Rave throwback producer branches out to explore dubstep and R&B on his new EP and keeps up his perfect hit-to-miss ratio in the process.

That Mystic EP

Dance music in 2010 does a lot of things very well: paranoid dubstep throb, blissed-out space-disco thump, idiosyncratic bedroom-producer clippety-clop. But I'm not hearing a whole lot of chaos-- the sense of apocalyptic noise-riffs exploding, of producers layering as many weird elements as they could manage on top of each other. That's what used to keep me up listening to the one weekly techno radio show on my crappy clock radio, ear up to the speaker, getting my mind blown by stuff like the Prodigy's "Charly" or L.A. Style's "James Brown Is Dead". These days, nobody really gives me that feeling like the Brooklyn producer Kingdom.
Kingdom made his first real dent earlier this year with "Mind Reader", a gleefully frantic pileup of house-diva wails and euphoric bass-farts. Next to that, the new EP That Mystic feels restrained to the point of austerity. But there's still a ton of shit happening here. Kingdom maintains the same sort of head-rush intensity of early-90s rave producers-- so many different percussive synth riffs beeping their way onto the track and than bouncing all around the interior like ping-pong balls. But as many new elements as Kingdom introduces, he keeps everything working in service of the basic, central pulse at the heart of every song.
That's especially true on the opening title track, which sets the blueprint while the other tracks just get busy within that foundation. But even as one track, "Pang", almost works as an experiment in straight-up dubstep, there's still a cluttered sort of simplicity at work here. All those bleeps and dings and whirs are there for a reason, and they all serve the tracks' central propulsion. This is fun music, and it doesn't have any big aim beyond that.
One neat wrinkle on this EP: Kingdom has a habit of sampling kinda-big R&B hits like Cassie's "Me & U" and Beyoncé's "Sweet Dreams", taking ghostly snatches of those familiar vocals and letting them flit around in the background, dodging in and out of the beats. Those songs are new enough that they still exist somewhere within memory, but old enough that it takes a second to dredge up where that little slice of vocal comes from. They sound like just-out-of-reach memories. But Kingdom never builds his tracks around those samples, and he rarely introduces them in the first half of the track. They're just one more weapon in the arsenal-- and that arsenal's getting bigger all the time.


It's Album Time is, as advertised, disco producer Todd Terje's first full-length album, and its title sets the tone: casual, confident, and unburdened by the imagined need for significance that scares so many good dance producers into losing their cool when given a bigger platform. Terje is a careful artist that's fluent in history, an expert with texture, and possessing a grasp on composition more akin to a 1960s film composer than a contemporary dance producer.

It's Album Time

In early 2012, the music director of a Norwegian state-funded radio station called P3 declined to add a song called "Inspector Norse" by disco producer Todd Terje to its rotation, saying it sounded like "background music at a beach bar." When an interviewer asked him what he thought about the radio station's description, Terje said he agreed with it. "It sounds like elevator music. Good, danceable elevator music." Then, in a pun fit only for hypothetical dads, he added, "Elevate your body!" In Terje's world, there is no distinction made between beating and joining—it's all join, join, join.
It's Album Time is, as advertised, his first full-length album. The title sets the tone: Casual, confident, and unburdened by the imagined need for significance that scares so many good dance producers into losing their cool when given a bigger platform. Most of the music on it could be classified as disco, with shades of cocktail lounge, exotica, surf instrumentals, and other styles that favor whimsy and novelty over sober artistic expression. Not that Terje isn't an artist—he is, and a careful one, fluent in history, expert with texture, and with a grasp on composition more akin to a 1960s film composer than a contemporary techno producer. But for as much ground as he covers on It's Album Time, the music feels effortless, gliding from Henry Mancini-esque detective jazz to bouncy, Stevie Wonder funk like breeze blowing through the waffle weave of a leisure suit. Conventional wisdom bears out: The looser the grip, the tighter the hold.
Despite recycling four of its twelve tracks from previously released singles and EPs, It's Album Time has a linear, cohesive feel. Instead of trying to top "Strandbar" or "Inspector Norse", Terje ties them together with short interstitial tracks—valleys that give perspective to the mountains. If he ever capitulates to the conventions of making a full-length album, it's in structure, which here is less redolent of disco than classic-rock pranksters like Paul McCartney or Frank Zappa: an introduction that features men whispering the words "It's album time" repeatedly, peaking with a ballad halfway through; closing with the joyous "Inspector Norse", and dying away to the sound of distant applause.
Terje is, at heart, a comedian. "I like my music very fruity," he told Resident Advisor in 2007. "Lots of percussion, lots of silly effects." When I interviewed the illustrator Bendik Kaltenborn, who has drawn the covers for most of Terje's releases including It's Album Time, he told me that the two first bonded over what Kaltenborn called a "Stupid" sense of humor. Everything about It's Album Time and Terje's self-presentation—whether it's the fart-like synth sounds, the conga-line enthusiasm, or the promo photos of him flexing his minor biceps with a pout on his face—is so studiously carefree that he sometimes seems less like a human being than an all-night party incarnate.
But like all comedy, Terje's act is held together by a taut thread of sadness. The beauty of his music is the beauty of a neon sign outside a cheap motel: It's kitschy but it knows it, and in its kitsch conveys both loneliness (it's dark outside and you've been driving for hours) and its easy resolution (it's warm inside and happy hour never ends, pink paper umbrella gratis). In the mockumentary-style video for Terje's "Inspector Norse" (which is excerpted from a Norwegian short film called Whateverest), a failed electronic musician living with his elderly father in a small town spends a day bowling and cooking drugs from household chemicals before turning out the lights and dancing to "Inspector Norse", alone. Afterwards, he wanders the streets in facepaint, confused, crying. He survives mostly on illusions, and without happy music, he'd be lost.
The album's least representative song is the one that sticks with me the most: A cover of the Robert Palmer ballad "Johnny and Mary," sung by Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry. The song is heavy, melancholic, and almost oppressively romantic—moods that the rest of It's Album Time feel designed to make you forget about. The lyrics tell the story of a couple who know they're alienated from each other but have hung on for so long they struggle with whether or not to break up. "Johnny's always running around, trying to find certainty," the opening line goes. "He needs all the world to confirm that he ain't lonely/ Mary counts the walls, knows he tires easily."
Ferry has spent his entire career crying crocodile tears, exploring the ways a seemingly insincere performance can ring with more feeling and pathos than something we recognize as "real". His voice—once a dazzling, cartoonish instrument, like Elvis with his finger in a wall socket—sounds hollowed-out and whispery, an old man whose wisdom brings him no comfort. In the original song, Palmer seems to hover above the characters, observing them, maybe even judging. Ferry sounds like he's in the next room, suffering troubles of his own.
As the song crests and the rippling arpeggios of Terje's synths reach their climax, you might wonder: What is a song so sad doing on an album so relentlessly upbeat? Not to ruin the mood, I think—only as a reminder that sadness is a choice. You could be "Inspector Norse" if you wanted to, peacocking wild across the dancefloor, spilling drinks on a stranger, recognizing the brevity of life by enjoying it. From an artist like Terje, it's proof that he could go deep if he wanted to. He'd just rather have fun.


Accompanied by a handful of his Solar Motel Band collaborators, the Philadelphia guitarist seeks the third path between classic-rock peaks and floating experimentalism.

All Time Present

On All Time Present, Chris Forsyth’s most ambitious album yet, he continues to make the case that there’s yet more to be wrought from the electric guitar. Though the Washington Post not long ago reported the instrument to be on the virtual brink of extinction and rock has been declared dead too many times to count, the Philadelphia guitarist finds new spaces for his instrument between familiar ecstatic structures and the experimental horizon. Forsyth sings here only on one track, mostly bolstering his reputation as a tasteful and inventive shredder, updating the neon acrobatics of Television’s Richard Lloyd with a host of maneuvers both big and little. Despite the occasional nod to rock formalism, All Time Present achieves a scope only hinted at on Forsyth’s previous full-lengths.
Forsyth’s playing is less reinvention than re-entrenchment, finding his voice inside the permanent revolution of guitarists yearning to combine their six strings in previously un-struck combinations, like mystic transliterators committed to a mathematical religion. And while Forsyth sometimes cranks up the wizardry and spits lightning through his strings in the traditional note-filled manner, there are just as many moments that don’t depend on Forsyth’s flash. On the acoustic-driven “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” the song climaxes with a repeating phrase that seems to get quieter as it goes.
As a member of the experimental trio Peeesseye for much of the 2000s, Forsyth located himself deep in the celestial noise fringe, making music that actively challenged form. With 2013’s solo album Solar Motel, though, he reframed his playing inside the vocabulary of classic (or at least canonical) rock. Epic and tasty solos over punk/motorik/hippie grooves followed. Forsyth has continued his allegiances with guitar experimenters, too, including a striking ongoing duo with spectral minimalist Loren Connors, but his subsequent albums leading the rotating Solar Motel Band have remained decidedly inside, their energy easily classifiable as rock.
Billed as a solo project, All Time Present channels the flaring Solar Motel energy on extended workouts like “New Paranoid Cat” (the newest iteration of his standard “Paranoid Cat”) and, especially, the nearly 20-minute album closer “Techno Top.” Most cuts feature semi-fixed Solar Motel dwellers, too, including keyboardist/saxophonist Shawn Edward Hansen and bassist Peter Kerlin alongside the soulful and melodic drumming of Ryan Jewell. The results are something different, more a fully stocked geodome than a motel.
“The Past Ain’t Passed” is nine minutes of raga-like wanderings, tension turning to release in an explosion that seems to happen with the slowness of leaves changing colors, aided greatly by Jewell’s flowing percussion. The album’s highlight is the layered and looping “(Livin’ on) Cubist Time.” Over a flickering guitar grid with no rhythm section at all, Forsyth weaves between foreground and background while Hansen’s saxophones hover at the edge of cognition, fluttering and vaporous. It’s a sublime performance that follows its own rules, both strange and conventionally beautiful.
Rosali Middleman’s singing on “Dream Song” and Forsyth’s own vocal dabbling on “Mystic Mountain” might be heard as additional textures. Despite a limited range, Forsyth isn’t a bad singer or lyricist, copping a serviceable attitude. But if his voice isn’t nearly as striking as his guitar playing, its presence serves All Time Present by adding another layer to his creative vision. The album’s many moods might also be heard as a series of refusals, and a reflection of Forsyth’s career—the refusal to just be a guy with a guitar, or just play fast or loud over a band, or quiet and abstract without one.
In recent years, plenty of guitarists have made the leap from local noise-weirdo post-freak-folk undergrounds to more orthodox forms with (perhaps) the potential for many more listeners. It’s not a hard equation to understand, creatively or commercially. Forsyth’s contemporary Steve Gunn, whose own experimental trio GHQ existed in almost exact parallel to Peeesseye, has found a voice and audience as a singer-songwriter by matching his playing to moody lyrics. But Forsyth, who also uses familiar and sometimes rocking modes in an attempt to do unfamiliar things, has carved out his own path. All Time Present is guided by a restlessness that is both utopian and utilitarian, where classic rock is only one point of the always incomplete map and the electric guitar can still spark something better than joy: freedom.


