This is the Italian electronic producer’s debut album for Munich’s Ilian Tape label; for a record coming out of post-industrial Turin, its aesthetic is surprisingly luminous.

Ritorno

The roster of Munich’s Ilian Tape may be headlined by locals like the Zenker Brothers and Skee Mask, but the label’s Italian contingent has long been one of its biggest strengths. Turin natives Stenny and Andrea first connected with the crew in 2011, when the former organized an Ilian Tape night and spent a couple of days driving the Zenker Brothers around his hometown. The following year, both Stenny and Andrea debuted on the imprint, and the two have been part of Ilian Tape’s core membership ever since, sharing similar trajectories and helping to solidify the label’s distinct brand of broken techno.
In 2019, Stenny leveled up when he released his debut full-length, Upsurge, which impressively brought together angular breakbeats, dalliances with drum’n’bass, and headier ambient sounds. Now it’s Andrea’s turn to tackle the album format, with excellent results. His productions have always fallen toward the dreamier end of the spectrum, and he’s leaned into that here; it’s not often that Ilian Tape releases could be described as shimmering, but the album’s palette is a lot closer to Café del Mar than Cafe OTO. The sparkling arpeggios of aqueous opener “Attimo” and the dreamy synths that idle atop the peppy breakbeats of “LS September” are just two of the LP’s more Balearic elements, but golden hues and languid melodies drift and linger throughout. For a record coming out of a cold, post-industrial corner of northern Italy, Ritorno’s aesthetic is surprisingly luminous.
Despite its sunny overtones, there’s plenty of low-end weight in the album’s foundation. The fluttering basslines of “TrackQY”—the LP’s most obviously club-ready tune—sound like something lifted from late-’90s drum’n’bass, while the crunchy wobble of “Liquid” is a classic dubstep throwback. There’s an abundance of DJ material, yet the album is practically devoid of staid, linear rhythms. Cribbing from house, techno, electro, breakbeat, jungle, trip-hop and IDM, Andrea’s hybrid creations have a lot in common with the more intriguing strands of bass music coming from UK outposts like Timedance and Livity Sound. From the soaring jungle mutation “Drumzzy” to the shuffling serenity of “Isabelle’s String,” the drum programming taps into a unique sort of organized chaos, with loose-limbed beats regularly teetering on the edge of collapse but somehow never losing the groove.
Ritorno is Italian for “return,” and it’s easy to detect a ’90s vibe in its cosmic inclinations and freewheeling rhythms, which hark back to a sunnier, more lighthearted era when genre lines were less defined and the electronic music world wasn’t quite so balkanized. But Ritorno isn’t a strictly nostalgic effort, and the production is unmistakably modern, even as Andrea criss-crosses through numerous styles and eras. Outside of his long-running affiliation with Ilian Tape, he has never been locked into any particular trend or scene; instead, he has quietly developed his own artistic vision during years spent working in the background. That patience has paid off: Ritorno is a remarkably confident and cohesive work. Nearly a decade in the making, it’s Andrea’s first big statement, and proof that this low-key Italian producer has something valuable to add to the conversation.


Four Tet's eighth album is made up of two 20-minute pieces, named "Morning" and "Evening". Both tracks move between diffuse drifts of electronic tones and skittering drum programming, and they tap into an expansive, emotional vein.

Morning/Evening

When Kieran Hebden began to play shows in support of his 2013 album Beautiful Rewind, one of the album's shorter tracks, "Ba Teaches Yoga", became a set centerpiece. Named for his recently departed maternal grandmother, the burbling track began to dilate beyond its original three-minute length as he kept performing it, eventually nearing the twenty-minute mark by the end of the tour. There might not be a direct sonic correlation between that track and the two twenty-minute tracks that comprise the entirety of Four Tet's eighth album, Morning/ Evening, but they seem thematically of a piece. The former pays tribute to his Indian heritage, the latter displays a structure that brings to mind Indian classical music.
In the same manner that ragas pertain to certain parts of the day, Morning/ Evening has a biorhythmic specificity in mind.  Both tracks move between diffuse drifts of electronic tones and skittering drum programming. The "Morning" side begins with a straightforward tap of closed hi-hats and a deep thump that sounds flat at first, before a trickier pattern of programmed drums are overlaid. A melodic swell of bass then appears, as graceful, slow-moving and almost imperceptibly evolving as what you might find in early New Age music or the works of David Behrman.
And then, just over a minute in, a bright, quivering Indian voice manifests, saccharine strings at play around her. Voices often factor powerfully into Four Tet's productions: think of the honeyed utterances of "Love Cry", the chopped pirate radio barks that underpin Beautiful Rewind, or the startling reconfiguration of J. Lo's "Ain't It Funny" on "Pyramids". But the loop of famous Indian singer Lata Mangeshkar, whose voice has adorned thousands of Hindi films over a seven-decade career, startles upon its appearance. It remains foregrounded for much of the duration of "Morning", receding around the eight-minute mark for some of Hebden's most complex drum programming, then reappears halfway through. In using a famous Indian playback singer, which he no doubt grew up hearing in his household, Hebden gives the track an opulent yet pensive feel, which in turn gives "Morning" emotional depth.
"Evening" picks up where "Morning" left off, with a coffee percolator of a beat that never quite solidifies, instead leading into the kind of tones that recall early electronic music pieces like Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon. Hebden allows each element plenty of space to breathe, striking a balance between the abstract and the accessible. Another wordless voice comes into focus about five minutes in, though my ears can't tell if it's Mangeshkar or another Hindu devotional chant.
At around the twelve-minute mark, amid chimes and gentle digital processing, "Evening" drifts into near-silence, but just as you rise to play something else, it returns: a hi-hat figure arises, amid shimmering electronics and a kick. The inverse of "Morning," the last five minutes of "Evening" gather velocity and strength, to where it seems everything is converging on a climax and payoff for this slow twenty-minute build. But right where a release might be expected, everything fades back out instead: You sense a desire to make a grand statement, but the dramatic dissolve doesn't quite stick the landing.
Nonetheless, Four Tet's position in the electronic landscape is solidified: He's able to work on the experimental fringe when he wishes, or collaborate with Burial, Jamie xx and Skrillex. Even news of a possible Diplo team-up doesn't cost him credibility. The scope and ambition of Morning/ Evening is profound, and will hopefully inspire producers to take bigger chances and not be satisfied with pop- or club-friendly lengths. Even where Morning/Evening doesn't quite work, it's daring and expansive.


Ty Segall's latest collaboration—with Ex-Cult's Chris Shaw and Fuzz's Charles Moothart—isn't a revolution. They’re just three friends, hellbent on sustaining guitar music’s urgency and simplicity

GØGGS

As one of the most prolific artists in garage rock, Ty Segall faces a slightly uphill battle where his side bands' staying power is concerned. With eight strong solo albums and 20 collaborations released over the past eight years, the axeman’s discography is a genre stronghold, and a veritable wellspring for guitar nerds. But unless you’re a Segall stan, it can be tough to distinguish the *II*s from the Twins, the Sleepers from the Slaughterhouses, the collaborations with White Fence or Mikal Cronin. So when Segall announced the formation of GØGGS–another side project, this time a trio with Ex-Cult’s Chris Shaw on lead vocals, Fuzz’s Charles Moothart on drums, and Segall on guitar–just months after dropping the enjoyable (if stylistically inert) Emotional Mugger, it was tough to muster the excitement for their self-titled debut, a 10-track punk record forged during post-tour jam sessions and intra-band sleepovers.
Keeping up with Segall’s catalogue proves an exhausting task at times, but never a slog. He's yet to put out a bad record: a reputation forged by latent musical skill, staunch discipline, and in the case of GØGGS, explosive rapport. Shaw may be GØGGS’ lead singer and principal songwriter, but it’s Segall doing most of the heavy lifting. The Californian’s guitar playing and backing vocals supply most of the album’s melodic thrust. No showboating or exorbitant solos here; on Dead Kennedy-esque rippers like “GØGGS,” “Smoke the Würm,” and “Shotgun Shooter,” Segall sticks to choppy down-strums and feedback-fueled tantrums, grounded by Mootheart’s cymbal-heavy clatter–a far cry from his usual, heavy-lidded psych jams. A few reliable standby guests drop in: Wand’s Cory Hanson plays bass and synths on “Gøggs,” while Vial’s Denee Peetracek lends vocals to “Final Notice.” Cronin lays down some grooves on “Glendale Junkard,” too, because what would a Ty Segall production be without him?
The album’s reliance on tinnitus-inducing sound effects and threadbare production styles safely situate it within Segall’s canon (Lead single “She Got Harder” streamlines the sludgy palette showcased on Twins, while “Assassinate the Doctor” reprises Emotional Mugger’s smothering noise-rock), but Shaw’s atonal, shouted vocals (a product of his hardcore upbringing) and violent lyrics (“I’m creeping through the night/with blood in mind”; “Double barrel in the dark/And I always hit my mark”) cast Ex-Cult’s distinctive paranoid pall over the proceedings. Having honed his skills in Memphis’ hardcore scene, the southerner possesses the sheer power and technical prowess needed to reign in his bandmates’ chaos: most noticeably on “Final Notice,” where Shaw (backed by Peetracek) brandishes a single, clipped phrase–machete-like, slashing through a blaring, glitchy soundscape. (Ironically enough, his screeched, nihilistic statement comprises the listener’s only foothold in the nightmarish whorl.)
Segall, Shaw, and Moothart never set out to shift paradigms or start a revolution– they’re simply three friends, hellbent on sustaining guitar music’s urgency and simplicity. In the age of glossy mixing and instrumental auto-pilot, their ungovernable racket’s refreshing and woefully needed, and judging from Shaw’s remarks in the album’s press release, the band recognize the power of such escapism. “This is not a side project,” he said of the band, “it is a necessity.” Judging from the sounds of this album, they don’t take that responsibility lightly–and it shows.


Created with a choral ensemble and a nascent AI, the Berlin-based electronic musician’s third album is a meditation on community, technology, and the future of, and beyond, the human species.

