On their first album of original material since 2004, the Blues Explosion never assume their comeback is assured. They're reapplying for the job of America's most raucous, hardest-working rock'n'roll band, and will let the sweat speak for itself.

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion: Meat and Bone

Meat and Bone

When the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion returned to the stage two years ago after a six-year layoff, their mission was philosophically simple, if physically demanding: They just had to live up to their reputation as the perpetually sweat-soaked band that showed the 90s American indie underground how to get down. And as that 2010 reunion tour-- which coincided with extensive reissues of the band's 90s-era catalog-- continued to rack up positive notices well into 2011, there was little doubt that, even well into their 40s, frontman Jon Spencer, guitarist Judah Bauer, and drummer Russell Simins still possessed the stamina of their twentysomething selves.
However, what the Blues Explosion could bring to the table as a rebooted recording act was far less certain. From their 1991 debut through to 1998's Acme, the band had undergone a dramatic evolution from no-waved scuzz-punks to studio-savvy funkensteins, but one that had seemingly run its course as they entered the new millennium: 2002's Plastic Fang saw the band awkwardly try to temper its sound into '70s-Stones suaveness (tellingly, it's the lone Matador JSBX release to not receive the reissue treatment), while 2004's Damage reverted back to the Acme game-plan of enlisting a supporting cast of hip-hop heavyweights (DJ Shadow, Dan the Automator, Chuck D), but in a manner that ultimately normalized the band's sound rather than redefine it. So a new Blues Explosion album in 2012 presents no obvious game plan. Do they make a sleek, radio-friendly blooze-rock album in attempt to muscle in on some of them Black Keys bucks? Do they try to score cred points with the Ty Segall set by revisiting their early-90s avant-noise roots? Or, given the Blues Explosion's track record of reconstructing black musics ranging from Mississippi Delta blues to Shaft-esque funk to NYC rap, do they try to put their own absurdist spin on contemporary R&B?
With Meat and Bone, the answer is: none of the above. Which is the best possible outcome, really: The Blues Explosion barrel through the album's 12 tracks as if they have no legacy to uphold, no expectations to live up to, and nothing to lose. Stripped of the cut-and-paste studio trickery and celebrity cameos that defined the band's records from the mid-90s onward, the self-produced Meat and Bone boasts no ambition beyond capturing the Blues Explosion in straight-up, no-bullshit rock'n'soul mode. It essentially provides them with a chance to rewrite their post-Acme history, and posit the question: what if the botched back-to-basics mission of Plastic Fang was salvaged by the maniacal gusto of Extra Width?
If anything's really changed here, it's that Spencer sounds genuinely humbled. In the early 90s, the Blues Explosion were distinguished not only by their fondness for the sort of blues-based tradition from which so much punk and indie rock tried distance itself, but also by Spencer's penchant for hip-hop-inspired self-aggrandizement; "Blues Explosion" was not only his band's name, but his most utilized lyric, as if he were practising a form of inter-song product placement. But with Meat and Bone, pretty much the only "Blues Explosion" you get is printed on the album cover, and Spencer's banter here-- "Are you ready for your new career? Need a J-O-B," "I feel like a god/ But I still got a problem paying the rent"-- leans toward the self-deprecating musings of someone who's aware he's no longer the king of the scene.
Amid a 90s indie rock environment that frowned upon rock-star posturing, Spencer's shameless shout-outs to himself came off as playfully arrogant, if not outright provocative. But Spencer understands it's the sort of rhetoric that holds less power today, when self-promotion isn't so much a cheekily effective way to assert a persona as a practical necessity for any aspiring indie act. So on Meat and Bone, the focus is less on theatrical myth-making than reasserting the band's real-deal bona fides: three men in a room making one big racket. While "Bag of Bones" and the Orange-tinted "Get Your Pants Off" suggest the band haven't unlearned all of their funk finesse, Meat and Bone gradually forsakes its congenial groove for pure smash-and-grab insolence, hitting a feverish peak with the New York Dolls-damaged "Danger" and the contorted glam boogie of "Black Thoughts", on which Spencer seemingly sums up his time out of the spotlight by declaring, "Without a doubt, this is the worst vacation I have ever been on!" But what makes Meat and Bone a success-- despite simmering down into a mid-tempo murk during its home stretch-- is that the Blues Explosion never assume their comeback is assured. They're reapplying for the job of America's most raucous, hardest-working rock'n'roll band, and will let the sweat speak for itself.


The poster boys of big beat, that hip amalgam of electronica and rock that has dug its way into the ...

Surrender

The poster boys of big beat, that hip amalgam of electronica and rock that has dug its way into the national consciousness via "The Rockafeller Skank," have been busy since their 1997 breakthrough, Dig Your Own Hole. Maybe last year's DJ mix album, the reasonably decent Brothers Gonna Work It Out, should have been the clue, but Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have clearly been raiding a library- sized record collection since their last offering of "original" music.
"Music: Response," the album's leadoff, starts like a ride on the Autobahn with Kraftwerk circa the mid '70s, with its analog synth blips and monotone computerwelt voices, before tossing in some ferocious beats to bring Krautrock into the new millennium. The mood carries through on "Under the Influence" with more Kraftwerk- styled noodlings. Meanwhile, their best instrumental effort is "The Sunshine Underground," an eight- and- a- half minute ride through chiming tones, wafting flute- like sounds, and sputtering and gurgling synths that intertwine with the briefest of dreamy vocals. Actually, it wouldn't have been out of place on the last Orbital album.
Surrender will receive a ton of hype based on its superstar guest appearances, and none more historically relevant than "Out of Control" with New Order's Bernard Sumner on vocals. Being electronic dance music freaks from Manchester, New Order is like the holy grail to the Chemical Brothers and it's easy to see why. The Chemicals share with their Manchester predecessors an obsession with hypnotic, melodic, dance beats. "Out of Control" works so well it could be a lost track from Low Life. After his turn on "Setting Son" with the Chemicals in 1996, Oasis' terminally out- of- style Noel Gallagher returns for another psychedelic, Beatles-esque anthem on "Let Forever Be," again snagging the rhythm track from "Tomorrow Never Knows" off Revolver.
Surrender is both the Chemical Brothers most immediately satisfying work and, perhaps not coincidentally, the most like a rock album of their career. Unlike a fair share of techno, these songs feel like "songs," not a collection of clever samples and a race to the fastest BPM on the planet. Yeah, you can go out and buy your jungle, your trance, your trip-hop and your ambient, but why would you when you'd be sacrificing the greatest gift of all: Surrender's love and understanding.


A free Christmas release, billed as "the World's First iPad Album", this nice marketing gimmick is the result of Damon Albarn's restlessness on tour.

The Fall

"It can be anything you want it to be. This is the nearest we have got to seeing what I would call a universal machine." That's British artist David Hockney talking about the iPad. Hockney does sketches on his, using an app called Brushes, and several of his works are already hanging this month in an exhibition at the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation in Paris. Hockney is presumably drawn to the novelty as much as to the functionality of Apple's curious device, which is like a big iPhone that won't make calls, or like a small laptop without a keyboard. Rather than render it redundant or limited, those disabilities have made it as universal as Hockney attests, attracting hundreds of thousands of users ranging from my mom to Damon Albarn, who recorded the new Gorillaz album on his iPad.
The Fall, released for free on Christmas, is a nice marketing gimmick and the product of Albarn's restlessness on tour. While Hockney's sketches clearly look like they were done on some kind of computer, nothing about Albarn's songs reveals their origins. Instead, The Fall possesses the crisply eccentric production value of a typical Gorillaz album, which may be a testament to the iPad's ability to manipulate and combine sound files with little loss of fidelity or complexity.
On the other hand, it doesn't appear to handle hip-hop very well. The Fall contains opens stretches of loping, belching beats that are painstakingly crafted yet often sound like they've been created as backdrops for MC cameos. But there's only one guest, a barely recognizable Bobby Womack on "Bobby in Phoenix"; otherwise, it's Albarn singing and creating songs, which gives The Fall the feel of a solo album. At times it needs other voices to liven up some of these long stretches. Even so, it's fitting that Albarn has released it under the Gorillaz moniker. For one thing, that band has always had a strong visual component that makes the cartoon/hologram characters seem like they were meant to be up- and downloaded, so it's not hard to imagine them trapped in an iPad like General Zod at the end of Superman II.
Songs like "Revolving Doors" and "Detroit" have the same hazily martial beats that have marked the Gorillaz' output since "Clint Eastwood", which makes The Fall slot neatly into the Gorillaz catalog. It's less a proper album like Demon Days or Plastic Beach-- more an auxiliary item like that live album or that G-Sides comp or that remix album (or, in Albarn's career as a whole, like his lowkey, homemade Democrazy set.) Albarn's mode may be somber and road-weary, but there's not a whole lot of heft here, which means it sounds like a unified outtakes record rather than a major statement. Thematically, it's a tour album, leaving behind the Pacific Ocean trash island of Plastic Beach for the highways of America, evoked in songs named after Phoenix, Aspen, Dallas, Detroit, Seattle, and Amarillo. With its rangey beats and garbled transmission noises, "The Parish of Space Dust" imagines a Texas as expansive as the cosmos, but it's just enough to make you wish Albarn had incorporated some southwestern influences the way Plastic Beach used island rhythms to bolster its setting.
Despite the emphasis on atmosphere that pervades the album and that seems like a necessary byproduct of its creative technology, The Fall may be the most earthbound Gorillaz album yet-- and at times, therefore, the most banal. At his best, Albarn manages to create an alien ambience, as if visiting America has made him feel as out-of-place as certain travelers must have felt around Roswell. Still, he's always passing through, never stopping for a visit, and as a result, The Fall is a blur. Whether as an album or as a touring document, it doesn't add up to much of a statement, which means the particulars of its creation will probably always overshadow whatever life this album may find.


The Louisiana rapper’s latest is typically blunt, anguished, and unsettling.

