The avant-garde tenor saxophone quartet returns with three adventurously dense movements, yet they maintain a focused sense of restraint and melody throughout.

Blade of Love

The fad of the saxophone quartet began in Europe during the early 20th-century classical scene. But it was in 1970s America that startling new concepts for all-saxophone groups started to appear with regularity. Often the players ignored the standard configuration of soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxes. In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago co-founder Roscoe Mitchell put together an all-alto sax quartet to perform his ferocious, atonal piece “Nonaah.” Around the same time, bands such as Rova and the World Saxophone Quartet were using the instrument’s swing legacy to craft styles that could slip between jazz and classical categories.
Battle Trance takes advantage of the possibilities opened up by those pioneers. In 2014, Travis Laplante’s tenor sax ensemble made its recording debut on the contemporary classical New Amsterdam label. Palace Of Wind showed that Laplante had the compositional chops to keep a three-movement, 40-minute piece lively. Just as crucially, he had partners who displayed crisp command of his ideas. Matthew Nelson, Jeremy Viner, and Patrick Breiner collaborated with Laplante on fast-repeating minimalist oscillations, sustained drones, as well as some charming melodic lines. Laplante cited classical music, avant-garde jazz and black metal as influences—and backed it up with timbres varied enough to make good on those claims.
On the follow-up, Laplante doesn’t try to set any world records for group-saxophone intensity. *Blade of Love, *comprised of three movements, often has a quieter feel than Palace—though it doesn’t stint on idiosyncrasy, either. A few minutes into the first movement, the group members sing notes through their instruments. As far as “extended techniques” in saxophone performance go, this isn’t a groundbreaking trope, but its use contrasts nicely with the thick, reedy blocks of sound that open the album.
Over time, each player stops singing and begins producing notes through the mouthpiece once again. After the first member makes the switch, you can tell what’s going to happen: The staggered return to “regular” playing is going to feel triumphant, once everyone is back on the riff. But despite its obviousness, this simple concept has a subtle beauty as it unfolds. Once all four saxophonists have made a return journey to more standard note-production, some of the players delight in expressive, bluesy lines that swing around the more manically pulsing parts. This joyful section of the piece eventually transitions to a section of searing drone, and then a mournful coda.
The second movement adds more unexpected sounds to the mix: Pops of the players’ lips, whistles and smacks of air are all pushed around through the saxophones’ metal bodies. Again, this is a setup for a path toward a more traditional sound, which eventually comes in the form of a bracing and soulful theme. The third movement is the shortest, and its initial, mellow rounds of chanted tones are probably the closest that any saxophone group has come to the sound of early devotional music. This time, the inevitable transition from vocalizations to near-unison saxophone shredding doesn’t carry quite the same charge. But on the whole, Blade Of Love shows that there’s plenty of sax-quartet innovation left for these artists to explore.


The Kills wrote and recorded their second LP in just over a month's time, and that expedited process lends No Wow a raw immediacy that fits the band's tempestuousness and sexual tension.

No Wow

You want to write the Kills off as either fashionistas freeloading off of more accomplished artists or opportunist White Stripes biters, except that everything you read, see, or hear about them-- the predestined bonding over Edie Sedgwick, the one-way ticket from Florida to London, the hunt for haunted mixers-- is a scene from an implausible art-rock buddy movie, and No Wow is the heart-thumping soundtrack.
The band is often described as sexually menacing, but the feeling here is more akin to a couple of best friends who toy with their sexual tension, fully realizing that doing anything about it would ruin everything. No Wow plots the wax and wane of relationships like this, as the duo drop the Velvet Underground curtain and spaz on each other in plain view. On the title track, they're talking shit and issuing challenges: Alison Mosshart scowls, "You're gonna have to step over my dead body/ Before you walk out that door" over Jamie Hince's steady rumbles and thrusts, the two taunting each other until the song explodes into a raunchy playfight chant. "Love Is a Deserter" threatens the firing squad if someone doesn't ante up, while "Dead Road 7" gets sick of the bullshit and shows you the exit sign.
The mothballed drum-machine used on No Wow feels less a Suicide nod than a means to eliminate outside interference. It provides the cool, mechanical pulse for Hince and Mosshart's theatrics without getting in the way like a live drummer would. There's no "hey, hey guys" interventions from the dum-dum box, and the little robo-bastard gets his freak on throughout "The Good Ones", a pulsating convection whose video has onlookers infected by pink lust at the mere sight and sound of the Kills.
"I Hate The Way You Love" and its "Part 2" comedown are Hince and Mosshart moving past the pseudo-drama, both attempting to prove each is more over it than the other. The former is a raucous "whatever" mock insult; the latter is a sappy, screeching acquittal mantra.
The Kills pay tribute to the Benton Harbor, Mich., Meijer's supermarket on "At the Back of the Shell", a handclap-driven exposé of smalltown romantic endeavors. Hince's obsession with a rare Flickinger mixing board that was once coated in Sly Stone's coke rails led the pair to the Lake Michigan town that's as well known for its racist cops as it is for washing machines and Sinbad. Once there, they squatted in a studio and wrote the entire album in just over two weeks. Three weeks later, the record was finished. The expedited process lends No Wow an immediacy and rawness that enhances the band's intention to pare down the sound of their full-length debut Keep On Your Mean Side.
The guns brandished earlier are holstered on "Rodeo Town" which is also the first song on the album to let Hince's guitar take a rest. It's country-fried jangle providing Mosshart the opportunity to stretch her vocal chords a bit. Hince's vocals are only separated once on the simmering "Murdermile" which also has Mosshart briefly revisiting her wailing days with Discount. Closer "Ticket Man" sends the band packing, exhausted and emotionally spent. Over a plodding piano, Mosshart pines, "Too many tickets is the problem, man/ Too many problems is the ticket in my hand". It's a fitting end to a fitful tantrum of a record.
The Kills might wear their obsessions on their sleeve, but they wear them with pride. They follow the tradition of the tempestuous male/female sparring of bands like X and Royal Trux with an utterly current sense of uneasy self-awareness. No Wow steps up to the promise of their EPs and debut LP, a boisterous reminder that kids can still hook up to songs that are little more than a guitar and attitude. If that makes the Kills poseurs, they'd probably be the first to admit it.


After a 17-year wait, Chinese Democracy needs to be a spectacle-- something that either validates its tortuous birthing process or a Hindenberg so horribly panned it somehow validates its mastermind as a misunderstood genius.

Chinese Democracy

To paraphrase another of rock's foremost procrastinators, Axl Rose just wasn't made for these times. Sure, armchair psychology and Axl Rose is a tired combination but it stands to reason that the only remaining original Guns N' Roses member expected Chinese Democracy to garner a 1990s-style brand-name reception: MTV would block off hours at a time to premiere its videos, fans desperate for real rock would line up at Sam Goodys nationwide for the midnight record release, and school would be forsaken to blast it on speakers the size of Greg Oden. Instead, "Shackler's Revenge" debuted on a video game, as if Gn'R were just some chump band on the come-up (or Aerosmith), and the album's world premiere found it meekly whispering through tinny computer speakers from a very un-rock MySpace page.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Chinese Democracy is that it's about the fifth-most shocking Guns N' Roses album. Sure, it's difficult to endure both Use Your Illusions in one sitting, but there's something fascinating about how the bombastically lonely "Estranged" could share disc space with the junior-high politicking of "Civil War", "Yesterdays"' concise, sepia-toned pop, and the critic-baiting tantrum "Get in the Ring". Had that record been a career-ender, it would've been a fitting finale. Instead, Axl took 17 years to, we hoped, explore new textures, manipulate songwriting conventions, seek out challenging collaborators, or delve into unfamiliar genres for inspiration. Yet on the way to being this decade's Sgt. Peppers, Chinese Democracy became its Be Here Now-- a record of relatively simple, similar songs overdubbed into a false sense of complexity in a horrorshow of modern production values.
Fans have long complained about Guns N' Roses still existing in the absence of Slash, Izzy, and even Duff, partially out of their talents, partially out of their iconography, and partially because there's no evidence Axl was an auteur figure who could work without his supporting cast. Judging from the personnel involved in the making of Chinese Democracy-- there were 18 musicians in all, not including orchestra players or the more than 30 who provided engineering and ProTools assistance-- it may be more appropriate now to think of Guns N' Roses as a free-floating creative project, even while the music itself suggests a more corporeal entity: The title track, after opening on a seemingly-interminable fade-in (it's been 17 years, another minute gonna kill ya?), pummels your ears with brickwalled, textureless power chords, the first of what seems like thousands of wah solos, and a xylophone. Initially, it's exciting to hear modern rock rendered in such operatic largesse, but the track ultimately proves insubstantial, a middle-aged symphony to nowhere.
This is generally how the rockers go on Chinese Democracy, clocking in at anywhere from nearly five minutes to just over five minutes, using those minor-third/flatted-fifth riffs co-opted by far shittier bands in Gn'R's absence. You also get a couple of piano-led ballads aiming at radio stations that don't exist anymore, while songs like "Catcher in the Rye" and "This I Love" conjure Journey and REO Speedwagon, except you can't really sing along to them. There is, however, a level of craftsmanship that salvages Chinese Democracy as a listening experience-- Axl's voice sounds surprisingly great, and even "Shackler's Revenge" has an ultrasheen gloss that particularly benefits its chorus. The problem lies with Axl’s creative direction: That same song is derailed by a grinding arrangement that suggests he's still looking to Korn records for inspiration.
It's that flaw which ultimately delivers the fatal blow. Even if Chinese Democracy had dropped a decade previous, it would still sound dated. 1996 appears to be the cut-off point for sonic inspiration, a time when the height of electronic and rock synergy in pop music involved having an acoustic guitar and a drum machine on the same track. Fans deserve better than hearing Axl trying to fight with post-NIN nobodies like Stabbing Westward and Gravity Kills for ideas. "Better" and the closing "Prostitute" feature memorable, fluid melodies, but are tied to rudimentary Roland tracks that Steven Adler could've replicated in his sleep, and while "I.R.S." sports an Illusion-sized chorus, it's dampened by empty conspiracy theorizing.
To that point, Chinese Democracy is inevitably and sadly limited in scope to the actual making of Chinese Democracy. Apart from a handful of appropriately vague love songs, Axl seems convinced that the only thing that's mattered to us over the past 17 years was anticipating whether "Riad and the Bedouins" might ever see its proper release. Anyone outside of Axl's inner circle appears lumped into some royal "you" and thrust into a meta exercise to be held up as evidence of a defiantly achieved victory: "All things are possible/ I am unstoppable," "No one ever told me when I was alone/ They just thought I'd know better," and most pointedly, "It was a long time for you/ It was a long time for me/ It'd be a long time for anyone/ But looks like it was meant to be."
Strangely, Chinese Democracy comes off like the inverse of the record it will likely finish behind on the week's Billboard chart, Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak-- one terribly protracted and isolated, the other dashed off and intensely personal. And yet, both feel humanizing in proving that even megacelebrities can deal with life-altering pain and expectations and still have little to say about it.
In an April Fools' review of Chinese Democracy written two years ago, Chuck Klosterman suggested that if it wasn't the greatest album ever released, it would be seen as a complete failure. Chinese Democracy needed to be a spectacle-- something that either validated its tortuous birthing process or a Hindenberg so horribly panned it would somehow validate Rose as a misunderstood genius. Instead, it's simply a prosaic letdown, constructed by a revolving cast of misfits ultimately led astray by a control freak with unlimited funding and no clear purpose, who even now remains more myth than artist.


