White Lung's newest is more outspoken, more anthemic than 2014's Deep Fantasy, and frontwoman Mish Barber-Way offers provocative challenges to the idea of what it means to be a Good Feminist.

Paradise

Although White Lung sprung from the Vancouver underground, they've never been shy about their ambition. "We'll celebrate breaking even after every single [self-booked] tour," frontwoman Mish Barber-Way wrote prior to the release of their second album, 2012's Sorry. "And that's totally okay with me." With Paradise, their fourth, they've talked about exploring a new pop sensibility, versus "this really stupid attitude that only punks have where it's somehow uncool to become a better songwriter." Barber-Way took singing lessons; they embraced "accessible." None of which, thankfully, has pared down Kenneth William's tar-spitting guitars, Anne-Marie Vassiliou's breakneck drumming, or their powerslide dynamic.
If anything, there's more of a spotlight on those things now. Over time, the Canadian thrashers have increasingly allowed space to let the pop potential of their songs shine through. After the sparking Catherine wheel sound of their last album, 2014's excellent Deep Fantasy, and its predecessors, the production on Paradise is roomy by comparison; convincingly stadium-sized, and billowing with dry ice, a touch indebted to pop's cavernous post-Steve Lillywhite moment. Having ruined her voice on the Deep Fantasy tour, Barber-Way now sings at a gothy remove rather than a throat-mangling shred. "Narcoleptic" chimes with dark, glassy synth-like guitars, and in "Hungry" and "Below," they've written two genuinely affecting power ballads that don't scrimp on attack or scream-'til-it-hurts hooks.
On Deep Fantasy, Barber-Way tackled body dysmorphia and addiction, and wrote bracing indictments of rape culture and the violent and insidious ways it affects society, from outright assault ("I Believe You") to the ongoing fear of getting your drink spiked in a club ("Down It Goes"). Unsurprisingly, it was often labeled a "feminist punk record." Which it was—and an important one, too—but however many years on we are from feminism's big mainstream moment, the term has become a suffocating expectation of art made by women: that honoring the sisterhood must surely be their only intention, that their politics are their identity, rather than the other way around, and should they make any move deemed *un-*feminist, they better line up at the nearest Twitter stake post-haste. White Lung are never a band to follow expectations, and Barber-Way has always expressed disdain for the concept of a singular feminism. As if to celebrate that, on Paradise, she follows the lead of an artist who initially confounded her own ideas of female power and agency.
In 2014, Barber-Way grappled with her appreciation of Lana Del Rey's Ultraviolence in a review for the Talkhouse. At first, she wrote, she had to separate the "Video Games" singer from her art because she found her "annoying." But over repeated listens, Barber-Way arrived at a revelation: "LDR is always searching for herself through someone else and sometimes she hits the mark and embodies the character perfectly." On Paradise (coincidentally or not*,* also the name of an EP by LDR), Barber-Way, who is now based in Los Angeles, shifts between her own perspective and various other female points of view, all of which offer provocative challenges to the idea of what it means to be a Good Feminist.
In one sense, it's a writing exercise: As a journalist in her own right, she's often written about marrying a "motorcycle-riding, Southern-born hick from Arkansas," and that she'd like little more than to abandon her career and escape to the country with him. It's a prospect she says is considered "grossly basic" in her punk peer group—and a happy one that "doesn't make for the best songwriting." But the one spot on Paradise where she tries it explicitly is awesome: It's the subject of the title track, a ride-or-die pounder with a killer chorus where she yearns for her husband to "ride south with me now." She sneers, "I'm all about you/You're all about me too," before asking anyone who cares to challenge her dream, "Oh, is that oppressive? No." A couple of songs seem to deal with getting over the addictions that she's mentioned in the past; what is Paradise if not exerting control over a totally personal environment?
Among Barber-Way's characters are two real-life serial killers. On "Sister," she sings as Karla Homolka, the wife of Paul Bernardo, who at the end of the 1980s became known as the "Ken and Barbie killers" thanks to a spree of murders in Scarborough, Canada—including Homolka's sister, Tammy. "You'll burn a bit/My little sister," Barber-Way sings, over intricate, trebly guitar. On "Demented" Barber-Way imagines a fight between British serial killers Rosemary and Fred West over their mutually assured destruction, echoed by what sounds like a wall of death race around the tip of a volcano. These songs are schlocky, but they serve as part of a deeper inquiry into how we perceive and attribute female desire and agency—female serial killers get shorter sentences than their male equivalents, because it's harder for anyone to believe they'd do it.
Barber-Way has called the sharp-edged "Kiss Me When I Bleed," whose chorus feels like mudsliding through a ring of fire, her riches-to-rags white-trash fairytale. "I will give birth in a trailer," she whines with stubborn pride, singing as a girl caught up with what her family think is the wrong kinda guy. This isn't about bullshit "choice feminism" or "empowerment," but offers a demanding characterization of the battles Barber-Way waged with herself over her own decisions, and one that asks that we examine our own responses: Do we sneer? Why?
Barber-Way wastes no time dismantling the traditional yardsticks of female worth, the rigged games of beauty ("Below") and fame ("Hungry"), and the Republican-endorsed concept of female bodies as pliant reproductive vessels. "Spare your good seed," she laments in a layered, robotic yowl on the hyper-speed "Dead Weight," "I'm getting bored and old." Deep Fantasy screamed itself black and blue fighting back against a culture of oppression. On Paradise, Barber-Way steps outside of her own body and the assaults it sustains, and creates a searing portrait of what it can look like to love without fear, even when that love doesn't resemble the fantasy we've been sold.


Have Fun With God is Bill Callahan and his mixer Brian Beattie's dub version of last year's excellent Dream River. It feels like a live, real-time dub, and in addition to this sense of spontaneity, the arrangements lend themselves well to the treatment.

Have Fun With God

The last decade or so of Bill Callahan’s music has been a steady process of refinement, stripping away extraneous words and instrumentation and leaving only what’s essential. While this trend doesn’t run in a straight line—2006’s Neil Hagerty-produced Woke on a Whaleheart has a comparatively heavy production touch—he’s mostly done away with reverb, distortion, and processing; his music tends to consist of basic instrumentation presented without adornment, reflecting a confidence that the songs are strong enough to do the work. Last year’s Dream River was no exception, so it was on one hand a surprise that an advance track prior to the record’s release was a "dub" version of "Javelin Unlanding" called "Expanding Dub". Dub essentially involves using mixing and effects as a form of expression; the song matters far less than what’s done to it, which initially seemed an odd way to hear Callahan’s spare music. More surprising still was word that Callahan and his mixer Brian Beattie would extend the idea to the entirety of Dream River, creating a dub version of the record, a la Mad Professor’s re-working of Massive Attack’s second album, Protection.
Initial surprise aside, Callahan’s interest in the form makes sense. Classic Jamaican dub from 1970s and 80s is music of great focus and discipline; mixers like King Tubby, Lee "Scratch" Perry, and Scientist often created instrument dubs for the B-sides of 7" singles in a single take, re-working the track and adding effects live while the tape of the original song rolled. So once everything was in place, dubbing a four-minute single would take four minutes, with all of the echo, drop-outs, flanging, and various other effects added in real-time. This approach stands in sharp contrast to today’s standard approach to remixing, which uses non-linear digital editing to allow for endless copying, pasting, looping, and processing. A classic dub doesn’t involve any extending of specific sections—the bones of the song are set and the mixer’s job is to shine light on different elements, foregrounding, backgrounding, and transforming, warping time without changing it. Given that, creating dubs using the tools at hand in Jamaica in the 1970s—often four-track tape machines—required a lot of practice and a tremendous amount of discipline. And the best dub can also feel like a celebration of the individual instrument, as parts fall away and you zoom in on the texture created by a simple bassline.
All that squares with Callahan’s approach to sound, and, however it was actually made, Have Fun With God feels like a live, real-time dub. The tape rolls, and the essential arc of each song is unchanged. In addition to the sense of spontaneity, the arrangements of this record lend themselves well to the treatment. Hand drums, flute, and clean guitar lines all lend sound rich in isolation, and light touches of echo, and Callahan’s voice, so front-and-center on his recordings, works well when single words or even syllables are called out and given light touches of effects. It’s also pleasingly disorienting to hear the music of this word-focused artist transformed in such a way that the words don’t really matter—here they mostly become sounds. With a couple of exceptions, where the tracks playfully focus on a key moment in a song (like the call-out of "beer" in the opening "Thank Dub"), there’s no attempt to pay the lyrics any particular attention or amplify the song’s "meaning." The approach also underscores the fact that there are some nicely tricky little rhythms pulsing under these mid-tempo songs.
So at its best, Have Fun With God works well as an experiment and as a listening puzzle to work through. If you know Dream River well—and it’s hard to imagine anyone else being interested in this record—you’ll hear new things in it after giving this record a couple of spins. It also seems safe to say that, despite its charms and left-field nature, Have Fun With God will be a minor entry in the Callahan catalogue, remembered about as well as his low-key 2010 live album Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, which is not to say I’m not glad both exist.


The Chicago rapper reflects on a bleak personal year and starts to recapture the optimism of his earlier music.

Days B4 III

If you begin to notice an uptick in melodramatic and emotional social media posts, that usually means new Lucki music is in the air. Earlier this year, the Chicago rapper released Freewave 3, a bleak project that detailed his heartbreak and the drugs that lead to that heartbreak. At times, the album is an uncomfortable listen, as Lucki narrates low points that typically would be reserved for a therapist: On the album’s centerpiece “Peach Dream,” his mother googles the effects of lean and sends him articles about the impact the drug will have on his kidneys.
With the 23-year-old’s second project of the year, Days B4 III, Lucki is in a better place. If Freewave 3 was rock bottom, then Days B4 III is the climb back up. He reflects on his last year, getting everything off of his chest before he can finally move on and recapture the optimism that laced his music when he was a teenager.
Lucki’s music works so well in large part due to his ear for production, plodding hi-hats that make it feel like your brain is stuck in quicksand, and his eerie, doomsday melodies. On Days B4 III, Lucki works with a team of producers that help him create that downcast sound: From a homegrown Chicago producer like DJ Eway to SoundCloud pillars like 16yrold and Brent Rambo. The twinkly and dreamy “Geeked,” produced by Condo, best defines Lucki’s blurry world. “Codeine never get bored of me,” he says, reflecting on times when he was most dependent on drugs. Even when Lucki tackles brighter production, like the spacy 16yrold-produced “Way 2 Rare,” he still fears spiraling back into that isolation: “Left me all alone, I hope there’s two of me,” he murmurs.
Lucki can portray his self-destructiveness with the clarity of Future, like when his son asks why his water is pink on “TBT.” He wears the influence of Chief Keef on his sleeve, both in the Almighty So-inspired cover art and the way he pairs a narcotized delivery with a choir of ad-libs like on the cryptic Working On Dying-produced “Left 4 Dead.” And like a throwback New York storyteller, a city that he has spent a lot of time in, he can piece together coherent and lively tales when he wants to.
His best story is the bitter finale “Last Time Mentioning (Good Riddance),” as he bitterly recaps the friends, girlfriends, and opportunities that drugs have driven away in the last year or so.  But, just like the song title hints, he wants to put it behind him. When Days B4 III ends, the dark clouds separate and the sun peeks through. It’s a suggestion that maybe he’s through with the story he’s been telling and adding to since he was 17, and now he’s ready to begin a new one.


