Ian William Craig's Centres is a swirling and alchemical blend of drone, keyboards, and manipulated vocals. The more time you spend with it, the further you will want to get lost in it.

Centres

Who is Ian William Craig? Nothing about the man, with his easily forgettable name, gently nerdy MFA-student look, and bio notes reading “operatically trained” and “Canadian,” hint at the vast ocean of beauty within his music. In a way, the banality of its presentation deepens the impact of his new album *Centres, *which might be one of the most beautiful, most strange, and most unique things you hear all year.
*Centres was *released this month with minor fanfare, as part of the re-launch of FatCat’s largely post-classical imprint label 130701. The magic of it boils largely down to a swirling, alchemic blend of three elements: majestic, manipulated vocals; gentle, well-constructed keyboard melodies; and a wash of noise, drone, and digital and analog decay. At times, t feels almost as if you could reduce Craig’s music to the still-complementary formula “Fennesz / Tim Hecker + Vocals.” But Craig takes these elements through their paces in ways that feel satisfyingly unpredictable and impossible to peg with shorthand description.
The first highlight of Centres is its opening statement “Contain (Astoria Version),” which begins with heavily treated, angelic vocals. On much of the album, Craig’s voice is presented largely untreated and untouched, but the fact that he chooses to begin “Contain” with his vocals in their most AutoTuned form feels like a gentle nudge to listeners to let go of expectations. “I will not contain you,” he sings, and in the context of this expansive album it rings like a promise.
Centres also edges a tad closer to the world of pop than on its two predecessors (2014’s A Turn Of Breath and last year’s Cradle For The Wanting, both on the tinier Recital label), which mostly means more texture, focus and listenability. The cathartic “A Single Hope” is the apex of this shift--the most direct, melodic track on the album (and one of the few featuring percussion); a throbbing, slow-burn hymnal that would even feel at home as one of the choice cuts on Cherry Red’s comprehensive shoegaze comp earlier this year.
Though as great as “A Single Hope” is, its pop-ish touch points feel a tiny bit quaint and limited next to some of Centres’ grander highlights. The aforementioned “Contain” and “A Circle Without Having to Curve” each run 10 minutes and embrace all three of Craig’s three ingredients while providing drastic shifts in tone and feel, not unlike watching a raging snowstorm. “The Nearness” begins with a beautifully played accordion and Craig’s (near) naked voice—which comes across here as an earnest and better-trained Thom Yorke—before the song descends first under the envelopment of murky fog and then is consumed whole by a rippling field of distortion.
Much of the rest of Centres carries in a similar vein, but at times, Craig’s voice resurfaces to carry the listener back home. “Set to Lapse” lays his  vocals on top of a bed flickering noise and wind. The organ-driven “Arrive, Arrive” plays like a Drowned God sea shanty. And winning album closer “Contain (Cedar Version)” is essentially the solo acoustic demo version of the album’s opener. The tone of his voice and the recording here surprisingly recalls Jason Molina’s on his acoustic demos of the tracks from Magnolia Electric Co., and as with those demos, “(Cedar Version)” provides a great closing counterpoint to the opening track.
They also serve as a gentle reminder of how beautiful Craig’s songwriting is, and that his talent is not in just manipulating waves of sound. Running at an overflowing seventy-three minutes, Centres initially seems like a near-formless sea of sound and voice. But over time, it reveals patterns inside the swirl, and the more time you spend in it, the further you will to get lost in its wondrous confines.


On a brightly colored pair of EPs, the UK musician builds upon the fantasy world he introduced on 2017’s Neō Wax Bloom: a cartoon universe characterized by digital overload.

Iglooghost: Clear Tamei EP / Steel Mogu EP

Clear Tamei EP / Steel Mogu EP

As Iglooghost, the British producer Seamus Malliagh has invented an entire fantasy world in which his music is the soundtrack to epic conflict among hypercolor cartoon characters. It's not an entirely novel idea—Gorillaz have played with a similar approach, though to radically different ends: Malliagh seems determined to throw the listener off balance, leaving it unclear how exactly one should meaningfully listen or dance to the music, or even how to engage with its fantastical narrative underpinnings. The tracks themselves are hyperactive, maximalist, and alien in a sharp and craggly kind of way, effervescent and menacing at the same time. Malliagh’s sound palette is both wacky and steely, poppy and industrial. But the most difficult thing to follow in Iglooghost’s music is the abrupt pacing, the unexpected and seemingly illogical buildups and drops, the aggressive rhythms that morph and jolt. Both in sound and composition Malliagh operates in exhausting, extended flurries.
A little less than a year removed from a debut album that introduced Iglooghost’s mythos and aesthetic, Malliagh has returned with a pair of EPs, Clear Tamei and Steel Mogu. On both he’s building upon the same world he introduced on Neō Wax Bloom, one that is fully fleshed out and occupied by fairy gods wearing cone-like hats and sentient bugs that zip across the landscape. The debut “was all based around the fact that the eyes of the god of Mamu had fallen out,” Malliagh recently explained to Fader. “Tamei is him when he’s a baby and training to be a god.”
The video for “Clear Tamei” is the first time Malliagh has been able to throw a bunch of money at the renderings and animations that interlock with his music. Besides the weird folklore, the visual aspect of Iglooghost’s output has always had appealing synesthetic qualities, the zany, ultragloss texture of his designs reflecting the frantic digital excess of his music. If you watch the video after listening to the song, which features Malliagh chant rapping in a mumbled gibberish over a shimmering landscape of pristine synths, the music kind of clicks, shifting the curiosity away from the sound and onto the absurdist world he’s invented.
With five songs each, Clear Tamei and Steel Mogu are bundled but opposing. As the hero’s soundtrack, Clear Tamei is showered in light and delicate electronic sounds that cut through the overwhelming density of Iglooghost’s music. Steel Mogu is dark, oppressive, and unrelenting. The blunt antagonism of the industrial sounds and breakcore rhythms on Steel Mogu, the anti-hero’s EP, are hardly a departure for Iglooghost, but the split release does segment the mood. The operatic trip-hop on Clear Tamei’s “New Vectors” is brimming with synths that creak, thwack, and shoot across the stage like laser beams, but there are also elements that sound like a soaring vocal or lush string section, or maybe the cry of an infant whose vocal chords have been transplanted with a MIDI pad. Steel Mogu doesn’t hint at any such comforts: “Mei Mode” thrashes around with weaponized 808s while “Niteracer” sounds like a whirling glitch. Listening to such dense and unpredictable music can feel both like a productivity-inducing adrenaline rush or a complete diversion.
Increasingly I’m convinced that Malliagh makes the type of music that happens to you, that turns your mind into a passive receptor and resists explication. Still, to listen to Iglooghost’s music is to marvel at and withstand its technical complexity, to be punched by it until you learn how to lean into the blow. At a recent basement show in West Philly, Malliagh’s headlining Iglooghost set was well received, but it also felt out of place on the dancefloor. His change-ups and breakdowns are too unpredictable and audacious to climb into and ride along with rhythmically, and his music is a sensory overload best confronted in headphones. A few days later, at the end of the short tour, he tweeted, “YO SO...I AM BORED OF JUST PRESSIN BUTTONS WHEN I PLAY LIVE” and announced plans to introduce props and giant costumes into his set. It seems like Malliagh has stumbled on something so weird and abrasive musically that he’s trying not just to extend the spectacle but also to interrogate its effects. He is asking of himself the same question he forces on his listeners: What am I supposed to do with this? It’s an exciting problem.


The women on Half Free are indeed half free: They're prisoners to bad choices and duplicitous men, but they're starting to take control of their situation. The sound further fortifies the common ground between Meghan Remy's diamond-cut melodies and avant-garde urges, and the album sounds like your favorite golden-oldies station beamed through a pirate-radio frequency.

Half Free

Three tracks into the new U.S. Girls album, Meghan Remy is awoken by a phone call from a girlfriend. She tells her about the bad dream she just had, in which her father emailed her a digital folder containing nude images of Remy taken when she was a child. But the really weird thing about it was—as Remy notes with a combination of embarrassment and pride—"I was kinda hot stuff. I mean, I don't know, I looked good—so it was kind of confusing." What follows is a brief conversation about the peculiar relationship dynamic between fathers and daughters compared to moms and sons—Remy's friend concludes that if she had been born a boy, she'd be "one of those sons that turns into a fascist dictator," while Remy retorts, "instead of just another woman with no self-esteem." Her sardonic punchline is punctuated by a burst of canned sitcom laughter—and, much like that infamous Rodney Dangerfield scene in Natural Born Killers, the device elicits more squirms than chuckles.
But on Half Free, that bizarre exchange counts as comic relief. And even though this interlude—titled "Telephone Play No. 1"—appears just six minutes into the record, it's still a necessary respite. By that point, we've already heard from the unhappily married wife of a man who had previously bedded her two sisters ("Sororal Feelings"), and a widow grieving her soldier husband's death over a riotous reggae groove ("Damn That Valley"). And there are several more tales of women with no self-esteem to come—unflinching portraits of ladies reeling from inattentive, cheating, or absentee lovers. So the seemingly random appearance of "Telephone Play No. 1" actually makes more sense as the album plays out. It's simply a verbal manifestation of what Remy's proper songs do musically: take us into the spaces that are supposed to provide us with solace—home, family, relationships—and make them feel awkward and uncomfortable. (As the dejected narrator of "Sororal Feelings" declares through a deceptively sunny harmony: "Now I'm going to hang myself/ Hang myself from my family tree.")
Likewise, Remy's music has always thrived on the conflict between the familiar and foreign. On previous U.S. Girls releases, her pop and experimental sensibilities—part Shangri-Las, part Sun Ra—were often at war with one another. (Take 2011's U.S. Girls on KRAAK, where the Ronettes-style romp "State House (It's a Man's World)" gets rudely elbowed into the free-form subterranean skronk of "Sinkhole", as if two opposing spirits were fighting for control of Remy's soul.) But, by building upon the grotto-bound R&B introduced on 2013's Free Advice Column EP (whose hip-hop-schooled producer, Onakabazien, returns here), Half Free further fortifies the common ground between Remy's diamond-cut melodies and avant-garde urges. The album sounds like your favourite golden-oldies station beamed through a pirate-radio frequency, seamlessly fusing '60s-vintage girl-group serenades and smooth '70s disco into dubby panoramas and horror-movie atmospherics.
But even as its backdrop mutates from deep-house throbs to psych-rock guitar solos, Half Free always focuses your attention to where it should be: on Remy's radiant voice and vivid storytelling. She's the sort of songwriter who can set a 3D scene in a single line that simmers with suggestion—the first words we hear on the record are "Well there were a four of us in a real small space/ Sharing more than just a family name," and you can immediately feel all the humidity and unease hanging in the room. The cinematically scaled production on Half Free only intensifies the domestic dramas playing out within her lyrics: the steady, string-swept build of disco reverie "Window Shades" mirrors the emotional breakthrough of its protagonist, a woman scorned who finally summons the courage to confront her philandering partner; the drizzling, slow-percolating beat of "Red Comes in Many Shades" provides the gray-skied ambience for Remy's tale of a doomed affair with an older paramour, all while her "tears fall like rain." And though "Sed Knife"—an upbeat power-pop revision of a 2012 B-side—may seem like an outlier here, its images of kitchen-table tensions fit right into the album's theme.
The women at the center of these songs are indeed half free: they're prisoners to bad choices, cruel circumstances, and duplicitous men—but they're starting to take control of their situation. And with the epic closer "Woman's Work", Remy leaves them with a neon-tinted, mirror-ball-twirling anthem to herald their impending liberation. "You arrived in your mother's arms/ But you will leave riding in a black limousine," Remy seethes at a departing ex who's off to live the high life—or the afterlife—without her, but the defiance in her voice suggests she's richer for it. "A woman's work is never done/ She doesn't sleep 'til the morning comes," chimes the Greek chorus behind her—and when applied to a creatively restless, audacious voice like Remy, it sounds less like a complaint than a promise.


