After laying out the template for Common's latest album, the drummer/producer offers up another hour-long selection of more than two dozen expertly-made beats that are just waiting to be rapped on.

Headnod Suite

The veteran beatmaker had a banner year in 2016, executive producing Common’s Black America Again, providing the blueprint for Kanye West’s “30 Hours,” and collaborating with Kaytranada, Esperanza Spalding, and the Roots. Four years after Karriem Riggins' first solo endeavor, Alone Together, put him on the map as more than just a standout session musician, Riggins’ musical life seemed richer than ever.
Alone Together’s sequel, the new Headnod Suite, echoes the template laid out by its predecessor. The record is, again, a nearly hour-long selection of more than two dozen expertly-made beats, seemingly linked by very little other than the fact that Riggins considered them strong enough to make the album. There’s one exception on Headnod—about two-thirds of the way through the record, a set of tracks form a mini-suite that stands as a short detour before we return to regularly scheduled swing programming.
These tracks, part of the “Cheap Suite,” are the most cohesive section of the larger record. They are roomier, more experimental, and they lead Headnod Suite into more interesting territory, as Riggins explores rhythm-and-space-led compositions reminiscent of the work of Deantoni Parks. Though they are harsher and less soulful than much of what precedes them, these tracks work as a unified experience. Moreover, once you listen to them, you note the trail of breadcrumbs from earlier in the album (“Invasion,” “Dirty Drum Warm Up”) that heralded their arrival.
Elsewhere, Riggins focuses on rolling out gem after gem, with careful thought given to the little details that distinguish a cubic zirconia from a diamond. Riggins is such an expert drummer that it can be hard to identify him as having any kind of percussive signature. These features—the perfectly chopped sample over the tiptoe-light beat on “Sista Misses,” the atmospherics and perfectly placed guitar riff on “Other Side of the Track,” the clatters and snaps that open “Bahia Dreamin,’” the complex bass work underlying the candy-sweet, teased-out melody on “Crystal Stairs”—give him his voice as a producer.
Riggins’ abiding love for hip-hop is showcased throughout Headnod Suite. On “Never Come Close,” a selection of Prodigy’s verse from “Shook Ones Pt. II” leads out of the track as if it were a final showstopping instrumental flourish, while on “Keep It On,” Common’s ad-libs are swaddled in a steady beat and warm instrumentation, like a beloved child. Even the interludes that Riggins commits to exploring throughout the record come off as a tribute to the skits and exclamations that adorn rap albums—little breaks where vocals communicate an attitude and sense of place.
Though there are few beats here that miss the mark, the big issue is that Riggins has trouble editing his cuts down to a standard length. They regularly sprawl beyond the two-minute mark and sometimes even make it to three. In an interview with XXL, he expressed that one of the big differences between Headnod Suite and Alone Together was that the new album contained more “stuff MCs will want to rap to.” True, some of the tracks seem gratuitously extended in order to coax rappers into adopting them, giving them a home on their own projects. You can’t blame Riggins for wanting more spotlight. His turn on Black America Again gave Common the template for what was arguably his strongest record in more than a decade. Coming off that success, and his many other impressive collaborations, Headnod scans as a beat tape in the classic sense: welcoming to all listeners, but meant to convey something particularly special for those who might help Riggins take his career even further.


On the London duo's second album, and first for Warp, they alter course from the manicured electronics of their debut, taking more risks-- especially with their vocals, and those of unexpected collaborator King Krule. And refreshingly, there's no nostalgia, dubby decay or wistfulness here.

Mount Kimbie: Cold Spring Fault Less Youth

Cold Spring Fault Less Youth

There exists a lovely, hazy video of a young Mount Kimbie performing in a church with a young James Blake. They're playing Kimbie's breakthrough "Maybes" (which later received an epochal Blake remix), and near the end of the song, the three of them-- Blake and Kimbie principales Dominic Maker and Kai Campos-- take on the song's prying, percussive vocal riff. Maybe it's the setting, but the moment feels big. Friends singing with friends, tripping into pop music, figuring it out on the fly. Blake would develop those instincts, finding plenty of acclaim as a singer songwriter. Kimbie spent the ensuing years folding in on themselves, making pretty electro-acoustic vignettes. They released a couple of EPs and, eventually, a debut album, Crooks & Lovers, that treated the U.K. electronic scene like a bonsai tree, pruning the unruly until something manicured and personal remained.
On Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, their second album and first for Warp, they alter course. They take more risks, particularly with voices: their own, often, and with unexpected collaborator King Krule. The duo, which has valued coherency and neatness, move towards live instrumentation, peppering their fizzy electronics with thumbed bass lines and crumpling drums. The music that results remains small and detailed, but also allows the humid outside air to contaminate it. If Cold Spring is not an unbridled reach for a brass ring, it's at least an acknowledgment that such a ring exists.
Don't let those instruments-- including the bossy brass sounds that open the album-- throw you, though. Cold Spring is a distinctly electronic album, and a modern one as well. Dolorous electric pianos and stuttering electronics constantly bother the rhythm section. And while Cold Spring owes debts-- to Four Tet and Fridge, to Oval, to wonky stylists like Isotope 217-- its collection of tones, syncopation, and lurch is contemporary and distinct. There is no nostalgia, no dubby decay or wistfulness, locked up in Cold Spring. This alone is refreshing.
Cold Spring succeeds because Maker and Campos go out of their way to foil their default, kempt state. The most noticeable example of which is the addition of King Krule, a.k.a. gravel-voiced youngster Archy Marshall. His churlish, marble-mouthed tone is so at odds with the Kimbie universe that when it first arrives, during the opening moments of "You Took Your Time", it sounds like someone aggressively tousling the band's meticulously combed hair. Krule is a magnetic presence, fronting on a murder-- "Now did you see me/ I killed a man"-- and slowly chewing words over a distended synthesizers and thin percussion, resulting in something of a grime ballad. When he returns later on "Meter, Pale, Tone" he expertly summarizes the odd, personal charm of Mount Kimbie: "Crack a toe/ It was the loudest of sounds."
Make and Campos take turns at the mic themselves, reprising the blocky sing-chants of "Maybes" to pleasant effect. It reminds me of shape-note singing in its pacing and expression: limited voices, irregular melodic shifts. It's not pop music, but on tracks like lead single "Made to Stray" and "Blood and Form" their voices balance on the arrangements' edges and tightrope to the finish. The instrumental tracks have a broader, almost post-rock feel to them, offering jazzy percussion, needle-threaded bass workouts, and heaving atmospheres. The resplendent "Break Well" and the closing "Fall Out" prove them still capable of erratic beauty.
For these gains they've sacrificed some of their agility, the crisp snaps and cracks of Crooks & Lovers, and their easy self-containment. But Cold Spring is miles from epic or strained, and it's comfortable with its imbalance. It feels like a personal triumph: On album two Mount Kimbie were a smidge more ambitious, something that will be true whether or not the outside world deigns to notice.


On her third album for Hyperdub, the UK experimental musician uses chaotic arrangements and glitchy drums to express knotty, difficult-to-name emotions.

Gentle Confrontation

The Kübler-Ross model has done the bereaved dirty ever since it entered the public consciousness in the 1970s. Its five tidy stages are woefully inadequate to handle the myriad shifting forms of grief: unpredictable physical manifestations, the random recovery or loss of memories, slow-dawning realizations, circular ruminations. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but it can help form emotional scar tissue. Loraine James’ third album for Hyperdub, Gentle Confrontation, is a self-examination of the marks and bruises inflicted by a significant loss in childhood. James has always wielded her voice as a malleable tool—sometimes sharpened into a jagged point between glitchy stop-start arrangements and skittering drums, other times barely perceptible beneath woozy pitch bends and plaintive synth chords. But with Gentle Confrontation she sounds newly and vocally vulnerable. “When I was seven my dad went to heaven, possibly,” she croons on “2003,” the album’s lead single. “I looked at the sky: uncertainty/It hurt me, uncertainty.”
In the six years that she’s been releasing music, James has proven herself to be a gifted moodsmith with no shortage of textures to meditate within. Alongside two previous albums of dancefloor-skewed IDM, there was a tender tribute album to minimalist composer Julian Eastman, Building Something Beautiful for Me, and a self-titled LP from her ambient project Whatever the Weather, all released at an impressive pace. In retrospect, it now seems that the Eastman project and Whatever the Weather may have been necessary precursors for James to tap into the marrow of such heartfelt material on Gentle Confrontation. The album’s self-titled opening track elegantly bridges the full expanse of James’ identities in an introduction that feels suitably cinematic: A dramatically swelling orchestral arrangement is given generous space to establish a doleful emotional register before being joined by electronic pulses and sampled drum loops.
Gentle Confrontation sprawls, and each track settles into a distinct tonality. James mirrors her raw lyrics on “2003” with a spare musical arrangement that consists of little more than the rhythmic movement of air through gasping levers and bellows. The coolly modern R&B production of “Let U Go” is remarkable for its subtly twisted feeling of discombobulation: Samples run in reverse beneath wonky chords; vocal processing renders indie R&B darling KeiyaA’s voice unrecognizable. Other standouts include “I DM U,” which pits James’ heady, unpredictable programming against the sharp sticks of Black Midi drummer Morgan Simpson. “Cards With the Grandparents” turns inwards, transforming a vignette of family life into an abstract sound study: James samples the sounds of a shuffling deck, laughter, and conversation, but she balances the light-hearted patter with a dose of melancholy (“My grandad has dementia, but he’s still very cool”).
When James revisits an idea, which she does a couple of times, each second pass reveals her evolutionary process. “Glitch the System (Glitch Bitch 2)” takes up where “Glitch Bitch,” from her 2019 album For You and I, left off. While the rework keeps the earlier track’s mid-tempo kick and swing, it casts off the fixed 4/4 structure and dials up the fluttering synth pads and pillowy kicks, yielding a melodic push-and-pull that soars with abandon. Similarly, “Prelude of Tired of Me” offers a mumbling inner monologue and a bottom-heavy sketch of a beat, whereas “Tired of Me,” seven tracks later, arrives spruced up and with extra sass. What at first seems like reticence—Loraine is back, she mutters, but she’s not feeling it, doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t want to think about it—abruptly dissolves into soft golden light and the plucked tones of a pastoral sunbeam. “I left it all/And I wonder/How would I find the power again?” she harmonizes, delicately.
Gentle Confrontation is peppered with notable collaborations, perhaps in acknowledgement of the role that music plays in formative years, when metabolizing one’s own thoughts and emotions through the lyrics and gestures of others becomes so critical. James credits early-2000s indie-electronic acts Lusine and Dntel as inspirations, and you can hear their influence on “One Way Ticket to the Midwest (Emo)” which features Corey Mastrangelo of the math-rock band Vasudeva. Its lilting folktronica is sweetly calming, providing a moment of rest at the album’s midpoint. But across the sheer length and expansiveness of Gentle Confrontation, some collaborations—particularly the sleek, sophisticated ballads featuring Eden Samara and George Riley—don’t quite attain the same level of resonance. Though delicately sung and tastefully produced, both lack the sense of revealing transformation so convincingly conveyed at other points in the album.
In the album’s closing track, “Saying Goodbye,” Contour sings a telling line: “To look me in the eye is to know my strife.” His velvety timbre and gentle cadence smooth over James’ fractured synths and scratchy percussion. Along with the opening title track, it provides a poignant bookend to an album that refuses to draw a neatly conclusive arc. Instead, Gentle Confrontation offers an invitation to bear witness to a process that’s human, hard to define, and close to the heart.


