The Scottish band is on familiar ground, patiently building mountainous songs suffused in nameless sadness, but they sound energized by the darkness—and refreshingly resistant to self-seriousness.

As the Love Continues

A Mogwai melody always sounds like a eulogy for someone you’ve never met. Whether played on a hushed piano or pushed through Stuart Braithwaite and Barry Burns’ guitars, their writing is sad in a way that’s not personal: full of familiar emotions, but still opaque about the specifics. After 25 years, 10 studio albums, a dozen or so EPs, and plentiful film scores, Mogwai’s fingerprints have become easy to recognize. As they’ve aged into elder statesmen of post-rock—two terms they would undoubtedly hate—they’ve become like a football team running the Air Raid offense: They only call a handful of plays, but when they run them well, they’re basically impossible to stop.
While they do spring a few new tricks, Mogwai are hard at work in their usual mode on As the Love Continues, patiently building mountainous songs and willing themselves into scaling them. These steady climbs have long made them a go-to name for directors looking to add a little spooky gravitas to their films, and while they’ve mastered the ability to reshape the Mogwai sound to fit the needs of someone else’s creative project, at times that seemed to come at the expense of their own. Thankfully, As the Love Continues builds on the work of 2017’s strong Every Country’s Sun, retaining that album’s energy and expansiveness while deepening their investment in the undefined sadness that has long been their emotional hallmark. There’s so much saudade dripping off the rainy edifices of this album, it’s practically Glaswegian bossa nova.
Mogwai’s fascination with the gnawing, nameless gulf drives As the Love Continues. Whether because of the conditions of its creation—with the band locked down in Worcestershire, England, and producer Dave Fridmann working by remote from the U.S.—or the conditions of its release, 11 months into quarantine, the dull ache at the album’s center is potent; the music seems more personal, sweatier, hot with breath. In “Midnight Fit,” the band twists slowly around a single chord, wrapping it with wigged-out keys and scuds of guitar, while Atticus Ross’ string arrangement faints repeatedly in the foreground. The beat—skipping slightly, as if it’s nearly lost its footing—never changes, and as a result, it never quite steadies itself, keeping the song from ever feeling totally grounded. It’s an achievement that stands with their best work, and the song’s shrieking drama, taunted by chords and drums that refuse to alter their courses, gives it a sense of tragic inevitability. It’s like watching someone stumble unknowingly toward an open pit.
While cruel fate and thwarted spirit have long been Mogwai’s bread and butter, it’s refreshing to hear them so engaged with and energized by their particular darkness. When Braithwaite’s voice emerges from a field of distorted guitars and bass in “Ritchie Sacramento,” he sounds like he’s reporting from the end of the world after having done his best to stave off the inevitable; in “Dry Fantasy,” the persistent suck of the backing track erodes away at YMO-like keyboard tones and flashes of New Order’s romanticism. Even opener “To the Bin, My Friend, Tonight We Vacate Earth” surges beyond its inauspicious opening, becoming stadium-sized and suffused with valedictory grace in a way that suggests Nick Cave’s Ghosteen, all while keeping its hollow core intact.
This dedication to beautiful ennui would be insufferable if Mogwai felt like it made them special, but they’ve long delighted in seeming not to take this very-serious-sounding music very seriously. Mogwai have long known that the nature of what they do—sweeping, dramatic, and ultimately blank—makes a brilliant screen for their listeners’ projections, and to their immense credit, they’ve always made a point of shitting on any attempt to turn their music into something precious; they’re practically daring you to form an emotional connection to a song called “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead.” When it works, this general insouciance deflates the grandeur and mythos, and ultimately makes the music itself feel more honest, even when it’s at its most irreverent.
To that end, a goofy ringtone beat kicks off “Here, Here We, Here We Go Forever,” eventually giving way to cement-thick distortion and what sounds like a guitar run through a talkbox, the vocals technically indecipherable but, emotionally speaking, easy to understand. They blast their way out of a soggy mid-album stretch with the uncharacteristically cheery rocker “Ceiling Granny,” whose tonal richness and triumphant crescendos make it feel like a distant cousin to Smashing Pumpkins’ “Rocket.” On “Supposedly, We Were Nightmares” they even play with the arpeggiated technicolors of Dan Deacon or Glassworks-era Philip Glass, and while it’s not necessarily an artistic success, it’s still charming to hear them write a song you could conceivably dance to.
Less effective is the pummeling “Drive the Nail,” the rare Mogwai song whose title accurately describes how it sounds; though they build toward relentless heaviness, the band doesn’t seem to know what to do with it, and ends up cycling through verses and choruses for seven minutes, their hammering never quite brutal enough to justify the repetition. Elsewhere, they set shrieking synths in the outer bands of “Fuck Off Money,” but the song’s lack of direction makes it feel like a hurricane in need of a path, and it ultimately spins out to nothing. Most disappointingly, Fridmann’s production buries a guest spot from saxophonist Colin Stetson, whose wild playing behind the Come on Die Young chording of “Pat Stains” provides a level of notational chaos that Mogwai, for all their love of volume and texture, simply don’t do on their own. Foregrounding order while a song builds to bursting in the background is one of the band’s best moves, but by never allowing Stetson to overtake them in the mix, they waste one of their most interesting collaborations.
Still, these are mostly problems of excess, all of them solvable by simply trimming the hour-long runtime, and Mogwai are always more interesting as maximalists. When it’s at its best, this album proves they’re becoming more certain of what their ambitions should be—and, crucially, who they are as a band. As the Love Continues comes off as a reminder of the emptiness of all things and the importance of finding meaning anyway. It’s a hymn to melancholy, and a strike against infinite sadness.

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The sleek Baltimore synth-pop band's latest might be their most explicitly political and theoretical work, tackling nothing less than the socio-psychological ravages of capitalism.

The Competition

The Baltimore band Lower Dens are no strangers to fitting sophisticated political thinking into pop songs. 2015’s Escape From Evil imagined a queer utopia built from the sounds of the past, and frontperson Jana Hunter’s rich voice made that future sound both vivid and elusive, an inspired marriage of sound and message. Their latest record The Competition might be their most explicitly political and theoretical yet, which is to say it is also their most didactic.
It’s called The Competition because, according to Hunter, the album considers the “socio-psychological” impact generated by the aggressions of capitalism and the free market. Conceptually, it’s almost an extension of Escape From Evil: Where that album mined pop history to track a course toward a queer future, The Competition is mired in the muck of the present, finding beauty and horror in the everyday. Sonically, it shares a lot with Escape From Evil, steeped in the sounds of the ’70s and ’80s, evoking at once the heat of Throbbing Gristle and the sheen of Roxy Music.
It’s a lot for one album to take on, and while Lower Dens tackle their themes with commendable ambition and skill, they run into some rough spots. Forced through the sieve of the overarching concept, some of the songs, both in sound and content, come off as overwrought and obvious. Take “Empire Sundown,” the closest the album comes to a call to arms. Hunter sings about the urgent need for revolution—“They take everything but they/Can’t tell us how to defend ourselves/The tide is gonna turn”—but the robotic drawl of their voice and chug of the drum machine denudes the effect. Amidst a frenzy of flashing synths on “Simple Life,” Hunter reflects on the the class divide, a little clumsily: “Chain ourselves to circumstances/I needa/Gotta know/If we ever had a chance.”
There are moments where the beauty of the music matches the seriousness of the writing. In “I Drive,” featuring the singer :3LON, Hunter spins a tale about the hegemony of heterosexuality wrapped up in the pure pleasure of retro pop. And on “Young Republicans,” which is about the death drive of the right wing, Hunter delivers the album’s sharpest line (“Born without souls or blood or skin/We’re young republicans”) with elan.
The strongest songs are the simplest: The Competition’s highlight is “Real Thing,” which came out three years before the album was even announced. It’s a heartbreaking track, made to sound like a sock-hop standard, redolent of the Boomer ennui of The Big Chill. Using all those symbols, Hunter tells the album’s best story: of the love one goes searching for outside the confines of traditional marriage. “I’m married to a terrific guy/I’ll never leave until I die/But I just love to get out and get it on/I don’t wanna live possessed by a memory,” Hunter sings at the start, before a beautiful tangle of guitar synth joins them.
What makes this song so effective—so affecting, maybe—is pretty basic: The power of Hunter’s voice, the clarity of the writing, and the richness of the sound stick in the way the album’s more labored songs can’t. It’s a political song, in so much as it inverts expectations, it hijacks tropes and makes them something new. But it’s exceptional for a whole other reason, too. It’s a great love song—one that just cracks you open.

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Formed in 1996 and over and done within four years, Laddio Bolocko was the strangest, most slept-on New York band of its time. This set of live takes and rarities adds to the group’s unfairly thin catalog, allowing a peek into the communal jamming and weeded-out home studio experimentation that drove their creative process.

