The 40-song label compilation from Argentina’s AGVA Records is a prismatic and circuitous immersion into the sounds and aesthetics circulating across Latin America.

ARENA02

It would be too easy to approach ARENA002, the latest release from Argentina’s AGVA Records, as a primer on Latin American club music. Since 2015, the Buenos Aires netlabel has helped nurture a community of experimental producers and created a home for porteño club kids through their recurring party series and radio show. Their first compilation, a 12-track album released in 2016, introduced the world to some of their early dance floor machinations. But ARENA002 eclipses the ambition of its predecessor with 40 songs from producers, beatmakers, and vocalists from the landscape of Latin American club music, as well as a handful of international collaborators.
Rather than attempting to capture or “represent” all of the region’s talent in one release, ARENA002 is a prismatic and circuitous immersion into the sounds and aesthetics circulating across Latin America, resisting simple categorization. The compilation functions more like a celebration of the networks of exchange and affirmation that AGVA has built, embracing an unbounded sense of possibility and drawing on the collective memory of folkloric and popular sounds to remind us Latin American music is not bound to a single experience, aesthetic, or trajectory.
Parzubanil and Kotrina’s “Liquid” is a prime example of this desire to disrupt fixed narratives. The track is a percussive collage: it blends aquatic droplets, ribbit-like synth stabs, and baile funk moans, layering them over drum loops, horns, and jungle breaks. The result is a hauntological continuum: Parzubanil submerges echoes of Latin American percussive traditions underwater, decaying and transforming them for the dance floor.
Ozomatecuhtli’s “Teotihuacanos” announces itself as ancestral homage and is perhaps the most direct example of folkloric tribute on the compilation. Its title, a reference to the inhabitants of the Mesoamerican metropolis of the pre-Columbian era, almost immediately evokes a sense of communion: rain sticks and pan flutes slither in the distance, and tendrils of Mexican tribal folk percussion bloom into a spectral house bassline. It’s more than a portal into the past—it’s a reminder that Indigenous musical traditions are still woven into the present.

More than anything, the producers on ARENA002 relish the joy of the dance floor. “Cuchillo y Sal,” a standout track from Peruvian producer Orieta Chrem, is propelled by culinary ephemera; samples of sharpened knives, running sink water, and salt and pepper grinders mutate into dembow riddims, gabber-style kicks, and sinister grunts and roars. Elsewhere, SAPPHIR22’s “Brujonaso” opens with a brash dance floor command: “Rompete ha’ta bajo, que e’tamos llegando” (“Break it down low, we’re coming”). A gun cocks, a maniacal voice cackles, and SAPPHIR22 unleashes a torrent of drum loops and sirens into a rave reggaeton vortex, as pitched-down echoes of Hector El Father’s classic “Noche de Travesura” float over the production. Imagine the blood rave scene from Blade, but with more perreo.
ARENA002 succeeds as a massive club pack, rather than as a traditional compilation meant to be enjoyed from start to finish. The release focuses primarily on producers from South America rather than the Caribbean or Central America, so consider it a partial introduction to some of the region’s sounds. Some tracks, like YOTO’s “Zaramostra,” revel so deeply in experimentation that they renounce any sense of compositional structure; it’s the kind of material that demands to be experienced live, rather than through headphones.
Still, ARENA002 is an impressive offering. It asks us to embrace a radical, open relation to South America’s folkloric, popular, and left-field sounds—to take club music from the region seriously, to challenge the limitations that European and U.S. perspectives have imposed on experimental music from Latin America. ARENA002 raises a middle finger to convention and expectation, and instead embraces the promise and freedom of abstraction.

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Terrifying and thrilling in equal measure, the debut album from the Oklahoma City sludge-metal band is a vivid rendering of the towering piles of poison littering America’s psychic landscape.

God’s Country

In World War I, fully half of America’s ammunition came from lead mined by the workers of Picher, Oklahoma. After generations of deindustrialization, Picher was abandoned in 2009, and despite a decades-long federal cleanup effort, it remains a ghost town strewn with mountains of toxic mine tailings—200-foot-high heaps of contaminated gravel known as chat piles. These poisoned mounds make a fitting metaphor for the Oklahoma City sludge-metal group. A gut-churning amalgam of molten guitars, pile-driving drums, and agonized howls, Chat Pile’s sound is as ugly as their inspiration—a terrifying embodiment of cancerous shit brought to the surface that should’ve been left buried deep below.
The quartet of singer Raygun Busch, guitarist Luther Manhole, bassist Stin, and drummer Captain Ron, Chat Pile have only been around since 2019, but they are inheritors of a musical lineage that goes back decades. On their first two EPs, the self-released This Dungeon Earth and Remove Your Skin Please, they did little to disguise their influences. The oily bass and guitar echoed the classic sludge of groups like Eyehategod, Karp, and Floor. The boomy blast of reverbed electronic drums flashed back to Big Black and Godflesh. Busch’s unhinged yowls immediately brought to mind the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow, while the mechanical brutality of the rhythm section evoked fellow former Amphetamine Reptile signees Helmet. At the margins, atonal spillover from arty groups like Unwound mingled with the lingering influence of drop-tuned nu-metal wizards Korn, obliterating hardcore’s conventional hierarchies of taste.
Chat Pile’s debut album makes no radical changes to that mixture; it just sounds bigger, uglier, and scarier. Once again handling production duties themselves, they’ve beefed up the music’s proportions, finding new depths in a mixdown that churns like a swollen river thickened with flood debris. Beginning with a halting progression of drum fills before exploding into Busch’s larynx-shredding shriek, the opening “Slaughterhouse” underscores just how forbidding their sound has gotten. The bass is tuned so low that its tones no longer register as actual notes—more like dark, gelatinous stains spreading across the low end. The guitar stabs and slashes, carving out dissonant yet hypnotic riffs that are catchy in spite of themselves. And the merciless snares and toms, driven home like a cattle pistol to the head, are the perfect complement to a song about abattoirs.
Despite the record’s imposing dimensions, Chat Pile pair heaviness with restraint. There are no solos and few double-time passages. Digging into their riffs with the tenacity of a dog worrying a bone, they stick to a methodical, mid-tempo pace—the determined gait of a contract killer on deadline. An innate sense of contrast amplifies the music’s force. Showing utmost respect for empty space, they know precisely when to pull back—to emphasize the cracked edge of Busch’s voice, or leave room for a silvery tendril of guitar—and when to flood the zone with pure, cleansing fire.
Even as an instrumental trio, Chat Pile would absolutely slay. But Busch tips them into true greatness. He’s got it all: presence, personality, and the storytelling abilities of a seasoned horror director. Start with his arresting voice, which might mimic the authoritative bark of a cop with a grudge or the withered mewl of a basement-dwelling troll, eliciting not just discomfort but something approaching physical disgust. When he screams, which is often, it’s not just figuratively blood-curdling, it sounds literally curdled, like little globs of matter were detaching from the walls of his throat, gumming up the vowels as they tumbled out. When he expresses vulnerability, he has a tremulous, sputtering tone somewhere between Bobcat Goldthwait and Barney Gumble on a three-day bender; it’s the sound of a man unraveling from inside.
While there are topical themes in their music—“Slaughterhouse” exposes the brutality of industrialized meat production, and “Why” is a desperate plea of sympathy for the unhoused—Chat Pile aren’t so much a political band as they are dystopian impressionists. “More than anything, we’re trying to capture the anxiety and fear of seeing the world fall apart,” says Stin. True to form, in song after song, Busch displays the awful magnetism of a street-corner ranter in a sandwich board. His subject matter can be chilling: In “Anywhere,” a gunshot rips through a moment of tranquility, leaving blood on the narrator’s face, brains on his shoes; in “Pamela,” a man seems to confess to drowning his son to get back at his wife. (At least, that’s one possible interpretation, in light of Remove Your Skin Please’s horrifying song about filicide, “Dallas Beltway.”) Seething like one of Henry Rollins’ angriest missives, “Tropical Beaches, Inc.” might be a businessman’s explosion of self-loathing. But the exact outlines of the songs’ narratives are rarely clear. Both captivated and repelled by Busch’s antiheroes, our sympathies drift uneasily across the rutted surface of the music, trying and failing to find a solid moral purchase.
What’s scariest is the path these songs travel as they devolve from garden-variety societal ills into a kind of free-associative chaos. “Wicked Puppet Dance” starts out like a cautionary tale about intravenous drugs, but by the second verse the paranoid narrator is meting out murder and arson, while the inscrutable chorus simply reels off a list of charged monosyllables, insistent as Nitzer Ebb and dripping with portent: “God’s/Eyes/Taste/Lips/Red/Phos/Death/Cum.” Likewise, “The Mask” begins as a short story told from the perspective of an armed robber, yet by the end, his howls are an inventory of “broken faces…/And jamming fingers/And goddamn dust in my eyes for the rest of my life,” a litany unintelligible to anyone not living in his own tortured mind. Even the closing “Grimace_Smoking_Weed.jpeg”—a nine-minute juggernaut about a guy so high he hallucinates the McDonald’s mascot in his bedroom—isn’t quite the lighthearted cannabis gag it might seem to be; deep down, it’s a harrowing existential nightmare, like a stoner-metal update of Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized,” toxic metals pooling at the bottom of his Pepsi.
Songwriting from the villain’s perspective is nothing new—see hardcore, see country, see narcocorridos. To Chat Pile’s credit, even their most unsettling songs never feel exploitative. As slippery as their songwriting can be, there is no doubting the band’s ethical compass. The question at the heart of “Why” (“Why do people have to live outside?”) is an unequivocal indictment of a system that relegates people to homelessness. The refrain of the dirge-like “Anywhere” (“It’s the sound of a fuckin’ gun/It’s the sound of your world collapsing”) ought to be looped at punishing volume outside NRA headquarters. Still, the question remains: Why would anyone want to listen to someone singing from the perspective of a child killer? Perhaps for the simplest of reasons: Because they are there. Chat Pile aren’t asking us to relate to these depraved characters, they are showing them to us because they are symptoms of a deeper rot.


Much like his rhymes, Aesop Rock’s score for the action thriller Bushwick is packed with captivating detail; it’s an excellent fit for the film’s unrelenting intensity.

