Myth, it has been said, is the buried part of every story. On April 23rd, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot finally emerges ...

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Myth, it has been said, is the buried part of every story. On April 23rd, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot finally emerges into the light of day, having spent the last year interred in its own cluttered mythology: a hermetic studio gestation, with the inscrutable guidance of Chicago ex-pat/kindly wizard, Jim O'Rourke; internecine squabbles; conflict and resolution with American media behemoth AOL Time Warner; the release portentously slated for September 11th, but mysteriously delayed; the indecipherable short-wave radio prophecies; and, eventually, the hero's welcome, with the first stirrings of spring. It's all there: the miracle birth; the unlikely hero; the, um, benevolent mentor; the primordial menace; good over evil. Joseph Campbell would be pissing himself if he weren't dead.
The miraculous birth narrative of Wilco's fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, is already old hat: banished from straightedge AOL Time Warner imprint Reprise on the cosmically short-sighted judgment of label executives who deemed the album a "career-ender," Wilco streamed Yankee Hotel from its left-wing website to millions before signing with weirdo progressive AOL Time Warner imprint Nonesuch. Long is the way and hard that leads up from AOL Time Warner into the light, I guess.
But the unique circumstances of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's long deliverance make for more than just pointless disc jockey chatter before spinning "Heavy Metal Drummer." The long delay and streaming audio conspired to ensure that everyone in the world has already heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in part, if not in its entirety. Vast digital pre-circulation, corporate controversy, and buzz like a beard of bees have rendered all reviews afterthoughts at best.
But myth is always an afterthought, and these days, the motif I like chewing on best is, without question, that of the Unlikely Hero. Who would have predicted an album of this magnitude from Wilco? As much I love the band, the fact remains that they were together for five years before they produced anything that could stand with Uncle Tupelo's March 16-20, 1992 or Anodyne. AM is rather forgettable, while the expansive Being There, though frequently inspired, travels on paths blazed by Tom Petty on Damn the Torpedoes, if not The Flying Burrito Brothers.
1999's dolorous Summerteeth was exponentially more sophisticated than anything that came before it, though its heroin innuendoes, shades of domestic abuse and nocturnal homicidal impulses sat somewhat ill at ease alongside the album's lush and infectious pop arrangements. Of course, Summerteeth was a strange and majestic, albeit dark, deviation from the alt-country genre Jeff Tweedy co-invented. But since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it has retroactively become more of a harbinger of things to come. Upon being pressed by the Chicago Sun-Times about abandoning alt-country, Tweedy dismissively bequeathed the old Wilco sound to Ryan Adams. And you can never go home again.
So does Yankee Hotel Foxtrot justify the controversy, delay and buzz? Everyone, I think, already knows that the answer is yes; all I can offer is "me too" and reiterate. And after half a year living with a bootleg copy, the music remains revelatory. Complex and dangerously catchy, lyrically sophisticated and provocative, noisy and somehow serene, Wilco's aging new album is simply a masterpiece; it is equally magnificent in headphones, cars and parties. And as anyone who's seen the mixed-bag crowd at Wilco shows knows, it will find a home in the collections of hippies, frat boys, acid-eating prep schoolers, and the record store apparatchiks of the indiocracy. No one is too good for this album; it is better than all of us.
But for all the talk of terminally hip influences-- Jim O'Rourke, krautrock, and The Conet Project-- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot still conjures a classic rock radio station on Fourth of July weekend. And this extends beyond the alternating Byrds/Stones/Beatles comparisons that pepper every Wilco review ever written; Yankee Hotel Foxtrot evokes Steely Dan, the Eagles, Wings, Derek & The Dominos and Traffic. The slightly disconnected, piano-led "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," is delicately laced with noise, whistles and percussive clutter, like some great grandson of "A Day in the Life." The muted, "Kamera" strums along darkly with acoustic and electric guitars; the twittering electronics in the background don't quite mitigate the tune's comparability to the clever and precise (though now largely neglected) jazz-inflected blues-rock of Dire Straits' stunning debut.
The cone-filtered and anthemic country psychedelia of "War on War" could have been jammed straight out of a hot "Bertha" at a 1973 Grateful Dead show. The violin and coked-up country lounge of "Jesus, etc." recalls some mythical seventies in true love and cigarettes. The sharp, stuttering guitar solo that rips open "I'm the Man Who Loves You" could have come directly out of Neil Young's hollow body electric circa Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. For all its aural depth and layering, Yankee Hotel tends to come off as earnest as yesteryear's FM radio. Wilco gets the benefit of O'Rourke's gift for cutting straight to the guts of every style, without the burden of his trademark contempt for the subject matter at hand.
And Tweedy seems to be coming into his own as a lyricist. I still wince when I hear him sing, "I know you don't talk much but you're such a good talker," on Being There. The brooding introspection of Summerteeth made for a handful of elegant lyrics, most notably the skeletal beauty of "She's a Jar," where "she begs me not to miss her" returns as the stinging "she begs me not to hit her," transforming a wistful love song into something gently bruising. But on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Tweedy becomes what I think he always was: an optimist and a romantic.
His declaration of wanting to salute "the ashes of American flags," is less cynicism than, perhaps, the devoted liberal's nostalgia for an honest patriotism (check out the array of properly lefty links at wilcoworld.com if you don't believe me). "All my lies are always wishes," he sings, "I know I would die if I could come back new." In "Jesus, etc.," there's a cascading simplicity when he sings, "Tall buildings shake, voices escape, singing sad, sad songs to two chords/ Strung down your cheeks, bitter melodies turning your orbit around." Sad, celestial and lovely. The final declaration on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of abiding dedication: "I've got reservations 'bout so many things but not about you." There isn't a truer word to be had.
On Summerteeth, Tweedy yowled about "speakers speaking in code" and I thought of that refrain from "I Can't Stand It" when I first heard the words "yankee-hotel-foxtrot" uttered by the disembodied English woman on the sublimely creepy box-set of shortwave radio transmissions, The Conet Project, which is sampled sporadically throughout this record. And in a deeper, more deliberate world, perhaps we could trace that thread to unravel the secret wonder of Wilco's new album. But I don't think there's any secret; and I don't think there's any code. Beneath the great story of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, there are all the tropes and symbols and coincidences of a little mythology; but under that is a fantastic rock record. And why tell you? You all already knew this.


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 Earl Sweatshirt’s debut mixtape, the keystone to Odd Future’s success.