38 Baby 2

Following in the footsteps of Louisiana legends like Boosie and Kevin Gates, YoungBoy Never Broke Again makes autobiographical rap that touches on pain, paranoia, and trauma. Over melancholy pianos and guitars, the 20-year-old sings and raps in a choked voice that sounds like he wants to cry, but doesn’t know how. He’s incredibly blunt, and listening to his music can be as brutal as immersing yourself in early Chief Keef. “Red dot and head shots for who wanna do me/Homicides, mamas cry, it ain’t nothing to it,” he wails on “Solar Eclipse.” Often he’ll mention his family and friends by name. The emotional immediacy is undeniable, even if the headlines swirling around him remain unsettling.
Since the release of early mixtapes like 38 Baby and AI YoungBoy, the Baton Rouge, Louisiana-raised rapper has built a massive and loyal fanbase who have consistently made him the no. 1 streamed artist on YouTube. YoungBoy is almost always involved in a legal issue, but with every one, he only gets more popular. The hip-hop tabloids have responded by following his every move like he’s their Paris Hilton, though the only time you’ll likely hear him speak is through Instagram Live. On that platform, tens of thousands of fans watch him faithfully like they’re at a megachurch, as he angrily rants, gives life updates, and runs through cigarettes like a bag of candy.
His new album, 38 Baby 2, isn’t that much different from any other YoungBoy project, but part of YoungBoy’s appeal is consistency. Throughout much of the album YoungBoy is in his comfort zone, reflecting on his struggles over mournful production: “My mama cars ain’t never had AC ever since I was little/Thank God every card I got in my pocket hold at least one million,” he sings on the intro, followed by a verse from his own mother. Next to his mother, YoungBoy sounds sweeter than he ever has, but that doesn’t last long.
YoungBoy has become defined by his menacing personality, as someone who can say, “I’m down to kill a whole house when my feelings involved,” like he does on “Rough Ryder,” and then quickly move onto something else. Typically he’s hostile and unpredictable; it’s made his relationships the source of endless social media debate and it’s reflected in his purest love songs. “Let me love you in my own way, that’s from a distance/I said ‘Fuck you,’ I was on them drugs and I was trippin’,” he sings on “Treat You Better.” It’s honest, but paired with real-life stories it’s hard to listen to. The best YoungBoy songs balance his lovesick attitude with his never-ending struggle.
No other rapper has mood swings this extreme: He can sound like a typical madly in love 20-year-old and a madman who is a liability every time he leaves the house. It’s what made YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s connection with his fans so personal; whether it’s good or bad, YoungBoy lets them into his life. And now he’s not just another rapper who sings about pain, but the rapper who sings about pain.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Harry Smith’s foundational 1952 mixtape that used the United States’ rich musical inheritance to suggest how we might better ourselves

