Accompanied by a wide range of verdant textures, the Kentucky songwriter deepens the emotional landscape of her earthy, reflective folk music.

The Spur

Joan Shelley takes modernity in microdoses. Her lean songs, which share genetics with Kentucky mountain music and its Irish-Scottish-English tributaries, have blossomed over the past decade in impressionist increments, all firmly rooted in her voice—a dazzlingly bright, peaty contralto—and her similarly earthy poetics. Even her visuals admit newness sparingly: The charming video for “Amberlit Morning,” a highlight of her latest album, The Spur, is set in present-day Brooklyn but counterweighted with references to Georges Méliès 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon, complete with black-and-white intertitles and a planetary satellite that’s clearly as handmade as the music. In Shelley’s world, old magic is often the best magic.
On The Spur, the singer-songwriter uses an uncharacteristically wide range of textures, each careful brushstroke of strings, horns, and vocal harmony deepening the emotional landscapes of songs that quietly savor their own instability, weighing change as a route to renewal, and shifting concepts of home. These ideas coincided with the birth of a child, Shelley’s first, with partner Nathan Salsburg—a fingerstyle guitarist-archivist who shares with her a similarly rangy attitude towards folk tradition (a recent solo LP, Psalms, was an exploration of ancient Jewish texts). Their uncanny melodic connection can seem the product of a single mind, recalling the voice-and-guitar telepathy between Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Like co-parenting itself, The Spur is grounded in the partnership while expanding it.
Some of this new breadth is in the vocal arrangements. “Completely,” a skeletal conjuring of mid-century R&B that Otis Redding might’ve done wonders with, employs Shelley’s multi-tracked voice, adding ghostly backup vocals as she offers wise comfort. On “Home,” Shelley works a word that’s done yeoman’s duty in American music, from “Home on the Range” to “This Must Be the Place,” echoing the Sanskrit mantra it phonetically resembles, leaning into its rhyme with the word “overgrown,” considering the place that formed her, the people who “sweetened and flawed” her, and harmonizing with herself in an aural hall of mirrors. A reliable highlight of Shelley’s LPs has always been hearing how her vocals play with others. On “Amberlit Morning,” her voice is a glowing ember alongside the crackling log of Bill Callahan’s, in beguilingly imperfect harmonies that recall her exchanges with her Louisville-area neighbor Will Oldham—whose voice is nearer her range—yet manifest even further out of sync, with elusive and hard-won flickers of connection.
The string and bass arrangements, by producer James Elkington, are equally striking, sympathetic, and illuminating. On the opening track, “Forever Blues,” Shelley frets over notions of loss as layers of violin and viola roll in like storm clouds, a backdrop recalling the lush string arrangements the late Robert Kirby provided for Nick Drake—an artist Shelley has covered—on Five Leaves Left. “When the Light Is Dying,” a slow processional with brass swells and swooping string stabs, conjures another of Shelley’s forebears, Leonard Cohen, channeling his gallows humor, clear-eyed acceptance, and eternal flirtiness: “I traced the black outline of every stubborn human thing/Alone on the horizon; ‘You want it darker?’ Leonard sang/Well, the light is dying/Darling, come inside.” “Bolt,” loamy with brass and strings that swell magnificently near the end, considers death’s flipside in an uneasy meditation on fertility, its title referencing plants gone too soon to seed and also, faintly but unavoidably, the urge to flee.
It’s satisfying to hear Shelley’s sound growing more verdant, the way carefully tended topiary fills out in spring. But the words and her phrasing remain the heart of what she does, and the judicious spaciousness of these settings feels both admirable and essential, crafting austerity that’s as much bounty as balm, and as celebratory as it is reflective. On “Between Rock and Sky,” the album’s penultimate song, we hear nothing but a handful of piano chords and her voice, pondering the phenomena of birth, the brevity of life, and above all, the importance of celebrating it in song, with glasses raised high.


Even though this collection of unreleased songs and rarities is slight, it testifies to the enduring power of the Microphones, and how they represented a thriving part of Pacific Northwest indie.

EARLY TAPES, 1996-1998

It’s been nearly fourteen years since we last heard new music from beloved K Records heroes the Microphones. After following up their 2001 classic The Glow, Pt. 2 with the challenging and somewhat inscrutable Mount Eerie, they dissolved abruptly before the band—more or less the work of Anacortes, WA resident Phil Elverum and a rotating band of collaborators—confusingly re-emerged a year later as Mount Eerie, having ditched the Microphones moniker in exchange for the name of that final record. Though Elverum has gone on to release more than twelve records over that span, and much of that music covers some of the territory his former band walked, the precise spirit of naive quirkiness of the Microphones has never quite since been replicated.
Now in 2016 Elverum has decided to reactivate that old appellation, on a release of twenty-year-old material likely to be unfamiliar to even fans of the band. Titled EARLY TAPES, 1996-98, it’s exactly as stated—a compilation of sixteen songs either previously unreleased or taken from limited release tapes from Beat Happening guitarist Bret Lunsford’s Knw-Yr-Own cassette label.
Many fans of the band eager for more Microphones may have had hopes, but to be clear, EARLY TAPES is no “lost classic”; it’s about as definitively a “for the fans” release as you can get. As Elverum himself admits, “Listening back to this music now is mostly embarrassing to me.” And as to why he’s dug finally them out now: “I am still basically an overgrown teenager postponing a real job.” It’s both a completely reasonable motivation for a musician trying to make it in 2016, and still, despite the limited quality of the contents, a valuable exercise for fans of either the band or the era.
The value of EARLY TAPES, slightness of the output notwithstanding, is testament to the enduring power of the Microphones and the way they stood in to represent a thriving part of Pacific Northwest indie. Even the album’s first track, the previously unreleased early-days cut “Teenage Moustache”—the album’s silliest moment if not its slightest—manages to conjures a nostalgia not just for the innocent sweetness of early Elverum/Microphones, but also wooly ’90s DIY indie rock (especially of the K Records variety) and the exploding sense of total possibility in the late pre-internet age. The semi-tuned thriftstore guitar recalls the more ramshackle ditties of Beck’s One Foot in the Grave and Stereopathetic Soulmanure, and the vocals recall the teenage warbles on Modest Mouse’s Sad Sappy Sucker. It’s not a great song by any stretch, but there’s something powerful and pleasant about it.
Thankfully, it’s not all just nostalgia. There are at least a handful of noteworthy new arrivals on EARLY TAPES. Chief among these is the heart-tugging “Compressor,” which unsurprisingly also serves as the album’s teaser single. A simple concoction of a drummer-boy snare shuffle, two-note guitar lines, and a rhythmic tattoo of a chorus, it resembles a Notwist Neon Golden outtake “ft. Phil Elverum.” The six-minute epic “Wires and Cords” is equally strong, the lone track here that points directly to the force they would become. Elverum also answers a longtime mystery in the song’s liner notes by explaining the original meaning of the band’s name, and why he abandoned it: “My music project was about recording and the terminology around it, vaguely trying to say emotional human stuff using this equipment as a vocabulary....This is towards the end of me trying to use recording technology metaphors and the beginning of the irrelevance of my band name.” An ode of sorts to one of Elverum’s obsessions, Stereolab, this organ-driven love note to former girlfriend and bandmate Bronwyn Holm shows Elverum beginning to look beyond sound sketches and imagining the great possibility of songs as storybooks. Both “Microphone, Pt. 1” and especially the Rentals-en-français “Microphone, Pt. 2” are low-key winners as well.
Many of the other inclusions on EARLY TAPES really are of the throwaway variety—go-nowhere instrumentals like “For Kaye June 6” or “(Bass)” whose mundanity suffers further for lacking at least the gut-warming tickle of Elverum’s frail voice. But there’s a wide enough variety to keep the proceedings from dragging and even the weakest moments offer at least a little charm, such as “The Creeps”’s calliope-style noir or “Rebirth on Tape Deck Mountain”’s meditative circular guitar melody.
It’s understandable why Elverum felt he had to leave the Microphones behind; sometimes, it’s hard to feel like you’re really growing without a conscious decision to shed your skin, even if the snake underneath is ultimately the same. It’s a testament to that original band’s lasting power and impact that something EARLY TAPES even has an audience at all. The Glow, It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water, and *Don’t Wake Me Up *will all remain higher listening priorities than EARLY TAPES, but it’s nice to know this exists.


Completed in 2017 and shelved for almost a year, Pinegrove’s third record is smaller, softer, and closer to the chest.

