With the *Fan-Tas-Tic: A Jay-Dee Production *box set, we're given the most concise and thorough presentation ever of the formative years of Slum Village, the group that counted J Dilla in its ranks.

The Fan-Tas-Tic Box Set

Slum Village is a rap nerd's dream—cult figures with a drama- and death-filled story that's tied into the genesis of a nigh-mythical figure, a man who was still redirecting the path of the genre while he lay on his deathbed. The group's lineup was constantly churning, and because it included producer J Dilla—one of hip-hop's most revered saints—in its ranks, they've become peculiar cult figures: frequently referenced, yet largely unknown. The group now consists of sole original surviving member T3 and longtime SV producer Young RJ, but it has variously boasted the presence of Detroit wordsmith Elzhi and J Dilla's younger brother, Illa J and gone through name changes (weeks after their official debut was released in 2000, they released quasi-album Best Kept Secret as J-88). But there is one combination—the OG trio of T3, Baatin, and Jay Dee (as Dilla was primarily known then)—that stands as the Supremes with Diana Ross, Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes featuring Teddy Pendergrass. And with the *Fan-Tas-Tic: A Jay-Dee Production *box set, we're given the most concise and thorough presentation of the group's formative years ever released.
The *Fan-Tas-Tic *box set is sourced mostly from the the group's two most widely lauded efforts—Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 1 and *Fantastic, Vol. 2. Both *achieved holy-grail status in part due to their scarcity, in the days when music was passed hand-to-hand and dubs of dubs were of ever-decreasing quality. The majority of people who heard the first two Slum Village records in the early days were hearing corrupted versions full of hiss and distortion that actually aided Dilla's warm grooves and the rappers' frayed and imperfect vocal performances. All of the songs were recorded in Dilla's basement on a DAT machine, which meant that the group had to do their songs in one take. They only had two mics—even ad-libs and hooks were done in real time. Furthermore, the entire debut album was made over the course of a week, sandwiched in between Dilla's growing responsibilities and rising renown as a producer for acts like the Pharcyde and A Tribe Called Quest. This imbued their early recording with a genuine garage-band quality—and even after they signed to A&M Records for their second project, they still recorded from the same location, bringing acts from the both coasts to in Dilla's Conant Gardens basement.
In hindsight, Dilla was the star of Slum Village, but that message was never broadcast through the releases—and it's great to hear Dilla's music outside of the idol worship that has sprung up around him following his 2006 death. Hearing full swaths of Dilla productions where his music is foundational but not central is almost unthinkable today. Even though this set is subtitled A Jay-Dee Production, it skips the heavy-handed approach of 2012's Rebirth of Detroit tribute or of his many reissued  digital artifacts, which tend to get weighed down by their own sense of of historical importance. On *Fan-Tas-Tic, *the stars are aligned equally—Baatin's squiggly esoteric weirdness, T3's rhyming with a chip on his shoulder, the celestial backdrops of Dilla's expansive, smooth-yet-rugged palette of soul samples. Everyone was locked in for these records, and the focus is on no single part, but the sum of Slum Village.
There's a beauty in how local these records are—not in terms of landmarks or civic pride (though that is palpable too), but in the sound of young artists trying to break away from a crowded pack of competition. T3 and Baatin experiment with bar formation, wordplay and vocal inflection—most notably on Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 1, which is more or less a collection of semi-polished demos chronicling their real-time progression from collaborators to actual group. On this debut, the rappers stutter as if trying figure out how to navigate over Dilla's low-end theories—the producer's tracks were incredibly articulate, full of intelligent bass grooves, cushioned and hidden drum patterns that spoke to a shyness, and an offbeat smattering of snaps, snares, ticks and claps that felt like nervous tension or socially awkward conversations full of pauses and repeated non-sequiturs. It's all there on Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 1's opening number, “Fantastic” which features a nearly-eerie but wholly-soothing track hosting laughable sex advice: “All you gotta do is grip your meat/ Laugh at her, massage her/ Take a bath with her/ Devour her.”
Foreshadowing his final evolution with Donuts, some of Dilla's tracks were lyrical enough to not require much rapping, and the group was smart enough to let some of his music breath, playing loose with their presence. For “Look of Love (Remix)” they laid back and mimicked Slick Rick; on “Hoc N Pucky” they free-styled over-the-top grunts and growls and sound effects; and on numbers like “Fantastic 2,” “Fantastic 3,” and “Fantastic 4,” they retreated to simply chanting hooks, treating alternate takes as half-song interludes.
If the song titles (and history) get confusing, it's understandable. Slum Village wasn't necessarily focused on being easily accessible or readily formatted.  Songs, themes and concepts were constantly treated as serials, reduxed, remixed, and reprised; the average song length on the debut is about two-and-half minutes, with almost half of them clocking out before the 90-second mark. Amazingly, they all come off as complete ideas. There's never the impression that the crew ran out of ideas, or had too many to share—rather, it feels as if they said what they had to say and when they had no more to say, they stopped.
By the time *Fantastic, Vol. 2 *was released in 2000, Dilla had worked closely with A Tribe Called Quest,  Busta Rhymes, Common, The Pharcyde and others—all of whom found new rhyme pockets in his work. T3 and Baatin obviously cribbed from these greats, but it wasn't just the rappers who felt emboldened by Jay's advancement.  One boon of his prodigious career is that—despite its brevity—Dilla's work had mini-phases and periods, like truncated versions of Picasso's Blue Period or Miles Davis' forays into fusion or funk. On Vol. 2 he's no longer condensed, adding a sense of comfort and ease to all his prior antics. Despite all of the (deserved) accolades given to Donuts, *Vol. 2—*with warm shimmers like “Get Dis Money,” “Fall In Love” and “Climax (Girl Shit);” throbbing excursions like “Eyes Up” and “Go Ladies”; and pulsing moments like “Conant Gardens” and “Raise It Up” —makes one of the strongest cases for Dilla's greatness.
The album featured Busta Rhymes, Kurupt, D'Angelo, Pete Rock, and—perhaps most notably—Q-Tip affirming the end of A Tribe Called Quest and anointing SV and flame keepers on “Hold Tight”: “Hold tight, this is the last time you hear me/ I'm out now, this is the last time to cheer me," he rapped. “I'ma leave it in the hands of the Slum now.” Q-Tip's declaration didn't help the album's fortunes much; Vol. 2 was shelved and left in purgatory for two years before being shipped off to another label. And by the end of that year, the Slum Village of Jay Dee, T3, and Baatin (who passed away in 2009) was no more.
*Fan-Tas-Tic: A Jay-Dee Production *also comes through with a comprehensive history of Slum Village (the A Fan-Tas-Tic story booklet), as well as full disc of instrumentals (which may or may not yield even more Dilla tributes), and a smattering of worthy remixes and further instrumentals from Pete Rock, Madlib and Dilla himself. Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 1 and *Fantastic, Vol. 2 *themselves are slightly re-worked and extended, but mainly kept intact and made to sound crisper without losing their original basement charm. The five included pieces of 7” vinyl seem gratuitous (their content is duplicated on the discs), but for the Dilla faithful and hardcore collectors, they're admirably fetishistic.  Some of the packaging seems thoughtless—the records, discs, and booklet are just in a box with too much space for them; they just sit and shift and will likely be damaged under less than the most careful handling. But the draw here should always be the music.  And Dilla comes through on both of these projects, but he's not the only one.  On the re-released version of Vol. 2's “We Be Dem #1” (and “#2,” both a reworking of the Vol. 1's “Beej N Dem”) Baatin raps: “You say looking for them niggas, yeah, we be them/This shit remind me of some old EPM/ D shit,” before going on to shout out the Roots, Detroit's House Shoes, and his rhyme partner, but never Dilla. It may be sacrilege to many, but hearing Dilla without hearing rappers talk about Dilla is the best way to hear Dilla.


L.A. musician Eddie Ruscha’s new synth-music project draws on Balearic beat and ambient pop for a concise, easygoing listen.

Who Are You

Anyone who has spent much time around synthesizers knows that each one is unique. Eddie Ruscha certainly does. The Los Angeles musician has been collecting synths for decades, and he describes them in terms usually reserved for woodland critters, deities, or psychoactive substances. One has a “wiggly” character, and another is distinguished by its “seeping snail trails and grit fits.” In one digital synth of recent vintage he hears the “hallucinogenic” specter of people chanting, “or possibly alien choirs.” On Who Are You, all those voices get the chance to be heard. Drawing inspiration from Balearic beat and ambient pop, it’s a concise, easy-on-the-ears listen whose surface simplicity leaves ample room for his instruments to reveal their quirks.
This is Ruscha’s first album under his E Ruscha V alias, but he’s no newcomer. He’s been producing and playing in bands for nearly 30 years. (He’s also the son, if you were wondering, of Ed Ruscha, the pop and conceptual artist.) In the early 1990s, he played in Medicine, a fuzz-besotted shoegaze act, and in the 2000s, he had a dub project called Future Pigeon; in recent years, both solo (as Secret Circuit) and in a variety of configurations with peers like Diego Herrera (aka Suzanne Kraft) and Rub N Tug’s Thomas Bullock, he’s been making left-field dance music indebted to cosmic disco, Italo, and primitive house. Who Are You is less club-focused than a lot of his recent output: The tempos are slower, the textures softer. It’s a lot less shaggy, too. If Secret Circuit’s Tactile Galactics, his last album for Beats in Space, suggested a spiked-punch basement party, Who Are You is geared for the breakfast table and the back porch.
Just 35 minutes long, the album is a mix of downbeat mood pieces, more fully fleshed-out songs, and effervescent ambient miniatures. The opening track, “The Hostess,” is one of the latter. The sparkling melody is reminiscent of music boxes; the gliding guitar melody is evocative of vintage exotica. The balmy mood thus set, “Who Are You” plunges us gently into Ruscha’s relaxed world, where the water is apparently 80 degrees year-round. It begins tentatively, with bubbly keys over halting drum-machine hits, and it gradually grows into a porous weave of synths and guitars with a decidedly tropical feel. There are hints of African guitar, Hawaiian slack key, and Caribbean steel drums, and behind that, chimes, birdsong, and wordless sighs, all bouncing like the animated molecules in a chemistry-class film. “Gravity Waves” is darker and dubbier, and “Lights Passing By” is a watery étude in the style of Harold Budd, with detuned piano swimming in an aquamarine tremolo haze. What all these songs share is an unusually vivid sense of detail. Ruscha is no minimalist, but he knows how to use empty space to let his sounds breathe. There’s a cartoon agreeability to his major-key changes, but there’s absolutely no clutter, and if you listen closely, the dynamic contours of his waveforms come alive, as vividly detailed as leaves under a microscope.
His stylistic cues are in keeping with the ongoing mellow-music revival: You can detect traces of Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s lilting chamber pop, Wally Badarou’s tropical funk, and Gigi Masin’s Mediterranean noonday calm; his guitar flourishes occasionally recall the Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly and Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie. On the penultimate song, “Endless Sunday”—one of a pair of late-album highlights—Ruscha flips the script and indulges in smooth-jazz bass, shimmering bar chimes, and a silky G-funk synth lead, all overlaid with the warmest vocoder this side of Boards of Canada’s “In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country.” Even here, at his most gonzo, what is striking is how restrained his hand is. He has a way of using instruments so that they seem much more present than they actually are, soaking up silence like sponges. In the tranquil “In the Woods,” a clarinet plays just four notes before falling silent again, but its presence lingers. “Mainly I look for an instrument to speak to me and involve me—to bring me into its world,” Ruscha said in a recent interview. On Who Are You, he’s the most easygoing tour guide you could ask for.


