The hyper-prolific Los Angeles saxophonist again opens his archive of ambient sketches, cloud-rap beats, and jazz experiments. It’s a far more compact package than last year’s sprawling Fresh Bread.

Superstore

Sam Gendel’s music is largely wordless, but his sense of humor tends to shine through anyway. Sometimes, it’s evident in the music itself—many of the songs on the Los Angeles saxophonist and producer’s new album SUPERSTORE play like minimalist, mattified updates of the Donkey Kong Country soundtrack. But you most often see it in his song and album titles: strange, jokey phrases and non sequiturs like “Lilriffriff” or “LANDCRUISELIFE” that suggest a penchant for everyday weirdness. SUPERSTORE is no exception: The title implies mass production, sameness, pure function over form. It’s a funny, knowing reference point, in large part because it’s hardly the kind of word you’d associate with Gendel—an artist whose eccentricities and fondness for inscrutability mean that he’s rarely done the same thing twice.
The title does highlight one thing about Gendel’s music: There’s a lot of it. Gendel releases albums with the frequency of a sixteen-year-old SoundCloud rapper; SUPERSTORE is his second album in under a month, following last month’s collaboration with 12-year-old Antonia Cytrynowicz, LIVE A LITTLE, and his ninth overall since the beginning of 2021. Coming in at 34 songs and totaling close to an hour, it’s a lot of music to wade through—although it’s still less than a third of the length of Fresh Bread, the 52-song album of beats, live cuts, and pop experiments that it serves as a sequel to.
SUPERSTORE draws from the same well as Fresh Bread—there are ambient sketches (“Surfside”), warped cloud-rap beats (“Squid”), outré experiments (“Pan”), and, occasionally, more traditional jazz cuts (“Sx Mrnng”). Longtime Gendel collaborators Blake Mills, Kevin Yokota, Gabe Noel, and Phillipe Melanson all appear too, adding small, but memorable, flourishes—Yokota provides a soft, jittery beat on “Two-Tone,” while Mills adds a drunken synth guitar line on “Gu Shi.”
For anyone who found Fresh Bread’s 224-minute runtime daunting, SUPERSTORE is a welcome change of pace; it feels more deliberately sequenced than its predecessor, with sharper contrasts song to song. I love the way the dusty, meditative “MFV” lulls you into a borderline-hypnotic state before the squall of “Foothammer” jolts you back into reality, and how the one-two of “La Guerra Di Piero” and “My <3 Sing” offer two vastly different variations on chopped and reshaped vocals. The former is dense and chaotic and the latter slick and bright, like something Solange might have included on When I Get Home; both offer pleasant refinements of the kinds of beats that were on Fresh Bread, and both lend the impression of Gendel as a canny producer, happy to let his samples guide the mood.
Gendel’s music is often described, perhaps unfairly, as “vibe music”—a kind of shorthand for something to put on in the background as you put your mind to something else. That’s true for some of his records, and definitely for portions of Fresh Bread. But SUPERSTORE is a good showcase of the power of Gendel’s music: More than just something pleasant to elevate a listener’s environment, this album forces you to meet it on its level. Walking around listening to SUPERSTORE can make your own city feel foreign and a foreign city feel like home; it has a trippy, kaleidoscopic effect that draws strangeness out of quotidian environments. Songs like the honking, limp-footed “Blueblackred,” or the piquant and percussive “Wave-Mini,” are so peculiar in their timings and textures that you have to readjust your perspective in order to fully get into them.
If Gendel’s music does cultivate a vibe, it’s one that’s pleasantly disorientating and deeply saturated, organic and synthetic in equal measure, playful and occasionally ominous—far from “vibe music” in the streaming-era sense of the phrase. SUPERSTORE highlights this feeling within Gendel’s music—its ability to paint a kind of psychedelic, off-kilter sheen on the everyday—more clearly than any of his projects to date. In this light, the album’s title makes sense—it’s all the Gendel you could ever need, all in one place.


Originally issued by Rough Trade in 1979, this bizarre outing from one member of Metal Urbain features low-tech synth/noise covers of punk classics by the Stooges, Velvets, Troggs and others.

Wall of Noise

My slow crawl around the world in search of new music from the past-- a crawl that finds me falling further behind with each passing minute, as thousands of records in an uncountable number of styles continue to find their way in and out of record bins-- has not yet taken me to the French punk/new-wave scene of the late 70s. And there's a good chance I'll never get there, since punk was never something I identified with much, and I've even been sluggish about hearing all the important stuff released by countries that speak my own language. Given my slight background in the Continental new-wave of the late 70s, I can't tell you exactly where Frenchman Eric Debris, who was a member of Metal Urbain before he started recording solo as Dr. Mix and the Remix in 1979, fits in. But listening to this compilation of his complete works under this alias, I can tell you he was onto something pretty great.
Debris' M.O. as Dr. Mix and the Remix was to record covers of late 60s/early 70s rock 'n' roll and avant-garage classics on which he'd overdrive the guitars to ridiculously trebly lengths, and then sing a bit like Ian Curtis, in a clunky French accent, through a pitifully cheap reverb unit while letting a rudimentary drum machine handle the beats. During Dr. Mix's short run from '79 to '82, Debris released a handful of singles and one full-length album (also called Wall of Noise), mostly on Rough Trade. In the 1995 Spin Alternative Record Guide, The Jesus & Mary Chain's Jim Reid pegged that album his third favorite record of all time-- which says something for Reid's courage, since the distinctive sound of Psychocandy appears to have been lifted wholesale from select Wall of Noise cuts.
The Stooges' standard "No Fun" appears in three different versions: The single, which leads off this disc, was a full-band leftover from a Metal Urbain session; the original album version included later is cheaper and noisier (and better); and then there's a great instrumental "version" (also recorded solo), which served as the B-side of the single. The Dr. Mix treatment of "No Fun" finds Debris sounding like a dork and yet managing a certain cool, democratizing Iggy Pop's sexuality by making it available to anyone with the energy that a few meager tools creatively deployed.
Even more exciting, the insistent and stiff 4/4 kickdrum on a 10-minute version of The Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" could become proper dance music with the right EQ settings, and Debris' slurred and drooling vocals lead one to believe he did, in fact, hit the mainline-- possibly sideways. The Troggs' "I Can't Control Myself" finds Debris turning down the guitar a bit to focus on his vocals, the barking cadence of which suggest that Wolfman Jack might have done a radio tour of France at some point.
Not all the old chestnuts fare so well ("You Really Got Me" is dinky synth-pop, and its clean recording makes it seem amateurish rather than inspired) and the Dr. Mix originals are generally pretty bad, mostly warmed-over rockabilly forms without the wit and energy Debris brings to the covers. Despite these serious dull patches, when Dr. Mix is good, he is very good. Most of all, Wall of Noise gets to the heart of why American rock music became a worldwide phenomenon: The format is supple and can be endlessly shaped and re-imagined without losing its essential identity.


The New York City quartet’s fourth album is classic and romantic, capturing the liberated frisson of disco and house in an ultra-saturated palette.

Al Mundo Azul

Mr Twin Sister anticipate trends with alarming precision: Their 2014 self-titled breakout fused R&B with low-key, nocturnal dance music years before Okay Kaya and Erika de Casier emerged as indie darlings, while Salt, the band’s 2018 follow-up, incorporated tasteful 2-step beats and lush jazz textures before PinkPantheress had even sat her A-levels. Slowly but surely, Andrea Estella, Gabel D’Amico, Udbhav Gupta, and Eric Cardona’s distinctive sensibility has inched its way into the zeitgeist. In 2021, Mr Twin Sister’s back catalog sounds better than ever.
The band’s fourth album, Al Mundo Azul, doesn’t depart from the sound of Salt as much as find the next mutation in its genomic sequence, largely foregoing the wavey tones of 2010s dance pop in favour of lurid Danceteria neons. Queasy, dub-influenced tracks and flashes of synthy psychedelia still abound, but the unifying presence on Al Mundo Azul is a strain of ebullient oddball disco that sounds like it originated four planets left of 2020’s Dua Lipa-led disco revival. At the center is the band’s forever-conflicted protagonist, Estella, whose sly, vagrant vocal style—that of a disco diva after a few too many bumps of ketamine—belies lyrics concerned with the American cult of youth, tech addiction, and social disconnection.
At its best, Al Mundo Azul captures the liberated frisson of disco and house without resorting to simple recreation. “Expressions” plays like “I’m Coming Out” as covered by Fever Ray, a clammy synth squelch rubbing up against the song’s Chic-like strut. The entire song takes place in the moments before a hookup, channeling the electricity of waiting at home for the phone to buzz. The rhythm of Estella’s voice—melismatic and ecstatic at one second, staccato and forceful the next—conveys the tension and release: “All this waiting/Wanting you/And I love how it feels/When you’re coming near.” Estella has a flair for inhabiting anticipation of all kinds: “Polvo,” one of the band’s first songs to be written entirely in Spanish, explores the grotesque wonder of the human life cycle. “Cualquier cosa podría estar en el polvo/Una semilla y los muertos (Anything could be in dust/A seed and the dead),” they sing. It’s a huge, potentially morose topic, but Mr Twin Sister approach it with impishness and verve, adding telescoping synth sounds and cartoonish drum fills that make the whole affair feel like light work.
Al Mundo Azul is full of high-key setpieces like “Polvo,” but the tracks that stray from the album’s ultra-saturated palette tend to stall its momentum. Opener “Fantasy” is too busy by half, irregular drum beats and Estella’s glissading vocals creating a sense of panic that feels unfocussed and incoherent. “The Pine Tree,” a sax-heavy dub track, is a frustratingly stagnant interlude between “Diary” and “Despoil,” inquisitive, psychedelic house songs that number among the band’s best. These vignettes might have worked were the throbbing beats of songs like “Polvo” not so deeply intoxicating. Disco is clearly a good fit for Mr Twin Sister. By now, though, they’ve probably moved on to the next thing with a spring in their step.

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Angel Marcloid’s vaporwave side project trades the electronic screamo fusion of her Fire-Toolz alias for glistening smooth jazz inspired by the Weather Channel.

Nonlocal Forecast: Holographic Universe(s?)!