Aesop Rock: Bushwick (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Known for his gruff voice and labyrinthine rhymes, Aesop Rock is easy to listen to but hard to rap along with. He weaves dense, captivating songs that beg for engaged parsing. He’s never stopped experimenting with his voice, which means that his production has often been overshadowed by his lyrics and his delivery. But in late 2015 a pair of filmmakers saw something in Aesop Rock’s beat-making and tasked him with scoring the action thriller Bushwick. His skill set turns out to be an excellent fit for the rapid-fire intensity of their film.
Spanning just a few hours and several blocks of embattled Bushwick, the film imagines civil war breaking out in Brooklyn. Rather than dystopian world-building, the filmmakers invest mainly in the immediacy of unrelenting violence, stringing together a series of exhausting, hyperlocal tracking shots. The gunfire is addling and constant, and Aesop Rock’s score is appropriately tense. “Corner Store” casts the opening fly-over scene of an apparently normally bustling Bushwick in an anxious light, with a sinister synth buzzing over plunked keys. Many tracks precipitate or accommodate the bewildering sounds of inner-city combat: incessant helicopters, unexpected silences, explosions that sound sharp when nearby and dull when far away. As an accompaniment to the film, the score accomplishes its assigned mood-setting role and even assists some sporadic character development. The eerie calm of “Mashed Potatoes” cuts against the energy of a revelatory fight scene to underscore a protagonist’s unusual poise under fire. But the isolated score also demands attention. The tracks come alive on their own; they sound, if anything, even more unsettling when left with room for the imagination to flesh them out.
Aesop Rock’s Bushwick score reflects the movie’s pace, going from uneasy (“Mashed Potatoes”) to frenetic and confrontational (“Ogres” and “Sharks and Minnows”). “Raiders” is a propulsive anthem on the prowl—less ducking for cover than rallying for the attack. “New Yule” is more sinister but less sure of itself, with fidgety synths that frantically drill for open space. Here and elsewhere, the score’s short tracks often feature glitchy mood-building before a prettier theme soars from the mix.
Most tracks are built from vibrating synths and rattling percussion—clanking, artificial sounds that erupt sporadically and burn slowly. Lonely, modulating synth leads function as interludes, buzzing like a disquieting electrical hum. It all makes a strategic backdrop for the movie’s shaky combat scenes, but many of these sounds were already in Aesop Rock’s arsenal. A number of tracks sound like meandering, toned-down siblings of the beats he designed for himself on his last album, The Impossible Kid. Shorn of vocals or DJ scratching, they amount to a kind of gritty, industrial-sounding trip-hop.
There are a few moments in the movie when the score slips directly into the scene instead of lying over it. When the protagonist visits her stoned and oblivious sister, “Chesterfield” thumps muddily through the wall from the apartment next door; here, on its own, the song’s lead synthesizers twinkle over a crisply defined beat, with a world of detail opening up in the empty spaces. Just like the artist raps, Bushwick is both busy and precise, commanding full attention. That his production blends in so well with the film is an accomplishment. Better yet that it holds up so well on its own. As always, Aesop Rock’s music flourishes under scrutiny.


The anonymous Brooklyn rapper’s third album is a little bolder and a little rawer, but it’s her versatility—across hip-hop, ballroom, house, and R&B—that keeps her sound fresh.

Shape Up

Leikeli47 may wear a mask, but she has a stronger sense of identity than many rappers who plaster their faces wherever they can find space. She’s a child of hip-hop and ballroom culture whose reference pool includes rap icons like JAY-Z and Lauryn Hill, and fashion icons like America’s Next Top Model coach J. Alexander; she lets her music speak for itself, but infuses it with just enough biographical detail to stand out. As a Black woman living in Brooklyn, Leikeli’s brand of anonymity grants her music a personal and communal confidence that extends across her three studio albums, all named after Black beauty treatments: 2017’s Wash & Set, 2018’s Acrylic, and her latest project, Shape Up.
Structurally, Shape Up isn’t far removed from the rhythm of Acrylic. Both albums revolve around pulsing beats that owe as much to ballroom and techno as they do hip-hop, and both eventually pivot to sultry ballads and love songs. The key difference between the two is the lack of a narrative throughline—unlike Acrylic, Shape Up has no skits or world-building exercises. Like any good sequel, the new album amplifies what worked before, streamlining an established formula without tampering too much. Leikeli’s braggadocio is slightly bolder, the intimacy of her stories slightly deeper. She opens the second verse of “Secret Service” with a raucous scene of her and some friends bumping JAY-Z songs while driving a van along the Potomac River, and you can feel the subwoofer rattling the chassis. Moments like these mark Shape Up as another peek behind her personal curtain, but it’s also a fiercely entertaining rap album in its own right.
Leikeli’s versatility goes a long way toward keeping her sound fresh. In her default mode, she mixes plucky punchline raps and gimme-what’s-mine boasts told with painterly detail. On “New Money,” she leads with a brutal shot at an ex (“My ex called me trying to talk again/But I don’t negotiate with terrorists”) and describes the Nike socks scrunched up in her Jimmy Choos before ending with a sweetly sung coda that recalls the opening melody of Beyoncé’s “Formation”: “I want every single quarter, penny, nickel, and dime/You ain’t gotta mail my check nigga; I’m outside.” “New Money” collapses all of her talents to dizzying effect, but they’re equally interesting when they manifest independently in the flows of the punchy autobiography that morphs into an action-packed stomp-out on “Zoom”; in details like the “assalaamu alaykom” that precedes a whirlwind romance with a partner on “LL Cool J” (short for “Ladies Love Cool Jewelry”); in the zig-zagging delivery of the ballroom scene she conjures on “Jay Walk.” Leikeli’s words are transportive, her sense of place amplifying the hectic production.
The scene-setting is just as captivating when she transitions away from pure rapping. Leikeli loves a jarring mid-album switch, almost as if she’s flicking your ear to ensure you’re paying attention. On Shape Up that’s a three-song stretch where she tells a failed love story over Temptations-style doo-wop (“Free to Love”), preaches pro-Black affirmations over a strobing house beat (“BITM”), and delivers a simmering R&B bedroom slow jam (“Baseball”). It’s a rollercoaster of tempo and mood changes, one that highlights the emotional and musical complexity of Black womanhood in blunter terms compared to the conceptual framework of Wash & Set and Acrylic. The candid romantic frustration and eventual clarity of “Free to Love,” in particular, give its story an equally personal and universal appeal.
Concept or no concept, Leikeli47 takes pride in using familiar elements of hip-hop, house, and R&B to continually remix her story. Her songs fuse stark confidence and raw vulnerability, unconcerned with how they scrape up against each other. Leikeli hasn’t strayed far from her musical comfort zone over the last five years, and Shape Up doesn’t attempt to fix what isn’t broken. But the control she exerts over her story ensures that every new album feels like an introduction.


The Nigerian superstar’s latest LP can feel heavy under the weight of his personal reflection and Pan-African crusade. It is a load worth carrying.

Twice as Tall

As a child, like many children, Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu was fascinated by superhero comics. He wanted to be his own superhero, so he named himself Burna Boy, a moniker that has followed him into a career as one of the defining musical acts of today’s African diaspora. Last November, after his fourth studio album African Giant permeated the summer from Abuja to Brooklyn, he sold out London’s Wembley Arena. Now, just a year after African Giant, Burna returns with Twice as Tall, and with it, a more resonant origin story—one that explains his ascent from 2018’s breakthrough single “Ye.” In an accompanying motion comic, the Yoruba deity Orunmila chooses Burna to embody his “secret flame.” With it, Burna is challenged to restore the gods’ faith in humanity. He meets these Black gods again, in 2020, his mission completed through his resounding success. “You make music passionately, like you are waging a war,” one tells him, proudly.
Twice as Tall is Burna’s battle cry. Compared to 2018’s jovial Outside and last year’s sunnily conscious African Giant, Twice as Tall can feel heavy under the weight of Burna’s personal reflection and Pan-African crusade. His newly moody Afro-fusion—a mix of afrobeat, reggae, dancehall, hip-hop, EDM, and more—amplifies his passion. Twice as Tall could’ve aimed to crystalize Burna’s position as a global Afropop star with easier, feel-good hits. Instead, he turns starkly inward, assuring himself of his power, and outward, reminding the world of its failures and its potential. It is a load worth carrying.
Burna Boy lost the 2020 Grammy for Best World Music Album to celebrated Beninese singer Angélique Kidjo, an idol and collaborator. Despite his reverence for her, the loss sickened him, as he recounts on album opener “Level Up.” As Burna—whose humility here is admirable—lists times that he’s felt small, he initiates the familiar, satisfying arc of the hero’s journey. Over Anderson .Paak’s menacing drums on “Alarm Clock,” Burna issues a warning in light Pidgin English: You’ll discover that I’m really unstoppable. The somber synths of “Way Too Big” sound like a hike up Mount Olympus. Twice as Tall is marked by Burna’s pride in his hustle, his confidence in his path, and his faith that he is favored by the divine. It’s littered with pleas to God, rebukes of the Devil, and prayers that his trek to victory will be uninterrupted. As the album ends, he and UK rapper and singer Stormzy offer a peaceful, self-assured balm with “Real Life,” before Burna settles into the might and limits of being merely human on “Bank on It.”
While Burna uses the album opener to meditate on his own capacity for greatness, he reveals grander ambitions than riches and relaxation, or even personal fulfillment. He’s on a mission to fold in all corners of the diaspora, bridging colonial ruptures to illuminate a common struggle. When the album was nearly complete, Burna enlisted Diddy as an executive producer, alongside himself and his mother, Bosede Ogulu. Diddy supplies his experience as an American music mogul and adds narration that neatly stitches tracks together. “We from the same tribe. It’s Black love,” he says at the top of “Alarm Clock.” On “Monsters You Made,” Burna rages about structural violence and the ways it breeds interpersonal harm, as well as protest. He pulls at the thread that connects all oppressive regimes, from the post-war Nigeria that radicalized his hero Fela Kuti to the modern United States. With a hook from Coldplay’s Chris Martin and bombastic production that evokes an Imagine Dragons single, the song smuggles one of Burna’s most radical political messages into a record that could top the modern rock charts.
The pensive tone of Twice as Tall may throw off fans of Burna’s more danceable tracks, but “Wonderful,” “Onyeka (Baby),” “Naughty by Nature,” and “Comma” offer reprieve from the album’s focus and fury, bringing the levity to an impressive mid-album stretch. Here, Burna indulges. Sure, “Onyeka” is inspired by Nigerian diva and activist Onyeka Onwenu, who hosted a striking BBC documentary about government corruption in Nigeria and was subsequently banned from seven of the country’s 36 states—but it’s really just a scampish love song. On “Naughty by Nature,” he enlists the titular rap trio, whose 1993 hit “Hip Hop Hooray” was the first song he learned word-for-word. “Comma” is the party anthem, akin to African Giant’s “Killin Dem,” and Burna has the time of his life making light of sticky situations and women’s cosmetic procedures.
In an archival interview featured in Alex Gibney’s documentary on Fela Kuti, the Afrobeat trailblazer says, “As far as Africa is concerned, music cannot be for enjoyment, music has to be for revolution.” Of course, Kuti’s music was widely enjoyed, but it was also complex and challenging. On his latest LP, Burna Boy leans into this aspect of the icon’s mythos. Twice as Tall advances Burna’s political vision, and is frankly less fun than the two recent projects that catapulted him to superstardom. But the world is less fun than it was a year ago, too. Society could use a hero, a godsend. Pairing rhythms that possess the hips with encouraging calls for Black unity and an infectious sense of self-reliance, Twice as Tall is Herculean.

