The Chicago rapper’s follow-up to his riveting debut LP argues for him as an adaptable and unmissable talent, an unlikely star in a new major-label system.

The Goat

Polo G raps with a sing-song lilt, but his songs are shaded with murders, heartbreak, and incredible pain. Each line is rendered in careful, writerly fashion, his voice barely produced and almost never doubled, so there is often little to distinguish chorus from verse. Memories, boasts, threats—all of it simply spills out. His songs are informed by the drill music that Polo grew up on on Chicago’s North side and once tried to imitate, but also borrow from rap’s more classicist branches. This approach was perfectly crystallized on Die a Legend, his arresting debut album from last year, which plays like an LP made up exclusively of the bloodlettings that sneak onto some albums’ B-sides. Its hits seem inevitable outgrowths of Polo G’s larger approach, the way its verses slide naturally into hooks. And the world it creates is unspoiled by outside interference: no treacly A&R-insisted beats or clumsily grafted features. It was easy to get lost inside.
Polo G’s follow-up, The Goat, is not quite so shut off to the world. Its front half is especially adventurous, folding in kinetic collaborations with rappers from North Carolina and Tennessee and tender love songs. It is not the singularly engrossing experience that Die a Legend is, but it argues for him as an adaptable and unmissable talent, an unlikely star in a new major-label system. When he does return to that well of somber reflection, Polo G draws some of his most chilling material yet: see the desperate “Relentless,” where he tries to convince skeptical friends: “Heaven ain’t the only way we can escape up out the gutter.”
It cannot be overstated how plain Polo G’s preferred syntaxes are, and how unsettling an effect they can have depending on the subject matter. This is, after all, a young rapper whose biggest hit includes a chorus that goes “We come from poverty, man, we ain’t have a thing.” When he raps about pain or trauma from his childhood and teen years, he often refers to them as “pain” and “trauma”; rather than make his music vague, this clarity is a helpful guide through dense verses packed with detail. Take the shimmering “No Matter What,” where he laments that his new money and power can’t bring back his departed friends: “But my homies died young and that wasn't part of the plan/Flying on these planes, wish I could reach and touch your hand/I don't wanna be awake, that's why I keep popping these Xans.” The problems are laid bare and the solutions are destructive, but the music—its lyrics and its sound—is always searching for a sort of exaltation.
Later in that same song, Polo G recalls sitting in a Cook County Jail cell as a public defender explained the details of a plea deal. He juxtaposes this memory with a more recent one, of him on stage in front of thousands of fans, but the latter does not scrub away the former. Polo G often raps about a string of arrests and short incarcerations as a teenager (weed possession and car theft) as a turning point in his life, and you can hear the weight of responsibility in his raps: a new father, Polo G has moved along with several of his family members to Calabasas. But he’s still haunted by loss. On “33,” he raps bitterly about a friend’s murder that has gone unavenged, a loose end that will never be tied.
There is another, curious motif in Polo G’s music. While it’s hardly uncommon for musicians to write about their self-medication, both Die a Legend and The Goat are littered with references to ecstasy. At the beginning of the 2010s, rappers often cited it in its traditional sense, as a party drug; more recently it has been given far grimmer purpose, as a salve for would-be shooters to steel their nerves before deadly confrontations. In Polo G’s songs, its purpose is characteristically plain: to steal by brute force the joy that can be hard to access otherwise. But this, of course, becomes another hurdle to overcome; Polo G has spoken in interviews about the pills’ nagging, lingering effects on his brain and body, and here, on “Relentless,” he raps that he’s “still trying to recover” from them.
Beyond the language, Polo G’s music itself has a sort of emotional earnesty. The closing track, the BJ the Chicago Kid-assisted “Wishing for a Hero,” samples the same Bruce Hornsby song that 2Pac flipped for “Changes.” Polo G does not undercut this grandiosity: He not only compares his business mind to Jay-Z’s, but promises Malcolm X that he’ll follow in his footsteps. It is difficult for a sense of destiny like this to read as anything but silly, but who better to sell it than a creatively fearless, uncompromised young rapper who’s bucked conventional wisdom to stand on the precipice of national stardom?


Smiley Smile/Wild Honey

In the mid-60's, Brian Wilson declared a race to the next major development in record production techniques. Everything looked good in Wilson's Beach Boys camp. He'd just produced one of the most revolutionary albums pop music had yet seen with 1966's Pet Sounds, and the reports of the follow-up, Smile, were extremely promising. "Our new album will be better than Pet Sounds," he pledged. "It will be as much an improvement over Sounds as that was over Summer Days." One can only imagine how great an improvement that must have originally been, and how exhilarating it would have been to look forward to such a dramatic shift occurring again after such a short period of time.
So who were his worthy competitors? Well, there were the Beatles, and then... well, really, that was all. Always the tough competitors, the Beatles were the group with Rubber Soul, the album that inspired Wilson to create Pet Sounds in the first place. He respected and admired them, and felt he could beat them to a pulp. And with Smile set for release in late '66, Wilson felt that he had the race "in the bag."
That is, until December of 1966, at which time label disputes and tension within the group had reached such a level that Wilson forced himself to abandon the Smile project as he had envisioned it. To fulfill contractual obligations, the Beach Boys recorded Smiley Smile in the first three quarters of 1967. The hype died, the album failed, Sgt Pepper came out, and Wilson began a quick descent into madness. He stopped taking sole production credits, and lost all confidence, fully aware that, without the possibility of Smile ever being completed, he could never top Sgt. Pepper.
It's truly a shame that Smile failed the way it did. And like any modern everyday thief in the age of Napster, I've been afforded the opportunity to hear the Smile recordings, or at least what's out there, unfinished, with an "unofficial" tracklist. It's hard to imagine how it would have sounded if completely finished; as it stands, however, it sounds like the beginning of something that could have changed popular music history. Perhaps we wouldn't be so monotheistic in our pop leanings, worshipping only at the Beatles' altar the way some do today. With the Smile material, full of vignettes, lush harmonies, unique arrangements and some of the most gorgeous of melodies, Brian Wilson proved that he was a man of virtually limitless genius.
So now that the history business is out of the way, let's talk about what the Boys and Capitol Records chose to release in lieu of Smile. Smiley Smile is a near-masterpiece. Without any awareness of Smile's existence, this album could have been a contemporary classic. Remnants of the vignette style are still there, along with a sense of humor both musical and lyrical. Group harmonies shine just as beautifully as any on Pet Sounds, and although the album isn't anywhere close to the sonic revolution that Sgt. Pepper had already brought, Wilson's innovative production and arrangements still bring out the best in every single track. And one of his best melodies can be found in "Wonderful," matching, if not topping, anything on Pet Sounds.
As someone who's heard the Smile sessions, I find many moments sorely missing, of course; if I had to choose, the most notable exclusion is the lounge-psychedelic mini-epic "Cabin Essence." And the songs that do appear from Smile are pretty radically reworked, with the exception of "Good Vibrations," already a #1 single from '66, which can be found in its final and perfect form here. Strangely enough, the most disappointing re-recording is of "Wonderful"; standing on its own, the Smiley Smile version is gorgeous enough, but it nearly pales in comparison to the stripped-down harpsichord and heartbreaking harmonies of the original.
As for bonus tracks or outtakes included here, the centerpieces are those culled from the "Good Vibrations" sessions. There are some takes from the original recording sessions, in which we're given a fascinating glimpse of Wilson's way in the studio; he directed most of the players live, as if he were conducting minor symphonies in pop music. Also included is an early alternate version with different lyrics and even a slightly differing melody, which, while interesting to compare to the final version, just doesn't fully succeed.
"Heroes and Villains" also appears in two forms. As Smiley Smile's opener, it remains a multi-part, multi-layered, harmonious pop single, true to the form of Wilson at his peak. Luckily, Van Dyke Parks collaborated on the lyrics as he did for much of Smile, ensuring a poetic success rather than a hit-or-miss Wilson affair, since Brian's lyrics tended to miss more often than not. As a bonus track, it appears the way it may have been originally premiered on Smile, with even more random sections, unpredictable twists and vocal samples. Surprisingly, the re-recorded "Heroes" works even better; rather than relying on twists and turns, it's based more on the voices of the gorgeous "psychedelic barbershop quartet," as Jimi Hendrix once referred to it.
Indeed, Capitol were smart to include 1968's Wild Honey on the disc as part of their two-for-one Beach Boys re-release series. But when comparing it to such an album as the one preceding it here, it barely deserves a paragraph. One or two of its tracks succeed, mostly when it's either a classic bittersweet Wilson melody ("I'd Love Just Once to See You") or a throwback to 50's dance-pop ("How She Boogalooed It"). And naturally, the production still sounded good as long as Brian was at least in the studio. The rest of the record is in the R&B; vein as interpreted by white surfer boys-- Beach Boys, even. There's also a Stevie Wonder cover sung with as much faux-soul as Carl Wilson could have possibly mustered. It's not pretty, and, to be blunt, neither is the majority of Wild Honey.
Back to 1967, on the day the Beach Boys recorded the bare and light-hearted "Vegetables," another track written for Smile: Paul McCartney decided to drop by the studio. He can be heard chewing vegetables for the track's only percussion. And, as Al Jardine recalls, McCartney and Wilson could be seen together behind the console at one point, and McCartney even ventured to play Wilson the just-finished "A Day in the Life" before Sgt Pepper was even released. While a supposedly "burned-out" genius was creating the most simplistic recording he'd made in years, he became a first-hand witness to the popular sonic revolution that he could have been. In the public eye, the Beatles were the clear victors, and the people simply weren't satisfied with second place. Now, with Smiley Smile finally reissued in America after years of out-of-print status, hopefully people will begin to analyze the whole race again. In my mind, it was a photo finish.


Kevin Morby’s captivating fourth album feels spacious and intimate at once. It possesses an elegant, dusky atmosphere and Morby’s hopelessly optimistic songwriting is the best it has ever been.

