On her second album, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter trades her off-kilter pop arrangements for straightforward, unfussy compositions.

Roach

On Roach, the sophomore album from Miya Folick, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter grounds her quarter-life crisis in the banality of everyday objects: cigarette lighters, medication, coffee slurped through a plastic straw. These items radiate a noble quality; they are Folick’s reliable companions, something to grasp as she staggers through bad habits and unhealthy relationships. Produced alongside indie hitmakers like Max Hershenow and Gabe Wax, Folick’s songs remain spry and sun-drenched, even as she suffers spiritual ambivalence and ultimately learns that being alone is a fortifying rite of passage. The imagery on Roach is precise and captivating, but the arrangements and production feel reluctant compared with the eclectic pop of Folick’s 2018 debut Premonitions.
If Roach seems to be narrated by two distinct people—one who is sturdy and self-assured, and another who buckles at the slightest disapproving wince—it might be because roughly half of these songs were written when Folick was a little younger. “Oh God,” “Bad Thing,” “Nothing to See,” “Cartoon Clouds,” “2007,” and “Ordinary” were released last year on Folick’s 2007 EP, her first collection of new material since Premonitions. This earlier suite of songs functions as a frame of reference for Folick’s arc—a series of hurdles to overcome. On the spare “Nothing to See,” she spills out a devastating account of soured love over scratched acoustic strings. As her partner chats up 19-year-olds on the internet, Folick contorts herself in order to compete: “I’ve been trying to change the way I look so you like what you see/I’ve been losing weight so I can wear these Dolls Kill jeans,” she sings.
As if that self-flagellation wasn’t enough, on “2007,” she confesses to a lifelong discomfort with her own body. “I’m a little girl with a woman’s past/I’ve never gotten used to having tits and ass,” she sings, synth strobes glowing beneath the surface. These songs are recontextualized on Roach,  as Folick takes stock of her insecurities and tries her best to banish them.
Steering away from the off-kilter arrangements of Premonitions, she expresses her awakening in straightforward, unfussy compositions. On the feisty pop-punk cut “Get Out of My House,” Folick sounds like a woman reborn, someone who’s finally embraced the pleasures of her own presence. “I love being on my own without you/Taking off my clothes without you,” she yelps over muted power chords and frothy crash cymbals. “Thought I needed your glow/Needed you to be home/But I’m better off alone/Woo!” You can almost picture Folick bouncing around the living room, joyfully chucking her partner’s record collection out of the window, disc by disc.
On the downtempo “Drugs or People,” Folick basks in isolation after ditching a party—a recurring theme in her work. She practically whispers her favorite scheme, the Irish goodbye: “I’ll go home and turn on SVU/Drink my tea and touch me like it’s you.” After exorcizing an ex from her apartment, Folick is free to luxuriate in solitude, but she hasn’t cured herself of anxiety outright. On “Cockroach” and “Tetherball,” Folick breaks from Zen-like self-sufficiency, picking up a scalpel to vivisect her flaws. The former is a hushed electro-pop lullaby propelled by skittering drum machines and kalimba-like synth patterns. Folick’s gentle delivery, almost childlike, make lines like “I’m a fucking cockroach” scratch like gnawed fingernails. “Tetherball” spells out Folick’s self-loathing in tighter scope. She compares her reckless nature to the titular orb—“swinging till it’s all tangled up”—and to an eight ball of cocaine, leaving smears of white on her tabletop. In these moments, solitude can be a liability.
Like all of her work, these songs emphasize Folick’s innate ear for sweet and vulnerable melodies. She even inserts occasional textures to subvert that beauty elsewhere on the album—a queasy sax solo on “Mommy;” a warped synth on “Shortstop.” But these details whet the appetite for something stranger; you wonder what Folick would discover if she plunged deeper into experimentation. Despite their detailed imagery and alluring melodies, the songs on Roach are ultimately less complex than Folick’s earlier work. A track like “Cartoon Clouds” drifts on an undeniable pop hook, but like much of the album, its production (muted textures, trap snares) is a little thin. The record fails to make use of Folick’s versatile pipes; she sits at a breathy mid-range during most tracks, smack between the guttural depths and spire-heights she hit on Premonitions.
That simplicity might be a thematic choice. Her greatest pop epiphany occurs on the sparkling anthem “So Clear,” when Folick gets off of the couch and heads outdoors. “I’m sun and sea/So suddenly/So clear to me,” she sings, her soprano sharpened to pinpoint precision. It might be a simple solution, even a temporary one, but Folick is happy to walk in the light while it’s shining.


The Seattle scuzz-punk pioneers deliver a grave diagnosis of a festering societal condition.

Digital Garbage

There are several readily available metrics that can help determine just how doomed our world truly is: increasing temperatures, rising ocean levels, species extinction rates, and so forth. But there is a less visible, arguably more accurate measure of gauging whether we’re flat out fucked: those moments when Mudhoney get political. While they’re never lacking in agitation and spite, the Seattle scuzz-punk pioneers tend to direct their ire at more, fish-in-a-barrel targets: posers, douchebags, themselves. But you know things in the world are really getting bad whenever Mudhoney remove tongue from cheek to deliver a grave diagnosis of a festering societal condition, be it the rise of evangelical extremism or neocon war pigs. And, in the never-ending shit show that is 2018, that latent impulse has been rudely re-awakened: Mudhoney’s latest album, Digital Garbage, feels less like a collection of songs than a news-saturated social-media feed filled with all the profane polemics of a 2 a.m. drunk-Tweet.
Earlier, this year, Mudhoney celebrated its 30th-anniversary by releasing LiE, a career-spanning live compilation that reified the timeless quality of their snot-nosed noise. Digital Garbage, on the other hand, is an album with no greater desire than to be dated as soon as possible—because that would at least be an encouraging sign that we’ve emerged from the world of shit in which this record is steeped. As the title suggests, Digital Garbage is Mudhoney’s comment on life in the internet age, though it’s most concerned with the insidious offline side effects of unfettered information dissemination. By Mudhoney standards, Digital Garbage’s relentless topicality practically makes it their first true concept album.
Mudhoney are hardly the only band fretting about the fate of humanity these days, but they are the only band with Mark Arm, whose sneering presence ensures that even the most woke proclamations will be in gloriously bad taste. Take the garage-rocker “Paranoid Core,” whose breathless stream of dog-whistled outrage—“Robots and aliens stealing jobs, they’re bringing drugs, they’ll rape your mom!/Beware the city’s dazzling lights where dykes are waiting to steal your wife!”—renders it a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” directed at InfoWars wackos. And as “Please Mr. Gunman” illustrates, dark days inevitably yield the blackest of humour, with Arm requesting that the titular shooter at least have the decency to mow him down “in church.” That may seem like an especially twisted way to commemorate the victims of Charleston; for Mudhoney, it’s a suitably absurd response to an absurd nation where even the most sacred public spaces aren’t safe from assault-rifle rampages.
But even Arm’s most acidic lyrics are tempered by some of the band’s tidiest performances to date. After spending much of 2013’s Vanishing Point fully inhabiting the role of aging cranks waging war on the kidz, Digital Garbage sounds more relaxed in its dad-punk skin. With few exceptions (like the Bad Seeds-style ICE-age lament “Night and Fog”), the spirit here is loose and playful, more Back in the USA than Kick Out the Jams. Arm and guitarist Steve Turner’s usual toxic-sludge fuzz is molded into more refined riffs and arrangements; look past the shotgunned guitar blasts and anti-religion rants of “21st Century Pharisees” and you’ll find a surprisingly soothing synth line holding it all together.
Still, even when compared to Mudhoney’s typical anti-pop, Digital Garbage makes few concessions to melodic accessibility, with Arm’s verbal splatter often forsaking such formalities as verse/chorus structure or rhyme schemes in favor of bluntly unsubtle diatribes. The album hits its manic peak with “Prosperity Gospel,” a rapid-fire inventory of late capitalism’s most odious traits (“Price-gouge medicine!/Let them eat death!/Get rich!/You win!”) that ends with a juvenile yet totally cathartic “fuck off!” But the track finds an unlikely sequel in “Messiah’s Lament,” wherein Arm gets to play the role of Jesus Christ, frowning upon the money-grubbing conservatives who like to thump the bible but seemingly pay no mind to the charity preached within. “Look at what they’re doing in my name,” Arm moans, as the song floats off in an acoustic psychedelic sway. It’s an uncharacteristically wistful turn, both in the context of this otherwise enraged album and Mudhoney’s entire muckraking career. But, thirty years after sardonically begging Jesus to take him to a higher place, the least Arm can do is sincerely return the favour.


The Norwegian pop singer’s second album never met a problem it couldn’t solve by the first chorus. It’s a feel-good formula of uncomplicated emotions and easy endings.

