On his debut solo album, the guitarist James Elkington—a sideman for Jeff Tweedy and Richard Thompson—reemerges with an elegant and assured collection of acoustic fingerpicking and smart songwriting.

Wintres Woma

On Wintres Woma, guitarist James Elkington reemerges at age 46 as an acoustic fingerpicking hero with a proper solo debut—an album that is at once beautiful, complex, and assured. Where plenty of guitarists have rediscovered themselves in the transition from electric bands to acoustic-minded singledom, such as Pelt’s Jack Rose and Cul de Sac’s Glenn Jones, Elkington stands apart among the wave of 21st century guitar soloists. This kind of reinvention has typically involved an embrace of John Fahey’s school of American Primitivism. But the British-born Elkington is neither American nor primitive. And while some of Elkington’s peers have evolved by jumping to singing and songwriting, he was already writing smart songs with his rock band the Zincs. Since that band dissolved a decade ago, Elkington has been an instrumental sideman for Steve Gunn, Jeff Tweedy, and Richard Thompson.
So it’s perhaps little surprise that Wintres Woma arrives with an instant elegance, occasionally akin to Brit-folk godfather Bert Jansch or Thompson, especially on wry, sad songs like “Grief Is Not Coming.” What is a surprise is how skillfully Elkington balances songs and his high-flying fingerpicking. The music is dotted with tasteful arrangement choices. A harmonica passes through (“Sister of Mine”), a pedal steel swells (“Hollow in Your House”), and strings swirl (“My Trade in Sun Tears”). But the spotlight stays on Elkington throughout: his songs, his voice, and his guitar, the latter of which seems to expand on the lyrics with small details and asides. On the traditional instrumental “The Parting Glass,” Elkington’s imagistic playing carries the performance easily.
The newfound rigor of Elkington’s fingerpicking provides a gravitas that both recalls the seriousness of the traditionalists in the so-called neo-ethnic folk movement of the early 1960s, and connects him to other contemporary fingerpickers. At the same time, Elkington’s indie pop roots show through everywhere, too, and to great effect. On “The Hermit Census,” a few cello swells and banjo parts go a long way—concessions to what the neo-ethnics might’ve sneeringly called “city folk.” As the song progresses and Elkington’s lyric follows the guitar down a melodic lane, he suddenly pulls out a series of Brechtian turns that Colin Meloy of the Decemberists might pen if he was a more agile guitarist and less precious songwriter.
The results reward close listening, and the close listening is a pleasure. The aching closer “Any Afternoon” offers charms for a psych-pop loving Beatlemaniac, a guitar soli connoisseur, or just an unaffiliated casual listener looking for new music. Recorded at Wilco’s studio in Chicago, Wintres Woma is an album that makes itself easy to like, its album title translating from Old English to mean “the sound of winter,” and it’s that, too.
On “Sister of Mine,” Elkington switches over to a more straightforward strum, plus upright bass. The sound is more city-folky and less flashy than anything that surrounds it, but it’s also just as appealing. It is a reminder that Wintres Woma came so fully formed only because of how many places Elkington has already been as a musician, sometimes hidden under his obvious virtuosity. Even the most jaded neo-ethnic (like, say, Llewyn Davis) could dig on the folk-blues work-out of “Greatness Yet to Come,” though the same person might be puzzled by the string-abetted middle section, which sounds like it could stretch into raga-folk infinitude. Despite his acoustic guitar, Elkington is no folkie, and the road seems as open as it’s ever been.


Saâda Bonaire, the model-esque non-singers Stefanie Lange and Claudia Hossfeld, released their lone single in 1984. This unexpected reissue from Captured Tracks under their Fantasy Memory subsidiary reveals that the project was the concoction of Ralph “Von” Richtoven, a Bremen club DJ, and produced by dubmaster Dennis Bovell in Kraftwerk’s Cologne studios.

Saâda Bonaire

In 1984, one of EMI’s A&R men—notorious for going over budget on recordings—went well over schedule with singles from two of his artists. One was Tina Turner, on her way to 80s multi-platinum success with “Private Dancer”, which the company was willing to forgive. But the other act, Saâda Bonaire, which featured two model-esque non-singers Stefanie Lange and Claudia Hossfeld, had their lone single released, only to be immediately dropped from the label, never to be heard from again.
As this unexpected reissue from Captured Tracks (released under their new Fantasy Memory subsidiary) reveals though, Saâda Bonaire was the concoction of Ralph “Von” Richtoven, a Bremen club DJ who fancied himself a Svengali, never mind that his vision for the group included upwards of 20 musicians at any one time who didn’t speak the same language—much less played the same musical scale—backing up his non-musical fiancée, Stefanie Lange and her friend, both women clad in Bedouin wear. For a group that had one single, this reissue unearths an entire album’s worth of material, produced by dubmaster Dennis Bovell in Kraftwerk’s Cologne studios. As the aforementioned names might attest, it makes for a curious early 80s mutant sound.
When Richtoven first conceived of the group, he had a local German reggae band he managed enter a studio to cover both J.J. Cale’s “Ride Me High” and James Brown’s “It’s a Man World” (unfortunately these covers were left off this reissue). He then set about overdubbing some Kurdish folk musicians he met via a Turkish Communist community center, adding his fiancée and her friend last. Trainwreck though it might scan, the results were intriguing to say the least, convincing EMI to let them record some more.
Enter that none-hit wonder, “You Could Be More As You Are”, which remains a curious beast: rubbery reggae bass, growling gong hits, synth stabs and jerky rhythms from hand drum and drum machine, featuring an assortment of whistles, saxophones, Turkish saz, and ney flute, all of it topped by the icy monotones of Lange and Hossfeld, who recall their memories of a German friend who sold her body for money at a young age, hit every club every night, and died too soon. It was idiosyncratic in their native Germany in the age of Neu Deautsche Welle groups, yet somehow became a club hit in Greece, and soon after became a holy grail for Balearic DJs around the world, where it fetches upwards of $170 a copy online.
It’s unfortunate that the album never saw the light of day back in the early 80s, as Saâda Bonaire had plenty of kindred spirits from that era. Over the percolating congas, pliant basslines, upstroked guitar, and saz licks of “More Women”, they sound a bit like Tom Tom Club. The snappy and spare “Heart Over Head” finds a middle ground between the Flying Lizards’ cover of “Money” and Soft Cell’s take on “Tainted Love”. The synth bass on “Invitation” emulates Imagination’s dancefloor smash “Just An Illusion”, though it’s shot through with ney flute and a vocal delivered as if Lange and Hossfeld were instead auditioning for that notorious Calvin Klein Obsession commercial.
The presence of Bovell, the Barbados-born, yet London-based dub producer who produced Linton Kwesi Johnson’s iconic 70s reggae albums as well as post-punk classics like the Slits’ Cut and the Pop Group’s Y, helps tie together what should have been a total mess. It’s easy to hear post-punk’s DNA here and from the vantage point of 30 years, one can imagine how Saâda Bonaire might have been an influence on the icy minimal wave sound, the talk-sing grooves of Peaking Lights, not to mention the vocals of Glass Candy’s Ida No. In another dimension, maybe Saâda Bonaire’s multi-culti dancepunk tracks would have influenced someone like M.I.A., or else their gender-bending lyrics could have been behind the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual. Alas, this rescued album can only show that Saâda Bonaire could have been more than they were.


Born Edward Larry Gordon, the new-age musician Laraaji first gained first wider notice when Brian Eno heard him playing in Washington Square Park and asked if he wanted to record an album as part of Eno's Ambient series. He went on to record a series of cosmic new age releases, situated at an intersection of drone and Terry Riley-style minimalism, several of which are being released as cassette tapes on Leaving Records, an imprint of Stones Throw.