Blackstar has David Bowie embracing his status as a no-fucks icon, clutching onto remnants from the past as exploratory jazz and the echos of various mad men soundtrack his freefall.

Blackstar

David Bowie has died many deaths yet he is still with us. He is popular music’s ultimate Lazarus: Just as that Biblical figure was beckoned by Jesus to emerge from his tomb after four days of nothingness, Bowie has put many of his selves to rest over the last half-century, only to rise again with a different guise. This is astounding to watch, but it's more treacherous to live through; following Lazarus’ return, priests plotted to kill him, fearing the power of his story. And imagine actually being such a miracle man—resurrection is a hard act to follow.
Bowie knows all this. He will always have to answer to his epochal work of the 1970s, the decade in which he dictated several strands of popular and experimental culture, when he made reinvention seem as easy as waking up in the morning. Rather than trying to outrun those years, as he did in the '80s and '90s, he is now mining them in a resolutely bizarre way that scoffs at greatest-hits tours, nostalgia, and brainless regurgitation.
His new off-Broadway musical is called Lazarus, and it turns Bowie’s penchant for avatars into an intriguing shell game: The disjointed production features actor Michael C. Hall doing his best impression of Bowie’s corrupted, drunk, and immortal alien from the 1976 art film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Trapped in a set that mimics a Manhattan penthouse, Hall presses himself up to his high skyscraper windows as he sings a new Bowie song also called "Lazarus." "This way or no way, you know, I’ll be free," he sings, smudging his hands against the glass. "Just like that bluebird." Bowie sings the same song on Blackstar, an album that has him clutching onto remnants from the past as exploratory jazz and the echos of various mad men soundtrack his freefall.
Following years of troubling silence, Bowie returned to the pop world with 2013’s The Next Day. The goodwill surrounding his return could not overcome the album’s overall sense of stasis, though. Conversely, on Blackstar, he embraces his status as a no-fucks icon, a 68-year-old with "nothing left to lose," as he sings on "Lazarus." The album features a quartet of brand-new collaborators, led by the celebrated modern jazz saxophonist Donny McCaslin, whose repertoire includes hard bop as well as skittering Aphex Twin covers. Bowie’s longtime studio wingman Tony Visconti is back as co-producer, bringing along with him some continuity and a sense of history.
Because as much as Blackstar shakes up our idea of what a David Bowie record can sound like, its blend of jazz, codes, brutality, drama, and alienation is not without precedent in his work. Bowie’s first proper instrument was a saxophone, after all, and as a preteen he looked up to his older half-brother Terry Burns, who exposed him to John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Beat Generation ideals. The links connecting Bowie, his brother, and jazz feel significant. Burns suffered from schizophrenia throughout his life; he once tried to kill himself by jumping out of a mental hospital window and eventually committed suicide by putting himself in front of a train in 1985.
Perhaps this helps explain why Bowie has often used jazz and his saxophone not for finger-snapping pep but rather to hint at mystery and unease. It’s there in his close collaborations with avant-jazz pianist Mike Garson, from 1973’s "Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)" all the way to 2003’s "Bring Me the Disco King." It’s in his wild squawks on 1993’s "Jump They Say," an ode to Burns. But there is no greater example of the pathos that makes Bowie’s saxophone breathe than on "Subterraneans" from 1977’s Low, one of his most dour (and influential) outré moments. That song uncovered a mood of future nostalgia so lasting that it’s difficult to imagine the existence of an act like Boards of Canada without it. Completing the circle, Boards of Canada were reportedly one of Bowie’s inspirations for Blackstar. At this point, it is all but impossible for Bowie to escape himself, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try.
Thematically, Blackstar pushes on with the world-weary nihilism that has marked much of his work this century. "It’s a head-spinning dichotomy of the lust for life against the finality of everything," he mused around the release of 2003’s Reality. "It’s those two things raging against each other… that produces these moments that feel like real truth." Those collisions come hard and strong throughout the album, unpredictable jazz solos and spirited vocals meeting timeless stories of blunt force and destruction. The rollicking "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore" gets its name from a controversial 17th-century play in which a man has sex with his sister only to stab her in the heart in the middle of a kiss. Bowie’s twist involves some canny gender-bending ("she punched me like a dude"), a robbery, and World War I, but the gist is the same—humans will always resort to a language of savagery when necessary, no matter where or when. See also: "Girl Loves Me," which has Bowie yelping in the slang originated by A Clockwork Orange’s ultraviolent droogs.
Though this mix of jazz, malice, and historical role-play is intoxicating, Blackstar becomes whole with its two-song denouement, which balances out the bruises and blood with a couple of salty tears. These are essentially classic David Bowie ballads, laments in which he lets his mask hang just enough for us to see the creases of skin behind it. "Dollar Days" is the confession of a restless soul who could not spend his golden years in a blissful British countryside even if he wanted to. "I’m dying to push their backs against the grain and fool them all again and again," he sings, the words doubling as a mantra for Blackstar and much of Bowie’s career. Then, on "I Can’t Give Everything Away," he once again sounds like a frustrated Lazarus, stymied by a returning pulse. This tortured immortality is no gimmick: Bowie will live on long after the man has died. For now, though, he’s making the most of his latest reawakening, adding to the myth while the myth is his to hold.


Liars' relentlessly tense new album finds the always excellent band focusing on detail and texture rather than stylistic schizophrenia.

Sisterworld

Whatever or wherever Sisterworld is, it sounds like a pretty creepy place. The fifth Liars album is relentlessly tense-- not so much scary as surreal. Every track is shrouded in echo and anxiety, and often all the tension erupts into bursts of buzzing guitars or pounding beats. Not every dark cloud breaks into a thunderstorm, but it constantly feels like one is lurking around the corner.
Despite such potential for surprise, overall Sisterworld isn't actually all that surprising compared to the rest of Liars' discography. For a band known for switching gears from track to track and album to album, this is the most thoroughly Liars-sounding record so far. It has the rhythmic insistence of Drum's Not Dead, the sleepwalking chants of They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, and the straightforward songwriting of Liars, often sounding like a streamlined update on the latter. The narrowed range brings increased depth, and it's intriguing to hear Liars focus on detail and texture rather than stylistic schizophrenia. It turns out refinement suits them as nicely as reinvention.
Take "Here Comes All the People", which the band spent a year on, crafting its basic structure in Los Angeles and adding orchestral atmospheres in Prague. None of that guarantees quality-- it's possible to make crap in both L.A. and Prague. But Liars used this elongated process to give zoomed-in attention to each moment. So the trembling guitar line, high-pitched strings, and psychotic piano all fit together, like a puzzle whose picture isn't clear until the last piece is in place. When singer Angus Andrew ends the song by chanting "counting victims one by one," the killer effect comes through lethal injection rather than a loud, blunt act. That mood continues into the meditative "Drip", a track that's almost all atmosphere, with Andrew murmuring, "When will I awake from this dormant sleep?" as if he has no say in the matter.
Not everything on Sisterworld is so subdued. "Proud Evolution" grows into a persistent Krautrock-styled groove; the clicking "No Barrier Fun" has the catchy lilt of a nursery rhyme; and "Scarecrows on a Killer Slant" sounds like a warped version of Liars' slamming "Plaster Casts of Everything". Even "Drop Dead", a drunken march that sound ever ready to collapse, holds upbeat energy in its skewed sway. Still, the dominant mode here is creeping tension without tons of cathartic release. That tension is so well-crafted that it consistently engages, but 42 minutes of it might not completely win over every Liars fan, especially those drawn to their more raucous moments. Admittedly, some parts are easier to admire than they are to enjoy. But stick with Sisterworld as it builds, let it seep into your brain while you wait for its bulging seams to burst, and you might find yourself unable to turn your ears away. Eventually, Liars' commitment to their own creepy cause proves contagious.


For their Dave Fridmann-produced Sub Pop debut, veteran slowcore band Low expand their palette, but achieve varying degrees of success.

