The BandGang crew is at the center of Detroit’s rap renaissance, and Lonnie Bands’ latest is a great showcase of its sound and energy.

KOD

The timing has never been right in Detroit. In the late 1990s, the Eastside Chedda Boyz established a sound with funky basslines true to Detroit’s Motown roots, deliveries inspired by Bay Area rappers like Too $hort, and rough, boundary-pushing lyrics that spoke to the hustle of the city. The collective became local legends, but through a combination of tragedy and the hip-hop world criminally overlooking regional scenes, the Eastside Chedda Boyz never had their breakout moment.
Then, in the 2000s, while that bleach blonde rapper became a phenom, Doughboyz Cashout began to build on the street rap foundation laid by the Eastside Chedda Boyz. They managed to attain a major label record deal through Jeezy’s CTE World Print, but that contract only halted their momentum and they too had to settle for Midwest fame. But thankfully, through the rise of YouTube and SoundCloud, cities that have been historically ignored—like Milwaukee, Baton Rouge, and Orlando—are receiving attention without the assistance of a major label. Which brings us to BandGang—a group of twentysomethings, lead by the mush-mouthed BandGang Lonnie Bands—who are at the center of Detroit’s rap renaissance.
KOD is BandGang Lonnie Bands’ latest album, a 21-song epic told from the perspective of a sedated Lonnie Bands as he rushes us through days filled with drug dealing, pimping, and scamming—where other rappers flex their cars and jewels, Lonnie brags about his credit cards. There’s a steady tension throughout the project set by the manic energy of the piano melodies and the Lonnie Bands storytelling that could double as a Harmony Korine script.
Each song on KOD is its own rapid-paced scene. “KOD” is the exposition, an introduction to Lonnie Bands, who is a traditional Detroit rapper in his lingo and humor who was just raised on the internet: heavy breathing, ad-libs, and a narcotized delivery are abound. “Press Me” is the album’s most action-packed sequence, as Lonnie balances a relationship with his ex-girlfriend and her best friend, sells fake pills, and ends up in Philly just to make a drug deal. He also comes away with one of the album’s many essential one-liners: “Bitch I’m the scam man, how you gon’ scam me.” Then, on “Shredgang 1.5” the RJ Lamont piano puts you on edge like you’re in the backseat of a drug deal gone wrong with Lonnie Bands at the wheel acting extremely calm.
At 55 minutes, KOD drags a bit, but Lonnie Bands injects periodic life into the album with a revolving door of guests. There are his game-obsessed Detroit peers like a slightly horny Sada Baby on “Weird,” the degenerate youthfulness of Drego and Beno on “Come Here” and “10 Freaky Hoes,” and some assistance from his BandGang crew members like a disgusted BandGang Javar on “Mines”: “You one of them dirty ass niggas people ain’t want in the pool.” Lonnie also revives the connection between Detroit and the West Coast, most notably with L.A. producer Ron-Ron, who contributes some of his menacing beat-making. These West Coast additions peppered throughout prevent KOD from becoming yet another Detroit album to exist within a self-contained bubble, and importantly, they aren’t forced. For once, everything in Detroit hip-hop is clicking, and KOD is a step closer to Lonnie reaching a breakthrough that so many Detroit icons before him couldn’t.


As modern music moves beyond modernism, the classical community is still scared of the innovations of 75 years ago. Alarm Will Sound tackles those scary sounds and finds new life.

Modernists

America’s classical music scene is one of the last fine-arts zones in which modernism remains controversial. While museums do brisk business with retrospectives of experimental visual artists—and as hardcore cinephiles flock to see Jean-Luc Godard’s exploration of 3D—you can still find attendees of classical gigs storming out of venues when the music of the mid-20th century is presented. The consistency of this response to the new and recent creates some self-inflicted wounds. Among other problems, the modernist-classical freeze out makes cultural absorption of today’s compositions all the more difficult. (It’s hard to process blazingly new music if you’re still covering your ears in response to Arnold Schoenberg.)
The bleeding-edge virtuosos in Alarm Will Sound have a bit of fun with this state of play on the cover for their latest album, Modernism, with an illustration styled in the manner of a poster for a midcentury sci-fi flick. In addition to pointing out that the history of “modernism” is now long enough to feel every bit as vintage as your favorite piece of B-movie ephemera, the comic portrait of screaming human faces also poses a rhetorical question: Do we honestly still need to act scared by this stuff? Over the course of their 40-minute set, the Alarm Will Sound players and conductor Alan Pierson respond to this prompt by delivering pure modern-classical fun. The six pieces they’ve chosen speak different structural languages, though each one shares a desire to bring across a sense of wildness that is exuberant at heart.
The first composition on the bill is a classical transcription of the Beatles’ “Revolution 9”—the legit musique concrete song on the White Album that was famously built from loops and samples of prerecorded sound (including some classical pieces). In interviews, both Paul McCartney and John Lennon were eager to talk up their interest in studio assemblages by European composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen. And Lennon’s partnership with Yoko Ono was also an influence (given her pathbreaking, early '60s association with experimental composers like John Cage and La Monte Young).
The arrangement on Modernists was devised by the composer and Alarm member Matt Marks, and it’s clear he’s fully sorted out all the sonic layers of the piece. Using nothing but acoustic instruments, the arranger has notated an impressive range of gestures present on the original. And the group’s performance here is stunning—particularly when Alarm’s woodwind and string sections play a few opening licks in a way that successfully calls to mind some of the backward-masking effects of Lennon’s tape loops. Overall, the performance makes a persuasive argument on behalf of “Revolution 9” as a modernist composition, full stop.
From there, Alarm Will Sound present works dedicated to them by a cross-section of contemporary classical heavy hitters. Charles Wuorinen has a fearsome reputation as one of America’s craggiest atonalists, but his “Big Spinoff” has a riff-fueled energy that’s easy to love. Wolfgang Rihm’s “Will Sound” is designed as a test of the group’s collective nimbleness: the length of the phrases for various players seems to be continually expanding and contracting, with each part needing to click into the overall performance just right. (Naturally, the group never sounds tentative when playing this madly morphing music.) Augusta Read Thomas’ “Final Soliloquy of the Internal Paramour” superimposes two texts by Wallace Stevens over some active, songful writing for the ensemble. Group pianist John Orfe’s original work “Journeyman” has some rollicking elements that fit in with the overall program, but it’s not quite on the same level as the other recent pieces.
The final composition on the album is another transcription—this time of a piece that’s easier to categorize as belonging to the modernist classical idiom. Yet taking on Edgard Varèse’s “Poème Électronique” is perhaps an even tougher assignment than transcribing “Revolution 9.” The original is plenty musical, but also frequently delicate. On this recording, when Varese’s opening music is assigned to “traditional” instrumentation, there’s a harmonic richness at play that feels at odds with the composer’s more tinny-sounding design. (As the album’s liner notes accurately tell us, Varèse hoped this piece would reach the audience “unadulterated by ‘interpretation.’”)
Though even a performance like this one has its uses—since a question-raising take can help us define exactly how much contingency and revisionism we’re willing to accept from any re-staging of past experimental glories. As with most modern art museum shows, you can quibble with individual curatorial choices. But overall, Modernists makes for a strong show, mounted on behalf of a wing of classical music that isn’t always represented at your local chamber music hall.


The jazz saxophonist and bassist’s latest collaboration turns songs by the likes of Joni Mitchell, Judee Sill, and Sheryl Crow into freewheeling, ethereal explorations.

The Doober

About a quarter of the way into “Sweet Fire,” Sam Gendel interrupts himself with a raspy, scraping yelp. Moments before, he’d been skronking away on his C-melody saxophone, lobbing a torrent of notes into the spaces around Sam Wilkes’ bouncing bassline. Suddenly, his voice erupts, as though he’s been stung by a hornet or grabbed hold of a searing hot pan. It’s not a howl of pain, but a fleeting exorcism, the power of the jam compelling him to release the spirit. In true call-and-response jazz tradition, he puts the sax back to his lips and conjures a couple of equally coarse honks from the instrument before resuming his dexterous cascade.
That flash of primal joy succinctly conveys the feeling of discovery permeating The Doober, the third album in the Los Angeles experimental jazz duo’s Music for Saxofone and Bass Guitar series. As on their first two records, the pair culled these songs from live performances, editing out the audience but keeping the crackling energy intact. Studios allow artists to shape, overdub, and edit their way into an idea, but playing live is inherently raw; feeling the vibe of a room, communicating without speaking, and leaving space for chance are more immediate paths to transcendence. The Doober is another document of these musicians’ innate chemistry and trust, finding magic in the journey with no real destination in mind.
Many of these songs are covers—or at least they start that way. There’s nothing especially faithful about these versions; Gendel and Wilkes are more interested in spacious textural exploration. On “Rugged Road,” they extract the chorus melody from Judee Sill’s yearning psych-folk classic “There’s a Rugged Road” and turn it into a wriggling, cartoonish mass. As the intensity builds, Gendel and Wilkes somersault over each other, layers of sax and bass swirling into a Tasmanian Devil cloud before collapsing, grinning and exhausted. In their hands, Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” becomes a modal study, shifting around itself like a deconstructed Rubik’s Cube. As the minimal drum machine pattern gets more motorik, Wilkes locks his Fender P-Bass into a repetitive groove while Gendel builds a tower of looped drones. Each track on The Doober is a framed photo of outer space, presenting the infinite in a digestible container.
They’re not innovators of form here—jazz musicians have long treated entries in the canonical songbook as blueprints rather than maps. Gendel and Wilkes do it with a cheeky sense of abandon. Their choice of interpolations is sometimes absurd—who knew there was such an aching, rain-streaked jazz number at the heart of Sheryl Crow’s “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the opening theme for perhaps the worst James Bond movie? In the final minute and a half of “Ben Hur,” one of the album’s finest moments, the duo’s cover of Miklós Rózsa’s “Love Theme (From Ben Hur)” melts deliciously into Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” Gendel’s sax pooling around a bizarre clip-clop percussion loop. There’s a palpable glee to the album, an almost mischievous acknowledgment that any piece of music can become an invitation to greater freedom.


The singer-songwriter’s seventh record is a Memphis vision quest—an earnest, ambitious collection that touches on family, nostalgia, and mortality.

