The Montreal songwriter shifts toward a stripped-back, folksier sound, highlighting her gossamer voice as she reflects on the ache of grief and the passage of time.

Goodnight Summerland

Helena Deland’s stirring new record Goodnight Summerland opens wordlessly, with a measured, melancholy piano sketch played by Lysandre Ménard. On the next song, Deland admits: “Saying something isn’t easy.” The introduction is a small moment of grace—a recognition that, sometimes, we need space to collect our thoughts before we can find the right words—and a fitting welcome to a stirring, reflective set of songs from the Montreal-based musician.
Deland’s previous work has been similarly marked by contemplation, though she’s worked across a variety of sounds. Her debut album, Someone New, paired straightforward singer-songwriter inclinations with dense electronic textures. It followed a series of EPs that included swaggering indie rock, yearning folk, and bubbly synth-pop. Recently, she’s collaborated with the rapper JPEGMAFIA and the experimental musician Claire Rousay, and made a collaborative electronic record as Hildegard with producer and multi-instrumentalist Ouri. But Goodnight Summerland displays a fresh focus and intention. Here, Deland shifts toward a stripped-back, folksier sound, highlighting her gossamer voice and newfound observations about the ache of grief and the passage of time.
Deland made Goodnight Summerland in the shadow of loss: Her mother, Maria, died in the summer of 2021. Deland wrote some of these songs before her mother’s death and recorded demos in her parents’ home in the weeks immediately following. Grief trails her across the album, starting from her first lines, which tell of “cream-colored ashes” and saying goodbye. Later, the stunning “Who I Sound Like” captures Deland in the shadowy space between desolation and acceptance, where she addresses her mother directly: “I just want to talk to you,” she repeats.
Throughout the record, Deland is accompanied mainly by her own acoustic guitar and some gentle percussion, with the occasional touch of piano and woodwinds. She made the record with producer Sam Evian, who plays various instruments on the record, and a small band. The subtlety of the production serves to highlight the record’s lodestar: Deland’s high, sweet voice. It can shift effortlessly between modes: conversational, placid, aching, curious, joyful; it’s rarely ever forceful but carries the emotional weight of introspection. The clarity of Deland’s voice is striking, given how often her lyrics highlight the slipperiness of language itself. “Maria, I might never know what I’d tell you,” she sings on “Saying Something.” On “Drawbridge,” she asks: “When we said ‘later’/What did you mean?” On “Night Soft as Silk,” she urges, “Tell me everything you think,” before admitting, “words can be so mild.”
Where words fail, Deland turns to the majesty of the landscapes around her. Across the record, she marvels at the natural world: its immense scale, the way it makes our individual human experiences seem small by comparison. On one track, she gazes at a pastoral scene—the terrain is “bright green, vibrant gray and everything pulsating”; its timelessness (“four hundred million years opened wide”) astounds her. Then she brings it back to human scale: “Rocks you keep in your car door,” she sings, “Have traveled through far more than your life.” Even the intensity of our pain is dwarfed by the span of geologic time.
Across the record, Deland grapples with the realization that time will pass—whether or not we ask it to, whether or not we’re paying attention. The point is underscored by Goodnight Summerland’s unhurried pace: Its patient piano intro; its midpoint, “Roadflower,” where Deland luxuriates through the vowels of a line like, “You’ve been so good/To me.” The record does have its more propulsive moments: “Night Soft as Silk” matches woozy guitars with stormy percussion; on “Spring Bug,” Deland’s band grooves underneath her breezy, swooping vocal melody. By the album’s closer, “Strawberry Moon,” Deland has found a kind of resting place. “Love, come to me,” she sings calmly over strummed guitars, acknowledging the potential of the moment before her: No amount of time “has ever been wasted/If it brought us here.”


The Long Island rapper's quotable second album features production work from the Alchemist and Q-Tip and improves on his 2010 debut in every conceivable way.

Reloaded

On the first single from Reloaded, Roc Marciano threatens to "push your afro back to 76... those were some good years, baby." He was born in 1978. It's not the first time the Long Island rapper has ignored the calendar year. After spending the 2000s in the major label hinterlands as a forgotten member of Flipmode Squad, he went Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on that entire decade with the release of 2010's Marcberg. On that album, he's firmly lodged in a style of hip-hop that never escaped the mid-90s, equally informed by the pimp posture of the 70s and the crack epidemic of the 80s. He remains in that zone today, but two years later, surrounded by rugged New York rap from artists like Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, Action Bronson, Heems, El-P, and the Pro Era crew (not to mention Nas' overtly nostalgic Life is Good), he sounds like less of an anachronism. Fortunately, he's taken this new enviornment as a challenge, and Reloaded improves on Marcberg in every conceivable way.
In setting and sound, Reloaded is most certainly a "New York" album. The beats are steeped in classic blaxploitation funk and understated menace, but the occasional glimpse of light and organic groove offers more entry points than the unrelentingly grim Marcberg. And where Marcberg simply filled a void, Reloaded can create demand among rap fans who look beyond the five boroughs. Roc's voice is more confident and distinctive and, more importantly, he's stepped up his lyrics. They've become something wholly his own as opposed to a clear stylistic descendent of anyone else. He's at a point that we see every few years where a rapper manages to accumulate the escape velocity to transcend the strictures of regionalism and become something that can be embraced by anyone who simply loves the possibilities that hip-hop lyricism allows for. It's "gangsta rap" in form alone, still presented as songs with hooks and structure, but the main pursuit is making the English language bend to their will: see Prodigy in 2000, DipSet in 2003, Clipse in 2005, Wayne in 2007, Gucci Mane in 2009, or Rick Ross in 2010. Or, it's "lyrical" hip-hop for people who don't necessarily think that term has to be the tool of the "good guys."
Roc Marciano pulls pretty much one trick over and over again throughout Reloaded, but it's an awesome one-- managing to stack one multisyllabic rhyme after another in a way that still makes narrative sense, without ever devolving into empty Scribble Jam showmanship. As a result, Reloaded is 100% quotable. Marciano's first few bars on "Tek to a Mack" basically sums it up: "I'm back for the crown, baby/ In the Avi' that's brown like gravy/ Style's wavy, lazy eye Tracy McGrady/ Deliver like an 80-pound baby." "Pistolier" is another astounding example of Marciano's limitless facility with gun talk: "diamond choker, we bonded at the Ponderosa/ Islamic culture put the copper in the toaster/ Pot smoker drive the Rover with the silent motor/ Mama I'm vulgar my persona got the fly aroma." Even better is how Roc is realizing the inherent comedy in all of this absurd wordplay. Closer "The Man" is something closer to straight punchline stand-up, as Roc comes up with the best NBA namedrops in recent memory over DOOM-style soul cheese ("sniff the Chris Mullin off the envelope," "the 4-4's chrome with the long nose, call it Ginobili"). Did you enjoy any of those? Great, because the whole album is pretty much that all the time, thrilling and incredibly nerdy, like watching the best Street Fighter II player in town rule the local arcade.
Based on the above, Reloaded should be something of a minor classic. But if you still consider hip-hop to be a triangulation of beats, rhymes, and life, it's the last of the three that ultimately limits its ceiling. Quite simply, nothing happens on Reloaded. At all. That's something of an overstatement, obviously: Most of the time, Roc and his associates will plot on your demise and execute it with ease, at which point they will have their way with your woman and celebrate over top-shelf liquor. Then they'll probably buy more guns. That's the plot of nearly every single track on Reloaded. Yet none of this seems to be happening in the present tense and it's easy to imagine Roc rapping the entirety of Reloaded from a podium, like it's simply a 55-minute lecture on wordplay. There's an almost wholesale dearth of storytelling and aside from the still rather vague encomium of "Thug's Prayer, Pt. 2", not a single personal detail.
But Reloaded's narrow brand of lyrical genius is so captivating on a second-by-second basis that these criticisms feel misplaced or even irrelevant. Though his appeal runs deep, Roc Marciano is a specialist and the flipside of the consensus praise granted to universal, emotive, and ambitious hip hop records like Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is that specialists tend to get underrated or overlooked. A rapper doesn't have to be everything to everyone, especially if their strengths lie in making antisocial, verbally virtuosic beatdown hip-hop-- after all, look what happened to Mobb Deep when they started making love songs. And if you simply want a rap album that will inspire all-caps quote sprees on Twitter or hourlong Gchat exchanges with your fellow microphone fiends, it really doesn't get any better than Reloaded.


The L.A. singer and rapper’s intimate EP confronts trauma and healing in smooth, unflinching songs.

Cry 4 Help EP

Kari Faux wasn’t always this introspective. The Arkansas native’s popularity grew immensely back in 2014 when she released the girl-bossy single “No Small Talk”; the song even made its way to the soundtrack for Issa Rae’s hit television series “Insecure” after being remixed by Childish Gambino. But a year after the release of her PRIMARY EP, the rapper and singer takes a more intimate approach. For Kari, CRY 4 HELP is about confronting trauma and healing, rather than an outlet for upbeat, braggadocious anthems.
The EP’s lead single, “Leave Me Alone,” explores Kari’s lust for isolation coupled with a disdain for people who simply want to waste her time. Over production that draws inspiration from 1970’s soul, she shows us a new side of herself. While “No Small Talk” was a bold declaration of confidence filled with cell-phone chirps and 808s, Kari now uses live drums and hazy synths working together to carry her alto croons. “Thinking ‘Damn man, where are my friends?’ I guess that love is just for pretend,” she resounds. Though she yearns to be alone, the need for simple human companionship is equally as present.
Kari remains just as unguarded on “Medicated,” a woozy song built on a slow, heavy drumbeat. The song’s hook spells out her intense highs and emotional lows—“Here we go again/She’s rollercoasterin,” she sings. Her voice lags behind the beat, giving a playful wink to the opening line, “I don’t wanna be medicated.” She quickly follows up in the second verse with the idea that drinking away the pain may be much more her speed, though it doesn’t help with sustaining the life she’s trying to lead.
On “Latch Key,” the EP’s closing song, Kari cuts to the chase. No longer crooning, she reverts to vivid storytelling in a monotonous yet resentful voice—separating this record from the other songful numbers. “All the while, I’m poppin’ thyroid pills to balance out my levels/Preparin’ for motherhood, Lord knew I wasn’t ready/About two weeks later, the baby had miscarried.” As Kari unpacks her load of emotional turmoil, she gives listeners a chilling look into her trauma and delivers it with unflinching attention to detail.
With each song peeling back another layer of her pain, Kari strongly suggests that the internal wounds you don’t deal with are the ones that will continue to haunt you. But therein lies this dark, moody EP’s silver lining. CRY 4 HELP is not only a wake-up call to go ahead and face the hurtful things in your life that you may believe you can’t, but also a reflection of Kari’s extensive growth as an artist and as a woman who has experienced life’s many challenges.


