Recorded in the storied Funkhaus studio in Germany, All Melody is pianist Nils Frahm’s grandest statement yet, yet it maintains the inquisitive, exploratory spirit of his most playful recordings.

All Melody

It’s hard for Nils Frahm to resist the pull of a good concept. For 2011’s Felt, the German pianist draped a heavy cloth over the strings of his instrument—a gesture of respect for his neighbors that yielded an alluringly tactile sound. The following year’s Screws, written and recorded with a broken thumb, comprised nine songs for nine fingers. And the year after that, to capture the grandeur of his live shows—neoclassical, post-techno, maximally minimalist affairs performed on multiple acoustic and electronic keyboard instruments, in the spread-eagled style of the progressive-rock keyboardists of yore—he collaged Spaces out of two years’ worth of thrumming, rippling concert recordings. But a recent collaboration with the German musician F.S. Blumm proved that he’s just as good, if not better, without a big conceptual framework to prop him up. Their album Tag Eins Tag Zwei is a wonderfully low-key set of improvisations.
All Melody is Frahm’s first major work since 2015’s Solo, and it feels like his biggest statement yet. He has fleshed out his usual arsenal of keyboard instruments—piano, synthesizer, pipe organ, etc.—with strings, trumpet, tympani, gongs, even bass marimba. The whole thing was recorded in the Funkhaus, a 1950s-era recording complex in the former East Berlin where he spent two years painstakingly building his dream room, right down to a custom-built mixing desk. The album’s rich dynamics are a direct extension of that building’s pristine acoustics. He availed himself of the Funkhaus’ natural reverb chambers—concrete rooms into which sound is projected and re-recorded—and he fashioned his own jury-rigged version out of a dry well at a friend’s house on the Spanish island of Mallorca. There’s even a choir, London’s Shards, whose wordless voices open the album on “The Whole Universe Wants to Be Touched,” a bold scene-setter whose melody moves like wind through reeds. The title alone suggests that Frahm is swinging for the fences.
But All Melody never feels imposing or overwrought. Despite its ambitious scope and somber mood, it is infused with the same exploratory spirit that made Tag Eins Tag Zwei such a delight. True, it’s not a wildly varied record: The tempos are generally slow, the moods contemplative, the melancholy almost all-pervasive. But within that framework, he explores as much ground as he can, from grand, sweeping choral passages reminiscent of Arvo Pärt to understated piano études. “Human Range,” where a silvery trumpet melody tangles with a mossy ambient backing, is reminiscent of Bill Laswell’s extended remix of the Miles Davis catalog; the more electronic, rhythmically oriented cuts, particularly the twin centerpieces “All Melody” and “#2,” find common cause with the British producer Floating Points’ way of balancing programmed and improvised music.
If there’s a theme here, it’s that holistic idea hinted at in the title: the ur-sound, the pedal tone of spiritual unity. In the liner notes, Frahm rhapsodizes about the morphological orchestra of his dreams: “My pipe organ would turn into a drum machine, while my drum machine would sound like an orchestra of breathy flutes. I would turn my piano into my very voice, and any voice into a ringing string.” That sense of fluidity gives the record its shape-shifting identity. It’s often unclear what you’re listening to at any given moment; even songs that sound like solo piano turn out to have cello and bass marimba lurking somewhere within their folds. Turn it up loud enough, and you can get lost in details like the creaking of the hammers on Frahm’s piano, or the sound of birdsong, presumably recorded outside his riverside studio, along the banks of the Spree.
The Funkhaus is a mazelike complex, and the way the record is structured often feels like a scale model of its sprawl. Across 12 songs and 74 minutes, All Melody functions as a single, cohesive piece of music, with recurring themes interwoven throughout. It’s easy to get lost in the album and then, hearing a familiar motif, come up short, as if turning a corner in a long hallway and wondering if you hadn’t passed the same spot just a moment ago. It’s a pleasantly disorienting sensation. And after traversing long, repetitive tracks like “Sunson,” “All Melody,” and “#2,” encountering a highlight like “Forever Changeless,” a short, melodic sketch for piano, feels like stumbling upon a hidden chamber illuminated by a stained-glass window.
Yes, he can be tasteful to a fault, and some of his melodic instincts occasionally tip slightly too far toward drawing-room prettiness. But the gorgeous closing track, “Harm Hymn”—a kind of coda for the whole album, just a handful of chords played on a whisper-soft harmonium—shows that his strength as a musician isn’t in the complexity of his composition, but in the nuances he gets out of his instruments and onto the tape; it’s in the echo and in the air, and in the way that he plays the room itself. For once in his career, there is no grand concept—just the space of the Funkhaus itself,  which proves to be more than enough.


Brooklyn quintet explore the parallels between small-town drama and big-city alienation.

Alligator

The National are stuck somewhere in the emotional recesses of life, the characters in their songs adrift on roads both literal and metaphorical. They're stuck between the country and the city, but not in the suburban or exurban senses-- their music reveals the parallels between small-town everybody-knows-everybody drama and big-city alienation. The Brooklyn (via Cincinnati) quintet engage with their American anxiety with a somewhat European elegance, and Alligator-- their third album and first for Beggars Banquet-- finds them pushing the tempos and trying on bigger shoes without losing the stately sense of pacing and dour melody that made their first two albums so pleasing.
Drummer Bryan Devendorf is the backbone of Alligator, his efficient, well-textured timekeeping featuring high in the mix and neatly delineating the band's newfound sense of rhythmic consistency. The music around him moves between lushness and austerity, bursting with chamber pop ornament and collapsing into wasted after-hours reverie. Matt Berninger's dry baritone deadpan is strangely emotional-- at times he almost sounds too tired of life to aim for a high note, and it brings an odd honesty to lines like "I'm sorry for everything." As he repeats the line over the violins and roiling guitars of "Baby, We'll Be Fine", he seems as if he's not only apologizing for everything he's ever done, but also everything that's ever happened that he couldn't control.
The slower, piano-driven death-pop of "Karen" offers some unusual chord progressions as Berninger warns a fading lover: "Whatever you do, listen/ You better wait for me/ No, I wouldn't go out alone into America." "This isn't me, you just haven't seen my good side yet," he tells her, but he's obviously doomed and he grows more desperate as metaphorical black birds circle his bed. On "Lit Up", he grows more confident, even swaggering: "My body guard shows a revolver to anyone who asks" he deadpans gracefully over jagged electric guitars, while his band shouts along for the chorus. The shouted chorus returns for the "Thunder Road"-sized rocker "Abel", the closest the National have come to writing an anthem.
Massed vocals and backing harmonies are two of the few things the National have added to their sound since their last album, and though Alligator is satisfying and engaging, it's not quite as bracing as their stellar sophomore outing, 2003's Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers. Still, the band's nocturnal vision of American pavement and deteriorated personal relations is engrossing, revealing itself slowly, peeling back the luxuriant layers and exposing intricate detail.


Promising band issues its second album and looks to build on compelling indie pop gem "Roscoe".

The Trials of Van Occupanther

The future ain't what it used to be, so these days the past can seem like a thing of the future. To wit: The sophomore LP by Texas-based rock group Midlake opened at #14 on the UK indie charts more than a month before gracing its sullen native shores. Similarly, Midlake take a step back from the synth-age psychedelia of their solid 2004 debut Bamnan and Slivercork on follow-up The Trials of Van Occupanther, an encouraging but ultimately disappointing contemplation of time's ceaselessness, love's promise, and Harvest-era Neil Young.
Speaking of time, Midlake waste little at first. Opener "Roscoe" keeps getting compared to Fleetwood Mac but actually comes closer to the pristine, high-concept chug of the Alan Parsons Project's paranoid 1982 hit "Eye in the Sky" (in a good way, gang) or the similarly anxious space-rock of the late Grandaddy. "Whenever I was a child, I wondered/ What if my name had changed into something more productive like Roscoe/ Been born in 1891, waiting with my Aunt Rosaline," whispers frontman Tim Smith, his phrasing elusive, his grassy tenor warming into multi-part harmonies after one of the year's most casually compelling pop moments.
Alas, nothing else here comes close: A fuzzy guitar solo goes Lindsay Buckingham's way on the legitimately Mac-like "Head Home"; monotonous single "Young Bride" chases ramshackle dance beats and skittery violins through a haunted and hookless forest; and "Bandits" pairs anachronistic wit ("Do you want to be overrun by bandits?") with mild woodwinds, an acoustic intro recalling "Mother Nature's Son", and gray Coldplay piano.
Throughout the album, the desperation for meaningful human contact glimpsed in the record's lonesome centerpiece "Van Occupanther" underpins images of mountaineers, stonecutters, and frozen pines. The album's second most affecting track, horn-sprouting "Branches", further illuminates the protagonist's heartbreak through ominous minor sevenths, "Exit Music (for a Film)" triad-inversion segues, and a canny reference to the Jackson Browne-penned classic "These Days". "It's hard for me but I'm trying," Smith delicately repeats, his voice falling between Young's woozy falsetto and the sinuous timbres of Thom Yorke. The second half of the disc, however, drags amid bell-like vintage synths, pastoral singer/songwriter strums, and a stolid mountain of midtempo melancholy. "On a clear day I can see my old house and my wife," intones Smith, still struggling against the passing seasons for an irrecoverable romance.
After Bamnan and Slivercork's Flaming Lips progressivism, The Trials of Van Occupanther may seem like a retreat. Yet despite all the shag-carpet throwbacks, Midlake's new one rises above retro pastiche to probe its central character, the lovelorn, calendar-confined Van Occupanther; spacey production and allusive songwriting mark the album as a present-day artifact. "We'll pass by for the last time," the disc concludes, but surely a band this promising will be back for more.


The uncompromising UK art-pop group returns with a record that continues down the path of Two Dancers, paring its sound down even further.

