The DFA stalwart delivers a set of psychedelic, late-night club cuts that invoke the dancefloor at its most immersive.

I Can’t Explain EP

Had the notion of acid house not been comprehensively explored at the tail end of the 1980s, we might have minted the term to describe the Juan Maclean’s I Can’t Explain, which is inspired by mind-expanding drugs and old-school house music. John Maclean—operating solo here, rather than in the company of Nancy Whang—says that he created the EP’s tracks “after weekends of head down dancing in dark clubs,” fine-tuning them across months and years of club play; just as significantly, he produced each track under the influence of psychedelics, “mostly LSD.”
House music plus hallucinogens is not a new idea, but it is a surprisingly rare combination, given how well the two elements compensate for each other’s weaknesses. Much psychedelic music is long-winded and diffuse, while house music is too often wedded to efficiency, and it is the push and pull between these contrasting ideas—the groove and the ramble, the strait-laced and the psychotropic—that drives this excellent EP.
Rather than the tweaking 303s and rough drum programming of classic acid house—which today sounds closer to proto-techno than it does the smooth thread count of modern house music—I Can’t Explain offers disco loops filtered into abstraction, with the cumulative effect like a DJ Sneak or Cassius record glimpsed through a narcotic fog. (A rather erratic 303 line does turn up towards the end of “City Life Disco,” but this is a rare moment of rough and tumble among the sweet kaleidoscopic soup.)
The EP’s four tracks (joined by a rather superfluous remix by Berlin-based producer Alinka) are maddeningly simple on the surface: just drums, bass, and a couple of brief samples. The brain-bending effects of this rather dogmatic mix arise in the EP’s production, where the sources are treated to a world of echo, phase, and dissociative effects. The beat on “City Life Disco” is so bathed in springy reverb it seems to almost double up on itself, like a rhythm that has bounced free from a passing King Tubby record.
Having so little to play with means Maclean’s production has to be perfectly calibrated: sufficiently repetitive to establish a rolling groove but with enough difference to sustain interest. Maclean expertly uses subtle variations in rhythm, tone, volume and effect to create shifting sonic sands over the four lengthy songs. The EP’s title track is based around one brief vocal sample which floats in and out of focus like a kiss in a daydream. Listening to this hypnotic composite feels being spun around and down a brightly colored helter skelter, a whirl of gentle adventure.
“Leave Me When You Can,” meanwhile, connects a slightly muffled disco drum loop, a snippet of vocals, and an exquisite production effect that sounds like wind rushing past a penthouse window. You can imagine Maclean fiddling with the song’s ingredients as his buzz intensifies, channeling the music’s warm lysergic rush. Despite the chemical distractions, though, Maclean is savvy enough to introduce an enchanting wrinkle, allowing a few bars of hi-hat to slip delicately out of time before bringing the elements back into line.
Whether it was the drugs or the power of old-school house, Maclean appears to have squared a circle on I Can’t Explain, as the dancefloor-friendly Juan MacLean of “Happy House” meets the hallucinogenic adventurer behind 2021’s Ritual Device—a record of drones intended for “psychedelic journeying”—and getting along famously. A lot of truly terrible music has been made under the influence of psychedelics, but Maclean’s gambit turns out to be both mind-expanding and pulse-quickening.

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The avant-pop group offers a comprehensive if inessential career overview on what may be the final edition of its long-running compilation series.

Stereolab: Pulse of the Early Brain (Switched On, Vol. 5)

When Stereolab announced the release of Pulse of the Early Brain, the fifth installment in the avant-pop ensemble’s Switched On compilations gathering up material not found on their proper LPs, they noted that it was “possibly the final edition.” The use of “possibly” does leave the door open to the band finding more rarities tucked away on a forgotten hard drive or making new music together, but it’s hard not to see this collection as the band’s concluding statement. Pulse of the Early Brain collects every remaining leftover from Stereolab’s substantial discography—rare EPs, singles, and stray comp tracks—that had yet to be included on any previous Switched Ons or as bonus tracks on their recent run of album reissues. Thirty years after the release of the first Switched On comp, their known archives appear to be empty.
The breadth of the material included on Vol. 5 also has the unintended effect of serving as a far-ranging career overview for Stereolab. Though it isn’t sequenced in chronological order, Pulse hits on every stage of Stereolab’s sonic evolution. The earliest tracks date from 1992, the year that founding members Lætitia Sadier and Tim Gane were joined by their longest-standing collaborators, vocalist Mary Hansen and drummer Andy Ramsay. The most recent tunes were released in 2008, right before the group announced their hiatus. Even though the 3xLP/2xCD set jumps backward and forward in Stereolab’s timeline, the result is a fairly comprehensive portrait of their development from their initial motorik nihilist assault to the pop molecules of their later work.
Representing the heady roar of the group’s earliest recordings are the four tracks from Low Fi, an EP originally released in 1992 via Too Pure. In each one, Sadier and Hansen coat their sugar-sweet harmonies with layers of chugging guitar and overdriven Farfisa and Moog. The material from the mid-to-late ’90s continues the dense, melodic height of albums like Emperor Tomato Ketchup and Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, as Stereolab worked to get as far afield from their usual sound as possible with more elaborate arrangements and danceable rhythms. “Robot Riot,” a previously unreleased track written for a Charles Long art exhibition, has a jangly momentum, while “Symbolic Logic of Now!,” originally found on a 1998 split 7” with one-and-done post-rock group Soi-Disant, explodes the concepts of Dots and Loops into dizzying dub exotica.
Also included is a quartet of songs that came from the prolific recording sessions that produced Stereolab’s final full-lengths, 2008’s Chemical Chords and 2010’s Not Music. And like those two albums, the striding funk groove of “Spool of Collusion” and the tickling fizz of “The Nth Degrees” expands the group’s pop palette with more luminous synth tones and a digital patina.
The downside to this final sweeping up of stray tracks is that, for the first time in this series, Pulse of the Early Brain is bogged down with a good deal of inessential material. One of the likely attractions for longtime fans is the inclusion of 1997’s Simple Headphone Mind, the long out-of-print second collaboration between the group and Nurse With Wound, the long-standing experimental project led by Steven Stapleton. The two tracks are pleasant enough, with Gane’s chiming guitar clashing nicely with the more proggy tones of NWW member David Kenny over an insistent drum machine pulse. But with the absence of Sadier and Hansen’s voices or Stapleton’s noisier antics—both of which feature prominently on the artists’ previous meet-up, 1993’s Crumb Duck—the songs feel skeletal and unfinished.
The same can be said for the various short tracks scattered throughout Pulse of the Early Brain, like a demo version of “Ronco Symphony” from 1993’s The Groop Played “Space Age Batchelor Pad Music” and a pair of minor tunes previously found on short-run flexi discs. Their inclusion is necessary, in order to make the series feel comprehensive, but they don’t add much substance to the overall story of the band—a tale may be coming to an end soon. Though tour dates are scheduled through December, there has been no indication from anyone involved with Stereolab that they will continue beyond that. But if that “possibly” mentioned above presages future music from the group, Pulse of the Early Brain has emptied out the closet and left them free to pack it full with new ideas once more.


When 37-year-old rapper the Jacka was killed earlier this year in East Oakland, he'd been on the verge of a modest resurgence. Drought Season 3, his first posthumous release and the third in his series of collaborative albums with fellow Bay Area rapper Berner, proves there was plenty of gas left in the tank when his life was tragically cut short.

