If pop is auto mechanics, then over the past few years, Deerhoof have completely unassembled the Benz. Deerhoof's excitement ...

Milk Man

If pop is auto mechanics, then over the past few years, Deerhoof have completely unassembled the Benz. Deerhoof's excitement in toying with the building blocks of pop songwriting-- and their characteristically short, almost infantile attention span-- energized Reveille and Apple O' to near-unparalleled levels of melodic potency, while the music's lack of any discernable patterns kept listeners continually stimulated, wondering what might come next. By the time of Apple O's release last year, it was clear that the San Francisco quartet had come to understand the mechanics of melody-making, and, more importantly, that pop, when too saccharine, eats itself. But Deerhoof never compromised their melodies to avoid potential schmaltz; rather, they kept their lines short and to the point, coating the songs with well-placed sheets of noise and fragmented melody. And yet, Deerhoof have never come off calculated or bookish. In fact, they seem to stumble upon their ideas: Their songs are strings of perfectly fortunate accidents, explosive and radioactive, but also instable and always on the verge of self-collapse.
At least with automobiles, there's a practical endpoint to mechanical deconstruction, but even with endless possibilities for combination (I wonder what happens when I hook the steering wheel up to the CD player?), one can only tinker for so long before the ideas become elaborate enough that the car must be rebuilt to support them. Deerhoof have reached a similar point in their career. With the exception of Holdy Paws, the band's songs have never seemed to aspire to "song status"; they were basically well-assembled sequences of simple and powerful ideas-- even one-minute tracks like "Holy Night Fever" covered a tremendous amount of musical ground.
On Milk Man, Deerhoof harness all they've learned from their previous experiments, and written what may be their first truly conventional songs. Here, they've focused their maniacal energy into seriously dense and carefully considered songwriting; even the cleaner and deeper production betrays Deerhoof's commitment to letting the songs speak for themselves, and to keeping individual parts as precise and undistracting as possible. Greg Saunier's drumming is the most restrained I've ever heard it, while Chris Cohen and John Dieterich-- who are of such one (brilliant) mind that in concert they can play in perfect tandem without ever looking at each other-- find themselves more concerned with static harmonies and more dominant of their precious miasmatic outbursts. Satomi Matsuzaki, meanwhile, has improved considerably as a singer, and is now capable of delivering remarkably complex vocal melodies. And with more developed vocal melodies comes Deerhoof's first crack at meaningful lyrics: Over the course of this record's 11 tracks, Satomi narrates a coherent (if somewhat disturbing) story about a milk man who kidnaps children and hides them in the clouds.
So is this Deerhoof's best? Is Milk Man, as SPIN remarked, "a perfect album?" It isn't, unfortunately, but the album plays host to what are easily some of Deerhoof's best songs, conventional or otherwise. Four-minute opener "Milk Man"-- longer than nearly every other song Deerhoof has recorded-- is as much a statement of the album's overall tenor as it is of the band's change of pace: Unaccompanied guitar lines interact confidently, building sparse but lush harmonies that together function as the song's recurring theme. The keyboard, which was noticeably absent from Apple O', returns here with remarkable subtlety, a respondent to Satomi's pristine melody. The internal interactions within the song-- as opposed to the external reactions of the band members-- are the focal point of "Milk Man", possibly Deerhoof's finest moment.
"Desaparecere" may be as good as the title track. Set to a drum machine, the quiet song boasts Milk Man's most complex harmonies, built entirely from keyboard sounds and Satomi's razor-sharp Spanish delivery and glissandi. Not a note is out of place. The song marks the first time Deerhoof have indulged so openly in the clicks-and-cuts of minimalist beatmaking, and it's done to beautiful effect. "C", originally released on seven-inch in 2002, finds a place on the album perhaps for its similar degree of restraint; here, Deerhoof experiment with slow, static harmony composition and phaseshifted white noise, as Satomi squeaks out a poignant minor-key melody and Greg taps out frantic snare rolls. What's most noteworthy about "C" is its terrifying use of space, particularly in the moment before a tense guitar chord is resolved by Satomi restating her melody on keyboard.
The three songs I mention above-- and to a lesser extent "Giga Dance" and "Milking"-- are simply fantastic; the rest of Milk Man, however, performs at a frustratingly lower level. The instrumental "Rainbow Silhouette of the Milky Rain" boasts a brilliant, spidery guitar duet in 3/4 time, but is otherwise an incongruous, ill-conceived medley of mediocre riffs and uninteresting drumming, while "Dog on the Sidewalk" seems completely pointless, an unusual misstep for Deerhoof. And the album's last four tracks, while hardly offensive, sound somehow unfinished in comparison to the album's high points.
Milk Man is certainly not some point of no return for Deerhoof-- they certainly aren't locked into writing in this more conventional style, just as they weren't locked in after the similarly song-oriented Holdypaws. The band is too committed to growing as musicians and writing better songs not to revisit the rambunctious Reveille and Apple O' woodsheds for inspiration. Milk Man not only testifies to how potent those sessions proved, but also to how successfully the band can step back and craft those rabid ideas into impressive songs without devitalizing them.


This new 10-song collection, Fellow Travelers, finds Shearwater covering Xiu Xiu, Coldplay, Clinic, St. Vincent, Folk Implosion, and others. Interestingly, the title seems to let you know who Jonathan Meiburg and company see as their role models and their peers.

Fellow Travelers

The wholeness of Shearwater’s aesthetic is an admirable quality, and one that lets people know right off the bat if the band's “not their thing.” Even before you hear Jonathan Meiburg’s operatic vocals, the ornate, orchestral arrangements give you the suspicion that his concerns are birds, snow leopards, horses, and golden archipelagos. This makes a Shearwater covers album an intriguing proposition and also a risky one: can anyone else’s songwriting survive in these conditions? So it’s even more interesting that this collection is called Fellow Travelers; sure, it’s taken from Trotsky, but all the same, it lets you know who Shearwater see as not only their role models, but also their peers. Coldplay and St. Vincent? Sure. Xiu Xiu? Well, Meiburg has collaborated with Jamie Stewart in Blue Water White Death. Folk Implosion? Um.
But any discussion of Fellow Travelers needs to begin with “I Luv The Valley OH!” It’s not only the definitive Xiu Xiu because it’s the best song Jamie Stewart has written. It’s also a song that couldn’t be written or performed by anyone besides Jamie Stewart, at least not effectively. Even beyond the music itself, a perverse mocking of glimmering, hopeful alt-rock, the vocals are sui generis Xiu Xiu where you can’t tell if it’s a legitimate cry for help or Stewart prank calling the suicide hotline. If you don’t have his track record, it’s a lot tougher to pull off lines like “there’s a razor, make a million billion threats” and “my behind is a beehive/ there's a buzz in my backside,” while slipping into incorrect French. Shearwater’s take is over-the-top in its own way—it just turns “I Luv The Valley OH!” into a goddamn stadium anthem with swooping bass and a constant, reverbed kick drum replacing the erratic, mortar rounds that punctuated the original. Sheared and watered down, the palpable danger of Stewart’s performance is replaced with cocksure pomp—while the exclamatory cry of the title in the original is one of the most harrowing, cathartic yells ever caught on tape, Meiburg’s haughty, oratorial style makes it sound like high school Shakespeare or just any old “oh”. I think Meiburg’s heart is in the right place here, but you take Jamie Stewart out of “I Luv The Valley OH!” and you’re just left with a song that has a nice melody.
As it turns out, Shearwater can somehow take the edge off a Coldplay song as well. “Hurts Like Heaven” was indicative of Coldplay’s pure-pop ambitions on Mylo Xyloto, giving Chris Martin’s vocals Autotune tweaks and the rhythm section a blinding sheen. Here, it’s a pretty, weightless piano ballad that’s closer to the stereotyped "Coldplay" that gets played for cheap laughs in major motion pictures. On the other hand, St. Vincent’s “Cheerleader” and Folk Implosion’s “Natural One” are given straight, respectful covers, but once again make a great case for the necessity of character. “Cheerleader” loses its lyrical bite without the context Annie Clark had created throughout her body of work, and while “Natural One” was included in the most absurdly grim movie about teenage sex ever made, Lou Barlow managed to capture the occasional fumbling and pure lust behind it all. A key line is “when mama’s not around, there’s no telling what we’ll do when we’re free.” Meiburg’s imperious vocals can evoke the mating rituals of majestic condors, but not that.
When Shearwater don’t have to compete with an original's familiarity or strong personality, Fellow Travelers succeeds by doing a service for overlooked artists. In its original form, David Thomas Broughton’s “Ambiguity” was the sort of thing that typically becomes an artist-beloved lost treasure, a gut-wrenching sentiment wrapped up in a six-minute, static-laced avant-folk song. It benefits from Shearwater’s immaculate, harp-led arrangement, which foregrounds the melody and lyrics. The same goes for Baptist Generals’ “Fucked Up Life”; Shearwater’s fellow Dentonites list a litany of relatable punishments and while it’s not that far off in subject matter from  “I Luv The Valley OH!”, Meiburg’s performance is much more suited to the source material.
Most revelatory of all is “Tomorrow”. It was the second single from Clinic’s 2008 LP Do It!, which found the band well into a stage of their career that Shearwater is just entering: where you’re perceived to have a “thing” and that thing is kinda taken for granted. If you didn’t recognize “Tomorrow”, it’s much easier to spot its Clinic tics after the fact—the circular bassline, the pinch melody. The cover here gives a mutual benefit, opening up Shearwater’s sound in subtle ways while putting a focus on Ade Blackburn’s actual songwriting acumen, which is rarely given a close reading.
Shearwater never sound like a band that does things for the hell of it, though you can understand how they’d benefit from Fellow Travelers regardless of the outcome. Last year's Animal Joy showed a band trying to let loose, just a little, even if they can’t truly sound like anyone else as long as Meiburg is at the lead. But it did at least show the group trying to rock, trying to groove. Fellow Travelers can be seen as Shearwater showing their scratch work, and while great cover albums can be a revelation or an embarrassment, most end up right around here: which is to say, admirable and flawed. Few things can be tougher for an artist than to purely express themselves. Expressing what they like about another artist is often one of them.


Bear1Boss has been a breath of fresh air with his bright, melodic take on Atlanta rap. His latest and best project yet focuses purely on fun.