On his debut solo album under a new alias, Spirit of the Beehive’s Zack Schwartz runs with his band’s genre-agnostic ethos, applying his hyperactive style to chillwave, rap beats, punk, and more.

i am gambling with my life

As leader and guitarist of Spirit of the Beehive, Zack Schwartz constructs densely layered indie rock that teeters between throbbing distortion and uneasy calm. Listening to their last record, 2018’s Hypnic Jerks, can feel like free-falling down the rabbit hole, post-punk guitars shredding through tape loops. On i am gambling with my life, his first album under the name draag me, Schwartz doubles down on that genre-agnostic ethos, applying his chaotic DIY production style to chillwave, rap beats, club music, punk, and seemingly whatever else he wants.
i am gambling with my life is functionally a solo album; Schwartz handled nearly every aspect of its creation—writing, recording, mixing, and mastering—on his own. Culled from dozens of drafts, the album was completed after he returned home from Spirit of the Beehive’s fall tour last year. The most noticeable fingerprint is a palpable sense of anxiety, one that permeates every groggy chord and Auto-Tuned performance with malaise. (There are appearances by other artists, such as Isaac Eiger of Strange Ranger and fellow Philadelphians Body Meat and Pedazo De Carne Con Ojo, but their voices are, for the most part, subsumed within the greater draag me universe.)
Like Toro y Moi, another musical polyglot who has thrown himself into various styles over the course of his career, Schwartz is knowledgeable enough to know when to subvert different subgenre tropes and when to indulge in them, sometimes over the span of a single track. “there is a party where i’m going” starts out like a scuzzy ballad in the vein of Yung Lean affiliate Bladee before it gradually disintegrates, leaving only eerie synth drones in its wake. Songs like “the curve” and “form” flirt with house music and vaporwave while retaining similarly strung-out atmospheres.
There’s a surprising amount of detail. Save for some scattered exceptions (like the closing “i want to go first,” which unfortunately devolves into ’80s pastiche), the album comes across as the handiwork of a deep listener, not the demo of a dilettante. Textures dance around the stereo field while guitars glitch and warble in unexpected ways. Such production tricks might be tougher to implement in a band setting, but devoid of any such constraints, Schwartz is free to flex his chameleonic prowess across these 19 bite-sized songs.
Still, Schwartz’s voice can get lost in the haze, his words ghostly and indecipherable. But when the lyrics peek through, they reveal an insightful writer who’s writhing in self-reflection, observing his own internal battles and the way his inner conflicts are projected onto the world around him. He can be a gifted storyteller, too. On “lie,” probably the closest Schwartz comes to the sound of his primary band, he quietly ruminates on his role in a toxic relationship. “Paid for damages/You crashed our car into,” he mutters. “Both our lives are wrecked/I still lie for you.”
While his artistic identity can be murky, Schwartz’s studio ability is undeniable. In an alternate universe, he could easily have been a reliable behind-the-scenes Los Angeles hitmaker turning out catchy bedroom pop and niche genre revivals. Instead, he’s a beloved figure in the Philadelphia indie scene, and as his solo debut makes clear, he’s got even more to give the world than Spirit of the Beehive has let on.


Madonna's 12th studio album, featuring collaborations with M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj, is the product of both a merger and a divorce.

MDNA

Madonna's 12th studio album is the product of both a merger and a divorce, but as much as the singer attempts to milk the latter event for pathos over the course of its 16 tracks, the tone is mostly set by corporate dealmaking. MDNA is the star's first record as part of a $120 million deal with concert promotion juggernaut Live Nation and a separate three-album pact with Interscope, and like a lot of new records by artists of her stature, it's essentially a mechanism to promote a world tour that will inevitably drastically out-earn the profits from her new music. These sort of records don't need to be cynical or uninspired on an artistic level, but this one feels particularly hollow, the dead-eyed result of obligations, deadlines, and hedged bets.
Madonna has made her share of bad music in the past, but for the most part, her failures have come from taking artistic chances that didn't pay off, as on her experiments with hip-hop on American Life and Hard Candy. Large chunks of MDNA are shockingly banal, coming across not so much as bad pop songs per se, but as drably competent tunes better suited to D-list Madonna wannabes. The worst of these numbers were produced by French DJ Martin Solveig, whose anonymous, unimaginative arrangements for "Turn Up the Radio", "Give Me All Your Luvin'", "I Don't Give A", and "B-Day Song" are paired with excessively bland lyrics. The latter track, a collaboration with M.I.A., is horrifically regressive, the sound of two of pop's great feminist provocateurs joining forces for what amounts to a tacky children's song about birthday parties spiced up with a couple of tired double entendres. (Sorry ladies, Rihanna beat you to that frosting-licking line.)
Madonna's tracks with house duo the Benassi Bros. and William Orbit, the principal architect of her 1998 album Ray of Light, are much better, if not up to par with previous career highlights. "I'm Addicted", a dynamic electro throbber by the Benassis, is the big keeper here, and their work on "Girl Gone Wild" yields a reasonably strong single that rises to the challenge of competing with Ke$ha, Britney Spears, and Katy Perry on pop radio. The Orbit collaborations mainly call back to their work together on Ray, the record that essentially established the aesthetics of the singer's past decade of music. "I'm a Sinner" is a serviceable rewrite of their Ray-era soundtrack hit "Beautiful Stranger", and "Falling Free" plays to her strengths as a singer of ballads, though it lacks the generous hooks of, say, "Take a Bow" or "Live to Tell".
The most interesting of the Orbit productions is "Gang Bang", a campy revenge fantasy that essentially uses her filmmaker ex-husband Guy Ritchie's sub-Tarantino aesthetic as a weapon against him. The title suggests porn, but it's really a nod to mobsters, particularly as her over-the-top, Ana Matronic-esque monologue turns especially violent and bloody. It's the album's boldest, most experimental track, and it's marred only by a just-off vocal performance that renders her very familiar voice a bit anonymous, and a half-hearted attempt at a dubstep bass drop. (Next time just hire Skrillex, okay?)
Madonna reckons with her divorce from Ritchie elsewhere on the record, but her attempts to address lingering bitterness and affection for her ex are so remote that the songs have all the soul of a carefully edited press release. "Love Spent", an Orbit production with brittle electro-acoustic accompaniment, at least approaches the topic from an interesting angle, focusing on the tension and power dynamic of a relationship in which one half of the couple drastically out-earns the other. The song picks up steam as it goes along, but it ultimately comes out like a tepid, ponderous rework of her 2005 smash "Hung Up". "I Don't Give A" starts off strong with her spitting out the lines, "Wake up, ex-wife/ This is your life," in a robotic rap, but she is upstaged by guest Nicki Minaj, who turns in an entertaining performance that is nevertheless below the standards of her usual features.
It's almost impossible to approach MDNA without some degree of cynicism, but it's equally difficult to imagine anyone being more cynical about this music than Madonna herself. Unlike previous late-period records in which she had the luxury to indulge in creative tangents and not get too hung up on scoring several hits, MDNA is a record that comes with major commercial expectations. The "this has to work" factor is high, and it's hard to shake the impression that she has some measure of contempt for the contemporary pop audience. We all know that Madonna is an extremely intelligent woman-- even if she's never been known for penning great lyrics, it's easier to take the mesmerizingly dumb lyrics of tracks like "Superstar" and "B-Day Song" as spiteful trolling rather than vapid pandering. It doesn't really matter whether or not this drivel is insulting to Madonna's audience-- the most loyal fans seem to embrace being submissive to her domineering persona-- but it is disheartening when one of the most influential pop artists of the 20th century is tossing out the world's umpteen-millionth "Mickey" retread as a lead single. She's the one who deserves better.


On her second album, the Virginia songwriter doesn’t merely reckon with loss; she tells a story about the way people carry each other through time.

Historian

Lucy Dacus has a warm, sonorous voice, the kind of voice that rings out like a bugle over dialed-up amps, the kind of voice that can lull you into feeling safe even when she’s singing about heartbreak, abjection, and death. Her second album, Historian, builds on the foundation set by her first, the lyrically clever and musically robust No Burden, which caught ears at Matador shortly after its release in 2016. As Historian adds new elements to Dacus’ music—strings, horns, vocal effects, and spoken word samples appear here alongside guitars, drums, and bass—it also finds the Virginia songwriter plumbing new thematic depths and broadening her stage. The album begins with a breakup and climaxes with the death of a loved one, two separate events that Dacus integrates into the same story. She doesn’t merely reckon with loss or paint a portrait of grief; Historian digs deeper than that. It’s an album about the way people carry each other through time.
It’s tempting to compare Dacus to fellow Matador signee Julien Baker. The two artists are friends, they’re both exceptionally strong lyricists, and they both moved from a tentative but impressive debut record to a full-fledged follow-up. They complement each other, but their work sits on different planes. Baker’s songs look inward, framing the self as a portal to God and the broader world. Dacus’ songs tend to survey the world first, then try to situate the self within it, to make connections between the environment and the inner experience of being alive.
A rich cast of characters flits through Historian. There’s the bad lover (and soon-to-be-ex) who’s the recipient of the deliciously barbed line “you don’t deserve what you don’t respect” on “Night Shift.” There’s the friend who casts aside the life they’ve always known in order to find meaning on “Nonbeliever.” There’s Dacus’ grandmother, whose death the songwriter illustrates on the resplendent “Pillar of Truth,” the album’s emotional core. “I am weak looking at you/A pillar of truth turning to dust,” Dacus repeats throughout the song. At times, she seems to switch places with her grandmother, describing the death with first-person pronouns as if she were the one at the end of her life, looking up at her family from her deathbed. Then she snaps back to herself, and all the life she still has left.
Dacus often sings with a wry edge to her voice, as if she both does and doesn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. The bolstered instrumentation on Historian doesn’t iron out that nuance into blank sincerity; when the music swells, the irony and fear and the slight tint of humor on Dacus’ voice swell too. The density of affect in the music means that it can take some time to unravel and expose itself fully. Historian’s big band moments grab you first. Then, over time, you hear quavers of uncertainty on lines like “I am at peace with my death/I can go back to bed.”
That gradual unfolding is one of Historian’s many delights. It’s not an easy album to wear out. It lasts, and it should, given that so many of its lyrics pick at time, and the way time condenses around deep emotional attachments to other people. The album grapples with hope, too, something Dacus believes “is the most powerful force that humans can interact with.” But she doesn’t conceive of hope as a kind of optimism or a sunny disposition. She sees it as a relationship to time, a way of negotiating with the future, a vessel for moving forward.