Skylight

A year ago, it looked like Pinegrove’s next move would almost certainly cement their status as indie rock heroes. Formed in Montclair, New Jersey in 2010 by friends Evan Stephens Hall and drummer Zack Levine, Pinegrove spent the next six years honing their folky math rock in increasingly packed basements. With their 2016 record, Cardinal, they magnificently captured the everythingness of being alive. It was a small record that did big things, reaching wide swaths of listeners by embracing the sentimentality of emo, the catchiness of power-pop, and the twang of country, creating a universe that felt welcoming and sincere. When the size of the crowd at Pinegrove’s early evening set at last year’s Pitchfork Music Festival dramatically eclipsed that of their emo forefathers, American Football, who occupied the same stage later that day, it was clear that a torch had been passed.
But three weeks after the November 2017 release of a glorious and cathartic single, “Intrepid,” everything came to a standstill. As Hall explained in a long, confusing Facebook post, he had been accused of “sexual coercion” by a woman he had been in a relationship with. In accordance with the alleged victim’s wishes, Hall and the band shelved Skylight, canceled their U.S. tour, and disappeared. So did many of their fans, who immediately denounced Pinegrove. Ten months after the Facebook post, in a story detailing the situation, Hall told Pitchfork, “I take consent seriously. All of our encounters were verbally consensual. But, OK, certainly this isn’t from nowhere. If she came away feeling bad about our encounter, feeling like she couldn’t express how she was feeling honestly at the time, that’s a huge problem.” He added, “We are thoroughly in favor of the dismantling of patriarchal structures, and the movement right now to elevate survivors and victims of abuse. And we are not interested in a listenership that doesn’t care about that.” Skylight, their third record, was originally meant to come out on Run for Cover, like Cardinal. The band and label mutually agreed that Pinegrove would self-release Skylight and donate the proceeds to charity.
There is no “right” way to return from such serious allegations; some feel there should be no return at all. It is impossible to ignore the accusations against Hall while listening to Skylight. At times, the album can feel subconsciously remorseful, but this is almost a twisted coincidence. The band insists that Skylight has hardly changed since it was mastered in October 2017, and some songs date back to at least 2015. Skylight opens with “Rings,” an optimistic but cautious declaration of new beginnings and accountability. “I draw a line in my life/Singing, ‘This is the new way I behave now’/And actually live by the shape of that sound,” Hall declares. Though “Rings” quickly continues the self-mythologizing of Cardinal, with references to Pinegrove iconography like ampersands, wings, and geometric shapes, it’s clear that empathy is not so effortless.
Recorded and produced by Hall and guitarist Sam Skinner at a house in upstate New York, Skylight focuses on atmosphere and abstraction. While Cardinal was defined by anthemic eruptions of longing, these 11 songs move patiently and often disregard verse-chorus song structures in favor of loose vignettes. “Paterson & Leo”—which originally appeared as a bonus track on Cardinal’s European re-release that same year—is a wisp of a lullaby about a friendship between two men adrift in their lives. Every instrument, from Levine’s drums to Adan Carlo’s bass slows to the stillness of morning, while Hall and keyboardist Nandi Rose Plunkett’s twin harmonies build with each verse until they take flight. (Plunkett, who left Pinegrove’s full-time lineup after Cardinal to focus on her own project, Half Waif, is a brilliant presence here.) In divine moments like “Paterson & Leo” and later, on “Amulets,” each slight note has a defined voice.
Little on Skylight merits the emo-revival label that has trailed the band since their inception. Instead, the group leans into the country tendencies that permeated Cardinal. On the closer “Light On,” Hall’s impassioned yelp melts into a full-on drawl, while a lap steel courtesy of Joshua F. Marré paints a rich wash beneath him. With much of the singalong hooks of Cardinal stripped back, Hall attempts to translucently dissect his limitations here. “I wanna talk about/All the ways/Every example of/The shapes/We use to communicate,” he intones on “Portal.” The recording is distinctly raw with few overdubs, evoking dusty alt-country or an indie-folk record from the early aughts. The effect is modest and discrete, especially on tracks like “Darkness,” a wandering meditation reminiscent of Sheryl Crow in her ’90s prime. On “Angelina,” a fan favorite that has appeared on compilations and live records, the desire gets tangled, but the passion rings clear.
At her 2015 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Yoko Ono built a free-standing spiral staircase titled “To See the Sky.” As visitors took turns climbing the steps toward a glass skylight—symbolizing infinite promise—the structure rattled. Each quiver seemed to suggest that transcendence never comes without risk. Despite our efforts, Ono explained, “We are not tall enough to touch the sky.” How easy it is, then, to sing about friendship, love, and community, to realize that art cannot account for your actions, to know we are not tall enough to transcend. Skylight closes with Hall looking upwards on the ballad “Light On,” as the band sways from one measure to the next. His voice stretches to a falsetto as he considers a real solution: “I wanna do much better.”


On her debut album, the New York singer-songwriter grapples with the big feelings and small details of young adulthood over appropriately cinematic backdrops.

Inside the Marble

Sometimes you go through a breakup and feel like you could just wither away; sometimes you read the news and are reminded that one day, the sun really will just wither away. Regardless of their respective scales, both problems can feel equally real. But the collision of these micro and macro heartaches can be destabilizing. “If I change my life/Will I die?” singer-songwriter Margaux Bouchegnies, who performs mononymously as Margaux, wonders on her debut album, Inside the Marble, pondering quandaries both personal and existential against dreamy, imaginative soundscapes.
Bouchegnies is a recent graduate of the New School; since finishing her studies, she’s become a fixture in the Brooklyn music scene, touring as a bassist with acts like Katy Kirby and Dougie Poole. Inside the Marble was crafted in the throes of that uncertain moment when the structures of academia fall away and you’re thrust into the so-called real world. It builds on her debut EP, 2019’s More Brilliant Is the Hand That Throws the Coin, which established her as an artist who could deftly capture the tumult of young love. You can hear the fruits of her coursework in her songwriting; she quotes Susan Sontag on More Brilliant’s “Faced With Fire,” and later released a set of songs inspired by the life and work of Emily Dickinson.
Bouchegnies has said that Inside the Marble is about “making sense of big feelings,” and she constructs appropriately cinematic backdrops for each of them. The moody “Midnight Contact” starts downbeat and minimalist, then builds to dizzying heights; it sounds like it could soundtrack the moment in a coming-of-age film where the wistful protagonist makes a life-altering decision. The songs are layered and dense—Bouchegnies plays guitar, bass, Mellotron, glockenspiel, Farfisa, Wurlitzer, and piano, while producer Sahil Ansari adds percussion and tape loops; other collaborators contribute trombone, violin, and clarinet. The arrangements are lush and naturalistic, filled with charming, well-placed details: the swooping strings on “Picture It,” a touch of pedal steel on “Dissolve / Resolve,” ghostly backing vocals on “Sadie Something.” The overall effect, though, remains surprisingly gentle, thanks in large part to Bouchegnies’ voice, which floats above the arrangements and rarely ever strays from its steady, self-assured delivery.
Her emotions range from the quotidian to the universal. On “Ships,” heartbreak is like a storm at sea, threatening to knock her overboard; later, on “Make the Move,” she’s reaching toward new love, sounding positively smitten over plucked acoustic guitar and steady percussion. On propulsive tracks like “Picture It” and “Sadie Something,” she contemplates time’s endless march towards oblivion: “Everybody/One by one takes/Off into the great unknown,” she declares on the latter. Intellectually, we might understand that not all anxieties (the social awkwardness she details on “What Could I Say?” or the what-am-I-doing-with-my-life paralysis of “I Can’t Decide”) are equally consequential. But it doesn’t always feel that way—especially in young adulthood, when our norms and values still have some settling in to do. It’s charming to hear Bouchegnies consider all these big feelings deeply, drawing an entire universe out of them before moving on, curiously and carefully, to the next.


They were outliers when they started, but by the time their classic debut arrived in 1982, Misfits’ gleeful, ghoulish punk rock was exactly in tune with the national mood.

Walk Among Us

In 1982, America hungered for horror. As the president yanked the country to the right and tensions with Russia portended mutual assured destruction, fans flocked to see George A. Romero’s Creepshow and John Carpenter’s The Thing—two films that uniquely revived 1950s scares for the new nuclear age, using goofy camp and gruesome social commentary to speak to a terrifying reality. Into this fraught atmosphere, Misfits dropped their magnificently malignant debut full-length, Walk Among Us.
When they formed in the late ’70s, Misfits were the wrong band at the wrong time. Frontman Glenn Danzig was a working-class kid from Lodi, New Jersey; he and bassist Jerry Only were directly inspired by the British punk movement of a few years earlier, particularly the fiendishly dressed crooner Dave Vanian of the Damned, as well as the unhinged New York punk of the Cramps. But there were also traces of Kiss, a decidedly non-punk New York outfit, in Danzig’s emerging theatricality. Misfits’ look incorporated face paint, skintight costumes, Halloween-worthy paraphernalia, and hair sculpted into “devil locks,” a radical deconstruction of the ’50s rockabilly quiff. They struggled to find footing in New York, caught in the transition from the punk class led by the Ramones circa ’77 to the nascent hardcore moment that followed. Where the first clique had been artier and open to outrageous stagecraft, it wasn’t receptive to a bunch of upstarts from the wrong side of the Hudson who dug sports and had the physiques of bodybuilders. The up-and-coming New York hardcore kids, on the other hand, embraced a spartan approach that attacked society head-on and held little affinity for vintage horror movies or glam.
Despite being pop-culture fanatics in a scene that wanted to divorce itself entirely from pop culture, Misfits soldiered on, finding an audience on punk's fringes by touring and releasing records on their own Plan 9 Records (named after Ed Wood’s infamous 1959 sci-fi/horror movie Plan 9 from Outer Space). Andy Wendler from Detroit’s hardcore heroes the Necros recalled in Steven Blush’s American Hardcore that by 1981, Misfits “were considered a dead band...Hardcore was so real, and these guys had this ghoulish imagery.” They weren't entirely alone: Around the same time, a crop of dark punk bands on the West Coast, including T.S.O.L., 45 Grave, and Christian Death, were making waves using horror-themed imagery that Misfits had pioneered. Danzig’s group, meanwhile, had twice attempted—and twice failed—to release a debut album by this point. At last, five years into their existence, and looking a little like latecomers to their own party, they finally unleashed Walk Among Us.
The core of the album was pieced together, Frankenstein-style, out of the abandoned scraps of their unreleased 1980 effort 12 Hits from Hell. Six of those songs—“Vampira,” “I Turned Into a Martian,” “Skulls,” “Night of the Living Dead,” “Astro Zombies,” and “Violent World”—became demos, and from that skeleton the band fleshed out a shambling monstrosity of gore-smeared hooks and schlock imagery. “I Turned Into a Martian” rummages through the dumpster of black-and-white sci-fi cinema with savage grace, picking random bits and stitching them into a narrative, like some kind of patchwork comic book. “Not the body of a man from Earth/Not the face of the one you love,” Danzig moans, imagining an alien invasion from the point of view of a possessed human. There’s a strange kind of empowerment to becoming an instrument of Armageddon, rather than a victim: “I walk down city streets on an unsuspecting human world,” the narrator goes on, electrified by his newfound evil.
Throughout Walk Among Us, dark powers take the form of trash from the past and fears of the future. When Danzig sings, “Death machine and man in love” and “Rocket-blast fury with a manual sex drive” in the track “Nike-A-Go-Go,” he’s citing the Nike missile project of the ’50s while straddling the phallic overlap between J. G. Ballard’s Crash and Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove. Like the Ramones, Misfits leaned heavily on the ’50s and ’60s for inspiration. But where the Ramones drew from sock-hop boppers and the British Invasion, Misfits drew from Elvis Presley and the Doors—the side of midcentury youth culture that seethed with psychosexual energy.
None of this would pack as much impact if Walk Among Us wasn’t so insidiously catchy. On “Vampira,” the B-movie star of Plan 9 from Outer Space is glorified as a pop-culture deity: “Black dress moves in a blue movie/Grave robbers from outer space.” The song’s sultry verse gives way to a chanted, gang-vocal chorus, the norm on an album where every track comes across as a potential hit single. Even “Braineaters,” by all appearances a throwaway song, gets lodged in the gray matter thanks to a sick cannibalistic punch line: “Brains at every single meal/Why can’t we have some guts!” By caricaturing the anxiety, ugliness, and chaos that lurked behind the thin membrane of civilization—rather than simply listing the symptoms, as most hardcore bands did—Walk Among Us taps into an unsettling, visceral sense of humor. Danzig, a fan of George Miller’s Mad Max movies and their mirroring of the era’s apocalyptic absurdity, recognized the cleansing power of this sort of horror.
Embedded in Walk Among Us is the methodology of mass worship that anti-rock crusaders of the time railed against, as if a slap in the face to the idea of moral policing. “Broken bodies in a death rock dance hall,” Danzig sings with ritualistic ecstasy on “All Hell Breaks Loose,” before boasting of his ability to contort young minds toward the dark side: “I send my murdergram/To all these monster kids/It comes right back to me, and it’s/Signed in their parents’ blood.” He goes further on “Astro Zombies,” an exultant anthem in which Danzig brags, “With just a touch of my burning hand/I send my astro zombies to rape this land/Prime directive, exterminate/The whole human race.”
“There is no compassion shown for anything here except for death, hate, and complete annihilation,” the fanzine Terror Times said of Walk Among Us in 1982. That was intended as the highest of praise. The same year, in a concert review, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner said Misfits “make the morbid nihilism of hardcore punk seem playful and ingratiating,” pointing out the band’s “boyish dress-up games and gleeful gross-outs.” Danzig, of course, didn’t literally advocate hate and destruction, as violent as their live shows often were. It’s clear from “Hatebreeders,” one of Walk Among Us’ most unshakable songs, which luridly portrays America’s Cold War youth as victims—raised as puppets and programmed to attack on command. “Next stop, annihilation/They bred the hate right in your fuckin’ bones,” he rages.
This album is a work of feverish imagination, but it’s in no way escapist. In its original press release, Danzig wrote, “People think we’re making all this up. We’re not. It’s out there. Every day’s a horror to me.” On “Skulls” and “Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight?,” he sings of butchering people and keeping their body parts even as the names Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy sent chills down the spine of a nation. Elsewhere, amid the bone-saw guitar of Walk Among Us’ high point, “Night of the Living Dead”—named after Romero’s iconic 1968 zombie film—Danzig offers a glimpse of the man behind the blood-soaked curtain: “You think you’re a zombie, you think it’s a scene/From some monster magazine, well/Open your eyes too late/This ain’t no fantasy, boy.” Neither glorifying nor condemning, Misfits simply distilled the anxieties of the early ’80s into a putrid elixir.
Walk Among Us was a triumph for the band, solidifying their following and codifying their ominous image. But it marked an ending, not a beginning. Their next album, 1983’s Earth A.D./Wolfs Blood, was a huge shift away from their catchy, melodic, Ramones-influenced howl-alongs and toward the more scathing blitzkrieg of hardcore. As if to symbolize this metamorphosis, drummer Arthur Googy was replaced by Robo of Black Flag. The dramatic transition was lyrical as well, with Danzig drifting further away from the thrills of vintage sci-fi and toward a more apocalyptic view of the world as it truly appeared, with its Reagan-era specters of economic injustice and nuclear war. Like so many other bands at the time, up to and including Bruce Springsteen and U2, Misfits had decided to become, in their own perverse way, socially relevant.
By Halloween of 1983, Misfits were no more. Danzig’s public persona in the years to come took itself with grim seriousness; for a long time, it seemed the only laughs he would evoke would be unintentional ones. Yet the joyful, campy heights he hit on Walk Among Us have continued to loom over his work, becoming a yardstick against which he’ll always be measured. The more he tries to earnestly paint himself as a creature of the night, the more he seems like the punk-rock Romero or Carpenter he was on Misfits’ debut—a shaper of shadows with an impish dimension. “Anything that makes you feel good is happy and positive,” Danzig told me with a laugh in 2007, implicitly summing up the hybrid of glee and gloom that has underpinned his creative identity for decades now. “I’ve always been the person who likes to take negatives and turn them into positives. And if they stay negatives, that’s okay, too.”


