Crystal Castles songs could once be split into two camps, the "pretty" ones and the "aggressive" ones. (III) is by a large margin the most focused record by the band, and frontwman Alice Glass' lyrics take on a new importance.

(III)

Crystal Castles seem to operate in a perpetual state of confrontation, conflict, and stress. That works in their favor as they face a new and strange set of challenges on their third album: Their brand of dark electro has proven so influential in recent years that it's put them in danger of sounding normal in 2012. Their first two records were explosive, unpredictable, and found them living on borrowed time, trying to outlast the blog-house fad that spawned their earliest singles and outstrip a run of bad publicity caused by early copyright disputes and cancelled gigs. "The world is a dystopia where victims don't get justice and corruption prevails," Alice Glass recently vented. "I'm one step away from being a vigilante to protect people and bring justice to the people I love." Indeed, her lyrics on the fiercely aggressive (III) take on a newfound importance, often reading like the broken promises of an overworked guardian angel.
Though the duo claims to have overhauled their recording process for (III), trading in all of their gear and disallowing the use of computers in the studio, the album couldn't be mistaken for the work of anyone else. It retains Ethan Kath's trademark staggered synths and Glass' acute wail still pierces through thick reverb. The music now conveys a sense of unease somewhere between waiting for the drugs to kick in and wanting to leave the club as soon as possible. As promised, it is unyieldingly "bleak." Even the catchy songs are filtered through a forbidding darkness. "Pale Flesh" exhumes witch house for just long enough to beat it at its own game, "Sad Eyes" is pure rave throwback, and the call-and-response hooks that materialize as scrambled vocal transmissions ("Kerosene") and longing synth countermelodies ("Affection") come off like power-pop played by catatonic automatons.
While not as immediately striking as either Crystal Castles (I or II), the streamlined sound allows more maneuverability and subtle variety in the actual songwriting. Crystal Castles songs could once be split into two camps, the "pretty" ones and the "aggressive" ones; (III) is the duo's most focused record, and the fact that it avoids assaults like "Doe Deer" or "Alice Practice" demonstrates an alluring confidence. Even the all-texture tracks ("Telepath", "Insulin") are more driven by rhythm than abrasion; they contribute to the overall flow rather than hijacking it.
Insularity is nothing new for Crystal Castles, as both of their self-titled records existed in a sort of personal airlock. Shortly after the release of Crystal Castles (II), they re-cast its cover of Platinum Blonde's "Not in Love" with Robert Smith on lead vocals, resulting in their most successful single to date, but it had the unintended effect of making the emotional illegibility of their own version more apparent. At the end of the tightly coiled "Kerosene", Glass reveals a desire to connect, breathing a promise of equal menace and love: "I'll protect you from all the things I've seen." Glass' lyrics are often addressed to children facing horrors they can't quite process or future atrocities they can't imagine-- references to blood, wounds, antiseptics, and soil are frequent, as well as a warning to "sell your bones for ivory."
So how is this popular, exactly? Fair question. Pop music is often considered to be synonymous with escapism, but it can also be cathartic, and many records this year have shared (III)'s apocalyptic bent. Albums by Swans and Godspeed You! Black Emperor view 2012 in the Mayan sense, predicting a form of divine retribution that will be cataclysmic but also possibly awesome. And while the typical goth jokes came easy when "Affection" dropped on Halloween, look at it in the context of being just another day: the New York Marathon planned to go on despite the destruction of Hurricane Sandy, the cover of the latest Sports Illustrated featured a story surveying the "resilience" of the Penn State football team a year after the Jerry Sandusky scandal erupted, and we were in the homestretch of an American presidential election that actually fostered the discussion of what constitutes "legitimate rape." Whether you listen to Crystal Castles or not, this is a time of confrontation, conflict, and stress, and the success of (III) is how it brings you close enough to the evil that men do to be shocked, repulsed, and affected by it.

Fiction / Casablanca / Universal Republic


Kelsie Hogue’s debut album is likely to be among the year’s most extra albums, but behind its excitable homage to Britney and “TRL” lies an even more intriguing spin on ’90s alternative.

Crush on Me

If you ever thought that pop music was getting too anhedonic, too bummed out or laid-back—basically, too chill—then Sir Babygirl’s “Haunted House” is a one-song counterbalance. It is chill like an active volcano is chill. “Haunted House” is relentless from the first synths, like the pizzicato strings from “Call Me Maybe” repurposed to sound like a heart palpitation, and never lets up the 4/4 jackhammering. Kelsie Hogue’s vocals are frantic and almost breathless, as if between each line she’d stopped to sprint at full speed. Melody chases melody, jerking into a scream and then springing down an octave, like some kind of “Looney Tunes” ACME Slinky.
It’s exceedingly high-energy and also high-stress, much like the party described in the song. And while every pop artist with the slightest drop of alternative, from Charli XCX to Alessia Cara to Lorde, records at least one track about hating shitty parties—knowing thy audience—rarely do they actually sound malevolent. This is, needless to say, not for everybody. It’s only February, but Sir Babygirl’s debut, Crush on Me, is near-certain to be among the year’s top ten most extra pop albums. And everything about it, from the name Sir Babygirl (“the absolute bullshit name,” Hogue told Paper) to the emotional tenor generally being somewhere around an all-caps AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, requires for you to be OK with that level of excess.
Before Sir Babygirl, Hogue used to sing in a hardcore band, and her current project sounds like her attempt to translate that energy into neon and spangles, or at least into 1999. Like seemingly all of her generation, Hogue was inspired by the “TRL” era she grew up on, where “everything—hip-hop, pop, everything—was really maximalist and cartoonish,” she said. But the “TRL” era was at heart controlled, from Max Martin’s template-rigid Cheiron Studios productions to Christina’s mechanical melisma and R&B ballads. The dances were highly choreographed, the hooks precisely scheduled, the weird Titanic skits tightly scripted. Even the screaming tweenage crowds outside were cordoned into place. You have to go pretty far into “TRL” deep cuts before you find anything as authentically teenage as “Flirting With Her,” a mash note disintegrating into a freakout over a tossed-off “hey.” Even in the deep cuts you’d have a hard time finding love songs not geared toward the straight male gaze—Hogue is non-binary and bisexual, and much of Crush on Me is unambiguously about crushing on women. And you almost definitely wouldn’t find something like the mid-song shriek on “Heels” (“I changed my hair!”). It’s less the Britney of Circus than a full-on psychedelic circus—and in that same interview, Hogue calls herself a clown eight times.
For a short set—nine tracks, two of which are reprises and one of which is a 1:43 outro—it’s remarkable how Crush on Me comes off as two albums in one. One album, containing “Heels” and “Haunted House,” is a less abrasive version of SOPHIE’s work with Mozart’s Sister, which ends up as a hyperventilating version of the alt-pop singles that litter playlists everywhere. They’re all executed well; they’re certainly done with the most gusto possible. But the familiarity gets a bit much. “Cheerleader” attends to its detail, with an actual cheer chant in the background, but “I’ll kill my reputation if you come with me to hell” is basically a lyric from Lorde’s “The Louvre,” influence turning to copy. The campfire-singalong nihilism of “Everyone Is a Bad Friend” (“Everyone I meet, I think is going to die”) is SoundCloud emo in a neon bodysuit. Then there’s the unfortunate timing of the title track, dropped just as “thank u, next” made crushing on yourself go meme supernova. At least the song, if not a smash, still oozes charm with its early-Madonna synth twinkles and Hogue’s near-delirious delivery.
The other, better album in Crush on Me is an alt-rock throwback of the kind Honeyblood or Charly Bliss have been making, the 1990s touchstones in this case being the Sundays, Tuscadero on The Pink Album, and especially Dressy Bessy on the But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack. This is of course still derivative, but it’s where Hogue allows herself to stretch. The reprises to “Flirting With Her” and “Haunted House” offer welcome breaks from the glitter treadmill. The formers bolsters its acoustic guitar break with a stalking orchestral background, the latter lets the pent-up energy of “Haunted House” dissolve into a featherlight rondo, and both are buoyed by Hogue’s voice at its most Harriet Wheeler ethereal. These, too, were inspired by Lorde, but the inspiration is a starting point, not an end. And if this were actually 1999, “Pink Lite” would make Hogue an instant star, as it voltrons “Here’s Where the Story Ends” and “Semi-Charmed Life” into the kind of monster track that would have engulfed alt-rock radio whole. “I’ll have months where I’ll just take everything in,” she told Paper; what’s truly remarkable is how much of that’s pushed back out, fully formed and infinitely shiny.


The prolific rapper Little Simz returns with a concept album that references Alice in Wonderland.

Stillness in Wonderland

Rapper Simbi Ajikawo, who records as Little Simz, is by all measures on an upward trajectory, with comparisons to iconoclasts like Lauryn Hill and praise from craft-minded virtuosos like Kendrick Lamar (the latter said Simz “might be the illest doing it now.”) By last year’s A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons, she’d experienced enough fame to be ambivalent about it—“the type of music that ain’t never gonna sell,” she rapped on “Wings.” But sell it did, enough for Simz’s next album to feature notably well-curated guests (though not Lamar; that collaboration will probably be pretty great whenever it inevitably happens). All of which served to set her up nicely for her new album, which is…a concept album based on Alice in Wonderland.
The reference to the children’s story is a metaphor, naturally—“It’s about situations I’m still trying to get my head around, and places where I’m still trying to figure out who to trust, or who not to trust,” Little Simz told Vice in late 2016. (The exact situations are a bit amorphous—in other interviews she’s suggested the music industry, or escaping into art, or escapism in general.) But the conceit is the biggest problem—there’s a limit to how many takes can be drawn from a book of Victorian math jokes and accompanying film of Disneyfied drugginess. Alice is also more suited to satire or farce—Carroll’s original idea—than serious subjects or earnest introspection, the two modes of this album. “LMPD,” the first track, features a conscious Chronixx verse on Bob Marley, Black Lives Matter, and pineal glands, followed by a birdsong-flecked interlude featuring a spacey, pitch-shifted Cheshire Cat that evokes, depending on how charitable one is, reggae or a spa. A point is being made here, but perhaps not the intended one.
On Stillness in Wonderland, befitting the title, Simz eschews the vivid psychedelia of peers like Janelle Monáe in favor of a muted, atmospheric approach. There are a couple of overt references—a “white rabbit” clip recurs throughout, and “King of Hearts” takes advantage of Alice’s most confrontational character to let Simz take off heads with Chip (still atoning for his kiddie-grime past as Chipmunk) and Ghetts. But for the most part, the wonder is in the arrangements. Much of Stillness features gorgeous production; touchstones might be early Martina Topley-Bird or last year’s KING album.
But Stillness in Wonderland comes off more as a sparsely edited mixtape than a self-contained album: heavy on atmosphere, light on songs. Simz is remarkably prolific—this is her 11th release—and the album often feels fragmentary: tracks have five ideas in the space where one should be, promising experiments are shoehorned into a concept that perhaps might not have been there. On “Picture Perfect,” she plays Wonderland MC over jaunty brass; if only there was more to say besides “Wonderland is amazing, ain’t it?”
Unusually for such an introspective album, the guest spots are welcome respite.“Poison Ivy” is a standout, a duet with longterm collaborator Tilla about a toxic-yet-compelling relationship, personified in a distorted, prickly guitar line tried to build an alluring soul duet atop. On “Shotgun,” there’s a gossamer hook by the always-welcome Syd, and then there’s Bibi Bourelly’s Rihanna-polished swagger on “Bad to the Bone.” It’s probably not coincidental that these two tracks are both more polished, with a radio-pop sheen totally out of place with the proggier stuff, and contain relatively few Alice references; Simz’s grappling with fame may well be a holding pattern. “I don’t want to be an overnight sensation/I’m tryin’ to make a record you can’t stop playin’,” SiR says on “One in Rotation”; there’s some false dichotomy shit going on here, and then the track cuts off, abruptly, as if snapped out of a dream.