All In One Peace

Why has new age music floated back into the musical conversation? The answer is complicated. Reissue culture in general has kicked into overdrive, as music across the spectrum gets rediscovered and re-packaged at a pace we've never seen before. The line between ambient music with cultural cache (Eno, spacey krautrock) and relaxation tapes for the bourgeoisie has grown blurrier, not to mention the mainstreaming of yoga, locavore eating, and sustainable culture, all of which focus on the body and the senses as a ballast for data-driven digital reality. And there's also the fact that the idea of "functional music" in the playlist era has become so widely accepted. In this climate, it makes sense that mellow music designed for meditation and relaxation would wind its way back around.
Into this context, enter Laraaji. Born Edward Larry Gordon, he knocked around several creative spheres in New York in the 1960s and '70s, working as an actor, comedian, and musician. Always a spiritual seeker, he had an epiphany in the '70s that caused him to trade in his acoustic guitar for a zither, and in the latter part of the decade he began busking in Brooklyn and Manhattan and releasing some of his home-recorded improvisations on small-run tapes. Laraaji's first wider notice came when Brian Eno heard him playing in Washington Square Park and asked if he wanted to record an album as part of Eno's Ambient series. Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, released in 1980, has always been a bit of an outlier in terms of Eno's ambient discography, because it sounds like no other music he was ever involved with (Eno produced, but it's a Laraaji album all the way). The intense energy of the hammered dulcimer on the record's first side could be trance-inducing, but it in no sense slips into the background.
For many observers, Ambient 3 was Laraaji's big moment, but he has released many dozens of albums since, most of which were not marketed to the broader music-buying public. For many years, if you walked into a new age shop anywhere in the United States, from Santa Cruz to Burlington, Vt., you'd find a rack of tapes for meditation and relaxation that you'd never find in a regular record shop. And among these you might find a release from Laraaji. Only recently, with several reissues and the release of an excellent collaboration with Blues Control, has Laraaji's work started to reach beyond those origins. This history is part of what makes this particular set interesting: three early Laraaji releases are being put out, on tape, by Leaving Records, a Stones Throw subsidiary co-run by L.A. beatmaker Matthewdavid. Where they were once presented as music for a specific purpose and offered for sale to those heavily invested in new age culture, they are now re-presented to an audience who hears them mostly as strange and obscure music to be collected.
The earliest tape in the set, Lotus Collage, which Laraaji issued himself in 1978, situates his music at an intersection of drone and Terry Riley-style minimalism, with a bent-note attack that draws in the music of India. Laraaji described his musical epiphany in terms of a universal vibration, and his music seems especially attuned to the feeling of matter moving rapidly in space. It has an elemental quality and the textures are metallic (his zither is outfitted with a pickup, and tuned to favor open strums and drone), bringing to mind oud, harp, guitar, dulcimer, bells, mbira, chimes, and singing bowls. At points on Lotus Collage he'll break into a strummed rhythm with damping that almost sounds funky, but these more propulsive moments are gradually subsumed into the drift. The overall feeling is one of relaxed contemplation, but Lotus Collage is ultimately a dynamic set, with intense peaks and lulling valleys. Like the other pieces here, it was clearly designed with tape in mind—two pieces, each just under 30 minutes, perfect for a C–60.
Unicorns in Paradise, from 1981, was presumably issued on a C–90. Over two 40-plus minute tracks, Laraaji makes use of a Casio keyboard to flesh out the buzzing zither with softer, rounder tones. The sharp attacks of Lotus Collage are nowhere to be found, and instead, aside from some repetitive keyboard parts deep into the second side, the record as a whole is very open-ended and free, as if it's a seed being blown along by a gentle breeze. It's a less cosmic sound than the earlier release, more atmospheric and diffuse, and it seems designed to give a room a certain tint rather than being a vehicle for close listening. You could isolate any two-minute section of the whole and have no idea whether it comes early or late on the album, but in this case that doesn't seem like a negative.
Connecting With the Inner Healer Through Music gathers two very different pieces that have never appeared on the same tape. The first side, a multi-part piece called "Trance Celestial", is a gorgeous collection of drones that feel richer and more fully formed than his earlier work. Here the divisions between individual instruments all but disappear, and everything feels integrated and focused. At times, the effect is close to the blissed-out post-shoegaze of Windy & Carl. The second side is a 35-minute piece with Laraaji on vocals offering a kind of guided meditation over plings and trails of synth.
The sound of Laraaji's voice, intoning over wisps, underlines just how differently we listen to this music today, in contrast to the the spiritual seekers who presumably bought it in 1983. Bad-vibes films and television shows from "True Detective" to Inherent Vice have cast this kind of calm, echo-laden speech in a very different light, highlighting the creepiness and cultish aspects over the presumed search for spiritual enlightenment. It's also a reminder of how new age spirituality is so easily twisted into something dark, since it does, after all, involve people at their most open and vulnerable. But none of this speaks to Laraaji's intentions; 30 years later, he is still making the rounds of yoga and meditation centers, putting on workshops that emphasize the healing power of laughter. This is not an artist who takes himself too seriously. And the fact that his music is returning 30 years later into a new world to reach people in a new way is an inspiring tribute to our highly cyclical world.


Completing the move from hard club music to phantom ambient music, the producer escapes pixel-pocked logic for something more like nature.

Serpent Power

Only a few years ago, Finland’s Celestial Trax, or Joni Judén, produced stark, screw-faced club music. He had a brittle, capably menacing take on the sound, full of icy synths and spring-loaded drums, but it didn’t stand out from scads of like-minded producers making grime-inspired beats with samples of cocking pistols and breaking glass. All those staccato snares and crystalline edges dissolve on Serpent Power, an album of ambient music so diffuse, there’s little to grasp, like tightening one’s grip on a cloud of smoke. This formlessness is the source of Serpent Power’s enigmatic allure.
Celestial Trax made steps in this direction with 2017’s Nothing Is Real, where Judén fleshed out percussive club constructions with pensive synths and eerily processed voices and juggled dancefloor cuts with beatless ones. But those forays into abstraction are nothing compared to the amoebic flux of Serpent Power. Here, there are no beats, no melodies, and very little in the way of a pulse; at most, a cycling synth pattern might tentatively poke its head through the murk before getting swallowed up in the depths.
Judén favors sounds with imperceptible attacks and seemingly infinite decays. Reverb and delay cover everything to the point that it’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the provenance of many of his sounds. Synthesizers shape the jellied bedrock, while watery piano casts a wistful glance back at Harold Budd’s liquid tone. There are ghostly flutes, dissonant string scrapings, and possibly the doleful cry of whales or seagulls.
If the outlines of the music are blurred, so is its lineage. The faintest hint of new age is audible in airy shakuhachi and the emotion-tugging sounds of rainfall, but it’s not all so pastoral. The atonal plucks and glassy timbres of a track like “Offline Offscreen” suggest a scrap of a Morton Feldman score that’s been scribbled on wax paper and wadded into a ball. The classical overtones of “Peace” are more consonant, reminiscent of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS at its most weightless. More than anything, Serpent Power recalls the spongy, low-key psychedelia of early-1990s ambient as formulated by Biosphere, Tetsu Inoue, and Pete Namlook, all artists who knew that an abiding sense of mystery was far more important than simple mood-setting.
Most of these 10 tracks flow from one to the next, only increasing the album’s stickiness. At times, contrasting chords will wash into one another in a kind of brackish swirl; at others, a low hum, like the throb of a submarine, blurs the seams between two distinct sets of sounds. Near the end, though, the shimmering “Blossoms in the Blue Sky” fades out and allows for a moment of silence before “In the End We Ascend” swells forth, beatifically triumphant.
Judén has described the album as a kind of “digital detox,” an attempt to escape the pixel-pocked logic of life online for something more like nature. (A limited edition of the album comes on a USB stick housed in a capsule carved out of juniper and birch branches.) That kind of epiphany might be a tall order for an album that consists of suggestively dreamy sound design, but there is an undeniable solace in these pieces, if you’re looking for it. In moving from club productions to ambient music, Judén has traded one crowded field for another, but Serpent Power doesn’t feel the slightest bit derivative. By melting down his sounds and starting over, Judén has managed a remarkable feat of alchemy.


Beneath the hazy sonics from this bedroom electro-pop project are well-structured and highly addictive songs, resulting in one of the year's nicest surprises.

Psychic Chasms

"Borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s." Those words, when James Murphy over-enunciated them on what's still arguably the decade's best piece of music-as-music-criticism-- LCD Soundsystem's 2002 debut single, "Losing My Edge"-- had the decisive feel of a gauntlet being thrown down. One 1980s baby struck back with a Nintendo Power Glove. Just a guess: Probably not what Murphy had in mind.
Of course, cheaply copied reminiscences of a blurrily imagined decade are basically their own genre now, cloudy and proud. The sound has many names, but none of them seem to fit just right. Dream-beat, chillwave, glo-fi, hypnagogic pop, even hipster-gogic pop-- all are imperfect phrases for describing a psychedelic music that's generally one or all of the following: synth-based, homemade-sounding, 80s-referencing, cassette-oriented, sun-baked, laid-back, warped, hazy, emotionally distant, slightly out of focus. Washed Out. Memory Tapes. Ducktails. Ah-woo-ooh.
For Alan Palomo, reflecting on the music of the Reagan era has a personal component. The Texas-reared Mexico native's dad, Jorge, was a bit of a Spanish-language pop star in the late 1970s and early 80s. The analog electronics of that bygone period echo throughout the younger Palomo's increasingly promising previous recordings, whether with former band Ghosthustler (he wore the Power Glove in the video for their "Parking Lot Nights") or, more recently, on VEGA's Well Known Pleasures EP. Finally, working with Brooklyn-based visual collaborator Alicia Scardetta as Neon Indian, Palomo has brought all the best of 2009's summer sounds-- bedroom production, borrowed nostalgia, unresolved sadness, deceptively agile popcraft-- together on a single album.
Whatever they owe to the past, the memories on Psychic Chasms are Palomo's and ours. Soft vocals recalling You Made Me Realise-era Kevin Shields. Italo-disco synth arpeggios. Hall & Oates drum sounds. Divebombing video-game effects. Brittle guitar distortion. Manipulated tapes that bend the notes the way Shields' "glide guitar" did, the way bluesmen's fret fingers did. Field recordings of birds. Oohing and ahhing backing vocals. And samples, on at least two songs, of the elder Palomo, whose electro-rock approach was quite similar. All combine on eight or nine unforgettable songs and a few tantalizingly brief interludes, indelibly capturing the glamor and bleary malaise of being young and horny as an empire devours itself.
Like a low-rent Daft Punk, Palomo takes what 1990s rock fans probably would've considered cheesy-- LinnDrum and Oberheim rhythms, Chromeo-plated electro-funk Korg riffs, processed party-vocal samples-- and not only makes them part of a distinct artistic vision, but also keeps them fun. Quick opener "(AM)" is rife with detail, as an indecipherable tenor floats over a mock-dramatic drum fill and 8-bit star cruisers do battle against twinkling fairy dust. Another sub-minute interstitial track, "(If I Knew, I'd Tell You)", keeps its secrets to itself, letting multiple melodic synth lines hint at a gulf-sized pool of melancholy over a tape-altered rhythm track. "Laughing Gas", at slightly more than a lyric-less minute and a half, is the one that ruins my attempted distinction between songs and interludes, with bongo drums, robot vocal samples, and euphoric giggles straight out of those Air France kids' dreams. The cumulative result is a meltdown-deadened but deliriously inventive perspective on pop.
"I really hope the medium by which someone writes a song isn't the only thing the song has going for it," Palomo told our own Ryan Dombal in a recent interview. With Psychic Chasms, Palomo doesn't need to worry. "Deadbeat Summer" and "Should Have Taken Acid With You" are two views of the same non-endless season-- one mind-expandingly lazy and the other too lazy for mind expansion, both undeniably catchy, both earning doctorates in The Graduate school of coming-of-age ennui. The Italo-alluding title track, the New Order-throbbing "Local Joke", and the visceral funk alarums of "Ephemeral Artery" are beautiful bummers, tracks with lyrics the faithful are sure to puzzle out the way kids used to with the first couple of Weezer CDs. "Living this way held by a single strand/ But you wouldn't understand," worries "6669 (I Don't Know If You Know)", which comes back, refracted again, as 56-second finale "7000 (Reprise)". If you want to destroy his sweater, hold this thread as he walks away.
Overall, Psychic Chasms is something like a dream collaboration between the Tough Alliance and Atlas Sound, the latter of whose Internet-only Weekend EP shares a delinquent theme with one of Psychic Chasms' best songs. After barely a half hour, the whole thing is over, but there's enough going on in the layered electronics and enigmatic longing to make this one of the year's most replayable albums. Consider "Terminally Chill", which has more vocal and instrumental hooks than the average Top 40 song, but also the immediately recognizable stamp of an impressive young talent. Palomo's gear was stolen last month while on tour with VEGA, but a recent FADER video suggests he could launch a decently credible alternate "career" as an acoustic troubadour doing Mexican traditional songs. For various mundane personal reasons, this cassette-focused album is one of the actual CDs I've listened to most since I actually listened to CDs. A new generation's borrowed nostalgia? High time.


