Twitchy, raunchy, and full of laugh-out-loud punchlines, the Detroit trio’s new album is the best ghettotech rager in recent memory.

Détwat

Like many Detroit genres, ghettotech sounds like it could have only been brewed from the sweaty corners of Motor City’s pulsing industrial landscape. A fusion of electro, techno, Chicago’s ghetto house, and Miami bass, ghettotech has operated as a playground for some of the metropolis’ most experimental electronic producers since its inception in the late-’80s, including legendary artists like DJ Assault, DJ Godfather, and Jeff Mills. In 2023, HiTech are carrying ghettotech’s torch, igniting the movement with their own kind of fuel.
Comprised of rapper-producers King Milo, Milf Melly, and 47Chops, HiTech take all of ghettotech’s classic elements—sped-up electro, distorted vocals, raw sexuality—and imbue it with a modern touch, distilled from growing up mining the depths of SoundCloud rather than tuning into underground radio stations. Détwat, their second full-length, uses nonstop 808s and a grab bag of freshly crate-dug samples to kick off the raunchiest, twitchiest club night since the heyday of Detroit techno.
From the first few seconds, HiTech impeccably set the scene: Featuring labelmate Fullbodydurag, from Omar S’ FXHE Records, “Nu Munni” launches a driving four-to-the-floor beat that rises steadily in your throat like a panic attack. More than anything else on the album, “Nu Munni” draws on the Detroit techno influences embedded in ghettotech, with HiTech laying down a sense of urgency that threads throughout Détwat. As a chubby bassline emerges, heaving breaths punctuate the production, operating as percussive stabs. There’s even a hint of ballroom here, when the beat suddenly drops and Fullbodydurag fires off the line, “Don’t start with me/Bitch I’ll finish it.” The bass levels sound as if they were being blasted out of a subwoofer in the back of a souped-up Honda; you can practically hear the screws rattle. More than simply paying homage to the genre that birthed them, on “Nu Munni,” HiTech are ushering it into the future.
Until now, HiTech were perhaps best known for their 2022 single “Cashapp,” which relied much more on Milf Melly’s rap skills than on its techno production. While Détwat’s hip-hop overtones are rightfully undeniable, it’s a cohesive evolution from the group’s 2022 self-titled debut album, in which the rap and electronic elements felt more disparate. “Birthday Pearls” is a lightning flurry of hypnotic bars; its pitch-shifting vocals give lines like “It’s my birthday/Suck a nigga dick or something” and “Pop that pussy, shake that ass/Stretch it like a yoga class” a sense of mischievous surrealism.
Lead track “Zooted,” featuring even more loopy, warped vocals, this time from yet another underground Detroit collaborator (DJKillaSquid), encapsulates the essence of ghettotech more than anything else on Détwat. Its hook—“I’ve been zooted/Bounce that ass”—is like a spiritual cousin to one of ghettotech’s most enduring anthems, DJ Assault’s 2002 masterpiece “Ass-N-Titties.” It contains the same joyful release of inhibition that defines so much of Black club music, and also like “Ass-N-Titties,” it’s funny as shit. The dance floors and nightclubs of this movement are first and foremost a place to have fun, and that spirit is front and center on “Teetees Dispo,” a story of love and lust told at breakneck speed. “If yo’ auntie in this bitch/She gon’ get on the floor,” raps our narrator, as the titular TeeTee drops it low. A second clubgoer approaches at the end of the song, delivering the final punchline: “Damn, who mama that is?/Nigga I think I like yo mama!”
“Teetees Dispo” condenses everything that makes HiTech unique in the contemporary U.S. hip-hop landscape—the deliriously catchy hooks, the unabashed humor, the detailed production, and the passion for their local scene. Ghettotech never went out of fashion in its hometown, and with Détwat, HiTech are twisting it into new, freaky shapes. It’s appropriately manic music that not only defies categorization, but does so with a blunt in one hand and a cup of Henny in the other, putting the booty bounce back in techno.


The Triad, Pantha du Prince’s first solo record in six years, is the producer's most maximalist and emotional release to date.

The Triad

Techno is often dismissed as clinical music, engineered for precision impact. But an irony of the genre—and one that Hendrik Weber, who records as Pantha du Prince, understands deeply—is that, though technical by definition, techno is most satisfying when you can feel the human inside the machine. This is the case with The Field’s analog loops and Ricardo Villalobos’ live samples; it’s what makes Holly Herndon’s cerebral experiments compelling and breathes life into Jon Hopkin’s chilliest compositions. Like those artists, the tension between organic and synthetic is at the core of Pantha du Prince’s work, from his minimal techno classics, Diamond Daze and This Bliss, to Black Noise, which saw Weber celebrating nature through field recordings and a collaboration with Panda Bear. You can hear it when Weber abandoned the trappings of the genre to experiment with a three-ton bell carillon, usually found in European cathedral towers, on Elements of Light, and it’s what makes The Triad, Pantha du Prince’s first solo record in six years, his most maximalist and emotional release to date.
Since the early '00s, Weber has evolved from monastic bedroom producer to an artist who prefers the company of friends, from Noah Lennox to The Bell Laboratory to Stephan Abry, with whom he created the duo Ursprung. In many ways, The Triad plays like the sum total of Pantha du Prince’s career thus far, uniting Weber's early minimalism with grandiose instrumentation and collaborative songwriting. Though *The Triad *is billed as a Pantha du Prince release, Weber has lots of help. Joining him are The Bell Laboratory's Bendik Kjeldsberg and Scott Mou, who performs as Queens. Together, the three musicians (and a handful of guests) act as the titular Triad, melding electronic compositions with all manner of analog synths (Synthi 100, ARP, CS-80), vocals, and live instrumentation.
As a result, The Triad sounds more like the work of a full band than one guy with a laptop, and it's better for it. Compositions unfurl slowly, starting as sketches before layers of instrumentation blanket one another in unpredictable ways. Weber makes expert use of the human voice throughout, treating his own and others' as additional sonic bricolage rather than the centerpiece of any given composition. Album opener “The Winter Hymn,” for example, begins with a beat, bells, and chimes, before vocals come to the forefront, thawing the track like morning sun on snow. On “Chasing Vapour Trails,” monotone vocals offer a playful counterpunch to the clamor of bells before the track's bouncy rhythm is joined by ragged guitar squalls for an effect reminiscent of Matthew Dear.
Speaking of bells and chimes, few producers have a better grasp of how to use them than Pantha du Prince. Even before his work using the bell carillon, Weber's palette relied heavily on metallic tones and percussive elements. On The Triad, these sounds blend fully into the DNA of the tracks—it's not a gimmick or a distraction, but the heart of the sound. The effect is simultaneously cooling (bells have a way of adding a chill to the production) and wholly organic. There's a tactile resonance to their sound that's inarguably physical, even when the sound is brittle or delicate, and when a track really goes for the dance floor (see: “You What? Euphoria!”) it hits all the harder.
Listening to a Pantha du Prince record is also a distinctly visual experience. His tracks have a way of enveloping the listener, invoking images of Arctic taigas, snow-capped mountains, rolling hills. Even Weber's track titles—“Islands in the Sky,” “In an Open Space”—ask to be taken as specifically visual experiences. Song titles even directly recall films: “Lions Love” is named after an Agnès Varda film, while “Frau im Mond, Sterne laufen” references a Fritz Lang dystopia. It's hard to say whether individual listeners will *see *the same things while listening to these tracks, but there is a distinctly synesthetic element to the music. The result is an album that creates its own world, one it feels like you could reach out and brush with your fingers.


Ambitious and heady as always, Patrick Wolf here takes a headfirst dive into new romantic pop.

Lupercalia

"Songs about love are obviously the most common theme in pop music, but I wanted to approach it in a way that hadn't been done before. The title refers to the Lupercalia festival, which is the ancient fertility and love festival that happens around Valentine's Day. I strive to be original-- it's one of my biggest ambitions. There can be nothing worse sometimes than a soppy love record-- imagine if I'd called it To Love: Patrick Wolf!"
That's Patrick Wolf doing the heavy-lifting when it comes to pinpointing what went wrong with Lupercalia: It's clear he hasn't shaken off his artiste pretensions since the goth-folk of his early work, but ever since the career peak of 2005's shadowy song cycle Wind in the Wires, he seems to want pop stardom. And while the clash of those desires can lead to fascinating music, it rarely happens when the artist considers himself above pop music and its consumers. And unfortunately, much like he did on The Magic Position and The Bachelor, Wolf is operating like someone who doesn't trust his audience to think at his level, offering a subtly condescending record that leaves so little to the listener's imagination that it actually may as well have been called To Love: Patrick Wolf!
At first glance, Wolf's headfirst dive into new romantic pop seemed like a good move. As with "Accident & Emergency" or "The Magic Position", Wolf put a good step forward on this album's lead single: "The City" remains an insistently kicky piece of kitsch, its cheeseball horn charts and can-do lyrics about love transcending material possession successfully recalling 80s new pop. But like "The City"'s video-- Wolf frolicking on the Santa Monica pier with a bunch of Hollister ad types-- the rest of Lupercalia is self-aware in all but one crucial aspect,  the ability to recognize just how blatantly it allows itself to lay it on so thick.
Far be it from me to deny someone the agency to make his "happy" record, but Wolf seems to feel as if self-consciousness grants him a license to go slumming in his most insipid songwriting impulses. The clincher from otherwise charming "House": "This is the greatest peace I've ever known/ Only love makes a house a home." Meanwhile, the lesson learned on  "Together" is "and I can't do this alone/ But we can do this so much better together," the last word harmonized just so in case you didn't get the gist. Sure, it's awkward when he allows himself a little more poetic license on the string-choked "Slow Motion" ("before you I was living in a silverfish kitchen"), but at least it's a new way to make the same point.
How the album manages to feel so impersonal is weird considering it was inspired by Wolf's recent engagement, but the smug piano narrative of "Bermondsey Street" feels stuck somewhere between "Our House" and "Born This Way". What's frustrating is that if you strip away the unctuous lyrical gaffes, Wolf gets most everything else right. During Lupercalia's first half, he continues to prove himself a fine craftsman of major-key melodies, and this is his most confident and convicted vocal performance yet. But like most of Wolf's records, he eventually gives into sad songs and waltzes as Lupercalia progresses, and studded with the same overproduction tricks of cluttered strings and processed samples, "The Days" and "Slow Motion" don't offer much in the way of contrast outside of tempo.
Considering how intriguing it is to think about Wolf in the abstract-- undeniably talented and ambitious as he is-- there's no reason he shouldn't be some sort of star.  But his claims to originality feel increasingly misplaced-- he's not the only auteur combining glam-rock ambitions with sexually ambiguous theatrics these days, and compared to Of Montreal's confrontational eclecticism, Diamond Rings' nervy confessionals, and Lady Gaga's full-frontal multimedia bombast, the domesticated Wolf of Lupercalia can't help but sound tame.