Smother

"It's about saying, are you going to come in and listen or not? Because if you're not, we're not going to accommodate you, to let you be part of and involved in this intimacy." That's Wild Beasts' Hayden Thorpe speaking to The Quietus this week on both Smother, his band's latest, as well as the unmanageable position in which they've found themselves at home in England over the years. When the relatively isolated Kendal four-piece first arrived on the scene in 2007, their brand of flamboyant, almost vaudevillian indie rock was peerless in a landscape dominated by Arctic Monkeys and post-Libertines lad rockers. Thorpe's voice in particular-- a song-carrying instrument that moves between frilly falsetto and bulldog growl-- divided at most turns. You were either compelled to hang on every jagged syllable or run the other way.
And then they decided to streamline some: For the curvy art-funk of 2009's Two Dancers, they reigned in their more baroque tendencies. Thorpe brushed his voice soft, the lower register croon of bassist Tom Fleming was worked in further to act as anchor, and a band that seemed too difficult and bizarre to shoehorn into the pop conversation was sorta kinda flirting with exactly that. Well, that's how it looked from the outside.
Despite the many critical successes of that album, Wild Beasts have remained an act with no intention of blending in. Smother, their third full-length, is just as the above quote promises: completely uncompromising. And that's why it succeeds. Thorpe and Co. have continued down the path of Two Dancers, paring their sound down even further. What they're left with is naked in arrangement, nocturnal in tone, and deeply, deeply sensual. And that, actually, seems to be the "intimacy" to which Thorpe intimated in conversation with The Quietus. From the first moments of "Lion's Share", an opening, piano-led crescendo: "I wait until you're woozy, I wait until you're lame/ I take you in my mouth like the lion takes its game." It's a line he delivers in a very controlled, sympathetic manner, one that would have stumbled out of his mouth four years ago.
And while the dimpled electronic grooves of Smother do make for close listening, Thorpe's overtly sexual couplets provide a slinky analog to the sonics at play. In "Bed of Nails", a melodic marvel in its own right, he uses a skittering bridge to proffer a few grunts, howls, and moans. But again, what makes this all work so well is the remarkable amount of restraint and rhythmic know-how these four employ. This band has come long way in that regard-- it's not easy to integrate the sounds of sex into song without coming off like the kind of guy with a favorite tree from which to creep.
Additionally, all of these songs undress very beautifully on their own terms as well. The ribbons of guitar that bind "Loop the Loop" together at its halfway point are stunning, praises that can also be sung for the acupunctural textures of closing beauty "End Come to Soon". Wild Beasts have never been an especially easy outfit to connect to either forebears or contemporaries, but here they've found certain amount of kinship in the dusky, liberated grooves of Talk Talk's Mark Hollis. You can hear it in the somber tick-tocking of "Invisible", just as much as the orbit of single "Albatross". But that's about as strong a link as you're likely to find, a feat in its own right. This is gloriously layered music that opts to celebrate its quirks and cowlicks rather than suppress them. Organically. There's a great amount of comfort that comes in hearing something like that. Thorpe delivers a unforgettable line in the circular prowl of "Plaything", a new age sex jam if there ever was one. "New squeeze, take off your chemise, and I'll do as I please," he quivers. "I'm not any kind of heartthrob, but at the same time I'm not any kind of slob." He makes a good point.


The Hague-based composer and pianist explores music’s transcendent qualities on an album of minimalist piano with subtle new-age overtones.

River Without Banks

In Russian musicologist Henry Orlov’s book Tree of Music, a chapter titled “A River Without Banks” details a throughline between several types of sacred music, including Gregorian chants, Indian ragas, African drumming, and Indonesian gamelan. Orlov argues that art allows people to become participants in a “higher reality” and experience  “symbolically significant change.” Leo Svirsky first learned about music’s transcendent qualities from his childhood piano teacher Irena Orlov, Henry Orlov’s wife. Following her death last year, Svirsky affectionately wrote that she taught him “how music is alive, how when we play music we tell someone’s story.” Dedicated to Irena and borrowing its title from Henry’s writing, River Without Banks is a minimalistic piano record that’s informed by the Orlovs’ grand musical philosophy—Svirsky’s monument to the importance of their teachings.
River Without Banks establishes its overarching mood within the first few seconds. Stately piano notes reverberate, their fluid melodies creating a hypnotic rhythm amplified by simple delay effects. The atmosphere is simultaneously dreamy and homey; the opening track’s title, “Field of Reeds,” refers to the paradisiacal location that ancient Egyptians believed they would travel to in the afterlife. Periodically, sounds that draw attention to Svirsky’s presence (most notably, the thump of the pedals) contribute to the arresting intimacy of the composition and its performance; these quotidian noises ground the sublime piece with a needed sense of humanness, bridging the gap between the earthly and celestial.
Svirsky’s River Without Banks is far more melodic than his previous output. His duo with Katt Hernandez relished in exuberant atonality and a brash style of playing. Heights in Depths, on the other hand, explored static drones and their associated psychoacoustic phenomena. River Without Banks most recalls a mixture of other artists’ works: the relentless piano minimalism of Charlemagne Palestine or Lubomyr Melnyk, the tenderness of Erik Satie’s compositions, the resplendence of new age. It’s all shrouded in a telestic aura, contemplative and heartening and unpretentious. In “Trembling Instants,” cascading piano melodies are enveloped in a cloud of ambience, their continual playing less like rigid latticework than impressionistic filigrees. Equally soothing is the more modest “Fanfare (after Jeromos Kamphuis),” where sparse, delicate chords evoke a sense of serenity. Like Svirsky, the titular Kamphuis also lives in the Hague and has studied under composer Antoine Beuger; the track feels like a small but heartfelt celebration of their friendship.
The majority of the album is characterized by Svirsky’s piano, with other instruments—many of which are played by other musicians—rounding out each track. On “Rain, Rivers, Forest, Corn, Wind, Sand,” the interwoven sounds of double bass, wind gong, and trumpet create layered but cohesive drones. Their unobtrusiveness allows for the piano to freely traverse different rhythms and moods. From expressive tone clusters to a whimsical frolic to a more percussive staccato style, Svirsky’s piano conjures a picturesque view of nature’s wondrous breadth. On the title track, the wavering rhythm mirrors the winding path of a river, while the countless notes feel like the bevy of different microorganisms that thrive therein. The song becomes more robust in its final third when double bass and a Tibetan singing bowl transform the piece into a lush musical tapestry fit for spiritual meditation.
It’s not always easy to tell when River Without Banks’ songs begin and end: The album’s six tracks aren’t considerably different from each other, neither musically nor emotionally. But this uniformity is what makes the album so immersive; it’s easy to become lost in its ruminative tone. In The Tree of Music, Henry Orlov noted that for people who are attuned to a particular type of sacred music—“to whom the music is his breath and movement”—their experience is heightened. They become “one with its flow,” and River Without Banks grants opportunities for just that. Svirsky’s album evokes a mystical sensation Orlov described as an “ever-lasting and therefore timeless now.”


Following a searing, four-song demo tape released last year, Perfect Pussy's proper full-length debut Say Yes to Love is an unrelentingly intense experience—23 minutes of five people pushing themselves to their absolute limit.

Say Yes to Love

Syracuse five-piece Perfect Pussy sound like a hardcore band fronted by Joan of Arc: A swirling maelstrom of fire engulfs a singer who shouts with the ecstatic conviction of someone who would rather die than apologize. Following a searing, four-song demo tape released last year, their proper full-length debut Say Yes to Love is an unrelentingly intense experience—23 minutes of five people pushing themselves to their absolute limit. Frontwoman Meredith Graves has called the band's songs "happy revelations about incendiary events," and this remains the most fitting description of their music. It doesn’t feel corny or hyperbolic to call this record life-affirming, so perfectly does it capture the flashes of gratitude, self-knowledge, and inexplicable joy that often follow an experience of great pain.
A Perfect Pussy song comes together in layers, and the group’s writing process is a kind of sonic avalanche. Graves has said that her bandmates Ray McAndrew (guitar), Garrett Koloski (drums), and Greg Ambler (bass) usually record a totally clean track first, and then she and keyboardist Shaun Sutkus come in and "make noise on purpose." That approach gives these songs an energy that is both chaotic and collaborative—the instruments sound like they're wrestling each other for space instead of working in harmony. And the textures of the eight songs on Say Yes to Love are damaged but also luminous; even at its most assaultive moments, like the gale-force ripper "Advance Upon the Real", jangly chords and a bright melody shine defiantly somewhere below the surface.
Say Yes to Love is so relentlessly pummeling that it's almost meditative, and its songs are caked in so much sludge it's often hard to make out what Graves is saying. Until, very suddenly, it's not. You know the feeling when you're in a place that's so loud and crowded that you have to scream into the ear of the person next to you, and then suddenly the room goes quiet and now everyone can hear you? And how this always seems to happen when you're saying the most private and potentially embarrassing thing? In a Perfect Pussy song, this happens to Graves constantly—"AND I WANT TO FUCK MYSELF/ AND I WANT TO EAT MYSELF," she is caught saying in one of these moments of jolting clarity. But a great power emerges as she delivers even her most vulnerable lines without a twinge of shame. She sounds emboldened by silence, her presence growing to fill it, like a person whose voice has been stifled and is now overjoyed by the chance to be heard.
It's easy to be overtaken by the primal force of this music but there's also an incentive to dig deeper. Say Yes to Love is a convincing argument for reviving that practice of reading along with the lyrics while listening. Graves' lines are full of vivid, visceral, and often unsettling images ("You can read the story of my last six weeks/ In little black bruises and marks from boys' teeth") and the sort of bold confessions plenty of people wouldn't tell their best friends. And her delivery is at once shit-kickingly tough and childlike, sometimes reminiscent of Life Without Buildings vocalist Sue Tompkins' wide-eyed swagger.
Perfect Pussy have been criticized for the buried vocals and often unintelligible lyrics, but the approach serves a purpose. There's tension in this music between vulnerability and defenses, between the things we tell each other and the things we feel the need to keep hidden. The lyrics to songs like "Interference Fits" and "Dig" (which meditates on sex and violence) are so intense that hearing every word could almost be a distraction—it'd be hard to pay attention to anything else. So you're given a choice of how to experience these songs: You can lose yourself in the rush, or you can follow along and think more closely about what they're trying to say.
There are a few moments in "Big Stars" when the feedback squall sounds like it's bleeping out something Graves is saying. If it's intentional, it's a pretty good joke about arbitrary censorship—a topic Perfect Pussy know well as they've quickly gone from being evangelized in limited-run underground zines to being covered in publications too refined to print their name. But an irony that we're just starting to understand as a culture is that, for women in particular, the first word in Perfect Pussy's name is much more obscene than the second. If you're female, it's far more socially acceptable to express self-deprecation than self-love, and it's more acceptable for anybody to express numbly detached nihilism than Perfect Pussy's particular brand of hard-won, audaciously blazing joy. Something about Say Yes to Love—the way Graves' bright, confidently optimistic vocals are threatened to be drowned out at every turn—speaks to the forces that make women in our society feel like they must exist in a constant state of perceived inadequacy. And fuck all that, says Graves at the end of the careening "Dig": "If I'm anything less than perfection/ Well shit, nobody told me!" Say Yes to Love is one of the hardest and most jarring records I've heard in a long time, not because it's trying to shock you with darkness, but because it's unafraid to stare directly into the light.


