Sheck’s raw and unruly debut is a force to be reckoned with, the rare project from an über-hyped prospect that actually delivers on its promise.

MUDBOY

For some time, rapping has stood alongside the wicked jump shot as one of the only legitimate hood escape hatches, and Sheck Wes tried his hand at both. Two years ago, he even skipped an important high school basketball game to pose in Kanye’s Yeezy Season 3 show at Madison Square Garden. His longtime friendship with NBA rookie Mo Bamba led to his breakout hit, which is still his most popular song to date. “Mo Bamba”—a song freestyled in 20 minutes and uploaded to SoundCloud days later without warning (and without Sheck’s knowledge) by co-producer 16yrold—ignited such buzz that Travis Scott and Kanye West signed him to a dual deal with Cactus Jack and G.O.O.D. Music, respectively. The song’s eerie melody and unruly energy serve as proper lead-ins to his full-length debut, MUDBOY. His hoop dreams have been forced to take a backseat now that his rap dreams are within reach.
MUDBOY delivers mosh raps with a cold, steely New York edge. The lo-fi and booming songs antagonize your senses and disrupt your day. Interspersed among the rowdy tracks are stories of Sheck’s trials as a “mudboy,” which he’s described as a process of toiling through grime to become a man. It’s its own coming-of-age album and the rare project from an über-hyped rap prospect that actually delivers on its promise.
Born to Senegalese parents, Sheck Wes split his childhood between Harlem and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has likened being in Milwaukee to being in prison and equated returning to New York with autonomy, and that pursuit of freedom is imbued and sometimes documented in his music. On the cusp of fame, Sheck’s mother shipped him to the motherland to study Islam, a pilgrimage he initially saw as a banishment and betrayal but now credits with a spiritual awakening. MUDBOY drinks all of this in, oscillating between autobiography and thrashing tribal chants. He bridges the gap between the DIY SoundCloud aesthetic and the Harlem youth subcultures he was tempered in.
Sheck collapses the space between “post-regional” rap and hyper-local rap with assists from Harlem producer Lunchbox and Miami producer Redda. Beats have trace elements of sounds near and far. They’re largely nightmarish alternatives to Pi’erre Bourne’s carnival attractions, forcing their way into your ear with the ugly, bass-boosted distortion of Ronny J (who has cranked up the wattage for Lil Pump, Smokepurpp, and Denzel Curry). Some sound extremely localized to NYC, others wouldn’t be out of place on Travis Scott’s Astroworld.
It’s somewhat ironic that Sheck Wes is signed to Scott’s Cactus Jack imprint because he’s almost the anti-Travis Scott. Where Scott is rigid in his raps and backed by a cabal of industry leaders, Sheck is unfastened and going it alone. This intuition extends to his ad-libs, chief among them “bitch,” which pops up frequently and at random, standing as a raw bearing of his emotions. “Why I say bitch so much? Let me explain it: It’s the only word where I can feel and hear all my anger,” he says on “Gmail.” Every utterance of the word—and MUDBOY by extension—feels like spontaneous combustion. His process is one of fluidity and recklessness, in sound and rhythm. Through him, you can hear the Harlem jigginess in his flows, the seismic hums of Kid Cudi, and the loose, informal ramblings of Lil B.
Like Playboi Carti, Sheck Wes was modeling before most had heard his raps, and both put an emphasis on form over function and style over structure. The inclination is to immediately hear Sheck’s songs as slapdash and superficial, owed largely to their lack of text, but doing so misses the point. Taken at face value, his rhymes are simple, but directness is the appeal, a force that delivers huge blows. To write it off as unremarkable is to risk looking like Zedd, being schooled on music theory by “Mo Bamba” co-producers Take a Day Trip after he took a shot at the song. It isn’t basic; it’s straightforward by design. Sheck has spoken openly about people getting “lost in the energy” in his music and missing the message. But as he put it recently: “I’m talking about some shit!”
Inside many of these amped-up jams are tales of self-discovery hiding in plain sight. “They just want the turnt shit/They don’t like the sad music,” Sheck laments on “WESPN.” But he sneaks in poignance anyway. “It gets tragic where I live, everything is negative/Hold the roaches in the crib, elevator full of piss/Everybody grew up tough, bunch of diamonds in the rough/Police ain’t never give a fuck, they just want us in them cuffs,” he raps on “Live Sheck Wes,” as clear and concise an indictment of big-city politics as any in rap. “Never Lost” recounts his month’s long exile to Senegal and all he learned in its aftermath. Later, on “Jiggy on the Shits,” this becomes a key part of his origin story, as he finesses his way back to America. “I turned a couple years into a couple months/I took my plan, and now I’m writing history,” he raps, adding in some Wolof—the native language of Senegal—for good measure. His writing is striking.
While MUDBOY is a strong and holistic statement from an upstart rapper, with the early-album run from “Live Sheck Wes” through “Chippi Chippi” being particularly stunning, these songs feel like underscores for the colossal “Mo Bamba.” It is not only the centerpiece but also a pure representation of what being a “mudboy” means: the fraternities immigrant kids find on the fringes of urban centers, the sense of community fostered in the New York underground, finding your escape hatch—be it balling or rapping—and pushing your way out the hood so that everyone you knew can share in that win. The song is in celebration of putting the city on and a rallying cry for those who might come after, following in his footsteps. That’s the essence carried within MUDBOY: the toil produces a man and a man clears a path for the next.

Cactus Jack / G.O.O.D. Music / Interscope


Angel Deradoorian zooms in on the heady, spiritual undercurrent of her past work for the new age Eternal Recurrence, which is hushed, meditative, and bathed in amber glow.

Eternal Recurrence

On Angel Deradoorian’s debut album, she closed one door and opened a dozen more. Up until that point, the Sacramento-born musician had spent most of her career supporting other people: most famously as a member of Dave Longstreth’s Dirty Projectors and Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, but also singing backup for Brandon Flowers, Charli XCX, Flying Lotus, and even U2. Finally, though, in order to say “yes” to her own instincts—there had been no solo work since her debut EP, in 2009—she had to say “no” to everyone else. The result was 2015’s The Expanding Flower Planet, an almost entirely self-made album in which Deradoorian found her voice by throwing her arms wide open to possibility. Jewel-toned keyboards, Middle Eastern scales, dizzyingly multi-tracked vocal harmonies over a mercurial psych-rock firmament—the album was hybrid to the core, stylistically polyglot, voracious in its embrace of the wider world.
On the follow-up, in what feels like an equally strategic move, she has begun closing doors again. Just six songs and 29 minutes long, Eternal Recurrence sounds like an attempt to zoom in on just one facet of The Expanding Flower Planet—namely, its heady, spiritual undercurrent—and blow it up to larger-than-life size. Hushed, meditative, and bathed in an amber glow, Eternal Recurrence feels like a church service, or a séance. It begins with warm synths that could almost be organs; Deradoorian follows her voice to the edge of language, tracing shapes against quivering drones. The shifts between minor and major are like the intermingling of colors through a rose window.
Patient and repetitive, the opening “Love Arise” is faintly reminiscent of Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi or Meredith Monk’s Book of Days. Setting Deradoorian’s vocal harmonies against chords bristling with overtones, and making the most of her swooping glissandi, it uses minimalism as a springboard to dive into an array of microtonal frequencies. The patient mood of the first song blows into wide-open reverie on “Return-Transcend,” an eight-minute meditation in which Deradoorian traces Middle Eastern runs over hurdy-gurdy drones. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the incense-laced, liturgical mood of Dead Can Dance—but the early, gothic Dead Can Dance, before their schmaltzier instincts got the better of them—and from there the record goes fully new age. “Ausar Temple,” whose title references the Egyptian god of the underworld, is nothing but two-and-a-half minutes of tolling bells, intermittent gongs, and running water engulfed in cavernous reverb.
To get here, she has had to excise some of the things that made her debut album so exciting: The variety, the unpredictability, the hummability. The Expanding Flower Planet is an avant-pop album as riotous as a medieval public square; Eternal Recurrence, its fluid tones draped like the garnet robes of a mystical order, takes a vow of austerity. Fortunately, the B-side’s three tracks step outside the hermit’s lair and back toward actual song form. “Nia in the Dark,” led by solemn electric bass, makes for a post-punk-inspired playground for her vocal experiments; “Mountainside” is a hothouse of piano and flute, and the closing “Mirrorman” is a kind of secular psalm not unlike Breadwoman’s spiritual minimalism.
Throughout, Deradoorian’s voice is the main attraction. Wispy one moment, bellowing full-throated the next, and capable of dazzling melismatic runs, it remains her not-so-secret weapon. It carries the music even when her lyrics don’t feel as transcendent as the subject matter calls for. Eternal Recurrence concerns itself with love’s transcendent power, but where her melodies soar effortlessly, her rhyming couplets (“Love in the morning when I open up my eyes/Love in the evening when the fading sunset dies”) can feel clunky, programmatic—earthbound instead of weightless.
In any kind of tradeoff, the question is always going to be: Was it worth it? And the answer here is yes, albeit with an asterisk attached. Short and potent, the mini-album benefits from its focused mood; I don’t mean to slight it to say that it would surely make for a good accompaniment to yoga or meditation. Unlike her boisterous debut album, it is a calming listen that lends itself to journeys into inner space, even if the lyrics can sometimes be distracting. Some of the record’s best moments are swirled deeply into the mix and arise without warning—like the strange, groaning bass gurgle that closes “Return-Transcend” in a flurry of synthetic whale song, or the closing coda of “Mountainside,” in which a tape-warped buzz hiccups expectantly. It’s in moments like this, where the music feels like it has a mind of its own, that the narrow focus of Eternal Recurrence leads to what feels like an infinite array of passageways, each one offering a potential way forward for the project.


The influential 1990s Illinois band is back: Longtime fans will be crying for the wrong reasons.