Bonnie "Prince" Billy, the Handsome Family, and others cover this itinerant folk-gospel artist, who preached salvation more than damnation.

Various Artists: Face a Frowning World: An E.C. Ball Memorial Album

That album cover up there is misleading: When E.C. Ball faced a frowning world, he did so with a smile. Or at least that's the impression his songs give-- that the stern-voiced singer and songwriter took immense joy in praising the Lord through music. When he wasn't driving a school bus and running a service station in Rugby, Virginia, the folk-gospel artist and his wife Orna traveled around Appalachia, playing churches of all denominations and radio stations of all wattages. Ball was no fire-and-brimstone scold, though, nor did he fashion himself as a God-appointed teacher with special moral authority. Instead, he remained humble, content, and hopeful, writing simple songs with simple messages. Even at his darkest, his songs celebrate faith: "Lord, I want more religion," he sings on one of his most famous compositions. "Religion makes me happy."
Not that every song is upbeat, but Ball preached salvation more than damnation. By and large, the artists on Face a Frowning World, which declares itself  a "memorial album" rather than a tribute (I'm guessing for reasons of Christian humility), revere this aspect of Ball's music, and in covering his songs, they also consider his faith-- whether they share it or not. Dave Bird testifies proudly on "He's My God", and Bonnie "Prince" Billy extols the stalwartness of "John the Baptist" before keening ostentatiously over Catherine Irwin's earthy vocals on "Beautiful Star of Bethlehem".
By contrast, Rayna Gellert's soft-spoken "Lord, I Want More Religion" is a ruminative, plainspoken prayer, a subdued take that suggests a one-on-one with the Big Man Himself. Even on "Tribulations", sung here by Joe Manning and Glen Dentinger, Ball's depiction of the apocalypse contrasts dramatically with the promise of rescue and reward: "When the fire come down from heaven and the blood shall fill the sea, I'll be carried home by Jesus and forever with him be." The two Louisville musicians sing those lines steadfastly, with a content resignation bolstered by the band's spare arrangement.
Face a Frowning World has the feel of a jubilee, as Louisville's Health & Happiness Family Gospel Band back a range of Ball fans and followers with the enthusiasm of a Sunday morning pick-up band. On the whole, they keep things loose and lively, although at times their energy gets the better of them: They liven up Jon Langford's "When I Get Home I'm Gonna Be Satisfied", but while the spirit is willing, their cover is too loud, too lusty, too worldly. Not that Ball was strictly a religious singer. In fact, he and his wife had a sprawling repertoire that included secular songs, and Face a Frowning World strains to make room for a few of them. Michael Hurley smocks through "The Early Bird Always Gets the Worm" as if he wrote it himself, and Pokey LaFarge turns "Poor Old Country Lad" into a jumpin' C&W romp. On the other hand, the Handsome Family inexplicably transform the playful children's rhyme "Jenny Jenkins" into a slow, dour duet that sucks all the fun out of the song's jumble of syllables. They turn Ball's smile upside down.


After the slight letdown of Living With the Living, Ted Leo's new LP is hopeful, purposeful, direct-- an improvement on every level.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists: The Brutalist Bricks

The Brutalist Bricks

Cred is essentially goodwill borne of good instincts. Ted Leo's got some fine instincts, and over the course of his career he's built up cred at an enviable rate. Lifers like Leo, unafraid of inserting passionate personal politics into ebullient guitar rock, don't come around too often, and few can boast a track record like his. The ease with which he synthesizes punk and its many roots and branches into something distinctly his own has only occasionally shown signs of slowing down.
Still, you couldn't be blamed for being a little worried about Leo's dedication in the wake of his flimsiest full-band effort to date, 2007's Living With the Living. Living had its moments, for sure, but it was an overlong, unbalanced, occasionally sluggish record, one that felt especially weary in the wake of 2004's vitriol-guided Shake the Sheets. It felt almost instantly like one of those long, all-over-the-place punk records you admire and namecheck but don't ever pull out; the kind of thing that's historically ushered in the sunset of a once-firebrand career.
The Brutalist Bricks, the first Pharmacists LP for the increasingly punk-leaning Matador, feels like a massive corrective to Living's letdowns. It runs 20 minutes shorter and has tauter, better tunes. After the bitter Shake the Sheets and the resigned Living, Bricks feels hopeful, purposeful, direct-- a mood helped along by the Pharmacists' most [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| impressive musical showing on wax since 2003's masterful Hearts of Oak. One never doubted Leo's passion, but Bricks finds him sounding rejuvenated, a refugee from the Bush regime poking his head above ground after lying low for Living and finding that now's the time to get to work.
Bricks kicks off with the throat-grabbing "The Mighty Sparrow", and from there, the stink of shrapnel hangs in the air through the rest of the proceedings. Leo, ceasing to shout only to peel off a blistering solo, sounds plenty invigorated, but it's the Pharmacists-- new bassist Marty Key, longtime drummer Chris Wilson and jack of many trades James Canty-- who seem to be straightening Leo's spine and providing these tunes with a solid backbone. Leo's sound, so expansive in The Tyranny of Distance days, has been pared down further with each subsequent record, and despite a few dubby touches and a bit more acoustic guitar, Bricks follows that path. These tunes feel distilled to their very essence, and the first half of the record feels more like one long earworm.
The middle third of Bricks is where you'll find its best bits, none better than "Bottled in Cork". Leo's long been a master of the travelogue; this one details the experience of being an Jerseyite overseas through the Bush era, and providing tips on how not to come off as an American idiot. The lightly funky "One Polaroid a Day" finds an unusually husky Leo him bemoaning the loss of true experience to constant documentation; take note, bloggers. The more breathless "Where Was My Brain?" and "Gimme the Wire" manage to stick despite their breakneck paces, thanks to Leo's insistence here on piling hooks on top of hooks; largely gone are the long expository verses from the Hearts/Sheets era and the never-ending choruses of Living.
But in distilling everything down to their essence, some of Leo's lyrical directness comes across a bit blunt-- not all, mind but there's a distinct lean towards sandwich-board fodder rather than the carefully constructed, metaphor-laced screeds of old. Few songwriters could kick off their best tune in years with a line like "There was a resolution pending on the United Nations floor" without inspiring either a yawn or a giggle, but Leo does it here with "Bottled"; he pulls it off okay, but there are a few more metaphor-eschewing moments like these where Leo goes way literal. "We all got a job to do and we all hate God" is how he kicks off "Woke Up Near Chelsea", and it reads better than it sounds on record. The otherwise lovely "Ativan Eyes" begins with a too-clever nod to Marx: "The industry's out of touch. The means of production are now in the hands of the workers" just isn't a line that belongs in a pop tune, particularly one that implores someone to lay their hands on Leo just a couple stanzas later. Leo's still exceptionally adept at saying a lot in a small space but there are more than a few lines that feel a little too forceful no matter how many times you run into them, sitting slightly askew next to the richer images and more pointed jabs here.
That occasional obtuseness is really the only thing keeping Bricks from the absolute upper-tier of Leo records; well, that, and "Tuberculoids Arrive in Hop", an unfocused, murky number that's serves as little more than a breather amidst the LP's hyperkinetic back end. Still, you hit play on Brutalist Bricks and these things seem, at best, like secondary concerns; weak spots and strained metaphors aside, the passionate, instinctual Bricks is the finest record from one of the greats in six rocky years.


The Queens native brings a directness and precision to his latest album, an unassuming notebook of observations from a mature rapper with nothing left to prove.

