On this collaborative album, Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick teams with twin-brother jazz duo the Mattson 2. The trio swings between lucidity and lunacy and back again.

Chaz Bundick Meets the Mattson 2: Star Stuff

Star Stuff

The first words we hear Chaz Bundick sing on his latest release are: “I think I’ve gone and lost my mind.” But they don’t so much set the tone for the record as reaffirm what’s been made obvious. We’re no less than three songs and 13 minutes in before we hear Bundick utter that introductory address—and all the psych-jazz jamming that preceded it already proved we’re dealing with a wandering mind that does not want to be found.
As Toro Y Moi, Bundick has always possessed the sort of voice that sounds like it could float off and dissolve into the ether at any moment. But his production has kept it contained. Whether it’s the hazy hip-hop beats of 2010’s Causers of This, the rubbery funk of 2011’s Underneath the Pine, or the space-age power pop of 2015’s What For?, Bundick prefers to do his tripping in controlled environments. Even his recent concert album—normally a forum where artists let loose—exhibited all the formality of a science-lab experiment. Last year’s Live From Trona should have been Toro Y Moi’s Pink Floyd: Live At Pompeii move, a performance recorded in the middle of the California desert for an audience of none. Instead, the isolated setting sun-baked the aqueous qualities of his music into a dry precision
But there was one great exception: The hands-down highlight of the Trona performance was a new song called “JBS” that saw Bundick backed by the Mattson 2, a twin-brother jazz duo he had met by chance in 2014. Framed by a beautiful fading sunset of a guitar riff, “JBS” initially unfurls like an early ’70s reverie from the Shuggie Otis playbook. But when Bundick’s sad-sack narrator says, “I think I’ll stay inside,” it’s an invitation for the trio to go further out, triggering an extended guitar odyssey that channels all the tension and anxiety underpinning Bundick’s plainspoken lyrical laments.
Where it represented a detour on Trona, “JBS” now grounds Bundick’s album-length collaboration with the Mattsons, recorded just before their desert dalliance. And the song’s opening rumination on psychosis proves highly symbolic of an album that swings between lucidity and lunacy and back again. After a minute of tranquil, Feels-esque ambiance, “Sonmoi” is violently overturned by Bundick’s intruding guitar solo, which sets the trio off on an acid-rock excursion. The track brings to mind Hendrix’s final frontiers, or Santana circa Caravanserai, but Bundick isn’t one to put on a shredding clinic—he plays a more reactive role to the Mattsons, tastefully layering his lines or unleashing percussive pricks to bolster their grooves.
In moments like these, Star Stuff provides a snapshot of players still getting to know each other, and in some cases, rushing to hash out ideas in their limited recording windows. The downtempo psych-soul strut “A Search” is embellished by Bundick’s wordless, one-man-Beach Boys harmonies, but when he starts humming over his phased-out guitar line, it’s like he’s laying down a guide vocal for as-yet unwritten lyrics. And on “Steve Pink,” the trio flirt with fusion, pitting a wah-wahed refrain against a stuttering rhythm—but the track manages to come off as overly busy yet too restrained at the same time.
Star Stuff’s best stuff follows the example set by “JBS,” when the trio approximate the sound of a radio dial in 1973 that’s shifting at random between AM pop stations and freeform FM frequencies. The title track is the album’s most focussed statement, with Bundick’s uncharacteristically dramatic vocal fending off string swirls over a bongo-powered backbeat. The instrumental “Cascade” syncs up fret-work contortions to a tropical funk thrust like a Brazilian answer to Yes. And the eight-minute epic “Don’t Blame Yourself” is effectively a late-album sequel to “JBS,” answering that song’s self-pity with self-help. “Everybody goes through it, too,” Bundick sings with sage-like calm, “Don’t just think it’s only for you/Upset over what has been done/Don’t you blame yourself.” To honor that therapeutic mission statement, the song’s celestial prog-jazz sway starts to fade in and out, as if submerging itself repeatedly in an isolation tank.
Of course, as “Don’t Blame Yourself” illustrates in its dying minutes, Chaz Bundick Meets the Mattson 2 wouldn’t be a proper improv side-project without at least one baptism by drum solo. But even in its most indulgent turns, Star Stuff serves its purpose: After making an overly disciplined live album for zero spectators, it’s refreshing to hear Bundick really jam like no one’s looking.


The Frank Ocean collaborator lays his hard drive bare, pulling back the curtain to reveal the scattered pieces of recorded music littering his cutting-room floor.

Vegyn: Text While Driving If You Want to Meet God

Never one to pass up an opportunity to self-aggrandize, Kanye West famously immortalized his work ethic on his debut album. “You can't fathom my love, dude,” he declared. “Lock yourself in a room doing five beats a day for three summers… I deserve to do these numbers.” It’s an axiom that’s motivated countless would-be artists in the decade and a half since: You want to be as good as Kanye? Put your nose to the grindstone and eventually you’ll get there. Even if the stuff you make is middling, nobody will hear it but you. Unless you want them to.
Text While Driving If You Want to Meet God!, a 71-track collection of bits and beats from Frank Ocean collaborator Vegyn, lays his hard drive bare. It’s a showcase of interesting drafts; an honest recording of the London multi-hyphenate’s musical trials since the relatively concise (but similarly cheeky) All Bad Things Have Ended—Your Lunch Included in 2014. Only a handful of songs reach the two-minute mark, and their nonsensical, diaristic titles suggest a busy artist tapping in the first phrase that comes to mind.
Throughout the largely instrumental Text, the artist born Joe Thornalley toys with ambient, hip-hop, and dramatically sound-stretched electronica. Vegyn also explores emotive ’80s synths and electric pianos, an affinity he shares with countless other producers looking to tap into that classic Vangelis magic. He writes crystalline arpeggios, invoking Nobuo Uematsu and other great video game composers, while his drums, if they’re present at all, rarely impose. The lack of structure makes Text even more of a mood record, something to put on in the background of a low-key gathering that won’t distract from conversation.
There are moments of brilliance, like the woozy twinkles on “Try and Do a Cd After That (132 Bpm),” the electric piano melancholia of “Sadly Does It (123 Bpm),” or the interplay of guitar and drums on “Save Yall Ready Know What It Is 003 (138 Bpm),” which evokes one of Vegyn’s best Endless contributions, “Slide on Me.” While the music is hardly uninspired, the abundance of micro-exercises highlights just how prosaic even the most beautiful chords can be when, given no purpose within the context of a song, they’re teased out and left to dry.
There isn’t much polish to be found here, either. Mastering levels can vary dramatically from track to track, forcing the listener to continuously reach for the volume, and the alphabetical sorting—an inherent result of the album’s framing as a track dump—makes sequencing moot. That’s sort of the point. This is raw Vegyn: an artist pulling back the curtain to reveal the scattered pieces of recorded music littering his cutting-room floor. Like the recent Radiohead OK Computer leaks, Text reveals genre-spanning influences and methodologies. Vegyn is clearly a gifted producer and an inventive arranger. What remains to be seen is whether he can focus those promising creative energies to deliver songs that are less fleeting.


Sorority Noise know brutal honesty can be uncomfortable, but they employ it so well on their latest album, a rafter-reaching emo record about the raw stages of grief and loneliness.

Sorority Noise: You're Not As _____ As You Think

You're Not As _____ As You Think

Numerous oft-quoted studies have equated a sleepless night with being legally drunk: you get the lowered inhibitions, impaired decision making, and depressed functionality, all without any of the buzz. And so Cameron Boucher’s first lyric on Sorority Noise’s third LP explains a lot of what’s to come: “This last week/I’ve slept eight hours total.” From that point forward, You’re Not As _____ As You Think tries to rouse itself from that despondency the best way Sorority Noise knows how: towering twin guitar leads, blinding bursts of distortion, instantly quotable lyrics where the vocals jump up an octave. It’s the kind of record that would be called “triumphant” if Boucher was in a position to enjoy any of it.
The title of Sorority Noise’s 2015 breakthrough Joy, Departed now carries unfortunate foreshadowing. In its wake, “a lot” of Boucher’s friends took their own lives by way of heroin or suicide and they were memorialized on 2016’s It Kindly Stopped for Me EP. Sounding like he’d slept eight hours in the past six months, Boucher’s register rarely left a conversational baritone, with offhand lyrics and monologues laid over incidental guitar and piano, almost avant-garde in its unguarded immediacy. Later that year, Boucher’s pre-Sorority Noise outfit Old Gray reformed for the blood-chilling Slow Burn: its scalding, minute-long screamo outbursts were the polar opposite of It Kindly Stopped for Me, but it had the same white-knuckled edge to confronting death and addiction, too emotionally drained to be anything less than direct.
You’re Not As opener “No Halo” finds the exact midpoint between these two projects and points Sorority Noise in a bold new direction. Boucher has never been more in command of melody while in his lower register or while inhabiting his hardcore roots. But even as the band makes one last surge towards catharsis before collapsing in an exhausted heap, there’s no relief: An organ drone fades out and the next song begins with Boucher muttering, “I’ve been feeling suicidal.” Similar to Modern Baseball and Julien Baker—quoted in succession on “A Better Sun”—Sorority Noise’s rise in stature has coincided with an increased candor about depression and advocacy for mental health treatment, confronting the sadboy caricature that still threatens to define this scene from the outside. The songs are in part Boucher's attempt to eliminate the distance between himself and the listeners and show they’re all in this together.
Similar to Modern Baseball’s Holy Ghost, You’re Not As rushes headlong through the outside hype and internal strife, streamlining their sound rather than expanding upon it. Joy, Departed was rife with orchestral swells, florid poetry, and obtuse song titles—the sort of things that pop-punk bands typically adopt to tell fans and the world at large know they’re trying to be taken seriously. But those didn’t play to their strengths, and it was only in a live setting that Sorority Noise discovered their best selves: windmilling on Gibson Explorers, letting the crowd take over during the climactic lyrics of “Using,” creating something close to group therapy.
The bulk of You’re Not As is designed for that exact purpose. Boucher nicks lyrics from his friends on “A Better Sun” and flatly states, “This is the part where I did cocaine to impress every one of my mouth-breathing friends.” And then comes a goddamn pick slide. Out of context, it’s a throwback to any number of post-Weezer ironists flooding the Buzz Bin, but it’s borne of the introspection that reveals how abject misery can become as routine as an office job. A pick slide as a rote gesture. Meanwhile, the midsection of “Disappeared,” “Car,” and “Where Are You?” eliminate any melody that wouldn't qualify as a hook. They rush as quickly as possible to the part that might give someone a sense of comfort in tragedy, or at least the understanding of what it might feel like to start losing friends in your early 20s. Boucher repeatedly chooses urgency over artifice: “You say there’s a god/You say you’ve got proof/Well I’ve lost friends to heroin/So what’s your god trying to prove?” It’s a lyric he might’ve been tempted to obscure or reword on Joy, Departed, and while the blunt immediacy of You’re Not As can occasionally come off as awkward, the discomfort of honesty is easier to handle than forced poetry.
In the same way that Joy, Departed tried to remove both the stigma and seduction surrounding depression, death isn’t glamorized in either direction here. All the albums about death from Sorority Noise’s peer group (Sprained Ankle, Home, Like NoPlace Is There, Stage Four) tend to be really fucking serious. Sorority Noise have that capability; producer Mike Sapone’s impact emerges during the slower numbers, as “First Letter From St. Sean” and “Leave the Fan On” recreate the desolate spaces of Brand New’s “Jesus” in miniature. The song structures become more compact, the concerns more corporeal.
You’re Not As might be something closer to emo’s Tonight’s the Night, a matter-of-fact, insomniac wake for those who died too young by their own hand. “I’ve got friends who’ve died, but everything’s going to be be alright,” Boucher sings on “Where Are You?” and if he doesn’t actually believe it in the moment, the show must still go on. During another restless night in the van on “Car,” Boucher muses, “It’s not ideal, but I’ve never felt more alive” and the glimmer of hope in those words feels earned. Hearing these lyrics yelled back at him as a show of solidarity might finally allow him to rest easy.


