Following the dissolution of the longstanding Boston power trio in 2020, Carl Shane reassembles the group as a quartet and pushes at the limits of its dense, cantankerous sound.

My Name Is Hell

Before flaming out in early 2020, Kal Marks shook Boston’s foundations from underground. The 2018 album Universal Care defined the noise-rock trio at its prickly peak; singer-guitarist Carl Shane embodied a proletariat everyman on the brink of collapse, his guttural yowl the sound of a man plunging into a visceral, violent panic. Following the dissolution of the longstanding power trio, the band’s tempestuous fifth album, My Name Is Hell, follows Shane with a newly cast quartet unfurling their dense, cantankerous sound with impudent bravado.
“This might be delusional, but I just feel more like a realist than a pessimist,” Shane told WBUR in 2018, challenging a notion that has loomed over the band since its inception in 2010. “I understand that, most likely, nothing good is going to happen, y’know?” My Name Is Hell vehemently defends this idea: “I know the wrath of God/Like the tracings of my own palms,” he cries on the crunchy trudge of “Ovation,” his voice gritty and hardened. It no longer registers as the Kal Marks of yore, the creature with its back against the wall. Where previous records feel bound by chains in a scrapyard, this album is feral and prowling, coursing with adrenaline.
Shane, now accompanied by Bethlehem Steel’s Christina Puerto on guitar, A Deer A Horse’s Dylan Teggart on drums, and bassist John Russell, used the new lineup to stretch out the group’s proportions, adding layers of ’90s-inspired guitar melodies and loose interplay to a trembling, rhythm-focused sound; the music buzzes with the most harmonic reciprocity his discography has ever seen. Turbulent opener “My Life Is a Freak Show” signals a shift similar to Swans and Harvey Milk following their first few strident releases. The days of wistful violence (Universal Care’s “Fuck That Guy”) are out; the goading curiosity of self and acceptance are in (“My life is a freak show/I got no place to go!”).
Peppy, punky songs like “The Future” and the anthemic “Everybody Hertz” feel more in keeping with former Kal Marks contemporaries like Pile and Krill, groups who fronted the Boston scene during their initial inception. But whereas Kal Marks once presented as the diffident underdog, proudly playing songs often without any tangible melody to grasp onto, the new iteration of the group allows itself more space to stretch out, making bold new harmonic choices as it does. “I’m bored again/I’ve never felt so alone,” Shane confesses on roomy album closer “Bored Again”; in a sparse, airy moment like this, we’re witness to a rare breath unadorned by anger or power, a striking instance of vulnerability that skips like a rock on a pond into lapping cymbal crashes and dual guitar leads.
At the crux of every Kal Marks release is a jaundiced study of humanity. Corporations, politicians, and organized religions are all predators of the working class, the unequivocal antagonists in every story Shane tells. My Name Is Hell is no different, but hearing his wits-end exasperation on the Jesus Lizard-esque “Debt”—“Debt! It’s growing higher, it consumes everything… Debt, you know my name!”—has considerably more juice coming from a tired 35-year-old than a tired 25-year-old. “Gone are the days I used to feel so free,” he blurts on “Shit Town,” a post-hardcore suburban anthem that doubles as one of the album’s most melodic offerings, his tone biting and cold.
My Name Is Hell is a chronicle of fortitude. “Won’t let Hell win,” Shane repeats on the album’s spongy title track, alluding to his closest encounter with his maker. For this band to be suffocated by working-class adulthood would be antithetical to its very purpose. Instead, Shane and company once again face the realities that plague them most. It’s this persistence, this bootstrapping style of trauma management, that cement Kal Marks as the stoic foremen of Boston’s post-hardcore movement.


Stevie Wonder’s early Motown career hit its peak on 1966’s Up-Tight, cementing his role as someone born to make music not only as a career but as a calling.

Up-Tight

Like the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard, Harlem’s Apollo Theater has its own “Walk of Fame” that displays the names of pioneering Black musicians. Stevie Wonder is one of them, his name carved into a plaque and embedded in the pavement in 2011, nearly 50 years after he first performed there. In 1961, then known as Little Stevie Wonder, he was one of the first child stars in the country to be signed to Motown. When he performed at the Apollo in December of 1962, it was clear that he was following in the footsteps of seasoned performers who had undertaken this necessary rite of passage.
By this time Wonder had already released two albums, A Tribute to Uncle Ray which was made up of Ray Charles compositions, and The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie, and toured across the country, entertaining segregated Black audiences as part of the “Motortown Revue.” Still, Wonder was so nervous during his Apollo debut that he dropped the bongos that he usually used to liven up the crowd in the middle of his performance. Wonder remembers Motown kingpin Berry Gordy chiding him for the fumble, but Wonder was unfazed. “Yeah, but I sang the song real good,” he replied back. It was a moment that proved that if he could keep the show going while on one of the most consequential stages in America, then maybe he could make a career from singing.
Four short years later, after dropping the “Little” from his name, Wonder released 1966’s Up-Tight.
At the time, Up-Tight was positioned as his last-chance album. There was fear among the executives at Motown that once Wonder’s voice matured in puberty, it would lose the crystal-clear clarity that had made him a phenom. It’s hard to fathom the idea that someone in their teens would find themselves fighting to stay relevant, but the music industry’s notoriety for wresting the life out of child stars to market their youth is unfortunately not new. Those who fail are left reeling with little money, and even less support, something Wonder would have observed in the rise and fall of Harlem-born singer Frankie Lymon, whose own transition from beloved child star to struggling adult performer highlighted the dark side of the business. Then just 15-years-old, Wonder had to make the album of his life, crafting recognizable hits and also the sound he hoped to create for the future.
The first track, “Love A Go Go,” is a swooping opener with a bounce and a step befitting a Hitsville release. The percussion and attention-seeking horns introduce the first notes and as the song continues it showcases Wonder as a master of space, able to envision how each instrument should perform as part of a group. There is a hint of hesitation in his vocals when he first comes in, almost as if he’s dipping his toes in uncertain waters, but by the second track, “Hold Me,” he’s confidently jamming aided by a pulsing percussion that builds and recedes at the right moments.
Popular session group The Andantes provide backing vocals on multiple album tracks, and on “I Want My Baby Back,” their harmonizing with Wonder is sublime. Co-written and produced by the dream team behind Motown’s assembly line of hits—Harvey Fuqua, Cornelius Grant, Norman Whitfield, and Eddie Kendricks—we hear Wonder’s notes almost crackling the vinyl, as if his collaborators just told him to let loose in the recording booth. Whitfield was one of the lead architects behind Motown’s distinct musical sensibility, writing songs for Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight and the Pips, along with the Temptations of which Kendricks was the co-founder. By collaborating with Wonder, this duo helped ensure that the album was in the vein of prior hits that had emerged from the label. In the young musician, they recognized and honed a skill and ear for melody that made him singular. They knew how to craft a successful tune, and their involvement showcased Motown’s vested interest in making sure Wonder had all he needed to make an album that would sail across the charts.
The album feeds off the youthfulness of Wonder’s fans. The title track was a meeting of the minds between Wonder and singer-songwriter Sylvia Moy, a key Motown player who convinced Berry Gordy to trust in Wonder’s changing vocals and shifting artistry. The bouncy “Teach Me Tonight” and “Nothing’s Too Good for My Baby” were clearly produced to seamlessly fit a Dreamgirls type of choreography–fast-moving, outstretched arms, swaying hips and flirty glances. and yet for all its exuberance and lightness, there is an unmistakable and potent introspection that emerges on the cover of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin in the Wind.”
With his mentor Clarence Paul next to him, Wonder delivered his first work directly addressing race and inequality, producing a song that carries a heart almost too heavy for a teenager. The song had made Bob Dylan a revered songwriter in mainstream America, and in a tradition evident since the emergence of negro spirituals, Black artists took a known body of work and augmented it with insight and feeling that transmitted the brutality they witnessed and the hopes they carried. During his early days, on breezy tracks like “Hey Harmonica Man” and his rendition of “Dream,” Wonder subtly projected an existence that mimicked a swinging pendulum, constantly moving between episodes of grief and snatches of happiness.
As a young adult, he talked about the experience of creating in a country that for years placed him center stage then asked him to leave through the back-door. His political messaging was subversive enough to confound writers, including the Black journalist Jack Slater, who wrote for the New York Times in 1975 that “Stevie is largely spiritual youth in search of love and purity, while [Bob] Dylan is the bristling bull‐detector and, ironically, the restless, teeth‐gnashing, bad‐ass nigger.” It’s a jarring dissonance that side-stepped Wonder’s Blackness because it was seemingly absent of rage. This was nine years after the release of Up-Tight and after albums such as Where I’m Coming From and Innervisions where tracks like “Heaven Help Us All,” and “He’s Misstra Know-It-All” saw Wonder singing for freedom and holding President Nixon to account.
On the “Blowin in the Wind” cover, he holds listeners with both the cadence of a preacher, and the spirit of a young man finding a way to articulate the experience of being Black—using a celebrated invocation of oppression to make personal an unacknowledged harshness. From his teen years, the artist understood his position as a Black person in America, and moved softly enough that his transgressive art was misconstrued. Yet the music never faltered.
To take a step back and look at the album is to see a community in practice and motion. Wonder’s mentors and collaborators, decades older than the 15 year-old who they had known since he was 11, all brought their very best to make sure the homegrown boy had all he needed to come out on top. He was protected and supported, and it’s likely one of the main reasons he was able to stay focused on his commitment to music while tilling the ground that would birth his still unmade classics. Up-Tight is his album built by a tough-loving community, and Wonder is the artist he is because of those who made room for him to explore, experiment, and soar.


The New Jersey rapper RetcH, or RetcHy P, began to gain traction on the indie rap circuit with his soul-chopping 2013 mixtape, Polo Sporting Goods. After doing time in county jail last year, he returns better than he’s ever been on Finesse the World, a sinister segue into his vivid underworld.

