On her solo debut, the veteran songwriter turns from writing hits for Shawn Mendes and One Direction to establishing her own voice.

LillyAnna

In the mid-’00s, Teddy Geiger was a somewhat reluctant member of a group of artists that also included Jesse McCartney and Ryan Cabrera. Some came from boy bands, others from reality TV—Geiger got her start on a show searching for a “new Partridge family”—but their music was much the same: exceedingly soft pop-rock that seemed made less for arenas than rom-coms or the soapy likes of “Laguna Beach.” (The video for Geiger’s biggest hit, “For You I Will (Confidence),” starred a then-A-list Kristin Cavallari.) It wasn’t a particularly remarkable run, nor did Geiger like it much—“I didn’t connect to what was happening on radio with singer-songwriter stuff at the time,” she told Rolling Stone—and after a couple sporadic forays into acting, she retired to pursue songwriting more to her own taste. Some of those songs would end up recorded by the 2010s’ crop of Ryan Cabreras, like One Direction, 5 Seconds of Summer, and, most notably, Canadian singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes, whose biggest hits (“Stitches,” “Treat You Better”) are Geiger-penned. LillyAnna, her debut as teddy<3 (It looked “cute,” she told Rolling Stone) is her coming out, both in the literal sense (Geiger came out as transgender last fall) and figuratively, as a solo artist of her own making.
Teddy joins more and more of her peers who have been lured toward solo careers by the industry’s increasingly Darwinian royalty structure. Though singer-songwriters have won some victories lately in the battle to actually get paid, the “singer” part is still far more lucrative than “songwriter.” But songwriters looking to become lead artists face two pitfalls. The first is to treat solo albums as a sort of clearinghouse for rejected tracks. The other, counterintuitively, is to release an album full of would-be hits, the same finely wrought smashes they shop to superstars—except without the superstars. This rarely works out as well as they hope. No matter how undeniable the songs, they’re still haunted by the ghosts of other artists’ voices, when emerging artists need to establish their own.
LillyAnna, named after an online alter-ego of Geiger’s, was written in the early 2010s. As a result, the album exists completely outside ’00s pop trends, which is part of its charm. The sun-kissed pop-rock of “Under the Blue” sounds a lot sweeter in 2018 than 2005, as do the lilting melody and “Here Comes the Sun” lifts of “Life Goes On,” or the VH1 scuzz of the title track. (They also, strangely, sound a thousand times better than anything Mendes has ever recorded.) Though the album was written pre-transition, Geiger wrote it from a place of searching—a “kind of all clouded” mental space, she said on Beats 1 Radio—and the subtext is noticeable and lends the album gravitas missing from the “Laguna Beach” days. The lyrics of “Under the Blue” fall like a warm hug. Geiger spits the verses of “I Was in a Cult” out with contempt, then roars the chorus like stomping on their ashes.
As an introduction to Teddy<3, LillyAnna isn’t perfect. The album’s a bit ballad-heavy, and when it departs from formula it’s not for the better—as on the distorted, Jeff Bhasker-ish R&B of “Loser,” a concession to modern tastes that comes off as also-ran Kehlani or James Blake. Sometimes there’s still a sense of holding back. “Get Me High” and “Body and Soul” sit at the exact midpoint of the Strokes, Carina Round, and Brittany Howard, and Teddy’s fuzzed-out vocal is pure glee; they’re just produced a little tinny, particularly in the percussion. (Every so often, in “Body and Soul,” a bit of twinkling keys or guitar squeals will pop out of the arrangement, like beacons from some other, more dynamic song.) But it still sets a more cohesive mood than a lot of her peers, a point best illustrated by “8,” an instrumental interlude in the middle of the album. It begins pleasant and drifty, but toward the middle, the chords go dissonant and the arrangement’s interrupted by what sounds like fences creaking or metal clattering. A high, pealing note wavers, flatting momentarily. Geiger’s said she’s interested in “roughing up pop music a bit”; this is proof of concept.


In the past two years, John Talabot has become an exemplar of a new breed of producers working at the intersection of deep house, disco, and indie pop. On his debut, the Spanish producer builds upon his distinctive sound-- bursting with color, nostalgic but never retro, easy-going yet slightly unhinged-- without repeating himself.

ƒIN

When the Irish techno producer Donnacha Costello released his debut album, Growing Up in Public, its title crystallized a key dilemma of any emerging artist: At what point do you decide you're ready to venture out of the bedroom? That was back in 2000, well before the internet had shifted into high gear; since then, the coming-out process has gotten only harder.
Barcelona's John Talabot and his first album, ƒIN, make for an interesting case study of the musical debutant: This is actually the artist's second time around. Under a different alias, as a resident DJ at one of Barcelona's techno institutions, he began his recording career in the mid 2000s, making punchy, melodic dance music with a clear debt to labels such as BPitch Control and Border Community. A few years later, around the same time that Barcelona's techno scene and the styles that fueled it began to go stale, his own productions began to shift. He eased into a mid-tempo chug and set aside buzzing synthesizers in favor of sun-bleached samples, trading neon fizz for dandelion fluff. Like a company de-listing itself from the stock market, the local fixture took himself private, assuming a new alias and wiping the slate clean.
It was a smart move. In the past two years, Talabot has become an exemplar of a new breed of producers working at the intersection of deep house, disco, and indie pop, and he has carved out his own niche somewhere between the slow-motion theatrics of artists such as Mark E and Tensnake, the globe-trotting jewel tones of Four Tet and Caribou, and the psych-pop rush of Animal Collective and Delorean. Having interviewed him a few times, I don't think there's a calculating bone in the-artist-currently-known-as-John-Talabot's body, but he has nevertheless benefited from being in the right place at the right time. His slow tempos, supersaturated colors, and tropical accents fit right in with the woozy, humid dance music that's currently in vogue, and he has found himself in esteemed company-- remixing the xx, recruiting Glasser's Cameron Mesirow for guest vocals, and releasing on Young Turks. He's currently on tour in Australia with SBTRKT, another indicator that his star is on the rise.
Ironically, this all means that, his quasi-anonymity aside, Talabot finds himself growing up in public all over again as he graduates from singles and remixes to the full-length album form. Perhaps it's those raised stakes that make ƒIN feel like such a triumph. Across the album's 11 tracks, Talabot builds upon his distinctive sound-- bursting with color, nostalgic but never retro, easy-going yet slightly unhinged-- without repeating himself.
Talabot's early singles tended to follow a single trajectory, beginning with a bed of chunky percussion and then piling on loops of acoustic guitars, Philly strings, and soaring, pitched-up voices, usually culminating in a swollen, almost over-the-top climax. He hasn't entirely abandoned that approach, but he hasn't remained shackled to it, partly because he has shortened his track times considerably: Where his singles and remixes routinely ran seven, eight, even nine minutes, most of ƒIN's tracks come in around the four-minute mark, giving him the opportunity to experiment with more modest ideas that say their piece and move on.
The album's first three songs show off his range. The opening "Depak Ine"-- at seven-and-a-half minutes, it's the LP's longest cut-- is disco by way of Depeche Mode, with stabbing synths, eerie vocal samples, and an inexplicable chorus of croaking frogs. (The title resembles the brand name of a mood-stabilizing drug, which might explain the shift from minor to major halfway through; perhaps the frogs denote side effects?) "Destiny", a co-production with Madrid's Pional, is one of the album's obvious standouts, with beautifully harmonized vocals over lilting Caribbean chimes and a cozy, reassuring chord progression. Then, like a kind of palate cleanser, the three-minute "El Oeste" is a sleek little miniature of melting synthesizers, scraggly drum machines and dub delay that gradually swells into a folky, Boards of Canada-gone-house vibe.
A few times, Talabot tries to recreate the sensation that he nailed on "Sunshine", an early hit that was as subtle as an ice-cream headache. With its stabbing chords and sped-up vocal loops, "When the Past Was Present" shows Talabot at his excessive best-- buzzing and slightly out of tune, with everything pushed into the red and teetering on the verge of collapse. "Journeys", the album's only misstep, goes for the same vibe, but there's something clunky about its construction, and the vocals, from Delorean's Ekhi Lopetegi, can be distractingly pitchy.
A kind of happy melancholy informs most of the album, but that unity of mood doesn't get in the way of the songs' potential to surprise. As many times as I listen, I keep discovering new sounds, phrases, and even entire songs that had previously passed me by, such as "Estiu", a demure, three-minute funk bumper that sounds like Dâm-Funk on Percoset, or "Last Land", whose breakbeat sounds based on the same sample used in Mr. Cheeks' 2001 club-rap hit "Lights, Camera, Action!".
ƒIN saves its best song for last: "So Will Be Now...", another Pional co-production, which loops sampled vocals into a dreamy haze before digging into a sparse, deep-house groove. It's restrained, but there's real power there. A friend raved to me about how the song moved the dance floor at Berlin's Panorama Bar one Sunday morning. On your home speakers, it's as comforting as a lullaby, but played loud, apparently, those stark finger snaps and swooning coos are a call to collective ecstasy. Those contradictory qualities inform the whole record as it luxuriates in the space between private and public, just as its ambiguous title blurs the line between ends and means.


Philly throwback rock band that birthed Kurt Vile releases an EP that displays new compositional strengths and flair for sonic texture.

