On his shape-shifting second album, the 18-year-old Vietnamese artist wrings beauty out of chaos with fractured, vignette-like compositions.

Came

The artists at the forefront of Vietnam’s experimental music scene are guided by boundless exploration. With Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế, the Rắn Cạp Đuôi collective conjured fantasias via deconstructed club. On Anna Agenda, the duo Pilgrim Raid mutated dance music to construct an apocalyptic song cycle. Another artist from this cohort, the 18-year-old Tran Uy Duc, has a similar penchant for fractured sound collages, but he doubles down on texture and shapelessness to emphasize atmosphere. Came, his beguiling sophomore album, can be described as a collection of contradictions: greyscale and prismatic, deadening and exuberant, baleful and inviting.
Based in Hanoi, Tran began making music in 2018. While not musically trained, he notes the importance of his father’s metal sculpture art, as it led him to “make friends with raw metallic noise every day.” You can hear his embrace of raucous sounds right out the gate: Came’s title track, which lasts 30-something seconds, erupts with abrasive howling. Tran incorporates rhythmic pulses and processed vocals in the following track, “Three,” and if you tilt your head just right, it’s essentially a pop song. Underneath the murky production, Tran relays scattered thoughts in a robotic voice, describing a craving for sexual pleasure and the fear of coming out as queer as two competing, compounding sources of loneliness.
Sequencing his songs like vignettes, Tran bolsters the wide range of emotions on Came. Much like his debut album, 100 BROKEN DREAMS, these 19 songs—interludes included—are loose, dynamic, and often short. As disparate as these tracks are, they’re shrouded in a cloud of anxiety and elation, capturing life as both a series of granular events and a monolithic fog. The cycloning assault of “got” feels far from the emotive guitar meanderings of “Louche,” but placed side by side, it’s clear that these differing expressions of despair and frustration are both pathways for catharsis. Sometimes, individual tracks are self-contained shape-shifters. Album highlight “Banal” launches with the retro-psychedelia of Yves Tumor before tumbling through riotous clanging, spoken-word hypnagogic pop, hyperpop’s embrace of AutoTune as brattish shrapnel, and a guitar melody lifted from jazz guitarist George Barnes’ “Ana.”
While it’s easy to trace the influences on Tran’s music—he cites Arca, Mica Levi, and Björk’s “Declare Independence” as having informed the album—Came consistently manages to surprise. “Catwalk” could soundtrack runways, sure, but its gloomy and acerbic production freely moves into more nebulous territories. When it concludes with 10 seconds of a straightforward dance beat, it’s both a sly wink and a reminder of how much he’s toyed with the titular conceit in the preceding three minutes. “Interlude A - Laura” is a sparse, diaristic reflection on a breakup, although the name in the title refers not to an ex but to the nail polish he wears, personifying the object as a source of comfort. And “Coop,” which features Phạm Thế Vũ of Rắn Cạp Đuôi, unleashes the album’s most exhilarating wall of noise before ending with quiet, intimate singing. Whatever sound or mood he’s exploring, Tran keeps things visceral; he wrings beauty and strangeness out of chaos, sometimes both at the same time.

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


The Colombian superstar’s first Spanish-only album in 19 years is a brutally honest look at her breakup that overflows with vengeance and still-got-it sex appeal.

Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran

With Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, her first album almost entirely in Spanish since 2005, Shakira signals a deliberate and timely return to her roots. When the Barranquilla native catapulted into the Anglophone pop scene with Laundry Service in 2001, she modeled a version of bilingual international stardom that opened doors for other Latine singers. Today, a new generation of Spanish-speaking stars like Bad Bunny, Rosalía, and Karol G have helped loosen the English language’s long-held grip on commercial pop. And while Shakira has always preached that music transcends language, her new album—saturated with bold-name cameos and dabbling in trending sounds—is poised to ride the latest wave.
But you’re probably here to hear about her divorce. Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran obsesses over the demise of Shakira’s 11-year relationship with Gerard Piqué, the former Spanish soccer player she now calls “Voldemort.” The album title originates from a lyric in the standout “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol.53,” the diss track originally recorded for Argentine DJ Bizarrap’s popular video series, and Shakira’s first all-Spanish song to reach the Hot 100. More than a year later, her digs still sting, from belittling her ex as a rookie to comparing his new girlfriend to a Twingo. Even when she’s not saying Piqué’s name, she kind of is: Imaginative, shady wordplay like “Yo solo hago música, perdón que te salpique” (roughly, “I only make music, sorry if it bothers you”) turned the song into a viral sensation. Then there’s the Kill Bill moment when Shakira reveals her intentions for this track, and perhaps to some extent, this album: “Esto es pa’ que te mortifique’/Mastique’ y trague’, trague’ y mastique’” (“This is for you to be mortified/To chew and swallow, swallow and chew”). Beneath her visceral rage is the heartbroken lover who simply wants to hurt her ex like he hurt her, to guarantee this record follows him forever.
Breakups are hard, and the balance of the album offers a brutally honest glimpse into the aftermath. With her personal business already in the press, Shakira sings through the stages of grief, notably focusing on acceptance—as defined by vengeance and still-got-it sex appeal. The saga begins as a fantasy on flirty nu-disco opener “Puntería,” with Cardi B, where women are goddesses and men are horny centaurs with washboard abs. Bizarrap appears again on the squelchy electro-pop track “La Fuerte,” which pulses with 2 a.m. club heat as a post-breakup Shaki seeks refuge on the dancefloor. But as the chorus swells and the tempo quickens, it sounds as if she’s on the brink of calling her ex. “Dime dónde, cuándo y cómo,” she repeats (“Tell me where, when, and how”), her voice breaking into the high-pitched plea of romantic anguish that first defined Shakira’s music—good thing she deleted his number.
At its core, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran is a pop album for a mainstream audience, a colorful concoction of EDM-infused dance tracks, generic disco beats, and the occasional rap that’s practically designed to be edited into glossy TikToks. Under its plasticky umbrella, Shakira also flexes her chameleonic powers, fusing Afrobeats with Dominican bachata, ska with northern cumbia, and electropop with reggaetón. Angsty alt-rock songs like “Tiempo Sin Verte” and “Cómo Dónde y Cuándo” harken back to her Alanis Morissette-esque 1998 album ¿Dónde Están los Ladrones? The latter song has a scrappy, start-stop guitar riff reminiscent of “Where Is My Mind?,” recalling her affinity for Aerosmith and the Cure. But if the hunger to assert her dominance across genres—to prove that no one can replace Shakira—feels genuine, the production choices seem more interested in proving her range than in locating each song’s most authentic expression.
Along the way, Shakira assembles a star-studded lineup that includes Manuel Turizo, Ozuna, and two Rauw Alejandro features. Her duet with Karol G (who’s experienced a public breakup of her own) delivers a tantalizing sorry-not-sorry vibe reminiscent of “Beautiful Liar.” As regional Mexican music continues to command the global pop scene, Shakira’s contralto tones, raspy cadence, and penchant for romantic storytelling find a match in the bajo quinto and accordion-powered canción “(Entre Paréntesis),” with Groupo Frontera, and the tololoche-tinged sierreño urbano song “El Jefe,” with Fuerza Regida. Some features, though, feel out of place. Did we really need a Tiësto remix of “Pa’ tipos como tú”? Cardi B’s punny “Puntería” verse seems like it could have been substituted with almost anything. Describing the origins of their collaboration, Shakira said, “I thought, ‘How cool would it be to have a woman rapper here?’ The only person who came to my mind was Cardi B. I had just met her in Paris and she seemed so nice.” This is also what comes to mind when I think of “Puntería”—nice.
Act one closes with “Última,” perhaps the most vulnerable moment on the album. It’s a piano ballad that feels like Shakira’s final attempt at closure: the first time she thanks Piqué for the time they shared, while also acknowledging their incompatibility as she sings, “Más fácil era mezclar el agua y el aceite”—easier to mix oil and water. The album’s second half undergoes a transformation akin to a post-breakup makeover, yet it can’t help but revisit the anger stage. Armed with lines like, “Dicen por ahí que no hay mal que más de cien años dura pero ahí sigue mi ex-suegro que no pisa sepultura” (“They say that there is no evil that lasts more than 100 years, but my ex father-in-law is still around and doesn’t have a foot in the grave”), she holds nothing back.
There’s a fan for every era of Shakira—some who expect her to adhere to Anglophone pop molds, some who pine for her rockera past. Since her debut, she has inspired debate about Latine stereotypes and the nature of cultural authenticity, but in this decade, her blend of styles is no longer perceived to be so foreign as it once was. It’s fascinating to watch Shakira take big swings and extend her dominance, but there’s a little piece that’s missing: some small token to show what made her such an icon in the first place.


The newly discovered, unreleased album from 1963 featuring the “classic quartet” finds the jazz giant thrillingly caught between shoring up and surging forth.