The fourth installment of Leyland Kirby’s six-part series as the Caretaker is his most visceral album yet, an ambient look at the degradation of music and memory.

The Caretaker: Everywhere at the End of Time - Stage 4

Everywhere at the End of Time - Stage 4

Leyland Kirby’s project as the Caretaker wasn’t always about dementia. “Initially it was all about ghosts and memories,” the experimental producer explained in 2012 about what’s now his best-known musical alias. Named after the job title of Jack Nicholson’s doomed protagonist in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Kirby sampled old Jazz Age 78s to make the kind of eerily distorted dance tunes you could imagine haunting the Overlook Hotel. It was a spin on similar techniques Kirby employed on rave and pop music in his main project V/Vm, but he later grew inspired by neurodegenerative diseases and studies on the positive effects of playing patients music from their youth. The Caretaker’s labyrinthine recordings suddenly found a new significance, and audience, with 2011’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, a record instantly hailed as Kirby’s masterpiece and one where music and concept paired so perfectly it felt like they’d always been inseparable.
Kirby must have felt similarly. In 2016, he went so far as “diagnosing” the Caretaker with dementia before announcing an ambitious multi-part finale to retire the project. Titled Everywhere at the End of Time, the project follows worsening stages of dementia through six releases over three years and is scheduled to end in 2019. It’s first three albums—Stage 1, Stage 2, and Stage 3—felt like retreads of sounds and ideas the Caretaker’s earlier masterpiece already perfected. But if Everywhere at the End of Time’s trajectory felt predictable at the halfway point, the dark, disorienting Stage 4 marks a total reconfiguration. It’s the Caretaker’s best record since Empty Bliss while evolving its sound in new and often frightening ways.
The record represents the beginning of the “Post Awareness” stages of dementia, setting up the unreleased Stage 5 and Stage 6 by breaking down foundational qualities present since the project’s inception. Gone are the short, melancholy vignettes with wistful titles like “It’s just a burning memory” or “We don’t have many days.” They’re replaced by four soundscapes, each stretching past the 20-minute mark and all but one clinically dubbed “Post Awareness Confusions.” They capture the darkest, most damaged sounds in the project’s lifespan whether dwelling on one ghostly sample for minutes or violently accelerating through skipping melodies, similar to the ambient experimental touchstone, Oval’s 94 Diskont. Stage 4 is likewise a record that makes you feel surrounded, making you a participant rather than an observer.
This is all by design. Kirby has said that the project is more about the second half than the first. Songs and samples from his earlier records, particularly 1937’s “Goodnight, My Beautiful,” resurface now in a almost unrecognizable blurs. By continually returning to the same samples over the years, Kirby has subtly programmed many of them into our own memories. It pays off amid the recollections and second-guessing of Stage 4, where the simple act of remembering a sample can be filled with this sense of tragedy.
While the three “Post Awareness Confusions” reach unexplored extremes for the Caretaker, the dreamlike “Temporary Bliss State” enters a new world entirely. Kirby leaves no trace whatsoever of the dusty 78 samples that define the project, warping whatever his source material was into pure ethereal abstraction. Twinkling, liquid melodies and gentle waves of noise make “Bliss State” even more disorienting than the harrowing “Confusions,” yet it is so beautiful it barely sounds like the Caretaker at all. While previous releases used cheerful samples to create tension, to suggest, as one carefree song on Stage 2 put it, that “A losing battle is raging,” there’s a genuine sense of peace for once. It’s a welcome respite, but it also signals the loss of control from patients with dementia. Going just long enough to make you forget what came before, the abrupt end and jarring snap into the final “Confusion” only becomes more devastating.
Dementia has seen increasing visibility in the years since Kirby first artistically approached the disease. Julianne Moore won an Oscar for portraying an early onset patient in 2014’s Still Alice, last year it received a rosy Disneyfication in Pixar’s Coco, while “Bojack Horseman” envisioned it through surrealist horror. It’s on all our minds because it’s scary, unknowable, and hurts people we love in ways we can’t imagine. One of our natural responses to things like that has always been to turn them into art, but there’s always a risk of pale romanticization. Stage Four becomes much more empathetic because it offers no such romance as the Caretaker closes in on the end—only confusion, terror, and tragedy. Like the end of The Shining, the “ghosts and memories” are taking over, and it’s as difficult to watch as it is to look away.


Cross Record's early work boasted a desolate, folk-born sound redolent of early Cat Power. On their new record, Swans and Shearwater percussionist Thor Harris lends them an entirely new energy, creating an inspired fusion of wispy and visceral sounds.

Wabi-Sabi

Cross Record forged their path along old-fashioned and modern lines at once. Their music's presence on Bandcamp, the stalwart American site that has become the new A&R for the country's best bands, got them their start, but the husband-and-wife duo of Emily Cross and Dan Duszynski didn't land their deal with Ba Da Bing Records until Cross sent a CD of their music with a note to label owner Ben Goldberg after meeting him at a Lady Lamb the Beekeeper show. Wabi-Sabi marks the first proper album Cross Record has created as Ba Da Bing artists, and indeed indicates a marked sense of sonic growth from the duo's early Bandcamp recordings, which boasted a desolate, folk-born sound akin to Smells Like-era Cat Power and Nina Nastasia à la Dogs.
Much ado has been made about where Cross and Duszynski recorded Wabi-Sabi, which is a Japanese term for the acceptance of imperfection. And yes, the relatively remote locale on the outskirts of Austin, Texas in the little town of Dripping Springs surely played a role in the Chicago-born group's desolate acoustic Cocteau-isms, particularly in the quieter moments of tracks like "Something Unseen Touches a Flower to My Forehead" and "Lemon." Additionally, the incorporation of a women's choir across a number of tracks adds another layer of airiness to this LP's sound.
But it's the presence of Swans drummer Thor Harris, who more than makes up for his absence on the latest Shearwater album, that helps Wabi-Sabi stand out from anything Cross Record has done in the past. The rhythms he achieves working with marimba, kalimba, and what's described only as "the mysterious black box" gives the group a heft that is absent on their earlier material. "Two Rings," for instance, may remind some of Tin Drum-era Japan, while the loping gothic stomp of "Wasp in a Jar" smacks of PJ Harvey's Dry. "High Rise," meanwhile, sees Duszynski himself channeling the power of Thor on the drums, counterbalancing his own Robin Guthrie-on-steroids guitar attack.
Yet, the partnership between the guitarist and Harris on percussion forges a solid foundation for Cross and her choir of singers: Julia Lucille, Liz Baker, Anna Milk, and Sarah Duncan. Within the album's most inspired moments, they hit atmospheric heights they've never reached before as a group. On "Basket," the dreamy vocal harmonies collide with Harris’ dense rhythms before collapsing under the weight of a divebombing wall of dirge from Duszynski’s strings, like FKA twigs produced by Michael Gira. It's an inspired fusion of wispy and visceral, a combination that doesn't seem like it should work as well as it does here. Throughout Wabi-Sabi, Cross Record thread their way between graceful and sinister, unfiltered beauty with heavier and uglier sounds, and tap into a dark well of energy that has potential to grow more powerful the further they explore it.


The Brooklyn producer and Night Slugs/Fool's Gold stablemate's appealing new EP is less concerned with jostling listeners into its rhythmic space than last year's That Mystic.

Dreama EP

Last year's EP That Mystic was a good introduction to Kingdom, the Brooklyn producer and Night Slugs/Fool's Gold stablemate who operates in a distinct idiom you could call "BK funky." At its core, the EP fused the intricacy of post-dubstep with the production sensibility and anything-goes nature of contemporary pop. And his everything-is-percussion approach built up a sense of bustling hugeness that, speaker-rattling immediacy notwithstanding, never overwhelmed its Swiss-watch rhythmic engineering. That it did so in an intense, almost panicky sort of way was part of the appeal-- the tweaky gallop of the title track's kick-heavy rhythm was one of bass music's best last year-- but it also left a lot of options for new directions to go in the still relatively early stages of an ambitious and wide-ranging style.
Dreama plays with a few of those options, maintaining the balance between keeping his big ideas both upfront and subtly beneath the surface. The songs on this EP are largely less concerned with jostling listeners into its rhythmic space and more prone to luring them in instead, though once they get inside they can still get thrown around a bit. The organized clamor and high tension still jumps out here and there, most notably in "Stalker Ha": Its snares are crisp to the point of brittle, it teases out a water-drip piano note just long enough to make it a neat shock when the melody turns into a Halloween homage, and it builds a sharp sense of anxiety out of the way it layers half-ecstatic/half-haunted wordless soul vocals over an insistently ringing old telephone bell. It's brisk stuff, an easy highlight of a repertoire still on the upswing.
But defining Kingdom by the standards of all that taut chaos his earlier work laid down doesn't fit quite as easily with the rest of the EP. Take the title track, a cut that opens with a loping stride of a beat-- a heavy skulk ready to break out into a Rickey Henderson sprint. If you dork out for drum patterns, it's a headspinning juxtaposition of kicks, snares, claps, and snaps that's striking enough on its own. But it's not put in service of deep-pressure dynamics and a mood steeped in turmoil-- it's more like straight-up funk, with an alternately pitched-up-and-down vocal "ayyy" careening off fat synths that simultaneously evoke classic boogie and current Dirty South-indebted R&B. It's wide open and airy to the point of almost being calming, but it still thumps. "Hood by Air Theme" is a bit more tense, with foreboding atmospherics, teased-out vocal snippets, swelling bass, and floodgate-bursting percussion buildups rolled out as a blatant prelude to a big drop. But the drop itself is what makes it, and it's so audaciously deployed and timed-- and recognizably iconic in just how joyous it is-- that it'd almost feel like a spoiler just mentioning where it comes from. (It also proves that in the right hands, there's no such thing as a too-obvious sample.)
Maybe the best summary of what Kingdom's capable of can be found in the opening track. "Let You No" incorporates a comparatively lesser-known R&B track, Sadie Ama's "Fallin", to similar dramatic effect as "Hood by Air Theme". But it's a more slippery build, capitalizing on sneaking early hints of her voice under cover of the track's whistle-squeak synth and some characteristically skittery beats. We hear her first as faint echoes, then chopped up percussively, then finally breaking through as a full-fledged hook that almost reads, in this new context, like a statement on breaking tension: "I should've held back/ But I just thought I'd let you know." For all his polyrhythmic complexity and string-pulling, emotional mood-setting, Kingdom knows his way around a voice-- and that's where he's got his future down on lock. Maybe pop's future, too.


