This new set of unheard songs is gripping and challenging, as to be expected from the the free jazz legend. Using oddball orchestrations, Sun Ra unfurls more complexities of the astral realm.

Sun Ra and His Arkestra: Thunder of the Gods

Thunder of the Gods

Last year, NASA unveiled the Orbit Pavilion, a domed, aluminum chamber that relays sonic information from space. The sound installation maps individual satellite voices in one track and compresses 24 hours of sound into a single minute in another. The two tracks transmit in tandem, creating a haunting space symphony.
These creaks and echoes bring to mind the work of Sun Ra, who did more than just give space a soundtrack; he navigated star clusters at light-speed. Ra’s sprawling discography surveys the whopping expanse of the cosmos. He quantified and catalogued planets through fits and starts in free jazz. When asked what inspired his compositions, Ra explained that his work came from being in tune with the universe. “The world, the way it is today, is the result of the possible that [people] did—it’s a result of the absolute thing. There’s always something else in a universe as big as this.” Ra’s idea of space was that it was vast but not unknowable—that its possibilities were merely a doorway to greater understanding. On the newly reissued Thunder of the Gods, a challenging and gripping reassemblage of oddball orchestrations played with his Arkestra, Ra unfurled the complexities of the astral realm.
Sun Ra’s free-wheeling, interplanetary jazz epics aren’t just the byproduct of a disciplined and rigorous musical education, a virtuosic musicianship, or an astronomer’s curiosity. Much of the bandleader/composer’s deep interest in space stems from a personal close encounter of the third kind: a trip to Saturn in the late ’30s, which Ra recognized as a call to action from another world. The experience, as he perceived it, was wholly changing and entirely instrumental in the music that would follow—his life’s work, an intense and often quirky diagram of space that helped birth Afrofuturism. His catalog is diverse and all-encompassing: Interstellar Low Ways, Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow, and Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy chart constellations with twitchy arrangements anchored by twinkling keystrokes and organ screeches. LPs like Visits Planet Earth and We Travel the Space Ways were more measured and telescopic, hedging toward a magnifying big band sound. But Thunder of the Gods is far more alien in its signals and movements.
“Thunder of the Gods” and “Moonshots Across the Sky” are recordings originally from the 1966 Strange Strings sessions in New York. Strange Strings is perhaps best remembered for Ra “playing” a squeaking door as accompaniment on a 2007 bonus cut—either an act of harmonic experimentation or simply goofball musicianship. But those sessions are best exemplified by “Worlds Approaching”; its grating string playing giving meaning to the LP title and its cacophonous mix simulating a rogue planet’s descent upon earth. Though not truly connected, “Worlds Approaching” shares a similar, frantic energy with its surrounding compositions. Still, these are outliers, even among his strange strings collection. Reed players Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, and Pat Patrick—all largely unfamiliar with strings—picked up guitars, ukuleles, and assorted handmade instruments during those sessions, and the ensemble is most appreciated on “Thunder of the Gods.” For 13 minutes, Ra uses strings as instruments of tension: sawing, creaking, scraping, and whacking.
“Calling Planet Earth — We’ll Wait for You” was later found on tapes from 1972’s Universe in Blue, and the recording got its first official release on the 2014 remaster of the LP. It’s a strange fit on that record, between the title track’s blued-out concept and the swaggering “Blackman” (or “When the Black Man Ruled This Land”) a vision of pharaohs and black sovereignty. “Calling Planet Earth” isn’t a probe of land or color. It’s a translated message broadcast in two parts: contact and invitation. The trumpet burps tap out like morse code. Squawking alto sax and rumbling percussion act as a lead-in to solo oboe runs that erupt and then flatline. The second act is a marvel of sonic impact. Ra’s space organ boots up like a frenzied R2-D2 floating aimlessly through a surging current.
In pieces, on other releases, these recordings are merely mismatched bits. But together, on Thunder of the Gods, they take on new life—deep wave transmissions from across the Milky Way. They’re each slightly askew, bordering on bizarre, yet completely exhilarating. It’s an intergalactic screening turned sci-fi odyssey. There are visions of interstellar travel, premonitions of the moon landing, and parallels to the mythical, relating the scientific with the divine. The intent is clear: “Where human feet have never trod, where human eyes have never seen, we’ll build a world of abstract dreams,” a voice exclaims at the midway point on “Calling Planet Earth — We’ll Wait for You.” Knowing the universe and all of its secrets is a fantasy from an inconceivable future. The way we render its greatest depths and fringes through sound are often merely an attempt to score the intrigue and mystery of the unexplored. Sun Ra dared to imagine outer space as an open channel; not as a window into all that we don’t know, but as a gateway to all that is possible.


The latest from Kevin Martin's experimental dub project is a series of four EPs collaborating with an outside artist, beginning with this release with Austrian guitarist-composer Christian Fennesz.

Edition 1

On London Zoo, the 2008 album from Kevin Martin's experimental dub project the Bug, one of the most nimble and beguiling tracks, "You & Me", was voiced by light-stepping Trinidadian singer-poet Roger Robinson. After that track, Martin and Robinson joined forces as King Midas Sound and followed with the 2009 full-length Waiting for You. Their latest project is a series of four EPs collaborating with an outside artist, beginning with this release with Austrian guitarist-composer Christian Fennesz.
Those familiar with Martin’s brand of concussive dub and Fennesz’s elegant dance between electronic glitches and dulcet guitar washes might be taken aback by the hushed tones of this pairing. There’s very little of Martin’s telltale drum programming, while Fennesz’s singular guitar tone is hard to parse amid the hash of gray static that envelops almost everything here. Kiki Hitomi, who previously lent her voice to both the Bug and a KMS remix, does her best Beth Gibbons impersonation on the melancholic trip hop of "On My Mind", but its one of the few tracks with a discernible pulse. Robinson whispers a line about "hold[ing] each other tight" but everything about his voice on the record suggests the phantasmal, a now-departed ex-lover who returns only in a dream. When he slurs about searching for safe ground on the eerie "Lighthouse" it seems to have been recorded from inside an abandoned one.
Edition 1 mimics the depression and subsequent grind and quiet desolation of a breakup so precisely that it's hard to take in all at once. And while the effect of such distant vocals works early on in the album, by the back half, it just sounds like every vocal was recorded over a poor cell phone connection, tinny and small. Robinson details the depression of a breakup in maddeningly mundane detail, muttering about going through the days in a "weed fog"; subliminal rhythms fade in and out but the expected bass surge never arrives. The album fully comes to life only on the haunting 14-minute instrumental "Above Water".
The dark melodic guitar elements on the record sound like Fennesz, but very little else is instantly traceable to him. Much of his discography involves collaboration with distinct artists like Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jim O’Rourke, and Sparklehorse, but what’s remarkable here is how Fennesz dissolves into the bleak landscape, his signature sound rendered indistinct, a loss of identity that mirrors the album's main theme.


While Coldplay will always be more enjoyable than groundbreaking, Mylo Xyloto works because the band once again manages to sound like Coldplay without sounding like any of its previous LPs. They maintain their stadium status grandeur while subtly challenging preconceptions.

Mylo Xyloto

"No one knows what it means, but it's provocative… gets the people going." A couple of Chris Martin's good buddies memorably flipped this obscure bit of Blades of Glory dialogue on Watch the Throne to annotate the purchase of Margiela jackets, but it's every bit as applicable to the title of Mylo Xyloto and speaks toward Coldplay's lofty ambitions on it. A new Coldplay album is the sort of thing that's used as a health check for the record industry, and the band is very much aware that they could just release "a new Coldplay album" that would leave everyone involved satisfied-- this is essentially what happened on 2005's X&Y, their fastest seller and also their weakest LP according to many. But being criticized as bantamweight compared to peers like U2, R.E.M., or Radiohead has clearly worn on them-- and truth is, they're all the better for their guilty conscience about a total lack of post-punk credentials. While Coldplay will always be more enjoyable than groundbreaking and their artistic advances seen as smart troubleshooting than divine intervention, Mylo Xyloto works because the band once again manages to sound like Coldplay without sounding like any of their previous LPs, maintaining their stadium-spanning grandeur while subtly challenging preconceptions.
While retaining the studio services and crucial cosign of Brian Eno, it's a relief that their most carefully thought-out work initially sounds less ambitious than Viva La Vida, a record whose orchestral and political bombast felt at the very least a necessary act of aggressive rebranding. Mylo Xyloto is brighter in both attitude and especially timbre, sleeker, more emphatic and up to the task of being a capital-E Event. Though their collaboration with Rihanna on "Princess of China" makes it all the more explicit, when you're at Coldplay's level, pop acts are your competition and Mylo places itself in a lineage of ultra-mainstream rock records spanning from Born in the U.S.A. to Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix-- swaddled in synths and gilded by state-of-the-art production, but never too off-putting if you still insist that "real music" is played by men with guitars.
Indeed, the militant, pound-the-dashboard beat that powers "Hurts Like Heaven" sounds like the band jockeying for the Boss' nod of approval. It's a remarkably aerodynamic piece of all-purpose inspirational rock that never gets too pushy even with Martin's meaningful/meaningless proclamations ("You use your heart as a weapon/ And it hurts like heaven"), tweaking its classicist template with a slight Auto-Tune on the falsetto harmonies. Likewise, the imperial march of "Paradise" is wheelhouse Coldplay, as is Martin's unfortunate tendency to stretch out syllables for rhymes that really aren't worth saving. But its power has little to do with whatever Martin's going on about (dreaming of paradise, mostly)-- it's all about how they unabashedly flirt with contemporary R&B production, cranking the drums way up in the mix and the massing the vocals on the chorus to overwhelming, Pavlovian effect. They don't want to completely do away with Coldplay qua Coldplay-- they're still four normal-looking guys who introduced themselves with frail post-The Bends Britrock like "Yellow" and "Trouble". But they continually ask, why limit themselves to that?
Of course, some of their limitations aren't really a matter of choice. While there's no shortage of venomous carping at Coldplay's expense, I've never heard anyone complain about Jon Buckland's guitar tone or the rhythm section not being up to snuff. All sonic tinkering aside, Martin is still a full-time target serving as the perfect avatar for Coldplay, undeniably well-meaning, painfully earnest, and lord, does he try. When Martin tells you that Mylo Xyloto is a conceptual love story inspired by the White Rose movement and The Wire, don't you at least believe that he believes it? So he's still a sucker for big parables told like he's the first to come up with them-- the innocence lost on the Muse-like stargazer "Charlie Brown" is documented awkwardly enough ("Took a car downtown where the lost boys meet/ Took a car downtown and took what they offered me"), even before you deal with the use of the Peanuts character as some sort of entry-level embodiment of adolescent purity. Likewise, though it's commendable that a multi-platinum band on its fifth record could make a swooning, waltz-time ballad called "Us Against the World" notable for not laying it on too thick, Martin pops off a line, "Drunken like a Daniel in a lions' den," like someone who's somehow just managed to hear "Hallelujah" for the first time.
Still, the collection of softies is among their best-- the measured beauty of breakup weeper "Up in Flames" and "U.F.O." confidently update the guilelessness of Parachutes through a self-described and self-explanatory "Enoxification." But maybe restraint's not what you're looking for out of a Coldplay album, and if that's the case, none of the ballads have the sort of shameless goosebump triggering of "Fix You" or "The Scientist". Which isn't to say that Mylo lacks populist thrill; it's just trying to mine alternative sources. They've sidled up toward music of more hedonistic ideals before, especially on A Rush of Blood to the Head; Martin's vocals on "Clocks" worked incredibly well filtered through dance remixes, while the ecstatic surge of "Daylight" really needed no translation. And thankfully, the revolutionary rhetoric of Mylo is based on love in this club rather than dope, guns, and fucking in the streets.
The aforementioned "Princess of China" is an insistent, mechanized grind that fits just as easily on Mylo as the next Rihanna album, though it wouldn't be a single-- everyone seems to be taking it just a little too seriously. The important thing is that it'll sound great at the Grammys. And "Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall" will surely work well as a festival closer: As a call to arms, it's pretty much nonsense, Martin's already infamous "I'd rather be a comma than a full stop" threatening to bring "Teardrop" to a dead halt. But then you remember Coldplay aren't just Martin-- it's Will Champion's kick drum guiding its four minutes of skyward propulsion, one of the cruelly underrated Buckland's pealing, major-key guitar leads (think "Strawberry Swing"), and, yes, Martin's wordless cooing coming together in a way that's sui generis Coldplay-- a band on top of a game they really don't have much competition in.
These are the moments I think about when people lament the lack of a monoculture-- so often we speak of indie bands that "should be huge" and songs that "could be hits" in an alternate universe. But with "Teardrop" and "Hurts Like Heaven", there's a thrill of knowing these songs can, should, and will be on the radio that you just can't recreate. With all due respect, while M83 shoot for a similar extroverted exhilaration on Hurry Up, We're Dreaming-- the penultimate electro rush of "Don't Let It Break Your Heart" proves both bands are ever closer to intersecting-- the idea that it could fill arenas still involves wishful thinking. It's still one man's project, whereas Coldplay was built for this from day one. It shouldn't matter, but it does-- while so many bands at their status revert to bloated contentment or some vague idea of rockist salvation, Mylo Xyloto finds Coldplay successfully continuing to explore the tension of wanting to be one of the best bands in the world and having to settle for being one of the biggest.