Though it includes some of the band’s least memorable songs, their latest live album makes a strong case for Coldplay as one of the 21st century’s most enduring arena acts.

Live in Buenos Aires

The difference between Coldplay’s hits and misses is so elusive that Coldplay themselves have never quite figured it out. The most uncanny scene in their new documentary A Head Full of Dreams—which, for the record, includes footage of Chris Martin coaching Beyoncé on recording vocals—comes from the writing sessions for 2005’s X&Y. Martin is penning a tender new ballad about how it feels when someone you love is grief-stricken and inconsolable. His working lyrics read as follows:

Tears stream down your face
When you lose something you can not replace
Tears stream down your face
And I-I-I-I-I-I will try to fix you

“Is that shit?” he asks shyly. His bandmates are unimpressed.
Cut to a performance at Buenos Aires’ 53,000-seat Estadio Ciudad de La Plata in November 2017. It’s the final night of the third-highest-grossing tour of all time, and the audience tells a different story. Herein lies the magic of Coldplay. The same way that no one wishes on their deathbed that they spent more time at work, nobody screaming in an audience of thousands wishes the lyricist workshopped the hits a little longer. And so, Live in Buenos Aires might feature some of Coldplay’s least memorable recent work, including more than half of 2015’s A Head Full of Dreams plus their jingle-in-search-of-a-product Chainsmokers collaboration “Something Just Like This,” but the 24-track album makes a strong case for the legacy of one of the 21st century’s most enduring live acts.
This trio of new releases—the documentary, the live album, and a concert film from São Paulo—coincide with the band’s 20th anniversary. Unlike the arena trailblazers they’ve always idolized, Coldplay have spent these two decades more or less following a linear path. Their few experiments have gone down smoothly as either commercial triumphs (2008’s Brian Eno-produced Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends) or at least coherent narrative moves (2014’s Ghost Stories, released after Martin’s separation from Gwyneth Paltrow). Even when they seem to take a left turn, it feels somewhat superficial: a software update, a new seasonal flavor at Starbucks. But it’s also this brand consistency that allows their retrospective releases to feel uniquely unified, victory montages as opposed to sprawling artistic surveys.
While their recent studio work reflects a somewhat depressing glut of ideas, the stage is where Coldplay reap the benefits of their headliner status. Like U2, they make sure each tour is its own dazzling, light-up spectacular, and it’s generally fantastic every time. They’ve released four live albums in the past 15 years, and there’s a good reason for it. Somehow, Live in Buenos Aires marks their first complete concert released officially. This means you get to hear all of Martin’s between-song banter, said almost entirely in Spanish. There’s also a sweet throwaway song written for that night, “Amor Argentina,” and a spirited cover of Argentine rock band Soda Stereo’s “De Música Ligera.”
Otherwise, Coldplay aren’t the type of band who like peppering their sets with surprises or deep cuts. Instead, they construct setlists like karaoke nights; the goal is to keep up the momentum and make sure everyone’s having a good time. This occasionally means stapling an EDM drop to the end of a song, as they do in “Paradise.” Mostly, it means constantly asking for auxiliary whooping just to keep spirits high, as they do before launching into “God Put a Smile Upon Your Face” and throughout pretty much every other song.
The crowd responds with an omnipresent roar that makes each track seem like the centerpiece. The opening “A Head Full of Dreams” plays here like a rousing call to action, despite sounding more like the theme song for a Coldplay-centric game show on ABC. If songs like this get the crowd going, then the big singles are veritable explosions. Hearing a massive audience scream through “The Scientist” still brings chills, no matter how many live versions you’ve heard. It’s Coldplay’s most patient and unguarded ballad, highlighting the strange intimacy they’ve maintained as they’ve ascended to larger stages through all of rock’s expansions and retreats.
At their best, Coldplay are both the cozy rom-com you watch on your laptop before bed and the big budget IMAX focus-tested to get your heart racing. In concert, even their weaker songs speak to this power. It’s a testament to both their dedication and the Cirque du Soleil-levels of professionalism involved with their live show. On Live in Buenos Aires, their quietest moments feel like massive group hugs and the anthems come off as celebrations. Still, a sense of humanity is missing. They sound like a band on top of the world, but they’ve also never seemed further away.


With ceaseless, snarling brutality, the Texas post-hardcore trio’s second album finds a new level of confidence to express the pointlessness of existence.

We Are Always Alone

Remember the cautious optimism of February 2020? Texas trio Portrayal of Guilt buried it under a flood of flesh-melting sludge called “The End of Man Will Bring Peace to This Earth.” Nine months later, they commemorated New Year’s Eve with a filmed live performance titled “2020 Will Burn in Hell Forever.” Their second LP arrives at a queasy time, when most resolutions are already abandoned and—months into a pandemic—arbitrary points on the calendar feel more arbitrary than ever. But it doesn’t matter if the glass is half full, half empty, or just something to smash against a wall: On We Are Always Alone, Portrayal of Guilt find a new level of confidence to express the pointlessness of existence. After all, what you consider to be “mood music” depends on whether you’re seeking counterprogramming or a chance to lean into the negative energy outside.
Portrayal of Guilt’s first album, 2018’s Let Pain Be Your Guide, was rooted in classic screamo and distinguished by crowd-pleasing jet-roar vocals and post-rock expanse. It earned them an opening slot on a Deafheaven/Touché Amoré co-headlining tour and suggested a similarly ambitious trajectory towards critical and commercial acclaim. They happened to be very good at this style of populist, blackened hardcore; the possibility of hearing something as anthemic as “Daymare” rendered with higher production values is still tantalizing. But in hindsight, Let Pain Be Your Guide now seems a bit conventional, even tentative compared to the new record’s ceaseless brutality. “Birth, awakening/A life spent suffering”—the first words of We Are Always Alone are virtually unintelligible through Matt King’s Gollum shriek, and so is just about every other lyric. Context makes the meaning clear enough: A life spent suffering is indeed nasty and brutish, but at least it’s short.
Similar to celebrated second LPs by Nuvolascura and Infant Island, We Are Always Alone manages to broaden an already excellent band’s scope without aspiring to accessibility. “The Second Coming” and “Anesthetized” undergo jarring spasms of blast beats, tempo shifts, and metalcore breakdowns, only to collapse under a sulfurous vapor cloud; the lyrics of “My Immolation” leave nothing to metaphor, nor does its coda, where the guitars pitch-shift to burnt husks. As “They Want Us All to Suffer” leads into the equally self-explanatory “Garden of Despair,” Alex Stanfield’s bass is distended to the maximum extent an instrument can be while still being identifiable as itself. Last year’s “The End of Man Will Bring Peace to This Earth” (a split single with Atlanta’s Slow Fire Pistol) reached towards the kind of populist post-hardcore and metal synonymous with the yoked-up sonics of Will Yip, who mastered We Are Always Alone; producer Phillip Odom has frequently worked alongside Yip, and it shows on an album that sounds like it’s constantly mid-deadlift. “Masochistic Oath” delivers its hook by stopping midway to impersonate a collapsing bridge: steel girders howling, cables snapping, windshields splintering.
Throughout the album’s 27 minutes, there are few, wisely employed moments of brightness—the citric guitar figures that begin “Anesthetized” and “It’s Already Over,” the clean vocals that occasionally glimmer low in the mix, an acknowledgement of the existence of something other than unrelenting darkness. But each is immediately followed by a quick cut to black: “I follow the light/There’s nothing at the end.” You can take King at his word: Every track on We Are Always Alone ends up someplace uglier and more forbidding than it started.

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The Finnish electronic whiz best-known as Luomo revists his dubby ambient guise.

Whistleblower

Is there anybody doing as much with dub these days as Sasu Ripatti? The tricks and tenets of the form have been so integrated into different realms of music production that they're simply part of the weather. Disembodied echoes, horizontal smears, transfigurations of details into plot-points and vice versa-- all such things are base elements that owe to the days when reggae producers started wondering what might be hiding between the wires in their mixing desks.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of dub in electronic music, but it's also easy to take for granted. Part of that owes to how literally dub gets invoked by those most closely associated with it: When the likes of Pole or Rhythm & Sound show their devotion to the dub methodology they hold dear, it tends to come out sounding more or less like re-versioned reggae. Drums fan out over bulbous bass-lines, tempos skew slow, melodies grow lazy and warm, and so on.
Sasu Ripatti is less literal. Under his working guises as Luomo, Uusitalo, and Vladislav Delay, the Finnish producer has allied with dub as both a method and a mindset. It starts with the interrelation of his three personae, which itself functions as a sort of dub gesture. But it's most evident in the way he trips and rubs each and every element of his sound as it transpires, whether under the schedule of house (cf. Luomo), techno (Uusitalo), or dub that wanders out of line.
The last one is what plays on Whistleblower, the eighth album credited to Vladislav Delay. The sounds are the same as they've always been: miasmic synth tones, rubbery kick-drums that stutter and tap, weird whirligigs given to tumbling around what could well be a big washing machine filled with an irradiated syrup of significant thickness. They're basically the same sounds that Ripatti mines as Luomo and Uusitalo, minus any veritable rites of rhythm.
As Luomo has grown evermore sensuous and inviting, the common knock against the work of Delay is that it's all a big tease. (Who could resist the desire to hear Luomo when he's so close at hand?) But while the tease does in fact taunt in tracks that rarely build beyond a lumbering yawn, the Luomo aura helps as much as it hurts, mostly by making Delay's dubby hesitations and ambient lack of pacing resonante all the more for the decisions they imply. When a series of pounding sounds wanders into a 12-minute track like “Wanted To (Kill)", what initially scans as arbitrary carpentry noise falls into a hypnotic pulse, in part because you're listening for it. Likewise the barely-suggested sound of a voice cut up in "Stop Talking"-- the mere chance that it might turn into a lush chorus in the fashion of Luomo makes it sneak into an ear all the deeper.
That's not to say that Whistleblower isn't worthwhile on its own terms. Few producers have as varied a store of sounds to draw on as Ripatti. And he never just plugs them in, which proves all the more evident when he's at his slowest and most patient. It's a wonder to hear how he tweaks and customizes every little fidget in "I Saw a Polysexual," just as it's stirring to hear when he pulls back to haunt in "Lumi." You could fashion a Venn diagram to make sense of the effects as they relate to Luomo and Uusitalo, or you could just draw a circle and stay inside.