Though former Drive-By Truckers member Jason Isbell's previous solo albums displayed promise with songwriting standouts, his new LP Southeastern is his most gripping and most personal album to date.

Southeastern

In recent interviews with the New York Times Magazine and the Wall Street Journal, Jason Isbell has been admirably forthcoming about his alcoholism, admitting that he can’t remember much of the time he spent with the Drive-By Truckers, who decided to move on without him after several attempts at rehabilation. Isbell's solo albums, especially his 2009 self-titled LP and 2011’s Here We Rest, ended up sounding cursory, as though he was trying too hard and not hard enough; there were too many go-nowhere genre excursions and not enough focused storytelling. It didn’t help that the music sounded too polished, too polite, too professional, with too little grit and personality.
Fortunately, Isbell’s story appears to have a happy third act. His friends confronted him about his drinking and checked him into rehab, and he emerged sober, determined, and newly focused. He got married (to the fiddler/songwriter Amanda Shires, who spearheaded his intervention), stayed clean, and recorded a new album*, Southeastern*. To his considerable credit, Isbell has very little interest in recounting his long fall or his darkest moments. This album doesn’t wallow in alcoholic squalor; its real subject is not what it means to hit rock bottom, but what happens after you pick yourself up. How do you allow yourself any kind of contentment or security when you’ve done such bad things? How do you live with that dark half lurking just offstage?
Isbell the storyteller knows this is rich subject matter, as the day-to-day conflict of not taking that next drink or not falling back into old ways proves much more compelling and humanizing than the non-conflict of simply bottoming out. That approach makes Southeastern his most gripping and his most personal album to date. “Live Oak”, the dark heart of the album, opens with Isbell singing a cappella: “There’s a man who walks besides me, he is who I used to be / I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me.” It’s a deeply revealing line, but “Live Oak” isn’t a direct confession from Isbell. Instead, it’s a piece of fiction about a murderer wandering Pre-Civil War America who finds tentative redemption with a forgiving woman. It does not have a happy ending.
Isbell inhabits similar men throughout Southeastern, and there’s a new clarity in these characters to match the new vigor in his voice. To an extent they become proxies to recount Isbell’s own recent transformation, which prevents the album from becoming too hermetically introverted. As a storyteller, he has a generous empathy toward the people inhabiting his songs, most of whom display a hard-won humanity despite the extremes of their situations.
On “Elephant”, a barfly tries to comfort a friend dying of cancer, unsure what to do but finally understanding that just being there and raising a toast is enough to ensure she doesn’t die alone. It’s an epic rebuke of those hideous cancer ballads that infected mainstream country music for so many years; when Rascal Flatts hear a line like, “There’s one thing that’s real clear to me: No one dies with dignity,” they ought to just pack in their Ed Hardy shirts and head home. An emotional kneecapping, “Elephant” is a standout on Southeastern, but for once it’s not one of two or three. Rather, it’s a crucial part of a statement album, one that draws as much from literary influences-- Peter Matthiessen, Shelby Foote, Colum McCann-- as from musical ones.
Southeastern is easily Isbell’s best solo album-- his most richly conceived and generously written. If it’s not quite the album that lives up to his considerable talents, it’s mostly the music that’s to blame. The production, courtesy of Dave Cobb, tends to buff away the rough edges of Isbell’s songs, which can rob his stories of impact and nuance. It’s not the 400 Unit backing him this time, but this group of musicians can’t sell the rocker “Super 8” or give it the boisterous urgency it demands. It threatens to become make-do country rock, lacking the specificity and idiosyncrasy of Isbell’s songwriting. Perhaps it’s fitting that the one instrument that stands out is Shires’ fiddle, which eddies and shimmies throughout “Traveling Alone” before adding a solo as eloquently understated as Isbell’s chorus. Of course they have chemistry.


Bowie was never more popular during this period, one he looked back on with guilt and bile. But Loving the Alien offers a reset for listeners—to hear these albums fresh, liberated from their composer’s dismissive opinions.

David Bowie: Loving the Alien (1983-1988)

Loving the Alien (1983-1988)

Every autumn since 2015, a new David Bowie career retrospective box set arrives. These are comprehensive (just about every remix and single/album edit is compiled, some albums even appear twice if their sequencing changed at some point) and yet incomplete (they omit bonus tracks found on Bowie’s early 1990s Rykodisc reissues). The apparent aim is an “official release” Bowie master narrative, in boxes sturdy enough to prop up a table.
Five Years (1969-1973) is the Major Tom/Ziggy Stardust figure eternally beloved by rock retrospectives; Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976) is Kabbalist Plastic Soul Bowie; A New Career in a New Town (1977-1982) is “Bowie in Berlin.” And the latest, Loving the Alien (1983-1988), is mass-consumption Bowie, the Man Who Sold (Himself To) the World. He was never more popular than in the period documented in these 11 discs (and 15 LPs): writing songs for kids’ movies, singing with Tina Turner for Pepsi, duetting with Mick Jagger for Live Aid, recording some of the biggest hits of his life.
It’s also a period with scant critical respect, a consensus that Bowie affirmed. He later rubbished many of his 1980s albums, calling them his “nadir,” claiming he was barely around while they were being made. As early as the Tin Machine era in 1989, he looked back on his ’80s with guilt and bile, acting as if he needed to quarantine himself from it. He even made up a story about burning his Glass Spider prop in a field at the end of his 1987 tour, a sacrificial bonfire of his mass-market ambitions (in truth, it was disassembled and sold for scrap). So Loving the Alien offers a reset for listeners—to hear these albums fresh, liberated from their composer’s dismissive opinions.
In January 1983, Bowie signed a lucrative multi-album deal with EMI and hired Nile Rodgers to make him some hits. If still considered to be as major an artist as Fleetwood Mac or Michael Jackson, he was nowhere in their league in terms of units shifted. So the massive global success of Let’s Dance was no fluke—the album was planned as intricately as a troop landing or royal wedding. Made with economy (as Bowie hadn’t signed with a label yet, he funded the sessions and watched every penny like a hawk) and recorded and mixed in less than three weeks, Let’s Dance was an EP’s worth of songs padded out with covers and remakes—one of which, a new version of his and Iggy Pop’s “China Girl,” was a sure-fire hit, Bowie predicted. He was right.
He was ready-made for MTV, but Let’s Dance was also a counter-move: an “organic” soul- and jazz-influenced sound instead of synth pop, even if having some of most colossal gated drums heard on a rock album to date. It was hooky, its tracks given booming sing-along choruses, its players included Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Chic rhythm section. And it had a remorseless sequencing: Its first side is three hit singles, back to back to back, with “Without You” as a cooling dish. The rest of the album is more or less B-sides, some odd (“Ricochet” mixes W.H. Auden with a clunking attempt at West African highlife), some ghastly (“Shake It,” whose refrain is the theme of a game show in hell). Let’s Dance had enough Bowie weirdness to make it stand out from other 1983 hit albums—“visions of swastikas” in “China Girl;” the cheery nihilism of “Modern Love”; the dark undercurrent in “Let’s Dance,” a lonely, desperate song beneath its trappings.
To crown his chart successes, he toured throughout 1983. Its document is Serious Moonlight, a Vancouver live recording heretofore only available as a DVD. Serious Moonlight is him starring as the jet-setting author of “David Bowie songs,” taking audiences through a guided tour of his catalog. Setlists were more adventurous than one might expect (Lodger’s “Red Sails” made the cut, “Suffragette City” didn’t) and the core of the band—Carlos Alomar, Carmine Rojas and Tony Thompson—were a supple unit who likely grooved better without Stevie Ray Vaughan as lead guitarist. Playing to the biggest crowds of his life, the tour kicked off his “Phil Collins” years, Bowie later said. Audiences were an uneasy mix of glamsters with lightning bolts painted on their faces and yuppies who woke up whenever Bowie played a new hit.
Tonight (1984) was the hangover: a curious, well-recorded, and often terrible record. Moods fluctuate from brittle exuberance to sleep-stung exhaustion to whatever Bowie channeled for his nightmare interpretation of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” It was the result of Bowie, mere months after his tour ended, stuck in Canada making a self-loathing album that he lost faith in midway through, opting to reuse “the EP’s worth of new tracks larded with covers and remakes” formula. Amid supper-club reggae (“Tonight,” “Don’t Look Down”) and amateur-hour rock opera (“Neighborhood Threat”), its few bright spots were “Blue Jean,” one of his most charming minor hits, the throw-anything-at-the-wall Iggy Pop and Bowie duet “Dancing With the Big Boys” (“Death to the trees!” “Your family is a football team!”) and the box set’s title track, “Loving the Alien,” a song that moves awkwardly, yearning to be a masterwork and falling short.
He didn’t tour Tonight, barely promoted it, soon wrote it off. That said, the album was still a hit—going platinum in months, reaching No. 1 in the UK. Re: Call 4, the latest edition of the “singles and oddments” disc that’s in all of these Bowie sets, collects the rest of Bowie’s mid-1980s commercial peak. He was inspired by contract work, cutting tracks for four different films. Some were his best songs of the decade: “This Is Not America,” with the Pat Metheny Group; the beautiful, doom-struck “When the Wind Blows” for Jimmy T. Murakami’s anti-nuclear-war film; and his last grand moment as a pop singer—“Absolute Beginners,” the theme for a Julien Temple musical, and which nearly became a UK No. 1. Loving the Alien also has Dance, a collection of remixes. An earlier version was proposed in 1985 as a stop-gap compilation and blessedly wasn’t issued at the time, although Arthur Baker’s remixed “Dancing With the Big Boys” is even more garish fun than the original.
The set’s centerpiece is Never Let Me Down (1987). Unlike Tonight, this was no contractual-obligation record. He labored over it and returned to hard rock, updating Ziggy Stardust for the late Reagan years. His songs would offer social commentary while also inspiring interpretative dances on tour; he even played some guitar solos. It wound up being an overcrowded, exhausting record whose aesthetic is a puree of Judge Dredd and Heavy Metal, the film Streets of Fire, mid-1980s “Doctor Who,” and BBC documentaries on “urban scenes” in New York and L.A. There were attempts at Neil Young eco-horror (“Time Will Crawl”) and reviving the Beatles as Day-Glo zombies (“Zeroes”).
While its first side was a solid run of tracks, the album fell apart on the flip, which has some of the most gruesome compositions Bowie ever wrote. (He considered “Too Dizzy” so irredeemable that he cut it from reissues: Its exile continues on this set). There were too many ideas, too many competing needs, too many overdubs. Some of Never Let Me Down sounds as if it’s been stitched together in a moving car. See “Shining Star (Makin’ My Love),” which has Jim Carroll dopers, Joe Strummer mercenaries, a Mickey Rourke rap, Prince and Smokey Robinson cosplay vocals, and Bowie singing “I-could-make-you-hap-py-ev’-ry-god-damn-sin-gle-day-of-your-life!” as if he was reading off a Telex in the vocal booth.
For all of its flaws, Never Let Me Down has a unity—the album has a somewhat charming period-piece feel to it now. It’s one of the most time-stamped “1987” records ever made. In its retooled, rearranged, and remastered form, Never Let Me Down 2018 often comes off as an upper that’s been turned into a downer—a song as gauche as “Beat of Your Drum,” a “Lolita number” (as per its composer) sung by Bowie all but resuming the role of Jareth the Goblin King and singing “I like the smell of your flesh!” is now weirdly somber. As Bowie’s vocals remain from the original record, and as these were over-the-top performances to ensure Bowie stood out in the traffic-jam mixes, hearing these vocals over downtempo and sparse new backing tracks can be jarring. The revised “Zeroes” in particular feels off, with Bowie’s vocals (and Peter Frampton’s sitar, an odd holdover from the original track) and the new backing tracks sounding as if they were taped at different speeds.
There are inspired revisions. The new “Glass Spider” makes Bowie’s most Spinal Tap performance legitimately eerie while preserving its “wait, what?” sense of absurdity. Exhumed horns on “Day-In Day-Out,” which had been replaced by synthesizer stabs on the original album, give that track more bite. But there are questionable calls. Why turn “Shining Star” into a bad song from the early 1990s, and replace poor Mickey Rourke with Laurie Anderson, who has a cool, wry presence but still says lines like “blew heads out of shape in the name of Trotsky, Sinn Fein, Hitler, cash down”? And the sweet “Never Let Me Down” feels overworked with Nico Muhly’s strings, like a colorized film. The remake doesn’t improve on Never Let Me Down as much as it honors the original’s all-over-the-place frustration; it’s an interesting curio.
Loving the Alien also has a Glass Spider tour performance which had only been available as part of a multi-media set in the 2000s. As the original sounded like a bootleg soundboard recording, it’s sonically an improvement at least. The tour was Bowie attempting things he’d do better at other times—filling setlists with mostly new or relatively obscure songs; having percussive dancers. Like much of his ’80s, Glass Spider offers more than the standard take suggests, if it’s still a holy mess at times. In Bowie’s highest-profile era, his work had a particular degree of tension—he wanted to make hits, he couldn’t quite do it sometimes, he half-hated doing it. Mass-market Bowie was still an oddity.