Laddio Bolocko: Live and Unreleased: 1997-2000

Live and Unreleased: 1997-2000

Formed in 1996 and over and done within four years, Laddio Bolocko was the strangest, most slept-on New York band of its time. They had some precedent in far-out outfits like Faust and This Heat, who used studio technology, isolation, and willful primitivism to push their music to into extreme places. And, because they blended '70s experimentalism with elements of American underground punk music, they had distant cousins in post-rock groups, like Tortoise and Trans Am (with whom they toured). Their vibe was very different, though. Tortoise was serene and vibey. Trans Am had a sense of humor. Laddio plowed down a different path altogether -- following common influences toward dark psychedelia and the occult.
Live and Unreleased collects odds and ends pulled from Laddio Bolocko's archives, including rehearsal tapes, concert recordings, and a DVD's worth of grainy concert footage. These are hardly throwaways or fans-only ephemera, though. The set—which spans two CDs or three LPs—adds depth and dimension to the group's unfairly thin catalog, allowing a peek into the communal jamming and weeded-out home studio experimentation that drove the band's creative process.
Liner notes by Oneida drummer Kid Millions give insight into the quartet's brief, grubby existence. After relocating to Brooklyn from southern Illinois during the mid '90s, drummer Blake Fleming, guitarist Drew St. Ivany, and bassist Ben Armstrong found a low-rent practice/living space in then-blighted Dumbo that offered no shower, but allowed no-complaints all-hours music-making.
The 20-minute "43 Minutes of (Excerpt)" is drawn from this time and captures the trio finding its stylistic footing. They trance out big-time here, with Armstrong and St. Ivany plugging away at car alarm-style riffs on bass and keyboard while Fleming goes wild on the kit. The tape marked the emergence of an idea that would drive the band's later work—mainly, the skewing of the senses through high-volume repetition—and also possibly helped to win over saxophonist Marcus DeGrazia, who engineered the session and who would join the band full-time shortly thereafter.
Looking for a change in scene, Laddio later decamped to an abandoned ski lodge in upstate New York. This period accounts for the collection's darker, more abstract material— where the band moved off the grid and completely into its own territory. Tracks like "Catskills # 3" and "Catskills #5" are full of alien melodies, haunting found sounds, and phantom piano tones. The music has an eerie energy to it, as if it wasn't so much being consciously written as channeled into existence. It's as if the quartet slipped down some strange Lovecraftian wormhole -- not so much in these sense that the music evokes horror, but that the band's druggy transcendence brings only disquiet and distance. After plotting out the material for their second record, In Real Time, Laddio ended its stay in the countryside and returned to Dumbo, where they landed in an even filthier crash pad. Not long after, the group called it quits. Armstrong and St. Ivany would go on to form the excellent trio, the Psychic Paramount while Fleming would do a few off-and-on stints in the Mars Volta and perform in the band Electric Turn to Me, along with DeGrazia.
Awesome as they were, it's hard to say that Laddio Bolocko has spawned many imitators. They were just too obscure. Millions' band, Oneida, embraced similar ideas and sounds, but the drummer admits that during Laddio's lifetime, even he had never heard of the band. But it would be hard to replicate the quartet's magic, anyway.
Laddio toured extensively throughout its existence and the live recordings included here—six songs taped during a performance in Slovenia—provide the some of the set's most compelling material. On stage, the band's strange and diverse ideas gel together perfectly. The songs are otherworldly, but visceral. The quartet performs with intensity and shared purpose that seems somehow paranormal, nudging out of their regular songs into unknown territory, searching out an ecstatic state.


On his first solo LP in 27 years, house producer Mike Dunn celebrates the old school: Acid lines squirm, vintage drum machines knock and thrash, and Dunn holds court with his commanding baritone.

My House From All Angles

Mike Dunn has been making house music for about as long as the style has existed. The Chicago native started producing in the early 1980s and came up DJing at house parties, where he’d flesh out his sets with drum machines and reel-to-reel tapes. The driving nature of early anthems like 1987’s “Dance You Mutha” comes, in part, from his improvising tunes in clubs, then going home and recreating more polished versions in his studio. Never too polished, though: Mike Dunn classics like “Dance You Mutha” and “Magic Feet” are prized for their raw, urgent feel, with unvarnished drum machines wreathed in gnarly acid basslines and his signature crowd-stoking vocals.
Dunn never stopped working. In the 2000s, he produced R&B singers like Syleena Johnson, and a deal with Diddy’s Bad Boy label had him making rap tracks like True Enuff’s “On My Momma.” Lately, alongside fellow Chicago veteran Terry Hunter, he’s been turning out sumptuous soulful house under the name House N’HD; his recent solo work is in the swinging, percussive style known as Afro house. But his glory days were the late ’80s and early 1990s, so it makes sense that he returns to those sounds on My House From All Angles. His first solo full-length in 27 years is essentially a celebration of the old school: Acid lines squirm, vintage drum machines (or their contemporary plug-in equivalents) knock and thrash, and throughout it all, Dunn holds court with his commanding baritone, alternately glowering and effervescent.
On the one hand, it’s an auspicious moment for musicians like Dunn who have been at it for decades: The raw machine sounds of ’80s and ’90s house are as hot as they’ve ever been, and there’s a hunger for fresh material that sounds old. (Much of Dunn’s most visible output of the past few years has entailed dusting off old tapes and collaborating with newer artists on explicitly retro-flavored songs; one of those, Jax Jones’ “House Work,” featuring Dunn and MNEK, has racked up 11 million YouTube streams in the past year and a half.) The risk veterans face is that there’s little incentive to push themselves past the sounds that first defined them. That’s the downfall of My House From All Angles: It’s full of capable floor-fillers, but it rarely offers listeners much they haven’t heard many times before.
My House is best when it aims for classic, rather than expressly retro. “Have It for You Babe” sounds like the kind of loopy disco-house cut that sent Daft Punk down their own filter-happy rabbit holes; “Modulation” is a slowly building acid cut with cavernous synth stabs reminiscent of big-room New York house. On “DJ Beat That Shhh,” the album’s highlight, luminous pads underscore Dunn’s most playful vocal performance, where his gravelly interjections function as pure texture. For the most part, My House sticks to the hip-house wheelhouse. There are chilly acid tracks overlaid with heavy-breathing vocals more spoken than sung: invocations of “that acid rush,” commands to “move it,” rapturous tributes to “that body music/That keeps you in a trance.” Too many of these tracks fall flat. The beats, basslines, and vocals all suffer from over-familiarity. It doesn’t help that two different songs rhyme “soul” with “lose control.” You get the sense that the well is running dry here.
Early in “DJ Beat That Shhh,” Dunn purrs, “Let’s take it back to the ’90s.” Ironically, it’s one of the few tracks on the album that doesn’t sound like his ’90s recordings. Its bright keys and vivacious vocal style are more in keeping with “This Here Is House Muzik” and “Na Na Na Na (I Walks With God),” a pair of bubbly songs Dunn put out in 2008. Where his early tunes are gritty as a basement’s concrete floor, those two are crystalline and soaring, and his voice bounces and skips in the same way that it does on “DJ Beat That Shhh,” like a perpetual-motion machine driven by chuckles. Like them, “DJ Beat That Shhh” offers the tantalizing suggestion that the real secret to house veterans’ longevity might not lie in reliving old glories after all.


On their first album in over a decade, the Swedish garage-rock mainstays refuse to evolve or age—they are here for a good time and absolutely nothing else.

The Hives: The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons

The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons

The Hives are the first to admit that all their songs sound the same. “We’re sharks,” lead singer Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist told Rolling Stone. “Sharks have been the same for billions of years, and they still rule. You have no need for development if you’re a shark. You don’t evolve since nothing kills you.” The band’s latest album, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, is shot through with this sort of galaxy-brained tween-boy logic. Their formula is both stupid and sublime: sledgehammer guitars, drums that sound like they’re being punctured as they’re being played, obtuse lyrics delivered at a steady Scandinavian scream. Look elsewhere for maturity and subtlety. The Hives have only one goal: a bloody good time.
The gory fantasia on display has been in place from day one. Legend has it, in 1993, the five original Hives, then adolescents, were plucked from small-town Swedish obscurity by an elusive Svengali named Randy Fitzsimmons. Guitarist Nicholaus Arson once described Fitzsimmons as “the brain of the band,” “the sixth member,” and the writer of all of their songs. When he died under mysterious circumstances, the Hives went on hiatus—that is until unanswered questions about his death led the band to excavate his supposed grave. Rather than a corpse, the casket held an album’s worth of music and lyrics.
Of course, none of this is true. Randy Fitzsimmons is Arson’s songwriting pseudonym and the Hives’ long hiatus was a result of health problems. Mundane mortality, sickness, and surgery collided with the band’s fantasy world, and this bolt of urgency may account for the sheer rage of their new album. Filmmaker Aube Perrie’s music video for this album’s opening track, “Bogus Operandi,” features the Hives being picked off one by one, then zombified, in a campy play on Stieg Larsson’s Scandi-noirs. Beneath the goofy horror parody is an air of genuine threat: getting older, getting sick. Randy Fitzsimmons may be a fantasy, but The Death of is all too real.
Even as life interferes, you can imagine the album as a flight of whiskey: subtle variations on one recipe, pure fun to consume, liable to intensify one’s desire to punch cops. Very occasionally, the production is countryfied to achieve a spaghetti western vibe, or larded with Halloween pedal effects. Hand claps, gang vocals, and call-and-response choruses fill out the band’s bag of tricks. The one true outlier is the break-up ballad “What Did I Ever Do to You?” The sultry, slow-burning torch song is a poor fit for the lead singer’s strengths, and a real vibe-killer to boot.
Far better are the tracks where the Hives marry a sense of righteous outrage with the just-plain-outrageous. “Two Kinds of Trouble” draws hard ethical lines—“Enemies! Friends!”—that get fuzzier—“Cops! Police!”—and further from legibility—“Boats! Planes! Norwegians! And Danes!”—as the song goes on. Howlin’ Pelle delivers the anti-capitalist anthem “Countdown to Shutdown,” interspersing dead-serious commentary on economic inequality with call-outs to “my guy Ponzi,” who “had a scheme.” (In a press release, Howlin’ Pelle called this song “37 percent more effective than the closest competitor and sure to help your Q2 and Q3 results.”) The band even brushes self-parody, to delightful effect, in “The Bomb,” stretching the call-and-response chorus to its furthest limit:

What do you wanna do? Get down!
What don’t you wanna do? Get up!
What don’t you wanna not don’t do? Not get down!
What don’t you wanna not don’t wanna do? Not get up!

