The RVNG label compiled this collection from five Sensations' Fix albums, one Franco Falsini solo record, and a series of unreleased outtakes. This work embraces a range of styles, including prog, kosmische musik, trad-rock, ambient, and psychedelia.

Sensations' Fix: Music Is Painting in the Air

Music Is Painting in the Air

The physical journey traveled by Franco Falsini, founding member of Sensations' Fix, is almost as scattershot as the music he ended up creating. Falsini has called various places home during his career, including his native Italy and London. But his greatest spell of creativity came in a home studio he put together in a basement in Virginia after moving to the United States in 1969. Naturally, that made him something of a trailblazer in the art of home recording, and his fondness for innovation, for exploring curious notions, for defying expectations, extended deeply into the music he made. The word that commonly comes to mind when listening to this work, compiled by RVNG from five Sensations' Fix albums, one Falsini solo record, and a series of unreleased outtakes, is "free." This work embraces a range of styles, including prog, kosmische musik, trad-rock, ambient, and psychedelia.
The open-ended approach Falsini took to his art makes it difficult to easily classify Sensations' Fix, but the disparate nature of his output is also a big part of the appeal. Anyone randomly picking up an album by the band could be transported into one of many worlds. Falsini's 1975 solo album, Cold Nose, was allegedly a soundtrack to a film about cocaine. Excerpts from it are included here, although no tangible evidence of the film's existence is forthcoming. Most of their music is instrumental and heavy on the electronics Falsini was obsessing over at the time, but there are also curios like the vocal-and-guitar driven prog-stodge of "Barnhause Effect" (from Vision's Fugitives) that opens this collection. In 1974, the band's label, Polydor, ended up releasing three Sensations' Fix albums in one year, partly due to the unusual contract Falsini had signed with them. Clearly this is a group that left a delirious trail of orchestrated and accidental confusion in its wake.
That kind of nonsensical approach, bombarding people with myriad stylistic turns over a brief span of time, explains why it's taken so long for listeners to grasp this music. Only after the dust settled did Sensations' Fix get their dues, primarily through DJ Shadow sampling them on The Private Press, but also in a gallery retrospective curated by Sonic Youth, and via Daniel Lopatin dropping a track by the band into a FACT mix. What's striking about Music Is Painting in the Air is how easily you can trace the central aesthetic of many future bands and genres through it. The bass-heavy "Left Side of Green" bears the spidery cadence of post rock; "Dark Side of Religion" is an unnervingly precise proto-Spacemen 3 cut; "Cold Nose Story" acts as a precursor to the fuzzy yearnings of Bristolians Flying Saucer Attack; "Fortune Teller" predates Ben Chasny's astral-folk projections as Six Organs of Admittance by many decades.
It might be a stretch to cast Falsini as some kind of indie rock soothsayer, but it's clear from this collection that he was testing out ground that would later be explored in a great deal of depth. He was never satisfied to run in place, to root the Sensations' Fix sound in one of many areas that was then (and, in some cases, still is now) ripe for exploration. Partly that can be explained by the era in which he was working. Falsini's liner notes explain how he was one of the first musicians to gain access to the MiniMoog, which he describes as "a tool to forward our sound into the future." That Falsini never had a clear idea what his own musical "future" held is both his biggest strength and weakness. A greater exploration of the echo-y loops that make up "Moving Particles" could surely have led to a moment of inspiration not far from Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4. The fact that he didn't get there, choosing many other avenues to explore instead, led him to somewhere incredibly fractured but no less fascinating.
There are no easy inroads into the Sensations' Fix sound-- something this compilation neatly addresses by laying everything out in a self-confessed "arbitrary yet inspired" non-chronological order. The approach to pulling everything together for Music Is Painting in the Air was as anarchic as the spirit in which it was conceived, leading to tracks like "Crossing Berlin", a pulse-heavy Arp odyssey that resembles an offcut from the Midnight Express soundtrack, nestling next to a series of broody electronics in the form of the "Darkside" trilogy from the Finest Finger/Vision's Fugitives era. There were, of course, some peers of this band. Occasionally their work brings to mind the mix of plastic pop, whimsy, electronics, and psychedelia spliced together by the United States of America. Elsewhere, the understated work of krautrock legends Cluster can easily be traced. But this is the world of a singular, often quite nutty talent, who created a puzzle whose secrets may never be fully unlocked.


On the rangy folk-rock band Big Thief's Saddle Creek debut Masterpiece, the songs sound cherry-picked over a lifetime of writing, the stories carefully compiled.

Masterpiece

Putting aside Mumford and Sons’ attempts to taint the term “folk rock,” there’s no shortage of strong singer-songwriters putting their own spin on the genre these days, from Angel Olsen to Father John Misty to Sharon Van Etten to Kevin Morby. As familiar as it is, music like this can be deceptively tricky to do right; it requires close attention to storytelling and lyrical economy as well as the ability to not completely overpower these words in pursuit of the occasional rock-out. On their debut Masterpiece, Brooklyn’s Big Thief hits the balance with ease and aplomb.
Singer-songwriter Adrianne Lenker pens evocative scenes of people and places, while the band shifts nimbly between lo-fi acoustic and throwback rock hooks, keeping everything noisy and tuneful. They do not reinvent the form and they probably won't be the band to break it, but Lenker has a striking voice and a way with turns of phrase—she is a clear star. She's released albums before—one solo and two proto-Big Thief collections with her main collaborator, guitarist Buck Meek, under the moniker Buck and Anne—but on Masterpiece, the songs sound cherry-picked over a lifetime of writing, the stories carefully compiled.
Masterpiece is a scrapbook of sorts, so it makes sense that the name songs—“Paul,” “Lorraine,” “Randy”—tend to be the strongest. "Paul" twinkles gorgeously through a wistful, dreamy ache of guitars as Lenker recounts a love that could have been if she hadn't been so practical, but "Lorraine" is the kind of scene worth replaying in your mind every night just before dozing off. Atop a lightly strummed acoustic melody, Lenker describes an encounter that under another's less tender eye would seem dirty. But Lenker—seemingly harmonizing with herself—captures the magic of spontaneous attraction, the way some lovers can draw you in through just about anything.
Compared to her stripped-down, pre-Big Thief work—where she sounds quieter, sweeter, slightly twangier at times—Lenker sings with more heft here, prodded by the big sound the band makes when it kicks in behind her. But even when the music veers towards feedback and solos, when it seamlessly shifts tempos and directions on a dime, Lenker’s voice remains the guiding force. On standout "Real Love,” the band alternates between sparse riffs and bright flourishes of guitar reverb as Lenker likens love to all the awful things—a heart attack, domestic abuse, blackened lungs. She connects it to childhood—how your parents' example of love can screw you up—and it’s a heavy realization that manifests into Masterpiece’s rawest bit of feedback.
What doesn’t work as much are the attempts to make Masterpiece feel overly homemade. The brief opening song, “Little Arrow,” is in a decidedly lower fidelity than the rest of the album, which can be charming but in this case detracts from how vivid the full band sounds. At the end of “Interstate," there’s a field recording of a baby repeating the same phrase about liking trucks. These touches to the scrapbook feel like tacked-on reminders of an earlier sound. Listening to Lenker’s early work, where she is definitely more of a folk singer, I’m reminded of a line from Masterpiece’s title track: “There's only so much letting go you can ask someone to do.”


On her second EP for Mark Ronson’s Zelig Records, the London multi-media artist proves herself a canny, sophisticated pop stylist with a taste for tales of millennial disaffection.

If It’s Any Constellation EP

In Issy Wood’s paintings, the smallest fragments of a scene can tell an entire life story. In exquisite detail, she catalogues seeming ephemera—the curvature of a snakeskin loafer, for example, or a kitten tchotchke—while leaving the background to melt away. Often painting objects seen in auction catalogues, the 28-year-old Londoner, whose visual art has been shown at Art Basel in Miami and landed her a spot in Forbes’ 30 Under 30, leaves the tragedy of a situation—the death or divorce that might have led such an object to be put up for auction—implicit.
Wood takes the same approach in her music. If It’s Any Constellation, her second EP for Mark Ronson’s Sony imprint Zelig Records and sixth in just two years, is a collection of pop songs that feel tightly cropped: tales of millennial tragedy focussing on just one point of view or one small, striking moment, placed atop arrangements that hint at the bombast of pop but expunge the bells and whistles.
The slight, sardonic products of this outlook are curious: Oddly shaped but undeniably stylish, they present Wood as someone with, at the very least, talent and a unique, appealing sensibility, if not always an impeccable sense for the kind of compositional and lyrical acumen that made her mentor Ronson a star. The five songs that comprise If It’s Any Constellation all seem to teeter on the edge of greatness before retreating. Or, as Wood herself puts it on highlight “Child’s pose”: “I’ve only got one foot in/I keep the other out/I should take that leap but I don’t.”
The best songs on If It’s Any Constellation use tropes of millennial life to convey deep, roiling disaffection. “Child’s pose,” the record’s final track, finds wry comedy in the idea of using yoga to escape trauma, summing up the often banal futility of wellness in one fell swoop: “Thought I knew what I was in for growing up/But now I’m moving to child’s pose,” she sings, elongating the word “pose” into a tumbling “oh-oh-oh” in the middle—like someone trying, and failing, to break into an expressive pop hook. “I’ll hold,” the record’s opener and something of a twin to “Child’s pose,” traverses a similar conceit, likening a breakup to being put on hold by a phone operator, and turning the experience into a squelching anti-betterment anthem: “I’ve made a list of things I need to work at/And every night I find something to add/And now I use it as a welcome mat.” Wood’s vocals are honeyed, inviting, and always multi-tracked, making her best lyrics feel like temptations from the devil on your shoulder; sometimes, she sounds like a more arch, more earthly FKA twigs.
In tone and style, Wood’s clearest contemporary is Norwegian-American satirist Okay Kaya, whose minimalist tales of anxiety and desire conjure a similar feeling of chic malcontent. But where Kaya laces her songs with surprising barbs—references to sexual dysfunction and emotional clumsiness, for example—Wood’s tend to feel smoothed over, a little too neat. As with her press—like an essay in Interview where Wood opines, almost Hannah Horvath-like, on how she “bypassed the ‘struggle’ we’re told musicians are supposed to go through” by being introduced to Ronson—Wood’s music can sometimes feel overthought, and therefore a little chilly. “Muscle,” co-produced by Ronson, gestures at mess (“Tell me I couldn’t make you happy/If I changed everything about me”) but, as it closes, settles for something closer to easily wrought neatness: “I’m worried if I move my face/That it might get stuck that way/Cause under the muscle we’re all the same.”
When If It’s Any Constellation falters, it’s often kept afloat by its primary instruments: the LinnDrum and the Juno-106, tools used to create some of pop’s most indelible moments. Wood has a gestural, fragmented production style—she is fond of foregrounding signifiers of classic pop, such as classic rock power chords, a lilting reggae beat, or the tinny clap of ’80s freestyle, all rendered with period patina by her gear—and, in a Pavlovian way, this gives her music the redolence of tightly made pop, if not quite the memorability. If this EP accomplishes anything, it’s establishing that Wood is a canny, sophisticated stylist—so much so that a lyric like “I’m getting tough/More robust,” from “Muscle,” is a tempting enough promise to keep you excited for next time.