Earl

Tyler, the Creator leaps onto Jimmy Fallon’s back and hangs there like a hyperactive kid at the zoo. It’s 2011: Instagram is in its infancy; young people are choosing the internet over television en masse for the first time; Tumblr has nearly tripled its audience in a year. Tyler just performed “Sandwitches” with Hodgy Beats on NBC’s “Late Night”—both representing the collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All—and this mischievous URL rap tag-team turned Studio 6B into a scene from The Ring. Entire verses of the song wouldn’t be performed on TV that night, but the omission of one lyric in particular felt impactful: “Free Earl, that’s the fucking shit/And if you disagree, suck a couple pimple-covered dicks.”
This was the crest of Odd Future mania: Tyler had released “Yonkers” (which Kanye West called the best video of the year) only days before, and the enigmatic Frank Ocean dropped his debut mixtape nostalgia, ULTRA without warning the night the “Fallon” episode aired. Rap’s monied old guard, JAY-Z and Diddy, were in a bidding war over the young crew. The media began nitpicking the collective’s grisly lyrics and struggling with the ethics of taking trolls at face value.
Despite a growing public profile, the kids of Odd Future were too caught up in their fringe internet communities to really notice; too busy squabbling with rap blogs that wouldn’t post their songs, or responding to fans’ questions on formspring, or relishing very online achievements like “going platinum on YouTube,” or literally predicting future VMA wins on Twitter. But looming larger than the collective’s rapidly expanding reputation was the silhouette of Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, an enigma known to OF onlookers as Earl Sweatshirt. He’d been AWOL throughout the group’s breakthrough with little to no explanation. “I wish Thebe was here to share this moment with us,” Tyler tweeted right after the “Fallon” performance. Even in his absence, Earl was still the wind in their sails.
So much of the hysteria surrounding these Los Angeles punks stemmed directly from “Earl,” the title track from the 16-year-old Earl Sweatshirt’s self-titled debut mixtape, released by Tyler for free on Tumblr in March 2010. Earl was slickly sinister yet designed to draw out a visceral reaction—American Psycho meets “Jackass.” And “Earl” was its lynchpin: gorgeously crafted sesquipedalian stanzas with gags about jacking off to Asher Roth vids right next to depictions of killing and eating people, the words scraping up against each other like fractured bones. In its semi-viral music video, under the glare of a grainy fisheye lens, Earl and his OF cohorts use a blender to concoct a drug smoothie out of weed, pills, cough syrup, and malt liquor before puking it all up. They skate, loiter, faceplant, and spit out blood and teeth. The juvenile, almost slapstick images betrayed the seriousness of Earl’s violent claims, as if watching an unaired “Loiter Squad” pilot. But the gambit had worked: Adults were mad, ergo teens loved it.
In Earl’s inexplicable absence, his comrades began cryptically roaring “Free Earl” while vaulting into the crowd at their sold-out shows, creating even more buzz and mystery around the already surging, inscrutable collective. (The chatter online was that Earl’s mom caught wind of the “Earl” video and had shipped him off to boot camp, a perceived totalitarian move that only fed his legend among Odd Future’s rabble-rouser fanbase.) Everyone wanted to know why the boy genius was missing. By the time he’d been found, Odd Future had already used his echo to become an indomitable rap force—and Earl had already become someone else.
Unbeknownst to most of his faithful, Earl Sweatshirt was the son of world-renowned poet Keorapetse Kgositsile and UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris, a union that seemingly prophesied his eloquence. According to the 1995 poem, “Poet — for Thebe Neruda,” written by Kgositsile’s friend Sterling Plumpp as both a tribute and a baptism, Earl was marked as a bard-king-in-waiting at birth: “You were born with blues With an ANC [African National Congress] imprint on them,” it said. “How you gon do anything but rule?”
But after Earl’s parents separated when he was a child, his father became a dark cloud forming just on the outside of his life. Earl’s early self-indictments tied his misfit motivations directly to an estranged relationship with his dad. “I’m half-privileged, think white and have nigga lips/A tad different, mad smart, act ignorant/Shit, I’ll pass the class when my dad starts givin’ shits,” he explained on “Blade” from the 2010 Odd Future tape Radical. “But as long as our relationship is turdless/I’mma keep burning rubber and fucking these beats with burnt dick.”
By chance or by choice, Earl had followed in Kgositsile’s footsteps anyway, fulfilling Plumpp’s vision. He picked up rapping in eighth grade, releasing a mixtape on Myspace under the name Sly Tendencies called Kitchen Cutlery. His raps were more sinewy then but no less of a marvel. It wasn’t until after Tyler discovered those Sly songs that Earl’s verses took a turn for the diabolical, positioning him as “the reincarnation of ’98 Eminem,” as he put it on Tyler’s Bastard cut “AssMilk” in 2009. He idolized Tyler almost as much as he did Em, and Tyler recognized instantly what the rest of the world would soon know: Earl Sweatshirt was a wunderkind. He liked to compare Earl to Nas’ Illmatic, and he wasn’t that far off base.
Earl had been recruited into a fraternity of mutineers who treated Supreme like haute couture, who made Eminem’s Relapse their unholy bible, who worshipped Lil B and skate pro Jason Dill as gods. They were contrarians goading moralists into reacting to their stunts, drawing life from the discomfort of others. For them, watching the squirming responses to their provocations was proof of a hopelessly stuffy society. “We’re not trying to offend or intrigue people,” Syd told Interview in 2011, one of many attempts to explain how a queer black woman could surround herself with so many perceived homophobes and misogynists spouting rape fantasies. “It’s more of a social experiment. We make fun of society on a daily basis, and people take it so seriously. They’re proving us right.” But more important than the jokes themselves was the fact that they were sharing them, finding fellowship and bonding into a collective.
One of the foundational tenets of Odd Future was mining power from being fatherless and building a chosen family in their little Thrasher community. Earl found Tyler’s IDGAF attitude empowering, and emulated it. In each other, they found brotherhood, making it their aim to “scare the fuck out of old white fucking people that live in middle fucking America.” (Ironically, their early audiences were usually majority white.) For Earl, that meant saying the sickest shit he could possibly think of with a straight face, screaming internally while he measured out multisyllabic scenes of torture and cannibalism.
In Sterling Plumpp’s ’95 poem to Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, he wrote, “Words are bullets here. Words are periods here. This is the end of a sentence,” and that’s exactly how Earl uses them: to perforate; and with resolution.
The verses on Earl are unspliced one-shots that impact instantly and then peel apart gradually. While many wordy rappers assemble bars as if reading from a schematic or like they’re noodling through a bowl of alphabet soup, Earl’s raps are idiomatic yet undiluted, technical yet unpredictable. He can be a methodical writer or a shapeshifter: On “Kill” he’s first trampling, then sinuous, then supple; chilling, then surgical, then irreverent. More interesting than his penchant for colorful dismemberment, or the incel logic on songs like “Luper,” is just how uncomplicated he makes complexity look.
Earl was the keystone to Odd Future’s success. It’s where their anarchist slogan—“Kill people. Burn Shit. Fuck School.”—first appeared. It’s the source of their edge, constructed on myths of the boy whose music was so dangerous his mother wouldn’t let him make it anymore. But more essential than any of that was its author: This prodigiously gifted kid, the son of a UCLA law professor and a world-famous poet, who had unleashed this almost otherworldly display of technical skill from the ether into an unsuspecting (and frankly unprepared) universe. His knack for storytelling was obvious, only his stories were night terrors about stalking, assaulting, and killing women. It was a jarring juxtaposition: his stoic manner, his beautiful wordplay, and his ugliest ideas, all underscored by dueling intentions—to taunt and to purge. There was a blatant disconnect between the rage in his words and the affectlessness of his demeanor, which at points made him seem either like a sociopath or a tempestuous virtuoso completely spent of energy from wrestling his inner demons. Over beats from Tyler and Left Brain, Neptunes paeans transposed for horror scores, he spun the most breathtaking nightmares.
Of course, some of the more vile diatribes on Earl were simply the result of a rapper employing shock-rap tactics and pushing the boundaries of acceptability, but the tape also showcased an angry kid who didn’t yet have the language of grief trying to process his feelings. He’s talked since about not having the capacity, at 16, to really rap about anything real, unable to use that piercing wit of his to look inward. “There was never a moment where I was trying to fucking perpetrate like I was some [rapist],” he told GQ. “That was my way of screaming, because I don’t yell.” Through these quiet atrocities of the imagination, he was gnashing his teeth.
Being 16 is being old enough to know better but young enough not to care, which is the sweet spot for an aggrieved imp spewing poison back into the world just to feel something. His raps bared that animosity in them. Plenty of the ire was aimless, but much of it was stoked by feelings of fatherlessness. His later verses on the subject, which are more clear-headed, present a tragic portrait: A father and son, both gifted orators, unable to really understand each other. On Earl, there are glimpses of him converting his anguish to rage, so as not to be consumed by sorrow. “Product of popped rubbers and pops that did not love us/So when I leave home keep my heart on the top cupboard/So I will not stutter when I’m shoutin’ fuck you, son,” he raps on “Stapleton.”
Somewhere along the line, raging on songs turned to causing real-world mischief. And so, just on the cusp of Odd Future’s swelling success, soon after the “Earl” video was released in May 2010, Earl’s mother sent him away to reform, and to heal—first to Second Nature, a wilderness program, for a few weeks, and then to Coral Reef Academy in Samoa, a therapeutic rehabilitation experience for at-risk boys. “He was really very clearly going through a rough patch emotionally,” Harris told The New York Times. “He was struggling.”
While Odd Future followers chanted “Free Earl” at shows and plastered the words across forums online, vilifying the rapper’s mom in the process, Earl was hearing stories of abuse from survivors, first-hand accounts of the kind of gruesome things he’d been rapping about. It changed him, made the things he’d been saying in songs real. And so he vowed to never be so blasé about the suffering of others again. “I’m a fan of macabre shit, you know what I’m saying? But not like that. At the end of the day, I’m not some evil guy,” he told GQ in 2013. “There was nothing you could do when you’re looking at a fucking little girl that’s been horribly abused.”
When he returned from Coral Reef in 2012, after being found out by Complex, it seemed like trying to fit his new self back into his old life came with major growing pains. Assimilating back into Odd Future proved difficult after more than a year of therapy; not just because he’d become something of a mascot to the fandom, but also because he’d always been the crew’s catalyst, the sorcerer among mortals. (“Tyler always treated him as sacred,” Odd Future manager Christian Clancy told The Times. “They all did.”) Tyler was the architect, but there was never any doubt who the best rapper was. Upon arrival, Earl was already one of the most purely talented rap writers of all time, bar none. He was a scalpel wielded by the collective to carve OFWGKTA into the collective consciousness. But now, he was seeking a different legacy.
In less than two years, he went from hailing “Earl” as a shining treasure, the track he thought he’d never be able to surpass, to shunning the song as something he couldn’t even listen to, likening its sound to skinning a knee. He performed alongside his friends at first but didn’t sign to Odd Future Records. The tug-of-war between his mother and best friend, compounded by the cultish fandom that rose up while he was overseas, had blemished his OF residency and made things awkward, alienating him from a makeshift family that was already beginning to dissolve. The riff had grown into a chasm. He was back, but he was already gone.


The British-Congolese rapper’s ambitious new mixtape proves there’s fertile ground to be found in the interplay between grime, UK drill, and velvety Afropop.

BackRoad Gee: Reporting Live (From the Back of the Roads)

BackRoad Gee recently joked about creating his own dictionary. His explosive raps are peppered with so many repurposed words that they’ve taken on new meaning. Often onomatopoeic, they function as more than sound effects or ad libs—they’re critical components of the verses. Take “brukutu.” Add a “u” between the first two consonants, and it’s a popular West African sorghum-based beer. In BRG’s hands, though, it could emulate the deadly spray of a weapon, as in his career-defining verse on Pa Salieu’s “My Family.” Or, as he makes clear at the start of his latest mixtape Reporting Live (From the Back of the Roads), it can be self-referential.
The British-Congolese artist’s unabashed will to twist, bend, and break language however he sees fit has made him one of the most exciting voices out of the UK. Though only a few years into his career, his bellowing tone and trademark phrases—which include forceful uses of “woof,” “vroom,” “skrrt,” and the wonderfully inexplicable “urrdum” and “mukta” (there’s a Sanskrit explanation for this, but to BRG, it’s a “personal interpretation”)—allow him to fluidly inhabit the various shades of Black British music. His latest mixtape—and best work yet—reads more like an album in both its versatility and cohesion. It’s an ambitious effort that feels more revelatory than exhaustive, proving there’s fertile ground to be found in the interplay between the raucous energy of grime, the sinister textures of UK drill, and the velvety melodies of Afropop.
BRG’s first two projects—2019’s Mukta Wit Reason and 2020’s Mukta vs Mukta—had brief moments of magic, like the latter’s breakout hit “Party Popper,” but for the most part, they fell prey to bloated tracklists and uninspired production. On Reporting Live, a markedly more refined BRG commands every beat. The first half is a well-paced journey through the annals of street music, with nods to UK drill, grime, and the liminal space between the two. Lyrically, he pays dues to the ends and the shadowy back roads that earned him his name, switching between aggression, sincerity, and moralism. “Look at the things that we done/Enough is enough,” he declares unflinchingly at the top of the mixtape. From the nihilistic terror of “Fxct It” to the tragic realizations of “Dark Place,” BRG’s struggle to change his life is endearing in its flawed humanity, making his gains all the more encouraging. By the time he reaches “Fear Nuttin,” a solemn bridge between the mixtape’s two parts, he’s traded physical protection for a spiritual kind: “Don’t fear nuttin, only Allah/Previously, we had guns in the car.”
The second half—which features Stylo G, Stefflon Don, NSG, and Olamide—leans into the sexier and more romantic corners of dancehall and Afropop. There are a couple of exceptions, including standout “Crime Partners,” featuring fellow genre-blender Pa Salieu. While its rhythmic trot and tender saxophone might induce you to vibe out, the stark lyrics (“My nigga got shot in his head and walked it off”) say otherwise and provide a clear-eyed counter to the “baby, oh” love songs and feel-good vibes that dominate Afropop. Afroswing pioneers NSG are formidable partners on the gritty grooves of “Ancestors.” On “Nyege Lewa,” BRG and Ms. Banks turn the Pan-African hall party classic “Premier Gaou” into a slinky sex song. And by the time Olamide’s voice chimes in on the bubbly “See Level,” it feels like BRG is on a well-deserved victory lap, as he croons in pidgin with the energy of a wealthy, unbothered African uncle.
Though BRG has cited Burna Boy, DMX, 50 Cent, and Koffi Olomide as influences, he’s probably most indebted to artists closer to home. His idiosyncratic vocals and inventive wordplay bring to mind grime great D Double E (who he hopped on a remix with last year) while his charisma, versatility, and ability to straddle the needs of the street and the club are reminiscent of J Hus. The latter’s crossover success was widely heralded as the greatest manifestation of the bridge between street raps, dancehall, and Afropop, giving the blended sound mainstream legitimacy. In Hus’ stretches of inactivity (partially due to incarceration), the non-committal style returned to the margins while UK drill stepped to the fore. BRG’s latest project could reassert the dominance of hybridity, making space for all of the UK’s great Black music to shine at once.

