rapping remains in fine form.

My Name Is My Name

Pusha T’s solo career post-Clipse has often seemed rudderless. He made great strides playing the preening, streetwise Mase to Kanye’s Diddy on songs like My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s “Runaway” and Cruel Summer’s “New God Flow”, but it took him a few releases (Fear of God, a patchy stab at bygone Re-Up Gang mixtape glory, and its sometimes distractingly star-studded sequel Fear of God II: Let Us Pray) to find his footing on his own. When he did, on January’s Wrath of Caine, he surfaced snarling over trap beats. The mixtape often subsisted off the sheer intensity of his delivery, and it placed him in lockstep with the mainstream rap zeitgeist. But it also cut him off from the flashy new-money arrogance of the first 10 years of his career, and it suffered in spots thanks to a noticeably diminished lyricism. Push flounders without a hands-on producer, it would seem. For his major label debut, My Name Is My Name, Kanye West is that guiding light.
Kanye never utters a word here, Auto-Tuned scatting on “Hold On” notwithstanding, but the sound and scope of the record are unmistakably Westian. The blaring fanfare and hyperactive drum programming Hudson Mohawke and Beewirks brought to “No Regrets” are direct descendants of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s “All of the Lights”. On opener “King Push”, Kanye and Sebastian Sartor reprise the vocal sample from the breakdown in “New Slaves”, pinching and distending it into funhouse versions of itself over horror movie synth stabs. Kanye’s production with DJ Mano on “Who I Am” advances the dark, austere Yeezus vibe as it melds oft-used samples (the “Yeah!” from Mountain’s “Long Red” and the frantic lick from South Bronx dance-punk pioneers ESG’s “UFO”) and a swatch of Warp producer Kwes’ serene “LGOYH” into something leagues more sinister than its requisite elements. My Name Is My Name is borne out of the same minimal, uncompromising darkness as Yeezus, but its communion with radio rap values delivers on the accessibility that listeners put out by Yeezus’ monomaniacal hellishness clamored for.
My Name Is My Name makes concessions for radio accessibility, but it’s never rankled by them. Guests grace nearly every track, but where they gobbled up real estate that should’ve been Pusha’s on Fear of God II, on My Name Is My Name, they’re mostly tasked with giving Pusha’s impish abandon wings. Frequent alley oops from singers scan as shots at offsetting the brass tacks boom bap of “Numbers on the Boards” and “Nosetalgia” with hooks, but Pusha seems wholly unfazed by any of it. He nets a beat from the-Dream and a lilting Kelly Rowland hook on “Let Me Love You” and effects a Mase flow so spot-on you’ll look for him in the liner notes. Elsewhere a disembodied, wraithlike Chris Brown’s good life platitudes on “Sweet Serenade” are waylaid by at every turn by gun-toting mogul talk.
Rappers get the same treatment. Trap clown prince 2 Chainz and dick joke dispenser Big Sean are so outmatched on “Who I Am” that they hang back to play comic relief. (2 Chainz wins here: “Entrepreneur/ Strip club connoisseur/ Hot fudge sundae/ Pour it on you, hallelujah”). On “Hold On”, Pusha sneers about studio gangsters who never sold drugs, then cedes verse two to corrections officer turned crack rap kingpin Rick Ross. Kendrick Lamar brings the expected lyrical pyrotechnics to “Nosetalgia”, matching Pusha’s verse about growing up a dealer with reminiscences of a childhood profoundly affected by family members’ drug use, and it’s the only time an outside voice comes close to stealing the show.
Though My Name Is My Name can feel like a moon around Kanye West’s recent work, the star here is unquestionably a reinvigorated Pusha T. This is never more apparent than on the minor Re-Up Gang reunion cut “Suicide”, where Pharrell provides a skittering metallic bounce with pitch 808s in place of a bassline, and Pusha and Ab-Liva trade bars with a zeal that’s been missing since the Clipse started to wither on 2009’s Til the Casket Drops. The rhymes on “Suicide” and the rest of My Name Is My Name are a cut above what we’ve come to expect from post-Clipse Pusha. He’s finally figured out how to marry the unlabored lyrical dexterity and unflappable cool of earlier work to the vengeful, bottomless menace of the new material. Pusha’s released a fair amount of music since joining Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music army three years ago, but My Name Is My Name is really the first release that delivers on the excitement initially engendered by the pairing.