Closer to Closed

We were the new Nathan Detroits. We assumed everything while Ariel danced in her room and took off her clothes. We were at their last show where Bob Nanna cried and maybe we did, too. Sure, this is a composite sketch, but we repped Braid to the fullest back when emo meant something. Of course, that "something" mostly meant humble Midwesterners with enough start-stop trickery and "auxiliary screaming guy" to crucially place themselves in the cred lineage of Fugazi even if the lyrics yelled "do you like me?" more than "you are not what you own." It's been hard since then: not just because Braid went dormant, but because emo's domination of early-2000s radio was a pyrrhic victory, its ensuing evolution leading to its becoming the single most vilified form in all of indie rock.
But oh shit, Braid are back. Even if Closer to Closed is just a four-song EP, come on! Chris Broach in the building! Unfortunately, the brevity of Closer to Closed only makes it easier to remember that this is also pretty much the same band as Hey Mercedes, a competently forgettable Vagrant latecomer that made Everynight Fire Works, a record I haven't listened to in a decade mostly because I recall it sounding a hell of a lot like this. "This" mostly meaning market-tested emo-pop with the emotion and pop aspects sterilized by an unwillingness to commit to either. It sounded somewhat desperate back when there felt like a reason and a market to sell out for, but now it just sounds utterly clueless.
This year, we've seen Taking Back Sunday, Saves The Day, and the Get Up Kids attempting to play catch up with themselves, but here Braid bafflingly jettison the goodwill of their past: the palm-muted verses and squeaky choruses, the one-sided conversations of the lyrics, the antiseptic production-- I'll say it could come from anyone because you probably don't remember who the Pinehurst Kids are. With not a single sharp edge provided by any riffs or even Broach (whose guitar doodles enough in the margins to let you know that he actually showed up), you haven't much choice but to sort of pitifully engage with Closer to Closed like a nervous friend before a huge date he's clearly going to fuck up.
During its first two clean-shaven and aloe-moisturized choruses, Chris Broach sings, "It could never be this good again/ You know it's true," and Nanna, "I want a do over, do over, do over." If you want to project your vague romantic frustration onto a blank slate, this'll do. You can just as easily take it as running commentary on Closer to Closed itself, stuck for inspiration outside of constantly introducing and apologizing for its own existence. (Congratulations...I'm Sorry, y'know?) "I wouldn't mind a second try," Nanna chirps on "Do Over", and at its climax, "now is the part where I break your heart" flips to "this is the part where we break some hearts." Hearing them stoop to the Panic! At the Disco-era necessity of establishing some sort of conspiratorial fourth-wall busting narrative with the listener is just such a fucking bummer that you can't even muster the energy to use their own words against them.Which is incredibly easy since Nanna's lyrics have further devolved into pure emo madlibbing.
Of course, it might be just as easy for you to point out that I'm a grown man and wanting Braid to pick up and recreate 1998 on the rebound is no more rational than my college friends expecting me to knock off that bottle of Goldschlager and somehow shake it off before that huge presentation the next morning. But are you seriously asking Braid fans to not care so much? Let us mourn in peace-- Urbana's just too fucking dark, and it's not getting any brighter.


Wendy Eisenberg’s trio combines bludgeoning post-hardcore with off-kilter runs, hairpin turns, and deceptively nonchalant vocals. The subject matter is serious, but it’s clear they’re having fun.

Editrix: Editrix II: Editrix Goes to Hell

Editrix II: Editrix Goes to Hell

The first sounds emitted by Wendy Eisenberg’s guitar on Editrix’s second album are screeching arcs of noise. These parabolas of dissonance ricochet for over a minute before devolving into scattered jabs that twitch with anxious energy. Eisenberg revels in the friction of these kinds of uncomfortable tones, frequently pairing discordant harmonies with lyrics that hit in a similar way. Often they sing of the awkward, bitter feeling of being thrown into a world that twists us into shapes that feel unnatural—the cognitive dissonance of living in a society that insists you act in ways that are in opposition to your core values. But even as Eisenberg exploits the expressive potential of discord, they frame these personal and philosophical crises with a disarming mixture of sincerity and irony that is both funny and profound.
Eisenberg’s music takes several forms, including avant-garde jazz and tender folk-like songs they sing by themself, but the bludgenoning post-hardcore of Editrix is their bluntest, most provocative outlet for this discontent. The trio, which includes Steve Cameron on bass and Josh Daniel on drums, pounds its way through Editrix II: Editrix Goes to Hell’s 12 songs. Each band member bears down on their instrument, and they bolster the intensity with complexity of their interlocking riffs and rhythms, which are frequently disrupted by off-kilter runs and sharp left turns. Those tight hairpins, dextrous in ways that allude to Eisenberg’s extensive jazz training, foster a gripping unpredictability as the band cycles through multiple tempos and melodic passages. Spindly guitars get tangled around beats so heavy with syncopation they make 4/4 feel oddly metered, but Editrix playfully ride these unpredictable waves. It’s clear they’re having fun.
One of the consistent elements between Eisenberg’s solo work and Editrix is their ability to write sticky melodies that fit neatly into knotty chords and chromatic riffs that only occasionally resolve. They consistently find the square pegs that will miraculously fit a round hole, and their nonchalant, intimate style of singing makes the juxtaposition feel natural. Rarely do they shriek, growl, or moan the way a typical punk singer might, and they don’t strain their voice to be heard above the instrumental maelstrom. Instead they sing as they might if accompanied only by a single guitar, their voice perched high atop the mix so each lyric can be deciphered and absorbed.
Abrupt shifts in tone are typical of the album’s lyrics as well, which are peppered with tongue-in-cheek lines that swerve into more severe territory. “The anthropocene means humans are winning,” sings Eisenberg on “Queering Ska” before admitting dire acceptance—“I know that it will end/That it is ending.” When they sing, “It’s 2019, who is queering ska?” gleeful upstrokes seem to answer their own question, but in the next breath, whimsy gives way to the trauma of the following year: “It’s 2020, who is not on Earth?” On “Time Can’t Be Redeemed,” they find a witty way to express dark ruminations: “On the subject of whether or not to live, I’m undecided and can’t be swayed.” It’s not that they use humor as a coping mechanism, but that they understand the absurdity buried deep in the hellish conditions of life under capitalism. Rather than succumb to it, they laugh in its face.
At this point there’s nothing inherently radical about simply stating known truths: We live in a morally corrupt system that prioritizes profit and power over the lives and livelihoods of our neighbors and ourselves. We’re alienated and frustrated. What makes Editrix’s music feel truly radical and transformative is the playful, powerful way the music reflects the everyday paranoia of living during this crisis-laden moment. Like Fugazi before them, Editrix takes punk’s framework and stretches it to its breaking point, pushing listeners to question orthodoxy in all its forms—ethical, ontological, and musical.


Though not necessarily nostalgic, the sound of Bury Me at Makeout Creek, the impressive third album from Mitski Miyawaki, is inventive and resourceful in a '90s-indie way.

Bury Me at Makeout Creek

Yo La Tengo. Fall Out Boy. And, upon the release of her third album Bury Me at Makeout Creek, Mitski. These three are just about the only rock musicians to successfully reference “The Simpsons” (we’ll leave out metalcore bros Evergreen Terrace for a number of reasons)—a small group considering the show's incalculable influence on people who listen to indie rock. Here’s some context for this particular nod: the cosmic punching bag Milhouse undergoes a fake faith healing ritual that he believes has restored his vision. Caught up in a rapturous song and dance number, he is promised a rare romantic tryst at the apocryphal Makeout Creek. He then gets hit by a truck. With his last bit of breath, he says this album title.
That more or less mirrors the narrative arc here. Opener "Texas Reznikoff" establishes contemporary comparisons—Mitski’s broad, tremulous vocals and sly humor recall Angel Olsen, while the equal split between unencumbered acoustic pining and pummeling, mid-fi indie rock respectively aligns her with labelmates Frankie Cosmos and LVL UP. And it lays out a compact scene of domestic bliss, littered with specificities—a lover who wears socks in bed, reads Objectivist poetry, and serves as the breeze in her Austin nights. The final acknowledgement of romantic contentment occurs less than three minutes into Bury Me at Makeout Creek and by its bitter end, the only thing that can bring Mitski comfort is the thought of dying with a clean apartment ("They'll think of me kindly/ When they come for my things").
The way an outsider might view her narrator is duly noted just by the loaded title of "Townie"—this is someone who’s stuck around far too long after the party ended and almost certainly has a distorted perspective as to whether it was any fun to begin with. “Townie” previews a horrible night out with all the protraction and morbid glee of a suicide pact. Her images are startlingly violent—she wants a love that falls like a body from the balcony, she’s holding her breath with a baseball bat. Guzzling a toxic Pinkerton cocktail of redlining distortion, white-hot self pity, and sing-along hooks, Mitski shouts, "I’m not gonna be what my daddy wants me to be...I'm gonna be what my body wants me to be," a call for freedom that's galvanizing from a teenage perspective, but increasingly sad as songs like "I Don't Smoke" and "Drunk Walk Home" lay out the terrible life plan the body of this self-described 25 year-old "tall child" has for her.
Though not necessarily nostalgia, the sound of Bury Me at Makeout Creek is inventive and resourceful in a '90s-indie way. The choruses here soar like power pop, but are subdued by tempo and fidelity, while cheap drum machines are deployed as much for their tone as their rhythm. And even when Bury Me has full band arrangements, everything calls attention to the narrator's loneliness—awkwardly thumbed basslines, slapdash drumming, a mocking chorale on "Carry Me Out", organ drones that could pass for someone nodding off on the keys.
But anything that gives you the sense of amateurism or self-defeat has intent and purpose. As tempting as it is to praise Bury Me at Makeout Creek by trying to quantify its intangibles—charm, relatability—the craft here is obvious, as is the accruing confidence of someone who’s developed a compelling voice in obscurity. Mitski can lay on the emo melodrama ("One word from you/ And I would jump off of this ledge I'm on, baby") just enough so things aren’t too real and mundane, and while these songs are first-person and personal, they're meant for an audience. It’s fitting to see a mutual respect between herself and Joyce Manor, whose Never Hungover Again is a similarly fantastic record of pop gems about choosing self-pity over feeling nothing at all and finding a kind of pleasurable agency in it. And as a result, Mitski Miyawaki is starting to gain a bit of separation from her band; Bury Me at Makeout Creek still sounds like a breakthrough even if nothing’s coming up Mitski in these songs.


Zayn’s reputation as a skillful interpreter of pop is tested on his second solo album, a tome of love songs with a concept that hinges on excess and its trickery.