Having traded K-pop’s regimented model for an experimental sound merging modular synthesis with vocal manipuation, the Tokyo-based Yeohee Kim finds a new degree of artistic freedom.

archipelago

True artistic freedom is a rarity, but Yeohee Kim knows its inverse all too well. The Korean artist nabbed viral attention in 2010 thanks to a pair of YouTube videos she uploaded under the name Apple Girl, covering Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” and Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” using only iPhone apps as instruments. This techie-baiting twee springboarded Kim to a career in K-pop, an industry known for its dazzling and genre-bending songs but not particularly celebrated for yielding creative control to performers. She’s said that dealing with the demands of others proved problematic for her early pop days. “I always thought about what people thought about me,” Kim told Harvard’s WHRB radio station in 2018. “I had to find this thing that I could not give up, I had to find the thing that I had to do before I could start saying ‘no.’”
Kim found just that by decamping to Tokyo, adopting the artist name machìna, and going independent. She also gradually shifted from the bouncy sound of her early years to an electronic palette that gives her music a newfound sense of unease. She’s come a long way from quirky YouTube uploads. She now performs partially improvised sets and has appeared alongside the wonky experimental producer Foodman. archipelago is her most fully realized work to date. The smartphone smoothness of her pop days has been replaced by a pivot to songs that use modular synthesizer as their foundation and are unafraid to move in all sorts of directions.
Earlier machìna releases retained their pop identity, with electronic elements merely rippling along the edges. Her new analog focus defines archipelago; the touches that once nudged her music towards the Pomplamoose-ian are twisted into new forms, adding tension throughout. Opener “moog, monk, modules” sets the tone for what’s to come, with mutating synth squiggles wrapping around a locked-in beat while ethereal vocal samples whizz by, upping the wooziness. Something feels off about the way it clambers ahead, but it still pulls you in.
Kim has said her fondness for modular synths derives partially from how they capture the feeling of a specific moment, and archipelago’s best stretches sound like they’ve been improvised on the spot. “315 Heda” begins as a kind of chilly minimal techno, climaxes with bursts of synth melodies spraying over the beat, and ultimately wriggles back to sparser terrain. She pursues a similarly morphing approach on both busy tracks, like the fizzy “Reboot,” and more skeletal ones, like the creeping “I Don’t Love You.” The few times machìna misfires are when she lets passages burble for too long without any sort of payoff: “Inujima Echo” builds from soft to slightly less soft, and then just settles for its duration.
That song is one of the few where Kim’s singing is relatively restrained; archipelago is more captivating when she adopts more inventive techniques. After placing the emphasis squarely on her vocals in her K-pop days, and continuing to put them front and center on initial machìna releases, she’s found a balance between blending in with her synthesized churn and soaring above it.
In “Past”—a song, she says, about the loneliness of a trip to Paris, fleshed out with field recordings from the city—she complements the song’s industrial chug by pitch-shifting her vocals, lending to a pervading sense of alienation. Kim frequently manipulates her voice like this, a tactic that only ups the headrush of busy cuts such as “XXX_patchwork,” though she’s also happy to present it unadulterated: On “Murasaki,” her higher-pitched singing breaks through thick layers of synth, to great dramatic effect.
All of machìna’s elements coalesce on “Neon,” a highlight of the album. She sets an uneasy musical backdrop with scratchy blasts of white noise and tumbling polyrhythms; her own singing begins simply, then grows distorted, throwing off a strange glow. Finally, she shoots up a register to deliver archipelago’s finest and most intense moment—proof positive that Kim has truly found her own voice.


With his latest, the Brownsville rapper cements himself as a preeminent stylist, his voice hushed but vicious, his production a grim rabbit hole of found sounds, minor keys, and few drums.

Honor Killed the Samurai

There’s this story in *The New York Times Magazine *where the writer asks his subject, Jerry Seinfeld, why he still spends months on the road. The comedian, worth nearly a billion dollars, could retire with his family to a private beach somewhere; if he wanted to chase some grand artistic dreams, he could surely land an unlimited budget from any number of movie studios. Instead he tinkers away in theatres, dark clubs, and at tiny private gigs, making minor variations on jokes that sometimes take years to perfect. “The smaller something is, the harder it is to make,” Seinfeld said,  gushing over the careful click of a closing door from one of the “few dozen” Porsches he owns. He’s drawn to the arts that require precision, he explained, like calligraphy—“or samurai.”
Halfway through his brief, brilliant new album, Ka sneers: “How many cars you need?” With *Honor Killed the Samurai, *the Brownsville craftsman cements himself as one of this generation’s preeminent stylists, his voice hushed but vicious, his production a grim rabbit hole of found sounds, minor keys, and very few drums. Beginning in earnest with 2012’s Grief Pedigree, Ka has peeled away every extraneous layer from his work, tinkering like the Porsche designer until each part fits within another just so. Now he’s arrived at its core, where each syllable is purposeful and every piano key is in its right place.
And yet the genius of Ka’s music is that the form follows function. On “$,” the song where he questions how many cars one man can drive, he also raps: “Watch me blueprint rec centers/I’m trying to inspire.” So much of his past, his worldview, his creative style is packaged into that one couplet, be it the deserted Brooklyn of his youth, his unerring loyalty, his economy of language. It’s the sort of line that unlocks whole sections of an artist’s psyche for the audience, all in fewer than ten words. As he says earlier on the song, “Could battle hard against catalogs with one leaflet journal.”
The irony of Samurai’s title is that, while the window dressing recalls feudal Japan, you rarely have to look back further than Giuliani’s New York to see the kinds of fiercely fought, morally fraught battles that rage in the background. By now, Ka’s story is well-worn—the Golden Age also-ran who walked away then, when the itch came back, locked himself in a bedroom until all the swords were sharp. He was a member of Natural Elements, a group that eventually landed on Tommy Boy but made little impact; when he resurfaced, it was in 2008 with a quietly show-stealing verse on GZA’s Pro Tools. He’s not a revivalist—in his time away he blended fury and control in a way that would be nearly unrecognizable in any era—and so his writing has an irresistibly fuzzy relationship to time.
See the passage on “That Cold and Lonely” where he raps, “With no clear winner, still appeared thinner/Don’t howl like I’m holier than thou, I’m a mere sinner/Wasn’t blessed to be resting in the ‘burbs/I was stressing, wrestling with the scourge.” That could be an origin story or a sad denouement; either way, he “tried years for these ideas to gestate.” On “Finer Things/Tamahagene,” the vocal layering is both well suited to fill out the mix and mimics someone’s own paranoid self-doubt. But more importantly, Ka wrings his hands over fulfilling his vast potential: “They say it’s royal in my blood*.*”
In the first verse of “Mourn at Night,” Ka says, simply, “My scars last.” That might be the best way to put it. Even setting aside the obvious detour his creative life took, the man’s work is littered with past moments of trauma that have, by this point, settled into his bones. The hours spent making himself one of genre’s greatest songwriters, the dollars lost to broken security deposits—they all add up to a life made for viewing through all the grimy, shattered lenses Ka has at his disposal. Because no matter how the borough shifts around him, he’s somewhere in a dark room, working and re-working the details until he gets it just right.


