Fiercely independent and with few avenues into its world, this minimalist record completes the psych-rock band's Thank Your Parents trilogy.

Absolute II

In 2009 the Flaming Lips invited Oneida to play at a day they were curating at an ATP festival in upstate New York. That pairing felt like an inevitable convergence of like-minded talents-- two similarly wayward outfits naturally coming together. Both have gone though stages of late-career reinvention, both have a fondness for repetitive psychedelic rock music played loud, and both have demonstrated scant regard for conventional career trajectories. At that point Oneida were two albums deep into a proposed trilogy titled Thank Your Parents. The fact that they decided to play a 12-hour set, complete with a double drummer assault from Lips sticksmen Steven Drozd and Kliph Scurlock at one point, made a strange kind of sense. It felt like Oneida were in the process of untethering themselves from their own sound, of cutting loose common constructs that had been threaded through their prior work. In Absolute II, the third and final segment of Thank Your Parents, that evolution has been taken to its most far-out point yet.
Of all the strands that make up the trilogy, which began with Preteen Weaponry in 2008 and continued with the triple album Rated O in 2009, this is the one that makes least sense as a standalone item. It's very much a part of a greater whole, a logical if somewhat obtuse and reflective way to enter the comedown phase after the wild diversity of the previous installment. With all three pieces slotted together, it's easier to process the other material. The studio trickery and dub-influenced tunes of Preteen Weaponry, which was split into three songs but designed to be listened to as a continuous track, now feels like a perfect ease-in entry point to the sprawl of Rated O. But finding a similar way in to Absolute II takes some work. There are no drums here and barely any vocals. Anything that could be defined as "traditional" instrumentation is largely absent. Initially, it feels impenetrable. Almost everything is locked in stasis, with tiny phrases and pulses occasionally prickling to the surface.
As such, it's firmly rooted in the minimalist tradition. Steve Reich's "Pendulum Music" is a touchstone, as is Philip Glass's "1+1". At times it bears a similar textural heft to Brian Eno's work with Harold Budd on their The Plateaux of Mirror collaboration. In terms of eyebrow-raising deviations in style it's not dissimilar to the arcane moods of Scott Walker's Tilt and The Drift. Like Preteen Weaponry this isn't an album that needed to be divided into individual tracks, although there are four of them, beginning with "Pre Human". The opening is built around a single repeating keyboard riff that's lightly distorted and sounds not unlike something Martin Rev from Suicide might have left on the cutting room floor around the time of their first album. It feels like a reflex shift out of the jagged edges of Rated O and into calmer waters, especially when it relaxes into solitary organ drones and droplets of water-like piano plinks.
But the mood of Absolute II oscillates somewhere between turmoil and ease, with the stretched out tones of "Pre Human" ultimately congealing into the hostile atmosphere of "Horizon". Here, the solitary vocal lines on the album are cut so they speak a curious un-language, which is set to aggressive machine noise that feels like a feverish itch prickling away under the skin. It's the dark side of Eno's dream for ambient, or the notion of Erik Satie's "furniture music" gone horribly wrong. Something that should sink into the background is ultimately turned on its head and shoved in your face instead. "Horizon" is painful at high volume, and it's most likely designed to be listened to that way. From there "Gray Area" continues in much the same vein, with its clanging guitar motif ratcheting up the inhospitable atmosphere. It's like Oneida have locked you out of their world and are making it as difficult as they can for you to re-enter.
This isn't music as escapism, it's music as challenge and provocation. Even the closing title track, which is all hushed-out generator hum and occasional murmurs of instrumentation, falls loosely into the same kind of disconcerting atmosphere as the incidental music to David Lynch's Eraserhead. Oneida are often talked about as a band that should have reached a wider audience, but they won't achieve that here, and they don't seem to care. They're a group whose music takes a great deal of time to sink in, where the process of evaluation slowly unravels over years and months rather than days and minutes. It's the reason why their album Each One Teach One, which is nine years old, is only now being fully unpacked and canonized as a major piece of work. Thank Your Parents will take an equivalent span of time to reveal its secrets, especially as this final part is likely to be met with a large degree of bafflement on first listen. But taken as a concluding piece of a larger body of work, as this is intended to be heard, it's a fiercely individual statement to end this chapter in Oneida's unique history.


Chapel Hill indie rock veterans Polvo have used time away to reflect, refine, and re-energize—and have thus come out the other side a more intuitive band than ever before. The band’s second post-reformation record, Siberia, drives the point home even further.

Siberia

When bands break up or embark on extended hiatuses, the cumulative effect of all those years away is automatically assumed to be degenerative. Conventional wisdom suggests that the passage of time—and the day jobs, marriages, and diaper changes that often go with it—will inevitably erode the youthful abandon and creative frisson that fuels inspiration, not to mention the aging musician’s physical ability to retain their chops. But since reforming five years ago after a decade of inaction, Chapel Hill indie-rock linchpins Polvo have been getting down to the business of blowing such theories out of the water. Their wholly impressive 2009 comeback effort, In Prism, instead proffered the notion that, when removed from the load-in/load-out drudgery of perpetual van tours, artists are able to reflect, refine, and re-energize—and come out the other side a stronger, more confident, and more intuitive band than ever before. The band’s second post-reformation record, Siberia, drives the point home even further.
Polvo’s improved prowess can be felt in literally the album’s opening seconds. Like a beaten-down lawnmower, the band’s early records needed a few tugs to rev up—think of the many false starts of “Thermal Treasure” on Today’s Active Lifestyles, or the molasses-drip intro of Exploded Drawing’s “Fast Canoe”—as if the band was untangling and reorganizing its intricate strategies in real time. By contrast, Siberia’s introductory salvo, “Total Immersion,” provides just that in an instant—it’s as if we’re joining the band in progress at the precise moment they locked into the song’s powerful riff during hour five of an all-night jam session, with all the sweat and humidity in the room shaken out through the barrelling, handclapped backbeat. But where art-rock forbears like Canfamously distilled their epic improvisation sessions into more manageable pieces, Polvo work the other way, revealing new melodies and motifs in train-like fashion; they’re constantly opening new doors to explore, but in a linear, structured fashion. The real triumph of Polvo’s second phase is how they’ve managed to become a more approachable band without losing their sense of adventure—they can still go from accessible to inscrutable and back in a single chord progression but the shifts feel fluid and predestined rather than spastic and impulsive. Their songs have come more sprawling, but their albums on the whole have become tighter and more focused and, in the case of the breezy but byzantine "Blues Is Loss", they have an uncanny knack for making a seven-minute song feel more like three.
Siberia is very much a sister album to In Prism, adopting its predecessor’s eight-song, four-to-a-side composition and even its sequential trade-offs between hot-wired rockers and psychedelicized excursions. But within these set parameters, the band continually surprise—in the extended fadeout to spectacular centerpiece track “The Water Wheel” alone, there’s enough new passages introduced in 90 seconds to spawn another record. Just when you think “Total Immersion” is about to dissolve in a dub-fuzz quicksand, its central riff suddenly reemerges like a rescue team leading you back to safety; and just as you’ve adjusted your ears to the high-beam synths (!) that  drive the chorus of “Light, Raking", you’re hit with a twinned, harmonic guitar solo straight out of the Brian May/Thin Lizzy playbook.
These subtle classic-rock quotes—like the “Tom Sawyer”-worthy arpeggio that underpins the tranquil “Changed”—serve to make Polvo’s complex guitarchitecture more inviting to the uninitiated, but what really makes Polvo 2.0 an especially enticing proposition is Ash Bowie and Dave Brylawski’s more emotionally revelatory approach to their vocals. Polvo’s 90s-era output didn’t necessarily shy away from pop melody, but you often had to cut through the band’s barbed-wire discord to get at it. Siberia puts the hooks—and lyrical ruminations on passion versus reason—further out front than even In Prism, to take full advantage of their ageless but increasingly expressive voices: the deceptively serene prog-folk reprieve “Old Maps" acquires the spectral melancholy of Elliott Smith, while the punchy power-pop of “Some Songs” will satisfy that rogue faction of first-album Foo Fighters fans who wish Dave Grohl would’ve continued down the winsome, jangly path of “Big Me” rather than cranking up the stadium-grunge ballast. Fifteen years ago, it would’ve been strange to be speak of Polvo in relation to such noted melody-makers, but at this stage in their career, crafting pop songs is as much an experiment for Polvo as piecing together multi-sectional avant-rock odysseys. And what makes Siberia so great is that it thoroughly succeeds on both counts—proving once again that, for Polvo, all those years out of the game are to be measured not in inspiration lost, but wisdom gained.


The release of Eyehategod, the Southern metal band's first album in 14 years, has been a long time coming; luckily, the resulting eleven-song testament is well worth the wait, resembling the band's most classic work through and through.