Elliott Smith's first and last albums are reissued, highlighting the remarkable progression of his sadly brief career.

Elliott Smith: Roman Candle / From a Basement on the Hill

When Elliott Smith's final studio record, From a Basement on the Hill, was released in 2004, some people wanted to avert their eyes. It emerged in the aftermath of his stabbing death the year before, during which the shock over his gruesome death was compounded by troubling revelations. We were hearing about spiraling drug problems, ambiguities in his autopsy, and his fraught relationship with his family. For Smith's hardcore fans, the album's very existence was charged. Smith's family had assumed the task of completing the record and several contentious artistic decisions were made, including bringing in longtime producer Rob Schnapf and Joanna Bolme to finish a number of Elliott's songs that had been recorded as demos. At the time, the final result felt too hot to touch, and it remains the uneasy outlier in Smith's discography to this day.
It was a sad fate for what had been shaping up to be the most sprawling, ambitious record of Smith's career. Whatever troubles may have been plaguing his personal life at the time, Smith seemed thrilled at the direction his music was taking. In interviews, he exulted in having discovered a "big" sound that made sense for him-- one that squared his expanding ambitions with his demand for pin-drop intimacy. His previous record, Figure 8, coated his songs in a blinding sheen that suited him as poorly as the rumpled all-white tux he'd worn to the Oscars. Basement saw him recoiling from that polish without abandoning his dream of a bigger sound, and whatever else it might be, it's the most complete document we have of the music he was hearing in his head those final years.
The opening of "Coast to Coast" immediately gives us an idea of the changes Smith had in mind. After 40 seconds of haunted carnival music, a brambled wall of guitars presses in from all sides, with Smith's wounded tenor emanating weakly from the center. Everything feels uncomfortably, purposefully too-close; with mics pressed up against the instruments, every twitch and scrape is crystalized. The mix is startlingly vivid: When the first guitar is strummed on "Pretty (Ugly Before)", the chord doesn't ring so much as bloom, suffusing the song with soft light. "Strung Out Again" is a lurching waltz, with Smith's guitar lines creaking and stumbling into wrong notes. Elliott's voice, in this context, has never sounded lovelier or more ruined. No beautiful sound escapes without scars.
Smith wrote with painful economy and eloquence about his own shortcomings, and his words cleaved through bullshit with bracing force. During the Basement on the Hill sessions, he began writing about his drug problems and depression with an unprecedented clarity. It seemed like an implicit rise to the challenge he posed himself in "Strung Out Again", where "Just looking in the mirror/ Will make you a brave man." He sings calmly and directly about terrifying scenarios. After years of rehabilitation and relapse, he had boiled the exhausting cycle of lifelong addiction down to eleven brutal words: "Took a long time to stand/ Took an hour to fall."
The context is part of the reason listening to From a Basement on the Hill felt somewhat indecent in 2004. Now, Kill Rock Stars is re-releasing the album alongside a remastered reissue of his 1994 debut, Roman Candle, situating the two records as bookends to an extraordinarily fertile career that may even help the volatile Basement on the Hill settle in more comfortably alongside the rest of Elliott's work.
Roman Candle, for its part, remains a fan favorite, and it contains some classic Smith songs: "Condor Ave", the title track, and "Last Call", in particular. And yet it mostly serves to point to all that Elliott would later become. It's wispier and more diffuse than his self-titled or Either/Or, and nothing here is as indelible as "Needle in the Hay", "The Biggest Lie" or "Ballad of Big Nothing". A few of the "No Name" song sketches drift in and out without leaving much of a mark-- Smith's music would become fuller, and his harmonic language more confident, on subsequent albums. The sound is there, though, unmistakable from the first note: the defeated whisper of the vocals, the deceptively intricate guitar work, and the angry little mantras ("leave alone, leave alone, 'cause you know you don't belong here"). From these beginnings, Smith would experiment with how much he could add to this framework without crushing it; on From a Basement on the Hill, he found a thrilling new plateau. Sadly, we can now only imagine where he would have gone from here.


Monuments to an Elegy, Smashing Pumpkins’ ninth studio album and the second in the band's Teargarden by Kaleidyscope cycle, is Billy Corgan’s first savvy artistic move in nearly 15 years: a Smashing Pumpkins album that has no precedent in his catalog.

The Smashing Pumpkins: Monuments to an Elegy

Monuments to an Elegy

Since the turn of the century, the Smashing Pumpkins have been a promise Billy Corgan just can’t keep. MACHINA/The Machines of God had about 20 minutes of outstanding music, 20 minutes of dreadful music, and 20 that fell somewhere in between—all of it at odds with Corgan’s “return to rock” claims for an album that had more synthesizers and chiaroscuro coloring than Adore. Meanwhile, Zeitgeist and Oceania each attempted to signify a workmanlike, “back to basics” approach for a band who never did workmanlike or basic. The whine was there, the riffs too, but that was about it. Corgan had been trying to trigger nostalgia for a version of his band that didn’t exist, so Monuments to an Elegy turns out to be his first savvy artistic move in nearly 15 years: a Smashing Pumpkins album that has no precedent whatsoever in his catalog.
For one thing, it is 33 minutes long. We're not talking about a mid-album triptych named after Greek goddesses or a bonus compilation available only if you preordered Monuments on iTunes—like, the whole thing is barely more than a half hour. And it’s split almost equally amongst nine songs of concise, gleaming alt-rock that leaves the album title as the only remnant of Corgan’s excessive tastes. Just a few months ago, it wasn’t particularly clear why Corgan would serve as an executive producer for sync-core opportunists Ex Cops. In retrospect, it may have been method acting, or at least a fact-finding mission to determine how the Pumpkins could sound modern without being desperate for relevancy.
As a result, Corgan isn’t chasing dead formats or trying to fit into playlists at radio stations that consider “Today” to be classic rock. He simply does what most de facto “alt-rock” bands do in 2014—he tries to blend in, making Smashing Pumpkins songs that aren’t exactly aiming for spins in Target, H&M, or car commercials but wouldn’t be out of place if those did come to pass.
But Corgan has always had a latent allergy to anything associated with “indie rock” and now that it’s basically synonymous with “alt-rock,” he still has to prove himself out of step by showing allegiance to his Stratocaster. There are synthesizers and drum machines all over Monuments, but they’re fringe: it’s a still a guitar album. However, he uses guitar as a tool rather than an instrument of expression as what were once riffs are now power chords, solos are whittled down to mere leads. As a result, the songs on Monument are SP concentrate, engineered for instant impact, vestigial songwriting parts around an uplifting chorus that could really be about anything. The lyrics are stupefyingly vague, but the songs about new love sound like they could just as easily be about lost love and vice versa, while the ones about staying true to yourself could be either.
Monuments is the easiest Smashing Pumpkins album, even though it’s the first where Billy Corgan is willing to share a studio with someone more famous and egomaniacal than himself. Drummer Mike Byrne has been replaced by someone nearly 30 years his senior in Tommy Lee, best known as the frontman for the rap-metal latecomers Methods of Mayhem and skinsman for a popular hair metal concern. Corgan surely relishes the opportunity to once again rep for the most uncool iterations of metal, but the partnership is more likely a result of the weird friendships aging rock stars can form with other aging rock stars, i.e., the only people they can relate to. Lee’s excessive tastes are even more downplayed than Corgan’s here, as his impact is most Crüe-like on the funk-metal stomp “Anaïse!” It is also the worst song on the album.
But while I can’t run the numbers as to how many new fans were earned due to Zeitgeist and Oceania, it’s best to assume that Monuments will be no one’s introduction to Smashing Pumpkins—so it’s not worth pretending Billy Corgan can ever truly blend in. The album manages to neutralize the indelible vocals by evoking Corgan's lesser-known guises of the past—the mash-note writer from Adore, the PMA mouthpiece from Zwan, and the facile pop-rocker that was mostly relegated to the B-sides during the Pumpkins’ commercial heyday. The end result is what might have been a state-of-the-art record in 2005 that would’ve done wonders for his reputation had it replaced TheFutureEmbrace.
For now, Corgan catches up with a decade in which his muse basically went missing. Opener “Tiberius” thumps at saturated power chords in waltz time while throwing things just off course with some extra time signature switches and sober piano. So now you’ve heard Smashing Pumpkins as a version of Weezer that fully embraced its late-2000s prog yen. Dear lord, is the title of “Being Beige” asking for it, especially when its crisp electro-acoustic layering and breathy vocals establish an unthinkable connection between Transtlanticism and Adore. It’s also the best thing Corgan’s written since “Honestly”, mirroring its choral surge and stilted, romantic wording. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think Monuments to an Elegy was a promising debut from a band that hasn’t found its focus yet and would sound just fine opening up for the Silversun Pickups.
But it’s the easiness of Monuments that truly make it an outlier—whether Corgan constructed a masterpiece or just sounded labored, it was obvious that a ton of effort went into Smashing Pumpkins. Once the bubbly “Anti-Hero” pops, there’s a relief in hearing the record end with Corgan having not fucked up for his longest stretch of time in two decades. But it’s ultimately nowhere near as rewarding as his best work because it took no risks. Surely, Corgan has an emotional investment in this, but he seems stuck with some of the best music in years and absolutely nothing to say about it. It’s probably too much to ask for him to go Mark Kozelek and also start writing narrative songs about his cats, his interest in combat sports, and his beef with media figures. But a glance at the titles foreshadows the songs of Monuments as empty vessels, whether it’s phrases repeated in the hopes of giving them heft and meaning (“Run2me”, “One and All”) or placeholder names of people that Billy Corgan probably hasn’t met yet (“Anaïse!”, “Dorian”). As for sweet nothings like, “I’ve never been kissed by a girl like you before” or “cherry blossom, this is goodbye,” well, you can’t pretend it’s someone other than a 47-year old Billy Corgan singing them to you.
As with Oceania, “not bad” doesn’t translate to “great” and the easiest and perhaps only way to have an emotional investment in these songs is to consider what they mean to the Smashing Pumpkins brand. Which is why “Drum and Fife” is the most resonant thing here. As with “Cherub Rock” and “The Everlasting Gaze”, it’s a strident rock song about Being Billy and Being OK With That. This is proudly anti-cool, with a Tommy Lee fill punctuating the line, “I will bang this drum to my dying day,” before an actual fife solo. He knows the hipsters never had his back anyway and in 2014, they are certainly not going to align for the big fight to rock, of all things. And he’s not trying to convince the doubters he’s not dead. When he sings, “you’re gonna listen now to me,” he’s only addressing those who have been following his beat the whole time.