PROTO

Holly Herndon makes music with that most personal of instruments: her computer, a machine used not only to weave together complex electronic compositions but also to access the frightening and spectacular realm of the internet. In her work, the Berlin-based composer wrestles with systems, both the soft internal system of the psyche and the equally mysterious phenomena of social-media networks, recommendation algorithms, and panopticon surveillance. Herndon’s voice featured prominently on her first two albums, skittering across dense electronic compositions, her words hard to make out and her presence difficult to pin down. On her third album, PROTO, she opens her process to include not just her own voice but the voices of a choral ensemble. The group includes Spawn, a “nascent machine intelligence” that runs on a modified gaming computer and was created in collaboration with AI expert Jules LaPlace.  Trained to process audio, Spawn uses neural networks to riff on music she hears; Herndon, who uses she/her pronouns to refer to Spawn, considers the AI not as an instrument or a tool but as an ensemble member.
PROTO is Herndon’s most technologically adventurous work to date, but it is also by far her most ecstatically humanistic. One of its most stunning and revealing moments comes on “Frontier,” a work inspired by Appalachian Sacred Harp singing, an a cappella tradition originating in American Christian communities. A single unadorned voice runs through a scale, as if leading a vocal warm-up; on the last note, a chorus of human and machine voices joins in. The sound undoubtedly stems from human throats and yet it is serrated and compressed in a way that could only have come from digital processing. But the seam between the two is not clear. There is no artificial layer to peel back, no true voice underneath plastic coating. Ninety seconds into the song, vocal notes shudder into a riff. The natural glissando of human singing dissipates; there is one note and then there is another, with no passageway between them, yet the music does not sound inhuman. It sounds like a new kind of human vocalizing, augmented by machine, not reduced by it.
Though PROTO’s vocal treatments sound futuristic, the album builds on a 50-year history of humans singing through computers. One of the earliest musical applications of voice-processing technologies dates back to the late 1960s, when synthesizer pioneer Wendy Carlos and her composition partner Rachel Elkind ran Elkind’s voice through a machine designed for telephone communications. The result can be heard in the soundtrack to the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange: Elkind sings the vocal part to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, her robotic voice perfectly suited to the synthesized instrumentation. When Elkind sings on a single vocal track, her lone voice sounds like a chorus. The machine amplifies the self beyond the borders of the individual.
Voice processors have proliferated since the 1970s, and in many of their most notable uses they have shredded, distorted, and multiplied the voices of women. In the 1980s, Laurie Anderson deployed a series of digital filters oriented toward comically deepened “vocal drag,” which also served as her own trio of backup singers. In 1998, Cher’s “Believe” threw Auto-Tune technology into overdrive to force her voice into a futuristic trill. This century’s musical cyborgs are some of the most fascinating and innovative contemporary performers: FKA twigs, Fever Ray, Charli XCX, SPELLLING, Arca, SOPHIE. That none of these artists are men points to a gender-transgressive impulse within cyborg performance: a desire to use technology to break open the body’s perceived boundaries and take flight away from the repressive and the mundane.
“The popular image of a cyborg is one of body augmentation,” Herndon said in a 2015 interview, whereas she and her collaborator Mat Dryhurst are “more interested in the emotional cyborg—those who use tools to emote, express compassion, build alliances across networks, disperse into anonymity.” It is no surprise, then, that as Herndon’s work becomes more technologically experimental, it also becomes more emotional. Cries of abjection and yearning populate PROTO. “Why am I so lost?” asks a chorus of overlapping voices toward the end of “Crawler.” On the rippling “Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt,” a solo voice issues forlorn sentences into sheets of processing: “I need to belong,” sings the voice, a statement that also opens the next song, “SWIM.” Voices cry out for each other and then coalesce, finding communion and solace in their mutual presence.
PROTO is a patient album and a technologically transparent one. Two tracks, “Canaan” and “Evening Shades,” document the process of training Spawn. Unmodified human voices sing and then Spawn responds with her interpretations of what she’s heard, like a young child in speech therapy. Rather than simply dazzle listeners with a perfectly honed AI, Herndon invites us into the awkward but beautiful process behind Spawn’s capabilities, the mistakes the computer makes as it learns. These two live-training tracks are a welcome reminder of the human labor behind automated systems.
Herndon’s last album, Platform, included a spoken-word piece in the form of an ASMR track designed to make listeners imagine themselves as a high-powered executive getting a massage. PROTO’s spoken-word interlude moves away from irony, instead letting a child take on the heavy subject of the future of life in the universe. “Extreme Love” imagines human beings not as Earth’s rightful inheritors squandering our prize but as an intermediary form of life whose primary purpose is to harbor and spread bacteria, “those minds inside us and crawling at our feet.” It is a hopeful narrative, a story of humans unknowingly birthing the next generation of life, incubating extremophiles in our guts that can survive long after we’ve cooked ourselves. “Extreme Love” speaks of human beings as components in a vast and incomprehensible system of life and behavior, an ecological phenomenon acting the only way we know how, opening a doorway into the next phase of the Earth’s history. It is a strange comfort, a vision of the future without guilt.
Of course it is painful to sit here on the edge of what seems like inevitable extinction, to want to keep living while watching enormous systems of human activity conspire to wipe out most life. The inertia of annihilation daunts. “Extreme Love” offers comfort by reminding us how small we are, and how natural—parts of a whole that moves not because of individual will but slowly across eons and of its own accord. It is so human to want more—to want to be, effectively, beyond human—and so human not to get it, except in glimpses. In rare moments survival offers itself. Voices call out and then cohere; loneliness drives us to be less lonely.
The specter of death lacerates PROTO—the closing song, “Last Gasp,” lurches along on a menacing, apocalyptic beat—but Herndon is not interested in preaching fatalism. Her music winnows its way toward what is most alive in its listeners. Hearing Spawn gargling human voices sparks up a mix of pathos and awe—pathos because of how childlike the sound is, awe at its complex and bizarre texture. Herndon and her ensemble displace the human voice from its usual setting just enough that it startles the ear. But that displacement allows you to hear voices as if for the very first time, listening ravenously for proof that out there in the unknown, someone besides yourself exists and is singing.


L.A.-based quartet Bleached carve out a new identity on their latest, fast-forwaring past '60s revivalism into jagged and precise '70s rock edge.

Welcome the Worms

Over the past decade, California rock has fully embraced the stoner beach party mood, mixing the '60s girl-group sound with a fuzzy, hotboxed playfulness. L.A.-based quartet Bleached have always been able to cruise in this lane fairly easily–their scrappy and infectious breakout single “Think of You” was exactly the type of ear worm that works best lazily blasted out of a drop top while riding down a palm-lined avenue. But even in the summer of 2011, there was an ever-so-slight whiff of “too little, too late” in the air surrounding the band, especially since singer/guitarist Jennifer Clavin and her sister, guitarist/bassist Jessica, were both members of cult art-punk band Mika Miko, one of those locally-beloved outfits who burned out way before they reached their full potential. It's always hard to not judge a new band by the successes of their past incarnations, and by the time Bleached released their flawed-but-solid 2013 debut album, Ride Your Heart, they had fit themselves in snugly with the multitudes of other Shangri-Las idolaters from their home state, but hadn't seemed to carve out a true identity for themselves, which was a shame.
Luckily, with Welcome the Worms, that identity has begun to take form, and surprisingly, it's not rooted in '60s revivalism at all, but fast-forwards a decade into the future with a precisely jagged '70s rock edge. What's immediately striking about the album is its simplicity—its melodies are stark, clean, and in direct contrast to the lo-fi, purposefully muddled sound that has defined Bleached and bands like them up until this point. Instead of scratchy and whimsical, Jennifer's voice comes through sultry and clear. The overall feel evokes Suzi Quatro or Joan Jett—women who slashed their way through a traditionally male genre using sexism's own weapons against it. On “Trying To Lose Myself Again,” in which Jennifer asserts “I know what I want/ And I know what I like/ Keep on feeling good/ Just like I always should,” you can practically feel the dirty heat rising from the Sunset Strip pavement.
There's an anecdote in the Runaways documentary Edgeplay where the band's bassist, Jackie Fox, describes finishing a night by vomiting banana daiquiris onto a telephone in a hotel room, only to be awakened hours later by Lita Ford trying to strangle her with the phone's cord. That's basically what “Keep on Keepin' on,” sounds like: a thundering, sudden, rude awakening that swiftly establishes Welcome the Worms as new territory for Bleached. It calls on rock showboating just a hair, even using a clever fake-out ending three-quarters of the way through, but doesn't come off as tongue-in-cheek in the slightest. You could easily classify this record next to the likes of say, Sahara Hotnights or the Donnas (a compliment or a curse, depending on how old you were in 1999), with the exception that it deftly avoids gimmickry where more purely rockist acts may bask in it.
However, simplicity is a fickle beast, and one that's difficult to maintain. Although Welcome the Worms starts off with a bang, it gradually loses that momentum as it goes on—and at only ten short tracks, it's a problem it never has time to overcome. “Chemical Air” makes perfect use of Bleached's airtight three-part harmonies, but by the time to get to tracks like “Desolate Town” and the downtempo “I'm All Over the Place (Mystic Mama),” that electricity has all but dissipated. While not a record of cast-iron slam dunks, Welcome the Worms possesses enough raw power to cast Bleached in a completely different light, and one that is considerably more sustainable than their debut.


Energized by the presence of a new bassist, the death metal pioneers still stand apart from the pack.