Taking Flight finds Ryan Hemsworth and largely unknown Seattle producer Lucas engaging in a generous give-and-take that plays to each of their strengths. This is warm and unhurried electronic music that's built for Sunday mornings.

Ryan Hemsworth / Lucas: Taking Flight EP

Taking Flight EP

No matter what source material he’s working with—be it a Gucci Mane verse, a Mitski song, or a Pokémon sample—Ryan Hemsworth wants you to know that he loves this stuff, sincerely and without reservation. He’s more than just an armchair curator, though; in the last few years, he's developed both a well-defined aesthetic and a deft hand. Where other DJs seek the thrill of juxtaposition alone, Hemsworth excels at making divergent tracks feel of a piece. Whether he’s flipping Tinashe or Blink-182, it always sounds like Ryan Hemsworth.
Lately, Hemsworth’s evangelism has found a new platform in Secret Songs, a quasi-label where he handpicks tracks from up-and-coming producers for an audience of the faithful. He’s built Secret Songs into a sort of anti-PC Music; in place of ironic distance, there’s a loving embrace—the label’s mantra states that this is a "friends only" affair. Naturally, the songs tend to hew to a type, which is to say that any of them could cleanly slot into Hemsworth’s DJ sets. One of these tracks, "Keep U Warm" by Seattle producer Lucas, was an early standout, a set of disparate sounds, ranging from wind chimes to cricket chirps, sequenced with the delicacy and precision of a music box. For his latest project, Hemsworth teams with Lucas for a collaborative EP that serves as Hemsworth’s first Secret Songs release. The end result finds the two producers engaging in a generous give-and-take that plays to each of their strengths.
The biggest surprise here is that the largely unknown Lucas often sets the tone. Whereas Hemsworth’s recent solo work favors crisp, clean lines, these tracks tend to crackle, buzz and fade. Melodies waft in as if through an open window and often drift off just as unceremoniously. Vocals are treated past the point of intelligibility, serving as textures that rub up against other elements in the mix. Given the gauzy sonic palette, emotions feel implied, rather than announced—not a bad look for Hemsworth, who can occasionally veer into preciousness on his own. There’s a sort of hazy sheen over Taking Flight that makes even the big crescendos feel slightly blurry, like vaseline smeared on a camera lens.
Thankfully, Hemsworth’s knack for pulling heartstrings remains intact, as does his skillful, trap-influenced drum programming, if it's used judiciously. While "From Grace" is the only track on here that feels like it’s built for the dance floor, there are points in all of these songs where, for a brief few seconds, things snap into focus rhythmically before retreating back into the haze. Lucas likes to work with snippets of found sounds and every rattle, flutter, and squeak here feels like it’s adding up to something, nudging the song toward a resolution. Drums are often employed only to stitch together all the sounds floating in the mix, suddenly making you aware of a beat that was there all along. This is warm and unhurried electronic music that's built for Sunday mornings.
At just over 20 minutes, Taking Flight is hardly ambitious, but it's a casual experiment that manages to feel vital throughout. It serves as one hell of a calling card for Lucas, whose previous output is limited to a handful of SoundCloud tracks. Meanwhile, a guy who’s made a career out of bending other people’s songs to fit his aesthetic gets to demonstrate that he’s just as adept at doing the exact opposite. And in allowing a less seasoned artist to eat away at the edges of his sound, Hemsworth has somehow managed to bring his gifts as a producer into even sharper focus.


The electronic duo’s latest is a wonder, a record of ambient house grooves filled with hundreds of tiny, captivating details. It’s also a showcase for the unique allure of their German label Giegling.

Insecurity Guard

There was a club in Weimar, Germany where a group of friends let their imaginations run wild. It was really just a house in a park with two dancefloors nestled within its warren-like maze of rooms. Parties sometimes ran for days; house and techno ran parallel with slower, more abstracted sounds: ambient, dubstep, even jazz. The venue was so fundamental to the collective’s sensibilities that on some of the homemade record sleeves for Giegling—the label they eventually founded—they sprinkled dust swept up after their parties into the drying ink.
That idea of a space apart—an autonomous zone, a utopia—continues to fuel Giegling’s efforts. On a recent world tour, they decked out clubs and theaters with candles, bouquets of flowers, and balloons, freely mixing chillout-room vibes and art-school antics with hedonistic, long-haul parties driven by heavy kick drums. Of all the artists on the label—Edward, Ateq, Vril, Traumprinz and his aliases DJ Metatron and Prince of Denmark—Kettenkarussell might best encapsulate that spirit of duality.
Kettenkarussell—the duo of Leafar Legov and Herr Koreander—were the first act to release a record on Giegling in 2009: I Believe You and Me Make Love Forever, a EP of trippy, minimalist house. But it was their 2014 album *Easy Listening *that really delivered on the label’s unique sensibility with a mixture of twinkling ambient miniatures, moody floor-fillers, and a bookending intro and outro sampling Bruce Lee and Jim O’Rourke, respectively. The Giegling crew can sometimes come dangerously close to self-parody in the pursuit of their sound (DJ Dustin, one of the label’s co-founders, described their aesthetic as “the feeling of seeing a sunset”) but *Easy Listening *proved that they were not without a sense of humor. An obvious Boards of Canada pastiche, right down to the warbly synthesizers, was called “Chords of Banana”—not just a sly pun on the Scottish duo’s name, but also a tongue-in-cheek riff on their psychedelic, synesthetic titling conventions.
On Insecurity Guard, the label’s two sides fuse together like never before. Rather than being divided into alternating tracks, as they often were on Easy Listening, here they’ve been swirled into one all-encompassing mix of muggy atmospheres and sleek, gliding house grooves, with driving beats wreathed in woodwinds and bells. The opening “Gate” deploys train-track clatter and pensive vibraphones in a way that suggests hurtling forward while standing stock-still, and in the pulse-quickening “Just for a Second,” the kick drum lashes to and fro while harp glissandi rise and fall with liquid grace; big, burly, shadowboxing drums are balanced by chords that feel as reassuring as a hug.
It’s full of tiny, captivating details likely to snap you out of your day and make you look up in wonderment. Halfway through the smooth, frictionless “New York Blues,” staccato synthesizer riffs stray from the tonal center and turn suddenly dissonant and bright, like sharp rays of sun hitting a rain-splashed windshield; then just as quickly, the track settles back down into its rolling, minor-key groove and hypnosis takes over once again. The album’s six-track, 43-minute run feels like a journey in miniature, one that blurs the line between ambient house and peak-time fare, between going up and coming down, depending on the listener’s mood.
They’re still taking cues from Boards of Canada; the backward flutes and jewel-toned synths of the closing “Brueder” tip their hat to the most wistful moments of Music Has the Right to Children. It’s also possible to hear echoes of Nicolas Jaar’s richly textured music, particularly his fusion of acoustic and electronic timbres. *Insecurity Guard *boasts as sumptuous a sound as you’re likely to hear on a “dance” record. They favor soft, porous timbres, like clarinet and crackling vinyl; they use struck tones with a metallic gleam, like Rhodes piano and mallet instruments. Whether at its softest (the warm, consonant chords of “Everything,” with their shades of Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock) or its heaviest (the fierce, pummeling beat of “Just for a Second”) it’s an overwhelmingly physical recording, one that envelops and caresses, taking advantage of an expansive range of frequencies.
It emphasizes, above all, the pleasure inherent in listening. There are no wasted motions, no unnecessary sounds; every tone unleashes a tiny burst of serotonin. *Insecurity Guard *is a kind of secret garden, a clearing in the woods, where the mundane falls away and reveals a world of heightened sensibilities.


The Montreal producer fondly glances back at his formative musical memories of the late 1990s: commercial electronica and alternative rock, in all their occasionally kitschy glory.

