On R Plus Seven, Oneohtrix Point Never’s follow-up to 2011’s Replica, Daniel Lopatin builds new music using the bright yet cold textures of the early computing age. The album plays with our collective unconscious of music technology to develop something that comes off as strange and otherworldly and, most importantly, rich with feeling, despite the icy surface layer.

R Plus Seven

There’s a continual tension in experimental electronic music between developing and owning a particular sound and exploring new ones. Creating a unique identity is difficult, and sometimes breaking out of it once it's been established is even harder. Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never is an artist working at one end of this spectrum. He’s restless, searching for new terrain, and his more recent full-lengths have found him reinventing himself with each new record. R Plus Seven, the follow-up to 2011’s Replica, sounds little like previous OPN releases. But despite the radical shifts—and this is what makes this project so consistently rewarding—you can still hear him in it; there are bedrock approaches and clear musical values that you can pick out as Lopatin.
The general approach on R Plus Seven is to build new music using the bright yet cold textures of the early age of personal computing. The aesthetic is identifiably “’80s,” but it’s not the ’80s of new wave, with its familiar array of synthesizers. Instead, Lopatin focuses on the hauntingly clean and clear pre-set sounds that were available for early, crude digital music production (and which were often used in commercial applications, from bumpers for local PBS shows to soundtracking instructional videos) and adds the kind of short-burst bits of information that were common when a sampler could hold two or three seconds of 8-bit audio. While this sort of throwback is common in electronic music, for Lopatin it serves a purpose beyond reference. R Plus Seven is aware of how music and textures like this are likely to be received, but it plays with our collective unconscious of music technology to develop something that comes off as strange and otherworldly and, most importantly, rich with feeling, despite the icy surface layer.
There’s a weird kind of innocence in this sound palette. The fake horns and whooshing vocal samples evoke a time when “the computer” as a concept was still very much rooted in the future rather than the present. The chintzy approximations of common instruments contain a sort of implicit critique of the idea that technology will save us all, but Lopatin’s music doesn’t get hung up on irony, even though it's definitely in the mix. It’s this quality, of highlighting the vacuous side of this music while simultaneously embracing its humor and poignancy, that elevates the OPN project to another plane.
Along those lines, during my first few listens to R Plus Seven, it was hard not to think of James Ferraro’s recent work in this area, specifically his album Far Side Virtual, which used the impossibly cheerful and polished sound of early digital culture to emphasize the music’s connection to mindless, friction-free commerce. To Ferraro’s credit, he’s kept a poker face when presenting this music, and you never quite knew where he was coming from, which made the listening experience fraught with ambiguity and anxiety. But Lopatin comes at it from another angle. He wants his music to do things that music is traditionally known to do: change, develop, use melody to convey feelings, build tension and then release it. That all of this happens within such tightly controlled parameters makes the fact that the record is emotionally engaging that much more impressive. Common sonic threads include wispy digitized voices on tracks like “Americans” and “Chrome Country” that bring to mind the then-exotic turn-of-the-’80s sound of the Fairlight synthesizer, an early sampling device, along with many brittle digital versions of sounds that are distantly “exotic,” conveying the feel of a blocky pixilated representation of a jungle or beach scenes.
Indeed, with “Americans” and “Inside World”, the album makes sharp use of contrasts between the real and the virtual, between “natural” and the representation of natural. I’m tempted to call it Fifth World Music in homage to the 1980 Jon Hassell/Brian Eno album Fourth World: Possible Musics, a record that has a clear spiritual connection to this one. Hassell and Eno hoped to filter ancient tribal sounds through the sound of technology to create an alien but distantly familiar landscape (their project generated discussion about clumsy wording and potentially problematic ideas of what constituted “primitive” music, but that’s a subject for another time). Lopatin grapples with some of those ideas of decontextualization and colliding worlds, but the meeting place is closer to a tableau from Second Life, providing another layer of disorientation.
Still, I can’t underscore strongly enough that, as with Replica, all of this takes place in a realm where musicality is paramount. You don’t listen to this record thinking about theory; it’s beautiful stuff, with chords and tunes and sections you remember. And it also draws from more sounds and eras than I’ve given it credit for. Opening track “Boring Angel” seems a tribute to the glorious repetition of Terry Riley’s process music, while “Along” and “Cryo” are closer to the mood and structure of that place where late-’90s IDM sounds met the winding structures of post-rock. R Plus Seven doesn’t have quite the disembodied weirdness of Replica, but it’s no less accomplished, another intriguing chapter from an artist whose work remains alive with possibility.


Liturgy frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's latest work is electronic side project Kel Valhaal, which mixes his interests in Southern rap with ambient drones and glitch.

Kel Valhaal: New Introductory Lectures on the System of Transcendental Qabala

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, frontman for the theory-forward black metal band Liturgy, is a big fan of continental philosophy—Nietzsche, the German Idealists, and psychoanalysis—and he’s used the lessons from his readings to craft an entire mythological system to drive the writing of his music. In his music, if you choose to believe it, there are messianic figures, divine life sources, and origin stories, one of which gives him the name for a new electronic side-project called Kel Valhaal.
The Sparknotes for his mythology goes something like this: A powerful deity/force of energy called 01010n gave her “light” to a messianic figure called S/he/im (us paltry mortals at our highest perhaps) who couldn’t handle all that power, so was destroyed immediately. So 01010n leaves the universe, leaving a flicker of energy called “The Genesis Caul,” guarded by two figures, Reign Array and Kel Valhaal. Their task for all of eternity is to produce “poetic/cultural/symbolic structures that might work as prisms so as to refract and reflect 01010n’s light.” Hunt-Hendrix’s debut album as Kel Valhaal, New Introductory Lectures on the System of Transcendental Qabala, is supposed to be the first “poetic/cultural/symbolic structure” that will help us come to grips with the awesome power of 01010n.  The way for us to see this light? Apparently, it is through what Hunt-Hendrix has described in an interview with *THUMP *as an “art shaman character—a rapping art shaman.”
According to Hunt-Hendrix, the music is supposed to mix acid house, industrial noise, and glitch with Southern rap. A best-case-scenario result might be “Tim Hecker meets Bone Thugs-N-Harmony,” or somewhere near Dälek or Death Grips. It opens with “Mea Culpa” a short instrumental intro, that sounds like an action sequence in a Z-grade sci-fi horror film: Jason X, maybe, or Battlefield Earth. After this inauspicious start, we're treated with the first track with, uh, art shaman rapping, “Tense Stage.” It’s almost impossible to catch what he says, and once his voice enters, notes and noises get splattered like a bucket of paint thrown from a skyscraper window. If you expect to glean any knowledge from Hunt-Hendrix’s lyrics, perhaps in order to harness 01010n’s light ....don’t, because as he’s said in the past: “I just free-associate prophetic nonsense, and then I find a way to deliver it.”
The album’s two best songs are very short tracks like “Bezel,” which utilizes washes of static paired up against claustrophobic keys and spare organ notes, or “NMWE” the only palatable vocal track because it is completely muted. The greatest musical offense that can be found in *NILOTSOTQ *is its centerpiece “Ontological Love.” It is the album's longest song, coming in at ten minutes, and the most Southern rap influenced and rap heavy piece on the album as well. Strange approximations of Mike WiLL Made-It’s murky drum machine whacks and whimsical synth arpeggiations occupy the entire space of the first three minutes. And when he does start singing, almost five minutes have passed by, and his badly processed voice comes off as nasally and out of focus. He screams the chorus (“Ontological love!”) in a robotic monotone that is equally lifeless and clownish. It’s purposefully confusing and uncomfortable, without any actual goal in mind.
Hunt-Hendrix’s interviews have indicated that in some ways, maybe, he is in on the joke. But if that is so, why is this project so self-serious and utterly humorless? He is bold enough to say that his music, his career, will be a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork so engrossing and multivalent that it speaks to all walks of life. And yet his music, time and again, is treated like an afterthought, just another piece of a larger and more pointless scheme of self-aggrandizement.


Abandoning black metal’s harsh intensity in favor of softer, gentler sounds, Deafheaven push themselves into surprising terrain. It’s a tricky proposition.