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With Woman, Justice attempt the sort of analog nostalgia trip Daft Punk pulled off on Random Access Memories. Have the enfants terribles of French house grown up?

Woman

Justice’s 2007 debut album, †, was expertly engineered for breakthrough success, delivering massive hooks with all the subtlety of a jackhammer. That said, they also had an impeccable sense of timing. Shortly after reigniting public interest in their catalog with the landmark Alive 2007 tour, Daft Punk—Justice’s direct antecedents—largely powered down until the release of 2013’s Random Access Memories. It’s difficult to overstate how much Justice benefitted from this timing, riding a renewed wave of interest in French house just as it was cresting, then stepping into a world hungry for Daft Punk as their closest analogues: two enigmatic French dudes forcing electro-disco through the sieve of hard rock dynamics. They certainly made the most of the opportunity on the live circuit, with ear-splitting arena tours that predicted the rise of pyrotechnic technicians like Skrillex and Deadmau5. Still, for all their success, Justice always felt like Daft Punk’s understudies: cruder, grimier, more willing to dredge rock’s cheesiest depths in search of a big hook.
That formula worked well in 2007 but now that Daft Punk is active and operating at pop’s highest echelons, does the world still need Justice? That’s the question the scruffy duo have been attempting to answer ever since. To their credit, they’ve hardly stood still: 2011’s Audio, Video, Disco found the act taking a hard left turn toward prog in order to distinguish themselves. Woman, their  latest, marks yet another tonal shift away from the leather-clad sonics of their debut and toward the brighter sounds of pop and disco.
They’ve stored away the crates of vinyl once and for all, padding out their synthcraft with live instrumentation and vocalists. As with previous Justice albums, Woman is full of earnest vocals, rubber-band basslines and weepy strings, only this time everything sounds much warmer and looser. Intentional or not, it’s hard not to see the parallels to Random Access Memories’ pop classicism and militantly analog approach. Just as Daft Punk did, Justice attempt to envelop the sounds of disco and funk in a full on, unironic embrace. And while they remain more willing to violate the rules of good taste (as always, all the faders are at 10 and they continue cramming everything into the midrange), Woman still feels about as “electronic” as RAM does: it largely scans as AM pop, just with more modular synths.
Justice being Justice, they can’t resist trying to land a few big singles and these songs tend to be the least adventurous on the album. “Safe and Sound” and “Stop” both attempt to recreate the winning formula of “D.A.N.C.E.”: stargazing choirs, layers of synths, a generous helping of slap bass. At best though, these songs feel like paint-by-numbers versions of Justice’s early singles. In between these throwbacks, we get a lot of middle-of-the-road pop: generically funky melodies, cheesy guitar solos, forgettable vocals, lyrics that are downright embarrassing. It’s not quite offensive but that’s also kind of the problem—much of Woman sounds like music designed by committee, better suited to soundtrack a car commercial than to actively engage the listener (incidentally, Justice do have a pretty strong track record when it comes to landing commercial and video game placements).
There are a few moments on Woman where Justice break from the script and most of them are far more memorable than the rest of the record. “Chorus” opens up with drone-y blasts of static that pop up again in the track’s airy back half. “Heavy Metal” kicks off with an Iron Butterfly meets Van Halen organ solo before segueing into a disjointed chorus that recalls Ed Banger’s heyday. “Alakazam !” goes all in on the record’s guiding sound: it’s a straight up four-on-the-floor disco number grafted on to the sort of grungy synth bassline that these guys wield so well. If you’re going to embrace corniness, why not really go for it?
While it’s hard to fault them for wanting to explore new terrain, as with Audio, Video, Disco, Woman’s focus largely plays against the pair’s strengths as songwriters. There’s a restraint on display that, coming from Justice, feels more like a lack of commitment. Is Woman more subtle and loosely composed than their previous records? Sure. Are those qualities desirable in a Justice album? Perhaps not. Ever since their emergence, electronic traditionalists have been wringing their hands over these guys but until now there was at least one thing you could never accuse Justice of being: boring.


French producer Mr. Oizo has been around for 15 years, but people may have first encountered him with the release of the music video for "Ham", starring John C. Reilly. That song comes from his new album, The Church, his first for Brainfeeder, a collection that takes the electronic sounds of the moment and warps them in a fun-house mirror.

The Church

The French producer of the grotesque, Mr. Oizo (pronounced Wahzo) has been around for about 15 years, but many people may have first encountered him last week, with the release of the music video for "Ham", starring John C. Reilly. That video, directed by Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric, starts out as an extremely on-the-nose parody of Black Friday, but by refusing to let up on the gas, Wareheim manages to bring it to an interesting climax in the form of a Mexican Standoff, a la The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
The video is at once strange, annoying, compelling, and obvious, which makes it a perfect vehicle for Mr. Oizo’s music. His new album, The Church, is his first for Brainfeeder, but it’s very much in tune with his methods for the past decade, taking the electronic sounds of the moment—in this case, trap, post-dubstep, and electro—and warping them in a fun-house mirror. Oizo, whose real name is Quentin Dupieux, has been compared to his fellow Frenchmen, Justice, many times in the past, and there’s definitely something there. But his music also bears thinking about in relation to newer artists; now that PC Music has emerged, Oizo almost feels like a long-standing, supervillianous nemesis to that candy-brite collective.
Does that mean that Dupieux has long been ahead of his time? Certainly. His music exists to disturb the natural state of things; he makes use of the dissonance of Inga Copeland but substitutes her icy cool for off-the-wall juvenilia. His love of the puerile is probably the most obvious element of his sound. Take "Dry Run", which, though it bears some resemblance to "Turn Down for What", substitutes that ubiquitous mantra with the goofy-voiced and terrifying plea to "scream for daddy."
This kind of cartoonish menace appears many times throughout *The Church. "*Mass Doom", a standout here, could soundtrack "Adventure Time" if the show were produced by the Joker—a sense of foreboding lurks within its impossibly cartoonish sound effects. "iSoap'"s got a nice groove which soon gets torn apart by a brassy loop plaguing you with its endless repetition like water torture.
The best tracks on the record are the ones confident enough to place their weirdness in the foreground. With the bizarro trap of "Bear Biscuit" (which even includes some DJ Rashad-like sampling at its tail) and the straightforward thump of "Ham", Dupieux seems to put all his cards on the table and the result are the two most compelling songs on the record.
But what’s most frustrating about Mr. Oizo is that, despite all his rule-breaking, his songs quickly start to feel shallow, as if he’s run out of ideas. "Memorex", the shortest song on the record, is one loop and a squeaker for the entirety of its running time, and once you get over their more irritating aspects, most of the songs here feel just that simple.
Then again, striving for anticlimax is a form of the avant garde. The title track ends the record, and when cloaked in words, Mr. Oizo’s aimless clowning becomes explicit. The song tells the story of a group of friends who get bored and steal cars. Many times throughout the song, it feels as if the group will do something terrible, particularly when the music drops and they go to the church. But nothing especially violent happens. The track is all suggestion. Despite the genuine fear that Oizo manages to build-up with this and other tracks on The Church, he does it all through the power of suggestion. Nothing ever really happens.


The 13 tracks on NO LOVE DEEP WEB thrive on paranoia and aggression, feelings threaded together by the sense that everything could be ending right now. For the second time this year, Death Grips have released a record that's both ruthless and rewarding.

