On his expansive debut studio album, the once enigmatic rapper expands his fascination with trap and melody to feature-length with mixed results.

The Melodic Blue

Up until recently, Baby Keem chose to be an enigma. His voice on the mic is distinctive, a high-pitched whine well-suited to jokes and boasts, but Hykeem Carter, the man behind the persona, often receded from view. Personal details in his music and interviews were scarce, and Keem outright hid his face until he began promoting his 2018 project, The Sound of Bad Habit. Even after revealing himself, he remained tight-lipped, but that didn’t stop eagle-eyed fans from noticing his name in the songwriting and producer credits of Top Dawg Entertainment albums like the 2018 Disney collab Black Panther The Album and Jay Rock’s Redemption. Rumors swirled that Keem was actually Kendrick Lamar’s cousin and merely benefitted from rap nepotism, but as Keem’s popularity and mystique grew on the heels of his 2019 breakout project Die For My Bitch, he kept his distance and mostly let his boisterous music speak for itself.
Nepotism or not, the rollout (or, according to former TDE president Dave Free, the “well-executed plan”) for Keem’s debut studio album The Melodic Blue telegraphed a more personal, or at least less secretive, direction for him. He publicly embraced his relationship with Lamar, signing with Lamar and Dave Free’s pgLang collective and releasing the tag-team track “family ties.” The album’s trailer is soundtracked by “scapegoats,” a brief but somber reflection on family that hits a bit closer to home (“Flowers on my uncle’s tomb, thousands to my auntie’s, too/I’m used to taking backstreets, last week was nothing new”) before drawing the curtain back again. While The Melodic Blue is indeed flecked with more intimate writing than usual, it isn’t exactly a confessional. Instead, Keem uses the opportunity to expand his well-established fascination with trap and melody to feature-length—with mixed results.
On earlier projects, Keem showed a skill for hopping between rapping and singing, sometimes within the same song. Whether he was screaming “Baby Keem just humbled a model!” on “STATS” or cooing about his indifference toward anyone’s opinions on “Opinions,” it felt like a natural progression, the same artist coming with a different approach. Some of that synergy remains on The Melodic Blue, and the highs are exhilarating. His opening verse on “family ties” is easily among the best of his career. Keem triumphantly skips over horns and thudding 808s with a handful of flows and reminisces on childhood Popeyes trips while puffing out his chest (“It’s a red dot, don’t get on the wrong red-eye”). Both “pink panties” and “first order of business” see Keem switching effortlessly between melody and bars about paying for lace fronts and thanking his mother for her love and support. When he sticks to what initially made Two Phone Baby Keem a success, it’s easy to understand the initial hype.
The core of what made Keem so appealing when no one knew what he looked like exists in bits and pieces here, but The Melodic Blue falls apart when he starts experimenting. He aims for pop and R&B more often, sometimes landing on something fun and propulsive (“cocoa”) and other times sounding jarringly indistinct. The coos of “issues” and “16” sound like leftover reference tracks from Drake’s Certified Lover Boy sessions, while “range brothers” is a stab at Travis Scott-style bombast—complete with multiple beat switches and glossy mixing. The latter starts out decently but dissolves into a memeable mess by the time Keem and Lamar are trading quotes in funny accents like children at a family cookout.
Keem’s collaborations with Lamar are among the album’s most perplexing moments. The chemistry in their hot-potato exchange at the end of “family ties” is undeniable, offsetting Lamar’s earlier choice to employ a flow and vocal tone that sounds like Hulk Hogan on helium. Compare that to the end of “range brothers,” where both Keem and Lamar trade short, breathy exchanges and goofy adlibs over a thumping beat. (I can’t decide if “top o’ the mornin’” or “Rollie gang, Rollie gang, Rollie gang” is more ridiculous.) The duo is clearly having fun, with Lamar, in particular, relishing rapping within looser, concept-free parameters, but that energy can’t always save these show-stopping moments from looking incredibly silly. Neither is as inexplicable as Keem’s hard left turn into acoustic emo-rock on “MY EX,” but it’s hard to tell if they’re joking or not, which isn’t always a good thing.
It’s strange because Baby Keem has always had a strong sense of identity. Whether he’s claiming to be 50 Cent or clowning on his lover’s ex, it’s easy to tell when you’re listening to a Baby Keem song. Much of The Melodic Blue is devoted to trying on other artist’s sounds when it would have benefited from more of Keem refining what already worked about his. An album this theatrical and expansive suggests Keem is aiming for the next level. He doesn’t have to fully open his mind and heart to be a great artist, but he does need to retain his own voice.

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On their third album, Amsterdam’s finest Turkish psych revivalists add synths and drum machines to spirited ’70s standards from the Anatolian funk canon.

Yol

Altin Gün’s third album arrives with the same mysterious allure as a weirdly shaped parcel found under the Christmas tree. Trapped in lockdown, Amsterdam’s finest Turkish psych revivalists started tinkering with drum machines and electronics, adding the spacey synth strut of early-’80s disco to their hallucinogenic rock/folk stew. The prospect sounds so charmingly idiosyncratic on paper that you almost dread to press play, for fear that reality will disappoint.
Remarkably, not only do the results live up to their billing, they also share errant strands of DNA with some surprising strains of contemporary pop. The moody interlocking synth lines of “Ordunun Dereleri” are only a whisker away from the Weeknd’s recent excursions into ’80s revivalism, and the handclap disco beat and wiggling bassline of “Maçka Yolları” is a wayward cousin to Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia. “Yüce Dağ Başında,” meanwhile, sits somewhere between Lindstrøm’s space disco and Gorillaz’ occasional excursions into reggae.
Damon Albarn’s cartoon troupe is a useful reference point for Yol (“road” in English). Much like Gorillaz, Altin Gün concoct their improbable musical fusions in the service of pop music’s joys, rather than eat-your-greens musical worth. Yol represents a fascinating musical laboratory for the way it alloys genres, as the band—founded by Dutch bassist Jasper Verhulst with members of Turkish, Dutch, and British descent—traces unusual routes through source material taken largely from the traditional Turkish songbook. But the results are never less than engaging, suggesting the Mentos-in-a-Coke-bottle school of experimentation rather than the relentless drudge of high school chemistry. If this year sees a livelier, more jubilant amalgam of disco breaks with saz than Yol’s “Hey Nari,” then 2021 will have been an outlandishly funky time indeed.
Allied to this liberal take on genre is Altin Gün’s enlightened view of instrumentation, with the band adding synth, congas, drum machines, and even the cosmic twang of the harp-like Suzuki Omnichord to the psychedelic guitar rock of their two previous albums. This approach might have been inspired by lockdown—the band was stuck at home for three months, swapping demos online—but Yol bubbles with life and adventure, free of the introspective torpor that the pandemic has inspired in some artists.
Altin Gün also have a wise ear for a tune. The songs on Yol are taken from often archaic sources: “Yekte” is a traditional song from the Anatolian city of Kayseri, while “Arda Boylar” comes from a region of the Balkans that once formed part of the Ottoman Empire. Every song works brilliantly in the neo-disco psych environment; the gorgeous despondency of the folk melodies blends with glittering pop production in a stream of gilded melancholy. It helps that Altin Gün are blessed with two extraordinarily gifted singers in Erdinç Ecevit and Merve Dasdemir, whose immaculate technique never comes at the expense of emotive power.
Tapping into these antique melodies gives Yol a curious sense of timelessness. The album sits somewhere between 19th century Ottoman Empire, ’60s Haight-Ashbury, the bubblegum boogie of ’80s New York, and the omnivorous pop universe of the present day. To pull off such a trick is clever indeed. But it is a mark of Altin Gün’s ingeniousness that Yol never feels forced. The album glides along like a particularly elegant swan, musical dexterity and audacious spirit paddling away frantically below the surface.

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Meshell Ndegeocello’s sprawling new record feels like a natural synthesis of the jazz, rock, dub, and soul sounds she’s explored throughout her career.

