Where Culture was an event, its follow-up feels more like an occurrence, the quality of its songs handicapped by an album that plays like a long and formless grab bag.

Culture II

Calling your album Culture is a move so ballsy it feels like trolling if you can’t back it up. And last year, the Migos did: Culture was the resilient Atlanta trio’s best album, but it also felt like a moment, arriving right at the crest of a monster wave of hard-fought acclaim. A lot of that had to do with “Bad and Boujee,” the group’s first No. 1 single, but what made Culture exceptional was more than just chart positioning. Suave and streamlined, it was proof that the Migos were capable of more than they’d been given credit for circa “Versace”—a real album’s album that elevated the group’s style without sacrificing what made people love them to begin with. They’d officially infiltrated the mainstream without going pop; instead, pop had gone Migos. All of it just felt right.
The Migos’ best quality is their ability to present truly virtuosic rapping in ways that are commercially viable, and it would be ridiculous to suggest that Offset, Takeoff, and Quavo’s talents have diminished since Culture’s release. But if Culture marked the very peak of the Migos’ triumphal arc, buoyed by a swell of goodwill, Culture II is simply… here, arriving in the wake of a handful of solid but inessential singles that hardly compare to the zeitgeist-dominating force that was “Bad and Boujee” or “T-Shirt.” It’s hard to say what Culture II adds to our appreciation of Migos in ways that don’t feel redundant: Yes, the trio is still incredibly successful, still ridiculously wealthy, and hey, one of them’s engaged to Cardi B! Where Culture was an event, its sequel feels more like an occurrence, the quality of its songs handicapped by the artlessness of its presentation.
The first thing to note about Culture II for anyone who may have made non-Migos-related plans for their leisure time is that it is long—dauntingly so. Its 24 tracks range across one hour and 45 minutes of digital space. Maybe the Migos just had that many ideas they simply could not deign to edit down. But it seems more likely to be another attempt to game the current Billboard and RIAA rules, in which 1,500 individual song streams count towards one full album sale (thus, the more songs on an album, the higher and faster it charts). It’s a familiar play from Migos’ label, whose “Quality Control” moniker feels fairly ironic here; last month, they released the 30-track Control the Streets Vol. 1 compilation, 22 of which featured Migos or some combination of its individual members. And currently pinned to the top of Migos’ Spotify page under “Artist’s Pick” is not Culture II, the album, but a 72-track playlist that repeats the album’s tracklist three times in a row. It’s not like this kind of craven opportunism is a recent development in the music industry, but it feels pretty dark all the same.
All this power-grabbing does a significant disservice to the songs here, most of which are good to great. In fact, there are two strong projects to be culled from Culture II’s sprawl: an album-quality selection of slick, playful nudges in experimental but chart-friendly directions on one side, and a mixtape’s worth of expensive updates to the O.G. Migos sound on the other. The lonesome sax solos wafting through “Too Playa” pair elegantly with the muted horns on Kanye co-production “BBO (Bad Bitches Only)” and the loungy “Made Men,” on which Takeoff’s adlibs feel like the intimate asides of a ’70s soul singer. On “Stir Fry,” the trio step outside their comfort zone with a Pharrell beat originally intended for T.I. circa 2008. “On the nose” doesn’t begin to describe “Narcos,” with its Latin guitar, “arriba!” ad-libs, and the best-worst drug lord accent attempt since “Tony Montana”—but if that’s not exactly what you come to a Migos song for, then Offset’s standing ovation-worthy second verse is. “I ain’t really with the razzle-dazzle/Knock him off and then I throw him off the boat paddle/Go to Tijuana, put the kilo on the saddle,” he raps with stunning precision, a reminder of why it’s worth it to trek through nearly two hours of material.
This isn’t to say that the “mixtape half” of Culture II is underwhelming, exactly; there’s a lot that works here, from the cosmic Ren Faire chords of “Supastars” (though it’s a weird choice for the album’s third single) to the haunted “Crown the Kings,” whose waterlogged vocal samples evoke a trapped-out Kate Bush. But the farther you journey into the album’s increasingly sleepy second half, the harder it is for these songs to hold your attention for much longer than a verse and a couple hooks. Even the song structures themselves start to feel formulaic: each of the album’s first nine songs opens with a Quavo hook leading into a Quavo verse, to the point where it’s often a full two minutes in before we hear anything beyond ad-libs from his compadres. “Too Much Jewelry” finally breaks free from the repetitive template: a Zaytoven-produced Gucci Mane homage and a showcase for Takeoff, who regularly steals the spotlight on Culture II even when relegated to a song’s final verse. The youngest Migo’s turn on the sultry bounce of “Gang Gang” is the album’s biggest surprise, his gravelly baritone holding down the melodic duties usually relegated to Quavo with unexpected grace.
It’s still a joy to hear the Migos rap, which is why it’s especially depressing that Culture II ultimately feels like a drag—a formless grab bag compiled without much care. Perhaps this is a hopelessly old-fashioned way of thinking; after all, there’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a playlist of our own, trimming and rearranging the album’s 24 tracks exactly to our satisfaction. And frankly, given the choice between pleasing critics with concise, thoughtful works like Culture or appeasing every fractured sector of one’s fanbase while boosting sales numbers—well, it’s not exactly a tough call. Maybe the culture is already too deep into its “album as outlet mall” moment—an endless, unedited data dump ready to be whatever we want it to be. But culture and art do not always share the same priorities.


Amsterdam DJ Young Marco Sterk mixes Buchla experiments with Nintendo-derived dance in his ambitious new mix.

Selectors 002

In just a few years, Amsterdam’s Dekmantel label has grown from throwing dance parties for 200 of their closest friends into a powerhouse label and a stellar annual festival. They recently leapt continents to throw their first festival in São Paulo and last year, they spun off another mini-festival, Dekmantel Selectors, staged on a coastal resort in Croatia. As the name suggests, the latter festival emphasizes DJs with an ear bent towards the obscure and unheard. For those who didn’t snap up tickets, as accompaniment, the label released compilations of such curious tunes from their favorite DJs. The first release in the series featured Motor City Drum Ensemble’s Danilo Plessow balancing transporter-beam house, loft disco rarities, and raucous gospel-funk.
For the second entry in the series, Amsterdam’s Young Marco takes a decidedly different path. Marco’s mix hunts for tracks from outcasts and outliers, suggesting a bizarro world of not-dance dance music. Across 10 tracks, he finds Buchla experiments and a track made entirely from the old Nintendo game Mario Paint, cringeworthy Eighties Dutch rap, and a dewy jazz-funk delicacy from the lone legendary name on the comp, Larry Heard.
Along the way, Marco pays plenty of cheeky tributes to his Dutch roots. In the wake of Sugarhill Gang’s chart success in the Netherlands, Jolyon Grevelt earned the humble title of being the first Dutch rapper, making a record as Danny Boy at the age of 13 in 1980. So leave it to Marco to find an even weirder B-side from the lad with which to open Selectors 002. Its rubber band-lite funk gets intercut every few minutes by cat meows, wikki-wikki scratches, vocoder chants, and what Jared Leto’s Joker sneezing might sound like run through an Echoplex. Yet somehow, it all adds up into something that just escapes being an unlistenable oddity.
While EBM became a worldwide force thanks to the likes of Front 242 and Ministry, Sterk finds late ’80’s Dutch examples that are peculiar mutations of that relentless electronic sound. Gerrit Hoekema’s “Televisiewereld” sounds as whimsical as Aphex Twin’s “Fingerbib,” with its circuitry curling up at the edges of the track. The Force Dimension’s 1989 track “200 FA” trades the genre’s distorted drum programming for what could be ethnographic tribal chants.
To Marco’s ear, there’s a connection to be made between the extremely rare and expensive Buchla Music Easel and a video game console. He digs up a 1981 track from Philly group Ghostwriters (an early duo featuring analog synth legend Charles Cohen) that deploys the Buchla on the joyous bubbling of “Swizzle” and then, a few tracks later, slots in Ray Tracing’s “Mariopaint,” an anthemic bit of digital tiddlywinks from the mid-‘90s. That entry comes from Irdial Disc’s peculiar ’95 comp that had as its only piece of gear the Nintendo Super Famicom, running the Mario Paint music sequencer as its only bit of software. Neither selection would scream “peak hour,” but in Marco’s hands, his gifts as a “selector” become clear. Like a packet of Sea-Monkeys, Marco knows just when to sprinkle in seemingly un-danceable tracks so as to make them wiggle to life in just the right setting.


After penning hits for Selena Gomez and Hailee Steinfeld, Julia Michaels brings her chart-topping songwriter chops to her solo career. The songs are refreshingly unique but their impact is varied.