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After years of waiting and mounting hype, Jay Electronica’s fantastic debut is a mystical, distinctive work that nearly lives up to all the lore surrounding the rapper.

A Written Testimony

The myth of Jay Electronica has long outweighed the music—in part because there was so little of it. He’s been: touched by Erykah Badu juju; cozy with a Rothschild; a Nas ghostwriter. He got a thousand beats from J Dilla, was anointed by JAY-Z, and was the last man left standing after Kendrick Lamar put the rap world on notice during “Control.” He is a homeless drifter turned enigmatic spiritual guru who accepted a co-sign from notorious Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, met super-Christian Chance the Rapper halfway on Coloring Book’s “How Great,” and worshipped at Hindu and Buddhist temples in Nepal during personal pilgrimages. But he’s only officially put out one mixtape, two singles, and a handful of other songs since 2007, occasionally appearing out of thin air to guest on songs seemingly at random.
And so with time, the myth grew. What was real and what was fiction began to blur, and what was real mattered less than what was interesting. The ghostwriting claims were disputed, he has never released a song with an original Dilla beat, and many count him as a footnote left in Kendrick’s wake, but he did actually end up between two of the wealthiest families in England. The selection of songs Jay Electronica has released over his career has drawn from all of this, only he’s put out as many of them in 13 years as some prolific rappers put out in a few months. The wait for his debut album has been so long that it became more of an ancient prophecy than a movable release date.
But the album, A Written Testimony, has finally materialized. It is a mystical, distinctive work that nearly lives up to all the lore surrounding the rapper. First and foremost, it is a prayerful offering that expresses the many spiritual and communal virtues he has internalized. But it’s also a record about the scrutiny of an insatiable public, one that leans on higher powers amid self-doubt. In just under 40 minutes, Jay Electronica erects monuments to Allah, NOI founder Elijah Muhammad, and Roc Nation overseer JAY-Z, who is at his side for nearly the entire album serving as sergeant-at-arms. “From a hard place and a rock to the Roc Nation of Islam/I emerged on the wave that Tidal made to drop bombs,” he raps on “Ghost of Soulja Slim.” From this well of deep faith, he summons rap performances that seem to defy space-time.
Like Dr. Dre scrapped the expectation-bogged Detox for Compton, Jay Elec (mostly) starts fresh here. An album called Act II: Patients Of Nobility (The Turn) had been in the offing since 2010, but a sequel three presidential terms in the making carries too much baggage. After waiting more than a decade for an album that will likely never come, fans instead received a brand new album only a few months after its announcement, one made in “40 days and 40 nights”—a period of great biblical significance (Jesus fasted, Moses waited on Mount Sinai for God’s law, Elijah fled in the wilderness). With the exception of “Shiny Suit Theory,” these are new songs, or, at least, previously unreleased ones. Whether the raps are from scribbled verses stashed away in Moleskines since the late 2000s or produced during the 40-day period of inspiration, the album sounds current because Jay Electronica’s rapping is immediate and immutable.
A Written Testimony is largely defined by the space between every note and word. These beats have a subtle grandeur to them that suits the gravitas with which Jay Elec performs. He produced most of the album himself, but the Alchemist and No I.D. follow his lead with gorgeous, unadorned flips. The music of “A.P.I.D.T.A.” is so untouched that the sampled band, Khruangbin, is credited as the producer. The beats on “Ghost of Soulja Slim” and “Ezekiel’s Wheel” affix understated drum kits to fuzzy, lo-fi samples that sound culled directly from TCM standards. Even “The Blinding,” which is split between booming Swizz Beatz and AraabMuzik chant music and elegant Hit-Boy dinner party rap, finds its way onto this tapestry. The unobtrusive but marvelous production allows Jay Electronica to be heard with the greatest clarity; he enunciates each syllable as if etching it into stone. These are his 10 hotep commandments.
Rap is no stranger to Five-Percenter rhetoric. It has touched artists from Wu-Tang Clan to Common, but Jay Electronica is curiously the rapper closest to the Nation of Islam and also the most cagey about his ideology. Through the NOI, as a young man, he found black power and unity, self-sufficiency and self-improvement. The teachings are his backbone and he uses them to lock horns with the devil. On “The Neverending Story,” he turns his origin story into a fable in which religious conviction saved him from destitution and hopelessness. Whether you take his faith at face value, the way he raps about it is mathematical—creating this impressive symmetry out of his life where there seemingly wasn’t any before. He weighs each word carefully and weaves in his own arcane theology. He is focused, convincing, and on message, even if that message is taking Biggie from Rap Mecca to actual Mecca, as Jay Elec flips a line from “Juicy” into one of the Five Pillars: “Remember Rappin’ Duke? Duh-ha, duh-ha/You never thought we’d make it to Lā ilāha illā Allah.”
It’s tempting to frame Jay Elec strictly as a mystic trying to fully unlock his chakras—and it’s hard not to when he’s rapping about the return of the Annunaki, calculating azimuths, or dragging his cross to Nazareth while wearing his crown of thorns—but he balances his mysticism with the down-to-earth perceptiveness of someone who has wandered the globe seeking refuge from sin. For all the time he spends consulting the universe in search of absolute truth, he spends just as much lingering in the traumas of the human condition. “I spent many nights bent off Woodford/Clutchin’ the bowl, stuffin’ my nose/Some of the cons I suffered for prose,” he raps on “Universal Soldier.” He mourns Flint, ICE breaking up families, and mortars striking Palestinians. His poignant verse on “A.P.I.D.T.A.” wrestles with the unceasing pain of experiencing death, even when you find comfort in the existence of the hereafter. The grandiosity is his sales pitch, but the real selling point is the empathy within.
He is supported at nearly every turn by career-redefining performances from rap’s greatest careerist, his billionaire boss JAY-Z. Rappers tend to fall off the cliff at 50, not just losing touch with the culture but losing their grasp of swing, like an aging athlete succumbing to arthritic joints. Hov has been turning back the clock for a while now, but he does something far more impressive here than 4:44’s personal accounting: He contorts into whatever shape is required of him by his host. During his last real foray into tag-team rapping, 2011’s Watch the Throne, JAY-Z was a step slower than his protege Kanye, a disparity largely exposed by his own eagerness to dictate the pace. On A Written Testimony, the God MC seems to simply be ordaining another. JAY clearly loves rapping with Jay Elec. These circumstances give him the chance to set his competitiveness aside and become the conscious technician he always dreamed of being.  “My ancestors took old food, made soul food/Jim Crow’s a troll too, he stole the soul music/That’s the blood that goes through me, so you assumin’/I could never sell my soul, they sold they soul to me,” he raps right out of the gate on “Ghost of Soulja Slim.” JAY-Z, who is pretty familiar with the movement, is reanimated by purpose here.
Together, the two Jays exchange epic pyramid raps, settling into a rhythm that would make Raekwon and Ghostface proud. On “Shiny Suit Theory,” JAY-Z raps, “In the world of no justice and black ladies on the back of buses/I’m the immaculate conception of rappers-slash-hustlers,” and that thread of divine providence as the key to overcoming black struggle continues here. JAY-Z and Jay Elec follow this train of thought from two different angles and meet in the middle: The Five-Percenter ideal that the black man is god and the idea that through Allah black people can be granted agency. This is where Jay Elec finds his strength. The dignity and earnestness through which he raps lend all his verses a certain authority. He isn’t asking for reverence, only for onlookers to heed his experience as a man who found religion and its power to transform. What you believe is up to you, Jay Electronica simply wants you to have a little faith.

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On her second album, reluctant Gen Z ambassador Clairo turns back the clock, embracing classic touchstones of 1970s folk.

