The New York producer’s second album is a showcase not only for the marquee guests but for Swizz’s talent as a great arranger and knowing when to step out of the way.

Poison

“It’s a difference between a beatmaker and a producer,” producer Swizz Beatz said, in a recent interview with Mass Appeal. “I’m not calling you to just jump on something. No, we’re producing here, this is the concept, I’mma put you on this ... Put this here, do that there, say this line instead of that line ... It’s levels to it.” The implication is that a producer is hands-on where a beatmaker is not, and has a greater impact on the song’s direction without necessarily playing on it, in an almost advisory role. That seems to be an important caveat for his new album, Poison, which bills him as a lead artist despite the fact that he rarely raps and made only half the beats.
Poison was culled from a massive backlog and whittled into a curated rap relic. It was made in a series with four other projects: an R&B album, an “energy” album for “motivation,” an “acoustics” album that’s “just vibes” and “for Sundays,” and a “global” album featuring international artists. There was an early version of this album that featured Kanye West, Bono, and Bruno Mars, but a change of direction led him to pick these 10 songs out of 70 to make what he called the “East Coast Chronic.”
For what it’s worth: Poison isn’t East Coast Chronic, or even close. That album was helmed by two titans at the peak of their powers delivering under colossal stakes. This one has far less vision, less focus, and no stakes whatsoever. It isn’t essential or transcendent. But the album doesn’t have to invoke the authority of one of hip-hop’s greatest monuments ever to be produced effectively and full of defining moments. Where else can you find Young Thug tighten up and barrel through the fidgety MPC programming of AraabMUZIK, or hear 2 Chainz two-step and swagger for Bink? The characters shuffling through these songs are worth following, thanks in large part to Swizz stepping back and letting the guests star, playing the role of director more than performer.
With his 2007 solo debut, One Man Band Man, Swizz Beatz cosplayed as a rap star that, for some reason, almost exclusively rapped about being a rich producer. (His attempts to rap about anything else were disastrous.) The idea that Swizz could do it all himself as a rap Swiss army knife was put to bed rather quickly. After more than a decade to reflect on that, Swizz has learned from his mistakes. His mic time declines exponentially from his first album to this one, with him mostly punching in for his typical hypeman duties or for a freestyled mini-verse or two. Those moments are still cringy but not insufferable, going on only long enough to be noticed and not long enough to become a nuisance.
Some of the hooks he performs can get irksome—one chorus is literally just him counting to 10—but he largely stays out of the way, negotiating space for the rappers he wrangled to flex on his behalf. It’s fitting that a man who puts a premium on the power of producing doesn’t seem to be above producing himself, which means limited exposure. He understands being the most prominent voice on the album won’t make it a good one.
With “producing” as the directive, Swizz treats Poison as an outlet for the artists he features without letting the inmates run the asylum. He leads each of them into a space where they’ll be most comfortable, which usually causes them to provide flashes of their signature stuff. After flipping “Special Delivery” into a Lil Wayne slapper (for Tha Carter V’s “Uproar”), Swizz pushes Weezy to find the ceiling of his gun metaphors for “Pistol on My Side”; his free-associative bars are reminiscent of a hungrier Wayne. Swizz gets Pusha T, the amoral dope dealer, to consider the way drugs ravaged communities on “Cold Blooded”: “Broken black homes is the modern slavery/You can’t raise a savage and deny the rabies,” Push raps, a rare glimpse of morality from him this decade.
Rappers of yore sound refreshed in his hands. Swizz draws Nas away from the Ye-induced bombast of his self-titled mini-album and ushers him back into a narrative space, where he uses that project-window vision to eulogize the old New York, and the producer gets the best verses out of Jim Jones since the Bush administration. He lets Jadakiss and Styles P reenact their longstanding call-and-response partnership with wondrous results (“Cartel ties and dope bars/Life is a movie and death is the co-star”) as Kendrick wakes the neighbors (“Something Dirty/Pic Got Us”). It isn’t just that everybody gets to do what they do best, it’s that he puts them in positions to make it so.
If nothing else, Poison is a shrine to the art of producing. Swizz’s fingerprints are all over it and the rappers who serve under him here are better for having felt his influence. At a lean 32 minutes, the album is nearly filler free and full of well-executed teamwork. No one will be adding Swizz Beatz to the pantheon of all-time rapper-producers anytime soon, but that’s not the point. In stark contrast to One Man Band Man, the album is not in service of Swizz, or some misguided solo rap aspirations, but in service of elevating others and realizing the power of collaboration.


On their sixth album, the Springsteen of Philly pop-punk and his bandmates look to the world outside their hometown, with fewer big choruses than ever.

Sister Cities

In the decade-plus since the Wonder Years formed outside Philadelphia, there have certainly been more popular and beloved pop-punk bands, but very few have insinuated themselves so credibly into the conversation as a band to believe in. The Wonder Years put themselves forward as the type of band a young fan could build an identity around without worrying that it would seem embarrassing years later. That’s proven remarkably true:  Even as predecessors like Brand New have slid into ignominy, the Wonder Years—tracking a roughly parallel creative arc—have kept going, leaving suburban frivolity behind for broader musical horizons, darker thematic material, and dozens of imitators.
As much as the Wonder Years’ five previous albums followed the broad tenets of modern pop-punk—nostalgia for a youth they’re too young to realize isn’t even over yet, the melancholy of the middle-distance tour schedule—a specificity of place has distinguished their music from all the soundalikes. Frontman Dan Campbell is a Philly Springsteen in an extra-medium hoodie, filling his lyrics with diners, basements, bowling alleys, and parks that delight local kids and make the songs come alive for people who’ve never set foot in his city. But every successful band eventually outgrows its hometown, and it’s clear on the Wonder Years’ sixth album, Sister Cities, that they’re struggling with where they fit in as citizens of the world.
“It’s a record about distance, or maybe how little the distance matters anymore,” Campbell recently said, hinting at the feeling of international saudade that comes through in nearly every song on Sister Cities. Even its title comes from an idealistic international program that Dwight Eisenhower launched in 1956 (and a park in Philadelphia that was the result of that effort). This is an album about how art lets us attempt, and sometimes fail, to relate to the rest of the world. The band underscored this theme with a pre-release scavenger hunt involving unlabeled vinyl records with spoken-word poems in various languages. “I left pins on a map. I’m handing you the string,” the band tweeted. “Tie them together. Unite us...” To those not already enthralled by these guys, it might have come off as some Radiohead-ass nonsense. But with the Wonder Years, it’s hard not to be swept up. As in everything else they do, there’s an overpowering sense of earnestness and vulnerability that makes it work.
They wrote the title track on Sister Cities, a characteristic toggle between quieter bass-led verses and cathartic, shouted choruses, when they were adrift in South America a few years ago. Campbell and company, lost after a canceled performance, found themselves at Santiago, Chile’s version of a sister city commemorative monument. Eventually a group of locals helped them put together an impromptu show. “I’m laying low/A stray dog in the street/You took me home/We’re sister cities,” Campbell sings. Even when he’s singing about finding community, there’s a sense of being on the outside observing.
That sense of insecurity and displacement comes to define the album, making it a more subdued record than the Wonder Years’ previous onslaughts of heroic underdog anthems. Album opener “Raining in Kyoto” revolves around another act of unprompted kindness from strangers, as Campbell attempts to honor his dying grandfather at a shrine “an ocean away,” and a Japanese man ushers him through the proper steps. But the guilt and pain of distance still shadow his thoughts: “You’re half-awake/And I bought you a radio to play the blues away/With my hand to hold, you asked about the way you wish they’d let you die at home.”
On “It Must Get Lonely,” a weary, slow-build track that forestalls the inevitable furious outro chorus for minutes of resigned meandering, Campbell confronts Irish seas, English streets, and “Montmartre in Paris where the crows seem to know my name.” That musical restraint, also heard on this album’s “We Look Like Lightning,” “Flowers Where Your Face Should Be,” and “When The Blue Finally Came” (the latter two of which withhold any payoff whatsoever), isn’t a new technique for the band, but its prevalence here is indicative of a progression in their technique. There are choruses, but they’re fewer and further between than on any previous Wonder Years album.
It borders on critical malpractice to call the Wonder Years a pop-punk band at this point—not because that term is a pejorative, by any means, but because it implies a creative stagnation that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Fans of big, stadium-swinging hooks might find Sister Cities a sparser, more introspective affair than they prefer, but the band seems okay with leaving South Philly basements behind and seeing more of the world.  After doing so much to put the spirit of their hometown into music, they’re aiming for something larger now.


The St. Louis band’s fourth album scrapes away their unwieldy experimentalism in favor of the approachable, frustratingly anonymous sounds of 2010s festival rock.