On their fifth album, San Francisco progressive metal band Hammers of Misfortune ditch their penchant for overblown concepts, get a new vocalist, and focus on 50 minutes of old-school riffing that could appeal to fans of titans like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest.

17th Street

Hammers of Misfortune's fifth album, 17th Street, is a song cycle about "loss and endings," though it sounds like a series of new beginnings. For starters, guitarist/lyricist/songwriter John Cobbett-- of recently disbanded SF black metal group Ludicra and onetime member of comrades-in-classic-metal/sister band Slough Feg-- has again retooled his rotating cast: Longtime drummer Chewy Marzolo returns, as do more recent additions Sigrid Sheie (organ) and Max Barnett (bass), but this is the first HoM album to feature guitarist Leila Abdul-Rauf (Saros, Amber Asylum, Vastum) and power-piped vocalist Joe Hutton (the Worship of Silence).
The band, which debuted in 2001 with the three-part rock opera The Bastard, have never shied from ambition. When I spoke with Cobbett in 2008, he said HoM's 2003 sophomore collection The August Engine was his "first attempt" to make an album as big as The Wall. 2008's sprawling Fields/Church of Broken Glass, two individual concept albums packaged together, was his second. But the music Cobbett writes is detailed enough that he doesn't need to fill four sides of vinyl to make his point. He's finally figured that out on 17th Street.
At a time when fans can get caught-up on how fast someone solos, or how ominous a back story they have to offer, HoM shake aside gimmicks and play classic progressive metal in a way that makes room for thrash, doom, NWOBHM, and legit hooks alongside honest feeling and larger concepts. Cobbett didn't spell out the specifics in the record's accompanying press materials; his songwriting and lyrics are evocative enough that it isn't necessary. These are songs about gentrification (in his hometown and elsewhere), paeans to areas of San Francisco, and stories about individuals living out their lives in those spaces-- though it's easy to ignore all of that and just go along for the air-guitaring.
Cobbett's said working with Abdul-Rauf got him to return to writing songs for the electric guitar, a claim consistently backed up by this record's incredibly emotive, vintage riffs. On opener "317", guitars entangle with a swaggering, synchronized momentum until one spirals out like the album cover's splayed lights of San Francisco. Two and a half minutes of instrumental music pass before Hutton gets all Walt Whitman with it: "We are the soil becoming dust/ We are the chrome becoming rust," etc. But even without the voice, the song's plenty expressive. It's followed by the the speedier, punchier "17th Street" with its doubled female harmonies, slick (then crunchy) guitars, and spacious organ. Lyrically, it's a focused study of a "ruthless" street outside a window (in, what you expect, is any city, anywhere), reminiscent of William T. Vollmann's descriptions of the Tenderloin district. Musically, it gallops, but maintains a 1970s airiness.
The best track, "The Grain", is a seven-minute "love" song that has guitars mirroring the vocal lines amid a number of space-stretching pastoral breakdowns. It culminates, over and over, with an anthemic multi-person chorus that you'll try to sing along with even if you can't possibly hit the notes. As far as these sorts of moments go, there's also "The Day the City Died", an ode to those cities and the places their inhabitants are heading: "This one's called I'm getting addicted/ This one's called I'm getting evicted/ This one's called another one moving away." It has a punkier vibe, but filtered through flamboyant 80s metal and, of course, scorching guitar solos. There's also a seven-minute piano-powered ballad, "Summer Tears", that had me reaching for my Queensryche albums for the first time since high school.
That's important. 17th Street is one of those metal albums that could appeal to fans of Judas Priest, Rush, Thin Lizzy, Iron Maiden, Dream Theater-- lifers not in the know about the current underground, who would stumble upon these 50 minutes of old-school riffing and (actual) singing and fall in love. And, even if you have been keeping track of what's bubbling beneath the mainstream, this is in a class of its own. Cobbett's a talent, one who makes well-considered, carefully crafted music, the kind of stuff that would work well in stadiums if metal of this sort could still fill them.


The full-length follow-up to Ys is no less ambitious, but this 3xLP set also has some of the most inviting and accessible songs of Newsom's career.

Have One on Me

It was a little disturbing at first to hear that Joanna Newsom's full-length follow-up to the ambitious and polarizing Ys would be a triple album. Where 2004's The Milk-Eyed Mender was an unusual record with its share of quirks (her squeaky voice and fondness for arcane language, the harp), it also had its simple pleasures. Most of the tracks were short and the sound was spare; you pretty much liked it or you didn't based on how you felt about Newsom's sound and her ability to put a song together. Ys, on the other hand, was unapologetically dense. The five songs averaged more than 10 minutes each, and through them Newsom sang continuously; Van Dyke Parks' arrangements were similarly relentless, seeming to comment upon and embellish almost every line. It was a rewarding album-- filled with memorable turns of phrase and impressive storytelling. Many were enthralled, and almost everyone at least admired it. But in comparison to Milk-Eyed, Ys took some serious work to crack. So when I heard that Newsom would be following it with a 3xLP set called Have One on Me, I had troubling visions of 25-minute songs with lyrics that stretched to 5,000 words.
As it turns out, Have One on Me is a "triple album" in the vinyl sense, in the same way that the Flaming Lips' Embryonic is a "double album," even though it fits onto one CD. There are 18 songs here, and they total about two hours. To pick a couple of reference points from the CD era, that's the same length as Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and just a bit longer than Biggie's Life After Death. Two hours is a lot of music, but having it broken into three discs, each the length of a 1970s LP, helps. You can dip into Have One on Me at a given point, listen for a while, and move on to something else. But while the album invites sampling, I've found myself returning to a different section each time I sit down with it. The highlights are spread out evenly, and Newsom couldn't have sequenced the record any better.
While songs here evoke moments of Ys and Milk-Eyed and Newsom's harp is still the dominant musical focus, it's striking how much Have One on Me feels like its own thing. Not a progression, exactly, more of a deepening. You can feel roots going down and an edifice being built. Her voice has gained depth and she sings with more force and clarity, so that's part of it. And the arrangements are more judicious and draw less attention to themselves (some tracks are just harp, others add horns, strings, and percussion, but with a lighter touch). But the bigger difference seems to be the overall mood, which is expansive and welcoming. The best songs feel more like conversations rather than artworks to be hung on the wall and admired from several paces away. Newsom seems to sing from somewhere deep inside of them, and her earthy presence has a way of drawing you in, bringing you closer to her music than you've been before.
The name you'll most hear in discussion of this record is Joni Mitchell. Part of it is that Newsom can sound a fair bit like her with her more richly textured voice. Sometimes, almost eerily so, like on "In California" (the way she wraps the vocal melody around the evocative title word is just a few miles up the PCH from Blue's "California"). In addition to her voice and phrasing, the more approachable songs here, from the stirring harp-and-voice ballads "Jackrabbits" and "Esme" to the funny, weird, and hugely appealing road song "Good Intentions Paving Company", have bluesy chord progressions that stand in stark contrast to the rigid folk modes of Ys. These songs sway and heave with a warmth and approachability that are new for Newsom. They, and several others like them, offer a fresh way into Newsom's music for the curious.
"The phantom of love moves among us at will," goes a line in "Esme". Most of the songs here deal with love in some form, another quality that connects Have One on Me to the broader singer-songwriter tradition. Sometimes the love is romantic; other times its about friendship or family. Newsom sometimes approaches the subject from her elliptical perch, talking in pictures-- "Each phantom-limb lost has got an angel (so confused, like the wagging bobbed-tail of a bulldog)," is the line that follows the one above in "Esme". But though Newsom indulges her gift for imagery early and often, Have One on Me has moments of simplicity and directness, where the tangled phrases can be boiled down to, "Life can be difficult and lonely and we all need love, but holding on to it can be hard."
One significant difference between Newsom and Mitchell is that the latter, especially early in her career, was writing songs that would sound good on the radio. For better or worse, Newsom is not a pop singer-- that's just not what she does. So I don't want to overstate this record's accessibility. A few tracks here, especially longer ones like the title track and "Kingfisher", approach the winding density that marked Ys. On these, song structure is elusive-- at any given moment you're not sure if you're listening to a verse, chorus, or bridge. The lyric sheet helps a bit, but with two hours of music to digest, you won't feel too guilty about using the skip button here and there, or digesting the record in pieces. Helpfully, returning to the most immediate songs causes their charm and appeal to bleed into the tracks that surround them-- so the album seems to grow and change as you listen.
Have One on Me begins with "Easy", about a wish for the kind of life the title suggests, and closes with "Does Not Suffice", which finds the narrator packing up a house to leave after a breakup, putting away all that reminds her lover of how "easy [she] was not." The latter is subtitled "In California, Refrain", it uses a similar gospel-inflected progression as the earlier song, and it's flat-out gorgeous, heavy with sadness ("the tap of hangers swaying in the closet") but also exhibiting quiet dignity and strength. It's my favorite song here, and it comes last, which is a dependable sign that I'll be returning to an album often. When I hear Newsom sing the word "easy" in "Suffice" and my mind jumps back to the opener, it reinforces just how many threads she's weaved between those songs and how incredible it is to discover new things with every listen.


After bowing out at the peak of the trap wave they helped usher in, Hudson Mohawke and Lunice return for their first EP in seven years, sounding as irreverent and unruly as when they started.