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This happened once before, at least. It was in Memphis-- not the ancient one nestled on the banks of the ...

The River

This happened once before, at least. It was in Memphis-- not the ancient one nestled on the banks of the Nile, the one situated along the Mississippi. In the early sixties, before the Beatles landed upon our shores and seeded the hippies. During those years, young kids became interested in the sounds of folk and blues, scarcely realizing that their Negro gardeners and street-sweepers were once prominent Blues recording artists in their own right before the Depression hit. Right under their noses, folks like Furry Lewis played and sang the blues, scant houses down from them.
Fast-forward to late-90s Williamsburg. After scoring increasingly pricey Brian Eno ambient records like Music for Airports and Discreet Music on Bedford Ave., a group of tousle-headed hipsters walk up to look for cheeky furniture at a vintage store called Lady Bird. Little do they realize that the store's proprietor, William Basinski, beyond the daytime gaze of his patrons, spends his nights distilling string signals from the radio waves into loops of melodic ellipses, weaving them back together like Mark Rothko's blanket, suggesting resonant depth far beyond the surface of radio static. It's something that Basinski has been doing in secret for decades, realizing the symphonies behind refrigerator hum, jackhammers, bum mumbles, subway screech, night bleats, and the low volumes of Klaus Schultze records left looping in the loft space, gleaning the aleatoric ambience of such noises and acting as alembic for their salient features. The River, recorded in 1983, marks the first time any of this work has seen wide release: 1998's Shortwave Music was an impossibly rare 12-inch (also on Raster-Noton), and the rest of his discography is a numbered assortment of self-released CD-Rs.
The River washes out your internal clock. Like the opening currents of Can's Future Days, it lulls you into dream-state. Drowned siren songs and dolphin chirps surface, AM symphonies and Muzak backwash swirl around, a reverberating snap crackle 'n' pop coursing over it all as it begins to move. Over the hour and a half of spectral waves, the tides heave heavenwards and back. Try as I can to hold on, there are no markers to indicate how far I've sunk into the music. If one image that continually loops through my mind as I drift, it is of an enormous ballet of ghostly zeppelins in the midnight sky, filled with careening ball lightning, hovering over the surface of the ocean, its ripples of water swollen with whale songs, rising and falling in a grand, gargantuan gesture.
In terms of psychoactive aural properties, the echoing freefall and slowly evolving twirls of bliss-smoke are reminiscent of another two-disc drop through Nirvana, that of the Taj Mahal Travelers' August 1974. But the emotional undertow here could only match fathoms with a minimalist classic like Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic. But The River is without context, an Alka-Seltzer commercial for transubstantiated Body of Christ tabs, peregrinating as they descend to the bottom of the Dead Sea's drinking glass, captured in slow-motion by structuralist filmmaker Michael Snow.
Though it's taken twenty years for these waves to reach 21st century shores, they don't show many wrinkles. In fact, The River is so far ahead of its time that in hindsight, it could only have made sense this far downstream, after the ambitious radio documentation of fringe noises such as the Conet Project's "numbers transmissions" and the noises incorporated into two of last year's more aurally exciting pop releases, Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the Trail of Dead's Source Tags and Codes (both integrated the sounds of shortwave radios, albeit only to make their guitar songs a bit weirder). It's a final justice that these clippings so mysteriously divined from the heavens can exist on their own infinite plane.


The young jazz singer’s live double album showcases the gravitas, humor, and modernity she brings both to classic standards and her own compositions.

Cécile McLorin Salvant: Dreams and Daggers

Dreams and Daggers

At just 28, jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant has already been lauded by the music industry, including its figurehead Wynton Marsalis, who said that a singer of her caliber only comes by “once in a generation or two.” To be positioned among the ranks of Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell, and Nina Simone—artists who place greater emphasis on telling a story that is universal over technical skill or prowess—takes gravitas, having a sharp wit about her and an old soul. Judging from the complex range and emotional heft that Salvant delivers on Dreams and Daggers, she has lives of experience already under her belt.
As a singer and composer, Salvant has always been comfortably nestled between a bygone era and the present day. This plays well to her strengths on her new double live album as she reimagines the work of Loesser, Rodgers, and Hart for today’s audiences. Salvant returns us to “simpler” times, when just a singer and her acoustic band could command no less than your full and undivided attention and, more importantly, when there were lyrics that implored you to utilize all of your senses in order to feel no less than the gamut of human emotion.
With a Best Jazz Vocal Grammy already on her mantle for her third album, 2015’s For One to Love, the Miami-born French-Haitian singer returns to us a little wiser, taking a deeper dive into the material she’s become known for. It is by far the boldest move of her career, one that pays off handsomely. On Dreams and Daggers, Salvant combines the well-known standards she’s already cut her teeth on (notably, her breakout version of the 1939 classic “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was”) with new original songs that explore love in all of its murkiness and splendor. It marks the coming of age for an assured young woman and artist who cradles every song with nurturing hands, full of caution and warmth.
“You’re My Thrill” pinpoints the moment when love is at its most abundant, as suggested by the bountiful spread of fish, assorted vegetables and exotic fruits laid out before us in the track’s accompanying video. Salvant’s delicate phrasing reveals her penchant for drama on the 1933 standard. Though evocative of the version made famous by Billie Holiday, it is still rooted in the present, thanks in part to its revamped, tension-filled string arrangement, courtesy of bassist Paul Sikivie. Her clever reworking of Nöel Coward’s “Mad About the Boy” also reveals her talent for reinterpretation, the way that she fully embraces a standard, like wearing the clothes of an old lover. As pianist Aaron Diehl lurks about, establishing the dark mood with a spare refrain, the ominous tone becomes wonderfully juxtaposed against Coward’s song of infatuation. Salvant takes full advantage of that fact as she rather unexpectedly, and angrily, belts out “Mad! It’s pretty funny... but I’m mad,” forewarning us all on how often infatuation can border on insanity and obsession.
Incorporating the blues into her live repertoire, especially one that consists mainly of standards, shows off Salvant’s expansive musical pedigree while paying homage to the earliest known feminists who unapologetically sang of love’s many trials and tribulations. On “Sam Jones’ Blues,” in the span of three-minutes, Salvant unleashes her “alter ego,” one who is brazen and revels in the bawdiness of the little known Bessie Smith tune: “You ain’t talkin’ to Mrs. Jones/You speakin’ to Miss Wilson now!” Though it marks a distinct departure from her pointed yet articulate and intimate phrasing, on the live album, Salvant wisely forgoes complete emulation. Instead, she finds deeper meaning, playing with the candor and suggestiveness of the music of Smith and Ida Cox, tapping into yet another facet of her vast range and personality as a vocalist.
Recorded live at New York’s renowned Village Vanguard just a year ago with her bandmates Diehl, Sikivie and drummer Lawrence Leathers, Salvant also incorporates new original music on the set. To juxtapose newer compositions against what many consider to be part of the Great American Songbook is indeed a high-wire act, especially when jazz standards continue to outsell newer works. But given our current climate, thankfully, we are now seeing a resurgence in artists who are pushing the boundaries of how jazz can evolve and still have great relevance in the 21st century. On songs like “More” and “The Worm,” Salvant asserts her own thoughts on love (“Do you love me? Do you think I’m pretty?”) not as an authority on the subject, but rather ensuring that her opinions are valid and are part of the ongoing conversation.
Much of how we operate today encourages that we further desensitize and distance ourselves from anything (and anyone) that can potentially disappoint or hurt us. But where does it end? That’s perhaps one of chief questions raised by this ambitious effort—how can our humanity continue to thrive and flourish without love? As she reimagines the through line of modern-day romance and heartache in jazz, Salvant is at her most versatile and expressive on Dreams and Daggers, choosing songs that wholly capture and embrace the full spectrum that is love—from the initial yearning to the relentless ache and betrayal.


The producer Roman Flügel has spread his work across genres and a number of aliases, and on Verschiebung he explores misty, muted techno.