Through a collection of songs that range from anxious garage funk to mercurial power pop, the San Francisco experimentalists argue for an urgent remaking of the world.

Actually, You Can

At the beginning of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, the latest documentary by historian and filmmaker Adam Curtis, is a quote by anarchist activist David Graeber: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” It sets the tone for a sprawling thesis about how we’ve arrived at our current state of global affairs, reminding the viewer that there’s always another path. The film shares the same message at the heart of Actually, You Can, the 18th studio album by San Francisco’s Deerhoof. It’s a record of reimagination, revolution, and reconstruction in the face of a seemingly inevitable status quo.
However, gleaning a clear message from Deerhoof’s music is like drawing water from a stone. Though singer/bassist Satomi Matsuzaki’s lyrics are playfully inscrutable, they contain moments of clarity. Chaotic opener “Be Unbarred, O Ye Gates of Hell” casts wealth disparities and labor rights into the metaphor of who benefits from a household appliance. Next, the shambling guitar-pop of “Department of Corrections” proposes that it’s time to reclaim autonomy from the powers that be: “O jailer, who’s in charge around here? And if not you then is it I? Yeah.” And the anthemic tangle that is “Ancient Mysteries, Described” switches to straight-up power chords for its ode to civil disobedience. Still, for each line that seems decipherable, twice as many are charmingly enigmatic.
The music of Actually, You Can gets its message across much more effectively. With little more than two guitars, a bass, and drums, Deerhoof conjures anxious garage funk, Tejano-infused noise rock, introspective dissonance, mercurial power pop, and just about everything in between. Guitarist John Dieterich has described the record as “utility music that makes you move and motivates you,” and indeed, each of these nine songs contorts with joyous abandon. A song as chock full of dueling riffs and fleeting tangents as “Be Unbarred, O Ye Gates of Hell” could only put people on their feet. Greg Saunier’s splashy and relentless drumming turns art-rock jams “Department of Corrections” and “Plant Thief” into songs that could soundtrack an uprising. Even the dislocated, slow-burning “Our Philosophy is Fiction” still feels like a rallying cry in the hands of a seasoned and uniquely expressive band like Deerhoof. Whatever Actually, You Can may lack in pointedness, it makes up for in raw energy.
Yet with all of the intensity and musical bedlam at work here, the brief sections of calm somehow resonate the longest. There’s something oddly hopeful and pure in the softly strummed verses of closer “Divine Comedy,” where Matsuzaki muses on yet to be realized possibilities for change. The tone of her delivery is flat and her cadence is hard to follow, but they are coupled with tender guitar chords, inviting the listener to dig deeper into the ideas behind this rare emotional break. Such reserved divergences are uncommon on Actually, You Can. So when Deerhoof does step back from their onslaught of prismatic garage band tropes, it’s a welcome reminder that rock & roll spectacle isn’t the only way to inspire change.
Buy: Rough Trade
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SETTING: Small office in small apartment in small, provincial town.
TIME: Martin Luther King Day. This Year.
AT RISE: Hapless ...

Take Offs and Landings

SETTING: Small office in small apartment in small, provincial town.
TIME: Martin Luther King Day. This Year.
AT RISE: Hapless Reviewer (female, about age twenty-six) sits at desk, drinking ill-advised coffee on mostly empty stomach, and quickly filling an ashtray. She stares helplessly at a computer screen and contemplates a pastel-hued CD cover. The sound of sentimental folk-pop plays softly in the background.
HAPLESS REVIEWER (sighs, lights cigarette): Should a band be derided if their music appears in an episode of a heavily scorned teen drama on the WB?
HER CONSCIENCE (enters from stage left, takes a seat in the broken yellow chair in the corner): This again?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: Yeah. So?
HER CONSCIENCE: No, they shouldn't. Otherwise decent bands have appeared on teen dramas before. Remember when the Flaming Lips played on "90210?"
HAPLESS REVIEWER: But what if appearing on a WB soundtrack is the band's single greatest-- though dubious-- claim to fame?
HER CONSCIENCE: Still, that's pretty harsh. (Lights cigarette.) Incidentally, how do you know that?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: I typed their name into a search engine and "Dawson's Creek" showed up.
HER CONSCIENCE: Oh. Is it any good?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: I dunno. A little contrived. Hard to believe they really sound like that naturally-- the girl, in particular. I could see how it might be a guilty pleasure, and I'm guessing the fanbase is predominately female. But personally, I think it's kind of boring, and a little too self-consciously precious for its own good.
HER CONSCIENCE: Are you talking about the show?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: Oh, god, no. The band! Rilo Kiley. From Los Angeles.
HER CONSCIENCE: How does it sound?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: Well, you can hear it for yourself. This is the first song, "Go Ahead." It has that airy, finger-picked folk thing going on. Pretty, I guess, but the most typical chord progression in the world. And the girl-- Jenny Lewis-- sings in that breathy, pouty little girl way favored by far too many female singer/songwriters these days. I hate that. She adds backing harmonies to give herself a little more substance, but it's hard to take someone seriously when they sing, "If you wanna have your cake and eat it, too/ And if you want to have other people watch while you eat it/ Go ahead." It's not quite campy enough to be twee. Like, it's a tad more upbeat than Ida, but less interesting musically.
HER CONSCIENCE: That's not a compliment, is it?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: Not really, no. And I feel sort of bad pointing this out. Rilo Kiley is kind of a new band and all, but this sounds really amateurish. "Pictures of Success" could be a prom band doing Ida, with all the problems that implies. You know, the questionable sound quality, slightly out-of-tune instrumentation (including a completely irrelevant trumpet line at the end), over-articulated vocals, and an unnatural gentleness that makes you feel a little bit embarrassed. (Pause) Jenny Lewis' vocals really drive me crazy.
HER CONSCIENCE: Well, what about this other singer?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: Yeah, that's Blake Sennett. He sounds a lot like Elliott Smith, but not as good. Still, it's an improvement over the girl. Otherwise, this song is fairly dismissable. You know how some bands can take the whole 60s lite-pop sound and subvert it to amusing and/or ironic effect? Not these kids. It's like Muzak! The Beatles-esque business on "Small Figures in a Vast Expanse" isn't so bad, I guess-- I think the guitars sound better there than they usually do. And I actually find that I don't mind Jenny Lewis' vocals so much when they're overdubbed as backing vocals.
HER CONSCIENCE: Have we heard this song before?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: No. It just sounds the same. Except track ten, "Always." It's not a bad song. I like the new wave intro. I like how over-the-top pop it is, and that it's comparatively loud. Reminds me of Velocity Girl, back in the day. And I'm inclined to believe this is the direction Rilo Kiley should take. But still.
HER CONSCIENCE: You're going to make fun of them, aren't you? For that "Dawson's Creek" business... HAPLESS REVIEWER: It's such a temptation. It's not worth it, though. I can't get a good dig in at Rilo Kiley because they're not bad enough to warrant my ire. I'm not offended, just bored. The worst thing I could say is that this is forgettable and any humor I may find in their connection to "Dawson's Creek" will do little more than remind me of who they are.


Velvety, ’90s-inspired deep house and industrial-punk sing-shouting make for a surprisingly complementary contrast.