Nervous System

Last April marked the first time since 1984 that no women landed a solo single in Billboard’s Top 10. Most of the divas of just a few years ago have faded or cultivated distribution channels outside radio airplay. When women crack the upper reaches of the charts nowadays, it’s almost always via second (or no) billing on a star producer’s track: Zedd and Alessia Cara’s “Stay,” Kygo and Selena Gomez’s “It Ain’t Me,” DJ Khaled, Bryson Tiller, and Rihanna’s “Wild Thoughts.” The improbable exception? Songwriter-turned-singer Julia Michaels, whose “Issues” bubbled almost all the way up to the Top 10 in a sea of dudes.
Michaels wasn’t exactly a newcomer, having written several pop tracks like Hailee Steinfeld’s self-love-via-”self-love” anthem “Love Myself” and most of Selena Gomez’s recent work, like the teasing “Hands to Myself” and crushed-out Talking Heads flip “Bad Liar.” What’s remarkable about this isn’t that Julia Michaels has successfully crossed over from behind-the-scenes songwriting; artists have managed this since Motown and probably before, and Michaels had all the support majors can buy. What’s remarkable in 2017 is that she did it without a decades-long label tenure like Sia, a high-profile vocal feature like Halsey (unless you count an uncredited Cash Cash spot, which you shouldn’t), or a pile of gimmicks like Meghan Trainor, whose early singles were practically storyboards for future thinkpieces. And what’s especially remarkable is that the singles Michaels released have bucked all the radio trends except the ones she started. They’re sparse in sound, confessional in story, and barely removed from their acoustic beginnings. They are, for lack of a better term, singer-songwritery.
This isn’t uncommon. Almost every pop writer, from Bonnie McKee to Stefani Germanotta, begins as a traditional acoustic artist, the kind who 20 years ago might have played Lilith Fair. Michaels is no exception; her influences include the unquestionably legit likes of Laura Marling and Fiona Apple, and pop-rock tracks like “Next to You” could easily have fit in on the soundtracks to “Dawson’s Creek” or even “Buffy.” But today, while male singer-songwriters have no problem charting (or, in Ed Sheeran’s case, being four-fifths of the charts in the UK) female singer-songwriters struggle, and adapt. What might have been released as an acoustic ballad 20 years ago is more likely today to be absorbed into an EDM topline—think David Guetta ft. Michelle Branch.
Michaels’ early career whiplashed between both poles. On the one hand, an album of sedate piano ballads she likened to a bunch of Australian singer-songwriters (”Issues” was particularly well-received Down Under, where she’s now touring). On the other, the “Austin & Ally” theme and a breathtakingly cynical cut-rate ”Tik Tok” for “The Hills.” But when launching a solo career, like launching a brand, lack of cohesiveness is death. So on Nervous System, Michaels’ first EP with Republic, she blends the two with promising results.
Besides “Issues,” produced by former Dr. Luke protege Benny Blanco, Nervous System is largely the work of Michaels’ core collaborators: co-writer Justin Tranter and producers Mattman & Robin (Carly Rae Jepsen, Tove Lo). Michaels’ influences are in there if you listen—in particular, the pizzicato strings of “Issues” and jaunty dysfunction of “Just Do It” suggest someone who’s spent a good year or two with Regina Spektor’s Begin to Hope. Likewise, “Don’t Wanna Think”—her take on Rihanna’s “Higher” with furiously played piano and self-referential lyrics—is songwriter’s songwriting: an acoustic portfolio piece. But most of Nervous System is far less polished, both as songwriting and as pop songs: production restrained where it might have been blown out, hooks delivered in low-key sotto voce, and lyrics first-thought-best-thought with words spilling out of the confines of their choruses and snapping at the ends of their verses. At best, the effect is disarmingly plainspoken when her asides and quirks are left in rather than sanded off. At worst, it leans a bit too much into the accept-me-at-my-worst confessional that’s become (fairly or not) singer-songwriter cliche: tell rather than show. Parts of “Issues” and “Worst in Me” might as well be SongMeanings explanations of “Fast As You Can.”
A current of bleakness has run through pop radio for some time now, and Michaels shares her part; singles like her “Surrender,” Gomez’s “Good For You” and Norwegian newcomer Astrid S.’s “Hurt So Good” are shot through with despair, sometimes intentional, sometimes not. But while those singles certainly achieve the desired effect, Tranter and Michaels are best when goofing around—like on the deeply dumb, kinda fun “Pink.” “There’s no innuendos, it’s exactly what you think,” Michaels whispers after a series of innuendos, with the deadpan mock-seriousness of someone who’s explained “Love Myself” to the press one too many times. The punchline? A chorus of scuzzy, breathy electro, but played more as goofy than seductive.
”Uh Huh” takes a standard campfire-strum of a pop ballad and dents up all the edges: verses strewn with dissonant plinks at the too-high end of the piano, voice contorted into a vocoder glissando, a chorus full of gleeful yelps, and about four lines’ worth of lyrics packed into where the hook would go. It’s perhaps the most shambolic song released to pop radio in 2017, and sounds nothing like its company—but its form perfectly matches its crushed-out, breathless subject matter. It doesn’t play like a hit at all, but neither did “Issues.” The songwriters who have succeeded tend not to be those who’ve tried to replicate the hyper-polished, machine-slick pop material of their clients but those who revel in unapologetic, relatable messiness, whether it be Sia’s cultivated camera-shyness and deeply uncool yet lucrative Clarissa Pinkola Estes flavor of self-help or Kesha’s scrappy party-runoff aesthetic—glitter, trash-bags, and human teeth—that kept devotees around well after the last drops left her bottle of Jack. Michaels, with her modest persona and writing style she likens to therapy, best fits this company, a promising sign for the future.


The London-based ensemble taps Hot Chip to flesh out the dimensions of its cosmopolitan blend of West African funk and electronic bass music.

Electricity

One of the oldest drums that we know much about is the West African djembe. It was used for celebration and communication, and its voice carried beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. A large goblet carved from a single piece of wood with a goatskin roped over the head, it produced three distinct sounds in swinging patterns: a low bass, a mid-range tone, and a high, accented slap. The way it anticipated the essential elements of electronic dance and pop music—kick, snare, hat—is as plain as the djembe’s thousand-year westward journey is staggering to contemplate.
The indomitable Ibibio Sound Machine are driven by an instinct for music as humanity’s means of talking to itself across vast times and spaces. A large international ensemble based in London, they blend West African funk and electronic bass music with cosmopolitan aplomb. Their songs can be light and teasing or clashing and commanding, but they always seek the ur-rhythm moving across the ages, finding it all over the place: in the bright, buoyant guitars and horns of the highlife music that became a Nigerian pop sensation in the 1960s; in the blazing Afrobeat heralded by Fela Kuti in the ’70s; in the global disco and R&B divas of the ’80s and their leftfield electro and no-wave foils; in the drum’n’bass of the ’90s and the indie house of the new millennium.
Though Ibibio Sound Machine seem to compress the distances between traditional and modern sounds, each of their four albums has generally been more electronic than the last, a drift that sharply peaks on Electricity. Not only is it their first record working substantially with outside producers, it bears the highly recognizable stamp of Hot Chip, who they brought on board after bonding over Francis Bebey and Giorgio Moroder. Though the album closes with a euphoric synth-pop tribute to the water drumming of Cameroon’s Baka people on “Freedom,” it opens with a Teflon thump and an icicle arpeggio on “Protection From Evil,” accurately announcing itself as Ibibio Sound Machine going all in on sleek, danceable electronic pop.
The holographic filter sweeps and webs of synth might suppress the warm, jazzy qualities of the band’s prior records, but they also heighten the impervious finesse and ferocity of Eno Williams. Her torrents of words deftly flip between English—“big, big grammar,” as she wryly has it on the title track, where a spacious groove seems heated and cooled by its own subterranean power source—and the Ibibio language of southern Nigeria, where she’s from. On “Protection From Evil,” she peppers drops ripped from Vitalic’s French touch heyday with percussive staccato syllables, giving full range to her unique gift for sharpening language to a piercing point.
Such restive, stimulating beginnings give way to a dazzling middle run that begins with “Afo Ken Doko Mien,” a warm bath of rippling song with perfectly chorused vocal samples. It continues through the single “All That You Want,” where Williams manages to wrest control of the Hot Chippiest music imaginable (you know it: a chubby bass bouncing on a candied funk trampoline) through sheer vocal force. And “Wanna See Your Face Again,” the absolute standout, is not the only time Electricity evokes the steely deep-house elegance of Tracey Thorn, Ibibio Sound Machine’s Merge Records labelmate. The contemporary energies thrumming along the music’s surface highlight the deep connections the record effortlessly draws—a series of starbursts connecting William Onyeabor to Gloria Estefan to Loose Joints to Grace Jones to a beat that picked up before recorded history begins, somewhere in West Africa, and never stopped.


Revisiting his Bobby Digital character in the soundtrack to a forthcoming graphic novel, the typically freewheeling Wu-Tang rapper-producer sounds frustratingly restrained.

RZA: RZA Presents: Bobby Digital and the Pit of Snakes

As a rapper, RZA has always been most effective as an uncontrollable ambassador from a place few humans would dare venture. His voice is the first you hear on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the command to “BRING THE MOTHERFUCKING RUCKUS” seemingly a message sent straight from hell; when he barrels onto Ghostface’s “Stroke of Death” (“SMACK THE JAIL BAILS BONDSMAN, STRENGTH OF 18 BRONZEMEN”), you’re left wondering whether terrestrial prisons could even hold him. From behind the boards, the Staten Island icon’s production work can be patient, even subtle. But on the mic he’s usually an unrepentant maximalist. This isn’t limited to group efforts or guest spots: His solo debut, 1998’s Bobby Digital in Stereo, imagined RZA as the titular antihero, riding around in a bulletproof “Digimobile” with guns of cartoon dimensions, nothing but an id to control them.
That character is the subject of the Abbot’s latest project, RZA Presents: Bobby Digital and the Pit of Snakes, the eight-song soundtrack to a forthcoming graphic novel. But while the title conjures some of the most delightfully harebrained moments of RZA’s catalog, on record he sounds frustratingly restrained: The songs’ over-considered structures leave just enough room for raps that too often stick dutifully to the expected plot beats. Where the best RZA songs messily enjamb his lust, wisdom, and hubris into one another, overlapping them in a way that makes a mockery of familiar syntax, here those elements are meted out so sparingly that they’re almost uniformly dull. That hesitancy, combined with some of his blandest indie-rock dabbling, makes for a record that’s less than the sum of its already spare parts. As RZA raps of Bobby Digital in Pit of Snakes’ first verse, in what could just as easily be a reflection on his own work: “This is just a fraction of his abilities.”
That opening song, “Under the Sun,” features some of the record’s strongest writing—the second verse builds momentum almost entirely through its phonetics; we know it’s growing more urgent when we hear Bobby “attack the shack with a pack of black German Shepherds”—but also typifies the ways the songs undercut their own momentum. The two verses are separated by nearly a minute and a half of mawkish guest vocals nearly indistinguishable from the ones that derail “Trouble Shooting” and “Cowards.” “We see the world grow, change, and decay,” Cody Nierstedt sings on “Under the Sun”; the line’s literality is an insult to a track that casually notes a cyborg’s penchant for slap-boxing kangaroos.
It’s not difficult to imagine a more compellingly fleshed-out version of Pit of Snakes, where the tension hinted at here between the rugged natural world and our safe digital cocoons is explored in more provocative ways. On “Something Going On,” RZA poses a question—“Would you rather have a smartphone, or a smart child?”—that would, in another context, be the beginning of an argument that grew far more absurd; here it is deployed like the punchline to a rote stand-up bit. Each of Bobby Digital’s minor emotional crises is cataloged with a heavy, deliberate hand (“The sky may fall and worlds may shake/Our bond of friendships, I’ll never break”). RZA has often, at least in the 21st century, been criticized as overindulgent, someone who needs to be reined in and edited. Bobby Digital and the Pit of Snakes is just the opposite: a minor record that would be far more engaging if it better embodied its author’s eccentricity.


The ambient power trio condenses a hard drive’s worth of marathon jam sessions into a succinct hour of cosmic minimalism and wooly post-rock.