There In Spirit

Consistency and longevity have become the defining traits of Queens-native Homeboy Sandman, whose first EP turns 15 years old this month. Though nowhere near as verbose as his regular collaborator Aesop Rock, he’s almost as prolific, with a consistent stream of albums and mixtapes under his belt, as well as full-length collaborations with the likes of Blu and Quelle Chris. His latest album There In Spirit, produced entirely by Detroit beatsmith and emcee Illingsworth, is more condensed than his previous solo records: It plays like an unassuming notebook more than a full-fledged piece of art.
While other backpack rappers might have spiraled off into abstraction, Homeboy Sandman has found a bluntness in maturity, bringing a deadpan precision and defined sense of melody to his flow. On the anthemic “Stand Up,” each couplet and bar comes together like two hands shaking, interlocked tightly together. The words arrive fairly directly, without much dense metaphor or description, his voice endowing even the simplest of words with a charismatic weight. Though he’s capable of constructing dense bars and elaborate webs of words, there’s a restraint to There In Spirit that feels slightly more intimate, an acknowledgement that sometimes the most straightforward word is the most evocative.
Sandman’s more unguarded bars pair well with the enveloping beats of Detroit stalwart Illingsworth, who has previously appeared on records by Open Mike Eagle and R.A.P. Ferreira. Fittingly, his productions are somewhere between Dilla-ish soul chops and the cartoonish electronics of the L.A. beat scene. Illingsworth’s beats have an analog warmth, pulling samples of string tremolos, piano lines, and soothing vocals from soul and vintage pop, to most vivid effect on “Voices (alright).” But the production is not entirely a throwback, fused with electronic wonkiness, like the fluttering hi-hats and bassy synth lines on “Keep That Same Energy.” These are beats that sound like they were chopped up live on an MPC, unquantized and human even when flirting with more futuristic textures.
As he enters his 40s, Homeboy Sandman is more mindful and cautious, sounding like a rapper who has worked too hard to chase clout or confine himself to trends. With sarcastic defiance on album closer “Epiphany,” he declares a well-earned indifference to the opinions of critics, haters, or jealous peers: “These people do not have swag.” While he’s concerned about the world at large, he ultimately keeps a cool distance by recognizing that those who would try to make him feel insecure are deeply dissatisfied themselves.
The key to his longevity is moving at a consistent pace, rather than dashing to get the first word in, like a veteran fighter choosing his blows carefully instead of rushing in hot. He’s more than able to pick up the tempo when he wants to, but here, he focuses on forming a melodic chain of allegory and slice-of-life-imagery, stretching his muscles more than flexing them. Repetition becomes a pointed rhetorical device, forming the very structure of his songs. Album opener “Something Fly” hinges on his inflection of the word “something,” which he clips and twists into a multitude of meanings. The hook of “Stand Up”—“If you don’t stand up, they’ll never stop”—is repeated with a clipped ferocity more befitting a battle cry or mantra than a chorus.
Homeboy’s skepticism of social media hasn’t waned since 2018’s “Never Use The Internet Again.” He’s frequently at odds with digital life, and he succinctly depicts his relationship with technology on “The Only Constant”: “Got emojis from my godfolks/Couldn’t see em cuz I don’t have an iPhone.” He comes off like a rap game Monsieur Hulot, responding with droll confusion and bemusement to how the world has changed. Sandman’s relationship with his interiority parallels his relationship with technology. He’s not necessarily guarded, just protected. There’s a dose of real vulnerability to There In Spirit, frequently framed with sly humor as a disarming mechanism. Where his work has so often been focused on lyrical invention, the cathartic expression of a track like “Feels so Good to Cry” reveals a simpler purpose, allowing his writing to become more diaristic. There In Spirit shows an upside to staying in the game as you start to age: Once you’ve cut your teeth and proved your worth, you can relax a little bit, reflect, and breathe.


Using only pedal steel, lap steel, and effects, Lanois turns traditional sounds into ambient and effortless music, brilliantly masking the complexity of its source.

Goodbye to Language

The pedal steel guitar is a remarkably complex instrument, both a marvel of modern engineering and a stubborn beast. It’s predicated on the idea of a hard cylinder skating up and down the fretboard, and all the tradeoffs required to bend notes and chords around its sleek but unforgiving axis. To allow the notes to glide the way they do, while still letting players modulate chords in the fashion of a conventional guitar, workarounds had to be built into the instrument as it developed over the years: a mind-boggling array of foot pedals and knee levers, plus multiple necks of 10 or even 14 strings each.
But it works, almost miraculously so. All those pulleys and levers come off less like simple machines and more like circuits in a computer; we just hear music pouring forth—a sound like water, like air, like colors loosed from the spectrum and left to run free in unpredictable rivulets. Daniel Lanois’ *Goodbye to Language *is a celebration of that elegant artifice. Recorded solely using pedal steel, his collaborator Rocco Deluca’s lap steel, and Lanois’ characteristic battery of effects, it highlights the instrument’s mutability—its legato touch, soft attack, long sustain, and tremulous vibrato—and it channels those qualities into free-floating music that flirts with the very dissolution of structure, even as it makes the most of its harmonic relationships.
It helps that Lanois has considerable expertise with effects boxes, tricks with tape, and assorted mixing-desk voodoo. He got his start recording Christian a cappella groups in a multi-track studio he pieced together in his mother’s basement in Hamilton, Ontario, and by the early ’70s, he was recording Rick James down there. A decade after that, he helped Brian Eno realize groundbreaking ambient albums like Ambient 4: On Land, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, and The Pearl, with Harold Budd. Working on albums like U2’s The Unforgettable Fire* *and The Joshua Tree, and Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy—in which he had Dylan play and sing to the accompaniment of a Roland TR-808 drum machine—he developed a style that balances extreme technique and extreme naturalism until the two create a new kind of truth, a kind of enhanced realism.
Lanois has recorded many solo albums before this one, most of them focused on more traditional songwriting. His last, 2014’s Flesh and Machine, flirted with the idea of ambient and experimental music, and one of its songs, “Aquatic,” even introduced the reverberant, free-flowing pedal-steel techniques of Goodbye to Language. But his new album distills that vision to achieve a kind of purity that is rare for any musical process. It sounds like country music that has been dubbed from tape to tape until it has achieved the consistency of spun honey. It’s difficult music to talk about in any detail because the details themselves are so diffuse; no two tracks sound exactly the same but they all blur together, even after dozens of listens, into a blissful kind of ur-music, amniotic and quietly ecstatic. Parsing its mechanics is a little like trying to describe the specific qualities of different kinds of sunlight.
That title, Goodbye to Language, speaks directly to the pedal steel’s uncannily expressive qualities. Motifs appear and dissolve again just as quickly. There is just enough dissonance to keep you caught up in its mechanics, and the relationships between chords can be quite counterintuitive and strange, but there is no real discord. As the songs shift from chord to chord, they move with an easy, lilting motion, and the most obviously electronic aspects—the loops, the backmasked bits—disappear faithfully back within the whole, determined never to call attention to themselves. Occasionally, a sense of physicality comes to the fore: squeaks of fingertips against strings, whorls of ribbed wire peeling off in delay. But for the most part, the music gives the illusion of being something sourceless, something created without effort—not product, but pure being; not labor, but freedom.


Rooted in authenticity but still layered in artifice, the rising pop singer’s debut is ambitious yet shallow, seemingly intent on proving its own seriousness.

Life Support

At 21, pop singer and TikTok star Madison Beer has spent an uncomfortable amount of her career navigating mini “scandals”—accusations that she copied Ariana Grande, that she lied about plastic surgery, that she romanticized Lolita. Beer signed to Island when she was 13, shortly after Justin Bieber tweeted one of her many YouTube covers, Etta James’ “At Last”; three years later, she split from the label, saying she felt “trapped” by the “Disney queen” image thrust upon her. The internet deals in absolutes, particularly for young women: She’s either fake or so raw it’s empowering; she’s rebelling against the patriarchy or bowing to it; she’s subversive or she’s derivative. Beer’s debut album is muddier. Life Support is rooted in authenticity but still layered in artifice, molded in the conventions of pop’s more unconventional players.
The comparison to Grande is clear from the intro, an elegiac run of harmonies ranging from breathy to belting. Beer borrows liberally—when she exhales “oh honey” over a heartbeat drum pattern and slow, strum-along guitar, it’s impossible to not think of Born to Die-era Lana Del Rey. “Good in Goodbye,” all maximalist sound effects hurled over a trap drum, is Demi Lovato by way of reputation. Beer’s biggest hit so far, “Baby,” is cobbled out of harps and glitter and a dense, writhing layer of synth-smeared vocals. It was originally called “Prescription Love,” she told NME, a song about “how it could be unhealthy to be dependent on love.” Instead, the final product sounds like every pop song about sex stitched together. “I can turn you on, on, on,” she wails through Auto-Tune.
Life Support is a concept album in the loosest sense. Beer has said the record explores her diagnosis with borderline personality disorder, sieved through the emotional arc of a breakup—a fascinating lens that rarely manifests in the music. Much of the album is spent confusing ceremony with cohesion: Beer seems so intent on proving that this is a big, serious record that she undercuts her more nuanced ideas. The production stays obvious and persistent. Mournful strings clobber sadness into your headphones. “Default” offers an elegant meditation on anxiety that gets lost in melodramatic gusts of violin; “Stay Numb and Carry On” fumbles a metaphor about cherry Alka-Seltzer to describe a panic attack—“Shake it up, and find some shelter to hide,” Beer says in a staccato pseudo-rap. “Follow the White Rabbit” buries a catchy beat in juddering bass and heady Alice in Wonderland imagery. Beer has an impressive voice, and when it’s freed from layers of effects it can convincingly convey fear and resignation, or glide into a gleaming harmony. On “Homesick,” the walloping production pauses, and Beer croons over just a guitar. It’s a reprieve, until she murmurs, “These ain’t my people, ain’t my crew, it ain’t my planet.” Soon after, a “Rick and Morty” sample belches in.
But even when Beer herself sounds lovely, her explorations of vulnerability and self-definition tangle in stiff, obvious metaphors. The writing relies on flimsy framing devices, shoehorning a delicate narrative about hiding and healing into simplistic slogans: the countdown chorus in “Emotional Bruises,” the color descriptions in “Blue,” the faux significance of spelling (“Ain’t no I in trouble/Just the U since we met”) in “Good in Goodbye.” Often her simplest lyrics carry the most weight. “Used to do these things so effortlessly, somehow,” she moans on “Effortlessly,” her vocals dragging and distorted. The beat pauses for a second, the wrenching want in her voice laid bare, as if the track itself is too mesmerized to continue. But then, with an almost tangible sigh, Madison Beer sings on.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The former mash-up maker suggests that he could build a second career as a backpack-scale Rick Rubin, rejuvenating rap veterans by reconnecting them with their most dependable muses.