Drought Season 3

When 37-year-old rapper the Jacka was killed earlier this year in East Oakland, he'd been on the verge of a modest resurgence. The initial arc of his solo career, which began with 2001's Jacka of the Mob Figaz and peaked eight years later with 2009's Tear Gas, was one of the most prolific auteurs of the 2000s. A peerless writer with a distinct sound, a gift for vivid prose, and a powerful moral conscience, his best material received little attention at his apex. (At least on a national level—within the Bay Area and its satellite cities, he's on his way to matching Mac Dre as a regional legend.) After a fallow period in the early 2010s, Jacka released his official Tear Gas follow-up, What Happened to the World, in 2014. Though his momentum had slowed, his writing was as strong as it had ever been. Drought Season 3, his first posthumous release and the third in his series of collaborative albums with fellow Bay Area rapper Berner, proves this was no fluke; there was plenty of gas left in the tank when Jacka's life was tragically cut short this past February.
This tape's prequel, Drought Season 2, was one of the last great albums of the Jacka's initial creative run. But at a time when his career should have been peaking commercially, the internet was wreaking havoc. Album sales were at their nadir, and popular regional stars like Jacka suddenly sat in the shadow of viral sensations like Lil B, whose prescient understanding of meme-marketing gave him a leg up outside his native Bay Area. And while Jacka had long sustained himself by charging for features, the Internet's clear-glass window into the Bay Area scene made it so bootlegs and guest verses buried his official catalog amidst a nebulous cloud of unofficial material.
At the same time, he began to nurse a codeine addiction. Initially, he appreciated syrup's effect on his vocal style, but as time wore on, it began to detach his words and flow from the groove. By the time Drought Season 3 was recorded, his voice no longer felt as present. Its wispier texture seems seconds from evaporating. On the album, this weightlessness detracts only when the Jacka aims for menace, as on the overdriven guitars of "45"; his reflective moments remain convincing, ghosted vocals camouflaging complex emotions and hard-earned wisdom in a dreamlike reverie. Despite this effervescence, his writing is sharp enough to cut glass. It's not just that he doesn't waste words; each statement is saturated with meaning, each deceptively simple lyric charged with purpose, its wider implications left to echo over each successive line.
His passing looms over the proceedings; lyrics recorded before his death take on portentous connotations. On "One Sound", he laments the catch-22 of success: "I just want to make you proud/ But you'd rather see me gunned down." It's a sentiment echoed by Husalah's chorus on "Win": "When you start gettin' money and these suckers start hating/ Sometimes when you win you lose." The Jacka's take on street rap is an urgent one charged by violence, anchored by realism that could verge on the despondent. Underlying it all is a struggle to stay sane in a fallen world, one marked by betrayal ("'Cause niggas got rich and ain't show us how") that is unsparing in its indictment of the wider world's complicity ("Where killing made it safe for y'all to walk around"). A stance of perpetual resistance in the face of the world's cruelty—a cruelty in which he is complicit and compromised—is his eternal subject. That he doesn't fold under its weight, even as the drugs numbed his pain, is a reflection of his abiding Muslim faith, a radicalized race consciousness ("Everywhere I've ever been they treat the blacks, unfair"), and confidence in his art—a trust in truth as a liberating force.
On its musical surface, Drought Season 3 is one of the smoothest rap releases of the year—appropriate for a collaboration with Berner, who has membership in Wiz Khalifa's more commercially-relevant Taylor Gang. The production is lush, colorful, and the dominant rap style throughout its guest-heavy tracklist—give or take Freeway's urgent mania—is one of half-lidded nonchalance. For the uninitiated, this sleek, subtle mood music belies its depth. Expensive-sounding production has long been the m.o. of the Drought Season series. After all, these were the tapes that made Berner's name, an (ostensible) weed-dealing kingpin buying his way into hip-hop with impeccable taste in collaborators and production. But for his part, Berner is no longer the cipher he once was. His flow, which previously relied upon a halting cadence that sounded As If He Were Rapping In Title Case, now rolls off his tongue in a more effortless legato. His lyrics have also deepened in both his attraction to arresting imagery ("I can see my stones glowing in the limousine tint") to an emotional potency that seems, well, Jacka-inspired in its multiplicity of meaning: "We die young but this here forever/ Leave my daughter a letter, don't believe what they tell you."
But while Berner's lyrical contributions here mark a substantial step forward, he's taken a step back in shaping the album's sound, which owes more to Jacka's camp than usual. It's most evident glancing at the record's guest list, which suggests an emotional send-off from his closest friends. For an independent artist working outside the major label system, Jacka's extended crew was built upon strategic alliances, but sustained due to stronger bonds: Ampichino, an Akron, Ohio-based rapper who collaborated with Jacka on two albums as the Devilz Rejects and frequently brought him to perform in the Midwest; Rydah J. Klyde and Husalah, the most active members of Jacka's group the Mob Figaz; Freeway, the sympatico former Roc-A-Fella rapper who bonded with the Jacka over their shared identity as Muslims.
The guests pay their respects in varied ways. On "Drought Season", Joe Blow, the most accomplished artist on Jacka's The Artist record label, unleashes a flurry of syllables in a controlled, laconic style that celebrates Jacka's legacy through breathless formal architecture. "Die Young", a remake of Cormega's street classic "They Forced My Hand", features Oakland legend Richie Rich, a rapper who was signed to Def Jam in the mid-1990s. He addresses his time in the spotlight in a way that could as easily speak to Jacka's own ambivalence to the industry: "I ate with Russell Simmons, so how could I be local?/ But a lot of that bullshit, I just couldn't go for." Cormega appears on "Whole Thang", his understated prose taking on deeper implications: "I was one amongst many, few remain." But it's Jacka's longtime partner Husalah who captures the album's purposeful spirit, on "Win": "As little kids took an oath to this criminal movement/ Hoping this song redeem our souls and wake you up like a rooster." Or perhaps that honor belongs to Jacka himself, who raps on the title track: "I try to end this with who I began with."
Indeed, it's the Jacka's purposeful ideology—scattered jewels throughout the tape which imprint themselves upon the psyche long after the song ends—that makes this a nourishing listen. The album's most revelatory moment comes on the hidden bonus track, "So Much Pain". With a beat that sounds like sun breaking through storm clouds, it opens with an affecting turn from Berner ("Thinking 'bout my mother, I'm screaming 'fuck cancer'") before jumping to one of the most compelling verses of Jacka's career. His truest skill as an artist was the ability to compress a world and worldview onto the head of a pin, and this song is a platonic ideal: opening with a scene of betrayal, he slips to tormented guilt, an indictment of the system, and an affirmation of religious faith that remains as vivid as his street stories: "I know I'm blessed the way you manifest a hopeless mind, into an open eye/ Never seen a god in the open sky, but I read the signs so I know you are, right there, unseen like the air you feel/ On your skin, unseen like the evil djinn, you know I kneel."
His verse ends in what may as well be his career's statement of purpose ("All I try to do is make it pop, somewhere/ All my fallen soldiers, dead or locked, you'll live again"). The effect is overwhelming, a moment of crystalline clarity, a flash of light. And as suddenly the light recedes, as Carey Stacks, a Seattle protege, returns to the here-and-now, to his immediate vicinity, to the concrete threats of the world in front of him: "Two feet on the ground, both eyes open."


On their second full-length in a decade, the despondent witch house pioneers return with an alluring invitation to join them in the depths.

Fires in Heaven

When the trio of Midwest malcontents in SALEM released their first EPs over a decade ago, they, like many young people in America, were staring down a dead end. As the critic Larry Fitzmaurice pointed out last year in an essay reflecting on the legacy of chillwave, much of the music that arrived in the early ’10s was implicitly engaged with the turbulence of the era. Still dealing with the hangover of two interminable wars, and with economic prospects decimated by the long wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it was hard for many to feel hopeful.
Part of the appeal of SALEM at the time was in how their early EPs and their 2010 album King Night reflected this societal despondency. Largely composed of oozy, unsettling electronic music that burbled in the middle-ground between shoegaze and DJ Screw tapes, their songs were desperate, longing, and lonely. SALEM stared dispassionately into the eyes of a dying world and then, suddenly, they went dark. Over the ten years since King Night, the band has been quiet. They released a companion EP the following year, but since then they’ve only emerged for a handful of remixes and one member’s unexpected production credit on Kanye West’s Yeezus.
Now a duo after the departure of founding vocalist Heather Marlatt, principal members Jack Donoghue and John Holland haven’t said much about the timing of their return, but it seems no accident that their second full-length Fires in Heaven arrives as the world is yet again in turmoil, facing down ecological disasters and social unrest, not to mention the economic uncertainty and the global health crisis brought on by the mismanagement of an unprecedented pandemic. Unfortunately, the world hasn’t changed for the better in the last decade, which seems to be the mindset with which that SALEM approach this record. Everything is still pretty depressing, and so is their music.
On the morose opening track “Capulets,” they nod to the fact that they’re emotionally in more or less the same place they were ten years ago. Sighing over a twisted sample from the Prokofiev ballet Romeo and Juliet, Donoghue murmurs about the mundanity of existence: “Ask me what i’m doing with my life / Ain’t shit to tell y’all.” It’s the same kind of stretched-out, dejected song they’ve made since their inception. Some of Fires in Heaven takes this mentality to extreme places. “DieWithMe,” for example, is grayscale and gothic, dreaming of the release of the afterlife underneath an instrumental that sounds like an ’80s 4AD release tape at half-speed.
The record’s closer “Not Much of a Life” is one of the more hopeful sounding moments, looping a dreamy vocal effect and snowblind synths in a disorienting swirl that feels a little like Slowdive’s electronic experiments. But even that track is gloomy at its heart, its title echoing menacingly like the intrusive internal monologue that greets you on sleepless nights: “It’s not much of a life you’re living.”
This sort of bleakness is familiar territory for the duo, but Fires in Heaven shows a newfound clarity in their expression. Mixed by Shlohmo—a fellow traveler in downcast beatwork—and mastered by frequent Kanye collaborator Mike Dean, this record finds SALEM excising a lot of the murk and mire from their previous compositions. They still occasionally bury vocals in a haze of effects, but their instrumentals are crushing now by design, their synth lines starker, the distortion more piercing. They’ve always been capable of expressing harsh feelings, but they seem now more able than ever to echo such sentiments in their music. Fires in Heaven is a more alluring invitation than ever to join them down in the depths.

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Trae Tha Truth is one of the most distinctive voices in Houston rap, even if he never broke through to the degree of his class-of-2005 contemporaries. His latest album features J. Cole, Dej Loaf, Future, and others.

Tha Truth

There's a run on great rap voices in Houston—Bun B's crisp baritone, Z-Ro's bluesy bounce, Scarface's bellow. But Trae tha Truth's might be the most unique—a rasp carrying so much weight he might be Houston's version of Big Rube, if Rube decided to rhyme. He's also never really broke all the way through like his contemporaries from the class of 2005, or escaped the local hub of the Screwed Up Click. There is a darkness to his music that might put off outsiders. Sometimes he even discomfits his own city: He was banned by Houston's most-recognizable hip-hop station for a sustained period of time because of an inane allegation he incited violence via his annual Trae Day, a local, charitable holiday (officially recognized by the mayor!). In other words, his art is so gut-level effective it nearly blacklisted him from a city he has represented tirelessly for over a decade. No one's realer than Trae.
However, true to Houston form, he can't quite sustain a full-length album. Between a solo run and his work with ABN, Trae's established a personal canon, but you'll be hard-pressed to hear a song of his after Fat Pat's "Tops Drop" and Chamillionaire's "Ridin'" during a best-of-Houston playlist: he's so prolific that in recent years he's spread his catalog thin. That there's no strong Houston presence on Tha Truth, Trae's first record in four years, is not a surprise, because he's always been the odd-man-out of the nationally-recognized Houston crew, and his affiliation with T.I.'s Hustle Gang makes some locals bristle. But it unfortunately lends a major-label-rap sameness to Tha Truth, his seventh official studio album, that is kryptonite to someone as unique as Trae.
Some moments work better than others, but the album feels shuffled rather than sequenced.  Problem, a good rapper, is sorely mismatched with Lil Boss, one of the few features (and only local one) to leave a mark, on solid first single "Yeah Hoe." Trae lets DeJ Loaf get the last word on this record, on the excellent closer "Realigion," and the fit makes sense: DeJ works the same anti-social angle Trae has trafficked in for years. Surprisingly, the J. Cole collaboration is the most affecting song. Cole's strained gravitas works in small doses, and it does on "Children of Men," a soulful lament that runs through familiar themes of violence and poverty but manages to twist them afresh in Trae's husky presence.
When not basking in the highs of "Children of Men" or the lows of ill-advised sex jam "Late Night King" (with a badly Auto-Tuned Jeremih on the hook), Tha Truth just hovers in the Houston-street-rap middle. On the intro, Lil Duval insists, "ain't no music out here for the struggle right now...that's what the people need." And Trae stays to true to his word. "Why" is a somber reflection on gang violence, but it doesn't resonate after it's over. "Tricken Every Car I Get" with Future and Boosie, is a good single, but it's mostly telling  for how hungry Boosie sounds: "Spray that thing candy but might wreck the whip the next day/Peanut butter insides covered up in plastic/stash spots everywhere, ride fly everywhere." These are fun lines that stick in your head on first listen, and they capture more vitality in a few seconds than Trae does for the entire record.
Showmanship has never been Trae's trademark, and that can be an issue. He's still rapping well enough over good beats, and he earns points for not shoehorning a Kirko Bangz hook or Travis Scott verse in somewhere. Yet Tha Truth doesn't feel vital, and, at his peak, Trae was arguably the most vital Houston rapper—anchoring a scene that featured the antics of Mike Jones and Paul Wall, he was the lyricist's lyricist, the conscience of the underground. Trae doesn't have to prove to anyone he's a necessary voice in hip-hop, but between Slim Thug's surprisingly solid twin Hogg Life records from this year, or the consistently mellow output from fellow ABN member Z-Ro, for now anyway, he's been outpaced.