Cowboy Sadness: Selected Jambient Works Vol. 1

Selected Jambient Works Vol. 1

Selected Jambient Works Vol. 1 opens with the slow grace of a sunrise. A low drone shimmers into view, joined moments later by the reedy hum of a Farfisa. Synth chords billow, tinged with rich delay, pushing glittering harmonics to the edges of the stereo field. After four delicate minutes, the elements dissipate like clouds and you realize that vast expanse of tone has captured your attention without overtly commanding it. Over the next nine songs, the trio of David Moore (Bing & Ruth), Peter Silberman (The Antlers), and Nicholas Principe (Port St. Willow) repeat and refine that slow-blooming approach, composing enormous, enveloping ambient panoramas that take up the entire screen.
The journey to Selected Jambient Works began in 2011, when a mutual friend introduced Moore to fellow Brooklyn musicians Silberman and Principe. All three trafficked in similar territory, occupying various overlapping points of the ambient, drone, and pop Venn diagram. They began to develop a shared musical vocabulary, recording marathon jam sessions on a handheld recorder. By 2017, all three had decamped to upstate New York, trading their cramped outer-borough neighborhoods for the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains. With Principe at the helm, the trio took the 20-plus hours of recordings they’d made between 2017 and 2021 and whittled them into a succinct 58 minutes of cosmic minimalism and wooly post-rock.
These songs are huge, to be sure—Principe and Silberman’s synthesizers stretch into infinity and Moore’s transistor organs shudder like tuning forks in a silo—but the spaciousness comes from the deft restraint each musician exhibits. The band makes ample use of reverb and echo but never relies on them as a crutch to create its expansive sound. “Billings, MT” builds into a velvety groove with Principe's brushed drums galloping next to Moore’s cyclical Rhodes figure, a gauzy hum wafting in the background. Two thirds of the way through, Silberman introduces a sparse baritone guitar line, suddenly giving the track new depth. “Ten Paces” has a similar blueprint, with Silberman’s spare guitar and Moore’s Rhodes drifting through a foggy synth chord, dancing around Principe’s steady but unpredictable drum hits.
Cowboy Sadness’ songs can initially feel airy and languid; their unhurried tempos and hazy atmosphere have a calm, almost heavy-lidded vibe. Yet lurking beneath the bucolic air is a slightly ominous quality, a shadow that doesn’t move with the sun. Synthetic strings slowly cocoon around the distorted melody at the center of “Full Mammoth” but allow spiky textures to peek out from the silken webbing. An anxious tremolo runs through “Starcharger,” speeding as the song presses on, gathering up blistering noise like a blade running over gravel. The band describes Selected Jambient Works as “the sound of the desert,” and the press materials mention patches of succulents, towering plateaus, and red-orange sunlight—all suitable reference points for the sweeping music found on the record. What makes Selected Jambient Works so remarkable, however, isn’t its ability to conjure images of the endless West, but rather the existential melancholy it conveys. The musicians of Cowboy Sadness understand that to grasp enormity, you must first acknowledge the smallest details; the farther you can see, they seem to suggest, the smaller you’ll feel.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Cake’s second album, a wry, earnest, and oft-misunderstood outlier of ’90s alt-rock.

Fashion Nugget

In the fall of 1996, as Cake’s offbeat single “The Distance” climbed the charts and became the most-requested song on alternative radio stations nationwide, frontman John McCrea compared his band’s ascent to being at the top of a toboggan run. “There’s an out-of-control feeling,” McCrea told a reporter for his local paper, “but there’s also a typical feeling. Because the toboggan ride is a set course that many people have gone down, you feel like you’re part of this grand rock cliche.” Had you never heard the band Cake, or laid eyes upon its white-bread mouthpiece, you might imagine these words coasting on a curl of cigarette smoke, the speaker obscured by dirty hair and sunglasses. But with his goatee and penchant for casual hats—trucker, bucket—this was not McCrea.
Amid the heavy-hitting, guitar-forward noise of the mid-1990s, which McCrea frequently referred to as, “that Viking alternative rock,” Cake were pragmatists, constructing wry but earnest pop music in the machismo era of post-grunge and nu metal. They could find artistry in a strip mall, or rush hour congestion on the I-5. Surely, they were being ironic.
Cake formed in the early ’90s under unremarkable circumstances, in an unremarkable place. McCrea, a few years older than his bandmates, had tried his hand at the L.A. songwriter circuit. But his eccentricities did not package well within prevailing butt-rock. So he returned to his home of Sacramento, and like any shrewd musician, poached players from other groups in town. Guitarist Greg Brown, bassist Victor Damiani, and drummer Todd Roper were regulars on the Sacramento bar-band scene. Trumpeter Vincent DiFiore was playing in a local jazz outfit.
Like all of their subsequent records, Cake self-produced their 1994 debut, Motorcade of Generosity. The album was “lo-fi” by necessity. Its songs were warm and close, and listening to it can feel like trailing notes down a stairwell into some subterranean tavern, where a cantina band plays over clinking pints. For all of its quotations from honky tonk and ranchera music, not to mention the slow-scorching “Jolene,” it was the snide “Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle” that primed Cake for college radio takeover. Its lyrics skewered rich rockers who were more interested in merch than the actual music. The song quickly became a fan favorite, perhaps because it allowed listeners to feel superior to their peers. It also cursed McCrea as the detached commentator—or worse, a self-righteous ass. In the opening verses of “Rock ‘n’ roll Lifestyle,” he sings:
Well your CD collection
Looks shiny and costly
How much did you pay for your bad Moto Guzzi
And how much did you spend
On your black leather jacket
Is it you or your parents in this income tax bracket?
Now tickets to concerts
And drinking at clubs
Sometimes for music that you haven’t even heard of
And how much did you pay for your rock’n’roll T-shirt
That proves you were there, that you heard of them first?
Over a decade after the song’s release, McCrea sat down with Terry Gross to discuss its legacy. He explained that he wasn’t interested in roasting posers so much as examining “the mercurially changing fashions of music.” He was mesmerized by the pop culture waste cycle, and how “music just got discarded every few months; consumed, discarded, consumed, discarded.” “Just thinking about all of these leather jackets that were no longer in style, that were just rotting in a landfill,” McCrea continued. “I like the idea of things being out of style, believe it or not, especially from an environmental perspective.” A closer assessment of the band’s catalog—tracks like “No Phone” and “Stickshifts and Safetybelts”—reveal McCrea’s fascination with the obsolete. But Cake has rarely been afforded the benefit of the doubt. Instead, they were just tossed off as unfashionable.
Maybe it’s because they were pointedly out of style. McCrea often referred to their work as “music product,” and was transparent about the band’s calculated approach to songwriting. Even their album covers stank of branding—the simple, high-contrast designs recalled the advertising boom of the ’50s and ’60s. “We are in a service occupation,” McCrea told The San Francisco Examiner, three months after releasing Cake’s second album, Fashion Nugget. “Our job is not glamorous. We supply the soundtrack for your drive to work.” Brown admitted a dirtier secret: “What I would really like to accomplish is making a living—having dental and health insurance would be nice.” Nothing could be more radical in the mid-’90s, when conservative politicians were holding congressional hearings to determine the effects of violent rock lyrics on adolescents. Yet the band’s approach to music-making was economical, not cynical. Cake cut their teeth in local bars, where performers are at best cause for dancing, at worst something to shout over. Implementing different genres was not only the result of eclectic tastes, it was a bid for survival. A wider net yields a more plentiful catch.
Fashion Nugget is like an oversized diner menu. There is something for most people: mariachi, jazz, tango, funk, country—none of which were cool at the time. Nor was stewing disparate genres in the same pot. It was as though Cake could see into the post-genre future, the inevitable outcome of the internet and our heightened access to everything. Among its 14 songs are three covers, the tango standard “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps,” made famous by Doris Day, Willie Nelson’s “Sad Songs and Waltzes,” and of course, their widely misinterpreted take on Gloria Gaynor’s disco juggernaut “I Will Survive.” After the mild success of “Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle,” Cake spent most of the ’90s asserting their sincerity. “I Will Survive” was not a joke, but an honest tribute.
McCrea must have known that his voice, blunt as a rolling pin, was responsible for such misconceptions. His only real “crime” was sounding so ordinary. Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” was an anthem of Black female empowerment, later adopted by the gay liberation movement amid the AIDS crisis. Cake’s version, coasting on palm-muted guitar and Damiani’s dexterous bassline, doesn’t so much wither as shrink. When Gross interviewed McCrea in 2005, she hedged: “When you sing it…it’s like a white guy who’s been hurt and he’s taken it.” McCrea admitted that his point of view made the song much angrier (“I should have changed my fucking lock”). In reality, McCrea’s character seemed pathetic—a man who masks his pain with pent-up fury. Even the music video depicts him as a woeful figure of piddling authority: a meter maid exacting revenge on the neighborhood.
McCrea’s drawl was more like a shield that protected the deadpan poet. How bold to kick off a record with these lines: “We know of an ancient radiation/That haunts dismembered constellations.” How perceptive to recognize the pure musicality of a name like “Daria.” On the mid-tempo “Italian Leather Sofa,” McCrea takes aim at a couple above his station: “They laugh, they make money,” he sings, before reducing them to their shining possessions: “He’s got a gold watch/She’s got a silk dress and healthy breasts/That bounce on his Italian leather sofa.” McCrea is a fine and streamlined lyricist, the kind that can pen an insult capable of attracting its target.
As Cake’s principal songwriter, McCrea often explored the fragile male ego. On the country ballad “She’ll Come Back to Me,” McCrea waits for the return of his estranged lover, ignoring mounting evidence that she is gone for good. On “Friend Is a Four Letter Word,” he piles his plate with self-delusion: “When I go fishing for the words/I am wishing you would say to me/I’m really only praying/That the words you’ll soon be saying/Might betray the way you feel about me.” There is a degree of inadequacy plaguing McCrea’s characters, particularly on “Open Book” and the brief, freakish “Race Car Ya-Yas.” The former describes a woman as a complex tome, stuck with a man who doesn’t “know which page to turn to.” The latter compares inane fuzzy dice to testicles strung “proudly” from rearview mirrors. McCrea swiftly reduces masculinity to something plush and pointless—a testament to his efficiency as a writer. The way he softens the word “fuzzy,” with an extended “ffff” over Brown’s needling guitar, is a small morsel of his wit.
Because Cake dealt in the aesthetics of normalcy, because they were decidedly uncool, they were frequently miscategorized or dismissed as sarcastic. Despite their success (Fashion Nugget would eventually go platinum), concertgoers and booking agents did not know what to do with them. They were put on bills with Korn, the Meters, Deftones, and Al Green. They inexplicably drew screaming teenage crowds, the kind prone to bra-flashing. Cake were compared to Beck and Weezer and the inferior Cracker. But aside from McCrea’s conversational delivery and his status as a “self-aware, medium-funky white guy,” as journalist Rob Harvilla recently put it, there wasn’t anything that sounded quite like Cake at the end of the century. What other band honored the trumpet like a lead guitar, or so effortlessly incorporated the vibraslap?
Only one Cake cut, 1998’s “Never There,” has managed to slip into the Billboard Hot 100. And yet their quintessential song is, undeniably, Fashion Nugget’s lead single “The Distance.” It was the rare track written by Brown, though McCrea insisted on arranging it. But following its breakout success, McCrea seemed to treat “The Distance” as an outlier in their catalog. “White males demand a certain amount of that power-Viking feel,” he told Billboard, trying to explain the single’s appeal. “People respond to that, because deep down inside, we all want to be inside a tall truck and roll over people’s heads.” It seemed like a dig at Brown, who, along with Damiani, left Cake before tracking began on the next album. There was word of inner-band conflict, of hours-long lobbying over whether or not to use reverb on one segment of a bridge. In the summer of ’97, Cake cut short a tour after McCrea collapsed due to “nervous exhaustion.” As the everyman of alternative rock, he was liable to suffer like your average guy.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.