This Is a Photograph

There is a Memphis that exists only in song, where the 20th century never ended, and the mahogany heart of Boomer Americana still pounds. It’s a city where legends—Johnny Cash and Sun Records in the ’50s; Isaac Hayes and Stax in the ’60s; Jerry Lee Lewis, B.B. King, and many more—once lived, and might again, if only their footsteps, reverb, and room tone could be perfectly recreated. For musicians, in particular, it’s a kind of mecca: Paul Simon sang about Graceland with an old Sun-style “traveling rhythm” on his big, midlife record, which inspired him to finally go see the Mississippi Delta with his waking eyes. And then there was Marc Cohn, who parlayed a mad dash through Elvis’ estate and Al Green’s church into an anomalous 1991 hit, “Walking in Memphis.” It was crass, blatant musical tourism, but it was rousing on its own terms, and Cohn had the courage to plainly voice the question that haunts all who walk around the city’s hallowed grounds: “But do I really feel the way I feel?”
This Is a Photograph, the striking new album by Kevin Morby, is partly a document of his own Memphis vision quest. With respect to depth and quality, it’s much closer to Simon than Cohn: polished and sure, but full of heart and wild touches; broad in emotional scope, but pierced with thematic chutes and ladders; plush with period furnishings, but arranged in exciting, inviting ways. Morby sounds like Dan Bejar doing his most respectful Dylan, with that wily little wheeze. By infusing his artful folk-rock with the unfailingly pleasing sounds of vintage gospel and soul, Morby has made an ambitious record that proudly stands out in his sprawling catalog.
Morby begins This Is a Photograph by staring at a magnetic picture of his father, young and shirtless—“a window to the past,” as he sings. The driving guitar lick and brisk handclaps seem geared to grab listeners who might have brushed past the Kansas City journeyman’s half-dozen albums, well received but often inconspicuous by design, over the last decade. He had been drawn to the photo in the wake of a bad medical scare. When this jolt of mortality was followed by the new anxiety of the COVID-19 pandemic, Morby fled to Memphis, where life and afterlife seemed so closely entwined. Eventually, he would finish recording the song there with the imprimatur of collaborators from Stax and Sun.
While spending a few weeks in the historic Peabody Hotel, Morby visited multiple sites of American tragedy: the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; Graceland, where Elvis slowly died; and the exact bank of the Mississippi River where the water closed over Jeff Buckley. There, he recorded the lapping sound that divides the eerie electric blues of “Disappearing” from the prismatic, pellucid “A Coat of Butterflies.” A direct address to Buckley, “Butterflies” is ravishing as bright sprigs of harp and guitar, aromatic tendrils of saxophone, and singsong harmonies swirl in the pooling embrace of celebrated jazz drummer Makaya McCraven. It’s the perfect medium in which to suspend Morby’s supple phrasing, where sturdy end rhymes hold all manner of expressive pauses and leaps firmly in place.
McCraven’s is not the only name that jumps out; a fleet of string players, saxophonists, and more play beautifully throughout. Cassandra Jenkins sings on two songs, including “Rock Bottom,” a ’60s garage bon-bon topped with beach-rock bop-bops. Tim Heidecker and Alia Shawkat show up, laughing maniacally, and they aren’t even the most surprising credits on a record where the whistle of a tufted titmouse is listed in the liner notes. True, Morby’s devices can risk feeling too clever by half: In the closing “Goodbye to Goodtimes,” he makes the silly choice of adding parenthetical overdubs after a few lines, reciting the names of Otis Redding and Diane Lane to help illustrate his point. Even the most effective meta-musical touches have a you-see-what-I-did-there twinge, but the risks can also amplify an exquisite sincerity that pays for all.
That sincerity comes to the fore on “Bittersweet, TN,” a duet for banjo and solemn fiddle that derives its intimacy less from its lyrics than from their structure, with Morby and Erin Rae trading lines with growing eagerness, until they’re finishing each other’s sentences. And “Stop Before I Cry”—which seems like the flip side of the self-consciously louche “Five Easy Pieces,” with its “tears in the cum rag”—is the record’s hushed tour de force. The strings and horns breathe evenly, in contrast to the lunging trepidation of Morby’s couplets. “Katie, stop the song now,” he pleads. “Stop before I cry.” The music, of course, stops on cue, only to keep returning in new regalia, pizzicato runs and trilling flutes. These quiet, personal highlights make it clear that the record’s flashiest Memphis homages are also its most vestigial parts. This Is a Photograph succeeds not because of its nostalgic freight but in spite of it, and Morby’s dialogues with the living, not the dead, are when he speaks most clearly.


The Maryland crooner’s dreamy R&B portrays a world where sex is a game and there are no consequences for anything.

Fuck the World

There’s a lot of slow-groove R&B right now, most of which is destined to rack up streams on sleep-inducing playlists with names like “Vibes.” Brent Faiyaz is often lumped into this scene, but he doesn’t deserve to be. The 24-year-old won’t be found crawling on his knees begging for his ex back, or making sugary love songs for lifestyle-advertising mood boards or direct-to-Netflix rom-coms. If you listen to the dreamy soul of his new album Fuck the World long enough, it starts to sound like a horror story. In his world, sex is a game and there are no consequences for anything.
Faiyaz is at his best when he’s cold-hearted, like Future minus the bleak outlook. “Rehab (Winter in Paris)” is unsympathetic from the opening line: “I got too many hoes/But they ain’t you,” he sings warmly over neo-soul ready strings and finger snaps—so warmly, in fact, that you forget that he’s actually telling the girl he’s supposed to be in love with that he’s sleeping around. The stripped-down, self-produced “Fuck the World (Summer in London)” is similar, with countless bars that make him sound like a demon (“Your nigga caught us texting/You said ‘Baby don’t be mad you know how Brent is’”) or stand out for the wrong reasons (on the hook he calls himself a “walkin’ erection”). Both songs are minimal in their approach, but layered, with small tweaks—like his slowed vocals on “Fuck the World (Summer in London)”—that elevate it all.
It’s worth noting that Brent Faiyaz is a savant at caption-worthy one-liners—“I’d probably be dead if I was basic,” “If you ain’t nasty don’t at me.” But there’s more to Fuck the World than Faiyaz’s ability to provide content for fit pics. He’s remarkably consistent as a songwriter; the weakest point over 10 songs is “Soon Az I Get Home (Interlude),” mostly because of its brevity. On “Let Me Know” he shows off his sweet (and under-used) falsetto, adding a coating of earnest gloom: “Who can I love when they tell me I can’t love myself?/How in the hell, could I possibly love someone else?” he croons.
True to Fuck the World’s title, Faiyaz spends most of his time shrugging, and his looseness separates him from his more self-serious R&B peers. The ethereal “Clouded” is an exception. For a moment, he wonders about his legacy: “Is anybody gon’ remember me?/If I go tonight I doubt the world would change.” Then, the moment passes, and he instantly returns to his comfort zone: too much sex, destroying relationships that aren’t his, and breaking hearts without remorse.


The hardcore-inspired alt-rock of War on Women's second album is as blunt as reality. They're not so much raging against the machine as blazing through the air that keeps it alive.

War on Women: Capture the Flag

On March 20, a month after Parkland, a high school student in Great Mills, Md. fatally shot his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend, Jaelynn Willey. The same day, the Baltimore five-piece War On Women released “Lone Wolves,” the opening track of their second album, Capture the Flag. “They don’t care if you live/They don’t care if you die/It’s only ever been about control,” frontwoman Shawna Potter seethes. She has said the song is about gun control and “the terrorism of entitled, angry white men that isn’t called terrorism”; she almost called it “Pulse.” “Then the analysts wonder if he got enough hugs,” Potter sings, “Another cycle of ‘too early to mention guns.’”
If, at best, subversive ideas can sneak into popular culture like a Trojan horse—with radical thought encoded rather than didactically stated—then War On Women pay this no mind. Their eviscerating alt-rock never backs down from the supposed trappings of protest music. War On Women state the facts. They are self-righteous. They point fingers. Activism is prominently at the heart of their screeds against the systematic plagues of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism. The enemy is everywhere. War On Women prioritize taking it down.
Last summer, this uncompromising approach found War On Women thoroughly out-of-step at the roving mall-punk summit Warped Tour. In a groundbreaking move, they brought a booth to promote “Safer Spaces” and teach festival-goers about bystander intervention. “There’s actually very few people who do what War On Women do,” Kathleen Hanna said in an interview about the Capture the Flag song she lent vocals to, “YDTMHTL.” “We do such similar work in the world that I felt an immediate shorthand with them.”
Like Bikini Kill in the 1990s, War On Women are on a fearless mission to change their subculture. (Potter, like Hanna, is herself an activist: She founded the Baltimore chapter of Hollaback!, the anti-street harassment nonprofit.) But while War On Women self-identify as a hardcore band, they largely slick their edges here, thanks in no small part to co-producer J. Robbins of post-hardcore progenitors Jawbox. The effect is accessible but merciless, more AFI than G.L.O.S.S., or a less aesthetically-minded White Lung. Only a handful of War On Women’s new songs adopt the traditional markers of hardcore—aggression, d-beat rhythms, air-tight rage—though these are their best ones. Their fury makes topics like reproductive justice, racist monuments, and female genital mutilation sound as gnarled and unfriendly as they ought to: “You tie us up in red tape/It’s red because we’re soaking in blood,” Potter screams on “The Violence of Bureaucracy.” Potter once said that her dream lineup for Warped Tour would include Babes in Toyland, Brody Dalle, Hole, Against Me!, and Katy Perry—all a testament to War On Women’s brick-heavy and yet manicured feminist rock schema, dynamic and massive.
Potter measures her antagonizing shouts, metallic roars, and cool-headed singing through powerful lines like “Our existence is our resistance/And your fear of us is our ammunition.” The album’s title track pivots on a hurtling, thrilling refrain: “You wanna legislate it/But you can’t even name it!” Its shredded gang vocals are pure solidarity. This is the collective sound of people who have felt in the depths of their souls the non-negotiable need for abortion rights, the anxiety of a pregnancy test, how fucked it is to not be able to afford Plan B. The proverbial flag appears to be a symbol of everything patriarchy wants to strip away, just to wield power over you. Capture the Flag is the sound of brazenly, corporally, unrepentantly fighting back. Its peak comes among the mathy riffs and group screams of the Hanna-featuring “YDTMHTL.” The same way a mainstream band like Rage Against the Machine made it a visceral joy to chant “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” War On Women make it life-affirming to empty your lungs in the name of their pitched rallying cry: “YOU DON’T TELL ME HOW TO LIVE!!!” War On Women are not raging against the machine so much as blazing through the very water and air that keep capitalist heteropatriarchy alive.
Capture the Flag’s lyrics can at times be so on-the-nose as to recall the earliest waves of women’s-lib folk and pop in the 1970s: “I’ll never, never be a silent woman,” Potter sings on the mid-tempo “Silence Is the Gift.” The most literal songs don’t always land. Still, the bleakness of the Trump era has carved space for them. A song called “Predator in Chief,” in which Potter sings of punching Nazis and the hypocrisy of the flag, can right now feel patently heroic. It is hopeful to imagine a room popping off to the sound of Potter wailing “I’ll show you the meaning of fear” or “Fuck this fucking rapist.”
War On Women’s purpose is so clearly delineated on Capture the Flag that the band included a 16-page “companion workbook” with the album. The idea of making punk-adjacent music friendly to academia might seem antithetical to such an anti-authoritarian band, but the Capture the Flag workbook is remarkably illuminating. It (thankfully) does not set out to teach students about “punk,” but rather about the themes of the record, presenting lyrics, some context (Virginia Woolf and Audre Lorde are mentioned), and links to further reading. There is a series of incisive questions to accompany each song, with “Lone Wolves” suggesting the prompts: “How are misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia related?” “Connect the lyric ’too early to mention guns’ with a current article on the GOP reaction to gun violence,” and “How much money does the NRA donate to Republicans?” Whether in the form of homework, a festival performance, or this defiant album, the curriculum of War On Women ought to be widely assigned. We should arm teachers, and ourselves, with this.