Movimiento Para Cambio

When Chris Vargas and Tobias Rochman first met as coworkers in a Montreal clothing shop, they clashed—“like oil and water,” Rochman says. But after Rochman’s solo project shared a bill with Vargas’ industrial band Pelvic Floor, something clicked. “We’re both strong-willed individuals,” says Rochman. “It’s better if we’re on the same side.” Together, as the duo Pelada, they fuse Rochman’s lithe house and techno productions with Vargas’ defiant Spanish-language vocals, sung-shouted in a thin yet forceful voice that cuts through the mix like broken glass. On Movimiento Para Cambio, their debut album, the duo’s opposing influences prove surprisingly complementary.
Though punk and dance music make strange bedfellows, it’s not an unheard-of combination: The two styles commingled at the Mudd Club in the late 1970s, engendering a funk-punk fusion that, decades later, would bequeath DFA its founding aesthetic. And in the 1990s, Atari Teenage Riot grafted hardcore punk onto breakbeat hardcore, echoing the Prodigy’s snarling aggression. But the two traditions have rarely yielded a merger quite like this one. Rather than seeking overlap, Pelada exploit the disconnect between their respective backgrounds.
On record, they still sound like oil and water. Vargas’ monotone shout is reedy and insistent, recalling hardcore punk’s classic declamatory style. Instead of responding with a correspondingly harsh sound, Rochman veers in the opposite direction, opting for velvety deep house descended from the lineage of Larry Heard. It’s an interesting proposition: Seduce listeners with reassuring sounds like the Korg M1 organ bass, a staple of ’90s dance pop, then shout them down like the singer at an all-ages hardcore matinee.
The contrast is apparent on the opening song, “A Mí Me Juzgan Por Ser Mujer,” in which Vargas, who uses they/them pronouns, directs their fire at patriarchal instincts and male privilege—the “machitos” demanding more than they deserve. Stuttering chord stabs and breakbeats build to a surging, acid-fueled climax, but the quantized grid keeps the energy in check; Vargas’ chorus, on the other hand, drips with barely contained rage. “They judge me for being a woman/But I was born in this body,” they chant in Spanish, voice rising to a pointed shout; “I didn’t choose it and I don’t know what to do/This is out of my control.”
Many of the album’s best songs are animated by this tension. In “Habla Tu Verdad” (“Speak Your Truth”), Vargas might just as well be standing at the front of a protest march, megaphone in hand, each chanted proclamation fit for a hand-lettered sign, while Rochman channels the brightly colored synth of Midwestern techno from the late 1990s. Sometimes, the two egg each other on. In “Desatado,” Vargas lies back, their voice flat and cool, while Rochmann builds the kind of bleepy, quick-stepping beat you might have heard from Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label in the 1990s. Then, as Vargas breaks into a shout, the music crescendos too, and the beat seems on the verge of pulling apart altogether.
They have other modes: “Granadilla” is a kind of ambient spoken-word R&B, while “Caderona” fuses ’80s electro with reggaeton. Best of all might be the closing “Aquí,” an environmentalist anthem set to the lush chords of Balearic house. The mood is idyllic yet streaked with turbulence: As the steady beats cruise on, they snag and stumble; Vargas’ speaking voice, uncharacteristically placid, is periodically run through shuddering glitch effects. Throughout the album, questions of control are paramount: Who has it, and whom they wield it against. Here, Vargas declares in a matter-of-fact tone, “Nature controls us/Not vice versa,” and the song’s subtly fraught quality—lovely as a sunset, yet disturbed by a hidden undercurrent—feels like the duo’s way of acknowledging our fundamental vulnerability.


Thanks to MySpace-driven publicity and a readymade backstory, this young, whipsmart Brit's mix of the Specials, the Streets, and Saint Etienne is positioned to be one of the albums of the summer.

Alright, Still

At some point soon, the internet-fueled superstar thing will no longer constitute a valid story angle. In the past four years, we've already seen pretty much every possible permutation of how empty keystrokes can beget real numbers. The most infamous examples are just that because they're neatly illustrative of how the net has swiftly undermined the machinations of the traditional system. The cases of Dizzee Rascal, Wilco, and the Arctic Monkeys alone serve as poetic reconsiderations of the practices of entire major label departments (A&R, distribution, and marketing, respectively). The only wing still standing? Publicity. Enter Lily Allen.
For all its ubiquity, MySpace had yet to yield a definitive zero-to-hero prior to Allen, but with "Smile" landing at the #1 spot on the UK singles chart a few weeks back, that's neither here nor there anymore. Since Allen started uploading a mixture of radio-ready originals, nervy covers, and links to blognerd-ready mixtapes to her MySpace page late last year, the 21-year old's profile has grown wilder than a Malcolm Gladwell ringlet. To date, she's racked up 550,000 page views, a recording contract with Parlophone/EMI, and, like her father (British actor/comedian and sometime football anthem dilettante Keith Allen) before her, a #1.
But to say that Alright, Still is interesting because it's an accomplished mainstream pop debut made by somebody who started out with broadband and an internet addiction is perhaps too facile a reading. The other day a friend was talking about a development unique to this era-- the differences between peoples' carefully cultivated online personas and their real-life selves. One might inform the other, or reject it, or reform it, or cannibalize it completely, but there's always a push/pull at the center, and the task of managing and reconciling all that on a personal level is a relatively new thing. It's just a hunch, but I think maybe one of the bonus reasons Alright, Still is compelling is because it inadvertently makes gestures to that whole phenomenon. It's a through-the-looking-glass trajectory that begins with a MySpacer who's got great tunes, good stories, and a funny way with commas, and it ends with a slickly produced pop album that isn't all that far apart from pretty much any other UK female pop singer in terms of packaging and presentation. Somewhere between those two points is truth, somewhere behind it all is real-life messiness, and I think people are enjoying figuring it out, not to mention having another familiar co-ordinate from which to put it all together.
None of which would mean much if Alright, Still wasn't fantastic. Fortunately, it's the kind of debut for which the cliché "great summer album" is happily perpetuated. Clocking in at just over 37 minutes and boasting no fewer than seven potential singles, it's an album made at the intersection of whipsmart British pop like Saint Etienne, the Specials and-– inevitably, given that both write colloquially about things like waiting in club queues and getting stoned–- the Streets. Although she's been beseiged by comparisons to the latter, it's a fair one. Allen might not rap, but she shares Mike Skinner's easy comfort with language; she's confident enough that she never overexerts herself lyrically, but she's not above risking a stupid joke either (witness "Shame for You"s wilting punchline, "Oh my God you must be joking me/ If you think that you'll be poking me"). A significant portion of Alright, Still is dedicated to verbal takedowns, with ex-boyfriends getting the brunt of the abuse, while would-be suitors and dumb girls trail behind at a distant two and three; in the wrong hands, it could all seem so petulant and bratty, but Allen's wit and cynicism sees it through.
Musically, ska, reggae, and calypso are her major touchpoints. From the dub-inflected kiss-off track "Not Big" to the skanking "Friend of Mine", there's not a lot here that doesn't use a horn sample or a guitar chug as its launching off point. As evidenced by the poison-penned "Smile" and the MySpace hit "LDN", Allen's appeal is in the way she combines those spacious, rolling sounds with A+ pop structures. When she operates outside of that comfort zone, the results are generally still of a high order, if not a bit more erratic. "Littlest Things" is a supple piano-tickler that provides one of Allen's sweetest lyrical moments while simultaneously leaving Ms. Dynamite in the dust on the R&B balladeering front, while "Everything's Just Wonderful" is the exuberant bit of cocktail pop that Geri Halliwell unsuccessfully spent her entire solo career trying to procure. Less favorably, the Madchester-flavored anthem-by-numbers "Take What You Take" reveals what Allen might sound like if she ever decided to make a run for the title of Britain's female Robbie Williams. (Perhaps not coincidentally, it's also the source of her weakest lyric.)
It's a shame that sample clearance issues likely prevented two of Allen's wickedest moments, the 50 Cent homage and Grandma Allen diss track "Nan, You're a Window Shopper" and the Origin Unknown-sampling "Cheryl Tweedy", from appearing here. Nonetheless, in terms of a debut record-- and especially given the weight of expectation placed on her to deliver something special-- Alright, Still isn't anything else but a fantastic success. Not only does Allen deliver on the musical promise hinted at in her MySpace demos, she also acquits herself as a genuine personality with wit and attitude to spare. But don't take it from me. You know how to Google-- she always was her own best PR person anyway.


Nick Cave’s cinematic work with his bandmate Warren Ellis is a slight departure from last decade’s trilogy of albums. It’s defined by its stark contrasts, at turns brutal, surreal, and romantic.