Various Artists: Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 1-3

PRE-DISCOGS, MAN HAS RECORDS BUT NO MONEY. TRIES TO SELL THEM, GETS RECORD DEAL INSTEAD. CHANGES AMERICAN MUSIC.
While the other kids were playing marbles or collecting Joe DiMaggio baseball cards, Harry Smith was becoming an amateur ethnologist. When the Oregon-born, Washington State-raised son of a cannery family was still a teenager, Smith jury-rigged a cheap recorder to a big battery. He captured the rituals of the Pacific Northwest’s indigenous Salish tribes as best as his crude technology allowed, a little Lomax of the left coast.
In the months to come, he swooned over the rest of his country’s early recorded legacy when, in 1940, a 78 RPM single by Mississippi bluesman Tommy McClennan arrived at a record store along the shores of Bellingham. Smith was haunted by that sound, obsessed, hooked. He wanted more of this American folk music. The bombing of Pearl Harbor soon gave it to him.
After the attack, when the United States joined the Allied forces in Europe, old-timers dug out their shellac phonograph records at the military’s command. Some would be melted down for weaponry, others dispatched to entertain “our boys” on faraway bases. Old record warehouses cleared their shelves to make way for fighting supplies. If you could get to it in time, you could amass the entire recorded history of the United States for peanuts.
Smith wasn’t going to war. His bowed skeleton and stooped frame caused by a childhood case of rickets made him unfit for duty. Instead, after moving to the San Francisco Bay in the early ’40s, he went shopping. He bought abandoned troves of “hillbilly and race records” (crassly commercial terms he perpetually resented) and even met Sara Carter—the captivating voice behind the transformational Carter Family country records he adored—a few hours east in a trailer encampment. For a decade, he amassed thousands of records that made their way to California from all points east—“immensely protective of the record collection and greedy about getting more records,” an old chum later described him, with love.
An associate of the emerging Beatnik resistance, Smith was also a burgeoning visual artist, fastidiously illustrating strips of film to run back through a projector; in those early days of LSD research, the results suggested astral phantasms, beyond the limits of reality. Heavyweights like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk jammed to his work and he to theirs, especially Dizzy Gillespie. He’d make intricate abstract maps of their pieces, hundreds of colorful little curves and geometric artifacts. When German aristocrat and eventual Guggenheim Museum cofounder Hilla Rebay offered him cash to continue this work in New York, he crossed the continent as the innocent ’50s dawned, all conservative and safe and potentially very boring.
But the money—as always with Smith—wasn’t enough, whether for the drugs he loved or the films he loved to make with them. So Smith sought out a record label head by the name of Moses Asch to buy thousands of his records. Smith needed cash more than shellac; Asch demurred. His finances, after all, weren’t exactly stable. Only four years earlier, his first label had cratered, sending him into bankruptcy. Because of those legal woes, his longtime secretary, Marian Distler, registered alone as the president of an all-new label, Folkways, never even mentioning Asch in the paperwork. Distler and Asch were surviving on $25 per week.
Rather than spend a fortune he did not have, Asch presented Smith with a counterproposal: The 33 1/3 LP was steadily gaining post-war popularity, so why didn’t Smith comb through his 78s and pick the most compelling tracks, the most gripping documents of American folk? If Smith would sequence them, Asch would issue the results with the imprimatur of his young Folkways imprint. Folkways had already released strong sets of Southern rags and blues and East Tennessee gospel, and others had released troves of folk elsewhere. But Smith, Asch later said, understood this music’s “relationship to the world.” He could do it better.
And so Smith—a struggling 28-year-old artist who embraced the occult and sometimes insisted Aleister Crowley was his father, new to New York from the Pacific Northwest—made a mixtape, largely documenting the struggles and songs of the American Southeast. The Anthology of American Folk Music, originally released in August 1952, collects 84 white-hot cuts of early blues, country, gospel, Cajun, cowboy, jazz, jug, and dance, jumping across those supposedly color-lined genres with revelatory aplomb.
These songs were only a couple decades old when Smith repurposed them; they were so strange and uncanny, listeners assumed the artists were dead. In effect, Smith had reached across the lacuna between the Great Depression and World War II, a period when vinyl sales cratered almost entirely, and pulled an almost forgotten past back into the country’s present. Some tunes here read like ill-informed news summaries of the Titanic’s disaster or presidential assassinations, while others are emphatic paeans to a ferocious and feared god. One man vows to run away with his love forever, while many others share dastardly deeds of betrayal, cheating, and murder. There is dying and dancing, working too hard and working too little, fucking and fussing and fighting, all tucked into four wonderfully overwhelming hours.
Smith split his mix into three broad sets of about 28 songs each. Each set got a symbolically colored cover, the hue tapped from his lifelong interest in alchemy—green “Ballads,” for water; red “Social Music,” for fire; and blue “Songs,” for air. There’s been much ado made about his intentional track-to-track connections, how a lyric or an idea from one song arrows into the next. Look for such links, and you’ll often find them. Instead, I recommend letting the Anthology wash over you as a whole, revealing a world where anything could and often does happen. When he spent time with the Salish tribes in his youth, he recognized his interest in “music in relation to existence,” how sound could mirror the mercuriality of life. This was that realization’s triumphant apotheosis.
But Smith didn’t stop with the music. When he trawled the scrap heaps and record shops in the ’40s, he collected record catalogs from stores and started tracing the songs to their sources, using the pioneering musicology of Cecil Sharp, the Lomax family, Olive Dame Campbell, Carl Sandburg, and the like to tease out their Appalachian, Delta, and even Transatlantic origins. In a 28-page book that accompanied the Anthology, Smith did his best to reveal those roots, his sources, and anything else he knew about both song and singer. He brilliantly reduced each number into an irreverent newspaper headline, too. Of “Ommie Wise,” a fiddle-backed murder ballad so tragic it may be the set’s heaviest wrecking ball, he riffed: “GREEDY GIRL GOES TO ADAMS SPRING WITH LIAR; LIVES JUST LONG ENOUGH TO REGRET IT.”
The liner notes—themselves an essential document of American musical intrigue—incorporated cut-and-paste photos of the performers, their instruments, sheet music, and how-to banjo schematics. The set’s cover, meanwhile, audaciously included a 16th-century sketch of the “celestial monochord” by Theodor de Bry, the European illustrator who gave Europe its earliest glimpses of the New World. It was said that the very hand of God reached from the heavens to tune it, divining all music, no matter the origins.
Smith’s Anthology represented his syncretic vision of the world, unbound by genre or class or concepts of high and low art. Mississippi John Hurt, the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, and Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, quoted by Smith in the liner notes, belonged in conversation, not distant cultural corners.
What’s more, 1952 was the middle of McCarthy’s Red Scare and the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, when the communist-linked Civil Rights Congress accused the United States of genocide against Black Americans in front of the United Nations. The Anthology offered a potent if tacit political message through Smith’s idealist vision for the United States.
Much like Woody Guthrie, Smith saw his country as it was but did not let that interfere with his hopes for how it could be. He never listed the race of these performers, an uncommon move in those days of unabashed Jim Crow, himself a byproduct of American folk minstrelsy. He deliberately omitted any song that included a racist epithet, a fact that became painfully clear when the label Dust-to-Digital initially included them in a 2020 companion set. Smith relished the fact that people thought Mississippi John Hurt, born near plantation land at the end of the 19th century, was a white hillbilly. This was America reimagined for the future, molded from the scraps of its barbaric past.
Perhaps this hope is why its signal keeps coming around again and again, like some lighthouse’s beacon. After its initial release in August 1952, it unsteadily emerged as a large piece of the foundation of the folk revival of the ’50s and ’60s, the movement that gave us the songwriters who reshaped the possibilities of rock and, by extension, all that followed. It was one of the first albums the White House acquired for its official record collection in the early ’70s, a bit of terra firma during the vertiginous Nixon years.
The monumental CD edition issued by Smithsonian Folkways in 1997 (the venerable institution acquired Asch’s label and all its 2,168 releases a decade earlier) sparked a subsequent renaissance, allowing the old sounds of American folk to follow unexpected new courses. A slapdash, pricy, and coveted LP rendition by Mississippi Records in 2014 had less widespread impact, but it looked gorgeous.
After 70 years, to hear this Anthology of American Folk Music is still to hear what you already know about the United States, our collective tangle of sadness and celebration, promise and failure. To really hear it, to understand the radical depth of the world Smith was trying to conjure, is to know that we could and can perhaps still be something better.
FORGOTTEN FOLK SONGS SWEEP UP INNOCENT BYSTANDERS, TRANSPORT THEM TO HEAVEN AND HELL, TURN THEM INTO MOLES BENEATH MOUNTAINS.
The critic Greil Marcus—an Anthology enthusiast so unabashed he once rendered the set’s characters into an imagined soundstage town dubbed “Smithville” to the apoplectic dismay of John Fahey—once called its 61st song “the greatest recording ever made.” By that point, in 2010, Marcus had been writing about the Anthology for well over a decade, his essay “The Old, Weird America” even serving as the analytical gangplank for the 1997 reissue.
His pick was “James Alley Blues,” one of the six tunes that New Orleans toughie, bluesman, and boatman Rabbit Brown cut in 1927. And it is a masterpiece in miniature, the bent-and-beaten strings of Brown’s tinny guitar the wobbly framework beneath his existential crisis. He desperately loves a woman who is exploiting his country naivete, using him for rent, groceries, and, it seems, goodness at large.
“Times ain’t now nothing like they used to be,” he bleats at the beginning, his voice trying but failing to get bigger than a moan. Is there a more concise summary of a curdling relationship, of the creeping suspicion that a love isn’t worth all the worry? By the song’s end, Brown doesn’t know if he should kill or kiss this source of agony. You just want him to run, to find someone who wants to be his “daily thought and nightly dream.”
There are at least a dozen songs on the Anthology that still dazzle me the way “James Alley Blues” dazzled Marcus when he wrote that in 2010, even after my own couple decades with them. I hear them and think that nothing could get better, that no one else has ever captured the essence of emotion or joy of sound so completely. This feeling lasts, at least, until the next good gobsmacking.
In fact, throughout the Anthology, there is the wonderful feeling that any of these songs might at any moment feel like “the greatest recording ever made.” Despite Anthology’s idiosyncratic artistry or all the through lines to follow from these century-old tunes, its nucleus remains these 84 songs. There was, after all, not yet a music industry about which to be cynical, no real precedent for being disaffected. Here are 69 acts forging blindly into the frontier of recorded sound, supercharged by the wide-open novelty of the whole notion.
Take, for instance, the 63rd song, Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1928 recording of the near-hallucinatory “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.” Lunsford was a singing lawyer and avid song collector from a nook of the North Carolina mountains that, a century later, remains economically and socially sequestered; in 1949, nearing 70, Lunsford recorded a staggering 330 songs in a two-week spree at the Library of Congress.
This, though, is his triumph. Sturdy but strange, like the burl of some mighty oak, his voice is perfect for this string of seemingly simple but altogether surreal images. He wants to be the rodent that topples the mountain, then the charming lover gifting his gal a “$40 bill,” which had not existed in the United States by that point for more than a century. He is a lawyer who talks about busting out of the pen, the sun-bathing lizard who somehow hears his darling sing. These incongruous images are an inheritance of the local oral tradition, but taken together, especially above Lunsford’s spring-loaded banjo, they shape an endless mystery. What does Lunsford want me to do with these warped vignettes? Fight the power? Relax and enjoy life? Give up on life altogether? Here is a riddle with no right answer, presaging abstract expressionism with little more than a few strings.
That sense of mystery is the locomotive behind many of these other “greatest recording[s] ever made.” Just what happens to “Frankie,” who shoots the scoundrel she’s been supporting after he repays her by cheating? Above one of the most enchanting guitar lines ever committed to shellac or any other format, Mississippi John Hurt doesn’t plainly say. And is Clarence Ashley’s take on the Appalachia-via-England standard “The Coo Coo Bird” the forlorn testimony of a ghost or the doubtful dreams of an ordinary American aspirant? In Ashley’s haunted hums and twitching banjo, I can hear it both ways.
The pleasures are as far-flung as they are absolute. Backed by two trotting guitars, the fiddle of Texas Prince Hunt is so fierce during “Wake Up Jacob” it recalls a scintillating Eddie Van Halen guitar lead or a splenetic Kathleen Hanna vocal. Once in my life, I want to feel what Hunt’s feeling, or at least how he’s been feeling it. Not so much, though, with G.B. Grayson and his exquisitely heartsick “Ommie Wise.” His fiddle sobs intermittently as he relays the real-life tale of Jon Lewis, who murdered Naomi Wise, a lover whose only crimes were sweetness and trust. He escapes into the Army, presumably to get paid for his violence. The weight of it all bends Grayson’s voice until it starts to break; his fiddle is all elegy, tears down a ruddy cheek.
From start to finish, Smith’s sequence of early gospel recordings—the second half of “Social Music”—is rapturous. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone sing with more force than Chicago’s Rev. Sister Mary Nelson, whose gutbucket warnings of the Second Coming are amplified by the innocence of two kids who chase her lead. Likewise, the growl and bark of Blind Willie Johnson, clenched so tight you may mistake the scriptural snippets of “John the Revelator” for nonsensical syllables, is countered by the seraphic tone of (possibly) his wife, Angeline Johnson. Heaven may be the goal, the juxtaposition seems to say, but you’ll need to endure hell to get there.
Of course, there are misses, songs that may make you wince the first (or last) time you hear them. Even Smith lampooned the set’s gambit, “Henry Lee,” a tale of murderous love and unrequited lust delivered so drably it makes the side-effect disclaimers at the end of pharmaceutical commercials feel inspired. I likewise tire of its successor by the Alabama duo Nelstone’s Hawaiians, more concerned with fumbling through a poor imitation of slack-key exotica than digging into this tale of child abduction. Or is it murder? Rape? They’re too noncommittal to offer insight or intrigue. Pop and Hattie Stoneman, who helped pioneer and popularize country music, remind me that someone’s influence can sometimes outstrip their art. Their two tracks here presage the worst of twee. The couple’s back-and-forth relationship banter is more cloying than old-fashioned rock candy, their preening recitations of courtship about as seductive as a box of rotten chocolate.
That’s the joy of any mixtape, made clear here for perhaps the first time. You can hear through someone else’s ears, take what you love and leave the rest. Some have made bloodsport of despising “The Lone Star Trail,” a cowboy’s travelogue softly strummed by Ken Maynard, a Hoosier who liked to say he was from the contested banks of the Rio Grande. He sings of the plains, his dreams, and his duties, pausing for a chorus where he coos like a coyote. Smith vaunted this as “one of the very few recordings of authentic ‘cowboy’ singing.” Critics have lampooned it as a pandering precursor to self-proclaimed folk musicians who know nothing of rural life. I’m with Smith here. It’s one of his Anthology’s very few stoic treasures. And when the moon is just right, I swear it may be the greatest recording ever made.
A MADMAN’S MIXTAPE FINDS ITS PEOPLE IN DRIBS AND DRABS! THEIR MUSIC RESPONDS IN KIND.
David Fricke wrote in Rolling Stone that it is “impossible to overstate the historic worth” of Smith’s Anthology. John Fahey, always a master of exaggeration, opined that it would hold up against “any other single compendium of important information ever assembled,” Dead Sea Scrolls included. Indeed, Smith’s masterwork is perhaps the most important American mixtape ever made, at least until the dominance of hip-hop decades later.
But its influence did not arrive as some sudden sea change, an instant and undeniable transformation. To wit, researcher Katharine Skinner has published intriguing work about how little the Anthology sold upon initial release, disappearing “from the market altogether for several years” and never even cracking Folkways’ internal best-sellers charts. This canonization, Skinner argued, did not comport with the mixtape’s commercial reality, at least before the Smithsonian’s ballyhooed 1997 edition.
Skinner’s findings fascinate me, not as a counter to the Anthology’s influence but as a suggestion that its spread, at least after the original 1952 release, was often an act of community, not unlike much of the music itself. Several years ago, while flipping through a record store’s used bins, I found a very early pressing of the Anthology’s spirited second volume, the records scuffed with love but perfectly functional. It felt like a talisman; more important, it felt instructive. Housed in a thick plastic case, stamped with the old organizational tags of a local library, my find had once been a community resource, forked over to now-unknowable people who were interested in such songs and, just maybe, went on to start a band of their own.
“It was the beginning of the folk revival, everyone playing guitars,” Alice Gerrard told me late last year, in an interview for The New York Times, of her arrival at Antioch College in the early ’50s. “My friend, who became my husband, gave me—no, loaned me—his copy of the Harry Smith Anthology. That blew my mind, so I started looking for other things.” Gerrard went on to start a canonical duo, Hazel and Alice, that at last centered women in old-time and bluegrass circles and, in turn, helped center women like the Judds in country. (The first song the Judds learned? A Hazel and Alice number.) The line between Smith’s low-selling compilation and, say, the chart-topping songs of Judds zealot Kacey Musgraves is long but direct.
How many times did that happen? How often is it still happening? It’s hard to say. Bob Dylan, for instance, has waffled about how much the Anthology inspired him, but he has talked about the way friends shared their copies. Bellowing Greenwich Village fixture Dave Van Ronk owned the set, Dylan admitted in 2001, so he and friends would hang out at people’s houses and listen. His “Hard Times in New York Town,” from 1961, is a faithful re-creation of the charged “Down on Penny’s Farm,” Smith’s 25th selection. Dylan simply swapped the scenery of the country gripe for his new city. Maybe Dylan learned of the duo whose members’ names remain unknown somewhere else, but Smith seems the most likely provenance, especially given how often bits and pieces of the Anthology peppered the next 60 years of his work.
There is a pernicious tendency to overstate the isolation of these performers, to treat those living in Appalachian hollers or Delta hamlets like hermits, sealed off from the rest of the world by design. But Anthology’s works were powered by community and connection, resulting from an exchange of ideas by its itinerant preachers, Hollywood actors, and bona fide party bands. Lunsford, the giver of the $40 bill, collected tunes as he moved across the peaks and valleys of the Blue Ridge. Charlie Poole and Kelly Harrell, who sing separate songs about dead presidents on the Anthology, labored in Piedmont mills, hardscrabble and dangerous places where music was a necessary social balm. They even recorded together.
Indeed, many songs on the Anthology are magpie masterworks, three minutes of magic synthesized from a half-dozen different sources. The residents of Smithville weren’t intentionally distancing themselves from society; they were trying to sell records. A few became some of the country’s first music superstars, while others still linger in near-anonymity. Take “Moonshiner’s Dance Part One,” an ecstatic medley of children’s tunes, romantic ballads, polkas, and gospel songs crammed into 160 breathless seconds by a party band in a St. Paul nightclub. The group, Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Café Orchestra, was a near-complete enigma until 2006, when relentless Anthology researcher Kurt Gegenhuber tracked down their census records and recording credits. They tried fitting the entire world into the sides of a 78. Interaction and recombination, not isolationism, is the true spirit of Smith’s Anthology.
As an audience, we’re closer to this message than ever. The first folk revival the Anthology helped spark in the ’50s and ’60s could certainly be conservative, with hordes of stand-and-deliver folkies just trying to give us some truth, man. (Dylan became Judas to the lot for simply indulging in electricity.) The next revival Smith helped usher in—after the Smithsonian reissued the Anthology in 1997, six years after his death—better actualized his syncretic vision. Having already inherited the liberation of rock in all its variants, plus free jazz and electronic music, this generation heard in the Anthology new fodder from an ancient fount. They ran with it, headlong into alt-country and freak-folk and a few dozen assorted permutations.
“It should be free and exhilarating … convey something of the wildness and wonder of existence,” English singer Sharron Kraus wrote of modern folk music in a stirring essay about the Anthology. She traced the ways it helped compel her to move to Philadelphia and join a community that had taken the set’s engrained strangeness as its cri de cœur. “It should open us up to unfamiliar worlds as well as familiar ones.”
The music of that fertile moment, inspired in part by Smith’s work half a century earlier, still sends out ripples. I now see that same unencumbered enthusiasm for putting disparate pieces together, for making the old new again, in online collage culture, a spillway of wild hybrids. Smith, I think, would have tried to collect the entire Internet and then yelled, with his wild grin, “Look at what I have found!” He wasn’t committed to protecting anything. He was committed to possibility.
84 SONGS TELL US WHERE WE WERE A CENTURY AGO. THEY TELL US WHERE WE ARE, TOO.
Soon after the start of the year, I commenced another rambling road trip across the Lower 48, the only states that existed when Smith made his mixtape. From California through Texas and out to Tennessee, and eventually north to Connecticut, I played his entire Anthology—at maximum volume, until my van’s speakers crackled like the horn of a vintage Victrola—on repeat for the first time in years. I spent 4,000 miles with it, thinking about the modern United States unrolling in front of me and the century-old nation rattling out of my stereo.
They felt shockingly similar, the topics Smith’s set tackles not only relevant but present at more highway crossings than not. “They cover such subjects,” ran the 1952 Billboard brief announcing the compilation, “as love, murder, robbery, politics, gambling, travel, prison, the Bible, courtship, hunger, etc.” Let’s unpack that “et cetera” to include unemployment, adultery, agriculture, industrialization, and beguiling rural weirdness. There is an abiding ethic of American restlessness to the Anthology, too, someone always going somewhere. They’ve grown tired of the country or jittery in the city, itching for a better lover or a new beginning altogether. It is music for moving on, toward some destiny you have simply yet to manifest.
Uncle Dave Macon’s electrifying “Way Down the Old Plank Road”—complete with the startling admonishment to “Kill yourself!”—documents being put on a chain gang simply for getting drunk, for existing freely. I passed near Mississippi’s infamous Parchman Farm and multiple road signs warning of hitchhikers that might be escapees of nearby penitentiaries, extant symptoms of the same carceral state against which Macon railed. And he was so white he was dubbed “The Dixie Dewdrop.” Blind Lemon Jefferson sounds like he’s singing for his sanity during “Prison Cell Blues,” especially when he hollers about the apathy of his captors. “I asked the government to knock some days off my time,” he sings, stretching that last word like a wail. “Well, the way I’m treated, I’m ’bout to lose my mind.”
There were mega-churches and little country sanctuaries along the way, all preaching pacific or prosecutorial strains of Christianity you can trace on the Anthology. There was Cadillac Ranch outside the city of Amarillo, then its more esoteric and funny country cousin, Slug Bug Ranch, in the small town of Panhandle, just to the north. They both reminded me of the wild ways folks find to entertain themselves, as eccentric as “The Coo Coo Bird” and enjoyable as Henry Thomas’ joyous taunt, “Fishing Blues.”
I saw the lights of farmers’ tractors blinking in the distance long after dusk and long before dawn, reminding me of the Carolina Tar Heels’ great country trot “Got the Farm Land Blues,” about the endless frustrations and travails of raising crops for a living. And it was hard not to think about the Tar Heels’ labor lament “Peg and Awl”—the tale of a longtime cobbler whose job has disappeared because a new machine that “make 100 pair to my one”—in truck stops, where drivers worried about the automation that may soon gobble their gigs, too. Vitriolic politics spilled off the front pages of local newspapers there, just as they did with the Anthology’s two songs about two presidents killed by a disgruntled man and an energized anarchist, respectively.
Most nights, delirious with white-line fever, I’d crawl into bed and watch a little Dateline, tales of cheating, robbery, and murder stuffed neatly into hour-long blocks. I couldn’t help but imagine how Buell Kazee would have told those tales in his adenoidal voice, or G.B. Grayson above his forlorn fiddle. Delight through other people’s worst moments? Sometimes, I swear I wished I were a mole in the ground, too.
There is little point in limning all that has changed about the United States, the advances we have made technologically, socially, and legally. But as I listened to Smith’s assemblage again and again, I couldn’t help but think that only the stitching had been replaced, not the fabric itself. “I’m glad to say my dreams came true, that I saw America changed through music,” Smith said at the 1991 Grammys, nine months before his death, leaning against the podium like the king of cool. Sure he did, but exactly how much?
I have long struggled with the name Anthology of American Folk Music, for the completism and inclusion it suggests but to which it never actually aspired. Smith worked within very specific parameters here, pulling only from commercially available recordings made in real if rudimentary studios between 1926 and 1932. He made field recordings of indigenous Americans during several phases of his life, but neither field recordings nor indigenous Americans are here. And neither are there many women nor much music from the North, the West, or the Midwest. Such records hadn’t flooded the market to the same degree as these raw transmissions from the South, the country’s unqualified musical Eden. The Anthology represents, at most, a cross-section of the whole of American folk music, and that fraction gets smaller every year.
As vital and urgent and engrossing as these pieces are, they are collectively a synecdoche for the enduring American condition, forming an anthology of American experiences from bits of our musical history. Smith intended to compile five, maybe even six volumes of the Anthology; a natural polymath, he instead spent the rest of his life making films, collecting things like paper airplanes and string games, and becoming the de facto mayor of the Chelsea Hotel, where he encouraged young artists like Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Fahey’s Revenant Records eventually finished the fourth volume, a year before the death of the guitarist and Anthology adherent. After three volumes, what else did Smith have left to say?
You can’t stream the Anthology, not out of some Luddite resistance but likely because the legal bureaucracy of gathering together these 84 tracks remains imposing if not altogether impossible. (You can, at least, currently hear about half of them on Spotify.) You can sample 30-second bits of everything and download the 1997 liner notes through the Smithsonian’s marvelous website. Or you can buy the 6-CD box set for $80, a hell of a federally subsidized deal.
But I think that Smith, forever in need of someone to float him more than a few bucks, might actually want you to steal it, to grab the whole thing from the Internet Archive and dig in for the rest of your life. The Anthology was always legally suspect, anyway, released by Asch with the hope that larger labels would not care about the passion-driven reissue of sides they’d long ago let drift out of print and into obscurity.
The Smithsonian, it’s worth noting, worked through these legal issues for its attentive reissue, prompting at least one critic to say it fit our “benign, Disneyfied version of the twentieth century.” He has a point. This music was a positive piece of our national inheritance, Smith always seemed to say. Someone might as well take a risk sharing what good came with so much bad, particularly if they could front him the cash.