The UK musician’s latest release is her most substantial work yet, adding a new sense of momentum to her ambient dream pop.

Rain’s Break

Using her voice, a synthesizer, some reverb, and little else, Lucy Gooch makes music of surprising complexity. Graceful and unhurried, it could soundtrack dramatic aerial footage of natural wonders: mountain vistas, sweeping steppes, glaciers calving into the sea. Its billowing dimensions and cloud-like shapes resemble ambient music; it is atmospheric in the extreme. But where ambient music’s runtimes can often sprawl into the double digits, Gooch’s work rarely breaks the three-and-a-half-minute mark. These are pop songs cloaked in cascading vocal harmonies and opulent robes of reverb. Imagine a garment that could make the wearer’s limbs resemble ocean waves: That’s what Gooch’s flowing production does to the trim melodic frames she drapes it over.
Born and raised in Norfolk, England, and currently based in Bristol, Gooch debuted last year with Rushing, a five-song EP that framed the dream pop of the Cocteau Twins in the language of sacred music, right down to the church organ on the title track and the Old Testament psalms she quoted in its lyrics. A similar air of mysticism permeates Rain’s Break; her songwriting and sound design alike are radiant and suffused in wonder. In the hands of a less talented artist, music so keenly focused on transcendent feeling is a risky proposition; it can easily tip into kitsch, or worse, pure hokum. But on Rain’s Break, Gooch manages to keep pushing outward while remaining grounded.
Like her debut, Rain’s Break has five songs; the EP is actually 30 seconds shorter than its predecessor, yet it feels bigger and more substantial. Gooch says that she upgraded her synthesizer on this record from a Roland to a Prophet, which perhaps accounts for the added sense of presence in her keys. Her synths have extra bite here, an almost imperceptible hint of serration in their edges, and she uses them in new ways. While pneumatic chords and buzzing organs remain her stock in trade, she also experiments with staccato textures and subtle pitch-bend effects that give her songwriting a newfound sense of movement.
In music this spare, patience is everything. Gooch lets the contours of her synthesizer dictate the pace of the title track; her call-and-response vocals follow the breath-like rhythm of the notes as they swell and decay. Many of the record’s songs drift through multiple movements and even the occasional key change. The first two minutes of “It Brings Me Back to You” are taken up by the back-and-forth motion of soft, unobtrusive string synths. Then, just as you are lulled to the point of distraction, the notes fade, and her voice rings out above a plucked bassline: “Oh and the silence, it brings me back to you.” Suddenly, we are seated alongside Enya, rigging slapping against the mast—an unexpected and delightful place to be. Still, despite the songs’ tendency to wander, they betray no trace of excess. Gooch has said that many were pared down from three- or four-part suites; the editing has served them well. For an artist whose favorite trick is the seemingly infinite crescendo, she clearly knows the value of restraint.
Gooch cites the influence of postwar British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s sumptuous use of color and atmosphere—Raymond Chandler wrote of their 1945 film I Know Where I’m Going!, “I’ve never seen a picture which smelled of the wind and rain in quite this way”—and even for those unacquainted with their work, it’s easy to see how the language of cinema has inspired her songwriting. Her imagistic lyrics (“Coloured in ash and orange”; “Rain falls hard on leather leaves”) lend to the music’s synesthetic pull, contributing to the overwhelming swirl of texture and color.
She has a lovely voice—clear, slightly breathy, and powerful in an understated way. Her vocal melodies are more agile than on the previous EP, her technique more ambitious. Like Elizabeth Fraser, Gooch sometimes sings in made-up syllables, but from there her lyrics morph into more clearly articulated ideas. There is a sense that she is homing in on private revelations: You can feel her pulling her thoughts out of the ether, mouthing the words before she is conscious of their meaning—a kind of divining trick. “I’ve been living with a quiet ache,” she admits on the opening “Rain’s Break”; in the closing “Ash and Orange,” she allows a chord modulation to pave the way for a moment of catharsis: “In my head/In my heart/I take it with me wherever I go.”
The record’s apotheosis comes halfway through, on “Chained to a Woman.” The song begins with soft, chiming synths that gently echo Hiroshi Yoshimura’s GREEN; Gooch’s voice comes sneaking in like water rising in a flooded house. As she sings of a secret desire being expressed for the first time, the chords take on its shape, twisting and turning into sensuous new forms: “All those things that I suppressed in order to survive/They really weigh me, weigh me/Down to my inner world, a tulip with its wings unfurled.” The chords pivot and her harmonies stack like the stripes of a rainbow, blurrily laddering skyward: “Wanting to pretend/Wanting to pretend.” It is a stunning finale, the opposite of the song’s subdued beginning; her transformation feels embodied in each quivering waveform. Where Rushing sometimes seemed to use its layers of reverb like a weighted blanket, a therapeutic form of obfuscation, “Chained to a Woman” hits with the force of a revelation. Gooch’s dream pop is opening up new dimensions; the deeper she goes, the more she uncovers.

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The Nashville singer-songwriter’s second album is a deft and subtly surprising inquiry into romantic illusion.

Blue Raspberry

Nashville native Katy Kirby initiated her second album as a songwriting experiment—directing swooningly lovely country songs to an imagined female lover. Funny the things music can tell us about ourselves. Shortly after writing Blue Raspberry’s title track, Kirby entered her first queer relationship. The finished album is a thoroughly lived-in document of a complicated romance: no longer genre exercise in yearning but a philosophical inquiry into it.
On Blue Raspberry—which takes its name from an artificially flavored gas-station drink—Kirby positions her songs in between artifice and reality, dissecting the ruses, contrivances, and willful hallucinations that sustain romantic fantasy. She studs the album with suitably unsubtle metaphors: fake diamonds, glitter, candy. At first, the songs sound as unthinkingly lovely as anything within the “sapphic yearning” strain of indie pop (think Clairo or girl in red). Repeat listens reveal a more jagged and complex version of intimacy, one replete with well-navigated confusion and contradictions.
As a lyricist, Kirby is inventive and exhilarating, though she occasionally overwrites. Though each line on Blue Raspberry overflows with excellent, original ideas, she tends to pile them high rather than give them the breathing room they deserve. “You’re the prettiest mermaid in the souvenir shop/But if you’re coming home this late, you know you’d better be drunk,” she sings on “Cubic Zirconia,” allowing what should have been a hard-hitting rejoinder to fall flat.
The songs themselves are soft and sauntering, built around close-mic’d guitar and piano and occasionally offset with strange, barely perceptible flourishes that evoke subtle unease. On “Hand to Hand,” a high, quiet chirp rings out like a fire alarm in heaven. On “Fences,” Kirby plays guitar as though she’s gently chucking it for wood. Throughout, she sustains a near-whisper, like she’s singing to a lover underneath a quilt. Her light-as-air melodicism helps take the weight off the more verbose lyrics.
Kirby’s best writing shows off her talent for contracting abstract ideas into the kinds of pithy lines that inspire furious underlining. She describes romance as “diminutive contrition”; falling in love “a carpet bomb of estrogen.” Her ability to give clarity to chaotic, contradictory forces sets her apart. She holds a poetic fascination with metaphorical fences, for instance; the ways in which they both excite and evade intimacy. “Good neighbors make good fences,” she sings on “Wait Listen.” It’s a heady reversal, rendered so tersely as to obscure the brainwork behind it. Blue Raspberry proves that Kirby is particularly dialed in on these vicissitudes of intimacy. With a little fine-tuning, she could transcend.