Wakin on a Pretty Daze is Kurt Vile's most spacious, becalmed record yet, and it contains some of his best-ever brand of cosmic stand-up. The album moves at its own stately pace and with its own serene logic and time.

Wakin on a Pretty Daze

The concept of samsara, one of the Buddha's four noble truths, holds that all beings are trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Fueled by internal struggle, we turn along an endless wheel of suffering, passing through untold lives in our never-ending quest for enlightenment. Some meditate upon this truth for years; Kurt Vile, on "Life's a Beach", nailed it for us in two mumbled words: "Life's awhile."
Vile's music has exuded this unique stoner-Yoda wisdom from the very beginning, even if you weren't searching for it. His sound-- warm, unhurried, and spacious-- doesn't demand close focus, but one of the joys of being pulled into Vile's lonely, contented universe is in discovering that he is muttering sharply self-aware things to himself. It adds another layer to Vile's appeal; seduced by the soothing, watery-blue glimmer of that sound, which promised to make you feel like the only human in the universe, you slowly realized there's actually one other guy here, and he's kind of a wiseass.
Wakin on a Pretty Daze is Vile's most spacious, becalmed record yet, and it contains some of his best-ever brand of cosmic stand-up. It opens, literally, with a stretch and a yawn: On the (almost) title track "Wakin on a Pretty Day", a wah'ed guitar rubs the grit out of its eyes while Vile beholds his furiously ringing phone with clinical detachment: "Phone ringing off the shelf/ I guess somebody has something they really wanna prove to us today," he notes. Unperturbed, he moves along, concerned with something far more pressing: "I gotta figure out what kind of wisecrack I'm gonna drop along the way -- today." The music quickens for a beat or two at this prospect, but settles back down. In Vile's universe, there is time enough for everything.
Accordingly, Wakin on a Pretty Daze moves at its own stately pace and with its own serene logic and time. Songs unfurl for six, or seven, or eight minutes without peaking dynamically or changing; the tangle of finger-picked guitars on "Was All Talk" queue up like synth presets that Vile just lets roll. On most songs, four or five chords cycle for minutes on end, echoing upward into the record's warm room tone. "Pure Pain" shifts between stomping, hard acoustic chording and two wide-open billowing finger-picked chords that simply hang while Vile muses: "Every time I look out my window/ All my emotions they are speeding/ Zip through the highways in my head." It can be occasionally frustrating to interact with a piece of music so fundamentally unconcerned with interaction, but like anything worth truly loving, Wakin on a Pretty Daze opens up slowly. The music, and the act of loving it, are exercises in patience. Or, as Vile puts it sagely on "Too Hard": "Take your time, so they say, and that's probably the best way to be."
Vile's releases are small variations on each other, and discerning the differences between them comes down to intangibles, things that are difficult to point to: The fact that he only yelps his little "Woo!" twice on "Shame Chamber" the first time around, for instance, indicating his bone-deep understanding that two "woos," for now, are plenty. Or the way the silvery guitar leads snake through the album without ever assuming the foreground, murmuring things that reward attention in the same way Vile's lyrics do. The way the drums nudge gently into the title refrain on "Girl Called Alex", and how Vile's "I wanna-" is abruptly cut off by a stinging guitar; these details, small by themselves, offer accumulated testimony to Vile's mastery of his world. Wakin on a Pretty Daze breezes past like a Klonopin dream, and radiates an easy confidence that is as rewarding to return to as a melody.
"Sometimes when I get in my zone, you'd think I was stoned, but I never as they say 'touch that stuff,' " Vile sings, with a hint of mockery, on Wakin's closer "Goldtone." The song is stunning, a desert island of Kurt Viledom. Ever since Vile signed to Matador, his music has grown warmer and more expansive as he receded further into the privacy of his own mind: On Smoke Ring for My Halo's "Ghost Town," he crooned gently, "I think I'm never gonna leave my couch again/ Cuz when I'm out, I'm only in my mind." "Goldtone," and all of Wakin on a Pretty Daze, feels like the culmination of Vile's quest to get away from people, noises, civilization and find somewhere to sit and whistle his own tune. If Kurt Vile could paint a storybook Heaven, it would look like "Goldtone", and he signs it with his most poetic, self-aware koan ever: "I might be adrift but I'm still alert/ Concentrate my hurt into a gold tone." A guitar pushes a wispy cirrus cloud across the sky, sea-blue chimes glitter, and Vile mumbles his way into the sunset.


On LCD's third LP, James Murphy applies his knowledge of post-punk and studio craft to remake 70s art-rock in his own hyper-modern, self-aware image.

This Is Happening

While discussing the burden of influence in 2005, James Murphy told us, "The Strokes are swimming up some incredibly serious stuff: Velvet Underground. Television. It's kinda soul-crushing in a way to listen to 'Perfect Day' and say, 'I'm gonna go write a song like that,' and it'll be fucking horrible by comparison." At that point, the Strokes had yet to squander their leather-clad, LES cool, and LCD Soundsystem were still, mostly, a Williamsburg blip. But over the past five years, things changed. Drastically. In 2010, early aughts trendsetters like Interpol and the Strokes are NYC relics, outpaced by a gang of stridently preppy, chart-topping Columbia grads and a 40-year-old Brian Eno obsessive. On This Is Happening, Murphy once again shows off his encyclopedic knowledge of all things post-punk and zip-tight. But he's also swimming up some serious stuff himself, including Eno and David Bowie's sacrosanct Berlin trilogy. And against his own prediction, it's far from horrible; it's actually pretty perfect.
"I spent my whole life wanting to be cool... but I've come to realize that coolness doesn't exist the way I once assumed," said Murphy in a recent Guardian feature. This realization probably has something to do with his rising cultural cache. After all, Murphy has done what all other music fiends only dream about-- he's flipped the system and become the embodiment of coolness. This is a phenomenal coup. And he's quick to rationalize his current status to the New Yorker: "I understand that if someone's going to make me his idea of cool I can't control that."
It's somewhat ironic, then, that Murphy's reign as New York's ambassador of post-hip-everything finds him nearly losing his cool on This Is Happening. His early singles and first album were him joking to himself, Sound of Silver was a collective rush of us vs. them, and now it's about him and her. This is also by far the bloodiest LCD Soundsystem album-- a series of bare, lacerating manifestos about distance between people, set to the fizzing art/dance-rock greatest hits inside Murphy's skull. "Love is a murderer," he sings on "I Can Change". He's not kidding.
On the hypnotic dirge "Somebody's Calling Me", the vocal chameleon tries on narcotic whispers while taking Iggy Pop's sleazy, empty-eyed "Nightclubbing" out of the club and into the bedroom. And though "All I Want" borrows that sliding Bowie guitar and kraut-y beat, Murphy makes it singe with his own tour-born regret, loss, and fatigue: "You learn in your bed you've been gone for too long/ So you put in the time, but it's too late to make it strong." Even considering his bold-name touchstones for This Is Happening, it would be shortsighted to cry rip-off; Murphy is remaking essential 70s art-rock in his own hyper-modern, self-aware image.
This fearlessness burrows its way into the rest of the album, making it more of a self-help guide to relationship hangovers than a woe-is-me fest. Opener "Dance Yrself Clean" starts quiet and stuffed with circular paranoia: "Talking like a jerk except you are an actual jerk, and living proof that sometimes friends are mean," Murphy mumbles to himself. "All My Friends" this is not. But then a massive, meaty synth expands the speakers, lifts the singer up, and plops him down smack in the middle of the dancefloor. LCD Soundsystem has always excelled at making sounds for moving bodies, but now that motion is more entangled with other, less exuberant emotions. Potentially misguided frat anthem "Drunk Girls" is a punchline-laden lark that ends with, "Be honest with me, honestly/ Unless it hurts my feelings." On earlier records, Murphy could sound like he didn't really mean it while hollering on the fly, but This Is Happening confirms him as a top-tier vocalist and lyricist capable of mixing heavy and light, lyrical and self-deprecating, sometimes in the same line: "Love is an open book to a verse of your bad poetry... and this is coming from me."
Murphy's vast perspective and all-knowing mien are invaluable assets to his success. Recorded in L.A. instead of his hometown, This Is Happening finds the unlikely rock star zooming out even further in search of the realness and truth mentioned on the album's "music about writing music" track "You Wanted a Hit". And on the virtuoso rambler "Pow Pow", he seems to locate a perch where he can "relax" and "see the whole place" and understand "advantages to both" sides of any argument. Sounds nice. But by the end of the song, he's beset by confusion, numbness, and a false sense of security. "What you want from now is someone to feel you," he croons. At first, Murphy showed how to let loose without losing your cool; now he's figuring out how to break down without cracking up.


Awful Records kingpin Father exploded onto the Atlanta scene with last year's effortless, maddeningly catchy single "Look at Wrist", and on his new surprise album, he offers party music about girls and drugs and fights that is deeper than it initially lets on.

Who's Gonna Get Fucked First?