Seventeen months since his release from prison, Gucci Mane delivers one of his most consistent and accessible releases in years, and a prime showcase for his renewed charisma.

Mr. Davis

Since emerging from prison fit, sober, and self-actualized, Gucci Mane has savored every moment of his endless goodwill tour, happily fielding collaboration offers, penning a New York Times best seller, and generally charming the hell out of the media. Even a year and a half after his release, his transformation doesn’t seem any less remarkable. Between his megawatt smile, improbable six-pack, and impeccably tailored new wardrobe, he now looks like the conventional star he never was even during his commercial window in the late 2000s, that confused era when labels were slotting him into Mariah Carey and Black Eyed Peas remixes.
For the most part, Gucci’s “young, active and attractive” makeover hasn’t impacted his music much. He’s less bitter now, he’s landing more jokes, and he no longer raps like a “before” example in a Mucinex commercial, but he’s continued releasing the same steady stream of low-stakes albums and mixtapes as before (and even during) his prison sentence. He’s done his big comeback event album, a couple return-to-the-streets albums, and a few of his usual collaboration albums. All of those were more or less expected. Released on the heels of his highest-charting single ever, the sticky Migos collaboration “I Get the Bag,” Mr. Davis is something that few would have predicted just two years ago, however: a Gucci Mane album with actual commercial expectations.
The industry’s fingerprints are all over the record, from its guest roster of A-listers like Nicki Minaj and A$AP Rocky to its perfectionist mastering job and that telltale sign of label interference, a delayed release date. Atlantic’s sudden interest in the veteran rapper is bittersweet, since Gucci’s usually at his best when he’s left to his own devices, and the album inevitably succumbs to a few test-marketed misfires—particularly “Curve,” a miserabilist Weeknd feature, and “We Ride,” a hollow victory anthem built entirely from circa-2011 radio tropes. The considerable upshot, though, is that there’s a level of quality control here that’s rare for any Gucci Mane project. Mr. Davis is his most consistent and accessible release in years, and a prime showcase for his renewed charisma.
What a blast it is to hear this guy when he’s locked in. Opposite Chris Brown on “Tone It Down,” Gucci barely disguises his smirk while riffing on his greatest and most ridiculous muse, his jewelry: “Big gold boulders in my Rollie/Look like Fred Flintstone when he pick a stone up.” On one of the album’s least chart-minded tracks, “Stunting Ain’t Nuthin,” Gucci revels in the chance to roll around in the gutter with Slim Jxmmi (the half of Rae Sremmurd who isn’t a clear lock for solo stardom) and perennial collaborator Young Dolph, both of whom have rarely sounded hungrier. And even on “Changed,” a leisurely Big Sean number that pretty much pilots itself, Gucci channels his old dazzle, stringing together zinger after zinger into one of those surrealist soliloquies that he used to do better than anybody: “I know my Granny probably looking down at me now/They used to look down at me but now look around/My house so big, my pool so motherfucking deep/So plushed out I don’t really like to leave.”
Gucci Mane issues music at such an unrelenting clip that it can be difficult to make the case for any given project, especially when the two or three before it were more or less as good. Even diehards could be excused for occasionally taking a pass on some of them. But for casual listeners who understandably tuned out after Gucci’s first couple good-not-great comeback albums, now’s as good a time as any to check back in. Between this spring’s cold, uncompromising Droptopwop and the personable crossover stab of Mr. Davis, Gucci Mane is making his most engaging music since his Trap Back/Trap God resurgence. Most artists are lucky to have one legacy-defining hot streak. Gucci Mane is now well into his third.


Fresh & Onlys guitarist Wymond Miles cultivates an arch air of high drama in his solo LPs. The songs on Call By Night touch on the exhilaration that sometimes accompanies sadness and uncertainty.

Call by Night

The Fresh & Onlys guitarist Wymond Miles cultivates an arch air of high drama in his solo songwriting. On releases like 2012’s Under the Pale Moon* *and 2013’s Cut Yourself Free, he combined baroque compositional tics and faux-English intonations, suggesting a muted Robert Smith backed by the world’s most chilled-out post-punk band. His best songs cultivate a perfect and patient balance between darkness and buoyancy, and the insinuating aftertaste lingers.
The songs on* Call by Night* evince the gentle intimacy of the instrument upon which they were written: the piano. If his prior material befit festival stages, this album’s austerity cries out for tiny venues so cramped that you watch beads of condensation form upon and streak down the performers’ water bottles. Some of them have the quality of madrigals: “Protection” establishes Night’s aesthetic: pronounced, theatrical talk-singing; vocals wreathed in echo. Undulating acoustic strums, tom toms, and slicing strings accompany the oblique advice he doles out on the title track, which borders on the avuncular. On the sloshing, epic “Divided In Two,” Miles sets fire to family trees. The staggering Americana gem “Rear View Mirror” and stately anti-ballad “Stand Before Me” very nearly justify coining the phrase “post-Malkmus drinking song.” Elsewhere, lumbering kiss-off “Summer Rains” makes a hopeful, widescreen case for new beginnings.
Despite its traditionalist instrumentation, its slightly retro reference points, *Call by Night *is an album striving to stand apart, to take deeper root. It’s a statement of intent that serves to elevate Miles above his back catalogue. In these modest-seeming songs, he touches on the strange exhilaration we occasionally feel in moments of sadness and uncertainty. It's a feeling we’ve become increasingly familiar with in society, and from his modest perch, Miles brings it to brilliant, stinging life.


Chillwave fixture releases an album of airy electronics, late-1960s psychedelia, and slow-burn rhythms.

Orange You Glad

"How patient are you?" It's not a very encouraging question when talking pop records, let alone a bedroom-psych pop record from the mind of a guy going for his Master's in ethnomusicology. But those of us who still consider patience to be a virtue will find that Julian Lynch's debut full-length Orange You Glad is full of great little moments that gradually (and successfully) cultivate songs brimming with hushed wonder. What really saves these four-track recordings from relying too heavily on aimless atmospherics is a profound interest in late-1960s psychedelia-- I'm guessing that spending most of your time writing lengthy papers about native Tunisian music is either going to heavily influence the record you are making, or drive you deep into the garage, back to a stack of Love LPs.
Most of us already familiar with Lynch probably are so as a result of his work with the Underwater Peoples label and their associates (he frequently plays in and with Ducktails, his "Banana Jam Pt. 1" was a highlight on this summer's Underwater Peoples Records Showcase sampler). But Lynch might soon have a niche all of his own thanks to the various improvisations on Orange, all anchored by uniformed suites of airy electronics, slow-burn rhythms, and his garbled coos and whines. Even the most patient (i.e., stoned) listener probably wouldn't come back for seconds if this was all there was to absorb, but Lynch interjects these weird little set pieces on almost every song-- that crazy low-budget Jimi Hendrix lick on opener "Venom", that quirky-cool bird-call synth blip on the too-short highlight "Rancher"-- that gives these pieces real character on an album that could have could have lazily revisited the same tones and ideas in an effort to over-establish "feel".
"Winterer One" nicely encapsulates a lot of the stronger points on Orange. "I saw witchcraft tonight," sings Lynch (it's one of the few discernable lyrics on the whole album, but one helpfully indicative of the moods explored here) over muffled tambourines and a bleary acoustic guitar line that gorgeously melts into a set of buttery-soft synth tones. It's a quiet victory with the ethereal  sadness of a Nebraska cut, oddly welcoming and calming. "Mercury" would be a big time throw-away if it weren't for Lynch's elusive clarinet carrying the whole thing, weaving in and out of those aquatic guitar textures like a fish through an anemone. And the fractured psych of "Andaza", it's violent wah-wah pedals screaming in the face of melancholic ho-hummery all make for wonderfully contrasted pop pieces that make the patience so virtuous.
Of course there is the obligatory 11-minute droner "The Flood" smack dab in the middle of the thing, a tedious rumination that plays like a very drugged-out seance for a snake charmer, only not a pinch as awesome as that might sound. You can't help but feel a little exhausted after it, leaving "Winterer Two" to stand as an unnecessary epilogue and rendering the syrupy far-outness of "Seed" a little bland. Moments like these curry some favor with those worried that Orange might not be much more than a welcome addition to your "Sleep" playlist, but that application seems somewhat backwards with such wide-eyed intrigue being so delicately stoked time and again. So if you do doze off with such brightly inviting ideas and sounds this hard at work, consider your REM cycle pleasantly soundtracked.


Recorded in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a seven-piece band, Moses Sumney’s first live album and film find freedom and beauty in the isolation of the forest.

Live From Blackalachia

About 30 minutes into his new concert film Blackalachia, Moses Sumney takes off into the air. He is singing “Plastic” while floating a few feet off the ground, a lone, weightless figure against the sky at dusk. Then, midway through the song, the ropes holding him up suddenly become visible, as though we’re catching behind-the-scenes footage from a movie set. “My wings are made up,” Sumney croons, “and so am I.”
It’s a dizzying effect, one that exposes the structures that constitute our self-presentation—the things that we show, the things that we don’t. In a way, the scene feels like a natural continuation of themes Sumney explored in his most recent album, 2020’s grae: Masculinity, gender, race, the multiplicity of identities that comprise who we are and how we are seen by the world.
Sumney has long grappled with image and perception. Burdened and distracted by what he described as a “cult of personality” attached to being a performer, he left Los Angeles in 2017 and took refuge in Asheville, North Carolina. He was drawn to the city’s natural surroundings—the forest, the sky, the birds—and Live From Blackalachia was born out of this newfound home. Over two days in summer 2020, Sumney and a seven-piece band recorded 13 songs culled from grae and 2017’s Aromanticism live in the Blue Ridge Mountains, an hour outside Asheville. Transported into Blackalachia and away from societal context, the music meets us with open arms.
As sprawling as their environs, the live renditions are all longer than their studio counterparts. The changes are sometimes minute: A note is held longer, a melody delivered more slowly, an instrumental interlude stretched and woven like a climbing vine. “Bless Me,” the longest track on the album, extends to eight minutes as Sumney freestyles off operatic vocal runs, toying with constraint and structure. On “Doomed,” the addition of Serena Wiley and Brian Horton’s saxophones and Derrick Johnson’s trombone adds a sweeping cosmic jazz sensibility. In the companion film, Sumney lies on the grass, twisting and turning, beckoned by the sinuous, organic motion of the music. At their most indulgent, the live takes make the studio versions feel domesticated by comparison.
Perhaps the most noticeable aspect of Live From Blackalachia is how undiluted each performer is, even at such length. Without his signature vocal harmonies, Sumney sounds more alone than ever. “In Bloom (in the woods),” the most radical reimagining, pares down the symphonic production of the original to basic string elements: A cello pulses underneath Sumney’s voice; a lone plucked violin evolves into frantic bows. The first third of a newly dynamic version of “Me in 20 Years” does away with many of the production flourishes and vocal layers in favor of a singular, slow-burning sensuality. When the song bursts open at the chorus, it’s like sunbeams on your eyes.
But Sumney is also joined by new company: Crickets chirp in the background; wind hums in the trees. Set atop living, breathing soil, the maximalist pizzazz of a song like “Virile” is imbued with earthy energy. Its wild-hearted outro rises and falls in a thunderous roar, as though the ground beneath were quaking. Live From Blackalachia has just one newly written track, an interlude titled “Space Nation Race Place.” When it plays in the film, Sumney lies naked in a bathtub in the middle of a field, his body garlanded with orange flowers. As the camera zooms out, he becomes smaller and smaller, eventually replaced by a shot of passing trees, like they’re one and the same. “I’ve needed a space to articulate my own loneliness, not at the level of state, or nation, or race, or place,” he recites. In Blackalachia, his isolation becomes a means to freedom and connection—an oceanic feeling so profuse and lush that it invites us in. As the interlude ends, the camera settles among the shrubs, Wiley emerges from the woods with her sax, and the first notes of “Colouour” drift forth like a greeting.