Teeny Lieberson’s voice is chameleonic and firmly in command, capable of twisting into a demanding growl or ringing out like the horns that punctuate her band’s newest album. Backed by her sisters Lizzie and Katherine and bassist Boshra AlSaadi, it’s the fault line on top of which TEEN’s art rock dance party is built.

The Way & The Color

Were Teeny Lieberson the protagonist of a pulp novel, you could see the cover advertising her adventures with a slogan along the lines of: “Teeny name… big voice!” The literal namesake of TEEN doesn’t sound anything like her figurative one: Her voice is chameleonic and firmly in command, capable of twisting into a demanding growl or ringing out like the horns that often punctuate the band’s newest album, The Way and Color. It’s the fault line on top of which TEEN’s art rock dance party is built. When she rumbles, the band (comprised of sisters Lizzie and Katherine on keys and drums, and newcomer Boshra AlSaadi on bass) rumbles; when she’s calm, they ease into their open-hearted groove. It’s a powerful arrow to keep in their quiver, even if their aim isn’t always true.
The Way and Color is stuffed with chugging synthesizers, gristly bass lines, braying horns, and high harmonies layered into multi-movement suites that sometimes feel like they’ve been crafted out of the ashes of a handful of songs. Despite the commotion, there are a few songs that assemble into something thrilling. Teeny huffs and puffs and nearly collapses on “Rose 4 U” before pausing to patiently build a triumphant peroration, and while “Breathe Low & Deep”’s explicitly proggy take on R&B doesn’t snap as tightly as Dirty Projectors might, it still swells to a satisfyingly spacey outro. At the same time, the most memorable track, “Tied Up Tied Down”, is the shortest one (not counting the wispy and wholly unnecessary instrumental, “Voices”) and the most conceptually straightforward. Reviewing their debut album, Pitchfork’s Eric Harvey wrote that “a seasoned producer could strategically shave 20 minutes off the album while losing little." Here, they've at least improved to just 10 extraneous, probably cut-worthy minutes.
TEEN say they’re inspired by Erykah Badu and D’Angelo, and the songs on The Way and Color address a similar kind of sinewy, sometimes sinister sexuality where bodies don't quite know what to do with each other. But their attempt to slink around doesn’t carry the same comfort level; it sometimes sounds as though the band, while playing, is repeating a mantra of “Be cool, be cool” inside their heads, infusing everything with a level of stiffness. There’s a song called “Toi Toi Toi” that borrows its title from the opera, where “toi toi toi” is said in the same way as “break a leg.” The Liebersons come from opera stock: their late father, Peter Lieberson, was an acclaimed composer, and their late stepmother, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, was a well respected mezzo-soprano. They grew up in a musical household, and in interview have spoken about the performative quality that their parents encouraged, such as singing for people at dinner parties and acting out plays like Oklahoma!.
This background might explain their fearlessness in overpacking their songs with ideas, and you want to give them credit for ambition rather than playing it safe. And they are getting better, inch-by-inch, and if The Way and Color is not all the way there yet you can hear it as a promising document of a formative period.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a groundbreaking 1996 mix from Detroit techno icon Jeff Mills, a brazen and electric performance that enshrined his reputation as the most ambitious DJ in the world.