None of the Hives’ brethren in the garage revival would ever risk sounding this stupid. Most of them have long since stopped serving up thick slabs of rock beef, opting instead for brainy blues, à la Jack White, or yearning paeans to a bygone scene, à la the Strokes. By contrast, the Hives cling sincerely to all things cornball, refusing to die or even to age. Nobody ever said sharks had good taste.


Kimbra's L.A.-recorded second album The Golden Echo is the Gotye collaborator's latest wager for staying power, but too often it overstays its welcome. The album's overlong, overdone nature suggests that she doesn't know how to refine her ideas beyond adding to them until they sound overstuffed.

The Golden Echo

Following a boost in visibility from Gotye's mega-hit "Somebody That I Used to Know", Kimbra's L.A.-recorded second album The Golden Echo is her wager for staying power, but too often it overstays its welcome. The Los Angeles-via-Melbourne-via-Hamilton singer reportedly cut the already-overlong album down to 12 tracks from 70, leaving cherished collaborations with Dave Longstreth and Flying Lotus to languish in a negative zone; while those ostensibly difficult decisions might suggest a ruthless approach to editing, the resulting album suggests that she's either a poor pick, leaving out some of her choicest shit, or doesn't know how to refine her ideas beyond adding to them until they sound overstuffed.
Gone is the alt-pop piper of "Settle Down" which had her lining up next to the Regina Spektorites; in its place, Kimbra attempts to sub a sprawling, clamorous vision where pop music is all things at all times. Bold and vulnerable, naked and swaddled, topical and timeless; the desire to reconcile these contradictions is everywhere on The Golden Echo, but it's a struggle to untangle them. Polarizing first single "90s Music" acts as a mission statement for the rest of the album, milking yester-yesteryear's R&B and flavoring it with kawaii affectation and a trap beat. "90s Music" sounds like it came from the temporal singularity, and if the other 11 tracks on The Golden Echo matched its coherence, it'd be an unmitigated success.
This potentially alienating take on pop places her as a contemporary of Janelle Monáe, except where Monáe's explicitly performative nature served as a rallying point for reconciling post-modern dehumanization and globalization, Kimbra seems too infatuated with the attendant spectacle to offer any comment. As an eclectic producer, Kimbra places herself to the left of the mainstream, but only just so: more straightforward tracks like "As You Are" and "Nobody But You", as well as the disco slink of "Miracle", alternate between lazy and capitulating modes. "Miracle" is perhaps the most egregious example of this occurrence: luscious, punchy, and faithful to the genre, "Miracle" could've been the strongest track on the album if it didn't drag on for a minute and a half too long. If "90s Music" is emblematic of The Golden Echo's squandered potential for success, "Miracle" is emblematic of all its shortcomings.
In spite of all that, amongst this interminable mess are enough moments that show Kimbra to be one of the most adventurous pop artists going. She nearly one-ups Passion Pit at their own game on the breezy, gluco-sick "Carolina", while the languid, lovelorn "Rescue Him" casts a distorted shadow of Justin Timberlake. For now, though, Kimbra's status as "That singer from the Gotye song" woefully underserves her full potential, but so does The Golden Echo.


Leaning into both his songwriting and his studio experimentation, the Texas guitarist proves his eagerness to move beyond the confines of modern blues.

This Land

It’s startling to hear Gary Clark Jr. begin This Land by spitting out a chorus of “Run, nigger, run”—the words he hears spit at him “right in the middle of Trump country.” Two years into the Donald J. Trump administration, anti-Trump songs aren’t exactly uncommon, but very few take dead aim at the openly racist politics surrounding the MAGA movement. That alone makes “This Land” bracing, but having these sentiments sung by Gary Clark Jr.—an artist who has until now studiously avoided making grand statements—is all the more powerful: It feels like the times have pushed the blues guitarist to take a stand.
According to Clark, it wasn’t merely the overall political climate that pushed him to write “This Land,” it was a specific incident with a new neighbor—one who couldn’t believe a young black man could own a sprawling ranch just outside of Austin. Gary Clark Jr. channeled his anger over this casual racism into a dose of fury so controlled, its origin becomes obscured—it becomes a proper blues song, in other words, where the specific is turned into something universal.
Ironically, “This Land” isn’t necessarily a harbinger for the rest of This Land, the Texas bluesman’s third studio album. Apart from “Feed the Babies,” which offers a vague plea for growth and understanding, there isn’t another song that directly confronts a societal woe, nor is there much anger flowing through its other 15 songs. What “This Land” does indicate is how Clark no longer feels restricted by the confining dictates of modern blues.
Even before the 2012 release of his debut, Blak and Blu, Clark called the blues world his home, cutting his teeth at the legendary Austin club Antone’s—the same place where Stevie Ray Vaughan began his rise to stardom. Often, it seemed as if Clark had stepped into SRV’s shoes: They shared an idol in Jimi Hendrix, a preternatural gift for mimicry (both guitarists could emulate their heroes at a drop of a hat), and an instinct to crank amplifiers to their limits. Clark’s tendency to release live albums after a studio set was a tacit admission that what his audience really wanted to hear was solo after solo—an acknowledgment that many modern blues fans prize pyrotechnics over songs.
There is plenty of guitar on This Land—“Highway 71” is nothing but an extended solo—but six-string prowess seems a secondary concern for Clark this time around; he’s happy to use the instrument for texture, not shredding. Blues also takes a backseat on This Land. It’s there on the fringes, informing the chord changes and coloring the arrangements, happily existing as coda on the finger-picked “Dirty Dishes Blues” and on the boozy stumble “The Governor,” but it’s not at the forefront. Instead, Clark draws deeply from the legacies of Prince and Curtis Mayfield, punctuating his slow-burning ballads, densely colored soul, and churning psychedelia with elongated reggae jams (“Feeling Like a Million”) and blasts of burning rock’n’roll (“Gotta Get Into Something”). Hints of these sounds could be heard on Clark’s previous album, The Story of Sonny Boy Slim—opening track “The Healing” and “Wings” were built upon drum loops, and “Star” and “Can’t Sleep” feigned funk—but on This Land, these interests don’t play as accoutrements: They’re the entire reason the album exists.
Usually, Clark works these lush, layered sounds into a sharply executed piece of roots-pop, enlivening retro cliches through keen hooks and imaginative juxtapositions: “When I’m Gone” melds an easy Windy City groove to a touch of Latin rumble, “Don’t Wait Til Tomorrow” threads drum loops and samples through its soulful plea. Sometimes Clark and co-producer Jacob Sciba rely on sound over song—it’s possible to envision “Got to Get Up” as an anthem designed to revive flagging audience interest at the tail end of a long set—yet that’s ultimately to the album’s benefit, since their studio concoctions feel more kinetic than a Clark concert. Even better, This Land is the first place where Gary Clark Jr. doesn’t appear hemmed in by the past. The album may be informed by old sounds and forms, yet these familiar tropes feel fresh thanks to Clark’s idiosyncratic splicing—a cross-cultural, pan-genre sensibility that speaks to the modern world as a whole, just as “This Land” speaks to this individual moment.


On her second solo EP in two years, the rising UK producer leans into her fusion of jungle breaks and irresistible melodies. Her emotional acuity reveals the makings of a uniquely talented pop writer.

Nia Archives: Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against tha Wall EP

If Nia Archives is shouldering the weight of expectations, then she’s not letting it show. Over the past 18 months, the Bradford-born, London-based producer has scooped up pretty much every UK industry accolade available to her (including a MOBO win, NME nod, and spots on BBC and BRIT polls) and seemingly been bridled with the responsibility of resurrecting jungle music for an entire new generation—all on the back of just a handful of tracks, along with many electrifying DJ sets. Yet she moves with the lightness of someone who’s just floated out of the club and into a cab, grinning for whatever’s next.
She seems, rightfully, thrilled by the whole thing, and it’s arguably this unfettered, joyous touch that has brought so many flocking to her flurried breakbeats. On Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against tha Wall, her second six-track solo EP, she pulls her jazzy vocals to the fore and dispenses with some of the more meticulous production tricks that so impressively peppered last year’s Forbidden Feelingz. This puts her knack for documenting the minutiae of party life, and all the emotional tangles that trail it, front and center—and reveals the makings of a uniquely talented pop writer.
But first: “Baianá.” The opener here, built around an accelerated, dissected sample of Brazilian body-music troupe Barbatuques, is fun with a capital Fuck Yes. Voices are repurposed as rave sirens, no drum is too many, and the only sign of a let-up comes in the brief blips when she lets her bass and shattered snares rumble on alone and unaccosted. After peak time, there are moves to be made at the afters. “That’s tha Way Life Goes” offers bittersweet rave gear as Nia Archives’ pirouettes towards a revelation: “Cos if it ain’t you, then it’s nobody/I gave you my soul, my mind, and body.” It's that most binding of vapid modern idioms—“it is what it is”—injected with the potent surprise of life and love. Plumped on marshmallow basslines and cooing chorus vocals, accepting your fate never sounded so lush.
The strings that glisten over the bridge of “So Tell Me…”, meanwhile, are reminiscent, with all the same tender feeling, of the soundtrack to Mike Skinner drying his eyes back in 2004. Like Skinner, though with less affectation, Nia Archives has the ability to depict life’s sordid, perhaps even regretful, kitchen-sink situations with unguarded honesty, empathy, and understanding. When it’s not Nia singing, she turns her obsessive break-splicing skills to give Maverick Sabre’s roll-neck vocals an injection of funk in a classic lovers’ back-and-forth on “No Need 2 Be Sorry, Call Me?”
If only there were more of all this. For the most part, these tracks offer snapshots and fragments that might otherwise unfurl into more fleshed-out stories. Then again, maybe that’s the point: This is an EP about dragging out the night’s short end, and making well-intentioned plans for life’s daylight hours. It’s party music for people beginning to feel the tug of seeing a full Sunday for the first time in a while.