Draw Down the Moon

In the early-to-mid-2010s, an earnest, urbane kind of indie rock ruled festival stages, Tumblr, and the pages of NME. Bands like Foals, Two Door Cinema Club, and the Wombats captured the hearts and minds of teens who craved the accessibility of pop but could only accept it when gussied up with skinny jeans, button-downs, and over-enunciated vowels. The sound was poreless, grit-free, and brutally effective: The squeaky-clean riffs and perfectly timed beats of songs like “My Number” or “Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves)” are still etched deep in the millennial psyche.
Logic would suggest it would take at least a few more years for this specific brand of indie rock to face a revival, but St. Louis, Missouri emo three-piece Foxing have other plans: Their fourth album, Draw Down the Moon, plays like a reboot of the Peak Yelp era, retreating from the art-rock sprawl of 2018’s emotionally and musically weighty Nearer My God and redirecting towards forceful, 4/4 rhythms and Yannis Philippakis-lite howls. The effect of this genre realignment is uncanny, scraping away the experimentalism that made the band’s earlier records so interesting and reining in lead singer Conor Murphy’s grizzled bark. You only have to listen to single “Go Down Together,” an uninspiring piece of festival rock built around a disco-rock shuffle and a falsetto “you-hoo-hoo” chorus, to understand the trade-off: Although this may be Foxing’s most anonymous record, it also feels like their surest shot at mainstream fame yet.
Their two prior albums, Nearer My God and 2015’s Dealer, suggested that Foxing were working hard to reconcile the emo-folk of their 2013 debut, The Albatross, with their proclivity for grandiose, Explosions in the Sky-style abstraction. Songs like “Slapstick” and “Night Channels” were compositionally and intellectually distended, but they were also melodically distinctive and attuned to the pop songcraft inherent in Murphy’s writing. So it’s disappointing that Draw Down the Moon tamps down Foxing’s brazenly unpredictable streak in favor of what Murphy describes as “songs that sort of sound like Passion Pit.” At least four tracks rely on some variation of the shuffle that animates “Go Down Together,” and only two find Murphy modulating his voice beyond a strained, monotonous yell—not the articulate emo cadence of past records, but something closer to a blandly emotional monotone.
Sometimes, Foxing sound as if they’re about to venture somewhere new—as on the glitchy “Bialystok,” which opens with a muffled clatter in place of drums, or “If I Believed in Love,” a slippery ballad where Murphy’s vocal sounds weightless, refusing to resolve with the song’s ever-changing beat—but that’s rarely the case. Draw Down the Moon most often plays like a collection of Total Life Forever extended cuts, moments of thoughtful lateral thinking tacked onto the beginnings and endings of otherwise familiar indie rock songs.
Lack of depth is a problem across the board: Murphy’s lyricism on Draw Down the Moon is frustratingly platitudinal. He has two main modes: Saying “I’ll be there for you” (“If you should fall, l’ll follow behind/We’ll go down there together/Side by side,” he sings on “Go Down Together”) or asking “Will you be there for me?” (a blood-curdling scream of “I can’t do this alone, I can’t” on “737” provides one of the record’s most dynamic moments). There are some notably good exceptions: The invocation of a “bad luck demon” who is “a rockslide on Halloween,” “a totaled rental in 2016” on the plaintive acoustic guitar ballad “At Least We Found the Floor” is inspired gallows humor; the image of a grounded plane on “737” being sold from hand to hand but never flown is a perfect symbol of hopelessness.
At its best, Draw Down the Moon uses indie-rock convention to initiate the same kinds of destabilizing left turns that animated Nearer My God. “737” builds not to the requisite triumphant peak, but to that baroque, violently screamed climax. “Cold Blooded” gets similar mileage out of Murphy’s ability to step into a full-throated scream; his serrated vocal appears sporadically to hack, machete-like, through the otherwise mundane “ah-ah-ah” chorus. Best of all is “Speak With the Dead,” the record’s portentous closer, which uses power chords and rolling drums to conjure action-movie spectacle. In these moments, Foxing’s new high-gloss exterior feels purposeful: a necessary contrast to the grotesque, a scale for the grandiosity.
There’s nothing strictly wrong with period-specific revivalism; in the same way that black midi bring back memories of King Crimson and Japanese Breakfast’s latest album evokes Jens Lekman and Beirut, Draw Down the Moon memorializes a certain sound and style with all the right period dressing. But where those other records deploy their influences with intent—black midi to sketch a landscape of alienation and political incoherence, Japanese Breakfast to reflect the joy and abundance of her lyrics—Foxing’s evocation of ’00s rock seems to serve no coherent purpose beyond pure accessibility of form. Maybe that’s a fine excuse, too, but Total Life Forever and Holy Fire are hardly old, and, frankly, they still sound pretty good. Draw Down the Moon comes off as simply more, a premature revival with limited utility for anyone who still enjoys the era it conjures.

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The Brooklyn singer and songwriter sounds more hopeful and more vulnerable on a mellow, reggae-infused companion EP to last year’s album.

Exodus the North Star EP

On her remarkable 2022 album Remember Your North Star, Yaya Bey unearthed grief and heartache amid a slow-burning patchwork of hip-hop, neo-soul, and Afrobeats. The Brooklyn-based singer’s new EP, Exodus the North Star, is a sparkling addendum and a joyous new extension of her biomythic approach to soundtracking Black Caribbean womanhood. On Exodus, Bey exchanges rhythm and blues with riddims and grooves and stretches her limbs across reggae, mambo, gospel, house, and jazz. It’s a sunlit, stained-glass depiction of self-love in the key of Jamaica, Queens.
Across six tracks, Bey names her desire for unhurried love and affirmation. Against the breezy reggae of the title track, she singjays “take me where the love is free” over fuzzy saxophone and swaying percussion. Toasting to the word “free,” she emphasizes her worth and sings of a tenderness that matches her sturdy, assured fly. “On the pisces moon” is another stripped-down reggae tune, prefaced this time with fluttering electric guitar plucks. “But I want more,” she repeats, her lingering delivery conjuring a balmy sense of longing.
Her sunny outlook fades on “munerah,” a metallic, bare-bones mambo for one that explores the struggle to let go of old narratives. Bey breathlessly oscillates between singing and rapping about her desire to maintain solitude but finds no resolution. “Ascendent (mother fxcker),” a lo-fi house hotbox produced by D.C. beatmaker Exaktly, restores her peace. Atop a wash of electronic pulses, she flexes her faith in herself, singing, “Sunshine won’t last all of my days, but I’ll be sunshine all of my days” with an audible grin. The swelling synths and subtle grooves evoke a sense of inner hope, a promise to stay blessed, free, and favored.
On “when saturn returns,” Bey leans on the concept of astrological rebirth to rejoice in having reached a new stage of personal evolution. Led by lustrous piano strokes, this organ ballad travels across time: a gospel choir pirouettes into a misty house beat co-produced with collaborator Nativesun. This is the fountain from which Yaya Bey drinks, drawing from an abundant source of diasporic teachings and traditions without overworking the sound. She makes use of space and darkness, of her flaws and her fierceness, experimenting with the sounds of her childhood to forge her ever-expanding language of love. Sometimes, that’s the only way to get free.
Correction: This review has been updated to clarify production credits for “when saturn returns.”


The shapeshifting multimedia artist ventures into pop with a concept album that stages arch critiques of art and consumerism within a retro arcade game.

American Gurl

“Featuring Kilo Kish” and “by Kilo Kish” hit different. Though Kish’s breezy, playful voice turns wry, manic, and bubbly in her collaborations with Vince Staples and Gorillaz, that range rarely carried over to her solo work—especially her early music, which tended to be indistinct despite its diaristic accounts of life in New York City. For Reflections in Real Time, her 2016 debut, Kish dialed up the autobiography but struggled to assert a musical identity, her songwriting hamstrung by scattershot production. Things began to click on EPs Mothe (2018) and Redux (2019), left-field forays into throbbing electronic music that traded her signature whisper-raps for charged singing. For American Gurl, a concept album about consumerism, she ventures into pop. The shift doesn’t always pay off, but Kish sounds renewed and self-assured.
When Kish began to lean toward electronic music on her EPs, she credited performing live with the change in direction, saying it made her seek sounds that matched the spunk and angst of her personal life. The other key variable was producer Ray Brady (Vince Staples, Santigold, Black Eyed Peas), who produced Mothe and Redux in their entirety (and much of Reflections). The bracing instrumentals he supplied for those records, characterized by thick slabs of bass marbled with strobing synths and fizzy melodies, helped Kish hone the kinetic delivery on display here. She rarely uses the lithe, conversational whispers that were the cornerstone of her early music, instead bouncing from breathy melodies to raspy coos to fleet rapping. If Mothe and Redux were the proofs of concept for her pop pivot, American Gurl is the finished design, presenting Kish as a madcap shapeshifter.
Again teaming exclusively with Brady, Kish stages the album as a retro arcade game, using the concept to hop genres and smuggle social commentary into outwardly fun songs. Reminiscent of Santigold’s 99¢, Kish often speaks as and likens herself to a product. “Do you see me?/Lost my face in the TV,” she chants on “TV Baby V.2 (Latch Key March).” On “Distractions III: Spoiled Rotten,” a follow-up to two meandering tracks from her debut, she’s pithy and arch. “I ain’t shit/But I can pay to fix it,” she sings over a frothy house beat.
“You want it/I got it/This soul is/A bargain,” Kish raps over hilarious Vince Staples ad-libs on “New Tricks: Art, Aesthetics, and Money,” the album’s best song. Its gelatinous bass kicks, machine shop SFX, and sneering take on fame would be right at home on Big Fish Theory, to which Kish and Brady both contributed. Still, it’s very much Kish’s song, her verses skewering the grim nexus of art and commerce and her willingness to let the two mix.

American Gurl fumbles when Kish tones down the sarcasm and guns for straight-up pop. It’s a tough sell. A number of choruses are garbled and anticlimactic, fracturing songs rather than holding them together. Also, her beat selections don’t always play to her strengths. The frantic rhythm of “Choice Cowboy” outpaces her sedate singing. And on “Attention Politician,” Brady’s screeching synths swallow her voice whole. American Gurl’s apt sequencing and constant forward motion keep these lapses from stopping the party, but Kish’s game could use some debugging. For now, her pop instincts aren’t as sharp as her wit.


On Austra's disarmingly personal second album, the Toronto band's core trio has doubled to a six-piece, bringing more layers to Katie Stelmanis' songwriting, and pushing it in a more house-inspired synth-pop direction.