Future Weather EP

"My friend/ Rides all alone." That's the War on Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel, on "Baby Missiles", the jittery, sorta-opening track to the Philadelphia ragged-rock band's new EP, Future Weather. It's literally impossible to tell who the friend in question is, but those familiar with the band's genesis could take a stab. Granduciel and Kurt Vile founded the band back in 2003, toiling away for five years and with various band members in the Philadelphia scene, leading up to their "big break" when Secretly Canadian took the group under their wing and put out their 2008 debut, Wagonwheel Blues. Then, Vile's solo material gained even greater attention than that of his main band, and he struck out on his own. He didn't leave the band, not exactly-- he's still a member, albeit not one who appears on Future Weather.
Laws of physics aside, it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to suggest that Granduciel and Vile have some sort of telepathy when creatively separated from each other. Just as Vile's latest EP, Square Shells, moved away from the tape-hissed classic rock sound of his previous releases and toward a lonelier, more reverb-coated place, Future Weather also takes a trip down a lyrically overcast road, littered with regret, isolation, and loss. The sentiments are frequently naked in presentation, especially in the lovelorn "Comin' Through" and just plain lonely "Brothers".
Adding to the record's bummed-out mood is the possibility that this release resulted from a point of frustration and personal disappointment. The majority of the EP was taken from seemingly since-scrapped sessions from the War on Drugs' follow-up to Wagonwheel Blues, suggesting that this release could represent a creative hand-washing from Granduciel, who recorded the majority of the EP by himself, with drummer Mike Zanghi and multi-instrumentalist Dave Hartley filling in the gaps as necessary. Yet Future Weather doesn't sound rush-released-- instead, the band's compositional strengths and flair for sonic texture have clearly taken a leap forward. (See the sea of tangled guitars and far-off harmonica in "Brothers" or the knotty shuffle of "Comin' Through".) This stuff still sounds homespun, but the reel-to-reel feel of Wagonwheel Blues is mostly gone and replaced with something more fully realized. With one foot in the past and one foot in the uncertainty of now, it's exciting to see what these guys' next step will be.


Sheffield band teams with filmmakers behind The Mighty Boosh, This Is England, and Sigur Rós’ Heima for a concert DVD and its accompanying CD.

Arctic Monkeys: Arctic Monkeys at the Apollo

Arctic Monkeys at the Apollo

“I always find live shows on film kind of boring. Even my favorite ones, I kinda zone out for most of it…. There’s just a visceral thing that never translates very well.” That’s none other than Mr. Arcade Fire, Win Butler, talking to this website about his band’s risky recent documentary, Miroir Noir. And he’s absolutely right. Like most notable rock films—from Don’t Look Back to Gimme Shelter to recent winner Glastonbury—Miroir Noir isn’t a mere chronicle of a band on a stage playing to people who are singing along. The film features bits of recording-session footage and offbeat montages along with grainy snips of shows; by adding elements of non-show spontaneity, Miroir Noir translates a real live gig’s snap that much better. Arctic Monkeys at the Apollo—which was released in the UK last November and hits the U.S. this week with a bonus live CD—shows the Sheffield quartet on stage at the Manchester Apollo playing to people who are singing along. The end. You are now permitted to zone out.
Well, not just yet, maybe. Apollo at least attempts to be more than just another concert movie. Instead of going with quick cuts and crisp-but-soulless HD video, editor Nick Fenton (Sigur Rós’ Heima) favors longer tracking shots and director Richard Ayoade (The Mighty Boosh) and director of photography Danny Cohen (This Is England) go with Super 16 film to give the piece a more cinematic feel. But there’s only so much one can do with lens flares and light trails (there are plenty of both throughout). The relatively artistic filming techniques are worn out within the first 10 minutes of the 76-minute movie. So it’s up to the Monkeys themselves to put on the show of their lives—to make something worth popping in the DVD player for years to come.
Too bad this band isn’t ready for such a document. They’ve got songs and charisma, but not enough to support a release like Apollo just yet. It’s the last concert of their 2007 world tour, but instead of leaving all their sweat and/or guts on the floor, they just look a bit tired. And while lead singer Alex Turner’s wise ass snarl comes through on record, his brattiness almost reads as condescension here±he tells the Manchester audience they’re being fed to the center of Berlin via satellite as a joke, but nobody really gets it.
The crowd is given short-shrift throughout, too; their vocal participation is largely muted and the cameras stay trained on the Monkeys the whole time, giving the film a hermetic feel, as if it were taped in an antiseptic studio. Aside from drummer Matt Helders, whose technical skill and enthusiasm is admirable here, the Monkeys teeter between off-the-cuff and off-the-mark; there is a difference between fuck-all and fuck-off. Songs that allow Turner to breathe—“Do Me a Favour,” “505,” “When the Sun Goes Down”—offer a little release from the wound-up monotony, but they’re not enough.
Concert DVDs are a good, cheap way for record companies to recoup losses from the decline of album sales but, as more and more flood the market, their second-hand POV quickly becomes ineffectual. Because, without any sort of originality, innovation, or personality, something like Apollo may as well be a YouTube fan clip. (At least that way we could have heard the real-life audience reactions.) Arctic Monkeys try to keep it respectable with experienced men behind the cameras and just-grainy-enough film stock, but all that is moot without something compelling to watch. This is frustrating, especially since recent YouTube videos with Diddy prove these guys have humor and chumminess to spare—why not work that into this DVD at some point? Near the very end of Apollo, the film abruptly and briefly cuts to a quick moving reel of behind-the-scenes footage of the band goofing around. They make weird faces, Turner hammily leads the camera to a picturesque oceanside locale. It's a great montage—and it’s over in 30 seconds.


Brooklyn duo uses unusual instruments and quick-cut songwriting structures on their quirky and bracing debut.

Riposte

Some of what makes Buke and Gass so unique is borne of need-- a need to sound like a full band despite having only two members; a need for singer Arone Dyer to find a physically comfortable instrument to play that won't aggravate her carpal tunnel syndrome. Yet the Brooklyn duo's approach to music making goes far beyond simply finding solutions to these problems. Dyer plays a modified baritone ukulele (the "buke" in the group's name) that, yes, is smaller than a guitar, but her cohort, Aron Sanchez, also plays a bastardized instrument (the "gass," Sanchez's own Frankenstein melding of guitar and bass) for no other obvious reason than the fact that he can. Percussion is taken care of by drums and bells operated by the pair's feet, yet Buke and Gass purposefully abstain from utilizing prerecorded loops.
As you might imagine, all this ingenuity and rule-breaking engenders a noise that's quirky and bracing, and those are the hallmarks of Buke and Gass' debut album, Riposte. Dyer and Sanchez feed their respective buke and gass through amps and pedals, creating a buzzing, springy sound that brims with kinetic restlessness. Meanwhile, the foot-propelled percussion monolithically thwacks away, lending the duo's music an austerity that belies its post-punk roots (groups like the Ex, Swell Maps, and Theoretical Girls are some of the main spiritual godfathers here). Dyer's voice easily gets swept up in this nervy momentum, her girlish yelps often evoking Karen O. So twitchy and bursting with ideas are Buke and Gass that their songs have a tendency to jump abruptly from one passage to the next without ever finding resolution or an anchor, and it causes a measurable chunk of Riposte's middle to blend together into something indistinguishable and a little wearying.
When Buke and Gass manage to focus their energy, however, the results are positively arresting. Standouts are several, starting with the opening "Medulla Oblongata", with its evocative lyrics and Dyer's breathless repetition of the words "danger doctor" (the album's strident, clinical lyrics are occasionally clumsy but actually suit the music well). Other highlights include the hypnotic, circular repetitions of "Sleep Gets Your Ghost", the fervent, psychosexual "Bundletuck" ("These days you wake up in a bundle of orgasm"), and the winking "Outt!" ("Everybody here is out to get you"). Dyer and Sanchez are the sort of artists who will continue to challenge themselves at every turn. As long as they can keep that boundless creativity from going in a million different directions at once, their listeners will reap plenty of rewards.


Chicago producer Ryan McRyhew, aka Thug Entrancer, started out on an IDM pathway but his new Death After Life gravitates toward stripped-down, chromed-out footwork.

Death After Life

You'd be excused for reading the descriptor "tribute to the music of Chicago's South Side" flown under the banner of a name like Thug Entrancer and, I don't know, shaking your head slowly and knitting your brow, maybe letting out a huff of annoyance. That the musician born Ryan McRyhew started out on a more IDM tip, moved to Chicago from Denver a couple years ago, then moved back out a couple years later, bringing an evangelical enthusiasm for old Trax Records 12" classics back with him? That's the way a lot of super-suspect appropriation nightmares start.
But that's also how a lot of engagingly weird cross-genre works happen, and Thug Entrancer's full-length debut album Death After Life—his breakthrough release on Daniel Lopatin's Software label—is more definitively a bold experiment than a cheap jack move. McRyhew's context has always been that of the generation that grew up with the idea of digital music as a normalized way of making things, from formative Mario Paint experiences onwards. So when Death After Life touches on a blend of styles, it comes across less like a cultural lift and more like someone finding a new element to add to the periodic table of beats.
It's tempting to call what Death After Life does "microjuke," at least in its more obvious moments. The focus cut, "Death After Life I" (all eight non-bonus cuts follow the title + roman numeral format), fits that descriptor most readily, spilling its footwork guts out with a stripped-down, chromed-out flourish and making sure the drum patterns are as frantic and agitated as the synth washes that act as de facto melody are floaty and light (if occasionally distorted to subtly unnerving did-I-just-hear-that? effect). The way McRyhew builds a beat comes across like an overflow of ideas, as if the opportunity to toy with the rapidfire snares, claps, and kicks of juke rhythms opens up so many variations he can't help but leap from one to another, chopping the one into fractions and shuffling it around like a blackjack dealer's cards.
Juke isn't the only ingredient in Death After Life, though—McRyhew puts his work together like somebody who spent decades listening to Roland-powered music and, finally given the chance to make some of his own, goes all shopping spree with it. So there's a thread running through this record that actually does juxtapose some of Chicago's core styles—not just juke and footwork, but ghetto and acid house, bracingly put through the wringer on "III" and "V". Granted, he's stripped out some of the crucial elements that make the material that inspired him so vital—with sparse exceptions, it doesn't push the BPMs to the 150-160 mark, and good luck finding an actual vocal sample anywhere on here—his ear for pitting the kind of slow-build chord progressions usually found in more ambient and minimalist works against that sort of dense rhythmic syncopation is well-tuned.
Death After Life gets a little cute here and there (cf. the extended roboseizure freakout outro to "III"), and it starts to lose a little steam near the end, when the downtempo digression of "VI" and the hopped-up yet unsurprising "VII" roll towards the official conclusion. The QED of "VIII" pulls out every genre-Cuisinart trick in Thug Entrancer's book to strong effect, and the bonus tracks of "Ready to Live" parts 1 and 2 show what he can do with his focus elsewhere—turns out he can get just as rhythmically berserk with neighbor-alienating bass hits as he can with drum elements. Whether this infatuation with the sounds of the South Side are a passing phase or a legitimate connection remains to be seen, but it's clear there are plenty of places Thug Entrancer can take it. And if Ryan McRyhew is a dilettante, then hey, looks like sometimes even dilettantes hit on something.