The Great Destroyer

"The future is prisms and math," Alan Sparhawk sings on "Death of a Salesman", one of the few successful tracks from The Great Destroyer. Any English professor will tell you it's dangerous to conflate an author with his narrator, but in this case, there are parallels to draw. Think of the prism as this statement from the band's online bio (written circa Secret Name): "Low is a trio from Duluth, Minnesota, who make very slow music. That's not the only thing there is to their music, or even the most important thing, but it's what you'll notice first." Anyone that's listened to myopic negative criticism of the group knows this all too well.
The bio goes on to note that there's more to Low music than narcoleptic tempos; indeed, you'd have to be tone-deaf or stubborn to listen to Secret Name or Songs From a Dead Pilot and not realize that. Still, the stereotype remains-- as do expectations from fans of all stripes, whether the band wants to cop to them or not. Most importantly, there's the expectations that the band has of themselves; over the past decade, the group has shown a willingness to buck convention and follow their muse wherever it leads. Unfortunately, it sounds like they've been lead astray. In other words (again, from "Death of a Salesman"): "I forgot all my songs/ The words now are wrong/ And I burned my guitar in a rage".
This forgetful rage is exemplified by "Everybody's Song", one of the album's many missteps. On this song, the group rocks out-- Sparhawk breaks out the Spinal Tap amp, Mimi Parker pummels her snare and high-hat, and Zak Sally...well, Zak doesn't have to change his approach too much, though he might be plucking his bass strings with more force than usual. On top of this mess are those patented gorgeous two-part harmonies, uncharacteristically straining to make themselves heard over the racket. And that's what this track amounts to-- a big ball of racket, crass and boorish, full of the sound and fury that don't amount to much. More importantly, it goes against everything that Low does successfully.
Don't take my word for it, though. According to Low, "they play songs stripped to their bare essentials: slow tempos, quiet voices, powerful lyrics, and minimal instrumentations." You'd think that a song following that plan of attack would be a smashing success, or-- at the very least-- a bit better than this Marshall Stacked stuff. Instead, they end up with a song bastard naysayers can use as Hater's Exhibit A in the case of Why Low Is No Good. "Broadway (So Many People)", an interminable seven-minute track, takes its sweet time alternating between bored lead-footed strumming and waning echoed ambiance before giving way to a cloying coda that aims for "pretty" but ends up well in the rough.
The rest of the album consists of various extrapolations of Low's sound with varying degrees of success. "Monkey", the lead-off track, is what "Everybody's Song" would be with just a smidge of restraint, a better sense of dynamics, and some self-awareness. Following that is "California", probably the best pop song the group's ever recorded (with the meta-aware "Just Stand Back" and the peppy Spector homage "Walk Into the Sea" finishing close behind). On the other hand, there are Low-by-numbers tracks like "On the Edge Of" (working the quiet/loud trick like a broken light switch) and over-wrought slabs like "Step" (complete with vocal effects, piano taps, hand claps, and children's vocals all drunkenly stumbling into each other), where the busy hands of producer Dave Fridmann still end up doing the Devil's work.
Erring on the side of minimal instrumentation would have done this record a world of good. "Cue the Strings" would play out beautifully as just Mimi & Alan set against a sea of feedback, but the invasive metronomic beat and the fake strings (popping in on cue) muddy the waters; the all tension/no release moves of "Pissing" is the slightly more successful flip side to "Everybody's Song" and its all release/no tension MO; "Silver Rider" pays too much attention to its own edict ("Sometimes your voice is not enough") and adds just enough bells and whistles-- a timpani drum here, a buried looped vocal there, some acoustic picking sprinkled throughout-- to upset the song's balance; "When I Go Deaf" works fine as a quiet acoustic number but loses a bit of its emotional heft when the full band comes in and the guitar tech plugs in Sparhawk's Flying V.
"The future is prisms and math." So let's crunch some numbers: Low's been an ongoing concern for over a decade. The Great Destroyer is their 8th album, and 12th full-length release. They've recorded enough songs during the course of their career to fill a three-CD box set with a set of 52 songs that barely overlaps what's available on their full-lengths. And never mind the number of tours and shows and hours logged in countless studios. I mention all this because of the intriguing subtext permeating most of these songs. It's in the song titles--"Death of a Salesman", "When I Go Deaf", "Cue The Strings", "Walk Into The Sea". It's in the lyrics--"never sing that song again," "the march is over/ The great destroyer/ She passes through you like a knife," "Yeah, time's a great destroyer/ It leaves every child a bastard." And, most tellingly, on "Just Stand Back": "I could turn on you so fast/ I'll just cut you in the end." Sounds like they're cutting bait and heading back to shore.
You can imagine a wry smirk on Alan's face when he sings: "It's a hit/ It's got soul/ Steal the show/ With your rock'n'roll". It's a wry encapsulation of a band that's made a point (up until now) to forgo convention, instead setting off to discover a new dialect in an old language. This line could easily serve as an epithet, or an epitaph. And maybe this is a death, and The Great Destroyer is Low themselves, orphaning their fans and their history for the sake of the group's creative edification. If this album is indeed the beginning of a long, arduous journey of rediscovery and rebirth and other fun ponderous stuff, here's hoping the rest of the trip is more enjoyable than this initial misstep.


Torch of the Mystics is Sun City Girls’ best-loved album. It's replete with moments of hypnotic tunefulness stretched into songs that feel as classic and well-worn as the dusty cassettes the band uncovered on their travels around the globe. Long out of print, it's been resissued on CD and vinyl.

Torch of the Mystics

The arc of Sun City Girls’ 26-year history was long, but it bent toward chaos. Their music was an unpredictable pile-up of rock, pop, jazz, blues, psych, noise, improv, and many far-flung global sounds—with special love for the music of the Middle East—delivered as ballads, jams, rants, plays, and pranks. Their dual passions for playing whatever they felt like and confounding any audience who would listen dovetailed perfectly, such that even their biggest fans can cite Sun City Girls moments that they found baffling or even off-putting.
This penchant for messiness helps explain why 1990’s Torch of the Mystics is Sun City Girls’ most famous and perhaps best-loved album. The most surprising aspect of this record is how well arranged and engaging the music is. Though the trio had roots in the Arizona hardcore scene of the early '80s, no one ever pegged them as purveyors of three chords and the truth, especially given the rambling releases that preceded Torch. But the three-chord riff that launches album opener "Blue Mamba" couldn't be more direct, and remains Sun City Girls’ biggest-ever earworm.
Torch of the Mystics is replete with moments like that—nuggets of hypnotic tunefulness stretched into songs that feel as classic and well-worn as the dusty cassettes the band uncovered on their travels around the globe (later mined for compilations on bassist/singer Alan Bishop’s Sublime Frequencies label). You can actually whistle along to most of Torch’s songs—one even starts with Bishop whistling the melody for you—and even the farthest-out tunes have discernible shapes that quickly burn into memory.
The most immediate images come from the guitar of Alan Bishop’s younger brother Rick. Earlier Sun City Girls albums hinted at his instrumental prowess, but it’s on full display on Torch of the Mystics. His playing isn’t about technical know-how or honed chops—though he clearly has both of those—but rather finding epiphanies in repetition. The curling chords of "Esoterica of Abyssynia" are so dizzying they seem to fold in on themselves, like a musical Möbius strip. Similar effects spin from the warped strings of "Radar 1941", which sounds like a water-logged surf tune that washed up from the other side of the planet.
An equal counterpart to Rick’s guitar is the malleable voice of his sibling, Alan. The Bishops’ worldly travels clearly gave Alan an ear for all manner of singing styles, and on Torch he displays the vocal capabilities to match them. At times he sounds like he’s channeling ghosts of singers past, as in the worshipful warble of "Space Prophet Dogon" or the strikingly-beautiful scale-riding of "The Shining Path". The latter is a cover of Bolivian folk song "Llorando se feu", and Sun City Girls’ treatment is typical of their magical way with covers. It retains the stirring mood of the original while transposing it to a more mysterious, fantastical realm (in this case, one haunted by the Spaghetti Western scores of Bishop hero Ennio Morricone). Yet as breathtaking as his singing can be, some of Alan’s most moving vocal performances come when he yells, hums, and moans, reaching for a higher plane while simultaneously conveying pristine beauty.
That pursuit is all over Torch of the Mystics, and a big part of what makes it great. It’s as much about the profundity of disorder as the clarity of structure. Though the latter may be more obvious on first listen, dig in deep and the trio’s love of surprise and confusion emerge loudly. Many tracks teeter on the edge of explosion, straddling the line between inspiration and insanity. Four of the songs were completely improvised, and all were recorded in single takes, but the album’s unity emerges from the band’s persistent vision. Torch of the Mystics finds a point at which chaos and order meet to become a third path—one that, in this thrilling and still-vital incarnation, only Sun City Girls could discover.


The New Jersey rapper makes Haiti the main character of his latest project, balancing social context with a sense of intimacy and urgency.

Balens Cho (Hot Candles)

Haiti is more than just a character in Mach-Hommy’s music—it’s the lens through which he views the world. Once one of the richest and most lucrative colonies in the Americas, the country famously played host to the West’s first successful slave revolt and remains an example of what happens when Black people take ownership of their labor, land, and capital: Punished with the present-day equivalent of $21 billion in debt to its colonizers—compensation for the enslavers’ “property”—the island nation is still reeling from its colonial history.
This context gives Mach-Hommy’s new album Balens Cho a sense of intimacy and immediacy. The Haitian-American MC doesn’t need to quote Fanon or other scholars to illustrate the effects of colonialism. He reflects it through depictions of the people within his sphere, like the brother-in-law who flees to Europe to study art, never to return, or the father whose social capital turned to dust in Mach’s hands after he died. He’s clearly scarred, but his defense mechanisms rely less on violence than they do on protection—of his heart, his mind, and his body.
Balens Cho contains no shortage of cheeky one-liners (“Your flow trash, plus you psoas like the muscle”), but they feel more matter-of-fact than a flex, a tool for Mach-Hommy to burn his thoughts into your brain. He wields his voice with intention, from gravelly croons on hooks to rhythmic flows in his verses. The brief interludes—which feature Caucasian interlopers to Haitian culture and sound like clips from vintage broadcasts—are somewhat jarring, making it difficult to become immersed in the images Mach-Hommy paints. They’re a reminder of the voyeuristic nature of listening to music this intimate as an outsider to the environment in which it was created; a mirror for some, a telescope for others.
If Mach’s approach seems somewhat combative, it’s likely by design. He makes no effort to make the music more accessible and often seems to attempt the opposite. His early fan base was small but passionate, and until very recently, you had to work hard—and pay a lot—to find his music. Even parsing the lyrics requires extra effort; they’re not available where you’d expect to find them, and transcriptions that pop up online are quickly struck down (as he reminds us on “Magnum Band Remix”: “Chain snatching to DMCA, either way, your link gone”). And because Haitian Creole varies from region to region, some of the lyrics in his native tongue may be tricky to interpret even if you speak it fluently.
Balens Cho feels softer and smoother than his last LP, this spring’s Pray for Haiti. Much of that can be attributed to Montreal producer Nicholas Craven—who produced half of this album’s eight songs—and Sam Gendel, a virtuosic instrumentalist whose saxophone is the second-most expressive voice on the record. It often serves as an instrumental foil to Mach-Hommy’s voice; Gendel’s extended outro on “Wooden Nickels” seems to mirror the end of “Traditional,” the two instruments in conversation with each other.
Even when it’s somber and elegiac, Balens Cho is devoid of self-pity. “What happens when conditions ain’t livable?” he asks knowingly on “Traditional.” “What happens when your vision ain’t visible?” The stories he tells here are not merely his own. He understands, better than most, the role of mythmaking in reshaping reality. Often, all it requires is a perspective shift; a statement like “All space programs derive themselves from Africa” might seem radical until you dig deeper and find that the oldest astronomical sites are found in Africa, where ancient astronomers named constellations centuries before the Greeks. Part of Mach’s genius is that he forces you to meet him halfway, to seek that which lies outside oneself. For those who do, the rewards are plentiful.