Carnage

Nick Cave sings, “This song is like a rain cloud that keeps circling overhead,” and then pauses before delivering the next line: “Here it comes around again.” This is “Carnage,” from the album of the same name, the first release credited to the duo of Cave and his longtime Bad Seeds bandmate Warren Ellis, aside from their prolific output of film scores. Just before observing the impending storm in his own music, Cave has been sitting on a balcony, perhaps outside a hotel room where a woman sprawls lazily across the bed. (We’ll find him back there later.) The balcony is one of many motifs that recur and refract across Carnage: some bags thrown in the back of a car, a Glen Campbell song, strange creatures by the side of the road, and above all, “that kingdom in the sky.” Together, these repetitions contribute to the sense that the album is less a collection of discrete songs than one long rumination in eight stages—or a circling rain cloud, coming around and around again.
Carnage comes after a remarkable trilogy of Bad Seeds releases, in which Cave and his band—among the fiercest animals in rock’n’roll, when they want to be—approached total stillness. By 2019’s Ghosteen, there were no drums and few recognizable rock instruments. Cave’s formerly narrative songwriting became impressionistic and autobiographical, sometimes seeming to embody the mysteries of life itself. Over crystalline loops of electronics and piano, he reckoned in piercing detail with the death of his teenage son Arthur in 2015, and his own search for redemption in the aftermath. It was, along with everything else, a pinnacle of his artistry, 40 years in. As a musician and as a person, where does one go from there?
For Cave and Ellis, the solution was to jettison even more cargo. They may have created Carnage as a duo partly out of pandemic necessity, but shedding the band also made good creative sense. Given the Bad Seeds’ recent trajectory, and the paring down of personnel, you might expect further exploration of Ghosteen’s meditative minimalism, and at times that is essentially what Carnage delivers. But in its most gripping and audacious moments, the album is much wilder than its predecessor. It draws from the formal language of modern cinema, concerned less with verses and choruses than images, settings, visceral portrayals of extreme emotional states. It begins on a smash cut, with a few lines of a stately Boatman’s Call-style piano ballad interrupted by a dissonant swirl of strings or electronics and an insistent mechanical pulse. Mid-lyric, Cave’s measured vocal takes on a note of terror, as if the floor opened under him and he’s tumbling into a bottomless hole of the mind.
Cave has always been attuned to the power of artifice and character, but here, more than ever, he is acting as much as singing. When he’s not delivering outright spoken monologues, he’s sticking to handfuls of close-by notes, relying on inflections of speech rather than melody for expressiveness. The most memorable part of a given line might be the implied threat beneath the force of this or that syllable, or the anxious way he draws out a particular “uhhh.” If you come to Carnage expecting the conventional virtues of rock or pop, even of Cave’s own earlier work—riffs, tunes, grooves, and so on—you will likely be disappointed. Even for those who enjoy the album, it may be hard to imagine listening particularly often. But, as is the case with plenty of great films, replay value seems beside the point.
Carnage has no plot per se, but its motifs gather force as they pile up and interact, such that listening out of order would do the album a disservice. The story they tell is a version of the one Cave has spent his whole career telling, before and after the tragedy that ruptured his personal life—about our equal capacities for cruelty and love, and the flickering possibility of salvation in a brutal world. “By the side of the road is a thing with horns/That steps back into the trees, and a child is born,” he declaims on “Old Time,” whose throbbing bass and slashes of guitar provide some of the album’s purest musical thrills. In “Carnage,” one song later, “a reindeer frozen in the footlights steps back into the woods.” Of course, headlights are what we generally picture freezing deer in their beams; footlights are more likely to illuminate performers at a theater. That sly inversion reaches back to touch the previous song, and we wonder if the child-giving horned creature by the road is a version of the singer himself.
As ever, Cave uses overtly religious imagery in ways both subversive and devout. The “kingdom in the sky” first appears in the album’s opening lines, where the foreboding music suggests we are doomed never to find it. Its final recurrence comes near the album’s end, in the dreamlike “Lavender Fields,” where a choir urges Cave’s narrator to have faith despite his loss: “Where did they go?/Where did they hide?/We don’t ask who/We don’t ask why/There is a kingdom in the sky.”
The kingdom appears most memorably between these poles, in the delirious coda to “White Elephant,” the album’s centerpiece. Over a sinister rhythm track that nearly scans as hip-hop, Cave gives a thunderous monologue in character as a sort of spiritual embodiment of white supremacy. As protesters tear down statues, his boasts become increasingly deranged. Then a drum fill and another jarring smash cut, this time to a drunken gospel-rock singalong, equally jubilant and grotesque: “The time is coming, the time is nigh/For the kingdom in the sky.” God is many things to many people, this passage suggests, and not all of them good. The album’s catchiest hook becomes an arch conceptual set piece, more unsettling than uplifting.
If Carnage’s feverish first half sometimes recalls David Lynch, its austere second is more like Terrence Malick. After “White Elephant,” the album settles into an extended comedown, both musically and lyrically. The abrupt tonal shifts recede in favor of Ghosteen-ish washes of placid harmony; Cave’s focus zooms out beyond the pained countenances and rictus grins of Side A to encompass entire cosmic landscapes. The second act is slightly less satisfying than the first, if only because it’s more clearly an extension of the last few Bad Seeds albums. But in the world of Carnage, these final four songs offer a tentative but hopeful resolution to the initial chaos. It culminates with a return to the balcony, on a morning with no storms in sight, for now. “There’s a madness in her and a madness in me/And together it forms a kind of sanity,” Cave sings atop drifting synthesizers on “Shattered Ground,” a couplet that should resonate with anyone who has passed through trouble with a partner only to find more on the way. The next line comes as a surprise every time I hear it, with a sudden, choked, almost accidental directness that only heightens its power and apparent centrality. Everything is in those five words: “Oh, baby, don’t leave me.”

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Producer Nigel Godrich steps out with a new band, working with Los Angeles-based producer/drummer Joey Waronker (who also does time with Godrich in Thom Yorke's Atoms for Peace) and Dimbleby & Capper vocalist Laura Bettinson. The trio's self-titled debut is a collection of dark, krautrock-indebted synth pop.

Ultraísta

After more than 15 years as a producer with some of music's biggest names, Nigel Godrich has been working with some comparative unknowns in 2012. Earlier this year, he lent his distinctive touch to Brooklyn indie outfit Here We Go Magic's third album, A Different Ship; now comes the debut album from a new band of Godrich's called Ultraísta. The group consists of Godrich and Los Angeles-based producer/drummer Joey Waronker, who've worked together on and off since Beck's 1998 album Mutations, including time in the Thom Yorke's side project Atoms for Peace. Vocalist Laura Bettinson, whom they recruited after seeing a loop-heavy performance from her electronic pop project Dimbleby & Capper, rounds out the band.
Those with knowledge of these artists' CVs won't have much trouble hearing their individual contributions to Ultraísta's smooth, krautrock-indebted synth pop. Waronker's tumbling rhythms are central, while Bettinson's layered vocals weave easily through and around the viscous synths. But it's ultimately Godrich's show, as Ultraísta's electronic squiggles and tight production bring to mind his work on Yorke's own solo set, 2006's The Eraser. Yorke's album had a distinctly gloomy, threatening tone, and Ultraísta feels similarly hermetic and overcast.
Over the course of the record, Ultraísta's atmospheric consistency turns out to be its biggest flaw. Almost every track adheres to the same formula: a complicated drum pattern to open followed by some synths or treated piano and then by Bettinson's voice, which is progressively looped and layered until the track's end. Once you've heard one of these songs, you've heard the entire record. And the dullness is driven home by Bettinson's voice, which is competent but lacks distinctiveness. Here and there she shows some versatility, like when she mixes a whisper with a holler on "Bad Insect" and conveys palpable desperation through on "Our Song". But generally, her smoky vocals sound cut-and-pasted from one of those chillout compilations that's clogged up many a used-CD music store section. She's not really saying much lyrically, either; the album's lyrics were collaboratively written by the trio, and as such they possess a factory-churned facelessness, consisting mostly of clichéd imagery and weightless invocations of passion.
To focus too much on Ultraísta's words, however, is missing the point. The group's clearly more concerned with making great sounds and creating a distinctive vibe than they are with making lasting statements. Taking that into consideration, Ultraísta succeeds on its own low-stakes terms. But while listening to it, I couldn't help but think about another album from a side project spawned by a high-profile British musician-- this year's >>, from Portishead member Geoff Barrow's knotty excercise in rock-deconstruction, Beak>. On that album, there's a genuine sense of discovery and adventurousness, a feeling of purpose that transcends the notion of a space-filling side project. Compare this with Godrich, talking recently to Consequence of Sound on Ultraísta's modest aims: "We've got a reason to be here and essentially it's just the entertainment and the fun of being able to do this-- it's a luxury, really. I mean I could be working at a fucking dry cleaners, you know what I mean?" From this perspective, the question with Ultraísta isn't so much "Why?" as it is "Why not?"


The singer-songwriter’s second album is a raucous, messy, and celebratory song cycle about finding kinship in queer nightlife.

An Evening at Macri Park

For as long as gay bars have existed in New York, they have lived under threat of extinction. The police brutality of the Stonewall era led to the religious right moralizing of the Reagan ascent, then the mass death and social ostracization of the AIDS catastrophe. In the current decade, iconic spaces like Therapy and Henrietta Hudson have either shuttered or had to resort to GoFundMe to survive the pandemic. Those that endure are not just drinking establishments but crucial lifelines for queer community and activism.
Macri Park may not carry the historic weight of the Stonewall Inn, but for a newer generation of queer Brooklynites, its barstools and drag nights feel like home. One of those patrons is Seán Barna, a drummer-turned-singer-songwriter with an irrepressible literary bent and a knack for fusing together queer New York’s past and present. His second album, An Evening at Macri Park, is a song cycle set in and around the Williamsburg bar, exploring what it means to find family amid “these queens and freaks I didn’t know I needed,” as he sings on “Be a Man.” It’s the kind of concept album that buzzes with a sense of place and character, rendering the United States’ most populous city as a vibrant small town.
Barna named his first album Pictures of an Exhibitionist, introducing listeners to his autobiographical storytelling and the defiantly queer characters who populate his songwriting. His extroversion and fierce need for connection remain hallmarks of his songs. On the rollicking glam standout “Sleeping With Strangers,” Barna seeks refuge in casual sex during a traumatic year, taking stock of a near-death experience with defiance and sass: “I looked death in the face/That bitch gave me a scar.” He sings in an affected croon that shares DNA with Rufus Wainwright’s, though he’s not shy about summoning the ghosts of an earlier milieu of NYC outsiders. On “Sleeping With Strangers,” he namechecks a problematic fave, trying to reconcile Lou Reed’s art with Reed’s treatment of his trans partner. On the downtown fever dream “Benjamin Whishaw Smiled,” he strides through the West Village and eyes the apartment where Bob Dylan once lived. That affordable, artist-friendly Manhattan no longer exists, but Barna is doing his best to keep the city’s bohemian underbelly alive.
Neighborhood bars can be party spots, but they’re also spaces to commiserate and share your sorrows. An Evening at Macri Park inhabits both modes, grief and joy mingled together. On “Disco Nap,” Barna finds solace in dancing, but he also alludes to the pain lurking beneath these nightlife thrills: “I will always hide my bruises with my best pearls,” he wails over Spectorian waves of orchestral grandeur. “The Lonely,” a keening ballad shorn of the album’s boisterous arrangements, is more like the tearful origin story that tumbles out as the bar empties out at last call. It’s about Barna’s memories of his early 20s, a period of mourning his brother’s death and coming to terms with his queerness: sadness and self-acceptance, never too far apart throughout the album.
This is raucous, messy, and emotionally rich music, as any art about queer nightlife ought to be. There are regrettable hook-ups (the darkwave-infused “Erotic Deficiencies” doesn’t quite land), the requisite drunken singalongs (“Thinking of You”), and weirdly triumphant run-ins with the most unexpected people (notably Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz, whose heart-on-sleeve vocals fit nicely with Barna’s aesthetic on “Be a Man” and “Sparkle When You Speak”). Its boozy atmosphere and glam-rock textures sometimes call to mind those great, mid-’70s records of exhausted debauchery, like Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats or Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man. As on those albums, there’s a sense of a songwriter both galvanized and drained by the drunken revelry all around him. But Macri Park’s tone is more celebratory, the work of a queer man carving out community at a watering hole where everyone else is a little bit damaged, too.