The rap trio’s latest, like its predecessor, can become a slog and at times seems shoddily constructed. But at its best, the album is a callback to their inspired peak.

Culture III

In her 2018 review for Pitchfork, Meaghan Garvey noted that at the time of Culture II’s release, the Migos’ official Spotify profile directed fans not to the album page on that streaming service, but to a 72-track playlist that repeated Culture II three times over. This, like the record’s 24-song, 106-minute runtime, was thought to exploit then-recent Billboard and RIAA rule changes that privileged discrete song streams when measuring album sales and chart performance. (For example, a 60-minute album split into 20 songs would chart higher than a 60-minute album that was split into 15 but streamed the same number of times front-to-back.) The Migos were not alone in evidently bending to these new market forces; by the end of the Obama years, rappers up to and including Drake had bloated their releases past any sense of decency or discretion.
In truth, Culture II contains plenty of acrobatic rapping and buoyant absurdity, though much of this is buried in the data-dump onslaught. So it was fair to be skeptical when a follow-up, Culture III, was announced—a 19-song, 75-minute tome including not only a mediocre collaboration with the Baton Rouge rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again, which would be 13 months old by the album’s street date, but features from two recently deceased rappers, Chicago’s Juice WRLD and Brooklyn’s Pop Smoke. Fortunately, those latter two collaborations are executed with a respectful touch. (The Juice WRLD song, “Antisocial,” meets the young rapper on his bleeding-heart level, and “Light it Up” is a wholescale attempt to integrate the Migos’ style into the Brooklyn drill sound that Pop Smoke and his go-to producer, 808Melo, helped codify.)
More importantly, both songs reflect what made the Migos exhilarating when they debuted, and durable over the long run: a playfulness that invites experimentation and an underlying earnestness that balances the trio’s goofier, more outre cuts. Like its predecessor, Culture III can become a slog, and at times seems shoddily constructed, its commercial ambitions ill-considered and to the album’s detriment. It’s also girded by songs that recall the Migos’ inspired peak—and a couple that rank among their best.
There are a handful of frustrating misfires. The Justin Bieber-assisted “What You See” is the worst song across any of the three Culture installments, an insipid bit of mopey bullshit, though it’s Culture III’s other foray into Canada that threatens to derail the record before it truly begins. Its second song, “Having Our Way,” cedes its first two and a half minutes to a half-formed hook and verse from Drake, a turn so drab and interminable that it suggests a stolen thumb drive more than an album sequenced by humans. That early lapse is mirrored toward the album’s end, with a four-song stretch (beginning with “Why Not” and continuing through “Time for Me”) that should have been excised entirely.
And yet, what “Having Our Way” and that B-side suite bracket is consistently, sometimes deliriously fun. Take “Jane,” a song whose hook is simply Takeoff rapping “She want a Birkin/I told her ‘Work it’” eight times, recalling the group’s hypnotic beginnings (their 2013 breakthrough mixtape hinges on songs where a single word or phrase—“China Town,” “Versace,” “Hannah Montana”—gets repeated to the point of abstraction). The Future collaboration, “Picasso,” is the most invigorated he has sounded since his January 2019 album The Wizrd, and the eerily metronomic “Modern Day” imagines a club walkthrough as something more sinister. That sense of abandon underscores much of the album’s middle: Despite being one of the more famous acts in pop music over the past decade, with at least Quavo and Offset verging on genuine solo stardom, verses here are often preceded by an ad-lib announcing the next rapper’s name, as if they were eager emerging artists and/or beamed in from 1986.
In the time since Y.R.N., the Migos’ vocal style—that staccato, triplet flow repurposed from old Memphis records—passed into, then out of vogue. The rap records that dominated the late 2010s and early 2020s in Atlanta, and by consequence on national radio, have taken a softer shape. And so, despite their ability to chart at will, the group has been pushed slightly from the genre’s center and recast as technical specialists. (The comparisons to Das EFX were unfair to both Migos and Das EFX, but you can see why they were made.) This suits them. Quavo did not become the breakout star some predicted after “Versace,” but when he barrels into a song the way he does halfway through the Polo G collaboration “Malibu,” he is a revelation: precise but with some bend to his voice, tightly wound but threatening to unspool into something more melodic. As industry reporting goes, the Migos make for dull work. But inside the clumsy, clamshell packaging, there’s still something singular enough to purchase.

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The new album from pop balladeer Jilian Medford unwinds the emotional pressure, leaning into high-adrenaline hooks and poignant moments of self-reflection.

Sucker

Ian Sweet’s new album, Sucker, opens with mortal fear. “What if I die?” Jilian Medford wonders; after a piano chord rings out for a moment, she continues: She’s afraid she’ll pass “with this song in my head,” that she’ll “never get to sing it.” Medford is no stranger to high-stakes songwriting: She wrote most of 2021’s ambitious and emotionally rich Show Me How You Disappear after spending two months in an intensive outpatient mental health program. Writing that record, Medford told Rolling Stone, was a process of “sifting through the weeds, grasping onto things, like, ‘I hope this lyric will help me literally to survive.’”
But despite its opening lines, Sucker doesn’t reprise that make-or-break intensity. Instead, Medford dials down the pressure, turning her attention to more mundane crises: letting herself fall for someone who will probably break her heart; the quiet aftermath of a breakup; cutting her bangs even though she swore she wouldn’t. Retaining her commitment to emotional transparency, she leans into high-adrenaline hooks and poignant self-reflection with confidence and grit.
Medford produced the record alongside Alex Craig and Strange Ranger’s Isaac Eiger, working at an artists’ residency at the Outlier Inn, a Catskill Mountains establishment where 24-hour studio access offered them space for experimentation and spontaneity. The songs are tightly constructed, but don’t feel buttoned-up; even when they deal with bruising emotions, there’s a current of lightheartedness and fun. The propulsive and fuzzy “Your Spit” reflects on the doubt that accompanies new relationships, but it’s also just about the thrill of making out. Her voice, which starts near a whisper, becomes a shriek of joy when the big synths kick in.
“Emergency Contact” and “Sucker,” with their shoegaze guitars and catchy hooks, are a deft synthesis of Ian Sweet’s indie rock beginnings and Medford’s playful pop instincts. Across the album, she tweaks a classic quiet-loud recipe just enough that songs like “Smoking Again” and “Your Spit,” with all their swerves and eruptions, feel like joyrides. Towards the back half, that catharsis can verge on predictable, but smart production flourishes—the creaky synth line on “Clean,” the corroded climax of “Hard”—continually push the music into stranger, more inventive territory.
Medford grounds her lyrics in memorable, off-kilter specificity: the melodic hum of power lines during a long drive, the salty taste of a kiss, an ex who always misspelled her name (“Two Ls when there’s only one/And a G instead of a J”). She takes herself to task, copping to mistakes with a self-deprecating wink. “I run my mouth/Like I run away/From everything,” she sings on the understated “Comeback.” When romantic trouble arises, she’ll say she had it coming. “I’m a sucker for the pain/And heartbreak,” she admits on the title track. If Show Me How You Disappear was a testament to perseverance and self-reliance in tremendously challenging times, Sucker is evidence that those skills still enrich us even when circumstances aren’t so dire. There’s palpable joy in the songs’ anthemic structures and Medford’s bright, confident delivery, even though there are reminders that this self-awareness was hard-won. Medford makes the crying and bleeding sound fortifying nonetheless. “It’s just a cut,” she sings on “Clean,” “and baby, I’m tough.”


With a persona modeled after Eminem’s, the Michigan-born star of Christian rap recently notched his second No. 1 album. But to most of the secular world, he’s a ghost.

The Search

While most of the hip-hop universe spent last week breathlessly debating Chance the Rapper’s event album The Big Day, that record was quietly outsold by an act almost completely off the radar of the general public: Michigan rapper NF, whose The Search became his second consecutive No. 1 album. NF has cemented himself as the biggest Christian rap star since Lecrae, and yet even with a No. 1 pop song under his belt—his sentimental 2017 crossover hit “Let You Down”—he’s a ghost to most of the secular world. Rap radio doesn’t play him. The music press barely acknowledges him.
It’s no mystery where NF’s following comes from. He’s a lyrical, white, and Christian rapper in an industry where all three identities can provide a fast track to a devoted audience. It doesn’t hurt that he models himself after perhaps the most successful white rapper of all time: Eminem, whose brooding persona and twisty delivery NF copies with the reverence of a 16th-century Japanese painter replicating the masters. Like Eminem, NF draws from his traumatic childhood, never shying from ugly thoughts or inner demons. And like Eminem, he’s from the technical school of rap, where the height of artistry is cramming as many syllables and as much internal rhyme into each bar as possible, nuance be damned. The only real daylight between the two is that NF doesn’t swear.
NF also shares Eminem’s shrillness and distorted sense of volume, rapping like he’s putting on the world’s loudest Punch and Judy show. He spends much of The Search darting in and out of an overbearing rappity-rap snarl-yell that can cut right through you if you don’t relate to his roiling anger. “Last year I felt suicidal, this year I might do something different like talking to God more,” he roars on “Change,” as the track unleashes sheets of Imagine Dragons-esque thunder, swelling like a gospel song. Later, “I Miss the Days” makes the gospel connection explicit with an actual choir.
The Search is a dark record. NF may be a Christian rapper, but his primary muse is misery, not faith, and although he uses too many words, he doesn’t mince them: His struggles with mental illness are life-threatening. On “Hate Myself,” he pictures himself in hell, where he belittles his own corpse: “You ain’t nothin’ but poor and weak.” On “Leave Me Alone,” he’s undone by obsessive-compulsive thoughts, like a character in an Edgar Allen Poe story. And on “Like This,” “Trauma,” and a few other somber tracks where he isn’t scream-rapping, NF begins to sound less like Eminem and more like Mac Miller circa Swimming, maybe the last major rap record that was this blunt about its creator’s longing to escape his suffering.
And like Swimming, listening to The Search induces a feeling of powerlessness: How are we supposed to respond to an album that often reads like a suicide note? At least some listeners are finding comfort in this music. On a Reddit forum dedicated to the rapper, a small community of fans post about how seen and comforted NF makes them feel, sharing hopeful memes and heartfelt testimonials. If nothing else, it’s a relief to see that something constructive has come from his pain. But the considerable chunk of the listening public that remains unaware of NF’s music may want to stay that way. The Search is an unpleasant ride.