This rare 1976 live recording shows the experimental folk musician in uncharacteristically lucid form, tying together unlikely influences into fluid, unusual compositions.

Live 1976

After playing one song in his live set, guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Sandy Bull pauses to demonstrate the presets on his new-fangled drum machine. He bought the Rhythm Ace from Japan, and he goofs on the programmed marches, jazz waltzes, western lopes, bossa novas, and boleros that this "drummer" can provide. "Now I'd like to introduce the rest of the band here," he announces to the crowd at the Berkeley Community Theater, opening up for Leo Kottke on May 2, 1976. "We got Sandy Bull on rhythm guitar (he whistles and impersonates the crowd's roars), we got Sandy Bull on bass, and Mr. Rhythm Ace playing the kick-ass drum part." The crowd laughs, as no doubt the only sight is of Mr. Bull on his lonesome up on stage, with guitar, oud, four-track machine, and the Rhythm Ace as accoutrement.
That his humor remains intact is evident, and as this rare concert document (rescued by Steve Krakow and released on his Galactic Zoo Disk label, an imprint of Drag City) can attest, Bull was physically intact in the 1970s as well. Much like the Kottke crowd on that night, you could be forgiven for thinking that Sandy Bull had already expired from a drug misadventure earlier in that decade. Although I already knew that Sandy Bull had passed away in the early 2000s, I mistakenly assumed that this live document would have shown Bull deep down in a hole. Aside from the unfocused and muddled 1972 studio album, Demolition Derby, not a note of his had been recorded in that decade as he grappled with serious drug issues that irredeemably waylaid his promising career.
A contemporary of steel-string virtuosos like John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Kottke, Bull's recorded work in the 1960s outstripped those of his peers for their singular vision and sense of adventure. Take "Blend", the side-long tour de force from his 1963 debut, Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo. While his aforementioned peers navel-gazed and wove solo acoustic guitar music well into the 70s (though Fahey did take a few whimsical detours), Bull enlisted jazz drummer Billy Higgins for his first recording date. By that point in 1963, the crossover between folk and jazz was non-existent, the worlds of white and black barely engaged in dialogue. At that time, Higgins worked primarily with the likes of Donald Byrd and Ornette Coleman, so it says something of Bull's adroit skills on acoustic guitar that he not only enlisted but matched Higgins' powerful and free rhythms note for note. For 10 minutes or so, Bull casts a spell on his steel-string, but when Higgins' toms thunder in, these two master musicians flash a level of telepathy that still astounds. Elsewhere, he fused banjo and "Carmina Burana" and juxtaposed Bach with Bo Diddley, Indian raga with the reverb of Roebuck "Pops" Staples. His subsequent records were diminishing returns as his drug use increased (and while it remains a bit of a mess, I have a soft spot for the writhing snakepit of sound that is his 1968 album, E Pluribus Unum) before he dropped out altogether.
Unlike another posthumous live album of Bull's recorded in 1969 (opening for Fahey), Live 1976 finds Bull in full command of his live setup, tape, and drum machines buoying his flights. His eight-minute oud improvisation is mesmeric, and on "Driftin'", he teases salsa rhythms out of an homage to doo-wop group the Drifters, all while garlanding steel guitar figures atop it. His vocal turn on "Love is Forever" proves that for all of this instrumental prowess, none of the steel-stringers should have ever been let near a microphone.
And after an anecdote that somehow ties together rehab, snake farms, and masturbation, Bull snarls "Swamp Music! Watch that gator!" launching into a funky 9-minute improvisation that stomps through wetlands situated right near Sly Stone's "Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa". More laconic and distended cosmic slop follows on the closing "New York City", and as his set ends, Bull need not impersonate a roaring crowd; they're more than happy to oblige.


Composed during an extended flow state, the UK avant-techno producer’s hypnotic new album balances murky, lo-fi dread with moments of shimmering beauty.

Statik

An apprehensive energy charges the atmosphere just before a thunderstorm erupts. The light seems wrong, shadows washed out by the flat, sickly greenish hue of the sky. You can feel the air thinning as the barometric pressure drops, preparing for the coming gusts of wind and spiky torrents of rain or hail. Those moments seem to last forever, stretching time taut until the storm finally arrives, offering a respite from the tension.
That nervous, clenched-jaw feeling saturates the beguiling Statik, Darren Cunningham’s latest album as Actress. It’s a soft and unsettling record, quietly off-gassing its paranoid aura like a decaying piece of fruit in a well-appointed kitchen. Even the album’s most beautiful passages—and there are many—move with an anxious slink, as if Cunningham had composed these tracks while hunched over, eyes darting, his shoulders brushing his ears. The majority of Statik came from an unbroken period of productivity Cunningham describes as an “extensive flow state,” and that deep focus gives it a cohesion that some of his previous records lacked. Each song seems to grow out of the preceding one, like a coral reef blossoming into a strange and singular world.
Cunningham conceals most of his sounds beneath a blanket of hiss, smudging everything into a blurry haze. He’ll often use sidechain compression to carve out kick drums, giving them the effect of railroad signals strobing on a foggy night. There’s a pervasive dreamlike atmosphere, as if each instrument is being played in a different space, all traveling significant distances to arrive in your headphones. The initial ambient moments of “System Verse” glimmer like light pollution on the horizon, wispy synth pads floating around a murky bass rhythm. As the song fades in, it feels as though it’s slowly—almost menacingly—approaching, coalescing into a muted but propulsive 140 BPM techno track. It can be difficult to compute exactly what’s happening at any given time on Statik, even if the elements are generally familiar.
A disorienting amount of tension yields very little resolution. The squirming synthesizer sequences in “Ray” overlap but never seem to touch each other, their circular standoff egged on by the insistent click of 16th-note hi-hats. “Cafe del Mars” features a delirious cascade of arpeggios accented by a string synth, building anticipation for a chord change that never comes. When Cunningham does offer a break from the pressure, he tends to bury it deep in the mix. The gentle flanged guitar melody on “Dolphin Spray” softens the song’s staccato edge, but you have to strain to make it out. Any moments of serenity are fleeting, at constant risk of being overshadowed by the looming dread.
“Rainlines” is the least nebulous track on Statik, and perhaps its easiest entry point. On the first listen, it plays like a slightly loopy, potentially improvised jam, chugging pleasantly in place. But lean closer and you’ll discover how jittery and unstable it is. The percussion moves around the kick drum like modal jazz, clav and open hi-hat occasionally switching places in the pattern, creating the illusion of a shifting rhythmic center. The loop gains and sheds harmonic intervals, tricking us into thinking the song’s key is constantly modulating. Near the end, the kick, hi-hat, and clap lock into place, forming a smooth house groove—only to collapse seconds later. It’d be maddening if it didn’t sound so good.
That’s the surreal magic of Statik: pallid terror deceptively wrapped in an inviting soft-focus glow. If it’s not Cunningham’s best work, it may be his most quintessential, a true distillation of his ability to simultaneously attract and repulse. This is music born of the era where meditation guidance is paywalled and basic necessities are locked behind plexiglass; where resource-consuming AI recommends a daily diet of rocks; where successive photos on social media might show the brutal aftermath of a bombing and a bottomless mimosa brunch. Statik is the soundtrack to a seemingly endless moment of dread-filled anticipation—something is coming, and we have no choice but to wait until it gets here.


Berlin-based UK producer Paul Rose eschews dubstep on his third Scuba LP, using prog house, trance, big beat, rave, old techno, and synth pop to create something stylishly retro.

Personality

At some point in the past year or so, appropriating the signifiers of big, dumb, and derided dance music became the thing to do. Overdriven riffs, snare rolls, embarrassingly huge climaxes, and even lusher comedowns: Trance, prog, and electro are seeping through the pores of underground dance music. Berlin-based UK expat Paul Rose has been leading the charge with this sort of stuff, stirring controversy with his overtly trancey "Adrenalin" and crafting a hypnotic sugar rush with "Loss". Long split between the worlds of 4/4 and bass music, I proposed that last year's DJ-Kicks mix spelled the end of the divide between his bass-oriented Scuba alias and the techno-driven SCB, and his third Scuba album, Personality, meshes well enough with this idea.
A Mutual Antipathy had Scuba excavating dubstep structures, and Triangulation showed him sending out feelers in all sorts of directions, but Personality is essentially a techno album. It's a day-glo, plasticine sort of techno, and it's loaded with way more vocals, hooks, and tuneful melodies than the past output from a producer whose all-encompassing dourness seemed to encroach on even the prettiest moments of his catalog (see Triangulation's heartbreaking "Before"). I've always thought that Triangulation's album cover-- an empty and bare concrete walkway-- was the best visual encapsulation possible for an artist whose music sounded completely devoid of humanity, all computer click, industrial clank, manipulated ciphers, and hollow drums. But look at Personality's cover art: There's a real piece of a human on there.
Don't let the arm and the sun fool you: opener "Ignition Key", even with its wafting breezes of ecstatic "ooohs," is every bit as cold and steely as the rest of his output. It's just reflecting more light, underpinned with the same rubbery bass sounds that defined last year's "Adrenalin" 12". It's followed by the heaving Shed-esque techno of "Underbelly", which uses Triangulation's array of manufacturing sounds: Maybe this new Scuba isn't so unfamiliar after all?
Then we hit "The Hope". If you thought "Adrenalin" was divisive, well, "The Hope" feels like internet trolling. With a lumbering somersault of a beat that combusts into obnoxious blasts of distorted synth, "The Hope" is a transparent Big Beat homage, a mid-1990s Chemical Brothers leftover right down to the cheesy and slightly uncomfortable vocal ("Got the camera/ Got the zinc/ Teenage girls/ Stop to think"). It feels defiant and irreverent coming from Scuba, but it works because it's so much fun-- "big room" in pretty much every way you can imagine. If you aren't swept up in the serotonin rushes, you're gonna be battered and bruised by its bulldozing path anyway.
From then on, Personality sticks to a fairly consistent template: metallic drums, detached synths, and cheeky vocal samples, all largely sounding deliriously cheery and upbeat. The only thing more surprising than the "never seen ya break it down like this!" chipmunk squeak on "Ne1butu" is the way the track explodes into a rollicking piano riff. "July" deals in the "Miami Vice" synth pop of Hyetal, "Tulips" is sickly sweet garage full of feminine pressure-- only weighed down with Scuba's usual leaden low-end-- and even the fairly tepid drum'n'bass exercise "Cognitive Dissonance" features a dog bark as one its rhythmic devices. Almost every track features some kind of luxurious, decadent breakdown; songs dissolving into gorgeous vapor trails and glowstick reveries halfway through before coming back up for air-- the same device that made "Adrenalin" such a monster and one that doesn't show any signs of diminishing returns.
That's not to say the album is all skittles and sunbursts: "Action" is high-octane twitch techno that coasts on snowballing momentum until it sounds like its going to explode from its own energy, and "Gekko" sounds a bit like he got lost in his own personal vision of Involver, all writhing basslines and indefatigably chugging chords. Scuba saves the most explosive for the closer: "If U Want" takes all of the album's hysteria teases and genre flirtations and bundles them into one convenient package, a four-to-the-floor stormer that recalls the most maximalist extremes of 1990s techno into a sleek, powerful vehicle. Brushed by swirls of synth that hint at climax, triumphantly euphoric chords, and a bassline that sounds like a malfunctioning engine, it's unapologetically enormous, leaving anything close to subtlety in the dust trails behind it.
It's a fitting end to Personality: Perhaps the most go-for-the-jugular thing Scuba's produced, "If U Want" still fits into his overarching discography like the rest of the album. Even at its most novel-- and there are a lot of firsts here for Scuba-- you can still hear the same grumbly, bearded guy behind the beats. Where he once used dubstep as the foundation for his distinctive productions, this time he's taking prog house, trance, big beat, rave, old techno, and synth pop, and packaging it up in something stylishly retro, all coated in a futuristic 2012 sheen. It's bound to ruffle feathers and turn off old fans, and in a way, going so outright "pop" is one of the gutsiest, risky things a pillar of the scene like Scuba could have done. Thankfully, his Midas touch extends to this stuff as well.