Carey Mercer and co. follow 2007's triumphant Tears of the Valedictorian with another record of ambitious, high-wire indie rock.

Paul's Tomb: A Triumph

Indie rock can sometimes seem like a figure skating competition, where those who can't make their vocals the prettiest instead aim for the highest degree of difficulty. Certain artists-- the Dirty Projectors, Joanna Newsom-- stretch the limits of the seven-note scale, crafting melodies that take longer to resolve than sentences in a German philosophy text. Others go for extremity of tone: the glass-shattering falsetto of Passion Pit, or the chest-rumbling baritone of the National. Frog Eyes' Carey Mercer grafts a combination of these approaches into his own voice, a slippery beast that sounds like it gargles with wax in the morning. And while some bands might settle for those vocal contortions as their only exotic feature, Frog Eyes' arrangements are every bit as unpredictable as Mercer's catalog of shouts, groans, and other odd emphases. At full flight, the band's lengthy epics trace impossibly complex patterns that can be briefly stunning in the rare cases where they improbably collide.
When we last heard from Frog Eyes-- before the weird-vocal derby really got fired up-- they left us with their best example of that spectacle: the serpentine, cathartic "Bushels". That song appears, at first, to have passed its baton to Paul's Tomb: A Triumph, which opens with the sprawling "A Flower in a Glove" and then winds its way through three more six-minute-plus journeys. But a disappointing pattern begins to take shape in each of these long chapters, as the band begins on a promising note during the first three minutes, but exhausts itself over the last nine.
That lack of endurance doesn't hurt the shorter songs on Paul's Tomb, which are powered by a claustrophobic energy of guitar screech, stop/start rhythms, and Mercer's strange, over-enunciated vocabulary. "Rebel Horns" packs several minutes' worth of multi-stage composition into an economical four-minute package. The similarly brief "Odetta's War" and "Lear's in Love" (in which Mercer tries to set the world record for most syllables in the stock lyric "I kissed a girl") both possess the kind of compressed, ferocious intensity that so often becomes diluted during the noodly excursions of the lengthier tunes.
All the same, it's clear that Frog Eyes like long songs. I like long songs, too. But the less focused, super-sized tracks on Paul's Tomb: A Triumph, especially compared to 2007's outstanding Tears of the Valedictorian, can't help but look like a hole shaped suspiciously like Wolf Parade/Sunset Rubdown's Spencer Krug, a former roommate and bandmate of Mercer's who doesn't appear here. Even in Krug's absence, cues could have been taken from him, or from Frog Eyes' other famous BFF, Destroyer's Dan Bejar, both of whom have recently charted long songs that stray far from their starting point, but nevertheless reach satisfying conclusions. As both of those artists understand well, even the flashiest skating requires a graceful finish.


This split LP from Blut Aus Nord and Ævangelist explores black metal’s capacity to accommodate an array of sounds and moods, not just grimness.

Blut Aus Nord / Ævangelist: Codex Obscura Nomina

Codex Obscura Nomina

If you were to pluck OG black metal fans from the past and drop them in the present, they might be horrified to hear what the genre has been turned into by artists who just don’t care to play by the rules. This split LP from Blut Aus Nord and Ævangelist, two acts who warp the parameters of black metal almost beyond recognition, drives that point home vividly. With their previous records, both bands have demonstrated that it’s possible to present myriad new shades of grimness. Here, each group elevates its craft to another level.
The first half of Codex Obscura Nomina consists of four pieces by Blut Aus Nord that fall under the title “Spectral Sonic Waves (The Sound Is an Organic Matter).” The long-running French quartet (whose name translates roughly as “blood from the north”) makes no bones about its disregard for black metal purism, flat-out declaring its intention to “erase all preconceived ideas of black metal— and extreme music in general.” It’s hard to find any reason to argue that these four songs don’t succeed in that mission. If you’re coming at this release from the band’s most recent work, 2014’s Memoria Vetusta III: Saturnian Poetry, be prepared to have your expectations shattered.
Drawing far more heavily from avant-garde, classical, and industrial influences this time, Blut Aus Nord bend pitch to such a degree that they almost manage to erase all preconceived notions of harmony too. At times, you might get the impression that the entire mix was run through into a harmonizer effect—but close inspection reveals that this band pays far too much attention to detail to rely on sheer sonic overload. And, in dramatic counterpoint to the last album, bandleader Vindsval, electronics player W.D. Field, and drummer Thorns eschew traditional black metal drumming, leaving far more space to hear every microtonal nuance in the meshwork of sounds.
By the same token, the band (which also includes bassist GhÖst) has taken great care to manipulate the instruments so that it’s hard to tell the difference between guitar, bass, keyboards, ambient samples, or voices run through effects. And the results are delightfully queasy from start to finish, landing in an ambiguous emotional space that feels like new territory for black metal. “Infra-Voices Ensemble,” the final track of Blut Aus Nord’s side of this album, goes even further than the previous three. With its programmed beats and half-discernible melodic keyboard progression buried in a snowstorm of effects, “Infra-Voices Ensemble” sounds like the band imagined My Bloody Valentine remixed into a dance track by Justin Broadrick.
Consisting of a single 22-minute track titled “Threshold of the Miraculous,” the Ævangelist half of this album contains more traditional black metal elements than Blut Aus Nord’s half. But that doesn’t mean that Ævangelist, an American duo that’s been around for way less time than Blut Aus Nord, isn’t being ambitious in its own way. In terms of scope, “Threshold of the Miraculous” takes an obvious step forward from the band’s most recent album, last year’s Enthrall to the Void of Bliss. This time, the band stretches its trademark blast beats, double bass drum volleys, miasmic clouds of keyboard and guitar, and monstrous growling into through-composed symphony. At times, the music veers off onto lengthy tangents with spoken-word vocals. During the second spoken section, frontman Ascaris delivers his vocals in a near-rap. “Eternity depends on this!” he declares over a hissing avant-industrial beat and Prong/Godflesh-style bassline as upward-pitching ambient swells threaten to engulf all the other instruments.
Just like other side of this split, the effect is queasy, but more forcefully so. (It’s probably not the best idea to listen to this tune with a hangover.) Clearly, Ævangelist meant to intertwine these disparate threads into a larger whole, but the majority of “Threshold” covers much of the same ground as “Meditation of Transcendental Evil,” the 14-minute piece that closes Enthrall. And compared to the sonic unification of the Blut Aus Nord songs, “Threshold” tends to meander. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, this split sets the high water mark for black metal’s capacity to accommodate an infinite array of sounds.


Featuring Mitski, David Byrne, Moses Sumney, and Randy Newman, the synth-rock trio’s score for the sprawling action film embraces chaos with an audacious range and unremitting sincerity.

Son Lux: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The sounds of Son Lux almost feel primordial. Somewhere in the cosmic gesturing of their music is the blurring of finality: Beginnings and ends erupt into flames as bright synths and apocalyptic broodiness collide. While initially a solo act, Son Lux grew into a trio when Rafiq Bhatia and Ian Chang joined Lott for 2015’s Bones. Their following albums, a sequentially numbered trilogy called Tomorrows, elevated the existential cyclicality of their work into something new and anarchic. These records seem to connect what would otherwise seem disparate: Ethereality becomes haunting, anger becomes plaintive, and sounds portend the infinite.
Their sonic location, somewhere between creation and destruction, renders Son Lux fitting to score the swelling Everything Everywhere All At Once, a film by the Daniels—the duo of directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert—that, too, disavows the conventional limits of creativity. Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is a middle-aged woman who is tired of her life: her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) scorns her, her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is readying a divorce, and the IRS is on her ass. Evelyn is tired of watching laundry tumble, of filing her taxes, of a path that has seemingly spun her in circles. Explosively kinetic, Everything Everywhere All At Once seeks a dynamic score able to match its ferocity. Son Lux delivers. Their soundtrack becomes our conduit across the multiverse, transcending and melding worlds otherwise alien to each other: sci-fi and kung-fu, hot dog hands and Debussy, slapstick and sincerity, mothers and daughters.
The thrill of Son Lux’s score is in its audacious range. As Everything Everywhere All At Once snaps between zaniness, hilarity, darkness, and hope, so too does its soundtrack. The dreamy piano theme of "Wang Family Portrait" foregrounds the film’s saccharine core, emerging in gentler moments: Evelyn’s family together, nostalgic gazes into the past, and visions of lives that could have been, in another universe. On the contrary, blustering tracks like “The Fanny Pack” are brash reminders that you’re watching a true action blockbuster, as strings tinged with adrenaline and held by an addictive bassline bring comic bravado to a fight scene set in an IRS office. Eeriness is also afoot in the score; Son Lux, better than most, knows how to make you shudder. Just listen to “I Have Been Watching”—Nina Moffitt’s vocals, so bare against saturated strings, are startling.
Despite running an hour and 54 minutes, the score doesn’t lose coherence. It repeats and reworks the same few themes: “Clair de Lune,” for instance, can be heard in “Deirdre Fight” and “My Life Without You,” in addition to its eponymous track on the score. “Come Recover (Empathy Fight)” is the expanded version of “Come Recover” on Tomorrows III. The score is a total achievement of ingenuity. Speaking to Slash Film, Bhatia, Chang, and Lott divulged that this score took years to compose. They had to learn new instruments, like the Chinese paigu drums, and also learn new ways to fuck with the old, like the violin (which were “played with crazy things,” said Lott), and the trumpet, played by director Kwan, who—no virtuoso himself—deliberately butchers it. Son Lux are also joined by a wonderfully odd cast of collaborators: Mitski and David Byrne, who duet on “This Is a Life”; Moses Sumney, for whom Chang drums; André 3000, improvising with the Mayan flute he’s been learning in private; and Randy Newman, offering his voice to both “Now We’re Cookin’” and an anthropomorphic raccoon in the film.
“This Is a Life” closes Everything Everywhere All At Once, and it endearingly captures its heart with unremitting sincerity. “This is a life/Free from destiny,” Mitski sings, and then with Byrne: “I choose you/And you choose me.” Both Everything Everywhere All At Once and Son Lux’s broader artistic ethos are rooted in the imperative of creation, so sprawling in its possibilities as to span an entire multiverse. Life, like music, is meant to be created. We can choose to fester in the bleakness of our unerringly chaotic world, or—like the Daniels and Son Lux—we can see chaos for what it is: an art of its own.