Memoryland

For those in the know, commercial “electronica” was always a sham: a marketing scheme masquerading as a genre that haphazardly threw together artists and scenes which often had little to do with one another. Originally used in the early 1990s to describe a wide swath of experimental techno, the term was quickly co-opted by the American music industry, which hoped to capitalize on the success of European artists like Fatboy Slim, Daft Punk, the Prodigy, and the Chemical Brothers and break the sound into the U.S. pop charts. (The fact that these artists were all riffing on styles that had originated years earlier in Black and brown communities in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York makes the electronica push feel like a particularly egregious act of cultural erasure.) In retrospect, it might seem absurd, but for countless young listeners—many of whom likely first encountered this music via their local alternative-rock radio station—electronica was a gateway into a whole new world, or at least a new sound palette. One of those listeners was Mike Silver, a Montreal native who would eventually go on to make music of his own as CFCF.
Memoryland is framed as a “capital-E Electronica album” and a direct homage to the formative sounds he heard in the late ’90s. Few artists would dare to make a record inspired by both Basement Jaxx and Smashing Pumpkins, but Silver has never been afraid to embrace the unfashionable. Genres like Balearic, new age, and smooth jazz are accepted and even celebrated in today’s electronic circuit, but back when he was making records like 2015’s The Colours of Life and 2016’s On Vacation, those styles were practically radioactive. On 2019’s Liquid Colors, he dabbled in drum’n’bass, which is admittedly in the midst of a full-blown revival, but he purposely focused on the music’s least underground strains, excavating the soundtracks of long-shuttered chillout lounges and oxygen bars.
That collision of electronic music with the pop sphere is at the core of Memoryland, and although an element of kitsch runs through it, the album isn’t some sort of extended joke. Electronica clearly meant a lot to Silver, and the first single, “Life Is Perfecto,” feels like a not-so-subtle tribute to Paul Oakenfold and his Perfecto label. (The UK artist was arguably the biggest DJ in the world in the late ’90s; his 1998 release Tranceport sold more than 100,000 copies in the US, a staggering figure at the time for a mix CD.) With its gauzy textures and twinkling melodies, “Life Is Perfecto” isn’t as over the top as Oakenfold’s swashbuckling 2002 crossover hit “Ready Steady Go,” or even his crunchy 1998 rework of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Perfect,” but the song’s dreamy ambience and grunge-pop guitars affectionately echo the era and its largely ahistorical approach to electronic music.
Relatively little of Memoryland is aimed straight at the dancefloor, but the crooked disco-funk loops of “Self Service 1999” nod to Daft Punk and the larger French touch sound, while “Night/Day/Work/Home” is a giddy pop-trance cut that also folds in the same sort of pseudo-serious, vocoder-assisted emoting that made Moby’s “We Are All Made of Stars” an unlikely hit in 2002. Less successful is “After the After,” which impressively channels the breezy vibe and skittering rhythms of late-’90s 2-step garage—think Artful Dodger—but is ultimately held back by the limitations of Silver’s voice.
Silver is no Craig David, but he does a bit of singing on Memoryland, sounding best on “Punksong,” a bouncy, 93-second piece of fuzz-pop that’s reminiscent of alt-rock also-rans like Imperial Teen and Veruca Salt. It’s the most blatantly “rock” moment here, but distortion-licked guitars pop up repeatedly throughout the LP; neither “suburbilude” nor “dirty” crack the two-minute mark, but both could pass as a Sonic Youth outtake. Lush highlight “Model Castings,” a glitch-flecked collaboration with Montreal indie outfit No Joy, sounds like a cross between “Windowlicker”-era Aphex Twin and something a shoegaze band like Chapterhouse might have cooked up. Silver could have played it cool and filled Memoryland with references to Underground Resistance, classic UK jungle, and whatever other ’90s sounds are fashionable at the moment, but he refreshingly doesn’t attempt to front. Clearly he was an alt-rock kid, and his willingness to acknowledge that—along with the blatantly rockist orientation of the electronic music that shaped him—is a big part of why the album is so charming.
Electronica reeks of what some might call inauthenticity, but does that invalidate the connections that Silver—and millions of others like him—forged with the music more than two decades ago? Memoryland seems to indicate that it doesn’t, but the album is more a warm remembrance than a full-blown celebration. Perhaps that’s why the LP’s more introspective tracks are some of its most potent. “Gravure Idol” is a whimsical psychedelic number that’ll surely trigger fond memories for anyone who was blown away when the Orb’s iconic “Little Fluffy Clouds” appeared in that Volkswagen Beetle commercial back in 1998, and “End—Curve of Forgetting” ventures even further into dreamland as it vacillates between new-age soundscapes and beatless trance. Silver is undeniably looking back at electronica through rose-colored glasses—in fairness, his glasses are actually tinted yellow in his latest press photo, which feels far more appropriate for that late-’90s era—and though he can still find joy in the bright colors and Y2K excess of these sounds, he’s also clever enough to recognize just how ridiculous they were in the first place.

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With a cast of female vocalists guiding and redirecting the songs, the National’s eighth album is their largest, longest, and most daring.

I Am Easy to Find

There’s a lot to marvel at on any National album: the regality, the musicianship, the compositional flourishes, the ornate displays of sublimated rage. The ex-Brooklynites are among the smallest handful of ’00s bands to close out the ’10s with a higher stock than what they entered with; theirs is one of the richest dynamics in indie rock. But for all they’re good at, every album has been first and foremost a litmus test on singer Matt Berninger. To enjoy the National, you’ve got to enjoy him.
Anybody who’s followed the band for seven albums has likely done so because they’ve connected with Berninger’s dapper hangdog persona, a Cary Grant interpretation of Leonard Cohen. He’s the kind of singer who can express listeners’ ugliest insecurities yet somehow make them sound like a brag, forever the star of his own movie where not much happens but it’s all beautifully shot. It’s a real feat spinning a fantasy out of feelings so messy. Even for listeners growing tired of his grousing voiceovers, or those who never liked it much to begin with, the band’s form-breaking eighth album I Am Easy To Find offers another way in. For the first time, Berninger is just a piece of this universe, not the center.
On nearly every song Berninger is accompanied and sometimes silenced by a rotation of featured female vocalists who step in to offer perspective, commentary, and dissent. It’s perhaps yet another lesson internalized from Cohen, whose songs regularly called on a chorus of women as their voice of reason. And like Cohen, the National have recruited some of the best singers out, among them Lisa Hannigan, Mina Tindle, Kate Stables, Sharon Van Etten, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, whose spotlight “Dust Swirls in Strange Light” benches Berninger all together. Most revelatory of all is Gail Ann Dorsey, David Bowie’s longtime bassist and backing singer, who heralds the album’s new direction midway through opener “You Had Your Soul With You.” Her extraordinary voice of saffron arrives like a divine intervention, instantly parting a track that had previously been National-by-numbers.
The album’s guest roster shores up the National’s greatest critical vulnerability—the myopic white, male vantage—so conveniently that it’s tempting to read it as cynical. In interviews, the band has been more than a little defensive about the choice, insisting it wasn’t made out of some patronizing notion of allyship. It’s the execution, though, that casts aside doubts. These women aren’t window dressing, they’re focal points, and each subtly redirects the music to previously unexplored directions. They approach these songs from the most daring angles of attack, creating an air of unpredictability that even 2017’s electronics-laced Sleep Well Beast couldn’t sustain. Their presence also turns the lyrics, some written by Berninger’s wife Carin Besser, from a monologue into a conversation. The competing perspectives seem to humble the singer, challenging him and shaking him from his own head. “I know I can get attached and then unattached to my own versions of others,” he concedes on “The Pull of You.”
All those outside voices aren’t the only reason I Am Easy To Find can feel like a remix of a National album. Just as those strong collaborators seize the control away from the band, so has the record’s producer Mike Mills, a director by trade who incorporated some of this music into a tear-jerking short film of the same name. In the band’s telling, Mills wasn’t shy about editing their work, often stripping songs of the elements the band was most excited about (that may be why so few of Sleep Well Beasts’ U2-isms have carried through). So although the album is the band’s biggest yet, with a cast of dozens including 13 violinists alone, it rarely feels bulky. Only the too-Arcade-Fire-for-comfort “Where Is Her Head” succumbs to grandiosity, prioritizing spectacle over purpose.
At 64 minutes, I Am Easy To Find is also the National’s longest album, which is a mixed blessing. It provides room to luxuriate and admire all these guest voices as the art pieces they are while getting sucked into unhurried treasures like “Quiet Light” and “Oblivions,” both among the band’s most weightless and sublime. But the record can drag, sometimes badly. “Rylan” sounds like a rewrite of every other mid-tempo National number directed at a character with a moderately memorable name, while “Hairpin Turns” adds ammunition the most frequent dismissal of this band: They’re boring.
The complementary inverse of boring, of course, is consistent, an adjective that’s similarly dogged this band for the last decade (it’s meant as praise, but more often reads as shorthand for nothing new to see here). Between the consecutive departures of Sleep Well Beast and I Am Easy To Find, the band has finally started pushing back against their reputation for playing it safe. If some of their gambits sound less risky than they actually are, it’s mostly because they’ve pulled them off so well.
I Am Easy To Find’s lyrics, too, celebrate risk. On “Not In Kansas,” Berninger fears that he may not be the type of guy to punch a Nazi, though he’d love to be. And while the album’s title sentiment could be read as romantic in a certain light—a sweet reassurance—the title track instead casts it as a passionless pledge between a couple too tired to fight but too vested to split. The words reek of defeat; there’s nothing alluring about them. In contrast, on “Hey Rosey,” Gail Ann Dorsey outlines a far more dangerous love, one like a razor blade and a radiant flame, and Berninger can barely contain his excitement. “There’s never really any safety in it!” he swoons, as the music crests and trembles deliriously. In love, as in art, easy is boring. The unknown? Now that he can get worked up about.


British singer-songwriter Beth Jeans Houghton is back with a new name and a new sound. The ukulele, harp, and glockenspiel of her 2012 debut have been replaced with Stones R&B rhythms, doomed Sabbath licks, and blistering Cali-punk.