Traditionalists no more, the Swedish band spend their fourth album exploring the divide between metal’s underground and mainstream.

Down Below

Three years ago, Tribulation needed listeners to know it could still sound hard. In the space of just three albums, the corpsepaint-cloaked Swedes had moved from a debut of dead-ahead death metal to an imaginative flirtation with the genre’s more progressive fringes, and, finally, to 2015’s The Children of the Night, a proudly theatrical record that cut the band’s devilish menace with playful psychedelics and arena-sized hooks. That album remains one of the decade’s decisive metal triumphs, its occult anthems every bit as ominous as accessible. But for a band that gave its earliest songs names such as “Seduced by the Smell of Rotten Flesh” and “When the Sky is Black with Devils,” The Children of the Night betrayed a certain softening, with keyboard-gilded choruses meant to lift lighters high. So they closed the LP with “Music from the Other,” a relentless seven-minute tirade about a descent into hell. The vocals were more raw, the guitars more claustrophobic—a reminder of Tribulation’s bygone aggression, and a reaffirmation of its serrated edge.
Down Below, the quartet’s delightful fourth album, makes no such concessions. Save for a bonus track (“Come, Become, to Be”), it ends with “Here Be Dragons,” a spiraling, piano-and-strings-backed sprawl that boasts one of the band’s most emphatic choruses. “Here be dragons/Here be death/Here be the somber that have felt the Devil’s breath,” exclaims Johannes Andersson, delivering each word of what could pass for a particularly dramatic Harry Potter passage with the patient enunciation of someone who fully expects those lyrics to be shouted back his way. The song ends with an extended, extravagant duet for xylophone and guitars. “Here Be Dragons” is a closing statement from a band newly comfortable with what it has become—former traditionalists who have nurtured rare crossover potential. Tribulation are now ready for stages as big as their massive songs.
From end to end, Down Below relishes exploring the divide between metal’s underground and more mainstream access points, or finding multiple routes between what’s below and what’s above. Long lost is the Tribulation that simply added a blackened veneer to death metal and, later, dressed that mix with black eyeliner and gothic keyboards. This record is something of a catch-all, a gyre of genres suited for much more diverse palettes. Tribulation goes there immediately, with opener and first single “The Lament.” Linking scabrous verses of mid-tempo thrash with well-tempered choruses where the band slows down and opens wide, “The Lament” blooms like the big gray flowers of some mystical plant. Tribulation even slides comfortably into a piano-and-bass interlude, a late-song respite that lets the newly initiated catch their breath before the finale.
“Cries from the Underworld,” meanwhile, leavens harsh, driving verses about hellish allure with guitars that, at times, sparkle like those of the Go-Betweens and racing drums that suggest the heyday of Interpol or the Editors. In this way, Down Below recalls Nachtmystium’s short-lived but similarly post-punk turn toward a wider audience. The economical playing of new drummer Oscar Leander has added a lean sense of momentum, which is essential to this progression. The song turns, too, on a repetitive synthesizer pulse, a sort of safety beacon that lingers in the mix for more than a minute. And Andersson stays largely out of the way during “The World,” almost whispering verses that largely decorate the song’s post-metal instrumental majesty. The heroic riffs, the lumbering-and-racing rhythms, the widescreen atmospherics: It’s a metal song for folks with reservations about most metal singing, a gateway that prompts memories of Isis or Mono, not Celtic Frost.
This all may sound cold and calculated, as though Tribulation were cynically casting a wide net for a bigger fanbase. The increasingly cartoonish lyrics and presentation (like the video for “The Lament,” which suggests Twilight for an art-house crowd) do little to mitigate that feeling. Still, Down Below is incredibly athletic and fun, with every guitar solo, lyrical twist and musical turnaround delivered in boldface italics. Notice the way Tribulation slices between the verses of the explosive “Subterranea” or squeezes so much action between every line of “Nightbound”: This is a band that absolutely revels in the possibilities suggested by its obsidian thrills, no matter the potential changes in the audience’s size and scope. Down Below is about death and hell, sure, but it’s proudly, defiantly not meant for an underground anymore.


Jana Hunter teams up with a new band that provides her with unhinged, dreamy rock more often in the service of atmosphere than her voice.

Twin-Hand Movement

Texas-born Jana Hunter, the talented freak-folk guitarist and singer, was the first artist to release an album on Devendra Banhart and Vetiver frontman Andy Cabic's label Gnomonsong. In all she's put out two full-length albums, one EP, and a split with Banhart, alongside contributions to other bands, including Phosphorescent and CocoRosie. Her last release was in 2007, and fans wondered where Hunter had gone until she recently started turning up at venues with a new band. The new group, a foursome based in Baltimore, immerses her elastic alto tone in a colorful mix of electric guitar, bass, and drums, yielding unhinged, dreamy rock with just the right mix of flourish and understatement. This is very much Hunter's band; anyone familiar with her work will hear the parallels between the two acts. The biggest difference between Twin-Hand Movement and Hunter's solo albums is the instrumentation: This album is more about her guitar than her voice, which is absent from a few of the songs. Both projects let their guitars go off and wander, but the lilting country twang seems to have been left behind.
Instead, Lower Dens experiment with a broad range of tones, all in the service of atmosphere. They also frequently stick to lower registers and slower tempos, which at times comes off as too introspective, especially on the instrumental tracks. The same could be said of the xx's debut-- when Lower Dens are at their most spare ("Rosie" and "Plastic & Powder"), the two bands sound similar-- but in place of the xx's foggy sexual tension, Hunter and company share a wider array of emotion. When Hunter's voice appears-- often deep into tracks-- it can sound spent, alluring, hopeful, and exasperated, and the guitars are just as versatile: screeching, whining, twinkling-- they're the show-offs in the band. That said, there is a placid, warm quality to nearly every track, no matter what the guitars are up to. (For this, credit is due to producer Chris Coady, who also mixed Beach House's Teen Dream; Coady turns busy bunches of layers into an elegant bouquet.)
Hunter's deep, smooth voice-- comparable to PJ Harvey's, especially on grittier tracks like "Completely Golden"-- is woven in with the least trebly of the instruments, whispery yet tensile. When it's time for the guitars to show off with elaborate arpeggios, gurgling shreds, and distant, glittery calls-and-responses, she stands back from the mic entirely, or at least gives the instruments, including her own, a long intro. Even when her lyrics are a key component of a song, she can sound (like Beach House's Victoria Legrand) a little lost in the mix, as if the force of the instruments were threatening to blow her away. The rare tracks where she's loudest are just as strong as the others: there's the slight "Truss Me", whose title is a good indication of how slow and loose the song is, and "Two Cocks", a joyous, robust potential single.
Lower Dens appreciate the grimy atmospherics of new wave as much as the dizzy elements of shoegaze, which can make Twin-Hand Movement confusing on first listen. But when variety sounds this good, it's hard to fault a band for sharing so many ideas in one place. The album is primarily about atmosphere: about translating feeling into music, rather than the music serving as a companion to lyrics. When Hunter ruminates about "just a-standing in your pretty presence" on "I Get Nervous", the instruments, playing a long, cozy intro of noodling and heartbeat percussion, are that "pretty presence"-- or the closest thing to it.


Lacking compelling hooks, a unifying mood, or a clear narrative, former One Direction member Zayn's debut Mind of Mine is a definitive step away from One Direction towards nowhere in particular.

