This set from the lo-fi pop eccentric gathers odds and ends from across his career. But weirdly it functions surprisingly well as an album, documenting changes in his sonic evolution and singular sense of humor along the way.

John Maus: A Collection of Rarities and Previously Unreleased Material

There is obsessive fandom and then there is unguarded, shameless devotion. Mausspace is a place for the latter. Launched in October 2007 by three John Maus obsessives, the website is a message board and unofficial news source dedicated to the lo-fi pop eccentric, philosopher, and former Haunted Graffiti member. Prior to Maus' breakthrough record, last year's We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, fans would often happen upon the site while scouring the web for his demos, only to discover they actually were not alone in their respective Maus worship. Forum avatars boast such phrases as "MAUS IS REAL" and "MAUS FOR PRESIDENT". And the discourse surrounding his reverb-washed new wave recordings and lovably pretentious persona can be profoundly sincere. Mausspacers seem unanimously to deem Maus a visionary, and often on the board he has been called a spiritual hero. Casual onlookers might wonder if Maus is legitimately insane; Mausspacers say he is prophetically different.
All of which is to illustrate that Maus, currently a full-time Ph.D candidate residing in Minnesota, possesses a strange kind of magnetism, due in no small part to his relentless desire to push his music to physically and intellectually intense boundaries. This new, 16-track collection of rarities and unreleased cuts from 1999 to 2010 is filled with songs of murky romance marked by his deep, gothic, and expressive vocals. It's largely been made available in physical form for committed Maus fans-- an ironic reality considering Mausspacers have already heard the majority of the material, despite the fact that it's never been commercially released. All but two tracks have been available to download on the site.
Regardless, this remastered Collection of Rarities is intriguing beyond its archival purposes, as it traces the evolution of an artist over the course of 11 years. And the readily apparent aesthetic progression here-- from elaborate noise and abstraction to Maus' progressive embrace of songcraft at its most pure and potent-- also documents Maus' developing theories regarding "pop's true potential" to do something visceral and subversive with the genre. Though adventurous, Maus rejects experimentation for experimentation's sake, insisting instead that "it is our task as artists to make an intensive use of a major language." Last year, The W**ire contributor Adam Harper published a book on Maus, titled Heaven Is Real: John Maus and the Truth of Pop, which considered his works as "metapop" that offered commentary on pop itself. "Does Maus have something to teach us about arriving at the truth through personal musical expression?" Harper asks. "Has he really discovered Heaven-- and can he take us there?" That such a book even exists says a lot about Maus and the impression his music has made. It can be thoroughly confounding.
Collection of Rarities' earliest cuts are dissonant, exploratory, and slightly nonsensical. "Lost" feels like traveling through time-- anxious and cinematic with an indecipherable, superdramatic vocal line, and sharp, meandering keys that conjure the frantic feel of a horror film. The earliest track, 1999's "Fish With Broken Dreams", is suggestive of Maus' interest in classical music; the sounds of a miniature symphony orchestra filtered through a Xerox machine and pushed through the looking-glass. "I Don't Eat Human Beings" is a peculiar, new age atmospheric, where Maus sounds lost in his own head.
Maus may have moved on from the scattered structures of his early years, but, thematically, self-loathing is all over this collection, which comes off very much as the sound of a man tragically alone, working within the confines of his own shell, committing fully to each idea. "The Fear" is one of several meditations on inner-strife and anxiety, wherein Maus declares, "Motherfuck, the fear is back/ The fear is back, the fear is back." Meanwhile, "Angel of the Night" touches on his own personal dissatisfaction with his last LP and an ensuing breakdown. The sad earlier track "Big Dumb Man" strikes as even more personal, as Maus seems to unpack the quandary of an emotionally stunted intellectual, singing with an almost theatrically desperate inflection, "Big dumb man/ Is talking about logic," and "Big dumb man/ Cannot convey any emotion."
Several highlights feature production that simply sparkles, like 2007's radiant "All Aboard", the driving dance groove of 2010's "Castles in the Grave", or "North Star", which conjures a lonesome, late-night feeling of subtle disorientation. But the collection's two greatest achievements do what Maus has spent his career becoming great at: unadulterated new wave pop. "No Title (Molly)", which was also recently released on flexi-disc for Record Store Day, is a widescreen synth-pop sprawler, where Maus repeatedly sings romantic lines like, "I want you in my arms tonight." Much ink has been spilt on Maus' maniacal live performances, wherein he punches the sky, tears his hair, sweats, screams, pogos, and runs-in-place; the mechanized drum beat on "No Title (Molly)" is tailor made for Maus' on-stage energy expulsions.
And the same goes for "Bennington", the record's most melodic track, and one of the most earnest, comically distraught, and characteristically Maus anthems yet. The smart humor is rooted in just how emphatically committed Maus sounds to his own desperation on "Bennington". There is legitimate pain in his voice, as he plainly recounts a sole night spent with the college girl he'll dream of forever, but it's so exaggerated you can't help laughing a little, imagining Maus singing with his arms thrust to the reaches of the sky on each dramatic, downbeat synth rip. "I still love the girl from Bennington/ Even though I'll never see her eyes," Maus declares, repeatedly, following cosmic, wizardly oscillations, "I love those fucking eyes/ Those eyes don't leave my mind." When he finally reaches the song's frustrated end, his introspective, staccato-sung plea is cringe-inducing. The narrative is tragic and ridiculous, a profoundly lonely outsider anthem.
"Bennington" is one of Maus' most simple songs, but that doesn't make it any less cutting or human. The fact that Maus is open to interpretation makes him fascinating. An academic might discover the Harper book and enjoy puzzling through Maus' philosophical treatises. Enthusiasts of DIY production might gravitate toward the collection for its homemade warmth. An aesthete may marvel at his sublime synth washes, and how they pour over the emotive, baritone vocal lines. Some Mausspacers, meanwhile, are self-described "teeny bopper-esque" fanatics, approaching Maus like a capital-P Pop star, making Maus memes and monitoring his Twitter page and even transposing his face into pictures from the movie "Space Jam". And that's all fine. We "get" Maus as we choose.


Incorporating elements of cut-up soul and hip-hop, this is a stunning transformation for a guy that seemed like a one-trick pony focused only on atmosphere.

Ambivalence Avenue

Boards of Canada's 2005 album, The Campfire Headphase, included a song called "Chromakey Dreamcoat" that sounded like guitar loops playing on a wobbly phonograph. You have to wonder if this was a shout-out to their li'l homey Bibio, who cut three records for Mush from the whole cloth of this idea. Like his idols, he filled his electro-acoustic music with antiquated cultural products and nature sounds-- things that are beautiful because we've less and less use for them. But he lacked range, his wavering loop-collages falling into two categories: those informed by the sprightly forms of British folk, and those that were nearly formless.
Bibio released Vignetting the Compost just five months ago, and it seemed to cement his status as a pleasant one-trick pony. So it's shocking how utterly and successfully he rewrites his playbook on this Warp debut. I actually have to eat a little crow. I wrote of Compost that Bibio had a "thin, modest voice that verges on anonymity," and suggested that he should favor atmosphere over songcraft. This seemed justified: The more the songs approximated pop structures, the less interesting they became. But on Ambivalence Avenue, Bibio proves that he actually can sing and produce memorable arrangements. He used to make FX blurs with traces of pop and folk; now he inverts that formula with bracing clarity.
The results are fantastic and diverse: The title track weaves bouncing vocals through crisp guitar licks and bouncy flutes; "All the Flowers" is a fey folk gem; the dreamy "Haikuesque (When She Laughs)" is better indie-rock than many indie-rockers are making these days. Summery anthem "Lovers' Carvings" coasts on crunchy, gleaming riffs and upbeat woodblocks, and the autumnal "The Palm of Your Wave" is simply haunting. It's hard to believe that these inspired, moving vocal performances are coming from the same guy who recorded moaning ambiguities like "Mr. & Mrs. Compost". Occasionally, you'll hear a little tremble in the strings and go, "Oh right, this is Bibio," but mostly, detuned atmosphere has been replaced by silky drive.
While these songs are a quantum leap for Bibio, they still reasonably project from the foundation he's laid. But there's no accounting for the remainder of the album, which finds him paddling the uncharted waters of hip-hop, techno, and points outlying. "Jealous of Roses" sets lustrous funk riffs dancing between the stereo channels as Bibio belts out a surprisingly effective Sly-Stone-in-falsetto impersonation. "Fire Ant" spikes the loping soul of J Dilla with the stroboscopic vocal morsels of the Field; "Sugarette" wheezes and fumes like a Flying Lotus contraption. The music feels both spontaneous and precise, winding in complex syncopation around the one-beat, with subtle filter and tempo tweaks, and careful juxtapositions of texture (see the arid, throttled voices scraping against the sopping-wet chimes of "S'vive"). Many songs taper off into ambient passages that have actual gravity, gluing the far-flung genres together. It's the kind of seamless variety, heady but visceral, that few electronic musicians who aren't Four Tet have achieved.
While Ambivalence Avenue is an excellent album by any measure, Bibio deserves extra credit for venturing outside of his established comfort zone. He began his musical career trying to emulate Steve Reich and Boards of Canada on no-fi equipment. He was fascinated by the physicality of media-- of degrading tape and malfunctioning recording gear. And he was interested in the natural world, letting the sounds of streams and rainshowers stand in for his own personality. Having depleted these ideas over the course of three solid albums, he's put them aside to do nearly the opposite. Ambivalence Avenue moves the focus from the flaws of media to their capacity for precision, and takes fewer cues from nature than from the urban sounds-- including Dilla and Madlib-- that Bibio admits discovering in recent years. By jettisoning a limiting aesthetic, he reveals his abilities to be startlingly vast, and one of our most predictable electronic musicians becomes a wild card.


On her studio debut, Mykki Blanco shines with both her lyricism and radicalism.