Eyehategod

Eyehategod’s twenty-odd-year history is so rich, dark, and squalid that it’s nearly impossible to ignore when discussing the band’s formidable musical output. Alongside Crowbar and Down (both of whom are also riding high on recent releases), they are the quintessential Southern sludge band, and were instrumental in articulating and perfecting that bleak, swaggering metal-meets-punk sound that frontman Mike Williams still calls “heavy blues”. While it’s easy to wax romantic over what Eyehategod friend and occasional collaborator Phil Anselmo once dismissively referred to as “the Southern slow jam thing, whiskey that, rebel this,” Eyehategod are so much more than their backstory. (And, anyway, Mike prefers vodka.) The New Orleans institution refuses to either take themselves too seriously or be made victims of their own mythology. They’re just here to play, and if you have a problem with that, well, they’re tougher than they look, and they already look pretty damn tough.
In the many years since they started the band and released 1989’s Garden Dwarf Woman Driver demo, Eyehategod’s core members have collectively survived the worst luck imaginable. They’ve been battered by hurricane winds, crippling addiction, jail time, depression, and ultimately, death; they've welcomed new drummer Aaron Hill into the fold following the untimely passing of original sticksman Joey LaCaze in 2013. LaCaze’s signature drumming style married swaggering looseness with a powerful physicality, and his presence is felt all over the band’s new self-titled album. It’s a fitting epitaph for such a larger-than-life talent, and an excellent sign for the future.
The release of Eyehategod has been a long time coming: the band took their sweet time dithering over album titles and labels, and the recording process was waylaid by fitful stops and starts, as it began at legendary Dopesick producer Billy Anderson’s studio, paused, and was resumed at Anselmo’s home studio alongside Down producer Steve Berrigan. Anselmo’s Housecore label signed on to the release resulting album, which marks the now-quartet’s first full-length studio recording since 2000’s Confederacy of Ruined Lives. The smoke's since cleared, and the resulting eleven-song testament is well worth the wait.
“Agitation! Propaganda!” is a full-bore rager that sounds more like Williams’ hardcore punk side project Arson Anthem than anything else. Eyehategod has always written fast songs, but they’ve never opened an album like this before; typically, they've preferred to catch their listeners off-guard with a mid-album burst like Dopesick's “Methamphetamine”, or kick things off with a bait-and-switch a la “Blank” on Take As Needed For Pain. For a few nerve-wracking moments, you’re left wondering whether Eyehategod have burrowed way back down to their punk roots and abandoned the heavy altogether, but halfway through the song those dirty Delta blues riffs force their way back in, and from then on, it’s business as usual.
Eyehategod resembles the band's most classic work through and through, from the abject aural misery on “Robitussin and Rejection” to the feedback-heavy “Flags and Cities Bound”, the latter of which sees Williams dip into one of his wild-eyed spoken word rants. Jimmy Bower and Brian Patton are in fine form as they pass leaden blues riffs back and forth, teasing out grooves and smashing into teeth-out blasts of intensity when the mood strikes. They have some fun, too; “Worthless Rescue” catches them smuggling in a straight-up Southern rock riff under loads of distortion, and the “Framed to the Wall” gives them another chance to wrestle with sweaty punk riffs before stalling back down into syrupy sludge. Bassist Gary Mader’s got the most heavy lifting to do across the board, matching LaCaze’s apocalyptic beats and anchoring the whole unsteady mess with dependably solid skill while Williams throttles both the mic and his own beleaguered vocal chords with a perverse alacrity. Acidic and unpredictable, you’d never guess just how many times Williams’ voice has been put through the ringer. As always with Eyehategod, those scars are internal.
The band has been playing several of these songs live for years, and there’s a reason “Medicine Noose” and “Nobody Told Me” have become set staples. The manic-depressive “Medicine Noose” is a lumbering behemoth of a song with a thick, patient central riff that promises big and delivers bigger, and the perfectly-executed  “Nobody Told Me” is the best song they’ve written in years, with a perfect riff that's exactly what fans would ask for if Williams, Bower, and the fellas pulled them into the practice space for input. “The Age of Bootcamp” has William wailing like a sick animal atop a familiar punishing groove that, more than anything else, signals that Eyehategod is back, and they aren’t going anywhere.
You’ve got to admire the sheer force of will that has brought Eyehategod to this point. After fourteen years, they’ve come out swinging, armed with yet another of their often-renewed leases on life and still spoiling for a fight. That Eyehategod exists at all is a miracle in and of itself, but the fact that it is so damn great is simply extraordinary.


The debut tape from the Montreal vocalist and producer is a daring, eclectic mix of experimental R&B, where intoxicated club nights bleed into sunglasses-and-Advil mornings.

Gada

In a 2016 interview, LuckyMe co-founder Dominic Flannigan described the Glasgow label’s strategy toward releases, saying, “We are quite slow at putting out records. Part of that is because we sign artists, not records.” This long-game approach, which feels delightfully anachronistic in today’s industry, prioritizes development and explains why signees like Lunice and Jacques Greene often spend several years making their full-length debuts. Major players have unsurprisingly taken notice, and many of LuckyMe’s artists have been tapped by household names including Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Ariana Grande, and more for behind-the-scenes work.
Now three years after releasing Littlebabyangel’s “@Cartier,” a menacing, post-Yeezus anthem, and equally ominous follow-up single “GENEVIèVE,” the boundary-pushing label has shared Montreal vocalist and producer Stephan Armstrong’s debut tape exclusively through a mailing list. By foregoing traditional digital outlets, there’s an added sense of intimacy to GADA, which serves as a compelling introduction to the semi-elusive artist. He’s yet to give an interview, and his internet presence offers scant biographical details, but the 11 tracks here speak loudly for themselves without giving too much away.
Featuring additional production by “childhood friend” Cameron Morse (who’s also worked with Montreal R&B singer and XO affiliate Black Atlass), the project plunges listeners into a shadowy, hedonistic world, where intoxicated club nights bleed into sunglasses-and-Advil mornings. Over the course of the tape, he alternates between a purposely wan R&B croon and chest-boasting Autotuned half-raps, the latter of which lends to the most thrilling moments. “Bring me a goddess,” he demands over a squelching digital beat on “320k,” listing minks, diamonds, Dior, and Prada as his preferred spoils of war. The one-two punch of “@Cartier” and “GENEVIèVE” still sound every bit as ground-shaking, all rumbling low-end and glassy-eyed come-ons. On the former, he references Biggie’s “Party and Bullshit,” turning the carefree hook into something more sinister.
Just when you’ve pegged the singer as a cold-hearted, red-blooded Adonis, he lets his emotional guard down on “Love Animation” and “Crazy Mary,” dialing back the maelstrom electronics in favor of more atmospheric backdrops. It’s hard to tell whether he’s singing about one woman or multiple women, but the album’s sequencing creates a whiplash narrative of weekend after-parties and weekday heartbreak. The only break from the metaphorical storm is the somber piano instrumental “Supersky,” which clocks in at an all-too-brief minute and forty seconds, and feels like entering the eye of a hurricane.
The slow-building closer “Los Angeles” is not only the tape’s most fleshed-out song, but perhaps the best summation of Littlebabyangel’s prodigious talent. There’s plenty of experimental flourishes—the track begins with the sounds of birdsong and gently falling rain, and ends with a breakdown resembling trance—but the tale of love gone amiss at its center is a premium display of pop songwriting. Two years ago, Scottish producer and early LuckyMe signee Hudson Mohawke shared a demo featuring Armstrong originally intended for Rihanna’s ANTI, which would later become ANOHNI’s sweeping, war atrocities critique “Crisis.” Whatever form his next move takes, GADA shows he won’t stay a secret for long.


Jessica Pratt’s fourth album of hypnagogic folk music hones her mysterious song to its finest point.

Here in the Pitch

There is already so much to admire about Jessica Pratt the folk artist: her elliptical lyrics, her nylon-string guitar and voice to match. But the label of folk singer-songwriter doesn’t quite capture the real essence of the Jessica Pratt song. It is difficult to describe, like a dream that doesn’t go anywhere but still feels like you should talk about it in therapy. In the bottom right-hand corner of the lyric sheet that accompanies the physical release of her fourth album, Here in the Pitch, Pratt includes a quote from Leonard Cohen, pulled from a 1975 Crawdaddy interview about the genesis of songwriting and trusting your own process: “The fact is that you feel like singing, and this is the song that you know.”
The great joy of Here in the Pitch is getting familiar with this mysterious song that Pratt knows so well. There are nine of them here that amount to less than half an hour of music—notable not only in an era of gluttonous releases but also because it’s the same track count and runtime as her last record, Quiet Signs, which she put out five years ago. Now, for the first time on her albums, there’s some light drumming and synth playing, a few basslines and distant bongos. Yet none of this makes the music sound bigger. It’s as if we’re zooming out while dollying in, a hypnotic shift in perspective that makes the music sound more intimate in a larger space. It is a prime example of hypnagogic folk that quietly explores the simultaneity of time in all its misery, wonder, and promise.
Which is to say, it also has a lot of reverb. What did she use as a reverb chamber, an Olympic natatorium? No, but as on Quiet Signs, Pratt continues to put the studio to work for her the way famed pop innovators like Brian Wilson or Phil Spector did by letting her voice sound like it could fill a cathedral in these tiny little songs. If her first couple of homespun records were her Pink Moon, this one has more the feel of Bryter Later, the warm sound of psych-folk melancholy sparsely appointed and loosely fleshed out. Sprinkle in the Brazilian rhythms of ’70s MPB albums and the pinpoint vocal precision of someone like Judee Sill or even a jazz singer like Anita O’Day, and you’re starting to map the old soul and hazy recombinant soundworld of Here in the Pitch. Something in its chemistry will turn any speaker into a vent that leaks the album into the room until it is invisible and all-consuming.
To understand this mysterious Pratt song, one must submit to its dream logic. She’s one of the few songwriters who, I think, favors the verse over the chorus. There’s no release of tension or fulfillment of a promise when she arrives at something resembling a chorus. Instead, her choruses gently turn you around and lead you back to the verse, where Pratt’s vocal melodies gambol and cartwheel around the space. The timbre of her voice resembles a breathy saxophone, like a cool Paul Desmond bossa nova tune. It is reedy and precise, languid and surprisingly technical. No one could just sing the melody on the verse of “Get Your Head Out,” right? You can hear just how considered every note is, each sung with her own unique interpretation of American vowels.
One of my favorite moments in Pratt’s catalog is on the song “Jacquelyn in the Background,” from 2015’s On Your Own Love Again, where it sounds like she’s impossibly detuning her guitar as she’s playing it. This melting sound was an unsettling moment of trickery for an artist whose elemental rawness was part and parcel of her draw. There’s a more subtle use of post-production effects on the dizzyingly obtuse highlight “Empires Never Know,” a rare piano-led song that features some backmasking effect on the vocals. You only hear it for a few seconds, but it’s crucial. Like Cindy Lee’s recent hypnagogic Motown pop record, Diamond Jubilee, the way Here in the Pitch uses the studio to bend and abstract the instruments makes it sound more like a transmission than a recording. These albums feel beamed in from far away, or long ago, so that this imagined distance the music travels makes each song feel much larger and more important than if it were produced like a Tiny Desk concert.
“Empires Never Know” also becomes the closest thing to a title track when Pratt sings, “I never was what they called me in the dark”—if you take the “pitch” in the title to mean darkness and not black tar. The syntax of that line is typical of the Pratt song. She uses odd tenses and conditional grammar to comment on the past or presage the future. These lines emerge as riddles and half-thoughts: “I used to want for what your desolation hadn’t come by” or “I soon should know what remains” or “It’s only lasted for awhile.” Pratt’s narrator is constantly inquiring about emotional states, searching high and low for the right phrase to evoke a feeling that’s difficult to name. This temporal displacement and imagistic writing make Here in the Pitch feel vaporous at first, but it soon becomes its own transfixing language, a magnet that makes your internal compass go haywire.
“And wouldn’t you say the past’s no longer quite as near as you’d like?” Take a minute with that one, from the final, warmest, most hopeful track, “The Last Year.” You’re witnessing music’s greatest horologist create another ornate clock to hang on the wall. Time is her muse, after all, this invisible force that binds the whole of the world to the same path. Her four albums comprise a body of work that is a metaphysical exploration of time and what you can find in its pockets. Her song considers how strange it is to conceive a distance between two moments, and likewise, how beautiful it is to consider the distance between two people. This is the Jessica Pratt song, and Here in the Pitch hones it to its finest point.