"New Atlanta," a concept propagated mostly by blogs to organize the riches of rap's constantly evolving, intimidatingly prolific capital city, entails a yearly changing of the guard. In just the last handful of years, we’ve seen Future take the mantle and inspire a school of hoarse, melody-driven imitators, only to be phased out by adlib-happy hit machines like Migos, yawping innovators like Young Thug, and precocious party-starters Rae Sremmurd. There’s a loose formula: Get acquainted with local hit-making producers like Zaytoven, Metro Boomin, the 808 Mafia crew; get a hit on the strip club circuit and local airwaves; collaborate extensively and pump out free projects hosted by the mixtape DJ of favor; maybe sign a 360 deal. The formula works, and has pumped out a lot of great, occasionally cutting-edge rap music.
But it’s not the only way to find success in Atlanta, as Awful Records’ kingpin Father has proved. His effortless-sounding, maddeningly catchy single "Look at Wrist" exploded on to the scene last summer, turning dancefloors into cooking dance mosh pits nationwide without so much as a DJ Holiday drop. Along with peers iLoveMakonnen and Key! (conveniently, the single’s two featured artists), he’s part of the latest iteration of "New Atlanta," broadly characterized for their DIY ethos and rough-around-the-edges minimalism. And while Makonnen quickly became the scene’s most visible constituent, Father’s been proving himself as its most consistent member. Who’s Gonna Get Fucked First?, a 12-song blast that dropped unannounced last week, is his strongest project yet, and a flag planted firmly in the soil of rap’s current epicenter. He reminds us that with good ideas and confidence in your own vision, you don’t need to play by any rules but your own.
"Look at Wrist", the song that put Awful on the map, came with a hilarious subtext that almost didn’t register because of its hypnotizing repetition. "Never had to whip a brick, but I get the gist" felt like meta-commentary on middle American rap fans’ investment in trap lingo with a total remove from the lifestyle. Father wasn’t moralizing—we’re all just trying to have fun here—but this wry, knowing wink consistently informs his work, even in the midst of the turn-up. This is music that’s deceptively simple, that’s deeper than it lets on.
The SoundCloud description of Who’s Gonna Get Fucked First? states its intent plainly: "32-mins of pure, unfiltered debauchery." This is party music about girls and drugs and fights, over efficient beats with lots of empty space. The unprintable title might give some initial pause, but it fits. Even more than partying, this is an album about sex—weird, freaky, intoxicated, potentially group sex—but also, consensual, mutually pleasurable, and age-appropriate. Father handles the topic with a maturity and egalitarianism that feels revelatory, resulting in the most sex-positive rap release of the year. On "Vamp", in the midst of frothing come-ons, Father reminds his paramour, "You have a right to all your choices." "Morena", featuring Awful members Stalin Majesty and Abra, riffs on Big Pun and Joe in an adoring homage to women of color. (Elsewhere, Abra—one of Awful’s two female members—steals the show on bratty, hater-baiting flex "Gurl".) And on album highlight "BET Uncut", Richposlim delivers a strong candidate for best guest verse of 2015, clowning slut-shaming men into submission: "I say she’s sexually liberated! You call her ass a ho." It’s one of many sharp insights hidden in plain sight amid the Henny-guzzling and pill-popping.
Where so much Atlanta rap of the last half decade has been indebted to crunk, Father seems more inspired by snap music, the subgenre that tore up mid-2000s parties with ringtone-friendly 808s, finger-snaps, and raucous dance instructionals. The sound requires a rare sort of magnetism, one that can command a room without seeming to try, a quality Father has in spades. Jermaine Dupri’s label So So Def also looms over the project, and Father even references So So Def one-hit wonder J Kwon on bow-throwing, drink-sloshing two-minute cut "Everybody in the Club Gettin Shot".
But Father’s primary influence isn’t from Atlanta (or, arguably, from this plane of existence) at all: He has always shown a clear debt to Lil B, less in sound than in based spirit. He nods to him directly on grimy cut "Read Her Lips", one of three KeithCharles Spacebar-produced tracks here, with the hook: "First I go on tour, then I fuck my bitch." But the album’s basedness—its oddly memorable turns of phrase, sincere devotion to the absurd and mundane, and purposefully sketchy, homemade quality—feels like a logical extension of a brain raised on bugged-out cartoons, anime, and the infinite rabbit hole of the Internet. Father was a visual artist before coming around to rap, and has cited a childhood fascination with "Rocko's Modern Life" and other '90s cartoons informed by acid trips and dirty jokes—stuff with a visceral appeal for children, but a snarky, debauched subtext for adults. It’s the same ethos that turns even the most seemingly straightforward Father tracks slightly askew.
With the exception of the KeithCharles Spacebar contributions, Father handles the production of the album himself. His style is aggressively minimal, leaving him room to experiment with rhythm and timing to better effect. It’s the ideal canvas for lines that embed themselves into your subconscious for days, the stuff you catch yourself mumbling into the mirror while brushing the Henny aftertaste off your teeth. And Father’s wry, casual lyricism is sharp and often loaded with insights, capable of doing a lot with a little. On the excellent "Back in the "A" Freestyle/On It", Father sets a hilarious scene with just three simple lines: "Run up on me, leave you looking like Eddie Winslow/ In that episode when he got his ass beat/ Take my niggas, then cash out at the Zaxby’s." He then insists on buying lunch for the whole squad. Friends, fights, and fast food: It might not be what you’ve come to expect from the hallowed grounds of "New Atlanta," but Father’s never played by those rules anyway.


Like his scores for Paul Thomas Anderson, the Radiohead guitarist’s soundtrack to Jane Campion’s new film invokes the 20th-century avant-garde, full of noble brooding and tormented ecstasy.

Jonny Greenwood: The Power of the Dog (Music From the Netflix Film)

If you don’t know what Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog is about, here’s a fun experiment: Try to guess its genre based on the music by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, the chief classical aficionado in the world’s most respected rock band. Made using a chamber ensemble of piano, strings, winds, brass, and more, the soundtrack is quite grand, full of noble brooding and tormented ecstasy, all in a sternly beautiful modernist mode. These 16 brief yet substantial themes run over darkly lustrous slopes and ominous plains, with each landscape seeming to spill into the other. Their uneasy but graceful unity even accommodates the occasional starchy old avant-garde outburst. It’s all very 20th century and fine and European. Now, raise your hand if you guessed the film’s a Western. No one?
The clever thing is that once you know, you can hear it everywhere in Greenwood’s score: in the cantering acoustic guitar trail laid through sharp-peaked strings on “25 Years,” in the brass that evokes a harmonica’s call and fall on “Requiem for Phil,” and even in the chromatic enfilades of “Detuned Mechanical Piano,” which suddenly seems less like Conlon Nancarrow and more like a player piano running amok in a saloon. Throughout, Greenwood uses the steeliest points of the classical canon to carve canyons and buttes into the hard, treacherous shape of a psychological metaphor.
Of course, this is not his first rodeo, in several senses. Greenwood has scored many films, particularly for Paul Thomas Anderson. Like the latter’s There Will Be Blood, Campion’s movie is also set in the American West at the moment when its physical frontiers began blurring into legend. That score superficially resembles Greenwood’s music for The Power of the Dog, though it was more busily cinematic, grandiose—and, yes, stereotypically masculine.
The Power of the Dog marks Campion’s return to cinema after 12 years and a stint in prestige TV with Top of the Lake, a chilly crime drama set in her native New Zealand. Though her filmography is merrily idiosyncratic, she’s especially known for reviving the romance of Old Hollywood period dramas with incisive contemporary characterization, and with the perspectival benefits of not being some cigar-chomping man. She also seems drawn to the pungent tidepools of humanity that form on the borderlands of the social and the wild.
In The Piano, Campion’s 1993 breakthrough, a woman with a daughter marries a landowner in a remote part of mid-19th-century New Zealand. In The Power of the Dog, a woman with a son marries a rancher in a remote part of early-20th-century Montana, unleashing the havoc of feeling into the manful, stunted world he inhabits with his brother. Throughout, Greenwood’s music mirrors the counterintuitive sensuousness and sophistication of Campion’s casting (extra credit if you guessed Benedict Cumberbatch as the lead cowboy); he cultivates a consistent sense of disturbed introversion through the plosive box step of “Prelude,” the reaching brass tendrils of “The Ravine,” and other tinctures of wonder and dread.
In a way, Radiohead have always been a postmodern prog-rock band, with sleeker taste and different tech than their ’70s forebears, but with a similar interest in smuggling Stravinsky and Messiaen into popular music. Greenwood must be the only artist who has both headlined Coachella and collaborated with Krzysztof Penderecki, the Polish composer whose turbulent tone clusters he often evokes in The Power of the Dog. When those shivers course through the strings, it might be the cry of night-veiled coyotes or a wail at the edge where one world ends and another begins. That double image perfectly exemplifies Greenwood’s own synthesis of pulp-Western brawn and refined symphonic emotion.

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D.C. rapper's "What the..?" concept-- an album-length riff on Seinfeld that incorporates snippets of dialogue from famous episodes and an endearingly goofy "drop" by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss -- surprisingly leads to a solid record filled with wit and ideas.