John Coltrane: Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album

Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album

From April 1962 to September 1965, while under contract to the record label Impulse!, John Coltrane led a more or less consistent working group with the same four musicians. After his death in 1967, this group—Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums—became known as Coltrane’s “classic quartet.” The group was powerful, elegant, and scarily deep. It was also a well-proportioned framing device. It made an artist with great ambitions easier to understand.
It is possible to hear conviction and morality in some of the classic quartet’s best-known music—like the devotional A Love Supreme, recorded in late 1964—as clearly as you can hear melody or rhythm. As a consequence, all of it can appear set on one venerable plane. As it moves inexorably from ballads, blues, and folk songs into abstraction, the classic-quartet corpus can seem an index not only for the range of acoustic jazz but for possibly how to live, gathered and contained, as if it were always there. But the corpus is only what we have been given to hear. And then one day a closet door flies open, a stack of tapes fall out, and a dilemma begins.
A fair amount of Coltrane’s music has been released after the fact, but nothing that would seem, from a distance, quite so canonical as Both Directions At Once, which is 90 minutes worth of (mostly) previously unheard recordings made at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio on March 6, 1963—the middle of the classic-quartet period. The Van Gelder studio, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, can be considered part of the framing device. It was where the group did nearly all its studio work. For reasons of acoustics, it had a 39-foot-high, cathedral-like, vaulted wooden ceiling, fabricated by the same Oregon lumber company that made blimp hangars during World War II. Coltrane’s music during that period, possibly encouraged by the cathedral-like room, became blimpier and churchier.
Why have we not heard these tapes before? It’s hard to imagine that they could have been blithely ignored or forgotten. The 2018 answer is that mono audition reels of the session were only recently found in the possession of the family of Coltrane’s first wife, Juanita Naima Coltrane. (Impulse! didn’t have the music; the label’s master tapes may have been lost in a company move from New York to Los Angeles.) The 1963 answer is unknown, and probably more complicated.
Coltrane’s contract with Impulse! called for two records a year. Whether that day’s work in March was to be conceived at the time as a whole album, or most of one, is uncertain. The extent to which you believe the record’s subtitle—The Lost Album—might be the extent to which you are excited by the news of Both Directions. I can’t quite do it, but there are other reasons to be excited.
It may be hard to hear as a coherent album for back then, though it is easy to hear it as one for now, in our current, expanded notion of what an album is. The music does not seem, in its context, to be a full step forward. It’s a little caught between shoring up and surging forth. (The after-the-fact title—alluding to a conversation Coltrane had with Wayne Shorter about the possibility of improvising as if starting a sentence in the middle, moving backward and forward simultaneously—helps turn a possible liability into a strength.) It can give you new respect for the rigor, compression, and balance of some of his other albums from the period. It is at times, as Coltrane’s son Ravi pointed out, surprisingly like a live session in a studio; parts of the music sound geared toward a captive audience. That may be the best thing about it.
Included on the album—which comes either as a single-disc version or a double-disc with alternate takes, both including extensive liner notes by historian Ashley Kahn—is a sunny, bright-tempo melody (the theme from “Vilia,” written by the Hungarian composer Franz Lehár for the operetta The Merry Widow); a downtempo, minor-key, semi-standard (“Nature Boy,” from the book of eden ahbez, the California proto-hippie songwriter); one of Coltrane’s best original lines, in four different takes (“Impressions,” which he’d been working out in concert for several years); a couple of pieces for soprano saxophone which are representative but not stunning (“Untitled Original 11383,” minor-key and modal, and “Untitled Original 11386,” with a pentatonic melody); “One Up, One Down,” a short, wily theme as a pretext for eight minutes of hard-and-fast jamming; and “Slow Blues,” about which more in a minute.
Coltrane was already building albums from disparate sessions, a practice that would soon yield 1963’s Impressions and Live at Birdland, two records that set live and studio tracks side by side. He may have been stockpiling without a clear purpose; he also had to consider what would sell. Since his recording of “My Favorite Things” in 1961—a hit by jazz terms—Coltrane had become recognizable. His subsequent working relationship with Bob Thiele, the head of Impulse!, was based on the notion that he could expand that audience, not shrink it. Six months before the Both Directions session, he’d made a record with Duke Ellington; the day after it, he’d make another with the singer Johnny Hartman. He was entering the popular artist’s paradox of striving to repeat a past success and trying not to run aground on retreads.
The sense of strength and inevitability we associate with Coltrane’s music didn’t just tumble out. It was likely a byproduct of diligence, restlessness, exhausted possibilities, obsession and counter-obsession. He thought about progress. He passed through serial phases of exploring harmonic sequences, modes, and multiple rhythms; when he acknowledged one phase in an interview, he was generally looking for the next. At the height of the classic quartet, he often didn’t have the time or psychic space for study and practice. “I’m always walking around trying to keep my ear open for another ‘Favorite Things’ or something,” he told the writer Ralph Gleason in May, 1961. “I can’t get in the woodshed like I used to. I’m commercial, man.” More: “I didn’t have to worry about it, you know, making a good record, because that wasn’t important. Maybe I should just go back in the woodshed and just forget it.” At the time, a record like Both Directions might have seemed an open admission that he could have used less worry and more woodshed.
What he meant by “another ‘Favorite Things’” might have been a similar act of counterintuition: a sweet, sentimental tune made paranormal, a curiosity that could break out beyond the normal jazz audience and anchor a hit record. If “Vilia” was intended for that role, it isn’t strong enough. “Impressions,” on Both Directions, in its first known studio recording—especially take 3—sounds sublimely focused. But I’m not sure Coltrane plays it here any better than he did sixteen months earlier at the Village Vanguard, the live version he’d choose later in 1963 when finally issuing the tune, on the record of that name. (It’s complicated, I know.)
“Slow Blues” is the one. There is no narrative here, as there sometimes was with Coltrane’s originals; it is not expressly about love or hardship or religious joy. But Coltrane turns himself inside-out. First, he phrases in bare, hesitant strokes, using negative space; then he begins to whip phrases around, repeating them up and down the horn in rapid, shinnying patterns, reaching for inexpressible sounds, getting ugly. (McCoy Tyner’s solo, directly following Coltrane’s, is tidy and elegant, thorough in its own radically contrasting way.) There is the idea of the “new,” and then there is something like this track, which transcends the burden of newness.
I imagine three possible problems someone might have had with putting “Slow Blues” on a record in 1963. One is that, at 11 and a half minutes, it would have taken up a third of the record. Two is that a long blues probably wouldn’t be properly commercial unless there was some sort of story attached to it. And three is that, as was the case with “Impressions,” “Slow Blues” doesn’t explicitly show progress. Hear Coltrane on the long, slow “Vierd Blues” from the Sutherland Hotel in Chicago in 1961. It’s not great sound quality, but it is great in every other way. “Slow Blues” grows from the same root. It’s no “better,” really, but it’s better to have more of it, and better recorded. It is possible to take in Both Directions At Once, some of it middling by Coltrane’s standards and some of it extraordinary by anyone’s, without much thought about sellability or progress. In an ideal case, both qualities are overrated anyway. This is an ideal case.


Fusing hip-hop and punk, the third solo record from this Minneapolis-based rapper and member of the Doomtree collective is his tightest album yet.

Never Better

Punk rock is a genre that was largely formed on the mindset that anyone should be able to express themselves musically, regardless of talent. Hip-hop traditionally lives and dies by skills, and it widely rejects the idea that anyone can pick up a mic and rock a stage without putting in hard work and sweat and dedication to their craft. Any artist that tries to fuse those two worlds has to be more than aware of how tricky a dichotomy that has to be; Minneapolis punk-rap artist P.O.S. alludes to this by claiming that his performing name stands for both "Promise of Skill" and "Piece of Shit." If that's too confusing, "Pissed Off Stef" works fine; it's Stefon Alexander's biggest unifying factor.
It could also be the biggest barrier to enjoying his work, even though Never Better-- the third solo album from the member of the nine-person Doomtree collective-- is P.O.S.' tightest album yet. Everybody's supposed to be high on hope right now, however guarded and pragmatic a hope that it is. But with a lead-off track ("Let It Rattle") that scoffs via repurposed Nas lyrics that "They out for presidents to represent them/ You think a president could represent you?", Never Better sets a confrontational tone that makes the album a potentially rough listen. But that bristling anger is subtly infused with a smart-assed insight and a thing for folding pop culture touchstones into unrecognizable shapes.
P.O.S.' lyrics have more in common with allusive free-spitters like Aesop Rock and Rob Sonic than, say, Gym Class Heroes-- giving you the gist of an idea while leaving you to try and calculate the deeper meaning in all the supposedly disjointed phrases ricocheting off each other. Some of the more intense lyrical moments, like "Grave Shovel Let's Go" ("They turning in they grave/ We dig 'em up and rearrange, aim/ Take 'em out the way they came") and "The Brave and the Snake" ("Slip through the sidewalk/ Skip to the hard part/ Tip to the card shark/ Rip through the rampart"), seem to run almost entirely on the fumes of some random-thought anxiety, threatening to drown out any first-listen comprehension with a barrage of aggressive internal rhymes and his meter-defying flow.
But the further you sink into it, the more sense it makes, and you're able to more clearly pick out the themes-- the recession rhetoric of "Low Light Low Life"; the post-trauma love story of "Been Afraid"; the fuck-what-they-think defiance in "Purexed". Worn ground, maybe, but the language makes it spark. And all that abstraction makes the matter-of-fact details in the autobiographical "Out of Category"-- which takes its titular hook from Lil Wayne's verse on Birdman's "Neck of the Woods"-- stand out a lot more starkly. When P.O.S. reminisces over his coming of age as a black punk rock kid, he captures the identity crisis vividly: "Found his kin, brothers at school think he tryin' to rewrite skin/ Others are fools, never seen some shit like him."
As far as the aforementioned punk/rap contradictions, you might wind up forgetting that there are any in the first place. There's still some nods to punk rock, lyrically (a quote of Fugazi's "Five Corporations" in "Savion Glover") as well as in the guest personnel (None More Black's Jason Shevchuk shows up to yowl all over the end of "Terrorish"). And "Drumroll (We're All Thirsty)", the most immediate, throat-grabbing track on the album, is some straight-up hardcore get-in-the-pit business that lives up to its percussive title. But the majority of the album fits a wider array of rockish hip-hop beats and hip-hop-influenced rock rhythms: "Savion Glover" rides on an uptempo combination of minimalist electronic percussion, splintered guitar chords, and rapidfire scratching, and there's a slick, borderline-pop sound to lead single "Goodbye" and deep cut "Low Light Low Life"-- produced by Doomtree members Lazerbeak and Paper Tiger, respectively-- that pushes it to the level of college radio's most crowd-pleasing indie-rap offerings.
From front to back, the album's an acquired taste, and even if it's not the big paradox that an album mixing punk ethics with rap virtuosity might risk becoming, it doesn't have a universal appeal, especially for heads leery of anything that might approach the misnomer of "emo rap." But P.O.S. knows this, and he's apparently come to terms with it: "We make our own and if they don't feel it, then we are not for them," he sings in "Optimist (We Are Not For Them)". And then, almost as an aside, he adds: "And that's cool." He could be all things to all people, but he succeeds when he remembers who he is to himself.