The West L.A. rapper attempts to broaden his sound on his latest album, a breezy collection of songs that combines low-key anecdotes with hard-won wisdom.

I Don’t Tap In or Tap Out

Big Sad 1900 raps about neighborhood tensions and everyday escapades with the hindsight of a character having a flashback at the beginning of a movie. His stories take place in and around West L.A.’s La Cienega Heights, and if you listen to him enough you can map out bits and pieces of the area without ever going there. On his breakout singles (2019’s “Therapy” and 2020’s “La Cienega Heights”), he reflects on brawls outside of Joe’s Market where he used to mob out in front of, paranoid trips to East L.A., lost loved ones, and recurrent jail stints. But the point of his writing is less about the action of these anecdotes and more about the hard lessons he has learned from them. It gives his music a wistful tone that has made him stand out in a crowded L.A. rap scene.
For a while now, Big Sad has laid down tales full of life and memories on tight collaborative mixtapes with a single producer. In the last two years, he’s had projects entirely produced by G-funk inspired beatmakers like Uce Lee, Cypress Moreno, 420Tiesto, and Steelz. They consistently give his tapes a cohesive and low stakes feel, and he attempts to shake this sound up on his latest album I Don’t Tap In or Tap Out. It’s more intentional, for better and for worse.
I Don’t Tap In or Tap Out isn’t a major label rap debut, but it does have the shape of one. Scattered throughout the 13 tracks are attempts to broaden his sound. It is a goal that could be read as ambitious but I think it’s cliché. On “Chapter 16,” we get the obligatory R&B hook by guest vocalist Yvbaby, whose bad singing is made worse by AutoTune. On “Ghetto Barbie,” Big Sad takes a swing at a love song, which seems unnecessary; he’s always been capable of weaving realistic-sounding Baby Boy-lite relationship details into his lyrics. (Here, he tells generic tales about Netflix and chilling and Dr. Miami visits.) But given the condensed structure of the record, these misses feel more like one-offs.
Despite the darkness of Big Sad’s stories, the producers here share a chill-sounding West Coast feel that gives the tape a breezy atmosphere. One of the best is the Uce Lee-produced “Let’s Get It Poppin,” where Big Sad raps about finding music with a sigh of relief (“Niggas mad I bossed up and got it poppin’/And be rappin’ about my life and make a profit”) over an old-school groove. 420Tiesto smoothly chops up a vocal sample on “Big Dogs,” and it’s the perfect backdrop for Big Sad and P4k, the star of L.A.’s red-hot Baby Stone Gorillas crew, to talk tough. On the bouncy “So What,” Big Sad is a little more upbeat, recounting melancholy club nights over bright percussion.
Big Sad still has plenty of room to grow. “Therapy 2,” combines his best traits (the ultra-specific details and deep introspection) with his worst (the song could use a switch up in flow and lyrics that go beyond his clear-eyed monologue). Once he figures out his strengths, he’ll be more than a great storyteller, he’ll be a really good rapper, too.


Three rarities collections by the pioneering English band offer a small survey of their evolution from a conventional pop outfit to psych visionaries.

Broadcast: Maida Vale Sessions / Microtonics / Mother Is the Milky Way

Trish Keenan was a woman out of time and between frequencies. In promotional and live concert photos, the Broadcast singer’s likeness was abstracted, fragmented, and awash in projection, shot through with an arsenal of visual effects that channeled the experimental art of Brion Gysin, Dora Maar, and Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. With her severe black fringe and starch white tunic, Keenan could even resemble a photo negative version of Nico. But where Nico came to resent her beauty and actively sought to subvert it, Keenan courted iconicity. By diffusing and distorting her image, Keenan became a Dale Cooper-figure for the band: an astral explorer capable of navigating and illuminating the alternate states their music sought to conjure.
Since Keenan’s passing from pneumonia in 2011, the limitless horizons that Broadcast proposed have been darkened by their singer’s absence. Any appreciation of the band, whether written in tribute or spoken among fans, is immediately asterisked by a sense of tragedy. Because so much of their music explored the spectral qualities of sound and memory, even listening to Keenan’s reverb-laden voice can take on the quality of EVP, skirting the line between haunting and haunted. Yet for a group whose best-known album is a masterpiece of death-obsession, the enduring theme of the band’s work is a rejection of finality. In a Broadcast song, new dimensions are always within reach, suggesting that sound manipulated could result in time transcended. The reissue of three collections of rarities—the new BBC Maida Vale Sessions, and two tour-only albums, Microtronics (2003) and Mother Is the Milky Way (2009)—provides a small survey of the band’s evolution from a conventional pop outfit to psych visionaries.
Like many British artists of their generation, founding members James Cargill and Trish Keenan were radicalized by what the critic Mark Fisher called “popular modernism,” the diffusion of challenging, surreal art through mass media. Part of the poignancy of the Maida Vale Sessions comes from hearing the band prove themselves on their heroes’ turf. The facilities at Maida Vale not only hosted the radio show of John Peel, from which these recordings are sourced, but the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which introduced the British public to electronic music on a mass scale, a history that prompted Keenan to describe the performances as an “initiation.” Maida Vale makes abundantly clear that the band passed with flying colors.
Encompassing material from 1997’s Work and NonWork compilation through 2003’s Haha Sound, the album charts their path from studious, ’60s songcraft toward their own singular sound. Had they stalled out creatively on songs like “The Note [Message From Home]” or “Come On Let’s Go,” Broadcast would have endured as some of the finest interpreters of swooning chanson and psych rock of the 1990s, a decade that wasn’t hurting for revivalists of either stripe. What distinguished them from well-observed pastiche, and what these live recordings highlight, is the dissonance and distortion that lurked at the edge of their sound, as they progressively fused psychedelic fuzz with aggressive electronic effects. The ominous piano chords that launch “Long Was the Year” land on a bed of flickering guitar feedback, while “Echo’s Answer” features a gorgeous extended outro where Keenan’s vocals recede and electric guitars duel over cinematic, ultra-processed strings. The shift from clarity to obscurity was also reflected in the band’s songwriting, as their bookish character studies were phased out in favor of nonsense poems, automatic writing, and cut-up lyrics. No one knows the answer to the questions posed by “Where Youth and Laughter Go,” but in its mesh of music box keyboards, starry-eyed lyrics, and ribbons of corroded and crystalline guitar, the band dares you to imagine.
Cold, clarion, and remote in its beauty, Keenan’s contralto is a singular instrument, an echo that never stops reverberating. One of Maida Vale’s greatest virtues is how it showcases her evolution between records. On tracks like “The Book Lovers” and “World Backwards,” Keenan belts, straining the limits of her range, an affectation that she would dial back by limiting herself to a glassy deadpan. She presents this technique most effectively on “Minim,” where her cascading sighs soar over unfurling synths, snares, and guitar, becoming elemental in the process.
Microtronics is a collection of instrumentals initially released on tour for 2003’s Haha Sound, and it expands upon that album’s interstitials and outros. Enamored with stock “library music,” the band aimed to make generic tunes in a singular way, diverse in sound but immediately recognizable as Broadcast. Tracks like “Microtronics 01” and “Microtronics 09” feature the crisp jazz you could imagine sound-tracking a David Lynch netherworld, while the comet strike synths of “Microtronics 06” and the buoyant jingle of “Microtronics 04” hold their own against Warp labelmates Autechre and early electronic composer Raymond Scott, respectively.
The acoustic fretwork and swelling strings of “Microtronics 11” point the way to the uncanny soundscapes of 2009’s Mother Is the Milky Way. By now whittled down from a five-person outfit to the duo of Cargill and Keenan, Mother plays like the band’s version of a mixtape, an audio collage that swerves wildly between the pastoral and occult. The record draws from both British folk music and British folk horror, contemplating the slippery delineation that separates prim and proper England from its pagan past. “In Here the World Begins” cuts through a squall of children’s recorder to offer a hypnotic, elliptical dirge about accessing a “dream within a dream,” while “I’m Just a Person in This Roomy Verse” features one of the band’s loveliest melodies, intruded by deranged babbling and demonic whispers. Having largely forsaken sampling in favor of recreating the sounds of the past on their own, Mother points to a thrilling, largely unexplored direction for the band: a universe where Vashti Bunyan meets Nurse With Wound, of dappled sunshine and bottomless darkness.
In late 2011, after Keenan’s passing, Cargill confirmed there was enough recorded material in the vault to fashion a new Broadcast album. As of now, it has yet to be released. Cargill has since made an excellent tribute to his creative and romantic partner with former bandmates as Children of Alice, and unreleased tracks and demos have trickled out over the years, often on Keenan’s birthday. Taken together, these three reissues make up one of the most substantial reminders of the band’s power, even in moments of relatively low-stakes creativity. They offer a rejoinder not to regard Keenan as a ghost who haunts the work but as an enduring presence who activates it with every listen.


Taking inspiration from the performance artist Marina Abramović, the UK bass musician’s second album uses chamber instruments and spoken-word fragments to get at the messy business of human intimacy.