Mind of Mine

Last Friday, in order to celebrate the release of his first solo album, Mind of Mine, Zayn performed the bonus track "LIKE I WOULD" on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon." He was assisted by the Roots and surrounded by fluorescent tubes, but he looked alone and slightly lost, his eyes gazing blankly ahead. Since he left One Direction a year ago, there’s an awkwardness and inflexibility visible in his performances, as if he’s just learning how to occupy a stage on his own. When he sings the chorus, "He-eeee / won’t touch you like I do," he starts to loosen up, giving a few rhythmic shrugs and meaningful gazes at the middle distance, but as a solo star he moves through space unsteadily.
In One Direction, Zayn contributed a distinct, introspective personality, the pleasing and elastic geometry of his hair, a capable falsetto, and an emotional reserve which contrasted tastefully with the adolescent exuberance of his bandmates. On his own, uninterrupted by four other voices, his vocal can sound shapeless, with his vowels collapsing into mumbled piles of feeling. His highly anticipated solo album is state-of-the-art amorphous R&B, Frank Ocean and Miguel-indebted stuff that swerves in and out of focus like headlights through a fog. But his voice doesn't stand out in it, and on fussy, textured songs like "tRuTh" and "BoRdErSz," he's just an additional cloud in a misty atmosphere.
In sparer, more reduced arrangements you can hear him strain; "fOoL fOr YoU" is a Beatles pastiche, just piano and drums and Zayn, and his voice sounds pinched and exposed. He sounds lovely on "sHe" and "dRuNk," incidentally the most assured songs on the record. There’s a dexterity to "sHe" that seems vacuumed out of the rest of the album, his vocal moving nimbly among blurred pulses of guitar and inverted piano clusters. When he unleashes his falsetto, it pierces the track, a crystal tower rising through the surface of the earth. It’s the only instant on Mind of Mine that seems to hint at his actual capacity for pop artistry. There’s also something gorgeous and spectral to his voice on the intermission, "fLoWeR," which is sung entirely in Urdu; he snaps with ease into the perpendicular arrangement of notes.
As a document of his metamorphosis, from goofy teen idol to humorless R&B singer, Mind of Mine is mostly unsuccessful. It’s not as secure or as nimble as Justin Timberlake’s Justified, and it lacks the three sublime and thermochromic singles of Justin Bieber’s Purpose. The album is so certain of what kind of adulthood it wants to convey that it often ends up expressing an amplified parody of it. The lyrics are hyper-focused on types of haze (drunk or drugged) and heterosexual sex; blustery lead single "PILLOWTALK" seems reverse-engineered from Zayn singing the word "fucking," a glossy wrought-iron context for an elementary school transgression. In the closing track "TiO" he sings "You get off on me / it's like cheating," which is likely intended to sound provocative and sexy but comes off, like the majority of sexual encounters on the record, as dour and joyless. (A clutch of Zayn-era One Direction tracks have a more whimsical and dynamic vision of sex, particularly "No Control," in which they seem super-psyched to have done it with someone cool.)
The bonus tracks expand the dimensions of the album. "BLUE" would seem Zayn’s attempt at a Coldplay-esque ballad if it approached any sort of resolution or climax; instead it just hovers nervously at half-altitude. These uncertain moments are the most compelling ones, perhaps because they feel truest to Zayn's tentative solo presence. Lacking compelling hooks, a unifying mood, or a clear narrative, his debut is oddly inflexible and over-calculated*.* Great solo pop careers are usually born when the performer figures out what space they want to claim and leave enough room for the listener to join them, but Mind of Mine is a definitive step away from One Direction towards nowhere in particular.


The 23-year-old songwriter’s debut renders tales of young love and its quandaries with diaristic lyrics and anguished singing. She’s at her best when she’s plainspoken and immediate.

Who Hurt You? EP

Los Angeles folk singer Jensen McRae never asks the title question of her debut EP, but its anxious premise haunts her songs. Shadowy forces populate her tales of young love and its quandaries, rotting budding romance from the inside, sniping at it from unseen perches. If McRae were a pulpier writer, this looming paranoia might be the centerpiece of her music, her narrators determined to unmask and confront the elusive “who.” Instead, McRae leaves the saboteurs unidentified, dwelling on the effects of their misdeeds with diaristic lyrics and anguished singing. Though her overreliance on allegory can give Who Hurt You? a detached air, her performances are often gripping.
McRae has a resonant, malleable voice that can shrivel into a wounded yelp or harden into a defiant war cry, poles that suit the melodramatic and confessional modes she favors. Who Hurt You?, produced in full by Rahki (Kendrick Lamar, Jorja Smith, EarthGang), showcases this range with spare compositions that render McRae in focus. Across the brief record’s six songs, she sounds clear and confident even when she’s channeling confusion or ambivalence.
“Immune,” a track about a troubled couple that visits a COVID-19 mass vaccination site and buckles under the weight of these unprecedented times, is charmingly maudlin. “What will we say to each other/When the needle goes in?/What will we be to each other/If the world doesn’t end?” McRae belts with dewy-eyed fear. The song began as a winking Twitter homage to Phoebe Bridgers, one of McRae’s influences, but the completed version goes full schmaltz.
“Wolves” is more hushed, turning brushes with predatory men into a mournful fable. The song makes deft use of negative space, lapsing into silence between McRae’s downcast lyrics as a lone guitar melody flickers in the background. “Thank God women learned to whisper/But I crave a microphone,” she laments in a splintered murmur, sounding both relieved and ashamed. The concepts on other songs are thinner. “Loving you is in my bones,” she sings on “Adam’s Ribs,” a ballad so awash in biblical allusions it could be a Veggie Tales script. “Dead Girl Walking,” a song that uses bodily pain as a metaphor for emotional distance, is just as flat.
McRae is at her best when she’s plainspoken, committed to being immediate rather than bookish. “White Boy,” a song about being erased, is artfully one-sided. McRae describes a white companion ignoring her with disarming precision. “White girl arrives/I turn invisible/I don’t like/Who I am to you,” she sings in a near sob, shrinking into herself. The song is less a confrontation and more an epiphany, McRae’s character stumbling into lucidity. As McRae finds her footing as a songwriter, that ability to burrow into the core of an idea or scene will be key to expanding the casts of her tiny dramas and giving those ambient shadows depth.

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The singer-songwriter’s latest—a loose reworking of Billie Holiday’s 1958 album Lady in Satin—is made with affection, curiosity, and care.

Think of Spring

M. Ward, who sings in a hushed rasp that rarely registers above a murmur, may not be the first vocalist to leap to mind when thinking of modern equivalents to Billie Holiday. An Americana minimalist with a penchant for arty atmosphere, Ward appears to exist on an entirely different plane from Holiday, a singer who always seemed like she was mining the depths of her soul. It’s not just a difference of genre or era: there’s a chasm separating the two artists in terms of aesthetics.
Art doesn’t tend to follow a straight line, though. M. Ward fell in love with the music of Billie Holiday when he was leaving adolescence and gravitating toward 1958’s Lady in Satin, the last album she released in her lifetime. Ward was drawn to how he mistook Holiday’s voice “for a beautiful perfectly distorted electric guitar—some other-world thing floating there on this strange mournful ocean of strings.” This characterization of Holiday is especially true on Lady in Satin, a record that captures a singer navigating through the damage of her voice due to drug and alcohol abuse. The evident wear on Holiday’s instrument rankled some listeners, as did the overripe arrangements of Ray Ellis, a producer who was known for his work with such pop trifles as the Four Lads. The cognitive dissonance was by design. Holiday realized her bruised voice would benefit from supple string support and this contrast is part of what gives Lady in Satin its power. Like the Frank Sinatra Capitol records of the 1950s that inspired it, Lady in Satin tells an autobiographical story through its interpretations of tunes from the Great American Songbook.
The same could be said of Think of Spring, M. Ward’s tribute to Holiday that essentially amounts to an album-length cover of Lady in Satin. The songs don’t run in the same sequence but apart from "The End of a Love Affair"—an Edward Redding song that was swapped for "All the Way," a Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn song written for Sinatra in 1957—they’re all here, all performed with an easy warmth that conveys a deep, abiding love of the source material. This intimacy is heightened by Ward’s decision to record the album on an old Tascam Portastudio he acquired when he was a teenager. Deep into the GarageBand era, working with such outdated analog technology as a four-track cassette recorder seems nearly as retro as the Great American Songbook itself, so the combination of vintage tech and classic tunes creates a bit of a dreamy shimmer, a quality that suits Ward’s quiet rearrangements of familiar tunes.
Ward’s gentle and floating reworks of Lady in Satin’s songs are grounded in his experimentations with alternate guitar tunings, an instrumental technique that results in unusual chord voicings and suspended notes. The particulars of the tunings aren’t as interesting as their feeling; the chord progressions and light riffs seem to hang in space, providing a soft bed for Ward’s husky whisper. It’s a folkie refraction of Holiday’s original album: She needed an orchestra to provide comfortable support for her weathered voice, while he only needs his own guitar to carry his grizzled purr.
Instrumentation and fidelity certainly are elements that distinguish Think of Spring from its inspiration, as is the record’s ultimate emotional impact. At the time he recorded the album in 2019, M. Ward had outlived Billie Holiday by a few years, yet he sounds younger on Think of Spring than she did on Lady in Satin, where she sounded as if she was wrestling with the collected weight of her entire life. The stakes aren’t nearly as high on Think of Spring. It’s an album made with affection, curiosity and care, a record with a specific, sometimes bewitching vibe. Its mellow sway is alluring but it also can drift ever so slightly into the realm of mood music, perhaps an inevitable result for a gently restless musician who seems to favor feel over feeling.

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With lush instrumentation and some welcome guest appearances, the follow-up to the UK singer’s breakout debut highlights her sumptuous voice and attention to detail.

Heart on My Sleeve

The distinct pleasure of Ella Mai’s 2018 breakout “Boo’d Up” lay in its breezy simplicity. The UK singer’s smash hit, which peaked at No. 5 on Billboard’s Hot 100, aspired toward the effortless sound of ’90s R&B, but Mai’s honeyed delivery brought something fresh and endlessly replayable to the formula. The ubiquitous track all but guaranteed a double-platinum certification for Mai’s self-titled debut, a record that drifted from breathy ballads to ascendant vocal runs, occasionally to boring ends. Yet her rich, textured voice and commitment to the throwback sound placed her high among a new generation of artists mining R&B’s history and giving it a modern spin.
On her second album, Heart on My Sleeve, Mai asserts herself as a resilient force, especially when she sings about falling head over heels in love. Executive produced by frequent collaborator Mustard, the record fleshes out her lovestruck sound with more tactile elements—acoustic guitars and strings are foregrounded more often than beats. Mai also thankfully forgoes the mood-killing spoken-word outros, replacing them with the occasional guest appearances: Mary J. Blige offers backing vocals and words of encouragement in her luxuriant New York accent on the vulnerable “Sink or Swim,” while gospel legend Kirk Franklin and his choir show up for a full-blown sermon on “Fallen Angel.” By leaning into lush, percussive instrumentation and rounding up collaborators who complement her sound, Mai has crafted a solid follow-up that centers her strengths as a singer and songwriter.
The best songs are closely in tune with Mai’s emotions. On the highlight “How,” she goes toe-to-toe with Compton rapper Roddy Ricch over a lilting vocal sample, adopting a springy flow as she picks herself up after a betrayal: “How could you switch it up on me in my darkest hour?” she demands. “Fallen Angel” takes a two-part approach, beginning with funky handclaps and hi-hats. “Maybe this is compensation for unmet expectations,” she considers in her fluttering mezzo-soprano before the song crests in its Kirk-assisted gospel outro. With her ear for melody and rich backing harmonies, Mai balances the tonal shifts with ease.
Mai falters when she slips into staid songs that come across as filler. On the straightforward, 808-laced ballad “DFMU,” the production flattens her precise vocal delivery; later, “Feels Like” is hampered by a half-committed lyrical conceit (as a hook, “feels like ooh” can only go so far). The stumbles keep Heart on My Sleeve from being truly exceptional, but Mai’s sumptuous voice and attention to detail make it a beguiling delight.