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The short-lived New York band WALL recorded this debut LP before breaking up last year. Drawing on the sardonic din of post-punk and no wave, they paint a picture of the city in a time of uncertainty.

Untitled

A posthumous debut is a strange thing. If it stinks, then good riddance. But if it is great, as is WALL’s Untitled, then fans are left with a craving that is insatiable. Like many bands formed in the underground of constantly mutating metropolises, WALL began as casually as it ended. Upon moving to New York City after three years in Berlin, bassist Elizabeth Skadden reunited with her childhood friend from Texas, vocalist and guitarist Sam York. The pair were joined by guitarist Vince McClelland and drummer Vanessa Gomez and WALL was born. In early 2016, the Brooklyn quartet released a self-titled EP of breakneck, agitated songs, and they concurrently developed a reputation for thrashing concerts (that their recordings were all produced by Parquet Courts’ Austin Brown also helped). Then, in summer ’16, WALL quietly called it quits.
Unlike Skadden’s work in feminist garage outfit Finally Punk, and McClelland’s in the 1960s pop throwback group the Keepsies, WALL conjures the desperation and immediacy of post-punk and no wave bands like Pylon, Au Pairs, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. “I’m supposed to be fucking positive? Fuck you!,” Lydia Lunch once said. “You want positive, go elsewhere. Go find a different lie.” WALL, like their contemporaries Priests, take the pragmatic spirit of Lunch and apply it to critically examining the pains of modern society and the failures of fleeting pleasures.
The city reflected in Untitled is dystopian, numb, a metallic wasteland. Sound familiar? “Validate me/Validate me/Competition, self promotion/Oh we’re all guilty,” York jeers on “High Ratings.” York’s voice is rightfully steely and sardonic as her bandmates create a combative frenzy behind her. “Wounded at War” is a desolate tale about how America glamorizes war and valorizes soldiers before abandoning them. “There’s no thrill in actualities/Sensationalize the truth and/Feed it to me,” York sings before the band flicks from a claustrophobic chug into into a surfy, slippery break. While WALL’s cover of Half Japanese’s “Charmed Life” shares the original’s skronking saxophones, in the context of Untitled it feels relentlessly cynical.
One of WALL’s great strengths is their ability to sound cohesive amid their rapidly descending chaos. “Save Me” witnesses a man and a woman, both voiced by Skadden, separately jumping to their presumed deaths from perilous heights. “See I’ve got the compulsion,” the male character explains over churning guitars and steady drums. “I like how danger feels/I’ve tried to best it, but human nature always wins.” As she recounts these stories, Skadden sounds more jaded than traumatized (“It really freaked me out,” she deadpans later), as if horror and helplessness are parts of daily life. The song only falls into a nightmare at the chorus, as the guitars reach their shrillest peaks and Skadden and York chant Ramones-style, “Save me from myself/Help help!” “Turn Around” remains cool and collected, as York recalls an encounter with a scary man “just dripping with confidence.” But once she confronts him, the song boils over into bellowing feedback.
Untitled concludes with “River Mansion,” which wraps up all of the record’s pummel into one grave, ghostly song. “River Mansion” is by no means cheery—“Lost in the dream,” York sings, “And we’re lying through our teeth when/Our eyes meet”—but Untitled is, crucially, not nihilistic. WALL point out the state of reality and attempt to exist within the never-ending nightmare. Together, the songs on Untitled paint a picture of a city in a time of uncertainty. The vague collapse of WALL reflects this as well; the band has yet to make a statement regarding their dissolution and have moved on to other other projects. Untitled doesn’t answer whether or not it’s best to burn out or fade away, but it suggests how to do the former quite well.


The first live album from the Philadelphia band feels loose and sounds immaculate, cementing their status as one of the premier live bands of their generation.

LIVE DRUGS

There’s a phenomenon at the heart of the War on Drugs’ music called the crossover: the point when one moment folds into another. You can hear it in most of their songs. Sometimes it’s evoked in their steady-marching swells, which can sound like the last sliver of rooftop fading out of focus in the U-Haul’s rearview mirror, or the last flicker of candlelight atop a birthday cake. Often it’s more literal: the point when Adam Granduciel sings his last word and the song’s grand, several-minute-long outro begins.
The crossover is all over the Philadelphia band’s first-ever live album, which captures them at the end of a metamorphosis. Before releasing their 2014 breakthrough, Lost in the Dream, which sped their graduation from small rooms to huge festivals, the War on Drugs were a four-piece touring group that excelled at making those small rooms feel enormous. Their rise in popularity precipitated their upgrade to a bigger lineup, which now includes baritone sax player Jon Natchez, multi-instrumentalist Anthony LaMarca, and mean-mugging drummer Charlie Hall in addition to Granduciel and longstanding members Dave Hartley on bass and Robbie Bennett on keys. LIVE DRUGS comprises recordings from tours behind Lost in the Dream and its follow-up, 2017’s A Deeper Understanding, as they found their footing as a six-piece between 2014 and 2019, documenting their evolution as a live band and their solidification into a Live Band.
The decision by Granduciel and co-producer, guitar tech, and stage manager Dominic East to pick recordings from such a large sample ensures that LIVE DRUGS always sounds immaculate. It has an especially muscular low end—and not just Hartley’s bass. Hearing Natchez’s baritone sax captured so cleanly in such a deep register almost makes it hard to believe that it could be a wind instrument. When Bennett strikes a couple low piano chords to accompany Granduciel’s first words of “Pain”—“Go to bed now I can tell/Pain is on the way out now”—it offsets the storm clouds around him as immediately as a weighted blanket.
Granduciel is a much different vocalist in the live setting than he is on record: more punctuated, less delicate, and even a little less melodic. His soloing, meanwhile, consistently sounds more articulated as he rips into these songs on a tailwind of spontaneous inspiration. In the first episode of a podcast made as part of the rollout for LIVE DRUGS called The Super High Quality Podcast, they discuss being open to songs evolving onstage from their recorded forms. They make good on that here, down to a song’s structure in one case: “Eyes to the Wind” goes drum-less for its first verse, the byproduct of the song once collapsing at a performance in Copenhagen. (This one, regrettably, is not that performance, but a later one that replicated and refined the new version.) It’s a nice respite of “small” from the constant “big.” Bennett’s piano plays the high end this time, sprinkling stardust over Granduciel’s words about the before and after of someone entering his life.
Drugs heads may be disappointed to find that there are no Slave Ambient cuts here, although “Buenos Aires Beach” from the debut album, Wagonwheel Blues (when the War on Drugs was essentially Granduciel’s loosely defined solo moniker) is given new, fuller life. The only other song not from Dream or Understanding is a cover of Warren Zevon’s “Accidentally Like a Martyr”—hardly a Zevon hit, and probably best known as the song that comes on after “Werewolves of London” on his best-selling album, Excitable Boy. The song choice is a small surprise, but Zevon is anything but: The War on Drugs have always stood proudly and obviously in the heartland rock lineage, and given that many others in there, like Zevon, had less-than-stellar reputations, they’ve also been an option that you could feel less messy about enjoying. It’s a beautiful take, but a less on-the-nose inspiration—they tackled a Bill Fay song and a Pretenders song multiple times in those years, for example—could have been a more interesting cover choice.
LIVE DRUGS flows well, too, as if it were all from one show. Which is to say that listening to it feels like being at that show, which is a whole different feeling in late 2020. The live album has always functioned to some degree as a reminder—but more of moments, not of: “What’s a concert?” When Hall slams his toms to ignite the final surge of “Under the Pressure,” easily among their best live cuts, it’s like they heard the question. You can hear the audience, revved-up by the harnessed tension of the previous two minutes, bleed into the mix. They are singing gibberish along to the guitar melody, which maybe you have forgotten is the absolute best genre of rock-concert-singalong, transcending languages and inebriation levels. To have been there at that moment must have been a thrill. To hear it today, at this moment, feels like a gift.

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Copenhagen band Lower's 2012 EP, Walk on Heads, possessed a specific kind of fury; their full-length debut, Seek Warmer Climes, is more romantic and refined, announcing a shift in Lower's sound. Lower are still noisy, but this time around they're focusing more on the jagged, wordy music you could easily term as "post-punk".