The inimitable art-pop singer collects his 21st century non-album collaborations, including work with frequent partner Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Sleepwalkers

Like many singers who came of age during glam and made their name as the new romantics were wresting English rock from the punks, David Sylvian has a voice-- unashamedly mannered and theatrical and oozing wounded romanticism-- that's both inimitable and divisive. It's also been the only constant in his music over the last 30 years; the man shreds styles as a rule, often as soon as listeners have adjusted to his latest changeup. So hardcore Sylvian-ophiles are usually in it for That Voice, which has grown warmer and deeper and more restrained with experience while still being recognizable within seconds. It's the reliable pleasure that's carried listeners through Sylvian's less-than-fertile periods, the collaborations that didn't quite spark, the styles that proved an ill fit for the singing, all the downsides to his ultimately admirable brand of creative restlessness.
Sylvian's voice is certainly the only constant on Sleepwalkers, a collection of his 21st century non-album collaborations that's coherently assembled, which means it flows like an album, but artistically all over the map, which means the individual songs range from several undeniable keepers to a small handful of wince-inducing missteps. Naturally, it's the missteps which stand out on first listen. Sylvian's singing, though it's more versatile than his reputation for mannered art-rock melodrama suggests, proves very, very awkward when dropped into a slab of George Michael-esque blue-eyed soul ("Money for All", complete with Vegas-y backup singers). The oddity of appropriating the style doesn't necessarily make the song fun to listen to, but it certainly dispels the rumors that Sylvian's hardened into a pop-spurning experimentalist over the last decade.
Some old-school Sylvian fans have been turned off by his 21st century albums, which have stretched verse-chorus structure to its limit while recasting both improv-style instrumental abstraction and avant electronics as a songwriter's tools. Personally I think 2003's Blemish and 2009's Manafon are minor masterpieces, but it's easy to understand why folks who fell in love with Japan's lush, tight synth-rock might not be too keen on the way Sylvian's albums now hide the pleasure of his voice inside the forbidding box marked "free music." If you're in that camp, Sleepwalkers, despite its wildly varying quality, may come as some relief. Here, in addition to the knotty electro-acoustic/glitch stuff, brilliant Blemish-esque tracks like "Sleepwalkers" and "Transit", we also get Sylvian goes country ("Ballad of a Deadman"), Sylvian goes piano bar torch singer ("Playground Martyrs"), and so on.
Sylvian's genre-takes are always a little skewed, as befitting a guy who's worked with Holger Czukay, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and other great avant/pop synthesists. Sometimes this tweaking adds frisson to what might have otherwise been too stale, too traditional. Sylvian-goes-country twangs for sure, but it also squeals and clonks and squirms with little Matmos-like musique concrète embellishments. But on a few occasions Sylvian's sound-art touches feel like oddball window dressing on flimsy tunes. And when one of those Blemish/Manafon style songs pops up, you're struck by what a singular sound-world Sylvian's solo albums have created in the last 10 years. That's not an achievement to chuck away lightly, so it's good that Sylvian has these one-off collaborations as release valves. Sleepwalkers naturally doesn't draw you into a world as fully realized as one of Sylvian's true albums. But his fearlessness, if not quite his versatility, at tackling new sounds (and even new structures) is still a beacon, especially at an age when many of his contemporaries have fossilized into post-punk heritage acts.


The Japanese ambient artist’s new album is an immersive textural exercise that demands full use of the senses. It is some of his most magnetic work yet.

Hydration

Daisuke Fujita is a channeler of the unseen. As Meitei, the Hiroshima-based producer has cultivated a whisper-soft style of ambient music, distilling what he describes as “the lost Japanese mood” into loops suffused with all the melancholy and mystery of an old ghost story. Though his main project has revolved specifically around the goal of interpreting Japanese history and culture through sound, with Tenka, Fujita has put aside any particular thematic focus. If Meitei has been fixated specifically on Japan, Tenka widens Fujita’s canvas, evoking a more universal kind of spirit.
Hydration is an exercise in texture, one that captures, as Fujita puts it, “a more everyday part of myself.” Even for a project supposedly designed with no particular concept in mind, Fujita can’t help but fully engage with this idea of music as a sensory experience (the physical edition of the album even comes with a fragrance specifically designed to accompany the record). Appropriately, Hydration moves like dew evaporating into the air: Fujita’s light, trickling sound design never offers anything like a melody, or even clearly defined chords for that matter, instead constantly hovering on the edge of becoming. It’s a delicate balance that Fujita pulls off with grace, making Hydration some of the producer’s most entrancing, elemental work yet.
Where Fujita’s previous albums typically condensed his ideas into short musical poems, Hydration’s extended track lengths allow the listener to sink more fully into its steamy depths. The album resembles an ecosystem abuzz with microscopic life, in part because it was inspired by the walks Fujita would take in the mountain forests near his home. Sounds seem to seep into each other, like the rainstick effect that courses through “Antioxidant Shower ~ Permanent Natural Circulations Seem to Be Beautiful ~,” before reappearing again in a new form on “The Ocean That You Observe in My Aquarium ~ The Eternity I See in Your Eyes ~.” Fujita’s ear-tickling timbres are serene; hear the way his crisp, icy synthesizers caress the chimes of “Diverse Aesthetics ~ Our Hydration Is a Symbol ~,” phasing in and out of the track like a cold, pulsing vein. It may seem stationary at first, but it possesses a level of subtly shifting detail, lifted straight from the book of ambient glitch practitioners like Oval and Vladislav Delay. Every tiny, granular tone comes together to form an incandescent whole.
Because Hydration is so focused on the small intricacies of particular sound patterns, any one wrong move can derail a whole track. The main misfire is “How to Spend an Aromatic Night ~ 23PM-1AM ~,” which resembles the buzz of a sea of cicadas, but unfortunately ends up becoming more grating than soothing. Aside from that moment, Hydration is as peaceful as a misty morning, the kind where every small refraction of light off the trees feels magical. In Japan, there’s a traditional incense ceremony known as Kōdō, where rather than “smelling” fragrances, participants are instructed to “listen” to the scent. With Hydration, it feels as if Fujita is asking us to treat his music in the same manner—not as something to be enjoyed via only one sense, but as an experience meant to emanate throughout our entire bodies. Understood this way, it is nothing short of nourishing.


The Harlem-based MC's long-delayed first official release finds her standing at a number of interesting junctions, if not yet having committed to a solid path.

1991 EP

Though it's only been about six months since the release of  Azealia Banks's debut single "212", the room's still trashed from when she first stormed the scene. On the strength of that one track, the hot-shot Harlem-based MC with a slyly aggressive flow became not just a rising star but a boundary-busting symbol of hip-hop's ever-changing mores. While some listeners gasped at the supposed audacity of Rihanna's suggestive chant, "cake cake cake," Banks, grinning, was like, "cunt, cunt, cunt." Around the time Ye and Jay were extolling jet-setter excess on Watch the Throne, Banks drummed up the sort of publicity you can't buy thanks to a charismatic, low-concept video shot on a DSLR. And as for the guy still stuck on the "no homo" refrain, the openly bisexual Banks waited until he wasn't looking and then slipped out the door with his girl and his best friend. By the measure of pretty much any metaphor you can throw at her right now, Azealia Banks is the girl with the most cake.
Banks' first official release, a four-song EP titled 1991, still finds her standing at a lot of interesting junctions, if not committing to a solid path. She's currently prepping a mixtape (Fantasea, which is slated for July) and a Paul Epworth-produced Interscope debut, Broke With Expensive Taste. But despite her visibility, the half-statement of 1991 reminds us that Banks is still an artist in her development stage.
From its opening "excuse-moi"s and "ooh-la-las," 1991's vibe is an almost comically caricatured version of extravagance and luxury. The title track's beat is runway-ready and Banks, reclined but in control, unfurls her lines like somebody chiseled is feeding her grapes. Like "212", it's an introductory statement, but this time Banks is in no hurry; a few minutes roll by before she gets to the breathy but bombastic hook, "NY rose me, most high chose me/ Let me know what I can-can-can-can do for you."
Like much of the music Banks has released so far, 1991 owes a stylistic debt to New York's vogue ball culture. The title refers to the year Banks was born, but it's also a year after the release of the cult documentary Paris Is Burning, which chronicled the drag ball scene, and a year after Madonna introduced voguing to middle America. She may be riding the crest of a revival of ball imagery right now, but this aesthetic is much more than just a trendy put-on. Ball culture is where she picked up that controversial vocabulary ("I feel like 'cunt' means so feminine... in the vein of, like, voguing," she said in a 2011 interview) and it's also responsible for the particular air of luxury that pervades 1991. Vogue culture values DIY fabulosity and "1991" and "Van Vogue" stay true to that spirit: They don't sound like songs about pursuing wealth so much as they profess of a kind of luxury of the self. Which means she's not rapping about accumulating cars and private jets; the finer things in life, Banks always seems to be saying, are the ones that make you look good.
Some of Banks' best lines are elegantly self-aggrandizing and enemy-deflating ("You gonna be a bitch, nigga, I'ma be that bitch"), but she's just as capable of executing those moves in more straightforward terms ("I'ma ruin you, cunt"). Even when she's barking her most aggressive lines, Banks' signature is her sly irony, and she lacquers it on deliciously thick here on the previously released "Liquorice" ("Can my hot fudge bitches get with your vanilla friends/ Hey, I'm the liquorice bitch, you know I'm looking for these niggas if these niggas is rich").
Like any new artist greeted with the sort of fanfare, the expectations people have of Banks seem perilously high. As an MC with commercial potential who's repping for hip-hop's two majorly underrepresented groups (women and the queer community), it's easy to saddle Banks with savior-sized hopes. But the long-delayed 1991 is solid and unsurprisingly promising. "What you gon' do when I appear? When I premiere?" she roars memorably at the climax of "212", and 1991 doesn't so much answer that question as add a couple of more dots to the ellipses. But as another example of Banks' versatile skills, it also gives ample reason to stick around for the answer.