Infinite Granite

Were they less restlessly creative, Deafheaven’s 2013 breakout, Sunbather, might have defined the band’s legacy. But throughout a gradual stylistic evolution, and beyond the provocations of their early days—the pink album artwork, the trendy haircuts, the hawking of the Sunbather font—an unwavering commitment to catharsis kept their music vital and thrilling. Deafheaven’s sweeping crescendos and relentless intensity have encouraged the kind of emotional bloodletting that attracts listeners from all across the musical spectrum, even ones who aren’t usually fans of black metal.
The elevator pitch for Infinite Granite, the band’s fifth album, is “Deafheaven minus the screaming and blast beats.” There’s no disputing that it’s their most subdued, least aggressive work by far, but that description also undersells how many gentler moments exist throughout Deafheaven’s discography, as well as how much clean singing there’s been on their last two records. Infinite Granite may push the band’s harshest elements to the margins, but its most striking departure is its abandonment of dynamic buildups and climaxes. Since Sunbather, the band’s music has been a linear, side-scrolling video-game landscape of cliffs and valleys; now it’s the famous Windows XP background of hi-res rolling hills with unknown scale but finite boundaries. Deafheaven are capable of gorgeous shoegaze, dream pop, and post-rock tapestries, but their replications of those styles begin to lose their emotional resonance when not interwoven with heavier fare.
As Infinite Granite progresses, it’s hard to tell if the songs are getting weaker or if it’s just your third or fourth time running up the same hill. Almost every track begins with ambient swirls of synth or guitar effects, which are soon paired with plaintive guitar strums and hi-hat-driven drum patterns. Once the full band kicks in, they’ll either ride it out for the song’s full runtime or select one of three options for transitions: blasting off on the back of a big Slowdive/My Bloody Valentine-style shoegaze riff, slowing down into a slightly heavier half-time breakdown, or granting us a brief glimpse of their black-metal side at the very end of the song, as a treat.
Deafheaven’s previous albums are hardly hyperpop-style mashups of a million different ideas—and indeed, by the mid-song breakdown in 2018’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love closer “Worthless Animal,” it may feel like you’ve heard slight variations of the same Daniel Tracy drumbeat a dozen times—but this is the first time the usually innovative band has felt like it’s playing by a set of predetermined rules. Infinite Granite’s update to a well-defined sound may seem like a brave attempt to escape whatever container that Deafheaven, their fans, and their critics have built for the band, but ironically, they haven’t sounded this boxed in since 2011’s Roads to Judah.
Still, within those limits, they do some impressive things. Frontman George Clarke’s poetic writing, now intelligible without the help of a lyric sheet, holds up under the spotlight, and his longstanding desire to deliver singalong hooks comes to fruition on the full-throated choruses of songs like “Shellstar” and “Lament for Wasps.” Guitarists Kerry McCoy and Shiv Mehra take the effort they once put into composing heart-wrenching solos and refocus it on laser-precision tonality, each new riff a microcosm of subtle shifts between reverb, chorus, and fuzz effects. Tracy may take more of a back seat than usual, but his thunderous fills telegraph where the rest of the band is headed, providing the spark for powerful moments at the tail ends of “Great Mass of Color” and “Villain.” The empty space where the screams, solos, and blast beats used to be is filled marvelously by bassist Chris Johnson, who, by virtue of both the softer style of music and fuller production, gets more space to roam than ever before.
Just as integral to Infinite Granite’s shift in sound is the presence of producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen, who, in addition to his work for rock heavy-hitters like M83, Paramore, and Jimmy Eat World, is a former member of Beck and Nine Inch Nails’ touring bands. This is the first Deafheaven album that’s not produced by Jack Shirley (though he’s still on board as engineer), and the difference between Shirley’s hands-off ethos and Meldal-Johnsen’s more involved approach is apparent. Eliminating blast beats is always going to allow for a wider range of frequencies—that constant pounding usually requires producers to roll back the bass levels or risk a muddled low end—but Infinite Granite sounds lush in a way that even the quietest moments on Deafheaven’s previous albums never have. Part of that’s all the layering of multi-tracks and effects, and part of it’s simply access to fancier gear—check McCoy and Mehra drooling over Meldal-Johnsen’s array of studio goodies in a recent Guitar World interview.
The idea here, as the band has said, was to set aside Deafheaven’s customary dramatic compositional dynamics in favor of subtler textural shifts achieved via the recording process itself. While that may delight audiophiles, an immersive headphones listen is only ever as powerful as the performance that drives it. On Infinite Granite, that performance is always skillful but rarely—aside from perfectly paced closer “Mombasa”—powerful in the ways Deafheaven have been in the past. If Infinite Granite was a debut by a band with no backstory, it’d be impressive as hell. But knowing Deafheaven’s singular ability to pull off thrilling highwire acts, their latest subversion of expectations feel less like a bold statement and more like a predictable move to gentler pastures.

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The former Chairlift singer-songwriter centers her sweeping solo debut on her powerful voice, crafting love songs about the moment of surrender, the pain preceding it, and the euphoria after.

Pang

Caroline Polachek named her album Pang after the bursts of adrenaline that jolted her out of sleep. She describes this as an internal thing, the sudden shock of emotion that “pricks you emotionally from the inside.” But it’s corporeal, too; you can’t say the word “pang”—or sing it, as Polachek does on the title track—without a quick release of breath, somewhere between a gasp and a sigh.
Pang is Polachek’s first album under her own name (she released 2014’s Arcadia as Ramona Lisa, and 2017’s Drawing the Target Around the Arrow as her initials, CEP) and perhaps not coincidentally, this album centers on her vocals. The music doesn’t depart too far from her work in Chairlift: a little Tango in the Night sophistipop, a little ambient, and a little from the charts. Her usual lyrical themes recur: living unexpected dreams, getting away with something sneaky-fun, tears in public and in oceans. There’s also that familiar tension between the anonymity of the city and the pastoral, even suburban; on “Parachute,” Polachek sings about love as a force pulling her “back to strip malls, highways, and treetops.” The scope of Pang, however, is wider.
She produced much of the album with PC Music’s Danny L Harle, and massively tones down his fripperies. At times, there’s a new age or modern classical tinge to the arrangements. Sometimes Pang sounds so sweeping it’s almost symphonic; the first few notes of “The Gate” almost sound like a synthetic orchestra tuning up. It’s a PR cliché to tout artists’ “classical training,” which can mean anything from actual classical training to a semester of voice lessons in college, but in her work, you genuinely can hear it. She’s mentioned writing melodies as wordless stretches of singing—she calls it “applesaucing.” For most of the decade, she’s taken classical voice lessons, specifically in baroque singing. This comes out not just in the soaring, near-operatic vocalizations throughout Pang, but in the crisp way she attacks words and syllables, the controlled vocal leaps, and precise staccato.
Even more specifically, Polachek took up opera lessons after hearing the version of Handel’s “Lascia ch’io pianga” in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. The non-traditional recording perhaps inspired her to use her training to non-traditional ends. Melodies that are heavily vocoded or Auto-Tuned often sound a little like a machine-made baroque run. As Polachek put it, “the voice just becomes the ultimate analog synth,” and it’s an effect she goes for a lot: the ornamentation throughout “Insomnia” and “Hey Big Eyes,” the digitally augmented glissando on the “Ocean of Tears” chorus, or the tumble of a vocal run, almost like a guitar solo, from the bridge of “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.” The influence also filters into the instrumental at times, most clearly the harpsichord-esque notes that underpin “Hey Big Eyes.”
Pang is such a coherent musical statement that when something doesn’t fit, it stands out. Polachek restructured the album somewhat late, swapping out five songs; what’s left is a sweeping, delicately latticed album with a few odd pop songs. They’re not bad pop songs. “New Normal” matches quick-cut lyrical scenes with a chameleonic arrangement: Polachek’s melody is yanked between two keys, and the instrumental goes from a conspicuously yeehaw opening of slide guitar to an almost dancehall beat to sputtering percussion and vocal clips from hip-hop. Somehow, it all works, but it belongs to an entirely different record. The Andrew Wyatt co-write “Hit Me Where It Hurts” feels like it was intended for Charli XCX—the low, throaty, near-spoken verses are drastically unlike Polachek’s vocal arrangements throughout Pang, but very much something Charli might handle.
What those five new songs—“The Gate,” “Pang,” “Ocean of Tears,” “Caroline Shut Up,” and “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings”—do have in common is that they’re all love songs about the moment of surrender, the pain preceding it, and the euphoria after. These are something Polachek’s said she’s hesitant to write. Whether this is true—after all, this is the singer of “I Belong In Your Arms” and “Crying in Public,” two of the decade’s most unabashed love songs—one still detects a certain wryness on Pang. “Caroline Shut Up” is the record’s most swooning track, a waltz-tempo love ballad. The title is what she shouts at herself, an exasperated reminder to stop overthinking lest she ruin the moment. She gets punchy and self-mocking in “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.” The arrangement is ’80s, somewhere between “Every Breath You Take” and “Everywhere,” but the scene is ’10s: crying in public over the Snaps you’re getting from your long-distance partner, culminating in the goofy-horny “show me the banana.” The chorus is punctuated, louder each time, with a gasp: the sound of a crush so sudden you feel like running out of the room, or bursting into a grin and never stopping. After all, laughter is a pang too.


After going synth-pop on 2013's Heartthrob, Tegan and Sara team up once again with super-producer Greg Kurstin for the follow up. At their best, they boil love songs down to their aching essence.

Love You to Death

In 2013, Tegan and Sara released their seventh album Heartthrob and immediately shot to a new level of fame. After a slow build over nearly 15 years, in which they steadily massed a fervent hardcore fanbase as a folk-inflected singer/songwriter duo, they metamorphosed in a blink into a massive pop group: instead of dual acoustic guitars and unadorned, harmonic vocals, they teamed up with Top 40 producer Greg Kurstin and adopted an ultra-glossy, near-blinding synth-pop sound. There's a razor-fine line between populist and derivative, and theirs was a calculated risk that paid off—not only was the record critically and commercially successful, it contained some of Tegan and Sara's best songwriting work to date.
After such an impressive and self-imposed breakaway, it's a bit of a shame that their new album, Love You to Death, feels like a focused retread of its predecessor. It's not a bad record—it's well-crafted, with some peaks equal to Heartthrob—but it lacks that intangible magic that so effortlessly bridged the first phase of their career to this new one. It might be unfair to ask them to recapture that moment, when they so recently were able to pull off the double accomplishment of becoming a new band while keeping their longtime fans, but between the bouncy synth hooks and sleek pop production (the band reconnected with Kurstin), you can feel some of the excitement draining away.
Their creative DNA has stayed more or less the same since they first began writing music, no matter the genre trappings around them. At their best, they boil down love songs to their purest, aching essence, capturing complicated emotions in economical, less-is-more lyrical strokes. “You kiss me like your boyfriend,” they coo on the album's lead single, “Boyfriend”—a moment of unrequited affection that sears through the buoyant synths and strike at your heart without halting the pace of the party. It's rare to find complex, personal songs about love and relationships matter-of-factly sung from a queer perspective, and in that respect alone Tegan and Sara remain a crucial voice in the pop landscape.
Elsewhere on the album, things a just a little less distinct; album cuts like “Faint of Heart” and “Stop Desire” are sturdy, but rely on a certain generic, contemporary-pop sound that could belong to anyone. Another highlight, “100X,” again shows how affecting they can be when they bend the tools of Big Pop to their personal ends. It's another tale of a relationship gone sour, this time with the narrator taking responsibility for the breakdown: “You were someone I loved/Then you were no one at all/It was cruel of me to do what I did to you,” they sing, the words placed simply around a sparse piano melody and some softly glowing synths. There's a straightforward emotional maturity in the moment that has always distinguished their best work.  The minimal instrumentation serves double duty as both stark moment of contemplation and mid-album comedown.
Although songs like the Vince Clarke-indebted “BWU” begin to quicken the album’s pulse in the second half, it's not until the second-to-last track that Love You To Death reaches its bombastic peak, when “U-Turn”'s wet, squelching keyboards punch through the record's firmament and blast off into the stratosphere. It sounds like the Song of the Summer 1986, all pool parties,  tiki torches and BBQs. It's proof that even though they might not capture lightning in a bottle twice, Tegan and Sara are still pushing hard to beat their own expectations, even this far into their career.