Girl Talk / Wiz Khalifa / Big K.R.I.T. / Smoke DZA: Full Court Press

Full Court Press

It’s probably been a while since your friend emailed you a mashup. The medium, so cutting-edge in the mid-’00s, is now as much a relic of the decade as a Shepard Fairey “HOPE” poster or a burned DVD of Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. So what do you do when the very craft you’ve dedicated your career to proves to be a fad? That’s the question facing Girl Talk’s Gregg Gillis, whose human iPod shuffle routine represented the pinnacle of mashup culture and, in hindsight, its conclusion. Once you’ve mashed up everything, there really isn’t anywhere else to go.
Gillis hasn’t released a Girl Talk album—or at least what we think of as a Girl Talk album, a Red Bull-guzzling megamix of popular music in any and all incarnations—since 2010’s All Day. But for 2014’s Broken Ankles EP, Gillis partnered with Roc-A-Fella castaway Freeway, who sounded absolutely nourished by production that paid homage to his early-’00s heyday. Gillis pulls a similar trick on a wider scale with his new album Full Court Press, which pairs him with not one but three rappers just past their commercial and critical primes: Wiz Khalifa, Big K.R.I.T., and Smoke DZA, who convened for several days of sessions in Los Angeles. Taken together, these projects suggest Gillis could build a second career as a backpack-scale Rick Rubin, rejuvenating rap veterans by reconnecting them with their most dependable muses.
It’s astounding how rarely rappers record together in the same studio. In an age when artists Dropbox each other verses with all the fanfare of emailing an invoice, most projects barely bother to create the illusion the talent involved was even in the same vicinity. One of Full Court Press’s chief selling points is the mere notion that four compatible artists spent so much time hanging out, spitballing ideas, goading each other to try a little harder than they normally might. Full Court Press is never better than when it feels like a true session, as on the closer “Everyday,” where Khalifa, K.R.I.T., and DZA all volley short bars over some Cali funk, all effortlessly synced with each other. Curren$y joins them just for that final track, but his bong-smoke vibe hangs so heavy over the album it’s as if he’d been there the whole time.
Wiz Khalifa isn’t the bona fide A-lister he used to be, but alongside this cast of internet favorites, he still sounds like a genuine star. Khalifa’s track record with albums is horrid; it’s as if the burden of carrying a full-length project sucks all the air out of him before he even arrives at the booth. But in short doses he’s an absolute charisma machine, and with three co-headliners to help him carry the weight, he raps with uncharacteristic joviality. If only his own records captured him this amiable, this focused, this awake. DZA, meanwhile, raps as ever with something to prove, while K.R.I.T., always so great with a hook, summons a fantastically sticky one on “Put You On.”
Between Khalifa’s lava-lamp dorm music, K.R.I.T.’s UGK-worshipping Southern soul, and DZA’s shadowboxing New York rap, Full Court Press’s lineup gives Gillis plenty of range to play with. None of these are proprietary lanes, of course, and plenty of producers work in them. But few of those producers are festival headliners, and Gillis distinguishes himself with his command of dynamics. Although his production is never nearly as busy as his old Girl Talk mixes, these tracks have an underlying antsiness to them. Much as he performs, Gillis produces like his finger is always hovering over the skip button in case things ever get dull. It’s a credit to his curatorial skills that on Full Court Press they never do.


In a minimalist piece presented in four different iterations—for strings, woodwinds, brass and organ, and choir and electronics—the Los Angeles composer strips her music down to its bones.

Long Gradus

The first few notes of “Long Gradus (strings)” are so fragile that they might break at any moment. Each member of string quartet Quatuor Bozzini bows one long tone without any vibrato or other ornamentation, stretching it out until it becomes paper thin. It’s like a skeleton of a Sarah Davachi piece—just the notes, none of the reverb. To write Long Gradus, the Los Angeles-based composer draws on many of the ideas that have shaped her work over the years—slow tempos, just intonation, harmonies inspired by Medieval and Renaissance polyphony. But where her previous albums felt cavernous, Long Gradus strips her music down to its bones, zeroing in on the timbre of each individual note.
Davachi composed Long Gradus while she was in residence at Quatuor Bozzini’s Composers’ Kitchen. The artists worked closely together to develop the piece, which explores psychoacoustics—the science of sound and perception—through sustained tones. It is composed of four movements, each between 15 and 17 minutes long, that progress through a series of intervals, tracking their evolution in time. Intended as an open-ended work, Long Gradus offers guidelines but no strict rules, so it may be played by any group of four instruments.
In the album version, Davachi shows the composition’s adaptability by presenting recordings of string quartet, woodwinds, brass and organ, and choir and electronics, demonstrating how the piece translates across instrumentations. Davachi has never shied away from writing long pieces—her albums often run an hour or more—but Long Gradus takes her work to a new extreme. Its four discs spread out over four and a half hours, examining the contours of the work from seemingly every angle.
Throughout, tones enter and fade with the ease of breathing. Each movement creeps from low to high pitches almost unnoticeably, save for some occasional clashes between frequencies, and ample pauses between notes give the music a glacial quality. Davachi has always explored measured, subtle motion: Her stretched-out progressions often seem to exist outside of time, moving at a pace that’s guided by intuition. But that’s a zoomed-out picture, and Long Gradus shows the granular: With this composition, Davachi invites us to take stock of every tone in the minutest detail.
The four iterations take on strikingly different qualities. When notes get close together in the string quartet version, there’s pronounced beating; when woodwinds play, there are soaring overtones. The strings often sound ghostly, while the woodwinds are bright and feathery; organ and brass feel deep and resonant while choir and electronics take on a Medieval air. Those changes are so subtle that listening to each feels repetitive—this is the same piece, after all, just played by a different set of tools. But the four versions of Long Gradus do show how the work transcends the particularities of a given adaptation. No matter the instrumentation, Davachi’s music is still evolving.


With the debut of his new project Metronome, Mikel Rouse reaches the rarified level of production ambition he first achieved in the ’80s, as he weaved together classical, electronic, and indie rock.

Take Down

New York’s 1980s club scene boasted famously cavalier attitudes regarding genre convention. Composers worked in rock venues, improvisers experimented with turntablists, and few musicians derived more joy from the era’s stylistic permissiveness than Mikel Rouse. Using the then-new LinnDrum machine, he painstakingly programmed Quorum—a complex, thumping percussion opus that was promptly adopted by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (and is still used today). He also fronted a melodic indie rock outfit called Tirez Tirez, which opened for Talking Heads and saw its final recordings distributed by IRS Records.
At the same time, the composer led a contemporary classical group, Broken Consort. This quartet drew clear inspiration from the minimalist-meets-rock energy of the Philip Glass Ensemble. But Rouse worked rewarding changes on this inheritance, even toying with approaches to atonal writing that were generally considered antithetical to minimalist trends. Overall, Rouse’s polyglot catalog of recordings from this decade still holds up; the Tirez Tirez albums remain in need of reissuing.
Now Rouse is on another hot streak. While some of his pop-song collections from the ’90s and ’00s strained to balance his hooks with his polyrhythmic play, recent albums like Recess and Boost/False Doors have displayed more cohesion. And on Take Down—the debut of his new project, Metronome—Rouse approaches his production duties with greater ambition than at any point since Quorum.
The opening track, “Habibi Lossless,” combines several Rouse hallmarks to stirring effect. His tenor voice and slide guitar both offer indie-folk comforts, while drier pitched percussion lines swerve around seductive electro-pop beats. Over the course of the 10-minute song, minimalist phrases of varying length cycle through the arrangement, creating cross-rhythms and a swirl of melodic information. Still, the center always holds. This attractive but mercurial structure is also suited to the lyrics, which hint at a romance interrupted (if not fully extinguished).
Longing for an affection that may already be lost is not novel subject matter. But Rouse’s musical evocation of this psychology is ingenious. The vocals take care of the present-tense melancholy, while the madly cavorting instrumental activity represents all the mental what-ifs and counter-arguments that rebel against a discouraging romantic prognosis. Toward the end, a slow vocal-and-guitar refrain is paired with blissfully untroubled techno programming; in addition to being a druggy juxtaposition, the compositional choice creates an affecting portrait of someone trying to dance through pain. Naturally, this strategy hits a dead end, too, and Rouse’s narrator can be heard expelling some exhaustion as the song concludes.
Solitude and romantic discord are themes that appear elsewhere on the album, though nothing else on Take Down is as heavy as the leadoff track. Songs that push vocalist Claire Karoly forward in the mix have a buoyant quality: “Habit” contains a synth-driven theme that draws from new wave, while the breeder-dissing “Growing Pains” has a middle-aged punk’s rejectionist spirit.
The composer doesn’t take any guitar-hero solos, but his range on the instrument is evident across all of these winding pieces. He threads playfully funky licks throughout “Ambulance Chaser” that go well with the song’s teasing vocal performance. On a track like “Side Myself,” Rouse can begin with acoustic, Delta-blues accents before turning to some exultant electric accompaniment during the climax. More than any lyrical or conceptual through-line, it’s this consistently well-judged mixing of parts—with elements and strategies culled from dance music, rock, and classical forms—that gives the album its unity.
There are scattered suggestions of an overarching concept, here and there, as is common with Rouse. He calls this album a “soundtrack to America’s future,” and so a particular song’s narrator may broach concerns over personal money-management issues, or class inequality, that are apt to sound timely not only now but in years to come. Yet those fears are never more than sketched, leaving these lines to impress more strongly as the stray worries that can be part of life as it’s lived, disappointment to disappointment.
Take Down isn’t as interested in any systematic critique of contemporary culture as it is in the idea that a frustrating circumstance might be bettered through some surprising new choice. Whenever the cynicism of a lyric threatens to make a song seem too cloistered, a new harmony or vocal cadence has a way of throwing open a window and letting in a new vibe. After growing up in those protean New York clubs of old, it’s as though Rouse knows full well that whatever room you’re in can be made to host the sounds you need to hear at any moment, conventions be damned.


The band’s sixth album is familiar and intimate, updated with touches of synth and drum machine but still rooted in melancholy brass and Zach Condon’s distinct baritone.