How to Let Go

There’s a certain kind of pop song that plays at gay clubs that you don’t really hear anywhere else. You know the type: Punchy, vaguely European, empowering in a totally uncomplicated way—songs like Ava Max’s “My Head & My Heart” or Rita Ora’s “Bang Bang,” good enough to dance to and catchy enough to sing along with, but which mostly serve to fill time between “Dancing on My Own” and “Stronger.” For better or for worse, Norwegian pop singer Sigrid excels at this specific sort of banger: Her new album, How to Let Go, features at least three of them. It’s a useful talent—“gay club filler” is an entirely valid, and I would argue vital, category of pop song. But as How to Let Go proves, true neutrality is hardly a solid foundation for a career as a pop star, and, for the most part, Sigrid is working with little else.
Sigrid has always been something of a blank slate; initially, it was part of her appeal. Her debut album, 2019’s Sucker Punch, was emblematic of a new crop of “real girl” major-label pop stars clad in casual fits and sporting natural-look makeup but largely selling the same kind of paint-by-numbers girlboss pop as their catsuit-wearing counterparts. Nestled among moments of faux-rebellion like “Don’t Kill My Vibe,” though, were a couple of real gems: ecstatic, smile-through-the-tears Eurodance songs like “Don’t Feel Like Crying” and “Strangers” that suggested that, were her sound to become little less conventional, Sigrid could one day emerge as a natural heir to Robyn.
How to Let Go, disappointingly, stymies that thought. On this album Sigrid might actually be described as an anti-Robyn—a pop star who trades exclusively in uncomplicated emotions and easy endings, who has seemingly lost any sense for lyrical tension. On nearly every song, Sigrid introduces some kind of problem (she’s lost her sense of self, she’s scared to move away from home, and so on) only to solve it by the first chorus, usually through embracing her own flaws or, occasionally, simply looking on the bright side.
Opener “It Gets Dark” typifies the ease with which Sigrid moves through the world on How to Let Go. “I’ve never ever been this far away from home/And all alone/It gets dark,” she sings over booming, stadium-pop drums, before promptly getting over it: “It gets dark/So I can see the stars.” By the time the interminably dim-witted Bring Me the Horizon collaboration “Bad Life” rolls around nine songs later, metaphor has gone out the window: “It’s just a bad day, not a bad life.” Over and over, these songs present sadness or discomfort as problems to be solved, rather than feelings to interrogate or even just sit with. Although Sigrid sings each line as if it’s eye-openingly profound, anyone looking for depth on How to Let Go will quickly find themselves in the shallow end.
This feel-good formula—the suggestion that you can simply feel better by, like, loving yourself—isn’t inherently bad: It’s what makes Sigrid’s uptempo tracks so compelling. “Mirror,” although an undeniable retread of “Don’t Feel Like Crying,” is lush and anthemic, and while its chorus of “I love who I see looking at me in the mirror” is far from revolutionary, it’s deeply effective when set to a triumphant, string-adorned disco beat. (It doesn’t hurt that, overall, the production on How to Let Go feels a little more textured than anything on Sucker Punch, which still isn’t saying much.) “Mirror” lets its catchphrase-y hook exist as a catchphrase; there’s no unearned pretension or desperate attempt at depth. The hypnotic, guitar-led “A Driver Saved My Night,” about hearing a great song in an Uber, is even better: Recalling ABBA at their weirdest, it’s a song that manages to make empowerment its muse without beating a listener over the head with it. These songs, as well as the similarly fun friendship-breakup track “Burning Bridges,” work because they’re not pretending to be anything other than fun, easily digestable pop—in a way, they know that they’re gay club filler tracks, and they’re content with that. It’s a lesson befitting a Sigrid song: It’s better to accept who you are than strive for something that you’re not.


Can there exist a fate worse than mediocrity for a band that's had a taste of greatness? How about ...

Summer Sun

Can there exist a fate worse than mediocrity for a band that's had a taste of greatness? How about for a band that's enjoyed perhaps one of the longest runs of greatness in indie rock's brief history? Yo La Tengo formed just as indie rock-as-we-know-it was getting its wings in the mid-80s. Sure, they didn't get really great until Painful dropped in 1993, pointing to a turn away from alt-country dynamics and toward dronier organ-rock and guitar freakouts-- but they sure as shit haven't let up since, kicking out consistently remarkable full-lengths roughly every three years.
2000's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out was the first sign that they might be running out of ideas. Though an incredibly strong record from any band that deep into a rock music career, and packed with touching breakup songs and beautiful, semi-experimental atmospheres, the across-the-map diversity the band had become known for was notably absent. Unfortunately, Summer Sun confirms suspicions, and, sadder still, marks Yo La Tengo's first album since their 1986 debut, Ride the Tiger, to lack invention altogether.
Summer Sun is pleasant, if nothing else, but that's such a loaded word for an album that clearly aspires to (and ought to be) so much more than it accomplishes. At least if the album had been completely wretched, it could have been dismissed as an unwitting experiment or some such foolishness. But it ain't, and that's the shame of it all; Summer Sun consistently reaches a height of disposability so static and homogenous that it simply must be dispersed over an hour's worth of music. This isn't the sound of one of the most prominent institutions in independent music maturing; it's more like decomposing.
It hurts to write that, but pipe the breezy, wistful blue skies of "Let's Be Still" through tinny elevator speakers, or the sound system of your local Wal-Mart, and it's nothing but indie-muzak. Call it a natural progression from And Then Nothing's moody, twilit explorations of texture and atmosphere, but progression or not, last year's instrumental The Sounds of the Sounds of Science had more creativity and dynamism in a single track than the entirety of Summer Sun, and that was a score to fucking nature documentaries-- never the most fertile ground for inspiration.
For a band that once thrived on its stunning eclecticism, as well as a masterful assimilation of moods and styles, to produce an album that's merely pretty is tragic. Though, even if it smacks of gross underachievement, there is something to be said for the competence and simplicity of a record that understands how to gracefully fade into the background. Inasmuch as none of Summer Sun's songs aim for anything more than hushed, dulcet melodies and passive meditations, most of them basically hit their targets. The same smooth, rolling bass, delicate guitar lines, and airy percussion morph almost imperceptibly from the blue skies and bright eyes of "Beach Party Tonight" to the ghostly call of the Big Star cover "Take Care" and all intermediary points. Additional instrumentation of all stripes (strings, brass, piano, and the list goes on) seems added as necessary for cosmetic purposes, and the results are rarely less than soothing, if unremarkable.
Truly memorable instances are few and far between, and often for the worse; the standout tracks on Summer Sun are primarily the beat-poetry jazz drone of "Nothing But You and Me" and the highly dubious post-fusion wankery of "Georgia vs. Yo La Tengo". It says something, I guess, about the relatively constant quality to be found here that the most notable tracks are the weaker ones, but that's kind of sad, isn't it? Who wants to remember an album for the lowlights?
If any bright spot is to be found on Summer Sun, it belongs to Georgia Hubley, whose gorgeous, dusky alto comes closer to lighting up a room than anything else on this tepid body. Her voice alone stands counter to the various missteps and cardboard cutouts, and alone brings "Today Is the Day" and "Take Care" closest to genuinely intimate, affecting glimpses in the midst of tunes that are all too willing to remain at arm's length. In particular, "Take Care", as the finale to Summer Sun, steeps the preceding hour of beatific, automatic smiles in a beautiful melancholy, like a knowing and regretful farewell. I hope that's not the case, but if this is truly the next step in Yo La Tengo's move toward some abstract concept like artistic maturity, I don't think I want to stick around for the conclusion.


The fiercely ambitious Chicago rapper turns in a scattered, familiar collection, ditching the epic scope of his past releases and sticking to what works.

Elephant in the Room

Mick Jenkins has spent his career holding a mirror to America and delving into the furthest corners of his soul. The loquacious Chicago rapper is fiercely ambitious when it comes to the album as an art form. We’re talking about a man who tried to define the meaning of love on The Healing Component, walk the path of Gil Scott-Heron on the intensely personal Pieces of a Man, and submerge himself into the conceptual depths of The Water(s). On his latest album, Elephant in the Room, Jenkins ditches the epic scope and thematic cohesion of those projects for something shorter and more scattered. By and large, he sticks to what has worked in the past: soft beats, jerky raps, intimate writing, and big-picture examination.
As ever with Jenkins, some of the most notable cuts are the societal critiques. “Thing You Could Die for If Doing While Black” is startling in its forthrightness. Jenkins drops his complex cadences and, in a low-toned voice, lists basic activities that can put him in danger with authorities. His lyrics range from mild offenses, like speeding and casual weed smoking, to the simple act of existing: “Might wanna go for a jog/Might wanna sleep in my car/Might wanna sleep in my bed.” The beat is built from despondent electric piano chords and, later, a bluesy guitar riff that sounds like something out of a noir cop thriller, adding another ripple to this probe on police violence.
On “Reflection,” Jenkins discusses his relationship with his father and his lingering feelings of abandonment: “He 6'2", I’m 6'5", he used to make me feel small/ I used to think he was strong, now I know he just weak.” It taps into the same hurt and resentment that Tyler, the Creator portrayed on the more hostile “Answer” back in 2013, and it reaffirms Jenkins as one of rap’s most interesting portrayers of great, but common, pain.
Not every concept is as strong. “D.U.I.” confusingly repurposes the titular abbreviation to critique the role of influencers. In the lyrics, Jenkins airs grievances toward those who want to take advantage of his fame for their own ends. The writing doesn’t land and he sounds more mildly pissed off than righteously furious. It was an idea best left in his notebook.
Jenkins still sounds most content when he simply raps about girls and stuff: Produced by lophiile, “Gucci Tried to Tell Me”—presumably a reference to Gucci Mane’s Noisy Raps interview—is jazz rap in the lineage of Slum Village, and Jenkins fills the lyrics with sweet nothings: “I’m no Randy Moss, but I'll catch your feels one day.” And with its clicky percussion and double-bass bumps, “Truffles” is in the lineage of older cuts such as “Pressed for Time (Crossed My Mind),” offering further evidence of Jenkins’ penchant for beats sparse on elements but unusual in their sense of rhythm. These highlights cohere into another solid project, but at this stage in Jenkins’ career, adding some new parts to his formula feels pertinent. Getting into a groove is cool, but staying in that groove for too long can become a detriment.

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On her fourth album, the Welsh singer Cate Le Bon establishes a strange, almost Dadaist lyrical scheme to make sense of some unnamed life rupture that's left her gasping.