Sarah Assbring's global influences bring her to bright new places with inspiring albeit uneven results.

KoKoro

KoKoro, the latest album by El Perro Del Mar, takes its title from the Japanese word meaning heart or feeling, and from there you get a hint of what’s to come on: new musical terrain informed by an exotic “Far East” sensibility, couched in familiar El Perro Del Mar territory of melancholy and vulnerability. Almost 12 years into her career as El Perro Del Mar, founder Sarah Assbring’s appetite for reinvention remains strong. On KoKoro, the Swedish singer’s fifth album, her global wanderings bring her to unfamiliar places with inspiring albeit uneven results that showcase an artist who could easily make a turn for pop stardom.
Assbring has said that she’d been listening heavily to Japanese, Chinese, and Cambodian ’60s pop prior to the making of the album, but the influences of these sources on KoKoro are so overt and jumbled with modern pop and world music sensibilities, it comes off as a hodgepodge of cultural tourism. Throughout the album, Assbring utilizes classical Asian and Middle Eastern instruments such as the Chinese stringed guzheng, the Japanese shakuhachi, and various other flutes and strings—all played by a cast of Swedish musicians—and features rhythms and melodies casually identifiable with all of the above backgrounds along with Ethiopia, Egypt, and Indonesia.
Coordinated or not, Assbring does a remarkably good job taking all of these sounds and fusing them into vibrant, bouncy pop songs that are miles away from the ’60s-inspired tunes of her early career. It wasn’t until 2012’s Pale Fire that Assbring first attempted to seriously change up the El Perro Del Mar sound, but while it was evident that her voice and talents could translate to more radio-friendly dance-pop, the album frequently played like feathery nostalgia for late ’90s lounge house and trip-hop. On KoKoro, however, Assbring seems to have figured out the transition, and its strongest cuts are her best arguments yet for shifting the El Perro Del Mar paradigm.
“Kouign-Amman” (a type of French pastry) blends Assbring’s pan-Asian fetish with spunky futurist pop. Exploding from the speakers with a sunny and reverbed vocals, Assbring weaves in a guzheng string melody in a way that feels organic and enmeshed rather than simply appended. Title track “KoKoro” comes the closest to true 21st-century world music, with a huge, echoing “kinda Middle Eastern” chiftetelli beat and bleating flutes. Assbring’s voice is also loud and present, living in the fabric of the song in a way that it never did on Pale Fire. It’s music for smiling under the late afternoon sun on a party boat on the Bosphorus with a crew of happy hedonists.
Best of all, if not quite as archly pop as the others, is the stunning baroque opener “Endless Ways.” Featuring delicately embedded strings and backing vocals that moan and tug, “Endless Ways” is a perfect synthesis of all of El Perro Del Mar’s developments as an artist. Lyrically it also represents an important touchpoint for Assbring’s transformation, outlining her sense of self-reflection in figuring out how to become a better artist: “I think I was too softly defined/I wish I was all pure/The goal I have is carved in my mind/Perfection is hard.” It sure is, but as pop songs go, “Endless Ways” certainly gets close.
Because of Assbring’s attempts at drawing from these ethnocultural traditions without a sense of clear rhyme or reason, its weaker compositions sound more “White Euro-Woman Does ‘The Far East’” rather than the breezily blended post-globalization culture mashes of M.I.A. Tracks like “Ging Ging” and lead singles “Breadandbutter” and “Ding Sum” don’t just feature the aforementioned guzheng for flair but spotlight it as a conspicuous driver of sound to a degree that feels fetishized rather than borrowed. KoKoro isn’t perfect, but Assbring’s knack for creating well-written, catchy melodies carries the record it even in its slightest moments and a huge step forward from Pale Fire, positioning El Perro Del Mar well for an interesting Act II as a modern world pop purveyor.


The singer-songwriter, fiddle player, and Highwoman’s latest solo album dwells in the space between grand pop balladry and Memphis soul.

Take It Like a Man

A songwriter with killer opening lines has her shit together: “I’m well aware of what the night’s made of/And I’m comin’ for you like a hawk for the dove.” Evocative, well-stressed, and horny, “Hawk for the Dove” is the kind of song Amanda Shires writes all the time, whether for herself or for her country supergroup the Highwomen. The scruffier, rangy approach of her seventh album Take It Like a Man complements the Texan’s flexible burr, plus the fiddle she has lavished on everyone from husband Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit to the late John Prine’s final recordings. Needy but not apt to grovel, willing to misbehave so long as they keep their cool, Shires’ characters exemplify the healthy tensions in country music.
Take It Like a Man dwells in the space between grand pop balladry and Memphis soul. Shires settles into a whispery talk-sing reminiscent of Stevie Nicks; why belt when she has room for an Isbell solo of characteristic pungency? His rhythm licks and twangy embellishments on “Stupid Love” and “Bad Behavior,” respectively, demonstrate the meticulousness of a player who practiced hours a day at the height of the pandemic. Multi-instrumentalist and producer Lawrence Rothman adds solid contributions on additional piano and guitar, but the standout is keyboardist Peter Levin, who (among many moments) locks in with drummer Julian Dorio on “Fault Lines” for the easiest of grooves.
On first listen Take It Like a Man may not offer material comparable to My Piece of Land’s “The Way It Dimmed,” To the Sunset’s “Wasn’t I Paying Attention,” or “If She Ever Leaves Me,” the Shires-Isbell-Chris Tomkins plaint sung by Highwoman Brandi Carlisle that ranks among the decade’s most shattering depictions of same-sex despair, but Shires marries hooks and narrative with a new assurance. Blessed with a gooey tune, “Bad Behavior” has Shires, eyes a-roll and smirk afixed, extolling the awesomeness of hookups. “Maybe it’s my nature/Maybe I like strangers,” she offers while Brittney Spencer and Maren Morris add “ya, bitch!” on backup. Refreshing her appetites as a means of replenishing her imagination is an essential component of Shires’ self-definition. She and Levin are at their best on “Empty Cups,” a lament for a relationship in which she fails “to keep the newness from wearing off.” Only “Everything Has Its Time,” a co-write with fellow Highwoman Natalie Hemby, offers the rote maxims that the rest of Take It Like a Man avoids.
An echoey mix sometimes makes Shires and the players sound as if they’re performing at the bottom of a well—a drier mix would’ve drawn these tales of lust and abandon in sharper colors. But as producer Rothman has the correct instincts: They foreground Shires’ big voice. And she and her band are more than simpatico on “Here He Comes,” a sly, slinky uptempo seduce-a-rama about bedding another stranger. Writing good drama is hard; writing comedy is work. Grace only looks easy.


Detroit indie rocker Stef Chura's lowlit, burnished debut Messes showcases her way with setting a twilit mood and her magnetic, mutable voice.

Messes

Detroit indie rocker Stef Chura has the kind of magnetic voice that music writers fall into ditches attempting to describe. Froggy, trembling, and full of unexpected catches, it sits in the forefront of her debut album Messes, and she often uses her finger-picked guitars behind it to trace and echo her vocal melody, framing for maximum scrutiny. She seems confident with her instrument and to grasp how it works, the same way a good character actor knows how to use their pointy chin, their waggling nose, or their thick eyebrows. Breath to breath, note to note, she  evokes different singers: On “Faded Heart” she sounds like Stevie Nicks impersonating Dan Bejar. On “Slow Motion,” she recalls Television’s Tom Verlaine, while on “You” she channels the velvety longeurs of Chrissie Hynde.
Nevertheless, she retains complete control of this unruly, coltish instrument, even as it tramples over small stuff like enunciation and diction. On paper, her lyrics are poetic and sharply rendered (“Thin like the skin on a lottery ticket”) but the journey from the page through her larynx is a rough one, and a line as simple as “You can do that” (the hollered chorus from “Spotted Gold”) can turn into an eleven-syllable phonetic rollercoaster with no discernible entry or exit point. The lyrics suggest the album’s title refers to the sorts of messes we make of each other (“Putting in overtime/To get my revenge on you/I can see in your eyes/There’s nothing left to lose”) while her voice itself shows what can happen when a perfectly clear-seeming thought gets garbled by its expression. It’s a metaphor for the gulf separating what we mean to say and what others hear, maybe.
Or maybe just an odd voice. In any case, Messes is alluring largely because of it, and the band surrounding her reinforces that allure. They play a simple style—roughshod, lowlit indie rock, with guitars and voice all flickering around the same burnished midrange—with quiet style and intuitive command. The music mostly stays at a mid-tempo simmer, only boiling over for a few moments of yelped catharsis, the guitars squealing as if kicked. The drumming has just the right hairs’-breadth hesitation holding back the downbeat, keeping the music loose and full of air. The album falls just right, like a stretched-out sweater with holes in the collar.
Messes, true to its title, feels inchoate, a few sloppy first strokes down on a big white page that catches the eye. It would be nice if she wrote some sharper songs; while her delicate and echoey fingerpicking tangles sound nice, she maybe gets a little too lost in them. A couple drowsier songs stretch out so languorously they start to lose shape—“Human Being,” a pleasant tangle of fingerpicking and Chura’s moan, is more mood than song. But it's a rich mood, sumptuous enough that the blurry contours don't matter much. It’s easy to indulge a reverie when it’s a vivid one, and Messes invites you to lose track of time for awhile with it.


Leaving the grand maximalism of his previous releases behind, the UK producer focuses more on the comedown of heartbreak creating an altogether cathartic dancefloor experience.