II EP

In 2012, Hudson Mohawke and Lunice’s joint project TNGHT burst into the public consciousness with a singular goal: Write bangers. After months of building excitement off the back of a legendary live debut at SXSW, they released their beloved self-titled EP, bridging the gap between experimental club music and Southern hip-hop while inadvertently becoming standard-bearers for the burgeoning “festival trap” sound that had begun invading American EDM. With their eye-watering bass and surgical drum programming, TNGHT classics like “Goooo” and “Higher Ground” set a new watermark for such obnoxious, body-shaking tracks. Soon enough, big record labels began to swarm the duo like koi fish flocking to flakes.
Then, at the height of their influence, TNGHT hung up their hats until further notice, wary of becoming pigeonholed and unwilling to associate themselves with the “bro-ish” bombast of DJs imitating their sound. The break was inevitable; after all, TNGHT was always an outlet for HudMo and Lunice to embrace the base desires they rarely indulged in their solo work, a fun side gig where “first thought, best thought” was the undergirding principle. Now, at a time when electronic acts have grown increasingly obsessed with crafting imaginary worlds to contextualize their conceptualist music, TNGHT have returned with a new set of absurdist dancefloor weapons.
Irreverent fun is the primary ethos of II. Listening to the EP’s eight tracks, you can practically imagine HudMo and Lunice in the studio, cackling and egging each other on as they scroll through a software synthesizer’s tackiest presets: How ridiculous is that sound? Wouldn’t it be hilarious if we used that one? The stiff flutes and chintzy brass on the dembow cut “First Body” sound like they’re straight out of GarageBand, but in HudMo and Lunice’s capable hands, they’re warped into an addictive hook. Cheesy rave synths dominate the mid-album highlight “Club Finger,” which feels like a spiritual successor to their last pre-hiatus single (and arguably hardest-hitting tune to date), “Acrylics.” It’s obvious that TNGHT are no longer concerned with whether rappers (or anybody, for that matter) can follow along with these beats, which only grow increasingly erratic as II goes on.
Having opted out of the trap wave, the two producers now channel their experimental spirit into more varied tempos and genres. “Dollaz” is probably the closest thing to a pure return to form: A trunk-rattling sternum-shaker built around incessant vocal samples that lodge themselves into your brain. Elsewhere, they dabble in SOPHIE-esque distortion (“Gimme Summn”) and crushed trance breakdowns (“I’m in a Hole”). Much of the latter track, with its distorted subs and tight snares, is reminiscent of Kanye West’s menacing single “All Day,“ which HudMo helped get to the finish line during his time in the G.O.O.D. Music camp.
In the years following their break, TNGHT’s legacy was defined by their outsized influence on rap-influenced EDM, as well as another Kanye cut, “Blood on the Leaves,” the breathtaking Yeezus standout that sampled the duo’s unreleased song “R U Ready.” In comparison to II, the early releases now sound borderline ostentatious—not because they’ve aged poorly, but because hordes of copycats, from SoundCloud wannabes to soft-drink brands, have dulled the edges of a once novel idea. But that’s what happens when you’re an innovator; everyone tries to jack your style, even if they only scratch the surface of what makes you special, diluting the quality of the sound you pioneered. Released from all possible constraints—no obligations, no “scene,” no hype machine behind them—HudMo and Lunice are now free to pursue every imaginable whim. There might be no going back to 2012, but there will always be new ways to fuck up some nightclub speakers.


Equally indebted to pioneering girl groups and her punk heroes, the New York singer-songwriter’s debut is a fiery exploration of love, anger, and coming-of-age.

Death of a Cheerleader

In 1999, a satirical comedy film called But I’m a Cheerleader proposed an astonishing lead character: a cheerleader who isn’t quite like the other girls on her team. She gets whisked away to a hilariously straight-laced conversion-therapy camp on the suspicion that she might be—gasp—gay. “I’m a cheerleader!” she whines in hesitation, as if this makes it impossible to fall outside societal norms. The movie marked a memorable early instance of the divergent cheerleader, an increasingly popular trope that drives the creative mind of 23-year-old singer-songwriter Mia Berrin, who makes bratty grunge-punk as Pom Pom Squad. On her debut, Death of a Cheerleader, the New York musician stakes her claim to pleated miniskirt canon, joining the ranks of those who’ve weaponized cheer imagery to disrupt convention.
Cribbing its title from another movie about a popular high school girl with a secret, Death of a Cheerleader marks a period of self-acceptance for Berrin. The album came about partially as a reckoning with her own queerness, as well as with her multiracial identity, which she didn’t see represented in the indie rock world: “Rock was invented by a Black queer woman—Sister Rosetta Tharpe—but I grew up feeling like I was odd for loving guitar-based music,” she explains in press materials. Self-produced alongside Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin, Death of a Cheerleader is an amalgam of Berrin’s influences, which span Billie Holiday, riot grrrl bands, and angsty cult films. Equally indebted to pioneering girl groups as well as her punk heroes, the album is a fiery and compelling—albeit slightly uneven—exploration of love, anger, and coming-of-age.
Informed by her own memories of pairing Dr. Martens with her school uniform and perusing cool-girl bible Rookie Mag after class, Berrin alludes to adolescent rebellion throughout Death of a Cheerleader. She recalls kisses stolen under the bleachers on “Head Cheerleader”: “You should ask your mother what she means/She said stay away from girls like me,” she sings. On the brutally hot-blooded “Lux,” she envisions herself attending the homecoming dance as the eponymous protagonist of The Virgin Suicides, delivering several of the album’s best lines in one fell swoop: “How do you expect me to figure myself out when I cannot tell the difference between bad and good attention?” she roars, evoking Kathleen Hanna’s snarl in a swell of guitar noise.
Elsewhere on Death of a Cheerleader, Berrin falls into a softer, more romantic mode, though its effectiveness varies. In the middle of the album is a cover of Tommy Jones and the Shondells’ 1968 classic “Crimson and Clover” that does little to revamp the original; between punkier moments like “Lux” or “Shame Reactions,” Berrin’s version feels out of place. Other songs like “Forever” and “Be Good” also tap into a ’60s pop aesthetic, but come off feeling too temperate. Berrin’s cheerleader character serves as a culmination of the identities and influences that made her, though it seems she’s still refining what that means for her music. The “death” of the album’s title feels more like a disavowal of arbitrary expectations—both those about cheerleaders themselves and about how a queer woman of color ought to present herself in rock music. “It was empowering, in a way, to put on the bitch costume and be the bitch,” Berrin has said of her stage persona. Death of a Cheerleader strives to pass the torch to like-minded underdogs with aspirations to someday become that girl, too.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On her exhilarating Hyperdub debut, the London electronic musician slathers on processed vocals in thick, inky layers, breaking feverishly free of the rhythmic grid.

Tommy EP

The rise of digital production techniques means that listeners tend to expect a certain clinical perfection in modern recorded music. Glitches are edited out and beats, confined to strict rhythmic grids, could run in perfect sync until the end of our days. Occasionally, though, an electronic artist will emerge who eschews the tight, rhythmic mapping of the sequencer in favor of cruder electronic tools. Burial once claimed to make music with the basic audio-editing program Sound Forge, and the wildly promising London producer Klein told FACT earlier this year that she uses Audacity, the freebie audio editor beloved of penniless media students everywhere, to arrange her music, recording hours of piano, guitar, and vocals that she later chops up and manipulates into strange new sounds.
In the same interview Klein says that she uses her voice as her primary instrument, pushing her vocal tones to see how high and how low they can go. Tommy, Klein’s first release for Hyperdub after the self-released Lagata and Only EPs of 2016, builds on this approach. But whereas her earlier records were relatively spacious, Tommy sees Klein slather on vocals—from herself, her collaborators, and in sampled snippets—in thick, inky layers, manipulating her source material until the voices sound tarnished, rotting, and irregular. The result is music that overwhelms with its sickly density: a flawed, chaotic structure that feels both solid and strangely vulnerable, like a huge, poorly constructed skyscraper.
“Prologue,” which opens the EP, is a brilliant example of Klein’s modus operandi. It starts with the abrupt, discombobulating rumble of processed piano chords, as if the listener has been dropped into the studio mid-session, followed by 20 seconds of random chatter. A lone voice starts singing a melody, which is then processed and pitched into a sound that is part human and part machine, the output of an Auto-Tune unit that has gotten bored and gone rogue. Slowly, more voices join and are themselves pulled in and out of focus, as the volume and intensity build and contract. “Prologue” is messy and feverish, the refracted, despairing sound of a chorus of ghosts calling from the bottom of the sea. It’s an intense, discomforting listen but never less than visceral in its impact.
What makes this destructive approach particularly fascinating is that Klein—a fan of both Brandy and Andrew Lloyd Webber—can clearly write pop hooks, which she dangles in front of the listener like a conniving angler. “Cry Theme” starts with a fragment of catchy vocal melody, which is pitch-shifted into chipmunk territory as a spectral chorus echoes underneath; “Tommy” seems to initially borrow from 1950s-style doo-wop harmonies, while “Everlong” pulls a similarly teasing trick with the kind of earworm acoustic guitar riff you could imagine introducing a minor R&B hit in the late 1990s. Hidden deep among the EP’s opaque sonic layers are beautiful vocal and instrumental parts, which Klein occasionally allows to emerge from the mix like body parts floating to the top of a muddy river, before dragging them back under in a brilliantly contrarian act.
If Klein’s sound is maximalist, though, her source material is anything but, cooked up largely from piano, guitar, and vocal snippets. Drums don’t make an appearance until five tracks in, on the brilliant “Runs Reprise,” where a helium R&B hook is rudely interrupted by a lurching, unsteady bass-drum thump and a furiously distorted breakbeat that rivals the bloodied intensity of Squarepusher’s best programming. It is a mark of the song’s almost unbearable density that when “Runs Reprise” finishes (barring a long, disorienting echo) just 37 seconds in, the listener feels overcome rather than underwhelmed. Elsewhere, an eerie synth drone and more frantic breakbeats give “B2k” the air of early ’90s jungle cut with ringing piano chords and snatches of a commercial R&B, rendered in an off-grid time signature that suggests a supreme disdain for musical convention.
That “B2k” is one of the more straightforward tracks on Tommy says a lot about the fearsome originality of Klein’s music. While she may borrow from R&B and pop, Klein’s output has more in common with the abstract impressionism of Jackson Pollock. Such intensity makes Tommy a difficult and even exhausting listen, despite a running time of just 25 minutes. But as Captain Beefheart and the Shaggs have shown in the past—and as Klein demonstrates now—stepping off the musical path that leads to standardized perfection can prove hugely rewarding.


