Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Laura Jane Grace’s 2002 folk-punk salvo, an album that yearns for an escape from and through rock’n’roll.

Reinventing Axl Rose

When you’re especially young, pop music opens a world where things actually happen. Behind the brittle plastic of a jewel case or the curved glass of a TV console, a gleaming reality promises a life outside the walls of your parents’ home. As a young Army brat flung between cities and continents, Laura Jane Grace clung to the image of Axl Rose as it came to her through MTV. The flash, bang, and squeal of Guns N’ Roses electrified her imagination. “Their music appealed to me because it felt dangerous. I was afraid of my parents seeing the liner note artwork,” she wrote in her 2016 memoir. “The look of the band, particularly that of wiry lead singer Axl Rose, excited me most because it was androgynous. Hair was big, clothes were tight, lines were blurred. I often couldn’t tell if band members were boys or girls, and I liked that.”
That was third grade. By age 21, Grace had changed her tune. “It’s obvious Axl Rose is a jerk,” she said then. She was explaining the title of her band’s debut album, Reinventing Axl Rose, to a newspaper reporter. The record’s cover featured a black and white stencil of the Guns N’ Roses singer with his arms flung wide, in seeming ecstasy before an adoring crowd. The band’s name, Against Me!, slammed against the back of his head with the bluntness of a midcentury propaganda poster, and red stars rained down over his shoulders. “In a way I’m pleading not so much for a new rock star, because a rock star is still a rock star, but for how music should be,” Grace said.
In the years between her grade school adulation and the jaded frustrations of her early twenties, the cracks in the adult world yawned open for Grace. The shine of a music video no longer offered a portal to a better plane; pop music lost its season, like tinsel spilling from a dumpster sometime in late February. Grace’s parents split while she was in middle school, and her mother moved the kids from Italy to Naples, Florida, a sleepy, wealthy enclave across the state from Miami where their grandmother lived. Grace bristled at her bleached, manicured surroundings. She grew out her hair and went punk, spiking her mohawk with food-grade gelatin and stitching patches onto her jeans as armor. By 15 she’d been convicted of two felonies after a cop brutalized her for standing around on a boardwalk; she spat in his face and he hog-tied her in the back of his car. By 16, she’d dropped out of high school and discovered the Minneapolis-based anarcho-punk collective Profane Existence, which put out releases with high contrast, xeroxed covers from scrappy hardcore bands like State of Fear and Civil Disobedience. These DIY factions proved music could open up into a current that ran deeper than the glitz of MTV. It could incubate politics more fervent and fertile than the adulation of the already wealthy. It could tether maladapted kids to each other with electrified wire, and carry them forward through the days of a world that seemed to want them dead.
Against Me! coalesced around Grace when she was in her late teens. She dubbed her first tapes in her bedroom and printed the inserts at Kinko’s. She played her first show under that name at a vegan restaurant in Fort Myers, in the middle of the day, to two dozen bored Floridians. In 1998, at 18, Grace recorded the band’s second tape, Vivida-Vis!, this time with friends: Kevin Mahon hammered away on a rudimentary drum kit while Dustin Fridkin scratched out bass. Through the hiss and crackle of the format, the warmth of Grace’s songwriting had already started to radiate; already, she had learned to cut wistful melodies and intricate lyricism with fevered aggression, to layer the overtones of acoustic instruments under the bite of electric ones. Folk delicacy and punk bluntness melted down into the same choked gutter, a combination that would prove fertile for decades of DIY music to come. The words she sang dissolved in her rasp, but could be recovered more or less in full on the photocopied inserts included with every tape. The band mailed copies of the cassette around the country to friends Grace had made through the punk zine networks of the late ’90s. The spring after putting out Vivida-Vis!, in early 1999, Against Me! set off on its first tour, playing punk houses, garages, and open mic nights further up the East Coast and in the Midwest. They slept outside and made no money, subsisting largely off dumpster diving and the reluctant sympathy of underpaid fast food workers.
Touring only deepened Grace’s disgust for Naples. After Against Me! pressed its vinyl debut, a self-titled 12" EP, on pen pal Jordan Kleeman’s label Crasshole, the band made its way north to the college town of Gainesville. In journal entries written shortly after the move, reprinted in her memoir, Grace detailed the gender rituals she would carry out in private. Dysphoria had followed her since early childhood when she saw Madonna perform on television and felt her inner self reflected in the pop star. She started trying on her mother’s stockings in secret on Sundays after her parents dragged her to church. Believing he had two sons, her father kiboshed any expressions of femininity he picked up on in Grace, chiding her when he noticed her playing with a neighbor’s Barbie dolls. Grace quickly learned to keep her longing private. In grade school, she read about the trans pro tennis player Renée Richards and learned that the gender stamped on a birth certificate need not be a lifelong sentence. Fed up with God’s silence on the issue, she inked a plea to Satan in her own blood asking to wake up a fully grown woman. Satan, too, failed to deliver. With no one left to ask, she kept ritualizing her submerged identity by putting on women’s clothes in secret: first her mother’s, then garments she shoplifted and salvaged from the trash. “The door to my bedroom is shut and locked. I have double and triple-checked,” Grace wrote in her journal in 2000, at age 19. “I light a cigarette and suddenly become real. I become her.”
“Who was ‘her’? She was the person I imagined myself to be, in another dimension, in a past life, in some dream,” Grace wrote years later in her memoir. She quarantined the desire to become herself inside the safety of the third person. Oblique references to dysphoria slipped into her lyrics. Against Me!’s 2002 EP The Disco Before the Breakdown contains pained lines about the rough edges of embodiment on the title track, questions forced through gritted teeth on “Tonight We’re Gonna Give It 35%.” “Can you live with what you know about yourself/When you’re all alone, behind closed doors?”
For their debut LP, Against Me! signed to No Idea, a Gainesville-based imprint that had built a dedicated following throughout the ’90s with releases from local punk bands like Less Than Jake and Hot Water Music. In retrospective interviews, Grace has said that the band recorded the album in two days, back to back. The CD insert lists four, but the point remains: These were loose, rowdy, largely live sessions where friends from the scene dropped in to track backing vocals after spending their mornings drinking. Save for “Baby, I’m an Anarchist!” a group effort originally intended for a separate band, the songwriting on Reinventing is all Grace. The energy, though, is communal. Gone is the nervous hush blanketing the growls on Grace’s early bedroom tapes. The band’s debut LP finds her in full-throated camaraderie with a roomful of other punks, scraping out tracks on the limited studio time they could afford, moving fast and sloshing over the minutia. What Grace sings on record often departs from what she’s written in the album’s liner notes, which are studded with parenthetical clarifications. After the elongated “Mary” on the chorus to “We Laugh at Danger (And Break All the Rules),” Grace writes, “as in ’the virgin,’” though she would later also mention that Mary is the name of her paternal grandmother. Song titles differ between the insert and the back cover; what’s called “Jamaican Me Crazy” inside the booklet got (thankfully) renamed to “Scream It Until You’re Coughing Up Blood” by the time the track listing was finalized. This was a roughshod and explosive debut, the sound of bottled teen angst barrelling over into the bitter deflations of young adulthood.
Two big, interrelated questions hang over Reinventing Axl Rose: What’s in the membrane that keeps you from death, and what’s the most that music can really do? The album begins with “Pints of Guinness Make You Strong,” a rumination on Grace’s maternal grandmother, Evelyn, who had been lodged deep in mourning ever since her husband, James, died 16 years before Grace was born. “Grandma Evelyn, who never remarried after her husband died of a heart attack in 1964, would slip into depression and not get out of bed for days. We would admit her to the hospital for treatment, and she’d spend a month here, get released, and six months later, need to be admitted again. I felt like I understood her hopelessness,” Grace wrote in her memoir. On “Pints,” Grace flexes her knack for tangible illustration in her lyrics. Evelyn’s passage through time snags on objects like her late husband’s AA card, still in his wallet, which still rests on their bedside table. She waits by the elevator as though he might someday step out of it. She drifts through decades in the same haze. Grace fears both her grandmother’s defection from progressive time and her grandfather’s self-obliteration. “Just like James, I’ll be drinking Irish tonight/And the memory of this last work week will be gone forever,” she sings at the chorus, her voice throwing sparks. The threat of eternal repetition and eternal amnesia galvanizes her. So does a love for her grandparents that stretches past death.
Terror of being stuck permeates Reinventing Axl Rose: stuck in Florida, stuck in America, stuck in poverty, stuck in patriarchy, stuck in a life closed off to reprieve or escape. The whole album howls against the quicksand of capitalist compulsion. “If Florida takes us/We’re taking everyone down with us/Where we’re coming from will be the death of us,” Grace promises in the group bark-along on “We Laugh at Danger.” Where she’s going feels murkier. What kind of world can you raise from the negative space of your dissatisfaction? Reinventing sketches the edges of that place with equal parts humor and rage. The satirical barbs of “Baby, I’m an Anarchist!” make a worthy sequel to Phil Ochs’ 1966 evisceration “Love Me I’m a Liberal,” its sights trained on the same immutable target 36 years later. “Those Anarcho Punks Are Mysterious…” traces the gulf between the longing for utopia as you see it and the messiness of trying to put it in practice. “It’s so much less confusing when lines are drawn like that/When people are either consumers or revolutionaries, enemies or friends,” Grace sings. An us-versus-them framework makes for great fun in a campfire singalong, but it flattens the world and the people who comprise it. How do we speak to each other beyond locating a common enemy? How do you build something new while the world around you collapses? On the snarling “Walking Is Still Honest,” a brisk and wrenching cut that, alongside “Pints,” still makes most Against Me! setlists two decades later, Grace finds a springboard in the ruins. “You can reach but you’ll never have it/We are untouchable/Untouchable is something to be,” she concludes in the last verse. There is freedom in accepting you’ll never win the game as it’s laid out for you. Sometimes the holes in your life grow so big they become doors.
Grace’s belief that music could drive communion rings out from every note of this album, even as she actively questions the extent of what music can do. She invokes Axl Rose not just as a symbol of the pop world’s excesses, but as a reminder of the way Guns N’ Roses made her feel as a kid: tapped into a secret power, lit up with the blaze of a great hook. “Maybe somehow this scam will still save us all,” she posits, dragging out the last three syllables, on “I Still Love You Julie.” On the record’s title track, Grace dreams of a band that plays with no hope of fame or wealth, a band that plays loud enough to fuse its listeners together: “Let’s make everybody sing that they are the beginning and ending of everything/That we are all stronger than everything they taught us that we should fear.”
A more perfect life lurks behind each of these songs, but it glows across the slow, mournful album closer “8 Full Hours of Sleep.” Here, Grace sings of a world just beyond this one: “Without classes, without nations,” without loneliness or scarcity or cold. She sings out to an unnamed “her,” someone who embraces the dreamer unceasingly, someone whose presence is so unbounded and mythological I can’t help but suspect Grace is singing to the potential self she also referred to in the third person in her most private writings. Here, she digs out the truth that fighting a war with yourself does the work of your enemies for them. It keeps you from plunging wholeheartedly into your own work: You have to live inside your own hands to really get them dirty. For a moment, against a melancholic Moog bassline, Grace dreams herself into a world she’s made real. It’s all there, the partitions melted away, one continuous experience. And then the sun burns through the haze and the dream evaporates; you wake up on someone’s floor in a rancid state and spend another day clawing toward yourself all the same. It’s slow, but you get there like you get anywhere. You scream it to yourself until it’s true.
Correction: A previous version of this review featured an incorrect timeline regarding the band’s early career and the labels that were interested in it. This has since been corrected.