Fragmentos EP

Latin America’s rising presence in the global electronic scene has rerouted the way dancefloors operate. Hovering around a hip-swaying 100BPM and boosting the key rhythmic elements that makes people move, such drum-driven music preserves the human touch despite its computer-generated origins. Mixpak Records’ newest signee Florentino (aka Yeshe Beesley) typifies this careful cross-section. The artist’s appetite for club-savvy productions reflects his base in Manchester, England (a northern city well-reputed for its rollicking DIY nightlife), but the influence of his Colombian heritage sculpts his sound into visceral dimensions. Consider Florentino’s sophomore release “Bloodline” on his hometown label Swing Ting. Led by blaring sirens the reggaeton march swaggers under martial percussion, glass shatters, and quivering vocal distortions. The sonic bricolage commands your attention, but, more importantly, conveys a singular diasporic sound.
Florentino has always worn the title of “El más romántico de los románticos” over his chest and his heart on his sleeve. His penchant for roses all over his album covers and lip-smacking kissing samples recall the “she loves me, she loves me not” flower game played by a smitten daydreamer. Where his previous work simulated the dopamine rush of fresh infatuation, his newest EP Fragmentos evokes the introspective comedown as he tears off the last “she loves me not” petal. The opening track “Nadie Se Muere De Amor” (No one dies of love) is beatless; the heart clearly needs resuscitating. Here, trickles of water and portly synths accent a plaintive melody line, but the fervent Florentino—the one responsible for those spirited, foot-stomping earworms—sneaks in on the follow up “Por Ti” with Catalan dancehall artist Bad Gyal. “Y entre los dos volamos/Como lo haces tu, te lo juro,” (You touch me/And between the two we fly/As you do, I swear to you”) she sings. Her glossy Auto-Tuned vocals, skipping over stripped kick snares and hi-hats, are a sweet reminder of the promises once made.
On Fragmentos, Florentino leaves behind the maximalism found in his previous work. The showman has traded his literal bells and whistles, and all those hurried snare lines, for a more streamlined approach. Gone are those aggressive sound collages, replaced with a renewed focus on vocal snippets and body percussion rhythms. If heartache is so distinctly human, what better way to convey the whirlwind than to sample each clap, kiss, gasp, fingersnap, and exclamation during the recovery process? Where most club-functional productions remain coldly cybernetic, Florentino manages to unravel the entire swathe of involuntary emotions with unusual panache, creating an altogether cathartic dancefloor experience.
“2 Late (Don’t Call Me)” opens with our protagonist drunk-dialing his ex, played by the Spanish reggaetoneras Ms. Nina. The song is the heartbreak counterpart to Cassie’s come-hither croon “Me & You,” icy synthesizers and all. “Ya me he ido y ya es demasiado tarde/Te di otra opportunidad, y no la supiste valorar” (“I’ve already gone and it's too late/I gave you another opportunity and you didn’t know how to value it”) she whispers in hushed tones. The voicemail greeting, “Hi,” becomes spliced and incessant throughout the strain. You can feel Florentino disparaging himself for his lack of willpower. Bitter laughter punctuates the production, both anguished and obsessive, as the phone continues to ring.
Fragmentos aligns with the passions of lovers scorned rather than with withdrawn despondency. Take “Mentirosa,” the album’s climactic track. Florentino borrows the quick elastic snaps of volume riddim typically found in Flex Dance Music (FDM) to sustain dramatic intensity at a slower BPM. Outraged accusations of “Mentirosa” (liar) rattle the composition until the maelstrom finally passes with a tinny flourish. In the final chapter, “Seductora” reminds us that heartbreak isn’t all about brooding, but the debauched flings and freedom that come with it. Grunts and cheers interspersed among flute trills, metallic triangles, and infectious airhorns signal a long-awaited rebound. With a wet kissing noise slapped dead-center in the dembow beat, Florentino is back on his bullshit. Just as there are plenty of fishes in the sea; more roses will bloom from their stems, waiting to be plucked. If Fragmentos resulted from only one thorn prick, Florentino has us anticipating another.


The wonderful second album from James Brooks’ project uses breakbeats, samples, and beautiful rave-pop motifs to tell stories about the bruising power of memory.

Main Pop Girl 2019

Over the past decade, James Brooks basically built a new sound from scratch. As one half of the duo Elite Gymnastics, he submerged jungle rhythms and delicate vocal melodies into shoegaze-y distortion. In 2014, after the duo split, he released Magical Pessimism 2014, his first solo record under the name Default Genders. The project showed promise, even though Brooks raised hackles with “On Fraternity,” a song about sexual assault that many considered in poor taste (the fact that Brooks initially used the moniker Dead Girlfriends—in reference to feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin—didn’t help). Five years later, Brooks has emerged with his second album, Main Pop Girl 2019, an astonishing leap forward that uses distinct rave-pop motifs to tell stories about the bruising power of memory.
Brooks spent several years in Minneapolis, Minn. and has written many songs about the lives of the city’s young down-and-outs. At times, he chafes against the cultural boundaries of a city that “hates us more than it loves Prince, white rap, black tar, and the Replacements.” But you can tell he’s enraptured with the rhythms and textures of the Midwest. His characters take drugs, fight, and fall in love in dive bars and chain stores. The effect recalls the romantic blue-collar narratives of the Hold Steady, or Billy Joel if he grew up with serious opinions about JRPGs. On “reverse chronological order (part 2),” which borrows its protagonists Brenda and Eddie from Joel’s classic “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant,” Brooks shows a remarkable eye for detail; he zeroes in on Eddie passed out on the couch, with “a flickering light that persists through the night, and an audible hum/‘Ocarina of Time’ droning endlessly on from the dusk until dawn.” But the tragic couple isn’t drowning their sorrows in bottles of red wine, they’re using heroin laced with Fentanyl.
Brooks zooms in even further on “Christmas Card From a Scammer in Minneapolis,” which nods to a Tom Waits song using a different kind of laborer. Brooks enjoys taking a scalpel to the sad-sack classic rock canon. Over plangent keys and a loping break, he wrings pathos from a character who we first encounter as they cut the tags off stolen clothes in order to sell them at a thrift store. This mundane life offers us a window into something larger. The protagonist remembers a text they got from an old roommate on the day of the 35W bridge collapse, which killed 13 people in downtown Minneapolis in 2007: “Not trying to make it a thing, just want to know that no one I know is buried underneath/That giant pile of debris they keep showing on TV.” By dialing in on small moments, Brooks captures the widescreen panorama of a city dealing with tragedy.
There’s little precedent for this kind of songwriting happening over jungle rhythms. In the late ’90s, breakbeats shifted so quickly from their dark, underground origins to a soulless, advertiser-friendly boondoggle that there wasn’t much time for anyone to explore a middle ground. Today, breakbeat revivalists like Special Request and Skee Mask typically focus on summoning the rough-and-ready sounds of jungle pioneers Metalheadz and their ilk. Brooks, instead, summons an alternate timeline where breaks became an established part of the pop toolbox, a conduit to music that’s as fragile and intimate as it is danceable.
Case in point: “Secret Garden .NUXX,” a Bruce Springsteen cover in the same ecstatic-melancholy register as Elite Gymnastics’ inspired remix of Korallreven’s “Sa Sa Samoa.” Brooks recently described his approach as similar to fanfiction: If he likes two things, he’s not afraid to write a crossover. In terms of emotional horsepower, what could more affecting than peak ’90s rave and the Boss' lyrics. This isn’t empty kitsch, though. There’s a deeper idea about the freedom of information running through the veins of this record. In a recent Q&A, Brooks wrote, “a lot of my favorite art came out of spaces where gifted artists fearlessly operated in direct violation of copyright law,” citing “early hip-hop, jungle, UK hardcore, Burial, mashups, [and] rap mixtapes” as examples. He’s also describing the renegade currents of the filesharing era, a time when he says “the internet could feel like one big pirate radio station.” It was a short-lived period of profound creative autonomy.
As these things become increasingly impossible to pull off online, we end up with artifacts like Memories...Do Not Open, the Chainsmokers album “about” nostalgia that doesn’t actually point to anything specific about the past. Brooks fights the sanitizing influence of copyright law by filling his records—released for free on Bandcamp—with references and covers. He wields nostalgia like a humming live wire rather than a sepia Instagram filter.
It all comes together on “Black Pill Skyline,” another spin on a chestnut from the classic rock canon. Brooks described the song as something “[Bob] Dylan would make if he was an extremely online millennial who’s really into the Beastie Boys.” He sings, “We don’t live on borrowed time, we stole it,” as both the chorus of the song and the thesis of the record: The past is constructed. One of Brooks’ core concerns is the way nostalgia crystallizes around memory like an oyster with a grain of sand, transforming people and places into twisted personal sculptures. “Family is like the air we breathe,” Brooks sings. “You can see that it’s inside you/All you have to do is bleed.”
All this pop theory powers the beating heart at the center of Main Pop Girl 2019 about how alternate histories are inseparable from our identity. “Sophie”—a revamped version of a song from Magical Pessimism 2014—is a song that Brooks has said is about gender identity. “Today somebody told me they want the old me back,” he sings on the chorus, “Somebody had to hold me back.” Brooks connects a transformation with the mutability of memory. “I had a dream that I was 15 and I could see everything that was about to happen/And I could stop it,” he sings. The memories we treasure are samples lifted from the archive of the objective past, and they can be manipulated and rearranged. The exes, dead friends, and old selves that populate Brooks’ songs are fluid and alive, like Springsteen transformed into a rave diva.


Despite popular perception, !!! never quite fit with the dance-punk explosion of the early-to-mid-'00s. As If, !!!'s sixth studio album, is very much a reaction to that crisis of identity, an attempt at re-establishing themselves as the premier suppliers of fun, kinetic, sprawling indie disco.