Gonno is a Japanese producer with ties to the eclectic and sunset-friendly Ibiza Balearic scene. His debut LP extends his emotive, exploratory approach to album length, treating his music not as a series of singles but as an extended session that unfolds like a meal among friends at dusk.

Remember the Life Is Beautiful

The opening song on Gonno's debut album, Remember the Life Is Beautiful, is called "Hippies". I don't know what the attitude towards hippies is in Gonno's native Japan, but there's no doubt in my mind that the song is meant sympathetically. Its backmasked guitars waft like dandelion tufts across an open field, and its bass tone is as reassuringly heavy as a hand-me-down blanket. It's ambient techno the way it's meant to be made, fleshed out with acid lines and updated with live drums, and the way it develops is so effortless—building to a softly rounded climax and then rolling back downhill—that it feels less like a work of art than a product of nature.
One place the hippie ideology has continued to flourish in dance culture is in the so-called Balearic scene, the fuzzily defined style of music that grew out of Ibiza's discotheques in the 1980s, when DJs like Alfredo and Jose Padilla bricolaged together an eclectic, sunset-friendly style out of ambient, dub, yacht rock, krautrock, acid house, and anything else that fit the mood. Gonno's Balearic bona fides are solid. After years of making relatively rugged, stripped-down techno, he took an abrupt turn in 2011 and wound up on Ibiza's very own International Feel, ground zero for the current decade's Balearic revival. On Remember the Life Is Beautiful, he extends his emotive, exploratory approach to album length, the optimal way to engage with it—not as a series of singles but in an extended session that unfolds like a meal among friends at dusk.
Remember isn't strictly a "dance" album, although warm-up DJs will find plenty of copacetic material here, and a few tracks are relatively peak-time in their energy. "Stop", with its ragged hi-hats and triplet bass, might be a vintage Border Community track, and "Revoked", with its chimes, arpeggios, and chugging groove, is part DFA and part Carl Craig. Four Tet and Caribou's hybridized live drums and machine beats inform a few tracks here, as do their photosensitive quirks and generally wistful air.
The uptempo cuts are the exceptions; most songs are stolidly midtempo, if not outright sluggish. In "The Worst Day Ever", which creeps along at 100 beats per minute, small plucked sounds pile up into a shimmering whole that verges on sensory overload; the equally dreamy "Confusion", a hair faster, affects a majestically relaxed groove. The sonic balance he achieves, between ethereal vibes and physical modeling, is tricky enough; few artists can project a sense of chill that's so convincing. Fittingly, some of the most powerful songs do without drums entirely. "Beasts in Your Mind" runs Göttsching's arpeggios through the Cocteaus' delay pedals, while "Already Almost" goes for a midnight swim in Harold Budd's blue lagoon. And on "The Island I've Never Been", he swaps out the drums for clanking ship's bells, climaxing with a green flash of arpeggiated synths before succumbing to dusk again. It's a wonderful summation of the album's strengths. Remember the Life Is Beautiful isn't a triumph simply because it so elegantly captures the Balearic style; it's that it so elegantly captures its spirit.


The Baton Rouge rapper is still a fearsome MC in his prime. His latest mixtape cuts the distance between his singsongy, hook-driven punches and his cold, levelheaded lessons.

By Any Means 2

Just as Kevin Gates became rap’s most unlikely star, his reality caught up to him. From October to March, Gates served 180 days for battery after kicking a woman in the audience at a Florida show. As authorities were processing his release, they discovered a pending weapons charge, and he was sentenced to another 30 months for felony gun possession. Gates has never been shy about being crude or obscene, and he seems to value publicly reconciling with the uglier aspects of his life. Songs wrestle with his limitations and see perseverance as its own form of progress. In a recent letter from prison, he seemed to suggest as much: “A great person is measured by all of the great tests they can undergo and still remain true to who they are. With that being said ‘I’m Him.’” What greater test is there than staying relevant out of sight, in a climate where people think and consume at the speed of Twitter? His message is clear: Not even prison can stifle his workflow.
The new Kevin Gates mixtape, a sequel to 2014’s By Any Means, is a reminder that the Baton Rouge rapper is still a fearsome MC in his prime, and that his voice still rings out even from behind bars. Compiled by his wife and manager Dreka with his blessings, the tape scans the entire Kevin Gates gamut, from plunges into melody to crisp scene-setting and bittersweet storytelling.
By Any Means 2 cuts the distance between his singsongy, hook-driven punches and his cold, levelheaded lessons (“These scriptures what I’m telling Khaza/Don’t let nobody know that you a monster/Keep it on the tuck and then surprise ‘em”). But perhaps because Dreka curated the project, there is a focus on softer moments and sex jams. There aren’t any songs as visceral and gripping as something like “4:30 AM,” and that feels like a conscious choice. The tape trades in these graphic episodes for several worthwhile surprises: the Joan Osborne -interpolating “What If” turns “One of Us” into a modern rap delight. The R&B crawl on “Fucking Right” pushes his raspy croon to its limits. “D U Down” is a playful bedroom romp. “In here layin’ in my chest/Teeth twinkle in the dark/She asleep and I’m awake/And I’m reminiscin’ in my thoughts,” he raps, relishing all the little details, showing off the intuition that makes him unique.
There are some flashes that seem like reflections of Gates’ current situation, particularly the opening passage on “Attention”: “Walk without an entourage in which I won’t discuss/Killers in New York in the clink, they know enough/My celly spit in the sink, one blink, I’m sheddin’ blood/If we was in the street, one squeeze would wet him up/Acceptin’ no disrespect, wait, who am I to budge?” References to prison stints are hidden throughout, as a nod to this term. Then there’s “Came Up,” which tracks his arc. “Gotta write Gucci, tell him hold his head,” he raps ironically, given their current role reversal. “Received no fundin’ from the label/Two strikes against me, no room for flakin’.” Every inflection enriches his tale, which rings true in the present context.
Proximity is crucial to the way Gates views the world. He’s constantly thinking about people, places, and things in terms of distance, both in relation to him and to others, and these juxtapositions add layers to his flashbacks. On “Jus Wanna,” he explores the mythos of “Plug Daughter,” recounting how a childhood learning to make and sell coke in Colombia led to his earliest romance. What seems like a second verse digression slowly weaves back into the main trafficking narrative, adding a nostalgic tint.
This is all a valiant effort to avoid being forgotten on the inside. By Any Means 2 seems to build around “Imagine That,” a heartfelt remembrance of humble beginnings. The video features home footage of Dreka, their daughter Islah, and their son Khaza. In the open, Gates tells Islah he’s going to miss her birthday. It ends with a hopeful shot of the rapper’s family standing under a “Welcome Home” banner. His kids rap along with his voice. These snapshots raise the stakes; they’re reminders that his world never stops turning, even when he’s not here to live in it.


With limitlessly innovative songwriting and production, the cinema of twigs’ music has never been more affecting. Magdalene is not just on the vanguard of pop, it’s in a breathtaking class of its own.

