One of the most surprising mixtapes of 2012 was made by a Flatbush teenager named Jo-Vaughn Scott a.k.a. Joey Bada$$, but the enthusiastic momentum that buoyed 1999 is missing on his second mixtape, Summer Knights.

Summer Knights

One of the most surprising mixtapes of 2012 was made by a Flatbush teenager named Jo-Vaughn Scott a.k.a. Joey Bada$$, an Edward R. Murrow High School student who channeled Native Tongues-style rap music with a deceptively sharp edge while heading up the intriguing Pro Era collective. Simply put, the kid could rap. No matter how much his flows echoed the work of his chosen style’s well-entrenched pioneers (Mos Def, Common, Q-Tip, Doom), his skills were such that 1999 was a fresh, welcome spin on well-worn subject matter.
Since that initial excitement, a lot has happened. In December, one of Joey’s best friends, Pro Era’s Capital STEEZ, tragically took his own life amid a storm of strange rumors, tweeting “The end” the night he committed suicide. Around the same time as STEEZ’s death, Joey turned down an offer to sign with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation imprint, later saying it would take a $3 million dollar advance to sign him (A$AP Rocky, who rose to prominence at roughly the same age, reportedly got that figure from RCA). All the drama pulls down Summer Knights, a record that mines the same bank of 90s rap influences but does so with a more negative, fuck-the-world mentality. The enthusiastic momentum that buoyed 1999 is missing, and Summer Knights is much cloudier proposition.
Even imbued with a darker tint than his debut mixtape, the touchpoints often feel clumsy. It starts with the lyrics: “Somehow the rap game reminds me of the trap game/ In fact is the exact same, and these tracks is my crack ‘caine,” raps Joey on “Sweet Dreams”. Knotty lines like “Fulfill your needs with similes non similar/ Spit that unfamiliar, put that on familia” (“Hillary $wank”) amount to nicely rapped nonsense. There’s much talk of “similes and verbs”, “metaphysics”, and there are direct homages: “Sorry Bonita” chops up A Tribe Called Quest’s spacey classic “Bonita Applebum”, and there’s a song called “Word Is Bond”. It’s one thing to bat around references, ping-ponging them in a way that riffs on the established themes and vocabulary of rap music. But the approach feels off. Take “Death of YOLO”, a song built off a promising, darkly funny concept-- the protagonist of the song is dead, having taken YOLO too far. Why deliver it with a straight face?
All that said, Summer Knights features strong production. If I had to pick a Native Tongues record to compare it to, it'd be the back half of A Tribe Called Quest’s relatively downcast Beats Rhymes & Life, where keys, hi-hats, snares, and low basslines mingle to create a warm bed of texture to get loose over. Joey can still rap, but the producers on Summer Knights-- Pro Era affiliates Chuck Strangers, Kirk Knight and Lee Bannon with single tracks produced by DOOM, Statik Selektah and Oddissee respectively-- are the real highlights here. While something like “#LongLiveSTEELO” is an affecting, heartfelt cut from Joey-- it’s basically Joey’s version of “I’ll Be Missing You”, complete with Faith Evans-like backup-- you’re 16 tracks deep into a listless affair.
Instead of embracing the styles of more contemporary-minded peers and bending those sounds into his own shapes-- seemingly a must in today's rap climate, if you want to work with a major and get played on the radio-- Summer Knights moves in the other direction, retreating to well-made templates without adding anything to them. Joey deals with heavier shit, but feels weighed down by it. The clunky lyrics wouldn't be a big of a deal if lyricism in the mode of his heroes wasn't one of the aspects he was deliberately playing up. But the deeper problem is one of tone. Joey too often comes out looking like someone who’s already grown weary of the system, an 18-year-old curmudgeon, a sharp contrast with the energy that 1999 promised.


Returning after a five-year absence, the Brooklyn musician slots into a tradition of cryptic, pastoral singer-songwriters; more than his lyrics, it’s the peaceful mood-setting that stands out.

False Spring

False Spring is a long, sweet ramble of an album. Like the view from an early morning flight, it assumes a vantage where everything looks still and glowing and peaceful. Brooklyn artist Zachary Cale works in the tradition of cryptic, pastoral singer-songwriters like Jeff Tweedy and Cass McCombs. But unlike his more lyric-driven peers, Cale’s goal is to stay out of the way of his songs. On False Spring, his work has more in common with wordless, new age-leaning Americana projects like the recent work of William Tyler or the ’80s output from the label Windham Hill. More than with his impressionistic words, Cale expresses himself most eloquently through subtle instrumental details: his fingerpicking, the way he places a piano in the mix, how one song’s fadeout speaks to the next one’s opening.
During the first half of the 2010s, Cale released nearly an album a year, each one a clear evolution from the last. But after 2015’s full-band breakthrough Duskland, he stepped away. “The last five years have felt like one long winter,” he wrote about this album’s long genesis. False Spring offers little insight into the darkness he might have faced; instead, he meditates on transformation, on deeper changes. Through the album’s hour-plus runtime, Cale seems less concerned with his own place in the world than with how the world has moved on without him: “The sand is shifting/The clocks are turning,” he sings brightly in “Mad Season,” surveying his environment before immersing himself back in it.
The instrumental songs come in pairs: the title track and “Magnetic North” near the top, “Black Dirt Drift” and “Seaside Downtime” near the end. Their sequencing gives the album a narrative thrust, and the band’s performances complement him at every turn. The sound is polished but exploratory, vibrant but refined. Hearing them at work is like the feeling of walking barefoot over wet grass. Cale encouraged his accompanists to write their own parts to each song, lending the music a more collaborative spirit. When a hushed saxophone solo emerges during the lilting “Come Morning,” it sounds almost inquisitive, answered by one of the album’s most mournful verses. Cale sings about feeling exhausted and voiceless, so the music trudges alongside him.
Even at their darkest, his songs aim to pacify, never settling too long on dissonant thoughts or minor chords. Amid all his introspection, Cale searches for hope. The closing “Free to Go,” accompanied by Alfra Martini’s gentle background vocals, might be his version of a sweeping finale: The lyrics turn wistful, the band settles into twilight balladry. “Please God, don’t let this be a mirage,” he sings. It’s a thought that might occur when life seems too beautiful to be real, and it’s a fitting sentiment to end an album so steeped in calmness and solitude that it sometimes seems to float just above reality.
Minus a few surging highlights—particularly the open-tuned uplift of “Careening,” a grand melding of Wilco circa Summerteeth and Yo La Tengo’s more blissful, acoustic jams—the mood itself is what stands out. According to Cale, he recorded several albums’ worth of material in the half-decade since Duskland, but these songs are what spoke to him. Their purpose is clear. “I wanna be your piece of heaven/In a world that’s cold and broken,” he sings in “Man Beside You.” From him, it’s a romantic gesture, and the key word is “piece.” On False Spring, he hopes to be part of something greater, a companion for the long haul.

All Hands Electric / Ride Through The Rain


Texas musicians and real-life “bffs” mari maurice and claire rousay work in the same room for the first time. More than a cool biographical detail, this fact defines the album’s lovingly meta style.

claire rousay / more eaze: an afternoon whine

an afternoon whine

Texas musicians mari maurice (more eaze) and claire rousay make music from field recordings, found objects, Internet noises, and the other everyday ephemera that define the idle stretches of our lives we might otherwise forget. an afternoon whine is their first release made in the same room together, and that’s more than a cool biographical detail: That mutual presence defines the album’s whole approach. Laced with room noise and friendly chatter, an afternoon whine captures the joy of a day shared by real-life “bffs.” It’s a celebration of togetherness and, by extension, their very friendship.
The margins of these pieces are flooded with domestic signifiers. One of the first sounds we hear is a toilet flushing, followed by the washing of hands. Later we hear the patter of a dog’s feet across the floor, the tattoo of fingers against a computer keyboard, the distant rumble of a dryer, and the flick of lighters (the latter is as much of a trademark for these two as it is for Lil Wayne). Dialogue between the artists occasionally finds its way through the firmament, and it’s as much a compositional tool as a way of letting us know that they’re not remote goddesses, but goofballs like us. Their banter is specific and personal, and we hear maurice and rousay’s dog Banana both addressed by name. The end of “songs for tuned guitar,” when we hear them half-jokingly discussing their artistic process (“I love telling people what to do,” says rousay), offers a microcosm of this lovingly meta album’s approach.
maurice and rousay call their music “emo ambient,” and they’re not just being glib. The two are enraptured by the distinctly 2010s intersection of Auto-Tune and emotional bloodletting, and last year’s </3 remains about as straightforward an emo-R&B album as we’re likely to hear from either of these restless experimenters. For the most part, the five-song, 30-minute an afternoon whine has less in common with that album than the sprawling compositions on their first joint effort, if I don’t let myself be happy now then when? But the two let us know what they're capable of by letting little phosphenes of Auto-Tune flicker through “floor pt. 3,” and a few minutes later, a serrated synth chord and patient guitar introduce the album's only full-on song, “smaller pools.”
“smaller pools”—alongside rousay’s stunning “peak chroma,” from this year’s a softer focus—is the most complete integration yet of the musicians’ singer-songwriter and Tascam-nerd personae. It’s a pop song, but it seems to assemble itself naturally out of all the domestic rustlings. Both sing through thick swaths of Auto-Tune, maurice preferring a soft flutter and rousay adopting a pitch-shifted caterwaul. It’s a delightful duet partnership, with maurice as the R&B diva and rousay as the gremlin determined to throw a monkey wrench into the album's Big Sincere Moment, but the goofy camaraderie hardly detracts from its poignancy. “It’s hard for me to feel that I deserve this at all,” maurice muses at one point, and for a brief moment a cloud of self-doubt shadows the landscape. Then rousay starts singing, too, and joy takes over.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the landmark 1972 album from the legendary saxophonist, responding loudly and passionately to the tragic outcome of a prison uprising.