Morbidity Triumphant

Autopsy were outsiders during the death metal boom of the late 1980s. While rising regional scenes in Florida, New York, and Sweden were beginning to define the young genre’s sound, Autopsy were out in the San Francisco Bay Area, surrounded by thrash and punk bands. Possessed, arguably the first death metal band, were among their only true peers locally. That isolation, paired with their commendable stubbornness, twisted their musical vocabulary into a thrillingly alien tongue. “Even going back to the first album, we didn’t do anything that maybe we were supposed to be doing, what would be the quote-unquote ‘norm’ of the time,” founding drummer and vocalist Chris Reifert said in an interview with Machine Music.
That first album, 1989’s unimpeachable Severed Survival, is one of the most original death metal albums of the decade. Autopsy absorbed the down-and-dirty energy of the Bay’s punk, hardcore, and thrash scenes, but even more notably, they embraced the slow, blues-based doom of bands like Trouble and Saint Vitus. There’s an undeniable groove to Autopsy’s music that’s unusual for death metal, and a lot of that is thanks to Reifert. He’s the rare extreme metal drummer who can bend the shape of a song to his will, and in guitarists Eric Cutler and Danny Coralles, he found willing partners who could ride his warped groove and add their own violent splashes of color.
That’s still Autopsy’s core trio on their latest full-length, Morbidity Triumphant, and punkish, doomy death metal is still the core of their sound—but the addition of bassist Greg Wilkinson seems to have reinvigorated the band. Autopsy have gone through bass players at roughly the same clip Spinal Tap went through drummers. Wilkinson, a metal lifer who also plays in Brainoil and Deathgrave, is the eighth person to step into the role. Around the same time he joined Autopsy, he also teamed up with Reifert for a sludgy duo project called Static Abyss, and the obvious joy of their collaboration bleeds into Morbidity Triumphant. Though Wilkinson only contributed to one song as a writer (the excellent “Final Frost”), his assured playing anchors the entire album. In one of its most memorable moments, he plays the menacing, dirgelike opening riff of “Skin by Skin” unaccompanied, establishing a center of gravity for the song while Cutler and Coralles layer on wild paroxysms of shrieking, flailing guitar. With Reifert behind the kit, Autopsy has always been a rhythm-driven band. He’s death metal’s Bill Ward, and in Wilkinson, he’s found his Geezer Butler.
Reifert is also one of death metal’s all-time great vocalists, and he’s in fine form on Morbidity Triumphant. Most death metal singers walk down one of a handful of paths—deep, dry gutturals; throat-shredding, higher-register barks; or a wetter, mid-diaphragm growl. Reifert’s approach is to careen across all three tracks on an out-of-control dirt bike. His isn’t the kind of vocal range that’s measurable in octaves, but as a death metal singer, he can go anywhere from the catacombs to the belfry. The way he jumps between styles only serves to emphasize the unhinged quality of his voice. Opener “Stab the Brain” depicts a stomach-turning “ritual abortion sacrifice,” and Reifert’s retching amps up the nausea factor tenfold.
On “Tapestry of Scars,” Reifert embodies a sadomasochist with pathos (“When I cut, my soul’s revealed/Clean is ugly, only scars are real”). Eventually, he seems to lose himself in his own method acting to deliver the album’s most unsettling passage, jumping outside of the meter to ramble in an off-kilter cadence: “Fuckin’ stabbing/Stabbing/Ugh, stabbing!” It’s a trick he’s used before, and it always serves to make the chaos in his narrator’s head feel a little more viscerally real. It’s not the only time on Morbidity Triumphant the band returns to familiar ideas: crazed vocals, punk attitude, churning doom riffs, expressive bursts of lead guitar. Old-school death metal is a crowded scene these days, with albums by aging OGs and new blood alike coming at a faster clip than ever. Without having to reinvent themselves, Autopsy still stand apart from the pack and their brand of bloodletting still sounds fresh.


Within an album that often sounds like an alien world, small moments of familiarity become breadcrumbs leading to a shared musicology.

M. Geddes Gengras: I Am the Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World

Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, the first in his Dark Tower series, is a collection of novellas connected by a shared protagonist, Roland Deschain, and a common setting, a post-apocalyptic American desert. Some of the book’s most striking passages draw on mundane connections to a shared past. In an arid landscape abandoned by society, superficial marks of human life—“The Rain in Spain,” Oreo cookies, “Beans, beans, the magical fruit”—take on almost religious connotations. The mind, King seems to suggest, is desperate to grasp onto the familiar.
M. Geddes Gengras, the prolific synthesizer maven, came to The Gunslinger after seeing his late father suggest the book in a dream. I Am the Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World is an album loosely based on that novel. Gengras, mirroring King’s prose, disorients the listener through a series of interconnected compositions, where small moments of familiarity become breadcrumbs leading to a shared musicology.
Opener “Zoltan” starts quietly, with chimes that ring out in irregular intervals and high-pitched synths that resonate and expand. Dusted with static, the track has an eerie, dream-like effect, and as the song builds with no clear central rhythm, the synths take on a human quality, like a church service that has decayed to reveal a wordless choral echo. Within an album that often sounds like an alien world, Gengras employs familiarity carefully. It is a profoundly disquieting effect, not nearly consistent enough to serve as passive, “lo-fi” ambient background music—but unlike the pleasant synth soundscapes for which he’s known, there is little comfort in close listening, either.
With a shared sustained tone, “Zoltan” progresses into “The Pump at the Way Station,” which takes its name from the second novella in King’s book, “The Way Station.” In The Gunslinger, the station seems like a mirage, a shack that’s outlasted society; Gengras illustrates the scene with synths that conjure a fried, reverberating guitar, like sounds out of a pulp Western. Its flirtation with Americana recalls the twang of David Bowie’s “Moss Garden,” replacing that song’s warmth with foreboding dissonance.
“Cellar/Oracle” begins with low, moaning groans and rippling squeals, halting progressions that seem to reverse and repeat at random, like a computer breaking down halfway through booting up. When the song finally finds a beat, it’s a discordant, muted drum that continues into “Passage Under the Mountains,” which, for readers following along in The Gunslinger, corresponds with Roland’s mescaline trip. Here things fall into a more natural rhythm, as the wooden beat from earlier meets a rubbery, featherlight synth progression. Halfway through, it locks into a chromatic techno groove, as hazy synths, reverberating echoes, and the crackling sounds of the sequencer layer recursively, as if to replay the past hour’s compositions in a new context.
Gegras leaves us with “The Drawing,” likely named for the next book in King’s Dark Tower series. The alien-like ripple effect retreats as slow synths melt into each other, foregrounding the sound of falling water droplets. Spa-like tranquility eventually gives way to more sinister notes, perhaps foreshadowing the darkness awaiting our protagonist. I Am the Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World finds Gengras pulling at the underlying psychosocial questions of the book—what strange connections do our synapses light upon after the familiar is gone?—and making a home for himself in the cataclysmal ooze.


Dusting off an old alias, Nicolas Jaar lets loose a surprise release of sample-heavy cuts both bolder and more refined than his early club tracks.

2012 - 2017

Nicolas Jaar has never been the type of artist to impose constraints on himself. Across the last decade, he’s made meticulous, collage-like compositions under his own name and through the longform psychedelia of Darkside. Sometimes he ends up with thrilling, dystopian techno-punk. Other times he ends up with a literal aluminum cube filled with music. Jaar’s work is exciting because its final destination rarely seems fixed.
Jaar snuck his latest album 2012 - 2017 out under his A.A.L (Against All Logic) moniker last week, and it is interesting in part because it is the first Jaar release in some time in which many sounds sit in familiar places and arrive at familiar times. Kicks, snares, and hi-hats assemble in predictable motifs. Samples—largely sourced from funk and soul—sing loudly, and plainly. Pianos gallop, because that is what pianos do at 128 beats per minute. There’s plenty to unpack here, as there is with all of Jaar’s work, but if you wanted to simplify things you could call 2012 - 2017 his house album, in that Jaar imposes upon himself the conventions and requirements of traditional house music.
This is something Jaar seemingly confesses with the title of the loping first track: “This Old House Is All I Have.” That opening sets the table for what is, by some margin, the sunniest and most ebullient song in Jaar’s discography: “I Never Dream.” These are thrilling, racing tracks, but they're also familiar, both functionally—every hi-hat in its right place—and emotionally, with the kind of crests and ecstasies you might find on 1990s labels like Nu Groove and Cajual. This familiarity is welcome, both allowing Jaar to more directly engage with styles he's referenced in the past, and to allow us, as listeners, to hear how his talents and idiosyncrasies shake out in this context.
Jaar’s work can be deeply rewarding but it can also feel stuffy; 2012 - 2017 is much looser and less formal, in part because it appears to be just a collection of tracks, and in part because no one would be expected to sit quietly in the presence of a kick drum and piano vamp. There are moments of downright silliness: The wildly chirpy vocal refrain on “Know You” practically tugs at your pant leg. To borrow from Yeezus—itself a masterclass of brazen sampling—as he does on “Such a Bad Way” is practically the equivalent of grinning after delivering a bad pun.
Samples have long been a foundation of Jaar’s sound. On 2012 - 2017, instead of molding them into obscure shapes, he’s scaffolding stages for them, happy to let long, coherent portions ring out. Stirring vocal refrains, rather than Jaar’s compositional talents, are the real stars of tracks like “Now U Got Me Hooked” and “Cityfade.” Jaar has excellent taste, and laying plain his choices in this manner reaffirms his ability to unearth potent source material.
This is hardly Jaar’s first stab at dance music; his precocious early work came out on club-oriented labels like Wolf + Lamb and Circus Company. (He even had a semi-official EP full of disco edits.) But Jaar has gotten weirder—and better—since then, and the material here is both bolder and more refined. He will occasionally break out some of his more outré tricks, like when he dresses “Flash in the Pan” in queasy synth ribbons, or when he tears open “You Are Going to Love Me and Scream” and exposes its gnarly digital innards. “Rave on U” is 10 minutes of Jaar foraging for a big, transcendent melody. But because the structures of these tracks never veer into abstraction, Jaar’s artful sound design never hits you from unexpected angles like on his previous records. On 2012 - 2017 Jaar’s compositional dynamic is reversed: He’s in service to the beats.


Augmenting electro-acoustic fusions with speech synthesis and language translation software, Visible Cloaks invoke mystifying new form of dialects and communication on their mini-LP.