After a string of misfires, the UK musician’s 14th album translates unimaginable loss into some of his most darkly moving music in years.

Fall to Pieces

Tricky has always worn his bruised heart on his sleeve. His brilliantly desolate debut album, Maxinquaye, was inspired by his mother, who died when he was four years old, and a song like “Strugglin’” laid bare in excruciating detail his experiences of pain, darkness, and toil. Fall to Pieces, which contains some of the most darkly moving music that Tricky has produced since that debut album, was produced in the shadow of tragedy. Tricky’s daughter Mazy died in 2019 as he was beginning work on a new record. Here, on his 14th studio album, he translates that unimaginable loss into moments of nauseatingly raw emotion.
“Hate This Pain,” one of the first songs Tricky worked on after his daughter’s death, channels the sickening depth of his loss into music of visceral simplicity. Tricky’s production, particularly in his early years, was enveloped in a dank, psychedelic murk that seemed to ooze out of the grooves. “Hate This Pain,” however, is unusually and agonizingly clean, its surfaces exposed like a fresh wound, a pristine MTV Unplugged in New York to Maxinquaye’s Nevermind. The song centers on a blues piano trill and tiny dabs of cello, trumpet, and slide guitar, over which Tricky and new vocal partner Marta Złakowska trade lyrics of deepest despair. It’s his best song in decades but almost exhaustingly moving, with unvarnished lines like “What a fucking game/I hate this fucking pain” delivered with agonising intensity. “Vietnam,” in which Tricky and Złakowska share a whispered duet over a detuned guitar riff, and “Take Me Shopping” have a similarly barren simplicity, reminiscent of the bleakly beautiful English West Country blues that PJ Harvey pulled from the stone on Dry.
However personal the burden of Tricky’s grief, his collaborators have played a significant role in shaping the sound and feel of the album. Marta Złakowska, who Tricky discovered in a Krakow bar after a singer dropped out of his Polish tour, has the perfect voice for a Tricky vocal foil, her spectral tones the wisp of smoke to his cigarette-end mutter, while Marie-Claire Schlameus’s cello and Kristof Hahn’s slide guitar creep around the arrangements with the finesse of art thieves. It’s a shame that some of the album’s electronic touches—the minimal drum pattern on “Thinking Of” or the cheap-sounding bassline on “I’m in the Doorway”—feel rudimentary in comparison to the band’s graceful touch. But electronic experimentation does play a major role in two of the record’s most intriguingly unorthodox productions. ‘‘Running Off,” with a prominent sample from Croatian musician Đuka Čaić, is a kind of Eastern European electro blues, while “Fall Please,” with its stuttering synth riff and percussive nods to D.C. go-go , is almost upbeat in its outlook.
Tricky calls “Fall Please” “the closest I’ve got to making pop,” which may overlook the pop nous of songs like Maxinquaye’s “Black Steel” (and overestimate mainstream taste for skeletal go-go production). But “Fall Please”—like Fall to Pieces as a whole—does share the laser-sharp emotional focus and melodic efficiency of the best pop music. Bar the rare moments of clunky electronics, almost every sound, touch, and shade on Fall to Pieces feels like it had to be there, in blessed contrast to the rambling dead ends, failed experiments, and misjudged covers of Tricky’s recent records. Fall to Pieces is an audacious cri de coeur that ultimately finds strength in adversity where others might fall apart.

Buy: Rough Trade
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It's sometimes easy to forget why Billy Corgan is famous, but these reissues of Smashing Pumpkins' first two albums underscore what made them so vital at the dawn of the 90s and why their influence is still felt today.

The Smashing Pumpkins: Gish [Deluxe Edition] / Siamese Dream [Deluxe Edition]

I remember reading a desert-island-albums list by Billy Corgan in 1993 that was so scarily like my own musical arc-- pop/prog/metal nerd discovers goth, Jane's Addiction, and My Bloody Valentine-- that I couldn't have been more designed for Smashing Pumpkins hyperfandom if I tried. Like no one before him, Corgan made those influences work. As Canadian writer Jennifer Nine once put it in Melody Maker, you got a sense that he was the kind of guy who worked out every last transcription from Guitar Player in the 1980s and then actually did something with it. It helped that the rest of the band had their own skills, especially in the case of Jimmy Chamberlin, a jazz/hard-rock drum freak let loose on alt-rock radio.
Alt-rock radio, at its height of commercial trendsetting, enabled the Pumpkins to not merely survive but thrive. There, Corgan could have his cake and eat it too, daring people to get annoyed at his starlust and reacting in kind while further building up his ambitions. He got his band signed to a major label and used the fig leaf of a corporate indie release for Gish, scored a prime spot on the Seattle-focused Singles soundtrack with "Drown", essentially went "Haters gonna hate" with Siamese Dream's first single "Cherub Rock", and got petulant when any other acts or writers accused him of protesting too much. And not just Pavement, either: "You hurt me deeply in my heart," he once infamously pouted to Kim Thayil before a 1994 Australian concert, following which the Pumpkins went on "to play the best set anybody has ever heard them play."
All of which goes some distance toward explaining why both reissues of Gish and Siamese Dream-- appropriately loaded with rarities, DVD bonuses, fancy packaging, and often-impressionistic song-for-song liner notes by Corgan-- remain remarkable though unequal listens. Even in 1991, Gish felt like something that started off well with songs like "Siva" and "Rhinoceros" but meandered a bit toward the end. Corgan's voice never sounded as lost in his music as it does here, and most of the emphasis is on the band's collective performance: Chamberlin's powerful, fluid drumming, Darcy Wretzky's strong basslines, and that thick, chunky glaze of guitars.
The rarities disc contains a few never-before-heard numbers, a few that have long circulated among fanatics (the Corgan-sung version of "Daydream" is a keeper), and a handful of remixed selections (including their best full-on rock epic, "Starla") that first surfaced on a full-length release via the odds-and-ends release Pisces Iscariot. These tracks do a better job of showcasing the band's various sonic sides than Gish itself. The DVD, a multi-camera cut from a live show at the Metro in Chicago almost a year prior to Gish's release, shows that the band already had their exact arrangements pretty well down, as well as a worshipping fanbase. The highlights include Corgan and James Iha's heavily long hair, curious fashion choices all around, and set-closing covers of Steppenwolf and Blue Öyster Cult; the video quality is pretty good and the sound mix, if heavily favoring the vocals, beats out most bootlegs of the time.
In contrast to Gish's steady flow, Siamese Dream crashes out of the gate. "Cherub Rock" remains an absolutely stellar opener with a sense of pure sonic melodrama, thanks to Chamberlin's circus-act drum introduction, a tight clip of guitars quickly matched by equally nimble bass, a volcanic blast of a guitar lead, and then a shift to a woozy, still-building sprawl. And all this before the first verse even starts. Throw in everything that followed-- the overt MBV worship of "Hummer", the country-rock-tinged wanderlust of "Mayonaise", "Soma"'s update of Prince's "The Beautiful Ones" for a new decade, and inevitably the MTV/radio hits "Today", "Disarm", and "Rocket"-- and no matter your take on its mastermind or his divisive whining/sighing vocals, it's an embarrassment of musical riches.
There's also the fact that the album's studio personnel was as essentially stripped down as the White Stripes; Corgan, frantically taking charge in the midst of band dysfunction, recorded nearly everything himself aside from the drums, and he'd probably have handled those too if he could. Siamese Dream's songs don't blend into each other, but some transitions exist; each stands out in a brilliant sequence, forming perhaps the best concept album they ever made.
One of the main things people complained about was exactly what made the band click even further. If Corgan's early lyrics were classic self-centered/self-righteous/self-pitying teenagerdom run amock, he always had an ear for hooks, metaphors, and deft summaries (thus, on "Mayonaise": "Fool enough to almost be it/ Cool enough to not quite see it"). It's catnip for when you have it bad, no matter how minuscule your problems might really be, and any number of later bands (My Chemical Romance most obviously, and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart most recently) took plenty of notice.
As for the many rarities, more Pisces Iscariot remixes and other demos and alternate versions take a bow, including a six-minute version of "Siamese Dream" itself (the original B-side version was a shorter and murkier take that ran under three minutes) and twin instrumentals "U.S.A." and "U.S.S.R.". The DVD is the most worthwhile addition of either reissue; taken from another Metro show a couple of weeks after Siamese Dream's release, it vividly illustrates how far the band had come in the three years since Gish: It showcases their more varied sound, Corgan's keener sense for playing to the crowd (there are flashes of his and Iha's underrated sense of humor), a killer setlist drawing on both albums (plus "Starla" and "Drown"), and brilliant sound and performances throughout. If Corgan's voice shows strain at many points, the crowd shots are especially entertaining, with endless moshpits and crowdsurfers during most of the loud points and plenty of the slow ones.
The full story of the band's existence has plenty of ups and downs to go through, and there are more reissues to come to spell this out, even as the current version of the band moves along according to Corgan's own cryptic impulses. Yet these two releases still resonate, as both a nostalgia fix underscoring how it was so easy to fall for Smashing Pumpkins in the first place, and as the best introductions to their music any newcomer could want.


The workmanlike renditions of hits he hadn’t played in years don’t rank among his best live takes, but there’s still a thrill in revisiting this curious point in the shape-shifting star’s career.