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A document of the Detroit jazz collective’s later years captures a cast of dozens balancing local community with cultural staying power.

Tribe: Hometown: Detroit Sessions 1990-2014

Hometown: Detroit Sessions 1990-2014

Almost from its birth, Tribe was much more than simply a jazz group. It was a living example of the ways that community and cultural capital could evolve together during the American century’s final third, in a city that helped define the era’s musical and civic spirit: Detroit, Michigan. Tribe began as a collective around four musicians—reed player Wendell Harrison, trombonist Phil Ranellin, trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, and pianist Harold McKinney—who embodied the late 1960s’ spirit of black self-determination. It ended up a local institution, tutoring program, and one of the unmistakable through lines in the city’s musical history. The contributions of Tribe members stretch directly from Ray Charles and Motown to Geri Allen and Detroit techno. If Hometown: Detroit Sessions 1990-2014, a wonderful compilation of mostly unreleased recordings from the latter chapters of Tribe’s history, doesn’t quite scale early-career musical heights, it makes clear that judging lifelong endeavors through a narrow lens of a single period of time—even one that contemporary perspective deems “classic”—is a fool’s errand.
There is no denying the value of Tribe’s revolutionary early sounds. Recorded mostly under the names of individual players and only occasionally as a group, their fluid mixture of soulful post-bop swing, free avant-garde playing, hard in-the-pocket jazz-funk, and almighty music of the spirit continues to spill gracefully off comps like Soul Jazz’s Message From the Tribe: An Anthology of Tribe Records 1972-76 or P-Vine’s Vibes From the Tribe Vol. I and Vol. II; it’s likely to appeal to any admirer of improvisational rapture or a fat-ass groove. But the myriad activities around these recordings, the ones that helped build and sustain both Detroit’s mythical creative streak and its literal artistic community, expose Tribe’s deeper virtues.
This is where neighborhood capital, and Tribe’s contribution to it, come into play. The self-sustaining ethos of Tribe Records, Harrison’s Wenha Records, and Harrison and McKiney’s Rebirth Records helped carry on Motown’s ideal of homegrown, artist-run labels, one that continues in the city’s dance music to this day. Tribe magazine—published from 1972 until 1977 and edited by journalist Herb Boyd, author of Hometown’s liner notes and the great 2017 book Black Detroit: A People's History of Self-Determination—was deeply involved in local politics, galvanizing votes for  the city’s first black mayor, Coleman Young. (According to Mark Stryker’s fine new book Jazz From Detroit, the publication was also successful enough to fund Tribe Records.) And both Marcus Belgrave’s Jazz Development Workshop and Harrison and McKinney’s educational and event-production organization Rebirth Inc. were responsible for fine-tuning an endless list of Detroit’s musical talent.
That’s one reason Hometown is stocked with performers you may recognize from classic John Coltrane albums (bassist Reggie Workman) or Theo Parrish 12"s (trumpeter John Douglas), along with lesser-known giants (trumpeter Jimmy Owens, trombonist Kiani Zawadi). Despite consisting of three separate sessions recorded over 24 years, and featuring two dozen players, the collection feels like a unified work. Eschewing the outer territories Tribe members once wandered, Hometown conveys a more comforting musical tradition (though with plenty of details that trail outward like breadcrumbs, for those paying attention). Its sound is, to quote the title of the McKinney piece that opens the set, “Wide and Blue.” Recorded live in 1995, at the SereNgeti Ballroom, a great turn-of-the-century Detroit jazz space, the song cuts a relaxed and confident stride: McKinney and Workman’s extended conversation and Harrison’s compact tenor solo are bookended by a theme stated on four horns—Harrison, Belgrave, Owens, and Zawadi. It’s a harmonic statement that wouldn’t seem out of place in the classic Blue Note songbook—that is, until the diminuendo, when horns unlock into a frenzied blowing burst that’s part Frenchmen Street, part Saturn.
Hometown collects many such knowing touches as it showcases the depth of an oft-ignored creative community and its cultural staying power. The experience and mastry is there for all to hear, whether in the lesser-known compositions (each of the 10 songs is an original that features its author) or in exceptional playing, which is beguilingly concise.
The songs are alone worth the price. Ranelin’s “Freddie’s Groove” is a dance number honoring Freddie Hubbard, precisely capturing the legendary trumpeter’s funky Red Clay/Straight Life period (cue: Ralphe Armstrong’s uncut bassline, Harrison quoting cartoon themes like Sonny Rollins, and guitarist John Arnold in rocked-up George Benson mode). The Pamela Wise composition that gives the compilation its name beautifully mixes the propulsion of a squad of percussionists with the intertwined melancholy of Douglas’ trumpet and Harrison’s tenor, supported by Wise’s modal keys. Zawadi’s “Libra Ahora,” the set’s single moment of stretching out, brings the clave and the drummers (including a star turn by percussionist Frencesco Mora), plus an extended interplay between the four horns. And then there’s McKinney’s “Juba,” which opens with the pianist’s wife and twin daughters in a rendition of an antebellum handclap-and-voice holler, followed by a horn party that McKinney amends by banging out wonderfully dissonant clusters.
Such social history has always been central to Tribe’s musical expression, and Hometown features a trio of direct lyrical engagements with the past that also speak to the present. Wise’s “Ode to Black Mothers” and “Marcus Garvey,” featuring words by poet/pastor Mbiyu Chui, are familiar ceremonial acclamations in which a lone teacher rises on a bed of drums to bear a valuable lesson. But McKinney’s closing “Slave Ship Enterprise” is something else entirely: a two-decades-old, solo piano-and-voice reading whose prescience would be remarkable if you didn’t know that black America has been preaching its message for a century. It is an inversion of the chords of “America the Beautiful,” rewritten as an operatically delivered tone poem, with McKinney unfurling a broad “comment on the American phenomenon”—at times ambient, at others direct. “Seems so near and dear, yet so far/Near as our ideals, yet far from the way we are,” reads his indictment of the “land of the free,” a ship “of state… where captain and captive must share a common fate.”
The fact that “Slave Ship Enterprise” ends on an almost undeserved image of hope—“U.S. spells ‘us’”—says a lot about where the faith of both Tribe and McKinney, who passed away in 2001, lay. (Belgrave died in 2015.) Like much of the collective’s work, musical and otherwise, it was rooted in the strength of the community and its culture. There was (and remains) an inherent understanding that the vitality of any hometown is expressed not only in how brightly its light shines, but in how long the people keep it on.


The latest from the wildly eclectic Calexico takes its cues from the group's two most recent records, the kitchen-sink aesthetic of 2003's Feast of Wire and the more basic rock-band approach of 2006's Garden Ruin. Iron & Wine's Sam Beam and Tortoise's Doug McCombs guest.

Carried to Dust

Being in Calexico is almost like attending a music school, where every record is another lesson on the way to a dissertation. Core members Joey Burns and John Convertino prepped in Giant Sand and Friends of Dean Martinez, and they've kept a busy schedule of extracurricular activities since, touring with Wilco and Iron & Wine and playing on dozens of other people's records. Their own albums have swerved all over the stylistic map while maintaining an essential sense of identity. The divergence in sound between their last two albums, 2003's Feast of Wire and 2006's Garden Ruin, basically predicts the shape of Carried to Dust-- Feast of Wire was the record where they tried everything and made it work; its follow-up was their basic rock album.
While they're frequently thought of as stylists or synthesists, Calexico use their cross-genre amalgams to make music of emotional power and beauty, and this record has exceptional instances of both. "Writer's Minor Holiday" provides the beauty. Convertino's laid-back, jazzy drumming drives the track, freeing falsetto vocals and sparing dabs of steel guitar to serve as ghostly hooks and allowing the central melody to reveal itself slowly. Several of these songs are like that-- the primary vocal is so understated it defers to the instruments; to that end, string-soaked, waltz-time ballad "The News About William" works almost like a duet between Burns and Paul Niehaus' steel guitar.
Multi-instrumentalist Jacob Valenzuela gets his first Calexico co-lead vocal here, sharing the mic with guest Amparo Sanchez on the Spanish-language "Inspiración", which has the album's boldest borderland horn part and a freaky underlying organ ostinato. Other guests include Jairo Zavala, who partners with Burns on the dark chorus of "Victor Jara's Hands", and Iron & Wine's Sam Beam, who lends his soft harmonies to the sensuous flamenco-dub slide of "House of Valparaiso". The album's final third is darker and harder, moving from the desert surf of "El Gatillo (Trigger Revisited)" to the sawing, mournful cello of "Falling from Sleeves" to the icy, spooky soundscape of closer "Contention City", a slow drift of electric piano, glockenspiel, and otherwordly steel guitar featuring Doug McCombs of Tortoise and Brokeback.
Carried to Dust, therefore, is more in the band's usual Southwestern jazz/country/rock/tejano mold than their last, but it's not as diffuse or far-ranging as Feast of Wire. Ultimately, this is the type of record this band is suited to making, and it richly rewards repeat listening-- details and melodies that seem buried or understated eventually come to fore, slowly revealed in a mixture of organic warmth, welcome variety, and subtle complexity.


On their latest, tropical-house duo Classixx enlist guest vocalists from How to Dress Well to Passion Pit's Michael Angelakos to T-Pain.