Holographic Universe(s?)!

Elevator music gets a bad rap—unfairly so. Like wallpaper, it asks nothing of you, not even that you pay attention; it’s just there to help you pass the time. It’s easy to connect that particular strain of soft, inoffensive jazz with the unpleasant experience of waiting or being put on hold. Muzak’s association with actual elevators is an inherited cultural memory at this point, but a bitter aftertaste still lingers.
Chicago’s Angel Marcloid is best known as Fire-Toolz, but with Nonlocal Forecast, her vaporwave-indebted side project, she’s dispelling some of those negative connotations. Last year’s Bubble Universe! riffed on ideas of background music with a fizzy blend of new age, prog, and paint-by-numbers jazz. On the follow-up, Holographic Universe(s?)!, she leans so hard on pastiche that she breaks through to the other side, embracing cheese wholeheartedly. This is full-on waiting-room-core, with guitars that moan, saxophones that mewl, and synths that twinkle like costume jewelry.
Marcloid cites the boilerplate jazz fusion that used to accompany Weather Channel broadcasts as an inspiration for the project, but Holographic Universe(s?)! has a way of feeling immediately familiar even without that particular reference point. For me, it calls up the supremely kitschy Mall Tycoon soundtrack and the strange, polygonal dreamscape of the Chao Garden in Sonic Adventure 2. These are sounds from the background of your life, Marcloid suggests, and they’ll find their way back to you as you listen; the lingering presence of those hazy, half-formed memories is crucial to the experience of the album.
As Fire-Toolz, Marcloid juxtaposes happy-go-lucky electronics with the anguish of screamo. And though the Nonlocal Forecast moniker is mostly a hub for the former, the music plays with opposites in its own way. The bright, jumpy “Imprinted, Encoded, Shone (Emergence)” gives way to samples of thunder and rain in its final seconds. True to its title, “The Bubbling Up of Duality on an Autumn Night by a Forest Stream” builds something gleaming and plasticky on top of a nighttime field recording. The world of this album is almost homeostatic: Things never get too hot or too cold, too extreme in one way or the other.
The album isn’t exactly kidding about any of this (the Kenny G-ish sax tones are completely straight-faced), but that doesn’t mean it’s not funny. “We’re Smeared Across a 2D Surface (Part 1)” opens with a ridiculous koan delivered in a thick New York accent: “She encounters and falls into a super hot soup of bits at the horizon.” There’s also a track called “My Big T.O.E.” and a sister song called “My Incomplete T.O.E.” on which Marcloid credits, uh, Fire-Toolz as a featured artist. Rather than feeling arch or insincere, this surreal, comic edge only enhances the feeling of riding the metaphorical elevator to a plane where goofiness is inherent and there’s space to let your mind wander.
Marcloid’s respect for that goofiness, and that brand of mid-grade pleasantness, is what makes it all work. “I think Nonlocal Forecast is very safe music, and that’s intentional,” she told the Chicago Tribune. A lot of music under the general rubric of vaporwave is “about” capitalism in a way that can be pedantic or reductive, but this album’s lack of ironic distance keeps it out of that trap. Smooth jazz may have been co-opted by customer service hotlines, but there’s no reason why we can’t just enjoy it for what it is, rather than what it means. Rescuing these sounds from corporatist purgatory, the free-associative daydream of Holographic Universe(s?)! ennobles the safety of leisure time.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A new live album from the avant-garde power trio led by Japanese noise icon Keiji Haino is a demented joy, best experienced at high volumes.

Nazoranai: Beginning to Fall in Line Before Me, So Decorously, the Nature of All That Must Be Transformed

Every member of the international avant-garde ensemble Nazoranai is a lifer and a legend, or at least one in the making. During the last four decades, the Japanese multi-instrumental improviser and vocalist Keiji Haino has emerged as one of music’s most restless spirits, bastardizing rock and noise, folk and jazz to create an idiosyncratic expressive lexicon. His mysterious persona—suggested by his all-black-everything clothes and omnipresent shades, and sealed by his love of koan-like poetry—adds to a sense of mystique that’s increasingly rare. Though the guitarist Stephen O’Malley is best known for the colossal drones of Sunn O))), his pursuit of pure tone has taken him from the psychedelic smog of KTL to the malevolent metal of Khanate; those one-note jokes about Sunn O))) don’t at all apply to O’Malley’s larger oeuvre. And Australian drummer, guitarist, and programmer Oren Ambarchi has developed a fascinating fluidity, meaning he’s as capable of pristine pop as he is corroded rock, precise techno programming as he is ruptured sound design.
The gravitational pull of Haino’s storied career is so strong that Nazoranai has often felt like his project—the elder musician’s power trio, buttressed by an unlikely rhythm section. The band’s first LP, a strange self-titled 2012 beast, was a clear combination of each member’s characteristic sounds. Its slow lumbers, for instance, felt guided by O’Malley, its more devilish gyrations anchored by Haino. Two years later, the trio spliced together four sides of chaotic and enthralling noise-rock, with moments of exploration into the unknown led by Haino’s keening screams. This trend comes to a head on Nazoranai’s third and shortest LP to date, Beginning to Fall in Line Before Me, So Decorously, the Nature of All That Must Be Transformed. A two-side live recording captured at Tokyo’s intimate SuperDeluxe in 2014, Beginning finds the full force and finesse of Ambarchi and O’Malley now behind Haino, a puppeteer who directs the trio through waves of anxiety and eruption. The result is a demented joy.
Beginning is best experienced at high volumes and close to the speakers, conditions that approximate the atmosphere of its original live setting. All three players are very busy during these dual 23-minute improvisations, rarely sitting still or laying back. When you’re surrounded by the action, you can intuit their interaction, as if you’re enjoying a spirited conversation between strangers speaking an imaginary language.
The first side begins with a murmur—twinkling bells, sporadic drums, a low-key rumble from an amplifier. It is an invocation for Haino, whose arrival with a shrieking hurdy-gurdy immediately escalates everything else. Haino has been playing the hurdy-gurdy for decades, steadily releasing a series of solo improvisations in the wonderfully titled series “The 21st Century Hard-Y Guide-Y Man.” But it’s still a special, scintillating thrill to hear the instrument in this context, howling out like the irascible ghost of Tony Conrad or a string quartet that’s finally tired of Haydn and sailed headlong into the abyss. At various points, Haino sustains menacing drones as the rhythm section thrashes beneath him—or he slices into their fray, zigging and zagging between drums and bass. At this album's best, the brittle wail of the hurdy-gurdy becomes a ping-pong ball, rapidly batted back and forth by O’Malley’s slow pulses and Ambarchi’s impatient energy.
The second side flows out of the first, with Ambarchi and O’Malley simmering as the hurdy-gurdy gradually recedes into the distance. The rhythm section lingers here for a moment, waiting for Haino to suit up for the next act. Suddenly, sharp splinters of electric guitar drive into the patter and, again, seem to activate the rest of the band. They growl and rumble through open-ended noise-rock, dive-bombing into deep passages of dissonance, each somehow more extreme than the last.
And then, near silence arrives in preparation for the finale: Haino speak-singing, this time in English, his voice a permanent scream. “No one can change anything,” he shouts on repeat. “I keep on changing. You can change—just you!” It’s strange to hear Haino in the role of self-help coach, a surprising spot of human vulnerability woven into his mystical veneer. It serves as a command; Ambarchi and O’Malley explode, leaning into their instruments with abandon. For the last six minutes, they have the force of Mats Gustafsson’s The Thing or Albert Ayler’s Bells-era band—pure paroxysms of sound, digesting a lifetime of listening and delivering it in ecstatic, urgent fashion. It is the peak at the end of a slow climb, an exit rendered in delirious unison.


"My hands 'round your throat/ If I kill you now, well, they'll never know." Dickon Hinchliffe may be talking ...

Waiting for the Moon

"My hands 'round your throat/ If I kill you now, well, they'll never know." Dickon Hinchliffe may be talking to a character he created, but he may as well be addressing you directly: that's the effect Tindersticks have. Even their gentlest moments can grab and startle you, and their fiercest always overwhelm. These six sad Englishmen have always been beyond classification; you've never heard anything like them, and the things you could compare them with-- Scott Walker, Serge Gainsbourg, spy film scores, Leonard Cohen, an apocalyptic bar band-- don't make for an easy description.
Their last two albums settled back a bit from their sharply confrontational, uniquely miserable trio of early works, albums whose sheer brilliance and distinctiveness the band are unlikely ever to match again. A readily identifiable R&B influence unexpectedly came to the fore in recent years, and though it suited them nicely, I was admittedly a bit worried about Waiting for the Moon, which could have very easily seen them losing the plot and slipping into formula. Instead, it resynthesizes everything they've done before, and emerges as a cohesive work mirroring the straightforward format of Simple Pleasure and Can Our Love..., all the while pushing the music in bolder directions than either of those albums.
The fact that Dickon Hinchliffe (the band's violinist and orchestrator) sings the first song comes as a bit of a surprise, though not an unpleasant one. He sounds kind of like Witness' Gerard Starkie, and his tenor is a good foil to the more familiar, foggy baritone croon of Stuart Staples. Opener "Until the Morning Comes" is a subtle lullaby, riding David Boulter's tinkling keyboards and a sweeping string arrangement and never rising much above a whisper despite the violence that crops up in the lyrics.
Staples takes the lead back on "Say Goodbye to the City", which is a tense, brooding grind of violin, syncopated drums, droning bass and minimalist guitar that explodes into gales of dissonant strings and frantic trumpet-- it's their most harrowing song since 1997, and it feels great to hear them back in this territory. Staples turns to a deadpan spoken narrative on "4.48 Psychosis", as the band builds a steadily boiling drone around him, letting drummer Alasdair MacCauley splatter jazz over his rock beat while Hinchliffe's violin coats everything.
Tindersticks are still pretty heavily set in their soul phase elsewhere, as on "Trying to Find a Home" and Hinchliffe's gorgeous "Sweet Memory"; the way the songs sit on the album, you can just feel the group constructing them, letting the pieces fall together naturally. The title track is a pensive music box of strings that gives Staples a perfect bed to shine on-- his vocals are probably one thing most likely to drive someone away from Tindersticks, but once you've acquired a taste for it, his deeply soulful gutter croon becomes a salve for all the worst emotions.
Waiting for the Moon is just what I needed from Tindersticks: an album that doesn't abandon their recent direction, but breathes new life into it by drawing breath from their noisier past. They may operate below the radar of hype and trends-- especially in recent years-- but for whatever public ignorace, Tindersticks are one of the best bands going today. I'm more than happy to have their hands 'round my throat.