Olympia

Olympia has been tipped as Austra's "dance album," though the Toronto band's debut, Feel It Break, contained enough club-worthy material: the arpeggiating likes of "Beat and the Pulse", and B-sides "Energy" and "Young and Gay" much more so. Its remixes came off less like mandatory singles life extensions than a glimpse into what these gothy tracks got up to after the witching hour. On Olympia, the main change from Feel It Break isn't adding beats but adding more in general: the core trio doubled to a six-piece, bringing more layers to Katie Stelmanis' songwriting, and pushing it in a more house-inspired synth-pop direction.
It's an obvious-seeming move these days, but Austra was close enough to this sound previously that it's not too jarring a development. Plus, they push in that direction with an unusual sonic palette: sparkly harp solos, deadpan early-Knife riffs, vocals that sound druidic, even guttural, including New Age-evoking morose choral drones. Much continues to be made of Stelmanis's opera training, but opera's just about the only sound that isn't represented here. It takes a while to get familiar with these sounds, which seems deliberate. "You'll never know me, I'll never know you," as Stelmanis sings on "Sleep", outright repudiating the notion of instant dancefloor connection.
Stelmanis' solo work would turn single lines-- "be your own company," "join us"-- into manifestos, a tendency for studies on a single riff that carried through into Feel It Break. Olympia sounds far more expansive and a little less removed-- "We Become" even grooves. Though opener "What We Done?" has the bass throb and synth counterpoint of a late-night dance hit, it doesn't do much else, and vocalist Katie Stelmanis sings her melody as if what she's hearing is a requiem. "Annie (Oh Muse, You)", the noisiest, synth-clappingest track here, mutters where there might have been melodies. Lead single "Home" is built on a house piano riff any of today's revivalists would envy, but it takes its sweet time getting there.
Stelmanis has said she listened to a lot of early Cat Power while recording Olympia, and while nothing here sounds anywhere near as stark, the lyrics often do, and lead appropriately tense, nervy sounding songs. There are still hints of Feel It Break's aesthetic-heavy mysticism, but in general, Olympia is an album where a title like "You Changed My Life" is the sort to be delivered over sincere piano. (Over a low-end-heavy chug, but still.) "Forgive Me", a plea to an estranged lover or friend, is blunt both lyrically ("What do I have to do to make you forgive me?") and musically: obsessive, pinprick-tense, desperate for closure. "Home" has a similar centerpiece-- "you know that it hurts me when you don't come home at night"-- and the arrangement sounds like the feverish, sleepless worry that accompanies.
Much of Olympia is disarmingly personal, and some, as usual with Austra, is political-- but not the stuff of Stelmanis and drummer Maya Postepski's previous riot grrl band Galaxy, nor the cinemascope revolution of Shaking the Habitual (another cited inspiration) but something subtler. Throughout Olympia, love is a radical act and heartbreak-- in greater supply here-- a failure of community; but the album doesn’t speak in those abstractions. “Painful Like” addresses bigotry, specifically anti-gay (“We don’t have to marry…. In this town we’ll bury all the minds that clench too tight”), but makes its point through quick flashes of detail (“bruised skin on top of mine”), a startling, candid sort of intimacy Olympia’s remaining tracks grasp for.
Later on comes the album's centerpiece "I Don't Care (I'm a Man)", the most fuck-off title Austra's ever written, but the track has no dramatics, just a coolly dispassionate gaze. Stelmanis plays something between a satisfied troll and a coroner surveying the third crime scene of the day, monotone while detailing "the whimper in her sigh, the softer brutalizing-- but I don't care, I'm a man." It barely lasts a minute, as if about to break into something more bracing; but the group's going not for shock but shrug value, the sort that gets disturbing once you process what you've just heard. This, it turns out, might be Austra's greatest strength.


In its newly remastered and rereleased incarnation, Trent Reznor's 1999 magnum opus *The Fragile *scrapes the sky like never before. Its companion, a reworking called Deviations 1, is mostly a curio.

Nine Inch Nails: The Fragile (2017 Definitive Edition) / The Fragile: Deviations 1

When Trent Reznor debuted The Fragile, the followup to his star-making The Downward Spiral some five years after that record’s release, comparisons to Pink Floyd’s go-to double album The Wall abounded. For one thing, Reznor tapped that record’s producer, Bob Ezrin, to help sequence from the chaotic collection of tracks he’d assembled. For another, both records were released at the turn of their respective decades, and could be seen as summary statements for much of the music of the ten years that preceded them.
But the most direct point of comparison is the sheer scale of both recordings. No, not their length, but their height, if you will. Years of overfamiliarity might have dulled our appreciation for just how goddamn towering they both sound. The Wall’s two versions of its anthemic introductory track “In the Flesh” and David Gilmour’s soaring solo on “Comfortably Numb” all but demand you look upward to see where the notes are coming from. Reznor and his collaborators—most notably producer Alan Moulder and guest guitarist Adrian Belew—similarly made The Fragile’s songs sound like vertical constructions, piling element on element, often with dizzying rapidity. And in its newly remastered and rereleased incarnation, The Fragile (2017 Definitive Edition), the record scrapes the sky like never before.
“The Fragile” and “Just Like You Imagined,” highlights of the album’s first disc (thinking it of a CD is a hard habit to break after nearly twenty years), are two of The Fragile’s most effective moments in this regard. Shambling into existence with a slow, steady drum beat that sounds like rattling chains, the title track works its way through three iterations of its chorus, the sole lyric of which is the disarmingly direct promise “I won’t let you fall apart”: first softly, near the bottom of Reznor’s vocal register; then at an ear-splitting, double-tracked shout, accompanied by cinematic synths; and finally with multi-tracked, major-key harmonies that turn the phrase into something close to a prayer. “Just Like You Imagined,” arguably Reznor’s finest moment as a composer, picks up where “The Fragile” leaves off, using that same celestial-chorus harmony construction and prominent cameos from Bowie sidemen Mike Garson on piano and Belew on guitar to create a wordless epic, spiraling upward in volume and intensity.
Which is not to say that The Fragile is all lacerating art-rock bombast. On the Dr. Dre-assisted “Even Deeper” and the late-album high point “The Big Comedown,” Reznor crafts a methodical industrial robo-funk that evokes deep-sea sonar pings and a malfunctioning robot, respectively. “Into the Void,” a direct Black Sabbath reference, juxtaposes the very NIN sentiment “Tried to save myself but my self keeps slipping away” with very un-NIN “ooh-wah-ah-ah” backing vocals. Its follow-up, “Where Is Everybody?,” is a sludgy pelvic thrust with a title cribbed from “The Twilight Zone” and a delightfully dark doggerel chorus: “Pleading and needing and bleeding and breeding and feeding, exceeding…Trying and lying, defying, denying, crying and dying.” Both are reminiscent of first-disc standout “The Wretched,” a relentless throb with a chorus that bellows “Now you know this is what it feels like” (itself an answer to “How does it feel?,” the refrain of Reznor’s collaboration with industrial supergroup Pigface “Suck”) and the almost comically spiteful line “The clouds will part and the sky cracks open and God Himself will reach his fucking arm through just to push you down, just to hold you down.” Misery loves comedy!
But it loves empathy too, and this is where The Fragile stands out from NIN’s catalog. On tracks like “The Fragile” (that “I won’t let you fall apart” chorus, the climactic assertion “It’s something I have to do—I was there too/Before everything else, I was like you”), “I’m Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally,” and “We’re in This Together” (the proof is in the song titles), Reznor dismantles his reputation for solipsistic self-loathing and outwardly aimed anger. There’s plenty of both, sure; album lowlight “Starfuckers, Inc.,” for example, is familiar to students of the alt-rock gossip circuit of the period as Trent’s kiss-off to his estranged former protégé Marilyn Manson, while their subsequent rapprochement led to a video where they teamed up against a Courtney Love lookalike. But in the main, The Fragile depicts an artist desperate to preserve the few connections he still has in the face of ever-growing substance abuse (this was the final album he’d record before getting clean and sober) and crippling grief (the record contains a dedication to his grandmother, a beloved figure who’d recently died). Whether positive or negative, the roiling, confessional tumult of the lyrics is reflected in the monumental sound, and vice versa.
The cumulative approach is at its clearest in “10 Miles High.” Cut from the CD version of the album to trim minutes off its already elephantine running time, the song had previously been relegated to B-side status, appearing only on the relatively obscure original vinyl edition, where both space and pacing permitted it to remain. Heard it in its proper context at last, “10 Miles High” comes across as the emotional and sonic key to the whole album: titanic in scale, unpredictably varied in its dynamic range, and absolutely annihilating in its despair and rage.
Beginning with a tinkling synth shimmer and distant-sounding vocals that murmur “I’m getting closer/I’m getting closer/All the time” (a callback to the band’s biggest hit, of course), the song gains ominous strength with loping, pounding drums and an assertive bassline. A repetitive, sour-sounding guitar joins in just before initial chorus bursts through the murk: Reznor shouts “I tried to get so high/I made it ten miles high,” each “high” echoing like a sonic exclamation point through the crunch of the guitar and drums that sound like they’ve been covered in cast iron.
Then the song peels back to a low hum, with a sardonically jaunty guitar strum and Reznor’s incomprehensible whispering dimly audible in the background. When the chorus and its repeated proclamations of miles-high self-medication come back, everything sounds muffled and choked rather than crisp and piercing. “I swore to God I would never turn into you,” Reznor’s muted voice screams, his disappointment in his failure dripping from every word like venom. The song ends as quietly as it began, with Reznor chanting the words “tear it all down, tear it all down” over and over until everything cuts off. As a lyrical and musical chronicle of complete and total personal failure, it’s peerless in the Nine Inch Nails catalog; only Broken’s scabrous “Gave Up” and The Downward Spiral’s title track (a song whose sonic toolbox “10 Miles High” raids extensively, but which somehow sounds optimistic in comparison despite its suicidal subject matter) come close.
All of this makes The Fragile: Deviations 1 a truly perplexing proposition. Reznor’s on record as saying that the original album emerged from perhaps the darkest period of his adult life, but that the recording process was a life-affirming period in retrospect. He’s teased a revamped re-release for the better part of the past decade, up to and including a more straightforward Apple Music-exclusive instrumental version a few years back on which several new tracks were debuted. Deviations 1 (Reznor’s obsessive ambition makes that numeral worth noting) is the fulfillment of this promise. Less a remix than a recreation, it’s meticulously constructed by Reznor and his longtime collaborator Atticus Ross from the existing recordings, stripping away the vocals and introducing alternate takes and brand-new songs culled from dozens of unused tracks. The result is a complement to the original, but not necessarily a compliment; its deviations are worth exploring for the curious and the completists, but they’re ultimately less than the sum of the additional parts.
Most of Deviations’ deviations, and certainly the best of them, are structural. By adding the new songs, a dozen in total, Reznor is able to seed melodic and rhythmic ideas for more thoroughgoing use later in the album. This, granted, is nothing new for Nine Inch Nails: The plinked-out keyboard hook at the end of “Closer” returns as the central melody of The Downward Spiral’s title track; “The Frail” is an acoustic work-through of the chorus of “The Fragile”; and “La Mer” introduces the playful melody later used to punishing effect in “Into the Void.” Reznor returns to this well with at least a couple of the new additions: “Missing Pieces,” inserted prior to “We’re in This Together,” serves as a prologue that introduces several of its key sounds, while “Last Heard From” revives them just prior to the album’s final stretch.
But *Deviations’ *experiment with musical foreshadowing goes a bit deeper. On the original, the breakbeat-and-guitar bedrock of “Starfuckers, Inc.” was a sonic anomaly, making the already dubious song even tougher to take in context. Here, new tracks “One Way to Get There,” “Taken,” and “+Appendage,” plus the skittering direct lead-in “Feeders,” insert that Atari Teenage Riot/Earthling-era Bowie sound at multiple points throughout the record, which goes a long way to making “Starfuckers” easier to stomach. Yes, it’s still a less-good “The Perfect Drug” with a goon-squad chorus, but at least it can’t sneak up on you anymore. (The inclusion of the single version’s pisstake coda—a sample of Paul Stanley shouting “GOODNIGHT!” at a crowd that begins chanting “WE WANT KISS! WE WANT KISS!” in response—indicates Reznor’s aware of the song’s goofball nature.)
More interesting still is the intermission that Reznor inserts between the original break between discs one and two.  In its original incarnation, the first half ends with the synth-Floyd soundscape “The Great Below,” and the second half begins with “The Way Out is Through,” a tear-down-the-sky (literally: the lyrics in the vocal version prominently feature the phrase “the heavens fall”) behemoth of distortion and vocal reverb. Deviations tosses in a trio of tracks as a palate cleanser between these two showstoppers: an open-ended guitar-and-drum loop called “Not What It Seems Like,” a wobbly bass-and-percussion number named “White Mask,” and “The New Flesh,” moved up in the track listing from its place on the original vinyl, its crescendoes serving as a sort of precursor to the high-volume “The Way Out Is Through.” Given the concrete purpose they serve, perhaps it’s unsurprising that they’re the best of the the new tracks. They are nevertheless bested by “Was It Worth It?,” a newbie crammed in amongst the party jams “Into the Void” and “Where Is Everybody?” Between a handful of squalling guitar lines and a keyboard melody that sounds like a rotating prism, it has more hooks than the opening scene of Hellraiser.
Yet even at a dozen strong, the new tracks don’t fully tell Deviations’ tale. That task falls to the now all-instrumental versions of the original songs, few of which hold up when compared to the originals. In some cases this comes down to dubious editing choices: “Pilgrimage (Alternate Version)” strips away its precursor’s “Tusk”-style marching-band section. Closing track “Ripe With Decay (Instrumental)” adds a backbeat, stripping much of the power of the entropic original. Most bafflingly, “10 Miles High (Instrumental)” builds up the regular version’s secondary guitar riff—played so quietly in the original that its presence seems almost sarcastic, like a mockery of the whole idea of riffs—into a dull cock-rock stomp and strut.
The album’s biggest problem, though, is a lack of editing, not a surfeit. Most of these songs have a pretty reliable melodic template; take out the words, and you’re left with overlong and unvaried segments. Groove-based songs like “Even Deeper,” “Into the Void,” “Where Is Everybody?”, and “The Big Comedown” weather this excess relatively well, since their rhythm-oriented structure has a funk-like momentum that carries them through the surplus sections. More straightforward rockers like “No, You Don’t” or “Please,” however—never the album’s strongest moments—drag noticeably without Reznor’s voice. If you want a metaphor for what’s lost in this new version, the revamped cover—a black, white, and gray David Carson photograph of a waterfall, now denuded of the original’s vibrant red overlay—pretty much says it all.
Reznor and Ross have no shortage of experience with instrumental recordings; indeed, turning The Fragile into an instrumental album merely brings it line with the bulk of the duo’s recorded output over eight years since NIN put out its sprawling collection of soundscape sketches Ghosts I-IV. At the time of the album’s original release, Reznor already had the unjustly forgotten score for the first-person shooter game Quake under his belt, and The Fragile 1.0 has no shortage of instrumentals. This makes the lack of a more stringent editorial hand all the more perplexing. Far too many of Deviations’ freshly vocal-free songs sound like karaoke versions rather than instrumentals that can stand on their own. The result is a listening experience that outstays its welcome on a song-by-song basis, let alone over the course of its massive 150-minute running time.
Fortunately, the originals are still out there. The Fragile arrived a stylistic turning point, emerging at the point where the “alternative” sobriquet fell out of fashion and “indie” achieved dominance. Today, though, reservations about the lyrics’ outré confessionality and the music’s jam-packed, everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink gigantism seem positively quaint. (Don’t care for titanically hyper-produced albums stuffed with uncomfortably intimate and self-mythologizing lyrics about your emotional world falling apart? Tell it to Lemonade.) The Fragile may lack the tightness of Nine Inch Nails’ other highlights: the concise fury of Broken, the inexorable depressive logic of The Downward Spiral, the late-career professionalism of Hesitation Marks. But it takes the emotional distress that gives it its title and transmutes it into something colossal, defiant, and resilient. Listen to it at your strongest or your weakest (and I’ve certainly done both) and it will offer you a sonic signature commensurate with the power of what you feel inside.