Taiwanese artist Pon blends traditional mythology and instruments with electronic beats and cacophonous samples on a release inspired by life in—and the urge to escape from—her home city of Taipei.

鬼島 Ghost Island EP

Life in a modern metropolis shapes the experimental music of Meuko! Meuko! The Taipei artist behind the project, Pon, cites “Taiwan’s irregular view/architectures and buildings, muggy, emissions-filled air, and hectic streetscapes” as influences on a sound constructed from an array of samples and synthesizer notes. The songs on her latest release, 鬼島 Ghost Island, frequently come off as claustrophobic, with noises tumbling over one another to form a cacophony reminiscent of daily city noise. But rather than just recreating the constricted experience of urban living, the album finds Pon incorporating traditional mythology and instruments to craft fantastical escapes—albeit with quotidian grime seeping in throughout.
This is just the latest aesthetic leap from an artist who’s fond of leaning into new styles. Pon first gained attention as a vocalist and synth player in indie-pop group the Shine & Shine & Shine & Shine (閃閃閃閃), an outfit whose melancholy jogs are a world away from the fractured beats she’s gone on to create. Although Meuko! Meuko! dates back to 2007, it really took off in 2015, when Pon arrived at a sound whose shadowy atmosphere undercut glitchy dance tracks loaded up with samples and toy noises and, at live shows, complemented by a whirlwind of images. Pon gravitated toward juke on last year’s About Time EP, approaching the genre with the same oddball flourishes as her frequent collaborator Foodman, but establishing a pervasive sense of unease that contrasted with the Japanese producer’s more joyful bounce.
On 鬼島 Ghost Island, Meuko! Meuko! shifts toward the overwhelming, evoking a constant flux that sounds closest to the work of Arca and Danse Noire founder Aïsha Devi. “都市念佛法會Metropolitan Sutra Gathering” opens the record with faint chanting, but samples and percussion jabs quickly drown out those vocals. Pon gradually consolidates this noise into one final burst, filled out by warped echoes of the original prayer. “狗戰 Dog War” uses barking to complement the drum machine rumbles that propel the song forward, resulting in the album’s most intimidating track. Pon has always constructed her compositions out of disjointed sounds, but now she’s adding even more of them to songs stuffed with ever-mutating details. The two remixes at the end of this collection heighten this maximalist sensibility, with producers GIL and Dutch E Germ retaining the restless feel of Meuko! Meuko!’s originals while introducing their own high-definition dollops to the tracks.
Pon’s approach to vocals has also changed. In the past, she often delivered short stories in speak-sing. Now, she treats her voice as another instrument to stir into the stews of noise she concocts. On closer “希卡公主 Princes Sika,” she nearly whispers, her voice lurking beneath chopped-up beats and periodically dashing out. It’s here that Pon best captures the tension simmering across 鬼島 Ghost Island, in a track that feels like hot breath on the back of your neck.
The album’s beats could populate any number of 2018’s dissected club tracks, but Pon incorporates additional touches that tie her songs to a specific place and culture. “Ghost Island” is slang used in Taiwan to describe the grim economic conditions facing the country’s young people (although Pon has said she used it as a creative springboard more than as a statement). “眾神廟 The Temple” loops Chinese horns to create a sweltering drone that reappears throughout the record, helping to unite the songs. There’s nothing particularly nostalgic about these instruments or the chanting, however. Modern constantly electronics grind up against these traditional sounds, a reminder that reality always finds a way to sneak into Pon’s escapist fantasies.
A short but focused release, 鬼島 Ghost Island showcases the broad potential of Meuko! Meuko! It’s also the latest export from a burgeoning community of musicians in East Asia—including Foodman, Sonia Calico of Taiwan, Korea’s Neon Bunny, and everyone in the orbit of China’s Do Hits label—who merge traditional sounds from their cultures with contemporary electronic music. Meuko! Meuko! brings new purpose to this juxtaposition, using the harsh sounds of modern life to give her music a distinctly 21st-century tension.


After the morbid nostalgia of 2011’s Build a Rocket Boys!, there’s a softer, rounder, lighter obviousness to Elbow's sixth full-length The Take Off and Landing of Everything.

Elbow: The Take Off and Landing of Everything

The Take Off and Landing of Everything

Elbow frontman Guy Garvey has been splitting his time lately between Brooklyn and his native England. Accordingly, there’s an atmosphere of perpetual suspension and too many transatlantic flights to the band’s sixth full-length The Take Off and Landing of Everything. Not that Garvey, from the album’s title on down, seems to be trying to encrypt that theme. After the morbid nostalgia of 2011’s Build a Rocket Boys!, there’s a softer, rounder, lighter obviousness to Take Off. The arrangements are even more porous; the melodies less terrestrial. But where Build a Rocket Boys! meditated on youth, the new album dwells on, well, take offs and landings as analogs of life and death like that parallel is the most clever thing anyone’s ever thought of.
Yes, Garvey’s symbology has gotten that much more sodden and heavy-handed, even as Take Off steadfastly sheds mass. On “Fly Boy Blue/ Lunette”, he’s traded in his rockets for the drudgery of commercial flight with all its degradation of wonder. Garvey’s in-flight movie may have been Up in the Air one too many times. Singing “I’m reaching the age where decisions are made on the life and the liver," he falls back on the bottle as a totem of existential boredom. His voice itself—numb, null, narcotic—spreads its warmth around that imagistic mixology. “So bring your faces/ Home to my sweet trampoline/ And acres of crash site love," he waxes later in “Fly Boy Blue/ Lunette”, and only the song’s bittersweet orchestral swells save it from falling out of the sky.
Moments of greatness come, just not often enough. The contorted syncopation and signature-twiddling of “Charge”—as well as its thick keys and dehydrated guitar—establish some real counterpoint and tension, elements the album otherwise mostly lacks. And Garvey’s in-character narrative summons pathos, tangible rage, and the entitled bitterness of old age and memory. He bites off words, chews them, spits; Roger Waters circa The Final Cut might have been proud. It complements Take Off’s other standout, its title track, a wash of throbbing, “Tomorrow Never Knows”-esque psychedelia that also channels Garvey’s most open inspiration of late, Peter Gabriel.
Those gains are almost entirely erased by lusterless lumps like “Honey Sun”, a song that begins promisingly with a clip of off-the-cuff studio hijinks before devolving into Elbow’s longtime default setting: a discrete if uninentional reimagining of Blur’s “Tender,” in all its crowd-baiting, platitudinous blankness. “Can I jump in the gun/ And fly/ Over the ocean” goes Garvey’s obligatory air-travel reference as he lands his 747-sized sentimentalism right on the nose. Perhaps it’s deliberate that throughout The Take Off and Landing of Everything, hardly anything truly takes off. Instead the album dangles there, an effortlessly leaden exhibition of glum triumphalism—and an example of what makes Elbow, at its least potent, so subtly unsubtle.


Will Wiesenfeld’s second collection of odds and ends revamps old sketches with new lyrics, revealing a deepening interest in pop songcraft.

Pop Music / False B-Sides II

When Will Wiesenfeld released his first Pop Music/False B-Sides collection in 2011, the two halves of its title seemed to cancel each other out. He hadn’t released any actual Baths singles, for starters, and the songs, which came from the sessions that birthed his remarkable debut Cerulean, certainly didn’t feel like lesser offerings. But the word “pop” hinted at ambitions outside the Los Angeles beatmakers' community that had been Baths’ home up to that point. The ensuing years haven’t dimmed Wiesenfeld’s enthusiasm for percussive arrhythmia, but pure songcraft has slowly taken priority in his work. By 2017, his ear for hooks had grown so sharp that he could literally write a theme song (for a “dad dating simulator,” natch) and it didn’t feel all that out of character. Now, as Baths ushers in its second decade, the title of Pop Music/False B-Sides II comes to feel oddly appropriate: it’s an assemblage of scattered instrumentals turned into pop songs might as well pass for the actual fourth Baths album.
The coherence of Pop Music/False B-Sides II is all the more remarkable given how it draws from a much deeper hard drive than its predecessor. The source material dates as far back as 2013, some of it initially intended for Baths, others for Wiesenfeld’s ambient-leaning Geotic project. Wiesenfeld only recently added lyrics to these “renewed ideas and sketches,” and so without any kind of chronological ordering or thematic ties to serve as clues to their origins, Pop Music/False B-Sides II functions as a sort of alternate-history glimpse into his evolution.
The metallic undertow of “Veranda Shove” suggests a timestamp around 2013’s Obsidian, as does the oblong lurch and silvery, filtered percussion on “Be That” and “Sex.” If so, Wiesenfeld is revisiting them in a much healthier place, eschewing Obsidian’s graphic accounts of body horror and romantic dysfunction for tempered sensuality. The propulsive skittering of “Tropic Laurel” (an ostensible update of 2011’s “Nordic Laurel”) and “Immerse” are cast in the image of Romaplasm’s RPG fantasias and reframed as something more immediate and emotionally legible. “Wistful (Fata Morgana)” scales the IMAX-scoped “Ocean Death” down into a portrait of seaside longing, and the handful of instrumentals cast Geotic’s increasing path towards sylvan dream-pop converging with that of Baths.
Pop Music/False B-Sides also presents a case for Baths’ role in the greater trajectory of what used to be called “lap-pop.” There are still hints of Cerulean’s formative influences—the dreamy IDM of Dntel, Four Tet’s early folktronica phase, Fennesz at his friendliest, the lopsided bump and grind of Donuts. But Baths has existed long enough to influence on others, honing qualities that have become immediately identifiable: The acoustic guitars or keyboards processed to sound like player pianos, Wiesenfeld’s telltale usage of ripe verbiage like “anoint,” “evergreen,” “appendices.”  Even at his most pop-focused, Wiesenfeld continues to work outside of a percussive grid, mimicking the occasional grace of human movement, at other times, its more common gangly gait; in the case “Be That,” the ex post facto songwriting process shows its limitations, as Wiesenfeld can’t keep pace with its cumbersome, staggering cadences.
“Be That” is immediately followed by “The Stones,” the lengthiest and warmest Baths song to date—“I still trust that men can be lovely/do what you like but do it to me,” Wiesenfeld sings on the final line, a sentiment that feels accessed after years of struggle. A pity that Pop Music/False B-Sides II waits until its final two songs to start trying new things, as what precedes it piles onto Baths’ existing catalog rather than exploring new depths or vistas. It’s a testament to Wiesenfeld’s artistry that the difference between the “almosts” featured here and his most beloved songs isn’t always immediately perceptible, but on a “heads only” type of release, it might be more revelatory to hear the ideas that were too outre for a Baths album; does he have another “Dream Daddy” lying around? But it’s worth noting that on the same day Wiesenfeld released Pop Music/False B-Sides II as the inaugural title on his new label Basement’s Basement, he reissued the first collection as well—before Wiesenfeld embarks on a new beginning, he wanted to show us how far he’s come.