Icarus Falls

Zayn—fka Zayn Malik, fka one-fifth of the British boy-band supernova One Direction—named his second album after the myth of Icarus, the seraphic optimist who flew too close to the sun and snuffed himself out as a result. It’s in keeping with Zayn’s status as a reluctant pop star: He was the first member to depart from his Simon Cowell-sutured group (four months before the other four went on indefinite hiatus), his social-media presence is mostly low-key, and the promotion around his new releases are comparatively low-key affairs. Too much excess chatter, after all, results in the music, the reason Zayn became Zayn in the first place, receding to the background.
Mind of Mine, Zayn’s 2016 solo debut, was steeped in the dry-ice chills of modern R&B, Zayn’s still-lithe tenor guiding the listener through tremulous, sexually charged tracks. Icarus Falls, its followup, treads more of the same ground—a lot more, actually—while also serving up a few surprisingly sublime pop moments.
On first glance, the 27-track length of Icarus Falls indicates a data dump, those streaming-age behemoths made to be played on repeat by stat-happy fans while they sleep. And it’s partly that; Zayn told British Vogue that some of its tracks were rescued from the sessions for Mind of Mine, which resulted in some “60-something” completed songs. But Icarus Falls is actually a double album, cleaved in two by “Icarus Interlude,” which features Zayn hammering home the concept over spindly guitars. “I guess I flew too close to the sun/Myth’ll call me legend, that might be why,” he muses before label-dropping Yves Saint Laurent.
Icarus Falls opens with Zayn in love, or at least something like it: “Sweet baby, our sex has meaning,” he murmurs over the percolating guitars and plush synths of the album’s first track, the bedheaded devotional “Let Me.” (His ability to just barely pull off that bodice-ripper-worthy line is a sign of his skillful interpretative sense.) It’s a gorgeous opening, straddling the space between the breezy acousti-R&B that dominated the late ’00s and the snare-heavy rhythms of modern trap-pop while also flaunting Zayn’s falsetto. It’s followed by a slew of love songs, some of which leap from speakers a bit more readily: The sparse, snap-assisted “Back to Life” turns a lover into a lifesaver; “Stand Still” places Zayn, pleading in chorus with himself, within chilly synths and a rubbery guitar solo; the sumptuous “I Don’t Mind” rides a laconic groove with hope and swagger. Zayn’s belief in the power of love utterly blinds him on that last one—“You can tell me all your lies/I don’t mind,” he declares.
Then come the aforementioned interlude and the back half of the album, the new mood signaled by a sample of the tremolo guitars that open Nancy Sinatra’s torchy version of “Bang Bang.” Zayn’s wail zooms in, and we’re off to the races, plunging into love’s dark side on “Good Guy,” being emotionally withholding on “You Wish You Knew,” and writing a poison-pen letter to an ex on “Entertainer.” The more volatile lyrical content of the back half seems to feed into its more exciting, varied music—“Sour Diesel” reforms the “I Wanna Be Your Dog” bassline into a tether for blissed-out funk-pop, “Scripted” smashes and glues back together the string-laden ballad ideal, and the tense “Fresh Air” pairs fuzzy yet insistent drum-machine hits with a drowsy loop, underscoring the pressure-cooker lyrics that outline a relationship on the rocks. (There’s also “Good Years,” a jaundiced look back at One Direction past that, possibly ironically, echoes the sort of Ryan Tedder-style balladry that might have padded one of the group’s earlier albums.)
Icarus Falls, as a high-concept pop album, is fine. It shows off Zayn’s reluctant charisma and love-song-ready voice amid R&B ideas that are fully immersed in the present, for the most part for the better. True, it’s long, but given that its whole concept hinges on the idea of excess and its trickery, maybe that’s yet another sly wink from one of teen idoldom’s most enigmatic artists.


Between 1977 and 1979, Andy Kaufmann taped 82 hours of audio from his everyday life onto a microcassette recorder. A keenly edited version of those tapes make up the 48 minutes of Andy and His Grandmother, a comedy album on Drag City that is, fittingly, unlike any other comedy album.

Andy and His Grandmother

Between 1977 and 1979, Andy Kaufman-- and his act-- changed. In '77, the comedian (or, as he preferred, "song-and-dance man") was 28 years old, and his bits were marked by wide-eyed innocence. At that point, it often seemed like his characters were pre-pubescent or eerily unaware of the adult world; in fact, much of his material at the time was culled from previous stints entertaining childrens' birthday parties as a teenager or hosting a kids' show, "Uncle Andy's Funhouse," in college. For Kaufman, retaining this child-like perspective was essential-- he even took up Transcendental Meditation in an attempt to hold onto this aura as he entered his twenties-- and it helped to inspire a similar feeling in his audience, to make them think back to a time before bills and heartbreak and death. A TV special he taped in the summer of 1977 epitomized this era as it featured his hopelessly naive Foreign Man character, a sincere interview with Kaufman's childhood idol Howdy Doody, and a step-by-step tutorial on how to make chocolate milk. The showcase ended with a sing-along to a song called "This Friendly World".
Due to its unabashedly offbeat nature (is he kidding? is he serious? what is he?) that special was shelved and would not air until two years later, after Kaufman had gained more fame with his role on "Taxi". But by then, in the summer of '79, the performer had, as one TV critic put it, "turned." He had started wrestling women onstage because he loved wrestling and its ridiculous theater. He also found the activity quite arousing and, according to Bill Zehme's definitive biography Lost in the Funhouse, it was a good way for Kaufman to break the ice with girls he wanted to have sex with after the show. Not very innocent. He also invented a new character, Tony Clifton, who was the exact opposite of his lovable Foreign Man-- a Vegas-style lout in a bad toupee, tumbling gut, and hideous moustache. Clifton was pure id, a reaction against Kaufman's kid-friendly former self. Looking back, that period between '77 and '79 was especially pivotal for Kaufman-- it's also the timeframe when he taped 82 hours of audio from his everyday life onto his newly purchased microcassette recorder. A keenly edited version of those tapes make up the 48 minutes of Andy and His Grandmother, a comedy album that is, fittingly, unlike any other.
The inspiration behind Kaufman's home recordings may be a man that his confidant and co-conspirator Bob Zmuda calls Mr. X (due to fear of retribution) in his book Andy Kaufman Revealed!. Zmuda worked for this apparently psychotic Hollywood screenwriter who would get himself into dangerous or outlandish real-life situations-- like insulting a mob boss' mother at her birthday dinner-- record them on audiotape, and then use those recordings as catalysts for his writing. Such mixing of fact and fiction was catnip for Kaufman, whose life often seemed like a series of pranks and put-ons. So Andy and His Grandmother-- compiled by veteran comedy writer/producer Vernon Chatman ("Louie", "South Park", "The Chris Rock Show") and documentarian Rodney Ascher (the Shining-obsessed Room 237)-- isn't merely a recording of Kaufman's stand-up performances, but rather recordings of real-life conversations that would plant creative seeds in his eccentric mind. Considering that many of the record's most memorable moments document wildly heated phone calls, it can seem like Andy and His Grandmother is more similar to a Jerky Boys album than comedy classics by Steve Martin or Bill Cosby.
Because, by-and-large, this is a record of provocation. It's also probably one of the most clear-eyed accounts of the "real" Andy Kaufman in existence, a serious feat considering his notoriously slippery relationship with what most of us call reality. The candidness here can be startling, even by 2013 standards. A track called "Slice of Life" has Kaufman talking to one of the many women he bedded while on tour in the late 70s. "We just screwed and here's the afterward conversation," he announces, before continuing: "It didn't look to me like you were enjoying it that much." But this isn't laugh-out-loud funny. It's unflinching. He asks her, "What happens if you got a baby?" to which the unnamed woman responds, "I'll hop a plane to Toronto and get a little abortion." Naturally, she asks for him to turn off the tape (there's an entire track here devoted to the voices of people requesting-- often in an incensed tone-- for Kaufman to "shut that off") but he's adamant: "Why is it that nobody understands that the kind of conversations that nobody wants me to tape are the kind of conversations that should be taped?" It's the sort of philosophy that runs through the work of many great comedians, from Woody Allen to Louis C.K., laid perfectly bare, without the filter of a camera lens, script, or stand-up routine.
Later on, a series of phone calls show up in which Kaufman diabolically riles up a woman who doesn't appreciate her feelings being used as some sort of meta comedy exercise. "You are fucked up!" she screams. "I WANT THOSE FUCKING TAPES!" The call is followed by Zmuda and Kaufman plotting how they could release the contentious conversations with this one tremendously angry woman as an album. "The concept would be funny because it's real, but it would be dramatic at the same time," Kaufman says, before excitedly suggesting to Zmuda, "Wouldn't it be great if she killed me and you have the tapes?" It's uncomfortable comedy, the kind that Kaufman would perfect with Tony Clifton and his inter-gender wrestling career. And these talks with various women accentuate the more problematic sides of his personality, the parts that were addicted to prostitutes and womanizing. "He hated that he needed to be with women," says friend Wendy Polland in Lost in the Funhouse, "because he didn't like the mind games they played with him. Which I guess was sort of ironic, wasn't it?" Andy and His Grandmother shows him fighting back against these women, and it can sound as compelling as a car crash.
But it's not all unusually cringe-worthy. There are moments when Kaufman's more lighthearted, '77-era persona shows up, like when he takes his grandmother out for a car ride and tries to convince her that a radar is guiding the vehicle (though that track cannily jump-cuts to a confrontation with a traffic cop who threatens to "knock the shit" out of a belligerent Kaufman). And all that phone yelling toward the end of the album is foreshadowed by another phone bit, "Andy Can Talk to Animals", where Kaufman gets into a shouting match with what sounds like a squealing pig: "Yeah, whaddya want? Say it fast." [pig squeal] "I had to change my fucking clothes so I can go out and have a good time and you just made me miss my appointment, so fuck you!" It's funnier than the real arguments-- likely due to the absurdity and lack of actual consequence-- but as Kaufman progressed through the late 70s, coaxing laughs from his audience became less and less of an imperative.
At one point during the album, a wronged woman lashes out at Kaufman in a particularly discombobulated-- but not inaccurate-- manner: "You think that I really don't know when you goof on me, and you think that I really don't know, and really I know, and you know that I really know, but you say I don't know." These are the mental hoops this one-of-a-kind performance artist would force people to go through on a regular basis, whether onstage or in front of his tiny personal recorder. It's why he still resonates and fascinates in our world of meta-this and post-that, why anyone would care about a collection of cobbled together personal recordings from an enigma who's been dead for nearly three decades. Based on Andy and His Grandmother, Kaufman comes off like an asshole, a hopelessly naive loser, a crazy person, a hothead, a hopelessly sweet grandma's boy, a sexually confused teenager, and a manipulative monster. In other words, he comes off like Andy Kaufman.


Considering the amount of pre-release talk surrounding Apologies to the Queen Mary, it's inevitable that reviews of Wolf Parade ...

