A harrowing and unrelenting record, Stage Four is a glowing testament the post-hardcore band's melodicism, honesty, and unconditional empathy.

Stage Four

Touché Amoré have been around for just under a decade, but they’ve already ascended from stalwarts of the Long Beach punk community, to flag-bearers of the American post-hardcore renaissance, to the heaviest band managed by Roc Nation. They’ve shared stages with heavy-hitters like Converge and AFI, and even played Jay Z’s Made in America festival last month alongside Rihanna, Coldplay, and Lil Wayne. Anyone who’s heard Touché’s racket—a leaden mix of serrated guitar leads, head-spinning tempos, and frontman Jeremy Bolm’s impassioned screams—knows that it’s not exactly poppy; but what the band lack in a universally-adored sound, they make up for twice-over with timeless themes.
Bolm’s hyper-confessional lyrics are a beacon of hope to anyone plagued by anxiety, depression, toxic relationships, and general self-doubt. Touché’s journey is Bolm’s journey, and the band’s output thus far has belied the stereotypical arc where the frontman battles then conquers his demons. Their first two albums, 2009’s *…To The Beat Of A Dead Horse *and 2011’s Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me, showed a man at war with himself, struggling to navigate relationships personal and artistic amid anxiety's unyielding fog. Two years later, on 2013’s ambitious Is Survived By, he appeared on the precipice of climbing out of that pit of doubt. “It’s not for nothing, but I’ve seen a transformation,” he reported on “Social Caterpillar,” “Like I consider my happiness for the first time in ages.”
And then it all fell apart. On Halloween 2014, in a cramped concert hall in Gainesville, Florida where Touché Amoré were performing as part of annual punk blowout The Fest, Bolm received word from his family back in California that his mother Sandy had died following a long battle with cancer. Understandably, the loss—and the fact that he couldn’t be by Sandy’s bedside when she passed away—tore him to shreds. When one of your parents dies, you never really recover; all you can do is sift through the memories and hold tight to the ones that make you smile. Or you can write an album about it, which brings us to Stage Four, Touché Amoré’s best album.
Grief gathers its strength from fine details: childhood memories, sun-faded postcards, the box of Cheez-Its that never got thrown away. It’s difficult to render those artifacts as universal truths, especially to those who have been lucky (or young) enough to have avoided the experience. *Stage Four *definitely doesn’t have that problem. Instead, its vivid imagery, anthemic arrangements, and unsuspecting listenability position it as hardcore’s Carrie & Lowell: an autobiographical tragedy that soars in spite of an overwhelming urge to succumb.
Whereas past albums have traditionally tasked guitarists Clayton Stevens and Nick Steinhart with all of the heavy lifting, wedding every syllable that falls forth from their leader’s mouth to a ragged note, *Stage Four *sees Bolm taking a stronger melodic initiative. Roughly one-third of the album’s tracks bear his abyssal murmur, a hoarse monotone landing somewhere between Kurt Cobain and Gregorian monk. His clean vocals on “Water Damage” and “Palm Dreams” are unlikely to earn him a spot on *The Voice, *but it’s to the band’s benefit: There’s still plenty of room for Stevens and Steinhart to churn out the heavy riffs.
The remaining space is filled up by Bolm's memories, expressed invariably with blunt, self-scrutinizing detail. On “Eight Seconds,” he recalls the exact moment he learned of his mother’s passing, conjuring the moment painfully and cumulatively, gasp by gasp: “A missed call with a message attached/‘We need to talk when you have a chance’/I stood frozen in that Gainesville venue/Not knowing how to react.’” By the next track (“Palm Dreams”), he’s back in California at his childhood home, sorting through his mother's belongings in solitude (“I dug through 40 years/All alone/On my own”) and lamenting his failure to address “the questions that went unasked/That appear when time has passed”–namely, how Sandy came to arrive in California at the first place. After an extensive guilt-trip, he vows to “find connections through extensions” (this album, perhaps?) and commends anyone on the listening end who’s experienced a similar hell: “It’s a rite of passage/It’s a torch to carry/When you feel that damage/And it’s extraordinary.”
Melodic shifts and thematic focus notwithstanding, *Stage Four *isn’t too far removed from the turbulent post-hardcore showcased on Is Survived By, a similarity largely owed to the production: muffled guitar roaring in the front, staccato cymbals clattering in the back, whirling feedback throughout. Both albums were produced by Brad Wood, famed sonic architect behind Liz Phair’s *Exile in Guyville *and Sunny Day Real Estate’s *Diary, *two similarly confessional classics. His mix for closer “Skyscraper,” a devastating duet with folk balladeer Julien Baker, which juxtaposes the duo’s whispered, steadily-strengthening pleas for closure with a phased, shoegaze-y backdrop. Intimacy meets infinity.
At last, they clamber back up from rock bottom to the literal top of the world. The album concludes atop a Manhattan skyscraper late one night, as Bolm gazes out at the bright urban sprawl 102 stories below. A few minutes before, on “Water Damage”, the man had declared that he’d yet to recover. But as he stands as close as he can to a heaven he wants so desperately to believe in, he realizes the sheer scope of it all—New York City, life, death, art—and finds comfort in it. “You live there, under the lights,” he observes, Baker’s angelic coos not far behind. “New York City/It’s all yours.” He's brought his mother back to life as both a saint of the infinite city and a crucible of hope for the rest of us.


(What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is Oasis' absolute pinnacle, and this expanded three-disc edition—which outfits the original album with 28  bonus tracks—shows just how much the band was on a roll in 1995.

Oasis: (What's the Story) Morning Glory?

(What's the Story) Morning Glory?

It’s hard to remember now, but when (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? was released in the fall of 1995, Oasis were losers. Sure, their 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe had gone straight to No. 1 on the UK albums chart, and sold several million copies worldwide. But in their first true test of post-success fortitude, Oasis could no longer claim the title of biggest rock band in the land. “Roll With It,” the teaser from Morning Glory, was released August 14, 1995—not coincidentally, the very same day as “Country House”, the jaunty new single from their bitter rivals in Blur (aka the London art-school yin to Oasis’ Mancunian street-tough yang). A year’s worth of tabloid sniping between the two groups—which hit its peak/nadir when Oasis architect Noel Gallagher declared that Blur’s Damon Albarn and Alex James should “catch AIDS and die” —had effectively come down to the UK chart equivalent of an after-school fistfight. And in this case, it was Oasis who walked away licking their wounds—that week, “Country House” outsold “Roll With It” by more than 50,000 copies to take the No. 1 spot.
As it should’ve: “Roll With It” is nobody’s favorite Oasis song and would be hard-pressed to crack a Top 20 list of the band’s all-time best. It's a catchy enough tune, sure, but its shoulder-shrugged message of “you gotta roll with it” felt atypically blasé coming from a band that had previously endorsed self-deification, immortality, and shagging well-heeled medical professionals in helicopters. However, for a band never encumbered by humility, the decision to go with Morning Glory’s weakest song was, in retrospect, Oasis’ cockiest gesture yet: They were willing to take the first strike in the so-called Battle of Britpop because they knew it was only a matter time before they’d be delivering the knockout blow.
(What’s the Story) Morning Glory? would go on to sell more than twice as many copies in the UK as Blur’s contemporaneous The Great Escape, and, over the following two years, it served as the unofficial soundtrack to England's imminent changing of the guard. But, just as significantly, it achieved a metric of popularity that had proven so elusive to Oasis' Britpop peers: bonafide American success, with the album reaching number 4 on the Billboard charts and selling 3.5 million copies Stateside. (The Great Escape, meanwhile, languished in the lower reaches of the Top 200.) For all their unibrowed laddism and two-fingered paparazzi salutes, Oasis projected a glamorous image of Englishness that was potent enough to stoke the Cool Britannia fancies of those North American Anglophiles who make trips to specialty shoppes to load up on Dairy Milk bars, but (unlike Blur) not so colloquial as to alienate the heartland. It’s the stuff upon which Austin Powers franchises and Brit-themed pub-chains would later be built.
Fortuitously arriving at the mid-point of the '90s—and representing the peak of a Britpop narrative that took root with the retro-rock renaissance of the Stone Roses and the La’s five years previous—(What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is Oasis' absolute pinnacle. If Definitely Maybe presented Oasis' raw materials—’60s psychedelia, ’70s glam and punk, Madchester groove—Morning Glory melted down and remoulded them into a towering sound that was unmistakably their own, with those omnipresent (but never ostentatious) string-section sweeps classily dressing up the songs like ribbons on a trophy. And yet the real triumph of Morning Glory is measured not by the tracks that have since become karaoke classics, first-dance wedding standards, and go-to bathtub sing-alongs, but the exceptional album tracks that never got a shot at certain chart supremacy—like the jet-roar jangle of “Hey Now” (for my money, the best Oasis song never to be issued as a single) and the crestfallen “Cast No Shadow”, dedicated to a then-mostly-unknown Richard Ashcroft of the Verve, a band that would soon reap the benefits of Oasis’ American incursion.
Ironically, the Oasis-whetted appetite for all things English was arguably also crucial to the impending Stateside success of the Spice Girls, who would usher in a wave of preteen-targeted pop that would eventually push guitar-oriented rock acts down the charts by decade's end. And what’s most striking about listening to (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? today is how, at the height of their powers, Oasis seemed to be bracing for their own eventual downfall. The tone of the album is decidedly darker and more reflective than the working-class escapism of Definitely Maybe, be it the foreboding “it’s never gonna be the same” prophecy of opening salvo “Hello”, the title track’s white-lined dispatches from the after-party circuit, or the cigarette-lighter-illuminated comedown of “Champagne Supernova”, wherein Oasis already sound nostalgic for the idealism of their debut album. And while Noel still deals in absurdist metaphor here (how exactly does one slowly walk down the hall faster than a cannonball?), he also emerges as a more personable, sobering foil to brother Liam’s bratty swagger—not just on his showstopping star turn on “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, but also in the way his backing vocals imbue “Cast No Shadow” with a deeper sense of despair.
This expanded three-disc edition of Morning Glory?—which outfits the original album with 28  bonus tracks—shows just how much Noel was on a roll in ’95. Conventional wisdom suggests Oasis released two near-perfect rock ‘n’ roll albums before a grueling, prolonged process of diminishing returns set in. That’s not entirely true—the truth is, Oasis produced at least three albums worth of spectacular songs, it’s just the one of them was spread out over various B-sides. Fourteen of these were collected on the 1998 compilation The Masterplan (a.k.a. Oasis’ Hatful of Hollow), half of which is culled from the Morning Glory era and reappears here. And as any long-time fan can tell you, these castaways rank among some of the band’s finest moments: perennial encore standard “Acquiesce” is a perfect sonic manifestation of Liam and Noel’s notoriously embattled but co-dependent relationship, contrasting the former’s sneering verses with the latter’s heartfelt chorus; “Rockin’ Chair”, along with the Noel-sung ballads “Talk Tonight” and “The Masterplan”, evince a subtlety and sensitivity rarely heard on Oasis’ albums proper. And for those who prefer to savor Oasis’ easy-going melodicism minus the Wembley-toppling bombast, the cache of Noel-strummed acoustic demos included here offer lovely, low-key showcases of his songwriting savvy.
Such unwavering consistency was no doubt the cornerstone of Oasis’ early success, but, in hindsight, it also factored into their subsequent stagnation. As this box set makes abundantly clear, Noel Gallagher is a master craftsman, able to construct totemic tunes with even the most modest of means. But he’s never really been one for artistry. No matter how much he professed his desire to be as big as the Beatles, Oasis were never concerned with the Fabs’ creative process—i.e., how they pulled from contemporary influences ranging from Dylan to Motown to Stockhausen to create truly modernist pop music—so much as their cultural omnipotence. And for a while, Oasis convinced us you could achieve the latter without bothering too much with the former: just write a stadium-sized chorus and the rest will take care of itself. (The relationship between Oasis and their idols can ultimately be measured as such: In 1968, George Harrison released the most freewheeling musical experiment of his career, Wonderwall Music; 27 years later, Oasis would appropriate the title and apply it to their simplest, most universal anthem.) What's the Story (Morning Glory) thrust Oasis to the top of the mountain, but left them with heads full of snow and clouded vision (while a revitalized Blur would later emerge as the band more in tune with The Beatles' adventurous spirit). In the dying moments of “Champagne Supernova”, Liam lets the song’s central question—“Where were you while we were getting high?”—hang in the air, as if to suggest the good times are already gone. And as Oasis would eventually learn, getting even higher won't bring them back.