Magdalene

From her first video, 2012’s mesmerizing “Hide,” the singular focus of her vision was apparent, a holistic project that rendered FKA twigs’ operatic approach to club beats inextricable from her astounding art direction. In the seven years since, she has made her art into a kind of theatrical multimedia experience, crafting elaborate shows and videos that intertwine and smudge the lines of classicism and the avant-garde. She is astonishing, ambitious, and seemingly good at everything, singing over her own ticker-tape beats, self-directing wildly conceptual videos, and ravenously hoovering up dance disciplines (apparently up to and including Chinese sword fighting) until she masters them.
Yet in spite of twigs’ distinctive soprano (spectral and often papery) and her experimental production (stunning and often bellicose), her music has resonated best as a part of a whole, a piece that propels her full-blown artistry but does not totally comprise it. Chalk this up to twigs’ innovation in the Eyeballs Epoch, but even 2015’s incredible M3LL155X EP—a brooding and serrated read on genres like industrial, ballroom house, and triple-time rap—centered adventurousness over melody. It let the fullness of her art bring the beats along with it—weird bangers meant to challenge patrons of the most interesting nightclubs—but was probably best experienced while watching French artist and polymath Michèle Lamy rendered as a deep-sea anglerfish. The gesamtkunstwerk of twigs sometimes overshadowed the music itself, in part because so much of twigs’ presence is her world-class athleticism as a dancer. She imbues voguing and lyrical ballet with such grace and sensuality that the emotion of her music emanates directly from her body.
Magdalene, then, is a fucking revelation. FKA twigs’ first album in four years, and her best work by far, is as introspective as anything she’s written, but more obviously centers her voice as a conduit for plain emotion. Written during a publicly scrutinized relationship with a famously reluctant vampire, as well as a more private recovery from the removal of fibroids from her uterus, she has said she found solace and inspiration in the story of Mary Magdalene, among the New Testament’s most reviled and misunderstood character, whose complexities were rewritten by centuries of chauvinist churchmen into a fallen-woman side note in Jesus’ story. By locating herself in Magdalene’s lineage, twigs, a Catholic school alumnus, explores the ways deeply conservative expectations trammel women; in doing so, she locates a version of herself within these ancient and oppressive archetypes, upending and transcending them through the power of her songwriting and the sheer magnetic pull of her presence.
“Thousand Eyes” opens Magdalene with twigs singing in the austere polyphony of Medieval church music, a meditation on the moment before a permanent departure (“If I walk out the door it starts our last goodbye”) that, with repetition, reveals itself as a hymn. It’s a prologue for an album whose songs are produced like narratives, with a beginning, climax, and denouement. She grapples with survival—psychic and physical survival—the way a woman who lives to move might respond to being laid out by tumors on an organ that facilitates birth. She is furious in parts, attacking tracks like the sweet “Home With You” and snarling standout “Fallen Alien” with virility and self-preservation. Even if shit went south, she refuses to saddle herself with the burden: “I’m a fallen alien, I never thought that you would be the one to tie me down,” she seethes. “But you did in this age of Satan/I’m searching for a light to take me home and guide me out.”
Magdalene is visceral and direct, but despite featuring a trunk-thumping Future collaboration (“Holy Terrain”), this is not a play to make pop music in the charts-humping sense. It’s a document of twigs’ marked achievements in songwriting and musicality as she elucidates her melodies without sacrificing her viewpoint. “Sad Day,” one of Magdalene’s most astonishing tracks, finds twigs properly genuflecting at the altar of Kate Bush, clearly having learned from her ability to translate inner sanctum into cinematic, Shelleyan alt-pop. The production by twigs, Nicolás Jaar, Skrillex, and benny blanco is utterly sublime: Skittering toms build onto an oscillating space-synth, the beats a proscenium for twigs’ voice and, especially, her lover’s desperation. Even if “Sad Day” doesn’t tell an explicit narrative in its lyrics, its production and twigs’ delivery tell an emotional one, that of the last desperate grasps at love in a power imbalance; we’re at the center where the story turns, teetering towards its inevitable end.
That the album stands alone is not to say the totality of her vision is truncated; twigs has already released three videos to accompany its nine songs. The first, “Cellophane,” set the tone for the project, showcasing her pole-dancing skills to a dissonantly sorrowful ballad. (That she apparently finds it funny is a testament to her character—serious artists who can’t laugh at themselves are the worst.) The armchair interpretation of “Cellophane” is as a meditation on the virulent racism that disgusting British tabloids and the worst of Twilight stans lobbed at twigs during her relationship with Robert Pattinson, but it’s equally a mournful reflection on the insecurities that dog any inequitable relationship. The imagery twigs has associated with “Cellophane”—pole dancing, a feat of physical strength set perpendicular to the emotional strength she sings about lacking—calls up the idea of performing for others’ pleasure. It’s a sad solo dance by someone both fully present in herself and aware that she’s toeing the line between agency and subjugation. As the final track on this deeply thought, deeply felt album, “Cellophane” acts as a rejoinder to “Thousand Eyes”—how sickening it must be, a woman artist constantly watched by bigoted tabloids interested in tearing you down from the man you love, how they did Mary M. and Jesus—and underscores the sorrow woven through Magdalene. The fact that sorrow spurred a musical growth this formidable, though, is evidence enough that twigs will always find her way back home.


Though he rose to early acclaim as a fingerstyle guitarist, the singer/songwriter is steadily developing into a poignant lyricist, now chronicling the places and people he hopes to understand.

The Unseen in Between

“Stonehurst Cowboy” sounds like a new kind of song for Steve Gunn. A gifted guitarist who happens to be developing into an even more gifted songwriter, the Philly-born, Brooklyn-based musician has written often about motion and travel: the life of the observer rather than the participant, viewing the world through the windshield. But “Stonehurst Cowboy,” an early beauty from Gunn’s The Unseen in Between, is more about the destination than the journey, and that destination is his late father’s former neighborhood in West Philadelphia. “Dear house near 69th/Old street looks the same,” he sings over a spiky, finger-picked theme. “Trees are strong, faces are gone/Background is still the same.” He sketches out his father’s tough time there, the stolen cars and hard drugs, but there’s no pity to Gunn’s voice. Instead, the song conveys a quiet wonder that the kid became such a good father, with wise counsel: “Call his name,” Gunn offers with a pause in the chorus. “He knows best.”
Gunn’s father and namesake died in 2016, two weeks after Gunn released Eyes on the Lines, a biographical note that instills “Stonehurst Cowboy” with a sense of reckoning. The tune doesn’t reveal much about him, especially compared to what his son has disclosed in recent interviews—like the one he did with Ryley Walker, where he talked about how his dad would smuggle booze into Eagles game or the one with NPR which explains how he was drafted but never sent to Vietnam. These are compelling details, but they’re purposefully omitted from “Stonehurst Cowboy.” It’s about everything the son didn’t get about his father. Gunn knows that it’s what we don’t know about our loved ones—their inner turmoils, those dark pockets—that tug at our imagination. This is where the dead live, in that unseen in-between.
He is just one of many complicated, mysterious characters on The Unseen in Between. Inspired by Agnes Varda’s film of the same name, “Vagabond” paints vivid, sympathetic portraits of characters Gunn might have met out on the road. He sings like he’s scrolling through old photos on his phone, looking at the faces of people he’ll never see again. Still, The Unseen in Between may be his most stationary album, with as many songs about being somewhere as getting somewhere, as with the old haunts of the “Stonehurst Cowboy.” Likewise, “Luciano” is a tender acoustic portrait of a bodega owner and his cat. “New Familiar” takes in the city around Gunn, its bustle of people, its flurry of noises, conveying awe at how the place can change constantly yet remain the same.
His playing on “New Familiar” is streamlined, indulging a subtle flurry of grace notes; the impression is one of elegant concision, an almost ascetic approach to the guitar. As an instrumentalist, Gunn often packs light: just the notes he needs and little more, the least ostentatious guitar hero imaginable. Yet, his playing on The Unseen in Between never fails to evoke that sense of expected movement, so it occasionally sounds like this traveler is simply staying in his lane. Even closer “Paranoid,” with its churchly piano and distorted rumbles, sounds naggingly familiar, as if we have been here before. “A hand-drawn map provides the facts,” he sings in what may be the quintessential Steve Gunn line. Maybe that’s the peril of songwriters who sings about journeys: The more you move, the more you can’t help but learn where all those back roads lead.


Nika Roza Danilova’s sixth record is more collaborative, widening the scope of her music and taking big leaps while retaining its primal, gothic spirit.

Arkhon

Nika Roza Danilova has spent over a decade crafting an auteurist vision of experimental pop. Over that time, her music has evolved dramatically even as its central tenets have remained steadfast: pitch black tone, the force of Danilova’s voice, a preoccupation with death on both a quotidian scale and a cosmic one. Her music, the vast majority of it self-produced, is the result of a dogged pursuit of a specific vision.
In the years following the release of her fifth album Okovi, Danilova began to question that line of thinking entirely. Spurred by a growing socialist consciousness—as evidenced on her Twitter account, which she uses to criticize and question the growing influence of big tech in the music industry—Danilova began to wonder whether her once individual process was just another manifestation of capitalism’s atomizing and isolating nature. “There’s so much exploitation and subjugation that is keeping humanity from collaborating and living in a more holistic way,” she said earlier this month. “[The industry] is siloing musicians through this auteurism where we’re all supposed to be these individual islands of artistic genius. So we’re not being encouraged to collaborate.”
On Arkhon, Danilova’s sixth record, she actively tries to counter the ethos that guided her earlier work, bringing in Sunn O)))’s Randall Dunn and session drummer Matt Chamberlain to bring a collaborative spirit to a once-hermetically sealed project. The resulting album widens the scope of her music while retaining its primal, gothic spirit. Deeply concerned with the nature of artmaking itself—and, specifically, how to do it freely without naturally absorbing the impositions of a cruelly alienating world—it’s a pleasantly shapeless record, an album of experiments and small upheavals that bring new, occasionally mismatched, textures into her world.
Arkhon foregrounds its concerns from its opener “Lost,” where Danilova laments about how corporate structures continue to disenfranchise artists. “Everyone I know is lost,” she sings, her voice deep and droning, shrouded in echo. The song progresses like an incantation or fairytale, Chamberlain’s tom-heavy drumming urgent and harrowing. “Lost” introduces Arkhon as an album about Danilova’s journey towards spiritual rebirth: over the course of the record, she is “crossing the abyss into something new,” stepping into a body of water that will “give you all you want,” walking eyes-closed into a forest. Oceans and forests have always provided a fertile metaphor for Danilova—her 2014 record was called Taiga, after the kinds of harsh, expansive forests commonly found in Russia—but these instances feel more portentous, more linked to some kind of urge to return to a more organic, naturalistic way of life.
True to its transitory nature, Arkhon feels like Danilova’s first record with permeable boundaries. For the first time since 2009’s The Spoils, this album feels in conversation with broader musical culture, with Danilova seemingly more content to reference and borrow from pop music at large. Certain moments in “Undertow” obliquely interpolate Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”—perhaps the greatest pop song ever written about the corrupting lust for power—while the final third of “Into the Wild,” a slow lament set to mournful piano and abstracted percussion, feels like Danilova’s answer to FKA twigs’ “Cellophane.” “Lost” initially begins with a beat made from a sampled breath, and it plays a little like a riff on a 2-step beat, redone in Danilova’s house style. And “Desire,” the album’s thundering centerpiece, comes off as the Zola Jesus version of an Adele ballad, the gale-force of her voice imparting the song with a bracing sense of catharsis.
Not all of these moments work—the FKA twigs-y section of “Into the Wild” is so similar to “Cellophane” that it feels galling—but on the whole, they do a lot to crack the surface of a project that could once feel cool to the touch. In fact, many of Danilova’s most significant experiments do fail: Chamberlain’s drumming, in particular, feels largely misused here, with the booming kit employed on “The Fall” and “Efemra” totally obliterating any nuance. In these moments, Danilova feels totally anonymous, like another stadium-aspirant star unable to compete with the production around her. It’s a shame, as some of the songs that suffer most from this heavy-handedness are also Arkhon’s most promising: The lyrics of “Do That Anymore,” written about the despair Danilova felt after Joe Biden beat Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, contain a wistful, world-weary quality that is hard to find in the music itself.
“Do That Anymore” evokes a kind of hopelessness that’s rare on Arkhon. Danilova’s lyrics here have a punky nihilism to them: “Chalk it up, we can’t change anything in this damn place,” she sings, resigned to a future of unhearing and uncaring liberalism. It’s the album’s closing track, but it’s almost like a prequel to the truths Danilova unearths across the rest of the album: Perhaps there’s a better life to be found among the wreckage big tech has brought upon the world. On “Sewn,” she offers nine words that feel like a mantra to recite on the way forward: “Carry on/Get wrong/Set it all on fire.” It’s a small but enduring flicker of hope.


They may owe their roots to hardcore, but on their second album, Toronto-based six-piece Fucked Up reinvent themselves with power chords, rich overtones, and anthemic, arm-swingng choruses to create one of the year's most ambitious and uniting hard rock records.