Sling

“Pardon my emotions,” Clairo apologized on her 2019 debut Immunity, suppressing a pounding desire to shut off the TV and just kiss already, worried that her friend would be terribly inconvenienced by the news of her crush. The 22-year-old artist’s world was one of discretion and uncertainty, small utterances and their shadow meanings, shy nudges toward people you want so badly to touch. (As she once told Rookie, “Getting close to someone is a really sensitive thing.”) But on “Blouse,” the hushed lead single of Clairo’s second album, Sling, the little thrills of adolescence are gone. “Why do I tell you how I feel/When you’re just looking down the blouse?” she sings, the dewy sincerity she once radiated now hardened into bitterness. Here is another young woman whose trust has been abused by an older man, and who is so hungry to be validated that she’ll risk being sexualized again: “If touch could make them hear, then touch me now.”
It is brutal to realize, when you’re young, that the ogling curiosity with which older people regard you is not the same as respect, and getting attention does not mean having real agency. Since she stumbled into fame in 2017, and not entirely of her own volition, Clairo has been narrowly interpreted through the prism of her generation—keywords: viral, YouTube, bedroom pop, POLLEN, bisexuality—as an avatar for sensitive youths more comfortable online than outside, and who speak frankly about their feelings. On Sling, you sense her exhaustion with this framing: “‘She’s only 22,’” she quotes anonymous commentators on closer “Management,” a song about feeling depleted by her career. And so, shrugging off the pressure to embody the future, she instead turns back the clock, embracing the touchstones of the past. Sling is her ’70s singer-songwriter album, the work of an old soul raised on Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and the Carpenters. “Mitchell told me I should be just fine,” she foreshadowed on the last record; now she’s stepping up to the mantle.
If it took Taylor Swift until her eighth album to retreat to the woods and return with a muted, elegant folk collection, then Clairo is far ahead of the curve. Recorded in the mountains of upstate New York with Jack Antonoff, Sling features vocal harmonies that sound like gleaming sighs, bluesy electric guitar whines, and plenty of minor key piano. Nothing really resembles a “hit”; the only single, the aforementioned “Blouse,” sounds like Elliott Smith's “Say Yes” tucked away in a sleepy winter cabin. In place of the heady ambiguities of young love are themes that Clairo once believed were “too emotional or intense to unravel”: “Motherhood, sexualization, mental health, and a lot of my own mistakes and regrets,” as she wrote in a recent newsletter. You can read the album, like many artists’ second projects, as an attempt to prove seriousness and maturation, to illustrate depth beyond what initially made her famous. For Clairo, Sling was a necessity: “This record has changed everything for me, because I was fully going to quit music,” she told Rolling Stone.
Her songs are wordier than ever before, etched with proper nouns and specificities—her friend Claud, the Atlanta suburb of Dunwoody, the Syracuse intersection of Comstock and Waverly. The granular and incisive lyrics are further proof of her songwriting talent, but they can also be harder to penetrate. (From “Zinnias”: “Got a cold piece of information to bring to you, said ‘Sorry but I can’t stay here while we wait for June.’”) Clairo has always been an insular artist, attuned to the nuances of private thought. But her prior songs were low-voiced conversations with other people, or at least her imagination of them—“Sofia, know that you and I/Shouldn’t feel like a crime,” she sang—and their simplicity afforded them a kind of openness. Here, Clairo is often alone, picking at knottier and more specific anxieties. “I blocked out the month of February for support/At least I have this year I won’t be worrying anyone on tour/…I throw my drink into the faces of my demise,” she sings on the pastoral, lullaby-like “Just for Today.” By her own admittance, all but Sling’s single needs “constant context”; she seems content for some of this knowledge to be hers alone.
There are real risks here: that the music is so understated and tasteful it becomes a snooze, that in wisening up you lose the gleam in your eyes. The quietness and occasional opaqueness of Sling remind me of a recurring complaint about Clairo’s stage presence, that she’s too withdrawn and timid to reach her audience. “If she says anything meaningful between songs, only the first few rows can hear it,” said one Guardian review. The singing on Sling does little to dispel this image. In its weaker moments Clairo assumes a hoarse, feeble whisper or mumbles like she’s under the covers late at night—although her vocals can also be exceptionally pretty, swelling into pearlescent “oohs” and golden harmonies. Sling is, in many ways, a curiously timed record, one that aspires toward domesticity, temperateness, and slow living at a moment when many people are craving unruliness and spontaneity. “Rushing so I can beat the line,” she cries out on “Bambi,” in one of the album’s most poetic lines. “But what if all I want is conversation and time?”
There’s a lesson in Sling’s irregular structures, about how if the present doesn’t move you, you can wait a few moments for something new to arrive. Sometimes a song proceeds slowly, and then a breeze wafts in and hitches up the tempo, until it feels like sashaying down the street in tap shoes. In the midst of “Bambi” is a sauntering horn section so waltzing and pleasant that you feel like a stranger might appear to gallantly tip his hat to you. It is an album of gradual beauty, each successive listen revealing new ripples and hues. One of Sling’s most vibrant, glorious moments occurs on “Wade,” not too long after Clairo murmurs that decades of her life are wasting away. The song slows, as if to alleviate her worry: woodwinds flutter like bluebirds, everything swoons in relief. Sling may be an album concerned with time, fears of obsolescence instilled by a vampiric music industry. But it also finds exuberance in stillness, a kind of gentle unburdening.

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Moon King’s Daniel Benjamin moves from shoegaze to disco on his latest release, but his version of the genre sounds too flat and tinny to survive on the dance floor.

Hamtramck ’16

Shoegaze tends to take place in wide open spaces, but on his first album as Moon King, 2015’s Secret Life, Daniel Benjamin imagined what it might sound like in miniature. Songs like “Apocalypse” offered up the same skyward yearning heard among Slowdive and Ride, but toned down the eruptions of bass and reverb. Moon King’s latest genre exercise also takes place in a narrow channel, only this time Benjamin fixes his sights on classic disco.
Inspired by a recent move to Detroit, Hamtramck ’16 is an EP-length collection of experiments hewn close to the shadow of Giorgio Moroder—so close that the bassline of opener “Come Around” is taken directly from Moroder’s 1977 hit with Donna Summer, “I Feel Love.” Rather than use that riff as a springboard for a similar exploration of space and texture, Benjamin lets it loop flatly in the foreground. The vibe isn’t dance floor transcendence; with Benjamin’s nasal voice and flanged-out guitars, it’s more indie brooding hour, like Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Multi-Love dialed down a notch or two.
Like generations of disco before it, Hamtramck ’16 situates boundless, unrequited desire against a rock-solid four on the floor backbeat. The way Benjamin vocalizes that desire, though, tends to feel a little rote. “Darlin’, I’ve been thinkin about you for a while/But I’m dreaming alone,” he sings on “Jasmine,” a combination of words you can imagine sitting among the scraps of many lyric books before it. Other lines, like those on the record’s most fun and flexible track “In & Out,” can be hard to make out through the reverb wash applied to his voice, forcing a disconnect between singer and listener. That ambiguity can work fine in genres like shoegaze or for bands like Radiohead, where the focus is not by any means the lyrics, but it leaves a vacancy here in disco, which, like most dance genres, demands a certain intimacy, or at least an acknowledgement that the dancer is being spoken to.
Instead, it often feels like Benjamin is murmuring to himself. Hamtramck ’16 rings too flat and tinny to sound like it could survive on a dance floor with other people on it. The treble’s oddly overpowered in the mix, and the drum machines tend to loom and clatter over everything else. On closer “Ordinary Lover,” a loud piano riff enters about 15 seconds in and doesn’t leave or change until the song ends. That’s four solid minutes of the same three piano chords at the same level, no breaks, no variance. It’s exhausting enough that I don’t even have the gusto to complain about how the chorus of the song goes, “I don’t want no ordinary lover/I don’t want no ordinary love.”
Disco never died, and even LCD Soundsystem came back from the grave. But it needs more than a rippling analog bassline and a few pairs of boots and cats to really thrive. Throughout Hamtramck ’16, I'm hungry for a couplet as delightfully strange and biting as Anohni’s on Hercules and Love Affair’s “Time Will”: “I cannot hold a half a life/I cannot be a half a wife.” I want figures to recede into the distance and come back twice as strong. I want anything close to the way Donna Summer whispers “ooh, it’s so good” like a sacred incantation. At its best and fullest, disco moves and breathes and dances like a whole body. Hamtramck ’16 walks more like an aspirational skeleton.


Beauty and the Beat

Edan is quite the character: With him, it's either "Sing it, shitface" or an exercise in hip-hop erudition, as heard on his Fast Rap mixtape. Which is why one never knows what to expect from his recorded output. His debut LP, Primitive Plus, mixed the retarded with the ingenious; it was an entertaining album in a backpacker era that was more often redundant than refreshing. So, when photos of the newly hirsute Edan emerged and rumors of a "rock" record made the rounds, it became easy to imagine a Derek/Biggie Smalls concept album replete with irony and wankery. This record is no joke. Having established himself as a ruthless wit and tireless scholar of rap, Edan makes the leap to "serious artist" on Beauty and the Beat, exhibiting an auteurism that places him level with his predecessors instead of prostrate before them.
On lead single "I See Colours", Edan declares, "Prince Paul already used this loop/ But I'ma keep it movin'/ And put you up on the scoop." The lyric is a synopsis of Edan's new outlook. Yes, it's been done before, but not like this. The song is his epiphany over a 60s jangle and mushrooming Moog effects. Like a master mathematician who suddenly sees the pattern in the formula, Edan commences his solution.
One more time before he blows your mind, Edan pays respects to the "true scientists". "Fumbling Over Words That Rhyme" is a timeline of the forgotten founders. True, many of the names he drops are familiar, but-- as many of the mentioned could tell you-- respect is the only restitution to them. Over a runaway break, Edan pays dues to the Fatback Band on up, providing a syllabus for future pupils.
The nightmarish diptych of "Murder Mystery" and "Torture Chamber"-- the latter featuring Percee P's lyrical conveyor belt over the churning bass-line from Pink Floyd's "On the Run"-- bleeds into "Making Planets", an organ dirge backing Edan's laidback braggadocio that changes gears into a Crazy Horse-ish Mr. Lif conspiracy theory. Each song transitions to the next through the ever-present Moog noodlings and shared elements, an effort at a hip-hop long-player and not simply a collection of singles.
"Rock and Roll" applies Black Sabbath, Velvet Underground, and Talking Heads to create a psychedelic ode to its titular genre, and "Science of the Two" is a tangled mass of Edan and Insight that rivals Run-DMC for seamless vocal interplay.
On the latter half of the album, "Beauty", "Smile", and "Promised Land" are three sample-packed masterpieces that compress the time between '68 and '88. Reversed drum loops, found sounds, droning feedback, Echoplexed vocals, syrupy strings, and truckloads of bubbling Moog intermingle with Edan's Kane-with-a-cold mic skills to astonishing effect.
The gravity of Edan's lyrics and voice on Beauty and the Beat is perhaps its most surprising element. He's gone from a brainiac prankster to the Borges of rap. Even his battle rhymes have a surrealist bent. He doesn't wear watches by Jacob. He "wears the Time Meridian as a wristband." He doesn't grace stages. He "does the show on a fireball." He doesn't wear his own clothing line. He "put a nameplate on a asteroid belt."
Edan satirizes the narcissism of hip-hop by being so out-there narcissistic that someone would basically have to say, "I'm the best MC times infinity" to compete. But it's more than just his otherworldly assertions. Nearly every bar is a saturated image of his subconscious put on display to ponder its meaning. Some of it may just be nonsense but most if it is resonant. His lyrical inventiveness and idiosyncratic metaphors place him in a category populated by few.
Edan is hip-hop, without a doubt. But he's the hip-hop that appeared in the suburbs in the late-80's and shared time with metal and indie rock, when MTV's weekend line-up was "Yo!MTVRaps", "120 Minutes", and "Headbangers Ball", with Public Enemy likely to find time on all three. Beauty and the Beat sounds like a record made by someone who once devoured the catalog and history of his favorite artists, traced their lineage as far back as he could, and has discovered his place in the genealogy. With that enlightenment, Edan is no longer an impersonation of his idols, but one of their peers.


This collaboration between Xiu Xiu and Italy's Larsen was pared down from lengthy jam sessions.

Ciautistico!