Portrait With Firewood

Whether you were one of the 1,400 people to participate in a soul-searching staring contest with Marina Abramović or you simply watched others sit before her during the 700-plus hours of her 2010 performance piece The Artist Is Present, it was one of the most intense and emotional experiences to be had in the atrium of the MoMA. And while watching JAY-Z rap “Picasso Baby” at Abramović was a teeth-gnashing train wreck of music and performance art, producer Felix Manuel is unabashed about admitting Abramović’s influence on his recent productions. As Djrum, Manuel has been at the cutting edge of UK bass for the past eight years, plowing through the barriers between dubstep, downtempo, techno, and drum’n’bass. When he set about working to follow up his debut album from five years ago, Manuel continually returned to video clips of Abramović, moved to tears by what he called her “incredibly deep understanding of the human condition.” The title of Portrait With Firewood, in fact, is a reference to one of Abramović’s own pieces.
Just how Abramović informed Djrum’s gorgeous, questing new work isn’t apparent on the surface. For the first third of the album, one might just assume the art-world influence means no foundation-quaking bass or steady beat, as Manuel instead foregrounds his own piano playing, arrangements, and collaborations with cellist Zosia Jagodzinska and vocalist Lola Empire. While classically trained on the instrument, Manuel says he was reluctant to let fans of his dance productions hear him on piano, a fear that seems unfounded considering the ruminative runs that open the album and set a contemplative mood throughout. “Unblocked” and “Waters Rising” elicit comparisons to Keith Jarrett and Alice Coltrane, but thankfully, Manuel soon pushes beyond those influences. In “Waters Rising,” rippling overtones mix with nervous wood clops as Empire’s voice surfaces and then sinks back down into the mix.
A duet between Manuel’s piano and Jagodzinska’s quivering cello on “Creature Pt.1” is so evocative that it could be mistaken for an Erased Tapes release. But as dubstep bass detonates across the second part of the track, it shatters the crystalline patterns of the first half, leaving instead jagged shards. The shrieking cello, clipped vocal samples, and knee-capping bass turn the contemplative first half into something menacing and quaking. Only at the end of the track’s second part does Djrum allow in a bit of light, although the vocal sample—“It’s not my mind, it’s not my body, it’s just my heart”—lands with more weight than just about any sound that came before it.
It’s on the latter half of the album that the emotional resonance of Portrait With Firewood is laid bare. A track called “Sex” is dark, turbulent, and knotty, as if the title wasn’t referring to the physical act so much as all the conflicting emotions that boil up around it. Yes, there are samples of heavy breathing—even a shout for emphasis—but as the piece drills deeper, Djrum sounds less interested in the peak of orgasm than the idea of falling into the dark chasms of another person. Amid the tricky rhythms and emotionally poignant strings of “Blue Violet,” Manuel drops in a plaintive female voice saying, “I never felt anything like this before, something I didn’t count on.” That sense of nakedness and exchange returns again at the album’s quietest moment, “Sparrows,” in which dreamy chimes and brushed cymbals twine together like lovers’ fingers. If only it weren’t reduced to the pat rhyme scheme: “I’ll show you my scars/You’ll show me the stars.”
Djrum’s attempt to bridge the gap between acoustic instrumentation and programming doesn’t always work, just as some of Portrait’s spoken word-bits come off as hokey rather than profound. The album’s most ambitious track doubles as its messiest: The nine-minute whirlwind “Showreel Pt.3” toggles between woozy ambience and furious breakbeat techno, with throttling kicks reminiscent of gabber. Atop it all, another disembodied voice laments, “I feel so divorced from the world.” When Manuel pulls it all together, the results are audacious as anything in electronic music right now, restless and in search of emotional connection—a rare instance of a producer holed up in his studio seeking to be present.


This tribute album is scattershot, as all such albums are, but the best moments find a new generation reckoning with what Smith's catalog means to them now.

Various Artists: Say Yes! A Tribute to Elliott Smith

Say Yes! A Tribute to Elliott Smith

Julien Baker was eight years old when Elliott Smith died. She’s not old enough to have experienced him as an active musician or even as a living person, which isn’t a knock against her. On Say Yes! A Tribute to Elliott Smith, she shows how a new generation of singer-songwriters are learning from his example. She renders “Ballad of Big Nothing” even breathier and more precarious than the original, a performance held together by tensile guitar licks and a grim determination. Her vocals are more expressive than Smith’s precise deadpan, a bit more conventionally soulful when she twirls her notes or adds some soft whooo’s toward the end. When he sang the chorus—“You can do what you want to whenever you want to”—it sounded like an accusation. When Baker sings those words, they sound more like a consolation, revealing the existential horror in such freedom.
Baker, at 21, is the youngest artist on Say Yes!; the oldest, J Mascis, is 51. That range of ages is one of the more intriguing aspects of this otherwise by-the-numbers tribute album, which is just as scattershot and inconsistent as any other tribute album. It does, however, suggest a legacy that is still evolving and developing from one generation to the next. Smith’s contemporaries tend toward more faithful renditions, with mixed results. Tanya Donelly can’t find anything new to do with “Between the Bars,” but it’s not quite as redundant as Adam Franklin’s “Oh Well, Okay.” For many listeners, “Needle in the Hay” may always soundtrack Richie Tenenbaum’s suicide attempt, but Juliana Hatfield takes the song outside the house and into the city. She adds a low-key drum loop and a harmonium that evokes heavy traffic and dense, pressing crowds, which lets a bit of air into the song without alleviating its dire anxieties.
We know what Smith meant to his contemporaries, but what does he mean to younger musicians who discovered him only after he took his life, after his legacy had cemented, after his albums had been elevated to the status of classics? Some of the most compelling interpretations on Say Yes! come from the younger artists, who have the benefit of some distance on the subject. The Nashville duo Escondido reinvent “Waltz #1” as a shoegaze pop anthem, drenching it in hazy reverb broken only by Jessica Maros’ surface-to-air vocals. It’s refreshingly over the top—a maximalist rendering of a minimalist song. Taking a different tack, Waxahatchee slows “Angeles” down to an even slower crawl, her only accompaniment a heartbeat drum and a guitar that would be hypnotic if it weren’t so discordant and unsettling. More than the music, it’s the vocals that lend the cover its sense of dread. Katie Crutchfield sings with a subtle sneer in her voice, twisting her vowels into a grimace that amplifies the grim, gray humor at the song’s core.
Elliott Smith is, ultimately, not especially easy to cover. His precise melodies make a deep and immediate impression, as do his fatalistic lyrics, but they’re never simply gloomy. His best songs possess some grain of humor—a dark, wincing humor that often bubbles to the surface in sarcastic asides. Walking the fine line between so many gradations of emotion can be tricky, and there are more missed opportunities on Say Yes! than revealing interpretations.
So it’s surprising that one of the standouts comes from one of the unlikeliest sources: Amanda Palmer has not exactly endeared herself to the music world, which makes her choice of songs so ideal. She turns “Pictures of Me” into a meditation on celebrity and a vertiginous rift between a woman’s public and private selves. “I’m so sick and tired of all these pictures of me, completely wrong, totally wrong,” she sings, her voice low but tense, as though barely suppressing her rage. She grits her teeth and pounds her piano violently, turning the song into a great fuck-you to the entire Internet. It doesn’t make her more sympathetic, but that’s not the point. In Smith she finds something like a kindred spirit, and in “Pictures” she finds a song that speaks for her. That’s why we all listen in the first place, right?


After a brilliant run of EPs, James Blake returns with an album that tilts toward traditional songwriting while refining his unique approach to production.

James Blake

In January, Portishead founder Geoff Barrow took to Twitter to snip at James Blake. "Will this decade be remembered as the Dubstep meets pub singer years?" he asked, not naming the 22-year-old producer who, only that morning, was highlighted in the BBC's Sound of 2011 poll. When dubstep boomed and shuddered from Croydon at the dawn of the last decade, Blake wasn't yet a teenager. Barrow, on the other hand, was almost 40 and already on hiatus from one of the previous decade's most influential bands. He'd heard the rise of dubstep-- its cavernous bass, quick-click rhythms, bent vocal hooks-- and the tall, plaid-wearing kid from Enfield must have sounded a lot like its populist fall.
Barrow's dismissal of Blake is, presumably, a defense of dubstep-- the gesture suggests a purist, an elitist, or both. Reconsidered from the other artistic end, however, the implication is that maybe this is the decade where singer-songwriters-- longtime wastrels of pianos and six-strings with three chords-- finally get interesting, manipulating their pretty little voices and best love songs for something more than plain ballads and pleas. In that case, Barrow is right about Blake's full-length debut. Composed of tender torch songs, elegiac drifters, and soulful melodies, Blake's first puts him in the rare company of fellow singers-- Thom Yorke, Karin Dreijer, Antony Hegarty, Justin Vernon, Dan Bejar-- who've recently bent their own lavish voices, not samples, to make interesting pop music shaped with electronics. These songs are bigger than the defense of any microgenre, and, chances are, they'll soon make Blake a star. He deserves it.
Dubstep producer Untold released "Air and Lack Thereof", Blake's first single, on his Hemlock label in 2009; it was solid, slightly spooky dubstep, with drums darting around a sample that kept eroding. Since that debut, though, Blake has slowly focused on crafting songs-- bona fide, three-to-four minute builders-- around hooks. Last year's "CMYK", for instance, spliced Blake's voice with cuts from American R&B to place an indelible hook inside a number that actually progressed through its four minutes. Blake's more recent Klavierwerke EP draped its dance floor intentions around his own sweetly sung voice. And now, he moves still further from abstraction, to verses and even an occasional chorus.
While the songs are the magnetic center here, Blake's musicianship and sonics are equally striking. A "dubstep" producer with a gentle piano touch and an ear for granular synthesis so sharp it will make fleets of laptop toters envious, his toolkit is seamless. The two-part "Why Don't You Call Me" / "I Mind", for instance, opens with only voice and piano, played with the studied delicacy of a classical student. But Blake cuts it short 30 seconds in by splicing and resampling the piano line. He then bends his own voice and sings the lone verse twice, editing and re-shaping it into a new form that bears only the faintest resemblence to its opening source material. In the suite's second half, the vocals become spinning smears that fall into the background. It's the only time on the album where the drum clicks, static bursts, and piano splashes become the essential motion. It's the type of track you might have heard on one of his recent EPs-- the kind Blake purists lament this album's supposed lack of.
With this new LP-- released on a major label on both sides of the Atlantic, no less-- odds are, a lot of people are going to listen, and I don't mean in the tail-eating, blog-bite-blog sort of way. "Lindisfarne II" takes what Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago did best and turns it into a simple, poignant mantra; if it doesn't score the season's end of some prime-time drama, a music director should be fired. The same goes for the album-ending "Measurements", which somehow pulls the sound of a Southern black gospel choir from Blake's laptop and white-boy coo. Feist cover "Limit to Your Love" works in just enough of dubstep's bass flutter and snare snap. If Blake really does cross over and become the pretty white male who introduces a broader audience to dubstep, with its foundations in Jamaican music and black musicians in South East London, he'll receive the tired, requisite backlash. But these 11 songs-- gorgeous, indelible tunes that are as generous in content as they are restrained in delivery-- will last a lot longer.