Famed neo-blue eyed soul producer expands his range beyond Stax, Philly, and Motown. Ghostface, Simon LeBon, Spank Rock, and Boy George guest.

Mark Ronson & the Business Intl.: Record Collection

Record Collection

It's very easy to be suspicious of Mark Ronson. Never mind the family connections, the fame garnered from helming albums by Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse-- artists charismatic enough to give any producer a cushy job-- or the dubious entity called the Business Int'l. The real cause for all those cocked eyebrows and dubious looks has been the diminishing-returns appropriation of old soul tropes in service of neo-soul radio hits, which actually sounded great on Back to Black but much less compelling-- almost comically crass-- on Ronson's own cashgrab 2007 album, Version. Full of payback cameos by Winehouse, Allen, ODB, and Robbie Williams, Version was a covers album that tried to position Ronson as a trendsetter, but proved dead-end rather than innovative and fresh.
Ronson's moment may have passed, but he actually seems relieved. Record Collection, his follow-up, succeeds at leaving his signature sound in the past and rolling out some new, often impressive tricks. Mercifully, there are no Daptone horns on here (no slam on that group, but they sound better when paired with Daptone artists), and Ronson expands his range beyond Stax, Philly, and Motown to reach into the 1970s and especially the 80s for inspiration. "You Gave Me Nothing" rollerskates on glittery disco beats, "Lose It All (In the End)" mimics the orchestral pomp of 60s crooner pop, and both "The Colour of Crumar" and "Circuit Breaker" soundtrack lost Atari games ca. 1986. The result is a grab-bag of an album: scattered, frantic, distracted, overeager, yet occasionally engaging nevertheless.
While that title may suggest a navel-gazing bedroom-auteur beatshop, Record Collection proves a surprisingly gregarious album, varying up the sounds and styles and making better use of cameos by his famous friends. Unlike Handsome Boy Modeling School and N.A.S.A., Ronson doesn't pair up his guests in stunt combinations. Rather, he's more interested in how they complement each other and the songs; he's after chemistry. "Somebody to Love Me" pairs Boy George with long-time Ronson associate Andrew Wyatt, and the former's gritty delivery makes him a nice foil for the latter's youthful falsetto. It's one of the most dramatic moments on the album, especially when Boy George pleads for someone to "see the boy I once was in my life."
Ghostface is the consummate professional, Spank Rock goes twee, and the album's runaway star is former Pipette Rose Elinor Dougall. She gets three songs that show new range, playing ABBA's Agnetha on "You Gave Me Nothing", Dusty Springfield on closer "The Night Last Night", and Debbie Harry in "Hey Boy". Her easy presence on these songs only hints at what a full-length collaboration between Dougall and Ronson might sound like. Alongside such naturally charismatic personalities, however, guests like Kyle Falconer from the View (the band, not the TV show) and Planet's Andy Greenwald fade into the mix, so overshadowed as to be absent.
Through almost every song, Ronson rides a shuffling drumkit beat, stitching the album and the guests together sonically. It's a bit too clipped and choppy to be especially funky, but it does keep things fleet and agile as Ronson introduces and develops new ideas, revealing a musical curiosity that Version seemed to preclude. His mission here is modest: As Simon LeBon sings on the title track, "I just want to be in your record collection." That's easy for him to say, since Duran Duran is in just about everybody's record collection. But Record Collection is a small step in that direction for Ronson. It sounds more curious and less intrinsically bound to any particular trend, which ultimately gives it a good chance of not embarrassing him in three years


The talented pop singer flirts with outright self-absorption on his latest record, a solo piano effort on which he bites off more than he can chew.