NO LOVE DEEP WEB

For a moment, forget about the cock on the cover: The most arresting and totemic image of this week's Death Grips debacle and/or coup actually arrived about five hours before the brazen California trio released its second major-label LP, NO LOVE DEEP WEB, online, for free and under an anything-goes Creative Commons license. Shirtless so as to expose the web of tattoos on his body, Death Grips frontman MC Ride stands with his back to the camera, his middle fingers foisted high and a cigarette tucked into his left hand. But he's balancing on a balcony, high up in what appears to be a rather well-furbished neighborhood, his toes hanging just over the ledge. He's tempting fate and taking the chance to make the strongest statement possible, even if he (and the photographer overhead) had to risk a fall to the death to get it. In fact, the only incident that might have given the riot-act release of NO LOVE DEEP WEB more currency in the media would have been an accidental death. At the very least, it would have kept at bay the conspiracy theorists calling Death Grips' Monday move a publicity stunt performed in conjunction with Epic Records. "Too soon," you'd say.
At the risk of appearing moribund, that phenomenon of big stunts and instant exits largely defines NO LOVE DEEP WEB, not just in release style but also in musical makeup. These 13 tracks thrive on paranoia and aggression, feelings threaded together by the sense that everything could be ending right now. With his voice squeezed above a heavy thud and electro chirp, MC Ride rolls the dice again, as he did on the balcony's ledge: "My life on a limb about to break." Across these 46 minutes, Ride creates a series of memento mori scenarios (and even goes so far as to invoke that phrase) and dares them to destroy him. As he puts it, "Fuck this world/ Fuck this body."
The record's most obvious example is "World of Dogs", which opens with the repetitive hook "It's all suicide" over Zach Hill's death-jazz drums. Crushed by its own quest for redemption, the grueling pace and noose-necked premise-- "Die with me/ Blow out the lights, take your life/ Ride the falling sky with me"-- make the song more grim than most black metal in 2012. The hook of "Lil Boy" is an invitation to burn brighter and faster, while the mortality-obsessed and especially corrosive "Lock Your Doors" includes a falling-from-life scream convincing enough to be sampled from a horror film. A minute later, Ride pictures the flame of a candle like the sand slipping through the hourglass: "Light the candle, burn the wax/ Before me dies, in scorch uprise/ Can't deny it, no way back." It's as if NO LOVE DEEP WEB was written and recorded knowing that its ultimate fate would either kill or catapult Death Grips. Essentially, the risk becomes the biggest reward.
After all, Death Grips' rage for some unnamed and very big system is written all across these tracks, and not just in the horror-house din of "Lock Your Doors" or the militaristic march of "No Love". MC Ride weaves networks of anxious and sometimes fatalistic visions; his phone's been tapped, and phantom footsteps sound just outside the door. At one point, he's stuck in a closed-circuit surveillance system, and he's the only one who can't watch. "Tongue cut out the mouth of reason, and chucked off the river's edge," he manages in one particularly manic span, again acknowledging the end waiting just at the other side of the precipice.
He lashes out, becoming the bully with a vivid imagination and an aggressive lexicon. "Lil Boy" taunts the effete, while "No Love" (likely and hilariously Epic's would-have-been "single") teases the bloated form of stereotypical industry executives: "Fuck do you do? Fuck a man with hips for hulu." Ride buys up guns, threatens homicide, evades the law, pursues his prey, and, by his own admission, teeters toward the edge of crazy. He's most fierce on "Deep Web", an industrial-strength boomer that finds him ready to fight and flee. "I'm the coat hanger in your man's vagina," he stammers, unleashing a line vague enough to offend most everyone. It's the sort of thing you could imagine him shouting from the top of the balcony Sunday evening, spreading the bad news like heavy mortar fire.
With his schizoid panoply of voices and hyperlinked lyrics, MC Ride remains Death Grips' fountainhead and most polarizing figure. But the production of Zach Hill and Flatlander lives on the same line of danger as their leader. They afford Ride perfect platforms for his effrontery. Closer "Artificial Death in the West", for instance, is the longest track here, pushing toward the six-minute mark. Ride raps like he's stuck between failure and the future, so the music matches those "hopeless premonitions" with synthesizers suggesting krautrock tripping toward its own oblivion. "Hunger Games" explores a similar fascination with the end while the beat ruptures into ill-shaped bits. It's the sound of a troubled mind trying not to fall apart.
Loud and punishing, the sonics of NO LOVE DEEP WEB suit MC Ride's mix of hysteria, rage and exhaustion. Perhaps Epic has concerns about Death Grips' ability to make a marketable record; as Death Grips are arguably the most challenging act on a major label right now (or last week, at least), that much is founded. But their ability to integrate every part into cohesive tracks-- in other words, to marry their sound to their fury-- is rare. After a string of shows in the spring, Death Grips canceled all subsequent dates to finish NO LOVE DEEP WEB. That's a questionable career move, but the effort and attention show here at every turn.
Death Grips exist within a cloud of hyperbole, from the maximized minimalism of their savage beats and the extreme unrest of their barked lyrics to the escalating gauntlet of their album covers and their blooming disregard of industry standards. To summarize, NO LOVE DEEP WEB-- a record ostensibly paid for by a label owned by one of the biggest companies in the world but released for free on the Internet-- features an erect penis inked with the title in sloppy Sharpie script on its cover. One of its most undeniable hooks reads, "She shoot pussy through your chest, you die." Everything about this trio seems extreme.
Especially when perceived as posturing for publicity, those appearances make it difficult to realize and articulate the issues that Death Grips make so urgent. But this is a trio of itinerant transgressors, making impossible demands on the boundaries of rap and punk and rock'n'roll and questioning to the core not only what constitutes a proper release but also the standard models for turning music into money. For now, at least, NO LOVE DEEP WEB is an extraordinary outlier in most every sense, an album with no definitive home or home turf aside from the millions who will likely download it.
So, are Death Grips publicity-crazed assholes who never saw a situation that couldn't be turned into a stunt, or are they real-life renegades who infiltrated the industry only to know they'd soon rip through its bowels? Frankly, at a time when what's for dinner can become a cause for publicizing yourself, and when one industry might shut down another to restore historically accepted order, they're nothing if not a lot of both. For the second time in one year, both on a large label and on their own, they've released a record ruthless and rewarding enough to animate that image.


The now-forgotten British author Horace Vachell introduced polo to the Pacific Coast when he relocated to Southern California in 1882 ...

You Are the Quarry

The now-forgotten British author Horace Vachell introduced polo to the Pacific Coast when he relocated to Southern California in 1882. Purchasing a large cattle ranch near Arroyo Grande, which he renamed Tally-Ho, Vachell bred ponies and even socialized in the costume of the sport. His greatest acclaim came from the 1905 novel The Hill, an aristocratic Icarus fable in which the son of a Liverpudlian merchant attends the elite Harrow boarding school, rising to cricket prominence before his evitable downfall and dismissal due to class difference. On his adopted home Vachell wrote, "In addition to the family fool, the Englishman to be found on the Pacific Slope include the parson's son, the fortune teller, the moral idiot, the remittance man, and the sportsman."
One could lob three of those labels at Steven Morrissey, the most unremittingly Albion presence in modern Los Angeles, but he remains an entirely unique breed of Englishman in home or Hollywood. Bitter, witty, hypocritical, contradictory, self-aware, sardonic, and nostalgic, Morrissey's persona-- in person, or in song-- is never one-dimensional or quickly read. Consider the "I" in his songs to represent "Morrissey" with peril.
The media and his audience have consistently misinterpreted Morrissey's lyrics and statements. Everyone from the Warlock Pinchers to the Windsors levied opinions at his persona. The trend continues with You Are the Quarry. The record is not an anti-American treatise, an encomium to England, an epistolary revelation, or even a bold comeback, and magazines who claim such are lazy and reading off the kit. Laden with brilliant contradictions, press baiting rouse, dark comedy, and real human complexity, You Are the Quarry simply stands as the most entertaining and lushly melodic work of Morrissey's solo career, one of the most singular figures in Western pop culture from the last 20 years.
In an epitomatory 1989 interview with Greenscene Magazine, Morrissey castigated those in chinchilla coats. "It's disgusting. They're disgusting," he spat. "If I see someone wearing fur I ask them to take it out of view." In the same interview, he pointed out that synthetic shoes "look silly" and confessed to wearing leather footwear, as there's "no sensible alternative." The first scenario seems unlikely and makes for a comedic envisioning (At the Savoy: "Excuse me, madam, but that rabbit shawl must be taken out of public view"), while the second statement reiterates that Morrissey never forsakes his role as photo-ready icon and dapper fashionist for a few cows.
Similarly, when he puts his hands on the hips of Liverpool and Hull to slowdance with England in "Come Back to Camden", the lyrics should be taken with the whole of the Winsford Rock salt mine. Obviously, a "discoloured dark brown staircase," a "slate grey Victorian sky," and "the taste of the Thames" fail to paint a whimsical postcard of home. Even those who've never choked for air while riding the 15 down Fleet Street can read the sarcasm without a spider map. Yet those weeping synthetic strings (violins and cellos use catgut and horsehair, by the way) flash "I miss you" in garish American neon.
When Morrissey humorously mocks Americans with, "You wonder why in Estonia they say, 'Hey, you, big fat pig, you fat pig,'" we laugh because most Americans don't know what Estonia is, let alone where it lies on the Baltic; fat Americans travel to Tucson not Talinn. Each of You Are the Quarry's 12 songs contains an equally delicious line. In "Let Me Kiss You", which incidentally features the most romantically melodic quasi-Marr guitar, Morrissey pulls the mask off an ostensible smooching ballad with the desperate gob of, "And then you open your eyes and you see someone you physically despise but my heart is open." Those artificial maudlin strings that sweep back in afterwards seem like the most appropriately feeble yet crushing sound on the record. The supposed ode to his Hispanic fans, "First of the Gang to Die", even contains poetic and dreadful images like solar illumination sparkling in cement reservoirs and on human bone.
Two songs drive home Morrissey's modi operandi. On "The World Is Full of Crashing Bores", the fear of being a suburban meatsuit and an opposing love of cheap pop thrills drives him to an ending refrain of sincerely conveyed cliche with "Take me in your arms and love me." The album closes with the quiff quivering mammoth, "You Know I Couldn't Last". Morrissey's tommy gun is pointed directly at the pop stars who take their passing charge with less zeal and erudition than himself. Robbie Williams and Jason Mraz would never use "gelignite" and "evil legal eagles" in a chorus, or dare stick their neck out for the critics. "The teenagers who love you, they will wake up, yawn, and kill you," he croons. At his most biting he sounds most relaxed. At his most self-deprecating he sounds most energized. By the time the title comes up, after "there's a cash register ringing and it weighs so heavily on my back," it's again clear that "I" is not the first person. But it could be.
Like fellow Southern Californians Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman, Morrissey shows no fear of offending or wrapping emotions in black humor, while exhibiting a deep passion for classic songwriting forms. Few-- possibly none-- would call the police "uniformed whores" and mockingly thank Jesus for bestowing him with love for which there is no receptacle on an album bulging with desire and soppy diapason. With a producer to match the vocal boldness of Morrissey, the record could have been pushed, musically, in a futuristic cinescope folk direction similar to recent The Flaming Lips. Flutes and piano and electric squelches peep through the sidewalk of simple lulling rhythms, acoustic guitar, and synthesizers. Jerry Finn, a Hollywood hack, knows only to throw all the parts out there with money stuffed in the panties. Prancing the choice embellishments in polo gear and avoiding standard rock mixing would have made the album perfect.
That's a rather considerable caveat to tag on the end on a review, but if you're listening to Morrissey albums for riffs and licks you're missing the point. Any instrumental bed under such incandescent personality and booming voice would pale. Envisioning the songwriter at work brings to mind a woman picking at an acoustic or a fellow hunched over a piano with a drink. The genesis of Morrissey music remains ambiguous both physically and in intent.
You Are the Quarry sounds effortless, and seemingly anything that pours from Morrissey's mouth comes wrapped in well-formed wit and melody. Some may want him to simply yearn for his homeland, or a woman, or a man, or bitterly attack pop stars or American culture, as this is seen as some sort of bold personal statement, but personalities rarely run down such black and white divisions. Creating an emotionally muddled, cantankerous, baroque, funny, longing, introspective, world-critiquing album is the most personal act a man like Morrissey makes. It trickles down to the logo on the cover, the resuscitated Attack imprint, a vinyl reggae label that has no relation to his music, yet reflects the taste and scholarship and attitude of man who began his career in music writing geeky teenage letters to NME begging for better New York Dolls coverage.
Often during the course of writing a review, as the CD plays again and again for the 13th and 14th times, a critic finds himself convincing himself more and more that the record is essential. Morrissey's nature inherently emboldens those looking to make a statement, and now that he's on the mark, I similarly feel the need to stick out my neck for his record. Then again, Horace Vachell eventually sold the ranch and moved back to England. You can go home again.