This newly issued 1971 set helpfully complicates the iconic harpist and pianist’s legacy, revealing her as not just a spiritual-jazz mystic but also the heir to her late husband’s harshly ecstatic fire music.

Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert

The Carnegie Hall Concert

Around 23 minutes into “Africa,” the epic centerpiece of a newly issued 1971 Carnegie Hall concert, Alice Coltrane takes control. Prior to this moment, the performance has featured her exclusively on harp, but for “Africa”—a composition by her late husband John, first released a decade earlier—the bandleader switches to the piano. The rendition takes a winding path, moving through fervent tenor saxophone solos set against a salvo of double drums, a hypnotic percussion break, and two lengthy bass features. Then Alice returns as though banging a gavel, pounding out the bluesy vamp that forms the backbone of the piece and calling the proceedings back to order. Her left hand acts as a booming bass-register engine, while her right answers with meaty chords, echoing the grand big-band orchestration of the 1961 version that led off John’s Africa/Brass LP. As the horns and drums reenter, wailing and exploding around her, she answers with the occasional burst of clanging energy from the keyboard but mostly holds down the center of the music, conveying authority amid the bedlam.
There are a lot of reasons to be excited about The Carnegie Hall Concert. It’s only the second full live album in the official Alice Coltrane catalog (an incomplete version of this same Carnegie Hall concert was previously released as a bootleg), and it dates from her most celebrated period as a bandleader, recorded just one week after the release of her acknowledged masterpiece Journey in Satchidananda. It features generously roomy renditions—including versions of two key Journey tracks, each clocking in at more than double the length of the original—that readily transport and at times overwhelm despite the occasionally rough sonics of the source tape. (Sadly, the 4-track master tapes of the concert were lost over the years—“Don’t ask me how,” writes Coltrane’s frequent producer Ed Michel, who oversaw the original Carnegie Hall recording, with palpable frustration in his production notes—so the release is drawn from a 2-track reference mix.)
And the album’s supporting cast is extraordinary, bringing together musicians from Journey—Pharoah Sanders on tenor and soprano sax, flute and more, Cecil McBee on bass, and Tulsi Reynolds on tamboura—with bassist Jimmy Garrison, a previous sideman to both Alice and John; Archie Shepp, a collaborator of John’s and, like Sanders, a strongly established saxophonist-bandleader in his own right; dual drummers Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis, the former of whom had joined John on 1960 sessions co-led by Don Cherry; and harmonium player Kumar Kramer.
But there’s another, perhaps even more valuable aspect to the album, exemplified by the “Africa” reentry described above: the way it helpfully complicates Coltrane’s rapidly crystallizing legacy. At this point, Coltrane’s overdue canonization has fully taken hold. During roughly the past decade, thanks to a series of illuminating reissues and tributes and a steady stream of namechecks (from tastemakers including Solange and André 3000), her work has been given its rightful due apart from the long-enshrined catalog of her iconic husband and collaborator, reaching a slew of new listeners in the process. But as her name has morphed into a kind of buzzword—often invoked in conjunction with the now-inescapable descriptor “spiritual jazz”—her image has at times been reduced to a near-caricature, that of the serene queen of the ashram, smiling benevolently from within her brilliant orange robes.
While there is of course some truth to that characterization, Alice Coltrane was not all prayer rugs and incense. As Flying Lotus—her grandnephew and frequent, outspoken champion—noted in a 2021 interview, Coltrane “was the matriarch of the family, but she was also the Godfather. She took care of everybody, but you couldn’t mess with Auntie.” In a starker way than any other prior Alice Coltrane release, The Carnegie Hall Concert allows us to glimpse these two incarnations side by side: Coltrane as both matriarch and Godfather; Coltrane as spiritual-jazz mystic and formidable heir to the harshly ecstatic fire music that her husband had spearheaded in the last few years of his life.
That juxtaposition seems almost intentional, as the concert is divided into two neat halves. First comes the Journey material, the title track and “Shiva-Loka,” as they’re sequenced on the album. In starting the show this way, Coltrane was both showcasing her new LP and honoring her guru. As Lauren Du Graf lays out in her helpful and detailed liner notes, the Carnegie Hall performance was actually part of an all-star benefit for the Integral Yoga Institute founded by Swami Satchidananda, Coltrane’s spiritual teacher at the time, her guide both out of grief, in the wake of her husband’s death, and on a transformative 1970 trip to India, and—as she’d cited in the Journey liner notes—a “direct inspiration” for the album.
Much like their studio counterparts, these live takes are beautifully chill and hypnotic in their simplicity. The main differences have to do with personnel and pacing. On “Journey in Satchidananda,” after a bit of introductory mood-setting, McBee and Garrison lock into the indelible 6/4 vamp that McBee played alone on the album, tolling like an eternal mantra. The tamboura and harmonium, elements inspired by Coltrane’s growing interest in Indian culture, are less present than on the studio version; here, Coltrane’s harp sets the mood, draping the whole performance in billowing, chiming splendor.
And whereas Sanders solos on soprano sax on the record, for this version, according to Michel’s notes, he plays flute, achieving a striking incantatory texture by vocalizing as he blows into the instrument, while Shepp plays soprano, bringing a bluesy pathos to the role. The longer running time gives both soloists plenty of room to explore the theme as it cycles into a pleasing quasi-infinity. On “Shiva-Loka,” another vamp-driven bliss-out, Sanders and Shepp both play soprano, the former dazzling with whirling sound shapes and the latter creating a lovely arc by starting out gentle and gradually turning up the grit. Blackwell and Jarvis, meanwhile, keep pace with a regal, laid-back pulse that harks back to John’s early-to-mid-’60s compatriot Elvin Jones.
Coltrane’s harp work on these first two tracks is flat-out gorgeous, but she seems content to play a mainly textural, supportive role. That changes dramatically on the final two pieces, 20-minute-plus renditions of two compositions by John, “Africa” and the minimal, staccato fanfare “Leo,” both featuring Alice on piano, the instrument she’d played in John’s band and worked at diligently in her earlier, largely undocumented musical apprenticeship in Detroit. These performances are as shatteringly intense as the first two were quietly meditative. The ensemble seems to be not just performing John Coltrane repertoire but consciously channeling the relentless rush of his most forbiddingly dense free-form work. “Africa” has a strong flavor of Trane circa the mid ’60s, when he beefed up his working band with extra drummers and saxophonists—with Shepp joining in occasionally and Sanders eventually signing on as a permanent addition—to create ever-escalating action paintings of sound.
As Alice switches instruments, so do Shepp and Sanders, picking up the tenors they proudly hoisted alongside Trane on 1965’s Ascension, and seeking out similarly furious peaks (Shepp’s roaring, ragged cries around the 5:00 mark are particularly arresting, as are Sanders’ multiphonic shrieks around 8:00). Alice also had plenty of experience playing alongside John in this mode—check out Live at the Village Vanguard Again! or Live in Japan, both recorded in ’66—but here, she’s even more commanding. During her solo, she establishes the firm bedrock of the piece while letting fly with swooping, swirling right-hand cascades. She often sounds here like either two or three pianists playing at once, nodding to the great McCoy Tyner, who was at the keyboard for John’s original version, while blasting off into her own distinct stratosphere.
More magic comes during her extended feature on “Leo,” a piece she had performed many times with John and would often reprise in later years. Starting around the 5:00 mark, she conjures a massive wall of rippling notes before launching into a series of breakneck dashes with the double-strength rhythm section, punctuated by prismatic storm clouds of sustain. You rarely hear Alice Coltrane mentioned in the company of the great power pianists of free jazz—Cecil Taylor, Don Pullen, Matthew Shipp, and others—but her staggering performances during this latter portion of the show confirm just how much she deserves to be regarded as a titan of that idiom.
The sound quality of the set is occasionally distracting, especially on “Shiva-Loka,” which contains some dropouts and intrusions of static. And there are moments when the mix feels disorienting—particularly when it comes to the contributions of the two drummers, which can be hard to parse as distinct musical statements—making you long, as Michel surely does, that this release could have been mixed from proper masters. But the recording has real presence and punch beyond its inarguable historical value; it sounds far better than posthumously unearthed John Coltrane recordings such as The Olatunji Concert.
Ultimately, the release of The Carnegie Hall Concert feels right on time, providing a welcome jolt of focus to a widespread impression of Alice Coltrane that’s started to seem just a tad vague. She’s here in full: the matriarch we now know well and duly appreciate; the Godfather we may not have ever properly reckoned with. The devotee of Satchidananda; the torchbearer for John. And the bandleader and instrumental powerhouse who marshaled formidable talents like Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, and found space for them within her rapidly expanding musical vision. There were more Alice Coltranes still to come, as she moved into challenging orchestral music, mind-bending organ work, and, ultimately, decades filled with devotional song. As this set shows, she always contained multitudes.


On Wolf's second album, he romanticizes travel and escape, pines for lost youth at age 21, dreams of domestic pleasures, and takes potshots at a debased culture.