Meshell Ndegeocello: The Omnichord Real Book

The Omnichord Real Book

The Omnichord was developed in Japan in the 1980s as a musician’s electronic accompaniment, incorporating a drum machine with rhythm and tempo controls, a set number of playable chords, and a “futuristic” touch-sensitive synthesizer ribbon. And while it has famous fans—Brian Eno, Joni Mitchell, and Damon Albarn, to name a few—it has always been a niche instrument: It’s mostly made of plastic, it feels like a toy, and it now sounds as cheap as it looks. In the hands of an exacting and protean virtuoso like Meshell Ndegeocello, deep into a decades-long career, the Omnichord became a tool for self-discovery.
In 2020, with no shows to play or sessions to sit in on, she found herself scoring three television shows—BMF, Queen Sugar, and Our Kind of People—simultaneously. At the end of marathon days spent collaborating remotely from her home in Brooklyn with an untold number of artists and executives, she would retreat to her attic. Alone with her thoughts and a gifted Omnichord, she would write, free of expectation, free to find things she wasn’t necessarily even looking for.
The bones that emerged from the attic would eventually become the songs on her latest LP, The Omnichord Real Book. A sprawling, 18-track album dosed with free jazz percussion, bass-driven funk, a capella beats, and gentle acoustic fingerpicking, the record feels like a natural synthesis of the jazz, rock, dub, and soul sounds she’s explored throughout her career. Ndegeocello has always had a forward-facing view, experimenting with new styles from album to album and serving as a chameleonic session musician for a wide variety of artists (Madonna, the Rolling Stones, Gov’t Mule). The expansive Omnichord Real Book draws on that history of shape-shifting and turns it into something both recognizable and new.
It’s her first release for the storied Blue Note imprint (a label she “dreamed about as a child”) and feels like a genuine reset in a career that has had several to date. Ndegeocello spent much of the last decade saying goodbye to her parents; after her jazz saxophonist father died in 2016, her mother suffered from dementia for years before passing in 2021. “I have no one to blame anymore for my inner hurts,” she told the Guardian. “No one to please. No one to miss.”
The album’s title references The Real Book, a collection of “lead sheets” for jazz standards that’s been published in various editions since the 1970s; sifting through her father’s things after he died, she came across the first copy he ever gave her. The function of a Real Book is to give musicians the bare minimum of information they need to perform a tune—usually just the melody and the chord changes—and it’s up to the player to bring the song to life. And indeed, while the Omnichord’s tinny electronic tones are the first we hear on album opener “Georgia Ave,” very little survives the record’s final mix. Ndegeocello’s early sketches give way to a richly produced coterie of live instrumentation from the session vets in her band and a coterie of collaborators at the forefront of contemporary jazz.
The transformation is by design. Many of her collaborators—Jeff Parker (guitar), Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet), Joel Ross (vibraphone), and Jason Moran (piano)—are masters of improvisation who add new dimensions to the worlds she’s lived in. Funky neo-soul grooves give way to sparse piano ballads, cosmic chords accompany jazzy horns, and twinkling desert blues guitar nestles into psychedelic soul basslines. She does most of the writing, yet can’t help but include other inspiration, like Samora Pinderhughes’ crushing piano ballad “Gatsby,” whose themes of self-reflection (“I been saying things I don’t believe/I been doing things that just ain’t me”) sound like they were written for her.
Through that lens, the sessions can be seen as a rumination on the illusion of control—of ourselves, of others, of the art that they make and release. It balances humility with ego, relinquishing control to artists with their own distinct voices, while offering a new set of standards into the jazz canon that has historically been anything but inclusive.
Ndegeocello’s solo albums—her early work, in particular—were often sexually and politically charged. She explored and asserted her own sexuality, and aggressively confronted the status quo and her place in it as a queer Black woman artist. The Omnichord Real Book is no less assertive, yet feels energized by grace and understanding. She processes shared trauma (“Towers”), communes with the spirits (“Vuma”), and embraces the dream of the unknown (“Georgia Ave.”) Having fought those battles many times over, Ndegeocello feels more concerned with the present, her assertions reflecting a new sense of self and the existential melancholy of a 54-year-old artist who finally feels comfortable enough to imagine the privilege of a dignified death.
This energy coalesces on “Virgo,” a nearly nine-minute Afrofuturist suite that serves as the album’s centerpiece. Her synth bass spends much of the first few minutes in conversation with Julius Rodriguez’s electronic organ as she sings of finding peace in pain; as the groove builds, she expands her gaze outward to the stars and deep space. When Brandee Younger’s harp comes floating into the mix, it’s as if they’ve cleared the earth’s atmosphere, free to roam the great expanse.
It’s often when we’re alone that we consider our connection to others. Alone in the attic with her Omnichord, Ndgeocello drew on the gifts from others that became the basis for her life as a musician: her father’s favorite records, her mother’s melancholy, the go-go music on which she cut her teeth performing in her youth, even the homogenous music industry that forced her to firmly establish her sense of self. And not unlike the lead sheets in the Real Book she first learned from, the songs she wrote remained incomplete until their communion: with her collaborators, with her audience. “The song is the spaceship,” she said in a recent documentary. “We just get in and see where it takes us.”


On his sophomore album, the Swedish singer and guitarist takes the basic elements of an acoustic troubadour's craft and explores their possibilities, not only as ingredients of songs, but as sounds to be enjoyed in their own right.

In Our Nature

They say the true measure of a great song is whether it still sounds as good when you strip the accompaniment down to a solo acoustic guitar. They, of course, are full of shit. This year alone, a bunch of my favorite songs-- Chromatics' "In the City", let alone Lil Mama's "Lip Gloss"-- have been more about texture and rhythm than melody. José González might still be best known for his unplugged cover of the Knife's "Heartbeats", but with this Swedish singer-songwriter, lack of adornment means something different than just showing a song's bones.
In fact, for González's follow-up to debut album Veneer, I hesitate to use the term "singer-songwriter" at all. It used to bother me that the Gothenburg-based artist hadn't written any originals as compelling as his covers, which so far have included not just "Heartbeats" but also Kylie Minogue's "Hand on Your Heart" and Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart". I'm so over it now. While sophomore full-length In Our Nature still only rarely nears the songwriting brilliance of González's fantastic cover selections (an unfair standard!), that's clearly not the game he's playing best.
On In Our Nature, González takes the basic elements of an acoustic troubadour's craft and explores their possibilities, not only as ingredients of songs, but as sounds to be enjoyed in their own right. A stray breath, the buzzing of guitar strings, a hand scraping across the frets: these are all shades in González's palette. The biggest embellishment you're likely to hear is a metronomic foot-tap, subtle hand percussion, or a backing vocal by Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagamo. Where the Knife's "haunted house" sound is informed by minimal techno, González's lo-fi acoustic guitar music could be dubbed "minimal folk."
Or "minimal folk-pop," if you prefer. Like British folkie John Martyn on 1973's Solid Air, González has a reassuringly airy voice and the intricate finger-picking of a leftfield jazz aficionado. Plus, there are plenty of hooks in his spare melodies and still sparer lyrics. Whether a political statement, a musing on sin, or a stark depiction of a troubled relationship, first video selection "Down the Line" is entrancing beyond its slightly distorted strums, droning treble strings, or clicking percussion. "It's all about compromising," González sighs into what he calls "the darkness."
The fire and brimstone from classic American folk (and its folk-rock inheritors) is often detectable behind González textures. For all its sleepy off-mic mumbling and uncluttered finger-picking, "Abram" reads as a shot against religion: "Even though you mean well (well, most of the time)/ You made a delusion and created lies in our minds." And from the first breaths of bloodstained opener "How Low", In Our Nature is haunted by the ugliness of war. With one of the more memorable, faster-paced guitar figures on the album, second video selection "Killing for Love" could be an indictment of blood lust, if not the lust in our hearts.
The preaching occasionally turns slightly pat. The title track trudges a bit, and its repetitions ("It's in our nature," or, "Put down your gun") don't make the dark theme more arresting. Closer "Cycling Trivialities" shows González at his most vulnerable, with a stream of plangent notes bubbling out from an unaccompanied guitar, and while the song's sense of futility-- capping off an album heavy with the stuff-- gets pretty powerful, an extended outro and the awkward title phrase itself find González in a rare moment of unwarranted excess.
Nevertheless, even the least striking tracks have their electrifying moments: Take "Time to Send Someone Away", which sets weary defiance over handclaps, or "Fold", which casts up a gentle plea against the better of its own hard-earned wisdom. Opening with a yawn, "The Nest" adds the bagpipe-like keyboard playing of Håkan Wirenstrand before ending in the hiss of amplified dead air.
Like its predecessor, In Our Nature is a collection of sparse acoustic recordings. But it's a more thoughtful and atmospheric work than either Veneer or last year's Stay in the Shade EP-- one that suggests González has enough talent to make good on the lofty Pink Moon comparisons. And for the first time, the cover-- an urgent acoustic rendition of Massive Attack's "Teardrop"-- isn't even the album's best track.


On his latest, syllable-twisting conspiracy theorist Ab-Soul becomes so information-obsessed that he loses sight of actual meaning. The songs are empty riddles, leading nowhere and saying nothing.

Do What Thou Wilt.

Occultist and ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley once said “I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.” Parsing this opaque statement reveals it was just Crowley’s cryptic, verbose way of devaluing faith and championing skepticism; a fake-deep principle demeaning the moralist position, the “Gotta Hear Both Sides” of a pseudo-cerebral ideology.
It also reads like an Ab-Soul bar these days. It’s fitting that Crowley, once dubbed the Wickedest Man in the World and written off as a Satanist for his musings about the supernatural, has been a source of inspiration for TDE’s syllable-twisting, in-house conspiracy theorist, who is becoming so information-obsessed that he seems to be losing sight of actual meaning—perhaps a bit woozy from inhaling around all the tomes and scrolls and manuscripts he’s been dusting off. His songs have become so abstract that very little happens in them anymore; they’re all empty puzzles, mazes made of loosely parsed Greek myths, astrological information, and the unfinished script pages for National Treasure 3, meant to be mind-fucking but revealed to be mush when even gently interrogated. His new album, Do What Thou Wilt., named for the defining law of Crowley’s Thelemic philosophy, is the ultimate act of performative wokeness.
It wasn’t always this way: Ab-Soul has been a thoughtful writer in the past, making sense of fringe sciences and unorthodox philosophies with elastic rhyme schemes, gently massaging them to suit grand proclamations about society’s shortcomings or personal explorations for spirituality. His breakout, Control System, remains among the best Top Dawg releases, boasting one of the most heart-wrenching and personal rap songs of the past several years (“The Book of Soul”). But the rapper has strayed from the confessional and introspective brand of stargazing that once made him one of rap’s most interesting voices. In recent outings, Soul has emerged as rap’s preeminent quasi-intellectual, besting peers like Lupe Fiasco and Jay Electronica (who he disses on Kendrick’s behalf here) with dramatic logical leaps, upping the ante with nonsense bars.
Ab-Soul spends so much time mixing pagan and Christian texts on Do What Thou Wilt. that it’s unclear what exactly he believes, or worse, what he’s trying to persuade us to believe. These songs are mostly self-serving or pointless, and they all contain plenty of bad phonetic reaches and try-hard wordplay. There’s a song called “Huey Knew THEN.” (Get it?!) It interpolates the “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” theme and he raps “I’m hornier than the brass section of the band, you understand?” This is what would happen if you gave Shia LaBeouf some DMT, a 12th Planet documentary, and a World Religions textbook.
The production comes courtesy of longtime collaborators like Sounwave, Tae Beast, Willie B, and Skhye Hutch, names familiar to TDE canon like Rahki and the Antydote, and notable outside producers like WondaGurl and A$AP P on the Boards. It’s mostly dark and ominous, with sloping traditionalist breaks that slink just behind the downbeat. When it’s good, dense, or atmospheric like on “Braille” on “Now You Know,” it can settle Soul into a comfortable rhythm or obscure some of his worse lines; but when it’s bland (“Womanogamy”) or overwrought (“God’s a Girl?”), things become twice as grating, and often unlistenable.
Do What Thou Wilt. has been billed both as a love story and a “woman-appreciation album.” It’s also supposedly an exploration of Crowley’s wicked objectives and Soul’s goal of being the most righteous man, among other stray themes. These many mismatching, criss-crossing threads create an incredibly convoluted 77-minute slog that is as tough to listen to as it is to digest. The overly-busy “God’s a Girl?” boasts the lines “You got me crying with a hard dick (amen)” and “come have sex with Jesus” in the first 35 seconds. “Wifey vs. WiFi / / /  P.M.S.” can’t decided if it’s a song about how digital communication interferes with intimacy or an extended prison metaphor. “Womanogamy” is a half-baked manifesto about liking girls that like girls that are in love with him; “RAW (backwards)” is a construction of lazy word games (“Man, I got so many flows them shits come with ceilings”); “YMF” or Young Mind Fuck, is lined with the most boring paradox of all-time: if Ab-Soul calls himself a liar, does that make him a liar, or is a liar calling himself a liar a lie? A better question: Who cares?
Among the worst songs is “Threatening Nature,” a single that proved to be a microcosm of the entire project. It’s an undercooked concept with even flimsier raps that would get laughed out of a smoke circle of college freshmen: “With all disrespect, I think the American flag was designed by fags,” he says, a line that would probably be repugnantly offensive if it weren't so ridiculous. On “Evil Genius” Soul raps, “I studied theology, ancient philosophy, astronomy, astrology/The current state of the economy/Washington D.C., fossils and dinosaurs/The origin of our species.” Perhaps he should’ve spent a bit more time studying music.