The Mixtape About Nothing

"The underground just spun around and did a 360!" When Eminem spit this rhyme in 2000 on The Marshall Mathers LP, he was, as usual, talking about himself, but I imagine the line must sound depressingly prophetic to circa-2008 underground rappers surveying the last eight years. In a strikingly short time, all of the mutually understood rules of independent rap's mid-to-late-90s golden age have been overturned, rendered obsolete by a combination of shifting critical opinion and the democratizing bulldozer of the internet, and indie-rappers have been struggling to gain footing in their bewildering new landscape ever since. Criticizing mainstream hip-hop's misogyny, violence, and materialism, for instance, once meant approving, pat-on-the-head reviews from mainstream rock publications like Rolling Stone and SPIN. These days, it is the quickest route to being derided as a self-righteous "backpack rapper," a term that has soured into a reflexive sneer.
In short, things just ain't the same for (non)gangstas, and any rapper who finds himself uncomfortable inventing a storied criminal past has learned to step carefully. D.C. rapper Wale (pronounced Wah-LAY, as he carefully points out early on) is all too aware of these potential pitfalls, and on his expertly crafted, exuberantly witty, and endlessly surprising new Mixtape About Nothing, he makes an art out of high-stepping lightly through a minefield. "An iPod mind to you Walkman guys," he calls himself at one point, and the adeptness of the rhyme matches the neatness of the distinction. Throughout the tape, Wale displays an almost Road Runner-like ability to evade classification. "I ain't a street nigga, but my niggas is some," he rhymes on "The End Credits", adding later, "I'm not a Muslim; my grandmomma was one." He likens stylistic comparisons to Lil Wayne and Lupe Fiasco to being "locked in a box," lamenting, "We apples and oranges, but everybody pair us." The endless self-positioning might seem obsessive, but Wale instinctively understands that categorization means the death of a three-dimensional personality, and he is determined not to be easily dismissed.
He has succeeded. On The Mixtape About Nothing, Wale emerges fully-formed as a rapper and as a thinker, a lightning-witted, irreverent guy blessed with both an infectious swagger and a sound moral compass-- twin gifts that enable him to accomplish some of the mixtape's most audacious feats. The central conceit, for example, might read on paper like nothing more than white-boy bait: as the title suggests, it's an album-length riff on Seinfeld that incorporates snippets of dialogue from famous episodes and features an endearingly goofy "drop" by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss ("Don't you think my kids are gonna think I'm so cool that I'm on this mixtape?? Mothafucka!!") But Wale's genuine love for the show rescues the venture from drowning in cheap irony. On the disarmingly earnest love song "The Grown Up", after Wale confesses, "I gotta be a man before I can become a father," the voices of George Constanza and Jerry weigh in like some Manhattanite take on the Greek chorus: "We're like children! We're not men! We find all these stupid little reasons to break up with these women!" The slyly perceptive joke-- that men of all classes and races shrink equally fearfully from the demands of adulthood-- only hints at the sort of unexpected emotional resonance Wale manages to mine from his unlikely setup.
Indeed, by effortlessly flipping this source material, Wale proves that there is almost no topic he can't handle. Rapping in a blaring voice oddly reminiscent of Rich Boy, he comes across equally funny and engaging complaining about Soundscan, illegal downloads, and "ringtone rappers" as he does while gleefully comparing his bank account to "brunch at a synagogue." When he tackles trickier issues-- mainstream hip-hop's prevailing misogyny and violence, for instance-- he demonstrates an uncanny knack for seeing all sides of the argument without losing his footing.
On the masterful "The Manipulation", he flips with frightening and instructive ease between unctuous, Common-style lover-man and the vilest Pimp C-style misogynist. "The Kramer", meanwhile, builds from the still-sickening audio of Michael Richards screaming racial epithets at nightclub patrons into the most thoughtful examination of the insoluble problem of the prevalence of the word "nigga" in rap music in years. "A nigga write 'nigga' in his lyric/ Expects a white boy to omit it/ The white boy spit it like he spit it/ Recite it to his friends-- who by the way, ain't niggas." The white friends "incorporate the lyric into their everyday living," until a black friend eventually overhears them. He lets it slide-- "it's so insignificant and little"-- and soon: "The things they say went a little too far/ He couldn't tell the difference between 'a' or '-er'/ So they just kept saying 'nigga' to his face/ There's nothing he can do/ He let it get away/ It came to the point he couldn't look them in the face."
No matter Wale's tone-- sternly critical or goofy, reflective or boastful-- the coursing music maintains a joyful momentum. Most of the original beats on the tape come from the D.C. production collective Best Kept Secret, who punctuate straightforward throwback-rap tracks with rattling bongos and woodblocks borrowed from D.C.'s go-go scene. But, just to show us he can, Wale also runs circles around the Roots' "Star" beat, the "Roc Boys" instrumental, and Shawty Redd-style synthesizers alongside Lil Wayne on "The Cliché Lil Wayne Feature". Wale is fully aware of his potential-- "Hip hop heads see a new day, and I is one," he proclaims near the end of the tape-- but he also squirms away from coronation as the next great hope, a label as constricting as any other. "You see, kings get killed, or at least overthrown," he notes on "The Vacation From Ourselves". His "mixtape about nothing" is really a mixtape about almost everything, and with it Wale has produced one of the year's most improbable and inspiring successes.


Recorded at home on his mother’s laptop, Barely March’s debut album is a scrappy, tuneful album of post-breakup self-deprecation that recognizes the absurdity of wallowing in your own bullshit.

Marely Barch

Publicly available information on Barely March’s debut album is scant, and all of it points to a creation myth of profound tragicomedy. If we take his lyrics at face value, Chris Keough got dumped in December and spent the rest of the winter writing songs about feeling like a total fucking loser and recording them on his mother’s laptop. The album’s rescue from the #pop-punk and #emo voids of Bandcamp is no more glamorous: Marely Barch was remastered on cassette by Telethon, who released a tuneful and stupefyingly ambitious five-act “powerpoppoppunk” opera in 2017 that was almost completely ignored by critics; they had found Barely March on a Facebook group for a Jeff Rosenstock covers compilation. This wildly dorky origin story suits Marely Barch: It’s an album of teenage self-deprecation that simultaneously recognizes the absurdity of wallowing in your own bullshit. It’s also an impeccably written Brief History of Long Island Punk, a genre that happens to be one of the best possible musical vehicles to express these exact emotions.
But Keough can’t help using the immediate tactics of a shitposter: the spoonerized album title; the three thinking-face emojis tacked onto a song called “thinking emoji”; the album cover. Clearly he was going to use “Mambo No. 6” and “Live Fast, Cy Young” as titles regardless of their content. At the very least, they’re of a piece with the truth-in-advertising of “My Life, in Shambles” and “Nervous as I’ll Ever Be.” “Surf Wax Antarctica” is the most tidy summation of Keough’s m.o., nodding to both a very obvious influence and another, less obvious one. “The voice on the TV reminds me that I am just so cowardly,” he yelps before quoting the most Know Your Meme moment from the relatively obscure Cartoon Network show “Courage the Cowardly Dog”: “Return the slab.”
The latter song is also a tidy summation of Marely Barch’s musical charms: Guitar Center glam metal on a Craiglist budget, falsetto whoops, and hyper-referential lyrics relating an emotional death march on Long Island’s Porcelain Beach. This is a record made in complete obscurity in a style whose gender dynamics are under more scrutiny than ever, and he’s mighty generous with this kind of emo melodrama. But getting dumped is totally fucking awful and Marely Barch is a tribute to those times when adult shit like perspective and forgiveness just aren’t gonna cut it. More importantly, it proves one can ingloriously self-immolate without taking anyone else down in the flames. Like the breakup albums that extend beyond their blast radius, the emotions are raw and real enough for the narrator to be relatable, while leaving open the likely possibility that you’ll end up taking the other party’s side. “I’m so stack overflow, the definition of insanity,” he admits, quick with a joke and clearly in touch with his emotions yet also unable to remove himself from his lifeless phone, his apartment, and, during “My Life, in Shambles,” even his shower.
Keough is too demoralized to demand you respect the confidence and craft of a genre that can barely look itself in the mirror, so he just earns it instead. “Magnolia, where have all the good times gone?” he yells in “Thinking Emoji,” honoring the lineage of emo bands attaching proper nouns to their longing with one of many hooks explicitly designed for raising a Schlitz before a tear falls in it. “Wrote a song in 6/8 time/Like that B side that you said you liked,” he sings in “As Nervous as I’ll Ever Be,” even as he’s dealing with grand, finely structured melodic gestures that recall “Killer Queen” as much as Weezer’s A game. As far as pop-punk and emo go, he kids because he loves: “Mambo No. 6” follows a model of dramatic introductory tracks and disarms it with a run of finger-tapping. Listen to a Hopeless or Fearless band and the drums sound like synth presets anyway, so Keough takes advantage of his recording limitations, using the rigidity of drum machines to give his music house-like propulsion or textural shifts, turning the percussive fills of “Thinking Emoji” into blasts of streaming static before it drops out into a coda of chopped and screwed channel surfing.
The most carefully chosen moment of Marely Barch ends up being the one that got it discovered in the first place. “Bonus Oceans” is a Jeff Rosenstock cover taken from I Look Like Shit, a collection of home recordings from 2010-2012, when Bomb the Music Industry! was winding down. Maybe Rosenstock’s comprehensive State of the Union albums are more depressing, but “Bonus Oceans” is his most desperate song: Shamed by a shitty restaurant job, exhausted by the futility of “Remember when?,” he wonders if he’d be better off getting cancer or shot so he could revert back to a childlike state of having other people care for him. It’s a testament to both Keough’s hooky songwriting and his cratered emotional state that the chorus could pass for his own: “If you don’t die young, you’re gonna live too long.” A tremendously affecting song, “Bonus Oceans” is a footnote in Rosenstock’s catalog, but it’s exactly where Keough is at right now: He might be ready to take on the world, if he can just leave his apartment first.


Scrapped in 1977, the original Chrome Dreams is one of rock's great lost records; 30 years later, Neil Young has decided that his new album is a sequel to that career enigma, referencing a chapter only his most dedicated fans would know about.

Chrome Dreams II

The original Chrome Dreams contained some of Neil Young's most enduring electric blowouts and most somber, stirring folk-rock. That is, it would have, had it ever come out. Scrapped in 1977, Chrome Dreams has earned a place alongside Smile and Lifehouse in the Pantheon of Lost Albums, a puzzle for obsessive fans and bootleggers to try and reconstruct. Fortunately, the record was thoroughly stripped for parts, and among its 12 songs, classics "Like a Hurricane" and "Pocahontas" popped up on other Young albums.
So now, 30 years later, Young has decided his new album is a sequel to that career enigma, referencing a chapter only his most dedicated fans would know about. Why? The fuck if I know. Part of Young's charm and continued credibility is that he's grown more inscrutable as his hair has grayed, the opposite trajectory of most of his Rock Hall of Fame peers. After his brush with death in 2005, one might have expected the singer-songwriter to slow down, or at least write a bunch of grim songs about mortality-- this is, after all, the guy who was singing about getting old when he was 24. But instead, Young has sped up his work rate and zagged at every opportunity, quick-fire releasing the ambitious Nashville throwback Prairie Wind and the hurried, furious Living With War.
Chrome Dreams II is less conceptually consistent than those two records; the family resemblance to its predecessor may simply be a matter of their shared scattershot approach. Indulging a grab-bag of styles and dusting off some long-shelved unreleased tracks, the record veers from Hallmark-card country to lite-soul throwbacks to Rust Never Sleeps-like garage rock. This variety might be distracting, were Young not so firmly loyal to the overarching production sound and band collaborators he's kept over the last ten years, with only his recent fondness for choral backing vocals doing much to distinguish it from his earlier work.
Strange then that the album's centerpiece, the 18-minute novella "Ordinary People", was actually recorded during Young's notorious 1980s identity disorder; it's a holdover from his 1988 r&b dalliance This Note's for You. Obviously, a song with a runtime that impressive necessitates the use of terms like "sprawling" and "epic," and it is pretty impressive, its 20 verses providing a stack of snapshots of life for drug dealers, assembly line workers, and the homeless between zealous horn and guitar solos. It aims to be the Band's "The Weight", and while it doesn't quite reach those lofty heights, it's a solid working-class anthem, despite the staleness of references to Lee Iacocca and boxing as an important cultural event.
In the shadow of "Ordinary People", the rest of Chrome Dreams II sounds a bit wispy-- particularly the surprisingly adult-contempo, over-sentimental "Beautiful Bluebird" and "Shining Light". The faux Motown of "The Believer" is a little bit better, but somewhat reminiscent of 2002's Are You Passionate?, an uncomfortable lowlight of late-period Neil. Matched up against the raw, solemn acoustic classics-- "Will to Love", "Star of Bethlehem"-- of the original Chrome, it's telling how far Neil's ability to sculpt his quieter material into something haunting rather than hokey has faded with age.
But the electric numbers, both the compact "Spirit Road" and the extended knee-bend workout of "No Hidden Path", still ripple with vitality, even though they feature only one-third of Crazy Horse. Neither match the furious beauty of "Like a Hurricane", and "Dirty Old Man" might be a pale imitation of the raucous "Sedan Delivery," but it's still thrilling to hear Young getting his aggression out, letting the undiminished fury of his guitar tone saw off the shackles of age.
Whether the album title is Young seriously trying to reconnect to a specific moment of his past or perhaps simply making an inside joke, it's an apt demonstration that he can still shapeshift with the best of them. But while Neil Young's self-fractionation abilities are intact, the low hit to miss ratio of Chrome Dreams II is proof that not all of those personae are still quite as functional as they once were, around the time of Chapter One. Though having one good trick in the bag keeps him from becoming a mere oldies jukebox like so many other 40-year rock vets, the sampler platter of Chrome Dreams II suggests his renowned versatility, by comparison to its cult-classic ancestor, ain't what it used to be.