Crab Day

Cate Le Bon's young niece did not take kindly to the idea of April Fool's Day. Instead, she declared, she would be celebrating Crab Day, and inaugurated an annual tradition of drawing crustaceans. And why the heck not? The budding surrealist realized early on that nonsense is often the best response to nonsense, that the constructs we use to prop up our lives are often totally arbitrary.
Named for her niece's flash of genius, Le Bon's fourth album features a song where the Welsh songwriter adopts an eerie falsetto and sings that she was born on the wrong day. A few years ago, her mum unearthed her birth certificate, and admitted to her daughter that they'd had her birthday a day off for nearly three decades. That sense of misaligned reality is the guiding force on Crab Day, where Le Bon establishes a strange, almost Dadaist lyrical scheme to make sense—or make more nonsense—of some unnamed life rupture that's left her grasping. Her perception is muddled, but in her solemn voice, everything appears clear: "I'm gonna cry in your mouth," she sings, like that's a perfectly sensible thing to do.
Last year, Le Bon released Hermits on Holiday, a collaborative album with White Fence's Tim Presley under the name Drinks. It pushed her usual pastoral post-punk into hairy, deep-fried territory; the only rule of its creation was that there were no rules. Le Bon has said that it revived her creativity going into Crab Day, which she recorded with her regular Welsh comrades Huw Evans (aka H. Hawkline) and Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo), and Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa. Things aren't as freeform here, but in the absence of her lovely, weathered old melodies, nothing feels quite as it should be; the sound is as precisely off-kilter as touch-typing while gazing out of the window, then looking at the screen to find you've been one key to the left all along. From neatly squawking guitar, curiously skittish marimba, and wry saxophone parps, LeBon forges a chaotic cubist cabaret.
It's unsettling, but Le Bon's sensitivity to shifts in tone and pace, and the strange interplay between her players, make Crab Day feel welcoming, like an old house whose creepy anachronisms become a strange comfort. A good half of its songs wed burbling guitar parts to stark, straight-shooting rhythms, and verses landslide into choruses where her vocals cascade like sycamore leaves, but they establish and normalize Le Bon's uncanny universe, and aren't without their individual touches: the feral cat guitar mewl of "What's Not Mine;" what could be a maniac bashing on a metal trap door in the midst of "I Was Born on the Wrong Day."
Crab Day's primitivism hasn't totally sacrificed her lovely, lilting melodies, which are filled with remorse on "Love is Not Love," and sad acceptance on "What's Not Mine." And she's transmuted the overly literal aggression of "Wild," from 2013's Mug Museum, into songs that pulse with weird rushes of adrenaline. With its racing verses and ambient chorus, "Wonderful" perfectly captures both the mania and distraction of being thrown for a loop, and "We Might Revolve" makes a horror film out of needling marimba and Le Bon's observation that "all the towns are miniature," which she delivers with the stern paranoia of a stoner certain they've seen something sinister in their domestic surroundings.
As much as Le Bon's expression on Crab Day feels abstract and alienating, it also speaks to a deep intimacy—perhaps one that's been lost and provoked all this discombobulation in the first place. Mug Museum made an emotional archive out of the dirty cups she collected in her room. Here, she ascribes impenetrable significance to inanimate objects—she feels like geometry, a dirty attic, and a humid satellite in the face of a lover—but struggles to rationalize the basics of human connection: She and the subject of her address routinely look through each other, the effect like a love story pieced together through split screen. "How would I know you really swim in me?" she asks on "How Do You Know?" "How would I know to stay?"
Crab Day is a voyage into doubt led by a queasy compass, and a ringleader who's prepared to stake out uncertain territory. Le Bon always keeps you guessing, making the old traditions of guitar-oriented rock feel arbitrary, too. Her nervy assessments of the world are filled with equal parts suspense and heart, and beautifully zany riffs, where the feeling of being frayed by uncertainty comes together into a strangely comforting patchwork.


The Chicago indie-rock trio scrape away 90 percent of what goes into a guitar album and come away with something effortless and uncomplicated.

Water

Dehd are a dissent to excess. The Chicago indie-rock trio, who use a total of four instruments if a snare drum and a floor tom count as two, have grown into masters of maximizing mileage. They’re the plate of noodles that staves off hunger for hours longer than the $15 brunch. They’re the extra-puffy secondhand coat that retains more heat than the North Face winter catalog. They’re the basement unit with bumpy, self-applied caulking that stays watertight while the neighbors’ mansion floods.
On their third release, Water, Dehd scrape away 90 percent of what goes into your average good-sounding guitar album—studio enhancement, stacked parts, precision playing, any cymbal crashes whatsoever—and leave it almost entirely up to their countermelodies and some strong lyrical turns from bassist Emily Kempf and guitarist Jason Balla to carry the load. They pull it off so well that it’s almost possible to forget a crucial detail: Water is also a breakup album, written after the two singers’ long-term relationship ended—and the band went on tour anyway.
Despite the crisis that led up to it, Water feels more like a culmination than a demolition site. For Kempf and Balla, who have been tirelessly prolific in Chicago’s independent music scene for years—Balla with Accessory, Earring, and the late NE-HI and Kempf with a long list of projects that includes her current solo moniker Vail—it’s the best overall set of songs either has made. That’s partially because their music reaches a new level of meaning against the backdrop of their no-longer-romantic relationship, but Water’s lyrics don’t sound like coded words or things left unsaid. These are love songs, plain and simple, only written from the other side of the timeline, the one normally less conducive to love songs. Kempf first flips the script on “Lucky”: “Lucky to have/People in my life with the power to break my heart,” she sings, Balla’s guitar jumping in right on the word “heart,” the downbeat.
The melodic chemistry between Kempf and Balla is natural stuff, the kind that makes it easy to understand why they’d put their band ahead of their personal comfort. Kempf’s prior work often leaned towards booming synth-pop, which explains her intuition for great basslines, while Balla’s was often built around his signature elastic guitar sound—it’s flexy, but can also snap hard enough to sting. Kempf’s singing voice has more muscle; as album centerpiece “On My Side” proves, she can both yelp on-pitch and belt from the gut. Balla’s voice is a little thinner and harsher, which, on songs like the galloping “Wait,” just means it sounds really cool. Together, their parts twist up like bicolor plastic-lace lanyards. It’s effortless, uncomplicated, and never more emotionally saturated than on the sighing, reconciled “Baby.”
There’s one more important dimension to this picture, and it’s drummer Eric McGrady. Onstage, McGrady stands between his bandmates, hitting the tom with his left hand and the snare with his right, as if physically holding his two friends together—the symbolism is almost too obvious to be real. When Dehd were recently asked on local radio if writing songs together is something they’d recommend to other bandmate-exes in the same situation, McGrady chimed in with his only words in the whole interview: “No, not at all.” His presence here makes the case that there aren’t two, but three sides to every split: Don’t forget those caught in the middle. The rhythms are simple but a drum machine couldn’t replace them; the real human being standing there is the whole point. Though he doesn’t sing, he might be the easiest person to empathize with.
Water is also what you might call a good bad-speakers album: You could hear it over  speakerphone and still probably get the full effect. There’s no treasure trove of subtleties to discover, no demand for good headphones—though it works just fine on those, too. Dehd would probably take this as a compliment. As fellow Chicago musician CupcakKe once said, “Cheap shit with a rich spirit goes a long way.”


The New York City rap crew’s latest is a mansion of sweet beats and vocal textures that bring a whole new level of professional polish to their sound.

SGV1

On a recent Friday night, NYC rap clan Surf Gang hosted a free gig in an outdoor parking depot full of vacant trucks and school buses. The location had already been changed twice—once in just the last few hours before, because of police in the area—yet hundreds of fans still made it. People danced and swayed over muddy ground, while others smoked in circles or climbed on top of buses, fists in the air. The concert felt like a pocket of beauty, at once gritty and vibrant with communal warmth, and the space seemed to atmospherically capture the way Surf Gang carves wonder into dissonant music. On SGV1, the group’s producers find intoxicating ways to spin militant vocal commands and bass thuds into something that sounds idyllic.
No definitive list of Surf Gang members exists, but the core associates include producers EvilGiane (recently big-upped by Drake), Harrison, TommyToHotty, and Eera, along with vocalists BabyxSosa, Polo Perks, Moh Baretta, Casper, and Bobainee. The group mixes cloud rap vibes a la Drain Gang with the hazy bounce of plugg beats and drill’s guttural bleakness. The result: moshpit rap with a tinge of glacial glassiness, as if the soundscapes are always teetering on the edge of collapse. You can tell the MCs apart by their textures. BabyxSosa’s tone shines like a neon sign, gloriously sky-high. Polo Perks, in contrast, has the deadpan drawl of someone fed up with life. Bobainee raps like he’s just downed a cup of coffee. Moh Baretta sounds like a resigned CEO. Casper’s helium melodies whistle like icy wind over your ears.
Each rapper is individually transfixing, so when four of them link on a posse cut like album standout “Cinderella,” it feels like you’re watching the SoundCloud rap Avengers unite or some crossover episode between two hit TV shows. The transitions between performers are seamless, sometimes nonexistent; at points, they’re all vocalizing in sync like hyperactive quadruplets—one could be rapping about smoking mimosas while another is grunting and someone else warbling gibberish in the background at the same time. EvilGiane keeps everything smooth with the organizational skill of someone who obsessively slots their emails into color-coded folders. He ensures no one tramples, weaving everyone into his ebullient beat with incredible fluidity. It’s a pure rush to hear the chemistry of every vocalist gliding over and accenting each other.
The vocals are mega-boosted by the instrumentals, which are like mini-museums, full of dazzling sound sculptures and little moments of reverb-rapture that feel as delicate as they are precious. The Harrison and EvilGiane-produced “Party” rocks and gyrates with the gawky swagger of a Nam June Paik robot come alive. Eera’s “24 hrs P2” could score a Legend of Zelda level, its ambiance so lush and holographic it makes BabyxSosa’s shrill echoes sound sacred.
SGV1 brings a whole new level of professional polish to the Surf Gang sound, something you wouldn’t have anticipated from the squad members’ earlier efforts. Polo Perks’s PUNK GOES DRILL took emo hits such as the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” and flipped them into bizarrely upbeat drill that scanned more like glittering graffiti than music. Moh Baretta’s #THISISNOTADRILL diptych layered drums and barked vocals over indie rock and pop chart hits like Edward Maya & Vika Jigulina’s accordion banger “Stereo Love.” Swapping the weirdness for crystalline cloud beats, SGV1’s producers sometimes make you yearn for some of that off-the-wall experimentation, especially when the tape drags during the middle and the shiny instrumentals begin to dissolve into one glossy goop. Tunes like the barely distinguishable “In My Ear” and “Avianne” sound manufactured for a (not yet created) cloud rap version of the Pollen playlist, that infamous Spotify collection crammed with amorphously vibey indie-pop designed to appeal to the masses.
While most of the tracks revolve around flexing, a highlight, “Problems (Outro),” features Bobainee meditating on how his life has been a series of anxious predicaments. “I was down real bad, so fucked up I couldn’t get a dollar,” he laments. “I got a 1-year-old son, fuck my baby momma… Deep in thoughts, sipping drinks so I can’t think about it.” Over a more kinetic beat, his commanding vocal presence could deceive you into thinking his painful past is only a distant memory, as if he’s no longer sad about it. But the vast, crestfallen instrumental—one of two produced by the trio of EvilGiane, Eera, and Harrison—lets you feel Bobainee’s agony in ways that his deep tone simply can’t provide. The beat sounds as if it’s crying.
Anchored by EvilGiane and the other members’ euphoric production, SGV1 is a mansion of sweet beats and vocal textures. Husky whispers, slow-motion chirrups, reverb-laden echoes that flutter into nothingness. It’s the rare rap album where the vocalists and producers feel like they’re nearly always working in lockstep, a triumph even more impressive considering how many there are. And it feels like a huge moment for New York rap fans, the kids who came out to the show in droves that night. There hasn’t been such an exciting new act in the city since Brooklyn drill pioneer Pop Smoke. Throughout the concert, feverish chants of “Surf Gang, Surf Gang!” soared across the landscape and felt something like a collective exhale.