Verschiebung

Deep house, by definition, puts a premium on emotion, but even by those standards, Roman Flügel is an uncommonly expressive producer. His “How to Spread Lies,” from 2010, remains one of this decade's most effective pairings of melancholy moods and dance-floor kinetics; so is 2010’s “Brian Le Bon,” which borrows a musical phrase from Duran Duran’s “Save a Prayer,” of all things. Even when his more playful instincts take the lead—see, for instance, the tumbling arpeggios and dizzying percussive interplay of “Brasil,” or the blurry electro of “Cookie Dust,” which swerves like a spinning top—there’s a wistful undercurrent that sets him apart from less sensitive producers.
Given the consistency of both his quality control and his emotional register, it can be easy to forget that Flügel is also one of house and techno’s most versatile musicians. In the ’90s, he spread his stylistic interests across a wide array of aliases—Eight Miles High, Soylent Green, Roman IV—along with his duo Alter Ego, with Jörn Elling Wuttke, and its various, well, alter egos (Acid Jesus, Holy Garage, Sensorama, et al). Deep house, acid, Frankfurt trance, and minimal techno have all figured in his playbook; with “Geht’s Noch?” and Alter Ego’s “Rocker,” he even added a bullet point for big, dumb rave anthems to his resume.
His new EP for the Die Orakel label finds him continuing to break new stylistic ground—and working at the far extreme of his more misty-eyed house productions. Verschiebung is inscrutable, austere, and single-minded in its focus. The title is a German word that translates, depending upon the context, as “displacement,” “deferral,” “movement,” “shift,” or “drift,” and the music follows suit. What appear, at first, to be four smooth, muted takes on reductionist techno, with sonar pings skipping across the top of pitter-pat drum patterns, prove, upon closer inspection, to be far thornier constructions. Ostensibly repetitive patterns short circuit again and again, and looped phrases break and scatter into fragments. Yet, unlike someone like Autechre, say, it still preserves the illusion of frictionless forward glide.
The four untitled tracks here are all variations upon a small, tightly controlled set of sounds—scratchy little hi-hats, rimshots, and tuned toms, overlaid with uneven bleeps evoking open car doors, or trucks backing up. There are no melodies, just stuttering patterns of queasily pitch-bent pings; minor keys predominate. It’s all resolutely analog, suggesting the sound of electricity pushing itself through wires—not so much dance music as impedance music. The most important element is the one you don't actually hear: the 16-step sequencer, or possibly sequencers, with which Flügel is controlling all his sounds. These are the machines that give his music is rippling sense of instability: By running patterns of different lengths against each other, and constantly manipulating his loops in real time, he turns out a softly tangled mess of sounds that just begs to be unraveled—yet switches up as soon as you've begun to tease out the specifics.
Where most house and techno rarely let go of the four-to-the-floor handrail, these cuts drift freely atop the steady pulse, with strange time signatures and dub delay stretching the rhythmic grid until it begins to warp. “Verschiebung 1” comes closest to the steady groove of minimal techno, but trying to parse its elements is a nonstarter, and will quickly prove as easy as compiling a grocery list while stoned. On “Verschiebung 2,” triplets hammer against a beat counted off in intervals of seven; on “Verschiebung 3,” glassy pings pile up like colliding rings on the surface of a rain-spattered lake. The drum-free “Verschiebung 4,” the record’s most austere cut, clangs like something hammering on the hull of a submarine. Listeners looking for emotional payoff may be put off by the coldness of these tracks, but you can’t help but marvel at their focus. It’s a comparatively minor work for Flügel, but even marking time to a broken metronome, he stirs a powerful sense of unease.


The latest from this Brooklyn art-noise band continues their analytical zeal while also expanding a more realized sound.

Repo

It's still a stretch to talk about Black Dice as a formalist collective, but the Brooklyn band's migration from loose noise to something more structured counts as one of the most intriguing narratives in the art-rock underground. In the beginning, around the turn of 2000, Black Dice became notorious for playing antagonistic post-hardcore punk shows in dramatically darkened rooms. It was a badge of honor to have gotten hurt, or at least certifiably scared, during one of their lashing affairs, which rated as physical ordeals as much as aural experiences.
Then, starting with their 2002 DFA album Beaches and Canyons, Black Dice repositioned themselves as an unusually gritty kind of ambient band. They took to standing stock-still behind tables of sequencers and effects, with occasional drumming the only thing to count as even remotely gestural. The change to stand-around gear happened around the same time as that of their compatriots in Animal Collective, but Black Dice's shift signified something different: hermetic, internal systems-like ideas, as opposed to Animal Collective's more external, ecstatic musings.
Four albums and lots of heady grinding later, Repo draws on that same analytical zeal while also expanding a sound that's increasingly more realized and strategic. With its steady forward movement and messy pointillist pillars thrown up where concise beats might be, the opening "Nite Crème" marks Black Dice's slow, lurching move towards something like techno. It wouldn't tear up any Berlin warehouse, to be sure, but thinking about techno proves useful to Repo: Where lots of techno artists have moved away from austere formalism toward more liberated outbursts of noise (see Ricardo Villalobos, Audion, any producer who treats where beats fall as a means more than an end), Black Dice, as a band, have effectively moved in the opposite direction, toward a richly murky meeting ground somewhere in the middle.
Much of Repo makes good on that same sort of bottom-up drift toward cohesion, whether rhythmic or not. "Glazin" plays similar sleight-of-hand with the calm pulse of reggae: As a sampled guitar clip gets infested with all kinds of anxiously granulated textures and whirs, a warm bass-line starts to roll contentedly beneath it. In "Earnings Plus Interest", a sampled drum break that could be sourced from 1980s hip-hop or 90s big-beat starts out splashy but then turns stoic, as clutches of noise crash all around it.
Those patented Black Dice clutches of noise sound more specifically placed on Repo than they did on 2007's Load Blown, an album that seemed to prioritize textural smear more than simple rhythm or spacing. Repo is still abstract in a similar and smeary way, but it sounds like Black Dice have gotten a better handle on their gear-- as if, having learned how to make more and more different noises on more and more different machines, part of their project has turned more toward what exactly to do with those noises. In those terms, highlights like "La Cucaracha" and "Lazy TV"-- with coolly stuttering use of a delay-glitch as quasi-African guitar and lots of warped DJ Screw drama, respectively-- qualify as compositions, however decomposed they prove.


Beyond its tabloid drama, the innovation of Destiny’s Child’s second album codified the sound of R&B at the turn of the millennium. It is stilletto-sharp, and laid the groundwork for Beyoncé’s career.