Glastonbury 2000

According to many British music publications, David Bowie’s headlining set at the Glastonbury Festival in 2000 is the greatest performance in the history of the legendary event. (NME, ever effusive, called it “the best headline slot at any festival ever.”) But it’s greatest that’s doing the work here, not performance. It’s not individual highlights that make the set so fondly remembered, but the overall gestalt. Like the old saw about climbing Everest, Bowie’s Glasto set mattered because it was there.
By the time he took to the Pyramid Stage, Bowie had spent 15-odd years in the mainstream-music wilderness—first, post-Let’s Dance, making milquetoast megapop no one particularly liked, then rebuilding his reputation with experiments in everything from Pixies-inspired garage rock (Tin Machine) to concept-album Eno-industrial (Outside) to a Nine Inch Nails/Goldie hybrid version of drum ’n’ bass (Earthling). Different people liked these experiments at different times and in different amounts, though never at the level of his 1970s and early-1980s output. (Earthling rules, for what it’s worth.) During much of that period, his greatest hits were largely retired from service in his live sets.
But now, with a generosity of spirit as lush and flowing as his hair—which hadn’t been that long since Hunky Dory—Bowie was back! Resplendently coiffed and backed by a familiar band of musicians (including pianist Mike Garson, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, and guitarists Mark Plati and Earl Slick, all of whom worked with the star for years), the once and future king of art pop was welcomed by the sprawling home-country crowd like Arthur Pendragon returning from Avalon.
The resulting set is an ebullient greatest-hits package anyone who was ever a fan is sure to enjoy, almost automatically. Actually, make that mostly automatically. How Bowie performed songs like “China Girl,” “Changes,” “Golden Years,” “Ashes to Ashes” (which he misremembers aloud as being the most recently recorded song in the set at that point, though he’d already sung “Absolute Beginners”), “Let’s Dance,” and so on is much less important, both historically and to the festival audience, than the fact he was playing them at all. And sure enough, none of these hits—not even the surefire crowd-pleaser “Under Pressure,” which he’d dueted on so memorably with Annie Lennox at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert a decade earlier—do anything more special in this performance than exist.
The band works much better when the material allows it to lean into its sleazy, session-pro sound. “Fame,” the John Lennon lost-weekend plastic-funk collab that seems to leave a trail of slime across eardrums whenever it’s played, sounds as dashing and debauched as ever. Recorded when Bowie was just a few months deeper into both 1975 and cocaine psychosis, the teutonic-occult behemoth “Station to Station” is another standout. Both the off-kilter groove of its main section and the barreling braukeller climax, with its guitar squalls and yelps of “It’s too late!,” feel made for massive crowds. (Which, as far as the Thin White Duke persona of that period is concerned, was sort of the point.) Moreover, hearing Bowie croon Kabbalistic jargon like “one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth” to said massive crowd serves as a helpful reminder that he remained, even then, one of the weirdest people ever to achieve festival-headlining success.
The anthems also fare comparatively well. Sterling Campbell’s drums and Mark Plati’s guitars on “Ziggy Stardust,” for example, hit each downbeat in the song’s legendary glam hook so hard that it’s like they’re trying to beat the doomed pop-star character’s crazed fans back down off the stage. It’s immediately followed by another of Bowie’s career-defining hits, “‘Heroes’,” which has achieved an iconic second life of its own in the “David Bowie Is…” museum exhibit and Julien Temple’s Glastonbury documentary. Bowie and company ease into this one, downplaying the desperate romance and holding the soaring Robert Fripp guitars back until after the second chorus; by the time Bowie scream-sings “I, I will be king/And you, you will be myyyy queen”—adding the possessive pronoun to deepen the connection between himself and the audience, to whom he reaches an outstretched arm on the DVD—they’ve taken to the skies and don’t set down again until the song ends.
Occasionally, intimacy works in his favor, which is no mean feat in front of a 150,000-person festival crowd. The set opens with his Station to Station cover of the Johnny Mathis ballad “Wild Is the Wind,” a terrific way to throw people who want to rock the fuck out off balance. After regaling the audience with a plea to sing for him should his recent bout of laryngitis prevent him from finishing—a charming bit of openly bogus self-effacement, given the brassy late-career warble he’d already deployed for four songs—Bowie drastically rearranges the vocal line on “Life on Mars?” to suit his aged range. Listeners inured to the song’s grandeur by decades of repetition now have to hang on to every word and note to see where it’s headed. It’s a brilliant maneuver by one of rock’s canniest communicators.
But more often, such shifts weaken the songs’ power. The rip-roaring disco/hard-rock hybrid “Stay” comes across like a soundcheck in its too-quiet chorus, and “Under Pressure” is underplayed to its detriment. Understandably, Bowie fares better in the set’s happily confrontational closer, “I’m Afraid of Americans,” which makes his lower range sinister and sneering—a far cry from the back-to-back bangers “Rebel Rebel” and “Little Wonder,” recorded nearly 25 years apart, neither of which bang much at all as presented here.
Whatever its historical import, Glastonbury 2000 is primarily a pleasant run-through of beloved songs for a gigantic, besotted crowd—a signal to people who were dying to love David again that, yes, he wanted to be adored. The DVD that accompanies the CD package conveys both the awe-inspiring size of that crowd and the excitement they and the artist shared about being there that night, making it almost certainly the proper way to experience the set. But compared to other official live Bowie releases, from the coke-addled craziness of the Diamond Dogs-era David Live to the far more muscular A Reality Tour set recorded a few years after Glastonbury… Well, as an album, this makes a helluva souvenir. It’s a chronicle of a particular moment in time, not a revealing glimpse of movement in a mercurial artist’s storied career. You kinda had to be there.


On its second album of 2023, the London trio looks to enliven its bookish, deadpan indie rock formula.

The Twits

Three years ago, when London trio Bar Italia emerged as signees to Dean Blunt’s mysterious World Music label, they curried niche intrigue among devotees ravaged by their foggy mystique. The world is much bigger, though, which meant that the music needed to be convincing enough to transcend online chatter—troubling, perhaps, for a group whose shadowy aesthetics tended to bleed into just-as-shadowy songs. Over the murky first months of their existence, two interpretations of Bar Italia’s sound seemed apt: tongue-in-cheek provocation akin to their World Music peers, or earnest slacker rock that only felt vapid because you weren’t listening for the right things.
During their initial stint with World Music, the group released Quarrel and bedhead, a one-two punch of LPs whose stark arrangements and compact lengths left people wanting more. Earlier this year, they signed to indie powerhouse Matador. Tracey Denim, their first album for the label, took tangible steps towards establishing an identity, as opposed to languidly tip-toeing around one. They were honing a sound—a deadpan, cut-and-dried effort shared between (very) amateur vocalists and lightly fuzzed guitars—that left a blurry trace of larger ambitions. Not only could they stand alone, but they were also willing to give it a try that lasted longer than 20 minutes.
Five months later, they’re back with The Twits, an attempt to expand on a tried-and-true formula. It’s bookish, looking-out-the-window music: foot-tappy and slightly unnerving, best consumed through faulty earbuds you have to hold at precisely the right angle to operate. The group echoes the same moody UK rock influences they always have (The Cure, Slowdive), but with a willingness to experiment that suggests they’ve grown bored of mere imitation. The result is a slackish near-hour of aspirant dorm-room rock, augmented with nerdy undertones and a teeny—dare I say too teeny—pep in their step. “You don’t realize it, hardly recognize it,” their voices tease in the record’s final minute, disembodied shouts riding eerie guitar feedback. It sounds like what the Shining twins might create with secondhand Stratocasters in a makeshift studio at the Overlook Hotel: music so unsettling, and so serpentine, that it almost feels as if it’s laughing at us.
This is still pretty angsty stuff, and per usual, the group favors themes of isolation and jilted romance. For all its crypticism, Bar Italia’s early music was rife with coming-of-age signifiers—breakup mantras, pleas for escapism, and fledgling musicality to represent fledgling adulthood. On The Twits, they sound refreshingly ready to add color where they once left tracks barren. “worlds greatest emoter,” which packs arena-sized riffage into a pint container, feels surprisingly danceable, as opposed to the pensive half-sway the group’s output usually encourages. The other singles are strong, too: Where they used to fester in heartbreak, a steely new determinism peeks through the cracks. “Keep playing with my receiving hand,” Nina Cristante goads in “my little tony,” “’Cause you know you lost the game.”
But these swings at more memorable songs are still underwhelming, and the minimalist sound remains prone to monotony. It isn’t as big of a problem here as it has been on previous releases, but at points, the trio’s gestures feel more suggestive of a hazy past than any potential future. “que surprise” is a sluggish slow-burner whose lazy guitars stumble into one another as if drunk. The reverb-heavy guitar work on “Shoo” sounds faintly like Murray Street-era Sonic Youth, which is cool, but where Sonic Youth rode those grooves into hypnotic epics full of tension and release, this song stays in one place. Talking about Bar Italia still mostly involves talking about other acts: You may hear tinges of the Velvet Underground in their folkish fuzz-punk, see shadows of Dean Blunt in their elusive personae. At their most effective, they speak loudest to our inner music geek: Come for what they remind you of, stay for what they’re learning to bring to the table for themselves.


Recorded in Anacortes, Washington, the stark original version of the songwriter’s 2019 album All Mirrors makes the experience of solitude sound metaphysical. The songs are spare, but still feel electric.