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As much as the Detroit dance producer’s aesthetic may feel familiar, the improvisatory results plunge into a whole new tributary of club rhythm.

Wuddaji

There are hard truths to be gained from burst myths. So it was in 2017, when I interviewed the respected Chicago DJ/producer Ron Trent about the birth of “deep house,” a dance-music genre often reduced to a palette of muted rhythms and moody chords. Trent, regarded as one of the sound’s 1990s architects, and one of Theo Parrish’s childhood friends, dismissed deep house’s genre attributes. It was, he told me, “a phrase we used back in the day to describe music that [Chicago house originators] Frankie [Knuckles] and Ronnie [Hardy] were playing. People had this perspective that house music was electronic shit, but that was considered eccentric. The stuff that Ronnie and Frankie were playing was disco and jazz and underground stuff. So we called that deep house.”
Trent’s insight unpacks the real-life cultural meaning of a phrase that dance music’s (mostly white) terminologists have diluted with their own projections, accentuating stylistic differences rather than celebrating the related virtues of house, jazz, disco, funk, techno, and other Black musical forms. His factual, broader definition of deep house also serves as an important point of reference for Parrish’s Wuddaji, the Detroit producer’s sixth solo album, on which he updates this original notion of “underground stuff” for 2020.
If one of the through lines of Theo’s career has been in setting the record straight—often christened deep-house royalty, he is likely to disregard the epithet as one more example of music-business glad-handing—the other has been to remain true to the spirit of dance music’s origins, even as he steers down rivers of his own choosing. Yet as much as Wuddaji’s dominant aesthetic of Rhodes piano, synths, and percussion may sound familiar, the results plunge into a whole new tributary of club rhythm.
Much of Wuddaji feels improvised, as though it had been made up (or at least mixed) on the spot. It’s foolhardy to call these meticulously layered hues “jazz,” even if the interplay between the keys and the mutating swing moves like a kaleidoscopic funk duo session. Yet this “live” energy, in which minimal elements are constantly in conversation with one another—in handcrafted rather than digitally synched detail—is this music’s distinguishing feature.
“Radar Detector,” for instance, is built around bass synth and a skittish broken beat; low-end echo ghosts the mix, and a shaker occasionally destabilizes the cadence further. Meanwhile, Rhodes and a right-handed keyboard line sing out short phrases before one begins to squeal deliriously. The mood is forceful, mirroring the forward drive of the title; the track’s internal logic emanates the pure id of Parrish at the controls. “Purple Angry Birds” and “All Your Boys Are Biters” are almost wholly percussive affairs, with every element focused on rhythm. The former features an insistent kick camouflaged by the faintest residue of a snare hit and is pockmarked with electronic tones that might represent the title’s subjects; an elegiac piano arrives about 90 seconds before its 10-plus minutes expire. The latter is simpler yet, a drum-programming flex that could easily be a live, one-take MPC masterpiece. They are Wuddaji’s most “techno” moments, but techno as performed by a drumline.
This on-the-fly quality is in keeping with a lot of the recordings Parrish has been involved in since the release of 2014’s exultant American Intelligence. It was there on his four “Gentrified Love” EPs, which featured collaborations with Detroit players who move fluidly and expertly through Black rhythm and improvisation, including trumpeter John Douglas, keyboardist Amp Fiddler and the producer Waajeed, and on his production for a Melbourne soul-jazz quintet featuring keyboardist Silent Jay and the Hiatus Kaiyote rhythm section. Jazz has also been a central element of Parrish’s legendary DJ marathons throughout his career, whether as content (spinning records by everyone from Gil-Scott Heron and Brian Jackson to Incognito to the Black Jazz label) or as form (treating the mixer as his improvisational tool as skillfully as anybody in the game). In lieu of bringing together musicians in a shared space in real time, Wuddaji practices solo improvisations learned partially from those DJ sets—gathering sounds from a long memory, fitting them into a new context. There are times when the interlocking rhythms—programmed drums, percussion samples, percussive audio fabrications—speak in language patterns as though across time.
Two notable deviations reinforce Parrish’s commitment to musical representations of Black joy and resilience. From its name on down, “HennyWeed BuckDance” is the set’s most populist party tune, dicing and looping bluesy electric guitar against vamping electric piano and chugging, bass-heavy drums; slinking along at 106 BPM, it is a groove by any other name and a worthy candidate for every history of soul. “This Is for You,” with vocals by co-writer Maurissa Rose, is something else entirely, one of those instantly classic anthems of simultaneous uplift and strength, melancholy and loss, aligning itself not with the actions of exceptionalists but with everyday heroic toil. Its four-chord melody reinforces the repetition of daily struggle, the beat building and building, and Rose’s voice, at times pleading, at others full of graceful fortitude, balances all the ideas embedded inside a life.
A single originally released in 2019, “This Is for You” could have easily been a record created for the summer of 2020. But it only seems like Wuddaji was made with our immediate times in mind; Parrish’s vision of Black music exists on a much longer timeline. “I do feel that music coming from the diasporic community, it needs to carry weight,” he said in an interview last year. “Whether that weight is a reflection on the experience. Whether that’s weight in terms of it freeing you from what you have to deal with. Or weight that’s talking about direct lessons about how to survive this shit.” That weight was in the records that Frankie and Ronnie played, and it is here as well. I don’t think you can get any deeper.

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Sixth album from the doom metal duo nearly matches their ferocious live power, and features assistance from noise icon John Wiese and experimental guitarist and percussionist Oren Ambarchi.

Black One

People fixate, but there's more to Sunn 0))) than robes and the Earth and AMP-derived name. Not only does the band's dark, heavy, theatrically composed sixth album, Black One, transcend the duo's previous material, overall it's one of the strongest records of the past year: Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley have unleashed a doom'n'gloom masterpiece.
Ultra cinematic and nearly matching Sunn 0)))'s live power, Black One's seven tracks will even please those who can't deal with uninterrupted drone. Getting assistance from key friends, including harsh noise icon John Wiese, the band overlaps smaller drone bits with the usual gargantuan exercises-- its staged like corpsepainted Noh drama. Opener "Sin Nanna"-- on which the wonderful Australian experimental guitarist and percussionist Oren Ambarchi handles all the instruments-- is the mood setter, and is named for a moon god who sported a lapis lazuli beard and rode a winged bull. It's followed by "It Took the Night to Believe" which transitions the listener into the longer works. The six-minute piece begins in media res, as if the recording tape hits a snag and snaps back into action. Power chords drop in quick succession over smoky bass drone; the brutal ghost cry comes courtesy of U.S.-based black metal favorite Leviathan, aka Wrest. In some regards it's Sunn 0)))'s most straightforward metal song to date, though its series of ebb/flows is anything but typical.
The bulk of the album-- each of the final five tracks are at least eight minutes long, with four of them moving past the 10:00 mark-- begins with an extended cover of Immortal's "Cursed Realms (of the Winterdemons)". Here Xasthur aka Malefic is cast asunder, grumbling about ravens, cursed realms, and the central thesis that "the face of the earth/ Will be to know black silence." It's more than two times as long as the original and built largely around Malefic's sub-tonal scowls and bleeding feedback drone.
Then comes the more old-school Sunn 0)))- and Earth-sounding "Orthodox Caveman", 10 minutes of pure drone made flesh with Wiese's digital noise and Ambarchi on drums. "CandleGoat", which O'Malley says is "an evolution of an artwork collaboration with Savage Pencil," includes soft-lit ambiance at its intro courtesy of Wiese and features a gravel-voiced O'Malley on the mic.
Each piece is strong, but the album's highlight is its glacial, sprawling, anguished closer, "Báthory Erzébet". The track's a reference to Elizabeth Báthory, and likely also the Swedish black metal band her surname spawned. Báthory was an occult-friendly member of the Transylvanian royal family who is reputed to have killed hundreds of young girls. Some legends even claim she thought the lifeblood of virgins would keep her young, so she not only tortured and killed her victims but also bathed in or drank their blood. Báthory died in 1614 imprisoned in her own castle. Perhaps mirroring Báthory's lock-down, Sunn 0))) crammed Malefic in a casket (inside a Cadillac hearse) with only a microphone and his fear of small spaces. His resulting petrified, dry-bones performance and the claustrophobic recording technique should net a Grammy. Leading up to the star turn's a gentle hum throughout which Ambarchi weaves in a gong, bells, cymbal, and guitar. Then comes the teeming Anderson/O'Malley assault, announcing the most triumphant avant-rock moment in recent memory.
Okay, Anderson and O'Malley have long hair and they populate their ambient universes with some likeminded players (whether Julian Cope or Joe Preston), but there's no reason for their work to be ghettoized as some cartoonish Dungeons & Dragons dog-and-pony show. I've spoken at length to O'Malley and can say, without a doubt, that he's one of the most intelligent people I've encountered (from any walk of life) and that he and Anderson plan to continually refine and complicate both their sound and the theories they hold about musical composition. (The last person I encountered so knowledgeable and rigorous about his own work was Tony Conrad.)
With Black One, Sunn 0))) harnesses the sounds and moods of black metal, then expands its palette through meticulous experimentation and a commitment to the physicality of sound. The result is a beautiful, deep, passionate reflection of life's bleakest corners.


Australia's promising young garage rock band finally has its two best bits of minimalist guitar music issued in the States.