The expanded reissue of Lou Barlow and Eric Gaffney's Sebadoh debut now features 52 tracks (up from 32), turning something once familiar into a gargantuan 79-minute lo-fi opera.

The Freed Man

"My soulmate is a special girl, a girl that's just like me/ She'll share tremendous oral sex and try everything she sees/ She won't be insane or hung up like most other girls/ I'll worship her until it hurts, 'cause she's on top of my world." Those lines open Lou Barlow's wonderfully warbled love ballad "Soulmate"-- on which, in less than two minutes, the gently tapping troubadour collapses into a hyper-strummed folk implosion. It's what I remembered most from Sebadoh's The Freed Man. I played the cassette version obsessively when it was released by Homestead; until recently, I hadn't heard it in close to a decade. It's weird what you forget.
When the expanded reissue of Sebadoh's debut outing arrived on the doorstep, I dug through the boxes in my closet containing seriously musty Shrimper, Union Pole, Search For Terrestrial Intelligence, Eldest Son, and Catsup Plate cassettes. Beside two coffee-stained copies of Sentridoh's Lou B's Wasted Pieces '87-'93, I uncovered a very worn The Freed Man Homestead original. The newbie has the same photo of Barlow and Eric Gaffney smiling and waving on the front. Listening to the oldie beside this expanded edition, though, is an entirely different experience.
For starters, Lou and Eric's original pre-Homestead cassette has more than doubled in length. That first version is an incredibly rare self-released edition of 25 or so copies -- 30 minutes with two 15-minute sides, as Gaffney told me via email. He explained, "I duped copies and sold those at Main Street Records, Northampton, MA for $1.00 in a box I made with Dr. Seuss art." I have the Homestead cassette (32 songs), but was too cheap to splurge on the Homestead vinyl (which Gaffney told me was "muddy, botched, redone a 2nd time"). It's kind of like detective work piecing together all these drafts. Gaffney noted that this new 52-song reissue is actually the fourth version: "The reissue contains songs and versions (one each, not multiple) from the orignal cassette release... from the LP version [i.e. the Homestead version], a few of my songs, re-recorded, off The Freed Weed CD, and unreleased tracks, along with the 2nd and 3rd 'singles' and part of the first split." Got it? Probably not. Whatever the math, the extras and different mixes/takes shift something once familiar into a gargantuan 79-minute lo-fi opera. It's fascinating from an archival standpoint, and I love that Gaffney painstakingly organized a brand new collage.
This Freed Man is overstuffed and weird, studded with some duds, and entirely fitting. Part of the joy of early Sebadoh-- this collection through Bubble and Scrape, aka the Gaffney years-- is the clash of egos and brilliant songwriters. It's totally evident on this new version: 25 songs by Lou, 25 by Eric, and two covers, including a garage-punk take on the Beatles "Yellow Submarine". Pretty telling, right? To take it even further, the cassette was re-mastered at Abbey Road Studios.
It's a lot of fun reading the separate notes provided by each player and figuring out the different histories. Gaffney's liners provide background about the record and trivia about his songs. Barlow's are briefer, but still historical: He mentions his favorite song of the bunch ("Jealous Evil"), and includes the totally dead-on statement that "this record was intended to be a mess, a stinking garden of delights." Hence the swamp-side photo on the cover (also mentioned by Barlow). Contextual shit aside, it's just great to hear Lou's downer folk countered by Eric's noise-punk-- that massive push and pull.
Fittingly, random feedback invades even the album's prettiest ballads. Chaotic cut-and-paste cassette noise tramples ambling pop songs. Fragments are held together by 4-track tape experiments, thorny acoustic bits, psychedelic hardcore, samples of television and family time. After Gaffney left, the band felt emasculated and boring, so for a fan of the old shit, this is a rare treat. I remember certain days as a kid fast-forwarding through some of the noisier pieces to get to "Soulmate", Barlow's gently tapping "True Hardcore" ("True hardcore is forever young"), and "Healthy Sick", or cringing at the dorky "Lou Rap." Other days you stuck to Gaffney's amazing fuzzcore, like the bottomed out, phased "Nest".
In the extras it's amazing to find skeletons: The patterns of "Elements" reborn as III's manic finale, "As the World Dies the Eyes of God Grow Bigger". Or to remember the things that were there all along like the forgotten brass on "Punch in the Nose", the crazed screaming and bleeding sounds turning into the harmonizing pop nugget, "K-Sensa-My" (Barlow, '86). So many new discoveries, too: "Oak Street Raga", "Dance," "Fire of July", "Jaundice", "The Lorax". The earliest material is Barlow circa 1984 ("Pig", not yet freed) and the newest, a live version of Gaffney's "Attention" (Hadley, MA, 1990).
Of course, the irony of releasing The Freed Man now is pretty huge. The title was partly a response to Barlow's recent freedom from Dinosaur and his control-freak nemesis, J Mascis (his thoughts, not mine). At this point he's not only back with Dinosaur J, they managed to record a new record. It sounds great, sure, but it's divorced from the time that made it essential. This shit, though, is so of its time and place. It's necessary for anyone who prefers the Mountain Goats on cassette or likes noise with their morning breakfast and summertime poetry. It breathes gorgeous dope-smoking breaths all over the place. (Crazy to remember this was going on alongside Dinosaur, You're Living All Over Me, Bug...all so amazing, but so amazingly different).
Okay, before listening, consider this set-up: A DJ and zine editor who delivers pizza for the Pizza Factory and collaborates with the late Charles Ondras (who went on to become Unsane's amazing drummer, RIP) joins his Sentridoh pal, Dinosaur's bassist, who comes armed with a cheap, parent-purchased 4-track. The two start smoking pot ("things sounded better slow..."), experimenting, feeling giddy with the results. This is a history I actually care about. It's gorgeous on so many levels.


The Miami sludge-pop band's third album feels like an attempt to make a break with the past, but they might not be able to, at least not yet.

Harmonicraft

Miami's Torche have spent the bulk of their career in transition, whether moving among labels, cutting and recruiting members, or flipping from pop-metal to instrumental sludge cascades. Their third album, Harmonicraft, is a summation of in-flux firsts: This is Torche's first full-length since the wonderful 2008 breakthrough, Meanderthal. It's also their first for Volcom Entertainment after stints on Hydra Head, Robotic Empire, and Rock Action. And it's their first since the departure of lead guitarist Juan Montoya and the addition of Andrew Elstner. You'd be forgiven, then, for expecting something fresh.
But given all Harmonicraft's inherent turnaround, it's surprising to hear just how codified and predictable Torche sound at this point. The band's early works (and live shows) came possessed by extreme senses of adaptability and possibility, with heavy lumber erupting from heartfelt limber without notice, and vice versa. On Harmonicraft, those assets are subsumed largely by structures and strategies that feel settled from the start. "Reverse Inverted" comes off like a song Torche simply forgot to put on any of their previous releases; the chug of "Skin Moth" picks up the pace and even adds a bit of falsetto at the start of the hook, though it otherwise might as well be mimeographed from Torche's seven-year-old debut. Despite the new member, the group's stylistic approach feels petrified here, with frontman Steve Brooks constantly staggering his way through mid-tempo verses before shouting mantras above harmony-heavy choruses. Though it's less than 38 minutes long, Harmonicraft starts to mire in monotony before it is half over. As bassist Jonathan Nuñez told Spin in a track-by-track preview earlier this month, "I don't know, man. They all kind of blur together after you've been talking about them. For me this song is just solid, intense Torche." He was, mind you, only on track eight of 13.
That's not to say that Harmonicraft is an unequivocal loss. Despite their proclivity for change, Torche have always embraced a good time, smiling and maybe shirtless on stage, even as they growled through their most viscous marches. "Kicking" is the sort of ricocheted anthem that deserves an arena lights show and a mass of gleeful people singing along, while the chromatic psychedelics and malevolent pulse at the start of "Snakes Are Charmed" create thrilling juxtaposition. Brooks lifts his voice a bit for opener "Letting Go", thinning his tone until it nears a yelp, suggesting Wayne Coyne with actual blood on his face. Elstner's solo at the start of 90-second ricochet "Walk It Off" affords Torche's hum a surprising, delightful squeal, as do his heroic spirals throughout "Sky Trials". Time and again, however, these songs skip back to the same middle ground of insistent throb and itinerantly thick vocals, stunting the surprises with typecasts.
With tracks named "Letting Go", "Walk It Off", "In Pieces", and "Solitary Traveler", Harmonicraft feels thematically like an attempt to make a break with the past, to show that Torche have survived their split with Montoya and an indecisive EP as a trio to emerge as a renewed recording-and-touring quartet. There are bursts that certainly suggest they want to do that, but others that indicate they might not be able to, at least not yet. The title track, after all, is a roaring Neu! recast, with the motorik beat hitting a little harder, with the guitars tuned to sound a little meaner, the pedals programmed so as to drown the rest of the sound. It's the cleanest break Torche have ever made with their reputation and probably the best thing here; it's unfortunately the outlier for a record best summarized by its own orthodoxy. Maybe this is Torche again dealing with a state of transition, wheels spinning deep into the rut as the band tries to push toward something new. Harmonicraft is not without its moments; it's just that, sometimes, spans of monotony and predictability make remembering or caring for those moments more work than they're worth.


There is chemistry between the Sonic Youth guitarist and the This Heat drummer, but their collaborative album feels more like mood pieces for skronk heads and completists only.