Mykki

Mykki is the first proper studio album by Mykki Blanco, but it’s just the latest in her long line of punk moves. The New York rapper has been rising through the Afropunk scene for half a decade, cleaving apart the conventions of hip-hop through her dense rhymes—hectic, often hilarious gasps of speech have their own internal scaffolding. It’s something Mykki offers in spades, from her declarations of  “smoking blunts wit my cunts” in the club to raging, “They swear they kingpins in Rio but really D boys in Jersey/Put a hit out he swerved, the nerve of doing me dirty!” But often enough, Blanco is radical merely by holding steadfastly to her persona: the queer, gender-fluid alter ego of the performance artist Michael David Quattlebaum Jr., a woman who’s the sharp-tongued, arms-aloft progeny of riot grrrl and Lil’ Kim.
It’s high-concept hip-hop, a swerve from the brusque heterosexualization of nearly all mainstream rap. And Blanco has been greeted by her share of raised brows. But this experimental persona is delivered so nonchalantly, it frequently undercuts the radicalism; it’s a facet of the artist, not an aggressively pushed narrative. (She’s already gone on record bemoaning the media’s usual response to her identity, which is to group her with other gay, black artists like Le1f and Zebra Katz.) On Mykki, her assertiveness never wavers, whether diving into top-shelf hedonism in the club bangers or keening to find love past carnality in the ballads. Unlike her breakthrough 2014 mixtape Gay Dog Food, Blanco’s full-length debut offers unabashed moments of autobiography: She’s Snapchatting naked. She’s falling in love for the duration of a pill. She’s talking shit across a club banquette, and she’s furious at her partner for those suspicious texts.
Mykki’s whirlwind of topics have a heated musicality to match, jostling backpack rap with spongy neo-soul, usually with a chant-along pop chorus twining it all together. Opener “I’m in a Mood” is her most delicately melodic moment, a woozy morning-after twirl in which Blanco sighs, “My sweatpants they Gosha/La Costra nostra/Ziplocked them potions/I love my lip gloss and lotion.” The ardent electronic rasp of her voice is an analog to the gentle gilding of Frank Ocean or Ro James. “For the Cunts” is a bubblegum rap kiss-off that revels in bravura bitchery, with a chorus that folds in cliquish giggling. The album’s most hypnotic and eccentric banger, “My Nene,” balances the previously unfathomable: husky baritone lusting after her hot-to-trot “Nene” (whose gender is deliberately never revealed) with the hyperbolically yelped, overtly silly verses that land somewhere between Lil Wayne, Boosie Badazz, and the Lonely Island. (In good conscious, I cannot endorse “Boy am I in luck/Shawty’s bad as fuck/One look at the booty make my noodle wanna bust” as a romantic entreaty at the club.)
These flashy moments are broken up with interludes of solemn introspection—twice as spoken interludes from Blanco’s diaries, in which she confesses a desire for monogamous love (which feels pretty punk in itself, nowadays). Most compelling is when Blanco raps her journey in the gruff, low-slung cadence she has mastered. In “You Don’t Know Me,” Blanco stares ahead, unflinching, into her HIV-positive status, her gender fluidity, and the misogyny that surrounds her, in an operatic tumble of disclosure: “Buzzing on the block, I guess you heard the news/I’m running through the city like a predator, I’m burning dudes,” she mutters, sliding into a tetchy bark. “Booling with my Hooligans but deep inside I feel the trigger/Smoking weed ain’t working and these Xans done killed too many niggas.” The tinny percussion offers minimal accompaniment, but Mykki requires nothing more; Blanco doesn’t need any help defining herself.


The Chicago quartet swings big on a Chris Walla-produced album that brings unexpected grandeur to their modest, rootsy indie rock. It sounds like a breakthrough.

The Window

A level-up record isn’t just a band’s best yet, or even the record where a band finally realizes its promise. It’s a record that taps some previously unrecognized potential, surpassing any reasonable expectations even the musicians might have had for themselves. Producer Chris Walla has had a hand in many such albums over the years: Tegan and Sara’s The Con; Foxing’s Nearer My God; The Decemberists’ The Crane Wife; and, depending on your level of Death Cab fandom, arguably at least two or three with his former group. And now, with Ratboys’ The Window, he’s produced another.

For the first decade of Ratboys’ existence, the intermittently rootsy, perennially likable Chicago group made modest records enjoyed by a rather small audience. By 2020’s Printer’s Devil, they’d expanded from a duo to a quartet and amplified their sound accordingly, downplaying folk and country for ripping alterna-pop in the Superchunk/Breeders tradition, but The Window is their first record to use that fuller sound in the service of a bigger statement. In Walla, they found a producer who flatters their songs with both polish and heft. He brings an unlikely sense of classic-rock grandeur to a band that had always seemed perfectly content playing club shows.

His timing couldn’t be better, because if ever there were an opening for this band, it’s now. Country-leaning indie rock is having a moment, and The Window fortuitously echoes some of the most celebrated albums of the past several years. Between Julia Steiner’s hazy, hopeful voice and the accompanying bouquet of fiddle, “Morning Zoo” could slot right into Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud. There are periodic shades of Big Thief, too—not only in the album’s lispy twang, but in the four musicians’ synchronistic chemistry, especially their almost telepathic vibe on “Black Earth, WI,” a joint-passing, nearly nine-minute guitarists’ showcase.

In its scrambled guitars and somersaulting hooks, the record The Window most closely mirrors is Wednesday’s Rat Saw God, albeit without the abrasive bite. On Wednesday albums, the drugs are harder and so are the life lessons; Karly Hartzman writes from a place of not just emotional drama but often physical peril. The world Steiner paints is safer and less squalid: Instead of rotting houses or torched landmarks, she’s more apt to observe the restorative calm of nature or the brilliance of the northern lights. Yet while Steiner’s songwriting may be sweeter and gentler, it’s no less vivid or lived in, and she never lets you mistake her tenderness for naivety. Her serenity is hard won, and these songs pull back the curtain on all the work she puts into her positive thinking. “I kill my thoughts with a knife/Then blow a kiss to the silence,” she sings. On “No Way,” she throws up a triumphant middle finger to the toxic presences she’s cut out of her life: “There’s no way you’ll control me again,” she boasts.

For all the sunroof-dropping riffs of escapist jams like “Crossed That Line” and “It’s Alive!,” sorrow tugs at the album’s margins. Over the Gin Blossoms-y heartland chime of the title track, Steiner relays her grandfather’s distant final glimpses of her grandmother, who was sequestered in a nursing home due to Covid restrictions. The guitars are purposefully bright, as if to allay the aching sadness of six decades together without a proper goodbye. Steiner’s plainspoken prose never oversells the tragedy, either. With material this touching, there’s no need.

Ratboys have written great tunes before, but they’ve never stacked so many together like this. There’s a confidence to The Window that can border on cockiness. All these sizzling guitars and mammoth, McCartney-esque bridges risk upsetting the fundamental humility that was always so key to the group’s appeal. The Window’s great gambit is to lean into them anyway, and it pays off spectacularly, heightening the thrills without sacrificing the amiability. What a pleasure it is hearing this charming little band show off.


Setting aside the punishing death metal of their main band, the Tomb Mold players’ side project floats a whimsical fusion of math rock and city pop festooned with sneaky metal accents.

Daydream Plus: Escape at Your Own Pace EP

Escape at Your Own Pace EP

The shredders of Tomb Mold seem intent on being anything but straight-ahead death-metal musicians. Since establishing their main outfit as one of the beastliest OSDM groups in recent memory, each member has stretched their tentacles further outward. In Dream Unending, guitarist Derrick Vella has embraced heavenly post-rock guitar tones and slowed his riffs to a luminescent crawl, while Tomb Mold’s latest album, The Enduring Spirit, is less a sludgy beatdown than a skyward journey into chorus-pedal-fueled prog. Payson Power and Max Klebanoff, now two EPs into their Daydream Plus side project, have ditched the distortion and devil horns altogether for a breezy fusion of smooth jazz and math rock.
If Tomb Mold have been unfairly maligned for dressing like nerds, Daydream Plus practically dare the haters to come after their lunch money. With artwork straight out of an old city-pop record and riffs so smooth you can practically hear the laughter erupting between takes, the whole project feels like an inside joke being wheeled out to the public just to see if it has legs. If the duo’s crisp 2022 EP set the tone, their follow-up, Escape at Your Own Pace, pushes their sound further, adding a new bassist and guitarist to the mix and bringing in the slightest of metal touchstones to create a silly yet satisfyingly light experiment.
Once again clocking in under 15 minutes, Escape at Your Own Pace briskly powers through its four short songs, reveling in its low-key vibe. Though the artwork may call back to jazz-fusion albums from the likes of Masayoshi Takanaka and Casiopea, the closer Japanese comparison would be the clean guitar tones of bands like toe and tricot, with Payson fluttering his way through one sweetly melancholic riff after another. “Gently Technical” opens the EP on a surfer’s high, its winsome melody building to a finale laden with show-offy finger taps and cheeky, wind-swept chimes. “Neighborhood Watch” makes the metal connection even more apparent, opening on a blast-beat run from Klebanoff before settling into its sunny groove, with Power firing off the occasional screeching pinch harmonic for good measure. The flourishes are integrated so subtly that if you didn’t know these guys were metalheads in their day jobs, you might miss it entirely.
The EP’s remaining half goes down just as easy, even if the tracks are mellow to a fault. “Hourglass” phases through one anime-credits-ready riff after another without offering much in the way of a build, while “Try to Relax” takes its own advice a little too much to heart, cruising on a slow, dreamy riff that effectively puts the EP to bed. The project’s greatest achievement is in the way it continues to widen Tomb Mold’s musical universe. As each member has experimented with brighter tones, it feels like brutality is becoming less central to what this group is trying to achieve. Turns out that once you strip away the monstrous riffs, torrential drums, and imagery of unholy interstellar oblivion, Tomb Mold might actually just be beach-blanket music in disguise.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified Dream Unending as Payson Power's project.


The Strokes return after a lengthy hiatus following the disappointing First Impressions of Earth, and they sound fragmented with a lack of purpose.