On its second album, the London band folds classic pop tropes into its songwriting—just the latest surprise from a group that has always kept listeners on their toes.

Anywhere But Here

Where the vocals of Sorry’s Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen used to stand stark and alone, on the north London band’s second album, Anywhere But Here, they’re frequently buffeted by a wave of bubblegum backing vocals, framing bitter musings and anxious hooks in dreamlike oohs and ghostly aahs. These wordless accompaniments, lifted right from the classic pop songwriting toolbox, might have once seemed too conventional for a band like Sorry. Their breakthrough songs were better known for growls, gulps, and electronic gurgles. But on Anywhere But Here, they fold these gestures toward pop history into their music with reverent sincerity, without losing their ability to surprise.
With her tongue characteristically in cheek, Lorenz said in a 2021 interview that the band was tilting toward “more song-y, ’70s arrangements,” and elsewhere they’ve cited the influence of songwriters like Carly Simon and Randy Newman. Anywhere But Here—which was produced by Lorenz and O’Bryen along with Bristol producer/engineer Ali Chant and Portishead’s Adrian Utley—might sit more comfortably alongside the punk-pop of Mica Levi’s Micachu and the Shapes, or Alex G’s off-kilter romanticism, than “You’re So Vain.” But it manages to weave classic techniques into the band’s strange world with a humor that never skids into distanced irony. The results make for some of Sorry’s most accomplished songs to date.
Sorry have long toyed self-consciously with musical clichés, but on Anywhere But Here, their pastiches are injected with real pathos. “Screaming in the Rain” is a forlorn duet on which both O’Bryen and Lorenz sound genuinely vulnerable, their voices flickering gently over threadbare guitar and a gloomy piano outro. Lorenz, in particular, brings a bodiliness to her performances: There’s the long, ragged breath she takes after imagining someone else putting their arm around her ex in “Key to the City”; the alteration between haunted whispers and halted, plosive intonation on “Willow Tree”; the way, on “Again,” her voice dwindles as she sings, “The world shone like a chandelier/And I was lost for good.” These visceral details tell a story, even when she’s projecting a disaffected tone—as when she cries on “Key to the City,” “I don’t care!”
Likewise, the magic of Sorry’s instrumentation lies in the tiniest and most jarring details. They’ve always created a vast amount of space in their productions, letting the most incongruous and compelling elements take the foreground. The spare “Baltimore” starts off eerily, with a few lone jabs at piano, a creeping guitar riff, a wobble of bass. Like the strutting “Step,” it lurches back and forth between quieter verses and choruses that build to a loud and frantic conclusion.
There’s never enough time to get comfortable in a Sorry song; it can be tricky to predict what’s coming next. The album’s weakest cuts are those that deploy familiar motifs like the quirky strums and city-life observations of “There’s So Many People That Want to Be Loved.” But at their best, Sorry wed hooky melodies and piercing earnestness with unsettling moments that shake you awake. Take the flourish of opera that adds drama to the downbeat “I Miss the Fool,” or the fact that “Closer” is less about physical or emotional intimacy than it is about feeling the slow creep of mortality (“Closer to the ether, closer to the worms,” Lorenz and O’Bryen sing sweetly in muted harmony). The jarring way they marry these unlikely elements, and their disarming lyricism, is often funny—but it’s never a joke. Where 925 was thrillingly inventive, but often kept the listener at a cautious remove, Anywhere But Here uses deeply felt storytelling and intimate vocals to usher us much closer.


The Philadelphia R&B singer’s stark, lightly poetic songs splay out the intimacies and contradictions of her raw emotions.

Hold Space For Me

Tiffany Majette wanted to be an astronaut; instead, she turned to music. As Orion Sun, she writes songs that hover and drift along, tenderly excavating past traumas and recent relationships. The 24-year-old singer and producer has orbited the Philadelphia R&B scene in recent years, opening performances by neo-soul crooner Daniel Caesar and eclectic rapper Tierra Whack. A 2017 mixtape, A Collection of Fleeting Moments and Daydreams, floated between outer-space imagery and drum-heavy introspection. On her debut album, Hold Space for Me, she unfurls her personal history, singing about learning to fall in love while grieving and about losing her childhood home. She describes her writing process as tapping into a kind of “darkness,” but there’s an airiness to her glistening jazz samples, quasi-trap beats, and tossed-off raps about Kanye.
The sparse production relies on Orion Sun’s voice to carry the emotional weight of each track. She’s most successful when she’s stark, frank, and lightly poetic: “I pray to God, wherever he resides/If loving her’s alright,” she sings in a soft, undulating voice on “Trying,” a glimmering ballad about a queer relationship. Her simplicity doesn’t always achieve its goal; after 10 repetitions of “it feels so good to know you,” you’re numbed to the romance of the words. The album wants to soothe, but its meandering vocals and slow, weary chords start to feel like a drain.
So when Orion Sun suddenly bursts out with a rap, it’s a welcome change of pace. Her occasional verses are fun, though sort of corny: “I feel like A$AP Rocky, bitches on my jockey, all up in my face, hockey,” she raps on “El Camino.” On “Golden Hour,” she finds a staccato, sing-song flow, and while the lyrics are never as strong as her more straightforward ballads, the twinkling synth and shimmering production effects complement her delivery. Towards of the end of the song, she sighs, layered vocals reverberating as she revels in her new-found success. “They’re fucking with me now,” she murmurs, genuinely shocked.
At times the album feels ill-equipped to handle the capital-E Emotions, performing metaphors so theatrical they invoke cliche. “Grim Reaper,” a song about a friend’s death (“Where do you go/When your soul leaves the physical?”), fades into the chirp of a disconnected phone line; the song ends with a fuzzy, shoveling sound, like someone scraping through dirt. At other points, she turns to underwhelmed interjections, like the “Oh shit” and “What the fuck’s going on?” of the opener. Each song builds a small space for raw emotions, splaying out their intimacies and contradictions. But once the feelings pass, they default to easy takeaways—love is cozy, death is sad, time is fleeting—and palatable chords.
On the album’s best track, “Coffee for Dinner,” Orion Sun interpolates The Weeknd, lilting a G-rated take on the Canadian superstar’s clammy sex chronicle “Often.” With vivid imagery and yearning vocals, she carves a space for herself out of the up-ended song, responding to the hedonism of the original with a gentleness that anchors the record. Her songs search for a smoothness that feels like safety, always taking a breath before unfolding.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In an attempt to give the world a true blockbuster rap album, the Houston rapper delivers a shiny, empty spectacle loaded with pop superstars who rarely make an impact.

UTOPIA

In Circus Maximus, the 75-minute documentary/brain poem that accompanies Travis Scott’s new album UTOPIA, our hero Travis gets into a scuffle with a tentacle creature and headbangs in an open field. He then climbs a mountain to seek an audience with Rick Rubin to confess a deep-seated fear that has been gnawing at his very soul: Do I still have the ability to rage?
This is Travis’ idea of getting vulnerable. Since he released his inescapable album Astroworld five years ago, Travis has fully embraced his persona as the ultimate hooligan, even after tragedy put that character under fire. In 2021, while he performed one of his raucous sets at his hometown Astroworld Festival in Houston, 10 people were killed and thousands more were injured during a sudden crowd crush. While Travis remains a defendant in several civil lawsuits, he was not held criminally responsible for the incident and has seemingly moved on, or pretended it never happened. Spoiler alert: He does still have the ability to rage. And to get that across, here is UTOPIA, a big, empty rap blockbuster that lives in the shadow of other bigger, less-empty rap blockbusters.
Specifically, those by Kanye West. That probably won’t be a surprise to anyone who has ever heard any song by Travis Scott, who’s been a Ye disciple since the days of getting some production credits on Yeezus a decade ago. But UTOPIA veers from heavy inspiration into Travis pretty much trying to Single White Female him. Well, that’s impossible, because even with the moody AutoTune warbling of 808s & Heartbreaks, the grand maestro vibes of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the icy electro synths of Yeezus, and the famous-friend-apalooza of The Life of Pablo, Travis is missing arguably the most important aspect of Kanye. Even at his most wild, most narcissistic, and most famous, Kanye still felt shit. Raw no matter how much he tinkered, layered, or absorbed. Unafraid to look like a fool, or at least convinced that he was so cool that it didn’t matter if he did. In the Circus Maximus film, the visuals are at times so pristine and polished that Travis looks like a cyborg; UTOPIA sounds a lot like that, too.
Sometimes, the marquee features and shiny production are good at masking the fact that Travis is an emotional blackhole on the mic. The digitized lilts over Blonde-inspired fogginess on “My Eyes” sound nice enough, especially when sprinkled with dreamy riffing from Sampha and Justin Vernon. The rage beat on “Fe!n” is played-out, but Playboi Carti’s new vocal trick (sounding like he has bronchitis) soaks up the attention and just lets Travis do a bunch of ad-libbing. Future is strong over the orchestral beat of “Telekinesis,” and I like when he raps, “Countin’ so much money till my skin peel.” SZA is here, too, sounding good and sounding like she’s collecting a check. But again, at his peak, Kanye was able to draw showstopping features out of collaborators—these are nothing more than fleeting thrills.
Travis needs those knockout guest appearances because nobody expects him to carry an album himself. The bar for him as a rapper is already low; he’s here for the vibes, not the skill, and that’s fine. But what happens when the vibes are off? UTOPIA is a more expensive model of his previous albums, but it doesn’t sound like he’s leveled up because his life is so different now that when he tries to act like it’s not, he comes off as fake as hell. (His romantic breakups and reconciliations have been endless tabloid fodder; his future as a bankable mainstream act seemed uncertain after the Astroworld Fest disaster.) That’s not asking him to suddenly be a lyricist, but one of the basic attributes we expect from rappers is to be real with us, or at least convince us that they’re not purely bullshitting. Mild edginess like “I got Ye over Biden” on “Skitzo” or blank moshpit-ready tracks such as “Topia Twins” just come off as deflections. It’s scared rapping, hiding behind the spectacle.
Even more so than his past projects, UTOPIA has rapid beat switch-ups, stacked credits, and cinematic songs for no other reason than he thinks that is what signals an event album. “Modern Jam” features some embarrassingly uninspired stripped-down rapping by Travis. But oooh the mildly funky beat is co-produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk! “Meltdown” is diet “Sicko Mode.” But oh man Drake dissed Pharrell’s new office job! (OK, it was kind of funny.) On “Delresto (Echoes),” the shimmering and buffering noise gets topped with Beyoncé’s wails. Never mind that she’s going through the motions like Robert Downey Jr.’s guest appearances in minor Marvel movies. This Beyoncé feature is about as deep as his nods to his Houston roots go, and still, it’s Beyoncé. Rap is such a regional culture, even for the megastars. Whether it’s Drake with Toronto, or Kendrick with L.A., or Lil Baby with Atlanta, a connection to their home grounds them as they become international superstars. Travis still had that on Astroworld, where the chopped-and-screwed Big Hawk sample on “Sicko Mode” or the homage to his hometown “R.I.P. Screw” went a long way in making him feel like a real person. UTOPIA’s global ambitions sacrifice that little bit of realness he had left.
So it’s not even surprising that “K-Pop” exists, a diabolically stupid plan to create the most popular song in the world. You have Travis, the Weeknd, and Bad Bunny fusing their croons together over a sauceless Afropop rhythm on a track where the title supposedly isn’t a reference to the Korean pop genre to game extra clicks, but has the same effect. The algorithms will love it, congrats on the hit song. Surprised he didn’t round out the chart-chasing by hitting up Morgan Wallen.
For all its blinding star power, every moment on UTOPIA should feel seismic, or at the very least impactful. Think of Quavo’s melodic fantasia on “Oh My Dis Side,” or Nav’s ice-cold breeziness on “Beibs in the Trap,” or even Drake’s “Sicko Mode” verses which were basically implanted into your brain permanently after one listen. Now, without those, all he has to back himself up is the production. Yet even that is so safe. He waters down the cutting-edge sounds of the past and, in the process, flattens his Southerness to the point that he feels like he’s from nowhere.
To Travis’ credit, rap needs blockbusters, too. Many of the genre’s great albums of the year are so completely absorbed in regional movements that they aren’t even cutting through the noise (see: Sexyy Red’s Hood Hottest Princess and Veeze’s Ganger). But it also would be nice to have a water-cooler monocultural event, a conversation piece that you can talk about with anyone, anywhere. We need those albums that end all the widespread fear-mongering that rap is on a downward spiral just because it’s struggling to get a No. 1 hit this year, rap albums that become so ubiquitous in pop culture that when you look back at that moment in your life it will be inextricable. There are fewer moments like that in art in general anymore, but to get there, the hollow spectacle of UTOPIA is not enough. You want something to grab onto beyond that, an idea, a feeling, honesty. You want music with a vision that can make you feel like your world, or the world, is different, even for a moment.