Releasing three markedly different albums over the past seven years, the Puritans have earned the trust of their audience. Their latest is an uncomprimisingly self-possessed record that finds them shedding any assocations they once had with the wider rock world, reinventing themselves as a neo-classical ensemble.

Field of Reeds

On Field of Reeds’ title and final track, Jack Barnett idly sings, “You asked if the islands would float away… I said, yes.” The answer comes back with a dead-eyed conviction that makes it feel as if Barnett has lost sight of the solid shoreline, something he'll definitely be accused of with These New Puritans’ third album. It sees the Southend group all but shed any assocations they once had with the wider rock world, reinventing themselves as a neo-classical ensemble. The result is an uncompromisingly self-possessed record whose intimate qualities shouldn't be mistaken for an easy listen-- in many respects, its clearest analog is Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden. It opens with a Portuguese jazz vocalist, Elisa Rodrigues, singing a sparkling, barely half-remembered version of Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s in Love With You”. As it ends, Adrian Peacock, who has the lowest known singing voice in Britain, unleashes an apparently bottomless vocal drone, sounding as if he’s humming along to a Sunn O))) song, while Barnett chants in phonetics like a tricksy goblin.
Despite releasing three markedly different albums over the past five years, the Puritans have earned the trust of their audience, allowing them to go wherever their iconoclastic spirit takes them. Their debut album, 2008’s Beat Pyramid, took the moony British post-punk phenomenon of the preceding few years and made it nasty, agitated, and wholly uninterested in emotive melancholy or accessible lyrical subjects. Numerology and olde magick were central, though good luck trying to prise much else from it. “You know I’ll be thinking this music’s symbolic/ This music is weightless, and when I sing, so am I/ You’ll be slashing at the air, describing nothing,” Barnett sang with deterrent glee on “Swords of Truth”. He's been equally oblique describing Field of Reeds. “I’m just putting one sound in front of the other and thinking about what comes next,” he told the Guardian.
Its follow-up, 2010’s Hidden, sounded like a strikingly, elegantly choreographed war, at once global and gothic with its destructive beats, mournful laments, and taunting vocals. And now, Field of Reeds is a stilled, abstract pastoral of sorts, where the music seems to grow and swarm as naturally as moss across rocks. Its closest modern peer might be Julia Holter's equally pristine Ekstasis. Where Hidden traded in damning impact, Field of Reeds uses Barnett’s self-taught compositional prowess-- and the borrowed skills of composers André de Ridder, Michel van der Aa, and Hans Ek-- to explore the effects of memory, requiring investment on the listener's part, too; “Spiral” seems to repeat a clarinet motif from Hidden; “Organ Eternal” rekindles the glassy pulse of “V (Island Song)” with the resonator piano, a riff that in turn strongly recalls “Tubular Bells”.
Field of Reeds was recorded over 12 months in three different studios. The drums were added around structures determined by the strings, horns, and magnetic resonator piano-- a haunted, silvery-sounding creation-- and barely appear at all in the album’s final third (Barnett has suggested there are three movements here). Somehow, the effect is more intimidating than the parts on Hidden where they smashed melons to simulate crushing a skull. The spareness and sense of space on Field of Reeds is remarkable, the kind that'll make you glance over your shoulder as beguiling mercury-slicked glows slip into an overwhelming, sometimes vicious sense of anxiety; "There is something there," as Barnett sings on "Fragment Two".
These shifts are made even more unsettling by the lack of aggression in the playing; where Hidden’s M.O. could be found in “Attack Music”, on Field of Reeds there’s the sense that these glowing clarinets and strings are occurring naturally, almost as if emanating from a landscape. Gone too is the obtuse vocal phrasing that ran through Beat Pyramid and Hidden; Barnett has talked about spending “hours going through each sentence of the lyrics getting rid of all the consonants,” a defamiliarizing effect that makes his lines as slippery and memory-foxing as the dream-speak in “Twin Peaks”. It's as upsetting too; Field of Reeds' quiet lyrical narrative seems to follow a period of loss; first a person, and subsequently, trust in any kind of concrete meaning, underpinned by the way lines disintegrate into phonetic babble. As his fastidious techniques show, Barnett is a total perfectionist-- he proudly made George play 76 drum takes on one song-- yet his control freakiness hasn’t killed the record; the effect is naturalistic, and often deeply moving, rather than in any way inert.
While Field of Reeds is a mysterious album in many ways, what it makes clear is Barnett’s faith in the purity of sound, rather than words, to communicate; remember, "This music is weightless, and when I sing, so am I." By removing any imposition of context, his words of consonants, his music of attention-grabbing impact, his ensemble of rock band-status, he’s created a truly strange and beautiful record. Whether Barnett makes it explicit or not, These New Puritans’ songs have always been concerned with their South-Easterly corner of the coast, the smoggy bowel of London where rusting World War II fortifications stand demilitarized among the islands, just like the sounds on this album. “Secret recordings were made in the marsh,” Barnett chanted on Hidden’s “We Want War”. It feels as though he finally trusts us to hear them on Field of Reeds.


Using her crystalline voice as a chief input for her laptop, the Calif.-based composer arrives at a poignant nexus of electronic accessibility and experimentation. Her impressive debut owes as much to her academic forebears as her club contemporaries.

