Released in 1994, the warm and mellow sound of Madonna’s sixth album has its seductive charms, but of all her work, it remains a curious non-event in the pop star‘s wildly eventful career.

Bedtime Stories

Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records.
Bedtime Stories, the confused, the misunderstood. The early ’90s found Madonna at peak levels of media saturation. Inescapable! Seven years of hits compiled on The Immaculate Collection, Madonna featured on virtually every award show, Dick Tracy paraphernalia in the McDonald’s Happy Meal. I saw her name on a religious pamphlet: “We Christians must reject the mainstream acceptance of the ethics and morals of Marx and Madonna.” I saw her in The Far Side, her Gaultier-ensconced breasts puncturing an inflatable life raft in a cheap sexist gag. She was less a musician and more a holy ghost. Bedtime Stories was the first Madonna album that felt like a non-event, an asterisk to her omnipresence, another hot day in a heat wave.
And as such, this album has been difficult to assess as an art object. Madonna was, in 1992-1994, an artist under siege. Sex, her soft-core porn coffee table book, had been called obscene; it has been subsequently been reassessed as a smart and entertaining post-feminist grand jeté. Her previous album Erotica, with its diversity and effective New Jack Swing tourism, was received generally well and is now considered among many of her acolytes to be her masterpiece. But Bedtime Stories is, if we must go full Pepsi Challenge with Erotica, a blurry non-event of an album.
Closing track and hit single “Take a Bow” is a kind song, lush in production and sentiment, and deservedly hung around the charts longer than any other of her singles. Babyface’s appearance here, at the height of his own artistry, is frankly lovely. It is for many fans, myself included, Madonna at her most sensitive and brave.
Bedtime Stories’ final single, “Human Nature,” in contrast, did poorly on the charts, and yet is one of her most effective grooves, with her anti-slut-shaming slogan, “I’m not your bitch, don’t hang your shit on me” thwocking its way through Jean-Baptiste Mondino’s amazing video. It is handily one of Madonna’s best songs.
Conversely, the album’s most successful worldwide single, “Secret,” beloved by many, just meanders—even upon its release I recall my young ears being distracted by the single edit’s monotony when it appeared on radio playlists. On the album proper, the track drags interminably over five-plus minutes. Listening again now, it sounds like a lesser version of subsequent album Ray of Light’s “Frozen,” the dry crumbs of “Secret”’s acoustic guitar tracks waiting to be muted and replaced with William Orbit’s thrilling, tensile production.
Most infamously, we have “Bedtime Story.” Like many other former teenagers falling head over heels for Björk’s first solo album, I recall staring incredulously at the B. Guðmundsdóttir credit when it appeared in Madonna’s liner notes. The song itself is unimaginably disappointing—sterile and static, a less-daring second cousin to “Violently Happy.” Björk’s detached science-textbook approach toward a love-song, which works so well when paired with her own mystic Icelandic aesthetic, doesn’t sit well alongside Madonna’s enthusiastic consumerism. Perhaps the song has some appeal, decades later, now that we’re familiar and tolerant of the sound of Björk-on-autopilot. Perhaps we view it affectionately as a blueprint for her subsequent masterpieces on Ray of Light. Ultimately it remains, to my ears, Madonna’s first truly embarrassing flop.
And most of the rest of the album never really achieves any level of indispensability. Several attempts at New Jack balladry have lovely moody productions married to unremarkable songs or performances. Opening track “Survival,” as carefully constructed as it is, sounds, well, much tidier than Madonna’s contemporaries. The “Inside of Me” sample of Aaliyah’s “Back & Forth”—out the same year—just reminds me as a listener about how 1994 was the year of Toni Braxton, Salt-N-Pepa, and Janet Jackson; far more exciting music than this.
The deep cuts on the B-side of Bedtime Stories have their fans. Babyface is here, Massive Attack’s string arranging collaborator Craig Armstrong is here also, with an expensive sounding moment, and there’s a cute Herbie Hancock sample on “Sanctuary.” But these songs, for me, are undone by all having nearly identical melodies and moods to “Secret.” What attempts to be sultry and smooth comes off as beige and un-fascinating; my mind wanders and my time is wasted. When Madonna plays tourist with gay culture, with Broadway, with Hollywood, with UK jungle, she is able to keep things (usually) deferential and still interesting, and often, achieve transcendence. But here, she sounds woefully out-of-her-depth as a songwriter and singer when slinging these square attempts at R&B balladry.
It is a compliment to the artist that only here, over a decade into her career, on her sixth studio album, does she, for the first time, let this listener down. Take “Human Nature” and put in on a golden record, play “Take a Bow” at my funeral, and let the rest of this sleepy album be forgotten; it is, to my ears and memory, Madonna’s first truly inessential moment.