In a 16-channel piece commissioned for France’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the electroacoustic pioneer looks to the origins of the universe and the unconscious mind for inspiration.

Beatriz Ferreyra: *Senderos de luz y sombras *

Senderos de luz y sombras

Part and parcel of Beatriz Ferreyra’s compositional practice is the act of surrendering to music. “I do not think of anything,” she’s explained; “the sounds with their colors, their shapes, and their dynamics take me by the hand and take me where they want.” The pioneering Argentine experimentalist has decades of work that are sprawling in this way, grandiose in both ambition and impact because of sound’s unpredictable, commandeering nature. Her 1972 composition Siesta Blanca transmogrifies Astor Piazzolla tangos into elemental sensations of cold and heat. Dans un point infini, from decades later, is a longform epic built on screeching, manipulated strings. Her latest album features what is perhaps her loftiest work: a 30-minute composition written between 2016 and 2020 titled Senderos de luz y sombras (“Paths of light and shadows”). A 16-channel piece commissioned by the French state, it looks to the origins of the universe and the unconscious mind for inspiration; as always, she’s drawn to the mysterious processes that animate life itself.
Its first half, “Senderos abismales,” begins with a slow crescendo that feels like being sucked into a vortex. Amid its agitated electronics is a familiar clatter, like that of a door being locked: a signpost for the way this music aims to entrap. The actual results are mixed. Ferreyra is at her best here when finding ways to ground her oblique electroacoustic cacophonies in the everyday, such as when gusts of wind and speeding cars sound like they’re rushing past you, their familiar sonics magnified to the point of being hyperreal. There’s a science-fiction affect to a lot of music in the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) tradition, but if the music is constantly shifting, then it’s hard to feel immersed when every step of an evolution isn’t allowed to shine. In the middle of “Senderos abismales,” revving motor vehicles seem to materialize out of primordial goo, but they quickly fade to drab, droning hums. If Ferreyra’s fascination with the universe’s beginnings includes matter-antimatter annihilation, then she’s begrudgingly successful: Flashes of energy are indeed created, but they’re instantaneous, fleeting.
A lot of writing about Ferreyra’s music notes her time with Pierre Schaeffer, founder of the GRM, but her stints with Bernard Baschet—the late instrument builder and sound sculptor to whom this record is dedicated—are insightful too. Baschet, along with his brother François, were invested in constructing novel sounds, and pieces such as Iranon and Chronophagie have an exploratory sense of wonder. Ferreyra also dedicates Senderos to another experimental titan: Bernard Parmegiani. After hearing an unfinished version of Violostries in the 1960s, Ferreyra was emboldened: “Everything is possible,” she remembers thinking. Whether with tape music or instruments made from metal and glass, these artists’ works helped Ferreyra see that she could conjure entire worlds from relatively simple means.
Ferreyra’s understanding of this power drives Senderos’ best moments. “Senderos del olvido” opens with a sneeze—or at least something approximating one—and the piercing tones that cryptically glisten thereafter sound like miniature alien lifeforms chattering away. By the track’s halfway point, she makes the familiar even stranger by folding in a variety of extended vocal techniques, layering sputters and breaths with engine-like sounds akin to those in “Senderos abismales.” It provides narrative complexity but little else, bereft of the ecstatic playfulness that defined Murmureln or the hypnotic folk roots of Echos. Senderos’ coldness is perhaps the point, but it fails to live up to its premise, providing few opportunities to feel like you’re witnessing something monumental. Its final minutes are not cosmic, merely quotidian: Synths flicker in dull, unceremonious fashion, sounding less like the subtle glints of star formations than the deadened atmosphere of a run-down casino.