Sierra Leone musician Janka Nabay returns with another collection of joyous bubu sounds. His greatest theme remains unchanged: how bubu music makes you dance.

Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang: Build Music

Build Music

Janka Nabay’s path as a pop musician—first in his home country of Sierra Leone in the ’90s and then in the U.S. in the 21st century—has been circuitous to say the least. First discovered in Sierra Leone, he was a big star at home before a long civil war and its brutal aftermath forced him to come to the U.S. in 2003 as an émigré. And while his 2012 Luaka Bop debut, En Yay Sah, introduced Nabay’s “bubu”—a restless, churning percussive gallop—to fans of world music and eclectic indie alike, work on a follow-up bogged down after a few false starts. The album was abandoned in 2014.
Three years on, Nabay and cohorts including Skeletons’ Matt Mehlan, Syrian-born Boshra AlSaadi, and journalist/scholar Wills Glasspiegel helped get Build Music built. At first blush, the formula for Nabay’s bubu seems to be largely unchanged. It originates from the Tenme regions in the north and west of war-ravaged Sierra Leone—a mesmerizing sound that was once the province of witches, and is now a part of the Ramadan holiday. Originally enacted on bamboo horns, bubu is now transcribed for synths. It’s a relentlessly joyous beat and at times it brings to mind the velocity of South African shangaan electro, though bubu feels more spry, as Nabay lets the rhythms rubber band between the drums, bass, and the call-and-response vocals of himself and AlSaadi.
On “Santa Monica,” Nabay reflects on a fraught incident he had out on tour, and sets it to itchy accompaniment. “Investigation, interrogation yay,” he enunciates, to which AlSaadi chirps back, “Ay/A-Cali-fornia San-ta Mo-nica,” letting the keyboards slowly arch across the song like a Pacific sunset. Nabay doesn’t go into detail about just what occurred. But with a history of Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, and the like, an encounter with the LAPD that involves interrogation doesn’t always end so well. It speaks to Nabay’s buoyancy and spirit that he defuses it just so until it’s a nonchalant—perhaps even celebratory—moment.
“Bubu Dub” bubbles like a case of cola, the Casio beats coming from one of the original Sierra Leonean “riddims” that Nabay had access to in the ’90s. So while the hiccuping, lo-fi presets percolate and give the song a vintage feel, the vocals are crisper and a keyboard whinnies with a sample of bubu horns, courtesy of Glasspiegel’s recordings made while traveling through the country in 2014. A curious blend of past, recent past, and the present, Nabay’s greatest theme remains unchanged: how bubu music makes you dance.
The album straddles a line between being thin and casual, at times pulling back the curtain on the finished product to show Nabay chatting, humming, and tapping out the building blocks of the songs to his bandmates. “Tek Lak la Gben ba Kun” finds Nabay just riffing along with a bass lick for two minutes. “Sabanoh” also eavesdrops on a session, with Nabay just chanting along with a droning synth line, before the fully formed version bursts into frame, wiggling with a cartoonish vivacity. But no matter the energy of the music around him, Nabay retains a languid calm in his delivery, the sound of a veteran in music across two continents and three decades just taking it as it comes.


Funk figurehead Steve Arrington's lineage is so clear and traceable that eventually pairing up with Dâm-Funk seems like a no-brainer. Instead of aiming for retro-funk bullseye, they made the weirder, more ambitious Higher.

Higher

Steve Arrington is one of the great underheralded figures in funk, a drummer/vocalist who transitioned from lounge acts to gigs with the Escovedos before joining the Dayton funk band Slave for a five-year stretch of hitmaking. After a successful solo career stretching through most of the 80s, he left the business at the turn of the 90s for the ministry, about the same time as g-funk was starting to mine his catalog for inspiration and a kid from Pasadena named Damon Riddick was traversing over that same turf for his own early demos. The lineage is so clear and traceable that pairing up Dâm-Funk with the recently unretired Arrington seems like an intersection of a no-brainer homage and a dream come true. Anyone who's heard classics like “Just a Touch of Love,” “Weak at the Knees”, or “Dancin' in the Key of Life” can probably picture how natural and comfortable it'd sound for Arrington to jam over the spaced-out, smooth-gliding bounce of the style that made Toeachizown so immersive. Played straight and aiming right for the retro-funk bullseye would probably result in one of the most effortlessly crowdpleasing throwback records of the year.
That's not quite what they did. Higher is messier than that, and weirder, and ultimately more ambitious. Instead of a straightforward selection of boogie jams that effortlessly recall 1982 and leave it at that, Arrington and Riddick put together something spontaneous, potentially polarizing, and joyously strange. Arrington's lost none of his range or power over the years, and he sounds instantly recognizable as the same man who laid a rubbery, often unearthly voice over tracks three decades ago. But he willfully goes off on odd tangents and improvised-sounding flights, spends a bit of time dodging a traditional on-the-one delivery for a more off-beat performance, and overall treats Dâm-Funk's backing track more like a suggestion to be elaborated on than an authoritative, meter-driving pulse. This is that rare record where the singer beats all the critics in the race to call a sound “angular”-- “that angular approach that's so funky and new,” to be specific, as he points out on “Tap That.” It's a phrase that touches on all the quirks and brow-furrowing curveballs that come with that territory.
Granted, it's not that out of character for Dâm-Funk, though it does seem less experimental than he's been of late. Keeping in mind some of his more daring post-Toeachizown work, from his amped-up yet faithful cover of Human League's “Things That Dreams Are Made Of” to last year's New Wave-via-Minneapolis jam “I Don't Wanna Be a Star,” this feels a bit more like a reversion to still-funky, but less eclectic, turf. That means a lot of similar tempos, boom-clap drum machine patterns, and flowing chords-- sounds that barely stray from the Toeachizown palette-- and the musical simplicity threatens to fall into a droning sort of repetition, albeit a pleasant one. On the bright side, it never actually drags, and the production's still a good complement: it feels like Dâm-Funk decided to cede the spotlight to Arrington, leaving his work to buoy Arrington's voice, give him a springboard to riff off, and leaving the more eccentric touches to the singer himself.
And this is where Higher really shines: this is a genuinely sincere, silly, joyous record that seems difficult to actually look down at. What it sometimes lacks in heavy groove and get-down raunch it makes up for in sheer enthusiasm and unpredictability; “the beats tend to sound the same” is less of a concern when they're all glimmering and elated to such effective ends. This album has been in the works for something like three years, but it sounds like it was thrown together off-the-cuff over a weekend by two musicians with a lot of good, pent-up ideas. That's to its benefit, and it makes the giddiness feel extra-human. Arrington has a short monologue in the middle of “I Love This Music” where he mentions how how people tell him how his style keeps changing after all this time. “Yeah,” he explains, “I think like a jazz musician.” Then he lets out this non-verbal string of rapidfire rhythmic scatting that sounds too internalized to be just a mess-around joke, even if he caps it off with a rimshot.
There's a real spiritual vibe that Arrington brings to the table, too, albeit laid out in secular terms, and he seems more like he's ruminating or meditating than singing sometimes. The ceaseless positivity of the lucid memory-banking “Good Feeling” (“I remember Little League baseball, yo/ How the bases were pure white, and the grass was electric green”), the brightly refracting refrains of love-song “Magnificent", “I Be Goin' Hard' and its “stuck on stooo-pid” defiance filtered through deliberately cartoonish runs that toy with his virtuoso range-- it's somewhere between being church and being #based.


Coming on the heels of Drink More Water 5, iLoveMakonnen's sequel to his breakout EP bursts with a confidence that’s earned after you go through the "hit-song-now-what?" grinder.

iLoveMakonnen 2

The sense of intimacy social media allows with stars can be tricky. Even in the most naturalistic and organic-feeling social media moments—a Snap of DJ Khaled extolling the virtues of water and cocoa butter; unscheduled Twitter rants that turn into full-blown hip-hop feuds—an element of pre-meditated performance still exists. These guys wouldn't be successful entertainers without that instinct.
iLoveMakonnen is one of a few genuinely engaging artists on Snapchat. When he Snaps himself covered in blankets in a cold hotel room, or of himself confronting pre-show jitters, his personality comes through so clearly it's hard to not feel moved. He's always seemed like a genuinely unique and humble guy, maybe somewhat performatively so. But what social media isn't in some way performative?*
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This matters in perceiving Makonnen's art because his relatability has always worked in his favor, even when some of his songs threaten to go off-the-rails, since his limited voice can only take him so far. He seems like a guy you know. "Tuesday" was a giant hit because it nailed something about the melancholy one feels when out on a weekday—it feels liberating, because so few people are out, but it can also be a stark reminder of the aimlessness that comes when you're unemployed, or depressed, or, in the conceit of the song, dealing drugs on the weekend. But those details didn't matter. We've all had a Tuesday (or Wednesday, or Thursday) night end far later than it should have. And it struck the kind of relatable chord that Drake does well, which naturally led to his golden co-sign.
Fast-forward a year and after this spring's experimental but quietly compelling Drink More Water 5 mixtape, and Makonnen has released the official follow-up to his first EP on OVO Sound. Some of these songs have floated around for a year or so and are staples of his live performances. But more than even the first EP, which delivered a handful of great hip-hop-indebted pop songs, this sequel EP bursts with a confidence that's earned after you go through the hit-song-now-what? grinder. Compared to his last mixtape, the hooks are sharp enough to cut glass, and the sequencing ensures that every facet of Makonnen—from Heartbroken Makonnen to Riotous Makonnen to Warble Makonnen to Onomatopoeia Sex Jam Makonnen—alternates every song.
On the lights-down, open-curtain starter "Forever", Makonnen hits the ground running: "I remember when you said you needed a love that lasted forever," before the ominous beat finally drops. The open-throated ballad kicks off his second EP as ably as Tom Cruise scaling a mountain during the first moments of Mission: Impossible 2. By the time Santigold shows up to memorably rap a few bars, the hooks (literal and figurative) have sunken in—Makonnen is aiming for the fences with his pop instincts.
However, the record is at its best in the contemplative heartfelt-loner love songs, like "Second Chance" and "Being Alone With U", in which Makonnen embodies his hip-hop-Morrissey role. Closer "I Loved You" perfects this formula with a stark piano on a trap beat. Makonnen offers formulaic Drake-isms like "I know you think about me when I'm not around," but they feel fresh in context because we feel like WeKnowMakonnen.
"Trust Me Danny" is the EP's signature moment, a windows-down banger that pays homage both to Makonnen's producer Danny Wolf and a viral Vine. It encapsulates Makonnen's aesthetic as well as his target audience—fans and students of hip-hop who recognize that hooks need to sail for maximum effect for a track to land as a rap anthem. Makonnen isn't another "weird" rapper cashing in, making disposable jokes and internet references for a Twitter-ready crowd before everyone wakes up and goes, "Where are the hits? Where are the hooks?" On this EP, he's angling to be a real pop star, to step out of the OVO shadow (which hasn't produced a major pop crossover artist since the Weeknd) and onto the radio. It's hard to know if that'll happen, but coming with a likable persona, real pop-songwriting chops, and an established audience never hurt anybody.