The composer Egisto Macchi was part of the same collective that included Ennio Morricone. He scored numerous films and documentaries in Europe: This collection gives shape to his legacy.

Egisto Macchi: Biologia Animale E Vegetale

Biologia Animale E Vegetale

When you imagine the music of a western film, you’re likely hearing the string arrangements of Ennio Morricone in your head. But you might not know that Morricone was part of an entire supergroup of Italian avant-garde composers called Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza (Il Gruppo), whose collective experimentation only found its way into the mainstream vis-a-vis their work in film and documentaries. Their work together spanned musique-concrete, serialism, and free jazz improvisation. One of the lesser-known members of the group, at least in the States, was Egisto Macchi, who like Morricone scored numerous films and documentaries in Europe. Biologia Animale E Vegetale collects the best of Macchi’s work for documentaries. Available for the first time since 1978, this collection of more than two hours of “library music” gives shape to a legacy that’s only being now rediscovered.
Biologia Animale E Vegetale is composed of 24 tracks, and thematically it’s supposed to explore the biological undertones of Macchi’s composition strategy. Macchi believed that that in the span of a composition something like a biome could be created, a small self-enclosed world that nurtured a symbiotic connection between composer and listener. The titles are all related to biology in one way or another, and the pieces themselves attempt to capture the essence of some biological subject (plankton, heart beats, frogs and toads). Macchi accomplishes this by attempting to mimic the movement of an animal in the pace of piece, or by creating a musical narrative about the process he is attempting to soundtrack. For example in “Cuore” (Heart) he starts with a pulsating drum beat that perfectly pantomimes the sound of an uncertain heartbeat. In “Stadi embrionali” (Embryonic stages), he attempts to mimic the sounds of growth and gestation. It starts off with the barest of minimal piano repetitions, and then as the actual organism of the song gets larger and larger, strings, horns and percussion crash into each other, leading the song down pockets and tangents.
He also touches upon early electronic music with two-part compositions like  “Cellule Animali 1” and “2.” The main motif of a vibrating ambient echo is painted in with pattering percussions that sound like raindrops. He carries this same tone into a composition called “Microorganismi,” which is essentially an exercise in anxiety and restraint. The ambient echo reappears, and is only accompanied by a slithering percussive sound, like spiders were let loose on a set of microphones and drum kits.
There is more whimsical music available in Biologia, and strangely some of these compositions would fit well in a latter day Wes Anderson film. “Millepiedi” (Centipede), which is delicate and pastel hued, or “Cani e cuccioli 1-3” sound like they were composed on a toy piano. Other tracks, like “Nascita di un fiore,” are irrepressibly romantic, recalling walks in the park. But for the most part, a lot of these songs resemble each other, even with minor variations in progression and instrumentations. Even when the pieces grow slightly indistinguishable, there's something interesting at work, a suggestion that there is something unifying in the pace of all biological life, a certain sense of speed and tension in all things that walk or move or breath.


Later this year, Relapse will issue LPs from Richmond, Va., doom acts Cough and Windhand. The two groups have released their best music to date on Reflection of the Negative, an immersive split EP that serves as an important notice for Richmond as a center for metal in the United States.

Cough / Windhand: Reflection of the Negative

Reflection of the Negative

If ever there were an optimal time for Virginia doom acts Cough and Windhand to release their best music to date, this moment seems like the right one. During the last few years, both Richmond bands have fostered a buzz that’s escalated steadily enough to mirror the electric crawls of their music. Ritual Abuse, Cough’s second album and first for relative metal major Relapse, evidenced the group’s ability to punish over the long haul, or to keep 12-minute marches interesting with deliberate lulls and requisite quakes. A year ago, Windhand emerged with a self-titled five-song debut that managed to be simultaneously spooky and psychedelic, with tremors of backwoods horror reverberating within the band’s riff-and-rhythm lockstep. It also introduced Dorthia Cottrell, a singer who slipped a fetching dose of soul into the band’s tidal sway. “Heaven”, she beckoned through repetition at the close of the record’s best song, “is on its way.” You wanted to stick around to see just what that meant for Windhand.
Later this year, Relapse will issue new LPs from both bands, something they’re teasing with the new, three-track split album Reflection of the Negative. The contributions from both bands are, so far, inarguable career highlights, cuts so well imagined and executed that you’ll, once again, want to know what’s next for both. The move is a marketing coup for Relapse, of course, but Reflection of the Negative is also one of the most immersive metal sets to arrive so far this year. If this is only a prelude, the main event will be aptly named.
As Craig Hayes pointed out at Popmatters last year, splits between heavy metal bands are a matter of convenience not only because they allow acts to share costs and fans but also because they serve as de facto display cases for subtle subgenre variations. Heavy metal is a realm of both establishing and erasing rules, meaning that a niche is pure only until someone new can come along and rearrange its ideals. That’s especially true here, with two acts from the same town and typically pinned with the same genre tags-- sludge, doom, stoner, psychedelic-- going in wildly different directions.
As they did in 2010, Cough uses the split LP format to go the distance with one uninterrupted track. These 18 minutes are a showcase of pacing and structure. Cough rides the same theme for the distance, and they don’t suddenly sprint after distended stretches, an easy and pervasive technique in such situations; instead, the quintet methodically adds and removes elements like a creaking organ, spliced movie samples, and shrieking second guitar to maintain intrigue without seeming impatient. Vocalist Parker Chandler initially crawls inside of the amplifier wall, his shrieks made mostly unintelligible by the band’s creeping tumult. Near the halfway mark, though, the drums briefly disappear, leaving only the scrambled guitars and his now settled desperation: “The time has come for sacrifice,” he repeats. The ingenious setup keeps the track interesting by revealing the layers slowly and in an unexpected order. Nearly a decade into their career, Cough has never sounded so belligerent, frightening or immediate.
On its side, Windhand opt for two numbers, both of which find the band ratcheting its intensity and urgency. The shorter “Amaranth” deals in italicized aggression, turning everything from Cottrell’s arching vocals to the sprawling guitar solo that consumes the song’s back half into a point that must be made now. Though it’s slower than its counterpart, “Shepherd’s Crook” capitalizes on the same feeling. Every piece comes with a little extra energy, whether it’s the irascible noise-guitar introduction or the fortified punch that the drums pack in the otherwise torpid verses. On their debut, Windhand, especially Cottrell, sometimes seemed as if they were hanging around for an audience to arrive, dipping into a groove long enough to give a crowd the chance to show. But with Reflection of the Negative, they’re coming at the audience from all angles. They’re done waiting, and they’re much better for the shift.
Reflection of the Negative also serves as an important notice for the Virginia capital of Richmond. When people talk about metal in the South, they’re quick to trot out the humid burgs of Savannah and New Orleans or, in a much different way, the death metal crucible of Florida. But Richmond has a historic and lively past with loud music, whether talking Honor Role and Breadwinner, Pig Destroyer and Municipal Waste, or even GWAR and Avail. Between Inter Arma’s Sky Burial, a study in metal miscegenation, and Reflection of the Negative, the city’s already responsible for two of the year’s most compelling metal albums. Release dates for full-lengths from Windhand and Cough haven’t even been announced yet. The time is right.


Originally released on the UK post-punk group Wire’s label in 1982, this long-lost one-off spotlights a singular busker who made magical music out of a stringed wooden door.