[Editor's Note: Rob Mitchum is an admitted former fan of emo-punk act Rainer Maria, a fact that has brought ...

Long Knives Drawn

[Editor's Note: Rob Mitchum is an admitted former fan of emo-punk act Rainer Maria, a fact that has brought him great ridicule from the rest of the staunchly anti-emo Pitchfork staff. Confronted with the dilemma posed by reviewing their latest album, and torn over whether to reveal his weakness for the band, or to verbalize the unqualified hate of the staff's collective opinion, Rob underwent what is medically known as a "psychic rift." The tragic results are presented below.]
You know, if there's one band I've never liked, it's Rainer Maria. Epitomizing everything wrong with the Midwestern emo movement of the late 90s, Rainer combined their diary-excerpt lyrics, dampened-punk sound, and pretentious aesthetic to create suffocating levels of melodrama that backpack drones of the Great Plains ate up like Doritos. With singer Caithlin de Marrais wailing out her vocals like a nailgun to my head, and Kyle Fischer's off-tune counterpoints not helping matters, the poet-named trio was always near the top of my enemies list.
So it probably comes as no surprise that I find Long Knives Drawn to be not very good, not very good at all.
Long Knives Drawn continues a direction Rainer first explored on 2001's A Better Version of Me, a failed experiment in shoegazer rock that replaced the usual cold monotone singing with impassioned capital-V Vocals. The result: Decisive proof that separating the stretched-out chord storms and detached microphone work of shoegazing is like the fatal severance of Siamese twins. Somehow, as weak as the band was before A Better Version, this approach made them even worse.
Which means it's at least a small relief that Long Knives Drawn starts out sounding more like the slightly more palatable early material, with the first three songs building to fiery peaks that are all too quickly abandoned. The lyrics quickly assume the fetal position, however, with lines ("you need contact daily, or conscience is failing") worthy of similarly over-serious mopester Pedro the Lion.
I could rag on the script all day, but the failings of Long Knives Drawn go beyond mere solipsism. De Marrais' constant fretting about wilting love is kept company by Fischer's run-of-the-mill fretwork, rarely contributing more than a overdriven fuzztone after the admittedly arm-swinging "Ears Ring". Stripped of the band's old jittery tendencies, much of the music just floats on by beneath de Marrais' histrionics, while a sat-on organ in (yipes) "The Awful Truth of Loving" does little to expand their dried up sound.
Without instrumental distractions, those wince-inducing words just keep ringing, ringing, ringing in my head. Consider the clincher on "The Imperatives", where the breathtakingly awful crowning statement is "I was thinking we could go and live in a monastery."
I went into Long Knives Drawn with, well, long knives drawn, but the album's complete inessentiality appears to even trump my considerable bias. Admittedly, the record does have a few more listenable moments than I was initially prepared to give it credit for, but as a whole, the album is such a continued watering-down of their old sound that I find it hard to believe it would even appeal to the Rainer Maria faithful. Chalk up another victory for the Pitchfork status quo.
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You know, I've got to be square with you. I used to like Rainer Maria. Having been a Midwestern teenager in the late 90s, square in the midst of my Melodramatic Period, Rainer's sense of tragic romanticism and ever-so-slightly math-punk sound was exactly what I was looking for in the late high-school/early college years. Powered by the wonderfully wrong harmonies of singers Caithlin de Marrais and Kyle Fischer, the trio hit their stride early with their debut's opener "Tinfoil" and Look Now Look Again, their second and best record.
So you understand how I'd disappointed that Long Knives Drawn is not very good, not very good at all.
Though I'm not too surprised, really, after the trajectory suggested by their 2001 release A Better Version of Me, a highly flawed effort that found the band smoothing out the time-sig skips and clashing duets for an unsatisfying Loveless-lite sound. Largely missing Fischer's distinctive vocal interactions, while reflecting his increased complacency with sitting on single (albeit noisy) chords for indeterminable amounts of time, A Better Version wasn't so much deserving of scorn as it was yawningly bland.
Long Knives Drawn at least hints at a rebound, starting off at an energetic clip with three songs which, at times, show hints of the band's old spark. "Ears Ring" even contains an abrasive riff and pessimistic chorus worthy of Pedro the Lion ("you need contact daily, or conscience is failing"), though without David Bazan's morose delivery, it doesn't come off quite so meaningful.
It's all a log roll downhill from there, though, as it becomes increasingly clear that Fischer isn't going to step to the mic, and the music isn't going to regain much of its previous unpredictability and kick. Rainer Maria doesn't even seem up to conjuring up much of a storm any more, "The Double Life" and "The Imperatives" being surprisingly tame, dampered affairs too lacking in boister to attract attention, and "Situation Relation" forgettably occupying the band's now-customary solemn, finger-picked closing track slot.
But ultimately, it's the unbearable triteness of the lyrics that does Long Knives Drawn in. Rainer sympathizer as I might be, I just can't forgive lines like "I think that we should go and live in a monastery" serving as the vocal hook without popping a Rolaid.
I went into Long Knives Drawn hoping for a comeback to justify my unpopular soft spot for Rainer Maria, but I've come away with all my fears about their route confirmed, wondering if my previous fanship was just one of those cheeky mistakes of youth. Whatever the reason for my apathy, it's a sentiment concisely summed up by the band itself: "Once there was something, and now there's just a piece of atmosphere." Chalk up another victory for the Pitchfork status quo.
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Times are tough for rap supervillains, it seems—even Rick Ross's nemesis 50 Cent is declaring bankruptcy. The surprisingly strong Black Dollar, Ross' first new project in a year, feels slightly recalibrated to reflect the new hard times.

Black Dollar

Rick Ross's unlikely ascendance from one-note joke to kingpin was dazzling to watch, but all commercial rap empires end, and the sun seems to be setting on the once-untouchable Maybach Music Group. 2014's Mastermind debuted at #1, but the hot air balloon of confidence that powered his best records felt deflated. Leading up to its release, he got more press for his loathsomely tone-deaf justifications of "U.O.E.N.O"'s rape lyric, which cost him his sponsorship with Reebok, than he was for radio hits. Besides "Sanctified", an album cut featuring Big Sean and Kanye West, little of Mastermind has lingered in the public consciousness. As for *Hood Billionaire—*the second album Ross released that year—did you recall that existed?
Times are tough for rap supervillains, it seems: even Rick Ross's nemesis 50 Cent is declaring bankruptcy. And Black Dollar, Ross' first new project in a year, feels slightly recalibrated to reflect the new hard times. A "grounded" Rick Ross would be unthinkable, but he has scaled back, mostly on the production, which leaves behind the booming, slow-moving productions of Lex Luger and his many imitators. "Foreclosed on my past life," he bellows on the opening track "Foreclosures", an early highlight and the most compelling music he's made since his Rich Forever peak.
The song offers the welcome surprise of hearing Ross treat money as something that eats away at relationships and breeds distrust, instead of green rectangles he enjoys tossing out of helicopters. There are not-so-veiled references to contract issues with his own artists: "That paper get funny when publishing's involved/ Mechanicals never matter, 'cause that was your dog." Rapping about music-industry arcana like "mechanicals" and publishing is not a surefire recipe for excitement, but Ross' sonorous voice still breeds drama. His delivery is so convincing that the man who once air-lifted his mansion from Miami to Boca Raton sounds halfway-believable as a financial advisor: "I never met an artist who fully recouped/ These the deals the deal dealers wanna deal to you!" he raps through gritted teeth.
That voice of his, and the way he makes it leap and tremble with joy, can momentarily make you believe anything. At his best, Rick Ross isn't just a fantasy-fulfillment rapper, or a maximalist hitmaker: He's a performer, in the purest sense of that word. On "We Gon Make It", his voice climbs in excitement, and the gusto, the control, and thunderous conviction of his performance recalls the promos cut by the greatest WWF wrestlers. There is a trace of Dusty Rhodes in how he savors pauses, pounces on ripe-sounding words, sometimes at the expense of intelligibility. On "Turn Ya Back", he spits every repetition of the word "back" like it's a mouthful of poison. "Money and the Powder" repurposes the chanted chorus from Scarface's classic "Money and the Power", and by the time Ross is done with it, the phrase has melted into simply "money and the POWWW!"
This energy has always been the electrifying current enlivening even his silliest lyrics—on "Bill Gates", he reiterates his dearly held dream of a world with "Wing Stops on every corner." It is what allows him to somehow to diss "Freeway" Rick Ross—the very real gangster whose identity Ross co-opted—and 50 Cent in the same bar on "Geechi Liberace". There are dull, rote spots on Black Dollar—"Money Dance" retreats into a soft-focus world of bowties, marble floors,  and cocktail-jazz pianos that is about as exciting as eavesdropping on senior executives. And the reduced ambitions also mean that there are no calling-card songs here, no tarmac-sized beats or immediate chanted hooks. It's clear that Ross is regrouping. But the project serves as a reminder: This a good energy to have around, still.


The Melbourne band Jaala has a rushing, halting feel to their debut album, reflecting the complex rhythms of life. When the band's guitarist, singer, and songwriter Cosima Jaala screams, it's not with rage, but with rollercoaster joy.