Wind in the Wires

In his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, as well as in numerous short stories, Steven Millhauser has explored the dark gift of genius, particularly in children, and the toll it exacts. His precisely situated historical bildungsromans are rich with period detail and Bunyanesque protagonists who fulfill the wildest promises of their eras, each a larger-than-life manqué whose preternatural abilities (be they in entrepreneurship or the construction of detailed miniature automatons) lead them along the same delirious arc: A meteoric rise to success, a period of virtuosic clarity, and then a flame out as genius shades into unhealthy obsession or is rendered effete by novelty.
It's from such embroidered yet prescient pages that young Wolf-- 6'4", striking, and outlandishly attired-- seems torn wholesale. He began to dabble in recording at age 11, recording violin, junky analog organs, and homemade theremin on his four-track. He joined the art collective Minty at 14 and impressed Fat Cat Records enough that they gave him a computer and mixer to further his explorations. At 16, he left England to form the raucous Mason Crimineaux in France and won over Capitol K, who would release Wolf's solo debut, the bombastic, uncontained electro-folk grab bag Lycanthropy, in 2003.
Until Wolf's story has been written in full, it's impossible to say whether his sophomore effort, Wind in the Wires, belongs to the rapid upsurge or the crystallization of vision, but there are signs to indicate the latter. Millhauser's characters' zeniths of achievement are often presaged by their returning changed from a long absence-- some outer expression of a burgeoning darkness within them. After Lycanthropy put him on the radar, Wolf absconded from London to a cliff-side chalet in Cornwall. The formerly blond singer returned with a shock of black hair and Wind in the Wires, which boils off the excesses of his debut and simmers in elegant pools of glitchy beats, found sound collages, crackling electrical sounds, and gothic shadows.
Wind in the Wires is like Bright Eyes' Digital Ash in a Digital Urn if Nick Cave had made it, a fertile nexus of tradition, technology, and Wolf's powerful pipes, as he romanticizes travel and escape, pines for lost youth at age 21, dreams of domestic pleasures, and takes potshots at a debased culture. "The Libertine" opens the album with clip-clopping hooves, a gypsy-disco beat, sawing violins and a spitting electrical undercurrent as Wolf inveighs against duplicitous priests, immoral heroes and other phonies, while the simpler, poppier "Land's End" gripes about the music industry's promotional apparatus. The languidly beautiful "Teignmouth" longs for release from banality: Over a staticky pulse and angelic choir, Wolf sings, "So when the birds fly south/ I'll reach up and hold their tails/ Pull up and out of here/ And bridle the autumn gales." And on the ukulele madrigal "The Railway House", Wolf imagines the placid contentment of growing old: "So wave goodbye to living alone/ I think we've found our home/ Let's paint these walls and pull up the weeds/ And cast our fevers in stone."
But to focus only on the broader traits is to miss what makes Wind in the Wires so outstanding: Wolf festoons his songs with strange, understated details that ratchet them toward the mysterious. Sputtering electricity, alien frequencies, and sculpted static billow across the record in sparkling clouds. In the midst of the mournful strains of "Ghost Song", a perfectly incongruous Bobby Digital-style "Whoop!" floats up like a bubble, and the same sound of cycling voltage that opens the first song ends the last one, wrapping the album in a closed circuit. Nothing here has been left to chance.
Wolf's strange blend of postmodernism and antiquity is where he seems to break away from being a Millhauser character and gains an affinity with the author himself: Millhauser honors traditional yarning while being fully aware of its archetypal implications; his characters' failures are the waking at the end of the dream or the bleak ending edited out of the fairy tale. For Wolf's sake, one hopes that with Wind in the Wires, he's caught that southbound bird's tail and escaped from Millhauser's inexorable parabola: To be the dreamer of dreams, rather than the dreamt, is clearly his heart's desire.


The introspective St. Louis rapper builds a self-contained world with his magnetic monotone and intricate, evocative raps.

A Japanese Horror Film

Is Liquid Swords a concept album? It probably isn’t, but part of the mystique of GZA’s defining statement is it feels like it could be one. From the meticulously structured verses to the skits and extensive dialogue excerpts from Shogun Assassin, the entire record works in the service of a dense mythology that’s all the more alluring because it never coalesces into a clean narrative. It’s a masterpiece not of storytelling, but of world-building.
Chester Watson’s A Japanese Horror Film is that kind of album, too. The Los Angeles rapper is part of a long lineage of monotone spitters who pride themselves more on their pen than their presence, combining the rap-as-chess intricacy of GZA (whose samurai fascination he also shares) with the absurdist splatter of MF Doom and the philosophical free-associations of R.A.P. Ferreira. Watson credits Earl Sweatshirt for making him start rapping as a teen, and on his earliest releases there was no mistaking that debt, but the two artists’ visions have diverged as they’ve entered their twenties. Where Earl's introspective raps have continued to retreat ever inward, Watson uses his to build something more fantastical and conceptual.
He raps like a dorm kid who sees messages on dollar bills. On opener “Life Wrote Itself,” he tells of wisdom handed down from gods and aliens and conveyed by shamans and pyramids, and that’s just a warm-up for the tracks that follow about spirit worlds, inter-dimensional travel, and reincarnation. “Got a lotta grim tales leaking from my stem cells,” he grumbles on “Yokai,” “Catching up on folklore, lying on the cold floor/My only regret in life is that I don’t know more.” While Watson isn’t above stacking syllables just because they sound great together, he also knows when to simplify his rhymes for added punch, which he often does when his bars turn to his frayed mental state. “Remember Biggie telling me something dark in a dream/I get no answer when I’m singing my prayers, they must be outta key,” he intones over the dank, creaky beat of “Fog,” part of a stark final stretch that closes out the record.
Like Liquid Swords, A Japanese Horror Film evades a linear reading, and yet it teases the possibility that with enough effort you might unlock a unifying theory that brings an entire story into focus. In spoken stretches between verses, Watson dialogues with celestial voices who inform him of his past lives and grand destiny, like NPCs guiding the hero of a video game. It's an effective, low-commitment framing device, creating an illusion of exposition while leaving Watson’s songs free to chase whatever whims they’d like. Their injections about Atlantis or the ins and outs of astral projection may not pay off narratively, yet they create a sense of momentum anyway.
Watson’s lane may be narrow, but it’s crowded; there will never be a shortage of rappers with big vocabularies and blasé deliveries rhyming over bare beats. Yet few have translated that style into a statement album that’s quite as substantial as entertaining as A Japanese Horror Film, a record that’s committed to the fantasy it builds yet tactful enough not to give away too much about it. As a lyricist, Watson understands the importance of specificity. But as a creator, he knows it’s the open ends that keep you coming back.


A Tribe Called Quest's seminal debut is an album that's largely focused outside of itself and its creators. There are three added cuts for this reissue—remixes by Pharrell, J. Cole, and CeeLo—that are passable and melodic but unneeded. Tribe's music needs no updating, even when it sticks out like a sore thumb, because that's exactly what it did in 1990.

A Tribe Called Quest: People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm

Approaching A Tribe Called Quest's seminal debut in 2015 is a loaded venture. The Queens, N.Y. trio (and sometimes "y" quartet, counting Jarobi) is one of the most revered acts in hip-hop—and with good reason. As part of the Afrocentric and innovative Native Tongues collective—which included De La Soul,  Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, Black Sheep, and others—they created and refined a template for '90s hip-hop that was street-astute, worldly, and more inspirational than aspirational.
Even without the Native Tongues' legacy, Tribe's heritage is not a light one. There's no stretch in saying that, without A Tribe Called Quest, the biggest rap artists of this year—Drake, Future, and Kendrick Lamar—would not exist as they do. Drake would not be Drake without Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak; Kanye would not be Kanye without his Tribe influences. Without Tribe, the Dungeon Family—birthplace of Outkast, Goodie Mob, and Future—arguably does not exist. And the improvisational looseness of Kendrick's opus is unthinkable without the innumerable branches of jazz and hip-hop sprouting from Tribe's experimentation, which differed significantly from the cooler jazz-sample leanings of Stetsasonic and Gang Starr. There's no Mos Def, no J. Cole, no Common, no J Dilla, no Digable Planets, no Neptunes, and no Clipse as we know them. Tribe is that important. And this album—the first ever to receive a perfect "5 Mic" rating from The Source magazine—is where it all began.
Arriving a year after De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm showed Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Jarobi to be whimsical yet grounded in reality. They weren't heady, hermetic, and puzzling like De La; in comparison to 3 Feet High's astounding range and informative sound collages, People's Instinctive Travels was clean and focused. Where De La went wide musically, Tribe went deep; where De La was deep and dense lyrically, Tribe went wide and abstract. That both projects managed to do all they were able to do and remain fun is one of the great wonders of hip-hop's first golden age.
Encountered now, in 2015,  A People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm feels like a palette cleanser. Considered with Kendrick Lamar's layered and angsty self-examination on To Pimp A Butterfly, the blunting and numbing escapist bounce of Future's DS2, and Drake's bombastic and moody mythological affirmations from If You're Reading This It's Too Late, it's an album that's largely focused outside of itself and its creators. There are three added cuts for this reissue—remixes by Pharrell, J. Cole, and CeeLo—that are passable and melodic but unneeded. Tribe's music needs no updating, even when it sticks out like a sore thumb, because that's exactly what it did in 1990.
"I Left My Wallet In El Segundo", with its eight-bar flip of the Chamber Brothers' "Funky" and Wes Anderson-like narrative, is sparse and simple. But it more than stands up, thanks in no small part to Bob Power's remastering, which makes everything sound fuller and crisper and which uses the empty space between the newly clarified sounds to create groove and warmth. On a fresh listen, the reason "Bonita Applebum" (powered largely by a generous  sample of  Ramp's "Daylight") is still considered one the best loved songs hip-hop has ever produced becomes clear—musically it's sunny and spry, capturing blushes of virgin courtship. It's objectifying, but respectful; cocksure but awkward; flattering and freaky: Q-Tip praises his desired's "elaborate eyes," promises to "kiss you where some brothers won't" and offers that, "So far, I hope you like rap songs."
The rhymes here are at once conversational and repressed, the topics concurrently large and small. Diet is tackled on "Ham 'N' Eggs" with Tip and Phife rhyming in tandem, "A tisket, a tasket, what's in mama's basket?/ Some veggie links and some fish that stinks/ Why, just the other day, I went to Grandma's house/ Smelled like she conjured up a mouse. " Sexual fidelity and STD's are dealt with on "Pubic Enemy" via "Old King Cole" who "wore the crown but not the jimmy hat" until one day "the fair maiden in the royal bedroom/ Caught the king scratching." Sex and safe sex were at the forefront of Q-Tip's mind—props (women) are referred to often, and the most important thing about retrieving his wallet from El Segundo seems to be reclaiming his "props' numbers" and condoms, or "jimmy hats."
The group is marked for their social consciousness, but not merely because of their awareness, but their ability to wax simultaneously about politics and art. On "Push It Along", Tip traverses police brutality, community unity, and rap dreams in a few bars, managing to be an approachable advocate for responsibility without seeming didactic: "The pigs are wearing blue/ And in a year or two/  We'll be going up the creek in a great big canoe / What we gonna do? Save me and my brothers?/ Hop inside the bed and pull over the covers?/ Never will we do that and we ain't trying to rule rap/ We just want a slab of the ham, don't you know, black?" The lyrics are 25 years old. But were they released today they'd seem right on time, while being out of place—because all these many years later People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm is more than a nostalgia artifact. It's a worthy listen, not because of what it was, but because of what it is.


