Armed with a fitfully expressive tenor voice and a crudely amplified nylon-string acoustic guitar, Newcastle singer-songwriter Richard Dawson often deals with death or disaster in his music. On his third album, Nothing Important, the subject matter feels personal, often uncomfortably so.

Nothing Important

Richard Dawson’s music often deals with death or disaster. The Newcastle singer-songwriter’s breakthrough album, 2011’s The Magic Bridge, features songs like "Grandad’s Deathbed Hallucinations" and "Man Has Been Struck Down by Hands Unseen", as well as a "Black dog in the sky/ Who pisses and slobbers all over the world." When looking for inspiration for his follow-up (2013’s concept piece The Glass Trunk) Dawson began with a database search for "death" at his hometown museum. The album’s a capella ballads, inspired by centuries-old news clippings, tell tales of mutilated horses, murder, and the moors. His latest LP, Nothing Important, is no less morbid in its talking points, but the tragedies described are less outlandish. The subject matter feels personal, often uncomfortably so, and Dawson always falls far from sentimentalizing or softening it.
The primary sonic forces on the album are Dawson’s brittle, crudely amplified nylon-string acoustic guitar—which recalls the timbre of UK free-improv giant Derek Bailey’s playing—and his fitfully expressive tenor voice, which, when not incited to the point of howling self-evisceration, evokes Robert Wyatt’s. On other albums Dawson has explored his disparate musical tendencies separately from one another: Experimental drones, folk sketches, imitation field cries, and free jazz diversions were relegated to separate tracks and even different releases. Nothing Important fulfills and extends the promise of this earlier work; incongruous stylistic elements are overlaid upon one another, and packed into unwieldy but tightly-wrapped packages (particularly, two dense, 16-minute long compositions).
The album’s lyrics begin with a birth, but the time stamp suggests that it is not Dawson’s: "I am born by Caesarean section at 9:30 AM/ In Princess Mary’s Maternity Hospital on the 24th May/ Sixty years ago today." In a handful of lengthy verses—often fit to iambic rhythms and lilting melodies reminiscent of 16th-century madrigals—Dawson sketches painful but faint memories, including the death of a baby and an uncle who reappears as a ghost. The choruses are explosive, and derail easily ("I am nothing/ You are nothing/ Nothing important"). Running through a laundry list of mundane, still-life images maddens the title track’s narrator to the point of surrendering: "Why do they remain so clear while the faces of my loved ones disappear?" Eventually Dawson’s voice trails off, and the instrumental themes which hold the piece together reappear briefly—fatigued and sluggish—and fade. Full of unlikely musical juxtapositions and bizarre imagery (dark omens like "a barracuda chewing on a chrysanthemum" or "a forking hairline seam of superglue through the Black Gate") "Nothing Important" is perhaps Dawson’s most ambitious and affecting composition to date.
"The Vile Stuff" is less nuanced: a slow-burning dirge based around a snippet of a sinister, raga-like melody. Dawson’s lyrics center on a group of classmates ("year 7’s") who suffer dire consequences after sharing a Coke-bottled slurry of mixed liquors on a fieldtrip. The humor here is pitch black, similar to that of an Edward Gorey picture book: Dawson’s narrator and his fellow transgressors suffer fractured skulls and cheekbones, stab screwdrivers through their hands, and hop into bed with their teachers. The song culminates in a blistering cacophony of bowed harp drones (courtesy of Dawson’s frequent collaborator Rhodri Davies), funereal percussion and feedback—the sound is only as discordant and unpleasant as adolescence.
Nothing Important is driven by an ongoing conflict between entropic impulsiveness and an almost classical sense of beauty and order. The music is frequently caught in a tug of war between melody and harmony. In the guitar instrumentals that bookend the album, for instance, Dawson always runs the risk of letting a particularly effusive riff overwhelm the chords and rhythms, and topple the whole musical edifice into a series of fragmented stabs and melodic shards. The lyrics, meanwhile, alternate visions of despair, pain, and anger with moments of reconciliation and acceptance. The ritual drama of falling and picking one’s self back up again (taking "responsibility," as Dawson prefers in interviews) plays out in every element of this music, and is key to its elusive power.


The Los Angeles-based ambient musician’s EP is restful and restorative, using lo-fi tones and textures to create a work that subtly transcends.

~~~ EP

When Ana Roxanne recorded an EP in 2015, she wasn’t making a debut. ~~~ originated as a private project, the culmination of formal and informal musical training from church and school choirs to college to studying with a teacher of traditional Hindustani vocal music. Freshly rereleased by Leaving Records, the EP’s warm meditations feel unconnected to a particular time or place. Its title is utilitarian, the kind of placeholder symbols tapped out to keep a digital file at the top of an alphabetized folder. Its low, wavering hums and glassy plinks have a restful, restorative quality; it fades into the background or rewards close listening with equal ease.
~~~ sets a mood through pacing as much as through sound. The quiet recordings of ocean waves that open “It’s a Rainy Day on the Cosmic Shore” and “In a Small Valley” serve as long pauses, building the illusion of space into a short album like mirrors in a small room. The fuzzy, analog aquatics recall the Environments series of field recordings, originally released in the 1960s and 1970s and recently reissued by Numero Group as an app—a modern edition of an earlier generation’s serene, anonymous background sound. Such sound can aid in introspection or distract from it, depending on your priorities; by shifting field recordings towards melody and spirituality, Ana Roxanne invites contemplation.
When ~~~ incorporates vocals, they fall between a murmur and a soft melody, intimate without getting personal. “In existential mathematics, the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory,” instructs a man’s gentle voice on “Slowness,” before pausing to ask, “Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?” Synthesizers cycle and burble, a kind of ambient music that’s more USS Enterprise sound effects than seashores. Ana Roxanne’s intermittent use of her own voice helps unify the collection, an individual stamp on a humanistic style. On “Nocturne,” her ethereal croon is an overheard echo of the cathedrals where, as a young person, she came to understand music as a sacrament.
In its final third, ~~~ shifts outward, taking a turn toward pop’s past. “I’m Every Sparkly Woman” is a cover of a cover, draining the funk from the Whitney Houston version of Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” and recasting it as a whispy strand of melody over bubbling Moog arpeggios. Misty and distant, the song’s karaoke influence shines through in sound and ambiance: virtualized pop with the forlorn glow of an empty bar. But it’s still of a piece with the music that surrounds it: textured but uncomplicated, soothing without feeling narcotic, flashing glints of personality without leaving the chill zone. Ambient music has perhaps never been so readily available as it is right now; Ana Roxanne’s quiet soundscapes offer the promise of artisanship in an automated age.


The cosmically minded group featuring rising jazz saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings dances to the apocalypse and pleads for humanity.

The Comet Is Coming: Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery

For the past two years, London saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings has traveled the globe as one of jazz music’s top performers, lending his hallmark bluster to like-minded artists Makaya McCraven and Moses Sumney, while crafting the sonic direction for two of his three disparate bands: the Caribbean dance-themed Sons of Kemet, the spiritual jazz-focused Shabaka and the Ancestors, and the cosmic jazz-centered the Comet Is Coming. Through a tireless work ethic, Hutchings has become one of the trendiest musicians in all of jazz, and is the leader of a U.K. jazz scene that boasts such names as Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, and Theon Cross.
Yet if there’s a flashpoint of Hutchings’ ascendance, it’s 2016, when his other band, the Comet Is Coming, was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize Album of the Year and Shabaka and the Ancestors released an exquisite album called Wisdom of Elders on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings label. From there, his name and likeness started appearing everywhere: Hop on his Instagram and Facebook pages, and you’re likely to see Hutchings blaring his sax on stage through grainy video footage, or posing alongside the likes of Kamasi Washington, who’s become a fan of his work. Though Hutchings has been a driving force in the British underground since the early 2010s—having played with a variety of bands, including the punk-focused Melt Yourself Down, and the kaleidoscopic jazz group Polar Bear—it seems the rest of the world is coming around to his magnetic creative artistry.
Of Hutchings’ groups, the Comet Is Coming reaches farthest, and their new album Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery feels directly influenced by the cosmic electronica of Flying Lotus’ Los Angeles and any of Sun Ra’s eccentric jazz. Co-written by Hutchings on sax, Max Hallett on drums, and Dan Leavers on keys, the Comet creates sci-fi-themed blends of jazz painted in dark shades of crimson. Equally nostalgic and progressive, the band mixes the upbeat bounce of 1990s house music with dismal funk and psych-rock, landing on a sound that feels tethered to disaster, like the soundtrack of a party that will soon dissolve. Across this album and the band’s previous work, there’s a sense of cataclysmic despair, that the world is ending and there’s nothing left to do but dance to the apocalypse. If 2017’s Death to the Planet scored Earth’s demise, Lifeforce details its restoration, just as the flames dwindle and the fumes rise from charred soil.
Lifeforce is an album in the truest sense, with each song blending into the next for continuous listening. Mostly low- to mid-tempo, the band skillfully integrates bleak and radiant tones, leading to an impressive nine-track suite of ambient, spoken-word and grime-infused compositions. Take the bookend tracks, “Because the End Is Really the Beginning” and “The Universe Wakes Up,” as examples: They’re both weightless, unfolding in a haze of foggy synth chords, faint drum fills and sullen saxophone wails, at once eliciting thoughts of impending doom and possible hope. Other songs feel especially festive: “Summon the Fire,” “Super Zodiac” and “Timewave Zero” have quick percussion and soaring synth work, and Hutchings accentuates them with turbulent blasts. The saxophonist’s technique centers on high-powered gusts that slowly unfurl until the track’s apex, where he heightens the energy even further with higher-pitched shrieking.
By the time “Unity” comes around, Hutchings takes the steam out of his horn, letting the notes flutter as Hallett and Leavers take center stage. On an album of gripping intensity, this song is the most optimistic, soft drums and oscillating synths conveying the deepest notions of peace. “Blood of the Past” is the album’s clear centerpiece and its heaviest track. Here, the trio produces a menacing instrumental on which poet Kate Tempest delivers a finger-wagging verse to, well, everything—vanity, capitalism, social disconnection, and nonchalance. She speaks the only words we hear on the album, crystallizing the Comet’s masterful release with blunt force impact. “Imagine a culture that has at its root a more soulful connection to land, and to lovers,” Tempest ponders. “...Unable to listen, we keep speaking … unable to notice ourselves, unable to stop and unwilling to learn.” The Comet’s point becomes clear in that moment: Earth’s demise isn’t due to some fiery blast you’d see in a movie, it’s due to the erosion of common decency, and our allegiance to superficial items that validate our existence. Lifeforce is a plea to stay human, and most of all, humane.