"I might not write a very good second album. The thing to do is not take yourself so seriously. The moment when you sort of start to believe all that stuff is when you get in trouble." That's Lily Allen talking to this website in November 2006. At that point, her MySpace clarion of a debut, *Alright, Still*, was four months into what would become a 17-month stint on the UK's album chart. With her bluntly nonchalant, blog-like songwriting about dudes with small dicks, breezy beats worthy of a terrible *Ska-lright, Still* joke, and link-happy marketing campaign from the web

It's Not Me, It's You

"I might not write a very good second album. The thing to do is not take yourself so seriously. The moment when you sort of start to believe all that stuff is when you get in trouble." That's Lily Allen talking to this website in November 2006. At that point, her MySpace clarion of a debut, Alright, Still, was four months into what would become a 17-month stint on the UK's album chart. With her bluntly nonchalant, blog-like songwriting about dudes with small dicks, breezy beats worthy of a terrible Ska-lright, Still joke, and link-happy marketing campaign from the web up, Allen offered the music industry a way forward if not fiscally, at least artistically. She was the New Pop Star-- slight voice, bawdy, prom dress 'n' trainers, self-sufficient. The Anti-Idol. "Refreshing" followed her; "candid" was her friend. And, more than anything, Lily Allen was funny, excelling in the droll British humor of someone who had sold drugs in Ibiza at age 15 and realized the absurdity of a 15-year-old selling drugs in Ibiza.
So it seems odd for this chart guerrilla to fall into so many trad-pop trappings on sophomore album It's Not Me, It's You. There's the sound: Alright, Still's hissy, homey samples are booted for decidedly more streamlined and schizophrenic backdrops. The voice: Allen's conversational and unpredictable flow is replaced with broad, upfront lines. The words: Since she's the story day after day now, the singer's journalistic wisecracks have turned inward-- and this time Lily's taking on biggies like religion, family strife, and drug abuse. The publicity: photo shoots for every wheezing print mag left, including brooding black and whites for Interview and Blender. She's taking herself a bit more seriously, in other words. It's troublesome.
But there is such a thing as good trouble. The push-pull between Lily's sober side and the side that slurred about how she'd "still fuck" 82-year-old Tony Bennett at an awards show last year can make for some appealing and slippery social commentary. Take first single "The Fear", part admission, part brag, part apocalyptic vision. "I want to be rich and I want lots of money/ I don't care about clever, I don't care about funny," she starts, "I want loads of clothes and fuckloads of diamonds/ I heard people die while they're trying to find them." For almost any other artist, the lines would be barbed, sarcastic, and, ultimately, uppity and bland indictments. But not for the loudmouth who recently told Spin about how she hopes to marry a multi-millionaire and admitted to The New York Times that she spent $143,000 on clothes and jewelry in 2008 alone. She's part of the problem and is plagued by an overwhelming sense of collapse; she has her cake, throws it around the restored dining room and then feels a tinge of panic while observing the mess. This is perceptive pop for a consumer culture OD'ing on consumer culture and Houdini investments. "I don't know what's right and what's real anymore," she confesses, sounding like the world's loneliest Real World alum.
When she turns her nose up at easy targets-- W., faith, hypocritical druggies-- this typically beyond-her-years 23-year-old can seem naïve. Futuristic Justice-meets-Care Bears synths flit by as Allen condemns cracked-out teens and their prescription parents on "Everyone's At It", but such revelations come off about as insightful as one of those "but Dad, I learned it from you" PSA's. Righty-baiting "Fuck You" utilizes "Sesame Street" piano plinks to serve its too-goofy hook-- and makes it clear just how easily Allen's winsome brattiness can turn into grating novelty. In her Spin cover story, she talked about her penchant for older men, complaining how 25-year-olds "think they know everything and they're just fucking idiots." Given songs like "Fuck You"-- and considering her usually savvy self-awareness-- the quote is particularly unfortunate.
Aside from a couple Alright, Still-type kiss-offs-- the quotable country lark "Not Fair" about an underwhelming bedmate and oom-pah circus lark "Never Gonna Happen"-- Sincere Lily takes grip on the rest of the LP. Family-minded tracks "Back to the Start" and "He Wasn't There" attempt (and fail) to hide rote therapy maxims behind maddening electro and faux-jazz, respectively. Britney/Kylie/Nelly producer Greg Kurstin works like a radio-ready Jon Brion, tossing out disparate styles with ease, but the stunt arrangements sometimes sound entirely divorced from Lily's accompanying sentiments. But form meets function well on two mid-tempo love songs, "I Could Say" and especially "Who'd Have Known". An airy, angst-less rewrite of Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone", "I Could Say" is snarkless and lovely-- Kid Icarus theme music via bulletproof Europop. "Who'd Have Known" is prime Lily 2.0, growing up without the heavy-handed, 2D "maturity"; it's a knowing ode to early love and all the uncertainty, excitement and irrationality that goes along with it.
"I don't have anything that I'm really passionate about. Maybe I just haven't found what it is yet. But it's not music, which is a shame, because it would be good if it was." That's Lily Allen talking to the New York Times last week. After the quick-hit success of her offhand debut, such a blasé attitude toward international success would be understandable, if a bit nuts. But, given the more considered It's Not Me, It's You, the quote comes off more like hedging; there will always be someone for vultures to photograph, but she's wise enough to know it might not always be her. Even if the new album can be cheaply on-the-nose and opportunistic at times, it's hard to root against Lily Allen. Her plight-- bare, self-conscious, petty, fearful-- is familiar. You see me; I see you.


Originally released in 1999, Underworld's newly reissued rave-inspired fifth LP is often thrilling, but is mainly a fascinating snapshot of the UK group at a moment of ambivalence.

Beaucoup Fish

It was 1999, and Underworld were in a dangerous place. After two decades of ups and downs—they’d been dropped by labels and management, gone deeply into debt, and cycled through four different band names—Underworld had become what they’d decided they never wanted to be again: a real band.
This was a significant change of fortunes from just six years prior. When Rick Smith and Karl Hyde, bandmates since 1979, and a DJ named Darren Emerson, a little more than 10 years their junior, released the trio’s landmark 1993 album Dubnobasswithmyheadman, they were starting from scratch. After getting turned on to the UK’s acid-house scene and abandoning the unfashionable, high-gloss pop-rock of Underworld’s previous iteration, they’d spent the previous couple of years recording a series of dance singles that they sold out of the back of their car.
Underworld weren’t a natural fit for the rave scene—there was Smith and Hyde’s age, for one thing, along with Hyde’s rambling, stream-of-consciousness vocals—but somehow, they struck a chord. Dubnobasswithmyheadman anticipated a growing desire for what’s sometimes been called “progressive house,” but in their case just meant a sound that was psychedelic and enveloping, with a little bit more personality than much of the era’s dance music. (Melody Maker called it a “breathtaking hybrid [that] marks the moment that club culture finally comes of age and beckons to everyone.”) Second Toughest in the Infants, the second album from their new incarnation, burrowed deeper into their moody psychogeography and fueled their continued upward trajectory with critics and fans. Then came Trainspotting. Getting “Born Slippy .NUXX”—until then, a B-side that had attracted little attention—onto the film’s soundtrack earned the band a whole new set of fans, particularly in America, where their vestigial rock trappings poured a spoonful of sugar over the bitter pill of unfamiliar rave beats.
Inspired by rave’s parallel economy—a world apart, massive but underground, with few ties to the old-guard music industry—Underworld had set out to remain independent. But their success, ironically, found them absorbed back into the pop music machine. Beaucoup Fish, the best-selling Underworld album, is fascinating precisely for the ways in which it captures them at a moment of ambivalence.
In many ways, the ’99 record represents a logical extension of their previous two albums. Track lengths have shrunk a bit—there’s certainly nothing like the pair of 15- and 16-minute colossi that kicked off Second Toughest—but they feel long, with tumbling synth arpeggios pushing forward like great big sawtoothed corkscrews. Even at just four and a half minutes long, the barreling piano house of “Push Upstairs” seems epic. And the way the 12-minute opener “Cups” cycles through its different phases even feels like a DJ set in miniature.
On balance, it’s the heaviest of the trio lineup’s three albums. One of the principal takeaways from this remastered reissue is how thrillingly fast techno used to be: Most of the proper club cuts here hover around a blistering 140 beats per minute, and their drum work pulls no punches. Underworld had always taken pride in their idiosyncratic approach: “The purists all hated us, because we were so eclectic,” Hyde told SPIN. But the only thing standing between “Moaner” and techno’s textbook definition is Hyde ranting, “Get the sound in your head/Black metal walls are crawling/I am the hunger above your town,” like a sidewalk preacher beneath his end-of-days sandwich board. (Another revelation here is how much, in retrospect, Sleaford Mods owe to Hyde’s imagistic armchair-sociologist shtick.) “Kittens,” ironic title aside, is an even more straight-down-the-middle take on boomy, big-room techno, albeit fleshed out with pastel-colored shoegaze guitars—part rave, part rocket launch. Blame it on the crash cymbals, maybe, but the track’s atmospherics have aged far better than the beats. The best of the bangers is undoubtedly “Shudder / King of Snake,” which riffs on the bassline of “I Feel Love” and adds bare-knuckled chord stabs and so much percussion that it sounds like a street fight between rival samba schools. There’s not a tougher piano-house track in the annals of Ibiza.
Despite the trio’s significantly raised profile, Beaucoup Fish makes surprisingly few overtures to pop. The only thing that comes close is “Bruce Lee,” a 100-BPM breakbeat tune that takes after big-beat contemporaries like the Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim. Still, there’s no melody to speak of, just an atonal clank buttressed by turntablist scratching. Hyde’s lyrics, which resemble scrambled advertising copy (“Life kid suck/Drink from the box/The juice kicks up/Live give suck the box drink/Yeeaaaah”) are “pop” only in the way Warhol’s soup cans were pop. More intriguing might be two nearly ambient sketches, “Winjer” and “Skym,” that set Hyde against a backdrop of synths and little else. Both songs suggest the lengths the group was willing to go to test listeners’ expectations; that they sequenced the two songs side by side on the album only reinforces what a curiously atmospheric vision they were pursuing.
The album’s most exciting and enduring moments are the ones that pair this suggestive ambient energy with their rhythmic instincts. “Cups” teases a hint of that: Hyde’s bluesy, vocodered melody swirls like colored smoke over one of the album’s most hypnotic grooves, and incidental keys sparkle like the light from a disco ball. “Something Like a Mama” smoothes over its tumbling breakbeats with soft sunrise pads, and the unresolved qualities of its bass-and-synthesizer counterpoints give the track an unmistakably searching feel. And then there’s “Jumbo,” one of the two or three most affecting tracks in their entire catalog. It’s as fast as anything on the album, fueled by crisp, snapping drums and a spring-loaded bassline, yet it feels like falling upward through clouds, like a midsummer snowstorm. It’s here that they truly made good on the immersive, otherworldly potential that always inhabited their music; it’s here that they outdid themselves as makers of extroverted music for introverts, of rave anthems for people happiest alone in their heads.
The extras on the 4x-CD expanded edition comprise mainly alternate takes and DJ remixes. The latter are mainly of interest to collectors. Unless you’re a working drum ‘n’ bass DJ, chances are you don’t need both a vocal mix and an instrumental of DJ Hype & DJ Zinc’s jump-up reworking of “Bruce Lee.” (That said, the techno titan Dave Clarke’s “King of Snake” remix, which folds “It Takes Two”-style hiccups and a bizarrely backmasked cymbal into the original’s rushing chord stabs, is truly a thing to behold.)
The alternate takes are not much more essential, but they offer an intriguing glimpse of any number of possible albums that Beaucoup Fish might have turned out to be. “Skym - A A1317 Nov 97” plays out like an unplugged rehearsal for keys, brushed drums, and Hyde’s unadorned voice. “Bruce Lee - Ricks 1st Dobro Mix” pitches the tune up by a half-step or so and adds silvery steel guitar to the mix. And “Jumbo - Diff Bass 2 A1317 Nov 97” sounds virtually identical to the album version, but without the bright synths and cutting bassline of the latter, it feels like a dimmer switch has been turned down; it’s good, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to the glories of the canonical version.
Hyde has complained that by Beaucoup Fish, some of the “rough edges” had come off their work. “We’re getting a bit professional,” he said of that period. “And by that I mean less intuitive, and more streamlined.” Yet what the outtakes show is how easily it all could have gone wrong. The album’s best tracks, like “Jumbo,” are the most streamlined ones; the album is most successful when it strikes a balance between their habitual grit and a newfound polish. Perhaps they never meant to come back as a real band, but the best of Beaucoup Fish finds them at the height of their powers.