Respecting folk music’s past while uprooting it from the pastoral, the UK group’s politically minded album mixes acoustic and electronic instruments across original songs and traditionals.

Follow Them True

London’s Stick in the Wheel live up to their name: For the past few years they’ve been jabbing at the spokes of the English folk scene in their attempt to upend the system. With their 2015 full-length debut, From Here, they conceived of English folk music as something rooted in the past but not in the pastoral; the songs were urban instead of rural, social realist, often abrasive, and defiantly outside the folk mainstream. On traditional tunes dating back centuries as well as originals about the London riots and contemporary land-rights laws, Nicola Kearey sings in a voice that has more in common with Joe Strummer than with Shirley Collins. Co-founder Ian Carter eschews the jazzy improvisations that have defined UK folk guitar since the days of Davey Graham and Bert Jansch. Instead, he plays intricate looped rhythms that sound like he’s mimicking the beats he once created with the XL Recordings-signed electronic group Various Production.
They followed up From Here with a 7” single based on 17th-century ballads, a split with the Irish band Lynched, and a collection of mostly a cappella performances recorded in the living rooms and kitchens of some of the country’s biggest folk artists. With their second album, Follow Them True, Stick in the Wheel continue their attack. About half of the album refines the acoustic folk sound of their debut, with lyrics emphasizing the pride of craftsmen and laborers as well as the desperation driving the poor. As Stick in the Wheel dig through the vast catalog of British folk music, they gravitate toward tales from the fringes of society: the destitute, the hopeless, the wronged, and the forgotten.
“Weaving Song” is a spare tune based on a traditional Scottish ballad, and Kearey navigates the intricate melody as she describes the ins and outs of the lost profession. Another traditional, “White Copper Alley,” dates back to the 19th century and finds Kearey singing in the voice of a woman driven to prostitution. As she outwits a john and steals his watch and wallet, the band settles into a complex groove as though running through the back alleys of 19th-century London. But it’s the last line and the band’s abrupt halt that stick in your wheel: “I need the money/To save my poor sonny/For without the doctor/Me boy he’d be dead.” Listening to the song in a country where healthcare is not considered a basic human right, the woman’s desperation sounds all the more powerful—and deeply relatable.
The other half of Follow Them True mixes the old with the new and pushes at the boundaries of acoustic folk. “Witch Bottle” floats on an accordion drone as though mimicking the synthesizers of a 4AD record from the 1980s. The title track is even more jarring: Not only does it have electric instruments, but Kearey’s voice is distorted and manipulated, her consonants sheared away so that it becomes pure sound against Carter’s pendulum-like guitar figures. Auto-Tune may be the least folk thing imaginable, but the way the effect is put to use on “Follow Them True” sounds uprooted from time, lending the song a strange majesty.
What’s most remarkable about Stick in the Wheel’s experiments with the contemporary and the historical is how naturally the group melds these two opposing forces. Rather than grind against each other, each benefits from the contrast. That’s especially true as the album winds down, where they move from an a cappella sing-along of the traditional “Poor Old Horse” to the reverb-drenched original “Red Carnation” and finally to the electronic pulses of “As I Roved Out,” another traditional. The sequencing only plays up the commonalities inherent in these disparate songs; it’s a reminder that we’re still singing about the same things for centuries now.


Black Flag’s debut LP is a living document of hardcore, a mutable album of anger, empathy, and politics. Its raw power is still felt today, and its influence on the genre is incalculable.

Damaged

As the last song on Damaged begins, Henry Rollins introduces himself. “My name’s Henry and you’re here with me now,” he says. Then he growls, as he does on and off throughout the rest of the song. “I don’t even care about self-destruction anymore.” The song ends, and he’s nearly breathless. “Damaged, my damage!” He sounds like he’s gone through several lifetimes of torture. “No one comes in. Stay out!” It’s 1981 and he is 20 years old.
Rollins joined Black Flag less than a year earlier when he was just a fan who viewed them as hardcore punk godheads. In his memoir, Get in the Van, Rollins wrote of watching the band perform: “It was one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen,” he said. “All the songs were abrupt and crushing. Short bursts of unbelievable intensity. It was like they were trying to break themselves into pieces with the music.” At that point, Dez Cadena was the vocalist, with bassist Chuck Dukowski and guitarist Greg Ginn handling the songwriting. When Cadena decided to move to rhythm guitar, Rollins was recruited to try out. Offered the spot, he accepted, and quit his day job managing a D.C. Häagen-Dazs store to move to California to be the new lead singer of Black Flag.
In the trifecta of early ’80s hardcore, alongside Minor Threat and Bad Brains, Black Flag crystallized what hardcore could do at its most crowd-pleasing. Minor Threat was more existential, and Bad Brains more romantic. Black Flag took the ethos of fast and loud and made it into a lifestyle. Though they’d achieved success as a band before Rollins, it’s the tone of his voice, simultaneously conveying anger and empathy, that elevates Damaged to its rightful position as a cornerstone document in the history of punk.
Thirty-five years on, Damaged still sounds absolutely berserk. Though made up of what is easily identifiable as “songs,” the record is at its most formidable when it becomes chaotic. Chuck Dukowski’s bass sounds like rubbing two giant sticks together to start a fire. His playing often feels like the way a Cro-Magnon man might approach rhythm, harsh and mean. Guitarist Greg Ginn is a wizard, playing his guitar like it’s a dental drill. With Cadena keeping some semblance of structure, Ginn shreds riffs apart, extending them into mini-solos across half a verse. He’s closer in spirit to Jerry Garcia or Sonny Sharrock than other hardcore guitarists. His playing is violently virtuosic, sliding between wild, fuzzed-out abandon and the immaculate conception of the chug that makes hardcore so exciting. While Cadena and Black Flag’s parochial drummer Robo establish a basic lifeline of stability, Ginn throws paint on the canvas straight from the bucket.
Damaged does have its semi-traditional moments, and they all suffer from the band trying too hard. Consider the fairly crappy pogoing punk number “TV Party,” something of a cult classic for its singalong chorus. It’s perfectly banal, this dumb little song taking potshots at normies who want to “watch TV and have a couple of brews,” which may or may not have posed a threat to the way of life of Black Flag and their fans. But on an album that is otherwise adventurous, sarcastically shouting out “The Jeffersons” and “Hill Street Blues” is an unnecessary tug back to earth. These are bad details. The more they seem like feral animals, the better.
They’re at their scuzzy best on songs like “Spray Paint,” which is just 32 seconds long. It begins with a second or two of feedback, like an engine revving, before taking off. “It feels good to say what I want/It feels good to knock things down/It feels good to see the disgust in their eyes,” Rollins sings. When the chorus hits, Robo stomps the crash cymbal, and the band screams the refrain: “Spray paint the walls!” They’re the kids of Lord of the Flies with guitars instead of spears.
So thank god for Henry Rollins, a beacon. Previous singers of Black Flag are cult favorites, but none could penetrate through the wall of sound like him. His desperation is the centerpiece of the album, pleading with you—with himself—for release from pain song after song. His clarity of tone balances out Ginn and Dukowski, and he acts as a sort of ringleader pulling in tentative listeners and converting them into fans. On songs when he’s hurting, particularly “Damaged I,” he can be hard to listen to, but he is always impossible to ignore, like an actor dying in convincingly dramatic fashion on screen.
It’s the album’s inherent violence—both self-inflicted (as suggested by the cover image of Rollins punching out his reflection in a mirror), and that which is brought to bear upon well-deserving abusers—that makes the album’s hate and danger so attractive. Hardcore has continued to evolve, and the adrenaline offered by Damaged has been absorbed wholesale by hundreds of other groups. Straight edge hardcore groups utilized Black Flag’s scorched-earth approach, abandoning subtlety for unadorned aggression. Grindcore and thrash bands traded heaviness for speed; listening to them is like cheering on a car race. From Los Crudos to G.L.O.S.S., bands have narrowed the rage present in the lyrics of Damaged and used them to motivate political action, where Black Flag just kind of seemed to be bothered by unfairness.
When Damaged emerged, though, it was an anomaly. In the 1981 LA Times review of the album, Robert Hilburn compared the band to melodic punk rock group X five separate times. Though he loved the album, he noted, “The group’s grinding guitar attack … still lacks the brightness of X’s often rockabilly-accented arrangements.” That may seem like an absurd comparison now, but in 1981, the cultural and sonic space between a poppy band like X and one like Black Flag was not so large. The many shades of grey in between had yet to be defined in detail. Damaged was such a leap forward for punk, the only point of reference was miles behind.
That’s changed. Hardcore was just beginning in the early ’80s, evolving out of punk rock. This was a time before the genre splintered in a million fractions, and they were essentially all contained with Damaged: trash, grindcore, youth crew. None of those really existed in ’81, whereas now they all have a deep canon of often absolutely brutal-sounding records. We’re not yet at the place where a record like Damaged sounds quaint, but Black Flag have a lot more competition in their bid for catharsis through intensity now. And even forgetting hardcore entirely, rap is often the place wild teens look for thrills.
I first heard Damaged in the mid-’90s, when I was 12 or 13. Every song was an anthem. Black Flag railed against “them”; for me, that equaled teachers, parents, jocks. Authority is authority is authority—smash it all. Now, as an adult, would I find it as remarkable as I did then? Listening to Damaged now sometimes feels as much an anthropological experience as much as a visceral one. There is a certain pleasure in reverse engineering the album’s controlled chaos. Over time, Black Flag has achieved a mythological status, and searching for the source of their timeless potency can lead to a wormhole of ephemera. Their music alone may not have sustained such fervid devotion.
In a sense, then, Damaged has survived more as a historical living document than as a piece of art. Should it be considered as it was written in the early Reagan years on the cusp of a technological revolution? Just like a well-armed militia has a very different meaning now than in 1776, perhaps the way we heard Damaged has, and should, change. Hardcore, at its most potent, has always dealt with problems pertinent to the time and place we live now. Most of the hatred expressed on Damaged is vague, “They hate us/We hate them.” The utility of that unspecificity may have run its course. We don’t live in forever, we live in a very volatile now.
Perhaps the best way to experience Black Flag was as Rollins once did: in concert, something Damaged can only imitate. Head to YouTube for a show in Hartford in 1982 and watch a shirtless, scruffy, and jacked Rollins roll around on the floor, arching his back like getting he’s getting zapped back from the dead. Dukowski smacks the bass strings more than he plays them. It’s basically impossible to see what Ginn is actually doing, his hands up and down on the strings, back and forth on his guitar neck, like he’s playing some kind of demented game of catch. The audience sings the words, comes up on stage, hangs out there. No one in the band minds. Or maybe they don’t even notice, zoned out on their own planet. Watch them play in Philadelphia in 1982. Rollins keeps getting punched by a member of the crowd. He leans into it. After a few rounds of getting hit, Rollins clocks the daylights out of him. It’s a real baptism by fire. For the wrong listener, Damaged may be just noise. But for the right one, perhaps it is too.