Aimée Collet Argote's ever-shifting project releases an engaging, incisive album of compelling contradictions and frictions.

Various Artists: Don’t Rock the Boat, Sink the Fucker

Don’t Rock the Boat, Sink the Fucker

Des Ark started as a queercore duo 10 years ago, releasing their first LP, Loose Lips Sink Ships, in 2005. Since its inception, the band has remained in a state of flux, with members coming and going almost on a show-by-show basis. The mainstay has been Aimée Collet Argote, a guitar player and songwriter currently based in Philadelphia. She spent nearly four years recording her second full-length, and one would imagine that would give her plenty of time to think up a better album title than Don't Rock the Boat, Sink the Fucker.
There is a curious incongruity between the presentation of the music and the music itself on Fucker. Scribbled across a radiant photo of Argote, that title suggests a bumper sticker more than an album, and "My Saddle Is Waiting (C'Mon Jump on It)" and "Bonne Chance, Asshole" don't sound like songs called "My Saddle Is Waiting (C'Mon Jump on It)" and "Bonne Chance, Asshole". Anyone expecting agitprop mallpunk or ironic cowpunk covers may be surprised by the shimmery pop sound of Fucker, which creates a dynamic, often dense sound out of a minimum of instruments.
This is an album of compelling contradictions and frictions. Argote is an especially forthcoming songwriter, penning incisive and cutting lyrics about female relationships that range from self-destructive ("I was fucking every girl who looked my way") to accusatory ("when you find a lover that you want to keep, I think you'll talk to her first, before you tell her you don't love her"). She bares her soul on the lyrics sheet, yet sings and mixes her vocals as if to obscure her words, often bending her syllables or burying them in the mix. Rather than alienating, however, the tactic proves engaging, as she makes the listener lean into the music and work to decipher it.
Most of the time it's well worth the effort, as Argote and her collaborators-- including guitar player Noah Howard and drummer Ashley Arnwine-- capture a loud sort of quiet, emphasizing the softer passages to give the abrasive moments more weight. It's most effective on "My Saddle Is Waiting (C'Mon Jump on It)", which begins with a gentle acoustic theme that repeats throughout the song. By the end, it has changed completely simply by juxtaposition to other melodies and motifs, and all the elements come together for an unexpectedly poignant finale. "Howard's Hour of Shower" is so spare that you can hear the speaker buzz behind her chiming guitars and vocals. On the other hand, "It's Only a Bargain If You Want It" churns stridently as the instruments grind against each other and Argote sings, "You will always be my girl." It's both reassuring and menacing-- a promise and a threat.
Listening to Fucker, it's difficult to discern Argote's intentions regarding that disconnect between the packaging and the music-- or if she even intended such a disconnect. The effect, however, is often intriguing, suggesting a sleight of hand that slyly upends listener expectations about the sound and politics of gender, sexuality, lust, love, and indie rock. To her credit, she never comes across as strictly political or academic, although surely she doesn't really buy into that title. Sinking the fucker is much too blunt; Des Ark rock with more nuance than that.


Island University Story: Selected Works is a condensed version of a three-cassette series that acts as a shadow narrative of Helado Negro's catalog, offering a gratifying variety of sounds and styles.

Helado Negro: Island Universe Story: Selected Works

Island Universe Story: Selected Works

When Roberto Lange performs as Helado Negro, there's not a lot to watch. He's an engaging singer and performer, but aside from the occasional knob tweak, his backing tracks stream from his laptop and assorted electronic gizmos with little intervention. Where another electronic musician might overcompensate with garish videos, Lange has come up with a curious, low-key solution that is a perfect fit for his curious, low-key music: He's flanked onstage by three figures who don't do much more than sway back and forth, ever so gently, dressed head to toe in tinsel. When your eye wanders from Lange's person, they're there to catch your gaze, reflecting the light like disco balls run through a shredder.
Those mute, cryptic figures make an appearance on Island Universe Story*: Selected Works*: Bits of their tinsel are mixed right into the clear vinyl on which the records are pressed. I like to think of the sparkly strands a little like religious relics, imbued with the aura of each show and each wearer. The unusual presentation suits the album, a condensed edition of Helado Negro's three-volume Island Universe Story cassette series, released between 2012 and 2014. The series is itself unusual. Lange has described its songs, which encompass a variety of experiments and one-off techniques, as a kind of shadow narrative within his catalog—not "outtakes or afterthoughts or byproducts or B-sides," but something "like the dark side of the moon: always present but… just out of sight."
Invisibility has always been of special interest to Lange, who was born in Florida to Ecuadorian immigrants and often sings, in Spanish and English, of slipping between worlds. His 2013 album was titled Invisible Life, and there's a song called "Invisible Heartbeat" on 2014's Double Youth**. On "We Will You," the first song on the new collection, he sings, "There's a future that doesn't see me." It's an immediate highlight of the record, with a deep-diving vocoder melody that recalls Basic Channel's underwater dub. "Enfocando" ("Focusing"), which follows, is another standout, with an odd collection of sounds—harpsichord-like synth melody, reggae-inspired guitar backbeat, jaunty whistling—that he rolls around like a palmful of jewel-toned baubles. "Enfocando," he sings, over and over, in his throaty almost-whisper, allowing each contrapuntal strand to zoom briefly into focus.
One of the stumbling blocks on Helado Negro's last two albums has been their relatively uniform palettes, so it's gratifying to hear him trying out so many different sounds and styles and moods here. Richmond, Virginia's Trey Pollard, a collaborator of Matthew E. White and Natalie Prass, lends watery pedal steel to "Mitad de Tu Mundo," a sort of ambient dub lullaby. "Stop Living Dead," which features Pollard's arrangements for string octet, has something of the dissonant, plastic feel of Arca's Mutant, as the acoustic source material is stretched into strange, synthetic shapes. "Enters," the album's most atypical cut, pairs major-key vocoder with 160-BPM electro rhythms, like a fuzzy Drexciyan daydream. And while most of the album is dominated by Lange's cool voice, which lingers over koan-like statements in a drowsy sing-song cadence, one of the album's most affecting tracks, "Detroit," is a slow-motion electro-funk instrumental where Lange's vocals are limited to background breaths and coos.
Yet Island Universe Story also coheres surprisingly well, given its scattered provenance. As a front to back listen, it may be more satisfying than any of his "real" albums. In a text accompanying the first cassette, Lange wrote of using the tapes to explore "subconscious whisperings, [a] deep labyrinth of dot-connecting"—a prescient approach, given the way that playlists, in the streaming era, have supposedly supplanted albums as the primary mode of long form listening. In putting together this Island Universe Story collection, Lange has made his own playlist of his subconscious whisperings, and it's the tinsel that serves as the connective tissue between them all.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit TLC’s classic second album, whose unapologetic femininity and low-key swagger made it a landmark of pop, R&B, and hip-hop.