Hard Hold

The debut album by Melbourne four-piece Jaala constantly shifts between time signatures, but it's not a virtuoso showcase. The band's guitarist, singer, and songwriter Cosima Jaala has said that she would struggle to identify any tempo—with the exception of 4/4, which, in her words, can "go fuck a dead donkey." Instead, the record's rushing, halting feel is her attempt to reflect life's complex rhythms. It's complemented by an unusual but brilliant pop palette that splutters with the chaotic energy of a Jackson Pollock.
The interplay between guitarists Jaala and Nic Lam, bassist Loretta Wilde, and drummer Maria Moles recalls Thrill Jockey's '90s Chicago set, splashy as Tortoise and richly mellow as the Sea and Cake. "Lowlands" ambles around a crooked bass line; "Order" has a splayed ska-punk lilt that evokes Clash ballads. Jaala sings with a jazzy, muscular intonation and a chalky squeak in her throat that recalls a punkier Amy Winehouse or Jeff Buckley, and also owes a debt to the skittish incantations of Life Without Buildings' Sue Tompkins. When she screams, as she often does, it's not with rage, but roller coaster joy. Considering how rampant the pace is—and Jaala's predilection for "brain-melting shit"—Hard Hold is often remarkably soothing, yet always surprising.
Jaala's lyrics are just as playful as her delivery, full of twists and wonderful imagery. They often deal with the ties that bind humans—love, obsession, violence—and she's just as interested in stretching the bonds of language. On "Hard Hold", she wrings the endless potential of a single syllable. "It's hard, a heart to a heart/ Too hard to unfold this hold with you," she sings, as if massaging out her own heartbreak, working agility back into her ticker's knotted muscle. "If sharing is a bowl of soup, then you drunk it dry," she tells her ex before she proclaims her newly discovered strength, a moment heralded by the song's buoyant lope bursting into a frenzied thrash.
Swaying between downbeat and more anxious passages, "Salt Shaker" captures Jaala's relief and guilt at leaving her humdrum seaside hometown. She licks salt off her hand to remind herself of the waves, and observes: "Those happy-holy-heinous houses/ They spread out and out for mileses." She's a distinct voice, and a versatile one, too: "Ticket" is a serrated tirade against an ex who used her, full of ugly screams and jagged riffs. But then comes closer "Hymn", a tender devotional where the band's edges soften to glimmer like sea ripples reflected on a cave wall.
H**ard Hold is a clever record that rarely foregrounds that fact—perhaps because it was recorded in a week, it hangs onto a scampering, impromptu quality that only adds to its appeal. While they sound nothing alike, Jaala's debut has a similar sense of fluid, approachable experimentation to a record like Bitte Orca: the kind of bright weirdness that seems to illuminate a whole new set of colors.


Though not as politically riling as his notorious Jerusalem, Steve Earle's latest album tries hard to be, with songs about sexing Condi Rice, and others that draw parallels between American and Iraqi soldiers.

Steve Earle: The Revolution Starts... Now

The Revolution Starts... Now

Hey, Steve, when does the revolution start? The title of Steve Earle's 12th album, silly as it is, could be seen as a nudge against Earle's previous release, the controversy magnet Jerusalem. His highest-profile record in ages, if not his highest-selling, it contained the O'Reilly-baiting "John Walker's Blues", an explication of the American Taliban's motives that was vilified for having the audacity to humanize the enemy, which Fox pundits and Nashville DJs saw as matter-of-factly treasonous.
There's little on The Revolution Starts... Now that's likely to ruffle as many feathers as that song-- i.e., nothing quite so revolutionary-- although two early tracks try their damnedest. "Rich Man's War" draws similarities between an American soldier named Jimmy and an Iraqi insurgent named Ali, both of whom Earle describes as "just another poor boy off to fight a rich man's war." Anyone with an American flag license plate holder is going to find parallels like these at least disagreeable and at most offensive (although Earle may have a better chance of reaching swing listeners than many dissenting acts). Like "John Walker's Blues"," the song works hard to make both Jimmy and Ali seem sympathetic, and while the effort is laudable, the result is less than compelling.
Faring far worse, both politically and artistically, is "Warrior", a spoken-word song full of purple-prose lyrics along the lines of, "Your faithful retainer stands resolute/ To serve his liege lord without recompense/ Perchance to fall and perish namelessly." Rather than being merely unrevolutionary, it sounds more like an embarrassment. It doesn't help that the song is sandwiched by a forgettable trucker anthem ("Home to Houston") and a story-song ("The Gringo's Tale") that takes forever to set up and then falls apart with a disappointing anticlimax that sounds as calculated as a stump speech.
Ironic considering its title, The Revolution Starts... Now is halfway over before it picks up with the one-two punch of "Condi Condi" and "F the CC". The latter rocks the album's catchiest shout-out and is stage-ready for an audience pumping fists and singing along with, "Fuck the FCC/ Fuck the CIA/ Fuck the FBI/ Living in the motherfuckin' USA." As it finally breaks down into a Ramones-style spellalong, the song becomes the most righteously defiant track on the entire album.
Earle sings "Condi Condi", a tongue-in-cheek-and-in-other-places ode to our current national security adviser, with Daily Show-esque straight-faced aplomb, and it should have fans lowering their pumping fists to cover their mouths as they chuckle over lines like, "Skank for me, Condi." While neither is as outright hilarious as Eric Idle's "FCC Song", both songs are a much-needed laugh amid all this election-year seriousness, and like a tent pole, they prop up an otherwise sagging album.
"Comin' Around", a duet with Emmylou Harris, and "I Thought You Should Know" rein in the politics in favor of more personal matters. While the songs may seem out of place on an album bearing this title, Earle lets them remind his listeners-- as if they need reminding-- that life continues during wartime, more or less the same as before. Heartache and happiness, dread and disappointment aren't exclusive to political anxiety, and these songs make the album sound less like a manifesto than a document of a year spent watching the dead-heat elections and going about your business.
Good as some of these songs are-- and the entire album is better than Nicholson Baker's similarly anti-war novel Checkpoint-- they're not quite enough to foment a revolution, and Earle closes the album with a lengthy reprise of the title track, which creates a bookend effect without actually building to anything specific. He's always been a deeply political musician, a radical in a genre whose stock-in-trade these days seems to be tradition. His ideology informs just about all of his albums to some degree, but politics as an overt subject may not be his forte, as The Revolution attests.


Channel Tres barely avoided the EDM world. And thank god for that. He turns in a debut EP of dark and deep hip-house with tons of promise.

Channel Tres EP

There’s an alternate timeline in which Channel Tres ended up an EDM DJ, resigned to the HARD Fest circuit until his soul officially bottomed out. Instead—in a case of what could be called divine intervention if you believe that Moodymann is God—he discovered house music. It was an awakening for Channel, now 26, who spent his post-college years songwriting, DJing, and generally just trying to make a living. And though he’d lived most of his life in Los Angeles, having grown up between Compton and Lynwood, something about the basement soul of Chicago and Detroit spoke to him: “That shit just woke me the fuck up,” he said earlier this year.
Enter “Controller,” the lead single from Channel Tres’ self-titled debut EP on Godmode (the label that brought you Yaeji’s pair of 2017 EPs, which similarly made the case for modern hip-house). Over loose, tumbling drums, Channel speaks as though he can’t be bothered to raise his voice much above a whisper, which makes his demands all the more powerful: “Your body is a game, fuck the lames, fuck the fame—I am your controller,” he decrees. His commands extend beyond the listener to the producer, Godmode co-founder Nick Sylvester (a former Pitchfork contributor): “Throw some sub in that bitch!” Styling himself as the omnipotent narrator of the dancefloor, Channel evokes an icier take on the near-religious devotion of Midwest house anthems where vocalists played the role of deities. But with his ice-cold spoken-word baritone—too cool to care, too commanding to be ignored—his inspirations skew more towards the composed sleaze of Moodymann’s “Freaki Mutha F cker” or the casual control of Mike Dunn’s “So Let It Be House.” These are artists who know that “less is more” only applies when you’re the coolest motherfucker in the room. Which they are.
If “Controller” feels warmed by mid-afternoon L.A. sunshine, the rest of the 5-track EP slinks into dusk. “Jet Black” is lit by the sunglasses-at-night glow of neon and street lights, its pulse reminiscent of the kind of Afrofuturist electronics where utopia and dystopia aren’t as opposed as they might seem. While spoken word of “Controller” ventures further into straight-up rap, Channel’s tone never veers from a self-assured deadpan. “Glide,” with its deeper-than-deep bassline and restless little snare hits, takes things even further into Motor City techno, Channel’s voice echoing across the cavernous space. But as lush background vocals and ambient synths creep in, it begins to resemble the work of guys like Theo Parrish or Mr. Fingers, Midwest pioneers who played man and machine against one another, making tracks where mechanical repetition coexists with improvisation, drift, soul.
Channel’s own unique perspective feels especially clutch on “Topdown,” where mahogany synths and a driving techno beat create the perfect pocket for his almost-raps: “Rolling with the top down/With my n****s, and your bitch.” He seems to be exploring familiar Midwestern territory, until halfway through, ’90s G-funk synths come wailing into the picture—an inspired halfway point between the Midwest and the West coast. It’s a lane ripe with promise, and one that begs for further exploration—hell, before there was N.W.A., there was the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, the electro group in which Dr. Dre performed turntable surgery in a sequined jumpsuit. With Channel Tres’ vision already this clear on his debut, the dancefloor is in good hands.


In 1968, the Brazilian pop singer began a Tropicália revolution against a newly installed military government. It's a vibrant, cheeky, agitprop album that purred and glided past the martial censors.