Thurston Moore / Charles Hayward: Improvisations

Improvisations

On paper, Thurston Moore and Charles Hayward are such a logical pairing it’s surprising they’ve waited until 2017 to cut an album together. Both have spent over 30 years camped out in the space between experimental music, pop, punk, the gallery world, and psychedelia, each having long ago established a deceptively simple sound signature. In Sonic Youth, Moore’s revolutionary guitar style and mumbly vocal delivery helped the band traverse expanses of noise among oblique poetics, nervous anthems, and thrilling rave-ups. An aesthete of all things underground, his downtown beatnik space cadet persona was the perfect passport between headliner status and DIY basements. Meanwhile, Hayward was a prog rock defector whose white-knuckle drumming helped make This Heat one of the greatest unheralded punk bands. Existing somewhere between Can and Crass, their studio collages and ragged, spindly songs tackled nuclear war, geopolitics, and suicide with unabashed seriousness.
What both groups excelled at was the effortless marriage of dissonance and hooks. While liberally indulging their respective avant inclinations, both bands wrote music that stays with you. “S.P.Q.R.”, “Bull in the Heather,” “Not Waving,” “The Diamond Sea,” and “Shadow of a Doubt” are just a few examples which expanded the language of the song, stretching it to surprising ends without breaking. Daring as they are, you can hum them in the shower.
The same cannot be said for Improvisations. Banged out in a single afternoon, the album’s seven tracks have a single, dominant mode, a jumbled, freewheeling momentum that blasts through its own murkiness with a limber energy. These tracks wash over you, their narrow palette reducing contrasts and amplifying the core vibe. Though the two have some chemistry, Improvisations is a sketchy listen overall, mood pieces for skronk heads and completists only.
The album opens with one of its longest sessions, the 10+ minute “A1.” (All of the tracks here are untitled.) Moore’s introductory slow-motion string scrapings set an evocative mood, with deeper bass notes floating in the distance. Promising as it is, they soon switch to a standard issue mid-tempo backbeat and some escalating noise textures. Five minutes in, they finally hit their stride with a series of detours spurred on by Hayward, who has a particular knack for turning drum fills into wormholes, pivoting away from the main beat without losing the groove. Like a human loop pedal, he grabs small gestures and then repeats and expands on them, rolling into fresh terrain where most drummers would fall back.
Moore’s playing, meanwhile, is all vibe and no parts. Smeared and rugged, he slices through thick, grungy distortion with sharp shards of metallic noise and detuned harmonics. It’s cool for a bit, but so blurry and indistinct that he cancels out his own impact. It will also be familiar to anyone with a working knowledge Sonic Youth’s canonical output. They weren’t historic improvisers—they were an art-rock band with a deep record collection and enough charisma to match their pretensions. A song like “Death Valley 69” is thrilling precisely because their noise bleeds so heavily into their melodies. Moore has certainly earned the right to slather on the sludge as thick as he likes, but it doesn’t make for memorable moments.
Another longer piece sags under its own weight. “A3” starts off with a motorik groove that glances towards “Born to be Wild” through a fog of overdrive before derailing into seven minutes of fumbling. Many of the ideas tossed at the wall could stick if Moore and Hayward would allow them time, but instead, they jump around aimlessly, juicing the energy when things get a little too lost. They’re clearly reacting to each other but haven’t really found a common ground where music can come to life.
In between, the more digestible tracks keep the same vibe going but benefit from their relative brevity. “B2” hits a nice chiming modal melody halfway through, while Hayward’s percussion exhales gracefully. As the album progresses, the mood opens up ever so slightly, closing on the best track of the record. “B4” plunks and wheezes with refreshing restraint, finishing off with some church bell harmonies and simple cymbal washes. It makes you wish they had booked a second day, or perhaps even a third. For all the racket, there simply isn’t enough focus, enough control, or enough music. Improvisations hints at the duo’s potential but is a fundamentally insubstantial listen.


Intended as a rallying cry against shifting trends, Pantera's most abrasive album comes off more like a cry for help that reveals the turmoil eating the band from within. It's also thrilling.

The Great Southern Trendkill

“Fuck your magazine,” growls Pantera frontman Phil Anselmo on the album-opening title track of what is easily the most abrasive and chaotic album in the Texas thrash band's storied career. As its title suggests, The Great Southern Trendkill was supposed to be Pantera’s re-dedication of purpose amidst a musical climate where metal was falling out of favor. In a way, it was. More than that, however, the album exposes the personal turmoil that would later sink the band for good.
Perhaps it’s understandable that Anselmo and company felt like the world was closing in on them. By the time they set out to make The Great Southern Trendkill in late ’95, Pantera were one of the lone remaining thrash-era metal acts that could still reasonably expect to shift half a million units. More crucially, they were one of the only ones doing so without diluting their sound. In fact, Pantera were growing more successful by getting heavier with each record. Whether or not we accept the popular narrative that the so-called alternative revolution had rendered metal “uncool” again, most of Pantera’s peers had hit steep career drop-offs and were struggling to remain visible.
So it must have felt convenient for bands like them to point the finger at a fickle music establishment they felt was turning on them. But that was a curious position for Pantera to take considering they’d managed to achieve world-beater status in 1992—right in the heyday of Lollapalooza and “120 Minutes”—and debuted at Number One on the Billboard album chart with 1994’s Far Beyond Driven. They may have seen it differently, but the truth is Pantera were riding a momentous wave of success when it came time to record The Great Southern Trendkill. And regardless, in spite of his chest-beating against the band's supposed enemies in the music press, on Southern Trendkill Anselmo exposes no one else but himself as his worst enemy.
In one of the breakdown sections of second track “War Nerve,” for example, Anselmo stops singing altogether and spits-up a tirade: “For every fucking second the pathetic media pisses on me and judges what I am in one paragraph, look here: FUCK YOU ALLLLLLLLLLLL.” To be fair, Anselmo is hardly the first performer to vent against critics (and one can only imagine how much more venomous his lyrics would have been had music blogs like this one been as prominent back then as they are now). But it’s telling that he can't keep his ire focused on an external source for the entire song, which begins with the lines “Fuck the world for all it’s worth/Every inch of planet earth/Fuck myself/Don’t leave me out.” Sure, Anselmo’s stream-of-consciousness wordplay often targeted multiple adversaries in single songs in the past, but “War Nerve” betrays his then-increasing tendency towards self-loathing and incoherence.
Anselmo caused a furor this past January when he made a Nazi-salute gesture and screamed “white power” onstage. Indeed, hints of Anselmo’s racial anxieties shadowed Pantera throughout their career, with Kurt Loder addressing them point-blank in a 1994 MTV News clip. And in a 1995 onstage rant that’s made the rounds on YouTube for years, Anselmo weighs-in on his disdain for rap culture and the “stop black-on-black crime” slogan in front of a Montreal audience. Though Anselmo starts off by saying “we’re not a racist band,” he later urges the audience to have pride in its white heritage.  Crucially, in that clip he uses the word “trend" to describe what he’s railing against—the implied subtext being that we were moving too far towards a restrictive PC culture. It doesn’t take a mathematician to put two and two together here and see how easily such statements lend themselves to a white-supremacist agenda. And so hearing Anselmo spew bile against “trends” on the The Great Southern Trendkill, one has to wonder what else was on his mind that he didn’t have the guts to say flat-out.
Whatever else you can say about him, though, you have to acknowledge that in his prime Anselmo was an electrifying performer—one of metal’s all-time greatest frontmen—with a relentless drive to create. (His prolific output in numerous bands bears that out.) Just four years earlier, Anselmo’s unparalleled intensity had supercharged the band's breakout album Vulgar Display of Power with an undeniable electricity. Listening to it, you couldn’t help but feel emboldened and empowered. Following up with Far Beyond Driven, Anselmo was able to keep up the same motivational demeanor, but a darker, more personal set of lyrics pointed to a cracking psyche behind the bravado. By the The Great Southern Trendkill, Anselmo’s psychic degeneration is alarmingly complete, and what was once a cathartic roar begins to verge on psychosis as Anselmo’s bandmates push themselves further and further to extremes as well.
Previous Pantera albums presented aggression as an athletic high. By contrast, on Southern Trendkill’s most frantic moments, the aggression hews closer to self-mutilation—a last-ditch attempt to provoke sensation when you’re too numb to feel anything. On songs like the title track and “Suicide Note Pt. II,” Pantera trade-in their trademark high-velocity boogie grooves for blurry spasms of noise. Fittingly enough for a band so openly plagued by substance abuse problems, on Southern Trendkill the “high” in the heaviness is gone. The album offers zero of the euphoric rush of the band’s earlier efforts, and there's almost no release to be found in its negativity. All that’s left is to wallow in the despair.
It was also telling that Anselmo—by this point deep in the throes of heroin and prescription painkiller addiction—recorded his vocals separately from the rest of the band at Trent Reznor’s Nothing studios in New Orleans while his bandmates recorded the music at guitarist Dimebag Darrell Abbott’s home studio in Dallas. According to the liner notes, Anselmo was actually present for writing and demo’ing material with the band in pre-production. But the fact that producer Terry Date needed to serve as go-between speaks to a communication block that couldn't have been good for the creative process.
Nevertheless, even all that internal dysfunction wasn’t enough to blunt the searing vitality of the final product. When it comes to music that captures the personal implosion of an artist about to go off the rails, The Great Southern Trendkill is about as thrilling as they come. It’s also the first time that Anselmo truly shows his fragility, ugly and wretched as it may be. As harried as its outlook is, The Great Southern Trendkill's seething hopelessness reveals a desperation that Far Beyond Driven hinted at but downplayed in favor of balls-out swagger. This time, Pantera no longer sound larger-than-life but instead like actual three-dimensional (and very fucked-up) people.
The Great Southern Trendkill gets extreme in spots, but it showcases the contrasts in the band’s musical DNA more than any of their other albums. The title track, for example, suddenly lurches from its blistering near-grindcore pace to a slow-moseying blues rock section laced with a trademark Dimebag solo, his love for original KISS guitarist Ace Frehley’s hummable leads still as evident as ever. Even more jarring, the energetic main riff on “Living Through Me (Hell’s Wrath)” recalls the vibe of classic ’80s thrash. But that period suddenly feels innocent and far back in the rearview mirror in comparison to the gloom that engulfs this album, especially when the song switches into a creepy dark-industrial mid-section that reflects its narrative about a harrowing sexual encounter between two junkies.
In another experimental detour, on “Suicide Note Pt. 1” Pantera actually try their hand at an acoustic ballad. Perhaps more shockingly, the song sounds like a cross between (then-trendy!) Stone Temple Pilots and Zeppelin’s “Over the Hills and Far Away.” Anselmo—an infinitely more capable singer than his harsh screams might indicate—drops his guard and opens up about his own suicidal urges. For once, the band gives us a glimpse into pain that’s genuinely affecting.
The Great Southern Trendkill’s rough-edged flaws help generate the music’s unique power almost as much as the band's blind determination to keep ratcheting-up the intensity level, come what may. It perhaps sums up the album’s mood best that, while touring to support it, Anselmo overdosed from heroin and was pronounced dead for over four minutes after a show in Dallas. Incredibly enough, he played the next show. Listening back to the album, both the overdose and the decision to just keep going make perfect sense. The band, apparently, had so much fire in its veins that it couldn't even stop itself—at least not right away.