Television / Adventure: Marquee Moon / Adventure

Marquee Moon / Adventure

These reissues arrive just a few months too late to catch the red-hot apex of 70s New York revivalism, but that doesn't mean they're any less welcome: with all the attention Television have received lately, it's been strange to see their masterpiece, Marquee Moon, stuck in a bin with all the other old classics at the record store, in a barebones edition with a blue "Super Saver" sticker on the wrapper.
Television, along with the other 70s legends that inspired the recent reintroduction of guitars, punk and garage-rock to the mainstream, are continually rediscovered by new breeds of NYC hipsters looking to start their own bands. The group's place in history has been resacramented again and again, so by now the backstory's old hat-- you know, the one about them kicking Richard Hell out of the band before they cut their first single, playing gigs and publishing verse with Patti Smith, and talking the owner of the then-unknown CBGB's to host shows of other genres than just "country, bluegrass, and blues" (which also makes them largely to blame for all those people that wear the club's t-shirts).
You can read first-hand accounts and second-hand analyses of all these events, and one thing you'll uncover is the debate over how "punk" Television was. Sure, they joined the movement from the beginning, playing out as early as 1973, and they harnessed the energy you associate with punk, even as they crossed it with art-rock and the poetic urges of frontman Tom Verlaine (nee Miller, renamed after the French poet-- but not in a fey way). But they were also a rock band that roared through long, tense jams: When I first heard "Marquee Moon", it somehow felt like I'd already been exposed to it on a classic rock station wedged between Steve Miller and Skynyrd.
With all that context, the most interesting thing about picking up Television's Marquee Moon-- today, for us folks who weren't old enough to buy the first edition vinyl-- is how ahistorical it sounds. If you listen to their original Brian Eno-produced demos, you hear a scragglier, faster band that's less confident and more... punk? If nothing else, the band at least sounded closer to the sometimes-sloppy Bowery clubrats Eno must have taken them for on those early tapes. Their sound on Marquee Moon, though, is clean, raw and simple. The band never breaks for a squall of energy, yet the whole record crackles with it, and they never rely on atmosphere to make their case. Billy Ficca's drums and Fred Smith's bass are extra lean and crisp, and the band's so tight that even the "Did you feel low?" call-and-response on "Venus de Milo" sounds amusingly rehearsed. The only rough edge is Tom Verlaine's striking warble, a somewhat choked-off tenor influenced either by Patti Smith or by someone kicking him in the throat.
But the things that make the record so classic, that pump your blood like a breath of clean air, are the guitars. This whole record's a mash note to them. The contrast between these two essential leads is stunning: Richard Lloyd chisels notes out hard while Verlaine works with a subtle twang and a trace of space-gazing delirium. They play lines that are stately and chiming, rutting and torrential, the riff, the solo, the rare power chord, and most of all, the power note: the second pang on the riff to "Venus de Milo" lands like a barbell; the opening bars of "See No Evil" show one axe rutting the firmament while the other spirals razorwire around it.
If Jose Feliciano had rearranged "Marquee Moon" the way he ruined "Light My Fire"-- by emphasizing the melody and lyrics and ditching the solos-- he'd have failed Television even worse than he did The Doors; every part of the song is a bridge to the monstrous Verlaine showpiece, and yet his guitar solo has no bombast: it climbs and soars in tangible increments, edging its way up scales and pounding like a contained explosion. The structural integrity makes this an Eiffel Tower in a world of Burning Men: in a decade full of guitarists spraying sweat on the arenas, Verlaine comes off like a man punching through ceilings.
Rhino's remastered release of 1977's Marquee Moon adds a few alternate takes; for example, you can hear "See No Evil" with guitar solos scrawled all over the verses. But you also get the first-ever CD release of "Little Johnny Jewel", a raw single that twangs and skitters around Verlaine's bug-eyed singing. So if you're new to Television but shy about picking up this bedrock masterpiece for the first time, just tell the cutie at the record store that you're buying it for that single, which alone would be worth the price.
With Marquee Moon entrenched in the canon, it's more interesting to revisit their 1978 follow-up, Adventure. This record has always suffered by comparison, mainly because it's so easy to relate it to the first record: the arrangements and the aesthetic are roughly the same, but the music is quieter and more reflective, and that means less horsepower. It's not weak or even very different from their debut, but you might be disappointed when the earth doesn't cave beneath your feet.
There isn't a weak song here, even if you count the abandoned title track, which is restored here as a bonus cut. "Carried Away", the best ballad on either album, floats away on an organ instead of a guitar; "The Fire" sounds as melodramatic as "Torn Curtain" but a lot less Stygian. And while "Foxhole" and "Ain't That Nothin'" wouldn't have broken the flow on Marquee Moon, there's a sense that they're going in a different direction but with the same tools. The reissue is great-- especially for the bonus "Ain't That Nothin'" instrumental runthrough-- but a new Television listener would probably be tempted to check out a whole different experience by picking up the live albums, The Blow-Up or Rhino Handmade's new Live at the Old Waldorf.
Television broke up after Adventure, and like typical mid-level rockers who fade away instead of dying, they went on to other projects, cut a reunion album in 1992, and still play occasional shows to this day. Writing this up now, it's hard not to feel out of place as someone too young to have caught their shows while the world is bursting with tributes and nostalgia from the people who loved them back when. But if my generation only inherited the band, then this release enshrines it again as something timeless, like that Greek sculpture the band once namechecked that shows motion and grace no matter what museum it's displayed in. Rhino and labels in the future will keep carbon-dating and explaining Marquee Moon, but sometime in the future, some Martian kid who can't get dates and hates sports will look past the plaque and sit in his room, blaring this music and wondering how life can possibly sound this great.


Blind husband-and-wife duo from Mali team with world music star Manu Chao to create a varied, bright, and charming album.

Dimanche à Bamako

Hollywood doesn't make movies as good as the life story of Amadou & Mariam. Their musical careers stretch back decades-- Amadou Bagayoko played guitar for the legendary Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako beginning in the late 1960s. At Bamako's Institute for Young Blind People, Bagoyoko met Mariam Doumbia, and the pair forged two parallel partnerships, one in marriage and the other in music. Their parents approved of neither. They began their recording career in the 1980s the way so many other African artists have-- traveling hundreds of miles to Abidjan in Cote D'Ivoire, which until recently was one of the cultural and economic centers of Francophone West Africa, to make cassettes and perform. Within a decade, they were playing in Europe and cutting all kinds of new influences into their sound, from Cuban son and horn-spiked funk to reggae and Delta blues, and Western labels were giving them the compilation treatment. Now, with Dimanche à Bamako, the blind couple from Mali seems well-poised to make a huge splash, though it's likely that the mainstream attention they get in the rest of the world will far outpace what they get in the U.S.
For Dimanche, the duo and their backing band brought in Manu Chao, a world music superstar famous just about everywhere outside of the United States, and the dividend is a varied, bright, and charming album. While Chao's beat-conscious eclecticism makes this Amadou & Mariam's most accessible album (to Western ears, that is), it also comes at the expense of some of the organic directness of their past records. Still, that's more than made up for by the incredible style salad they've dreamed up, one which Chao's airy production and love of field recordings holds together quite well.
In fact, you might hear something like this album driving through the streets of Bamako with the windows open, the way snatches of street noise, sirens, and voices drift through. Both Amadou & Mariam sing (Chao's voice is everywhere as well), and they're both restrained, smooth vocalists, especially compared to some of Mali's biggest stars, Salif Keita and Mory Kante. As such, this probably makes them more suited to chunky r&b; and Western pop than their countrymen, and indeed, were it sung in English, Amadou's thrilling descending chorus on "Politic Amagni" sounds like something you might hear blasting from a car at an American stoplight.
As pleasing as his voice is, Amadou's real talent is reserved for the guitar, an instrument he plays with supple, liquid skill. He reels off roiling lines and droning desert blues with graceful dexterity, reflecting influences as wide-ranging as Bembeya Jazz's Sekou Diabate, Robert Johnson, and Saharan guitar and oud music. Opener "M'bife" proceeds in two parts, the first being the proper song, featuring Mariam's starkly unadorned voice over male harmonies, percussion and strummed guitar; the second is a buoyant, thumping instrumental that intertwines rhythmic guitar interplay with tumbling balafon, a West African marimba with a slightly sharper sound than the marimbas we're used to.
Single "Coulibaly" layers male/female harmonies and bluesy guitar licks over a dense foundation of swirling rhythm guitars and clattering percussion, while "La Realite" brims with siren samples and off-beat organ. "La Fete au Vilage" sounds ancient by comparison with its modal guitar and traded verses, though granted it's unlikely that tablas could have made it into the background of a Malian folk song prior to the last few decades. Mariam flirts briefly with rap on "Camions Sauvages", coming halfway between it and Indian rhythm exercises, and the track highlights how important raw kinetic energy is to the album with an insistent beat framed by Amadou's slow, surf-y strumming.
The album spends a full hour swinging from strength to strength, and by the time it's over, it's clear that it would be a crime if it didn't rocket Amadou & Mariam straight to stardom. It's a shame that in the U.S. it's likely to be smooshed into the world music ghetto, because it demonstrates as well as any recent release just how meaningless the world music tag is-- if anything, it proves that music is perfectly capable of wandering right past borders and across oceans and teaching us that for all of our perceived differences, our cultures and art are compatible. Amadou & Mariam clearly see no boundaries.


Avant-rockers Deerhoof team with the elite contemporary classical outfit Ensemble Dal Niente for a weird and wonderful musical exchange.