Felix Walworth’s third album of skewed indie pop is solitary but inviting, setting songs about the pitfalls of intimacy against the most accessible sonics of their career.

Told Slant: Point the Flashlight and Walk

Point the Flashlight and Walk

The last time Felix Walworth released an album as Told Slant, they had company. Walworth was a founding member of the Epoch, an indie-pop musical collective that imploded toward the end of 2016; in the wake of that dissolution, Walworth made Point the Flashlight and Walk, the third Told Slant album, almost entirely alone. Compared to 2012’s Still Water and 2016’s Going By, which took inspiration from the screamed laments of early Modest Mouse, Point the Flashlight and Walk is brighter and more polished—a pop album, by Told Slant’s standards—but its themes are even heavier than usual. Its 12 songs are like a series of anecdotes, if not outright character studies, interrogating loneliness and unrequited emotions, offering a sense of communities lost and a person unsure how to define themselves again. The contrasting sound and subject matter make Point the Flashlight and Walk Told Slant’s most accessible record, but also their most intense.
Walworth is one of many queer people to find solace in Bruce Springsteen, and on Point the Flashlight and Walk, they took direct influence from 1982’s Nebraska, the rock icon’s most desolate and solitary album. The songs here are largely about characters who depend on and are devoted to each other, even if it means destruction for everyone involved. Many of the album’s themes are corollaries; the pointlessness of perfunctory relationships, the benefits of solitude, the dread of being stuck in that solitude. On “Flashlight On,” neither party can meet the others’ needs: “I would turn into you and you would turn into me/two empty things exchanging emptiness.” The narrator of “No Backpack” recognizes a similar destructive codependency, but opts to trudge on anyway: “I don’t want to run from you/When there’s no one you’re afraid to lose/You lose.” Walworth’s refrains often involve similar repetitions of terms, resembling intrusive thoughts more than conventional choruses.
In tweaking their own formula, Walworth also finds clever new tricks. “Moon and Sea” comes a little too close to early Death Cab for Cutie, but for a listener raised on that sort of bookish indie pop, the song’s uncanny familiarity dovetails neatly with its observations about refusing to leave the comforts of home. “From the Roofbeams” spins an elaborate aural metaphor based on phasing, a concept in audio engineering and music theory involving overlapping patterns that fall out of sync with each other. “Talking out of phase with you,” Walworth sings, followed by an incantation of “I can” that falls out of phase with itself, eventually becoming “Can I,” then “Can I stop loving you?”
That sense of playfulness—albeit in the service of serious topics—is new for Told Slant, and a part of the reason why Point the Flashlight and Walk can seem joyful despite its darkness. For an album about codependency and instability, this is sonically the most stable of any Told Slant release. It’s still raw, occasionally out of tune and time, but Walworth is a more confident singer, and the mix sparkles in a way that Told Slant didn’t before. “Bullfrog Choirs” is an outright pop song, its synths and pianos resembling AOR classics like “Solsbury Hill.” But Walworth and mix engineer KT Pipal stop short of full-on ’80s worship, never losing the project’s signature intimacy. Compared to the first two albums, which might as well have been recorded in the white voids of their cover art, these sounds have depth and dimensionality. If the previous records felt like eavesdropping on something private, Point the Flashlight and Walk sees you and invites you in.
Told Slant’s music, from the beginning, expressed a yearning for that kind of connection. On “Tsunami,” from Going By, Walworth hoped for anyone to “Tuck my hair behind my ears and say/Isn’t this silly, and aren’t you beautiful?” Various Epoch members grant Walworth’s wish on the recording, repeating the refrain back to them one by one. But intimacy doesn't solve underlying problems in oneself or a relationship. As Walworth put it in a Talkhouse post about Point the Flashlight and Walk, referencing Springsteen: “What happens after Mary takes that long walk? What if nothing changes, and it’s our own fault?” The album's characters are equally alienated together or apart, in stasis or movement. Nothing changes, but they walk on.

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On her Thrill Jockey debut, the solo guitarist creates truly borderless music, fusing the diverse global traditions she favors without drawing too much attention to the act of juxtaposition.

Cloud Corner

In the fall of 2015, a fan’s criticism caught the guitarist Marisa Anderson by surprise. She had just finished her set in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, a quintessential seaside town on Spain’s northeastern coast, when a British expatriate confronted her with a question: Why don’t you play any happy songs? She told him happiness wasn’t her job and walked away. But his provocation stuck: Could she write a solo guitar instrumental so buoyant, no one would mistake it for sad? Absolutely. Late on Cloud Corner, Anderson’s terrific Thrill Jockey debut, she practically jaunts through a stunning four-minute track named for the city where she accepted the challenge. With a miniature melody that rises, falls, and repeats in slightly irregular patterns, the song recalls waves lapping onto the shore beneath the fading springtime sun. Using just six amplified strings, Anderson conjures the wide-eyed wonder of a tourist seeing sights they never knew could exist.
Anderson has written plenty of songs that don’t scan as sullen; 2013’s frenetic “Galax” comes to mind, as does 2016’s resplendent “Into the Light.” But on Cloud Corner, “Sant Feliu de Guíxols” is the exception that at least suggests a rule: One of the best emotional mediums in the field of solo guitar, Anderson is a master of lovely melancholy. Written in memory of a favorite hiking trail that was incinerated by fires that swept around her hometown of Portland, Oregon in 2017, “Angel’s Rest” lets a sentimental phrase fade into the distance again and again, as if Anderson is setting every memory anyone ever made there free to drift away in smoke. “Lament” stems from the war in Syria and the ongoing refugee crisis it has created. Anderson elicits scratched notes from her slide guitar; they quiver and moan, the sound of a cry someone is trying to suppress. And “Sanctuary” is a tender lullaby meant for adults. With its graceful, glowing chords, the tune feels warm and inviting—but whenever it begins to lift, the weight of reality pulls it toward the ground again. In providing shelter, Anderson acknowledges the danger that waits outside.
One exultant song, Anderson’s uncanny ability to articulate emotions wordlessly, and her new-found enthusiasm for keyboards and Spanish guitars notwithstanding, the real feat of Cloud Corner is how well Anderson has learned to fuse the musical traditions she favors without drawing attention to the juxtaposition itself. “Surfacing,” for instance, begins with a subdued and ominous riff that seems to slink at the edges of the microphone. Anderson slowly answers her guitar with a twilit keyboard line, reflecting the quiet ascendance of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. The contrasting sounds move in tandem, seesawing between bluesy melancholy and classical transcendence, or between heaven and earth.
For “Slow Ascent,” Anderson plays a stately series of patient chords with her guitar and a Wurlitzer, evoking the stately minimalism of latter-day Earth. She surrounds those slow tones, though, with flurries of brief, tinny notes borrowed from the Tuareg tradition of northwest Africa. The idea continues one of Anderson’s most consistent compositional approaches, in which she subdivides one slow riff with a string of smaller melodies, played quickly and quietly between its notes. (You can hear her do it on opener “Pulse,” a preamble that serves as a concise summary of what Anderson accomplished before Cloud Corner.) But during “Slow Ascent” and elsewhere on the album, she ties this technique to sources of inspiration outside of her country and blues bedrock. Anderson’s music now seems borderless.
All of these threads—the extra instruments, the commingled influences, the artificial binary between happy and sad—intertwine in the title track, one of the most beautiful and transfixing solo guitar recordings in years. Anderson starts with a flickering electric riff that seems to weave nervously through space, moving like a taxi through late-afternoon traffic. She soon chases it with a complementary acoustic guitar, in a brisk counterpoint that wraps a soft surface around the harder, heavier line. The song simultaneously recalls the “continuous music” of pianist Lubomyr Melnyk (and his descendant, the guitarist James Blackshaw) and the incisive Delta blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins. What’s more, the sound seems to linger between a smile and a frown, suggesting that life could forever go either way. It’s Anderson’s best response to that critic in Spain, a wordless admission that her songs are, above all else, honest.


On this collaborative LP, Mica Levi (Micachu & the Shapes) pairs with the cellist Oliver Coates (a contributor to Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool) for one of 2016’s more enjoyable experimental albums.