This loose, billowing collaboration between the American avant-pop band Xiu Xiu and Italian post-rockers Larsen has a familiar back story: It's the classic band-meets-band, band-pursues-band, band-gets-band narrative arc. Xiu Xiu and Larsen, each aware and vaguely admiring of the other, meet at a Jarboe show, exchange records, vow to stay in touch, and become so mutually enthralled that they actually follow through and record an album together. They meet up in Torino without much of a plan and immerse themselves in the studio with trad rock instruments plus a bunch of theremins and glockenspiels. They jam intensely around sketched-out song structures and sequence the most realized bits as an album, an ephemeral and fractured thing that mirrors its mode of creation.
As listeners, we're rightfully wary of such one-off collaborations-- they often produce thrilling results in rap, where oversized personalities slam into one another explosively, but in indie rock, they can lead to a sort of hazy obscurantism as each musician tiptoes around the other's style. The results are often more interesting than realized, the sort of exploratory blurs that the In the Fishtank series often produces, which are easy to praise and then quickly forget about. And XXL may well wind up as such an artifact, prized by collectors but inessential for the causal fan. Nevertheless, it's surprisingly cohesive and focused for such a spontaneous production, largely because each band tempers the other's excesses. Xiu Xiu's confessional overstatement is as distinctly American as Larsen's cerebral reserve is European, and on Ciautistico!, they meet in the middle to create a music that scans as either a more rational Xiu Xiu, as on the structurally balanced instrumental tracks uninterrupted by dramatic shards of dissonance, or more emotional Larsen, as on the tracks where Stewart's aching vocals imbue the silvery drones with a messy human presence.
As if striving to embody the impulses of both bands, Ciautistico! is both corporeal and weightless-- you feel the bodily plunk of each intoned string and chime, and the shimmering confusion of the resultant sound waves decaying and diffusing into one another. The tone is icy yet resonant, drops of water falling into a deep well. "Paw Paw Paw Paw Paw Paw" opens with a low three-note bass drone and watery synth washes, but instead of continuing down the path of abstraction, Larsen's insanely tight drummer and Stewart's timorous vocals bundle up the atmosphere into a gloomy pop song. This is immediately offset by the album's most daunting song, "Minnie Mouseistic", which plays like the sound effects for a radio drama-- discordant tones, gentle concussions, creaks and ratchets bloom in isolation on a field of silence. Certain moments are pure Xiu Xiu, like the svelte electro-throb of "Ciao Ciautistico" and the sparkling fountain of synths that closes "Birthday Song", but for the most part, Xiu Xiu and Larsen slip into a methodical mind-meld, shuffling melodies and countermelodies toward their logical conclusions.


Portishead's 1994 debut is a masterwork of downbeat and desperation. They invented their own kind of virtuosity, one that encompassed musicianship, technology, and aura.

Dummy

In the UK, a dummy isn’t just a mannequin or an idiot; it’s also what Americans would call a pacifier. Savor the irony in the title of Portishead’s debut album. The album may suggest coziness, sonic swaddling, the gentle soundtrack to a raver’s comedown—and in 1994, ravers were plenty familiar with pacifiers. But Dummy doesn’t coddle, it unsettles. It tastes not like warm milk but coppery and bitter, like blood. Despite its two-plus decades spent soundtracking makeout sessions, it cradles a terrible loneliness in its heart. Despite its reputation as dinner-party music, it is straight-up discomfort food: curl-up-and-die music, head-under-the-covers music. It’s dark, dank, and quintessentially Bristol, mingling a chilling harbor fog with the resin of a thousand spliffs left to burn down in a haze.
With the exception of two UK singles released shortly before the album, there was no advance warning of the wind blowing in from the West Country. Portishead weren’t a gigging band; they only began playing live after the album started selling the kind of numbers that no one, at least no one in the band, expected it to. They were barely a band at all, in the traditional sense of the word. Their core lineup consisted of Geoff Barrow, a 22-year-old hip-hop fan obsessed with turntable alchemy; Adrian Utley, a 37-year-old jazz guitarist looking for a way out of the 20th century; and Beth Gibbons, a 29-year-old singer who’d grown up on a farm and, prior to Portishead, had “probably done more singing in her bedroom than on stage,” Barrow reckoned. Yet there isn’t a sound or a syllable out of place on Dummy. For 50 minutes, the album sustains a single, all-enveloping mood; its tracklist is a 10-sided die where every roll comes up some variation of despair.
Today, Portishead are regarded with a certain inevitability—their sound so perfectly executed, so in tune with the tenor of its times—that belies the sheer weirdness of how it probably sounded when you first heard it. It’s true that Dummy carries echoes of many landmark albums of the preceding years: the wistful narcosis of Mazzy Star and Cocteau Twins, the skeletal hip-hop of Eric B. & Rakim, the ethereal torch songs of Julee Cruise. PJ Harvey flits through its margins; so do the Orb’s stoned swirl and Seefeel’s dubby undercurrents. By 1994, Dummy’s after-hours vibe was already familiar from dozens of albums meant primarily for horizontal consumption, such as the KLF’s Chill Out, though Barrow downplayed any link to that scene. “Ambient music has never particularly appealed to me: Push ‘Go’ on a synthesizer, make some noise, put some delay on it and put a couple of sheep noises on it,” he sniffed to Melody Maker in 1995, in a barely disguised dig at Chill Out’s wooly livestock samples.
As much as Portishead’s sound was part of electronic music’s widespread mellowing, the musicians themselves had little truck with the rave scene; their own roots were closer to the dub and breakbeat traditions that had long been cornerstones of multicultural Bristol. Dummy’s closest antecedent was Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, and not by coincidence: Barrow had worked as an errand boy and tape op in Bristol’s Coach House Studios while that record was being made.
But Dummy is too idiosyncratic to feel like a calculated response to its predecessors. Its obsessions are too specific, and too doggedly pursued: the spy-movie twang of the guitars, the ripple of the Hammond organs and Leslie cabinets—if anything, its vintage signifiers feel out of step with that era’s rush of pre-millennium tension. Bristol’s junglists were carving new routes to the future in every chopped-up breakbeat, while Portishead were drizzling on muted trumpet solos like so much curdled milk. Where most of the decade’s cutting-edge electronic music was zealous about its agenda, Dummy pledged allegiance only to a mood.
The broad outlines of Portishead’s music are not particularly hard to decipher. They like their tempos slow, their drums crisp, their keyboards velvety. Gibbons sings with a smoky intensity that’s evocative of Billie Holiday and Sandy Denny without stooping to imitation. In the midst of an all-pervasive gloom, key details—tremolo-soaked guitar licks, turntable scratches, an unexpected sample of jazz fusioners Weather Report—glisten like peacock feathers under a blacklight.
They favor sounds imprinted with a host of associations, many of them filmic. Utley’s riffs come straight from John Barry’s James Bond theme; the woozy sine waves of “Mysterons” echo sci-fi soundtracks like The Day the Earth Stood Still; and “Sour Times” loops an extended sample of Lalo Schifrin’s music for Mission: Impossible. Their cinematic inclinations are borne out in the fact that they made an actual short film, To Kill a Dead Man, before the album itself. The 10-minute, black-and-white film is not particularly consequential, but it is notable for the way it visually remixes many of the same influences that make the album feel so instantly familiar. Fortunately, they proved to be far more adept at translating those moods and devices into music.
Like film noir, with its fondness for Venetian blinds and ceiling fans, Dummy thrives on mixing light and dark, hard and soft, positive and negative space. In “Strangers,” clean-toned jazz guitar morphs into a nervous dial-tone buzz. The galumphing rhythm feels like a heavy burlap bag being dragged over railroad ties, but Gibbons’ voice—a home-recorded demo that made the final edit—is a slender thread pulled taut. The metallic rattle at the center of “Sour Times,” an extended Lalo Schifrin sample, might be an alarm clock bouncing across the surface of a trampoline. Expert diggers, they know a nugget when they find it: Flipping Eric Burdon and War’s “Magic Mountain,” they take a sample that De La Soul had put to jubilant use in “Potholes in My Lawn” and turn it seasick and queasy. Even more remarkable is how they treat Johnnie Ray’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” on “Biscuit,” slowing its refrain down to 16 RPM and turning a sticky-sweet wad of ’50s bubblegum into a druggy dirge.
Their sense of contrast is particularly noticeable in the album’s rhythms. Barrow’s lickety-split vinyl scratching helps counterbalance the uniformly sluggish tempos, but the real action is in their breakbeats. In “Mysterons,” the looped snare rolls sound like a steel trap snapping shut and being pried back open in quick succession. The “Sour Times” beat resembles James Brown’s iconic “Funky Drummer” break, but transposed for a planet with only half of Earth’s gravity. “Wandering Star” and “Numb,” on the other hand, push forward as though running underwater, every beat a struggle against an overwhelming force. Track after track, the album toggles between crisp steppers and deadweight friction, between ping-ponging ricochets and Sisyphus’ last stand.
This groove was their invention, and theirs alone. Unlike most of their peers, Portishead didn’t rely on the same hoary Ultimate Breaks and Beats bootlegs that fueled the majority of the era’s club tracks. Their music may sound like the work of a couple of obsessive vinyl connoisseurs, but the irony is that they made most of it themselves. Some musicians speak of soundtracks to imaginary films; they created an imaginary soundtrack to use as their source material. Assisted by the drummer Clive Deamer, Barrow and Utley would jam in the studio, creating their own approximations of the ’60s music that inspired them. Once they had their songs engineered on 24-track tape, they’d take the final product and feed it back into their samplers; some material they even pressed onto vinyl dubplates, to manipulate the way a hip-hop producer would cut up breakbeats. Not quite a band, hardly a strictly electronic project, they had to invent their own kind of virtuosity, one that encompassed musicianship, technology, and aura. “It’s the air around the thing,” Barrow told The Wire. “What we are trying to do is create this air, this atmosphere: It’s the stuff that’s in between the hi-hat and the snare that you can’t hear, but if it wasn’t there you would notice it, it would be wrong.”
This air was the medium through which Gibbons’ voice soared. Would Portishead have been one-tenth the band they turned out to be had Barrow and Utley contented themselves with instrumentals, or hired session singers to lend a soulful patina at freelance rates? Not on your life. Gibbons’ voice is the center of the music; she elevates the recordings from tracks to songs, from mere head-nodders to forlorn lullabies.
She follows the contours of her voice along its breathy edge, cutting sharply through the meat of a glissando, falling back on the catch in her throat. Despite her convincing air of sorrow, she’s a knowing, playful singer, capable of shifting emotional registers on a dime, cycling through moods—jazzy and coquettish, grimly resigned, wild with grief—like a housefly tracing squares in empty space. In “Wandering Star,” her tone sounds almost flirtatious, despite the overwhelming vastness of her subject matter: “Wandering stars/For whom it is reserved/The blackness, the darkness, forever.” In the closing “Glory Box,” on the other hand, she is as incendiary as Utley’s overdriven guitar riffs, and when she sings, “This is the beginning/Of forever and ever, oh,” her sigh feels like a hole torn in the fabric of the universe.
And her occasional obliqueness frequently gives way to the album's real emotional payoff: out-and-out dejection. Some lines stand out as clearly as dog-eared diary entries: “Give me a reason to love you/Give me a reason to be a woman”; “Nobody loves me, it’s true/Not like you do”; “How can it feel this wrong?” When her words are hazy, her diction tricky, it might as well be part of a grand and treacherous strategy, like a boxer’s footwork catching you off guard before the knockout punch lands.
Without a public persona to measure Gibbons’ performance against, her presence within the songs was, and remains, that much more formidable. Pop fans typically like to know who is singing to them and why, even if it's an invented character. But that central mystery only makes Dummy that much more compelling. Who is this lovelorn woman marching off to war on “Roads,” her broken pleas part sigh, part icicle? Who will she become on the far side of forever and ever—the promised land of “Glory Box,” an uncharted territory that she makes sound both liberating and terrifying? Dummy arrived at a moment when young people were craving soundtracks for the comedown—but what happens when you follow Portishead all the way down, as far as they want to take us? These questions keep you coming back, trying to puzzle out its intimidating balance between bleakness and blankness.
It’s possible to hear in Dummy a collection of gratifyingly sad-but-sexy gestures, and plenty of Portishead’s followers—Lamb, Morcheeba, Olive, Alpha, Mono, Hooverphonic, Sneaker Pimps, and dozens of other acts forever lost to the cut-out bin of history—did just that. Whole retail empires flourished and collapsed while Portishead and their ilk were piped through the in-store speakers. Is Dummy stylish? Of course it is; you don’t evoke ’60s spy flicks without some deep-seated feelings about aesthetics, panache, the proper cut of a suit. But style, stylishness, is only the beginning. None of Portishead’s imitators understood that it’s not the blue notes or the mood lighting that make it tick—it’s the pockets of emptiness inside. Like Barrow once said, it’s the air.