Co-produced with Nashville’s Dave Cobb, the onetime boy bander’s new solo album is a coming-clean, “back to basics” record that hits like background music.

Room Under the Stairs

Zayn’s solo career has been a series of fits and starts, a product of a modern pop landscape where being a talented singer is far from enough to capture the zeitgeist. It may have been a mistake to initially define himself by what he was not: not a Simon Cowell shill, not a squeaky-clean boy band idol, not above laborious concept albums. His chosen character of the brooding, afflicted Don Juan, provocative as it may be, is not exactly unique; even the Weeknd has begun working beyond its creative limits. And with ROOM UNDER THE STAIRS, Zayn seems to be finally casting off that tried-and-tested persona, at least to an extent.
If you’ve ever tuned into SiriusXM’s The Coffee House station, you know what this album sounds like. Doing away with the pulsing, club-ready R&B of Zayn’s past solo work, Dave Cobb’s co-production paints a new backdrop of beachy guitar and live drums, playing into Zayn’s former One Direction role as the introspective crooner. “I’m finding my way on the highway this year,” he declares on “Concrete Kisses,” over sparkling keys and a meandering bassline. Recorded at his home in rural Pennsylvania, this is apparently meant to be Zayn’s coming-clean, “back to basics” record, channeling the likes of Chris Stapleton (another Cobb collaborator) and John Legend as a way of projecting sensitivity. The sound is pleasant enough, if a little too picturesque. The strongest entries are the trio of songs that Zayn didn’t co-write: “Stardust” is a gushy ode to new love, “Something in the Water” has Zayn doing his best Blonde impression, and “False Starts” carries a propulsion that’s sorely missing everywhere else.
While not completely devoid of references to partying—“So fucked, I can’t feel my face”—ROOM UNDER THE STAIRS gestures towards a vaguer messiness of long-term relationships. “Take me as I am, I’m tired/Of dancing around the point,” Zayn sings on “What I Am,” then proceeds to spend the whole album doing just that. Apart from a few true groaners (“Got a big old cup of shit/Told me to drink it”), the lyrics are mostly forgettable mush, circuitous nothings like, “These days, I live to my depiction” (“Grateful”) or, “With no senses, ain’t no sentence/Making sense of us” (“Dreamin”). These garbled thoughts only reinforce the songs as background music—the soundtrack at a boardwalk cafe where you’re only meant to hear every third word, or the needle drops on reality TV whenever one contestant proposes to another. They’re not bad, per se, but they’re anonymous.
ROOM UNDER THE STAIRS follows Zayn’s split from his on-again-off-again partner Gigi Hadid, which ended in 2021 when Zayn pleaded no contest to four charges of harassment for allegedly striking Hadid’s mother. Why, then, are relationship narratives on this album ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness? There’s a moment of startling emotional clarity on “Shoot at Will,” a revealing track where Zayn alludes to his and Hadid’s daughter: “When I look at her, all I see is you/When you look at her, do you see me too?” But for the most part, Zayn appears much more comfortable wearing the mask of vulnerability instead of actually exercising it.


The London artist's latest is a protean collection of a new kind of reggae lovers rock record that finds power in its diverse, hybrid style.

Spaghetto

Gaika Tavares is from the south London neighborhood of Brixton. It is a heterogeneous immigrant neighborhood endemic of the city’s rapid pace of gentrification. Just this year, protests erupted after a cluster of small businesses along the area’s railway hub were presented with sharp rent increases. Gaika returned to Brixton from art school just as the face of the neighborhood began to change. He notes, in an interview with the Fader, that the schizophrenic logic of real estate development would place an artisanal grocery store across the street from a housing project. That image in itself, while increasingly common throughout the globe, still feels like some anachronism playing itself out, as if the future of the neighborhood was flipping off its past.
In just the last two years, Gaika’s been busy archiving this experience of local change into defiantly industrial and viscerally uncomfortable music. His self-released mixtape Machine and his sophomore release Security (for Dre Skull’s Mixpak label) were the building blocks for a musical identity that he has called “ghetto futurism.” In each, he’s honed his blood-curdling howl and hypnotic patois into a sophisticated weapon he uses to castigate the milquetoast evil of the Queen’s government. He is not exactly a rapper, hewing closer to a dancehall deejay (in the style of Popcaan or Vybz Kartel), but the riddims he chooses to “toast” to are startlingly hybrid. He simultaneously borrows from the opiated beats of Clams Casino, the futurist dancehall of Rizzla, the industrial sneer of Death Grips, and the digital discomfort of Objekt or Amnesia Scanner, combining them into a slippery and metallic iteration of unique dance music. His latest release, Spaghetto (and his first for Warp) is a protean collection of eight songs that Tavares has described as his reggae lovers rock record.
Opening with “Neophyte,” he displays a new liturgical aspect to his sound. There is nearly a minute of humming, ambient static, and clouds of hisses before he enters the scene. It renders the entire vibe of the album far more gothic than any of his previous releases and allows himself to widen the scope of his sound and subject matter. In “Neophyte,” he considers the ways in which the black body has been pathologized by racist theology: “We're insecure in this image of God,” he says, and repeats with desperate urgency a warning about the shared vulnerability that creates: “Don't you know they'll break your body?/Don't you know they'll take your body?” He’s joined by Leila Adu, whose chorus (“Feelin' so raw/Livin' in these times/Oh, raw, so”) gives the track gospel-like feel.
In fact, Gaika creates his version of lovers rock by weaving electronic gospel into his dystopian sound. He manipulates his voice in different ways, dropping his howl for a syrupy and sometimes shaky singing voice, and relies on the help of female vocalists. He resides mostly in the background of “The Deal” complementing the singer Alyusha with sharp lines (“It's the deal that we made in blood/And it's written on your skin”). It almost sounds like a knockoff Kelela track, but Gaika's voice is such a weird instrument. It can be goofy and melancholic, almost recalling Lil B. He adds a tinge of goth sad-boy to his production that can soften the acidic dystopian vibe he usually works under, like on “Glad We Found It,” where he relies on a strangely tantric whisper that is overly earnest but lovable. It would almost be more interesting he if sung more songs with his inimitable howl. When he does, like in songs like “3D,” his screed on gentrification and cold city politics feels more forceful and intimate.
That said, Spaghetto is a strong EP from an artist who is surely going to release something even more wondrous variable and strange. He might not have the range, but he does sure have an intelligent sense of adventure and experimentation. Perhaps his music works so well because of its hybridity: mixing dancehall into German techno into gospel into stuff that sounds like Yeezus, all so powerfully. As Homi Bhabha theorized in regards to colonization, hybridity in cultural expression was an essential form of subversion on the part of the colonized and the oppressed. Gaika, like say, Elysia Crampton, is able to fuse vernacular forms into the sounds of popular culture in ways that are pleasurably disruptive and undeniably in your face.


For the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' fourth album, they returned to the casual creative processes that produced their first demo and electrifying debut album, yet they struggle to recapture their early vitality.