Ensemble Dal Niente / Deerhoof: Balter / Saunier

Balter / Saunier

Collaborations between classical players and composers associated with rock are no longer surprising. By now, most Radiohead fans know that Jonny Greenwood writes orchestra works. Fans of Annie Clark and Sufjan Stevens may have seen those singers’ chamber-music pieces show up on albums by groups such as yMusic. One thing that has remained rare, though, is the indie-meets-classical “merged ensemble.” While someone like Bryce Dessner may play guitar in a classical group, we haven’t seen him include his bandmates from the National in any original items written for the Kronos Quartet.
So it is genuinely notable to find the members of Deerhoof hanging with an elite contemporary classical group like Ensemble Dal Niente. Even more impressive is the fact that the Deerhoof players aren’t here to perform arrangements of their own music. Instead, this collaborative album opens with Dal Niente and Deerhoof tearing through a seven-movement suite by Brazilian-American composer Marcos Balter, titled "meltDown Upshot." This 23-minute opus takes full advantage of this mega-ensemble’s chamber chops and rock edge—just like you’d hope—but it doesn’t stop there. When he’s not indulging in minimalist-inspired patterns or proggy progressions, Balter also includes some gestures that sound copped from the world of avant-jazz.
That’s a lot of textures for any one composer to handle well. Though Balter pulls it off. His writing engages with the diverse talents of this group without ever feeling choppy. The contemplative first movement, “Credo,” places the delicate (but confident) vocals of Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki over writing for strings and piano that often glides over the minor second interval—a doleful semitone hop that receives tender-lullaby handling, here. The second movement introduces Greg Saunier’s drums and Ed Rodriguez’s electric guitar arpeggios, and it has a lightly propulsive feel.
A hint of manic writing announces the third movement, “Ready,” which is packed full of short, exciting riffs for the full ensemble, as well as saxophone squall and fast-moving vocal figures. Plucked strings, piano and Saunier’s drums animate the memorable “True/False.” Later on, “Cherubim” builds on the indie-power first introduced during “Ready.” This time, the drums and guitars hit harder—yet they don’t obscure the contributions of the Dal Niente players, either. And while this passage represents the height of freneticism during "meltDown Upshot," the climax of the piece is delivered by the more optimistic-sounding harmonies of “Rapture,” the closing movement. Overall, this feels like a major composition from Balter. And it’s also a triumph for the musicians of Dal Niente and Deerhoof. The performance comes from a group that sounds like a group, rather than two bands taking a flier on a cross-genre experiment.
On the record's other long track, Dal Niente play the music of Deerhoof, as newly arranged by Saunier himself. Though, in keeping with the band’s own fragmented aesthetic, these aren’t straight-up transcriptions. The stomping chords from the beginning of “Rainbow Silhouette of the Milky Rain” (originally heard on the album Milk Man) have been pulled apart a bit in the version that appears almost four minutes into "Deerhoof Chamber Variations." Now the barnstorming line sounds more akin to the work of John Adams, circa that composer’s madcap Chamber Symphony.
Touches like these keep Saunier’s recasting of various Deerhoof themes from seeming under-thought. But even when the music is smart and attractive, the roving unpredictability of the band’s own performances is not always captured by these arrangements. Nor does the overall shape of this 20-minute work have the same force as Balter’s major piece. Still, Dal Niente’s playing is always vibrant, and it’s interesting to hear Saunier stretching in this way. Deerhoof and Dal Niente are both plenty busy with their more typical efforts, but their joint-venture debut sounds far too good to be a one-off.


A trio of reissues from Merge and Third Man capture the L.A. punk veterans at two very different points in their career, tracking their growth from scrappy dilettantes to swaggering glam rockers.

Redd Kross: Red Cross EP / Phaseshifter / Show World

In a 1993 feature on his band Redd Kross, singer/bassist Steve McDonald bemoaned the fate of the group he started with his older brother Jeff in the late 1970s. “We’ve always been ahead of our time,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “We make records, and five years later another band has success with the sounds we’d already done.” At the time, that probably felt like the case, as some of the band’s most vocal fans, like Stone Temple Pilots’ Scott Weiland, were scoring multi-platinum sales by applying the same formula—’70s glam meets underground rock—that Redd Kross nailed on their second full-length, 1987’s Neurotica.
But listening to the work that Redd Kross did in the ’90s, the truth is much simpler. That’s particularly true of Phaseshifter and Show World, the two fine albums they cut for Mercury Records that were recently reissued on vinyl by Third Man Records. To paraphrase a song by Brian Wilson, another songwriter that hailed from the McDonalds’ hometown of Hawthorne, California, Redd Kross weren’t made for that time. They have always looked and sounded like a throwback to a bygone era of rock, no matter what the calendar said at the time.
That wasn’t always the case. When the McDonald brothers started making music together, they were caught up in the swell of punk rock, cadging rides from their folks to see X and the Dickies, and making a three-chord racket in their garage. They were enterprising enough to look up the phone numbers belonging to members of their favorite groups and bug them for a shot. Only one band took the bait, and before they knew it Red Cross, as they were known at the time, had their first gig opening up for Black Flag. Steve was all of 12 years old.
This is the period captured in another Redd Kross reissue: an expanded edition on Merge Records, their current label, of the group’s 1980 debut EP. The vinyl/CD re-release adds on a handful of demos and a live track recorded at the former Baptist church where Black Flag rehearsed. It’s capped off by some fantastic photos of the fresh-faced group—which at the time included Greg Hetson (Circle Jerks, Bad Religion) on guitar and early Flag vocalist Ron Reyes on drums—in all their precocious glory.
Heard some four decades on, the cookie-cutter punk of Red Cross sounds downright adorable. All six songs are wobbly and sloppy and fast—only two tracks are over a minute long—but played with undeniable enthusiasm. True to their tender age, the McDonalds sing silly screeds about spoiled rich kids, jocks, and cover bands.
The brothers’ punk inclinations on this EP masked their fondness for pop. Lyrical gripes about Kiss and the Knack in “Cover Band” belied the truth that the McDonalds were actually big fans of both, and the titles of “Annette’s Got the Hits” and “Fun With Connie,” the overblown live track that closes this reissue, are references to ’60s pop icons Annette Funicello and Connie Francis. Fast forward just a few years and the veil would be completely removed. The McDonalds and their bandmates played up their influences, dressing in loud thrift-store duds and recording covers of the Partridge Family, Bowie, and Charles Manson.
By the ’90s, Redd Kross were nowhere nearer the top of the charts, despite some valiant efforts and a lot of expense on behalf of their labels (Atlantic Records supposedly spent nearly $200,000 to promote 1990’s Third Eye). But a new deal with Mercury held some promise for the group, as did the cultural shift fomented by grunge. What came out of it, though, were two albums hampered by strange decisions and indifference from their label.
Although Phaseshifter was produced by the band—at this point a quintet including keyboardist Gere Fennelly, guitarist Eddie Kurdziel, and future soundtrack guru Brian Reitzell on drums—the thick, brawny sound of the record owes everything to John Agnello, who recorded and mixed the sessions. Perhaps an attempt to apply some hard-rock spunk to their power pop, in the vein of Andy Wallace’s work on Nevermind, the unfortunate results turn hip-swingers like “Jimmy’s Fantasy” and “Visionary” into headbangers and almost entirely bury Fennelly’s contributions. When Agnello releases his grip, the album is a blast, with “Lady in the Front Row” and “Ms. Lady Evans” evoking the luscious camp of the Sweet, and “Pay For Love,” a tune co-written by Jeff’s wife, Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go’s, revealing the thick, sugary zip of a milkshake beneath the power chords and Kurdziel’s yowling solo.
With the help of Mercury’s full-court promotional press (a spot on The Tonight Show, tours with Stone Temple Pilots and the Lemonheads), Phaseshifter was supposed to turn Redd Kross into a sensation, and when it failed to achieve liftoff, the label barely moved a finger for its follow up. The added shame of it is that 1997’s Show World is a little gem of an album. The group found a far more complementary collaborator with co-producer Chris Shaw, who, the year before, had helped Fountains of Wayne achieve power-pop grandeur.
Show World plays like a tour through Redd Kross’ record collection. Explosive acid rocker “Teen Competition” closes side A only to be followed by the ’60s Britpop homage “Follow the Leader” on the flip. The sweaty ballad “Secret Life” gets nestled between “Ugly Town,” which imagines the Righteous Brothers coated in distortion, and the glammy spark of “Vanity Mirror.” In contrast to its often muddy predecessor, the production here feels crisp and colorful, with plenty of open air for Kurdziel’s sharp-toothed and surprising solos to take flight.
Following some perfunctory efforts to promote the album, including a tour with the Presidents of the United States of America, Redd Kross went into a holding pattern for the better part of a decade. In 1999, Kurdziel died from what was reported to be an apparent drug overdose. The McDonalds stayed busy, producing other bands’ work, and Steve found gigs playing bass with Sparks and punk supergroup OFF!  But as artists like Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees started to find success mining a similar sound, Redd Kross were coaxed out of hibernation in 2006. Since then, they have steadily picked up momentum, playing numerous live shows and releasing 2012’s Researching the Blues and 2019’s Beyond the Door on Merge.
Between those new recordings and this recent spate of reissues—which includes 2018’s Record Store Day re-release of Third Eye and repressings of early efforts by the McDonalds on Merge—the world is finally catching up with Redd Kross. Hearing the cheeky ebullience of the first EP and the candied pop sheen of the group’s ’90s work confirms that, even as they sat alongside the biggest names in underground rock, the McDonalds never fit with the trends of the moment. But it’s not so much the case that they were ahead of their time, as Steve McDonald asserted in 1993; for decades, they’ve existed outside it entirely.

Buy: Red Cross EP / Phaseshifter / Show World at Rough Trade
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The Chicago rapper-producer’s new album blankets hedonistic flexes in a layer of frost.

Final Boss

True to his name, ICYTWAT’s music sounds like it emerged from a frozen hell, cold and intense as an Arctic snowstorm. The Chicago rapper-producer distills the airiness of cloud rap, the blown-out noise of rage music, and the bounce of Memphis crunk (particularly When the Smoke Clears-era Three 6 Mafia) into an impish, head-splitting mix. Final Boss, the fifth project he’s released this year, mostly keeps pace with recent work like April’s Have Mercy on Us and July’s 4 Tha Troopz. It’s a collection of hedonistic bangers that shimmer like stalactites.
As a rapper, ICY tends to lean on boilerplate flexing—vague talk of bag chasing, label deals, and endless drugs and sex—but his dead-eyed croak brings texture to his blustery productions. Often he’s the quietest aspect of a given song, whispering while the beats swirl and crash around him. On tracks like “Neva Worried,” he slurs through syllables with a shrug; on “Cut Up” and “They Don’t Hear Me,” he channels the ethereal bounce of Freewave 2-era Lucki. His ad-libs frequently sound like he’s trying to make himself gag, giving songs like “No Settling” and “Topside Freestyle” a jolt of Carti-esque weirdness.
Sonically, the team of producers behind Final Boss largely stick to Icytwat’s script. Cincinnati producer Rocco Roy handles the lion’s share of the beats, including “Onnat,” “See It In Her Eyez,” and “Black Card,” which throb with menace. Memphis producer Scott Romosa’s “Feel Like Pat” is a bit of explicit Three 6 worship that mixes the group’s gothic tendencies with warbling, eardrum-shredding bass. But a handful of outliers slow things down. Detroit’s Topside gives “Topside Freestyle” a muted swing with bass licks and glittering keys that, compared to the rest of the album, feel almost gentle. And while the drums, police sirens, and barking dogs on closing track “Final Boss Music” would induce Resident Evil levels of anxiety on their own, here it’s a reprieve from the chaos, a place for ICY to stretch his limbs while he’s off to “make some muhfuckin’ money.”
ICYTWAT knows exactly what he’s here to deliver: trippy music where odes to designer shades and blowing your label advance slot between punishing, maximal beats. It’s not an especially ambitious approach—he’s not aiming for the bombastic showmanship of Travis Scott or trying to pry open your third eye like his former Divine Council colleague $ilkmoney. Final Boss, like so many ICY projects before it, just wants to keep things cool.