The prickly singer/songwriter is a little more country than rock'n'roll on this 2xCD effort, which was recorded with a backup group called the Cardinals and features vocal contributions from Rachel Yamagata.

Cold Roses

In late 2001, Ryan Adams was inadvertently anointed the face-du-jour for "alt-country," an idea scraped off the ink-smeared pages of No Depression and tremulously shot into semi-mainstream consciousness by an over-jubilant, rural-romanticizing press: Adams' "breakthrough" record, Gold, turned out to be a lot more alt-rock than alt-country, and its proper, non-demo follow-up, 2003's spastic Rock N Roll, ditched the pedal steel altogether, embracing, instead, overblown riffs and smarmy vocal mugging. Cold Roses, which follows two weepy acoustic EPs (2003's Love Is Hell Parts One and Two), sees Adams trudging back to his country roots, turning up the twang, curling his cowboy boots into cold, east village pavement, and transforming his frantic yawps into star-fed cries.
Even for Adams' most zealous fans, hunting down new material has never been a particularly pressing concern: The two-disc Cold Roses is one of (a vaguely audacious) three full-length releases planned for 2005 (Jacksonville City Nights is slated to arrive this summer, with 29 expected in the fall), and while Adams has never been an especially sharp judge of his own work, Cold Roses suffers considerably from its double-disc conceit. Overstuffed and vaguely monotonous, the album could be easily whittled down to a single sequence of impressive songs; Instead, it's a meandering, occasionally moving series of mid-tempo laments, some more memorable than others.
Despite ample backing by the Cardinals (guitarists J.P. Bowersock and Cindy Cashdollar, drummer Brad Pemberton, and bassist Catherine Popper; with singer-songwriter Rachael Yamagata, formerly of Chicago's Bumpus, taking guest turns on "Cold Roses" and "Let It Ride"), Cold Roses doesn't feel particularly collaborative; followers of Adams' solo work will recognize loads of parallels to Adams' post-Whiskeytown, 2000 solo debut, Heartbreaker (minus the punk throwdowns).
Cold Roses' most palpable reference point may be American Beauty-era Grateful Dead: Excellent opener "Magnolia Mountain" mixes slow, "Box of Rain" melancholy ("If the morning don't come/ Will you lie to me?/ Will you take me to your bed and lay me down?") with Adams' trademark guitar scrapes and sandpapered howls, while "Cold Roses" is packed with giddy guitar noodling and jam-friendly interludes (even Adams' vocals seem deliberately Garcia-infused, straining and paper-thin, careening off into a smoke-filled sunset.) Meanwhile, nearly every bit of electric guitar on Cold Roses sounds as though it was plucked straight from Dick's vault, all wiggly solos and playful licks, unintentional and woozy.
Lead single "Let It Ride" bounces, proudly shuffling through a laundry-list of country requirements: whining steel guitar, longing mentions of Tennessee and Carolina, nods to the Cumberland River and ferryboats, big, lonesome wails. But "Let It Ride" also employs plenty of weird, Ennio Morricone-inspired western guitar whirls, and Adams' coaxing vocals are undeniable, charmingly sincere and innocent: The resulting song is properly engaging, more classic country than alt-anything.
"Cherry Lane" employs honky-tonk yawping and girl-gone words ("The glass/ It hits the floor" is accompanied by requisite glass-shattering sound effects), while the preciously titled "How Do You Keep Love Alive" mopes along, wearied and oddly pretty, half-sung over a languishing piano line. Adams' songwriting proclivities have always flirted with MOR, adult-alternative sappiness, but for the most part, Cold Roses is clever and uncommonly listenable, far less bombastic and contrived than its predecessor. Even lyrically, Adams is modest and cautiously confessional, careful to avoid the cocky caterwauling that invades much of his back catalogue.
Tellingly, Cold Roses is the first Ryan Adams record not to feature a picture of him on the cover; it's increasingly difficult to say exactly when Adams transitioned from bloated media darling to scrappy underdog, but it happened, and he commandeered the passage all by himself, squirming away from the overblown antics of yesteryear and embracing, instead, the staid earnestness of his roots. It's a welcome return.


Brooklyn-based label Orchid Tapes was founded in 2010 by Warren Hildebrand, who's also behind the dreamy Foxes in Fiction project. Boring Ecstasy: The Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes serves as a strong introduction to this tight-knit community, and highlights what makes it stand out during a time when anyone with Internet access can conceivably start a label.

Various Artists: Boring Ecstasy: The Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes

When the artists releasing music through Brooklyn-based label Orchid Tapes talk about the imprint, it sounds like they are describing a support group instead of a business. “It’s the idea that anything good enough, no matter how much publicity or fans the artist has gathered, deserves love and attention,” said Infinity Crush's Caroline White in a recent interview. “It feels like a bunch of friends.” Boring Ecstasy: The Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes serves as a strong introduction to this tight-knit community, and highlights what makes it stand out during a time when anyone with Internet access can conceivably start a label.
A devotion to intimacy and earnestness unites the musicians on Orchid Tapes, and those qualities have been part of the label’s DNA since Warren Hildebrand, who's also behind the dreamy Foxes in Fiction project, founded Orchid Tapes in 2010. Initially, he created it as a way to release his debut album Swung From the Branches in a physical format), but soon Hildebrand connected with other bedroom-based artists via Myspace. Since then, his label's released music from the likes of Coma Cinema and Ricky Eat Acid, whose Three Love Songs served as their first vinyl release earlier this year.
Ricky Eat Acid kicks off Boring Ecstasy with “Can You See It’s Bloom”, a woozy ambient-pop track that is one of two instrumental songs here. The other, Los Angeles producer Meishi Smile’s “Sincerity”, bookends the compilation on a fluttery, bittersweet note. The collection never settles for one particular style, instead letting each artist construct their own world without having to worry what’s happening around them, so the back-porch strumming of Alex G’s “Cards” co-exists peacefully with the drum-machine jitters of Julia Brown’s “Without You”.
The thread that ties many of Boring Ecstasy's contributors together is a neck-breathing closeness. Hildebrand’s contribution as Foxes in Fiction, “Rearrange”, slowly builds up from washes of guitar, but even as the music ebbs and flows, his words float through. Wisconsin-born, Berlin-based artist Yohuna delivers one of Boring Ecstasy’s most memorable cuts with the slow-burning “Badges,” which mixes synthesizers with her stretched-out vocals to create something radiating warmth.
There are missteps: Euphoria Again’s “Change” is one of the most stripped-down numbers here, but it lags, while The Sweater I Gave You’s “Nobody’s Baby” is too cluttered, taking away from the Oregon project’s usual charm. Daniel Abary’s Four Visions makes the noisier approach work better on “Hazy Past”, an appropriately fuzz-tinged song prone to moments of clatter that constantly shifts instead of succumbing to tedium. Infinity Crush’s “Spoiled” is nothing more than White’s singing and some guitar, but she delivers both with unblinking directness, punctuated by self-targeted lines like “I feel like shit/ We know, get over it.”
“Spoiled’s” lyrics touch on the other important aesthetic pillar of the artists affiliated with Orchid Tapes: they aren’t shy about baring their feelings*, so Boring Ecstasy* focuses on love gained and lost, usually against the backdrop of everyday happenings. “What’s the point of the leaves changing color/ I can’t watch them change with you,” Julia Brown’s Sam Ray sings on "Without You", the words out of step with the music surrounding it, underlining the desperation contained within. “The overall idea that we try to go for is releasing music by people who are really dedicated and put a lot of themselves into their music and don't try to follow any passing Internet trends or anything,” Hildebrand told Interview Magazine, and that comes through on Boring Ecstasy, a collection of music from bedroom artists unafraid to lean in close and expose their feelings, all while never sounding one bit alienating.


The NYC-based singer-songwriter Zachary Cale has released four albums in four years, and they all take place somewhere reliable and soothing. On his newest, he has a full band*,* one that confidently evokes dream pop and country rock, and he luxuriates in their sound.

Duskland

Duskland is a good name for a Zachary Cale album. Duskland would be a good name for all Zachary Cale albums. The NYC-based singer-songwriter has released four of them in four years, and they all take place somewhere similar. They are reliable and soothing, like old-fashioneds: Mix a little barely-perceptible organ hum and faraway slide guitars of '90s Yo La Tengo with the reedy voice of Cass McCombs, twist a few melancholic turns of phrase, and you will arrive at the place Zachary Cale is transmitting from. It's an inviting spot.
His last album, 2013's Blue Rider, glides well into this one: You can cue them up and lose yourself in a pleasant haze for a couple of hours and not take immediate notice where they end. Cale probably wouldn't be offended by the suggestion: His 2011 collection was called Noise of Welcome, and so was a song on 2013's Blue Rider. He likes "blue": besides Blue Rider, Duskland has a "Blue Moth". The crisp, palm-muted acoustic strumming pattern on "I Left the Old Cell" is pretty-damn-near identical to the one on "Hold Fast" from Blue Rider. He repeats himself, but it doesn't make his music feel redundant, just identifiable as his own.
Squint into the haze, however, and you'll discern moving parts in these simple and rootsy songs that help them resonate. "Sundowner" has a softly complicated arrangement—organs chime at different levels in the mix, playing different chord voicings, and somewhere in that rosy glow, a steady piano pulses. Cale's solo acoustic playing usually covers all corners of an arrangement, from backbeat and melody to counterpoint. But he has a full band on Duskland, one that confidently evokes dream pop and country rock, and he luxuriates in their sound.
There are some horns on "Low Light Serenade" (another very on-the-nose song title) that might have come from a Matthew E. White production, or Phosphorescent's last album. Cale makes good company with those artists, but his essence feels a little more elusive. Sometimes, that's just because it's often hard to make out what he is singing, even though his voice is mixed high; you can listen to a song multiple times, and only catch a few phrases. His singing is also odd, drawing out notes that don't seem obvious and hitching unexpectedly at others. He sits just far enough away from you. He's close enough to draw your attention, but far enough away to make you lean forward and follow him.