Michael O’Shea

In Albert Camus’ 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, he wrote of modern life: “At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” Bleak stuff—but the miracle of living in a bustling metropolis is that unexpected, life-changing encounters are possible, too. Take the example of Laraaji, just an unknown street musician busking in Washington Square Park in the late 1970s when Brian Eno dropped a business card in his zither case. Laraaji went on to become one of the luminaries of ambient and new age music.
Not long after, a similar encounter happened at Covent Garden in London’s West End, where the busker Michael O’Shea made the acquaintance of Wire’s Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis. Spellbound by his street-corner performance on a homemade stringed instrument, Gilbert and Lewis told him to drop by the studio anytime. Nearly two years later, O’Shea showed up unannounced; they recorded on the spot. Wire put out the results on their experimental label, Dome, in 1982. It would be O’Shea’s lone release and quickly became scarce. Thanks to Dublin label All City’s AllChival imprint, Michael O’ Shea’s singular music returns, its mystery wholly intact.
O’Shea, who came of age in London in the 1960s, got his start playing harmonica before traveling as a relief worker during the Bangladesh famine crisis of the early ’70s. While there, he contracted hepatitis and dysentery, teaching himself sitar during his convalescence. His nomadic lifestyle took him to Germany, France, and Turkey, where he brushed up against Algerian, Indian, and other strains of music. His travels also led him to sell off all of his instruments, but he came across an old door and set about festooning it with strings to craft a homemade instrument that variously evoked comparison to a dulcimer, zelochord, or sitar. O’Shea played its 17 strings with a pair of chopsticks and ran it all through a battery of effects. He called the thing “Mó Cará,” or “my friend” in Gaelic.
Odd as the man and the instrument might seem, O’Shea wound up with gigs at venerated London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s. He brushed shoulders and shared stages with Don Cherry, Alice Coltrane, Rick Wakeman, The The’s Matt Johnson, and Irish post-punk Stano, and even opened for Ravi Shankar at Royal Festival Hall. Outside of a few tracks on Stano’s debut album, little documentation of these encounters survives. (Wakeman apparently scrubbed his contributions from their recording altogether.)
Which leads us to this album, cut at Wire’s studios in a single session on July 7, 1981. The epic opener “No Journey’s End” puts us squarely in the no-man’s-land of O’Shea’s inner world. There’s little else like it. It feels at once orderly and amoebic, moving between chaotic density and calm. It brings to mind Laraaji’s music, but also hints at North African, Indian, and Irish folk idioms while not really seeming to resemble any of them. At best, they reflect how O’Shea might have encountered these styles in his travels, alighting on them before sallying forth into new realms. The piece gives the distinct impression of falling and rising way off the ground. Across its 15 minutes, the struck strings, gentle electronics, and intensifying patterns of the Mó Cará begin to mesmerize like a Spirograph.
The rest of the recording offers up more succinct glimpses into O’Shea’s world, with Gilbert and Lewis switching up the atmospherics surrounding the strings. Cavernous echo and reverb make “Voices” and “Anfa Dásachtach” seem like they are emanating from a submarine, bubbling up from deep underwater. “Kerry” is perhaps the pop iteration of the A-side, a two-and-a-half minute air. “Guitar No. 1” finds O’Shea switching to the titular instrument and conjuring a dark mood on its six strings. One gets the impression that no matter what tool was within O’Shea’s reach, he was liable to set up on any given street corner and strike passersby in the face with cosmic profundity.


Holger Czukay left Can in 1978 and began a solo career shortly afterward. His debut solo album, now reissued, reveals an impish, cut-and-paste jester behind Can’s impassive façade.

Movie!

‘Humor’ is not the first thing that springs to mind when you think of the music of Can. Power, darkness, intensity, sure, but even though the German progressive rock band used a can of okra as the cover image of Ege Bamyasi and released the punning 1978 single entitled “Can-Can,” the group’s sense of humor was well-buried under their muscular music.
So when bassist/producer/tape splicer/ shortwave radio manipulator Holger Czukay stepped away from the band for good in 1978 and started releasing solo material the next year, Can fans must have been baffled by Czukay acting like Buttons the Clown. But as Grönland’s much-deserved reissue of his debut album (now titled Movie! and boasting new cover art) reveals, Czukay might have been a merry prankster all along. There’s little in Can’s decade-long discography like the leftfield disco slink of “Cool in the Pool,” the album’s lead-off track, wherein Czukay’s heavily-accented come-on “Let’s get coooool in the poooool” might make you pause on the diving board. One can’t help but imagine how the wonky, lightweight ditty must have infuriated krautrock fans, but thanks to the likes of DJ Harvey and Prins Thomas, it’s become a disco-not-disco favorite in the 21st century. And for all of its skanking guitar and slinking rhythm, it’s a bizarre song, each sliver of space shot through with strange audio snippets, outbursts of opera singers, radio broadcasts and helium-voiced squeals. It’s like what Spike Jones & his City Slickers might have done with a disco track (the reissue's lone extra is an instrumental take of “Pool,” though without the vocals, it loses some of its charm).
The thirteen-minute long “Oh Lord Give Us More Money” halves the difference between between “Pool” and mid-70s era Can, Czukay teaming up with his old bandmates Michael Karoli, Irmin Schmidt, and Jaki Liebezeit for a long, serpentine jam. Much like their prior work, the band seamlessly shifts from loose and exploratory to tightly-wound in a single measure. But Czukay replaces the vocal space that Mooney, Suzuki, or Karoli previously occupied with a bevy of more goofy sound samples, primarily from cartoons: splats, slide whistles, howls, scampering feet, explosions. It’s a speedball of Can’s musical dynamism circa Soon Over Babaluma and Czukay’s sonic impishness; it runs a bit long, but not before making you grateful you heard it.
“Persian Love” anticipates the sort of sampling work Brian Eno and David Byrne would explore two years later on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (though Can did “Ethnological Forgeries” themselves back in 1974). Czukay builds a track out of snippets from Farsi songs and soundtracks, pairing the ululations with nimble key phrases and spry guitar licks. And while it draws on Persian sounds, the playfulness of the music surrounding can also bring to mind King Sunny Ade’s highlife, suggesting a willful blurring of boundaries, between Germany, Iran, and Africa. And the epic closer “Hollywood Symphony” is as shambolic as anything Can ever did. Liebezeit’s drums shuffle along while Czukay adds lyrical ramblings, layers of bass and synth, shortwave and more sampled dialogue (presumably from old Hollywood movies) that Czukay then interacts with. As Liebezeit’s drums goes into double time, Czukay goes full mad-scientist, adding synth squiggles and a dizzying amount of voices to it all, before the piece draws to an elegant conclusion. The seriousness of Can and prog-rock in general gives way to Czukay’s whimsical way with cut ’n’ paste, and on Movie!, Czukay acts less like a student of Stockhausen and more like Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Mad Professor, making merry with reels of 2” tape in his hands.


On their third album, the first with power producer Jack Endino, the Virginia doom band Windhand overcome the mistakes they made on their 2013 collection, Soma. Most importantly, the haunted, hypnotic voice of Dorthia Cottrell guides the action rather than being trapped inside the tumult.

Grief's Infernal Flower

The draw of Windhand is neither mysterious nor complicated: Even on the Virginia doom squadron’s very early demos, the haunted, hypnotic voice of Dorthia Cottrell cut through thick guitars like a finger beckoning through the pale fog. "Black Candles", the first song of the band’s first release, transcended its lockstep Black Sabbath ancestry only when she arrived, shifting as she did from a soulful moan to a blues wail in one sublime instant. Even when the band became more elaborate for their 2011 full-length debut, both by adding samples and entering extended psychedelic tangents, Cottrell remained the focus of the action and attention. Each song felt like a setup for her arrival, as Windhand methodically followed another set of doom or stoner instructions. Maybe it’s the group’s tube-amp buzz, but something about the relationship has long suggested a colony of worker bees, preparing the hive for its rightful queen.
But this approach—and Cottrell, specifically—got lost on Soma, the disappointing 2013 album that once seemed as if it might signal Windhand’s move toward the masses. Nearly from start to finish, Cottrell fought against the sounds surrounding her. The band suddenly subsumed the leader, presenting itself less as a support squad and more as the new star. Bass overran Cottrell on "Orchard", and the riffs wouldn’t step out of her way for "Woodbine". During the record’s two-song, 45-minute closing sequence, the band swallowed her almost entirely. Sure, the riffs, rhythms, and solos were competent and sometimes even captivating, but if you’re an idiomatic doom band signed to one of metal’s biggest labels, you’d hope so, right? Windhand overrode their best asset.
Grief’s Infernal Flower, Windhand’s third album and first with power producer Jack Endino, reverts to the strength of Cottrell and the songs themselves. The shift is apparent as soon as the drums and guitars lock into a march at the start of opener "Two Urns". Cottrell’s presentation—cool, collected, sinister—sits just above the surface of the still-roaring band. This time, she guides the action rather than being trapped inside the self-aggrandizing tumult. During the first eight minutes of Grief’s Infernal Flower, Windhand land a very deep hook, something they rarely accomplished across Soma’s 70 minutes. They even creep toward the economy and impact of alternative rock with "Crypt Key", a five-minute bruiser whose instant chorus suggests the Breeders with a big, burdensome case of the blues and a Sleep-sized backline. Windhand’s performances are direct without being simple here. The band and Endino take care to fold the layers of sound beneath or around Cottrell, never above her.
This directness carries over to Cottrell’s two solo numbers, too, both of which are more concise and less cloaked than her lone acoustic turn from Soma. The wonderfully frail "Sparrow" ponders the space between eternal devotion and the disappointment that mortality inevitably brings. You can imagine it as an antediluvian tune Harry Smith might have collected or a number fit for Windhand’s vintage guitar vortex—a testament to Cottrell’s command of songs when she’s given space to sing them.
Despite Windhand’s emphasis on economy, the quintet hasn’t given up on its love of at-length indulgence and improvisation just yet. For the finale, they pair two 14-minute tracks, each ending with a slow, steady, psych rock march. There are extended solos in both, the tones bending and fluttering into surreal patterns. During "Kingfisher", Windhand hover in a half-acoustic, half-electric haze, suggesting folk rock lost on a narcotic trip. Still, even as the jam lurches ahead, the singer and the song seem in control, as Cottrell judiciously delivers her sermons at the start and in the middle. She then slips into the background, as if dispatching the band to do her bidding. Likewise, Cottrell drifts in and out of "Hesperus", appearing, disappearing, and reappearing only to counter electric miasmas with arching melismas. Even when she’s quiet, Cottrell is now in control.
Early this year, Cottrell released a self-titled set of solo recordings. With her voice multi-tracked and manipulated, she sang 11 rather simple folk-and-blues songs over her own acoustic accompaniment. The sound was lovely, yes, but the effort felt listless and inward, as if a tape recorder had just happened to catch these back-porch performances on the wind. The hesitation mirrored Soma. But making and issuing that album, released the same month Windhand cut Grief’s Infernal Flower, must have galvanized Cottrell’s role as a capable singer able to command an entire enterprise. She expresses no hesitation here, and for that, her band has never sounded better. Sure, you can come for the twin guitars and the loaded rhythm section, but at last, Cottrell has made it clear you’re staying for her.


On a double-set of albums, the New York rapper stakes a claim to life’s dualities, exploring the many layers of her personality with style and vulnerability.