Radiohead's first three albums are given expanded 2xCD reissues.

Radiohead: Pablo Honey: Collector's Edition / The Bends: Collector's Edition / OK Computer: Collector's Edition

When Capitol released a few different shortcuts through Radiohead's career late last year, we were indifferent to its cause, citing a lack of need and poor selection. Most fervent Radiohead fans would have wasted their money buying these packages, and most people interested in the band would be best served by their actual albums. Well, Capitol has now begun to roll out those parent albums-- starting with the group's three 1990s releases (Pablo Honey, The Bends, OK Computer)-- again, without the band's participation. This time, however, the label is doing it right, dressing the releases up with the right accoutrements: B-sides from the era (and since the era overlapped with two-part CD singles, there are plenty), radio sessions, and music videos.
For an epochal, era-defining band, Radiohead had an unusual beginning, looking like they'd wind up one-hit wonders, chancers callously attaching themselves to a sound and moment yet with few ideas of their own. That first hit, "Creep", with its loud/soft dynamic and self-loathing lyric, fit snugly into the post-Nirvana alt-rock landscape-- no surprise: Radiohead copped as much from 80s indie rock as their Pac NW brethren did. Yet instead of being hamstrung by platinum success, Radiohead abandoned careerist moves for artistic ambitions, moving quickly to incorporate the record-collector's music of post-rock and Mo Wax, the post-dance, spiritually nurturing end of UK rock, and the pre-millennial tension of IDM and trip-hop.
By the end of the 90s, Radiohead hadn't supplanted U2, R.E.M., Oasis, and Metallica as the world's biggest rock band. But it was largely agreed upon that they were the world's best-- and with hindsight, arguably, along with the White Stripes, the last indie-friendly group to conquer the world and punch in the same weight class as early 90s alt-rock giants like Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Green Day, or Red Hot Chili Peppers. That they used this critical and commercial currency to such dazzling effect on Kid A and Amnesiac is still one of the highlights of this decade; that the press, especially in the UK, chose the more familiar and necrophiliac "new rock revolution" over the relatively pioneering Radiohead is one of the decade's lows.
UK rock, for all its heady artistry and visionaries throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s, had been slumming it a bit when Radiohead first emerged. Size and grandeur, which would become the goals for too many UK guitar bands by the end of the Britpop era, were largely missing from that country's indie scene when Radiohead started recording in 1992. Sure, the Stone Roses had trumpeted their own greatness a few years earlier, but most of the era's indie music was introspective, bands content to gaze at their shoes rather than aim for the back of the venue.
Radiohead's early, full-bodied music was, in most circles then, dismissed as empty Americanisms-- and not without reason. The expansive Pablo Honey set-- the 12-song album accompanied by 22 extras-- mostly highlights a group in hock to U.S. indie heroes Pixes and Dinosaur Jr. (with the occasional R.E.M. homage tossed in-- see: "Lurgee"). The loose "Anyone Can Play Guitar" and delicate "Thinking About You" thankfully break up the 120-minute mood, but most of the rest of the album is squarely in the post-grunge wheelhouse. That's not always a bad thing: "Stop Whispering", opener "You", and a re-recorded version of early single "Prove Yourself" hold up well-- and "Creep" has oddly gotten better with age. Elsewhere, the dreadful "Pop Is Dead", and songs like "How Do You?", "I Can't", "Ripcord", and "Vegetable" are run of the mill at best.
If Pablo Honey didn't betray hints of the band Radiohead would become, neither did its B-sides. Unlike contemporaries such as Blur, who used their non-album material to explore new ideas or moods, Radiohead's Pablo Honey-era work is primarily lesser versions of the album. The extra material kicks off with their debut release, the Drill EP, which features three rudimentary versions of LP tracks, plus "Stupid Car", the first of Thom Yorke's odd automobile-themed fixations (still to come: "Killer Cars", "Airbag", the "Karma Police" video...) From there, it's a mishmash of alternate takes and also-rans (highlight: the U.S. single version of "Stop Whispering"), with only the shoegazey "Coke Babies" and an acoustic version of early political commentary "Banana Co." (released in much better form on The Bends package) worth exploring more than a few times.
I distinctly remember then the first time someone suggested The Bends was a great record. Not being one of the million-plus Pablo Honey owners at the time, I was content to hear "Creep" on the radio over and over and expected I'd soon spend about as much about time with Radiohead's catalog as one would with, say, Hum or Ned's Atomic Dustbin or School of Fish. The My Iron Lung EP had beaten The Bends to U.S. record shelves by a few months, and the "High and Dry" / "Planet Telex" single was out a few weeks prior as well, but few noticed. Anyone who had explored those two earlier singles, however, would have been excited for the LP.
A reaction to the success of "Creep", "My Iron Lung" found Radiohead still exploring the loud/soft dynamic, but guitarist Jonny Greenwood was also locating his own identity and Yorke, inspired by Jeff Buckley, was using a wider vocal range, including some falsetto. Balancing a slightly artier sense of musical self-destruction with a sinewy guitar line, on "Lung" Radiohead found new ways to pick apart and re-construct the typical alt-rock template. Elsewhere on the EP, the five B-sides demonstrated a band whose collective heads seemed to crack open and spill out new ideas, moving the group away from the dour dead-end of grunge signifiers: With more loose-limbed and nimble guitar work ("The Trickster"), hints of art-rock ("Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong"), the valuing of texture over riffs ("Permanent Daygliht"), offers of emotional nourishment ("Lozenge of Love" and "You Never Wash Up After Yourself") and tension and apprehension about workaday life ("Lewis [Mistreated]"), and themes of misanthropy (um, most of the five songs), these tracks pointed the way toward what was to come.
The band's next release, the "High and Dry" / "Planet Telex" single, announced that they'd arrived. "Planet Telex", an early exploration with loops and studio enhancements for the group, is their first song that could have fit on any of their albums, regardless of how experimental they grew; "High and Dry", meanwhile, is the blueprint for the big-hearted balladry that spawned the careers of imitators Travis, Starsailor, Elbow, and Coldplay (who, let's face it, wound up perfecting this sort of huggable, swelling arena rock).
The Bends was essentially split between these poles: warmth and tension; riffs and texture; rock and post-rock. The tricks employed by "Planet Telex" were rarely bested on it-- only arguably by "Just"-- while the "High & Dry" version of the band was topped at every turn here, especially on "Street Spirit (Fade Out") and "Fake Plastic Trees". Even B-sides such "Bishop's Robes" and "Talk Show Host" come close to matching "High".
To many fans, this more approachable and loveable version of the band is its peak. I can't agree, but the record is still a marvel. It feels, with hindsight, like a welcome retreat from the incessant back-patting and 60s worship of prime-period Britpop and a blueprint for the more feminine, emotionally engaging music that would emerge in the UK a few years later-- led by OK Computer. Alongside late 1996 or 1997 releases by Verve, Spiritualized, Belle and Sebastian, Cornershop, Mogwai, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Primal Scream, Super Furry Animals, the Beta Band, Mansun, and even Britpop stars Blur, Radiohead's OK Computer led the push back against knuckle-dragging Oasis clones who segregated their Boomer rock leanings from the fertile explorations of dance, classic indie, hip-hop, and art-school sensibilities going on throughout the rest of the UK. But once again, the press chose what they knew over the new, and despite the plaudits for 2000's Kid A, by the time of 2001's Amnesiac, people wanted another The Bends.
OK Computer was the balance everyone agreed upon though-- real songs and tunes, but ones that didn't shrink from the increasingly unlimited possibilities of modern music-making. In that sense, Radiohead were not only record-collectors but futurists, approaching the 21st century from the perspective of their day rather than from the generation prior, as Stereolab, Broadcast, Tortoise, and others were doing (to wonderful effect, granted). Discounting the breather "Fitter Happier", only "Electrioneering" seems like a misstep on the album today, with the white-knuckle "Climbing Up the Walls" and pre-album teaser "Lucky" now standing firmly alongside more entrenched highlights "Paranoid Android", "No Surprises", "Karma Police", and "Let Down".
The record's B-sides are no less rewarding, especially "Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)" and "Melatonin", which would have fit fine on LP itself. "Palo Alto" proves they could do light and tongue-in-cheek, while "Meeting in the Aisle" makes you wonder why they don't record more instrumentals. The group's eventual fascination with, for a successful 90s guitar band, relatively foreign sounds like IDM and 20th century classical music found root around this time and it's on these extras where they first explored these notions.
Maybe you don't need to buy these again, maybe you own the material already. If you do, sure-- pass. If you have the LPs but stopped there, both The Bends and OK Computer are worth getting in these versions. If you're curious or a completist, Pablo Honey is out there, too. That the band had nothing to do with these is beside the point: This is the final word on these records, if for no other reason that the Beatles' September 9 remaster campaign is, arguably, the end of the CD era. That all of those discs are coming out at the same time, rather than being slowly and ceremoniously rolled out as they were 20-odd years ago, is a tacit acknowledgment by the music industry that they best sell non-vinyl physical products now, immediately, before the prospect of doing so is gone. With that in mind, I find it wise that many bands are wisely re-organizing their pasts, or having it done for them by their label. So long as it's done like this, I'm happy to re-purchase the stuff.