OVO Sound signee Roy Wood$ offers a chilled-out version of trappy R&B on his debut studio album. But he’s yet to find a sound that is distinctly his own.

Say Less

In a year that saw releases from every artist on the OVO Sound roster, signee Roy Wood$ had plenty to live up to with his debut album Say Less. He first got the spotlight in 2015 with his Exis EP, which was a promising introduction to the 21-year-old singer’s hazy R&B. The youngest of the crew, there was a definitive youthful flavor in his bluntness; songs like the manic “Unleashed” or the more relaxed “Jealousy” were remarkably candid but effective. Much of those qualities carried through the EP and mixtape that followed. Say Less, though, reflects someone still experimenting when he should ostensibly be hitting a more coherent stride.
Wood$ has plenty of clear talent, but here he ventures further into lands that exist outside of the brooding, darker-toned music he’s done up to this point. Songs like “What Are You on?” and “B-Town,” a spirited homage to his Brampton home, have a Caribbean flare that highlight his Guyanese background. “Little Bit of Lovin,” meanwhile, finds him doing his very best Michael Jackson impression. The nod is serviceable and convincing enough to stick, but the funky upbeat production does much of the heavy lifting to truly sell the song. It’s one of several pop-leaning endeavors on the album—the dancey “Something New” feels less inspired—but Wood$ still sounds more comfortable surrounded by his sulky shades of black and purple.
The album’s title track falls squarely in the wheelhouse he established on previous releases, and he thrives there. The song is smokey and it rumbles along; occasional creaking bed springs ad-lib his musings about using sex for company. “Falling in love with women, I don’t know what I see in ‘em/More times I be lonely so I don’t know what I be feeling,” he sings; his tone perfectly matches this sort of bedside introspection. Similarly, the sultry “Bb” works well, and Wood$ uses the space of FrancisGotHeat’s bass-driven production to play up the sexual tension of the lyrics. “Monday to Monday” also rises above the rest as he opens up about poppin’ pills and the pseudo good time (“Narcotics for fun/liquor’s for the pain,” he sings). The synth production, courtesy of FKi 1st, seems to float, providing the perfect backdrop for this sort of escapism.
It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly Wood$ brings to an R&B sound that is already so heavily inspired by Toronto and his own label camp, but his attempts to figure it out are, more often than not, rewarding. He borrows generously from his peers, adding in his own coarse rasp, but it’s not a departure significant enough to truly differentiate himself. When hints of a distinct musical identity do peek out—his accent, the gruff aspects of his voice, or the vigor with which he approaches his subject matter—it makes for memorable moments. “Back It Up,” for example, finds him forgoing the silky smooth vocals for a gritty delivery that becomes more pronounced alongside PARTYNEXTDOOR’s own signature singing. On standout single “Balance,” he plays up his dialect in an airy falsetto that contrasts well with Daniel Daley’s sleekness and PnB Rock’s affected melodies.
Wood$ does an excellent job of creating a chilled-out vibe—the kind of music that could soundtrack any setting, whether it’s time to club or wind down. That’s a fine quality to have, but there’s a sense that something deeper is tucked beneath the layers of his brand of trappy R&B. He’s in great company with OVO and in a position to add his own color to their tapestry, to make a larger impact, but he seems to still be figuring out what his lane will be. Nevertheless, wherever Wood$ is going, the destination seems to be worthwhile, and Say Less is a set of breadcrumbs worth following.


On her new album, the Canadian artist collages 18th-century pipe organs and cavernous drone music. It is a dark encounter between the past and present, revealing the full range of her gifts as a composer.

Two Sisters

Sarah Davachi is a master at making otherworldly music that coalesces the past and present. When she was in her 20s, Davachi held a job at the National Music Centre in Canada, a gig that introduced her to tinkering with quaint old synths and harpsichords. On albums like 2020’s Cantus, Descant, Mellotrons swirled around 15th-century pipe organs, sculpting drawn-out vibrations. On 2021’s Antiphonals, vintage synths, organs, and string instruments weaved into meandering meditations. Davachi often draws inspiration from experimental icons like La Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros, and her selection of instruments gives the music a cavernous quality, as if it could fill an empty cathedral. On her new album Two Sisters, Davachi once again explores this resonant mix of old and new, but this time around, she takes on more sinister hues and foreboding melodies. It’s a gripping transformation, one that illustrates the full range of her gifts as a composer, and reveals a darker side of her era-blending music.
Though this is new territory for Davachi, the creepier, hollower atmospheres of Two Sisters feel fitting, especially because her music has always conjured a sense of interiority. Where her past works would soar, this album lurks, like intrusive thoughts bubbling up to the surface. The album’s uncanny sound could be due to one of her influences, Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 cult horror film Possession, a psychological thriller that inspired the music’s portentous spirit. Throughout Two Sisters, Davachi explores the quirks of alternate tunings, often using just intonation; she employs instruments like strings, carillon bells, and pipe organs—including one from the 18th century—to fuel the project's eerie undercurrent. She also leans into her earlier musical interests, shifting between drone music and Renaissance polyphony.
Even in the tracks that feel more contemporary, Davachi still finds a way to effectively tie her music back to the past. Songs like “Alas, Departing,” which is reminiscent of chant music by 12th century composers Hildegard von Bingen or Pérotin, feel the most medieval. “Vanity of Ages” lands like a standard drone piece, driven by a gently quivering organ that unfolds over almost 10 minutes. Yet the central instrument here is a historical pipe organ from 1742, known as a “tracker” organ; it has a valve that can be pushed in to adjust the amount of air entering the pipes, affecting the pitch and volume of its tones. In execution, its sound is luminous and full, colored with a bit of crunch from Davachi’s tunings.
Two Sisters’ vision feels its clearest when Davachi mixes sounds from each era together, rather than focusing solely on the music’s mechanics. “Icon Studies I” and “Icon Studies II,” both climactic moments on this album, exemplify this cross-pollination by pairing radiant string instruments that rise and fall with hymnal resonance. These tracks tremble like drone music, yet evoke a sense of nostalgia, blending sleek and grainy textures. Here, Davachi builds a bridge between generations, illustrating how well both styles fit together, despite the centuries that separate them.
Davachi’s music is often known for its solemnity, as though it is designed for moments of great solitude. Two Sisters is certainly all of those things, but instead of exploring the comfort of alone time, it presents us with moments of disquiet and uncertainty, reflecting darkness and warmth in equal measure. “O World and the Clear Song” particularly hangs in this balance, radiating in soft waves that are gradually swallowed by jangling bells. Davachi has long shown us that she can write music that celebrates the joy of quietude—now, she shows us she can embrace the fear of it, too.


Despite outward appearances, this is the new covers record from indie rock legends Yo La Tengo.

Fuckbook

Though the youthful exuberance that carried their Condo Fucks City Rockers EP and high water mark Straight Outta Connecticut to modern-classic status during their mid-1990s heyday is now noticeably muted, Fuckbook, the latest LP from New London, Conn., trio the Condo Fucks is nevertheless the veteran band's pinnacle... Oh, what the hell am I on about. Fuckbook is, despite outward appearances, the new record by Yo La Tengo. But the bait-and-switch goes a little deeper than pseudonym, itself a (pretty funny!) dozen-year-old joke from the booklet of the band's 1997 effort I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One. See, Fuckbook is a covers record, even more so than 1990's Fakebook (thus concludes the gag portion of our program).
Yo La Tengo touch on about a million things in their music with varying degrees of success; the Condo Fucks, however, only do the one: Fuckbook gathers 11 mostly garage-borne rockers from the likes of the Troggs, Slade, the Kinks, Richard Hell, and others and, from the sound of things, runs 'em all through a shredder. If you've heard a Yo La Tengo record, you've probably heard a Yo La Tengo cover, but rarely if ever like these; so often the band adds its fine-tuned tumble to whatever they interpret, and the results are often reverent and, with some notable exceptions, inessential. But even the least jagged edge of this Fuckbook might give you a papercut. The thing rips-- its closest sonic counterpart is the Stooges' Fun House. You ever think you'd see a sentence like that about a Yo La Tengo record?
This gnarly, live-in-a-room sound isn't unprecedented: You could easily cherrypick a dozen similarly scuzzy rockers from the past four or five Yo La Tengo records proper, albeit with a generally higher production standard. But Fuckbook is leaner than a typical Yo La Tengo record in every way: It halves its predecessor's length and triples its volume, resulting in the most cohesive thing they've released since Painful. But while a singularity of purpose hasn't always worked out for Yo La-- see the sleepy The Sounds of the Sounds of Science or the haphazard live-on-air covers set Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics-- Fuckbook's lazer focus makes it  the most immediately enjoyable, endlessly replayable entry in their catalog in some time.
Though not all radio hits, these tunes are clearly familiar favorites to the band-- and, since no Yo La Tengo review would be complete without mentioning Ira's tenure as a rock critic, here's that part; to that end, the song selection's pretty impeccable, too. A false start marks the beginning of their opening take on the Small Faces' "Whatcha Gonna Do About It", and from there it's on; for the next 30 minutes and change, drums pound, guitars spill every which way, and a few voices you might recognize bleat out a tune or two you know by heart. Though they gleefully slop up every song here, quite a few stay close to their source material in tempo and timbre. For most bands, playing it that close to the hip would earn them a mark in the bad column, but even on the most reverent cover here-- the Georgia-sung "With a Girl Like You"-- they sound like they're having a blast, like something like this was just what they needed.
When they start to veer off the beaten path, Fuckbook really gets going. Their take on the Flamin' Groovies' "Dog Meat" actually manages to bring out the surfy central riff even further to the forefront, and James McNew's vocals throughout the disc-- and on their closing cover of Slade's "Gudbuy T'Jane" especially-- are a perfect fit with the material. Ira, a supremely underrated guitarist, gets his best showcase in forever here, and Georgia's as rock solid as ever behind the kit. She and Ira still aren't the most natural singers for this particular stripe of rock'n'roll, but their willingness to go for it adds a lot of Fuckbook's appeal. And, frankly, because the whole thing's so out of character, a lot of the charm of these somewhat unlikely lo-fi heroes-- who, even with Times New Viking, Fucked Up, and Sonic Youth as labelmates might be the single skronkiest band current signed to Matador-- lies in the fact that they just up and did this thing without provocation, and it worked. Sure, it's a covers record and a fairly unambitious one at that, unless "being confusing" and "being loud" are ambitions. And maybe for Yo La Tengo, they oughta be; as much as I'm looking forward to the next one from Ira, Georgia, and James proper, it's gonna have to work awfully hard to match the effortless blast that is Fuckbook.