The Philly indie pop band’s second album keeps things hooky and whimsical across 24 tracks of mostly light fare and dynamic songwriting.

Hit to Hit

The music video for “Velodrome”—a breezy indie power-pop cut off 2nd Grade’s second record Hit to Hit—features the band dressed up in character as a beatnik, a flower child, a home baker, a cowboy, and a bubble bather. Each is rendered as both earnest and comically archetypal—the beat poet, for example, plays the drums in tiny sunglasses and a French beret, in front of a copy of Infinite Jest, while never once breaking into winking self-awareness. Those discrete sketches of slightly askew tropes provide an apt visual guide to Hit to Hit, a record that often feels like a series of creative writing assignments illuminated by compact pop hooks.
Led by guitarist and vocalist Peter Gill, 2nd Grade is the product of Philadelphia’s thriving DIY scene, a supergroup of sorts for fans of West Philly house shows. Catherine Dwyer and Jack Washburn of the cult punk group Remember Sports provide guitar and bass, respectively; guitarist and vocalist Jon Samuels collaborated with Gill on the folk-country act Friendship; Gill previously played guitar in the now-defunct indie pop act Free Cake for Every Creature. There’s even a vocal credit from Carmen Perry of Remember Sports’ two-year-old brother. Gill’s new venture takes bits and pieces from each of those acts—the childlike wonder of Free Cake’s songwriting, the melodies of Remember Sports, the Americana of Friendship—and rids itself of any context or pretense. Instead, each song on the record exists with its own internal logic, homing in on a single concept—taxes, Texas, the existential freedom of riding your first bike—as the core tenant of that song’s universe.
If Gill’s vision weren’t so specific, and if the band weren’t so mutable in their approaches to instrumentation, these concepts would quickly wear thin. But at every possible juncture, Gill leans heavily into the playfulness of his ideas. There’s the cartoonish gunshot effects on “Shooting From the Hip” and the sound of motorcycles revving on the ode to road films “Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider.” There’s the thrashing punk track “Baby’s First Words,” whose title only starts to make sense as a toddler giddily yells “Truck!”
Though most of the record exists in the broader sounds of indie pop, borrowing from the jangly guitar of Big Star’s Chris Bell and the bright chord progressions of the Beach Boys, Hit to Hit manages to keep a sense of novelty by shifting modes throughout—on “100 Hrs,” Samuels’ deep, rounded twang takes the record into “Lonesome Cowboy” territory; the noisy discord and shouting vocals on “Jazz Chorus” recall the spartan intensity of Big Black. At 24 songs—most clocking in under two minutes—Hit to Hit is an unfiltered product, one that prioritizes absurdity and experimentation over consistency. It takes a bet on jingles as a creative mode (sometimes quite literally, as on the sugary-sweet “Sunkist”), and these songs are most fleshed out in that precise context—peppy, self-contained, practically built to be cheeky filler on a crush’s mixtape.
Hit to Hit’s final quarter, which the band recorded as an ensemble, takes a more grounded approach. But after a record of instant gratification, these gentler tracks have a tendency to melt together. “Flavor of the Week” and “Summer of Your Dreams” is built on open chords and romantic pining, but fails to grow into more than circuitous, sleepy strumming. It’s not that they’re poorly constructed—Gill’s soft crooning is a charming accompaniment to the subdued acoustic guitar. But in a world as whimsical as 2nd Grade’s, it’s hard not to wish for Gill’s camp counselor enthusiasm to stick around a little longer.


The long-running Belgian avant-garde band explores complicated gender dynamics on their ambitious new double album.

Figures

A genre that defined 1960s French-language pop music, yé-yé always had a glaring gender problem. Named famously after the refrain of “Yeah! Yeah!” that American and British bands introduced to continental Europe, many of the genre’s hits cast teenaged girls as doll-faced puppets for older male songwriters. Certain ’60s artists, most notably the indelible Françoise Hardy, challenged their contemporaries’ misogyny problem, yet yé-yé cast its long shadow on the Francophone mainstream for decades.
On Figures, Belgian avant-garde fixtures Aksak Maboul offer a compelling détournement of French pop’s gender assumptions. Led by Marc Hollander, Maboul emerged in the late 1970s as both globally minded experimenters and malcontents of convention. Their innovative 1980 album Un Peu de l'Âme des Bandits begins with a song called “A Modern Lesson” in which a signature Bo Diddley rhythm—the sort of clavé beat that courses through the bubblegum sounds of the ’60s—dissolves into distorted punk guitar work and discordant samples of Un Peu’s other tracks. The rest of the album thumbs its nose at Western pop, mixing in musical traditions from cultures as varied as Turkey, Polynesia, Baka, and the Mississippi Delta.
After Un Peu, Hollander put Aksak Maboul on the backburner, growing his record label, Crammed Discs, which expounds a highly influential global vision of contemporary sound. He also played in the post-no wave band The Honeymoon Killers, an early collaboration with the singer Véronique Vincent. By the time Aksak Maboul completed their next record, 2014’s Ex-Futur Album, Vincent and Hollander were married and had raised kids together. Musically, she had become frontwoman to his backstage sonic mastermind, a transgressively familiar format they bring to the double album Figures.
At its best, Figures addresses a 21st century in which the misogyny of the 1960s lives on, finding new places to hide and new opportunities to rear its head. One of the few English-language songs, “Dramuscule,” features a parodic conversation between a Georges Perec-reading man and a submissive woman. The man describes himself as the woman’s “hero,” and the woman tells the man, “I drink up your words, and I swallow mine,” before she later leaves him or kills herself—the narrative ends indeterminately. Vincent seems to echo yé-yé tradition on “Spleenétique,” repeating the song’s name at the beginning of each verse in a playful chirp before adding a few nonsense words. Yet the title translates to the English “Splenetic,” and the next lines maintain the rageful momentum coiled beneath her upbeat tone: “Idling speed attack/Ire swells in me.”
The conflict between words and music reflects the album’s gender battles. Though Hollander composed most of the music, Vincent wrote all of the lyrics, and her musings are often self-reflective. “La musique et les lettres,” she sings on a track near the end, her next line translating into English as, “Words have ensnared me.”
While the album’s hour-plus runtime is full of fragments and found sounds, Figures is most cohesive when it serves as a stage for Vincent’s writing. Hollander layers his restless electronic tracks with woodwinds, programmed beats, electric guitar, and runs of jazz piano, but the album lacks the surprising juxtapositions that mark Aksak Maboul’s early work, its relative smoothness often giving the impression that Figures’ arrangements are settings for words and voice.
Non-French speakers may find it difficult to appreciate the quality of Vincent as writer and chanteuse. Of course, listeners across the world are alienated by the tyranny of Anglophone songs, and Aksak Maboul’s musical vocabulary is admirably worldwide. Figures is both musique and lettre, male and female, and it rejects a whole bunch of tyrannies in the course of proving its point.


Virtuosic saxophonist Colin Stetson teams with Arcade Fire violinist Sarah Neufeld for an album of inspired minimalism. The eight pieces on the album feel simultaneously contemplative and busy—the sound of active minds idling in a lower gear.

Colin Stetson / Sarah Neufeld: Never Were the Way She Was

Never Were the Way She Was

There’s something inscrutable and implacable about the music of the Montreal-based saxophonist Colin Stetson. His journey from the edges of the avant-garde to touring with Bon Iver and Arcade Fire has an inexorable feel to it, as if Stetson pushed his way to prominence wielding nothing but the mighty sound wrung from his chosen instrument. Sarah Neufeld, a violinist who has been a permanent member of Arcade Fire since their second album, is a kindred spirit: She brings a highly unconventional ear to her instrument and also seems to wander between genres without much fuss. The pair even share an avid interest in yoga—Neufeld has opened a studio, and Stetson has talked about the role yoga plays in his discipline, both in assisting with his demanding circular-breath style and in the mindfulness it cultivates.
Neufeld and Stetson worked together on the score to the 2013 film Blue Caprice, and on Never were the way she was, they achieve a kind of ecstatic communion. The eight pieces on the album feel simultaneously contemplative and busy—the sound of active minds idling in a lower gear. The record is fantastic morning music, its tone and pace mirroring the moment in the day when your thoughts are murmuring, not yet speaking, and all you sense are their shades. It is too eventful, its surface too agitated, to be ambient, but it might help you think more clearly anyway.
Neufeld and Stetson’s pieces start with something very simple and build layers that you can hear stack and slot into place. Stetson is a virtuoso, the sort of player whose technical feats change people’s perceptions of what his instrument can do.  But the pieces on Never were the way she was are laid out as simply and clearly as a children’s story. Each time, Neufeld and Stetson begin with an undulating pulse, their two instruments working busily to create the illusion of one massive one (some kind of amplified church organ, maybe, that hasn’t been created yet). Once they’ve hit this point, they hold there, letting the multifaceted sound soak in.
Each piece on the album has a different pulse, with its own quality and clarity: Neufeld’s eerily smooth bowing on "Won’t be a thing to become" mirrors Stetson’s long-breathed, even tone, creating a glassy and impenetrable sonic surface. On "In the vespers", Stetson flutters his fingers over a few keys, making a wailing, high-pitched riff, and Neufeld bows sharp double stops beneath it. It’s an anxious sound, and listening to the jagged little peaks and valleys it hits is its own perversely pleasurable discomfort.
The mood behind these pieces is amorphous, but there is a steely, elemental feel to the album that suggests pre-industrial times. On the unmistakably baleful "With the dark hug of time" Stetson’s hammering fingers on the keys make a "CHUNK" that suggests the sound of  a stomping kick drum, and he plays in the lowest ranges of his instrument, where the sub frequencies aren’t too far off from a drone-metal band. This kind of buzzing, physically upsetting drone is an inherently primordial sound, and the piece feels more than a little 2001-obelisk. The scrapes and thuds embedded in the otherwise smoothly rolling "The rest of us" send a similar message. Though the pieces are fleshed out with other small touches—other horns at the periphery, and uncanny wordless vocals—the foundation of the album rests on the power and warmth Stetson and Neufeld generate by themselves. Never were the way she was has a bracing air, an implicit reminder of the things that can be done with two instruments and two hands.