The Philips Years is a humble title for a collection that contains some of the most important, moving documents of American history. Nina Simone’s Philips records remain her most essential.

The Philips Years

Nina Simone hurts you. She does it with her voice, which is sharpened and ready, versatile as a set of top flight chef’s knives able to slice through the music making a myriad of purposeful and precise incisions, wounds, gashes or lacerations. She does it through words, delivered sometimes like poisoned darts, other times like butterfly kisses from a child on the cheek of an exhausted mother. She does it by staring you down and withering your resolve; looking at you the way death looks at you, and in so doing giving you life.
Her pain becomes yours, and her pain is eternal and without limit. It is a human pain, a ghostly, ancient suffering that comes through her more than it does from her. Having been dropped to the earth in Depression-era America, she sang this pain through blues and Broadway, through jazz and campy lovestruck standards. She played Bach fugues and cantatas with the same urgent grace that she lent to the hammer-busting work ballads of the black south. Born a classical prodigy in a hot and rural segregated North Carolina town, she was formed into (or perhaps already was) a warrior of unmatched regality; a woman in possession of kind, delicate fingers and the kind of emotional bloodlust that only comes when you grow up in a place where people are lynched for looking just like you.
Ms. Simone attended Juliard with money her hometown collected to further her career, but left the school when her cash ran out. After a rejection from a conservatory in Philadelphia, she took on gigs at a supper club, and eventually earned a recording contract first with Bethlehem and then Colpix where she released eight albums, became a darling of the folk scene and culminated with a performance at Carnegie Hall in 1963.
But then civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway by a Klan member. And several months later a bomb ripped through a black church in Birmingham, Alabama murdering four children. And within months Nina Simone switched labels to Philips and unleashed a series of songs about civil rights and anger and freedom, the most noted of which is “Mississippi Goddamn,” a sprightly show tune that slow-builds into an unrestrained call to arms. The tune is based on a passage on Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s “Alabama Song” from the 1927 experimental play, Mahagonny-Songspiel aka The Little Mahagonny. Brecht and Weill would prove consistent and proper antecedents to the particular brew of theatricality and revolution that defined much of Ms. Simone’s work after she joined Philips. Her cover of “Pirate Jenny” from Threepenny Opera is one of the creepiest recordings of all time for a great many reasons, one of which being Simone’s implicit understanding of how closely 1930s Germany paralleled the violent psychosis of American racism.
These songs and scores more all appear on the seven albums she recorded at Philips from 1964-1967, which have been re-released as a boxed set. The set, simply called, Nina Simone: The Philips Years, covers a period of time that is arguably her creative best.
Too large to be subsumed under one description, the 74 songs contained herein cover all corners of the Simone musical universe, from the bright and lacy Sunday best of “Nearer Blessed Lord,” to the hellfire and brimstone of “Sinnerman,” from the lush, indulgent ennui of “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” to the bold, agonizing solemnity of “Strange Fruit.” Nearly every song in this far-flung cycle has its opposite, because Nina Simone was the nexus point of nearly all the western musical ideas of her time. She may be the only artist to find the link between Sam Cooke and Edith Piaf, between Bertolt Brecht and Malcolm X. Her thorough and strict classical training (she was in the truest and least sensational sense a diva) allowed her to treat the music of black Americans—soul, jazz, blues, roots and folk—with a level of deference typically reserved for Rachmaninov.
On display in these recordings is Simone’s vast and unmatched set of gifts, technical and otherwise. Her pure jazz keyboard work on tracks like “Mood Indigo” makes her one of the few pianists to legitimately rival Duke Ellington’s combination of clarity and melodic complexity. Although she largely interpreted other people’s songs, some of the strongest lyrical content in her catalogue comes from her own compositions, particularly “Four Women,” a spare, trenchant character study that manages to capture all the impossible contradictions of black American womanhood in just 16 lines. And the impact of her vocals went beyond her distinctive voice. She was an incisive and adroit singer, who could seamlessly navigate the vulnerable passages that appeared in ballads like “Don’t Smoke in Bed,” and “I Loves You Porgy,” while also bringing a virtuosic gravitas even to syrupy standards like “One September Day.”
The other end of her skill set was her unmatched ability to make listeners feel every bit of what she was feeling. Think of the vast and prickly joy of a track like “Feeling Good,” how it conveys a manic freedom, a heart-bursting love that shoots from the chest in nerve-sized lightening bolts, tingling like chandeliers shattering throughout your limbs. Or the meandering mourning of “Plain Gold Ring,” that unfolds itself slowly over the dark, creeping motive that comprises the song’s melodic underpinning. She delivers, “In my heart it will never be spring” in a way that darkens the skies of your own heart, stripping the foliage, laying bare the branches of your skeleton. At their peak, Simone’s powers bordered on emotional clairvoyance.
Predictably it was when she turned the full power of these weapons to the cause of affirming the rights and humanity of black people that her career began to falter in ways from which she could never fully recover. It is difficult to overstate how strident and militant she was about ending racism and injustice, how unabashedly she proclaimed her love for blackness and the preciousness of the lives of black people. My own mother and her sisters have told me for years that of all the civil rights leaders of their generation, it was Ms. Simone, dark-skinned, natural-haired, big lipped, seated at a piano with a head wrapped in queenly cloths, and fingers that have mastered Western music, who meant the most to them. It was Ms. Simone who loved them when she sang their pain. It was Ms. Simone who entitled them when she sang their anger.
This boxed set contains some of the best pure music ever recorded. It doesn’t really matter what your genre loyalties are. At its essence, music is about chords, melodies, and harmonies, and an artist whose humanity is so fully on display that you, as a listener can’t help but to vibrate sympathetically. When you hear “Mississippi Goddamn,” sung in 1964 in New York City, you are hearing a song that is so honest and fearless that it is still impossible to deny. And 2016 is a lot like 1964. Racially motivated murders still take place under the cover of night. Black people are still killed in churches to advance the cause of white supremacy. A nation still threatens to devour itself. At its most glorious, the work collected here is an affirmation of the level of humanity needed to keep the soul in tact and fight for one’s freedom. At its most mournful, it is evidence of the cost.


On the New York ensemble’s second album, their arid ambient-country landscapes take on a different tone, sounding less like a vacation than a dinner bell for the apocalypse.

High Line

On their 2018 debut album, Ghost Box, the New York ensemble SUSS evoked the American Southwest in mystical, ambient-country instrumentals. After their song “Late Night Call” attracted millions of Spotify plays, the band updated Ghost Box that fall, fleshing out their original work with vivid new tracks. On their second album, High Line, their arid sonic landscapes take on a different tone, sounding less like a vacation than a dinner bell for the apocalypse.
High Line begins gently in “Salt Flats,” its dusty swirls of synths building around slow-burning guitar. Soon, though, SUSS establish an ominous, lingering tone with “Wetlands.” Pedal steel approaches in piercing high range before low strings ripple up below, and dark electric guitar gradually surfaces amid the waves. The bent guitar notes burbling within the pedal steel’s elastic framework are gently combative, like a jellyfish bumping against the walls of an aquarium tank.
High Line offers less immersion than Ghost Box; its compositions feel like anxious, half-remembered dreams, evaporating just before they unfold fully. Spaced throughout the record, High Line’s trio of dune-titled pieces—“Blue Dune I,” “Blue Dune II,” and “Dunes III”—spread lingering tension. A swampy acoustic guitar arrives and disappears like an itinerant stranger near the end of “Blue Dune I,” pushing away background prickles of gently scraped strings. The acoustic guitar is more restless on “Blue Dune II,” hopping around with restrained half-strums; on “Dunes III,” distorted electric guitars wriggle alongside synths and pedal steel, with even darker synth flares adding a sinister foil. Like wind-shaped dunes themselves, the song trio shifts gradually, as if controlled by titanic forces that can be felt but never seen.
Tension seeps into “Too Young to Die,” which opens with a clear, lightly twangy guitar melody that’s subsumed by a thrumming bassline and sporadic background hisses. Turning skyward, “Ursa Major” is more mercurial, beginning brightly on wavering channels of pedal steel, fiddle drone, and synth fizz. It changes midway, turning to stormy post-rock with the arrival of lumbering drums and splashy cymbals before closing with a single, sparkling chime. Then SUSS finish on a serene note with “Sundowner,” the distinct metallic sparkle of a mandolin pairing with fluttering synths and blooming acoustic guitars. It’s a welcome uplift, though it doesn’t feel exactly hopeful, and so it suits the present moment. High Line is more clipped, on edge, and overcast than anything SUSS has done before—but then again, so is the world they live in.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Mac Miller's debut is the first independently distributed debut album to go to No. 1 in 16 years, but the Pittsburgh rapper is mostly just a crushingly bland and intolerable version of Wiz Khalifa.