Lex

The new mini-album from the Portland, Ore., duo Visible Cloaks completes a three-part multimedia project which began with the full-length Reassemblage—a strikingly evocative, hard-to-classify synthesis of textures and tones pulled from ambient and Fourth World music and Japanese synth-pop—and a recent animated short with Brenna Murphy, “Permutate Lex,” which gives rippling, acid-bright visual expression to their uncanny aesthetic.
The six tracks that make up Lex feel more fragmented, unsettled, and inscrutable than the dreamy, glitch-dusted ambient moods of Reassemblage, and that’s intentional. Riffing on the word “lexicon”, Lex is based on a palette of voices created by feeding a chain of dialects and accents through language translation software to create a kind of incomprehensible “future dialect”—as if these garbled words were the endpoint of a drastically globalized future where all existing languages have dissolved into one.
The idea that a universal language could resolve conflict is an ancient one that has persisted. In the Bible, the story of the Tower of Babel tells us why humans are doomed to constant misunderstanding, the second of our original sins. Punishing humankind’s hubristic attempt to climb to Heaven, God knocks down the tower and scatters the builders to every corner of the Earth, destroying their shared language “so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” Later, philosophers Francis Bacon and Gottfried Leibniz proposed new written languages based on pictograms rather than words, while in the 19th century the Polish-Jewish doctor Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof thought he could achieve world peace with the invention of a whole new language, Esperanto. Needless to say, none of these test-tube tongues caught on.
Lex’s “future dialect” is as utopian and, inevitably, as mystifying as its predecessors. The album opens with an undulating, almost baroque flute melody on “Wheel,” weaving through unintelligible crosstalk before unfurling into a soft lullaby. Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile fuse sounds from metallophones, wind instruments, and flickering synth pulses, though the sources are purposely obscured, adding a 21st-century digital-versus-acoustic complexity to the mix. On “Frame,” a similar palette, this time augmented with woody percussion and chimes, pops like fireworks, disjointed and disorienting, while “Transient” introduces Lex’s “future dialect” in full, latching glitched, faintly Germanic syllables onto sweeps of glowing choral tones that recall the emotional landscapes of William Basinski. The technique is repeated on “Keys,” cobbling broken speech onto stacks of toppling drum hits and queasy sliding synths; the parts are played together, rhythmically, so they arrive as a barrage of information that does indeed sound more like the patter of actual speech than any kind of melody.
Strangely, the concept is largely abandoned for the final two tracks, with “Lex” offering only faint vocal fragments among its alien ambience. “World” is an extended dive back into the textures of Reassemblage, with serene, sustained tones pricked by rustling and harp-like plucking. Stretching to almost a quarter of an hour, while every other track barely tops three minutes, “World” seems disconnected from the album’s conceptual framework, but it provides, at least, a soothing finale to a jarring experience. Though less memorable than its predecessor, Lex succeeds when it is heard as intended: as a conceptual companion to Reassemblage’s opaque experimentation, an appendix of utopian ideas that adds nuance and provocation to a seductive sound world where East meets West, and breath and circuitry are made one.


Showcasing a brilliant collision of beauty and despair, Deafheaven’s new album, New Bermuda, is even more overwhelming than their 2013 breakthrough, Sunbather. The group has shaped a suite of songs into one pliable, massive, and ecstatic 47-minute arc, one where they unabashedly treat the roar of electric guitars as a holy experience.

New Bermuda

Nothing about the band Deafheaven makes literal sense, starting with their place in the world. They are a black metal-ish band, but black metal fans either hate them or engage in constant, spirited discussions about why they don't. Their breakout, 2013’s Sunbather, took basic notions about black metal and shoegaze from their first album Roads to Judah and airlifted them into a rarefied emotional realm where track lengths dissolved into the whole along with straightforward interpretations: George Clarke’s lyrics compressed earthbound experiences—depression, material envy, struggles for purpose— into wild, leaping abstractions about love, oceans of light, tears. This was music that yearned palpably to leap across distances, closing gaps like a firing synapse.
New Bermuda, if anything, is more overwhelming than Sunbather. The roiling peaks of that album—say, “Dreamhouse” or "The Pecan Tree”—are the resting temperature of this one. They have shaped a suite of songs into one pliable and massive 47-minute arc, one that is as easy to separate into distinct quadrants as the stream from a fire hydrant. Clarke still screams euphoniously, leaning into long vowel sounds and open tones so that phrases like “on the smokey tin it melts again and again” function as color more than as thought. (You could never discern the words without the aid of a lyric sheet, anyway.) They are a band that works best in colors, as the titles of the albums and the salmon color of Sunbather’s cover attest: On New Bermuda, they revisit an ecstatic sound world that resembles, as Clarke puts it on opening song “Brought to the Water”, “a multiverse of fuchsia and light.”
Having discovered this multiverse, New Bermuda finds them shaping it. The album is shorter and more compressed than Sunbather, and doesn’t telescope into “loud” and “quiet” sections quite as clearly. There is still a nauseous sort of beauty to their chord voicings: the lurches into minor key on “Luna” feel as heavy as their swings back into major, like the motion of a great, creaking iron gate. The second half of the “fuchsia and light” lyric is "surrenders to blackness now,” and if Deafheaven’s music at its best represents a brilliant collision of beauty and despair, the battle feels pitched at higher stakes than it did on Sunbather. Clarke’s voice is sharper and mixed lower, clawing at the smooth walls of the music like something wretched trying to escape a pit.
The lyrics suggest that this confining space might resemble the sort of manicured suburban prison that Sunbather was set inside: "There is no ocean for me. There is no glamour. Only the mirage of water ascending from the asphalt. I gaze at it from the oven of my home. Confined to a house that never remains clean,” runs a passage from “Luna”. But listening to Deafheaven, you don’t feel the particulars of this dilemma any more than you notice the pebbles of a gravel driveway from the window of an airplane. The music acts as an incinerator for any malaise you bring to it. It is a warm blur of noise, and fans of many different kinds of moody sensual guitar musics can close their eyes and place themselves inside it: If you have at any point worn a Deftones, Cure, My Bloody Valentine, or an Explosions in the Sky t-shirt, there is room for you inside here.
But Deafheaven reach further and further on this album: The drowsily sliding guitars on the long coda to “Come Back” conjure the easy warmth of Built to Spill. An organ wells up as the guitars fade, like something Ira Kaplan would do on a Yo La Tengo record. The thick palm-muted chugging on the beginning of “Luna” is reminiscent of the Slayer of Seasons of the Abyss. The undistorted downstrokes on “Gifts for the Earth” are a visitation from Joy Division, while the flagrant wah-pedal abusing guitar solo on “Baby Blue” is pure Load-era Kirk Hammett.
All of these references, which bring together many bands that wouldn’t normally have much to do with one another, points to something dreamlike and uncanny in Deafheaven’s grand sound. At a moment when guitar-centric music feels less central to the conversation, and great indie-rock bands have retreated into hardy local scenes, Deafheaven play like a beautiful, abstracted dream of guitar music's transportive power. The year's most jolting guitar-centered rock records have reimagined the guitar's place in the constellation slightly—on Tame Impala’s Currents, the guitar glimmers distantly at us from beneath a glass, darkly—a distant shape moving beneath the larger, more legible shapes of the compressed drums and programmed synths. On Kurt Vile’s b’lieve i’m going down, it is part of a general out-of-time way of life, a devotion to anachronism and lived-in symbols that keeps the confusion of the outside world at bay.
Deafheaven, meanwhile, unabashedly treat the roar of electric guitars as a holy experience. But they have earned their sense of awe, and you can see audiences returning it tenfold in their live performances. The transcendence their music gazes towards has a long spiritual lineage. To wit: I pulled my earbuds out while listening to New Bermuda this morning in a store where Boston's "More Than A Feeling" was playing. The transition was seamless. They were aiming at the same horizon spot, made for the moment when you begin dreaming.


Released last year, this ambitious album by the Japanese singer-songwriter utilizes lush instrumentation to create a dreamlike soundtrack to an imaginary film.

Windswept Adan

Ichiko Aoba’s greatest strength is her ability to create pockets of intimacy. The Japanese singer-songwriter’s breathy vocals and placid guitar playing, often the only sounds you’d hear on her records, create a hypnotizing shroud that makes you feel like she’s performing for you alone. Aoba has been building a following in Japan since her 2010 debut Kamisori Otome—released when she was only 19 years old—but 2018’s qp was Aoba’s first small breakthrough; it connected her with listeners abroad and cracked Rate Your Music’s top rated albums of the year. The two years between qp and her next release gave people time to get up to speed on her back catalog, retroactively catapulting 2013’s 0 to the top spot for its own year. When her latest album Windswept Adan—now her first to be reissued internationally—received widespread coverage from Western critics last year, the established faithful weren’t surprised; this is the recognition they always knew she deserved. On Windswept Adan, Aoba expands her repertoire of sound and brings collaborators into her vision, yet she still holds on to the wistful imagination that allows her to dream up private universes.
Aoba conceptualized the project as the soundtrack to a film that only exists in her head, set on two fictional islands—one where the central protagonist is from, and another, teeming with flora and fauna, she is spirited away to. She began writing Windswept Adan as a story first, intermittently showing her progress to her primary collaborator and producer, TV composer Taro Umebayashi. Umebayashi would begin to compose based on Aoba’s concepts, which would, in turn, influence what Aoba wrote next. Lead single “Porcelain” came from the idea of musically portraying weather conditions on the Kerama Islands, which Aoba visited while researching for her script. One of the album’s densest tracks, it bursts with lush strings, woodwinds, pitched percussion, and Aoba’s feather-light vocals—gentle elements on their own, but when combined they become a tumultuous storm.
Elsewhere on the record, Aoba shows restraint, reminding us that more can also be done with less. Umebayashi plays an almost improvised sounding piano number on “Parfum d’étoiles,” the recording equipment so close to the instrument that the hammers can be heard thumping the strings with every slam of the keys. Field recordings of birdsong hang in the air, and Aoba haunts the track with a distant vocal, so low in the mix that it sounds as though it could have been picked up from another room. Aoba strips back to her own voice and nimble-fingered classical guitar on “Sagu Palm’s Song,” but rather than a return to something familiar, it acts as stark punctuation; after hearing Aoba’s voice accompanied by a rich tapestry of shifting elements on seven prior tracks, here she sounds truly alone. As the story’s protagonist deepens her connection with nature—witnessing its beauty, destruction, and eventual rebirth—each track distinguishes itself as a chapter in that emotional journey.
Aoba’s imaginary film draws to a close with “Luminescent Creatures,” the heroine giving herself back to nature. First, Aoba sings, accompanied only by lightly strummed chords. Slowly, strings start to swell around her as the scene approaches a dramatic end—as the final note rings out, only sounds of ocean waves lapping a shoreline remain. It paints a striking image, inviting you to live inside the world Aoba has dreamed up. In the Dreams & Visions companion book to Windswept Adan, she writes that she hoped her fantasies would immerse her more deeply into the world that she was laboring to create with every passing day. “Not knowing whether I’m asleep or awake is a sign that I’m on the right path,” she said. As Ichiko Aoba continued to dream bigger, it only makes sense that her music would keep expanding to fill the space.
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Vince Staples, Ms. Lauryn Hill, Megan Thee Stallion, and more come together for the soundtrack to the modern-day Bonnie-and-Clyde parable, set against a backdrop of police brutality.