The San Antonio-based rapper rides menacing, three-dimensional beats with steely confidence and creative flows, but he’s most interesting as a storyteller.

In Dimes We Trust

Mike Dimes is a hip-hop nomad in multiple senses. Part of a military family, he moved across the southeastern and western United States as a child before settling in his birth state of Texas. Dimes originally dreamed of pursuing a career in basketball, but a latent interest in poetry and an influx of rap influences—everyone from 50 Cent and Tupac to A$AP Rocky and Joey Bada$$—pushed him toward music. His 2021 debut DLOG, released while in college for business management, put him in the same field as artists like Kenny Mason and Grip: lyrically minded spitters comfortable over just about any kind of beat. DLOG’s sample platter of sounds could be hit-or-miss, but Dimes’ steely confidence and flow switch-ups kept the songs on track.
His latest project In Dimes We Trust is more musically focused, foregrounding the bludgeoning low end and minor-key flourishes of Texas and Tennessee hip-hop. He has an ear for the kind of sounds designed to drive both live crowds and headphone fetishists into fits of nirvana, and his best songs revolve around menacing, three-dimensional beats. The gloomy stomp of producer Zuri’s beat for “Paparazzi” evokes vintage Three 6 Mafia and Key Glock in equal measure, while singles “Home” and “No Trends”—produced by Zuri and cvleb and Treetime and Rxkz, respectively—pit victorious samples against weapons-grade 808s. But Dimes is never overwhelmed, his monotone voice cutting through the clatter at every opportunity. Considering that he’s only 21 and still in college, his presence and technique are remarkably sharp—he blends in with the beat without becoming constrained by it, keeping a breakneck pace on “Religion” and finding pockets you might not expect on “Same Gang.”
There’s a handful of lyrical subjects Dimes is keen on: being a better rapper than you; getting more women than you; generally stunting across this plane of existence in ways you could never imagine. But for all his skill and composure, his imagination is pretty limited in scope. His metaphors and punchlines aren’t quite as clever as this level of posturing demands—“I’m a Christian rocking Christian Dior” from “Luv” is one of several that feel basic—and even the sex boasts occasionally blur together. If it weren’t for the beats, some of the bars on “Jiggalo” and “Backroom” would be interchangeable. It’s a problem fellow subgenre-straddling rappers like IDK frequently encounter: No outright granola bars stand out, and that’s almost worse than if they did.
What is memorable—what balances out the patches of indistinct writing—are Dimes’ delivery and flows. He has a way of finding the melody in the amelodic, of stretching words until they snap like glow sticks. Take the way he chops up the names of all the women he’s seeing halfway through the second verse of “Jiggalo” (“Stephanie, Bethany, I don’t know, something with Effanie”); or the way his hook on “No Trends” careens around the drums and sirens of the beat like an inner tube through a waterslide. The excitement stems from the feel and application of Dimes’ words as much as from their meaning, verses and hooks feeding off the electricity of his vocal arrangements.
That isn’t to say that Dimes’ words carry no weight. He’s much more interesting as a storyteller than as a punchline rapper. Little bits of autobiography—telling off a naysaying teacher at the beginning of “Paparazzi”; the truncated path to success he lays out near the end of closing track “Who Is Mike Dimes?” (“Fourteen, saw a dream, 15, made a scheme/Sixteen, made a team, 21, love the green”)—illuminate his come-up and flesh out his personality. In Dimes We Trust inches audiences closer to a full understanding of his purpose. No songs here approach the bare-all storytelling of DLOG standout “Drive By” or his TikTok smash “My Story,” but his mood and control are fierce and he moves through beats like oil through water. Even when Mike Dimes’ writing blends in with the zeitgeist, his performance will grab your ears and shake your brain for loose change.


Following up their remarkable LOSE, the Staten Island rockers try to fight grief with dense, hook-filled songs about the intrinsic value of being alive.

Pretty Years

Cymbals Eat Guitars’ 2009 debut album Why There Are Mountains arrived at the very tail end of indie-rock’s halcyon days when it was still possible for a new band to earn a fast following just by doing the whole Built to Spill/Modest Mouse/Pixies thing well. That’s not to say they didn’t deserve their success. They were always more than the sum of their influences, considerably craftier and less predictable than most of the era’s ’90s enthusiasts. But as the public’s appetite for meat-and-potatoes indie rock waned, the band found that their fast rise didn’t buy them much loyalty. The group’s prickly yet exhilarating 2011 follow-up Lenses Alien demanded more from listeners than most were willing to give, and although their more immediate, emotional knockout punch of a third record LOSE seemed like a prime candidate for a second breakthrough, its reach didn’t live up to they hype. For all the accolades, as the band bluntly told Spin, “It didn’t sell.”
And so now a band that once stumbled into an audience now finds themselves scraping for one, a cruel reversal of fortunes for a group that’s making the best music of their career. But perhaps timing could work in their favor again. The emo revival has created a home for loud, openhearted guitar rock that skirts conventional notions of “cool,” and although Cymbals Eat Guitars aren’t by any means a complete match for that scene, circumstances have aligned the two. The band spent the two brief years between LOSE and their fourth album Pretty Years on the road with acts like Say Anything, Brand New, and Modern Baseball, so it may not be entirely a coincidence that Pretty Years, while holding true to its own distinctive aesthetic vision, confronts the same vital concerns that have made the best albums from emo’s modern crop resonate so deeply. Like recent works from The Hotelier and Sorority Noise, it’s about nothing less than the intrinsic value of being alive.
Some of those leaders of emo’s fourth wave have gone so far as to cast their music as a kind of support group, recording albums that double as manuals for coping with hardship. Pretty Years stops short of that. Despite the comparatively upbeat outlook of these songs—a shift that’s underscored by the album’s jaunty tempos—words of comfort don’t come naturally to singer Joseph D’Agostino. He spent much of Cymbals Eat Guitars’ grief-sick last album processing the death of a close friend, so even as he looks to better days here, he remains guarded and deeply skeptical of any good fortune. “It's as much of a declaration of love as I’ll ever muster,” he trills on “Close.” He’s trying to channel Robert Smith’s heavenly sigh, but his words don’t soar the way Smith’s do. His rasp imparts even his sweetest sentiments with a crotchety sting. “Can’t believe the shit that we were promised really might exist,” he marvels on “Have a Heart,” but it takes the song’s twinkling, Johnny Marr-esque guitars to confirm that, no, he’s not being sarcastic. He really is in love.
Every Cymbals Eat Guitars album has been dense, but none have covered as much ground as effectively as Pretty Years. With the help of producer John Congleton, who continues his remarkable streak of bringing out the best in nearly every act he works with, the band nods to some of the wilder arrangements of ’80s pop-rock records like Born in the U.S.A., Brothers in Arms, and Head on the Door. Jubilant E Street Band saxophones cut against D’Agostino’s voice on “Wish,” while the pumping “4th of July, Philadelphia (SANDY)” charges forward with the pageantry and sparkle of a lost Sandinista! gem. Pretty Years’ colorful arrangements keep the mood light even when the subject matter is anything but. On “Well,” bright Duran Duran synths soften the blow of D’Agostino’s harrowing confession: “Think I need help/Wanna get well.”
So D’Agostino still has some things to work through, even if he’s come a long way from the days of hyperventilating at the prospect of dirty hypodermic needles hidden in movie theater seat cushions. The terrible thing about anxiety, as anybody who’s ever suffered it can attest, is that there’s no permanent fix for it. It does get better over time, maybe even better than you could have hoped, yet you can never be certain that it isn’t still there, hiding dormant somewhere in your chest, waiting to throw off your heartbeat at the least expected moment. On the closer “Shrine,” D’Agostino confronts it head on, testing his progress by joining the family of his deceased friend for a meal commemorating his birthday. That prospect might have thrown him into fits just an album ago, but here things go about as well as you could hope, given the circumstances. “We laugh and drink and eat,” D’Agostino sings, “but we’re all just wishing you were here.” It’s not quite a happy ending, but it’s a fitting final anecdote for an album that so movingly testifies to the difficulty of appreciating what you have while still reconciling what you’ve lost.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Missy Elliott’s debut, a radically empathetic statement of self.