The rapper and now flautist’s debut solo album is an 87-minute devotional to new age, ambient jazz, and spiritual discovery. It’s beautiful, demanding, and among the most fascinating artistic left turns in recent memory.

New Blue Sun

André 3000 was never a solitary genius. Not when he put on the pith helmet and shoulder pads. Not when he kicked off a song called “Int’l Players Anthem” with an ode to fidelity and true love. Not even when he put a dozen versions of himself on stage in the video for “Hey Ya!,” an all-time classic song that will be played at weddings until the heat death of the universe, and on which he played nearly every instrument. Even when he sounded like he was rapping from outer space, his Southern accent dragged him back down to Earth, back to his roots, back to Atlanta, and more specifically, back to his friends and family. “It gives you an opportunity and support system to be as free as you can be,” he recently told NPR, reflecting on where he came from and where he finds himself now, in 2023, a starman in a brand-new galaxy, one dot in a different kind of constellation.
So New Blue Sun isn’t really a solo record. It’s also not a bandleader record in the jazz sense, like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue or John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, where the name on the sleeve indicates the leader in the studio. It’s not the work of one person surrounded by exceptional musicians to help execute his vision; in that sense, New Blue Sun is even less of a solo record than The Love Below, André’s half of OutKast’s 2003 double album. On the first full-length release to bear his name and his name only, André 3000—a man who once christened himself Possum Aloysius Jenkins, Dookie Blossom Gain III, Funk Crusader, and Love Pusher, all at once—is oftentimes barely visible. He is a stick of nag champa perfuming the room of this record. He is a happy contributor to its world, one among many. The man who brought Afrofuturism to TRL has a new trick up his sleeve: He’s blending in.
Like every OutKast record, New Blue Sun is the product of a community. Over the past decade or so, the worlds of ambient music, electronic music, jazz, beat music, free improv, and new age in Los Angeles have congealed to create a new and far-reaching style. It encompasses everything from the DIY dub jazz of Sam Wilkes and Sam Gendel to the harpscapes of Mary Lattimore to the fluid Ethio-funk of Dexter Story. Though there’s no real center to the scene, nearly everyone either has or is about to work with Carlos Niño—percussionist, producer, founding DJ of the influential internet radio station Dublab, and connective tissue in a city designed to discourage connection. You’d call him an instigator if his presence weren’t so gentle. The music he releases under the name Carlos Niño & Friends is technically complex and spiritually sincere. He invites a few people over, they improvise freely on whatever instruments are at hand, and Niño then chops, cuts, and shapes the jams into albums that swell with unspoken but easily understood feelings—André played flute on his album from earlier this year.
André and Carlos met at Erewhon, the grocery store whose, let’s say, exclusive prices and exceptional kombucha selection have made it the go-to shop for celebs and a highly memeable avatar of L.A. wellness culture. Niño invited André to an Alice Coltrane tribute concert he was hosting that evening, and they started jamming together soon after. Though he’d puffed a tenor sax on The Love Below’s “She Lives in My Lap,” André was turned on to the true power of woodwinds when he heard champion surfer Kassia Meador play her flute at a breathwork class in Venice. This is all intensely L.A., nearly to the point of parody—we haven’t gotten to the song inspired by an ayahuasca therapy session—but it’s also the everyday reality for plenty of people who live here. When Leaving Records’ Matthewdavid, who plays “mycelium electronics” on New Blue Sun, talks about how private-press new age music has opened him to more beautiful possibilities in his life, he means it.
That heritage means that New Blue Sun might be baffling and disappointing to anyone who didn’t have an opinion on Online Ceramics’ Alice Coltrane collection. There are, as the warning label on the vinyl sleeve promises, no bars—not a single word is spoken, sung, or rapped—but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have something to say. In spite—or maybe because—of its lack of language, New Blue Sun is the most emotionally direct music André has ever made. The methods might be oblique, the instrumentation often unclear, the man himself occasionally missing in action or off on his own pursuits, but the sense of intermixed sadness, loss, and peace that permeates this music is impossible to miss.
Together with a core ensemble of guitarist Nate Mercereau and keyboardist Surya Botofasina (both responsible for some incredible music on their own), André and Niño flood this record with a mood as blue and deep as the water off Catalina. You can hear it there in the opening moments of “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time.” It’s in the clear-eyed regret that comes through Mercereau’s guitar and sticks around as the group begins to build upon it; it’s the foundation of all eight of these songs.
André has been playing handmade flutes for years, a devotion that has put his desire for anonymity in jeopardy. Like John Coltrane, who would invite over a friend and then spend the entire visit working out new ideas on his sax, André’s devotion to his instrument is nearly compulsive; maybe you saw him practicing at LAX. So it’s surprising that he recorded much of New Blue Sun with a digital wind instrument he’d never played before. Like a Fairlight synth set to “strings,” it makes a virtue of how little it sounds like the instrument it claims to sound like, producing a flat and buzzing tone that André learns how to manipulate over the course of the record.
The great Pharoah Sanders, whose influence is felt in the general tone of New Blue Sun more than in its actual playing, sits out the first five minutes of his classic Tauhid, allowing his band to develop the mood before he makes his entrance, piccolo in hand. André does the same on New Blue Sun, sitting back and allowing us to stare into “I swear”’s breezy darkness for three minutes before he picks up his instrument. The song yips and howls, Niño rattles his signature shells, Botofasina weaves a meshy wave of synths that swell without breaking. There’s a lot to hear and very little movement; imagine a spotlit meteorite on display in a gallery, rotating slowly so you have time to take in all its facets. Now imagine what that would make you think about.
When André does finally play, he picks his notes carefully, like he’s testing to see where he fits. The melody he dots out in “I swear” recalls Philip Glass in the nakedness of its notes, or even the writer Raymond Carver: He’s making simple gestures feel grand by virtue of their accumulation. Throughout New Blue Sun, this tends to be how he plays his instrument, whether he’s setting the theme or exploring its variations. The notation is minimal, and he repeats short and uncomfortable phrases until they begin to sound right: Listen as he dips, brushes, and dabs in “The Slang Word P(*)ssy Rolls Off The Tongue With Far Better Ease Than The Proper Word Vagina . Do You Agree?,” finally tracing a few fine, confident lines at the top of the canvas that pull the song into a new mode.
About those titles: Yes, they are long. They are playful. He misspells Gandhi’s name, yes. There is something to be said about how André can’t help but use language to both say and obfuscate what he’s feeling. It’s tempting to map some kind of narrative onto instrumental music, particularly something as gauzy and obviously personal as this. You can read the beatific sigh of New Blue Sun as a comment on the relief of anonymity André must feel, or how the safety of a group of like-minded people allows you to take a closer look at the darkness outside. If you don’t look at the tracklist, you can do that. But those song titles deflect your gaze, keep you from taking this stuff too seriously, from reading too much into it. Call it a feint, but it feels like a way of keeping the music light and exciting, of protecting the exploratory spirit that went into its creation.
Despite his lyrical virtuosity, André has always sought out what a song needs; consider the way the back half of “B.O.B” is given over to gospel rave, or how “SpottieOttieDopaliscious”’ ineffable hook is a wordless trumpet line. Here, he’s doing the same thing, moving carefully and only asserting himself when it feels right. He tests “The Slang Word” out for vulnerabilities, teasing at its fabric with his flute, picking lightly lest he rip the seam. Armed with his contrabass flute in “That Night In Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control … Sh¥t Was Wild,” he’s much more confident. He slurs like Rahsaan Roland Kirk, tweets like Eric Dolphy, sets up a melody, then liquidates it and lets it simmer against the muted vibration of Deantoni Parks’ drum.
Parks, like the rest of the ensemble, is a full participant in the creation of this music, and throughout New Blue Sun, the other instrumentalists show off their ability to spontaneously birth new sounds. In “Ninety Three ’Til Infinity and Beyoncé,” Matthewdavid scrapes and smears crusty grains of noise thick as wheatpaste across the track and Botofasina brings to mind Laraaji’s Vision Songs, Vol. 1 with his homey basement organ in “The Slang Word.” Then there’s Diego Gaeta, whose slowly turning piano runs in “Ghandi, Dalai Lama, Your Lord & Savior J.C. / Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, And John Wayne Gacy” are the rotator in the gyroscope, a counterweight that keeps everything from tumbling. He flirts with dreamy realization, pumps a bit of gospel, then slides into a resigned darkness, barely touching the keys; the way his playing sits like a glass turned over the buzzing fly of André’s melody brings New Blue Sun closer to the tragic experiments of Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath, 1972 than jazz or new age.
Niño is a great architect of audio space, but his touch here is more subtle than it is on his Carlos Niño & Friends records. He layers carefully, letting you peek through windows into adjacent rooms, teasing you with the possibility of a party going on but keeping it just out of reach. In the album’s best song, “BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter Wears A 3000™ Shirt Embroidered,” he sets his own drums deep in the distance and cloaks them in mist, then keeps André halfway between the drums and the foreground, lightly dipping the his flute in distortion. It has the strange effect of making the background of the song more intriguing than the foreground, a sensation deepened by André’s melody. While Mercereau and Botofasina lacquer a sexy, tuxedoed duet for guitar and synth in the front of the song only to be overtaken by a wall of brass, André’s peppy, questioning melody disappears and returns at strange intervals behind it all, blurring out of view and occasionally getting lost in the noise. Even when it’s not there, you feel its presence in the haze; like a Magic Eye piece, “BuyPoloDisorder” is a song whose chaos resolves into unstable patterns over and over again. It’s among the best music anyone on this record has ever created.
Still, the instincts of André and Niño, who produced the album together, occasionally get the better of them. New Blue Sun is patient in a way that Niño’s work often isn’t, and the performances here develop so slowly they sometimes stall out. The stillness of the scene often aims for the muted drama of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s environmental music, but on repeated spins its dramatic tension collapses and can feel tedious at times. On “The Slang Word,” the ensemble struggles to break out of its mutual deference, and the gentleness of André’s prodding starts to feel like time-killing foot-tapping. When it does finally break free, letting out slurry little lines before hopping back into a jittery theme, the song is already beginning its (strangely lengthy) fadeout. This kind of music is built on the relationship between tone, texture, and personality, and as the pieces begin to dilate, it becomes harder to track their development; there are no truly dull moments, but there are dull stretches.
Asking people who have only ever shaken it like a Polaroid picture to clear their minds for 90 minutes of spacey new-age music might be a tall order. Even in the context of the world that birthed it, New Blue Sun is a demanding listen. For all its considerable bright moments, this is a frequently ponderous record, one that suggests a surprising amount of potential but that still demands a lot even from seasoned ears. It’s more successful as a symbol than as an album: It can be incredibly moving to witness one of the most self-assured musicians of all time put himself in vulnerable artistic situations and enjoy figuring out how to navigate them. Even on his handmade flutes, he never lets out the kind of fluid, cocksure flow that sold over 25 million records.
The album’s greatest triumph, then, is its normalcy. It reveals André 3000 to be nothing more than a guy with solid taste in outré music, another Angeleno in deceptively expensive workwear who’s probably been listening to Midori Takada since the YouTube rip. His ability to fit in and play along on New Blue Sun suggests he could easily spend the next 30 years making insular but genuinely interesting records for a small pool of devotees, riding off into well-earned obscurity like Laraaji in a Cadillac. Few stars of his caliber have managed an artistically and personally fulfilling post-fame career without repudiating what they did to become famous—or, worse, rehashing it. That he’s made such a thing possible is a significant achievement.