The New York duo MS MR resembles a pop-art design firm, a partnership that happens to offer pop music among other holdings. How Does It Feel is their second full-length album, and the larger sense that they're a smartly conceived rollout plan in search of indelible songs has never really stopped dogging them.

How Does It Feel

The New York duo MS MR resembles a pop-art design firm, a partnership of sorts that happens to offer pop music among other holdings. Lizzy Plapinger and Max Hershenow met as Vassar students, after Plapinger started the label Neon Gold as a thesis project. They rolled out the Candy Bar Creep Show EP on Tumblr in 2012, and their followup debut Secondhand Rapture came with "visual treatments" for all of its songs. Their song titles often feel like songwriting-workshop prompts ("Dark Doo Wop"). Like Marina and the Diamonds, MS MR offer pop that strives to hit its marks and offer something further: the viral hit and reactionary think piece about it, all in one.
How Does It Feel is their second full-length album, and the larger sense that they’re a smartly conceived rollout plan in search of indelible songs has never really stopped dogging them. They seemed interesting in 2012, and they seem interesting in 2015. But the songs don’t speak the same subversive and interesting language of their publicity. Plapinger is a powerful singer, someone who very much sounds like she belongs perched on footlights. But the aesthetics of her songs with Hershenow remain timid and careful: There are no mind-warping sounds to match the visual boldness of their videos, and none of Plapinger’s lyrics have the crisp, memorable economy of her album and song titles. If pop art traffics first in unforgettable iconography, then MS MR fail the basic test: You could be listening to other people when you are listening to MS MR, and it’s often easy to imagine that you are.
If there are no calling-card songs here here, there are several solid ones: "Painted" turns Plapinger’s tense, brittle recitation of the words "What did he think would happen" into a rhythmic tattoo. The song seems to be accelerating slightly for its entire length, obsessive irritation gathering force. On "No Guilt in Pleasure" (another one of those mission-statement style song titles), tiny thumb pianos share space with tarmac-sized synths, while Plapinger dips into the throaty, throbbing lower end of her register. In general, MS MR have a much better feel for "small, tense, and interesting" than they do for "big and soaring"—the verses crackle with friction and ideas, while the choruses taste generic. When "No Guilt in Pleasure" and "Wrong Victory" scale up into their Big Hooks, the flavor drains out of the music as the volume builds.
Plapinger’s lyrics also often clunk where they should soar. The synth-pop "Tunnels" builds a cool and autumnal atmosphere, but Plapinger trips through it with wordy lines like "Silence and motion on this quiet tread/ Searching for lanes that don’t lead to the end." They are conversational in a way that fights the basic impulse of pop lyrics, which is to distill emotions to a fine point. You can usually hear the semicolons in Plapinger’s lyrics, which struggle to wedge layered impressions and fleeting thoughts into the stark, four-color backdrops of the music. This is often a problem when you approach a genre—in MS MR’s case, pop music—with the stated intention of subverting or commenting on it. Genre writing is a complex enough game all by itself. Unless you are blessed with some illuminating thunderclap of genius, your efforts to "subvert" those tropes usually just renders them inert.


Ocean Roar is the second of a pair of albums Phil Elverum recorded on extended break from tour. May's Clear Moon was a dreamy fantasia about home. The midnight-black Ocean Roar, meanwhile, is an experiment in imagined homelessness: It has a facing-the-beast quality of a punishing spiritual quest.

Ocean Roar

Ocean Roar is the second of a pair of albums Phil Elverum recorded recently on extended break from tour. Holed up in a de-sanctified church in the town of Anacortes, Wash., he began making music of heightened attention-- to surroundings, to his consciousness, to nature. The albums are full of the kind of observations you find time to make only when you haven't talked to anyone for a few weeks. May's Clear Moon was a dreamy fantasia about home, its comforts, and also the trickle of anxiety you feel when you are reminded of its fragility. The midnight-black Ocean Roar, meanwhile, is an experiment in imagined homelessness: It has a facing-the-beast quality of a punishing spiritual quest, as if Elverum steeled himself and left his house at midnight, barefoot, and just kept walking.
Clear Moon opened with the faint sigh of a single acoustic guitar-- a tree branch scraping your bedroom window, maybe-- but Ocean Roar's "Pale Lights" opens on a storm, an an ominous churn of organ and drums signaling the imminent arrival of bad feelings. As he always does, Elverum shapes sounds so that they arrive in tantalizing pulses: When he sings, "a small yelp on the wind/ And then, more roaring," over the murk of the music, which has suddenly died down, you are squinting through the album's black-night sound to discern moving shapes just as he is. This odd sensation, of straining to hear music piping through buds wedged directly into your ears, is a good sign that you're in Elverum's world; it gives his music a fragile air, like something that might not survive without your intervention.
Elverum's voice sounds more frail than ever here, flanked by bleak, oppressive towers of electric guitar. He's talked about the influence of black metal on his music before, and it has surfaced sonically on Wind's Poem and elsewhere, but Ocean Roar is the first place you can feel it: The spine-scraping, all-sixteenths tremolo'd guitars of the Popol Vuh cover "Engel Der Luft" channel the tinny evil of early black-metal recordings; "Waves" pounds mercilessly with drum rolls and a nastily distorted bass guitar for nearly its entire running time, with Elverum surfacing only for a moment to mumble the album's title and disappear beneath the noise. He casts himself as a small force lost in the wake of something huge, and seems mostly interested in black metal for its elemental dread.
In the middle of all this gnarled, frozen-gray bleakness, the gentler moments gleam like snow-globe hallucinations. "I Walked Home Beholding" is the charmed center of the record, the moment when the noise clears and Elverum surveys, with his signature quiet awe, the power of nature to bury his small town. It is the kind of redemptive, reassuring note that many might choose to close on; everything's all right, kids, here comes the moon. Or, in Elverum-speak: "Totally at peace with the meaninglessness of living." But the final track, immediately following "I Walked Home", is a seven-minute, tar-thick pulse of droning guitars (one of two slightly overlong instrumentals on this quite short record) that threaten to blot out everything else before them, before cutting off, sharp, hot, and sputtering, trailing abruptly into an unsettled silence. What Elverum wants to convey with this rude closing is unclear, but one thing is certain: The storm, metaphorical or otherwise, has closed back in behind him.


Young Team [Deluxe Edition]

The current decline of the music industry is of course not so much a catastrophic collapse as a simple market correction: a delayed downturn that should've actually begun in the early 1980s, before major labels cajoled consumers into replacing their vinyl collections with shiny CD replications-- thereby artificially padding their bottom lines well into the 90s. But now that record companies have lost control of the means of production, it's funny to see the indie-rock industry resorting to the same behaviour: Making people buy the same albums over and over again, lavishing the reissue treatment not just onto era-defining classics (e.g., Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted: Luxe and Deluxe set), but also on albums that were simply very good. Just this spring alone we're being treated to 15th-anniversary editions of Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville, the Lemonheads' It's a Shame About Ray, and Sebadoh's Bubble and Scrape-- albums that were certainly much admired and analyzed in their 1993 inception, but which in 2008, don't really resonate far beyond nostalgic completists.
By that yardstick, Scottish post-rock perennials Mogwai are jumping the gun somewhat, reissuing their debut full-length album, Young Team, in an expanded double-disc edition barely a decade after it first appeared, and given that they've released a steady stream of mildly variable albums since then, it's not as if we've had much of a chance to miss them. But in this particular case, the reissue serves more of a practical than a canonical function-- the label that released Young Team in the U.S. in 1997, Jetset, went kaput several years ago, making what is still the band's most cohesive and consistently bracing album the hardest to find on these shores. But the timing is all the more appropriate given that Mogwai's most recent release, 2006's Mr. Beast, was their most perfunctory set of quiet/LOUD instru-metal to date, so it's an opportune time to revisit the album that made us care in the first place. And the fact that Young Team's influence can still be felt across the international indie-sphere-- not just in kindred art-rock spirits like Sigur Rós and Explosions in the Sky, but also avant-metal outfits like Boris and Pelican-- means the album exists today as something more vibrant than a museum piece.
For a mostly instrumental band, Mogwai have developed a reputation in the media for being big mouths who take no small delight in slagging other bands (hey guys, how about a 10th-anniversary reissue of those "blur: are shite" t-shirts?) and praising themselves. However, the spoken-word intro-- a friend reading out a gushing student-paper review of an early Mogwai performance-- that ushers in the slow-burn rapture of Young Team's "Yes! I Am Long Way From Home" feels less like a cheeky self-aggrandizing device than a rejection of the hollow Britpop hyperbole that was endemic to the era. But if Mogwai were determined to distance themselves from prevailing retro-rock fashions, Young Team evinced a nostalgic streak of its own, particularly for the pre-Britpop moment of 1988-91, when indie rock bands both American (Slint, Mercury Rev) and British (My Bloody Valentine, Bark Psychosis) were obliterating the parameters of rock music (and the VU meters that quantify them), before those groups either dissolved or turned more classic rock. So in a sense, Young Team was tending to unfinished business, bridging the continuum the connects shoegaze psychedelia to the anti-pop aesthetic and rhythmic thrust of the then-emergent post-rock.
But, of course, what distinguished Mogwai from the multitude of all-instrumental outfits jockeying for a Thrill Jockey deal was that their post-rock actually rocked. And to this day, nothing in their catalogue attests to this fact more than Young Team's startling second track, "Like Herod". Even when you heard it the first time, you knew the song's silently stalking momentum-- guided by Dominic Aitchison's deceptively melodic bassline-- would trigger an eruption of heavy-metal thunder that sounded like Slint soundtracking the shower scene in Psycho. But the tension lies not in question of whether the bomb is going to drop, but when, and this re-mastered reissue does a superb job of prolonging that feeling of impending doom-- during the song's second quiet stretch, you can hear Stuart Braithwaite and John Cummings' fretboard taps panning back and forth in the mix, like an unseen predator taunting you from some unseen location in the shadows before going in for a particularly savage kill. And after 11 years, I'm still never quite prepared for it.
At 11 minutes, "Like Herod" is actually only Young Team's second longest song; that honour belongs to 16-minute closer "Mogwai Fear Satan". Rather than resorting to sudden dynamic shifts, Young Team's colossal closer masterfully layers sheets of distortion, percussion and flute swirls over a repeated, ascending three-chord progression that-- despite the cacophony swarming around it-- projects a remarkable sense of calm. These two titanic tracks-- still staples of the band's live set-- have traditionally overshadowed the rest of Young Team's tracklist; listening to the album in its entirety today, what strikes you most is not so much Mogwai's brute force, but that these erstwhile piss-takers are capable of moments of great beauty and sensitivity: On the glockenspiel-gilded ballad "Tracy", random phone conversations are threaded into the mix, casting the mundane chit-chat in a overwhelmingly melancholic light, rendering the track as a requiem for someone who's no longer with us; on "R U Still In 2 It"-- Young Team's lone vocal track-- guest singer Aidan Moffatt of Arab Strap duets with Braithwaite on a devastating anti-love song that vividly captures a dead-end relationship being strung along by declarations of non-commital commitment.
Given how prolific Mogwai were in their formative years, much of what would normally be considered for anniversary-edition extras was already released 10 years ago, in the form of the Ten Rapid singles collection, the 4 Satin and No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew) EPs and the Kicking a Dead Pig remix collection. So all that this reissue's second "Appendix" disc can offer is one unreleased track (the suitably mournful "Young Face Gone Wrong"), a couple of compilation rarities, and a hearty serving of Young Team concert/radio-session recordings. The band's faithful version of Spacemen 3's "Honey" (taken from a 1998 tribute album) provides insight into Mogwai's more melodic influences, and seven-inch obscurity "I Can't Remember" finds the band toying around with a DJ Shadow-esque drum loop, but the live tracks mostly stick to the script-- the one revelation being that, in concert, Mogwai seem to be in more of a hurry to plow through "Like Herod" and "Mogwai Fear Satan", lopping several minutes off of each. Still, the version of "Satan" that closes this collection-- taken from Chemikal Underground's fifth anniversary party in 2000-- does add one sound effect that the original Young Team version merely implied: the sound of ecstatic applause confirming minds well blown.