On their 15th album, the indie-rock institution goes apocalyptic with their first concept record.

Future Teenage Cave Artists

On Future Teenage Cave Artists, Deerhoof fantasize about a future that feels frighteningly real. Populations evacuate their homes for greener pastures. People and animals are murdered senselessly. Survival is a privilege, not an assumption. Amidst this chaos, a new generation of teenagers still discover and make art, experiencing feelings as old as time.
From the first track, the world is fractured, brutal and basically over. Satomi Matsuzaki delivers the album’s opener, also its poppiest gesture, from the perspective of a hopeful, doomed adolescent: “Gonna paint an animal on a cave wall/Gonna leave it there forever while empires fall.” Greg Saunier’s snare-dense drumming is at its least busy, leaving space for listeners to share the teen’s excitement. Rapidly, the album fills up with dissonance and cluttered hooks, evoking a future in which humans are both overstimulated and denied the fulfillment of basic necessities. Matsuzaki’s one-liners are typically incisive (a few favorites: “Try my sci fi!” “Why would you kill my bambis?” “Cowboys were just a corporate invention”) and Saunier sings on a number of the tracks, his breathy, complementary voice never detracting from Matsuzaki’s singular, commanding persona.
This might be Deerhoof’s first overt concept album, but in every other regard, it fits comfortably into their well-worn blueprint. John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez write guitar melodies that are both gorgeous and guarded; Matsuzaki mangles and tweaks pop convention with dogged use of her upper vocal range. The lyrics occupy the same magically realistic, culturally wide-eyed space that the group has been exploring since it began in the 1990s.
This formula could make Deerhoof seem like a machine too well-oiled to keep surprising us—even if the band loves to claim that they reinvent themselves with each album, a perception that seems more and more like a fallacy with each new release. True, the indie rock collective have taken detours within their expanded universe: they released an EP covering The Shining’s soundtrack, put out an excellent collaboration with the classical ensemble Dal Niente, and brought in Awkwafina to rap on their revivifying 2017 album Mountain Moves. But Deerhoof are committed to being a band, while somehow never seeming nostalgic or close-minded to the world outside of rock ‘n’ roll: their four-piece is like a nuclear family that stays together as the indie scene that birthed them falls apart.
On the album’s cover, which Matsuzaki drew, a smartphone burns a kneeling teenager in the light of its camera. Appropriately, much of Future Teenage Cave Artists was recorded on laptops and phones, a tech-forward simplicity that reflects the album’s scrappy and cataclysmic milieu. It sounds less polished than their last couple of albums, but never as raw as their recently reissued early oeuvre.
Future Teenage Cave Artists surprises us with a sudden shift at its very end, which also brings the implicit themes of apocalypse into relief. “Damaged Eyes Squinting into the Beautiful Overhot Sun” is the record’s peak, its dynamic sound built on Deiterich’s three-chord rhythm guitar part and Rodriguez’s ascending riff, which swells before the song stops abruptly, as though the sun just absorbed the earth. Listeners are left with a stark performance of a Bach choral prelude on solo piano. This conclusion raises a bunch of questions—what does it mean for an apocalyptic album to end with a prelude? Why does a narrative about the artistic awakening of juveniles terminate with a centuries-old work? Is there hope for music after the madness of human self-destruction? In Future Teenage Cave Artists’ hectic, crammed-to-the-brim structure, Johann Sebastian gives Deerhoof listeners something they have been methodically denied: space to process the music. We’re left contemplating how a rock band, 26 years into their career, have managed to not only pin down the chaos of our time, but also to point toward our uncertain future.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


With vivid details and subtle textures, the latest collaboration between crys cole and James Rushford folds real-world sounds into a landscape of dreams.

Sylva Sylvarum

crys cole and James Rushford’s music was not made for kitchens or cars. Their work is so subtle that the smallest distraction—the noise from an AC unit, the rumble of a passing truck—threatens to drown out its nuances. The Canadian sound artist and Australian composer, who together record as Ora Clementi, specialize in small, quiet sounds evocative of rustling leaves, rubbed wineglass rims, and humming fluorescent bulbs. Silence the noise around you, and their work opens up a world of vivid and suggestive detail.
cole’s music, both solo and alongside collaborators like Oren Ambarchi, uses contact mics and controlled gestures to unlock a hidden world of vibration in everyday objects. Rushford’s pieces are fuller bodied, but not by much: Mixing electronics, tapes, and acoustic instruments, his compositions fixate upon the most ethereal textures and timbres. He described this year’s Lake From the Louvers, recorded during an artist residency on Lake Geneva, as an attempt to translate the play of light as it bounced off the surface of the water onto the windowpanes of his studio. Even when Rushford works in a more traditional mode, playing pianissimo is his forte: Last year, he released a recording of the modernist Catalan composer Frederic Mompou’s Musica Callada, a collection of diminutive piano sketches whose title translates as “Silent Music.”
The duo’s debut album as Ora Clementi, 2014’s Cover You Will Softer Me, was stitched together from whispering, crackling, and scraping sounds—manna for any ASMR lover. The music’s flow was so imperceptible that for long stretches, it was possible to wonder if the duo had simply set up microphones in some out-of-the-way space and walked away, allowing the tape to fill with the sounds of a building groaning under its own weight. Their captivating follow-up, Sylva Sylvarum, feels considerably more purposeful, as though its constituent parts were all meant to lead to a kind of epiphany.
The album begins with angelic voices, tinkling bells, and distant birdsong—a soft, glowing efflorescence as beatific as a moment of religious ecstasy. Across 15 tracks, the two musicians avail themselves of a wide array of sounds, atmospheres, and moods, yet all these pieces feel linked by some hidden design. They are held together not only by the musicians’ customary crepitations but also an eerie palette of synthesizers and guitar that are forever rising and falling, perpetually on the verge of slipping out of key—not dissonant exactly, but sour, wilted, enervated.
The shortest tracks are mere sketches. The minute-long “Sirin” runs pitch-bent flute synth through heavy reverb, reveling in the resulting vibrations; “Lathe of Heaven,” not much longer, pairs mournful guitar with choral pads and shrieking birds, almost gothic in its dour, languid movements. Often, a piece might abruptly change shape halfway through: “Umbrella Spinner” begins with bright mallet synths, reminiscent of Visible Cloaks, with a tentative, searching quality; the huffing of breath provides the pulse. But halfway through, the melody falls silent, giving way to more than a minute and a half of clicking sounds, like pebbles in the tide heard from underwater. In the first half, the artists are at their most lyrical; in the second, they cede the stage to purely environmental sound, as though erasing themselves from the frame.
A number of the most substantial tracks contain vocals. Practically as cryptic as their sound pieces, these are almost liturgical in tone, the lyrics neither sung nor spoken but softly chanted, like a church congregation reciting a prayer in unison. The artists have said that all the album’s lyrics are sourced from texts pertaining to utopias and the natural world, and the album’s title comes from a 17th century posthumously released book by Francis Bacon, a kind of miscellany of scientific facts and curiosities. In “Dialogue Between a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain,” they assemble a vast panoramic image out of stray shards and fragments—“precious and common stones... minerals and metals”; “wines, oils, and different liquids”; “all the different fish that are found in the rivers, lakes, and seas”; “dragons, worms, insects, flies, and beetles”—that dances in the mind like some ancient mosaic illuminated by flickering candlelight.
The words are difficult to make out; you don’t so much register their meanings as feel the weight of them sinking like stones into your subconscious. The same feeling is true of “Magic Mountain,” the album’s closest thing to an actual song, in which soft, optimistic synth pads serve as a bed for the pair’s sing-song recitation of places of natural wonder: “the Pacific Ocean seafloor... a prehistoric geological site in Colorado… a mountain on the border of North Cascades National Park.” It is unclear what these places may share in common, but the reverence of Ora Clementi’s tone is unmistakable. In moments like this, Sylva Sylvanum feels imbued with an almost spiritual resonance. Folding real-world sounds into a landscape of dreams, this album holds your attention even when it confuses.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The Brooklyn singer-songwriter navigates the aftermath of grief on his gentle new record.

Risking Illness

Grief is a shapeshifter. It looks different to everybody: a lingering ache, a temporary scrape, a heavy phantom limb. The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Ian Wayne encountered a form of grief he’d never known before after the death of his 3-year-old nephew from leukemia in 2017. He learned about his nephew’s illness while on his very first tour, and, within two weeks, his nephew had died. Now, three years later, as the world tries to synthesize new forms of grief every day, Wayne has released Risking Illness, a sensitive and gentle record that navigates the aftermath of a loss sharpened by Wayne’s sense of forward momentum and humility.
The album’s melancholic, close-knit arrangements of acoustic guitar, piano, and light percussion soften its devastation. Wayne’s level voice and sober pacing allow the record to unfold carefully, prioritizing deeper emotional understanding over split-second eruptions. Though Wayne doesn’t hold himself to all of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, themes of bargaining, depression, and acceptance form most of the album’s foundation. How is it possible to return to a “normal” life after it’s been suddenly cratered by forces beyond your control? Wayne asks questions that simply have no answers.
Mid-tempo jog “Gimme Something” is Wayne’s most hurried track, coasting over layered guitars and a pattering rhythm. He leans the titular request more toward a plea than a demand. Having reached a new low, Wayne introduces a vein of humility on “Gimme Something” that runs through the record. He addresses it directly in the soft, better-days aspirations of “Now Is Was” and promises to “own [his] problems” on opener “Coyote.” Wayne’s admissions of vulnerability sometimes bring an energetic edge to his despair, as if he’s still trying to wheel and deal his way into a better outcome. And when he’s exploring the duller pains of a relationship (“Baby,” “People”), he re-adjusts the commonplace bruises of disagreements and missed connections within his widened perspective.
Above the warm undercurrent of Risking Illness, Wayne uses strategic pauses to highlight the most impactful moments. In “Baby,” he leaves a moment of space between an instrumental break, explicitly declaring the start of a new chapter, relying on a hair’s-breadth of room to make his point land. As he sings, “Baby, I will always love you/In between the times that I do not,” he honors how tender affection can still linger long after the lights have gone out in a relationship.
On “Winter’s,” however, moments of silence feel like daggers, the album’s strongest and most affecting track by far. Singing alone with an acoustic guitar, Wayne fumbles with the loss of his nephew and its circumstances, guilt lacing his voice. He fidgets as if he’s trying to get the math—or any of it—to make sense by looking at it from another angle. An electric guitar slips in before Wayne completes the final line, “Twenty-seven on the day that he died,” and the full-band flourish that seals the track mirrors the busy preventative measures of turning thoughts in another direction before they get too dark. Some grief doesn’t ever go away; it makes room for itself at any size. Risking Illness acknowledges the heartfelt futility of trying to get over it.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Ludwig Göransson’s spectacular score captures the multiplicity of the fictional nation of Wakanda.