Jeff Mills: Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo

Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo

Getting onto the dancefloor of Liquidroom was always a mission. You first needed to venture to Kabukicho, the seedy edge of Shinjuku whose claustrophobic alleys and clutter of neon signage are what many think of when they picture Tokyo nightlife. From there, you’d line up around the block, trek a seven-floor staircase, pass security, elbow your way through the typically rammed 1000-cap venue, and hope whoever was playing that night was worth the cover charge. The club had hosted its fair share of notables by October 28th, 1995, but nothing on the scale of what went down that Saturday night. Because whether you were pressed against the stage or posted up at the bar, as soon as the clock struck 3 a.m. and Detroit’s Jeff Mills cued up his first record, you bore witness to the future.
Sixty-eight minutes and 38 songs chiseled out of that three-hour DJ set became Mills’ first commercially accessible mix, Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo. No real-time video of the performance exists, nor can you access the audio on any streaming service, but scan the comment sections under dozens of unofficial uploads or spend enough time in the danker corners of club smoking areas, and you’ll crash headlong into a wall of consensus that this is a mix without equal, the Techno Bible, unequivocally The One. You can ask ChatGPT right now what the greatest DJ mix of all time is, and it’ll hedge on the amorphous nature of subjectivity, then list Liquid Room top anyway.
Released in spring 1996, Liquid Room was a mix of such molten intensity that it warped the idea of what DJing could be. The received wisdom of how to construct a club set—one song after another; build-up, breakdown—was obliterated by this lean, striking man mixing like a Spirograph, executing a blur of hip-hop battle techniques over waves of crushing pressure. Records were piped in hot with phased doubles, scratches, stabs, rewinds, inverted frequencies, and hard stops, then torn from the platter without warning and discarded onto the floor, until you couldn’t be certain if this was dance music or a new frontier in free jazz.
A detail still broadly unknown is that Mills wasn’t even using his preferred setup of three turntables: In order to demo unreleased cuts within the mix, he was operating on two turntables and two reel-to-reel tape machines, which upped the difficulty level appreciably. It didn’t hurt that one of those quarter-inch tapes was built around a four-note call-and-response between a higher and lower rung of bells, a quirky splash of chiaroscuro in otherwise total darkness. Bouncing around like a hacky sack off the steel-capped toes of two established Midwest bangers, Mills’ “Life Cycle” and DJ Funk’s “Work That Body,” the track was listed only in the liner notes as “Untitled A.” We know it today as “The Bells,” a stone-cold anthem.
In the decades hence, a vast swathe of DJs and producers from the top of the commercial tree down to the roots of the underground have credited hearing this set or watching Jeff Mills play as their personal eureka moment. It would save time listing those who haven’t been influenced by him, his label Axis, and the collective he co-founded, Underground Resistance, whose infusion of self-sufficiency and martial messaging into electro and techno helped shape how listeners receive the ideology of Detroit and its music. Then, as now, Liquid Room stands as a high-water mark of a Black artform built around space travel and the necessity of forward motion: ’90s techno at its most unyielding and free.
And yet. At surface level, this thing is also… sort of a mess. Liquid Room may be taxing for anyone reared on the high-definition, blemish-free mixes that flood our digital feeds today. You don’t have to make it past the first song to detect crackle and damage in the audio. The third of the mix’s three segments has under seven minutes to build flow, which is shorter than most killer electronic songs. There’s sophistication and structural harmony in a Frank Gehry sort of way, but many of the transitions on Mills’ landmark set are fistfights, and the fidelity hovers a few steps north of garbage.
“What a DJ does with their hands,” Mills told Resident Advisor in 2019, “isn’t something you can expect to hear every time. It’s like sports… like you’re a tennis player, and your timing is really everything.” Well, Liquid Room is not the dignified sound of Mills gliding on clay. He’s in full McEnroe mode, battering aces down the middle of the court, showboating, snapping rackets, double-faulting constantly, propelled by a third lung—all while the crowd deliriously laps it up. Here’s the oracle, and he’s handling records so coarsely that it seems as if he’s close to losing control entirely.
Veteran electronic music journalist Michaelangelo Matos likes to compare Liquid Room to the Ramones’ debut, but I’d strike closer to home. This is techno’s Raw Power, both in essence and spirit. Don’t sweat the blown-out sound or odd loose passage among those daredevil moves; to chart Liquid Room’s influence, zoom out to observe the impact crater it left behind, ringed by onlookers who stood agog at the new possibilities available to them. It’s polarizing for a reason. It’s also brilliant for the same reason.
Jeff Mills’ reputation as a teenage DJ called The Wizard began in the early to mid-’80s, earning him club residencies in Detroit and neighboring Ann Arbor before he was old enough to legally enter the premises, as well as critical exposure on local stations WDRQ and WJLB. From 1982 to 1985, the latter was home to The Electrifyin’ Mojo, then-ruler of the airwaves and an exceptionally influential figure in the tapestry of the city’s late 20th-century musical evolutions. Competition sharpened Mills’ resolve. He would conjure slick open-format megamixes featuring several traits that later bubbled up on Liquid Room: lasered hyperfocus, an elite sprinter’s sense of pace, and the deployment of crowd-baiting feints and fades.
John Collins, Detroit techno historian and a core member of Underground Resistance, was knocked for six by the speed of Mills’ hands, which seemed to zip across the faders as if jammed on fast-forward. “No one had ever really done what he was doing,” he recalled to author Dan Sicko in Techno Rebels. “I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears.” Collins wasn’t the only one. In clippings from 1985, the Ann Arbor News spends three paragraphs trying to elucidate the specifics of how a 22-year-old Mills was turning Madonna’s “Into the Groove” inside-out, before waving the white flag: “No, it’s too hard to describe.”
That same year, the release of Model 500’s “No UFO’s” helped catalyze a new electronic movement called techno. The exact provenance of the style remains contested, given the blurry creative overlap with electro and synth-pop, and the techno- prefix was an existing descriptor for music built with or fascinated by advanced technology. But the techno pumping out of Detroit—anchored primarily, though not exclusively, by the Belleville Three of Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, and Juan Atkins (a.k.a. Model 500, as well as one-half of Cybotron)—was distinct enough to pull clear as a genre in its own right.
By the end of the ’80s, as hometown clubs like the Music Institute sharpened and expanded the sound’s remit, export compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit surfed a wave of British rave fantasia, and Saunderson’s group Inner City became a fixture on the European charts, techno was established. At this point, however, casual audiences still tended to regard it as more Midwest grooves fit for peak time. From the margins, Mills and “Mad” Mike Banks saw things differently. Here now was a fresh medium, one with an unprecedented opportunity to critique the fecklessness of urban blight and mass production that had scarred their predecessors. As a form of cybernetic communication born under Motor City’s smoke-choked skies, it spoke to the sci-fi fantasists on a deeper level. Big fun this was not.
Come 1990, The Wizard was off the air and applying his hand to production. Having already released one LP as part of the industrial outfit Final Cut, the cold austerity of techno was a natural progression. Banks, a former Parliament bassist who had appeared on Techno! and was constantly in hot water with local police for drag racing, was the perfect creative foil, but it took a chance studio meeting with Robert Hood, then MC Rob Noise, for Underground Resistance to be born. “HARD MUSIC FROM A HARD CITY” blared the back of 1992 compilation Revolution for Change, a winning mantra for the label whose sublimation of individual identity, cryptic dispatches from the front line of class war, steadfast refusal to bend to the major label system, and lashings of sonic punishment ignited multiple fires that burn within electronic music to this day.
An early expedition to NYC emphasized the gulf that had emerged between Detroit techno’s first and second wave. At the fabled Limelight club, one unnamed DJ attempted to block Mills from entering the booth until the offender was nearly hurled over a balcony by UR’s enforcer. Out on the street, UR’s matching attire turned the heads of Ice-T and Queen Latifah, who couldn’t discern if the group was a music movement or a militant one, and drew confrontation from local rap crews. (Fearsome they might have been, the label still wasn’t immune from making rookie judgment calls: In 1991, a submission tape arrived at UR HQ entitled Analogue Bubblebath, the very first Aphex Twin record. Mills and Banks passed.)
As the original trio would jet off to live performances in far-flung locations, Mills’ dexterity on the wheels of steel became a front-and-center draw. The baby-faced Wizard was evolving into the man whispered about at ever-increasing volume as the most skilled DJ on Earth, a transition ushered along by a pair of star-making club residencies at Limelight and Berlin’s Tresor. Soon, his shifting demeanor in interviews showed how heavily the responsibility of being an artist able to advance the form weighed on him. By the time Mills peeled off to found the Axis label at the end of ’92, he was on a collision course with destiny.
Prior to 1995, Mills had visited Tokyo two or three times. Japan’s appetite for techno was ravenous, and it’s clear the Detroiter felt kinship with local crowds, given that he agreed for his first official live mix to be a test balloon for Mix-Up, a new series from Sony Japan intended to capture the exponential growth of the club circuit. Until that point, Mills had appeared only on 1993’s Techno-Trance, a niche German tape pack, in which he shelled hard trance and was called “Geoff Mills” in a humiliating misprint on the packaging. It is not considered canon. Mills remains commendably abstemious when it comes to platforming his own work. He hasn’t recorded an installment of DJ-Kicks, nor a Fabric mix, and you won’t find him on Boiler Room (I was one of the bookers there for five years and Lord knows, we tried). Yet he did agree to Mix-Up, a series that ran for all of five editions and then was never heard from again.
Decision made, Liquidroom was sought as a staging ground for the recording. From opening in July 1994 to relocation a decade later, the original space became a favorite of wayfaring jocks like Laurent Garnier and DJ Shadow, as well as a regular host for beloved ’90s Japanese outfits including Melt-Banana, Boredoms’ Yamantaka EYE, and mercurial psychonauts Fishmans. “To say it looks futuristic is valid,” Mills wrote in Liquid Room’s liner notes, “but only if you have seen the future.”
On the big night, a dozen ambient mics were strategically placed around the venue with the intention of preserving a spatial topography of the club within the mix itself. Though this proved too complex to pull off, the idea was decades ahead of its time: In 2011, Four Tet’s FabricLive 59 took a similar approach to mimic the sensation of navigating the London superclub’s multi-level floorplan. Besides, there are moments on Mix-Up Vol. 2 Featuring Jeff Mills – Live Mix at Liquid Room, Tokyo (to cite the Japanese release’s full, and quickly truncated, name) where the audience responds with such deafening affirmation that only left and right in the stereo field was needed.
Taking apart the schematics of the mix reveals how brazenly Mills thumbed his nose at orthodoxy. Selections are afforded little time to settle as the speedometer flickers past the 150 bpm mark. During one showstopping move, Mills pumps the brakes and decelerates into an audibly worn copy of what was then Detroit electronic music’s de facto national anthem, “Strings of Life.” (Its standing has been complicated by the gravity of allegations that broke against the song’s co-creator Derrick May in 2020.) Despite a major tempo collapse, “Strings” is still pitched up as far as the Technics 1200s could handle without intervention. Where the mystique of 20th-century discotheque kings like David Mancuso, Danny Krivit, and Larry Levan was built on extension—either by getting hands-on with splicing tape in order to fashion boutique edits for the dancefloor, or letting the 12" run out in full splendor—here Mills revs in the opposite direction, fixated on dissolution, constantly asking: What’s the fastest I can get a song in and out while still unlocking its integral value?
Seventeen of Mills’ productions make up the backbone of Liquid Room, aired alongside key artists from the golden age of club music: Richie Hawtin, Robert Armani, Ken Ishii, Joey Beltram, Claude Young, and Surgeon. Yet some of Mills’ inclusions were still receiving tweaks mere hours before he caught his flight to Japan, with the crowd reception intended to guide their final form. In Segment 1, the overdriven bass and stacked sirens of an unmastered “i9” submerge the audio in tar thick enough that the crisp rave stabs from “Changes of Life” must scythe through it like a power hose. It worked a treat, so Mills knew the former was done.
Liquid Room also features so many instances of records getting spun backwards and forwards that you might assume there’s a zipper trapped under the needle. Not quite. Unlike club music derived from soundsystem culture—where wheeling up a record is an endorsement of the tune’s popularity and a way to spike energy levels, as much as the functional act of starting over—self-serious house and techno has long treated rewinds like muck tracked all over the floor of a polished blend; verboten except as a last resort. Liquid Room contains dozens of them, all dramatically on the money.
Two passages in particular leap out. First, head to the beginning of Segment 2 and try to picture exactly what’s going on. The Advent’s “Bad Boy,” already a livewire of a tune, is harried constantly from something off DJ Skull’s Met“L”gear EP; as both “Head Basher” and “The 187 Skillz” possess a near-identical growling synth at different speeds, no one can definitively agree which side is in play. Mills punches the faders up and down like a piston to stab in Skull during the fractional gap where the Advent ducks out, deploys a rewind for flair, and repeats the trick again. After six interventions, Mills resets DJ Skull on the platter, scribbles along the edge of the record to locate a different portion that might compliment “Bad Boy” post-breakdown, aligns an appropriate balance of high, mid, and low frequencies using only the left cup of his headphones cued to the mixer, relocks the tempo (the Advent has sped up during all this), then finally throws the channel up again and scratches “Head Basher” in for good, kickstarting another brawl-as-transition.
On a 2024 club-standard set of Pioneer CDJ-3000s with digitized, quantized, tagged, auto-looped, and scrollable audio files that have a visual waveform for good measure, this entire sequence might take a good DJ somewhere around four to five minutes. Mills achieves it on turntables in 97 seconds.
So that’s when things go right. Yet it’s the moments on Liquid Room when things go wrong that give the mix its aura of invincibility. Segment 3 kicks off with Mills phasing between two copies of his track “Casa,” but in a flash they’ve gone massively out of sync—you could drive a Freightliner through the gaps in the kick drums. The same song stumbles over itself like a drunk teenager for what feels like eternity, a disorienting whorl of competing tones that you simply do not hear in professional mixes.
Mills refuses to accept defeat. In a moment of violent perseverance, he starts attacking the trainwreck with frantic reloads, not so much correcting the beatmatch as folding the flub into his rhythmic toolbox, like a blacksmith striking the same iron over and over until it finally contorts into the required shape. Where any other DJ might cut their losses, Mills opts to ride the riptide, then leaves it in for the world to hear. The payoff is mesmeric.
Listening to Mills’ run from 1993’s Waveform Transmission Vol.1 through 1998’s Purpose Maker Compilation today can raise mixed feelings. They don’t, alas, make them like this anymore. Mills’ work helped to nudge techno beyond select early-adopter cities: turning the head of British junglists, directly inspiring the next wave of European stars like Paula Temple, Adam Beyer, and Joris Voorn, and spawning hardgroove, an offshoot of low-bollocks, high-impact rippers captained by Ben Sims, one of the few DJs credibly spoken about in the same breath as the Detroit greats. There’s a reason why an idiom like “Dublin’s Jeff Mills” or “the grimey Jeff Mills” translates without supporting context: His name is not only a reflection of a certain skillset, it’s synonymous with dynamism and quality.
Another word to describe Mills these days is dependable. Even in full flight, shredding the TR-909 or using three-deck acrobatics to coax a football field’s worth of dancers to the edge of ecstasy, control is key. Gung-ho chops and cuts have been supplanted by discrete feathering as Mills prioritizes stealthy exits that are “mainly subtracting sound away.” The same principle guides Liquid Room—ditch the inclination to ID each song and give yourself over to the product as a whole—yet his set progressions rarely accommodate hairpin turns anymore. He starts spacey, then it’s deep, then “The Bells,” then it’s euphoric, then it’s spacey again, then maybe a bonus 909 solo to cap the show. That’s the Jeff Mills Experience. The formula rocks. His reputation as the high deity of techno is staked on it.
For a mix that should have been rendered obsolete by decades of upgrades, Liquid Room’s influence sustains in part because it effortlessly bridges two opposing DJ disciplines: the cultivated depth of techno and the thrill of hammer-time maximalism. That chasm feels as wide as ever. Techno has been suffering an identity crisis for years—it has become simultaneously larger, whiter, and shallower. The big-room-ification of a once proud subculture has resulted in wan approximations of communal escape scaled up to jumbotron levels, then miniaturized to fit the screens in our hands. Equally, for a scene rooted in the shock of the new, there’s profound insecurity among the old guard about fresh blood entering the genre’s arteries. Mills has sat on the top line of an indiscriminately broad array of festivals, including many corporate ones, for longer than today's generation of clubbers have been alive—so whether young audiences currently feasting on devil-may-care DJing regard him as an icon of rave’s radical heyday remains to be seen.
But which is the Jeff Mills we actually want? The one heard on Liquid Room, a capital-A Artist in the mold of Miles Davis and Sun Ra, with acuity of vision and flaws too? Or the realpolitik Mills, dropping “The Bells” every show, still hoping techno might be a curative for social ills, playing the game as it lays? Uneasy collisions between the two—a hometown reaction to The Wizard’s comeback so frosty he retired the alias, or the baffling recurrence of crowds who lob projectiles at him when he’s not matching their expectations—suggest people are settling for the wrong option.
In a recent campaign for fashion house Jil Sander, Mills was asked to expound upon a theme, “mid-’90s optimism”—with the unspoken “that we’ve lost” echoing not far behind. There’s no glint of awe in our collective eye when DJing’s premier cosmologist collaborates with NASA. It’s just a thing that happens. The idea that technology could be inspiring or even fun anymore has dissipated. Accordingly, the notion that techno might be a pathway to revolution has lost resonance. So many arenas and aircraft hangars have passed in front of Mills’ eyes now that, by his own account, he sometimes zones out mid-performance and begins to dream, instead, of the stars. To some degree, he stands as an avatar for a future forestalled.
Yet I’d encourage you to listen to the mix and consider the opposite: that this is the work of an individual who believed so unreservedly in the possibilities of what lay beyond that they gave up their best years attempting to tear open that wormhole. At the root, Mills told author Hari Kunzru in 1998, his spin on techno has always been “about making people feel they’re in a time ahead of this present time. Like if you’re hearing someone speak in a language you don’t understand, or you’re in surroundings you’ve never seen before.” More than any DJ mix before or since, Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo makes a persuasive case for this music as an intercepted transmission from another realm, but the one commuting that message over a set of turntables isn’t a computer. It isn’t a chatbot, or an algorithm, or a self-learning system.
Machines can only take you so far, and what they explicitly cannot do is this. Because when the lights go up and the booth clears out, there stands only Jeff, human. And he’s playing the absolute shit out of those records.