Attica Blues

On January 26, 1972, Archie Shepp packed up his tenor and soprano saxophones and headed to A&R Recording in New York for the third and final session of an album he was planning to call Attica Blues. If he happened to flip through a newspaper that morning, Shepp would have seen a few articles relevant to his cause: the Attica Prison uprising, which had transpired four months earlier but still amounted to an unfolding story.
In its aftermath, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller appointed a bipartisan commission on penal reform, which was just issuing its first report. “We are profoundly troubled that the present correctional system reflects an anachronistic, bastille‐like philosophy,” the committee chairman told The New York Times. “We doubt that there is any real hope that it can accomplish society’s objectives today.” The quote appeared in the paper on Jan. 26, below a separate article with the headline, “Impeach Rockefeller Over Attica, A Buffalo Assemblyman Demands.”
Shepp probably wouldn’t have been surprised, or much impressed, by these indictments. What happened at Attica Correctional Facility, in upstate New York, amounted to one of the deadliest confrontations on American soil since the Civil War. On the morning of Sept. 13, 1971, state troopers opened fire on the prison in a siege-like effort to end a four-day rebellion in protest of inhumane conditions. According to a stark racial calculus, the protesting prisoners were mostly black and the assaulting troopers were mostly white. The savagery of the attack—39 people, inmates and hostages, were slain by police gunfire, with more than twice as many wounded—registered as an instant scandal and an unspeakable horror. As investigative journalist Tom Robbins characterized it several years ago, in an article for The Marshall Project, the assault on Attica was “a massive bloodletting marked by spasms of sadism.”
So it was a bold stroke for Shepp to respond to this moment with Attica Blues. It was also totally in character for him: A leading provocateur of jazz’s radical “New Thing,” he had titled his previous album Things Have Got to Change. The same Afrocentric and revolutionary energies pulse through Attica Blues, with resolute conviction but a shifting center of gravity. The album is a sociopolitical statement shaded with human complexity. There is protest in it, but also tenderness and wistfulness and hopeful rumination. It’s a landmark in part because it refuses the stoical clarity of a broadside, just as it wriggles free of the parameters that typically apply to a so-called jazz album.
Shepp came out of the avant-garde black-music tradition that proudly claimed Cecil Taylor and anointed John Coltrane. Those two lodestars were instrumental in his career: Shepp made his earliest recordings with Taylor in 1960, and when he signed a deal with Impulse! Records in ’64, it was through Coltrane’s intervention, under the label stipulation that he play Coltrane’s music. That first effort, Four For Trane, initiated a potent run of Shepp albums for Impulse!—including Fire Music, a Hall of Fame entry from ’65—that most observers filed, somewhat reductively, under “free jazz.” With all this in mind, it’s reasonable to expect that Attica Blues would open with a sorrowful dirge, like Coltrane’s “Alabama”; or in a cacophonous roil, like Coltrane’s Ascension; or in simmering rage, like “Malcolm, Malcolm, Semper Malcolm,” a spoken-word piece from Fire Music.
Instead, Attica Blues opens with wah-wah rhythm guitar, a snaking electric bass, and a clattering tambourine—signifiers of the street, in tune with the glorious stank of Funkadelic and the impudent grandeur of a blaxploitation score. Ten seconds into the title track, veteran gospel-soul singer Carl Hall (credited on the album by an alias, Henry Hull) bursts in like an emergency alarm. “I got a feeling that something ain’t going right!” he sings in a piercing, androgynous cry. “And I’m worried ’bout the human soul!” The lyrics come from a poem by Shepp’s drummer, Beaver Harris (credited on the album by his given name, William G. Harris), but it’s clear that Shepp shares the stated conviction: I’m worried about the human soul. As the song balloons into a psychedelic-funk fever dream, it quickly becomes clear that Shepp’s concerns are much bigger than, if also inextricable from, the systemic failure and heinous outcome at Attica. “Through his music here,” writes percussionist Abdul Zahir Batin in the album liner notes, “we can feel the roots of a plight.”
Shepp’s essential partner on Things Have Got to Change had been Cal Massey, a visionary trumpeter and arranger who shared his political perspective. They teamed up again for Attica Blues, and Massey, in turn, recruited Romulus Franceschini, his composing partner in a concern called The RoMas Orchestra. On “Steam,” a dreamy waltz that takes up much of the album’s first side, the flexibility of Franceschini’s string orchestration—featuring an all-star violin section of Leroy Jenkins, John Blake, and L. Shankar, along with cellists Ronald Lipscomb and Calo Scott—allows the song to morph from succor to astringency and back again. The song’s singer is Joe Lee Wilson, and his expressive baritone gives Shepp’s lyrics a tangible shape: “Summer,” he half-sings, half-sighs, “Soft as the rain/And sweet as the end of pain.” (If you have ever admired the work of Dwight Trible and Patrice Quinn in Kamasi Washington’s band, the declaratory stance of the singing should ring agreeably familiar.)
There’s an interlude between parts one and two of “Steam,” and it pairs a deep and droning solo by Jimmy Garrison, Coltrane’s longtime bassist, with the recitation of a poem by Bartholomew Gray. The poem, “Invocation to Mr. Parker,” pays homage to alto saxophonist and bebop progenitor Charlie Parker—“that driving music man/who used to wail out back.” It’s a nod to jazz lineage that might seem out of place on such a politically charged album, until you consider Shepp’s understanding of black music as unavoidably political in and of itself, a point of view he shared with poet and critic Amiri Baraka. Later, on side two, there comes “Good Bye Sweet Pops,” Massey’s elegy for Louis Armstrong, who’d died in the summer of ’71. The song has no words, but still manages to hail Armstrong as a village elder; it’s a regal, bittersweet ballad that kicks into double time for Shepp’s breezy yet commanding soprano solo. The album’s thematic framework invites a reading of “Sweet Pops” as a valiant soldier, weathering so much injustice in his time, and finding the ultimate dignity in release. Sweet as the end of pain.
The way that all of these songs and spoken-word passages swirl one into the next speaks to the realization of Shepp’s ambitions on Attica Blues. (Praise is also due to his producer, Ed Michel.) The way it all coheres is what makes Attica Blues one of the more successful concept albums in jazz history. But Shepp would probably object to at least two words in that encomium—starting with “jazz,” given his public disavowal of the term as a white man’s yoke for African American music. The other might be “concept,” with its lofty aesthetic baggage. “I don’t believe in the word ‘art,’” he told critic John Litweiler in 1974. “It’s, to me, not functional, it’s passive. It’s bourgeois in the sense that art develops at a point when people have leisure time. That’s like the Platonic ideal, something that can be observed as art, something outside experience.”
Attica Blues seeks the inside track of experience. The album cover is a Chuck Stewart photograph of Shepp at work, seated at a piano with a tenor saxophone lying prone beneath his gaze. But what he appears to be studying, as he smokes a cigarette, is sheet music. Over his left shoulder is a bookcase crammed with books and records; over his right is an Olympics ’68 poster, showing Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their black-gloved fists on the podium. A keen student of revolutionary politics, Shepp was well aware that the Attica uprising had a precipitating event clear across the country: the killing of author and activist George Jackson, shot dead by prison guards during a failed escape at San Quentin.
“Blues For Brother George Jackson,” which opens Side Two of Attica Blues, is Shepp’s paean to this fallen hero—and probably the most straightforward piece on the album, a 12-bar form with a grooving ostinato and a polished blare of horns. Shepp’s tenor solo, which follows a squawking alto statement by Marion Brown, exudes a characteristically robust charisma. Despite the temptation to memorialize Jackson in words—as Bob Dylan had in “George Jackson,” which was rushed to release the previous November—Shepp lets the soul in the song speak for itself.
That is, until “Invocation: Ballad For a Child” fades in, featuring another Beaver Harris poem; “I would rather be a plant than a man in this land,” it begins. As on a similar interlude from side one, the solemn recitation is by William Kunstler, a radical lawyer who’d been an appointed witness to the doomed negotiations at Attica, and who would later defend several of its prisoners at trial. The very presence of Kunstler may be the purest act of provocation on Attica Blues. But it also underscores a core conviction about the uprising, which came about because the largely African American prison population objected to subhuman treatment and brutal living conditions. The massacre that followed was just a dire confirmation of their plight. As Kunstler intones in “Invocation: Attica Blues,” speaking words by Harris: “Some people think that they are in their rights/When on command they take a black man’s life.”
We don’t need to draw an explicit parallel with the Black Lives Matter movement to recognize the undying urgency of Shepp’s argument. We don’t need to study the scourge of mass incarceration to understand that Attica Blues has lost none of its relevance. And we don’t need to strain, at least not much, to grasp the faith that the album places in the purity of a child. On “Ballad For a Child,” the bittersweet, Marvin Gaye-like reflection that follows Kunstler’s second reading, Carl Hall’s gospel vocals return. “But what the whole world really needs,” he sings, flipping into his buttery falsetto, “is a baby’s smile.”
The earnest sentimentality of that lyric might feel gauzy and credulous on an album so mired in hard realities—an impression that Shepp readily disarms by concluding Attica Blues with a song called “Quiet Dawn.” Composed by Massey as an Afro-soul bossa nova, it features a stirring vocal by the composer’s daughter Waheeda Massey, who was in grade school at the time.
The orchestration on “Quiet Dawn,” credited to RoMas, makes it one of the most vividly textured pieces on Attica Blues. The string section toggles between a quiet shimmer and a twitchy pizzicato, while the brass and reed sections meld into a soulful mass. Shepp’s rhythm section on the track—Garrison on bass, Walter Davis, Jr. on piano and Billy Higgins on drums, with several percussionists—maintains a strong pull without upsetting the song’s tonal balance. Shepp delivers his most bravura tenor solo, notes pouring out of his horn as if from a spigot.
But it’s the small, determined voice of Waheeda Massey that you remember after the song and the album are done. “Quiet Dawn” doesn’t have the most singable melody on the album, and her intonation often lands under a given pitch. That imperfection speaks to the innocence and vulnerability of a child—but young Waheeda also exudes a steady, untroubled self-assurance.
You can almost picture her gazing out toward the horizon line as she sings her father’s deceptively simple lyrics, more in reassurance than in resignation, at the top of the song:

It’s quiet
At dawn
And life
Moves on.


Regina Spektor’s latest album takes the unabashed earnestness that has always marked her music and rewrites it in a somber, minor key.