Angles

The last time we saw the Strokes in a music video they were dead. In the visual for 2006's "You Only Live Once", the quintet wore all white while dark liquid filled the room, leaving them drowned and floating. And if that really had marked the end of the band, few would've been surprised. Their third album, First Impressions of Earth, had them limping, desperately trying to expand the signature sound that looked to be swallowing them up like so much black water. It didn't work. And the Strokes are too cool and too smart to become one of those bands that puts out a record every few years just so fans can sing the oldies back to them, right? So they went away-- to an array of lackluster side projects, to families, to anywhere but the Strokes.
As late as November 2009, Julian Casablancas was non-committal on the subject of a fourth Strokes album. "We've been trying to do it for years," he said. "I'm always available and they know that but getting together is tough." Guitarist Nick Valensi went even further: "I'm not even sure we're going to make a fourth album at this point." But still, here we are with Angles, not a roaring comeback as much as a glorified spit-balling session.
The album attempts to rebuild the band from the ground up. Whereas Casablancas had previously written nearly every part of the group's songs including guitar solos and basslines, he steps back on Angles, which features songs from other members. And this revised process is evident in the credits: "All Music Written and Arranged by the Strokes." Casablancas called the new way "Operation Make Everyone Satisfied," which sounds condescending enough. And while the more democratic move may seem generous, the singer threw his clout around by separating himself from the rest of the recording process and sending his vocals to the band via electronic files. And the album's oddly collaborative origins are evidenced in both its scatter-shot diversity and its lurching fragmentation.
With its sprightly, dueling fret work and familiar, cascading chorus, first single "Under Cover of Darkness" hinted that the Strokes had come to terms with being the Strokes-- after dalliances with other styles and sounds, they seemed content with a revival in their own image. But, for better and (mostly) worse, that is not the case. Though this band was routinely slapped with claims of 1970s plagiarism upon their arrival, it's unlikely that many people have ever mistaken a Strokes song for one by Lou Reed or Television. So it's ironic that their mimicry can be uncanny on Angles. But traces of scummy CBGB punk are sometimes replaced with big-snare 1980s flash. "Two Kinds of Happiness" pilfers one-time tour mate Tom Petty for the palm-muted and hiccup-phrased verse before ramping things up in a whooshing vintage-U2 hook. And "Games" is another 80s throwback, utilizing crystalline synths and distant hand claps to help prove its dour and strained point about "living in an empty world." Opener "Machu Picchu" recalls "Down Under" dudes Men at Work. These are not the expected influences for a Strokes album.
Which would be fine-- great, even-- if they were carried through with anything resembling charm or commitment. Throughout, the album is hobbled by disconnections-- between verse and chorus, lyrics and music, intent and execution. Casablancas' ambivalence about his own actions crops up often. On the ugly prog wannabe "Metabolism" he declares, "I wanna be outrageous/ But inside I know I'm plain." Disjointed closer "Life Is Simple in the Moonlight" has him confessing, "There's no one I disapprove of or root for more for than myself." And while the singer's singed self-loathing was present in the Strokes from the beginning, it was always tempered with music that provided some uplift. But on the sad-eyed and drum-less "Call Me Back", he's left to moan about how "no one has the time, someone's always late" against a single guitar and ethereal keyboard. Listening to the track, it's pretty easy to see why people may not be returning his calls.
Yet there are still those moments when you remember why it's a good thing that these five guys stayed together. The beatific "Gratisfaction" is so easy-going and straightforward in its Thin Lizzy-meets-Billy Joel strut that it immediately rushes past nearly every other song here in the race for greatest hits-dom. Even better is "Taken For a Fool", which is the only track on Angles to really offer something refreshing while also sticking with That Strokes Sound. The song's verse is air-tight and bizarrely funky like some lost tape from David Bowie's Lodger, while the hook relieves the syncopation with to-the-point brashness. Talking about his general sonic goals in 2009, Casablancas said, "The ideal for me is to get really out there but have it go full circle and sound pretty normal." It's a worthwhile aim, and "Taken For a Fool" nails it.
As news about the Strokes' shaky resurgence has continued to flow over the last few months, two of the group's contemporaries chose to bow out. The White Stripes-- who faced off against the Strokes in a friendly Coolest Band Alive competition for a few years in the early aughts-- officially broke up after a hiatus on February 2 in order to "preserve what is beautiful and special about the band and have it stay that way." Meanwhile, fellow wry New Yorkers LCD Soundsystem will wrap up their run April 2 at Madison Square Garden. As it happens, that's just one day after the Strokes will play the same venue to kick-start their second life. Everybody wants to quit while they're ahead. Some actually do it.


Serving as a synopsis of everywhere he's taken Toro Y Moi to date, Chaz Bundick's third full-length is also the longest and loudest of his releases. Here's silky R&B, roller-rink pop, bubblegum funk, and tasteful chillout music, all unified by a voice that's grown more confident with time.

Anything In Return

We like to think of artists as straining against their limitations, pushing boundaries, confounding expectations, and provoking listeners. This framework makes it easy to underestimate the kind of ambition Chaz Bundick's demonstrated within the context of Toro Y Moi. He's a prolific artist who never comes off like he's in a race with his muse; he subtly expands his range and refines his production skills, but in genres uniformly bereft of bombast or overstatement. Even after 2011's rep-solidifying Underneath the Pine and its equally worthy successor, the Freaking Out EP*,* many still want to view him as the guy whose earliest singles became definitive documents of a subgenre synonymous with apathy. So Anything in Return can appear like it has Big Third Album things to prove, ambitious in easily understood ways: it's the longest Toro Y Moi album and the loudest as well. It just manages to do those things on Bundick's self-effacing, generous terms. Which shouldn't obscure Anything In Return's accomplishment of being another strong, forward-thinking record from an artist whose grasp never seems to exceed his reach.
Anything in Return serves as a tidy synopsis of everywhere Bundick has taken Toro Y Moi to date. So there's silky R&B, roller-rink pop, bubblegum funk, tasteful chillout music, all unified by a voice that's grown more confident with time. The light touch he applies to his melodies sounds assured rather than meek. The higher BPMs early on make Bundick's peripheral relationship to dance music more overt. He's been on the giving and receiving end of countless remixes and revived his Les Sins project for a partnership with Dan Snaith's Jiaolong label, so he's had plenty of chances to workshop with similarly-minded artists. "Harm In Change" is where he shows the results; unlike the introductions from Causers of This or Underneath the Pine, Anything In Return doesn't begin on a wobbly note, rousing itself into shape. The bass drum hits almost immediately, and along with single "Say That", "Harm In Change" incorporate gestures that would typically have to wait until the inevitable remix make themselves heard: house diva samples serving as punctuation on his own vocal lines, four-on-the-floor beats, modular synth bass, all distinguishing it from the decisively organic Underneath the Pine.
That said, it isn't dance music proper, nor does it aim to be. You might already be hearing it as a potential go-to for rooftops, house parties, or any non-club function, or perhaps as dress-up/go-out music for people who don't relate to "Suit & Tie". Anything in Return never feels exclusionary, so the extroversion of the music and the increasingly tony production ensures that any mention of Toro Y Moi as a "bedroom" act has to relate to the lyrical concerns only. "So Many Details" follows the uptempo introductory duo with a seductive slow grind and cooed lyrics ("This ain't appropriate…I just want to tease your eyes") that project a polite sort of lasciviousness before unraveling into a hint-dropping, percussive coda. "Rose Quartz" consolidates what came before it, two minutes of patient, hands-in-the-air build up before establishing its central juxtaposition of instinctual desires and metaphysical hesitance-- "Don't let me fall/ 'cause I feel weak."
As with his previous two LPs, Bundick bookends Anything in Return with the most instantly captivating material, while the middle ultimately establishes the determinative mood. This is where Anything in Return truly differentiates itself. Causers of This took was an immersive experience, aqueous and aquamarine, while the ornate and warm *Underneath the Pine *painted with pastels; Anything In Return is better described by its shape and body rather than its color. While Toro Y Moi is more or less characterized as portable music, you really should consider a nice subwoofer for this one.
This newfound emphasis on the low-end counters his tendency to let songs drift. This is particularly true on tracks that would otherwise be the most stereotypically chillaxed: "High Living" anchors itself with bass that lets the good times roll very, very slowly, "Studies" lays nasally funk guitar over an insistent drum break, the champagne-swilling "Touch" fizzes but never goes flat. It can actually get a little too lost in its luxury; Anything in Return has more truly great music than any Toro Y Moi album, but at 52 minutes, the overall impact gets dulled. When "Cake" pops up as the 10th track*,* it's by far Bundick's most assertively-sung, and the stickiest as well. It's a revelation for him as an artist, but the startling jolt it provides after the midsection makes you feel like the Anything kicked its feet up for about 10 minutes too long.
Anything in Return could still be called "lifestyle music" in the pejorative sense. If you think Toro Y Moi exists solely as a sonic accessory for buying tote bags, this album won't do much to change your mind, largely because it doesn't really want to. But Toro Y Moi's music has a relatable quality that can't be overlooked. The most direct lines tend to be fourth-wall busting mentions of being on tour, having no plans on Friday night, and trying to sort out girl problems, especially when they're freaking out about failing a class and how to explain it to their parents.
While tech-obsessed, sonically omnivorous, and emotionally distracted music typically serves as fodder for "sound of life today" thinkpieces, Anything in Return embodies a certain ideal of young adulthood at the pace it's actually lived; of fluidity between creative pursuits and careers, between hanging out and making out. It's tough to say whether Bundick is seeking to make a "statement" as Toro Y Moi, no more than any of his peers are seeking to define themselves with a nine-to-five (in fact, his definitive song "Blessa" may have been about the futility of just that). But the occasional structure is helpful for an artist constantly plotting his next move. For now, the musically and emotionally rewarding Anything in Return evokes the feeling of being young with options and in no hurry to figure it all out.


The Juan MacLean's third studio album cements their status as one of DFA's flagship acts, cementing the partnership of John MacLean and Nancy Whang as the kind of ever-evolving collaboration the label was built on.

In a Dream

Juan MacLean represents something of an archetype DFA artist: a reformed indie rocker who immersed himself in synth gadgetry and surrendered to the groove. He typifies the behind-the-scenes, slave-to-the-music vibe from which so much dance music springs, and like any great dance artist, Maclean's best work has come via his singles ("Happy House", "You Are My Destiny"). If James Murphy was the quarterback of the DFA roster, then Maclean was the president of the AV club.
If there's any extra urgency or excitement surrounding Maclean's third studio album, In A Dream, it's that DFA now lacks a flagship act, and Nancy Whang—frequent collaborator, In A Dream cover star, justification for the definite article preceding the Juan's name—seemed to be a burgeoning creative force herself in the waning days of LCD Soundsystem. Her work on In A Dream is among her best: brassy and affecting, she sings like a punk rocker whose feet have warmed to disco but not her heart.
Which is just as well: Maclean and Whang have been distilling the funk/punk out of this project since 2005's still beloved Less Than Human. To wit: within about a minute of the album's start—the cardio motorik of "A Place Called Space"—we're treated to a searing guitar lead. What Maclean and Whang have settled on here is a more muscular, downtown version of the type of reedy disco-pop that Lindstrøm & Christabelle explored on Real Life Is No Cool. In A Dream is hi-def synth boogie, flexing and preening in ways its forbears simply couldn't, as if old Ze Records and italo-disco classics had spent the last 30 years in the gym packing on studio wherewithal and audio fidelity.
When everything comes together, In A Dream is spectacular. "I've Waited For So Long" whips around hurriedly as Maclean and Whang trade verses and choruses. "Running Back To You" is a slo-mo bass gargle, with Whang's salt-corroded vocals bristling against the perfectly formed contours of the bass synth, which Maclean walks carefully on a leash for the song's duration. "A Simple Design" is the most compact, finest ever summation of this partnership, a simple, danceable track that finds the two dancing around each other, Whang's "la la la"s providing ample space for Maclean's flights of fancy before she grabs the chorus by the throat and caresses it gently.
Problems that have persisted throughout The Juan Maclean's output crop up here as well. Maclean is a less frequent and less irksome vocal presence than on prior records, though he's still uncompelling, pushing through the shoulda-been-anthemic peaks of "Love Stops Here" with affectless utterances. Maclean is a masterful synth programmer but not a singular one, and so sometimes In A Dream resembles those beautifully built urban townhouses, trading sturdiness for creativity and sapping some of the fun in the process.
That's the harshest grenade you can throw at In A Dream, though: it's too comfortable and robust. When the duo come in for the requisite 10-minute, album-closing jam, it feels earned, and it's motive and charming enough not to bore. In A Dream is Maclean and Whang's most fruitful, balanced partnership, and if it fails to truly make a star out of either of them, it cements them as the kind of ever-evolving collaboration DFA was built on.