City Music

Big city music has always been a fantasy: romanticizing filth, creating pockets of utopia in cruel systems, rich kids slumming it in an attempt to glom onto gutter poet romance. Making music that reckons with storied cities demands hard-bitten cynicism, but also a quasi-religious belief in their transformative potential. Earlier in his solo career, Kevin Morby made more direct references to the artists who consecrated places like New York and Nashville in the popular imagination. These days, he’s a songwriter of such elegance and gentle wisdom that he can make a record interrogating the concepts they proposed—heroism, definition, belonging—while remaining sincerely convicted about their importance.
Contrary to City Music’s theme, Morby’s fourth album was made on the beach in California, in a studio with an ocean view. Its spacious sound is out of sync with his bustling setting, but it draws you into his warm, eye-level focus. Joining him are guitarist Meg Duffy and drummer Justin Sullivan (his former bandmate in the Babies), and Richard Swift on production. Together they create a dusky atmosphere, an unshowy product of the band’s intuition. The playing is cottony and spare yet full of winning melodies and its sound is consistent enough that when they break from a dreamy lull, it becomes all the more captivating.
Sometimes that means a jolt of energy. The title track is almost seven minutes of a cascading, sleepy riff that suddenly yanks a ripcord and scampers into oblivion. “Oh! That city music! Oh! That city sound!” Morby sings over and over, his belief in the idea sending him spiralling into another dimension. But both the sad, sexy “Come to Me Now” and the idly groovy “Pearly Gates” have the opposite effect, cracking open to reveal moments of cosmic beauty. On the latter, it’s Swift’s three daughters singing a wordless, heavenly refrain that’s mirrored by Meg Baird’s eerie cry in Morby’s bittersweet cover of Germs’ “Caught in My Eye.” Both moments are captivating, inviting awed contemplation—one of Morby’s most distinctive skills as a writer.
“Come to Me Now” and “Caught in My Eye” are among the rare moments on City Music where Morby sounds genuinely desolate, his voice cracked and broken. But mostly, his voice stays buoyant and puppyish. His ever-welcoming tone is a key part of a record that asks what it means to belong, and how you find your people. On the surface, “1234” seems like City Music’s most obvious moment—a lean, surfy rocker that hurtles and clatters like a runaway train. The world does not need another Ramones tribute, but Morby smartly repurposes their starting-gun countdown as a code to a secret world. (Plus, his subtle reference to poet Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” adds a wry shade of knowing to his naïve performance.) He keeps hustling on “Tin Can,” which sounds like the cast of “Sesame Street” doing a Velvet Underground skit, and is just as charming as you’d imagine.
Really, Morby’s city is a stand-in for a heart, for community; his band’s nuanced interplay is living proof of the fact that he knows how good it feels to be part of something bigger than yourself. He sings about the childhood friends who bring out your best parts, about how we’re all made up of the people who pass through our lives, however briefly, and wishes for laughter, dance, freedom and connection for everyone. It’s hopelessly naïve and optimistic, which is what makes it so beautiful, particularly now. It’s not hard to hear City Music as a lament for lost innocence, a pledge to maintain optimism and humanity at a time when those qualities don’t just feel like vestiges of youth, but of some better civilization that’s rapidly disappearing. In his best album yet, Morby makes a prayer out of the squall.


Weezer's Rivers Cuomo hooked up with Scott Murphy, frontman for pop-punk band Allister, for this Japanese-language album. Released on Universal’s Japanese imprint, Scott & Rivers splits most of its time between ruthlessly utilitarian power pop and midtempo, jangly acoustic alt-rock.

Rivers Cuomo / Scott Murphy: Scott & Rivers

Scott & Rivers

There’s a 99% possibility that some 10th-grade boy out there is currently relying on Pinkerton to guide him through the indignities of adolescence, and how’s this for some perspective: He wasn’t even born when Weezer released that album. And it’s been that long since any form of denial played a role in Rivers Cuomo’s music. From “Pork and Beans” to “Can’t Stop Partying”; from the Raditude cover art to the Hurley cover art; from the Weezer Cruise to the Pinkerton reunion tour, Cuomo has pretty much done everything over the past 17 years except take “no” for an answer. So when you consider his longstanding predilection for Asian culture (to put it mildly), the only thing surprising about him making a Japanese-language album is that it took him until 2013 to do so. And yet, Scott & Rivers is one of the few unequivocally good ideas he’s had in a very, very long time: name a 21st century Weezer album that wouldn’t be immediately improved if you didn’t understand English.
Cuomo linked up with a suitable travel buddy in Scott Murphy, frontman for Allister, a Drive Thru pop-punk band you might be familiar with if you keep tabs on the Warped Tour, but have likely only heard if you’ve been to the Warped Tour. They're very much “big in Japan.” So what can be expected of Scott & Rivers? Are Murphy and Cuomo going to fully concede to the stylistic tenets of J-pop? Is it simply going to split the difference between Girlfriends and Dead Ends with lyrics like “goddamn you half-Japanese girls” sung in full Japanese? Is it going to appeal to the 18-year old girl who lives in small city in Japan or the 35-year-old she grew up to be since Pinkerton? Holy shit, there’s a song called “Butterfly” on here; is Rivers really going there?
Some of these questions are answered definitively, all are answered rather uninterestingly. No matter what language you speak or how familiar you are with either artist's work, there isn't much culture shock to be had listening to Scott & Rivers. In short, it’s a hell of a lot like an off-brand recent Weezer album, in that the style isn’t guitar rock taking cues from factory pop, but factory pop interpreted through clinical guitars that sound like they’re sourced from test tubes rather than tube amps. It would sound overproduced for 1998 yet seems curiously rinky-dink compared to the current pop maximalism of any continent; Scott & Rivers splits most of its time between ruthlessly utilitarian power pop and midtempo, jangly acoustic alt-rock that reimagines the break between Pinkerton and the Green Album as one where Cuomo ditched Harvard for higher education in the form of Stroke 9 or Eve 6 CDs. Or, in the case of the pure synth-pop numbers and the cover of Kimura Kaela's "Butterfly" (sorry), those of Vitamin C or any other sub-Spice I can’t immediately recall.
This isn’t some Kickstarter lark-- it’s being released on Universal’s Japanese imprint. But the few hooks that are sung in English make it abundantly clear that neither Cuomo nor Murphy's songwriting has been altered in the slightest: “I love, love, love my homely girl!/ She just knocks me to the ground!” “I freakin’ love my life!/ It’s turning out just right!/ It’s a party every night!” Those two songs are “Homely Girl” and “Freakin’ Love My Life”, naturally. Otherwise, the frictionless production and rounded, vowel-heavy Japanese phonetics gives Scott & Rivers a sonic viscosity where consuming one song or all 12 feels roughly equal. It sticks with you, but the sweetness has a sickly chemical feel.
Cuomo told us from the beginning that his favorite rock group was Kiss, so we shouldn’t be surprised about him using his artistic goodwill as quarters in a perpetual game of whack-a-mole, going after whatever monetization opportunity presents itself. In some ways, it’s weirdly admirable. Scott & Rivers just seems more savvy than anything-- you sense that he and Murphy know something us Yankees don’t, or maybe Scott & Rivers is just prelude to Weezer’s inevitable Live at Budokan. There’s a heartening belief in how Cuomo still sticks to writing the kind of songs that need mass exposure for them to mean anything to anybody, and assumes rock radio still has the juice to provide it. There’s no doubt he believes it, so there’s no way a song called “Freakin’ Love My Life” could be ironic; Cuomo’s fantasy world is the realest thing he knows.


The acclaimed Norwegian avant-rock band splits the difference between jazz and metal while still transcending their influences.

Blackjazz

Though they're separated by profound differences-- most especially improvisation and rigidity-- jazz and metal have a lot more in common than most fans would admit. In particular, both tend to be torn over innovation: There are those who believe that no art form can survive without pushing its boundaries outward and upward, and those who believe that straying too far from those boundaries turns the music into something else, something undesirable and ugly. Into this morass of dreary arguments over authenticity wade Jørgen Munkeby and his colleagues in Shining, and they handily illustrate how the whole issue can be mooted by just not caring that much about pleasing either side.
It's not as if Blackjazz, with its electrifying fusion of jazz structures and punishing metal instrumentation, is unprecedented: The first buzzy guitar chords of "The Madness and the Damage Done", which quickly settle into unpredictable jazz patterns, call back to Borbetomagus or Peter Brötzmann. The appearance of a spastic saxophone owes more than a bit to American jazz-punk, and Shining's extreme metal elements recall Enslaved, with whom they've collaborated in the past. Even the band's past as an acoustic jazz ensemble, and its use of distinctive rhythm patterns and odd instrumentation, are reminders of other forward-looking Scandinavians like Jaga Jazzist.
But Shining manage to transcend their influences, numerous as they may be, by simply throwing themselves into the sum of their parts with such gusto. From beginning to end-- and including a predictable but enjoyable cover of King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man" that tips their prog influences-- Shining never fail to convince themselves, or listeners, they're presenting something new. That conviction, combined with their undeniable chops-- Munkeby's unhinged sax work and the extremely adept drumming of Torstein Lofthus deserve special attention-- carries Blackjazz into somewhere worth exploring.
It's when Blackjazz fails to go whole hog, in fact, that they're at their least convincing. The world certainly doesn't need another Opeth, and Shining still gets a bit carried away with the synth noodling with which symphonic metal has cursed an unlucky world. Even Helte Hermansen's guitars are hooky, powerful, and wound up in exciting progressions, but they could stand to get a little dirt on them; Munkeby's vocals also benefit from grit, and a less clinical guitar sound would definitely benefit Shining's overall attack. Still, Shining are combining jazz and metal in original ways, from the filling up of jazz's precious empty spaces with ticking nervous energy to the replacement of metal's vocal aggression with creepy and disconnected noise. And if that's not the same as true originality, it's close enough.