Drawing freely from funk, gospel, African pop, and electronica, Ahmed Gallab’s exuberant new album rejoices in the power of Black diasporic identity and community.

We Belong

On his new album, Ahmed Gallab, the Sudanese-born, New York-based multi-instrumentalist behind Sinkane, embodies the sense of deep pain and great joy that powers the sound of Black liberation. From the earliest spirituals to the first civil rights songs, the uplifting power of gospel to the cathartic energy of funk, Black music resonates with this profound duality, serving as a fundamental tool of resistance—a loud, proud refusal to comply with the expectations of a world that seeks to oppress. On We Belong, Sinkane uphold this legacy, smashing through constraints with revolutionary exuberance. The fact that so many civil rights anthems remain as relevant today as they were in the 1960s could be cause for sorrow, but Gallab chooses to celebrate the beauty in the struggle—most of all, the role of community and togetherness in driving it forward.
Sinkane’s albums all exude positivity, starting from the sunlit, breezy grooves of Mars (2012) and Mean Love (2014), which drew on Sudanese pop, ’70s funk, and electronica to give shape to the borderless sound that has come to define Sinkane. Gallab sharpened his focus on Life & Livin’ (2017), engaging more deeply with issues afflicting the world around him; on 2019’s Dépaysé, he explored his identity and the complexities of growing up as “an outsider” while reiterating messages of hope and unity. Thematically, then, We Belong is no great departure. Yet it feels grounded in a way that Sinkane’s previous albums were not, its joy less rooftop party, more radical and transformative. Opener “Come Together” lays out the core theme, urging those who feel they don’t belong to do just as the title suggests. “Greater than a sum of parts/There’s a better life to be,” Gallab belts over a swell of surging synths, as the word “Africa” rings out in a robotic drawl, transforming the track into a George Clinton-esque pan-African anthem.
We Belong is Sinkane’s most collaborative album to date, welcoming luminaries like soul singer Bilal and the late jazz multi-instrumentalist Casey Benjamin. It especially draws on “a specific kind of Black musical community” centered around New York, Gallab said in a statement. Many of the featured vocalists, such as Ifedayo Gatling (of the Harlem Gospel Travelers), Tru Osborne, and STOUT, have roots in gospel. The title track, co-written by Gallab and Amanda Khiri, channels the transcendent joy of Black church music through call-and-response vocals and an earth-shattering performance by STOUT. Together, they offer up P-funk extravagance, a call to freedom, and a few words borrowed from Alexander Pope: “Be yourself, free your mind/To err is human/To forgive divine.”
On an album that doesn’t seek simple escapism, “How Sweet Is Your Love” stands out as a rare moment of pure disco release. Bolstered by radiant strings and shimmering synths, Sinkane invite you to shed your worries and embrace the present moment. But We Belong doesn’t shy away from confronting the harsh realities of Black existence in America: The soul- and gospel-inspired “Everything Is Everything” reflects on the persistence of racial inequality and systemic violence, evoking the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others (“Y’all only know our names from hashtags”). The track epitomizes Sinkane’s ability to intwine such starkly contrasting emotions, opening on pensive, weighty guitars before reaching for the sky with soaring vocal harmonies and Osborne’s urgent entreaty: “My people, we will find our way/We ain’t got more time to wait.”
Tracks like the Afrobeat-infused “Liming,” with its East African vocal flourishes, hark back to the Sinkane of albums past, acknowledging the journey so far. In the years since his prior album, Gallab earned a master’s degree in composition, enabling him to join his kaleidoscopic influences in a more rigorous way; he’s credited as producer alongside Money Mark. The more collaborative approach feels like a natural progression from his experience as musical director of the Atomic Bomb! Band, a supergroup tribute to the work of groundbreaking Nigerian artist William Onyeabor that included the likes of Pharoah Sanders and David Byrne, among many others. By zooming out and opening up to the community around him, it feels like Gallab has given life to the vision he had for Sinkane’s music all along. Glittering with disco lights and showered with confetti, We Belong is a radiant homage to Black music and Black people.


The Chicago post-punk quartet’s jittery second album rails against gentrification, algorithmic overload, and the bankruptcy of life under an extractive system.

Freak Frequency

Stuck are preoccupied with life’s most consistent torment: capitalism. On their wryly-titled debut Change Is Bad, the Chicago quartet captured the nagging anxiety of life under a fucked-up system, pairing political screeds with twitchy, groove-driven post-punk that recalls Protomartyr and Mission of Burma. Lead singer Greg Obis likened his powerlessness to that of a bug: “I am the cockroach hissing alone/Another panicked and twitching drone.” The band sharpened their knives on 2021’s Content That Makes You Feel Good EP, critiquing corporate surveillance, the commodification of art, and the brutal ineffectiveness of cops.
Their second album Freak Frequency stays on theme, informed by the difficulty of maintaining sanity in a world ruled by bloodthirsty plutocrats and algorithms. How do you cope with the reality that your city’s most recent mayor—who looks more like a cartoon villain than most cartoon villains—was more interested in crushing teachers unions and sending out the police than improving general well-being? Reckoning with goofy, blatantly transparent evil, the band’s music sounds weirder and more diabolical than before, anchored by twisty, bickering guitar lines, scattered saxophone honks, and Obis’ manic vocal delivery. Leaning on cool overenunciations and sassy wails, he dials up the absurdity.
Obis foams at the mouth on “Time Out,” yelping satirical slogans like “Sell the pain!” to convey how social media gorges on our psyche like it’s a T-bone steak. Similarly, lamenting the way that history repeats itself on “Break the Arc,” he spits out consonants like a machine gun; underneath, the guitars stab like daggers while devilish boings add an element of farce. The darts keep flying: On “Do Not Reply,” Obis rebukes corporate executives who would “jump me in a heartbeat for the change in my pocket,” and on “The Punisher,” he pokes fun at MAGA stooges who exist in never-ending delusion.
The attacks are invigorating, but the band has a more vulnerable side, too. “We all know it’s just a matter of time before the stress becomes me,” Obis sighs in defeat on “Lose Your Cool,” consumed by anxiety even as he hears his therapist reassuring him in the back of his mind. On Plank III,” he recounts a relationship that fizzled after a diner became an empty lot, observing how gentrification can rob people of meaningful experiences. But he still has his sights on the developers who caused this ruin: “3D-rendered transformation/They didn’t leave any traces/of the lives that were lived here.” Stuck’s songs may not fall on the ears of the reckless billionaires and sycophants they write about, but they make an impact all the same.


On her third album, the British singer-songwriter proves to be an artist deeply invested in archetypes, one who doesn't muck about with the details of 21st-century life in her explorations of desire, loss, and understanding.

A Creature I Don't Know

Laura Marling's music feels timeless. I don't mean "timeless" in the sense that people refer to, say, Adele or Duffy as timeless, when really they're really just evoking a very specific time that happens to be distant. Marling evokes other artists, too, but they're spread out over the past five decades of pop and rock, from Joni Mitchell, Fairport Convention, and Leonard Cohen to Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, and PJ Harvey. Still, her songs feel divorced from time, lacking clues or signposts to indicate whether her stories and scenes might be set 500 years ago or yesterday. Marling's first two albums were noteworthy in large part for their precociousness. Her newest is A Creature I Don't Know, and it's her first that can't benefit from stunning you with its level of maturity. This is simply who Marling is right now-- an artist deeply invested in archetypes, one who doesn't muck about with the details of 21st-century life in her explorations of desire, loss, and understanding.
Certainly it's a brave artistic approach, this notion of wrestling with only the most primal states of being and ignoring all the fleeting fads and noise that make up the rest of our world. At the same time, such a large part of songwriting is making human connections, and often with Marling it's not entirely clear whether these songs are springing forth from a 21-year-old Englishwoman or some deathless, wandering spirit. Her reliance on heavily symbolic language and lack of interest in putting more of her personality into her compositions creates frustrating paradoxes: Her music's intimate yet distant, earthy yet seemingly not of this earth.
That said, the success of each song on A Creature I Don’t Know hinges on how well Marling inhabits the role she's given herself. Fortunately, while she may not be a particularly revealing performer, she's an extremely commanding one. Marling's tendency is to be stark and direct, and her presence carries equal weight whether she's accompanied by little more than piano or guitar (the unnervingly hushed, death-obsessed "Night After Night") or a churning instrumental malestrom (the Neil Young-worthy "The Beast"). On "The Muse", "Salinas", and the Zeppelin III-goes-hoedown single "Sophia", Marling's scarily impressive self-possession actually spills over into a kind of wickedly controlling glee, as she adds domineering theatrical flourishes to certain words and phrases in a manner that comes reasonably close to matching Harvey during her mid-1990s reign. Marling may spend the majority of these songs and several others struggling to find wisdom and peace in the face of trials brought on by lust, money, and death, but she almost always sounds like she already has all the answers.


After COVID foiled the tour behind their debut album, the London pop chameleons return with an EP that lurks in the shadowy spaces of claustrophobia, existential dread, and the sadness of a long pandemic winter.