Blue Slide Park

At the 2000 VMAs, Eminem's performance of "The Real Slim Shady" featured him walking across Sixth Avenue in Manhattan and into Radio City Music Hall followed by a few hundred extras that had been styled in his image, bleached hair and all. The performance was an arresting, and very literal, visual representation of the song's claim of there being "a million of us just like me." Pittsburgh rapper Mac Miller is having his "'The Real Slim Shady' at the VMAS" moment right now, even if he'll never actually perform there. There are hundreds of thousands of listeners trailing him intensely-- Blue Slide Park sold just about 145,000 copes in its first week in stores, making it the first independently distributed debut album to go No. 1 in 16 years. And the reason Miller's mass of fans follow him is not because of his music, at least not completely. It's because he looks just like them, because they can see themselves up on the stage behind him, if not next to him.
It's a presumptive conclusion, but it's hard to find much, if anything, in Miller's music that suggests otherwise. He is an outsider, but he brings no outsider's perspective to his music. Forget Eminem, Miller's point of view is less unique than Asher Roth's or Childish Gambino's. He lusts after fame, money, and women, and he smokes weed and parties. Obviously, there's nothing wrong with that; it is rap music, of course. But it does raise the question of why Miller is so popular, because despite his claim of being a cross between John Lennon and UGK, he's mostly just a crushingly bland, more intolerable version of Wiz Khalifa without the chops, desire, or pocketbook for enjoyable singles. Unless you buy into Miller's persona-- and why would you?-- Blue Slide Park offers you nothing that you can't find done more much artfully by, say, Curren$y.
This is, in a way, rap music's fault. Mac Miller has been called "frat rap," and while there's a slight truth to that, the term leaves unacknowledged the fact that frat guys used to engage with the rap world writ large. That interaction may have involved an unhealthy appreciation for Jurassic 5, but it also involved rocking YoungbloodZ and Ying Yang Twins songs at parties. The pop world has left rap behind, save four or five rappers, and it's opened a door for someone like Mac Miller to seize the college-aged, white-male fanbase. If that fanbase is interacting less with rap music, then maybe they've rallied around Miller because he also barely engages with the wider rap world. Consider the fact that Blue Slide Park has not one feature-- not a guest verse or chorus. For a contemporary rap album, let alone a No. 1 rap album, that is basically unheard-of. Before you consider that to be a noble pursuit, the album could've used somebody, anybody, to break up the monotony of Miller on the mic.
Miller's world is a hermetic one, and unless it's one you inhabit, the album holds no appeal. It's a normal rap album, sure, but as listeners we should strive for more than a no-stakes work by a guy wearing the same streetwear brands and snapbacks as everyone else, who has merely found a niche and exploited it. Miller's hustle can't be knocked, and it shouldn't be, but his art is 144,487 times less remarkable than his first week sales numbers would have you believe. His success is not a mirage, no. But it is a projection.


After the straightforward radio-rock trappings of the Raconteurs, the back-to-basics Icky Thump packs an unexpected freshness, resulting in the best White Stripes album in years.

Icky Thump

For all intents and purposes, the White Stripes appeared to be defunct in 2006, put on hiatus while Jack White gallivanted the globe with Midwestern pals the Raconteurs. The previous year's Get Behind Me Satan, commercial success that it was, sounded in retrospect like a man frustrated with his duo's limited options, fiddling with more keyboards and pedals than previous Stripes LPs. Coupled with White's perceptible glee at the Raconteurs' expanded sonic palette and shared frontman duties-- not to mention the more diverse wardrobe options-- some thought it unlikely he'd don the red and white again any time soon.
Icky Thump, then, is a bit of a resurrection: Reuniting with Meg gives Jack the opportunity to slip back into sister-lover character, get his weird clothes out of the attic, and return to basement blues. After the straightforward radio-rock trappings of the Raconteurs, Icky Thump packs an unexpected freshness, even given its back-to-basics premise; had it come immediately after Satan, it could have seemed like a cynical, regressive gift to the core fanbase, but following Broken Boy Soldiers, it recaptures a sense of goofy fun and a caustic edge that the duo haven't possessed since White Blood Cells launched them to the A-list.
Recorded over what qualifies as a marathon session for the Stripes (a whole three weeks), Icky Thump re-assembles most of the scrap-heap elements that characterized the White Stripes' pre-fame trilogy: grimy garage-blues, a left-field cover, bizarre spoken-word bits, and shameless Zeppelin and Dylan cues. The most obvious breaking development is White's instrument sound-- its tones are so aggressively tweaked that it's hard to tell whether he's playing a guitar that sounds like a keyboard or a keyboard being played like a guitar (prediction for the next White Stripes album gimmick: keytar).
The leadoff title track declares this territory nicely, alternating an overdriven, tortured organ with savage guitar jabs, and already proving a better integration of keys and frets than Satan's marimba experiments. "I'm Slowly Turning Into You" blends Wurlitzer verses with fuzz-guitar choruses almost seamlessly; "St. Andrew (The Battle Is in the Air)" finds White facing off against bagpipes (yes, bagpipes) with chainsaw seizures; and on "Conquest", he trades shrieking Casio tones with a trumpeter.
Yet, Icky Thump also treats us to a band that once again seems comfortable with its broken-in sounds, from the reverb-thud hammer of "Little Cream Soda" and the British Invasion 12-bar of "300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues" to the back-porch ditty of "Effect & Cause". Perennially dismissed, Meg White once again puts the lie to the theory that John Bonham like totally made Led Zeppelin bro, squeezing the most from her limited repertoire and unsteady tempo when locking in with Jack on classic Stripes-stomp breakdowns like the one in "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)", where raw talent takes a backseat to chemistry. The duo's effortless dynamic on "Bone Broke" dismisses the garage-rock trend starting to tiresomely re-bubble yet again amongst the indie dregs, showing that world tours haven't taken them too far away from sweaty suburban Detroit house parties.
But unlike most other 10th-time-around blues-rock revivalists, the Stripes don't settle for endlessly rewriting "96 Tears", as the record's two weirdest (and maybe best) cuts prove. "Conquest", with its theatrical vocal and faux-mariachi fanfares, teases a promising revved-up early Scott Walker direction until you realize that it's a meticulous recreation of the Patti Page original. "Rag & Bone" with its spoken-word verses, is practically a thesis statement for a band that loves to write songs about itself, casting Jack and Meg as junk collectors with a way-creepy relationship, prone to amphetamine rambles and big, chunky rock choruses.
If there's a complaint to be registered about Icky Thump, it's that certain aspects of the Stripes' early character appear to have been annexed off: The sweet pop of "You're Pretty Good Lookin' (For a Girl)" would probably be Raconteurs property nowadays, and White's country dalliances (i.e. "Hotel Yorba") are totally absent. Revisiting old territory also carries with it the hazard of backward comparison, and the highest highs of Icky can't quite reach the altitude of the band's breakthrough singles, but some of that inadequacy is tempered by the group's more robust sound-- De Stijl now feels anorexic in a side-by-side taste-test. Whether it was remembering their own advice from "Little Room" or the freedom to write in another mode with the Raconteurs, White's strategy worked its rejuvenating magic, allowing the Stripes to roll back the stone on Icky Thump.


Almost 15 years after Kicking a Dead Pig comes Mogwai's second remix album, featuring Jesu/Godflesh's Justin K. Broadrick, Tim Hecker, the Soft Moon, and others taking on tracks from the 2011 LP Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will.

A Wrenched Virile Lore

Mogwai made their name on a simple formula: be very quiet, and then, without warning, be sadistically loud. But very early on, the group showed they weren't especially precious about their practice. Their 1997 full-length debut, Young Team, was quickly followed by Kicking a Dead Pig, wherein Young Team's tracks were subjected to sonic surgery by a cast of noted studio scientists that included Kevin Shields, Alec Empire, and µ-Ziq. At the time, it hardly seemed odd that the most undanceable band in all of Scotland would welcome the opportunity for a beat-based rethink. After all, in the wake of the late-90s electronica boom, remix albums had effectively replaced live albums as the default cash-cow-milking measure for rock bands (as acknowledged by the collection's piss-take of a title), and the ample negative space in the band's music presents producers with a large canvass to color in. But despite its impressive cast and elaborate double-CD presentation, Dead Pig ultimately sounded like random attempts at applying Mogwai's metallic noise to the darker strains of electronic music of the era (drill and bass, digital hardcore), to the point of using its entire second disc to determine who could produce the most gonzo version of the band’s epic signature track "Mogwai Fear Satan". (Shields' titanic take won in a landslide.)
Fourteen years later, the band's second remix album, A Wrenched Virile Lore, arrives as a more cohesive work, presenting a cerebral, alternate-universe reimgination of Mogwai's 2011 release, Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will. Despite its severe title, Hardcore counts as the band’s most blissful and texturally rich to date. *Hardcore'*s sound provides producers with more jumping-off points than the band's mountainous art-rock would normally allow. If Kicking a Dead Pig was mostly about giving Mogwai's atomic guitar eruptions a mechanized makeover, A Wrenched Virile Lore repositions the songs' central melodies in more splendorous surroundings. In the hands of Justin K. Broadrick, the post-punky krautrock of "George Square Thatcher Death Party" becomes the sort of gently ascendant, anthemic opener that you could imagine blaring out of a stadium to kick-off an Olympics ceremony; Pittsburgh prog-rockers Zombi hear the mournful piano refrain of "Letters to the Metro" as the basis for a glorious, strobe-lit Trans Europe Express flashback. Or in some cases, the material is stripped down to its essence: Glaswegian troubador R.M. Hubbert re-routes the motorik pulse of "Mexican Grand Prix" off the speedway into the backwoods and transforms it into a hushed, Jose Gonzalez-like acoustic hymn, while San Fran neo-goth upstarts the Soft Moon scuff away the surface sheen of "San Pedro" to expose the seething menace lurking underneath. However, there are limits to this approach: Umberto's distended, ambient distillation of "Too Raging to Cheers" simmers down this already serene track to the point of rendering it inconsequential.
Like Hardcore, A Wrenched Virile Lore features 10 tracks, though it only references eight of the originals. However, even the mixes that draw from the same songs are different enough in approach and sequenced in such a way that the reappearances feel like purposeful reprises: Klad Hest's drum and bass-rattled redux of "Rano Pano" finds its sobering aftershock in Tim Hecker's haunted and damaged revision, while Cylob's cloying synth-pop take on Hardcore's opener "White Noise"-- which fills in the original's instrumental melody with lyrics sung through a vocoder-- is redeemed by UK composer Robert Hampson's 13-minute soft-focus dissolve of the same track. Renamed "La Mort Blanche", its appearance provides both a full-circle completion of this record (by book-ending it with mixes by former Godflesh members) while serving as a re-entry point back into Hardcore by reintroducing the source song's main motifs and widescreen vantage. But more than just inspire a renewed appreciation for Hardcore, A Wrenched Virile Lore potentially provides Mogwai with new avenues to explore now that they're well into their second decade, and perhaps instill a greater confidence in the idea that their identity can remain intact even in the absence of their usual skull-crushing squall.


Ripe 4 Luv, the full-length debut of Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook as Young Guv, mines genres like soft rock, power pop, and R&B for the general feel and quick hooks, then moves on. It’s Cook’s cleanest, most easygoing release yet, and far and away his catchiest.