Princess Nokia: Everything Is Beautiful / Everything Sucks

The comedian Hannah Berner recently posed a question on Twitter: “Does anyone else feel like they are a lazy perfectionist with ADHD and chronic fatigue who is pretty chill besides the occasional panic attack and loves their friends but hates people?” The answer, at least among the many people I know who shared the tweet, seems to be a resounding yes.
In a climate of absolutist cultural politics and rigid personal-brand guidelines, it can feel risky to embody harmless contradictions in public. Princess Nokia’s two new albums are presented as a response to this paradigm; on the jointly released Everything Sucks and Everything is Beautiful, the artist stakes her right to duality, no matter how seemingly oppositional. There may be something in the air: Moses Sumney has described his new album as an expression of multiplicity. Noname recently announced a mini-run of shows pointedly called the Hypocrite Tour.
If anyone would take the mantle of divergence as ethos, it’s Nokia, who has proudly and loudly collected a number of identities over the years. “I’m a weird kid. I’ve got so many personalities eatin’ me up inside. And I think that’s the basis of the music and my whole identity,” she said in a 2017 interview. The albums funnel some of those identities and their respective musical styles into two distinct modes. Press materials describe Everything Sucks as “a brash, ruthless and insistent collection,” and Everything is Beautiful as “a representation of the sensitive, feminine side of the gender fluid artist.” It’s almost a little too on the nose.
Everything Sucks was made primarily in the span of one intense week in New York, with friend and producer Chris Lare (aka owwwls), and that tight turnaround is evident. Its 10 songs are a locust swarm of angst, restless and frantic, as one can become in a city so densely populated. The first four tracks are zealous fight songs with lyrics like, “I’m the monster under your bed/I’m the goblin from the dead” and “Who dat, who dat, who dat?/The bitch is back/Who dat, who dat, who dat?/I will attack.” You can practically see a moshpit forming while a devil circles her left shoulder. There’s a preemptive, almost B.Rabbit-esque listing of her flaws: she’s crazy, she’s gross, she’s generally a mess, and what of it? The closer “Just a Kid” is an exception to the aggression, an awkwardly delivered but vulnerable story of the traumas of her early years, including a stretch in foster care.
Nokia finds more success on Everything is Beautiful, which, in comparison, is warm and expansive. Made over a span of two years, including some time in Puerto Rico, it has the optimism and groundedness of being in a place where you can occasionally look up and see a wide sky. The production, with beats primarily by Tony Seltzer and 1-900, are peppy and bright, and the themes spiritual and forward-looking, like an antidote to the hellishness explored on Everything Sucks. The jazzy sounds that have shown up in segments of New York’s reinvigorated independent rap scene offer a welcome complement—via the downtown crew Onyx Collective and Los Angeles saxophonistTerrace Martin—to Nokia’s experiments with effective but technically imperfect vocal styles. One song, the gentle and self-deprecating “Heart,” is ready-made for a sync on a future season of Insecure: “I hate social media, I wish it all would end/I’m not like those other girls, in fact I’m fucking worse,” she raps. This is Nokia at her best, a relatable, unpretentious narrator of her own growth.
For someone proud to have resisted the industry machine, both albums show that Nokia is adept at making music that fits neatly within its bounds. There are familiar flows and familiar sounds throughout: she out-Chances Chance the Rapper with a version of his signature sing-songy delivery, snarls in Cardi B’s clipped flow, and resuscitates the plonking piano that gave OG Maco a hit some years back. It’s easy to grow tired of her insistence that she’s a misfit, until you consider that scores of artists have built careers on similar narratives with far less self-awareness. And yet the album’s best moment comes in the form of a poem on an outro track: “I survived from trauma and I’m living out my purpose/And I’m sure you are too, we’re really not that different.”


While nodding to West Coast legends of the ’90s, G Perico steps into the spotlight on his debut, a searing and vivid album that details a world of his own.

All Blue

If you’re unfamiliar, G Perico can seem like a contradiction in terms. He channels pimp rap legends, then calls into KDAY to dedicate slow jams to his girl. He opened a business near the same blocks where he used to earn all his money tax-free, then survived an assassination attempt after he’d gone legit. When he was a child, his grandmother gave tarot card readings out of the house; the rapper, born Jeremy Nash at the tail end of the ’80s, thought he could see his own future, one that ended in an early death. And when he makes his case against Donald Trump, he does it on a song built for the strip club—City Hall is too far north, anyway.
But nothing about G Perico is a contradiction. His lived experience is that of someone who grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the ashes of crack and Reagan and the Riots. He wears his hair in a Jheri curl and could trade slicked-back shit-talk with anyone up to and including DJ Quik and Too $hort, and he always makes sure his lawyers are paid on time. On his debut album, All Blue, Perico funnels all of that and more into lean, shimmering songs that recall early ’90s G-funk but provide, well, a blueprint for the future.
Last fall, Perico put out Shit Don’t Stop, an engrossing mixtape that made him a minor sensation on both sides of the 10 freeway. All Blue is Shit Don’t Stop blown up to its widescreen endpoint: more joy, more peril, more money. There are sunny afternoons interrupted by drive-by shootings, liquor-soaked parties with third strikes looming overhead. On the opener, “Power,” he raps, “My homies live forever, we ain’t never gonna die,” but the understanding that this might not be true underscores almost every song on the record. And when All Blue ends, with “Alive Tonight,” it breaks up fatalistic verses with a hook that doubles as a somber thank-you for another 24 hours free from handcuffs or bullet wounds.
It’s hard to overstate how focused All Blue is. It clocks in barely longer than 35 minutes; of 13 tracks, only three surpass the three-minute mark. So rather than a first-person narrative, the LP plays as if G Perico is your friend you catch up with a few times a day, dispensing wisdom (don’t walk with the flow of traffic, in case killers try to pull up behind you) and summing up the grimmer part of his life in neat couplets (“I could’ve been lost my life, Crip/So fuck all that nice shit”). The songs are sleek and economical, from their tightly wound structures to remarkably straightforward storytelling (from “Can’t Play”: “My uncle smoked crack/I used to sell it to him/I used to drop it in his pipe and watch him go stupid/After every four zips, rubber banded cash/Grab some more and throw all the money in the stash”). The fat’s been cut away—all that’s left is bone, sinew, and curl activator.
All Blue is the record you make when you can’t sit still. When he raps, Perico is constantly in motion, whether he’s skipping out of police custody before he sees the county jail (“Wit Me Or Not”), flying back and forth to Vegas just to play craps (“How You Feel”), or fucking, digging through her purse, and leaving (“Get My Staccs”). Physical spaces figure prominently in his work, and Perico renders them in such vivid detail that when he brags “made hundreds of thousands on West 104th Street,” your mind’s eye can populate the block with every actor. Perico’s at a point in his life where he can bounce back and forth between South Central and palaces in the Hills; he just happens to have his sharpest thoughts while in transit.
Perico invites obvious comparisons to ’90s legends like Quik, but he’s not a revivalist. If anything, he seems to exist parallel to conversations about era and lineage in rap. In his writing, Perico’s world is populated by neighbors and enemies and smokers desperate to wash his cars—never other rappers. It’s refreshing, and it eases the weight of tradition and expectation, all while pulling liberally from the aesthetics of the early Clinton years. In that way, All Blue is a distinctly L.A. record, shaped by the city’s culture but not backward-gazing or needlessly reverent. And on “Bacc Forth”—the anti-Trump song Angelenos will hear all summer between midnight and last call—he boils his city’s ethos down into six words: “Looked at death and started dancing.”


Recorded in a rented house in the Hudson Valley, and weaving together found sounds with spontaneous music-making, the quartet’s self-titled album is as much an audio documentary as it is a folk album.

Florist

In 2019, discussing the correlation between the wordless ambient music she releases under her own name and the folk-influenced songs she writes for her band Florist, Emily Sprague confronted the limitations of being a lyricist. “I’m interested in words being more—like a sentence saying a hundred emotions, and being five words long,” the 28-year-old artist explained. With Florist, she has put this idea to the test. Her words are simple and pared down and always open for interpretation. Take, for example, the winding desert road of a title track to 2017’s If Blue Could Be Happiness, where she repeats those five words during a long, slow coda that encourages you to sort through your own associations with each one.
“But language just scratches the surface of what we experience,” she continued. “I feel like I need to be able to explore sound and communicate things without words, too.” For the most part, Sprague has explored these thoughts via modular synth on serene but adventurous records like Hill, Flower, Fog. At the time of the interview, she was also working on a new album with her Florist bandmates—guitarist Jonnie Baker, bassist Rick Spataro, and percussionist Felix Walworth—that presented new context for her ambitions. The self-titled 19-track release is as much an audio documentary as it is a folk album, with over half the tracklist consisting of found sounds, momentary improvisations, and combinations of the two, presented as duets with nature.
In order to listen to Florist front to back, you have to take a retreat similar to the one the band took to make it. Instead of their usual routine, entering the studio with a batch of songs that Sprague had prepared, the quartet temporarily moved in together and embarked on a more collaborative process. In a rented house in the Hudson Valley, they set up their equipment on a screened-in porch and let music-making become part of their daily practice—something that could weave between cooking and catching up, brewing coffee and watching the rain. To mirror the process, after each major song on the record, there’s a quiet comedown, equalizing the noises they made together and the ones that surrounded them.
Among the first things you notice is the dynamic of the band. Because Sprague is such a striking lyricist, and because her voice is so quiet and affirming—a kind of scribbled birdsong that follows the cadence of poetry recitations more than pop music—it has been easy to overlook how crucial each member is to the group’s minimalistic style. On Florist, they constantly draw your attention to their delicate interplay: In “43,” one of nine tracks featuring vocals, the band follows Sprague’s lyrics concerning the nature of home and family, all leading to an image of fireflies and a long instrumental outro led by a stormy, electric guitar solo: a rare moment on a Florist record where things sound in danger of spinning out of control, teasing a sense of chaos.
It’s a reminder that Florist has always been a collaborative effort, a sensitive group of musicians all equally in tune with the small wonders and moments of connection and disruption Sprague evokes in the lyrics. In these songs, you can hear how their increased intimacy allowed them to locate subtle new textures that conjure these feelings—say, the layered horns in “Spring in Hours,” or the slide guitar in “Feathers.” Listening to the instrumental tracks, like the fingerpicked “Duet for Guitar and Rain,” you gain insight into how they may have landed on these sounds—momentary bursts of inspiration, collected like seashells on a beach.
Of course, none of the instrumental tracks would be nearly as interesting if the more traditional songs weren’t among the strongest Sprague has written. After the stark evocation of grief on 2019’s Emily Alone—a sad and singular peak in her catalog, written and recorded in isolation after the death of her mother—these songs continue a narrative of loss and recovery, a tentative sunrise after a long, sleepless night. In the wake of those songs that explored Sprague’s relationship with her mother, “Red Bird Pt. 2 (Morning)” is a stunning, clear-eyed invocation of her father’s vantage: his memories of driving to the hospital on the night she was born, helping build the house where she grew up, and carrying the weight of grief alongside her in the present day.
Sprague has always been preternaturally equipped to deliver these autobiographical stories while maintaining a unifying, zoomed-out perspective, where each “you” and “I” slowly assume a cosmic form. This worldview forms an almost psychedelic throughline in her work, slowing down time—every drop of rain, each passing thought—so that she can better understand its full trajectory. The lyrics on Florist are filled with deaths and reincarnations: hearing her mother through the birdsong in “Red Bird Pt. 2 (Morning),” or the portrait of herself in “Dandelion” as a withering plant in the garden of her home. (After recording the music in Florist, Sprague moved to the Catskills, where she grew up—a type of homecoming that many of these songs search for.)
Because the interludes outnumber the actual songs, it is difficult to call this Florist’s most accessible album, but it is certainly their most physical. Had the tracklist been condensed, you might hear a great album by a deeply in-tune band recording in the woods. Instead, you get to explore each of those components: the band members convening, the songs falling into place, the woods themselves. It’s best experienced as a whole, but some tracks stand on their own. “Sci-Fi Silence” begins with a humming synth, then fades into a gentle folk song and slowly builds into an anthem, centered on a single phrase. “You’re not what I have but what I love,” Sprague and her bandmates sing together, over and over again. It’s the type of distinction she has spent her career exploring. On Florist, they fill the space between: a living document of what mattered most and what’s still flickering in the night.