Finesse the World

On "Disclaimer", the mean-mugging opener to RetcH’s dark Finesse the World mixtape, the New Jersey rapper issues a series of warnings for listeners colored in with pop culture references: "This ain’t no Wale, this ain’t no Makonnen/ This junkie's dying in the stairwell ‘cause the dope is potent." It’s an abrupt introduction, a shoulder check that announces itself with its sudden sting, and it’s a fitting entrance for RetcH, who is best described as a menace. RetcH is a small-time drug dealer, a corner boy passing off product through closed-hand transactions on the block. Dealing opens doors to violent crime and petty larceny. There isn’t any of the chest beating bravado that helped mythologize drug impresarios like Reasonable Doubt-era Jay Z or (to an entirely different extent) Rick Ross. This isn’t glamorous. This is felony possession with intent to distribute. This is "selling smack and tucking bread with your granny." This isn’t Scarface, it’s Pusher.
RetcH, or RetcHy P, first began to gain traction on the indie rap circuit with his soul-chopping 2013 mixtape, Polo Sporting Goods, which was entirely produced by Thelonious Martin. The tape, and especially the brilliantly composed "Special Jim", which was endorsed by Earl Sweatshirt, showcased his colorful storytelling and his angling perspective. RetcH often takes a winding approach to writing that supplements dramatic scene-setting with lesser, more arresting details. He has a keen sense for exactly what makes his stories worth telling—the visceral nature in which he presents them—and he constantly frames his verses like he’s describing a first person shooter to a blind person. But many of the soul samples on Polo Sporting Goods weren’t equipped to fully utilize his skillset. After doing a bid in county last year, RetcHy P returns better than he’s ever been, in his element, on Finesse the World, a super sinister segue into his vivid underworld.
As a proud street urchin, RetcH is a poster boy for Keeping It Real, one who won’t hesitate to snuff a show-off for his jewelry just to laugh about it. On "Still With It", which employs the "fame hasn’t changed me" trope with a twist, he raps, "Still rock polo that I stole on me/ Still fuck up niggas that done told on me." He’s at his best when he unapologetically explores the murky depths of villainy. There were glimpses of it on Polo Sporting Goods, but, as the title implies, that tape had a focus on flair over felonies. With Finesse the World, RetcHy P fully embraces being a scoundrel. This is the darkest he’s ever been, and he rips through ominous productions from noted gloom casters A$AP P on the Boards, H.N.I.C., and Antwon Carrera. There are no moments of reprieve; this is a labyrinth of dark alleyways. Turning the corner just introduces more unscrupulous characters.
Things really heat up on Finesse the World when the beats warp into sonic distillations of evil and RetcH barrels through them with a snarl. On "Affiliation" he locks eyes with his foes, firing literal and figurative shots in all directions over a forbidding, distorted piano riff. He writes engrossing tales about small-time drug trafficking on "Cheap Work", which makes use of its rumbling bass and a wailing train horn sample. RetcH is at his most venomous on the title track over grim production from H.N.I.C., rapping phrases like "Ready to shoot the next thing that's breathing, nigga/ I'm fucking heated, a fucking heathen, policing demons" with real fury. The deeper he crawls inside the sparse, shadowy soundscapes, the better he raps. The tape does have a somewhat singular sound, but RetcH is most at home beneath a cloak of darkness.
Somehow, through all the snarling and terrorizing on Finesse the World, RetcHy P retains his knack for storytelling, penning street epics as captivating as they are chilling. He does some of his best writing on "Amedei Procelana", which finds him posing naked for a sketch artist and dealing during chem class. He does some of his best rapping on the A$AP P-produced "Round Here", where he raps in compact bursts, stressing syllables like he’s trying to rip them. When he spits, "Nigga you could get smoked eating jerked chicken/ In front of everybody and still won't be no witness," the juxtaposition of his phrasing with his cadence almost makes the act seem comical. There’s even a reunion with Thelonious Martin for "Bad Luck", which plays like a wicked outtake from the Polo Sporting Goods sessions. But he really puts it all together on Finesse the World’s most interesting cut, "Product of Da Block", layering an elastic riff with one of his most ferocious flows. He opens the song with a speech that condemns friendliness in rap: "When the fuck did everyone become so friendly… When you see me, don’t even approach me because I ain’t friendly." It only takes one listen for that same malice to become contagious.


The Brooklyn singer-songwriter makes being a loser sound lush with textured, self-deprecating songs that land like punchlines.

Katie Von Schleicher: A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night

On A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night, Katie von Schleicher is a luckless harlequin on a velvet stage, showcasing an array of indignities against a luxe backdrop of strings and woodwinds. She’s a clown; a loud talker making faux pas; a deadpan underdog. Like Harry Nilsson on A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, she makes being a loser sound lush, teetering between cheeky, aggressively charming pop and dreamy balladry.
The Brooklyn singer-songwriter’s latest album is more acerbic than 2017’s Shitty Hits and 2020’s Consummation, the pay-off, perhaps, of writing classes taken during a lean period without a booking agent or a plan. “Honestly my tight five needs work,” she confesses on opener “Montagnard People,” but the songs here delight like a series of clever, well-timed punchlines. Her candor makes her a protagonist worth rooting for. “When you’re mourning the past/You’ll remember your ass,” she sings, recalling lapsed advice to take nudes while she’s still young and hot. She snoozes the alarm under a heap of pillows and suffers from week-long migraines. “I wear becoming like a burlap sack,” she says on “Elixir.” Somewhere between Faye Webster and Eleanor Friedberger, von Schleicher delivers her sermon from inside a conversation pit, sunk deep while the hubbub transpires a few feet away.
The quips are the album’s most noticeable gems, and they shine all the more inside such atmospheric production. A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night is an excellent attestation to von Schleicher and collaborator Sam Griffin Owens’ direction: Every song sounds textured and multifaceted, with steady builds and decrescendos that juxtapose joy with the comedown. The arrangements—a menagerie of saxophones, clarinets, and violins with the jaunty bounce of guitar chords—walk a tightrope between the schmaltz of a Herb Alpert record and the evocative swell of Brenda Lee’s “Emotions.” It succeeds as party music, the kind that starts jubilantly and lapses into wine-drunk silence. Although occasionally, like on “Bottle It,” von Schleicher slows down the tempo and risks killing the buzz.
The album is not all joyless rides and parties, surfacing raw anxieties about failure and being left behind. But it finds solace in revelry: “Tonight I’m a dancer/I wanna feel alright/There are a million worries, I know,” she sings on “Elixir.” If time and existentialism comes for us all, the best we can ask for is a picture of our ass at 25 and a pop song on the radio while we languish on a California highway. A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night gilds indignity with glamor, a winsome paean to shiftlessness and melancholy.


On his latest, the Long Island MC exults in the kingdom he’s created within underground rap.

Mt. Marci

Roc Marciano knows his influence looms large over rap and is tired of waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. He’s said as much in interviews and in bars: “What good is the credit if you can’t get it while you alive?,” he growls on “Tom Chambers,” a song from his last studio album Marcielago. Released in 2019, Marcielago is the closest the New York rapper-producer has come to explicitly staking a claim to his legacy on record. The impact of his minimalist production style and surrealist pimp chronicles was an open secret within the modern hip-hop underground and between power players like JAY-Z and ?uestlove alike for years. His foundational 2010 solo debut Marcberg celebrated its 10th anniversary this past May and, following Marcielago’s chest-thumping, long overdue flowers were delivered.
Marciano’s own faith in the value of his art is well-documented. He’s been selling his albums at premium prices through his website since 2017’s Rosebudd’s Revenge, circumventing streaming services for at least two weeks at a time to reap what he sees fit. Mt. Marci, his tenth studio album, is no exception. If Marcielago was the Thanos snap on his decade of underground hip-hop innovation, then Mt. Marci is him celebrating the fruits of his labor the best way he knows how: by putting his head down and continuing to churn out colorful wordplay over finely chopped loops.
Many of the album’s beats sound as though they've been ripped from the deleted scenes of a Melvin Van Peebles film, with Marciano as its slant rhyme-spitting antihero. “Where I’m from, hammers ring/Can’t be mishandling things/I’m not a square but yeah, my hands is clean,” he says on “Baby Powder.” On “Pimps Don’t Wear Rabbits,” he manages to take something as simple as putting on jewelry and make it sound superhuman: “My diamond chain’s a climate changer/I’m playin’ with weather.” The worlds he creates are rich with mise en scene.
Marciano’s humor is underrated. Rap thrives on hyperbole, and while many rappers sell their otherworldly tales with their chests puffed out, Marciano moves in the exact opposite direction. His deadpan delivery makes his metaphors even funnier, like a mob boss stumbling into an open mic night at a comedy club. He doesn’t just cook cocaine well, he came up “scraping the bowl like an eight-year-old.” His sex is so wild it’s only comparable to the GS Boyz’ Stanky Legg dance. He claims his haters play his music in secret like they’re watching porn. Because he never alters the grain of his voice, his jokes slide by without losing the feel of the ceramic bowl or the glow of a computer screen in the dark.
As funny as Marciano can be, his world is still largely a grim one. The close calls and brief flashes of life that dot his songs—images of an addict smoking out of a Country Time lemonade can, glimpses of a father who was “a wino but he was fly tho”—balance his cartoonish eye for detail with pathos. “Two diamond crucifixes I wore for all the times that I’ve been double-crossed,” he remembers over the elegant piano keys of the absurdly titled “Steel Vagina.” Moments like these illuminate the person underneath the white fur and cream-colored suede Yeezys.
Whatever mood Marciano is trying to convey across Mt. Marci, the beats help steady his directorial lens. Per usual, Marciano handles the bulk of the album’s production, crafting all but one-and-a-half of the album’s 16 songs (“Downtown 81” was made by Seattle polymath Jake One and the first half of “Baby Powder” was made by Pro Era stalwart Chuck Strangers). Songs like “Wheat 40s” and “Steel Vagina” are vintage Marci, driven by pristine, barely embellished loops that glimmer with chandelier luster.
As tight as he is within his comfort zone, Marciano experiments to great results. He’s largely abandoned his trademark lack of percussion, with the majority of the songs featuring drums of some sort. “Covid Cough” turns a guitar wail and off-kilter drum patterning into the wonkiest beat he’s ever created, accented by a fiery ScHoolboy Q verse (“I got nothin’ to prove/I sold 20, made 20, I’m in the shadow of who?”) "Wicked Days" is an eerie mass of blips and hums more reflective of Flying Lotus and Death Grips than the grainy mid-’90s aesthetic he usually prefers. Somehow, with little musical direction, Marciano corrals these sounds with nothing but his mid-tempo rasp.
Much like genre-defining artists before him such as stylistic forebear (and album guest) Kool Keith, Roc Marciano lives in his own world; we just visit him there.  His claims of mastery over his lane of hip-hop are bolstered by the quality of his songs. His sound is bombastic yet refined, a delicate balancing act inspiring artists both large (Earl Sweatshirt, A$AP Yams) and small (Ka, Stove God Cook$). He’s worked hard over the last decade, and he’s feeling slightly more appreciated for it: “I ran it up without a loan/I guess you could say I’ve come into my own,” he says on the title track. Mt. Marci is a proclamation from a throne of his own creation.