One half of Tonstartssbandht, Eola is a vocal-only project with loops and blues. Dang is charming, weird, and extremely sincere.

Dang

Most everything produced by Orlando-born brothers Edwin and Andy White has a certain freewheeling quality. In the case of their cultishly beloved duo Tonstartssbandht, this has meant a frenetic, even theatrical, approach to what could be vaguely termed psychedelic guitar rock, with a strong emphasis on touring and live improvisation over producing studio output. Tonstartssbandht has existed in some form for nearly a decade, at times as a long-distance project, Edwin and Andy each living in various cities and touring with other groups. In that time, both have maintained solo projects that, though distinct in sound, are in spirit very much linked to the work they’ve done together.
For Edwin, that’s Eola, the title under which he releases his own murky pop songs, built mostly from staggered choruses of vocal loops. Dang, his first release since 2013, compiles a selection of recordings made between 2011 and 2015. Eschewing Tonstartssbandht’s proclivity for instrumental flourishes, these songs are pared-down and rhythmically cyclic, nodding to gospel and blues, tropes White warps and reworks into repetitive structures.
While White’s enthusiastically straining voice is the backbone of all of this, it’s also obscured, soaked in reverb and vocoder effects. The result oscillates between sing-songy and droning, upbeat and disconcerting. Opening track “And I Know” layers an impassioned vocal performance over a two-note dirge, introducing the record with a degree of anxious intensity. In the songs that proceed, however, the pace slows, and White’s singing takes a gentler turn. The record includes two cheerful renditions of full-on pop songs—one a take on his brother’s “Big Chestined Nights,” and the other of Montreal-based associate Sean Nicholas Savage’s “Someone’s Got a Secret”—but White’s own songwriting tends toward something more meandering. This can be one of the record’s frustrations: though absorbing live, meditative tracks like “Daylong Breathing” and “Future Hymns” have a somewhat uninviting tinniness about them in this reproduction. White is an expressive and playful singer, and his songs are at their best when these qualities are amplified by, rather than buried beneath, lo-fi processing and recording techniques.
Part of that Tonstartssbandht spirit embodied here is, personal evolution aside, a good-natured and perhaps wholly unintentional unwillingness to bend to shifts in the dominant sounds of indie and experimental music. Rather, their music’s tendency has been to create in performance its own self-containing world. Eola has social and aesthetic affiliations to a niche breed of offbeat small-batch tape label pop—most obviously, Arbutus Records and the Montreal-based scene around it—and such points of reference can feel, already, somewhat of a bygone era. But unchanged as it sound may be, Dang is an odd enough record to stand on its own, satisfying for its intuitive, rather than intellectual, approach to experimentation.
For that reason, its curious—and seemingly very sincere—absorption of devotional tropes seems best understood at the level of the voice. On “How Far Am I From Canaan,” White reprises a gospel song made popular by Sam Cooke. Much unlike Cooke’s sweetly sung and singularly uplifting rendition, it’s droning and skeletal, but also overflowing with feeling in its own abstract way. White’s scratchy “hallelujah, hallelujah now” strikes as both unholy and, for all its grubbiness, at least a little transcendent. However unpolished, Dang still has a glow about it.


On Montreal producer CFCF's new Outside, instead of simply losing himself in the haze of the translucent pastels as on previous release Continent, Silver uses the release as a bid to ground his music with more approachable song structures.

Outside

It's kind of hard to believe that Outside, the latest offering from Montreal electronic producer Mike Silver (aka CFCF), is actually only his second full-length release. Since introducing himself with his debut Continent, Silver has released a series of EPs that, given their length and depth, work as larger statements rather than placeholders. Reliably innovative and stimulating, these efforts helped illuminate the varied intellectual curiosities (architecture, film, objects) that inform his constantly mutating palette, often with arrestingly beautiful results. In the ever-expanding sphere of electronic musicians willing to take risks, Silver managed to stand out thanks to both his willingness to think outside the box and his keen pop sensibilities. So it's no surprise that, on Continent, he's embracing the traditional aspects of the long-player format on Outside, crafting vaporous, understated tracks that often play as updates on vaguely new age-y, soft rock radio staples.
One of Silver's greatest strengths is his ability to modify his sound while still sounding uniquely like himself. Outside boasts the same familiar textures and colors we've come to expect from CFCF, evidenced by the fluorescent kabuki dreamscapes ("Jump Out of the Train") and sweltering, celestial atmospherics ("Find") on display here. But instead of simply losing himself in the haze of its translucent pastels, Silver uses Outside as a bid to ground his music with more approachable song structures. Touching on the likes of Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel and even Sting, Silver gives the album a more human touch, inspired by "the yearning for stability that comes from constant movement." Amorous and aching, it's no wonder Silver feels the urge to throw himself from the train, as much of the album evokes how the strange, reflective quietude of a life spent inside the cabin can dull the realities of the busy, bleary landscapes rushing past your window.
The most notably different thing about Outside is the return of Silver's actual voice, now more in the foreground than on any of his previous releases. It's unspectacular—hushed, a little flat, at times almost plainspoken—but one with a deliberate purpose, used to bring more shape and emotional clarity to these pieces. He even goes so far as including a surprisingly faithful cover of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's "Strange Form of Life". But most of the time, Silver's vocal presence acts as more of a distraction than a guiding light. While a good portion of these songs would sound unfinished without a lyrical component, you can't help but wonder what Outside would sound like with anchored by a different person (or persons) on vox, Active Child assist on "Train" notwithstanding.
Much like Continent or any of the subsequent EPs released under the CFCF name, Outside is designed to wash over you, creating an immersive experience that often times helpfully obscures the weightiness of Silver's concept exercises or, in this case, hokey confessional pop. Except this time around, the effect can't quite stand up to his current fascination with slightly warmed-over, 80s adult contemporary looks. Needless to say, if you balked at Bon Iver's "Beth/Rest", it's unlikely that you'll take much interest in the minimalist takes on Tears For Fears ("Feeling. Holding"), softcore cable porn soundtracks ("The Crossing"), or the funereal "Miami Vice" vibes ("This Breath") that pepper the record. It's not that Silver doesn't successfully develop these ideas, but he presents them in ways that are too resolute and self serious to be effectively absorbed.
And yet, with repeated listens, Silver's hypnotic grip strengthens, often overshadowing his cheesier impulses. "The Forest At Night" is as revealing a title as any, while the excellent "Find", with its hair metal ballad guitar and humid, swelling synths, feels very much in spirit with the music of former Emeralds member Mark McGuire. On opener "Beyond Light", Silver finds himself back in the depths of some Herzog-ian jungle scene, all maddening arpeggios and tribal drums. The beauty of a project like CFCF is that it's an amorphorous one, despite the clear lines that can be drawn from one release to the next. The shadows its shape casts may not always create flattering silhouettes, but there's both comfort and anticipation to be found in knowing that Silver's constantly tweaking the lighting.


Rap's trickster god and R&B's least tolerable person collaborate on a mixtape with no discernible upside.

Slime&B

Of the many strange pop-culture artifacts to emerge from quarantine, a collaboration between Young Thug and Chris Brown probably falls higher on the plausibility index than Beyoncé shouting out OnlyFans or the name X Æ A-12, but their new mixtape, Slime&B, still feels beyond explanation. It’s hard to imagine it existing in a world less dystopian than the one we’re in now. The title implies a meeting of the minds and a marrying of their styles, yet this is a clear mismatch. Brown, while still commercially viable, has been slumping creatively. Thug is at the height of his success and near the peak of his powers. To work with Brown, Thug must sacrifice a ton of what makes him special and engaging. Why go from So Much Fun to so little?
Thug is no stranger to this kind of project. On Rich Gang Tha Tour, Part 1, he and Rich Homie Quan formed an unlikely yin-yang duo that seemed linked even when unyoked, and even though he often lacks chemistry with frenemy Future, their collaborative tape, Super Slimey, was still like watching two sluggers at a home run derby bat flipping every time they go yard. They were two of rap’s preeminent talents in their primes, independent but together.
Young Thug teaming with Chris Brown doesn’t have the same upside. Brown is a deposed R&B king-turned-heel whose continued hitmaking is offset by his inability to grow or show restraint, in his music or in his life. He is an incompatible, and in some cases unwelcome, partner for rap’s mischievous trickster god—indeed, someone’s already made a version where he is entirely cut out of the tape. The two of them don’t share any meaningful connection, and they mostly come across as self-indulgent.
Young Thug, for his part, sounds jaded and disengaged. Roping Thug into Chris Brown’s world of frictionless songcraft limits the possibilities for what the rapper can do; he’s rarely seemed as bored as he does on “Trap Back.” Thug says he recorded his verses in a single day; honestly, it sounds like it. (He was spotted shooting hoops with Brown the day before they announced the tape.) He is so prolific and explosive that it’s easy to imagine a lot of his best rapping happening like this, but his verses and hooks here are aimless in an idle sort of way. These are “nothing else to do” bars without real inspiration. Even if the point of this project is simply to kill time, listening shouldn’t feel like a waste of time.
Nor does his proximity to Brown push him to deliver on his singing. When Thug is locked in, as on the Swae Lee duet “Offshore,” he sounds like he could make all the chairs swivel on The Voice or pull a T-Pain at the Tiny Desk moment. But his performances here are just flat and spiritless, paling in comparison to the no-holds-barred crooning of his “singing album” Beautiful Thugger Girls. These two just don’t have any chemistry at all; on “She Bumped Her Head,” Brown sounds like he’s encroaching on Thug and Gunna’s space, trying to squeeze himself into a role likely meant for Lil Baby.
Thug and Brown find common ground in the cut-the-line VIP lifestyles they lead, how that celebrity gets them laid (often), and the nature of their stroke games (always great, apparently). But there aren’t many songs that really sell the Playboy Mansion debauchery they’re aspiring to. Songs about being too wasted (“Undrunk”) and about not being wasted enough (“No Such Thing”) cancel out. And after half an album of womanizing, Chris Brown comes up for air just long enough to disavow the entire thing: “Poppin’ bottles in the club/Fuckin’ models, doin’ drugs/And I can’t do this anymore/I feel like an animal,” he cries. Granted, he does so on his knees trying to win a woman back, but still, it is a severe U-turn. Young Thug, missing the point entirely, plays the song differently, fully coveting the way of life that Brown is questioning. Neither of them seems to be paying any attention, so why should we?