Chromatics set their surprise “seventh” album at the witching hour, telling a sometimes-muddled tale of heartbroken lovers reaching out to the spirit realm.

Closer to Grey

Across nearly 200 releases, L.A.-based producer Johnny Jewel’s Italians Do It Better label has perfected an unmistakable aesthetic. While the music ranges from abstract instrumentals to sugary synth-pop, the design of each record envisions its creators as would-be movie stars and their music as the cult classics we ought to remember them for. Few of the label’s many acts play so directly into the conceit as Chromatics. Since Jewel reinvented his band in the mid-2000s as a dark pop group with a taste for oblique theatrics, Chromatics have imagined their albums as soundtracks, imageless films in the language of music.
It’s impossible to discern clear plots or specific characters from a given record, but that’s not the point. Jewel and his band—singer Ruth Radelet, drummer Nat Walker, and guitarist Adam Miller—excel at constructing settings and engulfing them in dramatic atmosphere. For 2007’s Night Drive, it was a meditative, lamplit film noir viewed through a car windshield. Kill for Love, released in 2012, played like a tumultuous, naive romance in the solitude of a Lynchian suburb. That Chromatics can conjure such elaborate moods with little more than a synth, drum machine, and guitar to accompany Radelet’s uncommonly restrained voice is testament to the strength of their vision.
It may also explain why these albums take so long to finish. Jewel once said that his writing process involves recording multiple ideas at once, waiting for months, and then revisiting them to bring their meanings into focus. Given this circuitous approach, as well as Jewel’s numerous solo records and film scores, a seven-year gap between Chromatics albums is perhaps to be expected. Closer to Grey was announced only a day in advance, and its arrival wasn’t the only surprise: After teasing the now-mythic 21-track opus Dear Tommy for the past five years, Chromatics had instead put out their most modest record to date. Think of Closer to Grey as an auteur’s niche art project—satisfying to the superfans, though not necessarily winning over new ones.
But like clever illusionists, Jewel and his assistants are no less enchanting for their sleight of hand. The subtlest gesture can feel hypnotic or horrific depending on the light. Echoing Kill for Love’s opening cover of Neil Young, Closer to Grey begins with a spooky, stripped-down version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.” The sound of a match strike or a record-needle drop opens the song like the final motion in a séance ritual, before Radelet begins her quiet commune: “Hello darkness, my old friend.” It’s a dead-simple rendition—mostly organ drones, distant synth arpeggios, and a soft drum machine kick—yet it sets the tone for an album set at the witching hour, a sometimes-muddled tale of heartbroken lovers reaching out to the spirit realm.
Closer to Grey is most captivating when it indulges these supernatural fascinations. Standout “Light as a Feather,” with its weightless harmonies and shuffling drum groove, feels like a musical ghost story. “I hear a voice, she whispers secrets from the dead,” Radelet sings in her usual demure tone, calling out to herself from beyond: “Nothing lasts forever.” The sense of otherworldly convergence returns on “Whispers in the Hall,” with enough dissonance and tense, Halloween-esque synth loops to qualify as the most ominous song in Chromatics’ catalog. The smoky “Touch Red” lingers beneath wakefulness, slipping into nightmares with the introduction of a distorted guitar. At its most striking moments, Closer to Grey recognizes the importance of pushing at the edges of a tried-and-true sound.
When Jewel’s arrangements become too austere and his songwriting falls back on the overly familiar, the album loses some of its charm. The basic synth melodies and deadpan vocal hooks of “Twist the Knife” are more anemic than even this terminally cool band can pull off. The title track is paint-by-numbers Chromatics—understandably so, since it’s at least four years old. Its palm-muted guitar plucks, 4/4 drum beat, and melancholic melodies don’t sound bad, or even past their prime—but they have little to offer an album that shines when experimenting. The glockenspiel and sweeping strings on lovelorn ballad “Move a Mountain” might feel slightly out of place, but at least they’re unexpected.
As with much of Jewel’s work, Closer to Grey’s ultimate enemy is time itself. He’s not attempting to outrun it so much as wrestle it, trying to bend bygone eras to his will. The five years between Night Drive and Kill for Love resulted in music that transcended an already exemplary blueprint for chilly disco-pop; the next seven were building slowly towards a monumental statement. Then, out of the blue, Closer to Grey arrived with a note explaining that it represents the seventh Chromatics album, effectively turning Dear Tommy (the would-be sixth) into a “lost” record. The switch-up adds a fascinating page to the band’s ongoing mythology, but it also robs Closer to Grey of its own narrative. By the band’s own telling, the best Chromatics record is the one you’ve never heard.


Playing fast and loose with his samples, the Austin, Texas, producer seems to ask: Why stick to any one genre or era when you can submit to the decadence of pure vibes?

a couple of good days

Mai tais, hippie speedballs, and landlocked exotica are but three of the many opulent visions that Fennec conjures on his latest LP, a couple of good days. “We want a few laughs, a few joints, and a few drinks among those we love,” wrote the Austin-based ex-lawyer-turned-DJ on his Bandcamp page, promising the soundtrack to “a couple of good days” to be enshrined in future reminiscences. You might thus expect the album to be weighed down by nostalgia. Mercifully, Fennec falls prey to no such regressive impulse: His bossa nova-driven, sample-drenched four-to-the-floor grooves impressively balance between languor and anticipation. Eschewing the self-seriousness that tends to pervade memory lane, good days flips J Dilla-esque samples over frothy beats, inducing a margarita haze in lieu of handkerchief-waving morosity. Why devoutly adhere to any one genre or era, the record seems to ask, when you can submit to the decadence of pure vibes?
Fennec’s previous records were never this much fun. His 2014 debut, Let Your Heart Break, suffered from Odesza-core milquetoastery. His last single, 2020’s “Finding Rest In a Weary World,” was impressive but relatively subdued, tinged with ambient melancholia even as the beat hit its stride. And while his previous LP, 2020’s free us of this feeling, fleshed out some of the elements that make good days such a joy to listen to, it never quite committed to them. The new album doubles down with the glorious, winking panache of a proud pornstache-haver. “Girl, don’t let it get you down,” the album opens, as a drum roll leads us into a thick, humid beat. On good days, the lyrics are all that lean generic; “girl” is a fittingly tongue-in-cheek introduction to an album that revels in a knowing sort of escapism, in the impermanent thrill of fun for fun’s sake.
Fennec’s bolder instrumental choices shine throughout, and while saxophones, pianos, strings, and woodwinds might seem more suited to a concert hall, good days luxuriates in making their presence known on the dancefloor. The richness of “fonzi”’s guitar makes the entire song, even as its beat throbs furiously. Album standout “a lil more conversation” includes a guitar solo so pronounced it’s almost absurd amid six-string twang, relentless percussion, and a Rhodes warbling for dear life above it all. Still, it’s this light-heartedness that carries the track; its energy never wanes, and even the vocal sample (“Let’s just wine, dine, and have a good time”) comes off more mischievous than corny. Even the shorter songs brim with delirium; the brief “partyhop”’s eponymous sample–“Let’s party hop!”—comes to life over one of the album’s crunchier basslines as it slides and sputters, before a fake-out ending at the 45-second mark. And let’s not forget the hi-hat triumph “honda with my bb,” good days’ equivalent of a slow jam, where the sheer ’90s-ness of the beat and angelic violins somehow wax romantic; the sampled “H-h-h-h-honda” sounds downright aching.
The album’s hazy cohesion admittedly hits a wall at points. The jaunty, clown-shoed bounce of “russian dressing” threatens to become unpleasantly cartoonish at a moment’s notice, and while the choral sample somewhat grounds the song, its juxtaposition against the rest of good days feels more like an acid trip gone south than a well-executed foray into a different style. “bnb” suffers the opposite problem by not taking nearly as many risks as the rest of the album does. While it’s perfectly nice, it isn’t very interesting, and by the time its six minutes are up, you just kind of wish “honda with my bb” had played a few more times instead.
All good things do come to an end, though, good vibes included, and Fennec makes sure to crank up the joy to its full potential before good days’ inevitable conclusion. “marijuanita” is so short yet so exultant that you almost start feeling a creeping dread, realizing how easily that forty-eight minute daze just slipped through your fingers. Whatever anxieties may arise, though, does it really matter when the music pulsates this hedonistically? Not really. Fennec’s a couple of good days is an album for ironic pool floats, silly straws in frozen beverages, squinting through aviators in Diazepam heat, enjoying the slow roast before the sunburn.


This is a long-overdue gift for fans of acoustic guitar music; Blackshaw-- growing into his prodigious own at the startling age of 25-- has finessed his abilities and 12-string acoustic guitar into a veritable solo symphony, schooled equally in complex 20th century composition and uncommon beauty.