America’s Sweetheart 2

Back in the late ’00s and early 2010s, an often underappreciated wave of Atlanta rap came after the rise of trap led by T.I., Jeezy, and Gucci Mane, and before Young Thug, Migos, and Future turned into megastars. They were young, flashy, had bad haircuts, never seemed to be in a sour mood, used AutoTune in a way that made their voices resemble cyborgs, and sung-rapped over sweet-sounding pop-rap beats that might make you want to lay on your stomach and kick your feet in the air. These were rappers like Travis Porter, Roscoe Dash, and the Rich Kidz, who for a brief moment in time churned out giddy party anthems. Now, the Buffalo-born, Eastside Atlanta-raised Bear1Boss is reigniting this torch.
For some time, Bear1Boss loomed in the background of Atlanta’s underground, but in the last 10 months behind a prolific run of seven mixtapes and EPs, his bright, optimistic, and melodic take on Atlanta rap has been a breath of fresh air—especially with the boom of YoungBoy pain rap and Whole Lotta Red raging rockstar vibes. “Do not listen to me unless you want to have fun, I don’t do depressing music,” Bear said in an interview, and it’s become an unofficial mantra. That’s pretty much the mood of his latest and best project yet, America’s Sweetheart 2, which feels like he put on a blindfold and dragged and dropped songs from his hard drive into a folder and called it a mixtape.
Over the course of 21 structureless tracks that barely crack the two-minute mark, Bear1Boss, along with a squadron of producers—Popstar Benny, 14 Golds, Ziti, and many more—expand on that turn of the decade pop-rap foundation. On “New Panoramic,” despite lyrics that could have been spit out by an AI, Bear’s nasally melodies have this mesmerizing nature to them that might bring to mind Skooly, and the production blends lush keys with effects that sound like buttons being smashed in a cartoon spaceship. The same could be said for “Girl,” which pays homage to Bear’s infatuation with Atlanta’s mixtape era by weaving gunshots, sirens, and air horns in between his sugary croons and the cutesy beat. “Mojo” is probably the deepest Bear will get: “I was in that club, and I think I seen my old ho/Thousand racks in the club, yeah, I think I got to let it go,” he lilts as if he just poured his heart out, and even though he clearly hasn’t, it feels like he did.
But, of course, given that Bear’s approach to mixtapes is so uncut, there are records scattered across the project that are unlistenable. I can’t tell if “New Ferrari” is purposely trying to capture the low-quality feel of a leak or if he just didn’t care enough. “Fatality” sounds like a throwaway from Uzi’s Luv Is Rage era. And because the lyrics are so minimal when the production takes a step down like it does on “Personal,” the song immediately falls flat. These issues plagued Bear’s previous mixtapes like Super Fancy 2 and Lil Hotsauce Vert more than they do America’s Sweetheart 2. The consistency has caught up with the experimentation, and given that the songs are so short, they only need one standout moment to justify their replayability, whether it’s the glitchiness of “Me + U” that has traces of digicore or the opening seconds of “Nan B!tch,” which sounds a bit like he’s warbling over a jungle track. Or “Bottom,” which has these hypnotic high-pitched screeching raps that sound like they belong on a mixtape hosted by DJ Scream. It’s fun and flawed and doesn’t give a shit, just like all of the music that inspires him.

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Suffused in romantic piano flourishes, winsome synth leads, and drums that race like a teenaged heart, these seven tracks pursue pure, unadulterated delight.

Joyful

Halfway through the opening track on Andras’ Joyful, a pipsqueak voice pops up over a squirrelly acid line and giddily rolling snare, repeating a single spoken word: “Honeybird.” It makes for a strange collision of sensations: On the one hand, nods to classic rave and ’90s trance; on the other, a term of endearment rendered as a cartoonish chirp, stripped of all context. Whatever the word is supposed to mean, if anything, is never made clear, but the effect of that Rosebud-like refrain is unmistakably tender and carefree. The Australian producer couldn’t have picked a better title for his album: Suffused in romantic piano flourishes, winsome synth leads, and drums that race like a teenaged heart, Joyful’s seven tracks pursue pure, unadulterated delight.
Andras, aka Melbourne’s Andrew Wilson, is a clever manipulator of both codes and emotions. Though he got his start making sample-based hip-hop, since 2012 he has teased the outlines of deep house, lo-fi electro-funk, and new-age ambient, using aliases like Andras Fox, A.R.T. Wilson, and House of Dad, and as part of the duo Wilson Tanner. His output has gotten increasingly cheeky and occasionally arcane: 2016’s House of Dad, a tribute to his plumber father, sampled the sound of a flushing toilet; 2018’s Help generated ambient sketches from YouTube bloopers and shock videos; last year’s Boom Boom was a bongo-driven critique of the way that portable audio colonizes public space.
Joyful is a simpler project. There are no big concepts, no grand themes beyond nostalgia for some of Wilson’s earliest epiphanies as a listener: Thirteen years old, listening to trance music in the backseat of his parents’ car as it crests a hill and the ocean appears in the distance. The keys are mostly major, the riffs fetching, the sense of possibility nearly boundless. Occasionally Wilson, a seasoned crate-digger, surfaces a scrap of something vintage—a warbly aria or keening violin—and works it into the mix, sprinkling on the crackle of worn vinyl like fairy dust. When there are voices, they are digitally sped up or otherwise manipulated, mantra-like repetitions familiar from motivational posters and Instagram captions, like “live forever” or “what I feel.” Somehow, he delivers these in a way that’s guileless, unironic; he could probably get away with “Hang in there, baby” without batting an eye.
Wilson being Wilson, he can’t resist a little mischief. In “Saga of Sweetheart,” the synthesizer is an uncanny hybrid of Roland keys and Appalachian banjo; the acid line in “River Red” sounds at first like an homage to Larry Heard’s “Sun Can’t Compare,” but it turns out also to have rural origins: In a fascinating interview in Record Culture magazine, Wilson reveals it to be a note-for-note rework of John Fahey’s “Sligo River Blues,” transposed to the TB-303. This kind of tomfoolery shouldn’t work—and yet it does; nothing about Joyful scans as gimmickry. Thanks to standouts like “Harf Green” and “Goggles,” Wilson’s wistful sentimentalism and bright-eyed cheer carry the day, taking the edge off his loopier instincts.
The latter is one of the most affecting pieces of dance music I’ve heard in a long while. Never mind the vestiges of dubstep squelch or the pitch-bent echoes of Eurodance; those restless tics are folded into a whole so sumptuous, so swoon-inducing, their kitsch quotient barely registers. The core of the song is a long, melancholy organ melody that feels strangely familiar, almost like a hymn; the tempo is several clicks faster than is customary for a song so bittersweet, which lends a welcome oomph to a track that might otherwise brood. Where most of Wilson’s ode to joy sinks into simple pleasures—a catchy acid line, a reassuring syllable—“Goggles” embraces the kind of grandeur that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever gazed in awe at the view from a moving vehicle, headphones tugging on their heartstrings.

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The California duo Wreck and Reference strip away the basics of metal, redefining the genre even as they sit outside it. On their new album, their songcraft catches up to their uncompromising gloom.

Wreck and Reference: Indifferent Rivers Romance End

Indifferent Rivers Romance End

W**ant, the previous record from California duo Wreck and Reference, was a metal record at war with metal’s allergies to adaptation. Felix Skinner’s sampler and Ignat Frege’s drumming made bare piano as sharp as any HM-2-blasted riff, and Skinner weaponized existential dread with his commanding vocal performance. By stripping away the most sacred of basics, they opened up new avenues for extreme music. They fit into the modern metal landscape that seeks to redefine itself, even if they don't necessarily see themselves as metal. If Want was a blueprint for a metal world without guitar, its followup Indifferent Rivers Romance End is that world with developed architecture and landscaping, their songcraft finally catching up to their uncompromising gloom.
Wreck and Reference are nowhere near synth-pop, but Indifferent shows that they think like a smart synth-pop group: using electronic layers as tools to advance compositions, not textural ends in and of themselves. This isn’t an uplifting record by any means, but it also feels less dim, illuminating Skinner and Frege’s mutual anxieties and uncovering diversity in the process. At the end of “Flight but Not Metaphor,” there's a thudding bass drum, like your heartsickness is the most exclusive club in town. It’s a small and sly incorporation of dance music, unburdened by the try-hard aesthetics of, say, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix grafting electronic and hip-hop onto metal. Increased attention to detail translates in even in their most aggressive songs, with “Ascend” given a goth funeral via huge synth horns and “Languish” driven by flickering strings.
Skinner has come into his own as a vocalist, relying more on his croon than his scream throughout Indifferent. His voice hasn’t changed much, but his confidence in expressing the lack thereof has never been better. Skinner's growth is none more apparent than on opener “Powders,” Wreck and Reference’s take on a confessional piano ballad that just might be their defining song. It’s more of an argument ballad, really—he narrates a bickering couple’s ongoing resentments, a cycle of seemingly mundane but ultimately serious questions without answers: “And you said what about the powders? And I said what about the fluids? And you said what about the cowards? And I said what about me, what are you trying to say?” Frege’s snare roll after the first verse triggers Skinner into full-on hysteria, and even with a noisy buildup in the background, he’s the dominating presence. (Like on Want, Frege’s nimble drumming is the duo's secret weapon.) He ends by yelling “That's fine” over and over, blurring the line between empowering battle cry and admission of defeat.
“Apollo Beneath the Whip,” from Want, aimed for similar heights, and “Powders” hits the bullseye with a smart combination of focus and expansion. That it comes first is indicative of their black humor (their Twitter puts most sadboyploitation to shame)—they’re smirking a bit by clobbering you with their heaviest song from the jump. More than any metal song in particular, it’s reminiscent of Future Islands’ smash “Seasons (Waiting on You),” and while it’s more volatile, the futility of trying to reason with someone when they have no intention of agreeing with you still stings.
Alan Vega’s passing reminds us that there will never be another band like Suicide, but Wreck and Reference are perhaps the closest to a contemporary inheritors we’ll see. It’s not just the minimalism that begats catchiness, or the confrontation-yet-cool attitude, or the fuck-you to traditional rock/metal instrumentation, but the overall sense that grime and rot, whether it originates in ’70s NYC streets or in the chattering mind, can bloom beautiful music. Suicide defined punk and overcame it at the same time; Indifference comes long after metal’s formation, and despite that, Wreck and Reference are paving the way for a new language that may go beyond metal.


The Brooklyn rapper’s first new studio album in five years puts a plush Bad Boy veneer over corner-bred rhyme schemes. Wide-ranging production makes it easy to ignore the rough spots.