On their first album in nearly a decade, Jakob Dylan and co. return with highway ballads and Saturday afternoon rockers, sounding like the classic rock band they’ve always ached to be.

Exit Wounds

During the alt-rock gold rush of the 1990s, the Wallflowers didn’t quite belong to the grunge or burgeoning Americana camps, but they benefited from the abundance of guitar bands. They arrived during the radio heyday of both Pearl Jam and Hootie & the Blowfish, so there was an audience primed for their strum-and-jangle. With its enduring singles “One Headlight,” “6th Avenue Heartache” and “The Difference,” 1996’s quadruple-platinum Bringing Down the Horse provided the foundation for frontman Jakob Dylan to lead various incarnations of the Wallflowers through lineup changes and extended hiatuses, negotiating slight shifts in fashion without abandoning the group’s adherence to the basic building blocks of rock’n’roll: guitar, bass, and drums, all given dimension by whirls of Hammond organ.
Exit Wounds, the group’s first album in nine years and only their seventh record in nearly 30, doubles down on these basics, offering an album that could in many ways have been released somewhere in the mid-1990s. Dylan is the only original member from the days of Bringing Down the Horse, so the consistency in sound and aesthetic is surprising. Revisiting old Wallflowers records makes it apparent how much he struggled with a desire to modernize their trad-rock to suit the times—2002’s Red Letter Days has a discernibly glassy electronic sheen—and his instinct to forge ahead on a well-trodden path.
No attempts to reckon with contemporary fashion are apparent on Exit Wounds. Working with a lineup he assembled toward the end of the 2010s, Dylan seems comfortable playing the same kind of highway ballads and Saturday afternoon rockers he’s been writing for decades. His voice bears slight leathery undertones that are highlighted by the Wallflowers’ soulful Americana, like in the opening track “Maybe Your Heart’s Not in It No More.” The song provides an ideal opening salvo for the record: the group’s confident groove is offset by Dylan’s modicum of middle-aged introspection, a sentiment that’s echoed through many of these songs. Dylan balances these moments of doubt with wry self-deprecation, a tendency that’s pushed to the forefront on “I’ll Let You Down (But Will Not Give You Up).” This blend gives his straight-ahead songs a slight lift. He’s arriving at familiar destinations through detours, not the main road.
Call it wisdom, call it maturity, but the depth of experience deepens the traditionalism of Dylan’s music; he’s grown into the clothes he’s been wearing all his life. To that end, he is assisted greatly by the production of Butch Walker, another old-school rock’n’roll lifer who knows which elements of Dylan’s music to accentuate. The leanness of Exit Wounds is a bit deceiving. It may sound unrushed but the simple, direct arrangements give the record a pulse of subdued energy. Keyboards soften the harder edges of the guitars, Americana singer Shelby Lynne provides harmonies throughout, and the rhythms are supple even when they’re straightforward. Every detail adds not only texture but also character.
None of Walker’s brushstrokes are surprising but they do accentuate Dylan’s personality. He’s got a slightly surly disposition that camouflages an open heart; it’s hard not to see his bruises when he sings “set myself on fire keeping you warm” on “Roots and Wings.” Like Tom Petty, Dylan prefers small gestures to grand statements, finding the emotional truth within a clever turn of phrase like “the dive bar in my heart.” This modesty has been one of Dylan’s gifts since the beginning, when he was attempting to write songs that felt like they’ve been kicked around for years. Now that he’s gotten some mileage under his belt, his songwriting feels sharp and his collaborators sound at ease. On Exit Wounds, the Wallflowers finally turn into the classic rock band they always ached to be.

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Bibio smartly reteams with Olivier St. Louis for a brief, effervescent, if somewhat canned retro R&B homage.

The Serious EP

Stephen Wilkinson knows a good thing when he hears it. The English multi-instrumentalist and electronic producer’s albums as Bibio usually draw on an acuity for curation rather than composition. He collects fine-grained sounds and moods from lightly dusted corners of music and mounts them in blurry exhibits with bespoke cultural histories. On his new EP, he curates himself, correctly identifying and expanding on the best thing about his last record.
The ’80s R&B homage “Why So Serious?” stood out on the day-glo pop pastiche A Mineral Love because of a charming guest spot by Olivier St. Louis (née Daysoul), a UK vocalist who previously appeared on tracks by Hudson Mohawke and Onra. Bibio’s settings are often distorted, as though smeared in memory, but this one was unusually period-perfect, with a guitar picking out spiky cursive in a breathy mix of synths and percussion, and a vocal line masking sex with tender concepts like devotion. It was a markedly simple look for a producer prone to bouts of electronic psychedelia.
On The Serious EP, Bibio and St. Louis concoct three new songs in the same style, and though not one is as effortlessly head-turning as the original, a pleasant froth is sustained throughout. The most striking is “Stress Me Out,” where a parched funk crunch elicits a restive performance from St. Louis, whose effects rely more on timing and inflection than natural timbre. The quieter storms of “Make Up” and “Night Falls”—an abandoned vocal from A Mineral Love with new custom-built music—are much flatter, briefly descending and dispersing with little development. They miss the loose, casual strut of their source, and the faint but pervasive remove typical of Bibio starts to creep in.
According to Wilkinson, he and St. Louis hung out at his country cottage but then made the EP over email, which may account for the lack of spontaneous interaction detectable in the tracks. Though the retro R&B style is timely, Bibio and St. Louis don’t modify it with hovering menace, like the Weeknd; or a political charge, like Blood Orange; or restrained anger, like Frank Ocean. Like the canned effervescence of the music, the emotions seem patched in from another time, neutralized by distance.
St. Louis’ lyrics here are more general than personal, let alone idiosyncratic. “Make Up” is dominated by bromides about how you’ve got to try to succeed, and so on. “Stress Me Out” is about what it feels like to be stressed out. It’s unabashedly light, limited, occasional fare. But it’s also a needed freshening up of an increasingly opaque discography. The title track is a keeper, and the prospect of Bibio providing his colorful instrumentals to other singers—albeit in a more thorough, ambitious, altogether more serious way—is an intriguing one.


The sequel to the canonical Atlanta mixtape is meant to be a legacy-defining stamp, but despite all its glossy guest stars (Morgan Freeman!), it never rises above “just fine.”

Savage Mode 2

Savage Mode 2 wants to be a moment, at a time when the only moments that seem to matter are life-and-death. It’s the sequel to the mixtape immortalized in the Atlanta hip-hop canon, the one that made 21 Savage a star and cemented Metro Boomin as the signature rap producer of the 2010s. It’s Metro’s official return after almost two years of near silence, and most notably, 21’s first release since he was unjustly detained and threatened with deportation by ICE. It’s packaged with a cover made by the historic Pen and Pixel company and it features Drake and Young Thug guest appearances, along with Morgan Freeman, who gives a Big Rube-style monologue about “Snitches and Rats.”
Sequels are supposed to be bigger, louder, and more expansive. Throughout Savage Mode 2 it’s obvious that this duty is weighing on their shoulders. Savage Mode was a straightforward collection of nine good-to-great songs, while the sequel is intended to be a legacy-defining stamp. You can tell that every piano chord, 808, and sample chop was endlessly stressed over; Metro’s production is not as effortless as it once was.
At their worst, Metro and 21 try too hard. On “Said N Done,” Metro’s flip of Stephanie Mills’ “Touch Me Now” is smooth, but given to 21, it feels like it’s only purpose is to capitalize on the modestly viral Instagram videos of the rapper singing along to R&B hits. When the Atlanta rapper unleashes the in-his-feelings side of his personality it’s gimmicky, which is most clear on the Drake-assisted “Mr. Right Now.” “Slip and slide like a waterfall/You need some TLC, we can creep if you want,” raps 21, squeezing in the most surface-level ’90s R&B references imaginable.
But Metro is up to the task, despite some overthinking. The St. Louis-raised beatmaker does more than simply lay the foundation for 21 Savage, who at his best sounds like the rare villain in a slasher movie that you root for. Metro completely controls the brooding atmosphere, with beats that lay drum patterns rooted in Atlanta trap and Memphis crunk over an unpredictable mix of melodies and samples.
“Glock in My Lap” is arguably the most cinematic beat Metro’s ever made. Produced alongside Honorable C.N.O.T.E. and Southside, their three consecutive producer tags add tension like the consecutive footsteps on a creaky floor in a horror movie. All 21 has to do is follow Metro’s lead. Similarly, the busy “Rich Nigga Shit” instrumental madly weaves together a hypnotic string section with a breezy West Coast vibe (and lots of cowbell). It shouldn’t work but does, like a french fry dipped in a milkshake. 21 comes off slightly unnatural on the song, ultimately overshadowed by a Young Thug guest verse memorable enough to reignite Metro Thuggin pipedreams.
21 Savage is only comfortable when Metro is slightly more reserved. “Slidin” could fit on any Metro project released in the last half decade, and 21 is naturally rapping about violence as if he gets a kick out of it like O-Dog in Menace II Society: “I just made an opp do the running man,” he raps. His punchlines have been better, but he makes up for it by sounding like he’s skipping through a wasteland. “Steppin On Niggas” is the one Metro risk where 21 holds his own; he flows like he spent time studying Eazy-E.
Nevertheless it’s hard to be swept up by the aura of Savage Mode 2 when it’s just fine. The first Savage Mode didn’t become an ATL classic because of celebrity cameos or Billboard numbers; it was because Metro and 21 were at the peak of their powers, and only the producer is close here. 21 Savage is just along for the ride.

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On their impressive debut album for DFA, London's Factory Floor exist along an axis of artists that embrace industrial, post-punk, disco, acid, avant-garde minimalism, electro, dub and-- most crucially-- the dancefloor, without being beholden to any one genre.