Caetano Veloso

In the history books, it was on March 31st, 1964 that a military coup ousted Brazilian President João Goulart. The U.S.-backed junta overtook all branches of government, ending nearly a century of newfound democracy for the one-time adjunct of the Portuguese empire and subjecting the country to two decades of increasingly repressive military rule. In Caetano Veloso’s 2003 memoir Tropical Truth: A Story of Music & Revolution in Brazil, he is adamant that the date is a lie: The coup actually took place on April Fool’s Day. Four years into the new regime, then-twentysomething Brazilian pop singer Veloso recorded his first solo album.
But the first voice you hear on his 1968 self-titled release isn’t that of Veloso, but of Portuguese knight Pêro Vaz de Caminha, credited with discovering Brazil in the year 1500. He wrote a letter to Manuel I, King of Portugal raving about the fertile Brazilian land and how “all that is planted grows and flourishes,” convincing the king that the presumed island was worthy of colonization. Carta de Pero Vaz Caminha is considered the first literary text to emanate from Brazil but it gets parodied in a high nasally voice by Veloso’s drummer Dirceu. Little did the percussionist know that the tapes were running. And when the arranger of the session mimics the “exotic” sounds of the Brazilian rainforest, it points back to that time when Brazil was virgin land, before the empire arrived at her shores.
Caetano Veloso’s debut album remains one of the most revolutionary albums released into the worldwide tumult of the 1960s. The opening salvo of Tropicália, it announced the arrival of the greatest Brazilian talent since João Gilberto and launched a fifty-year career that’s not only changed Brazilian music but American music as well, from Talking Heads to Beck to No Wave legend Arto Lindsay and Animal Collective.
To non-Portuguese speakers, Caetano Veloso might not sound anywhere near as transformative as the other albums of that year: Electric Ladyland, The White Album, White Light/White Heat, Anthem of the Sun, A Saucerful of Secrets, to name just a few. Couched in lush orchestral strings suggestive of the generation prior instead of the psychedelic production effects of the moment, it’s a sound thoughtfully strummed on an acoustic guitar. It has few of the tricks and technology of the aforementioned, but at its heart, it’s a revolt, a message delivered at a purr rather than a howl, elegantly gliding past military censors.
At the time, the album struck a balance between the polemics of communism on the Left and the crushing military might on the Right, sloughing off the nationalism and patriotism on either side while embracing a love of country in the shadow of the American Empire. And at the center of it all was Veloso and his supple, silken voice, a Bing Crosby croon delivered with a glint in his eye and Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries surreptitiously tucked into his back pocket.
The seeds of Tropicália’s revolution were planted the year prior when Veloso submitted “Alegria, Alegria” (“Joy, Joy”) to the TV Record Festival. Featuring a burst of fuzz guitar and electric organ it became Veloso’s first anthem, his self-described “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” It’s also his Breathless, his “Chicken Noodle Soup,” at once a critique and embrace of 20th-century pop culture. Veloso drinks Coca-Cola, quotes Sartre, name-drops Brigitte Bardot and Claudia Cardinale, all while slyly quoting fellow Brazilian pop star Chico Buarque’s “A Banda” and shrugging his shoulders at the end with the line: “Why not?” It set the themes for the movement to come in Tropicália: courting mass media, distancing themselves from the Left and silently protesting the powers that be. As Veloso later told the New York Times: “It was against the dictatorship without saying anything about it.”
The success of “Alegria, Alegria” emboldened Veloso as he worked on a new album. During lunch at a friend’s house one day, he sang some of the new songs, including one that still didn’t have a title. Brazilian film producer and screenwriter Luiz Carlos Barreto suggested the name of a recent piece from visual artist Hélio Oiticica, an installation that required the viewer to follow a path through sand, lined with tropical plants, until they ended at a television set. “Until I could find a better title the song would be called ‘Tropicália,’” Veloso wrote. “I never did find a better one.”
“Tropicália” opens with Dirceu’s recitation about Brazil as a “tropical paradise,” shouted amid a clatter of jungle drums, tympani, shakers, agogô bells, and the piercingly high frequency of flutes imitating bird song, before the orchestra strikes up and Veloso ambles in like a giant surveying all of Brazil:
*Over my head the airplanes
**Under my feet the trucks and trains
**And pointing out the highland plains is my nose
**I organize the movement, too
*I lead the carnival.
As expansive, outsized, and hallucinatory as Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” as insouciant and word-drunk as Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Tropicália” is allegory and absorption of all the contradictions of Brazil: its baião rhythms against suave orchestral surges, its colonial opening against the overstuffed modernist lines of Veloso. In the chorus, Veloso praises the sophisticated and urbane song form of bossa nova yet rhymes it with “mud huts.” Throughout the dense lines, Veloso swings from jungle to city, from swimming pools to sea, referring to fellow Música Popular Brasileira (MPB) singers like Elis Regina, Roberto Carlos, and—at the last refrain—to Buarque’s “A Banda” again. Though this time, Veloso adds a twist, rhyming it with the lady in the Tutti Frutti hat, Carmen Miranda.
By that point in the ’60s, Miranda was perceived as kitsch, the Brazil of old, even though early in her singing career, the “Brazilian Bombshell” was her country’s first full-fledged pop star and one of the highest paid entertainers in Hollywood. But Veloso was sincere in his embrace of Miranda, and in teasing out the last syllable of her name, he also nods to Dadaism, melding colorful camp and the avant-garde in just a handful of syllables.
“One characteristic of Tropicália... was precisely the broadening and diversification of the market, achieved through a dismantling of the order of things, with a disregard for distinctions of class or level of education.” So Veloso wrote in Tropical Truth, adding that one goal of their movement was “to sort out the tension between Brazil the Parallel Universe and Brazil the country peripheral to the American Empire.” It was a fine line to straddle, embracing both their own heritage and American pop culture. It meant admiring the colorful cartoonishness of the Kool-Aid Man but neither buying nor drinking the Kool-Aid, all while not falling for the consumerism being offered up religiously since the junta took power.

The American poet Elizabeth Bishop traveled to Brazil in the early ’50s. A two-week voyage turned into an 18-year stay in the country, where her aristocratic spouse, Lota de Macedo Soares, fed her access to the upper echelons of Rio society. Bishop found herself with a bird’s-eye view of the coup d’etat that would soon grip the country. She marveled at its efficiency and the support it appeared to engender, writing that these displays of anti-communism were becoming “victory marches [with] more than one million people marching in the rain.” From her perspective, it was simple: “...all in about 48 hours, it was all over...The suspension of rights, dismissing lots of Congress, etc... had to be done—sinister as it may sound.” But for the Brazilians who weren’t in positions of power and prominence, those in the favelas or those in the working classes who would not stand to profit handsomely, something far more sinister loomed.
In the United States, a group of economists began to impose a debilitating economic plan around the world through means of torture and suppression. Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine traces this nefarious economic shock therapy from Iraq in the 2000s back to Indonesia in 1965. But its earliest iterations took place in South America. In 1962, Brazil had elected João Goulart, who Klein writes was “committed to land redistribution, higher salaries and a daring plan to force foreign multinationals to reinvest a percentage of their profits back into the Brazilian economy rather than spiriting them out of the country and distributing them to shareholders in New York and London.” It was a dynamic attempt to close the gap between the rich and poor in the country.
But less than two years later, the U.S.-backed junta ousted the president and—with an economic policy scripted in the White House—instilled a plan “not merely to reverse João Goulart’s pro-poor programs but to crack Brazil wide open to foreign investment.” In just a few short years, most of Brazil’s wealth was in the hands of a few multinational corporations and the income gap widened, never to be narrowed again. That inequality remains today, exemplified by the Olympic Games in Rio. The political corruption and abject poverty lie just beyond the colorful walls erected to keep the favelas out of sight on our television screens.
And as the people took to the streets to protest the economic hardships befalling them, it was these same corporations behind the violent repression that soon followed. In Brasil: Nunca Mais, a book that detailed the dictatorship’s torture record from 1964 until democracy was restored in the 1980s, the extralegal forces that brutalized unions, student groups, and other dissidents were funded “by contributions from various multinational corporations, including Ford and General Motors.”
These nefarious forces at work were neither observed by the ’60s counterculture in the United States (then protesting for civil rights and against the Vietnam War) nor for most of the Brazilians themselves. As Veloso noted of the time, “Almost all of us were unaware of those nuances back then, and even if we had been, it would have changed nothing; we saw the coup simply as a decision to halt the redress of the horrible social inequalities in Brazil.”
But even if the young Veloso wasn’t consciously aware of the corporations sucking his country dry, his lyrics suggest an awareness of something terribly amiss. It’s a line that runs through the work of all who gathered under the banner of Tropicália: fellow Bahian Gilberto Gil; the psychedelic wunderkind trio Os Mutantes; bossa nova singers Gal Costa and Nara Leão; the wry, live wire Tom Zé; Rogério Duprat, the producer who studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen. While Tropicália earned the ire of the Left by not writing overtly political songs, in tapping into the collective disquiet of the time, their songs became all the more resonant.
Mocking his corporate overlords and their thirst for profit, Veloso made a tangy MPB album perfect for public consumption his first time out, his artful pop becoming Pop Art becoming agitprop. “Paisagem Útil” (“Useful Landscape”) scans as a string-laced bossa nova that toys with the title of Tom Jobim’s “Inútil Paisagem" (“Useless Landscape”). It’s an ode to Brazil where Veloso offers up a love of Rio's city lights and speeding cars, his lovers kissing under the glow of an Esso sign, a romantic scene set in a simulacrum of nature under the auspices of that multinational oil company. The speedy “Superbacana” is a frevo as penned by Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. The titular hero “Supercool” battles Uncle Scrooge and his battalion of cowboy minions and uses advertising lingo for shiny new products like “super-peanut” and “biotonic spinach” and—amid the dizzying blur of slogans—“economic advances.”
Translate the title of the jaunty “Soy Loco Por Ti, America” and it reads as “I Am Crazy for You, America.” And at the time, the Tropicálistas were eagerly absorbing as much music as possible from their neighbors to the north. “We were ‘eating’ the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix,” Veloso said of their influences at the time. “We wanted to participate in the worldwide language both to strengthen ourselves as a people and to affirm our originality.” They fervently spun albums from the likes of Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Frank Zappa, and more, but rather than simply mimic the trends to the north, they made these influences bear out the music of their half of the hemisphere. So on “Soy Loco,” Caetano isn’t being cheeky about loving America, it’s just that he means South America. The song playfully dances between a Colombian cumbia and a Cuban mambo, sung in Portuguese and Spanish, with Veloso hoping for a united South America rather than the North American Empire. The lyrics toy with the notion of naming, be it the name of America or the girl he plans to bring to the beach (Marti), but then Veloso pivots and he sings of a nameless country.
Fun enough beach fare, until Veloso signifies a dead man whose name can’t be said. He continues to land on this figure: “The name of the dead man/Before the permanent night spreads through Latin America/The name of the man/Is the people.” Less than a year prior, on the other side of the Brazilian border in Bolivia, Che Guevara was captured and killed by CIA-assisted forces. It would be decades before Veloso would admit that Che Guevara was the dead man at the center of the song, but with his death, the prospects of a united Latin and South America were imperiled. And in the years ahead, Brazil remained under the heel of the American Empire.
As Tropicália grew in popularity around the country, Veloso began to see more attention from the authorities. A performance with Os Mutantes for Festival Internacional de Canção in September of 1968 became a riotous confrontation with the audience. Soon after, another show featuring Veloso, Gil, and Os Mutantes was staged under another piece of art from Hélio Oiticica. Only this one featured a man recently shot dead by the police with the slogan “seja marginal, seja heroi” (be a criminal, be a hero) written on it.
By the end of the year, both Veloso and Gilberto Gil were arrested by the military police and detained two months in solitary confinement without being charged with a crime. After being allowed to play a farewell concert, they were then exiled from Brazil for the next four years. Living in London and then in Bahia upon his return in 1972, Veloso continued to record albums that were by turns exquisite, experimental, and introspective.
Veloso recalled an interrogation from an army sergeant during his imprisonment: “The sergeant was revealing that we tropicalistas were the most serious enemies of the regime. But in that little room of the army police, I did not have the strength to feel proud: I was merely afraid.” None of that fear can be heard here. Instead, bravado and bold assurance run through every number. At the center of it all is Veloso, with his swagger and full belief in the power of his songs to dance around the tanks and petroleum companies, to triumph over both the CIA and Uncle Scrooge. Amid the album’s blinding color and tropical fronds that would make Carmen Miranda proud, Veloso made a stand against the dictatorship without saying anything about it.