Supa Dupa Fly

In the summer of 1997, following the murders of both 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G., hip-hop underwent a transformation. Amid the continued rise of Clinton-era “tough on crime” policies, the unexpected and widespread popularity of gangsta rap from the projects to the suburbs showed no signs of stopping. But the music industry itself felt bogged down by the real-life violence that rap stars spoke of. As a rising star, Missy Elliott was frequently hired by Bad Boy Records to write for some of its hottest stars, and she even ran into Biggie Smalls the night he was killed. But rather than dwell on the tragic murder and roiling violence of rap at the time, Missy sought to capture the feeling of a generation breaking out of societal norms in the name of amusement and pleasure with her debut album, Supa Dupa Fly.
When faced with times of escalation, the Black community often folds within itself to find solutions. With hip-hop, the Black youth that had fought and raged to be heard saw themselves at the helm of what would become a billion-dollar industry. By the late ’90s, rap had shifted from gritty biography to decadent stories about children of the crack era growing up to be millionaires off their own talents and oral history. Those who had been marginalized were now the Black nouveau riche—a movement led in the East by Bad Boy Records. The label’s music focused on a new class of black millionaires who wanted to talk more about what they were looking forward to rather than leaving behind, and Missy was right there in the mix.
Though Missy was mostly writing for R&B stars and was then known as a singer, it seemed inevitable that she would try her hand at rapping. The late ’80s and early ’90s had introduced New Jack Swing: a fusion of hip-hop rhythms, samples, and production techniques with urban contemporary R&B. The success of Teddy Riley, a Virginia native and father of New Jack Swing ushered in the reign of the Neptunes and Timbaland: producer powerhouses who would eventually become titans of the industry by running with new styles of production. By virtue of its geography, Virginia connected the tenacious sounds of the Northeast and the looser style of the South. It was this very storm that brewed up the magic of Missy and her partner in beats, Timbaland.
High school friends who had met in their home state of Virginia, Missy and Timbaland spent the better part of the ’90s writing for almost every major R&B act at the top of the charts, including SWV, Jodeci, and Aaliyah. By the July 15, 1997 release of Supa Dupa Fly Missy was already the head of her own imprint, The GoldMind Inc, which co-released the project. Considering the male dominated landscape of the era, this feat was not only incredibly impressive for a female rapper but an undeniable catalyst for the way the genre would take shape in the new millennium.
Hailing from Portsmouth, Virginia, Melissa Elliott had spent her entire life onstage, even performing for her own dolls at a young age. Getting her start singing in church, she became a regular fixture in talent shows across the city and state. She first linked up with Timbaland while working on material for her all-female quartet, Sista. The group got a break when they caught Jodeci’s DeVanté Swing backstage at a show; he took the group on. Unfortunately, the Sista project was shelved and Swing’s label, Swing Mob, later shuttered, but Missy took it as a lesson to become well-versed in songwriting and production. Timbaland has said that working with Missy was what first introduced him to the idea of melodies and made him think of his beats in song form.
While much of the music of the time was powered by well-known samples, including Bad Boy’s hits such as “Mo Money Mo Problems” (which flipped Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out”) and “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” (based on Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”), Timbaland and Missy preferred not to sample—and if they did, it had to be interesting. Timbaland would speed up vocal samples just to use as them as a bass line. He used breakbeats in a unique way, too, employing them to create pauses and longer stretches of silence. The dead space became its own canvas within the beat where Timbaland could use overlays of beatboxing, clicks, and just about any cool sound, from a baby’s cry to an Egyptian flute. But it was the intuitive songwriting style and unique imprint of Missy’s pen that would make the duo a top-tier act.
By summer 1997, Missy had just finished writing nine tracks for Aaliyah’s One in a Million and made her debut as a rapper with a feature on Gina Thompson’s “The Things You Do.” Supa Dupa Fly was not a project she had long considered making but rather a reaction to the demand for her talent; the record was recorded within two weeks. “I did this album for my fans and not to make money, because I’m already making money with my songs,” she told interviewers around its release. Timbaland produced the entire project, and, together, they delivered a perfectly edited joint résumé.
It is impossible to separate the two throughout any of the 17 tracks. The record even has moments where they sample themselves, bringing back beats they had previously used for other artists: The syrupy guitar loop of SWV’s “Can We”—a song that notably starts with Missy’s soft whispers of being “supa dupa fly”—is interpolated on three separate tracks. It becomes a signature of sorts on an audio collage of Afrofuturism and Black Cool within the pop space.
Throughout the album, Missy follows the algorithm of pop lyrics: short and catchy phrases that boil down raw feelings in real time. However, her concerns were never with the sunny side of love but rather the work and pain that it takes for one to find real affection in this world. Tracks like “Beep Me 911” and “Sock It 2 Me” speak of a need for sex more than true love. “I was looking for affection/So I decided to go/Swing that dick in my direction/I’ll be out of control,” she sings. Missy’s brand of nasty singing was less Anita Baker and more in line with the hypersexualized bars of the likes of Lil’ Kim (who would become one of her best friends) and Foxy Brown.
This talk was especially innovative coming from a curvy, gender-bending woman who often appeared in exaggerated and animated form in her videos. In the iconic visual for “The Rain(Supa Dupa Fly),” Missy appears as a Michelin woman, dancing into the camera while wearing a giant plastic bag suit and biker’s helmet. The costume made her look even bigger than she was but also took away the obviousness that she was not a thin Lolita type. In the same video she wears a straight wig and sits on a hill twirling it in caricature of Lil Bo Peep. “We wanted to make fun of the ways record companies try to make black women look white,” Missy has said. “Fake hair, fake music.”
She was quite aware of how she looked and how the mostly male-audience of rap would receive her but she did not cower away from being the sexual aggressor. Missy rapped and sang about the woman who was self-assured and still sensitive to heartbreak; one that knew what she wanted enough to demand it but was prone to getting hurt. Even better, because of her “lack” of sexual appeal to the market of the time, she was able to skip the highly-sexualized performative nature of her female rap contemporaries. Many of those acts spun objectification into sexual empowerment, and Missy also empowered those who may have been told that their bodies were not attractive and therefore not valuable to consumers. What sells is not real life, and she made it clear that women like her have sex too. She also did not look down on her peers. Her focus was innovation, not morality.
One of the LP’s strongest ballads, “Best Friends,” featuring Aaliyah, tells the story of a woman who wants to protect her pathetic man in spite of what her friends may say. “My best friend say she sick of me cryin’ on the phone/Tellin’ how the men be doggin’ me/My best friend say don’t tell her nothin’ bout me and you/’Cause she ain’t showin’ me no sympathy,” Missy cries before belting out a chorus that declares her defiant commitment to be there for this wayward lover and whatever he may need. These everyday stories of love give her writing style the freedom to be as empathetic as it is explicit. Missy brings the biographical component of rap full circle for women here, not as just a raunchy counterpoint to its misogyny but an entirely new safe space for women to express their sexual liberation in dulcet tones.
Better yet, she was able to make her music contextually specific to its audience. Some of the album’s initial reviews criticized Missy’s writing skills, claiming that the lyrics were lacking in substance and structure. But whereas contemporary pop had been mostly for a white audience, R&B was a decidedly urban (read: Black) art form. 1997’s top love songs were far from sexually explorative: LeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live” and Backstreet Boys” “As Long as You Love Me” spoke of love as a virtuous happenstance, and heartbreak as a calamity that would stop all motor function. Missy spoke of tortured love at the hands of men that were not quite respectful and most definitely bad for you-- the kind of relationships you needed friends to survive through—and she spoke of it in the language of the hoods she came from. What some wrote off as “lazy” and “uninspired” lyrics were simply in AAVE, speaking directly to the audience from which they came. On “Beep Me 911,” Missy takes on the role of a spurned lover who has had enough of being humiliated but may still hear him out. “Why you played on me, wasn’t I good enough for you/All those other girls you’ve been with can’t do like I do/Gave you all my dough when you needed it all the time/And if you planning on leaving me again then give me a sign.” These were not linear characters with strict moral standards on how they could be treated but real people with flaws who went against what was best in the name of comfort or even orgasm. These were topics that everyone could empathize with, marketed directly to those who informed the context.
Supa Dupa Fly speaks to the way Missy stuck to having fun with the music. She and Timbaland saw a opening to transpose the outlook of this young Black culture class and the very sound it used to define itself. What followed Supa Dupa Fly was many years of the industry attempting to reproduce what Missy and Timbo had created organically and by the time “Get Your Freak On” became an international success in 2001, much of the urban and pop landscape was employing Timbaland’s sound. But no one would ride his beats like Missy. On “They Don’t Wanna Fuck Wit Me,” the pair do back to back, almost freestyle verses, talking shit about their innate ability to crush tracks. Missy notes the things that seem to irritate her detractors, though they can’t stop listening. Over a sparse beat she rhymes, “I come back into my flow/My people just don’t know/They hate the way that I hee/They hate the way that I hee-haw/Cuz I got too much dough/You know my steelo/So what you come here fo’?” She brings back to focus the new money of rap’s Golden Age, which not only bought her a new lifestyle but the space and privilege to enjoy being herself.


Guided by Voice’s 24th studio album is a 32-track double-album that contains plenty of tiny details to savor. It is impressively low on filler from Robert Pollard.

August by Cake

For better or worse, Guided by Voices leader Robert Pollard has always staunchly resisted the quality-over-quantity rule. In addition to the band’s proper albums, GBV has now issued five rarities box sets, each containing 100 tracks or more. So even fans will likely shrug knowing that August by Cake, GBV’s 24th studio album, is a 32-track double-album. Pollard also claims that it’s his 100th release overall (knock yourself out if you want to go combing the internet for an exact count).
A good deal of Pollard’s charm stems from his willingness to release unformed sketches of songs that barely develop past the work-in-progress stage. But Pollard’s prolific output can also be read as an obsessive quest to master the art of songwriting. And once you hear his most committed songs, it can be frustrating to return to his shoebox of cassette demos. Take the string-laced 2004 tune “Window of My World.” In under three minutes, Pollard steers the band through folk balladry, orchestral pop, and dreamy, anthemic psychedelic rock—an irresistibly catchy confection of a song that made you wonder why Pollard didn’t push himself more often. Strangely enough, though, August by Cake benefits from Pollard not trying too hard.
Since their 2010 reformation, Guided by Voices have nearly doubled the pace of their output, releasing two and even three albums in the same year. Somewhere along the way, Pollard crossed over from displaying a lack of effort into embodying effortlessness, and in terms of scope and flow, August by Cake coalesces into one of Pollard’s most complete efforts. As always, several of the new tunes consist of one idea repeated in trademark GBV fashion and then abruptly cut short. Sequenced without pauses between songs, the album surprisingly doesn’t become exhausting because, for once, Pollard doesn’t disrupt his own flow.
In fact, more than Pollard or any of his bandmates, it’s the song sequencing that steals the show here. When a bright church organ swoops in to lift the woozy “Generox Gray Ⓡ” out of its downtempo doldrums, your ears immediately perk up—for all of seven seconds, that is, until the song is over. Rather than doom the track to its fate as yet another incomplete song fragment, Pollard gives the brevity of the organ a purpose by segueing directly into the faux-electronic drumbeat of “When We All Hold Hands at the End of the World.”
By the time you get to the premature fade-out on fifth track “We Liken the Sun,” the album’s cadence is established and the entrance of the next song actually feels welcome. From there, there’s no shortage of small-but-significant attributes to pick apart and savor over repeated listens. The harmonies and guitar wash of “Goodbye Note” recall Bob Mould in Sugar, and bassist Mark Shue’s lead vocals on “Absent the Man” are a breath of fresh air. But most noteworthy is the absence of Pollard’s typical filler, shared before it had a chance to blossom.
Like any songwriter steadily plying his craft, Pollard has grown almost imperceptibly understated and even tasteful with his decisions. August by Cake is as much a sum of those choices as it is of songs. After over 30 years in pursuit of the perfect song, Pollard has finally started to recognize the album for everything it can be.


The second album from the Albany freak-folk group is vivid and dreamlike, revealing a meticulous attention to detail.