As If

Despite popular perception, !!! never quite fit with the dance-punk explosion of the early-to-mid-'00s. While an endless procession of angular Gang of Four imitators came and went, !!! carved out a space for themselves as disco true believers, foregoing the calculated dourness of the '80s for the joyous excesses of the decade prior. Few of their peers were releasing epic singles that stretched for almost 10 minutes (2003's now-classic "Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)"), or essentially trolling fans with something as simple as their name ("It's pronounced 'Chk chk chk'," "Actually, it's any three monosyllabic sounds in rapid succession," etc.). And no other group had a frontman as gleefully irreverent as Nic Offer, who is not opposed to busting out a dutty whine onstage in board shorts and a midriff-baring T-shirt. Making the uncool cool became second nature for !!!, yet another quality that separated them from the pack.
But !!! have repeatedly suffered from bad timing—they're unable to distance themselves from that one, fairly brief moment midway through their career where they found themselves part of something bigger, and that lens distorts the way their music in received. As If, !!!'s sixth studio album, is very much a reaction to that crisis of identity, a mostly successful attempt at re-establishing themselves as the premier suppliers of fun, kinetic, sprawling indie disco.
!!!'s secret weapon has always been their sense of humor—from their beginnings in the late '90s, when Offer basically had the wardrobe of an off-duty American Gladiator, to the tongue-in-cheek career highlight "Pardon My Freedom" from their politically-charged second LP Louden Up Now, whose chorus of "Like I give a fuck about that motherfuckin' shit" serves as a mini manifesto for !!!'s entire ethos.
There's nothing quite as special as "Pardon My Freedom" on As If, but opening track "All U Writers" delivers the album's first chuckle amidst it's pounding dance beat: "I knew I shouldn't have kissed him in a Chevrolet," sings a plaintive female voice, as Offer's distorted and stuttering vocals provide the song's structure. There's immediately a sense that !!! aren't necessarily trying to recreate past greatness but are pushing their sound and style in a new direction. The clearest example of this—and subsequently the best, if strangest, track on the album—is "Every Little Bit Counts", a straightforward rock-pop party song that would fit snugly on a Haircut 100 record circa 1983. The track has a big, broad, singalong chorus, a fist-pumping drumbeat and Orange Juice-like jumpy guitars, and it's unlike anything !!! have put forth up to date. "Freedom! '15" serves as a spiritual sequel of sorts to Louden Up Now: "Freedom!/ How's that working for you, baby?" sings Offer and his band of sarcastic backing singers, condensing the last decade of American political apathy into six minutes of funk.
Speaking of which, As *If * leans a little too heavily on the groove in the middle, with moments like "Funk (I Got This)" fading into the background, but it's reinvigorated towards the end by the riveting "Lucy Mongoosey", which uses another singalong chorus as an anchor, an introspective pause among all the dancing. The final track, "I Feel So Free (Citation Needed)", features Offer's slowed-down, slurred vocals narrating the construction of the song itself: “It's quiet around here without a kick drum” he states, before said drum comes into the mix and transforms it into a heady, weirdo, funny, controlled mess, much like !!! themselves. With a little luck, As If will be the turning point !!! are looking for, the beginning of a new path without the dance-punk baggage they've been toting around for the last decade.


The eight-track Water EP collects preliminary sketches from Aaron Maine’s best album, the spring release Pool. These rudimentary demos are filled with their own attractions and surprises.

Water EP

The New Yorker cartoonist Adrian Tomine was 17 when he started writing the comic “Optic Nerve.” Its early issues were later collected in a book called “32 Stories,” and for fans who had come to admire Tomine’s sharply written dialogue and distinctive style, those first works may have come as a surprise. Almost laughably amateurish, they gave lie to the idea that he had sprung from nowhere, a fully-formed comics genius. Instead they offered a chart tracking his artistic growth, and served as an inspiration to young artists despairing at their own sloppy work.
There is a distinct pleasure in getting a glimpse at the scratchpad of a favorite artist, recognizing go-to techniques and little creative experiments in a less presentable guise. That’s the idea animating Water, a new release from Aaron Maine’s band Porches that collects six of the demos for songs from the winter 2016 release Pool. The record represented a transition for Maine, from the digitally enhanced rock and folk of his earlier Bandcamp releases to mournful indie pop powered by synths and drum machines. The demos on the cleverly-named Water, though impressive by the standards of most song sketches, lack the sophistication of the mixes on Pool, allowing committed fans a look at the sinew between the more bare-bones Porches projects and the muscle of the newer record.
Maine has expressed enthusiasm about his recently developed production ability and the songs on Water suggest that his pride is well earned, demonstrating how he edited and improved his creations. Water’s version of the song “Pool” lacks the kick of the final cut, which is better paced, bringing in discreet instrumental flourishes one after the other. “Car,” on Pool, derives its power from the emotion built into its awed refrain, “Oh, what a machine.” The song is subdued on Water, its chorus less of a standout.
But even as the songs on Water emphasize the relative strength of Pool, they carry listeners down a road not taken, one filled with its own attractions and surprises. The Water version of “Shaver” may not include the final version’s killer saxophone solo, but it almost makes up for it with a lovely organ progression reminiscent of some of the sounds on the 2011 Porches record Summer of Ten. And of course, it’s not always so clear-cut which version of a song is “better.” For instance, the production on Pool’s version of “Mood” is crisper, but the verses on the Water version seem to be sung more sweetly. There are plenty of other examples where the rough version of a particular song includes an element that I wish had made it to the final cut.
Water also features two new unreleased tracks, “Black Dress” and “Black Budweiser T-Shirt.” Neither feels anywhere close to finished; if anything, they feel less fully realized than the six demos. The video for “Black Dress,” however, features choreography from Emma Portner and Devonté Hynes, and is worth watching.
When he was doing press for Pool, Maine said that he had worked hard to make the demos sound as good as he possibly could, and that work is obvious. The versions of the songs on Water have enough depth to make for a solid record in their own right. That Maine realized there was a whole separate layer of work still to be done on each song allowed him to make the best album of his career. This is an instructive example of artistic maturity in process, one which makes Water more than just a vanity project. Instead, it’s a demonstration of what it takes to tweak a song, upgrading an intriguing idea to the point where it’s nearly irresistible, where an artist comes into his own.


The electronic composer’s first album in 33 years is also her final one—she passed away in December. The synthesizer pieces here are the lightest and most playful of her career, like beacons of hope and change.

Pauline Anna Strom: Angel Tears in Sunlight

Angel Tears in Sunlight

2021 was supposed to cement the renaissance of Pauline Anna Strom. The electronic music composer originally self-released her music in the early 1980s, though it never resonated far outside the New Age cottage industry. Her music wasn’t enough to cover her rent in the San Francisco Tenderloin District, so Strom sold off all of her equipment by decade’s end, becoming a Reiki master instead. In the intervening years, the blind-since birth composer’s idiosyncratic approach to synthesizer-based music—intuitive, asymmetrical, destabilizing—resonated with a new generation of explorers. Thanks in part to her inclusion on 2017’s much needed compendium Trans-Millenia Music, Strom realized she had fans ranging from MGMT and Caroline Polachek to Avalon Emerson. Buoyed by so many new listeners, she returned to music-making and was set to perform as part of the home-listening live concert series Oda (programmed alongside the likes of Madlib and Arca) and release her first album in 33 years.
Instead, Angel Tears in Sunlight arrives posthumously, as Strom passed away in December of last year. Perhaps she knew that her work might make sense in a future era, right down to the name she originally chose to release music under—Trans-Millenia Consort—which literally translates as “crossing time companion,” suggesting that the composer's perception of that concept was vaster and deeper than most. “If I made music now, I’d be something else,” she stated in the liner notes to Trans-Millenia Music, as much a prophecy as her prior recorded work. Rather than sounding like an epitaph, though, Angel Tears arrives as a beacon of hope and change. The lightest and most playful of Strom’s recorded work, it signals new vistas ahead, ones that sadly will now have to be explored by others.
“Tropical Convergence” teems with chimes and gurgling layers, suggesting sunlight reflecting on water. Strom’s work was often evocative, at times suggesting the more turbid mind states of the human experience (she titled some songs “Freebasing” and “Mushroom Trip” despite never dabbling in anything stronger than alcohol), but there’s a distinct lightness here, as if unburdening the worldly concerns of the past few years. The moving, minor-key “I Still Hope” ascends steadily towards its titular aspiration in two brief minutes.
Rather than track down the analog gear and tape machines from her past, Strom acquired new synthesizers for the new album. The unfamiliarity gives the album an exploratory feel, freeing Strom to dive down every rabbit hole, even adding in recordings of her two pet iguanas. “Marking Time”—with its dizzying un-gendered voice samples– isn’t far removed from Oneohtrix Point Never’s “He She” or SOPHIE’s bubblegum choirs. “The Pulsation” foregrounds her previously buried rhythmic experimentations: slippery drum patterns and polyrhythms arise from all corners of the track, full of struck metallic tones and synths acting like wild bird calls, the track dense as jungle foliage. “Equatorial Sunrise” explores similar rhythms with a glowing synth patch.
Only on “The Eighteen Beautiful Memories” does Strom recall the dark ambient contours of her early work. Against a slow-evolving sine wave, a poignant synth line emerges, offering a glint of brightness before receding away. “I dream in color,” she told one interviewer. “I’ve always seen things in my mind. I don’t know how else to interpret it.” Her song titles often reflected whatever her mind was on, be it impressions of far-off lands or Gothic horror. From the titles to the music itself, Angel Tears in Sunlight captures Strom turning her mind’s eye towards something warmer and more radiant than her prior work suggested, which might be as simple as the heat lamp for her iguanas or something more cosmic. Lamentably for us, she then moved fully towards that light.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Over 40 years after its initial release, the composer’s pioneering work pairing computers with live players feels not only prescient but also refreshingly optimistic.