2000

Joey Bada$$ was just 17 when he released his landmark 2012 mixtape 1999, and he was simultaneously looking to the past and the future. Hip-hop’s blog era had its fair share of revivalists, but this was a Brooklyn kid who worshipped at the altar of luminaries like Wu-Tang Clan and MF DOOM and opened his debut single “Waves” with an ode to one of his borough’s most celebrated rappers. There was an urgency to Joey’s words, rhyme schemes, and flows that split the difference between the fresh and the familiar. When he raps about wanting to meet JAY-Z, buy his mother a Range Rover, and take over the world over a swelling Freddie Joachim sample, you believe him. He was taking a similar stance to Nas on his 1994 debut Illmatic: an old soul with a young face, unstuck in time like a multiversal traveler.
By honing the vintage aesthetic and skill, Joey and the Pro Era collective granted their movement some edge, the kind that leads the children of former presidents to rock your gear. But as his ambition and profile began to grow, he often struggled to reconcile his love for the golden era with distinctive, modern sounds. All-Amerikkkan Bada$$, his 2017 album, mixed lush live-band production and political consciousness with roughneck flows and the bland platitudes of his platinum-certified single “Devastated”—a pleasant but messy shot at being all things to all people. Joey’s been in the spotlight long enough to see the old-school ethos he made his name on experience a revival in both the underground and mainstream and even star in an Oscar-winning short film. But though his rap fundamentals are as solid as ever, that middle ground has become a niche, breeding enjoyable but unchallenging music.
To its credit, 2000, his third studio album and first in five years, tries to move past those growing pains. On intro “The Baddest,” Joey looks back on his first decade in music, placing himself among the likes of Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole with an unfazed chill, amplified by the lush piano interpolation of DeBarge’s “I Like It”: “You niggas thought I was finished? I’m offended/I’m just getting replenished/MCs gettin’ diminished when I’m in attendance.” You’ve heard Joey rap like this before, but the scope is plusher, a Bad Boy veneer slathered over corner-bred rhyme schemes. “Baddest” sets the stage for 2000 which, as a whole, blends in with the posh New York rap zeitgeist. He’s jogging in place in the flashiest tracksuit he could find.
Joey thrives when he stops overthinking and just floors the gas. The surface-level social justice polemics of All-Amerikkkan dragged down that project’s best moments, and they’re thankfully absent from 2000. Much of what makes the album exciting on a technical level has been retrofitted from 1999, which soared on personal stories and thesaurus-stretching feats of rhyme. A song like “Brand New 911” is pure flow, the snap and tone of bars like “They resent me ’cause I’m counting all these blessings heaven sent me” harmonizing with producer Chuck Strangers’ harsh snares and flailing trumpet. His words cut deeper when he dips back into autobiography, recalling his cousin writing his first rap for him on “Where I Belong” or talking about passing down good traits to his daughter on “Written in the Stars.” When the flow and feelings combine, as they do on the gut-wrenching Capital STEEZ ode “Survivors Guilt,” it’s easy to root for Joey.
But some of those old habits gnaw away at his songwriting, too. Neither 1999 nor his 2015 studio debut B4.Da.$$ were above leaning on cliché, and 2000 sometimes does this with moneyed swag rap. “Cruise Control” and “Zipcodes” are filled with flavorless boasts that any rapper could’ve spitballed in the booth. On “One of Us,” Joey’s bare-bones flexing is upstaged quickly by guest Larry June, who’s the gold standard for rappers making luxury sound as attainable as logging in with Face ID. When a skit from “One of Us” involving a man calling Joey to ask him to stop sleeping with his soon-to-be fiancée bleeds over into the love song “Welcome Back,” he just…raps about sleeping with this poor guy’s soon-to-be fiancée. It’s uncomfortable even before Chris Brown starts cooing “Blow your back out like I should” on the hook. And that’s separate from the just plain bad bars sprinkled across the album—“Swimming mainstream like a hip-hop-potomus” from “Eulogy” and “My stock like a teenage cock, it stay up” from “Written in the Stars” are tortured metaphors that should’ve never left his Notes app.
The wide-ranging production often makes it easy to ignore the rough spots. Classy instrumental interpolations (Chris McClenney and Erick the Architect’s piano-led strut on “The Baddest,” every Statik Selektah beat here) sit next to glossy boom-bap (Chuck Strangers’ “Wanna Be Loved”) and crossover beats (Mike WiLL Made-It’s “Cruise Control,” BBEARDED’s “Welcome Back”). It’s a testament to Joey’s growing ear that he sounds good on all of them.
But it’s not surprising Joey knows how to ride this kind of material—many of these beats aren’t appreciably different from the ones that dominated the Pro Era/Flatbush Zombies/Underachievers supergroup Beast Coast’s 2019 album Escape From New York. Familiarity isn’t a bad thing, but it’s underwhelming considering the hype behind Joey’s first album in half a decade. Not only is 2000 the first album he’s released since fully committing to acting on shows like Mr. Robot and Wu-Tang: An American Saga, but it’s also directly tied to the 10th anniversary of 1999. It’s a considerable amount of buildup considering that Joey is doing the bare minimum: meeting his standard for rapping and expanding his horizons just far enough to properly integrate into the modern hip-hop rat race.


Two institutions of electronic music, braininess, and design-- Brian Eno and Warp Records-- come together for their first-ever co-release.

Small Craft on a Milk Sea

A Google search for "Small Craft on a Milk Sea", the title of Brian Eno's new album, turns up several sites focused on the record's next-level packaging. As phrases like "signed and numbered," "copper plate," and "lithographic" gave way to descriptors like "birch paper-covered slipcase," "crimson stock," and "foil blocked credit sheet," my first thought was whether the relentless fetishization of the physical product does the content within any favors.
My second thought was, of course it's going to be lavish. This is, after all, Brian Eno and Warp, two institutions of electronic music, braininess, and design, coming together for their first-ever co-release. The union is so forehead-slappingly perfect that one wonders how the two have managed to co-exist independently for so long. But if lavish is the language here, it's for more than celebratory reasons. Constructed partly out of rejects from Eno's soundtrack work for Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones and partly from original studio sessions held in 2009 and 2010, Small Craft on a Milk Sea is being pitched as a loose homage to the very concept of soundtrack music.
This concept is not a new one, not even for Eno, whose 1978 album Music for Films and its 1983 sequel were borne from identical insight. If not for the sheer amount of time that's passed, or his new collaborators-- electronic music composer Jon Hopkins and guitarist Leo Abrahams-- he might easily have christened this Music for Films 4. And the truth is that, although much has been made of the trio's working process and how it relied equally on improvization and computer editing, Small Craft on a Milk Sea sits surprisingly comfortably alongside the records from Eno's ambient and experimental golden era. Others might argue that fit is a little too comfortable.
With few exceptions, Small Craft on a Milk Sea's 15 songs fall roughly into one of two categories: 'ambient' and 'active.' The [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| former contains some predictably transcendent moments, such as the gently climbing opener "Emerald and Lime" and its later-appearing sister "Emerald and Stone", both of which conjure up the sort of meandering, piano-led beauty that Angelo Badalamenti specializes in. Elsewhere, another twin set, "Complex Heaven" and "Lesser Heaven", offer barely moving soundscapes that are respectively foreboding and serene, and "Calcium Needles" invokes an ambient frost that's as chilly as Biosphere's most glacial work.
The 'active' category yields mixed results, occasionally sounding overindulged or dated. "Horse" is a hyperactive mix of mewling guitars and shuddering snares, while "Paleosonic" and "Dust Shuffle" go down as aimless proto-industrial electronica. "2 Forms of Anger" fares far better, sounding like a fractured triangulation of Skinny Puppy, Joy Division, and Tin Machine (that's a good thing, right?), while "Bone Jump"'s dorky arpeggios and haunted house synths mostly just manage to charm.
As Small Craft on a Milk Sea oscillates between these familiar poles of serenity and disarray, it becomes evident that the Warp connection isn't indicative of any drastic modernization of Eno's sound. And yet, in an interview with Pitchfork earlier this week, Eno spoke about how some of these tracks began with conceptual briefs in which he instructed his collaborators to replicate popular music from the near future. If that's the case, perhaps Eno's version of the future isn't forged by sonic innovation but rather by recombinence and fashion's unpredictable finger. Given enough time, the fresh will be re-born as stale, the wonky will become cool, the cliché will become transcendent, and the freak will become a salaryman. When taken as little slivers of a larger poem, Small Craft on a Milk Sea's song titles present the listener with a notion of the past, present, and future existing as one holistic entity. With Brian Eno, you have a man who sounds uncompromisingly like all three.


The unclassifiable Spanish duo span 1990s-inspired alternative rock, glitching electronic percussion, mournful Andalusian flamenco, and the dread empty spaces of post-punk.

Pantame

Murcia, a city of half a million in the south of Spain, lies amid an expanse of arid scrubland, so it’s not entirely surprising that a homegrown variant of desert rock might flourish. Crudo Pimento—the duo of Raúl Frutos and Inma Gómez—have made that music for a while now, recording unconventional takes on psychedelia and blues and Mexican son jarocho on homemade instruments, singing in Spanish and English and sometimes French, howling as often as they sing—sounding sometimes like an Andalusian Tom Waits or an Iberian Beefheart—with all the hardscrabble panache of a pair of frontier outlaws.
Pantame, which the group recorded in the Brooklyn studio of Marco Buccelli, a drummer and producer who has worked extensively with the New York singer-songwriter Xenia Rubinos, marks a shift. It’s not quite desert rock, though it’s hard to define exactly. A chance brush with the album’s lead single, “Hollow Body,” might suggest an industrial act with a knowing, though hardly tongue-in-cheek, approach to the genre: The throbbing drum machine and breaking-glass samples are dead ringers for vintage Wax Trax, and Frutos’ larynx-shredding snarl summons the perfect mixture of Trent Reznor and Peter Murphy. It’s a giddy spin on evil that’s fitting of his graying beard and wild-eyed mien.
But even as a first encounter with Crudo Pimento, the song’s Lynchian ambient bookends—soft strings, keening voices—indicate that there is more to this duo. Whizzing through 13 tracks in 29 minutes, Pantame takes in 1990s-inspired alternative rock, glitching electronic percussion, the dread empty spaces of post-punk, and an overdriven blast of live jazz improv that sounds as if it were recorded on a waterlogged Dictaphone in a blast-cratered nightclub. Frequently, the mournful vocal melodies of Andalusian flamenco take the reins, bending heavy-metal malice and hip-hop swagger to haunting contours forged in centuries of drought and melancholy.
The album flows in a single, meandering stream of music, a tenacious creek in a cracked riverbed. If the satisfying crunch of guitar rock is the unifying element, the really interesting stuff happens in the interstices, as pigfuck rave-ups collide with steel-guitar reveries, analog synth squiggles, and stuttering fantasias that sound like Oval going to town on a scratched-out Swans CD. The lyrics, mostly in Spanish, mix the sacred and the profane with a surrealist’s acid-tipped brush (“I promise to water your streets/With the blood of those who offended you/Don’t think that money/Will free you from death”). “D.E.L.A.S.,” a blissed-out funk-rock jam that resembles Red Hot Chili Peppers on MDMA, cribs its chorus from a poem by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Jump cuts and jarring movements are bedrock principles of these supersaturated collages.
That the pieces of Pantame don’t seem as though they should fit together naturally is part of the point. That they do, and so neatly, is a testament to the rapport between Crudo Pimento and Buccelli, who gigged with the band in Spain and subsequently invited them to record in Brooklyn. His array of synths and samplers helps achieve something new: a flickering hybrid that brokers an uneasy truce between dirt and silicon. But Buccelli’s MPC workouts—a technique that gives a song like “Ventana” its ungainly shudder—are just part of the equation. The alien power of Crudo Pimento is baked in, no plug-ins required.
“Pantame,” which features Rubinos, might be the album’s strangest cut, precisely because it sounds so normal: It’s straight-up roots reggae, unadulterated and unhybridized (save for that mid-song free-jazz freakout). “No hay tiempo para droga en New York City/No hay tiempo para droga en Barcelona,” Frutos croaks, a grizzled sage: There’s no time for drugs in New York City, there’s no time for drugs in Barcelona. Whatever it’s supposed to mean, I hear it as a lament for the pace of modern life, a rejection of global capitalism, a recognition that recreational drugs are first and foremost about having time to burn—a resource nobody seems to have enough of in big, expensive metropolises.
I visited Murcia once; the hash was strong and the evenings were aimless in a way that would be inconceivable in the world’s rat-race capitals. Pantame feels like alternative rock in its truest, most idealistic sense: rock music in search of an alternative, better way of living. That search, too, is fundamentally about time—time to pursue one’s craft, time to build one’s instruments, time to wander into the desert and get properly lost.