The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

Like plenty of other bands in the internet era, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart seem poised to attract an audience that will far outstrip that of their easily identifiable precedents-- in their case, groups like Rocketship or Shop Assistants, each obscure these days even by Approved Indie Influence standards. A few other twee/noise-pop revivalists arguably pulled off that same trick last year, but Pains of Being Pure at Heart are likely to appeal to listeners beyond online name-droppers and Brooklyn scenesters.
That these second-wavers are getting first-rate attention shouldn't be a worry unless you're into dick-measuring contests about the late-1980s (but I was there) or still holding a grudge against Vivian Girls and Crystal Stilts. Despite being such a streamlined listen, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart acts as something of an indie Rorschach: Once our staff got a hold of the fuzzy, major-chord fizz of "Come Saturday" or "Stay Alive", it raised comparisons to everything from Sleepyhead to Black Tambourine to even Peter Bjorn and John (at their most shoegazy) and Ride (at their most heavy-lidded). In other words, you'll dig this record as long as you're a fan of trebly, melancholy pop music. Which is quite a lot of people reading this review.
What distinguishes POBPAH from the rest of their modern peers is a sense of craft located in the sweet spot between wilfull amateurism masking incompetence and not gumming things up with bells and whistles. It's immediate and substantial, but initially, it can seem distracting that the band is built more for speed than muscle. Yet these aren't songs that need anchors-- as much as Alex Naidus' bass plays an integral role in pushing everything forward, he's more likely to contribute melodic counterpoint than low end. Kip Berman's voice is appropriately unaffected, working in melodies that almost feel like 45-degree angles-- exact, acute, and just right. Keyboardist Peggy Wang-East doesn't harmonize in a traditional sense with Berman very often, but particularly on "Young Adult Friction", her vocals are a hook in themselves, taking an already strong chorus to a higher plateau.
So yeah, they've got the sound figured out, but what ensures that this will be something that'll make it past the point where the indie cycle of life goes on and bands are inevitably starting to cop the sounds of, say, Archers of Loaf? Regardless of the b&w cover art, there's more gray matter than initially appears. The title alone of "This Love Is Fucking Right!" is enough to set off the sugar shock factor (it's a nod to the Field Mice), and that's before the chorus which renders the f-bomb "feckin!," but the invocation of "you're my sister" before the title is as dark as you want it to be.
"Stay Alive" is the record's centerpiece, boasting the most anthemic chorus; initially, it could pass for cloyingly optimistic, with bell-like keyboard pinches accenting thumbs-up signifiers like "shoot at the sky" and "you'll stay alive." But once again, after closer listens it takes a darker tone, possibly talking down a suicidal friend. Most tellingly, "Come Saturday" sets the stage for the rest of the record with a promise of ignoring parties for a summer wasting and spent indoors. It's every bit as heartfelt as the later lyrical nod to Another Sunny Day.
But then again, sincerity never made me turn up the volume. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart simply made a slyly confident debut that mixes sparkling melodies with an undercurrent of sad bastard mopery, and you're just being a dick if you think the past has some kind of patent on that. That's just the way good pop music works.


On his solo debut—assisted by Sufjan Stevens, Justin Vernon, and Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan—the multi-instrumentalist rethinks the horn’s role as an album’s driving creative force.

Carm

CJ Camerieri, the horn-playing co-founder of chamber ensemble yMusic, begins and ends his debut solo album with repose; in between, there is murk. Camerieri has recorded with Paul Simon, Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens, the National, and, once, Taylor Swift, and two of those famous friends, Stevens and Justin Vernon, join him on the album’s bookending songs. Expectedly, they’re the most familiar-sounding entries on Carm. “Song of Trouble,” co-written and arranged with Stevens, begins with a procession of Camerieri’s brass and is tenderly blotted with French horn and trumpet as it develops into a recognizable Stevens hymn. “Land,” featuring Vernon, is graceful and pastoral. They are light moments on an otherwise overcast album, one that is often surprising in structure, if not mood.
After its wintry opener, Carm is dense and foreboding. One after another, the songs take on different shades of black, with Camerieri’s horns adding glinting accents. At times, they’re the focal point, as on “Nowhere,” where they buzz and swirl, punctuating the steady groove with staccato pulses. Elsewhere, Gayngs leader Ryan Olson’s production takes over: “After Hours” borrows from dubstep with its blown-out bass and threatening, chopped-up vocal sample, using just a bit of trumpet to add color. What’s unshakeable is the absolute darkness within which Camerieri operates. Dread is pervasive. Vernon’s sampled howls, for instance, are littered across “Invisible Walls,” a track that also features “feedback” in the credits. But a surfeit of bleak, minor-key compositions offering little in the way of release or resolution leaves the album feeling top-heavy, no matter how finely detailed the individual songs are.
Throughout Carm, Camerieri attempts to rethink what it means for the horn to be an album’s driving creative force. Frequently, rather than casting himself as the protagonist, he assumes a supporting role. Camerieri’s trumpet and French horn are part of the story, and while they guide the proceedings, they don’t always feel the need to stand out.
Some of the best moments come when Camerieri is somewhere between showman and accompanist. He takes the lead on the easy-going “Soft Night,” but his own synths, Mike Boschen’s trombone, and a rustling beat from Amati help complete a piece that feels like it progresses and tells a story, wordlessly mirroring the pop structure of the opener and closer. “Already Gone,” featuring Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan, is balanced and gentle, Camerieri’s horns acting like pillows for the hushed vocals. In stark contrast is the Mouse on Mars collaboration “Scarcely Out,” a skittering composition that follows the duo’s rhythmic sensibilities; it’s a fascinating, if hyperactive, experiment. But “Song of Trouble” and “Land” remain the moments when Camerieri seems most comfortably situated as a complementary force, the brass that amplifies a piece to greater effect. Here, it feels like he’s returned home.

Buy: Rough Trade.
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The Melbourne quartet’s fifth album doesn’t counteract any Sonic Youth comparisons, but it does conjure an alternate history where the rock formalism of Goo and Dirty became the band’s defining sound.

Lithium Zion

There’s a fine line between encouraging an intra-band democracy and having an identity crisis. As a four-piece with four singers, Melbourne’s Deaf Wish are liable to sound like four different bands. On their 2015 Sub Pop debut, Pain, they sought catharsis through any means necessary: clanging noise brutalism, hoarse-throat hardcore, frazzled indie rock, distortion-soaked psych. But it was one of those albums that sounded like the band was getting its shit together in real time. Once you got through Pain’s scatterbrained first side, you could sense Deaf Wish learning to let their melancholy melodies lead the way, with singer-guitarists Jensen Tjhung and Sarah Hardiman settling into a familiar Thurston/Kim dynamic.
Lithium Zion, their second Sub Pop album and fifth overall, picks up right where they left off—though not without some shake-ups along the way. After a decade of bashing out makeshift-space recordings, the band graduated to a proper studio, with Total Control’s Mikey Young overseeing the mixes. They also bid adieu to bassist Nick Pratt, the member responsible for their fiercest circle-pit stompers. But if Deaf Wish are still very much fueled by a love for frayed-nerve noise, there’s a consistency of vision here that distinguishes Lithium Zion from the band’s caterwauling back catalog. That evolution is apparent in the band’s choice of opening tracks. On Pain, you were instantly confronted by the impenetrable post-punk of “The Whip,” a song that climaxes with the sort of hammering assault that can make you see stars. But with “Easy,” on Lithium Zion, Deaf Wish make the initiation process, well, easy, by hitching their churning guitars to a cascading, “Tomorrow Never Knows”-style drum beat, striking a perfect balance between dissonance and groove. Hardiman’s “FFS” follows, with two exhilarating minutes of restless agitation and revved-up noise-punk that demonstrate the greater focus in effect.
Alas, the specter of Sonic Youth is impossible to avoid in these songs. But the album doesn’t mimic Deaf Wish’s spiritual forebears so much as it imagines an alternate history for them, one where the rock formalism of Goo and Dirty became the band’s defining characteristic, rather than a blip in their sprawling discography. (Not only is Lithium Zion’s title track an asphalt-ripping instrumental like Goo’s “Mildred Pierce,” it’s even slotted in a similar side-two position.) Yet there’s an absurdist sensibility at play here that rarely cut through Sonic Youth’s ultra-cool veneer: The needling mid-tempo rumbler “The Rat Is Back” finds Tjhung curling up with his cat to fend off an invasive rodent; “Hitachi Jackhammer” opens with Tjhung and Hardiman reciting ad copy for the titular product, before unleashing a juddering punk squall that conjures its operational qualities.
But more than just harnessing the band’s unbridled energy into tightly coiled rockers, Lithium Zion displays a greater willingness to play Deaf Wish’s singers off one another, projecting a deeper sense of camaraderie. Like Pratt before him, new bassist Lee Parker serves as a caustic counterpoint to Tjhung and Hardiman’s disaffected sneers, but his sensibility meshes more naturally with theirs. On “Deep Blue Cheated,” Parker transforms the band into an evil twin to fellow Melburnians Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, until the song’s hyper locomotive thrust is cooled by Hardiman’s soothing counter-melody, a trick she deploys throughout the record.
As Lithium Zion confirms, the story of Deaf Wish’s evolution is very much the story of Hardiman’s own. Her increasingly versatile vocals have brought greater emotional depth to their music, from the haunting spoken-word passage that interrupts the PJ Harvey-esque “Afraid for You” or her sad-eyed duet with drummer Daniel Twomey on careening closer “Smoke.” And the swooning “Birthday,” a shot of Brill Building-via-Knitting Factory melodic discord, counts as the most affecting pop song in the band’s canon to date. Deaf Wish may still be suckers for hair-raising noise, but the real thrills on Lithium Zion come when they embrace nuance.


Beck's Odelay-- the album on which this former folk-hop singer combined the disparate noise, blues, and subverted hippie-isms of his early work into a showy post-modern marvel-- is reissued with a disc of era-appropriate B-sides and two previously unreleased tracks.