Destiny’s Child: The Writing’s on the Wall

The Writing’s on the Wall

In the music video for “Flawless,” Beyoncé splices in a clip of her on “Star Search” as a child with Girls Tyme, the group that would later become Destiny’s Child. What’s remarkable about the clip isn’t that Beyoncé has it—she keeps an archive of virtually every recorded moment of her life, temperature-controlled and cordoned off like a business data center—but that Girls Tyme lost to a folk-rock group that sounds like the midpoint of Sophie B. Hawkins and Michael Bolton.
There is no better microcosm of what happened to Top 40 music between 1993 and 1999 than this. Bands like the “Star Search” winner were buried in a landfill of post-grunge, while R&B groups built out from soul and quiet storm to create a sound innovative enough to earn the “futuristic” label almost everything got in that pre-Y2K time. This bore itself out in the revival in the early-to-mid-’90s of excellent girl groups vaguely in the Supremes mold—TLC, En Vogue, SWV—but it would be Destiny’s Child who would become their true successors.
The Writing’s on the Wall, one of the best-selling R&B albums of all time, is perhaps most known for what was going on behind the scenes. In spring of 2000, founding members LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson fired, through an attorney, Mathew Knowles, the group’s replacement for late manager Andretta Tillman and, more importantly, Beyoncé’s father. They alleged that Mathew Knowles kept too much of the group’s profits and that the group’s attention was disproportionately allocated in favor of Kelly Rowland and Beyoncé, increasingly featured both as lead singer and in promo. “Ninety percent of the vocals you're hearing is Beyoncé and Kelly,” Mathew Knowles rebutted in the Houston Chronicle, “but they all got paid the same.”
But the two only expected a change in management, perhaps mediation, until the video for “Say My Name” came out and Luckett and Roberson saw, for the first time, their replacements: Michelle Williams, a former backup singer for Monica, and Farrah Franklin, a dancer from the “Bills, Bills, Bills” video. That Joseph Kahn-directed clip, four minutes of posing in color-coordinated rooms, became one of the defining “TRL”-era music video trends—in the past year alone it’s gotten at least two homages in Kehlani’s “Distraction” and Tove Styrke’s otherwise unrelated “Say My Name.” But it was a product of necessity—Luckett and Roberson were dismissed so quickly that there wasn’t time for the two newcomers to learn much choreography.
The ensuing years of lawsuits, accusations, and characteristically Southern bless-her-hearts didn’t hinder the group’s sales—The Writing’s on the Wall still “sold nine million,” as Knowles said on the title track of their follow-up Survivor—but dominated both the tabloids and the more respectable outlets so thoroughly that Beyoncé, Rowland, and Williams would spend the next eighteen years smoothing it over and eventually rolling it into their own narratives. The name of the album is the first of what would be Beyoncé’s many rebuttals to the press one too many commentators joked about how compared the group’s ever-shrinking lineup to the reality show of the same name.
By most accounts, The Writing’s on the Wall was the moment the members of Destiny’s Child took much-needed creative control. The group’s childhood stint on “Star Search” made an R&B career seem achievable, but the path to achieving it involved years of grueling artist development in the girls’ teens with training “boot camps” each summer: strict daily regimens of jogging, voice and dance lessons, often at once, constant rehearsing, tears. “We weren’t allowed to leave the house except to go jogging,” Roberson recalled. “We had to watch old videos of people like the Supremes and the Jackson 5.” Indeed, Joe Jackson was a role model to Mathew Knowles, for better and worse, and his actions figured into Luckett and Roberson’s lawsuit. When Destiny’s Child’s debut came out on Columbia, they were still in their teens, and it too was the product of a lot of behind-the-scenes hustling—a failed partnership with Elektra Records, a lot of producers and directors tried out and dismissed.
The result was something of a baby neo-soul album that even Beyoncé admitted was an awkward fit for the then-teens. The Writing’s on the Wall, by contrast, was recorded quickly, in about three weeks, and feels like it. Everyone sounds hungry, everyone has new ideas. You can tell from the intro alone: a Godfather-inspired sitdown, steeped in drama with a take of Spanish guitar from Andy Williams’ “Speak Softly, Love” and kept there by the four women styling themselves as Mafia dons—the capo di tutto capi played by, naturally, “Beyoncé Corleone, from the Southwest.” What seemed silly at the time coming from a barely established girl group makes more sense decades of concept albums and a world domination later.
Many of these new ideas came from of the album’s new production duo: songwriter Kandi Burruss, formerly of Xscape, and producer Kevin “She’skpere” Briggs, both fresh off a breakthrough smash, TLC’s “No Scrubs.” Originally brought in for just one track, Burruss and Briggs not only ended up with five tracks but crafted its most recognizable sound: guitar riffs chiseled to a point like stiletto heels, hitting in precisely choreographed time; knotty percussion arrangements, record scratches, bubbles and breaking glass arranged into a dense mesh; orchestral brass draped in the background like plush curtains; vocals wound in and around like scrollwork.
Along with Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, who reprises the thick, paranoid mix of “The Boy Is Mine” for “Say My Name,” Briggs and Burruss craft a singular style that, compared to the minimalist arrangements of today, is downright rococo. At least one early mix of “Say My Name” was tossed out by the group for being too crowded and fussy, a sentiment most reviewers at the time echoed. Now, it’s fascinating to hear, a sonic Rube Goldberg machine. Even the simpler tracks were relentless and intimidating, like the instrumental to “Bug a Boo,” mostly just a looped Toto sample. The group was baffled with what they’d even do with it. “At the time people weren’t really singing over those types of tracks,” Burruss said. “You’d look at it as something they’d rap over.”
Rapping was no problem for Destiny’s Child; their early “Star Search” incarnation was as singer-rappers, with emphasis on the latter. Their grown-up adaptation of rap—melodic R&B delivered in soon-to-be-trademark staccato vocals—had a soft launch in the group’s breakout hit, “No, No, No (Pt. 2),” encouraged by collaborator Wyclef Jean. And of course in the R&B waters at the time was the undeniable influence of Timbaland, most notably 1998’s destined-for-the-canon Aaliyah track “Are You That Somebody.” Curiously, Timbaland and Destiny’s Child’s paths barely crossed. Tim produced their inessential soundtrack cut “Get on the Bus,” proving the two artists had an inexplicably poor fit. Missy Elliott produced one track on The Writing’s on the Wall as a surrogate, there’s a gag reference to “No, No No” on Timbaland’s Jay Z collaboration “Lobster and Scrimp,” but that’s about it.
Timbaland’s influence was felt nevertheless. In 2000, the Village Voice called The Writing’s on the Wall “...the Aaliyah album Aaliyah didn’t make.” While there are hints of Aaliyah’s shyer, more stylized vocals on The Writing’s on the Wall, particularly in Luckett’s feathery soprano harmonies, a more typical Destiny’s Child vocal is brassier, more conversational, virtuosic in a sneakier way. The verses of “Say My Name,” ricocheting from double-time to triple and back, are as technically skilled as any number of acclaimed rappers but never obvious about it. (Like any No. 1 hit, “Say My Name” has been endlessly covered, but there’s a reason most people stick to the chorus or slow it down to languid, unchallenging speeds.) “That staccato, fast singing has kind of become the sound of R&B. It’s still here in 2006,” Knowles told The Guardian. It’s still here in 2017, too; examples are too abundant to list, but the reigning king is Drake on almost anything—including, on “Girls Love Beyoncé,” his own ersatz Destiny’s Child song.
The Writing’s on the Wall is presented with a loose religious theme—each track is introduced in the form of a Commandment, and the album ends with a prayer: “Amazing Grace,” dedicated to late manager Andretta Tillman. Specifically, its theme is confession: a catalog of relationships and the failings thereof. This was, and is, fraught territory. Practically since the album’s release, Destiny’s Child have dodged accusations of man-hating. Beyoncé stood in front of that giant FEMINIST display at the VMAs not as a response to a couple of thinkpieces but to over a decade of misinterpretations of her work, starting here. Forget the dated technological references in “Bug a Boo,” its hapless-clinger archetype has stalked his way from pagers to cell phones to today’s social media. “Bills, Bills, Bills” was so vastly misunderstood the group had to patiently re-explain it in almost every interview. This particular scrub isn’t just broke, but a brokeness vortex; he drains her girlfriend’s gas tank, maxes out her credit cards and ruins her credit. Maybe it’s a testament to the comparatively flush 1999 economy that this almost sounds quaint. (The lady he’s running up her bills with? His mama.)
Beyoncé, in particular, would develop this theme at length throughout her career: money as a weapon, wielded by and against women. It’s the last straw of “Hey Ladies”: “The worst thing of it all was that he gave her money/Now, how he gonna give her my ends?/That’s a no-no.” And it’s one of the many indiscretions on “Confessions”: “Remember that time you wondered where your money went?” The bridge professes contrition, but Missy’s track suggests the lie; the sweet-seeming guitar line curdles within seconds, dropping out ever so often to punctuate lines. The track is a game of confession chicken with Beyoncé delivering, in carefully measured detail, “He kissed me like a guy could never kiss a girl before.” These aren’t the words of someone who's sorry, at least not just sorry. Confessional music in the ’90s is often thought of as the work of gamine singer-songwriters. But The Writing’s on the Wall, along with TLC’s CrazySexyCool, are the template for the 1990s’ other strain of confessional music—it’s right there in the title—and the one that’s survived most into 2017.
Destiny’s Child were still in their teens when The Writing’s on the Wall was recorded, so it’s natural for them to still try on styles. But while its pop and R&B sections are distinct, they’re equally assured. On the pop side, there’s “Jumpin’ Jumpin,” Beyoncé’s only production credit on the album and a test run of sorts for her solo singles: most obviously “Single Ladies,” but also the constant escalation seen on cuts like “Love on Top.” The R&B tracks, meanwhile, root Destiny’s Child in history, a fact unfortunately downplayed by the public once the girl group became the girl group of its era. The coy, pillowy “Temptation,” and the wistfully romantic “If You Leave” present a dyad of unconsummated, nuanced yearning, directly to the feelings. The former is produced by D’Wayne Wiggins of Tony! Toni! Toné! and the latter a duet with Next, both of whom provide gravitas beyond mere filler. “Sweet Sixteen” was originally recorded as “16” by Jody Watley of Shalamar for her album Flower; besides a rawer lead vocal by LaTavia, the track is left reverently unchanged. It’s undeniably compelling but a clear outlier—a nod to legacy by an act on the cusp of creating its own.
In a way, The Writing’s on the Wall is a victim of its own success. The album was released to muted critical response, was not nominated for an Album of the Year Grammy (unusual for one with its sales) and was, Beyoncé recalled, something of a hard sell. “You have to remember at that time that we'd talk to people at the record company and they'd say, ‘Look, they don't even play R&B in Europe right now,’” she told The Guardian. It’s now been so subsumed into the sound of pop and R&B the 2000s, not to mention into each alumna’s solo work, that the original no longer sounds surprising. But it’s important to remember that the sound of 1999, as actually experienced in 1999, was rather dismal: a chintzy early Max Martin sound that Max Martin would abandon almost immediately, goofy soft-rock, a watered-down facsimile of a “Latin invasion”—and R&B, eclipsing the rest in innovation.
Since the beginning of popular music, pop and rock have routinely borrowed—or stolen—R&B’s tricks, and conditions in 1999 were particularly ripe for this kind of crossover. The industry had money, which always helps. And unlike today, with Top 40 and urban radio playlists so siloed that a track like “Bad and Boujee” can reach No. 1 and still have pop radio barely touch it, Destiny’s Child could routinely top all the major charts. They could enter one millennium opening for Dru Hill and enter the next one touring with TLC and Christina Aguilera. And echoing the Supremes, they could firmly plant themselves atop the lineage of girl groups, while codifying the sound and subject of popular music for the foreseeable future.


The Missouri-born Chicago psych folk musician and Will Oldham collaborator's magnificent second album is powered by her extraordinary voice, elegant strokes of wordplay, and a thoughtful, never morbid belief in the finality of death.