The Washington, D.C. rapper burrows further into his subdued sound, creating a vivid panorama of his existence with each deadpan bar.

Wegahta Tapes Vol. 1

Few rappers employ vignettes like Sideshow. He’s an unflinchingly personal rapper—which is saying something, considering he keeps company with MIKE, Mavi, and Navy Blue—but he delivers his narrative through piecemeal snapshots. The Washington, D.C.-via-Ethiopia rapper has favored this approach since his 2020 debut Farley and hasn’t veered far from it since, choosing to render his visage a little less blurry each time he refines his craft. On his latest project Wegahta Tapes Vol. 1., Sideshow burrows further into his sound, searching for clarity in the stories and regrets that cloud his mind.
On the opener “Wegahta’s Brother,” he floats from existential anguish to memories of moving drugs to pay rent, spinning the block where his cousin was gunned down, and buying Japanese denim. Though these moments aren’t directly connected, they don’t feel like non-sequiturs. These fragments of memory bleed into each other, creating a panorama of Sideshow’s life in all its melancholy splendor. Sideshow’s raps aren’t overly flowery or poetic, sticking strictly to the brand of dead-eyed reporting of rappers like Vince Staples. But unlike Vince, who changes his flow and energy levels on a dime, Sideshow delivers every bar with a muted deadpan sincerity.
Drugs are on the periphery of nearly every song, and he treats the selling of them as a numbing but necessary means to an end. Near the end of the Evidence-produced “Henrik Clarke Kent,” he goes from bragging about profit margins with his partner to solemnly recounting a time when he served drugs to his auntie. Paranoia from dealing seeps into even his most trusted relationships. On “S95-Bound,” he raps, “Half my niggas robbers, half ’em scammers; all of them killers/All my brothers scholars, some in college and prison/But I can’t tell who solid, who gon’ rob me or switch.” Sideshow pulls in so close that you can smell the rubber bands wrapped around stacks of money and hear the cars idling outside his block.
Sideshow’s voice may not fluctuate often, but his ear for beats keeps the sounds of Wegahta Tapes fresh and eclectic. Loops and percussion–courtesy of MIKE (“Wegahta’s Brother”), Grimm Doza (“Lunchin”), and Roper Williams (“Rhodes to Rox,” “HP Sport”)–rotate and simmer like a rotisserie chicken on a spit. The beats for closing tracks “Sneeky Steps” and “SALT KILLS SNAILS” are outliers that embrace candy-colored keyboards and faster drum programming, but they are mixed low enough to match the rest of the album’s subdued palette. Sideshow catches flows over all of them effortlessly, his musical wanderlust offering as much adventure and danger as the dilapidated D.C. streets he walks down.
No matter what beat he’s rapping over or what memory he’s unearthing, Sideshow remains a grounded and sobering storyteller. It takes a certain level of conviction to start an album by refuting the existence of heaven while still holding out hope for a better tomorrow, and that’s the hat trick he pulls off. There’s no doubt that he’s more content to be touring the country and featuring on Alchemist records instead of being caught up in the streets, but as long as these images linger in his head, he’s willing to use them to exorcize his demons.


Samantha, a free mixtape that piles together recordings from as far back as 2012 and as recent as last month, including collaborations with Washed Out, Rome Fortune, Kool A.D., and more, ably tracks Chaz Bundick’s evolution as a producer and songwriter.

Samantha

Part of the fun in following Chaz Bundick’s musical trajectory is hearing how he changes up his style from one project to the next. From Causers of This on, each Toro Y Moi release has been a subtle shakeup: 2011’s stellar Underneath the Pine laser-cut the corners of chillwave down to a fine point; 2013’s Anything in Return turned his songwriterly impulses into disco and pop gems; and, most recently, he channeled early experiments with garage and indie rock into this past April’s What For? But each project somehow sounds distinctly like Toro Y Moi, bound by Bundick’s unflagging production chops. The latest Toro Y Moi project, Samantha, is a free mixtape that piles together recordings from as far back as 2012 and as recent as last month. It serves as a neat way of tracking Bundick’s progression as a musician while prominently highlighting his talent for both beat-driven and atmospheric production.
Samantha is filled with unexpected turns. Sparse one- and two-minute instrumental sketches serve as interludes, creating a sense of flow with soul and R&B samples ("Stoned at the MoMA", "Prayer Hands", the Ciara-quoting "Boo Boo Mobile"). Bundick ventures into ambient on glitchy, sedate closer "welp, tour’s over" and "ambient Rainbow", with the latter layering choral vocals and soothing washes of sound to mesmerizing ends. It’s a testament to Bundick’s innovation that he’s still finding ways to contort his signature sound into new shapes. Even when songs do call back to his previous work, as on "Us 2", which pairs a churning hip-hop beat with sugary synth pads that sound lifted from his 2011 cover of Cherrelle’s "Saturday Love", they still put a fresh spin on the approach.
The songs on Samantha are about the ups and downs of relationships, placing most emphasis on the downs. Bundick even goes so far as to tack an extended sample of The Notebook onto the end of creeping, Washed Out-assisted "Want", a move that very narrowly evades tipping over into schmaltz. On the trap-influenced "The Usual", he laments the frustrations of being a workaholic in a relationship, an unusually frank moment from Bundick. Elsewhere, Kool A.D. spins off into woozy, emotionally conflicted verses ("I got problems acting like a fuckin’ grown up," he grouses in Auto-Tune on "Real Love"), while rising Atlanta rapper Rome Fortune relays relationship fallouts on two of the tape’s best tracks, "Pitch Black" and Puff Daddy-sampling "Benjiminz". Samantha lightens up by the end, as on the sweetly jittery "Enough of You", but the main theme seems to be that relationships are complicated messes that can lead to comfort and love as easily as pain and heartbreak.
That Samantha comes in the wake of the guitar-driven What For? makes the mixtape particularly welcome, like a palette cleanser to prepare us for wherever Bundick goes next. Even if he's purging his hard drive of one-offs that didn’t fit anywhere else, with a free-form structure, winning collabs, and appealingly nocturnal ambience, Samantha is a welcome addition to Bundick’s catalog.


This unstable amalgam of kazoo squeal, vacuum cleaner whine, and defenestrated drums from the prolific Spanish producer mines a joyous sense of play and surrealistic wonder.

SHuSH

On the surface, the Spanish drummer and electronic musician who calls herself RRUCCULLA isn’t a “mystery producer,” at least not in the ways typically fetishized in dance music. Her real name is Izaskun González. She is 24 years old, a cheerful user of social media, and from Bilbao, a picturesque port city in Spain’s Basque Country. Her alias is a playful variation on the Spanish word for arugula. Onstage, she eschews visuals, encouraging audiences to let her heavily abstracted electronica spark their own imaginations. Still, there she is, front and center, tapping at sampler pads before sitting behind a full drum kit and laying into muscular rhythms in odd time signatures. In a video of her 2016 live debut, she tells the crowd through a voice processor so creepy it could scare even Karin Dreijer, “This is the first time I’ve come out of my cave.”
But once you focus your attention on her sounds, all certainties fall apart. What kind of music is this, and how on earth has she made it? On Bandcamp, she has a rapidly growing catalog of self-released albums. What began as an exploratory take on L.A. beat music—it’s easy to hear the influence of Flying Lotus and Brainfeeder on 2015’s Yesterday is Tomorrow’s wtv and Tactile Emotion—has become increasingly idiosyncratic. Last year’s Istripuak collected improvised drum solos that she subsequently manipulated. SHuSH, which she occasionally spells as the more fittingly onomatopoeic SHo͝oSH, is her most alien excursion yet, a kind of splattercore drum ‘n’ bass riddled with acoustic drums and slathered with elastic synths and pitch-shifting effects. An unstable amalgam of kazoo squeal, vacuum cleaner whine, and defenestrated drum kit, it is chaotic. Trap beats perforate whoopie cushions. Bright tendrils of synth flick across the fizz of bubbling water. Prepared-piano plunks dot concussive breaks and helicopter pulses. High-pitched voices darting across the upper register imply that medically inadvisable quantities of helium have been huffed.
Her titles suggest outlandish images—“Vestido de Párpados” (“Dress of Eyelids”), “Menta Fútil” (“Futile Mint”), “Cicatriz de Chocolate” (“Chocolate Scar”)—that play out in synesthetic eruptions of color, texture, and unpredictable movement. There are echoes of Arca, SOPHIE, Drexciya, Aphex Twin, Raymond Scott, John Zorn, Mr. Bungle—sometimes all in the same song. She says she began working on “Cicatriz de Chocolate,” for instance, in her hotel room while waiting to see the jazz pianist Brad Mehldau; the track itself is inspired by Chinese and Japanese math-rock. Jazz is a major influence. Opener “Intro coma 绿茶” is a showdown between blocky piano chords and her own livewire drumming, while “Té de Cabello Blanco” liberally samples a skronk solo. The whole album was inspired, she says, by a kind of thought experiment: What would free jazz sound like if played by children?
Still, for all that gonzo overload, she knows when to pull back, making SHuSH a more balanced listen than this shock and awe might suggest. That happens across the full record, as when “Menta Fútil” offers a quasi-ambient breather during the jittery first half, and within individual songs. Halfway through the stuttering breaks and atonal topline of “Té de Caballo Blanco,” piano chords and a reassuring bassline take the edge off the agitation. The effect is a bit like watching the video of an explosion in reverse, scraps of shrapnel fitting themselves back together. Most of RRUCCULLA’s songs are short, just a few minutes apiece, which is probably for the best; human consciousness ca. 2018 can take only so many bewildering switchbacks before going numb. That said, the seven-minute “Vestido de Párpados” is one of the album’s most engaging cuts.
If Alfonso Cuarón were filming Children of Men today, the seasick “Miel Oscura” would make a great choice of “zen music” for Michael Caine’s character: RRUCCULLA’s atomized trance stabs and undulating shrieks seem beamed back from a future in which notions of musical pleasure have morphed and mutated so thoroughly, it’s hard to recognize them as such. This may not sound much like free jazz, per se, but her album is an expression of unfettered play at its purest. Children love squishy things: Play-Doh, magic sand, homemade slime. SHuSH translates that tug of war between form and formlessness into exhilarating electronic music.