Eddy Current Suppression Ring: Eddy Current Suppression Ring / Primary Colours

The four members of Eddy Current Suppression Ring all worked for a vinyl pressing plant outside Melbourne, Australia. Six years ago, as their company Christmas party wound down, the four began jamming drunkenly together. They'd never penned a song or been in a band. Impromptu frontman Brendan Suppression simply ad-libbed lyrics into a tape recorder. Somewhere in there, more than just chemistry took hold. They settled on one questionable band name, an electrical circuitry term that also yielded three individual monikers: guitarist Eddy Current, drummer Danny Current and Brendan Suppression. Bassist Rob Solid held out. They released a spate of 7" singles on their own with relative ease. Then they unleashed two mighty full-lengths that until recently have never been available outside of their native Australia at the same time. Both are primal slabs of minimalist guitar music.
The "M" word might conjure images of bands falling anywhere between Wire and the White Stripes. While it's easy to detect notes of Wire, ECSR have developed an economy of sound that relies less on spiny riffs and more on an instinctual use of space. Within the clatter of each three-minute blast, Suppression is given the room to do just what he did during that Christmas party, not so much diarizing as slobbering each thought as it arrives to him. In "Cool Ice Cream", he screams for ice cream/sex over some guitar coiling and motorik bass, the end product a lot like a cuddlier, less creepy version of the Fall. And like the thrust of the Stooges, another easy reference point, that sexual drive (or template, really) lives and breathes in the dynamics as well. "Pitch a Tent" marries the same ideas to mangier soloing. When ECSR are at their best, they're working around an insistent groove, building before finally collapsing to saddle up again seconds later. There's little variation, but there needn't be. Even when the songs butt heads with one another, the melodies are pure comfort food. There isn't a weak song in the pack.
The stronger record by a hair, last year's Primary Colours is a very natural, even artfully polished extension of its predecessor. The DNA remains the same, just married with less hitches. As "Memory Lane" opens with nearly identical chopping, Suppression makes a difference by slowing his roll. Always dynamic, he presents himself here as an insightful drunk rather than just a drunk. Take the way "Wrapped Up" runs along some really beautiful ribbons of guitar melody for instance, Suppression going so far as to harmonize the equally warm refrain. "Colour Television" hits harder and with more menace than anything they've done yet, but there's a softening of edges taking place throughout, a band testing limits after having already refined them. Current in particular is able to dictate the climate, forcing the band out of the garage and suggesting they never go back.


Despite Syd tha Kid and Matt Martian's affiliation with Odd Future, the bubbly neo-soul on Purple Naked Ladies, their 2011 debut as the Internet, felt largely disconnected from the larger collective's oeuvre. On their sophomore album, Feel Good, the Internet continue along this path, sharpening their songwriting and slowly reigning in their propensity to wander.

Feel Good

"They don't know the struggles that she was raised with... so shut the fuck up," Syd tha Kyd sang last year on "She DGAF" with the sort of middle-finger-up irreverence often found in the music of her crew Odd Future. It was one of the few moments on the Internet's Purple Naked Ladies where you could draw a direct line from the bubbling neo-soul of Syd and Matt Martians to the rest of Odd Future. Outside of a few appearances from Left Brain and Mike G-- the latter of which Syd has produced for in the past-- Purple Naked Ladies felt largely disconnected from the entire OFWGKTA oeuvre, the controversial collective mentioned more out of obligation than because of any musical or ideological kinship. On their sophomore album, Feel Good, the Internet continue along this path, sharpening their songwriting and slowly reigning in their propensity to wander.
The biggest leap forward is made by Syd herself-- where in the past she would sometimes disappear into her surroundings she now takes center stage with confidence, her down pillow-soft vocals claiming the spotlight with an easy swagger. Her voice is still a delicate thing that sounds like it could blow away given the right gust, but it's able to pull off things it wasn't capable of before: the sensual come-ons of "Don'tcha" require a self-assurance Syd hadn't quite developed yet on Purple Naked Ladies, and she injects "Shadow Dance" with a been-here-before poise of someone at least a decade her senior.
She's writing hookier songs, too. "Sunset" unfurls with precision, moments of interest arriving at a steady and consistent clip, whether it's a switch-up in the track's loping groove or a colorful melodic run from Syd. Elsewhere, "Runnin'" finds its sweet spot early on and then spends the rest of its duration playing around with the angle and strength of the light being shone at it. And although the Internet are still interested primarily in fusing the proggier elements of experimental jazz with the patient warmth of neo-soul, there are fewer moments here that'll have you glancing at your watch, an occurrence that happened a little too often on their debut.
But while Feel Good finds the Internet latching onto hooks with greater frequency, they haven't completely excised their tendency to meander into jam session territory where the music loses most of the direction. The album is never aimless-- they always succeed in setting a pleasant, vibe-heavy atmosphere where detours are allowed and exploration is encouraged-- but at times it does feel like the Internet still haven't figured out how to identify what to keep and what to leave out.
There's a proficiency at work on Feel Good that's undeniably impressive-- it's an album full of musicians who can play and they approach this stuff with an endearing alacrity and a willingness to let Syd do more this time around that will pay dividends on future records. She's still got room to improve where lyrics are concerned, with generic clunkers such as "I'm a fiend for your attention" and "You're beautiful, you brighten up my day" exposing her as the fresh-faced 21-year-old she is. But an incremental improvement is still improvement, and Feel Good makes a good case that Syd, like her pals Tyler and Earl, isn't going anywhere.


On his fifth album, the Portland power-pop musician embraces a spontaneous, home-recorded approach that exudes a playful charm.

MTV

Mo Troper doesn’t care much anymore. That’s not a slight toward the Portland power-pop songwriter, but his own confession about everything aside from songwriting. “That’s the most fun part for me,” he told Paste about his fifth album, titled MTV. “So when it comes to recording, I think the first pass is usually best. The more attempts I make, the more sterile things become.” He settled into this attitude in the wake of his labored-over third album, 2020’s Natural Beauty. For its follow-up, last year's Dilettante, he took a vastly different approach: a see-what-sticks 28-track album that came across as Troper’s crack at his own Alien Lanes.
On MTV, Troper embraces spontaneous magic in a more concise way. With the exception of one song from the archives—the full-band, studio-recorded 2016 track “Play Dumb”—Troper recorded and performed the whole thing alone on an 8-track tape recorder after a long, emotionally taxing tour. MTV barely breaches half the track total of its predecessor, but it still manages to incorporate its sprawling philosophy. And while Dilettante flirted with nu metal and screamo parody, the range of these songs feels more meaningful: Even the 31-second “Tub Time” commits to its shtick of “Scott Miller resurrects himself to collaborate with the Wiggles” bathtime jingle in a way Dilettante songs like, say, “Cum on My Khakis” never approached.
When Troper gives his songs the space to breathe, the results are even more remarkable. Whether in the endearingly saccharine lead single “I Fall Into Her Arms,” with its strolling melody and cracking vocals, or “Waste Away,” with its bouncing, clap-along rhythm and airy, euphoric harmonies, Troper breezes through an array of colorful, whimsical modes, even when hinting at a suffering below the surface. “I’ll stick a rope right down my throat/And kickstart my insides,” he sings in “I’m the King of Rock ’n Roll,” before erupting into a fuzzy, swaggering guitar solo in an effort to smother his pain with bravado.
This rousing, darkly humorous anthem is right in his comfort zone, but the intimate folk of “The Only Living Goy in New York,” is more surprising. Here he invokes the hushed shakiness of Elliott Smith while addressing themes of faith and alienation. Cathartic closer “Under My Skin” is similarly stripped-down, but its approach is more cartoonishly angsty, resolving to move beyond heartbreak out of spite, like Pinkerton-era Weezer as interpreted by the Chipmunks. These disparate concepts and influences are tethered together with an unbridled playfulness, despite lyrics about puking, crying, loneliness, and romantic frustration.
When MTV threatens to become topically morose, it’s accompanied by a varispeed pitch shift, embodying the dichotomy between tongue-in-cheek mockery and raw emotional nakedness. Still, calling MTV mature would be disingenuous: Goofy asides and self-pitying lyricism are baked deep into its crust. There are occasions where Troper becomes a bit snide, as in the joyful, vitriolic insults on “No More Happy Songs.” And some of the more experimental diversions—like the chaotic jazz-math-melded meltdown “Power Pop Chat” and the loose, shambling pseudo-medley “Final Lap”—occasionally take a step past liberation into directionless. But on the whole, Troper's childishness has never been more charming, his melodies have never been sticky-sweeter, and his love of music for music’s sake has never been more apparent or inviting.


Despite the number of British bands still playing under the umbrella of post-punk this decade, there's still so much TNP get right about the sound: scraps of syncopated guitars making the barest insinuations of melody, stiff electronic beats that sound like factory noise, and a singer who barks excitedly but whose message is initially cryptic.

Beat Pyramid

Whether you're a longtime fan of Joy Division or a booster of Bloc Party, there's much you'll find familiar on the debut LP of These New Puritans. But out of all the British bands still playing under the umbrella of post-punk, there's so much that TNP get right about the sound: scraps of syncopated guitars making the barest insinuations of melody, stiff electronic beats that sound like factory noise, and singer who barks excitedly but whose message is initially cryptic. The pattern suits them well and doesn't sound derivative or dated; that may be in part to this record owing as much to its heavy, ominous beats as its guitars or melody. "Numerology (AKA Numbers)" has a bludgeoning thump driving its layered keyboards and chicken-scratch guitars, while "Doppelganger" has atmospheric effects that would fit onto any Prefuse 73 record.
Moreover, there aren't any wide-eyed ballads or snappy, ingratiating choruses here. These New Puritans come at their songs as if they were challenges presented to them and they write them to their own distinctive logic. It's simpler than it sounds: Finding just the right amount of verse to fit in 60 seconds on "Swords of Truth" or how much tension they can wrest from (and how long they can get away with playing) one open note on "Elvis". Rather than verse to chorus and back, the songs seem like chunks of raw riffage and misbehaving machinery sewn together, their sleek edges fitting perfectly. Electronic interludes flow expertly between the tracks, never sounding extraneous, while the songs themselves are full of jagged transitions, like the percussive rant of "C 16th" or the seething patchwork of "Colours": A flurry of drums into a strutting chorus and simmering bridge section. Meanwhile, lyrics bleed from one song to the other, melodies and themes are recycled, titles blur into each other-- the album is almost remixing itself as it moves along, adding to its chaotic overall feel.
Tantalizing advance singles "En Papier" and "Elvis" are both here, with "En Papier" veering between from winding guitar licks to anchorless electronic textures, and "Elvis" maybe the album's most insistent track-- its tension and release is much simpler than many of the other tracks, but the chorus is monstrous, as is the payoff. They're among the album's best, but they don't outshine the rest, and Beat Pyramid proves to be an affirming and promising first step. The mystery and paranoia are mostly communicated through the music rather than the heavy repetition of the lyrics, with their questions about numbers and sums of money coming through in impatient monotones. Making a genre that's become a bankable prospect sound earnest and exciting is no easy feat; hopefully the next step is finding room for some more trenchant messages along with it.