Ludwig Göransson: Black Panther (Original Score)

Black Panther (Original Score)

In a blockbuster movie, nothing says “important” quite like the imposition of a large orchestra—especially one that favors a Eurocentricity that’s historically been set against black expression. The use of such an orchestra in Black Panther is intriguing because the film is the first of its magnitude to carry the joy of an African utopia that never was. The story wraps itself with a specific kind of grandness that a traditional, classical orchestra has rarely appealed to. Ludwig Göransson—the composer of the Black Panther’s score who’s frequently worked with the film’s director Ryan Coogler, not to mention Childish Gambino—does incorporate some African accents into his 132-piece orchestra, but even he noted that that’s not really enough. “The most difficult part is that as soon as you put production and orchestra on top of African music, it doesn’t sound African anymore,” he told Pitchfork. “So the challenge was incorporating these things and making them still feel African.”
Part of what keeps Göransson’s use of African music from feeling dilettantish is how he recognizes the breadth of the Black Panther universe. The horns swell and the polyrhythms rumble not with a distant awe, but with a believable intimacy; the reference point isn’t the mere idea of Africa, but all of what that idea encompasses. In a spectacular way, Göransson’s score captures the multiplicity of the fictional country of Wakanda.
”Wakanda”—which plays when the hero, the Black Panther T’Challa, prepares to take his throne in the film’s opening act—offers a glimpse into that sort of specificity. T’Challa begins the movie as an inheritor of a new kingdom who feels the magnitude of his deceased father’s legacy, and in this vulnerable moment, Senegalese musician Baaba Maal solemnly cries a song that serves as a metaphor for the fallen king. Göransson isn’t simply ticking off the diasporic boxes; he’s rooting them in an emotional context. The sadness adds gravity to the piece’s later half: Regal brass decorates a wide shot of Wakanda, signifying the glory he’ll have rule over.
The movie’s main villain, Erik Killmonger, is given that same amount of care and development. Not only is he a foreigner to the nation despite his familial ties; his worldview barely intersects T’Challa’s, who puts his loyalty to his nation over Killmonger’s desire to empower black people outside of the continent. The piece of music named after him embodies the inner conflict that drive his actions. The tambin flute appears as a ghostly presence, its windy notes puncturing with the urgency of an ancestral cry from the afterlife. But the theme resolves with trap hi-hats that now dominate hip-hop. The change-up and its familiarity re-centers Killmonger as an African-American, whose generations-old plight pits him against Wakanda’s isolationism.
So when Killmonger brings these elements with him to Wakanda, he becomes the disruptor. The Black Panther’s righteousness doesn’t do him much good at first, though. The royal horns and drum that once marked T’Challa’s presence—signifiers of his pride—are reduced to gasps in the pivotal second-act scene where his rival destroys him in ritual one-on-one combat, at times quieting altogether to emphasize the scene’s brutality. Killmonger’s venomous out-of-placeness is further harped on as we see him cooly marching toward the throne, as the camera flips upside down and the hi-hats rollick once again. Yes, his role as an outsider comes from being a villain. But how much of a home is Africa, really, for African-Americans when they’ve been systematically detached from the motherland for centuries?
Despite the emphasis on African instrumentation, the score’s classical elements don’t exist solely as accouterements: The orchestra delivers its traditional magnificence while the African signatures humanize it. The most significant example is that string phrase that rises in parts of “Ancestral Plane”—an emotive section that expresses a tension and surrender, like a fist unclenching in divine humility. That theme is featured when T’Challa visits the mythical ancestral plane as part of his ritualistic duties as the new king. When he gazes at the beautiful, purple-hued universe, the music helps the audience share in his reverence but it never feels like it’s manufacturing that emotion.
It’s a testament to Göransson that he gives the score’s most resounding moments over to the African diaspora. Near Black Panther’s end, T’Challa takes the wounded Killmonger to a cliff so the tragic warrior can gaze upon Wakanda’s majesty. The orchestra gives the scene a climactic weight, but it eventually recedes to push Baaba Maal’s weeping croons to the forefront. There’s triumph mixed with a sense of mourning as he sings to this beautiful, fictitious land. Alas, the sun must set on Wakanda as well.


Accompanied by the 12-person Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, the Norwegian metal-jazz guitarist explores motherhood and mayhem on nine action-packed songs full of overdriven riffs and warring counterpoints.

Hedvig Mollestad / Trondheim Jazz Orchestra: Maternity Beat

Maternity Beat

Hedvig Mollestad’s music is like a particularly extravagant geyser that spews periodically when not bubbling away underneath the surface. Her sound sits at the heavier end of the metal-jazz continuum, a space the Norwegian guitarist has explored extensively with her eponymous trio on seven albums over the past 11 years. Maternity Beat, Mollestad’s latest collaboration with Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, continues the narrative experimentation of her recent solo releases Tempest Revisited and Ekhidna, this time making motherhood the object of focus.
Writing and arranging a double album of compositions for the 12 players of Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, plus Mollestad herself, is a significant undertaking, but it’s also ambitious in the range of themes it incorporates: parenthood, the global migration crisis, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. What groups the various ideas in Maternity Beat together is, unsurprisingly, motherhood—particularly its connection to emotional states. From there, Mollestad digs deep in her toolkit for interesting ways to convey her concerns—take the slightly disconnected voices on “Her Own Shape,” a parable of parenthood, or the urgency of an onlooker’s cries going head to head with passive drones on the striking opener “On the Horizon Part 1.” Rather than distilling her ideas too neatly, Mollestad leaves them murky, making her socially engaged themes inextricable from their musical surroundings.
The sound of Maternity Beat is similarly knotty, exploring dissonance, harsh noise, and crunching grooves on nine action-packed compositions. Mollestad described creating the project as being “as thrilling as jumping off a cliff,” and the feeling of inching your toes over the edge is clear from the first listen. In “On the Horizon Part 2,” a multitude of instabilities—uneven meters, warring counterpoint, thumping grooves, and overdriven guitar riffs—loosely connect to create a landscape constantly moving in different directions. Frenzied figures balance on top of that unstable ground, with scorched-earth improvising from saxophonist Martin Myhre Olsen, and, on “Donna Ovis Peppa,” violinist Adrian Løseth Waade.
Balancing the full-blooded moments are more tranquil corners like “Little Lucid Demons,” a quaint étude for small ensemble and Laurie Anderson-like automaton voices; it expands out into a luxurious groove with a stretched melody that nods to John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. “Look for swing, look for flow, look for beat, then take it away,” the voices half-sing in stereo. But rhythm never totally disappears in Mollestad’s music, which maintains a constant heartbeat even in minimal moments.
Mollestad’s pieces fare best when they marry dark and light in one picture, like the bizarre gothic dirge “Do Re Mi Ma Ma,” with its surreal touches of cartoonish humor, weary whole-ensemble exhalations, and dense trio improvisations shared between Mollestad, organist Ståle Storløkken, and drummer Torstein Lofthus. It’s the most vivid of Mollestad’s musical portraits, throwing strong colors onto her massive canvas; less convincing are the pieces rendered in pastel (“Her Own Shape”) or monochrome (“All Flights Cancelled,” borrowed from Mollestad’s 2021 trio album Ding Dong You’re Dead). The latter song’s immediacy—as Mollestad faced the prospect of an international touring season scuppered by COVID-19—fades as it’s translated across projects and timeframes.
The album’s two framing tracks, “Maternity Beat” and “Maternity Suite,” come right at the end, and travel to the project’s extremities. “Maternity Beat” sits in a calm yet eerie space, where Mollestad delivers prolonged harmonic trickles, waiting for ensemble respite that only appears in snippets. “Maternity Beat” follows abruptly with big rock textures, Mollestad’s raucous soloing, and general noisy joy, as the band gets its chops around busy, boppish lines. Heard as one continuous 19-minute piece, the two songs encapsulate an artist whose most interesting work resides at the edges.


The unearthing of these odd compositions from the East Coast ambient group creates a three-hour stream of instrumental riches, whether you’re looking to find samples or get lost in a trance.