Various Artists: Queen & Slim: The Soundtrack

Queen & Slim: The Soundtrack

Melina Matsoukas, the director for Beyoncé’s incendiary “Formation” video, makes her feature film debut with the romantic thriller Queen & Slim, starring Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith as a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde. After meeting up for a first date, the titular couple are pulled over for a traffic stop, the encounter escalates, and Slim takes the officer’s gun and shoots him in self-defense. Branded as cop killers, the couple go on the lam. When video of the shooting goes viral, the fugitives become symbols of both terror and justice among a polarized American public, and along the way their unlikely romance blooms.
This is complex emotional territory, and the film’s music does its best to keep pace. In addition to the score, provided by Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange), the movie has an original soundtrack, courtesy of Motown Records, bringing artists from across its storied roster in attempts to tie the many themes of the movie together.
Everyone seems to have a pretty good idea what they’re getting into, and they all handle it differently. Megan Thee Stallion is proudly complicit on “Ride or Die”; Syd, ever the master of the moody come-on, is raring to go on “Getting Late.” But the 6lack and Mereba-featuring alt-R&B slow-burner “Yo Love” takes Vince Staples way out of his comfort zone, to awkward effect. There are also redundancies and placeholders: Bilal gets help from Raphael Saadiq remixing his 2000 jam “Soul Sista,” a song that already soundtracked a classic black romantic drama, and the psychedelic R&B of Choker’s “Collide” is just a reminder how much better Miguel would be, who is not only more talented but better suited for the task.
The soundtrack’s best songs focus on how having a partner-in-crime would bring comfort in trying times. On “Catch the Sun,” a tender Lil Baby pretty convincingly explains why he and his co-conspirator are better together. Ms. Lauryn Hill is similarly focused on the connection the journey fosters on “Guarding the Gates.” Burna Boy’s upbeat “My Money, My Baby” makes the order of its priorities clear. The outlier is the closer, literally called “Runnin’ Away,” which samples the Pharcyde’s “Runnin’”; Blood Orange makes the iconic hook the center of a noir epic.
The music of a movie like this will always have a social justice bent, and it is clumsily handled. “I’m going out with a bang, I’m tellin’ you what it is/If I get racial profiled, why live?” Lil Baby sings. On the title track, members of Coast Contra address the elephant in the room as hamfistedly as possible. “It’s gun violence, your son dyin’ for nothin’/And your daughters be suckin’ dick ‘fore they even get they first kiss,” Taj Austin raps, putting systemic violence on par with sexually active teens, while Rio Los only adds the most basic cliches. “Yo Love” engages vaguely with the source material, but Vince Staples, who has plenty of experience taking bad cops to task, would’ve been better served here playing a similar role. This soundtrack is desperately missing a song as fed-up as Killer Mike’s “Don’t Die.” Ultimately, the topic of militant policing feels glossed over. The traffic stop is the jumping-off point—for Queen and Slim’s romance, for their lives as outlaws, and for their representation as avatars for black grief and retribution. It is the axis upon which the entire movie turns, and the soundtrack’s inability to unpack that is anticlimactic.

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The Brooklyn drill artist follows up his two-year-old hit “No Suburban” with a grim and terse debut LP.

The Unluccy Luccy Kid

Sheff G’s The Unluccy Luccy Kid comes two years after his breakout “No Suburban.” The eerie anthem found the Flatbush native convincingly adopting Brooklyn drill’s signifiers—brusque threats, lingo-filled punchlines, and a video of hoodied-up men whose ages were betrayed by their backpacks. Millions of clicks later in 2019, Sheff G is still something of an underdog: Unluccy Luccy Kid comes after Canarsie’s Pop Smoke took over the summer with “Welcome to the Party.” The spotlight’s redirection hasn’t deterred Sheff, though. The production here is cleaner, but his debut project finds him repacking his style instead of making large steps forward.
The Unluccy Luccy Kid feels more like an industry necessity than a statement. A few of its tracks can stick out on their own, like the previously released “Flows,” his bluesy collaboration with fellow Brooklynite Sleepy Hallow. But strung together, these tracks are dulled by their own repetitiveness. You’ve heard all these grievances elsewhere: We came from the struggle, don’t like fake love or snitches, and don’t pretend you shot somebody, just be yourself.
Sheff G largely avoids the introspection or detail that would give these tropes weight. He broods about being “a product of power and pain” over the funereal pianos of “Respect,” but his verses are pridefully elliptical about what that means: “Never talked what I did/Still I will never talk what I saw.” To be fair, that’s not really anybody’s business; however, Mozzy’s vivid verse on the ghostly “Menace” (“Meet me on Fourth, right by the court/None of these shooting guards play around”) has more resonance.
Sheff G largely relies on the compact, off-beat syllabic barrages that he rode on “No Suburban.” His approach works best when he’s not trying to contort that flow into singsong melodies, like the clumsy and generic “Designer.” Sleepy Hallow appears on half of the project’s tracks and does well as the choleric foil to Sheff’s bearish presence, landing many of the album’s darkest jabs (“What can they tell me about the trenches, almost lost my sense/So if my name is ever mentioned just tell the judge send a sentence,” he raps on “All My Life,” darkly humorous but dead serious).
The Unluccy Luccy Kid isn’t going to be the groundbreaker that pops the Brooklyn drill scene out of its bubble, but that’s probably how it was designed. Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow sound more engaged when they’re rapping unapologetically about street dealings. A few of drill’s artists have expressed making music mainly for the folks who walked those streets. If Unluccy Luccy Kid connects with them, hasn’t it served its purpose?


The collected footnotes from the Baltimore band's decade-long career plays almost as smoothly as a proper album, showing the meticulous  construction behind some of Beach House’s spells.

B-Sides and Rarities

With grace and skill, Beach House tend to hide the evidence of the labor put into making their albums. Traces of writing, recording, mixing, and sequencing fade in service of a holistic, cinematic experience. You don’t see the edges because Beach House wants you to feel like you’re inside of them. But on their first collection of non-album tracks, B-Sides and Rarities, the Baltimore duo expose the tight weave of their work.
It’s a testament to the band’s consistency that B-Sides and Rarities plays nearly as smoothly as a proper Beach House album, even though one of these tracks—scattered non-chronologically through an hourlong playtime—is more than a decade old. All but two songs on the compilation have been released in one form or another; the previously unheard tracks, “Chariot” and “Baseball Diamond,” are not deep cuts off a long-forgotten cutting room floor but outtakes from the band’s most recent pair of albums, 2015’s Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars.
Although those albums were released within months of each other, Beach House insisted that the latter wasn’t a footnote to the former, but a fully realized project in its own right. Here, then, are the footnotes: two songs that retain all the band’s evanescent loveliness, but don’t quite reach the euphoria of Depression Cherry’s “Sparks” or Lucky Stars’ “Somewhere Tonight.” Still, “Baseball Diamond” boasts one of Victoria Legrand’s most compelling vocal performances in years, a whisper poured through a raspy filter. She sings, “I want you to win,” and the way she crinkles the last syllable breaks open a fissure of pathos in her typically stoic alto. It’s one of the most moving dramas set on a baseball field since Rilo Kiley’s 2002 slugger “My Slumbering Heart.”
The band’s deeper listeners will likely recognize most of the 12 previously released tracks included on B-Sides and Rarities; even casual fans should know plenty of these songs. There’s an early single mix of Teen Dream’s “Used to Be”; recorded two years before the rest of the album came out, this version quickens the tempo and dampens the treble, but doesn’t quite match the scope of the glossier, fuller album take. Though it’s not quite a demo, the crunchy 2008 mix of “Used to Be” opens a porthole into Beach House’s long, slow creative process. It also exposes the delicacy of their magic: Tinker with just a few sliders, and their spell dissipates.
Two refurbished cuts from Beach House’s 2010 iTunes Session EP also indicate the band’s strength lies more in the processing of their songs than in the bare writing of them. “White Moon” and “Norway,” anemic on the original session recording, get fleshed out with extra effects and tweaked levels. “Norway” in particular takes on an especially narcotic quality compared to both the session take and the album version; gone are the bright arpeggios, replaced with a more intermittent lurch from guitarist Alex Scally.
Also collected on B-Sides are contributions to various compilations, like “Saturn Song” from 2014’s The Space Project (featuring samples recorded in actual space) and a cover of Queen’s “Play the Game” from 2009’s Red Hot charity album Dark Was the Night. Both fit neatly alongside the rest of Beach House’s miscellany; the latter especially highlights how indebted the band is not just to dream-pop giants like the frequently cited Cocteau Twins, but to classic experimental pop as a whole. Legrand’s voice slides frictionlessly up Freddie Mercury’s octave swoops, and even his lyrics sound like a natural addition to Beach House’s myriad musings on the complexities of love.
Though the majority of B-Sides and Rarities can be easily found by those inclined to find it (the piano sketch “Rain in Numbers” is a hidden track at the end of Beach House’s self-titled debut, making it not much of a B-side or a rarity), the impulse to gather up loose ends into a cohesive package feels like a solid effort at future-proofing recordings peripheral to the band’s primary discography. Many of these songs date to the era of mp3 blogs, when fans meticulously saved their libraries to their hard drives. More listeners rely on streaming now, and while many tracks here could already be streamed officially, some were only previously online due to unauthorized YouTube uploads, whose longevity is always uncertain. Beach House claim their odds and ends under an authoritative title here, improving the already great odds they’ll be around for generations.


The British singer-songwriter’s third album is a singular, extraordinarily horny, and occasionally bleak pop record largely about the complexities of queer desire.