Remember Us to Life

Nobel Prize precedent aside, this is not a particularly great time to be a pop singer-songwriter. Royalty pay is underneath the toilet for most songwriters for hire, and solo songwriters aren’t faring much better. What used to be, for better or worse, its own genre—a solo acoustic, piano or guitar, maybe some strings—is practically nonexistent in today’s market. The pop chart has drowned it out for years. The alternative music charts are capricious, but lean rock and male. The adult contemporary chart is basically just the pop chart, minus rap.
It’s not that these artists have stopped making music. That music’s just been decontextualized and diluted-down and flung in a dozen directions. You can succeed with traditional singer-songwriter fare if you're male—see Ed Sheeran, or Jake Bugg, or whoever else is being heralded as the savior of musical authenticity this year—but if not, your niche is dead of a thousand market fluctuations and Lilith Fair insults, and your options are limited. The closest things in the past few years to traditional singer-songwriter hits are Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song,” which sounds basically like Katy Perry, or Ruth B’s “Lost Boy,” which is literally four-and-a-half minutes of Vines.
Such a market doesn’t allow singer-songwriters much of a legacy. The 2000s had no shortage of talent, much of it sharp enough to resist dumbing-down and some of it rewarded commercially, but it hasn’t produced a mainstream household name, a Fiona Apple or a Tori Amos. In an alternate universe one of them might have been Regina Spektor, whose 15-year career deserves much more recognition than it's gotten. The problem is, there are two Regina Spektors: the public perception and the actual musician. The actual musician records character studies, often set to dizzying classical-piano gusts like “The Flowers” and “Aprés Moi,” and writes with an earnestness not often seen these days. You can draw a direct line from Spektor’s albums to artists working today like Sara Bareilles or Ingrid Michaelson.
The public perception takes that earnestness and recasts it as one-dimensional quirk—it’s probably not coincidental that this style of music peaked around the same time the “manic pixie dream girl” archetype did—in order to dismiss it. This has actually been an incredibly good few years for Spektor; her theme song to “Orange Is the New Black” was nominated for a Grammy in 2013, and she’s recorded with artists like zeitgeist-y Chance the Rapper. But it’s been a low-key kind of success, one that hasn’t resulted in any inescapable singles like “Fidelity” or “Samson.” And yet, Spektor has continued to release, every couple of years, some pretty decent albums.
Remember Us to Life is another pretty decent album, but a more somber affair. Spektor recorded it with a full orchestra—“I almost felt like the subconscious of the record was strings,” she told Rolling Stone—and it lends the album a certain weightiness. There are undertones of preoccupation with one’s legacy throughout. It often rises from subtext to actual text, as on the resigned “Obsolete” (“This is how I feel right now: obsolete manuscript no one reads and no one needs”) or “Tornadoland,” which sets Spektor’s plainspoken line against a blossoming orchestral swell that at one point resolves itself into something resembling the THX intro. Against this, Spektor’s piano line becomes an almost cartoonish downward dive, matching the lyrics: “Everybody’s time has come, it’s everybody’s moment except yours.” The mood is one of panic, restrained until the moment it no longer can be; see also single “Bleeding Heart,” about pain tamped down, featuring a bridge that shouts and claps and exults until it too is snuffed out.
The biggest buy-in with Spektor’s music has been that earnestness, its requiring you to be OK with songs that talk about rowboats feeling trapped in paintings, or laughing at God as one of us, or ditching your corporate job to take off your shoes and splash around in puddles. Remember Us to Life doesn't dispense with these nostrums, but it does rewrite them in a minor key. “The Trapper and the Furrier" is much like “Ghost of Corporate Future,” but the shoe-splashing of the former is replaced by a funeral dirge in which the rich only get more, more. If that sounds dreary, “Small Bill$” is what passes for upbeat: the same message (pretty much Discworld’s Sam Vimes theory, rewritten to include weed and Coca-Cola and an implied 99% uprising), just in the form of funhouse cabaret with bitterly lilting backup vocals. (If that sounds equally intolerable, Spektor’s probably never going to be for you.)
Remember Us to Life suffers from inconsistency; against the weightier atmosphere, less adorned, more traditionally Spektor songs like “Older and Taller” or “The Light” sound like they come from an entirely different album. But Spektor’s albums have always been tonally inconsistent—Begin to Hope had classical pieces “Aprés Moi” next to ballads next to electronic moves like “Edit” next to fizzy and (yes) quirky singles like “Fidelity” and “On the Radio,” and it all was perfectly fine. In Spektor’s catalogue, Remember Us to Life balances comfort food for Spektor fans with the maturity and wisdom you'd expect from a singer-songwriter passing the 15th year of her career.
CORRECTION: The original version of this piece used an incorrect title and insinuated that Spektor received a Grammy nomination in 2016.


Andrew Bird fashioned I Want to See Pulaski at Night around “Pulaski at Night”, a song he wrote but didn't want to hold until he had enough for a full-length. He composed a handful of instrumentals to form prologues and epilogues around it, comparing it to soundtracking a film.

Andrew Bird: I Want to See Pulaski at Night

I Want to See Pulaski at Night

It’s hard to think of Andrew Bird’s new EP as an EP. It’s an appropriate seven tracks, arranged to be reasonably cohesive across a half-hour, and concerned only with a handful of musical ideas, which it teases out intelligently and patiently. So far so good. Bird fashioned the release around a single song, “Pulaski at Night”, which he wrote but did not want to hold until he had enough for a full-length. Instead, he composed a handful of instrumentals to form lengthy prologues and epilogues to “Pulaski”, comparing it to soundtracking a film. So think of the EP as the director’s cut of the main song. Or an extended mix. Or a short suite. Think of it as an EP, however, and it feels slight—never quite the sum of its parts.
“Pulaski at Night” is prime Bird: tightly crafted, lyrically witty, understated yet sophisticated in its arrangement of loops and plucks and thrums and whistles. “I paint you a picture of Pulaski at night,” he sings on the chorus. “Come back to Chicago, city of light.” The galloping violin strums give that sneaky hook its subdued grandeur and steady insistence, Bird’s bow tracing the topography of the Midwestern landscape. It sounds as though he’s trying to erase the many miles between him and the person he’s addressing, who is clearly far away. At one of his Gezelligheid shows last winter, Bird explained the song’s origins and specified which Pulaski inspired him, but there’s something so teasingly vague about the song's shadowy “you” that it’s better left unexplained. On its own, the song could be about a departed friend, a distant lover, or every fan who isn’t in the town Bird is playing that night.
If “Pulaski at Night” is Bird at his most dependably and stalwartly Romantic, the rest of the EP is just Bird. There is, admittedly, a warm familiarity to the plaintively whistled theme of “Lit from Underneath”, to the staccato plucks of “Hover 1”, to the evocative bowing on “Hover 1”. As well, a few unexpected flourishes illuminate some of these songs, such as the loose-limbed raga rhythm on opener “Ethio Invention No. 1” and the quickly fading notes that arc across “Logan’s Loops”. At times that familiarity curdles into predictability, and nothing else carries the sense of purpose and longing as the title track. Not that Bird needs to reinvent himself on a minor release like this one, but an EP is an ideal medium for indulging new experiments and rethinking one’s approach. The most innovative and intriguing aspect of Pulaski is not its music, but ultimately its not-quite-definable form.


Paid For It is San Francisco songwriter Mark Treise's second album as Jealousy. The shapeshifting, odd grooves underline stories of indulgence and guilt.

Paid For It

Paid For It is Mark Treise's second album as Jealousy. The San Francisco songwriter—who also plays bass in the leaden, woozy rock outfit CCR Headcleaner—issued Viles in 2011, which featured similarly elliptical lyricism and oblong, idiosyncratic grooves. Paid For It, which was recorded in Los Angeles, features Don Bolles, best known as drummer of The Germs, behind the kit on some songs. Otherwise, Treise is responsible for the sounds, including power drill, broken bottle, gurgling electronics, and field recordings, but principally bass guitar, which he’d loop live in the studio and ply with effects until sufficiently forbidding.
The emphasis on overlaid bass lines rather than chord patterns lends Jealousy songs strange, shifty shapes. "Doin’ a Little Time" is typical of the strongest tracks on account of its consistent, pulsing bass motif, which anchors an ebb and flow of hiss and noise. There are deceivingly few sonic components to Paid For It, but their nightmarish dub reflections swell to fill what feel like massive chambers. The six-minute highlight "Fresh Kill," for instance, features little more than rhythmic pitter-patter augmented by two-or-three note melodic gestures. Like Paid For It overall, the song eschews conventional structure and development in favor of cyclical, rippling bass beneath Treise’s eerily enchanting voice.
On Paid For It, Treise yearns for visceral, elemental experiences. The title track, which invokes goddesses and autoeroticism alike, seems like a fraught meditation on personal identity. Florid mythical imagery recurs throughout, but passion most often dovetails with destruction: "And I loved hard like iron," goes "Fresh Kill." "And bent the word ‘love’ into a crescent moon / terminal swoon." He's a glutton for self-loathing: In one song, Treise is "sucked up and fucked up" and a "sleazebag scumbag scumfuck" whose face is a "wretched cliché." And yet, the track is called, "I Want It." If indulgence is paramount to Paid For It, the next most important theme is guilt.
Generous reverb and delay tends to render vocals soothing or spooky but indistinct. Not for Jealousy. The effects warp Treise’s weary incantations, moisten his lisp, and lend his leering murmur a sense of bleary, opiated oblivion. That means Paid For It is a druggy album, but few druggy albums capture the balance between blissful stupor and nausea so well. And while dull gloom is often peddled under the pretenses of chic austerity, Paid For It evades the trappings of stylish-but-innocuous miserablism. A couple songs feel impenetrable to a fault (including the vertiginous opener "Been Wrong"), but the album's overall pleasures—in the terms of Treise’s spiritually conflicted lyrics—are akin to a rewarding séance: shock and awe before the medium’s ritual flair, followed by an uneasy, lingering sense of connection.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the major-label debut from the sludge-metal pioneers, an album that marked their transition from rockers to experimentalists.