A pair of Brock Van Wey tracks, plus new ones from DJ Koze and Dettinger highlight the latest version of Kompakt's annual ambient series.

Pop Ambient 2010

One decade in, Kompakt's Pop Ambient series can stand tall next to its brother-in-arms Total series as a documentation of the style and form of a singular label. Plenty has changed in 10 years, though, and Kompakt's totem franchises now seem like matters of simple upkeep rather than label highlights or genre events. Kompakt's two major releases in 2009, the Field's Yesterday & Today and Matias Aguayo's Ay Ay Ay, both saw attention from more than dedicated beatheads, while PA09 featured more tracks than ever from outside the label's roster. Perhaps appropriately, there is a chore-like throb to PA10, with many series standbys swapping back in and few draws for the merely curious.
The Pop Ambient series is a little like living in a small town, such that the standards for big news are radically altered. Here's your PA10 headline: 2009's breakout experimental composer, Brock Van Wey, appears twice as bvdub, serving up an EP's worth (21+ minutes) of new music. Other not-as-frequent contributors to the series include DJ Koze (a Total regular) and the rare new production from Dettinger.
If there's a sonic constant this year, it's slowly revolving peals of sound: guitars, pianos, and horns set to slowly lap against background tones. There is an attractive industriousness to Jürgen Paape's "864M", while Koze's "Bodenweich" pairs padded piano chords against slurring electronics. Bvdub impresses twice, first with the haunted vocal patches of "Lest You Forget" and, moreso, with the 17-minute "Will You Know Where to Find Me", which beautifully splices a choral sample into sheets of diva-noise, easily competing with the best of 2009's White Clouds Drift On and On.
Next to bvdub's material, however, much of PA10 seems overly simple. Dettinger's "Therefore" features a two-second rhythmic shard looped for more than five minutes of wearying homogeneity. Marsen Jules' album-opening "The Sound of One Lip Kissing" features huge reverberating pianos that clang and batter to distraction. Old hands the Orb turn in the sleepy "Glen Coe", which wavers and reflects dully. Andrew Thomas and Mikkel Metal, two frequent PA contributors, each offer a track of harmless sound-sculpting.
PA10 arrives as Total 10 did last year: without fanfare or notice celebrating a decade of studious, mostly worthwhile compiling (one could reasonably argue that two regular label-comps per year is celebration enough). Instead, we get another workmanlike volume, one less distinguished and notable than its predecessors. Next year's model will almost surely arrive, just as regular and with as little fanfare; here's hoping it better reflects Kompakt's still considerable import.


Marching Church used to be the solo effort of Iceage frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, but now he has incorporated a backing band and scaled up the melodrama.

Telling It Like It Is

All the world’s a stage to Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, Iceage frontman and Marching Church mastermind. The Dane was sporting a death mask when we first met him in the early ’10s—a grungy Hamlet, flailing and wailing beneath the house lights. Championed by Matador, his band ascended, and in time, those tragic poses became more polished, less garish—and on 2014’s ambitious Plowing Into the Field of Love, downright romantic.
Rønnenfelt attempted to continue Iceage’s momentum after their last album, but his writing failed to open up a clear map for the band’s next steps. Naturally, the musician wrung out his brainstorms into the new Marching Church album instead. This time around, the project’s no longer a solo effort: Rønnenfelt’s formally incorporated his backing band from This World Is Not Enough–a formidable crew featuring members of Lower, Hand of Dust, and others—and his Iceage bandmate Johan S. Weith into the group writ large. Such moves beg the question of overarching intentions, of where Iceage ends and Marching Church begins; despite the confessional undertones of its title, Telling It Like It Is offers little in the way of demarcation–but boy, is there drama.
Last year, the Dane visualized his Marching Church as one man’s luxuriant fantasy, plucked from the pages of Dorian Gray (“What I pictured was me in a comfortable armchair, adorned in a golden robe, leading a band while a girl kept pouring me champagne”). This decadence—manifested in moaned tantrums, eye-rolling Swans worship, and directionless, woe-is-me racket—torpedoed This World Is Not Enough, rendering it a slog. Thankfully, Marching Church’s sophomore effort scales back the melodrama and ramps up the discipline: Rønnenfelt and company are focused on verses and choruses and dynamics, rather than self-indulgent noodling—and in the case of this album, a little bit goes a long way.
The delirious “Lion’s Den” opens with a far-off subterranean rumble—Kristian Emdal’s loping bass encircles a skittering piano line, while the forlorn melodica squeals–before a brittle, clanging backbeat surfaces, kicking off the hypnotic death march over which Rønnenfelt presides, eyes glinting, lips curled. After he’s lulled us into complacency with an otherworldly falsetto, the chorus hits, his voice deepens into his usual bloodthirsty moan, and dread sets in. “In the lion’s den,” he taunts, as if smelling our fear through the speakers, “They still bite after you/They still chase after you/Come on in.” Is Rønnenfelt offering an escape from the beasts’ assault, or is he just another big cat  in the big city, peering from behind his disguise?
The beauty’s in the liminality: not just on “Lion’s Den,” but in the album’s broader creative approach, which, however formalistically grounded, seeks to blur the lines between human passion and studio precision through copious overdubbing. “We wanted it to sound like a studio and the instruments, as if the studio became a member of the band,” he told CLRVYNT, “We didn't want it to sound like a realistic live band playing.” Indeed, the album’s inherent connections with the uncanny valley, its inquiries into where the band ends and the cavernous surroundings begin, are more effective dramatic vessels than any of Rønnenfelt’s ham-fisted imagery. It’s hard not to stifle a chuckle at his operatic bellows regarding the act of being “fist-fucked by destiny,” or at the blistering chorus on “Heart of Life,” wherein the Dane offers a compelling impression of Nick Cave after a few too many cocktails—“At the heart of life, shoo-gahh!.” On the other hand, the record's overarching dynamics—the existential tug-of-war between the band’s hypnotic krautrock attack, Rønnenfelt’s vengeful yowls, and the studio’s limitless expanses on the glam-but-glum “2016” and the country-tinged “Calenture” (familiar and yet ever-so-off, like a trip to Westworld)–suggest that the musician’s at least partially aware of his own absurdity, and perhaps, that he’s learning how to weaponize it.


On his debut mixtape, the Brooklyn drill rapper performs with hungry urgency, as if prosperity is around the corner for everyone except him.

Bizzy Banks: GMTO, Vol. 1 (Get Money Take Over)

GMTO, Vol. 1 (Get Money Take Over)

Brooklyn drill rapper Bizzy Banks comes from a Trinidadian-American family in East New York, a prideful neighborhood at the outskirts of the borough. A short drive or train ride from East New York and things quickly change, as money gets pumped into Brooklyn, but the low-income areas remain the same. It’s like living behind a glass wall in your own hometown, with wealth and good fortune shoved in your face but no way to access it. In the best Brooklyn drill music, you can feel that tension in the rappers’ voices. Why shouldn’t they be able to have nice things and live good, too? It’s right there. And if, nobody is going to help them, they’ll figure it out, by any means necessary.
Since his 2019 breakout single “Don’t Start,” the 21-year-old Bizzy Banks has been capturing this inner battle. Days spent getting fly and tipsy and scoring quick cash will hopefully make up for the violence, trauma, and struggle that haunts him. On his debut project GMTO Vol. 1, he never outright comments on a changing Brooklyn, but you feel it. “Look, serving these fiends for what?/So I can have J’s when I step in the club,” he says on “Top 5,” maybe the best song of his young career. Earlier on the track he raps, “I was raised by the block/I was nine when my father got knocked/I was twelve when my brother got knocked/I was thirteen when I let off that shot,” and it feels like he’s trapped in a world where prosperity is around the corner for everyone except him. This tone is the mixtape’s through line. On “Heartfroze,” weak crooning doesn’t take away from heavy reflections on the paranoia and the pressure he feels on a day-t0-day basis.
Similar to Pop Smoke, the underlying weight of Bizzy Banks’ music doesn’t stop the party. On “Extra Sturdy,” an upbeat Bizzy glides over a beat from A Lau—a Harry Fraud collaborator who has helped diversify the sound of Brooklyn drill production—that sounds like you’re stuck in a funhouse at the circus. Then, there’s “Neo,” where, dated The Matrix references aside, Bizzy’s sharp flow lands somewhere between the rapid-fire G Herbo delivery he grew up on and the stop-start swagger of some of Brooklyn drill’s signature hits (see: “Big Drip”). And, “Cool Off” is ready to ring off at the end-of-the-summer backyard parties throughout New York; he balances a high-intensity verse with a calm and catchy hook.
Though, Bizzy Banks runs into the same problems nearly every Brooklyn drill rapper—except Pop—has faced on their debut mixtapes. Despite the fact that he has one of the better ears in the subgenre for production, there are still some duds: “Quarantine Freestyle” and “Quarantine Freestyle, Pt. 2,” feature the type of routine drill production that can be found any day on the Raps and Hustles YouTube page. Then, he gets poisoned by the common, misguided belief that drill rappers have to learn how to make music other than drill. Which leads to “Hold You,” an unbearable attempt at a J.I the Prince of NY-type club record, and “Beautiful,” a bizarre interpolation of Jesse McCartney’s “Beautiful Soul” and one of 2020’s most unsettling love songs.
But the peaks of GMTO Vol. 1 are high enough to overlook the parts that don’t work. On, “Don’t Start Pt. 2,” the sequel to his breakout song, Bizzy raps empathically “These niggas must think it’s really just music,” feelings he’s been holding in for years are being poured into a single verse. It’s this urgency that unites all the drill scenes, from Chicago to the UK to Brooklyn. Bizzy Banks is going to have all of the fun of a 21-year-old, even as the system works against him.