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 Diva, an album that captures Ivy Queen’s legacy as an ardent lyricist and vocalist, a forceful defender of women, and a torchbearer for reggaetón’s subversive—and commercial—promise.

Diva

Long before she’d earned the honorifics of La Diva, La Caballota, or La Potra, Puerto Rican rapper Ivy Queen was a pigtailed newcomer whose panties rose above her baggy pants. This was Martha Ivelisse Pesante Rodríguez’s look when she infamously auditioned for The Noise, the Puerto Rican collective and nightclub that became pivotal to the evolution of reggaetón in the ’90s. Back then, Ivy Queen was a shy girl from around the way, a young emcee and songwriter from the small town of Añasco eager to cut her teeth in an emerging movement. She’d arrived at the home of now-legendary DJ Negro, ready to drop a verse for some buzzy rappers (and soon-to-be pioneers) who had assembled that day. She was so overwhelmed by nerves that she grabbed the mic and turned her back to DJ Negro during the performance. “Muchos Quieren Tumbarme,” a vicious and self-assured proclamation of femme autonomy, flowed out of her, securing her spot in the crew.
Ivy Queen’s audition was a bellwether for the gender expectations she would navigate—and challenge—throughout her career: the fine lines between assertiveness and confrontation, confidence and arrogance, weakness and vulnerability. In an industry often driven by the objectification of women and the reinforcement of male control over our pleasure, Ivy Queen was tasked with destabilizing the dominance of male desire in reggaetón, while also pushing against monolithic critiques of the genre as inherently misogynistic. She was responsible for making space for all those who are marginalized in the movement—a role too often demanded of women in music, and even more so when they are heralded as the queen, the sole figure carrying the weight of liberation for others. And as deferential as it is, the title “Queen of Reggaetón,” as she’s commonly referred to, isn’t enough to capture all of Ivy’s complexities, to reveal everything she has to offer us.
No project embodies this better than Diva, Ivy Queen’s third studio album. Ivy Queen teamed with independent label Real Music in 2003 for the release; in 2004, the project was licensed and distributed as Diva: Platinum Edition under Universal Music, now with a handful of bonus tracks and remixes. The album is a snapshot of reggaetón in a crucial moment of transition; the genre was in the midst of commercial ascent and sonic transformation for the masses, and although others like La Sista and Glory made their mark, Ivy Queen remained the most visible woman in a boys’ club. With its deep dancehall and reggae en español influences, along with its themes of revenge, sexual freedom, and the politics of the dancefloor, Diva evinced the elasticity of reggaetón—its intrinsic capacity to soundtrack the carnal and the political.
Ivy Queen’s arrival did not come without obstacles. Pesante Rodríguez attended high school in New York, but dropped out in the late ’80s and eventually moved to Puerto Rico. She fell in love with hip-hop en español while watching Vico C on television, mesmerized by his ability to blend incisive raps with sticky dancehall riddims. But she was equally enamored of the salsas and boleros of powerhouse vocalists like Celia Cruz and La Lupe; she started writing her own music after watching the former during a 1974 Fania All-Stars concert on TV.
After a stint in The Noise, Ivy Queen went solo, releasing her first two albums, En Mi Imperio and The Original Rude Girl in 1997 and 1998, respectively. Sony Music signed her for the latter album, which featured a highly publicized collaboration with Wyclef Jean, an early sign of the commercial maneuvers reggaetón would embrace in the new millennium. The Original Rude Girl unfortunately never reached its anticipated commercial heights, and Ivy Queen was dropped from Sony. La Caballota issued singles on compilation albums and mixtapes like The Majestic and Kilates, before releasing Diva on the independent Miami-based label Real Music Group in 2003.
At the time Diva was released, Ivy Queen was as reverent of her roots as she was focused on imagining an artistic future for reggaetón. The album firmly honors Ivy’s love of lyricism and movement, but it also tells stories of sexual liberation for and by women. The year before Diva’s release, sexual and racial anxieties about reggaetón exploded in Puerto Rico. Senator Velda González launched an “Anti-Pornography Campaign” calling for the removal of all “pornographic” material from reggaetón music videos and lyrics, which she claimed degraded women, were vulgar and sexually indecent, and presented an affront to family values (read: white, middle-class norms). The campaign reflected deep-seated racist fears about hypersexuality and respectability in Caribbean music. Of course, there are plenty of examples of women’s bodies being exploited in reggaetón. But predictably, much of the discourse was facile, failing to make sense of the ways the entertainment industry commodifies women, only to later punish them for expressing their own sexuality.
Diva disrupted many of these simplistic narratives. Rather than relegating women to spaces of spectatorship or sexual service, the album explores the freedom of independence, the euphoria of dance, and the satisfaction of revenge. It allows us to enjoy a perreo sucio and remind men that we can be the masters of our own desire. Ivy Queen discards any sense of genre determinism, and instead creates moments of joy and authority—even if they remain within the boundaries of fantasy and commerce.
Diva begins with Ivy Queen laying it all on the floor. Using the language of a boxing match, she recounts her years of rap battles in The Noise, the obstacles she has faced, and the poet and prophet she’s become in spite of an uneven playing field. Many of the tracks signal Ivy’s profound love of dancehall, rap en español, and her eminence in the movement before it was dubbed reggaetón. “Papi Te Quiero” employs the “Buy Out” riddim made most famous by Notch’s “Nuttin’ Nuh Go So,” while “Money Making” enlists legendary Panamanian rapper Japanese, who lends his deep baritone and old-school flow to the production alongside a verse from Ivy’s now ex-husband Gran Omar. Meanwhile, “Sangre” and “Tú No Puedes” are reminders that Ivy Queen is first and foremost a rapper; both revel in hypnotic, early ’00s bombast, and you can almost feel Ivy Queen’s ornate, acrylic talons gripping the mic as she smugly announces her arrival: “Llegó la perra” (“The bitch has arrived”).
But it’s when the album heads to the dancefloor that Diva excels; this is where La Potra most convincingly asserts her power, where she invites us to lay siege to hypermasculine posturing, to revel in sex and refuse the conquest of our bodies. With its playground handclaps and blazoning horns, “Alerta” is at once an affirmation of tenacity and an explosive warning for any and all men intent on interrupting your grinding. “Quiero Saber,” which appeared on the platinum edition of Diva, is an invitation to a dancefloor entanglement with plinking synth stabs that sound like they were lifted straight out of a 2003 FruityLoops drum kit. You can practically feel the humidity in the basement perreo air with the song’s “bellaqueo tra-tra-tra-tra” outro. Of course, even the dance tracks on Diva reflect complex cultural prejudices; “Súbelo” invokes the all-too-common racist epithet “pelo malo” (“bad hair”) levied at Black Latinas who style their curls naturally.
It’s “Quiero Bailar” that will live on as Ivy Queen’s most memorable dancefloor anthem, a reprieve from any reggaetón night dominated by cishet men’s voices and sexual cravings. The baroque harpsichord preamble will go down as one of reggaetón’s most unforgettable intros, turning an antiquated flourish into a vehement assertion of consent. Ivy Queen rides the beat, a version of producer Jeremy Harding’s “Liquid” riddim, and reminds her man that expecting sex after a perreo-fueled tryst is just plain dumb. The song affirms that women in reggaetón are more than just nightclub accessories.
The gruff bars of “Quiero Bailar” and many other Ivy Queen songs are a central element of her magnetism. She’s part of a long lineage of throaty women vocalists in Latin America, like the influential Cuban singer La Lupe. Scholar Alexandra Vazquez aptly describes this genealogy as “the kind of hoarseness that sounds like having to constantly speak above things”—especially men. This quality of Ivy’s voice has also long cast a shadow on her work, sparking misogynistic and homophobic insults that characterize it as overly masculine or too butch. La Diva shrugs off these slights; she embraces her vocal style as a “blessing” that allowed her to stand out, perhaps most clearly in her songs of betrayal, like Diva’s “Tuya Soy” and “Venganza.” As scholar Petra Rivera-Rideau writes, when Ivy Queen spits venom about a partner’s infidelity in her signature baritone, she presents herself as a woman who longs to be seen and loved in her suffering, signaling many of the same themes of abandonment, anguish, and humanity La Lupe explored in her work. But Ivy Queen assures us that her agony won’t be in vain; both “Tuya Soy” and “Venganza” threaten violence for all the deception, even promising she’ll force her man to his knees if he tries it.
For those of us who grew up in the midst of reggaetón’s commercial rise, Ivy Queen soundtracked hundreds of preteen parties de marquesina and femme sexual adventures. The rapper has said her career wouldn’t have blossomed without the LGBTQ community, who granted her the nickname “La Diva” in the first place (the term of endearment was first bestowed upon her at the drag shows she attended with her late friend, makeup artist Willy Rosado). She’s won over queer fans for her support on issues like gay marriage, while also challenging homophobic claims that queerness is a “virus” and defending Ricky Martin when he came out in 2010; in 2014, she toured gay clubs in the U.S.
Alongside Daddy Yankee and Tego Calderón, Ivy Queen has been lauded for ushering in reggaetón’s commercial rise—in 2004, Diva: Platinum Edition hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Tropical Albums chart. But once again, Ivy was tasked with representing all those who were marginalized at the peak of the sound’s mainstream surge. Women in reggaetón were mostly known as chorus girls or side chicks; Ivy Queen became the exception to the rule. The whispered hooks and breathless moans of artists like Jenny La Sexy Voz were key to reggaetón, but often went uncredited (a tradition of silencing that continues to this day, as evidenced by the controversy around Puerto Rican singer Nesi’s unnamed appearance on Bad Bunny’s “Yo Perreo Sola” and the few Black Latinas who are currently visible in the genre’s mainstream today). Ivy Queen has described the responsibility of speaking for all women as a “challenge” and a “status that is difficult to maintain,” and in a 2014 Houston Chronicle article, she succinctly recalled the immediacy of her fame: “All of a sudden, I was the voice of many women.”
Ivy Queen indisputably stepped up to the challenge, but she was forced to navigate the contours of a sexist industry. Sometimes, she had to affirm her skills in masculine or binaristic terms; at others, she had to soften herself for fear of appearing too pushy. The examples are endless: In 2008, she dismissed rumors that she was a lesbian in an interview with the Dominican newspaper Hoy, reaffirming her previous heterosexual marriage and current relationship and saying she “raps like a man.” After Diva’s release, she revealed she originally wanted to title the album La potra, but Universal Music Latino considered the title “too threatening” and “would not sign off” on it. Four years later, she told Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día about the ways she was forced to use the rhetoric of masculinity to prove herself in the industry. “For a woman to exist in this genre, no one knows what we have to go through,” she said. “Sometimes you have to show a masculine side for them to pay attention to you. I didn’t earn this spot because of a pair of boobies—it’s because of my voice, my character, and the respect I’ve had that others treat me equally.” Finally, in 2010, she echoed this sentiment, telling the El Paso Times, “In this industry, I have to be one of the guys.”
All of these experiences expose the burden that women musicians face in the confines of the patriarchy. Ivy was not afraid to rap about being a woman who was confident but still plagued by heartache; nor was she afraid to celebrate her sexuality while rocking a pair of baggy pants. A new generation of artists has attempted to follow in Ivy Queen’s footsteps and cited her as an influence—among them Cardi B, Melii, and Melymel, as well as dozens of others who grew up as outsiders to the movement, like Karol G and Rosalía. Ultimately, La Caballota has remained a singular presence in mainstream reggaetón: an ardent lyricist and vocalist, a forceful defender of women and queer communities, and a torchbearer for the genre’s subversive—and commercial—promise.