Hadsel

The note of surprise on Hadsel, Beirut’s sixth studio LP, is not so much that Zach Condon has recorded an album on a remote Norwegian island with free access to a church organ, it’s that he hasn’t done so before. This sneaking feeling of familiarity is at the heart of Hadsel’s comfortable and occasionally underwhelming charm. Condon has, objectively, changed the Beirut sound since the Balkan brass days of Gulag Orkestar, his whirlwind 2006 debut. But his rich baritone croon, which swoops and curls around melodies like an eagle after a rabbit, is so distinctive, his brass arrangements so stridently mournful, that he can’t help but sound like himself.
Hadsel, named after the municipality in which it was recorded, has its moments of reinvention. The use of the Hadsel kirke organ, whose ministerial drones underlie several of the album’s songs, introduces an austere, baroque elegance to the title track (especially) that is far removed from the ultra-bright tones of much modern pop music. For a blackened moment, the listener is transported to the hostile beauty and long nights of a Norwegian winter, the cold wind blowing around an icy wooden church. But as soon as the brass starts its stately call, we’re plunged right back into the world of Gulag Orkestar et al.
At the same time, the modular synthesizers and drum machines that made their bow on 2019’s Gallipoli are more prominent on Hadsel. “January 18th,” “Spillhaugen,” and the second half of “Süddeutsches Ton-Bild-Studio” take on a borderline jolly, Switched-On Bach-style electronic wobble, while “Stokmarknes” and “The Tern” are marked by writhing electronic beats. But it almost feels like Condon has used these elements too well, weaving unfamiliar sounds around his lugubrious vocal so snugly that his invention slips by unheralded.
This isn’t necessarily a problem, given the album’s lucidity and songwriting strength. Condon recorded Hadsel at a time of great personal difficulty, after health problems forced him to cut short Beirut’s Gallipoli tour in 2019. Upon arriving in Norway, he threw himself into recording as if “lost in a trance”; when he later returned to Berlin, rather than turn to his band for help, Condon fleshed out the Hadsel recordings on brass, percussion, and ukulele. The resulting sound is not exactly minimal, but it has greater clarity of purpose than Beirut’s more overblown records. This is an intimate, unflinching album that draws its power from Condon’s voice, which is frequently multi-tracked into giant choirs, like a lonely man who has invited his imaginary friends to a party.
It remains thoroughly cathartic to hear Condon in full canorous flight, pushing simple vocal lines to grandiose conclusions. Drum machine aside, “So Many Plans” is a classic, horn-heavy Beirut heartbreaker in the style of “Elephant Gun.” “The Tern,” meanwhile, is a master class in pared-down songwriting, riding one melodic thought to towering emotional extremes. Condon went to Norway and came back with a familiar tangle of contradictions: Hadsel is a new beginning for Beirut that sounds like old times, a record born of despair and solitude that still feels full of life.


The live album captures a night of the exuberant collaboration Karin Dreijer fostered with the Plunge stage production, adding volume and dimensionality to old and new songs alike.

Live at Troxy

For their 2014 Shaking the Habitual Tour, Karin Dreijer and their brother Olaf expanded their synthpop duo the Knife from a twosome to a troupe. The siblings wore the same jewel-toned jumpsuits and glittery makeup as the nine other performers they invited into the group, visually diminishing any sense that they were bandleaders. The symbolic collectivism of the stage show accentuated the themes running through the album of the same name: freedom, communalism, and the urgent need to dismantle social hegemony to clear space for a better world.
While touring behind their second album as Fever Ray, Dreijer applied a similar conceptual bent to a rather different show. The performers on the Plunge tour each wore distinct costumes—a fur coat and thigh-high boots, an orange polyester muscle suit, facepaint and velvet opera gloves—creating characters from the messy, ad-hoc getups. Hoping to challenge the music industry’s pervasive gender disparity, Dreijer hired as few men as possible for the tour. Five out of the six stage performers were about 40 years old, and four were parents—Dreijer's effort to counteract the ageism and sexism that often freezes mothers and women past their 20s out of performing creative work.
Fever Ray’s live album, Live at Troxy, captures a night of the exuberant collaboration Dreijer fostered with the Plunge stage production. While the Shaking the Habitual Tour made extensive use of pre-recorded backing tracks, allowing the performers to dance freely and lip-sync to the music, Dreijer opted on the Plunge tour to have everything played live. Physical percussion bolsters live-triggered drum machines on the record, adding volume and dimensionality to old and new Fever Ray songs.
Dreijer’s 2009 self-titled debut as Fever Ray sprung from a place of isolation and deep introspection. A few songs from that album appear on Live at Troxy, but they are newly reinvigorated: They sound like memories of isolation now dispelled by having found community. “When I Grow Up” and “I’m Not Done” were both significantly revamped for the Plunge tour, spiked with higher tempos, gulping vocal samples, and newly colorful percussion. These new incarnations fit right in alongside the playful offerings from Plunge, but even Fever Ray’s iciest cuts fill with new warmth here. The drumbeats tower on “Keep the Streets Empty for Me,” while synthesizer figures twirl irreverently. It’s as though the speaker has finished a long nighttime walk home only to find their apartment filled with friends. And the powerfully chilling “If I Had a Heart” sounds like Dreijer making peace with past selves: They sing live and unaffected over a recording of their pitch-shifted performance from 10 years ago, voice cracking and rasping in ways the processed vocal didn’t allow.
Even in their studio versions, most songs from Plunge sound like they were written to be played in a club full of people—it’s an album about fucking your way out of your shell, and it lends itself to joyful, gay celebration. Live, tracks like “To the Moon and Back” and “Wanna Sip” flare with life and color, animated by the urgency and risk of live performance. When the drums crash in at the beginning of “IDK About You,” and the synths peal and squiggle, you can almost see the band members grinning at each other.
On Plunge, Dreijer openly celebrated their queerness for the first time, never losing sight of the fact that even romantic relationships don’t transpire in a vacuum. To grow close to another person is to open yourself to the world in which they’re enmeshed, to participate in the broader social fabric. Plunge expertly traces the threads connecting the sexual and the political, the bond between two people in a couple and the bonds that link a community. On Live at Troxy, we get the chance to hear Fever Ray—a band, now—exalt all of that good human love as a collective, a chosen family thrilled to share their music and their play.


Rapper associated with Busta Rhymes' Flipmode Squad steps out with an album that combines early 1990s boom-bap with an impressive flair for storytelling.

Marcberg

"Don't be out showing your teeth/ Niggas will think shit is sweet, so keep it low and discreet." Long Island's Roc Marciano follows his own advice. Once destined to be an also-ran of Busta Rhymes' Flipmode Squad, Marciano has locked himself in a dilapidated apartment and recorded a masterwork of insular, borderline-sociopathic hip-hop, much in the vein of the mid-1990s heyday of Mobb Deep. Prodigy once threatened to stab you with the bone of your own nose, and Marciano also comes from the streets of pre-Giuliani New York, where it's so dark you can barely see three feet ahead of you, where "niggas [are] duct-taped up and mistaken for lunch." In Marciano's New York, the weak get devoured and smacking someone is explicitly referred to as an involuntary movement.
Marcberg could be heard as revivalism in the vein of Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...Pt. II from kindred spirit Raekwon, mainly because it sounds like it was released in 1992. Marciano still refers to police officers as "jakes," Naughty by Nature and Earl Boykins(!), as well as London Fog(!!) are all referenced. The beats are minor-key, sample-based boom-bap, as if Swizz Beats, shiny suits, and rappers in skinny jeans never happened. The key to the record's appeal is that while it clearly pays homage to a bygone hip-hop era, it never sounds dated or overtly reverent.
Much of that is due to Marciano's hyper-syllabic and percussive flow, narrative flair, and fastidious eye for detail as both a rapper and producer. Along with the eerily visceral thump of "Pop", he keeps his eye on the kids on roller skates, hoping none of them get hit with a stray bullet during an impending gunfight. The blaxploitation groove on "Whateva Whateva" serves as the perfect backdrop for Marciano's gifted wordplay and dark comedy, where Marciano threatens to "pop the air out of your balloon and the spare, too." None of the music on Marcberg rises above a dull roar, but that makes it that much scarier; here, you have no idea when someone is going to jump out of the corner and shoot you.
Even when Marciano tips toward cliché, he finds a way to make it work. The whole drug-as-woman metaphor has been around forever, which makes "Jungle Fever" all the more impressive. A tender ballad centered around a bright-but-dusty piano sample, Marciano attacks the subject of dealing cocaine by envisioning it as an interracial relationship. But what makes "Jungle Fever" special is that while other rappers might adopt the obvious "Hey, white girl, let's have fun" pose of the song's premise, Marciano lets his guard down after he and the girl in question start making money together, letting her buy him clothes and hiding her from his mother. By the end, he's waiting by the phone for her to call, stressing over when she's going to return, or if she's even going to return at all.
"Fuck being a taxpayer," Marciano snorts. If Marcberg sounds so claustrophobic and unconcerned about the rap scene surrounding it (one that has changed over at least four or five times since this record's closest counterparts have been recorded), it could be because Marciano has been too busy honing his craft to worry about swag rap.


Like their previous work, the British production duo's latest album contains heavy doses of sounds that rile, pacify, and intrigue, but here they constantly tip their hand.

Scintilli

Over the past several years, as European electronic music's moved from its all-minimal-everything phase into fuzzier areas, I've made a mental note of comparing no less than a dozen young producers to Plaid. I didn't listen to Plaid-- British production duo Andy Turner and Ed Handley-- very much, not even their 1999 mini-masterpiece Rest Proof Clockwork. Instead they remained faintly but firmly ensconced in my memory, the result of a burgeoning electronic music fan seeking a group Radiohead wasn't constantly namedropping (scratch Aphex Twin, Autechre), but that was still available at Sam Goody. I would never suggest that Plaid were a direct inspiration for a group like Mount Kimbie, though there are worse things than being a token in the revival of soft-focus, reasonably scaled beatmongering.
Scintilli is Plaid's first non-soundtrack work since 2008 and their first proper studio album since 2003 (2006's Greedy Baby having been an audio/video collaboration). It doesn't count as a "new direction" for the duo because they've never really fucked with "direction" in the first place. At their best, Plaid nestled into the wide crevasses between hardline, dystopian techno, broken beat, and experimental composition. Their synthesis was recognizable but not unrepeatable; they stood out for their casual, unhurried sense of adventure. (In the late 1990s, they were called Intelligent Dance Music because their records had "Warp" on the back, and they didn't sound like Moby.)
There's a danger in this lack of direction, though: sometimes you exist comfortably outside electronic-music narratives and sometimes you get lost. Scintilli isn't the first time Plaid have stumbled into the latter state; all things being equal, they operate in this mode better than most. Still, Scintilli underwhelms, lacking the ease with which Plaid used to stitch sound together. They're no longer inscrutable; like their previous work, Scintilli contains heavy doses of sounds that rile, pacify, and intrigue, but here they constantly tip their hand. The dolloping keyboards of "Craft Nine" calm; the walloping bass of "Sömnl" disrupts.
Plaid's skillful incorporation of the female voice remains intact (Björk sometimes seems to aspire to "Lilith", her 1997 collaboration with the duo) on soft-footed opener "Missing" and closer "At Last". Their overall sound has remained eclectic even as their tracks grow compartmentalized. I still appreciate Plaid's baselessness-- how I can never quite place what I'm listening to. They're less diffuse than their late-90s Warp peers but far more so than, say, Mouse on Mars or Flying Lotus, artists with whom Plaid share sensibilities but little more. I find Scintilli-- and its ambitious alternating of composure and chaos-- admirable, but "admirable" sounds (and feels) like a backhanded complement. I would prefer to find it fizzy or confusing or aggressive. Scintilli is a disappointingly static record from a duo of born tinkerers.