Odelay: Deluxe Edition

In Spin's 20 Years of Alternative Music, Beck is called "a generation's consolation prize after the death of Kurt Cobain." Chronologically, it's an apt assessment: Cobain killed himself on April 5, 1994; "Loser" peaked at #10 on the Billboard charts three weeks later. But back in the mid-90s, Beck was practically Cobain's polar opposite. Whereas Kurt exuded raw power with every phlegm-spewing roar, Beck rapped in monotone (when he wasn't crooning like a sleep-deprived folkie). Kurt hunched and staggered; Beck pranced, did splits, and mimicked robots. Kurt raged against a doomed world with a vitriolic mix of anger and sincerity; Beck took the piss out of a doomed world with a mix of irony and showmanship. Admittedly, they were both known to wear flannel shirts from time to time.
Beck's popularity can not only be read as a consolation prize to Cobain's legend, but as a reaction to it-- the weirdo L.A. huckster who could sing "I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me" as a t-shirt-ready slacker joke rather than a seething slacker lament. So, after getting their hearts busted by an unlikely savior, Alternative America turned to a cheese-whiz rhyming folk-hop clown who treated death as just another convention to flout. With "Loser", Beck was the rebound boyfriend, the one who'll make you laugh for the time being. And then came Odelay-- a thoroughly carefree-sounding affair that made everyone take this boyish imp very seriously. It's the album where he managed to combine the disparate noise, blues, and subverted hippie-isms of his early work into a showy post-modern marvel.
In hindsight, the record sounds like the world's most accomplished demo reel-- an introductory smorgasbord pumped-up on its own premeditated randomness. The origins of Mutations' shambling acoustic blues can be found within come-down closer "Ramshackle". And Odelay's funkiest, most scatterbrained tracks like "Where It's At" and "High 5 (Rock the Catskills)" were later pushed to their logical extreme on Midnite Vultures' ingenious Prince-isms. Add some sweeping strings and "Jack-Ass" easily becomes a Sea Change highlight. So while Beck has spent the last 12 years largely sampling and expounding upon the ideas he presented on his most popular album, Odelay's most distinguishing feature is its effortless summation of decades of popular music by-way-of the Dust Brothers' still-fresh production.
From the nervy opening chords of "Devil's Haircut" (based on the garage-rock classic "I Can Only Give You Everything") to the signature sax riff of "The New Pollution" (lovingly pilfered from forgotten tenor player Joe Thomas's "Venus"), Odelay is the album every record-diving MPC-phile wants to make. Though the LP was a huge commercial success, its sound was never successfully equaled by savvy opportunists. Chalk it up to the increasingly complicated legalities of sampling, as Beck explained in a 2005 interview: "Back [on Odelay] it was basically me writing chord changes and melodies, and then endless records being scratched and little sounds coming off the turntable. Now it's prohibitively difficult and expensive to justify your one weird little horn blare that happens for half of a second one time in a song and makes you give away 70% of the song and $50,000." And, of course, it's the little lifts-- the sex-ed dialogue on "Where It's At", the snippet of Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony #8 in B Minor" on "High 5", the dozens (hundreds?) of unique drum hits and perfectly placed sonic scribbles-- that makes Odelay such a deep and engaging listen even after all the headphone sessions and Best Album of the 90s accolades. Tellingly, when Beck and the Dust Brothers tried to recreate their signature style on 2005's Guero they couldn't pull it off, inadvertently reinforcing Odelay's lasting appeal in the process.
To some, it may seem a bit premature for this 12-year-old LP to get the deluxe treatment, but in this age of shameless instant-reissues put forth by disintegrating major labels, it's a relatively classy (if not exactly indispensable) barrel scrape. Along with a playfully drawn-over cover and liner note contributions from Thurston Moore and Dave Eggers, the reissue is padded with an entire disc of era-appropriate B-sides along with two previously unreleased tracks. While sometimes intriguing and ecstatic, the bonus tracks rarely live up to anything from the proper album. Of the unearthed songs, the schizophrenic dial-flip pastiche "Inferno" contains many genre-hopping ideas across its seven minutes but none are fully realized. And "Gold Chains" is a decidedly less funky version of "Sissyneck" with lyrical hip-hop symbolizers in place of country tropes. Unwisely, the extra disc begins with U.N.K.L.E.'s never ending "Where It's At" redo, which at 12 minutes is easily nine minutes too long. Elsewhere, semi-songs, stepping-stones, and studio wankery abound, revealing Beck's growth post-Mellow Gold in real time-- they're interesting in theory, at least. The most enduring tracks-- "Feather in Your Cap" and "Brother"-- are somber ballads Beck recorded before he hooked up with the Dust Brothers. With lines like, "Disappointment is a feather in your cap/ You want the truth so you can crush it in your hand," these songs suggest the straightforward emotionalism of Sea Change-- an approach Beck would need a few more years to feel comfortable bringing to the fore.
For all of their differences, both Kurt Cobain and Beck had overarching obsessions with death and decay. Kurt took his preoccupation with the ultimate end to its ultimate end, but Beck chose to gussy it up on Odelay, going on cryptically about Gods and devils while hip-hop-tinged party music juxtaposed the existential angst. On "Novocane", he screams through a bullhorn: "Got so numb, longhorn drums/ Detonate with the suicide gate." Later on, he's "more dead than alive" over a distinctly lively old-school jam. "Put a song in your throat/ Let the dead beats pound all around," he hums on "Ramshackle". Through ingenious technical savvy and an ear for hooks that span generations, Beck and the Dust Brothers managed to turn many dead beats into signs of life on Odelay. Twelve years on, it's still a prize-- no consolation necessary.


This reissue stays true to the darkness and exuberance that defined the band’s revelatory 1999 album.

Summerteeth (Deluxe Edition)

The late ’90s saw a widespread mutiny in the alt-country scene, as several mainstay acts dropped the twang to explore new sounds and styles, but no band went quite as far as Wilco did to shed their association with that movement. On Summerteeth, their third album, they embraced the Beach Boys, the Zombies, the Kinks, and Van Dyke Parks. Not just those sounds, but those ideas: They experimented in multiple studios, building the songs up with timpani and chimes, the ersatz strings of Jay Bennett’s Mellotron, the bleeps of ancient keyboards, even some back-masked vocals. It was another in a series of impressive transformations, after the band had already managed to grow out of alt-country also-ran status with 1996’s Being There.
On Summerteeth Jeff Tweedy and Wilco sound jumpier and nervier than they’d ever sounded before, as though they’ve been struck by lightning. There’s a sense of buoyancy and joy in the music, a sense of renewed mission in their engagement with a new set of influences and references—none of which has dimmed in the ensuing two decades. In fact, if Being There pondered the folly of playing in a midlevel rock and roll band, their follow-up is full of love songs to love songs. It’s not too wild a theory to suggest that the “you” Tweedy keeps singing to might actually be the music of the bands who influenced this record. “It’s for you I swoon,” he declares on “I’m Always in Love,” sounding like a man whose favorite song is whichever one is playing at the moment. Music is his shot in the arm. It’s what tells him every little thing’s gonna be alright. It’s the reason you undertake this foolish enterprise. Music is the other woman, the third point in a love triangle, and on some level that’s not even figurative: Tweedy knows he’s sacrificing time with his family—and security and stability and love and direction—to take these songs out on the road and show them off to people.
As exuberant as Summerteeth often sounds, it’s a dark and dire album—a missive from a man teetering on the edge of addiction and estrangement. After years on the road, Tweedy was trying to kick painkillers and largely failing, while Bennett was moving in the opposite direction and nurturing a new set of bad habits. That’s all compounded by Tweedy’s alienation from his wife and young sons; he describes a “fragile family tree” on “She’s a Jar” and laments his detachment from those he loves so much. “Watch me floating inches above the people under me.” To convey his disconnection, Tweedy took a new approach to songwriting, schooling himself in the works of experimental writers like Henry Miller and William H. Gass and tinkering with exquisite corpses and cut-and-paste techniques. Summerteeth is somehow both opaque and almost uncomfortably revealing: a tragically fragmented self-portrait.
After so many years and so many albums, that defining tension between the joy of music and the misery of the music business has only grown more poignant, perhaps because we’ve seen the committed dad rocker Tweedy has become, we’ve heard the music he’s made with his sons and their friends, and we’ve watched as he has established what you might call a family business. Summerteeth looms ominously in Wilco’s catalog, marking a point where he knows it all could have gone wrong. He now sounds like a man who understands pop music will save his life.
That quality makes the bonus material on this drinking-age-anniversary all the more potent. Let’s start with the scratchy demos, which could be Tweedy’s lost ‘90s lo-fi album, as though he was listening to nothing but Sebadoh and One Foot in the Grave. He sounds weirdly compelling in this stark setting, especially considering the direction these songs would take over time. There’s an unexpected loneliness to these songs in this state, as these same lyrics mean very different things without their billowing pop orchestrations. “All I Need” is a cough of a song, its delicate melody nearly ripped apart by his hoarse vocals, and this version of “I’ll Sing It” sounds intensely despairing even before you remember that he re-recorded the demo with his son Spencer Tweedy for 2014’s Sukierae. That makes the small flourishes more affecting, especially on “I’m Always in Love,” when someone—presumably his wife—sings dreamily along with him, perhaps offering comfort or just a reminder that he’s not alone in his musical madness.
It’s clear from these rough sketches that Wilco could have taken these songs in any direction—well, any direction but alt-country. The handful of early run-throughs and weird takes are all over the place, gesturing toward the large well of music from which they were drawing. With its breezily shifting keyboard chord and lazy snare tap, the “Slow Rhodes Version” of “Summer Teeth” sounds like ’70s yacht-soul, as Tweedy punctuates his vocals with a few shaky falsetto woo-hoo’s. One alternate take of “Nothing’severgonnastandinmyway (again)” recalls the unabashedly bouncy choruses of Tommy James & the Shondells, while the other sounds like their stab at a ’90s alt-pop radio hit. There’s also a strain of fuzzy punk running throughout these tracks, with the soundcheck recording of “We’re Just Friends” evoking a Midwestern Undertones and the non-album track “Viking Dan” sounding frayed and feral—more like the messy migraine noise rock of A Ghost Is Born than the tidy pop confections of Summerteeth.
Wilco sound like yet another completely different band on the live discs, which document a show in Boulder, Colorado, from November 1999. Away from the studio and up on the stage, Wilco are further refracted: sunny and light at one moment, heavy and crunchy at another. There’s an uncomfortable divide between the new songs and the old; Bennett’s Mellotron stands out even more than usual on the Summerteeth tracks, but it’s mostly absent on the older numbers. In fact, Wilco reverts back to familiar form as the show progresses, which is a shame, as it’d be fascinating to hear a song like “Casino Queen” or “Kingpin” dolled up in summer psychedelia. The standouts, oddly enough, might be the handful of tunes from Mermaid Avenue, released the year before. Tweedy did surprisingly well conveying Woody Guthrie’s warm sentimentality and goofy humor, and those virtues are even more pronounced in this setting. Wilco play “Hesitating Beauty” and “Hoodoo Voodoo” like they’re making them up on the spot, and they sound free and casual—refreshingly far from any dark thought.
When the crowd applauds a boisterous version of “Passenger Side,” Tweedy remarks, “If I wasn’t so heavily sedated, I would have been really aroused.” He’s going for a laugh, but it’s not even a joke. He makes several drug references, which he apparently intended to be charming, but his disorientation is alarming, especially when they invade the songs. On “Can’t Stand It,” he rewrites the lyrics so that “Our prayers will never be answered again” becomes “I swear, I’ll never eat acid again.” Such moments cast a pallor on an otherwise fine set, although that may be more representative of Wilco at this particular moment than anyone would like to admit. At the same time, it’s refreshing to get such a warts-and-all portrayal of a band hitting their stride even as they trip over their own shoelaces. In that regard, this reissue stays true to the spirit of the album, giving equal time to the delight as well as the despair.

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With Slowdive’s Neil Halstead in the producer’s chair, the Los Angeles harpist swells her gentle ambience with a more strident sound but remains as transporting as ever.