The New York rappers’ complementary styles unlock a world of imagistic detail and surreal coincidence.

Another Planet 4

It would be nice to resist the reference points, but Lungs offers them so readily. When he was in the fifth grade, he told the blog RhymeBeat, his mother gave him a birthday present: the Fugees’ The Score. The rapper-producer, who grew up between New York City and Long Island, says the first time he listened to that record, he was running a 103 degree fever, hallucinating that one side of his bunk bed opened onto a vast desert, and if he rolled to the other side, a jungle. When the fever broke, he logged onto a file-sharing platform called Frostwire and downloaded two totems of Def Jux’s apex: Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein and Aesop Rock’s Bazooka Tooth.
Those seemingly incongruent schools of hip-hop—a moodiness that aspires to spiritual awakening, atonality that quickly resolves from noise into signal—would become twin pillars of his style. Since the beginning of quarantine, Lungs has been joined by fellow New York-based rappers like AKAI SOLO, Fatboi Sharif, and his collaborator on the Another Planet series, Phiik, in forming the spine of a new scene that sounds like it could only have emerged “since the beginning of quarantine.” Where New York’s non-drill underground had been dominated by rappers like MIKE and Navy Blue, whose insouciant deliveries mask a constant inward drive toward an improved self, this cadre seemed to snap upright with raps that are muscular, verbose, and agitated with the cacophonous world outside.
Another Planet 4 is the first full-length installment in the series Phiik and Lungs began in late 2020 and the cleanest distillation yet of their binary star chemistry. While Lungs is the one who admitted an adolescent pirating spree, it’s Phiik who sounds as if he’d be at home on a release schedule next to Aesop Rock or Vordul Mega. His verses are packed just as densely as Lungs’ are, but Phiik maps a route through them, as those Def Jux rappers did, with halting rhythms, onomatopoeia, and the percussive qualities of language. (See especially his verse on “When I Needed Someone”: Fear Factor, a backpack of bugs.) Lungs, by contrast, raps like lines of code flitting across a screen, ceaseless and seamless. Your brain needs time to attune to the sheer amount of information contained in his verses, which can overwhelm on first pass. The effect of these styles together—cousins but not twins—is to build dynamism where there might otherwise be only virtuosity.
And still, the detail comes as a flood. Each rapper’s lyrics are acutely observed. Some images are so rich as to be ethnographic: Phiik’s “45-year-old off-duty cop rocking Dunks,” Lungs’ recollection of a party “out in Suffolk, Italian kids headbutting walls, all bumping Cage/They parents upstairs, fucked up, doing bumps to Jimmy Page/The streets unpaved.” When Lungs drives on the LIE it’s with a “stomach full of bad Perc 30s”; when Phiik imagines a threat from the margins of society, it comes in the form of “overly pissed weirdos in a duster with a hit list.” The sinister figure out of The Matrix or Columbine punctures a porous border between pop culture and what we know as reality. The first lyrics on the album are “Lana Del Rey.” Unk rattles out of speakers and Colin Farrell dives into a phone booth, Steve Irwin dies and Windows 95 boots to life, Vine microcelebrities order drugs on their phone and rappers sound “like James Dolan when he piss,” all this adding up to a simulation that “can’t even run properly, without lags.”
This overload is in psychic step with the production, which is handled entirely by Lungs under his LoneSword pseudonym, and sounds like Operation: Doomsday if it were pieced together on one of those translucent iMacs in a school computer lab. In place of the quiet storm samples pulled from Stretch Armstrong’s record collection are the drumless loops that have dominated New York post-Marcberg, gestures toward jazz, lonely sirens, R&B samples half-heard through apartment walls. But even while Lungs and Phiik tend toward minimalism on a beat-by-beat basis, they eschew it in the aggregate, the album in sequence mimicking a brain as it shuffles through libraries, news feeds, memories.
Though dizzying at first, Another Planet is never quite inscrutable, and in fact traces the outline of a worldview: one that prioritizes basic decency, one that’s afraid of straying too far from the coasts because someone “might try to shoot up Target.” Lungs and Phiik understand not only how to navigate this din, but how to wield it for their own purposes—and how to critique the plausible deniability it grants to those who would rather shrug and move immorally. As Lungs raps on “Death Weapon,” before noting how tidily a New York street cleaves the “yuppies sitting in heated tents” and the unhoused people freezing to death across from them: “I tried to read the verse and couldn’t—there was too many ink blots.”


The North Carolina band once sounded tethered to the past. Now, more than 20 years into its career, it trades retro Americana for more expansive cinematic atmospheres.

Hiyo

Age suits Chatham County Line, who have been anxious to act older than their years from the moment they picked up stringed instruments. Founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1999, they once sounded like they might have been emissaries of a much earlier era, but with the passage of time, they’ve become less tethered to the past while expanding their vision of what Americana could be. After feinting toward heartland rock on 2020’s Strange Fascination, Chatham County Line turn moodier on Hiyo.
CCL vocalist/guitarist Dave Wilson co-produced the album with producer and music supervisor Rachel Moore, who in 2022 enlisted the group to serve as backing musicians on the set of George & Tammy, a Showtime series dramatizing the legacy of country icons George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Once filming was complete, Wilson returned the favor by convincing Moore to join the group in the studio. The album they created together feels appropriately cinematic, drifting from bluegrass picking and plaintive harmonies into territory where such distinctions cease to matter.
Chatham County Line still emphasize harmony, both vocal and instrumental, yet they appear newly eager to discover what lies beyond the borders of bluegrass. They place their emphasis neither on songs or fingerpicking, two cornerstones of the genre, but on atmosphere. Moore’s subtle use of studio effects gives Hiyo an almost painterly grain. The players ride meditative, melancholy chords that ebb and flow, reaching a pinnacle on the soft pulse of “Heaven,” which spends as much time receding as it does creeping ashore.
The desire to experiment occasionally leads them astray; Wilson’s writing on “Lone Ranger” gets bogged down in bedroom power dynamics. They’re better served by a lighter touch, like when they preserve the gendered lyrics in a haunted version of Patsy Cline’s “She’s Got You.” The Cline cover is one of a handful of retro accents on Hiyo—the closing “Summerline” features Wilson crooning into a phased old-timey microphone—but Chatham County Line have never seemed less burdened by the past. They embrace electronics and melodies sweet enough to be classified as pop—on “Magic,” they do so simultaneously—and discover new spectral microtones lying within their combined voices. These impressionistic textures place the album in a netherworld that’s untethered from any specific time or place. There’s an unquantifiable restlessness at the heart of Hiyo that keeps the record just out of reach, hinting at territories both alien yet oddly comforting.


For club-friendly artists to become or remain relevant on the strength of a single great 12-inch is not unusual, but ...

Louden Up Now

For club-friendly artists to become or remain relevant on the strength of a single great 12-inch is not unusual, but when the New York-based funk/rock octet !!! kept a prominent finger in the disco-punk pie with merely one song, last year's "Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)", it seemed an impressive feat. Two years earlier, the band had cut a self-titled full-length that went mostly unnoticed. But by 2001, !!! had latched onto an updated no-wave aesthetic that countless other bands would soon mindlessly mishandle. The featured 10-minute dancepunk epic-- stuffed with more hooks and movements than entire full-length albums-- not only reclaimed the band's reputation, but promised new life to the genre itself. The band's trajectory was the genre's trajectory, and with "Me and Giuliani", !!! and disco-punk began to stray away from safe post-punk skronk, and gradually draw nearer to more adventurous disco sleek.
On Louden Up Now, !!! have progressed toward a slicker, more disco-oriented sound. The band generally forgo the sloppy horn lines and heavy punk riff backbone of their debut, opting instead for slow, trance-like builds. At the heart of the album is a suffocating, dark electro-acoustic disco smog that recalls Black Devil's 1979 Disco Club EP, as well as Larry Levan, Walter Gibbons, and Arthur Russell's more pessimistic contributions to the disco underground. All of which is to say that the production on Louden Up Now is particularly commendable. Over the course of songs such as the first single "Pardon My Freedom", "Shit Scheisse Merde (Part 1)", and album highlight "Hello? Is This Thing On?", the !!! rhythm section boasts not only an adroit shape-shifting timbre, but enough subtlety for close listening.
Louden Up Now isn't all dancefloor thrills, however: !!! smartly dodge pigeonholes and one-trick-pony accusations with some less punchy moves, such as the psychedelic grind of "Dear Can" and the bright but blunted moonbounce of "Theme from Space Island". On "Shit Scheisse Merde (Part 2)", the band even curiously infringe on the drum sampling and sparse rhythmic figures of their sister group Out Hud.
So the production is great, the songbook is varied, and the band is tighter and more ambitious than ever-- the only problem with Louden Up Now is the unfortunate paucity of ideas within the songs themselves. It's as if the equivalent of all of the musical energy of "Me and Giuliani" has been spread over the album's nine other tracks. While Louden Up Now's electronic embellishments are finely mutated, the album sorely misses the huge, nearly anthemic guitar hooks that, to my mind, make !!! so exciting. Also sadly absent from anything other than "Me and Giuliani" are the distinct chapter-like movements of !!!'s longer numbers. On both "Shit Scheisse Merde (Part 2)" and "Dear Can", !!! get caught in a groove and seem hesitant to explore other potential variations or moods.
!!! always flirted with the possibility that they'd fail to fully deliver on the promise of "Me and Giuliani"-- unfortunately, just as a single 12-inch can make a reputation, that track can also serve as a potentially unforgiving benchmark. Louden Up Now contains plenty of good ideas-- as well as two tracks ("Pardon My Freedom" and "Hello? Is This Thing On?") that could soundtrack summer dance parties and net !!! a larger audience. But even when one considers that most listeners are no longer apt to be wowed simply by the concept of dance music with guitars-- and that most of !!!'s audience has come to accept Nic Offer's generally asinine lyrics as an inherent part of the group's unique dynamic-- Louden Up Now is simply not the indie-dance juggernaut many hoped it would be.