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For the ravishing Moonlight, Nicholas Britell composed a score that splits the difference between classical and codeine. It’s orchestral music, chopped and screwed. There’s beauty in its glacial pace.

Nicholas Britell: Moonlight (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Lucrecia Martel, Henry Roy, Carlos Reygadas, Charles Burnett, Edward Yang, Earlie Hudnall Jr., Kahlil Joseph, Claire Denis, Wong Kar-wai: Moonlight is a film of many influences, most of them undisguised and unmistakable. Certainly director Barry Jenkins has a personal vision, clear and true—and his lauded Best Picture winner is indeed rich in distinctive, highly original sounds and images, several already impressed upon the popular imagination. But the Miami-born filmmaker’s cardinal talent is for synthesis, plainly. He sops up styles from all over and wrings out something marvelously new.
Moonlight tells the story of Chiron—black, gay, unwaveringly taciturn—as he advances in three tragic acts from viciously bullied adolescent (Alex Hibbert) to briefly self-discovering teen (Ashton Sanders) and, finally, to repressed and reinvented trapper (Trevante Rhodes) with a wounded, yearning soul. Jenkins renders this plaintive coming-of-age drama with help from an arsenal of disparate inspirations: the slow-motion reveries of In the Mood for Love, the brawny homoerotic tension of Beau Travail, the radiant cobalt palette of Viviane Sassen’s beachside portraiture. The combined effect is strikingly eclectic. Jenkins draws from a huge range of traditions, and what he yields is totally, ravishingly, his own.
The film’s visual models, derived mainly from international arthouse cinema and fine-art photography, are perhaps to be expected of a self-confessed cinephile with a very keen eye. More surprising is how Moonlight sounds—and the wildly different music that inspired it. The soundtrack ranges from Aretha Franklin to Goodie Mob to Boris Gardiner and Prez P. The two cuts most pivotal to the action are Jidenna’s “Classic Man” and the “Laudate Dominum” from Mozart’s Vesperae Solennes de Confessore. And the stirring original score—delicate chamber music composed by Nicholas Britell for piano, violin, and cello—has been chopped and screwed in vintage Houston hip-hop fashion. In fact, I propose the influence that looms over Moonlight most profoundly isn’t Wong Kar-wai, as has been suggested. It’s DJ Screw.
Jenkins had chopped and screwed orchestral music in mind before he knew it was possible. Britell had never even heard of the technique. (“Because how’s a guy from New York who went to Harvard gonna know what chopped and screwed music is?” Jenkins joked in an interview with Pitchfork late last year.) Britell’s introduction to the style was swift—and he told Jenkins he thought he could do something with it. They ran Mozart and Beethoven through Final Cut Pro and slowed them to a crawl to hear what it was like. It seemed to work. “You know what?” Jenkins recalls telling Britell. “This shit ain’t too bad.” So Britell set out to write a score that would split the difference between classical and codeine.
The first piece in the film, bubbling up nearly 10 minutes in, is “Little’s Theme”—a gentle, vaguely mournful minute of piano and hushed violin that begins as young Chiron stares into his lap in the booth of a fast-food restaurant, keeping every thought and feeling submerged. When the piece returns in the second act—Chiron now several years older, looking no less deeply inhibited as he sits sullen in his high-school classroom—the key is pitched way down, from D major to B major. Britell did not play the theme in a lower key, as he explained earlier this year to Song Exploder. “Chiron’s Theme” is simply “Little’s Theme” bent downward on a computer: it’s a sort of orchestral remix, or “Little’s Theme” chopped and screwed.
Of course, the piece descends even further—inevitably, satisfyingly—when reprised once more in act three. There’s a great deal of beauty in the glacial pace of Britell’s chopped and screwed compositions: the new tempo brings out the sorrow and the longing concealed in every fragile note. But there’s also something dangerous in the sound, something fraught with impending peril—and the music accords very much with the cinematography in this respect. The way the camera bobs beneath the boiling waves as father-figure Juan (Mahershala Ali) teaches Chiron to swim makes it seem like both are at risk of drowning: a threat lurking just beneath a moment of splendor, reflected so well by the ominous and exquisite “The Middle of the World.” Like Chiron’s life, the music always seems on the brink of lapsing into tragedy.
“In hip-hop, sometimes that pace is so fast that you miss things,” Jenkins said of why he felt chopped and screwed was right for the film. “I don’t mean literally miss lyrics, I just think there’s an emotion in what these cats are saying that gets by you. When you slow things down there’s this emotion, this yearning. I think in some ways, in Moonlight, we’re doing the same thing.” Moonlight is all about slowing things down: it’s about how identities are made, how appearances are cultivated, and how if we stop for a moment the difference between who we’re trying to be and who we are becomes obvious. The clash in styles lays bare these themes so compellingly. It’s real life chopped and screwed.


Seattle veterans make their J Records debut with this eponymous, monolithic return to straightforward rock.

Pearl Jam

No, really-- this album is the return to form that Pearl Jam fans have been waiting for since Ten. Or Vs.. Or Vitalogy. Or whichever album was the last on which Pearl Jam were a fully accredited rock band. This eponymous effort-- the group's eighth studio full-length, and first for J Records-- is the most consistent effort the group's released since its second album. No pump organ-flecked spoken-word jags about insects, no meandering Eastern-tinged meditations on life, no songs about Jeff Ament's dog. Just 13 tracks of thoughtful, middle-aged, post-grunge rock'n'roll for the thoughtful, middle-aged, post-grunge fellow in all of us. But it gets pretty boring pretty damn quick.
Think what you will of the group, but there's no denying their growth. Despite having the wide eyes of Alternative Nation turned toward them-- selling 17 million copies of their first two records-- Pearl Jam decided to take the road less traveled, and that seemed to make all the difference in maintaining the band's creative viability. Of course, this choice is where they broke with the lion's share of their fan base-- millions who bought into Pearl Jam's original MO weren't willing to put up with creative wanderlust. On Pearl Jam, that's what you get from start to finish (barring one accordion cameo in the minute long reprise of "Life Wasted"). While there's no shirt-rending Jesus Christ poses to be had here, this is as close to the righteous bombast of their heyday as they're likely to ever get again, for better or worse.
One thing that has returned, unfortunately: An emphasis on Eddie Vedder's voice, an acquired taste's acquired taste. That his mushmouthed mewling and moaning became the template for a slew of copycat chest-thumpers is the stuff that keeps vocal coaches up at night. The "weird" Pearl Jam albums found Vedder's singing improving ever so slightly, to the point that he was actually singing without any odd affectations-- the uh-huhs, the oooh-yeahs, the arghs. On this album, though, he's back to the multi-line mulching, growling for all he's worth through its more aggressive tracks. He often sounds best on the low-tempo songs, where the mood better complements his voice's strength-- Eddie's a crooner, not a wailer. But here, he even wails through the slower songs, killing "Parachutes" with his over-emoting and vamping unsuccessfully over the bluesy saunter of "Come Back".
Granted, Pearl Jam haven't lost the perspective they've gained through age-- good luck trying to get their young selves to pen a Springsteenian working-class portrait like "Unemployable". Instead of trying to rage against the machine, they're appealing to its intellectual nature. Unfortunately, this nuance is steamrolled by the group's need for fan-friendly riffage. After years of trying to live up to one of their early statements-- "there ain't gonna be any middle anymore"-- it's disappointing to find them steering the ship back toward the center.


Some Other Time is a newly unearthed Bill Evans studio album, initially recorded in 1968 in Germany but not released until this month. It still sounds fresh and alive almost 50 years later.