Factory Floor

Originally signed to London’s blastfirstpetite label, Factory Floor’s earliest transmissions included a 10” plus DVD box set and most telling, a 12” featuring remixes from the likes of Throbbing Gristle’s Christ Carter and Joy Division/New Order’s Stephen Morris. Soon after, Factory Floor collaborated with Chris & Cosey, the Pop Group’s Mark Stewart, and former New York downtown disco composer Peter Gordon, showing that the new band was well aware of its sonic forebears. Their sinewy self-titled debut for DFA now orients Factory Floor along an axis of artists that embrace industrial, post-punk, disco, acid, avant-garde minimalism, electro, dub and-- most crucially-- the dancefloor, without being beholden to any one genre.
It speaks to the trio’s acumen that, for all of the above musical signifiers, their album never feels overstuffed. They’ve peeled back the industrial drones that informed their earliest releases so as to get at the throbbing heart underneath. It’s evident from the start as “Turn It Up” starts as a 164 BPM tock before quickly paring down to a sensible 124 BPMs: With just a nerve-jangling synth line and handful of percussive events-- including a hi-hat that sounds as if the band whetted it down to a razor’s edge-- Void’s processed voice slithers between the masculine and feminine, and there’s enough frigid, metallic-tinged negative space to suggest a meat locker.
“Here Again” is similarly spartan: an ascending arpeggio, a twitch of a beat, a mix of sequencer and Gurnsey’s beat at its most mechanistic, Void’s “ooohs” dubbed to the point of turning to steam. The trio constantly ratchet up the pressure until the song’s midway point, wherein the tension finally breaks and Void’s line can finally be heard. It’s one of the few moments on the album where such anxiety actually gives way to release.
The album’s highlight is the seven-minute “Fall Back”. “Did it feel like you were going to fall on the ground?”, Void asks in a detached tone that falls between Throbbing Gristle’s “Hamburger Lady” and an alien abduction interrogation. The menace grows from there. When Factory Floor are in this mode, DFA’s influence is most clearly felt; it’s a perfect amalgam of programmed acid lines that seem about to ooze blood and live drums that mimic a man-machine, a hybrid sound of flesh and circuitry that underpinned the label’s most crucial singles. It’s certainly the most visceral music the label has released since the earliest Juan Maclean sides (and it’s the eeriest outside of the Invisible Conga People single).
The album’s lone drawback is that, for much of the disc’s 53 minutes, there are barely varying degrees of pressurization. The pacing falls somewhere between the dread of Walter White walking down his gasoline-soaked hallway on "Breaking Bad" versus the dread of walking the zombie-filled prison corridors of "The Walking Dead". The three minute-long interludes sprinkled throughout do little to leaven the situation. It’s exhausting, to where by album’s end, I’d be hard-pressed to differentiate between “Work Out” and “Breathe In”, even though both are bracing and thrilling as isolated tracks. But in a year where the likes of Kanye and Trent Reznor have reached deep into the dark circuitry of the Wax Trax back catalog to revive the corpse of industrial music, Factory Floor’s relentlessness suits the present moment.


On his fourth solo album of the year, the Louisiana rapper wears his regional roots with brash defiance. It’s a reminder of how thrilling he can be when he’s focused and cohesive.

YoungBoy Never Broke Again: 3800 Degrees

3800 Degrees

YoungBoy Never Broke Again is a viral phenomenon like few others. When you break down the streaming data, the endlessly controversy-baiting Baton Rouge rapper is one of the biggest artists in the world, with his own Fortnite emote to boot. Yet he remains a cult figure, with almost no radio support and few live performances, due to his enduring legal troubles. His fame is an example of what some critics have called “invisible music stardom,” the product of a fractured industry in which artists can rack up massive streaming numbers without being packaged and promoted to the public as pop artists usually are. There’s no real deliberate strategy behind his releases, aside from completely flooding the rap market and offering another song for the algorithm to shuffle. YouTube in particular is where YoungBoy is king: It’s a fitting platform for an artist whose lyrical threats and real-life exploits paint him as an extreme provocateur.
But on 3800 Degrees, his fourth full-length solo album of 2022, YoungBoy stakes his claim as an artist whose impact transcends the world of the internet. Though stylistically very different, in spirit, 3800 Degrees is similar to the turn Young Thug took around the time of the release of his debut commercial mixtape Barter 6. Back then, Thug’s frequently overwhelming flood of releases and leaks distilled into a more thoughtful and cohesive product. At 33 minutes, 3800 Degrees is more concise than many of YoungBoy’s frequently meandering albums. With its compact style and classic sound, it is more critic-friendly and more appealing to old head haters.
If you didn’t know YoungBoy had signed to Cash Money, you could probably guess based on the Juvenile-inspired cover art—an early signal that this album seeks to place YoungBoy in a particular historical lineage. The throwbacks go deeper than just the visuals, though; YoungBoy’s remix of C-Murder’s “Like a Jungle” presaged the nostalgia of 3800 Degrees. The production is a not-quite-retro but still classic affair, draped in the kind of clean basslines and MIDI piano you might hear on a No Limit release.
Despite his willingness to buck convention, YoungBoy is almost like a Voltron assembled from the legends of Louisiana rap: There’s the alien wavelengths of Lil Wayne, the erratic intensity of Silkk the Shocker and Mystikal, and the bluesy passion of Boosie and Kevin Gates. On “Choppa on My Shoulda,” YoungBoy offers himself as the literal reincarnation of Louisiana rap’s golden age: “So cutthroat, you would think that they brought Slim back from Magnolia.” YoungBoy wears his regional roots with pride on the bounce production “Ampd Up,” which recruits fellow Baton Rouge native Mouse on tha Track and includes a salsa-style montuno piano.
He’s not always fast or especially clever in his wordplay, but YoungBoy’s bars are frequently dense, delivered with an almost demonic energy; he crams his words into spaces where other rappers might need a breath. Every bar twists and swerves, his voice at once a high-pitched whine and a deep rumble. YoungBoy is a toxic crooner with a fondness for heartbroken ballads—there’s guitar all over albums like August’s The Last Slimeto, but 3800 Degrees strips away the soulful side to emphasize the menace. The pain and passion intertwine, with the paranoia of a life constantly lived on edge filtering into every moment.
Emotion dictates his delivery above all else, but YoungBoy’s raps never feel quite like pure freestyle either, with lyrics and phrases infused with melody for emphasis. On “Won’t Step on Me,” YoungBoy effortlessly pivots between a sing-song chorus and relentless verses; he lets his Southern twang hang out, contorting “Baton Rouge” to rhyme with “would.” The unrestrained intensity feels first-take and off-the-dome, his flow almost taunting the beat, never respecting its confines or rhythms, words spilling outside the margins. E-40 comes through with a guest verse and product placement for his branded wine, the Earl Stevens Mangoscato, on “Thug Nigga Story,” suggesting another reference point for YoungBoy’s wordy and unpredictable flows.
Even when YoungBoy is working with vintage sounds, he still exists on his own terms, arriving with brash defiance. As he declares on “It Could Go,” “I ain’t no 2Pac of this generation, I’m AI YoungBoy.” Just like he plays with the beat and twists his words into unexpected combinations, YoungBoy toys with tradition. He contains multitudes: he’s an heir to No Limit and Cash Money, an artist who embodies the idea of “gangsta rap” like few artists have since the 1990s. But he’s also prescient, building his empire by gaming new platforms and algorithms. More than any of his other full-length albums, 3800 Degrees is a culmination of—and a direct statement about—his ethos as an artist and individual. The surface may change, but the hustle at the heart of it all is timeless.


Newly reissued by Ghostly, this 2008 release from the influential experimental trio represents the zenith of their early drone excursions, and hints at the more meticulous compositions that were to come.

Solar Bridge

In their seven years as a trio, Emeralds evolved from jammy, lo-fi noiseniks into advanced abstractionists and, eventually, unabashed sentimentalists—from the “bullshit boring drone band” they once jokingly called themselves into prog-rock perfectionists, stalwart believers in the transcendental power of arpeggios and counterpoint. Between 2006 and 2008, their first three years together, John Elliott, Steve Hauschildt, and Mark McGuire were furiously prolific, putting out at least 37 releases—mostly CD-Rs and cassettes of freeform, side-long improv sessions recorded at home in Cleveland. Solar Bridge, originally released in June 2008 and newly reissued by Ghostly, nine years since the group disintegrated, is one of the peaks of that early period. A transitional work—not only their first CD release but also the first album they recorded to a computer, rather than straight to tape—it represents the zenith of their longform drone excursions before they moved on to shorter, more varied, and more meticulously composed pieces with their four subsequent major statements: Emeralds, What Happened, Does It Look Like I’m Here?, and Just to Feel Anything.
Particularly in their early years, Emeralds forced people to think differently about the act of listening. Or if not to think, exactly—because the best of their music operates on an unconscious level—then to feel differently, to orient yourself in new ways with your ears. Compared to the aggro overload often espoused by their Midwestern noise kin, Emeralds preferred to slow down and space out, opting for immersion over confrontation. Especially on record, their music prized interiority. In the early work, there are few riffs, melodies, or grooves—in fact, few identifiable musical events at all. Very little could be said to happen, and when it does, it’s often so gradual as to be imperceptible. Everything is blurred; with the rare exception of when McGuire’s guitar snakes forth from the mix, it’s impossible to discern what anyone is doing. On their early cassettes, their music resembles—in the most hypnotic way possible—a faraway airplane heard from inside a walk-in cooler while a flatbed hauling beehives idles outside.
That description largely holds for Solar Bridge. Despite recording digitally, they were still improvising in real time, with no subsequent edits or overdubs, and nothing on the album’s two original tracks, nor the reissue-only, previously unheard “Photosphere,” sounds like it could have been planned. Twelve and a half minutes long, “Magic” crosses the depth and density of a Rothko painting with the minimalistic detail of an Agnes Martin. Newly remastered, the Ghostly edition sounds markedly more vivid than the original (and that’s before taking into account the fact that many people’s experience of the first edition will have been not even via the original CD or LP, but as a lossy YouTube rip). A rumbling swath of minor-key drones establishes the color field; an infinitude of squiggle and fizz supplies the filigreed line work. The shape of the piece is a crescendo in search of a climax that never comes, as thickets of buzz swell and intensify. Twice, the music reaches an imperceptible peak before easing off, making way for a subtle shift in the tone color. There’s a suggestion of rhythm buried in the churn, but with so many oscillators running out of phase, you can only lock into a given pulse for a few cycles before your attention drifts to another. A multiplicity of experiences, all taking place simultaneously, are embedded in the tension between mechanical repetition and freeform drift.
“The Quaking Mess” operates according to similar principles, stretching out a single pedal tone for the length of its 14-minute run. For the first half, it’s arrayed in glistening tones that suggest coins spinning on a zinc countertop; McGuire’s guitar seeks out pockets of silence in the swirl to sketch brief, mournful suggestions of melody. In the second half, as additional frequencies fan out across the spectrum, filling in the intervals of the scale, a ringing open fifth assumes an almost architectural heft, like a pair of Greek columns emerging from the mist, and the final plateau is a monolithic drone of Sunn O)))-like intensity. The 17-minute “Photosphere,” on the other hand, is among the quietest, gentlest cuts in the band’s catalog—little more than a soft, shimmering cloud of the most reluctant dissonance. Listen closely, and you’ll hear a three-note melody cycling slowly downward, but otherwise, it sounds almost incidental, like a particularly sleepy chorus of guitar feedback. Eventually it fades out, lending the impression it might go on forever.
The serenity of “Photosphere” makes for a provocative contrast with the two tracks from Solar Bridge’s original release. Recalling the dank, muted qualities of Allegory of Allergies, a two-hour cassette that preceded Solar Bridge by 11 months, it underscores an element of the trio’s sound that has tended to be overlooked. While they were active, Emeralds were often described in cosmic terms, in no small part for the obvious influence they took from so-called kosmische German acts of the 1970s, like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Popol Vuh. But as time went on, they began to resist that reductive framing, and with good reason: They were cultivating their own style, one grown from a specifically Midwestern strain of psychedelia. While it’s possible to imagine their sprawling drones as the soundtracks to thousand-year-journeys across the Milky Way, there was always something refreshingly earthy about their music. You could just as easily flip the telescope and invert the metaphor, trading galactic webs for the mycorrhizal networks running through the soil beneath our feet—every vibrating frequency, every quivering tendril of tone, a zigzagging branch in a vast, interconnected symbiosis. Part of the beauty of revisiting Solar Bridge today is the opportunity it offers to revise what we thought we knew about the band.