Urgent even at its sludgiest tempos, the Fredericksburg, Virginia band’s second album draws on a bleak palette to create illusions of infinite depth and vastness.

Beneath

Infant Island could pass for post-hardcore, metal, or even post-rock, but the first time anyone called them “screamo,” they took on a potentially paralyzing geographical legacy. Barely out of college, the quartet are already the most notable band to emerge from Fredericksburg, Virginia, about an hour away from Richmond, sometimes called “the screamo capital of North America.” Virginia gave rise to pg. 99, City of Caterpillar, Malady, and Majority Rule, bands whose unstable lineups, obscure discographies, and sudden implosions set the standards for emo’s most chaotic offshoot. Recorded and mixed at the studio of Majority Rule’s Matt Michel, Infant Island’s second full-length Beneath is a brazen monument in a subgenre that typically has little use for canon and longevity.
The band’s 2018 self-titled debut arrived during an international boom period for screamo. While peers like Portrayal of Guilt, .gif from god, and Respire were pushing the genre towards new frontiers of malevolence and orchestral opulence, Infant Island stood out for their versatility, equally suited for a future in the shadow of Sunbather or as melodic firebrands. But their recording budget was in no way commensurate with their ambitions: It was easier to find the celestette, upright piano, and bowed glockenspiel in Infant Island’s credits than in the mix.
In light of Beneath’s sterling production values, Infant Island feels like watching a 3D movie without the glasses. The band sound more daring and confident, and it’s now possible to fully appreciate the intention behind each textural clash. “Here We Are” finds an unexpected nexus between surf-rock and doom metal in its foreboding introduction before burying Daniel Kost’s howls in blue-black tide. “The Garden” and “Death Portrait” are equally locked into militaristic rigidity and spasmodic skramz, visceral and cosmic imprisonment, haunted by bodies buried in the earth and hovering over trees. “Content” plays on the double meaning of its title, tracing a life of complacent cultural consumption before being consumed back in the dirt, bookended by tingling feedback and somber strings.
Beneath takes its cover artwork from John Martin, the English Romantic painter of works like The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, who once boasted that his work “shall make more noise than any picture ever did before.” Like Martin, Infant Island’s bleak palette creates illusions of infinite depth and vastness within relatively compact frameworks. Screamo tends to work in punishing brevity or pulverizing length, but the nine tracks of Beneath are sensibly paced and separated, each movement given enough space to make its point and no more. The album dedicates a significant portion of its runtime to outright ambience, its three evocatively titled instrumentals (“Signed in Blood,” “Colossal Air,” “Someplace Else”) an apocalyptic Neapolitan of infinite darkness, blinding light, and pink mist.
Infant Island clearly intend Beneath as a full-length experience, urgent even at its sludgiest tempos. But it’s no slight to describe the album’s first 20 minutes as being in service of “Stare Spells,” a unification of nearly every variant of heavy music within earshot of mainstream acceptance. Connoisseurs could draw comparisons with any number of legends in the way elegiac acoustic chords and glistening reverb commingle with devastating, downtuned sludge and tinny cymbal crashes: some Neurosis here, a little Touché Amoré there, lots of Envy. Kost’s voice falters just the slightest bit upon entry, a split second stuck between a clean melody and a blackened howl; it’s a presumptive error that needed to stay in, proof of the degree to which the band is pushing itself.
Ordinarily, Beneath would be heralded as the realization of Infant Island’s potential, but it might not even be their strongest release of the past month. Sepulcher, a four-track EP that’s only six minutes shorter than the album, was recorded after Beneath’s completion but released three weeks prior. It takes the band’s ambitions to extremes: “Burrow” is their most propulsive and dynamic slab of pure screamo, “Ghost Whines” their most defiant commitment to paranormal experimentation. It’s capped off by “Awoken,” the kind of stunning, 10-minute scorched-earth aerial view that every screamo band tries to make when they’re completely feeling themselves. Separating the two recordings is understandable—they were produced at different times, under different sets of pressures. Together, they’d be an instantaneous landmark of the genre; separately, Sepulcher and Beneath are superlative documents of a great band that still has their heroes’ propensity for confoundment in them.


The unmistakably dramatic pop singer seeks the divine feminine, embracing a bold yet soft aesthetic that’s more effective than some of her lyrics.

Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land

Twelve years into her career, it’s hard to imagine that Marina Diamandis was once a MySpace artist marketed as a quirky Britpop-ish act. Her whole career is so thoroughly of these times. She was fan-forward from the beginning; her original stage name, Marina and the Diamonds, made her fans part of her persona as the eponymous gems, and they rewarded her with devotion. She made just-outside-the-mainstream pop before such music was the Spotify-playlist default; she studded her lyrics with light social commentary when that was still somewhat rare on the Top 40 charts.
Through it all, Marina’s musical persona has remained unmistakable: dramatic, theatrical, her heart worn not just on her sleeve but in a shiny, spangled, and wide-open frame. Her voice spans throaty lows to fluting highs; her lyrics are forthright and low-irony, for better and worse. As an acting coach might say, she’d rather be big and wrong than tiny and right. (From an acting coach, this is a compliment.) But her music has morphed over time, thanks to a series of fast-replaced collaborators: pre-disgrace Dr. Luke and his unsubtle sound on Electra Heart; relative unknown Faultline producing more muted work on Froot; a veritable songwriters’ camp on Love + Fear; several Clean Bandit features during a short-lived EDM phase. Marina has expressed unease about the shifts—Electra Heart made her feel “kind of ashamed, like this isn’t really who I am,” she told The New York Times, while the lower-key Froot made her fear she wasn’t ambitious enough. Her unease is understandable: She is thoroughly herself, in front of so many green screens.
Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land is Marina’s boldest music yet. She wants you to know it from the first seconds of the title track: a glam schaffel beat that Marina turns into her own personal pulpit. She swoons and evangelizes and delivers rapidfire hooks—the big one shares a melody with “Womanizer,” but as hooky pop hits go, you could nick far worse. “Venus Fly Trap” might not much say much that Marina hasn’t already said on 2010’s “Hollywood,” but the song is far more brash—it sounds carnivorous—and Marina casts herself not as an outsider gawking at the town, but a star victorious over it: “Why be a wallflower when you can be a Venus fly trap?” She sought out female producers for the album, most prominently Jennifer Decilveo (Bat for Lashes, Beth Ditto)—which shouldn’t be noteworthy, except they’re so rare in the pop industry that in 12 years, Marina has only worked with a handful. Chalk it up to creative synergy, but there’s a muscle to Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land that she’d missed for quite some time.
Marina would probably chalk it up to more than synergy. Recruiting women collaborators ties into the album’s theme: The “ancient dreams” are largely divine-sacred-feminine stuff, and she’s eager to talk about them. “New America” has a decently spooky arrangement—frantic pizzicato strings, vocals arranged like ominous choirs, faint poltergeist SFX in the background. Like Halsey’s “New Americana,” Rihanna’s “American Oxygen,” and JoJo’s “American Mood” before it—and that’s just the past few years—its social commentary isn’t wrong, just a little more overt than pop songs usually get (“Who gave you jazz, hip-hop, rock’n’roll and the blues?”), but ultimately feels like box-ticking. “Purge the Poison” doesn’t get more specific so much as it gets more, period. The track is full-to-bulging with tense handclaps, dramatic vocal swoops, and motormouth delivery of keywords. It wants to be a curative for every societal ill in the zeitgeist: COVID-19, racism, capitalism, misogyny, “every single war,” Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo, the collective societal whoops-my-bad over 2000s-era Britney Spears coverage (written, Marina says, before the buzzy Framing Britney Spears documentary, though she admits it was tangential.) The remix, with Russian feminist provocateurs Pussy Riot, adds even more.
Marina doesn’t have space to say much besides “these things exist, and they’re bad.” She does have punchlines—about the sultan of Brunei, whose anti-gay policies led to boycotts of his real estate investments, she quips: “I guess that’s why he bought the campest hotel in L.A.!” But her delivery muffles the punch, rushing to get to the next point, and those points muffle the message. As she sings in “Purge the Poison,” women hold only about one-quarter of government positions. But women contain multitudes: Currently among that quarter are women whose supposed divine femininity didn’t stop them from mocking a colleague’s transgender child or calling the LGBTQ-rights Equality Act “dangerous” and “disgusting.” The narrow focus muddies the album’s politics. To her credit, Marina has welcomed critique, addressing similar comments from fans by saying, “I like seeing [these] comments…it does make me think about my own place.” Some more thought, and a rewrite, might have aimed her lyrics more true.
Besides, Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land makes its point through its aesthetic. There are a lot of ballads here; the sheer quantity of them, their lacy ornamentation and quiet maximalism, evoke a soft-focus femininity. The music in “Man’s World” is something between a lament and a swoon, with long curlicues of melisma, distant strings, a lyrical collage of François Boucher cherubs, Marilyn Monroe’s Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow, and Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace. “Highly Emotional People” is a ballad in the Sarah McLachlan tradition, made of light piano, floaty soprano, and enough reverb to fill an ancient shrine. “Pandora’s Box” returns antique dramatics to the modern ballad—rolling cello, Old Hollywood strings, all in a flowing arrangement. Everything is delicate, but nothing is muted. This aesthetic certainly isn’t for everybody, but after her ambivalent pop experiments, Marina no longer needs her albums to be. It’s a beacon out for the highly emotional people of the world, of whom she clearly is one; it’s for her.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Where her last album explored grief, the R&B singer’s latest is more grounded, exploring the ups and downs of a failed relationship.