Holy Red Wagon

When Bruiser and Bicycle released their 2019 debut, Woods Come Find Me, the Animal Collective comparisons were inevitable. Though unsuspecting and humble in nature, their lo-fi sound tapped into similar vocal hijinks and manic acoustic arrangements as Sung Tongs, prompting a pavlovian response for anyone who ever bookmarked Said the Gramophone on Internet Explorer. Founded by multi-instrumentalists Nick Whittemore and Keegan Graziane, Bruiser and Bicycle spent four years perfecting their follow-up, Holy Red Wagon, and honing their identity away from their freak-folk touchstones. While the comparisons are still easy to draw, the band embarks on its own winding adventures with the help of drummer Joe Taurone. What sounds at first like free-spirited chaos settles into a strange rhythm, like three different heartbeats that just happen to intertwine snugly.
Though Whittemore and Graziane started writing Holy Red Wagon pre-pandemic, the restlessness of 2020 influenced the spirit of the project. The two started individually writing and demoing tracks to show each other—a first for the band—and continuously modified them as time stretched on forever. “I had this need to create as big of a space as possible through music because I was being so compressed in [my studio apartment],” Graziane told Post-Trash. After all that refining, their songs evolved into intricate, tightly crocheted doilies that are dizzying up close but transform into a singular design from afar—hence the median song runtime of seven minutes. On standout “Unknown Orchard,” a retelling of the Garden of Eden through the eyes of a tour guide pointing out the forbidden knowledge dangling within reach, a claustrophobic 5/4 time signature expands into something playful and spacious. Guitars flicker atop a jovial indie-rock hook before segueing into freeform jazz-funk. It’s one of many mid-song change-ups, a staple of their songwriting that reflects a desire to indulge while keeping the overall delivery tidy and light.
Bruiser and Bicycle allotted another lengthy chunk of time for production and mixing, allowing for a similarly meticulous process. Inspired by Dave Fridmann’s production on the Flaming Lips’ Embryonic, they asked producer Scoops Dardaris to emphasize the drums for a loud, saturated tone and a hi-fi sheen on the rest of the instruments. You can hear the effect toward the end of “1000 Engines” when Taurone transitions from a jittery syncopated beat fit for the Dodos into a blown-out crash that swallows the mix whole: drilling the snare, showering the toms in a rain of bullets, and rattling his sticks on the cymbals. This attention to detail is evident through each song: the keyboard straight out of a ’70s horror film that buzzes loudly over the start of “Superdealer,” the squealing synth of a dystopian radio dial in “Lunette Fields Speak,” the searing guitar notes over carnivalesque melodies in “Aerial Shipyards.” Holy Red Wagon overflows with these production tricks that roughen up the texture while smoothing the edges of their moving parts.
As staunch congregants at the altar of multi-tracking, Bruiser and Bicycle build their songs like post-modern skyscrapers, stacking level after level until it all seems precarious. That density can be deceptive; take “Forks of the Jailhouse,” a breezy jangle-pop earworm reminiscent of Real Estate that, in reality, has so many layers that it initially crashed Pro Tools. Their maximalist approach surfaces most obviously in Whittemore and Graziane’s shared vocals, which are key to those Animal Collective comparisons. Whittemore channels his inner Avey Tare with warbled falsettos and giddy enunciation, especially in the wordless harmonies of “Aerial Shipyards” and the descending vocal lines of “1000 Engines.” Closer “We Thought the Sky” picks up where Fall Be Kind’s “What Would I Want? Sky” left off, shooing away the 2009 clouds of bong smoke for a sensation more like heat shimmering above scalding pavement. They go full power-pop on the vocal harmonies, even breaking out the “ba ba ba’s” before a surrealist synth melody wiggles into frame and their yells turn psychedelic: “Give me your arms in the sunlight/We wanna build the sky.” It’s a dreamlike pursuit, but Bruiser and Bicycle make it clear they’re up to the task.


On his debut album, the Toronto artist provides his origin story, and proves just how hard it is to escape from the long shadow of Drake.

I Told You

Toronto singer and rapper Tory Lanez has his eyes fixed on mega stardom. “My name is Daystar Peterson. One day I’ma be the biggest artist in the whole world,” he says casually in the opening moments of his debut album, I Told You. But for now, he isn’t even the biggest artist in his own city. Lanez is among a group of Toronto artists trying to escape Drake’s long shadow through emulation. He has been pestering the OVO boss in an attempt to get his attention and by extension, the world’s, and Drake eventually gave him half a bar on the Meek Mill diss “Summer Sixteen” with a dig at the so-called "New Toronto," the class of up-and-comers molded in Drake’s image.
This shot, in a way, legitimized Lanez as a Drake adversary or at least a potential Drake understudy, and Lanez has since produced a platinum single, the Brownstone-sampling “Say It.” In Lanez’s mind, these constitute huge stepping stones in his career, one that started when he was kicked out of his grandmother’s house. I Told You chronicles this journey, relying heavily on skits and an out-of-body Menace II Society-esque narration ploy to tell its story, which basically is a long-winded build to (as its title implies) force-feeding doubters crow, cycling through several iterations of Drake in the process. As a title, I Told You isn’t a far cry from Thank Me Later.
To be clear, Tory Lanez will never be Drake. He doesn’t have the knack for hooks, he isn’t better at writing raps than the Drake brain trust (or at making songs, for that matter), and he has a much tougher time finding the right rapping to singing ratio. But that doesn’t stop him from trying to remake Take Care on his debut. Some songs smolder into other attached songs, like “I Told You / Another One” and “Dirty Money.” Others try to dole out that patented half-sung rapping that has become a Drake staple. And “Loners Blvd” is a straight up “Look What You’ve Done” knockoff in both intent and tone. There are even samples of “We’ll Be Fine” in “4am Flex” and “Friends With Benefits.” Give Lanez credit, though: He has succeeded where several others have failed in playing Drake’s game (politicking in interviews but waging a war of subliminals) and existing in his world and sonic space (c.f. the robbery he pulled on his version of “Controlla” or his play for world audiences with the dancehall-flecked single “Luv.”) In a post-VIEWS universe, it isn’t impossible to imagine a scenario where Lanez cuts the distance between them.
Over the last few years, Tory Lanez has grown into a relatively versatile artist, a better singer than rapper, but decent at both. I Told You is a sonic variety pack compared to his last two mixtapes The New Toronto and Chixtape 3, both of which tried to split his sound cleanly down the middle. His debut is an introduction not only to his story, but to his full skill set. He isn’t a particularly quotable rapper, but he strings together some interesting cadences on “To D.R.E.A.M.,” which, in the narrative flow, functions as his “Backseat Freestyle.” His falsetto slips into the melting guitar licks on “Guns and Roses,” a song that toys with a simple but effective ‘love is war’ metaphor. “Cold Hard Love” is like putting songs from two different Weeknd eras together at the seams, and it’s an intoxicating brew of atmosphere-warping R&B and pop zip.
The longer I Told You runs, though, the more it unravels. It’s an overly ambitious project that attempts to shoot a movie and forgets it’s an album in the process. Sometimes in an effort to pat himself on the back, Lanez reduces songs to plot points in his own myth-making. He could’ve shaved at least 10 minutes off the 76-minute runtime just by cutting the fat. He suffers from Travis Scott Syndrome: the tendency to overdo. Songs don’t always need big second acts or elaborate arrangements. Sometimes, less is more. “Flex,” a song almost entirely made of hooks, is two hooks too long. “4am Flex” could’ve done without the rapped outro. Everything doesn’t need a skit.
Some songs here are hastily penned with only exposition in mind like a pivot moment in the Fox industry drama “Empire.” Others are jammed in completely ignoring the flow of the album, making room where there isn’t any through dialogue or soliloquy. It’s also ironic that an album this long somehow rushes the ending; the climax of his rags-to-riches yarn is fumbled in a frenzy of singles. Tory Lanez is a promising talent who has a long way to go before he can be considered Drake’s peer, but he’s already nailed at least one Drake-ism: the bloated, overwrought album.


After freeing himself from the feuds and narrative that dragged him down, Meek Mill’s third studio album is a comeback by any measure, honest and gripping.

Wins and Losses

Meek Mill spent much of the last two years trying to understand how a ghostwriting bombshell dropped mid-Twitter rant could backfire so tremendously. Less than 140 characters completely changed his trajectory. When he exposed Drake as a Quentin Miller mouthpiece, he couldn’t have anticipated the blowback—“Charged Up” and “Back to Back”—would send his career spiraling. Long after the matter was closed he was still rapping about it constantly, as if dazed and trying to make sense of what happened. Many deemed the series of Drake disses, which would come to include  the “Summer Jam Screen” moment and “Summer Sixteen,” as resounding losses, the type rappers don’t recover from (ask Ja Rule). Earlier this year, the other shoe dropped: Meek and Nicki Minaj unceremoniously split after two years of dating, and the subs went flying in song. Minaj invited Drake to send stray shots at Meek on “No Frauds.” These moments have come to define Meek for many who were only casually invested in the first place. He is continuously addressing these setbacks because no one will let him forget about them.
His third album, Wins and Losses, assesses what it really means to be defeated. In an interview with Atlanta’s Streetz 94.5, he clarified the album’s ambitions: “I just wanted to give people a real perspective of my life, what we call wins and what we call losses. I lost my case, we lost Lil Snupe, Chino lost his brother. Where we come from, that’s a loss. When you talk L’s and W’s, you get an L, that mean you got life in jail. It’s critical. It ain’t what they talking about.” Much like his major label debut, Dreams and Nightmares, his new album juxtaposes rap dreams and hood realities, but draws more deliberate distinctions. He recognizes rapping as salvation from street life, not some gladiatorial clash inside an echo chamber. Meek makes the case there’s more than one way to win, and that being bested in the rap coliseum isn’t nearly as devastating a blow as seeing close friends die. Subliminal shots don’t hit the way real ones do. The album is a comeback by any measure, honest and gripping.
Rap is largely a perception game (as Meek’s MMG boss can attest to), and on Wins and Losses Meek attempts to change his narrative using a different perspective. Here, he isn’t Drake’s also-ran or Nicki Minaj’s ex; he’s the ultimate underdog, a battle-rapping corner boy who came from nothing and gained everything. “I just made like 20 Ms, they say it’s an L (what?)/Niggas prayin’ that I fall and I wish ‘em well,” he raps on “Issues,” making light of his perceived misfortune and those who want to see him fail. The message is even clearer on “1942 Flows”: “I done seen all these niggas try to downplay my dreams/So I’ma give it to ‘em every time I’m on the scene.” Chasing dreams is Meek’s guiding principle. He’s always been about triumph in the face of adversity. He finds solace in knowing he’s achieved all he set out to, and that he wasn’t even supposed to be here.
Aside from trading in his Rolex for a Patek, and Maybachs for Wraiths, Meek settles back into his usual rhythm on Wins and Losses. He wasn’t rapping poorly on his 4/4 EP or his DC4 mixtape, but Drake had taken up so much space in Meek’s consciousness (and ours) that he was dictating many of Meek’s raps and how people chose to listen to them. Across 67 minutes and 17 tracks, Meek gets back to what he does best, diagramming a tumultuous life lived—praying for bricks, prison stints, starting out broke and earning millions, losing a brother and memorializing him in ice. He sees stunting as a salute to the dead. “Rockin’ all this ice, I’m just tryna hide my scars tho/Somethin’ bout that Wraith and them lights, how them stars glow/Give me motivation,” he raps on “These Scars.” Alongside Young Thug on “We Ball,” a sparse thumper driven by Thug accents, he laments lost comrades, vowing to honor them and provide for those still living. “Heavy Heart” indicts betrayers and defiantly challenges naysayers. He’s sharp and adrenalized, even in mourning.
The most moving Meek bars use success as a lens through which to understand misery, reflecting on a distressing past, measuring the distance between fame and struggle, and finding the overlaps. It is a constant balance, as displayed on “Heavy Heart”: “Shit I’d rather work and walk ‘fore I ride luxury with niggas that don't fuck with me/I’m startin’ to hate this fame shit, look what it done to me.” Wins and Losses considers the trappings of celebrity better than any other Meek project. There is never a sense of calm in his raps; he’s always on edge. You get the feeling that recent events have left Meek not knowing who to trust, and his music carries that anxiety.
Some songs are rehashes, like “Connect the Dots,” a Rick Ross collaboration that evokes past team-ups like “So Sophisticated.” And “Ball Player” is just one of a handful of tracks that should’ve gotten the axe; redundancy is an issue on the album, as it is on any Meek album (so much so that twice he addresses listeners critical of his endless Rollie raps). He operates in finite space at polar extremes: agony or exuberance. But Meek does challenge himself, and those who suggest he’s merely a shout rapper, on Wins and Losses: “Fall Thru” slathers on the Auto-Tune for a more chic sound; “Open” packs rapid fire flows into a muted sex jam; “Young Black America” turns a heavy sample of JAY-Z’s “Blueprint (Momma Loves Me)” into a chilling 13th audiobook. When tested to come up with his most insightful work and justify his missteps, he delivers compelling alternate truths. Wins and Losses shows the rap game is much harder to score than one might think.