Y.R.N. (Young Rich Niggas)

The guest list for Young Rich Niggas, the new mixtape from emerging Atlanta trap trio Migos, is short but telling: in 19 tracks, there are guest spots from Gucci Mane, trap scene evergreen and early supporter of breakout stars like Waka Flocka and Future whose revolving door Brick Squad collective currently counts Chief Keef and Young Thug as members; Soulja Boy, spirit guide and occasional symbiote for weird rap mainstays like Lil B and Young L of the Pack; and Trinidad James and Riff Raff, whose left-of-center theatrics have brought their authenticity as well as their worth as lyricists into constant review. Migos are both natural descendents of Atlanta's florid coke rap cottage industry and purveyors of something defiantly stranger. On the surface, Young Rich Niggas appears to traffic in slight, hooky pop rap, but the abundance of aesthetic and lyrical quirks here also genuflect to rap’s frayed outskirts.
Young Rich Niggas’ lyric sheet is a vast expanse of trap house platitudes, but Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff’s absurdist humor sets these songs apart from the pack. “China Town” juggles plentiful references to Asian culture-- Honda, Mortal Kombat, Manny Pacquiao-- hilariously failing to hit on anything legitimitely Chinese. Mixtape highlight “Hannah Montana” is a flurry of bald-faced boasts about proficiency at dealing drugs, but the codenames for the product are all culled from white female TV, movie, and pop stars. It’s the song’s chorus that illuminates Migos’ incontrovertible weirdness, though. At the end of each verse Quavo bludgeons the mix shouting “Hannah Montana! Hannah Montana! Hannah Montana! Hannah Montana!” until he’s driven home the principal silliness of the word combo. Migos' choruses work like that a lot of the time: the badgering, hypnotic repetition of “Trapped out the bando” on “Bando” and the comically insistent “Versace/ Versace Versace/ Versace Versace” refrain of “Versace” warp each phrase in your mind until they hit the ear like something other than English, hammering hooks home with the manic urgency of toy commercials.
If that seems like a shaky foundation for an hour-long mixtape, know that Migos’ bag of rhyme schemes is more varied and adventurous than simple catchphrase repetition: Young Rich Niggas houses capable double-time speed trials like “Cook It Up”, brawlers like “Hannah Montana” and “China Town”, the half-baked self-satisfied stunting of “Bando”, dalliances with sung hooks on “Adios” and Auto-Tune experimentation on “Finesser” and “Pronto”. And for all its smart alecky veneer, Y.R.N. is shot through with a palpable darkness that comes to a head at the end of the tape: there's the one-two punch of “R.I.P.”, an ode to Future’s recently deceased Freeband Gang associate OG Double D, and “Thank You God (Outro)”, a rags-to-riches yarn that charts Migos’ progression from childhood adversity (“Daddy was a hospital patient/ Next thing you know he ain’t make it”) to financial comfort that’s couched in the self-flagellating remorse of Offset’s proclamation that he “sinned every day just to get this success.”
Migos’ deceptively simple lyricism favors production that follows suit. Trap’s booming 808s and ticking hi-hats are still present, but where the production of, say, a Rick Ross song is designed to blurt out of speakers like a battering ram pushed it through, Y.R.N. shoots for pared down productions that highlight the strengths of the songwriting. The staccato synth blips on Zaytoven’s “Versace” beat race against the lyrics laid over them. The plodding piano line on “Adios” walks in lock step with its sung hook. Dun Deal fades the foreboding bells and guitars of “Hannah Montana” after each verse, punching up Quavo’s frantic chorus for maximum effect. Guest MCs similarly fold into the songs where they’re featured. Gucci Mane goes along with the gummy Auto-Tune shtick of “Dennis Rodman”, and Trinidad James and Riff Raff’s contributions to “Out Da Gym” are surprisingly reserved. (Drake jumped on a remix of “Versace” last week and coopted the Migos cadence with childlike zeal.)  The willingness of Migos’ collaborators to follow their lead feels like a vote of confidence in their sound, a rarity in a time of rap game Frankenstein’s monsters like A$AP Rocky’s “Fuckin’ Problems” and Kanye West’s remix of Chief Keef’s “Don’t Like”, releases that played like pic-stitches of the artists’ famous friends.
Young Rich Niggas finds Migos perfecting their sound even as they bristle at it, and the tape rarely delivers anything resembling a failure. The subject matter can be suffocating in its cavalier depravity, especially on tracks like “FEMA”, which employs a heavy-handed metaphor comparing one’s speed at whipping up crack to the movements of Hurricane Katrina, and Migos’ kingpin fantasies also hit a few sour notes racially speaking. (See: Y.R.N.’s bottomless stream of Latin names for cocaine connects and “China Town”, whose adventures in drug smuggling are periodically punctuated by gross “ching chong” ad libs.) Y.R.N.’s indiscretions are usually, mercifully scant, however, and the group never approaches this material with anything less than an affable, good-natured goofiness. With Young Rich Niggas, Migos have peeled the gruff exterior off of trap and revealed the giddy, catchy party music underfoot.


The new Rage Against the Machine/Public Enemy/Cypress Hill supergroup is a harmless if not crass experiment that amounts to a bad cover band playing songs they actually wrote.

The Party's Over EP

Picture yourself this past weekend at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut. You kicked off Friday night by celebrating Brody Jenner’s birthday at Avalon and then made a preemptive strike against a Patron-induced hangover at Bow & Arrow Sports Bar with some Philly Cheesesteak Egg Rolls dipped in chipotle ketchup. Maybe you had a lucky streak at the slots on Saturday afternoon and blew your winnings at Yankee Candle before an afternoon nap and a chance to see Black Sabbath as part of their “farewell, for real this time” End Tour. And to cap it all off, you watched 75% of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, and Cypress Hill’s B-Real do rap-metal retoolings of “Shut ‘em Down” and “Killing in the Name,” getting a chance to scream, “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” with 10,000 others in Sun Arena before slumping back to work on Monday.
It does make Prophets of Rage come off as five guys turning some of the most incendiary music to ever hit the radio into a crass if not harmless nostalgia trip, so why not make some “more like profits of rage, amirite?” jokes and file it next to the CBGB Lounge and Bar in the Newark Airport, and the $225 *Unknown Pleasures *T-shirt at Barney’s? Because this would be a grave misunderstanding of Prophets of Rage. “Dangerous times demand dangerous songs,” their website declares, an admirable statement if Tom Morello had any new rage directed at any new machines that have arisen since his band’s 1992 debut. But despite pop music being politically weaponized to a degree unseen since the ’70s, it’s painfully clear that Prophets of Rage believe they alone can fix it. Their shockingly flimsy EP *The Party’s Over *risks nothing and hangs nobody. They’re either ignoring the past 23 years or even worse, they have nothing at all to say about it.
A generous reading of *The Party’s Over—*four reworks of the collective’s best-known songs and a barely-there title track—shows the timelessness of Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine’s earliest works, music that felt truly dangerous when it bum-rushed MTV with Aerosmith and Meat Loaf videos still in heavy rotation. The systemic pathologies that inspired *It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back *and *Fear of a Black Planet *are still very much intact, and while Rage Against the Machine soundtracked more chest days than May Days, their visceral impact is still undeniable. These inflammatory times grant Prophets of Rage a tremendous opportunity to use their material as proxies for new discussions. “911 is a Joke” could be extended to implicate the utter failure of public services in the neighborhoods where they're needed the most; “Night of the Living Baseheads” might be reconfigured to tackle new forms of misunderstood drug addiction and price gouging; and what would be better than a Rage-style rework of “She Watch Channel Zero?!” a song that already samples Slayer?
But none of this would likely fly at Barclay’s Center, BB&T Pavilion, EagleBank Arena or any of the other monuments to financial oligarchy in which the band currently performs. On what essentially serves as tour promo, Prophets of Rage shut up and play the hits: The Rage songs don’t rage against any specific machine and the Public Enemy songs could pass for Rage songs. The title track and “Shut ‘em Down,” now fused with variations on “Guerrilla Radio,” could just as easily be shouting the praises of the Denver Broncos’ defensive line as shouting down Nike’s lack of investment in black neighborhoods. And while the black militant theater of the S1Ws and the Bomb Squad’s production conveyed a sense of clear and present danger to white America, they’ve been replaced by Dave Grohl giving the Black Power sign in a full-band portrait and Morello doing his “no keyboards, ma” routine. Two decades on, the once innovative guitarist becomes the sound of teens safely working out their angst in suburban garages.
*The Party’s Over *is unlistenable to anyone who has a meaningful relationship with the originals, either due to the suspect politics of Prophets of Rage, or the fact that they’re simply a bad cover band playing songs they actually wrote. Since it’s essentially the same format as Audioslave, one would assume Prophets of Rage would be superior to Audioslave on account of not being Audioslave. Whatever your opinions on the merits of “Cochise” compared to “Fight the Power,” Chris Cornell is more suited to the strengths of Rage’s rhythm section than Chuck D, B-Real or basically any rapper who isn’t Zach de la Rocha. While DJ Muggs and the Bomb Squad made memorable use of metal, Public Enemy and Cypress Hill’s music always came back to funk. Rage Against the Machine could never groove worth shit and everything here is subject to the same militaristic plod and pentatonic riffs that would actually make Prophets of Rage a pretty convincing Lex Luger cover band.
As such, Chuck and B-Real are both overworked and unchallenged, straining like people trying to jog as slowly as possible. Not even taking the shoddy recording of the live tracks into account, the bigger issue is that Chuck D raps like de la Rocha’s simplified sloganeering is beneath him, which it is. Meanwhile, at some point, B-Real figures he’s supposed to take on the Flavor Flav role and can’t seem to decide what to make of the situation. He makes a game attempt to slightly revise the second verse of “Killing in the Name” (“Some of those *up in Congress/*Are the same that burn crosses”), but mostly sounds uninterested in making another rap-metal album 16 years after his last one. No one sounds like they’re having any fun here—Chuck and B-Real can’t even muster a convincing “Motherfucker!” at the end of “Killing in the Name.”
The bigger issue is that while Morello claims, “We’ve come back to remind everyone what raging against the machine really means,” The Party’s Over has nothing to say about Black Lives Matter, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, subprime loans, North Carolina law HB 2, continuing bloodshed in Chicago, or even Donald Trump (indications suggest their live show is no more revealing of their actual platform). The title track makes passing reference to the Illuminati and war machines and that's the only thing they've written in the 21st century. And while “No Sleep Til Cleveland” is indeed a “Fight the Power”/Beastie Boys mashup performed at the Republican National Convention, they didn’t even bother to change the actual hook to “no sleep til Cleveland.”
Mind you, that’s a Beastie Boys song from their Licensed to Ill* *days about drinking and fucking anything that moves while on tour—weirdly apt in this setting, seeing as how there’s far more “Fight For Your Right to Party” than “Party For Your Right to Fight” in Prophets of Rage. Consider that AWOLNATION is, for some reason, their opening act on their “Make America Rage Again Tour,” a meme so played out that the band Filter got to it first. But even if the message of Prophets of Rage is vastly different than Donald Trump’s, they’re engaging in the same exact form of communication—wielding both bullhorn and a dog whistle, yelling as loudly as possible only to people who are predisposed to hear it.