The Cloud of Unknowing

For fans of acoustic guitar music, James Blackshaw's The Cloud of Unknowing is a gift that's long overdue. Blackshaw's fourth album gracefully glides over the same sonic ground that his contemporaries generally tread with reverential obedience or dilettante tactics. Growing into his prodigious own at the relatively young age of 25, Blackshaw has finessed his 12-string acoustic guitar into a veritable solo symphony that's as schooled in uncommon beauty as it is in complex 20th century composition. But don't fear the esoterics: For everyone else, The Cloud of Unknowing is the gem no one expected to find. Blackshaw writes high drama into instrumental music with subtlety and charm, speaking on sentiments and stories without requiring a single lyric (or, most of the time, any accompaniment at all). A rare intersection of genre advancement and general accessibility, The Cloud of Unknowing is one of the true masterpieces of its own heralded realm.
The title The Cloud of Unknowing is lifted from an anonymous 14th century text that articulated a mystical view of Christianity which asserts that God can be better met through a continuum of experience and love than through absolute knowledge. Fittingly, the five pieces here capitalize on dramatic push and pull, alternately joyous and foreboding 12-string figures that are constantly reabsorbed into a web of sheer movement and energy. Despite his age, Blackshaw accomplishes this through profound musical erudition: Closer "Stained Glass Windows" nods to microtonality, climbing up and down an arch in the tiniest intervals, much like Rhys Chatham's gorgeous, glacial work with 400 electric guitars on A Crimson Grail.During "The Mirror Speaks", disparate melodies collide, interlock and crisscross, bending and pushing one another up or down. In his final years, Claude Debussy could pin such lines against one another with a piano in much the same way, but Blackshaw is an Englishman born nearly a decade after Bert Jansch left Pentangle and thriving in a time during which folk has found renewed currency. So here, he assimilates those past masters and, prospering from what he's learned from them, laces one technique to another.
Part of Blackshaw's success stems from his confidence. He's a beneficent host to one of the few non-technical ideals that united the great early minimalists: He fully inhabits an idea, allows it to build, and expires only when it is ready. The Cloud of Unknowing opens and closes with 11 and 15 minutes pieces, yet these long forms are as approachable as the best four-minute pop songs. Their complex frames bear lucid motifs through brisk movement, guiding the listener through thousands of notes from 10 fingers and 12 strings with purpose.
Such perfect commitment is new to this album. Earlier non-guitar excursions embedded in Blackshaw's work felt slightly apologetic or indecisive. An excessive tampoura-and-cymbala drone overran the best bits of last year's O True Believer, and a disc-closing track with heavy percussion and organ provided a simple, sour end. Blackshaw was tempering his extremist tendencies then. On The Cloud, though, Blackshaw seems fully settled, engaging his pieces and ideas with the unflinching belief of Tony Conrad in 1964 or Steve Reich in 1965. "Running to the Ghost" augments guitar with violin and glockenspiel, but those auxiliary parts are mere bells and strings highlighting how much sound Blackshaw can fit in one lithe motion. Indeed, it's his rumbling bass line (his tuning for this track starts in B) supporting a nimble, mid-range melody and the strings that weave between its notes. The glockenspiel teases from above. The only non-guitar piece is a wandering four-minute electronic token. It's long enough to serve as an intermission but short enough to feel more like a pause than a distraction.
And that's a good thing. On an album where movement, experience, and persistence mean everything, it's best to let Blackshaw's 12-string momentum have as much space as it wants. The Cloud of Unknowing carves out a new, peerless space altogether-- one that puts Blackshaw at the top of his class.


The Swedish minimalist composer David Wenngren specializes in soft, evocative miniatures. The songs on his latest album pass by quickly, like fortuitous weather that can hold for just so long.

The Quiet City

The Swedish pianist, violinist, and composer David Wenngren seems to regard minimalism less as a classical tradition than as an ascetic dare. In Library Tapes, which has been his solo project with a host of revolving collaborators since the early 2000s, Wenngren paces up to the minimum threshold where groups of tones pass into music, and not a step farther. His compositions hover and linger, straitened but far from severe, wrenching maximum feeling from one idea at a time. Once a melody has been stated in full, it’s gone.
Across dozens of releases, Wenngren’s miniatures have gained depth but not mass, from the solo piano and field recordings of his earlier work to his collaborations with cellist Danny Norbury, multi-instrumentalist Peter Broderick, and ambient musician Christopher Bissonette. Wenngren doesn’t shy from titles likeSketches, Fragment, and Patterns (Repeat); he seems leery of hanging conceptual baggage on his music.
If the modestly evocative title The Quiet City gives the impression of something a bit heftier, it’s apt. Wenngren is deconstructing the piano trio—a form consisting of piano, violin, and cello—and strewing its parts into musical haiku. But these are still sketches, fragments and patterns, and Wenngren still declines to elaborate on anything once it’s been said. Often, the songs fall short of two minutes, and almost never cross three, as if they were fortuitous weather that could hold for just so long. This, as the naturalistic titles suggest, is more or less what they are—10 walks in the woods, largely but never exactly the same, each already settling into irretrievable stillness.
But it’s rare for Wenngren to have this many musicians on one album. His usual piano tone is offset by pianist Olivia Belli, who plays on bookends “Entering” and “Leaving.” The latter, with Julia Kent’s roving cello, is the highlight, a bright and propulsive take on Library Tapes’ sleepy drift. And pianist Akira Kosemura’s consummately innocent voice is right at home on “Brighter Lights.”
As the cast grows, the material they play remains exceedingly stark and simple. Some of it would be fit for a baby’s mobile if not for the sustain and processing, a Library Tapes hallmark, that extends each touch of a string or a key into clouds of ambiguous chords and drones. In “The First Signs,” Kent and violinist Hoshiko Yamane play keening lines that leave pulsing afterimages on the silence that follows, and it’s here, between each moment and its reverberation into memory, where Wenngren cultivates his poignant sense of weightless time.

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For his latest LP, Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan formed a new band and returned to straight-ahead guitar rock. It’s got some of his most aerodynamic songs in over a decade, but suffers from redundancy.

Lo Tom

It’s actually super easy for David Bazan to find a friend these days. While he cemented his legacy in Pedro the Lion by casting doubt on the sustainability of marriage, democracy, sobriety, religion, and just about every other bedrock of society, Bazan’s most prolific phase yet is owing to how he’s become an irrepressible people person at age 40 and beyond. Whether conducting Q&As at his live gigs, touring Control and Headphones by popular demand, offering new songs through a subscription service, or routing house show tours, it’s all in the name of fan service. But he’s maybe become too good at identifying his target market—turning out solid releases that have held great appeal to Bazan, his diehards, and few outside of those two groups. For the mere fact that his new band Lo Tom is actually a band, it’s perhaps the first album he’s done since his solo debut, 2009’s Curse Your Branches, that comes with any kind of relative sizzle or mystery.
Lo Tom consists of Bazan’s ever-trustworthy pal T.W. Walsh on guitar, as well as Trey Many and Jason Martin of Tooth & Nail mainstays Starflyer 59, whose overlap with Pedro the Lion’s fanbase might be total. After all, both spent the late 1990s and early 2000s straddling the line between secular indie and Christian audiences, and it stands to reason that Lo Tom will doubly excite the same people rather than spread its potential draw. And while Lo Tom isn’t being presented as much more than a couple of friends kicking back, it’s only lighthearted relatively speaking as well. “Covered Wagon” is one of Bazan’s most surreal and spirited views of American cultural decline, while “Bad Luck Charm” reduces the complicated narrative of his masterwork Control into a single snapshot. A loveless couple sits in a hotel room with champagne and a joint, wondering where everything went wrong but unwilling to say a word to each other.
Yet, still, the stakes don’t feel especially high. “Covered Wagon” is a smirk at our collective regression, not an impending apocalypse. “Bad Luck Charm” isn’t claiming the entire institution of marriage as futile, it’s just a shitty night for people who don’t seem to know anything different. Befitting such ambivalence, Bazan’s new band isn’t attempting to create the same tension or portent as Pedro the Lion, but Lo Tom nonetheless signals his return to straightforward guitar rock after the electronic bedroom-pop of Blanco and Care. “Overboard” and “Covered Wagon” hold true to Lo Tom’s bashed-out creative process, two of Bazan’s most aerodynamic and hooky rock songs since 2004’s Achilles Heel. But as it turns out, the rudimentary drum machines and synth washes of Care and Blanco have mostly been swapped out for equally simple grunge riffs and rigid, slow-and-steady rhythms. Even at less than a half hour, Lo Tom suffers from redundancy, not surprising when you’ve made more than one song reminiscent of “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” and you’re not actually AC/DC.
Lo Tom isn’t Bazan’s cock-rock album, though. It’s just one that seemingly abides by a first-thought, best-thought process, whether it’s riffs, concepts, or double entendres. Bazan’s sociopolitical takes on “Covered Wagon” and “Another Mistake” are stuck somewhere between the devastating authority of Winners Never Quit and the wit and incision of Bazan’s Twitter account, whereas the cleverness of “Bubblegum”’s metaphor lasts about as long as a wad of Big League Chew. Maybe if there’s any disappointment in Lo Tom, it’s in the dissonance between what the band set out to accomplish and a lingering desire to see Bazan have success similar to former slowcore warblers-turned-solo sages Mark Kozelek or Bill Callahan. To get to his Benji or Apocalypse would probably require him to plumb the depths as he did with Curse Your Branches, but the closing “Lower Down” ironically suggests the opposite: “Man, you don’t need to chase the sound/If it comes from lower down,” he sings, justifying the existence of Lo Tom in the process. Perhaps he’ll change his mind when the next project comes around, but as Bazan once said, it’s good to have options.


On his laid-back and locked-in new EP, the Atlanta singer-rapper sounds more subtle and assured than ever.