With her second album as Mozart’s Sister, Montreal’s Caila Thompson-Hannant uses aggressively bubbly synth-pop and unhinged vocals to explore the peculiarities of love.

Field of Love

A few years ago, a tow-truck driver in Texas asked Caila Thompson-Hannant a seemingly simple question: “Do you wanna be big in music?” But the D.I.Y.-bred Montreal artist was taken aback. “I honestly could not answer him,” she recalled in a recent interview. “It kinda shook me, and I thought a lot about it mostly because I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted.”
After playing in offbeat art-rock bands like Shapes and Sizes and Think About Life, Thompson-Hannant went solo as Mozart’s Sister in 2011. Ever since, the dance-pop project has been a conduit for her zany, freewheeling impulses as a songwriter and producer. And with her second album, more than ever, she’s prioritizing her endearing peculiarity over any sort of run at stardom.
Field of Love is an obvious lurch forward from her debut, which at times had Thompson-Hannant coddling some of her quirks in appeasing, indistinct production. By contrast, the instrumentation on the new record is daring, aggressively bubbly, and sharp. As an extension of her love-buzzed lyrics, which can turn from schmoopy to demented in a single line, Thompson-Hannant’s voice has always been unhinged: whooping, cooing breathily, even intoning baby sounds. The beats she’s produced on Field of Love, meanwhile, flirt with unabashed garishness and fully match the whimsy of her vocal theatrics like never before.
The first several songs on Field of Love set a fizzy tone, with lead-off track “Eternally Girl” pushing front-and-center synths that twinkle and plunk over tight, driving kicks. Here and throughout, Thompson-Hannant disarms with a suggestive charm, pre-ordaining an entire relationship from a pang of romance: “I could be the one that you love,” she sings in a soaring alto, before immediately promising, “I will be the one that you love.” It’s a song about feeling like a little girl in love and embracing that excitement instead of qualifying or suppressing it.
Through Mozart’s Sister, Thompson-Hannant has written about romance both fiercely and daintily—at turns and at once—often amplifying the heart’s whims rather than trivializing them. “The minute we sat down to dinner I knew,” she sings on “Moment 2 Moment,” explaining how a new couple didn’t even need to order drinks before adding, “you know how rare that is.” For all her aggressive vulnerability, Thompson-Hannant sometimes drops the sentimentality for a colder edge. On “Plastic Memories,” a tweaked-out and pounding dance track, she compartmentalizes a breakup in order to leave it behind, hushing, “Happy goes away, so does the pain.” On the same song she leans in and chants savagely, “I am a death messenger, things that have happened are gone.” It’s a jarring, fist-pump-worthy epiphany, a promise to live in the moment.
Toward the end of the album, “My Heart Is Wild” reprises an originally stunted song called “My House Is Wild” that first appeared on Thompson-Hannant’s 2014 debut LP, Being. The original covered up a sincere invitation with clunky industrial production, but “My Heart Is Wild” peels down to the core of the song—Thompson-Hannant’s voice, which she samples, triggers, and unleashes with giddy hope. The new version sounds less guarded, like she’s singing and dancing manically about love at a wide-open sky instead of to a dark, throbbing dancefloor. It’s the same effect she nurses throughout Field of Love, doubling down on her gut whims, newly confident. The record reads like a manifesto—a pronouncement that anxiety and empowerment can dovetail, that vulnerability can be menacing, and, of course, that love can be infectiously weird.


These days I tend not to "root" for many musicians, to pledge loyalty to an artist I loved when we ...

Last Exit

These days I tend not to "root" for many musicians, to pledge loyalty to an artist I loved when we both were young, or circle album release dates or try to anticipate when a record will leak. More often than not, I instead brace myself for disappointment-- even from those whose work I most cherish. It's a pessimistic and potentially sad approach, but one that unfortunately seems to cushion blows more often than result in pleasant surprises. With the debut full-length from Junior Boys, I let my guard down. After two EPs of glacial, silken electro-pop (2003's Birthday and this year's High Come Down), I just flat-out wanted more. Thankfully, I got it. Last Exit may be my anti-A Grand Don't Come for Free-- a little album I waited for with open arms rather than gritted teeth-- but its heights eclipse virtually all other music I've heard this year.
The (to date) quiet rise of the Junior Boys is well-documented in the virtual world of the blogosphere, which for the most part has gone totally bonkers for the Ontario trio. Over the past year, the rapturous praise has been so constant that listing off the band's generous number of touchstones has practically become sport. Tellingly, though, for every time someone says Junior Boys sound like Timbaland goes for New Pop, an amorous two-step trying to coax indie-pop onto the dancefloor, or David Sylvian rummaging through Martin Fry's wardrobe and Basic Channel's outtakes, that person is only telling a part of the tale. More often than not, Junior Boys capture the mood and feel of many of these artists rather than ape their sounds. In fact, each of this record's 10 deceptively simple and very approachable tracks carry the distinct fingerprints of lead songwriter and singer Jeremy Greenspan, who manages to fold elements of nearly a quarter-century of forward-looking pop into a distinct sound without sounding either conceptual or trading on contradictions or the smoke-and-mirrors of attention-grabbing eclecticism.
Four of the album's tracks-- "Birthday", "Last Exit", "High Come Down", and "Under the Sun"-- were first released on last year's EPs and sit nicely alongside the new songs. Thankfully, Junior Boys are neither shying away from what they do best because of the success of those singles, nor failing in an attempt to reach those same heights. Among the new songs, "Teach Me How to Fight" is anthemic Sophistipop, a shrinking violet rallying cry; the nocturnal orchestral maneuvers of "Three Words" delicately flicker beneath "Neon Lights"; and "Bellona" flutters and clicks as Greenspan laments long days and lost opportunities.
So, yes, despite the high dance IQ and its luxuriously monochromatic sensuality, the record does seem very... indie. On "Teach Me", Greenspan is requesting to "show me what it's like to give back pain," as his paper-thin voice projects honesty, vulnerability and the puppy-dog loyalty of sentimental, pale-skinned boys. So thankfully that's the fey, Anglocentric early 80s sense of the phrase "indie," then, albeit dressed up with graceful, hopeful romanticism rather than self-deprecating fatalism. At times, that sense of hope seems buried under throbbing beats or kept at arm's length by cold, pristine sonics, but dip your toes beneath that sleek surface and you'll find an album of great warmth, beauty and even soul.


These three tracks come from the last project the beloved emo rapper worked on before he died. They remind us how good he was, but don’t yield new insights.

GOTH ANGEL SINNER EP

Posthumous releases go through a quick, sad diminishing-returns cycle. The first one is usually the closest to the artist’s vision, and subsequent releases require deeper digs into the vault and more intervention to make whatever’s left back there presentable. That’s especially true of posthumous rap projects, which are subject to ever-more questionable guest features and production choices. With every release the artist’s presence grows fainter, the doubts about whether they would have wanted this louder.
Lil Peep’s posthumous output is subject to those same laws of gravity, even if so far the stewards of his legacy have done right by him. Save for a bonus track featuring XXXTentacion that Peep might not have approved of, 2018’s thoughtfully compiled Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 2 was, if not quite Peep's vision, at least a respectful imagining of what it might have been. And in some ways its follow-up EP GOTH ANGEL SINNER, short as it is, feels even more like Peep’s creation. Peep revealed the title himself on Twitter in 2017, just weeks before his overdose death at age 21. He performed its opening track “Moving On” on his final tour, and even co-directed the video for its closer “When I Lie.” The video isn’t much—a spur of the moment, one-take shoot filmed in a green room while on tour in Germany—but it’s evidence these three songs aren’t empty leftovers. They are, at minimum, vestiges of a project Peep cared about.
Lil Peep emerged at a time when it was no longer unusual for a young rapper to identify more with Kurt Cobain than Tupac. But where many of his SoundCloud peers embraced rock mostly as an ideal, borrowing its imagery and attitude but not necessarily its sounds, Peep made alternative a foundation of his aesthetic, and like much of his final output, GOTH ANGEL SINNER splits the difference between rap and modern rock. “Belgium” cloaks itself in a flanneled, In Utero-shaped riff, while the guitars on “When I Lie” crackle and glower like Linkin Park.
None of these tracks do anything fancy. They’re disarmingly direct, barebones enough that they feel like demos despite their crisp finish. It’s Peep’s intuitive phrasing that makes them soar. “I was out in Belgium on tour, that’s the day that I convinced myself that I was truly yours,” he scowls, and as wordy as that prose reads on paper, his groggy delivery imbues every syllable with intention and implied backstory. His writing is never flashy, but it’s flowered with nonchalant internal rhyme: “Stick that needle in my eye, just lost my peace of mind/I’m not evil by design but I feel dead at times,” he raps on “When I Lie,” in a flow at once drowsy and purposeful. He was so good at this.
Lil Peep’s fame hadn’t peaked when he died, and GOTH ANGEL SINNER is further evidence of how high his ceiling was. Especially given how Post Malone rode a related strain of emotive, rock-suggestive rap to fame and fortune, it’s easy enough to imagine the star that Peep could have become. But posthumous releases can only tell us so much we didn't already know. They can only speak to what no longer is, not what would have been. And as welcome as any unreleased Peep material is, the declines are already on display on GOTH ANGEL SINNER: It sounds a lot like Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 2, but there’s a lot less of it. It’s possible there’s still some worthwhile material left in Peep’s vault, but it’s increasingly unlikely there are any revelations.


On their mesmerizing collaborative album, the gnomic NYC rapper and the avant-garde poet and musician piece together ideas and sounds from history’s jagged shards.

BRASS

Moor Mother and billy woods are both time travelers of sorts. For Moor Mother, an activist and educator with the Black Quantum Futurism collective, time travel is a way to recover obscured Black pasts and multiply Black futures. Evoking black holes and cosmic hauntings, her music crisscrosses timelines to reveal the illusion of time as progress. For woods, being Black is a form of time travel. The past constantly intrudes on his oblique and often comical narratives of the present, a cosmic context collapse. On BRASS, the pair’s wanderings through space and time reach new heights of detail and imagination, piecing together ideas and sounds from history’s jagged shards.