Wolf Parade: Apologies to the Queen Mary

Apologies to the Queen Mary

Considering the amount of pre-release talk surrounding Apologies to the Queen Mary, it's inevitable that reviews of Wolf Parade's debut will contain bad wolf puns, Modest Mouse references (Isaac Brock recorded much of the album), riffs on Montreal's music scene by those who couldn't locate the city on a map, and namechecks of the quartet's pals, the Arcade Fire and Frog Eyes. Amid the noise, what Apologies might not receive is the close listening it deserves.
There's no question the lonesome crowded sound is here, but when Wolf Parade dig in and dust off their influences, the band rolls like a Ritalin-deprived power-Bowie or 70s Eno flexing piano-based hooks over Pixified rhythms. Component ingredients include electronics, keyboards, guitar, drums, and two spastically surging, forever tuneful vocalists (Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug), but there are also surprises: A theremin cries in the slow-poke "Same Ghost Every Night"-- one of the longer tracks, it grows in pageantry as it swells to the six-minute mark-- and a spot of noise-guitar echoes throughout Krug's windy "Dinner Bells". And unlike most participants in indie rock's million-band march, Wolf Parade makes familiar elements mesh in special ways.
Groups like Neutral Milk Hotel and the Arcade Fire inspire listeners to both feel their music and listen closely to what's being said. Wolf Parade's Boeckner and Krug sing so energetically it can be difficult transcribing, but as lyrics reveal themselves on multiple listens, Apologies is populated by ghosts, crumbled brick, haunted technology, Marcel Dzama animals, fathers and mothers, off-kilter love songs, rusted gold, and endtime/brand new world scenarios that furnish the album's ornate instrumentation and clever arrangements with an inspired if elliptical story arc.
The album's roughly split between Boeckner and Krug, their tracks often alternating to a tee. But there is a non-cut/dry bleed between them, with both showing up on the same song, backing each other, screaming at the same time. I wouldn't want to inspire a quarterback controversy, but I tend to be a Krug man-- to my ear, he's the more intriguing lyricist, a Bowie-inflected guy tackling nonstandard song constructions. On the other hand, Boeckner is more traditionally palatable, which may make him the favorite by consensus: His work is often less unhinged or unpredictable, and this focus allows for some of the album's most immediate standouts.
Apologies starts with Krug's mousy "You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son"-- also included on the band's self-titled EP-- and Boeckner's "Modern World", but it really takes off with "Grounds for Divorce". Honing in on one of the album's main themes, the track finds a momentary beauty and romanticism within potentially alienating technology: "You said you hate the sound of the buses on the ground/ You said you hate the way they scrape their brakes all over town/ I said, 'Pretend it's whales, keeping their voices down.'" Spiraling behind Krug's vocals, Boeckner mingles his guitar splashes with textured keys and a distant shout of affirmation.
Boeckner's best are the anthemic "Shine a Light" and his lovely, ragged closer, "This Heart's on Fire", which induces thoughts of the Boss in full grease-monkey Valentino mode. Krug's key tracks also come toward the album's end: the regal swagger of the Frog-Eyed "Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts"-- note its absolutely sublime vocal cadences and group hug-- and "I'll Believe in Anything", one of my favorite tunes of the year. (Diehards can scope out an eviscerated take on Krug's Sunset Rubdown album, but in either hip-shaking form it's unexpectedly moving.) Tangy video-game synth, half-Moon drums, and pretty guitar reps embrace a maniacally charming Krug come-on: "Give me your eyes, I need sunshine/ Your blood, your bones/ Your voice, and your ghost." Boeckner's guitar distorts, the keys trill, Krug somehow finds even more energy in his pocket, and the fucker continues for another two-and-a-half blissful minutes with a shopping list of promises of escape and hope that culminates with: "I'd take you where nobody knows you/ And nobody gives a damn either way."
On paper this all could sound average, but Wolf Parade's true talent is transforming the everyday into the unprecedented. Fittingly, then, the record isn't going to change the direction of modern music, but it will enrich small moments of your life-- lying in bed alone or with a loved one, the morning commute, the dancefloor, a house party.
If you can, block out the baggage of its built-in hype machine and take this stuff for what it is. I still remember the excitement felt when I first heard Modest Mouse more than a decade ago. At the time, my friend and I talked about how it sounded like this or like that or whatever, but beneath the snobbery and geeky influence-detecting, we were excited, and so obviously into what the band was doing. If given the chance, Wolf Parade should engender similar scenarios: In a few years, other folks will still remember where they were when they first heard Apologies to the Queen Mary.


The songwriter takes an uncharacteristic breather with a collection of faithful, occasionally brooding covers of 1980s hits like “Forever Young” and “The Safety Dance.”

Aisles EP

Angel Olsen doesn’t want you reading too much into her new Aisles EP. On the heels of two of her most emotionally taxing albums yet, she’s recorded something entirely out of character: a covers EP of ’80s hits she’s heard at the grocery store. It’s not a declaration of a lighter new direction, or a sign that she’s entered a Weezer-y, internet-pandering phase of her career. They’re just some covers, she insists. “I know it’s not really in my history to do something unintentional or just for the hell of it,” she writes in notes accompanying the EP. “I just wanted to have a little fun and be a little more spontaneous.”
If that’s a lot of preface, it’s because you’re about to hear Angel Olsen cover “The Safety Dance,” and some assurances it’s a fluke might take a little of the sting out of that. Trading on her icy presence, Olsen’s slow-motion rendition of Men Without Hats’ 1982 hit is pure schlock, the kind of moody novelty cover that might soundtrack a trailer for an Ozark ripoff on Amazon Prime. Only the slightest indication of a smirk in Olsen’s otherwise robotic voice betrays that she’s in on the joke, that yes, this is ridiculous, and no, she doesn’t care that you assumed she was above this kind of thing.
Laura Branigan’s Euro-disco banger “Gloria” gets a similarly brooding makeover that slows its strobing tempo to a graveyard crawl. But elsewhere Olsen plays these covers pretty straight. She preserves the prom-dance tenderness of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” and the direct hookiness of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “If You Leave,” both of which highlight the brighter corners of her voice. Aside from softening the guitars and cutting out Billy Idol’s extremely ’80s rap, her take on “Eyes Without a Face” is otherwise faithful to the original.
There are some pleasurable little details dotted throughout these songs, though they’re subtle: how the tangles of strings and synthesizers faintly tease the dense, dramatic arrangements of All Mirrors on the slower numbers, or the way Auto-Tune lifts and coddles her vocals on the more upbeat covers. For a few moments when the drum beat picks up on “If You Leave,” the EP imagines how sensational that voice might sound over an actual dance track—a prospect that no longer seems so improbable.
Aisles is most endearing when it leans into frivolity, largely because there’s little else with such relaxed stakes in Olsen’s discography. After five albums of roiling, car-crash emotional intensity, there’s something gratifying about hearing her knock out a few undemanding covers. At times her distance from this material becomes its own muse: These aren’t, after all, songs she grew up loving, or treasured family favorites. They’re just some tunes she’s enjoyed while grocery shopping, and she interprets them with fitting nonchalance. It’s an unusual departure for a songwriter who’s always staked everything on her conviction, but if any artist has earned the breather, it’s Olsen.

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The Colombian and Canadian musician’s second album is a symbolic reclamation of her crown. On one level, she’s recollecting intimate relationships; on another, she’s calling entire countries to task.

Miss Colombia

When Lido Pimienta recorded her first EP, Color, in 2010, her then-husband produced every track and refused to teach her how. It was, she said, “a way of keeping me dependent on him.” Nine years and one divorce later, Pimienta does things differently. She recorded the majority of Miss Colombia in her home studio, wrote and arranged each song herself, and co-produced the album with fellow Torontonian Prince Nifty. The result is a staggering exhibition of her skill as a singer, songwriter, and shit-stirrer.
Pimienta came to mainstream attention in 2017, when her debut LP La Papessa won the Polaris Prize, Canada’s highest musical honor. Self-released, funded by a $6,000 Ontario Arts Council grant, and nominated alongside albums by Leonard Cohen, Gord Downie, and Feist, La Papessa was the definition of a dark horse. Despite the global boom of reggaetón and cumbia, Latin genres remain critically underrepresented in Canadian music. Little wonder, then, that Pimienta’s Polaris victory, and her calls for “brown girls to the front,” rankled the alt-right.
Named after Steve Harvey’s gaffe at the 2015 Miss Universe contest, Miss Colombia is Pimienta’s symbolic reclamation of her crown in an industry fraught with racism and misogyny. Crafted with deep passion and careful attention to detail, the record sounds like the full realization of a long-held dream, made possible at last by a wider platform and a bigger budget. Its palette is warmer, richer, and more reliant on traditional Colombian instrumentation than the chilly “digi-cumbia” (a label she shuns) of La Papessa. Pimienta places herself within a starry constellation of guests, including Colombian icons Sexteto Tabala and Bomba Estéreo’s Li Saumet, and outshines them all. These 11 songs form a full-throated declaration of mastery, all the more impressive for Pimienta’s insistence on prioritizing Afro-Colombian rhythms and instruments in an overwhelmingly white musical landscape.
Sung almost entirely in Spanish, Miss Colombia conveys rage and solidarity more than chipper positivity. Pimienta often writes from the perspective of someone who has drunk deep from the poisonous wells of misogyny and racism. The funereal dirge “Nada” is an early, devastating exercise in this mode. Its narrator, a woman scorned, says that she does not fear death: “Soy mujer y llevo, el dolor adentro.” (“I’m a woman and carrying pain is what I do.”) On “Pelo Cucu,” a eugenics allegory à la Ham’s Redemption, a mother yearns for her “nappy-haired” daughter to marry a “niño blanco, de pelo bueno… pa mejorar la raza.” (“A white boy with that good hair… to improve our race.”) By laying hatred bare, in plain, unadorned language, Pimienta deftly exposes how people vulnerable to bigotry often absorb that bigotry, replicate it, and hurt others like themselves.
The self-loathing in these songs is made all the more poignant by Pimienta’s irrepressible confidence. She refuses to rescue any more immature partners (“Coming Thru”), relaxes after escaping an emotional vampire (“Te Queria”), and rallies her listeners to fight anyone who makes them feel small (“Resisto Y Ya”). There is a pleasant, slippery ambiguity in these songs. On one level, Pimienta is recollecting intimate relationships; on another, she’s calling entire countries to task for their failure to protect black and brown women. Both Canada and her native Colombia are on the receiving end of her blistering critiques. Still, she’s optimistic about a future where she can live in these countries free from harm. “Ya llegó la oportunidad,” she sings on “Quiero Que Me Salves,” “para arreglar nuestro pasado.” (“The chance has arrived to fix our past.”) She might be singing to a lover; she might be singing to a head of state.
In the three years since the Polaris Prize’s early vote of confidence, Pimienta has ably realized her potential and silenced those who doubted her deservingness. She has opened herself up both to collaboration and to mentorship, working with aspiring indigenous musicians and fundraising for Fuerza de Mujeres Wayuu. She is still an extreme rarity in Canadian music: an Afro-Colombian queer woman with indigenous Wayuu heritage, a single mother, a Spanish speaker. The great promise of Miss Colombia, and of her new leadership in a predominantly white scene, is that brown girls will hear it and be inspired to surge to the front.