Movement

In a recent interview with the British magazine FACT, Holly Herndon refuted the trope that electronic music is the stuff of impersonal and inhuman androids. The Tennessee native bought into that narrative herself while living in the electronic hub of Berlin, where, though she played with a band named Electrocute, she began taking contrabass lessons. Her hope was that if she could master a "real instrument," she might, one day, be taken seriously as a composer. But after returning stateside to study at the electronic sanctum of California's Mills College, she realized that her laptop-- a web of code and a fountain of sound-- could make music as personal, intimate, and important as that of any ensemble. "This is actually the most interesting instrument for me," she told FACT. "I also think that it's the most personal instrument that the world has ever seen."
Many people might balk at that idea, that a computer is somehow a more personal instrument than the customary acoustic toolset of music. After all, how can a box of wires, circuits, and chips connected to a screen and controlled by fingers be more individual than a guitar, with its strings simply pressed by fingers, or, better yet, the human voice, the sound of someone simply singing? But, to an extent, computers are forever malleable, able to be programmed and reprogrammed to fit needs and whims and, in turn, to alter those old modes of expression in ways that they couldn't do themselves. On her proper full-length debut Movement, the California-based composer uses her crystalline voice as a chief input for her laptop, ultimately arriving at a poignant nexus of electronic accessibility and experimentation that owes as much to her academic forebears as her club contemporaries. It's a record with the rare capacity to turn cynics who might scoff at the idea of laptops-as-intimate-instruments into believers.
It seems overly convenient and coincidental to compare Herndon's Movement to Laurel Halo's Quarantine. Here are, after all, two American women releasing records in the same year that weave their respective voices into intricate electronic music that sits at the borders of pop, dance, and more esoteric forms. The links are reductive enough to be insulting. But both Movement and Quarantine are bold records, dependent upon a multiplicity of voices from one source to press against borders of populist versus experimental media-- or, better yet, to unite them. At times, both Halo and Herndon seem like would-be popular sirens, ready to deliver hooks to the radio; at other points, however, they seem destined for careers of gigs in small art spaces or extended fellowships at universities. But at their best, they seem like both and neither, composers and thinkers unafraid to elide convention, circumvent categorization and arrive, fully formed, at an intersection of things often thought to be mutually exclusive.
Movement's humanity stems in part from its variety of moods. At times overtly playful and slyly sexual, decidedly monastic and obviously extroverted, these seven pieces skip between feelings with a true-to-life mercurialness and unpredictability. Herndon's sonics are impressive; see the subdural bass moans of opener "Terminal" or the careful, Oval-like slices of "Control And" for proof. But she never betrays the soul of her music for the sound of it. During "Breathe", for instance, Herndon takes a series of deep breaths and scrambles the patterns of inhalation and exhalation. She splits the actions across the channels, conjuring an unlikely choir of dissonance and consonance. Sonically, it's impressive enough, but emotionally, it portrays the struggle to rise above the world's din, to stay centered in a bustle of hyperactivity. It's electronic Zen: Herndon successfully links an electroacoustic premise to a pragmatic observation.
Especially considering that this is her first LP, Herndon's ability to steer music that's simultaneously complex and approachable is astounding: "Fade", for instance, should lure fans of the Knife with its iterative keyboards and sticky arctic hook, but the structure-- or, more specifically, the way Herndon handles the beat in relation to her voice-- is a marvel all its own. Herndon frames the rhythm with her voice, syllables darting between its cracks like water washing through rivulets. But that's just the most superficial layer of Herndon's voice. Underneath the hook, samples of her singing crisscross beneath the beat, supplying counterrhythms and serving like little magnets that draw the listener deeper into the song with each pass. It's a perfect interface of machine and user and of intricate composition with irrepressible songcraft. Likewise, though the noisy 64-second track "Interlude" might seem ostracizing at first, it plays out like a miniature video game of voices. Herndon manipulates her own tone into blips and volleys that clash with one another in their own electronic Mortal Kombat. It's quixotic, a dose of levity in a field not known for it.
"Dilato", the brilliant closer, is the only track that doesn't key on Herndon’s voice. Instead, she samples and stretches the patient intonations of classical baritone Bruce Rameker, pulling his syllables until they turn into a brooding, wordless chorus. The piece is Movement's most unapologetically academic; it treats speech with such force that it recalls Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, in which the composer repeatedly played back and recorded a tape of himself reading text in a room until his speech hummed into howling oblivion. But listen closely for Herndon's own voice, which joins Rameker's most notably just before the three-minute mark. She harmonizes with him for a moment, singing one syllable with an operatic grandeur. It's over in an instant, but it's enough to reiterate Herndon's symbiotic thesis and to make "Dilato" feel like much more than a rote exercise in bending one person's voice into phantasmagorias.
Appropriately named, Movement feels like a progression and challenge from one of the year's most exciting new voices, producers, and composers. It's an invitation by example to move in several circles at once and emerge with something that’s brazen, fresh, and entirely individual.


At Last!

Anyone trying to reverse-engineer the particular way contemporary pop ballads are now sung— the careening melisma, the guttural, quasi-unscripted grunts, an apparently boundless capacity for emotion–needs only to consider a handful of tough, pioneering American singers: Bessie Smith, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Alberta Hunter, Aretha Franklin, and Etta James. This past Record Store Day, Portland's Jackpot Records reissued James's masterwork, At Last!, on limited edition vinyl, including the four bonus tracks which first appeared on a CD reissue in 1999. More than a half-century after its release, At Last! remains one of the greatest records about loneliness ever made: a languid, jazz-inflected paean to (reluctantly) working it out on your own.
James was born in 1938, in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, as Jamesetta Hawkins. She never knew her father, and her mother was only fourteen when she gave birth. James was raised by a series of foster parents, and came of age singing in the Echoes of Eden choir at St. Paul's Baptist church. Stories of her childhood— including the ones she recounts herself in Rage to Survive, her tellingly titled autobiography—are grisly. One of her foster parents, a loutish man called Sarge, used to drag her from bed in the middle of the night and force her, via brutal and humiliating beatings, to sing for a cabal of his drunk poker cronies. In the early 1950s, she joined a girl group (the Creolettes; later the Peaches) and met the R&B producer Johnny Otis, who suggested she re-name herself–transmuting "Jamesetta" into "Etta James"–and eventually helped the Peaches book a spot opening for Little Richard on a national tour. James left the group to sign with Chess Records, and began collaborating with Harvey Fuqua, then of the Moonglows and later a crucial, visionary producer for Motown. At Last!, her debut album, was released by Argo, Chess's jazz imprint, in the fall of 1960.
If there's anything anachronistic about At Last!, it's how plainly vulnerable James sounds while performing these songs. Insomuch as it's possible to distill any one theme from the last couple decades of pop music, it's the presentation of—and insistence upon—self-empowerment as an infallible path toward joy. Those sorts of affirmations can induce a wild ecstasy in the moment—I AM THE BEST! NO ONE CAN TOUCH ME! SUCK A DICK, JERKS!—but eventually, one has to worry about whether those same notions are not, in fact, a deeply odious and toxic force in the world. It can't be great for whole generations to come of age hollering self-aggrandizing anthems that never quite acknowledge the most gratifying and dangerous thing a human being can actually do: courageously make room for another person in her heart.
So when James loses her man, and sings a verse like this one, from "Stormy Weather"—"Life is bare, gloom and mis'ry everywhere / Stormy weather, stormy weather / And I just can't get my poor self together / I'm weary all of the time, the time / So weary all of the time"—it sounds fearless. Most of At Last! concerns itself with unmitigated heartache. James isn't the sort of singer capable of or interested in couching true anguish in anything prettier or more reassuring, and there is a glorious synchronicity between the frankness of her vocal and the heaviness of the lyrics. James was a professional, and a true expert—her control is astounding; she bites off each note like she's taking a chunk out of an apple—but there's no moment on At Last! that feels explicitly or distractingly performative. There's something almost punctured in her breath, like a person who has been struck in the chest, effectively felled by pain.
James opines, repeatedly and without guile, her inability to find and keep the right person for her to love. There are moments where she thinks that she had it, maybe, for a minute (like on "Anything to Say You're Mine," in which she waits for a letter from her lover, hoping their correspondence might finally reveal his devotion to her), and then moments in which she is convinced she has already lost, and will continue losing – that the ecstatic, unspooling, true, true love she watches other people share and celebrate will elude her forever.
The latter idea reaches a kind of brutal apotheosis on "Sunday Kind of Love," in which James sings, over a spare, barely-tinkling piano melody (interrupted, on occasion, by rising swells of strings), about what she wants but can't ever seem to get: an earnest communion that lasts long past Saturday night, "for all my life to have and to hold." James isn't necessarily having a tough time attracting men to her bedroom, but she can't seem to land a caring or truly unafraid partner. Periodically, James lets out a little "Uh!" between lines of the verse. Those little vocal punctuations are commonplace now, but when James looses one, even the quickest, most under-thought "Uh!" communicates tremendous certainty. She knows what she wants, even (especially) as it remains just out of her reach.
What's maybe most satisfying about At Last! is the record's title track, arguably the single greatest unburdening ever laid to tape. It plays like a person stumbling into a hotel room and simultaneously dropping all of her bags on the floor. In an album of lost and mangled love songs, in which relief and fulfillment begin to seem truly impossible ("I can't love nobody unless I'm loving you," James announces in the bonus track "If I Can't Have You," a duet she co-wrote with Fuqua), here is a moment of extraordinary deliverance. Finally, James finds her man: a person who doesn't get spooked, doesn't waver, doesn't leave her crumpled somewhere, alone and pining. "My lonely days are over, and life is like a song," she sings, her voice buoyant. The irony – that her own songs, in fact, express considerable pain – is deep and heavy.
Beyoncé famously performed "At Last" at Barack Obama's first inaugural ball, while he and Michelle shared their first dance. The performance was poignant for obvious reasons—there was, at last, a black president in the White House—but James quickly called bullshit on it ("She ain't mine… I can't stand Beyoncé," is how James expressed her annoyance during a Seattle concert, shortly after the ball aired on television). There is a sense, among singers of a certain era—who came of age as performers in a pre-Civil Rights America—of ferociously protecting what they have made or claimed as their own, usually against staggering odds (Aretha Franklin still insists on being paid up-front and in cash, and keeps her purse firmly wedged under her arm as she strolls onstage). James didn't write "At Last"; it was written in 1941 by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, for a musical film called *Orchestra Wives—*but she animated it, made it feel real. And there isn't a single moment on At Last! that doesn't feel unmistakably her own, and forever.