CHILOMBO

Jhené Aiko has a knack for smooth melodies that waft over wispy production like air kisses, lithe and sensual yet frictionless. Her calling card is clear-eyed storytelling that, like the wise best friend in a rom-com, pinpoints precisely why a romance failed or succeeded. Her best songs accent that clarity with narrative or vocal contrasts (often provided by guests, but sometimes Aiko herself), but on Chilombo the formula is pushed to its limit. Despite confident, freeform performances, Aiko’s music too often lacks a pulse.
Compared to the multimedia odyssey of Trip, which was accompanied by a poetry book and short film, Chilombo is leaner and more grounded. Instead of heady explorations of grief, Aiko focuses on the standard peaks and valleys of life post-breakup. The record is loosely about a woman enduring heartbreak and emerging stronger, and the opening suite of songs wears that framework lightly. On “Triggered (Freestyle),” Aiko fumes over reminders of the old relationship: “Trying to let the time kill/All our memories/All you meant to me/All that history/All that’s history,” she croons, each riff on “all” cutting deeper. On “B.S.” she glows with self-satisfaction over a ticking hi-hat: “Flexin on my exes in my Model X/Pretty little skinny little bitty/Body Model X.” By the end of the song she’s so charged up that seeing her replacement “boosts her self-esteem.”
This suite ends with “P*$$Y Fairy (OTW),” which opens with a yearning, bass-boosted intro then blossoms into a twinkling ode to Aiko’s sexual prowess. “I know you love fucking me,” she declares, turning a passive construction into a boast. The song is full of similarly odd flips in perspective (“That dick make me so proud”), blurring who is giving and receiving pleasure like a titillating funhouse mirror.
Unfortunately, everything that makes that opening run charismatic and personable is abandoned as Chilombo stretches on. The jarring “Happiness over Everything (H.O.E.)” is a retread of “Hoe,” from her debut mixtape Sailing Souls. The verses are improved from the hokey original, but it’s weird to hear the self-proclaimed “pussy fairy” turn coy and inert. “Just don’t get the wrong impression,” Aiko pleads, her charm suddenly depleted like Cinderella at midnight. On “10k Hours,” Aiko and Nas turn Malcolm Gladwell’s magic number into a dry index of personal history. “Ten thousand hours turned to ten thousand bridal flowers,” Nas raps flatly about his marriage to Kelis, sounding bored of his own story. Against her feathery melodies, there’s no traction, no dynamism.
The production plays a huge role in that inertia. Produced almost entirely by Lejkeys and the duo Fisticuffs, the album is soft and hushed, dulled percussion and starry keys drifting in a vacuum. Aiko is clearly a student of Quiet Storm, a format that gives the voice space to contract and expand in carnal waves. And her voice certainly has that power; the vocal runs on “Surrender” are variously controlled and indulgent, evaporating into the cloudy synths and condensing beneath them as a breathy purr. But the tempo never rises above a resting heart rate, the acoustic flourishes never dictate the shapes of songs, and Aiko’s performances aren’t consistently magnetic.
There’s an audience and a market for Aiko’s atmospheric take on R&B, but the most interesting aspects of her music have always been rooted in her malleability. Like Jeremih, Ty Dolla $ign, and other R&B artists who straddle genres, she’s got the fluency to provide more than a big hook or play foil to another star. Whether she’s cooing, humming, or rapping, she brings an easygoing grace and playfulness that tends to open up songs. Chilombo gestures at this larger skill set, but settles for good vibes. It’s very chill, and nothing else.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


Peeling back the lo-fi veil of his previous work, the 23-year-old Bristol producer channels classic club sounds and Y2K video-game aesthetics into breathtaking new hybrids.

Miracle in Transit

If you were a child in the 1990s, your first exposure to house and techno probably wasn’t in a club full of sweaty bodies. For listeners too young to make it into an actual rave, you’d be much more likely to hear dance music blaring from your television set during late-night gaming sessions. The drum’n’bass loops of Bomberman Hero, the jungle rhythms of Parasite Eve, the thumping trance of Need For Speed—the rise of home consoles hit right when dance music was bursting into the mainstream, and the composers of many of the most popular game soundtracks of the era channeled these addictive, looping new electronic sounds into their work; some were even DJs themselves. Stripped of their original contexts, these styles left a different impression, and as the Y2K generation has aged into adulthood—bringing a nostalgia for rave culture with it—a new crop of producers has begun to present alternate-reality takes on what club music can be.
One of those is Naked Flames: In the past two and a half years, the 23-year-old Bristol producer (known only as Anton) has published a steady stream of digital releases and YouTube mixes, all as hyperactive as an illegal rave on Rainbow Road. On last year's Binc Rinse Repeat and 247 365, Naked Flames coated his sped-up trance and house in a lo-fi VHS haze, adding a soft, sweet texture to serene melodies and supercharged funk basslines. His music is as breathlessly joyous as it is aggressively hypnotic, its low-bitrate pulse extending endlessly as each song sucks the listener into a cotton-candy vortex of dance bliss. But on Miracle in Transit, his latest release for chronically online net label Dismiss Yourself, he attempts a sharper, sleeker approach. Dropping the smeared production for a clean, shimmering sound, Miracle in Transit shows off Naked Flames’ ear for jubilant house music that can stand on its own two feet, with gleaming synth lines and phased flutes circling around each other in a dazzling race to the finish line. Naked Flames is still learning how to sustain his sugar highs over his tracks’ extended runtimes, but Miracle in Transit proves that the producer’s past internet cult hits weren't an accident. His productions reconfigure the dancefloor from an exhilarating new vantage point.
Part of what made Naked Flames’ previous releases so entrancing lay in how the crudely lo-fi production seemed to fill in the blank spaces around the edges of his tracks. An avowed Basic Channel acolyte who refers to his own style as “dub rave,” Naked Flames brings an almost hypnagogic element to his music; the dreamlike veil of distortion can feel like glimpsing the perfect party through a tiny keyhole. Without the lo-fi shroud, Miracle in Transit occasionally reveals the limits of his loops’ repetitive nature. “Pan Matsuri” opens the album on a glimmeringly pretty note, with swinging hi-hats and glowing chords breezier than anything we’ve heard from Naked Flames before. But as the track swells with sighing, J-poppy vocals and ethereal washes of synth, it feels like it’s building to some climax that never fully arrives. “Carrot Car” fares much better: From the moment its bouncy acid bassline kicks into gear, the track launches into a heavenly stomp as multi-colored and kinetic as a secret Sonic the Hedgehog zone. As the song pushes itself higher and higher, making way for gloriously chintzy karaoke horns toward the end, it captures Naked Flames at his euphoric best. With the lo-fi production cleared up, the track’s glee is all the more potent.
There’s a careful balance between steady patience and uninhibited release at play throughout Miracle in Transit, and the album’s best tracks reward the extended time it can take to reach their peaks. On “Miles of Conkers,” Naked Flames hovers over a misty, hurried beat for a full five minutes, working on an almost ambient level until a Crystal Waters-like organ enters the picture. The bass begins to rush, the hi-hats start getting jukey, and soon Naked Flames is ecstatically layering sparkling synth lines. Where the track is slow to get going, by the nine-minute mark, it’s over too soon. The dreamy “Under Every Tree in England” similarly shapeshifts as a noodling guitar sample gives way to a playfully mysterious marimba hook, gliding over its relaxed seven minutes with a confident stride. Miracle in Transit’s best moments are like marathons that induce delirious trance states so absorbing, it’s hard to imagine raving any other way.


The New York rapper reconnects with the Los Angeles producer for a masterful road-trip album. Humor and dread, weed and food, technique and style—billy woods is in full command of it all.

Maps

In billy woods’ music, personal history is global history. There’s a recurring figure in his songs: the Average Joe thrust onto the world stage and forced to select from a menu of bad choices. “It ain’t no compromise, I’m Ho Chi Minh, ruthless, MC Ren/Small caliber, close range, General Nguyen,” he rapped on 2012’s “The Foreigner,” likening a petty street beef to the Vietnam War. Alone and as one half of Armand Hammer, he’s turned such juxtapositions into a mad and beautiful science. His unorthodox rhymes hit like jet lag, scrambling the body’s sense of time and space.

Fittingly, woods’ second team-up with Los Angeles producer Kenny Segal is a travelog. Maps, a concept album about the highs and lows of touring, decisively enters the pair into the ranks of rap’s great stylists and storytellers. Reposed and taut, elegant and menacing, woods’ dispatches wind around Segal’s kooky boom-bap like a boa on a branch. The pair are road warriors attuned to the horrors and wonders of the world, trading the cramped dread of 2019’s Hiding Places for the horizonless totality of a desert. The road leads everywhere and nowhere at once.
As a Jamaican and Zimbabwean New Yorker who grew up on two continents, Woods regularly incorporates distant locales, global cuisines, and snatches of other languages into his writing. But in recent years, his voice has become as worldly as his pen. Across Haram, Aethiopes, and Church, he’s honed a range of sighs, cadences, and artful pauses that add flavor to his oration. He’s no impressionist, but his masterful storytelling brings people and places to life with quick, visceral strokes. “Delivery fee is ooof,” he exhales on “Rapper Weed,” shaving two words from the apocryphal Hemingway short story challenge.

The one-liners, punches, and vignettes on Maps are legendary, packed with detail and delivered with impeccable timing. woods’ itinerant flow will always be an acquired taste, but his command of it is undeniable. His voice slashes through the air like a gavel strike, commanding and weighted. He can pack a saga into a couplet. “Learned the hard way, motherfuckers will run in shooting/After we spent months tryna strategize,” he raps on “Blue Smoke,” his annoyed tone filling in the story. His sardonic deadpan is so effective that even simple bars like “You can’t fix stupid” and “The earth is a sphere” become gut-busters.
On “Waiting Around,” a flirtation in Belgium doubles as a slick waltz through Cam’ron’s discography: “Jaundiced moon, she had perfect teeth/Purple haze had ya boy like come home with me/She kissed my cheek/Diplomacy.” The album is packed with such wordplay, all of it brisk and tactile. Instead of emphasizing immersion in distant places and sounds like M.I.A.’s Kala, Yasiin Bey’s The Ecstatic, and Mach-Hommy’s Pray for Haiti, Maps foregrounds transit. woods’ perspective-hopping writing leans into the flux of experiencing the world in fragments: hazy conversations and bad sleep shadow him as he shuffles between time zones. It feels like he’s a fugitive rather than a tourist.