Across four pieces, including a cover of Ace Frehley's "Fractured Mirror", it feels like the Australian multi-instrumentalist is listening harder than ever to feel out new ways to move forward.

Audience of One

It's a strange kind of fate that has caused Australian multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi to spend most of his career making records that demonstrated his singular guitar sound, only to gain greater notice for an album that barely shows it off at all. But that's the way Audience of One, released by his longtime label Touch, is panning out. Ambarchi is also known for his collaborative work with Sunn O))), with whom he's recorded and played live, complementing his extensive solo releases and further alliances with musicians including Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Christian Fennesz. Other guests emerge on Audience of One's four pieces. Among them are impressive contributions from Warm Ghost's Paul Duncan, providing vocals on the opening "Salt"; and Eyvind Kang, filling out a chamber arrangement on the expansive "Knots".
There's a sense of new life forming, of Ambarchi's re-contextualizing his place in the world. His music has taken in vast stylistic shifts in the past, but here he forges deeper into the unknown, loosening control over his work to allow his collaborators to leave a more indelible footprint and pushing many of the shapes he forms into a tighter framework. Those shapes on the opening "Salt" mirror the glass-like ambience of Markus Popp's Oval, sifting a stilled beauty into the track as Duncan's keening vocal echoes softly over them. When a hushed swell of strings momentarily enters the frame it scrapes close to the kind of work Jason Pierce was experimenting with circa Pure Phase, where a chilly tone-drift provides a simple backdrop for raw, unhampered emotion.
That may be a surprising comparison for longstanding fans of Ambarchi's work, but on Audience of One he's clearly happy to buck a few expectations. On the 33-minute centerpiece "Knots", there's a greater widening of his vision, bringing in the pitter-patter of drummer Joe Talia's metronomic ride-cymbal playing, initially counterbalanced by shards of abstract noise, ranging from barely extant slivers of sound to a blackened, all-encompassing bedlam. It's strung up in an unusual space, full of gaps for the musicians to move around in but also striding forward with purpose and goal, ricocheting back and forth between the known and the unknown. It's reminiscent of Thomas Fehlmann's work with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra on "DFM", where all the players are intuitively aware of how to expand into spaces without overwhelming the track's fragile fabric.
"Knots" is intricate and fascinating, the kind of piece that's impossible to digest in one or two hearings, always holding back secrets to reveal on further plays. There's a lightness and a density to it, with Ambarchi's black-hole soloing at the midway point falling back into near-quiet in the final third before a series of forceful, metallic clangs push and pull it to a barbed close. The only way out after that is to return to the buttoned-up euphoria of what came before, with singer Jessika Kenney cooing over "Passage" while Ambarchi caresses out ambient noise by kneading the rims of a series of wine glasses. It's a necessary climb-down from "Knots", an escape hatch that stops the mind from reeling on what came before.
To complete the picture, and to continue the strain of reinvention that runs throughout Audience of One, the album closes with a cover of Ace Frehley's "Fractured Mirror". It's a marginal lift in tone after "Passage", with the plush march of a drum machine providing a steady pulse for glass-cut guitar playing to echo around. In 2004, Pitchfork's Brandon Stosuy reviewed Ambarchi's Grapes from the Estate, wondering what the guitarist could do with Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher". "Fractured Mirror" may be the closest we get to an answer, with the overabundant guitar playing of Frehley's version sucked out and replaced with a downplayed beauty that's just about perceptible if you listen closely to the original. But that's typical of Ambarchi's approach on Audience of One, which feels like he's listening harder than ever to feel out new ways to move forward, causing him to quietly cleanse his vision in ever more compelling ways.


Chicago singer and songwriter Maria Jacobson ambles into notes from unexpected angles, emboldening the question marks behind interrogative, introspective lyrics.

A Private Picture

Fran frontwoman Maria Jacobson had been deeply involved with musical theater her whole life, but became fed up with it while working as an actor for a small Indiana theater after college—where she’d given a commencement speech urging her class not to wait for perfect  circumstances to start creating things. Jacobson moved to Mexico, where she taught English when she wasn’t pouring thoughts into a notebook, and then into a guitar. She returned home to Chicago and started an indie rock band. In a music video for a song from Fran’s 2017 EP, More Enough, Jacobson walks across the city carrying a tray of coffees to a recipient that never appears, then finally sits down by the river and enjoys them herself. Fran songs often sound like they’re straight from the brain of someone doing exactly this.
Jacobson’s musical-theater background will surprise precisely no one who hears her voice for more than a few seconds. But she doesn’t rely on it to bear the weight of Fran’s debut full-length, A Private Picture; instead, she likes to offset it with grungy foundations, creating a crunchy/smooth interplay that weaves through the album. She applies jazzy twists and ambles into notes from unexpected angles, emboldening the question marks behind interrogative, introspective lyrics that try to pin down uncertainties—about ambition, about direction, about which people to keep around.
When discussing her writing process, Jacobson has spoken about the challenge of navigating between “crazy and cool-sounding” and “really simple” chord patterns. That struggle is audible at times, like she’s not entirely sure which would serve her idea better. Her choices make for some intriguingly weird moments on A Private Picture. “(I Don’t Want You to Think) I’ve Moved On” sounds like an unsent email to a not-quite ex sung aloud from a sleepy ragtime saloon. The title track goes rogue in the third verse, spiraling past its allotted time as Jacobson’s doubts burn on and her band fires up: “I’m a blur, a peripheral illusion that you use for inspiration when the inkwell’s running empty/And now I’m scared of my reflection.”
Still, A Private Picture’s most profound moments are its simplest, including two or three when Jacobson nails notes so high it’s almost a shame to hear them anywhere but in a cathedral. “In My Own Time” attests to the virtue of patience in both its lyrics and strolling tempo, while “Desert Wanderer” closes the album at its peak with a languid but lucid slow burn. It stretches out over seven minutes and could have easily gotten away with another five.
On “Time and Place,” Jacobson calmly repeats a koan: “I can’t feel it, but I have it/And I can’t see it, but it’s there.”  Similar wording has been used to describe religious faith, but the type of faith Jacobson seems to address on A Private Picture is more personal: faith in her intuition, faith that taking one good step now will eventually reveal another right step after that. These songs move together like a collection of personal vignettes, united in their conviction to keep that faith alive. If it doesn’t always sound effortless, it’s thoughtful, authentic, and occasionally fantastic.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Menace Beach are a Leeds-based band steeped in '90s alt-rock. Over the last few years, the same intersection of early '90s alternative and indie-rock has inspired vital releases from Speedy Ortiz, Swearin’, and Joanna Gruesome, but Menace Beach are even more committed to their specific set of influences than those groups.

Ratworld

The most celebrated figures of early 1990s alternative rock were enigmas and iconoclasts, tortured souls or wayward poets raging against machines that weren’t always clearly defined. Not every member of the Alternative Nation bled for their art, however. Behind the genre’s complicated stars were bands less interested in challenging the establishment than in just making cool noises with their guitars, acts like Superchunk, Elastica, and the Breeders. What these bands lacked in mystique, they made up for through sheer sonic abundance, amusing themselves with unfettered hooks, giddy tempos, and stylized riffing. With their fuzz-kicking guitars and modest attention spans, those bands serve as the guiding inspiration for the young Leeds group Menace Beach, whose full-length debut Ratworld bottles and concentrates the exuberance of that era's alterna-pop.
Menace Beach are in good company mining these sounds. Over the last few years the same intersection of early '90s alternative and indie-rock has inspired vital releases from Speedy Ortiz, Swearin’, and Joanna Gruesome, but Menace Beach are even more committed to their specific set of influences than those groups. Their closest peers, in that sense, are Yuck, another band that's so fully internalized their record collection that their music becomes a form of roleplay. When singer/guitarist Ryan Needham merrily sings "Fuck everything you ever wanted to be" on Ratworld opener "Come On Give Up"—flanked on backing vocals, as he almost always is, by his eager co-lead Liza Violet—he’s channeling every unassuming alt-rock singer who ever softened a barbed lyric with a chipper, slightly dweeby delivery. Casual self-loathing was just as much a part of the fabric of '90s alternative as whimsical tonal juxtapositions, and Menace Beach don’t shy from either.
Like many of Leeds’ buzziest rock bands, Menace Beach have ties to Hookworms leader Matthew "MJ" Johnson, who produced their album at his increasingly busy Suburban Home Studios. Johnson also serves as a sometimes member of the band, but little of Hookworms’ psychedelic menace carries through Ratworld. The only hints come from the warped organs piped into "Dig It Up" and "Fortune Teller", and even those songs are so bombastically poppy that they go down easier than anything in Hookworms’ playbook. Johnson is smart to stay in the background, rather than risk interrupting the simple, sugary chemistry between Needham and Violet. They co-wrote the album together, and Ratworld reaches puppyish levels of excitement every time one of its choruses unites them. Theirs is the rare lead vocalist/backing vocalist dynamic that feels like an equal partnership, with Violet’s injections propelling these songs nearly as much as their rubbery bass lines or pogoing guitars.
Violet takes just one solo lead on Ratworld, and it’s the album’s biggest departure, a song so personal she confided to Rookie its working title was "This Is My Song", because she didn’t want anybody else to hear it. It's the record’s one moment of true vulnerability, but like every song Menace Beach write, it’s also an homage, in this case to the smoldering, reverb-saddened ballads of Galaxie 500. Here the familiarity that usually works in the band's favor cuts against them. When the song’s dreamy haze breaks into a shower of corroded guitars, there’s no surprise; that’s how these kinds of Galaxie 500 appropriations always play out. On an album that otherwise so joyfully captures the exhilaration of alternative's recent past, it's one of the rare moments where Menace Beach's borrowed sounds don't deliver the same charge they did the first time around.