Welcome Back to Milk

In the summer of 2012, after releasing her debut LP Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose, singer-songwriter Beth Jeans Houghton suffered a nervous breakdown, scrapped an entire album, and devised a new plan of attack. She plotted a drastic reinvention and arranged sessions with producers who would nod along with glazed expressions before layering on Auto-Tune and ornamental synths in the studio. Exasperated, Houghton turned to nefarious Bad Seed Jim Sclavunos, impressed by his yen for psych bands like Lemon Pipers and Ultimate Spinach, and developed her classic-rock chops. Then, just before hitting the studio, Houghton eviscerated the work, wrote two new tracks, and rebuilt, once more, from the ground up.
The result of the triple-distillation process is Welcome Back to Milk, a radical musical and psychological inversion of its predecessor. Where Cellophane Nose sketched an alluring wonderland, the follow-up finds Houghton, now working as Du Blonde, fierce and firm, assertive enough to know when to keep us away, at a distance that suits her. In the sense that it strives less to be pretty than honest, the album is about growing out of preconceived social roles. Cellophane Nose was a resplendent work of odyssey and intricacy, a feature some critics couldn’t untangle from her femininity: In a short paragraph, the Guardian review describes its "airy, fairytale quality," observes one song "skipping delicately" and compares another to "fellow sprite Alison Goldfrapp." Perhaps Houghton took it to heart.
So Welcome Back to Milk skews primal. The debut’s ukulele, harp, glockenspiel, and Wurlitzer are all out, along with any "nu folk" threads; in their place are Stones R&B rhythms, doomed Sabbath licks, blistering Cali-punk, and a primitive kind of glam–the most flamboyant instrument Houghton employs is the voice of Future Islands' Samuel T. Herring, who makes a lovelorn, pantomime-villain cameo on "Mind Is on My Mind". But if a picture is forming of barren blasts and ruthless efficiency, that’s not quite it: "Four in the Morning" is a wrenching piano ballad, "Isn’t It Wild" waltzes dreamily to the stars, "Hunter" concedes tenderness for an ex-lover. Still, what’s important is that the record feels fierce, is designed to, and Houghton has pulled no punches in spreading the word.
The record’s opening brace alone leaves you dazed throughout the first half: "Black Flag" acts out both sides of a lovers’ spat over stormy guitars, while "Chips to Go" thunders along on a devilish, Sparks-like riff as Houghton yells and trills theatrically. Third track "Raw Honey" simmers, but despite being resolutely unpunk (a frilly guitar solo consumes one-third of its runtime) the fingerpicked hook is so inescapably reminiscent of Californication-era Red Hot Chili Peppers it’s tempting to hear a pass-agg kiss off to Houghton’s ex-beau Anthony Kiedis.
The men of Welcome Back to Milk fare about as well as you’d expect, which is not very. On Cellophane Nose’s "Atlas", Houghton sat with her boyfriend "dissecting the atlas for places we’ve been/ Your list is longer, but you’ve got more years on me." Here, that sort of homey affection would feel jarring: Domesticity has become a battleground where partners pick fights ("If You’re Legal"), polish their egos ("After the Show") and mansplain your "issues" ("Hard to Please"). On "Young Entertainment", a shimmering noir-punk number, she demands, "What is it like to fuck your mistress with her hands tied?"
Welcome Back to Milk scans as an overhaul of its protagonist’s romantic history, a poised reassessment of domestic situations that seemed okay at the time, but maybe weren’t the best, after all. Wherever her gaze turns, Houghton’s conviction is lethal. On "Mr. Hyde", she shreds a domineering narcissist to pieces; on "Four in the Morning", she shreds herself to pieces; on "Black Flag", she simply shreds. This all serves a winning mission statement: Radically reinterpret your past, and your present will look after itself.


Brand New’s fifth album stands as a monument to their gradual evolution. It is a wise and vulnerable conclusion for a rock band who were crucial in shaping a scene, a sound, and many emotions.

Science Fiction

The eight years of psychotic speculation ahead of Brand New’s forever-delayed “LP5” did more for the band’s legacy than topping Deja Entendu or The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me ever could. This fan fervor lent the album a mythical status typically granted to someone who died or disappeared. Objectively, it’s been 14 years since “The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows” peaked at No. 37 on Billboard’s Alternative chart, eight since Daisy, their most recent and least loved studio album, and they’ve toured both clubs and festivals regularly in the time since. The excitement surrounding Science Fiction now that it has arrived is faintly tempered by the thudding finality of it all: “#thisIsTheLastOne” and the “Brand New 2000 - 2018” t-shirts are a statement of fact. But to put it in his own words, “LP5” was a millstone around Jesse Lacey’s neck. Science Fiction turns it into a monument.
As they’ve done throughout their two decades, Brand New defy expectations to a degree that can make even their most beloved past work feel short-sighted. If the streamlined pop-punk throwback singles “I Am a Nightmare” and “Mene” were eventually bundled into Science Fiction, it might’ve been the equivalent of that oft-fantasized Radiohead album where they returned to The Bends; a satisfying capitulation to fans who refused to evolve along with the band. Instead, from its opening invocation of burning witches, Science Fiction is most similar to A Moon Shaped Pool: We’ve never heard this band be this quiet or this gracious about aging. And it’s unnerving because an infamously inscrutable frontman drops his defenses and finally becomes vulnerable, like he knows this might very well be the last time he gets the chance.
Lacey’s long-lasting aversion to talking about himself and his music is completely at odds with the band’s most popular work—his logorrheic lyrics inspired thousands of LiveJournal status updates lost to the digital dustbin of history, only to be salvaged decades later at jam-packed Emo Nights across the country. Given that 2003’s Deja Entendu was essentially a concept record about Brand New’s conflict with modest fame, how much could we trust Science Fiction if Lacey hadn’t mentioned the rise in expectations during his transformation from Warped Tour pin-up to musical prophet? “Got my messiah impression, I think I got it nailed down,” Lacey sarcastically self-harmonizes during the one song that evokes Deja Entendu in both shout-along catharsis and Brand New meta-criticism. The real punchline, though, is the chorus: “I’ve got a positive message, sometimes I can’t get it out.” Sure, if we could all constantly radiate love for everyone and shrug off our demons, maybe Brand New wouldn’t need to exist. But Lacey was built to fight through all this to the bitter end.
Science Fiction doesn’t provide much joy beyond its mordant humor, but using the acidic feel of “old Brand New” as a counterpoint, it resonates longer, has more gravitas, and carries the weight of earned wisdom. The candlelit “Could Never Be Heaven” expresses Lacey’s desire to be a reliable family man in his 40s with as much intensity as he once summoned to smite exes and Taking Back Sunday. On The Dark Side of the Moon and Antarctica hybrid “In the Water,” he warns, “‘Hide your daughters,’ the old men say/You were young once before, you know how we get our way,” and as the guy who admitted to doing just that on Deja Entendu’s dark and regrettable song “Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis”, he should know. Likewise, centerpiece “Same Logic/Teeth” takes a stern but empathetic look at cyclical self-destruction: “Your friends are all imaginary/Your shrink stopped answering the phone/So you decide to make incisions at your home while you’re alone.”
While Science Fiction keeps the energy up with diamond-cut harmonies, howled hooks, and pithy quotables, it also blooms outward with new qualities: patience, long stretches of stillness, denial of easy answers, defiance. It’s bookended by two of Brand New’s lengthiest songs and certainly their most disquieting. Lacey dreams of bursting into flames through all of the nocturnal, dubbed-out opener “Lit Me Up,” yet never reaches above a mutter; he closes the album with the chilling guitar figures of “Batter Up” turning into white ash, like “Jesus Christ” given a Disintegration Loops treatment. They’re produced with astonishing clarity and detail by longtime “fifth member” Mike Sapone like controlled burns. The stately balladry of “Waste” is slowly subsumed by guitarist Vinnie Accardi’s molten feedback, “451” and “Desert” recall the aggressive, parched blues of PJ Harvey or Feist’s Pleasure. By emphasizing closely-mic’d drums, live-room dynamics, and gristly, 3-D grain, Science Fiction creates an unusual intimacy despite its sweeping expanse, ensuring the listener never feels too far removed from Brand New even if they’re being projected on a festival screen.
For all of Brand New’s ambitions, it’s hard to recall a popular rock band making an album this crafty, this finely decorated without jettisoning the attributes of rock music. Accardi has been a key architect in the defining and redefining of Brand New’s sound, and Science Fiction features his most inventive textures and his proggiest soloing, mandolins and banjos, but also stiffly strummed power chords, intimate acoustic picking, and arena-ready anthems. This is populist rock music—outsized alternative rock—and the scope and scale is unique enough in 2017 to forgive the inevitable moments where Lacey could’ve used an editor, namely the indelicate Nagasaki and Wizard of Oz metaphors on “137” and “Could Never Be Heaven.”
If Brand New sonically recall the mid-90s, when emotionally fraught and morally conflicted guitar bands ruled the airwaves, no wonder they released Science Fiction into the unsuspecting world as 500 one-track CDs. From its arresting cover art to its careful sequencing, it’s an album that impresses with its carefully considered wholeness. It rigs even the potential “singles” with unexpected segues, trap doors, false endings, found sound, lo-fi vignettes, tape loops, and lyrical Easter eggs that either reference their past work or can easily be manipulated into doing so. “In the Water” ends with the same incantation that began “Daisy” and splices in a manipulated voice that blurts “seven years” seven times—an off-kilter reference to “Seventy Times 7”? Or the count-off from “Limousine”? Why is it seven years when Daisy came out eight years ago?
For years, Brand New obsessed over Science Fiction and it should be treated in kind. It secures their place in 21st-century rock music by re-establishing why a lot of their acolytes became musicians themselves. Whether it’s Manchester Orchestra’s blockbuster dirges, Lil Peep’s sweet and sour emo-rap, Julien Baker’s ecclesiastical confessionals, the cleansing emotional purge of Sorority Noise’s You’re Not As _____ As You Think, the caustic nu-grunge of Citizen, or even their choices in opening acts (Modern Baseball, Cloakroom, (Sandy) Alex G, Foxing), popular guitar music in 2017 has been undeniably shaped by Brand New, a band who has served not just as damaged role models but as a formative musical influence. And this was all before they provided an example of what all these bands could aspire to sound like in their 40s without disowning their younger, more dramatic selves. In death, they provide a last will and testament—if this truly is the end for Brand New, Science Fiction points a way forward for everyone else.


Since 2006's Year of the Dog, Fucked Up have released an EP once every 12 months or so featuring music inspired by different years of the Chinese calendar. The seventh in the series*, Year of the Hare*, shows them indulging their weirder sides, embracing outsider psych and sound experiments.