Combining elements of the best ambient music with the emotive nostalgia and accessibility of Fennesz's Endless Summer and Boards of Canada, From Here We Go Sublime may wind up 2007's most luxuriant electronic record.

From Here We Go Sublime

After centuries of music consumption, we're still obsessed with the crescendo. From all that classical music we learned in school to modern soundtrack fodder to the banal quiet/loud/quiet dynamics of groups like Explosions in the Sky, people still seek the thrill that comes when music reaches its stirring Big Moment. Blame remote controls or the death of vinyl, but 30-odd years after Brian Eno invented ambient music, most people are wary about "turning off" to any music that doesn't actively seek to engage them. Deep listening remains mostly theoretical in the age of mp3s.
Minimal techno isn't exactly built for the iPod age, so what's a post-disco producer to do when he wants the restraint but also the explosion? If most 21st century pop music could be whittled down to a ringtone without losing any of its effect, a dance producer who actually manages to hook the ear for six or seven minutes after that opening jolt-- while still rejecting, you know, narrative or harmonic development-- is doing something special.
Axel Willner, founder and sole member of the Field, is hardly the first to split the difference, but his formally simple yet functionally overwhelming music captures not only those big ecstatic peaks but also the initial ringtone-esque bursts like the two sides of the same coin they are, and basically just repeats them until he decides to stop tape. Willner's records under his Field alias (his other guises include Cordouan, Lars Blek, and Porte) do away with the build-up almost entirely while still milking the climax like a chemist running real-time tests to see just how long he's got until the drug's effect wears off.
That kind of pared-down sound-sculpting is everywhere in continental European electronic music these days, but rarely is it as instantly enveloping or as comforting as the Field's debut, From Here We Go Sublime. The album recalls Kaito, another artist on the German label with one great idea, likewise pushing wistfulness and simplicity to the brink. Favoring a dreamy minimalism of just a few sounds waltzing around each other, Willner smears, chops, and processes slivers of musical information-- the tips of a vocal, a note and a half of an instrumental-- in a delicate computer-assisted retrieval process. But unlike other maestros of hiccup and twang, Willner favors uncomplicated, revolving compositions rather than a loom-like mesh. It's a bare bones compositional gambit that could wind up utterly irritating, but with the ears of a hip-hop cratedigger and the hands of a surgeon is bliss. Gliding like zero-gravity skaters, opener "Over the Ice" spins, twirls, and pivots on just a shivering vocalized "e"-- split across two octaves-- and an undulating "i."
But if Sublime initially sounds set for the dancefloor and not the couch, it's strictly down to Willner favoring quick tempos and rhythms, like the concussive "uh!" and the bumping acid bassline on "The Little Heart Beats So Fast". Despite its nods to house and techno, Sublime is really an extension of the best ambient electronics of the last decade or so, especially Gas, a project of Wolfgang Voigt, who as co-owner of Kompakt Records is now releasing the Field's music. (Not for nothing did Willner's sublime "Kappsta" appear on Kompakt's Pop Ambient 2007 even as it could easily fit here.) Folks may also call the Field trance, because there's an often anthemic bigness to Willner's little sounds, a certain shameless bombastic quality to the way he deploys his loops and builds his arpeggios. And like both bog-standard dancefloor trance and ethereal Gas records such as Pop, Field tracks sound loud, even when played soft.
People may also call it trance because of Willner's elementary drum tracks, often just a deflated machine thump flecked with hi-hat hiss. Compared to peers like Perlon, Kompakt may not be particularly known for its adventurous drum programming but Willner's purposefully entry-level beats shift much of the percussive burden onto his melodies. And while Willner may be building his arpeggios out of baby love sighs snatched from the mouths of the Temptations (on "Things Keep Falling Down", sadly not included here) or strummed guitar loops nicked from nuggets of yacht rock instead of preset synth pads or Ableton plug-ins, his spirit animals are the likes of Sasha, Digweed, and Tiesto, guiding him on how to put his sounds together for maximum spine-tingly impact. There's a reason those guys sold so many records to a whole generation of folks looking for, well, the sublime. And like all those 2xCD 1990s trance mixes, an hour of Willner's vibrations may have you drooling for an off-beat or a key change or, hell, a build-up to crescendo.
But forget pop musical concerns for a second-- Willner's triumph on Sublime remains how he manages to isolate and repeat his little moments, transmuting them through the basic dance music building blocks of juxtaposition and repetition into something bigger, wringing pleasure out of the always potentially dull aforementioned "sound sculpting": The metallic schlurp of the drums and background hum of robot cicadas on "Mobilia"; the fingertip flutters of the textural stuttering all over Sublime; the hot and heavy pressurized soaking of "Sun and Ice"; the disembodied zombie doowop filched from the Flamingos' "I Only Have Eyes for You" that echoes through the title track like Kraftwerk daydreaming they're a soul duo, before the voices finally unspool into a timestretched blur as the record fades out-- one of the most shiver-inducing moments you'll hear all year. Often the best part of Willner's tracks are those final few seconds, as on "A Paw in My Face", the guitar sample finally escapes its loop with a joyous twang of freedom (only to reveal its source as Lionel Richie's bloodless lite-FM staple "Hello"). If Willner doesn't hit at least some of your pleasure centers, well, forget your ears-- your nerve endings might actually be dead. Even three months in, it's a safe bet that From Here We Go Sublime will wind up 2007's most luxuriant record.


The extremely online 25-year-old comedian’s foray into a more traditional comedy format makes for an imposing and uneven listen, even for the most logged-on.

An ASMR Album

For better and worse, social media is a spawning ground for people who thrive on getting laughs—and that certainly includes Brandon Wardell. The 25-year-old Los Angeles-based comedian is part of a micro-generational group of aspiring funnymakers who have essentially gotten famous through cracking wise online, even while pursuing more traditional routes such as stand-up and sketch comedy. To date, he’s amassed more than 665,000 Twitter followers who keep tabs on his topical musings ranging from Juuls to Sprite-bottle gravity bongs and meeting Post Malone. “It’s the purest form of expression that I have,” Wardell told Rolling Stone in 2016 regarding his Twitter account. “There’s something super-visceral about Twitter. It’s just a lot of like brain vomit.”
You have him to thank (or blame, depending on how you look at it) for the “Dicks out for Harambe” meme, which he told Rolling Stone was riffing off of a joke made by his Twitter friend SexualJumanji; he served as the “opening act” for Bob Odenkirk’s 2014 comedy album Amateur Hour and has since hosted a Comedy Central Snapchat series, along with appearances on TV shows ranging from “What Would Diplo Do” to “@midnight with Chris Hardwick.” His press bio notes that “since Brandon’s appearance on those programs, they have all been canceled,” a self-effacing aside that nonetheless highlights a simple truth: the 280-character comedy Wardell and his peers traffic in doesn’t always translate well to more traditional formats. It’s new-medium stuff for new-medium audiences, which is totally fine.
Wardell’s brand of comedy is largely geared towards the Extremely Online, and that goes double for his first comedy album, An ASMR Album. Despite being loosely constructed around a smattering of stand-up material, it’s not quite a comedy album in the traditional sense; for one, the audience is wholly imaginary, and much of the material has been crafted to service the conceit of recording an “ASMR” stand-up set—specifically, an “Autonomous sensory meridian response” experience that resembles what Wikipedia cites as a “low-grade euphoria” as a result of hearing close-miked sounds. ASMR videos have taken up plenty of real estate on YouTube for a while now, and to promote the album Wardell recorded two mock-ASMR videos of his own for online content hub Super Deluxe’s Tingles video series (which typically showcases actual ASMR videos).
Suffice to say, the learning curve for enjoying—or even understanding the basic premise of—An ASMR Album is harsh and unforgiving for anyone who doesn’t spend a minimum of eight hours online per day. Even so, this combination of sounds-of-the-studio trickery and joke-telling can be a bit imposing for even the most logged-on. A few infuriatingly imprecise comparison points come to mind: Drag City’s gleefully antagonistic Andy Kaufman voice-memo collection Andy and His Grandmother from 2013, experimental composer Robert Ashley, and the unbridled antagonism of the closing minutes in Andrew Dice Clay’s The Day the Laughter Died. An ASMR Album isn’t so much a comedy record in search of an audience as it is seeking listeners to send into a state of utter confusion.
By extension, whether any of the material on An ASMR Album “lands” with listeners is largely irrelevant, and picking apart the jokes and set pieces it’s structured around seems to be of little worth amid audio gags like a tiny house band performing chiptune-sized jazz niblets, and Wardell supposedly lint-rolling his “damn ass.” But some jokes (a bit about a DJ who drops an entire Woody Allen album into a set filled with artists that have allegedly committed sexual assault) do land a little better than others (a similar bit in which Wardell warns his younger self not to go to a party at Bryan Singer’s house, in vain); other jokes that riff on “wokeness” and straight men engaging in gay sex come across as dated and carrying the potential to needlessly offend.
Perhaps the most inspired bit of joke-writing comes during “Crowd Work,” in which Wardell imagines what it would be like to do a stand-up set with an ex-girlfriend as the only member in the audience—but it doesn’t take long for the gag to go into the deep end, mutating into a homoerotic gag in which Wardell falls in love with his ex-girlfriend’s father. Without ruining the “twist,” it only gets more convoluted from there, as the album sputters to a surrealist and near-nonsensical conclusion. The pretense of performing for an audience almost disappears completely, and that’s kind of the point. If a Tweet goes un-fav’d in the woods, there’s no one around to read it, and An ASMR Album is similarly unconcerned with who’s listening. The antagonism is admirable, even if it’s not much fun to experience.