Zaki Ibrahim’s second album is a future-soul marvel that connects sounds across time and oceans, creating thrilling moments of pop music synthesized through her wise and worldly vision.

Zaki Ibrahim: The Secret Life of Planets

The Secret Life of Planets

The most pernicious lies about Canadian culture—that it is fledgling, subpar, or one-note—are self-generated. A month ago, I read a 1964 short story where the late novelist Mavis Gallant describes a photo of an expat family taken on a “Canadian-looking lawn.” It takes skill to make something as dull a patch of grass seem even more dull, though it is a pretty effective quip. Growing up in the Toronto suburbs in the ’90s, that same derisive shorthand was used to poke fun at homegrown radio and television content that conformed, lacked imagination: “It sounds Canadian,” “It looks Canadian,” we’d say.
The recent, unprecedented interest in Canada’s youth culture stems mainly from rappers, pop stars, and YouTubers—many black and brown, or children of immigrants—who leapfrogged these civic tropes to find global success. But in the rush to canonize this digital generation and their savvy, we’ve subtly encouraged the ahistorical idea that culture is somehow new here. For decades artists have flouted the overwhelming whiteness of Canadian sensibilities, considered their ancestries, made the pilgrimage “home,” returned, and eked out space. Exile is part of the Canadian story—almost all of us are settlers on this land—and this forgetting helps no one.
Singer and songwriter Zaki Ibrahim is part of this history. The Secret Life of Planets is Ibrahim’s second full-length release in a 12-year career, half of which was spent fervently gigging around Toronto’s R&B, rap, and house music scenes, before decamping for her fatherland in South Africa. In Cape Town, she found new inspiration in the loping cadence of kwaito, recorded parts of her 2012, Polaris Prize-nominated LP Every Opposite, and lent her flushed, practiced vocals to collaborations with local musicians as well as Hyperdub producers like LV and Scratcha DVA.
Along the way to arriving at Planets, Ibrahim has gathered new methods, sounds, and communities, recombining old ideas to make something all her own. This analog/digital, past/future, sensory/tactical approach to music-making is her hallmark. On The Secret Life of Planets (a title that riffs on a kitschy 1979 Stevie Wonder album), she flexes this musical vision—helped by Toronto producers/instrumentalists Alister Johnson and Casey MQ—with singular focus and nuanced whimsy. Try, but it’s very difficult to pick a favorite patch of sound from the Planets’ 13 tracks, her best album to date.
Despite its title, Planets is less liturgical science fiction and more soulful and sublime, focusing on cosmos of human experience. Ibrahim’s space odyssey somehow feels like both the dewy coast of British Columbia, where she was born, and South Africa’s sun-blanched expanse. Musically, she’s connecting a lineage of black styles across eras and oceans. Emotionally, she’s narrating a moment when time collapsed: her father’s death, followed four months later by the birth of her baby boy. Could life be more literal? Planets captures the giddy wonder that can come with immense despair. That moment when you raise your wet cheeks to the sun, our closest star and anchor, and find some peace in the immensity.
“Intro” feels the most familiar to the astral theme; it’s the dulcet, soft-lensed opening credits of a planetarium laser show, orbited by voices that are gurgling, somber, and far-off like a transmission. For most of Planets, Ibrahim and her producers dig into a range of earthbound electronic sounds: “Get There” is the lucid, bass-heavy two-step of the rave, “Love Made Naked” skips backward to boogie, and “Do the Thing Right” vibrates like a sweaty function, as vocal chants, percussion and horn sounds collide over the tipsy wub of Afrohouse. In the past, Ibrahim’s affinity for four-on-the-floor house and improvisational vocal rhythms have provided beautifully literal tributes to her South African return. But on Planets, she’s syncretized these interests into something of her own that sounds placeless, inquisitive, undeterred.
There are some thrilling pop moments too. “Cut Loose” follows a sultry loop and releases into rapturous, funky, wall-of-sound harmonies. On “Diamond Time,” which feels equally indebted to Chaka Khan and the warm bounce and clean lines of ’90s British soul, Johnson and MQ freak a range of wild synth sounds and muted handclaps, but it’s the big hook that takes it away. “I known love through the ages,” Ibrahim and her chorus exhale in unison, before soaring over the beat, “Big enough to blow your mind.” And on the incandescent lullaby “Galileo,” there’s a spotlight on Ibrahim’s most compelling gift: her moonlit voice, contoured by emotion.
Ibrahim’s eclipsing talent has been tenaciously honed outside of the pressures of a homogenizing industry that would benefit from making her its star. Planets isn’t just a product of black American or South African music styles; it’s multiple identities make it distinctly Canadian. It’s the work of an optimist whose voice wasn’t silenced by the confines of an unimaginative industry; it’s expansive in effort, and by sheer existence.


The neoclassical-ambient duo of Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran offers a gorgeous, towering, and apposite score for a dance theater production based on the Italo Calvino novel of the same name.

A Winged Victory for the Sullen: Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities

While appearing on albums for reputable labels such as Mute, Kranky, and Bedroom Community, today’s electronic-ambient artists are also afforded a healthy sideline in commissions for dance, theater, art installation, and film. One key benefactor is the choreographer Wayne McGregor, who treats his internationally acclaimed spectacles like he’s booking Moogfest, enlisting composers such as Max Richter, Ben Frost, and Jon Hopkins.
But those lines seem especially blurred in the case of A Winged Victory for the Sullen, whose second album, Atomos, was written for McGregor. Two of the group’s four LPs are scores, not even counting two other compositions for film soundtracks. Pianist Dustin O’Halloran’s most famous song is the Transparent theme, while Adam Wiltzie—whose ambient group Stars of the Lid launched countless hum-alikes—was tapped to score the big Whitney Houston doc for reasons even he doesn’t understand.
The only noticeable difference between the duo’s albums and commissions is the latitude that they allow themselves on the latter. That’s certainly the case on Invisible Cities, the score for a sprawling dance theater production based on Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel. Ambient musicians do have a habit of imputing weirdly specific concepts to interchangeable drones. But in this happy case, the applied content could hardly be more harmonious.
In Calvino’s 1972 novel, the 13th-century explorer Marco Polo describes imaginary cities to his contemporary, Kublai Khan, the Mongolian emperor later immortalized by a laudanum-dazed English poet. Any AWVFTS album would resonate with the beautifully wrought shape of Calvino’s prose, its sentimental, sorrowful grandeur, and the dreamlike flow of glittering details. Chip away all that agate and chalcedony, and Marco Polo is not describing cities, but how memory structures them, and what longings attached to them—two themes AWVFTS know well.
On Invisible Cities, their established neoclassical-ambient template is perfectly intact, with wide, spreading basses on the bottom, distorted melodies sharply etching the high end, and soft harmonies shifting in the abyssal middle. The tempo is solemn, the pacing regal, the mood perpetually expectant. The hopeful uncertainty of O’Halloran’s piano lends human scale to towers of holy drones and fuming strings. But there are more varieties of motion and force here than their imperious stasis usually allows.
Several songs dance on rapid pizzicato strings or driving violin ostinatos, while others incorporate tight, breathless arias. Others explode the elegant façade with exhilaration. “There Is One of Which You Never Speak” builds to a shorting mess of circuitry, almost shocking from a group that usually abhors any stereo chaos. The big finish, “Total Perspective Vortex,” goes even harder. The usual symphonic ice-melt erupts in volcanic distortion, which is then chopped into the strafing patterns that pervade the record, peaking in a metal scream.
Naturally, the most explicit Calvino references are in the song titles, though it’s nice to think of the subtle elephant-trumpet timbre of “The Dead Outnumber the Living” as an homage to the pachyderm in the book’s prologue. Wiltzie and O’Halloran knew what they were about when they snagged the line “desires are already memories” for a title, though somehow they overlooked “a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening,” an excellent précis of their whole vibe.
Still, one more parallel might be suggested. Calvino deployed heightened emotion with schematic rigor—most of the book’s Wikipedia page is concerned with its intricate internal structure. (He was a member of Oulipo, some French authors who started trying to write literature with math in the 1960s.) In a different way, AWVFTS does the same thing.
This is a group, after all, whose prior album was a sort of musical treatise on the perfect fifth. Their music conveys a sense of drama, high stakes, even godlike perspective, yet it does so in such a seamless, unerring way that it feels abstract, tooled for proscenium halls. A baseline of reliability can double as a cap on transcendent potential, and it’s those cap-rattling moments that make what’s otherwise simply another fine album from this duo worthwhile.

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Pépé Bradock made his name crafting immaculate deep house, but for more than a decade he has delighted in flouting expectations. Guitar in hand, he does just that on this album under a new alias.