Electronic producer Scott Hansen builds a subtle album heavy on warm synths and serene beauty that at its best evokes the work of Boards of Canada and Bibio.

Dive

Scott Hansen, aka Tycho, is a fairly well-known graphic artist, and you can hear his design skills at play in his music. Like a particularly crisp logo or font, his songs have a good sense of scale and proportion, and it's clear that a lot of work goes into them. Take a look at his artwork and you'll have a good idea of what his electronic compositions sound like, too. Nostalgic, 1970s-inspired imagery, a heavy sense of tranquility and faraway longing, all tied together with a pretty sleek modernity. Several of these elements have been sort of beaten into the ground in indie music over the past few years, but with Dive, Hansen manages to pull them together in a way that still feels compelling.
Tycho's tracks are built primarily with synths and sampled live instrumentation, and his electro-organic approach brings to mind leaders in this field like Boards of Canada and Bibio. Sonically, too, he explores terrain similar to those guys': "A Walk" and "Coastal Break" nail a pastoral peacefulness with warm, sepia-toned beats and flourishes of acoustic guitar. What separates Tycho, at least from a lot of the bedroom-oriented artists currently exploring similar sounds, is simple craft. These tracks are OCD-level meticulous. Hear it in the percussion: In place of the tinny, synthetic beats favored by lots of indie-ambient startups, Hansen takes extra care to capture real live drum sounds with a crack and thump that makes you feel like you're in the room with them.
His attention to detail goes beyond highlighting individual instruments. It's there in the way Hansen simply builds a song, merging all the synth wooshes and percussive ripples to find a natural arc. "Daydream", for example, starts out fairly simple with twinkly guitars and a sturdy, knocking beat, but the song's pulse quickens as it progresses, and by the end you've got something heady enough to live up to its title. Because Hansen clearly wants this to be a deep headphone experience, those subtle shifts go a long way in holding your interest. And in terms of the imagery he builds-- fields, pastures, calming oceanic scenes-- it's all there, and it's pretty easy to set your brain on "relax" and conjure up those natural landscapes.
If that nicely detailed tranquility is Dive's biggest selling point, it also exposes a nagging flaw, which is a lack of tension. Hansen is so committed to keeping things serene that he doesn't incorporate much danger or risk, and at times the album can feel a bit one-note. An out-of-nowhere tonal change or an occasional tinge of darkness would give the record more balance, make it more interesting. That missing element of surprise keeps Tycho from reaching the same heights as BoC or Bibio (the former more otherworldly, the latter more adventurously poppy), but ultimately Hansen succeeds at what he sets out to do. Dive might not be the most ambitious instrumental record you hear all year, but it almost always sounds good.


The Fleet Foxes tourmate and old-time music practitioner follows an album of traditional tunes with a collection of his own songs.

Out on the Open West

Frank Fairfield's backstory is the stuff of old American legend: A troubled vagabond who eventually made his way home to Los Angeles, Fairfield rooted through the city as a street musician, pulling bow across fiddle and hammering away at a banjo or acoustic guitar on corners or in flea markets. One afternoon, the right musician saw him play, became his manager, hitched him to a tour with champions Fleet Foxes, and landed him a record deal with one of the country's most trustworthy syndicates of old sounds, Tompkins Square. Now, he's the subject of a documentary and a touring musician with audiences in multiple continents. In a time where musicians and their managers attend workshops on going viral, and when the companies that own the music plan album leaks in advance, Fairfield simply played because he somehow had to talk about his feelings. Everything else just found him.
Fairfield's debut collected his interpretations and arrangements of 11 traditional tunes; Out on the Open West, the follow-up to his 2009 entrée, features three arrangements of traditional tunes, and they're all instrumentals-- the halting "Haste to the Wedding/The Darling True Love", the ebullient "Turkey in the Straw/Arkansas Traveler", and the foot-stomping "Texas Farewell". But the best songs here are Fairfield's own, and they're tremendous achievements from a guy who once said he wasn't a songwriter: "But That's Alright" is a sad, spirited bit of self-medication, the title phrase muttered in the chorus with the same kind of bitter resolve that tides people through strings of bad news.
On "Kings County Breakdown", he bows with a get-out-of-town abandon, like he's racing away from a hard week's work for his favorite vacation spot, or more likely, his baby. "Ruthie" is a tender, torturous goodbye. Fairfield is a strong player, but here, he smartly fumbles along the banjo's neck, the lament's lyrical depression mirrored by the broken technique. "Who will set her coffin? Lord, who will lay her down? Who will lay sweet Ruthie in that cold rocky ground?" he sings before answering that he will. The despair is overwhelming. Out on the Open West, then, not only cements Fairfield as a remarkable performer but also suggests that he's an evocative writer with his own stories to share.
It also puts Fairfield squarely in the folk tradition of collaboration. His self-titled debut was mostly Fairfield. On "Kings County Breakdown", though, he's sawing his fiddle alongside mentor and guitarist Tom Marion. That's young colleague Jerron "Blind Boy" Paxton singing perfectly content harmonies on "But That's Alright" and Old Crow Medicine Show's Willie Watson doing the cheery picking on the title track. But the most remarkable moment in Fairfield's slender catalog is "Poor Old Lance", a stunning bit of sadness that puts him squarely in the league of his heroes. Assisted by a trio of fiddle players, Fairfield sings with the sort of human moan that you can hear in Doc Watson's blues or any number of Harry Smith or Alan Lomax's field recordings. These troubles have never seemed more like Fairfield's own.
Fairfield is worthy of your consideration, even if you've never heard or considered the old-time music. He plays with a rare integrity, offering up his life in a way that does exactly what folk music must do-- it relates the world as the singer sees it, mixing sadness with sweetness, excitement with low-down and miserable depression. This has nothing to do with genre; hip-hop, jazz and rock all feel this way, too. Like the best of it all, Fairfield's music seems inexorably real and entirely necessary.


The Flaming Lips' unrelenting new album retains Embryonic's weighty mood but deconstructs the instrumental bombast into skeletal, mechanical forms. Where its 2009 antecedent played on themes of environmental destruction, The Terror deals in personal turmoil-- loneliness, depression, and anxiety.