With assistance from the London Contemporary Orchestra, the prolific Canadian composer’s arrangements propel dense, elliptical mythologies that unravel like fantasy novels.

Island

The unpredictable chord changes of Owen Pallett’s orchestral-pop arrangements give way beneath you like a pulled rug. Aching piano melodies dip in and out of brass and wind sections, turning just when you least expect to play up Pallett’s quietly sturdy voice. Over the past decade, the prolific Canadian composer has offered string arrangements to Frank Ocean, Fucked Up, and even Tim Burton, who recruited Pallett and longtime collaborators Arcade Fire to contribute to last year’s Dumbo remake. On their introspective solo albums, however, Pallett’s weaving arrangements propel dense, elliptical mythologies that unravel like fantasy novels.
Their fifth album, Island, marks the return of Lewis, a “young, ultra-violent farmer” from the fictional 14th-century land of Spectrum, first introduced on 2010’s Heartland. That album’s deeply meta theological crisis centered on Lewis’ rage at a god named Owen Pallett, culminating in a bloody battle that seemingly vanquished Owen the deity for good. The gloomy world of Island picks up directly afterward: Owen is gone for now, and Lewis has washed ashore alone, enduring a grim journey of self-reflection during Pallett’s most delicately scaled-back work yet.
Heartland couched Lewis’ monologues in baroque, off-kilter pop songs that burst with life; Island is far more downcast and restrained. Pallett envisioned the album as a suite of orchestral music, recruiting lush accompaniment from the London Contemporary Orchestra to bear out the idea. The first half of the album offers murmurs of the orchestra’s full weight, with sepulchral suspended piano notes and spare acoustic guitar gently forewarning of tragedy to come. The slowed-down pace allows Pallett to lean into the folk inclinations of their early-2000s group Les Mouches, creating bounding fingerpicked guitar lines on songs like “Transformer” and “Fire-Mare” that give Lewis’ story an earthiness to match his new life as a cigarette-smoking, booze-swilling misfit.
Through the Lewis avatar, Pallett explores questions of life, death, and faith while remaining oblique. It makes for a bizarre game of interpretation, one Pallett invites both by casting themself as the omniscient creator of Spectrum and through straightforwardly vulnerable lines that recall 2014’s troubled In Conflict. As Island’s story spirals, depressive lyrics bleed through the narrative dressing. “I am a wound un-healing,” they sing in an airy upper register on “The Sound of the Engines,” when Lewis gets into a fight and wakes up in an ambulance. Album centerpiece “A Bloody Morning” depicts Lewis drunkenly crashing a sailing ship with the frank admission, “I’ve mistaken self-indulgence for self-care.” Crashing cymbals and pummeling timpani recreate the waves, while Greg Fox’s insistent drumming forms a frantic heartbeat as passengers tumble overboard. The chaotic, terrifying scene is one of Pallett’s most heart-rending, painting out Island’s narrative climax in vivid colors.
The album climaxes with “Lewis Gets Fucked Into Space,” where Lewis senses the deity Owen’s presence once again in an erotic mind-meld of the two characters. The song is a self-reckoning, ascending on tapping percussion, fanfare, and celestial strings. “I wonder who will sing of me when I am gone?” Pallett mourns, guiding Lewis to an astral sense of clarity. The album’s cinematic ending takes stock of devastation, from Lewis’ egotistical mission on Heartland to the literal wreckage of Island. “Let me be your confessor/Lay your burdens down on me,” Pallett lilts on closer “In Darkness,” a sweep of elegiac strings drifting in behind him. “You don’t need to die to be forgiven.”
These small, fastidious details add up to a tapestry that feels deeply lived-in, even if Island often lists toward the subdued or dreary. Much the album moves so subtly that the songs at times feel interchangeable, rewarding multiple revisits rather than a casual listen. But as intentionally dark and foreboding as Island can be, it gives Pallett room to breathe, clearing away the violin and piano loops that gilded In Conflict and Heartland to bring world-weary questions into focus. Its languid, ruminative pace is the time required to reveal a glimmer of hope through the gloom.


Toronto songwriter Tamara Lindeman self-produced her bold fourth LP. From front-to-back, this is the first Weather Station album that sounds as fleshed-out and powerful as the world it contains.

The Weather Station: The Weather Station

The Weather Station

Tamara Lindeman’s work as the Weather Station has always been an interrogation of the self: putting sparse, intricate music to the narratives we construct from our lives and memories. While Lindeman often includes other characters in her songs, their presence mostly leads to deeper insight into her own mind. In “Shy Women,” from 2015’s Loyalty, she observes another woman’s increasing hardness with age, “as though it were mine.” In another track, she sings about a friend who looks so similar to her that they get mistaken for sisters. The pair laugh it off, but there’s a quiet anxiety, she suggests, of having someone accidentally become an appendage to your life.
The Toronto songwriter’s self-titled fourth album further explores that strange intimacy. Its songs are passionate and sprawling, formless and unwieldy. Often, Lindeman fills them with more thoughts than they seem capable of containing. “I don’t know what to say,” she sings at one point, “So I say too much.” There’s a desperation to her words, but Lindeman’s voice has never sounded clearer or bolder. She risks  so much fear in her writing—fear of losing time and power, or her mind and her identity—for the cosmic payoff of happiness with another person: “You and I, we are complicit,” she sings, “Now we’re gonna live with it, our open eyes.”
In other words, this is Lindeman’s relationship album. For an artist whose breakthrough LP was called All of It Was Mine, there’s a startling generosity to the subject matter: after spending her career protecting and studying her psyche, she now devotes an entire album to it. In “You and I (On the Other Side of the World),” she describes a brief moment of happiness at the beach before a storm, “You in my old cardigan, and I in your blue jeans.” But the same things that draw these characters together also become a burden. “I cannot tell us apart,” she sings sadly in “In an Hour.” Lying beside each other, the couple are at once interchangeable and “dizzied by distances.” There’s a question, throughout these songs, of how to stay true to oneself while holding onto one another. It’s a balancing act that can swerve in a heartbeat from romantic comedy to psychological horror.
In addition to being self-titled, The Weather Station is self-produced by Lindeman. She finds new ways to bring her words to life, backed by a band with more urgency and energy than ever before. The guitars are largely electric, with driving rhythms where once she favored quiet brush strokes. Most of these songs avoid typical structures in favor of long, escalating verses, and Lindeman builds backdrops that offer complimentary dynamics to her lyrics. The single “Thirty” is an immediate stunner: dusty and simmering, with a faded, psychedelic flute accompaniment that buzzes like mosquitos in a desert. For other songs, she arranged full string sections, and in “You and I,” the strings accent her slow shifts of mood and tone. “We got good at walking,” she sings, before clarifying, “Walking in step—we can’t help it.” From front-to-back, this is the first Weather Station album that sounds as fleshed-out and powerful as the world it contains.
Throughout her career, Lindeman’s music has fit firmly within the folk lineage. This is both due to her preferred instrumentation (fingerpicked guitar, piano, banjo) and her subject matter, songs filled with rivers and roads, snow and rain. On The Weather Station, she largely forsakes that rural setting in favor of a domestic, sometimes claustrophobic landscape. When she turns to nature, it’s viewed through a wistful lens, like she’s locked inside and watching from a window through half-closed blinds. “I was raised to hear the curlews, I was raised to notice light,” she sings in “Complicit,” “And I watch the little swallows delicate in their flight.” Here, the gentle imagery arrives in a moment of tension: a declaration of identity torn from the environment she recognizes. It’s her heaviest, toughest song yet.
The emotional stakes on The Weather Station are particularly high; Lindeman refers at various points to a broken economy, to mass shootings and climate change. But the most vivid devastation she describes is internal. The album ends with the dreamlike fragment, “The Most Dangerous Thing About You.” Its closing lines are striking and mysterious: “And all of the sadness you can’t explain poured from you like a summer rain, hand in hand with your child in the morning,” she sings, before a sudden sweep of strings enters and disappears just as quickly. Lindeman narrates the song from afar, inconspicuously, in stark contrast to the closeness that defined the preceding tracks. Still, she makes these observations feel just as touching and true. “Love, it is no mystery,” she tells us in “You and I,” “I love because I see.” By the end of the album, she shows us there is no other way.


Devendra Banhart’s ninth LP continues on with the wispy, low-stakes coziness of 2013’s Mala, though it’s much darker. Its best moments are a reminder of why Banhart touched a nerve in the first place.