Kenny Segal matches that motion with kaleidoscopic production that shifts like tides. He brings out all the stops for this record, supplying free-jazz freakouts (“Blue Smoke”), dreary loops (“Bad Dreams Are Only Dreams”), and jackknife beat switches (“Babylon by Bus”). Some songs, like the bluesy “Houdini” and wistful “FaceTime,” are filigreed with instruments that embellish the settings and moods of woods’ tales.
Others, like “Year Zero,” which features a stunning Danny Brown verse, are spartan voids of creaky percussion and eerie synths that play up woods’ wry prophesizing. The globetrotting beats of Maps might initially scan as more conservative than the abrasive and experimental soundscape of Hiding Places, but the variety is forward-thinking. Segal understands that woods, who has gained a reputation as a doomsayer, is at his core an explorer. His beats push woods into new sonic and narrative spaces.

woods still drops doom bombs (see: “Sooner or later gonna be two unrelated active shooters/Same place, same time, great minds, Tesla and Edison”), but throughout Maps he also follows the slivers of light peeking through the crawl spaces he normally calls home. “I crack a smile at what you say is the truth/I be dead serious laughin’ in the stu,” he says on “Hangman,” finding bemused comfort in conversations with idiots. “I will not be at soundcheck,” he repeats with defiance on the puckish “Soundcheck” as he absconds to chow on some Szechuan food. Despite its myriad miseries and inconveniences—especially crappy and/or overpriced weed, a nuisance woods brings up with charming frequency—the road still offers detours and escape routes.
Adjusting the temperature to livable also allows woods to showcase his cinematic eye. The record is exquisitely sensory: a housecat greets the returning traveler with purrs, conch fritters crisp in the skillet, weed smells like turpentine and tastes of “Jamaican oranges” that look like limes. These tiny delights often give way to unguarded relief. “For a brief, sweet moment, it was nothing in the thought bubble/From up here the lakes is puddles, the land unfold/Brown and green, it’s a quiet puzzle,” woods reflects on “Soft Landing,” which interpolates the pop standard “Feeling Good.” The line revisits a point of view from last year’s tetchy “Paraquat”—“Clouds cleared, I’m looking at the city like jihadis in a cockpit”—but there’s no grim irony, just awe.
woods returns to several themes and ideas from previous records with fresh eyes—most notably home, the subtext of all road epics. “NYC Tapwater” tenderly catalogs the unique pleasures of life in New York City then ends by clarifying it’s a cruel place. It’s not a twist; it’s a warning from someone who has settled into the mirage. On the dreamy “Agriculture,” which is splashed with warm hums and twinkly keys, a pastoral refuge fails to cure the protagonist’s anguish: “Stooped in the coop, gathering eggs/Traded some to the neighbors for fresh bread/I say I’m at peace, but it’s still that same dread.” Letting light into songs gives the darkness more weight.
According to woods, Maps is a “post-pandemic” album because it emerged from his hectic tour schedule following quarantine, but that description also fits its apprehensive mood. It navigates a future that is indistinguishable from the past, turning history’s queasy loops into a dazzling torque.  The pair’s songwriting is so inventive and electric that even the depths of the late capitalist abyss begin to offer pathways to freedom. “I already knew the options was lose-lose/Baby, that’s nothing new,” woods raps with devilish charm on “The Layover,” “That just make it easier to choose.” There’s no better way to fly.


The Foreign Exchange's fourth studio collection is a happy album about coming to terms with a stable relationship in the wake of a more tumultuous one. It’s more musically ambitious than anything the R&B duo has attempted before, incorporating live instrumentation throughout and dabbling in funk, soul, disco, soft rock, and house.

The Foreign Exchange: Love In Flying Colors

Love In Flying Colors

The Foreign Exchange introduced their latest album, Love in Flying Colors, with a pair of trailer videos called “Her” and “Him,” which showed the title characters listening to each Foreign Exchange album in succession at different stages in their lives. Accompanied by the slogan “life is all about keeping a beat” the message that this is music to grow with may have been a little too on-the-nose, but this process of changing and maturing has been the underlying theme for the duo’s music since 2008’s Leave It All Behind. Coming out after the dissolution of singer Phonte’s rap group Little Brother, that album’s embrace of R&B felt like as much of a fulfillment of the title as its narratives of relationships in turmoil did. Phonte has generally positioned his move away from rap and into R&B—and, more specifically, R&B that explores the mundane intricacies of everyday relationships—as a maturation befitting someone his age (he’s now 34). Promoting Authenticity in 2010, he suggested that there was a void to fill for R&B “about getting married, having kids, slowing down.”
Love In Flying Colors is shooting for that goal: Broadly, it’s a happy, settled album that seems to be about coming to terms with a new, stable relationship in the wake of a more tumultuous one. To achieve that tone, it’s more musically ambitious than anything the Foreign Exchange have attempted before, incorporating live instrumentation throughout and dabbling in a comfy palette of funk, soul, disco, soft rock, and touches of house. It’s crisp, familiar and accessible, but taking this approach also holds the group to a higher standard and plays against its strengths. Previous Foreign Exchange projects could lean a little bit on novelty: 2004’s Connected proved that engaging, soulful hip-hop could be created by a Dutch producer and a North Carolina rapper collaborating over the internet; Leave It All Behind showed that Phonte had a better singing voice than anyone expected; Authenticity was a moody, drifting work full of minimal, electronic production that presaged the wave of bedroom R&B acts that would start sweeping blogs a year or two later. In contrast, Love In Flying Colors isn’t just holding itself up against historical precedent, it’s had the unfortunate luck of falling in the middle of a disco revival zeitgeist without the on-hand studio resources of, say, Daft Punk or Pharrell.
Phonte and Nicolay are great at building an atmosphere in which lyrical phrases are allowed to slowly unwind and Phonte’s voice is used to fill out tracks rather than punctuate them. The clean funk of Love In Flying Colors demands sharper songwriting and stronger vocals, though. If Phonte’s voice was a pleasant surprise when the group was creating understated neo-soul, it’s a bit of a liability when they’re gunning for full-on Kool & the Gang thrills—a fact the duo seems to implicitly recognize by bringing in plenty of guest talent to handle some of the more ambitious melodies (one of the most fun things about the entire Foreign Exchange project is the way it’s grown from an email exchange into a fully fleshed-out musical community). Songs like “Better” and “On A Day Like Today” are missing the punch that would make them the fully realized celebrations they’re trying to be. In general, the album’s meandering middle section blends together, sitting in the same grooves for too long and offering little in the way of the memorable outbursts that this type of funk demands.
There may be a reason, too, why mature subjects like settling down, working through fights and getting married don’t yield much in the way of popular R&B: a meaty phrase like “tell me you’ll stay by my side for all time/ Not just a moment” doesn’t exactly go down smoothly as the climax of a song like “The Moment”, which otherwise is a limber, pitch-perfect dancefloor exercise that shows the direct lineage between disco and early house. And that’s far from the cheesiest lyric on the album, which is heavy on oversimplifications like “sometimes it all feels so enormous/ I wonder why we even try.” Where the album does reign things in lyrically and the mood breaks away from muted satisfaction or confusion into actual excited joy, it’s clear what Love In Flying Colors could be. Opener “If I Knew Then” is triumphant in its breezy declaration that “love’s flying high,” and “Dreams Are Made For Two”, a duet with frequent Phonte collaborator Carlitta Durand, is inviting with its climbing synths and pillowy bass line, even if its couples getaway fantasy verges on wild over-sentimentality. Is there a reason that the songs tend to work better the more unreservedly happy they are? Getting to that self-assured, carefree place in which this type of music works best isn’t easy, and, unlike in the past, the Foreign Exchange aren’t letting themselves hide confusion behind studio tricks. This is all-out openness and clarity, which, for better or for worse, is just a little more grown-up.


Spider Bags' latest album is their first for Merge and their highest-fi release to date, but here the North Carolina country-punk band's taken on a more skeletal sound regardless. It was recorded in just three days, but it sounds a bit less dangerous, and a bit more inscrutable, than their past releases.