The serrated new EP from rawboned Philadelphia art rock band Palm is their best work to date, full of tensions that boil over and careen.

Shadow Expert EP

When you hang with the same people long enough, you inevitably invent your own dialect with them. You also probably get sick of them occasionally. Palm’s Kasra Kurt, Eve Alpert, Hugo Stanley, and Gerasimos Livitsanos have a preternatural ability to get both of those ideas across at once with their rawboned art rock. Kurt and Alpert have been playing together since high school; in 2012, they formed Palm with Stanley and Kurt’s roommate Livitsanos at New York’s Bard College before relocating to Philadelphia. None of the quartet is trained in their respective instruments, so they developed their own messy syntax from scratch. Consequently, listening to Shadow Expert, their best work to date, is a lot like trying to understand people quarreling in a language you don’t understand. Surely there is a fundamental logic, but it can be impossible to tell.
With that, Palm create the frenzied mental math of an obsessive, circular argument. Kurt’s and Alpert’s contrapuntal guitar phrases on “Walkie Talkie” and “Trying” are ceaseless repetitions of warring thoughts that count to infinity before tensions boil over into new wildly careening anxieties, never resolving anything along the way. Shadow Expert’s six tracks only last for 17 minutes because diagramming that kind of entropy is completely unsustainable. By “Sign to Signal,” the album’s last track, attrition takes over and a final instrumental attack gradually sputters. It’s disorienting and exhausting.
Inscrutable though they may be, Palm are not completely sui generis: They descend from a long line of experimental weirdos. Throughout Shadow Expert you can hear echoes of Slint’s Spiderland, the brash clangor of pre-SST Sonic Youth, the tricky time signatures of math rock demigods Battles, and the wonky iridescence of Deerhoof and tUnE-yArDs (the latter two have shared producer Eli Crews with Palm). But whether or not they have the chaotic compositions of these forbears in mind, Palm seem most interested in willfully straddling the line of communication breakdowns.
With a shoegaze ethos, Kurt and Alpert’s vocals are utilitarian, generally dedicated to how they are interacting rather than what they are saying. In an uncommon moment of intelligibility, Kurt, who sometimes sounds like Avey Tare, admits as much on “Walnut” when he slowly tuts “I’ve had enough of,” before enunciating every syllable: “speak-ing words so you might un-der-stand!” Palm Mad Lib-ed together the lyrics of “Walkie Talkie” from magazine clippings, and in the song’s spiky midsection, Alpert and Kurt alternate chirping words at each other, finishing each other’s thoughts via the imagined titular device. But after this flurry, a familiar phrase—the title of their previous record—emerges: “Trading basics with each other,” Kurt sings amid the band’s controlled detonations.
Trading Basics, with a few exceptions, was more subdued and straightforward than the serrated Shadow Expert, but the concept behind their debut’s name remains pertinent. At points, as on “Trying,” Stanley’s frenetic drumming perfectly mimics the panicked guitar stabs. At others, like “Two Toes,” Livitsanos’ thundering bass tries to restrain Kurt and Alpert’s guitars from jumping down one another’s throats before an unexpected moment of strummed unison. The band is constantly communicating in esoteric shorthand, often in several cross-talking conversations at once. What is basic to them is confounding to the listener, and they take that idea to a logical extreme.
In doing so, Palm offer a paradox about the precise chaos of Shadow Expert. They are navigating jagged angles, often introducing new tensions without resolving old ones, but their combined efforts create their own synchronicity. Conflict, in and of itself, becomes an act of solidarity.


An extensive 4xCD set celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Paisley Underground mainstays’ debut LP, chronicling the early years of the Los Angeles group’s underground rock.

The Dream Syndicate: The Days of Wine and Roses (Expanded Edition)

The Days Of Wine and Roses (40th Anniversary Expanded Edition)

The Dream Syndicate took their name from a 1973 album by Tony Conrad called Outside the Dream Syndicate. Conrad, in turn, was making a reference to the experimental group he co-founded with La Monte Young and John Cale, which tinkered with free jazz, drone, classical, and what Young called “dream music.” Even without those associations, it’s a great band name, combining the institutional with the mysterious, but that nod to Conrad and his cohort speaks to big ideas about what rock’n’roll could say and how it could say it. These three kids in their early twenties, along with the more seasoned drummer they persuaded to join them, were fascinated by ideas of noise and abrasion, din and drone, deconstruction and entropy, and they were committed to bringing those ideas to rock clubs. To audiences in the early 1980s, that mission made them just as confrontational as the punk bands still roaming L.A., and even more confounding.
They were equally besotted with the mainstream pop and rock of the 1960s, celebrating Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds right alongside Nuggets and the Velvet Underground. Those interests aligned the band with a crew of local acts that would coalesce into the Paisley Underground, which included the Bangles, the Rain Parade, and Green on Red. Both of these pools of influence—’60s rock and ’60s avant-garde—combine beautifully on their debut, The Days of Wine and Roses, released in 1982 and generally considered to be a college-rock landmark with an outsize impact on the Minutemen and R.E.M., among others. It’s an album of sparkling spontaneity, full of songs that creep and crawl with a weird, dark energy, as though even the players themselves don’t always know where they’re headed. Pitting highly structured songcraft against discursive guitar outbursts, the Dream Syndicate struck a precarious balance of order and chaos that remains exciting and combustible four decades later.
Commemorating the album’s 40th anniversary, this 54-song, 4xCD expanded edition of The Days of Wine and Roses shows how the band developed those big ideas during its first days together. While not presented in chronological order, the set works as a year-in-the-life history that includes some of their earliest rehearsals, shows, and recordings. The L.A. scene was in flux in the early ’80s: The first wave of punk bands had generally subsided, and hardcore was only just starting up. New-wave and skinny-tie bands were enjoying some success, but they reflected larger trends rather than specifically local concerns. Fresh out of college, Steve Wynn found a job at Rhino Records (the store, not the label), where his co-workers dramatically expanded his musical vocabulary. Nels Cline had a particularly profound impact on Wynn, introducing him to the works of Don Cherry and Albert Ayler, among other free-jazz pioneers.
Yet Wynn’s first recordings barely hint at what would make the Dream Syndicate so distinctive. In October 1981 he taped a handful of songs in his basement with a 4-track and a drum machine and released two of them under the name 15 Minutes. There’s a peculiar charm in the way he turns his primitive setup into a dank aesthetic—an approach that works best on “That’s What You Always Say.” With its tinny robot beat and Wynn’s low, close-mic’ed vocals, this demo sounds curiously goth, or at the very least suggests he’ll soon start a new-wave band. Compare that version to the one the Dream Syndicate recorded a few months later, just a week after they made their live debut at Club Lingerie. This version, released on their Down There EP, opens with Kendra Smith playing a walking bassline just a click too fast, then gives way to Wynn and Karl Precoda’s violent guitar scribbles. It has a lot more life than the 15 Minutes version, not to mention a frazzled paranoia that recalls the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.”
The quartet spent much of 1982 practicing and playing shows around Southern California. In May they booked a short set at a vintage store called 1313 Mockingbird Lane, a show notable primarily for the debut of an eight-minute instrumental called “It’s Gonna Be Alright.” It’s not a jam so much as a distension and distortion, with the band rending the song as they play it. The rhythm section of bassist Smith and drummer Dennis Duck (who’d just defected from Human Hands) holds everything together with what could be a krautrock cover of “Gimme Some Lovin’,” while Wynn and Precoda sound like they’re cramming in bits of every other song they know. At any given moment it’s a Can jam, a lysergic Pink Floyd freakout, a psych-rock rave-up, an act of punk aggression, a hoedown. It’s a mess, but an exciting one.
When they played the song again in September—live on KPFK, at 2 a.m., with a live audience—they were calling it “Open Hour” but still capturing that same barely contained chaos. It didn’t make the final tracklist for their debut LP, perhaps because it was too unwieldy for an album of such controlled sprawl. Eventually it did morph into “John Coltrane Stereo Blues” on their 1984 follow-up, This Is Not the New Dream Syndicate.
All of these experiments and experiences culminated in The Days of Wine and Roses, which focused the band’s wilder forays while sharpening their songcraft. “Definitely Clean” has the tumble-down-the-stairs energy and lascivious feedback of prime Kinks, with Wynn and Precoda’s guitars racing toward a finish line. A similar riff works in a completely different way on “Halloween,” which sounds like the players turned their sheet music upside down. Rather than carry momentum, the guitars disrupt it in a deeply unsettling way. There are moments of sunny clarity on these songs, yet most of the album exists in a woozy, dreamlike space: “I dreamed last night I was born a thousand years ago,” Wynn sings on “When You Smile,” which locates a queasy existentialism in the imagery of silly love songs: “It seems like the end of the world when you smile.”
In some ways, it really was the end of the world. Before The Days of Wine and Roses even hit record stores, Smith left the band; she would soon form Opal with David Roback. The Dream Syndicate weathered frequent turnover throughout the rest of the decade, finally breaking up in 1989, before reuniting in 2012. During their initial run, they released a string of perfectly fine albums that sound overthought and overproduced compared to their debut. That makes the nostalgia of the album title sound like a self-fulfilling prophecy, as though they already knew that it was all downhill from 1982. But Days isn’t about the past, despite their fascination with both the avant-garde and the mainstream of the ’60s. It’s more about the present moment and all the possibilities it holds; by focusing on the immediate now—not any one point in 1982 but the point of inspiration and creation—this crew of young, inexperienced thinkers and players managed to translate heady ideas into visceral music.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a monumental artifact of soul—one of the best live albums of all time, from the singer who wrote the 20th century’s defining civil rights anthem.