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The Mexican-American singer-songwriter harnesses the musical echoes of their ancestors into a gorgeous, dreamlike memory palace.

Lucha

The earliest recordings that Luz Elena Mendoza Ramos made under the name Y La Bamba were stark and immediate by design. The songs on their 2008 debut Alida St. felt captured, not recorded—as if Ramos had grabbed a guitar in a rush before tuning it, balancing a laptop awkwardly on a living room chair so they could hit “record.” The songs in question, and the ecstatic way Ramos’ pleading voice wrapped around them, seemed to be the point; the recordings are just artifacts. Listening to them felt like listening in.
With 2019’s Mujeres, their music began expanding in all directions. Suddenly, the music happened around you, no longer a sound in a room but the room itself, one you could wander around in. Not coincidentally, this was also when Ramos began taking over production duties. They’ve spoken candidly about struggling with impostor syndrome in the studio, but the evidence of their vision is obvious: No one else would have intuited the dimensions, layers, or shadows they find in this music except its creator. It’s rare for a project to discover its full potential 15 years onward, but that seems to be exactly what’s happened with Y La Bamba.
On Lucha, Ramos worked with engineers and producers Coco Hernán Godas and Ryan Neil Oxford to shape their music into a memory palace. The samples resemble hand percussion, and the live congas sound looped. On “Dibujos,” a flute and piccolo are taffy-pulled until they mimic an analog synthesizer, while a high whine on “Collapse” emerges from either a Farfisa organ or a guitar. Their music has never quite sounded this silky, enveloping, or unreal, with familiar sounds consistently warping into unfamiliar shapes. When they invite their old companion Devendra Banhart to join on “Hues,” he sounds utterly submerged inside their world—a wide-eyed Dorothy wandering through Ramos’ self-constructed Oz.
Ramos’ clarion voice, which used to emerge from their songs like a cloud of birds bursting from tree branches, is masked and treated in intriguing ways, so that they often seem to be murmuring from the corner of the mix. This style heightens the sense that Ramos’ music exists in conversation with what they have called “the echoes of my ancestors.” The Spanish lyrics to “Nunca” come from a heartrendingly simple poem written by their mother, expressing the pure desire to protect them from evil and harm. Even if you don’t speak the language, the familial warmth is unmistakable. The cover of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” has a childhood-memory sense of unreality to it, with pianos and horns curling in the background like a sun-warmed Polaroid.
At the center of this shifting world sits Ramos, a clear-eyed presence whose aching voice is the waveform that steers the music through all of its choppy waters. In the pleading catches of their phrasing, you can hear the music their parents loved—mariachi, corridos, rancheras, música azteca—coursing under the surface. In a recent interview, Ramos talked of their transfixion with mariachi singers when they were young, performers whose voices transmitted emotion purely and simply, as if they were pulling a row of colored scarves from their throats. Singing was a given in their family, as natural as the shift between Spanish and English that happens in Ramos’ songwriting, and in their dreams. “How can you not sing?” Ramos asked, their eyes wide and bewildered.


The prismatic, outstanding new album from the Brooklyn singer-songwriter moves gracefully through jazz, R&B, soul, and reggae. It’s a searching and specific exploration of connection, pain, and desire.

Remember Your North Star

On Remember Your North Star, the resplendent new album from the Brooklyn singer-songwriter Yaya Bey, scenes of heartache and joy are both glimpsed through a prismatic lens. Bey’s blend of R&B, soul, and jazz is bound together by the specificity of her lyrics, which recount conversational stories of sex and breakups and lend vivid color to her music. Following her breakthrough Madison Tapes LP and introspective The Things I Can’t Take With Me EP, Bey has crystallized her sound into one of the most dazzling albums of the year. The multifaceted music of Remember Your North Star lingers with somatic force, depicting the collision of thoughts, troubles, and desires of a Black woman searching for connection. It’s a powerful statement of purpose that resists easy answers, instead swirling through Bey’s mind as she looks for them herself.
Bey has described Remember Your North Star as a “thesis,” a way to center Black womanhood while working through the misogynoir that occurs in their romantic relationships. “I saw a tweet that said, ‘Black women have never seen healthy love or have been loved in a healthy way,’” she said in a statement. “That’s a deep wound for us. Then I started to think about our responses to that as Black women.” In practice, those ideas manifest in expressionistic songs largely produced by Bey herself that consider the traumas inflicted by misogyny, often by drawing on her own experiences of depression and familial turmoil. Moving through jazz, R&B, soul, and reggae with a dancer’s careful sense of balance, Remember Your North Star’s themes are rooted in the desire to be loved and wanted, with rich, detailed traces of autobiography folded in throughout.
Bey has worked within ideological frameworks before—2016’s The Many Alter-Egos of Trill’eta Brown explored similar ideas, inspired partially by Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography, a style that merges history, biography, and myth. Remember Your North Star refines that conscientiousness into a sharpened blade. “I am the daughter of a girl/Who could go missing/For seven years/Thirty-one years/And the world wouldn’t skip a beat,” she opens in a scratchy vocal filter on the spoken-word interlude “i’m certain she’s there,” an ode to her mother, landing an instant gut punch on generational trauma. Bey also revisits the soul-crushing grind of working a nine-to-five that she scrutinized on Madison Tapes, picking apart capitalism’s sway over her circumstances. “Ain’t nobody tell me it’d be like this,” she sings in a lilting flow on the mellow “nobody knows,” going on to pin down a recognizable frame of mind for millennials across the country: “I done worked my whole life and I still ain’t rich.”
Bey’s focus on the past adds depth and context to Remember Your North Star’s stories about the relationships in her life today. Vacillating between come-ons and teardowns, her stances are always moving. On the woozy “don’t fucking call me,” as she ruminates on post-breakup loneliness in an airy upper register, she describes a toughened sense of adoration for a challenging lover: “Love you like cooked food, baby, you’s a meal,” her pitch-shifted voice chants, “Only cost a few gray hairs/That’s a steal.” She constantly shifts into different modes of lyrical and vocal expression, each one more poetic and surprising than the last. “keisha” is a masterclass in melody, adopting the swagger of R&B’s greatest shit-talkers while retaining Bey’s coolheaded style. The song’s washed-out guitar melody and drums open up into a sunny beat for the instantly memorable, sprightly chorus: “The pussy so, so good and you still don’t love me,” she sings, braiding confidence and vulnerability into one.
The oscillation between moods reflects Bey’s mind, jumping from one thought to the next as quickly as she changes flows. Even the album’s sparer elements—a looseness of form and structure, the textural and lo-fi production on songs like “street fighter blues” and the dubby “meet me in brooklyn”—are in service of amplifying her words. Bey's approach to creating a thesis is freeform and conversational; she doesn’t hand you a roadmap, instead establishing a mutual trust that her listeners will understand her more deeply than that.
For all of the hardships and complexities she’s working through, Bey also knows there’s no pain without joy. The album expands her scope toward more upbeat production, turning Remember Your North Star into an engaging, shapeshifting listen that places it among other recent R&B albums that pull from neo-soul and hip-hop for experimental spare parts. “Pour Up” takes her to the dancefloor, where she and Washington, D.C. producer DJ Nativesun envision a hedonistic night out with a thick bassline and a thudding beat. She sounds as natural in a raucous setting as she does on the smoky standout “alright,” where her tempestuous modulations attain a dreamy weightlessness. Here, her message snaps into focus, creating a mantra-like salve over breezy, rolling percussion and keys. “Don’t it feel like love is on the way?” Bey ponders, turning the question into a passionate affirmation for Black women in every walk of life. Remember Your North Star assures that working through messy emotions and behaviors—whether inherited or learned—is integral to receiving and giving love. With her deft voice and casual rhythms, Bey makes the process sound freeing.


The Cutting Edge gathers music Dylan recorded over 14 months for the albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. These two years are Dylan at his wildest: Later on, he'd have discipline, but this is what he sounded like when he was free.