Twixtustwain EP

In March 2020, the London pop chameleons Sorry were about to embark on a series of shows in support of their debut record, 925: a headlining tour across the UK, SXSW showcases, festival dates. You know what happens next. One year later, the band’s new Twixtustwain EP offers assurance that while the world went on pause, Sorry have only gotten weirder. Sorry’s core songwriting duo, Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen, first met as schoolmates. Initially, the friendship was contentious but eventually softened and the pair started a project, initially known as Fish. Later renamed Sorry, the band expanded and added band members Lincoln Barrett (drums), Campbell Baum (multi-instrumentalist), and Marco Pini (synths).
While 925 blended post-punk, pop, and jazz, the five-song Twixtustwain evokes the experimental collage of Sorry’s first two mixtapes, 2017’s Home Demo/ns vol. I and the following year’s Home Demo/ns vol. II. Though Lorenz and O’Bryen frequently cite prolific Philadelphia weirdo Alex G as an inspiration, another city of brotherly love band, Spirit of the Beehive, feels fitting as well. Like Spirit, Sorry flit between ideas, rarely sticking to a clear blueprint. Overall, however, Twixtustwain lurks in the shadowy spaces of claustrophobia, existential dread, and the sadness of a long pandemic winter. On the downcast opening duet, “Don’t Be Scared,” O’Bryen takes the lead, mumbling reassurances to a lover until he is abruptly cut off by a confession from Lorenz: “I’m at odds with myself/So many questions, even more doubts.” “Cigarette Packet,” on the other hand, channels its romantic confusion into bright chaos, with cowbell, synths, and babydoll vocal distortion all merging into a sort of hyperpop-lite.
With its shapeshifting songs and lyrical uncertainty, Twistustwain feels elusive. On the knotty “Things To Hold Onto,” Lorenz asks for a few crumbs of affection to cling to even if it makes an imminent separation more painful in the long run. The disjointed, glitchy “Separate” explores  physical and emotional distances. Most of the EP’s lyrics are grounded in plainspoken observations, but Lorenz’s imagery is particularly poetic here: “Feel like I’m the salt and you’re the water spinning round,” she sing-speaks in her distinctive, detached monotone.
Twixtustwain’s closing track, “Favourite,” is the EP’s most restrained. Evoking the dreamy sprawl of Galaxie 500 with hints of weirdness buried in the mix, Sorry’s version of a love song is straightforward and intimate, exploring the complicated dynamic of wanting to be desired while feeling insecure. “I couldn’t explain/Or put into words/All of the pain/That we’ve maintained/And put in a box,” Lorenz murmurs as O’Bryen repeats her words in the background. It’s a curiously quiet way to conclude an eclectic collection, but it shows Sorry’s determination to explore every avenue.

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The pop star’s latest is less of a faceplant than a comfortable rehash of past glories. He scales his stuttering electro and squelchy ’80s funk into hollow, expensive-sounding maximalism.

Justin Timberlake: Everything I Thought It Was

Everything I Thought It Was

Y2K is back and Justin Timberlake is the asterisk in the trend report, left in the dirt like skinny scarves and fedoras. The ex-*NSYNC singer’s stuttering electro-pop, kissed with silky millennium-era R&B, produced at least one all-time album with 2006’s FutureSex/LoveSounds. But after a decade of borderline unlistenable music, hindsight suggests that despite his talents as a performer, Timberlake was also simply in the right place at the right time to benefit from Timbaland’s mid-’00s hot streak, or snag the Michael Jackson rejects that made up his 2002 debut Justified.
Timberlake’s sixth album, Everything I Thought It Was, is designed to buff the dents out of his public image in the wake of a recent memoir by his ex-girlfriend, Britney Spears. She wrote that he encouraged her to get an abortion, told the media she was a “cheating slut and a liar,” and generally acted even worse than you might imagine from a cornrowed white dude who’s prone to speak in AAVE. In an interview to promote the album’s lead single “Selfish,” a wispy mea culpa directed to “the owner of my heart and all my scars,” aka his wife of 12 years Jessica Biel, Timberlake spoke admiringly of music that lays male emotions bare. Referencing Donny Hathaway’s cover of “Jealous Guy,” he told Zane Lowe, “You just don’t hear that from men often, that they would express an emotion that makes them vulnerable. Growing up the way I grew up, you’re kind of taught not to do that.”
Timberlake’s read on contemporary pop could have been true half a decade ago, but today’s radio airwaves are full of men talking about feelings, and the biggest songs last year from male artists were yearning country ballads. No one really wants to hear about gender from an artist who saw fit to name a 2013 single “Take Back the Night,” but softboy masculinity is a useful touchstone for an artist embarking on a redemption arc. Listening to his new album makes it all feel about as convincing as the rootsy pose he struck on 2018’s Man of the Woods, an album for the hypebeast whose hiking boots have never seen soil.
At 77 minutes, the mercilessly unhurried Everything I Thought It Was does everything you thought Justin Timberlake did but worse. Contrary to the story he told Lowe, the album stops short of meaningfully grappling with his past, offering a lily pad for rote, randy showmanship. “Flame” shoots for the cinematic swoop of “What Goes Around…Comes Around” but trades the intricacy of FutureSex/LoveSounds’ karmic ballet for smooth radio piano, soundbank samples of siren wails, and arson metaphors piled like dusty coals that are never going to take. By the end of the song you’re begging for something, anything to jolt the song’s eight producers out of bird-feeding Timberlake’s former triumphs back to you.
Timberlake’s songwriting hasn’t matured much since he co-wrote the labored addiction metaphor “Rehab” for Rihanna in 2007. Love is like war but also like a drug; women are angels who “taste” of cotton candy, or demi-gods with a “temple” primed for worship. The Timbaland co-production “Technicolor” should be a synesthetic delight with its kaleidoscopic imagery and visions of cosmic union, but it falls into The 20/20 Experience’s trap of an overlong runtime and a beat switch that goes nowhere. (Not for the first time on this 18-song album, I wondered what bass ever did to hurt Timberlake and his collaborators.)
Timberlake was always a shameless flirt with just enough goofy self-awareness to pull off a song as fundamentally silly as “Sexy Back.” On Everything I Thought It Was, gone is the switchy sub begging to be whipped if he misbehaves, replaced by an epilated chancer who gives you the ick. “Help me mess up this bed,” Timberlake sings on “Liar,” a fine-enough Afrobeats track featuring Fireboy DML and produced by Danja. “Don’t act like you don’t know what I meant.” We did. On “Imagination,” one of the album’s better attempts at disco-funk, Timberlake promises that “feeling is believing,” the kind of pick-up line that could keep a group chat fed for weeks. The electro-funk-leaning Calvin Harris co-production “Fuckin’ Up the Disco” is a highlight, even if the lyrics evoke an overserved IT technician at a conference wrap party. “You the password, I’ma hit reset,” he speak-sings, in a song that also invites its subject to “run your nine-inch nails all over my back.”
I’ll resist a gag about Timberlake’s own downward spiral, because Everything I Thought It Was is less of a faceplant than a comfortable rehash of past glories that has nothing to do with putting a fresh spin on his signature sound(s) and everything to do with cautiously course-correcting ahead of an extensive world tour. Timberlake has lived an uncommon, fascinating life, but offers only boardroom-approved breadcrumbs of insight. Album opener “Memphis” is a cliché take on the pressures of fame that makes Spears’ “Lucky” look like “For the Roses.” “They say, ‘Just be great/Who cares if there’s too much on your plate?’” Timberlake sings over a Noah “40” Shebib-esque beat that Jack Harlow would pass on as too generic. Aside from a shoutout to “Phineas, Jess, and Si”—his wife and kids—the song could be by anyone.
Ironically, it was songs like “Cry Me a River” that helped establish a template for gossip-powered pop hits that use not-so-secret Easter eggs about artists’ personal lives to jumpstart discourse. (See Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” or Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire.”) But with Timberlake you’re not sure you even want to hear it. There’s little on Everything I Thought It Was that piques curiosity, even though its author is utterly convinced of its importance. “A singular piece of art,” Timberlake recently declared while unboxing a vinyl edition with an alternate cover. “If there’s any film buffs out there like myself, this is a Fellini reference.” At least the singer resisted saying that something else was 8½.
Timberlake’s reticence to reveal much of anything makes you wonder if he really wants to play in pop’s big leagues at all. A recent raft of poorly judged features arrived to crickets, and Everything I Thought It Was’ only headline-making moment came after news that *NSYNC would reunite for one new song, “Paradise” (it’s ghastly). The album’s best moment looks to Timberlake’s boy band era more cannily. On the elegantly spare closing track “Conditions,” he draws on his quieter head voice to worry if a partner will stay by his side “if I lose myself and I go missin’/Make a couple hundred bad decisions/Do some shit I know won’t be forgiven.” He sounds adrift, with just a flicker of the pathos that bristled through *NSYNC’s indelible “Gone.”
The moment is brief. Timberlake has been punching below his weight and coasting for a decade thanks to certain stylistic and demographic advantages. Everything I Thought It Was brims with a misplaced confidence that can only be described as Timberlakean, laboring for such a long, long runtime under the misapprehension that a risk-averse mop bucket of last decade’s trending sounds is gonna hit through the sheer force of its performer’s waning charisma. For Timberlake in 2024, that’s something like business as usual.