Sam Cooke: One Night Stand! Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963

About three-quarters of the way through One Night Stand! Live at the Harlem Square Club, the beat stops and Sam Cooke says he’s gotta tell us about his baby right now. Backed by drumrolls, clattering cymbals, and a swaying buzz of minor-chord guitar, Cooke is speak-singing, hoarsely, in a free-flowing cadence. He and his lover fussed and fought; she left; he feels so alone; and now he has to banter with a telephone operator before finally—finally!—he gets through to her. “I got a message for you, honey/I wanna tell you that darling you-u-u-u-uuuu, ohhhhhhh,” he roars, desperate and teasing. The crowd can’t stand it, erupts in shrieks; you can pick out individual voices. Smoke and booze hang in the sweaty Saturday night air. Cooke starts up again: “You send me.”
It’s a sly twist on Cooke’s first pop hit and only No. 1, “You Send Me,” originally released in 1957. At Miami’s Harlem Square Club, he bats the title around twice more, each time heightening the expectation he’ll switch into the familiar tune, each time also reminding us how far he’s evolved since then. Cooke doesn’t end up playing the rest of the song, but his howling entreaties make the mere promise of it feel like the entire world. When, right at the brink and without straying from his telephone story, he abruptly pivots into a different number, the 1950s are vanquished and the ’60s have definitively begun.
As a civil rights advocate and architect of soul music, alongside Ray Charles, Cooke is a towering figure in American history. After Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Rosa Parks comforted herself by listening to Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” and its resonance has never waned since, from Barack Obama’s first presidential election victory speech to the funeral of George Floyd. The song has become foundational, and so is Cooke’s artistry as a whole, touching anyone who was ever influenced by soul: Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding on through to Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen, Sexyy Red and Jonathan Richman, and many more in between.
And yet for someone whose legacy has become such a part of the cultural firmament, Cooke remains surprisingly mysterious. As a successful Black singer, songwriter, and businessperson—he co-founded his own label, SAR Records, at a time when that was rare for any artist—Cooke prefigured Prince and Michael Jackson. In 1986, he was one of the first 10 inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside obvious shoo-ins like Elvis Presley. But even then, Rolling Stone misstated both the place and year of Cooke’s birth. Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic executive who coined the term “rhythm and blues,” told The New York Times that Cooke was “the best singer who ever lived,” but not before the same Times critic got Cooke’s home city wrong. Though he died in 1964, Cooke seems to somehow keep winning Grammys, including a lifetime achievement award in 1999, but his discography has hardly been given the retrospective attention of other industry titans from the era. His work is messy and alive, and fraught with existential contradictions.
In 1931, Samuel Cook was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the Delta blues birthplace at whose crossroads Robert Johnson purportedly sold his soul to the Devil. He was the fifth of eight children, carried by his mother on a Greyhound bus to Chicago while still a toddler. There, he started his singing career in his father’s church at the precocious age of 6, performing alongside his siblings as the Singing Children. At 16, he joined up with a local teenage gospel group, the Highway QCs. Three years later, he was invited to join the gospel circuit’s more established Soul Stirrers. At 26, he made his solo, secular debut—first unceremoniously with a one-off single as Dale Cook, and then, with an added “e” to seem “classier,” as Sam Cooke, with “You Send Me.”
In “You Send Me,” Cooke delivered a masterpiece of restraint, expressing the giddiness of new love with a breezy sophistication that kept any hint of romantic love’s usual erotic frisson concealed beneath the smooth surface. “You move me,” he sang, with the disarming politesse of Eddie Haskell, several years before the Troggs roughened the phrase on “Wild Thing.” A string of hits that still populate oldies stations, film soundtracks, and karaoke songbooks would follow, but there’s plenty of reason to wonder what could have been. As was typical of the pre-rock era, Cooke’s albums were often scattershot, at least until he won artistic control in late 1963. And even then, with an eye on the careers of the few other Black performers who had won over the era’s white audiences—especially jazz-pop trailblazer Nat King Cole and Cooke’s near-contemporaries like Harry Belafonte and Johnny Mathis—Cooke was not averse to supper-club schmaltz. Devastatingly, Cooke was shot and killed under disputed circumstances on December 11, 1964. In a posthumous insult, industry vagaries kept portions of his catalog languishing out of print for decades.
One Night Stand! Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 is a monumental soul artifact, one of the greatest live albums of all time, and, in its defiant partying from the depths of the segregated South, a veiled precursor to the explicit activism of “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which wasn’t released as a single until after Cooke’s death. In a scant 10 tracks and 39 minutes, the album captures one of the most beguiling figures of 20th-century music as close to the peak of his powers as he was ever recorded, sounding grittier and more seductive than you’ll hear on those good-times oldies blocks but still every bit in command. Now, 60 years later, it’s a righteous celebration that collapses the decades.
Ahead of the performance that would end up on One Night Stand!, Cooke was in a fascinating flux. At the start of 1962, he was already the best-selling singles artist on RCA after Elvis. That October, while James Brown was in Harlem recording what would become his classic Live at the Apollo—and when nuclear tensions peaked during the Cuban Missile Crisis—Cooke was touring the UK with Little Richard, who dashed off for a Liverpool bill headlining above the Beatles. The appreciative reaction overseas helped encourage Cooke to incorporate more gospel fervor into a reworked set, which he debuted at the Apollo, complete with hanging-on-the-telephone “You Send Me” riff, on November 2. On the same Apollo bill was another soul luminary, saxophonist King Curtis, who Cooke cajoled into joining him on an upcoming Southern tour even though, as a revered session player, he could have made more money at home. Cooke closed out 1962 with a return to his roots, joining the Soul Stirrers onstage for New Year’s Eve.
At the same time Cooke was emphasizing gospel passion in his live music, he was becoming more politically engaged. He was poring over the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the pioneering Black writer from the post-Reconstruction period. According to Cooke’s biographer Peter Guralnick, he was also “undoubtedly” reading a James Baldwin essay published in The New Yorker in November 1962. Alongside an urgent call to action, the piece, part of the writer’s enduring race-relations book The Fire Next Time, ends with a powerful assertion that Black is beautiful. Right before the tour with King Curtis, Cooke gave an interview urging his fellow Black stars not to forget Black weekly newspapers and magazines.
No one seems to remember how it was decided that two RCA engineers would be flown down to record Cooke’s January 12, 1963 performance in Miami. The Harlem Square Club was a 2,000-capacity building within the “Little Broadway” district of the segregated city’s historically Black neighborhood of Overtown. According to Newsweek, “Liquor was sold from a caged enclosure by a bartender armed with a shotgun.” The engineers set up their equipment—eight microphones and a three-track mixer—during a 4 p.m. matinee, adjusted it once the crowd exploded for the first evening show, at 10 p.m., and then gave up all hope of getting back to the stage before the late show, at 1 a.m., which would be immortalized on One Night Stand!.
It’s the strongest full-length Cooke ever laid to tape. His studio albums—even the best, August 1963’s wee-small-hours blues opus Night Beat and February 1964’s expansive Ain’t That Good News—were lavished with strings, choirs, and superfluous cover songs aimed at white swells with fat wallets. Live at the Harlem Square Club showcases a tight, guitar-driven band that King Curtis’ fiery sax takes to another level; Cooke’s vocals, while still as melismatic and controlled as ever, are gorgeously rough-edged. Aside from King Curtis’ introductory “Soul Twist”—a 1962 instrumental hit—and a wry rendition of the Nat King Cole standard “(I Love You) for Sentimental Reasons” that’s tucked away at the back end of a woozy medley, One Night Stand! is all Cooke originals. It’s an ode to spontaneity and evanescence that feels as elaborately plotted as a concept album.
In this setting, Cooke’s hits take on new life. After a few words from King Curtis and a friendly greeting from Cooke, “Feel It (Don’t Fight It)” sets out a pair of favored Cooke themes, the transcendent powers of good music and young love, at an uncharacteristically breakneck pace; even if you wanted to fight the feeling, you’d have to catch it first. “Cupid” arrives almost in quotes—“Maybe you remember this one,” Cooke begins, “a very nice little song, nice and sweet”—and accentuates the original’s Caribbean feel and stretches out the onomatopoeic “sss” when Cupid’s arrow goes “straight to my lover’s heart,” while Cooke’s chuckles drive home the irony that for all of the tragedies in his life, he surely never had to pray to a minor Greek love deity. Cooke livens up his dance craze tie-in “Twistin’ the Night Away,” here interpolated with part of Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” by exhorting everyone to “take round” their handkerchiefs; his “take the, take the, take the” ad libs feel as jubilantly insistent as a Chuck Berry guitar lick.
Cooke’s interplay with the crowd also transforms the material. “Chain Gang” was always an unusual pop hit, with lyrics about forced, largely Black labor, and the propulsive Harlem Square Club version posits an alternative universe where the Clash covered this instead of “I Fought the Law.” But there’s a secondary type of release in a mass of people shouting “uhh” and “ahh” as Cooke purrs, “Oh yeah,” that seems more in line with the lusty grunts at the end of Fleetwood Mac’s “Big Love.” In a full-throated sing-along of “(I Love You) for Sentimental Reasons,” at least one woman’s voice stands out on its own, filling out the harmony. Other voices squeal. Not unlike Apollo 11, the 2019 moon-landing documentary using unreleased archival footage, it feels like you’re bearing witness to a key historical moment from an uncannily intimate perspective.
Part of the tension of One Night Stand! comes from Cooke’s purposefully sappy celebrations of love positioned alongside his real-world cynicism. The front end of the “Sentimental Reasons” medley is the Cooke original “It’s All Right,” a song of unconditional devotion that’s introduced as advice for men who hear that their lovers have been unfaithful—they should try a little tenderness, obviously. The second-to-last song of the set, “Nothing Can Change This Love,” seems like a swooning love song that’s all “cake and ice cream” in the lyrics, but Cooke’s cackling laughter, King Curtis’ yearning sax solo, and the band’s ragged minor chords emphasize the cracks in the studio original’s cool reserve.
Cooke’s deconstructed take on “You Send Me” follows another sweeping bit of self-mythologizing. On the bluesy “Somebody Have Mercy,” then his most recent song on the pop charts, Cooke sings about “goin’ down to the bus station”—his own autobiographical crossroads—and wondering if a “cotton-pickin’ matchbox” will hold his clothes (“Can you imagine me carrying one of them suitcases?” he asks the audience). At its core, it’s another song about lovesickness—“have mercy” in the Roy Orbison-Jesse Katsopolis sense—but in another ad lib, Cooke shoots down an urban legend circulating at the time: “It ain’t that leukemia, that ain’t it,” he deadpans. He soon chuckles, but the need to respond to a “Paul is dead”-level conspiracy theory is an indication of the pressures confronting a gospel-turned-pop star, two weeks shy of his 32nd birthday, long before the 24-hour news cycle. The live version, with another standout King Curtis solo, vastly improves on the studio cut, but the closing lyric would be malapropistic brilliance in any incarnation: “I got such a long way to get there/And such a short time to go,” Cooke sings. It doesn’t make sense, but the dissociated feeling resonates through the ages.
One Night Stand! crests—as does, arguably, Cooke’s entire career pre-“A Change Is Gonna Come”—with an incredible rendition of “Bring It On Home to Me,” then a recent non-album single and Cooke’s most gospel-charged solo side to date. “This song gon’ tell you how I feel,” Cooke begins, and he doesn’t let the audience down; if you listen closely, you’ll hear a thumping sound that can only be Cooke pounding his chest. The band is raucous, Cooke exudes joy, and the crowd sings along like it’ll keep the lights from going on, Cooke from leaving, them from having to go home to 1963 reality. Cooke recognizes it, too: “Everybody’s with me tonight!”
As critic Hilary Saunders has written, One Night Stand! throws “the party of the century on the eve of destruction.” Six months after its recording, Cooke’s 18-month-old son died in a drowning accident. In October, Cooke was turned away from a Shreveport, Louisiana, hotel in the events that inspired “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The following February, again in Miami, he met with Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X. By the end of 1964, Cooke was gone.
Before Cooke’s passing, he did release one live album, 1964’s Sam Cooke at the Copa, a slick set so Las Vegas-ready that it’s introduced by Sammy Davis Jr.; one jarring highlight is a hepcat-paced “Blowin’ in the Wind” cover. Cooke’s manager prior to his death was Allen Klein, the infamously pugnacious impresario who later feuded with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and that fact seems to partly explain why One Night Stand! sat in the vaults until RCA brought in a new head of A&R in the mid-’80s. Indeed, several of Cooke’s albums were long out of print, including the album with “A Change Is Gonna Come.” When this live set was finally issued in 1985, as Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, amid a spate of archival soul releases, critics took notice, sending the 22-year-old recording to No. 11 on the Village Voice’s 1985 Pazz & Jop poll.
Although Leslie Odom Jr. gives an emotional performance as Cooke in a 2020 film, One Night in Miami…, dramatizing the 1964 encounter with Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, there may be a reason that no one has yet made a biopic about Cooke alone. His lofty mission, combined with the brutal indignities of Black stardom in ’50s and ’60s America, meant that he was constantly recalibrating, his innermost thoughts tucked away deep: a soul cipher. He was complicated. Even to his intimates, Cooke was, as biographer Guralnick wrote, “someone who could mask everything but his ambition.” As a little boy, he pretended popsicle sticks were his audience. By the time he was 9, he told his brother he was never going to work a regular job, just sing and get rich. In one of his final interviews, he spoke earnestly of his “intense desire to make all of my audiences happy.” He also offered an inscrutably open-ended definition of soul: “the capacity to project a feeling.”
In 2000, another version of the Harlem Square Club recording was released as part of the box set The Man Who Invented Soul. If this was your introduction to these performances, as it was for me, you missed out for years on much of the crowd noise that helps make the music feel so alive. The audience’s rowdy presence was restored in a 2005 remaster, which revived the original “One Night Stand” working title, swapped in new cover artwork that shows King Curtis, and is widely available on streaming platforms. If Cooke’s purpose in life was “wooing the world,” as The Independent put it, One Night Stand! is the album that can still pull it off.
Cooke recognized early on that Bob Dylan would draw a crowd not for the way that he sang, but for the message in his words. In January 1963, for Cooke, performance was still more gestural. One Night Stand! ends not with a protest song, despite the tumultuous times, but with a manifestation of communal joy that the powers that be couldn’t take away. The song is the featherlight yet floor-stomping soul groove “Having a Party,” which neatly bookends the album by name-checking King Curtis’ set-opening “Soul Twist” and then adds yet another perfect Cooke lyric: “The Cokes are in the icebox,” he sings, recognizing the poetry in the details of everyday mid-century existence. The mood is euphoric, shaky, the right amount of too much.
“I gotta go, but when you go home, keep on having a party,” Cooke announces at last, in a farewell that feels like a benediction. “If you’re with your loved ones somewhere, keep on having that party. If you feel good all alone riding with the radio some time, riding in a car and the radio is on, keep on having that party.” As “A Change Is Gonna Come” ascends to its sacred place as a national hymn, Live at the Harlem Square Club stands as a reminder that somewhere in between too-hard living and fearful dying—who knows what’s up there beyond the sky, anyway?—we surrender ourselves to Saturday night. Cooke told us how he felt, and now everybody is with him.