The second studio LP from this austere project finds the Basic Channel producer continuing to work with Sasu Ripatti (aka Vladislav Delay) and adding guests.

Moritz Von Oswald Trio: Horizontal Structures

Horizontal Structures

As a member of pioneering minimal/dub/techno outfits Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound, Moritz Von Oswald has spent more than a decade imbuing machine music with human warmth. More recently, he's doing the opposite-- making warm bodies sound like machines.
Moritz Von Oswald Trio is his group of living, breathing musicians-- an all-star ensemble that also includes Max Loderbauer (NSI, Sun Electric) and percussionist Sasu Ripatti (Vladislav Delay). It's a unique concept: a live band that performs minimalist dance music-- well dressed, clean-shaven, and ready to jam.
Horizontal Structures is the group's second studio LP, following a debut, Vertical Ascent, and a live album recorded during an appearance at New York's Le Poisson Rouge. As with the trio's previous output, the compositions on Horizontal Structures are entirely improvised. The record's four long, languid tracks all stretch more than 10 minutes. But the group uses that freedom sparingly. The music has no solos and no dramatic shifts in tempo. A steady pulse-- typically a drum machine or sequenced pattern-- is introduced, then embellished upon using live instrumentation and effects. It's tonal, but never directly melodic. In fact, individual expression of any sort is extraordinarily disciplined-- limited to modest knob tweaks and percussion fills. Like Von Oswald's work with Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound, the music makes heavy use of extended repetition. The tracks may be jammed out on the fly, but the results are tightly governed by the trio's shared affinity for minimalism.
But reserved and mechanical as it is, Horizontal Structures is a very warm record. Von Oswald and his regulars soak the music in reverb and atmosphere. This time around, additional musicians augment the trio-- Paul St. Hilaire (aka Tikiman) on guitar and Marc Muellbauer on double bass. Both toss a few swatches of dubby riffage and jazzy rumbling into the mix, as on "Structure 2", which pours glassy drones atop a percussive sequencer pattern and Rhodes piano tinkles. The mood is similar to electric-era Miles Davis, minus the fury. "Structure 3" and "Structure 4" make use of more traditional dub-techno elements-- burbling echo, reverb spikes, and phased hi-hat chatter-- but keep the pulse relaxed. "Structure 1" is an anomaly-- a loose, surprisingly abstract meditation that only gradually congeals into a rhythmic form. Though it's music is deeply informed by the club, Moritz Von Oswald Trio steers clear of hard kicks and bass. Where most live bands strive to deliver physical intensity, these guys headed down a different, more zoned-out path.


The South East London rapper carves out a lane between grime and UK rap on an EP marked by industrial-strength 808s and her own playful bark.

Wild Yout EP

The video for Flohio’s “Wild Yout” makes for a disorienting backdrop to the title track of the young UK rapper’s second EP. The drab, claustrophobic corridors of housing estates give way to images of a camo-clad Flohio in an overgrown London heath, posing and bopping among forests and purple flowers, crosscut with grainy close-ups of her crowd-surfing. The distant cranes and skyscrapers revealed at the end complete the picture of an urban jungle. It’s a visual approximation of the wildness fueling Flohio’s music—specifically, the untamed creativity that makes her one of the city’s most exciting young MCs. It’s easy to find her sound thrilling—if also sometimes tiring in its relentless, pounding delivery.
The EP’s four tracks are all produced by 808-sliding HLMNSRA, who injects his own brand of the industrial trap sound that Flohio tends toward: thickening and thinning hyper-electronica with binding coherence and clear consideration for the accented flows laid on top. Only one song, “Toxic,” takes a step back from the broader intensity, aligning mellow vocals with ethereal instrumentation and stirring in mature contemplation about people and relationships, rather than lashing out or seeking to prove something, her default mode. It shows a new and more complex side of the London rapper, and it’s the standout moment on the EP. More of this would be welcome, and would frankly serve to offset the stressful, jarring synths of “Breeze,” the weak link in an otherwise neat effort to showcase the talent of an artist still figuring things out.
Part of what makes this EP so interesting as a mile marker in Flohio’s explosive rise is how it helps to place her within the spectrum of London’s music scene. Born in Nigeria, Flohio has lived since she was a small child in Bermondsey, in South East London—SE16, to be precise, a postcode she chanted over production duo God Colony’s industrial thwack back in 2016. In terms of geographical proximity and a refusal to be boxed in, she shares traits with the fellow proud SE London local Octavian: She’s a product of transnational upbringing; an embracer of hope and grit in the harsh inner-city cold; a sudden regenerator of the eclectic sonic influences filling the postcolonial capital’s streets right now.
It would be incorrect to simply label Flohio’s music here grime or trap. She takes from and transcends both in equal measure: spitting one minute, rapping the next. “Bop Thru” has the same catchy, anthemic feel as “Wild Yout,” and the punchy lyrics and cadences of both will inspire sing-alongs from raucous crowds. Flohio has continued to adapt to her producers’ tempos, flowing with deliberate boldness and flair, and channeling the mind’s-eye image of a gun-finger-filled warehouse rave, rather than a pirate-radio set. Her fearless, booming voice recalls the soulful yelp of grime veteran Shystie on her 2004 classic “One Wish,” employing a tone of rugged, unforgiving aggression as a weapon to smash through the glass ceiling of a male-dominated scene.
Flohio’s outrageous and even intimidating confidence here is enough to suggest we’re listening to someone who’s both learning and having fun, exploring her identity while tearing up dance floors across the nation. The hype is real, and justified. It’s an exciting way to end a year of sizzling building-block growth.


Fiona Apple: Extraordinary Machine [Jon Brion version] / Extraordinary Machine

If you're particularly web savvy, you may have seen the previous version of this review up on the site before its replacement with the edition you're reading right now. Here's the story: I crafted the original to be my most ambitious yet-- epic in scope, embellished with the richest prose I could possibly summon. But alas, the powers that be were not, as they say, feeling it, and sent me back to the drawing board to craft a review less eccentric and more crowd-friendly. Or actually, maybe I had second thoughts about the original review myself, choosing to self-regulate and take a mulligan. I don't know, it's very confusing; but know that all this vacillation was never for publicity's sake, no, never that.
So I can empathize with Fiona Apple, who has gone through a similarly arduous journey on the road to releasing her first album in six years. Earlier this year, Extraordinary Machine appeared destined for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot status, as the nearly-finished album Apple made with longtime collaborator Jon Brion was shelved, then surreptitiously leaked to the world's music thieves. But rather than graciously accepting a starring role in Fuck the Man Rock N' Roll Myth #67, Apple did a do-over, this time working with Mike Elizondo, best known as right-hand man to the good Dr. Dre.
Unfortunately for Apple and Elizondo, that Brion version isn't going away quietly. And now, upon the release of the official retail version, it only makes sense to compare the two-- a sort of musical Pepsi challenge-- given that they share 11 of 12 songs. The differences are far from subtle: For all but two songs, the title track and "Waltz (Better Than Fine)", Elizondo overhauled the original takes-- or maybe underhauled is the more appropriate term in this case, given the addition-by-subtraction philosophy applied throughout.
Apple is a songwriter who can turn every relationship hiccup into a calamitous tragedy, and Brion fittingly applied his production talents with the intent of blowing up her songs to 2.35:1 aspect ratio. On "Not About Love" and "O' Sailor", Brion scored Apple's compositions no less extravagantly than his soundtracking work for the indie-film elite, applying dollops of lush orchestration to place her piano and throwback vocals in an epic frame. Though the material wasn't always Apple's best-- "Oh Well" and "Window" in particular, sounding a bit through-the-motions-- the symphonic presentation kept it interesting and gave the LP a cohesive flavor.
Elizondo's approach is more eclectic: Rather than applying copious amounts of strings, he employs bits of organ, backwards loops, and busier drumming to flesh out Fiona's sound. But the fleshing out is kept skeletal, so as not to distract from the central elements of Apple's voice and piano. Though the Brion version was likely unmastered, it's still striking how much the emphasis has shifted from a broader sound to Apple's contributions alone, like demos in reverse. You can also pour a 40 out for fallen countermelodies, as Elizondo hacks away Brion's embellishments upon "Not About Love" and "Window" in his efforts to keep the spotlight fixed solely on the star.
Not to say that there aren't moments where Elizondo either improves or offers a valid alternative to the Brion takes, as "Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song)" remakes the routine "Used to Love Him" with twitchy synth-bass and "Oh Well" benefits from a stronger vocal take. The dreamy "O' Sailor", meanwhile, refuses to be ruined, though the new version knocks the original out of its cosmic moody-blue orbit by insultingly replacing actual strings with the synthesized variety. Not so tamper-proof are the triplets "Red Red Red" and "Please Please Please", the former losing most of its drama thanks to a dull ambient backdrop, the latter ironically softening its single-ready punch on what's supposed to be the more traditionally commercial album.
The officially released version of Extraordinary Machine remains a decent-to-good album, one that showcases Apple's considerable vocal and key-pounding talents. In its new clothes, the album fits alongside her prior two albums, with only the slightly less consistent material bringing it down a peg. The shame of it all is that Apple, after six years of silence, could've made a more definitive, progressive statement rather than something familiar and similar-- and we've got the bootlegs to prove it.


Mississauga-born singer and producer Jahron Brathwaite's second album as PARTYNEXTDOOR matches the Drake affiliate's self-assured cockiness with an increased benevolent streak. It functions something like Toronto's answer to ratch&B, replacing the dirtbag charm (or ugliness, as some argue) of someone like Ty Dolla $ign with a more benign disposition.