The Chicago psych trio’s loops and layers seem to play tricks on time: Long songs fly by quickly, and short pieces feel expansive.

Bajascillators

Chicago’s Bitchin Bajas make languid, slowly developing music, relying on boundless repetition rather than big changes to move forward. But compared to previous full-lengths—like 2014’s 76-minute self-titled album and 2017’s 80-minute Bajas Fresh—Bajascillators is surprisingly compact. On each of the four tracks, Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan start with minimal loops, add concentric layers, and crest into multiphonic bliss. They still stretch and float, utilizing a score of instruments including keyboards, reeds, and woodwinds. But everything here is focused and relatively efficient, making for a sharp distillation of the band’s core strengths. If you could squeeze 47 minutes of music onto a 7", Bajascillators would fit that format well.
Time has always been a malleable concept for Bitchin Bajas. Their open-ended approach lets sounds grow but never stagnate, so the trio can make long songs seem to fly by quickly and short pieces feel expansive. On Bajascillators, each track is roughly the same length—the shortest runs nearly 10 minutes, the longest 14—yet each one facilitates a significantly different temporal perception. Opener “Amorpha” hits the ground running with a mesh of marimba-style loops— aided by Laurie Spiegel's Music Mouse software—and sprints toward the finish line. That’s followed by the airy, glacial “Geomancy,” whose sparse tones and deliberately paced chords evoke a film slowed down to the point where you can see the shift between each frame.
When it comes to messing with perception, the most dazzling piece on Bajascillators is “World B. Free.” Named after a legendary basketball player who himself seemed to defy the laws of physics, the piece starts distant and subtle, with a high-pitched drone slowly crawling in from the horizon, as if the track were an extension of “Geomancy.” A few minutes in, a circling synth slips under a clarinet-like melody, and the loops begin to multiply. Soon, innumerable sounds are crossing paths and spawning new patterns, and “World B. Free” clicks into a busy pace. Then it fades again, melting into echoing chimes and dying trails, like the last evidence of a rocket shot into space.
Many of those kinds of sparks and embers on Bajascillators are heard best through headphones. Playing in the background, the album can come off as merely soothing, but get up close and you’ll notice many more patterns and curves than the surface suggests. That effect is clearest on closer “Quakenbrück,” the catchiest cut here. Driven forward by the drumming of guest Rex McMurry, it rapidly grows into motorik space -rock, sounding like classic Bajas as well as the band McMurry shares with Crain and Frye, Cave. If that means this isn’t a big change of pace from the trio’s previous work, that’s no problem. Bitchin Bajas’ music is about keeping on, and Bajasicllators does that as well as anything in their discography.


The ninth album from Ben Gibbard and Co. is their strongest album of the 2010s, a dubious achievement that nonetheless deserves recognition for its rare moments of shining, indie-pop songwriting.

Death Cab for Cutie: Thank You For Today

Thank You For Today

On “Gold Rush,” the first single from Thank You for Today, Ben Gibbard waxes about the many ways his native Seattle has changed over the past two decades, mourning memories of old buildings and intimate moments under street lamps before sighing: “Please don’t change/Stay the same.” The accompanying video follows suit, a dorky-haircut take on the Verve’s iconic “Bittersweet Symphony” visual that features Gibbard getting knocked around by rude passersby during a daytime neighborhood stroll, ending up trapped in a sea of pedestrians glued to their phones. The get-off-my-lawn-ness of it all isn’t fresh territory for Death Cab, a band reputed for cloying sincerity that has nonetheless occasionally showed some teeth regarding the ephemera of modern life. Recall the closing moments of 1998’s Something About Airplanes’ “Amputations,” which samples a speech that features the following excerpt: “In this modern day, we have instant coffee and instant tea—instant disbelief, that’s the reason we will never become anything.”
But while “Amputations” is indicative of Death Cab’s early, beloved Barsuk days—chiming guitars, soft-focus songwriting, Gibbard’s endearingly unadorned vocals—”Gold Rush” is one of a few moments on Thank You for Today that embody the lows of the band’s 2010s output. Constructed around a sample of Yoko Ono’s “Mind Train,” the song feels inert in its steady chug, with watery processing laid atop Gibbard’s vocal take. Thank You for Today marks the first album Death Cab have put to tape since longtime member and in-house producer Chris Walla’s departure, but it’s the second record of theirs helmed by studio vet Rich Costey, whose credits include several Muse albums and Interpol’s divisive major-label move Our Love to Admire. Once again, his production touches lend these 10 songs a competent, anonymous sheen.
While it’s tempting to fully blame Costey’s presence for Thank You for Today’s emptier moments, the fault unmistakably lays with Gibbard and the gang. The album’s faults are a byproduct of Death Cab’s tendency to dip their toes into textures incongruous with Gibbard’s songwriting, which emerged around their 2008 LP Narrow Stairs. While that album found great success in exploring a variety of styles, from Pet Sounds chamber-pop to tricky math-rock breakdowns, its 2011 follow-up, Codes and Keys, went full-bore in ditching guitars for airless atmospherics and brooding song structures, making for the band’s most dismal effort to date—a classification that even Gibbard himself agrees with.
Thank You for Today isn’t as uniformly bland as Codes and Keys—if anything, it’s the strongest Death Cab album of the 2010s, a dubious achievement that nonetheless deserves recognition. But there’s moments that suggest Gibbard and the rest of Death Cab are still struggling through the beige malaise that has cast a pall over their more recent work. “I Dreamt We Spoke Again” suffers from more vocal processing along with drifting tones and a cheaply stolen New Order bassline; the plodding “When We Drive” possesses all the charm of a car commercial, while “You Moved Away” smothers its lyrical musings on time passed and friends left behind—themes that course throughout Thank You For Today’s often-bloodless veins—with pitter-patter percussion and soupy atmospherics.
Closing track “60 & Punk” is possibly one of the most acerbic songs Gibbard’s written since Plans’ infamous “Someday You Will Be Loved,” casting a critical eye on besotted, long-in-the-tooth lifers over echo-laden piano and brushed drums before arriving at a crushing, open-ended question: “Were you happier when you were poor?” Even amid its melancholia, there’s something funny and self-aware about the 42-year-old Gibbard referring to a past-his-prime bandleader as “A superhero growing bored/With no one to save anymore.”
Prior to Thank You for Today, it’s been slim pickings in terms of album highlights in Death Cab’s 2010s oeuvre—so it’s something of a relief that this latest release offers a few of the band’s strongest songs since Narrow Stairs, gossamer indie-pop gems that recall the band’s glory days, if only for a few minutes. “Summer Years” twists and turns with interlocking guitar lines and a sneakily paced drumbeat, while the peppy “Autumn Love” recalls The Photo Album in its verse structure, before hitting the type of effervescent chorus that Atlantic-era Death Cab have occasionally excelled at.
Then there’s “Your Hurricane,” possibly the loveliest Death Cab song in more than a decade, a ballad cloaked in vintage-4AD guitars and an emotive vocal take from Gibbard that can hang with his best work. Scuff up the clean-sounding production and maybe close your eyes, and it sounds classic—a broken-clock reminder that, despite recent missteps, Gibbard’s still capable of these silken moments without sounding totally adrift. Capitulating to nostalgia is often an unwise stylistic choice, but perhaps Death Cab could look back a bit more in the future. The past doesn’t always have to be a hindrance—sometimes it can just be a nice place to rest for a while.


The Chicago trio excels in precisely detailed ambient dub with just the right amount of reverence for turn-of-the-millennium avant-garde electronic music.