Silver Ladders

What makes Mary Lattimore’s work so entrancing is its interiority. With just a harp and loop pedals, the Los Angeles musician creates dreamscapes from the patterns behind her own eyelids and sweeps her audience up in them. She expanded her arsenal on 2018’s Hundreds of Days, adding theremin, electric guitar, and her own voice. On her new album Silver Ladders, she has teamed up with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, swelling her gentle ambience with a more strident sound.
The two were introduced by a mutual friend at a festival, and although Halstead had never recorded a harp, Lattimore asked him to produce her next album, which she ended up recording at Halstead’s studio in Newquay, on the north coast of Cornwall. Silver Ladders is imbued with a mixture of nostalgia and fresh inspiration—the product, perhaps, of shifting to a small rural town with few distractions and ample opportunities to reflect.
Halstead’s touch is perceptible throughout the album as a subtle bolster to Mary Lattimore’s ideas. His influence comes through strongest on “Til a Mermaid Drags You Under,” where his reverb-soaked guitar dances around the steady harp melody. His dissonant, razor-sharp tones cut through the solemn, meditative bass line, and the guitar follows Lattimore’s lead as the song rises out of the melodic depths and takes a redemptive turn. Halstead’s thrumming guitar also enters halfway through “Sometimes He’s in My Dreams,” gradually introducing a secondary voice to Lattimore’s layered harp. A restless track, it feels like a vivid dream; Halstead’s guitar speaks as if for the title’s “he,” a mirror for the subconscious.
Drenched in memory, Silver Ladders concerns itself with the sublimity of small moments. The album’s title track is inspired by an experience Lattimore had swimming in the sea on the Croatian island of Hvar; the opening harp melody is disjointed and uncertain until it falls into a bassy lull, recalling the experience of being held in the water’s bobbing restlessness. Album opener “Pine Trees” evokes walking through a pine forest: It exudes light, like rays of sun breaking through the forest canopy, while also suggesting a sense of thickness and depth. “Chop on the Climbout” originated from Lattimore mishearing a pilot during takeoff; the pulsing drones that open the track synthesize the feeling of an airplane’s engine, while Lattimore’s layered harp chimes create a bubbling sense of mystery, like being the first in a crowd to spot a minute detail. Lattimore uses her music like a teleportation device, transporting her listeners to places and times that are both imagined and real.
Silver Ladders is energetic yet also deeply calming. Lattimore’s virtuosity goes beyond technical ability: She has the uncanny ability to pluck a string in a way that will instantly make someone remember the taste of their fifth birthday cake. On Silver Ladders, Mary Lattimore brings the world to her level gently and without force, but always compellingly.

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A$AP Ferg’s new free tape, Ferg Forever, features guest spots from M.I.A., Big Sean, SZA, and Tinashe as well as production work from Big K.R.I.T., Clams Casino, Mike WiLL, and others. It's a mixed bag that finds an interesting young rapper trying shit out.

Ferg Forever

It was smart when RCA decided to release A$AP Ferg’s Trap Lord debut as a for-profit digital download, rather than the free mixtape it was originally conceived as. The album had the anthemic songs to justify being a formal debut, electric tracks like “Let It Go”, “Shabba”, “Work (Remix)” and the majestical “Hood Pope”. Though Ferg’s name probably wouldn’t pop up in the screenplay for Top Five, his energy and charm carried him through the material, blowing through wide-open running lanes thanks to a “HOOO!” or two.
That Ferg Forever is a free mixtape, then, says it all; the quality is a mixed bag, and the sonic threads are far less uniform. Much like Trap Lord, Ferg relies on a stable of up-and-coming producers—two highlights in particular, “Fergsomnia” and “Dope Walk”, are respectively produced by VERYRVRE and Stelios Phili. He’s also collected tracks from known entities such as Big K.R.I.T., whose woozy direction on “Bonnaroo” feels out of place (not to mention that all Ferg does is list off ways he picked around at Bonnaroo) and Mike WiLL Made It, who teams up with Tinashe” on the flat “Thug Cry (Remix)”. There’s a dancehall song, “Jolly”, along with an ode to group anal sex (“Weaves”) which makes the “I FUCKED YOUR BITCH” refrain on Trap Lord lowlight “Dump Dump” feel downright classy. Clams Casino even shows up on "Talk It", but his typically insistent energy is swapped for the effort of a goth teenager picking around in the “Mario Paint” song editor. Mixtapes are often dumping grounds for whatever comes to the artist’s mind, but here, it’s hard to argue for the form.
Still, the tape shines in the right places—the parts where it’s fun. Take “Fergsomnia”, whose stupendously goofy “FERGSOMNIA!” chant gives way to a characteristically knotty Twista verse. The reworked “Reloaded (Let It Go Pt. 2)” is a blast, full of “YAH!” ad-libs, a pair of blazing verses from Crystal Caines and Ferg’s former tour partner, M.I.A., and a hilariously deployed sample from the slightly more famous “Let It Go”. It’s within these tracks that Ferg finds his voice, and while relationship songs like "Commitment Issues" have their heart in the right place, the undercooked, stream-of-consciousness recaps never tap into the glee of the highlights.
Even so: Ferg is a compelling young dude trying shit out, so it’s hard to fault the weaknesses of Ferg Forever too much. This wasn’t released as his sophomore album, after all, and in the meantime it’s interesting to watch Ferg style-sample, freewheel deliveries and rotate producers. Not everything floats, but if the shelf life of jams like “Shabba” are any indication, the handful of hits on Forever will hold Fergensteins over till Trap Lord's sequel is out in stores.


Mark Kozelek turns over all non-vocal responsibilities to the Album Leaf's Jimmy Lavalle on this collaboration, setting his ruminations on memory to Lavalle's subtle electronic pulses. The effect underscores Kozelek's lyrics with a new and more urgent desperation.

The Album Leaf / Sun Kil Moon: Perils from the Sea

Perils from the Sea

Has Mark Kozelek ever written a truer or more succinct description of his creative process than “Ceiling Gazing”? “Layin’ in my bed ceiling gazing/ Wide awake with jet lag from Australia,” he sings on the standout from Perils from the Sea, his new collaboration with Album Leaf founder Jimmy Lavalle. As a churchly organ repeats an insistently ascending phrase, Kozelek describes the stack of mail that awaited him after a tour, including “a wedding invitation from a new young relative I never even knew of.” The card sets his mind reeling around his family tree, until it alights on memories of his sister. She’s just suffered through a bad divorce and is raising two daughters, age four and seven; he wants to live a long life just so he can see how they grow up. It’s a quietly poignant song, one that subtly lays out the distance between Kozelek and his loved ones even as it tries to connect them in song. “Can’t stop my mind from racing,” he concludes. “It’s not good or bad, it’s just how God made me.”
Few songwriters can sketch a scene with Kozelek’s eye for detail or his economy of language, and fewer still can match the insight with which he can draw a character. In recent years, however, the sheer volume of work Kozelek has released through his Caldo Verde Records has tended to dilute the impact of his songs. Not even the most avid fan could keep up with the deluge of bonus discs and live albums, and musically he has narrowed his palette to a single instrument: that nylon-string guitar he introduced on Admiral Fell Promises. It makes more financial than aesthetic sense, as it allows him to keep touring expenses to a bare minimum, but those nylon strings have comes to define his sound both on stage and in the studio, collapsing his songs into one another.
That makes Perils from the Sea unique in Kozelek’s recent catalog. He mostly turns over all the non-vocal responsibilities to Lavalle, so instead of plucks and strums, we hear forlorn beeps and bloops-- somewhat more hushed than on the Album Leaf output, yet distinctively textured and tailored to Kozelek’s signature phrasings. Lavalle favors a subtle pulse and thrum that gently reinforces the concreteness of the details. On “Caroline”, the stuttering beat gooses the tempo a bit and gets Kozelek singing faster than usual. It’s another song that contrasts the securities of home (waking up next to his love and her rat terrier pup, hanging around familiar coffeeshops) with the lure of the road, yet the music lends the emotions a new and more urgent desperation. It may be Kozelek’s finest moment since anything off Ghosts of the Great Highway.
Kozelek writes songs by simply letting his mind wander, then spends years retracing his steps on stage. That his songs move by tangent and discursion can frustrate a listener since it means he tends to eschew choruses, bridges, hooks, and other structural embellishments. Instead, his songs are built almost exclusively from verses, and they often worry over a single, simple melody. When it works, as it does on “Ceiling Gazing”, that approach can locate immense symbolic power in even the most seemingly banal items: a scratched copy of Heart’s Dreamboat Annie that he and his sister played countless times, for example, or the lonely house in Ohio where she lives now.
Lavalle understands this, and he crafts beats to represent the mechanisms of memory. Only occasionally do they sound at cross-purposes. The psychedelic synths on “1936” sound too ominous and otherworldly for what is a pretty thin story centered around a special dime, and on “You Missed My Heart”, the burble of background noise cannot redeem a strained account of a murderer who kills-- and eventually dies-- for love. The sentiment is too clever to ring particularly true, which is on Kozelek’s shoulders, but Lavalle’s beats are too noncommittal to add much gravity or levity. Still, the effort is appreciated, if only because the song shows both men readily moving out of their comfort zones. Perils from the Sea may not be a seamless collaboration, but neither artist has sounded so purposeful in his reverie in years.


The experimental jazz and classical composer’s newest work uses wildly divergent sounds to conjure a subtle, mournful mood.