The Terror

When Wayne Coyne opened The Flaming Lips’ 2004 Coachella set by crowd-surfing in a giant inflatible bubble, it represented more than just another gimmick to add to the band’s ever-increasing arsenal of theatrical parlour tricks. It effectively split the Flaming Lips into two bands. On the one hand, you have the merry pranksters that have remained a constant in music-new feeds for the past decade, whether they’re doing rails with Ke$ha, beefing with Erykah Badu, or taking the concept of a physical album release to literal extremes. And then the other, you have a band that, over the past few years, has entered the most fiercely experimental, stridently anti-pop phase of its long and storied career. It’s just that the former aspect inevitably overshadows the latter-- even on the tours for 2009’s dark, disorienting Embryonic, volcanic salvos like “Worm Mountain” and “See the Leaves” simply got subsumed into the Lips’ usual onstage circus and became the backing soundtrack to more bunny-costume dances.
But with The Terror, the Lips take the bold step of bursting their own bubble. The band’s unrelentlingly bleak new album relates to its predecessor much as Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots did to The Soft Bulletin, retaining its antecedent’s weighty mood but deconstructing the instrumental bombast into more skeletal, mechanical forms. For all its claustrophobic tension, Embryonic still offered much in the way of thunderous rock catharsis; The Terror presents no such salve, drowning its meditative, melancholic melodies in a suffocating, smoggy haze of buzzing synth frequencies, with little rhythmic release. The first song may be called “Look… The Sun is Rising”, but it’s less cheery proclamation than grave warning, its stuttering drum beat and dentist-drill shocks conjuring ominous images of a not-too-distant future where the mere act of going outside will require the use of a gas mask and protective suit.
Tellingly, The Terror has resulted in a complete rethink of the Lips’ stage spectacle, one designed to disorient rather than delight. Last month at South by Southwest, the band previewed the album in its entirety at Austin’s Auditorium Shores with a set-up that deemphasized Coyne’s usual carnival-barker cheerleading in favour of an all-out video-screen sensory assault (and random acts of hair-pulling), the singer held in place by a custom-made synthesizer molded into a baby doll sprouting massive tentacles that extended to the stage’s backdrop. Naturally, a set of unfamiliar, unremittingly gloomy material didn’t make for ideal Friday-night entertainment for many of the 30,000 in attendance, but Coyne’s static position onstage is a fitting visual metaphor for his performance on the record.
Where Embryonic played on themes of environmental destruction, The Terror deals in more personal turmoil-- loneliness, depression, anxiety. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the album was preceded by news of Coyne’s separation from his partner of 25 years, Michelle, and of multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd relapsing temporarily.) Accordingly, Coyne spends the record singing like someone who’s strapped to a hospital bed, often resorting to a cautious sing-speak or fragile falsetto as if too beaten down to muster up the strength for anything more. (Or maybe it’s a vocal-eroding side effect of being the most chatty, gregarious frontman in rock.) Even when unleashing an invective like “You’ve got a lot of nerve/ A lot of nerve to fuck with me,” his voice remains eerily emotionless, relying on duet partner du jour Sarah Barthel of Phantogram to give the line extra bite.
In light of Coyne’s more muted presence here, the real drama on The Terror stems from the way in which the Lips layer their tones and drones into heady, hypnotic surges. The Terror may be the Flaming Lips' most demanding album to date, but it’s also the most sonically of a piece, immediately thrusting you into its dense miasma and seamlessly dissolving one track into one another; in the transition from the despairing “You Are Alone” into the spectacular percussive procession “Butterfly, How Long It Takes to Die”, you hear the same quiet-to-clamor fluidity that Liars mastered on Drum’s Not Dead. And from the desolate post-apocalyptic atmosphere, some powerfully affecting moments emerge, like “Try to Explain”, a beautifully bruised break-up ballad that romanticizes the past while defeatedly acknowledging that things will never be the same.
But if The Terror presents a distillation and refinement of ideas initially explored on their post-Embryonic interim releases-- like last year’s Heady Fwends collaborations and their infamous hours-long jams-- it still feels underdeveloped in spots. At 13 minutes, centerpiece track “You Lust” is the longest song to appear on a proper Lips record since the 1980s, and a companion piece to Embryonic’s “Powerless”, using a coolly repetitive organ refrain as the foundation for an agitated, free-form synth freakout. But its imposing grandeur is diffused by an intrusive, creepily whispered chorus incantation and a drifting, protracted denouement that lingers for far too long. And in the wake of the absorbing, slow-roiling intensity of the penultimate “Turning Violent”, the closing “Always There... In Our Heart” (a bookend echo of “Look… The Sun Is Rising”) doesn’t quite deliver the blown-out grand finale its repeated 1-2-3-4 build-ups suggest, instead simmering down before reaching full blast. (Seemingly aware of this anti-climax, the band tack on the incongruently cheery Hyundai-ad jingle “Sun Blows Up Today” and an Edward Sharpe-assisted cover of "All You Need Is Love" as bonus tracks, a move that feels not unlike appending a gag outtakes reel to a film’s closing credits.) But even if it doesn’t consistently exhilarate to the same extent as the band’s most totemic works, The Terror is nonetheless a significant work in their voluminous canon: By matching their ever-evolving, exploratory musical ethos with less eager-to-please, more confrontational modes of performance, the album marks the moment when the Flaming Lips become whole again.


Classic-rock magpies, brothers Michael and Brian D’Addario construct a fabulously campy pastiche from the spangled castoffs of the 1970s.

The Lemon Twigs: Songs for the General Public

Songs for the General Public

The Lemon Twigs, the project of brothers Michael and Brian D’Addario, are a classic-rock vampire act. Cloaked in the sequins and skin-tight leather of the axe-wielding ’70s, their latest album plays like a bit: Think of them as the Zoomer version of the Darkness in the way they gleefully joust with rock’s macho past. An over-the-top and occasionally frustrating listen, Songs for the General Public is a gaudy, tongue-in-cheek patchwork.
The D’Addario brothers are meticulous songwriters who channel inspiration from Ziggy Stardust and Marc Bolan; fussy, baroque and extremely complicated, their music glows beneath black lights and is drenched in sexuality. On their third album, the arrangements have become more refined and almost neurotically precise. Where their last record was a concept album about a monkey raised by humans, the new one is more thematically free-associative, populated by tough guys, nutty poets, and the occasional leather fiend. On the tightly conceived “Hell on Wheels,” black Cadillac Eldorados blaze through the streets as competing strings and jangly piano keys balloon to Michelin Man proportions. The D’Addario brothers sound like they’re running through a revolving door, breathlessly switching between Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger impersonations as they take each lap.
On Songs for the General Public, songs constantly go in unexpected, devilish directions. Take “Moon,” which starts with a harmonica solo and somehow transitions into full Elton John balladry by the song’s midpoint. The D’Addarios compare the moon to a giant toenail in the sky and rhyme “We resent people with lives” with “We resent tall guys.” The song is stuffed with ideas, almost to a fault. While such excess can be exhilarating, it’s sometimes hard to parse exactly who the Lemon Twigs are and what they really want to say. They slingshot their way through so many different influences, it can feel like they aren’t fully grounded.
What is crucial is that they do everything with levity. Just take a song like the operatic “Fight,” which infuses anthemic elements of Bruce Springsteen and Queen into a tight three-minute sprint while also making time to lament the woes of a middle aged man who wants to feel “beautiful again,” and really isn’t in a great spot with his old lady. Or perhaps “Ashamed,” an oddly touching ballad about a “brother and sister who make it with each other,” speckled with acoustic guitars and delicate strings that evoke the warmth of the Velvet Underground.
More often than not, listening to Songs for the General Public feels like watching the D’Addario brothers throw old ’45s at a brick wall to see what sticks, snickering all the while. They want you to have a good time, and they sound tighter than ever; they just need to figure out how to control the Frankenstein that they’ve made.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Wire were born at the dawn of punk, but they became the quintessential art band. In the three closing years of the 1970s, the English quartet had one of the greatest opening runs of any band, shifting to post-punk before punk began to go stale and forging three masterpieces in a creative furnace so hot it burned out by the end of 1980. Those albums-- *Pink Flag*, *Chairs Missing*, and *154*\-- still sound remarkably fresh, and have been re-mastered and reissued with their original vinyl tracklistings, both individually and as part of a five-disc set, *1977>1979*, that also includes live

Pink Flag / Chairs Missing / 154

Wire were born at the dawn of punk, but they became the quintessential art band. In the three closing years of the 1970s, the English quartet had one of the greatest opening runs of any band, shifting to post-punk before punk began to go stale and forging three masterpieces in a creative furnace so hot it burned out by the end of 1980. Those albums-- Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, and 154-- still sound remarkably fresh, and have been re-mastered and reissued with their original vinyl tracklistings, both individually and as part of a five-disc set, 1977>1979, that also includes live performances recorded in London (in 1977) and New York (1978).
Pink Flag was a fractured snapshot of punk alternately collapsing in on itself and exploding into song-fragment shrapnel. The record's minimalist approach means the band spends only as much time as needed on each song-- five of them are over in less than a minute, while a further nine don't make it past two. It's clear you're not getting a typical 1977 punk record from the opening seconds of "Reuters", an echoing bass line that quickly comes under attack by ringing but dissonant guitar chords. The tempo is arrested, lurching along to the climactic finale when Colin Newman, as the narrating correspondent, shouts "Looting! Burning!" and then holds out the lone syllable of "rape" twice over descending chords, which grind to a halt over chanting voices. It's all the bombast, tension, and release of a side-long prog opus in just three minutes.
As if to underscore that this isn't a predictable album, the next song, "Field Day For the Sundays", rages to a close in just 28 seconds. The band acknowledges the thin line between advertising jingles and pop songs on the 49-second instrumental "The Commercial", but also write a few genuinely hummable songs, like "Three Girl Rhumba", whose guitar part is actually more of a tango, and the more identifiably punk "Ex-Lion Tamer". "Strange," meanwhile, makes the mistake of sticking around, only to be eaten by spacey amp noise and quivering ambience-- a taste of things to come.
Wire immediately left the crunch of Pink Flag behind on Chairs Missing, 1978's great leap into even artier weirdness and Brian Eno-inspired ambient experiments. Producer Mike Thorne's synthesizers took a more key role, propelling songs into haunting soundscapes and downpours of noise. The funny thing is that, though a fairly major departure for the band, the album cloaks its curveball up front, beginning as Pink Flag did: With bassist Graham Lewis's nakedly produced pulse being attacked by guitars. "Practise Makes Perfect" seems almost cheekily named for the way it builds directly on the constant crescendo structure of "Reuters", except this time Newman's ragged vocal is met with interjections of derisive laughter and the final comedown leads into a bed of gently viscous synth.
That denouement foreshadows one of the album's most arresting tracks, the starkly minimal bass-and-electronics sculpture "Heartbeat", an openly beautiful piece of experimentation that morphs into a pop song without a chorus. The album as a whole is less purposefully fragmented than its predecessor, the songs more conventionally structured even as they veer in unexpected directions. The stunning centerpiece is "Mercy", which provides the basic blueprint for an absolute ton of tension/release post-rock. Over nearly six minutes, it storms through thunderous verses with Robert Gotobed's drums shuddering away underneath. Each new section leads to a nastier climax, culminating in a blazing guitar-and-drum conflagration.
On 1979's 154, named for the number of shows Wire had played to that point, the band moved further into the abstract. "On Returning", "The 15th", and "Two People in a Room" are concise, punchy songs that place the vocals up front, sometimes with two-part harmonies. The last of these is one of Wire's great, frenzied moments, with Newman's tortured vocals shouting down Bruce Gilbert's intravenous guitar riffs with crazed shouts of "My God, they're so gifted!" 154's centerpiece, "A Touching Display", out-apocalypses "Mercy"; it's a hellish soundscape that features Lewis' heavily distorted and processed bass fretting out a harrowing anti-melody. Despite the incredible highs, though, 154 is also the least consistent of Wire's first three albums, and a few of its experiments don't bear full fruit.
One of Wire's overlooked strengths was their ability to write a tremendous pop song, as exemplified by songs like "Mannequin", "Outdoor Miner", and "Map Ref. 41 Degrees N 93 Degrees W" (an open field in Iowa, by the way). Listen to the harmonized "ooh ooh"s on "Mannequin", the softly sung verses of "Outdoor Miner" (which was only prevented from chart success by a payola scandal), and the transcendently huge chorus of "Map Ref." indicate this was a band that could have made an entire career out of harmony-laden power pop.
As it stands, they didn't, and Wire famously quit a year after 154, claiming to have run out of ideas. Their subsequent reunions have put the lie to that notion, but you have to admire Wire's insistence on laying off when the inspiration doesn't feel right, even as the band's initial run remains an unassailable testament to its unquenchable creativity.