On the Other Ocean

A New York Times article recently explored a spate of violence against robots, from people attacking driverless cars in Arizona and beating robots with bats in Russia to taking down one security bot in Silicon Valley with a tarp and barbecue sauce. Beyond dystopian depictions of HAL-9000 and Skynet, there’s plenty to fear from automation, be it decimating entire industries to hijacking our thought processes. But those menacing portrayals implicate humans and automatons alike: “We see ourselves in the mirror of the machines that we can build,” Frédéric Kaplan wrote in his essay “Who is afraid of the humanoid?”
“As far as machines being the enemy, I’m convinced that technology is amoral,” composer David Behrman told Perfect Sound Forever back in 1997. “Whether it’s a force for good or evil or neither depends on who is doing what with it and for what reason.” In the late 1960s, he  began to experiment with how such inanimate objects—from battery-powered devices and synth modules to light sensors and the earliest microcomputers—might thoughtfully engage with human beings, be they classically trained musicians or modern dancers. Starting with 1967-68’s bracing “Runthrough,” Behrman began to tinker with his machines and inch towards equilibrium.
To call Behrman a composer might make him bristle, though. In a Village Voice review, critic Tom Johnson wrote, “Behrman doesn’t make pieces exactly. He assembles electronic equipment [that] is capable of doing certain things. These things change quite a bit… because he keeps tinkering with the machinery and adjusting his musical goals.” When Behrman encountered the Kim-1, an early and relatively inexpensive microcomputer that became available in 1976, he quickly adopted it for his live performances. Behrman could now program the computer to “hear” pitches and respond by sending harmonies to two of Behrman’s handmade synthesizers. It could also give chord changes to the players and alter the rhythm of the piece. In small steps, the computer could accompany and interact with the musicians. Two of these performances comprise On the Other Ocean.
“On the Other Ocean” and “Figure in a Clearing” date to 1977 and feature Kim-1 engaging with woodwinds in the former, cello on the latter. While computers are now integral to modern music-making, from Pro Tools for editing to the alien ribbons of Auto-Tune that festoon pop radio, On the Other Ocean suggests a parallel world, a path not taken. Behrman and his machine don’t seek to attain the impossible or superhuman, much less strive for perfection. There’s something peculiar about how the two sides interact, like Short Circuit’s Johnny 5 auditioning for the Philharmonic.
“On the Other Ocean” puts Arthur Stidfole’s bassoon and composer Maggi Payne’s flute into play with Kim-1. They unhurriedly hover around a set of pitches; the first time Kim-1 attempts to harmonize and swoops up to a new tone, it’s like a kid cannonballing into a pool, clunky yet elegant. Soon a slow-motion game of tag is on, the humans holding tones for a delectably long duration until the computer catches up. The composition’s 24 minutes seem to draw down in an instant. “Ocean” is slippery, yet it lingers for an exceptionally long time. It’s composed but diaphanous. It makes sense that during this era, Behrman also made a piece wherein clouds passing overhead trigger the computer.
The performance that yielded “Figure in a Clearing” predates “Ocean” by about three months, revealing the fiddling Behrman did in the intervening time, which led the Times’ critic John Rockwell to put him in “the great American tradition of the garage tinkerer.” The liner notes say that there are 33 electronic generators and the computer chooses chords made by 16 triangle wave generators. But the music’s dreaminess precludes any attempts at counting. Against David Gibson’s carefully bowed cello, Kim-1 is like a satellite in elliptical orbit, or a leashed dog in the park: now pushing the pace, now slowing it down. It may feel a bit busier than its counterpart, but, ever so slowly, stasis is achieved.
Over 40 years after its initial release on the Lovely Music label, an early, awkward exchange between a primitive computer and human improvisers may scan as quaint: Today, we all walk around with computers in our back pockets, and machine learning replaces more skilled jobs every day. But, while abstract electronics might not be for everyone, the end results remain not just lovely but even, perhaps, liberating.
At a time when giant streaming platforms deploy algorithms to lead millions to listen to playlists of ambient music from fake artists, the entire apparatus of the music industry has come to seem insidious, as though the machines themselves—and not simply their corporate overlords—were out to deceive us. So in hearing Behrman, his players, and a computer work in harmony, we can hear a better future. As he explained to Rockwell, while such work “has a very private feeling for me, and yet I don’t see why 83 million people couldn’t enjoy that private feeling. Solitude could be a universal treasure in a crowded world.”


Rick Ross' new mixtape, possibly his best full-length, finds the Teflon Don moving out of his comfort zone and entering a world where it feels like something is at stake.

Rich Forever

With both Rick Ross and star producer du jour Lex Luger at the top of the rap game, it's easy to forget how much of the former's career is now owed to the latter. Ross was a successful artist before he ever hooked up with Luger, but his stunning transition from begrudgingly accepted popular rapper to one of the genre's most respected artists can basically be traced directly back to Luger's beat for "B.M.F. (Blowin' Money Fast)", the song that will go down as the indelible single of Ross' career. The beat was so titanic that Ross-- who had gone to great pains to protect the self-constructed image of himself as an opulent drug kingpin-- shouted a chorus where he imagined himself as genuine, real-life drug kingpins Big Meech and Larry Hoover. In one fell swoop, Ross tore down his carefully assembled existence while simultaneously building up the one that paved the way for the career surge he's riding, which has culminated in Rich Forever, the new mixtape that now stands as his artistic pinnacle.
"B.M.F." is genius for many reasons, but there is one crucial aspect of the song that makes Rich Forever tick: It was the first time that Ross ever really got mean. It's almost incredible to consider, but despite his stature and physical presence, "B.M.F." was the first intimidating Ross track since his debut single "Hustlin'", the first since then that pumped a dangerous amount of adrenaline into your veins. In the four years between those songs, Ross kept everything but wealth and women at a distance. He chose cinematic, orchestral beats that colored that image perfectly, and while it was no doubt an effective strategy, songs like "Maybach Music 2" are the equivalent of a living room in a mansion where you'd be afraid to touch any of the furniture. "B.M.F." was Rick Ross as Dave Chappelle as Rick James yelling "fuck yo' couch," except the couch was actually his own. It was exactly what his career needed.
Luger produces only one song on Rich Forever, but his fingerprints are all over the mixtape, and its roots are firmly in "B.M.F.". It's the first Rick Ross full-length with an attitude, and the result is a record where it finally feels like something's at stake for the Teflon Don. The aggrieved sneer of "…these motherfuckers mad that I'm icy!" permeates the album, and the energy derived from Ross' contempt adds an important dimension to his character, one that was missing when he got too comfortable making 1,000-thread-count music. The best beats here-- the ones that act as the backbone of the album-- are appropriately sinister, and actually improve on the Luger template that has dominated street rap for the past 18 months. There's the grinding churn of "MMG Untouchable", the haunted house bombast of "King of Diamonds", and the appropriately glistening keys of "Yella Diamonds", beats so good they render Luger's lone actual production ("Off the Boat") totally unnecessary.
The opening quarter of Rich Forever especially drips with disdain, and though deviations into radio pop and the lush instrumentation he's long cultivated do pop up, Ross sets a tone for the record early that courses through every track that follows. "B.M.F." did happen to crest with his marked improvement as a writer, but it also magnified Ross' ability to pen spectacularly outlandish and vivid boasts, and he stuffs a vast number of them into the first four or five tracks here. Ross calling his chain "the ghetto's guillotine" on "High Definition" or his Corvette "so clean you'll think Bruce Springsteen rent that" on "Fuck 'Em" or conveying his hunger for money by hilariously seething that he "likes his nachos hot" on "MMG Untouchable" is the mark of the Don at work, not content to merely build verses around the names of luxury sunglasses brands. And when he does retreat back to the throne for a regal track like "Keys to the Crib" later on the album, there's an undeniably spiteful glee in his voice that's missing from his earlier albums.
Ross has jarred himself out of his comfort zone and gotten his hands dirty, and in doing so he's also fleshed out an image of the boss as paranoid and constantly peeking over his shoulder. "Last Breath", which smartly tabs Meek Mill (Ross' top underling) and Birdman (the bossest of all rap bosses) for guest verses, undercuts images of ringside seats and all-white Beamers with a feeling of queasy desperation and lurking mistrust. Then there's "Stay Schemin'" which perfectly deploys a zonked-out French Montana to mumble-sing a hook about staying one step ahead of plotting enemies. Montana sounds so stoned that it brings to mind the image of Tony Montana lurching his head up from a pile of cocaine, and it's a fascinating, if not bizarre, end to an album that starts with Ross at his absolute meanest.
"God forgives, I don't," is a phrase that pops up from time to time on Rich Forever, and fittingly it's slated to serve as the title of Ross' upcoming album. He'd been batting around the slogan long before this mixtape existed, but Rich Forever adds vindictive muscle to a motto that at one point might have come off as a hollow attempt at branding. It's a record that uses nastiness to cement the character "Rick Ross" as three-dimensional, and uses a barrage of bangers to cement the rapper Rick Ross as an undeniable force.


Though the shadow of Wand’s mentor Ty Segall still hovers over Wand’s blown-out garage sound, the band's own flickering light is shining through. Here they add some folk rock to the mix, bringing beautiful, honeyed melodies to dark, bleak songs about curdled dreams.

1000 Days

On their third album, Los Angeles’ Wand gracefully sidestep the potential pitfalls of psychedelic songwriting—meandering guitars, rambling lyrics, directionless tracks. They ground the blurry, bizarre visions established on their previous efforts, Ganglion Reef and Golem, in colorful imagery, so that the faces of the monsters they’ve written about on past records come into full focus.
While the shadow of Wand’s mentor Ty Segall still hovers over Wand’s blown-out garage sound, the band’s own flickering light is beginning to shine through more often. They have added some progressive folk rock to the mix, fondly recalling unique and memorable records like Mellow Candle’s Swaddling Songs and Comus’ classic First Utterance without sounding like a carbon copy. Cory Hanson’s voice shimmers  against the acoustic palette of songs like the beautiful closer "Morning Rainbow", the song that also contains 1000 Days’ key lyrical thesis: "We will see this world together in its terror."
Paralysis, paranoia, disappearance, erasure, pure fear, and curdling dreams are all themes that reappear in Hanson’s lyrics for 1000 Days; even the titular song, a concise bit of folky garage pop with a sunny-sweet choral melody, seems like it might be a love song at first but quickly turns into the nightmare of relationship stasis, depression, and ennui ("I don’t need a thing ‘cause I’ve had every dream"). The mingling of beautiful, honeyed melodies with dark, bleak lyrical content is nothing new, but Wand do it especially well, and they have a precision in their songwriting that keeps their music from spinning off into glazed burnout territory.
Though one worries that with such a prolific release schedule that Wand will run out of ideas, 1000 Days is a heartening record, a record that sees a young band picking up steam, playing with their influences more deftly than on their prior LPs, and bringing a thoughtful approach to old and well-traveled sounds. There’s enough interesting moments on 1000 Days to hold onto these songs, go back to them, and explore within them. That’s more than many of their cohorts within the cluttered and long-trendy field of psychedelic garage—there are hundreds of disposable tape-label bands with little to say out there, and it’s wearying to search through all that crud for the occasional gem, which does exist—have to offer.