Half Way Home

On the last day of November 2010, Bonnie "Prince" Billy played an unannounced, mystifying show with "the Babblers" as his backing band-- made no less odd by the fact that the band was seemingly wearing fleece pajamas. Website Chattarati reported that, among songs that sounded more traditionally Oldham-like, there was also "charged-up punk that featured Angela Babbler screaming down the throats of the front row." It turned out that Angela Babbler, whose voice was described as "blood-curdling" by another site, was actually the Missouri-born, Chicago-based singer Angel Olsen, and that the "charged-up punk" was a cover of Kevin Coyne and Dagmar Krause's "Sweetheart", from their 1979 album Babble-- an old favorite of Oldham's.
Since then, Olsen has formed part of the Cairo Gang that performed on Bonnie "Prince" Billy's recent records, and she's toured with them too-- though her extraordinary voice has set her miles above the backing-band parapet. Halfway through Wolfroy Goes to Town's "Time to be Clear", she breaks through the welcoming lull with a wordless melody as casual but striking as a ditty that Edith Piaf might have hummed whilst hanging out the washing. Trade "blood-curdling" for "blood-chilling"-- she doesn't sound of this world. "When something like that happens, I don't know how to feel," Oldham said of Olsen's improvised warble, in a Pitchfork interview. "It's almost like I get hollowed out and then filled, but I don't know what it's with. It's a mixture of apprehension and satisfaction at the same time."
Olsen's voice is possessed of an intensely dramatic range; one minute she's barely singing-- more a downcast, near-spoken tumble of words-- but the next, she's a tragic heroine of the Weimar cabaret, tremendously poised but letting emotion rag her throat as if a freight train were passing through. Hers is not a voice made for modern laptop speakers. Its chalky squeak will earn lazy comparisons to Joanna Newsom; really, her palette is a mixture of the great, lost singer Connie Converse, Jason Molina's old-timey drama, Bill Callahan's terrific and unsettling ability to shift between dourness and comfort, and Nina Nastasia's graceful lope. Olsen's voice is extraordinary and unequivocal, which makes the way she uses it to sing of the most profound doubts on the follow-up to 2010's initially cassette-only Strange Cacti even more affecting.
In a recent interview, Olsen talked about how she was born into a big family, but was eventually adopted, crediting her uncle and biological mother as being "a huge part" of why she plays music. She hasn't told the story of her adoption beyond that, aside from that she was given a keyboard as a parting gift before leaving her birth family. "You can imagine why I became attached to it," she said. That instrument barely figures on Half Way Home, which is mostly made up of stitches of acoustic guitar gathered into a loose but regular weave, soft double bass, and the odd patch of stark, rudimentary drumming. You get the impression that Olsen would find using the keyboard in her solo material too literal, too personal; she's spoken of her concern that there's often "too much self" in songs, and there's only one here that's set in any kind of concrete scenario rather than on a psychological stage.
Sliding in with mournful electric guitar, "Lonely Universe" concerns the loss of a mother figure at a time when "I was only a child, about to lose my child-like mind." Her brothers and sisters can't help; the ambulance comes anyway, leaving Olsen dressing for school, floating as "a lonely universe." It's a heartbreaking acoustic-and-brushes sway, where her vocals, at their most dramatic, call to mind a tender Elvis, or convey the affect of a piece like Gavin Bryars' "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet". It's also a canvas for Olsen's most elegant strokes of wordplay: She sings about the departing "sweet mother earth" as if she had been a lover-- "the way you touched my hands like you never had before," "You won't always understand when you've truly loved someone until after they've gone." (The previous song, the slow and spare "Safe in the Womb", talks of motherly comfort, and the protection offered by states outside of being alive; pre-life, after-life, mental purgatory.) Lyrical statements are proffered and then cut poignantly; towards the song's end, she wryly refers to the loss of her childlike innocence in more general terms: "Well, losing your mind, it ain't half as bad as it seems." Double-take, and and the devastation builds up. You can't blame her for the doubt that sets in-- "time to give up that unforgiving act of altogether-ness." Go for broke, be selfish, abandon connections, community, and family, because what good did they do you anyway?
Olsen knows betrayal like the best of them: On "Miranda", she's a sheriff reading someone their rights, though the soft Emmylou Harris hurt and creak of her voice when she sings, "I love you dear, but it's not up to me/ And it's never quite been, you see," suggest that the guilty party's transgressions are emotional rather than legal. "Some of the things that you've said in my ear/ As you open a door and casually smile.../ How I have wanted to scream out/ All of the things that entered my mind," goes the end, in the record's only instance of her being driven to speak her many thoughts aloud.
Belief and the futility thereof scar Half Way Home's glowing skin. "Always Half Strange" sounds like a curio recovered from turn-of-the century Europe, that casual, romantic drama filling Olsen's voice again as she fingerpicks gently. It finds her in a state that preoccupies her throughout the record-- "half life and half dream, and half crazy to believe in anything it all." She hides out in her mind, working out the value and meaning of things and people, and often judges her own worth by how much she weighs on another's mind. ("Oh, to be that distant thought/ Some growing memory/ In your mind," goes "Acrobat".) Here, things exist only if you believe in them, and it's easy to see how the precariousness of that idealism might leave you feeling a tad shaky: On the ominous, classical "The Sky Opened Up", Olsen ascends to a gap in the heavens, and returns to "see things just as they are"-- "appalled at what I had found." Whatever she sees up there imparts the distressing truth that, "If you dare to be true to what you believe/ There's always somebody to lose."
It's no coincidence that Olsen receives this damning truth from a place beyond life: One belief she sustains across the album is in the finality of death. The great beyond strikes fear into many, but for Olsen, at least it puts a cap on the uncertainty of living. What's striking is that her ruminations on the subject are never morbid or even particularly sad. "If only we could understand each other, I'd happily die," she sings on "Can't Wait Until Tomorrow", one of the album's only slightly weaker tracks; rawer, even, than anything on Strange Cacti. "I thought this time last year, I'd be dead," she recalls on the conversational, largely plainspoken "You Are Song", as if recalling a more casual expectation-- improving at French, or learning to bake bread.
For anyone starting to worry for Olsen's emotional health, there are patches of warm, inviting firelight away from Half Way Home's darker corners. The certainty of her feelings in the opening song, the waltzing "Acrobat"-- "I love the way your body's made/ I love the way your voice is sex"-- revives Olsen, who had assumed herself to be dead, her voice cracking with a renewed burst, almost Antony-like in rapture. And there's a tremendous, near-girlish and flirtatious feel to "The Waiting", which also proves the greatest employ of her slight backing band; electric guitar as sharp as wires bursting from fixtures, a soft male chorus, that conversational, cantering double bass. Dreamy and wry at the prospect of being swept off one's feet, it could nearly be a modern interpretation of "Fools Rush In" from the woman's perspective-- and there's something about it that calls for a male vocal to duet with Olsen, though the fact that she shirks the obvious speaks volumes about her distance from trad country tropes. And on the flippy, festive "Free", she takes incremental steps towards infatuation: "Sometimes I have to take you in my arms/ Press your heart against my heart, oh!/ You know, each day it means a little more." Come the end, she's a congregational rogue, breaking ranks to exclaim that she "can only reach him in my mind" in the kind of voice that makes skirts billow, surprised.
What makes Half Way Home magnificent is its openness to what could be, to potential. Yes, we're all going to die in the end, and you can get there by casting off all belief and going it alone, or gathering moss and weighing heavier, leaving a mark, going the distance with company. It's the battle between the internal and external, the transference of intention to what's really conveyed; the tug of war between wanting to be something to someone and offering them yourself in return, while keeping something for self-protection. It's a very open record about what goes on behind a staunch emotional guard; what Will Oldham said about that "mixture of apprehension and satisfaction at the same time" rings completely true. That battle and potential is best summed up in a line from the closing song: "It's known that the tiniest seed is both simple and wild."


Black Lips are a go-to band for vintage lo-fi freaks, and their raucous live shows have helped them cross over outside of crusty dive bars. Good Bad Not Evil, however, is the record where naysayers, disinterested friends and aquaintances, people on the street, and anyone else within earshot has to sit up, shut up, and listen.

Good Bad Not Evil

Black Lips can, to date, be depended on for raucousness, irresponsibility, occasionally pissing in their own mouths onstage, and sloppy garage tunes indebted to noise and punk as much as the band's Southern roots. Given all that, the idea of them hitting anything outside of a niche audience seemed slim. They're a go-to band for filth-rock puritans, even as their unhinged live shows have helped them slowly gain a larger audience with each album's release.
Good Bad Not Evil, however, is the record where naysayers, disinterested friends and acquaintances, and anyone else within earshot has to sit up, shut up, and listen. The "garage rock" tag will perpetually follow this band, and while I'm not saying it isn't sometimes apt, there's a difference between being a revival act and seeming blissfully out of time. Black Lips' idea of being topical is writing a jilted love song to a girl named Katrina from New Orleans, and their idea of diversity is writing a country song about breaking a death to children (and sounding terribly inconvenienced by doing so). It's as if they missed the past 30 years of rock history; perhaps they drank the memory away.
While it may not be as blistering as the band's early work, or even this year's "live" Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo-- because where else could you really go after that?-- Good Bad nonetheless stands tall in their catalog for finding a way to turn it down without becoming tame. Here, Black Lips fold all of the bacchanalia into the corners of direct, vintage pop songs, so that the new tracks have taken on an ominous tone without being quite as off-the-rails as the band's reputation would suggest. Note the brief moments of backwards guitar in the otherwise, uh, lean "Lean", a twangy undistorted march with plenty of echo on the ragged vocals.
"Veni Vidi Vici" is the biggest and wariest step forward, with a drum loop somewhere between Motown and Madchester, replete with a vibra-slap that will forever evoke hot summer evenings and a chorus that's as irrepressible and arrogant as a soccer chant. Yet for the most part, Black Lips don't stray from their comfort zone, they just push that zone outward. Their spooky quasi-mystical element gets much spookier on "Lock and Key", a blues vamp slithering its way from an Indian burial ground, and their flower-punk gets more flowery on "It Feels Alright" (formerly "Good Bad Not Evil"), where singer Cole Alexander varies his voice to evoke two singers-- a touch that's charming, almost comical, and completely punk.
The band is still preoccupied with its reckless bad-boy image, as "Bad Kids" is a country-inflected sing-along to the merits of irresponsibility that sounds so puerile it's almost self-deprecating. Still, they're hardly one-note here: "Cold Hands" is the record's lead-off single and probably its catchiest song, but it's more wounded than brash, lyrically occupied with trying the straight and narrow and failing rather than eschewing it entirely. It's a nice change of pace that hits a new emotional center-- for two-and-a-half minutes anyway.
Throwbacks to earlier albums-- such as "Slime and Oxygen", with its stomping circular rhythms, caterwauling guitar bends, and more-than-usual vocal echo-- already pale next to the braver material. Even the record's few missteps are at least adventurous, including colliding immaturity with more mysticism on the toy-piano-led "Transcendental Light". Were you to grab any of their older records-- which you really should-- you could hear a band out-freak the best of them. But Good Bad Not Evil is evidence that they want to do something more, which is heartening-- and here they've accomplished it.


Adopting the atmospherics of the Clientele and Real Esate, this Captured Tracks band manages to be both evocative and technically proficient.

Beach Fossils

If you've followed indie's trade winds over the past year and a half, you can probably predict what a Brooklyn band called Beach Fossils sounds like to a staggeringly accurate degree. In this case, please set aside the prejudices: Beach Fossils aren't merely trying to evoke the feeling of sand between your toes, and even if you think you've mentally checked out of anything summery and lo-fi, this is a wonderful record. Dustin Payseur's Captured Tracks band claims influence from improvisational jazz, classical music, and Stereolab, and his songwriting owes more to loop-based composition than garage-bound woodshedding. From the functionality of the song titles on down, Beach Fossils has purpose and economy. It's built on cleanly picked single notes stacked over complementary bass patterns and unobtrusive drums.
Despite working in generally constricted song patterns-- there's little in the way of verse/chorus structure-- Payseur has no problem letting his vocals and guitar craft hooks. In fact, it's the guitar riffs that you'll probably end up humming: check the pitch-shifted Peter Hook homage on "Daydream", the tight "Youth", or "Sometimes", on which Payseur falls just shy of soloing. Drift and atmosphere also work for Beach Fossils: the breezy coda of "Window View" feels like it could drift forever as long as it handed you a lemonade part of the way through.
The way Payseur's vocals are masked with reverb brings to mind the early singles of the Clientele, while the interlocking musicianship bears a lot of similarity to their tourmates in Real Estate. But while Payseur has an ingenuity with melody, what keeps him from reaching the heights of those acts is a lack of true immersion. The Clientele's Alasdair MacLean works in miniature, capturing evocative details that we otherwise miss in our daily lives; Real Estate's Martin Courtney is big-picture, using a generalized suburbia as a backdrop for larger philosophical points. In comparison, the mundanity of Beach Fossils can be deflating, and you don't catch much on the fifth listen that you didn't on the first-- a song called "Vacation" is about taking a bus out of town, while "Golden Age" and "Daydream" are nearly every bit as literal.
Yet the lack of guile can also be a strength, giving Beach Fossils a directness often attributed to more aggressive styles of music. Detractors might claim that this stuff isn't particularly challenging, but in light of its near-Memorial Day release date, doing so feels like criticizing white t-shirts or ice cream cones. This is an uncomplicated soundtrack for relief, which "Lazy Day" puts forth most pointedly. It's something like the photo negative of Wavves' "So Bored", not just sonically but philosophically-- having fuck all to do isn't some sort of grounds for cracking up, but for kicking back and enjoying it.


Brian Eno is rarely idle. His latest, Someday World, is a collaboration with Underworld’s Karl Hyde, and, like much of Eno’s recent output, it’s released by Warp. Eno's presented the record as a collection of half-thoughts he tried to salvage after browsing through a stray hard drive one afternoon.