Tyler, the Creator’s sixth album is impressionistic and emotionally charged, the result of an auteur refining his style and baring more of his soul than ever before.

Igor

The moods of Tyler, the Creator’s albums have largely been defined by absence—of his father, of critical acclaim, of love. He responded to what was missing with antagonism, album after album, until 2017 when he looked back at his life with a sunny lens and twinge of nostalgia to deliver his best work, Flower Boy. That Grammy-nominated album is eminently pleasing, the sound of an iconoclast succumbing to his better judgment. Igor, the 28-year-old’s sixth full-length, is Tyler finally content in the face of all that agony.
Igor sounds like the work of a perfectionist giving shape to his more radical ideas. Tyler, who proudly produced, wrote, and arranged the album, is singing more but he’s not worrying whether his tracks have a traditional pop arc. Songs don’t build to a crescendo, they often begin there. The opening “Igor’s Theme” serves less as a guiding force and more like a recurring motif of doom that hides in the shadows and pops its head in at select moments, like on “New Magic Wand” where spooky synths erupt below Tyler’s thought process: “I saw a photo, you looked joyous,” goes one of the more poignant lines. Atop this budding dread, Tyler layers candied keys and harmonizing vocals. The brightness is defiant, as Tyler processes the loss of someone he loves.
The first we hear of Tyler’s vanishing relationship is on “Earfquake”: “Don’t leave, it’s my fault.” First pitched-up and later untreated, Tyler’s voice is pleading but not cloying. He doesn’t sound like he’s lying to quickly repair deep damage, as his words may suggest, he’s just being sincere. Igor becomes a gracious and giving breakup album whose narrative is fleshed out more clearly later in the record: Tyler seems to have fallen for a man (“You’re my favorite garçon,” he sings at one point) who wants to return to his female partner. “I hope you know she can’t compete with me,” he first sings on “Gone, Gone / Thank You,” before shifting his tone: “Thank you for the love/Thank you for the joy.”
As the album progresses, Tyler goes through his undulations of denial and acceptance, but spends considerable energy hoping to help his beloved find satisfaction, even if that means a future without him. “Take your mask off,” he advises on “Running Out of Time,” “Stop lyin’ to yourself, I know the real you.” It’s an empathetic turn from an artist previously allergic to other people’s perspectives. The parting ultimately leads to self-discovery: “You never lived in your truth,” he tells his ex. “But I finally found peace, so peace.”
There’s a run at Igor’s center where each song’s momentum seems to propel him forward emotionally. It’s during this stretch that Tyler is at his most creatively fluid, as on “A Boy Is a Gun,” where he flattens his voice to sing “gun,” sounding like a laser cutting across the track and maybe also through his own psyche. Combined with the Kanye West–assisted “Puppet,” these tracks in their varied tone and tempo reflect the volatility of Tyler’s emotions across Igor. Most songs don’t even have a natural ending, they just snap off, like someone pulled the aux cord abruptly.
Igor may be unsettled but it never feels restless. As Tyler grapples with uncertainty and unfulfillment, he delivers an album that feels like it is suspended in midair. It reminds me of Solange’s When I Get Home or King Krule’s The Ooz, albums that succeed in communicating mood as their own sense of logic. Tyler’s interpretation of this sort of stream-of-consciousness feels weightless. The whole album is sustained by mutating, colorful chords, impressionistic cracks in tonality. On top of that, Tyler’s synthetic falsetto singing adds a surreal element to Igor. The lines between desire and reality and internal monologue and human conversation all become blurred.
Tyler, the Creator never shied away from sharing what he thought his life was missing. “I ain’t got no fucking money,” he yelled simply enough on the inimitable “Radicals,” an early Odd Future anthem. And when he got what he thought he wanted, he flaunted it: “Also stuck with a beautiful home with a case of stairs,” he taunted his father on “Answer.” Igor is the first time Tyler has not been motivated by some absence because he lost a bit of himself in someone else. “Are We Still Friends?,” the album’s rough and honeyed send-off, is Tyler’s final attempt at salvaging his relationship. He’s finally without his beau and asks for the compromise of friendship. The track, as with many on Igor, ends sharply with a synth never resolving its buzz. There’s nothing left to say when you’ve given all of yourself away.


Ryan Adams' cover of Taylor Swift's 1989 is a lot of fun to think about and talk about, but not much fun to listen to. It is, in other words, a pure product of the Internet. At its best, Swift's 1989 crackles with life, while Adams has transformed it into... a run-of-the-mill Ryan Adams album.

1989

Ryan Adams' cover of Taylor Swift's 1989 is a lot of fun to think about and talk about, but not much fun to listen to. It is, in other words, a pure product of the Internet—a robust, cross-platform, thinkpiece-generating app that testifies mostly to Adams' ability to get attention. You have to hand it to him for knowing what he's doing: His album choice churns up some nice, irony-rich soil for culture and music critics to wriggle around in. Even though Taylor Swift has been a songwriter first and foremost throughout her career, 1989 was where she collaborated more intensely with superstar producers like Max Martin and Shellback to help her cross over from Queen of Pop Country to the center of the pop world proper. The move worked spectacularly: 1989 is among the best-selling albums of the post-Napster era. And now Ryan Adams has transformed it again, into... a run-of-the-mill Ryan Adams album.
It's an odd object to engage with. Adams is entertaining, always has been, and he's carved out what is by now a fascinating career, filled with a few widely beloved heartland rock albums and a great many weird one-offs that have won him a devoted cult. 1989 is on the one hand an example of the latter, but it's presented in the style of the former. He throws himself into the album completely—the arrangements are fully realized and he sings with care and precision, revealing his admiration. But he also reveals some fairly crucial points about how good songs are put together.
Every recorded song is the end point of a long road with many possible forks in it—a series of small decisions about chord changes, melody lines, lyrics, and arrangements. Swift's 1989 songs are written for a specific kind of production—the melodies are clipped, percussive, and designed to hit with force at very specific times. They are written to be electro-pop songs, which rely more on big dynamic changes and repeating cells of melody.
At its best, Swift's 1989 crackles with life, and highlights what it feels like to be young and looking at the world from a very specific moment; Adams transforms those feelings into a wistful and generic feeling of weariness. To put it in the context of an artist to whom Adams is often compared, 1989 shows why Springsteen went synth-pop on Born in the U.S.A. in 1984—the songs demanded it. The songs that sound like anthems were meant to be anthems; Springsteen's stark demos of the songs are instructive but they weren't the finished product. Remember, too, that he tried to turn his dark folk masterpiece Nebraska into a full band album but realized it needed to come out as an acoustic demo. Which is to say that "Out of the Woods" is "Dancing in the Dark", not "Atlantic City".
Swift knows this about her own material, and the demos of 1989's songs she included on the album show how dramatic the transformation can be. In Adams' hands, they are flat, flavorless rockers, and when the music isn't simply boring it crosses the line into actively grating. He wants "Blank Space" to be a Big Star-style heartfelt ballad, but the melody feels thin, rushed, and monochrome in this setting. He delivers "Shake It Off" in a grim and determined tone that would be appropriate if he were singing about how conservative politics have decimated rural families at the inaugural Farm Aid—but when paired with a repeated refrain of “haters gonna hate," it sounds ridiculous. And Adams' "Style" is downright garish, coming off like Bono fronting Survivor, the dark side of the album's titular year.
Adams' 1989, for all its sincerity and technical execution, is ultimately hollow because it's nothing but context. There's everything surrounding it (the unexpected match of singer and song, the details of the release) and there's what you bring to it (your relationship to the music of Swift and Adams, your demographic profile, your feelings on rock and pop and covers in general) but there's no essential reason for it to exist. This is why Father John Misty's rush-released version of "Blank Space", wherein he remade Swift's song in the style of the Velvet Underground, was such a brilliant example of a recorded song as music criticism. His track was a hilarious (and, importantly, still musically enjoyable) reminder that Adams' entire album is a gesture. It's a formal exercise. You listen and think, "Ah, I see what he did there" and then you forget about it.


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 the brilliant 1979 album from the Mael brothers that transformed them into future-pop prophets.