Brigitte Barbu: Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne

Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne

Brigitte Barbu, better known as French deep-house enigma Pépé Bradock, is an impossible man to pin down. After a brief scuffle with the mainstream at the end of the 1990s thanks to “Deep Burnt,” a jazzy house classic of immaculate poise, Bradock has retreated—or perhaps advanced—into a career of inscrutable oddity. His erratic release schedule wanders between moments of beauty, fear, and utter outlandishness. Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne (Muzak for Broken Elevators), only Bradock’s third album in 24 years—following the 1998 singles anthology Synthèse and last year’s appropriately titled collage effort What a Mess!—continues this beguiling and sometimes frustrating trend. The album is neither the “abstract hip-hop LP” that Bradock promised, nor an example of the deep house with which he made his name. There are no beats, for a start, and barely a hint of the constructive patterns that house typically demands; the songs instead ooze from one point to another like microorganisms in the primordial soup.
Most eye-opening of all is the role that the electric guitar plays: Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne was recorded and mixed during a one-week studio residency with the guitar employed, he says, as “a brainwashed instrument, mirroring machines and computers.” The instrument’s presence shouldn’t be a total surprise—Bradock started playing guitar at 14, graduating to Parisian jazz-funk bands before house took over—but the instrument has barely featured in his music since. On the evidence of the exquisite, often entrancing, patches of guitar melody on Muzak, I wish it had. Bradock has a gift for the kind of atmospheric guitar traces that Steve Hillage employed on albums like Rainbow Dome Musick, notes misted onto the mix like the suggestion of rain. Rather than mirroring the machines, though, the guitar flows into them, dissolving the border between digital and analog as it joins Bradock’s collection of esoteric drones, trills, and pulses.
The album’s best moments coincide with the strongest melodic work. “Dae Boj DeMoya” washes in on a gorgeously tender melody whose hybrid guitar/synth tone falls somewhere between a whistle, pedal steel, and slide guitar; its haunting tint of Americana evokes the KLF’s journey into the American dreamland on Chill Out, with the melody becoming progressively more enveloped in electronic curlicues as the track develops. “Sainte Amante” travels from spidery guitar lines to airy chords, which bathe the song’s electronic arpeggios in shimmering light, while “Mistori” uses a sublime combination of reverbed guitar and synth drone to trace layers of melody, ending up like Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks if Brian Eno had set his controls for the heart of the sun rather than the moon’s barren surface.
Muzak’s tendency to meander is both its charm and its Achilles’ heel. When the musical ideas are strong it is a luxury to drift along on Muzak’s wave, free from the distraction of beats or extraneous elements; when they are weak or ill defined, as on “Ray Z,” a track most notable for sporting a comically duck-like squelch, the music feels rather slight, more a collection of sounds than anything approaching a song. On an album this short—with just six songs and five brief sketches to its name—this feels wasteful. Perhaps completing an album in one week was an unrealistic proposition for an artist who confesses to work at the pace of a “Burgundy snail.”
Then again, the tendency for dazzling self-sabotage is typically Pépé Bradock, a hugely talented producer whose obduracy is part of the package. There are no simple answers to the Bradock riddle, and nor would you want them. This week he’s Brigitte Barbu, recording amorphic, guitar-led caprice; the next week he won’t be, but Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne remains another perfectly imperfect milestone along Bradock’s exasperating golden path.


J Dilla's younger brother trawls through the late producer's wealth of unused beats and uses them as the foundation for his debut album.

Yancey Boys

Illa J is the younger brother of the late stoner-rap deity J Dilla. That in itself speaks to some fundamental lameness, like if Jay-Z had a rapping younger brother who called himself Zee-J. More to the point, his familial connection to a great dead producer appears to be Illa's chief qualification to release an album. On the interlude "Alien Family", Dilla associate Frank Nitty tries to make a case for this particular feat of nepotism, testifying as to the musical abilities of the entire Yancey clan: "It's like they the Jackson 5 from Mars." If you say so, Frank Nitty.
And yet Yancey Boys does work pretty well because of that familial connection: Illa exclusively works with previosuly unheard mid-1990s Dilla beats, and a new album full of old Dilla beats is never a bad thing. Dilla apparently left behind a Tupac-level archive of unused material when he died in 2006, and Yancey Boys is pretty much 48 minutes' worth of the producer's trademark glimmering murk. It's a good little, unhurried, rainy-afternoon rap album. Dilla had a definite formula-- amniotic soups of echoed-out Fender Rhodes, sharp snares, gurgley bass, precisely sloppy record-scratches-- yet surprises do pop up every once in a while on Yancey Boys. "We Here" swipes the drums from Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express". "All Good" employs someone running a stick up and down one of those wooden crocodile sculptures. Mostly, though, these old beats just thump away in a comforting sort of fog.
As for Illa, he's got a rapping voice way more soft and delicate than the vaguely clumsy tough-guy yammer Dilla himself usually used. At times, Illa recalls a seriously stoned and vaguely bored Q-Tip. His lyrics are heavy on digression. On "Strugglin'", apropos of nothing: "My favorite White Stripes album is Elephant/ OK, I know that's irrelevant/ But that's my shit." "IllaSoul" is a weird sort of a come-on song, Illa getting stoned and staring at the ocean while at the same time hitting on some girl. Actual lyric: "I'm so glad that we got we/ And also, I'm so glad that we got weed."
But Illa spends at least as much time singing in a relaxed soul-singer falsetto coo as he does rapping-- and he rarely diverts attention from the beats, which makes him a more appropriate vessel for them than a prominent Dilla collaborator like Common or Busta Rhymes would've been. Illa recalls fellow indie-rap psych-traveller Aloe Blacc in the way he mixes Sam Cooke harmonies with utilitarian rapper. But unlike Aloe, Illa rarely gives the impression that he's doing anything more than fucking around in the studio. This, after all, the sort of album where someone says, "I grab your derriere and vibrateth my fingertips" in a vampire accent over "Für Elise". At the end of "Sounds Like Love", Illa ad-libs, almost to himself, "It's just the music. It speaks for himself." He's right. And thanks to his brother's beyond-the-grave contributions, he himself is the most disposable part of his own debut album. Luckily for him, it probably won't be too hard to find another hour's worth of unused Dilla tracks when it comes time to record the follow-up.


Vermont is the new synthesizer-based project from German electronic composers Daniel Plessow (Motor City Drum Ensemble) and Marcus Worgull. These careful, patient pieces, a handful featuring Can's Jaki Liebezeit on drums, are focused and luminous.

Vermont

Vermont is a new project from Germans Danilo Plessow and Marcus Worgull. For Plessow, better known as Motor City Drum Ensemble, it represents the first significant dump of new material since his wildly popular Raw Cuts series—dusty, sample-based house ravers—put him on the map at the end of last decade. The album, a collection of percolating synthesizer landscapes, represents a new direction for both, one that borrows from Germany's storied history of outre music in both form—the influence of artists like Popol Vuh and Hans-Joachim Roedelius is undeniable—and function: Can's Jaki Liebezeit guests on drums.
Despite its relative obscurity in the canon of western music, instrumental synthesizer music is plentiful. Analog circuitry is enormously fun to fiddle with and gear obsessives have a tendency to hit "record" and do just that. Artists such as Steve Moore, Norm Chambers (Jürgen Müller, Panabrite), Steve Hauschildt, and Jorge Velez (Professor Genius) are just a handful of artists who've released exciting works in the genre recently. This is music that sits in the middle of a venn diagram that brings together ambient, improvisatory, and generative musics, which is to say that it's music that can often seem more edifying and enriching for its creators than for its audience. Vermont's careful, patient compositions don't feel particularly generative or improvisatory, but the instruments still do a lot of the heavy lifting: anyone not predisposed to enveloping pads and wispy filigrees of melody will find little else to sink their teeth into.
If Plessow and Worgull distinguish themselves, it's via clarity and execution. Because its creators are often using finicky gear three and four decades old, lots of synthesizer music tends to sound as worn and fractured as the tools used to make it. Vermont, though, is focused and luminous; its high is similar to that of waking up early, totally sober, and gathering oneself. There's discipline and fidelity in this music, which is a fancy way of saying it has its shit together. Vermont is never less than agreeable and pretty: if you get off on hearing a bunch of volts and circuits evoke mountains and fog, Vermont might be for you.
Evoking those landscapes, though, is all Vermont does. It's polite music that, unlike proper ambient music, has pretensions that extend beyond politeness. It's here where Vermont's balance hurts it. Something foggier or more random would open more avenues to explore, but Vermont feels complete, without mystery or intrigue. It lacks the psychedelia and stoned otherness of its inspirations. "Macchina"'s puddled rhythms and "Ruckzug"'s graceful plumes are lovely, but oddity and intrigue are beyond their grasp. "Cocos" is a moody, minor-key sea of texture, but it never stirs up any real tension.
To its credit, Vermont stares its self-imposed limits in the face and walks away with plenty of elegant moments. Its slightness makes it nothing more than a diversion: for listeners, sure, but also for its creators. Vermont is a side project that sounds like one, a pastime for Plessow and Worgull, a minor curiosity for their fans.


Feist’s quietest album to date is warm and comforting throughout, but really peaks when it gets fuller, weirder, and more unpredictable.