Karamika is a duo of British musician George Thompson (who does numerous remixes as Black Merlin) and Gordon Pohl, who's one half of Düsseldorf act Musiccargo. Their debut evokes the primitive, visceral early electronic music of Cluster, Harmonia, and Neu!, a time before available software and computers when these electrical surges weren't so easily tamed and manageable.

Karamika

In the mid-'70s, Brian Eno was so taken with the strange sounds emanating from Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius's studio in the rural village of Forst—both the duo music they made as Cluster as well as their trio with Michael Rother as Harmonia—that he traveled from England to Germany to record with them. The results of that meeting only came to light in the past few years (it's fully documented on the forthcoming Harmonia box set) but the meeting sprang to my mind while listening to Karamika.
Karamika is a duo of British musician George Thompson (who does numerous remixes as Black Merlin), and Gordon Pohl, who's one half of Düsseldorf act Musiccargo. At times, their work together evokes the chilly sounds of early-'80s minimal wave and some of John Carpenter's analog synth soundtracks. But the snaking, immersive 12 tracks that comprise their debut often brings to mind the primitive, visceral early electronic music that Cluster themselves made back when they were still known as the woolly, circuit-bending band Kluster.
Karamika's music is reactive in that sense, pulling away from the use of readily available software and computers to revisit an era when these electrical surges weren't so easily tamed and manageable. "Ton 01" begins with a slowly undulating sine wave and throb, and when the metronomic drumming enters it brings to mind Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter's first forays as Kraftwerk. As the track moves along, a noisy guitar appears, reminiscent of the one that worms through Neu!'s "Hallogallo", showing where early electronics grappled with rock instrumentation, each pushing the other into strange new realms.
There's nothing especially novel about emulating the likes of Cluster, Kraftwerk, or Neu! in 2015 (nor would it have been back in 2005), but it's hard to get the parameters right. The exploratory spirit remains intact, but Karamika's resultant tracks feel more focused and they are judicious in adding new layers and noises to the initial framework so that it doesn't all collapse under the weight. More often than not, the deeper you travel into the pieces, the more mesmerizing they become.
A sense of claustrophobia and dread lurks beneath the surface throughout. As "Ton 04" moves through its nine minutes, the throbs gather in density until they feel like a migraine. The cavernous clattering on "Ton 07" begins as an early experimental piece might. Disembodied voices appear on the album highlight "Ton 9", and at the peak of tension a child's laugh comes in, which has a horror-film effect, prickling the skin rather than breaking the tension. In that way, Karamika's homage to their German forefathers forgoes the utopian spirit of some of those albums. Instead, Thompson and Pohl hint at the isolating, disconnected present.


Reissued for its 50th anniversary, Satanic Majesties remains a singular entry in the Stones’ catalog. It is the strange result of a bizarre set of personal, professional, and cultural circumstances.

The Rolling Stones: Their Satanic Majesties Request

Their Satanic Majesties Request

Did the Rolling Stones intend Their Satanic Majesties Request to be a spoof of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or was it a sincere attempt to siphon some of the magic of the Beatles’ masterpiece? This question has hung over Satanic Majesties ever since its release in late 1967, perhaps due to the persistence of the perception that the two groups are locked in a deathless rivalry, or maybe just because their album artwork is so similar—not entirely surprising, considering how both ornate cover images are based on photographs snapped by Michael Cooper. Certainly, the arrival of a 50th Anniversary super deluxe reissue of Their Satanic Majesties Request just a few months after the lavish 50th Anniversary super deluxe reissue of Sgt. Pepper’s invites such comparisons and, once again, the Stones wind up with the raw end of the deal.
The Beatles plumped up Pepper with session tapes, alternate mixes, and other ephemera that not only made diehard fans salivate, but provided fresh insights to an album whose story seemingly had been exhausted. In contrast, ABKCO slaps CDs and LPs of the stereo and mono mixes into a slim LP-sized fold-out box but never bothering with anything laying in the vaults, even though annotator Rob Bowman mentions two separate unreleased versions of “Sing This All Together (See What Happens)” in his liner notes. Such offerings may seem skimpy but blame ABKCO, not the Stones, who have no say in how their ’60s material is disseminated and reissued.
Cast aside any comparisons to the Beatles, though, and consider Their Satanic Majesties Request on its own terms. Sure, Keith Richards claims in his 2010 memoir Life that “none of us wanted to make [Satanic Majesties], but it was time for another Stones album, and Sgt. Pepper’s was coming out, so we thought basically we were doing a put-on,” but that’s part of a rich tradition of the Rolling Stones dismissing their second album of 1967 that stretches all the way back to 1968, when Mick Jagger said it took them a year to finish the album because they were so “strung out.” While it is true that 1967 ranks among the worst years in Rolling Stones history—it opened with Jagger and Richards getting busted for dope, Brian Jones faced similar charges not much later, and interpersonal tensions were heightened by Keith swiping Anita Pallenberg away from Jones—the Satanic Majesties sessions didn’t last an abnormally long time. A few tracks were cut in February but they began in earnest in the late summer, after all the court cases were settled...a situation that presumably kept the Stones busy enough to not pay too much attention to the June release of Sgt. Pepper’s.
Amid the personal turmoil of 1967, the Rolling Stones also faced a fracture in their inner circles, as Richards and especially Jagger became disenchanted by their manager and producer Andrew “Loog” Oldham. Immediate Records, the label Oldham launched in 1965, gained momentum thanks to the success of the Small Faces, but a bigger distraction for Loog was his increasing fondness for various intoxicants. Hunkering down in the studio in the aftermath of the Summer of Love, the Stones were riding on the same vibes that flowed from coast to coast in 1967, but they—or at least Jagger—were also determined to sever ties with Oldham. Jagger later claimed the Stones went wild on Satanic Majesties “to piss Andrew off, because he was such a pain in the neck. Because he didn’t understand it. The more we wanted to unload him, we decided to go on this path to alienate him.” But, as always, there may have been a mercenary mission driving Mick’s emotions. According to Fred Goodman’s biography Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles, Made the Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll, “Oldham, who was contractually obligated to pay all recording costs, suspected the band members were out to bankrupt him and force his resignation. “Suddenly they weren’t arriving in the studio with songs. There’s actually nothing to do. Three weeks this is going on—and three weeks in the sixties was a very long time. I was bored and had no idea what I was doing there.’” According to Klein, the man who muscled aside Oldham in the management of the Stones, the faltering sessions was indeed intentional: “’What bothered Jagger was that Oldham was making five times as much as him.”
All of this means that Their Satanic Majesties Request is the product of a bizarre set of personal, professional, and cultural circumstances, each pushing the Stones to make a record that’s its own strange, wonderful entity, one that is an anomaly within the Stones’ catalog but not one without precedent. Certainly, its immediate predecessor Between the Buttons—in both its U.S. and UK incarnations—has elements that resurface on Satanic Majesties, especially an insouciant rhythm and calculated indifference, the first flowerings of the signature Jagger trend of floating just above whatever cultural trend he co-opts. The Stones don’t seem quite as assured here as they did on Between the Buttons or Beggars Banquet, the 1968 sequel that cemented the band’s reputation as heirs to an American tradition that never was theirs by birthright. Satanic Majesties, on the other hand, burrows into British music from music hall (witness the pure camp of the closer “On With the Show” or the stately “She’s a Rainbow,” purple in its prose and procession) to pastoral folk (the hesitant hum of “Gomper”).
What’s fascinating about Their Satanic Majesties Request is how it belongs to neither the precious school of English psychedelia or its rootsy American counterpart. Nobody on the American west coast really rocked hard in 1967—down in L.A., Love puffed themselves up with orchestras, up in San Francisco they were loathe to shake their folk roots—and the British psych acts of ’67 relied on trippy textures, eschewing any suggestion of swing. Keith Richards may later have claimed he couldn’t play his “old shit” on these sessions—and that was just four years later, in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1971—but Their Satanic Majesties has a pulse that no other psychedelic album does. Blame it on Charlie Watts if you want, but every song on Majesties has some air in its rhythm, which means it grooves when other psych records rely on texture.
Unlike whatever private press psych set you may unearth, this is a band that actually mastered their instruments, so the music is kinetic even when it’s aimless. The group enjoys pushing the boundaries of what they can achieve in the studio and what they can do as a unit, so they indulge in making sounds  without the constructs of a song. Since the Stones usually adhere to a rigid structure, hearing them play without a net is thrilling, especially because they purposefully wandered without direction, then cut up a collage of the best elements some time later. This doesn’t mean Satanic Majesties is without songs—”She’s a Rainbow,” “2000 Man,” “Citadel,” “2000 Light Years From Home” are as clearly defined as any of their ’60s singles—but the endless, gormless “Sing This All Together (See What Happens)” and “Gomper” are supporting evidence for Oldham’s thesis that the band was attempting to run out the clock on his dime. They’re also strange and wonderful, pointing toward where the Stones would land, particularly “Sing This All Together (See What Happens),” which descends into a dry run for Keith’s five-string riffing. It’s a hint of a future to come that finds counterparts in the open string drones of “2000 Man” and the piercing echoes of “Citadel,” which contain bracing modern elements that overwhelm the period accoutrements of the production.
Nevertheless, the charm of *Their Satanic Majesties Request * is that it is an artifact of its time, especially in how it’s emblematic of the excesses of its era but sounds like nothing else of its year, either. Perhaps psychedelia wasn’t a natural fit for the earthbound Stones, but the dissonance between their gritty rhythms and ornate, precocious arrangements is enthralling, not in the least because there’s no other record—by the Stones or anybody else—that sounds quite like this. And that means, with all its bad ideas, absurdity and wonder, Their Satanic Majesties Request may capture the ideals of the psychedelic 1967 better than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as it holds dear to the idea that there’s an entire world existing within your head.