Whether as the Sun God, I.B.M., IAMTHATIAM, or most often as Hieroglyphic Being, Jamal Moss' discography is filled u-turns; Africans With Mainframes swings into Chicago acid house at its most caustic.

K.M.T.

Recently DJ and producer Jamal Moss appeared on a panel on Afrofuturism at Moogfest alongside Reggie Watts, Janelle Monáe, and hip-hop production duo Christian Rich. It was good company for him to be in, but even in that eclectic crowd he is an outlier. Whether as the Sun God, I.B.M., IAMTHATIAM, or most often as Hieroglyphic Being, Moss' abundant discography is filled with so many u-turns that it begins to resemble a Spirograph. For every CD-R of synth squalls there is another full of manic drum machine polyrhythms. And then there was We Are Not the First, last year's meeting with an ensemble of free jazz’s finest, suggesting an imaginary space where the AACM gigged at Ron Hardy's Music Box.
Working with fellow producer Noleian Reusse as Africans With Mainframes, now Moss swings from Windy City jazz to Chicago acid at its most caustic. While the duo have released a slew of 12”s dating back to 2001, K.M.T. is their first full-length. Kemetic Modulating Textures is eight tracks of Moss and Reusse at their most unrelenting and there’s a coarseness to every texture that at times might make you mistakenly think it was just slapped together. Yet the frequent references to Egyptology (Googling each track title reveals a profound knowledge of prehistoric culture) suggest a greater thought at work, and if you manage to survive the bruising BPMs of the album's first half, it becomes mesmerizing.
Opener “Anachronistic” sets the table for what lies ahead: everything in the red, a snare fill stumbling and slipping across the grid, the 808’s edges increasingly fuzzy with distortion. And then just when it verges on pure noise, that telltale acid squiggle worms through and the snare coheres into a visceral thrill. What might scan as sloppy and unfocused suddenly snaps into sharp relief and it’s effective throughout K.M.T., album highlight “Negroid Spinx” being a fine example. It too features overdriven snares that concuss to the point of delirium and then at the 3:30 mark, Moss and Reusse drop out the beat and give us a brief respite, a glimpse of an oasis in the midst of a haboob.
On the back half of the album, AWM relent and allow in more space. The epic “Qustal Artifacts” builds carefully, the track forgoing heavy beats for a heady array of arpeggios, the results not unlike Cluster, had they been Afrocentric rather than Germanic. “Naqada” and the title track sound like some tribal Folkways field recording rendered on machine rather than anything currently extant in electronic music.
Last year, Moss explained his first encounter with Sun Ra’s music as a shock to the system: “His music wasn’t about making sense: it was just about receiving these transmissions, this knowledge.” It’s a lesson that Moss carries forward with K.M.T., suggesting that while some of his tracks might scan as scrambled transmissions, continued exposure reveals a profound signal beneath the noise.


On their debut album, the anarchic Philly hardcore trio muster a raw, thrilling assault against complacency.

Covert Contracts

Surviving under capitalism is hard work. It extracts compromise. Constant precarity locks us into routines, inertia dulls our senses. Breaking out requires kinetic energy—commitment to the illogical unknown, to making the sort of disruptive noise that startles even its creators. On their debut album, Covert Contracts, Control Top harness the chaos necessary for transformation.
The album opens with “Type A,” in which the narrator reclaims their agency by declaring autonomy against an inflexible know-it-all. “The thought of chaos worries you/Only your solution will do,” taunts Ali Carter, echoed by an upbeat Tony Molina-esque guitar riff, before screaming plainly “Why don’t you get out/Get out of my way!” The bridge dissolves into noise and then springs back up like a fighter dancing on their heels.
But obstacles to freedom don’t just come from individuals. They also come from alienated labor (“Office Rage”), the smokescreen of information overload (“Covert Contracts”), patriarchy (“Traffic,” “Ego Deaf”), bad-faith communication (“Chain Reaction”), and a litany of other root causes including the nation, ambition, and “the cronies on the left and the right” (“Betrayed”). To reflect this ambient anxiety, Control Top songs are coiled and driving, frantic and cathartic. Carter’s vocals, mixed clear and up front, follow a legacy set by LilliPUT/Kleenex and Ari Up of The Slits—sharp and staccato on verses that build to explosive hooks, and plenty of unexpected details which include yelps and sneers, an actual cough after the line “Trying to speak but I can’t stop coughing,” and moments of open vulnerability on otherwise straightforwardly aggressive tracks. Alex Lichtenauer’s hardcore drumming gives the songs a punk urgency while Al Creedon (Bleeding Rainbow) brings no-wave and noise influences to his guitar work as well as samplers and synth drones.
Covert Contracts was produced by Creedon, who has also worked with Priests and Pouty, and came out (during peak Aries season) on Lichtenauer’s label Get Better Records. Something like a Kill Rock Stars of the Philly scene, the label (“for the queers, by the queers”) has put out vital records by bands such as Disipline, HIRS, Sheer Mag, Empath, and Choked Up. “Everything looks like a commercial /It’s a brand to be controversial,” deadpans Carter on the titular song, concerned with being unwittingly locked into someone else’s scam. But on their own terms, on their own label, there is room to be expansive.
Their supportive band dynamic comes from a place of mutual healing: when Carter brought them onto Control Top, Creedon was feeling uninspired by punk and guitars, and Lichtenauer had quit drums after an abusive situation in a previous band. Control Top created a space for everyone involved to rebuild, and the energy is of a band existing despite the odds. It’s no wonder that, despite the claustrophobic subject matter, Covert Contracts crackles with genuine joy. “What is this/Sense of elation,” sings Carter on “Prism.” “Could it be/Liberation?”


On a pair of 30-minute SoundCloud streams, the former Giegling affiliate applies his windswept aesthetic to boom-bap, ambient, and jungle, to emotive—some would say maudlin—effect.