Whole New Mess

Before opening her songs to other people, Angel Olsen collaborated with loneliness. Whole New Mess was her blistering original vision for 2019’s epic All Mirrors: a stark acoustic album that she recorded the previous fall at church studio The Unknown in Anacortes, Washington, while still processing the wounds of a breakup. It was months later that the second version—All Mirrors—began to emerge, recreating the emotional catastrophe with dazzling strings and synthesizers, a baroque pop maelstrom. And yet, despite the ornate arrangements of All Mirrors, swarming and towering into the red, Olsen’s colossal voice always played the starring role. The sweep of the MGM strings matched it.
With Olsen’s many-hued warble at the center—at times sounding like a Joan of Arc for crackling emotional resilience—the raw Whole New Mess recordings embody their theme of inner strength. It’s tempting to say that Whole New Mess calls back to Olsen’s other more minimal works, like her exquisitely distant first EP, 2010’s Strange Cacti (“Your thoughts exist in someone else’s head,” she assured us); or the fevered eloquence of 2012’s Half Way Home; or the cassette where she once covered Dolly Parton and Skeeter Davis. But Whole New Mess has a singular power. The songs are spare but still feel electric, and despite their lower volume compared to All Mirrors, you couldn’t necessarily call them quiet. Their slow-strummed chords and finger-picked patterns are at times deliberately brittle and blown out. Whole New Mess amplifies a different source of loudness.
These unvarnished songs sound in harmony with the elements of their atmosphere: the vapor in the air, the dew at twilight. If the sun’s radiance can enter the frame of a piece of music then “Waving, Smiling” is proof. If the night itself could be a component of a song then you might sense it on “Tonight (Without You).” Whole New Mess makes the experience of solitude sound metaphysical: Olsen sings of stretching her bones out on the floor, waving her hand at no one, watching the thoughts inside her head come clear, like an introvert’s prayer. “I like the life I lead without you,” she sings on “Tonight,” as it glows. This is the lonesome sound, where in lieu of studio-made fireworks you simply hear everything, as orchestrated by one person. “It’s every season, where it is I’m going,” Olsen croons on the title track, a new song and among her best ever, about weathering the storm of really changing, of recalibrating the heart by way of the body and mind. She sings with the depth and candor of Patsy Cline, but her guitar chords are choppy, unpolished, underscoring the point: Life requires messes.
Whole New Mess cycles through these phases and shows their seams. “Too Easy (Bigger Than Us)” is the sound of love beginning, of obsession incarnate, and while the All Mirrors cut exists in a soft hallucinatory haze, this one is desperate and haunting. “Some things happen for a reason/Cancel all these plans/I’m dreaming,” Olsen sings in a high-pitched teardrop that wells like Hank Williams. “(New Love) Cassette” previously evoked smitten AM pop reborn in Broadcast, but here it sounds like no one but Olsen and the scratchy surfaces of her guitar strings, suspended in time. The song is like cellophane, voicing a desire to be someone’s “strength” and “breath.” These illusions soon unfurl. The brooding, wearied ballad “(Summer Song)” tells a tale of enduring hell to find “the weight of all the world came rushing through.”
On All Mirrors, the title track and “Lark” scaled staggering heights. What’s clear on Whole New Mess is that those songs—retitled as “(We Are All Mirrors)” and “Lark Song”—are also the most searching and inquisitive, moving by their own inexhaustible logic. Olsen said she wrote “Lark” about the verbal abuse she has endured in relationships; when she sings, “The way you scream like something else is a matter,” the scream is literal. On both albums, “Lark” is fittingly monumental in response. Olsen sings of “hiding out inside my head” with tidal force, staking out a fortress above the turbulence, a place to protect her dreams. Within them, “(We Are All Mirrors)” borrows one of Surrealism’s most potent images, the mirror, as a reminder that every surface is a possible site of recognition or distortion. Its thick layers of reverb, clangor, and busted organ drones reflect as much. Even the parentheses-filled track titles evoke a mutability.
The transformation that these piercing songs undergo between All Mirrors and Whole New Mess echoes a fact of Olsen’s work that grows truer with each release: she has become a voice of possibility, one ever in flux. The candlelit torch song “Chance (Forever Love),” the penultimate track of Whole New Mess, is a scene of falling action with no clear conclusion, recalling the wonder of Judy Garland if revisited through the supreme melancholy of Sandy Denny. Olsen aches in her conviction, “leaving once again, making my own plan,” “not looking for the answer, or anything that lasts,” wandering with her disillusionment and her glint of hope. “All that space in between where we stand/Could be our chance,” Olsen sings. “It’s hard to say forever love.” If the ending is messy, complicated and unresolved, that’s just right.

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On her fourth album, the Nashville singer-songwriter moves beyond the unadorned Americana of previous albums to arrive at new sounds, moods, and emotions.

Walking Proof

There’s a moment on “Rae,” Walking Proof’s opening cut, where roots rocker Lilly Hiatt’s plaintive strumming and quivering voice are consumed by a Technicolor wave of sound that pulls the song in an unexpected direction. That moment is Walking Proof in microcosm: The album pushes Hiatt out of her comfort zone, widening her palette and deepening her emotional reach, transforming music that was once starkly black and white into vivid, saturated hues.
Hiatt spent the past decade carving out a reputation on the Americana circuit, laying the groundwork with her hard-edged 2012 debut, Let Down, and sharpening her focus with 2015’s Royal Blue. Her real breakthrough arrived in 2017 with Trinity Place, where she plumbed the depths of a painful breakup. Produced by Michael Trent of Shovels & Rope, it was flintier than its predecessors but still adhered to the conventional contours of Americana; at its core, the songs were rootsy and the productions were unadorned.
Walking Proof, her fourth album, may be rooted in country and rock traditions, but the album can’t be called spare: Even at its hushed moments, it’s bright and dense with detail. Some of this lushness is due to Hiatt’s decision to work with Lincoln Parish, a producer who previously was part of Bowling Green, Kentucky’s premier alt-rock pastiche outfit, Cage the Elephant. Parish coaxes a considerable amount of color out of Hiatt’s songs, playing supplementary guitar and keyboards while weaving in instrumental cameos from guitarist Aaron Lee Tasjan (“Little Believer”), violinist Amanda Shires (“Walking Proof”), and pedal-steel player Luke Schneider (“Move”). All these contributions enhance Hiatt’s road band (guitarist John Condit and bassist Robert Hudson return from Trinity Place, while drummer Kate Haldrup is a new addition). A lean and lithe combo, as capable at delivering nuance as noise, they follow their leader whenever she raves, wails, or sighs.
Some melancholy undercurrents flow through Walking Proof—there are missed connections and misconstrued intentions, pleas to friends and lovers to think better of themselves—but it’s not as explicitly confessional as Trinity Place, reflecting Hiatt’s decision to write about a shifting set of characters and emotions. She also adds some breathing space to the record, placing the bright, cheerful “Little Believer” and the riotous “Never Play Guitar” in the middle of their two respective album sides, a sequencing trick that quickens the album’s pace and lets songs like “Some Kind of Drug” linger in the air. Hiatt wrote “Some Kind of Drug” after accompanying her sister Rae on a mission to help Nashville’s homeless, winding up with a portrait of a city whose gentrification threatens to swallow up its underlying humanity.
Hiatt’s empathy shines through on “Some Kind of Drug,” but most of Walking Proof is written on a smaller scale, focused squarely on interpersonal relationships. She recounts a miserable trip to Portland with a sly grin on “P-Town,” gently but defiantly asserts her independence on “Candy Lunch,” and pledges her unwavering devotion to her sister on “Rae,” a lovely portrait of complex familial love. The existence of “Rae” slightly undercuts Hiatt’s contention that Walking Proof isn’t as autobiographical as Trinity Place, but the song also helps illustrate the differences between the two albums. Trinity Place hits hard and strong, while Walking Proof winds through moments of incandescent joy, gentleness, cathartic noise, and even unease (“Scream” ends the hopeful album with an eerie crawl). It’s as if Hiatt has emerged from a dark, uncertain period as a stronger, bolder artist, winding up with an album that encompasses a full spectrum of feeling as it rocks with abandon.


With confessional writing and immersive beats, the Seattle rapper-singer’s latest album is a more tender take on the player-with-a-cold-heart blueprint.

Monochrome

Seattle-raised vocalist Highway is the kind of rapper-producer who understands that well-curated vibes are their own art form. He orbits the same universe as many other somber rap-crooners, but he’s not as emotionally distant as Dro Kenji or joony, and not as aloof as Destroy Lonely or Ken Carson. Though he often follows in the same cold-hearted player blueprint as the rest, if you dig deeper, you’ll find that his songs skew disarmingly romantic, tackling missed connections and intense affairs. Imagine if Future walled himself off in his codeine palace for a few months and listened to nothing but Blxst and SahBabii albums, and you’ll be close to grasping the duality that Highway represents—a puppy-dog lover roleplaying as a svengali. That eclecticism amplifies his latest album Monochrome, a project as steamy and enveloping as a post-workout sauna session.
As a rapper, Highway typically eschews clever witticisms, instead opting for confessional writing that wrings pathos and humor out of his lifestyle. On “Don’t Lie,” he admits to showing up early to a date’s house and nervously smoking a dozen blunts before peppering his lover with sweet nothings. It’s just enough for the ending—the most sexually charged weed cypher this side of Lil’ Kim’s “Drugs”—to shake the table. One song later, on “Show Goes On,” he’s hooking up with twins and dropping puns that would make Chow Lee (Long Island’s horny drill impresario) blush. You never know which version of Highway you’ll get song-to-song, but it’s always entertaining, because he knows how to squeeze the most mileage out of his bars in any given situation.
He accomplishes this feat by switching up his flows, singing and rapping, and leveraging his pristine ear for beats. His staccato, Playboi Carti-esque delivery on “Show Goes On” flies, while the balladry of “All U Needed” and “Sin City” drips with a syrupy glaze. Meanwhile, “Jet” and “on dat shit” settle into bouncy swag rap. Highway’s melodic style translates well to just about every form he takes, whether he’s talking about ghosting one-night stands or falling hard for one.
The beats keep up with this shifting template. Highway is an accomplished producer in his own right—he’s worked with Chief Keef and co-produced his last handful of projects—but mostly backs off the boards here. Many of the songs here boast at least two beatmakers, making for a gaggle of collaborators that offers up variations on synth and 808 arrangements. Two names that consistently show out are Houston producer and longtime creative partner xjay, as well as jetsonmade, the South Carolina musician who played a pivotal role in defining DaBaby’s sound in the late 2010s. They each work well enough by themselves: jetson’s synthetic horns and bass give “Sin City” a sultry wiggle, and xjay’s blown-out drums on “on dat shit” crackle like rock candy. But their two link-ups on “B & W” and “Let Up” are among the album’s most effortless, creating a bedrock that allows Highway to gloat and flaunt his way to the top.
Monochrome is an album where the beats feel bleached but deeply textured, where the emotions and motivations of its protagonist simultaneously oppose and complement each other like a yin-yang symbol. The lane of moody sing-rappers is more crowded than ever, but Highway’s variety and command keep him from drowning in the mix. Unlike his peers, there’s an organic sepia tone to his words and affect—not surprising for an artist who hails from grunge’s birthplace—that never devolves into pastiche. Whether he’s planning a perfect night or reminiscing on a regrettable one, the vibes will always be immaculate.


Hudson Mohawke's gleaming soundtrack to the open-world action-adventure game Ded Sec - Watch Dogs 2 makes a surprisingly strong followup to his last proper full-length, last year's Lantern.