PARTYNEXTDOOR TWO

Last year's self-titled debut from PARTYNEXTDOOR saw the Mississauga-born singer and producer refashion himself as something of a narcotics-fueled lech, a persona that has, in 2014, hardened into an archetype familiar to anyone with a remote interest in R&B over the last half-decade. The beats were shadier than those he sang over when he was making music under his own name, Jahron Brathwaite, and so was his character. "You got wild bitches telling you lies" he sang on "Wild Bitches", a line so Weeknd-esque that it's kind of shocking Abel Tesfaye didn't get to it first; elsewhere, he boasted of ejaculating on a lover. While his voice sounded great in the dingier digs, the sleaziness felt grafted onto his personality in a way that always felt artificial, and it clashed with his more genuine—and compelling—loverman tendencies.
Brathwaite has scrubbed this occasional creepiness from his sophomore effort, as PARTYNEXTDOOR TWO matches his self-assured cockiness with an increased benevolent streak. He spends the majority of the album in awe of the women he sings about: "East Liberty" teems with talk of sunset-watching and proclamations of "forever"; in less capable hands, a line like "the ocean's calling your name" would be an eye-roller, but Brathwaite's puppy-dog earnestness—not to mention the track's woozy, dense throb—prevents it from inducing gag reflexes. Brathwaite does open-minded sincerity much more convincingly than he does charming asshole: "I want you to turn up every night on me when I see you," he urges on the Drake-assisted "Recognize" while acknowledging upfront that both he and the woman he's singing to have other lovers. There's a refreshing lack of jealousy and possessiveness on PARTYNEXTDOOR TWO, even as Brathwaite argues that he's in a league far above his competition on almost every song here.
Dropping his defenses helps turn PARTYNEXTDOOR into a project that feels more like Brathwaite's own creation rather than one that primarily (and cynically) reconfigures of-the-moment sounds, but it's still very much a project in perpetual conversation with the rest of today's R&B and rap landscapes. Brathwaite inhabits the same world as his boss, Drake, a place where it's difficult to tell exactly where singing becomes rapping and rapping becomes singing. This time around, he unapologetically swipes Young Thug's higher-and-higher-and-higher delivery and the relentless triplet cadence that Migos has breathed life into, both of which are employed on more than one occasion.
Brathwaite isn't afraid to look into the past, either. He takes Dru Hill's "Share My World" and slow-roasts it overnight for the sweltering "SLS", and the moment the track finally takes off is one of the album's biggest thrills. "Muse" finds PARTYNEXTDOOR submerging Ginuwine's "Only When Ur Lonely" in a vat of ink, thickening it up into a viscous sludge. Not all sample choices turn out so well, though—specifically, an egregious sample of Disclosure's "Latch" on horndog anthem "Sex on a Beach" feels like a play for borrowed interest rather than an inspired recontextualization of a recent hit. Someone will flip "Latch" in an intriguing way, it just won't be PARTYNEXTDOOR.
But PARTYNEXTDOOR TWO succeeds, much like its predecessor, largely thanks to Brathwaite's aptitude for mood. His molasses-thick production continues to get weirder in subtle ways; tracks that recall early-'90s R&B suspended in amber ("Grown Woman") sit next to tracks that sound like they come from an alternate universe where Vangelis has become the go-to producer for decaying bangers. Lyrically, PARTYNEXTDOOR TWO doesn't have its eyes on anything original, and its back half suffers from a turgid sameness that eventually numbs, but Brathwaite's second album functions something like Toronto's answer to ratch&B, replacing the dirtbag charm (or ugliness, as some argue) of someone like Ty Dolla $ign with a more benign disposition.


With his fifth album, the North Carolina rapper aims for righteousness but often ends up sounding self-righteous instead.

KOD

Listening to a J. Cole album can feel like listening to a very intense young lawyer attempt to win a difficult case. Throughout his career, Cole’s raps have often been self-serious and polemical, with their success depending on the overall strength of his argumentation above all else. And while many of his individual claims can be convincing, you often get to the end of a song and think something like: Wait, did he really just argue that corporations take taxes and use them to buy and spread guns? Few artists stake so much on their ability to persuade an audience of their worldview, particularly when that worldview is so absolutist. You do not listen to J. Cole to enjoy his wit or his stories, but to partake in his wisdom, which often involves an element of moral panic: On his new addiction-themed album, KOD, he loves to suggest that people should abstain from things—smoking, drinking, online dating. Sometimes, he’s persuasive, but just as often, he simply seems self-righteous.
For a talented technical rapper with reverence for hip-hop’s history, Cole has never really been playful. (His previous album, 4 Your Eyez Only, was all about death.) Aside from his weakness for corny punchlines, his verses are frequently free of the word games that his top-tier peers revel in. But even so, Cole is capable of making a strong case for his beliefs. When he does, it’s thanks to the emotional appeals he embeds in certain songs. On “FRIENDS,” he confesses to his dependence on weed before calling out specific friends who abuse drugs; in asking them to stop, he mostly ditches his sanctimony. On another standout, “Kevin’s Heart,” Cole uses the pint-sized comedian’s very public infidelities to reflect on the challenge of monogamy: “My phone be blowing up/Temptations on my line/I stare at the screen a while before I press decline.” Cole is most effective when he keeps things personal rather than turning up his nose at the choices of others.
Other songs work because of the North Carolina rapper’s technical ability and skill behind the boards. Previously, when Cole has wanted to make a statement, he’s asked all collaborators to leave the room. The new album, like his would-be magnum opus, 2014 Forest Hills Drive, is absent of other artists (save kiLL edward, a mysterious guest whose voice, when sped up, sounds like J. Cole’s), and Cole produced much of it himself. “ATM” and the title track are potent reminders of the way he can rip up a song with his flow alone. Cole is friends with Kendrick Lamar, and KOD, with its stripped-down production, snare-drum flows, and focus on virtue and vice, can feel like a pale shadow of DAMN. Unlike the Pulitzer winner, Cole is far more predictable and accessible.
Cole simplifies lust on “Photograph,” where he again reminds us that his ideal woman is a holy Madonna who is sexy but never shows too much skin. He’s thoughtlessly proud on “The Cut Off,” in which he commends himself for his generosity after talking about how tempted he is to become violent. And on “BRACKETS,” he boils down a complicated topic in order to make a difficult argument work. The song ends with the story of a mother who loses her son. On the day of her son’s funeral, she remembers she has to pay her taxes, which she believes indirectly funded his death. Much like DAMN., the song uses the cyclical nature of time to make a point—that taxes are evil. But unlike Kendrick, Cole jury-rigs the narrative to make his case. Specious as they may be, songs like “BRACKETS” help us understand Cole’s appeal: He unites his audience against bogeymen like taxes, or the government, or white teachers in black schools, or a new generation of rappers. If you agree that those things are unequivocally Bad, you might be willing to listen when he tells you what not to do.
The most personal song on KOD is about his mother, Kay, and it combines the emotional appeal and evocative detail of the album’s best tracks with the selfishness of its worst. On “Once an Addict (Interlude),” Cole recalls his mom drinking too much after his stepfather had a child by another woman—even pinpointing the Marvin Gaye and Al Green songs she was listening to at the time—as he regrets his own callous reaction (“Why she always using me for a crutch?”). But while those elements make the song powerful, Cole expresses a surprising lack of empathy for his mother’s troubles, even with the benefit of hindsight, and is hamstrung by clumsy lines (“Maybe things get better with time, I heard it heals”). Listeners are asked to think about the rapper’s pain, rather than his mother’s.
Kay has encouraged her younger son to use her struggles as a warning to others, which he has done in the past. But there’s more to her story. She worked hard raising two sons by herself, working as a mail carrier to the point where her feet ached. One of those sons became a successful rapper, bought her a house, granted her the opportunity to stop carrying mail and to pursue acting, to meet Barack Obama and Afeni Shakur. In its haste to show the ugliness of her addiction KOD’s portrait of her glosses over any and all explanatory or redemptive details. It misses many other things too, when it conflates healthy and abusive self-medication, or refuses to make a distinction between marijuana, alcohol, and harder drugs. Because Cole is so often trying to convince us, he frequently only tells one side of the story, concealing the full picture in order to win an argument that nobody started.


On the follow-up to her debut solo album, the former iamamiwhoami member tilts her off-kilter electro pop toward compellingly dystopian visions.

REMEMBER THE FUTURE

Jonna Lee, aka ionnalee, moors cavernous electronic pop with regularly discomfiting theatrics. Her three audiovisual albums with producer Claes Björklund as iamamiwhoami were mysterious, occasionally sinister curios driven by tensile electronics and dance pop, paving the way for creative collaborations with Comme des Garçons and Röyksopp, with whom she was a touring member. The Swedish artist turned inward last year with her debut solo album as ionnalee, Everyone Afraid to Be Forgotten, assembled following a cancer scare and diagnosis of a thyroid disorder that threatened Lee’s ability to sing. The discovery spurred her to a leaner vision of iamamiwhoami’s mannered electronic pop, with candid lyrics, front-and-center vocals, and warlike drums and electronics forming some of her strongest music yet. Follow-up REMEMBER THE FUTURE maintains Lee’s off-kilter, spare approach to pop music while adding a broader one to her themes, homing in on a murky vision of dystopia, sci-fi retrofuturism, and the hope that lies beyond whatever misfortune may lie ahead.
REMEMBER THE FUTURE joins rank with other contemporary electronic-pop albums with similar future-shock leitmotifs, most memorably from the Knife and Austra. Lee’s approach is more tactile, reflected in the tin robot she built for the album art, a “retro space-age symbol” expressing idealized and wide-eyed space-race ambition. As a result, the frozen-over REMEMBER THE FUTURE feels like watching an arthouse disaster movie with a bittersweet ending, tracing the expressive outlines of a downfall, its aftermath, and the inevitable path to an optimistic ending. Whether it’s about literal ecological destruction or interpersonal turmoil seems to be beside the point, as the two become interchangeable in Lee’s hands: She is often ornate and in distress, walking among “the shatters at the bottom of our ocean” and icing over into “crystal in the mouth of your river.”
Lee’s seesawing melodrama is tempered by new shades of disco and darkwave. “WIPE IT OFF” frets over “meds wearing off” on top of a manic, fleet-footed dance track with bright, vigorous synths. Lee is loose and unencumbered, like she’s enjoying the upshot of delirium, wiling away the night at some snowed-in club. The inevitable crash comes on “MATTERS”: Zola Jesus arrives like a serene angel of death among muffled drums imitating the hammer of a heartbeat while Lee laments the indelible image of a “thin blue line” across a “fatal sky.” Atmospheric and stretching to nearly seven minutes, “MATTERS” is the album’s pulsing core, a gloomy intimation of the dangers of tunnel vision before an impending disaster. Yet Lee remains generous, offering up confidence in a pacifying, crystalline tone: “We matter/Raise our voices/Hum until their walls shatter.”
Occasionally Lee conveys her sci-fi themes a little too obviously. On the ascendant title track, she processes her voice through a hammy vocoder, as if giving voice to her ersatz robot, and she relies on alien synthesizers on the meandering “RACE AGAINST.” She adds similar processing to better effect on the propulsive highlight “SOME BODY,” throwing shapes over a rubbery synth line and pressurized drums. Toward the end of REMEMBER THE FUTURE, however, Lee finds a new apex, recruiting Röyksopp for a cover of Angelo Badalamenti’s “Mysteries of Love,” from the soundtrack to David Lynch’s nightmarish 1986 film Blue Velvet. Cocooned in slow-moving, Vangelis-sized synths and steered by Lee’s reverberating voice, it feels like a beaming, natural progression for her fabulist style of music. Here, Lee honors a direct forebear of her unearthly visuals in her own devoted, unique way, revealing the best sides of her music with a dreamy flourish.