Year of the Hare EP

The thing about Fucked Up is that on their proper albums, their music has never been all that fucked up. At this point, the Toronto band is basically a heavy guitar pop group fronted by the unmistakable hardcore bark of Damian "Pink Eyes" Abraham. They're hardcore in spirit and attitude and Wikipedia entry only: 2014's Glass Boys was more digital-age the Who than Minor Threat (and the same goes for 2011’s hour-plus rock opera David Comes to Life, really).
As far as living up to their name, it's in their ongoing Zodiac series where they let the freak flag fly. Since 2006's Year of the Dog, they've released an EP (sometimes only "EP" in name) once every 12 months or so featuring music inspired by different years of the Chinese calendar. These songs are often long and more experimental. The seventh in the series*, Year of the Hare*, includes a 21-minute title track that was written and recorded in 2013 and a eight-minute B-side recorded in 2014. The cover art was designed by Converge frontman Jake Bannon, who's released Year of the Hare on his Deathwish imprint, but this music isn't especially heavy.
Instead, it sounds like the kind of outsider psychedelia that may have popped up on a weirdo imprint like Siltbreeze at some point in the '90s alongside the Strapping Fieldhands, the Dead C, and Harry Pussy. The B-side, "California Cold", actually made me think of psyched-out noise-freaks Temple of Bon Matin and Comets on Fire for the first time in awhile. The vocals are hazy and occasionally buried, the guitars reminiscent of a blown-out "Free Bird". There are shakers, saxophone, and flute. It's a lusciously murky offering, one that works as an anthem before folding in on itself and breaking apart in interesting ways, and overall is the stronger of the songs here.
The title track finds them experimenting with the process of recording itself. "Year of the Hare" starts in silence for two minutes before an acoustic guitar strums and the song slowly picks up pace. But throughout these 21 minutes, tape is spliced and edits are intentionally obvious: you get the sound of a cable unplugging (and the connection being reestablished), an empty studio layered over and over, a plaintive piano starting and stopping and warping, music skidding out into a dead-end and then negotiating a new climax. "Year of the Hare" feels, at times, very much like their version of a modern-classical experiment: John Cage collaborating with Youth of Today. It's not until about the six-minute mark when they allow themselves to go full bore into the song, and here it becomes an enjoyable Fucked Up anthem. Though, after repeat listens, it remains unclear if you really needed to go through the rest to experience that rush.
Abraham and guest vocalist Isla Craig sing—at different times, it's more like Act I and Act II than a duet—about various rabbits, from the popular culture of Alice of Wonderland ("There's only one way to stop a mad watch") to the kind you find in your backyard. There are "hare/hair/heir" puns and references to endless fucking and endless proliferating. These lyrics were written by guitarist and producer Mike Haliechuk, who has said that the song "focuses on time, and becoming lost in it. The modern way of life, getting stuck in time-sucking gadgets and trends, stress and scheduling."
The song itself is circular, finishing how it began; it feels very much like an endless loop, Abraham howling somewhere in the middle: "Mad as a march hare, two days late/ They stole all my time and ate all my space/ A thousand rabbits with a million heirs/ It's always tea time in the year of the hare." The track was accompanied by an unsolvable interactive video that features an office worker being haunted by rabbits on the subway, in his office, and at home. I couldn't get the video to work properly, so just kept refreshing my browser, until I started to wonder if that's actually what they wanted me to do.
All of this is admirable enough, even if, at this point, the commentary is a bit obvious. But hey, Fucked Up have continued to stretch and find new ways to carry on, and for a hardcore group that formed in 2001, this is worthy of respect. Doubling down on all of this, the band is about to go out on a Zodiac-themed tour, performing Zodiac songs (some never before performed live) as a nine-piece featuring all the members of the group, Doomsquad.
You have to wonder, though, if it isn't time to scale back a little, and to find complexities in a more compact approach. You can add layers and length endlessly, but that often dilutes (Chinese Democracy vs. Appetite for Destruction, if you will). Sometimes a power trio is more than enough. Because while "Year of the Hare" offers nice sounds and concepts, it essentially works best as background music. All said, I'm not sure if background music's what I want from a band who, on more than one occasion, literally caused the hair on my neck to stand up.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the wondrous alchemy of performance and technology found on Tortoise’s third record.

TNT

Imagine a graphic showing all the bands the five members of Tortoise were in before they came together and then all the bands they went on to play with after. At the top of the funnel you have groups ranging from dreamy psych-rock to earthy post-punk crunch, including Eleventh Dream Day, Bastro, Slint, and the Poster Children; on the “post-Tortoise” end are groups focusing on electro-jazz and twangy instrumental rock like Isotope 217, Chicago Underground, and Brokeback. In this graphic, Tortoise is the choke point, the one project that has elements of all these sounds but is never defined by nor committed to any of them.
Instead, Tortoise floats free, a planchette moving over a Ouija board guided by 10 sets of fingers, where everyone watches the arrow float in one direction but no one is quite sure how it gets there or who is doing the pushing. No album in the band’s initial run embodied that like their third, 1998’s TNT. Weirdly beautiful and impossible to pin down, TNT was a fulcrum, a place where the musical values of the past (instrumental proficiency, deliberate composition) met the digital future.
But first we should start with that past, with a rhythm section, or rather, two of them. The first of these came together when drummer John Herndon and bassist Doug McCombs became friends and started playing together in Chicago in the early 1990s. Entering a studio with producer Brad Wood to record an early single, Herndon and McCombs overdubbed multiple parts to flesh out the sound but realized they needed more musicians for what they had in mind. They played the tapes for their acquaintances, drummer John McEntire and bassist Bundy K. Brown, who formed the rhythm section for the Louisville-based post-hardcore group Bastro, and soon after, the four players, along with percussionist Dan Bitney, became Tortoise.
If the early ’90s was the perfect time for a band like Tortoise to emerge, Chicago was the perfect place. The city’s burgeoning independent music scene was attracting national attention. After the post-Nirvana alternative rock explosion, the hunt for “the next Seattle” was on, and Chicago was one of the candidates. In 1993, Billboard published a piece touting Chicago as “Cutting Edge’s New Capital,” citing the buzz around artists like Liz Phair, Urge Overkill, and Smashing Pumpkins. But if the national press was more focused on the MTV-ready alt acts, that meant that the underground was free to do their thing far from the glare of the spotlight. For Chicago, the building blocks of such a scene were the city’s record labels, particularly Touch and Go, Drag City, and, beginning in 1995, when it moved from New York, an upstart imprint called Thrill Jockey launched by former Atlantic A&R rep Bettina Richards.
After bassist Brown had been replaced by ex-Slint guitarist and bassist Dave Pajo, Tortoise began moving fluidly between musical worlds. An experimental strain of music using rock instrumentation was emerging, and “post-rock” seemed to fit as a blanket description. Initially, the term applied to UK bands like Disco Inferno and Bark Psychosis, but a framework for understanding this music from the U.S. was laid out by critic Simon Reynolds in a late 1995 piece for The Wire. As Reynolds pointed out, the American flavor of post-rock (the piece highlights Tortoise, Labradford, UI, Stars of the Lid, and more) could be thought of as anti-grunge, a music that suggested a headier and less earthbound alternative to the alternative. “Grunge literally means ‘grime,’ ‘muck,’ ‘dirt,’ Reynolds wrote. “It’s appropriate that so many of those in revolt against Grunge’s earthly passion have turned to science fiction and outer space in order to free up their imaginations.”
Guitars dominated the grunge-derived strand of music, but post-rock left room for electronics and other instruments. McEntire was Tortoise’s resident tech wizard, and the band’s M.O. moved from the thudding beats of the debut into something that could fit with what was happening with various strands of electronic music. On Virgin’s 1995 set of dark atmospheric electronica, Macro Dub Infection, Tortoise appeared alongside Spring Heel Jack, 4 Hero, Tricky, and the Mad Professor. And in 1996, they were included in Mo’ Wax’s blunted head-nodding 2-CD trip-hop set Headz 2A, sandwiched between songs by DJ Krush and Massive Attack. Tortoise didn’t exactly fit on either compilation—they were too disjointed, too ready to leave the groove behind if something else caught their fancy. But these compilation placements helped to reframe their music as a studio creation first, something assembled from parts.
Remixing was in vogue, and Tortoise embraced it. The astonishing 20-minute journey “Djed,” the opening track from their second album, 1996’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die, put the idea of after-performance manipulation at the center of the piece, as a deep-pocket groove is born, develops, and shatters halfway through in a moment of digital haywire that sounded like a mistake. That garbled transmission when the piece implodes provided a clue as to what the next record might be about.
TNT took the ideas of “Djed” further into the creative possibilities of nonlinear editing. It was recorded to hard disk via Pro Tools, a relatively new idea on the music scene when they started working on the album in late 1996 (Stereolab’s Dots and Loops, engineered by McEntire around the same time, was another early entry for the technology). TNT is a record where copy, cut, paste, and undo reign supreme. Individual parts were worked up in rehearsals, recorded in various combinations, and later reconfigured into new pieces of music by McEntire and the band.
One of the delicious tensions of TNT is its ex post facto assembly. It doesn’t really sound like music created by careful manipulation of each bit and put together from parts. You almost always have a sense that individual people, not machines, are playing each part and even though the players’ skill ranges from “highly accomplished” to “virtuoso,” the pieces also sound human. You can see hands on keys and people standing over drum kits. Beats are a bit off-kilter, the guitar seems in dialogue with the bass.
TNT’s opening title track is the most live-sounding cut on the record, but it, too, was carefully built one part at a time. As it begins, the cymbals and snare taps are like the tide rolling in, the skitters and crashes are as jazzy as Tortoise get, and out of this foamy pile emerges Jeff Parker’s immortal guitar line. Parker was new to the band, and was the first player to bring serious jazz chops, with his history with Chicago’s legendary collective AACM. He announced his arrival in Tortoise with a guitar phrase that might be the group’s most memorable single moment, a riff that sums up not only the album’s mood but the spirit of an entire era. Parker’s 12-note phrase seems to ask a question and then half answer it, and because it conveys the feeling of an incomplete thought, it leaves a space for the listener to fill. Driven by that guitar refrain, which loops throughout the track, “TNT” folds in horns, a sequencer, and chunky bass as Parker offers counterpoint phrases. You can feel both how “played” it is alongside the album’s modular nature, where each part is slid into place as it grows and then explodes. “TNT” conveys possibility—it’s a musical expression of what it feels like to wonder about the future on an album that feels like it’s living inside of it.
Nothing else on the record is quite so dynamic or organic. Instead, TNT settles into a liminal zone that straddles genres and threatens to slip into the background but never does. It’s a vague record, but that’s actually one of its strengths—the music frames uncertainty, leaves avenues unexplored, and sounds a little different each time you hear it. Many of the tracks flow one into the next, and motifs appear and then reappear later. A few songs become loosely joined pairs as one idea is introduced and then explored later from a different angle. It’s an album that seems to be in conversation with itself.
The hiss of the closing cymbals in “TNT” cross-fades into the bass-driven mood piece “Swung From the Gutters,” a quiet track that feels like a lost interlude on the Grateful Dead’s Blues for Allah. This focus on a simple melody connects it to “The Suspension Bridge at Iguazú Falls,” which shows up later on the album but unfolds at a much more deliberate pace. None of these nods to genre are played completely straight. “I Set My Face to the Hillside” opens with the voices of playing children before a nylon-stringed guitar enters, carrying a memory of flamenco that blooms out like the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone. That sound was already an established template for Tortoise, but here they tweak it. On “Set My Face,” you can almost hear the clop of horseshoes in the drums, but then the main melody enters, played on melodica, and you imagine Augustus Pablo meeting the Ventures uptown.
Other references are more of-the-moment. On “Almost Always Is Nearly Enough,” Tortoise do a convincing imitation of the squelching, endearingly awkward electro-pop that Mouse on Mars was releasing on Thrill Jockey around this time, complete with fluttering programmed beats and a squawking robotic vocal. That vocal continues through “Jetty,” which gets close to dance music proper, with a jittery forward-leaning beat. “The Equator” is loping electro, a wobbly gurgle of a bassline percolating below a twinkly electronic drone and a slide guitar. The defining word for all these tracks is “almost”—they hint at the work of other artists and embody a range of styles, but they never go all the way. Tortoise were never interested in making actual dance music, the same way they never wanted to improvise in a conventional way. The music is about what happens in the cracks.
“The focus is definitely shifting to the treble over the last couple of records,” McEntire told Billboard in early 1998. He was talking about the use of mallet instruments, especially the marimba, which pops up frequently on TNT. “Ten-Day Interval” and its companion piece “Four-Day Interval” pick up the Steve Reich thread that wound through parts of Millions Now Living and make it more explicit. “Ten-Day” is comparatively dense and busy, while “Four-Day” feels like a ghost of its predecessor, ticking along at half the pace and unfolding with twice the space. Tortoise’s take on Reichian repetition has an appealing pop edge to it, foregoing long-form trance induction and instead laying out a basic premise: tweak the rhythm with bits of piano, bass, and percussion, and get out. All the pieces function together, and none, with the possible exception of the title track, draw undue attention to themselves.
For their first two albums, Tortoise received almost nothing but raves, but the reaction to TNT was initially mixed. It seemed to pull back slightly after the first two albums strained against limitations. Where the band once shattered conventions, now their music was quiet, pretty, and worked in the background of a dinner party. SPIN thought TNT was accomplished but ultimately bloodless and antiseptic, while The Wire called it “one of the least explosive records ever made, and one of the most gently perplexing.” Neither criticism is unfair, but both inadvertently point to what makes this record special—its essential in-between-ness. Jeff Parker told CMJ in 1998, “People expect everything to be so obvious. But life isn’t like that, so why should music be like that?” TNT is not about certainty. It’s a free-floating work that tends to find a different meaning everywhere it lands, an album that’s beautiful on the surface but gets harder to parse the deeper you go. To enjoy it is to embrace that uneasy sense of not-knowing, of luxuriating in a sound that doesn’t tell you what to feel.