Hudson Mohawke: Ded Sec - Watch Dogs 2 (OST)

Ded Sec - Watch Dogs 2 (OST)

Hudson Mohawke does drama better than most. His drums move with the heft of a cruiserweight boxer—powerful but lithe, kicks and snares leaving dents where they land. His rhythms come from trap, but his atmospheres couldn't be further than that genre’s grimy, boarded-up noir: His music positively glistens with chimes and arpeggios, and his monumental horn fanfare suggests armor-plated legions battering down castle doors, or angels raving at the pearly gates.
Those contradictions have made him one of the most interesting producers in pop music. His beats stud songs by Kanye, Drake, and Pusha T like luxurious expanses of diamond pavé, brilliant yet still rough to the touch. And working alongside Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, he provided Anohni’s HOPELESSNESS with a harrowing fusion of liturgical gravitas and Hollywood blockbuster. (Despite having been labeled a maximalist, he knows when to get the hell out of the way, and the restraint he brings to Anohni’s album only serves to highlight her own larger-than-life presence.)
There’s no lack of drama in his soundtrack to Ded Sec - Watch Dogs 2, which is good: It is, after all, an action-adventure open-world video game about hackers and global corruption, in which spectacular acts of anti-establishment violence play out against the backdrop of San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. HudMo’s music is a natural fit, and he brings his most effective tricks to the table: heart-in-mouth trombone blasts, blindingly bright synthesizer melodies, bruising drums. His customary sound set—a mixture of obviously synthesized brass with simulacral acoustic instruments like harpsichord and piano—complements the uncanny valley of the game world, a painstaking recreation of various Bay Area neighborhoods. If anything, he frequently upends expectations for video-game soundtracks by tilting away from purely electronic textures. Elegiac piano, strings, and choir give the opening “Shanghaied” a feel like John Williams gone trap. Loping Afro-Cuban percussion rounds out the giddily maximalist “Play N Go,” and the symphonic percussion of the regal “Haum Sweet Haum” is faintly reminiscent of Hans Zimmer’s score for Inception.
Ded Sec probably shouldn’t be considered a proper follow-up to last year’s Lantern, but it actually holds up favorably in that regard. With a mixture of full-length tracks and minute-long sketches, it’s nicely varied. The short, shimmering ambient study “W4tched (Cinema)” suggests that the producer may have picked up a trick or two from Oneohtrix Point Never during their time together working on Anohni’s album, and OPN’s influence also hangs over the gorgeous, light-speed “Cyber Driver,” with its R2D2 chirps and space-elevator arps. “Amethyst” pairs dial-tone synths and horror-movie organs with scissor-handed snare-and-hi-hat acrobatics in a way that makes even the most hackneyed trap tropes feel vibrant—no easy task. And on the short, kinetic “Balance,” he continually keeps you guessing as to where the downbeat will land; his tricky programming, playing triplets off constantly shifting syncopations, reveals him as one of the most rhythmically interesting producers out there right now.
In fact, despite the omnipresence of his customary blare, what might be most interesting here are the nuances that he brings to the table. In “Eye for an Eye (Reprise),” a quiet sketch for FM synths, he strips away the drums to let us see just how dexterous his timbral touch is, every note a jewel-toned liquid explosion. Before “Watch Dogs Theme” builds to its expected climax, with buzzing chords firing like illuminated jets of water, he rolls out a curious, elliptical drum pattern that seems to be pulling itself apart at the seams. Like many of the most interesting moments on Ded Sec, the real action is happening just beneath the surface of all those shiny things. It’s enough to make you wonder what a shadowier, more minimalist Hudson Mohawke might sound like. We’ve basked in the glow of his rockets’ red glare; what would it be like to taste their acrid soot?


Psych-rock band King Gizzard is giving its fourth album of the year away as a free download. The immersive Polygondwanaland is the farthest the seven-piece has strayed from its psych sci-fi roots.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Polygondwanaland

Polygondwanaland

The psych rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard chose to release its fourth album of the year—with a fifth supposedly en route—as a free digital download, encouraging fans to create as many copies as they please. “Make tapes, make CD’s, make records,” reads a note accompanying the album’s release. “Ever wanted to start your own record label? GO for it! Employ your mates, press wax, pack boxes. We do not own this record. You do. Go forth, share, enjoy.” Whether they're trying to scale back record expenses, or it’s an altruistic transfer of power to fans, King Gizzard’s decision to surrender control over this album’s physical reach is a comical one. Polygondwanaland is the farthest the seven-piece has strayed from their usual psych sci-fi roots. The band still employ lyrical nerdiness and wigged-out guitar in the album, but whereas King Gizzard’s last records got knee deep in prog rock, Polygondwanaland slinks into those waters until it’s waist high and loses the usual gnarly riffs.
Like its mouthful of a title, Polygondwanaland delivers a 10-course meal without dividers between its dishes. Songs seep into one another for an immersive listen. The stirring, quiet percussion of “Inner Cell” tiptoes into “Loyalty” for a slow buildup, before it splashes into the punctuated vocals of “Horology,” a sea of guitar tapping and rich, warm woodwinds. As usual, transitions are key in King Gizzard’s work, but they add a smoothness to Polygondwanaland that makes it particularly digestible, so that every vocal sigh and gaudy synth acts as a complementary flavor.
Like the euphoric peaks of 1970s-era Yes or the melodic sections of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s discography, a solid first impression and a memorable farewell make these type of dense records impactful. King Gizzard put the majority of their stock in this. Polygondwanaland opens with 10 minutes of painstakingly recorded instrumentation on “Crumbling Castle.” Syncopated drumming and clean guitar scales part ways for bandleader Stu Mackenzie and his gentle voice. The song’s vague rumination on sickness and fragility parallels the instruments gently blowing behind him: backing guitars harmonize with one another, a flute solo fades in, and barely-discernable keyboards whirr in the distance. Then, in the song’s final minute, the band trades that for a wall of stoner-metal sludge. Closing track “The Fourth Colour” opts for the same dazzling effect. After endless, bright guitar trills and a rhythmic drone, a risible drum fill prompts the band to wreak havoc in the song's final minute, exploding with the psych rock frenzy of Flying Microtonal Banana or I’m in Your Mind Fuzz.
King Gizzard tend to get roped up in the flourishes on Polygondwanaland, before giving way to an instinctive simplicity. At times, it works to their advantage, like when they moderate the dynamics of a feverish tempo on “Deserted Dunes Welcome Weary Feet.” Elsewhere, the band dulls itself by overthinking a section and losing their knack for natural flow. King Gizzard try their hand at hocketing—a technique where multiple singers share a single melody, alternating delivery across multiple notes—near the end of the album, but the focus on how they deliver the syllables loses the spark of the technique’s erratic feel. If there's nowhere left to push their envelope of indie rock ridiculousness, then prying into a genre rarely savored, nevertheless understood, in the 21st century is a bold step. Had they indulged in the campiness, it could have sharpened their own voice within the genre.
At the very least, King Gizzard’s decision to give listeners control over the record’s physical production reflects the album’s musical shift. Prog rock is a genre known for disregarding traditional structures and often failing to land perfectly, so King Gizzard drag it out of the basement and into broad daylight with Polygondwanaland to make every triumph and flaw visible. Even if they don’t complete it in time, releasing five albums in a year is cheeky and fun, and they’re smart for giving listeners a way to participate. The album positions King Gizzard as a band more concerned with experimenting openly than with clearing the goal without getting scratched, which any adrenaline-seeker would tell you is the whole point. “P.s. If u wanna make cassettes I don’t really know what you would do,” the end of their note reads. “Be creative. We did it once but it sounded really shit.”


Maria Uzor and Gemma Cullingford channel ESG, Liquid Liquid, and New Order but surpass mere genre mimicry on a debut album that captures the feeling as well as the sounds of classic dance music.

Sink Ya Teeth

If you have even a passing interest in the last 40 years of dance culture, Norwich duo Sink Ya Teeth’s debut is sure to sound familiar—and that's the point. Maria Uzor and Gemma Cullingford’s self-titled album is a veritable archive of au courant reference points: the rubbery basslines of Liquid Liquid, ESG’s call-and-response dance-punk, the alluring menace of dark disco, New Order’s synthetic ecstasy, the cold atmospherics of electro. These sounds have been revived before, notably during the 2000s, as the retro-futurist electroclash movement and the side-long revelries of early DFA gave way to bloghouse, a microgenre that played fast and loose with dance music’s past. Now, nostalgia for ’80s club music also calls back to that period.
But Sink Ya Teeth surpasses mere genre mimicry, as Uzor and Cullingford channel the feeling as well as the sounds of classic dance music. Style is easy to copy, but attitude is hard to fake, and Sink Ya Teeth have plenty of the latter. “I feel a little depressed/A little melancholy at best,” they intone in deadpan unison on breakout single “If You See Me,” their disaffection a perfect match for the dry beat and rubbery bass. In an interview with M magazine, Uzor described the squiggly track “Pushin’” as channeling a “frenzied and almost sexualized addiction to religion and salvation.” When she sings, “And when the sermon begins/She feels the tears of a thousand years of sin/But he keeps pushin’,” it evokes dance music's long relationship with carnality and guilt, from Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” to the opening of LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33.
As UK music industry veterans—Uzor previously made hazy psych-folk as Girl in a Thunderbolt, while Cullingford played bass in early-2000s indie act Kaito—Sink Ya Teeth know their way around a recording studio. At its best, the album’s clean, glassy sheen reflects that expertise. These high-fidelity songs demand to be heard as FLAC files; every element in the mix sounds flawlessly isolated but meshes seamlessly with its surroundings. As the duo’s influences suggest, this is music-nerd music made by music nerds: In the winking intro of opener “Freak 4 the Kick,” a single kick drum (get it?) gives way to a leather-jacket synth line and Uzor and Cullingford’s floaty vocals. Modern dance music of all stripes tends to bear the mark of its wholly computerized creation, but Sink Ya Teeth sounds distinctly human, the work of flesh and blood and pure ability.
For all their talent, the pair has yet to establish a distinctive musical personality. Throughout their self-titled album, Sink Ya Teeth prove they can convincingly handle a plethora of styles—but it remains to be seen whether there’s more to their retro-modern aesthetic than capable replication. Their debut is enough to spark curiosity about where they’ll take their sound next, though, and that’s no small accomplishment. In the 21st century, dance and indie music have been so littered with nostalgic variations on old sounds that it’s become hard to get excited about any artist who crafts songs by thumbing through the history books (or thrice-ripped YouTube clips). But Sink Ya Teeth are primed to make the past new again.


On his debut for the 4AD label, the UK producer releases his strangest, most low-key, and least dance-friendly record.