On their 11th album, Rivers Cuomo and co. aim for a hook-filled tribute to California guitar pop but the production gloss suffocates any personality these songs could have had.

Pacific Daydream

Long ago, Rivers Cuomo basically split Weezer into two different bands. One of them puts out experimental albums (Pinkerton, Maladroit, The Red Album, etc.), and the other puts out commercially-minded records (The Green Album, Make Believe, etc). At times (The Blue Album, Everything Will Be Alright in the End), Weezer straddle the fence. There’s a bit of mad genius to this approach. Not only does Cuomo—something of a creative contrarian who’s been ultra-reactive to fan response in the past—get to buck expectations when he wants to, but he also gets to appease both sides of the aisle.
If you like hooky Weezer, about half of the albums should appeal to you, while the same applies if you’re partial to the more out-there Weezer. Pacific Daydream is the band’s first offering to fall far short for both camps—not because it’s one of the most extreme examples of Cuomo going for a radio-friendly sound (though it is that), but because he betrays the band’s mission in the process. This is all the more disappointing when you consider that even when Cuomo churns out dance-pop fluff such as “Feels Like Summer,” it’s still abundantly clear that he hasn’t lost his gift for coming up with earworm hooks.
“Weekend Woman” offers a clear example of just how these songs go wrong. Weezer have used glockenspiels for texture in the past (Pinkerton’s “Pink Triangle,” last year’s “California Kids,” etc.), but here they follow ’80s-era Cheap Trick into the void between powder-puff rock and adult contempo, and the percussion instrument is front and center. This could have turned out to be another example of Cuomo taking gutsy risks, but "Weekend Woman" sounds less "spacious" and more "empty." Other than the one eccentricity in the arrangement, there's little to distinguish this song from hundreds of pop songs you've forgotten about. In fact, the album is almost completely devoid of the chunking guitar riffs that sit at the core of Weezer’s soul. And on “QB Blitz,” they even manage to take the “power” out of “power ballad.”
Lyrically, Cuomo’s continued fixation on nostalgia and dime-store rock mythology further chokes what little the music may have had to offer. He tries to pass himself off as the dreamy-eyed kid you invariably find shredding at Guitar Center by including references to Mexican-made Fender guitars and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but the observations are pat, delivered without detail or conviction. And while there are moments on Pacific Daydream when Weezer take half-hearted stabs at the harmony vocals that Brian Wilson so famously seared into our musical DNA, the strangely wan “Beach Boys” isn’t one of them. Had producer Butch Walker (Avril Lavigne, P!nk, Panic! at the Disco, and Weezer’s own 2009 album Raditude) nurtured the song’s quirks, “Beach Boys” could have actually explored its hinted fusion of Latin music and reggae. The airy lead hook in the chorus even contains suggests yacht rock, a style that could do worse than to have Cuomo give it a go.
To be fair, Pacific Daydream does show us new sides of the band—splashes of Spanish guitar, clavinet—while Cuomo and fellow guitarist Brian Bell’s acoustic handiwork threads the music with a delicate touch we rarely get from Weezer. Nevertheless, toothless melodies coupled with an excess of production gloss suffocate any personality these songs could have had. When Cuomo and company do more than pay superficial lip service  to the Beach Boys, it comes off as crass—even dishonest—coming from behind the music’s thick, gleaming surface.
Looking back, it’s no surprise that Cuomo’s distinct combination of fuzzy guitar riffs, sunny hooks, unabashed awkwardness, and roiling internal conflict struck such a profound nerve. But for the second album in a row, Cuomo anchors the music more specifically to California. Sure, that’s worked for scores of artists in the past, but a crucial part of Weezer’s appeal was that you could believe they came out of any garage on any tree-lined cul-de-sac in any suburban zip code in the U.S. Pacific Daydream, in spite of its name, mostly just gives you a feeling of being nowhere.


Broken Social Scene guitarist Andrew Whiteman's latest is at once straight-laced and funky in the way that only indie rock can be.

Apostle of Hustle: National Anthem of Nowhere

National Anthem of Nowhere

Andrew Whiteman, Broken Social Scene guitarist and Apostle of Hustle bandleader, is not an apostle, he's a hustler of hospital-cornered quilt of breezy, bouncy pop, with all of his more famous band's overlapping propulsion, but little of its chaotic bliss.
Where Folkloric Feel opted for cobwebby murk, National Anthem of Nowhere dovetails in bright, tidy corners. It's at once straight-laced and funky in the way that only indie rock can be. Tight, molded percussion and luxuriantly fluffed basslines make clean passes through delicately reverbed sheets of guitar and lathed synths. Affable vocals remake the music's nighttime throb as afternoon flirtation. The first record found Whiteman hung up on Cuban music, but National Anthem of Nowhere seems less discriminating in which genre particles it assimilates. The accumulation doesn't change the music's vanilla flavor, but it makes it bolder: The languorous "NoNoNo" threads throttled hand percussion through smoldering gypsy folk; the icily cragged "Jimmy Scott Is the Answer" is a mild-mannered indie rock approximation of classic soul; the post-rocky squalls of "Fast Pony for Victor Jara" are shot through with juicy tropicalia. On "Haul Away", Whiteman even manages to merge two of indie rock's favorite exotic templates-- the Western movie twang and the sea chantey.
Whiteman is aptly named-- there's a stiffness to his swing that, despite the house beat pulsing through "My Sword Hand's Anger" and the svelte disco bass on "The Naked & Alone", makes it better for headphones than dancing. This is an audiophile's record that encourages appreciative observation more than participatory engagement. Whiteman's vocals are strikingly similar to Jason Collett's; they have the same grainy, ingenuous croon, but the music deftly assembled around it makes Apostle a different thing that BSS (less rock) or Collett's solo project (less rustic). Galumphing percussion and angelic synths flesh out the fluidly hitching indie rock of "Cheap like Sebastian", and the vivid yet carefully time guitar fireworks of the title track are capped with a breath-arresting horn finale. By the time the piano filigrees of "A Rent Boy Goes Down" leaned into a mean, distorted cha-cha-cha, I was charmed enough to berth on Whiteman's international cruise ship, even though it really felt more like reading a Let's Go! guide than traveling.


Most of the songs on Juan Wauters' second album of sweet, unvarnished folk-rock are arranged for acoustic guitar, electric bass and other things that can be rehearsed in the living room without bothering the neighbors. Simplicity here isn’t a matter of technical limitation but of philosophical stance: For Wauters, music stopped evolving when the Beatles decided mysticism was more complicated than puppy love.

Who Me?

Juan Wauters’ sweet, unvarnished folk-rock comes from a forgotten New York, between the suburbanization and white flight of the 1950s and the impoverished 1970s, when it was enough for Simon & Garfunkel to visit the Central Park Zoo on the A-side of the single and the Queensboro Bridge on the B-side, when people’s hearts were alight with hope for a new baseball club called the Mets.
His second album, Who Me?, features 13 songs, all of which are less than three minutes long and several of which are less than two, played on about as many chords. Most of them are arranged for acoustic guitar, electric bass, and other things that can be rehearsed in the living room without bothering the neighbors. Simplicity here isn’t a matter of technical limitation but of philosophical stance: For Wauters, music stopped evolving when the Beatles decided mysticism was more complicated than puppy love.
Wauters has always seemed breezy but never quite so meek. I first encountered him as the singer of the Beets, a bratty, separatist band whose songs were anchored by declarations so simple they sounded like Zen aphorism. (My favorite of these is still probably "If you’re cold, get a coat," though I also get great comfort from "There’s only one horse and twenty riders/ Only one of them will get to ride it," which I take to be a metaphor for the narrow odds of success.) Whatever certainty he had has winnowed. "I grew up thinking I’d be a hero," he sings on "El Show de Los Muertos". "I grew up thinking I wouldn’t be them/ But what am I doing/ Here alone lost and wondering/ How many times do I have to die to be only me?"
Doubt is universal, but Wauters always seemed like someone able to enjoy himself in spite of it, someone who brandished his cardboard sword and charged the castle laughing. That’s him on the cover of Who Me?, standing on the hood of a car with the Manhattan skyline in the background, dwarfing the buildings but shying away from the camera. Later, he said he looked uncomfortable because they had to stop traffic in order to take the shot. Being in the way isn’t really his way.
I like Wauters; I want him to win in part because I don’t think he cares much about winning. His songs are a stay against the passage of time: Kid to adult, openness to inevitable close. Music that takes on smallness as a cause—the third, self-titled Velvet Underground album, Daniel Johnston, half the history of indie pop—usually carries within it some hard intimation of purpose, a candle flame, a secret message that tells the people who bother to stick with it that they are in fact on the true and noble path. Call it the secret toughness of wimps. Every time I see the title of this album I reflexively think, yes, you*!*


Using her customary palette of field recordings, captured conversations, and instrumental contributions from friends, the Texas composer lays bare her darkest thoughts about friendship and solitude.