Entourage: Ceremony of Dreams: Studio Sessions & Outtakes, 1972-1977

If you’ve ever heard (or even heard of) the Entourage Music and Theatre Ensemble, there’s a strong chance you’ve listened to Four Tet. Nearly two decades ago, the British producer was rifling through stacks of records in a London flea market, digging for samples among the castaways. He happened upon The Neptune Collection, an unknown-to-him 1976 release from the Folkways label. With the record’s enormous green-and-purple vortex at the center, the quizzical band name on the flanks, and Folkways’ proud pedigree in tow, Four Tet took a chance.
The album’s first cut, “Neptune Rising,” immediately rewarded his risk. In fact, its second little guitar riff—so high-pitched and plaintive it sounds like a harp being played with a bottleneck slide—became the coruscating core of “She Moves She,” the undeniable anthem of Four Tet’s 2003 LP, Rounds. Entourage had called it quits twenty years earlier, but a former collaborator heard the track during a student’s dance performance, recognized the indelible hook, and alerted guitarist Wall Matthews, one of Entourage’s surviving members. He met Four Tet, accepted (with some snark) his explanation as to why he hadn’t cleared the sample, and welcomed the trickle of cash and cachet that came. It was Entourage’s posthumous, largely nameless flirtation with very minor fame.
But now, Entourage has another potential avenue out of obscurity. Since 2005, Tompkins Square Records has revived the reputations of at least a dozen overlooked guitar pickers and folk singers, excavating essential listens from the private-press graveyard. For the three-disc set Ceremony of Dreams, the label and Matthews waded through much of what Entourage recorded but didn’t release on its two captivating Folkways albums. The result is a three-hour stream of instrumental riches, whether you’re looking to find samples or get lost in a trance. Ceremony of Dreams confirms what Four Tet’s sample from so long ago suggested: Entourage really does sound that cool.
It’s important to note that Entourage was not a New York or Los Angeles band. Instead, they thrived in relative cultural isolation—first in the recesses of a Baltimore disco, then in a string of small college towns and coastal cities through New England. A bit of a performance art collective, they often accompanied dance and theatrical productions or were joined onstage by dancers. On and off in different incarnations between 1970 and 1983, Entourage paralleled or presaged several vital artistic movements with a stunning sense of clarity and resolve. These 30 tracks alternately conjure the ecstatic minimalism of John Cale and La Monte Young, the billowing clouds of Arvo Pärt, the aleatory intrigue of Derek Bailey, and the strange guitar beauty of Sandy Bull. Entourage weaves the melodies of Iraq, the moodiness of country & western, and the open-ended quests of what would become “jam bands” into all of these strains.
Forty years later, it still feels genuinely adventurous. Ceremony of Dreams is a strange box set—fitting, you know, given the eccentricity and oddity of its subject. Neither of Entourage’s two LPs, which can be downloaded and nabbed on CD through Folkways or bought for outlandish collector prices online, are included. If you want to hear the version of “Neptune Rising” that Four Tet sliced, it’s not here. Instead, you find two different interpretations—an early version where the bit Four Tet bought is less prominent and an alternate take where everything feels muted and smoothed, as if the song is somehow being transmitted through a dream.
Most of these 30 tracks are outtakes, alternate takes, or partial demos of tunes later completed by the full band. There are three consecutive versions of “The Shores of God,” a slippery saxophone-and-piano fantasy that brilliantly balances at the edges of soft jazz and new age psychedelia and showcases the finesse of Entourage founder Joe Clark. With warped electric bass and endless piano glissandi, the finished version, unreleased until now, feels like Weather Report conjuring and chiding Debussy. A rendition for horns and bowed bass reveals the magisterial harmonies and bold vibrato at play, while a piano-only take shows the Keith Jarrett-like impulses lingering beneath it all. More than the crowded and frantic version that ends The Neptune Collection, this take on “Tarbox Poltergeist” shows that Matthews was one of the most dashing acoustic soloists of his day, worthy of mention even now alongside the likes of Bert Jansch. A fragment of the glorious “Euphoric Bells” seems not simply to hang in the air but to become the air itself, suggesting it has and will forever exist. Because so little is known about Entourage at all, this composite of odds and ends feels revelatory from start to finish—an addendum that becomes the core by virtue of its very existence.
The songs on Ceremony of Dreams may make you ponder the history of cultural appropriation and its role in Entourage’s music. Written by a motley crew of college professors and white bohemians, these songs undeniably lift from Iraq’s maqam tradition and India’s ragas, from the barebones blues and brassy bebop. But they feel like composites of enthusiasms, made not with a mind for exploitation so much as exploration. These songs are uniformly uncanny and singular, suggesting that Entourage’s biggest worry was always trying to build something new from parts it already loved. It’s only appropriate then that most of us only stumbled upon Entourage when a young electronic magpie did the same with pieces from one of its songs, simply because he loved the sound. At last, Ceremony of Dreams gives us the bigger picture.


The New York rapper is known for his breathless flows and punchy hip-house beats. His second album is just as slick, but this time there’s a little tenderness.

Svengali

Cakes da Killa is ready to step on anybody’s neck to get what’s his. He established himself in New York’s booming queer rap scene in the early 2010s, bringing sharp flows and a brusque, ego-shattering voice to the hip-house beats that quickly became his hallmark. His music is loose and snappy with a strong sense of form, gliding across eardrums like beads of sweat on the foreheads of club kids at The Limelight during a humid Sunday morning. And while Cakes’ sophomore album Svengali is no stranger to pulse-quickening BPMs and steamy come-ons, these songs are less noisy, more willing to groove and simmer instead of quake.
Though the project was directly inspired by jazz greats like Yusef Lateef and Alice Coltrane, Svengali isn’t a jazz album in form or content. But judging by the videos and single artwork, Cakes is clearly influenced by his forebears, and interested in connecting his modern style to that lineage: “Arched back on loan from my ancestors,” he hisses on the opener “W4TN.” With Svengali, he reaffirms his status as a world-class rapper and cements his place in a long line of queer Black artists holding shit down. The community he’s a part of has been a driving force of U.S. popular music for at least a century: The ballroom and house scenes that have recently ensnared some of the biggest pop stars in the world—especially this year—are easy examples, and they, like most genres born toward the end of the 20th century, all have roots in jazz. Plus, it’s not breaking news that many of the genre’s early greats, including Tony Jackson, Josephine Baker, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith, were queer too.
The jazz clubs and speakeasies of the Harlem Renaissance have been replaced by the cyphers and ballrooms that Cakes came up in, and now he’s here to spit. He’s namechecked rappers like Busta Rhymes, Lil’ Kim, and Cam’ron as inspiration in the past, and he shares their fierce commitment to technique and rhythm. “W4TN” feels like a moody inversion of Busta’s “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,” as if reimagined by Kevin JZ Prodigy; the digital shuffle of producer Sam Katz’s beats never throws Cakes off the trail of a sudden fling that could turn into something more. Katz—who produced every song on Svengali—creates an understated version of the four-on-the-floor chaos the duo has been pumping out since at least 2013. When Katz attaches fuzzy, sampled hi-hats to the fading synths of the title track, Cakes zig-zags through them on his way to a hook-up at the bar. Whether he’s club-hopping at an upscale lounge (“Luv Me Nots,” “Drugs Du Jour”) or traversing the explosive drums and keyboards that propel “Sub Song,” Cakes adapts, quickly finding a flow to demolish. In contrast to the current wave of Jersey club rap, which mines rap out of danceable beats and prioritizes its own breathlessness, Cakes’ style is all about making it through the eye of the storm unfussed.
His delivery is supremely confident, but parts of Svengali scan as the most vulnerable and tender of his career. Cakes’ knack for storytelling manifests in a loose narrative throughline, a flash of lust that evolves into deeper feelings. On “Luv Me Nots,” he plays the role of the svengali longing for devotion even while he’s busy seducing his next victim. The reprised version of that song, which appears toward the end of the record, softly chronicles how the walls surrounding his heart come crumbling down. Eventually, the forceful ballroom pleas of “Think Harder” put an exclamation point on his desire. The voicemail interludes that appear across the album hint at a specific object of his affection, but the story still works as a progression from player to simp. An instrumental overture and climax bookend each side of the album, giving Cakes’ struggle for romantic control an epic scope.
Cakes da Killa doesn’t have much left to prove. He’s released 10 projects in as many years and established himself as a local icon, one who’s well-known enough to have appeared on Netflix’s rap competition show Rhythm and Flow back in 2019. Even with all those achievements, Svengali feels like a milestone he’s been working toward for years—a smooth balance of anxiety and aggression, love and lust, confidence and vulnerability. Whether he’s pleading for love or manipulating it in the shadows, Cakes’s decisive presence ties it all together. He’s like a bandleader of the jazz era he reveres, putting on for the divas and icons of his time.


Manchester post-punk musician Julie Campbell’s third album is dense with possibilities, whiplashing between past and future. The maximalism isn’t big-picture, but granular: busy, hyperreal instants by the millions.

Former Things

As LoneLady, Julie Campbell achieves a certain paradox: quiet maximalism. She makes music firmly in the post-punk tradition, but unlike many landfill nu-New Orders doing the same, her work is expansive, not reductive. Time and again, she likens her work to psychogeography, what she’s called an “edgeland”: the information overload of memories, possibilities, and associations beneath any patch of ground. The shudders and spikes of her music convey a world that’s threatening in its sharpness, like it’s got an AR overlay. The maximalism isn’t big-picture, but granular: busy, hyperreal instants by the millions.
Campbell’s debut, 2010’s Nerve Up, was tense and cerebral, each song sounding about to snap. The 2015 follow-up Hinterland projected that tension out onto her Manchester hometown: confronting reminders of the city’s industrial past in every imposing or abandoned building, then projecting onto them her own bygones. “I actually like things crumbling into disrepair and ruin,” she told NME. “I still daydream about owning a big, crumbling mill. I wouldn’t renovate it: I’d just let it crumble slowly around me.” But not only mills can crumble. Former Things dwells on interior and exterior threats, but especially on those found in memory. Nothing is just itself; everything Campbell sees contains loss and has room for more. The album was recorded at a former rifle-shooting range, and every song sounds like she’s still anticipating the guns.
Originally envisioned as a techno album and recorded on vintage synths, Former Things is packed with Campbell’s busy, weaponized arrangements. The lyrics, too, are deliberate and dense—she’s one of those uncommon songwriters whose words work equally well on paper. On past albums she’s delivered her lyrics staccato and frantic, as if the thoughts were coming urgent and fast. On Former Things, the way she exerts control—clipping her voice short, making it ricochet—has a way of mimicking digital quantization via old-fashioned vocal cords. “(There Is) No Logic,” in particular, sends her voice out into a playground of sampling and echoing.
Any playgrounds here, though, are haunted. The business of the arrangements is Campbell’s way of crowding out “threats—everywhere I look, everywhere I turn.” This is the chorus of “Threats,” and in the breaks in the arrangement are ad-libs that sound like echoes of grinding teeth. On “Fear Colours,” Campbell gives herself watery, distorted backing vocals that sound more metallic than human. The samples are harsh and cutting like intrusive thoughts—one recurring sound is a buzzing razor. The title track comes closest to levity, but it, too, is about mourning childhood. The cinematic strings in the chorus could almost be dreamy, if they weren’t interrupted and cut off by the polyrhythmic tremors of the arrangement—constant reminders of what’s crumbled and ruined.
Recurring throughout “Time Time Time” is a synth-chime loop much like the one in Alan Parsons’ “Sirius,” circular to the point of obsession. Campbell’s arrangement keeps returning to it, stopping it short, twisting the melody around, the exact way she turns over the memories in the lyric. The digital manipulation of “(There Is) No Logic” gives way to raw vocals and rawer fears: “Every heartbeat has a number...Curiosity will kill you, and your body knows it.” When the crowded headspace of the arrangement finally quiets on “Terminal Ground,” funereal synth chords lie beneath. The nihilism would be clear without the words, but Campbell adds to the finality: “Your dreams…Where are they now?/Forgotten/Break out/Break your flesh down to a terminal ground.” On this, the final track, she herself has become a crumbling building.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


In the 1990s, the Cornish electronic musician Luke Vibert offered a pranksterish take on drum & bass under the Plug moniker. This collection of recordings from 1995-1998 foreshadows the kitchen-sink work of Rustie and James Ferraro.