Mosquito

There's a refrain you often hear about bands running on the sort of quick-burning demon energy that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were channeling in the early part of the last decade: You had to be there. But on rare occasions, a band will make a record so thick with atmosphere that "being there" is just a matter of pushing play. Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 2003 debut, Fever to Tell, is one of those achievements: Even if you didn't make it to one of the infamous early New York shows and have the pleasure of getting your glasses sprinkled with the beery spit of a grinning, lipstick-smeared frontwoman in tattered Christian Joy, the record itself did a commendable job of bottling that experience. It was a debut that aced music's classic chemistry lesson: Combine a few unlikely, molten compounds, take a step back, and wait for the bang.
When they put out their second album, it seemed, at least at the time, like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were growing up too fast. Show Your Bones favored songcraft over shambolic energy, and sounded disappointingly tame on the heels of Fever's maniacal night-sweats. (It was also the beginning of a creative schism in the band; as Zinner told Spin in 2006, "I didn't want to write and record in a studio... I just wanted to do demos on a four-track in somebody's apartment." He lost that argument.) But in the long run, Bones has aged remarkably well, and now feels like a pivotal moment in the band's arc, setting the tone for a career of evolution, reinvention, and constant forward motion; 2009’s excellent It's Blitz! was a record of glammy, neo-Blondie avant-pop, staying true to their quirks but successfully expanding their range.
Mosquito, the group's fourth record, is its first step backwards. It feels uncharacteristic, calling to mind a lot of words that have never fit this band before: confused, dreary, uninspired, and-- on one particularly baffling song about aliens-- uncool. Karen may have bleached her hair electric blonde and donned some inspired, tinselly Elvis suits, but for once the band hasn't applied a similarly gleeful spirit of reinvention to its sound. Instead, Mosquito aims for more of a back-to-basics approach. "We have this shitty little downtown studio [in New York] that belongs to us," Karen said in a recent Pitchfork interview, "so we wrote songs and recorded demos whenever we felt inspired; it was kind of like Fever to Tell and our first demo." But the often limp Mosquito lacks their earlier material's spark.
Mosquito is not without highlights, but it requires some patience to unearth them, because when this record is bad, it's loudly, brazenly bad. "Area 52" is probably the lowest point in the band's catalog; its lyrics have a Spinal Tap syntax ("Message came from outer space/ Future of the human race") that makes it play like self-parody. The song also features an uncharacteristically wooden vocal from Karen, who's eventually drowned out by a wash of spacey blips and bleeps. At least she sounds like she's having a little more fun with "Mosquito", but even her trademark charisma can't inject a sting into the weak chorus ("They'll suck your blood! They'll suck your blood!" she tries, over and over). It's surprising how off the mark these songs sound coming from a band who used to be able to do goofy well. The upbeat songs on Fever careened with a wobbly, inebriated energy, but whenever Mosquito aims for "zany" or "light," it teeters around like an exhibitionist "drunk" on non-alcoholic beer.
"Mosquito" should have been a B-side at best, but the fact that it's the title track-- and the inspiration for the garish, David-Cronenberg-vomiting-on-a-Garbage-Pail-Kids-card cover art-- makes it that much harder to ignore. That a thin, overly literal song like "Mosquito" is at the center of the artistic statement they're trying to make only makes this album more of a head-scratcher. Whatever's holding this collection of songs together never quite congeals-- a problem exemplified by the James Murphy-produced "Buried Alive", a moody, nocturnal groove interrupted halfway through by a verse from Dr. Octagon (the high-concept, time-traveling alien persona of avant-rap legend Kool Keith) that lands in the song with a heavy thud.
On repeated listens, though, a few diamonds emerge in the rough. Built around Zinner's expectant single-note riff, the gradual crescendo of "Despair" plays like a more muted take on Show Your Bones' best single, "Cheated Hearts", though its refrain is even more poignant. "Oh despair, you've always been there," Karen sings with the perfect combination of exhaustion and defiance, "You were there through my wasted years... there through my wasted life." The closing track, "Wedding Song" (which Karen sang to her husband Barney Clay at their 2011 wedding reception) sounds a bit like a happy-ending sequel to "Maps", brooding with a similar emotional intensity ("In flames I sleep soundly/ With angels around me"). But the most promising-- and perhaps only truly new-- avenue the band wanders down on Mosquito is "Subway", a subtle, evocative sound collage driven by Karen's falsetto and the percussive churn of a train on the track. It's heavy on conceptual follow-through and finely crafted atmosphere on a record where both are in short supply.
On their best and most smartly sequenced albums, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs create a sense that their bratty swagger and disarming vulnerability were emanating from the same power source. In the wake of Fever's amped-up "Date With the Night" or "Tick", "Maps" feels like an inevitable come-down, but the songs on Mosquito don't feed off each other in the same way. The album's most keyed-up moment comes early, in the solid lead-off single "Sacrilege", but when a gospel choir storms the song's closing coda it feels unprompted-- this is a band that used to be able to kindle the same kind of fire from the minimal components of its own chemistry. Still, even if Mosquito suggests otherwise, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' much-lauded SXSW showing and recent homecoming performances in New York prove that magic can still happen for them on stage. Maybe now you just have to be there.


The second album from the mercurial singer lets listeners in on another intimate journey of self-reflection, this time drawing on laconic folk, downtempo rock, and upbeat disco.

Okay Kaya: Watch This Liquid Pour Itself

Watch This Liquid Pour Itself

For Kaya Wilkins, songwriting is therapy. On Both, her 2018 debut under the name Okay Kaya, the Brooklyn-via-Norway singer built a small diorama of minimal bedroom pop with lyrics about her mental health, traumas, and desires. Its moments of feeling lost in social and sexual scenarios were oddly relatable, whether earnestly asking a lover to come with her to get an IUD, or exploring her curiosity about BDSM via Matrix costumes. On her second album, Watch This Liquid Pour Itself, she again lets listeners in on another intimate journey of self-reflection through frank disclosures about her life, this time drawing on laconic folk, downtempo rock, and upbeat disco to foreground a different mental cleanse.
One of Wilkins’ inspirations for Watch This Liquid was Hippocrates’ theory of chemical systems regulating human behavior, especially the black bile secreted by the kidneys that was said to cause depression and melancholia. The album is likewise Wilkins’ own purge, giving equal weight to an everyday encounter, a moment of longing, and a fleeting memory of her past, including time in a psychiatric hospital following a depressive episode. She tells her stories through a lilting voice that crawls from a whisper to a crisp contralto, which highlights her wry sense of humor. “Overstimulated” floats on a gently plucked electric guitar, easing you in as she describes feeling turned on with deadpan over-awareness: “Anything could happen/At any given time/No wonder why I’m overstimulated.” This trick works best with some of her more cynical lyrics; “Everybody, please give a warm welcome to this current mood,” she begins in a woozy, sardonic voice before reminding us we’re all at the mercy of the planet on the deceptively buoyant pop-disco interlude “Mother Nature’s Bitch.”
The album’s more pointed instances of stilted, blunt-force lyrics sometimes undermine Wilkins’ sarcasm. Her verbiage can be so edgeless as to pull you out of the song entirely, like when she grips you by the shoulders in the beginning of “Asexual Wellbeing” for some inexplicable brand-name whiplash: “All I need is your cerebral per diem/That midnight Van Leeuwen/Netflix and yeast infection.” It’s charming and funny in doses, but dilutes the power of her confessionals and keeps us at arm’s length. Later on the album, she tries to get ahead of the most salient critique here: “My lovers used to like all of my songs/Now they only find me annoying.”
Watch This Liquid eventually finds its footing, even if it’s a little off-kilter. “This is Scandinavia,” she pronounces on highlight “Givenupitis,” populating a vision of her home with droll references to its “children of apathy” and “politicians” over a spare trip-hop beat and a ringing bell. In moments like these, Wilkins’ obliqueness gives way to something deeper, raw, and atypical, like on the dreamy, horn-laden “Popcorn Heart,” when she compares her heartbeat to ducklings, “strong, streamlined, and quick.” At times the honesty on Watch This Liquid Pour Itself might be its worst fault, but it’s usually its finest quality.

Buy: Rough Trade/Vinyl Me, Please
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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Ice Cube’s 1990 debut solo record, a groundbreaking piece of hard and funky reality rap that introduced the tabloid decade.

AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted

Ronald Reagan knew television. Broadcasting since the birth of the medium, he always understood exactly how he looked on the other side of the camera. He used TV to cast himself as a kindly septuagenarian who loved jelly beans and playing cowboy, while his aides prepped him not with foreign policy debriefings but by telling him what to do in a particular “scene.” His major political battles were waged by the combined force of law and the mass media against enemies foreign (the Soviet Union) and domestic (the poor, especially Black).
Throughout the decade, a credulous, ratings-hungry TV news media used Reagan’s “law and order” style of right-wing governance to cast young Black men as the nation’s primary criminal menace, known mainly by their Action News poses, described by Ice Cube on “Rollin’ Wit the Lench Mob”: “On my knees in the street /Interlock my hands and feet.” Los Angeles made a great staging ground for Reagan’s so-called war on drugs, and in 1989 the hardline, media-savvy LAPD Chief Daryl Gates invited Nancy Reagan (and a phalanx of TV reporters) to observe a staged raid on a suspected dealer. “The working press arrived to find Mrs. Reagan and Gates munching fruit salad in an air-conditioned motor home parked beside the alleged rock house,” reported the L.A. Times.
By the early 1980s, television had replaced the daily newspaper as the nation’s primary news medium. Increasingly, the cultural relevance or accepted truth of an event was only fully acknowledged once video surfaced on the nightly news, or an evening TV drama ripped the story from the headlines. TV’s unique capacity to absorb, juxtapose, and regurgitate current events through pre-existing genres and cutting-edge visuals would soon come to be characterized as “postmodern,” but a more useful term came from critic Todd Gitlin, who described ’80s TV programming as the ultimate “recombinant” platform. Writing in 1983 of TV shows and films mimicking the increasingly torrid pace of Reagan’s unregulated late-capitalist consumerism, Gitlin explained that “in a world stripped of transcendent unities, the strategy of collage, of juxtaposition, makes the best of a bad situation,” in which “order can be assembled only from the juxtaposition of shards.”
Pop music had been juxtaposing shards into new forms for decades by this point, and no form was doing so more virtuosically than hip-hop, whether via DJs looping rhythmic breaks or rappers adopting outlandish personae and shuffling through pop culture references. As hip-hop became more political, rappers started mimicking the news reporters who were constantly prowling around their neighborhoods. In 1982, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message” opened with Melle Mel braying a tabloid headline about the shards he saw all around him: “Broken glass, everywhere!” A year later, Run-D.M.C. debuted with their own form of recombinant street journalism by flipping Walter Cronkite’s epochal and confident CBS Evening News signoff—“And that’s the way it is”—to a mordant slogan for young Black no-hopers at the dawn of Reaganism: “It’s like that/And that’s the way it is.” A few years later, Public Enemy frontman Chuck D—who was born in 1960 and came of age during the peaks of Black Power and 1970s Black television—took the metaphor to its logical conclusion, telling Spin that “rap is Black America’s TV station,” a medium that “gives a whole perspective of what exists and what Black life is about.”
Ten years Chuck’s junior and perhaps his most prominent admirer, Ice Cube also came of age in front of the tube, and thought of his creative process via televisual metaphor. In a 1990 interview for the rap TV show Pump It Up, Cube pointed at his temples and told host Dee Barnes, “This is my VCR. I just like, go through the streets and live, and kinda observe.” Fittingly, the interview coincided with the release of Cube’s debut solo album AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, the title a timely riff on Fox television’s groundbreaking “reality” television program. America’s Most Wanted was itself very recombinant: host John Walsh addressed viewers from a set that merged the imagery of a TV police station, news studio, and charity telethon, introducing flashy, dramatic re-enactments of violent crimes for which the fugitives were still at large, then prompting viewers to call a 1-800 number with tips. Walsh himself had taken a unique path to fame: after the abduction and murder of his son, he became a national advocate for child safety, and was himself portrayed on TV by Hill Street Blues star Daniel J. Travanti in the blockbuster 1983 made-for-TV movie Adam.
With America’s Most Wanted, John Walsh repackaged his family’s trauma into the character of a mercenary news anchor: Cronkite with a dash of Dirty Harry. On “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted,” Ice Cube also plays an entertainingly inflated version of himself: an intelligent, cocky, and preternaturally media-savvy Black 20-year-old from South Central, who just so happened to have spent the previous summer with his previous group, N.W.A., being surveilled and harassed by cops across the midwest for the crime of writing and threatening to perform a song called “Fuck Tha Police.”
But apart from a quick “FBI on my dick, stay off!” in the third verse, Cube elides the previous year’s drama on the title track (he also saved his epochal N.W.A. diss for his next album). Instead, he casts himself as a fugitive from America’s Most Wanted’s armchair vigilantes, holing up in the hood after a profitable and fully armed “trip to the suburbs” a few weeks earlier. When he sees his face on television, he tries to make a quick escape, but has already been snitched on by a woman down the street watching the broadcast, and is immediately loaded into the back of a police cruiser. The lesson? The police will ignore him for robbing his “own kind,” but the second his character moves into white neighborhoods, he’s got a target on his back.
Cube’s larger point should sound familiar: Sister Souljah made it after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising and became a national pariah. It’s the same justification for why, apart from the police, pop radio was Cube’s biggest enemy, such that he devoted an entire AmeriKKKa track to assailing radio programmers’ fear of alienating advertisers with “real” Black music. A couple decades earlier, it was the same idea that kept the books, films, and recordings of some of Cube’s forerunners and inspirations—The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, Rudy Ray Moore, Donald Goines, Melvin Van Peebles, Iceberg Slim—limited to Black bookstores, record shops, and nightclubs; and inspired J. Edgar Hoover to label the media-savvy armed revolutionaries the Black Panther Party as the “greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.” Less than 25 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Cube and a new crop of vociferous young Black men were actively trolling “the color line”—a phrase popularized by W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk that still dominated U.S. race relations.
But at the dawn of the 1990s, it was clear that the latest front in the long-running war for Black American self-determination would be waged as a mass-media spectacle, attempting to counteract a vast new culture war. The struggle against a supposed coarsening of popular culture, led by far-right conservatives, evangelical Christian groups, and ad-hoc organizations like Tipper Gore’s PMRC, quickly filled the significant political gap left by the waning Soviet Cold War. Democratic congressman Sidney Yates explained it succinctly in a 1990 interview: “You’ve got a fight going on today that is just as emotional as the fight that took place (in the 1950s). Except communism isn’t the bogeyman. This time it’s pornography and obscenity.” Predictably, rappers would soon find themselves in the crosshairs of a media spectacle with dire political stakes.
Hip-hop’s ascendant political revolution would be televised, and not only via Cube licking shots at Soul Train and Arsenio Hall on AmeriKKKa, Public Enemy sending-up of B.E.T.’s news programming on “Night of the Living Baseheads,” or Ice-T squaring off with Tipper Gore on Oprah. After teaming up with P.E.’s production team the Bomb Squad, Cube and his producer Sir Jinx used the newly released digital sampler to mimic cable TV’s depthless channel-flipping phantasmagoria, stirring L.A. electro-funk, a bleak sense of humor, and plenty of TV clips into a fun-house mirror of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back’s ceaseless barrage of Malcolm X and James Brown soundbites. Taking additional cues from De La Soul’s skit-heavy, TV-poisoned masterpiece 3 Feet High and Rising and 3rd Bass’ sampledelic The Cactus Album, AmeriKKKa is what critic David Toop called “television structured music, influenced as much by tabloid news dramatizations as by the fragmentation of TV narrative by over-frequent commercial breaks.” Cube, Jinx, and the Bomb Squad were deploying Reagan’s preferred cultural weapon against the world he bequeathed them.
At the end of the skit that opens AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, during which Ice Cube is executed by electric chair, a man’s voice weaves its way into the soundscape: “Was America willing to maintain order, no matter what the cost?” The voice belongs to civil rights icon Julian Bond, narrating the landmark PBS civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize about the heated late-1960s moment after the FBI had assassinated Black Panther Fred Hampton and police had opened fire on protesters at Attica prison. For Ice Cube, the answer to Bond’s question was an unqualified “yes”: The nation’s very existence was predicated on, at the very least, shutting people like Ice Cube up. But then the sample leads into “The N***a Ya Love To Hate.” Not only would he not shut up, but Cube fought back as the first major rapper to create a brand out of the language’s most notorious slur.
It started as trolling—Cube’s erstwhile collaborator MC Ren loved baiting white journalists into awkwardly saying it aloud during interviews. The word had been intellectually and politically reclaimed via the fire-and-brimstone soul of Curtis Mayfield, the incisive comedy and commentary of Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory, and the minimalist poetry of hip-hop’s politically minded originators. At the time, Cube would occasionally don a black ballcap with that word emblazoned on it. On AmeriKKKa’s single “Who’s the Mack?”, he clarifies that in lieu of the wide-brimmed hats and loud suits of hip-hop’s emergent pimp contingent, he’s “just a straight up N-I-double-G-A.”
The music video for “Who’s the Mack?” was where Cube first demonstrated his gift for cleverly assessing and satirizing Black pop culture. In the clip (directed by Alex Winter of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure), Cube positions himself as a different kind of “street reporter” than he was on “Fuck Tha Police” or “Straight Outta Compton.” Here, he addresses the camera like a TV newsmagazine host while DJ Pooh dramatizes different versions of young Black men trying to get over in the modern world: an abusive pimp throwing sex workers into the trunk of his car, a conniving “squeegee man” bugging motorists for change, and a sleazy ladies’ man talking about his hot tub to women at the club. To Cube, they’re all playing the same con game. Light years from Max Julien’s Goldie character, Cube democratized macking: At the end of the video, President Bush is “President Mack,” disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker is a “Busted Mack,” and over-leveraged Manhattan real-estate developer and soon-to-be-divorced tabloid icon Donald Trump is a “Broke Mack.”
The “Mack” track clearly demonstrated the possibilities of the Bomb Squad and Cube/Jinx’s creative and comedic mind-meld, weaving a period-appropriate sample from Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man soundtrack with Shock G’s winking pimp caricature from the previous year’s pop crossover “The Humpty Dance.” When Cube and Jinx showed up in New York to record, P.E.’s production team sent them to scour a Long Island warehouse basement packed with records to find the samples they wanted to use. “With (the) Bomb Squad it was like, ‘We can’t go to the real studio until we fill these two crates up with records that you like,’” Cube recalled. A couple years before Dr. Dre re-cast P-Funk as G-Funk, “You Can’t Fade Me” flipped the smooth hook from “Rumpofsteelskin,” the Chuck D collaboration “Endangered Species (Tales From the Darkside)” used George Clinton’s “Bop Gun” scream, and “The Ni**a Ya Love To Hate” borrowed “Atomic Dog”s electro-thwack. AmeriKKKa’s production wasn’t nearly as earth-shatteringly great as the Bomb Squad’s on Fear of a Black Planet—the highest possible bar to clear, to be fair. In fact, the album’s best production moment comes on the all-too-brief dice-game drama “What They Hittin’ Foe?”, which sounds closest to what the Dust Brothers had just cooked up for Paul’s Boutique.
During production, Chuck D acted as something of an older brother to Cube. “You don’t gotta become conscious overnight, but you also have to grow,” Chuck said. Though AmeriKKKa was far from the political call-to-action Cube would shape for 1991’s Death Certificate, “Endangered Species”—the subtitle of which was cleverly flipped from the era’s creepiest syndicated TV horror show—laid out his politics clearly. After a news anchor frames the track like an investigative TV news report, Cube dismisses calls to ally with African freedom movements while describing Black Los Angeles as America’s own Bantustan, crawling with racist cops whose primary concern is adding to their personal body count of murdered Black youth. Cube raps it in an angry bark that was becoming his trademark sound. Where Chuck’s booming delivery channels Black oratory through Marv Albert, Cube in high dudgeon raps like a bully taunting you to your face, through a megaphone.
Off-record, Cube was dating a woman whom he’d marry in 1992 (and is still with). On wax, however, women were targeted as much as “the police, the media, and suckers that went pop,” never more than via the selfish asshole who narrates “You Can’t Fade Me.” An R-rated Maury episode a few years before the fact, the track cycles through numerous imagined and violent scenarios to avoid responsibility for a child: “Then I thought deep about giving up the money/What I need to do is kick the bitch in the tummy.” When critic Greg Tate asked Cube to explain that line, Cube replied, “Everybody has fantasies,” aligning the perspective with someone who imagines robbing a bank while waiting for a teller. (“You Can’t Fade Me” was actually quite tame compared to the Geto Boys’ gruesome 1990 track “Mind of a Lunatic,” on which the trio imagined themselves as the most sadistic, murderous villains imaginable.) On “It’s a Man’s World,” Cube’s protégé Yo-Yo plays the straight woman to Cube’s outsize sexist buffoon, but as a battle of the sexes, it’s not a fair fight. This is Cube’s world, and within it, women are required to contort to the vulgar imagination of a 20-year-old with plenty of emotional growing to do, but who still always gives himself the last word.
But at the same time, “You Can’t Fade Me” offers insight into Cube’s greatest gift: storytelling. It’s a macabre view into the mind of a young man with fucked-up priorities, but Cube lays it out with the condensed detail of Slick Rick or Ice-T. Cube’s preternatural skill at evoking the Black suburban experience that served as the mundane background to his gangsta fantasies is still somehow underappreciated, and “Once Upon a Time In the Projects” displays the youthful, creative demeanor that would produce Friday five years later. As the story opens, Cube’s in the family living room of a young woman he’s hoping to hook up with—naturally, the suburban chaos reminds him of Good Times and Robin Harris’ standup routine “Bebe’s kids.” But like an amateur version of a Richard Pryor bit, the scene quickly grows bizarre when, at the end of the first verse, Cube realizes he’s sitting in the front room of a crackhouse. When the cops show up, they misinterpret the word “dope” on his t-shirt and toss him and the girl into a police cruiser. Of course, there’s a moral: “Now the story you heard has one little object/Don't fuck with a bitch from the projects.”
On the surface, Cube’s politics on AmeriKKKa would appear to be a simple reactivation of the Panthers’ media-savvy push for Black liberation in the shadow of Reaganism, but clues to a deeper conservatism are everywhere. Not just in his consistently articulated belief that women were nothing more than sex objects to be used and discarded, but also in “Who’s the Mack?” when he instantly assumes that Black people asking for spare change are up to something sinister, or in “Projects,” when he says the woman’s gang-affiliated younger brother “needs to pull his pants up.”
It wasn’t a Bill Cosby-style integrationist conservatism that Cube aspired toward, but, as a 1990 Rolling Stone interview revealed, the worldview articulated by Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam—whom the reporter observed Cube watching with interest on an episode of The Phil Donahue Show. Over the prior decade, Farrakhan had dragged the Nation of Islam from near-irrelevance onto television and into hip-hop lyrics, selling out Madison Square Garden with an ideology rooted in economic and social separatism. The “projects,” for Cube and Farrakhan, weren’t the symbolic origin of future Black success like they’d soon be for Nas and Jay-Z, but an embarrassment to the Black community that, importantly, it was up to the Black community itself to fix.
Cube would explore his unique approach to Farrakhanism in depth on the double album Death Certificate, but that was still a year away. In 1990, Cube and AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted served as a bombastic introduction to what would later be dubbed “the tabloid decade,” a merger of Reaganist law and order and TV’s shift to lurid infotainment drawn from the supermarket checkout line—otherwise known as the first wave of “reality” entertainment. Specific to hip-hop, it was AmeriKKKa as much as Nation of Millions and Straight Outta Compton that laid the groundwork for hip-hop’s brief and dramatic evolution into an expansive truth-telling media spectacle.