Dedication

Zomby's early records weren't always aggressive, but they were never really demure, either. When his first Hyperdub singles began to attract notice in 2008, he was part of a wave of post-dubstep producers who drew as much from synth-driven 1980s film scores, 8-bit era video game soundtracks, and electro as they did from Jamaica, hip-hop, or UK garage. True, his output wasn't as garish and noisy and abrasive as those made by some of his more intractable collaborators and remixers, and he used the EP format to experiment with tracks more ambient-leaning than club-ready. But they still had distorted riffs, the kind of low-end that makes you adjust your stereo settings to avoid frying your speakers, and hooks more Capcom than Kraftwerk.
His first proper album, 2009's Where Were U in '92?, even ditched dubstep entirely to recreate the unruly spirit of the genre's ancestor, hardcore rave. The album sounded far more fine-tuned-- and far less cheap-- than most of the hardcore tunes it paid homage to. But it also suggested Zomby wanted nothing to do with the kind of listener who throws on an electronic album as unobtrusive background noise. If his not-quite-dubstep peer Lone brings the pacific and beatific side of early rave into modern UK beat culture, Zomby brings in the roughness, the menace, the boldness. Even when he goes for almost-beatless psychedelic beauty-- check "Mercury's Rainbow"-- the results have a disorienting intensity, like John Carpenter incidental music on fast-forward and with the bass at +8.
Although it's barely longer than some of his EPs, Dedication is being sold as Zomby's second album, and it's also the strangest, most low-key, and least dance-friendly record he's released yet. It's hard to say to whom Dedication is aimed-- certainly not hardcore dubstep fanatics-- and that's part of its perverse charm, especially since everyone was likely expecting a cohesive, scene-summarizing statement given that this is Zomby's debut for big-time indie label 4AD. It's too jittery and restless and rhythmic to work as comfy ambient music. But while it's very obviously designed to be listened to rather than politely ignored, its choppy transitions and abrupt shifts in mood means it doesn't always flow the way we expect of albums or even home-listening DJ sets. In a way it reminds me of the same hermetic and stuck-between-worlds sound Boards of Canada were mining circa Geogaddi, alternating crunchy beat experiments with ethereal sound-washes and sometimes blurring the two modes together. Dedication never quite reaches (or aims for) the same scope or grandeur as BOC; it's a weirdly personal record, the kind made by a studio loner stringing together little oddities. So maybe call it Zomby's private reels made public, an audio sketchbook filled up with haunted miniatures, something to marvel over if never quite immerse yourself in.
It's certainly the most stylistically wide-ranging record he's released yet. It's got some of what Zomby fans have come to love, those icy arcade game sound effects stamped into brief club tracks ("Digital Rain"), but just as often the album chases unexpected directions. For a guy not known for his love of atmospheric murk or soulful smoothness, the blurred vocals on "Natalia's Song" evoke the downcast vibe of Burial with just a hint of the Art of Noise circa the sensuous "Moments in Love". For a guy not known for working with singers, on "Things Fall Apart" Zomby drafts Noah "Panda Bear" Lennox as left-field diva, re-imagining the droning repetitions of Tomboy as techno for kids who grew up reading Nintendo Power. But throughout Dedication you're struck by how assured Zomby is with textures outside of "game cartridge kitsch," how he refuses to be slotted into an already-dated subgenre for marketing purposes. "Haunted" is like a computer-assisted take on the pensive soundtrack-jazz of DJ Shadow circa Endtroducing... with the vinyl crackle cleaned off. When the beats drop away entirely here, you're more likely to somber acoustic piano ("Basquiat") than glossy, unnatural keyboards.
Barring a few exceptions, Dedication lacks the wobbly jump-up energy of Zomby's best-loved early singles and the rave-y mania of Where Were U in '92. He's more inventive with rhythm than ever; they're just not the kind of rhythms you might have expected. With their finger-snap drums and bass ooze and queasy synths, "Witch Hunt" and "Lucifer" have the sluggish gravity of Southern hip-hop and grime, outdoing acts like Salem in approximately one-third the time and with no sketchy rapping to dull their creepy pleasures. An entire album of tracks like that might have made for an easy hit, given Zomby's profile and the buzz around similarly druggy instrumental rap from producers like Clams Casino and the wonky trip-hop of the Brainfeeder crew, but Zomby won't make it that easy on himself. Though it doesn't sound like the work of a show-off, Dedication is in many ways the work of a producer pushing himself to see how hard and how far he can push his music into new places. Some might lament the fact that so many tracks feel like teasers pointing toward something longer and more developed, with most of these two- or three-minute ideas fading out as soon as they get a good, eerie groove going. If so, you can take comfort that he's given himself so many possibilities for album number three. Just don't expect a producer this perverse to follow up on any of them, let alone all of them.


Maine-based songwriter Liza Victoria’s proper debut album is a work of intimate beauty—a self-contained world that feels like a long song cycle rather than a collection of various pieces.

Deserts of Youth

To listen to Deserts of Youth, Liza Victoria’s proper debut album, is to eavesdrop on moments of quiet intensity. Devoid of reverb or overt production effects—a radical choice, in the age of atmospheric GarageBand records—Deserts’ seven songs are comforting yet arresting, effortless while intricate. At times, the Maine-based songwriter’s feathery falsetto is barely audible, a wisp of wind blowing through a deserted street; other times, it’s powerful and clear. Her lyrics, when you can decipher them, feel mostly like conduits for her unusual vocal patterns, less a means of communicating thoughts than establishing setting and mood. Throughout, Victoria seems most keen on satisfying herself; after all, as she sang in an early recording, “I am the friend that I need the most.”
In line with her 2014 release, The First Museum, Deserts of Youth begins as a light, psychedelic affair. The jazzy “Century Woods” opens the record with a lilting breeziness. On the ghostly “Another Window,” she counts to four without falling into a steady rhythm, speeding up and slowing down as she recounts observations literal (“Your keys are lying on the floor/At the bottom of the bed”) and abstract (“It’s the shadow of the morning… Watch the light breathe where the shadows began”). Although Deserts retains the simple guitar-and-vocal structure of Victoria’s early work, it is a sizeable step forward in songwriting and vision, a haunting, emotional experience that’s most effective as a whole.
The album’s scope is captured neatly in its stunning centerpiece, “Lady Day of the Radio.” Although all the songs on Deserts hover around the five-minute mark, “Lady Day” feels especially epic. It boasts Victoria’s most evocative guitar playing yet as she shifts between sad, broken fingerpicking and a stirring climax, the closest she has tread yet to a genuine guitar solo. Situated right in the middle of the album, “Lady Day” is a song so commanding that it seems to dictate the record’s structure; the opening tracks builds up to it, and the closing numbers slowly resolves its cathartic rush.
The self-contained world of Deserts of Youth makes the album feel more like a long song cycle than a collection of various pieces—a quality aided by Victoria’s penchant for ending songs abruptly in the middle of lines and writing familiar variations on her melodies. In “Wander,” a stirring ballad that plays like a heartbreaking coda to “Lady Day,” Victoria’s aimless narrator mirrors the music’s meandering quality. “We walk around the old part of town,” she sighs, before reaching one of the album’s most memorable refrains: “I never know where to go with new love.” A moment later, she amends the lyric to address “old love” as well, tying them together into a single entity, removed from time. It’s the record’s purest attempt at a singalong chorus and a lyric that’s emblematic of the album as a whole: a daring new work of strange, intimate beauty that already feels like an old favorite.


On their second full-length, the Portland duo of multi-instrumentalist/producer Jacob Portrait (also of Unknown Mortal Orchestra) and vocalist Charlie Hilton make a conscious push to distance themselves from their electro-tinged beginnings. But Blouse's guitar-driven make-over hasn't rendered them unrecognizable.

Imperium

In the fall of 2011, the last thing the world needed was a song called "Videotapes" that sounded a little bit like a lost Human League hit dubbed onto an old, worn-out cassette. This kind of idea wasn't exactly novel: Chillwave had broken and crested, VHS nostalgia was inescapable, and bands claiming the tag "dream pop" were cropping up like dandelions in springtime-- was it really possible that none of them had already written something called "Videotapes"?
It's a testament to Portland's Blouse, then, that the murky earworm bearing that particular name managed to stand out even among the crowded crop of hypnagogic pop. Maybe that's because, like "Videotapes", all the songs on their unexpectedly fresh self-titled debut were driven by the tension of opposing forces, as the heat generated from radiant, sun-bursting synths collided with the airy cool of Charlie Hilton's vocals. Blouse found a balance between texture and melody: here was a band that clearly cared about atmosphere, but never at the expense of a solid, Top Gun soundtrack-worthy hook.
With their second full-length Imperium, though, the band is making a conscious push to distance itself from those electro-tinged beginnings. Blouse have nixed the synths and drum machines: Multi-instrumentalist and producer Jacob Portrait (who also plays bass in Unknown Mortal Orchestra) proudly announces in the press release that the record was made entirely with "instruments that don't plug into the wall." Sure, selling your proverbial turntables to buy guitars is enough of a sophomore album cliché to get a mention in LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge", but luckily Blouse's guitar-driven make-over hasn't rendered them unrecognizable. That much is clear from the jump: Bouncy opener "Imperium" takes some of the familiar elements of Blouse's best tunes-- namely sweeping strums and lurching, rubbery basslines-- and blends them into a gloomy swirl. "Are you one of us?/ Are you one of us?" Hilton chants as the song winds down, in a haunting monotone that's half Hope Sandoval, half creepily malfunctioning automaton. Though Hilton's out in front, Portrait is Blouse's secret weapon, concocting the immersive textures that give Imperium its distinct atmosphere. The driving "Eyesite" sounds like it was recorded in the frigid but sparkling depths of an icy cave, while the up-tempo ripper "Arrested" has the loose, unvarnished feel of a band jamming in a the garage-- albeit one equipped with an enviable pedal board.
And yet, there's a lack of variety in Imperium's marble-cool tone that makes it feel more one-note than Blouse's debut. It's laudable for a band to push itself out of its comfort zone on its second album-- there are artists out there who lay such a lazily trendy coating of synthesizers over their songs that the electricity in their practice spaces should be cut just to stir creativity. But Blouse weren’t one of those bands. Their debut showed the promise of growth, and their “no synth” policy may have hemmed them in unnecessarily. When Blouse headlined one of Captured Tracks' 5 year anniversary shows earlier this month, the contrast was clear: The new, thoughtfully structured songs showcased the band’s ear for sticky hooks, but only when Portrait plugged in his tower of synths to play older track like "Time Travel" and "Into Black" did the music bloom.


Simon Jeffes’ Penguin Cafe Orchestra were charming and baffling in late ’70s UK music, mixing ambient, Balearic, drone, and more. Now Jeffes’ son is using the name with members of Gorillaz and Suede.