Seek Warmer Climes

The cover of the Copenhagen band Lower's 2012 EP, Walk on Heads, featured vocalist Adrian Toubro, head shaved, singing dramatically in a live setting. Its look and feel was reminiscent of an early hardcore 7", and the music itself possessed a similar kind of fury. Their full-length debut, Seek Warmer Climes, features a more romantic, refined image of a man in white lounging in the dirt, announcing a shift in Lower's sound. (The photo was taken by Lower bassist Kristian Emdal, who plays in Vår with Iceage's Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, and who also did the cover art for Iceage's You're Nothing.) They're still noisy, but this time around they're focusing more on the jagged, wordy music you could easily term as "post-punk".
The thing you'll notice first on Seek is the growth in Toubro's approach. He croons, and sighs, and doesn't shout as often. He possesses a writerly approach—the vocal lines often ramble and collide with the music as if he wants to cram in as many syllables as possible regardless of what the rest of the band is doing. His delivery smacks of the type of vocalists that gravitate towards new wave and death rock (and he somewhat resembles Bryan Ferry at times, too).
Lower aren't making pop songs, but the best songs here have hooks. The central motif and narrative of opener "Another Life" ("Strive for another life/ Open your arms/ Invite it inside/ I'll show you what it takes to stay balanced"), along with Toubro's upbeat clip, makes for a potent salvo; that energy continues onto the second track, "Dart Persuasion", which pairs rabid drumming with another nice central repetition that would fit well in a manifesto: "For all the tragic scars of your past/ You pointed out/ With an eye pinned to your navel/ Should I be shocked to the core/ By your rigmarole/ Your snivelling narration."
"Lost Weight, Perfect Skin" possesses a plastic surgery metaphor that comes across as ponderous, but it possesses enough fire to match the sarcastic, cutting sentiments within: "Lost weight, perfect skin/ Will bring the torment to an end/ Put the smile back on my lips." The album's first single, "Soft Option", is another good example of Lower in the zone, bringing in Morrissey-like background vocals with serrated guitars.
Elsewhere, Seek can drag in a way that this kind of music shouldn't. "Unkempt, Uncaring" echoes its title in its loose construction and doesn't leave much of impression; elsewhere, the grand cacophony of "Bastard Tactics" and "Craver" don't amount to much more than that clatter. That said, even in Seek Warmer Climes' less impactful tracks, there are glimmering moments, and it's a testement to Lower that it's hard to discount any of the songs in their entirety.
Befitting such a curious band, the best song on Seek Warmer Climes is the longest, and the one that features accompaniment by two cellos. The 7-minute "Expanding Horizons (Dar es Salaam)" is about Toubro traveling to Tanzani in 2009 to work at an orphanage and finding that the religiousness of the place conflicted with his own change-the-world idealism. He left, moved around Africa, was almost kidnapped in Dar Es Salaam, and so on. "Expanding Horizons" opens with him singing, "Here I stand/ On foreign land/ Expanding horizons/ Though nothing seems to match my fantasies/ I'm living a dream", and the song itself offers the spaciousness of travel. It's patient, open, and the build feels earned. When he repeats "caress yourself" a few dozen times toward the end, you want him to keep going with that brief, very effective phrase.
It may not be fair, but it feels necessary regardless to acknowledge that fellow Danish punks, and associates, Iceage have cast a large shadow that all young Danish punk bands are measured against. That group's 2011 debut New Brigade still feels like the perfect encapsulation of the scene's overall aesthetic, and Lower strike me as the other Danish group from that scene who have it in them to reach those heights. Toubro has said that "every song on [Seek Warmer Climes] deals in some way with personal development, be it emotional or cosmetic. How to act in different social contexts, and to acclimatize oneself into a given situation without losing face." With that in mind, the occasional sense of compositional confusion makes sense: even if it doesn't always result in a thrilling listen, Seek Warmer Climes captures a promising band in transition.


Foo Fighters dropped the free Saint Cecilia EP right before Thanksgiving. Though Grohl gushes over the spontaneity of its creation in the warm liner notes, the results sound about as slickly produced and hedge-betting as an actual Foo Fighters album.

Saint Cecilia EP

Dave Grohl is as much of a rock 'n' roll ambassador as he is a rock musician at this point, and his politics stand on a well-meaning, but wobbly platform: whenever someone with an elite level of money, power and influence presents himself as an everydude, cognitive dissonance is inevitable. While the star-studded travelogue Sonic Highways promised "a musical map of America", it could've passed for a longform Hard Rock Café commercial, ignoring basically every genre outside of the blues-rock lineage. The featherweight Sound City: Reel to Reel documentary and soundtrack was similarly amicable, but it happened to conflate rock 'n roll's "human element" with the Neve console, a machine costing somewhere between $78,000 and $1 million.
The same unintended gap in perspective between Grohl's aw-shucks persona and his output defines Saint Cecilia, a free EP dropped right before Thanksgiving. In the virtual liner notes, Grohl gushes over its recording process, telling of good friends digging through old riffs and creating new jams, wasted away in Margaritaville. The results still sound as slickly produced and hedge-betting as any actual Foo Fighters album.
As well they should—when Dave Grohl and his friends want to record over a lost week(end), this means having Austin's St. Cecilia Hotel turned into a recording studio within the matter of hours, while Gary Clark Jr., Jack Black and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band jam in the periphery. There are expensive microphones and professional recording engineers and famous photographers namedropped like high school buddies. If you really want to hear Foo Fighters songs in chrysalis, by all means, find a bootlegged copy of Pocketwatch.
Meanwhile, St. Cecilia's title track arrives already sounding like it's made the rounds on whatever's left of your local rock radio station. It's the most immediately pleasing thing they've done this decade and also the most instantly familiar, with a robust chorus built on a progression of straight-strummed barre chords, stacked harmonies and broad lyrics that express a general sense of yearning, but nothing that puts Grohl's personal life on the spot. In other words, it's not terribly different than "Learn to Fly" or "Times Like These" or "Next Year", proof that Foo Fighters are modern day, power-pop workhorses in their natural state rather than a rawk band.
Whenever that reputation threatens to stick, Grohl always draws on a Northern Virginia upbringing that put him within driving distance of DC's hardcore scene. "Sean" and "Savior Breath" are punk Foo Fighters, or as punk as they can sound in 2015—infinitely more energetic than anything on Sonic Highways, but only incrementally edgier, Wasting Light without Butch Vig's glossy overlay.
Foo Fighters couldn't make a truly sloppy, abrasive or hookless song if they tried, and they're certainly not going to. With every album prepping the inevitable Foo Fighters' Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, Grohl gets closer to actualizing his unstated goal of being this generation's Tom Petty, a real deal, aw-shucks everydude churning out one centrist and likeable rock song after another. Just look at Grohl's personal trajectory: After Kurt Cobain's suicide, he made the painful decision to turn down his hero's offer to play drums on tour with the Heartbreakers (Saturday Night Live had to do) and Foo Fighters have recently added "Breakdown" as a staple in their live sets.
But even if Grohl's vocals are as immediately identifiable as Petty's by now, he is further than ever from having a distinct voice; Foo Fighters remain our most unknowable and emotionally blank rock stars. Grohl's hooks are wide enough to catch any feeling,—"Things are gonna go, no matter what I say/Nothing's set in stone, no matter what I say"; "Who you runnin' from?"; "No one lets everyone in." Foo Fighters are a power-pop band in this sense. But amidst the plodding alt-roots of "Iron Rooster", Grohl's genial recriminations ("Have you ever been young enough to feel what you wanted to feel/ Take back those years for something real") are best pointed back at him; as well as being their most diverse, hooky and unpredictable records, Foo Fighters and The Colour and the Shape were the only ones where you could trace Grohl's lyrics to some kind of source and there was still some question as to what he wanted this band to be.
Even at their exalted status, Foo Fighters are not an institution like U2 or Coldplay; unlike those bands, there's never any debate or even discussion surrounding their next artistic move. If you consider Grohl in a rock 'n' roll CEO role, like Dan Auerbach or Jack White, it only draws attention to how perverse and prickly Auerbach and White  seem in comparison. But for as much effort as it takes to love Foo Fighters, it's nearly impossible to dislike them. Read Grohl's letter again and even Beach Slang can seem kinda wishy-washy about rock music, leaving no doubt that making Saint Cecilia was clearly a rejuvenating experience for Foo Fighters. The EP itself is less convincing as evidence.


The L.A. band has long carried the flag for a particular strain of SoCal indie, but the follow-up to 2016’s fashionably yearning Sunlit Youth sounds both more personal and more timeless.

Violet Street

Local Natives epitomized L.A. indie with the airy harmonies, hirsute style, and earnest ambition of their lovably scrappy debut, 2010’s Gorilla Manor. As the decade comes to a close, they still do. A collaboration with the director Van Alpert and visual artist Public-Library on the video for the Shawn Everett-produced single “Café Amarillo” puts Local Natives just one degree of separation from Post Malone, Drake, Kacey Musgraves, and Nike, rather than Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes. But that kind of development is part of the inevitable gentrification that comes with long-term success. In 2019, you can hear the music of recent L.A. emigre Wild Nothing in 24 Hour Fitness and pay $3000 a month to call Wavves your landlord.
The band has frequently been acclaimed (and occasionally criticized) for its uncanny ability to embody the sound of a particular moment, but the unusually direct lyricism and domestic mindset of Violet Street key the album not to the 2010s, specifically, but young adulthood in general—transitioning from post-grad uncertainty to adult grief to idealism to disillusion and, now, the business of getting on with the rest of their lives.
Local Natives have led by example on that front. In 2017, under the Jaws of Love. alias, Kelcey Ayer released Tasha Sits Close to the Piano, a collection of tender ballads so intimate that they felt like a wedding gift made public. Bassist Nik Ewing covered Dennis Wilson’s troubled cult classic Pacific Ocean Blue in its entirety, and Taylor Rice got married, an event addressed here on the sleek, shimmering “When Am I Gonna Lose You.” Alongside Violet Street’s classy, retro sleeve, the new songs carry a thematic and sonic timelessness, a welcome sidestep after Sunlit Youth’s overreaching currency. The broad uplift in both the synth pop and politics of songs like “Fountain of Youth” feels frozen in a much happier, more innocent time, somewhere between a 6 p.m. Coachella set and hearing “Fight Song” at an “I’m With Her” rally.
Most of Violet Street focuses on the unsung upkeep of relationships. If not especially sexy subject matter, it’s substantial enough to balance the aloe-infused smoothness of “When Am I Gonna Lose You” and “Café Amarillo” that carries over from Sunlit Youth. Local Natives have never shied from expanding their reach, and Violet Street’s singles could easily slide into drive-time playlists between the similarly soul-infused pop-rock of latter-day Beck, Haim, or Cage the Elephant, even though they are too emotionally jittery to feel comfortable, despite the luxe materials and enviable backdrops.
Most of Violet Street’s lyrics bear that out literally. Rice traces the California coastline toward Big Sur with his wife on “When Am I Gonna Lose You,” unable to enjoy the moment for what it is; Ayer is halfway between Dover and Calais on “Café Amarillo," in search of grounding; formative memories of drinking cheap vodka admit the echoes of Dodger Stadium are slivers of sunlight in the June gloom of “Garden of Elysian”; while Wilshire Boulevard is reimagined as a post-apocalyptic wasteland on “Megaton Mile.”
But for all of the globe-trotting that went into Violet Street, Local Natives remain quintessentially SoCal: genial, approachable, and optimistic, even if their surroundings are liable to be on fire or crumbling into the sea. Even the grim doomsaying of “Megaton Mile” sounds like a backyard party at ground zero, a soundclash of Earth, Wind and Fire’s ecstatic vocal volleys and “Gimme Shelter.” To the same extent that their artistic peak, Hummingbird, bore the deep blue imprint of its producer (the National’s Aaron Dessner), Violet Street follows Everett’s code of organic experimentalism.
Local Natives don’t claim particularly esoteric influences; there’s something refreshingly quaint in the way they still gush over Frank Ocean and “Pyramid Song,” and designed “Munich II” to sync up with the intro to Drive. But whereas their integration of modern R&B felt a little too obvious on Sunlit Youth songs like “Coins,” to say nothing of their Beyoncé cover, Local Natives sound liberated by Everett’s oblique strategies, bringing the same kinetic energy they used to bash floor toms to stitch together samples in ProTools.
They created the symphonic soul of “Megaton Mile” by feeding loops to the mixing console and playing “a game of Twister” on the faders; the “musical time machine” app Radiooooo spawned the  Silver Lake sunrise of “Munich II”; and the brief return to their previous album’s blaring KROQ synths, on “Gulf Shores,” is actually a guitar run through fuzz pedals. The harmonies still have the tendency to gloss over the grit in the lyrics, but the refrain on “Café Amarillo” goes to the heart of an album that balances immediate lyrics and inscrutable methods, to ends both experimental and elemental:  “Some things are so simple, they’re impossible to explain.”