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The ninth Rick Ross album features tons of guests including Young Thug, Future, and Nas. As the Bawse enters his 40s, his bite has weakened, but he still owns his lane in luxury rap.

Rather You Than Me

On Rather You Than Me, the ninth Rick Ross album in just over a decade, the Miami rapper calls himself “so divisive,” but that isn’t true anymore. At some point—probably around 2010’s Teflon Don—Ross became a strange point of consensus. He shrugged off the 50 Cent-led character assassinations; he came out looking like the lone success story from Jay Z’s reign as Def Jam president. (Jeezy blew up in this period, too, but the popular perception was that he was ushered into stardom by T.I.) This decade, even as the rap zeitgeist moves further and further from his aesthetic wheelhouse, he’s been a fixture at radio and on the albums of his famous peers. *Rather You Than Me *is a smooth, enjoyable attempt to wrestle the spotlight back onto his solo work.
A three-song stretch on the album’s A-side (“Trap Trap Trap” through “She on My Dick”) aside, Rather You Than Me plants itself somewhere off the Atlantic coast, on a yacht with saxophones and fine linens and Michael McDonald. The perplexing and endlessly impressive thing here is that while this style has mostly fallen out of vogue (J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League no longer has multiple singles in the Top 40), it still suits Ross incredibly well. From the grand, contemplative “Scientology” to the velvety “Santorini Greece,” the record frequently sounds more foreign than it really is, like a love letter to the long-ago Obama years. Both of those songs mentioned are produced by Bink!, the Virginia native who matched Just Blaze and Kanye West beat-for-beat on The Blueprint; they fit neatly alongside duets with fellow vets like Nas and Raphael Saadiq. Rather You Than Me is an album that’s comfortable in its middle age.
There are times when Ross seems to strain too hard to recreate “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast)” “Dead Presidents,” an otherwise very good, if impermanent, collaboration with Future, Yo Gotti, and onetime rival Jeezy, feels frustratingly like a retread. “She on My Dick,” with an assist from Gucci Mane, would be an admirable play for radio if not for its impossible-to-clean-up hook; the Young Thug- and Wale-featuring “Trap Trap Trap” is by far the best of the three, where the template is updated to allow more negative space, in fitting with 2017.
The most newsworthy song on the album is “Idols Become Rivals,” which is introduced by a Wing Stop-hawking Chris Rock and which flips a Camilo Sesto sample the same way the producer T.T. did for The Dynasty’s “Where Have You Been.” (As an aside: shouldn’t Jay and Beanie Sigel’s soul-baring on this beat be sacrosanct?) Ross takes Birdman to task over Cash Money’s notoriously suspect business practices, from his alleged refusal to pay producers their fair share to his treatment of Lil Wayne and the rest of the former Hot Boys. The subplot is that, after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, Birdman and Wayne moved to Miami (“You came to my city, nigga”). Ross casts himself as a custodian of Dade County—and, implicitly, of hip-hop—and he takes his post seriously.
Tucked toward the end of Rather You Than Me is the fifth installment of Ross’s “Maybach Music” series; unlike previous installments, which were either packed to the gills with guests or at least nabbed a lone A-lister, this one features the Detroit rapper Dej Loaf—an extraordinary talent, but, you know, not Jay Z. On that song, Ross says, “Maybe this my magnum opus,” but that isn’t true. It’s a veteran settling into a comfortable rhythm that will probably ferry him into legacy act waters at some point in the future. For now, it’s a quiet yacht ride.


Linda McCartney’s first and only studio album was released to resounding silence shortly after her death in 1998. But she and Paul shared a musical chemistry as singular as Yoko and John’s, and as emblematic of their shared interests.

Wide Prairie

Linda Eastman met her second husband Paul McCartney in 1967 at a club in London called Bag O’Nails. The Beatles were busy launching their new album Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Linda was photographing the event. Divorced and supporting her young daughter Heather, Linda had begun making a name for herself in photography. She was noted for her ability to freeze-frame rock stars in moments of quicksilver humanity—see this perfect picture of Jimi Hendrix yawning, or Jimmy Page making room for an older lady to pass him on the sidewalk. Decades later, Paul said he “just saw her across the room and fancied her like mad.” They were married two years later.
As with Yoko and John, Linda’s interests bent the course of Paul’s own career—if Paul was ever associated with animal rights activism or vegetarianism, it was because those were Linda’s concerns, and she devoted her life to them, as well as to her family and photography. And as with Yoko, Linda became an instant magnet for misogynist hostility—she was an interloper, a non-talent leading her genius husband astray. When Paul put Linda’s name beside his for his second post-Beatles album, Ram, the result was the most roundly belittled release of Paul’s career, the one that Rolling Stone called “the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far.”
When she started a new band with him called Wings—well, they were Wings. Not even Paul and Linda liked Wings: “We just picked the wrong people,” Linda later said. “Paul is such a good musician, and none of the Wings were good enough to play with him…including me, for sure.”
Over the next several decades, Linda and Paul remained inseparable. Linda would become a force in vegetarian cooking, releasing several cookbooks and developing a line of meatless frozen foods. She stepped away from the spotlight, more or less—she still popped up in Paul’s videos from time to time, but the era in which she played keyboards next to her husband, decorating the stage with lava lamps and scarves, was over.
Yet her music career never strictly ended. Over the years, she released a trickle of songs as one-off singles and EPs, where they would not attract undue (and presumably unkind) attention. One of those songs, “Seaside Woman” (under the pseudonym Suzy and the Red Stripes), became a minor hit, peaking at #59 in the U.S. In 1985, she cowrote and executive-produced the animated children’s special Rupert and the Frog Song, which featured “Seaside Woman” and the surreal “Oriental Nightfish.” But otherwise, Linda McCartney ceased to be known in the public eye for her music.
When she died of breast cancer on April 17, 1998, she and Paul were in the process of assembling her first and only studio album. The track listing was composed of odds and ends she had written with Paul over the years, and the result was released to resounding silence shortly after her death. “Let’s just note, as gently as possible, that Wide Prairie is not any good,” wrote the Washington Post. And that—once again—was it.
Now that Wide Prairie is being reissued, it’s probably time to look at Linda’s music a little more squarely. Yes, there are painful moments here, particularly her attempts at a “howdy, pardner”-style country accent. But she and Paul shared a musical chemistry as enviable and singular as Yoko and John’s, and as emblematic of their shared interests. The songs here glow with the comfort and warmth of domesticity. “I’m the cook of the house,” Linda boasted on the song called “Cook of the House,” followed by the sound of a sizzling pan. Domesticity was also the wellspring for Ram, and showed just how slyly subversive such celebrations could be (“Eat at Home” is not about cooking.)
They also harmonized together in a way that was hard to imitate—Linda’s wild, untrained voice against Paul’s choirboy tenor generated a messy, gratifying wholeness. Linda’s voice is thin, yes, but decades of punk (and a few years of SoundCloud rap) have trained pop listeners to hear differently. There is a peculiar yowling joy to their rumpled reggae-lite cover of “Mister Sandman,” a trifle that nevertheless feels as inviting as a hammock. She made him sound rougher, and he made her sound sweeter. They sounded better together.
Away from critical and commercial scrutiny, Linda allowed the antic musical theater touches of Ram to run amuck. Wide Prairie is silly and exuberant, almost relentlessly so, but also deeply strange: Nearly every song is an exhaustive mini-medley of pop-song styles—music-hall oom-pah horns, country fiddles, skiffle keyboards, electric-blues guitar riffing, monster-movie synthesizers on “The White-Coated Man.” Sometimes, when all the horns are tooting, it can feel like you’re being trampled underfoot by an army of first graders.
But poke beneath the whimsy and you will find a delirious buffet approach to the American songbook not too far from Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle. Her ear for melody was highly unusual, and she made the kinds of harmonic leaps that other songwriters did or would not. The piano ballad “Love’s Full Glory” picks its way across the keys with the kind of wayward, meandering melody that Paul was noted for, but with unpredictable stagger steps in the progression that felt inimitably Linda’s.
The best moments are the simplest and most relaxed, with the fewest instruments and the most straightforward words. “When it comes, you will go with quiet dignity/Across the yard, up the ramp,” she sang on “Cow,” a song about exactly that. “Going to meet the final man/With nothing on your face/Except for that familiar beauty/And he will eat you/Because he didn’t look.” The words might provoke giggles on the page, but in the song, they are disarmingly sweet—Linda plays a Casio keyboard as a backing track, its tinny sound a reminder of the childlike innocence of the message. What child, after all, hasn’t come to the horrified realization that the cute animals in the field are the same ones we eat?
Though few current artists acknowledge her as a godmother, you can hear echoes of Linda in Girlpool, in Fleet Foxes, in any number of indie pop and freak-folk albums. One might say she got the last laugh, but she didn’t seem the type to need it. “I always thought I could do anything I liked doing,” she told Playboy. She seemed to live her life in accordance with an internal compass, with serene disregard for the opinions of observers. She liked making music, she liked taking pictures, she liked spending time with her husband. When she died, it was in Paul’s arms.

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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 Type O Negative’s third album, a brooding and influential reinvention of goth metal from 1993.