Any Human Friend

In Marika Hackman’s telling, life as a twenty-something in a major city means nights where you kiss strangers, consume substances, and stay up until it becomes light again. It also means nights where you stay inside of your apartment and talk to no one. This polarity is the basis of the British singer-songwriter’s third album, Any Human Friend, which is a singular, extraordinarily horny, and occasionally bleak pop record largely about the complexities of queer desire.
Hackman is not interested in being coy or mincing words. As a result, there is much sex to be had within the album’s 40 minutes. On “All Night,” she coos “Kissing (eating)/Fucking (moaning)” in multi-tracked harmonies while a guitar screeches atop languid synths. The snarkily titled “Hand Solo” is about, well, sex for one: “It’s all right/I’m jerking!” goes one extremely emblematic line. Jokes aside, “Hand Solo” is also about feeling lovelorn: “It’s hard to be alone,” she sings at the start, adding “I love this” moments later. You can feel the anomie creeping in as the song rides out its disaffected groove, sounding like pop rock by way of a chilled-out Annie Clark or Hélöise Letissier.
As far as straight-up pop goes, “Blow” is the closest Hackman has come. She has dipped her toe into writing big hooks before, but “Blow” is her most committed and fully realized effort, with thumping drums, a Strokesean guitar snarl, and a very Italians Do It Better synth part. It’s relatively new territory for her, and it suits her coolly unimpressed alto.
There are a few dull moments, like “Conventional Ride,” which explores how it feels to be the object of other people’s sexual curiosity. The lyrics are less cutting and sly than Hackman is capable of, especially considering how adept she can be at tackling the difficulties of being a queer woman under the straight gaze. The broad sloganeering of “The One” draws laughs and eyerolls: Hearing Hackman refer to her audience as “fuckers [that] want my dick” is a little much, and a joke about BDE being a venereal disease feels more like a tweet from the summer of 2018 than it does a line in a song, but it gets a laugh nonetheless.
Any Human Friend reaches its high point with the quietest song. “Send My Love” is not a love song, but it is about love, and what it means to be betrayed by someone you trusted. Hackman sounds totally at peace as she asks, “Did you love me tonight/Or any night of our lives?” This is the continuum that Hackman’s record lives inside: those quiet moments of reckoning with what it means to be alive, young, and cautiously enamored of it all.

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Inspired by its Afrobeat underpinnings, the Beninese singer tackles an album-length cover of the Talking Heads’ 1980 landmark, in the process unearthing hidden rhythmic and emotional nuances.

Remain in Light

Nearly 40 years on, Talking Heads’ Remain in Light remains a pinnacle of New York City rock, in part because it drew from anything but the strictures of rock‘n’roll. Instead it preferred cycling polyrhythms, mesmeric vamps, and dizzying layers and loops. But depending on which half of the band you asked, you might get a different answer as to its sources. For the rhythm section of Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, the band’s newfound groove came courtesy of funk, R&B, and hip-hop (Frantz played drums on Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks”). But frontman David Byrne and producer Brian Eno traced the album’s inspirations to Afrobeat. It’s the latter that perked up the ears of Beninese icon Angélique Kidjo, who first encountered “Once in a Lifetime” in the early 1980s but never heard the entire album until 2016. “It might be rock‘n’roll, but there’s something African to it,” she recently told Rolling Stone about her first brush with the classic.
In taking these coastal art rockers’ nervy sound back to Africa, Kidjo also picked a pregnant moment to cover the album in its entirety: The nuclear pall of the early ’80s compares all too easily to our current predicament. Kidjo’s own track record makes her a natural for such a task, given her expansive vision of the continent’s music (to the point that she has often faced the asinine accusation that her music isn’t authentically “African”). And she has plenty of help here, from Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, Blood Orange’s Devonté Hynes, Kanye/Rihanna producer Jeff Bhasker, and the man whose cephalopod-like drumming originally inspired the album, Afrobeat legend Tony Allen. While she foregrounds the 1980 record’s latent paranoia, social disquiet, and political loathing, Kidjo also imparts a tactile sense of resilience to offset the original’s despair.
The ecstatic gush and worming electronics of “Born Under Punches” remain intact, right down to a glitch recreation of guest guitarist Adrian Belew’s arcade-on-the-fritz guitar solo from the Talking Heads recording. But it’s when Kidjo and her cohorts diverge from the source that the album’s headier moments arise. The band’s twitchy approximations of Nigerian pop polyrhythms on “Crosseyed and Painless” and “Houses in Motion” become more muscular and graceful with Allen himself behind the kit.
But the star of the set remains Kidjo. Her poised and powerful presence fleshes out nuances in Byrne’s lyrics that the precocious singer often seemed to approach cerebrally rather than feel viscerally. While he may have gleaned certain ideas about African iconography from Robert Farris Thompson’s 1979 study African Art in Motion, Kidjo has that tradition fully ingrained in her extensive body of work. As Byrne once put it to Thompson about “The Great Curve”: “You think that’s very down and earthy, but I was talking about something metaphysical.” Kidjo, on the other hand, transmogrifies the song’s refrain (“The world moves on a woman’s hips”) back to flesh and blood.
Kidjo also transforms the queasy ambience of the album’s last tracks into something resembling optimism. That dirge for a terrorist bomber, “Listening Wind,” might be the recast album’s defining moment. Against steadfast hand percussion, Kidjo assumes the role of the song’s protagonist, Mojique, while Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig sings backup in Kidjo’s native Fon. Their voices converge in the chorus into something that feels at once desperate yet emboldened, giving voice to that otherwise powerless protagonist.
Whether it’s a coincidence or a more concerted reckoning with patriarchy, this year in music is revealing a number of black (both African and African-American) female artists tackling canonical works by male musicians, many of them white men, and reframing and recasting those classic songs and albums in a manner that feels refreshing and revitalizing. Bettye LaVette breathed life into neglected numbers as well as well-worn standards from the Dylan songbook; Meshell Ndegeocello reimagined both Jam-Lewis and Prince classics so that they might be heard and felt anew. Kidjo finds her own way into these songs, infusing them with a tactile sense of empathy. Rather than echo the emptiness of a line like, “The center is missing/They question how the future lies,” her voice imparts a sense of hope, allowing in a brief glint of light.


White Lung’s bracing third LP is a product of its environment, one filled with people who refuse to be a part of the solution because they won’t even admit there’s a problem. Its staunch ideals are delivered by a compelling, relatable frontwoman and 22 vicious, compact minutes of melodic punk.

Deep Fantasy

White Lung aren’t subtle—but then again, neither is the doorman who assumes every woman with a band is either a groupie or the merch girl. Nor is your average comments section in response to just about any article posted about a female artist. Nor are the standards of physical beauty, relationship dynamics, and personal happiness promulgated by pop culture. Nor is drug addiction. Nor is the #notallmen hashtag. Nor is questioning Sky Ferreira about how much her breasts are responsible for her success, nor are authorities liable to ask “what were you wearing” to every accuser of sexual assault. White Lung’s bracing third LP Deep Fantasy is a product of its environment, that environment being “the real world in 2014,” filled with people who refuse to be a part of the solution because they won’t even admit there’s a problem.
So, White Lung are not subtle. But Deep Fantasy is definitely savvy, ensuring its staunch ideals are delivered by a riveting, relatable frontwoman and 22 minutes of vicious, compact musicianship and addictive melody. It’s an uncompromising feminist punk record that can be grasped by anyone who finds themselves compelled by kickass rock music and basic human decency.
The importance of White Lung’s potential reach can’t be overstated. Formative influence Courtney Love has specifically expressed hope for White Lung to “achieve some kind of mainstream success”, noting, “It means there are more people listening, and you're affecting the zeitgeist more.” It’s hard to imagine a rock band of any kind to be allowed the platform that Hole, or even less commercially fortunate acts like L7 and Babes in Toyland, could have two decades ago. However, Deep Fantasy is being put out by the same people responsible for Animal Collective, Real Estate and Arctic Monkeys records.  In 2014, this is the equivalent of a major-label debut.
The result is a best case scenario retaining the accessibility that marked White Lung’s 2012 breakthrough Sorry, while amplifying the parts that translate to a bigger stage. Sorry producer Jesse Gander returns, and he did a pretty good job last time a long-overlooked Vancouver punk band had the opportunity to put everything on the line.  As on Japandroids’ Celebration Rock, the sound of Deep Fantasy is not slick so much as knife-like: piercing, bright, precise and forged under a great amount of pressure.
And it leads with the sharpest part__—__opening duo “Drown With the Monster” and “Down it Goes” assumes you’ve never heard White Lung before, and they're the best and hookiest demonstrations of what they do. These are doomed, minor-key dirges sped up to the point where they become anthemic, performed at the highest possible velocity where they can still qualify as potential pop. Anticipatory guitar roars are required to take off after Anne-Marie Vassiliou's held cymbal-crash introductions and they keep pace with a rigid, doubled-up hardcore rhythm and fill-free drumming. Mish Way often inverts typical song structure, hanging high notes perilously over sludgy, drop-D chords in the verse while she takes a lower, more menacing and tense register on the choruses. Guitarist Kenneth Williams uses technical precision for texture, as harmonics and high treble flicker like sparks from a buzzsaw against metal.
It’s thrilling, and White Lung don’t do much else from that point on. Even compared to 2014’s other high-profile, high-BPM, sub-half-hour feminist punk LP, Deep Fantasy is sonically blinkered__—__there are no ballads, no ambient noise instrumentals, and the few seconds of feedback that close the album is about as close as you get to “atmosphere.” White Lung does just about one thing musically on Deep Fantasy, but it's one thing that no one else is doing right now. Though often positioned in the lineage of bands from a time when Lollapalooza was a traveling circus, White Lung are a modern creation, their kohl-streaked punk more Black Sails in the Sunset than Black Flag. Occasionally, the cohesion of Deep Fantasy can be taxing, but for the time being, this is the band taking their sound as far as it can go.
Way's lyrics can be just as condensed as the music itself, but they're more like concentrate, expanding on contact and allowing the listener to come up with their own formulation. Considering "Drown With the Monster"'s nasty snarl of a hook, some poor sap from an energy drink company might try to mindlessly co-opt it for a commercial, which is a tribute to how open-ended “Drown” is; Way struggles with an undefined addiction and never quite says whether she’s giving in, giving up, or giving herself another chance to fight. “Down It Goes” and “Snake Jaw” are likewise dense and comprehensive, touching on the threatening imbalance in sexual pursuit  (“You fear my thick skin/ I’m thinking there’s a knife”), dysmorphia ("You drag me behind/ Like bitter squirming swine"), body image (“If I get fat one day, will you run away?/ I’ll starve if you promise to save me”) and disordered eating ("Here comes my dinner now/ It's for the win").
Deep Fantasy does work best as a multimedia affair; it almost certainly requires its lyric sheet to be understood, and Way’s outside writing supplements her work rather than disenfranchising the listener of their personal interpretation. At Deep Fantasy's center, there’s one song that can be effectively heard as a straightforward demonstration of self-confidence, of friendship, of support. Way explained that it’s the one written as a reaction to rape culture, and it takes on a new, demolishing power upon the realization that its title is the last thing a sexual assault accuser is likely to hear__—__“I Believe You”.
Just about every aspect of White Lung’s music is aggressive and sounds angry and invective, though “I Believe You” stresses the resonance and empathy; while Way’s philosophical and theoretical leanings might not be considered “mainstream,” it’s a compliment to Deep Fantasy to say that none of its calls for dignity, for humanity, for understanding sounds remotely radical—rather, they’re pretty fucking rational. Plenty of people with progressive tastes in politics and pop culture still could reasonably think “feminist punk” (or any political variant of any music) isn’t something they’d necessarily enjoy listening to, and while Hole sold millions of records, surely a great deal had access to their underlying message because they saw “Miss World” jammed between Live and Candlebox videos on MTV. This is principled music, not doctrine, and while inspired by its surroundings, it’s defined by its leader making bracing art. Deep Fantasy is a product of its environment, as well as one hell of a survival guide to live through this.