Bill Evans: Some Other Time: the Lost Session from the Black Forest

Casual jazz fans know Bill Evans through his association with Miles Davis. Kind of Blue, the one jazz album you own if you only own one, features Evans on piano on four of the five tracks, and his brief liner notes sketch out the group's approach to improvisation in poetic and accessible terms. When you learn a bit more about Kind of Blue, you learn that Davis actually envisioned the record with Evans in mind. And though for years Davis was listed as the album's sole composer, Evans wrote "Blue in Green" (he eventually received credit.)
Another Kind of Blue piece, "Flamenco Sketches," was partly based on Evans' arrangement of "Some Other Time," the Leonard Bernstein standard. (Evans had earlier used the slow opening vamp as a building block to his breathtaking solo piano composition "Peace Piece"). So though he may not be an especially famous jazz musician, Bill Evans played an integral role in shaping the most famous jazz recording of all time, and the arc of his discography is a rewarding one for those branching off from classic Miles. "Some Other Time" continued to be a touchstone piece for Evans for the rest of his life, appearing regularly on his albums (notably on his duet record with Tony Bennett). And now it's become the title track to a newly unearthed studio album, one recorded in 1968 in Germany but not released until this month.
Jazz in general overflows with archival material. It's a live medium, and recordings of shows have been common since the early part of the last century. Studio LPs could typically be cut in a couple of days, which generally meant a wealth of unused songs and outtakes. But it's somewhat rare to have a true unreleased album—a collection of songs recorded together at a session with the thought of a specific release that never saw the light of day.
Some Other Time: The Lost Session From the Black Forest is one of these. It was recorded when Evans was on tour in Europe with a trio that included Eddie Gomez on bass and, on drums, a young Jack DeJohnette, who would go on to much greater fame with Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, and as a leader himself. It was cut between stops on a European tour by German producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt, with the idea that the rights and a release plan would be figured out later. This particular group had only been documented on record just once, on At the Montreux Jazz Festival, recorded five days prior to this date. So the existence of an unheard studio album by the trio is a significant addition to the Evans story.
The piano/bass/drums trio setting is where Evans did his most important and lasting work. He thrived on both the limitations and the possibilities of the set-up, and returned to it constantly over the course of his quarter-century recording career. He generally favored truly collaborative improvising in the setup; the bassist in his trio was expected to contribute melodically and harmonically, in addition to rhythmically, and he could often be heard soloing alongside the pianist. Eddie Gomez, heard on this album, was a steady partner of Evans' for a decade, and the level of empathy between the two players is something to behold. On "What Kind of Fool Am I?," Gomez's dancing lines darts between Evans' bass notes, almost serving as a third hand on the piano. On the immortal title track, Gomez seems like half a conversation, accenting and commenting on Evans' melodic flourishes. For his part, DeJohnette offers tasteful and low-key accompaniment, heavy on the brushwork and soft textures on cymbals—he was more of a role-player at this point in his career. But the three together feel like a true unit.
The tracklist on Some Other Time is heavy on standards, with a few Evans original sprinkled in. To love the American songbook is to be in love with harmony, and Evans never stopped discovering new possibilities in old and frequently played songs. He had a way of phrasing chord progressions for maximum impact, and he used space as virtually another instrument. Evans recorded "My Funny Valentine" many times in a number of different arrangements, often uptempo, but here he drags it out into an achingly poignant ballad that picks up speed as it goes. In his autobiography, Miles Davis famously described Evans' tone as sounding like "like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall," and the tumble of notes on the faster sections of "My Funny Valentine" evince that crystalline loveliness. In addition to the material planned for the original LP, there's a second LP of outtakes and alternate versions that feels very much on par with the first disc.
Evans' art has endured in part because he has a brilliant combination of formal sophistication and accessibility; critics and his fellow musicians heard the genius in his approach to chords, his lightness of touch, and his open-eared support of others in his band, while listeners could put on his records and simply bask in their beauty, how Evans' continual foregrounding of emotion made the sad songs extra wrenching and the happy ones extra buoyant. He was sometimes criticized for an approach that could sound like "cocktail piano," meaning that it wasn't terribly heavy on dynamics and tended to be lower key and generally pretty, but this turned out to be another strength. If you wanted jazz in the background while engaging in another activity, Evans was your man, and if you wanted to listen closely and hear a standard like "Some Other Time" pushed to the limits of expression by his ear for space, he was there for that too.
Evans was one of those jazz artists who changed relatively little over the course of their career. His style developed and his sound had subtle shifts in emphasis over time, but his general approach to music was remarkably consistent, and he remained apart from most of the fashionable trends that wound through the jazz of his era. His first studio date as a leader, in 1956, was just a year after Charlie Parker's death, with bebop very much still au courant; his last, in 1979, the year before his death, was the year Chuck Mangione was nominated for a Grammy for the discofied light jazz funk of "Feels So Good." In both of those years, Evans recorded small-group acoustic jazz albums featuring his standard trio, playing a mix of standards and a few originals. About midway between those two bookends came this set, recorded in a small studio in Germany and left on the shelf, and it still sounds fresh and alive almost 50 years later.


After tentative vocal experiments on 2016’s R M H Q, the New Zealand guitarist crafts an entire album around guest singers, all women, in which he progressively blurs the traces of his own handiwork.

Suffuse

In 2016, veteran experimental guitarist Roy Montgomery fully shook off a decade-long musical hibernation with the four-LP set R M H Q: Headquarters. Three of the albums were entirely instrumental. Only the first, R: Tropic of Anodyne, featured the New Zealand musician’s voice: a world-weary baritone that dipped in and out of shadowy curtains of guitars. An artist whose most evocative music has historically been instrumental, Montgomery seemed wary of the prospect of singing even as he committed to it. “Where’s the value in cadence?/What makes lyrics sublime?” he wondered out loud on R: Tropic of Anodyne’s title track. The voice may be the most immediately human component to any piece of music, but vocalizing is an inherently vulnerable endeavor. It originates in the body and travels to another body with no intermediary.
For his new album, Suffuse, Montgomery took his discomfort with his own voice as an opportunity to open his music up to a roster of full-time singers. Built on R: Tropic of Anodyne’s outtakes, Suffuse boasts a different guest vocalist for each track. All are women, and Montgomery tailored each song’s instrumentals to each woman’s particular vocal style. Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr opens the album with her formidable contralto, flooding a composition that doesn’t fall far from R: Tropic of Anodyne’s severity. Grouper’s Liz Harris closes it, her voice barely audible amid a wash of distorted guitars.
Male songwriters often compose for and with female pop singers, but such an arrangement is rarer in experimental music, where the idea of fixed individual artistry holds greater sway. Throughout Suffuse, Montgomery seems to try to shake that pretense. He dissolves his creative control as the album unfolds; while opener “Apparition” sounds like an R M H Q B-side with a slightly different vocalist, Julianna Barwick floods “Sigma Octantis” with her signature vocal layers, and the closing track with Harris could have been cut from a Grouper album. Montgomery’s creative thumbprint fades under his collaborators’. Throughout Suffuse, he tries with increasing fervor to lose himself.
Montgomery wrote the lyrics to the first three songs on the album, but let the guest vocalists hold the pen on the latter half, and you can hear his language slip at the midway point. Side A writhes with desire: specifically, the forthright hunger that tends to be associated with masculinity. “Have you something for me?” quakes Fohr on “Apparition,” while Katie Von Schleicher takes point on the frayed sexual longing of “Outsider Love Ballad No. 1.” “Hear me dying in the dark for something that smells of you/Here’s me lying on a bed that could have been stained with you," she snarls. Her voice snags along a trio of repeating melodic peaks like she’s clawing her way up a gravelly mountainside. The smell and the stain in Montgomery’s lyrics recall the tactile, violent hunger of Pixies’ “Cactus,” and so does the grain of Von Schleicher’s delivery, which ranks among the album’s most compelling. Montgomery wrote the song’s spare chord progression to suit her voice, and she pulled her voice threadbare to suit his lyrics: an astonishing exchange of artistry.
By “Mirage,” when the sisters Clementine and Valentine Nixon of Purple Pilgrims throw a hush on the music, Montgomery relaxes his grip. He can still be heard in the tone and the pace of the guitars that fall behind the vocals, but he has withdrawn from the foreground. His guest singers sound less and less like him, their voices higher and airier, and he swaddles the guitars in additional reverb to complement the shift. Few albums lay bare the process of their making quite like Suffuse; fewer still evince a desire on the part of the artist to relinquish control, piece by piece, until they have all but handed the reins to someone else. By introducing some of the era’s most compelling women singers to his music, Montgomery uncaps the catharsis that comes when you don’t have to sound like yourself. The rigid boundaries of self and gender fall away the more he unclenches from them, and in the space that’s opened, he finds new ways to let his music speak.


Now a touring member of Broken Social Scene, Land of Talk leader Elizabeth Powell enlists Justin Vernon of Bon Iver for production assistance on the band's first proper full-length, and the result is a mix of the debut EP's wiry rock and affecting acoustic tracks.

Some Are Lakes

As a newly-minted touring member of sprawling indie behemoth Broken Social Scene, Elizabeth Powell certainly has her work cut out for her. But she's not so green. Land of Talk, the band she fronts, debuted in 2006 with the well-received "super" EP Applause Cheer Boo Hiss, on which Powell steered well clear of the hushed pop ruminations of Emily Haines or Feist. She opted instead for steely, tightly-coiled guitar music you can see your breath in.
Produced by man of the moment Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver), Some Are Lakes, Land of Talk's proper full-length debut, is a clear-eyed expansion on the post-hardcore bridge Powell began constructing two years ago, the one that stretches between today's Montreal and the Seattle era that birthed Pretty Girls Make Graves. And while just as thorny and gnarled in parts as its bruising predecessor, Some Are Lakes' has more to offer aurally-- its calms are ultimately more haunting and compelling than its many storms.
Opener "Yuppy Flu" arrives on a current of drums and bass before splashing into Powell's icicle guitar gusts, the three locking horns later in a stretch of white-knuckle harmonic interplay that sets the bar high very early. Unfortunately, save for the jounce of "Young Bridge" or poppy crispness of the title track, that stretch is one of the few moments wherein Powell's rocking doesn't feel a bit ho-hum, like territory not worth revisiting. "The Man Who Breaks Things (Dark Shuffle)" is a chain of minor-chord jangle without any release, while "Give Me Back My Heart Attack" is a wiry mess of crushed glass dissonance that hints at Sonic Youth as much as tireless punk maelstrom "Corner Phone" does. All three tracks contain flashes where Powell's pipes-- arguably as knee-buckling as those of her antecedents inside the BSS stratosphere-- feel fenced-in by racket. Because as satisfying as older rockers like "Speak To Me Bones" or even new jam "Got A Call" prove to be, it can feel like you're fighting for affection from these songs.
Which is exactly why the Fleetwood Mac-meets-Afghan Whigs soul-pop of "It's Okay" is worth returning to time and again. Instantly inviting, Powell's nighttime vocals are pushed up front and left to float, weightless. As violent, plaintive, and ultimately conflicted as anything she's already written ("I know how to kill but I hate how it feels."), many of Powell's lyrical sketches are of the blood red, open-heart-surgery variety, a word set her producer knows well. You could in fact argue that Vernon played a hand in sanding down Land of Talk's edges, mostly to the album's betterment. As on, for instance, the closer "Troubled", an acoustic heartbreaker sung partly in French that was actually recorded at the same hunting cabin Vernon recorded his deep woods opus For Emma, Forever Ago. It's a song with no desire to keep you at a distance or leave you standing outside. That feels pretty good.


Can you feel yourself getting old? Can you feel yourself getting jaded? There's nothing you can do to\n ...