Remain Calm

Though her soundtrack for Jonathan Glazer’s 2014 feature Under the Skin was more prominently received, Mica Levi’s tape Feeling Romantic Feeling Tropical Feeling Ill felt like her landmark release that year. The hour-long mix, with colorful, droning chapters bleeding seamlessly into one another, broke from the brash pop of her band Micachu & the Shapes, offering instead an elastic take on avant-garde composition. Loose and weird, it stomped and crackled all over the place, brimming with an impulsive sense of personality.
On this new collaboration with cellist and producer Oliver Coates, who also performed on the Under the Skin OST, Levi loops back to that unstructured sound. (Accordingly, Remain Calm has origins in a live collaboration for NTS Radio, also in 2014.) But she builds it up, too, by decluttering and introducing a more orchestral sensibility. With her songwriting for Micachu & the Shapes or her soundtracks, one gets the sense that Levi is sinking herself into a style, a set of constraints, conditions reflected in those projects’ concision. Here, as with Feeling Romantic, the field is wide open, and the results are imaginative and multi-textured.
In form, these 13 tracks, most under three minutes long, resemble sketches. This is not at all to the release’s detriment—rather, it recalls the stylistic play and emotional frankness of Arthur Russell’s World of Echo—and this unfinished quality is a crucial method of delivery. The minimal “Schoolhouse,” which lasts 43 seconds, sees Coates’ bright picked strings weighted by a teasing beat. “I’ll Keep Going” is more lush, even mournful, the titular refrain repeated in a smeary drone over piano and deep, sustained cello notes. Coates’ instrumentation is lovely but understated, folding effortlessly into the clattering productions such that prim classical connotations feel like afterthoughts. Even when the cello is brought to the fore—on “County H,” for example, which consists of just strings and a barely-tonal radio-transmitter-like sound—it’s repetitive, textural, and melodically restrained, again bringing Russell to mind.
More traditional strains of contemporary experimental music can at times be weighed down by their own history. And while Levi and Coates are clearly products of certain traditions, their influences are widespread. Tracks like the fragmentary “Xhill Stepping” or “New Wren Kitch,” which has the feel of an unraveling Actress B-side, nod to UK hip-hop and garage; scrawls of noise and vocal modulations bridge into brainy, gallery-bound sound work. The unfussy way Levi and Coates negotiate these references keeps this album from sounding like self-conscious pastiche. All the while, Remain Calm (like most of the projects Levi has been attached to) maintains a loping pace, easy and cool even as instrumental flourishes nervously flutter.
The breadth of Levi’s career offers an exciting framework for a new generation of musicians looking to uproot themselves and move—as might be most intuitive in our contemporary cultural economy—in several directions at once. We sense less a linear evolution in her sound and more a continual, varied expansion, driven by collaborations like this that are rooted in improvisation, as well as more rigid, genre-driven assignments. (Coates, too, negotiates between projects this way: He played with the London Contemporary Orchestra on Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, for one, but this year also released Upstepping, a solo LP of oddball deep house.) Remain Calm is particularly refreshing for its relative approachability, no doubt the product of sly pop and dance sensibilities that are lodged somewhere in there alongside the open-ended phrases and sonic atmospherics. Even as its mood slides from pensive to morose to quietly exuberant, this remains throughout one of the more enjoyable experimental releases this year.


On his major label debut, the once-scrappy Boston rapper Cousin Stizz flaunts his wealth as well as his ear for distinctive, minimalist production.

One Night Only

Bostonians aren’t exactly known for their friendliness. Still, Dorchester native Cousin Stizz is especially standoffish. The rapper’s breakout single, 2015’s “No Bells,” was a study in understated, menacing territorialism. “Who you know from out here? Your name ‘aint ringing no bells, boy,” Stizz huffs on the song, over piano notes that reverberate through the air like, well, bells. In an era of busy, up-tempo trap beats, Auto-Tuned hooks, and vulnerability as currency, “No Bells” stood out. The song is skeletal and unapologetically cold—the sonic equivalent of a “keep out” sign. It announced Stizz as one of the few young rappers aiming not for club anthems but rather for the realism of life at street level.
Two years, two mixtapes, and a major label deal later, Stizz is now looking far beyond his Fields Corner block. On One Night Only, his debut release for RCA, the rapper assumes the stance of a self-assured star—stunting on his peers, taunting his naysayers, and calling in favors from the likes of Offset and G-Eazy. Production-wise, One Night Only is Stizz’ strongest project yet, though that’s not only due to the contributions of name-brand producers. While Wondagurl, VInylZ, and Dun Deal all land beats on the album, it’s the five tracks produced by frequent Stizz collaborator Tee-WaTT that give the project a real sense of cohesion. Using “No Bells” as a blueprint, the relatively unknown Virginia producer constructs lean instrumentals that are airy yet disorienting—a perfect pairing for Stizz’ stone-faced verses and catchy, half-sung hooks.
The results of this chemistry are often dazzling. Opener “Switch Places” is built around decaying tones that ping pong back and forth in the mix; the song sounds the way that staring out of a taxi after too many drinks feels. Evoking Drake, “Doubted Me” wraps Stizz’ wounded flexing in a glitchy neon glow. “Paid” grafts a trunk-rattling beat onto an icy vaporwave melody built from Game Boy violins and crystalline synths. And on “Headlock,” Stizz makes Offset meet him on his home turf: a wobbly, seasick beat, courtesy of VinylZ. “These days I run it like Ricky, I'm Ross,” Stizz boasts on the track, adding rhetorically, “What does it take, turn yourself to a boss?”
Stizz also toys with some new sounds on One Night Only, though he occasionally ventures a bit too far outside of his comfort zone. Both the marimba-heavy “Neimans Barneys” and the lurching “Jo Bros” borrow from the Migos playbook, brute-forcing catchiness through repetition; the latter even employs a Nextel chirp as a prominent sonic motif. Other stylistic experiments are less compelling. Mid-album cuts like the bouncy “No Ice” and “Paper Calling” (reminiscent of Future) feel a bit flat and drag on the record’s momentum. Worse yet is “Pullup,” wherein Stizz fails to land a funky sex jam, laying bare the limits of his charisma.
Cousin Stizz might lack range, though when his delivery clicks with the production, as it does on most of these songs, it’s hard to argue with the results. On One Night Only, he manages to carve out a distinctive lane in trap, offering up a slower, more hypnotic take on the Atlanta sound. Stizz himself, however, remains a bit of a cypher. While his early work felt insular, it also lacked a concrete sense of place or perspective. Now that he’s graduated from rapping about trying to acquire money to rapping about actually spending it, what once read as plainspoken relatability is starting to feel a bit generic: on most of these tracks, Stizz is just another rapper cataloging his access to women, cars, and designer clothing. But he makes it sound great, even if he continues to keep the listener at arm’s length.


The Boredoms offshoot's seventh full-length arrived last year in Japan on Boredoms’ own Shock City imprint and which is only now seeing wide release through Thrill Jockey; it's the group's strongest effort in some time, taking a number of heady, out-rock ideas and cueing them up into a fairly approachable mixtape.

Gamel

When OOIOO started in the mid-1990s, there wasn’t much evidence to suggest that the band would be any longer lived than the numerous other satellite projects rattling through deep space orbit alongside Japanese noise-rock giants, Boredoms. OOIOO (say it oh-oh-eye-oh-oh) has endured, though, and nearly twenty years and six albums later, the all-female quartet—lead by Flaming Lips LP namesake and Boredoms percussionist Yoshimi—have established their own voice, audience, and influence, long since transcending their origins as ancillary Bore-product. Gamel—which arrived last year in Japan on Boredoms’ own Shock City imprint and which is only now seeing wide release through Thrill Jockey—is OOIOO’s seventh full-length and also the group’s strongest effort in some time. Like the group's best work, it takes a number of heady out-rock ideas and lines them up into a fairly easy to digest mixtape.
Given their shared DNA, Boredoms and OOIOO mirror one another in a number of ways, particularly in their zeal for primitivist rhythms, psychedelic tones, and trippy fluorescent color schemes. But while the former has gradually evolved into a sort of high concept drum circle—with performances that often involve a seven-necked guitar and dozens of percussionists—the latter has consistently kept things small. For the past decade, Boredoms' sheer mass has forced the project to focus on a single schtick, but OOIOO has been free to float from sound to sound, with songs that sometimes evoke fusion-era Miles Davis, Konono No. 1, and the European prog-rock band Gong within the same five minutes.
Still, the best OOIOO records have always benefited from a central theme—be it kraut rock-style repetition (Feather Float) or tribal psychedelia (Armonico Hewa)—to ground the band’s ever-mutating sensibility. This time around, the glue comes via two metallophone players, who expand OOIOO’s riffing with melodies drawn from Javanese gamelan music.
The instruments—which are played by hammering mallets against brass rods tuned to microtonal scales—preserve Gamel’s percussive and propulsive core, but also produce strange harmonies and overtones that imbue the music with a heady psychedelic sheen. If you’re an anime fan, some of Gamel’s sounds might inadvertently trigger memories of Japanese collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s score for the film Akira. That music used a similar mix of sounds—synthesizers, alternate tunings, traditional instruments—and perfectly complemented that film's strange and quasi-psychedelic sci-fi style. Gamel is a little more organic and much more ebullient, but just as otherworldly and futuristic.
Prior OOIOO albums were, evidently, recorded by the band and then extensively tweaked and edited by Yoshimi in studio post-production, but Gamel was mostly recorded live. As a result, the music isn’t quite as crowded. Yoshimi has laid off the effects—echo, reverb, and synthesizer glop—and there are fewer hard turns and zig-zags in the compositions. For the first time, OOIOO actually sounds like a real, living breathing band.
One of the best things about OOIOO records is that they provide a way to experience a number of fairly culty musical ideas—prog rock, psychedelic music, and so on—from a point of remove. The band's nonsense chants and jagged melodies provide all of the weirdness without necessarily conjuring the established imagery and associations, be they good or bad. It's easier to listen with fresh ears and hear these strange sounds as something playful, unfamiliar, and approachable, qualities that Gamel definitely possesses.


A genre-spanning collection of cryptic transmissions, interludes, and asides, the Manchester duo’s second album gets at emotion in an oblique fashion, remaking your desires as it plays.