Signs

Purelink’s debut single might have been a time machine. One track, the B-side’s “Head on a Swivel,” invoked the ’90s drum’n’bass of artists like Photek and Source Direct, in which breakbeats splintered like shards of glass over inky pools of bass. The A-side’s “Maintain the Bliss” was hazier in feel yet even more sharply focused on its contemporaneous reference points. Buoyed by vaporous clouds of synth, with featherweight filters sweeping back and forth over soft explosions of sub-bass, it was reminiscent of a strain of ambient techno perfected a quarter-century ago by acts like Vladislav Delay, Deepchord, and a little-known Glaswegian artist named Pub, whose 2000 dub-techno epic “Summer” drew the blueprint for Purelink’s blissed-out reverie.
Obscure as these reference points may seem, they’re worth noting because they indicate just how specific Purelink’s vision is. All still in their twenties, the Chicago trio’s members—Tommy Paslaski (aka Concave Reflection), Ben Paulson (aka Kindtree), and Akeem Asani (aka Millia)—appear to be connoisseurs of a rarefied strain of Y2K-era experimental techno. But where many acolytes of bygone styles labor under the anxiety of influence, “Maintain the Bliss” felt effortless. It could easily have been a lost classic rescued from a 25-year-old DAT.
The new album Signs keeps its gaze trained on the digital avant-garde of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The glinting contours of the opening “In Circuits” are reminiscent of Jan Jelinek and Oval, while the faintly dubwise rhythms and distant crackle recall Pole. In one sense, they’re right on time. With so many young musicians reanimating the skeletons of shoegaze, nu-metal, ’90s alternative, and jungle, it stands to reason that someone would devote equal attention to these marginal sounds from the same period.
But Signs never feels expressly retro. That might be because there are so few obvious cultural associations to attach to these sounds in the first place—the so-called clicks + cuts movement was always among electronic music’s most faceless sectors, its unshowy practitioners stubbornly hidden behind their laptop screens. But what chiefly saves the record from feeling backward-looking is the sheer loveliness of the results. Ambient and dub techno have always foregrounded sensory pleasure, and Purelink excel in that department. Signs is a virtual steambath of foggy chords, chest-massaging bass, and sumptuous, ultra-vivid textures.
They maintain a uniform mood of gentle repose across the whole 39-minute release. There’s nothing as insistent as a four-to-the-floor beat; where kick drums appear, they land only every so often, offering the merest hint of a pulse. Instead, movement comes from the way that synths and filters swirl, curling like foam along the shoreline. Tracks are largely monochromatic in tone, with the exception of “4k Murmurs,” whose gliding chord progression is the record’s emotional high point. At the same time, Purelink elevate themselves above more overtly functional chillout producers in their uncanny grasp of detail. These tracks tend to sit comfortably in the background; in fact, their lulling rhythms and hushed volume makes them difficult to concentrate on for long. But occasionally, a sound flashes out like a beacon—a crisply tapped ride cymbal, or a brisk tintinnabulation, or an unfamiliar chug cutting crosswise through the mix. Purelink’s hypnotic music is good at putting you under, but it rewards those occasions where you straighten up and snap to attention.
In addition to “4k Murmurs,” the other highlight is the penultimate track, “Untitled.” At first glance, it appears to be the least distinctive of the bunch: just a murky churn of chords flecked with trebly fizz and arrhythmic clanks. Listen deep enough into its matrix of signals, though, and you may imagine that you hear footsteps or creaking brakes. The track’s stillness suggests an abandoned city at night, sounds wafting upward like steam from a subway grate. Metallic chords periodically strike, with no audible rhyme nor reason to their timing; it sounds like a kind of automatic music, as though no humans were involved in its making. Rather than being off-putting, that anonymity is comforting: a snapshot of the digital sublime, a hymn to the beauty of accidents. Purelink’s intentions, whatever they’re trying to do with such classic influences, are immaterial: On Signs, the sounds are moving gracefully through them.


Recorded on the fly with ex-Pixie Frank Black, Art Brut vs. Satan is Eddie Argos' scrappy, romantic, and painfully hilarious return to loserdom.

Art Brut vs. Satan

Spoiler alert: Art Brut lose. Of course they do. Tramps like former Art Brut tourmates Hold Steady were born to run around wearing baseball jerseys in front of Counting Crows fans (and good for them!). Art Brut were born to lose: How could they ever improve on the clumsy meta-punk rush of their first single, "Formed a Band"? They arrived almost fully formed. They never got to play "Top of the Pops". When they miraculously came up with another 11 songs just about as good-- or, in the case of "Emily Kane", arguably better-- on their brilliant 2005 debut album, Bang Bang Rock & Roll, it only added sting to their inevitable defeat. They were even losers at being losers. I loved them for it.
That's partly why it's so strange now to read reviews that lump Art Brut in with more commercially successful UK bands such as Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand. At live shows, lead not-quite-singer Eddie Argos used to change "I can't stand the sound of the Velvet Underground" to "I can't stand the sound of Gang of Four," and I always assumed his targets were obvious (hint: neither the Velvet Underground nor Gang of Four). Full of fist-pumping but self-mocking bar-punk about obsessive fandom and romantic awkwardness, Bang Bang Rock & Roll was the closest our decade has come to The Modern Lovers. Art Brut's true peers are lyrical music geeks like John Darnielle, Jeffrey Lewis, Jens Lekman, Los Campesinos!, the Tough Alliance, and, most recently, Nodzzz. It's not irony; it's self-aware sincerity.
Good news for people who love losers: Art Brut's third album is on what Kanye might call "some Benjamin Buttons shit." Gone is the slight maturation of their good-- but, sadly, not great-- sophomore album, 2007's It's a Bit Complicated, which tried to win by the attractive-people rules of polished production; the songs were still warm, witty, and alive, but they just didn't have the original's "I've seen her naked-- TWICE!" brashness. Recorded on the fly with fellow Jonathan Richman acolyte Frank Black, Art Brut vs. Satan is a scrappy, romantic, and painfully hilarious return to loserdom. Coldplay will always be more popular. So what? I hate those guys!
Art Brut probably do, too. If they can't topple vague, pasty, barely breathing background rock from the charts, at least they can sing gloriously doomed songs about it. "Cool your warm jets, Brian Eno," Argos jibes on "Slap Dash for No Cash", teasing shiny U2 clones the way he previously skewered vapid post-punk revivalists. Argos champions instead the records where you can hear not only the crack of the singer's voice, or the squeak of the guitarist's fingers, but also (as on a Gorky's Zygotic Mynci B-side, apparently) their parents complaining about the volume-- not because those records are more artistically valid, or more authentic or whatever, but for a more important reason: "Those are the records I like."
Black gets the Art Brut spirit down on record better than anyone has before, with the blazing pop-metal vainglory of Weezer, the scruffy cheekiness of early Rough Trade bands, and lots of enthusiastic backing vocals. Fun for them, fun for us. "Demons Out!" shifts the Smiths' "Panic!" from hanging DJs to denying record buyers suffrage, but don't mistake it for a Death Cab for Cutie-like manifesto against U.S. Auto-Tune pop; more accurately, it's an ideal rebuke against the endless Travis Kooks Kaiser Chiefs Razorlight blandness of UK "science museum" rock. So too "The Replacements", which melds the Mats' "Alex Chilton" and the Brut's "My Little Brother" into a clamorous endorsement of used CDs and deluxe reissues. Extending the prior album's trend toward sacrilegious song titles, "Twist and Shout" may not have you accidentally repeating its off-key la-la-las in public, like the song's narrator, but you'll probably know exactly how he feels. Not that Satan gives a damn about songs that communicate aspects of everyday life with clarity and human charm.
Art Brut remain ever the underdog when they're singing about arrested development and girls, too. "DC Comics and Chocolate Milkshake" is a cereal-eaters' song as universal as Jerry Seinfeld, with a nicely echoing bridge, while perfectly sloppy public-transportation anthem "The Passenger" rewrites Iggy Pop from the perspective of a guy who can't drive. "Summer Job", with its Vampire Weekend-whooping intro vocal, is the album's only concession to conventional melody, and its summertime-blues-curing slackerdom could hardly be more enjoyably juvenile. Like a bizarro "Rusted Guns of Milan", "What a Rush" fumbles for morning-after Beatles vs. Stones meaning-- and socks. Add to vocab: "Sober...ish?". Slowing down but not going ballad, "Am I Normal?" is a preview of the kind of shy neurotic who might go on to write "Emily Kane".
Art Brut Vs. Satan begins and ends with a hungover Argos trying to remember what he did the night before. Frantically buzzing opener "Alcoholics Unanimous" finds Argos sending apologetic mass texts; he's been concerned about what he's been up to, and with good reason. On epic finale "Mysterious Bruises", which I didn't even notice was seven minutes until I looked it up later, Argos proclaims: "I fought the floor and the floor won." Satan always wins. The beautiful people and their sycophants will always outnumber lovable losers. But this is a record I like.


The no-wave inspired Brooklyn punks Pill pair controlled chaos with darkly funny, incisive political commentary.

Convenience

At the core of Pill’s debut full-length, Convenience, is a statement in the form of a question: “Is this situation based on power?” The query is rhetorical—of course it is—and singer/bassist Veronica Torres has her follow-up locked and loaded, a revolver pointed at the head of the patriarchy. “My body, my queerness, my decision to bring life,” she sings on “My Rights.” “My body my fight, congressman wants to steal all of my rights.”
Already fixtures in the Brooklyn DIY scene, Pill  introduced themselves last year with a self-titled EP that dropped via Andrew Savage’s Dull Tools label. (The band has since signed to Mexican Summer.) As with Savage’s band, the post-punk quartet Parquet Courts, Pill are careful students of rock history, but difficult to pigeonhole. Often, Pill is described as a no wave act, a genre that was defined above all by its refusal to be categorized. “I can’t stand it when you hear a band and you know exactly what’s in their record collection,” Teenage Jesus and the Jerks’ Lydia Lunch once said. While one might guess at the bands that have inspired Pill (Neu!, ESG, Sonic Youth, Sleater-Kinney), the four-piece is more than an assortment of influences.
Convenience, takes the themes of their EP and expands on them, tightening their hooks in some places, letting looser arrangements unfurl in others. Torres tends towards a speak-sneer that sometimes verges on spoken word. Her lyrics, steeped in feminism, are immediate and cutting. “Convenience is more modern-day folk or protest music for the conflicted confines that New York City has become,” reads Pill’s Bandcamp description. Anger is vented, lust explored and questions asked, but no panacea offered.
On “Fetish Queen,” Torres presents herself as both a sex object and romantic adversary. “Picture me in your favorite tee,” she sings, indulging High Fidelity rock dude fantasies, before flipping the script: “Love serenade in a hand grenade/Love serenade in a bondage game.” Though Torres’ lyrics are confrontational and sardonic, they’re also clever, sometimes darkly funny. “Body con, body conscious, body consent, body control,” she sings on “Love & Other Liquids,” mixing images of Herve Leger clubwear with a pro-choice call to arms. On “Speaking Up,” a song about a workplace sexual advance, the liner notes include a sad face emoji. “No I won’t get you a coffee :-( I’m your superior!,” they read, placing the exchange firmly, and realistically, in the realm of an office Slack chat. Set to clean guitar and warbling sax, plays like the negative of a Violent Femmes song, with Pill calling out creepiness for what it is.
But Pill is more than a mouthpiece for Torres and, more often than not, she’s locked right in with the other three players. Convenience ranges from post-punk to surf-rock to free-jazz, but no matter the sound, the songs seem rooted in communal improvisation. Benjamin Jaffe, the band’s saxophonist, creates ribbons of noise that oscillate between artful squawks, painterly washes of sound, and technical, free-associative runs. The sax establishes a constant push and pull with Torres, and the lyrics about power dynamics are mirrored in the back-and-forth of the song structures, with Jaffe serving as a de-facto second vocalist. Using Andrew Spaulding and Torres’ tight rhythm section as anchor, Jaffe just as easily becomes a lounge act riding a motorik beat (“Love & Other Liquids”) or a psychedelic punk, whose dissonant wails melt into the chug of Jonathan Campolo’s guitars (“Medicine”). Campolo and Spaulding, it should be said, do triple duty or more—each playing a variety of instruments including a custom-made noise rig.
Because *Convenience *covers so much distance, and does so with such a free-associative spirit, everything doesn’t always hang together; it wouldn’t be as interesting if it did. Unexpected digressions lead to minutes of far-out jamming that derail the album’s momentum (see: “Sex With Santa”). The band is more effective when riding a groove (“Vagabond”) rather than going for broke in psychedelic-freakout mode (“100% Cute”). More often than not, though, Pill’s four members create controlled chaos that combines musical chops rarely seen in punk with incisive social commentary. Other bands have one without the other, but Pill know words are only as powerful as the music behind them.