Bob Dylan: The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Volume 12

After 2013's Another Self Portrait, and given the continued brilliance of Dylan's bootleg series in general, you start to get the idea that Bob Dylan has alternate versions of damn near every album in his career in the hopper. The Cutting Edge, gathering music Dylan recorded over 14 months in 1965 and 1966, for the albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, does not dispel this notion. The set exists in several editions (2xCD highlights, ultra-limited 18xCD complete, and this set, the deluxe 6xCD edition) and could conceivably be mined to assemble two or three alternate versions of each of those three albums.
Pick a random deep cut like Highway 61's "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry", and it appears here in four versions, three of them complete. The five versions of Blonde on Blonde's "Visions of Johanna" total 33 minutes. No fewer than 20 of the tracks are given over to "Like a Rolling Stone", including the various rehearsals, alternate versions, false starts, and tracks highlighting the stems containing individual instruments from the master take. So The Cutting Edge is the last word on obsessive studio documentation designed for rabid superfans. But it also happens to contain an almost unbelievable amount of great music that, broken into more digestible portions, any Bob Dylan fan can appreciate.
During the period covered by this compilation—the transitional, acoustic-leaning folk-rock of Bringing It All Back Home, the gnarled blues-rock of Highway 61, and the Americana fusion of Blonde on Blonde, enabled by producer Bob Johnston and his Nashville session pros—Dylan recorded in a way that has become rare in the era of unlimited tracks and non-destructive editing: He got a band of musicians in a room and recorded live. In a 1985 interview with Bill Flanagan (who also happens to contribute an essay to this set), Dylan claimed, "I don't think I knew you could do an overdub until 1978."
That approach partially explains why this massive trove exists in the first place. With the recent Led Zeppelin reissue sets, we were left mostly with early and alternate mixes as bonuses because the masters were carefully constructed in the studio from fragments. With Bruce Springsteen's ongoing archival series, he's been liberal about recording new instruments and even vocals in the present day to fill in blanks. But Dylan's alternate versions could more accurately be called alternate performances, meaning each one is unique. And given the way he refined and re-worked songs during this period—trying them with just voice and acoustic, adding a full band, changing tempos, time signatures, and lyrics—the different versions can be sharply different in mood and effect.
"She's Your Lover Now", a song recorded during the Blonde on Blonde sessions but not included on that album, is a good case study in what makes this set fascinating. It wasn't included because Dylan was never able to record it properly—it's a complicated song, with some unusual changes and held notes, and he and his band were never able to get through it without mistakes. Eventually Dylan grew frustrated and moved on. But it's easily one of the best songs Dylan had written to that point, meaning it's one of the best songs he's ever written period, an alternately hilarious and pained story of a guy, his ex-girlfriend, and her new boyfriend encountering each other at a party. The title refrain basically amounts to Dylan saying "You deal with it—she's your problem now," and his disdain for the new guy reinforces how much it still hurts, and how he thinks this dude isn't anywhere nearly enough for her ("And you—just what do you do anyway?"). Songs this rich were coming fast and hard for Dylan during this period, and "She's Your Lover Now" is so powerful it's almost a shock to the system when it breaks down after six minutes, a bum note and everyone stops playing, and you are reminded that they were living inside this song and the famously oblique "wild mercury sound" Dylan hoped to conjure at the exact same moment.
One of the main points of Greil Marcus' book on "Like a Rolling Stone" is that the song could have been many things, but what it was owed a lot to chance. Dylan recorded it many times but one take turned out to be the take, and the slight variations in phrasing altered how it was heard forevermore. That quality, of all the possible worlds these new versions suggest, animates the set. What if "Like a Rolling Stone" had been a slow waltz? What if "Leopard-Skin-Pillbox-Hat" was filled with goofy sound effects? What if "Mr. Tambourine Man" had been released in its full band version? (The recording of the latter ends hilariously when Dylan cuts it short and says "The drumming is driving me mad! I'm going out of my brain.") Some of the differences were subtle and some weren't, but the way this music has been pored over in the years since, none are insignificant.
These two years are Dylan at his wildest. He revolutionized popular music lyrics during this period, bringing in surrealism and romanticism as channeled by the Beats and making it work in a pop context. One of the things he inherited from the Beats was a belief in spontaneous writing and trying to take lyrics more as dictation. Which is not to say he didn't revise—he did, and often. But it's always been a mistake to put too much emphasis on the details of these words and what they might "mean." Sometimes they were selected because a turn of phrase was funny, or because Dylan couldn't think of a better rhyme, or sometimes simply because that's what came out. Later on in his writing, he'd have discipline, but this is what he sounded like when he was free.
The structures of these lyrics probably owe something to Dylan's rumored drug experimentation during this period, specifically with marijuana and amphetimines. People on speed use a lot of words and cram them into spaces too small to contain them; they follow digressions and join phrases and ideas that needn't necessarily be joined; the desire to make illogical connections leads, on the one hand, to paranoia—you start to see things that aren't there. But if these tendencies can be channeled just so, they can lead to new structures. "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken" goes one of my favorite lines in "Tombstone Blues" (heard here in a complete alternate take and another partial version). Nouns and adjectives get chopped up and mixed together, the collisions of language leading to Gertrude Stein-like moments where you can feel your brain being rewired.
All of which is to say that the idea of "Dylanology" in the classic sense of decoding these lyrics to undercover what they might "mean"—Who is Mr. Jones? Where is "Desolation Row", what the hell are those jewels and binoculars doing hanging from the head of the mule???—is missing the important point: During this period, language itself was a playground for Dylan. The Cutting Edge is music of the present, but not the '60s present, an eternal present; the songs are about observation and they exist in a place where it's always now, in sound and word.
The music here conjures a feeling of acceleration that couldn't continue—Dylan's songs couldn't get any knottier or more surreal. The album after this one, John Wesley Harding, released in 1968 after Dylan's mysterious motorcycle accident (The Basement Tapes were recorded in between, but not released until 1975), found him heading in the complete opposite direction, stripping everything to the bone and writing with shocking economy and clarity. If everything up until this point had a certain logic to it, the hotshot young folk singer who is growing immensely with each year turns to rock'n'roll, after 1967 Dylan would be impossible to get a handle on. He had many brilliant records ahead of him, but he started to understand the precise value of theater and artifice. Here he was too wild and moving too fast to even figure out how that might work; he was a trickster, as witnessed in his infamous press conferences, but nothing was channeled into a specific direction: It was all blasting outward, in every direction, all at once.


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 Nirvana’s transcendent live acoustic album recorded in 1993.

MTV Unplugged in New York

By the time Nirvana recorded their performance for MTV Unplugged in November 1993, they were the biggest band in the world. Not that they looked like it. Dave Grohl in his turtleneck and ponytail, Krist Novoselic wrangling his giant, borrowed bass, Kurt Cobain struggling to act relaxed in a room filled with people who thought he was a prophet.
Of course, that was the point of Unplugged, and, in a way, of Nirvana: Even after Cobain got famous, he tried, often painfully, to seem normal. A month or so after Unplugged was taped, he bought a black Lexus, but was so mortified by it—and mocked so thoroughly by his friends—that he returned it within a day. “This is from our first record,” he mutters before “About a Girl.” “Most people don’t own it.” Never mind the five million people who had bought the one that came next.
Cobain was reportedly miserable before the taping, worried the band didn’t have the grace to pull off something so subtle. “We’re just musically and rhythmically retarded,” he’d told Guitar World in the wake of 1991’s Nevermind. “We play so hard that we can’t tune our guitars fast enough.” As few as 24 hours before Unplugged, he was considering having Dave Grohl sit out because he thought Grohl’s drumming would overpower the rest of the band. For musicians whose sound was so essentially electric, the idea of playing acoustic—or, as it came to pass, in a subdued, semi-amplified state—wasn’t just like going on stage naked, but amputated. Afterward, Cobain reportedly complained to Unplugged programmer Amy Finnerty that the audience must not have liked it because they were so quiet. “Kurt,” she said, “they think you are Jesus Christ.”
MTV had started hosting “Unplugged” in 1989 as a way to package famous artists in comparatively approachable contexts. (The name alone—“Unplugged”—conjured an imagined utopia where music was nothing more than the spontaneous expression of people in a room.) You’d come in, strip down, show your fans the heart bleeding under the armor. Between 1991 and 1993, guests of the show included middlebrow alternative acts like Elvis Costello and R.E.M., legacy artists like Eric Clapton and Paul Simon, and contemporary pop stars like Mariah Carey. A few hair metal bands came through in an attempt to be taken seriously, as though the lust of teenage girls was not serious enough. The day before Nirvana filmed their set, the show’s guest was Duran Duran.
As with all creative endeavors, Cobain seemed eager to strip the charade of its artifice and do something he perceived to be real. At the very least, he hadn’t clawed his way out of Aberdeen, Washington to let Nirvana become Mr. Big. He’d ordered the stage to be decorated with black candles and stargazer lilies, a funereal scheme routinely invoked as a premonition of his suicide, when in actuality it had more to do with his penchant for twisting conventional beauty into something grotesque. A treatment for the “Rape Me” video documented in his diaries called for lilies and orchids—“ya know, vaginal flowers,” Cobain wrote—to be shown blooming and withering in time-lapse, as though incapable of retaining pageant posture for more than a few seconds. Cobain himself regularly appeared in torn dresses and smeared makeup, storming through performances with the fury of a shattered debutante, more Sunset Boulevard than Black Flag. And what were Nirvana’s best songs but demonstrations of how the most corrosive blasts of noise could turn into lullabies fit for a T-Mobile ad? If you buy flowers, you already know: nothing stinks quite like a big, sweet bouquet of lilies.
The setlist, submitted to MTV without concession or explanation, contained six covers and no hits other than “Come As You Are,” a point of contention so contentious that Cobain was still threatening to cancel the performance a day before it taped. (“He did it just to get us worked up,” Finnerty said. “He enjoyed that power.”) Three of the six covers were originally by then-tourmates the Meat Puppets, an Arizona band that, like Nirvana, ventured to create a world that collapsed the distance between brilliant and dumb, ordinary observation—“the sun is gone, but I have a light”—and cosmic insight. The performances are creaky, intimate, eerily temperate for a band known to explode. On first hearing their cover of Leadbelly’s “In the Pines” (here titled, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”), Neil Young reportedly compared Cobain’s voice to a werewolf’s: neither dead nor undead, but beyond. I get it. Unplugged makes me feel like Nirvana could fill my body with arrows and I would still keep walking.
Cobain had been unhappy with Nevermind, at least in retrospect; at one point, he described it as “candy-ass,” at another, he compared it to Mötley Crüe, which, coming from a punk rocker obsessed by humility and authenticity, indicated the presence of a rot so total as to make the host unsalvageable. In Utero, which had only come out a couple of months before Unplugged was recorded, sounded like a corrective to whatever Cobain heard when he listened to Nevermind: brutal, mean, the sound of the puffy, white skin that rises around wet sores. Listening to it now, I can almost smell the turpentine I used to huff after school. Its popularity should’ve made me feel less alone. Instead, it made me feel like stabbing my stepdad and driving his car into a pole, which, when I think about it now, is probably exactly how a 12-year-old is supposed to feel.
The critic Chuck Klosterman called it “guilt rock,” as in rock music one makes because you feel guilty for making something as successful as Nevermind, guilty for reaching across the aisle to the meatheads you hated. But listening to Unplugged—the delicacy of the sound, the brittleness of the performance, the grit of Cobain’s voice—I came to understand that rage finds its anchor in fragility; that Unplugged and In Utero were necessary counterweights to an increasingly polarized creative mind. Where In Utero had validated my anger, Unplugged revealed a place beyond it: steady, understanding, wounded but at peace—less a funeral than the empty, eerily settled feeling one gets after a tantrum.
This is the Nirvana you hear on Unplugged: Not the voice of their generation but a strange holler from old, wet earth, a band who didn’t break with tradition but constellated it in new and intuitive ways. I liked the old blues song (“Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”) because it reminded me that Cobain’s pain wasn’t a new kind of pain and neither was mine, just a realm of feeling people had been passing through forever and one I would eventually pass through too. As a kid—fitful, agitated, outwardly miserable but possessed by a secret hope everything will suddenly change—you dream of something like this, the calm hand on your shoulder telling you not that you should feel better, but that it’s OK to feel bad, that people have felt bad forever, that sometimes feeling bad is enough.
It’s an unsettling legacy. A working title for In Utero was I Hate Myself and Want to Die, a kind of expression that is everywhere now: the sarcasm that preempts genuine pain; the hyperbole that strains to turn suffering into a joke. Killing yourself, the meme. Acting blasé about the heat death of the universe. The idea that we are so acclimated to misery that it becomes boring. “I’ve always felt it was kind of necessary to help out the ‘now generation’ internally destroy the enemy by posing as or using the enemy,” Cobain wrote in his diary. “The Now Generation”: Even in private, Cobain couldn’t escape his cynicism. The deeper tragedy of his story wasn’t his addiction or even his suicide, but the Icarian stubbornness of insisting he could take fame’s bait but dodge its hook—that he actually could destroy the machine from inside. Run that gauntlet enough, and you not only want to name your album I Hate Myself and Want to Die, you hate yourself, and you want to die, and then, a few months later, you do.
In the five months between Unplugged and Cobain’s suicide, Nirvana filmed two more spots for MTV. The first was an interview by Kurt Loder and Finnerty that devolved into Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl destroying an alleged $12,000 worth of hotel furniture—the kind of macho display you wanted Nirvana to be a corrective to, not an example of. A few days later, they played a show in an empty warehouse on Seattle’s Puget Sound, later packaged as Live and Loud. Here was the brutal, incandescent Nirvana again. If Unplugged’s crystallizing moment was Cobain gasping before the last phrase of “In the Pines,” Live and Loud’s was Cobain riding waves of feedback out of “Endless Nameless,” shoving his guitar into a camera and spitting at the lens. He was, by all accounts, in a good mood. And he finally got to play “Rape Me” on MTV.
At the end of Unplugged, between “All Apologies” and “In the Pines,” Cobain tells the story of a man from the Leadbelly estate trying to sell Cobain Leadbelly’s guitar for $500,000. You can hear him stretch the figure out for comic effect, as though anyone, especially someone as knowing as him would be so stupid as to pay a half-million dollars for a collectible guitar. Real punks don’t buy history; they desecrate it.
Still, he couldn’t contain his petulance and self-loathing, adding that he’d asked David Geffen to buy it for him personally, playing the black-sheep son of a rich and endlessly indulgent dad. He’d already practiced this bit once before, in the October 1993 issue of Spin, but with a slightly different punchline, complaining, “I just wish there was some really rich rock star I could borrow the cash from.”
About a month before he shot himself, Cobain bought a 1965 Dodge Dart for $2,500. He didn’t end up driving it much, if at all. It was recently displayed in an exhibition in Ireland called “Growing Up Kurt Cobain,” while the car’s title—State of Washington, VIN number 2155173082—was sold in 2010 at auction, for a winning bid of $640. “The soul is cheap,” Cobain wrote on “Dumb.” Yeah. And the crap is expensive, and in the end almost nothing is priceless.