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Ambient music is about the creation of aural environments, and one of the most popular constructions is the womb. The ...

Submers

Ambient music is about the creation of aural environments, and one of the most popular constructions is the womb. The womb is the place where we all imagine ourselves at peace and feeling good. Your body floats in warm, liquid space, and your senses are at rest. If you could experience light in the womb, it would only be the dimmest flesh-colored glow. Maybe your folks pump the Raymond Scott records and the Mozart into your Mom's belly, but the only thing you hear are soft, indistinct noises run through a low-pass filter. A friend of mind used to drink cup after cup of TheraFlu when nursing a hangover. He claimed the medicine put a five-inch thick layer of warm cotton between him and the world. And that's how I imagine the womb: A tuned-out heaven perfect for dreaming.
With Submers, Vancouver-based artist Loscil (Scott Morgan) practices the art of the aural womb. This is music without sharp edges. The synth textures are warm, deep and viscous as amniotic fluid, and like Wolfgang Voigt's legendary Gas project, Loscil knows that you can't live inside the body of another without hearing a distant heartbeat. So a delicate 4/4 thump drifts in on occasion to remind us of the source of this safe and wonderful place. Calling Submers "The Best Album to Fall Asleep to in 2002" (it came out late last year) might seem like a backhanded compliment, but this is seriously gorgeous stuff that just happens to be the right sort of thing for drifting into another consciousness.
Submers has a concept: All of the tracks are named for submarines. And if "womb-like" is one apt description for Submers, "aquatic" is another. In additional to sounding a bit like Gas, Loscil also reminds me of Japanese ambient collective Neina in his focus on textures so complicated and detailed they can pass for nature. The drones in "Argonaut I" are piled at least four layers high, enough to get lost in, as a glowing edge of higher pitched sound twists around something deeper and harder to fathom. "Gymote" adds the slightest wisp of static and gentle, almost bell-like tones as rhythmic accompaniment, and then sends the whole thing on its way with a speedy, steady bass drum. "Diable Martin" has a similarly quick pace, but something about the distance of the thump makes tempo matter little. It still feels like a drone, even if the BMP is technically over 100. "Diable Martin" has a few other techno bits to it, a quivering synth sequence and light taps of percussion, though these elements don't disturb the reverie.
But the delicate touches are what really make it. The unsteady drone in "Resurgam" is fragile as hot glass blown to its bursting point, such a beautiful sound that could possibly fall apart at any moment. "Triton" adds the slightest bit of tension and dub undercurrents, along with a ghost of an orchestral sweep, and though it seems less tied to the theme it's one of the best tracks here. Finally, "Kursk", a tribute to the lost Russian sub, ends the album on an ominous tone, with the kind of mid-bass cello-like drones that Stars of the Lid dream about. Then comes silence. It's time to open your eyes, walk slowly to the CD player, and press "play" again.


The here-then-gone-again collaborative Gucci/Future mixtape *Free Bricks 2 *is the sound of two superlative talents working without boundaries.

Gucci Mane / Future: Free Bricks 2: Zone 6 Edition

Free Bricks 2: Zone 6 Edition

It’s not clear whether Free Bricks 2: Zone 6 Edition is supposed to exist. Future and Gucci Mane’s new six-song exercise has been scrubbed from the Soundcloud page that birthed it and left to kick around in inconspicuous tracks bundles or in the YouTube ether. It came with no warning and left with little fanfare, a nineteen-minute exhale from two of the most visible and, probably, overworked rappers in the world. Unless one of these songs pops off under new packaging, Free Bricks 2 is probably going to come and go (The Return of East Atlanta Santa in stores December 16). Which is a shame, because Free Bricks 2 is pretty potent dose of what makes Future and Gucci Mane so magnetic.
Written and recorded in less than 24 hours, the sequel to 2011’s Free Bricks is fresh to a fault, with a few cadences that could have been smoothed out, a few points where Gucci still sounds as if he’s getting his post-prison footing. (Speaking of timeliness and Terre Haute, an otherwise unmemorable line about Monica Lewinsky from opener “RR Trucks” sticks in your brain because of Gucci’s heart-wrenching get out the vote speech from earlier this month.) Also endearing: two cult heroes decide to open their new record with a song about maybe, at some indeterminate point in the future, buying a new car they’ve heard about.
“Selling Heroin,” which Southside furnishes with a beautiful bounce is, decidedly, a Gucci Mane song. This proves to be a freeing thing for Future. Since Honest was received coolly by his hardcore fanbase, the preposterously good-looking Atlantan has retreated to his wheelhouse. The career-defining run that began on Monster, became codified on 56 Nights, and culminated with last July’s DS2 was built almost exclusively on songs that forewent the joy or R&B experimentation of his first two LPs. Here, Future comes unhinged just a little; most importantly, he sounds like he’s having fun.
As for Gucci, he’s been on a slow ramp up since his release from custody. This summer’s Everybody Looking was solid, but would have been unremarkable if it came out during his storied mixtape run; last month’s Woptober has more world-class rapping than its predecessor, but no songs that will significantly alter the Gucci canon. While his pen seems mostly intact, the Zone 6 legend can’t quite find the right vocal register, what with the massive weight loss and newfound sobriety. This is likely to be sorted out soon, but in the meantime there are moments when he sounds like he’s searching. There are also brief passages where Gucci’s vocals come unmoored from the beat in a way his more laconic early-Obama self seldom did.
But Gucci finds the pocket frequently on Free Bricks 2, and the result is always a joy. On “Die a Gangsta,” he raps: “They call me East Atlanta Santa, I’ma fuck up the profit/I’m the Grinch that stole Christmas, I might go in your stocking/I’m talking, too cocky, I got so much juice/My wrist is too rocky, they done let Wop loose.” Even if Future’s cool disaffect is en vogue, Gucci is the record’s emotional center, and when he’s booking luxe hotel room penthouses for shooters or buying his sixteenth Bentley, he’s the only rapper in the world you want to listen to. That’s the insane gravitational pull that Gucci’s somehow managed to harness: when he’s on, not only is he endlessly listenable, he renders his fiercest competition an afterthought.
Free Bricks 2 benefits from a superb production lineup—Southside and Metro Boomin split duties, except for when they pass the baton to Zaytoven, who’s played a crucial role in ushering each rapper into the limelight. Zay helms “Kind a Dope,” the record’s highlight, where Gucci channels Ridin’ Dirty and raps, “When you was playing basketball, man, I was playing Pimp C.” This little piece of Gucci's legacy is forgotten, and it’s the crux of why a tape like this can be so impressive; even if Future and Gucci Mane are cast as instinctive, impulsive savants, each is drawing on a wealth of musical knowledge that informs their work. Free Bricks 2 will likely get lost in the shuffle, but it’s the sound of two superlative talents working without boundaries.


L.A. singer-songwriter Shannon Lay’s new album is a work of plainspoken mysticism that goes to the small, bright truth of things, showcasing her unusual songwriting and quietly commanding voice.