The Irish post-punk band’s most demanding and musically adventurous album is also its most open-hearted,  striking a perfect balance between tough and tender.

Skinty Fia

The year 2019 already feels like the distant past for most of us, but for Fontaines D.C., it really must seem like another lifetime—and that has less to do with the pandemic than their own skyrocketing success in spite of it. Pretty much everything that defined this band three years ago, when they dropped their debut LP, Dogrel, has already changed. Once the scrappy underdogs who ironically declared “I’m gonna be big!”, the Dublin-bred quintet have headlined arena shows for crowds of 10,000 in the UK, appeared on CNN, scored a Grammy nomination (outside the Alternative category ghetto, no less), and crossed “multiple appearances on Jimmy Fallon” off their bucket list. Where they once reanimated familiar post-punk and garage-rock influences with a pugilistic intensity, these days they’re more keen on arranging choral harmonies and crooning squeeze-boxed ballads. Even the band’s essential Irishness—reflected in their site-specific lyrics and baked right into their very name—is now up for debate: With four members currently living in England’s capital, Fontaines D.C. can now be more accurately rebranded as Fontaines LDN.
But while one’s identity can be greatly shaped by their home environment, it’s often hardened by their distance from it. On the band’s third album in four years, Skinty Fia, Fontaines D.C. detail what it’s like to be the boys in a not-so-better land, as Irish expats who may share the same skin tone and speak the same language as England’s dominant culture, but who are instantly singled out the moment their accents are revealed in mixed company. Named for an arcane Irish slur that translates to “damnation of the deer”—which, for Fontaines’ purposes, functions as a vivid metaphor of cultural mutation and degradation—Skinty Fia is a record about living in a place that looks like home but doesn’t feel like it. Fontaines D.C. use that feeling of placelessness to their advantage, seizing the opportunity to reinvent themselves on a track-by-track basis.
On their 2020 release, A Hero’s Death, Fontaines D.C. already sounded eager to check out of the post-punk revival they helped rally, frequently downshifting into moodier and more melodic territory. Skinty Fia further hammers home the point that this band’s true peers aren’t IDLES and Yard Act, but rather bands like Iceage and the Horrors—groups that erected rigid stylistic barriers only to delight in bulldozing them with each subsequent record. Fitting for an album inspired by moving to London and missing Dublin, Skinty Fia finds its spiritual center at the approximate midway point of Manchester, a city whose rich musical history—evolving out of post-punk into indie-pop, rave-rock, and stadium-sized Britpop—provides Fontaines D.C. with a roadmap of paths to explore.
So while the first thing we hear on Skinty Fia is an urgent Joy Division-esque bassline, the song that’s built on top of it—“In ár gCroíthe go deo”—could never be confused for an Unknown Pleasures outtake. Instead, that rhythmic pulse serves as the unsettled foundation for bassist Conor Deegan III and guitarist Conor Curley’s haunted harmonies, which repeat the title—the Irish phrase for “in our hearts forever”—with funereal solemnity before Chatten’s cries into the void and Tom Coll’s jungle-patterned drum beats steer the song toward its stormy conclusion. Tellingly, Fontanies’ first album as Londoners also marks the first time they’ve foregrounded their homeland’s native tongue in song, and it’s not just for ornamental purposes: The titular phrase was at the center of a media controversy in 2020, when the family of a deceased Irish woman who lived in Coventry, UK tried to have it transcribed on her tombstone, only for the Church of England to demand it include an English translation. For a recent transplant like Chatten, that news story provided a crash course in living as an Irishman in England, where cultural identity is something you have to keep fighting for even when you’re dead.
That homesick, fish-out-of-water feeling manifests itself in myriad ways on Skinty Fia: Where the title track channels Chatten’s uneager-to-please outsider attitude into a strobe-lit industrial funk swagger, “Bloomsday” is a wistful farewell to Dublin, rendered as a melancholic gothgaze soliloquy. But in Chatten’s case, living outside his homeland also provides him with a greater clarity and objective distance to properly diagnose its current condition. Though he’s always balanced shamrock-tattooed pride with tough-love critique, he’s never written a song as angry and anguished as “I Love You.” What begins as a misty-eyed ode to his country gives way to a laundry-list screed on why its brightest minds may feel compelled to leave it, as Chatten sounds off on the church scandals, economic instability, and suicide epidemics that have ingrained a sense of hopelessness in Irish youth. When Chatten disrupts the song’s dreamy atmosphere to rail about his island being “run by sharks with children’s bones stuck in their jaws,” it’s like the Stones Roses’ “I Wanna Be Adored” being gate-crashed by John Cooper Clarke.
Those drawn to Fontaines for the first-pump fervor of songs like “Big” and “A Hero’s Death” may find Skinty Fia a more forbidding proposition: Tracks like the disintegrated dirge “How Cold Love Is” and the Unhappy Mondays groover “Nabakov” don’t exactly lend themselves to pint-smashing sessions with the lads. But the real triumph of Skinty Fia is that Fontaines D.C.’s most musically adventurous and demanding album to date is also its most open-hearted. While Chatten’s voice remains a blunt instrument, he now wields it more elegantly, striking a perfect balance between tough and tender: On the self-loathing cad anthem “Jackie Down the Line,” he applies a Wembley-ready wail to a Smithsian sway and delivers the sort of capital-c Choon that all but guarantees Fontaines an opening slot on the Oasis reunion tour whenever the Gallaghers finally get their shit together. And on “Roman Holiday,” he paints a beautifully smeared portrait of young Irish lovers making the streets of Londontown their own, haters be damned, tapping into a stream-of-consciousness magic realism that approaches the heady heights of mid-’90s Verve.
But even those moments of grace won’t prepare you for “The Couple Across the Way,” where Fontaines’ exploratory impulses and dogged romantic spirit intersect in a mournful ballad that echoes John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy theme—albeit performed entirely by Chatten on accordion. Inspired by the singer’s actual Rear Window-esque observations of his neighbors, the song voyeuristically peers into the flat of an argumentative older couple trapped in a perpetual state of verbal warfare, “after 23 years of the same.” In the midst of apologizing to his wife for his latest destructive outburst, the husband makes a comment that’s as poignant as it is devastating: “Across the way moved in a pair with passion in its prime/Maybe they look through to us and hope that’s them in time.” By burrowing into Fontaines D.C.’s particular experiences as strangers in a strange land, Skinty Fia ultimately homes in on the eternal fears—of growing old, bored, bitter, and unloved—that unite us all.


Drawn from the same sessions as 2022’s Gold, the UK jazz poet and saxophonist’s new album counters that record’s opulence with a spare, percussive sound.

Alabaster DePlume: Come With Fierce Grace

Come With Fierce Grace

Alabaster DePlume cuts a grand figure: ringed, tattooed, bestowed with a splendiferous stage name that also pokes fun at the idea of stage names. Yet the Mancunian singer-poet-saxophonist’s role in the fertile UK jazz scene is less mad genius than social locus, hosting fertile sessions at London studio and club Total Refreshment Centre in which bright young players can indulge their brightest ideas. His 2022 album Gold: Go Forward In The Courage of Your Love came out of these sessions and situated DePlume’s slithery poetry and tenor saxophone playing within the most opulent strains of ’70s spiritual jazz: Bennie Maupin, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane. Come With Fierce Grace, by contrast, is so spare that it could have been composed in the Stone Age.
Most of the album’s expanse is taken up by percussion: drum thwacks, rimshots, clicked sticks, woodblocks, sleigh bells, chimes. DePlume mostly plays tenor saxophone, and his most sustained burst of spoken-word inspiration comes at the end of “What Can it Take,” riffing on themes from Gold: being “brazen like a baby,” going “forward in the courage of my love.” DePlume’s music encourages an elemental purity of thought, unclouded by the emotional self-censorship that modern social interactions demand. Come With Fierce Grace aspires to a similar ideal in its composition—a raw, brutal immediacy as reflective of an egoless musical ideal as a drum circle, cacerolazo, or grounation. It’s the sort of music people make instinctively, banging on whatever’s handy in pursuit of a common goal, be it communal joy, spiritual ecstasy, or rebellion against the status quo.
The difference is that DePlume has some of the best jazz musicians in the UK behind him. Hotshot drummer Tom Skinner lays down a serpentine groove on “Greek Honey Slick” that moves like a Chinese dragon, or like those guys struggling to carry the giant snake through the meadow on the cover of Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Cellist Hannah Miller imparts a sense of maudlin grandeur to “Fall On Flowers” and “Not Even Sobbing.” Vocalists bring light to this cracked and ragged landscape: Momoko Gill riffs thoughtfully on DePlume’s poetry on “Did You Know,” accompanied by a humming, musing choir of herself, while on the wonderful deconstructed jazz ballad “Fall On Flowers,” a circle of voices coos in mournful unison as DePlume’s saxophone flickers like a votive candle.
Many of these tracks seem to start in the middle, likely because they were curated by DePlume from the best parts of endless jams and shoot-the-shit sessions. As monstrous as tracks like “Greek Honey Slick” and “Fall On Flowers” are, they feel less like self-contained compositions than pieces of a larger morass of music only hinted at on Fierce Grace’s 42 minutes. Jam curation is an underappreciated art (Teo Macero, Carlos Niño, and Mark Hollis are among its greatest practitioners), and DePlume shows a knack for it here. Surely there were more consonant and ear-pleasing moments from the sessions that produced the albums, but most of those probably ended up on Gold. Fierce Grace is beautiful in the same way as a stick insect.
Every now and then, DePlume and his band will hit on an insistent single-note pattern—it happens on “What Can it Take,” again on “Naked Like Water,” and finally on the spectacular and stately “Broken Again.” It’s an unmistakably modern sound, one that repeats with mechanical repetition and inhuman relentlessness: noise, in other words. Amid this primal, ancient-seeming music, it’s as jarring as a straight line on the surface of an alien planet, and it serves as a reminder of the hyper-stratified post-industrial drudgery to which DePlume’s pursuit of musical and mental liberation is a revolt. The music on Come With Fierce Grace is not designed to be played in restaurants, cafes, cannabis dispensaries, or any other context so casual or vulgar. It might seem at first to be about little more than the joy of its making, but what it argues is how precious that joy really is.