Four years on from the landmark Person Pitch, Panda Bear returns with a record that embraces both summer fun and hushed spirituality.

Tomboy

Noah Lennox's Panda Bear project has always been about making "difficult" music scan as almost radio-friendly, to translate experimental moves to a broad audience with little interest in such things. It's a strategy he learned, at least in part, from sonic forebears like Arthur Russell and Brian Wilson, along with the avant-techno types he reveres. Like those disparate influences, Lennox has used potentially off-putting compositional and textural ideas to craft some of the most inviting music of his era. In turn, he's inspired more of his own followers in the last four years than anyone might have guessed. Lennox has found himself the unwitting king of the chillwave nation, hero to a whole generation of underground kids drawn to his mix of heavy reverb, sun-woozy synths, droning kraut-surf-ambient-pop songs, high childlike voice, and psychedelic-cum-nostalgic sleeve art.
Tomboy, Lennox's fourth solo album as Panda Bear, was mixed with Pete "Sonic Boom" Kember of Spectrum/Spacemen 3. And again, in a way there's little here that's any further out-there than the blissful psychedelia and dream-pop Spacemen 3 and their peers were playing in the late 1980s, a lineage that stretches right back to stuff we now consider classic rock. With its angelic choirboy harmonies over an unchanging synth buzz, even "Drone", the album's roughest song, is a dead-ringer for the way Spacemen 3 songs like "Ecstasy Symphony" merged the pop high of Beach Boys with the woozy downer feel of the Velvet Underground.
But despite Tomboy's shorter songs and more conventional structures-- especially compared to the loose percussive jams of Lennox's 2007 solo breakthrough Person Pitch-- he's still committed to pushing his music to strange places. And few of his chilled-to-the-point-of-entropy acolytes can match Lennox for warped hooks. Forget comparing his gorgeous voice to their mumbling. Unlike many chillwave and dream-pop artists (and Spacemen 3), Lennox is blessed with the ability to actually sing, and he knows enough about crafting harmonies to do more than vaguely nod in the direction of 60s pop. So Tomboy is a pretty singular mix of the eerie and the inviting.
Despite the murk and terror and noise of Animal Collective's earliest music, there's never been anything particularly ugly about Lennox's mature solo work, starting with 2004's Young Prayer. But even then, he wasn't comfortable playing the laid-back hippie stereotype that's been laid on A.C. by detractors in recent years. Young Prayer might still be the most emotionally wrenching album in the Collective's catalog, an album written by a young man wrestling with some heavy shit. Lennox's father was dying of brain cancer while Young Prayer was being written. "[My father] got to read the lyrics, which was the most important thing to me," he told me in 2005; Young Prayer was a last attempt at confirming the good his father had done for him.
Musically, the album was the least bleak, least difficult thing an Animal Collective member had recorded to that point. But the unembellished recording-- you could almost hear the empty rooms in which it was recorded-- only heightened the fragility of the songs. "I didn't want to spend a lot of time producing it or thinking about how I wanted to get it to sound," Lennox said in that same interview. "I just wanted to get it out quickly." Tomboy is a much more considered record, with thickly layered psych-style production. There's also another heavy dose of dub, the most studio-bound and effects-driven music of the last 50 years, with the kind of extreme echo that plays like an overt tribute to the very different Jamaican psychedelia of King Tubby and Lee Perry.
But Tomboy's also something of a return to the simplicity, if not the emotionally blasted vibe, of Young Prayer after the ornate structures and epic lengths of Person Pitch. Instead of a Young Prayer we now have a "Surfer's Hymn". Instead of a naked guitar and a lot of blank space in the recording we get a wall-of-sound rush and percussion that's like Steve Reich by way of IDM. But the spare droning quality and devotional feeling of the music remains. There was plenty of church music in the Beach Boys and Arthur Russell, too, and Tomboy has a similar quality of embracing both summer fun and hushed spirituality.
The trouble with recording a ramshackle epic like Person Pitch is that you set up a portion of your audience to expect the next album to be at least as grand in both scope and design. There are certainly no obvious peaks on Tomboy like "Bros" or "Good Girl/Carrots", where the 12-minute lengths announced them as attention-demanding stand-outs. So Tomboy's smoothness will likely be mildly divisive among Lennox's fans. Many might have hoped that Lennox would have recorded something less accessible to separate him from the beach-obsessed glut of bedroom pop. But the scaling back on Tomboy in no way represents a scaling back of ambition on Lennox's part. In a way, what he's pulled off here is even more difficult. He's condensed the sprawl and stylistic shifts of Person Pitch into seemingly tidy songs. The fact that he's able to make music that's both otherworldly and familiar-on-first-listen is something that all of his followers would like to achieve, and very few have the chops or inventiveness to pull off.


Featuring co-production from Kurt Vile, the classic trio’s latest reunion album is their breeziest and most melodically generous yet.

Sweep It Into Space

If you bet a sizable sum back in 2005 that Dinosaur Jr.’s improbable reunion would last longer than the band’s previous two eras combined and generate four new albums ranging from good to great, you’d have cashed in by now. But who would have taken such a gamble? Against steep odds, the Western Massachusetts noisemakers’ classic lineup has made more records in the 21st century than they did in the ’80s, and unlike Pixies, they’ve achieved a kind of lineup equilibrium that eluded them the first go-round. (Maybe time really does heal deep wounds—or maybe J Mascis and Lou Barlow just learned how to communicate after becoming dads, as drummer Murph mused in this SPIN profile surmised.) Even during the pandemic that interrupted the recording of the band’s fifth and latest post-reunion album, Sweep It Into Space, Dinosaur Jr. seemed compelled to play together in person, performing one of the earliest socially distanced rock shows at a farm in Connecticut.
That sense of effortless—if hard-won—chemistry permeates the new album. Partially recorded in fall 2019 with co-producer Kurt Vile, then completed by Mascis during last year’s quarantine, Sweep It Into Space bears little evidence of its protracted creation. It’s the breeziest and most melodically generous of the trio’s reunion efforts, even flirting with power-pop on the compulsively hummable “And Me.” The album brightens the punkish snarl of 2016’s Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not but rarely strays far from Dinosaur Jr.’s familiar guitar-forward racket, another testament to this band’s reliability well into their fourth decade.
Sweep It revs up like a used car with “I Ain’t,” a major-chord stomper in which Mascis starts ripping melodic solo licks even before the first chorus hits. The song’s main refrain, “I ain’t good alone” (easily misheard as “I ain’t gettin’ old”), evokes the simple yearning for musical companionship that has defined this band’s reunion. Mascis’ skill seems to have only grown during quarantine, which he spent playing Hindu peace chants in solidarity with healthcare workers and jamming along with the Schitt’s Creek theme song. His fiery solos remain piercing as ever, whether he’s wailing over the buzzsaw chords of “I Met the Stones'' and “Hide Another Round” or injecting pyrotechnics into the brooding “To Be Waiting.”
The band departs from familiar territory when Vile asserts his presence behind the boards, like on the rolling country rock of “I Ran Away,” which  features Vile’s 12-string accompaniment. The acoustic-electric mix of “And Me” is a nice change from the band’s usually implacable roar, but the jaunty “Take It Back” is the one most likely to raise eyebrows among longtime fans. The song is just a few trumpet overdubs away from ska, swapping out the usual Marshall stacks for a digital Mellotron and a Blue Beat-inspired rhythm, with a disjointed but still catchy chorus.
Otherwise, Sweep It Into Space is classic Dinosaur Jr., straight down to the division of labor: As on each of the band’s post-1997 albums, Barlow is allotted exactly two songs, a tradition so consistent you wonder if it’s baked into a contract. As usual, they’re wordier and more cerebral than Mascis’ contributions: a slightly mawkish song of devotion called “You Wonder,” a compelling English-folk pastiche called “Garden.”
The latter is a survival anthem, and takes its title from a sign Barlow spotted on a shed while driving through Massachusetts: Back to the Garden. “I was looking for a resolution,” Barlow explained. “Where do we go when faced with such dramatic confusion? Back to basics, back home, back to the garden.” It’s not just a song title; it’s also Dinosaur Jr.’s animating principle.