Frozen Letter

Life is tiring, and Spider Bags have always provided a party for the increasingly fatigued. Frontman Dan McGee’s words have had a whiskey-slouch to them ever since the band's 2007 debut, A Celebration of Hunger. It could spring from his North Carolina clime, but there’s a Southern gothic bent to Spider Bags that separates them from a lot of American garage fare. McGee gives a leery eye to all there is to love; he whips dry vitriol and broken-hearted balladry into roadhouse punk songs that sound like they’re barely hanging together. This is part of the fun of listening to any Spider Bags song, as they cause you to ask to yourself, “Might this whole thing crumble into a pile of dirt and rust?”
Over the years, things congealed more and more, which culminated in their most cohesive work to date, the 2012 album Shake My Head. That album was crammed with life, skipping around from shit-kicker fuzz to psych freak guitar solos while keeping the twangy energy up the whole way through. It follows that Frozen Letter is a bit of a comedown, drunk on its own sound; McGee, aged and with two kids under his roof, sounds utterly windburned by life. It’s their first record for Merge, which means Frozen Letter is easily their most hi-fi record yet—but the band takes on a more skeletal sound regardless. It was recorded in just three days, but it sounds a bit less dangerous, and a bit more inscrutable, than their past releases.
The band split Frozen Letter into two divergent sections, as the first four tracks kick-up all this dirt only to have it idly settle as the album winds on. It has the shape and feel of a sturdy ‘70s classic rock record, swirling with the Kinks' charm and the strutter of early AC/DC. The guitars, the vocals, and the lyrics are flayed and bony, more exposed than ever before, which works both for and against the band.  Frozen Letter is at its best when McGee plays sweet and direct as on “Back With You Again In The World”, an ode to a love as simple as the fired-up Dixie shuffle they take up. When he taps into the morose, self-pitying spirit of Hank Williams on the ballad in the back half of the album, “Walking Bubble”, his words tumble out with ease, turning out a beautiful phrase like ”There aren't enough words in a day for a man like me” with the ease of flipping a blade of wheat grass from one side of the mouth to the other.
The record is filled with little moments that pop—the guitars that scream at the end of “We Got Problems” and their cover of Texas rocker/drifter John Wesley Coleman’s “Summer of ’79” are two big highlights—but in between are long, vexing stretches of inertia. Spider Bags used to play through the bitterness and the malaise, but on Frozen Letter it sometimes sounds like they're surrendering to them instead. The album title itself comes from "Coffin Car”, where McGee imagines a frozen letter jutting out of the ground, then strolls about for five minutes detailing oblique visions of grey horses, curtained rooms, and shiny smokestacks. This, like much of the record, doesn’t build a song so much as it does a series of Rorschach splotches. Everything finally comes together at the end with a big glam blowout, as McGee screams, “I’m tired over your love.” What should be a hollering celebration, though, does little more than force a smile.
As the record closes with the too-fried psych “Eyes Of Death”, it's clear that Frozen Letter exudes ambition without having accomplished much. Spider Bags all but perfected lolling alt-country on Goodbye Cruel World, Hello Crueler World, but Frozen Letter's sallow, raw feel doesn’t sync up with its songwriting. There's a limp, mostly-constructed skeleton of a great rock record here, and maybe that's exactly what it's meant to be. So what Spider Bags do here isn't as thrilling as their previous efforts, which left listeners on the edge of your seat, wondering if everything would fall apart. Regardless, it's easy to commiserate with Frozen Letter, as there's empathy to be found in hearing Spider Bags tirelessly trying to put these songs back together.


Sia’s shiny Christmas album feels inconsistent and underwritten, like opening a gift where someone’s forgotten to remove the tags.

Everyday Is Christmas

Ever since Sia transitioned from “Six Feet Under” coffeeshop songwriter to Top 40 fixture, her career has contained the tension between the writer she’s trained as and the pop star she’s become. Specifically, she has a habit of giving smart, bluntly candid interviews in songwriter mode that are, in pop mode, the exact wrong thing to say. A Billboard interview where she mentioned the “victim to victory” songwriting template of tracks like “Titanium” was thrown back at her, in the headline of a New York Times pan of This Is Acting and countless other reviews. So what was it like writing her first Christmas album? “[There’s a] shortage of good Christmas music… It's not like you have to have an original idea to begin with,” Sia told Zane Lowe. “It's like, Christmas, mistletoe, ho-ho-ho, Santa Claus, Christmas list, elves.” This is technically accurate, in the way that a professional elf might accurately describe Christmas gift-giving as “like, hammer, nails, molds, wrapping paper.” But it also kind of grinches up the business.
Of course, there’s no shortage of existing Christmas songs—virtually every musician records them as a quick stocking-stuffer for music blogs and streaming sites—but most of them are strictly for diehard fans. As far as canonical Christmas songs, the past few decades have produced basically only two. There’s the “All I Want for Christmas Is You” school: festive (or “Extra Festive” or “SuperFestive!”, as Mariah Carey dubbed the re-recordings of her hit) and infectious, in both senses of the word. Then there’s the “Last Christmas” school, where Christmas is an incidental setting for smaller human dramas. There’s plenty of room for variation here, from the downright morose original versions of “White Christmas” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to the acid-dipped tinsel of Dragonette’s “Merry Xmas (Says Your Text Message),” to the sumptuous femme-fatale drama of Saint Etienne’s “No Cure for the Common Christmas,” to the infinite takes on Wham!’s original.
The latter’s also closest to Sia’s non-holiday music, where big pop songs like “Chandelier” are infused with an underlying darkness. It’s a strange choice, then, that Everyday Is Christmas is mostly played straight. Like Kelly Clarkson’s Wrapped in Red, the album was produced by Greg Kurstin, and his trademark shiny production becomes DEFCON 1 festive. “Candy Cane Lane” is colorful and lightweight. “Santa’s Coming for You” has an ironic title, but the only threat is being smothered by Christmas cheer. There are some lovely ballads, such as the lilting, “Unchained Melody”-esque “Snowman” and its sister light-jazz track “Snowflake” (only kind of ruined by the news of 2017 discoursing the word into oblivion), which linger on the season’s impermanence. But they’re the same metaphor, so the effect is muted by sequencing them right next to each other—or anywhere close to “Puppies Are Forever,” the sonic equivalent of having the Christmas stuffing squeezed out of you by a rictus-grinned Elmyra Duff.
There’s plenty Sia could do with an album entirely of Christmas originals, but too many are underwritten; there’s more consistency in the art direction than the songwriting. “Underneath the Mistletoe” flirts with being candid about an obsessive holiday crush—“it’s Christmas time, so run for your life”—but abandons the idea almost immediately. Half of “Ho Ho Ho” wants to be a Christmas misfits’ anthem; the other half wants to be a Christmas version of “Chandelier,” with lots of booze, nothing to lose. The production, vaguely festive and vaguely pop-skanky, doesn’t commit to either. Sia’s got a self-own for this, too: “It was easy and fun. We did it in two weeks.” Of course, plenty of great albums were secretly written in two weeks, just like plenty of fine presents were secretly purchased on the eve of December 24. But it’s still like opening a gift where someone’s forgotten to remove the tags.


Given Robert Pollard's pedigree and prolificacy, it should surprise no-one that Honey Locust Honky Tonk is a good record. But what is surprising is quite how good it is, his best and most focused in some time. Pollard burrows deeper into his beloved classic rock, and somehow discovers new modes of expression.

Honey Locust Honky Tonk

“Prolific” has long been the dominant adjective to describe Robert Pollard, and even then it sounds like an understatement. Deep into his fifties, he hasn’t lost a beat or slowed down a bit, but instead churns out album after album after EP after one-off solo thing after album. Already in 2013 he has released a new Guided by Voices album, a full-length under his Teenage Guitar pseudonym, a singles box set, and a 12”, with who knows what all else planned for the next six months. It’s been this way for decades now, such that Pollard’s chief trait as an artist is the frequency of his output. Consequently, it’s all too easy to forget that he’s not just a prolific songwriter, but a good songwriter, too. Indie rock’s own Joyce Carol Oates possesses an insanely deep vocabulary of classic-rock tropes, a facility with killer hooks, and an idiosyncratic lyrical style that has matured to reveal new depths of wisdom, humor, and harrumphing crotchetiness.
It should surprise exactly no-one that Honey Locust Honky Tonk is a good record: Even at his most unedited and undigested, Pollard’s music still displays a joy in its own resourcefulness, a contentment in its own faith in the power of rock and roll to define a life. In other words, every release is worth spinning at least once. But it should surprise everyone that Honey Locust Honky Tonk is a very good record, his best and most focused in quite some time. One byproduct of his prolific nature is a constant flattening out of his catalog, so that everything, especially at this end of his career, begins to blur together; the highs never seem quite so exciting anymore, the lows no longer quite so embarrassing, and very little stands out as essential. That any particular release stands out at all is by now a small miracle.
Pollard’s dedication to the form has always been impressive, and he has remained largely untouched-- or unperturbed, or uncompelled-- by outside forces or trends in rock and roll. Instead, he has burrowed deeper and deeper into his beloved classic rock and has somehow managed to find new modes of expression in this tiny realm of music. “Circus Green Machine” builds on great bursts of acoustic guitar power chords that sound like Pete Townshend is about to spin a yarn, while “Strange and Pretty Day”, the album’s lowest-fi recording, nods to Skip Spence or maybe Roky Erickson with its insistent one-note piano theme. By this point, Pollard has even become his own reference point: Scuff up the sound a bit and “Airs” or “Igloo Hearts” wouldn’t be out of place on Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes.
Even if it’s not hard to imagine a 30-something Pollard penning these new tunes, Honey Locust Honky Tonk nevertheless sounds like the work of a man with some years and experience behind him. There’s some polish on the melodies, a new forthrightness in the lyrics. And by forthright, I mean how he repeats the pretzel-logic line, “We may never not know,” ad infinitum on “It Disappears in the Least Likely Hands (We May Never Not Know)” and still makes it sound somehow poignant. There’s always been an odd melancholy to Pollard’s music, but there’s a peculiar gravity to the psych-rockin’ “Her Eyes Play Tricks on the Camera” and the country-rockin’ “I Killed a Man Who Looks Like You”. A desperate gregariousness pervades the 44-second toast “I Have to Drink” and surely informs the camp-choir sing-along that ends “Real Fun Is No One’s Monopoly”.
The guitars on Honey Locust Honky Tonk can be sluggish at times, especially during the more cumbersome anthems, and the tracklist could stand some pruning. But these are perennial complaints, excusable for being bound up among his many eccentricities, and Pollard compensates with what seems like a greater sense of mission. Mortality looms over Honey Locust Honky Tonk, explicitly defining songs like “Who Buries the Undertaker” while implicitly informing fragments like “Shielding Whatever Needs You”. Rather than dour, however, the album sounds concerned, perhaps even worried, which illuminates even some of its weaker or seemingly extraneous tracks. It focuses Pollard, who sounds like a man who has said so much already but still has so much left to say.


The North Carolina rap group (minus producer 9th Wonder) reunite for a warm, breezy LP that recalls the best of their original work.