The Imperfect Sea

Laid up in the south of France after ingesting some bad shellfish back in 1972, British guitarist and composer Simon Jeffes experienced fever dreams of a world “of ordered desolation… a place which had no heart.” In the days after, Jeffes dreamt of its cure, wherein “the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing.” Jeffes also had a surreal poem pop into his head about being proprietor of the Penguin Cafe—and by 1976, he had established the Penguin Cafe Orchestra bearing such properties. They were one of the eras more charming and baffling entities, daydreaming between ambient, Balearic, drone, Irish folk, pop, world, classical, all of their output exquisite and slightly aslant. Which is perhaps to be expected from the man who was game enough to couch Sid Vicious in orchestral strings for “My Way.”
The Orchestra disbanded only when Jeffes passed away from an inoperable brain tumor in 1997, and since a Royal Albert Hall concert in 2009, his son Arthur has released three albums in the new century, carrying the torch. Or at least carrying the name, as his Penguin Cafe features no members of the original ensemble, instead compiling contributions from members of Gorillaz, Suede, and Florence and the Machine. (Some of the old Penguin Orchestra continue to perform this music as the Anteaters and the Orchestra That Fell to Earth). Arthur has the pedigree, if not the history, for this 21st century Penguin Cafe.
Their website states that since their audience is more attuned to dance music, the group is a corrective in replacing “electronic layers with real instruments: pads with real string sections, synths with heavily-effected pianos.” Fair enough, though such self-seriousness replaces the prevailing whimsy of the original and assumes that electronic music fans can’t also chill with Stars of the Lid, Alarm Will Sound, or even the Williams Fairey Brass Band. “Ricercar” most closely resembles the Orchestra of old, stately and bouncy in equal measure, the strings nimble like some Renaissance-era dance while the percussion comes from world music. But “Cantorum” has all the drama of an indie documentary soundtrack, tugging at heartstrings via bowed strings, a move now easily replicated by dozens of other composers.
The slow-moving “Control 1 (Interlude)” creates a sustained mood of careful piano notes that drop like melting icicles and humming strings, though it also most closely resembles the gorgeous minimalism of Bing & Ruth. The twinkling lyricism of “Half Certainty” and “Protection” align them with their Erased Tapes’ labelmates, meaning the pleasant and polite—if at times ignorable—aspects of ambient music.
Three covers are interspersed throughout the album. The most charming is a version of Kraftwerk’s “Franz Schubert,” a knowing wink to the original group’s own history—Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s first major show was opening for the Germans back in 1976. They play up the lullaby-like aspect of the original and, in a clever twist, close mic the sound of salt swirling around in a bowl in a manner that replicates the crackly shellac of an old 78, putting the futurists into a bygone time. There’s also a version of the original group’s “Now Nothing,” expanding the track by two minutes but reducing the original’s blend of strings and voice to just piano.
It leads into the closer “Wheels Within Wheels,” a cover of Simian Mobile Disco. But instead of a big build, the beats are replaced with rattles and cycling piano that create plenty of drama and tension before slowly peeling away. The notes describe making the four on the floor from “floorboards in the old Penguin studio,” which seems like a rather circuitous route to take to get to a thud that barely registers. In the years between the two iterations of Penguin Cafe, all manner of composers and ensembles have tackled the likes of Aphex Twin; the novelty of mixing electronic and acoustic has long since worn off. Coming as Penguin Cafe Orchestra did amid the clashes of punk and progressive rock—on a roster featuring meticulous new composers like Harold Budd and Gavin Bryars—the elder Jeffes’ playfulness was refreshing. Three albums in, it’s yet to be determined just where the younger Jeffes aims to take the group, but there’s a rigidity to The Imperfect Sea that approaches ordered desolation.


Haley Bonar’s Impossible Dream is a brisk half-hour of barbed power-pop tunes that sting so sweetly that it’s only after the fact you consider you might need a tetanus shot.

Impossible Dream

Haley Bonar is only in her early 30s, yet to hear her tell it on Impossible Dream, you’d think her best days are long behind her. She sings about herself—or her surrogate selves in her songs, not that she makes much of a distinction—as if she’s washed up and permanently faded. On the record’s stickiest line, she manages to take a two-fer dig at both her past and present selves: “I was impossible when I was beautiful.” It’s familiar territory for the Minnesota songwriter, whose lyrics often read like tragi-comic bumper-sticker slogans. “I wish I could date my former self,” she quipped on her last record, 2014’s Last War, “She’d be a fun girlfriend.”
That record was a reinvention of sorts, even if it’s unlikely that an artist as down-to-earth as Bonar would use a term as pretentious as “reinvention.” After several albums of personable if not always especially distinguished indie folk, Last War dialed up the tempos and the volume and set fire to whatever lingering idealism she’d been clinging to. Impossible Dream is a true sequel, another brisk half-hour of barbed power-pop tunes that sting so sweetly that it’s only after the fact you consider you might need a tetanus shot.
There’s some irony in the album title, in that the dreams Bonar details really aren’t all that impossible: a family, a satisfying career, the respect of those close to her, a general sense of stability. But Bonar is mostly preoccupied with the forces that prevent us from realizing those dreams, be they the burden of outside expectations, the passage of time, and, in particular, the long shadow that our upbringings cast over us. “Hometown” opens the record with a failed attempt to escape that shadow, with an image of Bonar fleeing her small town, watching it burn as it shrinks in her rearview mirror. It should be a moment of triumph, but, she sings, “The further that I get, the deeper my regrets/Hometown goes wherever you go.” A song later, as everything goes to shit, she can’t escape a nagging thought: “Your mom was right/She’s always right.”
In spite of her fatalistic world view, Bonar largely keeps things light, singing over catchy new wave accompaniments in a punky Gwen Stefani pout. The record turns somber, though, when Bonar questions her own career path. For years each Bonar album came packaged with the same origin story: After being discovered by Low’s Alan Sparhawk, she impulsively dropped out of college to join the band on tour, and has dedicated her life to music ever since. Sure, it was just the guy from Low, and no, she didn’t go on to become Taylor Swift or anything, but there’s still a real element of fantasy in that story—every artist dreams of being discovered, and Bonar was.
It truly stings, then, to hear her poke holes in her own modest fairy tale. “Jealous Girls” is ostensibly about a woman rendered miserable by her own trust issues, yet its sympathies lie more with her philandering partner, a troubadour stuck touring through grim bars in unglamorous towns, presumably not unlike the one Bonar herself left behind. Who could blame an unfilled artist for finding reassurance in the company of women on the road? After all, Bonar sings, “They’re reminding you that you’ve still got youth.”
And that’s what Bonar’s songs always come down to: youth, that most fleeting of resources. The desire to make up for lost time is the driving force behind her songs, and it may also explain her own rock ’n’ roll makeover, which not coincidentally began around the time she became a parent. She also moonlights with a no-stakes dance-punk band on the side, Gramma’s Boyfriend, where she hits the same themes (“I live my broken dreams,” she sang on that group’s last release). From a less self-aware songwriter, these songs could scan as sour grapes, the grumblings of an artist bitter she never quite achieved the success and recognition that her early press seemed to promise was in reach, but they're filled with so much mischief and humor that they never feel truly bitter. For an album about things that haven’t worked out as she hoped, Impossible Dream finds her in mighty good spirits.


Former Isis frontman Aaron Turner’s minimal-leaning metal trio takes on a new challenge: Keeping up with Japanese avant-garde pioneer Keiji Haino.

Keiji Haino / Sumac: American Dollar Bill - Keep Facing Sideways, You’re Too Hideous to Look At Face on

On their second album, 2016's What One Becomes, Sumac—the trio led by Hydra Head Records founder and former Isis frontman Aaron Turner—were heading towards a minimalist style that tested doom metal’s spatial limits. By teaming up with Japanese avant-garde pioneer Keiji Haino for American Dollar Bill - Keep Facing Sideways, You’re Too Hideous To Look at Face on, their first collaboration and Sumac’s third record, they’ve taken on a different kind of challenge. Haino is an outsize presence; with his visceral overdrive on guitar, vocals, or any instrument he picks up, he naturally takes over any project he’s on. On this five-track set, that means Sumac primarily functions as a rhythm section, a role in which they excel.
Sumac were already playing slow and loose with structures before, and Haino obliterates any sense of form. His orthodoxy is that there are no orthodoxies, and so Sumac’s lumbering doom becomes an endless outburst of wahs and scrapes. “What Have I Done?...”—a track whose full title runs to 43 words, and which gets split into two parts on opposite ends of this album—has some of the band’s most volatile clusters, rife with overlapping guitar freak-outs and escalating drums. The sound falls in line with Fushitsusha, Haino’s long-running free-rock band, at their most chaotic, and it also recalls the noisy, disassembled grindcore of Sissy Spacek and Burmese.
If Haino is Hendrix caterwauling through the multiverse, Sumac are the Experience bringing him back into our atmosphere, burning without disintegrating. And while Haino and Turner are the marquee names, it’s drummer Nick Yacyshyn who holds it all down. Sumac lets him break free from the steady d-beat hand needed for his other band, Vancouver hardcore group Baptists, loosening up without compromising intensity. That’s even more true on American Dollar Bill, where Yacyshyn has mastered the art of making what could be a complete mess come off as composed and intentional. He doesn’t fall apart, even when you wonder if he’s about to collapse from constant explosion.
For all his influence, Haino hasn’t completely remade Sumac in his image. Both parts of “I’m Over 137% a Love Junkie and Still It’s Not Enough” resemble Sumac’s more tranquil breaks, where Turner punctures lucid drones with squeaks and squalls. Over Haino’s spaced-out twang, they finally simmer. Of course, Haino doesn’t allow for too much peace, letting forth some of his most piercing shrieks when the rest of the band gets quiet. “A Love Junkie” is this collaboration at its most dreamy, yet even the heavier tone of most of the album has its own hazy, disorienting quality. Sumac’s other works have had definite ends and beginnings; American Dollar Bill’s all-enveloping calamity can drift in and out if you’re not listening intently. You don’t go to Haino—or Sumac, for that matter—for easy listening, anyhow.
Haino isn’t new to playing with metal bands: He’s recorded with Boris and plays with metal’s avant emissary, Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley, in Nazoranai. His career has taken a parallel path to many metal groups, exploring new directions in loud, wailing guitars without adhering to rock structures, standards, or attitudes. Even as metal has come closer to the experimental world, he still feels quite far from them. American Dollar Bill bridges that gap, travelling through several extreme languages and still coming out with Haino’s iconoclastic touch.