CrazySexyCool

The original concept for CrazySexyCool was simple: Women contain multitudes. The title, an amalgamation of their personalities, was a way to subvert the public’s perception of each member: Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins as the “cool” one, Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas as the “sexy” seducer, and Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes herself supposedly “crazy.” She figured, rightfully, that each of them was all of those things at once. Straightforward enough—and yet some of the album’s male producers initially missed the point about the self as a many-layered construct. “They’d do a crazy song for me, a sexy song for Chilli, and a cool song for Tionne,” Left Eye told Vibe in 1994. “We had to explain that CrazySexyCool doesn’t just describe us individually. It describes all the parts of every woman.”
Each member of the Atlanta R&B trio had a distinct role, but the point was how they all came together. T-Boz was raspy and matter-of-fact, her jazz-like vocal style centering tone and swagger over power and clarity. Chilli was the closest to traditional R&B, imbuing their songs with quiet-storm sultriness. Left Eye was the rebellious poet who rapped, sang, and came up with many of their musical and visual concepts.
It was Left Eye who suggested the group pin condoms to their clothing and tape them over her own eyeglasses to promote safe sex, a laudable fashion statement that came to define their anything-goes credo as artists. As with their predecessors Salt-N-Pepa, none of TLC’s messaging in their songs, visuals, or outfits seemed scripted or telegraphed. Unlike in the typical girl group, no one member was ever elevated over another. Their individual styles merged seamlessly because they played off each other’s strengths, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Their 1992 debut album, Ooooooohhh... on the TLC Tip, presented the trio as sexual and independent twentysomething women who allowed themselves to be goofy, improper, and a little bit messy on their own terms. The critical success and triple-platinum sales of that album positioned TLC as role models for younger listeners and pop industry anarchists who pushed the fundamental truth that women have basic physical needs. In the video for “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg,” they fired water guns and sang about sexual autonomy while sporting bright, baggy jumpsuits and kooky Digital Underground-style puffy hats, making the case for sexual expression without suppression.
CrazySexyCool was slicker and more scandalous, smoothing out TLC’s approach without losing the tongue-in-cheek wit of the debut. Its songs emphasize not just sex but pleasure in all its many forms. It’s a liberating, multifaceted view that suggests sexy doesn’t have to be raunchy or explicit alone: It can manifest itself in the movement of a serpentine sax, or the way T-Boz whispers, simply, “Yes, it’s me again” at the beginning of “Creep” like it’s foreplay.
Released in November 1994, CrazySexyCool earned TLC two No. 1 hits, “Creep” and “Waterfalls,” and secured their current status as the highest-selling girl group of all time, having gone diamond with 10 million units sold in the U.S. by June 1996. TLC’s singular appeal wasn’t only from catchy hooks and savvy visuals: It was their organic way of touching on universal subjects like sex, self-love, and freedom with a certain ease and affability that made their music both exemplary and inviting.
While their more vocal-centric peers of the ’90s—SWV, En Vogue, Xscape—prioritized neatly stacked gospel harmonies and flat-out singing, TLC’s collective advantage was making real music in a pop space that more often presented girl groups as flawless, demure, coordinated confections. With its funky energy and mixture of singing and rapping, CrazySexyCool fit squarely between the year’s star-making R&B debuts by Brandy, Usher, and Aaliyah and the major first statements in hip-hop from the likes of Notorious B.I.G., Nas, and OutKast. Their signing to Babyface and Antonio L.A. Reid’s LaFace records had catapulted them to the forefront of Atlanta’s hip-hop and R&B scenes, and their crossover success carved space for labelmates like OutKast and Goodie Mob to be as weird and expansive as they wanted, and still make it pop.
Left Eye’s deftness as a rapper, and T-Boz’s talk-sing style, which flirted with rap cadences, provided all sorts of possibilities for producers like Jermaine Dupri and Sean “Puffy” Combs, two prominent officiants in the marriage between hip-hop and R&B. Rap bookends the album: Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest sets the tone on CrazySexyCool’s intro, kicking a cool 16 like a hype man warming up the crowd at a house party; and well before many listeners outside of Atlanta knew his name, TLC’s hometown peer André 3000 appears on the gloomy closing track “Sumthin’ Wicked This Way Comes.”
The lead single “Creep” was the first sign that TLC had discovered a more muted palette compared to the hyperactive sound of their debut. The song slinks in with a sample of Slick Rick’s “Hey Young World” as T-Boz presents the best and simplest solution to being cheated on: “So I creep/Yeah.” Her low, conversational register makes it sound like she’s got her feet kicked up in the recording booth and a cool mint in her mouth. She adds a slight vocal fry on the Babyface-produced “Diggin’ on You,” a subtly jazzy and easygoing love story about surrendering to the rizz. Left Eye blocks it instead on upbeat “Kick Your Game,” taking comedic turns as both the pursued and the pursuer over Jermaine Dupri’s signature bells-and-bounce production. Knowing that Left Eye once said she met her ex-boyfriend, NFL star Andre Rison, after he followed her in the club one night trying to holler, it’s hard not to hear the shade when she mentions a pickup line about making love on the 50-yard line.
T-Boz’s morning voice is supremely suited for the album’s overtly sexy songs, especially “Red Light Special,” a drawn-out tease over a spiraling string instrumental from Babyface, with sax notes snaking like they’re doing slow body rolls. She has a laid-back style of seduction, while Chilli sounds like she’s at the edge of ecstasy, a dynamic they also play with on “Let’s Do It Again.” What’s sexy is cool is silly and vice versa, even in passing moments, like the interlude where Chilli initiates a game of phone sex, only to end the call with a juvenile joke and a toilet flush. The only point seems to be that it thrills her, and that’s enough.
TLC’s go-to producer Dallas Austin said he wanted to “bring out the Prince side” of the group on the album, an influence felt in the slithering melodies and pure craving for sex. “Red Light Special” sounds like a straight-shooting sister to Prince’s tickling, moaning “International Lover,” with a similar crawling chord progression. Babyface produced the actual Prince cover: a rework of “If I Was Your Girlfriend” that T-Boz manipulates with a sly wink and a higher-than-usual vocal range. (Prince, who once called TLC his favorite group, granted his rare approval for the cover.) Prince’s original pines for the singer’s imagined intimacy between platonic female friends; TLC uses the more traditional meaning of girlfriend, twisting the original without losing its subversive spirits. “Case of the Fake People” is a similar whirlpool of funk, interpolating the O’Jays’ sweeping “Backstabbers” with boom-bap production from Austin and T-Boz and Chili’s voices swirling in and out of overlapping melodies.
T-Boz loved pointing out that Clive Davis, founder and then-president of LaFace’s parent label, Arista Records, initially hated the concept of “Waterfalls.” In fairness, it was an odd choice for a single: a cautionary tale about the HIV/AIDS epidemic and drug abuse that’s weighty in subject matter but weightless in execution, using lakes and waterfalls as a metaphor for slipping over the edge. The airy, warped production from OutKast producers Organized Noize sounds like actual carbonated water bubbles bursting on the track. It’s a wonder that the song worked, let alone topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart for seven weeks straight. But “Waterfalls” is a beauty, one that gets deep without drowning itself.
By the time T-Boz and Chilli started recording CrazySexyCool in the summer of 1994, Left Eye was spending time in court-ordered rehab after being indicted on a felony arson charge for setting fire to the home she shared with Rison, meaning she wasn’t as present for the sessions as on other TLC albums. She wrote and recorded her verse for “Waterfalls” during a two-hour break from the rehab center. Admiring the world around her in the car, she felt optimistic: “My life is 10 shades of gray/I pray all 10 fade away.” Left Eye, among hip-hop’s most agile lyricists, once said she never really distinguished between a rap and a poem. She rhymes from an almost childlike perspective here: innocent, curious, cocky, and mischievous. “Waterfalls” is as much Left Eye’s poetic opus as it is TLC’s career-defining record. In her limited appearances, she provides the album with many such small but potent pleasures, whether trading preacher-esque yelps with Busta Rhymes on “Can I Get a Witness (Interlude)” or rapping abstractly about whatever she wants to and somehow tying it back to the topic at hand on “Switch.”
Through TLC’s willingness to be anything—but themselves most of all—CrazySexyCool demonstrates that authenticity can be the driving force of a great pop record. That point still resonates nearly 30 years later in the work of artists inspired by TLC, including Kehlani, K-pop powerhouses BLACKPINK, and Cardi B, who referenced Left Eye’s arson charge on her debut album: “Smash your TV from Best Buy/You gon’ turn me into Left Eye.”
A year after the infamous fire, in a 1995 interview with the British weekly Melody Maker, Left Eye lamented that she felt like she’d earned a label as the “jealous, crazy bitch” while her ex came off clean. She rarely addressed the fire in interviews, and only spoke about it at length in the 2007 VH1 documentary The Last Days of Left Eye, released five years after she died in a car crash in Honduras, and assembled from video diaries recorded during her trip. As she explains in the doc: She came home late from a night of partying, she and Rison argued, and it got violent. After waking up to her bruised face in the mirror, she grabbed a stack of his Nike sneaker boxes and lit them on fire in their bathtub, unaware that the flames would spread and consume the home. It didn’t seem to matter to the public that Left Eye had previously filed an assault charge against Rison or that she later described him as jealous and controlling. All most people likely remember is that Left Eye burned down her NFL boyfriend’s property.
The record that may best encapsulate Left Eye’s fury and her vision for CrazySexyCool is a B-side that also appeared on a limited-edition bonus disc. “My Secret Enemy” is many things at once: dark, funny, fly, seductive, blunt, eerie, soft, bluesy. She raps with high-pitched vivacity about the weight of her past, telling her life story through poetry, examining her internal darkness, and slyly alluding to the fire: “Now as I look at myself, I’m seeing someone familiar/Staring back at me through every deep crack that’s in my mirror/And as I think to myself/I’m hearing somebody else scream at me.” The song ends with the voice of a newscaster who points out the hypocrisy of Left Eye’s ridicule in the media while Rison, with his history of alleged abuse, was still “regarded as America’s sports hero.” Then there’s T-Boz, in her low and scratchy cigarette drag of a voice, chiming in with background harmonies. She doesn’t overshadow Left Eye, just complements and supports her, finding and filling the rhythmic gaps in her bandmate’s slippery flow. As always, even when their approaches were divergent, TLC’s members worked together as one.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.


The debut album from Caracara—co-produced by former Modern Baseball frontman Jacob Ewald—is dynamic and diffuse, drawing on slowcore, gothic folk, post-hardcore, and more.

Summer Megalith

Early into the debut album from Caracara, frontman William Lindsay lands on a phrase that says a lot about Summer Megalith is a whole: “We felt the lack long after.” Catch that reference and it’s clear that post-hardcore outfit Pianos Become the Teeth is canon for Caracara—especially their beautifully battle-scarred early phase. But that concept of “the lack long after,” that emotional phantom limb syndrome, connects Caracara’s self-described “distorted emotional music” with the numerous other bands Summer Megalith evokes. They might call Wolf Parade, the Antlers, or the Twilight Sad—bands who in retrospect can be heard as emo covert ops—with grandiose, heart-rending, throat-shredding ambition, relentless and implacable in their yearning.
As such, they are not a band that has mastered a single, fully formed aesthetic. Summer Megalith is dynamic and diffuse: Bookended by acidic slowcore and lustrous, gothic folk, it deviates into D.C. post-hardcore and “The O.C.” soft-rock. If it comes off like a survey of every contemporary variant of modern emo, most of it emanates from Lindsay’s voice alone. Early dispatch “Crystalline” took on a whip-smart, nasal tone similar to former Modern Baseball frontman and Summer Megalith co-producer/mixer Jacob Ewald. Together, they slather the album in crackling midrange, making “Burn Me I’m Made of Matches” the most evocatively and accurately named track here. Their earlier single “Glacier” found Lindsay at his most agitated, choking out melodies like Cameron Boucher, the Sorority Noise frontman who is releasing this record on his Flower Girl label.
While stylistically shapeshifting on a track-by-track basis, Summer Megalith keeps a steady emotional center. “If this is being civil, I want to be evil, I want to destroy it all,” Lindsay sighs, his despondent melody doubled by moaning cello. He wants to be evil, but it’s just that—a want that he can’t afford. “At least I got to say that you were mine,” Lindsay mutters as his train leaves the U-Bahn station during “Prenzlauerberg,” doomed to watch a lover’s face endlessly fade out in a dim haze of dissipating memories, drugs, and streetlamps at 4 a.m. Meanwhile, when the guitars drop out on the chorus of “Pontchartrain,” his confessions break through the fog like a blast of cold water: “There’s no point in feeling pain/If you learn nothing.”
Given this unbearable weight of regret, it’s appropriate that the first half of Summer Megalith is filled by crescendos with no climax. “Evil” immolates for five minutes, leaving smoking husk; “Glacier” drops verse-chorus structure for an endlessly upward bridge, an impassioned smear of Mineral and M83. While Caracara’s desire to yearn in the most flamboyant and grand-scale manner stands out amid the Philadelphia house show circuit from which they were born, the production can occasionally feel mismatched. But those concerns are moot during the second half of Summer Megalith, where Caracara and Ewald prove capable of shaping some of the most immediately cathartic indie rock of recent times. “Oh Brother” initially feels like the centerpiece, rejuvenating 2010-era stylistic tics (clacking percussion, galloping folk rhythms, off-mic hollers) to comfort a disillusioned friend before a saxophone solo emerges from a sweltering post-rock coda. Either one would’ve been the most thrilling peak to that point.
Summer Megalith reaches its height on a song called, fittingly, “Apotheosis.” Over a lone guitar, the lyrics speak of broken homes, holy ghosts, a visit to a clinic during the “18th week of pregnancy,” and Lindsay makes a solemn promise to outlast the trauma: “When the world turns the rafters into splinters in our feet/You know that I'll stand by you the way that you stood by me.” The stakes are too high and the ambience too raw and cavernous for “Apotheosis” to stay this quiet for too long. When the guitars, drums, and horns finally do try to bring the house down, Lindsay holds his ground: “We’re created, we’re destroyed/Desperate and overjoyed/I don’t feel this way for anything.” When the time does come for Caracara to feel this way, they feel it all.