The newest Fleet Foxes member has been crafting hushed folk for years, and he stays prolific as a solo artist with this, his second LP of the year.

Year in the Kingdom

J. Tillman's got one a hell of a voice, of course: The newest Fleet Foxes member wasn't just plopped down behind the drumkit post-Sun Giant 'cuz he gives good beard. It merits mention that Tillman's been crafting hushed folk yearners for years, and that Year in the Kingdom is Tillman's second LP of 2009. And it's right around here that we can stop bringing up those other dudes; whereas Foxes trade in the precise and the pristine, Tillman's songs drift along like a piece of ragged wood in the river, a little gnarled but easygoing nevertheless. He's also dealing in a much more contemporary style of folk, kinda, taking plenty of cues from Mark Kozelek's placidly expansive work with Sun Kil Moon and even more recently Bon Iver's ambient whirl. Tillman's records-- and there's no shortage-- are quiet, pensive, unassuming things, Sunday morning kick-around music. And, while the loose, oft-airy tunes can occasionally feel inexact, when cloaked in that voice and a few inspired rattletrap arrangements, you'll barely register the deficit.
Year in the Kingdom kicks off with its tidy title track, a strummy, stripped-way-back affair with nothing more than Tillman and his guitar. It's a pleasant enough intro, but I'd have gone with the significantly more adorned "Crosswinds" to kick things off. Tarting Tillman's tune up is a touch of banjo and a few woos while the whistling of the wind teases out the nooks and crannies of its central melody; the effect is not unlike Jim O'Rourke's crackling but never overdone production on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, with a relatively straightaway song taking on new dimension with the addition of a few key elements. Tillman's long been good at coloring in his compositions on wax; his partiality to slow and steady song structure and his avoidance of most vocals besides his own does leave plenty of room to screw around, but there's an incidental feel to the extraneous noise here, in service of the song rather than some kind [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| of cloak.
As a lyricist, not unlike Foxes' Robin Pecknold, he leans on the pastoral pretty hard, and there's some references to laying a lamb on somebody I suspect might just be biblical. But even when they fail to connect on their own terms, there's a journeyman feel to his words as they unspool (helped along by his lived-in pipes) that conveys meaning even when it's not necessarily there, evoking images of long walks under the stars and that sort of thing. That, plus Tillman's intimate, close-miced voice, does lend Year in the Kingdom a lonesome, somber tone, one Tillman-- a funny, amicable dude, if you've ever heard him clowning on himself at a Fleet Foxes gig-- would do well to shake on occasion. Next time, maybe; for now, the stout, supine Year in the Kingdom, Tillman's second fine record of the year, will certainly do.


The newest Aphex Twin since Richard D. James returned from his extended hiatus shows a simpler side of his music, with slower tempos and spine-tinglingly rich tunes and timbres.

Cheetah

Aphex Twin has always contained multitudes, and in the two years since Richard D. James returned from his extended hiatus, we have been reminded not only how many different facets he has, but also how good he is at compartmentalizing them. Each of his last three releases has shone the spotlight on a different aspect of his identity. Syro, his comeback album, was a bold, virtuosic, big-tent statement in the vein of I Care Because You Do and the Richard D. James Album—a showcase of all his talents across a variety of rhythms, timbres, tempi, and techniques. The hermetic, atonal Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt2 EP featured James in his mad-scientist lab coat, going to town on MIDI-controlled player pianos and programming robotic gizmos to thwack at drums. And Orphaned Deejay Selek (2006-2008) EP gave us James—technically recording as AFX this time—in dancefloor destroyer mode, laying waste to the rave at 150 beats per minute.
Cheetah, his new EP, shows us yet another side—at first, you might even say a simpler one. The record's tempos are, for the most part, slower than on Aphex Twin’s last few records, and its beats are straighter. You might think that’s a bad sign; after all, much of James’ genius has always been his dizzying rhythmic dexterity. But James’ take on four-to-the-floor is not like other producers’ approach to the same cadence. Even here, his sense of swing is unparalleled; accents flick to and fro with abandon. Machine claps splash like Baka water drumming, and 32nd-note fills spill forth like bags full of ball bearings. Crucially, with his beats less busy, it has left James more room to focus on spine-tinglingly rich tunings and timbres. And that’s where Cheetah really stands out: To sink into it, preferably on good headphones or better speakers, is to be immersed in woozy, viscous frequencies far more vivid than you’ll find almost anywhere else.
That’s particularly true of openers “CHEETAHT2 [Ld spectrum]” and “CHEETAHT7b,” both of which trudge along at a torpid 100 beats per minute. Their titles reference a British electronics company called Cheetah that was active in the late ’80s and early ’90s; the particular instrument to which they pay homage, and which James presumably used to make them, is the Cheetah MS800, a short-lived digital synthesizer that has been described as “one of the most unfathomable instruments ever made.” (When Warp surprise-premiered Cheetah at Nashville's NAMM convention in late June, they displayed an MS800 under Plexiglas.) What makes the MS800 unusual is its wavetable technology—or, as described in the user manual, in a phrase Warp repurposed for *Cheetah’*s press release, “sounds programmed to sequence through changing waveforms as the note plays, giving exceptional movement and character to the music.”
You can hear and feel that mutability in action: The synthesizers in “CHEETAHT2 [Ld spectrum]” move with a slippery, sidewinding motion, and the phaser applied to the drums feels almost greasy. Those wispy, warbly qualities give it a creepy, vaguely gothic air that's reminiscent of the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds, which is certainly not a thing I ever expected to find myself saying about an Aphex Twin record. “CHEETAHT7b” uses some of the same sounds and melodies—both tracks, it seems, are variations on the same core material—and its synths give off an eerie, palpitating glow. It’s remarkable what different moods he can evoke from such similar sets of sounds: Where “CHEETAHT7” is calm and meditative, “CHEETAH2” rolls with a sly sort of swagger, like someone in wraparound shades driving a convertible very deliberately around the block, leering.
Two short, ambient sketches show off the MS800’s mercurial properties in even greater detail, but the centerpiece of the EP’s latter half is a pair of tracks whose titles reference the Sequentix Cirklon, a multi-track hardware sequencer that also turned up in the titles of two Syro tracks. Here, we’re back in slightly more familiar territory: Both tracks ride the kind of snapping electro rhythms that were common on Rephlex records throughout the ’90s; “CIRKLON1” plies the kind of naïve, winsome melodies that have been James’ stock-in-trade from the very beginning, while “CIRKLON3 [Колхозная Mix]” ropes some hyperactive slap bass into the mix. Both are case studies in beat-based electronic music in which no two bars are alike: they are wriggling dynamos, and wrapping your head around all their moving parts is a little bit like herding centipedes.
There’s one other aspect of James’ personality showcased on Cheetah: the archivist. He first revealed that side of himself in 2015, when he uploaded nearly 300 old demos to an anonymous SoundCloud account, and he continued in the same vein with Orphaned Deejay Selek, his first official release of vintage, previously unreleased tunes. Two of *Cheetah’*s core tracks, it turns out, were included in his monumental SoundCloud dump, under slightly different names: “CHEETAHT7b” (as “CHEETAH7 Teac”) and “CIRKLON3 [Колхозная Mix]” (as “CHEETAH3 Teac”). What’s striking about the versions included on the new EP is how much better they sound. They’re clearly the very same recordings as those that went up on SoundCloud, but the rough versions sound like they’ve been wrapped in a dozen layers of cheesecloth; they're flat and muffled where the polished versions boast the sharp angles and bright gleam of quartz crystals. When James uploaded all that material to SoundCloud, it seemed like he was washing his hands of it, throwing it out so that he could move on. But it looks like one more aspect of his personality intervened: James the obsessive-compulsive, determined to make one final pass at perfection. Lucky for us, too.


On his second album, Bartees Strange widens his stance and levels his gaze, staying grounded in his nimble genre-hopping and his dynamic songwriting.

Farm to Table

Bartees Strange’s 2020 album Live Forever was an exuberant declaration of freedom, and few rock debuts of recent years have filled me with such a desire to stand up and cheer. Strange spat rap verses, belted emo choruses, and stomped his distortion box with a conviction bordering on frenzy: Look at everything I can do, the album nearly screamed. Wading into the border separating rock and rap has long been a quick way to get tangled in barbed wire, but Strange leaped effortlessly over policed barriers that ensnared countless artists before him. “Genres/Keep us in our boxes/Keep us from our commas,” he rapped on “Mossblerd,” probably the clearest manifesto on an album full of them.
Live Forever jump-started his career, landed him on year-end lists, and got him signed to 4AD. At the root of any kind of sudden stardom lies a question: How well do you handle getting noticed? Based on his second album, Farm to Table, his first for 4AD, Strange gets noticed well. On Farm to Table, he’s saying many of the same things he said on Live Forever, but more with his chest, with his feet planted even further apart, his gaze more level with ours. The genre leaps in his songwriting have grown more sure-footed and, if anything, even wider—“Mulholland Dr.” opens with a clean tangle of emo guitars, then ascends into a chorus massive enough that you could uproot it from its home terroir, switch the arrangements, and sell it to Adam Levine. The chorus on “Wretched,” meanwhile, sounds like an actual Maroon 5 hit, its synths and side-chained beat exploding overhead like fireworks over a stadium.
Strange only works in big swings, and the contact high of his music is partly from his own audible elation when he connects. He likes sweeping gestures and reliable pleasures, which he deploys with force and conviction. Check the big horns on “Heavy Heart”; you can practically see him jubilantly cueing them with his arms over his head. On “Black Gold,” he retells his journey from Oklahoma to the D.C. in strokes broad enough for an MGM musical: “Now it’s big city lights for a country mouse.” His writing jumbles emotional extremes until they start to blur into one another: His lyrics are full of pained apologies that sound like bravado, chest-banging declarations that sound like cries of despair.
Strange’s genre leaps land so clean because of his remarkable voice. As a kid, he sang opera, and he can do pretty much anything: twirl into a falsetto, scale up an octave to punch a Broadway-sized high note, unleash soul shouts. On “Hennessy,” he flexes melismatic lines over a lo-fi acoustic guitar set up, and it sounds like someone caught D’Angelo on an iPhone. Recalling the loneliness of his itinerant upbringing as the child of an Air Force engineer on “Tours,” he rasps “I’m your son” with a venom that is surprising, nearly vengeful, shading a tender ballad with abject and primal undertones.
Working as a Black man in indie rock, he’s alive to the political dimensions of his stylistic choices, and the songs find subtle ways to exploit them. With its ragged, meandering Auto-Tune vocal, “Cosigns” is very close to a straight Future song, except instead of boasting about sleeping with models or driving push-button cars, Strange brags about hanging with labelmates Big Thief and 4AD founder Martin Mills. The song starts out feeling sly—a major label flex on an indie budget—but winds up excavating the circular pathology behind his ambitions: “How to be full, it’s the hardest to know/I keep consuming, I can’t give it up/Hungry as ever, it’s never enough.” Likewise, the mellow, lawnmower-beer groove of “Escape This Circus” recalls Real Estate circa Atlas until it becomes clear Strange is singing not about New Jersey sunsets but rather late-capitalist breakdown: A man with holes in his shoes mumbles to Strange about cryptocurrency while he ponders starting a war that could “end on the news.”
The most overtly political moment is also its simplest—“Hold the Line” is a prayer for Gianna Floyd, the daughter of George Floyd. It’s a power ballad, essentially, a lighter-waver in the mold of “Purple Rain,” with slide guitar solos that cry out in between the verses. Strange doesn’t have much to say, strictly speaking, about watching a young girl speak on camera about her murdered father. “Can’t imagine what’s running through her young mind now,” he sings, his voice husky and full. In another Bartees Strange song, this moment would preclude the explosion—a burst of guitar distortion, a vocal leap. But here, he lets the guitars trail away into silence. It’s the most subdued music he’s ever written. So much of Strange’s music is driven by declarations—of power or need, of pain or love. But in a catalog full of affirmations, “Hold the Line” is his first unanswered question.