TK

Larger Than Life

Brent Faiyaz is the guy in the club who seems mysterious and knows it. He’s got the moody-yet-cool lane on lock, and it’s made him one of the most prominent men in R&B right now. There’s nothing too deep about it, but when it works, it’s like his life is a Scorsese montage of short-term relationships that end with his suitcase getting tossed out the window. His velvety speak-sing won’t blow you away—especially if you were raised in a crib where weekends were soundtracked by the supernatural smoothness of Luther and such—but it is effortlessly fly. As a songwriter, the Maryland native relishes in being the villain (it won’t come as a surprise that he has said he “grew up on Max B and Dipset”). In the process his name has become a descriptor of its own—for the kind of dude who’ll play games with your heart.
What keeps the fuckery in Brent Faiyaz’s music feeling like real life instead of image upkeep is the setting. Since his breakout moment with the silky hook on “Crew”—with D.C. rappers GoldLink and Shy Glizzy—there’s been a sense that even if one of his late-night adventures takes place in L.A. or New York, all roads lead back to D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. On the heels of last year’s underwhelming but extremely popular Wasteland comes Larger Than Life, a life-is-good album where Faiyaz could easily have chosen to pop champagne to his success by bringing all of today’s most powerful rap and R&B artists into the fold. Instead he pays homage to his home by getting both regional pioneers and up-and-comers involved in his mess.
To underline the point, Larger Than Life kicks off with one of those timeless intros from Virginia Beach’s Timbaland that sounds like it’s been ripped off an answering machine. Once the smoke clears for Faiyaz’s naturally icy croons, the immediately recognizable sample is TLC’s “No Scrubs,” which sounds like a jittery Timbo beat but of course isn’t. No context necessary, though: Faiyaz’s conversational and flirtatious delivery is as crisp as ever. That’s followed up by “Last One Left,” another obvious flip, this one derived from Timbo’s beat for Missy Elliott’s “Crazy Feelings.” (Missy, another Virginia native, is here too, basically re-recording the cascading hook of the original.) What could have been just karaoke is spiced up by a pretty batshit verse where Faiyaz lectures some poor girl about getting relationship advice from her friends: “If they gon’ run yo’ life, then get your ass out of mine,” he sings sweetly, as if he’s not in full guilt-trip mode. Tacked on at the end is emerging Maryland rapper Lil Gray, spitting one of those radio-friendly guest features you could expect from Fabolous or Fat Joe in the early 2000s.
Predictably, Faiyaz does the Neptunes, too, on “Best Time.” This one is boring—summoning Timbaland and the Neptunes within the first four songs is nostalgia overload. He doesn’t even need it, not when he can choose from original local producers like Tommy Richman and Mannyvelli, who made the breezy “Upset,” and Manny again on the weightless “Moment of Your Life” (with Dpat and Sparkheem). Unfortunately “Moment of Your Life” doesn’t have vocal chemistry to match: Faiyaz’s thin coos are blown away by the traditional pipes of duet partner Coco Jones. It’s like replacing Usher on “My Boo” with Omarion. Usually Faiyaz gets around those vocal limitations by sticking to an even temperament, but when he tries to sound in love or at least infatuated, the grace turns to strain. He almost gets there on “Wherever I Go”: The falsetto right before the chorus is a nice flourish, just not enough for the pain to hit. It might feel beside the point to rag on his vocals, but rap-infused singers have had the range before. Send him a link to Lloyd’s Street Love.
Faiyaz sounds most alive when the stakes aren’t all that high, like on “WY@,” where his version of accountability is “I be doin’ shit I shouldn’t do for real/That’s why I always tell you to come through for real.” Or when he’s just laying down some player rhymes on “On This Side” with A$AP Ant and CruddyMurda, the D.C. rapper who doesn’t waste his moment in the spotlight. Still, he leaves a lot of emotional questions hanging. Is this life lonely? Is it monotonous? Faiyaz sings about stories that would be the highlight of most people’s year like it’s just another day. There’s gotta be another layer, I just know it. One more look under the hood—that could turn Brent Faiyaz into more than just R&B’s resident cool guy.


The first LP from Hype Williams in six years is ostensibly helmed not by its founders—Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland—but by a duo called Slaughter & Silvermane. It’s full of sludgy 808s and cheap synths.

Rainbow Edition

Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland were musical creatures born in a cloud of obfuscation. Their since defunct collaboration in Hype Williams fueled the beginning of the mystery around them. Blunt and Copeland were possibly fake names; in interviews they presented as opaque, put-on, and difficult; and their music was just as willfully obscure. Across their handful of records, their sound was not so much a solid thing, but rather like the thick dry ice fog Blunt prefers to perform under, gaseous and wet. It was a sound at the middle of IDM and pop and hip-hop and performance art. Their music was not exactly made for pleasure in mind, but maybe for thinking or more likely trolling.
Blunt and Copeland ended Hype Williams six years ago, and have not made music together since 2012. Over the past year, a group claiming to be Hype Williams released a pair of albums, but their representatives said Inga and Dean were no longer involved. The same inscrutable electronic sound was present on these records, but apparently they were fakes. Rainbow Edition is the first new officially-sanctioned Hype Williams record since, and the group is now fronted by a duo of musicians called Slaughter & Silvermane (at least according to a picture provided by the group’s reps). The album is 20-songs long, with not many tracks much longer than a minute.
While the sound is not dissimilar to previous Hype Williams efforts, it does have a rudimentary, more aggressively analog feel. The tracks are cleaved from thick, sludgy whacks of 808 drums and cheap synthesizers. They bear the influence of soul and hip-hop, which is not unlike the sound of Blunt’s recent Blue Iverson project (one of a few hints he’s behind this even though he says he’s not), but Rainbow Edition is more distorted. It’s like the kind of shitty-sounding, computerized soul music someone would make for a straight-to-VHS movie—the poor quality recalls the constant static wailing of a dial-up modem.
There are vocals, too, but they often come in snippets of pre-recorded conversation, telephone calls, and static-heavy samples, lending the record a feeling that almost approximates eavesdropping set to clunky music. Take, for example, the opener “Madting,” which is mostly a conversation a woman has with a group of men, accusing them of being “Uncle Toms” as a rinky-dink drum beat plays hesitantly in the background. It sets a sour but intimate tone that the album carries throughout its brief runtime.
While titles like “Cockblocker Blues” or “This Is Mister Bigg. How You Doing Mister Bigg” might suggest only play, this album for the most part is rather melancholic. At its best, Rainbow Edition expertly mixes high and low like in “Spinderella’s Dream,” where jagged synth sounds and angelic choruses intermingle to create what sounds like the prettiest arcade soundtrack ever. But, this being a Hype Williams record, jokes and goofiness are more readily apparent as an animating factor than actual musicianship and songcraft. There are genuinely weird songs, like “The Whole Lay,” which features a helium-inflected, Auto-Tuned voice crooning amid a field of flutes, as if to make a joke on the current trend of flute in pop music.
But then there are strangely poignant moments, like “#Blackcardsmatter,” where a male voice slurs the title phrase over and over again. The title itself is a seemingly crude joke, an inversion of “Black Lives Matter” that references exclusive, income-based credit cards; even more, the prickly, minor key piece sounds like it was composed on a Fisher-Price toy keyboard. But there is a sense of sheer sadness to it all, embodied by the absurdist but piercing lyrics that the heaving voice utters (“They wouldn’t really like this/The interracial thing/All I’ve got to say is Black Cards Matter”). The song is unexpectedly affecting.
Aside from a few bright spots, Rainbow Edition is ultimately a thin record of short, demo-quality beats. Like so many of Hype Williams’ records from the past, this one will feel like a curio or better yet, another reason to ask the question: Who the hell made this?


On King Woman’s debut LP, band mastermind Kristina Esfandiari finds her own path to redemption in doom—and it’s enough to inspire new believers outside of metal circles.

King Woman: Created in the Image of Suffering

Created in the Image of Suffering

The response to Doubt stunned Kristina Esfandiari. In 2015, the San Francisco songwriter finally issued her proper, full-band debut as King Woman, a name she’d toyed with for years while playing in other people’s bands. Across the EP’s four songs, Esfandiari used blown-out, country-kissed doom to reckon with and rage against a childhood spent in a Christian cult-like community. The unlikely mix—where waves of distortion and wrecking-ball drums crashed against a voice that somehow drifted even as it raged—found a sudden following. Conjuring Slowdive, Sleep, and maybe even Lucinda Williams, King Woman became one of the decade’s most interesting new doom acts, loaded with crossover potential.
But Doubt courted a more unexpected audience, too—the same religious clutches Esfandiari had castigated during those songs and in interviews with The Huffington Post and Rolling Stone. She soon started to clarify her positions publicly, but she didn’t back down. “This is my experience. This is my story, and I don’t give a fuck about what any you think,” she said last year. “I’ve had no voice for long enough, and there’s so much that I need to say.”
Esfandiari doesn’t repent during Created in the Image of Suffering, King Woman’s brazen and brilliant first LP, either. Instead, she redoubles her frustration and invective, not only impugning religious fervor but slyly subverting it as well, using its ecclesiastical language for very human conquests. Her writing is gripping and unapologetic, shrugging off the veils and cloaks of Doubt to address her grievances and express her regrets directly. “I wish somebody would have told me/’Cause the past you can’t get back,” she sings as “Worn” lifts to its grand chorus, “Feels like somebody wore me/There’s a deliverance I lack.” Backed by a three-piece that seems now to share ownership of these songs, she seems to be finding her own path to redemption in doom—and, in doing so, created one of the young year’s most powerful rock records to date.
No one gets off easy here. Esfandiari scorns the self-medicating faithful during “Deny,” her soft but haunting voice riding a riff that feels as sharp as a reaper’s scythe. “Shame,” meanwhile, spotlights the existential dread of Esfandiari’s former fellow adherents. She wonders how they find comfort in doomsday prophecies and punitive proclamations, why they seek shelter in something that feels so vengeful. She worries less about what people worship than how they worship—specifically, how they use their beliefs to ensnare themselves and those around them, herself included. During Doubt, King Woman seemed to be learning how to communicate these concerns as a group; here, they preach together as a mighty team. The band pounds away behind her questions and observations, the bellicose rhythm section and snarling guitars demanding answers from a society of self-delusion.
The real strength of this still-new quartet becomes clear on “Hierophant,” the centerpiece of these eight songs. Esfandiari funnels the language of the sacred into a series of profane come-ons: “If you’re a holy church, I wanna worship,” she sings. “If you’re a sacred script, I am the Hierophant.” She treats actual human lust with the same sort of obsessive, accidentally prurient language evangelicals sometimes use for God. It’s funny, seductive, and coming from someone who has seen both sides, tragic. And with a chorus that hits like an electrified lullaby with a heretic’s sense of mischief, it wouldn't be hard to imagine “Hierophant” as a rock radio anthem. Now that would be a coveted fall from grace.
Religious reckoning, of course, is nothing new to metal. For decades, the genre has subsisted on turning crosses and crowns upside down, self-identifying with the damned, and lampooning sources of self-proclaimed deliverance. But Esfandiari’s rebuke on Created in the Image of Suffering is personal and real in a way that vaguely recalls the torment of the Delta blues or the spiritual keening of early American gospel music. Darkness is not just some metaphorical tool for expressing defiance or disillusionment—Esfandiari has suffered and survived the horrors of which she sings. And yet there is an empowered spirit at the core of Created in the Image of Suffering, an understanding that goodness and light can crawl out of that dark, even if it takes a lifetime. With King Woman, Esfandiari has staked out her own salvation, and Created in the Image of Suffering is strong enough to inspire a lot of new believers.


This suite of three intricate, hour-long guitar drones from the Swiss experimental musician suggests no ends or beginnings, just an unfathomable expanse of immersive sound.