The stylistic touches on London indie rockers the Proper Ornaments' debut LP Wooden Head are extraordinarily ordinary ones: Next to those sweet Beach Boys vocal counterpoints sit Byrds-buzzing guitar interplay and some-Velvet Underground-morning detachment.

Wooden Head

In 2010, Argentinian songwriter Max Claps and James Hoare, of UK indie-poppers Veronica Falls, started a London band named after a song by so-square-they're-psychedelic 1960s baroque-poppers the Free Design. What the Proper Ornaments have in common with "The Proper Ornaments", from 1967 opus Kites Are Fun, isn't immediately obvious, but it starts with a penchant for hypnotic harmonies and continues with an insistence on the right decorations. Where those sunshine-y forebears quasi-ironically skewered "Mad Men"-era superficiality—"brand new car," "hat and gloves," "pretty wife who you almost love"—the '10s model proudly accessorizes itself with scruffy neo-psych.
The stylistic touches on Wooden Head—billed as the Proper Ornaments' proper debut LP after last year's promisingly ramshackle Waiting for the Summer, which collected previously released singles and EPs—are extraordinarily ordinary ones for an indie band. Next to those sweet Beach Boys vocal counterpoints sit Byrds-buzzing guitar interplay and some-Velvet Underground-morning detachment. With its rickety eight-track recording, you'd be hard-pressed to guess whether the album was influenced more by the O.G.s or their offshoots: the British C86 scene, California's Paisley Underground movement, New Zealand's Flying Nun label. In woolier moments, throw in the Beta Band. In shoegazier, throw in Ride or even early the Verve. There's a song called "Stereolab"; it actually sounds a bit like a Stereolab.
As that list of comparisons probably suggests, the Proper Ornaments mix and match these related yet distinct sonic accoutrements well enough that they might one day become a reference point themselves—which you might expect, considering they've shared bills with fellow magpie-connoisseurs such as Crystal Stilts, Woods, and Real Estate. As with those bands' efforts, though, Wooden Head is strongest when it leaves you remembering smart hooks rather than a clever aesthetic. Check out "Magazine," maybe the breeziest song ever from the point of view of ammunition, or elegiac finale "You'll See". Weather, a recurring theme since the previous record, is beside the point on the gentle "Summer's Gone", which applies the sepia softness of the Clientele to being "old enough to lose your own mind."
For every band like Deerhunter or Los Campesinos!, who turn their indie-inclined record collections into something appealing of their own, music history is littered with others who mine the clerk-approved past without adding much to those halcyon days at all. Claps and Hoare, joined here by bassist Daniel Nellis and drummer Robert Syme, certainly skirt that risk—the guitar chimes on "What Am I to Do?" bring to mind "Dear Prudence" by the Beatles, whose enshrined-in-marble likeness rarely flatters anybody. But the Proper Ornaments may have been just as shrewd in naming their album as in naming their band: Wooden Head was the title of a 1969 odds and ends compilation by the Turtles, released after the "Happy Together" group split. As humble, tastefully appointed psych-pop goes, the Proper Ornaments surely have their hearts—and heads, wooden or not—in the right place.


Houston compiles songs Mark Lanegan recorded and then shelved during the period between 2001’s solemn Field Songs and 2003’s scabrous Here Comes That Weird Chill, but it doesn’t so much capture the metamorphosis as reinforce the abruptness of his about-face.

Houston

By 2002, Mark Lanegan was already five albums deep into a solo discography that had uprooted the former Screaming Tree from his grungy groundwater into more rustic, earthier realms. But that year would mark a significant turning point in his career. You can hear it in the jarring contrast between 2001’s solemn, sepia-toned Field Songs and 2003’s scabrous Here Comes That Weird Chill, where Lanegan's brooding balladry gave way to clanging industrial funk, lecherous electric-guitar grinds, and CB-radio squawks. There are a couple of ways to account for the dramatic shift. It’s possible that, with the Screaming Trees officially on ice as of 2000, Lanegan no longer felt the need to present his solo work as the sobering counterpoint to his main band’s amped-up overdrive. Or maybe Weird Chill (and its 2004 counterpart Bubblegum) bore the corrupting influence of becoming an official member of Queens of the Stone Age for 2002’s colossal Songs for the Deaf (a move that would spur Lanegan’s transformation into rock’s most promiscuous collaborator).
Houston compiles songs Lanegan recorded and then shelved during this transitory period, but it doesn’t so much capture the metamorphosis in action as reinforce the abruptness of his about-face. Rather than serve as a bridge between Field Songs and Weird Chill, it suggests the cul-de-sac Lanegan may have hit had he continued down the former album’s footpath into more arid terrain (as emphasized by Mekon Jon Langford’s creepy cover art). That’s not to say Houston is a retread of Field Songs. Thanks to the atmospheric accordion haze provided by Bukka Allen, the sitar accents of Ian Moore, and controlled feedback bursts of long-time collaborator/ex-Dinosaur Jr. member Mike Johnson, the album gently blurs the edges of Lanegan’s sturdy roots rock template with subtle lysergic touches, like mirage vapors rising from the desert sands. But, presumably, Houston wasn’t the bold statement Lanegan needed to deliver at a time when, post-Screaming Trees, his solo work had been promoted from sideline activity to full-time endeavor. The album’s procedural subtitle—Publishing Demos 2002—hints at the career crossroads he was facing at the time.
However, 13 years removed from that context, Houston is a means to revisit Lanegan in his natural habitat, following a decade of increasingly eclectic pursuits both within and without his own discography. Rooted in timeless musical forms—folk, blues, country rock, spaghetti-western soundtracks, eastern-infused psychedelia—Houston never feels stylistically tethered to its moment of origin; it’s the sort of album that could’ve conceivably been released at any point in Lanegan’s career. Adding to the sense of temporal disorder is the fact a handful of its songs actually first surfaced on the soundtrack to Cook County, a 2009 indie drama about meth addicts in Texas that provided a suitably despairing backdrop for "When It’s in You", an early, radically different arrangement of Weird Chill’s howling opening salvo "Methamphetamine Blues". But its wobbly-kneed, light-headed lurch bears none of the nasty, scuzz-covered choogle that powers the later version, nor does it contain the song’s now-familiar chorus line. Perhaps Lanegan only later realized that staying the course to Houston would amount to "rollin’ just to keep on rollin'".
"When It’s in You" isn’t the only scrap material here salvaged for future use; the hypnotic guitar refrain of "Two Horses" would get recycled no fewer than two times on future releases. But like last year’s judiciously curated Has God Seen My Shadow? box set (which showcased two of these songs), Houston ultimately serves to illuminate a more sanguine side to Lanegan that’s often obscured by the imposing, wraithlike persona he’s projected in his later work. Even at his most dejected, there’s a perceptible smirk forming at the edges of his grimace; on the lilting acoustic serenade "Nothing Much to Mention", he surveys the wreckage of a doomed relationship at a wedding reception gone wrong, but is still game to take advantage of the open bar ("pack up that crystal chandelier/ but leave some pink champagne on ice"). And on Houston’s burning-embered highlight—the cantina slow dance "Halcyon Days"—Lanegan optimistically raises a toast to the good times before wryly admitting, "I’ll do my suffering tomorrow." It’s a sweet, self-deprecating moment of levity undiminished by the fact that—as the grimy, guttural Weird Chill would soon prove—Lanegan wasn’t joking.


The rising star’s effortlessly sexy new album offers a startlingly modern take on the R&B coming out of Nigeria.

Odunsi (The Engine): EVERYTHING YOU HEARD IS TRUE

EVERYTHING YOU HEARD IS TRUE

From the first moments of opening track “luv in a mosh pit,” EVERYTHING YOU HEARD IS TRUE—the effortlessly sexy new album from burgeoning Nigerian alt-pop artist/producer Odunsi (The Engine)—sweeps you up in bygone visions of nightlife partying and youthful indiscretions. The music conjures sweaty basement parties, awash in red neon lights and the heat of strangers all around, where life is only as important as the moment you’re in. It might seem cruel to reminisce over tightly packed clubs in the middle of a pandemic, but the crush of quarantine only enhances the album’s rosy, nostalgic glow.
The artist, born Bowofoluwa Olufisayo Odunsi in Lagos, Nigeria, first came onto the scene with his 2016 EP TIME OF OUR LIVES. On EVERYTHING YOU HEARD IS TRUE, the follow-up to his debut, 2018’s rare, he continues to distill his eclectic influences into something all his own. Mashing the singing voice of Ralph Tresvant or Frank Ocean with light Afrobeat influences and the sensibilities of Prince if he were a Soundcloud rapper, he has tapped into a startlingly modern take on the R&B coming out of Nigeria.
Odunsi sings with irresistible magnetism and confidence, and his lines have a repetitive, nursery-rhyme cadence. On “airplane mode,” he harmonizes in a gentle near-whisper, hopscotching through sweet club nothings like “Shawty don’t talk like I know ya/ Shawty don’t talk like I owe ya.” On “PDA!,” he borrows from Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” shouting “freaky Margiela ela ela eh eh” over bouncy synths. The record captures early love’s sweetness even as Odunsi’s lyrics veer explicitly into cynical machismo (on “airplane mode,” he sings: “You be playing games that I taught you, had to get money had to stunt on you”). The bitterness is leavened by the sweetness of the music, and by the overall mood of love-drunk melancholy. To play on a famous Straylight Run song, the theme seems to be Existentialism on Club Night.
At only seven short tracks, there’s very little wasted space or energy. The brevity contributes to the cohesion, allowing Odunsi to hold tightly onto the specific mood he sets. It’s a complete thought, and the vibe it conjures is vivid and glamorous enough to induce pangs. With such a short runtime, it leaves you wanting more, but at least it leaves you wanting.