A new reissue of Arca’s 25-minute mixtape from 2013 highlights its prophetic, trailblazing qualities. It remains an unfathomably skillful and multi-layered piece of music.

It sounds strange to say it now, but when Arca’s &&&&& dropped out of the blue in the summer of 2013, it felt like we’d finally arrived in the future. The 25-minute mixtape sounded like a celebration of speed, of the infinity of musical information that the internet puts at our fingertips, of the wild emotional contrasts of a night spent staring down the barrel of one’s feed. And to top it all off, it played like one continuous track.
Though the Venezuelan producer’s source materials (grime, trap, glitch, dub) derived largely from club culture, &&&&& seemed to take a mischievous pleasure in disrupting the metric grid that dance music was built on—reveling in a sonic rubberiness that her previous two EPs, Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, had hinted at in name. Even the image that accompanied it—a bird-like creature with distended legs and translucent skin, courtesy of artist Jesse Kanda—seemed to suggest the birth of something new, quivering inside an amniotic sack of digital slime.
In truth, &&&&& was probably less the dawn of a novel genre of electronic music than the crystallization of a perspectival shift that had already been in the works for some time—and not just in the foggy rooms of GHE20G0TH1K, the joyfully irreverent LGBTQ and POC-focused dance party where Arca interned as a college student at NYU, though it probably started there. Where the cool kids of the late ’00s had met the rising tide of technology with a retreat to the obsolete sounds and formats of the past (think: the vinyl collector culture driving the global techno scene, the cassette tape fetish of the chillwave generation), a new generation of producers and DJs at the turn of the ’10s—armed with CDJs and sample packs and vape pens—seemed to see a new revolutionary potential.
It wasn’t just that the tools of electronic music production were becoming more widely accessible, or that the internet seemed to be having a democratizing effect on music, catapulting unknown artists to overnight fame; it felt like the old distinctions between high and low, underground and mainstream, club culture and pop culture, were finally on the verge of collapsing once and for all—and rattling the foundations of the culture industry in the process.
Arca had given only one formal interview to date, but what we did know about her seemed to situate her in the cultural crosshairs of that moment: Hood By Air, the avant-garde fashion brand co-founded by GHE20G0TH1K’s Shayne Oliver—and for which Arca would compose the occasional runway soundtrack—was galvanizing the worlds of streetwear and couture with its vision of a gender-fluid, multicultural future. Auteurist experimentalists like Mykki Blanco and FKA twigs, who’d also tapped Arca for her lurching, ballooning sound design, seemed poised to become crossover stars. Just a month before she unveiled &&&&& to the world, Kanye West had dropped the era-defining Yeezus, an album with enough crunchy synth strobes, expressively deformed samples, and blood-curdling screams to sound right at home at a semi-legal warehouse party at peak time. In what critics roundly heralded, somewhat paradoxically, as a sign that underground music had finally entered the big leagues, he’d enlisted Arca’s own services for the production, alongside fellow eclectic beatmakers like Evian Christ and Hudson Mohawke.
Even with so much in flux, it is hard to overstate how novel &&&&& felt when she uploaded it to SoundCloud. Though it was technically “released” by the label Hippos in Tanks, a home for brain-bending sounds that seemed to emblematize this “Wild West” moment in music, it didn’t actually seem to be for sale anywhere; and though Arca was billing it as a digital “mixtape,” a format that derived from hip-hop but that was becoming increasingly popular as a promotional vehicle in SoundCloud producer circles, it didn’t exactly seem to be teasing a more finished work to come (though Arca did self-release a small vinyl run of &&&&& in 2014). Unfolding as one long musical utterance—by turns hyper-caffeinated and mournful, brutal and full of open-eyed wonder—&&&&& was a complete work unto itself, an unfathomably skillful and multi-layered piece of music that is perhaps only possible to describe as the sum of its own contradictions.
Here was music that was at once decidedly challenging and overflowing with hooks. And it was so aggressively synthetic, so plastic in its conception of sound and rhythm, that it somehow evoked the unchained emotionalism of the romantic composers she played as a young piano student (Schumann and Mendelssohn) more than it did actual dance music. Mostly, it felt like the first clear articulation of a feeling that was already in the air, and that arguably continues to drive the musical conversation to this day: In the post-internet world, music didn’t have to be one thing or another. It could be abrasive & melodic & synthetic & organic & prickly & sweet and frankly, whatever felt right in the moment.
At least, that’s one possible explanation for mixtape’s enigmatic title—even though &&&&& always sounded too free-associative to feel like the mere illustration of a concept. Listening to it now, on the occasion of a new reissue and remaster from Berlin record label PAN—one that, for the first time, will make the record available on streaming services in the form of individual tracks—it’s the record’s rolling tides of feeling, its combined technical dexterity and emotional specificity, that stands out. Whether she’s splicing a pitched vocal sample into the aural equivalent of a strut, flooding the room in a cold ocean of synthetic voices, or dropping down the energy with a distended, melodic sigh, this symbiosis of woman and machine feels life-affirming.
Seen from the vantage of 2020, of course, &&&&& feels like it was heralding a bright new future that never came to be; it’s hard to remain optimistic about technology when our politics are descending into Twitter-addled madness and the platforms we might have expected to sustain our creative economies in a time of crisis seem incapable of compensating our artists more than a fraction of a penny per stream.
Over the past seven years, Arca has continued to drill down into the complexities of power, gender, and the economics of the music industry itself, using each successive project to reveal another side of her person, to question why we do things the way we do, to reach out to her people through the pixelated ether. But there’s something a bit melancholy about listening to &&&&& now—the feeling that instead of freeing us from the past, technology has left us stuck in a loop, endlessly refreshing in search of a better world that never arrives, but that we can still dream of in our art. And while &&&&&’s genre-splicing, additive approach to sound arguably continues to set the blueprint for much of youth music today—from the post-club artists and collectives across the world pushing sound into mutant new shapes, to stadium pop—it’s hard to say whether there has been any giant, qualitative leap forward in music ever since.

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After a decade, Janet Weiss and Sam Coomes’ band returns with an album that’s musically rejuvenated but lyrically nearsighted.

Breaking the Balls of History

When Janet Weiss broke her legs and collarbone in a 2019 car crash, she gained a new appreciation for drumming—not just as an artform, but as a lifeline that could be snipped at any moment. The world was in lockdown by the time her bones healed, so Weiss took refuge in daily jams with Quasi bandmate Sam Coomes. The duo ended up recording the first new Quasi album in a decade. “I can hear in the music how happy I am to be there and to be playing at that level again,” Weiss said in a statement announcing the record. She’s right; the audible joy and relief in her drumming is the most tactile part of Breaking the Balls of History. What the record offers in energy, however, it lacks in efficacy; Quasi’s comeback sounds like a productive songwriting session that never got a round of edits, leaving glaring holes where the creativity and experimental vision of their best work should be.
As ever, Quasi remain true to the art-rock spontaneity and lyrical brashness of mid-’90s Portland, Oregon. There are echoes of fellow local acts past and present: punchy keyboard chords on “Queen of Ears” like the Thermals, a tongue-in-cheek guitar solo on “Nowheresville” like Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, an ascending guitar line on “Inbetweenness” like Menomena. Weiss has never drummed harder on a Quasi record; she crashes through “Riots & Jokes” like it’s the last drum fill of an encore. Coomes plays up the fried dissonance of his Rocksichord at every opportunity, bringing a raw, blues-indebted twang to “Rotten Wrock” and a natural complement to his throat-scratching yell on album highlight “Back in Your Tree.” Compared to 2013’s hiatus-inducing Mole City, the enthusiasm is welcome.
Breaking the Balls of History was born from a desire to live—immediately, vivaciously, free from judgment or pressure—before it’s too late. As Weiss put it, “There’s no investing in the future anymore. The future is now. Do it now if you want to do it.” Quasi introduce that carpe diem sensibility with opener “Long Last Laugh,” a scrappy, heartfelt ode to navigating life that’s peppered with metaphors for defense mechanisms, like a porcupine with nails for quills. But the clever imagery and surrealist refrain of “a last long laugh at the edge of dreams” soon give way to more banal, abstract songs that don’t meet the urgency of their subject matter.
Written during the pandemic, Breaking the Balls of History is heavy with the anxiety and fatigue of racial unrest, political violence, and public mistrust. But when Quasi march onward in peace from those problems while simultaneously shooting backward in annoyance, it’s hard to know which direction they want to go. The lyrics waffle between underwritten observations of hot-button topics and purple prose. In “Doomscrollers,” Coomes sets a scene full of charged imagery: Punisher skulls on pick-up trucks, kids stuck in virtual school, “the anti-vaxxers and the climate deniers.” But then nothing else happens—not to them, about them, or by them. “Here they come now/Thoughts and prayers,” he sings later on “Nowheresville,” gesturing to the politician’s rote response to tragedy without any supporting commentary. If this is a laugh at the edge of a dream, it’s an awkward one—the kind that fills a pregnant silence.
Quasi didn’t come out of 2020 empty-handed. They sound rejuvenated and youthful, but they forget to look beyond the moment that prompted their rebirth. That’s shaping up to be a frequent hangup of pandemic art: for better or for worse, much of the middle class experienced lockdown in a similar way, leaving artists to recount what many listeners know firsthand. You can’t help but wish Quasi illustrated their nonsensical dreams with more color, or rubbed their eyes harder to produce a clearer vision of the realities they condemn. Instead, Breaking the Balls of History has a blurry quality: a jumble of all-too-familiar thoughts that never add up to a breakthrough.