The Chemistry of Common Life

Whether it's their second release or their 60th (no one's even pretending to be sure), Fucked Up's The Chemistry of Common Life is really easy to get excited about. A lot's been made about how it could possibly revitalize hardcore, although framing it within genre terms tends to lead to the wrong questions: Is it too melodic and instrumentally diverse to qualify as hardcore? Maybe. Is it heavy and chaotic enough to satisfy fans of the debut, even while it dramatically broadens their fanbase? Possibly. Can a band as destructive as Fucked Up really carry an entire scene on their sweaty, unshaven backs? Stranger things have happened.
It might seem counterintuitive to call Chemistry a grower: From the first listen, it's both pummeling and riveting. When frontman Pink Eyes (Damien Abraham) makes his grand entrance 1.5 minutes into the massive album opener "Son the Father", he channels G.G. Allin by way of Les Savy Fav's Tim Harrington, delivering fiercely intelligent lyrics in a singing voice presumably treated by years of guzzling Canadian Club and then eating the bottles.
That said, The Chemistry of Common Life is a guitarist's album: 10,000 Marbles (Mike Haliechuk) and producer Jon Drew balance classic rock force with shimmering overdubs, at times recalling the Smashing Pumpkins, while at others echoing the layered, chiming guitars and famed loud/quiet dynamics of Bossanova-era Pixies. First single "No Epiphany" has 18 overdubs alone. Fractured harmonies bring "Crooked Head" to its cruising altitude, while breakneck opener "Son the Father" is almost tactile in its texture, with power chords and rich overtones busting into an arm-swingng chorus that doubles as the record's thesis: "It's hard enough being born in the first place/ Who would ever want to be born again?"
It's a hell of a pace to sustain, particularly after the bongo-laced battering ram "Magic Word", but Fucked Up get plenty of help: Chemistry is an "it takes a nation of millions" endeavor, born out of a sense of community and the determination to create something huge. According to the band, something along the lines of 70 tracks of instruments went into the making, as well as guest vocals from Vivian Girls and Sebastian Grainger (formerly from Death From Above 1979). It's not a situation where Fucked Up are seeking credit merely for beginning the album with a flute or other decidedly non-hardcore instruments. These touches often provide the most memorable moments: The gorgeous curtain-raise of female voices that open "No Epiphany"; "Twice Born" and its shout-along chorus ("Hands up if you think you're the only one denied!"); the mystic Black Mountain-style duet on "Royal Swan".
Along with a sense of community, the album also offers a refreshing take on religion. Fucked Up's spiritual bent is something richer than believers being targeted by secularists aiming to make them look stupid (there's your Religulous spoiler-- save the $10): Chemistry is questioning but rarely cynical, the album's midsection testing faith in the face of reason and science, and finding meaning in the actual search for answers ("Days of Last", "No Epiphany").
Chemistry doesn't sit still, and perhaps paradoxically, its most palatable track might be its most divisive-- judging from the ringing open-chords and insistent drum beat of "Black Albino Bones", you might get the idea that this is actually an indie rock album (oh yeah, it is on Matador), a forgotten Husker Du track, or god forbid, pop-punk. Were it given a more conventional vocalist, it could easily sidle into MTV with more ease than this performance of "Twice Born". But while "Black Albino Blues" marks the album's most melodically uplifting track, it might be the most lyrically melancholy, furthering the message of the title track that the magic in our lives is still often a result of nature. "It's the little things that get us through life," barks Pink Eyes before Dallas Green sweetens up with "I need a little escape." This still being Fucked Up, it's a song about sex and drugs, but if they happened to leave something out of that eternal triad, it's only because The Chemistry of Common Life kicks enough ass to demand inclusion on its own terms.


Japanese sludge trio unleash their most melodic, conventionally structured, and aggressively addictive LP to date: Flirting with shoegaze and ambient, Pink is a 47-minute frenzy that welcomes 2006 with open arms, bludgeoning fists, and a call to arms against MOR complacency.

Pink

In underground metal years, Boris are senior citizens: Their self-released debut full-length, Absolutego, dates back to 1996, and compilations were hosting their material two years prior to that. But as invigorating as some of their earlier records are, the band didn't begin to gain a substantial following outside the metal world until 2003's outstanding Akuma No Uta-- parodying the artwork of Nick Drake's Bryter Layter-- struck a chord with independent music fans seeking an antidote to the more polite pop sounds of the Shins, Sufjan, and Death Cab for Cutie. Now, following more than a decade of hard labor and a swarm of 2005 releases, the trio gives their ever-expanding audience something to chew on: Pink is their best album yet, and by some distance the most accessible of their career to date.
The past 12 months have been increasingly kind to louder and more challenging artists, but even if Sunn0))) hadn't droned onto discerning hipsters' iPods, it's not difficult to imagine the awesomeness of Pink-- a supremely well-paced rock'n'roll album that's quickly winning over even long-suffering metalphobes-- helping these Japanese veterans leap-frog indie kids into a New York Times Arts & Leisure mention. If you don't believe me, sneak a listen to the spaced-out seven-minute opener, which manages to combine the best elements of classic British shoegaze and Sigur Rós with bliss-out metal faves Jesu and Isis. Just don't bank on the rest of the album to follow in its footsteps. After all, the three folks behind it-- guitarist Wata, bassist/vocalist Takeshi, and drumming vocalist Atsuo-- are the same atom-smashers who nicked their named from a Melvins song, operate the Walmart-friendly Fangs Anal Satan record label, and downshift from blown-out Motörhead to Earth on a dime. They've collaborated thrice with Merzbow, worshipped amplifiers with multitasking experimental rock legend Keiji Haino, and chilled with noise legend Masonna. Put simply, they're too restless (and ambitious) to fixate on a single style.
So, after allowing the opener to evaporate, Boris jump-cut to the album's title cut-- a full-throttle psych riot. Track three's high-octane guitars circle Atsuo's "yeah"'s and "ooh"'s until treating us to a magnificent feedback'n'drum finale. Track four ups the fuel intake, sporting Pink's highest in-the-red ratio, while track five sweeps aside its predecessors with a pile of industrial Melvins sludge topped with sheering Blade Runner delay, six-string atmospherics, and angstful, wailed vocals. Then, as that brief respite passes, "Electric" cranks the cowbell for two minutes of instrumental boogie, replete with tiny post-punk guitar daggers closing out the song. And there's still more distorted head space to follow, all of it well-stitched and feral. To keep it brief, key moments include: 1) the rising/falling near-pop vocals and final wall of fuzz on track seven; 2) stoner handclaps and Olivia Tremor Control studio effects on track eight; and 3) the textural shift of track nine, where bone-dry, gutteral drums and crashing junk-shard cymbals overtake the bass fuzz and vocals completely.
Enter the finale. Ten seconds of silence introduces the gentle strum and softly brushed drums of the penultimate "My Machine". Its mood hearkens back to the opening song, briefly reprising its blissed-out tone, but two minutes later, reveals itself instead as a forward-looking antidotal preface to Pink's final 10-minute juggernaut and standout track. The closer delivers an absolutely massive wallop, overlapping entropic vocal lines with furious ambient spillage. I used to think that, of everyone in the punk realm, Unwound or Drive Like Jehu had the best control over their feedback flutters, but this thing's gonzo in its perfectly dense acrobatics. And best of all, its unshakably addictive refrain, blistering, scorched-out guitars, thunderous, supercharged rock, and countless change-ups not only warrant its extended length, but make it feel about half as long as it actually is, and keep the listener fully engaged throughout its entire runtime.
As their timeline suggests-- or, to be more accurate, as their history makes it impossible to guess-- Boris could follow Pink with an hour of fried electro-acoustic guitar, powerbook, and piano glitches. Or they could soundtrack a short film in braille. Then, of course, there's Altar, their much-anticipated upcoming collaboration with Sunn0))). But for now, basking in Pink's riptide, Wata, Takeshi, and Atsuo are 2006's balls-out riff-makers to beat. The bar's been raised high and early, rockers-- don't bump your head when you try to sneak under it.


The Black Keys’ singer’s solo album bears little relation to his past efforts, yet nonetheless exudes his signature retro-soul fetishism. It’s casual in execution and intricate in construction.

Waiting on a Song

On the opening title track of his new solo album, Dan Auerbach sings a song about wanting to write a song—before invoking the age-old myth that it’s often best to just stop trying and let the tune find you. “Songs don’t grow on trees/You gotta pick ’em out of the breeze,” he sings on “Waiting on a Song,” a twinkly hit of countrified pop that, as the album cover suggests, sounds very much like it came wafting in as Auerbach reclined on a pile of leaves. But the end result is ultimately a testament to the great paradox of songwriting: it takes a lot of heavy lifting to make something that sounds so effortless.
Auerbach moved from his native Akron, Ohio to Nashville back in 2010, where he has since overseen the Black Keys become one of the biggest, busiest rock bands in America (and by extension, became an in-demand producer for everyone from Dr. John to Lana Del Rey.) Now, comfortably entrenched in his Easy Eye Sound studio, Auerbach’s approach for Waiting on a Song was a lot more like Planning for a Song. The album assembles a roots-rock dream team that includes famous names like John Prine, Duane Eddy, and Mark Knopfler, but also seasoned Nashville tunesmiths like Luke Dick, Michael Heeney, and David Ferguson. As per Music City tradition, songwriting for the album was treated like the job that it is, with tunes developed and recorded on a set weekly schedule.
The result is an album that both bears very little relation to Auerbach’s past efforts, yet nonetheless exudes his signature retro-soul fetishism. Whether it was his 2009 solo debut Keep It Hid or his 2015 foray with the Arcs, Auerbach’s outside pursuits have had the Keys’ muddy footprints all over them. But Waiting on a Song could be his first record without a drop of the blues in the mix, with Auerbach favoring the less gruff, more melodic register in his voice atop a studio-smoothed concoction of country, soul, folk, and power pop.
With “Livin’ in Sin” and shuffling “Shine on Me” (powered by Knopfler’s unmistakable thumb-pickin’ tone), the album essentially functions as Auerbach’s less-democratic version of the Traveling Wilburys, like one of those ’70s-focused satellite radio stations where hit songs from different genres are grouped together by virtue of their common decade and blur into one another. The symphonic soul of “Malibu Man” crosswires the grooves of Al Green with the glittery choruses of T. Rex; “King of a One Horse Town” comes on like Neil Young’s “Down by the River” played on acoustic guitar and produced by John Barry.
While Waiting on a Song is casual in execution, it’s extremely intricate in construction, with each disco-string sweep, brass-section stab, and razor-sharp acoustic strum deployed with push-button precision. At times, the album feels less like a traditional singer/songwriter affair than a business card for Auerbach’s studio. Alas, Waiting on a Song also betrays the limitations of its song-factory set-up, in that the consummate craftsmanship renders the lyrics a secondary, impersonal concern.
Even if he isn’t explicitly singing the blues here, Auerbach still peddles its well-worn witchy-woman cliches. The undercooked folk-funk of “Cherrybomb” spins a gold-digger caricature about a girl who’s “sweeter than an apple pie” but bolts “as soon as my money went away.” And though the banjo-plucked “Stand by My Girl” initially sounds like a pledge of commitment, it’s delivered by a back-door man who’s afraid “she’ll kill me if I don’t.” They’re the sort of eye-rolling lines that are more easily digested within the Black Keys, but are left hung out to dry by this album’s pristine production and light-hearted approach. For all of Auerbach’s eagerness to deliver the Music Row-worthy songwriting goods, Waiting on a Song can you leave you wishing he had waited a little longer.