DIIV's long-awaited follow-up to Oshin is not the radical break in style that Zachary Cole Smith had promised: While it's mostly about getting high and it sounds exactly like DIIV, it finds more interesting ways to do both of those things. Call it Requiem for a Dream-pop, dedicated to a gorgeous yet unglamorous portrayal of addiction.

Is the Is Are

When "Dopamine" dropped last year, it spent four minutes breaking nearly four years' worth of promises Zachary Cole Smith had made about DIIV’s sophomore album. There was no remnant of the San Francisco magic Smith hoped to conjure by working with Chet "J.R" White. It did not sound like Royal Trux and it definitely did not sound like Elliott Smith. It didn't signal that Smith would follow through on his proposed indictment of guitar-based music’s lack of originality and relevance. It was, however, the most sharply written DIIV song to date, making a promise Is the Is Are actually keeps: While it’s mostly about getting high and it sounds exactly like DIIV, it finds more interesting ways to do both of those things.
Though not the Tago Mago or Tusk-style double album Smith originally planned, Is the Is Are makes unusual demands for an indie rock record. With each of the five singles in its protracted rollout, DIIV confirmed they were making their proprietary sound deeper and more immersive. The revelation of a 17-song tracklist promised scatter and sprawl, like a hybrid of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and Disintegration. However, this is more in the spirit of Seventeen Seconds to Pornography:  gray, gloomy textures, depressive fatalism. And like those records, Is the Is Are doesn’t engage in fantasy or open up new worlds—it builds a nearly impenetrable wall around the self. Call it Requiem for a Dream-pop, dedicated to a gorgeous yet unglamorous portrayal of addiction.
DIIV's signature trick is conflating the treadmill momentum of habit with the false hope for escape, and this was about the only trick they had going on Oshin. Written and performed entirely by Smith with every instrument mixed evenly, Oshin relied on its cumulative effect, soft-selling its hooks. Whereas Oshin was meditative and static, "Dopamine" and "Under the Sun" are transportive and intricate, taking mid-song off-ramps to more interesting vistas. Even "(Fuck)" serves its purpose as an 17-second cleanse between the record’s murky midsection and its luminous final stretch. Now functioning as a road-tested, democratic band in the studio, every member of DIIV has to assert himself, and the slightest alteration to their usual sound brings out new features—a brief glimmer of piano cuts through an enveloping humidity on "Healthy Moon" similar to early R.E.M.; the jumped-up rhythm of "Valentine" is sourced from the Smiths while retaining DIIV’s clenched-teeth tension; Devin Perez’s melodic basslines function as a lead instrument and allows Smith and Andrew Bailey’s guitars to search out more interesting textures and harmonies.
An hour of this ensures there are times where DIIV threaten to become too in love with their own sound, particularly toward the middle. But beyond lending Is the Is Are a necessary heft to back Smith’s claims, these songs are convincing portrayals of checked-out living. We don’t get to find out much about the Roi and Grant to whom "Bent" and "Mire" are dedicated; DIIV’s obsessive tinkering turns everything outside of Smith into a hall of mirrors, false friends and true loves reflecting back on his own struggles. On "Bent (Roi's Song)," Smith sighs, "When it feels right, you just lost the fight," a deflated admission of defeat before "Dopamine" echoes the same sentiment with a false sense defiance. "Mire" repeats "I was blind but now I see" as an epiphany, and Smith immediately regrets awareness thereafter by meeting the "Incarnate Devil."
You can make legitimate guesses as to whom that song might be dedicated—scene guys in Brooklyn, drugs themselves, people once in his inner circle? Smith’s measure of quasi-celebrity might give him unfair advantage over his stylistic peers, but it’s an advantage all the same, so when his conversational lyrics feel insular, we at least know who’s having the conversation. Sky Ferreira contributes lead vocal on the exhaust-huffing "Blue Boredom," deadpanning sing-talk beat poetry that imagines the two as Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore rather than Kurt and Courtney. She’s just as present when DIIV allow themselves fleeting hope on the awestruck "Under the Sun" and resignation on the heartbreaking "Loose Ends"—"Does it feel watered down/ Do you feel older now?" appears in quotes on the lyrics sheet, implying it’s a talk between people stuck having the same conversation over and over again.
Immediately after "Loose Ends," Is the Is Are goes on the opposite of a victory lap, trudging toward its finish with no hint of optimism. Penultimate track "Dust" has been kicking around since 2013, and the lyric "I’m fucked to die in a world of shit" immediately jumped out of their practice space. I expected it to be a placeholder, a sentiment to be expressed more artfully at a later date—unlike his heroes, Smith doesn't allow for humor or irony. But the line remains on "Dust" and introduces a hint of nihilistic sarcasm that, along with its title, evokes an unintentional grunge-era classic: Alice in Chains’ Dirt, the most harrowing document of smack-addled myopia to ever sell five million copies, the scariest aspect of which was its narrator’s utter refusal to acknowledge outside help, let alone seek it. And immediately after "Dust," Smith spends Is the Is Are’s eerie closer warding off interventions with a hopeless mantra: "It’s no good, it’d be a waste of breath."
Even if DIIV turns its morose self-indulgence into a virtue, it’s unlikely to change the conversation amongst their detractors: those who see DIIV as an embodiment of everything insular and insufferable about Brooklyn indie rock will probably find that Smith is no more capable of filling his ambitions to be a true generational artist as he is one of his oversized T-shirts. But Smith’s willingness to open himself up to criticism by making statements—fashion, musical, or self-promoting—make discussions of DIIV more divisive and passionate than those surrounding similarly positioned bands like Wild Nothing, the War on Drugs, or Real Estate.
This aspect of DIIV aligns with songs like "Dopamine," "Dust," and "Waste of Breath," ensuring that Is the Is Are hits on a visceral, teenage level similar to that of the Cure or Smashing Pumpkins, bands who were also mercilessly mocked in their day by gatekeepers of cool as both social climbing posers and "stuck in the terminal malaise of adolescent existentialism." It’s the same immediacy that inspires thousands of high schoolers to rock Unknown Pleasures and Nirvana T-shirts as well, even if they might not understand their cultural impact. But they relate to the disillusion, doubt, and confusion of a compelling, controversial frontperson because those things never go out of style.


Five Years is an exhaustive 12-disc set covering a significant period in Bowie's development, from his proper debut through 1973's Pin Ups. Included among some classic albums are live sets, singles, and alternate mixes.