Houdini

Even as a kid, Buzz Osborne had the hair: that splendid shock of aerodynamic curls that rose above the crowd like a sail at the 2010 World Series playoffs, a crown befitting the name King Buzzo. Born in the remote Washington lumber town of Morton, Osborne moved around the state with his dad, who worked in the timber industry, before the family settled in Montesano in coastal Grays Harbor County. Twelve-year-old Osborne was an outsider: a new face in a tight-knit community, a musical omnivore in a place where record stores were nonexistent and playing the high school dance was the peak of most musicians’ ambitions. The hair didn’t help. “He was a freak and no one liked him,” said Matt Lukin, one of the first like-minded kids Osborne met in Montesano, with whom he’d form one of the Northwest’s most influential heavy rock bands, the Melvins.
Osborne’s dad wanted him to sign up for the Army, but when Buzz fell sick he went to the local recruiter’s office and got a permanent excuse from service; instead, he got a job at the local Thriftway, where a disliked employee named Melvin became the inspiration for the name of his band. He met Lukin at Montesano High School, and their social circle would expand to include Osborne’s coworker Mike Dillard and a couple of kids named Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic. During this time, Osborne positioned himself as a relentless rock’n’roll evangelist, spreading the gospel of ’70s groups like Kiss and Cheap Trick and punk bands like Black Flag and MDC to his friends. He burned compilation tapes, made pilgrimages to the DJ’s Sound City record shop in nearby Aberdeen to talk music with clerk Tim Hayes, and even wrote an article for the Montesano Vidette arguing the value of small shows; years later, Novoselic would credit him with bringing punk rock to their community.
When Osborne formed the Melvins in 1983, with Lukin on bass and Dillard on drums, he found a new vehicle for his crusade—and a way out of Montesano, as the band started gradually playing gigs closer and closer to the nearest major city, Seattle. The Melvins played covers of Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and Osborne’s beloved Kiss, mixed in with fast hardcore punk. That changed in 1984, when Black Flag confounded their fellow punk rockers by concluding their album My War with three six-minute-plus tracks that pulled away from the breakneck speed of hardcore toward the wounded crawl of doom metal.
Black Flag were enjoying an absurdly productive year, releasing three albums (starting with My War) and playing roughly 170 shows. One of these shows was September 25, 1984 at the Mountaineers Hall in Seattle, with a hungry young band called Green River opening. Osbourne, Cobain, and Lukin all went, with Cobain selling his entire record collection to buy tickets. None of them emerged the same. Cobain started spiking his hair, spray-painting cars, and screaming to strengthen his vocal cords. As for Osbourne and Lukin: “The Melvins went from being the fastest band in Seattle to the slowest, almost overnight,” in the words of another Washington punk named Kim Thayil, who would form a band called Soundgarden that same year.
By this time, the Melvins had replaced Dillard with a drummer named Dale Crover, whose mother’s house in Aberdeen made for a makeshift practice space. The fledgling C/Z Records picked them up and put them on a 1986 compilation called Deep Six that was meant to highlight the new sound brewing in the Northwest, but after cutting 1986’s self-titled EP for C/Z and 1987’s Gluey Porch Treatments for Bay Area label Alchemy, Osborne and Crover moved to San Francisco. Lukin alleges that Osborne declined to formally fire him, telling him he’d broken up the band; it wasn’t until Lukin ran into Osborne in San Francisco that he learned the truth. (Lukin would go on to co-found Mudhoney, then retire from music to pursue carpentry.)
The Melvins’ early years in the city produced some of their best work: Ozma and Bullhead, with Lori Black (the daughter of Shirley Temple, of all people) on bass, and the mighty drone-metal ur-text Lysol, with Joe Preston holding down the low end on an early entry in one of underground metal’s most enviable resumés. Meanwhile their old buddies Cobain and Novoselic were building steam fast in Seattle, exalting the influence of the Melvins at nearly every turn. “You couldn’t buy better advertising,” said Osborne, and soon, major labels intent on snatching up as much of the Seattle sound as they could were looking to this manifestly, militantly bizarre band in hopes they might be the next Nirvana. The Melvins went with Atlantic and booked San Francisco’s Brilliant Studios to make their fifth album, 1993’s Houdini.
If the industry climate was ideal for a band like the Melvins finding an inkling of commercial success, the band’s personal circumstances were not. By the time they started working on Houdini, they’d fired Preston and taken Black back on, but she checked into rehab after being busted for heroin possession in Portland, and Osborne and Crover played bass on most of the album. Meanwhile, ostensible “producer” Cobain was deep into his own heroin addiction and consumed with the making of Nirvana’s In Utero, released on the same day as Houdini. Originally scheduled to workshop songs with Osborne before production, he flew into San Francisco on the first day of sessions and was asleep by 6 p.m. “I went to [Nirvana manager] Danny Goldberg’s office in L.A. and said, 'Look, Kurt Cobain’s strung out,’” Osborne said. “Kurt was really bad, as bad as he’s ever been.”
Houdini’s status as the best-selling Melvins album no doubt owes a lot to Cobain’s name on the sleeve. Yet its status as the most beloved Melvins album speaks to how well the band weathered these circumstances. Houdini isn’t a blown opportunity, nor does it sound like a stab at the charts. For the most part, it sounds like the album they might have made if they’d still been bouncing around Bay Area indie labels. The Melvins made a habit of working fast and loose, usually banging out albums in a few days. Osborne often made up the words to his songs on the spot, and the lyrics on Houdini are gloriously impenetrable. It’d be easy to totally dismiss them as phonetic gibberish if not for the presence of a lyric sheet in the liner notes. Say it with me now: “Los ticka toe rest!”
There could be an objectively correct interpretation of these songs somewhere in Osborne’s head, but he’s at no great pains to share it with the listener. If a song like “Night Goat” seems to be about sex, not every verse has to corroborate that interpretation, and if “Sky Pup” finds Osborne affecting the nasty nasal tone people use when they’re making fun of someone else, it’s more likely that that’s just how he decided to sing that day. Osborne’s approach to songcraft brings to mind Magma singer Klaus Blasquiz’s explanation of his outré French avant-rock band’s self-invented phonetic language: “The language has of course a content, but not word by word.” There’s a fearsome purity to these songs, free of context, existing only to be themselves.
With the vocals free from the obligation of meaning anything, the Melvins invite us to listen to what’s going on with the guitars and drums, particularly the latter. Dale Crover’s role is more architectural than anything else. “Hooch” begins with a Bonhamesque clatter that simmers down to a single kick drum before the voice and guitar enter; the two tom hits that punctuate Osborne’s first two lines feel as crucial to the song’s meaning as anything out of the singer’s mouth. The riff cycles between a few basic power chords; Crover is really the soloist. “If the drums were different, the song wouldn’t be as good,” Osborne admits. “It’s effective because of the dynamics of the way the drummer plays.”
The brilliance of “Night Goat” lies in the way the drumbeat never gets off the ground—it always seems to be stuck in dead space like the metal equivalent of a TV “breaking news” theme, anticipating nothing. There’s a bit on “Lizzy” where the riff is accompanied only by Crover’s woodblock, and those hollow thunks on the off beat somehow sound significant, even if you can’t place your finger on why. “Hag Me” is so slow that it feels beatless, almost ambient; it’s this album’s answer to Bullhead’s “Boris” and Lysol’s “Hung Bunny,” a glacier moving under its own weight. It’s no coincidence that Crover’s most straight-ahead rock beat comes on a holdover from the circa-1983 Mike Dillard days—nor can it be a coincidence that the song in question is called “Set Me Straight.”
If there’s anything everyone can agree on about the convoluted credits for Houdini, it’s that Cobain played on two songs: “Sky Pup” and the 10-minute closer, “Spread Eagle Beagle,” which consists entirely of percussion. “It’s cool, but I’ll never listen to the whole thing,” Osborne said of the latter, and it’s easy to understand why. This is no “Moby Dick” or “Toad.” Instead of building to a climax or playing rhythmic tricks on the listener, “Spread Eagle Beagle” clatters obstinately until the distances between the drum thwacks grow so long that it’s almost as if you’re listening to a parody of CD-era albums whose bonus tracks come after a long silence. Listeners are likely to ask “is it over yet?” for more reasons than one.
It speaks to the talent and work ethic of the Melvins that they were able to come out of the strange, sad circumstances of Houdini’s making with an album that feels like the logical next step in their career. But it’s also hard to shake the feeling that had the Melvins actually spent some time with Cobain or a more reliable producer working this thing out, they might’ve made a better record. Bullhead and Lysol are tighter, and the Melvins sound much more comfortable on their second Atlantic album—1994’s sensual, atmospheric Stoner Witch—whose ambient and noise experiments are far more purposeful and enjoyable.
Houdini feels both definitive and transitional. It’s definitive because “Hooch,” “Night Goat,” “Lizzy,” “Hag Me,” and the mid-tempo bruiser “Honey Bucket” rank among the band’s best songs, and because it shows them at the peak of their powers as a pure metal band while hinting at their budding experimental impulses. It’s transitional because it’s the last album they’d make before they’d let those impulses take over. “Spread Eagle Beagle” is more interesting as a prank than as a piece of music, and “Pearl Bomb” lives and dies by its curious stuck-typewriter percussion track, but they would predict the Melvins’ output for the subsequent decade, starting with their next album, 1994’s Prick, made in an adulterous coupling with Amphetamine Reptile while still on Atlantic—and home to such songs as “Pure Digital Silence,” which is exactly that.
By Stoner Witch, the deliberately prankish Atlantic swansong Stag, and their first post-Atlantic album, Honky, these left turns would be a crucial part of their sound. Their music since then has generally bounced between variations on their early heavy-rock sound and diversions both fascinating (the wintry, underloved Honky or the electrifying remix album Chicken Switch) and grating (their predilection towards jokey covers like “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” or, infamously, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”).
The Melvins are still active and prolific, even if their inability to hold down a bassist has become such a running joke that 2016’s Basses Loaded built its whole concept around juggling six current and former Melvins on low-end duties. As indelible as their impact on Northwest rock was, it seems like a small part of a career that’s placed them at the center of the Bay Area’s stable of art-metal oddballs, centered on their longtime home of Ipecac and its boss Mike Patton, and as pioneers of sludge metal, which is more true to the Melvins’ original Black Flag-meets-Black Sabbath vision than the music Nirvana would become famous for.
Given the Melvins’ refusal to compromise their sound and disgust for “rock stars” and institutions such as the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, it’s hard to imagine they’d be happier if they were a Seattle success story than in their present role as a hardworking cult band. Houdini ultimately sold 100,000 copies, and the band even cracked the Top 200 with The Bride Screamed Murder in 2010, but they have no hits to begrudgingly play for casual fans, no single towering underground classic hanging like an albatross. In a 2012 interview after taking the stage at the Loft in Atlanta, Osborne expanded on a philosophy that hasn’t changed since he exalted the values of tiny punk shows in the Montesano Vidette. “This is about as big as I like to go,” he said of the 650-capacity venue. “You can see from everywhere; you don’t feel like you’re in some airplane hangar. There’s a reason I liked punk rock to begin with. I haven’t forgotten that.”


The New York quintet diverges from its dance-punk roots, stirring in dashes of surf-pop, big beat, and classic rock on an album that explores the mysteries of the universe and the human psyche.