The Florida rapper’s debut album is muted and mired with pain, trauma, and controversy. The reasons it is difficult to listen to can overshadow the need to listen to it.

17

One of the most disruptive effects of streaming culture, especially as it pertains to rap, is the way it brings the periphery to the center: When one hot SoundCloud single does more for a young artist’s career overnight than years of label development, there are no rules beyond what works and what doesn’t. And so the fact that 2017’s most vital rap movement—a loosely-connected group making bruised, blown-out DIY music that often doesn’t sound much like rap at all, mostly discussed under the umbrella term of “SoundCloud rap”—has almost no mainstream appeal is not a hurdle, but a selling point. “Look At Me!”, the breakthrough hit from XXXTentacion, this scene’s most contentious poster boy, is a succinct embodiment of SoundCloud rap’s ideals. Purposely mixed like shit so you know it’s real, with crass lyrics that tumble over a decayed, bass-boosted Mala sample, the song was an inhospitable introduction to the underbelly of South Florida rappers that have so far dominated the sub-genre. Currently, it has more than 92 million SoundCloud streams; the first comment on the track reads, “MY EARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
But despite making a handful of the scene’s marquee hits, the 19-year old born Jahseh Onfroy stands apart from his SoundCloud rap peers. That distance was plainly illustrated in this year’s XXL Freshman cypher: while Playboi Carti, Ugly God, and Madeintyo bounce around, hyping one another with ad-libs and cooking dances, XXXTentacion lurks motionless in the background, head hung low. Then Sonny Digital cuts the beat, and X crouches to the floor, expressionless, rapping in a chilling monotone: “And if the world ever has an apocalypse, I will kill all of you fuckers.” There is a sense of unease when Digital brings the beat back; whatever just happened, no one is sure how to follow it.
It’s a thing, these days, for rappers to insist that their work transcends genre—and hey, more power to ’em, though by now it’s a bit clichéd. But a deeper dive into X’s three-year catalog turns up sufficient proof that it is more than just lip service when he lists his inspirations as Nirvana, Papa Roach, and the Fray. Scattered throughout his SoundCloud are surprisingly compelling experiments in grunge, nu-metal, and post-Weeknd R&B. In fact, “Look At Me!” might be one of X’s least essential offerings—a solid introduction to his persona, but an insufficient distillation of his artistry. If anything, the song’s most revealing element is its title’s imperative exclamation point: “Look At Me!” is not a request, but a demand.
It turns out people are looking, though perhaps not for the reasons X had hoped. As “Look At Me!” crept up the Hot 100 earlier this year, X sat in a Broward County jail, serving time for violating a house arrest agreement from 2015 charges of home invasion and battery with a firearm. But more recent, and far more harrowing, charges have made X notorious, raising the valid question of whether ethical consumption of his music is possible. Miami-Dade County court records reveal charges that include aggravated battery of a pregnant woman. That woman is alleged to be his ex-girlfriend; a photo of her swollen, bruised eyes has been circulated across social media. Google Trends data shows a grimly proportionate correlation between the alleged October 2016 incident and X’s sudden spike in visibility. Since then, there has been almost no middle ground in the response to the rapper’s popularity. X assumes a cult-leader authority over his die-hard battalion of stans, outlining in interviews a rubric for fandom that feels more like the Sea Org’s billion-year contract. Many of these fans seem eager to comply by trolling his critics (and, horrifyingly, his ex herself) with frenzied claims of “innocent until proven guilty” and familiar misinterpretations of the First Amendment. Meanwhile, just as many listeners have chosen to opt out entirely, and understandably so; it is soul-crushing enough to exist in 2017 without the obligation to engage with music made by even alleged abusers.
If you can stomach it, though, it is interesting in a purely critical sense to imagine receiving 17, X’s first official album, on unmarked CD or anonymous zip file. Nothing on the 22-minute album sounds anything like his breakout hit; and while I imagine that X relishes in this opportunity for a bit of a fake-out, it feels disingenuous to chalk up 17’s stark distinction from “Look At Me!” to pure provocation. In an Instagram post last month, X warned fans: “If you listen to me to get hype or to not think, don’t buy this album.”
In fact, it would be a stretch to call 17 a rap album at all; instead, it is a collection of shell-shocked bedroom R&B and hopeless, rock-bottom grunge that deals exclusively with depression, heartbreak, and suicide. “Jocelyn Flores,” a half-sung, half-rapped dedication to a friend who ended her life in a hotel room earlier this year, presents pain as one’s final connection to something that’s no longer there. “Dead Inside (Interlude)” is just a piano and X’s racing thoughts, reminding me quite a bit of the 2000 version of Cat Power’s “In This Hole.” “Voices in my head/Telling me I’m gonna end up dead,” he chants along with the funereal plod of “Save Me,” a blatant cry for help that sits somewhere between Staind and unplugged Chris Cornell. Of its 11 songs, only half make it past the two-minute mark. But if the songs on 17 often feel like unfinished thoughts, well, that’s what existing inside the black hole of depression and PTSD feels like. And for those who have suffered from mental health issues, it’s hard not to relate, on some primordial level, to the visceral despair here. There is no respite, no light at the end of the tunnel, just darkness.
As genre boundaries have dissolved and rappers have become known as the new rock stars in a post-Rebirth world, the recent resurgence of emo, rap-rock, and Hot Topic aesthetics makes sense beyond just millennial nostalgia. But part of the reason stuff like rap-rock was so maligned (aside from straight-up classism) was that it often seemed to sit awkwardly in the middle of the two genres it attempted to merge, unresolved. More than most of his fusion-inclined predecessors and all of his current peers, 17 presents X as impressively adept at reconciling his influences into a sound that is shockingly elegant, even at its most unpolished—an album whose disparate influences dissolve in an acid bath of raw feeling.
It is that visceral emotion that makes it easy—against all of my better judgment—to understand what makes X’s core audience so intensely, uncomfortably fanatical. If Xanax, within the vernacular of SoundCloud rap, has come to function as a trendy accessory—a signifier for a certain type of fuck-the-world cool for those on the fringes of society (or those who imagine it might be glamorous to be)—17’s desperate numbness is a reminder that opiates’ clinical purpose is to temporarily anesthetize a traumatized mind. The R&B songs here—especially the Trippie Redd-featuring “Fuck Love,” currently the most-played song on SoundCloud this week—feel adjacent in sound to popular R&B of the past few years. But where “alternative R&B” in the 2010s has largely suffered from an air of total detachment, “Fuck Love” bleeds emotion. You’ve probably experienced, in recent years, the strange cognitive dissonance of turning up to Future songs in which he appears to be on the brink of overdose, or bopping along to Lil Uzi Vert telling us his friends are dead. But 17 forces you to sit quietly in X’s headspace, to wholly embody that suffering; to be dancing to this stuff would be perverse.
And at the same time, this is precisely what makes 17 as a record, and moreover, the entire XXXTentacion phenomenon, so harrowing. “I put my all into this, in the hopes it will help cure or at least numb your depression,” he announces in the album’s intro, the “p” in “depression” popping into the microphone, painting a picture of X recording alone in his bedroom, just as you are listening to it. And though it’s preceded by a creepy demand for fealty (“I do not value your money; I value your acceptance and loyalty”), X seems sincere in his hope that his words might be a balm to others in pain. But it is impossible to navigate the line between cathartic solidarity with his listeners and valorization of rage, to the point of excusing the reprehensible behavior it can inspire in those who don’t see a way out. It seems almost too fitting that this is the hottest new rapper of 2017—in a cultural moment in which we are more woke than ever but unable to apply that awareness to actionable results; a digital landscape that so often feels catered towards the lonely, angry, and impressionable who seek a sense of belonging at any cost.
And while there is no shortage of catharsis in and around 17, I have a hard time getting past the nauseous feeling I get when songs like “Revenge” and “Carry On” allude explicitly to his ex-girlfriend, whose last name is the title to the album’s wallowy alt-rock outro. Certainly, it is within X’s artistic license to write about any of this, regardless of its veracity. At many points, he appears painfully aware of his mistakes, though he is conveniently unspecific as to exactly what those are. But when he sings on “Revenge,” in that queasy Isaac Brock yelp, about his vendettas against those who have betrayed him, directed obviously towards his ex, it feels like a monument to something fucked and evil, something that should be torn down.
I can’t help but wonder what it might sound like if XXXTentacion took these dark, gut-level thoughts a step further, from the knee-jerk documentation of rock bottom (as talented as he is at showing, not telling, how depression feels) to some kind of reckoning of his own part in all of this, and maybe even an attempt at contrition. And this, in turn, leads to the uncomfortable question as to whether that is what listeners really want from X anyway; does repentance ever make for art as vital as the kind born from seething, dizzying pain? Perhaps naively, I would like to think it is worth pursuing all the same.