Scott Walker's third album in the last 17 years features drums and guitars and other passing references to rock music, but its deepest roots are in the dissonant, turn-of-the century compositions by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg.

Bish Bosch

Bish Bosch starts with 30 seconds of what sounds like a jackhammer and ends with a funereal rendition of "Jingle Bells" for solo xylophone. In-between, there are tense silences, horror-movie strings, and 20-minute songs without verses or choruses. At the center of it all is an old man wailing about cutting off his own balls and feeding them to someone. The man seems to think this is some kind of opera. He is Scott Walker, and he puts the situation to us like this: "I've severed my reeking gonads/ Fed them to your shrunken face."
"Gonads" and "sever" are good indications of the vocabulary and subject matter at work here. Like Walker's last two albums-- 1995's Tilt and 2006's The Drift-- Bish Bosch is austere, high-minded music about a dirty world where people always seem to be getting castrated or mutilated by something or another. It features drums and guitars and other passing references to rock music, but its deepest roots are in the dissonant, turn-of-the century compositions by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg-- music that divided its early audiences between applause, hissing, and laughter. More than anything Walker's latter-day albums sound like a parody of what people probably think of when they think of "avant-garde." No scene captures them better than video footage taken during the recording of The Drift, in which Walker-- a friendly looking man in a baseball hat-- instructs a percussionist on exactly how he would like him to punch a side of beef.
The story of Walker's career is a strange and amazing one. He grew up in Ohio but spent most of his life in England and Europe. He was cover-boy famous by his early 20s and a has-been by 30. Between 1967 and 1969 he released a series of orchestral pop albums whose stories about Joseph Stalin and childhood prostitution contrasted-- sometimes beautifully, sometimes just cynically-- with their high-gloss arrangements. No man has ever sung the word "gonorrhea" with more poise.
Between the 1970s and 1990s, he effectively disappeared, putting out a few sub-mediocre country albums, a few new songs with his former group the Walker Brothers (including "The Electrician", which is really the starting point for the music he's making now), and 1984's Climate of Hunter. The output of his unexpected second act-- Tilt, The Drift, and now Bish Bosch-- have taken 20 years to record. Scarcity creates demand-- this is basic economics. With an artist like Walker, though, long waiting times between albums serve mostly to reinforce the idea that he is careful and deliberate, and in turn, the idea that his music is not just product, but that purest of things which cannot be rushed: Art.
Besides the appropriately exhausting 20-minute sweep of "SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)", the best songs on Bish Bosch-- "'See You Don't Bump His Head'", "Corps De Blah", and "Epizootics!"-- are also the most immediate. Walker's approach here, especially compared to Tilt and The Drift, is almost cartoonish: Big, bouncy saxophones, bright trumpet fanfares and, on "Corps", what sounds like a small dog barking. These songs work for one simple reason: In the midst of all Walker's void-courting experimentation, they give listeners something vaguely familiar to hang on to.
Here and there, the contrast between the brainy and the base is so deliberate it sounds like pandering. When Walker sings “If shit were music, you'd be a brass band!" on "Zercon", for example, he's probably trying to remind people that this is all supposed to be on some level funny, which makes it instantly less funny-- not to mention less tragic-- than the Walker who sang lines like "I've become a giant, I fill every street/ I dwarf the rooftops, I hunchback the moon, stars dance at my feet" in a song about an overworked husband whose only liberation in life comes from whores.
As much as it can sound like it stands alone, Bish Bosch is part of a tradition of music that tried to find new ways to articulate that same old misery. Wagner operas, Mahler symphonies, the brutal cabaret of Jacques Brel (who Walker covered extensively in the 1960s), David Bowie, Diamanda Galás, the aggressive anti-music of no wave, even early Swans: this is music that doesn't sound exactly like Scott Walker but makes Walker's bleakness and theatricality sound that much more familiar. Bish Bosch is difficult music that was intended to sound difficult and be enjoyed primarily by people who enjoy difficult experiences. The irony is that it is difficult in conventional ways.
Walker's career has always been surrounded with the whispery, romantic myth of genius, and we need myths like that-- myths about people who seem to forge their own path into the wilderness of their art, slowly and alone. The danger is to pretend that the music exists somewhere above us, or, like a carnival ride, is something we have to be This Smart to understand.
Like the movie director David Lynch, Walker is an artist that people-- fans and non-fans-- seem bent on "getting," as though there was anything to "get" in the first place. Let's pretend there isn't. Let's pretend that when Walker tells a "you're so fat" joke halfway through "Zercon", it's not a metaphor for anything, but an insult about fat people.
A few minutes later, he breaks down and starts screaming, "Did you ever throw your own mother's food back at her? Did you ever tell her 'Take this junk away'? What kind of an unnatural son would do that to his own mother?" Let's pretend that the moment has nothing to do with 5th-century Moorish history or the astronomy behind brown dwarf stars. Let's pretend it's simpler than that. Behind all its obscure references and theatrics, Bish Bosch is a catalog of basic human cruelty-- a subject no footnote could ever make any easier to understand.


The Horse Lords saxophonist uses overdubbing to recast his instrument as a virtual organ. The quest of its making is as much part of the appeal as the music itself.

a presentation

If you have any preconception of what a saxophone is supposed to do in experimental music, leave it at the door before entering Andrew Bernstein’s a presentation. The sax wasn’t even designed to do the things Bernstein makes it do; as a monophonic instrument subject to the finite resource of the player’s breath, it’s inherently averse to polyphonic, longform drone pieces like the three that comprise a presentation. But by overdubbing layers of saxophone into dense chords, Bernstein has recast his instrument as a sort of reed organ. Instead of the Coltrane-Sanders-Ayler continuum Bernstein tapped on 2018’s An Exploded View of Time and in his work with Baltimore’s Horse Lords, you might instead think of the pipe-organ music of Sarah Davachi and Kali Malone, or Phill Niblock’s Four Full Flutes, or Pauline Oliveros’ Accordion & Voice, or maybe Homer Simpson passing out on the horn of his car on the way to Duff Gardens.
a presentation sounds like a lot of things other than a solo saxophone album, and yet it never seems to make a big deal out of the fact that it’s entirely made on saxophone. Aside from the breath control required to sustain the notes, this slow, simple music isn’t particularly conducive to virtuosity, and he’s not trying to coax any sounds from the instrument that no one has ever thought to coax before. The album hinges on a simple, rather brilliant idea: Why not use this instrument to make this music? There’s no reason it couldn’t have been performed on a polyphonic instrument, and that’s kind of the point. The irrational quest of its making is as much part of the appeal as the music itself.
It also suits the stubbornness, obstinacy, and immovability of these three pieces: the nearly half-hour “in flux” and two shorter tracks that set Bernstein’s saxophone against electronic drone tones. If you get a twinge of awe looking at the Pyramids of Giza or the Three Gorges Dam or the Merchandise Mart, you’ll find something to like in this music. This is blank, featureless stuff, devoid of rhythm, melody, or texture beyond the light grit in Bernstein’s tone or occasional phasing between two layers of vibrato. The brain starts thinking architecturally, and the individual layers of saxophone start to resemble logs in a cabin or posts in a fence. a presentation fires the brain up for the same reason an isolation tank does: In the absence of anything to latch onto, it starts to fill in the blanks.
Even if it’s up your alley, this isn’t the kind of thing you’ll want to listen to every day. It’s trebly, austere, and dissonant, thanks to Bernstein’s use of just intonation rather than the equal temperament most common in Western music. But as a testament to the human capacity for ingenuity, it’s kind of awesome. Reviewing 2001: A Space Odyssey and discussing the scene in which the proto-humans discover the monolith, Roger Ebert speculated that “the smooth artificial surfaces and right angles of the monolith, which was obviously made by intelligent beings, triggered the realization in an ape brain that intelligence could be used to shape the objects of the world.” Eons of evolution later, such a vast and finely wrought object as a presentation can still induce the same awe.


Following the loss of her voice while out on tour, the Chicago singer-songwriter turned to her synthesizers as she recuperated, building loops out of glowing, meditative tones.

Mia Gargaret

The voice is a singer’s portal into an audience’s heart. It can inspire recognition, empathy, the feeling that you aren’t alone in your sadness or joy. “The listener’s inner body is illuminated, opened up: a singer doesn’t expose her own throat, she exposes the listener’s interior,” the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum wrote in his book The Queen’s Throat. So how does a singer communicate when their voice suddenly vanishes?
This was the predicament facing the dream-folk songwriter Gia Margaret after her voice disappeared while touring her 2018 debut, There’s Always Glimmer. As she recuperated at home in Chicago, Margaret took to puttering around on a synthesizer, building loops of glowing, meditative tones. These ambient experiments form the basis of her second record, a collection of 11 gentle songs titled Mia Gargaret.
On There’s Always Glimmer, Margaret invoked nature in words, through images of mist and moons spilling through windows, embers burning, stones sinking into water. Without her usual tools of communication, she turns to field recordings to expand her world: Church bells, footsteps, and bird calls are sprinkled throughout. Pensive opener “Apathy” ends with a clip of her vocal exercises, with a therapist cheerily encouraging Margaret to feel “free in your body and let things come out the way they want.” After several songs of dissonant synths, “Lakes” pairs samples of crashing waves against the delicate pickings of an acoustic guitar.
Early on “barely there,” Margaret uses her own speaking voice—marking its first significant appearance on the album—to reflect on anxiety. “Do you ever feel like you’re living your life but you’re also barely there?” she asks. “The conversations you can’t remember because when you had them your mind was just trying to make it to the next sentence.” Mia Gargaret’s patient pace and contemplative tone encapsulate these questions of existence, dissociation, and introspection. The aptly titled “sadballad” pairs a melancholic piano melody with elongated synth notes. Suspended in a state of calming lethargy, “3 movements” nods to Margaret’s classical piano training.
“Body” samples a lecture titled “Overcome Social Anxiety” by the British philosopher Alan Watts, whose work also inspired Buchla wizard Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith on her 2017 record The Kid. “‘My body is a burden to me.’ To whom? To whom? That’s the question,” Watts says over Margaret’s twinkling synthesizer. “When there is no body left for whom the body can be a burden, then the body isn’t a burden. But so long as you fight it, it is.” On the final track, “lesson,” Margaret’s singing voice materializes for the first and only time. Featuring contributions from Oakland singer-songwriter Stephen Steinbrink, “lesson” harks back to Margaret’s debut while pointing to a new future that incorporates the lessons learned on Mia Gargaret. The song both suggests the healing of her vocal cords and seems to confirm Watts’ words: When given time to rest and regenerate, the body is capable of small wonders.