6pc Hot EP

He may not be the genre’s biggest star, but few R&B singers have demonstrated a better understanding of the genre’s commercial winds than 6lack. On his 6pc Hot EP, he name-checks Usher and T-Pain, touchstones of popular ’00s R&B, but his own style mines more of-the-moment inspiration, from the late-night melancholy of Drake to the art-house soul of Frank Ocean, both of which he shades with the atmospheric trap of his native Atlanta, the longtime gravitational center of rap and R&B radio. He prides himself on his ties to the city. 6pc Hot, which opens with a cruise through the Atlanta of his youth, is titled after his favorite neighborhood wing spot (he’s marketing the EP with his own hot sauce). Even his stage name, cumbersome as it is, is a nod to the Zone 6 district where he was raised.
Like most Atlantans on the charts right now, 6lack’s talents lie somewhere between rapping and  singing, and on his first two albums, he sometimes seemed to resent being boxed in as a singer. Even on his smoothest songs, he adopted the jaded detachment of a rapper. “Fuck me like you about to lose your place to the girl next store,” he sang on 2018's East Atlanta Love Letter, where he leaned hard on The Weeknd's tropes of toxic men and hateful sex. That's not a great look for anyone, and it was especially ill-fitting for an everyman like 6lack, who’s always been more convincing playing a wounded soul than an asshole.
6pc Hot shows what a pleasure he can be when he loses that sour edge. These six songs wallow less and luxuriate more. Soothing and sumptuous, more bittersweet than outright sad, the after-hours dispatches “Long Nights” and “Float” pair the coziness of an overstuffed couch with the sleek angles of an Eames chair. “I just followed the emotions of quarantine,” 6lack has explained of his process for the EP, and his lyrics periodically touch on the crisis—the isolation, the longing for out-of-reach comforts, the sense of being locked in an inescapable cycle—yet the music is too nimble, too free for lockdown. We should be so lucky if our quarantine felt like this.
Even when 6lack is kicking around dopey boasts just for the fun of it on “ATL Freestyle,” he's gotten so improbably good at pairing together free associations that even lines that read like groaners on paper (“My life is VVS, I practice clarity”) breeze by like sweet nothings. And where 6lack's nonchalant delivery could previously scan as too cold, too removed, he’s gotten bolder at playing up the yearning and fragile beauty in his voice. The wait-until-quarantine-is-over ballad “Outside” is his most unabashedly sentimental song yet, and he sells the sweetness and romance.
There’s just one feature on the EP, and it illustrates how delicate of a balance 6lack strikes between laidback and locked in. Lil Baby, who may be on the hottest streak of any rapper on the radio right now, attempts a quick lap on “Know My Rights,” yet he’s unable to find his footing amid the track's vaporous bump. His verse isn't so bad that it derails things—four tracks in and the EP’s mood is too established to be upended by one miscalculated verse—but his flow is too hurried, too frantic. He's doing too much, racing against the music instead of making it work for him. 6lack’s great instinct is knowing when to do a little less, and on 6pc Hot it pays off sublimely. He no longer sounds like a replacement-level R&B singer. He's starting to sound like a master.

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On Mikal Cronin's first album for Merge, the Ty Segall collaborator balances the "power" and "pop" elements of his sound with aplomb, while sounding utterly out of sync internally. It's pop poetry for the aloof, and Cronin's most fully realized, beautifully arranged, well-crafted work to date.

MCII

"Do I shout it out?/ Do I let it go?/ Do I even know what I'm waiting for?/ No, I want it now/ Do I need it, though?" Throughout MCII, Mikal Cronin gets in these ruts. His lyrics are delivered as someone who's never fully sure of his next move and who's completely unclear about his ambitions. He's sure that he's in love, but he keeps letting it slip away. Somehow, he keeps mucking up his day-to-day communication. It never used to be like this. He keeps talking about how time is getting away from him, which might be his way of acknowledging a crisis about getting older, though it's just as likely that he's accidentally spending hours clicking on YouTube videos. He wonders if he's wrong. (He doesn't think so.) He consistently has good intentions, but he's inadvertently prone to choking on the follow-through. He sums up his turmoil pretty well in "See It My Way": "I hear the song-- I wanna sing along with you/ But when I try I’m out of tune/ I turn and walk away." It's a sweet and snappy sentiment from someone who's ultimately out of sync. This is Cronin's pop poetry for the aloof.
So it's somewhat ironic that MCII is also his most fully realized, beautifully arranged, and well-crafted work to date. Since he's spent the past year shredding for the masses in the Ty Segall Band, it's easy to forget that he recently earned his B.F.A. in Music and learned how to compose for different instruments. He rightly noted that his education came in handy for his Merge debut, which subs out some of the psych freakouts from his first album for string arrangements. K. Dylan Edrich, who recently contributed strings to Thee Oh Sees' most recent two albums, lends her talents to a handful of songs, from the plaintive violin solo on "Peace of Mind" to the frantic viola on "Change".
One of the most impressive things about MCII is how Cronin balances "power" and "pop". He makes the "pop" part of the equation look effortless-- in 10 songs, he offers 10 solid, catchy melodies. When it comes to "power," he's much more conservative than he's ever been before-- especially when you consider Slaughterhouse. There are entirely acoustic songs here that pretty well prove that he doesn't need to rely on punk rock sludge. So when the tender stuff is over and he steps on the fuzz pedal, the effects are extremely satisfying.
Album closer "Piano Mantra", for example, begins with a particularly fragile-sounding Cronin singing "I’m tired, I’m sick, I’m broke up." Edrich's strings are quietly introduced, then an acoustic guitar and some drums, and finally at the end, a feedback screech ushers in a distorted electric guitar. It doesn't even take center stage or threaten to become the main attraction-- it just adds a sturdy, noisy spine to Cronin's formerly delicate ballad. Everything-- strings, fuzz, slide guitar, etc.-- is purposefully and carefully implemented. He uses the more muscular sounds to offset his bubblegum jangle, and while he did ask Ty Segall to lend a hand on the album, he only brought him on board for two guitar solos. Neither are very flashy-- they're well-placed bursts of power that complement the melody.
There's one moment in particular that puts to rest any notion that Cronin is just a glorified garage sideman: "Don't Let Me Go", the only track Cronin recorded entirely by himself at home. It's just him, his acoustic guitar, and his voice singing both the melody and harmony. With that skeletal structure, he loses the "I'm not sure what's next or why I act like this" tone and gets straight to the point. He pleads for the person he loves to give him another shot. "You're all I know," he sings in his falsetto. It's the most direct, vulnerable statement he's ever made, and in an album otherwise packed with uncertainty, it's powerful.
Cronin has said that his first favorite album was Nirvana's In Utero-- a record noisily recorded with Steve Albini before the band went to R.E.M./Katrina and the Waves producer Scott Litt to soften a couple of the album's songs. There's a loose analogy at play here-- Cronin recorded MCII with Eric "King Riff" Bauer at his Bay Area shred factory, Bauer Mansion. Later, he had the album mixed and mastered at Berkeley's hallowed Fantasy Studios. (Cronin has admitted that he got the idea from Segall, who worked in those same two studios for Twins.) The outcome is a great sounding album that sits nicely between the poles of "fuzz war" and "cooing balladeer." Cronin has proved with this album that, like Cobain before him, he's so much more than a longhair with a fuzz pedal. He's an excellent pop craftsman who knows how to turn the power up for maximum effect.


This 1992 meeting of Moritz von Oswald, Thomas Fehlmann, and Juan Atkins is a monument to the improbable transatlantic alliance that techno forged between Detroit and Berlin.

3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins: 3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins

3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins

3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins is a story of a musical friendship being forged, of techno spreading its steely tentacles, and of Berlin’s musical rebirth. To understand 3MB—Berlin producers Moritz von Oswald and Thomas Fehlmann, joined here by Detroit techno originator Juan Atkins—you need to know about Tresor, the Berlin club turned label, which imported the tough, metallic sound of second-wave Detroit techno to a city still rocking on its heels from the fall of the Berlin Wall. The music of Black Detroit found a second home in Berlin, a German city whose desolate, lawless edge and abandoned spaces mirrored Detroit’s own history of industrial decline.
Both club and label launched in 1991, with X101 (the heavyweight trio of Jeff Mills, Mike Banks, and Robert Hood) providing the label’s first release, followed by an album by Detroit’s Blake Baxter. But it was record number three, 3MB featuring Eddie Flashin’ Fowlkes, that really ushered in Tresor’s spirit of cross-Atlantic collaboration. The record paired von Oswald—who would later form influential dub-techno duo Basic Channel with Mark Ernestus—and Swiss producer Fehlmann, later of the Orb, with Fowlkes, a pioneering Detroit DJ whose 1986 record “Goodbye Kiss” was a landmark of techno’s early years.
3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins, which is being re-released as part of Tresor’s 30th anniversary celebrations, was the pinnacle of the Berlin label’s early collaborative force. The combination of Atkins’ peerless synth melodies, as heard on his groundbreaking electro records as Cybotron and Model 500; von Oswald’s love of bass pressure and the artful echoes of dub; and Fehlmann’s ambient textures, all barrelling along at Tresor’s pacey tempo, marks the exact meeting point between three distinct visions of the electronic music sound. Across dueling mixes of three different tracks, the record presents a cosmopolitan view of techno as a receptacle for diverse influences—an open-minded philosophy that’s far from the retrenched business-techno model that holds sway today.
The von Oswald and Fehlmann mix of “Die Kosmischen Kuriere,” for example, combines echoing synth lines, astral pads, a bumping Detroit drum-machine beat, and a sternum-thumping bassline, a mixture both elegant and fierce. The Magic Juan edit of “Bassmental” plots a similar course from Detroit to Berlin via downtown Kingston, with delicate shreds of electronic melody bobbing around on shuddering waves of sub-bass like paper boats in a storm. The elements themselves are familiar; the juxtaposition unique and magical, only failing on the album’s cumbersome closing track, “The 4th Quarter,” where the awkward rhythmic mesh of bass and treble suggests two incompatible records blending in a DJ’s headphone.
For such an important moment in techno’s global creep, relatively little has been said about the record’s origins. Atkins has spoken of meeting von Oswald in the early ’90s when the latter came to Detroit to buy musical gear; Fehlmann has said the album was produced in von Oswald’s Berlin studio, “all hands-on jamming, with no real plan.” We can presume that the Magic Juan edits of “Bassmental” and “Jazz Is the Teacher” see Atkins take the lead, while the von Oswald and Fehlmann mixes of “Die Kosmischen Kuriere” and “Jazz Is the Teacher” were overseen by the Berlin producers. Such close analysis may not be entirely in the spirit of the album’s wonderfully simpatico meeting of minds. But having two alternative mixes of “Jazz Is the Teacher” offers a fascinating insight into how one musical idea—the incorporation of jazz into techno—can play out in two very different ways. The Berlin producers’ mix of the track is literal, layering a sample of live jazz drumming over a rudimentary electronic thump; Atkins’ take is more figurative, his drum machine itself swinging with all the chaotic precision of improv. That the song also features the album’s best synth melody, a kind of cosmic lament, is the icing on this particular space cake.
The reissue, 29 years after the fact, drives home that this historical artifact still retains its power. Like many great, important records, 3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins is both a history lesson you can dance to and a corporeal joy you can study. It portrays the nightclub as a place for wild abandon and cultural exchange, with unlikely music partners finding freedom in improbable reciprocity.