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists: Shake the Sheets

Shake the Sheets

Can you feel yourself getting old? Can you feel yourself getting jaded? There's nothing you can do to stop it. Your once-torrid show-going pace has slowed to a crawl, you can no longer stand sitting through opening acts, you start wishing for anti-smoking legislation instead of bumming cigarettes, your back hurts. Older tracks begin to infiltrate your iPod, new albums have a shorter grace period before deletion, sometimes you chose to just read a book. You start to realize that the bands you're listening to are actually younger than you are, for the first time, and this realization finally breaks the dam you've built against constantly playing Spot-the-Influence. Past nostalgia starts to overtake present enjoyment, and no longer are you a first-order listener, frantically casting out nets to be the first one to the next big thing.
You know it's a bad sign when even the old reliables stop delivering, when their new release barely dislodges previous albums from your rotation, when you start pleading for them to play old songs live like your parents at a CSN concert. Want specifics? Let's take, oh, say Ted Leo for your example. You and Ted have crossed figurative paths for five years now, since the night he lent precious indie cred to your college house's basement by performing there accompanied by only a reel-to-reel (even though you feared booking a guy from some scary-sounding band called Chisel). From then on, you never re-met in person, but fan-love bloomed over rush hour singalongs to The Tyranny of Distance. While living in Leo's once-home of D.C., you attended most of his frequent visits, wrote gospel-like reviews about Hearts of Oak for a rambunctious webzine, and generally formed a one-man street team for the man and his Pharmacists.
Your first sign that relations might be fading was when Shake the Streets hit the file-sharing black market, and you were taken by surprise-- you hadn't even updated your wishlist. Now, months later, the usual Ted Leo delayed sink-in has yet to occur, despite frequent commute listening parties. Which begs the question: Is it you that changed, or is it Ted?
Or perhaps, more accurately, has Ted not changed enough? You can't help but notice that Shake the Sheets is the most Chisel-sounding record he's released as a solo artist, returning to stripped-down arrangements and, on "The Angel's Share" and "Little Dawn", his fascination with repetition. Gone is the more aggressively percussive approach of Hearts of Oak, the drum-circle assault of "Ballad of the Sin Eater" that took your head off more than once at dark Black Cat performances. The Pharmacists have receded back to a power trio format, a slight expansion from Leo's recent pretending-he's-Billy-Bragg jaunt, not attempting to toy with crooked arrangements or extraneous instruments.
Instead, Leo focuses on making a ruler-straight power-pop album, a facsimile of a late 70s punk-fed singer/songwriter LP with cover art featuring the artist against a solid-color background. You're less entertained by the Thin Lizzy flourishes, here on the other side of The Darkness' full-flung tributes. You're finding it more difficult to make Dexys comparisons, now that you're starting to appreciate how awesome Dexys actually was.
You also find yourself surprised that Ted Leo isn't taking advantage of his political timing-- a release date Michael Moore would kill for-- just as you're surprised to find yourself looking for political music at all. "Ballad of the Sin Eater" was the best description of ugly-American guilt you'd ever heard or read or danced to, so the relatively limp and general "I wanna sweep the walls of arrogance" criticisms of Shake the Sheets can't help but disappoint. Instead, you find Leo mired in unrepresentative cliché-driven lyrical content like, "It's time for getting down," from "Criminal Piece". But no, you shouldn't presume to know what Leo should sing about, you definitely should not presume that.
In a strange turn of events, you find yourself not as into Leo's usual tics: his unhinged vocals and spasmodic guitar. You find yourself strangely aggravated by Leo's characteristic punk-scat; especially unforgivable is a Jacko-like "shebooyah" in "Walking to Do". It doesn't help that most of these vocal detours are placed into songs ("Walking to Do", "Counting Down the Hours") that sound like the wait music for Splash Mountain.
But the question again: Is it you, or is it Ted? Is it silly for you to hold artists to the standard of constant evolution, dismissing all efforts to double-back on formerly fertile territory? Is it unfair to apply the context of your current musical frustration to the innocent victim of Shake the Sheets? Is constant self-awareness and within-review second-guessing drying up as a valid stylistic trick? Is it possible to be too subjective when you're writing opinion pieces? You wonder if the whole second-person device has really defused the self-indulgence of this very review.
Nevertheless, you hope your arbitrary ten-point scale score adequately conveys that, while disappointing, Shake the Sheets remains better than most of its current brethren in indie cryostasis. You feel a pang of guilt at holding Ted Leo to such high, possibly unreasonable standards, a pang of self-disappointment that you no longer have the iron constitution to be breezily dismissive of a review's ripple effects. But the largest pang of all is the stereotypical one of sadness, mourning the lost ability to follow a favorite artist down any path, the willful naivety to cloak any sub-par effort in the forgiving deafness of fandom. And then having to write about it.


Nearly five years after their debut, the UK indie rockers return with a cinematic new sound and a determination to turn old hurt into healing catharsis.

gen wo lai (come with me)

Performed willingly or not, cultural assimilation is a nerve-wracking high-wire act, particularly from the vantage point of a child. Memorizing social scripts designed to erase you for the slightest deviation, but still at the mercy of familial expectations, there’s an added layer of anxiety: It can feel as if you’re never more than a classmate’s comment on the unfamiliar textures of your homemade lunch away from a painful fall from grace. Retroactively labeling these fears as purely symptomatic of self-hatred does little to smooth over the scars they’ve left behind.
It’s a process of self-discovery that Dama Scout vocalist Eva Liu—whose family immigrated from Hong Kong to the UK—knows well. She documents it obliquely across gen wo lai (come with me), exploring and exploiting the tense atmosphere of these diasporic blues. The band caught a small wave of buzz in 2017 from a self-titled EP that, for the most part, blended into the indie-rock landscape of the day: a mixture of tough but buoyant drums, jangling guitar hooks, and spaced-out, low-key vocals that might be best compared to psych-rock outfit Crumb just before their detour into hazy bedroom pop. Returning for a full-length nearly five years later, the London-based trio has instead lurched into a trajectory positioning it as a UK analogue to America’s reigning bad-trip therapists Spirit of the Beehive, weaving cryptic meditations on existential dread into a cinematic new sound. gen wo lai (come with me)’s unruly vignettes illuminate flashbulb memories of alienation to light the way on a healing journey through the past.
Rather than agonize over the bleeding, Dama Scout’s strategy in nursing these wounds is to peel off the bandage and let the cut breathe. The opening title track exemplifies this approach, meditating on the memory of Liu’s grandmother eating chicken feet over the seasick churn of bassy synthesizers; guitars and basslines slide in and out of phase before swallowing each other in a brief but satisfying cacophony that washes the creeping anxiety away. It’s here that Liu’s fragmented lyrical approach is at its most potent. Elsewhere, particularly on the sauntering “lonely udon,” the results are less rewarding: When the white-noise rush of studio flourishes appears to lift the track into catharsis, the sensation is one of meandering chaos, a premature rush to experimentation without narrative consequence.
These moments are mercifully few. For a band only now stretching beyond the limitations of an EP, Dama Scout reveal surprisingly assured production instincts, with an ambitious attention to detail. When they twist the EQ knobs into oblivion halfway through “dan dan bub”’s second chorus, pushing the entire song behind a wall of ambience, the effect pricks up your ears, building anticipation for the melody’s return as its chord progression sails out of reach. “emails from suzanne” goes even further. The slashing rhythm surges and decays in fits and starts, mirroring the pain of a mind that “Divides in places/Divides in spaces” by veering sharply between silence and explosive, stoner-metal fuzz. gen wo lai (come with me) deals in uncertainty, suspicion, and doubt, but Dama Scout fold these discomforts into one another with lush, thoughtful orchestration, building pathways between emotional roadblocks and transforming them into interdependent points of self-discovery.
Dama Scout settle for one final false climax to close out the album. The sullen piano dirge of “bubble bee” encapsulates the record’s purest moment of despair, complete with a chorus calculated to raise and then dash hopes, with high notes furiously gasping for air before disappearing beneath the waves of a rising drone. This eerie collapse feels curiously welcome, a chance to recover after covering so much ground at a breakneck pace, but Dama Scout have never sounded more energized; there’s a sense that they could come leaping back at you through the feedback at a moment’s notice. Healing, and second-act transformations like gen wo lai (come with me), can sometimes mean making a home within the discord, harnessing the power of a storm instead of waiting for its eye to pass overhead.


Largely centered on the piano, the songwriter’s first solo album in eight years is wistful, heady, and mesmerizing.

Furling

Meg Baird has made a name as a masterful guitarist, but it’s a piano that ties together her songs on Furling. In a recent interview with Aquarium Drunkard, she spoke about how working at the piano grounded her in a sense of home. Notes fall in aqueous clusters in the starkly beautiful “Wreathing Days,” and a mellow timbre undergirds the melodies of “Ship Captains” and “Ashes, Ashes.” The instrument’s felt-padded hammers land with the ease of falling back into a beloved armchair.
Baird’s willowy voice, along with the acoustic focus of her earlier records, have sometimes earned her the “folk” label, a misnomer that fails to account for her range. With her 2000s group Espers, she pressed forward on hypnotic, far-out psychedelia-tinged abstractions; at the trap kit for Watery Love and Heron Oblivion, she lands each beat like she’s trying to pound through the earth’s crust. With Furling, Baird both expands her palette and distills her multitudes into some of her richest work. She co-produced and recorded the LP with Charlie Saufley, her partner and her bandmate in Heron Oblivion. (The pair completed much of the recording process before March 2020, crediting its belated release to production delays.)
In contrast to her alternately thunderous and delicate work, Furling smolders like an incense cone as Baird works her way through serpentine arrangements. A wistful mood reigns. Splitting the difference between weariness and a restful exhale, Baird contemplates loss and savors fleeting comforts on “Twelve Saints,” leaning into a languorous atmosphere. Her romantic reassurances fold into the soft mandolin sweep of “Star Hill Song.” “I love you even when we can’t deal,” she sings, drifting alongside a wandering guitar line and loose percussion.
In a solo catalog full of satisfyingly sparse compositions, the gentle touches Baird brings to Furling stand apart. One such adornment arrives at the hands of harpist Mary Lattimore, with whom Baird released a 2018 duo LP, Ghost Forests. She adds a shimmery flourish to Baird’s melody on “The Saddest Verses,” where acoustic guitar strums float over a pliant electric guitar line. Baird tempers her softer material with moodier streaks in the overcast roll of “Unnamed Drives” and “Will You Follow Me Home?,” which drifts along with the ease of a purposefully purposeless stroll. “I’d like to know you’re hazy/I’d like to try and catch you maybe,” Baird sings. The songs’ winding instrumental threads lend each one a unique sheen, accumulating into a heady and mesmerizing whole.
Furling is not quite a departure for Baird: For every ominous turn like the instrumental opener “Ashes, Ashes,” there is a return to the warmth of her more characteristic solo material, like the rolling fingerpicking of “Cross Bay.” As a whole, these songs collect the charms of her past work and expand upon them. While her previous solo album, Don’t Weigh Down the Light, arrived in 2015, she’s been relatively easy to find since—lending her guitar and voice to friends like Steve Gunn and Will Oldham. It speaks to Baird’s ever-expanding ethos that, after 20 years of eager, in-depth collaboration, she’s managed to sound more like herself than ever.


Cornelius's Fantasma was a high point of the mid-'90s Shibuya-kei scene, an eclectic crate-diggers' subgenre that celebrated old sounds. Its vinyl reissue shows it still sounds fresh in 2016.