JT and Yung Miami strive to regain their spot as the dirtiest, most provocative hitmakers in rap.

RAW

The title of the new City Girls album is a shocker: RAW aka Real Ass Whores. It’s an attempt to convince the music world that their X-rated anthems of tricking and scamming haven’t lost any edge just because they got real professional in the three years since City on Lock. In that time, Yung Miami, who chants like New Orleans bounce and Miami bass pioneers of the past, settled into the role of talk show host with Caresha Please, an occasionally raunchy and often therapeutic interview series designed to make her the next rapper-turned-mogul. JT, the more hardened rhymer, transformed into a Vogue-approved It Girl, with more appearances at runways than on rap songs. They’ve intentionally steered their image away from the Miami fast life and closer to Vivica A. Fox’s businesswoman in Two Can Play That Game.
As this transformation was taking shape, the City Girls' lawless, horny, club-hopping escapades became a living mood board for the next generation. It’s not out of pocket to say that Sexyy Red’s Hood Hottest Princess, arguably one the biggest mixtapes of the year, wouldn’t have been able to flourish like it did if the duo’s 2018 album Girl Code hadn’t come before it. But who wants to be discussed like musical relics? The City Girls sure don’t. Throughout RAW, they’re on a mission to regain their spot as the dirtiest, most provocative hitmakers in rap.
Too bad they sound too splintered to get there—I wouldn’t be surprised if a chunk of RAW was recorded while Miami and JT were in different cities. They don’t feel like they’re on the same wavelength nearly often enough. Most of the standout moments go to Miami. Her verses are always rich with carefree personality, like how she erupts over the hushed beat of “Line Up” for a few of the most emphatic bars on the album: “It’s just somethin’ about a nigga who put money in a brown bag/Ooh it turn me on like a light switch.” That “ooh” sounds like she’s panting in the booth. Then on “Show Me the Money,” over a flip of Rebbie Jackson’s “Centipede” so fly that you could imagine it in the hands of turn-of-the-century Hov, Miami’s shifty-flowed flexing does Trina on “Nann Nigga” about as well as anyone except Trina herself.
JT isn’t quite an afterthought, but it sometimes feels like she’s clocking in. Her solo track “No Bars” is supposed to be her close-up, and the thudding Michigan-style beat makes you believe that she’s about to black out. Instead the song is pretty tame, full of clean-cut bars about which brands she would like to be sponsored by. (“Got bitches tannin’ for this dark skin” is a good one, though.) There’s a little swag to her opening verse on the Magnolia Shorty-interpolating “What You Want,” even if it’s quickly upstaged by Miami going for broke: “Fuck them kids, I’ma swallow that jit.” As a unit the City Girls are at their best when JT is the core and Miami is the wild card. That’s the case with “I Need a Thug,” a twist on LL Cool J’s “I Need Love.” The way JT rips into her verse (“He walk in parties and you know the sticks is up/I walk in parties and you know the dicks is up”) allows Miami to act more like Freaknik host.
By now you’ve probably noticed that there are a ton of obvious samples on RAW, as is the trend in popular rap. I’m not against that as long as the flip has a point aside from nostalgia mining, and for the most part, the City Girls are good about that. Turning “From the D to the A” into “Fuck the D to the A” (one of their earliest loosies from 2017, sentimentally repurposed on this album) is clever and spiritually right. The Usher hook on “Good Love” can go, but one thing the City Girls should always do is reimagine bass throwbacks. The spin on the “Int’l Players Anthem” sample on “Fancy Ass Bitch” is on the dull side, though without it we wouldn’t have that explosive Miami verse where she breaks out some French: “Hit Paris, oui oui.”
Then there is “Face Down,” straight up first-rate City Girls. Miami and JT take the concept of one of the filthiest—and most degrading—2 Live Crew time capsules and reclaim it by flipping the power dynamics. As the pummeling Mike WiLL and P-Nasty beat goes, Miami lays down imagery that in this day and age could get its own obscenity trial (“I make him face me, nasty, squirt in his mouth”) and JT sets the tone with one of those bars that you want to yell every time, even if you’re part of the demographic whose pockets she’s trying to hurt: “Shoutout my bitches gettin’ bags out of niggas.” It’s two racing minutes that will make you think that the City Girls still got it.


On Willis Earl Beal's second album, Nobody Knows, the music is more diverse and expansive than it was on his 2012 debut, Acousmatic Sorcery. Sounds and styles he only had the tools to hint at before are rendered professionally and in high definition, and his voice is given the sonic space it probably deserves.

Nobody Knows

Acousmatic Sorcery, the 2012 debut by Chicago songwriter Willis Earl Beal, was an album of mysterious, crudely recorded folk and blues that wouldn't have gotten half the attention it did if it weren't for Beal's backstory. An army vet drifting from Albuquerque to his grandma's house on Chicago's South Side, Beal released his earliest recordings via CD-R, usually accompanied by hand-drawn zines, left, as he put it to GQ, "all around the hipster places and the coffee shops"-- places where Beal rightly guessed that people would be drawn to strange, singular art objects that seemed like missives from a subterranean world.
If that all sounds calculating, it's because it was: Like his hero Tom Waits, Beal presented himself as a savant-like character who just crawled out of the swamp but was in reality a savvy performer aware of peoples' longstanding fascination with outlaws, boogeymen, and characters who present themselves as forces of nature rather than products of society. At one point last year, he even told Time Out Chicago he wanted to be an outsider artist, somehow forgetting that one of the conditions of being an outsider artist is not knowing you're an outsider artist.
Thankfully, Beal's backstory isn't as relevant to Nobody Knows, which in 2013 arrives more or less like any other album: Recorded in a studio, released by a label (instead of picked up by one retroactively), marketed, hopefully, like the work of another singer-songwriter just elbowing his way through the crowd. The music is more diverse and expansive than it was on Acousmatic Sorcery, which is probably just a function of better resources: Sounds and styles Beal only had the tools to hint at before are rendered professionally and in high definition, and his voice-- a bellowing, conventionally soulful instrument-- is given the sonic space it probably deserves, sitting in the mix like an old iron anchor.
The songs on Nobody split their influences between old-fashioned blues and indie ballads, replete with the sounds of glockenspiels and warm, staticky ambience. The modes aren't all that different. Blues ballads, like indie confessionals, can be almost threateningly intimate, like a cage built from the singer's feelings designed to trap and hold a listener in place. Parts of Nobody-- like parts of Acousmatic Sorcery-- imitate nervous breakdowns, sexual frenzy, and other states of uncomfortably heightened awareness, but that's the point: A born seducer, part of Beal's routine is to draw his listeners into dark places, lower his eyes, jingle a set of keys, and grin.
Like Waits, Beal is a mishmash of tropes made from a shared language you know without having to be taught it: he's "Cool like a fool in the summertime" on the hymn-like highlight "Wavering Lines"; he's "in transition goin' from town to town" on "Ain't Got No Love"; he's "nine hard inches like a pitchfork prong" on "Too Dry To Cry". He's a shadowy figure skulking the streets at night; he's a corner-store preacher on the brink of revelation; he's a little hambone and a little field holler. He's less a blues singer than a blues incarnate-- an artist that will appeal to people more interested in blues as a theatrical concept than a genre of music.
Which is all to say that despite his apparent idiosyncrasies, Beal is pretty up the middle. Compared to TV on the Radio, Autre Ne Veut, or even Daughn Gibson-- all of whom have experimented with weird, histrionic mutations of the blues-- Beal sounds like a traditionalist more interested in moving ideas around than expanding on them. The real irony of Nobody Knows is that it makes him sound like a more fully realized artist, but a more conservative one, too.