Back on Time

The vaults of electronic mischief spun from the fingertips of Cornish musician Luke Vibert are apparently well-stocked. Like his fellow West Country dweller Aphex Twin, Vibert appears to have a dearth of unreleased material yet to see the light of day. These days most musicians and music fans have some form of useless archive-- the simultaneous rise of the mp3 and computer-based sequencing software guaranteed that a surfeit of recorded music would lay dormant on hard drives across the globe. Back when Vibert was starting out, at some point in the early 1990s, he seems to have been a digital junk soothsayer, amassing a great body of work while the rest of us were tooling away on Prodigy message boards and getting to grips with AOL for DOS. Unlike the rest of ours, his binary debris actually seems to have some value.
In 1995, Vibert released a series of EPs under the name Plug, which served as a catchall moniker to present his typically twisted take on drum'n'bass. An album, Drum 'n' Bass for Papa, followed a year later, around the time he was being courted by major labels. Trent Reznor's Nothing Records released Drum 'n' Bass for Papa in the U.S., handily packaging it with the prior EPs. As the popularity of the genre waned, Vibert wisely bailed on Plug, instead choosing one of his many other aliases to work under. But he couldn't shake what once seemed like a one-off fudging of popular genre tropes. In 2006, an EP titled Here It Comes emerged, comprising four unreleased Plug tracks. Now we've got another clearing of the vaults, this time in the shape of a full-length LP comprised of Plug recordings Vibert made from 1995-1998.
The original Plug records skirted under the radar of most serious drum'n'bass heads. It lacked the pile-driving ferocity of most Metalheadz releases and/or the jazz-tinged seriousness of Good Looking's output. There were other shades of drum'n'bass, of course, but very few of them touched on humor, which remains a common touchstone for many of Vibert's projects. It's unlikely he was looking to hold down a residency at the Blue Note in pre-hip Hoxton (ironically, the same venue where his current label, Ninja Tune, hosted their legendary Stealth nights). Instead, he always seemed happiest working in his own sphere, which, for Plug, meant blurring the lines between the bloodless white-knuckle ride of drum'n'bass and the easy listening boom that was gathering pace around the mid 1990s.
Back on Time is barely separable from Drum 'n' Bass for Papa; it's essentially more of the same. Vibert's breakbeats still writhe and skitter, methodically contorted around his eccentric choice of samples. On "A Quick Plug for a New Slot", a lumbering beat slugs lethargically into the mix before a pinging sitar line forces everything to lurch into a sprightlier clip. The excellently titled "Come on My Skeleton" feels like it's straining under the weight of its own excesses, with fat slabs of industrialized sound vying with twists of an opera singer climbing up into her higher range. The latter ends with Vibert pulling a rabbit out of the hat in the form of a straight-laced man claiming, "you might also become aware of your anus or genitalia." Even on this older material he's an expert at diffusing tension in that way, always ready with a banana peel to slip under the mix in case things are getting a little too serious.
That pranksterish approach is the point where most people either get on or off board with Vibert. On Back on Time, it works to his advantage, largely thanks to his ability to balance out his humorous inclinations with an unnerving ability to sequence it all over an impressively brutal infrastructure. On "Back on Time" he's able to filter John Barry-esque string parts through indecipherable vocal bellowing and a beat that floods the mix with its tinny timbre. Even the relatively subdued "Mind Bending" ends up stacked high with junk, with Speak & Spell-style speech synthesis vying for space with jerky analog loops and a wild-eyed raver shouting, "fucking excellent acid house." That form of maximal japery foreshadows the work of Rustie and James Ferraro, partially explaining why this material sounds fresh again. It's a kitchen sink-like flood of sound, always on the verge of resembling a gigantic curveball being forced down your throat, but with Vibert pulling back from the humor brink at all the right moments.


Roosevelt's debut is a cocktail of disco, French touch, Ibiza house, yacht rock, and electropop that evokes some crowded Tiki-torch dancefloor lost on the Mediterranean coast.

Roosevelt

By any reasonable measure, summer 2016 is turning out to be a challenging time for people seeking even a modicum of contentment with the world. From our social media feeds to the 24-hour news cycle, we’re being fed a steady diet of abject misery, and it’s beginning to take its toll on even the most trivial aspects of our culture. Take for example, an annual ritual pop music fans typically heartily anticipate: The Song of the Summer, when one hit single above all others is crowned as the inescapable feel-good chart-topper of the year. For the first time in what seems like decades, the airwaves are barren of such a mood stabilizer, and while the factors contributing towards such an absence may be varied and complex (the continued destabilization of the music industry; streaming media creating a niche listening culture rather than an overarching mainstream; the general sense of apathy gripping the nation), it has left an undeniable void.
However, this vacuum may be one reason why Roosevelt’s self-titled debut album feels like a balm from its first track. Roosevelt sounds like an almost scientific approach to a summer dance record; a cocktail of disco, French touch, Ibiza house, yacht rock, and electropop that evokes some crowded Tiki-torch dancefloor lost on the Mediterranean coast. Even the artwork plays the part: Roosevelt (aka Cologne-based producer/DJ Marius Lauben) stands awash in purple light, his name displayed in a sharp, 1980s cursive. It looks like something you’d find on a poolside coffee table of a Malibu mansion after a massive rager, slightly stained with suntan lotion and margarita mix.
Germany isn’t known for its tropical exports, which is probably why there’s an underlying moodiness threaded throughout Roosevelt, a sense that the album’s sunny disposition may be as fleeting as summer itself. The lead single “Colours” begins with buoyant bongos and a dry, upbeat piano melody, before Roosevelt’s slightly wispy voice floats into the mix. “When you left/You took your colors with you,” he sings over a building disco beat, a wisp of melancholy drifting through an unbridled party. It’s a trick Roosevelt uses often on the album, tempering a rush of adrenaline with a dose of Teutonic sobriety.
The fact that Roosevelt is being released on Joe Goddard’s Greco-Roman label is no surprise, as it shares a sort of spiritual kinship with some of Hot Chip’s more bombastic moments, while mimicking some of their nerdy charm. Every song on the record contributes to this air of reverie, a testament to Roosevelt’s strength as a producer, as one track languidly slips into the next. If anything, it can get a little too laid back—it’s the kind of record that's so uniform it ends before you realize it.
That being said, tracks like “Fever” do an impressive job of highlighting what is probably Roosevelt’s most impressive talent: finding subtle ways to reinvigorate some of dance music’s most widely-abused tropes. Nothing has been more overused in the past five years than four-to-the-flour, punchy keyboard stabs (think every single Calvin Harris song since 2009), but when “Fever” opens with them, it feels fresh, not like a quick production trick that's been used thousands of times. It’s not a stroke of genius, but it’s cleverly deployed, and touches like this elevate the album and give it a slightly tongue-in-cheek edge.
The album ends with “Close,” a mid-tempo comedown, constructed around a knowingly cheesy Casio beat. It’s the song that's the most indebted to Roosevelt’s 1980's soft rock influences, his voice flirting somewhat perilously with R&B inflections, wrapped in a super thick, elastic bassline. “The days are turning black/You’ll be sorry when you realize/There’s no turning back” he croons, forebodingly—and the message is clear: the sun’s rising, the party’s over, time to clean up, head back to reality.


This acknowledged inheritor of Miles Davis and Teo Macero's experiments in electric jazz and studio-aided collage composition creates a stunning new LP.