On her second album, the Montreal songwriter pens straightforward tales of escape but fares best when she’s retreating into fantasy.

Ada Lea: one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden

When the going gets rough, Alexandra Levy flees—by bus, by car, or by daydream. On her debut album as Ada Lea, 2019’s enticingly messy what we say in private, the Montreal musician reported on breakup grief with one foot out the door. But her second album, one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden, is narrated on the go. “I’m flying out of here tonight like a butterfly,” she sings on “violence,” her words followed by booming drums. After three nearly percussion-less minutes, her breakthrough suggests that the price of escape—having to constantly look over her shoulder—is worth the departure.
Written in bursts over the past few years and co-produced with Phoebe Bridgers collaborator Marshall Vore, one hand covers a wide range of stories, both autobiographical and fictional. On the moody folk-pop highlight “partner,” Levy sings through hazy vocal filters over percussive pitter-patter, memories of a past romance flashing through her mind as she hits the road. On the throbbing nylon acoustic ballad “hurt,” she imagines busing back to her parents’ house after a particularly rough breakup; on “backyard,” she fantasizes about never having left in the first place. “Stars wouldn’t leave our backyards for as long as we’d ask them to stay/And they stayed,” she sings in a daze. She sounds like she wants to remain there forever too.
Levy is at her best when she’s retreating into fantasy. During the second verse of “my love 4 u is real,” she describes walking up cathedral steps, with a wedding band “foreshadowing something tragic, something mad.” As her narrator moves forward, Levy’s voice sharpens alongside backing vocalist Charlie Hickey, and the gurgling synths get louder. The music is appropriately high-stakes for the dizzy spells that Levy describes, and the melody only gets catchier as the noise increases. “I wanted so badly for you to feel it like I did,” she sings in her highest register, addressing a love that isn’t “like other love that hangs there half-dead, always taking something from behind your back.” The explosive distortion mirrors her rage and desperation at the unrequited affection.
This burst of electric guitar and drums, helping Levy convey the disorienting aftermath of doomed romance, feels more connected to the shapeshifting chaos of what we say in private than the rest of one hand: Nothing else here thrills like the constant twists of “mercury” or the monstrous seething that ended “for real now (not pretend).” Levy opts for more straightforward sounds, but she also manages to carve some new territory. The gentle yet ominous propulsion of “can’t stop me from dying” evokes the feeling of walking home alone at 5 a.m. in complete darkness, convinced a stranger is following you. “Nothing in the world can stop me from dying again,” Levy repeats, imagining her own Montreal version of the time-looping Netflix series Russian Doll. Both narratively and sonically, it’s a striking contrast to the album’s more literal stories: This fictional character actually can press the reset button. But each escape, whether real or imagined, is a chance to start anew.

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Fronted by onetime Jay Reatard collaborator Ryan Rousseau, the Arizona collective Destruction Unit's chaotic sophomore album Deep Trip is spacey and punky, and it refuses to acknowledge that there’s anything remotely untoward about that particular alchemy of elements.

Deep Trip

There’s a chapter in Mark Barrowcliffe’s 2007 memoir The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange in which the author recounts the time in the late 70s when he stopped listening to punk-- the cool music of his native England at the time-- and got into Hawkwind instead. Hawkwind, so his teenaged self reasoned, was more conducive to his Dungeons & Dragons lifestyle and its fixation on all things mystic, cosmic, and denim-jacketed. Punk was about confrontation; Hawkwind was about escapism. At the same time, Barrowcliffe glosses over the basic irony: Many early punk bands, including the Stranglers and the Damned, were influenced by Hawkwind-- and Hawkwind could rage as ferociously as their punk cousins, even when singing about psychedelic warlords and space rituals.
For Destruction Unit, this is all so much false dichotomy. The Arizona collective’s sophomore album, Deep Trip, is spacey. And it’s punky. And it refuses to acknowledge that there’s anything remotely untoward about that particular alchemy of elements. Void, released earlier this year, showed glints of this shimmering space-punk alloy, but it hadn’t quite cohered and hardened. That’s understandable; although the band came together a decade ago, while frontman Ryan Rousseau was serving in the Reatards-- Jay Reatard and his Lost Sounds bandmate Alicja Trout were original members of D-Unit back then-- the group’s current lineup is relatively new. The scrambled, scratchy shakiness of Void has given way to a sound that’s far more focused, corralled, and even refined in its primal ergonomics of paranoia. Chaos abounds, but it’s been funneled into Deep Trip’s streamlined and astrodynamic pulse.
As pulses go, it’s still an erratic one. One of Rousseau’s strengths is knowing the difference between being spacey and being droning; although Deep Trip tracks such as “Slow Death Sounds” and “Final Flight” are brutally, brain-poundingly simple, their riffs don’t lapse into repetition for the sake of repetition. There’s some deceptively catchy and even classic songwriting going on, as one might expect from an ex-Reatard. Here, though, those caveman hooks are given an even more corroded crust of gunk, howl, and echo. On “Control the Light”, Rousseau gulps for air in some bug-eyed trance, like Lux Interior’s last gasp stuck in a near-death-experience loop. Grinding washes of wah pedal and modulated distortion evoke misanthropic freakouts and crises of pataphysical identity, and the low throb of motorik locomotion creeps in to calm the spasms.
The chemical formula is a familiar one to Hawkwind cultists. But “The World On Drugs” and “God Trip” are far less merciless in their cenophobic contemplation of the emptiness of space, both inner and outer. Rousseau and crew are shoveling noise like frantic androids to fill the void, a process of proto-industrial dehumanization that mirrors Chrome at their most savage and severe. But where Chrome-- and their closest contemporaries, Hawkwind-- skirted punk, Destruction Unit embraces it, sticking everything from garage slop to hardcore convulsion into its nihilistic nightmare fantasy. But in the same way Chrome and Hawkwind crafted eternal hymns to stellar and cellular entropy, Deep Trip is anything but fixed to any one time and place-- contemporary or retro. Even when the album infrequently dips into crooning, diffuse looseness on “The Holy Ghost”, there’s something more timelessly potent in the way D-Unit throttles the warp drive. If space-rock as a whole is a role-playing game, one in which its players imagine having front-row seats for the heat-death of the universe, then Deep Trip is the one of most advanced vehicles yet designed to take them there.


We hear the avant-garde composer’s antic voice here and there on her interpretation of Vivaldi’s masterpiece. If it’s not a mind meld, it’s at least as fun as a Face Swap filter on Instagram.

Anno

“The Four Seasons” by Antonio Vivaldi have been balled up, stretched, flattened. They have been remixed, rewritten, “reimagined,” deconstructed: Whatever interpretive violence can be done to a piece of music has been visited upon these four drearily familiar little concerti composed in the 18th century. The same way that hip new restaurants tee up to offer their spin on the hamburger, modern composers will turn to “The Four Seasons” to demonstrate the extent of their daring on its blank canvas. Max Richter loosened the timing belt on the piece’s engine, so that the fluttering strings fell out of sync, calling to each other over distances like lost birds. Now Anna Meredith—whose most famous composition sounds like the “Ride of the Valkyries” as reenacted by an arcade machine—swaggers up to these broken, chipped-up monuments to see what she can do.
The weirdest thing about Anna Meredith’s spin on “The Four Seasons” is that, at least at first, there doesn’t appear to be much of one. Her collaboration with the Scottish Ensemble begins pretty reverently: The harpsichord on “Spring” is genteel enough, and the string playing idiomatic enough to make you forget you’re not listening to a local daytime classical station. Only at the edges does Anna Meredith practice mischief—at the very end, “Spring” melts into cawing birds, fluttering wings.
Meredith’s antic voice comes out in these interstitial bursts. She cherry-picks moments from each of the four concerti and weaves them together with her own additions, which separate the movements. These pieces do all kinds of interesting little things—smudge the borders between movements, offer ambivalent shades of feeling, comment on the themes themselves. What they don’t do much of, really, is show us what Meredith is drawn to in this classical-music chestnut in the first place. They seem like bedfellows of convenience, or commission, rather than like minds of any sort. Meredith’s music is caffeinated, anxious, exultant—in a word, urban. She tends to luxuriate in feelings of dark panic, of clamminess. Hearing her descend on these pastoral themes like some mechanized swarm of bees is fun, in a vandalizing sort of way, but some of these the pieces aren’t in conversation with Vivaldi so much as they hock spitballs at him. The burbling keys of “Autumn” crash into the end of “Summer” like a Stereolab album that has poked its head into the wrong meeting.
Her muted material casts longer, more unsettling shadows. “Low Light ,” one of two elaborations on Winter, sounds a little like “Dowager,” a lovely chamber-pop highlight from her 2016 album Varmints. It’s a reminder that although many institutions have turned to Meredith to give them kinetic, exciting commissions, she can also summon vast reserves of feeling. On her addition to “Summer,” which she titles “Haze,” she draws out long-limbed, sinuous melody lines, which sound like the evaporating fumes of the movement itself. As the harmony darkens, bringing some hints of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (another chestnut from classical’s unofficial Top 40) with it, wisps of keyboard smear the digital/analog border. This little zone feels like a fertile clearing—not quite belonging to Meredith, but bearing her marks; not quite Vivaldi, though haunted by his melodies. If it’s not a mind meld, it’s at least as fun as a Face Swap filter on Instagram.
Anno might have worked better, or engaged more fully, on stage, where it was accompanied by lights, by projected images, by surround electronics. Live, it landed in that bright, attractive zone between performance and installation, the kind that that tends to attract young audiences and win press. On record, however, it feels less consequential—intermittently fun, occasionally pretty, slightly surprising. The larger problem isn’t so much with Meredith or Vivaldi as the question of why they were ever in the same room in the first place. Without a larger sense of comity, the kind that tends to unite jazz musicians with Stravinsky, or techno producers with Steve Reich, Anno has the feel of a speed-dating workshop. You can’t deny anyone’s enthusiasm or ingenuity in the venture. But, looking at the results, you can’t help but wonder if everyone’s energy was best spent elsewhere.