This collection gathers the cloud-rap pioneer’s earliest and most seminal recordings, in danger of being lost to the digital ether.

Instrumental Relics

“Cloud rap” has been so absorbed into hip-hop’s identity that it’s hard to remember when it was subversive and new. The title of the latest installment in Clams Casino’s long-running beat-tape series implies that the tracks have been scavenged and preserved, like fading artifacts of a forgotten epoch. Michael Volpe wasn’t the only producer weaving ambient textures into trap beats at the start of the last decade—an era where experimental artists like Shlohmo and Evian Christ collaborated with the likes of Kanye and Drake—but few artists were linked as closely with the subgenre.
Clams’ influence on hip-hop has remained at the elemental level; his work with rappers like Lil B, A$AP Rocky, and Soulja Boy truly shifted the sonic window. Without Clams, it’s hard to imagine Yung Lean or Drain Gang, and rap’s ongoing infatuations with the alternative rock spectrum might not be so passionate either. Clams was out there sampling Thursday in 2011, and now he works alongside a new generation who would probably not be making music without his influence: Lil Peep, Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, Ghostemane, and Nedarb, who credits “I’m God” as the beat that made him want to start producing.
Instrumental Relics contains many of Clams’ most notable early collaborations (Soulja Boy’s “All I Need,” A$AP Rocky’s “Numb”), as well as three tracks from his Rainforest EP on the late Tri Angle records (“Treetop,” “Drowning,” “Gorilla”), an original cut from the Grand Theft Auto V soundtrack (“Crystals”), and a handful of other strays. Most were previously available and have only been remastered here, but “I’m God”—the definitive Clams Casino recording—can now be officially streamed as a standalone piece of music for the very first time. The instrumental’s unforgettable sample has gone from an unapproved flip to a full-fledged feature, with Imogen Heap credited alongside Clams Casino.
“I’m God” was instantly iconic, immediately imitated, and impossible to recreate. Like Clams’ most haunting work, it decays and disintegrates inside your eardrum, more like a Burial composition than what you’d normally expect to hear Soulja Boy rapping over—the kind of thing I wish Mark Fisher had gotten to write about. For all its innovation and ethereality, there’s something timeless about “I’m God,” with drum programming that skews more boom-bap than trap, betraying Clams’ roots in New Jersey and his love of the East Coast’s classics — one of his first collaborations was with Havoc of Mobb Deep.
Clams Casino emerged around the same time as witch house, a phenomenon his ectoplasm-laced compositions were often linked to. There’s no smeared eyeliner or guest appearances from Robert Smith, but it’s easy to see Clams as a slightly more uptempo kin to Salem and Pictureplane, not just in the general chilliness of his sound, but in the strong gothic undertone to his early work—that aesthetic sense of haute morbidity is maybe most evident on “Unchain Me,” an instrumental from Lil B’s I’m Gay (I’m Happy) that flips “Cry Little Sister,” Gerard McMann’s theme from The Lost Boys. Clams erodes vocals with waves of reverb and decay, like choirs crying with their mouths sewn shut, but the sample here sings out with a euphoric clarity.
On his most distinctive tracks, Clams utterly destroys the human voice — fragments of human speech frozen into glass panes, fractured with echo and PaulStretch, and played backwards before being reverbed into oblivion. Clams’ approach to sampling is really only one degree away from the contemporaneous Daniel Lopatin’s Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1, a similar experiment in a more genre-friendly package. The sample on “Motivation” is like a found-footage videotape, an inscrutable object drenched in snow and noise. There were words there once, but they’ve been manipulated into a murky pool of pure texture. I know that I could go to WhoSampled and very easily found out the source of those haunting vibrations, but I’d rather entertain the mystery.
As the 2010s recede, it’s increasingly apparent that some of the last decade’s most influential rap music was incompatible with the decade’s most significant shift in music technology: the advent of an endless stream of digital music that can only be accessed and never owned, a gated and guarded community that only so much inventiveness and copyright infringement can slip through. The history of hip-hop’s blog years is written in dead Mediafire links, removed MySpace pages, and uncleared samples. It’s heartbreaking to consider how many SpaceGhostPurrp loosies have been lost to virtual erosion, how much Playboi Carti music vanished when he became a label-sanctioned star and management AstroTurfed his online presence, how nobody remembers who Main Attrakionz are anymore. Beyond the sound itself, Instrumental Relics is vital because it ensures, at least for now, that these instrumentals won’t become relics.


A woozy dynamic of pushing people away while simultaneously drawing them close courses throughout Lavender, a striking album of beautifully rendered and deeply layered synth-pop.

Lavender

Because Nandi Rose Plunkett is so generous with her voice it can be easy to overlook the complex systems of beats and instruments layered behind it. An album about love, familial legacy, and the inevitable decay of human life, Lavender maintains an aversion to linear time. Plunkett’s grandmother, who was near the end of her life when Lavender was recorded and has died since, stirs the titular flower in a pot on the stove and walks through her garden; Plunkett is carried in her mother’s arms like a child; a relationship with a lover appears cross-sectioned in the now, all its conflicts and joys open to the light. Past and future converge on this album, which so badly seeks resolution to the stories in which human beings perpetually ensnare themselves, and so deeply knows that these stories have no ends.
The recursion Plunkett finds when she looks back at her family and forward into her own relationships manifests itself in the album’s instrumental loops and persistent choruses. Its crown jewel, “Silt,” climaxes with a lyric Plunkett sings over and over, each time more urgently. “If you’d only give me what I wanted,” she repeats, stretching the “me” out in the back of her throat to turn the words into a demand, while a shuffling backbeat whips the song into a frenzy. The effect is similar to what happens when Björk lacerates her vowels; it’s as if the voice has to break because it cannot contain the feeling put into it. Earlier in the song, Plunkett deploys a different vocal strategy: She runs a distant-sounding backup vocal through Auto-Tune, depleting her own voice of the nuance it can convey. The overdriven primary vocal and the diluted backing vocal mirror the duality she traces in her lyrics, where she sings, with a note of apology, “Nobody deserves me/I get lonely/I get angry.” Self-effacement and desire compete for space—Plunkett shrinks herself and then explodes herself, awash in what she wants and ultimately unafraid to ask for it.
That dynamic, of pushing people away while simultaneously drawing them close, courses throughout Lavender, Plunkett’s third album as Half Waif. It’s a central paradox of intimacy: No matter how much you’d like to dissolve yourself in someone’s love, you still have to return to the isolated body you’re forced to call home. Among these songs, Plunkett finds herself in opposition to those she cares about most at the same time she wants to unify with them. It’s not an irrational roadblock; it’s just a particular condition of being alive.
Beneath her words, Lavender ripples with the densest, most expansive production yet recorded under the Half Waif name. The album’s lyrics might stand out first because they are sung so clearly and with so much urgency, but Plunkett accomplishes a difficult feat in welding her voice to her backing tracks so that each song emerges as a singular organism. The jittery synth line on “Lilac House” juts into her percussive delivery, a subtle guitar riff pulses under her searching vocal melody on “Keep It Out,” and even the comparatively straightforward piano ballad “Back in Brooklyn” echoes the lyrics’ feeling of placelessness in the way Plunkett’s hands wander restlessly across the keys. Her voice dips in and out of its surroundings, and the surroundings reinforce the voice—the more you listen, the more they blend together as one. The courage necessary for making an album this emotionally raw bleeds into both the words Plunkett sings and the adventurous, far-reaching melodies through which she sings them.
Through its weighty discussions of desire and love and the impossibility of complete resolution in any relationship, Lavender cracks open a sense of freedom. It would be easy to get bogged down in these subjects, to give up, to make the album a monument to despair. Instead, Plunkett finds momentum in her songs, as if naming and dissecting the finer points of loving people somehow lifted its weight. There comes a point where you realize that devoting yourself to someone will lead to the suffering of one kind or another, and yet you surrender to it anyway. Lavender hits upon that moment of surrender, holding its strange alchemy up to glitter in the light.


Led by the poet and musician Moor Mother, the jazz ensemble evokes our American topography, both physically and psychologically, by capturing what’s in the news and what’s underneath that surface.

Irreversible Entanglements: Who Sent You?

Who Sent You?