DJ Healer: Lost Lovesongs / Lostsongs Vol. 2

Lost Lovesongs / Lostsongs Vol. 2

The Prince of Denmark—that is, the proper prince, Shakespeare’s prince, the skull-fondler and doomed dilly-dallier known widely as Hamlet—was a blurry sort of character. Famously unsure of himself, he was prone to things like acting mad and then forgetting it was meant to be an act, and also spreading death like a contagion. At the end of Hamlet (spoiler alert, for those who haven’t tuned in since the 17th century) everyone’s been offed and the kingdom is in disarray. Now, it may seem a little overcooked to start drawing parallels with Giegling’s Prince of Denmark—the anonymous, much-adored, much-emoting techno producer whose aliases include DJ Metatron, Traumprinz, and now DJ Healer—but then, he’s never been afraid to lay it on a bit thick himself. As he exits the troubled kingdom of Giegling, still in turmoil after revelations that its co-founder Konstantin doesn’t believe in women DJs, the Prince of Denmark has passed on to the next life to pursue his spiritual and existential investigations as DJ Healer. On this twinset of mulchy club tracks and after-hours grooves, he seems to be wandering in purgatory, looking for answers.
Lost Lovesongs and Lostsongs Vol. 2 appeared on SoundCloud in the last week of 2018. Their low-key delivery as a pair of half-hour streams (the tracks are unmixed), along with their “lost” titles, suggests a hard-drive dump rather than a milestone release. (When the Prince has something very important to say, he likes to say it through eight-disc LP box sets priced at €100.) But the tracks are carefully sequenced, and they’re split into two distinct moods. The maudlin palette of Lostsongs will be instantly identifiable to fans of DJ Metatron and Traumprinz’s sentimental club hits, while Lost Lovesongs is the more obvious successor to last year’s Nothing 2 Loose, the new-age-infused triple-vinyl LP that introduced the DJ Healer alias.
Lostsongs is easier to stomach. Opening with “Outro,” DJ Healer runs a warm bath of gloopy, sad-eyed synths, reminiscent of Mr. Fingers’ sci-fi voyage “Qwazars.” It’s the kind of loop you could stew in for hours. The rest of the half-hour, aside from two sections of drizzly ambient, plays with different versions of the same recipe: chilly minor chord loops, scruffy breakbeats, dreamy vocal fragments, and an overcoat of surface noise that’s part dub techno, part Burial; muck pollutes every crevice. “U 4ever” is the basic iteration, placing a lip-wobbling sample (“Have you ever-r-r-r?”) over stuttering IDM-style breaks and frozen drones. On “Grown,” Healer returns to Olive’s 1990s crossover dance hit “You’re Not Alone” (a prototype edit appeared in his Resident Advisor podcast in 2013) to slice off a single soppy line—“See how our love has grown”—without brushing off two decades of moss and mold. The action peaks with “Geister,” tipping close to 170 BPM and fueled by dank synths and a snaking bassline, placing us close to vintage drum’n’bass territory. Insofar as these are club tracks, they’re for those moments when you close your eyes and turn inward, away from the communal scene, only to get snagged on some existential drama bubbling up from your subconscious.
Lost Lovesongs then takes those awkward internal soliloquies and gives them a Broadway transfer. Lost Lovesongs is almost unbearably squishy; it runneth over with feels. It’s a post-club face wipe for sensitive skin, a totally moist after-hours playlist for softbois who put American Beauty on in the background while they roll baggy spliffs for the crew. It has thunderclaps. Though not as toe-curlingly pompous as Nothing 2 Loose and its whispered monologues (“All of this is a mirror that expands…”), Lost Lovesongs doesn’t hold back on the earnest stuff. “Everything becomes meaningless,” someone says, over and over, through a fog of new-age drones and white noise. A reedy church organ pulls on the heartstrings, joined by boom-bap drums and a quivering voice singing, “Lost, lo-ost.” It is exactly like Play-era Moby, which is an amusing comparison because Moby was deemed uncool not only for making million-selling coffee-table electronica, but because he was the world’s worst sellout, which in the ’90s was a terrible thing. (Famously, every track on Play was licensed for a commercial). Our Prince, along with Giegling, found fame by doing the exact opposite: creating the illusion of quality through obfuscation and scarcity.
The final track on Lovesongs goes in hard, with waterlogged piano drifts barely keeping it together under a tear-jerking line nabbed from a Terence Trent D’Arby song: “Holding onto you means letting go of pain.” The wracked voice of the all-too-briefly-famous 1980s musician seems a symbolic choice for Healer: D’Arby changed his name to Sananda Maitreya in 2001, saying his earlier incarnation had died a “noble death.” The DJ Healer project is itself infused with the tantalising possibility of leaving old identities behind, of “dying” and being resurrected. (The first DJ Healer album was even announced on Easter Sunday.)
Writing about Nothing 2 Loose, Resident Advisor’s Will Lynch made the perfect connection between Healer’s sentimental sincerity and the famous scene in American Beauty where Ricky Fitts, the outcast teenager who takes his camcorder everywhere, shows his neighbor a video of a plastic bag dancing in the breeze. “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it,” he wibbles. Lynch implies that the whole thing is fake-deep—philosophizing about a plastic bag, for god’s sake: So lame, so cringe. But it’s a revealing reference, because the grocery bag isn’t just about beauty—it’s about seeing God. “That’s the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things,” Fitts says, “and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever.” You could imagine the same quote floating over new-age pads and a dusty breakbeat on Lovesongs. So if you don’t feel the same way—that there is something, somewhere, looking out for you—then you’ll probably laugh, or cringe, at all of this. If you do, or if you can suspend your lack of belief for long enough, then maybe it’ll hit you right in the feels.


The British house producer Leon Vynehall's new album continues in the vein of 2014's mini-LP Music for the Uninvited, but it boasts a bigger sound in almost every way, with more layers, bolder basslines, and harder-edged drums.

Rojus

Leon Vynehall's music is an artful blend of punchy and plush. Since the British producer started putting out records, in 2012, his music has blended the tough, percussive energy of contemporary UK house music, with its muscled low end, with the rich harmonies of sample-centric producers in a continuum that stretches through Pal Joey, Moodymann, Pépé Bradock, and Four Tet. Stylistically, he hasn't changed much since his first singles. But while there's no shortage of electronic musicians who approach dance music as a form of collage, Vynehall has developed into a master craftsman. He's got a keen sense for tone color, and the way he mixes textures—blocky piano chords, silken disco strings, rounded horns—lends to an unusually tactile sensibility, like brushstrokes built up into thick waves and oily crusts.
Rojus continues in the vein of 2014's mini-LP Music for the Uninvited, but it boasts a bigger sound in almost every way, with more layers, bolder basslines, and harder-edged drums. With the exception of beatless opener "Beyond This," whose arpeggiated synth and sampled birdsong make for a breezy ambient aperitif, the record aims its sights squarely at the dancefloor, with bass and percussion pushed up in the mix and tempos locked between 118 and 124 BPM. Like Music for the Uninvited, which was inspired by the cassettes he listened to in his mother's car, Rojus is a loose sort of concept album, one that purports to compare the mating rituals of birds of paradise with the behavior of clubbers. (The title means "paradise" in Lithuanian; it comes from a book cover he serendipitously stumbled across around the same time as his epiphany regarding dancers and jungle fowl.)
The theme doesn't extend much further than the sampled caws and trills woven into a few tracks. Still, like his avian inspirations, who sometimes use tools to prep the patch of ground where they'll dance for potential mates, Vynehall proves a remarkably resourceful producer: Instead of limiting himself to a single drum machine, he avails himself of scads of percussion sounds sampled from a variety of sources—a choice that yields a vastly expanded palette of timbres and timing. "Paradisea," one of the record's standouts, boasts at least three different sampled snares and a panoply of differently treated hi-hats; its syncopated accents are typical of the record's highly elastic sense of swing. The effect is a dizzying array of textures and frequencies, about as easy to parse as a rainstorm.
Vynehall only stumbles when it comes to the uniformity of his songs. They all avail themselves of similar types of sounds, and they all develop in exactly the same way—by beginning with a particularly resonant set of loops and then progressively adding more layers. To create tension, he'll mute a handful of sounds throughout the breakdown and then bring them back for a reprise. But there are no choruses, no bridges, no unexpected left turns. And his sounds sit so well in the mix, there are really no surprises, either. A little dissonance would go a long way.
Despite sonic attributes meant to suggest roughness, rawness, and even risk—the distortion, the swing, the grit—the music remains fundamentally agreeable, polite, even a little safe. Even the wordless cry that goes soaring over the top of "Blush," meant to evoke a moment of total abandon, fits so well with all the other moving pieces that it provokes admiration for its craft more than it stirs, much less disturbs, the soul. It points you in the right direction, but it doesn't quite tip you over the edge.
In addition to its ornithological conceit, Rojus is supposed to represent the arc of a night out. But it doesn't quite manage: The music's intensity remains more or less constant from the second track on. A good nightclub should have nooks and crannies, hidden rooms, mysterious passageways; its layout should encourage all kinds of mystery and mischief. But as wonderfully appointed as Rojus is, it really offers just one vista: Once you're through its welcoming foyer, you know exactly where you're going to be and what you're going to hear until the doors close. As a set of tracks for DJs to pick from, Rojus offers plenty of potential. As a front-to-back listening experience, it's almost paradise—but not quite the album that it wants to be.


On his latest release, the former Emeralds member presents a back-to-basics approach to his trancelike guitar playing. The result is an LP that feels as natural and refreshing as summer rain.

Ideas of Beginnings

Mark McGuire’s best performances gain their momentum from a feeling that they could go on forever. His style of looped guitar work focuses on one or two introduced melodies that eventually overlap and congeal, joined by harmonies that extend into a trancelike wave of rhythm. It’s a style that seems to be built entirely from new beginnings.
Between 2007 and 2010, McGuire solidified this technique with his prolific output as a solo artist and member of the influential drone outfit Emeralds. But after his ambitious, autobiographical breakthrough Living With Yourself, McGuire searched for different ways to expand his sound. He brought in drum loops and live percussion; he tried his hand at singing and eventually mimicked the feeling of a full band. The resulting records were intriguing plot twists but not necessarily satisfying developments in his catalog. McGuire’s music always suggested subtler means of evolution.
Ideas of Beginnings is a new introduction to McGuire and a much-welcomed return-to-form. Composed of eleven pieces mostly focused on one instrument, it’s the simplest, prettiest music McGuire has made since his limited-edition CD-R days, and it serves as a stunning showcase for his distinctive style. Opening with the brief “Beginner,” the album makes no claims to build upon his sound or engage in new ideas—and it’s all the better for it. There’s a lightness to McGuire’s playing that makes Ideas of Beginnings an easy and addictive listen, spending its 35 minutes illustrating how dynamic the sound of his unaccompanied guitar can be.
While solo guitar compositions are often noted for their loneliness and intensity, McGuire has never operated in the same plane as traditionalists like John Fahey. He’s always eschewed the patterns of rustic Americana for more tranquil motifs, a kind of new age music transcribed for six strings. There’s a reason why his most natural collaborators have been synth-based acts like Oneohtrix Point Never or his Emeralds bandmates as opposed to players in the New Weird America camp; his only true connection to folk music is his instrumentation.
The opening run of solo acoustic songs on Ideas of Beginnings are dazzling examples of McGuire’s mastery. “Skipping Stones” and “Smiling From Up North” are breezy and subtle, conjuring images of rushing water and shivering blades of grass. His focus on bright, open chords allows his melodic counterparts to fill the spaces with an emotional undercurrent, shifting the atmosphere of the songs like passing clouds, occasionally dimming or illuminating the landscapes. “Late Summer Early Evening” glides with a loose, galloping picking pattern. Like many songs in the album’s first half, it all goes down in under two minutes, as if McGuire hit record as soon as he started playing it without giving much thought to where it would lead. His excitement sustains the record, creating a sense of familiarity without feeling like a retread.
The album is sequenced neatly into distinctive movements to explore the territory McGuire has covered best, with the opening run of acoustic songs segueing into a series of lo-fi pieces and field recordings. These tracks are followed by two electric guitar compositions that serve as the album’s high points. “To Continue” finds McGuire’s delayed, chiming strings building to an almost orchestral sense of immersion, the space between each note filled with ghostly reverberations. In “Beginning of Winter,” he takes the opposite approach. His muted picking is packed as densely as possible to create a cozy, percussive effect.
The album closes with two droning pieces that wrap things up with a feeling of renewal, indicative of the spacier music on his other new release, the explorative Vision Upon Purpose. That album’s wild synth experiments suggest that the back-to-basics approach of Ideas of Beginnings won’t necessarily be a lasting mode for McGuire. Still, the album itself is enough cause for celebration. With Ideas of Beginnings, he’s refined ten years worth of growth into a record that feels as natural and refreshing as summer rain.


Bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty—the rhythm section of Fugazi—team up with experimental D.C. guitarist Anthony Pirog for an economic, emotionally resonant instrumental power-trio record.

The Messthetics

The music of Fugazi presented a series of overlapping conversations—between punk and funk, aggression and experimentation, the personal and the political. And those internal tensions became manifest in the frisson between the band’s two caustic yet complementary voices: the blare of Ian MacKaye and the sneer of Guy Picciotto. But if Mackaye and Piccotto were the de facto stars of the show, then bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty were the directors in the control room engaged in their own off-mic dialogue. In their 16 years together as Fugazi’s rhythm section, Lally and Canty developed a personality of their own every bit as distinct as the band’s dueling mouthpieces. When you think of any given Fugazi song, often the first thing that comes to mind is the band’s authoritative but mischievous sense of groove.
So when you hear the stalking, bass-powered backbeat that kicks off the Messthetics’ debut album, it’s like listening in on old friends shootin’ the shit. The Messthetics is Lally and Canty’s first venture together since Fugazi went on hiatus in 2003, after which Lally decamped to Italy for the better part of a decade, while Canty became an in-demand soundtrack composer, side player for Bob Mould, and frontman for the short-lived art-pop outfit Deathfix. But if their rhythmic repartee in the Messthetics is the same as it ever was, it serves as the foundation for a dramatically different construct than Fugazi. While Fugazi fearlessly embraced un-punk influences—dub, piano balladry, musique concrete—shredding was not one of them; they were so self-conscious about indulging in a little guitar noodling that they gave their song with lots of arpeggios the tongue-in-cheek title of “Arpeggiator.”
With the Messthetics, Lally and Canty defer to Anthony Pirog, a dexterous guitarist and a mainstay in the Washington D.C. avant-jazz scene, who’s given free rein to unleash his six-string splatter atop Lally and Canty’s propulsion. But lest that combination suggest a post-hardcore version of Surfing With the Alien, the album is more an instrumental power-trio record that values economy and emotional resonance over technical wizardry and structural complexity.
The band wisely ease you into their hermetic world with the opening track, “Mythomania,” where Pirog offers fleeting displays of his favorite tricks—shortwave-frequency screeches, morse-code shocks, and fretboard fills that bend strings and minds alike. But Pirog sets off his full arsenal of pyrotechnics on rock-outs like “Serpent Tongue,” where he plays call-and-response with himself, effortlessly switching between the song’s incessant main riff and his frenetic, interstellar leads. And with the dizzying patterns and freeway-ready thrust of “Quantum Path,” the Messthetics imagine an alternate history for Rush where Alex Lifeson says, “Eh, Geddy, maybe you shouldn’t be the singer,” and makes their instrumentals the rule instead of the exception.
The Messthetics is a carefree, low-stakes endeavour for its participants; recorded live off the floor in Canty’s practice room, the album captures two old pals communing with a new one, exploring the potential of their developing dynamic and sculpting ideas into song-like shapes (or, in the case of “Your Own World” and “Radiation Fog,” leaving them as moody, formless interstitials). This is a band tuning out the noise of the outside world by making some of their own. But for all the guitar acrobatics and rhythmic fury on display here, The Messthetics also yields some beautifully meditative moments: on “Once Upon a Time,” Pirog coasts on a gentle Afrobeat shuffle en route to an aching, skyscraping solo, while the sullen post-Slint lurch of “The Inner Ocean” erupts into dramatic second act where he lets his guitar not-so-gently weep. Clearly shredding is something you should administer to heartstrings as much as guitar strings.


On his sixth album as Hiss Golden Messenger, M.C. Taylor's lifelong theme remains intact: What happens when you feel a distance from the thing that’s meant to sustain you?

Hiss Golden Messenger: Heart Like a Levee

Heart Like a Levee

Hiss Golden Messenger is a strange name for the music of M.C. Taylor. Rather than preach the word, he’s often scoured for it, doubted and discarded it. Faith, he learned, cannot save you from depression or from the temptation to self-destruct, and when hypocrites can play it as their “get out of jail” card, what’s the use of it at all? God barely comes into the equation on the sixth Hiss album, recorded in Taylor’s 40th year—around the time when the Big Questions tend to get outweighed by smaller, more immediate responsibilities. But his lifelong theme remains intact: What happens when you feel a distance from the thing that’s meant to sustain you?
Hiss took flight with 2010’s Bad Debt, a record written in the quiet moments while Taylor’s newborn son slept. After years flailing in ’90s hardcore band Ex-Ignota and Americana outfit the Court and Spark, Taylor gave up trying, for the first time, to find an audience. The album’s charred hush found one anyway. Family and adulthood became central to the work, the revelations they offered making the hard times worthwhile. “The misery of love is a funny thing,” he sang on “Mahogany Dread” from 2014’s Lateness of Dancers. “The more it hurts, the more you think you can stand a little pain.”
The album’s success tested his thesis. As his Merge debut and breakout moment, it necessitated endless touring, taking him away from his wife and two young kids, who inspired the music and gave it purpose as a vocation. Heart Like a Levee is Taylor reckoning with the guilt of being an absent provider whose work financially supports his family—and spiritually sustains him as a good father. It’s not “rock star writes home,” but a familiar theme to anyone who’s felt pulled to honor disparate callings, and the rare record that doesn’t treat adulthood as a punchline or a final resting place.
Nor do the mature themes smother the songwriting, where Taylor locates a grounded soulfulness in his tapestry of folk, country, blues, and dub, whether he’s furrowing deeper into the groove he started digging on Lateness of Dancers—as on freewheeling standout “Ace of Cups Hung Low Band”—or easing back into his porch. Although Heart Like a Levee is often heavier than its sunny predecessor, the core Hiss band (Megafaun’s multi-instrumentalists Phil and Brad Cook, and drummer Matt McCaughan) tend to strike a major chord M.O., even when the lyrics are decidedly minor-chord: There are moments of profound communal joy here that continue the homespun gospel Taylor minted on Lateness. That contrast makes the music feel real and integral to a life, and the way that domesticity’s small lows and highs are always intermingled.
As rollicking as it often is, Heart Like a Levee is a deeply intimate record, filled with anxious conversations about obligation. “It’s hard, Lord/Lord, it’s hard,” he sings on capering opener “Biloxi,” surveying the scene at his eldest kid’s birthday party. “There’s one way in and one way out and we’re gonna have a good time.” The title track unfolds with Taylor and his wife laying in bed on an ostensibly perfect morning. “We’ll pretend all we wanna,” he sings with his trademark reedy nuance. “Yeah, tomorrow I’ll be on my way.” His high-pitched acoustic guitar mounts the tension as he unleashes a series of rhetorical questions, each more desperate than the last. “Will you grieve me, honey?” he asks in a wrenched tone, then skews quieter: “Did I give you a reason to try?” he asks in one of the album’s more flooring moments.
The pleas recur on “Happy Day (Sister My Sister),” a beautiful acoustic duet with Tift Merritt that sounds like a flood of relief but offers little of it. “Sister, my sister/What should I do?” Taylor sings with a sigh. “Should I wade in the river/With so many people living just/Just above the waterline?” If that sounds a little like liberal guilt, “Like a Mirror Loves a Hammer” is its flipside, exposing Taylor’s darkest inclinations to throw it all away rather than cause anyone more pain. “Should I drown in that Atlanta rain? Yes, babe—I can’t stand it,” he seethes, blurring into swampy dub funk shot through with mystic ricochets of reverb. The track stands alone in the record, its magnetic groove as myopic as Taylor’s mindset, doggedly pushing forward (and making the idea of a Have Fun With God-style album remix sound eminently necessary).
If all this makes touring life sound like too much trouble, Heart Like a Levee offers two songs that trace Taylor’s bond to the road. “I can feel October coming on the backscratch wind,” he yearns like a weathered traveler on “Cracked Windshield,” where the tiniest golden synth gradually casts a piercing light on his gentle ruminations. The tension finally breaks on the impressionistic “As the Crow Flies,” a subtle, cantering groove that breaks into a raucous height-of-summer refrain led by Phil Cook’s euphoric holler. “Blue horizon—late again/West Lafayette, babe/And tomorrow’s a dream,” Taylor sings, and the view seems endless.
Although younger male artists are returning to domestic settings in their music, there are few older male artists questioning how their work impacts upon the families they leave behind. It’s borderline inconceivable that a white, male, 40-something artist could bring a refreshing perspective to a traditional genre, but Taylor’s graceful accountability and invigorating songcraft makes him an anomaly. His own dose of perspective arrives at the end of the plainly gorgeous Heart Like a Levee.
“When I set the river on fire, you laughed in my face,” he recalls on “Highland Grace,” over an easy tumble of a groove, the words and music aligned for once. He ticks off his old stubbornnesses: “And if you can’t buy it and you stand and deny it/And if you can’t see it and you refuse to believe it/And if you can’t count it but you can’t help but doubt it,” he yearns over softly twiddling piano. “But loving her was easy/The easiest thing in the world.” Love as salvation is Old Testament songwriting, but few artists make you feel it like Taylor does.