Song of Silver Geese

Many experimental musicians draw inspiration from multiple styles. Fewer make these excursions sound as fluid and natural as the composer and multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu does. Most familiar to contemporary jazz audiences, thanks to her frequent presence as a bandleader and session player on the celebrated NYC-based jazz imprint Pi Recordings, Shyu’s work holds just as much appeal for fans of modern chamber composition. In live performance, she’s apt to incorporate a variety of dance traditions; the press release for her latest album cites Javanese shadow puppetry as a key influence. While madly diverse interests can make for a fascinating profile page, the trick for a composer is to make all those reference points cohere into something new.
Song of Silver Geese shows Shyu working at a high level. The nine-movement album is made up of selections from a longer stage show, and the recorded versions have plenty of dramatic movement. Over the course of the work, which is dedicated to two of Shyu’s recently deceased mentors, she employs a dizzying range of languages: English, Indonesian, Javanese, Taiwanese, Mandarin, Tetum Wehali, and Korean. During “Door 1: Prologue—Song of Lavan Pitinu,” she delivers a few lines that give a sense of the album’s funereal tinge: “I’m no longer able to recount in detail the story of my life/Now that it’s twilight and there is so much silence.”
At the same time, the supporting music reflects Shyu’s joyous performer’s sensibility. While plucking a spare and haunting motif on a string instrument, Shyu can also bring vivid variety into her vocal lines. Her straight-tone notes have a poise that communicates profound calm. And when her voice breaks, it does so with precision. After this, the introduction of vibrato can suggest a new sense of exploration. This all makes for subtle material, and yet Shyu’s way of navigating these slight changes feels fully alive, giving an extra emotional dimension to an otherwise mournful album.
Her instrumental writing for other players thrives on a similar sense of contrast. The Mivos String Quartet, guests from the avant-garde classical sphere, appear alongside the more jazz-like backing of performers who have worked with Shyu before, in her Jade Tongue ensemble. “Door 3: Dark Road, Silent Moon” is driven by the string ensemble, whose members seem to revel in the brief solo jaunts and ensemble dances that Shyu has scheduled in between passages flush with long, meditative tones.
A hint of jazz propulsion begins to emerge during “Door 5: World of Hengchun.” But Shyu is saving the real bash for the penultimate track, “Door 8: World of Baridegi.” During its most feverish passages, this track offers a concise experience of the qualities that make Shyu such a magnetic performer. Here, conceptual density and improvisational fire manage to complement, rather than obscure, her overall compositional design. There may never be a genre heading that can do justice to such a method. But that is no great loss. Shyu’s personal language—the product of singular study and many curiosities—can tell her story persuasively on its own.


Nas has produced an excellent 21st-century record that balances political powderkegs, audacious Escobar floss raps, complementary beats, and honest-to-god inspiration-- too bad that record was his recent mixtape with DJ Green Lantern, not Untitled.

Untitled

I'd hate to confuse correlation with causation, but the 18 months since Hip Hop Is Dead have gone a long way towards proving Nas wrong. Graduation and Tha Carter III showed that challenging mainstream artists can still produce genuine Billboard blockbusters, the avant-garde has been well-represented by stellar releases by Dälek, Subtle, and El-P (amongst others), and Jay Electronica (producer of the astounding intro "Queens Get the Money") and Wale have emerged as exciting new voices with promising commercial prospects. Even Nas seems to have gotten the message this year, producing an excellent 21st-century record that balances political powder kegs, audacious Escobar floss raps, complementary beats, and genuine inspiration. Unfortunately, that record was the far superior DJ Green Lantern Presents: The Nigger Tape (whose songs are sadly underrepresented here), not Untitled.
Not that it's going to matter. Whether Nas intended to actually follow through with his incendiary, original album title, he's been treating his own self-fulfilling martyrdom as the record's main goal. (See the claim on "Hero": "Try telling Bob Dylan, Bruce, and Billy Joel they can't sing what's in they soul/ So Untitled it is/ I never changed nothing.") Whatever the unfettered vision for the record, through masterful PR work, Nas has given ample reason for listeners to blame everyone but himself for his most cynical and arguably worst album yet. At least Nastradamus was up front about being a shitty crossover bid.
The most frustrating thing is that this could have been a solid record. But now, how is Nas going to come off like he intended Untitled to be an unflinching look at race relations and yet somehow leave off the track he did with stic.man? Worse still, the righteous message of "Association" (strength through interaction with those who inspire you) is forsaken for the stilted, spoken-word ramblings of "Testify", in which Nas accuses white downloaders of being unwilling to "ride" with him for whatever reason. And what about the hallucinogenic "Esco Let's Go", where he fantasized about "[writing] hood movies like Posse and Five Heartbeats" while summoning Elizabeth Taylor for career advice? Instead, we get an elderly German rhyming "knotty head" with "Nazi sled" ("America"), "Breathe" and its boring consumption rhymes ("First I cop/ Then I yacht"-- do go on!), and the gutless "Make the World Go Round" in which Nas, Chris Brown, and Cool & Dre top even Fat Joe in terms of trend-hopping insincerity, toasting to ballers, gangstas, hustlas, and the very same ringtone rappers he was willing to throw under the bus just two years ago when it was convenient for his public image.
On Untitled you get to decide whether you prefer Nas thoroughly exploring half-assed concepts or half-assedly exploring thorough concepts. Note the distinction: Either he's missing obvious targets or hitting ones not worth aiming at. Peep "Sly Fox", a concerted attempt to be the "She Watch Channel Zero?!" for conservative news zombies, right down to its steady guitar chug. The main difference is that "Channel Zero" risked alienation by confronting its target head on, whereas when it comes to preaching to the choir and picking easy fights, Nas has no problem being the Morgan Spurlock of this rap shit. Speaking of rhymin' for the sake of riddlin'-- "The Fox has a Bushy tail/ And Bush tells lies and Fox trots, so I don't know what's real." Which essentially means nothing.
More successful is the Busta Rhymes-featuring "Fried Chicken", which might actually be the record's strongest cut, but it doesn't take the expected route of cultural subtext, instead working the blues trope of female/food personification. But immediately after, you get the perspective piece "Project Roach", and in case Nas' verses somehow went over your head, a Last Poet intones, "Niggas is like roaches/ We're never gonna go away." Just because you understand him, it don't mean that he's nice, and just to make sure you're even more confused once the record finally ends, he precedes the suspiciously fence-sitting Obama song ("Black President") with "We're Not Alone", a cashed-bowl musing on extraterrestrial life.
As anyone who has followed Nas in the past decade knows, you're not here for the beats. Though he's never been hesitant to enlist the trendiest producers, they're rarely inspired to step up their game; here, it's obvious what the difference is between second-rate Timbaland tracks and something from the new line of pop-savvy super-producers. Particularly in the first half, Untitled is turned into Vice City, where each hired gun coats their tracks with ugly layers of polyester drums, fluorescent synths, and aimless violence. You can distinctly hear Polow Da Don buying into his own hype on "Hero", ignoring Nas as a lead instrument and bombing out the mix with pinwheeling keyboard arpeggios and obtrusive unison bends. On previous listens, "N.I.G.G.E.R. (The Slave and the Master)" sounded like the record's centerpiece and DJ Toomp's honest approximation of the fat cat lounginess of American Gangster. But check its tinny string section and punchless snares back-to-back with "Say Hello", and Toomp's trying to make it rain with nickels.
Though many view Illmatic as the gold standard for hip-hop albums, it's abundantly clear that Nas is better off doing anything but trying to recreate it. His best work of the past decade ironically goes against the very concept of traditional album-making (The Lost Tapes, The Nigger Tape). When caught up in the increasingly antiquated promotional cycle, Nas is more likely to rely on ugly manipulation of people who tend to care way more about his work than he apparently does, and accomplish the exact opposite of what he presumptively set out for-- see how Stillmatic took advantage of those who needed to believe that it had equal footing with The Blueprint (illustrated by The Source's hilariously opportunistic 5-mic rating). See how Hip-Hop Is Dead took advantage of people willing to believe that Nas had anything trenchant to say about a game that increasingly sounded like it didn't need him anymore. Thanks to about a half-hour's worth of music made nearly 15 years ago, Nas will never lack a following, and the press battles surrounding Untitled will keep his name hot enough so we can do the same thing all over again in 2010, when he announces the release of his new album, McCain Killa.


The Louisville band sell classic pop-rock almost perfectly. Their sophomore album is smart, well-polished, and cheeky—loaded with more riffs than you can fit into the trunk of a Camaro.

White Reaper: The World’s Best American Band

The World’s Best American Band

Rock music hasn’t been the sound of popular youth culture in a very long time and there is no shortage of real, systematic causes: the irreversible narrowing of radio and print media, the economic and logistical nightmare of putting five dudes and their gear on tour and the undeniable fact that rock bands are extremely bad at creating content for music’s 24-hour news cycle. The competitive spirit, self-promotion, and obsession with quantifiable metrics that make hip-hop and pop music into a compelling spectator sport are invariably considered poor taste on and off-record. White Reaper, on the other hand, are from Louisville, KY—where the Muhammad Ali Center stands as a tribute to its native son who backed up the greatest anthology of shit talk ever heard. It’d be enough to have the sense of humor to call their album The World’s Best American Band. Even better if they have the heart to actually mean it. But White Reaper have the chops and the guts to make their hometown hero proud: bragging is when a person says something and can’t do it and White Reaper do what they say.
In White Reaper’s world, being coy about influence means you have something to hide and they proudly flaunt theirs like denim patches—Ramones, of course, but also Cheap Trick, Kiss, Thin Lizzy, Van Halen, rock bands who essentially functioned as pop. The opening title track poses The World’s Best American Band as both a concept record and self-fulfilling prophecy, piping in the kind of crowd noise that can only be generated in arenas far bigger than White Reaper may ever see in this lifetime. But as the Louisville Lip once said, “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.” “Rally up and dress to kill/Lace your boots and crush your pills,” Tony Esposito snarls before a ridiculous and necessary key change celebrates a victory lap after trying to snort the finish line: “If you fight and win/Throw the pool chairs in/And then confess your sins.” It’s the lowbrow wisdom of a band that’s either been there or seen enough Burt Sugarman videotapes to get the gist of it. But then a school bell rings and they’re back playing the teenage dirtbag on “Judy French,” a song that can make a Kia in rush hour traffic feel like a Camaro doing donuts in a high school parking lot.
The question remains as to why they stopped short of just calling it The World’s Best Band. They’re not the kind of caricatured, po-faced folk-rock that tends to be called “Americana.” But throwing “American” in the mix keeps their streak of self-deprecating farce intact: their debut was called White Reaper Does It Again. And the mere phrase “American Band” immediately triggers the wild shirtless lyrics of Mark Farner: “We’re coming to your town, we’ll help you party it down.” If these aren’t the only concerns of an American rock band, White Reaper believes that they should at least be the top two.
Up to this point, they’ve developed a reputation for wild live shows and fun, if rather derivative garage rock hooks, which made them not altogether different than 96% of the bands playing Burgerama any given year. But not only does the play-acting on The World’s Best American Band lend them a discernible personality, it makes their ambitions all the more obvious. In the tradition of modern classics like Is This It and It’s Never Been Like That, White Reaper are spiritually burning through a label advance but obsessing over efficiency and the bottom line like accountants. There’s nothing even remotely close to a ballad here, and in the slots where these would usually show up on a 10-song record, we get a blatant “Blitzkrieg Bop” homage (“Party Next Door”) and a 12-bar punk ripper that they could pass off as a Chuck Berry tribute (“Another Day”).
Who said craft had to be subtle? Unlike its puffier, unbalanced predecessor, The World’s Best American Band is mixed significantly louder than anything else you’re probably listening to right now and it’s equally glittery and gritty like a blood-caked switchblade—far more polished than the similarly indebted Sheer Mag, but with more edge to rule out any comparisons to the ’70s LARPing of Free Energy. And of course, the invocation of Grand Funk Railroad makes the connection from the band to Richard Linklater and his vision of boys and girls in America partying to British music all the more clear.
The Dazed and Confused comparisons are inevitable given Esposito’s snot-rocket vocals and the twin-guitar leads, while the keyboards and anxious drumming push White Reaper towards the MTV and new wave forms of pop-rock that typified Everybody Wants Some!! As with those films, a reductive reading of White Reaper can criticize the apparent lack of stakes and a worldview that only delays gratification rather than presenting actual conflict—boys will be boys and they’re always back in town. Yet, the words of “Eagle Beach” are as bashful as a Dashboard Confessional song: “I just wanna be a real good pair of your blue jeans/But you never wear the house when you’re wearing me.” And besides, whether it’s a high school dance or a garage rock festival, Esposito makes it clear on “The Stack” what he's learned about how rock becomes pop: “If you make the girls dance, the boys will dance with ‘em.”