Twisted Crystal

Since their formation in 2010, Guerilla Toss have maintained an appealing mix of hyperactive exuberance and sonic innovation. From their dance-punk palette to their homages to LSD, the New York-based quintet’s outré energy seems to grow with each new project. Their uncanny and otherworldly instrumental concoctions complement their uncanny and otherworldly themes, whether they’re singing about a talking parrot or Jesus Christ. Twisted Crystal, their third DFA release, finds them traversing new compositional terrain in their exploration of yet another colorful abyss.
Diverging from their previous forays into punk and new wave, the album embraces sweeter melodies, stirring in dashes of surf-pop, big beat, and classic-rock showmanship. Despite this honeyed approach, things still get weird on Twisted Crystal. Occultists of sound, Guerilla Toss bend their instruments in strange, mysterious ways; guitarist Arian Shafiee employs Eastern tuning, while the album uses Eventide processing to add a coat of burnished reverb that recalls classic-rock monoliths like Led Zeppelin. Cowbell gallops in, guitar riffs zigzag in unexpected directions, and sci-fi spaceship sound effects light up the songs like burst glow sticks. As they’re exploring these novel sounds, Guerilla Toss saturate their songs with social commentary.  The album captures the hysteria that comes with struggling to understand the world, and the universe, around us—tripping on blind faith, falling into potholes of ideology, and awakening oneself to paralyzing complacency in order to act against it.
Twisted Crystal feels post-human and extraterrestrial, a mystical attempt to connect with a higher power. Warped, gooey guitar lines and spiraling synth flutters hit like a sugar rush, most impressively on opener “Magic Is Easy.” The album’s production offers just the right amount of overstimulation, incorporating sounds seemingly imported from both dreams and nightmares as it emphasizes lyrics steeped in metaphysical inquiry. “Jesus, take me from this planet/You’re the leader and I’m your little rabbit,” frontwoman Kassie Carlson sings on “Jesus Rabbit.” It feels like a bizarre children’s song, as Carlson schemes her way off Earth, poking fun at humanity and the idea of divinity in the same breath.
On “Walls of the Universe,” skittering strings and a climactic synth crescendo conjure the infinite enormity of the cosmos. Carlson sings in a robotic voice about a journey across the universe with a talking bird, once again escaping the mundanity of earthly existence for adventure in another world—or, as she puts it, “crossing the line from boring to obscene.” Lead single “Meteorological” finds her plumbing the depths of human emotions, where moods can be as unpredictable as the weather. Led by a spunky bass riff and propulsive drums, she reflects on her inability to read other people’s reactions—and even her own—with total accuracy. Time and time again, Carlson launches inquiries, only to conclude that much of the human experience is impenetrable.
But when Guerilla Toss are confronted with the limits of their understanding, they take it as an invitation to expand their minds. On closing track “Green Apple,” Carlson turns her attention to the sights and sounds that surround her. Both senses awaken as she describes spirals of green-apple incense, while textural chaos erupts around her voice in the form of bandmate Peter Negroponte’s unrelenting drums and flute-like synths. Carlson leaves us with haunting questions, sowing doubt about the reliability of our own perceptions: “Did you really see?/Do you really think that?/What do you believe?”
On Twisted Crystal, Guerilla Toss journey to the edge of the universe and grapple with the mysteries of human existence. Such adventures can be panic inducing, but here they conquer anxiety through curiosity, finding excitement and even solace in abstruseness.


The 20-year-old UK producer broke out on TikTok with snippet-sized songs that ache with nostalgia for the recent past. Her intimate, lived-in music succeeds where cheaper imitations fail.

to hell with it

Within the cultural whirlpool of TikTok, home movies of high schoolers from 2004 represent a strange utopia: “[Life] just seemed to be happier and easier back then,” reads a top comment on a popular video. Like many of her peers, the British producer and singer PinkPantheress projects a sense of wistfulness about the early aughts. “[M]usic was so unpolished and cool because I feel like people weren’t afraid of being a little bit cringe,” she told i-D. Since releasing her first song on TikTok in late 2020, she’s cultivated a sound that she calls “new nostalgic”; for the 20-year-old singer, that means websites designed to look like Myspace profiles and music videos uploaded with intentionally low resolution. On her debut mixtape, to hell with it, PinkPantheress sketches a Y2K fantasy that’s strongest when she uses the past as a guide, not a gimmick.
PinkPantheress is savvier and slicker than other young musicians who’ve cribbed aesthetics from the 2000s. Unlike newly minted viral stars like Jxdn or Addison Rae, PinkPantheress has put her songs at the forefront of her fame, obscuring her identity behind a moniker adopted from her TikTok username. It wasn’t until months after her first TikTok that viewers got more than a glimpse of her face; her real name remains almost impossible to find.
And then there’s the music itself, quicksilver slices of bubblegum breakbeats that blink to life and fade out in just over a minute. Her breakout song, “Pain,” sampled UK garage megahit “Flowers,” but slows it down to match her sleepy state of mind. Rather than try to overpower the sample with her lyrics, she fills the space with “la la las,” letting the simple two-note sample breathe, revealing the “lo-fi hip hop beat” inside the pulsing, dance-ready rhythm of the original. Her songs have a welcome, deceptive simplicity that’s missing from the cynical sheen of ultra-famous U.S. TikTok artists; she’s content to let a beat simmer, sing a few coy phrases, and leave before the concept grows tired.
But what sets PinkPantheress’ music firmly in the modern day is her voice, an ethereal, pixelated miasma that breaks from the earnest delivery of her British predecessors. Her pinched coos feel hyperreal, the edges of her syllables sharpened as if sung by a swooning voice-to-text machine. There are obvious comparisons to futuristic singers like Grimes and Poppy, but PinkPantheress’ strangely soothing vocals also recall the performative over-enunciation of “TikTok voice.” That intimate quality reflects the recording process for most of her early singles, which were tracked lying down in her college dorm room because she felt unable to sing standing up. The combination of retro samples and Clairo-esque bedroom pop delivery breaks the early-2000s spell: Sure, those songs were perhaps more “cringe,” but their vocals were overdubbed to the high heavens. PinkPantheress feels like she’s whispering in your ear.
While she’s clearly a passionate scholar of the early millennium, she also seems aware that this era of her career can only go so far. Most of her songs are maddeningly fleeting, as if a longer look would reveal cracks in the facade. But PinkPantheress is beginning to push beyond genre tropes; though to hell with it is essentially a collection of previously released singles, the tape’s new songs hint at broader palettes and bigger risks. Where earlier lyrics were almost all outward projections onto an anonymous crush, “Reason” and “Nineteen” reflect on her own life. The latter, with its crashing waves and drawn-out violins, is the closest the record gets to a ballad. “I wasn’t meant to be/This bored at 19,” she confesses, a grounding moment on an album saturated with post-party depression. It’s a slow and sensual track underscored by a low bassline, and unlike the rest, it builds without cutting to a breakbeat drop. It still doesn’t exceed the maximum allotted time for a TikTok, but it’s constructed for private sentimentality, not internet virality.
PinkPantheress succeeds where cheaper imitations fail because her reference points feel lived-in rather than opportunistic. She adds an undeniably contemporary spin on her trove of samples, imbuing them with the intimacy and immediacy that comes from a childhood spent on self-confessional platforms like Tumblr and TikTok. On to hell with it, PinkPantheress sculpts a digital-age paradise that exists only in an invented memory of the past, setting the stage for a career set more firmly in the present.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Veteran rapper/producer Black Milk teams up with D.C.-based live band Nat Turner for his latest release, a raw and unhindered affair that brings to mind organic hip-hop experimenters like Dilla and A Tribe Called Quest.

Black Milk / Nat Turner: The Rebellion Sessions

The Rebellion Sessions

In 2013, almost two years before Kendrick Lamar released To Pimp a Butterfly, rapper/producer Black Milk trekked a similar path on No Poison No Paradise, a jazz/hip-hop hybrid partially about his upbringing in Detroit. Amid an otherwise dark soundtrack, songs like “Sonny Jr. (Dreams),” featuring keyboardist and Lamar collaborator Robert Glasper, and “Perfected on Puritan Ave.” best exemplified that fusion, the latter giving way to a raucous breakdown mid-song. The musical integration wasn’t as pronounced as Lamar’s, but it showcased Milk’s ability to merge genres without losing his signature sound. Across several recordings from the last decade, this artist has become known for his mix of hard drums and gripping samples as well as his masterful engineering, which makes everything refreshingly clear and crisp. In some cases, Milk’s instrumentals—steeped in funk, 1970s soul, and electronic dance—can outstrip his rhymes, which range from humble bragging to civic despair, leading some to debate his lyrical ability.
For The Rebellion Sessions, Milk links with Nat Turner, a largely D.C.-based band that has backed him up live. The project came together on a whim and was recorded in one week as something of a creative challenge. The results are mostly stripped down in a way that separates them from Milk’s usually heavy compositions. The genesis of Milk’s live sound dates back to 2010’s Album of the Year, a conceptually expansive project on which the rapper assessed personal strife over thick percussion. Only three instruments show up on Rebellion: drums by Zebulun Horton; bass by Malik Hunter; and keys by frequent Milk collaborator Aaron “Ab” Abernathy.
Milk plays conductor on this album, orchestrating the vibe of the tracks, setting Rebellion’s introspective mood. The record plays like four guys in a room, one riffing off the next in a relaxed environment. The music is decidedly modern, shaded by the influence of Miles Davis, J Dilla, and D’Angelo, floating by in quick sketches. On “The Ancient Rebellion,” for instance, the band mimics the volcanic opener of Davis’ “Bitches Brew,” its guitar and cymbals milling in the background, crashing in sporadic heaps. “Electric Spanking” deeply resembles Voodoo: Over a stomping funk jam a la “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” the vocal tone seems borrowed from D’Angelo himself. Songs like “Burn,” “Take 2,” and “The Knock” float by too quickly, leaving me to wonder what could’ve been if they played on a little while longer. Rebellion is somewhat transitional in that regard, yet it’s still anchored enough to last well beyond first listen.
There’s a strong rap strain throughout Rebellion that brings to mind A Tribe Called Quest and Guru’s Jazzmatazz recordings. It has a serene aura that continues the work Milk established on 2014’s If There’s a Hell Below, following the atmospheric “Hell Below” and “Story and Her,” especially. While those tracks were more structured, Rebellion is raw and unhindered, as if the quartet sculpted it in one take. It’s nuanced black music without borders, an extension of Milk’s vast sonic arc.