Jon Hassell: Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street

The jazz trumpeter Jon Hassell's embrace of electronic effects and extensive post-production has positioned him curiously. He is an acknowledged inheritor of Miles Davis and Teo Macero's experiments in electric jazz and studio-aided collage composition, and yet the ambient nature of his work often lands his discs in the new age racks. Hassell studied with Stockhausen and Pandit Pran Nath, played on the first recording of Terry Riley's In C, and collaborated with the likes of La Monte Young, Talking Heads, David Sylvian, and Ry Cooder. He's also the inventor of something he calls Fourth World, "a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques"-- a phrase that's hard to shake free, in 2009, of associations with Putumayo compilations, or Burning Man. It's difficult to think of another contemporary jazz musician whose reputation encompasses such opposing poles: conceptual rigor on the one hand; easy listening on the other.
Hassell's new album, Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, does in fact make for easy listening-- profoundly warm, immersive, relaxing listening. It's electric-blanket music, isolation-tank music, lucid-dreaming music that moves as assuredly as if by the power of your own suggestion. I've been tempted to call it "yoga for the mind," except that the phrase sounds way too glib, too slack, for music this rigorous. But it's also a puzzle, a non-Euclidean rendering sourced from small-ensemble sessions and recomposed via digital editing. It's as hard to separate out the music's discrete pieces as it is to discern between its structure and sense of drift.
Much of the album's pleasures are immediate and visceral. This is as sumptuous as "ambient" music gets. The album opens with a glowing song, "Aurora", that sounds exactly like its title suggests, with scratchy, glowing drones of uncertain provenance taking on a daybreak shine as Hassell's trumpet rises like a heat mirage in echoing, overlapping lines; there's a faint echo of dub in the bass. "Time and Place" is slow, spelunking funk, descending ropey bass lines through chambers where ambient shimmer illuminates melodic figures as lifelike as cave drawings: bluegrass violin, panting organs, and of course Hassell's reverberant horn melodies, which slide around the edges of the song's key signature, highlighting its contours in slippery relief. A dubby pulse echoes the percussive rattle of Hassell's Earthquake Island and, on a more contemporary note, the Moritz von Oswald Trio's Vertical Ascent, which might not be surprising, given that von Oswald has professed his admiration for Hassell's work. The track leads almost seamlessly into "Abu Gil", where violin and electric keys blow its modal structure wide open. One of the album's centerpieces, the 13-minute song is grounded in more loping percussion and a pinging bass line that wobbles like a taut clothesline; Hassell's trumpet is refracted through delays and a harmonizer effect, throwing shadows in fourths and fifths as it slinks, catlike, around the changes.
You might not notice any of these things on your first or even tenth listen. The measured pacing, especially on the slowly unfolding title track, lulls you into a state that can be described only as hypnotic, as reassuringly resolving string phrases lay out the soft, spongy ground over which Hassell drifts and soars. Like any bird on the wind, Hassell knows how and when to conserve his energies; he lies quiet for long stretches, letting reverb carry his melodies. Often, the line between cause and effect is blurred beyond recognition, leaving only a suggestion of breath lingering in the air. The music's gaseous feel serves to highlight more solid forms, like blocky keyboard chords, that sit like squat, rounded ruins poking through the forest canopy.
The title comes from a poem by the 13th century Persian Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi: "Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street/ I took it as a sign to start singing,/ Falling up into the bowl of sky." Some 700 years later, it proves to have been an exceptionally prescient description of Hassell's own malleable approach, melting geometrical structures with blur and bent pitches, turning breath to wind and cheating gravity with every updraft.
But if part of the music's pleasure is its liquid physicality, an equal measure derives from its conceptual base. Formally, it's hard to say exactly what to call this stuff: jazz? Electro-acoustic improv? Ambient dub? All those terms apply in some measure. Rather than a record of single performances, the album is stitched together from fragments of both studio sessions and live recordings-- although "stitched" is an inexact metaphor for joints this smeared and seamless.
As Hassell describes it in his liner notes, "The music presented here is a montage of the last years of concerts and the changing cast of the group I call Maarifa Street-- all musicians who have contributed their personalities-- the way an actor does to a film-- to this living, morphing process that occasionally gets set down as a 'record.'" The slippage in his hyphenated phrases approaches the horizontal rush of the record itself, ideas overlapping, subjects blurring, dependent clauses assuming a commanding role. His touring group Maarifa Street is here a core ensemble including Peter Freeman (bass, guitar, percussion), Jan Bang (live sampling), Rick Cox (guitar), Jamie Muhoberac (keyboard), Kheir-Eddine M'Kachiche (violin), Dino J.A. Deane (live sampling), Eivind Aarset (guitar), Helge Norbakken (drums), and Steve Shehan (percussion), with a few other players occasionally rotating in for a single track. The album's sleevenotes also credit Thomas Newman and Rick Cox for the title track's repeated string phrases, Eivind Aarset for "a beautiful loop" in "Blue Period" and ambient dub producer Pole for a sample used in an unspecified track. (Bringing things full circle, the composer Miles Evans-- son of Miles Davis' collaborator Gil Evans-- is credited "for the atmospherics" in "Abu Gil".) That might look like a lot of names in a row, but I think they bear repeating, for Hassell clearly means to impress upon us that this is a collective effort. Even Arnaud Mercier and his live-sampling software, Cognition, get a mention-- suggesting the degree to which the album's creation was not only a collaborative process, but one where the easy assumptions about chops and genius don't apply. Wrapping your mind around this music is about as easy as grabbing a fistful of river, but that's precisely what makes it so rewarding.


Latest from the hardcore-prog band runs the thematic gamut from the death of rock radio to the work of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell.

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: Tao of the Dead

Tao of the Dead

Tao of the Dead, the seventh LP from embattled hardcore-prog studio junkies ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, is something of a double-concept album, running the thematic gamut from the death of rock radio to the work of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. It is split into two sections-- well, suites-- divided by key. There's a limited edition that comes complete with an extra half hour of music and a graphic novel. There's that cover. Considering, if I told you Tao of the Dead was the band's most stripped-back, least bombastic affair in ages, would you believe me?
Trail of Dead pared down to a four-piece for the 10-day Tao sessions, re-shifting their focus back to guitar and peeling away plenty of the ostentatious orchestral-psych flourishes that’ve bogged them down in the recent past. Save the quarter-hour you'll spend with its five-part closer, Tao of the Dead seems to chop its recent predecessors' average per-song runtime roughly in half. Worlds Apart and especially So Divided-- the nadir of the Trail of Dead catalog-- dragged on with excessive runtimes and twice-too-many choruses and elaborate instrumental scaffolding that, tarp removed, revealed a house of cards.
Rather than blowing out the back end of every song with such a movement, Tao of the Dead maps its grand ambitions over its full length; songs slip by quickly but not without notice, and certain motifs reappear throughout, lending the disc a somewhat hallucinogenic disorientation. Mostly, though, they move; the clipped construction helps, as does the Dark Side of the Moon-style seamlessness between cuts. But the songs themselves-- out front with the melodies, easy on the extraneous racket, alternately lovely and bruising-- are among the most delicate and memorable the band have unleashed. And, smartly, in shifting the focus back to the tunes themselves, they've pushed the grand payoff to the end, once they've really earned it.
Opener "Let's Experiment" gives way to "Pure Radio Cosplay", a sweaty rocker with an almost Stonesy underpinning that laments the death of rock radio, a clever inversion considering it's the band's most radio-ready track in years. Conrad Keely's rough-hewn, gun-to-the-head howl is, like almost everything, pitched down somewhat here on Tao, evincing notes of near-prettiness at times, but he spits out "Cosplay" like he really can't believe something like Nickelback exists while he languishes in semi-obscurity. Yet the sour, why-not-us vibe of World's Apart couldn't be farther from the fantastical worlds Keely touches on here; his lyrics, as they often do, seem dwarfed by the music, but the few he dangles out in front seem to emerge from Keely's full immersion in Tao's mythos. He didn't just namedrop Yes' Relayer and Rush's Hemispheres in pre-interviews because there's little or no pause between songs; each conjures a fully-formed universe between your ears, a quality Tao not only aspires to but frequently achieves.
As "Cosplay" winds down, Keely jumps in with "Wanna do another?," and off they go to "Summer of All Dead Souls", elegantly oscillating between space battle to acoustic plea without overselling either. "Cover the Days Like a Tidal Wave" lays a spoken-word missive over some undulating chords. Despite its title, "The Wasteland" is a lovely, sinewy psych-grunge number, gliding nimbly from mellotron to megawatts. And "Spiral Jetty" feels like a the start of something overcooked that, in the past, Keely and company might’ve drawn out. Here it doesn't hit the two-minute mark, closing out with a bit of dazzling feedback, then easing into the sumptuous "Weight of the Sun (Or the Post-Modern Prometheus)". These aren't epics in miniature, exactly; they move through sections and shift tone gracefully, but individual tracks rarely overstay their welcome, instrumental passages rarely getting more than a few seconds to themselves. When the reprise of "Cosplay" swings around again two-thirds of the way through the record, it's a surprise every time: shouldn't that've felt longer?
Tao, smartly, farms out most of its monolithic hugeness to the record's last two-- well, six-- tracks. But not before "Ebb Away", the loveliest track Trail of Dead have made since "Crowning of a Heart" from The Secret of Elena's Tomb EP nearly a decade ago. A little guitar tumble, remarkable in its understatement, gives way to a crunchy alt-rock chorus that sees Keely letting go of attachment and doing as its title suggests. It'd make for a helluva closer, but Tao of the Dead isn't about to let anybody off that easy. Onward and upward they go into kosmische whirl "The Fairlight Pendant", guitars encircling like three Can records playing at once. It gets to be a little much after a few times through, but I suppose it wouldn't be a Trail of Dead record without some overblown throwback jam, a slack "Pendant" happily picks up. But there's still the little matter of "Strange News From Another Planet", the five-part, key-of-F, half-a-"Family Guy" closing suite. "Strange News" is a bit like the last three Trail of Dead records in microcosm, lots of movement, with a tendency to drift. The track goes from a lurching alt-rock swirl to sampling a documentary about teenage homelessness in Seattle to a Source Tags-style hardcore pummel and back around again. Some will find the grandiose "Strange News" the most thrilling bit of Tao; others may take it as a separate piece entirely, saving it for later or skipping it outright.
So much of Trail of Dead's post-Source Tags & Codes output has felt desperate to recapture that now-classic set’s bluster and heart, only to favor one over the other to the detriment of both. That album’s teetering-on-the-brim mix of beauty and furor seems now like lightning in a bottle, the sort of thing you’d spend your life trying (and failing) to replicate. Tao of the Dead does feel, in its songs and structure alike, like the first post-Source Tags record not cooled in the giant shadow of their decade-old triumph; more patient, more potent, more dynamic, less overloaded, the band deftly charting out their "Flight of the Navigator" death trip, the skewed alt-prog fantasia between their ears come hurtling to life. Set your controls for the heart of your bong.


Simian Mobile Disco have survived past the death of their microgenre ”bloghouse.” Their latest album is a study in dance music rather than a practice, a suite that demands to be heard in one sitting.