Honest Labour

What do you do with an ambient album about love? That’s the challenge of Space Afrika’s Honest Labour. Space Afrika are a duo of musicians—Joshua Inyang and Joshua Reid—who both hail from Manchester, though the latter is based in Berlin. The music that they make varies from album to album, but what is consistent is their ability to place the listener in a state of reckoning with themselves. Space Afrika’s 2020 mixtape hybtwibt? contended with the minutiae of racial oppression, fusing snippets of daily life, protests, and popular songs with distorted melodies. It’s the type of work that invites neither easy listening nor easy answers, even though it’s often beautiful. Their previous album, 2018’s Somewhere Decent to Live, is even more elliptical. One sound or one sample will be swirled again and again, until it’s impossible to discern if it’s still there. It makes you reevaluate your senses, and after a listen, it’s easy to want to start touching the walls to reorient yourself. Honest Labour, named after the patriarch of Joshua Inyang’s Nigerian family tree, is somehow more deeply rooted and maddeningly abstract then these previous releases. A genre-spanning collection of extraordinarily detailed interludes, asides, and transmissions, the record gets at emotion in an oblique fashion, remaking your desires as it plays.
Though the music may sound minimal on a first listen, Space Afrika fill up the songs with samples and heavy instrumentation, overwhelming with disjointed parts. They tempt fracture, embrace distortion, and emphasize delay, all in service of creating sound that feels close to the beginning of Wings of Desire; you feel as if you are Bruno Ganz hovering from apartment to apartment, subway to subway, divining the thoughts of the denizens of each building you pass. Two early standouts exemplify this tendency. In “Preparing the Perfect Response,” over warbling, resonating strings, a woman speaks about her life and the struggles that she’s gone through in order to begin to appreciate herself. The closeness you feel to her comes from the detail in the sample, and the way you can hear her pound her chest when she declares that she loves herself. As the background oscillates behind her, she stays resolute. In “Indigo Grit,” over a backdrop of abstracted electric piano, clipping bass, and thunder samples, you hear their collaborator, who goes by the name of guest, singing mordant lines about “hidden things.” Two-thirds of the way through, this singing is replaced with a dialogue on the meaning of love: A man asks a woman whether love just means “to like someone a lot”; she says no, there’s a huge difference between the two. When he asks her to clarify, she hesitates, and the song abruptly ends. The effect of this is crushing. After moving you through an impeccably created atmosphere full of yearning, they place you right at the edge of expression, pushing you deep into the places that you hesitate to go, and then they cut the cord.
As the album progresses, concrete statements become more legible, and it becomes possible to delineate specific genres. Space Afrika provide their version of hip-hop with “B£E,” which begins with a clattering drum echo. Even as they work in an identifiable style, they curve the song by bringing in momentary waves of static and dropping the beat out entirely. And once the beat returns and strings swell, it gets even deeper. Blackhaine, a Manchester rapper, gives an impression of what he sees, the loneliness that surrounds him, and a final tag of pride: “Man are trynna get rich at the top of the map.” It’s an expression of love to a city and culture that nurtured them, delivered in a way that earns every scintilla of sentimentality. The first half of “Girl Scout Cookies” is drifting ambient pop that floats on Bianca Scout’s voice, which is somehow as light and sharp as Elizabeth Fraser’s, and a disappearing synthesized glissando. After a sample of a feud appears for an instant, a transfixing This Heat-like guitar riff repeats as Scout sings cryptically about how she’s “run out of chances,” ending the song by repeating the words, “For the last time.” Not only does the song function as a bifurcated embrace of two disparate styles, it feels like a depiction of the slow understanding that one’s idealized love is slowly ebbing away beneath the day-to-day destruction of reality; it’s dream pop with an industrial underbelly.
The tightly controlled mix of voices and textures on Honest Labour feels cinematic primarily because it pursues human feeling. Kodwo Eshun said the Detroit techno duo Drexciya “exacerbated the dehumanization” of electronics in order to create “impalpable hallucinations that get on your nerves.” After repeatedly listening to Honest Labour, I think the electronics of Inyang and Reid do the exact opposite. What they do on this album is create a wholly humanistic synthetic world focused on figuring out exactly what we mean when we talk about loving one another. Honest Labour is a taxing, emotionally exhausting experience precisely because it replicates the messiness of human existence, in all its flaws, insensitivities, and oppressions. The titular last track repeats the melody of “Indigo Grit,” yet this time the keys are clear, a wavering cello plays along, and celestial electronics pulsate in and out. As the cello plays, the other instruments slowly fade out, and you are left listening to this lone player, struck by their devotion to their work. And then it’s over.

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L.A. MC/producer Jonwayne's formal Stones Throw debut Rap Album One is a dense affair. While the rapping on Rap Album One can feel bogged down in thought, the production benefits from the almost mathematical approach.

Rap Album One

There are many ways of loving hip-hop, but there's one in particular that most fans go through at some point that involves thinking really hard. Listen the right way, and the music turns into this fantastic puzzle, or maybe an equation that works out just so: Hook the beat up, convert it into hip-hop form, write a rhyme, etc. There's a specific kind of hip-hop that tends to fit this mindset best, in which the lyrics are geared in equal parts toward head and record scratching, the beats put you in a zone, and the only possible reaction is turn to your (perhaps equally stoned) friend and say "that's dope."
That style is one that the Los Angeles-based label Stones Throw excels in, and MC/producer Jonwayne is more or less the label's archetypal practitioner. Coming from an electronic background inspired by hanging out as a teenager in L.A.'s beat underground during the rise of artists like Flying Lotus and the Gaslamp Killer, Jonwayne has spent the last couple years staking out a claim as an MC with his series of Cassette mixtapes. His vibe is that of the friendly slacker dude who seems to always be hanging around in high school parking lots or dorm common rooms, eager to talk your ear off about some obscure psychedelia band or Wu-Tang deep cuts. With his proper debut, Rap Album One, he's upfront about what he's offering, cutting a Silent Bob or Dude-like figure in press photos and using a picture of a saltine cracker (wink, wink) as his album cover.
Pretty much everything about Jonwayne's approach to rap can be summed up in his lines from "You Can Love Me When I'm Dead", in which he explains, "this is rap shit, recite banter with high standards/ cold-blooded art like a salamander on fine canvas." His lyrics are clever and exactingly written, full of dense internal rhymes, and carefully thought-out punchlines. Although he offers some biography, particularly on "The Come Up Pt. 1 and Pt. 2", mostly he sticks to lyrical-bread-and-butter stuff that can't really be begrudged.
But while Wayne may be a rapper who seems primarily interested in technique, he's not a very technically interesting rapper. Almost all of his verses are delivered in a monotone, and he rarely varies his flow to sound any way other than steady and studiously composed. He raps slowly and deliberately, often taking a pause between bars, in a way that makes lines land like stoner proclamations or Deep Thoughts. Lyrics like "Shoes in the closet/ My stomach's got too many knots to justify tying laces and looking sharp" seem profound but end up revealing themselves as aimless upon closer inspection. On the song "Yung Grammar", the sort-of funny idea of screwing down a hook about grammar skills is immediately undermined by the revelation that there's basically nothing that sounds more boring screwed than a list of the parts of speech.
Elsewhere, though, it's these types of experiments that yield the album's best results. Much of "You Can Love Me When I'm Dead" is simply a piano riff that leans heavily on the instrument's rarely used low end and a drum machine with the phrase "every time I grab the mic I rock it just like that" being scratched in different ways. It sounds cool, and it's easy to zone out to, a trip to the traditionalist rap fan's subconscious. On "Zeroh's Song", by far the album's best and most interesting cut, rapping is more or less abandoned as snatches of sung phrases flit in and out of the track. Wayne blurts out the screwed-down phrase "they went back to moon!", and counts in a sinister voice over meandering synthesizer plinks. It's totally weird and fun, connecting the dots between Animal Collective, DJ Screw and Chance the Rapper, the moment when the album feels the least deliberate and the most playful.
The upside to Wayne's exacting approach throughout is that the production sounds fantastic, a clear indication of where his roots lie as an artist. His sound is minimal, in many cases relying on just piano and subdued drum pattern—live he uses just a sampler and a mic—which works to vivid effect. "Sandals", for instance, relies almost entirely on hi-hats, a perfectly calm match for Wayne's low-key style. While the rapping on Rap Album One can feel bogged down in thought, the production benefits from the almost mathematical approach (things get literally mathematical on the vinyl version, which, at 45 RPM, is designed to sound screwed down when played at a normal 33 ⅓ RPM). The album may be hard to connect to on anything other than a cerebral level, but sometimes that's the best way to connect.


Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982) reintroduces us to the indomitable Vivien Goldman—music journalist, reggae scholar, NYU’s “Professor of Punk”—whose recordings helped build post-punk at its magic hour.

Vivien Goldman: Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982)

Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982)