The indie rockers pay tribute to their heroes with a love and abandon that can only come from living with these songs for decades.

The Feelies: Some Kinda Love: Performing the Music of the Velvet Underground

The Feelies may not be the Velvet Underground’s first disciples—Jonathan Richman was there at the inception, tailing the band with the fervor of a Deadhead. But it could be argued that the New Jersey institution, led by Glenn Mercer and Bill Million, is responsible for much of the indie rock that flowed downstream from the Velvets. Crazy Rhythms, the Feelies’ 1980 debut, bristled with a confined nervous energy as the band brought the downtown innovations of the Velvet Underground to the suburbs, an aesthetic that became part of the lingua franca of guitar-pop for the ensuing decades.
The Feelies’ new album, Some Kinda Love: Performing the Music of the Velvet Underground, captures a performance held in conjunction with the touring exhibition “The Velvet Underground Experience” during its New York City run in 2018. Setting up shop at the White Eagle Hall in Jersey City, the Feelies invited fellow Velvets fanatics Richard Barone and James Maestro of the Bongos to hop on stage, then proceeded to tear through a set that sidelined the avant garde escapades of the Velvet Underground to focus squarely on their strengths as a rock’n’roll band.

Rightly celebrated as a key act in the birth of transgressive rock, the Velvet Underground also had a sweet undercurrent flowing through their occasionally abrasive music. Some of this can be chalked up to Lou Reed’s enduring love of doo-wop and R&B, an affection that grounded the group even as they floated far afield on waves of noise and ambience. As a band, the Feelies don’t quite share the same R&B affinity, yet they hone in on that warmth, deliberately sidestepping the ominous dread of “Heroin,” the cacophony of “Sister Ray,” and the poignant sadness of “Pale Blue Eyes” so they can play songs that collectively sound like a celebration.
The Feelies favor no particular era of the Velvet Underground on Some Kinda Love, balancing selections from the group’s early years with John Cale with songs originally sung by Doug Yule, Cale’s replacement in the Velvets. It’s a holistic view of the band that places an emphasis on songs that sound great within the confines of a club. The most telling selection may be “Head Held High,” a rocker that opens the second side of Loaded—the last album Reed made with the group—and the moment where Some Kinda Love kicks into high gear: It’s a song with no higher meaning than being a real good time, which is precisely what the Feelies intend to deliver.
The Feelies play this music with the kind of love and abandon that can only come from living with the songs for decades. They don’t treat the original Velvet Underground recordings as sacred texts: They shape their arrangements to suit their own strengths, choosing to snip off the snappy instrumental coda to “Who Loves the Sun” and streamlining “I Heard Her Call My Name” so it feels like a garage rocker. It’s evident in this performance, as on so much of Some Kinda Love, that drummer Stan Demeski swings more than Maureen Tucker, the drummer that gave Velvet Underground their potent, primitive thrust. Without her almost militant beat, “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “Run Run Run” seem lighter, but that isn’t to say Demeski plays conventionally. He propels the music with a playful sense of rhythm, giving Mercer, Million, and bassist Brenda Sauter plenty of room to roam, sliding in and out of grooves and barreling into breakneck rave-ups.
Listeners with a deep knowledge of both bands may be able to appreciate such moments as the conclusion of “White Light/White Heat," which ends with a flurry of noise that feels cathartic, not cataclysmic. (Similarly, they may be the only people amused by the fact that Some Kinda Love is named after a Velvet Underground song not heard on this record.) But even with no prerequisites, Some Kinda Love works as a roaring rock’n’roll record because the Feelies play with such enthusiasm. Their tribute feels like a communion. It’s not a revival—it’s a celebration of their lifeblood.


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 Judy Garland’s mythical 1961 live album, a late-career triumph that helped to outline the shape of queer fandom for decades to come.