It's arguably the greatest jazz recording of all time, but this 50th anniversary edition-- which adds a DVD and an extra disc-- comes only 11 years after a wonderfully remastered edition. It's also priced at more than $100-- not exactly the best way to first experience it.

Miles Davis: Kind of Blue: 50th Anniversary Edition

Kind of Blue: 50th Anniversary Edition

Miles Davis's Kind of Blue belongs to that special class of album that everybody treasures immediately and then, over time, goes on to process in his or her own terms. For some, it's a masterpiece so resounding in its effect as to make the rest of "jazz" extraneous (or at least reasonably deferred until some later point when older or more patient). For others, it's a hallmark whose masterpiece status no amount of further exploration could impugn. Either way, everybody likes it. As Q-Tip says on a documentary included with this new 2xCD/DVD 50th-anniversary set, "It's like the Bible-- you just have one in your house."
All of that might make Kind of Blue sound kind of boring, and indeed, part of the album's allure owes to the fact that it is among the least immediately radical paradigm-shifters you're ever likely to hear. As another bit on the DVD tells it, this one from the host of the 1950s TV show "The Robert Herridge Theater", a serious guy in black-and-white, smoking: "There are many ways to tell a story, and what you're listening to now-- the music of Miles Davis-- is one of the ways."
Such matter-of-fact understatement suits Kind of Blue, an album that sounds like it's never been in a good mood it didn't consider fleeting or a bad one it couldn't brood its way out of. When Davis and his band commenced recording in 1959, they settled on a new form of "modal" jazz that called for improvising through scales as opposed to preordained chord changes. And even if that doesn't sound apparent to an untrained musical ear, it's suggested by a spectral sense of wandering-- an ease with uncertainty that comes across in no uncertain terms.
Kind of Blue's rewards get doled out patiently and persistently, from the cool walk of "So What" to the magisterial glide of "Flamenco Sketches". The tracks that fall between-- "Freddie Freeloader", "Blue in Green", and "All Blues"-- cover pretty much everything else. The story of them all is told to good effect in Celebrating a Masterpiece: Kind of Blue, a 55-minute documentary that anchors this new anniversary package-- which also includes a 60-page book and the album on blue vinyl. Nobody with a curious ear has hurt for Kind of Blue-related resources over the years, especially since a remaster in 1997 rescued the sound of it in fantastic fashion. The CD sounds the same in this new package, which pairs Kind of Blue on a disc with an already-released alternate take of "Flamenco Sketches" and nine short false-starts and studio bits, none longer than two minutes. Disc 2 cobbles together six earlier recordings by the players responsible for Kind of Blue: Davis, Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. The standout is a 17-minute live recording of "So What" played much faster, tighter, and harder than simmering version that went on the finished album.
The DVD features the full 26-minute "Robert Herridge Theater" show supplementing the documentary, which does an admirable job of taking the album itself as its subject. Some of the drama that surrounded the making of it enters in, but for the most part, the film focuses on how the album works and why. Much of it owes to the whole of the band. But then there's Davis-- an inimitable presence who drummer Cobb, still a bit wowed this many years later, describes as sounding "like he was sitting on an iceberg somewhere out in the South Pole, alone."
As an album, Kind of Blue is unimpeachable, the kind of record you look forward to listening to decades down the line. As a reissue, this anniversary package (expensive at $109.98) is nice but less than essential, best for completists or those with good record players to put the new vinyl pressing to good use.


The 23-year-old singer’s careful observations add new profundity to her storytelling. Her second album confirms her place as one of modern R&B’s realest talkers.

Ry Ry World

The opening 20 seconds of “RIP,” a beat-switching standout from Mariah the Scientist’s Ry Ry World, feel like a cosmic ascension, pianos and synths glowing like sun-haloed clouds. “I’m speeding on my way home from Eleven,” she sings, a likely reference to the Miami superclub. The beatific vibes are a feint—the song bottoms out for swampy bass and a menacing, pitch-shifted Beach House sample. “I dream to be a fool,” Mariah sneers, as 808s hit with the sting of a slap. “That way you wouldn’t know that I knew what you do.” You can picture her swerving between lanes, glassy-eyed. Unable to kick this boy in the balls, the gas pedal will have to do.
Mariah’s second album confirms her as one of modern R&B’s realest talkers, as well as one of its most vivid storytellers. Her earliest songs began as poems, and there’s an imagistic quality to Ry Ry World’s casual evocations of, say, snow on a sunroof during a trip to Toronto, or the “damage in the brain matter” inflicted by a lover’s mixed messages. Less consistent lyricists would make these lines into centerpieces; for Mariah, they’re scenery.
The careful observations endow Mariah’s storytelling with particular heft. “I want to remind my fans to ‘tell it like it is’ because it helps define your character,” she said in an interview last year. “If you’re gonna be the bad guy, own it.” She commits to the bit with flair. With its pitched-down “Cry Me a River” sample, “Revenge” morphs from a confessional to a murder ballad; Mariah bares emotional wounds before imagining righteous payback. “Tell ’em that in death we’ll meet again,” she sings, voice cracking. “Like it ain’t your blood that’s on my hands.” You could imagine it soundtracking some avant-garde production of Macbeth, but it runs deeper than theater, too. It can be easier to pour out your heart by couching its secrets in hyperbole.
Ry Ry World is concise at just 10 tracks; along with recent projects from serpentwithfeet, Jorja Smith, and Victoria Monét, it’s a refreshing counter to the more bloated releases of major label R&B. At times the brevity is frustrating. With production from Swedish duo Jarami (Frank Ocean’s “Chanel,” “Biking”), the 90-second intro “Impalas & Air Force 1s” feels like a blissed-out drift through a coral reef. It would be welcome at triple the length. The unmemorable “Maybe” slides into watery ambience, and cheap shots at “big booty [...] city girls” don’t add to its likeability. Mariah is at her best when she focuses on her own desires and agency. Over Spanish guitars on the raunchy “Walked In,” she plays feature artist Young Thug at his own game. “Off the Tesla, yes sir,” she instructs, before warning, “None of that cappin’ about booin’ up.”
Fans have long gossiped about Mariah’s past relationship with Lil Yachty; in “Brain,” over a beat that rattles like a pinball in a sewer, she namechecks one of his tours and seems to describe her own depressive episode from the time. “I just/Wanted to escape for sure,” she sings, adding pained backing vocals. “I was/Staring out the big window, but I/Should've locked the bedroom door.” Once she starts it feels like she can’t stop, in a raw, diaristic digression that’s unique to Ry Ry World. You might find yourself replaying the song to let its brutal honesty sink in.
Around the time of her debut, Mariah defined her music as “a summation of my agony.” Recently she updated that description. “It’s more like after agony,” she said. “Maybe it used to hurt, and now it’s just a little scarred.” She traces that evolution in the wonderful “2 You,” a bittersweet ballad produced by DJ Camper, co-architect of at least two of the past decade’s best R&B songs. “I never thought it would go up in flames,” Mariah sings, as her voice breaks through an airy beat built of oohs and aahs. “But look at what we made/Sure was beautiful.” In the video, she performs against a starry backdrop, as if surveying her past with a birds-eye view. Her eyes are wide open, ready to experience it all.

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Trading some of their signature groove for a more destabilizing sound, Spoon have created an offbeat, unexpected, but ultimately cerebral record.