Multitudes

On Multitudes, Leslie Feist is a new mother softly soothing her baby to sleep with lullabies of fear and death. She is a sorcerer channeling thunder and lightning, finding life in the rumble and the flash. She is a grieving daughter with a new understanding of what it means to be alone. She is an exorcist driving out our collective anxiety with screams that could wake the dead. She is a 47-year-old single parent looking beyond romantic love.  She is a choir leader singing to the birds, and the birds are singing back.
These pieces of her sit alongside the ones she’s stacked up across two decades of sidelong stardom: The cosmopolitan chanteuse. The chirping indie rocker. The reluctant pop idol. The translator of millennial heartbreak. The solitary blueswoman. The creative community builder. The spartan folkie. The seller of digital devices. The champion of all things analog. The naturalist. The wind. The water.
Written during the blurry height of the pandemic, when Feist was beginning a new life with her adopted daughter, Tihui, Multitudes is largely a testament to hushed perseverance amid personal and collective upheaval. It is her quietest album, an invitation to introspection. Half of the 12 songs here don’t have any drums whatsoever, and most of the rest lack anything resembling a steady backbeat. And whereas the distorted tones smeared over 2017’s Pleasure could make it seem as if she were squaring off against her guitar and microphone, Multitudes mostly sounds as cozy as a winter sweater that’s three sizes too big.
Nearly everything revolves around her voice, a darting melodic hummingbird flying right next to your ear, along with her acoustic strumming and fingerpicking, calling back to classics by Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell. Several times across the record, a chorus of Feists sings lines in the round, offering an illusion of plenty. On “Forever Before,” an ode to Tihui that details the perspective shifts that come with no longer living only for oneself, she repeats the words “fear” and “fearless,” stretching them out wide, and the effect is as serene as a deep breathing exercise. This is comfort music that emerged during a period when Feist, and everyone else, needed lots of comforting—ASMR-folk for the tattered soul.
At times, the album’s lowkey spareness can make it feel plain; lullabies, after all, are meant to lull. Feist’s canny sense of rhythm, the way her words dance between snare and bass, is missed. As is her lightness, her sense of play. The intimacy created by Feist and longtime producers Mocky and Robbie Lackritz puts realness to the fore—she is up-close, personal, unvarnished—but this can also snuff out the mystery that hangs like smoke over some of her most intriguing work. And however lovely, a song like “The Redwing” can’t help but feel a little redundant amid an oeuvre filled with references to fine feathered friends and the freedom they represent.
When Multitudes gets fuller, weirder, and more unpredictable, it hits its peaks. “I Took All of My Rings Off” plays like an ancient fable of enlightenment made modern. She removes the jewelry from her ears, fingers, and dreams, buries it in the dirt—and then things get cosmic. The song shakes off its gravitational pull about halfway through, as Feist’s voice is suddenly enveloped in a cloud of reverb. She sounds like she’s floating hundreds, then thousands of feet above the ground, awash in vintage synthesizer tones that conjure a retro futuristic moonshot. The song is messy and meandering, easy to get lost in. It’s also one of a few tracks on the album that features production from Blake Mills, whose adventurous way with singer-songwriter music—from his work with Perfume Genius to his arresting solo album Mutable Set—is a perfect fit for Feist.
Opener “In Lightning” is the most propulsive thing here, where Feist makes her own version of a vintage Björk banger. Booming percussion that sounds like an army of marching redwoods is smashed together with the singer belting in full voice and a swooping string arrangement from Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, the veteran musician and composer whose credits range from Flying Lotus to Mary J. Blige. The song is about embodying the brightest and loudest forces, and Feist unequivocally steps up to the task.
She has often written about the wonders of the natural world, but Multitudes represents another subtle perspective shift: Instead of concentrating on her small place within the enormity of the elements, she now finds solace, love, and oneness in Mother Nature. Sound corny? It’s not. “Become the Earth” introduces itself like a stripped-down Roy Orbison or Elvis ballad—except those guys never sang about the process of our bodies decomposing in the ground only to rise again as overgrown vines. At the midway point, the music dies, and Feist begins her ascent, her voice glitching and breaking up in the void, as if she’s losing her signal with human existence. “Some people have gone, and the people who stayed/Will eventually go in a matter of days,” she sings, matter-of-factly, making the idea of death as approachable and universal as it should be but rarely is. It’s hard not to think of the song as a fittingly unconventional elegy for her father Harold, an abstract painter who passed away in the spring of 2021.
Why search for transcendence in a romantic relationship, she seems to say across Multitudes, when you can find it in a giant sequoia that was here long before us, and will be here long after. Or in the camaraderie of womankind. Or in the baby sleeping in the corner. These are the kinds of noble sentiments we’ve come to expect from Feist, as if she alone has the power to bypass the bullshit and unlock profound truths. This nobility was tested last year when she embarked on a tour with Arcade Fire days after that band’s leader, Win Butler, was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, which he has denied. After a couple of uncomfortable sets, she walked away. “The last two nights on stage, my songs made this decision for me,” she wrote in a statement. “Hearing them through this lens was incongruous with what I’ve worked to clarify for myself through my whole career. I’ve always written songs to name my own subtle difficulties, aspire to my best self and claim responsibility when I need to. And I’m claiming my responsibility now and going home.” For all that she contains, Feist’s song of self does not waver.


Six years and one nearly fatal accident after her promising debut, French singer-songwriter Melody Prochet celebrates her recovery with an album of gleefully overstuffed psych-pop.

Bon Voyage

Melody’s Echo Chamber’s Bon Voyage is one of those “highly anticipated” albums that are as haunted as they are hyped, with fans’ excitement for the music giving way to concern for its creator. French psych-pop artist Melody Prochet isn’t a celebrity, but the travails she underwent while finishing her second LP were newsworthy: It ends with a song originally released in 2014. “A million hours of work” went into her sessions with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, Prochet’s now-ex-boyfriend and the producer on her self-titled 2012 debut. The most distressing setback was a nearly fatal accident that led to a broken vertebra, a brain aneurysm, and an understandably canceled tour. (Prochet has underplayed the incident, allowing only that it “broke a life pattern that didn’t work for me.”) Instead of responding to that turn of events with a cleansing, sober album of plainspoken acoustics, Prochet celebrated her emotional and physical recovery by taking gleeful, blindfolded swings at an overstuffed piñata of psychedelic candy.
The sound capitalizes on the strengths of Prochet’s collaborators: Swedish psych fixtures Fredrik Swahn of the Amazing and Reine Fiske of Dungen, as well as Nicholas Allbrook of Australia’s Pond—three artists whose adventures in blissed-out trippiness are only intermittently concerned with structure—served as the record’s musical and spiritual advisers. Opener “Cross My Heart” begins with a 12-string guitar figure that could’ve appeared on any of the above musicians’ releases, or as a continuation of the stylish pop modes on Melody’s Echo Chamber. But, after 30 seconds, the intro gives way to an album’s worth of instruments and production tricks: grainy string sections, close-mic’d drum rolls, twittering flute, double bass, and a breakdown into beatboxing and synthesized record scratching. It’s the raw materials of an Avalanches track and their finished sample collage at the same time.
Prochet’s private psychedelic reel toggles between English, French, and Swedish lyrics; analog purism and postmodern pranks; soul-cleansing screams and a spoken-word bit from Allbrook about fucking and shitting himself at the moment of his death. Though the sacred texts it cites fall firmly within the syllabus of the lysergic ’60s and ’70s, Bon Voyage feels more spiritually indebted to the pancultural, track-stuffing maximalism of the late ’90s—sound for sound’s sake, the result of indiscriminately rummaging through heavy deep cuts and easy-listening kitsch alike. The difference is that the irony and detachment that defined that era are absent; while Prochet is content to let her vocals serve as one of the album’s infinite luscious textures, her immediately intelligible lyrics are pull quotes that hint at the central tensions behind Bon Voyage. The paralyzing pain of its backstory coexists with the overwhelming joy of its creation.
But the record is almost entirely beholden to this subtextual reading, and it’s a hard one to uphold for 33 minutes. Prochet’s willingness to lose herself and the listener in a reverie starts to yield diminishing returns. Bon Voyage is overflowing with ideas, and their splattered presentation ultimately brings to mind Robert Frost’s saying about free-verse poetry: It’s like playing tennis without a net. The whistled bubblegum hook of “Breathe in, Breathe Out” is given as much weight as its momentum-killing bridge. Hearing the mammoth drum fills on “Quand Les Larmes D’un Ange Font Danser La Neige” once or twice is a kick that becomes numbing after more than seven minutes. “Desert Horse” contains the most arresting lyrical image—“So much blood on my hands/And not much left to destroy”—but it subjects Prochet’s voice to shrieking octave shifts, Auto-Tune, insectoid buzz, Arabic ululations, and rinky-dink drum machines. It’s both Prochet’s most emotionally invested performance and the one with the most distractions.
That chaos is apparently by design, though: Prochet has described “Desert Horse” as a document of “becoming an adult woman in a mad world.” And as tempting as it is to consider what Bon Voyage could’ve been with more focus and grounding, there is no alternate-universe version to separate the album’s maddening density from its immediate appeal. Despite the scattered song structures, the tracks unite to form a strangely cohesive whole; squishy funk-pop jam “Shirim” sounds like it was recorded in a bouncy castle, and “Desert Horse” seems to spill out from a padded room furnished with Pro Tools, but they’re both chasing the same antic impulses. Bon Voyage celebrates the catharsis of clearing away old wreckage, but it also revels in replacing that mess with new toys.


Recorded in Reykjavik with producer Valgeir Sigurðsson (Björk, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), Sam Amidon's new album was mostly captured in single takes, the band playing together in the studio and indulging only minimal overdubs. Rather than producing a more urgent album or at least one that sounds rawer or wilder in its performances, Lily-O too often sounds distracted by small flourishes.

Lily-O

The centerpiece of Sam Amidon’s fifth proper record is a nine-minute song called “Lily-O”, which opens with Amidon singing a lengthy a cappella epilogue about three suitors courting three ladies. It’s austerely quiet until two minutes into the song, when a second instrument enters—a single crackle of electric guitar, sharp and splintery, like a log sparking in a fireplace. Amidon is settling in for a long story that is less about marriage and more about betrayal, violence, death, and loss. “Lily-O”, we soon learn, is a murder ballad, with one brutal stabbing followed by a long list of bequeathals. “Oh what will you leave to your brother John, oh Lily-O?” he asks. “The rope and gallows to hang him on.”
Despite the grimness of the subject matter, Amidon never raises his voice, preferring instead to deliver the tale with a calm that borders on psychopathic. He would rather let the other instruments express the characters’ hope and grief and outrage as best they can: that electric guitar gives way to a jittery acoustic strum, which is joined by a skittering snare drum and some stray electronic bloops and bleeps. Sounding as though the song’s guts are spilling out, the din is perhaps intended to evoke the psychological state of the murderer, or to provoke some moral response in the listener. The players certainly are up to the task: Amidon is an accomplished banjo player and fiddler, the scion of a family steeped in folk tradition, and he’s joined by the ace rhythm section of bassist Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Chris Vatalaro. And that chiming, slicing guitar is played by Bill Frisell, the legendarily eclectic musician who has performed with John Zorn, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Elvis Costello, among too many others to list.
So why does both “Lily-O” and the album of the same title fall so flat? Recording in Reykjavik with Valgeir Sigurðsson (who has produced albums by Björk and Bonnie “Prince” Billy), the makeshift band captured most of the album in single takes, playing together in the studio and indulging only minimal overdubs. Rather than producing a more urgent album or at least one that sounds rawer or wilder in its performances, Lily-O too often sounds distracted by small flourishes—the jazzy piano interlude between “Won’t Turn Back” and “Maid Lamenting”, for instance—at the expense of variation and shape. These songs are all pitched in the same mode and the same mood, as though each expresses the same dreamy reverie. As a result, the whole is persistently wistful, as its uniform tone overrides the nuance of the actual subject matter. In other words, the sorrowful “Maid Lamenting” and the contented “Devotion” strike the same chord of melancholy as the work song “Walkin' Boss” and “Groundhog Variations”, which is about frying and eating whistle-pig brains.
Somehow, Lily-O is Amidon’s most deliberate-sounding album, despite the spontaneity of its creation. He’s a fine instrumentalist with a wily sense of rhythm, especially when he bangs out the tricky patterns of “Pat Do This, Pat Do That”, but he can be a limited vocalist. Amidon sings every line in the past tense, even if it’s not conjugated as such, as though these songs are all memories fluttered around his brain during some lonely evening. The title track sounds like some repressed trauma gently resurfacing, yet Amidon cannot make those horrors sound immediate or dangerous. Every drama and every emotion sounds like it is safely put away in the past, with nothing to disrupt the present or to affect the living. On previous albums, Amidon has scrambled our sense of time by including old-time covers of new-time songs like Tim McGraw’s “My Old Friend” and Tears for Fears’ “Head Over Heels”, but there is nothing on Lily-O to break the spell these musicians have too carefully cast. In other words, there is nothing to get Amidon out of his own head or out of our collective past.