Sounding at once meticulous and reckless, sinister and goofy, the experimental trio’s first album in nearly a decade is its most direct appeal to the pleasure center.

Mod Prog Sic

Listening to Black Dice has always been a daunting proposition. After years of primal catharsis therapy on early releases like Semen of the Sun and Cold Hands, the Brooklyn-based trio of Aaron Warren and brothers Bjorn and Eric Copeland began to mellow out with 2002’s Beaches & Canyons. With that album, Black Dice transformed into something more expansive and far stranger: an abstract rock group who tore up the experimental-rock blueprint. This was psychedelia that had roots in space rock, electronic music, underground dance clubs, and lo-fi ambient. They also summoned a bizarre strain of new age that carried an undertow of tumult, a subliminal threat to the peace they were trying to induce. The dominant aesthetic became something like avant-garde slapstick, with constant tension between hypnotic and disruptive impulses.
Mod Prog Sic, Black Dice’s seventh album and first since 2012’s Mr. Impossible, continues their uncompromising approach. The opening “Bad Bet” reintroduces their predilection for shifting moods and subverting expectations several times per minute. It bursts into life with no niceties, as if it had been accumulating pressure in a laboratory vat. After an intro of sinister, prowling electronic music that recalls Cabaret Voltaire’s Red Mecca, a buoyant, 130-plus BPM techno beat launches the track into an unsettling strain of 3 a.m. dance-floor hedonism. You don’t raise your hands in exultation to Black Dice’s club bangers; you use them to cup your skull in confusion. Like their best work, it sounds at once meticulous and reckless, sinister and goofy.
More than two decades into their career, Black Dice have shorn away some of the chaos and turbulence that once swirled through their music. The change brings their brutish beats and scrapyard percussion into sharper relief. The diseased, mocking guitar tone and choppy vocal sample that populate “Tuned Out” evoke Butthole Surfers during their peak 1980s live debauchery. “Tuned Out” builds a potent momentum that reminds you that guitarist/electronics wiz Eric Copeland released three records on club-oriented label L.I.E.S. These songs are still riddled with distortion and akimbo rhythms, but the music is streamlined into a twisted functionality, doing to your hips what they’d previously done to your mind.
More than ever, Mod Prog Sic extends Copeland’s demented dance-floor sensibilities to their illogical ends. “Big Chip” features the funkiest beats on the album, while “Jocko” approximates the wah-wah guitar from Isaac Hayes’s “Theme From Shaft” and then warps it into a strafing Roland 303 acid riff, processing the elements into a Rube Goldberg machine jitter. A peppy, distorted species of techno, “Downward Arrow” is the cut most likely to get dance floors throbbing, with its whip-crack beats and croaking “yeah yeah yeah”s. While nodding to pop music’s impulse to get bodies moving, Black Dice can’t help undermining it with indecipherable voices and arcade-game warbles that whirl around the rhythm.
Black Dice’s 2009 album Repo prominently featured the phrase “Go where new experiences await you” on its cover. A quarter-century into their career, and after a nine-year hiatus, this mantra still guides their work. While they revel in disorientation, Mod Prog Sic marks the trio’s most direct appeal to the pleasure center.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Side project of Black Mountain's Stephen McBean this time includes contributions from members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Jackie O Motherfucker.

Outside Love

Vancouver's Stephen McBean may be better known as the principal songwriter and frontman for the gritty psych outfit Black Mountain, but he also leads that group's gentler counterpart, Pink Mountaintops. Though Pink Mountaintops was originally conceived as a solo project, McBean clearly thrives in a collaborative environment. The project's third album, Outside Love, features input from an impressive cast of indie rock staples such as Sophie Trudeau of Godspeed You! Black Emperor/A Silver Mt. Zion, the Sweet Hereafter's Jesse Sykes, Josh Stevenson of Jackie O Motherfucker, and his longtime creative collaborator, Amber Webber of Black Mountain and Lightning Dust.
Although Pink Mountaintops were temporarily put on the back burner after the success of Black Mountain's self-titled sophomore album in 2005, McBean resurrected the group the following year with the release of Axis of Evol, on which he continued to explore his deep-rooted love of dark psychedelia with minimalist rhythmic patterns and spidery, hazy, lo-fi guitar. With Outside Love, McBean takes this theme on an adventurous journey to surprising heights, and the fully realized sound allows his ideas more room to breathe. The granular spaciousness of the production, when paired with intentionally sloppy drums and chiming guitars, imparts an atmospheric, almost gothic feel. This works beautifully on the Mazzy Star-esque "While You Were Dreaming" and on the outstanding opening track, "Axis: Thrones of Love", which expands with lackadaisical smokiness as a rinse of reverb settles like morning mist over the male-female co-sung chorus.
Despite the cloudy threads that crisscross through every song, Outside Love throws out some supremely positive vibes. On "Holiday", McBean declares that everyone he knows deserves a vacation in the sun "until the lions are off of their backs", and "The Gayest of Sunbeams" is a shambolic, joyous romp built on uptempo chord shifts and group vocals that burn with enthusiasm. But it takes multiple listens to uncover the complexity of Outside Love; despite its deceptively simple architecture, it's grounded by rich stylistic flickering. The folky ambiance of "And I Thank You" could have slipped out of Bill Callahan's back catalogue, while the string section that hangs in the background of "Vampire" has a discreet but haunting presence, like cobwebs diffusing light through a window. This kind of agile songwriting shows that Pink Mountaintops' substance lies not only in what they show, but in what they choose to hide; here on Outside Love, they move between shadows and light until the form is revealed.