The solo debut from this rapper and singer, who’s worked with Usher and Jidenna, unfolds like a shamelessly wild night out, with material highs and emotional lows galore.

Collection 1

Shamelessness rules SAINt JHN’s world. It’s a place devoid of inhibition, where overindulgence is as regular as breathing, and “ratchet” is a compliment of the highest order. Consider his maddeningly addictive single “I Heard You Got Too Litt Last Night,” a gleeful account of bad decisions (“One pill had her looking like Naomi/And two pills had her looking like my soulmate”) without any of the regret. When he sings the hook over wacky synths and a bit of boom, it’s more a pleased taunt than an accusation. On the contrary, by his own measure, “it was a vibe.”
SAINt JHN grew up between the Caribbean nation of Guyana and New York, and got his feet wet in the music industry writing songs for Usher, Jidenna and Hoodie Allen before deciding he no longer wanted to “live [his] life through other people’s voices.” Now, he’s using his own to showcase himself as an artist with as much potential as he has bad habits. His full-length debut, Collection 1, unfolds like one of the wild nights he loves singing about, offering a contrasting portrait of material highs and emotional lows along the way. When “I Heard” finally hits at the end of the album, it’s a dazed flashback to all the debauchery that’s come before.
To listen to Collection 1 is to inhabit, however briefly, the highly Instagrammable lives of the pretty ones. There’s more alcohol and drugs than anyone could ever need, but underneath the haute fashion and the partying-based lifestyle is a bed of insecurity and hurt. It’s not necessarily new ground, but SAINt JHN’s overly-proud air does a good job of convincing listeners that it’s all flex and fun...until it isn’t. For every turned-up bender, the depression of “Some Nights” is trailing not far behind. The song, which wears a major Kid Cudi influence on its sleeve, is the album’s most introspective. “Some nights I kill myself just so I can feel like I’m so alive,” he moans:  Heartbreak is the reason for this particular trip to the bar or club. The vapory “Reflex,” meanwhile, captures both moods in one swoop. It’s all “bad bitches,” “real niggas” and foreigns, almost but not quite hiding lines like “picture me rolling something up to chase the demons.” These brief flashes pull the bravado down to earth, grounding the album in something beyond superficial vice.
Stylistically, SAINt JHN fits well within the current pop landscape, with his seamless shifts between rapping (“Traci Lords”), singing (“Selfish”), and sing-rapping (“3 Below”). He borrows from everywhere: “God Bless The Ratchets” sounds like it could’ve been pulled from a SoundCloud trending list, while “Brilliant Bitch” is the sort of trap-y R&B song that rules more mainstream charts. With his industry experience in tow, it’s clear he knows his way around a song. His hooks are sticky, and the production choices are primed for ubiquity. “Selfish,” in particular, is a display of undeniable pop prowess, with its arena-ready synths, island-flavored garnishes, and wispy vocals lamenting an ill-fated romance (“I wish we were both somebody else/so you wouldn’t be somebody else’s”).
Taken as a whole, Collection 1 plays out like a series of tweets, going so far as to even adopt the lingo social media has helped popularize (“lit,” “issa vibe”). SAINt JHN is just charismatic enough to pull it off. He makes a balancing act of self-examination and self-destruction, and still emerges largely unapologetic for the choices he’s made. It makes for an enchanting soundtrack for the most reckless of nights and the morning after.


In the second installment of his “COVID-themed” remix series, the Brooklyn-based drummer-producer reworks jazz classics and modern recordings.

Shades of Flu 2

Kassa Overall isn’t being glib when he calls his Shades of Flu series “COVID-themed.” It was cruel that the pandemic hit America at the same time the Brooklyn-based drummer-producer’s excellent second album, I Think I’m Good, dropped, forcing him to go to ground when he should have been out riding the crest of a wave. Remixing has provided an outlet during this strange period in the jazz world. By taking apart old records and piecing them back together in audacious new ways, Shades of Flu encapsulates the adaptability of musicians forced to create in their bedrooms and basements. The sometimes tumultuous nature of Kassa’s mixes also reflects the peculiarity of present-day existence. There’s an element of chaos to this music you wouldn’t associate with Shades of Blue: Madlib Invades Blue Note, the series’ clearest inspiration.
Shades of Flu 2: In These Odd Times improves upon what made last year’s Shades of Flu: Healthy Remixes For an Ill Moment great. Once again, Kassa remixes jazz recordings, both old and modern, but this time he recruits musicians from his inner circle, such as Dezron Douglas, Brandee Younger, and Tomoki Sanders (son of Pharoah), to add new improvisations to the old arrangements. Yet Shades of Flu remains highly personal. It’s easy to picture Kassa thumbing through his vinyl shelves to get a feeling for which of his favorite cuts he can reinterpret. Like the first album, the set takes the form of one single track with Kassa’s voice wandering in and out of the mix to guide you, giving it the feel of a DJ set.
As before, one of the most prominent sounds Kassa adds is a flat, thumping style of programmed percussion. Placed under jazz recordings’ acoustic timbres, it creates a natural tension. Those drums are present on Kassa’s take on Kris Davis’ “Diatom Ribbons,” from the prolific Canadian pianist’s 2019 album of the same name. Kassa jumps around different points of the arrangement, focusing on short piano riffs or simply letting the brass solos ride out, deconstructing Davis’ work like a mad scientist obsessed with unraveling the composition’s mysteries. To top it off, in the intro, he shouts out each musician’s first name, like a jazz hypeman.
Specters of hip-hop history fly through Shades of Flu 2. Kassa loops the word “one” throughout the Heath Brothers’ late-night funk number “Smilin Billy Suite Part 1” in a way that’s reminiscent of Ghostface Killah’s “One.” The opening bass riff of “The Creator Has a Master Plan” gestures toward A Tribe Called Quest’s iconic Lou Reed sample, and Kassa takes the low-hanging fruit by editing in one of Rakim’s most famous bars: “Thinking of a masterplan.” Most surprisingly, he adds what appears to be Kanye West’s drum intro and vocal ad libs from “Heard ‘Em Say” into Wayne Shorter’s “Ponta de Areia.” There are even elegant guest verses from Stas THEE Boss of THEESatisfaction and Nappy Nina to match the cool double bass of “I’m a King” (which doesn’t list its source material), while one voice—probably Kassa’s—is slowed to a hypnotic crawl, evoking the spirit of DJ Screw. He understands that remixing and rap can’t be disentangled.
Despite some radical alterations, Kassa typically preserves the general tone of the songs he reworks. There are times when you get the impression he just wants to vibe to his favorite records with you. On a new mix of Roy Hargrove’s beautiful midnight jazz tune “Never Let Me Go,” he embellishes the soft piano with just a few extra elements. And he preserves the Hitchcockian air of Chick Corea’s “Trio Improvisation Part 2,” a claustrophobic cut for piano and violin, but takes it to another plane by adding panicked voices and percussion that sounds like a ticking clock.
The set ends with Kenny Baron’s “Passion Dance” as Kassa takes the original’s storm of piano keys and adds jittering drums to form a more tweaked-out piece. The young futurist’s final act is to bask in the sound of applause. And so he should. With Shades of Flu 2: In These Odd Times, Kassa Overall once again proves that COVID measures can’t deter his determination to push jazz into strange new realms.

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The enigmatic Philadelphia producer’s latest release submerges vocals in dark interiors, suggesting that the truth may lie just under the surface of our perception.

Triz

Pontiac Streator’s music seems deliberately engineered to confuse; it arrives without any real clues as to how it’s meant to be parsed. The pseudonymous Streator is based in Philadelphia, but his releases are conceptually detached from place. They don’t belong to Philly, or any other city, as much they belong to a particular scene. You might call it West Mineral-adjacent; flitting between styles and stage names, the loosely defined collective putting out ambient-electronic music on labels like Motion Ward and Experiences Ltd. is unified by a commitment to the intentionally obscure.  It suggests that these heady sounds are more purely absorbed without the constraints of identity and specificity.
This elusive M.O. works on the level of Streator’s discography, too. 11 Items, Streator’s 2019 collaboration with Ulla Straus, handled a dizzying breadth of textures, from slippery, percussive rumblings (“Item 3”) to a sort of sleek, postmodern TV performance, complete with samples of a live studio audience (“Item 7”). The projects Streator has already put out this year range from punishing cybergrind and noise (virtualdemonlaxative) to restless, tongue-in-cheek ambient (Micro Incubus) to more amorphous chill-out music (Select Works . vol 1). All of it is uniquely stubborn, resisting interpretation at every turn.
Streator’s new solo album Triz is just as confounding as these past works, but offers a deeper, buzzier high. The density is part of the appeal; with repeated listens, the record’s intricate mixes yield new surprises. “Post Los” is a burbling mass of unplaceable, vaguely organic sounds, as indebted to the alien dialogue in District 9 as to the effects of Space Cadet 3D Pinball. “Lamp Fest,” another feat of layering, is roomier, and nearly tropical—as close to restful as the album comes, while still managing to sustain the spell.
Though there are no lead vocal parts on Triz, the album is haunted by voices. Ghostly hums trace the contours of “Transier Unt”—a chilly fractal of ambient electronics—while “Trizlang Gem” rests on soft choral figures. “Om Ne Ud” recalls Loscil’s aquatic concept record Submers, but the textures here are busier and more tightly knit; studded with blips that feel a little like sonar, the track bleeds periodically into lo-fi radio crackle—transmissions of what sounds like a human voice, its message hopelessly scrambled. On “Angelus Spit,” which invites similarly garbled vocal fragments into an emptier tableau, those corrupted blasts feel like a taunt. The truth echoes out there, Streator hints: It would offer some resolution, if only we had the tools to decode it.
The breakdown of communication and perception is at the heart of the final track, “Stuck in a Cave.” The production is sticky and humid, embellished with alien bird calls; what might initially scan as naturalistic is filtered to the point of feeling eerily artificial. Streator works best in the dark, in constructed interiors and glitched-out paradoxes; here, finally, the radio dispatches of “Om Ne Ud” and “Angelus Spit” crystallize into something at least perceptible, if not entirely lucid: “I’m stuck in a cave, what’s happening?” Triz is less an answer to the question than an acknowledgment that there may not be one.