Transference

Up to this point, Spoon have employed their signature tight pocket grooves as a shorthand for authority, certainty, and swagger. It's one of the most appealing things about the band, and the sound has made even Britt Daniel's most vulnerable moments seem grounded and forthright. They've turned it all inside-out on Transference, subtly shifting the leading signifiers of Spoon-iness just so for a destabilizing effect. Their go-to trick for the first half of the album is to include bits of sound that abruptly cut off, usually sung phrases that drop entirely out of the mix mid-syllable. This may be aggravating for some listeners, but this counterintuitive move makes sense in context, indicating distraction and tongue-tied indecision. This is a perfect example of the group's genius as a studio band: They get very cerebral in arranging their material, but every clever move is entirely in the service of maximizing physical impact and gut-level response. These are not simply recordings of a top-notch rock quartet playing in a room; this is art built to hit precise emotional marks with an impressive balance of off-the-cuff improvisation and rigid discipline.
Though their previous records have opened with stylish, immediately thrilling numbers like "Small Stakes" and "The Beast and Dragon, Adored", Transference begins with "Before Destruction", a pensive slow-burner that's more of a muted prelude than a flashy entrance. We're knocked off-balance from the beginning, and the next few songs sustain a sense of confusion and disorientation. "Is Love Forever?", a jaunty cut that sounds as though Daniel were aiming to write a much dizzier version of Phoenix's "Listzomania", bumps right into "The Mystery Zone", an excellent late-night groover that hits the same sweet spot as older gems like "Don't You Evah" and "I Turn My Camera On". When that track ends suddenly, it's like walking right into a wall before "Who Makes Your Money" has you wobbling along with Daniel in a concussed haze. The album sobers up as it moves along, and the progression always makes a certain emotional sense, but it's ultimately a big pile-up of unorthodox creative decisions. On first pass, Transference seems a bit off, even somewhat sloppy for a band known for keeping things focused and snappy. However, upon closer listening it becomes obvious that these guys have made a meticulously crafted "mess" that conveys the feeling of flailing around and failing in search of meaningful connections.
The name of the album refers to the Freudian concept of unconsciously projecting feelings for one person or thing to another. It's also the term used to describe when a patient develops a romantic attachment to their analyst, mistaking the intimacy of that relationship for actual love. Transference isn't a concept album, but it's not hard to figure out why they might have chosen the title. There's a nagging desperation for "real" love at the core of this record, tangled up in a genuine cluelessness about what it is or how it works. "The Mystery Zone" finds Daniel theorizing about relationships and unknowable fates like a rambling, semi-coherent drunk, stumbling up to big ideas but trailing off or nodding out before saying anything that makes complete sense. "Written in Reverse" seethes with the bitterness of unrequited love, and Daniel's larynx-shredding vocal hits the right note of resentment and resignation as he spits out lines like, "I wanna show you how I love you, but there's nothing there."
Even the most stable tracks seem frustrated or tentative. The gorgeous "Out Go the Lights" sounds as exhausted as it is lovesick, and the scorching "Got Nuffin" confronts neuroses head-on with plucky courage, but also a chugging riff that evokes gut-churning anxiety. It's hardly uncommon for Spoon songs to deal with failed love and thwarted desire, but Daniel has rarely sounded so vulnerable and his feelings have never seemed so unresolved. Some may hear Transference and get the impression that it's an incomplete or uneven work, but its elliptical nature is ultimately the key to its charm. All through the record, Britt Daniel sounds like a guy left hanging by life, waiting around to figure out the answers to all his questions. It wouldn't make sense for him to tell you anything he doesn't know himself.
Though the band produced the album themselves, half of the songs on Transference are presented in their original "demo" form, resulting in unexpected shifts between raw and slick audio textures. Since Daniel and drummer Jim Eno are experienced engineers, almost nothing on the album could rightly be considered lo-fi, but there is a disarming immediacy to these less polished tracks that makes the record as a whole seem very relaxed and informal in comparison to their previous efforts.
"Goodnight Laura", a straightforward ballad on the album's second side, gains a lot from this approach, with an intimate "live" sound that gives the impression that you've accidentally stumbled into a Spoon rehearsal. "Trouble Comes Running" has the opposite effect with its dramatic stereo separations, but the low-key feeling of the recording preserves an energy that may have been flattened with a more full production. Both of these tracks could be considered "minor" Spoon songs, but they reveal just how high the bar has been set for Daniel and company, and how easily their skill can be taken for granted. Following the creative strides made on their last few Merge releases, the only big surprise on Transference is that they've become willing to let their hair down a bit. It can be a bit of a let down if you come in expecting another blockbuster like Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, but something of a revelation if you meet them halfway.


The Sunny Day in Glasgow affiliate steps out with an album of unconventional indie pop that’s brimming with potential.

Smiley Face

Jen Goma has been American indie pop’s best kept secret for almost a decade now. Since being recruited into the cult shoegaze collective A Sunny Day in Glasgow in 2009, she has sung with acts such as the Pains of Being Pure at Heart (she featured on a cover of James’ “Laid” on the band’s last EP, and has joined them as a touring member), People Get Ready, and Roman à Clef, a revivalist sophistipop trio with her Sunny Day bandmate Ryan Newmyer and ex-Pains member (and Ice Choir frontman) Kurt Feldman. Her presence has always added a welcome flair to whichever project she joins, and although she has proven herself to be a master collaborator, it seems surprising that she is only now releasing her first solo venture. Under the name Showtime Goma, the Brooklyn musician has snuck signatures from all the bands she’s been a part of over the years into Smiley Face, an album of unconventional pop brimming with potential.
Indie pop, as a genre, typically combines heartfelt earnestness with amateurish technique, as if the musicians involved just stumbled upon the concept of being in a band and decided to give it a go. One of the things that has always set Goma apart from many of her peers is her serious chops—her powerhouse vocals can’t help but be the main attraction in whatever project she finds herself in. She’s much more pop than indie, singing with the kind of crystal-clear focus that you just don’t hear often enough in her line of work. This undeniable charm is what makes Smiley Face both a wildly enjoyable and a slightly frustrating listen. The songs are full of hooks and well constructed, and the album’s DIY take on sun-drenched dream pop suits Goma’s persona perfectly. But the album is packed with so many ideas that Goma herself runs the risk of getting lost in the fray.
This is immediately apparent on the album opener, “Oh Shit”; it's catchy, and it flawlessly showcases Goma’s range from high-pitched belt to throaty snarl, but it has so many starts and stops, and pivots and turns, that you’re left wishing for a good, clean, singalong chorus to sink your teeth into. Not that Showtime Goma should aspire to Top 40 polish—it’s abundantly clear that she seeks to explore the side of pop that privileges sincerity over artifice. But sometimes a little editing goes a long way, and the emotion in a track like “Oh Shit” would be all the more powerful if things were a little more pruned.
That’s not to say that Smiley Face doesn't ultimately benefit from Goma’s ambitious songwriting and ear for experimental production. When the album does successfully harness its erratic energy, the result is lushly layered songs that twinkle with glossy synths and big, sing-along melodies. Lead single “Big Disaster” finds the perfect balance between Goma’s natural pop delivery and the left-of-center vibe the album embodies. Opening with a shimmery guitar riff that could have been lifted from a Katy Perry track circa Teenage Dream, and accompanying that with a fuzzy breakbeat, the track makes striking use of Goma’s clever skills as a lyricist: When she sings, “Wear a sexy mask/Disguise is a beauty too/I feel like a man/Like a proper dude,” she smarly draws a line between gendered concepts like feminine enigma and masculine posturing at the same time as she underlines the song’s tonal duality.
Almost every track on Smiley Face was written with Greg Saunier, the Deerhoof drummer and experimental pop composer, and his fingerprints are all over the record, especially on tracks like “Come and Know Me Better Man,” which rides a demented, not un-Deerhoof-like organ loop and shuffling, funky percussion. In the end, Goma’s collaborative instincts help her to bring it all home. One of Smiley Face's most effective songs is “How R U?”, made with her Sunny Day bandmates Newmyer and Ben Daniels. It’s the big, euphoric payoff that lifts the album into the stratosphere: a bubbling odyssey with a chorus reminiscent of Chairlift at their most joyous, or Carly Rae Jepsen on a subdued comedown. Less than three minutes long, it’s short and sweet, but it encompasses everything that makes Goma such a unique voice in contemporary indie. Smiley Face is a solid effort at finally establishing an artist that has been flying under the radar for way too long. After paying some serious dues, Jen Goma is ready to put her talents front and center. In a word, it’s showtime.


YG pays heartfelt tribute to the late Nipsey Hussle on his latest while still reserving plenty of vitriol for his favorite targets: broke dudes, snitches, broke dudes who also snitch.

4REAL 4REAL

In 2015, YG survived a shooting at a Los Angeles studio. His resulting paranoia birthed 2016’s belligerent Still Brazy, and the effects lingered through his last album, 2018’s chest-thumping Stay Dangerous. “I’m the man, bitch, I walk ‘round like I’m bulletproof,” he rapped, sounding like a man possessed. After surviving an attempt on his life, in what he believed to be a set up, his message was clear: He wasn’t going to be caught with his guard down again.
Earlier this year, Nipsey Hussle got shot, too, only he didn’t make it. Nip was a mentor to YG. Despite being in rival gangs, the two rappers formed a bond. They appeared alongside each other representing unity against the evil empire on “FDT.” They’d been planning a joint mixtape together as far back as 2013. After Nipsey’s death, YG pushed the release of his album back out of respect for the fallen, and there’s an inscription in his honor on the cover. In a speech given at Nipsey’s service, which appears as a track on 4REAL 4REAL, YG referred to him as his “brother from the other color” and congratulated him for leaving a lasting legacy and an unbreakable brand before vowing to carry that legacy forward. “The muthafuckin’ marathon continues,” he and Mustard shouted in unison, in keeping with Nip’s decree.
4REAL 4REAL, though dedicated to Nipsey’s memory, doesn’t really expound upon his values. YG doesn’t pick up the financial-freedom mantle. He isn’t really out to educate. He’s a tad too bitter to make something like Victory Lap. Instead, he honors his friend the only way he knows how: by doubling down. That means continuing his War on Snitches and picking up whatever slack remains in representing the West Coast. “Call Dre, Call Snoop, Call Game and Kendrick, too/When you think about the West it’s me and Nip, red and blue,” he raps in the opener, illustrating how diametrically opposed forces can be halves of a whole. If Nipsey was the community organizer, YG is the disruptor.
That said, YG is calmer on 4REAL. Not “calm,” but calmer. Credit Nip’s influence. He still reserves plenty of contempt for his favorite targets: broke dudes, snitches, broke dudes who also snitch—but he makes a concerted effort to sidestep real violence. There are fewer confrontations—“Forward progress, I don’t backtrack/That’s my old life, audible, I’m passed that,” he raps on “Bottle Service.” (He does threaten to put someone in a chokehold, but it stops there, which feels like progress.) The energy goes into the rapping, which is cleaner, clearer, and more focused than it has been in a few years.
Mustard and YG remain perfect partners for each other, two artists who value cutting straight to the point. Mustard makes YG sound sharper and funnier, and YG seems to embolden Mustard’s wildest beats—check out the mariachi horns of “Go Loko.” 4REAL 4REAL doesn’t quite reestablish YG as the album artist of My Krazy Life and Still Brazy, but what it lacks in a satisfying through line it makes up for in highlights. The breezy, feel-good Cali groove of “Do Yo Dance” and the satisfying block anthem “Do Not Disturb,” both of which feature Kamaiyah, are some of his catchiest cuts. On “I Was On the Block,” YG experiments with a spaced-out, off0-kilter Valee-style flow, and it suits him. “Heart 2 Heart” is the kind of gangsta-empowering, buy-back-the-block tutorial that would do Nipsey proud, with Meek Mill turning up to counsel on enduring prison bids. There’s always at least one cringy song on a YG album, in which he needlessly judges some woman’s sexuality (here, it’s “Keshia’s Got a Baby”), but he rectifies this by letting Compton’s Day Sulan close the album with “Her Story.” It’s a move in line with Nipsey’s ethics: pay it forward, help bring other perspectives to light, uplift your community. The marathon continues.