Because Dornik makes sumptuously arty R&B, he gets compared to Frank Ocean, the Weeknd, and Miguel, none of whom he is anything like. The debut album from Jessie Ware's touring drummer and labelmate ably conjures substance out of sheer gorgeous style.

Dornik

Jessie Ware might seem an unlikely tastemaker: an artist who exemplifies hushed, unshowy restraint, unassuming craft over buzz. So it only makes sense that the colleagues she has attracted work in a similarly low key. Her labelmates on PMR Records include producer Julio Bashmore, who’s quietly become an innovator in a genre full of professional Xeroxers; Jai Paul, who’s known for compelling music that’s barely released; and Dornik Leigh, Ware’s tour drummer, who’s since embarked on a solo career as languidly paced as his music. Lead single "Something About You" came out in 2013 and already sounded timeless, or more precisely out of time: lovelorn neo-soul that shimmers like a late-summer mirage. Subsequent singles "Drive" and "Stand in Your Line" were much the same, and two years later, Leigh’s proper debut *Dornik—*named for his parents, Dorothy and Nick—already sounds lived-in.
It’s hard to hear about Dornik without soon after hearing about his resemblance to Michael Jackson. The comparison is fair—Dornik, like many, idolizes the King of Pop, and does resemble Michael vocally, albeit a less hysteric, more quavery version. (And hey, Dornik is a more compelling idea of Michael x 2015 than Xscape was.) Because Dornik makes sumptuously arty R&B, he also gets the Big Three R&B Comparisons almost every time: Frank Ocean, the Weeknd, and Miguel, none of whom he is anything like. Better comparisons might be Maxwell circa BLACKsummer’s night, or Dev Hynes, or mid-'90s Sade and Everything But the Girl, or for that matter Ware herself. Often, Dornik evokes the brooding side of early-'90s R&B: the cascading-waterfall SFX, reverbed woodwinds, and fuzzy guitar that appear throughout, the haze of synth pads that hangs over most of the album, Dornik’s preference for retrofuturist sounds over modern.
All this moodiness is in service of something specific: Dornik rivals E•MO•TION for the year’s most crushed-out album; it’s as if Ware’s "Imagine It Was Us" was an entire album of longing bliss. "Blush" is full of little synth twinkles and dazed guitar tumbles that sound like smiles creeping upon a lover’s face. "Mountain" is an uncannily accurate reproduction of the feeling of lying side-by-side with someone in a meadow by a quarry. "Stand in Your Line" might have been an insufferable friend-zone lament from another artist ("I joke and call you my girl, then you smile and you laugh and you call me your boyfriend—oh, if this were true"), but Dornik offers a vocal earnest enough and an arrangement luxuriant enough to hush any complaints. Even the more combative tracks sound as if an hour or kind word would sweep him right back into a swoon. The lyrics rarely transcend pillow talk, but it hardly matters; Dornik leaves the poetry to the arrangements.
All this makes Dornik easy to get lost in—and also, to lose track of. Extending "Imagine It Was Us" to album length is an amazing idea in theory, but in practice hypnotic becomes narcotic. The sequencing is curious: singles toward the end, midtempo mood pieces toward the front; it makes otherwise sumptuous tracks sound samey, and when Dornik tries to inject levity (the singsong "Chain Smoke"), it makes for a jolting, unwelcome distraction. In a way, though, even this fits: the album’s like a fog one can drift in and out of for however many exquisite minutes. There are points in summer and in love when nothing else will do.


The deep cauldron of metal, prog, and doom influences have so far been a key to Pallbearer's greatness, but their third record fails to piece it all together. They have run up against their limits.

Heartless

Rising metal stars Pallbearer have an unlikely fusion of influences: melancholic doom, prog that’s more ’80s slick than ’70s technical, and a touch of Boston’s hyper-produced hard rock. One couldn’t have predicted they would go from cult metal festivals like Rites of Darkness to Bonnaroo in a few years. Pallbearer should be commended for making it this far with their sound, but Heartless, their third record, shows that they have run up against their limits.
Album opener “I Saw the End” is similar to Foundations of Burden’s “The Ghost I Used to Be,” Pallbearer’s first realization that they could take their heavy sound and mold it into something catchy. Those often opposite attributes are sharpened and condensed, especially when guitarist Devin Holt rips into his solo at the end. They covered Type O Negative’s “Love You to Death” on last year’s Fear and Fury EP, and in “The End” they’ve mastered Kenny Hickey’s layered, warm goth-metal soloing. Combined with their Pallbearer’s love of Pink Floyd, they’ve reaffirmed prog’s role into metal, especially Rush’s cerebral rocking.
Heartless could use more of that inspiration. They’ve become their own worst enemy by writing meandering tracks that betray their prog loftiness and their innate need to crush. “Thorns” attempts to light the same fire as “The End” and exhausts itself as it goes on. “Lie of Survival” and “Dancing in Madness” are worse offenders, as both build towards nothing and use doom as a crutch, rather than as a starting point. In the past, weighty sorrow poured out; here, it’s strained, slow for the sake of slow. Background synths don’t add anything to these songs, and they also don’t get across bassist Joseph Rowland’s infatuation with krautrock. The beginning of “Dancing” is ripe for more active electronics, some series of Tangerine Dream-like arpeggios, something to break up the monotony that was once so rich. Pallbearer are not shredders or speed demons; any slight dip in momentum is fatal, and those two tracks shoot Heartless down. It hasn’t worked against them before, as they were adapting doom into prog’s confines, but this record doesn’t move that concept forward.
“Cruel Road” awakens Heartless from its stupor by taking a lumbering approach to theatrical metal. “Road” moves like a King Diamond song in its succession: a brooding intro, rising hysterics, a dip into neoclassical melodies, then another climatic spike to close the song. Overt dramatics are something Pallbearer hasn’t worked with before, and it feels a lot fresher than most of the record. The common line between “I Saw the End” and “Cruel Road” is Pallbearer falter less when they break out from their gloomy template. “A Plea For Understanding” is the longest and most somber track on Heartless, and perhaps its best, with a lighter take on doom. Holt and Campbell’s shimmering cleans really carry that mournful feeling “Dancing” and “Lie” struggle to convey, and Campbell’s vocals have never soared higher. “A Plea” is such a chore to get to, and it’s too bad Heartless is more defined by its bookends.
I recently saw Pallbearer perform in Austin, and Rowland was brimming with energy, acting almost as a hype man, and Holt found a new ecstatic height in his soloing. They brought an arena liveliness to a sound that requires patience. “The End” benefitted from this invigorated band, and there’s good to reason to think it will become a staple of their sets. Bringing it live is still crucial to metal success, and on that front they are ready to ascend to the next level. That doesn’t translate on Heartless, where too much space is squandered.


Over the years, director John Carpenter has created classic film scores for films like Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13. Lost Themes is his first standalone album and his darkly atmospheric style is intact.

Lost Themes

Since his career began in the mid-1970s, John Carpenter has been responsible for an admirable run of well-loved science fiction and horror films. Many of his features had low budgets but a lot of style. They were dark, dystopian, and violent (though seldom gory), with plots that glued together genre conventions drawn from westerns, '50s monster flicks, and exploitation cinema. His best movies—Halloween, Escape From New York, and Assault on Precinct 13, to name a few—have transcended cult-classic status. For the type of people who read Fangoria magazine, these are all-time hall-of-famers and required midnight movie viewing for virtually anybody else.
In addition to writing and directing, Carpenter also composed the scores for a number of his films. Working primarily with synthesizers, he crafted minimalist music that perfectly matched the eerie vibe of his pictures. These scores have proven at least as influential as the films they accompanied. Over the years, they have been studied by countless electronic musicians, dance producers, and general weirdos, who continue to find inspiration in the director’s ability to marry mechanical orchestration and highly emotive melodies.
Released by Sacred Bones, Lost Themes is Carpenter’s first standalone record. It is not a collection of cues, but a set of independent compositions that echo the sinister tones of the director’s film work. Each track is a sort of mini-score unto itself, shuffling a theme through a variety of moods and variations. To call Lost Themes a John Carpenter solo album is a bit misleading, though. The record is a collaborative effort that was casually jammed into existence by the director, his son Cody (of the band Ludrium), and godson Daniel Davies. As a result, if you’re coming to Lost Themes looking for the vintage Carpenter sound, you will have to adjust your expectations a little.
Horror and sci-fi films are where the techniques and sounds of 20th century avant-garde music—electronic composition, tape music, atonal harmonies—found practical use in the mainstream world. Dissonant sounds slot well into these kinds of stories because they effectively convey shock and alienation. And it doesn't hurt that they're easy to generate with minimal resources. All you really needed to start with was one long, sustained, eerie and suspense-generating minor chord.
Carpenter's scores blended experimental ideas with simple but solid melodies. Having limited skills as a musician, the director made innovative use of technology—mainly synthesizers and drum machines—to generate epic sounds on a thin budget. Most importantly, he allowed synthesizers to sound like synthesizers, rather than trying to pass them off as a budget orchestra. These warbly alien squiggles and pulsing bass tones imbued his melodies with a distinctively robotic touch.
Because these machines were time consuming to set up and program, the director had to adopt a spare style, which he often put to brilliant use. Some scores, like Carpenter's collaboration with composer Alan Howarth on Halloween III, were composed on synthesizers as the film was being played back live, which gave them a drifty and improvisatory feel. These instruments played a large role in Carpenter's aesthetic, but he never seemed wedded to vintage gear. As the times changed, so did his instrumentation, and by the '90s, Carpenter's scores had lost a bit of their grit and otherworldliness.
Lost Themes was composed using the computer-based sequencing software Logic Pro, and it sounds quite different from his analog synth-driven works. The keyboards are brighter and more video-gamey. On some songs, this doesn’t matter so much. From its first piano tones, "Vortex" is immediately recognizable as Carpenter’s work. If the director has a defining go-to gesture, it’s the pulsing synthesized bass tone, the beating of a single repeating note that provides a foundation for plaintive chords and hazy keyboard leads. It provides the bedrock for the Assault on Precinct 13 theme and also the soundtrack to Escape From New York. Fittingly, it is the central ingredient on "Vortex", which opens Lost Themes.
Other times, though, the details seem more haphazard. In Lost Themes’ lesser moments—"Obsidian" and "Domain"—it sounds as if the pair are trying to evoke dread and awe using keyboard presets borrowed from Kraftwerk-goes-Christmas holiday electro ensemble, Mannheim Steamroller.
The main thing that’s missing, though, is a movie. Carpenter’s classic scores were filled with silence and space out of necessity. Film cues needed to stay simple and retain a consistent mood so as not to overpower the on-screen imagery, which relieved a lot of the director’s music from the need for formal structure. Unshackled from that restraint, Carpenter and his collaborators have created a set of recordings that are very ornate and dense. They shift moods frequently, segueing between eerie drones and heavy rock. At times, the album is a bit reminiscent of the Italian prog rock band, Goblin, who also composed horror film scores. This doesn’t make it bad, but it does make it a very different kind of listen. And ultimately, it's a less distinctive one. The eerie and empty vibe-outs that made up Carpenter scores like Halloween III and Prince of Darkness left a lot of room for imagination. They imparted scant information—just heavy atmosphere and mood that oozed out of the speakers like, well, the fog from The Fog and ultimately seeded creativity and invention that had little to do with the films they were made to accompany. Lost Themes is plenty dark and heavy but shorter on inspiration.