Ripe 4 Luv

The video for Young Guv’s "Crushing Sensation" plays like a failed Rocky montage. Inspired by the images of athletes posted around his apartment, singer Ben Cook rolls out of bed, throws on some sweats, and hits the streets. His heart’s not in it, though: He attempts some pull ups and listlessly swipes at a punching bag, but mostly he putters around the city, kicking snow, smoking cigarettes, and staring at nothing in particular.

That same noncommittal attitude has carried through Cook’s many bands outside of his primary gig playing guitar for Fucked Up. He’s bounced from one flash collaboration or side project to another—among them Marvelous Darlings, the Bitters, Roommates, and Yacht Club—leaving a trail of demo tapes and 7-inches but never devoting himself to any act for the long haul. Some of those bands flamed out before they could realize their potential, others were probably never intended to have much of a shelf life, but each inched Cook ever so slightly away from messy punk and toward the tuneful comforts of power-pop, the jumping-off point for his full-length debut as Young Guv, Ripe 4 Luv. Tying some of the loose ends from his previous projects, though never too neatly, it’s Cook’s cleanest, most easygoing release yet, and far and away his catchiest.
Like every album released by Slumberland Records since its 2006 resurrection, Ripe 4 Luv is versed in the shimmery indie-pop of the label’s heyday years. But Cook is too restless to limit himself to any single musical tradition, so Ripe 4 Luv also detours into soft-rock slow jams, giddy new wave, and Prince’s hormonal R&B-pop. The title track is straight out of Dirty Mind, all bubblegum guitar and funk strut, while "Aquarian" sets its 10cc-style pillow talk against a mechanically cool, Sade-esque groove.
Cook has the songwriting chops to pull off all these styles. He’s ghostwritten for such unlikely big names as Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson, and Maroon 5, so he’s never been as bound by punk orthodoxy as his years in the Canadian hardcore scene suggested. And unlike many indie acts that have moonlighted with soft rock and R&B over the last half decade—Blood Orange on Cupid Deluxe; Destroyer on Kaputt; Gayngs with Relayted—Cook isn’t too concerned with nailing the nuances of these genres. Instead, he captures the general feel, mines it for a quick hook, then moves on. He’s just not the type of musician who’s going to dedicate the effort required for a sustained, elaborate genre homage, especially when the gist will suffice.
Ripe 4 Luv is relentlessly sunny throughout its 33-minute run, though Cook can’t resist letting a little skeeziness in here and there. Behind its ringing guitars and Alex Chilton harmonies, "Kelly, I’m Not a Creep" disguises an unnerving portrait of an inter-apartment building stalker. The seven-minute closer "Wrong Crowd", meanwhile, stretches Young Guv’s throwback soft rock to the point of sleazy parody. The joke grows stale even before some Showtime After Dark saxophone arrives to close out the song. It’s the album’s only bum track, but thankfully it’s tucked at the end, and it doesn’t sour what came before it. Throughout Ripe 4 Luv you can sense that it’s taking every ounce of discipline Cook has to play these pop songs as straight as he does, so he can be forgiven for indulging a little kitsch at the finish line.


Featuring most the magisterial Dusty in Memphis and its lesser follow-up A Brand New Me, plus a bevy of related tracks, a new collection captures one of pop’s most fascinating personalities in her second act.

Dusty Springfield: The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971

The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971

By 1968, Dusty Springfield had begun to suspect that there was no easy way down. Cool enough to duet with Jimi Hendrix on her regrettably named ITV show It Must Be Dusty but hobbled by increasingly dowdy material, Springfield realized it wasn’t a good time for singers with bouffant hairstyles who hoped to stay hip. Signing with Atlantic and relocating to Memphis that year looked like a smart move, resulting in a body of work as substantial as Aretha Franklin’s own Atlantic recordings. The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971 collects most of the magisterial Dusty in Memphis (1969), its lesser follow-up A Brand New Me (1970), and a bevy of tracks orbiting the albums like lonely satellites.
Before turning to this fecund epoch, it’s important to appreciate Springfield’s achievements. To savor the run of singles recorded between 1963 and 1967, from “I Only Want to Be With You” to “The Look of Love” means appreciating Springfield’s combination of winsomeness and submersion; unlike Dionne Warwick, another beneficiary of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s compositions, Springfield wasn’t detached, as her performance of the 1966 Pino Donaggio and Vito Pallavicini composition “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” rewritten in English, testifies. But Springfield, who wrote a song here and there and exerted more production control than credits aver, had grown restless. She insisted on working with the redoubtable producer Jerry Wexler. The eight songs he brought to what became Dusty in Memphis represented the best of the so-called Brill Building songwriters: Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Randy Newman and Michel Legrand chipped in too. With Arif Mardin and engineer Tom Dowd joining Wexler, the venture had promise.
A combination of Springfield’s mild anxiety about singing live with a rhythm section and her insistence on controlling the material stalled the project at first. “To say yes to one song was seen as a lifetime commitment,” Wexler carped later. Most of the vocals she eventually recorded in New York, a development with no bearing on the album’s swampy, undulating sonics: Dusty was in the fantasy-selling business. Aretha had already rejected a John Hurley-Ronnie Wilkins soul number called “Son of a Preacher Man.” Time and impatience with the Pulp Fiction mythos hasn’t dulled Springfield’s signature tune, in which she sasses and upbraids one “Billy” while an ebullient horn section blows its support and bassist Tommy Cogbill plucks the sweetest line she’d ever sung over. So self-assured was Springfield’s performance that Franklin recorded a version for This Girl’s in Love with You (1970)—and it’s merely decent (Springfield and Annie Lennox remain the only women to have gone eye-to-eye with Franklin and survived).
Bifurcating erotic abandon and a melancholy as permanent as soul death, the rest of Dusty in Memphis depends on the intuitiveness with which the players and the singer understand their respective needs: Springfield’s for ballast, house band the Memphis Boys for ethereality. It’s not a concept album as such but it often unfolds like one: Dusty Springfield recreating herself as lover and loved, essaying her stylized version of soul music. “It is a love that is all at once diffuse, dark, unpredictable, ecstatic, and a terrible deal,” Warren Zane speculated in his 33 1/3 book on the album. This sparkling remix underscores the achievements: the oboe in “I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore” circling her mediations like a long-legged fly; Reggie Young’s forlorn guitar arpeggio in “Just One Smile” and—it was 1968—his sitar in “In the Land of Make Believe.” Singers dependent on an upper register risk tiring listeners with their intensity; with Springfield, the syllable-at-a-time approach noted by future producer Neil Tennant, torturous to her current record makers, transforms her into a co-creator. Tangling the sensual and the threatening, she masters assonance (“br-eh-kfast in b-ehhh-d”), discretion (quietly breathy in the verses of “Don’t Forget About Me” as if afraid of wearing out a welcome), timing (a full stop for each word in the chorus of “No Easy Way Down”).
A Brand New Me steps away from the brink. Relocating from Memphis to Philadelphia with songwriter-producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Springfield doesn’t inhabit the material: she externalizes it. The album is soft-focus, blurry. Gamble and Huff approach her as if circling a runway. Sweet banalities like “Bad Case of the Blues” unfurl alongside gutbucket funk pop like “Lost.” The title track, her last American Top 40 hit until 1988, is a manifesto in search of a cause. The mildly bossa nova-flavored “Let Me in Your Way” works best: Springfield follows bassist Ronnie Baker’s melody. For a hint of what could’ve been, look to the bonus material collected on the anthology, most of which has found homes on reissues of the studio albums over the years: “Haunted,” graced with swampy organ lick, and a momentum similar to Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run”; the way in which “Someone Who Cares” switches from cocktail ballad despondency to I’m-here-to-tell-ya euphoria; and “Willie and Laura Mae Jones,” a sharecropper-era fantasia by Tony Joe White in which the cotton is high and the corn is growin’ fine.
One part of that tale rings true: lots of corn, fine and high, on the last half of this compilation—itself redundant, for remastered and expanded versions of both albums have existed for years. Yet Dusty Springfield remains one of pop’s most fascinating, protean personalities. Not just a British woman singing R&B but a queer British woman, she dwelled in a sinister twilight where objects of desire bobbed gender-fluid but no less distracting. She was the poet of the afterglow. The 1970s she spent doing TV theme material and backing vocals for buddies like Elton John; after the collapse of her relationship with erstwhile collaborator Norma Tanega, she was scared about British tabloids outing her. She waited a pop eternity for Tennant and Chris Lowe, aglow with childhood memories of her and Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw, to give her sympathetic arrangements again. Like Gladys Knight and her Pips, Springfield needed backtalking backup singers and horn blasts after breakfast in bed. The Complete Atlantic Singles is the un-easiest of listening. Thank Dusty Springfield.

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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 an ambitious, righteous piece of hip-hop storytelling from 1999.