Rufus Wainwright: All Days are Nights: Songs for Lulu

All Days are Nights: Songs for Lulu

Rufus Wainwright seems only fitfully interested in being a pop musician. That's certainly his prerogative, but it's not great for those who love the things he can do with a four-minute tune. Throughout his admirable yet frustrating career, Wainwright's assorted passions (for opera, for theatre, for Judy Garland) have led his music down paths that were often more intriguing in theory than execution. He should be lauded for allowing nothing to dictate his artistic choices, with the understanding that such boldness opens him up for criticism when he bites off more than he can chew.
However, the real danger with an artist who listens solely to his own muse is that he'll cut off the outside world, making music that can't be related to or enjoyed by anyone but himself. Wainwright gets closer than ever to that vanishing point of self-absorption on his latest effort, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu. The only things you hear on the album are Wainwright's voice and his piano, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that he wants you to luxuriate in both when it's far more likely you'll feel like you're drowning, given how rarely Wainwright buoys the listener with an actual melody or memorable lyric.
Wainwright's biography is fascinating-- child of famed folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and the recently departed Kate McGarrigle, an openly gay performer who's been an outspoken social activist yet also battled serious addictions. Still, it's a bit much for Wainwright to ask his listeners to follow as he enumerates Big Apple landmarks ("Who Are You New York?") or sings for six minutes in French ("Les feux d'artifice t'appellent") or transcribes a phone conversation with his singer-songwriter sister ("Martha"). This is particularly true if our only accompaniment is going to be plodding piano chords and mooning vocals (a symptom that's stretched to almost-hilarious extremes on "Zebulon" when Wainwright resorts to sounding the same single piano note several times in succession).
Even when the words are gift-wrapped for him, however, Wainwright struggles. Three of the album's songs find him setting music to Shakespeare sonnets, but only his arrangement of "Sonnet 20", often held up as proof of the Bard's homosexuality, manages to avoid being a droning mess that actually saps power from those legendary verses. As for the most salvageable of the songs that are solely Wainwright's own, "The Dream" is admittedly movingly sung, but the only genuine keeper is "True Loves", a heartbreaking tune about how happy lovers make lonely people feel miserable that's so universal in sentiment it feels like a modern-day standard. Something anyone can enjoy-- imagine that.


With the help of Converge guitarist and veteran metal producer Kurt Ballou, the versatile emo band continues to mature with hints of Big Star and subgenre subversion.

Million Dollars to Kill Me

Even in the surprisingly experimental context of recent emo-leaning indie rock, Joyce Manor have always depended upon an impressive versatility. An accelerated, bashing cover of the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” served as the theoretical centerpiece of 2012’s Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired, while the band’s 2014 breakthrough, Never Hungover Again, offered a masterclass in emo’s many moods—reflective, angry, sentimental, self-incriminating, passionate.
Before they even released 2016’s Cody, Joyce Manor had cemented themselves as emo’s answer to Guided by Voices, packing albums with brief melodic gems indebted to the band’s ancestry but retaining their own peculiar, scruffy charm. On that record, leader Barry Johnson and the band pushed their songs past the four-minute mark, even adding acoustic textures that genre purists liked to dis as “selling out.” But the developing songcraft on Cody’s highlights was undeniable. Closer “This Song Is a Mess But So Am I,” for instance, added ounces of fabric softener to Joyce Manor’s melodic-hardcore washing machine. Johnson crooned over spiky riffs as he tore into the the very act of songwriting: “I wrote this one for you/’Cause that’s all I could do/Sad, but it’s all true/So I guess it’ll have to do.”
On their fifth full-length, Joyce Manor continue their trend of maturation, musically and emotionally. This record began as a collection of potential solo songs for Johnson; with contributions from former Impossibles leader Rory Phillips, it’s the band’s least-punk, most melodically rich album to date. Johnson revealed during a recent Stereogum profile that he was concerned Cody sounded too much like “a rock record with Big Star riffs.” That fear seems to have vanished, as Joyce Manor sound more like the power-pop pioneers than ever on the brisk Million Dollars to Kill Me, from the sweetly sung bridge of “Think I’m Still in Love With You” to the soft strums of closer “Wildflowers.”
The depth that supports these songs owes in part to veteran producer and Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou, who makes his recording debut with the band here. It’s funny to think about the guy who grinds in one of music’s most intense bands working on a song like “Silly Games,” a sock-hop number that doubles as the most slow-dance-ready emo tune since Rufio’s “One Slowdance.” But Ballou’s careful hand has added a sophistication to many metal bands in the past, including his own. He situates a layer of ba-ba-ba’s just beneath the surface of “Fighting Kangaroo,” while the shoegaze-tinted “Gone Tomorrow” sways atop a bedrock of riffs through which a stray melodic line occasionally surfaces for air.
If there’s one aspect of Joyce Manor that suffers during Million Dollars, it’s Johnson’s writing. In the past, he’s often been inscrutable even at his most emotional, but the impact was there. Here, though, he sometimes dips too deeply into purple territory, singing “My friend Tommy, he does origami/Forever in the morning shade” during “Gone Tomorrow” and exclaiming “Broke-a-hontas, orange eating/Talk like that, now who’s screaming” near the end of the peppy “Up the Punx.”
But elsewhere, Johnson shares the defeated tenderness that stems from getting older and wishing to live more simply. He marvels at roadside foliage and “sunshine coming in through the open window of my bedroom” on “Wildflowers” and archly flips emo’s reputation for toxic misogyny at the start of “Big Lie.” “Girls can be kinda controlling/I wanna be controlled, I think it’d be alright,” he sings. “Everybody thinks I’m joking/If it’s funny, then hold me while I cry all night.” It’s the kind of surprising turn that epitomizes Joyce Manor’s trajectory so far. Their willingness to expand the subtleties of their sound makes Million Dollars to Kill Me an enthralling listen, even at its lowest points.