Redemption concludes Dawn Richard's trilogy. If Goldenheart was aggressive and Blackheart depressive, Redemption is reflective, an unusual headspace for a dance floor album to inhabit.

Redemption

At first blush, Redemption, the new Dawn Richard record, feels like a victory lap. The conclusion to a trilogy of albums, Redemption signifies the end of a project that felt, at one point, as if its completion were uncertain, between shifting collaborators and Richard's brief 2014 reunion with the girl group Danity Kane. Redemption's opening tracks also seem to confirm that it's intended as the inverse to its predecessor, 2015's Blackheart, the sound of which was thick and full of dissonance; Redemption initially feels weightless. As it progresses, though, it reveals a depth that's both distinct from its predecessors and draws on them both.
Richard's 2013 album, Goldenheart, seemed to describe a disintegrating relationship that had ascended into myth; Richard positioned herself as if she were engaged in battle with her own emotions, and through metaphor her emotions had swollen into literal giants. “Faced the beast with my bare hands/Tried to break me down with all his strength,” she sang in “Goliath.” Blackheart was more slippery, a vortex of introspection in which Richard’s grasp of metaphor seemed to deliberately loosen, so that mythical figures like Calypso and the Titans coexisted with the thrum of amphetamines and the slur of depression.
If Goldenheart is aggressive and Blackheart is depressive, Redemption is reflective. This is a curious position from which to record a dance record; the dance floor is rarely characterized as a reflective space. More often it is utopian, escapist, a portal to an alternate reality. In the first proper song, “Love Under Lights,” Richard paints her own dance floor vision. She encounters a woman in a Led Zeppelin shirt, and they start to talk about music. “She said she fucking with Drake/I said King Kendrick,” Richard sings as the synthetic pulses behind her ripple and gleam. “I guess we’re kindred spirits.” Richard conceives of the dance floor as a place of protest (“Black Crimes”), of contemplation (“Voices”), of engagement (“Vines”), all of which are components of desire, whether for another person or another life. The drums behind her shatter and reorganize themselves into new rhythms throughout the album , as if they’re building and disassembling digital chandeliers.
The production on Redemption is distinct from the glassy backdrops her former collaborator and manager Druski provided on Goldenheart, and it's a deliberate move away from Blackheart's production, which felt like being sucked into a whirlpool. *Blackheart’*s primary producer, Noisecastle III, appears twice on Redemption, on “Black Crimes” and “LA,” but his more collagist aesthetic blends seamlessly with the sound world that Machinedrum and Richard build, an incandescent fusion of the organic and the synthetic, the electronic and the acoustic.
The notes that open “Voices,” while digitally manipulated and multiplied, sound like they've been issued from a bass clarinet. The bass tones that break through the surface of “Renegades” are oddly reminiscent of a tuba. “LA” is a parallel ode to Louisiana, where Richard was born, and Los Angeles, where Richard lives now; it mutates from a stuttered, ultramodern gleam into a spiraling guitar solo that sounds imported from a ’70s jazz fusion album. Then the melody shifts again, this time performed by a polyphonic brass band arranged by Trombone Shorty to resemble a New Orleans second line parade.
The integrity of Richard's voice provides the through line, which is often caught in ghostly tangles of itself or locking into prismatic harmonies, similar to how Prince or D’Angelo treated their voices. On the interludes, which are often as fully formed as the actual songs, Richard isolates and distorts her voice until it seems to separate into kilobytes. “Hey Nikki” is the closest the album comes to settling into an R&B tradition: It's an inversion of Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” considering the character through a different lens; instead of viewing her as an object of desire, it isolates her agency, and the song generates its desire from the aura of that agency. (Blackheart did the same thing with the titular character of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”) Richard’s voice floats above the music in the verses, but  doubles, deepens, and fights through a menacing haze in the chorus: “Hey Nikki/Don't you wanna come and get with me?”
After “Hey Nikki” the album descends into a more introspective space. “Sands” describes a past relationship; In “The Louvre” she elevates someone into “a work of art” as a way of letting them go, and then the record itself lets go of its own instrumentation as it segues the outro, “Valhalla.” Richard, her voice heavily processed, finally glimpses her utopia; it is one “where rebels are the majority/And my color isn't a minority.” The tone is one of arrival after a long struggle, but there are hints, too, that this maybe a fantasy: “Escape,” she sings, and it feels as if her promised land was a mirage, forever shimmering just out of reach.


Clocking in at 76 minutes, The Colour in Anything is James Blake’s wonderfully messy dive into maximalism.

The Colour in Anything

It’s not James Blake’s fault that* The Colour in Anything* came out in the middle of a rainy week. Or it might be; the circumstances seem almost planned. Maybe the team plotting the surprise release of this album was watching storm fronts, waiting for ideal new-James-Blake-album conditions. On first impressions alone, they succeeded wildly: When bed sheets are in disarray, when grey light seeps into wet windows, and the sky is an interminable reminder that there is always a chance of showers, his particular brand of impressionistic melancholy is hard to resist. Stay in bed or descend out into the streets, it doesn't matter, his music finds a way to summon personal rain clouds that follow you wherever you go.
In keeping with his last two albums, The Colour in Anything is a hard, frank, and unsparing listen. But if you listen closer, you will notice some tonal shifts in the fog. For one, Blake shed the monomania of his past work, allowing other voices and sounds to creep in. He’s noted in interviews that *The Colour in Anything *is meant to represent a sea-change, personally, musically, and geographically. The disposition of this record is suppose to reflect its milieus: Southern California, friendship, and new love. Seven of its 17 tracks were co-produced by Rick Rubin. Much of the album was also mixed and mastered at Rubin’s Shangri-La studios in Malibu. Frank Ocean and Justin Vernon appear throughout, lending writing and production help. There’s also Connan Mockasin, who appears, bass in hand, for a song. James has stepped out of his London bedroom and invited collaboration at an unprecedented level. Clocking in at 76 minutes, The Colour in Anything is Blake’s wonderfully messy dive into maximalism.
All that said, in the best way possible, in no way shape or form is *The Colour in Anything *a rapid departure or reversal of what Blake does well. He still paints in deep blues and greys. His production is still unparalleled, spacious, and impossibly textured. His voice is still chilly and metallic, but maintains all its choir boy charm. His music is still towering and menacingly sad. He sings almost exclusively about lost love (“While you were away, I started loving you”), miscommunication (“I’m sorry I don’t know how you feel”), miasma (“I hope my life is no sign of the times”), and defeat (“I want it to be over”). It can be brutal to hear the microscopic variations of themes hammered over and over again, making the album’s pace something between apocalyptic and glacial. Each listen is draining in its way, and when it's over it feels like decades have passed. It can be so self-indulgent and extravagantly sad that it comes close to ruin porn. But it’s worth it. And there are positive messages to eke out of the experience, vitally important ones; that it's all right to be hurt, or alone, that heartbreak helps fuel the flow of life.
As contemporary electronic music moves towards more caustic, crunchy, and self-referential tropes, Blake's music is almost resolutely old fashioned. It deploys auto-tune, expressive (bordering on Platonic) percussion, minimalist pianos, and throwback sub-bass warble and womps. He distills his influences of R&B, gospel, and the wide patina of British dance music in such strange and ineffable concoctions that it makes it difficult to not rewind certain chunks of drum breakdowns and airy synths continually. The melancholic funk of “I Hope My Life (1-800 Mix)” or the dive bomb synth swoops of “Radio Silence” show Blake’s ability to orchestrate moments that mimic the stark romantic bombast of a Caspar David Friedrich painting.
Yet ironically Blake’s own grasp of lyric writing is still immature. He is never clever, catchy, or subtle. If anything he can even be comically melodramatic (“Where is my beautiful life?”) or annoyingly whiny (“I can’t believe that you don’t want to see me”). It makes it so that you wish he would just hum and slur his words into indistinct hunks of emotion. There are also several missteps in how his voice is treated throughout the record. A high pitched vocal processing in “My Willing Heart” is nearly unlistenable. Guest Bon Iver's “hooooo” at the start of “I Need a Forest Fire” is laughable in its wimpy approximation of bravado.
But these flubs are all forgivable. For the most part his singing can be vertiginous, isolating, and induce rapture when stretched into vast choruses. And when he’s alone at the piano, turning off the electronics, Blake approaches the sublime. He may never be able to reproduce the discomfiting beauty of his cover of “A Case of You” but he can still yoke tears from dry eyes in vulnerable songs like “F.O.R.E.V.E.R.” or the album’s title track. In closer "Meet You in the Maze," arguably the album's best song, he abandons instruments all together and sings in a multitudinous acapella that washes away the harrowing experience of the last hour in a rush of catharsis. It’s the closest the album comes to an anthem, and it’s heartwarmingly about self-care, discovery, and acceptance. After the probing self-consciousness that preceded it, these five minutes of fragility feel healing. “It's me who makes the peace in me...Music can't be everything," he sings, a moment of pained honesty showing that amidst the grand big-budget drapery of this album, its goals are actually quite modest. At the end of the day Blake just wants to prioritize happiness and self-knowledge above all else. It’s a thoroughly unhip statement that makes you believe smiling, even if it hurts, is the coolest possible thing in the world you can do.