Ape in Pink Marble

The cornerstone of Devendra Banhart’s career was an album called Cripple Crow. Released in 2005, the 22-track record presented Banhart as an artist brimming with ideas, surrounded by friends, and firmly at the center of a movement that was beginning to gain traction outside his indie bubble. Since then, Banhart’s career has been characterized by less momentous events: a DOA major label debut, some forgettable collaborations, a few art books. Especially considering his newfound penchant for breezy, non-confrontational pop music, in 2016, it’s hard to imagine Banhart being at the forefront of anything. While the artists he came up with have been striking career-bests through dramatic reinvention and childhood psychoanalysis, Banhart seems mostly content to plink away at his keyboard and entertain himself.
On the whole, Ape in Pink Marble, his ninth album, doesn’t sound much different than Mala, his solid 2013 release. Teaming again with that album’s collaborators, Noah Georgeson and Josiah Steinbrick, Ape shares Mala’s wispy, low-stakes coziness. Despite the chilled-out atmosphere, however, Ape is a much darker listen, and its best moments are a reminder of why Banhart touched a nerve in the first place. Opener “Middle Names” laments the loss of a close friend over a chord progression not far from Dan Bejar’s “Chinatown.” The following “Good Time Charlie” is even better, tying a burbling folk melody to a weirdly touching narrative about a police officer. “Sometimes I breathalyze/And he gives the DUIs,” Banhart swoons before subverting the romance with a haunting question: “Is it love or just blood in his eyes?” With their gentle, psychedelic guitars and lilting vocals, these opening tracks come as close to Banhart’s sweet spot as he has since he first ventured out of it a decade back.
Around the time of his last album in 2013, Banhart addressed a common criticism of his recent music: “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a friend [say], in this tender and discreet voice, ‘It’s just you and me bro, and I want to tell you the truth: make a record of you and an acoustic guitar. Please.’” Despite his self-awareness and the intimate strength of the opening tracks, Ape is not the return-to-form his friends have been pushing for. It’s dragged down by the same aimlessness that’s affected most of Banhart’s releases. Things get particularly dire in the middle stretch, with a pair of goofy tracks—“Fancy Man” and “Fig in Leather”—that are at once grating enough to disrupt the flow of the album and still anonymous enough to soundtrack a Chipotle. Even Banhart’s best albums had their share of jokey self-indulgence (let’s not forget that the “real good time” Banhart promised to have in 2004’s “This Beard Is for Siobhan” was just between him and a false set of teeth), but these songs represent the nadir of his recorded output.
After those missteps, the album’s second half plays it fairly straight. Heavy on ballads and low on energy, Banhart sometimes comes in danger of scrubbing away any remnants of his once-magnetic personality. Occasionally, though, Ape approaches sparse brilliance. “Mourners’ Dance” is simple but effective, with a calming synth-and-vocals atmosphere that justifies Banhart’s Morrison-esque “raise the dead” intonations. Early single “Saturday Night” is the closest this album comes to a straight-up radio pop song—something that Banhart’s had his eye on ever since 2009’s “Baby”—and, with a dusky, OVO moodiness, it makes for one of the record’s finest moments.
Ape closes with a pair of languid, burnt ballads, almost forcing the listener to drift out of focus. These tracks, however, are not entirely without charm. “Lucky” might seem like a plain admission of admiration, with its lovesick chorus and soulful guitars, but deeper listens reveal it to be more like a sigh of relief at the end of a troubled relationship, a quiet acceptance that the flame is gone. “Baby I can see the sun is setting in your eyes,” he sings as guitars twinkle around him, “Another reason why I’m lucky.” There’s a sense of freedom in his voice, hinting at a clean break from the past and a move toward more comfortable, if less inspired, territory. It just goes to show that Banhart might be more in control than we think, even when it seems like he’s barely there.


After an illegal remix made him a TikTok hit, the Brooklyn rapper-singer struggles to create an identity on his debut,  enlisting high-profile guests like Kanye, Lil Uzi Vert, and Future in the effort.

While the World Was Burning

SAINt JHN was crooning woozy knock-off Future verses when a 19-year-old in a village in Kazakhstan illegally made him a hit. In 2019, three years after the song was released, a budding DJ named Imanbek Zeikenov uploaded a remix of SAINt JHN’s glowering “Roses.” In Imanbek’s version, SAINt JHN’s voice is pitched up to a bouncy, unrecognizable register amid constantly thwacking bass. Enter TikTok: The remix became inescapable on the app this spring, with its rows of sweatshirted teens (and Jason Derulo) wriggling along to the beat. The track’s success made an intriguing dilemma for a rapper who once created a fake PR company to promote himself — virality without recognition, ubiquity without any sense of identity.
SAINt JHN’s new project struggles to build a persona for him from these confusing beginnings. The album is laden with shockingly high-profile features—Kanye, Lil Uzi Vert, Kehlani, Future himself—and amorphous, vapor-like production from f a l l e n, a relatively unknown producer who shares SAINt JHNs proclivity towards aggravating name stylizations. The production is both anonymous and instantly familiar, recalling the hazy crooning and dribbled-out drums of both Travis Scott and Gunna. There is a vague sadness at the record’s core, but SAINt JHN only spells it out occasionally and clumsily. “I’m scared of overdosin’/I’m scared of falling in love,” he moans on “High School Reunion, Prom,” but there’s no emotion in his confession.
We get wisps of SAINt JHN’s background: allusions to the poverty line, a lyric about being kicked out of his mother’s home on New Year’s Eve, the words “abandonment issues.” Unfortunately, most of these details are packed into the opener “Sucks to Be You,” which gets bogged down in its grating guilt trip of a chorus. “It sucks to be you, ‘cause I would have loved you,” he wails. “I’d watch the whole world burn to see you dance.” This tendency towards clumsy, cringe-inducing lyrics punctures the album’s better tracks. “I don’t think I even thought twice that I thought it,” he mumbles on “Gorgeous,” one of the sleeker and more propulsive tracks.
On “Ransom,” an almost-tender track anchored by Kehlani and 6lack features, SAINt JHN finds a smoother, more assured balance between singing and rapping. But the chorus hinges on a garbled metaphor that compares texting to a hostage negotiation, made more absurd by SAINt JHN gravely proclaiming, “I’m too handsome.” Like much of the album, “Time for Demons” cobbles together a pastiche of rap tropes, blurring them into nonsense. “I’m savage mode, I’m not average, I’m on demon time, just in my cabbage,” he chirps. “Cut from a different cloth, from a different upholstery,” he states on “Pray 4 Me,” fumbling for meaning with soft murmurs and glistens of piano, before Kanye deploys a verse that mentions Israel and centrifugal force like so many MadLibs.
While the World Was Burning presents itself as a victory lap for SAINt JHN. Three of the thirteen tracks are old, repurposed songs; two of those are versions of “Roses.” DaBaby remains apparently game as ever to hop on any remix, and he updates the plodding “Monica Lewinsky, Election Year” with a leering verse. (The actual Monica Lewinsky has said she wished she got royalties for the song.) And then there’s the second-most popular version of “Roses,” where Future’s adlibs and dynamic, gravelly rasp are in direct contrast with SAINt JHN’s shuffling verse. It’s a symbolic, full-circle moment, the imitator collaborating with his inspiration, but the gravity Future instinctively brings to any track gets lost here. In SAINt JHNs songs, like so in much of TikTok, sadness becomes aesthetic and anesthetized, until it’s just another vibe.

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The latest viral rapper absorbs Black influences while marketing himself as if he doesn’t. His songs are fine, but he is a cipher, a husk, and a vacuum of taste.

Valedictorian

Yeah, there’s another viral rap sensation. I know, this happens basically every other week, but this is our reality. Some are cool as hell; some I hope to never hear again. There will be many, many more. This one is named ian. Yes, just ian. After a few years of uploading music to SoundCloud, he blew the fuck up in early 2024 through a combination of outrage clicks and undiscerning excitement. The reason was simple: He was a white guy dressed like a frat boy on his way to his 8 a.m. finance class who made technically OK music that sounded like he was in Slayworld, the internet-famous group that once included Summrs, Autumn!, Izaya Tiji, and Yeat. Yeat is white, too, but unlike Yeat, who tried to distract from his whiteness with the questionable use of turbans and alien-speak, ian leaned into his suburban white kid schtick: vanilla outfits (white tee, sweats, slides) and a From the Block video for his breakout song “Figure It Out” shot at an outdoor lunch with his sitcom-looking real-life family, where you can spot full wine glasses, a prep school hoodie, and an American flag swaying in the wind.
“Figure It Out” is the lead single to ian’s first full mixtape, Valedictorian, which includes artwork that mimics the “You know I had to do it to ’em” meme and premiered at a packed listening party on the streets of New York, blasted out of the sunroof of a minivan. It’s probably his best song, though that isn’t saying much. Through his slurred, ATL-style melodies, he delivers a sprint of catchy flexes like, “Can’t choose what color I’m feelin’ today, thank God it’s a two-toned watch” and “My big brother like Marshawn Lynch, he’ll run through somebody.” The official Lyrical Lemonade video (anywhere there’s a popular rapping white boy, you’ll find Cole Bennett) even includes a cameo from Marshawn Lynch, which is pretty cringe because you just know the joke is supposed to be Tough, Black ex-NFL star hangs out with suburban white rapper.
That right there explains the problem with Valedictorian: It’s making a joke out of the music and culture it’s trying to swagger-jack. Everything is so tongue in cheek: Look, isn’t it so funny that a college-age white kid who you could imagine playing lacrosse at a New England private school has a mixtape hosted by DJ Holiday, famous for talking his shit on some of the greatest Gucci Mane and Chief Keef projects? “This the coldest motherfucker I seen in a long ass time, dressed white as hell though,” says Holiday, laughing (probably in disbelief about how much he’s being paid). “Fuckin’ rich ass prick.” Look, isn’t it so funny that he’s got beats that sound like old Zaytoven (all except one by producer Sxprano)? “Judgment,” with its calming strings and crafty drums, sounds like a replica of something Zay would have given to Yung L.A. Look, isn’t it so funny when he raps a bunch of car puns like Young Dro (“They go both ways in the Cullinan truck, the doors must hate each other,” from “Grand Slam”), or imitates the Auto-Tune melodies of Dirty Sprite-era Future (“Bentayga”), or wants so badly to be Chief Keef (“AirBnb”)? The irony is there to distract you from the fact that this is empty music. If you heard it without a face attached, you would click on it, observe that it’s a sauceless copy of its influences, and keep scrolling.
That said, none of Valedictorian is unlistenable—just devoid of any personality or imagination. Performing an amalgamation of melodic regional rap of the last decade or so, ian lacks the ability or intention to do anything other than replicate music that already exists. He’s not rewiring ATL swag of the past like Bear1boss or dissecting nostalgic dance rap like Xaviersobased. He’s just a white kid that has heard a lot of rap, and there are lots of them. After years spent falling down SoundCloud wormholes, I’m almost numb to white rappers that would probably do the surgery from Face/Off with Chief Keef or Young Thug if it were possible.
So my initial instinct with the ian phenomenon was to shrug and say it’s not that deep—at least he isn’t Lil Mabu or Brennan Jones, rappers so clearly making a mockery of the genre to feed their thirst for fame. At least there aren’t any nascent signs of a pop-country or indie rock pivot, not yet. But the more I think about it, there is something unsettling about ian’s fast rise. He’s stumbled onto a simple, repeatable blueprint that absorbs Black influences while presenting and marketing himself as if he isn’t. That might be scarier than all of the obvious rip-offs of the past, because suddenly you can imagine opening your eyes to see a mainstream rap landscape overrun with ians. (Introducing your Rolling Loud headliners owen, hunter, and dust1n, brought to you by Backwoods and Meta!) Another step toward the far-away, or not so far-away, day when we will have to remind the people around us about the Black roots of rap, because Spotify playlists sure won’t. Well, until then, see you next week when another rapper falls from the cloud.