Co-produced by Mute founder Daniel Miller (Depeche Mode, Yazoo), Liars' dark, largely electronic and sample-based latest album is a return to their adventurous, experimental roots. It's also the group's most human and fragile album to date.

WIXIW

Even at their highest points of visibility, Liars have spent the last decade creating obfuscation. Their 2001 debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, was a raging fire of herky-jerky Solid Gold antagonism that ended a locked groove which, on CD, ran longer than all of the record's songs combined. The lead single from 2006's Drum's Not Dead, "It Fit When I Was a Kid", featured the unconflicted cover image of the trio's faces superimposed onto gay pornography. Liars have shifted around geographically over the years as well, from New York to New Jersey to Berlin, but since settling down in Los Angeles in 2009, they've made some of their most unsettling and misanthropic work thus far.
The band's latest curveball arrives early on their latest album, WIXIW. Its opening track, "The Exact Colour of Doubt", features Tangerine Dream-like synths giving way to soft pitter-patter percussion and a guitar line that shimmers with just the right amount of reverb. It's lovely, ethereal, and not remotely indicative of what follows.
WIXIW is a return to Liars' more adventurous, experimental roots, a dark and abstract detour from the more straightforward one-two punch of 2007's self-titled effort and 2010's Sisterworld. While the latter showcased comparatively traditional instrumentation, WIXIW is largely electronic and sample-based, with frontman Angus Andrew's vocals featuring as one of very few recognizably organic presences on the record. The trait this album shares most with its predecessor is an abundance of creeping tension, but there's little catharsis to be found here, just a steady level of overcast unease.
Liars have always excelled at creating self-contained atmospheres and the overall vibe on WIXIW is pure dread and uncertainty, no doubt a by-product of the album's genesis. Andrew mentioned in our interview that the creative process was "more difficult" than in the past, a result of he and band member Aaron Hemphill's increasingly collaborative songwriting. The strengthened partnership between the two is apparent, to the point where Andrew appears to address Hemphill directly on the cosmic rumination "His and Mine Sensations": "Tell me it's a lie, Aaron/ Tell me it's a lie."
While making the album, Andrew also began a serious romantic relationship while a relationship of Hemphill's ended. WIXIW finds itself emotionally and lyrically somewhere in the middle, mixing bitter sentiments and pleas for protection and safety with the same embrace of duality that marked Drum's Not Dead. The new album's title is pronounced "wish you," and the harrowing upward climb of its title track and centerpiece reflects the type of yearning that the pronunciation suggests: "I wish you were here with me/ I can't no longer take it all/ Wish you would not come back to me."
WIXIW is a very human and fragile album-- moreso than any other Liars record-- and it's initially easy to overlook these traits because the sound is so cold, electronic, and distant. It's so clearly the result of a rock band attempting to create electronic music that comparisons to Radiohead circa Kid A and Amnesiac are somewhat unavoidable. (Andrew's decidedly Thom Yorke-ish vocal takes on "His and Mine Sensations" and "III Valley Prodigies" add some weight to that, too.) But where Radiohead drew from the then-contemporary glitch of Warp-stamped IDM, Liars look further back on WIXIW, evoking an earlier period of electronic music.
That nod to the distant past is represented in the choice to bring in Mute founder and producer Daniel Miller (Depeche Mode, Yazoo) as a co-producer along with the band themselves, as well as in Liars' own rudimentary, back-to-basics sampling techniques, where they recorded dripping wet rags and deflated balloons, among other things. (You can find videos documenting these sampling techniques at the band's website.) As a result, even WIXIW's most inhuman moments retain a force of brute, blunt physicality. Take Liars' drums away and leave them with nothing but machines, and they still project an incantatory, campfire-seance vibe.
Appreciating WIXIW's taken risks and the subsequent riches that follow is a lot easier of a task than deciding where it ranks on the best-to-least-best scale of Liars' records. I'm fairly certain it's not their best, but even as I type this, each spin brings out new details and textures that color the listening experience in a different way. What we end up with is another very good album from a band that consistently turns out good work while charting its own path. Fascinating turns of change have always been Liars' sole consistency, and in that respect, I hope they stay the same forever.


The possibility that Lil Wayne's new album could be overshadowed by his recent health scare is confirmed by this rote, crass reassembly of what once made him great. Weezy called II "my bum-ass album" on his release from hospital: turns out he wasn't just being self-deprecating.

I Am Not a Human Being II

The title is sadly accurate. Lil Wayne is a full-blown cottage industry now, a one-man corporation that provides succor and service to careers ranging from Nicki Minaj and Drake’s to Gudda Gudda and Lil Chuckee’s. With this many shareholders come obligations, so despite the increasingly obvious and pressing personal needs of Dwayne Carter the man, Lil Wayne Inc. steamrolls forward, impervious to setbacks. When Carter landed in the ICU for six frightening days this month, after seizures that many assumed were related to his ongoing, years-documented problems with codeine addiction, his handlers smoothed things over with the panicked dissembling of hangers-on propping up an ailing dictator. After his release, Wayne gave a thumbs up to TMZ cameras to allay fears, announcing he was “better than good.” He did look good, but he also, tellingly, shrugged and offered this: “My bum-ass album is coming out... March 26? It's 26?...You’re gonna get that shit or you won’t. If not, it’s whatever.”
This spirit of indifference hangs heavy on I Am Not A Human Being II. In his review of 2011’s Tha Carter IV, Ryan Dombal observed that "after an epic run, it seems as though Wayne has finally run out of inventive ways to say he's on drugs, or great at sex, or extremely interested in making money,” and two years later, the prognosis has only grown more grim: No song on IIis meaningfully distinguishable from the next. Everything pumps out in an undifferentiated slurry of interchangeable dick jokes, drug references, and lame puns. Tha Carter IV moved nearly a million copies in a single week, and this staggering success may have sealed Wayne’s artistic fate.
All of the quirks and peculiarities that once made Wayne great have hardened, six or seven years later, into nearly unbearable tics. All of his lyrics have devolved into barely rearranged little puzzles of themselves, with countless versions of his "She ride/ Take this dick like ___” formulation, none of them funny or creative: On “IANAHB”, a woman takes it like “advice,” while others ride it like both "go-karts" and "the Kentucky Derby" on "Curtains”. His tweaking of gangsta-rap’s language has never been more perfunctory. He sounds terminally bored, and even the better rap songs on here-- the hits, like the Mike Will Made It-produced, Future-and-Drake-featuring “Bitches Love Me” or the rubbery, Bay Area-influenced clap of “Rich As Fuck”-- work around him, not with him.
The only moments where Wayne sounds marginally interested in his own music come when he veers furthest away from rap. On “Romance”, he sings in his croaky, limber way about his profane version of love while Cool & Dre’s synthesizers smear like bionic fireflies: “She kissed my ankle when I twist my ankle/ She even did anal when she don't do anal.” On the big, clomping pop rock of "Back To You”, his voice is a shpritz of Lil Wayne on the surface of a towering club-pop production, the kind that mashes together the respective sugar highs of Euro club-pop, hair-metal, and synth pop into a glutinous ball (If you’re wondering whose sampled voice that is crooning at the bottom of all that mess, by the way, it’s Jamie Lidell’s.) This might not be the most promising future to ponder for Wayne’s music, but they’re the moments he sounds happiest: as a cog in a much bigger machine than himself, set free from being the all-consuming center for the first time.


Naomi Punk's proper debut, originally released on vinyl and now being issued by Captured Tracks digitally and on CD, captures the Olympia, Wash., trio studying the grunge rulebook just to tear it in half.

The Feeling

Olympia/Seattle's Naomi Punk are at least partly inspired by their grunge forbearers. The genre's basic elements are well-represented: The sludgy erosion over the guitars, the drums blasting with machine-grade heaviness. Since the old formula goes "one part metal, two parts punk, and one part psychedelic weird shit," it's not a stretch by any means to consider Naomi Punk a grunge band. And while they're clearly a part of a long lineage of bands taking their influence from the Seattle rock scene of the early 1990s, Naomi Punk's songs are not cheaply manufactured recreations of Soundgarden or even TAD.
The Feeling, originally released on vinyl and now being issued by Captured Tracks digitally and on CD, captures the trio studying the grunge rulebook just to tear it in half. Naomi Punk's approach to grunge is one of deconstruction and rebuilding in different places with fewer parts. Most of the album's songs change tempos at the drop of flannel, breaking into a dense wall of meticulously controlled chaos. Guitars are not delivered with a steady stream of chords; they come in blasts along with the crash cymbal, often at irregular points in the song. There's almost a need to keep up with them rhythmically over the first few listens, because the phrasing of the chords and beats zig zag through a motley course, unintentionally using empty space as every bit the weapon their guitars and drums are.
Despite the grunge signifiers, Naomi Punk seem to be working under a template like slowcore, art-punk, or no wave played at half-speed. They've given themselves a narrow palette to work with in this sense, but The Feeling's funeral-march tempos and unrelenting heaviness don't detract from what makes the album compelling. Aside from three quasi-classical guitar interludes, the record comes packed top-to-bottom with total bruisers, and for most of its 35 minutes, the music is hitting you with pummeling force, every bit as visceral as your favorite punk album from this year. Most of the songs come with a cathartic breakdown of some sort, whether it's the rollicking finish of "Trashworld" or the chorus of "Burned Body".
Not only does The Feeling connect on a purely visceral level, it's got plenty of emotional resolve. For a band whose poppiest song's titled "Burned Body" and for all of the lyrics about charred flesh and self-immolation, Naomi Punk are good at injecting a bit of hope and optimism into their music. "I am the sun/ I am the shooting star" goes the opening lyric of "The Spell".
The title track takes that optimism and shoots it into anthemic territory. Playing out like the battle scene climax of your favorite war movie, "The Feeling" starts out scaling back to hold the tension, but rolls into explosion after explosion. The chorus, the sedate tease of the middle eight, and then the climax-- "And now I know that I can find a way"-- triumphantly rise above the din. Monolithic and seemingly impenetrable at first, The Feeling has a number of these moments, subtler details that offer plenty of rewards for whoever can stand being pummeled for almost 40 minutes.


Produced by BADBADNOTGOOD, the second album from the Hiroshima-born, Montreal-based singer-songwriter explores heartbreak and familial history with a subtle and dynamic approach.