Living Water

A plainspoken mysticism rules heaven and earth on Shannon Lay’s remarkable Living Water, a quiet, mostly acoustic album that is bigger and stranger than its hushed dynamics and finger-picked sparkle might suggest. Crack open the Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s unassuming lyrics and you’ll find pearls of unconventional folk wisdom scattered throughout. “All it is,” she sings on “Orange Tree,” an early highlight, “is simple small and true/You and all connected at the root.” In “Caterpillar,” she contemplates the oceanic dimensions of a life force that “either creates destroys or delivers.” She has a tendency, when grappling with the Big Questions, to follow her train of thought to a place where sung or spoken meter can’t quite keep up (“Life is like the sea/Ever changing in itself and in all of its surroundings”), but what might look chaotic on the page flows as naturally as water when she sings. The sweetness of her voice, with its faint vibrato, along with a trace of placeless accent the Redondo Beach native might have picked up from listening to folk singers from across the Atlantic, smooths her words as they tumble out. She’s best when she goes straight to the small, bright truth of things: “We ask the sky when the answers are right below our feet”; “Life is confusing and we are asleep.”
Lay’s sound is not a novel proposition. You can hear affinities with a number of acoustically tinged projects of recent years—Julie Byrne, Big Thief, the Angel Olsen of Half Way Home, as well as a wide range of canonical singer-songwriters: Elliott Smith, Karen Dalton, Nico, Nick Drake. Lay also plays in a garage-punk band, Feels, but there are no echoes of their fuzzy ferocity here. Solo, she sings soft, often melancholy songs accompanied by her own acoustic guitar; a few songs on Living Water feature violin and cello, and there are hints of standup bass in the mix. But her captivating music is distinctive in ways that are hard to put your finger on.
The album was recorded by the Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly, who also worked on Half Way Home. And instead of the watery reverb of Lay’s debut, All this life goin down, or the close confines of her demo collection, Holy Heartache, he has opted for stark, wide-open atmospheres aching with empty space. (Though Lay’s official debut came out earlier this year, this feels like her de facto introduction to the world, thanks in part to the efforts of Kevin Morby, who is releasing the album on his new Mare imprint, a sub-label of Woodsist.) With few bells or whistles and little studio trickery, the recording puts a primacy on her unusual songwriting and her quietly commanding voice.
The haunting opener “Home” offers a good glimpse of what makes Lay’s music special. A thin stripe of violin sets the scene; chiming open fifths move in parallel against a steady, finger-picked ostinato. That repetition, combined with unexpected shifts between minor and major, has a way of bedeviling the usual verse/chorus structures. (She has a knack for forms that leave you feeling slightly off balance without quite knowing why: Another song, “Orange Tree,” is in 6/8 time but is structured in 10-bar phrases.) “Home” is about feeling lost and trapped, yet her chord progressions move as unfettered as weather. She’s not a powerfully melodic singer; she tends to mull over the same notes, alternating high, clear tones with careful melisma. But she is expressive in her dynamics, sliding from forceful to hesitant within the space of a few lines, and the zip of her fingers against the strings accentuates the faintly breathy edge of her voice. It’s a strong choice for an opening statement. It’s unsettling; it leaves you slightly on edge.
She has more dulcet modes. “Always Room” could almost be a children’s lullaby, though its whimsical opening refrain—”There’s always room for a little more/And there’s always reason for a little less”—might puzzle even adult ears; I hear it as a kind of bargain struck between frivolity and frugality, pleasure and sense. “The Moons Detriment” is bright-eyed and hopeful, a song about a love that surges “Like an eager new river channel”; “The Search for Gold,” another near-lullaby, promises rebirth “in the grass of a warm summer night.” The image is so sweet, it’s easy to miss the way the next line (“Good and evil through and through”) falls like a shadow over her moonlit reverie.
Those shadows are never far from even her most tranquil songs. The nostalgic “Asa” cradles the hope that our best days are not behind us; the dirge-like “Coast” is as turbulent as the conflicted emotions that shape its churning drums and electric feedback. When she wants to, she can be straight-up heartbreaking. On “Recording 15,” she addresses a loved one who is far away—estranged, abroad, maybe dead. “I don’t know what’s real anymore,” she pleads, and then she strikes a nerve so raw, it chills: “I have lived without your touch/For so long that it fades from my memory/I’m so hungry for your touch.” An unflinching portrait of loneliness and desire, it is the most direct of all Living Water’s songs, and also the album’s most unsparing emotional gut-punch.
It’s a testament to her restraint that even here, bittersweet never turns maudlin or morose. And maybe it’s a testament to her spirit, too: Living Water is shot through with a kind of ragged hope—not optimism, exactly, but a determined belief in the power of that life force to pull us all toward something like transcendence. It’s there in “Orange Tree,” in the image of the singer finding answers right beneath her feet; it’s there in the title track, an almost animistic snapshot of the Southwestern landscape, where “living water” brings both destruction and salvation. And it’s there in the staggeringly beautiful country blues of “Come Together”: “There’s so much pain dwelling within us all/Don’t go spreading yours around/Oh lord knows/We all have enough,” she sings, in what is one of the record’s truest and most resonant lines.
Then a startling thing happens. An electric counterpoint explodes into the frame and her voice fractures into joyous multi-part harmony: “Come on, shake your broken shoulders/Come on, move your broken shoes.” A life-affirming celebration of the wounds we all wear, it perfectly exemplifies Living Water’s seductively deceptive form. Like a late-summer sky the color of robin’s eggs, the album’s outward simplicity masks the vastness of what lies behind.


The Radiohead offshoot’s new live album is both an unexpected treat and a flex, proving the trio can replicate its gnarliest, most thrilling material onstage and sans studio trickery.

The Smile: The Smile (Live at Montreux Jazz Festival, July 2022)

Some live albums arrive in the thick of a band’s imperial phase and feel like a victory lap. Others are transparent cash-ins (you know who you are). The best ones serve as historic artifacts, commemorating a gig of rare significance: a star-studded farewell concert, say, or an extraordinary songwriter exorcising private grief in a public forum.
The Smile’s new live album does not fit these categories. It’s more like a proof of concept, a flex. See? it tells you. It’s not studio trickery. These three blokes really can replicate this stuff live. Indeed, the band lock in to the wobbly 7/8 meter of “Pana-Vision,” recreate the wooly, tablature-resistant riffs of “Thin Thing,” and nail the careening intensity of “You Will Never Work in Television Again” (here rendered at a more breakneck pace) without breaking a sweat.
Comprising Radiohead veterans Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood alongside Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, the Smile emerged as 2022’s little supergroup that could. While Radiohead have long been ambivalent about the live album format, giving us just one (2001’s I Might Be Wrong) across a 30-year recording career, the Smile operate differently. Seven months after its excellent studio debut, A Light for Attracting Attention, the trio released its set (or part of it, at least) from last summer’s Montreux Jazz Festival.
Since the beginning, the Smile have been dogged by an eminently reasonable question: How is this not just two Radioheads stacked in a trench coat? The answer is right there in the title of this release: This band plays jazz, see. They play at jazz festivals and have a jazz drummer. They recorded this live album at the long-running Swiss festival, just like Miles Davis and Nina Simone once did. They’re only one degree of separation from the legendary Impulse! Records.
These eight songs—all from their studio debut—don’t sound drastically different here, but Yorke and Greenwood seem invigorated by their drummer’s jazz pedigree. On the elegiac “Speech Bubbles,” Greenwood achieves the herculean task of plucking a harp with one hand while playing keyboard with the other, embellishing the song with an anarchic piano solo that faintly echoes the mother of all anarchic piano solos, “Aladdin Sane.” On “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” they are joined by saxophonist Robert Stillman, whose shrieking accompaniment lurches towards a punk-jazz hybrid that’s more Nation of Ulysses than “The National Anthem.”
Greenwood, as ever, brings new meaning to the word multi-instrumentalist; you may need video accompaniment to appreciate his mid-song leaps from piano to bass to manipulating said bass with a bow during “Free in the Knowledge.” On A Light for Attracting Attention, that haunting lullabye to self-delusion and “A Hairdryer” were two distinct tracks. In this performance, they are conjoined by an extended avant-noise segue, a fine overture for a rendition of “A Hairdryer” that’s sharper edged and more kinetic than the studio version by far. With Yorke on gloriously fuzzed-out guitar and Skinner unleashing a torrent of pitter-patter syncopations, it’s like the evil stepchild of “Optimistic.”
It’s a Radiohead tradition to test-run new material on tour, sometimes years or decades before properly releasing it. (Recall the embryonic “True Love Waits” that appeared on I Might Be Wrong.) With just one album to their name, the Smile have embraced this tradition by necessity. At Montreux, the group performed four new songs, including a woozy slow-burner called “Bending Hectic,” which Yorke claimed to have completed half an hour earlier.
Disappointingly, this live release omits the new songs. Perhaps Yorke and co. view them as works in progress. At 35 minutes, it’s more a sampler than a full set—essentially a bonus feature for one of the year’s finest rock albums. You already know that these three musicians have forged a thrilling chemistry amidst the chaos of the pandemic. That this live album exists indicates that they know it, too.


Katie Crutchfield and Jess Williamson’s debut as Plains sends it back to the ’90s with a thoughtful, personalized interpretation of old-school country-pop.

I Walked With You a Ways

Maybe the term “’90s country” means nothing to you; maybe it invokes your entire musical upbringing. Whatever the case may be, that decade of country music—which encompassed everything from the exquisite Car Wheels on a Gravel Road to the novelty “Achy Breaky Heart”—is often looked back at nowadays with heavy sentimentality by those who remember it, a rose-tinted counterpoint to the slick, snap-track country-pop that’s become Nashville’s cash cow. The biggest stars of that era—Shania Twain, Garth Brooks, Martina McBride —were able to meld three-chords-and-the-truth narratives with big-stadium affability on a scale that hasn’t been replicated since. It was also a time before country music was burdened by post-9/11 jingoism, and when the industry arguably made greater strides towards gender parity than it does today—all compelling reasons to ache for its return. “Why don’t we all just start putting our ’80s and ’90s records on and let’s figure out, what is country music?” Kelly Clarkson declared in a 2019 slam against modern country radio. “What is the sound we like again?”
You could do worse than to ask Katie Crutchfield and Jess Williamson, daughters of Alabama and Texas, respectively. Their new album, I Walked With You a Ways, their first as the duo Plains, is not an exact pastiche of Trisha or Shania or any of the other women who commandeered country airwaves while Crutchfield and Williamson were young. Nor is it a vague homage to those artists, either; this is a thoughtful, personalized interpretation of old-school country-pop that only two musicians intimately familiar with its sounds and sensibilities could produce. “We came back to it almost inevitably—like, it’s in us,” Williamson has said. I Walked With You a Ways is a nostalgic yet clear-eyed endeavor, rife with wistful memories and fresh starts. The fact that both members of Plains began their careers running away from these roots, making their names as indie acts before circling back to something folksier during the pandemic (Crutchfield with Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud, Williamson with Sorceress), only deepens this album’s feeling of homecoming.
Produced by Brad Cook, who also assisted Crutchfield on Saint Cloud, the songs take on the same graceful warmth and sauntering pace. The two singers trade lead vocals and songwriting credits, linking the two halves together through their splendid harmonizing. A track like “Hurricane” might’ve fit well on Saint Cloud as another one of Crutchfield’s methodical, solitary musings on incongruous relationships, but paired with Williamson’s backing vocals, it takes on a new level of grandeur. Conversely, Cook’s production strips back the polished reverb and glittering embellishments that Williamson utilized on Sorceress. Her twang is on full display here, wringing sorrow out of the album’s centerpiece weeper, “Abilene,” and fitting right into the tradition of crystalline country vocalists of Dolly Parton and Margo Price. It makes you wonder why she hasn’t been singing like this for longer.
In Crutchfield and Williamson’s world, breakups are a fact of life, as commonplace and mundanely tragic as the rundown gas stations on a two-lane highway. Their songwriting is more direct than their past work, favoring simpler phrases and evocative still lifes (pink carnations, a cigarette butt in a potted plant). But both artists still relish a circuitous way of storytelling, drawing out a single moment of revelation across a whole song. Take “Summer Sun,” where Williamson offers a meandering apology to someone she dated while old wounds were still fresh: “You had no reason to be afraid that my heart was hidden behind a wall that came before you.” Across her songs, Crutchfield advocates for a partner to rise to her high standards, calling them out on their avoidance and dishing out hard-earned sage advice. “You know you can’t lose a fight if you take cover or abandon it,” she intones, not unkindly, on “Easy.” They make space for the disappointment and heartache while keeping empathy for whoever’s on the other end.
Like all albums birthed out of a particular music fascination, the influences on I Walked With You a Ways are widespread and a joy to uncover with each listen. “Line of Sight,” with its wandering dobro and humming Wurlitzer piano, recalls the Chicks both in their ’90s heyday and their darker, alt-pop turn on 2006’s Taking the Long Way. Williamson covers “Bellafatima,” by contemporary Texas singer-songwriter Hoyt Van Tanner, and transforms it into a waltz that sounds as old as the prairie itself, the kind that Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt might have included on their pair of Trio albums. These callbacks are subtle enough to never upstage the main heartlines running through the album; a mournful guitar solo might sneak in for a moment between chorus and second verse, or an organ might take up a call-and-response melody on “No Record of Wrongs,” only to fade back into the cozy backdrop of acoustic strings and drum brushes.
Outside of the mainstream, more artists as of late have donned their cowboy hats and done their best spin on vintage Americana. Call it the Spotify Indigo breed of country, if you must. Cult favorites like Price, Tyler Childers, and Sturgill Simpson imbue their traditionalist leanings with an anti-authoritarian streak. Others, like Orville Peck or the “Merle Haggard with a Pax” outlaw Dougie Poole, tap into gimmicky yet sincere subversions of a modern country star’s subject matter. Plains, by comparison, feels much less weighty, a logical conclusion to two girls who wore out CDs by Deana Carter and the Judds. Country has been their guiding north star, and it’s a privilege to finally get to see it shine.