Phil Elverum lost his wife—an artist and the mother of his child—to cancer. His new album is a meditation on her memory, but also on what it means to keep living.

A Crow Looked At Me

No subject has been more badly exploited by art than death. How often have you found yourself in the middle of a good book or movie, warming up to its world, making the magical passage through which its characters’ lives become temporarily real only to be sped into artificial reverence by someone dying? Gosh, you think: Death: That’s big. This must be a pretty meaningful experience. Death is reduced to a sympathy-extraction device, what the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani once described as “literary ambulance-chasing,” designed to crowbar into the hearts of an audience just as they were thinking about changing the channel. Real death, meanwhile, moves ominously through the world of the living like a tide, gathering in waves that break without warning or reason, paroxysms of grief followed by yet more shapeless life. Fake death pops. Real death remains a slog.
Onto this tightrope walks Phil Elverum, a hermetically introspective songwriter who records under the name Mount Eerie. In spring of 2015, Elverum’s wife Geneviève was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a disease that kills 80% of patients within a year. According to the American Cancer Society, nearly all people with pancreatic cancer are over 45; two-thirds are over 65. Geneviève died three months after her 35th birthday. A year and a half earlier, she had given birth to her and Elverum’s first child, a girl.
A Crow Looked at Me, Elverum’s ninth album as Mount Eerie—and 13th overall, counting his earlier music as the Microphones—mentions Geneviève in nearly every song, sometimes by name, sometimes through cold, negative space. It’s almost as though Elverum has nothing better to talk about. Which, of course, he probably doesn’t.
Elverum’s recent albums—2015’s Sauna, 2012’s double feature of Clear Moon and Ocean Roar—were heavy on ambiance and fuzz, sonic embodiments of things through which we can’t see. Crow is spare and clean, mostly voice and some guitar, the sound of coffee in winter. You can almost hear the floorboards creaking. In a recent interview, Elverum called it “barely music.” Given the floss-thin line between his art and experience, you could take it as the album’s intended genre: Barely music.
Over the past few years, there have been a handful of albums similar to Crow, or at least with a similarly autobiographical premise: Sun Kil Moon’s Benji, Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell, Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree, stark, diaristic albums haunted by literal death, grief on record. Indie culture tends to prize this kind of undecorated directness as a stand-in for truth, as though nobody has ever spoken clearly and lied.
But listening to Crow, the songwriter I kept thinking of was Chan Marshall, whose early music as Cat Power felt confessional but surreal, painfully direct but impossible to pin down. Like Marshall, Elverum’s sleight of hand is that standing naked doesn’t make him any easier to see. If anything, Crow’s cold spaces and plainspoken delivery lull the listener into an illusion of solid ground even when it’s not there, laying everything on the same emotional bandwidth, from meditations on geese and forest fires to descriptions of his wife’s jaundiced skin. He never tells you how to feel, or more surprisingly, when.
Elverum’s early albums as the Microphones captured the solipsism of one’s 20s, where even small feelings are uncontainable, not the internal flicker of neurons but plate tectonics, the saga of raging rivers and moons and stars. Here, one’s inner world was always swallowing the outer one, not just a life among many but an allegory of heaven and earth. That the music was so obsessively layered, so obviously the product of a single mind only cemented the underlying metaphor: Elverum wasn’t just the center of his universe, he was its creator.