MINUTES FROM THE 2002 ANNUAL MEETING OF THE CONCEPT ALBUM SOCIETY
As I'm sure you are all aware, 2002 ...

Tallahassee

MINUTES FROM THE 2002 ANNUAL MEETING OF THE CONCEPT ALBUM SOCIETY
As I'm sure you are all aware, 2002 has been a fantastic year for the concept album, quite possibly one of the best since our heyday at the turn of the 1970s. While major-label artists resisted the rock opera urge (which is perhaps for the best; let us not forget MACHINA and Chris Gaines), acts below the mainstream radar took up the slack nicely. John Vanderslice, Black Heart Procession, Pedro the Lion... hip-hop even gave us a concept record that, shockingly, was not a science fiction gimmick: Mr. Lif's I Phantom.
Soon, we'll be voting on final nominees for our honorary Pete Townshend Concept Album of the Year award. But before you cast your ballot, some members have requested that we address a late entry to this year's competition: The Mountain Goats' Tallahassee. Since his full-length cassette debut in 1991, John Darnielle has threaded the sagas of flawed relationships through his albums, generally told in one-song installments. Now, for the first time in 81 albums (okay, 16... or something, it's confusing), Darnielle has expanded these tragic stories into an entire LP, set in the diamond city of Florida's panhandle.
The idea is enticing: Darnielle, known for crafting two-minute biographies like "Fall of the Star High School Running Back" richer in detail than a 700-page novel, is given greater room to flesh out his stories. His talent for depicting the rises and falls of a relationship in singular, tiny details (fighting over the car radio, for example) makes him ideal for the task of an indie-folk Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
The result is the pleasant musical equivalent of a slow, deliberate character study, rich with symbols like circling crows and a house in disrepair, more concerned with in-depth observation of the protagonists than with narrative movement. Unfortunately, this pace makes for a less than successful concept album, with song topics tracing an endless I Love You/I Love You Not oscillation, from the cautious happiness of the title track and "Game Shows Touch Our Lives" to the for-the-throat attacks of "No Children" or "Have to Explode".
The music is distracted by another concept, as well-- a meta-concept, if you will, with Tallahassee touted as the first Mountain Goats release to be recorded with a full, traditionally-instrumented rock band. Darnielle spends most of the album teasing the listener with this promise, adding a bass here, some minimal drums there, perhaps a harmonica, before (gotcha!) we arrive back at a Darnielle solo arrangement. When we finally come to a song with an actual, honest-to-God rhythm section ("See America Right") it sounds disappointingly like... Cake?!
The majority of Tallahassee, recorded with Darnielle's Extra Glenns cohort Franklin Bruno, is, like the Extra Glenns' Martial Arts Weekend, typically stripped-down Goats fare with an occasional minimal embellishment. And as has been the case whenever Darnielle has chosen a studio over his trusty Panasonic boombox, the end result sounds somewhat thin-- especially considering the more delicate strum-style he's been developing of late. A few exceptions are pleasant, like the Casio-fed "Southwood Plantation Road" or the bright piano line that runs through "No Children" before the delightfully/horrifically bitter singalong chorus, but songs like "Peacock" and "Idylls of the King" are over-wispy. Johnny Goat's usual lyrical acuity also comes slightly short of his usual track record, as he unveils one of the best entries from his notebook of "Love is like..." similes (in this case, it's like "the border between Greece and Albania") only to later drop the dud, "People say friends don't destroy one another/ What do they know about friends?"
These transgressions are somewhat forgiven, however, by "Oceanographer's Choice", Tallahassee's only song to truly come through with the full-band promise, and a breathtaking portrait of the usual relationship violence becoming physical. With drums and ominous organ that finally add some urgency to the story, and sad, sliding electric guitar swooping in and out like symbolic crows, the music finally measures up to the emotional intensity of Darnielle's imagery. When the band drops out, the scene freezes, and the characters fully realize the consequences of their meltdown: "What will I do when I don't have you?"
Suffice to say, if the rest of Tallahassee lived up to the standard set by "Oceanographer's Choice", we'd have a surefire candidate here for Concept Album of the Year. However, Tallahassee is not even 2002's second best song cycle about disintegrating love (it's succeeded by Pedro the Lion's Control and Black Heart Procession's Amore del Tropico). While Tallahassee, as literature, is richly detailed, even stunning on occasion, Darnielle's apparent phobia for full-band arrangements prevents the music from keeping pace with the storylines. It's an admirable experiment, but not one that will likely find its way to the podium come election time.


The new Mastodon EP is an eclectic, psychedelic journey that sees guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds picking up a Sho-Bud 13-string pedal steel guitar. His mastery of the instrument is quickly clear.

Cold Dark Place EP

Across their catalog, Mastodon scream about walking trees and assassinated czars; giant sharks and steam-breathers; sex in space and sleep undersea. But despite their predilections towards heavy-metal high fantasy, the Atlanta band have been, and always will be, peddlers of the cold, hard, extremely loud truth. “We tend to channel any and all emotions through this art that we call Mastodon,” bassist Troy Sanders said in an interview last Spring in anticipation of Emperor of Sand, a collectively-written account of cancer struggle masquerading as a prog-metal-spiked Arabian Nights. (Three members of Mastodon had family members battling the disease.) By expressing their present personal pain in terms of mythic beings, deadly monsters, and wrecking-ball riffs, the band don’t just own their anguish; they make a cosmic spectacle of it, typically a top-notch one at that.
Mastodon’s new EP, Cold Dark Place, is primarily sourced from a single tormented soul: Brent Hinds, the band’s fleet-fingered, sludgy-throated, erstwhile-penis-statue-carving axeman/vocalist. Originally conceived and composed as a solo album, this four-track effort—the contents of which originated during the sessions for their last two albums—eventually blossomed into a de facto Mastodon record. The final product, while technically credited to the full band, is distinctly Hinds’ own, all daredevil guitar stunts and quaking, crooned refrains: a satisfying, if nonessential, dose of latter-day Mastodon, not to mention a compelling self-portrait.
Where Emperor of Sand found its creators self-immolating in a far-off desert, Cold Dark Place hits closer to home. The band’s southern roots are on full display here thanks to Hinds’ latest weapon of choice: a 1954 Sho-Bud 13-string pedal steel guitar he acquired several years ago, fully outfitted with knee and foot-benders. Texturally alluring and technically intimidating, the Sho-Bud comes with a steep learning curve; most axemen spend their whole careers trying to reap its atmospheric rewards. Not so for Hinds, whose mastery of the instrument is clear within seconds of six-minute opener “North Side Star.” As his dulcet wails and arpeggios drift around the cavernous sonic space like phantasms in the night, the Sho-Bud transmogrifies and warps, a bluegrass instrument on a terrifying acid trip. Halfway through their psychedelic journey, the spell breaks, giving way to a southern-fried boogie that reeks of funk, but mostly dread.
This game of stylistic hopscotch, as with most of Mastodon’s records, is the EP’s M.O. “Blue Walsh,” a holdover from the days of 2014’s Once More ’Round the Sun led by drummer Brann Dailor, snakes between prickly psych-pop à la Pinback and the usual syncopated sludge. Lead single “Toe to Toes,” meanwhile, pits Hinds’ arena-friendly choruses against his bandmates’ bruising breakdowns. The EP’s mercurial sprawl, coupled with its lack of overarching narrative, occasionally makes the band susceptible to slog, primarily on the concluding title track: a downtempo ballad similarly dominated by Hinds’ Sho-budding and singing. It spends far too much time flopping around in the muck, rendering a painstakingly-crafted finale dynamically dull; Hinds’ uncharacteristically muffled vocals, which sound as though they were recorded through a microphone filled with cotton balls, don’t make things any easier.
Near the end of “Toe to Toes,” though, Hinds sheds light on his life as a raconteur rock star. “I played the fool/I played the sinner/I played the part of me that no one wanted to see,” bleats the face-tatted southerner, in a rare show of intimacy. Therein lies the record’s central conceit: the real cold dark place is the heart of the man who made it. Hinds said so himself in a recent interview with Loudwire, going on to reveal the EP’s big takeaway as “the concept of living and how much it hurts to fucking be alive.” And yet, however thematically mired in misery, Cold Dark Place plays out as a triumphant march into the darkness: one man’s pain, collectively conjured and conquered.


If last year's Syro was a masterful summation of the sound Richard D. James pioneered on his classic 1990s Aphex Twin releases, Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 is a very good reminder that there was also experimentation going on alongside the canonical LPs.