Scott Morgan's fourth Loscil album, like his others, explores calm, textured, emotionally neutral space.

Plume

From a career standpoint, artists making ambient music don't have it easy. They're usually faceless, like most electronic producers-- we have no idea who is making this stuff. Since subtle understatement is the genre's forte, they're not typically at the cutting edge of technology, either, so the gear geeks inevitably move on to something else. And then there's the problem of how the music changes once a template is established. It's a fantastic and rare thing to create your own voice in electronic music, but once it happens, you're confronted with where to go next. No matter how appealing or distinctive your sound, it's unlikely that most people will need four or five albums of it.
And that's where I'm finding Scott Morgan's Loscil project here on his fourth album. It's not that he keeps making the exact same record over again. There are changes. Sometimes he makes the heartbeat 4/4 kick a priority; other times he focuses more on glitches. Sometimes his music sounds bubblier, more aquatic, or more organic; traditional instruments have cameos. But despite the variance, the general character and prevailing mood of his four albums is virtually identical. Were a listener looking for a calm, textured, emotionally neutral space to stumble upon any one of them, including Plume, I'm sure they wouldn't be disappointed. If you know his first three records well, on the other hand, you might find this one redundant.
Let's talk about the differences. Morgan looks back a bit further on this record, giving Plume a clear "classic ambient" sound. By using spare bits of guitar and piano, he evokes the 1970s world of ambient pioneers like Eno, Cluster, and Tangerine Dream. "Chinook" and "Bellows" in particular sound like the Reich-channeling trance music Tangerine Dream brought to soundtracks in the late 1970s and early 80s-- most famously for Risky Business-- and it does so rather nicely. Throughout, Plume is much less diffuse with lighter processing. Morgan seems content to let the synths go it alone on droney tracks like "Zephyr" and "Motoc", inserting just the smallest bits of static-ridden glitch to send ripples across the placid surface. Plume sounds older and more spacious than any of the earlier Loscil material.
Which all adds up to...I'm not sure, exactly. Plume is certainly a nice-enough record, but it also seems like the kind of music Morgan could do well until the end of time. There's no sense of challenge or risk, no feeling that this project wants to step outside what it already knows. Not a terrible thing, but also not a quality that invites close attention as new material piles up. One of the tracks, appropriately enough, is titled "Rorschach". You'll hear what you want to hear in these blobs of sound, and the specific place you're coming from will make all the difference.


Two years after its release, the Postal Service just keep milking the debut, Give Up: This new EP features the title track, one new song, and remixes by Matthew Dear and Styrofoam.

The Postal Service: We Will Become Silhouettes EP

We Will Become Silhouettes EP

I think I can say without exaggeration that the Postal Service is the most important band in music history. Okay, in the past five years. Three years. In the genre of indie rock. In the sub-genre of indie rock with laptops. In the sub-genre of indie rock with laptops featuring Ben Gibbard. On Sub Pop.
Okay, maybe they're not so important in the grand scheme of things, but for a group of their size and funding, the Postal Service have been surprisingly ubiquitous. Thanks to that "Scrubs" guy, "Such Great Heights" has been added to Hollywood's palette of trailer music, perfectly expressing that "dramedy about quarter-life crisis" sensation. The friendly resolution to the band's mini-spat with the actual United States Postal Service earned them national coverage, and a choice gig at the influential Postmaster General National Executive Conference (which, as you may remember, launched the career of the Beatles). And the duo's brand of point-click indie-pop has begun to inspire their peers to follow suit: Rather than find his own tech support for his recent digital wanderings, Conor Oberst merely picked up his phone and growled (quaveringly) to his secretary, "Get me Tamborello!"
All of which is good reason for Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello to celebrate with a few cold-brewed Coors Lights-- but not a reasonable justification to shake the last few shards of pocket change out of two-year-old Give Up. "We Will Become Silhouettes" is one of the flatter tracks from that album's saggy middle, an unsettlingly chipper song about living through the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Christmas carol backing vocals, accordion samples, and the climactic New Order keyboards can't distract from lyrics about fallout shelters and uncontrollable mitosis-induced body explosions. It's difficult to think of a movie looking for that lap-pop Hiroshimal sound... maybe it could be the love theme from 56 Days Later.
The single's lone new track is "Be Still My Heart", which-- as its title might imply-- is typical Postal Service heart-meet-sleeve territory. Sadly, it seems only half-hearted: Built around dreary old guitars and live drums, it sounds more or less like a Death Cab demo with a few anxious clicking noises added to it.
Clicking noises are also the weapon of choice on the single's two remixes, Morr Music producer Styrofoam's take on "Nothing Better", and Matthew Dear's reworking of the A-side. The Human League-biting medical terminology duet of "Nothing Better" is much more deserving of promotion to single status than "Silhouettes", but sometime-Notwist (and Gibbard) collaborator Styrofoam doesn't add much to the original, oddly choosing to make it more rockier while adding a rhythm track that sort of sounds like a guy making the O-face and flicking his cheeks.
Ghostly International tech-house wunderkind Matthew Dear takes a few more liberties with "Silhouettes", giving it the old separate-the-elements treatment and spiking the track's drink with a handful of Ambien. The swirling ambient loops alter the music to fit the lyrical creepiness a little better, but it still doesn't quite nail the mood, perhaps due to Gibbard's incorruptibly saccharine delivery. Someone should've been a bit more willing to goth it up, or maybe just have given the song over to another band, a la the Postal Service's "Such Great Heights" single. Anybody death metal would do (though I guess it'd be hard to find one with a Sub Pop contract).
So in the end, We Will Become Silhouettes does little more than advertise for a revisitation of Give Up. One wonders if the protracted flogging of that album means that new product from the band is far off-- especially since Gibbard is busy riding Death Cab's prestige into the indie MOR growth market, and Tamborello is embracing his newfound role as the go-to guy for indie heartthrobs looking to modernize their sound. If so, that's a shame, as their snail-mail collaboration remains the most effective shuffling of the IDM and indie scenes in decades. Well, okay, in the past three years.


The title of L.I.E.S.' two-and-a-half-hour second label-summating compilation, Music for Shut-Ins, may or may not playfully allude to the forward thinking dance imprint's reputation for fringe-originating dance music. But the collection approaches a perverted accessibility.

Various Artists: L.I.E.S. Presents: Music for Shut-Ins

L.I.E.S. Presents: Music for Shut-Ins

Ron Morelli isn't here to make friends. After two years and change of simmering in obscurity, the sometimes-producer, mostly-curator's Long Island Electrical Systems imprint enjoyed a profile-raising 2012, emerging as one of the most thrilling American dance labels in a field that's typically dominated by European voices. The chatter surrounding L.I.E.S.' quiet climb served as a reminder that the New York City's still an embarrassment of riches when it comes to forward-thinking producers and DJs.
So when 2013 rolled around, Morelli did what any misanthrope enjoying a taste of low-level success would do: he left NYC, abandoning the city he once referred to as an "overrated cesspool," moving himself and the L.I.E.S. name to a new home in Paris. An interview with FACT around the release of last year's dark, misshapen solo debut Spit (released by fellow enfant terrible Dominick Fernow's Hospital Productions) found Morelli in top grouchy form, the choicest quotes drenched with negativity: "People are terrible and always have been. That's the harsh truth since the dawn of man...We're all going to die alone."
Granted, Morelli's antisocial causticness shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's familiar with L.I.E.S.' loosely drawn aesthetic, which amounts to various strains of dance music filtered through layers of psychedelic grit and static sludge. The level of interest directed in the label's direction these days is partially owed to good timing, as noise musicians have increasingly turned their ears towards the dancefloor with results similar to L.I.E.S.' more inscrutable output.
More often than not, dance culture can't help but ascribe eye roll-worthy nomenclature to emerging sounds and scenes, which explains why you've probably heard L.I.E.S. releases referred to as "outsider house," a term not-totally-seriously coined by distant-relative noisenik and Hessle Audio boss Ben UFO. (As curious labelings of American DIY-dance phenomena go, the term is certainly less embarrassing than what we were stuck with two years ago.) The title of L.I.E.S.' second label-summating compilation, Music for Shut-Ins, may or may not playfully allude to its reputation for fringe-originating dance music. If so, it's another example of the label's overlooked sense of humor; the booklet art for 2012's American Noise comp took a yellowed image of a shish kebab, cast a phallic shadow on a mushroom, and drove the whole pointed stick straight through a gesticulating Skrillex's mouth.
L.I.E.S. release music at a constant clip that, unless you're the type of listener that lives this shit for real, is nearly impossible to keep pace with; the swarm of sounds is so persistently overwhelming that it can (and occasionally has) come across as, well, just a lot of noise. So the label's compilations have functioned less as a way to keep tabs on its general direction, instead providing a somewhat incomplete but necessarily concise method of appraising what its artists have been up to as of late. It is, from a label run by a human being who has gone on record expressing a hatred of humanity, a considerably generous gesture.
Compared to the label's other long-playing excursions in 2013—a platter of rudimentary synth experiments courtesy of Brooklyn producer Marcos Cabral, the murmured nightmares of eerie-techno duo Shadowlust's Trust in Pain—Music for Shut-Ins approaches a perverted accessibility insofar that the L.I.E.S. catalog's lack of sonic approachability can occasionally come across as overstated. There are moments of flat-out gorgeousness—the skipping placidity of "northeast" producer Samanthas Vacation's eponymous side-long single, Berlin resident Florian Kupfer's distant, emotive soul-house jam "Feelin'", D.C. duo Beautiful Swimmers' jungle-infused "The Zoo"—laid up against purely psychedelic workouts that carry their own iridescent beauty, like Beau Wanzer's trapped-in-the-mainframe "Crush of Lust" and L.I.E.S. regular Vereker's analog tunnel-chaser "Rosite".
Taken in small chunks, Music for Shut-Ins is as bewildering and exciting as its predecessor, a reminder of why L.I.E.S. have thus far escaped falling trap to faddish notions, remaining as engaging now as they did when no one was even talking about them. At two and a half hours, though, it's a slog as a front-to-back listen, particularly in the opening moments of the 2013-collecting first disc. This is fine, though, as the purpose of compilations like these aren't so much as to be listened to as proper albums as they are to literally compile, to properly round up singles that, especially considering L.I.E.S. low-profile method of releasing their white-label releases, would otherwise dissolve in the low-bitrate ether of YouTube rips.
American Noise and Music for Shut-Ins share an identical structure: one disc of appraising the L.I.E.S. oeuvre thus far, and another disc of new material. Whereas American Noise had two years and change of material to draw from, Music for Shut-Ins takes its previously released work from just over a year's worth of releases, which drives home L.I.E.S.' increasingly impressive track record of releasing forward-thinking dance music. The second disc of American Noise suggested that the label's sonic future would further embrace fragmentation, and as such, anyone coming to Music for Shut-Ins looking for hints on where L.I.E.S. is or will be should look elsewhere. Above all else, Morelli and company have demanded that we expect nothing but the unexpected, and the pleasurably gnashing dissonance of Music for Shut-Ins' past/present collision suggests that the L.I.E.S. label's what's-next surprises are far from growing stale just yet.