The beachy post-punk duo are at their most confident, with a sense of anguish that brings emotional depth to otherwise plain lyrics.

Heaven Surrounds You

Los Angeles musician Nick Rattigan has always kept his artistic personas clearly divided. There’s the somber, introspective Rattigan, sole member of Current Joys, whose seclusion manifests in downtempo guitar pop that echoes like a tinny speaker in a cave. Then there’s the bolder Rattigan, drummer and singer of Surf Curse, whose self-deprecating heartaches spiral into restless guitar riffs. Current Joys songs feel like private reflections—particularly on last year’s A Different Age—but his music with bandmate Jacob Rubeck pulls you in by the hand. While early Surf Curse often fell victim to juvenile songwriting (“I’m Not Making Out With You” and “Forever Dumb” appeared on their 2013 EP Sad Boys), their third album, Heaven Surrounds You, is the most confident Rattigan’s ever sounded.
Lead single “Disco” is the best song here, driven by clean, racing strums reminiscent of Vampire Weekend’s debut. But where Ezra Koenig bobbed his head under a chandelier somewhere near the Columbia campus, Rattigan shuffles and twists beneath prom-night decor with a Mia Wallace type. “Disco” invokes the allure of legendary couple dance scenes, the kind that make you want to fall in love with somebody just so you can replicate the choreography. As Rattigan coos “I can’t wait for you,” the track imparts a corresponding salacious urgency: Nothing is more important than right now.
The closest Heaven Surrounds You comes to matching “Disco”’s silver-screen magic is “Safe,” with a whirling keyboard refrain worthy of a climactic montage. “Safe” swaps the lust of “Disco” for complacent loneliness. “I held you away… I can’t leave my home/I’m safer at home,” Rattigan sings, opting to withdraw entirely rather than risk getting hurt again. “I’m safe alone,” he concludes, though his repetition of the line suggests he’s second-guessing himself.
With help from violinist Eliza Bagg of Pavo Pavo, songs like “Opera” and “Trust” exude a baroque-pop eeriness that compliments Rattigan’s occultish references: “Beware of the witching hour/’Cause I can feel you in my room/Is that still you?” he warns in “Hour of the Wolf.” “Tie my wrists and fuck my mind,” he demands in “Opera,” seeming more sinister than inviting. Rattigan isn’t the strongest vocalist—when he belts, it sounds like he’s really trying—but there’s an anguish that surfaces in his quiver, bringing an emotional depth to otherwise plain lyrics.
When things get too plain, the album falls short: Lines about “another night of feeling lonely and confused” feel like they could’ve come from anyone. Dull melodies make tracks like “Labyrinth” and “Dead Ringers” mostly forgettable, and a borrowed title like “Midnight Cowboy” relies on the classic cinema reference to conjure what Rattigan’s uninspired lyricism can’t. In its final moments, Heaven Surrounds You attempts to deliver profound awareness of mortality: “I love all the people in my life/All my friends keep me alive,” Rattigan sings. As with much of the record, there’s likely a far deeper implication behind the clichés—he just needs a more insightful script.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Returning to the apocalyptic club setting of its early-’90s work, the industrial metal duo crafts the most inviting record of its late career.

Purge

Since forming in 1982, Godflesh have mastered a sound that blends overwhelming intensity with superhuman restraint. Along with the announcement for Purge, the duo’s first studio album in six years, Justin Broadrick explained the title is a reference to his recent diagnoses with autism and PTSD. “I'm blessed with the fire of creation, and it’s how I transcend the curse,” he wrote. “I have to create, and regularly, or I disappear further into the realms of my conditions.” In Purge’s songs of alienation and frustration, Broadrick does battle with himself, animating his struggles through a set of colossal beats and blistering guitars that forecast what the ambience of a club might be like at the hour of judgment.
This isn’t the first time Godflesh have taken to this setting. On 1991’s Slavestate EP, they took inspiration from EBM (electric body music), which they further explored on the following year’s bleaker full-length, Pure. Those songs relied on drum loops and trance-like structures paired with Broadrick’s harsh, often atonal riffage to introduce a metallic, hip-hop-inspired post-metal sound that has never left their music since. Godflesh’s programmed drums have always sounded like your hand might get caught in them if you got too close, and Purge brings them back to the bounce of early landmarks like “Spite” and “Mothra.” “Nero” opens the record with swinging hi-hats and a spoken vocal sample laid over top of Broadricks’s wave of syncopated picking patterns and abbreviated two-note melodies. But any dancefloor euphoria is quickly undercut by the lyrics, as Broadrick growls instructions to “restrain yourself” and “betray your needs.”
The brighter sound of Purge sets it apart from the first two post-reunion Godflesh albums, 2014’s A World Lit Only By Fire and 2017’s Post Self. B.C. Green’s bass takes on a more quiet and diffusive presence, a suffocating rumble instead of his more characteristic crushing overdrive. Broadrick’s guitar, meanwhile, sounds like it’s running on gasoline, and it’s complemented best on the climactic, breakbeat-driven “Permission.” A crunchy “OH!” responds to each snare hit while Broadrick’s echoing pleas collapse into full-throated barks and his guitar dips into dissonant frenzies. The repetitive structure lends a false sense of stability that makes the shift all the more unsettling, a slowly unfolding floor-filler of a track that recalls Edmund Burke’s assessment of the sublime as “not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror.”
The militaristic “The Father” and head-crushing “Mythology of Self” are a stark comedown: Their spare and lopsided drum patterns draw attention to the moments when Broadrick and Green lock in, each unison hitting like a blow to the face. Broadrick has said that he sees Godflesh’s brand of aggression as a defensive gesture opposed to the chest-puffing masculinity he’s wrestled against in other extreme genres. His aim is catharsis, channeling violent extremes for the sake of security not domination. On Purge, Godflesh strike a balance between communal vulnerability and seething hostility that makes for the most inviting entry in their late career.


The New York rapper’s highly anticipated debut album is another big, long flex from one of the most skilled rappers to emerge in the last five years.

Herstory in the Making

In the immediate wake of the viral 2016 hit “OOOUUU,” Young M.A was quickly projected to be a trailblazer for modern New York City rap, pegged as a rejuvenator for quintessential New York City rap, and preordained as the city’s best pure rapper in what had felt like ages. She was the hottest rapper of the moment, maybe the most promising hometown prospect since 50 Cent, and even he was impressed.
Usually, all stories of viral rap success play out in the same way—a label swoops in after a bidding war, new music is released posthaste, and most of it sounds dangerously close to the viral hit itself. But something funny happened with M.A: She never signed with a major, she held off on rushing out an album, and she retreated deeper into her notepad, not once trying to recreate her signature song. Without much of an attempt to capitalize on her virality, the hype subsided, and many wrote Young M.A off as a flash in the pan. In a twist, in the years since, she has quietly lived up to everything unfairly foisted upon her.
Young M.A isn’t just one of the best rappers in her city, she’s one of the best anywhere. She has spent her free moments, during on-air appearances or hijacking other rapper’s songs, putting beats through the torture rack until she’s cracked them. Though a longtime master of the form, her freestyles have become epics. Her singles have become confessionals. In these structureless spaces, she’s unleashed. Her verses feel undiluted and ceaseless; she seems inexhaustible, like she could rap forever. Herstory in the Making, her long-awaited debut album, was supposed to be a punctuation mark. It was meant to put a cap on this arc, to give shape to her untreated verses and her story. Instead, it is merely another flex, another display of her competence and skill. She runs the gauntlet and comes out largely unscathed.
A name like Herstory in the Making implies biography and Young M.A has confirmed as much in interviews. She always seems to be setting the record straight in her raps, but these aren’t her memoirs. In an attempt to offer all of herself, she ends up providing only glimpses, never settling long enough to divulge much. Despite that, she finds enough balance to provide a convincing self-portrait. There is plenty of the tough M.A—the raw M.A—to satiate fans of her bruiser raps, especially on bum-rushing songs like “No Mercy” and “Bleed,” but there is vulnerability elsewhere. The NY Bangers-produced “Sober Thoughts” reveals struggles with depression and substance abuse in the aftermath of her celebrity. When she lets her guard down, she grows as a storyteller.
The most glaring illustration of this is “No Love,” on which Young M.A wrestles with her brother’s murder and her own proximity to street life. As the song goes on, she keeps reliving his death in different contexts, feeling its impact in different ways. It is some of her most centered writing. “I seen my brother go from human to Casper/From a bed to a casket/Tryna move on, but it’s like my life goin’ backwards,” she remembers, trapped in a nightmare. There’s no love in the streets so she finds it elsewhere—down a bottle of Hennessey, in her mother, and in God. She always raps with clarity, but when she writes with purpose her songs become even more affecting. Sometimes, the writing is so crisp that it becomes like journaling in its detail and narrative focus. “My paychecks use to be a pair of Jordans/And I know I can’t afford ’em, but I went ahead and bought ’em/Then I quit, started slangin’, spent my money on recordin’/Yeah, the studio was small, but man, that shit made me a fortune,” she raps on “Car Confessions,” as clear a rendering of converting aspiration into inspiration as you’ll ever hear.
There is such a natural finesse and composure to M.A’s rapping that it can, at times, seem almost casual. But it’s easy to underestimate what’s happening on Herstory in the Making because she performs a rap clinic for nearly 70 minutes without exerting much energy. While the album may not be the resounding statement of self the title makes it out to be, it is a fine endorsement of everything that those who have ignored her have been missing. If nothing else, Herstory in the Making is an exhibition of Young M.A’s ability to rap proficiently over anything. She bobs her way through the muted, glowing Mike Zombie-produced “BIG” and then lurches through Zaytoven’s trap gospel on “Kold World” like Peak Gucci Mane. She slides off the “My Hitta” synths with singsong flows. With each song on her debut, Young M.A is reasserting her place in rap.