claire rousay: sometimes i feel like i have no friends

sometimes i feel like i have no friends

“What if?” can be a trapdoor to hell. Waiting on the other side of that interrogative lurk paranoid delusions and pipe dreams, both potent mood oscillators. In sometimes i feel like i have no friends, San Antonio composer Claire Rousay explores the subject of friendship through a spiralling self-examination packed with dangerous hypotheticals. “Why does anyone want to be around me?” Rousay wonders in the mission statement of the 28-minute piece. “How do I have friends? Do I deserve it?” The ambient soundscape, like all of Rousay’s work, is assembled from field recordings, inventive percussion, and captured conversations. Here, Rousay seeks the marrow of friendship, and in turn presents the mechanics of the mind: its tendency to wander, scrutinize its host, and occasionally soothe.
In the opening measures, wind chimes flutter and tree branches sway and crack. sometimes i feel like i have no friends plays like footage of a blustery seaside, although it’s possible that these sounds—recorded in San Antonio, Chicago, and Rotterdam (the only coastal locale)—may have nothing to do with the sea. Rousay doesn’t map out the origin of each field recording, possibly because she knows that the mind is quick to construct a scene for each. What passes for surf might be a freeway overpass, or trash blowing around an empty parking lot. The tableaus morph with each listen; is that really a wind chime, or is it a bicycle bell? What’s interesting is that such disparate sources can produce such tranquil audio. Rousay, who once told The New York Times, “I basically record my whole life,” is intrigued by the multiple sonic properties of everyday things. Listeners can get lost in the limitless vistas she conjures, only to learn that they come from the sound of a seltzer can.
The images of windy beaches and blown leaves drift in and out as a halo of piano, played by Emily Harper Scott, quiets the mind. But when Rousay’s voice chirps in at the three-minute mark, it feels like a guided meditation gone wrong. “How many friends do you have?” she asks. “Do you ever say something bad about someone you would call a best friend?” (You may find yourself answering these questions silently and inadvertently.) “What if word got out that I’d said something bad about a best friend? Would they forgive me?” Each “what if” grates on the nerves, prodding you out of hypnosis. Rousay spirals further down, taking us with her: “What would happen if everyone turned their back on me one day? Am I ready for that? To be completely alone?”
Early in her monologue, Rousay sneaks in a growling drone. It grows louder and inflames the sense of unease stoked by her interrogation. But Rousay is an excellent manipulator of mood and atmosphere, and she is quick to rescue her listeners from self-obsessed despair. The remaining minutes are filled with barroom chatter, a car radio, and snatches of conversation between Rousay and her friends. The topics are light and banal: an 80-year-old Vietnamese tailor who is “obsessed” with Anthony Bourdain; a student who turned in improperly formatted homework. Rousay drowns out her anxieties in the mundane chitchat, which eventually disappears in a rain of wood and metallic percussion. Scott’s piano returns, and a swell of violin (courtesy of Rousay’s real-life best friend Mari Maurice, aka More Eaze) restores a sense of calm. In this serene passage, the questioning voice has been silenced.

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In a live recording from a site-specific 2016 performance at Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House, the Japanese polymath and the German minimalist balance piercing tones with emotional warmth.

Glass

A third of the way into his 2017 comeback album, async—Ryuichi Sakamoto’s first solo album in eight years and his first since recovering from throat cancer—a rustling noise arises on “Walker.” It’s a hushed, uncanny piece, full of faraway electric drones mixed with a much closer and more personal sound, of leaves crunching underfoot. It’s a sound that Sakamoto recorded while strolling the grounds of the 20th-century American architect Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House before a duo performance with Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai) back in September 2016. Noto and Sakamoto’s musical dialogue stretches back to the beginning of the 21st century, when the duo began trading the files that ultimately became 2002’s Vrioon. They most recently collaborated on the soundtrack to Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant. Their work there made the frozen wilderness of the film feel all the more bitter, and Glass, the live recording of that 2016 performance, pushes deeper into chilly abstraction.
After decades of making groundbreaking synth-pop as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra and working with artists such as Brian Wilson, Iggy Pop, and David Sylvian on his own solo albums, Sakamoto pivoted away from pop music. But collaborating with one of the most austere electronic producers of the clicks ‘n’ cuts generation marked a return of sorts. He has said that making experimental music led him back to the music of his youth, working under the influence of artists like Nam June Paik and the Fluxus movement.
There’s a resonant center to Noto and Sakamoto’s work together in which stark timbres and abstract electronics ultimately turn heart-stirring. That sense slowly arises on Glass, a site-specific performance that utilizes Johnson’s building as an instrument itself. The music’s drifting forms scan as ambient, but rather than imbue a sense of calm, Glass evokes an intensifying sense of unease it evolves. Glass bowls are rubbed with a mallet and digitally processed; ghostly tones from Sakamoto’s Sequential Circuits synthesizer waft about in space; and crotales (small tuned disks) are struck so that their high frequencies seem to hover like flying saucers. When Noto and Sakamoto introduce an even higher sound it evokes a physical sensation akin to freezing rain suddenly turning to ice, brittle and crystalline.
Nearing the 20-minute mark, a breathy, voice-like drone flares up. Watch the video of the performance, and the source of this mysterious, haunting howl turns out to be so innocuous, it would be easy to miss. Sakamoto approaches one of the panes of the house’s outer wall and, with a small mallet in hand, contemplatively traces arcs across the glass, eliciting otherworldly shivers. Abstract as most of the sounds on Glass are, and as unstructured as the improvisation is, there’s something considered at its heart. The tones, though still sharp as glass shards, are infused with a warmth that slowly permeates the final moments of the piece. It shows off Sakamoto’s late-era mastery in working with more experimental artists: Drawing on the cerebral, piercing tonalities of Alva Noto, he adds just enough earthy heat to keep the piece from freezing over.


On his new album, the sad-boy pioneer regresses into empty flexing, content to remain stagnant while the rap world passes him by.

Starz

Yung Lean moaned so Lil Xan could mumble. With his sad-boy aesthetic, the Swedish cloud-rap pioneer set the stage for all the polarizing, Very Online baby-faced white rappers to follow in his wake. (“I thought it was funny, a 16-year-old kid rapping about coke,” he said recently.) But Yung Lean’s music has rarely served as anything more than a bridge for other rappers to advance across. “Yeah, I’m only 23 but there’s like, like, ten of me,” he raps on his new album Starz, not just a flex of his pedigree but an unwitting critique of how easy his stuff is to replicate. Lean deserves a lot of credit for being ahead of his time, but to paraphrase Drake, it isn’t about who does it first, it’s about who does it right, and on Starz, his methods seem outmoded and nondescript.
The sounds Lean helped popularize are better off in the more capable hands of his Drain Gang collaborators, especially Bladee and Ecco2k, who push the music well beyond his limits on recent projects. Many other rappers have taken bits of the Sad Boys style and scurried off in so many different directions it’s hard to do a head count, but several of them did something more worthwhile with it. Lean, for his part, has remained largely static. Even as he’s become more comfortable with himself, there’s still an emptiness to his music that makes it seem uninhabited. Starz feels like an abandoned promotional website for a tentpole blockbuster: A snapshot of a bygone little kingdom unto itself, standing still, oblivious to the world that has passed it by.
On 2017’s Stranger, Lean polished his songcraft a bit, and he stopped turning sadness into a meme and started reckoning with it. “Red Bottom Sky” showed his pop chops, and “Yellowman” teased the offbeat experimental musician he could potentially grow into. Sadly, the songs on Starz don’t really move in either direction. He’s still largely plagued by the same issues that hampered him in 2013: His boasting isn’t just inauthentic, it’s boring, and glimpses of real, genuine emotion are far too rare. On Starz, it’s easy to imagine most of the songs being better if someone else were performing, or if no one was performing at all.
The music’s punch and pathos come from producer and frequent collaborator whitearmor. His icy electronics make Lean’s one-dimensional performances seem stereoscopic. The erupting synths on “Violence” nearly blot out the stains of Lean’s expressionless rapping: “Put the money in motion, I pull strings, Geppetto,” he says, sounding more like the puppet that has yet to become a real boy. The crystalline arpeggios on “Acid at 7/11” aren’t enough to salvage the amelodic chants or the song’s fleeting moment of introspection (“I sold my soul when I was very young/I’m so gone”). Lean has talked before about the titular harrowing incident in Canada, seeing a man crack his skull open at the convenience store while he was high on LSD, describing it as the worst drug experience of his life, but that isn’t the song he wrote. Too many of his songs operate in this way—as approximations of episodes that never quite articulate the feeling.
The rapping on Starz, if it can even be called that, is utterly devoid of character. Lean regresses into bad habits, disappearing into empty flexing. “Pikachu” is the most explicit “Young Thug did it better” moment, and on songs like “Hellraiser” and “Iceheart,” Lean’s mentions of brands feel like product placement. There are flashes of evocative writing buried deep. “My dreams are in heaven, I won’t sell you them/Yeah, I lost a friend but we will meet again,” he raps on “Low.” He has a painterly way with melancholic imagery when he bothers: “Blood writings on the moon paint the sky/Living is whatever, I know what it feels to die,” he raps on “Sunset Sunrise.” But most of the time, he doesn’t bother, and whole stretches of the tape pass by without evoking a single identifiable emotion.
Yung Lean is most tolerable on Starz when his songs play into the surrealism. On the yappy “Dogboy” and the crooned “Boylife in EU,” his oddball personality jumps out. The closer, “Put Me in the Spell” is closer to the Fray than any rap song, and while his singing is strained and incompetent, at least he’s going for it. Too much of the album seems satisfied with the small space Lean was able to carve out for himself.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Sean “Diddy” Combs’ 2010 side project: a dark and stormy concept album about one man’s transit through love.