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The latest from the indie rock rapscallion is an often pretty, occasionally frustrating record that was recorded quickly, but still sounds labored over.

Here Comes the Cowboy

In 2015, Mac DeMarco was living in Far Rockaway in the shadow of JFK airport. He hadn’t yet properly crossed over to the mainstream, but in the indie world in which he operated, he’d become something of a slacker icon. He was hanging out with Tyler, the Creator, playing shows to legions of young folks who saw something in him that they could relate to. The mini-album he recorded at home in Rockaway, Another One, was unremarkable if pleasant. DeMarco doubled down on what he’d become known for: syrupy songs about love that were dazed and detached over wobbly guitar licks that sounded like he was going to fall asleep while playing them. There wasn’t much to grab on to. But it was also the point in his career where it became undeniably clear that DeMarco was on to something. At the end of the album, he gave out his address and invited listeners to drop by to hang out. A lot of them actually showed up.
Since then, DeMarco has moved to Los Angeles, and released a spare and unexpectedly deep album called This Old Dog, which helped solidify his spot as indie’s goofball leading man. His new album follows closely in spirit to the endearing and open-hearted of This Old Dog. DeMarco says he named the album Here Comes the Cowboy because he liked using the word “cowboy” as a nickname or term of endearment, which, like many things in the Mac DeMarco universe, is half inside joke, half inadvertent trendsetting. Here Comes the Cowboy is an often pretty, occasionally frustrating record that was recorded quickly, but still sounds labored over. His music evolves in inches: he iterates on the same sound but tweaks it subtly with every release. Lyrics become more direct. Ideas become simplified. The crustiness of his early songs is mostly gone here.
Here Comes the Cowboy arrives at a time when there are more eyes trained on DeMarco than ever before. He’s now famous enough that a cult of personality has developed around him. He will always be the goofy guy with the Alfred E. Neuman smile, whether he’s singing about his relationship with his dad, or writing weirdly moving odes to cigarettes. DeMarco is approachable and never too serious, which means that there’s sort of two Mac DeMarcos: the everyman who is down to drink some tallboys, and the popular artist who makes naive music that sounds unsullied by the unfortunate intrusiveness of the real world.
The album has some genuinely great moments: “Nobody” is gorgeous, lush, and laconic—a slow-burning and burned-out take on a classic California stoner jam. Similarly, “All of Our Yesterdays” is a fluid update of Mac DeMarco’s signature sound: a gentle melancholy so deeply embedded in the track that it takes a few listens to notice that it’s there at all. His music might sound largely the same, but even in DeMarco’s world, time still passes, life continues, and we all fight against getting older, harder, and more cynical.
Frustratingly, what should be appealing about the album—the breeziness and low-stakes, anything-goes atmosphere—is also what makes it impossible to latch onto the bulk of the songs. On “Preoccupied,” DeMarco sounds literally preoccupied. You can virtually hear him staring out the window while he sings his way through half-formed thoughts about opening your mind and filling it with bullshit. The best part is the birds chirping in the background—they give some texture to the oddly sterile world DeMarco has constructed. Stripped down tracks like “K” are fine enough, but never really seem to go anywhere, mainly because they lack the ramshackle aw shucks-ness of his best songs. You’ll find yourself wishing for something a bit more fun, or at least something with a bit more verve to it.
So what to make of “Choo Choo”? The watered-down funk track features an actual train whistle backing up DeMarco’s falsetto refrain of, you guessed it, “Choo Choo.” Is this song a joke? Sure, probably. A song for children? There’s been better. DeMarco is a vocal fan of Modern Lovers’ Jonathan Richman, who found the sweet spot between humor and a kind of knowing sadness. DeMarco can also do this well. On stage, he’s all pranks and jokes; on record he’s largely attempting to get at the core of universal human ideas. “Choo Choo” is neither funny nor insightful. In a different era, it’d be a whimsical stop on the way to the next song. Now, it just feels like a waste of time.
Here Comes the Cowboy doesn’t have any of the quirkiness or heartbreaking details of 2, or the airtight jams of Salad Days, or the refinement of This Old Dog. It sounds nice, but for a lot of its runtime, it also sounds like DeMarco is exhausted, like he’s ready to move on and try something new but is trapped in a creative holding pattern. It’s possible that he’s aware of this himself. On “Little Dogs March” he sings “hope you had your fun...all those days are over now.” Sounds about right.


Nine Inch Nails’ veteran film composers provide a techno-driven score to Luca Guadagnino’s love-triangle tennis dramedy, while Boys Noize remixes it into a sleek, pumping megamix.

Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: Challengers (Original Score)

Challengers (Original Score)

At a recent premiere of Challengers, journalists stopped Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on the red carpet to ask them about the score, their latest in a stellar run that began in 2010 with The Social Network, and which has bagged them two Academy Awards so far. “We’re used to the world of being in a band where we can control everything and we’re the bosses,” Reznor said. “Working in film, it’s interesting and it’s fun because we’re not the boss, we’re working in collaboration and in partnership with the director.”
Reznor said this coyly, as if the theme of control—having it, wanting it, giving it up—hasn’t been central to his art for decades. Before Ross came on board, Nine Inch Nails was Reznor’s solo act dressed up as a band. He was notoriously detail-oriented, insisting on total creative oversight of things the label would usually handle, like artwork and music videos. Dominance and servitude have been a recurring theme in Nine Inch Nails’ lyrics since “Head Like a Hole,” the first track of their first album.
That one was written when Reznor was broke, in his early twenties, and working as a janitor in a recording studio so he could make his own demos after hours. Some 30 years later, things are different. Reznor is a cult hero, an industry darling, and just a Tony away from an EGOT. Somehow, the man whose most famous lyric is “I wanna fuck you like an animal” ended up scoring a film for Disney—and winning an Oscar for it. If the first act of Reznor’s career was defined by him being the boss, the second has shown him either sharing creative agency or letting others take the lead.
Appropriately, Ross and Reznor’s latest score is for a film largely about control and being controlled. Challengers is directed by Luca Guadagnino, the master of slow-boil eroticism who gave us Call Me By Your Name and Bones and All (also scored by Ross and Reznor). Zendaya plays Tashi Duncan, a tennis star turned coach who spends the movie’s decade-plus storyline as a puppet master to her two suitors, besties turned rivals Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). After luring them into a three-way kiss in the hotel room scene you see in the trailer, she leans back and watches with a smirk as they make out with each other, then tells them she’ll give her number to whoever wins the next day’s tournament. She dates Zweig, but it fizzles when he balks at the idea of letting her guide his career. Donaldson is a more willing subject. She becomes his coach after an injury ends her own tennis career, and they end up married with a kid and appearing together in Aston Martin ads, a tennis power couple with her at the helm. The story’s climax and central storyline revolves around a match between Zweig and Donaldson that she’s slyly choreographed, and in which she’s dangled herself as the prize—stakes that suit her only by guaranteeing a bit of really, really good tennis.
Challengers is invariably described as hot, sexy, steamy, etc., but there is almost no actual sex in it. The erotic charge comes mostly from Zendaya’s character and the power she has over these two men, on and off the tennis court. The movie’s tagline could have come straight from “Head Like a Hole”: “Bow down before the one you serve.”
Like Donaldson, Reznor and Ross thrive by following instructions, giving us something Reznor acknowledges he probably wouldn’t have thought to do. “Luca said, ‘What if all the music was driving, thumping techno, like a heartbeat that makes the movie fun?’” he recalled. “I don’t know that we would have landed on that on our own.” True to Guadagnino’s brief, Challengers (Original Score) offers a smorgasbord of thumping club sounds, from electroclash (“Yeah x10”) to synth-pop to fast and functional techno. Each one feels like a dutiful genre exercise, but with a sonic signature that that is unmistakably Reznor and Ross’, especially in the way instruments like piano and guitar gel so elegantly with synths and drum machines.
The music works brilliantly in the film, driving the action as much as it follows it, less a backdrop than a bold counterpoint to what’s on screen. Take, for instance, the moment when kick drums start pounding during a dorm-room argument. Or, more generally, the idea of rave music as the soundtrack to a tennis dramedy, a pairing that works so well you probably wouldn’t notice how counterintuitive it actually is. Much like their music for The Social Network, Ross and Reznor’s score opens dimensions to the film that might not have been visible otherwise. Almost every review of Challengers has praised the score specifically—even, in the case of the BBC, when they’re panning the film itself.
Ross and Reznor’s past soundtracks, however inspired, have never quite worked as albums outside the context of their respective films. The music on Challengers stands up on its own better than any music from their other scores, but the record as a whole still has a lumpiness that's symptomatic of the format, with many tracks clocking in at less than three minutes and some appearing and reappearing in multiple versions. Evidently wise to this concern, Ross and Reznor hired the German DJ and producer Boys Noize to create a supplementary mixed (and remixed) version of the OST—no mean feat given the dramatic range in tempos, but one he handles with flair, creating a tight half hour of party rockers, dusted with samples of rackets thwacking and sneakers squeaking on clay. Boys Noize’s mix weaves it all together into a smooth, dynamic arc, and delivers a far more interesting version of “Compress / Repress,” lobbing in some gabber flourishes that shouldn’t work but absolutely do.
“Compress / Repress,” co-written with Guadagnino and sung by Reznor, is one instance where the shared artistic control gets confusing. Historically, Reznor has lent his voice to music that prized sincerity and authentic personal expression above all else. This song feels different: The lyrics flatly complement the themes of the film, and the production is a kind of straightforward synth-pop you’d never get from Nine Inch Nails. For this lifelong NIN fan, to learn the lyrics weren’t all Reznor’s was clarifying and, somehow, relieving; to see him doing another artist’s bidding is strangely humanizing. As a movie theme, it’s fine. As a Nine Inch Nails track, it would be a bit vanilla. Either way, at a screening this week in Berlin, it had a few audience members chair-dancing their way through the final credits.