The Italian synthesizer wizard follows up her 2019 album Ecstatic Computation with an instrumental set of controlled abandon and rapturous minimalism.

Myuthafoo

Nothing signals synthesizer psychedelia quite like the combination of an arpeggio and a delay. The arpeggio divides a chord into looping sequences of notes. The delay allows those sequences to overlap. Once set in motion, the pairing can sound like a hall of mirrors receding toward infinity. When employed by dilettantes, it’s a simple trick that gets tired fast, but in the right hands, it’s magic. Caterina Barbieri is a wizard—and she knows a lot of other spells, as well.
An Italian musician based in Milan, Barbieri has been recording since her mid twenties. Now 33, she’s ready to look back. Her latest, Myuthafoo, serves as a companion to her 2019 album Ecstatic Computation, originally on Editions Mego. Myuthafoo appears on Barbieri’s own label, light-years, which is due to re-release Ecstatic Computation. Myuthafoo follows that album’s model, managing to be tight (six tracks in just 32 minutes) and rangy at the same time. The earlier record had a broader variety, and it included vocals—or at least vocaloid sounds. Myuthafoo is more self-assured, more controlled, less goofy. (Then again, the pinging synth pop of Ecstatic Computation’s “Pinnacles of You” may just be your thing.)
In the past, Barbieri has regularly played with her voice. Last year’s Spirit Exit brought to mind masterful Auto-Tune tinkering, like if Max Headroom produced Kate Bush. Better still was Barbieri’s 2014 album Vertical, a richly gloomy outing of layered glottal intonations—Diamanda Galás’ Tuvan goth rituals put to resonant purpose by way of ambient grandmother Hildegard of Bingen.
Myuthafoo, however, dispenses with vocals entirely, and is better for it. The absence of singing brings Barbieri’s synths to the fore. Part of the wonderment of Myuthafoo isn’t just how she sequences; it’s what. The tones on “Sufyosowirl,” heard loud, are thick and syrupy—yet also utterly frictionless, leaving no sticky residue.
While many of her peers aspire aesthetically to the sympathetic minimalism of, say, La Monte Young or Michael Nyman, Barbieri has her sights set on more riotous heights. Much of Myuthafoo suggests she’d rather be the synthesizer equivalent of Franz Liszt or Sergei Rachmaninoff. This music speaks of a hunger, at times for something boisterous, rambunctious, and extroverted; at others there’s an unabashed emotional longing.
She signals this urge right at the outset, with “Memory Leak.” At just 78 seconds long, it is less a song than an overture, a fanfare. It sounds like the sort of thing a massive arena would blast as the headliner takes the stage, Klieg lights spinning and theatrical fog filling the hall.
“Math of You” is like Underworld’s “Rez” as reworked by Ryoji Ikeda. It takes the rhythmic patterning of rave music and funnels it into a form that’s precise, immersive, and generative. In place of Underworld’s unfettered abandon, we get another sort of catharsis. It may feel controlled, but so does a roller coaster. The illusion of chaos—in the sense of an ornate employment of physics—is thrilling nonetheless. “Alphabet of Light” exhibits prowess on some imaginary organ-like instrument where the notes are freed from anything resembling a keyboard and veer upward exponentially for countless octaves. You can picture Barbieri in one of Rick Wakeman’s capes, pointing toward the heavens. It can get a bit samey, but it’s never not fun. And the album closes on what could pass for a collaboration between Aphex Twin and Angelo Badalamenti, a somber pop crowd-pleaser titled “Swirls of You.”
This may seem like “headphone music”—intricate, virtuoso, open-ended—but it’s also living-room music. The fractal vapor trails and oceanic drones are all the better when they’re magnified to full size. If you sit in front of your speakers while the title track blasts, prepare to become convinced that some sort of invisible yet somatically present shimmering lattice of metallic particulate has spontaneously unspooled in the space before you. Really. For at her best, Barbieri doesn’t just make music; a wizard, she excites the air.


On this two-and-a-half hour, semi-improvised opus, the two guitarists and composers approach finely wrought detail and vast empty space in ways that can warp one's perception of time itself.

Keith Rowe / Michael Pisaro: 13 Thirteen

13 Thirteen

The first recorded collaboration between veteran guitarists Keith Rowe and Michael Pisaro is dauntingly ambitious. Before making a note of music, the pair decided 13 Thirteen would last 140 minutes. They each separately wrote and recorded scores, then improvised together along with those pre-recorded elements. Pisaro’s score includes four samples from Shostakovich’s 13th String Quartet, each occurring three times in 10-minute intervals, and the composition is divided into 13 discrete sections. As if to emphasize their ambition, Rowe calls his own score “Fate” and his half of the improvisation “Life” (a reference to Russian author Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate).
Absorbing those concepts along with nearly two-and-a-half hours of music might seem like a formidable task. But as a listening experience, 13 Thirteen is far from intimidating. There is a lot of space and near-silence here; that’s often the case with the kind of music that Rowe and Pisaro each make and that Erstwhile frequently releases. But 13 Thirteen also offers plenty of warmth and detail. Even when they get busy or loud, the sounds the two musicians make are patient and resonant. Once your ears acclimate to their long-form approach, the vibration of a single guitar string can sound both welcoming and monumental.
The momentousness of Rowe’s playing comes from a long career of study and practice. The English-born 77-year-old, known best for his work with pioneering British group AMM, has heard and made so much music that every improvised sound he creates—usually with tabletop guitar and electronics—is informed by layers of history. Pisaro brings a lot to the equation too, as a prolific player, collaborator, composer (he has written over 80 scores, many published by Germany’s Edition Wandelweiser), and professor currently teaching at California Institute of the Arts.
All of this combined experience is clear on 13 Thirteen, especially in the way each sound fits into an evolving narrative. Every choice is distinct and measured, giving the listener ample time to contemplate it and connect it with what came before. Rowe and Pisaro are like tour guides for their own sonic worldviews, never rushing you but also never lingering too long. That might sound facetious, given how lengthy and sparse 13 Thirteen is, but focused attention reveals that even the most gradual sections continually move forward.
Despite the album's weighty classical influences, you don’t need much prior knowledge to track the piece’s recurring motifs. The way the string samples, guitar plucks and strums, and Rowe’s harsher, metallic sounds periodically surface gives 13 Thirteen the feel of wordless verse, filled with subtle rhymes and complex rhythms. This effect is aided by the intense clarity of the recording. Even the softest sounds are sharp and detailed, making everything refreshingly concrete and life-like, especially for music that could be called abstract.
As Rowe and Pisaro’s motifs build, 13 Thirteen becomes physically and emotionally affecting, and in the right frame of mind, it can slow you down, warping and even dissolving your internal clock. More subtly, 13 Thirteen will likely stretch your understanding of improvisation. Free-form music often toggles between bracingly abrupt moments and placid stretches where players spin wheels before regaining momentum. But Rowe and Pisaro find a middle path where all sounds are surprising yet none are shocking. Following their interplay is like taking a meditative roller coaster ride. By working their craft in such a thoughtful, considered manner,  Rowe and Pisaro open up space, both within their music and within anyone who chooses to listen.


Even noise guys need break-up albums, records that can pull them out of their funk without making them feel like ...

Death From Above 1979: You're a Woman, I'm a Machine

You're a Woman, I'm a Machine

In the corner of every show-- even if it's the dirtiest, smelliest AS220 showcase or an impromptu Lightning Bolt concert in a Jamaica Plain kitchen-- there's always some guy with a beard talking to another guy with a beard about feelings. There they are, right in the thick of no-bullshit rock 'n' roll-- fucking noise rock, mang-- bitching about trust and love and What She Did, while all their buddies are breaking dishes during "13 Monsters" and sweating in the July heat and Spiewak sweatshirts they all secretly bought off Karmaloop. Today the noise is just too much-- something Beard Guy No. 1 never thought he'd say-- and he takes a taxi back to his parents' house in Greenwich, climbs into his Throbbing Gristle pajamas, and cries cries cries until his hornrims fog up.
Even noise guys need break-up albums, records that can pull them out of their funk without making them feel like complete assholes-- and simply put, Death From Above 1979's second album and Vice Records debut, You're a Woman, I'm a Machine, is the answer. The album title only hints at the viciousness with which this Toronto bass/drums/vox administers its own emotional purge. The whole affair sounds admittedly far-fetched, especially considering both the band's musical history-- their 2003 debut Heads Up was good and short but merely barked-- and the band's apparent dickheadedness: After Death From Above Records (aka the DFA), approached the band to change its name, the duo responded by tacking on the legal minimum of numbers to their moniker and posting to their former web site: "FUCK DFA RECORDS FUCK JAMES MURPHY WE DECLARE JIHAD ON THEM HOLY WAR ENDING IN THIER DEATH AND DISMEMBERMENT... james murphy is a selfish piece of fuck that will burn in the flames of a specially dedicated rock and roll jihad. if i had the resources i would fly a plane into his skull."
You're a Woman comes as an unexpected and almost regrettable delight in that sense-- it has the attitude, but possibly too much substance, for a true Vice Records release. This is high-gloss, feel-better noise-rock that balances riff-heavy micro-Sabbath bravado with a tenderness quite foreign to the current Providence-born noise scene (of which DFA79 may not be considered to be their contemporaries after You're a Woman). Some might bemoan the album's accessibility, but that's hooks, actual song structure, and broken hearts for you: By turning the rock knob down a notch, DFA79 have kept You're a Woman loud and nasty and ensured a cohesion and unusual degree of listenability-- something that the harder, better, and admittedly more authentic Lightning Bolt still hasn't been able to do in concert or on record.
From the livid call-to-arms stomp of "Turn It Out" to the scraps and squelches and metalloid pathos of "Romantic Rights" to the strangely powerful teenage schlarp-turned-massive Oedipal joke of "Going Steady" ("I have never seen you suffer/ I will never hurt you, lover," then, "I will never make you suffer/ I will never hurt you, mother") to the redrum rant of fiery first-half climax "Blood on Our Hands" ("There's blood on the shoes from all the people you stepped on"), DFA79 waste no time on subtlety-- their lyrics and singular jingles are huge but fully exposed and vulnerable as all hell. Frustration and jealousy increase to painful degrees until the title track's punk chorus ("Now that it's over, I love you more and more"), an avatar of the album's bitterness.
This purge over, DFA79 end You're a Machine with two responses to this draining ordeal. The first is the sex-furious, self-explanatory graphic fete "Pull Out"; the second, "Sexy Results", is about getting back to the prowl, and it's the best dance-punk song since the late genre's untimely death earlier this year. There's the obligatory French introduction, there's cowbell, there's handclaps, and the lyrics put Nic Offer's "what did George Bush say when he met Tony Blair?" hook to shame. And, at the end, a superfunk synth straight outta Chocolate City makes it clear that the DFA79 libido is back. Will the cycle of You're a Woman repeat itself? Probably, but for now get out of the corner and just fucking dance.