In the beginning there was Patti, and she created light and it was good. Luckily, Vivien Goldman was around to ask her some questions. In November 1976, Goldman—music journalist, reggae scholar, a woman who is now known as New York University's “Professor of Punk”—went deep with Patti for the London music weekly Sounds. They chopped it up over Albert Ayler, astrology, and *Radio Ethiopia’*s feminine energy; Patti quoted Rimbaud's dying words and proclaimed that the Queen of Sheba was “like, the heaviest woman in rock‘n’roll.” A month later, Goldman visited a squat that reeked of cats and had panels missing from the floors, in order to report on an exhilarating new band called the Slits (who would become her friends and collaborators). In the piece, Goldman details her first meeting with the Slits’ firecracker teen screamer, Ari Up—elaborate black makeup slashed around her eyes, the word ‘SLIT’ painted on her cheek—at a gig attended by Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten (another future comrade in art). “Are you Vivien Goldman?” Ari asked, with “what appeared to be dismay.” Of course she was. “I don’t know…” Ari continued, “I thought you’d be much—younger…” She was 22.
How could one resist the pull of a current so strong? How could a person be in the purview of all this and not fully participate? How do you stand to the side? These are questions that Goldman does not have to answer or ask, because she did, of course, play. In her formative years, there were no demarcations between musician and critic. As readily as Goldman critiqued and grilled bands like the Slits, the Raincoats, and Public Image Ltd.—all kindred spirits moved in their own ways by reggae, dub, punk, and pop—she also recorded with them. Punk’s most sacred promise is, after all, that it can be yours—a hard light to un-see. When punk and reggae famously collided in ‘70s Ladbroke Grove, Goldman ultimately gravitated towards the latter. She is 62 now, and remains a creator, a translator, a formidable beacon of ideas.
Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982) is one of several compilations released this season to reintroduce some of the women who helped architect post-punk at its magic hour, among them the expansive, two-disc Sharon Signs to Cherry Red and thrilling Subnormal Girls Volume 1. Resolutionary pairs Goldman’s visionary Dirty Washing EP from 1981 with two feminist art-rock songs she wrote and sung in the Flying Lizards, and three by her cosmopolitan, proto-world music duo Chantage. On Resolutionary, you'll find production by John Lydon and percussion from Robert Wyatt, a forefather and fixture of the Rough Trade scene then (Geoff Travis was once Goldman’s roommate). Goldman covers Bob Marley’s “Do It Twice” and she collaborates with British punks and musicians from Jamaica and Zaire. Her pop sense is sharp, her lyrics are witty, her voice a full soprano mixed high and clear. Among *Resolutionary’*s fragmented soundscapes, Goldman sounds as though she’s sung on a theater stage.
Goldman formed Chantage with Eve Blouin, a native of Guinea, while they shared a flat in Paris in the early ‘80s. The soukous guitar lines on these recordings came from Zairean player Jerry Malekani, and Chantage also worked with a violinist named Jancsi Hosszu, a man they first spotted playing at a Hungarian restaurant, who’d never been in a studio before. They found yet another collaborator by going out to All Saints Road and asking, “Who’s the best steelpan player in the area?” (They arrived at a fellow named Bubbles.) The shuffling drama of Chantage’s “It's Only Money” makes it sound like a snippet from a musical—or perhaps if broke, destitute squatters wrote a lost scene from La bohème. It alludes to the desperate predicaments one can get into in order to survive as an artist, and it underscores the unusual relationship artists had with money in that era, a time when squatting communities were alive throughout Europe. “Tu M’Fais Rire” is a rich, chic, strikingly harmonized a capella sung in French, the anti-punk lyric twirling and translating to: “Today people are embarrassed to say they love each other/It's a frightening feeling/But for us, it is bliss.”
Goldman’s deep love of reggae comes out most deliberately on the wondrously bold Chantage recording of “Same Thing Twice,” a slightly renamed version of the 1971 Wailers song “Do It Twice” (Goldman wrote a book on Bob Marley in 2006). It’s more sensitive than your usual rude boy joint, with an infectious lovers-rock sway. Chantage radically recast “Same Thing Twice” and its extremely sensual come-on from a female perspective: “Baby you're so nice,” they harmonize with sheer glee, “I’d like to do the same thing twice!” It’s hot, mellow disposition is heartening and happy, alive with pure joy—their singing seems to melt, and it just makes you smile. The upbeat swing of the horns could be from Return of Django. Chantage push this optimism towards the sun.
Before Chantage, Goldman was a member of avant-garde new wavers the Flying Lizards, who became known for their absurdist cover of the Motown hit “Money (That’s What I Want)” and wacky, conceptual performances—you can watch them playing toy instruments on Top of the Pops, a noble undertaking. Goldman’s two songs, “The Window” and “Her Story,” both appeared on their debut LP in 1979—they are unabashedly feminist, which was rare. “The Window” tells the nightmarish, vivid story of a guy who’s throwing things at the glass, while Goldman hopes that her door’s locked tight: “I don’t want to let him in.../I wish he wasn’t twice my size/Sometimes you fight for the world/Sometimes you fight for yourself.” The groovy “Her Story,” meanwhile, is about the tyranny of history, which feels apt here.
But it’s really the cult Dirty Washing 12” EP—“Launderette,” “Private Armies,” and “P.A. Dub”—that makes this reissue so utterly indispensable. (For years, I honestly thought it was all she’d ever recorded, and with just two secret songs, Goldman seemed like a post-punk hero in her own right.) In ’81, Dirty Washing came out on Viv’s own label, Window Records, distributed by Rough Trade. While in New York, Goldman walked into the tiny record shop at 99 MacDougal Street and handed over a copy, so the collection got a pressing on the legendary 99 Records. Dirty Washing is a woman building a world. I listen to Dirty Washing to feel less alone.
On Dirty Washing, Goldman orchestrated the ultimate post-punk posse cuts. She asked her friend, George Oban, bassist in the local reggae band Aswad, to jam with her, bringing the resulting tape to fellow reggae connoisseur, John Lydon. When Public Image Ltd. were recording Flowers of Romance, they let Goldman use their downtime in the studio; Keith Levene of Public Image Ltd. played guitar. A wild ensemble of characters floats into the mix, texturing these bohemian songs: spacious percussion from Wyatt, the Raincoats’ classically trained violinist and noted feminist Vicky Aspinall, toy piano maestro Steve Beresford of Flying Lizards, another drummer called Shooz. The now-legendary dub producer Adrian Sherwood mixed them all in a couple hours (Goldman was a fan of his LP Starship Africa). Goldman was well-positioned to assemble something epic like this. As Sherwood once put it: “Viv was mates with everybody. She was very friendly, and she decided to make a couple of tunes.”
“Launderette” is a funny and filmic song about a romance sparked among hypnotic washing machines: “I wanted 10 pence for the dryer/Yes, that was how we met/My laundry bag was broken/My clothes were soaking wet/I felt I needed hugging.” And so it goes; her new suitor comes around her flat and stays for weeks and will not leave, and after she “learns to say no”—to take control of her domestic space—she can't even escape him while she’s washing her socks. “Your hair’s all over the bath,” Goldman playfully adds. “You always were untidy.” The wandering, irresistible bass line tells the story, too. You know it’s going to happen again. She does not sound mad.
“Private Armies” is a cut-and-paste collage, a cloud that billows with a communal energy. It is one of the best documents of this era. Its ambient psychedelia is a swirl of reverb and echo, full of booms and crashes and flutters. The drum beat is stoned-sounding, and the bass is cinder-block heavy. Mixed with the raw echo of a sawed violin, the tough clatter is ominous, and the blown-out dub reprise is even heavier. That version later appeared on the 1981 debut from New Age Steppers, the collaboration of Ari Up, Sherwood, and the Pop Group’s Mark Stewart. Near the end, Goldman is sort of rapping.
With so many ideas zipping in and out, it's a small miracle that “Private Armies” remains so engrossingly tuneful. In direct terms, “Private Armies” speaks of Goldman's friends Vernon and Norman, who sat in their car and watched a bunch of skinheads “beat shit out of a person on the pavement/blood everywhere.” Goldman shouts the refrain: “If you can't get a hard-on/Get a gun!” Three and a half decades ago, “Private Armies” evoked the distinct and frustrating absurdity that any person could own a weapon of war, that masculinity should be equated with violence. (See also: Anohni’s “Violent Men,” released this year.) As Lee “Scratch” Perry once said, dub is where you can “hide from the fuckers.” Such places become scarcer everyday.
The roles of the musician and the critic can often seem opposed. One recalls the Lester Bangs character in Almost Famous advising the budding rock scribe, “You CANNOT make friends with the rock stars,” but—plot twist—Bangs played in bands, too. Goldman brought a reportorial instinct into her music, which is clear from the six-minute audio interview that comes at the end of this reissue, wherein Goldman incisively discusses “Private Armies.” (“Living where we are now,” she says, “people don’t need guns.”) “Private Armies” remains searingly relevant, and so does Goldman. Her uncommon path is inspiring; it is a reminder that there is no path but your own.


At a time when so many young, emerging New York City rappers are eagerly presenting themselves as a sum of their classic New York rap influences, Ratking have generated attention by trying to represent something different. Ratking's palette is restless, chaotic, and cluttered, and So It Goes sounds like it exists in its own world.

So It Goes

At a time when so many young, emerging New York City rappers are eagerly presenting themselves as a sum of their classic New York rap influences, Ratking have generated attention by trying to represent something different. Bursting onto the scene with rabble-rousing gusto and a reputation for wild live shows, teenage MCs Wiki and Hak (of the Upper West Side and Harlem, respectively) and Harlem-based producer Sporting Life aim to revitalize the reckless spirit of classic New York rap.
From the title of their full-length debut So It Goes—a Kurt Vonnegut reference that doubles as commentary on whether hip-hop is dead—to the album's nearly-exclusive focus on New York as a muse, it's impossible to misinterpret Ratking's stance on the constant conversation that runs through hip-hop culture. “This ain't 90s revival/ It's earlier, it's tribal revival,” Wiki raps on “Protein”, a disorienting song with an insistent MIDI tone driving the beat, a lengthy instrumental break in the middle, some understated singing, and a lot of disembodied yelling. Above all, Ratking's palette is restless, chaotic, and cluttered, and accordingly So It Goes sounds like it exists in its own world.
It's an album tied inescapably to its urban setting, with snippets of voices and the dings of closing subway doors drifting around under the clanging instrumentation. Sporting Life's instrumentation crackles with energetic drum-machine patterns and digital washes of noise, but the sound of So It Goes is never too harsh, with soulful backing vocals and meandering horns that offer an underlying warmth, particularly on the languorous highlight “Snow Beach”. The contributions of engineer and Jay-Z associate Young Guru (again, the New York lineage here is solid) are valuable, too: while previous Ratking recordings occasionally sounded claustrophobic because of the chaos' collision with the dense jumble of lyrics, So It Goes sounds spacious and clear.
The increase in clarity includes Wiki and Hak's rapping. Wiki first attracted attention as an MC due to his dense, rapid-fire delivery, and both rappers have a gift for freewheeling, tangled flows. However, their presence is satisfying on a basic level, too, breaking from the anti-expressiveness that often comes with such lyrical recitations. Hak often gives his rhymes a physical depth, creating a percussive effect through heavy alliteration, while the more ebullient Wiki yells and repeats short phrases like the singer of a hardcore band. These phrases echo and ring out like proclamations: “The earth is fucked, the city is gone!”, “The city implodes with the prettiest prose!” “20 degrees outside! We're toasted in the tunnel!” Much of So It Goes isn't as concerned with following traditional rap structures as it is with creating rich panoramas.
There isn't anything here that's trying for pop accessibility (unless you count King Krule's singing on the excellent downer anthem “So Sick Stories”), and So It Goes drags a little toward the end, especially with regards to the title track's new-agey ramblings, so the constant noise and loose structure can feel oppressive. Where Ratking dives deepest, then—the police harassment protest song “Remove Ya” and “Snow Beach”, which addresses NYU's gradual takeover of New York's downtown and paints a rich lyrical portrait—the payoff is greatest, proving that Wiki and Hak are perceptive observers. There's a pulsing, lived-in energy to So It Goes that captures what New York feels like and pushes at the boundaries of lyrically-driven rap. Beyond conversations about their city or genre, Ratking's greatest success is confidently offering a sound that feels untethered from expectations and bristles with the exhilarating energy of trying something new.


On the fourth tape in his Bin Reaper series, the Michigan breakout looks to level up with slicker beats and bigger cosigns. Fortunately, he’s still rapping about NBA stars and SpongeBob.