The avant-garde guitarist expands her compositions to fit her largest group ever, creating one of the most intricate and entrancing sets of her career.

Away With You

Mary Halvorson has been hailed for her technique ever since the debut of her trio. Recorded with bassist John Hébert and Xiu Xiu drummer Ches Smith, the guitarist’s first album as a bandleader referenced the power of noise-rock and the manic leaps of melody prized by her onetime teacher Anthony Braxton. Nearly a decade after that big splash, Halvorson still shreds with distinction, and that’s just one widely admired aspect of her art.
With each subsequent recording on the Firehouse 12 label, she has kept a recognizable language intact while refusing to repeat herself. First, she turned her core trio into a quintet, adding alto sax and trumpet. Then she built the band into a septet, incorporating trombone and tenor sax. As her lineups have increased in size, Halvorson’s sophistication as a composer has come into focus. After a solo-guitar covers project in 2015, she’s back to enlarging her compositional palette—this time with an octet that adds pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn to the roster.
This isn’t one of the instruments you’d typically expect to hear in a jazz group of any size, but its expressive range makes it a perfect fit for Halvorson’s quick-change compositional style. Alcorn’s pedal steel can suggest the warmth of country-western aesthetics, and also the droning sustain of ambient moods, often within the same tune. Opening track “Spirit Splitter (no. 54)” opens with a swaying line for the pedal steel on the surface. But underneath, the song teems with melodic activity. Ingrid Laubrock’s tenor saxophone navigates a tricky, ascending phrase, while other brass and reed players hit strutting, staccato passages. Amid the manic quality of the writing, there is still a relaxed vibe thanks to the players’ collective subtlety. The well-blended sound of this group can also be heard during the song’s spotlight features, as when trombonist Jacob Garchick improvises behind alto saxophonist Jon Irabagon’s incendiary solo.
On Away With You, performances veer from tightly scripted to more free-sounding sections, before heading back toward established themes. But these transitions rarely feel jagged. The title track begins with arpeggios from Halvorson’s guitar that gradually fade into the background once harmony lines for the other instruments take over. After a development section, Alcorn’s guitar emerges, referencing Halvorson’s original part. Then the two guitarists break the theme down again, collaborating on some intense, minimalist riffing.
Though Halvorson’s flintier attack is usually distinguished from Alcorn’s more rounded tone, here that’s not always the case. On “The Absolute Almost (no. 52),” Halvorson picks up a slide, occasionally emulating the sound of her pedal steel counterpart. Elsewhere, Alcorn uses an extended solo on “Fog Bank (no. 56)” to evoke experimental strumming effects that will sound familiar to Halvorson’s fans. The composer-bandleader doesn’t take as many solos this time around—she prefers to linger inside the sound of her octet. But when Halvorson does cut loose, as on “Safety Orange (no. 59),” she’s as inventive as ever.
Trumpeter Jonathon Finlayson sneaks up on the listener, moving from a mellow to a regal sound in the course of a few bars. And Ches Smith’s drumming is similarly adaptable—offering straight-ahead swing rhythms as well avant-garde marches and clattering explosions. There aren’t many fast tempos to be found on Away With You, though the album still has a live-wire feel, thanks to the density of the writing and the crispness of all those performances. The result is one of Halvorson’s most entrancing sets yet—and the first one in which ensemble interplay seems even more important than the various soloists’ individual fireworks.


The digicore scene’s two biggest rising stars aren’t yet distinct enough to complement each other in interesting ways.

then i’ll be happy EP

Ostensibly, Glaive and ericdoa recorded part of their new EP, then i’ll be happy, back in January at a sleek North Carolina Airbnb that fans quickly dubbed the Hyperpop Hype House. The final product makes that label feel like a misnomer. This music might soundtrack a hype house, but it rarely sounds like hyperpop. Instead, it’s frustratingly safe and directionless, the growing pains of two ascendant teenagers reconciling their digicore roots with new musical interests.
Over the last couple years, the digicore/hyperpop scene has come to understand Glaive and ericdoa as future stars. At their best, they blend genres with the fluency of international pop icons and the unhinged creativity of young, online artists, matching stadium-sized hooks about breakups to SoundCloud-native flows. In their beats, produced by a rotating cast including Whetan, glasear, and youngkimj, the guitars swing into EDM drops and the drum patterns switch up almost obsessively. Both signed to Interscope, Glaive and ericdoa currently sit somewhere between the online underground and the charts, poised for a real crossover.
After a few fleeting moments on loosies and posse cuts together, then i’ll be happy marks the duo’s first extended collaboration. While compelling as solo artists, Glaive and ericdoa aren’t yet distinct enough to complement each other in interesting ways. They both sing in a similar nasally shout and write in angsty aphorisms. Their chemistry occasionally comes to life, like when Glaive seamlessly passes the baton to ericdoa on the enveloping opener “naturale,” which charts how the pair are navigating life after a bit of fame. And the way they harmonize “men-tal! an-guish!” on the following song recalls the stronger moments on ericdoa’s 2020 album COA.
The bigger issue is that their individual artistic tics seem to be dissolving. Songs like Glaive’s “sick” and ericdoa’s “sheaskedwhatmylifeislike” became digicore canon not because they hopped genres, but because they sounded like SoundCloud rappers drawing outside the lines. then i’ll be happy resorts to blatant chameleonism: The middle stretch doles out three sterile, paint-by-numbers pop songs, the worst offender being “pretending,” which sounds like Big Time Rush karaoke. All their songs are short, but this one bizarrely fades out after barely a minute and a half, like they just didn’t care about it anymore. New fans might not sense anything wrong, but to digicore diehards, these songs suggest the grimmest possible artistic trajectory: a descent into the grey mush of bankrolled, “genreless” artists.
Fortunately, the EP closes with its two strongest songs, the singles “cloak n dagger” and “fuck this town.” On the former, Glaive hurtles through four-on-the-floor madness and gated drums as he barks one of the most spiteful hooks he’s ever written: “Fuck you! I hope you rot in hell/I know you never cared, but I’m still doing well.” “fuck this town,” meanwhile, slinks through darker, dancier rhythms, with a perfectly dejected chorus mixed so that it flashes like strobe lights over the drums. In these Glaive and ericdoa songs, you can hear a kernel of the scene that birthed them: off-the-cuff arrangements, confessional writing that could be read as rap or emo, thoughtful genre explorations that subvert norms instead of succumbing to them.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


With easy hooks, surprise structural twists, and a gift for non-sequiturs, the Canadian quartet’s debut is a vivid portrait of the big-city struggle. Pavement’s influence is impossible to ignore.

Football Money

In 2013, Jeremy Gaudet relocated from Canada’s smallest province, Prince Edward Island, to its biggest city, Toronto. And he soon became acquainted with the cruel irony of moving to a vibrant, bustling metropolis overflowing with cultural activity and opportunity—i.e., that you often need to find a soul-sucking, creativity-stunting desk job to survive there. (A librarian by trade, Gaudet has quipped that “I work in Excel.”) A natural big-city survival strategy is to carve out a small community that reminds you of home—which Gaudet did by starting a band with fellow Charlottetown expats Mike Walker (bass), Brohan Moore (drums), and Brian Murphy (guitar).
But their group, Kiwi Jr., has proven to be more than just an after-hours amusement. Nor is it fair to classify them as a side-project offshoot of Alvvays, the popular indie-pop group in which Murphy plays bass. Rather, Kiwi Jr.’s debut album, Football Money (released last year in Canada on Mint Records and now more widely available via Persona Non Grata) is a vivid portrait of acclimatizing oneself to a new hometown exponentially bigger than the one you’ve known—of being constantly bombarded by stimuli and aspirational messaging that leaves you feeling both exhilarated and exhausted. And while they may not be the only band singing about the struggle of trying to make rent in a place where “everything is out of my price range,” few do such an expedient job of making you laugh out loud while you’re dying on the inside.
The very name Kiwi Jr. may elicit a smirk from a certain type of indie-rock fan, one who views New Zealand’s Flying Nun label as the Narnia of the underground, and who appreciates the nod to J Mascis’ tactic of adding a paternal suffix to avoid cease-and-desist lawsuits from similarly named artists. And the name fits: After all, if you could combine Antipodean indie rock with Dinosaur Jr., you’d essentially get Pavement—a band whose influence on Football Money is impossible to ignore. Not only does Gaudet’s voice drawl and crack in unmistakable Malkmusian fashion, he possesses a similar gift for piling on non-sequiturs about sports, scene politics, and the privileged class that cohere into uncannily pointed social commentary.
Throughout Football Money, Gaudet spews a ceaseless stream of celebrity namedrops, historical figures, and local landmarks that includes, but is not limited to: the SS, James Dean, The Book of Daniel, beloved Toronto Chinese restaurant New Ho King, Ren and Stimpy, the Toronto Transit Commission, the Front de libération du Québec, the “Luke, I am your father” scene, Burt Bacharach, the IRA, Jesus, R.E.M.’s “Talk About the Passion,” Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, and the Cy Young Award. But more than just show off Gaudet’s pop-cultural panache, they provide crucial color that make these tales of everyday woe feel lived-in.
On “Salary Man,” Gaudet frames the life of a rat-racing corporate suit as a sardonic superhero origin story, boasting of his perfectly Marie Kondo-ed lifestyle (“nothing says ‘home’ like a basket of folded white shirts”) and his formidable ability to make it to work on time after a night of binge-drinking. But beyond presenting a damning portrait of the typical finance bro, “Salary Man” leaves open the possibility that the most loathsome and handsomely paid office drones have become that way because they’re not able to do something more spiritually fulfilling. “I gaze through the window, there is still poetry there,” Gaudet’s streetcar-riding protagonist sings, dreaming of a life outside the financial-district skyscrapers. And when it comes to critiquing those who indulge in the spoils of unchecked capitalism, Gaudet hardly lets himself off the hook. Locomotive rave-up “Gimme More” is a cheeky indictment of instant-gratification addiction, with Gaudet reading out a shopping list of needs like a kidnapper negotiating ransom demands: “Gimme more Star Wars, gimme open barre chords, gimme more, gimme more, more, more!”
Gaudet has such a witty way with one-liners, and the band is so effervescent in their execution, that it’s easy to overlook the elevated level of craft at work. Football Money clocks in at a lean 10 songs and 27 minutes, with nary a second wasted. (Only the mid-album interstitial “Soft Water Apple”—a brief, dirgey recasting of what appear to be “Salary Man” lyrical outtakes—feels dispensable.) Songs like “Leslie” and the title track breeze by at such a brisk clip, and are loaded with so many easy hooks and surprise structural twists, you barely notice that they lack proper choruses. And while it’s tempting to align Kiwi Jr. with equally erudite and urgent contemporaries like Parquet Courts and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, winsome turns like the gleaming “Comeback Baby,” the glammy stomper “Wicked Witches,” and jaunty jangle-pop gallop “Swimming Pool” (in which Gaudet transposes his life story with the legend of Brian Jones’ death) ground the singer’s wandering wordplay in ’60s and ’70s pop fundamentals.
It’s a degree of craftsmanship that earns Kiwi Jr. the right to subtweet their less imaginative peers—or even themselves. On the frenetic “Nothing Ever Changes,” Gaudet sings: “This boy knows I hate his bands/Everyone looks like a lumberjack,” before adding, with an audible eye roll, “Guitars!/More guitars!” While Kiwi Jr. are too clean-shaven and tidily dressed to pass as lumberjacks, surely Gaudet—as the frontman of a guitar-centric band making Pavement-inspired indie rock in the year 2020—is aware that such a dismissal could easily be volleyed right back at him. That just speaks to the confidence flowing through every track on Football Money: It may be slanted at familiar angles, but the enchantment is their own.