The Chilean American producer’s latest album is his most probing and existential, taking influences from all over his career and placing them into grim atmospheres that slip in and out of reality.

Cenizas

Nicolás Jaar wrote much of his arresting third album in isolation, holed up in a remote corner of the world without booze, cigarettes, or caffeine. It was an attempt to rid himself of negativity, the electronic musician said, but the solitude didn’t work as he planned. Negativity haunted him, as did his ego, and eventually Jaar realized the only way out was through: that he’d have to face his flaws in order to heal. (Indeed, the optically deceptive cover art suggests a turn inward.) Cenizas latches onto this revelation and burns with suspense, fury, and sadness. It isn’t a work of clarity but of cleansing—of reckoning with constructive anger—and offers little relief aside from a few fleeting moments that are so vivid and lovely they almost hurt. It’s Jaar at his most interrogating and existential, exploring grim atmospheres that feel both hallucinatory and troublingly real—a relatable image in a disorienting time.
Occasionally, the audacious way Jaar strings sounds together—warping melodies, skewing rhythms, stretching soundscapes into horizons of feeling—can make you question your perception. How can it sound both noisy and minimal, mournful and alive? Layer by layer, he reveals new dimensions and expands our understanding of what this album is: a cerebral study in sound design that insists upon asymmetry and atonality; a storm of texture and tension that refuses tidy resolution; a heady, meditative glimpse into Jaar’s widening third eye; a quietly radical political statement about inequality and resistance. It is a world in which future jazz, warped psychedelia, ambient noise, and monastic chanting coil together like vines–an example, perhaps, of the producer’s own vision of coexistence.
Jaar, a Chilean American who grew up between Santiago and New York City, appears to be feeling a heightened sense of geopolitical dread. Both countries are in states of violent unrest, albeit of different forms—riots and uprisings across Chile, a slow and ugly unraveling in the U.S.—and it’s hard to find an interview where Jaar doesn’t sound distressed. (His father, the activist-artist Alfredo Jaar, looms in his work.)
Over time, Jaar’s music has become increasingly confrontational and politically charged. His 2011 debut Space Is Only Noise introduced listeners to his disruptive spirit and global tastes. Sirens, his ambient-leaning follow-up, conceived partly in reaction to the rise of Donald Trump, illuminated the cyclical nature of power and the illusion of democracy. Jaar now runs a handful of musical operations—the excellent techno-club alias Against All Logic, the Dave Harrington team-up Darkside, and his own label, Other People—all of which delight in dissonance and rage against cliché. Outside of his solo projects, he’s worked with FKA twigs on her 2019 album MAGDALENE, crafted pipe organ compositions for a cathedral in the Netherlands, collaborated with sound artists in the West Bank, and performed through speakers buried in the Arabian desert for an installation about land rights and climate change. Jaar is determined, he’s often repeated, to explore electronica as a form of protest: “Can electronic music talk about the world around us? Can we get out of this abstract bubble? How can we resist?”
All of these endeavors show up in Cenizas—the choir in “Hello, Chain,” the monastic humming in “Xerox,” the references to saints and sin in “Sunder”—but Jaar’s environmental efforts also trickle in. After completing an artist residency at Amsterdam’s Het HEM, he participated in an exhibit questioning the military’s use of local forests and quoted anthropologist Anna Tsing: “These livelihoods... show us how to look around, rather than ahead.” The line reappears in “Faith Made of Silk,” the album’s absorbing final track, where it doubles as a call to action. “A peak is just the way towards a descent,” he warns. “You have nowhere to look/Look around not ahead.”
Given all the technical ground Cenizas covers, Jarr is an impressively meticulous guide. Every pluck, ping, buzz, scratch, and whistle is intentional, a bump in the tunnel as you slide down the rabbit hole. Once you’re there, he makes even the most discomfiting sounds—a frantic glissando after a tirade of keys, the squawk of a bow dragged across muted cello strings—feel natural. As these foreign environments begin to feel familiar, the less attached you become to your reality.
Jaar seems eager to make you question your instincts. On “Gocce,” he plays with order and chaos, control and surrender, until you’ve suddenly forgotten which you prefer. Do you sink into the meditative loops of “Garden” and rock in its hammock of major-to-minor keys? Or do you prefer the spontaneous turbulence of “Rubble”? Your impressions might shift as you venture deeper. “Agosto” mystified me the first four or five listens, so fitful and deranged. Now, I’m dumbstruck by its strange, serpentine beauty. Every mysterious element of Cenizas—the prickly stimulations, slithering melodies, unnerving atmospheres, and imposing instrumentation—feels designed to get under your skin and stir you awake.
Despite the urgency that permeates the album, it never feels sanctimonious or preachy. Jaar is subtle and ambiguous, sometimes frustratingly so; even his rage is rendered in mournful tones and heaving, negative space. “Mud,” one of the few tracks with a steady beat, marches right up to conflict but doesn’t engage, evaporating into high-pitched hums and electronic vibrations. You can’t help but wonder if Jaar is holding back, and if that in itself is a form of resistance. As he indicated on Sirens, his mission isn’t to further an agenda as much as it is to implore us to act—to speak truth to power, to save ourselves. Cenizas is an album for inner battles, where it’s even more important to keep the faith. Jaar uses the Spanish word for ashes because of its duality; it’s a reminder that destruction generates renewal.


Detroit underground hip-hop star comes to grips with his particularly difficult 2009 on this deeply determined LP.

Album of the Year

Between his solo release Tronic, Fat Ray teamup The Set Up, and his production work on Elzhi's The Preface, Black Milk's 2008 made him look invincible. And you might note the potential tongue-in-cheek hubris in calling his follow-up Album of the Year and assume that he feels untouchable now. But the self-congratulatory name of his new release is deceptive. The year in question isn't the 2010 that the drop date places its contention in, though anyone who loved Tronic or hard-bumping, densely expressive hip hop in general wouldn't be off base in considering it as a candidate. The title is actually more closely connected to a different year: 2009, when Black Milk lost his close friend, Village's Baatin, and saw his manager HexMurda go through a life-threatening experience after a stroke left him comatose.
"'09, hardest year in my lifeline," he admits in leadoff track "365", and you can hear the evidence in this album. But it's not some morose attempt to dwell on a rough period-- it's more like the product of a deeply determined effort to persevere through it all. Some artists redouble their work efforts when they're confronted by trying times, as though hours spent over a notebook or an MPC is the one thing that'll keep them centered. And whether or not that's what pushed Black Milk to another solid album, it's clear he came out of his time in the studio with something more to him: an even tighter grasp on his production-auteur approach.
That approach stretches out a bit more in ambition, even as the sonic imprint becomes more recognizably his. Album of the Year might be called his acid-soul record: "Gospel Psychedelic Rock" practically asks for that tag, but its Westbound-era Funkadelic allusions and heavy R&B mood are echoed throughout the album. And it's a logical progression from his previous work, whether placed up front (the metallic funk of "Keep Going"; "Distortion" and its reverbed, congealed-mercury wah-wah) or woven into beats that recall Tronic's digital pulses and the rich analog bass. In his work with straight-up samples, like when he reconstitutes Blackrock's garage-funk monster "Blackrock Yeah Yeah" for "Deadly Medley", he translates a dusty cratedigger discovery into one of his characteristic headknock beats while amplifying the strengths of the source material. And when he brings in live-band musicians to complete his compositions-- drummer Daru Jones and keyboard player AB chief amongst them-- it all snaps into a deep-breathing focus worthy of the latest Roots record.
There's a lot of sprawled-out jamminess to those tracks, and at their best-- like the understated Afrobeat inflections of "Round of Applause" and the sun-drenched guitar in closer "Final Chapter"-- they ride out in a way that reveals a certain synergy between the way Black Milk approaches rapping and the way he builds beats. There's a real musicality to his flow, and he raps like a producer in that it's hard to tell whether he tailors his voice to his backing tracks or vice versa. He does sound a bit more comfortable riding a sparse groove than a busy one; the wall-to-wall drum fills of "Keep Going" make his voice push like a sprinter trying to charge through knee-high surf, while sparser cuts like the electro-soul "Welcome (Gotta Go)" foreground it in a way that makes it the strongest, most elastic piece of percussion. Either way, he's got enough authority to thread his voice into a rhythm in a way that takes it over, and enough confidence in the beats themselves to let their outros ride out unaccompanied for a good minute or so.
As a lyricist, Black Milk's typically come across as a man who makes being down-to-earth sound like a source of strength. And while there was an unspectacular battle-rap anonymity to his past lyrics, they were at least spit in the service of a strong overall style. Now he's grown a bit, upping the emotional dimension subtly and letting some more specific humanistic details come through, even in the lines that read like average boasts on paper. There's still plenty of quoteworthy moments that serve equal measures of acrobatic internal rhymes ("Coolest flow, signal to my crew the cue to go/ With they fingers on triggers, gunpowder under cuticles") and rib-jabbing punchlines that might risk some eye-rolls. But they wouldn't mean as much if they weren't coming from a man who now drops them in the service of working through some heavy thoughts, dealing with the trials in his life ("Distortion") and the perseverance that helped him get through it ("Final Chapter") in a way that only makes the triumph sound that much more rewarding.