My brother turned me on to jazz in the mid-80's. At that time, many classic records were out of ...

Chicago Underground Quartet: Chicago Underground Quartet

Chicago Underground Quartet

My brother turned me on to jazz in the mid-80's. At that time, many classic records were out of print and just starting to be issued on CD. Columbia had the most distinguished catalog, with Miles Davis, the Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens, all the early Billie Holiday, some Duke, the most popular Monk, and Dave Brubeck, to name just a few. One by one, Columbia reissued the old records on CD as part of the "Columbia Jazz Masterpieces" series, complete with new artwork, digital remastering and, in some cases (like Miles Ahead), radical remixing. I remember reading the promo material in the CD booklets and getting excited about what was going to be reissued next.
Another Columbia artist was Wynton Marsalis. When I first began listening to jazz, Wynton was creating high-profile records of his own. At that time, his quintet included his brother Branford and was heavily indebted to the Wayne Shorter/Herbie Hancock lineup of Miles Davis' quintet. I liked some of those mid-80's Marsalis records. Black Codes from the Underground, in particular, still stands as a powerful statement.
While he was making this music, Wynton was just hitting his stride as a tastemaker. Along with critic pal Stanley Crouch, he was telling the world that this music was the greatest form since the demise of symphonic music, but that only a narrow slice of what was being marketed as "jazz" actually deserved the appellation. To him, the biggest imposter was electrified fusion.
Now, I admit I was an impressionable teen. Wynton, Crouch and my brother all told me "fusion sucks," and I never thought to question their judgment. Any jazz with electric instruments, with the possible exception of In a Silent Way, was to be avoided at all costs. That was the Chuck Mangione shit. Fuck that.
Forgive me, Miles, for I knew not what I did. It took me another ten years to figure out that there was some great electrified jazz floating around. And now I find music that blends jazz with textures from other music more interesting than the "real thing." Like the last Isotope 217 album. Or this new one by the Chicago Underground Quartet.
Like Isotope, the Chicago Underground in its various numerical configurations is an adventurous fusion unit fronted by cornet player Rob Mazurek. The other constant is drummer/vibraphonist Chad Taylor. This edition also includes the guitar of Jeff Parker (of Isotope and Tortoise), in addition to the old standby Noel Kupersmith (now also a member of Brokeback) on bass. With so many musicians on loan from such familiar bands, the Chicago Underground Quartet is bound to sound a bit, well, familiar. And it does. This is definitely the kind of tech-tweaked instrumental music that Chicago has been specializing in for close to a decade. But the tweaks are subtle, and this is such a low key, unassuming and melodic record that it still sounds very fresh to my ears.
Jeff Parker opens the album on "Tunnel Chrome" with a deftly plucked guitar pattern that recalls the opening chords to "Night in Tunisia." Taylor doubles up on both drums and vibes, and Mazurek adds some heavily processed horn (he's also credited on the album sleeve with "electronics") that has a very guitar-like tonality. His processing gives the piece, which is very straightforward post-bop jazz, a bit of an otherworldly flavor.
In addition to Parker's lovely guitar playing throughout, these less traditional flourishes are what make this record interesting. "Three in the Morning" begins with a gorgeous guitar lead that soon dissolves into delicate phase-shifts and backward harmonies as Mazurek's cornet states the theme. "Four in the Morning" sounds all the world like a ballad off of Miles Davis Cookin', with Mazurek on Harmon mute. But Taylor's brushwork is so robotic it sounds like a Pro-Tools loop (which I suppose it might actually be). There's no thought of adding an offbeat accent to this brief song, which gives a whiff of the technology involved in the recording.
This restrained approach is the order of the day for the Chicago Underground Quartet, and only occasionally do they cut loose and blow. On the flowing, impressionistic "Welcome" (not the Coltrane tune), Parker adds some distortion to his guitar and Mazurek goes into gospelized Donald Ayler mode, sounding like he's gearing up for a march. It's a welcome change of pace, but the mood here tends toward the controlled, thoughtful and expressive. While this is nothing like the full-blown electronic love-in that was the last Isotope record, the Chicago Underground Quartet know how to integrate technology into their distinctive jazz sound. It's a fusion of some kind-- I'm sure of that-- so Wynton would not approve. But I'd call it a worthy extension of the tradition.