Bloody Kisses

One day in the early 1990s, Peter Steele crammed his monstrous frame into a New York City Parks Department truck and set out for the Hamilton Avenue Marine Transfer Station. Located on the banks of the Gowanus Canal, it was a holding ground for thousands of tons of trash before the trash was ferried to Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill. He was hauling 40 cubic yards of human waste, and there was a backup at the station, a line of garbage trucks stopped along the road. He liked the job—it paid $40,000 a year—and it gave the Type O Negative bassist and lead singer time to write.
Steele looked like a more Nordic Undertaker, or Glenn Danzig but a foot taller. He was an archetype for the brooding, hypermasculine metalhead that crawled out of the primordial ooze. And for three hours, while sitting in traffic waiting to unload a truckful of excrement, he composed a song in his head. It was, he later told an interviewer for the deluxe reissue of his band Type O Negative’s landmark third album, Bloody Kisses, about “the ultimate goth girl” who was “in love with herself.”
The vampire of South Brooklyn, who shoveled shit between band practices, cut both a relatable and controversial figure. “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All)” is a send-up of the goth-girl archetype (”She’s got a date at midnight with Nosferatu/Oh, baby, Lily Munster ain’t got nothing on you”), the title referring to the only thing a Little Miss Scare-All could ever truly fear: the roots of her hair showing. But Steele made an industry of synthesizing the ironic with the sublimely earnest. In that same interview, he reveals that the song has some verisimilitude: “It’s about the girl I fucking slashed my wrists over,” a reference to his 1989 suicide attempt.
Goth metal, then still in its infancy, was made popular in the early ’90s by “The Peaceville Three,” which included My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost, and Anathema, all from Northern England. The genre was a self-serious mashup of death metal and doom that left little room for outsized personalities like Steele. But Steele didn’t care about the death metal part; he just wanted the doom. Coming out of the 1980s as an all-star in the New York City thrash metal world—a scene that bred bands like Anthrax, Overkill, and Nuclear Assault—he entered the next decade with that same brash attitude, but with an urge to slow things down. In creating Bloody Kisses, Steele re-invented goth metal by grasping on to influences like Black Sabbath and the Beatles, and creating a lane for mainstream goth-influenced bands from Finland’s HIM to Evanescence. Never again would Steele make an album that straddled these two worlds, with one foot in a mud-flecked work boot, the other in pristine black leather.
Steele hinted at Type O Negative’s style back in 1987, the same year he started in the Parks Department and released his thrash band Carnivore’s second and final album, Retaliation. Glancing merely at the tracklist, Retaliation anticipates most Type O Negative albums: a joke opener (“Jack Daniel’s and Pizza”), classic rock cover halfway through (Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression”), and a smattering of offensive song titles (honestly, take your pick). The album is good, if musically unremarkable, crossover thrash.
What Steele became infamous for in the mid-’80s, though, was his racist and misogynistic lyrics—written off by fans and hagiographers as “sarcastic”—and by extension, his perceived worldview. He penned the words for fellow New York hardcore band Agnostic Front on their 1986 song “Public Assistance,” a racist screed against so-called welfare queens. He’d repeat this theme on Type O Negative’s debut, Slow, Deep and Hard, in the lyrics to the song “Der Untermensch,” and in interviews throughout his career.
Originally called Repulsion, Type O Negative emerged in 1990 after the grindcore pioneers with the same name enlisted a lawyer. Steele, along with childhood friends guitarist Kenny Hickey, keyboardist Josh Silver, and drummer Sal Abruscato, settled on naming their gothic doom project Type O Negative—after a short stint as Sub-Zero, also taken—because “it didn’t sound too metal.” According to Silver, the band preferred ambiguity, so that “you couldn’t tell what kind of band, what type of music it would be.” Steele had a reputation from his time in Carnivore, and the band didn’t want to be pigeonholed as just another thrash act, a genre that broke into the mainstream that year with landmark albums from Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax, and Suicidal Tendencies.
The first two Type O Negative albums, though, were indications that Steele wasn’t quite ready to leave the past behind. They were still being booked at Carnivore’s old stomping grounds, in the East Village at The Ritz and in Brooklyn at L’Amour. And his crude sense of humor carried over from the ’80s. The cover of 1991’s Slow, Deep and Hard featured a blurred image of a penis (maybe Steele’s) and the follow-up, a “live” album—versions of songs from their first LP with fictionalized stage banter and a fabricated booing crowd overdubbed—released the following year, The Origin of the Feces, is famous mostly for the cover depiction of his anus (definitely Steele’s). Carnivore’s speedy thrash riffs and howling vocals have survived, but midway through, songs slow to a crawl, infused with foreboding synthesizers and mournful church organs. Both records are mixed bags, as if the band is a chimera struggling to become something not entirely unsettling.
Type O Negative found their true form when they retreated to Silver’s home studio in Brooklyn to record demos of what would become Bloody Kisses. Roadrunner, Carnivore’s label, stuck with Steele after he formed Type O Negative, and when VP of A&R Monte Conner heard what the band had come up with, he was blown away, recalling that it sounded like “nothing before and nothing after.” The tape contained the majority of what would eventually become Bloody Kisses, including a complete version of “Christian Woman,” which crystalized their new musical identity. Instead of a tossed-off hardcore song with slow parts thrown in, Conner heard Sisters of Mercy gloom, Sabbath riffs, and Beatles harmonies underneath Steele’s new baritone delivery, which weaves together sexual and divine themes.
With four tracks over seven minutes long and four instrumental interludes, Conner heard a cinematic epic, importantly, one that would cross over to fans in multiple genres: goth kids, metalheads, maybe even soft-rock fans, who would get a doom-laden cover of Seals and Crofts’ “Summer Breeze.” Roadrunner sent the demo to Jim Steinman, a producer on Sisters of Mercy’s 1987 album Floodland, who remarked, “There’s nothing I can add to this.” The label never again insisted on a producer for the band. Once they could reinvent a genre whole cloth by themselves, they never again had to answer to a label.
While “Black No. 1” is the band’s trademark song, the 11-minute, organ-drenched dirge “Bloody Kisses (A Death in the Family)” is the album’s emotional centerpiece. Ostensibly about a woman who died by suicide, it’s actually a veiled tribute to Steele’s elderly cat Venus, who died while he was writing the album. It’s also Steele’s first stab at describing emotional pain without couching it in humor or veiled misogyny—a heartbreaking ode to a creature he adored, one who used to sit on his chest while he did bench presses. “No one wants to hear a guy who’s six-foot-eight with long black hair and fangs crying about his fuckin’ cat,” Steele said, “so I had to make it extremely metaphorical.” The title track is a characterization of Steele as a person to this point in his life: deeply emotional and sentimental, struggling to convey his humanity. For the first time, fans were exposed to how raw Steele could be when he really tried.
However, this is not the case throughout the album. Steele would still hedge his real misanthropy and pain with tongue-in-cheek New York brashness. Even the cover of the album, a pair of goth women, with parted bloodied lips and closed eyes in apparent ecstasy, is difficult to take seriously, especially knowing the two album covers that preceded Bloody Kisses. Is Steele skewering goth girls, as he does on “Black No. 1”? Did he tire of producing albums that would be judged, quite harshly, by their covers? Steele never gave a definitive answer, and the band later complained that they hated the finished product. Steele, obsessed with the color green, complained that the particular shade of green was all wrong, after spending hours rifling through color swatches that designers use.
It was also around this time that Steele began to employ a type of vampiric affect in his vocal delivery. In the first verse of “Black No. 1,” he stresses final consonants in “dark,” and “milk,” trilling the “t’s” on the phrase “trick or treat,” sucking air through his fangs before cooing, “Happy Halloween, baby.” Left to their own devices, Silver and Steele purposefully added a layer of sensuality to the vocals, putting Steele front-and-center. Silver added more compression than usual to the microphone, which is, according to Conner, “why you can hear every time Peter smacks his lips.” The intended effect was to go a step beyond what forebears like Sisters of Mercy were doing in creating a sense of mystique and sexuality—and it worked. “It’s like you’re inside his mouth,” Conner said. “It’s all so immediate.”
Doing press for the Bloody Kisses tour, Steele was asked about this vocal transformation, and in typical fashion, he couldn’t describe his art in a straightforward or neutral manner. “I’ve really gotten sick and tired of all these male vocalists with low testosterone levels that sound like little girls having their feet tickled,” Steele said. “I think men should sound like men.” This is a hill Steele would die on. From his time in the New York hardcore and thrash scenes through Bloody Kisses, and even near the end of his life, he spoke in a heteronormative, gender-biased tongue. In his final interview, in 2010, he said, “I admit, I am a sexist,” before throwing off another one-liner about being sexist against men only, but there is truth in humor. He didn’t appear to care that people thought of him this way either, which, in addition to the publicity these interviews would create—without any truly negative consequences—is why he kept giving them.
Metal and punk bands are rightfully called to account by fans, critics, and artists in these subcultures for a fraction of what Steele has said into a microphone or tape recorder. Part of the reason Steele has gotten a pass is a longstanding narrative that frames him as a wan, unreliable narrator who is maybe-maybe-not just stirring the pot. After all, his recipe for most things was half-sincere, half-ironic, as if he could never really commit fully to one genre. The closer, “Can’t Lose You,” is a sitar-laden dirge that features Steele crooning “I can’t lose you” repeatedly. It appears as an unironic plea to a lost love for five minutes, until fading out with the so-called Bensonhoist Lesbian Choir—e.g. his bandmates and friends from Brooklyn who would hang out in the studio—chanting, barely audible, “Everybody smokes pot/Monte Conner sucks cock.” (Conner would later brush the intended insult off, saying, “It wasn’t meant to be mean.”)
Type O Negative would evolve further into the goth rock side of gothic metal. Though the music would never be better than it was on Bloody Kisses, the band eventually took (overt) homophobia and misogyny off the records. For what it’s worth, Steele tried to walk back some of his words in that final interview, speaking of “I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else,” from Slow, Deep and Hard: “When I used the words ‘slut,’ ‘whore,’ and, ‘cunt’… I’m not proud of that language.”
After Bloody Kisses was released in August 1993, Type O Negative, by association, became both a beneficiary—and a casualty—of the 1990s goth and nu-metal subculture, no doubt reinvigorated by the films of Tim Burton, the rise of Marilyn Manson, and the ubiquitousness of Hot Topic, which specialized in merchandise depicting the films of Tim Burton and the music of Marilyn Manson. Type O Negative also shared bills with labelmates Coal Chamber, Fear Factory, and Spineshank as Roadrunner shifted its focus to nu-metal near the end of the decade. They no doubt made converts out of fans of their sleeker industrial and nu-metal openers, but along the way became lumped in with the black JNCOs set.
And that’s despite Type O Negative hitting on a mid-90s pop-culture trifecta in the wake of Bloody Kisses. Beavis and Butthead, watching the “Black No. 1” video, gave a rare favorable review, calling the sound, “A cross between Danzig and Megadeth.” Steele appeared on a 1995 The Jerry Springer Show episode called “Sexy Groupie Girls Tell All!” where a woman with a crude tattoo of the Type O logo on her shoulder calls him “the most beautiful man she’s ever seen.” And, infamously, eager goths opened that year’s August issue of Playgirl to see a fully nude Steele unfurl from the centerfold.
Today, you can still buy a Bloody Kisses T-shirt at Hot Topic, just as you can purchase an officially licensed Jack Skellington oven mitt. But you can also find numerous editions of obscure Type O Negative designs from any number of bootleg T-shirt makers on Instagram alongside ones for well-regarded metal bands like Bolt Thrower and Obituary. On Halloween 2017, I sipped bourbon at an Austin dive bar as metalheads chanted the chorus from “Christian Woman” as if at a revival church. The Type O Negative logo—a negative symbol inside a circle, both green—is newly iconic, like the Crass cross or the Black Flag bars. It has become a token of both goth and metal culture, not just because of its austere radioactive design, but because Bloody Kisses remains a unifier of goth and metal, an uncut gem stuck between the dump and the landfill.
When Peter Steele died from sepsis on April 14, 2010, the most revealing tribute for Steele came from Julius Spiegel, Brooklyn Commissioner of Parks:

I remember Pete Ratajczyk [Steele’s real name] not at all like the dark character some of the blogs have portrayed, but as a very hard-working, sweet and respectful guy, always eager to please. Even after he had achieved notoriety, he would visit us, occasionally even coming to our hokey dinner-dances, just to reminisce. He often joked (at least I thought he was joking) about coming back to work at the Parks Dept.