Amid attention from mainstream hip-hop, the Glasgow producer's latest shows he has improved markedly since 2009 debut Butter.

Satin Panthers EP

Hudson Mohawke's recent output-- a bonkers remix of Wiley's "Electric Boogaloo", a handful of decent edits on his Soundcloud-- has been enough to catch relatively high-profile ears. Not long ago, the Glasgow producer (real name: Ross Birchard) received a ridiculously glowing Twitter shout-out from hip-hop head-knocker Just Blaze, and Chris Brown jumped on an old HudMo track. Still, in a way it's surprising Mohawke has received any level of popularity beyond beat freaks and Warp roster-checkers. His 2009 debut LP, Butter, didn't exactly flow like the melted yellow stuff; it was an unfocused mix of future-R&B pastiche and jumbled funk experimentation.
Good thing for second chances. Mohawke's new Satin Panthers EP shows the kind of improvement that a couple of years in the lab will do for you. His music is still jumbled-sounding, but rather than being sneakily complicated, this record is obviously so; the fact it all works so well is the sneaky part. Mohawke packs in oodles of genre- and artist-specific tics: the hard-hitting repetition of Chicago juke, the sharp melodic tang of Bristol's "purple" scene, the sticky swarm of Los Angeles-era Flying Lotus, the light-cycle chaos of hip-hop producer Lex Luger, and the galloping rhythms of UK funky. Which might sound like the recipe for a total mess, except HudMo combines every ingredient expertly.
One complaint: The EP's 17-minute run time feels too brief. Luckily, Satin Panthers offers more than enough to tide listeners over until a potential follow-up album, whether the double-octave bass line on "Thunder Bay" or the building synth spirals on "Octan". The closing track, a burst of marching-band mania, is called "Thank You", but when all's said and done, there's a lot of gratitude to go around here.


Following on this three Art Dealer Chic EPs, the young Los Angeles-based R&B singer and songwriter has come into his own. Kaleidoscope Dream is a gem of an album, respectful of tradition, quietly ambitious, and deeply personal.

Kaleidoscope Dream

Since his debut in 2010 with the outstanding "Sure Thing", the young Los Angeles singer/songwriter Miguel has been something of a for-the-R&B-heads-only sleeper star. He showed up armed with a guitar, an endearing croon that is both virtuosic and everyman, a coiffed haircut, and a slightly retro sensibility. His voice is an elastic thing that's rarely used to excessive effect; he avoids the histrionic R. Kelly worship of so many of his compatriots in favor of the school of smooth Sam Cooke ad-libs. And though his lyrics are full of silly puns and earnest platitudes, he takes sex very seriously: He's a happily-married man in a genre full of lascivious bachelors, and his best music radiates maturity, self-assured and confident but rarely showy. But despite his obvious talent, he hasn't quite been able to break through to a wider audience.
Miguel's 2010 debut album, All I Want Is You, was flanked with some stellar singles but weighed down by a lack of identity as he flitted from producer to producer. It sounded like he couldn't decide whether he wanted to be a Salaam Remi faux-nostalgia crooner or a smart hip-hop crossover star, and the indecision hung over the record like a cloud (it didn't perform well commercially either). He returned earlier this year with a free trio of EPs under the self-conscious title of Art Dealer Chic, showing a newfound entrepreneurial sensibility and a streak of independence. Those mostly self-produced songs at times sounded like rough sketches, but they made it up for it by sounding personal and liberated from the demands of the industry. Free and widely available, they earned him some well-deserved re-examination. They also contained his best songs to date. And now, with his second full-length, he's delivered on that early promise.
Kaleidoscope Dream starts off with "Adorn", also found on the first Art Dealer Chic EP. It's one of the giddiest love songs of the year, a track where ecstatic infatuation is hemmed in by Miguel's understated vocal dexterity, and this album feels like its proper context. He rockets off into falsetto for irresistibly brief moments, and a new outro spirals elegant, trained vocal gymnastics around the song's chorus. "Adorn" also showcases Miguel's secret weapon: modesty. It's definitively, deceptively simple, a nugget of concentrated sunshine, and not necessarily all that original. But I'll be damned if it doesn't pull you in and make you feel it.
That touch of modesty colors most of Kaleidoscope Dream. There's the tender "Use Me" where he admits being nervous about having sex with the lights on. Even more affecting is the acoustic murmur "Pussy Is Mine", which deflates masculinized hip-hop tropes with insecurity, pleading, "Tell me that the pussy is mine/ 'Cause I don't wanna believe that anyone is just like me." The sentiment turns sardonic on the Ryan Leslie-like jaunt of "How Many Drinks?", where gorgeous falsetto verses are offset by uncertain pleas of "I don't wanna waste my time."
The plush, lightly psychedelic production buffers the record's more barebones moments, and Miguel's precocious vocals take flight on the bombast rather than drowning in it. Standout "Do You..." unfolds in an ethereal cloud of synth, voices streaming like angelic choirs before stumbling into a verse buoyed by its own euphoria. Not many singers could get away with lines like "What about matinee movies/ Pointless secrets/ Midnight summer swim, private beaches/ Rock, paper, scissors/ Wait! best outta three!" It's the stuff of unbearable rom-com montages, but Miguel's playful delivery brings it over. He's the rare vocalist who makes you feel what he's singing about, even when his lyrics can be transparent. When he wants to sound deadly serious, he's on the verge of tears; when he's happy, he's practically laughing as he sings.
Kaleidoscope Dream has elements of the sort of tasteful R&B record that the Grammys love, but much like Beyoncé's 4, it cuts through its own statuesque stateliness with raw emotion reined in by an ever-present sense of professionalism. And it succeeds in part because it sounds like Miguel's album and no one else's. There are no intrusive guest appearances, and the record sounds even less of its time than the first, reveling in its own contextual vacuum with abandon. Though there are some unexpected choices. Like "Don't Look Back", which is propped up by grand synth runs before melting into an interpolation of the Zombies' "Time of the Season". That song's musky psychedelia is a good example of the record's overarching theme, the highly sexualized seen through the lens of the eager and innocent.
When Miguel isn't accompanied by glossy synths, the music is all about intimacy. Take "Arch & Point"-- with a simple rasp, strum, and metronome, it sounds like it was recorded in the very bedroom it's ostensibly taking place in. "When it feels this good then it just comes natural," he insists, and there's not a better ethos for where his career stands at this point. Emerging unscathed from middling mainstream performance, Kaleidoscope Dream sounds, at its utmost, natural and easy, an artist set free to do what he wants and proving himself every bit the unique voice his debut seemed to deny. It's respectful of tradition, quietly ambitious, and deeply personal, a wonderfully considered album from an artist who was starting to seem a lot like a forgotten gem in the wake of mishandled promotion.


For most of the first 45 seconds of Chilean producer Ricardo Villalobos' debut album Alcachofa the only sound is provided ...

Alcachofa

For most of the first 45 seconds of Chilean producer Ricardo Villalobos' debut album Alcachofa the only sound is provided by a vocodered voice. But rather than using that device to turn man into the sheen of a playful disco machine, Villalobos' treated vocal on opener "Easy Lee" is murky, weighted down by reverb and doubt. It frequently trails off at the end of words and sentences. It's exhausted. And when the thump and snap of light 4/4 rhythms accompany it, it sounds even more submerged, as if it's trying to keep its head above water.
Villalobos approaches the admittedly wide and increasingly nebulous net of tech-house as if 2002 never happened-- no The Present Lover, no All That Glitters, no Digital Disco, no Total 4. That's certainly not bad, it's just another tangent for this ever-pulsating sound. The odd thing is that even without getting in touch with his inner pop child, Villalobos has landed in the same general area as the Tied to the 80s retro futurists: a delicate mix of nuance and melody. It's sort of the morning-after-- or possibly the walk home from the club, the how soon is now?-- to all of those of shiny, hands-aloft nights out. And Villalobos isn't the only producer taking this route. It's also one traveled by Luciano and the suddenly prolific Matthew Dear, whose Ghostly International releases-- EP1 and EP2, and his upcoming Leave Luck to Heaven album-- all demonstrate a similar approach to tech-house.
The roots of the Villalobos' music-- which can also be found on his own outstanding mix albums Love Family Trax and Taka Take, Perlon's Superlongevity compilation, and a series of 12-inch releases under his own name and as half of Ric y Martin-- lie in the Kompakt label's ambient beginnings and Basic Channel and the rest of the minimalist Berlin crowd. Like the Berliners, he wades through gurgling, delicate pools of dubby bliss. His mix of groove and nuance seems somehow warm and cold at the same time, a very human expression of somber emotions. Its bittersweet tone is compounded by a blend of the familiar (the self-deprecating vocals almost direct house of "What You Say is More Than I Can Say", the late-night speedway of "Y.G.H.") and the unexpected ("Waiworinao"'s chugging guitar, the polyrhythmic "Fools Garden (Black Conga)").
One setback is that the set misses perhaps his most beloved track, "808 the Bassqueen", although that may not have matched the record's tone. What is recycled from previous releases includes "Dexter", lifted from Taka Taka, and the aforementioned "What You Say is More Than I Can Say", which appears here as an edited version of the track, originally released on the Halma 12-inch.
One of the few vocal tracks, the me-against-the-world of "I Try to Live (Can I Live)", perhaps best illustrates the hesitancy, doubt, and weariness that drifts through Alcachofa. There and elsewhere throughout the record, Villalobos seems to be seeking comfort and finding it in small moments, in the nooks and crannies of the sound rather the more traditional heart-pumping moments explored by many tech-house producers over the past year or so. Instead, at Alcachofa's heart beats a more steady rhythm, pumping out fragile melodies painted with small yet precise brushstrokes.


On his first full solo release on Planet Mu in nine years, veteran IDM producer Mike Paradinas looks to the past, pairing jungle breaks with sugary synths.