This project's generic-sounding alias obscures the fact that it is a collaboration between Alvin Aronson and Galcher Lustwerk. Their combined sensibilities yield a sumptuous techno LP. These are not so much songs as spatial fields: You enter and walk around, admiring the ingenious architecture.

Scenes 2012-2015

Like a lot of things related to White Material, the vinyl-only New York techno label founded by DJ Richard and Young Male, Studio OST's debut album deliberately keeps a low profile. The unassuming title, Scenes 2012-2015, suggests a hodgepodge; it also suggests that the material inside is old news (and there's nothing worse in electronic music, which is generally thought to evolve at lightning speed). Likewise, the project's generic-sounding alias, with its air of anonymous work-for-hire, sounds less like an artist's name than an obscure bit of metadata, and it leaves out any indication that White Material's Alvin Aronson and Galcher Lustwerk are involved, despite the substantial weight that the latter's name carries as one of the most hotly buzzed-about artists in recent underground American dance music.
But Scenes 2012-2015, which the two RISD grads recorded over three years in a handful of home studios around New York, is no hodgepodge. It's a proper album—the kind that conventional wisdom says that dance music is no good at producing. It's got a beginning, a middle, and an end, and its A and B sides tell slightly different stories; it's meant to be listened to in one sitting, all the way through. And while the album's nine tracks are plenty diverse, encompassing ambient sketches, techno and electro patterns pitched at a wide range of tempos, and even a flickering, 144-BPM study in juke's full-throttle skip, they're also unusually cohesive. They make do with a pared-down set of sounds that give the impression of coming from a modest set of gear, and they avoid samples, advanced digital sound design, and intricate computer trickery in favor of long, linear synthesizer and drum machine patterns, loosely and elegantly woven together. The palette is muted but not self-consciously lo-fi, and the mood oscillates between dreamy and melancholy, though not without a playful undercurrent.
Unlike Lustwerk's music, all nine tracks are instrumental, aside from the occasional garbled hint of ring-modulated speech buried deep in the mix, like an intercepted transmission from across the cosmos. The two musicians' respective styles surface in shifting proportions: "Above the Waves," with its squelchy funk bass and almost jazzy Rhodes keys, recalls Lustwerk's solo productions; "ITCZ," a fuzzed-out daydream for wispy chords and a clunky vintage CR-78 drum machine, shares the hazy vibes of Aronson's "Fog City," from last year's City EP. What predominates is their shared appreciation for ’90s electronic music: Much of the album brings to mind the sound of R&S Records and its Apollo sub-label from the mid ’90s, when artists like Ken Ishii and Biosphere were fusing ambient and techno in exciting ways. "Session" has the crisp, sparkling quality of artists like Morgan Geist and Titonton Duvanté; the stunning "Whitesands," which closes the album with a moody swirl of plangent fifths and crunchy percussion, might be a lost Aphex Twin or Autechre demo circa 1994.
The centerpieces of the album are "ITCZ" and "Unnatural City," which spin mechanical clatter, shimmering chords, and deep-diving bass frequencies—in the latter, there's no bassline to speak of, just an 808 kick plunging unfathomably low—into sedate, hypnotic configurations. "ITCZ," rolling out ceaseless son clave rhythms, is plodding and steady, while "Unnatural City" moves at a fleet, rolling clip, but what they share in common is an unusual balance between stasis and dynamism. No single element dominates; every sound has equal weight, from quicksilver pings to chalky snares. They're not so much songs as spatial fields: You enter and walk around, admiring the ingenious architecture, and five minutes later, you leave—albeit somewhat reluctantly. But Aronson and Lustwerk are smart enough to know when to hold back, and as a result, they've come up with one of the year's most generously proportioned techno long-players—one far more sumptuous than its modest profile would ever suggest.


With contributions from Hudson Mohawke, Kode9, the Field, Gang Gang Dance's Brian Degraw, and Eye from the Boredoms, this varied remix set plays up the humorous and party-starting aspect of Battles' personality.

Dross Glop

Watching Battles play on a stage over a lake in France at two in the morning last summer, you could see that they had transformed into a full-blown party band. You could see it in the way Ian Williams was moving in between two keyboards, his porn star moustache twitching, in how Dave Konopka playing with hunched intensity. And then there was John Stanier, destroying the drums in a way that said, "I could definitely kill a man with these hands."
Everyone knows by now that Tyondai Braxton left on bad terms in the middle of making what became Battles' second album, Gloss Drop, and that the remaining members were forced to redefine what the group meant for themselves and for their audience. They managed it admirably, with the shaky live shows at the start of the cycle morphing into unequivocally brilliant outings such as the above-- all of which makes it interesting to wonder why a remix album distorting the band's identity 12 different ways seemed the logical next step.
Each member of Battles has said in interviews that there's a version of Gloss Drop that will never see the light of day. It's an album built on possibilities, one that had a number of distinct incarnations prior to the one we know, which in itself possesses at least three outward personalities. In his review of Gloss Drop, Jess Harvell commented on the album's propensity for pitching virtuosity against silliness, and blurring the lines between human and machine sounds, which are relationships explored-- and sometimes to really great effect—on Dross Glop, this intriguing, rewarding remix collection.
It's an obvious point than when stood against a number of minimal techno rejigs of the source material, it's the playful, borderline daft moments that stand out the most, riding the gamut from fun to flipping nuts. At the milder end of the scale, there's Hudson Mohawke's take on "Rolls Bayce", an unexpectedly soft and emotive take from the Glasgow producer. He plays on the prettier, chiming parts of the original, buffering the steel drum warmth with pillows of sustained, complementing pastel synths. Hyperdub's Kode9 turns "Africastle" into a seven-minute, house-focused mini set of sorts, fizzing and grinding ominously before slamming into a kind of chiptune dancehall dance party. Most strikingly fun of all is Gang Gang Dance's Brian Degraw's reworking of "Ice Cream". In one interview, Ian Williams said that the original reminded him of a Bollywood song before Matias Aguayo's vocals were involved, and here, it's a strutting global magpie, stuttering with rudimentary synths that you might hear at an Omar Souleyman show, dallying with a little dancehall, and ending with Aguayo's sexy grunts looped to lunacy.
While Pat Mahoney (LCD Soundystem) and Dennis McNany's version of the Gary Numan-featuring "My Machines" isn't as nakedly playful as the aforementioned, it's one of a handful of tracks here that amplifies Battles' renowned humorous streak. An itchy stomp at the beginning, by the end it's a distant cousin of Moroder's disco work, where it's not hard to imagine Numan busting out the chorus of "I feeeeeel looooove." Shabazz Palaces turn "White Electric" into a coolly loping presence, repurposing the song's bass into what sounds like a horn section, again blurring that line between organic and synthesized sounds. Even though The Alchemist's interpretation of "Futura" is ominous, hanging heavily around a Dilla-style beat, his inclusion of one of science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's famous quotations feels knowing and delivered with a raised eyebrow, all things considered: "If a futurist could, by some miracle, predict the future, his prediction would sound so absurd and so far fetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn."
In contrast to this collection's more boisterous efforts, it would be easy to overlook some of the subtler, more cerebral moments here, one of the finest examples of which comes with the Field's remix of "Sweetie and Shag". Axel Willner's last album, Looping State Of Mind, was his most varied collection yet, but this redux is disarmingly simple, paring the chiming, furious clank of the original down to something many half-lives removed, recalling the sense of decay that Willner demonstrated on "Then It's White"; Kazu Makino's vocal turn is reduced to a series of gasps in among tight snares. At their finest, these quieter moments touch on the emotive slant of Hudson Mohawke's remix: Qluster's "Dominican Fade" pairs prim horns with beautiful organ glimmers, sounding nothing like the source material but no worse for it. The same can't be said for Kangding Ray's "Toddler", which is four minutes longer than the original, sounds nothing like it, and resembles a steady, dull rave on an active helipad at its most exciting; elsewhere, Gui Boratto's "Wall Street" feels blocky in comparison to the way some of these remixes play with differing tempos, like the anxiously palpitating grind of Silent Servant's "Inchworm".
While a few songs here feel like very distant relations of the originals that inspired them, there's only one remix present that lives up to the full inversion promised by the album's title: unsurprisingly, that comes from Boredoms' Eye, enlisted to remix his own Gloss Drop appearance, "Sundome". Where the original was neatly sparkling and contained in its final bout of explosiveness, Eye's own version is elephantine, blown out, and cacophonous, with his tentacular mind throwing all sense of structure against the wall. It's a thrilling look inside his brain, a microcosmic version of this peep under the hood that Battles have allowed with Dross Glop, showing off the constituent parts that now make their machine a smooth, assured, and always giddily exciting ride.