The Nigerian-born artist collages highlife, Afrobeats, and electronics into his bravely experimental second EP. While the medley is audacious and impressive, it sometimes feels unfinished.

akọle EP

When Loshh Aje released his debut EP Ífaradá last February, he was set on finding joy in unlikely places. Across seven tracks, which swayed between gospel, funk, and highlife, the Nigerian-born, London-based musician explored the possibilities of resistance against longstanding oppression. He addressed slavery and police brutality in England, contentious topics that were in the zeitgeist when he recorded the EP, all while exhorting the importance of celebration in the midst of struggle.
On his sophomore EP akọle, Loshh has shifted slightly away from political matters. He remains a person of deep thought and careful consideration, no matter how light or dense his thematic concerns are, but here, personal introspection takes precedence over social issues. On Ífaradá, he played the observer and participant, preacher and congregant. But akọle is a lengthy diary entry filled with the musician’s desires and most intimate moments of vulnerability. At all times, he, and not the corrupted world, sits in the middle of the conflict. On akọle, he is more focused on personal progress, making money, and the enemies preventing him from reaching his blessings. There are moments when he returns to gloomier days, examining how far he has come, and there are other times where he is simply thinking on his feet. Having shed the glum textures that marked his previous work, akọle is a profound (although sometimes hastily constructed) project, buoyed by unglamorous but steadfast soul-searching.
“a” begins with a gentle wail before unspooling into a skeletal beat, buffered by talking drums and uneven drum pads. This is a song of supplication: in the background, his mother, Funke, prays for him in Yoruba, while his guttural sing-talking resembles a Yoruba native priest in the middle of incantations. “All these weapons formed against me no/They shall not prosper,” he declares. Loshh’s writing remains as witty and ironically unserious as ever. He sings with the fervor of a prophetic Nigerian pastor in the peak of Sunday service, declaring the scripture as a personal manifesto, as convictions, as matters requiring immense urgency.
“k” is a more cohesive groove, featuring fellow London-based Nigerian musician Obongjayar. The Santiago Morales-produced track—which is also the most memorable number on the EP—pays homage to the gritty percussive foundation of “Konko Below,” the famous Afropop number by Lagabaja. The Afrobeats enigma rose to fame around the early 2000s for merging West African instruments, such as talking drums, with the saxophone. As was common for Afrobeats artists of that era, he also had a penchant for digging into sociocultural issues. On “k,” Loshh grapples with self-preservation. At times the lyrics feel slapdash and poorly improvised, taking unexpected turns, as though they were made up on the spot and left without further review. But several key changes manage to keep the track adequately centered. By its end, “k” overflows with undeniable honesty.
Loshh is difficult to categorize; his influences transcend the boundaries of genre and include hip-hop icons like André 3000 and Snoop Dogg, as well as highlife and Afrobeats maestros King Sunny Adé, Yinka Ayefele, Fela Kuti, Pasuma, Psquare, and Lagbaja. Though he draws on multiple sources, Loshh’s practice of combining these inspirations all at once can sometimes leave his songs at an embryonic stage—they never seem to reach a point of mature development.
Across akọle, it often feels as if buckets of paint were thrown on a blank canvas, leaving the art staring back difficult to make sense of. Even his brief return to the topic of police brutality in the Fela Kuti-esque “l” feels like an afterthought; it is brash and fevered in its delivery, but lacks the much-needed poetry that his songwriting can carry. Ultimately, akọle is the work of a prodigious talent carefully building his own sonic language—unpredictable, charged, bravely experimental—that only he can lay claim to. At his best, Loshh’s instinct for uncanny storytelling imbues his work with a bold and timeless quality. Sitting just a little longer to refine his ambitious but riotous experimentations would have served akọle well.


With their spectacular 2002 debut, Turn on the Bright Lights, Interpol set an immeasurably high mark to follow, and its popularity has ensured equally high stakes: If the band stumbles on this highly anticipated follow-up, their humiliation will be very public...

Antics

It's hard to imagine what spurred the density and gloom of Turn on the Bright Lights, an album that, in retrospect, sounds like a popular band reacting to massive overexposure; its masterful statement of bruised withdrawal begged to divide a large fanbase, not create one. There was nothing about Interpol's self-contained, visionary debut that might have suggested their subsequent eyebrow-raising catapult to fame, particularly given their aversion to the traditional single format. Perhaps Paul Banks' lucid expression of discontent and impending dread spoke to an increasingly frustrated audience inundated by a generalized threat. Or maybe Interpol's popularity is simply a case of viscerally powerful music confounding formulas of public taste, breaking through purely on the basis of songwriting merit. Either way, Bright Lights set an immeasurably high mark to follow, and its popularity has ensured equally high stakes: If the band stumbles, their humiliation will be very public.
Fortunately, the members of Interpol understand what other bands take for granted: Careers aren't necessarily made or broken by second albums alone, and an ideal follow-up needn't engage the perceived potential of a defining debut or consciously redefine a pre-established sound in order to be effective. Redefinition, in particular, is a non-issue for Interpol, because one of the most enduring pleasures of their first album is its timeless singularity. Accordingly, it has been well understood that Antics wasn't going to be, nor could it be, Bright Lights 2. Bootleg versions of new material-- notably the live recordings of "Narc" and "Length of Love" that leaked last summer-- didn't suggest a radically altered aesthetic or faceless repetition, nor does Antics deliver either. Interpol avoid common sophomore pitfalls because they refuse to engage the immense weight that surrounds this release, and their tenuous position between shrewd self-consciousness and diversionary costume changing informs this album's openness and plasticity.
Antics exudes a preceding aura of heaviness-- even the packaging is heavy; the album's cryptic liner notes consist of little more than stark grayscale photos and epigrammatic Morse code spelling out bits of song titles ("Length", "Narc", "Cruise", "Exit", respectively). An image from the band's debut appears on the first single, "Slow Hands", and becomes a representative metaphor for the album as a whole: After reflecting on the aftermath of a soured relationship, Banks takes the "weights" described in Bright Lights' "Obstacle 1" from his "little heart" and projects them onto the woman who presumably put them there to begin with. Musically, however, the song is far removed from the layered density of Interpol's former material, exhibiting pristine, unmuddied production and a chorus ("We spies/ We slow hands/ You put the weights all around yourself") that slithers and stomps with post-punk dance-floor swagger. Similarly, Antics casts off the weight of advance hype, stewing anticipation, and unreasonable expectations, and wisely distinguises itself as a strong collection of singles rather than as an immaculately cohesive album. And, where Interpol were once synonymous with emotive desolation, they here opt for an atmosphere of poignant resignation.
Opener "Next Exit" is immediately jarring; a tranquilized doo-wop organ progression and spare percussion announce a very different band. It is explicitly clear that Interpol have changed, from the band's more casual tone ("We ain't going to the town/ We're going to the city/ Gonna track this shit around") to new mixing techniques: Carlos D's bass and Daniel Kessler's guitar are relatively hushed in the mix to make room for Banks' underscored vocals, allowing him a range of expression previously unexplored and buoying the band's newfound pop leanings with lyrical eloquence. His vocals on tracks like "Narc" soar where they were once buried in the impermeable fog of their surroundings, and many who found his delivery in the past to be occasionally monotonous (company that includes Banks himself) will find his melodic range here to be a welcome change of pace.
Although most songs evince a clear shift to singles territory, a natural progression of the band's sound is evident. "Evil" employs a Pixies-esque bassline and upbeat rhythm section to counterbalance its ambiguously bleak lyrical themes. The band demonstrates judicious restraint on "Narc", relegating a potentially overbearing blanket of synth strings and organ to a peripheral role while punching up Kessler's crisp guitar lines and Carlos D's almost imperceptibly fluid bass work. The syncopated funk bassline and disco-pop rhythm of "Length of Love" initially seem to be at odds with the song's lush orchestration, but these counter-intuitive touches add a dynamic element to the limited confines of the song's composition. The band hasn't lost its knack for exploration and epic construction, though; "Take You on a Cruise", "Not Even Jail", and "Public Pervert" steep the album's middle section in the kind of dark theatricality that distinguished their debut, while the expansive "A Time to Be So Small", with its deliberate pacing and depiction of "cadaverous mobs," concludes Antics with unsettling macabre.
Though Interpol couldn't be expected to surpass their previous heights, it's difficult to imagine a savvier or more satisfying second step. But the real revelation is that the band has wisely ignored a shortsighted perception of their career which dictates that where Bright Lights was an audacious plunge from a great height, Antics is the crucial landing. Even on those terms the band has succeeded. However, their liberation of form emphasizes the fact that, in the grand scheme of Interpol's career, this is only one in a series of great, if not Great, albums. Antics shows Interpol shedding the weight of their accumulated baggage and (hopefully) staying a while.


Book Burner is Pig Destroyer's fifth album, and despite a five-year gap since their last record and the addition of a new drummer, it's the work of a long-haul, tour-honed grindcore unit in frightening control of their caustic materials and even more caustic philosophy.