Faraway Reach

When Classixx released their debut album Hanging Gardens in 2013, it turned out that the Los Angeles duo Tyler Blake and Michael David, previously known for their production, were equally talented as songwriters. Among the album's many highlights were the songs in which the duo brought in outside voices, such as the glorious Nancy Whang-assisted kiss-off "All You're Waiting For" and the pre-sunrise melancholy of “Borderline,” which featured an affecting performance from Kisses vocalist Jesse Kivel. These fleeting glimpses of the pop album Classixx might one day make were tantalized, and on their sophomore effort Faraway Reach, they plant their flag even firmer in straight-ahead pop.
Their songwriting remains a strong point, and Classixx continue to show a knack for choosing kindred-spirit collaborators. This time around, names that would appear in larger fonts on festival posters show up: Michael Angelakos of Passion Pit—whose has worked with dance producers before, appearing on last year's Adventure, the underrated debut from France's Madeon—drops by on “Safe Inside,” and his wide-eyed sincerity neatly aligns with Classixx's buoyant worldview.“I Feel Numb” is full-on disco, featuring a heart-on-his-sleeve vocal from Holy Ghost! frontman Alex Frankel.
“I am the one who makes you feel OK,” Frankel assures a concerned significant other as he warns them that he might be slipping into another depressive spell. It's an example of the world-weariness that suffuses the record—Frankel makes this person feel not good, not great, but just OK. And, as any adult will attest, sometimes OK is good enough. An album that recasts the dancefloor as a space to explore—and, crucially, attempt to combat—the malaise of adulthood, Faraway Reach concerns itself with less-than-glamorous topics ranging from depression (the aforementioned “I Feel Numb”), to mundane and banal activities like fighting with one's partner in line at the grocery store (“In These Fine Times”) and allowing of the pain of the past to inform but not define you (“Just Let Go,” which absorbs the anthemic qualities of big-tent EDM and features How to Dress Well aka Tom Krell in full-on diva mode to great effect).
Classixx redeems the bleakness of these topics with their natural sense of warmth—their music often feels like a familiar hand on your shoulder urging you to keep going. In hindsight, the sun-bleached vibes of Hanging Gardens played a role in the rise of tropical house, and the same laid-back tempos and vague hints of sea breeze  are found on Faraway Reach. But there's an inclusivity to Classixx, a sense of arms-outstretched welcoming that makes it impossible for anyone to turn their nose up at their music.
“I can do whatever I want,” warbles T-Pain on standout “Whatever I Want.” This confidence applies equally to his collaborators—in a nod to Michael David's birthplace of South Africa, Classixx effortlessly bring in Nonku, daughter of famed South African artist Ray Phiri, on “Ndivile.” And the album's wordless moments, of which there are only three, including tranquil opener "Grecian Summer" and the title track, demonstrate that Classixx haven't lost the ability to craft propulsive dance grooves, even if they're treated more as scene-setters and transitional tools. At various points, Faraway Reach is: a shrug; a call-to-arms; a balm. At its best, it's all these things at once.


A new reissue of the the master craftsman’s 2001 album offers the quintessential portrait of his third act, showcasing a fascination with the places where genres intertwine.

Nick Lowe: The Convincer (20th Anniversary Reissue)

Nick Lowe was never known for his finesse. They called him “Basher” back in the days when he produced seminal records by the likes of Elvis Costello, the Damned, and the Pretenders. Most of the time, he was satisfied after the first or second take, moving on to the next thrill, a breakneck pace reflected in the music he made with and without his band Rockpile during the late 1970s. His tempos were reckless, his hooks were heavy, and he relished every harmony and joke. On the back cover of his 1978 solo debut Jesus of Cool, Lowe sported a replica of the Riddler outfit from the 1960s Batman TV series, and the suit fit: He was a pop prankster on the run from sincerity and maturity.
Time waits for no one, and, after his pop stardom slipped away during the 1980s, Lowe decided to act his age. A quick glance at the album cover for The Convincer, Lowe’s newly reissued  2001 album, conveys just how many years had passed since he was a shaggy-haired scamp, cracking wise about how it’s “Cruel to Be Kind.” Staring directly at the camera, bearing a wry grin, Lowe is clean-cut, grey, and dapper: The rock’n’roll ruffian has turned into a debonair charmer. Musically, The Convincer is the quintessential album of Lowe's third act. Its unfussy, minimalist production enhances the deliberate craft of its songs: There are no unnecessary elements, only what’s needed to bring the song to life.
Discussing his creative approach at the time of The Convincer’s release, Lowe told No Depressions’s David Cantwell, “I work on it like mad until it feels like I’m singing someone else’s song and I can take any kind of liberty with it I want.” Cover songs have  long been a trademark of Lowe’s work, and the selections of “Only a Fool Breaks His Own Heart,” originally cut by jazz singer Arthur Prysock and popularized by the calypso vocalist Mighty Sparrow, and Johnny Rivers’ “Poor Side of Town” serve as mile markers, illustrating where Lowe had been and where he was headed. Both of the songs date from the middle of the 1960s, right in the swinging heyday of the British Invasion, but they speak to a time when professional songwriters composed malleable standards that would sound good in the hands of pop, country, or R&B singers. Lowe aimed for this sweet spot with his original material, echoing the stylish, composed lilt of the Brill Building while incorporating the homespun craft of Nashville's Music Row.
Lowe wasn’t interested in stylistic exercises; he wanted to find the places where different genres intertwined. Underneath Lowe’s pre-Beatles craft, his band cooks with the simmering intensity of Memphis soul. The smoldering opener “Homewrecker” makes this influence plain, unfolding in suspended tension until the southern groove snaps it into focus. Lowe’s compositions play to these juxtapositions: Witness how the surly “Has She Got a Friend?” gets sweetened by a soaring, soulful bridge that flips the song’s rockabilly on its head. Sometimes, Lowe lets the twists lie within his stories, as on “Indian Queens,” where the narrator recounts misadventure after misadventure. Lowe’s flair for exquisitely rendered details comes to a peak on “Lately I’ve Let Things Slide,” a weary chronicle of a relapse: “There’s a cut upon my brow/Must have banged myself somehow/But I can’t remember now.”
Maybe there's a connection between “Lately I’ve Let Things Slide” and the wild carousing of Lowe’s youth, but the song, while rendered with specific imagery, doesn’t feel autobiographical. He’s not wallowing in the darkness—he’s savoring a song so finely sculpted that he can perform it with the freedom of an actor. In this song, Lowe gives his best vocal performance on record, snarling punchlines (he delivers “Let’s cut to the chase, pal” with barely concealed contempt) and milking drama from even the quietest moments. These are well-worn showbiz tricks that hardly felt modern in 2001, and they sound even more old-fashioned 20 years later on this reissue, accompanied by  a bonus acoustic EP (largely covers, all worthy, including the original “Different Kind of Blue”) that was originally included with the album’s first pressing. Still, The Convincer doesn’t seem dated so much as suspended in time. Its mid-century points of reference are so far in the past that they now sound fresh, providing the essential elements for a master craftsman who can carve them into music that only sounds sturdier and more distinctive with time.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The indie rock veterans return with their second album since their almost decade-long layoff. While the punchy hooks and uptempo shouters are still here, the album as a whole is a shade darker, focusing on personal loss and the passage of time.

I Hate Music

When bands have been around awhile, people tend to discuss the way age has entered their work, even if the topic doesn't quite fit. With Superchunk's 10th album, I Hate Music, a collection that focuses on the forward march of time and the pain that goes along with it, this kind of commentary is unavoidable.
The Chapel Hill quartet has been a reliable and surprisingly consistent force for almost 25 years. They formed in 1989, a little bit before "punk broke," during a time when people with their eyes on the underground and ears on college radio thought of the band's North Carolina hometown as an indie-rock Seattle. They released their ninth album Majesty Shredding in 2010 after the almost 10-year hiatus following 2001's Here's to Shutting Up, and nothing much had changed: Superchunk still delivered amped-up, pogo-inspiring power pop. They've had a formula from the beginning, but it's one that works.
Their second post-hiatus record, I Hate Music, has a strong title that carries a deeper layer of meaning with it. They've released records upon records full of unbridled joy, frontman Mac McCaughan also records solo material as Portastatic, and he and bassist Laura Ballance are still going strong with their powerhouse indie label, Merge. So, no, Superchunk don't hate music. The sentiment speaks to something you find happening when you edge closer to 40 and beyond: loved ones start dying, and something that used to seem distant starts hitting close to home. As McCaughan sings on "Me & You & Jackie Mittoo": "I hate music-- what is it worth?/ Can’t bring anyone back to this earth/ Or fill in the space between all of the notes/ But I got nothing else so I guess here we go…" It's an "I can't go on, I will go on" sort of thing, and they create one hell of a ruckus in the process of moving on.
Like post-SST and then present-day Dinosaur Jr., the pace is a little slower here, some of the guitars quieter, and the production shinier, but the upward push of McCaughan's voice and that Superchunk momentum remains. (The acoustic and synth flourishes lend it a feeling similar to the early work of the more downcast, stripped-back Portastatic.) It's more grounded and focused than Majesty, and more thoughtfully reflective. Superchunk's best songs have always been the spastic ones, but though this is their darkest album to date, they don't fall into a midtempo torpor. McCaughan's nasal yowl can't help being anthemic, whether he's calling a co-worker a slack motherfucker, asking you to punch him harder, or, as in I Hate Music's excellent opener, "Overflows", singing lines like: "Everything the dead don’t know/ Piles up like magazines and overflows/ And everything that you won’t see/ Just swirls around/ Comes down and buries me." The subject matter here stings.
I Hate Music doesn't treat loss as vague or theoretical. The album's dedicated to a close friend of McCaughan and the band, the filmmaker and artist David Doernberg, who died after a battle with cancer in March of 2012. As McCaughan wrote in a blog post around that time: "I can't possibly enumerate the ways that Dave was intertwined into the fabric of our own family and lives. Likewise I have a feeling the hole that his passing leaves is larger than we even yet know." Once you learn where the songs are coming from, the sad lyrics are sadder, the happy lyrics more wistful.
Doernberg haunts the record beautifully. McCaughan sings in the final song, "What Can We Do": "Meet you on the corner every time it snows/ I’ve got wrinkles around my eyes/ I’ll say I love you, I won’t say goodbye," while the breezy "Me & You & Jackie Mittoo" references the Skatalites founder and the joy of hearing his music in a van with friends. On another standout, "Trees of Barcelona", McCaughan shares the wonderfully rendered memories of Portastatic playing Primavera Sound in 2007, and the friends who ran through the city when that set was over. The quieter, milder "Your Theme" asks for the impossible in simple terms: "Oh what I’d do/ To waste an afternoon with you/ Eating obscure, looking at girls, shopping for jeans/ Learning how to be and not to seem/ Singing your theme."
Thoughtful, quiet moments like that work but, this being Superchunk, the uptempo tracks still hit hardest. The fantastic "FOH", for instance, is cut from the same the cloth as Superchunk's raging best, as McCaughan asks a series of questions with few answers: "Did you lose something?/ Oh, I lost something.../ Tell me, are you coming around?/ When are you coming around?" Mount Moriah's Heather McEntire lends distant backing vocals to "Breaking Down", a jaunty song about fading memory. And things get especially amped on "Staying Home", a one-minute punk song about staying home that feels like their "Screaming at a Wall".
A song that combines both approaches is the the previously mentioned slow-builder, "What Can We Do" with its "I won't say goodbye." It's an epic recounting, and a fitting end to an album about listening to the music you loved with a friend and hating that music because it won't bring him back. But all the band can do is create more music anyway, offering up songs that will inevitably soundtrack other lives and deaths, too.