May the Lord Watch

The prospect of a Little Brother reunion seemed so unlikely that both Day One fans and this guy expressed excitement and disbelief when it happened. For the past decade, the North Carolina trio—consisting of producer 9th Wonder and rappers Phonte and Big Pooh—were in different places, creatively and personally. They arrived with fanfare in 2003 via Okayplayer’s message boards and a big cosign from the site’s founder ?uestlove. This wasn’t Southern rap the way we were used to hearing it: Between 9th’s airy, soul-sampling beats and the rappers’ complex flows, Little Brother drew comparisons to East Coast stalwarts like De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and EPMD.
Two years after the critically lauded debut The Listening, Little Brother signed to Atlantic Records and released its second—and maybe its best—studio album, The Minstrel Show, a conceptual LP that spoofed the WB Television Network and the cartoonish black images it promoted. Then the seams started showing: Little Brother’s deal with Atlantic fell apart, and 9th Wonder—who was in and out of the crew due to his rising fame—left the group. Little Brother’s subsequent albums, 2007’s Getback and 2010’s LeftBack, simply didn’t have the same verve. Phonte and Pooh had been rapping together since college; now they were grown men with separate interests. They were limping to the finish line and needed a break from each other.
So there was genuine shock this past May when Phonte announced on Instagram that he and Big Pooh had reunited Little Brother and that new music was on the way. In interviews, Phonte had been cool on the notion of the group getting back together. “I understand people will always ask for it,” he told Billboard in March 2018. “Personally, it’s not something that I have interest in doing, because I enjoy the peace that’s in my life right now.” His tone changed by September, when he was asked to perform a last-minute set at the annual Art of Cool Festival in Durham. He turned the gig into a Little Brother reunion show, and following it, Phonte and Big Pooh agreed to record a new LB album.
Phonte and Big Pooh sound rejuvenated, and while 9th Wonder isn’t on this record (or part of the group), the beats compiled by Khrysis, Nottz, Zo!, Black Milk, and Devin Morrison have a sophisticated bounce, making this feel like an old Little Brother album without dwelling too much in the past. Thematically, May the Lord Watch picks up where The Minstrel Show left off: Radio host Peter Rosenberg shows up as president of the make-believe UBN Network to announce the death of Percy Miracles (Phonte’s singing alter-ego on LB records), and ?uestlove appears on “Inside the Producer’s Studio” as a fictional James Lipton to interview Roy Lee (Phonte’s beat-making alter-ego who can’t really make beats). On “Niggas Hollering,” sports commentator Jemele Hill debates the all-time greatness of Michael Jordan in a fake First Take. In this way, May the Lord Watch feels like deluxe fan service for the 30 and 40-somethings who remember LB’s early projects.
Like Tribe’s 2016 comeback LP, We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service, May the Lord Watch captures Phonte and Pooh where they are now without sacrificing what made them popular. Beneath the light moments, they reflect on the dark times that brought them here. On “Right on Time,” Big Pooh raps: “Took some odd jobs to put salmon on the plate, contemplating moving dope just to get my pockets straight … doing Uber pickups, they don’t recognize the face.” Meanwhile, Phonte acknowledges his struggles to stay above water as an indie artist: “Yeah I got success and the stress to match, ’cause peace of mind rarely comes with a check attached.” “Sittin Alone” delves into life post-30, when Netflix is more fun than clubhopping, and your scented candles are more exciting than overpriced VIP lounge liquor.
There’s no way to know if Little Brother is back back, or if May the Lord Watch was the group’s way of bringing this chapter to a rightful close. But if it’s truly the end, Phonte and Big Pooh have gone out on a high note. May the Lord Watch is the result of clear-eyed reflection, of getting older and wiser and realizing that petty differences shouldn’t dissolve a true brotherhood.


No longer content to play music tethered to the past, the Virginia guitarist uses field recordings and unsettling ambient experiments to remake his virtuosic folk compositions for the present.

The Morning Star

Making folk music can require consultation with the dead. In his semi-autobiographical short-story collection, How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, from 2000, the late luminary John Fahey ascribed supernatural powers to his six-string, calling it “the road to the unconscious past.” Eighteen years later, these remain insightful words about an American musical tradition brimming with ghost stories. Heeding this wisdom throughout his young career, Daniel Bachman has paid tribute to the rhythmic nuances of American Primitive, ragtime, and folk with virtuosic guitar playing. But now, for the first time, the Virginia musician is approaching American roots music as a living panorama, not as something confined by its own past. On The Morning Star, Bachman expands the spatial dimensions of these genres to create folk for an uncertain present rather than an idealized past.
He has no choice but to begin this task with an exorcism. To banish the assumption that current folk music is fundamentally nostalgic, he expels lingering spirits with the 19-minute “Invocation.” An eerie arrangement of singing bowls gradually conjures metallic screeches from the beyond, before arriving at the calming buzz of a shruti box, then erupting into a fiddle’s feverish squeal. Bachman included drone compositions on his self-titled 2016 record and 2014’s Orange Co. Serenade, but those tracks offered grounding tranquility, while “Invocation” trades in unresolved tension. His longest album to date frames its seven songs as ongoing movements; freed from the burden of neatly pruned concision, each one seems to stretch out to infinity.
With the spell of “Invocation” lifted, Bachman invites us into rural settings evoked by meditative guitar pieces, extended field recordings, and unsettling ambient experiments. While his earlier work valued Leo Kottke-esque feats of fingerpicking, on The Morning Star, Bachman’s guitar moves discreetly, letting bustling fauna set scenes first. The chirp of evening crickets and cicadas on “Sycamore City” goes on for a full minute before Bachman’s guitar arpeggiation kicks in, mimicking their erratic sounds. On “New Moon,” his slide whines like a mosquito following a similar preamble.
On his previous records, Bachman moved swiftly through songs, but in mirroring the natural world, The Morning Star’s version of folk music constantly reconsiders the roles of its smallest and largest details. Though he plays hypnotically throughout the album, Bachman’s prominence on each track fluctuates depending on the size of its overall soundscape. His manic guitar is central to “Scrumpy,” until it settles and falls into the background, behind the sound of a passing train. And sometimes Bachman is altogether absent. “Car,” a menacing organ-drone piece that evokes Southern Gothic imagery of pastoral decay, climaxes with the static of an AM radio tuned a millimeter past an evangelical station. This creepy, serene and impossibly expansive view of the countryside intimates that American roots music, much like our natural surroundings, is so vast as to be unknowable.
Fahey experimented with field recordings and musique concrète, too; his late-’60s output included dog barks, locomotive whistles, sampled rainforest sounds. But if this was his pathway to the “unconscious past” he describes, Bachman is more interested in how these elements can push his music into the present. On “Song for the Setting Sun III” and “IV,” he revisits a series he began on 2015’s River, but this time he dims the major-chord brightness of the first two installments with slower, more melancholy and disjointed arrangements. Bachman’s willingness to fundamentally alter the tone of his compositions feels like a rejection of Americana traditionalism that upholds ancient genre conventions without looking for a bigger picture. A brief but vital moment on “III” illustrates this shift: An ambulance siren fades in and out, its wail less an interruption than a reminder of scale. The theoretical emergency—which might have altered someone’s life—comes and goes, yet the song calmly proceeds. Bachman respectfully plucks on, leaving the listener to appraise the gravity of what’s happening in the background.
That open-endedness is the heart of The Morning Star, and it doesn’t just represent a new style for Bachman; as the record progresses, it also teaches his audience a new way of listening. Closing track “New Moon,” whose title signals the completion of a cycle and rebirth, might have come off as meandering and repetitive at the beginning of the record. But in its final moments, once you’ve adjusted your ears, Bachman’s delicate gestures sound at once extremely private and cosmically vast.


The multi-instrumentalist and songwriter’s latest album is somber and searching, filtering personal vulnerability through his familiar delicate melodies and vocal effects.

Break Me Open

In his solo career outside of Bon Iver, S. Carey has crafted a tranquil vision of the natural world. The classically trained composer and multi-instrumentalist often takes inspiration from the wilderness of his native Wisconsin—among other places—to create evocative arrangements bent on capturing the resonance of a pristine landscape. Close your eyes and you’ll see towering, snow-covered pines or the summer sun’s radiant reflection on the creek.
But in between 2018’s Hundred Acres and his new LP Break Me Open, Carey contended with monumental loss: His marriage fell apart and his father passed away. The idyll woven into his music didn’t just darken—it fractured. His latest album is somber and searching; at times, it’s flat-out bleak. On the pulsating “Dark,” Carey sings to his children: “If I ever lost you/I’d throw myself into the deepest riverbend.” Though delivered in a near whisper, the line whips the ear like a raw winter wind. A moment later, Carey catches himself with wry self-awareness: “Well, I know that seems dark/But that’s what I might do/If I ever lost you.” It’s meant as a declaration of love and devotion, but the song’s climactic groundswell, pierced by trumpet and saxophone, confesses a yawning pain.
Break Me Open evolves Carey’s early-career instinct for dense arrangements woven from dulcet instrumentation and technological experimentation with overdub and Auto-Tune. Working once again with producers Zach Hanson and Chris Messina, he spent nine days “putting a bow on years of demos and tinkering, building, re-building,” he wrote on Instagram. In true Carey fashion, that meticulous evolution can be heard in the sheer quantity of synths, loops, and vocal effects braided into each track—synthetic textures that heighten his delicate melodies and intrude on the natural landscape so central to his music.
A flurry of synths embody the immobilizing sensation of “Paralyzed,” where Carey contemplates his children growing older and leaving him behind. The song feels suffocating, but he builds to a soaring finish, knowing that to hold something too close is to lose it. Near the end of the brooding, almost claustrophobic “Starless,” a Prismizer effect captures his bewilderment. The blank sky hanging over the song keeps its compass hidden; nature, once a source of respite and gold-tinged verdancy, seems distant and disorienting in the wake of so much personal loss. “The earth is all but dead,” he sings. “Where will you lay your head?”
Carey’s spare writing, with plainspoken lyrics that sit diminutively against the expansive dimensions of his soundscapes, doesn’t express the same emotional complexity he strives for in his music. On Break Me Open, he’s still processing—the shock of divorce reverberates through his lyrics, which reach for understanding but fall short of poignancy. “If you judge, please don’t/Judge me from where I was,” he sings on “Where I Was.” The next line sets up a dramatic contrast that lands without impact: “But if you must, please do/Judge me from where I am.” Alongside “Waking Up,” it’s a modest, quiet song that ends before it fully unfurls.
Though his words reach for darker emotional valences, the album’s most honest moments come across in Carey’s compositions. On “Desolate,” his arrangement reflects the slow decline of a relationship: an opening heartbeat rhythm is surrounded by a flutter of synths, eventually ceding to steadier percussion that finally makes way for soft, meditative piano. His instinct for rose-colored, languorous moments can’t fully depict the heart-rending heft of his personal drama. “A wound gives off its own light,” wrote the poet Anne Carson. Rather than chase down meaning, Break Me Open abides within sensation.