A dozen years after its release, Fevers & Mirrors, Bright Eyes' defining LP, is reissued by Saddle Creek, along with 2002's There Is No Beginning to the Story EP.

Bright Eyes: Fevers and Mirrors / There Is No Beginning to the Story EP

No album we review here is exempt from getting a numerical score, so just believe me when I say I did the best I could up there. Because isn't Fevers and Mirrors ultimately critic-proof? After all, while reviewing it 12 years ago for Pitchfork, Taylor M. Clark questioned whether Conor Oberst's mortal frame could withstand his all-consuming ambition, called the vocals "hypothermic," and debated whether the record was more narcissistic or solipsistic. I actually agree with him-- I just also happen to think those are some of Fevers and Mirrors' most uniquely compelling qualities. And how can you account for the emotional attachment listeners have to this thing? The symbolic significance of Fevers and Mirrors' title boils down to how, in self-reflection, we reveal only the ailments which we project. And if this is somehow your first experience with Bright Eyes, I'd suggest you take a gander at songmeanings.net, where the dozen songs here are among the most commented-upon in the site's archives. This thing causes our internal mirrors to reflect some fucked-up fevers.
As such, there's the temptation to use this, the culmination of Saddle Creek's reissue of Oberst's earliest Bright Eyes material, as a review of memories rather than music. The worry is that this will somehow be ineffective without my giving you a couple of Facebook pages of girls I knew in college and my scratched CD which skipped about two minutes into "A Song to Pass the Time". But, nah. Fevers and Mirrors isn't degraded from being removed from the bullshit of your youth, and in any context it's a tremendous record that is "critic-proof" in the same way Violent Femmes, Pinkerton, and, yes, the Smiths are. Scoff if you must, but let me ask you this: How many people do you know got into Morrissey as teens? Okay, now how many got started in their 30s?
That said, Oberst and I are the same age and neither of us has outgrown Fevers and Mirrors: On his end, you'll never hear a live performance of "The Calendar Hung Itself…" as something done out of obligation. And in light of recent releases as divergent as Death Grips' The Money Store and Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, I've come to understand Fevers and Mirrors' magnetism as an example of how I'm drawn to records where something really feels like it's at stake, records that sound unstable. That's certainly the case here. Up to this point, Oberst had released some decent material culminating in Letting Off the Happiness (his On Avery Island to Fevers' In the Aeroplane Over the Sea), but beyond that, his work as Commander Venus and solo was mostly notable for the youth of the person who made it. It was all very precocious and little of it stands up now.
Still, in 2000, it put Oberst at the center of concentric, radioactive areas anticipating their impending "moment": oversharing culture, emo, Omaha, Saddle Creek, Bright Eyes. It's here where the weight of being essentially synonymous with Bright Eyes starts to dawn on Oberst, and fortunately for the listener, there was no separation between where he was an artist and as a person. Yes, it's a record about breaking up (that is, if your affections are requited in the first place), unfulfilled dreams, real nightmares, the burden of talent, and the encroaching dread of a future where nothing substantial ever changes within you. All of the things that get judged as #whitepeopleproblems by other white people who apparently had their shit together before they could legally drink. Play Fevers and Mirrors for someone who served in a war or underwent a serious medical procedure, and they'd probably tell Oberst to snap out of it. Indeed, you learn later in your years that, as Morrissey put it, "there are worse things in life than never being someone's sweetie," but in the thrall of Fevers, sometimes these are the kind of things that do feel like the end of the world for at least an hour.
Focus on his imperfect pitch, and, yes, Oberst isn't a technically proficient singer. But on Fevers, he became remarkable at controlling how he wants to express himself while appearing no more capable of controlling what he's feeling than he is the sun-- another symbol used throughout Mirrors, mostly envied for the pathetic predictability of its rise and fall. Like many of his LPs that would follow, Fevers begins with a very long and quiet solo performance overlain by sampled dialogue, and within five minutes, Oberst has no idea why he's even bothering, heavily sighing through one of the many perfect syntheses of thought and tone: "Once the page of a calendar turns it's no more/ So tell me then what was it for?" This demonstration of nihilism is short-lived obviously, and the rest of Fevers is spent purposefully thrashing within the straitjacket of one's self.
It's unfairly criticized as one-note whining, but on the contrary, Fevers is a record where seemingly every form of self-loathing is in play. It starts immediately after Oberst's premature epitaph with "The Calendar Hung Itself…", a streaking, disintegrating comet of emotional immolation. I don't think Oberst ever got as purely angry as he did here, and no matter what vitriol he spewed at the government, the social contract, or an errant lover from there on out, nothing could compare to the hatred he turned on himself. There's a bit of Elliott Smith's plainspoken catatonia on "Something Vague", where Oberst sighs, "now and again, it seems worse than it is/ But mostly the view is accurate." By "Haligh, Haligh, a Lie, Haligh", he manages a chuckle at the futility of trusting in another, but sarcasm proves to be a terrible defense mechanism; a friend tells him on the phone, "no, it's just some guy she's been hanging out with/ I don't know, the past couple weeks I guess," and in repeating those words, Oberst's voice cracks with the quiver of a young man having to carry on a conversation as if he's not being slowly robbed of his will to live.
So, absolutely-- Fevers and Mirrors is the kind of record you're meant to commiserate with, or at the very least, let its misery make your own seem kinda manageable. But let's be perfectly clear that there's actual music on this thing too, and rarely is it less than fantastic. Thus far, Oberst's career has been bookended by an ambition to tap into the eternal truth of folk music, and there are vestiges of public-domain melodies that can't help but pour out when using a certain progression: "A Song to Pass the Time" sidles awfully close to "The Gambler", "Something Vague" morphs into a close reading of "No Woman, No Cry". And yet Oberst, his band, and house producer Mike Mogis create something wholly identifiable as a "Saddle Creek sound," testing their capabilities for a deceptively diverse and always engaging sonic experience.
Looking back, what stands out is how little relation it has to emo or just about anything.  There is no Fugazi in Bright Eyes, no Sunny Day Real Estate, no punk rock, to be honest. And there's no Bob Dylan either and crucially much less Jeff Mangum than in the past, at least musically. Some songs here ride a single melody for their entirety in service of Oberst's words; others explode into nimble choruses, and the arrangements are every bit as volatile as the narrator: "The Calendar Hung Itself…" moves in lockstep with Oberst's breathless and nervy howling, its Latin churn interrupted by buzzing G-funk synths, clinking percussion, and before its climactic verse, what sounds like Q-bert falling to his death. "Sunrise, Sunset" predates Beirut's fixation with klezmer but finds little comfort in nostalgia, punctuated by distorted pummeling and rupturing Fevers' quieter second half. The opening line of electric piano on "The Movement of a Hand" undergoes subtle mitosis throughout its four minutes, accumulating an unnerving alien beauty as it layers over itself. Though hardly a big-budget affair, Mogis' production sounds absolutely perfect in recreating the scenes set by Oberst's lyrics, warm and tactile but with an unsettling cabin fever effect-- long overdue for this vinyl reissue. Intoning, "this barren land is alive tonight," "Arienette" reimagines the Omaha plains as a claustrophobic hell filled with bloodthirsty predators and paranoid prey, "Haligh, Haligh, a Lie, Haligh" mills about a disheveled apartment, "When the Curious Girl Realizes She Is Under Glass" bangs at a piano in drunken disgust. Like many other teen headphone symphonies, from Dark Side of the Moon to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Fevers and Mirrors is a world unto itself, even if it just happens to be a somewhat large city stuck in the middle of Nebraska.
While we're on the subject of how Fevers creates its own universe, at this point, we must talk about "An Attempt to Tip the Scales". The song itself is perfectly fine, if one of Fevers' least substantial. Nah, this is all about the radio interview. I debated whether or not to put that in quotes because I think there is value to the fact that some listeners continue to believe it's real. But, spoiler alert: Knowing that the DJ is actually Matt Silcock of labelmates Lullaby for the Working Class and "Conor Oberst" is played by Todd Fink of the Faint rightfully puts it alongside "The $20 Sack Pyramid" and "Welcome to Purple Haze" as one of the funniest skits ever put to tape. The rapport between the sycophantic, unprepared DJ and the pissy, entitled artist gets increasingly more hysterical as it goes along, and for the ease of transcription, I'll quote only the jokes made at Oberst's expense, of which there are many: "My mother drowned one [brother] every year for five consecutive years. They were all named Padraic… they all got one song," "I want people to feel sorry for me. I like the feel of the burn of the audience's eyes on me when I'm whispering all my darkest secrets into the microphone." It drives home the point that, like most young adults, Oberst can sense the ridiculousness of his own bullshit even while in progress; earlier on "The Center of the World", completely dumbfounded by his own inability to cope with seemingly trivial circumstances, he's left to scream "THIS ISN'T HAPPENING! HAPPENING! HAPPENING!" It bears repeating: on a record often accused of taking itself too seriously, its creator allows his friends to conduct what's basically a five-minute roast. As such, it's the ultimate embodiment of the record's title, holding a mirror up to Oberst's critics who said he needs to get over himself.
The There Is No Beginning to the Story EP is included in this reissue, and it functions less as an appendage to Fevers than a commencement speech on a stage of Oberst's artistic development. In very tangible ways, it sets the stage for Lifted-- for one thing, its title and several lyrics sprinkled throughout are quoted later on, and most obvious is "From a Balance Beam", the first song on There Is No Beginning and one that would also appear on Lifted. Though undoubtedly the work of Conor Oberst, it wouldn't fit on Fevers at all-- the production sounds noticeably more expensive, with Mogis learning how to apply a cool shimmer to mandolins, field snares, and most crucially Oberst's voice. More notably, "From a Balance Beam" is every bit as wordy and fatalistic as what came before, but whether it's the melody (one of the best Oberst has written) or just the breezy ambience, it actually sounds incredibly optimistic.
It's by and large the best thing here, which isn't to say the EP's not worth your time. There Is No Story just can't help but be dwarfed by its immediate surroundings. Nonetheless, it does give insight to the places where Bright Eyes would go in the future-- "Messenger Bird's Song" anticipates the overreaching, tremulous intimacy of I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, while "We Are Free Men" indicates the deeper, more theatrical vocals Oberst would experiment with on Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. It also contains seedlings for a couple of melodies he would incidentally reprise. "Loose Leaves" is a rare time where he obscures his words with a distorted microphone, which is a shame as the lyrics point toward an incisive snark that outward-looking records like Cassadaga and The People's Key couldn't quite manage without sounding pedantic. It closes on a Neil Young cover, which is less important for how it's executed than what it meant: Oberst was starting to place himself within the lineage of rock royalty and deal with the expectations that came from outside his immediate group of friends and collaborators. It's the fissure that ultimately separates everything that came before and after for Bright Eyes.
So is Fevers and Mirrors the best Bright Eyes record? Some days I think it is, but the important thing is that Oberst gives you options, and just about everything he's done since-- even the hamfisted political punk of Desaparecidos and the misguided democracy of the Mystic Valley Band-- is at the very least an attempt not to repeat himself. He's become oddly undervalued even if I doubt whether he has another masterpiece in him. Depending on my mood, I prefer the monomaniacal scale of Lifted or the electro-goth narcosis of Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, and I get what others see in I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, a record I find to be highly overrated on account of its playing by someone else's rules for once-- it was there where Oberst really attempted to be the "next Dylan" or "next Gram Parsons" rather than the only Conor Oberst. Which is exactly what we got on Fevers and Mirrors, a record steeped in roots, yet wholly of the moment, intelligent but prone to indefensible emotion, a very personal work made amongst talented friends. Most people discover Fevers and Mirrors at a time when they're being bombarded with the canon, and the recognition of something that feels utterly yours instead of received wisdom created a true cult of admirers and imitations who had the same white-light experience as myself: When I first heard Fevers and Mirrors, it sounded exactly like the kind of music I'd want to make. Thankfully, Bright Eyes did it, so I didn't have to.