On her second EP, the South Korean producer branches out from the house music of her debut, touching upon juke, trap, and techno while sing-rapping in a mixture of English and Korean.

How can I

박혜진 Park Hye Jin’s previous solo release, the 2018 EP IF U WANT IT, was characterised by a dreamy electronic mood and laconic vocal style. So it’s a kick in the pants to hear the South Korean house DJ warning us to “shut the fuck up” over a sinister techno backing on “NO,” the fourth track on her new EP—like catching your grandmother cursing, or Daft Punk dabbling in hardcore. How can I is Park’s first release for Ninja Tune, the new label a sign of her blossoming status in the dance world. But far from playing it safe, Park uses the opportunity to expand her musical horizons: The EP’s six tracks touch variously upon juke, trap, house, and techno without ever committing to a genre.
Pulling this all together is Park’s flat-but-flexible voice, which has a way of creating micro-melodies out of the smallest inflections. In the chorus of “Can you” Park adds a sing-song edge to the word “babe,” transforming a trite line (“Can you be my babe?”) into an infuriatingly catchy hook—half playground taunt, half declaration of intent. She later adds an impassioned “I fucking hate you,” the two phrases crashing into each other and throwing off narrative sparks.
Park began experimenting with rapping and singing around 2015, two years before she turned to DJing. Yet her vocals on this EP, sung half in Korean and half in English, have more in common with the finite, hammer-headed style of juke than the expansive world of rap; her ultra-repetitive lyrics and sharp vocal hooks tend to ratchet off the beat like just another percussive sound.
The production on “Can you,” the EP’s best track by a pinch, also nods toward juke, using the barrelling kick drums, skidding hats, and frantic BPMs pioneered by DJ Deeon and DJ Slugo in Chicago a quarter century ago. But Park subverts juke’s unyielding musical storm by adding hazy synth melodies to the mix, and the light-and-shade contrast between melody and beat echoes the battle between love and hate played out in the song’s lyrics. “How come” follows a similar route, its 172 BPM scramble, garbled vocal cutups, and nebulous chords suggesting the energetic elegance of a rave in a rose garden, while “NO” is straight-up nasty, with Park’s bullish vocal riding a metallic techno stomp. “Like this,” the EP’s opening track, is the only song that would have easily fit on IF U WANT IT, its house shuffle and feather-light chords serving as a dapper stylistic bridge to what has come before.
At times it feels like Park is deliberately playing against her strengths as she confounds our expectations and forgoes the gorgeous indolence of IF U WANT IT. The repetitive nature of her vocals means there is little room to hide when the hooks don’t connect. The EP’s title track is horrible: A generic trap beat meets a slurred chorus that sounds about as melodious as a foghorn and inspires a mixture of mortification and distress. But a single misstep on an EP full of intriguing new paths does not a total failure make. How can I is not as thematically coherent or straight-up enjoyable as IF U WANT IT, but it is considerably more inspiring in its experimentation—a challenge, perhaps, to a house-music scene too happy in stasis.


Continuing to mature into a more grown-up image, the nine-member K-pop girl group balances self-contentment and romantic confidence with breezy summer thrill-seeking.

Taste of Love

Nine-member K-pop girl group TWICE have been around for more than a half decade, navigated stark stylistic changes, and maintained a dependable discography every step of the way. During the first three years of their career, they released ebullient singles that worked in tandem with their cutesy, chipper demeanor: energetic group chants, light and airy production, genre-hopping that matched the many moods of young love. The 2019 hit “Fancy” signaled their move toward a more mature image, and the follow-up singles—including the Dua Lipa-indebted scorcher “I Can’t Stop Me”—confirmed they could thrive in this new era (2019’s Feel Special and 2020’s Eyes Wide Open are their most electrifying releases). TWICE continue their hot streak on Taste of Love, offering further proof they stand head and shoulders above most of their contemporaries.
This excellence isn’t immediately obvious from lead single “Alcohol-Free,” an unhurried bossa nova song produced by JYP, aka label head Jin-young Park. On the surface, the love-drunk lyrics feel unnecessarily tethered to a sobriety metaphor—a peculiar move for a group shedding its youthful side. But in the context of their work until now, “Alcohol-Free” is a significant step: TWICE now unabashedly sing about love without the anxieties that underlined previous singles. On early-career highlights “TT” and “Likey,” beats that landed between freestyle and Atlanta bass suggested that TWICE were forcing themselves to push past sadness and hesitation. Here, any bounce or buoyancy points to paradise; the cheery atmosphere is wholly, remarkably content.
Taste of Love overflows with these moments of clear, magnetic confidence. “First Time,” one of the strongest tracks, is both spacious and patient. These two qualities are crucial, as they allow vocals to remain the focal point, and Nayeon and Jihyo’s declarations of a fulfilling romance sell their deep satisfaction. Jade Thirlwall has a co-writing credit, and it serves as an illuminating point of comparison: Little Mix have captured K-pop’s spirit better than any other Western girl group, but on this mini-album, TWICE sound most self-assured when eschewing maximalist bombast for subtler evocations. “Conversation” most elegantly showcases their less-is-more approach: The verses are backed by little more than frothy synth bubbles, but when the chorus arrives, a commanding bassline reveals the sensuality and insistence in every line. TWICE don’t need to belabor broadcasting their emotions; the production does enough to fill in the canvas.
TWICE’s devotion to breeziness on Taste of Love cements it as one of K-pop’s best summer albums. It also makes their search for love more fun than ever. “Scandal” has whispered vocals, sparse piano-house thumping, and a seductive bassline—they’ve never sounded so poised. On “Baby Blue Love,” laid-back disco grooves anchor their desire for dancing with somebody. The song is less about infatuation, though, than savoring the highs of summer partying—its sweeping strings provide a modest but luxe climax. “SOS” takes their in-the-moment living even further: TWICE ask for a lover to save them, but they sing with such understated cool that it’s evident they’re uninterested in anything long-term—right now, it’s about playful memory-making. The shimmering synth blips mirror their lighthearted calls, closing the album out on a sweet, pleasurable, altogether carefree note. TWICE make it all look so easy. And with Taste of Love, they convince you that seeking out summer thrills is the most important and irresistible task at hand.

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The German producer offers his prettiest, silkiest, and most poignant minimal electronic music ever.

Venq Tolep

In Robag Wruhme’s world, the sun is forever on the horizon—the sky turning peach, the birds gently chirping, the moon hung just so. Once upon a time, the German producer born Gabor Schablitzki pursued a more antic muse. Both solo and in the duo Wighnomy Brothers, with Monkey Maffia, his productions epitomized the fidgety energy of the genre known simply as “minimal”: dry, scratchy rhythms, bristly as an anti-static brush, flecked with hiccupping repetitions and crisscrossing strobes. His 2004 album Wuzzlebud KK remains a masterpiece of the period, as burly a profile as minimal ever managed, but as the style’s flame faded and Wruhme’s rhythmic tics fell out of favor, he pivoted toward the moodier sounds of 2011’s Thora Vukk, finding a middle ground between his bruising dancefloor instincts and pensive jazz piano.
Now, eight years later, Venq Tolep shows how much Wruhme has mellowed with age. This is the prettiest music he has ever made: The album is suffused with the wistful glow of radiant synths, the occasional piano or string ensemble, and largely wordless vocals. Lysann Zander, of the groups Stereofysh and Send More Cats, is credited on the first two tracks, but her voice has been rendered unintelligible, as pure, silky tone color. Rather than a collection of club tracks, Venq Tolep is poised in the gray area between home-listening house, ambient, and half-remembered vestiges of IDM. Sometimes it feels like an attempt to fashion a new kind of songwriting, one less dependent upon lyrics than simple human presence.
The music isn’t beatless, by and large—as always, it swims in rippling drum programming, a stream of syncopated hi-hats and glitchy fills that move like liquid. His arrangements move in similar ways, surging forward and falling back just short of the anticipated peak. That curious sense of motion plays out across the album, translating to the only slightly frustrating thing about the record: Especially in its first half, as it skips across a succession of short, sketch-like pieces, Venq Tolep struggles to get going. The gentle “Westfal,” all backwards hi-hats and sighing vocoder, would make as fitting an introduction as the album’s actual opener, which precedes it; track three, “Iklahx,” peters out after a couple minutes of pitter-pat clicks and heavenly coos. Only with track four, “Ak-Do 5,” does Wruhme really find his percussive groove, wedding the airy sounds of early Boards of Canada to a crisp, decisive drumbeat, but then it’s back to the hammock, as though he were worn out from the brief exertion.
Still, as horizontal house goes, it doesn’t get lovelier than this, and the album’s reluctance to deliver dopamine hits when they’re expected also translates to one of its more alluring qualities: the frequent tension between the harmonic and melodic qualities of traditional song form and dance music’s linear, repetitive structure.
There’s only one fully vocal track: “Nata Alma,” a remix of Bugge Wesseltoft and Sidsel Endresen’s 1999 song “You Might Say,” a haunting plea from the depths of a failing relationship. This actually isn’t the first time Wruhme has reworked the song; the Wighnomy Brothers delivered a punchier version of it in 2003, but this one sounds little like the earlier remix. It’s sadder, slower, and more expansive. Endresen’s delivery is the perfect foil for Wruhme’s tearjerking: There’s real pathos there—you can practically make out the contours of the lump in her throat—but there’s even more restraint.
The album ends with an outro that might at first seem like overkill, given the preponderance of intros, sketches, and interludes. It’s a simple conceit: Over plangent piano chords, friends from around the world phone in, say their names and hometown, and count to three in their native languages. Some names are familiar (Pampa boss DJ Koze, labelmate Axel Boman), some less so; they come from San Francisco, Hamburg, Tel Aviv, Santiago, and if there’s no obvious organizing principle, the scattered map points suggest a picture of international community, the kind fostered by a lifetime in independent music. It’s strangely affecting, this tender portrait of a chosen family, and proof of how Wruhme can elicit real emotion out of such humble stuff.