Bin Reaper 3: New Testament

A few years ago, you’d be forgiven for thinking that BabyTron and his Detroit-area trio ShittyBoyz were an elaborate spoof. With mixtape titles like Dookie Brothers 2 and an entourage regularly referred to as the Dog Shit Militia, Tron and his collaborators veered dangerously close to branding themselves as a parody-rap outfit. But riding an upswell of listenership, Tron seems newly keen on the big-time and, on his new tape Bin Reaper 3: New Testament, it’s clear he’s ready to be taken—if not seriously—at least serious-ish.
BabyTron first appeared on the Detroit scene in 2019 with ShittyBoyz compatriots StanWill and TrDee. Alongside scam-rapper Teejayx6, they ushered in a wave of deadpan, reference-heavy flows about embossing debit cards and ripping off the elderly. But where Teejayx6 favored narratives and occasionally detailed instructions, BabyTron and the ShittyBoyz preferred sample-heavy beats and mile-a-minute non-sequiturs about basketball, cartoons, and money-making. In the years since, BabyTron, the clear break-away talent, has released over a dozen projects either solo or with his group and garnered a cult following. Enter Bin Reaper 3: New Testament, a natural title for the fourth entry in his Bin Reaper series, following last October’s Bin Reaper 3: Old Testament.
If the serialized title and relative promptness of New Testament’s arrival suggests an album of castoffs, BabyTron does his best to prove those presumptions wrong. The more commercial beat selection, high-profile features (including Lil Yachty, Babyface Ray, the ever-present ShittyBoyz, and a high-energy turn from Rico Nasty), and BabyTron’s own giddy confidence all suggest a premeditated stab at crossover stardom. Fortunately he’s still rapping about NBA stars, SpongeBob, video games, and (for some reason) Shameless, but it’s accompanied by a newfound sheen and his biggest cosigns yet.
The South Park-referencing “Mr. Hanky,” for instance, features a harder beat than BabyTron has ever attempted, filled with sinister piano and sampled vocals. Overtop, he delivers droll schoolyard taunts by way of the car dealership: “This life shit up and down, kinda like a seesaw/Aston Martin with the horses, pull off in a yeehaw/Threw your album in the dumpster, that shit sounded weak sauce.” Gone are the days of ShittyBoyz’s dinky production: Producer Bye Kyle! brings an air of professionalism to the beats, which are often darker and more aggressive than BabyTron’s past instrumentals.
Frequently on New Testament, BabyTron sounds invigorated, continuing to deliver some of the best one-two punch(lines) in rap. On “RIP Hutch,” also featuring Remble and Rico Nasty, he raps, “Got it off the hustle, off the muscle, I ain’t buy fame/Feelin’ like Sub-Zero, masked up in these ice chains.” BabyTron has always flexed, but fresh off his inclusion in XXL’s 2022 Freshman Class and an uptick in streams on both his newer material and extensive back catalog (particularly 2019’s “Jesus Shuttlesworth”), his big-upping and trash-talking carry new weight. This is the first BabyTron album where a line like, “Shit, I’m getting 30 for a verse, I got the gift of gab” is even halfway believable.
New Testament’s primary issue is its runtime. At 26 tracks, and with this much gimmick, there’s bound to be some skips. BabyTron doesn’t stray from his dry, wry flow very often, instead leaning on mid-song beat switch-ups for most of New Testament’s dynamic changes. His uncanny deadpan is versatile enough to handle jarring instrumental shifts, but often fails to engage on slower cuts, as on the mid-tempo, jazz-inflected “Beetleborgs,” featuring Cordae. It’s a snoozer, and Tron doesn’t seem capable of altering his affect enough to make a mellow song sing.
At its best, though, Bin Reaper 3: New Testament marries BabyTron’s idiosyncratic regional style with newly focused ambition. On “Next Level 2,” when asked “Tron, what make you different?’” he replies, “‘Without I, you can’t even spell commitment. Do you get it?” BabyTron may rap some silly stuff, but at 22, he’s discovered the central truth to leveling up as an offbeat act: You gotta commit to the bit.


E-40 sounds like a resigned elder statesman on his fourth album with cousin B-Legit, and that’s a surprise coming from someone who used to be superhuman.

Connected and Respected

According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great wept not because there were no more worlds to conquer, but because he’d yet to become the master of a single one. Were the Macedonian warrior-king alive today, he and E-40 could discuss the finer points of boundless ambition, perhaps over a bottle of Earl Stevens Mangoscato. At 50 years old—E-50, if you will—the Vallejo rapper, label owner, beverage impresario, and Wingstop franchisee has released Connected and Respected, his fourth collaboration with his cousin B-Legit. Counting his LPs with the Click and Too $hort, Connected and Respected is E-40’s 30th album. There are no more worlds left for him to conquer.
E-40 wasn’t the first Bay Area rapper (that was probably Motorcycle Mike) and he wasn’t its first homegrown star (that was Too $hort), but the slang maven with the quicksilver voice is its arch-stylist. At his peak, E-40’s verses ebbed and flowed like Napa River tides and had the carefree, unencumbered sway of a Hillside sideshow. He was a thrilling listen: a line’s meter and syllables had little bearing on those of the next, so every verse had a breathless, acrobatic quality. But thirty years of rapping has dulled his powers. Either the ravages of age or an understandable ebbing of interest has turned his voice, once volcanic, into something more viscous. He remains a gifted rapper and a witty lyricist, but he’s human—and, for E-40, that wasn’t always the case.
Fortunately, he and B-Legit (whose own Tryin’ to Get a Buck and The Hemp Museum are critically underappreciated) have a chemistry forged by time and consanguinity. Historically, B-Legit, with his deep, plainspoken lilt, has played the straight man to E-40’s antic, vibrating energy. E-40 was the gun that shot a BANG! flag; B-Legit was the jet-black truncheon in a dark alleyway. On Connected and Respected, that calculus has been altered. They now share an age-appropriate world-weariness, and the lightheartedness that marked classics like their (and Mac Shawn’s) “Sideways” and the Click’s “Hurricane” is largely absent. When their hard-bitten bad cop-bad cop routine works, it works well. The wizened, slightly dyspeptic storytelling of “Life Lessons,” “Up Against It,” “Barbershop,” and Click reunion cut “Blame It” would have been out of character 20 years ago but, with both rappers nearing or at their fifties, their transition into elder statesmen feels right.
What feels wrong, though, is the limited range of Connected and Respected. Despite its array of respected Bay Area producers—most notably P-Lo, Traxamillion, and the Mekanix—there’s an off-putting uniformity to the album, which is stuck in a gray zone that’s either post-Mobb Music or post-Mustard, depending on your historical perspective. This seems less the fault of the producers than it does E-40 and B-Legit. When they’re engaged, the album’s washed-out palette plays as menace rather than exhaustion. There’s a revealing contrast to be found in the work of SOB X RBE: A similarly restricted sound feels more exciting in the hands of the hellions from Vallejo’s Country Club Crest, probably because they’re young and rap like their shoes are on fire.
The cousins’ most dramatic deviation from that monochromatic tone is the album’s capper, “So High.” It might be a cynical play for song-of-the-summer status, but that’s ultimately immaterial. The sample of Howard Johnson’s pleading 1982 electro-boogie jam “So Fine” is pitch-perfect for our aging protagonists. It’s a bolt of fresh, pure orange light on an album that, after 19 songs and 57 minutes, can become cloudy and overbearing. It’s nostalgic without being cloying, fun without being overly self-aware, and the logical—and enjoyable—extension of two careers spent interpolating and reinterpreting funk and soul. It’s not a new world for E-40 to conquer, but a sunkissed coast worth revisiting.


One of the biggest grassroots success stories of the decade makes their well-deserved, Rick Rubin-assisted major-label bow.

I and Love and You

Do the Avett Brothers ever wake up feeling cranky? Mean-spirited? Less than generous? Their songs all communicate an unfailingly chummy earnestness that stems from candid introspection and unbidden love for their fellow man, and perhaps more than their brotherly harmonies or their rambunctious take on string-band Americana, that sincerity is their chief appeal. Of late, however, the Avetts' self-reckoning has grown so overbearing that it borders on obsession and threatens to limit their musical range. I and Love and You, their sixth studio album, doesn't break from their monolithic solemnity, but actually intensifies it: The hook on "Ten Thousand Words" goes, "Ain't it like most people, I'm no different, we love to talk on things we don't know about." On "The Perfect Space", they sing in sharp harmony: "I want to have friends who love me for the man I become, not the man that I was." There's a similar potential yearbook quote in every song-- every verse, just about-- and after a while, you may begin to wish they'd get angry about something, or, god forbid, crack an ironic joke.
I and Love and You is a crucial album for the band. One of the biggest grassroots success stories of the decade, they spent years self-releasing albums and self-promoting shows to gradually growing audiences, eventually signing to North Carolina indie label Ramseur before moving up to Sony/BMG/Columbia Records. For their major-label debut, the trio (which includes brothers Scott and Seth and unrelated bass player Bob Crawford) worked with producer Rick Rubin, whose involvement gives the album added critical and commercial cache. With a large and loyal fanbase, they could be as big as Dave Matthews and bring string-band rootsiness to the mainstream. Or not. One thing is for sure: After I and Love and You, they can no longer go back to being the Avett Brothers they once were.
As a major-label debut, the album plays to one set of their strengths while ignoring others. The Avetts continue to emphasize bold melodic lines, emphatic performances, and lyrics whose self-criticism is so magnanimous it becomes a form of self-praise. "And It Spread" moves from gentle to raucous the way more pedestrian bands do quiet-loud, and "January Wedding" is so delicate it nearly blows away in its own breeziness. These songs draw less from the celebratory energy of Mignonette and Emotionalism-- rambling albums whose spirited imperfections made them all the more endearing-- and more from the recent Gleam EPs, which showcased a calmer, more polite acoustic craftsmanship. That trend may predate Rubin's involvement, but here it sounds like a product of the Beard's approach to Americana, which is unerringly clean, sparse, and tasteful.
Every instrument sounds perfectly placed, and that's a shame because the Avetts got more mileage out of their rough edges than most bands this decade. Buffing away their rough edges and rowdy quirks, Rubin establishes a mood of intense pensiveness even on the first song, when they announce they're getting no sleep till Brooklyn. The title track builds carefully as the brothers ask the borough to welcome them, carefully adding an instrument or two with each verse until the song reaches its destination-- a big, cathartic finale. Most of the songs that follow employ a similar technique: opening with a soft acoustic intro, then inserting other sounds to underline the sentiments. It's effective until it becomes predictable, but later in the album, "Laundry Room" plays around with that formula, following a winding path from a gentle near-ballad (marred only by the lyric "I am a breathing time machine") as it transforms into a swirling bluegrass jam that's one of the album's finest moments.
There are surprisingly durable hooks on the stand-out "Tin Man" and the upbeat "Slight Figure of Speech", which, back to back, make the second half much livelier and more tenacious than the first. Rubin allows the Avetts to expand their sound and indulge these pop urges, but not always to great effect. With its jaunty piano theme and insistent screaming, "Kick Drum Heart" tries for Wilco but achieves Guster. Generally, there's a refinement to I and Love and You that seems slightly out of step for a group that has built an audience on performances and recordings that sound rawly spontaneous and heartfelt; breathlessly conveying their positive message has always been more crucial than deciding where to put the banjo or how prominent to make the strings. These songs, on the other hand, are more purposeful, more written, more professional. It's not that there's no room for such studio nuance in the Avetts' music, but it gives I and Love and You a quotidian sheen, making their signature sincerity seem sappy and much less special.