Jozef Van Wissem, the self-professed "lute player with a punk rock attitude," offers a collaborative LP with the film director (and guitarist) Jim Jarmusch.

Jim Jarmusch: Concerning the Entrance Into Eternity

Concerning the Entrance Into Eternity

Jozef Van Wissem's self-proclaimed "liberation of the lute" has always been a process of inversion. In fact, the songs on his very first release, 2000's Retrograde Renaissance Lute (A Classical Deconstruction), are literally inverted. He took traditional lute tablatures and rewrote them upside-down, then cut up and rearranged the results to form new compositions. Since then, Van Wissem has continued to invert his baroque instrument in order to be, as he told us earlier this month, "a lute player with a punk rock attitude." He's written musical palindromes (melodies which sound the same played forwards or backwards), delved into experimental techniques like field recordings and improvisation, and collaborated with modern-styled string players such as James Blackshaw and Tetuzi Akiyama.
Those players dip into classical styles themselves too, but the musical mindset of Van Wissem's latest collaborator, Jim Jarmusch, was formed in the punk-drenched milieu of late-1970's New York. There the now-famous indie film director played keyboards and sang with the no-wave band the Del Byzanteens and shot no-wave films starring musicians like John Lurie and Richard Edson. Which makes the pair's debut album the first full release Van Wissem has made with an actual punk rocker. (Jarmusch added guitar to one track on Van Wissem's 2011 solo album, The Joy That Never Ends).
Such a meeting of divergent backgrounds could result in a kind of tonal car crash, but Jarmusch easily and compellingly weaves his playing into Van Wissem's era-bridging craft. At times their sounds connect like rhyming lines of poetry; in other places, like opener "Apokatastasis (Restoration)", Jarmusch's long tones form the echo of Van Wissem's patient, precise notes. In a few instances, such as when Jarmusch plays acoustic guitar, it can even be tough to tell these twin souls apart.
That complementary vibe is due in large part to Van Wissem's simple, sparse melodies, which leave lots of room for Jarmusch to enter and move around in. Concerning the Entrance has its moments of contrast and tension, too. On "The Sun of the Natural World Is Pure Fire", the way Jarmusch grinds out caustic noise behind Van Wissem's exploratory plucks produces a mesmerizing dissonance. Later, on closer "He Is Hanging By His Shiny Arms, His Heart an Open Wound With Love", he interrupts Van Wissem's solo playing by reciting St. John of the Cross' poetry with a cool, detached tone, sounding oddly like Thurston Moore at 16 rpm.
Still, the best moments come when Van Wissem and Jarmusch share a single musical mind. The most blending comes during the album's middle track, "Continuation of the Last Judgement". As Van Wissem devoutly spins out a lute loop, Jarmusch adds small accents, then slides into electric guitar waves that slyly bend around Van Wissem's cycles. Here, the duo's capacity to find interlocking patterns feels infinite, making "Continuation" the best possible title. You can imagine these comrades spinning their wordless yarns long after the album ends.


America first caught a whiff of what Richard James had to offer in early 1993,\n\ when Warp released the ...

Surfing on Sine Waves

America first caught a whiff of what Richard James had to offer in early 1993, when Warp released the Surfing on Sine Waves album under his Polygon Window alias. Though a few imports had already made a ripple stateside, Surfing on Sine Waves, distributed by TVT, marked the first time a James record could be found at domestic prices. The album was originally one in a line of Warp's "Artificial Intelligence" releases, a series that later birthed the much-maligned genre designation "Intelligent Dance Music." As part of the label's recent retooling of its catalog for a larger U.S. audience, Surfing on Sine Waves has now been remastered and re-released in the States with the addition of two unreleased tracks from the period.
In the wake of 2001's Drukqs, an album most Aphex Twin enthusiasts consider among the man's worst (I'm still waiting for a used copy to show up), it's fun to get reacquainted with the old material, if only to get an idea of what made James such an electronic music icon. Surfing on Sine Waves is rarely rated with the Selected Ambient Works albums or the early singles collected on Classics, but it's still a key record from the era that put James on the map and began the myth-making that would mushroom to Howard Hughes proportions around the time of the "Windowlicker" single.
Listening to Surfing on Sine Waves in the context of electronic music circa 2002, I get an idea what it must have been like to listen to Buddy Holly in 1970. Naturally, there are both positive and negative aspects to re-experiencing artifacts from an earlier time. While this album is a crude template for what post-rave electronic music would eventually become, there is a charm in its technological naïveté, and the record's devotion to puritan virtues like chords and tunes is appealing in a post-Autechre world packed with overachieving signal processors. Catchy, melodic and memorable tracks are what made the Aphex Twin so wonderful at his best; Surfing on Sine Waves has a handful of these, albeit in rough, embryonic form.
There are basically three kinds of tracks on this record: the hard dancefloor bang, the edgy mid-tempo bounce, and the melodic ambient drift. Bangers like "Quoth" and "Quixote" are the weakest of the lot to my ears, and they wind up being where the lack of technology is felt most. Though they surely sounded revolutionary on the '93 dance floor, the thin beats have since lost authority and lack the drum programming audacity that James would develop as the 90s wore on. Check "Isopropophlex" and "AFX2" from the Analog Bubblebath EP and "AFX114" from Caustic Window Compilation for far more commanding examples of this sound.
The propulsive mid-tempo numbers are what sound most interesting to me now. The sour acid squelch of the Roland TB-303 is the lead instrument on both "Ut1-Dot" and the untitled seventh track, with the latter inflating the signature sound to almost comic proportions. Working against the harsh machinations of the 303 are soft layers of keyboards and tinny but gently insistent beats. Sometimes these three components seem to be navigating entirely different but complimentary paths, giving the music an endless, drifting quality. Turns toward the kind of melody that made James famous include the jittery, piano-driven "If It Really Is Me," which sounds like Kraftwerk covering the theme from "The Young and the Restless" (that's "Nadia's Theme" for those of you without access to Mary J. Blige liner notes).
The two unreleased tracks are solid and fit nicely with the original record. "Portreath Harbour" is electro with a Middle Eastern tinge, as robotic handclaps compete for space with a melody right out of Lawrence of Arabia. "Redruth School" is filled with repeating patterns of percussion, with a faux-xylophone sequence providing counterpoint to the mournful synths. Wisely, Warp decided to keep the quiet and lovely "Quino - Phec" as the album closer on this version of Surfing on Sine Waves, as it ranks with the best of Aphex's ambient work in conjuring alien atmosphere. Though not quite an essential James release, Surfing on Sine Waves remains an excellent album from a fascinating and important period in electronic music.


Widowspeak's captivating singer Molly Hammilton conjures Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval but the key to this crestfallen Brooklyn trio is the guitar work. The skill with which Widowspeak assimilates its influences into alluring song structures is what prevents this from being an exercise in tributary.

Widowspeak

It usually takes years of practice and several albums for bands to reach the crestfallen state Brooklyn trio Widowspeak showcase on their debut. Here, the music's poignant rush came quickly: We're told their debut single "Harsh Realm" was recorded after the band played a total of six shows. The fatalistic croon of singer/songwriter Molly Hamilton has already garnered plenty of Hope Sandoval comparisons. It would be remiss not to mention those here, as Hamilton's phrasing is often nearly identical to her most obvious influence, but there's enough variation in mood and texture to give this project a weight and balance all of its own.
Much of the credit is due to the versatile guitar lines traded between Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas. At times there's a hollowed-out starkness and foreboding to the playing reminiscent of Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western soundtracks ("Puritan"); at others there's a meshing of hippy idealism and influences extracted from bad-vibes garage rock not dissimilar to Love at their peak (see the pleasingly atonal guitar solo that ripples through "Nightcrawlers"). The latter even bears a moody 1950s tenor that sounds like Alex Zhang Hungtai of Dirty Beaches with the filth cleaned out of his fingernails. Anyone looking to wallow in 1990s nostalgia will find much to gorge on, too-- touchstones from that decade come thick and fast. For instance, when Hamilton's not channeling Sandoval, and when the band crawls out of the doldrums into more upbeat territory ("Gun Shy", "Half Awake"), she often resembles Madder Rose singer Mary Lorson.
The skill with which Widowspeak assimilates those parts into alluring song structures is what prevents this from being an exercise in tributary. There's an ache to "Harsh Realm" that's all their own, the central vocal line ("I always think about you") bearing a downplayed creepiness that suggests Hamilton knows a thing or two about the ill effects of obsessive love. The one-two punch of "Gun Shy" and "Hard Times" are where the band hits its peak, the former combining their natural wistfulness with bouts of polished-up Link Wray guitar twang that wouldn't sound out of place on the soundtrack to Tom DiCillo's Johnny Suede. On "Hard Times" they bend everything around a featherlight pop framework that provides a perfectly melancholy backbone to Hamilton's naturally listless demeanor: It has the right amount of sun and shade much of Widowspeak possesses, the lightness of touch in the arrangement preventing the songwriting from toppling over into unpalatable sorrow.
Sometimes they don't get that balance right-- on "Fir Coat" it sounds like the song is racing away from Hamilton, and the closing "Ghost Boy" is built around the kind of Moe Tucker-inspired drumming that feels tired in the wake of legions of Brooklyn bands mining the sound over the past few years. But this is clearly the work of a group still finding its way, hammering out the kinks in public view. There's a potential here that could lead to something with a great deal more gravity. It's to Widowspeak's credit that they do make this first taste a brief peak behind the curtain: Five of the 10 songs don't go over the three-minute mark, and the entire runtime's barely half an hour. The economical use of space makes Widowspeak feel like a chance meeting with a pining stranger, one who spills their guts then vanishes from sight just as they're beginning to make an impression.