Diddy - Dirty Money : Last Train to Paris

Last Train to Paris

The act of adopting a new nickname has become an astrological event for the artist-producer born Sean Combs. He got the name Puffy from a childhood friend who said a young Combs would huff and puff when he was mad; of course, this was before the Puff Daddy moniker became synonymous with happy new-money raps and wealth. Then came his first major rebrand: In 2001, he changed his alias to P. Diddy fresh after a breakup with Jennifer Lopez and a very public trial where he was acquitted on gun charges. Four years later, he was just Diddy, having dropped the “P” because, as he said, it was getting between him and his fans.
This year, as part of his latest reinvention, Combs has co-opted the world’s most complicated emotion and turned it into a lifestyle built around positive affirmations and unity. He now calls himself Love, a word that is everything to him: a sensation, a hashtag, a vibe, and the name of his nebulous club. But the Diddy of 2010 had a much more cynical view of love. His fifth studio album, Last Train to Paris, released that December, tells the story of a romance doomed by distance. Combs is the jilted protagonist who envisions love as a vast, deceptive, often unattainable warmth. At a time when hip-hop was still easing out of 50 Cent’s clutches, an electro-rap concept record about feelings was a legitimately bold move. Combs described Paris very abstractly as “train music,” equating trains with sensuality, movement, and the rhythms of the heart. His interviews, accordingly, blurred the lines between commerce and genuine introspection on the subject. “I’ve always fucked love up,” he told the Guardian in 2010, adding that love was something he felt he could never “achieve and conquer.” He was 40, a multimillionaire bachelor, confessing to journalists that he was lonely.
Though he’d rapped about his personal life before, Combs positioned Last Train to Paris as more than an album: It was an all-new sound, energy, and vibration through which he could revolutionize pop. He’d been a fan of acts like the British dance trio Loose Ends (featuring two men, one woman) and figured he needed a woman’s perspective to actualize his vision, so he commissioned Dawn Richard from his successful girl group Danity Kane and fellow singer-songwriter Kalenna Harper to join him under the name Diddy-Dirty Money. The resulting album took three years to complete, and when it landed, it wasn’t as clairvoyant as Combs initially planned. By then, David Guetta-fronted Eurodance (Akon’s “Sexy Bitch,” etcetera) was crashing parties and spilling over Solo cups, and hip-hop was changing. So Far Gone and 808 & Heartbreaks had both arrived well before Paris, flipping the tone of mainstream rap from tough to emo. What Combs did was more intentional: he took these intersecting trends and packaged them into a savvy collaborative effort. With Paris, he made a convenient, prophetic statement, embracing his love scars just as a new generation of rappers began pouring their resentments about relationships onto songs.
Grief is a familiar, tragic part of the Diddy brand. The No. 1 hit that launched him into solo stardom, “I’ll Be Missing You,” was an elegy for his friend and protégé, The Notorious B.I.G. Combs released his debut solo album, 1997’s No Way Out, while battling depression in a world without Biggie, whose death set up an entirely new challenge for Combs. The budding pop superstar known as Puff Daddy had spent the decade building an empire in his own image, comprised of a record label (Bad Boy Entertainment), a clothing brand (Sean John), fragrances, a hit reality TV franchise (MTV’s Making the Band), and a luxury vodka (Cîroc). All the while, the world saw him not as an artist foremost but as a rapping executive with a capable squad of ghostwriters. As 50 Cent once taunted in an interview, “An artist would be someone who actually wrote something on a record.”
It wasn’t that the classification bothered Combs—he understood the instinct to view him primarily as an entrepreneur. But going from a mogul sidekick to the main character meant his artistry had to grow in real-time. “When I became an artist, I wasn’t really prepared,” he told Spin in a 2010 interview. “I knew it was something I wanted to do, but I wasn’t trying to do it at that level yet. I feel like I’m in my most artistic phase right now.” Biggie’s death evidently launched Combs into a space where besides rapping, producing, and dancing in videos, he had to become both the star and curator of his solo albums, which to him required more foresight and reinvention. Even so, he’s never really an island on his projects. Paris is organized behind a higher concept, but like his previous work, it still functions as a compilation where Diddy is the greatest showman.
As good artistry does, though, Paris wound up telegraphing a shift in the air of hip-hop. Lil Wayne performs slam poetry on two tracks, which should tell you everything you need to know about the album’s mood. “Before you get here, put yo’ panties in yo’ pocketbook/That’s what I told her/Over the Motorola,” he recites breezily to open “Shades.” Spoken word is certainly not not Weezy’s medium—he adds a necessary lightness to the whole affair. Diddy’s rhyme schemes, in comparison, are quaint as love letters scrawled on loose-leaf, like streams of consciousness that skip from vexed queries (“I don’t comprehend how you can’t love when it’s so easy to,” he says on “Yesterday”) to full diatribes (“You’s a motherfuckin’ bitch to me/You just let me bleed,” he vents on “Hate You Now”). His raps are distractingly simple across the album, leaving space for Richard and Harper to be the true stars. Their more indulgent textures add dimension to the songwriting and overshadow Combs by design. When Richard flits from whispering her lines to exerting force on “I Hate That You Love Me” (“Love is in, then it’s out,” she sings), she’s adding deeper tones than Diddy can, even when her lyrics are straightforward.
On songs where Combs is a shadow, his collaborators—in this case, a suite of 19 other producers and 17 artists ranging from Grace Jones to Rick Ross—step in to effectively mirror his ennui. Trey Songz and Usher sound like pure sugar on “Your Love” and “Looking for Love,” respectively. Justin Timberlake summons his FutureSex self on “Shades,” but it’s Bilal and James Fauntleroy who gel beautifully on the hook, posing a charming yet bitter, harmonized hypothetical: “What you gonna do/When I’m perfect for you?” Does the song need a committee of voices? Not really, but it seems the more misery, the better. Drake offers a typical lament on “Loving You No More,” with a verse that matches the album’s overall theme of selfish love.
Combs is the most impassioned when he’s deep into warbling zone, like on his self-produced (with Mario Winans) “Angels,” a hip-hop soul ballad that masterfully contrasts his agony with Ross’ glossy boasts, rolling synths, and a flawless resurrected Biggie verse (“Dying ain’t the shit, but it’s pleasant/Kinda quiet,” Big offers). Like West did with 808s, Diddy saw Auto-Tune as the perfect tool to capture and transmit his cold despair. And though T-Pain didn’t invent automatic pitch correction, he influenced the Paris sound so much that Combs initially asked his “permission” to use Auto-Tune. The album’s engineer Matt Testa said Combs later gave Pain a royalty point.
There is a vibrancy to the atmosphere of Paris that seems to refract its cynicism. The effect is cool and industrial, with whirs and buzzes paced at the speed of a treadmill sprint. Lasers shoot through the Danja-produced “Yeah Yeah You Would” like arrows, and a hyper drumline powers Swizz Beatz’s “Ass on the Floor.” On “I Hate That You Love Me,” Combs compares Rodney Jerkins’ deceptively happy chords to “the way love feels.” The environment feels dark and confined like the dankest EDM venue, with the vulnerable, heartstring-pulling ethos of 808s. Similarly, the songwriting can quickly go from clunkers to devastatingly concise bars: “Yesterday, I fell in love/Today feels like my funeral,” Chris Brown drones relatably on one of the latter tracks, “Yesterday,” a better club ballad than his other cameo, the pulsing “I Know,” featuring Wiz Khalifa. The album’s most glaring disaster is “Coming Home,” a dreary, well-intentioned song about triumph in mourning.
A sense of loss looms over Paris, a place where love is clearly for sale. The bluster of it all threatens to extract you from the experience. You can hear the album actively striving for innovation in the background—before Combs begins crying out on “Yeah Yeah You Would,” there’s Swizz Beatz, noting that what we’re about to witness is “a brand new sound.” It wasn’t exactly that. We’d already heard versions of these weeps by then, though not in this setting: a dark and stormy dance record about a fickle emotion. Over a decade later, with rap fluent in more love languages than ever, Paris appears even more forward-thinking. The album remains a relic of a transitional period in hip-hop when rappers began openly embracing the idea of wearing their bruised hearts and egos on their sleeves. They haven’t stopped bleeding since.

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Basinski's new album *A Shadow in Time *contains some of his strongest work since The Disintegration Loops introduced him to the world at large.

A Shadow in Time

In the fifteen years since William Basinski released the debut installment of his Disintegration Loops series he has been rapidly, and rightly, lionized. But for two decades prior to that, he was just another eccentric artist in New York, a tinkerer who built his own instruments, ran a venue and experimented insatiably with tape loops. He would tune in to the easy listening piped out by CBS and record snippets of it, creating a massive archive of schmaltz that, through the alchemy of sampling, could be transfigured into something infinitely more haunting. “I would set up loops, get them going, put on the tape recorder and let it go for the length of the cassette because if it was going, it captured this eternal moment,” he told The Quietus in 2012. That eternal-moment is quintessential Basinski; his work has been uniquely fixated on time and loss, his compositions heaving with longing, melancholy and a sense of impenetrable mystery.
At its best, Basinski’s music inspires the sort of rapturous testimony usually reserved for peak experiences, cult leaders and the dead. When it’s not working as well, it can feel not unlike so-called “ruin porn” or the photography of Edward Burtynsky: lovely aestheticizations of late-capitalist collapse that comfort more than they confront. Thankfully, his new album *A Shadow in Time *contains some of his strongest work since The Disintegration Loops introduced the world to the artist.
The two pieces on A Shadow in Time offer contrasting entry points into his work. The title track is a richly layered composition for the archaic Voyetra 8 synthesizer that was a year in the making and showcases Basinski at the height of his compositional powers. David Bowie tribute “For David Robert Jones,” on the other hand, is an off-the-cuff tape loop piece commissioned by L.A.’s Volume gallery in the weeks after the artist’s death. Built with re-purposed tape fragments that had been chewed up by a former roommate's cat (“this big, fat motherfucker,” he called it) “For David” exemplifies the entropic decay he’s most known for while adding specific, Bowie-riffing details.
As with all Basinski’s work, there’s a tantalizing juxtaposition between chance and intention (the Voyetra 8 wasn’t even guaranteed to turn on, and when it did, it “was already doing some weird shit so we used it and more”). But on “A Shadow in Time” this tension plays more of a supporting role than a lead. The piece opens with a slow-motion cascade of shimmering high harmonies and murky, shifting lower tones. In its austere beauty, it calls to mind Pauline Oliveros’ landmark Deep Listening, but with an added dash of dread. Clocking in at just shy of 23 minutes, “Shadow” spends its first half stretching towards infinity and its second collapsing on itself.
Around the seven minute mark (amazingly it only feels like three), the piece begins to hollow out. Gradually those glassy high notes drift away like the dust tail of a comet, and tape hiss overtakes the piece. The sense of deterioration is palpable, made more dramatic by distant synth moans and weird bursts of chirping noise that poke through just as “Shadow” drifts into silence. It’s the kind of ending that makes one feel less like a listener and more like a witness.
In the wake of the A-side’s descent, “For David Robert Jones” feels like a cool down for the audience and a victory lap for Basinski. An orchestral clip that could easily be a Disintegration Loops outtake opens, circling around itself and never quite resolving. We’re on more familiar footing here, and the emotional tenor of the the piece, though engaging, is less arrestingly in-your-face than “Shadow.” Six minutes in, a gnarled saxophone juts through rudely, throwing the chilled out transcendence pleasingly off balance. A nod to Bowie’s own saxophone honking on “Subterraneans,” it’s an amusingly punk bit of sabotage, but it fails to develop into something more. Over fourteen more minutes the tension dissipates and “For David” runs out of steam.
Discussing The Disintegration Loops in 2012, Basinski told the Quietus “Over the period of the hour, that melody just decayed right in front of my ears… and eyes… I remember thinking, 'This is not about you.’” While this sense of riveting discovery isn’t fully achieved on “For David,” the album nonetheless offers a stunning journey into a vast, ink-black void.