µ-Ziq: Magic Pony Ride

Thirty years after the release of Warp’s first Artificial Intelligence compilation, the specter of IDM persists. Though the notion of club music made for home listening might feel pedestrian at a time when chilled-out, focus-oriented electronica fuels the streaming industry, the names of the movement’s originators still hold weight today. Aphex Twin’s insignia appears on the cover art of frenzied digicore singles. Gen Z’s new wave of retrofuturist rave producers cite Venetian Snares and Squarepusher as influences. Save for exceptions like Autechre, most of the folks deserving of a spot on IDM’s Mount Rushmore drop new material in infrequent bursts, often adhering to the glitchy palette of their early work. Like veteran jazz artists or jam bands, they work within their brain-tickling, technically proficient wheelhouse—they still churn out good stuff, but it’s functionally dad rock for lapsed ravers.
That’s quite literally the case for Mike Paradinas: father of two, Planet Mu labelhead, and the mastermind behind pioneering IDM project μ-Ziq. The English producer’s once prolific output has slowed to a drip since the mid aughts, as looking after his family and signees has taken up the majority of his time. The expert knob twiddling of Paradinas’ early career has thus been replaced by nudging the cursor on his laptop, an occasional pastime during rare moments of leisure. Magic Pony Ride, his first full record of solo tracks on Planet Mu since 2013, came together last year after his kids returned to school.
Though his fusion of dense, mechanical rhythm and baroque orchestration is almost always recognizable, μ-Ziq’s albums reveal the essence of the tools that shaped them, like a clay impression. During the peak of Paradinas’ productivity in the mid-’90s, works like Bluff Limbo proudly bore the scars of conflict between his Atari ST and analog tape, gritty breakbeats leaving welts. After a rough decade of transition from hardware to Logic plugins, 2013’s Chewed Corners marked the beginning of a creative resurgence. Taking cues from the squad of Chicago footwork producers he’d recently signed to Planet Mu, his production felt looser and more relaxed, with hi-hats blithely scattered across tufts of Reese bass. The music sounded like the macOS interface from which it came: optimistic, silicone smooth, and a bit uncanny, undergirded by a small tinge of lysergic spiritualism.
While Magic Pony Ride retains the gummy textures of his recent oeuvre, it is unusual in its overt nostalgia. Electronic pioneers like Wendy Carlos and Jean-Jacques Perrey influenced μ-Ziq’s work from the start, but here he’s equally fixated on his own back catalog. After finishing up the 25th anniversary remaster of 1997’s Lunatic Harness and pressing an onslaught of archival compilations, Paradinas decided to re-incorporate the era’s jungle breaks on the new record. The decision is charming when it works, but more often feels stiff compared to the material it’s referencing.
True to its title, Magic Pony Ride embraces Paradinas’ sugary side. Synths froth and squeak. Kitschy piano riffs ascend to euphoric heights. Sampled vocals coo. Songs like “Uncle Daddy” and “Turquoise Hyperfizz” contain some of his most unabashedly happy arrangements to date, ironing out the jazzy, occasionally dissonant wrinkles of traditional IDM in favor of pure indulgence. It’s the most exciting of the new developments in Paradinas’ style, merging the plasticky stringed melodies of Planet Mu signee Jlin with the dreamy headspace of Orbital.
The lower end of these mixes feels less inspired. On “Magic Pony Ride (Pt. 2)”, drum fills bob awkwardly beneath squelching synths, merely fleshing out the soundscape where a Lunatic Harness break might have pushed the track into unknown territory. Take the mangled percussion that crops up two-thirds of the way into that record’s now-classic “Brace Yourself Jason,” for instance, which slows things to a lossy, glitched-out crawl before Paradinas rattles off a pseudo drum solo. It’s a jarring detour, but the break reinforces the impact of the song’s melodic theme as it resurfaces one last time. The tracks on Magic Pony Ride may resemble these ancestors at a surface glance, but they lack the adventurous whimsy that earned comparisons to his buddy Richard D. James. “Unless,” which clocks in at a full six minutes, is the record’s most stagnant offering on this front, riding a flat, unadorned bassline for half of its runtime before a single kick or snare enters the fray.
Some of Magic Pony Ride’s best moments take place when Paradinas ditches the breaks altogether. “Picksing,” built around an oddly looped sample of his daughter’s voice, is both eerie and inviting, weaving breathy synths, bouncing keys and chopped vocals to immersive effect. The intro to “Don’t Tell Me (It’s Ending),” likely an homage to Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent),” is also lovely, featuring cute pulses of vocoder that would feel right at home on a PC Music single.
The past 24 years of Paradinas’ work as head of Planet Mu have considerably broadened the horizons of mainstream club culture, introducing his audience to genres like footwork and bubbling house while encouraging the label’s artists to experiment and evolve. So while μ-Ziq ranks lower on his list of priorities than it did in 1997, it’s a little disappointing to hear such a retrospective project from an artist who’s always been down to toy with the sounds of the present. The flirtations with trap and dubstep that appear throughout his latter discography haven’t always succeeded, but they were at least admirable in their willingness to swing for the fences. Look to the remix EP μ-Ziq dropped in April for that missing sense of abandon: In the hands of footwork producers like RP Boo and DJ Manny, his tracks are pared down to the bare essentials, flayed to bits and rearranged into inventive polyrhythmic mosaics. Based on these two releases, Paradinas’ talents as a curator have eclipsed his own musicianship—when you’re surrounded by the future, looking backward can look like regression.


Manuel Gagneux’s latest provocative mix of black metal and black folk music of the South is an absurd union that offers moments of transcendence.

Stranger Fruit

Stranger Fruit, the second album by provocative Swiss-American metallurgist Zeal & Ardor, ends with a perfect piece of black metal for 2018. Above an invocation of roaring guitars, Manuel Gagneux begins to sing, his voice bending forward with the urgency of Sam Cooke’s revolutionary soul. “Like a strange fruit out of season, you are bound to die alone,” he starts, his voice floating in and out of a woeful melisma. “You will swing free in the breeze then/You are bound to die alone.” But Gagneux doesn’t stop with a historical lynching; he briskly pulls that terrible past into the worrisome present, noting the senses of isolation, exploitation, and existential anxiety that come with being black (or any sort of outsider, really) in modern America. “They’re coming closer just to kill us,” he laments as a blast beat collapses into a series of doleful handclaps and foot stomps. A mix of au courant “atmospheric black metal” and gripping Southern soul, the music is itself a time machine. A plea for defiance and another piece of proof that black metal’s evolution remains unfinished, “Built on Ashes” is one of the year’s most powerful songs, a real anthem for our era.
Born in Switzerland to a Swiss father and an African-American mother, Gagneux started Zeal & Ardor four years ago as an online dare. Bored, he proposed a game on 4chan: What two seemingly disconnected genres should he try to blend into one song in thirty minutes? Users suggested he fuse black metal with “black music.” (The bigots didn’t put it so politely). Gagneux defied the insult by accepting the challenge in the most extreme way possible—combining black metal with the lumbering melodies of the slave chants and work songs John and Alan Lomax captured during field recording sojourns in the deepest, most dreadful recesses of the South. The eventual result, 2016’s nine-track Devil Is Fine, became one of metal’s most celebrated and debated recent records, prompting both purity tests and accusations of appropriation. Above all, it was a revelation for how the force of black metal could be used to pose entirely unexpected questions.
Stranger Fruit is Gangneux’s fitful attempt to prove that Devil Is Fine wasn’t a fluke, to show that an absurd union may have actual vitality. And it mostly does. A brilliant prelude poignantly pairs rumbling blastbeats to moaned blues, while “You Ain’t Comin’ Back” links post-rock theatrics, black metal dynamics, and a full-choir with Gangneux’s most powerful singing to date. “Don’t let anybody tell you that you’re safe,” he screams late in the song, his nerves completely on edge. Many of these pieces are exhilarating testaments to Gangneux’s vision and conviction. On occasion, though, you can hear the strain of Gagneux trying to figure out how to make this project matter. Where Devil Is Fine was a breathless 25-minute expression of an idea, Stranger Fruit is an explicit 47-minute attempt to expand it. The effort is sometimes awkward, with artful interludes that nevertheless seem unnecessary or didactic hooks that can occasionally stumble toward Godsmack blunder.
Still, amid the mess that the process sometimes makes, Gagneux takes a critical next step on Stranger Fruit. He expands beyond the work songs and spirituals that were his bedrock, fast-forwarding through a century of American racism and resistance to incorporate gospel, country blues, and funk—music that has foundationally pushed back against brutality. Where the clanging rhythms of his first anthem, “Devil Is Fine,” explicitly invoked the chain gang, its Stranger Fruit counterpart, “Gravedigger’s Chant,” heads first for the Saturday dance party with a hint of stride piano and then to Sunday service through an overdriven Pentecostal organ. During the breakdown of “Row Row,” Gagneux swaggers into handclaps-and-bass funk, which remains the rhythm section even as he adds serrated electric guitar. The song itself considers the twin terror of enslavement and of then trying to break from those bonds, how they are distinct symptoms of the same oppression. The funk frames the promise of freedom, the joy of deliverance. “Don’t You Dare” translates a banjo line to the electric guitar and couples it with a field recording of crickets. “Waste” hits the ecstatic falsetto heights of TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe. These contemporary elements not only bring Zeal & Ardor into the moment but also suggest there’s a lot of room left for Gagneux to explore, more ways for him to create new conversations through heavy metal.
Stranger Fruit also pushes back against the reductive claims of appropriation that Gagneux faced (and smartly answered) with Devil Is Fine. It is clear here that he is not fetishizing or romanticizing the source material or its painful backstory; instead, he is using it to connect the then with the now. In that way, Stranger Fruit recalls Kara Walker’s astounding series, Works from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). Walker plundered historic black-and-white illustrations of the Civil War published by  Harper’s Magazine and affixed monolithic silhouettes onto them, meant to convey the context omitted from the images. Dead black bodies lie in the road as army trains pass. A slave cloaked in Spanish moss looms above a river as a boatload of cotton passes. A slave lifts her hands in exaltation as the Union occupies Alexandria, Virginia. Zeal & Ardor complicates familiar narratives and our sometimes-facile understanding of our history by juxtaposing it with modern ideas, causing us to pause and consider what seemingly disconnected strains have to say about the world at large and what we have in common.
Stranger Fruit is an uneven record. But by mixing genres and squaring them against ancient issues that remain tragically current, these songs grapple with past, present, and the possibility of the future by asking two necessary questions: How can art let us understand the problems we’ve overlooked or misunderstood? And how can we begin to fix them?