Playboi Carti's go-to producer goes solo, crooning in AutoTune over his blissfully simple earworm beats.

The Life of Pi’erre 4

Most hip-hop producers could put in their 10,000 hours on FruityLoops and still never come close to Playboi Carti’s “Magnolia.” The blissfully simple four-note earworm earned Carti his cult following and turned its maker, Pi’erre Bourne, into a sought-after producer.
Rather than continue to feed hits to stars like Carti, Lil Uzi Vert and 21 Savage, Bourne has put all his attention into his solo career as a rapper. Which brings us to The Life of Pi’erre 4, his major-label debut and the first real test of whether he can carry a project. The answer is not quite—his heavily Auto-Tuned vocals have a tendency to get washed out by his hazy backdrops, and Pi’erre 4 is one-note as a result, more vibe than statement.
At least the vibe is enticing. Bourne’s beats hum with the same off-kilter melodies that made “Magnolia” so thrilling, and the edges are filled with interesting noises. The fuzzy synth notes on “Be Mine” sound like they were played on an electrified toy piano, while “Romeo Must Die” turns on a distorted refrain that sounds recorded 500 feet below the ocean surface. Most of the tracks are accentuated by over-the-top sound effects—a lion roar, or a reworked vintage DJ drop (“Damn Pi’erre, where’d you find this?”)—that give the project the momentum of a street-bought mixtape.
Once you get past the initial dopamine rush, Bourne starts to run into trouble. Unlike the MCs who buy his beats, none of which are featured here, he fully saturates his voice in Auto-Tune, more akin to T-Pain or Fetty Wap than Uzi. His voice often drowns in the mix as a result. Add this to the fact that none of the songs evolve much over their runtimes —put Pi’erre 4 in waveform, and it’d look like a bread loaf, a hunk of sound with no peaks or valleys—and you start to tune out.
Which is a shame, because Bourne puts effort into his lyrics. All the obvious tropes are here—money-chasing anthems (“Doublemint”), odes to jealous exes (“Feds”)—but he hints at a more interesting story in between. On “How High,” he dives into his formative years in Queens (where he split time between South Carolina): “Just a college nigga, honor roll/I dropped out of college, lost my home.” On “Try Again,” he speaks of the loneliness that comes with his sudden rise in fame: “It’s just me, and I’m alone again/Spending all my money on my own again.”
There are some catchy hooks as well—on “Racer,” Bourne croons nimbly alongside some late-’90s R&B keyboards—but for the most part, the beats on Pi’erre 4 speak the loudest. Nowhere is that more obvious than on standout track “Guillotine.” The beat sounds like Bourne looped a creaking screen door; a warped sample breathes with the beat, groaning ruefully every four bars. The sound alone says more than the forgettable clichés of Bourne’s lyrics, demonstrating that the producer, for now, does his best work behind the boards.


A seven-track accompaniment to the brothers’ album Mixing Colours—released as both standalone EP and digital add-on—highlights the nuances of their playing and the limits of the attention span.

Luminous

Five months after the release of their duo album Mixing Colours, Brian Eno and his younger brother, Roger, pick up what they’ve called a “back-and-forth conversation” with Luminous, an EP featuring six new tracks and a tune previously restricted to the album’s Japanese edition.
The two men’s musical exchange took place over the course of 15 years: Roger, a pianist, would improvise pieces on a MIDI keyboard, then pass them off to Brian to treat with effects and electronics. For years, there was no goal in mind, but eventually, they built up enough material for an album. Perhaps too much material:  The resulting full-length  was a lovely if minor work from the two musicians, one hampered by a numbing 75-minute runtime that undermined both the nuance of Brian’s treatments and the grace of Roger’s Satie-like refrains.
On Luminous, with its focused 28-minute length, similar material takes a stronger hold on the listener’s attention. Although created with the same methods and technology, these finely spun instrumentals have an underlying energy that Mixing was often missing. A fine example is “Manganese,” a song anchored by a simple melodic phrase that, when filtered through Brian’s effects, sounds like a player piano set adrift in deep space. “Pewter,” the original album’s Japan-only bonus track, floats free alongside it—a glistening mass of synthetic chords and haunting atmosphere that calls to mind a previous Eno brothers collaboration: 1983’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks.
Luminous’ brevity also puts both men’s individual contributions into sharper relief. Roger’s playing on “Malachite” rolls and sways like a slow, joyous waltz, and his melodies on “Vermillion” and “Violet” feel as thick and languorous as a summer afternoon. Brian’s contributions provide all the finer details: the fireworks-like electronic bursts throughout “Vermillion,” the gorgeously clashing overtones within “Moss,” the understated bass on “Pewter.”
On vinyl, Luminous exists as a standalone release. But for digital service providers, the Enos and Deutsche Grammophon made the curious decision to fold these seven tracks into the original tracklist of Mixing Colours—not sprinkled throughout, but plunked en masse toward the end, preserving Mixing Colours’ two closing tracks as a finale. It’s an unusual move, one telling of the ways that the album format has evolved in the streaming era. The Eno brothers aren’t going the route of Kanye West, who made changes to both The Life of Pablo and ye long after they were released. But in their own small way, Roger and Brian are embracing the idea of an album as a living document.
Which might not be to the benefit of Mixing Colours. Whatever mood and flow they were trying to create with the original album is disrupted—and the lift that the songs from Luminous provide is quickly whisked away with the return of Mixing Colours’ pleasant but forgettable material. However unwittingly, the Enos make the case that Mixing Colours might have been better served by treating its material in the manner of this new EP: doled out in smaller servings, the better for the richness of their collaboration to be appreciated.

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On their latest, Thee Oh Sees show an eagerness to drift away from their foundational ’60s psych-pop and garage-punk roots into more cosmic realms.

A Weird Exits

In stark defiance of pop music’s “don’t bore us, get to the chorus” maxim, John Dwyer believes the best antidote to boredom is getting rid of the chorus altogether. Rather than introduce a rousing, anthemic melody to elevate a song to the next level, Dwyer takes the shortcut to ecstasy: after riding a relentless robo-punk rhythm through a couple of creepily cooed verses, he simply screams “wooo!,” and uses his fuzzbox as a springboard into the stratosphere. At this point in the band’s 11-album run, you can pretty much set your watch to this maneuver—A Weird Exits’ pulsating opener, “Dead Man’s Gun,” dutifully triggers its strobe-lit squall at the 40-second mark. But the trick never fails to exhilarate, because Thee Oh See’s blast-off moments never feel like smooth, assured ascents—they’re more like riding a whirling fairground attraction and realizing your safety belt has come unlatched.
Even as recent albums have introduced stoner-prog jams and Mellotron-swirled ballads into the mix, Thee Oh Sees have become, as John Peel famously quipped about the Fall, one of those “always different, always the same” kinda bands. With each hastily released album, you’re guaranteed a healthy dose of the band’s patented motorik mayhem, but in Thee Oh Sees’ case, that signature sound is no dead end—it functions more as a home base from which the band can confidently roam and to which it can safely circle back. A Weird Exits doesn’t make any surprise detours like Drop’s Beatlesque lullaby “The Lens” or Mutilator Defeated At Last’s psych-folk pastorale “Holy Smoke”; rather than slam on the brakes and pull a U, it gradually eases off the accelerator. But while raygunned rave-ups like “Gelatinous Cube” will keep the stagedivers busy at the band’s legendarily unhinged live shows, more than ever, Thee Oh Sees show an eagerness to drift away from their foundational ’60s psych-pop and garage-punk roots into more cosmic realms. And, as this album proves, you can venture even further afield when you have two drummers powering the ship.
A Weird Exits is Thee Oh Sees’ first LP to showcase the double-thump tandem of Ryan Moutinho and Dan Rincon, whose interplay naturally encourages a greater degree of rhythmic variation. While Krautrock remains the driving force in Thee Oh Sees machine, the guiding spirit here is more Jaki Liebezeit than Klaus Dinger, with a premium on loose, limber mid-tempo grooves instead of locked-in momentum. That balming effect can be felt even on a windmilled exercise like “Plastic Plant,” which has all the qualities of a classic Oh Sees rocker, yet opts for a cool shuffle instead of a full-torque thrust. But the double-barreled attack is most potent on the instrumentals: the punnily titled “Jammed Entrance” etches a squiggly morse-code keyboard pattern into a mushroom-heady funk; the jazzy guitar refrains of “Unwrap the Fiend Pt. 2” give way to a taut, tambourine-shakin’ strut and phased-out solo that open up a vast, spectral sense of space. (By contrast, the droning eight-minute reverie “Crawl Out From the Fall Out,” doesn’t give the drummers much to do other than tentatively tap their cymbals, but then its swirling, lung-engulfing Spacemen 3-via-“Ode to Street Hassle” haze is too thick to encourage much muscle movement.)
As Thee Oh Sees are wont to do, they close A Weird Exits with a slow dance—though it’s the rare one in their canon to push the VU meter to the same extremes as their high-octane ragers. With its mournful, church-organ melody, “The Axis” initially waltzes in like a dirtbag “Whiter Shade of Pale,” the romantic yearning replaced by scathing anti-sentiment (“Don’t you know how much / I don’t love you”). But, in its dying moments, Dwyer unleashes a squealing, distorted guitar solo: Even when their pendulum is swinging at a steadier pace, Thee Oh Sees still have the power to hypnotize—but from its twitchy jams to its blown-out power ballads, A Weird Exits’ most intriguing moments come when they break the trance.


Billed as a country album, the latest LP from the idiosyncratic soul artist born Jerry Williams Jr. examines grief from a distance, taking time to savor life’s little sweetnesses.