Book Burner

The new millennium has seen indie kids finally investigating metal as if it were part of their heritage, rather than as if they were facing down a hostile army doing unspeakable things behind enemy lines. Despite their relatively high profile with false-metal media outfits, though, grindcore titans Pig Destroyer have ferociously exempted themselves from any crossover discussion, all without doing much more than being themselves. The reasons why that kind of resoluteness would keep them outliers should be obvious if you know what "grindcore" means. If not, the first four tracks of Book Burner are a pretty good crash course: You shouldn't need more than four minutes to figure out if this band is for you.
During those four minutes, we get saturation-sprayed by the kind of rasping scream that will keep some future ear-nose-and-throat specialist in cushy golfing weekends. Frontman J.R. Hayes has one of the best and most convincing lunatic presences in metal. Even if he's a pussycat in his home life, when he's psycho-raving on record he turns into the guy on the subway you hope would move along to the next car. Presence is important for outsiders when dealing with a genre where some of the biggest stars "sing" like a troubled digestive tract. Pig Destroyer have loads of it thanks to Hayes, a desperation and rage they manage to communicate like actual desperate and angry humans, rather than relying on played-out metal scariness.
Now given those running times, the tempo on those four opening statements is obviously set at "insane," and only occasionally notched down to "mosh," with new, presumably non-cyborg, drummer Adam Jarvis doing stop-on-a-dime swerves and shifts that only programming should be able to pull off. It's Jarvis' first record with Pig Destroyer, and he wastes no time in introducing himself to the fold: The third track, "The Underground Man", which lasts all of 32 seconds, is just awesome, a senses-battering overload that manages to both swing and clobber. It's as if Jarvis, who also plays in the deathgrind band Misery Index, took about six hardcore songs he'd been tinkering with, all of them at different speeds, and then decided, hey, why not just slam them all together without once losing the groove. When it's over you feel like you just staggered off a broken tilt-a-whirl.
Maybe you should give it to track five though, because that's when guitarist and band mastermind Scott Hull unleashes the first of many sick-ass riffs that any lover of heavy guitar could understand, a woozy swamp-muck strut that could quite plausibly be called anthemic. Hull's own affinity for perverse grooves is another reason for Pig Destroyer's improbable sense of swing between the full-frontal assaults. Despite their commitment to total destruction, PD's guitar does offer a ton of familiar pleasures, little blurts of fierce thrash or low-down Southern boogie, with the few seconds of righteous evil that close out "Eve" being both typical and exemplary. It's just that we really are often talking literal seconds to grab onto. And though he clearly invested many childhood hours studying metal's unholy texts, Hull's just as interested in making sounds like a swarm of killer bees squeezed into your ear via a turkey baster. So yeah, this is still music with zero intention of meeting the non-extreme audience halfway.
Book Burner is Pig Destroyer's fifth album, and despite a five-year gap since their last record, the epochal Phantom Limb, and the addition of a new drummer, it's the work of a long-haul, tour-honed grindcore unit in frightening control of its caustic materials and even more caustic philosophy. Like a Hollywood stunt choreographer let loose on a demolition derby, Pig Destroyer attacks these minute-and-change bursts of chaos with dominating precision. Even when they ride out a groove, like riff-monster "Baltimore Strangler", it's more like breaking a bad horse than enjoying a friendly gallop. Plus, the title alone should let you know the kind of blasted emotional world we're inhabiting here. Think one of those max-out-the-credit-cards underground horror films made by and for obsessives: Book Burner is utterly ugly, thoroughly alienating stuff that doesn't give half a shit if you can stomach its musical and spiritual violence.
It's also one of the best rock albums of the year, though maybe it should come with a sticker that reads "abandon hope of rockin' good times, all ye who enter here." And Pig Destroyer even have qualities to please those who go to metal for its "avant" qualities as much as the abuse. If even the most room-clearing metal can get praised for its sonic adventurousness in our texture-obsessed times, for a grindcore band-- extreme metal often at its furthest-out extreme of rawness and ragged production-- Pig Destroyer have an incredibly rich sound. The addition of noise dude Blake Harrison for the last couple of records has given the music an extra horrible-blare layer of gnarled electronics. And despite the band's famed lack of bass guitar, the weight of Hull's typically low-end-intensive production job reattaches the heaviness to a genre where too often the pursuit of speed leaves everything tinny and weirdly weak.
The one thing that's hard to deny is that Book Burner's even less user-friendly than Phantom Limb, which wasn't exactly a freindly how-do. It's like PD decided to take the innovations of Limb-- the massive and unashamed riffage, the body-bruising weight-- and apply it to the chewed-and-chopped frenzy of their first few, more traditionally grind LPs. One thing for sure though is that PD continue to play with an invention and intensity that sucks the breath out of fans, a dedication to both grind's visceral appeal and shaping it into new forms that puts them leagues beyond most of their peers. It's that raging conviction, the totalizing whomp of their sound, one you can feel in your gut as much as hear, that makes them powerful, above and beyond however much their sense of rock groove and rock drama nudges their genre's self-imposed boundaries forward.
So PD put this crazed and hateful stuff together with as much smarts as any high-brow metal band, but also with an end-of-their-rope furty that's more Jake LaMotta punching prison walls than John Petrucci doing Rimsky-Korsakov-for-idiots. There's a queasy joy you feel in your lizard brain with heavy music played with PD's can't-be-faked physical force. Their aggression seeps into you like an unwanted, but eventually not-unpleasant sickness. Maybe that's not your bag. It's not a lot of people's bag. But if it is, Book Burner is seriously cathartic. However convoluted things get, you still wanna pump fist and bang head, even if you're not always sure when you should be doing so.


A fundraiser for Polish LGBTQIA+ organizations presents a bounty of progressive electronic music, compiling 10 hours of material from Rrose, Violet, Peder Mannerfelt, and more.

Total Solidarity

On July 27, a month after World Pride brought some five million queer revelers to the streets of New York City, the city of Bialystok, in northeast Poland, held its very first Pride march. It ended in a terrifying display of vitriol and violence, spearheaded in large part by the Catholic Church. Women and children and men held an armed “family picnic” near the march, according to reports in The Guardian, then proceeded to kick the shit out of their fellow citizens. In an irony almost unbearably ridiculous, the brutes wore shirts reading “Fags Out” and chanted the slogan to the melody of the Village People’s (via Pet Shop Boys) “Go West.”
Appropriating gay culture to terrorize queer communities feels very 2019. But so does Total Solidarity, a marathon release compiled by Oramics, who work in Poland and throughout Europe “to empower women, non-binary and queer people in the electronic scene,” and Vincent Koreman of the crucial Dutch experimental house label New York Haunted. Its 121 tracks, spanning more than 10 hours, present a state of the union for global electronic music, an alphabetical assortment of the major figures (Catz ‘n Dogz, Danny L Harle, Ekoplekz, Rrose, Varg2™) and dozens of artists who, by evidence of their exemplary contributions, shouldn’t be unknown for long.
Proceeds of Solidarity will go to grassroots LGBTQIA+ organizations throughout Poland, who surely need actual funding and not just the social-media currency of “awareness.” Good intentions don’t always make good albums; luckily, as a whole, Solidarity astonishes with its consistency of quality, if not genre, offering versions of virtually every kind of big room, side room, chillout area, bedroom, backroom, and interzone soundtrack.
How to approach such a bounty? Put it on shuffle while hosting a sign-painting party for the next demonstration? Listen while you work your desk job or shift at the food co-op or animal shelter? Feed it through Bluetooth speakers to drown out the Proud Boys stans across America? Many of the inclusions are dancefloor dreams come true: Violet takes two trends seemingly past their prime, broken-beat breaks and dubstep’s wobble, and fashions an irresistible charmer called “Self-Inspection” that couldn’t sound fresher. Kai van Dongen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” with its plush toms and pads, is exactly what you’d want to hear while doing just that, unless the minimalist sleaze of Dale Cornish’s “Raise Your Voice” or the hardcore/Cabaret Voltaire mixup “Accepted” by Graham Dunning get you off quicker. Others eschew beats altogether. Kamil Szuszkiewicz’s “Power Ballad” is a slow fanfare of what sound like clusters of horns, bursts of static, and held resonance. Peder Mannerfelt’s “A Drone Against Homophobia” is pretty and aptly titled. Best of all, Object Blue’s “Pure” is an ominous swoon that dissolves into a quick snatch of field recording, as if a dream becoming a nightmare reality.
Some artists look back, like Le Chocolate Noir, whose “Act” is woozy proof that trying to sound like Chris & Cosey is an excellent start; Mirt summons the goopy dub of Pole or vintage Orb for “Remake the Past,” which does in a lovely kind of way. Lee Gamble’s “89” is as catchy as anything he’s put out in ages, with a submerged electro beat, loosey-goosey bassline, and industrial accents that tease Depeche Mode’s wan plea for tolerance, “People Are People,” without kitsch. Drzewna’s “There’s a Man” and Baasch’s “Sneaker Fairytale” are perfectly queer New Wave gems. Others look ahead: “Geneva Drive” by drmcnt is house like a Zaha Hadid building, all slick and swoopy curves. Liar’s “Americana” builds a screaming diva epic out of screeching eagles and gunshots and should be the intro music for next year’s presidential debates.
In 21st century queer diasporic fashion, I listened to Total Solidarity almost entirely in one sitting, on a flight from Sao Paulo to New York, sunk into my chair beneath a couple Spanish Valium and four or five fingers of Kentucky bourbon. I was moving from a country with a new fascist dictator who, several people told me with a kind of shell-shocked quizzical sigh, hadn’t (yet) quite followed through on his promises to literally disappear Brazil’s queer communities. I was entering a country whose white supremacist president is gleefully installing institutions of terror against LGBTQIA+ Americans, particularly those who are trans and of color, that will last for generations to come. In my climate change-accelerating flying tube, I had a panic attack: I lucid dreamed about an installation I saw by the artist Vulcânica PokaRopa in which video testimonies of trans Brazilians played in a half-moon between blood-spattered floors and rabble-rousing banners and flying mannequins; I stood in the bathroom and let Felicita’s “oooh heavy” melt my brain. How you hear Total Solidarity, like how you hear “Go West,” depends on how free you really are. Meanwhile, since Bialystok, things have only gotten worse in Poland, with right-wing forces joining up with Catholics to establish “LGBT-free” zones throughout the country. These PR stunts proceed on the assumption that the existence of queer people is somehow optional. Fuck that. We are everywhere: Just listen.