Amidst personal and professional turmoil, Lil Wayne's stopgap release Sorry 4 the Wait 2 finds him sounding wounded in a way he's rarely allowed himself to be.

Sorry 4 the Wait 2

Sorry 4 the Wait 2 shouldn't exist. If Lil Wayne had his way, we'd be listening to Tha Carter V right now, originally scheduled for release in October, which turned into early December, which came and went with only a series of frustrated tweets from the rapper. It's not strange for artists to complain about the glacial pace at which record labels often move, but Wayne's tweets felt less like a display of temporary discontent and more like the words of an artist that has reached the end of their rope—it doesn't get much more black and white than "I want off this label and nothing to do with these people." With rumors swirling that Wayne is ready to take his label, Cash Money, along with his long-time mentor and father figure Bryan "Birdman" Williams to court, the possibility of a reconciliation between the estranged parties seems less and less likely with each passing day.
Amidst this intra-label drama, there feels like there's something at stake in Wayne's music again. Whereas the first Sorry 4 the Wait served a similar function—it was a prime example of mixtape as apology—its sequel carries a sense that its star has his back against the wall for the first time in years. There's a purpose in Wayne's rapping that's been absent for a while, and when mentioning his current situation with Cash Money, he sounds wounded in a way he's rarely allowed himself to be. Over O.T. Genasis' "CoCo", he raps in an exasperated sigh: "Tunechi, niggas don't appreciate you/ You've been down since day one, it meant nothing on day two."
In 2015, Wayne's approach to mixtapes—rapping over beats popularized by other rappers—is an anachronism. These days, the tapes of even the greenest rappers contain mostly, if not entirely, original work. At his peak, Wayne would make beats his own through a manic inventiveness that he's still trying to recapture almost a decade later. There aren't any performances here that will have you dragging the originals to the recycle bin, but there are moments that thrill, like when he lifts the melody of Rich the Kid's hook from Migos' "Jumpin' Like Jordan" and then takes it in about eight different directions on "Trap House".
If there's a word that describes Wayne's rapping on Sorry 4 the Wait 2, it's "engaged." Wayne remains really good at the physical act of rapping, even if now you can hear the gears lurching into action whenever he switches into a double-time flow, like he does on "Selsun Blue", which finds him dropping quotables again ("Got the yay locked down like Kim K.") over the minor-key dread of Roofeeo's "All About the Money" beat. With that said, what used to be knee-slappers have been forehead-palmers for a few years now, and what he presumably considers clever is usually less so by at least half. Mercifully, the groaners-per-minute ratio here is lower than usual, and this is likely due to the fact Wayne's got more than just bad sex puns on his mind.
Wayne's in a weird position: his style has been so thoroughly picked apart that, in many cases, rappers who have absorbed traits of his have taken them to even further extremes. For instance, "Off Day", the immediately-forgettable single he released in November, saw him try to play the oddball. At different points on that song, he sounds like Drake, iLoveMakonnen, and Young Thug—basically, everyone but himself—and it's as cringe-worthy as it is transparent. On Sorry 4 the Wait 2, he's enjoying being Lil Wayne again, for better or worse. It also feels like rapping is once more a choice rather than a contractual obligation, which, at this point, might be the single greatest compliment one can pay Lil Wayne.