On her seventh LP, the Canadian country singer spins a wild, Spaghetti Western-style yarn about heartbreak, revenge, and redemption.

Liberty

Liberty could be a person. Or maybe it’s a place, or a horse. Whoever or whatever the name signifies, it’s the animating concept behind Canadian country singer Lindi Ortega’s seventh full-length—a narrative record that spins a wild yarn, not unlike Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger or Kenny Rogers’ Gideon. Ortega follows her unnamed protagonist through the open deserts of the American West as she rides a wild palomino from heartbreak to revenge and ultimately to redemption. It’s tempting to read this story of escape as autobiographical, especially given the way Ortega has elsewhere connected her onstage “country gothic noir” persona to her real-life body dysmorphia. But Liberty is about more than retelling personal war stories. In its twangy guitar, galloping drums, sun-baked palette, and high-plains drama, it’s a nuanced and often irreverent spin on Spaghetti Western films and their soundtracks. She’s celebrating her artistic freedom by showing us how an old pop-culture tradition can be made new and vibrant.
Naturally, Ennio Morricone looms large. The overtures that preface each of Liberty’s three acts practically quote the man who gave us the soundtracks to The Good, the Bad & the Ugly and most of The Hateful Eight. Working with producer Skylar Wilson (Justin Townes Earle, Caitlin Rose), a small team of songwriters including John Paul White, and the Nashville guitar duo Steelism, Ortega emphasizes mood as much as story, as though the desert were a state of mind rather than a place. Night is always falling on these songs, bringing it with the menace of the unseen but also the promise of a brighter morning. “Don’t come any closer to my heart, if you’re afraid of the dark,” she sings on the first full song, offering a wicked wink to the Technicolor arrangement.
As that wonderfully over-the-top line makes clear, neither Ortega nor any of her collaborators is afraid to veer toward Old West kitsch in these songs, whether it’s the Hazlewood-level reverb on her vocals or the chimes-and-whistling theme on “Afraid of the Dark.” That sense of dress-up may be the album’s most endearing quality, underscoring the playfulness of the music and storytelling. “You Ain’t Foolin’ Me” crackles with crunchy power chords, which bring to mind Young Guns rather than Once Upon a Time in the West. And “Pablo” interrupts its ode to an unusually gifted guitarist with a surf-rock guitar solo. Historical or musical accuracy, thank goodness, isn’t really a concern.
As Liberty proceeds to its final act, the mood grows graver, the music more straightforward and streamlined but no less inventive. “In the Clear” is a quiet ode to calm and security, and Ortega gives an understated performance to underscore those virtues: “There ain’t no hurricanes or tornadoes here.” She closes out Liberty with a song of gratitude, covering “Gracias a la Vida” by the Chilean folklorist and composer Violeta Parra. The title means “Thanks to Life” or “Here’s to Life,” depending on who’s doing the translating, and it’s been covered countless times over the last 50 years, most famously by Mercedes Sosa and Joan Baez. Ortega puts her own stamp on this standard by underplaying it. Accompanied only by a simple guitar strum and a distant trumpet, she makes the song sound like a small, private prayer as she rides off into the sunset. She may not be the protagonist in her story, but she still sounds like the hero.


The Nashville trio Yautja are a prog-minded band that combines grindcore and Amphetamine Reptile-era noise with the artier shades of hardcore and death metal. Their Songs Of Lament EP, a sort of companion to last year's Songs of Descent LP, plays like an extended suite.

Songs of Lament EP

Technical progress is vital to metal's character. Metal bands have always pushed themselves to be faster, heavier, more challenging, and more musically dextrous than their predecessors. That said, it's still rare when an act genuinely succeeds at altering the meta-structure of the form. Anytime a Meshuggah or Dillinger Escape Plan comes along, you can bet dime-a-dozen imitators will cheapen the impact of their innovations. To make matters worse, today we're swarmed by retro-obsessed bands hell-bent on recreating the vibe and tone of, well, name any year and heavy metal subgenre. Not to mention that rampant sectarianism fosters a mentality where superficial differences between camps become paramount and crossing barriers becomes a transgression.
Every now and again, though, a band comes along that sidesteps these conventions. With their debut album, last year's Songs of Descent, Nashville trio Yautja (named after the extraterrestrial creature from the Predator film series) reminds us that what we think of as metal today can be as boundless and mutable as the range that jazz had encompassed by 1970. A prog-minded act that combines grindcore and Amphetamine Reptile-era noise with the artier shades of hardcore and death metal, Yautja doesn't just stack hairpin turn after hairpin turn—an approach that was tired by technical death metal's mid-'90s peak. Instead, bassist Kayhan Vaziri, guitarist Shibby Poole, and drummer Tyler Coburn create a highly malleable, mercury-like alloy that changes shape with liquid ease yet retains the solidity of its structure. (The way their music moves, it might've been more fitting for these guys to name themselves after the villian in Terminator 2.)
As its title suggests, the new EP Songs of Lament was crafted as a companion piece to the full-length, but there are some key distinctions. For starters, Lament leans closer to a grimier, more punkish production aesthetic. Meanwhile, because Yautja came out of the gate with a flair for tempo changes, the lean toward slower sections this time around doesn't seem drastic. With Songs of Lament, Yautja once again shows that, like the art of the fastball, sheer speed is most effective when a band can mix up its delivery and hit you from unexpected angles.
Case in point: Songs of Lament closes with the nine minute-plus "Crumbling", which climaxes in a sludge/doom buildup where Poole and Vaziri churn out an ominous riff at a crawling tempo. When Coburn suddenly explodes into a flurry of fills, followed by a blast beat and a jazzy double-time figure on the ride cymbal, the song feels like it's taking off even as it trudges through muck. That one passage speaks volumes about Yautja's mindfulness when it comes pacing. In fact, one marked contrast between Lament and its predecessor is that the EP plays like an extended suite of music. As for subject matter, all three of Yautja's members write lyrics and supply vocals, with Vaziri doing the lion's share of the barking. And while the cutting lyrical content does linger at the irate end of the emotional spectrum, Yautja's nonpartisan musical approach lends the words a more sophisticated hue by default.
Understandably, Songs of Lament doesn't accomplish as much as its full-length companion does in terms of furthering metal's evolution. Moreover, the new material is rendered somewhat two-dimensional by a mix that sounds flatter in comparison to Songs of Descent's full-fidelity production. Still, the new songs certainly show what this band is capable of when it makes subtle tweaks in its approach to structure. Indeed, Songs of Lament extends the pleasures of the debut while whetting the appetite for what new wrinkles Yautja might have in store the next time around.


The second album from the Australian trio hums with rage and retribution, executed with biting specificity and vast emotional range by singer Georgia Maq.

Camp Cope: How to Socialise & Make Friends

How to Socialise & Make Friends

The Melbourne punk trio Camp Cope are not impressed with the so-called Indie Rock Asshole. Sure, he’s outwardly progressive and affable, his music is usually quite good, and it can be easy to mistake his condescension for genuine concern. They're not buying it. Camp Cope might have titled their sophomore album How to Socialise & Make Friends, but they refuse to mince words on “The Opener,” which, yes, opens the album but is more accurately about an opening band, the supporting act—a metaphor for what is often deemed a woman’s station in life. Singer and guitarist Georgia Maq offers a relentless, chorus-less takedown of this subset of wanker while Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich plucks a bassline that’s the aural equivalent of an eye roll, and drummer Sarah Thompson props it all up with steady, stoic drumming.
Maq doesn’t let up in the title track that immediately follows, ably folding the personal and political into an intricate origami crane of misogyny until finally coming to the realization that this shit is paper and can be crumpled up and thrown into the fire. It is here where we learn that the origin (and sarcasm) of the title is some guy’s self-help book collection. As Maq zigzags between empathy and anger, we also get a sense of the album’s overall sentiment: Camp Cope will not make themselves small to help others in their hometown’s tight-knit punk community like self-help dude (or dudes in general, really) feel more comfortable. The opening trilogy of songs ends with “The Face of God,” which details a sexual assault by a fellow musician and the subsequent doubt, both self-inflicted and external, since the abuser didn’t seem like “that kind of guy.”
Camp Cope wrote How to Socialise before the #MeToo movement really took off. But reckonings don’t just fall out of the sky, and not since the alt-rock boom of the ’90s has music felt more ripe for a revolution. Camp Cope’s windswept punk feels both retro and right now, like Courtney Barnett covering Tigers Jaw covering Ani DiFranco. Their sound is jangly but unpolished, folky but not crunchy. Maq’s voice, decorated with Australian diphthongs, ably meanders from shouty to soft, conjuring an inexplicable mashup of Joe Strummer and Joni Mitchell. It’s an instrument she’s been honing since her similarly prescient, self-titled, Australian Music Prize-shortlisted 2016 debut.
How to Socialise’s center drags just a little with generalities like, “I really hope you’re happy where you are now” in the album’s six minute centerpiece, “Anna,” which segues into a similarly slightly vague “Sagan-Indiana.” A near-constant state of catharsis in “Animal & Real” has a numbing effect, like outrage fatigue for the ears. Of course, these are minor missteps among lyrics that are otherwise brilliantly concrete, and songs whose emotional range is vast.
Such is how you could describe the closer, “I’ve Got You,” a poignant song recounting the death of Maq’s father. With just her powerful voice and an acoustic guitar, she narrates a slideshow of disparate memories—a childhood injury involving broken glass, news of police violence, and small indignities like being asked to pay extra for a hospital room with a view. It’s the literal death of the patriarchy. But it’s also a sage acknowledgment that people are complicated—full of broken parts and beautiful parts—even Indie Rock Assholes.


Maya Bon’s diaristic bedroom rock charts attraction, loneliness, neuroses, and late capitalism in winsome, pointillist detail.