The Roots follow their tightly-knit return to rawness Game Theory with another record that finds them coming across as intelligently aggressive firebrands, as they express precisely and without compromise an increasingly universal strain of anxiety and frustration

Rising Down

It's gotten to the point where I can't even imagine the Roots being soft anymore. Not to be dismissive of their first few albums, which were thoughtful without being mushy or maudlin, but their three recent records-- the underrated/overhated alleged-sellout The Tipping Point, the Def Jam-released tightly knit return to rawness Game Theory, and now Rising Down-- are so singularly focused on a kind of distilled, uninhibited force that it's now difficult to think of the Roots as anything but intelligently aggressive firebrands.
You don't throw on these albums if you want to chill out, and Rising Down does more than any of them to express, precisely and without compromise, a specifically African-American but increasingly universal strain of anxiety and frustration. A lot of Rising Down's urgency and immediacy owes to the massive guest roster. The Roots' Philly core of affiliates-- vets Dice Raw, Peedi Peedi, and Truck North, former member Malik B., and relative newcomer/search engine nightmare P.O.R.N.-- appear on more than half the record's songs, and they help give the record a sense of a communal strength in numbers; their appearances on vicious throwdown "Get Busy" (with the some deft cuts from Philly's legendary DJ Jazzy Jeff) and a stretch of tracks in the middle ("I Will Not Apologize", "I Can't Help It", and "Singing Man") feel like the spiritual and lyrical core of the album.
The guests from outside Philly work just as well: Talib Kweli spits with an atypically growly delivery on the anti-defeatist anthem "Lost Desire", Common displays glimpses of his late-1990s shine ruminating over tour fatigue on "The Show", Wale kills it with some so-corny-they're-great metaphors ("good rappers ain't eatin', they Olsen twinnin'") on "Rising Up", and Saigon's final verse on "Criminal" is the fierce peak of a three-MC slow lyrical burn. And while Styles P's turn on the title track works well enough (it's something to hear the dude behind "Good Times [I Get High]" go after the pharmaceutical industry), Mos Def's verse-- the first one on the whole record-- is one of the best he's ever done, and probably the best guest spot on Rising Down: "Identities in crisis and conflict diamonds/ Blindin', staring at lights till they cryin'/ Bone gristle popping from continuous grindin'."
But despite the massive ensemble cast, Black Thought is still the core of the record and the well-worn accusations of him being anti-charismatic feel largely false here. Most of his great moments come on tracks which feature a lot of other MCs' great moments, and after getting overshadowed on "Rising Down" (can any MC make the subject of global warming into a dope lyric?) he comes out swinging for the rest of the record. On "Singing Man", even with P.O.R.N. portraying himself as a vividly realized school shooter and Truck North putting together a disturbingly evocative characterization of a suicide bomber, Black Thought's depiction of an African child soldier justifying his violence ("13 year-old killer, he look 35/ He changed his name to Little No Man Survive") is both sharply written and unsettling. His delivery is a bit more varied than you might expect, too, particularly when he's rapping about getting underpaid like he's got a clenched jaw in "I Will Not Apologize" or sweating his way through a pills-and-stress panic attack on "I Can't Help It". And when he's turned loose on a hookless lyrical exhibition, Black Thought is nearly unstoppable; it's scary the way he blazes through the one-take assault of "75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction)", throwing out endless Big Daddy Kane-level proclamations of untouchability ("My hustle is long, my muscle is strong, my man put the paper in the duffel I'm gone/ Y'all still a light year from the level I'm on/ Just a pawn stepping right into the head of the storm"). The abrupt way it ends, it sounds like he could've gone on full throttle for another two hundred bars if someone hadn't taken a cleaver to the tape reel.
A revamped production style accompanies the deeper, darker lyrical tone, taking the aesthetic of Game Theory to its grimiest conclusion. Most of Kamal's keyboard work here isn't with the archetypal Fender Rhodes of Roots albums past; he's using a number of grimy analog synths that snarl and spit and hiss, the kind you hear in dead prez's "Hip Hop" or Outkast's "Stanklove" (or the J.B.'s' "Blow Your Head", for that matter). That racket combining with ?uestlove's fierce, crisp percussion makes for some diabolical rhythmic low-end, and since it dominates Rising Down's personality it gives the album the feeling of being this bionic monstrosity that just so happens to have a lot of headknock to it.
There are a couple of exceptions, like the guitar-driven midtempo Fela pastiche of "I Will Not Apologize" and the unexpected country-blues tinge to "Criminal", but they're rare breathers in an album that otherwise closes in on you. Only when the triumphant, old-school Roots return on the demi-go-go of "Rising Up" does it feel like the weight's been lifted, and even then something about it-- the endless Oprah/Travolta namedrop hook, the mawkish Chrisette Michele vocal about a crying b-girl, the overly tidy-sounding keyboards-- seems a bit out of place. (Maybe not as out-of-place as the now-infamous and super-creepy Patrick Stump collab "Birthday Girl", however; excising that disaster singlehandedly saved the album's character.) Rising Down isn't always an easy listen, but it's an exciting one, and its abrasiveness never gets in the way of a good throw-your-hands-up beat or a well-crafted lyric.
If you've been paying any damn attention to the world around you, most of Rising Down's messages ring familiar, and frequently true: This is an album that tells you the entertainment industry is turning into a coon show, the climate (both environmental and cultural) is getting fucked up, and broke people are still struggling. But this record states these ideas with respect to the notion that you know them already, and puts all the revelation and subtext into its unyielding sound. You could call it preaching to the converted, but it also feels like a reminder to the lapsed, less a wake-up call than a shot of renewed adrenaline.


Jade Lilitri, frontman for Long Island pop/punk outfit Oso Oso, assembles an album-length tribute to ‘00s indie rock and emo, one style and song at a time.

The Yunahon Mixtape

Jade Lilitri’s latest project has “mixtape” in the title, but it is pretty much the opposite of super-mutant strains like Coloring Book or If You’re Reading This It's Too Late—expensive-sounding, heavily publicized albums that have as much in common with an audiobook or an app as they do a mixtape. Oso Oso’s second LP is advertised as an album about a mixtape, in the old rewind-and-record, Maxell-cassette sense. More accurately, it’s a tribute to the emotional state of mixtape-making: being dumbstruck in love, or simply being dumbstruck by the concept of love, daydreaming the lifespan of an entire relationship and actualizing it within a span of 40 minutes.
For ’00s indie rock fans, Yunahon Mixtape can be heard as a seamless Since I Left You-style collage borne from college radio crate digging between 2001-2004. It’s a veritable Easter egg hunt for brisk, Barsuk-era Death Cab for Cutie melodies, and the appropriately titled and panoramic “Great Big Beaches” stages a misty-eyed, full-hearted reshoot of “Cath…” Elsewhere, Lilitri steps outside of classic emo to practice the fastidious, ship-in-a-bottle complexity of the Shins (“The Secret Spot”), Built to Spill’s anxious prog-pop (“The Bearer of the Truths”) and the walking-wounded blues of Spoon (“The Slope”).
But prior to starting Oso Oso, Lilitri played as State Lines, a Long Island emo outfit that demonstrated an endearingly fervent dedication to bringing a certain kind of late-90s New York back in the 2010s. Oso Oso’s 2015 debut sounded like someone trying to deconstruct pop-punk, but it appears in its purest form on The Yunahon Mixtape, as a secret weapon: when things threaten to get too fastidious on “The Walk,” the second half breaks into a mad dash, while “Shoes (The Sneaker Song)” follows “Great Big Beaches” with a four-minute mile.
Lilitri is as much of a student of his influences as he is a fan, understanding the exact methods that make the sound of this music hit a certain way at a certain age and linger in the years to come. This is music that reflects a mood more often than it sets one, and the coherence of Oso Oso’s influences allows the emotional tenor to shift wildly without upsetting the flow, from drumming up the confidence to act on a crush, putting feelings out in the open, and the subsequent vertigo of awaiting reciprocation. Lilitri played everything but drums here, and the stacked harmonies and call-and-response actually enhance its insularity in a meaningful way: most mixtapes are conceptualized long before they hit the reels.
Whereas State Lines or even the first Oso Oso album had the pinched sound of teen melodrama, The Yunahon Mixtape is pure romantic comedy: meet-cutes, playful misunderstandings, inside jokes and the acoustic midpoint where three minutes apart feels like an eternity. And like most entries in this realm, Yunahon allows itself cliché as an indulgence; the very first line plays on “falling in love” as a physical pratfall and “Shoes (The Sneaker Song)” proudly wields its uber-emo sentiments.
There’s enough acidity to keep it from getting too cloying, enough specifics to keep it grounded, enough humor to make everyone feel like co-conspirators playing hooky from realistic interactions. All of this makes The Yunahon Mixtape a realization of its ambitions and completely out of step on numerous fronts. It’s understandable if the current state of affairs has completely sapped your ambition to have your head in the clouds, but damn if The Yunahon Mixtape doesn’t make a good argument for getting on Lilitri’s level.