Aphex Twin: Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 EP

You had a feeling this was going to happen. After returning last year from more than a decade of light activity, Richard D. James is back with his second Aphex Twin record in four months. If Syro was a masterful summation of the sound James pioneered on his classic 1990s releases, Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 is a reminder that there was always a lot of low-profile experimentation going on alongside the canonical LPs. Rather than cobble together Syro leftovers (it’s fair to assume there are many of these), James draws from a different aesthetic altogether. It’s all there in the title: whatever the process for actually assembling these tracks, the individual sounds do indeed seem to be physical objects vibrating in space, as if James had marshaled a battalion of robots to realize his latest compositions.
Texturally, the music bears some similarity to bits found on Drukqs, specifically the prepared piano tracks that contrasted with that album's more frenetic breakbeat excursions. "Jynweythek Ylow", "Strotha Tynhe", and "Penty Harmomium" are clear antecedents to the music found here, but Acoustic Instruments takes those ideas further. Piano, prepared and otherwise, features heavily, but so do various drums and wood and metal percussion instruments. And where James used to offer his electro-acoustic pieces as a showcase for lyrical melodies, about half the music here consists of crisply arranged beats, with loping drum lines that occasionally veer toward funk.
The most striking thing about Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 (the title is a typical James puzzle—no word of where Pt 1 may be) is how directly his musical concerns can be mapped on to another context. The grooves, the de-tuned melodies, the bridges, the way rhythms can lag a split second behind the beat—all are signatures of his electronic work and all are found here intact. A good point of comparison demonstrating how difficult this must be is Acoustica: Alarm Will Sound Performs Aphex Twin, an album from a decade ago that found the new music ensemble tackling some of James’ better-known compositions. The skeleton of tunes like "4" and "Meltphace 6" was there, but the sense of movement was way off. Here, we can hear the person and the sensibility behind the sounds.
On some tracks, you can almost hear their electronic counterparts. "diskhat1" features clipped drums with a steady hi-hat and a prepared piano riff that sounds dissonant to the point of seeming alien. "hat5c 0001 rec–4" is constructed with similar tools but uses a piano motif from the bass clef to give it the anxious feel of a tightly-sequenced synth. "piano un10 it happened" can be filed with James’ most delicate and beautiful pieces, one of those effortless melodies that vanishes into the air right around the time you start thinking about the Windham Hill catalog. Indeed, brevity is key: Acoustic Instruments is the perfect length—28 minutes long, 13 tracks, with about half fully fleshed out and the others serving as sketches—for this sort of treatment. James has a handful of ideas, he comes in and executes them perfectly, and then he gets out.
If Syro was a re-introduction for James, a way to put his music in front of people who didn’t know or follow along with his earlier work, Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 is a release for established fans, people who want to know what his pieces would sound like in an altogether different setting. So while the EP feels like it can be connected to other music (it’s easy to draw lines to gamelan music and kinetic film scores), the greatest pleasure comes in knowing where it came from and how it came to be. It’s an Aphex Twin EP more than just an EP, and as those go it’s very good.


After the post-punk atmospheres of last year’s Love What Survives, Mount Kimbie return to dance music with a DJ set that proves them to be both adventurous selectors and cagey mixers.

DJ-Kicks

For some artists, it can take some effort to get out from under the shadow of the scene they came up in. Consider Mount Kimbie, who got lumped into the “post-dubstep” bucket alongside James Blake (whose post-2010 output has put considerable distance between himself and that descriptor). Last year’s spiky Love What Survives found the duo of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos more inclined to draw on post-punk and German kosmische rather than dance music. True, they kept up a sideline DJing bass music and grime, but they consider themselves a band first and foremost, telling Resident Advisor, “We weren’t as massively into club culture as a lot of people… We never intended to DJ at all.”
With post-dubstep fading in the rearview, Mount Kimbie provide the latest entry in the long-running DJ-Kicks series. Despite their alleged intention not to be DJs, the mix proves them to be not only adventurous selectors but cagey mixers as well. They embrace both mellow, metallic-tinged rhythms and full-on roaring techno, moving swiftly between the two poles with a set that breathlessly cycles through over 20 tracks in just under 50 minutes. It’s restless yet steadfast in its direction. The mix ramps up quickly, moving from the watery abstractions of vocoder composer Madalyn Merkey to the shimmering electro of Via App’s “Baby K Interaction” and the distorted flicker of early-’80s Australian industrialists Severed Heads. The latter two artists both set the mood of the mix and also make return appearances.
Barely five minutes in, the mysterious gamelan ensemble De Leon and their measured metallophone cadences emerge. Such clangs hark back to the driving pulses behind Love What Survives (think of the mbira-like plinks on “Marilyn” and “SP12 Beat”)—a burnished timbre that the mix returns to often, from the spark-spraying whiplashes of Object Blue’s “Even in You” to the subway-construction echoes of Mount Kimbie’s own contribution, “Southgate.”
What might initially scan as detours—like the experimental chirrups of cellist Oliver Coates and the tumbling percussion and electronics from the duo of Beatrice Dillon & Rupert Clervaux—all fold into Kimbie’s undeterred trajectory. Same goes with the hardier dance tracks. Whether in the pinging Berlin minimalism Efdemin’s “America (Terrence Dixon Minimal Detroit Mix)” or the deeper strains of N.Y. House’n Authority’s late-’80s classic “APT. 2B,” Mount Kimbie tease out and highlight each track’s experimental qualities. When the smeared, muffled vocals and squawking signals of Severed Heads’ “Lamborghini” drop into the Abstract Eye’s well-deep techno, it shows the duo’s knack for taking each new sonic element and feeding it right back into the relentless pace of the mix.
The velocity ticks upwards with Marco Bernardi’s glowering electro and the bewildering pings of Aleksi Perälä’s “UK74R1512110”; the latter turns twinkling as Nina Kraviz’s pounding techno reduction of Mount Kimbie’s own “Blue Train Lines” takes over. Kraviz atomizes King Krule’s howl, but just when it seems like the song’s cut-brakes techno climax will careen over the cliff’s edge, they land on a groggy closer in “Obviously.” Credited to the seemingly obscure duo of Taz & Meeks, it turns out to be the handiwork of Tirzah and Mica Levi: a groggy, chopped-up hybrid of R&B and 2-step that you might even call “post-dubstep.”


The debut album from UK indie pop artist Hannah Rodgers, aka Pixx, is forlorn, agitated, and at times infectious. She sings critically of her doubt and discontent with our times.

The Age of Anxiety

“The great vice of our age,” W.H. Auden lamented in a letter to his friend Theodore Spencer after the publication of his final book-length poem, The Age of Anxiety, “is that we are all not only ‘actors’ but know that we are. It is only at moments, in spite of ourselves, and when we least expect it that our real feelings break through.” Auden felt we had been paralyzed by our own self-awareness—that the more we reflected on our place in the world, the more entrenched we became. For Auden, the examined life only made it harder to live.
The Age of Anxiety was published in 1947, and it has been continually reimagined. The poem was adapted by Leonard Bernstein as the Symphony No. 2 for piano and orchestra in 1949, by Jerome Robbins as a ballet (set to Bernstein’s music) in 1950, by the Living Theater Studio in New York as a play in 1954, and again by students at Princeton in 1960. And now it arrives as an album by UK indie pop artist Pixx—sort of. Surrey-born Hannah Rodgers, 21 years old and a new signee to 4AD, found her debut album’s suggestive title scrawled in a notebook handed down by her brother. This record is not an adaptation of the poem so much as it was inspired by that phrase’s enduring intrigue.
Still, Pixx’s Anxiety and Auden’s share much in common. Both seem forlorn, agitated, sick with ennui. Both bristle at the anguish and malaise of the age. “Toes,” an erratic, hazy synth-pop number reminiscent of a pre-Visions Grimes, lambasts the demands of a life broadcast on-screen for likes and follows: “The longest hair/The bluest eyes/The whitest teeth/The fakest smile,” Rodgers recites flatly, before concluding with a simple droll order: “Let’s go out/Let’s go outside.” Elsewhere she addresses the tension between vanity and social consciousness—both on the rise. “Everyone is in a rush to have some fun but times are tough,” she sings on the buoyant “Waterslides.” “There must be something here for me/I’m terrified by what I see.”
At times this disaffection feels too broad, even adolescent. Lead single “I Bow Down” is monotonous and overproduced, leaden with a repetitive vocal melody and scuzzy, muddled electric guitar; its lyrics muse vaguely on Auden’s “age of anxiety,” but amount to little more than nondescript platitudes (“to put a weight on it/would be to mold the answer/deceivingly”). “Everything is Weird in America,” the album’s most straightforward bid for pop triumph, is as trite as its title suggests. “But be aware it’s not all it seems/A vision built on movie screens,” Rodgers intones. “Hear me, hear me cry out/Everything is weird in America.” That the latter refrain proves so infectious makes the hollow sentiment all the harder to shake.
Pixx is at her sharpest when her doubt and discontent are animated by something more acute. In the case of “Romance,” the album’s best track by far, it’s resentment, rancor, and rage—familiar emotions to pop singers the world over. “You don’t care as long as you leave in a pair,” Rodgers snarls, positively vicious, as waves of synth boil around her. “You’ll be fine as long as you keep up the flair.” The similarly harsh “The Girls” is vitalized by its own insecurity. It suffers from one of Rodger’s most unfortunate rhymes—“I hope they read about the boys/Who are no good, treat them like toys”—but its rich vein of sorrow is tapped to great effect. “I wish that I could dance like the rest of the girls,” Rodgers croons, movingly. It’s the statement of an artist who, in Auden’s phrase, not only feels but is critically conscious of her emotions.


After last year's tiresome Paralytic Stalks, Kevin Barnes regroups for what is arguably the best—not to mention the funniest, prickliest, most purple, and least fastidious—Of Montreal effort since 2007's *Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? *