Babehoven: Demonstrating Visible Differences of Height EP

Babehoven, the Philadelphia-via-Los Angeles band helmed by Maya Bon, saturates the listener in particulars. Her latest release, Demonstrating Visible Differences of Height, is a diaristic EP that charts attraction, loneliness, neuroses, and late capitalism in winsome, pointillist detail. Its appeal stems from highly personal textures, references, and ephemera—a view as intimate and up-close as a goldfish’s, and equally as frustrated by glass walls.
These five songs get their emotional traction from Bon’s ambivalent, deadpan delivery, set against syrupy electric guitar and drums as slack as a morning-after fugue. On album standout “Asshole,” she sings, “If I always dick around, in the morning will I be an asshole?/While I’m laying on the ground/In the morning I wanna see your asshole.” Though the peculiar mix of self-loathing and lust feels very au courant, the backing instrumentation could’ve been a Slanted & Enchanted demo track. The song toggles between this central question and sensory bits and pieces: missing socks, chilly air conditioning, an exhortation to “Keep them coming, I can’t feel anything anyway.” As any noon-riser knows, there’s no separating the visible detritus from the feeling that you, too, might be lost and made partly of garbage.
Where “Asshole” languishes, “Confident and Kind” hums along, the sort of ambling meditation that might soundtrack an episode of “Gilmore Girls.” “I’m wearing shorts for the very first time in my life, feeling confident and cute, confident and kind,” Bon sings unconvincingly, a half-hearted pep talk. Behind her, acoustic guitar strums like a nodding friend as she narrates the discovery of a pollen allergy, ensuing sickness, and a $500 salon visit she describes as “a narcissistic treat as the world is depleted.” In the course of a day, she covers climate guilt, the body’s treachery, and gender troubles, singing, “Having short hair as a femme in 2019/Feels like I don’t know my body/Feel like I am just nobody/Unless I have some silky soft hair.” The body is a cage; “Confident and Kind” describes the feeling of realizing its dimensions.
There’s an urgency to Demonstrating Visible Differences of Height that’s belied by its mellow tempos, yet evident in the way Bon’s voice occasionally becomes fevered, panic setting in. The generality that unites the EP’s many specificities—the hair treatments, the Tuesdays, the self-doubt—is the recognition of our own limitations. Some walls close in from the outside, and some we build for ourselves, but confinement is confinement. Discouraged but not defeated, Babehoven soundtrack the feeling.


Red stands as one of classic rock’s heaviest albums and also one of its most meticulous. With its dark, meditative sheen, it laid the groundwork for Robert Fripp’s more atmospheric work to come.

Red

Robert Fripp composed a list of reasons why he needed to end King Crimson. “The first,” he told Melody Maker in 1974, “Is that it represents a change in the world.” Fripp, then 28-years-old, felt that King Crimson—the progressive rock group he founded six years earlier—had become antiquated, representative of a different time. Furthermore, the band was dissolving before his eyes. On tour from October 1973 through the following summer, Fripp had observed growing tension among the quartet, now settled into their strongest lineup and on track to achieve their greatest commercial reception to date. “Situations are developing to an extreme,” he wrote in his fastidiously maintained tour diaries from this period, “Wonder how much I should take.”
The tour culminated with Fripp’s decision to end the band and focus on self-preservation. The work that immediately followed—his ambient, experimental collaborations with Brian Eno; his seminal guitar accompaniment on David Bowie’s “Heroes”—was more serene, more cerebral. He lived in solitude. He studied Gurdjieff. This was how the future looked to him. Crimson—with their drum solos and multi-part epics, their Mellotrons and tales of purple pipers—had become what he called a “dinosaur” band. “The old world is, in fact, dead,” he explained, “What we’re seeing now is, if you like, the death throes.”
While it would serve as the band’s final statement of the decade, Red, released in the autumn of 1974, does not sound like a eulogy. It’s vicious and vital, bristling with energy and new ground to cover. It stands as one of classic rock’s heaviest, most meticulous albums. It was equally influential for Kurt Cobain and Trey Anastasio; as seminal for metal as it was for math rock; equally beloved by scholars and stoners. With a dark, meditative sheen, it also lays the groundwork for Fripp’s more atmospheric work to come: music that influenced an entire field of artists diametrically opposed to everything he helped popularize in progressive rock.
Of course, King Crimson were progressive rock by definition: They helped codify the genre with their debut, 1969’s In the Court of the Crimson King. But half-a-decade later, with its British folk haze and whimsical orchestration, that album felt like, and was, the work of a completely different group. Within a year of forming, Crimson’s entire lineup shifted around Fripp—a tradition that mostly continued with each new release. This resulted in a discography that can feel more like a series of collaborative experiments than new progressions from a recognizable rock band.
Fripp has repeatedly referred to Crimson not as a singular creative entity but rather as “a way of doing things.” This particular way of doing things, however, seems to be modeled entirely after Fripp’s own mind: fueled by intellect, anxiety, and restless momentum. During the ’70s, he led the band through its myriad incarnations, from the absurd, meandering Lizard to the psychedelic and electrified Larks’ Tongues in Aspic. He never lingered too long on one particular sound or grew too comfortable with his company. Drummer Bill Bruford once described him as being “one part Joseph Stalin, one part Mahatma Gandhi, and one part the Marquis de Sade.”
As singular as they were, for most of the decade, and to most of the world, King Crimson was just one band in a grander cultural phenomenon. Progressive rock was a whirlwind of cascading notes, dizzying time signatures, heady concepts, and elaborate outfits. Crimson played into nearly all of those stereotypes at various stages, but Fripp somehow remained skeptical. Once described as “the world’s most rational rock star,” he always seemed averse to trends, too self-motivated to crossover. But when Red arrived, the genre had never been closer to a breakthrough in America, thanks to works by bands like Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull. But while these groups were gaining traction overseas by incorporating bigger hooks, cleaner stories, and brighter colors, Fripp was directing Crimson toward their darkest sounds yet.
Red is a record about fear. Its five songs are fiery and anxious, visceral and bold. The whole band (Fripp, bassist/vocalist John Wetton, and drummer Bill Bruford) were growing weary of one another, but they remained deeply attuned to their emotional climate. In “One More Red Nightmare,” a crashing airplane is a metaphor for entrapment, as Bruford rides against a busted-up cymbal he found in a trash can. It sounds like an accident, like scrap metal colliding in the sky. “Fallen Angel,” a ballad that’s alternately sweet and threatening, makes direct reference to gang violence in New York. It’s the first King Crimson lyric that could be called topical.
Red was the first Crimson album to retain the compact, five-song structure of Crimson King and the only to match its impact or influence. Both albums flow cinematically from rock epics to imagistic ballads, with heady mood pieces in between. Both feel like windows into new, sometimes frightening worlds. Both feature prominent contributions from multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald, who co-wrote all the songs on the band’s debut and appears as a guest on Red. Still, Red is no retread. In fact, the only part of the album that sonically recalls Crimson’s early days arrives in its final three minutes: a disorienting, jazzy coda that sounds like their previous six albums played in fast-forward.
The grand idea for Red was conceived during the band’s 1973-74 tour, which also saw the release of the half-live, half-studio album Starless and Bible Black (a phrase the band borrowed from Dylan Thomas). The rougher sound on Red came from the improvised performances they had begun to slip into their live sets, between the avant-garde blues-rock hybrids from Starless. Fripp had taken to calling these improvised pieces “blows”—a term that, somewhat ironically, implies a sense of breezy inevitability (maybe “improv” was too academic; “jam,” too American). As Crimson disintegrated on the road—with Fripp eventually eating meals separately from his bandmates—they knitted that distance into their live dynamic. Their “blows” begin in tentative, ominous movement before transitioning into lumbering grooves. Most feature hair-raising performances from violinist David Cross, who uses his instrument to make as much noise as possible, like a child crying for help. (By the end of the tour, before the recording of Red, he was out of the band.)
”Providence,” an improvised piece recorded live at their ’74 tour stop in the city of the same name, appears as the penultimate track on Red. Sequenced between the screaming “One More Red Nightmare” and the closing “Starless,” the song might seem like a quiet reprieve, but it builds to its own creeping intensity, like the scene in a horror movie when the protagonist finds a place to hide that turns out to be a trap. The performance is led by Cross’ violin, chased by Wetton’s distorted bass. When the whole band comes crashing in, it feels violent, even fatal. This was Crimson going off-script, no longer following the letter of the prog law but letting their instincts and their emotions run the show.
If “Providence” was the tortured sound of Crimson falling apart, the title track is their holy union. “Red” is effervescent, crushing, endlessly ascending. The song defines what Bruford calls the band’s “thick, intelligent Metal kind of sound,” making prominent use of the tritone, a Crimson melodic signature that signals dissonance, something lurking in the background (think: the “Twilight Zone” theme). The band had played at being sinister before, but “Red” was the first time that Crimson themselves sounded like something to be scared of. It’s a constant climax, a frightening rush of adrenaline.
“Red” is one of the band’s only ’70s songs to survive into the next incarnation of Crimson, which reunited Fripp and Bruford along with guitarist/vocalist Adrian Belew and bassist Tony Levin. Wetton—who, for casual listeners, might sound like he’s leading the charge on Red, as Crimson bluesiest, ballsiest frontman—would go on to find success in a different arena, fronting the pop supergroup Asia and singing their hit single “Heat of the Moment.” “I always found a certain frustration playing with Crimson,” he admitted in Dave Weigel’s The Show That Never Ends, “I was never really interested in jazz.” Despite his trepidation toward their material, his final appearance with the band was a revelation for the whole group.
“Starless,” the closing track on Red, was the swan song for Crimson’s ‘70s era and the finest song the group would ever record. In live versions, its central motif—a sad, hummable refrain—was performed by Cross on violin. On record, Fripp plays it on guitar, soaring with the same weightless sheet metal bend he later brought to “Heroes.” Wetton’s lyrics, meanwhile, are crushing in an imagistic way, delivered solemnly, like the national anthem for an imagined country. During its climactic breakdown, as Wetton’s bass buzzes with Geezer Butler levels of menace, Fripp plays a series of unison notes paired on two strings, climbing up the fretboard until the tension can no longer hold. Then, the band blasts off into a rapturous finale, in 13/8 time no less.
There are a lot of ways to hear Fripp’s solo during the breakdown in “Starless.” Sometimes it sounds like a mockery of the tedious gymnastics that had come to define prog rock. 1974 was, after all, the year that Yes toured their 80-minute slog Tales From Topographic Oceans in its entirety, giving naysayers an 80-minute excuse to abandon the genre altogether. It was also the year that Genesis released The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway—their final album with frontman Peter Gabriel—taking their sound to theatrical, conceptual extremes. “Starless,” in its way, was Crimson’s own self-immolation. With his solo, Fripp suggests stasis, a growing nausea, an explosion of monotony, as the band swarms around him like vultures. Bruford taps on bells and scratches cymbal heads as Wetton’s bass increases in volume and agitation. All the while Fripp sits on his stool, riding forward, one note at a time. You don’t know how much more he can take. Then, he finds a way out.