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Imposing and stark, the Soft Moon's Captured Tracks debut is impressively bathed in the tension and gloom of the industrial and goth 1980s.

The Soft Moon

From the Bauhaus-influenced record cover, to the dead thuds that pound every corner of The Soft Moon, there is something imposing and stark about Luis Vasquez's debut record. It casts a bleak shadow, like a graying tower block. The record heavily recalls the industrial and goth 1980s, eras of music bathed in blackness, yet beneath the squall and the otherwise monolithic sound poke out some impressive moments of clarity.
The record announces itself on "Breathe the Fire" with a Joy Division-like beat and creeping synths, Vasquez's vocal-- as on much of the record-- never rising out of a whisper. When it finally does on the tense single "Circles", it's wordless and yelping, sounding more like a pagan chant. That tense song eventually builds to a visceral, satisfying release of noise; it's a trick repeated a few times on the album, but Vasquez's timing and restraint make it just as gratifying each time.
These fleeting moments of release lend some grounding to a record that-- with its slightly phasing bass lines and watery guitar-- is often hard to pin down, a perception only enhanced by the obscured vocals. The icy exterior of The Soft Moon might make it a little inaccessible, but it's never willfully obtuse, and the sequencing neatly frames one of the albums high points, "When It's Over"-- a moment of beauty peering through the darkness that surrounds it. It's a natural centerpiece for the record, and Vasquez here allows space to surround the drums for the first time, while a fragile guitar and bass underpin glacial shifts. There's also a rare moment of transparency for the vocals as Vasquez's post-apocalyptic narrative is articulated and given a heart.
That "When It's Over" is the sole escape from the claustrophobic drums and frosty static elsewhere makes it seem even bleaker. It's as though the only respite comes for Vasquez when the world is over. While goth was always melodramatic, something about the wordless, faceless dread invoked on The Soft Moon seems distinctly of its time and place, a world in which we're often reminded of our doomed course via out-of-reach financial barons and rogue, nation-less aggressors. That The Soft Moon carries the look so well here does the same trick as many of Goth's best moments-- it makes oblivion seem like an enticing prospect.


On their beautiful second LP, the Minneapolis duo conjure the grandeur of Scandinavian extreme metal with reverence.

Moonlit Navigation

Time is a fickle mistress, and so are metal fans’ sympathies. Bands who end up stuck in era-specific transitional subgenres like melodic death metal, for example (or metalcore, or crossover thrash, or blackgaze) still have their fans and their place in history, but are often left behind as the genre forges ahead without them.
But, even though melodic death metal, its close associate, melodic black metal, and their hellish spawn, melodic blackened death metal, may not be all that cool anymore, it doesn’t mean that fans have stopped loving them. While their popularity and visibility have plummeted since the late ’90s and early ’00s, these subgenres are still going, with their own classics and new devotees. The Minneapolis duo Inexorum are a case in point: Their second LP, Moonlit Navigation, sounds like a guided tour through the best of the ‘90s Necropolis Records catalog. Helmed by Carl Skildum with the new addition of Matthew Kirkwold, the project’s unabashed worship of melodic Scandinavian extreme metal is a joy to hear, and they deliver it with reverence.
Describing Inexorum’s chosen micro-genre demands hair-splitting; to be brief, the sound marries the most melodic forms of black metal and death metal, adding occasional dashes of Viking-metal grandeur. Skildum has referenced his love for this particular era before, and Moonlit Navigation is dotted with sonic references to early Dawn, Sacramentum, and, fittingly, Amorphis, whose Tales From The Thousand Lakes may as well have been written about his own rural Minnesota upbringing. And in a testament to the living nature of the genre, those who came upon this scene a bit later may instead recognize shades of more recent acts like Amon Amarth, Thulcandra, or Insomnium. But Skildum and Kirkwold blend signifiers so seamlessly that their sound becomes its own living, breathing thing.
Both band members also play in death thrashers Antiverse and serve as part of medieval metal visionaries Obsequiae’s live lineup, so their genre agnosticism comes as no surprise. Picking apart songs like the grandiose title track or more downbeat “Chains of Loss” in order to deem this bit more death metal, or this bit more purely black, feels misguided; to properly appreciate an album like Moonlit Navigation, the listener must commit to occupying that messy space in between. The clear delineations that now separate death metal and black metal did not exist in their chosen sound’s heyday, and it’s a credit to Skildum that he allows everything to bleed together.
The cold, windswept atmosphere that hangs over the record is as important as the riffs or Skildrum’s weathered growl; there is a sense of place, grounded in the northern woods and jeweled lakes that surround the duo. The bombastic “Dream and Memory” allows the folk-influenced melodies and soaring grandiosity of Viking metal—its own complex beast—to imprint itself on Inexorum’s sound. On the triumphal, synth-powered “The Breaking Point,” which features guest vocalist Sarah Roddy, Inexorum wreathes its stirring melodies in uptempo thrash beats and blasts of frigidity. The acoustic interlude “Wild Magic” offers a momentary respite before “In Desperate Times” closes the coffin lid with a flourish of blastbeats and razor-sharp black metal riffing.
One of the beauties of Moonlit Navigation—for it is an overwhelmingly beautiful album—is Skildum’s ability to craft something new from older, near-forgotten pieces. When there are so many boundary pushing new bands drawing extreme metal forward—from black metal anarchists Dawn Ray’d and extreme metal shapeshifters Immortal Bird to Inexorum’s genre-smashing labelmates Thou and noise-rock vanguardists Couch Slut—it can be hard to understand why anyone would feel compelled to look backwards. But with their latest, Inexorum has provided a compelling argument for honoring the best of extreme metal’s past, even as we continue to carve out its faster, louder, weirder future.

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The art-punk eccentrics’ first album in six years is a woozy celebration of Britain’s sleazy past, and it sounds like nobody other than Clinic.

Wheeltappers and Shunters

For 12 years, Clinic’s intrinsic surrealness was counterbalanced by an output that was positively businesslike. Every even-numbered year, the Liverpool band delivered a capsule-sized blast of post-punk psychedelia, as reliably timed as a new Harry Potter film, and perhaps equally inscrutable to outsiders. (“Wingardium Leviosa!” is a Harry Potter spell and “Diggy diggy da mona mon!” is a Clinic lyric, but wouldn’t you believe the reverse was true?) The run began with 2000’s Internal Wrangler—a brash, near-perfect debut whose urgency is communicated via sinister surf licks and blasted-out organ tones—and seemed to wind down with 2012’s Free Reign, a slower, dub-inspired mutation of their sound. At their best, a new Clinic album sounded like absolutely nobody else; at worst, a new Clinic album still sounded like nobody else, but also sounded a little too much like the last Clinic album.
And then, after a 2013 remix album based on Daniel Lopatin’s original Free Reign mixes, Clinic’s prolific zeal mysteriously ceased. More than six years passed without an album. Although the band never announced a break-up or hiatus, it was easy to fear that it had become another cultural casualty of the early 2000s, like MP3 blogs or RAZR phones.
Wheeltappers and Shunters, the group’s first album of new material since 2012, puts such concerns to rest. It’s unmistakably Clinic: deeply eccentric, brief as hell (shorter than the Ramones’ debut!), British to the point of obsession, and steeped in the sort of classic drum machines and synthesizer textures that rarely come within 10 feet of a Discover Weekly playlist. Ade Blackburn’s vocals frequently veer into cryptic mutterings and even gibberish, but here he’s more intelligible than usual: You can clearly hear him enunciate lyrical gems like “Wednesday was a shit day!/Every day is a shit day!” on “D.I.S.C.I.P.L.E.,” a paranoid rave-up that would have been doused in distortion had it been recorded 15 years ago.
This seems to be in the spirit of the project: Wheeltappers is, in Blackburn’s words, “a satirical take on British culture, high and low.” Its songs evoke a seedy British era of traveling circuses, seaside resorts, and smoke-filled nightclubs, and its title references a long-forgotten 1970s variety show. Granted, every Clinic album could be perceived as fetishizing the distant past, given the band’s fondness for vintage instrumentation and retro eccentricity, not limited to 1950s rockabilly, doo wop, and post-punk groove. But this thematic weight gives the songs an overarching purpose and provides some context for Clinic’s typically bizarre interludes (see: “Tiger,” in which Blackburn repeats the phrase “joining the cir-cus” in an ominous incantation). “Be Yourself / Year Of The Sadist,” meanwhile, is a quintessential Clinic ballad, in the vein of Internal Wrangler’s “Distortions” or Funf gem “Christmas.” The song’s swaying melody is a vehicle for the group’s tender side, until the track mutates into an oddball sample of a British town crier hollering in 1971. It’s peculiar, on-theme, and characteristic of the band’s tendency to never let a pretty song get too normal.
Fans may wonder whether Wheeltappers picks up where Free Reign left off or marks a return to the punkish terrain of earlier Clinic. The answer is a bit of both. These songs are jaunty and quick—only one passes the three-minute mark—but full of woozy sonic flourishes and traces of Free Reign’s narcotic groove. (Check out “Ferryboat of the Mind,” which, in both title and sound, evokes a dubby journey down a cartoon river.) The album was mixed by Dilip Harris, who is known for work with predominantly electronic acts like Mount Kimbie and who likely warrants some credit for this record’s experimental undercurrent. Headphone listening is encouraged—especially with “Complex,” which throbs along on a drum-machine pulse immediately reminiscent of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” or “New Equations (at the Copacabana),” in which Blackburn’s heavily processed vocals form a foggy détente with what sound like the echoes of an autoharp (but may, in fact, be something more obscure, knowing this crew).
These are novel variations on the familiar Clinic sound. Some, like the queasy synth refrain in “Rubber Bullets,” work less well than others. And some of the melodies seem rather thin, considering the band had six years to generate them (looking at you, “Mirage” and “Rejoice!”). That’s an ancient weakness of the group, and Wheeltappers and Shunters is nothing if not steeped in the past. “The good old days, the good old ways,” Blackburn mutters on “Complex,” his voice coated in sarcasm. Britain’s past is full of sleaze, but at least it brought us Clinic.