Someday World

Brian Eno is rarely idle. In 1996 he published a book titled A Year With Swollen Appendices, which detailed his extraordinary life over a 12-month span. Even his quiet days, it seems, have some sense of purpose to them. For the book's September 25 entry*,* he doesn’t do much at all, aside from noting two phone calls that came through: one from David Bowie, the other from Paul McCartney. Although much has surely changed since then, his workrate hasn’t dipped, and the albums keep coming. His latest, Someday World, is a collaboration with Underworld’s Karl Hyde, and, like much of Eno’s recent output, it’s released by Warp. Eno hasn't exactly given this album the hard sell, instead presenting it as a collection of half-thoughts he tried to salvage after browsing through a stray hard drive one afternoon. “I had a big collection of 'beginnings' sitting around waiting for something to galvanise them into life, to make them more than just 'experiments,'" he said in advance of the album's release.
So Someday World may not be built on the most exciting premise, but even Eno’s malformed thoughts are usually worth a look, or a listen, or a read, depending on which medium he’s currently working in. Here, he brings in a group of collaborators alongside Hyde, including familiar accomplices (Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay, Coldplay’s Will Champion), a family member (his daughter, Darla Eno), and a co-producer in his early twenties (Fred Gibson). It sounds expensive, in the way that Eno’s production for Coldplay or U2 often does, although with less obvious ambition beyond being an outlet for a group of people to work in ways they perhaps haven’t before. There’s form and structure, although whether it was always there or devised after the fact is difficult to discern. As Someday World progresses, it gradually falls into that bracket of projects that were probably much more fun to record than they are to listen to.
Eno talked about how we are “deep in the grid period of making music” in reference to computer-based composition in 2010, and that's the place this album is rigidly stuck in. There’s no looseness here, very little space to move around in. The mode is largely set to “pop” throughout, but only in the sense that Eno and Hyde are reaching for catchy, polished rhythms. Strangely, for someone so reticent to expand on his past, it’s a resolutely backward looking work by Eno’s standards. Everything feels a little old, including the jungle-lite drums (“Daddy’s Car”), nods to '90s electronica (“When I Built This World”), and the creeping fear of Blur’s 13 (“Mother of a Dog”).
It doesn’t help that Hyde sounds particularly uninspired, only finding function on the obvious standout tracks (“Daddy’s Car”, “Who Rings the Bell”). The deliberate strain in his voice grates by the time track nine comes around, sounding like years of coasting through unremarkable Underworld albums like Barking has taken its toll. It may have been difficult for Hyde to find a way in here—the precision-tooled arrangements don’t often open up much room for him, leaving him stranded somewhere above the music but never fully immersed in it. He’s more observer than participant, letting a watching-the-world-go-by glassiness settle in as his vocals take a distinct back seat to the studio trickery.
The record runs out of steam around “Witness”, where a deadpan Miss Kittin-style female vocal is threaded over the top. (Thankfully, it exits just as the ghosts of electroclash’s past are whipping at Eno and Hyde's ankles.) Someday World is well arranged, meticulously produced, even catchy at times. But there’s an overriding sense of aimlessness, of people just dropping by the studio and breezing into the songs before wafting off to a more important appointment. For an Eno work, it’s disappointingly lacking in direction.


This 2xCD set gathers together the Britpop band's singles on one disc, with another well-chosen disc of album tracks and B-sides.

The Best of Suede

When Britpop first began to cohere as a concept and a potential mission statement, no band defined its vague, abstract ideas better than Suede. By the time Britpop became an actual going concern, Suede were simply grandfathered in; and when the whole thing spittered to its post-Oasis peak, Suede were considered washed up. But in 1993, they were the creators of the fastest-selling debut LP in UK history and had been anointed as saviors of British indie before their debut single, "The Drowners", even hit the shops. This made them a natural for the British press to create ideas around, and so when Select argued for a return to wit, artifice, glamor, and British art school traditions, Suede were easy avatars for those hopes.
Wit, artifice, and glamor may have been foreign to bands like Oasis or Cast or Ocean Colour Scene, but for many in 1993 they were welcome respites from a hangover of faceless, egoless electronic producers and gruff, dour American arena rock. On the relative margins of UK music, Tricky and PJ Harvey and the Tindersticks lurked-- and the Aueturs and Saint Etienne were also considered prototypical British hopes-- but Suede could articulate the desires of the outsider while broadcasting over Radio 1. Like Pulp, although perhaps neither band would be into the comparison, Suede were a more acceptable and easy to grasp Big New Thing. And, also like Pulp, they were comfortable creating complex pop songs about human relationships-- fluid with notions of sexuality and openly pursuant of lust and animal drives in an demure indie world that favors flowers and letters. Try to imagine, for example, Jarvis Cocker or Brett Anderson wooing someone by making them a mixtape?
Unusually, however, they were introspective about the whole thing too. While American glam revivalists like the Dandy Warhols wallowed in a cliché of leather jackets and rock'n'roll decadence, Suede inhabited those worlds at night and seemed to be able make some sense of the consequences and their motivations in the light of day. They did epic and visceral but they also did delicate and tortured. These twin poles-- crunchy glam rock and fragile balladeering-- found them at their best. They slipped when they lived between those worlds, aiming for the midtempo and MOR. As a result, there's a lot to admire about Suede, and a lot to ridicule, and they typically go hand in hand. In the end, Suede had no tribal allegiances, and few nationalistic desires; they were essentially fueled by youth, low-rent glamor, available drugs, cheap thrills, and the hangover and harm one gets from their pursuit. If they romanticized anything, it was being young and bored and free. Ordinariness was the enemy.
The group was undoubtedly at its best during its first few years, when guitarist Bernard Butler was still acting as ambitious musical foil to singer Brett Anderson's anguished, romantic lyricist, and this is reflected on the new 2xCD collection The Best of Suede. The first disc of the set is essentially a replay of their singles collection, dropping a few late inessentials; the second is a very well-chosen selection of album tracks and B-sides from throughout their career, but mostly from the era surrounding the band's 1993 self-titled debut and 1994's Dog Man Star, which was finished without Butler after a walkout over creative differences.
On the whole then, this provides a pretty complete, accurate picture of who Suede were, something that would have been incomplete without that second disc. The group's singles tend to fall into the glam-rock half of their work; it's disc two that elevates this set into something special, and into all the Suede that most people will ever need. In hindsight, it's striking how little the band fit into the landscape that coalesced around it. The band's first five singles-- "The Drowners", "Metal Mickey", "Animal Nitrate", "So Young", and "Stay Together"-- and their B-sides (five of which are here) foisted a charismatic, direct group onto the UK's shoegaze- and Madchester-soaked indie scene of the years prior.
In the end, Britpop soon became about a desperate need to fit in; Suede made great pains, for a time, to stand out. The protracted Dog Man Star sessions left the band in a few pieces, but the sheer scale and willingness to work without a net was at odds with most of their peers. The resulting record is full of pomp or pomposity depending on whom you ask, and there are no apologies for it here: The band wisely include the full, widescreen 20-minute run of "The 2 of Us", "The Asphalt World", and "Still Life" on this compilation.
After the departure of Butler, Suede again kicked against fashion: Unlike their pioneering peers, however-- Blur looked west for their self-titled 1997 album; Pulp made a hangover record-- they eased into the second phase of their career by retreating to their past. When guitarist Bernard Butler split to put together one great single with David McAlmont, and little else, Suede hired Richard Oakes, a 17-year-old Bulter acolyte located through their fanclub. Oakes did his best Butler-circa-Suede impersonation on their comeback LP Coming Up, and Anderson shifted into self-parody on a few of his lyrics. The band got by on hooks and gumption, and oddly became a bigger success than ever, enjoying five Top 10 singles in the UK and taking off throughout the rest of Europe.
Retracing their steps was naturally a sloppy affair creatively, however, with second-hand retreads and just plain gaffes. Another weak album later, and a comeback that few remember, filled out the rest of the group's career, and although the cherry-picked songs from those sessions sound better here in retrospect, nobody was going to break sales records or receive early hype based on the strength of something like "Everything Will Flow". These few songs are here to make up the numbers and provide a complete picture. And this is a complete picture: This is one of the most warts-and-all bands of our time-- their risk/reward divide was off the charts. In today's more timid climate, it would be almost unthinkable.


10.1 is a two-disc set—the first in a series, no less—celebrating 10 years of the Hyperdub label, with one disc collecting tracks from the archive and the other showcasing new material. It's an expansive and impressive look at what makes this hard-to-pigeonhole label consistently exciting.