The record is an outgrowth of “Furies,” an Adult Swim single from July that appears here as the album’s opener. Produced by Backwoodz Studioz mainstay Willie Green, “Furies” strikes a deft balance between woods’ grim fables and Moor Mother’s spacey prophecies. Though their verses don’t speak directly, they achieve a kind of parallel harmony, their crystal balls tapping into the same frequency. That rapport deepens on BRASS.

As on “Furies,” the production helps woods and Moor Mother speak the same language. Both artists lean toward harsh, dissonant sounds in their solo work, especially Moor Mother, whose free jazz, spoken-word, and noise collages are often confrontational and bracing. Here, the arrangements are softer, more somber, the production a steady fizz of shifting percussion, thick static, fuzzy samples, and flecks of acoustic instruments. At times this backdrop grows outright ominous, as on “Mom’s Gold,” where a snarl of feedback erupts from the already prickly mix, and “Maroons,” where a morose trumpet and prickly synth wail into the abyss. But generally, the mood is calm, almost meditative, keeping woods and Moor Mother’s spirited performances in the foreground.

The pair works well together, their shared disinterest in meter and linearity giving their songs dazzling shapes. woods is the archaeologist, digging through the rubble of history for absurdities and continuities. A crash course: “Traffic stop, I reached for my slave pass slow” (“Giraffe Hunts”); “Alan Greenspan fucking Ayn Rand/She came, finished him with her hand” (“Rapunzal”); “We waved every day, but good fences makes good neighbors/Like those mountains in Asia (“Blak Forrest”). Moor Mother is the mystic, using history as the jet fuel for her vision quests. Her verses are just as far flung as woods’, but tend to be cheekier, flightier: “Through the air like Kobe Bryant/’08 season, the year after Garnett screaming/Anything is possible” (“Rapunzal”); “You can’t imagine a blacker future than me/Forever young, forever in the zone of the one” (“Tiberius”). Together they treat history as a mass grave and a playground, heeding its horrors yet finding room for dark laughs and cautious hope.
Sometimes they manage both. “Scary Hours” begins with woods narrating a deportation in Wakanda that builds to a reference to the Berlin Conference, the 19th-century European summit that formalized the pillage of Africa. “Sickly white men clad in animal skins/African kings, flies swarm on piles of limbs/Inoculate the babies, inoculate the babies,” he raps, claiming colonizers as African royalty—and suggesting Wakanda is just another evil empire. That sequence would be audacious on its own, but it’s just the prologue: moments after woods’ bleak lament, the sky opens up and John Forte swoops in on a rush of woodwind and horns singing of liberation and escape. Then Moor Mother builds that outburst into a rally cry, gliding over the brass. “Welcome to the party,” she booms, channeling Pop Smoke.

Throughout BRASS, woods and Moor Mother sharpen each other. Though they are individually fond of ellipses and cliffhangers, as a unit they actively seek out ways to riff on each other and expand ideas. On “The Blues Remembers Everything the Country Forgot,” when Moor Mother’s verse ends with a spirited call to arms, rather than matching her indignation, woods lets the tension linger. “We waited and we watched, we waited and we watched,” he chants, showing fury can be as paralyzing as it is galvanizing. Similarly, on “Giraffe Hunts,” the overlapping images from their verses—the bombs, guns, and landmines of a warzone; a leering police sergeant; cobras, rattlesnakes, and bison—create an elegant tapestry. It feels like a shared hallucination.
It’s telling that as the pair zooms through time, they make one explicit stop in 2020, a brisk, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it one-liner from woods. “Hydroxychloroquine unpacked and boxed up again,” he raps on “Rock Cried,” condensing a whole year into the bleak status changes of a medicine. On Moor Mother and billy woods’ looping, geological timescale, this is 2020’s standout episode. Everything else is mundane and indistinct, that regular dystopian shit. BRASS is the rare, mesmerizing album that can throw that kind of gut-punch, land it—and keep moving. It feels like freedom.

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Pete Rock, whose production work helped define rap in the 90s, has managed to stay continually relevant without capitulating to changing tastes. 80 Blocks from Tiffany's Part II, Rock's second collaboration with Bronx duo Camp Lo, achieves rich, dark tones that smartly fill up the sonic spectrum with a minimum of moving parts.

Pete Rock / Camp Lo: 80 Blocks From Tiffany's Pt. II

80 Blocks From Tiffany's Pt. II

Over the past few years the chorus calling for a return to “real” hip-hop that’s been going steadily since the 90s has only gotten louder and angrier as the genre’s entered an era of unprecedented experimentation that’s left older fans and artists bewildered. Most of the arguments seem to come from rap musicians who’ve fallen out of style and knee-jerk reactionary hip-hop heads who can’t deal with rappers wearing kilts. Few of them make a convincing case.
Pete Rock, whose production work helped define the 90s “golden age” is a rare exception. 80 Blocks from Tiffany's Part II, his second full-length collaboration with the Bronx duo Camp Lo, offers proof that amidst the expeditions rap music’s launching into new sonic territories like EDM, noisy psychedelia, and quasi-industrial music, the classic boom-bap stuff still has a place.
Rock’s one of the few musicians who made his name in the aggressively unflashy 90s East Coast sound who’s managed to stay continually relevant without capitulating to changing tastes. A Pete Rock beat from 2013 works on the same basic level as a Pete Rock beat from 1993, but it doesn’t sound dated. Unlike some of his contemporaries who’ve been happy to go through their careers chopping up the same old breaks they’ve been playing with for years, he’s been constantly evolving his sounds while his method of putting them together has remained fundamentally unchanged.
“No Uniform", a collaboration here with Brooklyn bruisers M.O.P. is a prime example of Rock’s ability to make old school techniques sound new again. The drum pattern is classic boom-bap, and M.O.P. still flows about the same as they did when they broke through in 2000 with “Ante Up". But the instrumentation replaces the crackling grittiness that typified the roughneck beats of their prime years with richer, darker tones that smartly fill up the sonic spectrum with a minimum of moving parts. And the fuzzed-out guitar sample looping on top of everything is placed over the drums in a peculiar, precarious way that adds a new flavor of tension to the song.
“Megan Good", which features a verse by the increasingly respectable Mac Miller, takes the new-old dichotomy even further. The snappy, dirty drums and one-note hollowbody bass riff that form the song’s bare-bones foundation would have been familiar to crate diggers back at the dawn of hip-hop, but if Rock had arranged them into a snappy, hip-shaking retro-soul-pop confection a decade ago the way he does here, he probably would have incited a riot amongst pop-averse hardcore rap fans.
Like the individual tracks that make it up, 80 Blocks II finds new life in well-worn ideas. Its structure predates the modern definition of a mixtape as essentially just an album without a label. It’s more like what DJs and producers put together when they were still dubbing the results onto actual tape-- a freewheeling collage of songs, extended samples lifted from movies and TV, brief instrumental sketches, and spoken word interludes (delivered here by Rock, with his voice pitch-shifted up to helium-balloon squeakiness) outlining the collection’s purpose and its contributors’ bonafides.
And like a lot of those old school mixtapes, 80 Blocks II runs too long by almost a third. But in smaller doses it’s easily equal to some of the best and boldest rap music being made right now. There’s something incredibly admirable about the way that hip-hop’s been charging full-speed ahead into the future, but Rock’s music is a good reminder that occasionally looking back over your shoulder can be a very good thing.


Chicago’s Horsegirl mines a loose-limbed indie rock sound on their debut album, with an assist from some members of Sonic Youth.

Horsegirl: Versions of Modern Performance

Versions of Modern Performance

Collectively, the members of Horsegirl are probably 20 years younger than their most recent influence. Gigi Reece and Nora Cheng are college freshmen, Penelope Lowenstein a high school senior, but Versions of Modern Performance glows with the drowsy heat of 30 years’ worth of indie rock. Depending on your age, you might hear Yo La Tengo or Stereolab in the featherlight vocals; maybe the fat, crayon-streaked guitars of Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis or Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch. The longer you listen, the more the album resembles a hedge maze made from familiar references—the yawn of the whammy bar on “Bog Bog 1” swirls in some My Bloody Valentine, while Cheng’s bird call of a melody on “Beautiful Song” evokes Laetitia Sadier. If a group of young people picked up some guitars to make a blurry, pleasing sound at any point in the past seven presidential administrations, you’ll hear echoes of them here.
Horsegirl are breakout members of a largely teenaged Chicago indie scene, and their debut comes decked with auspicious cosigns from scene elders—John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth) is behind the boards, while Steve Shelley and Lee Ranaldo play on “Billy” and “Beautiful Song.” It’s a compliment, then, to say that Versions could have come out in 1997, or 1987, since that’s entirely the point. Indie rock of this era was loose-fitting, and in order to make it work, everyone has to play that way—hugging the downbeat too tight would curdle the vibe, as would an overly busy bassline. The sound has to stretch, like a dog in the sun, otherwise you’re not doing it right. Lowenstein and Cheng, who trade vocal duties alongside guitars and six-string electric bass, manipulate fuzz tones like batted balloons, while Reece hits the cymbals like someone throwing paint buckets at a barn. They’ve got the balance just right—no explosions, just a steady, nervous churn continuously disrupting the music’s placid surface.
This haze offers excellent cloud cover to hide songwriting surprises, and Horsegirl take the opportunity. You might have to listen to “The Fall of Horsegirl” twice to realize the hook is simply Lowenstein counting quietly to six. “Anti-glory” starts rumpled and messy before pulling taut for a chorus in which they simply snap “Dance!” at you, like they’re tossing firecrackers at your feet. “Billy” builds up a good head of steam before speeding up unexpectedly and veering into a corner.
If there are nice surprises throughout on Versions, there are no revelations. From the studied perfection of its guitar tones to the vocals that closely mimic their heroes, Versions is a bit like an apprentice’s masterwork, a demonstration that they’ve absorbed their lessons. The lyrics are fragmentary, open-ended, and occasionally arresting (“I’m on the run from the severed leg of my son,” from “Option 8”). But any capital-S Statements that Horsegirl might make are probably percolating somewhere in that soupy sound, waiting for the right moment—hopefully album two—when they will emerge. For now, Horsegirl aren’t so much carrying the torch as they are keeping the pilot light lit, low and steady.


Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward’s first album together in six years is a low-stakes set of Beach Boys covers, toggling between merely pleasant and overly precious.

She & Him: Melt Away: A Tribute to Brian Wilson

Melt Away: A Tribute to Brian Wilson

For all the talk about actors and crossovers that has dogged the duo, She & Him is first and foremost about fandom. Zooey Deschanel never hid her love of bright, shiny pop baubles, and she never appeared overly self-conscious onstage. She didn’t come across as an actor trying to convince us she was a singer but more like a music nerd who really loved all those do-do-do’s and ba-ba-ba’s. Even before she and M. Ward covered Dusty Springfield, Herb Alpert, and Johnny Mathis on 2014’s Classics, you knew these were some of their favorite artists, because those references lived right on the surface of every song they ever recorded or performed. They never bothered to hide their enthusiasm, which along with the distinctive timbre of Deschanel’s voice gave their songs a sense of novelty and purpose—a reason for existing that went beyond just being a vanity project for her or a side project for him.
Fourteen years into their career together, however, there’s not a whole lot of novelty or purpose left. They haven’t released an album of originals in nearly a decade, and they haven’t released anything at all since their second(!) holiday album, six years ago. Their new one, Melt Away: A Tribute to Brian Wilson, is another covers record—not a catchall like Classics that shows the range of their fandom, but one devoted exclusively to Brian Wilson. The only surprise is that they didn’t get around to it sooner, given how large the Beach Boys looms in their music. “Zooey and I can wholeheartedly agree that we love everything they’ve ever done,” Ward told the Los Angeles Times in 2010. “Those harmonies and chord changes? That’s the sound of California.” Wilson’s influence was reflected in the sunny Golden State innocence of their early originals like “This Is Not a Test” and “I Was Made for You,” and it shows in the obscurities they choose for Melt Away. This won’t be the only Wilson tribute to include “Don’t Worry Baby” or “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” but how many others will give space to lesser-known gems like “Good to My Baby” and “Deirdre”? Melt Away, to their credit, is a fan’s playlist.
And yet, there’s a boldness missing from these new versions. It’s not just a matter of being overly reverent or taking too few liberties. In fact, Deschanel and Ward obviously love all the details that go into Wilson’s arrangements, and they take pains to get everything just so: the sitar and piano flourishes on “Kiss Me Baby,” the sobbing guitar on “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” the revving hot-rod rhythm that drives “Do It Again” (which features newly recorded vocals by Wilson himself). But it’s all a little too tidy, a little too perfect. Their version of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is bracing simply for sounding so stilted and awkward; it’s a live/studio hybrid, reminiscent of Simon & Garfunkel’s cover of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love,” that pits their careful orchestrations against what sounds like an audience’s slightly behind-the-beat clapping. It doesn’t really work; in fact, it prevents you from being carried away by the song or the daydream of finding the right someone to spend a life with. But it’s still the album’s most audacious moment.
Maybe they just weren’t made for these times, or maybe the problem has more to do with size. When Wilson wrote and scored these songs, he made them sound larger than life, adding grandeur to passing daydreams and everyday yearnings. But She & Him’s covers all remain simply life-size, even when the harmonies explode on “Kiss Me Baby” or when closer “Meant for You” pledges lifelong devotion. There’s a warm twee intimacy to the best moments on Melt Away, but it’s just not enough. There’s nothing to suggest that pop music can play a profound role in a listener’s life, beyond just vibe music for a dinner party. Toggling between merely pleasant and overly precious, Melt Away is such a low-stakes endeavor that it never even registers as a comeback.


Originally released in 1979, only to sit in the teenaged Emerson brothers’ home studio for decades, Donnie and Joe’s sole record showcases a prodigal talent for blue-eyed soul and landlocked yacht rock that's only just getting its dues.

Dreamin’ Wild

If the Seattle-based label Light in the Attic hadn’t already spent more than a year planning a reissue of a peculiar vanity press album from Donnie & Joe Emerson, two teen brothers (ages 17 and 19 respectively) located in the logging community of Fruitland, Washington, they would have had to initiate it for the calendar year of 2012. Some 33 years after pressing up copies of Dreamin’ Wild, only to have it sit in their home studio erected solely for its creation (right next to a concert venue erected 30 yards from the house), its dream is finally turning into a realization.
For an album whose renaissance can be traced back to record collector Jack Fleischer encountering a sealed copy sitting on a mantelpiece in a Spokane antique shop—far from any other dusty record in the place—and posting an entry on his Out of the Bubbling Dusk blog, it’s taken a curious and circuitous route to its current renaissance. Ariel Pink bassist Tim Koh championed it on his Lamaraba blog, Soul Sides repped for it while another blog mocked its cheesy cover. It also popped up on Memoryhouse’s mixtape for Self-Titled magazine and nu-disco producer Psychemagick slotted it alongside Czech disco and Italian synth-prog on his After the Void compilation.
This year alone, Donnie & Joe Emerson’s stunning soul ballad “Baby” has been covered by dubstep rapscallions Hype Williams on their Black Is Beautiful album (without crediting the original), while Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti collaborated with Dâm-Funk for their soulful rendition of the same song. Originally intended for a forthcoming Light in the Attic compilation, Ariel and Dâm’s cover ended up being chosen as the first single from Ariel’s forthcoming album, Mature Themes. Not bad for a financial disaster that derailed a teen’s dream and nearly bankrupted the Emerson family, decimating their acreage from 1,600 down to 65 via a woeful bank loan taken out at 18% back in the late ’70s. Remastered ever so gently, with fascinating investigative liner notes from the Stranger’s Dave Segal (a former editor of mine), the full story behind the album is far more bizarre than the sight of a white jumpsuited, two-headed brother against a JCPenney’s portrait backdrop on the cover would lead you to believe.
In some ways, the Emersons’ story runs parallel to that of the Wiggins sisters from the Shaggs. Just as that their father decided that his girls could make their own music and not just rehash what was emanating from the radio, Don Emerson Sr. also wanted his sons to play their own music and not simply regurgitate the pop hits of the day. It’s only natural for a father to encourage creativity in his sons, but Don Sr. went well beyond ordering a Danelectro guitar out of the Sears-Roebuck catalog and calling it a day. Instead, he took out a loan with his land as leverage in order to erect a log cabin for the boys to woodshed in, then furnished it into a full-blown studio, complete with a TEAC 8-track, amplifiers, drum kit, PolyMoog, and more. (And that’s saying nothing of “Camp Jammin’”: a 300-capacity venue that their father also erected on the property, complete with his/her bathrooms, concession area, balcony and green room.)
And unlike the Shaggs’ endearing/excruciating Philosophy of the World, Donnie and Joe can sing, write songs, and play. In between logging, fence-post digging, and other farm chores, the boys practiced nonstop and put Dreamin’ Wild to tape with little idea of what was happening in popular music (they barely even knew how to load a reel of tape in their studio) other than what emanated from the radio. Listening through, you catch glints of Smokey Robinson, Hall and Oates, the Commodores, Bread, Pablo Cruise, Boz Scaggs, and Chuck Mangione amid the AM bullion. Blue-eyed soul, meandering funk (see “Feels Like the Sun” which encourages you to “sing or play a musical instrument along with the boys”), and landlocked yacht rock are evident. Yet the wide-eyed and utterly sincere vision of a 17-year old Donnie stuns.
Whenever he takes a guitar solo—or when he drops an unhinged psychedelic Moog blast on the vamp of “Give Me the Chance”—his talent is prodigal. That he can then endeavor a naked piano ballad like “Dream Full of Dreams,” deftly wrapping a warm synth line around it, hints at what his future as a songwriter or producer might have been like. Psychedelic slow-burner “My Heart” even shows him knowing how to bring an album to a satisfying close. In another century, Donnie Sr. could have saved the Emerson land by simply uploading a video of his son singing to YouTube and waited for international acclaim that way. Instead, we are left with a curious what-if album that during its finest moments—to twist a Brian Wilson phrase—is a godlike symphony to teenhood.


Hot Hot Heat return to an indie (Dangerbird) and make their best album since 2002's Make Up the Breakdown.

Future Breeds

If you agree with Tony Soprano that "remember when?" is the lowest form of conversation, it hasn't been easy to talk about Hot Hot Heat's sojourn on Sire. That relationship worked out for nobody-- not the band, not the label, and certainly not their fans. Now, living in the shadow of a beloved debut is nothing new, and Make Up the Breakdown is doubly burdened by its P.O.V., since nailing the metropolitan jitters and elegant wastefulness of twentysomethings isn't easy to do twice (see also: Interpol, Strokes).
Hot Hot Heat are back at square one on Dangerbird, and maybe that gave them the message. And while they're not rewriting "Bandages"-- Steve Bays' voice has sanded too many of the edges off his yelp for that-- for better or mostly worse, there's a promising return to getting lost and naked in the city again. Whether it's due to their rough decade or just the accumulating bitterness of age, Bays flips the script on his persona-- no longer a victim, he's now spewing venom outward. "YVR" begins with the sound of a revving engine as Hot Hot Heat rediscover their full-throttle spaz. "Times a Thousand" cops a "Take Me Out" disco stomp and turns it militant-- "It's not my fault that they hate your face," Bays spits.
Future Breeds is also HHH's first self-produced album; like many rookies behind the boards, they seem to want every instrument loud as fuck. I actually don't mind that pressed-against-the-glass sound from a band that flounders when it fails to be punchy. "21@12" is either a threat or conspiratorial pep talk, but it's held together by a spirited hook. The arm-swinging "Implosionatic" lives up to its title, and it's what Hot Hot Heat do best, compact, unpredictable and delivered with the scalding energy of a band about to jump out of its own skin.
Breeds might be #2 with a bullet in their discography, but it tails off whenever Hot Hot Heat dial down the energy. Unfortunately, this has been Hot Hot Heat's cross to bear-- "In Cairo" is still their only successful slow song. Bays isn't a crooner, and when the synths try to play piano ballads, HHH sink into their mid-decade anonymity, almost indistinguishable from Robbers on High Street, White Rabbits, or any other band label heads really hoped people would think sound like Spoon. But even a half-return-to-form was necessary for a group that a lot of people were on the verge of writing off, and a nice surprise if "the best Hot Hot Heat album since 2002" still means something to you and you know what they had to do to get there.