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The solo debut from Wye Oak member Andy Stack threads kinetic dream-pop and electronic textures into a hypnotic break-up record.

Release the Dogs

You would expect a solo record by Andy Stack to sound good—making records sound good is what he’s all about. Even in his own band, the Baltimore-bred duo Wye Oak, he is an elusive presence. His chattering drumming and engineering finesse, though integral to the uncanny sound, can seem almost incidental, backlighting the larger-than-life silhouette of singer-guitarist Jenn Wasner. Stack has been even more secret-saucy in other projects, from his studio and tour work with Helado Negro and Lambchop to the structures he helped build under the visionary pop-classical song cycle Spiritual America, with Wasner and composer William Brittelle. He is a maestro of marginalia, a technician who minimizes himself to maximize the song.
So of course, Release the Dogs, Stack’s first solo record as Joyero, sounds good. Threading kinetic dream-pop with latent strands of electronic music, it has something of the rubbery minimalism of Arthur Russell’s early disco and the pointillism of Animal Collective, the tangled understory of Caribou and the skyscraping canopy of M83. The production is lush yet astringent, all lemony glares and purpley shadows. The arrangements are usually restrained to a few limber strands, so that every decision stands to account. But there’s a difference between sounding good and being good.
Stack lands on the right side of that difference, filling in his margins with a presence, a small but warm and agile voice, and a knack for melody. “Alight” is an invigorating start, weaving propulsive bass and fingertip percussion into a net that keeps hauling up great, shining organ chords. The vocal melody on “Dogs” burrows through a dreamy, locomotive arrangement for guitar and electronic pads and slips into your ear, where it lodges fast. He places words as carefully as filters and fills, nestling in syllables so they add a layer of rhythmic definition. The overall impression is of gentle vigilance, soft tension, a certain insomniac energy.
Outside of its most nocturnal passages, Release the Dogs feels optimistic. It takes a little while to notice that it’s actually a breakup record. Recorded in Marfa, Texas between Wye Oak records, fixed addresses, and relationships, the record uses a central canine metaphor to outline a flickering state of transition, somewhere between tame and feral. It develops through second-person address and elliptical vignettes, such as the domestic scenes softly humming and crackling in “Starts.” On “After You,” Stack sends his lamentation traveling farther than ever, laddering from his lowest vocal register to his airiest and back again, as if he’s trying to get away from himself. As is always the case with records cast for a me and a you, the listener sometimes wonders, then where am I? But look, it’s a breakup record. Everybody gets one, and it’s the only embryonic thing about this markedly long-steeped debut.


A collection of spartan demos, false-starts, and practice runs of early Beach Boys songs recorded in 1961-62 amounts to a curious, often campy origin story for hardcore fans only.

The Beach Boys: Becoming the Beach Boys: The Complete Hite & Dorinda Morgan Sessions

Brian Wilson wasn’t born a pop Zeus, suffused with orchestral grandeur and full “teenage symphonies to God” in his head—he was once a gawky, deferential teen who sang a terrible song about a doll. It helps temper the decades-long fetishization of his genius and makes Becoming the Beach Boys: The Complete Hite & Dorinda Morgan Sessions, the rough audio of their earliest studio hours, a refreshing listen. It acknowledges how very far Wilson and his bandmates began from the gorgeous harmonies and slick pop songwriting that made their fame, and serves as a reminder that even if we admire artists who seem youthfully irrepressible, we’re often coming in at their 10,001st hour.
The Morgan sessions, recorded in 1961-62, find the young Beach Boys (ages 15 to 20) floating their first material in the Hollywood home of producers Hite and Dorinda Morgan. Instead of whirling around the studio playing maestro and directing orders, in a take of his sonorous ballad “Surfer Girl,” Wilson meekly asks to overdub his bass (Hite Morgan barks back, “No,” and the matter is closed). The rest of Becoming the Beach Boys falls in line with this moment, a minutely parceled collection of occasionally insightful false starts and hesitancies. Its nine songs span 63 tracks, many under a minute and punctuated by tape skips, giggles, even the odd admission of burping. (The culprit is never identified but sounds like it could be Dennis Wilson, undersung singer/songwriter behind the group’s gorgeous “Forever.”) Forty-five of these pre-Capitol Records cuts were previously unissued; the rest appearing on such long-forgotten cobblings as The Beach Boys’ Biggest Beach Hits, released in 1969, and Lost & Found 1961-62*, *released in 1991.
Remarkably, for the first material the Beach Boys ever attempted, three of these tracks would become huge hits—the chipper “Surfin’” and “Surfin’ Safari,” then, a year later, “Surfer Girl.” The first stabs of these are boisterous: “Surfin’” lurches out of the gate, its demo skittish with those now-familiar doo-wop bass vocals. Carl, Dennis, and Brian Wilson’s harmonies are tinnier with a twinge of stuck-chin bravado, even through the rather unconvincing insistence that “We’ll do the Surfer Stomp/It’s the latest dance craze.” (The cloddish move was a real, short-lived trend in the Boys' native Hawthorne.)
Two years before Wilson’s production debut on “Surfer Girl,” in which he nurtured its luxurious harmonies and added the iconic falsetto top note, the song makes a halting introduction here in chord progressions more minor and morose. “Surfin’ Safari” is led confidently by Mike Love, with shades of the nasal tones he would later refine and popularize, even while his noncommittal placeholder mumbling veers towards “Flight of the Conchords” in the third and fourth takes.
Six songs here never made the Boys’ studio output, and rightfully so. They range from “Beach Boy Stomp (aka Karate),” a surf-rock instrumental à la Dick Dale and the Surfaris, which sounds like a sandy spoof on the Champs’ hit “Tequila,” to the swingy pop ditty “Judy.” The master version of the latter features some of the most indicative hints of the band’s vocal promise, liquid tenor topping a sturdy bass. The song’s namesake was Judy Bowles, Brian Wilson’s first serious girlfriend. In his forthcoming memoir, I Am Brian Wilson, he recalls her fondly but also unearths an old vendetta with Mike Love for trying to dance with her. This would not be the last time Love would encroach on his turf.
“Barbie,” a schmaltzy teenybopper ballad, rings as it was: writer Dorinda Morgan’s attempt to capitalize on a trendy new plastic doll. Even the Scotch 111 tape it’s recorded on seems to disdain this slavish, sluggish praise of “Barbie, Barbie, queen of the prom/Turned down dates with Eddie and Tom”—two of the takes are thwarted by skipping and scrambling effects. The unsettling ragtime piano jaunt “What Is a Young Girl Made Of” sounds like the soundtrack to a Woody Allen fever dream; incongruous in its tetchy delivery by Brian Wilson, it scarcely improves over seven more attempts.
The Beach Boys have varied in lineup over the past 20 years—sporadically with Brian Wilson, usually under the pallid and reliably dickish thumb of Mike Love—but their camp has been constant in its steady stream of ‘60s material reissues and compilations, ranging from seismic to “at least Dad’s Christmas present is sorted.” Becoming the Beach Boys is, true to the name of the label that dispatched it, a curio for those who have heard the band’s full works and wish to gorge further on the scant unexplored crumbs of their history—or for those who collect Barbies.


After a decade, the Icelandic band returns with an album of minimal music performed maximally, along with a 41-piece orchestra, climate despair, and Jónsi’s inimitable vocals.