Sorry You Couldn’t Make It

Jerry Williams Jr. knows how to tell a colorful story because he’s lived one. Ever since a revelatory psychedelic experience in the late 1960s, the 77-year-old musician and producer has issued some two dozen volumes of far-out funk and soul explorations as his larger-than-life alter ego, Swamp Dogg.
In 2018, Williams told Rolling Stone that he wanted to “shock the shit out of [listeners]” with Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune, an album that made heavy use of the titular audio program to warp his voice as he continued to reckon with the death of his wife, Yvonne, in 2003. His new album Sorry You Couldn’t Make It restores him to a more even keel, examining grief from greater distance while savoring life’s little sweetnesses. Billed as Williams’ country album, Sorry You Couldn’t Make It hits its thematic marks within funkified arrangements. “I’d Rather Be Your Used to Be” and “Sleeping Without You Is a Dragg” are exemplary tearjerkers; “Family Pain” addresses the intergenerational fractures of poverty and addiction. “A Good Song,” meanwhile, feels like a zoomed-in update to Tom T. Hall’s plainly gorgeous “I Love.”
As on Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune, Williams is accompanied by a handful of guests. Justin Vernon and Poliça’s Ryan Olson, who helped Williams actualize his Auto-Tune landscapes, return to the fold; alongside them are Nashville titan John Prine, Jenny Lewis, and Olson’s Poliça bandmate Channy Leaneagh. Across the album, Vernon serves as an unobtrusive sideman on guitar. Prine first appears on “Memories,” but he and Williams find surer footing on closer “Please Let Me Go Round Again,” as they look back on life in wistful bewilderment. Prine’s affinity with Williams feels natural and immediate; set to a relaxed soul shuffle, their gentle ribbing makes a charming finale.
The record’s only real derailment comes at the end of “Memories,” when the song begins to garble and warp as though recorded on damaged tape. The analogy to human memory is a familiar one; here, it feels like an overt effort to prevent the atmosphere from getting too warm and nostalgic. (God forbid those glowing, lightly goofy guitar ripples linger, lest we start trusting our own rose-tinted glasses.) The more muted instrumental reverberations in the back half of “Billy” pursue the same effect, tilting the song away from saccharine balladry.
Williams has long been celebrated as a cult figure, sharing his generous appetite for experimentation only among those curious enough to tune in for themselves. Half a century later, he remains a broad-minded explorer whose genre-free approach to his craft reveals fresh curiosities. But, as Williams lays out across Sorry You Couldn’t Make It, even his creative victories are bittersweet: He must go on living without the people with whom he’d most like to celebrate.

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On his fourth solo LP, the indie rapper shifts from scattered journal entries to focused autobiography, telling the story of his family and his neighborhood with intimacy and warmth.

The Koreatown Oddity: Little Dominiques Nosebleed

Little Dominiques Nosebleed

For a decade, Los Angeles rapper and producer the Koreatown Oddity has drifted around the city’s indie-rap scene with a leisurely detachment. Distributing cassette beat tapes by hand, making dusty, stoned records with vaunted producers like Ras G and Jeremiah Jae, and occasionally sporting a wolf mask, he treats rap more like a pastime than a calling. His name, a reference to the neighborhood where he was raised, has always underscored his origins, and his music has tended to be diaristic, capturing his observations, wisecracks, and hijinks in real time. On Little Dominiques Nosebleed, his fourth solo LP, he shifts from scattered journal entries to focused autobiography, telling the story of his family and his neighborhood with intimacy and warmth.
Koreatown is central to his story, but he presents it on his terms, subverting the enclave’s current status as a hub for nightlife and haute cuisine. Avoiding the awkward mix of admiration and anointment that tends to paint the 1992 riots that ravaged the neighborhood as a footnote, the Koreatown Oddity treats his namesake as a living, breathing place, embracing the baggage and the cachet. On “Koreatown Oddity,” he recounts standoffs between Korean shop owners and Black residents with a disarming nostalgia: “Riding around with my moms in a riot salute/Terry with the jheri curl tying plastic bags on his shoes/Koreans on the roof/Of the California Mart/With the shotguns ready to shoot.” Compared to Ice Cube’s fury on “Black Korea” and fellow Koreatown native Dumbfoundead’s competing loyalties on “Unplaceable,” the Koreatown Oddity’s version of black and Korean tension feels like a family squabble. Even when it's under siege, his Koreatown belongs to all its residents.
On “Kimchi” he expands this idea into a cheeky rundown of Koreatown’s assorted history. Over a thick bassline flecked with whistles and cowbells, he unveils the city beyond the Yelp reviews, citing the neighborhood’s ironic demographics (mostly Latinx), Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, and gang conflicts. “The place where I be/It ain’t all kimchi,” he summarizes. It’s definitely perverse for a black man to be a tour guide for an Asian community, but the Koreatown Oddity sells it because he’s complicating Koreatown’s narrative rather than rewriting it. His added chapter enriches the saga.
This emphasis on landscape and heritage enhances his writing, which feels less scatterbrained than his previous music. He’s still a bit of a rambler, and his rapping is notably less dexterous than usual, but his lumbering flows work well with his vignettes. The album’s best song, the breezy “Weed in LA,” compresses his personal history—from his favorite hill to his dad’s music collection to his mom’s migration from Ohio to California—into a brief verse bookended with an affected ignorance. “I heard they legalized weed in L.A./Oh woooord?” he smirks, making Koreatown feel like the center of the universe.
His recollections aren’t always nostalgic. The title tracks detail two childhood car accidents, one leaving him with chronic nosebleeds and the other a broken leg. His production does the heavy lifting on both songs. For “Little Dominiques Nosebleed Part 1” the arrangements move from triumphant horns to a loungey swing to a sour organ chord as he goes from cruising the streets to suffering in them. You can feel his impression of his home shifting from pleasure to pain. “Little Dominiques Part 2” makes that danger feel ambient. Built around a jagged symphonic loop that buzzes and whirrs like the throne room of a beehive, the song treats the second car accident like an inevitability.
The album falters when the Koreatown Oddity goes philosophical. He’s got a spiritual streak that tends toward floofy new ageisms, a habit that short-circuits songs where he attempts to condense his experiences into mantras. Compared to the nuance and keenness that characterize his tales of his home and family, his spiritualism comes across as vague at best (“Chase the Spirit”) and obtuse at worst (“A Bitch Once Told Me”). On “We All Want Something” Anna Wise sings the title, and that’s it; that’s the whole song.
Though Little Dominiques Nosebleed doesn’t stick the landing, it’s a rich portrait of place and personhood. The Koreatown Oddity raps about Koreatown like it’s an extension of his body, claiming every crevice and surface of the locale as his own. The specter of gentrification looms over his home, but strangely he seems unfazed. While he can’t repel all the foodies and tourists, he can savor the flavors that aren’t for sale.


Working with a cellist and producer Mike Mogis for the first time in more than a decade, Tim Kasher’s angriest but most vulnerable band squares up against the era of Trump.

Vitriola

You can argue that making a true anti-war movie is impossible. The cinematic treatment inevitably glamorizes conflict and prompts the audience to pick a side. Tim Kasher has the same issue. Cursive detractors and diehards can agree that the band’s classics, 2000’s Domestica and 2003’s The Ugly Organ, are cautionary tales of unchecked male insecurity. But Kasher turned divorce and artistic narcissism into such compelling theater that they could feel like endorsements.
Since 2003, he has tried to live up to and downplay The Ugly Organ while trying not to repeat it—the only thing more depressing than The Ugly Organ and Domestica themselves, after all, would be a married 44-year-old continuing to autopsy every last sexual and artistic failure. On Vitriola, the first Cursive album in six years, he revisits those career peaks from a different angle. This is the first Cursive record to feature original drummer Clint Schnase and Saddle Creek house producer Mike Mogis in 12 years, but, more important, the first with a cellist since The Ugly Organ. They haven’t sounded this inspired since.
Given his multiple projects and side-hustles, Kasher won’t make a Cursive record for any old thing. Cursive records have to be about the only things—marriage, art, sex, religion; even their least-imaginative work required a libretto. Though Cursive had already started work on new music in 2016, you can probably guess what motivated Kasher to finish this one. He faces the same issue as most artists who have recently pivoted to politics: Do you have an obligation to do more than restate the obvious? On Vitriola, screaming “I’ve had enough” suffices. “Free to Be or Not to Be You and Me” and “Under the Rainbow” aren’t expressing anything novel about existential torment or economic oppression. “It’s Gonna Hurt” doesn’t elaborate much beyond its declarative title, because it doesn’t need to.
Kasher may be a songwriter, a new label impresario, a bar owner, and often seen as synonymous with Cursive. But Cursive is still a band, one that once fashioned an orchestral version of punk where the pretty instruments became primitive prison weaponry. Bowed cellos sounded like a dulled handsaw. Pianos were pounded into wooden shards. The guitars would have twinkled were they not wadded into tinfoil balls. But swerving away from The Ugly Organ brought them toward the middle of the road, turning Cursive into a more conventional rock act. Since Vitriola is meant as a soundtrack to the horror show of daily life, much of it sounds like a second-wave emo band falling down a flight of stairs and hitting every one. And it’s not just the violence of Cursive’s early years that returns—their softer moments have never sounded so beautiful or vulnerable.
Kasher credits new multi-instrumentalist Patrick Newbery with the interlude “Remorse" and its fragile piano and feedback conjure a hungover sunrise so clearly even the title seems redundant. The anxiety of an overdraft fee is embedded in the pins-and-needles guitar flickers of “Life Savings.” “Noble Soldier/Dystopian Lament” slowly tightens the noose as Kasher gives a farewell address to his idealistic former self. Megan Siebe’s cello is the pure embodiment of Cursive, offering a stereotype of sadness while harboring a disturbing capacity for viciousness.
That used to be true for Kasher, too, but his poison pen has mellowed these days to a fatherly mix of earnestness and sarcasm. By the second track, he already makes his “our civil war ain’t so civil anymore” and “thoughts and prayers” quips. He used to call himself full of shit, but now he’s just full of scatological puns—at least three on “Pick Up the Pieces” alone. He grinds through “Ouroboros” for a seemingly interminable six minutes with time-for-some-game-theory lyricism: “The voice of man has been exposed as vitriol/Don’t gotta read between the HTML.”
If these “Weekend Update”-style wisecracks aren’t overly useful as a political tool, they’re at least helpful in confronting the day’s latest outrage. “I’ve been screaming for years/But it gets me nowhere,” he bleated on The Ugly Organ. He picked a good time to start screaming again, if only because so many others are, too, albeit to mixed results. On Vitriola, Cursive songs again supply the satisfaction of blaring your horn at a shitty driver or hanging up on a robocall—fighting against an encroaching sense of cosmic impotence with contained acts of victimless aggression.