Working as Moor Mother, the Philadelphia poet and musician Camae Ayewa styles her music for sensory overload. Compressing hip-hop, punk, industrial, electronic, and noise music into a siren blare, she thrusts hundreds of years of brutal injustices in our faces, as if hoping to cram as much information through as small an opening as possible. The brevity of her songs often reflects this exigency: In discussing the throttling 83 seconds of “Deadbeat Protest” (from her 2016 album Fetish Bones) during a Red Bull Music Academy lecture, Ayewa said such brevity was “to get all the information in a short amount of time.”
As a member of the jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglements, Ayewa’s approach to time has shifted. Within the expanse of the form, she knows she can convey the same urgent information at a much slower pace, allowing the group—horn players Keir Neuringer and Aquiles Navarro, bassist Luke Stewart, drummer Tcheser Holmes—to elevate her into new places. She picks her spots within the music accordingly, punctuating each of the album’s five expansive compositions.
Space defines the album, the band evoking our American topography, both physically and psychologically, capturing what’s in the news and what’s been repressed underneath that surface. At times, their 2017 debut album felt like a travelogue, and “The Code Noir/ Amina” continues that trajectory, with Ayewa evoking the Deep South, Holy Hill, and South Carolina. Whereas a Moor Mother song would typically clock out well before the two-minute mark, here she’s only just getting started by then, conveying a stunning image of scorched earth: “A mountain ain’t nothin but a tombstone for fire.” Stewart’s bass and Holmes’ drums keep everything at a rolling boil as the horn lines rove, expand, and Ayewa’s focus widens. She speaks of the void, the African ancestors who actually built America and died nameless, then asks: “At what point do we give a shit, do we stand up and say something?”
That’s not the only question she asks. The 15-minute title track begins by interrogating a beat cop, then expands to “stop and frisk” policies in general, and ultimately encompasses the sense that for most communities of color, the local police department is an occupying force at best. Ayewa, Neuringer, and Stewart first played together at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event, organized after the NYPD shot and killed Caribbean immigrant Akai Gurley, and as the band roars toward a furious climax, they even invoke Gurley’s name. Yet right at the peak, Ayewa’s voice vanishes and everything drops away to near-silence. Spare horn lines rise and evoke the eerie space of electric Miles, the mood changed entirely. Five minutes pass before she’s heard again, her voice contemplative now, speaking of a brief feeling of freedom that “tasted so good,” a joy measured in gasps.
Perhaps the group’s most remarkable attribute is that while anger is ever-present, the fury is tempered, the music focused and controlled. As Ayewa’s inquisitive gaze turns inward on the sinewy Latin-tinged groove of “No Mas,” she remains resolved “to love ourselves fully.” Built from a walking bassline and clanging hand percussion, “Bread Out of Stone” never rises above a simmer to convey the message of resilience in the face of oppression. The shrieking, flailing properties of free jazz are often interpreted as unbridled anger, rising as it did during the heights of the Civil Rights era and inner-city unrest. And while Irreversible Entanglements draws on that tradition, they aren’t merely mimicking an older version of jazz. They are making it resonate now, emphasizing it as a music of ritual, much like Ayewa’s other loves, like gospel and blues. It conveys all of the urgency of her raw, earlier work now across a greater vista, untethered by time yet wholly in the present.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their debut, the art-punk legends had already arrived at the tunefully agitated sound they’d carry through their career, but weren’t yet attempting to craft a major statement.

Talking Heads 77

Contrary to the way they sounded, Talking Heads were not in a hurry. David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Frantz had no particular plan to play music together when they moved to New York City after the dissolution of Frantz and Byrne’s band back in Providence, where all three had attended the Rhode Island School of Design. That lasted until Frantz and Weymouth saw the Ramones at CBGB shortly after they arrived—the kind of downtown show a couple of broke art-school graduates might wander into in late 1974. Still buzzing, Frantz, the drummer, convinced Byrne, the singer-guitarist, to give it another go. But they didn’t have a bassist in New York, and they couldn’t find one they liked.
Rather than settle and start playing shows quickly, they decided that Weymouth could do it—never mind that she’d never touched a bass before. She bought one on layaway and set about learning, listening to records by pioneering hard rocker Suzi Quatro and receiving occasional words of encouragement from free jazz legend Don Cherry, who happened to live in the same building, down the street from CBGB, where the newly minted trio rented a loft for $250 a month. Talking Heads practiced for six months before they were ready for their first gig: at CB’s, in June 1975, opening for the Ramones. Another two years passed before they recorded and released their debut album. They had a big future ahead of them. Why rush?
During those two years, they developed their music and career carefully. They added a fourth member in keyboardist-guitarist Jerry Harrison, formerly of the Modern Lovers, to fill out their spindly early sound. They turned down one record deal, always waiting for the right fit. They immersed themselves in the profuse richness of music and art that New York made available at the time: dancing to disco and salsa, rubbing elbows with avant-garde improvisers like Cherry and composers like Philip Glass, jamming with Arthur Russell, who almost got Harrison’s seat in the final lineup. And they brought it all with them as they clawed their way to the center of the new thing called punk rock that was happening at CBGB.
Talking Heads 77 feels both like the culmination of the band’s days as downtown New York darlings and the primordial origin of their late-’70s-early-’80s masterpieces. They were already accomplished enough that Rolling Stone opened its review by noting how long they’d taken to record an album, and Talking Heads 77 shows it, expressing an arch, agitated, and abundantly tuneful sensibility belonging entirely to them. If they had gone the way of their less durable CB’s scene peers—say, the Dictators, or the Shirts—and broken up soon after, it might have been viewed as a one-and-done record collector classic today. But they didn’t. Alongside its ingenuity, Talking Heads 77 also exists as a mere glimmer of potential, a fascinating prelude to a few of the most visionary albums ever recorded.
The band’s curiously multivalent relationship with pop music was already being negotiated. Across 11 songs, Talking Heads aspire to pop’s communal uplift while also creating distance from the genuine article. A few seconds into “Uh Oh, Love Comes to Town”— cymbal crashes, four chords ascending toward frenzy, the rhythm locking in—and we’ve arrived indisputably at the Talking Heads sound. Frantz plays like an R&B session drummer with a gun held to his head, just a little too edgy and insistent. Weymouth is bouncy and melodic, with no trace of a beginner’s tentativeness. A gleeful steel pan solo appears from nowhere, an early sign of the band’s disinterest in rock orthodoxy. Byrne yelps, proclaims, and carries on conversations with himself.
As he would again and again, he addresses human connection in the stilted language of an atomized and impersonal society. He frets that falling in love might cause him to “neglect my duties,” as a stockbroker might make a bad investment—so concerned with performing his role that love becomes an incursion, an obstacle toward getting work done. Crucially, however, “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town” is not black-witted satire. It may be a postmodern send-up of a love song, but it’s also a love song. The rhythm section does a stiff imitation of the Funk Brothers, but they still lay down a pretty good groove for dancing. Parsing the blend of sincerity and irony in any Talking Heads song is difficult, but you never doubt their belief in the music.
For New York, 1977 was a difficult year—economic freefall, neighborhoods ravaged by arson fires, a blackout that threw the city briefly into anarchy, the shadow of a serial killer who stalked the outer boroughs the summer before—and Talking Heads 77 occasionally embodies that darkness. “Psycho Killer,” the catchiest song ever written about a sociopathic murderer, is more disquieting in footage of an early CBGB performance than it is on record, where it evolved into a campy performance of violence, turning the killer’s chilling laughter into a goofy refrain.
“No Compassion” is more mundane, and more menacing because of it, with a narrator who calmly rationalizes his own refusal to empathize with anyone. Opening with an uncharacteristically hard-rocking riff and lurching between two drastically different tempos, it feels like a last vestige of affinity with the punk scene’s heavier and more nihilistic tendencies. Still, its message probably shouldn’t be taken at face value. “So many people have their problems/I’m not interested in their problems,” Byrne moans at one point, a rich sentiment coming from a guy beset by problems on all sides and eager to tell you about it, whose response to the joys of new love is a resounding “uh oh.”
These moments of intensity arise as occasional spasms across an otherwise upbeat and approachable album. At times, Talking Heads ‘77 seems to leapfrog the stormy minimalism the band would pursue across the trio of Brian Eno collaborations that followed this album, and instead offer a budget approximation of the pancultural dance party they threw on 1983’s Speaking in Tongues. Talking Heads ‘77 abounds with ecstatic rhythms and bright sonic details: a honky-tonk piano disguised as a disco bassline on “The Book I Read”; mallets and Latin percussion building toward a sultry sax refrain on “First Week / Last Week … Carefree”; a toylike synthesizer on “Don’t Worry About the Government,” a song whose cheeriness in the face of alienation is both heartening and unsettling. The Talking Heads of ‘77 come off like enthusiastic collagists rather than master sculptors: these sounds are thrilling on their own, but they don’t always cohere with the holism of later albums.
On “Tentative Decisions,” Byrne engages in a one-man call-and-response, switching between his usual whine and a cartoonishly stentorian low register, simulating the interplay of lead and backing vocalists on any number of old pop and soul records. This was a new kind of self-awareness for rock bands, who by the mid-’70s were steeped in decades of pop history, and anxiously searching for their own place within it. Talking Heads articulated that self-awareness without ever sounding smug or lapsing into parody, twisting pop’s stock gestures into new shapes while maintaining their core musical appeal. It was a feat no one had accomplished in quite the same way before them, and no one would repeat in quite the same way. No one except the Talking Heads, that is: Byrne would closely replicate the “Tentative Decisions” vocal arrangement on the chorus of “Slippery People,” from Speaking in Tongues. But by 1983, he had an actual chorus of slick-sounding backing singers—the distance between Talking Heads and the rest of the world growing smaller, but never collapsing entirely.
After its tense final chorus, “Tentative Decisions” explodes into the most jubilant stretch of music on Talking Heads ‘77, an instrumental coda with a four-on-the-floor drumbeat, congas tapping at the edges, and high-stepping piano from Harrison—all of it repeating with minimal variation as the song fades out. More than anything, it sounds like house music, a genre that wouldn’t come along for a few years, but would eventually leave a seismic imprint on pop. Talking Heads stumble into the resemblance on “Tentative Decisions,” and stumble quickly out of it. Still, in 1977, they didn’t need to rush toward the future. They were already there.