On their follow-up to 2012's Shrines, Purity Ring find the pop world about where they left it. If their balance of delicacy and danger doesn't have the advantage of novelty anymore, their aesthetic is strong enough that familiarity becomes a decent substitute.

another eternity

In early 2011, Purity Ring showed us the perfect balance for "future pop": Be ahead of your time, but not toofar ahead."Belispeak" and "Ungirthed" perfectly anticipated the reframing of indie pop as festival-ready "Internet music", and when Shrines came out, about a year later, the Edmonton duo saw their star rise alongside the similarly-minded polyglots like Grimes, kindred spirits who helped shift the sonic paradigm further away from guitars. But if pop listeners come for the songs, they tend to stay for the personalities, and this is the issue facing Purity Ring on another eternity. On their debut, Megan James and Corin Roddick were hard to read and analysis-averse, and they remain so. Their sound remains singular, but is it still interesting?
Staying the course, as they largely do on another eternity, isn’t that risky a proposition for them: The pop world seems right about where Shrines left it. Accordingly, James and Roddick try to close the gap separating their vision of pop from actual pop. The bolder and brighter presentation of another eternity singles "push pull" and "begin again" gets them awfully close to latter-day Taylor Swift or Katy Perry; "repetition" could’ve popped up on If You’re Reading This It's Too Late or serve as a backing track for the next Miley Cyrus single, all acts whose 2013-2014 output drew liberally from Purity Ring.
But if Purity Ring don't have the advantage of novelty anymore, their aesthetic is strong enough that familiarity becomes a decent substitute. Within the first minute of another eternity, the ease of recognizing Purity Ring amongst their still-growing brood of imitators is actually startling. If the lower-case stylization of another eternity and its song titles seems overly precious, at least it’s congruent with James’ distinct vocal approach. She works something like an origami expert, quickly folding and refolding melodies until they’re acutely angled, pointed, and elegant.
James’ lyrics explore the same juxtaposition of delicacy and danger, though less so than on Shrines. She promised a more personal, present-tense perspective than her past work, and so her macabre, childlike fascination with bodily functions is applied to more adult situations, like breakups and such. At best, James’ impressionism leaves an imprint on your brain—on "repetition", the curious boast "Watching me is like watching the fire take your eyes from you" is delivered with enough gusto to hit at a gut level.
However, by posting the lyrics sheet prior to the release of another eternity, the duo revealed as many "o’ers" and leering, stiff turns of phrase as a Decemberists album ("Baby why don’t you see my sea/ Get inside and build your castle into me"). At times, the moony metaphors devolve into Wordsworth Tumblr-jumble, and on "stillness in woe", James achieves a sort of Purity Ring singularity with one line: "Meet me in the back shed/ I’ll be hanging up the knives/ Humming melodies that rhyme/ Building castles out of shovels."
It's this twee undercurrent that manages to keep Purity Ring nominally "indie", and also provides crucial contrast with Roddick’s productions. Roddick wants to remind listeners more of Mike WiLL Made It and Noah "40" Shebib than Burial and the Knife this time, and he makes everything sound more cushy and cavernous, evoking the sensation of sitting on the most comfortable couch in the club after everyone leaves. Throughout, Purity Ring manages to sound big without sounding expensive, forgoing nuance and detail for scalability. Stream it on laptop speakers and you can still picture every dazzling MIDI trigger in a live setting.
James and Roddick altered their process for another eternity, working together in the same studio, and as a result they seem to have gravitated towards the sort of tricks meant to provoke an immediate, contagious enthusiasm from the person standing right next to you. Credit to Purity Ring for being honest with themselves and acknowledging that they’ve spent the past couple of years playing festivals and collaborating with the bigger names in oddball mainstream rap (Angel Haze, Danny Brown, Ab-Soul). The beats that pop up during the hooks of opening duo "heartsigh" and "bodyache" are meant for bleacher stomping, while there are legitimate "Levels"-level drops on "begin again". Any sort of indignation feels misplaced—you might as well shake your fist at a rock song for containing a riff. But most of Roddick's "new" tricks could’ve ended up on Shrines, whether it's the apparitional, pitched-down vocals, flickering Auto-Tune, warped bass and a fairly brazen nick of Frank Ocean’s "Thinkin Bout You" on "stranger than earth". As a result, it's difficult to tell when another eternity builds on Shrines and when Shrines is being stripped for parts.
By every objective standard, even the one set by its near-suffocatingly cohesive predecessor, this is a narrow work. Eight of its 1o tracks clock in between 3:15 and 3:40, and its tone, timbre, topicality and flow are pathologically even-keeled; there’s nothing to upset the equilibrium like Shrines' jarring Young Magic guest spot "Grandloves". Verses and choruses are pretty much equidistant at all times. You can imagine another eternity as beat-tape like source material, where just about every melody could be extracted for outside hook use.
Perhaps we should’ve saw that coming considering the numerous allusions to repetition and new starts in both the album and song titles. But the most worrisome bit of referentiality comes not from Roddick's production or James' melodies, but from a recycling of Shrines’ most powerful image. That one came on "Fineshrine", where James experienced a love so overwhelming and frightening, she asked them to climb inside her rib cage. "seacastle" likewise views sexual congress as a supernatural escape plan and on "repetition" she echoes the favor from "Fineshrine"—"Climb up in my rattling spine and I’ll contract." This obsession with connecting and disappearing in rapid succession is fitting for a record that finds Purity Ring trying to stake their claim at pop's center but ultimately retreating within themselves.


The Portland quartet crank up the chorus and distortion pedals in service of jangly hooks and gleaming counter-melodies.

Don’t Know What I Am

Like any hopeless romantic worth their weight in mix CDs, Alien Boy wears its heart on its sleeve. The group takes its name from an EP by Portland punk legends the Wipers; their roster of covers includes a bleak take on Oasis’ “Wonderwall” and a morphiated Morrisey on the Smiths’ “Hand in Glove.” And like her influences, Alien Boy guitarist and vocalist Sonia Weber works at extremes: Every TV show is Friday Night Lights, every romance is like a dream, every melody is coated in chorus effect. The band’s new album, Don’t Know What I Am, wraps contemporary angst in a shimmering haze, drowning depression in lustrous dream pop.
With a pedal roster longer than the tracklist, Don’t Know What I Am vibrates with echo and reverb. The album arrives during a resurgence of shoegaze within emo and metal, with bands like Deafheaven and Nothing leading the charge. Alien Boy check some of those boxes: Like their 2018 debut full-length Sleeping Lessons, this record was produced by Jack Shirley, a former screamo bandleader known for his expertise in effects-heavy, effusive metal.
But where many of their contemporaries lean into the genre’s jagged edges, Alien Boy reach for chorus and distortion in service of jangly hooks and gleaming counter-melodies, more Cure than Codeine. “Nothing’s Enough” bounces with Siouxsie and the Banshees’ psychedelic sheen; “Ache #2” (named for the Jawbreaker song) recalls the paranoid bassline of “Every Breath You Take.” Where Sleeping Lessons felt top-heavy, with no song quite matching the nostalgic gleam of its opener, Don’t Know What I Am uses pacing to its advantage. Just as things begin to grow sleepy on “Seventeen,” “How Do I Think When Yr Asleep?” opens the proverbial pit with drum rolls and breakneck guitar solos. Weber’s vocals are clean and earnest, more about feeling than perfect form, as if to match the vulnerability in her lyrics.
She sings about “you” and “me” and “them,” obscuring the proper nouns of her life, but her disarmingly intimate words ache with a specific loneliness. As on Sleeping Lessons, the lyrics track the bitter end of a relationship, but here, Weber wrestles with messier aspects of acceptance and identity long after the breakup: “Sometimes I look in the mirror and you’re all I see,” she confesses on “Memory’s Vault.” “Something Better” comes closest to a thesis for the record: “Is it okay to still feel this way?” She takes a cue from Moz, repeating words and phrases until they turn into chants that inject energy into the album’s most despondent moments. “I want something better than out here,” she cries. Shouted enough times, it starts to sound aspirational.
There’s nothing jaded about the world of Alien Boy; Weber picks over old fights like scabbed wounds. The emotional openness of her writing sets the band apart from contemporary shoegaze inclinations towards existential ennui. It’s one thing to cover up your detached nihilism with reverb; it’s in some ways riskier to lean into the desperate romance of Loveless. And sure, hearing Weber sing about giving her “fragile heart” to a lover might summon a few eye-rolls from the Sargent House crowd. But Alien Boy knows that it’s futile to put up a front. As Weber concedes on “Memory Vault,” “It’s just too hard to be cool.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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