Hyperdub 10.1

In 2003, writer Steve Goodman, now known to keyed-in music nerds as the producer Kode9, was interviewing Kevin Martin, the mastermind behind the bombed-out dub project the Bug, for dance publication XLR8R. The conversation turned to dubstep, the roots of which were just starting to take hold in London; Martin heard a track of Goodman’s, who was just then cutting his teeth as a producer, and he encouraged him to start a label to release it, promising to help find a distributor. Less than a year later came HYP001, “Sign of the Dub” b/w “Stalker”, a collaborative release between Kode9 and UK rapper Spaceape (then credited as Daddy Gee).
For Hyperdub’s first four years, the label moved carefully when it came to releases. Most of their output from 2004–2006 was credited to Goodman and Spaceape, including the duo’s debut LP Memories of the Future, but they also worked with some guy named William Bevan, whose self-titled debut LP as Burial came in 2006, a year after Goodman put out the project’s wobbly first 12“, South London Boroughs. Burial was a modest record that initially attracted curiosity more than it did accolades, but in 2007 Bevan returned with the excellent Ghost Hardware 12” and the instant classic Untrue, a record that came to define dubstep for legions of new listeners seven years before Merriam Webster decided to define it themselves.
One of the most influential electronic records  in recent memory, Untrue cemented Bevan as one of the decade’s most vital producers and introduced dubstep (more as a concept, less as a sound) to a much wider audience. So you can imagine what its success did for Hyperdub. A brief glance at the label’s chronological catalog resembles a dam about to burst, and Untrue was the low frequency that shook the firmament to the point of collapse. In 2008 came releases from up-and-coming names that, six years later, are familiar to anyone in the know: bass music basket case Zomby, abstracted pop outfit Darkstar (who at that point were working with a more explicitly dance-focused sound), dubstep-gone-freestyle queen Ikonika. Martin’s lover’s rock-focused King Midas Sound project even put out their first release for the label that year.
Hyperdub marked their fifth anniversary in 2009, but despite a half-decade of existence, the label’s creative surge had kicked into high gear only two years previous. So the excellent 5 Years of Hyperdub was as much an overview of where Hyperdub had been as it was a chance to draw on the increased exposure electronic music was receiving and define something approaching a “scene.” Ace cuts from Los Angeles hip-hop auteur Flying Lotus, Dutch dance producer Martyn, and dub-as-fuck mad scientist Mala appeared alongside catalog highlights from label regulars Kode9, LV, and yes, Burial.
5 Years of Hyperdub was the culmination of a series of five 12" releases collecting label highlights—5.1, 5.2, you get the idea—and the expanded approach Hyperdub’s taken to that concept for their 10-year anniversary is indicative of how quickly Goodman’s label has grown, both in size and influence. 10.1 is a two-CD set—the first in the series, no less—with one disc collecting tracks from the label’s last five years and one with entirely new material. Each compilation will have a theme, and 10.1 turns its focus towards dancefloor-centered cuts, so those waiting for a collection of Hyperdub’s stranger entries might have to wait a little longer.
That said, 10.1 is more proof that Hyperdub can’t help but embrace left-of-center even as it focuses on club fare. This is far from a bad thing: Hyperdub’s released some of the most appealingly odd and oddly prescient electronic music of the last 15 years, and the glaring omissions from this volume’s disc of catalog cuts—Terror Danjah’s fiery grime tune “Acid” from 2010, Ossie’s bubbly UK Funky cut “Set the Tone” from 2011, the jagged piano-house of Laurel Halo’s “Throw”, from last year's Behind the Green Door EP—only serve to highlight the wealth of material the label has released.
Dance music label comps serve a dual purpose: 1) provide an accessible way for non-collectors to obtain material that might’ve received limited release; 2) offer labels a way to define their legacy or current position in the music landscape. 10.1 fulfills the first function simply by existing, and effectively flips two middle fingers towards the second. One of the most intriguing elements of Hyperdub’s output is its sheer unpredictability and refusal of easy categorization. The closest thing to dubstep proper on the first disc is Burial and Spaceape’s Burial cut “Spaceape”, an obvious nod to Hyperdub’s humble beginnings; from there, we’re hit with variations on the breezy skip of Funky (Funkystepz’s “Hurricane Riddim”, Ill Blu’s “Clapper”), 8-bit fantasias (Ikonika’s “Idiot”, Walton’s “Aggy”), low-slung hip-hop (Mark Pritchard and Om’mas Keith’s “Wind It Up”), and effervescent grime (Kode9’s “Xingfu Lu”).
In addition to shining a light on the difficulty of categorizing Hyperdub, the old-stuff collection is further proof that the label’s vision is always trained forward. Appearances from regulars Ikonika and Cooly G are a reminder that, along with Laurel Halo and Canadian techno-pop architect Jessy Lanza, Hyperdub’s been one of the few of-the-moment dance labels to consistently showcase female artists. Stylistically, they’ve also found themselves ahead of the curve: Morgan Zarate’s as-of-yet-underappreciated “Hookid”, from 2011, is a tangled sigh of staircase tones, phased-out bass hits, and cascading synths ripped from Southern U.S. hip-hop. At the time, it was a curiosity; in 2014, it sounds like a trap precedent, if that sound’s basic elements were scrambled in a blender and poured all over some poor sap’s kitchen counter.
The new-stuff disc offers few hints as to where the label is headed next, which is unsurprising, but the variety on display is only matched by the quality of the tunes themselves. Detroit techno fiend Kyle Hall’s “Girl U So Strong” builds and breaks with wheezing tones and backbeats, a throaty diva shout occasionally popping up to offer an anchor; Zarate returns with the hard-hitting “Kaytsu”, a track even more explicitly trap than the genre-predicting “Hookid”, while the relatively quiet producer Kuedo (whose 2011 LP Severant still stands as an overlooked gem) returns with a track dubbed after his namesake and sporting his signature Vangelis-meets-Big Tymers style of aural hypnotism. Following the explicit reggae of his Essential Mix from last year, Mala delivers one of his meanest anthems to date with the stomping “Expected”, while Japanese producer and Hyperdub mainstay Quarta330 closes out the disc with the hyper-colorful “Hanabi”.
The “what’s to come” section takes up the back half of 10.1’s fresh-jams collection, in the form of a stretch of footwork primarily from the Teklife crew. Footwork continues to gain a greater presence in the electronic world, aided by fellow UK label Planet Mu’s scene-surveying Bangs & Works compilations and cemented by last year’s classic LP from the late DJ Rashad, Double Cup. Earlier this year, Goodman told The Japan Times that he was drawn to getting involved with the genre by way of Planet Mu founder Mike Paradinas: “Mike said to me, ‘Go on, release this stuff, because everyone thinks I’m crazy.’”
Paradinas had a point—footwork in its rawest form can be grating, and the stretch of brown-sound bass hits and repetitive vocal samples that mark the back half of the first disc of 10.1 may lead to a few headaches. But Hyperdub’s embrace of the genre was perfectly timed, and the cuts presented here showcase a scene that is further mutating and innovating as it gains more widespread attention. Taso & Djunya’s “Only the Strong Survive” pairs footwork’s intense focus with a starry-eyed sense of wonder, DJ Spinn“’s ”All My Teklife“ features synths that glisten so bright they threaten to overpower everything else around them, and DJ Earl’s ”I’m Gonna Get You" hammers its titular phrase home to the point of aggravation until the sample drops out with a sense of relief before revving up all over again.
Rashad appears posthumously on both discs of 10.1: along with DJ Taye, he had a hand in DJ Earl’s other cut on the new disc, the typically intense “Bombaklot”, and Rashad and Gant-Man further explore Double Cup’s acid techno flirtations on the enjoyable “Acid Life”. He also closes out the disc of catalog highlights—the comp was announced well before Rashad’s sudden and tragic death last month, so this is an unusual occurrence of timing above all else—with the epochal “Let It Go”. A titanic track that could be considered footwork’s own “Strings of Life”, “Let It Go” has a classic, immovable sound, as a lone drum machine kicks things off before meeting up with the endlessly, blissfully repeated vocal sample. Some warped strings enter, and for a second it seems like things are off—“Something doesn’t sound right” is, granted, an understandable reaction to most footwork—but then the vocal sample completes itself with a diva’s cry, “Baaa-by/ Bayyyyyy-beeeeee”, that hits like a gut-punch.
“Let It Go” was released on March 18, 2013, as part of Rashad’s excellent Rollin’ EP for Hyperdub; a year, one month, and eight days later, he was found dead at his home in Chicago’s West Side. Before his death, I must have personally listened to “Let It Go” at least eight or nine times a week, and every time I put it on, it took me places that only the most impressionistically beautiful pieces of music can go. I’ve listened to it while feeling sad, happy, unsure, frustrated, in love, out of place—basically, it’s music I put on when I want to feel something. After Rashad’s death, the urge to latch onto the track’s more melancholy aspects is there, but every time I reach for “Let It Go”, the flood of emotions remains rich and complex. Rashad touched a lot of people with his visionary, melodic approach to footwork, and the dance community has only begun feeling the effects of his legacy; amidst the incredible collection of tunes on 10.1, “Let It Go” is proof that, even in the ever-changing world of electronic music, it’s possible to create something that sounds absolutely timeless.


The latest in the RVNG's series of improv collabs between experimental music veterans and their contemporary counterparts includes minimalist David Borden.

Borden, Ferraro, Godin, Halo & Lopatin: FRKWYS Vol. 7

FRKWYS Vol. 7

The concept for RVNG's FRKWYS series-- meetings between young experimental musicians and veterans-- is nothing revolutionary, but so far the results have been quite rich for one-off collaborations. That trend continues with Vol. 7, for which the label first approached Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never. Together they brainstormed a project involving minimalist composer David Borden. The latter's résumé is wide-- even including a mostly-unused score for The Exorcist-- but he's best known for founding the synth ensemble Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company. That group began in 1969 playing Moog versions of pieces by Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. Soon they began composing their own music and experimenting with newer electronics, something they continue to do today.
Such openness to sounds and ideas comes through on the five pieces here, which are impressively varied despite being pretty uncomplicated. Part of that variety is due to the participants Lopatin brought into this session last August-- James Ferraro, Laurel Halo, and Samuel Godin, all open creative minds on their own. But what's most impressive about Vol. 7 is how it never sounds like a mess of piled up activity, or five voices elbowing for room. If someone told you this was made by one person, you'd probably believe them. So it's not too far-fetched to guess that, for two days in the studio, these five became of one mind, joined by a simple sonic vision.
Perhaps Borden is just that forceful a musical personality, steering his comrades toward a very distinct set of goals. However these tracks came together, the unity of purpose is evident throughout. It starts from the very first seconds of opener "People of the Wind Pt. 1", a 12-minute drone that constantly builds and expands, marrying airy etherealness to dense guts in a way that recalls Stars of the Lid's best epics. From there, the ensemble winds through a range of moods and timbres. "Internet Gospel Pt. 1" warps like an underwater wedding processional; "People of the Wind Pt. 2" adds a sense of galactic transmission to Pt. 1; and "Twilight Pacific" fuses Lopatin's flowing repetitions to Borden's Terry Riley-ish all-night-flight inclinations. All of this can get pretty spacey and drifting; you'll need some predilection for things like OPN, Emeralds, or the early Kranky roster to fully dig into such synthed-out pieces.
Stick with it, though, and you'll get rewarded by closer "Just a Little Pollution", whose rippling synths and haunting Julee Cruise-like vocals-- presumably provided by Halo-- make it a kind of otherworldly pop song. It's as if these sonic sculptors spent the previous five tracks chiseling away at a big block of sound until it produced this shiny little gem. It's remarkable enough that this one-time alliance produced so much good improvised music, an approach so dependent on listening and communication that it can take years of trial and error to create the right working situation. But the fact that they also made that music build to an album-ending peak gives Vol. 7 a shot at being a record that holds up over time, regardless of how impermanent this group itself may be.


The enigmatic songwriter’s latest album is full of vignettes that shift to reveal and conceal themselves in ways too unpredictable to be easily faked. It might be his best yet.