Lorde oversees the soundtrack to the new Hunger Games and the results are frequently great. In addition to a Kanye remix of one of her tracks, artists include Chvrches, Ariana Grande, Tinashe, Bat for Lashes, and Major Lazer.

Various Artists: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 OST

There are few safe choices on Mockingjay, one of the most thrilling soundtracks for a blockbuster film series in recent memory. Much of the record is outfitted with an electronic throb that wouldn’t sound out of place in the clubs of District 1 (the Rich Kids of Instagram in the Hunger Games universe). And, yet, many tracks soar beyond the reasonable expectation of a film soundtrack that would’ve been snapped up by thousands of teenagers even if it were just 81 minutes of off-pitch Mockingjay whistles.
Lorde, who’s gone from complete unknown to holding the reins of one of the world’s biggest movie franchises in just 18 months, has assembled a stable of rising stars like Tinashe, hyper-relevant indie-friendly sensations like Charli XCX and Chvrches, Raury, and more. Tracks like Chvrches' kinetic call-to-arms "Dead Air" and Raury's meditative "Lost Souls" would have been standouts on their respective debuts. They’re standouts here. There are the emotional highs and stripped-down ballads you might expect to color moods of a specific scene, but the whole record crackles with electricity: Those ballads are just as striking as the more pounding cuts like the opener "Meltdown" (Stromae ft. Lorde, Pusha T, Q-Tip and Haim) and Ariana Grande's sky-scraping collaboration with Major Lazer, "All My Love".
Charli XCX connects with Simon Le Bon for the lovely piano ballad "Kingdom", an effortlessly composed song co-written with Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij after the two got drunk at a Miley Cyrus concert. Lorde's cover of Bright Eyes' "Ladder Song" is straightforward, but sweet. Bat for Lashes' contribution, a cover of Son Lux's "Plan the Escape", is a twinkling snowglobe of a song that will almost certainly score a tense moment of Katniss introspection as she mulls over the two hollow clods after her heart (team #SingleKatniss).
After the rustic rock-leaning OST of the first movie, which featured contributions from Arcade Fire, the Decemberists, and Neko Case, the series leans toward electronic pop. Following in the veins of Catching Fire’s OST, Mockingjay moves with the action of a series that began in a hermetically sealed environment before transitioning to a city where every battle has larger implications. Across the board, the songs sound like threads of hope escaping gloomier pasts, echoing the arc of the film's generational heroine. It's no coincidence that, of the 14 songs featured on Mockingjay, 11 feature female vocalists in the foreground. Sure, the lyrical sentiments are often delivered as platitudes—"We’re just a mess of broken people but we love the game!," and so forth—but that's part of the deal when you're working with some populist YA lit poking around well-established archetypes. It’s a big, broad tent for everyone to get lost in.
Though lots of distinctive voices are represented on the soundtrack, one person stands out. "Katniss would be a huge Lorde fan," series star Jennifer Lawrence voiced during the promotional rollout, directly making the connection that the strong, independent Katniss character is an effective muse to the world's most famous teenager. While Lorde's vocals are all over Mockingjay—from the swirling centerpiece "Yellow Flicker Beat" (and its Yeezus-tinted Kanye West rework) to supplementary vocals on "Meltdown" and a hook to the Miguel/Chemical Brothers collaboration "This Is Not a Game"—her presence elevates the project; you can feel the other stars on the soundtrack bringing their A-game out of respect for the project's core vision and passion. Though not everything works on its own (the flat electropop of XO's "Animal" is one dud) Mockingjay adds up to a fun pastiche of modern sounds. In conclusion, three fingers out of five.


Don’t be fooled by the of-the-moment pop sound: The 24-year-old singer’s debut album is the showcase for a refreshingly original perspective.

High Highs to Low Lows

For Lolo Zouaï, flexing is a matter of authenticity, not fronting. The 24-year old singer’s debut album, High Highs to Low Lows, is full of pop hooks and casual brags, yet Zouaï sounds most proud—and comfortable—when working with the real facts of her life, particularly when they lack glamour.  “I can’t wait to really get paid, not just minimum wage,” she sings on the title track, which serves as a mission statement of sorts. “They think it’s all Gucci but it’s 99 cents/I swear.”
The child of French-Algerian immigrants, Zouaï, who sings in both English and French, contributed songwriting last year to H.E.R.’s Grammy-winning self-titled album. Her own music, which she’s released sparingly over the past year, blends the vulnerability of H.E.R.’s lyricism, the hip-hop-adjacent bounce of thank u, next-era Ariana Grande, and the electro-pop experimentation of AlunaGeorge. High Highs to Low Lows, written entirely by Zouaï and produced by her frequent collaborator Stelios Phili (responsible for Young Thug and Elton John’s “High”), is compelling in its movement between sultry, charismatic bops  and moody, melancholy slow-burners. Zouaï finished recording the album before signing with RCA, and the record feels genuinely like Zouaï’s own project, each song a vehicle for a different part—sensual, depressed, cocky, homesick, in love—of the same whole.
Keeping with the Grande-embodied, lite-hip-hop wave currently washing over contemporary pop, High Highs to Low Lows incorporates trap bass and brooding synths into an effective, of-the-moment sound. On single “Ride,” Stelios builds a swirling whirlpool of timpani, guitar plucks, claps, and looped yodels to create a coquettish, urgent banger. Highlight “Out the Bottle,” with its faux-rap delivery and candy-coated beat, is a sonic cousin of Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings,” but unlike that song’s hollow boasting, which feels crass and unearned, Zouaï’s joy in simply getting drunk on a plane is contagious and convincing. Several songs, like the bilingual “Moi,” feature outros that turn unexpectedly melodic or drowsily chopped and screwed, as if to hint that even on the poppiest songs, Zouaï and Stelios are giving us only a taste of their full abilities.
For all of the album’s fun—and it really is fun, particularly the PG-13 “Caffeine”—Zouaï excels at looking inward. “Summers in Vegas” recaps the singer’s time with her father, who owned pizza stores outside of Vegas, with vivid precision. “Pour your wine in a red cup/I saw you hide it under the register,” Zouaï sings, somberly. “The desert strip is no place for a kid.” “Desert Rose,” which features the album’s most accomplished songwriting, directly addresses Zouaï’s family in Algeria, who’ve exiled her for leading what they call a life of sin. “‘Inshallah,’ that’s what you say/You think I lost my faith,” she sings, both pained and self-righteous. She finishes with a refrain of “Habibi”—which translates to “my love” in Arabic—effectively pleading for, but not expecting, reconciliation. Sequencing the two songs amid a series of upbeat anthems undercuts their power somewhat, but they nonetheless add color and history to Zouaï’s evolving story, one that she is intent on telling in her own voice.
Zouaï wears her heart on her sleeve, and it sometimes gets in the way; “Here to Stay,” an ode to depression that recalls the mournful guitars of Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” tips the scale away from introspection and toward melodrama. Mostly, though, she stays on the right side of vulnerable, detailing her own peaks and valleys with charisma, wit, and raw introspection. High Highs to Low Lows works because Zouaï feels real and multidimensional: silly, swaggering, sexy, and deeply human. “Don’t take myself too serious/Tough body, soft interior,” she sings on the sun-drenched “Chevy Impala.” It’s a precocious outlook on life: As long as you know yourself and trust the process, Zouaï’s music implies, even the lowest of lows are just stops on the way back up.


Georgia Flipo follows up her viral hit "About You" with a pop debut that hopes to re-bottle the song's charm.

About Us

When the Melbourne band EMPRA broke up in 2016, touring drummer Georgia Flipo took it as a signal to start making her own music. She spent the following year isolating herself in her bedroom, eschewing friends and family and emerging with the viral hit “About You” in early 2018. Built around a rumbling synth and cresting with a massive, over-the-top drum fill, the song bore traces of Art Angels-era Grimes and seemed preordained for success, especially paired with its endearingly lo-fi video.
“About You” was an anthem of unspecific longing and indecision: “Just let me go/Give me one more chance, baby,” she pled in the bridge. About Us, her debut album, spends its entirety in this same purgatory. The first lyric of opener “Lover” is effectively the album’s thesis: “I just wanna be your lover/You know that we ain’t friends.” The song revolves around that couplet at a glacial pace, and each time Flip repeats it, her voice grows more ragged. Without any specificity to add color to the troubled relationship in question, though, the song remains shrouded in opacity. A surprising number of other torch songs follow “Lover,” considering the album’s modest 10-track length, and none is more revealing than any other. “Morning” sees Flip pining for the same absent lover but admitting no fault for why that lover might be gone (“I fucked up” is all she reveals). Immediately after is “Waking Up Tomorrow,” which sounds like the same slow piano ballad, just more plaintive and desperate. “Bring Me Home” leads the album’s come-down and is a rewrite of Rihanna and Mikky Ekko’s “Stay.”
Between the fretting love songs are Flip’s more straightforward attempts at crafting viral hits. On “I Am Not Afraid,” she offers up a self-help anthem on the order of Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” and Katy Perry’s “Roar”: “I am not afraid to do this alone/I know that it scares you but I am my own home,” she sings. The piano intro to “Drink Too Much” generates a little excitement with its almost-quote of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” but again succumbs to the plight of non-specificity. It’s a song about losing someone because of your bad habits, but that much is evident from the title alone. “Stupid” tries on the glowering noir-pop production of Banks and Halsey. “Why we always actin’ stupid?/Why we always do this, do this, do this to ourselves?” she asks. But—do what to themselves? Act stupid how? Without more detail, it’s hard to care.
There is one welcome moment of certainty on the album. On “Killing My Time,” G Flip’s voice gains a self-assured edge that’s not present anywhere else. The song opens with a dancehall-inspired beat that simmers in the background as she exclaims: “Leave me baby/Please leave me alone.” It’s perhaps the most definitive statement on the whole album, one made more effective by an infectious hook that echoes “The Middle,” last year’s inescapable collaboration between Zedd, Maren Morris, and Grey. “Killing My Time,” with its feeling of resolution, would do well as the album’s penultimate track—a position held instead by “About You.” Structured as it is, the album concludes in largely the same place where it begins.


Planet Mu's first Bangs & Works compilation emphasized the Chicago scene's connection to and identification with hip-hop culture. This second, improved 26-song edition emphasizes the city's house roots.