Portrait of a Dog

In 2022, upon noticing that his grandparents were beginning to forget his name, Jonah Yano traveled to their home in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, hoping to archive any and all memories of them. Tirelessly recording footage and conversations, and digitizing thousands of photos and documents with the help of his brother, Yano channeled his emotional energy into the gut-wrenching highlight of his new album, Portrait of a Dog. At the center of “Song About the Family House”—marked with somber acoustic guitar and his wistful, cracking vocals, trailing away after every line like a faded memory—is a rush to immortalize his family’s history, knowing that even if the people he loves are gone, the details of late nights and home-cooked meals won’t be lost.
This connection to the past brings a new level of focus to Yano’s work. His debut album, 2020’s Souvenir, blended drum’n’bass, rock, and ambient with acoustic instrumentation, adopting the sounds of his numerous collaborators to create an expansive landscape. In his lyrics, Yono reflected on his parents’ separation and the experience of being an expatriate after moving from Hiroshima to Vancouver at a young age. Refining the sprawling sound of Souvenir, Portrait of a Dog is produced entirely by the Toronto group BADBADNOTGOOD, encasing Yano’s melancholy lyrics and tranquil guitar playing in a more casual environment and giving the album a meditative, inviting tone.
Portrait of a Dog meanders naturally as Yano follows the band’s jazzy arrangements and bends around instrumentalists like cellist Eliza Niemi. The sections that accompany Yano’s vocals are purposeful and restrained, harkening back to the effective, straight-laced compositions from BBNG’s 2016 album IV. On “Call the Number,” Yano croons along to a mixture of subdued piano and sweeping cello. But once the vocals stop and the band takes over, the improvisation and solos run wild, transforming the coffeehouse lullaby into a frenetic live set in a smoky basement club. Pianist Felix Fox-Pappas dazzles at the end of “Always” and Leland Whitty closes “Haven’t Haven’t” with a rousing tenor saxophone solo.
Each of the 12 songs was written in the aftermath of Yano’s trip to his grandparents, while he was also going through a breakup. Yano credits songwriters like Adrianne Lenker and Feist as inspiration, and he follows in their lineage of cryptic, diaristic intimacy. Heartbreak seeps into the material, but instead of recounting the pain in precise details, he deals in pithy allusions, leaving clues about his feelings. At times, his sparse approach can lighten the emotional weight of the material, like his whispered lines about “the cold middle of the night” in “The Speed of Sound!” The crux of the song depends on everything but the actual words: His voice lilts with every syllable, making the imagery feel crushing and poignant.
Yano can conjure equally affecting moments even when he isn’t speaking to us directly. A recording of his grandfather’s voice opens “So Sweet,” inaccurately describing their familial relationship: “Get your music out and say, ‘This is for my uncle,’” he instructs, before being quickly corrected by Yano’s grandmother. It’s a sobering moment, but it speaks to Yano’s undaunted pursuit to preserve the past, in all its imperfection and beauty.


At first listen, Loom plays like an appropriately wistful dream pop cousin to Young Marble Giants or the Marine Girls, or perhaps something resembling Camera Obscura’s awkward stepsister. But underneath all the jingle-jangling guitars and twee musical meanderings, Fear of Men are quietly seething.

Loom

Almost every song on Loom, Fear of Men’s full-length debut, includes a reference to water. The narrator in these songs risks being consumed, overwhelmed, sunk like a stone, or washed away completely. The drowned romanticism of the band’s lyrics (“I tried my best to destroy you but the waves/ Keep overflowing me/ Washing me out ‘till I’m empty”) is reflected in their music as well—a kind of delicate, twilight indie pop swirl that belies the heady darkness that seems to always be simmering just underneath. At first listen, Loom plays like an appropriately wistful dream pop cousin to Young Marble Giants or the Marine Girls (or something resembling Camera Obscura’s awkward stepsister). But underneath all the jingle-jangling guitars and twee musical meanderings, Fear of Men are quietly seething—a prim librarian who just happens to carry a warm switchblade in her book bag.
Fear of Men is essentially the work of two mindful British art students: Jessica Weiss (guitarist and vocalist) and Daniel Falvey (guitarist). Taking their name from a rare anxiety disorder (“androphobia” is an abnormal and persistent fear of men), the band set about making songs that took on mortality, mental illness, and loneliness and set them against a melodic backdrop of Smiths-like guitars. The fruits of the band’s early efforts were collected into an aptly named 2013 collection called Early Fragments, a release that showcased the band’s ability to marry the beautiful with the slyly profane. It’s a concept the band pushes even further on Loom. When Weiss sings “Lie alone until the dark takes it all/ Without a body, I am free to dissolve,” it’s a fitting descriptor of the band’s aesthetic: Personal melancholy and romantic dread loom large, while an ever-present ocean of ambiguously deep feelings threatens to wash everything away.
Musically, Loom is a nice step forward. “Green Sea” and “Seer”—both of which appeared previously on Fragments—sound bigger and bolder here, each benefiting from more assured production. The record’s best songs—“Inside” and “Descent” among them—balance the record’s darkest lyrical sentiments against it’s brightest melodies, which generally proves to be Fear of Men’s neatest trick. Though the band’s committed DIY aesthetic is admirable—they employ a strict hands-on approach to everything, from the production of the music to the album art to the band’s videos—the music might be better served by the help of an outside producer. This is far and away a more sanguine listening experience than anything the band has recorded before, but even with the addition of a full-time drummer (Michael Miles) and a live bassist (Becky Wilkie), the rhythm section can’t deliver the kind of punch the material demands. And the album’s shimmery sameness (and turgid melancholy) eventually starts to feel a bit rote.
When the band does cut loose, as they do on the sublime “America”, the albums’s best track, you get a sense where they might go next. The song veers from gentle strummer and escapist fantasy to something resembling heaviness, with diaphanous guitar lines momentarily giving way to a bit of roiling feedback and what sounds like a tiny little amp being mercilessly overdriven. It’s a rare moment of abandon. Fear of Men are likely never going to shred riotously, blow up their gear, or even raise their voices to anything resembling a scream—they simply aren’t that kind of band—but here’s hoping that all that well-considered vitriol in Weiss’ lyrics might eventually bleed over into their music.


Michigan-born, Montreal-based saxophonist crafts a unique modern jazz record with both mind-boggling technique and in-the-moment expression.

Colin Stetson: New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges

New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges

Once in a while, I can convince myself that it's impossible to say anything truly new in music. There has been so much music made and documented in the last 50 years, my thinking goes, that the best we can hope for is an artful re-combination of elements of the past (which seems like more than enough, most of the time). But then I'll come across a new record that sounds like nothing else I've heard: I can't quite place it, but its appeal feels so organic and easy to understand, I don't really feel a need to place it, either. Such is the case with the second solo album from Michigan-born, Montreal-based saxophonist Colin Stetson, New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges.
A few things about this record make it highly unusual. First, Stetson generally records his pieces solo, live, and in a single take. Some of these tracks have so much sound, so many cross-crossing and overlapping elements, it simply doesn't seem possible that one musician is making them in real time. "Judges" has clattering percussion, a menacing bassline, and a growling lead element that sounds like an anguished voice processed in a strange way. Well, the percussion turns out to be a close-mic'd recording of the instruments' keys being manipulated, the low-end comes from the fact that Stetson plays the enormous bass saxophone and has a good sense of how to underpin a tune with a deep pulse, and the lead voice is indeed his voice-- Stetson vocalizing through the horn as he blows. That all of these things come together at once in a piece that is compelling and highly musical is nothing short of miraculous. The key to Stetson's approach is that he uses an array of microphones placed in strategic places-- on the horn, on his neck, on the other side of the room-- and then mixes everything down into a churning cauldron of sound (engineer Efrim Menuck from Godspeed/A Silver Mt Zion and producer Shahzad Ismaily had their work cut out for them, and they succeed brilliantly; Ben Frost is equally great on the mix). Stetson has also mastered the technique of circular breathing-- playing continuously with his mouth while breathing through his nose-- so that the sound can unspool unencumbered by his body's need for respiration.
The record does bring certain reference points to mind. When Stetson really gets the circular breathing going and unleashes a torrent of notes the climb up and down the scale, fans of free improv might think of solo material by players like Peter Brotzmann and Evan Parker, whose mind-boggling technique is put at the service of in-the-moment expression. But Warfare Vol. 2 doesn't sound much like improv or even jazz, despite our associations of the genre term with the solo horn. These pieces sound composed and carefully ordered, often closer to the precision of classical minimalism than the expressionism of fire jazz. And compared to someone like saxophonist/composer/bandleader Anthony Braxton, with whom Stetson has worked (if you are a virtuoso on bass sax, you're going to wind up working with Braxton, who greatly expanded the context for unusual reeds in jazz), Warfare feels less cerebral, almost like a "pop" version of some of those heady compositions.
So there's no prior experience needed here. You can dive in and immerse yourself in the swirl of musical color that is "From No Part of Me Could I Summon a Voice", in which Stetson's blast of notes, many per second, are recorded as though from across a vast stone space, each one vanishing into the air in a cloud of natural reverberation. Or marvel at the way Stetson makes a track like "Red Horse (Judges II)" sound almost as if it had a breakbeat, the slap of the keys on the instrument so pronounced in the mix you focus on the rhythm first and the texture of the air coming through the horn later.
Reinforcing the music's connection to both minimalism and pop, several tracks here feature the vocals of Laurie Anderson, whose approach is a natural fit with this material. "A Dream of Water" features her clear and hypnotic voice articulating memorable imagery ("There were those who lived in the crawlspace/ There were people lighting candles") over a grinding and relentless arpeggiated figure from Stetson. "All the Colors Bleached to White (ILAIJ II)" begins with Anderson's vocal and a swelling chorus of voices and then shifts gears to a hard, noir-ish stomp whose deep tones can easily shake an entire room. Shara Worden from My Brightest Diamond joins the proceedings on a powerful and affecting cover of Blind Willie Johnson's "Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes", a mutant, arted-up blues that reminds me of the overlooked album of Ekkehard Ehlers, A Life Without Fear, the way it abstracts a folk idiom and boils it down to a central emotional idea.
Like the rest of the record (and Vol. 1 is also excellent, if not quite as varied or powerful), "Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes" feels like music I've been subconsciously craving without even knowing it exists. And though New Warfare Vol. 2 is easy to enjoy on a purely musical level, as sound, without bothering about the underlying ideas or any notions of how it's made, it's also a gratifying reminder that horizons of musical expression are so much more vast than prevailing trends would indicate.