Spiegel nails Steele in three sentences: the blue-collar mentality, Steele’s penchant for nostalgia, his cryptic sense of humor, and, importantly, the dichotomy between Steele’s public and private personas that came to fruition during the making of Bloody Kisses. The self-described “monster” and “psychopath” was really a sweet lunch-pail-type guy, according to a coworker who knew him pretty well—a braggadocious behemoth with prehistoric views, who swigged red wine by the bottle when he performed to combat stage fright. It was that duality that forever cast himself and his band in that absurd, singular, toxic green light.

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Empress Of is the alias of Lorely Rodriguez. Her debut EP consisted of shimmering synthpop, and now, she's stepping up as an avant-R&B auteur with pop star potential. Her first proper LP, Me is not just Rodriguez's most outwardly pop-focused work to date, but also her most restlessly experimental and lyrically raw.

Me

Lorely Rodriguez's evolution over the past half-decade mirrors the twists and turns of indie rock itself. She first appeared as a member of Brooklyn's Celestial Shore, a quirky art-rock quartet rising in the wake of Dirty Projectors and Vampire Weekend. After debuting her Empress Of alias with a series of color-coded song snippets on YouTube, she released an EP of shimmering synthpop just as kindred spirits like Phantogram, Grimes, and Purity Ring were crossing over. Now, she's stepping up as an avant-R&B auteur with pop star potential—like a Björk unleashing her inner Beyoncé. But each step of the way, Rodriguez has gradually become a more captivating singer, compelling songwriter, and creative producer. And what makes the first proper album from Empress Of so impressive is that it's not just Rodriguez's most outwardly pop-focused work to date, but also her most restlessly experimental and—as suggested by that stark, Horses-style cover shot—lyrically raw.
It's that last point that provides the real revelation on Me. True to its title, Me is a vessel for Rodriguez's most personal thoughts; she wrote these songs during an extended sojourn to central Mexico, where she lived alone for five weeks at a friend's house in a remote small town. The intense isolation provided the opportunity to reflect upon her life back in Brooklyn with great clarity, as she laments the financial hardships of trying to make rent in a gentrified city (the steamy slow jam "Standard") while acknowledging the luxury of living in a country with potable H20 (the rippling house of "Water Water"). But for the most part, Me is a requiem for a doomed romance, and the greatest measure of Rodriguez's confidence is just how candid and vulnerable she allows herself to be here.
The bulk of Me forms a concept album of sorts documenting the life cycle of a relationship. She takes us from the sloppy hook-up sex of "Make Up" ("Nothing comes between us/ But a piece of latex/ When you tear my clothes off/ Like I was a paycheck") to the obsessive dependency of "Everything Is You" ("All I want to be is you"). She chronicles the lapse into domesticity on "Need Myself" ("Can we stop watching the TV?/ Can I get up off of my knees?") to the intoxicated post-breakup haze of "To Get By" and the heartache-induced insomnia of "Icon" ("Close my eyes/ I see your face/ I just keep myself awake"). Rodriguez's writing is loaded with vivid details ("I can hear you grind your teeth/ When you're laying fast asleep"), but the scenery will feel familiar to anyone who's languished in a partnership after the thrill is gone, and agonized over the decision to break free.
If the songs on Me resemble diary entries, the pages have been torn out and shuffled, so that events fall out of order. We are continually shifted between pre- and post-breakup experiences, which mimics the experience of sorting through a failed love. After all, our memories rarely materialize in chronological order—a fleeting fond reminiscence of an ex has the power to momentarily override the longing and pain that fueled it. The narrative goes beyond Rodriguez's candid lyrics into the production itself, which offers dramatic commentary or reinforcement. When she confronts some cat-calling bros on "Kitty Kat", the track responds to her simple plea of "let me walk away" with a cluster of claustrophobic synth jabs. And the tripped-up groove of "To Get By" comes off like a bad trip in the middle of a nightclub, where your stomach turns queasy, knees wobble, and the faces of the dancers around you become slow-motion psychedelic smears.
But Rodriguez is equally adept at channeling her inner turmoil into euphoric release, like on the Herculean house romp "How Do You Do It" and the pitch-shifting space-disco delirium of "Threat". On the latter track, Rodriguez effectively coins Me's don't-look-back mission statement by declaring "our memories are a threat"—and by the time that chorus is punctuated by the blare of synthesized trumpets, her troubles are already forgotten. Rodriguez may spend much of Me inside her mind, but it’s as much an invitation to get out of our heads.


Death Index is the collaboration between Carson Cox, lead singer for Merchandise, and Marco Rapisarda, a regular in Italy's hardcore scene. Unlike most hardcore or punk records, Death Index was made layer-by-layer in a studio, creating a cool distance between vocals and music that allows for some fascinating contrasts.

Death Index

Merchandise’s evolution from wounded bedroom pop to vivid college rock was paralleled by vocalist Carson Cox’s public contemplation of punk, a slide from weary respect for its values to exhaustion with its dogma. In 2012, Cox told Pitchfork, "Punk is still the spiritual music of my life, but I’m not interested in being that kind of person anymore." In 2014, ahead of Merchandise’s 4AD-released After the End, he demurred to NME, "I was born after punk died, so whatever." To Noisey: "I’m just sick of fucking punk scenes." Fittingly then, Cox and collaborator Marco Rapisarda’s collaboration as Death Index didn’t involve rehearsal, gigging, or any other trappings of scene participation. It’s the next passage in Cox’s personal history of estrangement from punk.
Death Index was recorded in Berlin, Tampa, and Italy. Cox sings on every track. Rapisarda, a regular in Italy’s hardcore scene, plays everything else. A few songs surfaced online late last year, grabbing attention from high-profile U.S. hardcore label Deathwish. Their live lineup is forthcoming at the moment of Death Index’s release, meaning the record was made by in-studio, part-by-part layering. It's a novel way to create punk or hardcore—which typically celebrate live ensemble combustibility and recordings that capture it—and the oblique approach helps explain Death Index’s alien charms and rudderless missteps alike.
The recording process’s fragmentation seems to have yielded an album where Cox sounds as distant from the music as he apparently feels from punk itself. Sometimes that distance makes for fascinating contrasts, setting Rapisarda's deft, muscular performances against Cox's emotionally textured vocals. Musically, opener "Fast Money Kill" is rousing, concise hardcore that Antidote fans will recognize as nearly identical to "Life as One." But Cox’s full-bodied singing, with its aching quiver and trill,  evokes the dreary post-punk of Manchester. His nuanced, wounded croon also distinguish the throttling "Fuori Controllo" and the leering "Little N Pretty," the music's insular, sealed-off atmosphere allowing for the unlikely combination to flourish.
Sometimes, though, the sound skews antiseptic and clinical on songs that crave deformities. The dirge-like "FUP," on which Cox professes his numbness in rather hackneyed terms, ("I’m so fucked up/ That I fall down to my knees/ Where you can’t feel anything") and the spare synth pulsations of "Lost Bodies" feel like orphaned intros, over before they start. "The Meal" and "We’ve Got a Number" feature martial rhythms and rollicking riffs in the style of post-punk acts such as the Birthday Party but it's missing the dynamics, the urgency, the frantic, headlong motion, and the threat of splintering apart. Here it feels more like a grid plotted with leaden thwacks and blackened leads. In these moments, Death Index sounds too steady; undergirded by the metronomic logic of the studio, it precludes the mutations, even mistakes, that live collaboration instilled in its influences.


The Canadian shoegaze band’s singer teams up with Spaceman 3’s Pete Kember in an attempt to push past their comfort zone into electronic territory.

No Joy / Sonic Boom: No Joy / Sonic Boom EP

No Joy / Sonic Boom EP

In an ideal scenario, artistic collaborations work a kind of magic: Two talents add up to more than the sum of their parts, with creativity and curiosity yielding an end product that wouldn’t otherwise exist. That’s what Jasamine White-Gluz of Canadian shoegaze band No Joy had in mind when she began emailing with Sonic Boom, a.k.a. Pete Kember from Spacemen 3, in the fall of 2015. The more her band stayed within the confines of rock, the more White-Gluz wanted change. So No Joy decided to release three EPs that departed from the band’s shoegaze and noise-pop past, starting with 2016’s Drool Sucker and 2017’s Creep. The final installment in this series, No Joy / Sonic Boom, sees White-Gluz venturing into unfamiliar electronic territory with Kember. But while the pairing of their two sounds is unexpected, that initial surprise is about as far as the EP goes. It’s tepid from start to finish, offering little that feels exciting or inspired.
From the brusque opening of “Obsession,” No Joy / Sonic Boom sets itself up as a pulsing yet clumsy listen. The 11-minute opener begins well enough, with bass thumps building a trance beneath paranormal EQs as White-Gluz’s vocals smear across the higher registers. Her voice warps itself in alluring, subtle ways across the EP: It’s manipulated into a keyboard choir effect that can start or stop with the lift of a finger, gets pitched up to capitalize on its honeyed texture, and loops endlessly like a synth in the background. It’s easy to forget she’s contributing, though, due to Kemper’s habit of getting lost in his own experimentation. While soothing and inviting at its best, his electronic ambling ends up drifting off in aimless directions on all four tracks—that is, until he comes barreling back into the frame, like when the end half of “Obsession” finally returns with a sudden, misplaced drum fill. It’s as if neither artist, working remotely from their respective homes of Montreal and Portugal, felt comfortable pushing the other to refine their ideas past the rough draft stage.
The only song that makes effective use of White-Gluz’s and Kember’s complementary skills is “Triangle Probably.” Comically, it’s also the song most akin to the shoegaze sound White-Gluz hoped to ditch with this project. Chopped guitars whirl through echo pedals in a propulsive motion. In the distance, alternate vocal lines fade into focus and synths click like a spoke card on a bicycle wheel. Though it features a similarly abrupt reprise like the one in “Obsession,” this track keeps a tighter grasp on its intentions and proposed payoffs, sounding like a true meeting of minds instead of a not-especially-necessary Sonic Boom remix of No Joy.
Throughout No Joy / Sonic Boom, you can hear White-Gluz finding the borders of her comfort zone and looking for guidance when she makes it to the other side. The trouble seems to be that Kember does little to develop her ideas once she gets there, settling instead for familiar deadpan loops. There’s not nearly enough give and take to make the collaboration work. The result is an EP that feels hesitant to leap into any of the worlds it builds, however appealing they sometimes appear.