Judy at Carnegie Hall

In a photograph snapped on the evening of April 23, 1961, a line of disembodied hands reach out to grasp for Judy Garland onstage at Carnegie Hall. They belonged to a group of men whose allegiance to the star was as passionate as it was fraught; as bound up in their identification with her strength and humor as with the many troubles of her life. Their cohort could only be spoken about in code, and in time, a whole vocabulary emerged to describe them: friends of Dorothy, the boys in the band, Best Judys. To journalists and outsiders they were objects of amusement, if not outright scorn: “the boys in tight trousers,” “ever-present bluebirds,” or as one writer bluntly called them, “a flutter of fags.”
What’s most striking about this image is Garland’s responsiveness to the people connected to those flailing limbs. Her eyes are cast downward, reciprocating their gaze, engaging them as individuals rather than an undifferentiated mass. Most accounts of that evening are of a restless and animated audience, leaping out of their seats and swarming the footlights to be closer to the singer. According to one review, the fervor was so intense “you could not tell whether the crowd was clapping, shouting, screaming, laughing, or crying. The sound suddenly had no character. It was just an expression of total approval and acceptance.”
“It was, even by the strictest definition, perfect,” Gerald Clarke, Garland’s biographer, wrote of her series of performances at the storied New York concert hall. But strict perfection is at odds with Garland’s enduring appeal. The expressiveness of her voice outpaced its technical merits. Her genius was using a flawed human instrument to communicate something far more complicated than a lovely song sung straight. She approached show tunes and pop standards with such unguarded emotion that they came to seem disarmingly personal, no matter how well-known or widely performed. Despite her music’s theatricality, the scrim separating the person from the performer was unusually thin: the draw of a Garland concert had as much to do with her glamorous presence as her unbridled singing.
The mystique of Carnegie Hall was only enhanced by the success of its recording. Judy at Carnegie Hall spent 95 weeks on the charts and 13 of them at the No. 1 spot. It won several top awards at the 1962 Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, the first ever awarded to a woman. It was a record that lived up to the hyperbole of its liner notes and soon was widely known as “the greatest night in show business history.” After a sometimes rocky 1950s, it once again reaffirmed the star power Garland had always possessed, marking the moment when the singer and her audience were in perfect sync with one another; when the peak of her powers as an artist was met with the kind of sustained and unconditional recognition she’d always sought.
Though beloved by her audience, Garland was also the subject of decades of ridicule and gossip about her romantic failure, substance abuse, and professional unpredictability. If she didn't have an enduring romantic partnership, she often found love through applause, forming a complex circuit of affection between herself and the public. This was especially true among pre-Stonewall gay fans, who heard reflections of their own perilous lives in the resilience she embodied. To listen to Judy Garland was not only to feel “total approval and acceptance,” but to be recognized for one’s difference and embraced for it too.
Born Frances Ethel Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, the yet-to-be-christened Garland was marked for success at an early age. Thrust into a performing group with her only modestly talented sisters, “Baby” Gumm was quickly singled out by her legendarily awful stage mother, Ethel, as the most likely potential star. The family relocated to Lancaster, California, where Ethel dedicated her weekends to hauling her youngest to auditions. Her efforts paid off when, in 1935, Garland was signed to MGM. Judy’s voice was so outsized and affecting that it could cow bullies into submission; it could telegraph feelings so beyond her years that executives were unsure how to make use of her. She was considered too old to be a child star, too plain to be a glamor girl, and too “fat” to be a sex symbol. MGM’s dedication to policing the young actress’ weight was notorious: hiring spies to catch her eating, pushing unhealthy fad diets, comparing her to an overweight mannequin, and most crucially, putting her on a pharmacy’s worth of pills.
From early on, shame defined Garland’s persona. Where the stars of the late 1950s and ’60s would go on to make unguarded teenage emotion central to pop, Garland disclosed feelings that seemed more related to early adolescence. The spur that sets a given track into motion often isn’t angst but embarrassment. It’s present in her earliest numbers like “You Made Me Love You,” which she originally sang from the perspective of a moony-eyed young fan longing for the impossible embrace of her idol, and reaches its pinnacle with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a song so naked in its yearning that it feels almost intrusive to listen to. By the time Garland stepped onstage at Carnegie Hall to perform both numbers, she’d grown into her powers but preserved their signature tension. The “triumph” of so much of Garland’s music is of conquering self-consciousness with talent, and in doing so, attaining a freedom unfettered from shame.
In 1950, after years of being drugged by the studio and overworked to the brink of psychosis, Garland was effectively kicked out of the film industry. At the behest of her husband, Sid Luft, she pivoted to live performances and reminded everyone what MGM had long exploited her for: the sheer power of her voice. The tour’s success reinstated her in Hollywood, but by the end of the decade, she was in a rough way. Her marriage to Luft was falling apart due to his colossal mismanagement of her fortune, and her health was rapidly deteriorating. Doctors told her that hepatitis would likely leave her incapacitated for the rest of her life. Tellingly, it was news that she initially seemed to greet with some relief, as though it would finally allow her to have a moment’s rest. But after she got wise to the extent of her financial troubles, it became clear that rest was not an option. After a period of convalescence, Garland was able to partially re-generate her liver, hire new management, and get back on the road.
Unlike her extravagant shows from the 1950s, Carnegie Hall was envisioned as a straightforward engagement. No circus acts, no cheap thrills, just Judy backed by a 40-piece orchestra. The setlist was a series of highs drawn from every era of her discography, from breakthrough hits (“You Made Me Love You,” “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”) to film performances (“The Trolley Song,” “The Man That Got Away”) to mature standards (“Do It Again”) and classics from the American songbook (“Swanee,” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”). These were songs that she had lived with and performed over and over again, that had developed a universe of popular recognition and quiet personal subtext. You don’t need to know, for instance, that Garland’s original performance of “You Made Me Love You” prompted Mayer to finally recognize her star power to hear the emotional economy of her delivery at Carnegie Hall, the ease with which she can shade reminiscence with regret. At 13 years old, she was told to sing “Zing!” at her very best because her dying father would be listening over the radio. But understanding that history isn’t necessary for grasping the heaviness beneath the song’s light heart.
After basking in the applause, the first sound that Garland makes on the record is a flattered but self-deprecating “oh!” Then she kicks off into “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You).” Self-effacement and self-empowerment go hand in hand for Garland: the song is a call to optimism in the face of personal ruin that’s paced like a stand-up comedy routine. Between warbling verses, Garland rattles off a list of troubles that run from petty slights to outright devastation, practically inviting the listener to map the song’s catalog of misfortune onto the gossip cycle surrounding her own personal life. After being deceived, told she looks stout, handed a subpoena, and having her groom get cold feet, Garland sings a mantra for survival: “Forget your troubles/C’mon get happy!”
Though that motto may be saccharine, Garland makes its positivity sound like a kind of faith. The attitude of unyielding cheer in the face of collapse, reflective of the musical theater tradition in which she cut her teeth, is like an inversion of rock’s detached cool or punk’s ferocious snarl. But it can be just as defiant of a rejection: a refusal to be diminished by life in the face of mundanity or outright ruin. Garland sums it up multiple times throughout the evening, like in “San Francisco,” where she plays up the melodrama of the original number before the arrangement quickens and she flips it from a dirge into a brassy homecoming. “That’s Entertainment!” elevates the idea to cosmic scale, paraphrasing Shakespeare to sum up theater’s ability to elevate everyday mediocrity into a vast human comedy: “The world is a stage/The stage is a world of entertainment!”
From Dorothy’s implacable longing to Esther’s hometown pride in Meet Me In St. Louis, Garland’s appeal was thoroughly rooted in nostalgia. Judy at Carnegie Hall was composed primarily of numbers that dated back to the 1920s and 1930s, which she managed to keep relatively fresh by accommodating elements of jazz and swing into her arrangements. The nostalgia she inspired in the early ’60s was two-pronged: for the Golden Age of Hollywood and the long-lost world of vaudeville, where the Gumm family had gotten its start. That nostalgia was not entirely benign: When critics needed a point of comparison for the young Garland, many reached for vaudeville star Al Jolson, America’s most famous blackface performer.
Garland covers two songs popularized by Jolson on Carnegie Hall: George Gershwin’s “Swanee,” which she had also performed in 1954’s A Star Is Born, and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.” In both cases, her pleas to return home to “mammy” have aged as poorly as the blackface she once donned for 1939’s Babes In Arms. But these are the only wrinkles in an otherwise flawless evening, and reminders that the feigned, backward-looking innocence of the American songbook is far more dated than the worldliness of Garland’s singing.
After a lifetime of stewing underneath a veneer of perfect poise, Garland developed a razor-sharp wit and self-deprecating sense of humor that would make her a talk show favorite toward the end of her life, even as she was left slurring and glassy-eyed in her seat. Her stories between numbers are genuinely funny, as when she recalls using a safety pin to affix an ill-fitting evening dress for a seated performance at a piano: “I sat down and the pin came undone and into my derrière. I’ve never sung so high or so fast.”
On the other hand, the anecdote she tells of a journalist flattering her all night only to publish an article about how fat she’s gotten is hard to laugh off, even as it’s played for comedy. “I’ve spent years and years and years trying to please through singing or acting,” Garland once raged on tape recordings for a memoir that never materialized, “and yet I’ve constantly been written or talked about as an unfit person.” Those tapes reveal the flipside to the concert’s circuit of affection, the life largely not captured on record: of lonely, inebriated nights in far-flung hotel rooms, stone broke and many miles from her children, years of anger surfacing as her battle-honed sharpness dissolves into chemical slush.
The most affecting numbers on Judy at Carnegie Hall are the ones where she communicates pain and loss, like the aching way she phrases “The man who won you/Has run off and undone you” on “The Man That Got Away,” or her powerful belting as the song blazes to a climax. In that number and “Stormy Weather,” Garland’s use of dynamics demonstrates her tight rapport with her backing band, allowing the music to swell and recede so that almost pitifully small levels of woundedness eventually culminate into pyrotechnic displays of emotion.
“Come Rain or Come Shine” rides a breakneck drum line that becomes increasingly frantic as it’s accompanied by strings, horns, and a relentless ride cymbal, with Garland’s voice growing more ragged with desire the more aggressive the music becomes. By the end of the song, her ferocity is matched by a crowd that won’t stop screaming. “Alone Together” dramatizes its deep weariness and devotion with a pitch-black vortex of woodwinds and strings. Wielding the powerful lower end of her contralto for all of its resolve, and the corroded edge of her vibrato for all of its turbulent emotion, Garland encircles the audience with her passion while conveying a fear it might not be enough to protect them.
Later, after flubbing a verse in “You Go to My Head” and gamely carrying on, she hedges her performance of “If Love Were All” by bringing the lyrics sheet onstage for a performance backed only by piano. Garland more than makes up for her caution by how totally she occupies the loneliness at the song’s heart and the despair of its final lament: “But I believe that since my life began/The most I’ve had is just a talent to amuse.” Though their music is quite different, Garland’s appeal is not entirely dissimilar to that of later performers like Elliott Smith or Kurt Cobain, although her scorching honesty is complicated by her need to express herself through the veil of other people’s songs. If those performers gained part of their power from raw disclosures of pain, what animates Garland is an almost unbearable dose of dramatic irony.
This capacity to read Garland beyond face value—to sense, for instance, as she breaks down over the hopelessness of her partner’s addiction in A Star Is Born, that she was also talking about herself—also placed her at the forefront of camp. The “failed seriousness,” as Susan Sontag later put it, of a child star who developed a lifetime of trademark tics to cope with the spotlight, has been a boon to generations of drag queens and actresses in want of an award-winning biopic.
Though the lexicon of contemporary gay culture is unthinkable without “Judy, Judy, Judy,” the audience who clamored for Judy at Carnegie Hall inhabited a vastly more hostile world than the modern listener. Apart from the brutal policing and social ostracization, the 1950s and early 1960s was a heyday of Freudianism in America, and the profile that emerged of homosexuals as effeminate, repressed, and grotesquely sentimental elicited both patronizing sympathy and flagrant contempt. In a very homophobic article for Esquire in 1969, William Goldman managed to sum up both: “First, if [gays] have an enemy, it is age. And Garland is youth, perennially, over the rainbow. And second, the lady has suffered. Homosexuals tend to identify with suffering.”
Though Garland’s death in 1969 on the day of the Stonewall Riots is mythically invoked by some as a driving factor for the rebellion, it actually marked a decisive break between generations. Gay liberation was, to a large extent, about materializing a self out of the shadows. The defiant, often hard-bodied new homosexual that emerged in its wake had no need for Garland as a conduit to express itself or to articulate its political demands. In turn, loving Judy became not only passé but slightly shameful, an activity associated with the most pathetic kind of closetedness: evocative of mothballs, jazz hands, and a deferred life of masochistic yearning.
But even as the cult of Garland dipped, it laid the seeds for powerful new affinities to develop between performers and their audiences. In Judy at Carnegie Hall, one can hear the genesis of contemporary queer fandom, in all of its relatability and complicated emotional grappling. Judy’s precipitous highs and lows have gradually been given a cleaner shape by the artists who succeeded her, smoothing out the turbulence in favor of a much more manageable approach to pop as a way of life, whether that be narrativizing a fully-rounded approach to sex and romance (Madonna), sharing moments of shattering vulnerability (Janet Jackson), or performing jazz standards while taking on A Star Is Born (Lady Gaga). Even when the going is rougher, she remains the benchmark for preternaturally gifted performers who persevere despite unthinkable odds: just look at how often her name comes up in discussions of Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, or Britney Spears.
However satisfying it is to see “The Trolley Song” come full circle and get meme’d into oblivion, it’s difficult to imagine a singer today occupying quite the same status for their fans as Judy did for hers. The identification that accumulated gradually around her over decades is now recreated on an industrial scale, virtually overnight, with billions of dollars at stake. It’s no longer just Judy: You can now take your pick of queer singers to stan, or choose from an even larger pool of flamboyant pop girls, gaybaiting boys, and industry-backed “outsiders.” Psychological subtext has given way to a ready-made therapeutic language of overcoming trauma. No public controversy or tabloid trouble is too minor or damaging to create a new album cycle over. This has all contributed to deep cracks in a once iron-clad relationship. Artists are in the awkward position of having to give profuse thanks to fans while also trying to claw back their autonomy from them. Fan service has increasingly become fan deference. At times, it feels like the tail is now wagging the dog: that the purchasing power of gay money—and the sense of entitlement over artists that comes with it—not only dictates the sound of pop music but the character and affect of its performers.
That’s part of what makes Judy at Carnegie Hall so moving. The singer’s capacity for openness was met with a proportionate show of gratitude by an audience who could appreciate it for the act of generosity that it was. Her struggles were not their struggles, although both knew the pain of being unable to reconcile the roles foisted upon them with their deeply inconvenient yearning for basic happiness. This is also what makes “Over the Rainbow” such a powerful anthem. The song was talismanic for Garland, and she treated it with a protectiveness that she did not extend to anything else in her repertoire. The lives of Dorothy Gale and Judy Garland were equally fantastic, but time had frozen the former in a fairytale while the latter was left to square her longing with an adult understanding of just how pitiless the world could be. On the record, Garland does not burst into quiet sobs while singing like she did in the 1950s, but she does approach the song’s central emotion with an almost holy reverence. The mature grain in her voice makes its final question feel all the more poignant and heartbreaking: “If happy little bluebirds fly/Beyond the rainbow/Why, oh whyyyy, can’t I-I-I?”
Ultimately, Garland could not resolve her unhappiness, but struggled against her limits, yielding a hard-won truth that she bore out in her art. Like Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz, Judy at Carnegie Hall found home: among an audience who loved and accepted her, applauding her for all that she was rather than defining her by all that she lacked.