The new album from Cory Hanson’s band Wand is its most focused, finessed, and best record to date. It contains an audacious refinement that transcends the group’s beginnings in the garage-rock scene.

Plum

The first thing you should forget about Wand may be the only thing you remember about them. The intoxicating Los Angeles quintet’s founder, Cory Hanson, has backed both Mikal Cronin and Ty Segall, vanguards of a pan-garage scene with which Wand has been linked from the start. On Wand’s first three records, recorded and released in a 13-month rush beginning in late 2014, the band invoked a similar musical mania, ping-ponging among subgenres with a teenaged enthusiasm that reflected the spirit of those contemporaries and mentors.
But after substantial personnel shifts, a requisite Hanson solo record, and a workaday spell of full-band songwriting with a new lineup, Wand has returned with Plum, its first album in two years. Not coincidentally, it’s the most focused, finessed, and best Wand record to date, with a refinement that transcends those aforementioned peers. It’s among the most exhilarating rock records you’ll hear all year.
Wand’s first three albums were ecstatic scatter plots, with points of musical interest spread across the tracks with a joyful and casual abandon. Within the span of a few songs, Wand would slip—as they did on a particularly strong portion of their debut, Ganglion Reef—from clench-jawed stoner rock to swirling psychedelic pop to “Going to California” acoustic melodrama. There have been florid instrumental interludes and serpentine prog-rock constructions, blustery punk tantrums and hazy pop dreams.
All of that returns on Plum, but Wand has folded those strains into single tunes, connecting an array of once-disjointed thoughts into strong, singular statements. The title track leaves no room for uncertainty in the shift: Over staccato piano, Hanson sings with newfound soul, belting blues of self-doubt over twin guitars that scrape and crawl like those of Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo. “Bee Karma” buttresses spectral, psychedelic drift with a riff strong and sharp enough for a classic rock station, while Hanson follows the melodic contours of Radiohead’s “Optimistic.” Time and again, Wand resorts to this hyper-condensed juxtaposition. “Driving” switches from country mope to guitar theatrics, and “White Cat” somehow puts the rhythmic map of Lightning Bolt beneath an arching power-pop hook. This holds together remarkably well, as if Wand, for the first time, melted its influences and ideas into the same piece of vinyl, not a string of isolated singles. This succession of touchstones, one wedged neatly against the next, is thrilling.
Indeed, Plum feels fun, with its declamatory pianos and slicing riffs, magnetic hooks and grand solos. But it was written during a prolonged period of change and loss—“politically, familially, romantically,” Hanson told Stereogum. “It really helped to have all of us together,” he continued, “because in the end, when all this shit was going down, we were kind of all that we had.” Peek beneath that veneer of delight, and the lyrics dig into an admixture of despair and hope. “The Trap,” a gorgeous ballad supported by the sublime harmonies of Sofia Arreguin, ponders the will to persevere when what matters most to you is falling apart. These songs animate death and disagreement, reconciliation and regret, forever bound like the sounds themselves.
Realizing that some of these feelings are bigger than his ability to express them, Hanson even ponders the wisdom of words: “Stand on a frozen language/Terrified by light,” he sings poignantly during “Blue Cloud,” a bittersweet song about the push and pull between being lost and found. “Beauty will surround you, and you’ll be free at last.” Impossibly knotted guitars grind and growl, finally emerging in radiant consonance. Hanson and the band express what they cannot with words: You keep going long enough and, just maybe, it all works out.
At its initial clip, Wand would now be about nine records into its four-year-old career. That seems to be a ridiculous prospect, but listening back to the wealth of ideas that percolated and passed through that introductory suite, it isn’t impossible. Hanson had a lot to sort through and say. But a multivalent record like Plum—where the songs peel apart into layers of fun and frustration, sadness and esprit—likely wouldn’t have been possible in such a mad dash. Wand smartly stepped out of that cycle, not just to regroup but to change its process and product. For a rock band that had earned a reputation as ramshackle and unfiltered, there’s an uncommon audacity to that decision—to slow down, to press “pause,” to reemerge as something more nuanced and thoughtful. Sure, Plum still delights in rock’n’roll, but, in only two years, Wand has mirrored the maturation of the genre itself, moving from the youthful verve of “Tutti Frutti” toward rich, emotional terrain. That’s a fast pace, after all.