Saxophonist Daniel Thorne and his Immix Ensemble stretch the boundaries of contemporary classical music and avant-garde composition. Each movement on Transition garbles a classic instrument with electronic processing.

Transition

Most musical instruments are frozen in history, timeless in function but stuck in the contexts that surround their invention. Spurred on by this idea, saxophonist Daniel Thorne and his Immix Ensemble teamed up with Bristolian producer Sebastian Gainsborough (Vessel) to compose Transition. Transition is a four-movement suite, stylized as a conversation between concert-hall orchestration and left-field electronic production--something which in the last few years is a rapidly growing intersection. Each of the work’s four songs is supposed to highlight the historical snapshots of specific instruments (the trumpet, the saxophone, the oboe, etc) and how their contexts can be remixed or garbled with the presence of an electronic partner.
It’s not necessarily a groundbreaking concept. For last the decade, artists like Nils Frahm, Max Richter, or Daniel Wohl have been stretching the boundaries of the conversation between contemporary classical music and avant-garde composition that Thorne and Gainsborough are just entering. The piece is actually two years old, having been originally commissioned in the fall of 2014 for performances at Tate Britain and the University of Liverpool. The performances also stressed a collaboration between video art and orchestration, meaning it often feels like something substantial just listening to the album.
To its credit, Transition is an extremely breezy listen for a record of experimental classical music--running a little over 26 minutes, with only one song extending over eight minutes. The economy and pacing allows Thorne and Gainsborough to play with a wide range of elements without any feeling of excess or wasted space. Each of the four movements use their minutes wisely, allowing for more exploration than you’d think possible.
Starting with “What Hath God Wrought,” the artists decided to pair the bass clarinet and saxophone, the instruments whose sounds compliment and challenge each other the best across the entire album. There is something dancerly about the ways the two instruments weave around each other. Their faceoff is made interestingly discomfiting by a low drone that Vessel overlays on top of the action, something that very slowly takes over the song. His electronic touch is barely perceptible at first, but he sneakily washes out the sounds, making them feel older and less stable by generating a series of bleeps and fields of static that give the recording the character of an old radio broadcast.  “What Hath God Wrought” gets more and more crowded, allowing the analog and electronic sources to crash into each other and becoming indistinguishable. It seems to make the argument very early on that these sounds can’t exactly coexist naturally, that they always generate friction by sharing the same space.
Following “What Hath God Wrought” is “De Revolutionibus” (“On Revolutions” in Latin), a movement that furthers the tension Transition wants to make very apparent. Of the four movements, it seems to be the most influenced by Vessel’s history of moody and industrial productions. It’s undeniably Gothic in mood, with violins screaming in the presence of electronic squeals and hisses. There are brief horrifying moments where it sounds like insects are crawling around the recording microphones. The instruments are artfully crumpled together, adding to the texture of a song that seems to draw inspiration from bumper-to-bumper traffic and free jazz. It’s the most interesting eight minutes of the entire album.
“Scope” was the only one of the songs not co-penned by Gainsborough, and as a Thorne-focused affair, it lacks the same tense conversation of the two pieces that preceded it. The electronics seem to disappear for nearly six minutes, and it makes for a conventional and wan listening experience. To make up it seems they packed the closer “Battle Cry” with all the violence its title suggests--transforming the conversation between the musicians into a full blown argument. Fittingly “Battle Cry” ends abruptly. The last squeaks of the trumpet cut the rope, and curtains fall down on Transition almost with no warning.
Overall Transition is never as probing as it can be. It doesn’t allow for total investment from a listener because the marriage of sounds is incomplete and fitful. The thought experiment that should be at the core of the album sometimes felt lost in a confusing morass of interjections and trip-ups. But there are enough moments of pure gold that peek its head out of the morass that make the experience worth it in the end.


After a string of surprisingly and contentiously accessible albums, SY attempted to balance their pop curiosity with its experimental instincts.

A Thousand Leaves

In 1995, Sonic Youth bucked expectation and headlined Lollapalooza. The booking, an offer they had refused multiple times, seemed emblematic of the band’s trajectory; five years prior, they had signed with David Geffen’s DGC imprint, the label that released more accessible LPs like Goo and Dirty. Sonic Youth had always found Lollapalooza corny—a “crowd of university kids with a spring-break mentality,” as Thurston Moore once put it. But in 1995, with a supporting lineup of Pavement, Beck, and the Jesus Lizard, Sonic Youth recognized that a cultural shift—one they’d been nurturing for the past 15 years—was rumbling in the mainstream. They also realized that their festival bounty could finance a new means of creative freedom: Sonic Youth used their earnings to purchase a 16-track recording studio in lower Manhattan, and A Thousand Leaves was the first LP to grow from its soil.
It was a polarizing harvest. Those initiated on the poppier Goo and Dirty found the 1998 album’s yawning passages and guitar tangles inaccessible. Those who felt betrayed by the very accessibility of Sonic Youth’s early-’90s DGC output, however, heard a band merging its dual aptitudes: fearless experimentation and melodic indie rock. Now, 21 years since its release, A Thousand Leaves reveals a group that was still full of creative ambition nearly two decades into its career. Despite major-label grooming and the hurdles of parenthood (Moore and Kim Gordon had their daughter Coco in 1994), Sonic Youth made an album for no one but themselves. A Thousand Leaves is far from perfect, but it’s the sound of four musicians doing exactly what they set out to do.
This clear-cut sense of intention no doubt stems from Sonic Youth’s increased control over their music, or at least the means of making it. Unencumbered by hourly rates, the group took nearly two years laying down the 11-song LP in its new studio in New York’s Financial District. “We just sort of let ourselves grow away from the cycle of writing, recording, touring—the competitive nature of being out there,” Moore told The New York Times in 1998, later revealing that the compositional inspiration for A Thousand Leaves was just as unrestrained. “Turntable and disk jockey culture is pretty much all about repetitive and improvised structure,” Moore explained. “There are no real classic song ideas.”
That A Thousand Leaves was void of “classic song ideas” might have fueled some critics’ disdain for it in ’98, but much of the record has aged well in the past 20 years. “Sunday,” an undeniable gem that marries Sonic Youth’s dual tendencies toward melody and experimental spinouts, was an early single, paired with a Macaulay Culkin-starring music video directed by Harmony Korine. “Sunday” also received the commercial radio treatment, its original five minutes chopped to three. The truncated version sadly omits the song’s most interesting passage: a mess of squeals and gasps from Moore’s and Lee Ranaldo’s guitars around the three-minute mark. As their gnarled instruments unspool, Moore deadpans: “With you, Sunday never ends,” just before the lights dim and the song is snuffed out.
Some of the most successful tracks on A Thousand Leaves are crafted from opposing forces. Songs like “Wildflower Soul” and “Karen Koltrane” fold quiet, measured details into greater passages of cacophony. “Wildflower Soul” seemingly spans every word in the band’s sonic vocabulary: ’60s folk, the Velvet Underground, and the combative guitar ensembles of Glenn Branca. The 11-minute “Hits of Sunshine (For Allen Ginsberg)” is brimming with clatters, clicks, and squeaks that sound handmade in a foley studio. During a wordless interlude, guitars warble like Peter Frampton’s talk box dosed with codeine, their oozing pace steadied by Steve Shelley’s modest snare.
Thurston Moore has said that Sonic Youth’s approach to writing lyrics had more to do with the musicality of words—how they function within the existing composition—than their literal or metaphorical significance. “Hits of Sunshine” is one of the few tracks on the album whose lyrics succeed on both planes. Moore practically whispers, unveiling vivid, impressionistic scenes. “The painting has a dream/Where shadow breaks the seam,” he murmurs. “Blue is bashful/Green is my goal/Yellow girls are running backward.” It’s a fitting elegy for the legendary Beat poet (and friend of the band) Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997.
Elsewhere, the voice is wielded as an instrument of abrasion, particularly on Kim Gordon’s superbly caustic entries. “The Ineffable Me” is delightfully snotty, Gordon’s vocal cords ripped raw and strained into shrieks as she tears down office misogynists. “Don’t you break her… Or you’ll fuck with me,” she commands, before taunting her enemy: “It’s a cushy job/A pussy’s job/A cum junkie’s job/Makes my dick throb.” Bass crunches and rumbles beneath her as if she’s standing atop an active volcano. Gordon spews equally potent venom on “French Tickler” and “Female Mechanic Now on Duty,” the latter alternating punk discord with lulling guitar excerpts. “Modern women cry/Modern women don’t cry” Gordon muses at the song’s center, summarizing the complex, often conflicting standards women are held to (which, two decades later, have not much improved).
The tracks on A Thousand Leaves that haven’t endured are those that drag, or, as one reviewer wrote in the ’90s, feel simultaneously “tossed off and overwrought.” Opener “Contre Le Sexisme” is one. While its atmospheric chimes and smears of static make for a nuanced ambient piece, Gordon’s pitchy croons are just small enough to irritate, like a fruit fly flitting around your ear canal; the instinct is to swat it away. “Hoarfrost” and “Snare, Girl” are snoozers of a different caliber; they follow a more traditional song structure than “Contre,” but fall flat when compared with the rest of the album. Perhaps they were inserted as sonic respites from all the noise, but silence could have done the job just as well.
Some of the record’s shortcomings haven’t evaporated with age, but 21 years after it divided critics and disoriented fans, A Thousand Leaves is an exciting—if flawed—testament to longevity and process. Prior to A Thousand Leaves Sonic Youth had already put in 17 years as a group, released nine albums, and started families; they could have easily banged out another crowd-pleasing LP and collected their checks, or retired altogether. Instead, they chose to make a piece of art on their own terms and time. That it emerged imperfect was likely the least of their concerns.


Multi-instrumentalists Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund combine forces on textured, stormy folk compositions that encourage deeper listening.