After a prolific period of experimentation, Animal Collective return with an album that achieves a peaceful equilibrium between their immersive 3D soundscaping and innate melodic charms.

Time Skiffs

Animal Collective navigated their first decade as if lost in some surreal and splendorous dream. From 2000’s Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished to 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, the quartet functioned like a perpetually mutating organism, reshaping their sound and character not just album-to-album, but occasionally mid-sentence. But in response to Merriweather’s crossover success, they would spend much of the following decade acclimatizing to the waking world as a festival-ready force that had to concern itself with hitting the back rows. Their records became more over-the-top and in-your-face, and felt less like drifting through a dream than listening to someone manically reenact theirs. Through a combination of solo projects, familial obligations, and transatlantic living, the band that once used the stage as their sandbox was confined to studio-scheduled creativity: Their 2016 album, Painting With, was the first Animal Collective album that didn’t get workshopped in a live setting before being committed to tape.
But since then, Animal Collective have been overcompensating for those limitations in the most wonderful of ways. Even when you factor in pandemic shutdowns, the past half-decade has been one of the most prolific stretches of this group’s career, yielding field-recording experiments, audiovisual projects, and soundtracks that have rekindled their improvisatory impulses. And, Sung Tongs anniversary tour notwithstanding, their live performances once again became communal woodshedding experiences. Beginning with a mini-residency at New Orleans’ Music Box Village in 2018, Animal Collective previewed a bounty of new material, some of which, naturally, has changed quite radically over the years. Following much YouTubed documentation, a handful of extended, more abstract tracks officially surfaced on 2020’s Bridge to Quiet EP. Time Skiffs is the long-awaited climax to this period of prodigious exploration—an album that achieves a peaceful equilibrium between Animal Collective’s immersive 3D soundscaping and innate melodic charms. Call it an Animal Corrective.
With its inviting ambiance, unhurried vibe, and ebullient group harmonies, Time Skiffs readily conjures warm memories of AnCo’s late-2000s halcyon days. But the album possesses a personality and methodology all its own. Over the years, Animal Collective’s free-flowing aesthetic, lovey-dovey sentiments, and fondness for tie-dye have garnered any number of Grateful Dead comparisons, but this is the first record where they sound like an actual jam band. While Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear) has traditionally used his drum kit to heighten the clamor of the group’s most chaotic moments, here, he plays the steady timekeeper governed by a dubby discipline. The album’s two opening tracks, “Dragon Slayer” and “Car Keys,” are presented as discrete songs, but were performed live last year as a single continuous piece, like interlocking units in the same space-age bachelor-pad complex.
That fluidity extends to the band’s treatment of voices, which has typically emphasized the considerable contrast and ping-ponging interplay between Dave “Avey Tare” Portner’s crazed, contorted exhortations and Panda Bear’s beacon-of-light meditations. Time Skiffs presents a more unified front, thanks in large part to the mediating presence of guitarist and keyboardist Josh Dibb, aka Deakin, the wild-card member who’s drifted in and out of the picture over the past 20 years and who typically plays a non-vocal supporting role alongside synth wizard Brian “Geologist” Weitz. But with Lennox living in Portugal and focused on completing Panda Bear’s 2019 release Buoys, Dibb stepped up to play Portner’s foil at those Music Box showcases. Toward the end of the set, Dibb led a chant that eventually got absorbed into Time Skiffs’ majestic lead single, “Prester John,” now a six-minute dubwise odyssey that’s guided through the fog by Dibb and Lennox’s luminous harmonies, before riding into the sun on an uncharacteristically funky drum break that evokes Steven Drozd’s in-the-pocket grooves for the Flaming Lips. Dibb’s Music Box contributions also included an ambient ballad (working title: “DownDownDownDown”) that’s reborn as Time Skiffs’ gorgeous comedown closer “Royal and Desire,” where the group wraps his melancholic melody in loungey exotica that yields the most downright elegant piece of music Animal Collective has ever produced.
As much as Time Skiffs is a celebration of Animal Collective’s finely tuned musical telepathy and brotherly bonhomie, the group is also well aware they’re releasing it into a turbulent world where people need more than always-have-a-good-time platitudes to make it through another day. The eco-conscious ideologies and existential despair embedded in their stopgap Meeting of the Waters and Tangerine Reef projects seep into the lyrics here: While the aforementioned “Car Keys” begins as a game of hot potato between Dibb and Weitz’s wiggiest synth settings and an overexcited vibraphone, it leads to Lennox’s helpless cries of “How are we doing now?” and follows them up with an even more disillusioned query: “How we gonna know?” But in true Animal Collective fashion, the line between anxiety and ecstasy is often smudged: They couch their most dire prognostications in “Strung With Everything,” a carnivalesque Beach Boys reverie that peaks with the sort of call-and-response breakdown you’d hear in a romantic early rock’n’roll single—though, in this case, the view from Lookout Point has gotten a lot bleaker: “Let’s say tonight, you and me,” Portner excitedly sings, “we’ll watch the sky fall into pieces!”
Time Skiffs achieves its most masterful balancing act between the playful and profound in the seven-minute centerpiece “Cherokee,” a song that began popping up in setlists back in 2019 and immediately felt like a new AnCo classic. That title may raise an eyebrow coming from a band that recently made a point of renaming their 2003 album Here Comes the Indian to a less culturally flippant title, but it’s not a stretch to think the two are somehow related, as “Cherokee” speaks to the process of developing a greater conscientiousness toward your behaviors and surroundings. Inspired by drives around Portner’s home turf near Asheville, North Carolina, the song functions as both surrealist personal travelogue and a cogent commentary on the peculiarities of modern American life, which, for him, include being mistaken for a foreigner by a gas-station employee, pondering the fate of empty mailboxes in a world of smartphones, and, yes, riding around in a Jeep-brand vehicle that appropriates the name of the very Indigenous people whose ancestral land he now inhabits.
“I’ve been driving for a long while/Spent some time in a Cherokee/Learning things,” Portner sings, delivering those last two simple words with a humbled sense of awe. For all their wild-eyed abandon, Animal Collective records have always encouraged us to appreciate and savor the most fundamental yet easily neglected aspects of life—friendships, family, nature, history. Two decades into their journey, that commitment to self-improvement, planetary care, and mutual respect remains their animating force. And if this nightmare of a world gets in the way of pursuing those ideals, consider Time Skiffs an invitation to keep living the dream.

Buy: Rough Trade


The second album from the Philadelphia noise-pop band comes with some great new sounds, but dials down some of the thrill and fervor that made their debut so exceptional.

Visitor

Even the most adorable noise pop has a lightning-spark fury: It has to if you want to justify the tempo. Maybe that insistence is what inspires the instant devotion to bands like No Age, the Go! Team, Sleigh Bells, bands that burn hot-white if only for a short amount of time. With Empath’s 2019 debut, Active Listening: Night on Earth, the Philadelphia-based quartet set off a new firework of lo-fi sweetness, one that kept close to its punk roots. Active Listening bolstered its opaque mixing and nocturnal ambiance with an impossibly propulsive sound. The band’s second album, Visitor, still embodies Empath’s unique qualities—cute but not childlike, dreamy but not drowsy, candied but not overindulgent—but drifts into a more sedate, syncopated direction, and sheds some of the energy that made the debut so exceptional.
Visitor holds fast to Empath’s off-beat idiosyncrasy. Samples range from Minecraft sounds to Jamiroquai presets; the music video for lead single “Diamond Eyelids” features frontwoman Catherine Elicson graphically birthing puppets of her own bandmates. But the record is centered by the confusing decision to make their sound slower, clearer, and less punk, as if they’ve identified the most crucial foundations of noise pop and set out to specifically undermine them. The journey from wall-of-sound 2016 EP Crystal Reality to today feels like a weighted swan dive into rote clarity. Tracks like “Genius of Evil” merely go through the motions of energized indie pop, and both “Elvis Comeback Special” and “80s” meander sideways with little inspiration. There’s still an unguarded thrill there, but it’s like someone’s switched out a microscope lens that renders Empath more visible: we’re brought into greater clarity, but a crucially clouded enigma is gone.
At the same time, that decision renders Elicson more audible. Her plaintive near-slurring is more immediately intelligible, which works to the band’s benefit. She lilts the entirety of “Genius of Evil” in one accusatory run-on sentence; the conviction in “Paradise” tumbles out of her mouth with the same youthful exigency as the monologue in Drop Nineteens’ “Kick the Tragedy.” Notably, “Passing Stranger” reads like a sequel to 2019’s “Hanging Out of Cars,” as if the latter’s protagonist has grown in real time, and looks back with unclouded eyes. Where the intertwining of death and desire was declared just “another weekend,” the reality of that finality now leads to this scene: “You cried/Until your knees were weak/You would never tell and no one could ever see.”
While in the past Empath songs seemed to exist in the moment, tracking Elicson’s quick-tempered thought processes and emergent desires, she now looks back on external, location-specific memories—low-hanging clouds in New Mexico, escaping on buses in Chicago, the warmth of weeks spent in a bedroom. These unpeopled places evoke the empty, liminal space memorialized by the album’s cover, and the suggestive absence of its titular visitor. In some form, Empath retains that romanticism: quick-tempered singles “Born 100 Times” and “Diamond Eyelids” still feel exhilarating and breathtaking. But for an album where most tracks don’t extend past three minutes, and from a band with such a breakneck spirit, Visitor feels a little too languid.

Buy: Rough Trade


UK band continues to make high-stakes music that excels best when acknowledging its dance-rock present rather than its emotive past.