Simian Mobile Disco: Welcome To Sideways

Welcome To Sideways

For many groups, it can be just as difficult to grow out of a specific time or place as it is to shed the preconceptions attached to one hit track. Simian Mobile Disco, the production duo of James Ford and Jas Shaw, reached crossover success in the mid-’00s, as part of a brief yet strangely prolific microgenre that has been described as everything from “new rave” to the cringeworthy moniker “bloghouse.” Disappearing pretty much as soon as it was conceived, and despite giving birth to some fairly decent music, bloghouse, like so many frivolous electro genres before it, fell almost immediately out of favor with the tastemakers and cool kids who tend to be the arbiters of such things (consider that the Justice remix of Ford and Shaw’s previous band Simian’s most successful song somehow became the title of Zac Efron’s ridiculously uncool DJ drama We Are Your Friends). As a new decade began and EDM started to slowly encroach on mainstream electronic music, other acts that came up at the same time as SMD, like Justice, Kavinsky, Boys Noize, and Digitalism, began to lose their footing, their more pop-influenced aesthetic pushed out by a harsher, sweatier style of techno.
The success of SMD lies in their singular approach to this problem. Instead of trying to hold onto the style of their defining debut, Attack Decay Sustain Release, and its relatively vocal-heavy, DJ-friendly string of dancefloor bangers, each of their subsequent releases has showcased a different side of their considerable analogue production talents. Their discography runs the gamut of what techno has to offer: Their sophomore release, Temporary Pleasure, harked back to the radio-friendliness of late-’90s big beat, whereas 2014’s Whorl was entirely recorded at an intimate show in Joshua Tree, CA and reworked as an experimental, improvisational piece. As it turns out, SMD’s initial wave of popularity was more of a happy fluke than a measuring stick for the rest of their career.
Welcome to Sideways lies on the clubbier side of SMD’s output, but as more of an instrumental exercise in sustenance and restraint than the needle-drops and fist-pumps that have become synonymous with tech house. The album opens with the simple 4/4 beat of “Happening Distractions,” the building block on which Welcome to Sideways constructs its minimal melodies and heady, spacious sequencing. Good electronic music is almost always a method of addition rather than subtraction, and all of the tracks on the album begin as skeletal imprints of sounds and ideas before they take full form. Other early tracks like “Far Away From a Distance” and “Bubble Has No Answers” mimic the build-ups of SMD’s harder past releases but in a drawn-out and dream-like state—when the beat does drop halfway through these mini-odysseys, it’s muted and disconnected, like hearing a raging party from beneath a tranquil Ibiza swimming pool.
However, this is far from a party record. Clocking in at just over an hour in length, Welcome to Sideways is a study in dance music rather than a practice, one of those albums where skipping to a desired track is useless, as its meant to be experienced as a whole suite. “Remember in Reverse” begins with a soothing loop that’s gradually overcome by stacked glitches and fades until it reaches soaring altitude, and the seven-and-a-half minute closer “Drone Follows Me Everywhere” is SMD at their most oppressive, one pounding beat layered with a lead blanket of dark synths. For an act that has seen it’s biggest dividends producing easily consumable techno-pop, this variation might seem like a risk, and if Ford and Shaw hadn't already built a sturdy reputation as analogue technicians, it would be. But SMD have been doing this for a long time, and know how to toe the thin line between hypnosis and boredom. This album may not be their most compelling release to date, but it remains the work of two uniquely complementary musicians set on an ever-evolving path.


Annie’s first album in about a decade, written and and recorded in a haunted house, collapses decades into an evocative blur.

Dark Hearts

More than a few of us, these days, have been keeping an unusual, deliberate focus on our memories as they form: which ones we'd keep, which ones we’d prefer to destroy, whether any were worth keeping at all, and how they’ll come out decades later. What we might be left with, the research suggests, are “smudged reproductions”: memories recalled through a fogged-over lens, hazier than life. Dark Hearts, Annie’s first album in about a decade, is formed entirely of these smudged reproductions. The Norwegian singer is best known for crafting pop at an arch, ironic remove, but her new album recalls the song that, until now, was her outlier: “Anthonio,” a song conceived as an imagined perfume commercial. Dark Hearts, written with The Sound of Arrows’ Stefan Storm and recorded in a haunted house, is a whole album of this: fever-dream pop.
Opener “In Heaven” sets the mood: a slow-dance ballad heard through a funeral shroud. The low strobing synths and processing on Annie’s voice melt away as the complications disappear from the lyrics, leaving a swooning chorus. It’s ’80s cheese, but it’s cheese with the finest presentation: the ABBA-esque melodies of “Corridors of Time,” the Burt Bacharach sway of “It’s Finally Over,” the last-prom-dance synths throughout, and at the Gouda apex, the entirety of “The Streets Where I Belong.” Over an “Every Breath You Take” guitar chug, Annie recalls an affair, then sweeps away the fourth wall for her dream lover to play guitar hero: “Take it away, Johnny!” Almost every song finds Annie reminiscing about the past, or more precisely, casting her past self in a movie that she can soundtrack. The hometown she recalls isn’t beachy Norwegian Kristiansand but Hollywood at its most seedy-glam. The bad boys she courts are recalled in the softest focus. She recalls hearing songs often—never just a song, but their song.
Decades collapse into an evocative blur. Annie and Storm’s two most cited inspirations are Twin Peaks in 1990 and David Cronenberg’s car-fetish flick Crash in 1996; in between lies the ’92 of “Forever ’92,” a year, Annie’s said, that has stayed with her. Also hanging around are the nuclear fears that preoccupied the 1950s and 1960s, themselves interpreted through the ’80s. The LA-pocalyptic 1988 film Miracle Mile is all over Dark Hearts: it provides the name of one song, the source of another song’s samples, and acts as the spiritual precursor, thanks to its moody soundtrack by Tangerine Dream. There’s also a meta nostalgia at work: taken together, these inspirations sound a lot like the last decade, via the apocalypse-pop of the early 2010s, then via Random Access Memories, Italians Do It Better, and other synthwave soundalikes.
Dark Hearts is best at its most artificial. The moments that aim for “realness” seem less so: the dusty acoustic Americana (Annie-mericana?) outro to “Miracle Mile,” or the title track’s jagged arrangement and stabs at seriousness (“an inquiry into family relations,” she said, stretching just a bit).  Far better is “American Cars,” which has no resemblance to the rugged real things but does recall American car commercials, if scored by Badalamenti and Moroder. In a different song “break free and then never look back” might come off badass, but as delivered in Annie’s sotto voce and surrounded by Storm’s sighing backing vocals, it’s a pure mood. “Mermaid Dreams” is half spoken word and all melancholy. “The Untold Story” is so heavy with “Live to Tell” synths that the production almost fully clouds over Annie's voice telling that story—which, perhaps, is the point.
Toward the end comes the apocalyptica that’s almost expected in 2020: a Skeeter Davis riff in “Countdown to the End of the World,” then that end of the world delivered via “The Bomb,” the closest thing on Dark Hearts to a full-on dance song. But both tracks are less dramatic than hazy; the former clarifies that doomsday is really just “an ordinary day,” and the latter, while full of air horns and trance synths and sampled cries about nuclear war, is more sedate groove than banger. It’s the end of the world, and everyone’s only kinda feeling it. The most telling lyric on Dark Hearts is one of the Miracle Mile samples: “Forget everything you heard, and go back to sleep.” Who among us doesn't prefer dreamland lately?

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The Nashville-based singer-songwriter’s fifth album breaks through to a spare, unvarnished, and occasionally volatile style of indie rock that feels in step with the newly sharpened edge to her lyricism.

History of a Feeling

Madi Diaz spends much of her fifth album, History of a Feeling, spent and screaming, in the throes of a breakup, ready to take up the mantle of your messiest friend. The Nashville-based songwriter is crying on the M train, kicking down her ex’s door, and refusing to let the past go. In her own words, she is “not really looking to get healthy,” and at her angriest, as on opener “Rage,” she has no care for eloquence whatsoever: “Forgive and forget/Fuck you, fuck that.” Never mind the high road: The narrator of these songs is totaled on the low road, a smoking wreck a few miles south of the nearest pit stop.
After a handful of emotionally nondescript early records, History of a Feeling breaks through to a spare, unvarnished, and occasionally volatile style of indie rock that feels in step with the newly sharpened edge to her lyricism. Although inspired by a uniquely chaotic time in its creator’s life—the album chronicles Diaz’s breakup with a partner who also began transitioning around the same time—History of a Feeling is really a record sharply focused on the self, the ways we respond to stress and pain and the passing of time. The breakup acts more as a way for Diaz to map her own emotional landscape: the way she can be cruel and kind in the same breath, her tendency to oscillate from petulant and puerile to mature and measured, her ability to slip from romantically lovelorn to platonically devoted. It’s the rare record that captures how visceral it can feel to work through, and truly understand, your own feelings.
After dropping out of the Berklee College of Music, Diaz spent the better part of the last 15 years in Nashville and Los Angeles, working as a writer and session musician. With credits on records by Kesha, Elle King, and Bleached, among others, Diaz has the resume of an industry lifer: The vast majority of her work, aside from her four prior solo records, has been for soundtracks and commercials, working on material used in everything from Lucifer to Love Island. But where pedigreed songwriters have a tendency to turn out solo records that are mealy, mushy, or just generally overcooked, on History of a Feeling, Diaz steps away from the conventions of hired-gun songwriting with ease.
Her songs often succeed because of how little is done to them. Every single song on History of a Feeling is driven by a strong, indelible vocal melody memorable and polished enough to sit on a far more commercial record. Rather than toning down her natural affinity for melody, Diaz and producer Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Bon Iver) pull everything else back. The vocal melody is often the only moving part in these songs. On “Man in Me,” Diaz’s clarion voice—a titanium box lined with velvet—takes the song to the rafters with just dissonant guitars and gently arpeggiating piano. It’s a song about trying to work through perceived deception, though it’s not played as a tearjerker because Diaz is smart enough to know that the song, and its inhabitants, deserve something more complicated.
The skeletal ballad “Woman in My Heart” doesn’t play Diaz’s high-gloss vocal melody for cheap pathos. Where a lesser artist might go for easy catharsis, Diaz lurches into a bluesy, unrelenting stomp. “Think of Me” works within similar musical boundaries—fragmented guitar chords sit atop the cavernous thud of a bass drum—but Diaz’s delivery conjures a vastly different mood. Her words tumble out like ill-advised texts; you can practically see her typing in a fury, first slowly— “I hope you fuck her with your eyes closed/And think of me”—before letting the rest flood out as one unwieldy phrase: “I hope you fuck her with your eyes closed/Put the shame off with some benzos/Swallow the feeling while you walk home/And think of me always.” In an instant, Diaz’s vitriol is revealed as a plea, a coping mechanism to hide her own lingering feelings.
The tension between melody and arrangement on History of a Feeling occasionally recalls Feist’s last two records, Metals and Pleasure: music that reverse-engineered the outcome of pop music without using its bells and whistles, eliciting feelings from the texture and tone of a sound more than the words. Those albums, like History of a Feeling, are combustible and earthy, made all the more functional for how unprocessed and unadorned they sounded. There’s proof that these songs would work with shinier production: “Resentment,” the centerpiece of History of a Feeling, first appeared on Kesha’s 2020 record High Road. That version used tricks of the trade—gossamer synths, a belting vocal performance, occasional shifts from second-person to first-person—to create emotional weight. And yet Diaz’s version, stripped-back and relatively at ease, hits so much harder. She makes even the most immovable feelings open up with just a little time and space.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.