Five Years 1969-1973

"Not only is this the last show of the tour", David Bowie announced at London's Hammersmith Odeon on July 3, 1973 by way of introduction to "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide", "but it is the last show we will ever do." The recording of that nugget of rock history appears in this box collecting most of Bowie's music from the years of his ascent, so let's take him at his word for a moment.
Imagine that Five Years (allegedly the first of a series, though Bowie has always announced many more projects than he's released) was all the documentation there was of his musical career—that he'd entered the public sphere with his 1969 single "Space Oddity", retired from the stage after the Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane tour, and vanished to a Tibetan mountaintop following a loving salute to his roots, Pin Ups. He'd certainly be some kind of glam-rock legend, even more than his friend and rival Marc Bolan. He probably wouldn't have the enduring cultural cachet he commands in our world, but there would still be a fervent cult around his three great albums and three iffy-to-good ones, and even more interest in his live recordings and ephemera. To put it differently, Hedwig and the Angry Inch would be the same; LCD Soundsystem wouldn't.
In our world, though, Five Years is only a slice of a much longer curve. The earliest album in the box, 1969's David Bowie—a.k.a. Space Oddity, a.k.a. *Man of Words/Man of Music—*wasn't Bowie's recorded debut, or even his first self-titled album. (In fact, there could theoretically be a Five Years 1964-1968, tracing his evolution from rock 'n' roll wannabe to fussy vaudevillian, although it would mostly be kind of awful.) It was, however, a follow-up to his first successful single, a haunting novelty record about a lost astronaut that had been released a week and a half before the moon landing. The young singer/acoustic guitarist behind these songs obviously has a mountain of charisma, a gift for hooks, and a taste for the language of experimental science fiction, and not the faintest idea what to do with them most of the time. So he wears his influences on his sleeve ("Letter to Hermione" is intensely Tim Buckley-ish; "Memory of a Free Festival" is a hippie rewrite of "Hey Jude"), and constantly overreaches for dramatic effect.
As it turns out, what he really needed was a good hard rock'n'roll band. Bowie assembled a very short-lived group called the Hype with guitarist Mick Ronson and bassist Tony Visconti; by the time they recorded The Man Who Sold the World in April, 1970, they'd picked up drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey, and gone back to using their singer's name. The Man Who Sold the World is the dark horse of the Bowie catalog. There were no singles issued from it, and the title track didn't really become a standard until Nirvana covered it decades later. But toughening up the arrangements made Bowie's stagey warble vastly more effective, and a lot of his artistic risks paid off: the album's opener is a ferocious eight-minute metal sci-fi opus, "The Width of a Circle", with some of the most overtly homoerotic lyrics a pop musician had ever intoned ("He swallowed his pride and puckered his lips/ And showed me the leather belt 'round his hips").
The theme of shifting sexual identity became the core of Bowie's next album, 1971's scattered but splendid Hunky Dory: "Gotta make way for the Homo Superior," he squeals on the gay-bar singalong "Oh! You Pretty Things", simultaneously nodding to Nietzsche and to X-Men. He'd also made huge leaps as a songwriter, and his new songs demonstrated the breadth of his power: the epic Jacques Brel-gone-Dada torch song "Life on Mars?" is immediately followed by "Kooks", an adorable lullaby for his infant son. The band (with Trevor Bolder replacing Visconti on bass) mostly keeps its power in check—"Changes" is effectively Bowie explaining his aesthetic to fans of the Carpenters. Still, they cut loose on the album's most brilliant jewel, "Queen Bitch", a furiously rocking theatrical miniature (Bowie-the-character-actor has rarely chewed the scenery harder) that out-Velvet Undergrounds the Velvet Underground.
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars from 1972 was the record that made Bowie the star he'd been acting like for a while, although its reputation isn't quite the same as its reality. It was mostly recorded before Hunky Dory was released; it purports to be a concept album, but doesn't actually have a coherent concept. ("Starman", "Suffragette City" and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" were all late additions to its running order.) It is, nonetheless, a fantastic set of songs, overflowing with huge riffs and huger personae. "Five Years" opens the album with Bowie's grandest sci-fi apocalypse yet, Mick Ronson shreds his way to the guitar pantheon, and the band's flamboyant performance of "Starman" on Top of the Pops famously gave the next generation of British pop musicians a bunch of funny tingling sensations. The whole album, in fact, is as erotically charged as an orgone accumulator: Bowie was probably the only person who could have remained sexually ambiguous after declaring "I'm gay, and always have been."
Aladdin Sane, recorded while Bowie and the Spiders were touring their asses off in an attempt to get America to love them the way England already did, is effectively Ziggy Stardust II, a harder-rocking if less original variation on the hit album. There's a paranoid sci-fi scenario ("Panic in Detroit"), a blues-rock stomp ("The Jean Genie"), a bit of cabaret ("Time"), a blunt sex-and-drugs nightmare ("Cracked Actor"). The big difference is that where Ziggy ended with a vision of outreach to the front row ("Give me your hands, 'cause you're wonderful!"), Aladdin is all alienation and self-conscious artifice, parodic gestures of intimacy directed to the theater balcony. Bowie overenunciates his cover of the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together" to turn it into a caricature of a disinterested Casanova; his sneering rocker "Watch That Man" is a better evocation of the Stones themselves.
Then there's Pin Ups, a quick-and-sloppy covers album that's more interesting in theory than in practice. The repertoire is the songs he'd heard in London clubs when he'd been starting out as a professional musician (less than a decade earlier), and that had shaped his idea of rock: music by the Yardbirds, the Who, the Pretty Things, and the like. (In other words, not so much his idols as contemporaries who found their audience before he did.) But the original versions of every one of those songs are vastly better, because Bowie doesn't have much to say through any of them, and covers up for it through cruise-ship-entertainer oversinging. His art, in those days, was an art of persona, and songs like "Sorrow" and "See Emily Play" didn't have much to offer it. The band was falling apart, too: the Spiders' drummer Woody Woodmansey had been replaced by Aynsley Dunbar (a veteran of the same London scene), and Ronson and Bolder were gone by the next time Bowie recorded.
Bowie released six studio albums in the '69-'73 period, but Five Years is a 12-disc set. The Ziggy film soundtrack, a document of that allegedly final stage performance that was first released a decade later, appears in its expanded, two-disc 2003 form, complete with a 15-minute "The Width of a Circle" and unnecessary Jacques Brel and Velvet Underground covers (still no sign of the songs on which Jeff Beck played at that gig, though). Live Santa Monica '72, a radio broadcast that was bootlegged for decades and officially issued in 2008, is included here too. Ziggy Stardust itself appears in both its original mix and co-producer Ken Scott's 2003 remix, which is frankly not all that different.
The selling point here for Bowiephiles who probably have all of that stuff already is the two-disc Re:Call 1 (its title cheekily adapts the old RCA Records logo's typeface), a collection of material that only appeared on singles. Some of them are triflingly different mono mixes, but there are a few fascinating oddities: both the never-previously-reissued 1970 dud "Holy Holy" and the much sharper 1971 remake that nearly made it onto Ziggy Stardust, both the frequently-reissued 1972 killer "John, I'm Only Dancing" and the just-as-good 1973 remake that nearly made it onto Aladdin Sane, and a peculiar '71 single (released under the name The Arnold Corns) with larval versions of "Hang On to Yourself" and "Moonage Daydream", both of which were heavily rewritten for Ziggy. Still, Re:Call 1 is far from a complete collection of the officially issued recordings that Bowie made in the 1969-1973 era: there's no "Sweet Head" or "Lightning Frightening" or "Bombers", for instance, and it'd have been nice to include the version of "The Supermen" that he re-recorded in 1971 with the Spiders from Mars' classic lineup.
Five Years doesn't really reconsider or recontextualize Bowie's first classic period—that was more the job of EMI's Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane reissues a decade ago, and their 2009 Space Oddity reissue. (The book included with the new set features producers' notes from Tony Visconti and Ken Scott, contemporary reviews of the albums and the final Ziggy show, and reproductions of ads, but nothing especially revelatory.) It's just a collection of some superb records, and some less good ones, from an interesting era of a major artist. If those five years had been all we'd gotten of Bowie, this would be an essential artifact. But they weren't, and the wonders that followed them make the scope of this box seem both over-inclusive and incomplete.


Eleven Into Fifteen: a 130701 Compilation is a new anthology pulling unreleased work from 130701’s roster, celebrating not just the label but the hazily-defined genre of “post-classical.”

Various Artists: Eleven into Fifteen: a 130701 Compilation

The exact meaning of “post-classical” is inherently vague, but is generally suggested to encompass artists who experiment with sounds or structures typically associated with classical music. It's a fluid category: 20th century minimalists like Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass—and even rock-covering Kronos Quartet—would have once been considered post-classical, but many of today’s younger listeners would probably drop the prefix without thinking twice. Nowadays, the term means something different—a little more experimental, and a bit more likely to tease indie rock and popular music tropes. Coincidentally, many of its most well-known practitioners can be found on FatCat Records imprint 130701’s small but excellent roster. Listeners interested in “post-classical” might then look no further than Eleven Into Fifteen: a 130701 Compilation, a new anthology pulling unreleased work from the eleven artists 130701 has signed over its fifteen years of existence, celebrating not just the label but the hazily-defined genre itself.
There isn’t an obligatorily-included dud or clunker on Eleven into Fifteen; it’s a record full of highlights, a cohesive body of work. Unfamiliar listeners might assume it was all one artist, rather than a compilation. Though the eleven tracks follow a variety of the stylistic threads within post-classical—prepared piano lullabies, Rachel’s / Godspeed-esque rock/classical hybrids, experimental sounds—there’s a uniformity to tone and mood that provides testimony both to the talented ears of 130701’s A&R folks and the underlying theory of the genre itself.
Notable songs include Dustin O’Halloran’s delightful “Constreaux No. 2”, which meshes the prepared piano style of Hauschka (also found here) with sun-is-shining strings reminiscent of Rachel’s 1996 minimalist classic Music for Egon Schiele. O’Halloran, like many artists within the genre such as Jon Hopkins and Ólafur Arnalds, has become well known for his film work, having scored such films as Marie Antoinette, Breathe In, and this year’s upcoming *Lion. *It’s easy to imagine his track playing over a scene from a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film.
Set Fire to Flames’ ten-minute epic “barn levitate” carries some of the cacophonous urgency of Godspeed You! Black Emperor (with whom they share several members), while keeping one foot more firmly rooted in the classical. It doesn’t attempt to cover the same breadth of ground as their sister band, instead allowing a web of atonal strings to create an oddly comforting sort of meditative blanket for the listener. Resina’s “June” follows in this regard, but with a more classical sensibility in placing a beautifully mournful violin melody alongside the racing and impatient background.
If Godspeed were a type of post-rock, Sylvain Chauveau’s “N B” and newly signed 130701 artist Ian William Craig’s “Tender Fire” utilize guitars and noise in a way that feels like some kind of post-Post Rock, still toe-dipping in the paradigms of rock & pop music while being even further removed from genre norms. On “Bach Study,” Max Richter (author of last year’s eight hour-long “cradle song” Sleep) provides what might be the easiest way to explain post-classical to a noob—ostensibly a classical music construct, it's overlaid with a sheen of decaying noise that eats the song up until it fades away, leaving only a tinkling quasi-Satie piano in its place.
The record’s final and longest song, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s “They Being Dead Yet Speaketh,” is perhaps the closest thing to a traditional 20th century classical piece. A stately epic with pacing, composition and tone that remarkably echoes Brian Eno’s own 2016 foray into post-classical, The Ship, it’s a pleasantly languorous way to put a bow on 130701’s recent story. 130701 is curated and sequenced so well it might pass as a DJ mix; the fact that each track is previously unavailable makes it an unmissable release not just for fans of the label, but for music fans curious about unfamiliar compositional styles and the entire nebulous world of post-classical. Here’s to fifteen more years.