At just over 40 minutes, Four Tet's new Jungle-steeped Beautiful Rewind is an effortless listen, but when it wanders it feels like a bauble, one from an artist from whom we are accustomed to receiving richer gifts.

Beautiful Rewind

Brows were furrowed and lips pursed when "Kool FM", the advance single from Four Tet's Beautiful Rewind, was released. Gutty and tuff, "Kool FM" appropriated the name of a legendary pirate radio station that existed during the rave and jungle era, abstracting that era's chopter rhythms and throaty MCs. Kieran Hebden has developed a bit of a johnny-come-lately reputation among certain observers, though, his plunges into UK bass music viewed as harmless and well meaning but perhaps a bit awkward. "Kool FM" seemed to be the latest instance of Hebden chasing dance music's tail: over the last 12 or so months, many artists returned to the breakbeat-based club music—popularized in the UK in the early and mid 90s—whose rhythms are sourced from funky, sampled drum breaks rather than from more rigid and electronic drum synthesizers. Even amongst those who sought only to commemorate jungle, rather than recreate or refine it, Hebden might've been late.
But if Hebden has been hopping trends, he's been doing so fruitfully. "Love Cry", from 2010's excellent There Is Love in You, became an actual club hit, as did several of the tracks from last year's Pink, a compilation of extended, dance-friendly singles. Hebden found a way to adhere to dance music's strictures and conventions while still applying his sun-dappled psychedelia, stretching his easy melodic ideas over terse rhythms and rubbery basslines. Pink was "Four Tet does dance music" but, hey! Four Tet's doing dance music!
Likewise, Beautiful Rewind borrows without apology from a trend but sounds undeniably like a Four Tet record. Jungle, with its mighty musical appetite and don't-give-a-fuck sampling culture, might be a nice fit for Four Tet, whose music has always relied heavily on samples. Crucially, it's not jungle's mangled breakbeats that interest Hebden so much as its MCs: sound-system junkies shouting up the DJs, themselves, or just babbling rhythmically. These gruff utterances run counterpoint to Hebden's beatific melodies and cooing female voices. There's plenty of friction: jungle and rave famously threw traditional notions of good musical taste out the window, while Hebden's output, with its patient tunefulness and cordial radiance, is nothing if not tasteful.
Beautiful Rewind echoes the ephemeral aspects of jungle, the infectious rush of the new, the patter of voices through radio static, rather than the functional signifiers—quickening tempos, mangled breakbeats—that defined it. The album serves as a compact, romantic remembrance: prettier, milder, and less funky than its inspiration. It also feels very personal, like these moments are Hebden's own recollections, his own tangential relationship with a subculture. Where albums like There Is Love in You and Rounds felt inviting, loving even, Beautiful Rewind sometimes seems like it's drawing connections that mean more to Hebden than they ever will to us.
Take, for instance, late-album stormers "Buchla" and "Aerial", which masterfully integrate sampled MCs into their herky-jerky rhythms but fail to complement "Unicorn"'s shimmering pools of melody. The stirring, chaotic opener "Gong" recalls Hebden's collaborations with Burial, but its steamy urban roughage is cleansed by "Parallel Jalebi"'s tidy thrum. It's during transitions like these when Rewind comes unstitched, when it feels more like a small bundle of Four Tet productions than an album.
At just over 40 minutes, Beautiful Rewind is an effortless listen, but when it wanders it feels like a bauble, one from an artist from whom we are accustomed to receiving richer gifts. Hebden has previously turned a lack of precision into broad, idyllic albums, but Beautiful Rewind feels as though it's circling, cautiously looking for a place to land. There are still plenty of treats, especially when those jungle MCs are able to unmoor Hebden from his default state of bliss-y, pastoral expanse. Beautiful Rewind is staked on the past, but for as much flack as Hebden takes for repeating what other artists have already done, Rewind falters most when Hebden does little more than repeat himself.


With one of her most harrowing and powerful albums to date, Margaret Chardiet zeroes in on the locus where global horrors register on the individual.

Devour

Throughout her work as Pharmakon, Margaret Chardiet stages existential conflicts—between the self and the body that houses it, between the individual and the unknowable other—by setting her own voice in opposition to brambly, industrial electronics. She cries out against nightmares of her own making as if in the grips of pain or panic. Her fourth full-length album, Devour, simulates a skirmish whose boundary lines are less clear. Instead of pitting the self against an external antagonist, she grapples with the horror of the self attacking the self.
Chardiet dedicates Devour to “all who were lost to their own demise, all who have been institutionalized; whether in prison, psychiatric facilities, or drug rehabilitation.” Institutionalized people are often scapegoated for individual problems with systemic causes; crime, self-harm, and addiction get painted as character defects, rather than symptoms of a dysfunctional world. With one of her most harrowing and powerful albums to date, Chardiet zeroes in on the seam between the sick person and the sick ecosystem, the locus where global horrors register on the individual.
Devour is the first Pharmakon album Chardiet has recorded live in studio. The A and B sides of the record each comprise a single, continuous session, which lends momentum and immediacy to the music. Though she doesn’t uproot her longtime palette of abrasive electronics, Chardiet deploys new strategies for her vocals, which wobble and fray against a blaring bass tone on opener “Homeostasis.” She howls against instrumentation that seemingly wants to smother her, singing deeply from her diaphragm as if straining to be heard. If some of her earlier work, 2014’s Bestial Burden especially, induced a sense of claustrophobia, then Devour does the opposite: It radiates in open space, as though Chardiet were screaming for help into empty darkness.
Between lurches of electronic noise, Chardiet squeals and rasps and growls, her voice lacerated by the barbed-wire sieve of effects. These songs center her prowess as an industrial vocalist, someone who can transmute the chronic trauma of survival under capitalism into an appropriately scathing outburst. But somewhere between the hypnotic throb of “Spit It Out” and the military clip of “Self-Regulating System”’s percussion, Chardiet’s chaos paradoxically prompts a deepening sense of calm. It’s as if, by giving voice to the mesh of self-loathing strangling so many of our brains, she can momentarily dislodge it.
One of the most enduring images of autocannibalism is the ouroboros, the snake who eats its own tail. It’s a symbol that creates itself in an attempt to destroy itself: The snake wants to eat its own body, to vanish inside its own digestive tract, but in doing so becomes something more than just a snake. Externalizing the desire to obliterate the self similarly reroutes a destructive impulse into an act of creation. With Devour, Pharmakon furthers industrial music’s decades-long history of seeking truth about the self in noise and negation, of boring holes in the propaganda that assures us everything about the system is working just fine.

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On their debut, Spiritualized seemed to emerge from the ether perfectly realized, creating rock music that was serene, spaced-out, and shamelessly untroubled.

Lazer Guided Melodies

Spiritualized’s debut album, released a short time after the band had floated free from Spacemen 3, is a record both in thrall to rock’n’roll tradition and ambivalent about rock’s foundations in heaviness and grit. While rock’n’roll is a corporeal movement, the sound of bodies moving in time, Lazer Guided Melodies—which is being reissued on 180-gram vinyl—feels almost weightless, an astral take on the blues that seems to drift by on cosmic winds. It’s one of the most gentle rock records of its time, with spaced-out guitars and rolling bass lines tenderly nudging Jason Pierce’s vocal melodies along like a weathered stone rolling slowly down a hill.
As Spacemen 3 fractured at the start of 1990s, Pierce asked members Will Carruthers, Jonny Mattock, and Mark Refoy to form Spiritualized, with the second side of Spacemen 3’s final album, Recurring, serving as a Spiritualized record in all but name. And yet the leap in quality— and, indeed, clarity—between the slightly murky promise of Recurring and Lazer Guided Melodies, which was released in 1992, is startling. Pierce has said that Recurring was the sound of a band finding their way; Lazer Guided Melodies seemed to emerge from the ether perfectly realized, the work of a band utterly in control of their fate.
Lazer Guided Melodies’ effects-laden guitars and hushed vocals may have had something in common with shoegaze bands like Slowdive and Ride, who were then emerging onto England’s indie rock scene. But Spiritualized went further back for their inspiration: “Run” is a brilliantly rolling half-cover of a song by American blues guitarist J. J. Cale, while “Shine A Light,” with its chorus of “Lord, shine a light on me” and languid saxophone, draws on the gospel tradition. This song also demonstrates what a sharp songwriter Pierce can be, with two lines of perfect vocal melody gliding languorously about the mix.
In calling back to gospel and the blues, Spiritualized joined a long and storied list of UK bands, from the Rolling Stones to The Animals, who have taken advantage of—some would say exploited—Black American musical traditions. Like the Stones before them, though, Spiritualized succeeded in drawing out their own, very English, take on this music. Using quivering fuzz guitars, bass lines arranged high in the mix for melodic effect, organ drones and a wealth of echo, phase, and other effects, Spiritualized created music that was serene, spaced-out and shamelessly untroubled, the blues blissed out in heroin’s sexless embrace. “Shine A Light” closes with the kind of musical freak out that The Stooges perfected on Fun House, but it sounds entirely without venom, a bad trip glimpsed from the corner of the eye. On “200 Bars,” Kate Radley, who joined Spiritualized on keyboards shortly after they formed, calmly counts out the song’s bars in her listless English accent, like an admin clerk noting lines in an Excel document, while the music slowly pulses behind her. It is the perfect realisation of the band’s rock’n’roll/un-rock’n’roll dichotomy. And yet Lazer Guided Melodies is not entirely retro: the beautiful “Symphony Space” is a drifting ambient number that has more in common with Spiritualized’s contemporaries The Orb and Screamadelica-era Primal Scream than J.J Cale.
While Spiritualized's third album—a noticeably heavier record—bore the mantle of Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, it is Lazer Guided Melodies that merits the cosmic laurels, an album of hypnotic power that marked a high point in the British reinvention of American musical tradition.

Buy: Rough Trade
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