Shone a Rainbow Light On

Shone a Rainbow Light On, by the new instrumental folk trio Setting, evokes the dark, infinite expanse of the night sky with its shimmering stars. The joint project of multi-instrumentalists Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund, the album draws upon free improvisation, Americana, and minimalist music to recreate the textures of the murky unknown. The three artists are experts in composing intricate soundscapes out of a few elements: Fennelly crafts celestial drone music as Mind Over Mirrors, Bowles has played for years in the trailblazing psychedelic noise band Pelt, and Westerlund has drummed in the folk-rock group Megafaun and DeYarmond Edison, the early band of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Together, they show that Americana music doesn’t have to be sun-dappled and bright, it can be mysterious and unwieldy, too.
Formed during the pandemic in 2021, Setting began as a series of regular improvisation sessions in Westerlund’s backyard in Durham, North Carolina. Bowles and Westerlund had already been playing together occasionally as a percussion duo, and Fennelly had given them the motivation to all gather while passing through Durham from the North Carolina coast. During the trio’s early sessions they’d jam outside at a distance, letting the wide-open spirit of the outdoors seep into their work. The trio’s songs move in cycles, like a storm blowing through a field, and their instruments often flutter like birds or buzz like insects.
Though Settings’ music sprawls, it feels minimalistic in practice, exploring just a couple of chords like Philip Glass and encouraging deeper listening like Pauline Oliveros. The trio often begins with a few long notes, gradually adding rhythms and other timbres to the mix; their motions are subtle, their music deepening with each added layer. Opener “We Center” feels like a delicate meditation at the start, beginning with soft, rustling noises. Pulsating rhythms enter at a distance and come into view with each repetition. Hearing the song is like looking out at a barren wilderness and noticing, upon closer examination, that it’s teeming with life.
Shone a Rainbow Light On’s twists and turns give each track bottomless dimension. The tense, fast-paced, “Zoetropics” starts with forlorn tones and bustling rhythms; bristling, plucked melodies join the fray only to pull away as quickly as they enter. “A Sun Harp” opens with a series of free improvisations on piano, synths, and percussion, layering patterns that don’t seem to mesh; it grows into an uproar, each instrument crescendoing until it bursts aflame. Their music is at its most haywire, yet by the end, it still returns to a place of calm. The solemn closer “Fog Glossaries” is the most unexpected. The rumbling song sighs out chords, and a chime gloomily marks the passage of time. It’s the darkest track on the album and where the trio’s details feel their most vivid—nature’s thorniness displayed in full beauty.


The band’s seventh album is compulsively listenable, oddly moving, and stranger than it first appears.

A Bath Full of Ecstasy

New Hot Chip songs always seem like spaceships: sleek, polished, unsubtle, a little ridiculous. These qualities make it easy to marvel at the work of the London group while also underestimating it. Hot Chip have been around for nearly 20 years now, and though they reached a peak about halfway through (their mid-career albums Made in the Dark and One Life Stand are hard to choose between), they’ve never entirely dropped off. Their last album, 2015’s Why Make Sense, was a grower, complete with one of their best singles to date (“Started Right”). Their new one, A Bath Full of Ecstasy, sounds at first so Hot Chippy as to be a caricature, with big Technicolor beats and big, tenderly sung ballads from lead vocalist Alexis Taylor, but it turns out to be another strong entry. For the most part, it’s compulsively listenable, oddly moving, and stranger than it first appears, as the band gets existential on the dance floor.
This is despite some truly dopey lyrics. The opener is called “Melody of Love,” and floats this sentiment at you: “I always seem to hesitate/Too little always comes too late/There is a sound that resonates/A melody of love.” That’s purpler than a bruise. But Hot Chip have one of the more interesting relationships with banality this side of Dan Bejar (think of their ludicrous, beautiful song “Brothers”). And the more you listen to “Melody of Love,” the more comforting you find it. The scale of the music is just immense, enough to dwarf the silliness of the words. The track was created from a 12-minute, gospel-sampling instrumental track and whittled down to a state of intense purity with the help of the xx producer Rodaidh McDonald, but it still feels colossal. At some point, even the lyrics start to make sense as a catalyst for free association. A line as throwaway as “Do you have faith to feel in this world” seems profound for the kinds of thoughts it inspires with the soaring music accompanying it.
If this sounds like testimony from someone who has done a slow-acting but effective hallucinogen, then I’ve managed to deliver the correct impression. Hot Chip recruited the psychedelic whiz Philippe Zdar, of Cassius, and his Dionysian energy overflows as he monkeys around with the mix of songs like “Positive,” playing restlessly, helping the track light up like the dance floor at Angels in the early 1990s. The band is most effective when Zdar or McDonald succeed in pushing it out of its comfort zone; the lesser songs here—“Spell,” the title track—feel as if they could have been recycled from old sessions. (But neither is without its charms: The hook on “Spell” takes you right back to the “Ready for the Floor,” too catchy to dismiss entirely.)
Taylor had an interesting exchange with a reporter at The Guardian on the subject of chemical escape. The reporter seemed more than a little bit taken with the idea that the “ecstasy” in the album’s title was an explicit reference to the party drug. Taylor responded that the feeling of ecstasy was “just a nice thing to be talking about these days.” Whether drug-induced or not, it didn’t matter to him (and it shouldn’t, really, to anybody). More to the point, the songs on A Bath Full of Ecstasy were written “for people to bathe in, or be lost in an active way,” he explained. This goal, when met, puts the best songs here in line with recent releases from Neneh Cherry and Helado Negro. It’s music that creates a soothing bubble, not to seal off the outside world but to create space to breathe within it. For perspective, not escape.
The tracks that best exemplify that idea are mostly mid-tempo numbers in the album’s back half. The entire band rises to meet Taylor’s dreamy melancholy on “Why Does My Mind?,” one of a pair of heartbreaking songs, and perhaps Hot Chip’s most Zen expression to date, as Taylor wishes away his desires, lust, and blues. Goddard follows on its fraternal twin, “Clear Blue Skies,” his friendly, casual warbling belying the weight of the questions he poses (“Why does it matter?”) over a 2-step-indebted beat that sounds like something Kieran Hebden, a friend of the band, might have cooked up. It all wraps up with the gorgeous “No God,” where Taylor jubilantly embraces life on Earth, rejecting the importance of anything else. (“No God… can make me feel the way you make me feel.”) Perhaps 70 years ago, the suggestion that a romantic connection could be more important than a divine one would have registered as a radical act. Now, it scans as sweet and a bit strange, the perfect Hot Chip combination. Also, it’s a jam.

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The final volume of Matthew Herbert's "One" trilogy is an overwhelming, inscrutably political electronic record culled from an unlikely source: It consists of manipulated recordings Herbert made of a pig's life "from birth to plate."

One Pig

The last volume in Matthew Herbert's "One" trilogy contains the same sonic ruminations on consumerism and mechanization as the previous installments, as well as their mood and tenor. Like One One, a heady singer-songwriter record, there's a hushed creeping intimacy to the thing, and a Zen-like acceptance of overbearing forces, even if it intends to keep on kicking against them. Like One Club, which twisted field recordings from the Frankfurt nightclub Robert Johnson into splayed-apart dance music, thereby ingesting corporatized club culture on its own terms, One Pig is an overwhelming, inscrutably political electronic record culled from an unlikely source. In this case, it consists of manipulated recordings Herbert made of a pig's life, "from birth to plate."
This certainly isn't the exploitation record PETA assumed it was gonna be, and it's not a slab of musical vegan didacticism that presumably, many more, who prefer their music to be good first, and message-oriented second, feared either. No matter how visceral Herbert's mix of animal grunts and menacing electronics feel, the message is never something simple like, "it sure is sad that we kill animals." Rather, it moves listeners to be more mindful of consumption and waste (the pig's parts were even turned into instruments), while acknowledging just how strangely disconnected we are from the animals killed to put food on our table, or say, shoes on our feet.
But the lingering feeling on One Pig, the first half in particular, is still one of abject horror. "September" (each song is named after the time of year when the sounds contained therein were recorded) begins with stabs of noise that could be from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre score, and then shifts into a slowly molting rhythm, punctuated by horrifying retches from the pig. As the track perversely bounces along, the animal wails become harsher, and Herbert pulls the growl in and out of the mix and you begin to expect, even anticipate them. Its appearance in the mix becomes as viscerally rewarding as a typical pop-song hook.
Much of the record intends to freak listeners out, but there are gorgeous moments of pause too, and often those conflicting feelings are contained on the same track, making the message complex and never one-note. "November" is a delicate recording of the pig oinking, jaggedly interrupted by telling sounds (knives clanging together, something plopping on a hard surface) and nervous rhythms (gulps of tinny feedback, vibrant drumming), foreshadowing the pig's death, and even suggesting it's oddly cognizant of the end in some way. It's a way to invoke empathy for the creature. But then, the track bounds foreword into an intense damaged dance track, slamming into "December" which begins with an ominous metal gate opening. Rarely does a piece of music feel this genuinely temporal-- like anything could happen at any moment.
As One Pig moves closer to the end, the songs gain focus and the pig itself is subsumed into the process, not just sampled, but literally creating the music thanks to a strange "pig blood organ" and a drum made of pigskin. "August 2010" begins with recordings of the pig being cut up and fried, and ends with it being joyously consumed by a room of people. In between is a sea of strange, melodic whines and moans-- like the pig cheaply Auto-Tuned or vocoded. According to this excellent making-of video on The Guardian's website, the sound's generated by that organ, whose sucking rhythms are the result of blood coursing through the instrument.
To suggest you cannot enjoy the record would be inaccurate, but Herbert has cleverly designed an album that must be experienced on its own terms. The last track, a touching, voice-and-guitar ode to the pig by Herbert that looks back to One One's simplicity-- and in that sense, provides circularity to the entire trilogy-- makes the pig's absence palpable. Throughout the album, even those most viscerally catchy and hypnotic songs, just as they're almost getting into a conventional groove, are boldly interrupted by the pig, making it impossible to ignore the processes that lead to the record's creation. Imagine if those really sweet leather boots you bought let out a "moo" every time you stuck them on your feet and tightened the laces.
Herbert notes in the making-of video that, for legal reasons, he could not record the actual death of the pig. And that says a great deal more about government-sanctioned ignorance and the bizarre regulations on food manufacturing than One Pig really ever could. What Herbert has put together is a witty, difficult, touching testament to making something lasting out of one of the world's many cruel inevitabilities.