Guitar Studies I-III

A jumble of 825 motorized cardboard boxes, bumping into one another until they conjure the rhythm of distant techno. A sea of 663 suspended steel washers, bouncing from the floor until they invoke an overcrowded gamelan convention. A wall of 1,000 square feet of plastic wrap, blown by ventilators until it summons the pop and crackle of dusty vinyl. These are just three of the dozens of installations and sculptures that Swiss artist Zimoun has concocted over the past two decades, in order to elicit extraordinary sound from assemblages of everyday objects. (Highly recommended: Pass a few amused and mesmerized minutes or hours watching Zimoun’s other ingenious schemes.) They are attempts to create the feeling of chaos through control, to design systems so immense and intricate you are simply overwhelmed by their effect. When such sculptures work, they spark a keen sense of wonder—where else in your day-to-day existence have you overlooked such possibilities?
Zimoun’s actual albums, though, have never quite captured those twin senses of intrigue and imagination quite like Guitar Studies I–III, a new triptych of fastidiously made and totally immersive hour-long guitar drones that marks his debut for Lawrence English’s essential Room40. For each piece, Zimoun recorded a string of hour-long guitar improvisations, each exploring a different idea, like a motor vibrating the strings or a ball pinging against them. He played these takes through an assortment of amplifiers, sometimes hi-fi and sometimes shabby, and occasionally re-recorded the results by playing the passes back through carboard tubes or even half-broken speakers speckled with sand. There were no loops or shortcuts. An ostensible glutton for tedium, Zimoun stitched and mixed the layers together until they fit like tongue and groove.
If that all gets complicated, just remember this: By folding together so many layers, Zimoun created spans of electric sound that seem to have no end or beginning, no top or bottom. Listening feels like walking in some high desert that appears barren until you notice how alive everything is, including the soil itself. “It could even be endless,” Zimoun said of an earlier release. “It’s not going somewhere and not coming from anywhere—even if it is continuously changing.” At last, he masters that phenomenon.
The first of these three massive pieces unspools like a relatively quiet soliloquy from a member of Sunn O))). Massive chords roar in seemingly ceaseless waves, buttressed by low harmonies and static quakes that rise and fall, like breathing. The closer and longer you listen, though, the more you may hear; buried in the background of the track’s second half, for instance, there’s a piercing hum. Hearing that high tone glacially peel away from the surrounding lows is a subtle but visceral thrill, like time-lapse video of seasonal ice breakup.
The 64-minute finale moves like one of Rhys Chatham or Glenn Branca’s signature guitar armies, distilled until only the absolute essence remains. A fluorescent guitar tone serves as the piece’s through line, while other guitars offer variations—a distant tremolo murmur, a shorting cable’s crackle, a sweetly sighing riff. Just as there’s no clear beginning or end, “III” suggests that Zimoun doesn’t intend for this music to be happy or sad, glowing or gloomy; as with reality, it hangs always somewhere in between.
This liminal sense permeates “II,” the album’s centerpiece and masterpiece, plus its best balancing act between control and chaos. A murmur of a melody repeats from start to finish, like a spring daydream beset by static blips and ghostly hums. Think GAS marooned in the Black Forest, or Fennesz forever scoring the same square inch of shimmering ocean. The piece feels one note away from collapse or completion, as if one more element would either end it or elevate it into euphoria. But that change never comes, so “II” just flickers like an eternal flame, beautiful and bright but somber.
Guitar Studies I–III is bound to court one of the most rote criticisms of experimental music: Anyone can do this, right? Actually, maybe! Zimoun has been a guitarist since he was 10, but there are no fanciful licks or ornate riffs here, just patience and imagination. Given enough time and pedals, most decently competent instrumentalists could approximate most of these sounds, even if they lacked the wherewithal to build such intricate layer cakes. In that way, this music reflects geologic deep time, where rather ordinary events repeated over millions of years have shaped a splendid planet of mountains and canyons, rivers and plains. No one moment makes history or even stuns you; taken as a whole, the effect is completely awe-inspiring.


On their first album in six years, the experimental pop duo (mostly) puts down their namesake instruments to fold more electronic elements into their potent songs.

Scholars

Buke and Gase are often billed as an experimental pop act, a tag that has more to do with their inputs than their output. More than a decade ago, Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez designed the instruments from which they take their name—a bass ukulele (Buke) and a guitar-bass hybrid (Gase). More recently, they've crafted “the Arx,” a multi-instrument electronic control system that sounds awesome and sounds awesome. Still, on Scholars, their third proper LP and first in almost six years, they sashay into a familiar lineage of deconstructed, bold pop alongside the likes of Dirty Projectors and Braids, bands folding ingenious electronic elements into potent, acoustic-centered songs. The pair built these dozen colossal tunes by jamming and chipping away at their most ecstatic improvisations until the most powerful snippets with the heaviest grooves remained. The result suggests a robotic chamber orchestra, soldered together by someone shielded in a helmet emblazoned with a Bananarama sticker, Hot 97 blaring from a nearby boombox.
Dyer enters the album with a sky-high lament, her voice rising through a web of droning chords: “I fall down on the weekend/I fall so many times on the weekend/Yeah, you couldn’t find a better friend than me,” prompting memories of younger days of inebriated abandon from a distant, more-calm vantage. It sure feels beautiful, though—especially the way the sun glints from every word hanging in the air. Like Imogen Heap, she routes the round through Auto-Tune, creating harmonies that chase her transfixing voice like an army of droids. The melodies are huge, unfurling as multi-colored banners in the sky. Dyer meanders through them like she’s lost, ultimately finding her way back home via unpredictable but meticulously plotted rhythmic and melodic routes.
“Scholars” itself sets up a Bizet-worthy aria before bending toward 1990s grunge, all smashed to bits under relentless drums. Dyer and Sanchez play all these tricky grooves with their feet, using kick drums, tambourines, snares, and other triggers like subway buskers; rather than a limitation, it’s a kind of formalist constraint, establishing the cohesive framework from which they build. It recalls the early work of Yeasayer (or, more generally, dance forms like disco) in that the percussion and songwriting feel mutualistic, so that one cannot exist without the other. The off-kilter beat of “Pink Boots” seems to have shaped Dyer’s very syllables.
Living somewhere between Animal Collective and the Dresden Dolls, Buke and Gase’s 2010 debut, Riposte, established them as an innovative outlier amid the blog-rock flotsam. In 2013, General Dome added more complex arrangements, astounding vocal lines, and some studio wizardry. Scholars ups even that ante, as Buke and Gase largely ditch their namesake instruments in favor of the Arx and other electronics, setting up a transfixing contrast between synthetic and acoustic sounds, all led by Dyer’s skywriting voice. The production here snaps with the clarity and force of stadium-sized headbangers while maintaining the intimacy of Buke and Gase’s earlier work. It’s as if stints opening for the likes of the National and Battles challenged Buke and Gase to consider their sound in larger spaces without losing their fascinating edge.
Dyer manages space so well with her voice on “Derby” that the track sounds like a lost Sneaker Pimps single. There are shades of Frank Ocean’s Blonde, as when “Temporary” flosses an ode to New York through a vocoder and over a bouncy riff. “Wrong Side” wrangles the hard-knocking inflections of Björk’s Volta, while “Eternity” simultaneously recalls the insouciance of Tom Waits and the global rhythmic explorations of Yonatan Gat. Even in their extended absence, Buke and Gase have exemplified the ethos of self-determined musicians, songwriters, and sonic explorers, looking for ways to warp and refine an idiosyncratic craft. With an eye toward the innovations of contemporaries working in similar modes, Scholars exists on its own proud terms—suggesting the authority of a peer-reviewed entry to the canon.


Recorded in Nashville, backed up by an acoustic string-band including Jim Lauderdale, this is sort of a mishmash of ideas, some kicking around for decades.

Elvis Costello: Secret, Profane and Sugarcane

Secret, Profane and Sugarcane

Most of Elvis Costello's records for the past 15 years have been side projects of one kind or another-- attempts to show how very broad his range is that mostly demonstrate the opposite. He's released jazz records, classical records, a soundtrack or two, collaborations with New Orleans R&B overlord Allen Toussaint and mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. And every few years, at least when he's not threatening to quit recording, he gets together with his actual rock band-- the Attractions or their current iteration, the Imposters-- and does what he's genuinely brilliant at.
Secret, Profane and Sugarcane is not one of those rock-band albums. Costello recorded it in Nashville, backed up by an acoustic string-band including Jim Lauderdale, who sings harmonies on most of it, and the estimable dobro player Jerry Douglas. The most promising name in the credits, though, is producer T-Bone Burnett, who worked with Costello on 1986's King of America (as well as a nifty 1985 single credited to the Coward Brothers). King was a focused, fire-spitting album: a seething riposte to American culture and a conflicted love letter to American music.
The new record is no King: It's a gummy mishmash, an overambitious collection of table scraps and leftovers. (The forced wordplay of the title is the first sign that it's trying to cover too much ground.) There are remakes of a couple of songs that have been kicking around the Costello repertoire for ages ("Complicated Shadows" and "Hidden Shame", both of which previously turned up on the expanded version of All This Useless Beauty); there are a handful of fussy arias salvaged from a never-finished opera about Hans Christian Andersen and Jenny Lind, and a song dropped from 2004's The Delivery Man. There's a songwriting collaboration with Loretta Lynn, and two more with Burnett. One of the latter, a pastiche of Good Old Boys-era Randy Newman called "Sulphur to Sugarcane", is the closest thing to a keeper here (and the song from the album that Costello's been playing live the most), although it'd probably be more striking at three minutes than six. The version of the old Bing Crosby/Patti Page standard "Changing Partners" that closes the album is the most sensitive performance on it-- Costello's always had a great ear for covers. It's also a simpler, better-crafted song than any of his originals here.
The glory of the Attractions/Imposters is that they can make basically anything in Costello's repertoire sound good--even when the songwriting flags or Elvis oversings, they're fiery and idiomatic enough to keep things interesting. The Sugarcanes, as this album's ensemble will be called when they back Costello on tour this summer, are a fine, subtle, tasteful group, but accompanying this particular frontman occasionally calls for a degree of bluntness or spotlight-hogging they can't supply. When he tries to evoke early Johnny Cash on the remake of "Hidden Shame", their boom-chicka-boom lacks snap; when he slows down to a midtempo stroll or torch-song crawl, they don't bother to attempt the Americana-as-critique ferocity of King of America. And when he cranks up his delivery to spit'n'sneer, as on "My All Time Doll", they just get railroaded.
At its worst, this is effectively a contemporary acoustic neo-No-Depression record with Costello's signature vocal tics slapped on top. It's yet another entry in his string of gestural albums-- another argument that he's not "just" the rocker with a rock band whose rock songs still form the backbone of most of his live performances, both in their native idiom and out of it. But whoever suggested that being one of the great rock musicians was something he should aspire to move beyond?