Will Anderson amplifies everyday heartbreak with towering shoegaze and supersized power-pop anthems that demand to be played loud.

Cartwheel

For most of its existence, shoegaze promised a glimpse of an alternate plane of existence, either in the womb, the afterlife, or the unconscious. You know, “dreamlike,” “heavenly,” “ethereal”—whatever assured transcendence from this mortal coil. Mere words melt into suggestive, non-verbal cues. The typical hierarchy of rock band instrumentation dissolves, the guitars and bass and drums surging as one utopian soundwave. The right effects bank can turn that piece of wood you used to strum “Wonderwall” into a jet engine or a swarm of comets. And though shoegaze has repeatedly rejuvenated itself by merging with digicore, black metal, emo, and even alt-country, perhaps the most impactful change for the genre over the past decade is its acceptance of life on life’s shittiest terms, emerging now from the cramped apartments and overworked laptops of the bummed-out and broke. Such as Will Anderson, the mid-30s mastermind behind Hotline TNT’s intoxicating second LP, Cartwheel, where an average guy’s everyday heartbreak is blown up into a Loveless for the lovelorn.
Though Anderson made his reputation in cosmopolitan Vancouver and Brooklyn, Cartwheel exposes his roots as a quintessential Midwestern indie rocker, born in Wisconsin and mo(u)lded by a non-musical stint in Minneapolis. Much of Cartwheel abides to the Copper Blue standard of redlining power-pop, impressing itself equally with sticky, circular melodies and concussive volumes. But when Hotline TNT tap the keg and hit the gas on “Out of Town,” Anderson throws a winking “baby girl” into the first line and channels his inner Paul Westerberg. “We had to betray the Bob Mould guidance one of these days and see how the other half lives,” he joked in a statement. To Hotline TNT, those Twin Cities indie rock icons aren’t just role models, they’re the authors of the commandments: Be striving but skeptical, passionate but never pretentious.
The Twin/Tone influence on Cartwheel is obvious, and so is its spirituality, drawing out the Midwestern tendency to manifest modesty as self-deprecation and/or self-sabotage. In the early aughts, Anderson made a non-SEO-friendly name for himself with the scuzzy noise-rock project Weed. Hotline TNT gave themselves a similarly hard time by withholding their debut Nineteen in Love from streaming and trying to generate momentum as a live act during the thick of the pandemic. It can’t be a coincidence that the Cartwheel cover art imagines a bootleg Charlie Brown T-shirt, because Anderson spends most of the album breaking his own heart in 10 words or less: “After the fall/I pretend it’s all my fault,” “Tell better lies/Unsatisfied/Maybe next time.” Lead single “I Thought You’d Change” is the most hopeful song on Cartwheel and, for that reason, also the saddest; after whiffing so many times, why would he expect anyone to change?
The recent reimagining of Tim, the Replacements’ infamously tinny major label debut, as their forever-denied blockbuster reanimates the questions that had vexed Anderson when signing to Jack White’s Third Man imprint: How can an underdog band flex its increased confidence and craft without sounding triumphant? The guitar tones on Cartwheel are indulgent, though never gaudy, reflecting the very specific priorities of someone who will happily survive another month with no bed frame because they really needed the latest Death by Audio pedal.
There are the requisite trick shots: Opener “Protocol” rises and grinds both coffee and teeth, its pristine chord progression soon drowned out by what sounds like at least three household appliances stirring to life; the queasy guitars on “Son in Law” are strung with bungee cords. But Cartwheel gets the most mileage out of blunt-force volume. Its digital clipping and deafening compression are load-bearing features that make the hugeness inextricable from its limitations: This is music for jailbreaking the volume limiter on a pair of headphones. “BMX” and “I Thought You’d Change” lean on melodic lead riffs that recall dozens of ’90s alt-rock hits without sounding like any in particular, yet Hotline TNT’s arena-rock dreams ensure that the cheap seats will feel like an underplay at a venue with no noise ordinance.
Though Cartwheel occasionally relents in tempo and density, it’s extremely loud at all volumes, a force multiplier for the saddest secrets of its source material—power-pop love songs in love with the concept of love as learned from other power-pop songs about the same thing. Anderson overdubs himself not to achieve harmony or catharsis, but to prove that misery loves any kind of company it can get. And whereas most shoegaze legends were shrouded in mystery, dehumanized by design, Hotline TNT supplements its music with NBA zines, Twitch streams, and cameos by Brooklyn comedians. No matter how far into the red Cartwheel pushes, there’s one sound that stands out: Anderson’s humble, everydude voice, somehow rising above the clouds of dirt and grime even at a mumble.


While walking a tightrope across a daring concept album, rapper Riz Ahmed offers compelling, unapologetic account of what it truly feels like to be brown and British in 2020.

The Long Goodbye

There’s always been a fire in the work of the British-Pakistani actor, musician, and activist Riz Ahmed. In 2006, the same year in which he made his film debut in critically acclaimed docu-drama The Road To Guantanamo, he ruffled feathers in the UK as Riz MC with “Post 9/11 Blues,” a satirical rap song so caustic that it was temporarily banned from radio. On “I Ain’t Being Racist But…,” the spoken-word monologue that closes out his 2016 mixtape Englistan, he lampoons the hateful shibboleths of white supremacism with savage fury. His rise to Hollywood stardom did little to dampen the flames, as he took on roles/played characters like the coldly manipulative Omar in 2010’s Four Lions to his Emmy-award winning performance as Nasir Khan, a Muslim man accused of murder in HBO’s The Night Of. But rarely has his rage been as incandescent and pointed as on his second album, The Long Goodbye, his first project under his full name.
The ambitious concept album reframes the UK’s relationship with British Asians as a “toxic and abusive” love affair that has reached its breaking point in the wake of Brexit and the rise of the far-right. On its face, equating the weight of colonial trauma with a fictional woman is a tough sell, and in less assured hands it could easily come off as insensitive. But it’s an inspired move for Ahmed, a rapper with a PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) degree from Oxford whose lyrics often read like they should come with footnotes. The break-up album format allows him to transform the political into the personal. The dispassionate, sanitizing gaze of academic history gives way to an intimate, heart-wrenching account of the human toll inflicted by the Empire on South Asia and its diaspora.
Opener “The Break Up (Shikwa)”—set to a melismatic qawwali vocal sample—sets the tone with a monologue that traces the trauma caused by centuries of conquest, colonialism, and exploitation. The East India Company becomes a “stray pale chick” named Britney who “came to trade” but then refused to leave. The British Raj’s brutal policies are recast as acts of violence (“Beat me red and blue ’til I knew right was white and not brown”), and Partition becomes a parting act of spite (“Carved a scar down my middle just to leave me stretched out”). Ahmed’s voice turns increasingly frantic as he comes home one day to find himself locked out, his dreams of a multicultural future replaced by the grim reality of homelessness. “Britney, if you break up with me I might just break up,” he pleads, his voice cracking. “This will either be the end of me or be the wake-up.”
That idea of finding oneself in a cultural “no man’s land” is a source of both anxiety and optimism throughout the record. The anxiety is self-explanatory, but the optimism comes from the possibility of staking claim to this middle ground between “us” and “them.” While Ahmed has played around with this idea of a “third culture” identity earlier, such as on Cashmere’s “Half Moghul Half Mowgli” (and much of Englistan), there’s a renewed sense of topical urgency here. “Toba Tek Singh” takes its name from a short story by celebrated Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, about the absurdity of waking up to find that your country is no longer your own. Its central protagonist is a Sikh inmate of a “lunatic asylum” in Lahore who is being sent to India post-Partition. But he refuses to choose between the two new countries, falling to the ground in the “no man’s land” between the borders. It’s a story about the trauma of displacement, of being unmoored from your home and identity. Ahmed’s interpretation shares that pain, though he tries to put on a brave face. “Stranded, I’ll make a stand in one place,” he raps on the final verse. “I’ll dig my heels in, so what’s my damn name?”
A similar blend of despair and bravado runs through “Fast Lava,” where Ahmed delivers rapid-fire verses over a fevered jungle beat hammered out of temple bells, chimtas (traditional musical tongs from South Asia), and a bone-rattling bass drum. “I spit my truth and it’s brown,” he declares, paying homage to his Pakistani heritage. “Can I Live” drops the history lessons in favor of a harrowing portrait of a community with its back against the wall. “Please just let me live for two minutes,” Ahmed sings, begging for a reprieve from the Islamophobia, the hate crimes, the exhausting pressures of being one of the Western world’s scariest bogeymen. But he already knows that it’s not going to happen. Lines like, “Hope my people don’t just end up as a memory,” and, “My people floating face down, sinking in sand,” land particularly hard, eerie echoes of the social media posts and news headlines emerging from New Delhi over the last few weeks, after Hindu nationalist mobs carried out a pogrom on Muslim communities in the Indian capital with the alleged complicity of the police.
This is heavy stuff, but Ahmed’s wry wit and laser-focused delivery ensures that it doesn’t feel overwrought. He may be heartbroken but he’s no victim. The tide turns on the second half of the album, as Ahmed progresses from anger and bargaining to acceptance. The task of carrying on the break-up metaphor falls on the shoulders of the surprisingly fun skits peppered through the album—phoned-in messages of relationship advice from brown and black luminaries including Mindy Kaling, Hassan Minhaj, and Mahershala Ali. Ahmed regains some of his swagger on tracks like “Mogambo” and “Deal With It,” having a little more fun as he takes barbs thrown at British Muslims and turns them into thorny badges of honor. It’s reminiscent of the comic villainy of his rap duo with Heems, Swet Shop Boys, though the humor here has a darker, more brittle edge.
That’s only natural, given everything that’s happened in the last four years. The early idealism of the #Resistance has curdled into bitterness and fatalism, the light at the end of the tunnel slips further and further away. Even the jokes have barbs now: “And my cock it just grow/When they kick us in the balls,” he raps on “Mogambo,” an iron fist wrapped in locker room banter. Swet Shop Boys producer Redinho’s production mirrors the anxiety—the shehnais, 808s, synth-sitars, and bhangra drums are now used to unsettle rather than uplift, stabbing and clashing bursts of sound to get your blood up. On the rare occasion that the record strays into more commercial territory, such as rhythm-and-bhangra cut “Any Day” (featuring a heavily Auto-Tuned Jay Sean), the attempt falls flat.
The Long Goodbye is a compelling, unapologetic account of what it feels like to be brown and British in 2020—Mo Salah and “random” searches, bhangra nights and mosque stabbings, “the spoils and the scars.” Ahmed is open to the idea of a rapprochement with his country, but now on his terms, not those dictated by the erstwhile Empire or its UKIP heirs. He’s tired of playing the good immigrant just to claim a piece of what he’s already owed. While the sentiment is enough to make the album worth listening to, Ahmed’s ability to weave experience and cultural touchstones into an affecting tale of heartache, loss, and redemption is something of a marvel. After all, in these years of Brexit, pogroms, and “build the wall,” who doesn’t feel a little estranged from their country right now?