No. 1 in Heaven

Punk set out to shock the ’70s rock establishment, but disco did a far better job. Safety pins and ironic swastikas had nothing on one-piece jumpsuits and boogie shoes. After all, no one ever hosted a baseball-stadium rally to detonate a bunch of Sex Pistols records, a fate that befell a pile of Saturday Night Fever soundtracks at Chicago’s infamous Disco Demolition Night on July 12, 1979. As some noted at the time, and many more have since, it’s evident that coded racism and homophobia were fuelling that event more than a simple distaste for 4/4 grooves and syrupy strings. But perhaps the most ridiculous thing about the sight of young men storming the field at Comiskey Park to defend rock’s honor was that many of their heroes were looking to get on the Studio 54 guest list themselves.
By 1979, pretty much every rock act of note—the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, KISS—was making a beeline to the dancefloor, and if others like Pink Floyd, the Eagles, and Lynyrd Skynyrd harbored no explicit desire to get in on the 12" market, they were at least absorbing some of disco’s polish and finesse. For many of these artists, disco proved to be more of a one-night stand than a serious commitment, a fleeting concession they could make to the pop marketplace while reassuring the Disco Sucks crowd it was all just some cocaine-addled mistake. No rock band would be crazy enough to actually completely reinvent itself as a full-on disco act and seek out one of the genre’s key architects for guidance. But then no rock band is quite like Sparks. For them, disco wasn’t simply some bandwagon to jump on—it was the career-saving life force that transformed them from glam-rock has-beens to future-pop prophets.
When you consider the story of Sparks, nothing really makes sense; everything about their narrative is just a bit off. For over 50 years now, brothers Russell and Ron Mael have enjoyed a telepathic creative partnership that’s yielded several hit singles—yet rarely in a row, rarely in the same country, and rarely in the same style. Their career has been a never-ending roller-coaster ride, but the Maels always manage to correct course when it appears they’re flying off the rails. They pick up fans in one territory as they shed them in another; they’ve alienated old followers with their wild aesthetic shifts while endearing themselves to new niches.
Even at the height of their commercial success, Sparks were never an easy sell. Founded in Los Angeles, the group first gained notoriety by crashing the UK glitter-rock scene with their violently theatrical 1974 hit single “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us.” But their look was as glum as it was glam: in contrast to Russell’s pretty-boy preening, Ron adopted a stern, professorial look, topped with a Charlie Chaplin-inspired toothbrush moustache that many interpreted as creepy Hitler cosplay (a confusion compounded by the fact the Maels are Jewish).
That contrarian streak would only become more deeply entrenched over the coming decades. Over the course of 25 albums, Sparks have left no genre—operatic art-rock, new wave, house music, classical, metal—uncorrupted. But their catalog is unified by a singular crass’n’classy spirit that’s made them the only band to appear on the soundtracks to both the Jean Claude Van Damme bloodbath Knock Off and Leos Carax’s arthouse mindfuck Holy Motors. (Their love affair with the latter filmmaker will intensify this summer with the release of Carax’s Sparks-scored musical Annette, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard.) As confirmed by director Edgar Wright’s recent star-studded documentary/fan letter, The Sparks Brothers, the Maels are beloved by many infinitely more famous artists—from Beck and Björk to Flea and Jack Antonoff—for their brazen nonconformity and derring-do. But there was a time when those qualities were more liabilities than assets.
As glam rock degenerated into punk in the mid-’70s, Sparks found themselves in an awkward position. While first-wavers like the Sex Pistols, Ramones, and Siouxsie Sioux admired the Maels for their disruptive presence, the actual music Sparks were making at the time—the carnivalesque art-pop of Indiscreet, the butt-rock raunch of Big Beat, and the Beach Boys-inspired fantasias of Introducing Sparks—represented precisely the sort of spectacular excess that punk sought to extinguish. What’s more, those records were commercial disappointments—even in the UK, Sparks’ most reliable market. But instead of trying to rehabilitate their image by making a play for the pogo pit, the Maels were more keen on joining the other revolution happening at the time.
Released in July 1977, Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” was the Star Wars of disco singles—the sort of blockbuster event that makes everything that came before it seem obsolete and inadequate. The song originally appeared as the final track on Summer’s album I Remember Yesterday, a conceptual record that explored different eras of music from the ’40s up to disco. “I Feel Love” was a late-addition lark that imagined the sound of the future, one where live instrumentation would be replaced by oscillating synth patterns and traditional song structures would dissolve into hypnotic mantras. But the song proved to be less fantasy than prophecy, signaling disco’s shift from a sleek variant of funk into the foundation of electronic dance music.
It was “I Feel Love” that forever changed the name of its producer, Giorgio Moroder, into an adjective. Once a purveyor of piano-tinkled bubblegum pop and funkified Moody Blues covers, by 1977, Moroder had (alongside his silent production partner, Pete Bellotte) become a genre unto himself. His landmark solo album, From Here to Eternity, extended the electronic explorations he began with Summer over the course of an entire record, while his synth-driven, Oscar-winning score for Midnight Express the following year further tightened his stranglehold on the pop zeitgeist. Moroder’s rise happened to coincide with the Maels’ growing disillusionment with rock music, which portended their dismantling of Sparks from a five-piece band down to the core fraternal duo.
Among all the rock acts of their vintage, Sparks were the ideal candidates for a disco makeover. Raised on a steady diet of Saturday matinees and Sgt. Pepper’s, the Maels approached music as a form of roleplay, inhabiting their satirical songs like characters in an absurdist sketch show. Unlike many other bands of brothers, they avoided typical sibling-rivalry sensationalism and flipped the fraternal-jealousy cliché into their stage schtick, with the buttoned-up Ron shooting death stares at the coquettish Russell as if he were silently hatching a plot to destroy him. In their ’70s glam-rock prime, Sparks didn’t have to put on lipstick, dresses, or feather boas; for the Maels, rock’n’roll was the costume, the vehicle that allowed them to act out their most ridiculous flights of fancy. And it was a costume they could easily throw off once it had outlived its usefulness.
As they tell it, Sparks’ dancefloor pivot wasn’t so much an act of trendspotting opportunism as just another new experiment in playing dress-up. “We were feeling that we had been taking a band format as far as we could go,” Ron recounted in a 2020 interview. “We heard ‘I Feel Love’ on the radio [and] we thought it could be interesting if Russell was singing on that kind of cold electronic background.” But without access to that sort of gear, all they could do at the time was put the idea out to the universe. At one point in the late ’70s, a German music journalist asked the Maels if they had any new music on the horizon; the brothers responded that they were working with Moroder. It was purely jokey wishful thinking, but like the futurist premise of “I Feel Love” itself, their dream eventually became a reality. The journalist happened to be a friend of Moroder’s, and before long, the Maels were hunkering down in the producer’s Musicland Studios in Munich, toying with the furniture-sized synths and sequencers that would shape the sound of their 1979 album, No. 1 in Heaven.
From its dewy opening synth droplets, No. 1 in Heaven doesn’t simply expand the Maels’ musical horizons, it exists on another planet entirely. That feeling that grows even more pronounced once a throbbing “I Feel Love” pulse sets “Tryouts for the Human Race” in motion. Where even Sparks’ most accessible songs can dart around like a pinball, Moroder keeps the Maels on a linear ascent, with the producer’s trusty session drummer, Keith Forsey, serving as the Mercedes-grade pace car. When Russell’s hair-raising voice enters the mix, you’re treated to the thrilling spectacle of the most restlessly rhapsodic singer in rock reborn as a natural disco diva.
Sparks, of course, weren’t the only rock-oriented artists tooling around with electronics in the late ’70s. But in contrast to Kraftwerk, or Bowie, or Tubeway Army, the Maels weren’t so much embracing the sci-fi qualities of the synthesizer as using it to heighten the ever-present tension between Russell’s vamping vocals and Ron’s withering lyrics. In true Sparks fashion, No. 1 in Heaven isn’t just a disco album; it’s an album about disco, drawing narrative inspiration from the genre’s underlying motifs and energies and filtering it through their own uniquely peculiar perspective. Ironically, by completely overhauling their aesthetic, Sparks never sounded more Sparksian, probing a culture obsessed with lust, vanity, and materialism as eagerly as Kraftwerk celebrated European public-transit efficiency.
So where Summer treated disco as a conduit for orgasmic ecstasy, Russell sings “Tryouts for the Human Race” from the perspective of actual sperm gunning for their one-in-a-million shot at being a fertilizing hero. (“One of us might make it through/The rest will disappear like dew!”) Emerging from a blizzard of sparkling synth tones, the giddy “Academy Award Performance” bounds down the red carpet like a young starlet greeting the paparazzi pit, but the song’s exhortations (“Play the shark! Play the bride! Joan of Arc! Mrs. Hyde!”) could just as easily describe the plight of any woman who has to put on many different faces in order to satisfy the patriarchy. The proudly Eurotrashy “La Dolce Vita” sounds tailor-made for the sort of Mediterranean nightclubs where Moroder’s music reigned supreme, but it’s more interested in examining the characters who frequent such establishments—namely, the young gigolos serving as bored arm candy for older rich socialites. And with the ebullient “Beat the Clock,” the Maels use disco’s relentless, sweat-soaked rhythms as a metaphor for a nascent computer-age culture on the cusp of accelerating out of control, presenting a highly prescient portrait of a young busybody eager to cross off his bucket list—getting a PhD, traveling, sleeping with Liz Taylor—before he reaches adulthood.
But for all its craven characters and dry-ice decadence, No. 1 in Heaven ultimately leads to a moment of soul-purifying rapture. When Sparks began working on the record, they had seemingly lost the ability to write a hit song—so the most they could do was dream of one. The album’s quasi-title-track closer, “The Number One Song in Heaven,” is the ultimate manifestation of the question that hovers over Sparks’ entire career: Are they being ironic or not? Certainly, the very concept of a chart-topping song written by God fits right into the Maels’ meta-humor wheelhouse. And yet, the song’s belief in disco’s unifying power and out-of-body transcendence is 100 percent genuine. Beginning with a slow-motion opening tract that appears like a bright Biblical light beaming down from the clouds, the song suddenly shifts into an exhilarating second act that makes it feel like you’re being rocketed into the stratosphere. If “I Feel Love” was Moroder’s attempt to imagine the future, “The Number One Song in Heaven” is his vision of the afterlife: electronic disco reborn as a spiritual experience.
While it’s impossible to confirm if No. 1 in Heaven was indeed a hit among the Pearly Gates cognoscenti, the song did return Sparks to the Top 20 in the UK, and the album accrued enough pop-cultural cachet to prompt Paul McCartney to adopt Ron’s signature look and mannerisms in the video for his 1980 single “Coming Up.” (“Beat the Clock” further infiltrated the mainstream when it was quoted on the chart-topping novelty disco-Beatles medley “Stars on 45.”) But those Top of the Pops appearances and rock-star acknowledgements were just the first ripples of this album’s outsized impact.
For the first post-punk generation—the teens caught between punk’s cynicism and disco’s celebratory energy—No. 1 in Heaven showed how you could succumb to the allure of the dancefloor without sacrificing your subversive spirit. In its fusion of flamboyance and frigidity, No. 1 in Heaven effectively shaped the neon-tinted sound and arch sensibility of ’80s synth-pop as we know it—in Wright’s documentary, members of Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Erasure, Visage, and New Order all profess as much. (The latter’s Stephen Morris also admits he cribbed the drumbeat from “The Number One Song in Heaven” for Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”) The album’s influence only continued to reverberate across the decades: In the vocoderized vistas of “My Other Voice,” you’ll find the blueprints for Air’s space-age bachelor-pad soundscapes and Daft Punk’s robot prog; in “Tryouts for the Human Race,” you get the dry run for LCD Soundsystem’s skyscraping electro-rock anthems.
Sparks’ relationship with Moroder would last for just one more album, the more new wave-leaning Terminal Jive, after which the forbidding logistics of touring with “a synthesizer the size of a building” (as Ron describes it) prompted the Maels to reform Sparks as a proper band for their ’80s run. There would be many more peaks and valleys to follow, but No. 1 in Heaven was the album that gave Sparks the confidence to weather them, cementing their legend as rock’s most unpredictable, chameleonic, and brilliantly counterintuitive band. Thanks to four decades of advances in synthesizer technology and the album’s legion of imitators, No. 1 in Heaven may no longer represent the sound of the future—but its techtopian pop still feels like the future you wish you were living in now.

Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here.