Just as he did for his 1978 film, John Carpenter provides the score for Halloween’s 2018 reboot. But this time, the synths have been cleaned up and dread is occasionally outweighed by winking nostalgia.

John Carpenter / Cody Carpenter / Daniel Davies: Halloween: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

John Carpenter’s Halloween theme is so terrifying, so instantly iconic, that it makes you forget certain things about the original movie. Like the fact that Michael Myers spends at least a third of the film driving around town slowly in a tan Buick, for example. This is to say nothing of balding shrink Dr. Loomis—lurking in a trench coat and catcalling children from behind the bushes on Halloween night, he disturbed me upon rewatching nearly as much Myers. But those finger-stabbed piano notes burn all of the campiness off of the entire Halloween enterprise. They are ingenious in the way that the movie’s premise—random man in mask murders babysitters for no reason—was ingenious. The movie was a big clean table with only a few well-placed objects on it, and it showed the world what you could do in a horror film with meager resources and a whole lot of taste. Those little piano notes are an entire philosophy of art given marching orders.
Carpenter wouldn’t say such high-flown things about his work, though. Even though his name is on all his movies, he works less like an auteur and more like someone cooking chili for 20 on game day—toss everything we need into the pot, make sure there’s enough. He scored Halloween himself because, he says, “I was the fastest and the cheapest I could get.” He made all the music in three days, working without the benefit of the finished movie to work against, and he often didn’t have the time, inclination, or ability to tune the synthesizers properly.
The new movie, directed by David Gordon Green, is better lit, better acted, scored more richly then the original. There’s a lot more money, and time, to burn on the effort, and you can feel all of that love lavishing itself on the screen. This isn’t a B movie, like the original: It’s a B+ movie.  But some of that fine-tuning and focus-sharpening scrapes off the no-budget dirty fuel that the Halloween engine is supposed to run on. The first thing you notice about the new Halloween score, which Carpenter rewrote himself and updated with modern synths and blasts of NIN-style digital guitar, is that the synths are tuned now. That’s right—tuned. Who’s afraid of a goddamned tuned synth? Frankly, the out-of-tune analog synths were better, creepier, more reflective of the movie’s weird insularity. Updated and polished, they sound merely brisk, like Myers is putting some time in on the elliptical in the off-season.
As  everyone knows, Jamie Lee Curtis reprises her role as Laurie Strode, the sole survivor of Myers’ original massacre and the first hallowed Final Girl in all of slasher-moviedom. (The other sequels, including the weird and fun Season of the Witch, are jettisoned like a bunch of bodies over a bridge.) Now, Strode is haunted, a doomsday prepper, and Carpenter gives a neat twist to her own theme to suggest her desolation—those iconic three notes, but with mournful chord progressions poured beneath them. There are fun little grace notes like this everywhere in the score, a sign that Carpenter is engaging with his source as eagerly as next-generation director David Gordon Green.
One of the best decisions Carpenter made in the original movie was to leave out music almost entirely—you spent a lot of time just listening to wind in the trees and watching a Steadicam stare at houses. The new movie recreates this woolly blankness, so when the themes do poke through—that icy-needle sonar ping that signals Michael Myers is watching, the little lawn-sprinkler percussion that undercuts the main theme, telling your lizard brain that Myers is on the move—the jolt they give, both nostalgic and dramatic, is more delicious.
A funny side effect of Carpenter’s ubiquity, though, is that even in his most memorable work, he gets a little lost among his many imitators. Forty years on, “John Carpenter horror music” is its own genre tag, its own minor zip code. Listening to his updated score, you don’t come away marveling at how one-of-a-kind his vision is—you mostly catch yourself making mental lists of other John Carpenterish artifacts. The work of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the theme to “Stranger Things,” the entire career of AraabMuzik—it can be difficult to remember that you are actually in the presence of an originator.
But that’s fine. Carpenter is working in service to his own nostalgia, and he understands intuitively what his score is here to do. It is not meant to be frightening. It is meant to make you feel warm and fuzzy things about John Carpenter, about the first time you saw the original Halloween. Nostalgia makes for a funny complement to horror, in a way: It reminds you of all the times you felt safe and loved. Horror—or true horror, anyway—is supposed to render you helpless and alone. It’s hard to be terrified when you are grinning in recognition.


The Russian producer better known as Buttechno applies his gonzo sonics to psychoactive ambient miniatures and joyfully off-kilter club tracks.

Pavel Milyakov / Buttechno: La Maison de la Mort/Minimal Cuts EP

La Maison de la Mort/Minimal Cuts EP

Buttechno is not a put-on. Despite the seemingly silly handle that Russian producer Pavel Milyakov deploys, the thrilling and exhausting array of tracks he’s dropped since late 2015 is without peer, be it in his home country’s own burgeoning scene or in the electronic music underground at large. Across music for Gost Zvuk, his own Johns Kingdom imprint, the Cititrax label, or Russian designer Gosha Rubchinskiy’s fashion shows, Milyakov often seems to try his hand at just about everything but techno. He’s liable to careen from screwball electro to lo-fi pop, wicked acid to cartoonish dubstep. Then again, he does drop heart-squeezing techno bangers with the best of them.
La Maison de la Mort emphasizes his minimal ambient side, which will no doubt only bring more comparisons to Aphex Twin. The album’s 16 tracks alight on weird dubs, hushed études, lashing noise, and what could pass for a lost theme from Stalker. The title stems from Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem of the same name, which you can hear recited in Russian on the opening track, setting the tone with allusions to cemeteries and the underworld. Milyakov adds just a hint of drone to the piece before it cuts off. “Bolotniy” has a pulse, but the sonics are otherwise skeletal. Milyakov sustains the mood with just a modulated bass and an ungrounded wire’s crackle to serve as a beat, redolent of the work of the late Mika Vainio.
Working with so few elements and instead letting his prowess for electronically manipulating sound come to the fore, Milyakov’s gradually shifting repetitions give the album a psychoactive feel. Long tracks like “Moon Pad” and “Flights” revel in their echo and decay, imparting a sense of melancholia. And while the bubbling arpeggiations and EKG thump of “Synthetics” don’t do much on their own, Milyakov suddenly scribbles feedback across it all like a 2-year-old with a crayon. The slowly-plucked strings of “May Guitar” lead into some slinking static before suddenly dropping us into the razor wire shrieks that comprise “Virus Saw.” But such restraint at times makes the tracks stagnate. “Octa Amb Plucks” gurgles upward and back down, but one might wish that the bits of hi-hat sprinkled in midway through might have taken the track elsewhere.
Milyakov returns to his Buttechno alias for a four-track EP on Anthony Naples’ Incienso label. While minimalism remains the modus operandi, the ends results couldn’t be more different: Minimal Cuts is geared towards the club rather than a desolate interior headspace. Even when making dance fare, Milyakov always keeps some discombobulating quirks in the mix, never quite letting the tracks align with the grid. A chirrup of cheap electronics gives “Rz Bass” a screechy edge to its first half before Buttechno lets the body-jacking groove take over. He dabbles in the squelching frequencies of a 303 for “Orient ACD,” but holds those queasy tones for an extended time, triggering extra drums a hair early. It’s slight but just enough to throw you off. “Dubber Funk” is erected with some scraped guitar bits and globs of bass to ricochet all over the beat. It’s a dub techno track in the Basic Channel vein, but Buttechno pushes the echo and delay to a ludicrous extreme, the peak of the track feeling like a bouncy ball in a hall of mirrors. “Dub Hole Funkin” also uses a sliver of guitar—this time with some wah wah thrown in for added wobbliness—as well as a drum sample clipped too soon and what sounds like exhaling through a straw. No matter the sonic minutiae in his hands, Buttechno pushes them all towards a sense of maximum joy.