Fantasma

By the mid-‘90s, Japanese pop culture had peaked in global coolness. Anime and video games enthralled kids all over the globe, and author Haruki Murakami was starting to gain traction in the English-language world. And although it might not have been  quite as universal as Pokemon, Shibuya-kei music was winning praise from Western listeners. The genre’s mish-mash of sonic references and samples spanning the entire 20th century caught the ears of non-Japanese labels, leading to the ‘60s-swooning of Pizzicato Five and lounge-tronica of Fantastic Plastic Machine seeing widespread release. Nothing captured as much critical attention, however, as Keigo Oyamada’s Cornelius project, whose 1997 album Fantasma came out Stateside one year later via Matador Records. Soon after, the Shibuya-kei movement became oversaturated and its biggest names drifted to new sounds.
Fantasma marked the high point for the movement, and has since been celebrated as the style’s ultimate triumph. The Japanese music media isn’t big on “all-time” lists, but when the mood strikes, Cornelius’ third proper album always winds up in the top ten. All this canonization has the side effect of making Fantasma feel like an artifact, a musical museum devoted to a scene that could never exist outside of ‘90s Tokyo. Portland-based imprint Lefse’s new vinyl reissue—featuring four enjoyable bonus tracks, albeit songs that aren’t on the album for a reason —reminds that what makes this set of songs special hasn’t aged. Like Endtroducing… or Discovery, Fantasma took the (often literal) sounds of the past to create something new and exciting, while also ending up a celebration of the process of finding, listening and creating music.
It’s fitting Shibuya-kei’s finest statement came courtesy of one of the people most central to its emergence. Coming of age during Japan’s economically booming Bubble years, Oyamada had time to play in bands and spend hours exploring Tokyo’s well-stocked record stores. Alongside Kenji Ozawa in the group Flipper’s Guitar, he crafted songs drawing inspiration from all sorts of eclectic sources—the Scottish post-punk of Orange Juice, Madchester, bossa nova, the Monkees’ movie debut Head. Despite a tendency to swipe melodies wholesale, they pushed a slew of new sounds into the Japanese music conscience.
Alongside Pizzicato Five and a few other groups introducing unfamiliar styles, Flipper’s Guitar’s CDs sold extremely well at Shibuya music stores—well enough that they snuck into the nation’s album charts. The media, smelling a trend, called it Shibuya-kei (literally, Shibuya style). From there, new artists emerged, not united by a specific sound but rather an ethos that writer W. David Marx pins as “pastiche and bricolage,” offering an alternative to mainstream J-pop. Oyamada launched a label, Trattoria, sharing music from names such as Kahimi Karie and Hideki Kaji, and started his solo career as Cornelius, releasing two albums that found him caught between singer-songwriter and musical curator. He also starred in a Shibuya-kei-tinged hair mousse ad.
Fantasma, though, promised something different and more daring. Whereas previous Cornelius albums launched right into sunny horn fanfare, “Mic Check” begins with a faint click and a lot of space. Someone puffs a cigarette, a can cracks open, and somebody whistles a portion of Beethoven’s 5th. Early copies of Fantasma came packaged with earphones, and “Mic Check” quickly establishes why—it’s a producer’s album, one where every sound is labored over and plays a role in the greater journey. Oyamada wants the listener to be adequately ready for this—“can you hear me?” he asks in Japanese—so that they don’t miss any detail, before letting a semi-song bloom around them.
From there, Oyamada treats listener to a smörgåsbord of musical thrills. His songs here frequently jump between headphone channels—the dizzying Speak & Spell rock of “Count Five or Six” being a great example of this technique—while going one step further by playing around with the idea of recording music. Side two of the record starts with “Chapter 8 (Seashore and Horizon),” which opens with Robert Schneider and Hilarie Sidney of the Apples in Stereo performing a very Apples-in-Stereo-sounding song. But before a minute can pass, someone hits the stop button on a cassette player, and Oyamada jumps in with his own interpretation of sweetly sung indie-pop, the sort of number that could easily slide into the Elephant 6 catalog. Then the player clicks again, the tape rewinds, and the Apples come back in frame.
“Fantasma is a kind of album that only has one entrance and one exit. That is, you can’t listen to if from the middle,” Oyamada told a magazine around the album’s release. As the defining Shibuya-kei full-length, it’s loaded up with references to obscure older music spliced with styles that were, in 1997, fresh—drum ‘n’ bass drills through tropicália on album centerpiece “Star Fruits Surf Rider,” while “Monkey” jams samples sourced from R&B and an old record starring Mr. Magoo to create a playful romp that’s the most stereotypically Shibuya-kei-sounding thing here—but Oyamada wasn’t simply flexing his deep record collection. Sounds reappear frequently across Fantasma, songs referencing one another in subtle ways—early English-language reviews tended to knock Cornelius for having too much going on, but Oyamada knew exactly what he was doing with the rush of noises. Everything ends up in its right place, making for a more cohesive and intimate listen.
And that’s fitting, as Fantasma celebrates the process of discovery and falling in love with music. Shibuya-kei was built on crate-digging discoveries, but oftentimes could come off as simplistic (or, at worst, trying to be too cool with nothing but some obscure records). But only Fantasma peers into the actual act of listening. Half of the songs here feature no coherent lyrics, but when words do come through, they capture the feeling of being at a concert (“Clash”) or shutting out the world via headphones (“New Music Machine”). Sudden shifts in style even make sense within Fantasma’s walls—the twinkling, childhood collage of “The Micro Disneycal World Tour” gives way to the feedback-soaked, adolescent thrash of “New Music Machine.”
Nearly every song title on Fantasma references an existing musical group, obscure or world famous, but it feels like an act of grateful tribute rather than a hip name-check. With Flipper’s Guitar, Oyamada straight-up sampled chunks of the Beach Boys “God Only Knows,” but on his own “God Only Knows” he spends the track’s seven-minute-plus run time weaving an intricate pop production inspired by (but never directly taking from) Brian Wilson (and quoting another Oyamada favorite, the Jesus And Mary Chain). He reveals his intention with the penultimate number, “Thank You For the Music,” which acknowledges all of his musical heroes, along with the listeners who came along for the Fantasma ride, all over a folksy backing track that makes way for a rapid-fire collage of sounds heard over the course of the album...a reminder of the last 50-some minutes.
A lot of Shibuya-kei in 2016 sounds extremely dated, and it’s not totally the fault of the music for this. A big draw of the style was how the artist themselves served as a curator for the audience, funneling the forgotten sounds of yesteryear to a new audience. But the internet has completely changed the concept of curation—anyone can become an expert on niche styles with some focused Wikipedia digging, while the idea of finding a new perspective to old sounds has been replaced with “make me a playlist that sounds best while I’m in the bath.” Not to say there aren’t perks to a digital reality—I downloaded Fantasma off Soulseek in 2005, and it’s easier to find Shibuya-kei deep cuts on YouTube now rather than go to the actual Shibuya neighborhood.
But Fantasma distills the spirit and process of Shibuya-kei down to its purest essence and still sound warm and celebratory today. He imagined musical utopia, where genre lines fade easily and where geographic borders can vanish (in 2016, Japanese artists construct their own imagined versions of albums because of streaming exclusivity). In the ‘90s, Cornelius caught attention for a cool sound that earned him comparisons to Beck, but it’s the sense of sheer joy and excitement running through Fantasma that still makes it an exhilarating listen today.


Featuring collaborations with Sia, Dev Hynes, Charli XCX and more, Blondie’s 11th album is a bit uneven but remains a showcase for Debbie Harry’s versatile, supremely grounded voice and style.

Pollinator

For decades, Blondie’s weapon has been their talent for synthesis. While tracks like “One Way or Another” and “Hanging on the Telephone” front-loaded themselves with spiky riffs and Debbie Harry’s petulant yet wondrous vocals, other entrants in the New York New Wavers’ catalog got their power—and staying power—from places removed from what was then considered “rock.” “Heart of Glass” added disco’s bounce to the band’s guitar crunch; their cover of the rocksteady classic “The Tide is High” made plain the Caribbean influences that were infiltrating rock in the late ’70s and early ’80s; “Dreaming” was an urban-cowboy sigh reclining on a cloud of glitter; and Harry’s downtown-blasé, Fab 5 Freddy-saluting bridge on “Rapture” led to it becoming the first rap video to appear on the white-breadiest, earliest iteration of MTV.
From the title on down, Blondie makes it clear that Pollinator, their 11th album, is full of outside ideas—only two of its 11 songs were co-written by Harry and Blondie’s longtime guitarist/Harry’s songwriting foil Chris Stein. Collaborators include of-the-moment gurus like Dev Hynes and Dave Sitek as well as pop workhorses like Sia and Charli XCX; keyboardist Matthew Katz-Bohen, who joined the band in 2008, also co-wrote a pair of tracks, while John Congleton (St. Vincent, Goldfrapp) handled production.
Although it has its moments, the end result is predictably uneven. Blondie’s commitment to tense and jumpy pop remains, even though Harry’s voice is more grounded some four decades after the band’s debut. Pollinator opens with the Harry/Stein rocker “Doom or Destiny,” which chugs along on a simple, brain-Velcro riff and is full of winking wordplay; Congleton gives Harry’s lower-register vocals a metallic sheen that makes the rapid-fire internal rhymes sound playfully robotic. “Long Time,” which Harry co-wrote with Hynes, is a downshifted “Heart of Glass” with seen-it-all lyrics; the blooming keyboards buried in the mix provide a counterweight to Harry’s heavily processed vocals.
Fellow New Wave lifer Johnny Marr penned the muscular, urgent “My Monster,” one of the album’s highlights. Harry’s voice gets to peek out from the digital-processing curtain as guitars and keyboards zip around her. Charli XCX—one of the better 21st-century pop artists operating in Harry’s spirited yet serious style—wrote “Gravity,” a spaced-out synthpop romp that allows Harry to vamp and pout. The album nears dudsville with the Sia Furler/Nick Valensi co-write “Best Day Ever” because even though its synths sparkle, Furler’s lyrics-by-numbers are far too 101 for Harry’s wise persona. (Perhaps a verse en Français would have helped.)
Two of the album’s more unexpected collaborations wind up being its high points. The other Harry/Stein co-write, “Love Level,” opens as a swaggering pop-reggae hybrid then amps up the intensity as John Roberts (the comedian best-known as Linda on “Bob’s Burgers”) enters the fray, which quickly crests into a dancefloor cacophony. “Fragments,” meanwhile, is a seven-minute, blown-out cover of a 2010 piano ballad by the Vancouver musician (and movie blogger) Adam Johnston. In its original form it’s a slow-burn romantic broadside with knotty lyrics (“egocentricity,” “reality,” and “disparity” all fit into a verse that also contains the phrase “overwhelming rejection”); Blondie’s version surrounds Harry with guitar fuzz and breakneck drumming, allowing her to fully lean into a torchy vocal performance that culminates in her showing off her weathered, still-intact higher register as she laments that she doesn’t even remember. It’s part “Is That All There Is,” part defiant wave goodbye—and it’s a fitting close to an album that shows one of the most crucial American rock bands searching for footing in a chaotic, collapsible pop landscape.