A Prince Among Thieves

Prince Paul is responsible for some of the most important music in the hip-hop canon, but despite his contributions, he is also hip-hop’s perennial odd man out. Too often overlooked, sometimes rejected, and at various points dispossessed by the music biz, Paul Huston’s alternating perspectives as insider and outsider have given him a unique ability to engage with the absurdity of it all. A Prince Among Thieves, is, on its surface, a masterpiece of humorous hip-hop storytelling over 35 tracks and 77 minutes, featuring an ensemble cast of Golden Era rap stars and underground legends. What lies beneath, however, is biting satire born of a decade of career hardships and their residual effects on the psyche of this goofy genius from Long Island.
In the 1980s, Prince Paul was a bright-eyed, prodigious teenager who earned a rep in the black suburban enclave of Amityville, New York as a young DJ with skills and taste. His rep would stretch to the streets of East New York, Brooklyn, where lauded hip-hop band Stetsasonic added him to the group, first as their DJ and later as one of their in-house producers. Seeking more autonomy to execute his left-field ideas, Paul connected with three like-minded young men who attended his alma mater, Amityville Memorial High School. In De La Soul’s Posdnuos, Trugoy, and Mase he found kindred spirits who were just as nerdy and willing to get weird as he was.
With his new creative accomplices, Paul sought to upend the rap clichés of the day. While other hip-hop producers were wringing James Brown’s catalog dry of samples, Paul and De La’s eclectic palette of sources included everything from Johnny Cash to Sly and the Family Stone. Where their contemporaries wore gold, De La wore black leather Africa medallions; where their peers were self-important, they were at times self-effacing; and while other acts were busy coming out hard; De La came with jokes.
Their formula worked. 1989’s 3 Feet High and Rising gained widespread critical acclaim, as did De La’s 1991 sophomore effort, De La Soul Is Dead. Together, the four young men subverted stereotypes, expanded rap’s sample palette and perfected the rap album skit as a storytelling device, making them essential to the cohesion of an album. Riding high off of these successes, Prince Paul was, for a few years, an in-demand producer working with rap’s hottest acts at the time, including Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick, Queen Latifah, Boogie Down Productions, and 3rd Bass—he even produced a song for Brooklyn MC the Jaz on which a young JAY-Z rapped and shouted him out by name.
The remainder of the ’90s weren’t as kind to Paul. These days, it’s entirely possible for rappers like Drake or producers like Pharrell to enjoy years-long hot streaks In hip-hop’s adolescence, rappers were lucky if they made it to a third album without getting dropped by a label, and producers may have had a window of a year or two while their sound was hot before the music of the day moved past them. To an early ’90s audience that was increasingly becoming enamored with the sounds of gangsta rap coming from the West Coast, Paul’s signature weirdness and eclecticism were passé. Paul and De La found also found themselves growing apart creatively during the making of the group’s third album, Buhloone Mindstate. Suddenly, the guy who co-produced the answering machine jam “Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)” couldn’t get his hip-hop friends and associates to return his calls.
By the middle of the decade, Paul’s career was in decline and his personal life was in disarray. His imprint Dew Doo Man Records had failed, he was De La Soul-less, and on top of it all, he was embroiled in a custody battle with his ex-girlfriend over his son, Paul Jr. Paul prepared to say goodbye to the music biz with a final middle finger in the form of his 1996 album, Psychoanalysis: What Is It?!. The record was an equally bizarre and intriguing exploration of the recesses of his mind, featuring his far-from-famous, ’round-the-way friends on vocals. His taste for absurdity was now tinged with disillusionment and his humor was at it darkest. Paul explained the thinking behind the project in an appearance on The Cipher podcast in 2015: “My career’s over, people hate me, nobody’s gonna hear this record ... Let’s make this record all about somebody who has all these psychoses and all this other crazy stuff and not worry about what people will say.”
To his surprise, the album earned acclaim as an oddity on the hip-hop spectrum and soon, his former label Tommy Boy reached out to re-release the album and to work with him again. Tommy Boy wanted Paul to be their resident prestige artist at a time when they were making money from pop-rap acts like Coolio and Naughty By Nature. Reinvigorated by the new interest, he pitched an idea: Instead of an album with a narrative told solely through skits, why not do an album that’s a story from beginning to end? The project could be acted out through low-budget music videos, and the label could launch Tommy Boy Films with it. The label bit on the idea of the album but tightened their purse strings when it came to film production costs. In those days, digital video wasn’t readily accessible, and proper filmmaking was too expensive. They put up a measly $10,000  for him to shoot a trailer.
Undeterred and even inspired, Paul wanted to create something at the intersection of schlock and hip-hop—funny, off-kilter, and entertaining. “I wanted to make a movie on wax, I wanted to make an adults’ kid album,” he told Complex in 2011. As he started to piece together the plot of the album, he studied the B-movies he loved growing up, adapting the most cliche scenes for his script. Deciding how he would end this story, Paul thought about the bumps and bruises he had acquired in the years prior and indulged the chip on his shoulder. Thinking back to all of his disappointments and failures in the music biz, and a family court proceeding where a judge awarded his ex-girlfriend custody of their son, the idea that would underpin the story came to him: “The bad guy always wins.”
The story would center on a schmuck of a protagonist named “Tariq,” an aspiring rapper and part-time slacker in need of $1,000 to finish recording a demo for an impending meeting with the RZA. To get the money in a week’s time, he reaches out to his not-nearly-as-straight-laced friend, True, who, instead of loaning him the cash, offers him entrée into the criminal underworld to earn it. A naive and gullible Tariq would quickly learn that a grand don’t come for free and fall victim to dirty-dealing and betrayal. Tariq was a victim of shady people, circumstance, and poor decisions. Tariq was Paul.
With the tragicomic storyline sorted out, Paul had to play casting director, too. Though Psychoanalysis re-opened the door to work with people like comedian Chris Rock, it did not fully restore the industry clout he had enjoyed in his heyday. Tommy Boy wasn’t giving him a huge budget, so ideas like getting Notorious B.I.G. to play “True” were out of the question. So he would do what he had always done—appeal to the outcasts.
For his cast of rappers-turned-voice actors, he sought out underground emcees to play the main characters and rappers who had been largely deemed over-the-hill as the supporting cast. For the lead, he tracked down Breeze Brewin of the underground rap group the Juggaknots. In the mid-’90s, Breeze Brewin went from being doomed to obscurity after his group was dropped from East West Records to being a part of the vanguard of a burgeoning college radio-propelled NYC underground rap micro-scene that included El-P and his group Company Flow as well as acts like Non-Phixion and Natural Elements. Prince Paul knew Breeze Brewin’s serpentine flow—full of internal rhyme schemes and tongue-in-cheek jokes—would be perfect for A Prince Among Thieves; a starstruck Breeze Brewin jumped at the chance to work with a man he considered to be a living legend.
For True, Paul cast a rapper named Sha from a local Amityville group called Horror City. Paul called in favors to round out the rest of the cast: a post-House of Pain and pre-Whitey Ford Sings the Blues Everlast played the racist crooked cop “Officer O’Malley Bitchkowski”; Kool Keith was “Crazy Lou,” a crazed black-market arms dealer who was an ex-Marine captain “discharged for sexual misconduct with a deadly weapon” (read: he fucked guns); Big Daddy Kane was a smooth-talking pimp named “Count Mackula”; Xzibit, Kid Creole, and Sadat X played rowdy convicts in a jail cell; Breeze’s younger sister, rapper Queen Herawin, played Tariq’s skeptical yet loving girlfriend; and Chubb Rock was the kingpin, “Mr. Large.” Paul’s old crew De La Soul even popped up with Chris Rock to play over-eager crack addicts.
“The crazy thing about making that album is that nobody knew what was going on,” Paul told Shawn Setaro of The Cipher. “Nobody knew the whole story, how it went. I gave people [their] parts and they didn’t see the other person’s part and I just recorded [them] line for line for line and edited it all together.” This was 1998, years before Pro Tools was in wide use, so Paul went about the tedious work of putting together the music piece by piece and the dialogue line by line using an ASR-10, ADAT digital tapes, and a MIDI sequencing program. For the project’s beats, he simplified his approach, making the tracks from a sample or two with overlaid drums programmed onto them. It was more economical and it put the story and his players in the foreground.
After nearly two years of work, A Prince Among Thieves was released in February 1999. The album begins at the end of the story, as EMTs attend to our wounded protagonist. Sirens wail in the background and Tariq’s internal monologue sets the stage. The skit gives way to the mournful strings of “Pain” where we discover that Sha has also been shot. As Tariq, Breeze Brewin paints a picture of violence and betrayal that tease the twists and turns to come. He’s presented as a relatable loser who lives with his mom on “Steady Slobbin.” Flipping the concept behind Ice Cube’s day-in-the-life-of-G “Steady Mobbin,” our protagonist recounts all of the L’s he takes during his day, from being broke and harangued by his mom to his premature ejaculation during in a sexual encounter with an unattractive woman.
To flesh out the characters, Tariq gives us some background on his relationship with his sly-tongued homie True on “Just Another Day”: The two go way back. True taught Tariq how to rhyme when they were younger but wound giving up his rap dreams when Tariq surpassed him. Tariq detects envy but figures something so small could never come between brothers. The contradiction and cognitive dissonance lend depth to the two main characters and their relationship while grounding the cartoonish supporting characters we meet later. Paul’s dim view of human nature at the time informs the story, as Tariq sets out on his Faustian path to $1,000, his morals loosening along the way.
In a genre that was, especially at the time, obsessed with authenticity and realness, Paul delighted in skewering cliches with the sharp tip of satire. Recurring themes in rap that had since become tropes were now fodder for parody, as Tariq made his descent into the underworld. To get a gun—de rigueur for any aspiring hustler or posturing rapper—he has to visit Kool Keith’s “Crazy Lou,” at his hideout (the password is “enema bandit”). The romanticized subject of guns gets sent up as Kool Keith runs down a list of real and fantastical firearms before unveiling his ultimate weapon: a “six-foot gorilla” with “the aluminum skin of an alligator” otherwise known as “Dragon Plus ... with a twist.” By the time he’s done talking about this imaginary arsenal, you’re unsure if the weapon he’s just described is animal or mechanical but you are certain that it is nonsense. You can almost hear Paul giggling in the studio.
And what allegory about temptation would be complete without sex? A hilariously simulated love scene—complete with a boinging sound effect to signify an erection—is interrupted by Everlast as a crooked NYPD officer. The character is another stroke of comedic genius: He embodies every stereotype of a racist New York City cop with lines like, “It’s the Bad Lieutenant runnin’ up in your tenement/Plantin’ evidence on any black resident,” and, “I’ll shoot you in the alley/And burn you like a cross at a fuckin’ Klan rally.” But characters like Everlast’s and Big Daddy Kane’s “Count Macula” are more than just cool cameos in Paul’s cynical story, they are agents of betrayal. Characters meant to convince the listener that the odds are stacked against the good guys. They’re Paul’s adversaries, disappointments, and failures personified.
For all of its surprises, Easter eggs, guest stars, the dramatic center of A Prince Among Thieves remains Breeze Brewin’s Tariq. When he realizes that he’s been set up and the extent of the betrayal our loveable simp is overcome with a vengeance that leads him to a Western-style showdown on “You Got Shot”: “It’s hard to live/Knowin’ that you’re doing the same/Knowin’ ‘bout you and your game/Let God forgive, I won’t...” His innocence lost, Tariq’s climactic transformation from gullible chump to jaded would-be avenger mirrors Paul’s experience in the music biz. But Paul, our auteur, knows that righteousness and victory seldom come together.