House of Sugar

Alex Giannascoli’s songs draw weird poignancy from the ordinary. The artist who records under the enigmatic name (Sandy) Alex G mixes the real and the imagined, the possibly-biographical and the probably-fictional in the same breath. His songwriting is detailed but stubbornly opaque, swathed in a fuzz as thick and soft as dryer lint. This unassuming style, initially developed over a half-dozen EPs and albums released independently online, bleeds together DIY rock and homemade folk with snatches of country, industrial, or electronic. He’s become an undeniable, if low-wattage star of 2010s indie rock.
His third album for Domino, House of Sugar, is the clearest and most inviting articulation of his skewed aesthetic. It employs most all of the things that make Alex G songs sound like Alex G songs: sturdy, ragged chord progressions; abstract, existential-leaning lyrics; Molly Germer’s homey violin playing; squeaky, pitch-shifted vocals like the voices you’d give your own bad ideas. The title refers to both the SugarHouse Casino in Philadelphia and the gingerbread house from “Hansel and Gretel.” Like a fairy tale, the album is both sweet and sinister, layering different modes to obscure its true intentions. These are songs about feeling discomfort in the gaze of others, vignettes that shift to reveal and conceal themselves in ways too unpredictable to be easily faked. “You and me/These are titles I can hardly speak,” Alex croons over the barn-dance sway of “Southern Sky.”
Mixer Jacob Portrait, who’s worked on Alex G albums since 2015’s Beach Music, brings out professional-quality fidelity without clearing the cloudy textures. House of Sugar is full of little instrumental parts and mumbled background vocals that come through and fall away without necessarily building or resolving, like students in a school pageant. As with earlier albums, it’s studded with experiments: “Project 2,” an interlude of fluting vaporwave synths, and “Sugar,” where melodramatic violin and piano are coated in Vocodered gurgles. They’re less interruptions than camouflage; “Sugar” leads into the open chords and tender Elliott Smith coos of “In My Arms.” “He lay his head/Back on my chest/Once had a wife/Now nobody’s left,” Alex murmurs.
The best moments on House of Sugar are like this, bittersweet and empathetic. “He was a good friend of mine/He died/Why write about it now/Gotta honor him somehow,” he sings in the matter-of-fact opening lines of “Hope,” but the scene fades to a raucous celebration of life: “In the house they were calling out his name/All night/Taking turns on the bed/Throwing bottles from the windows of the home/On Hope Street.” Alex’s late friend isn’t named; the only name is the street, Hope, an emotional coincidence too improbable to believe from anyone else. In his dreamy, surreal landscape, it makes total sense.
The album closer, recorded live at a November 2018 show in St. Louis, is another of these perfectly imperfect Alex G gestures. “SugarHouse” is a song for closing down the bar, but Giannascoli’s words transform the concert crowd into weary gamblers at the end of a long, artificial day: “You never really met me/I don’t think anyone has/But we can still be players together/Let SugarHouse pick up the tab.” They’re the words of a man conflicted about himself, but not his intentions—an appeal to the type of community that comes from the bottom, not from the top. There’s enough space in Alex G’s stories to tell your own.

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Recalling Cabaret Voltaire and the darker strains of Detroit techno, Gatekeeper offer an eerie and entrancing slab of carefully reconstituted 80s synths.

Giza EP

Last year, around the time Salem were causing such an online ruckus by marrying exploitation movie aesthetics to plodding beats, Pitchfork contributor Philip Sherburne wrote a piece on his blog that attempted to link the vogue for "witch house" to a wider trend toward dark, dank electronic music. He cast a wide net, from the krautrock-ish Emeralds to the haunted sound of post-Burial dubstep. But he also noted that, whatever the subgenre, the vibe of "much of it [is] specifically rooted in the apocalyptic aesthetics of the mid-80s," a time when Cold War horror seemed to leak into even the dance-your-cares-away world of club music.
Perhaps no new act exemplifies this aesthetic as much as sometime Salem associates Gatekeeper. From its cover art (an Atari cartridge meets the Portable Grindhouse aesthetic?) to its sound, Giza is a slab of carefully reconstituted 80s synths. Gatekeeper combine elements of mid-period Cabaret Voltaire (the eerie, unintelligible sampled moans and growls), the most sinister stalking-you-down-a-dark-alley strains of Detroit techno (think Suburban Knight more than Derrick May), and the on-the-cheap choral grandeur of every keyboard-owning "composer" ever tasked to rip off Vangelis' score for Blade Runner.
Obviously Gatekeeper's members are neck-deep in nostalgia for this era. Not for nothing is Giza's accompanying video collection being released on VHS. That kind of over-the-top commitment to retro is rare indeed. But still, do we really need another spot-the-reference exercise from a couple of guys who never quite got over the 80s?
We do when it's executed with this kind of audacity and intensity. Sure, Giza's period detail is exquisitely rendered, with a bright and crisp sound in direct opposition to the digital murk of the witch house crew. But though Gatekeeper clearly know their history, this is miles from the stuffy, deadening world of vintage keyboard connoisseurship. The vibe of Giza is pure suburban hoodrat thrills, over-amped electronic music made for teenage metalheads playing coin-op games in grotty strip mall arcades. And despite Gatekeeper's audible love for Z-grade horror flicks, this isn't really bleak stuff. Gatekeeper realize that there's also lot of kitschy joy to be had with such superficially spooky materials, and at its best Giza offers the same kind of brute adrenaline rush this stuff gave good-natured darkness junkies the first time around.


Keep You is post-hardcore outfit Pianos Become the Teeth's first album for punk heavyweight Epitaph, and it's a more restrained record compared to its predecessors.

Keep You

Pianos Become the Teeth sound exhausted on Keep You. As well they should. For the better part of a decade, they’ve created music of extreme emotional and physical engagement, music tagged as “post-hardcore” because of the reverberating guitars and five-minute song lengths or “screamo” by the less self-conscious. Their 2009 debut Old Pride had a recording of Kyle Durfey’s mother describing the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis on her husband, a perversely calm moment because words were being spoken instead of yelled. Longevity isn’t expected out of the bands or the people in it, and there are an equal number of former and current members of Pianos Become the Teeth. Several moonlight with Geoff Rickly’s hyperbolic, great punk rock and roll swindle United Nations; by comparison, that’s a fun band. And now here’s Keep You, the result of Pianos Become the Teeth spending the past three years switching labels and drastically reconfiguring their sound, consequently putting everything at risk. You will feel the burn.
Keep You is Pianos' first album for punk heavyweight Epitaph, which likely means it will be an introduction for many. If that’s your situation, take a few listens to their previous highlights and know going in to Keep You that Durfey does not scream once. This is important for several reasons, the least of which is that a lot of their older fans are pissed. Because it turns out that he can actually sing, and in a rich, resonant register rarely heard in indie rock and often associated with flannel-clad he-men of various stripes. But these are lyrics that require subtlety and range, as Keep You edges towards acceptance following the four stages of grieving that preceded it. During opener “Ripple Water Shine”, Durfey takes himself to task—“I'm still always slowly waiting for what follows/For what I've learned about being so defined by someone dying,” and going forward, he does raise his voice, but it never cracks. In this music, you process and tolerate your inner turmoil rather than drowning it out.
Meanwhile, here’s drummer David Haik performing some of Pianos’ older material. He doesn’t do that either on Keep You; he’s just as active and dexterous, but nowhere near as loud, darting around “Repine” and “Ripple Water Shine”, reminding the listener of the herculean effort they’re putting forward to repress their rage and how that could fail them; they probably won’t lash out, but they might. And these are guitarists who haven’t lost their technical prowess either, they just don’t have to play as fast or loud—Chad McDonald and Mike York rely on fingerpicked patterns and blunt-force chording to alternately constrict, mesmerize, soothe and bludgeon.
So, to recap—no screaming, musicians of conservatory-level aptitude practicing extreme restraint, and producer Will Yip doing his best Peter Katis impersonation, keeping the vocals and percussion at the fore to establish intimacy in an otherwise hall-filling sound. Maybe Pianos Become the Teeth aspire to be the post-hardcore National? It’s not far-fetched when you listen back to the outsized, half-sung “Hiding”, which was included on a split 7” with Touché Amoré, who would later cover “Available”. So Keep You is a progression more than a clean break, and the best way to put yourself at the forefront of post-hardcore these days is to prove that you’re kinda done with it. If Keep You was intended as their way of separating themselves from Touché Amoré and La Dispute, they’ve succeeded. But they're now just parallel to each other.
Pianos’ craft is certainly at the level of Is Survived By and Rooms of the House, which already feel like future standards, but Keep You doesn’t have the same populist appeal. Everything here will bring a circle pit to a dead halt, while melodic hooks and catharsis are scarce. Moreover, Durfey isn’t a storyteller like La Dispute’s Jordan Dreyer, nor does he speak in rallying cries like Touché Amoré’s Jeremy Bolm. Keep You’s lyricism bears a greater similarity to early Mark Kozelek, captivating in its evocative detail and conversely, prone to detail so personal, it’s intimidating. Both aspects are prevalent during the stunning postmortem of “April”, where Durfey drinks from a tin mug with an engraved date and even he’s unsure of its meaning—“What happened 7/31/76 that made them etch your name and the date?/ What'd I miss? It was a Saturday”. Even the person it’s addressed to is unclear—“I got your picture sitting on the sink...Water dripped and hit your cheek in the right spot/ It ruined my week, when I just wanted to wash the filth off.”
Emotionally pulverizing moments like these are so common throughout Keep You that it becomes something close to critic-proof. It’s certainly got its musical shortcomings, but they that shrink in light of its potential to level those who can get past them. Whenever Durfey’s lyrics get too insular, there’s the recognition that by giving so much of himself, the best response is to give right back. Only Durfey and his family know the stories behind lines like, "I've never had that old Ed size/ I've never had Robert's prison guard skin", and, "How odd life would be if you had made it from Elmira to Kansas City/ Instead you cried the whole way, punching the wheel home." But you can relate if there are people in your past have been reduced to physical signifiers and the geographic signifiers are only relevant in your ability to understand the scale between them, of leaving a suburb for the “big city” and being paralyzed with fear.
When it seems like Keep You’s achromatic desolation is too unrelenting, you catch a reference to memories formed in places like Arcade, New York and Seven Valleys, Pennsylvania. The latter is a town of less than 500 near the Maryland border; I’m guessing you’ve never been because damn near no one has. But if you’ve ever driven through anywhere in the rural mid-Atlantic, particularly during this time of the year, you might recognize the ache and strange hope in the barren trees, endless fields and rundown building showing some kind of resilience in the middle of nowhere. It’s bleak and beautiful in the same way Keep You is, and it gives a lot provided you put your share of effort into it. And so you’ll probably feel exhausted after listening to Keep You; as well you should.