Átta

Does Jónsi ever wish his voice weren’t so pretty? While he’s never made the same album twice, either as a solo artist or a collaborator or the frontman of Sigur Rós, he’s also never made an album that turned out anything other than exquisitely beautiful, no matter how much he’s fought against it. Sigur Rós responded to their international breakthrough by going full-on hauntology with ( ), but if the movie syncs were any indication, they were still seen as friendly ghosts. They made an album whose title translated to “steamroller,” but the music itself consumed the listener like a bubble bath. Even beyond the legal and interpersonal turmoil, the past decade has been inhospitable to Sigur Rós’ creative process—if Jónsi expressed his anger towards a world of “climate change, doom-scrolling and going to hell” on a Sigur Rós album, as he does here, would their English-speaking audience even be able to tell? ÁTTA proves that Sigur Rós are physically capable of making angry music—but they aim for the softer, more poignant variants: despair, depression, and dejection.
Three months earlier, Sigur Rós announced an upcoming tour with a 41-piece orchestra—a perfectly sensible endeavor if they were still engaging in the brand stewardship that took up much of the past decade. It turns out that they were tipping their hand in the direction of ÁTTA. The introductory “Glóð” misleads with its electronic crackle and backmasked vocals, suggesting a continuation of the purely textural work of Valtari or Riceboy Sleeps. And since ÁTTA is almost entirely absent of guitars and percussion—their disgraced former drummer has not been replaced—it’s likely to be described as “ambient.”
But throughout, Sigur Rós make the distinction between ambient and classical for people who might not otherwise listen to either of these forms. This is minimal music often performed maximally; without access to the frothy distortion and cymbal clatter that typically brought Sigur Rós songs to a crescendo, the strings on “Skel” slowly accrue a concussive force that draws as much attention to the mixing as Jónsi’s vocal dynamics. He dips into his lower register often throughout ÁTTA and allows himself to rise triumphantly alongside even the loudest orchestral blares, performing like a first-chair soloist more than the frontman of a rock band.
Advance copies of ÁTTA were delivered as a single 56-minute track, a strong suggestion that its narrow range of tempo and texture is an intentional choice and that its optimal listening experience replicates what most people probably expect of a 41-piece orchestra: fully seated, no bathroom breaks, withholding the temptation to seek a moment worthy of a standing ovation until it’s done. (The official release is split into 10 tracks like any other Sigur Rós album.) Regardless of its more refined presentation, this is not an album of passages or movements or suites. It’s best understood and appreciated as a collection of songs, of which there are clear highlights.
“Klettur” might be the most conventional display of heft on ÁTTA, but it’s also the most satisfying, the only establishment of continuity from their previous album of original material, 2013’s underappreciated Kveikur. After 15 minutes of somber swells, it emerges from a shivering riff that could conceivably be bowed on Jónsi’s guitar as a crowd-pleasing reward for their patience. The other track to feature any kind of percussion ( an understated, pulsing kick drum in both cases), “Gold” is in the mold of “Avalon” or “Untitled 8,” but recast as windswept folk sung by the last man on earth. As much as “Klettur” and “Gold” supply immediate pleasures, they also call the overall concept into question—are they payoffs for their sedate surroundings or just glimpses of an album where Sigur Rós makes more daring use of an orchestra while working outside of rock’s strictures? While ÁTTA is always engaging, it’s engaging through a familiarity that feels like a missed opportunity during the stretches where the London Symphony Orchestra mostly sounds like they’ve been tasked with playing Ágætis byrjun stems.
Still, even Sigur Rós seem to admit that ÁTTA is intended as a multimedia experience. Though “cinematic” has been the default tag for Sigur Rós’ music on its own, they’ve long relied upon visuals to get the point across. Witness lead single “Blóðberg,” whose title alone encompasses their tendency to spring forth in beauty—it’s a wild thyme plant native to Iceland whose name translates to the way more badass “blood stone.” On its own terms, it’s one of Sigur Rós’ most desolate arrangements, but the despair is recognizable; without the anchor of any low end, Jónsi sighs and howls as the strings surge and recede. The video extends “Blóðberg” to a full 10 minutes of little more than drone shots of a barren wasteland—either desert or tundra—where twisted mannequin remains are indistinguishable from gnarled branches.
It’s not surprising that Jónsi has noted climate crisis as a primary prompt for ÁTTA’s nihilism; it’s also hardly coincidental that Sigur Rós teamed up with Johan Renck, a director best known for his work on the Chernobyl miniseries, even if the landscape might actually be on loan from Renck’s current project, a lunar sci-fi drama starring Adam Sandler. If “Blóðberg” is any indication, Jónsi has carefully assessed our impending environmental apocalypse as inevitable and a matter of incremental decline rather than an extinction-level event more suited for the climax of “Ný Batterí.” Even given its inspiration, ÁTTA never feels dishonest in its expression or its ambition to provide Hopelandic for hopeless times.


The rising London rapper flexes his versatility with a musically diverse set that feels more like a major studio debut than the mixtape it’s billed as.

Endorphins

In the crowded and competitive world of UK rap, Octavian Godji is doing everything he can to stand out. The 23-year-old South Londoner arrived on the scene with a gripping backstory: He left France for Britain at an early age, attended the prestigious BRIT School, endured homelessness at age 15, and slipped into drug dealing. But it was last year’s debut mixtape Spaceman—an elegant suite of woozy beats, deft poetics, open-book confessionals, and the spirit of Noah “40” Shebib—that lifted him out of the pack. Follow-up Endorphins goes in a new direction—or rather several. Octavian is having fun, pulling at different stylistic threads to see what’s at the other end. And with high-profile guests matched by a crisp collection of beats, Endorphins feels more like a major studio debut than the mixtape it’s billed as.
How diverse is this set? Well, consider the following: Octavian doing a dead-on 21 Savage impression alongside Skepta on the creeping “Bet”; matching A$AP Ferg’s boasts on a track called “Lit”; enlisting Abra for the Lil Peep pastiche “My Head”; underpinning the Theophilus London-featuring dancefloor jam “Feel It” with 1980s-style pop drums;  linking up with Jessie Ware amid the thumping drum machines and grinding synths of “Walking Alone.” Yet these swerves rarely feel jarring. With forceful presence, Octavian establishes himself everywhere he goes and never sounds out of his depth.
While Spaceman’s downtempo ambience was punctuated by flashes of naked fragility, this new tape finds Octavian—deploying slang originating everywhere from London to Lawrenceville—mostly interested in drugs, money, and girls. Opening track “Gangster Love” is an ultralight beam of gospel choirs, piano chords, and half-rapped croons doused in Auto-Tune. Except Octavian isn’t reaching for a higher power, unless you consider hooking up a holy moment. “Skrrt away from them man like a ’Rari,” he wills a potential sweetheart from the other side of the room. The unlikely combination of music and lyrics works, if only for its audacity.
Still, there can be a captivating precision to Octavian’s performance. “Molly Go Down” plays like a druggy lurch around an empty house at 4 a.m., slowing time as he slurs out lines like, “I take molly to slow down.” It’s in these instances that Octavian shows his voice—raspy, heavily accented—to be his most potent weapon.
Some missteps remain. The tail end of “Walking Alone,” where he croons formlessly over an electric guitar, could have been nixed. The light dancehall beat of “World” is too translucent to leave much of an impression. But there’s enough here to affirm what we already knew: Octavian has carved out his own distinct corner of British rap. On Endorphins, he asserts his artistic flexibility without diluting his natural gifts.


Foals' debut, like many British records, trails clouds of homeland hyperbole. The press is calling them "math rock" and the band members have cited Gwen Stefani and Steve Reich, but Foals are squarely in a more recent and less exotic tradition: the hi-gloss end of the post-punk revival.

Antidotes

Foals' debut, like many British records, trails clouds of homeland hyperbole, but it's harder than usual to cut through and get a fix on what exactly they do. Reviews have offered afropop, math rock, and techno as reference; the band members themselves cite Gwen Stefani and Steve Reich. Antidotes suggests these are mostly red herrings. Foals are squarely in a more recent and less exotic tradition-- the hi-gloss end of the post-punk revival: Think a more playful Bloc Party, a more measured Futureheads, a less heartfelt Maxïmo Park.
That's not to say they lack their own sound. If some of the UK press have seized on "math rock" as a way to describe the largely 4/4 Foals it's less because they fit the genre and more that their best tracks sound like they were plotted on grid paper: oblique instrumental vectors crossing, rotating and transforming. In concert videos the guitarists face each other, instruments high and tight against their chests, reflecting one another on an invisible y-axis, shutting the audience out. The stances fit the songwriting: Foals are a band who offer their listeners little in the way of graspable emotion or explanation, but sometimes make up for that with momentum and intrigue.
Take "Cassius", for instance: Breathless, contorted ska-pop, built around high, nervy guitar lines and stuttering brass, with Yannis Philippakis' plummy yelping prominent in the mix. Repeat listens make sense of the sound, reveal the excitement in the muddle-- but the content? It might be about Muhammad Ali. It might be about the Roman Senate. You may as well flip a coin, since it doesn't remotely matter which-- you can thrill to "Cassius", you can dance to it, you can admire its construction, but there's something chilly about its aggressive abstraction.
So what? Aren't thrills and admiration enough? On tracks as propulsive as "Cassius" and its fellow single "Balloons" the answer's yes. "Balloons" actually has one of the album's stickier lines-- "We fly balloons on this fuel called love"-- but is still driven by how its syllables dance and swing, not how they connect. Both singles also use the Antibalas horns-- intermittent guests throughout the album-- to excellent effect, enlivening and widening a slightly arid sound. The brass takes Foals into the tense, mournful spaces the English Beat once explored, and they feel at home there.
When the tempo drops, the problems begin. As tracks like "Red Socks Pugie" and "Heavy Water" slow down, the band loses its crispness and instead of weaving around one another the instruments tread on each others toes, with good hooks lost in a murky coagulate. Worse, Philippakis' voice feels more exposed. It's a blunt tool at best, a kind of blank bark: each word given the same pained heft. On the album's longest track, "Big Big Love (Fig. 2)", he's repeats the dramatic line "Oh! Electric shocks! No!" again and again as the band wind down. He's demanding our attention but, without any discernible emotional context, doing nothing to earn it. The effect is excruciating.
These moments of misplaced weight make Antidotes hard to recommend, but there are good ideas and moments all over the record. The delicate "Olympic Airways" makes a wistful virtue of the drones and echoes that bog the band down elsewhere, and even finds a prettier register to Philippakis' vocals. "Two Steps, Twice" and "Tron" aren't as memorable as the singles but share their appealing intensity.
And it's likely Foals know their strengths and potential. They ditched Dave Sitek's original mix of Antidotes for an overuse of reverb, and they left their first buzz-building singles off the record, preferring to look forward. They've also taken pains in interviews to disassociate themselves from the moribund main current of British indie. That's a wise and admirable stance, but it's not showing up in their music quite yet.