Pala

There's a song on Friendly Fires' eponymous 2008 debut that's called "Jump in the Pool". The lyrical concerns are pretty straightforward (hint: jumping and pools are involved), but what makes it one of the LP's standouts is how its chorus takes the titular advice and just goes for it, changing from peppy polyrhythms to fast, charging lushness in a matter of seconds. It's a melodic shift that's as over-the-top as it is impressively delivered-- but that's kind of the point. Friendly Fires was best when playing to the rafters with romantic electro-gaze textures ("Skeleton Boy") and big, cheesy gestures ("Paris"). They're sensualists who excel under a lack of restraint.
Wisely, the band's sophomore effort, Pala, wastes no time submerging itself into its own indulgent environment. The multi-layered neon pop of album opener "Live Those Days Tonight" only hints at the LP's sonic ambition, as the band's immense co-production with buzz-bin consigliere Paul Epworth lends extra depth to its colorful sonic detail. There's been three years between Friendly Fires and this thing, and they've clearly spent it well by jewelling every last detail with careful precision (the B-movie blast that spools off "Blue Cassette"'s final reel, "Helpless"' backseat chatter and Boards of Canada keyboards).
To an extent, Pala also clears these guys' name on the "rockist dance-dilettante" list. From the galloping UK funky rhythm in "Chimes" to the filtered, bleeping funk of "Hurting", there's an array of styles tried on and, for the most part, successfully worn. Those successes speak as much to the band's listening habits as they do to a sense of maximalist adventurousness.
However, all the signifiers in the world don't change the fact that Friendly Fires are a rock band first-- and a particularly emotive one, at that. The band's three members got their start as teenagers in the never-known vocal-less "post-hardcore" (read: emo) outfit First Day Back. Anyone who's ever had a taste for that stuff knows that once it enters your blood, it tends to stay there, and Pala's high-stakes framework reflects that. Hearts are set on fire regularly (no, not like that), while impassioned pleas "Show Me Lights" and "Pull Me Back to Earth" are exactly as sweeping as you'd expect. It's when the band gets too entrenched in maudlin, dark-hued dramatizing (the too-slow-burn of the title track, "Chimes"' bald-faced falsetto foolery) that Pala's deep-sea diving feels similar to drowning.
Not to worry, though-- they have a sense of humor too, as "Hawaiian Air" proves. As the title suggests, frontman Ed Macfarlane's lyrical concerns focus on a trip to, you guessed it, Hawaii-- only, he spends the entire song detailing his escapades on the flight there ("watching a film with a talking dog," "skipping the meal for a G&T"), barely able to breathe in that tropical oxygen. It's a simple-pleasures zoom-in that belies the album's candy-painted sweep, a sneaky yet sentimental grin amidst all the pleading and sincerity-- 'cause this stuff is supposed to be fun, right?


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a landmark disco and pop album, a dazzling and fabulous collaboration between Chic and Diana Ross.

Diana

In the summer of 1979, Chic were simultaneously a colossal success and on the precipice of becoming a footnote in music history. Guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards put out three slinky, disco-funk albums in as many years with platinum records like “Le Freak” and “Good Times” when clouds of smoke billowed out of Comiskey Park in Chicago, where their records and so many others were being destroyed by mostly white rock fanatics. The disco backlash hit full stride, dampening both Chic’s mood and sales and curbing the duo’s momentum as it reached an apex.
Rodgers wasn’t exactly surprised by his group’s seeming downfall. In fact, owing to the group’s sudden, triple-platinum success, he thought it was all but preordained to happen at some point. Always the chameleons, he and Edwards adjusted to the times by making new wave, dance, sometimes even straightforward rock. Yet as the duo segued into production work, crafting the everlasting, celebratory 1979 album We Are Family for labelmates Sister Sledge, Rodgers held on to three childhood idols on his bucket list he still wanted to work with: Barbra Streisand, Mick Jagger, and one Diana Ross. Within a year, he would be writing and producing for one of them, as though with enough confidence—and perhaps a fair amount of cocaine—he could bend the law of attraction at whim.
The chance to work with Diana Ross didn’t come without its own professional risk. By the time diana, their sterling pop-disco collaboration, arrived in the spring of 1980, the legendary Supremes singer hadn’t had a Top 10 hit in four years. The new album would be Ross’ 11th LP, following 1979’s The Boss, a peppy disco record produced by husband-and-wife duo Ashford & Simpson that performed decently on the charts but couldn’t touch the crossover success of her biggest solo hits like 1973’s power ballad “Touch Me in the Morning” and 1976’s swooning “Love Hangover.” Now, on the other side of a divorce from talent manager Bob Ellis and embarking on a fledgling acting career, Ross was determined to find a fresh sound with which to reintroduce herself.
Ross had recently moved with her three children into an apartment in Manhattan to film The Wiz. She grew beguiled by New York’s seductive commotion, whether watching revelers from a private balcony at Studio 54 or ensconced in the darkness of a movie theater by herself. “This was to be my initiation into taking responsibility for myself,” she wrote of the move to the city in her 1993 memoir, Secrets of a Sparrow. Ross had good reason for reclaiming a lost sense of authority: Her most recent film, Mahogany, had been critically panned, and she often felt at the mercy of Motown head Berry Gordy when it came to her music. Ross had already lived many musical lives—auditioning for Gordy and joining the Supremes as a teenager, then reinventing herself twice through her dual solo and film careers. But as the ’80s loomed, she was dangerously close to appearing old-fashioned.
Suzanne de Passe, Motown brass and Gordy’s right hand, had come to the same realization. Having already revitalized Ross’ career in 1972 with the Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues (for which de Passe became the first Black woman to receive a screenwriting nomination at the Oscars), she was now intent on doing the same for the diva’s musical career. Chic’s crossover appeal and spare, in-the-pocket grooves neatly fit the bill; though they hadn’t met, de Passe used to run in the same circles as the band in the late 1960s, when she booked acts for Midtown nightclub the Cheetah. She brought Ross to one of Chic’s shows in Santa Monica, where Rodgers and Edwards forged a friendship with the star backstage even as they were both clearly bowled over by her presence. “There was something in the air that bonded us,” Rodgers recalled in his 2011 memoir, Le Freak. “She was almost like a sister.”
Chic approached Ross’ new album with the meticulous ambition of a passion project. Determined not to misrepresent her, Rodgers and Edwards met with Ross in her apartment and asked questions about her life, as though conducting interviews for a documentary. Song ideas bloomed out of these free-flowing conversations: Ross told them she wanted to turn her career upside down going forward (see: “Upside Down”). She had left behind the pain of her divorce and was ready to start anew (see: “Have Fun (Again)”). Even the baby grand sitting in her apartment became a premise (“My Old Piano”) as though each detail of Ross’ life were a symbol of something far greater and more emotional than at first glance.
The resulting vulnerability and craftsmanship Chic brought to diana remains its most enduring quality. The album coasts on simple, engaging rhythmic patterns and undeniable hooks, all given a glamorous lash lift by Ross’ petal-soft performance. They wrote polysyllabic lyrics and staccato chants to emphasize her distinctive enunciation, and introduced horns to round out the new sound with a pop-soul burnish. Through it all, Ross fully invests in the songs’ underlying connections to her life, while meeting Chic’s arrangements with exquisite restraint. “Money won’t be enough/When the going gets tough, it’s rough,” she sings on the strutting “Have Fun (Again),” her gossamer soprano dancing upward, “Try to cuddle with your business/And you’ll see that love is priceless.”
Inspiration for diana came from Rodgers’ tireless nightlife at the time, too. He wrote “I’m Coming Out,” the album’s jubilant, immortal centerpiece, after a night out at the Gilded Grape, a Hell’s Kitchen nightclub he deemed “the pinnacle of trendy sleaze.” While in the bathroom, he noticed a group of drag queens dressed as Ross on either side of him at the urinals—a manifestation of her authority among the gay community that he sought to honor in his own surreptitious way. Ross interpreted the song as an indication of eventually leaving Motown—she would sign to RCA for 1981’s Why Do Fools Fall in Love—but in truth it spoke plainly and openly to her entire queer fan base, a declaration of standing in your truth that cemented her status as an LGBTQ+ icon.
It’s ironic, then, that both “I’m Coming Out” and “Upside Down,” two of Ross’ most enduring songs, caused an irreparable rift in the album’s process. After Ross brought a rough mix of the album to the popular radio DJ Frankie Crocker, she came back to Rodgers and Edwards with a changed outlook. In the wake of Disco Demolition Night, Crocker thought Chic was set on ruining her career with this new set of disco pop (it didn’t help that he’d also pointed out the subtext of “I’m Coming Out,” assuming Ross was coming out on the record herself). Once Gordy also derided “Upside Down,” Motown demanded the demos back and ceased communication with the group, succinctly bringing a rude awakening to a dream collaboration.
They didn’t hear back until Rodgers and Edwards received a new mix of the album in the mail, reworked by Ross and Motown engineer Russ Terrana. The songs were shortened and radio-primed; Ross’ voice was more up-front in the mix and there were new vocal parts spliced together. After devoting themselves so completely to the project, all of their work had been Frankensteined into something slimmed down to appease as broad and commercial an audience as possible. Rodgers and Edwards even sought out an attorney to remove their name from the record in a last-ditch attempt to stand their ground.
Nonetheless, diana was released with the new Motown mix in May 1980 and remains Ross’ best-selling album to this day, lasting on the charts for 52 weeks. The album is a masterpiece of pop and dance music, even without Chic’s punchier mix (both versions of the record are available to cross-compare, released as a deluxe edition in 2003). “Upside Down” topped the pop and R&B charts by September, and “I’m Coming Out” reached No. 5, even after it was clocked as a gay anthem by critics as soon as it was released. That the song prevails today is testament to Rodgers’ canny songwriting and Ross’ infectiously joyous performance, carrying out the ecstatic message over an exacting guitar line and bellowing trombones.
Listening to the album provides endless pleasures, from the loungey deep cut “Now That You’re Gone” to the refined ballad “Friend to Friend,” written as a tribute to the close relationship between Ross and de Passe. Rodgers and Edwards understood how to bring the pop star into their elegant arrangements, where she infused them with her outsize personality. Ross practically transcends time on the buoyant floor-filler “Give Up”—you can picture her swaying and gyrating to the restless bassline in the studio, giving it life with each breathless chorus.
diana represents a union of two generations: Ross’ unfettered sophistication and Chic’s uptown disco-funk, stirred into an instantly enjoyable cocktail. “She represented the perfect blend of soul and style, everything we wanted Chic to be,” Rodgers said of the diva. Their resulting collaboration is still one of the band’s most memorable and all but guaranteed Chic’s long-standing career, a status ensured once Sugarhill Gang sampled “Good Times” for “Rapper’s Delight” and jump-started hip-hop. “I’m Coming Out,” too, was later sampled for a rap classic in 1997 with Biggie’s “Mo Money Mo Problems,” further proof of the album’s far-reaching alchemy.
Ross eventually returned to Motown and teamed up with Rodgers again on 1989’s Workin’ Overtime, but diana persists as their stone-cold classic. The album both set a new bar for her musical career and established a template for the dance and pop music of the next decade, and the next decade, and the next. diana stands out among its peers in the ’80s because it comes underpinned by the intimate bond she formed with both Chic and her audience, delivered with indefatigable grace. Today, Ross still reliably opens her live performances with “I’m Coming Out,” a timeless anthem that continues to resonate with precise, dazzling magic.

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