Originally released in 1997, the German producer’s world of mythic drones and breakbeats is newly remastered and remains a blistering and confrontational touchstone of electronic music.

Christoph De Babalon: If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It

If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It

The timing couldn’t be better to reissue Christoph De Babalon’s brooding, groundbreaking album If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It. Ambient music is enjoying a widespread boom, dark drum ‘n’ bass has come back into vogue, and De Babalon’s record remains one of the few to successfully combine both styles. More than that, the German musician’s apocalyptic album is the perfect tonic for a moment in which the symbolic Doomsday Clock has literally ticked closer to midnight. The patron saint of gloom Thom Yorke has called it “the most menacing record I own.”
Some intimidating music becomes less so as it ages. Once-radical techniques become commonplace; every year, a new contender arrives with a sound that’s a little faster, a little louder, a little meaner. But De Babalon’s blistering breaks and mythic drones have maintained their power—perhaps, in part, because they were so crude and unusual to begin with. Sullen and misanthropic, his music refused to play anyone else’s game. Twenty-one years later, revisiting the album is like stumbling upon a remote island disconnected from the rest of the world.
If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It wasn’t necessarily an obvious fit for Digital Hardcore Records when it was originally released in 1997. Alec Empire, leader of the band Atari Teenage Riot, had launched the label in the mid-1990s as a platform for savage breakcore couched in punk-rock bluster and guerrilla chic. Early Digital Hardcore records were emblazoned with AK-47s and Uzis; Atari Teenage Riot’s aesthetic, mashing up thrash guitars with gabber drums and lots of shouted sloganeering (“Start the Riot!”; “Kids Are United!”; “Cyberpunks Are Dead!”), suggested a rave-era take on political punks Nation of Ulysses. De Babalon’s album, on the other hand, opens with “Opium,” a 15-and-a-half-minute swath of slowly cycling foghorn drones, church bells, and dubbed-out cries. It is at once terrifying and strangely comforting: druggy as its title, with a sub-bass buzz evocative of distant airplanes. There are surface similarities to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, released a few years prior, but where that record is blissfully eerie, “Opium” is filled with dread. To put it right up front like that was a bold move, a way of saying that punk hadn’t cornered the market on confrontation; slow, gelatinous sounds could also grab you by the lapels and shake the daylights out of you.
The ravers who stuck it out through “Opium” got their reward with the next track. With “Nostep,” we’re back to sounds steeped in the renegade parties where De Babalon cut his teeth. This is the meat of the record: banger after banger, a succession of face-punching breakbeats wrapped up in haywire synths and suffused in foggy wrongness. “Expressure” juggles impish acid squelch with rolling, blown-out snares and tabla. “What You Call a Life” is a kind of chopped-and-screwed jungle, with slowed-down breaks bristling like the hairs on a dog’s back. “Water,” the evil peak of the album’s first half, is a 188-BPM volley of exploding breaks over queasy drones reminiscent of avant-garde atonalist composers Xenakis or Ligeti; it sounds like a full-scale assault on the gates of hell.
Unlike most of the era’s jungle and drum ‘n’ bass, there’s very little funk beyond what’s hardwired into the sampled drums; remnants of dub reggae remain in the form of truncated bass blasts, but they might as well be fossilized footprints embedded in weathered stone. The low end, while voluminous, is mostly a trick of the mix, spreading out beneath rattling snares and cymbals like a shadow or a bloodstain. And unlike more dancefloor-oriented drum ‘n’ bass, these tracks don’t really develop much beyond their perfunctory intros and periodic breakdowns. They stretch from end to end like brick walls topped with broken glass. There is always more going on than the ear can discern; the amount of information packed into any given bar is almost overwhelming. Trying to pick out a given detail—the ice-pick clank of “Dead (Too),” or the banshee wails of “Water”—is like trying to read someone’s wristwatch as he drives his car into a wall.
De Babalon revisits the murky, beatless atmospheres of “Opium” twice more on the 77-minute album. “Brilliance” layers looped string samples in a shifting moiré that’s not unlike what Wolfgang Voigt was pursuing in his ambient GAS project around the same time. “High Life (Theme)” comes close to the bleak perfection of “Opium.” Slowed-down drones are looped, layered, and fed through gentle delay until they lap like black waves against the midnight shore. Subtle micro-tunings play tricks on the brain, creating new tones out of harmonic collisions. Here you can really hear the reissue’s improved sound, which is the handiwork of the celebrated Berlin mastering engineer Rashad Becker. Space has opened up; two dimensions have become three. But it’s still rough around the edges, lo-fi by design, jealously guarding its secrets beneath a faint patina of digital hiss. It goes on like that for 11 minutes, a lonely outpost of musique concrète, desolate as a ghost town, every bit as eerie as it sounded two decades ago. If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It proved unnecessarily wary: No one has ever made another record quite like this one.


Kindred spirits in the I-35 noise-rock scene share a split EP rooted in the ’90s underground; the normally pummeling Chat Pile indulge some surprisingly tuneful indie influences.

Nerver / Chat Pile: Brothers in Christ EP

Brothers in Christ EP

Chat Pile are shaping up to be landlocked American heavy music’s equivalent of indie film auteurs, nerdishly tweaking the conventions of various genres while maintaining their singularly warped perspective like a rictus grin. On their outstanding debut album, last year’s God’s Country, the Oklahoma City quartet updated sludgy Reagan-Bush noise rock with pseudonymous vocalist Raygun Busch’s grippingly theatrical excoriations of the meat industry, the unhoused crisis, and a purple McDonald’s spokesblob—plus basslines tuned so low they felt more edible than audible. Nearly as winning was the band’s take on alt-country, complete with wiseass lyrics name-checking Kid Rock albums, from last November’s soundtrack to an indie film in which Busch actually acts.
Brothers in Christ, a split EP with Kansas City kindred spirits Nerver, brandishes another set of influences from the late 20th-century American underground. “We’re leaning more into the indie-rock side of our taste a little bit,” Chat Pile’s bass player, known as Stin, told Grammy.com. Elsewhere, he specifically cited canonical bands Slint, Sonic Youth, and Guided by Voices, along with lesser-knowns Starfish, who recorded for Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey’s influential Trance Syndicate label. The EP is a worthy expansion of the greater Chat Pile universe: part loving tribute, part crate-digging adventure, all existentially fucked up.
The first of two Chat Pile songs on the set, “King,” channels the bleak absurdity of God’s Country into a perfectly 120 Minutes-worthy package. Quiet/loud dynamics, militaristic mid-tempo drums, and oily guitar tones that could stain a downtown apartment’s wall pay homage to their chosen milieu, as do Spiderland-like chiming harmonics, but the bass still squelches somewhere beneath human comprehension, and the song manages never to be predictable. By the time the band is chugging at full hair-raising force, Busch has hinted at day-drinking and book-reading—dangerous pastimes, both. He even manages to distill the questioning despair of God’s Country into shout-along non sequiturs: “What makes me alive?/What’s the meaning of this?” Go off, king.
Chat Pile’s other entry on Brothers in Christ, “Cut,” has a video that’s a grim, color-deprived snapshot of life between the coasts: flat land, leafless trees, dreary homes. Said to be inspired by Stephen King, the song itself is closer to Robert Eggers circa The Witch. All through its hyper-realistic recreation of so much “buzzes like a fridge” alt-rock churn that followed in the Pixies’ abstract wake lurks an unseen but palpable menace. Busch veers between conversational deadpan and hysterical pleading, frantically attempting to stave off something that he doesn’t want and alluding cryptically to “God’s voice.” Whatever may end up cutting him before the song ends, it goes deep.
The two songs by Nerver solidify the sense of a family affair within a community of curious obsessives. Not to be confused with the almost identically named NerVer—apparently a splinter project of “Cumbersome” post-grungers Seven Mary Three—the KC band traffics in bellowing, full-throttle pummel reminiscent of late-1990s bands like Unsane. They’ve released a couple of albums, most recently last year’s Cash, but to date they’re fairly obscure; they shared a fateful 2019 OKC warehouse bill with Chat Pile, and the two groups went on a mini-tour together in 2022. Lacking Chat Pile’s distinctively skewed lens, Nerver’s contributions here don’t break much ground that hasn’t been trodden by other bands that have put their own fine spins on ’90s noise rock over the decades, but they’re keen and bracing, a fittingly fervid appetizer to Chat Pile’s cracked main course. Who knows where the sound of Chat Pile’s in-the-works second album may end up, but for the health of their scene, a small-scale, friends-oriented record like Brothers in Christ feels like an important gesture.