Bangs & Works Vol. 2

When the first Bangs & Works compilation was released by Planet Mu last year, it emerged in a climate of controversy and accusations surrounding its authenticity and propriety, with some seeing it as a document of a Chicago scene as viewed by certain UK electronic tastemakers. This time, however, the circumstances feel simpler: Footwork influences and references are the norm for a whole international world of "bass music," and the questions of exploitation and gimmickry seem to have been put to rest, or at least pushed aside. Good timing, too-- the second Bangs & Works is a marked improvement over its predecessor; as if unconcerned with being comprehensively representative to outsiders, its curator, Mike Paradinas, can delve into the very depths of the sound's weirdness.
Part of the reason that footwork proved so fascinating to so many different sectors of dance music simultaneously was its unforgiving extremity: Sonically rough and rhythmically brutal, it laced together latent impulses from jungle, breakcore, and house into something that sounded like mutant hip-hop-- booty house gone berserk. Compatible with so many universes yet still alien enough to be ineffably hip, it was the outsider of music of 2010 that stubbornly fought its way into the conversation. Hip-hop and R&B samples were the theme of the first Bangs & Works, emphasizing the Chicago scene's connection to and identification with hip-hop culture, but the focus on the second has changed. Instead of the staccato vocal clipping and syllabic repetition, you're more likely to hear swerving synths or pounding drums on Bangs & Works 2, a document of the scene that emphasizes its house roots.
The first track sets the mood appropriately: RP Boo's "Heavy Heat" is a stormer of sub-bass and grim horn stabs, nary a vocal to be found outside of Boo's own producer tag drops (a common sound on Bangs & Works 2). There are still tracks with vocals-- rapping on DJ Earl's "Hit Da Bootz", chipmunk crooning on DJ Solo's "What Have You Done", hype-man hypnosis on DJ Roc's "Get Buck Juice"-- but they're the exceptions. Instead we get the lush synth-funk of DJ Rashad & Gant-Man's "Heaven Sent" or the pendulous insanity of DJ T-Why's ear-piercing "Finished". That same producer's "Juice" and tracks from DJ Metro like "Smak My Bitch Up" show how dissociative and trippy footwork can be without sacrificing its crucial danceability-- not that it was ever easy to dance to in the first place.
It's two new-- to Mu, anyway-- producers who run with that weirdness, standing out on the compilation's most progressive moments. Young Smoke provides vivid psychodrama with his string of lush tracks at the compilation's end, like the sparse funk of "Space Muzik Pt. 3", not too far from a Pearson Sound production. But it's Jlin who steals the show early on with "Erotic Heat", all tremulous low-frequency throbs, cracking snares, and drum patterns that snake and writhe with unusual precision. So many footwork producers are content to let their tom-toms skate across a slippery surface of undulating sub-bass, but Jlin's are unusually tactile and exact, little miniature cascades unfolding separately at will. Sharing the same Mortal Kombat sample as DJ MC's "Y Fall" but utilizing it so much more effectively, Jlin proves what makes her particularly special with the swampy psychedelia of "Asylum", harboring some of the hardest and heaviest-hitting percussion of any footwork track released on Planet Mu to date. Jlin's tracks are captivating because she relocates footwork's focus, rendering those bass rumbles even more isolated as she scatters the percussion to far-flung corners of the stereo spectrum. Her tracks show not only footwork's room for experimentation but the raw power that shines through even its weirdest moments.
Just like its older brother, Bangs & Works 2 is an exhausting listen, 80 minutes of intense syncopation spread over 26 dense nuggets. But whether it's the generally higher production values this time around or simply a more agreeable palette, the whole thing feels a little easier to swallow. It's hard not to jump from track to track getting excited with each producer that steps up to the plate, almost enough to override the sometimes slipshod feeling of compilations like these-- and with the newfound thematic coherence, hodgepodge isn't an issue. Paradinas' library of footwork tracks numbers well over 1,500, and he's done an admirable curatorial job of finding some common threads in a sea of cobbled-together mania. No longer dealing with the pressure to bring a new sound to the masses, he's instead coaxed out one of its most curious aspects for a disc of strange musical delicacies likely to appeal as much to footwork fanatics as those looking for new avenues for the avant-garde.


Bill Callahan's first live album, recorded in 2007, is a 2xLP/download set that captures one of this era's best singer-songwriters in amazing form.

Bill Callahan: Rough Travel for a Rare Thing

Rough Travel for a Rare Thing

Bill Callahan's first live album reflects his approach to music. It's a 2xLP set (also available as a download, no CD), and the packaging is minimal-- two slabs of vinyl, no notes, and all credits and recording info are printed on the disc labels. The functional nature of the package says, "The music is what's important here." Callahan kicks off the album by mumbling, "We're gonna get right down to business," and then he and the band-- guitar, bass, drums, violins-- proceed to do just that. It's 2007, they are in a small club in Australia, and Callahan is drawing from a catalog of songs any songwriter would envy. Turned out to be a good night.
Though Woke on a Whalehart, Callahan's first album under his own name after leaving the name Smog behind, was just about to come out when Rough Travel for a Rare Thing was cut, the setlist focuses heavily on his previous full-length, 2005's A River Ain't Too Much to Love. Five of the 11 songs come from that release, with stops at Supper, the "Rock Bottom Riser" single, and Knock Knock along the way. There's one reach back to 1995's Wild Love ("Batheysphere"), and one tune from Whaleheart ("Diamond Dancer"). Heard together, with this band providing lean and effective accompaniment, the songs sound like they belong on a single album. Rough Travel flows. Callahan's voice, having grown richer and deeper over the years, is front and center, putting the focus squarely on the words and the way he phrases them. There's plenty going on there to keep things interesting.
Indeed, Callahan's singing is a model of how much can be done with a limited vocal range. Sometimes he's half-talking and telling stories. Sometimes he's bending lines to put emphasis on certain words. Sometimes he's doing something close to a croon. In every case, his vocals are bound to the lyrics and reflect how he writes. The songs here are on the long side-- six minutes or so on average-- but it's not because Callahan wastes words. He knows when to leave space, and he has a way of making hard, clear images stay in your mind. When he sings a word like "gold" or "river," you see the color and you can feel the water. Three words placed next to each other, like "rock," "bottom," and "riser," the way he sings them, can tell a tiny story on their own, complete with a discernible arc. Performance and arrangements aside, Rough Travel, though not a "greatest hits" kind of set, affirms the authority of Callahan's songwriting. No wonder writers tend to love him.
Though Callahan's focus can come across as remote and stoic, he can also be playful. Take "The Well", for example. Much of the song focuses on the narrator's obsession with a single drop of water clinging to the edge of an old bucket perched at the top of an abandoned well. It's not much to hang a nine-minute song on, but Callahan imbues the image with drama and gets in some funny lines along the way. "Everybody has their own thing that they yell into a well," he sings, one of those lines of his that makes you think, "Yeah, that feels right." And he puts some echo on his voice as he runs down his: a hoot, a "Hello?", and a "Fuck all y'all."
The instrumentation here is mostly acoustic, and the structure of the songs, including the traditional "In the Pines", which Callahan has covered on record and turned into something that feels like his own, lend a stately feel. But the songs are not easily bound to genre. Unlike his label-mate Will Oldham, whose loose rootsiness can lead to music that seems like it's drifting in from the past, Callahan's work seems of its time and makes you aware of the artist behind it. And Rough Travel, though ultimately only for established fans, turns out to be a very good snapshot of where that artist's music stood at the end of the last decade.


Sadie Switchblade of G.L.O.S.S. steps out with a solo album that touches on the hardcore of her main band and adds elements of country music and acoustic folk.

Up Against the Bricks

Sadie Switchblade, the lead singer of the Olympia hardcore band G.L.O.S.S., once framed her side project Dyke Drama as a balancing force to that musical violence. “[It’s] pretty transparent,” she said. “The songs are either about trans girl problems or dykey lesbionic friendships.” The recent G.L.O.S.S. EP Trans Day of Revenge dices seven minutes into five tracks; their riffs taper off like a nail’s sharpened tip. On Up Against the Bricks, Switchblade’s second solo album, anger tends to remain interior, rendering the narrator sardonic in defeat. (“Dyke Drama” can be read as a meaningful shrug.) The closest thing to an anthem here promises: “You can’t count on me/I ain’t no sure thing.” Outside hardcore’s vital extremes, the thrill of materials straining against structure, Switchblade has space enough to pause inside ambivalence.
G.L.O.S.S. is an acronym for “Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit,” and their music is about surviving in a world that believes your existence illegitimate. Dyke Drama songs describe a life lived on top of that, the resigned longing, the bruise you can’t stop touching, the scene of the crying. The title track uses radical iconography to chalk off lost years: “Is it too late for dreaming? To go back to believing?/To push me up against the bricks, grab my skull and kiss my lips?” No longer screaming to keep up, Switchblade’s voice moves between frustration and abandon—the circuit that electrifies so many pop-punk songs. Returning to words over and over, she gives paradoxical shape to a not-quite-relationship: “I don’t wanna stop, I don’t wanna stop/ Wasting my time, wasting my time, on you, on you.” I thought of the character from one Alan Hollinghurst novel who senses “the pleasure flecked with its opposite, with little hurts and contradictions that came to seem as much a part of love as the clear gaze of acceptance.”
Up Against the Bricks may be a solo release, but it also affords Switchblade the chance to place other musicians in her design. The backing vocals are all sung by her roommate Erica Leshon and Joey Seward, and you can hear the close acoustics surrounding them. Harmonies slide almost unconsciously behind and ahead of each other. On “Cis Girls,” a grimacing snapshot of the ornamental status trans women often receive even amidst queer spaces, Leshon’s voice takes over the lyric—one of those girls, one of “those girls, one of those, one of those girls”—as if to ostracize Switchblade from her own song. “Some Days I Load My Gun” considers suicide in disturbingly straightforward terms; imagine “Everybody Hurts” with every gentle consolation drained away, leaving only the crushing weight of the fact. At the end Switchblade is barely still audible, overwhelmed by Seward’s droning organ, a single bright note held until it blinds.
The looseness of bar-band rock pardons drunks and licenses the strange. Dyke Drama can spare the time to develop lyrics like “Day-for-Night,” describing a turbulent family as the kind of scene that film directors correct from morning to twilight. But that organ suggests Switchblade is drawn to other genres entirely. Up Against the Bricks finds her covering “I Just Wanted to See You So Bad,” a song Lucinda Williams recorded for her self-titled 1988 album, and it’s about as reverent as punk gets. (Any irony that attaches to the line “you were staying in a big hotel” must be self-deprecating.) Switchblade rephrases the rueful original in hoarse and frantic cadences, as if she were jabbing elevator buttons out of desperation. Who could lie down and relax with so many doors to listen through?