At 73, the outsider artist has made his most ambitious and approachable album: an extraordinary aural memoir that tells a cosmic story of survival.

Oh Me Oh My

The Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children was the kind of educational institution that traumatized its students more than it educated them. Founded in 1911, after the state of Alabama took over a large farming campus in the Mount Meigs community near Montgomery, the juvenile correctional facility became infamous for the horrific abuse and torture it inflicted on poor Black youth. In 1947, inspectors visiting the school found 300 boys “cooped up in cramped quarters with nothing to do or occupy their energies except to eat and live like hogs.” By the 1960s, a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, young inmates were forced to pick cotton from sunrise until sundown; beatings and sexual abuse were common. “This was functionally a slave plantation,” concluded the journalist Josie Duffy Rice, who spent a year and a half researching the school’s history for a podcast series.
Lonnie Holley, who was born into extreme poverty in Jim Crow-era Alabama and spent his childhood being passed from surrogate parent to surrogate parent, was among the souls who did time at the Mount Meigs campus, where he was eventually sent after being arrested at 11. “I was like the Jungle Book child,” Holley reflected in 2018. “I was cast away from society.” The trauma lingers. Even at 73, as an internationally renowned visual artist and musician whose work defies classification, Holley experiences night terrors, haunted by memories of Mount Meigs.
He exorcizes these ghosts on “Mount Meigs,” the harrowing centerpiece of his fourth and finest album, Oh Me Oh My. As a roiling, free-jazz storm of bleating horns and frantic drums erupts around him, Holley transports us 60 years earlier, summoning the fields where he worked and the name of the belt-wielding man who beat him into submission. “They beat the curiosity out of me/They beat it out of me/They whooped it/They knocked it!” he recounts with mounting intensity. Like much of Oh Me Oh My, the song is an extraordinary aural memoir, honoring Holley's story of survival in what can only be called a fucked-up America.
Holley is a self-taught visual artist who specializes in vast, sprawling sculptures and found-object assemblage—work that he fashions from discarded materials such as animal bones and abandoned shoes and pieces of steel and which has made its way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Throughout Oh Me Oh My, he applies a similar approach to music, creating unorthodox and moving songs out of the trauma and raw life materials that others would rather forget or discard. He surveys not only his own suffering at Mount Meigs, but the suffering of his mother, who gave birth to “baby after baby after baby after baby,” as Holley yowls on “Oh Me, Oh My,” a stunning track that pairs his narratives with Michael Stipe’s mournful croon.
Holley, a descendant of slavery, also taps into the intergenerational lineage of Black trauma, dramatizing an exchange between an enslaved person and her enslaver on “Better Get That Crop in Soon,” set to a funky undercurrent of kalimba and marimba grooves. (Slavery is a recurring theme both in Holley’s sculptures, which have depicted slave ships, and his music, which includes the 18-minute epic “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship.”) By sequencing the song next to the more explicitly autobiographical “Mount Meigs,” he draws a parallel between his own experience and that of his ancestors, all victims of state-sanctioned brutality.
Made in collaboration with producer Jacknife Lee, who shares a writing credit on every song, Oh Me Oh My manages to be Holley’s most approachable and most ambitious album all at once. The widescreen, full-bodied arrangements are a grand departure. Holley began a music career in earnest in his 60s; his early releases, 2012’s Just Before Music and 2013’s Keeping a Record of It, contained chintzy, off-the-cuff arrangements that mostly served as a malleable canvas for the artist’s free-association storytelling. On 2018’s sprawling MITH, the music assumed a more dreamlike, jazzy texture, with tracks that unfolded across seven minutes or more.
On Oh Me Oh My, the songs are more tightly structured, while the musical backdrops take on a cinematic life of their own: the sputtering, orchestral funk of “Earth Will Be There,” the ambient drift of “Kindness Will Follow Your Tears,” the frantic, vibrating polyrhythms of “Better Get That Crop in Soon.” We even get traces of West African pop on “If We Get Lost They Will Find Us,” which features the raspy wail of Malian vocalist Rokia Koné. The poet Moor Mother blurs personal and cosmic histories into one on “I Am a Part of the Wonder” and “Earth Will Be There,” which place Holley’s detail-rich reminiscences in communion with free jazz, electro-funk, and the long, rich tradition of Afrofuturism.
Oh Me Oh My is the rare album that can be described as both “star-studded” and virtually bereft of mainstream appeal. Lee, who’s produced records for the likes of R.E.M. and U2, marshals some big-name contributors, and some will look askance at the intrusion of marquee guests into Holley’s work. What’s striking is that these guests rarely steal the spotlight (Koné is the exception), content to serve as part of the patchwork of Holley’s outsider art. Stipe contributes a soulful mantra to the title track; Sharon Van Etten brings a world-weary yearning to “None of Us Have But a Little While,” which yields Holley’s most melodic singing to date. And Bon Iver’s chilly, multilayered falsetto is instantly recognizable on “Kindness Will Follow Your Tears.” It’s the first time conventional hooks have been present in Holley’s music.
Every Lonnie Holley song is a survival song because Holley survived extraordinary circumstances and unimaginable pain to get here. Yet improbable optimism is embedded in his spirit; it’s reflected in his catchphrase, “Thumbs up for Mother Universe!” Throughout Oh Me Oh My, he finds a kind of liberation in naming his pain, adding it to the cosmic record, placing it next to that of his ancestors, both spiritual and literal. On “I Can’t Hush,” the elegiac would-be closer (the actual closer, “Future Children,” an experiment in vocal manipulation, has the feel of a gratuitous hidden track), he reckons with the abuses inflicted on his mother and grandmother. They stayed silent and kept it all “locked within their brains,” something Holley cannot do. “I need the black ropes of hope,” he states in his grandfatherly drawl. “I need the togetherness/Where we put our Black hands together and act like a rope.” Out of this rope, Holley fashions these remarkable songs; junkyard scraps have always been his liberation.


Like their Danish neighbors Iceage, Lower's overheated punk has cooled down considerably as their scope has expanded. On their new EP, they shift from post-punk to goth—specifically the booming goth rock of the '80s, when acts like Sisters of Mercy and the Cure recorded in what sounded like cobwebbed dungeons that had been improbably outfitted with high-end studios.

Lower: I’m a Lazy Son...But I’m the Only Son EP

If singer Adrian Toubro had something important to say on Lower's debut EP Walk on Heads, the rest of the band sure did their best to stop anybody from hearing it. The louder he shouted, the harder the band roared back, drowning his words under sheets of blistering squall. Like their Danish neighbors Iceage, however, Lower's overheated punk has cooled down considerably as their scope has expanded. By last year's full-length Seek Warmer Climes, which favored post-punk's slow crawl over hardcore's speed-trial tempos, the singer was no longer locked in bloody competition against the rest of the band. Lower's latest EP I'm a Lazy Son…But I'm the Only Son cements their new pecking order: Now Toubro's voice leads and everything else follows.
That voice has earned its place at the front of the mix. It's the band's strongest instrument, and it's never been more expressive than it is on these five songs. On opener "At the Endless Party", he croons "Come on sweetheart, take me as I am/ Drag me to your chamber and toss me around," pulling at the word "sweetheart" until it becomes an accusation. It's the delivery of a desperate man trying to preserve his dignity in the face of dire need. "We'll never connect; there's no way around it," he mourns. He's not the first guy to sing about using sex to numb the pain, but he may be the first to make the pain sound like the better alternative.
"Endless Party" introduces the latest evolution in the band's sound, which undergoes a logical shift from post-punk to goth—specifically the booming goth rock of the '80s, when acts like Sisters of Mercy and the Cure recorded in what sounded like cobwebbed dungeons that had been improbably outfitted with high-end studios. The stark, churning bassline of "Keep Me in Mind" lurches as if it's weighed down by frost. Lower's commitment to goth's pervasive dreariness is impressive, though as Only Son's unhurried closer "Nasty Business" crawls past the six-minute mark it's hard not to pine a little for the speed and brevity of their punk output. The band makes an effort to fill in the track's creaky expanses, coloring it with sober pianos and echoes of muted horns, but really, this is Toubro's show, and it's his poetry of sorrow that drives the EP. "I deserve something more," he broods, "So much given, nothing given in return." On song after song, Toubro defends his own honor, demanding to be heard. And he is.