lousy with sylvanbriar

Credit Kevin Barnes for knowing when he’s testing your patience. After last year’s Paralytic Stalks, where his flamboyance came across as ho-hum and even his self-absorption sounded strangely obligatory, Barnes changed up his process for Of Montreal’s 12th album. He left Athens, Georgia, and decamped to San Francisco to write. Instead of recording by himself, as he has done on almost every Of Montreal album, he assembled a small band of sympathetic performers. Together, they eschewed computers and lofty conceptualizing, favoring in-the-moment energy over down-the-rabbit-hole perfectionism. Relative to his usual dictatorial working method, it was positively democratic.
Especially after Stalks, Lousy is bracing. It’s arguably the best—not to mention the funniest, prickliest, most purple, and least fastidious—Of Montreal album since Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? Barnes sounds more focused and straightforward, perhaps newly aware that his listeners won’t follow him just anywhere. The songs here boast clearly defined choruses and verses and bridges, even if his digressions within melodies lend the music an intriguing volatility.  If he was channeling Prince and Faust and the fictional glam-funk avatar Georgie Fruit on previous records, on Lousy with Sylvianbriar his spirit guides seem to be Donovan and Dylan. The album’s softer moments tweak the former’s pastoral folk and spiritually declarative lyrics, and when this iteration of the group cuts loose, they sound like they’re racing down Highway 61 en route to Plato’s Retreat. On “Belle Glade Missionaries” Barnes adopts Dylan’s long-winded phrasing, rushed delivery, and heavily coded lyricism, but the performance never descends into impersonation.
Dylan has been an evergreen influence on generations of musicians, but Barnes seems intent on puncturing the Bob mythos a bit, which means Lousy is never lousy with hero worship. Is that album cover a cheeky allusion to Bob’s infamous motorcycle accident, after which he retreated from public scrutiny for a few years? “Hegira Émigré” could be a sly parody of Dylanophilia, suggesting how ill-suited the old forms of protest music are to the post-Occupy world: “My baby’s meditating to stop the war, but I’ve got myself a rifle 'cause I ain't gonna get walked on anymore,” Barnes sings, as the band stomps around like the Band ca. ’66.
Barnes' songwriting has always thrived on petty feuds and lacerated relationships, stoking low-level, long-simmering interpersonal conflicts for inspiration. At his best, he teases out the tensile connections between humans, giving voice to the darker thoughts and casual prejudices that cloud every mind. Witness “Colossus” : “Your mother hung herself in the National Theater, when she was four months pregnant with your sister,” Barnes sings, setting the scene for someone else’s grim family drama. “Maybe your family, they are just losers.” The statement reads as harsh, but its poignant and commiserative, somehow, heightened by the band’s curiously delicate arrangement. It’s the most empathy Barnes has mustered in ages, even if the sentiment is barbed.
Barnes writes in in his own language, a peculiar and personal mix of purple prose poetry, exhausting academic-speak, prescription-medication warnings, and plainspoken pronouncement. So perhaps Dylan is an even more apt model for Barnes than Prince ever was. Like Dylan, he asks you to decode, to dissect, to discuss. Also like Dylan, Barnes seems playfully aware that his lyrics are Gordian knots, impossible for even the most devoted Of Montreal fan (including, possibly, himself) to untangle completely. And yet there are moments of clarity on Lousy with Sylvianbriar that prove Barnes is both his own harshest judge and most lenient jury. Or, as he sings on “Triumph of Disintegration”: “I had to make myself a monster just to feel something ugly enough to be true.”


The second landmark album this year from Big Thief is raw, tactile, and essential. The intimate songs zoom in on a band that feels, at this moment, totally invincible.

Two Hands

Coming from a band who, just five months ago, materialized somewhere deep in a forest with a mystical set of songs wrapped in a vast, alien cosmos—a band who, in order to summon the perfect squall of noise, claimed to have suspended an electric guitar from the ceiling of a barn and batted it around like a piñata in a circle of amplifiers—Two Hands is jarringly earthbound. For their latest album, the Brooklyn quartet Big Thief invites you to join them live and unadorned in the studio for the span of 10 songs. “Hand me that cable/Plug into anything,” Adrianne Lenker sings, moments after issuing a more basic instruction: “Cry with me/Cry with me.”
Nearly every song overflows with tears and blood, bared teeth and broken tongues; living, killing, dying. There are few overdubs, and sometimes you hear the band members instructing each other when to step back or take a solo, like they’re just rehearsing for the actual performance. It makes for a specific kind of rock record: an attempt to capture a band’s imperfect, raw essence, to show what happens when they simply count to four and take off. The approach is best known for accentuating a tough, ragged cohesion, like Neil Young records in the ’70s, but this record goes somewhere different. The more Big Thief zoom in, the more magical they sound.
It’s a trick that these musicians have spent their careers perfecting. Since their 2016 debut, Masterpiece, each successive album has felt like a breakthrough geared for larger spaces. But their own interpersonal dynamic has followed an inverse trajectory. “At this point we’re basically touching each other,” guitarist Buck Meek recently observed about their magnetic live shows, a connection made literal on the new album cover. After the spacious odes to the natural world on U.F.O.F, Two Hands is a record defined by these collisions—a reminder that intimacy isn’t just about the comfort we bring to each other but also the proximity to our sickness and pain, blood and guts.
The record proceeds along a bell-curve, with the heavier moments at the center reverberating through the quieter points on either end. The focus is on the patient interplay between Lenker’s guitar—rhythmic and physical, like a slot machine with infinite outcomes—and James Krivchenia’s drumming, as patient and instinctive as it’s ever sounded. The accompaniment from Meek and bassist Max Oleartchik, who plays a few solos in “Those Girls,” is more understated but just as crucial. In sparer, creeping moments like “The Toy” and “Cut My Hair,” you can sense the band listening to each other, responding with reassuring hums and nods. And when they do cut loose, you feel the thrashing.
Variations on the word “crying” appear in half these songs, and each time Lenker sings it, she tells a different story. Occasionally her lonesome, quivering voice feels like an outsider descendent of country-folk singers like Kath Bloom or Iris DeMent, particularly in “Replaced,” a co-write with Meek. Other times, she sounds like someone clawing at her own skin, trying to escape. In “Forgotten Eyes,” a heartland rocker whose lyrics might be about homelessness, she trembles uneasily toward the final chorus, holding out the “ng” of “tongue” until it makes a phlegmy, growling noise in the back of her throat. Big Thief were built for moments like these, where sound merges with meaning, where the floating voice in your headphones finds its body.
As a lyricist, Lenker has become newly adept at telling stories through her absences. She’s written songs in the past that dazzle with poetry (“Mary”) and others that are memoiristic in their precision (“Mythological Beauty”), but these are pared down to just the most crucial bits of dialogue and wisdom. “Everybody needs a home and deserves protection,” she sings in “Forgotten Eyes,” her voice breaking at the word “needs.” “Talk to the boy in me/He’s there,” she begs in the closing “Cut My Hair” as the music cuts out from underneath her. Best of all is “Not,” a fiery exorcism that merges some of her most explosive imagery with a climactic guitar solo; the desperation in her playing feels like a string of cries interrupted by shallow, gasping breaths.
“Not” sits at the heart of the record with “Shoulders,” a stunner that’s been in the band’s live repertoire for years. Like a dark analog to Bruce Springsteen’s “The Promised Land” or the Mountain Goats’ “This Year,” it gains power from its folk simplicity: a plaintive melody and a chorus that snowballs with a momentum that seems physical—part promise, part prayer. Lenker, who once noted that she is often both the attacker and prey in her own songwriting, finds its gospel not by rising above her circumstances but through succumbing to her complicity. “The blood of the man who’s killing our mother with his hands is in me,” she sings. “It’s in me/In my veins.” Her voice sounds genuinely desperate, anguished, like she would rid herself of it if she could.
The version of “Shoulders” on Two Hands is the definitive take, though you can see its spirit in every live performance. During one particularly great video from Philadelphia’s Johnny Brenda’s in 2017, Lenker’s guitar cuts out during the first chorus. She takes it off and, for the rest of the song, is just a singer: pulling the microphone from the stand, closing her eyes, and doubling over as if in pain to deliver the second verse. Instead of picking up her guitar part, Lenker’s bandmates only highlight her absence, drawing your attention to the new void at the song’s core. By the end, all that’s left is Krivchenia’s steady drumbeat and Lenker front and center, sort of jogging in place, as everyone in the room holds their breath. It’s a random technical issue but it’s also a chance for Big Thief to pose their favorite kinds of challenges. How much can we strip away without losing our essence? What happens when our most basic modes of expression fail us? How will we carry on together? On Two Hands, they are unstoppable.


The Chicago bassist’s solo debut—featuring guests including Makaya McCraven, Isaiah Spencer, and Tomeka Reid—ranges widely, from free jazz to post-bop to meditative tone poems.

Ism

Like the mighty jazz bassists that preceded him (Jimmy Garrison, Ron Carter, Peter Kowald, and Buster Williams immediately spring to mind), Junius Paul often makes himself felt before he’s actually heard. That’s him, buoyant and deep, shadowing Makaya McCraven, the perfect complement to the drummer’s rhythms—that is, when he’s not bending, wobbling, and prodding McCraven and group into new terrain. Paul also supports the likes of reedman Ernest Dawkins, Roscoe Mitchell Quartet, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, where his bass work is as sturdy, supportive, and invisible as rebar. So when the Chicago musician steps to the fore on his massive, sprawling debut, Ism, it’s a thrill to feel and hear every contour, throb, and spontaneous spark across two pieces of wax.
Not just an opener, “You Are Free to Choose” serves as a mission statement from Paul and his assembled cohorts, some 14 in all; they leave no rhythmic idea unturned. The chase is everything. The frenetic, skittering rhythms suggest the volatile mix to follow, fully embracing that freedom to not choose, roving from free jazz to post-bop, meditative tone poems to hip-hop thumps (or “badoop” as McCraven put it recently, describing his bandmate’s sound). Recorded over a four-year span in various clubs and studios throughout Chicago, Ism reflects its many homes and the many sounds that feed into the music of the Windy City. Which might sound restless, except Paul exudes such confidence that no matter the session, his bass makes it all hang together.
“Bow Hit,” which follows, features Paul’s droning bow work, Isaiah Spencer’s rumbling kit, high tones from Jim Baker’s Arp, and a contemplative solo from saxophonist Rajiv Halim. It approaches stillness only to swan dive into “Baker’s Dozen,” a slippery mix of avant-jazz shot through with head-knocking drums and G-funk frequencies. “The One Who Endures” flips back into charging hard bop, Paul’s upright a flurry of quick-fingered runs.
It all leads to “Spocky Chainsey Has Re-Emerged,” a sidelong exploration from a quartet that toggles from modal jazz to fusion, like Bitches Brew set to boil rather than low simmer. About 13 minutes in, Paul lowers the temperature and space opens up for organ and trumpet to cool out. Just when you think it might drift off, turbulence enters, a Sun Ra-like dissonance curls around the edges, and Paul guides the band back up to speed again.
“Paris” is the other expansive piece, this time featuring a trio—one of three pieces where Paul is back in step with McCraven. The rhythm section slowly winds around trumpeter Marquis Hill’s unhurried lines, but there’s a tactile thrill when Paul’s stalwart bass coheres into a hummable figure and locks in. McCraven’s snare cracks and the piece achieves liftoff, the three moving at an inspired pace. Yet there’s still another point in the piece when Paul’s bass runs quicken again, somehow finding another plane for everyone else to vibrate on.
The last side of the album finds Paul in a more ruminative mode. His strings are in sweet conversation with cellist Tomeka Reid on “Fred Anderson and a Half,” as they pay tribute to the late tenor saxophonist, a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and owner of the Velvet Lounge, where Paul honed his chops weekly. It segues into the most hushed piece on the album, “Ma and Dad,” full of the kind of reverentially small sounds that the Art Ensemble of Chicago plied a half century ago. Listen closely and a strange rumble arises. Is it Paul’s bass? No, just a motorcycle engine idling in the distance before roaring away. But it speaks to Paul’s conjured atmosphere that such an intrusion slots into Ism perfectly.

Buy: Rough Trade
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