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The reunited Guided by Voices' third 2012 release is the most consistent of the lot, faithfully approximating the tumbling, track-to-track momentum of the band's mid-90s masterworks, proving that Pollard and co are determined to make the most of this second wind.

The Bears for Lunch

Even when Robert Pollard was exploring new extremes in amateur home-recording, hyper-prolific songwriting, and Budweiser consumption in the 1990s, he was always picky about which of the thousands of songs he wrote was officially issued under the Guided by Voices name. From their 1986 formation through to the b(r)and's dissolution in 2004, Guided by Voices proper released an average of one full-length album per year. That's a brisk clip for most acts, but a relative coffee drip when you consider the song overflow Pollard continues to divert to his exponentially increasing array of solo and side projects. So his decision last year to revive Guided by Voices with its "classic" 1992-96-era line-up suggested a return not just to the band's ramshackle roots, but their old quality-control standards as well.
The band's actual post-reunion strategy tells a different story. Pollard and co. were already well into their mid-30s when the band first emerged in the early 90s. Now, two decades on, they seem determined to make the most of this second wind and release as much music as possible while they can still physically withstand the scissor kicks and windmills. The Bears for Lunch is their third album of 2012, following January's comeback Let's Go Eat the Factory and June's Class Clown Spots a UFO. And like its immediate predecessors, The Bears effectively picks up where this line-up left off with 1996's Under the Bushes Under the Stars, mediating between the band's formative lo-fi lunacy and their desire for a more streamlined sound.
But if all this new GBV material faithfully approximates the form and fidelity of the band's signature works, its impact has been diminished by a lack of context or conceptual vision. Back in the mid-90s, each new GBV album played out like a game of "will they or won't they": would Pollard and his trusty foil Tobin Sprout limit their morsels of melody to 60-second spurts, or would they allow the songs to flourish into alternate-universe power-pop classics? And despite their randomized appearances, those album sequences were always carefully considered, where even the seemingly throwaway tracks were strategically stitched into the crazy-quilt patchwork. But by mostly settling into the Under the Bushes mid-fi comfort zone, the band's 2012 albums mostly just sound like one Guided by Voices song after another-- some exceptional, some forgettable. That's hardly a bum deal for long-time fans, but there's little sense of the organizing principles that made those early albums eminently replayable and rewarding.
The Bears for Lunch, however, is the most consistent of this year's trifecta. It may not boast an instant, indeliable earworm like Class Clown's "Keep It Motion" or Factory's "Doughnut for a Snowman", but there are no buzzkill duds like "The Big Hat and Toy Show" either. And, of the three, it's the album that most faithfully approximates the tumbling, track-to-track momentum of the band's mid-90s masterworks, with off-the-cuff oddities like the gruff busker ditty "Have a Jug" and the absurdist chant "Finger Gang" effectively setting up more dignified, resonant turns like "Hangover Child" and "The Challenge Is Much More".
As per GBV tradition, Pollard's lyrical concerns mostly orbit around aviation, medieval folklore, and boys of various preternatural abilities. So the greatest revelations here come when Pollard seemingly takes stock of his own mortality, as on the sleazily suggestive love song "She Lives in an Airport" ("she makes it quicker and competition thicker/ designed to spark up a real weak ticker") or on "The Military School Dance Dismissal", which sounds like Pollard crooning a Hunky Dory piano ballad in some Dayton dive at the age of 85. Sprout, for his part, responds to Pollard's ever-changing whims by keeping his feet firmly planted in Rubber Soul, contributing The Bears' most richly melodious songs in the folksy "Waking Up the Stars" and "Waving at Airplanes" (the latter of which is no less poignant for pinching its acoustic fanfare from Bad Company's "Feel Like Makin' Love").
Taken together, GBV's three releases this year plot an alternate late-90s course for the band, one which in Pollard stuck with his basement buds and never hooked up with Cobra Verde for 1997's muscular Mag Earwhig!, never signed to TVT, and never asked for Ric Ocasek's phone number. This GBV would've simply continued to crank out album after album of pleasingly wobbly indie rock, gradually refining their craft and reining in their eccentricities but stopping short of realizing their hi-fi arena rock potential.
Still, as The Bears' late-album progression gets tripped up by the one-note discord of "Tree Fly Jet" and "Amorphous Surprise", you can't help but think the band's re-emergence would be that much more dramatic if they had pared down their three 2012 releases into one record stacked with the best songs from each; surely, no O.G. GBV fan would've felt cheated by receiving "only" a single, no-filler album from a line-up they never thought they'd see in action again. After all, Guided by Voices' 1994 critical breakthrough Bee Thousand was as much a triumph of judicious pruning as quality songcraft; the most important takeaway from this year is that Guided by Voices can still produce enough of the latter to allow for the luxury of the former.


The Austin-based producer Spencer Stephenson (aka Botany) builds his music, made from loosely interlocking samples and loops, like a collage artist.

Raw Light II

The music made by Austin-based producer Spencer Stephenson (aka Botany) has an air of psychedelic spirituality. Stephenson has toyed with narrative frameworks to bolster this impression: His third album, an instrumental project released last year called Deepak Verbera, was presented as a continuation of the 20th-century work of an Argentinian metaphysical researcher named Horris E. Campos. Except, it’s not entirely clear that Campos was real. “Horris is kind of my Ziggy Stardust, a character that I feel like I channel music through in some way,” Stephenson told FACT Magazine a few months ago.
As Botany, Stephenson builds his production like a loose-handed collage artist. He doesn’t interlock his samples—obscure and unexpectedly funky loops, religious chanting, Eastern psychedelic sounds—so much as neatly pile them atop one another, setting into motion paralleling trajectories. Sometimes Stephenson’s beats seem to end in two different places, resolving separate beginnings. The former jazz drummer has also become increasingly indifferent to consistent percussion, often letting his creations meander with a casual disregard for traditional structure that borders on ambient.
*Raw Light II *is Stephenson’s fourth album as Botany, but he’s billed it as a follow-up and companion piece to his sophomore record Dimming Awe, the Light Is Raw. Both albums were mastered by the L.A. beat scene mainstay and Leaving Records founder Matthewdavid, but the new one is a little shorter and entirely instrumental, skipping out on the welcome vocal appearances of the original. Stephenson’s beats are certainly busy enough to stand alone and command their own attention, and they just as frequently demand some patience.
Stephenson often barely avoids cacophony, but seems to revel in his nearness to the effect. At the middle of “Yon,” Stephenson strips away everything but a throbbing bottom-end kick, maybe just to splay out the absurd intrigue of the sounds he’s lifting. Is that a cow mooing? Suddenly it sounds perfectly nice underneath an anxious shout and hymnal vocal bops.
The density of Stephenson’s sample-stitching can obscure the accomplishment of the pairings themselves. There are plenty of sounds and interesting moments I heard only through headphones and furrowed concentration, but I’m not sure I enjoyed the record that way any more than setting it in motion and zoning out. Still, some of the tracks are convoluted enough to constitute a slog. “Janis Joplin,” a short burst of a track in the middle of the record, stands apart. It stutters and clanks along, but it serves up the most immediately digestible, loopy funk here, like an intermission palette-cleanser. I found myself returning to the song often, but never enjoyed it as much out of context. It’s the same effect Stephenson nurtures throughout, arranging unexpected sounds and somehow making them sound perfectly, weirdly in sequence together.


Combining folk instrumentation and found sound, the Norwegian duo’s debut fosters a sense of familiarity, even when the music meanders.

Saints and Sebastian Stories

Norweigan duo Konradsen’s debut was written over a period of three years by band members and longtime friends Jenny Marie Sabel and Eirik Vildgren, and the meticulous attention to detail bears this out. Saints and Sebastian Stories moves from one lush set piece to the next, interrupted by the occasional spoken interlude. The instrumentation signifies folk, but the music is less inspired by contemporaries Jesca Hoop or Laura Marling than someone like Blonde-era Frank Ocean, even as the horn arrangements and quirky touches are indebted to Sufjan Stevens. Comparisons abound, though the result is less memorable than the influences.
With the creativity of a bedroom recording and the polish of studio production, these 13 songs often feel like sketches. Found sounds and samples create a sense of familiarity, even when the music meanders. “Dice,” the first song Sabel and Vildgren made together, swaps out traditional percussion for the sounds of cutlery and clinking dishes. “Television Land” arrives with a bizarre prelude from a family friend (both the friend and the track are dubbed “Big Bruce”) before interpolating Bette Midler’s classic “The Rose,” referencing the Brad Pitt baseball drama Moneyball, and incorporating a surprisingly jazzy groove into its climax. The left-field references complement the music’s found-art aesthetic without really clarifying anything.
Lead songwriter Sabel’s voice is airy and upfront, her singing alternating between conventional runs and babbling ad-libs. Still, a record this quiet needs lyrics that deliver, and that’s where Saints and Sebastian Stories begins to fall short. The imagery can be evocative (“Hold me closer/The rest is an odd mistake”), but they are too opaque by half. For every moment of clarity (“Some say I should never be a mother/It’s a loving thought I left to die,” from closer “Written to the Others”) there are long stretches where they seem to be saying nothing much with great effort.
With time the music blends together, until initially beguiling arrangements become less surprising. The drum break in “Give” or the unexpected saxophone solo that closes “Roasted” are gorgeous, but the songs don’t gel. The influences seem to become more overt as well; the self-conscious Justin Vernon mimicry of “Baby Hallelujah” is distracting, and “Warm Wine” recalls José Gonzélez’s electronic experiments without reinterpreting them.
Listeners fond of early 2010s folk like the moody, wandering Ben Howard or Americana trio the Staves will feel at home in Konradsen’s record. Both Howard and the Staves took ambitious detours after finding initial success with less interesting music; Konradsen’s approach skips the groundwork to go for experimentation. It’s folk music untethered from tradition, prioritizing well-crafted production over well-crafted songwriting.