Real life—its unpunctuated hum, its customer-service lines—has a way of knocking that out of you. Over the past several years, Elverum’s point of view has become earthbound to the point of mundanity. Sauna, from 2015, featured an entire song about walking to the bookstore and seeing a pumpkin. Refreshingly, the pumpkin was not presented as a metaphor for anything; it was a pumpkin. Or, if it was a metaphor, it was only for the accumulation of stuff with no particular meaning or attachment to narrative, for that rare, seamless mindset where things are what they are. Crow’s sharpest line is in its third act: “Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about, back before I knew my way around these hospitals.”
Most of the time, though, Elverum’s ground isn’t so solid. Crow isn’t so much about sickness or death but the hallucinatory stupor of grief, a state where everything—toothbrushes, flies, crows, and sunsets—flickers with suggestion and memory, as though Geneviève’s spirit had been scattered back into the universe like seeds. One understands Elverum’s temptation intuitively: After all, he can still hold her toothbrush.
So simple, so tactile, so deceptively real are these songs. Their cumulative effect is that they become wobbly with metaphor, forcing the listener into the kind of magical thinking that transforms everything in the living world into a sign of the dead, only to snap back into a reality that for better and worse means nothing. Halfway through the album, Elverum’s daughter asks if mama swims, to which Elverum replies that yes, she swims all the time now, because they scattered her ashes over water.
The album’s most breathtaking line is its last. “Sweet kid, I heard you murmur in your sleep. ‘Crow,’ you said. ‘Crow.’ And I asked, ‘Are you dreaming about a crow?’ And there she was.” In a single moment, the mechanics of these songs—the way dreams refract life, the way grief resurrects the dead without logic or warning—becomes blindingly clear. Then, either because Elverum is polite, or because he’s tired, or because there is nothing more to say, he ends with the image of his wife lingering like something glimpsed through a rainy window, blurry, then gone.
It would be easy to hear this album as sad. Certainly the facts of Elverum's story are. But facts aren’t art and art isn’t real, at least not the way cancer is. For an album so firmly anchored by death, Crow is suffused with life: The geese, the forest fires, the crows, the grocery-store lines where Elverum stumbles through awkward conversation with people from town. Tragedy hasn't stopped him from noticing the world; if anything, it seems to have pried his eyes open for good. As for the question of sadness, I defer to a quote attributed to Anton Chekhov that art should “prepare us for tenderness.” I have two very young children of my own; one of them is sleeping on my chest while I write. Listening to Crow, I find myself imagining what life would be like if I had to raise them without their mother. Think along these lines for any longer than a few seconds and you, like I, may find yourself rebounding from sorrow to a state of almost infinite gratitude. Take a good look, Elverum says: Most of this is beautiful and none of it is guaranteed.


The Detroit rapper teams with the producer Sterling Toles for his most forward-thinking, experimental, and personal album.

Boldy James / Sterling Toles: Manger on McNichols

Manger on McNichols

This year has been good to Boldy James. February’s The Price of Tea in China was something of a return to the Detroit rapper’s roots—another LP with longtime collaborator the Alchemist, in an effortlessly classicist style—but his victory lap, Manger on McNichols, branches into new territory.
Boldy’s toolkit is simple—a clear-cut flow, and an ear for lived-in phrasing—but he uses it to construct a rich simulation of Detroit, rendering a version of the city that’s tangible even to listeners who have never visited the real place. The landscape Boldy paints is overwhelmingly, almost oppressively dark: “I never been to the joint, but that’s just how it is when you live in Detroit,” he raps on “Detroit River Rock.”
Though Boldy has long had a knack for self-reflection, his writing is even deeper and his focus more intense on Manger on McNichols. It’s not just Detroit that’s depicted in detail—Boldy also writes his way through some of his most traumatic memories. He’s at his most introspective on “Mommy Dearest (a eulogy),” a stream-of-consciousness internal monologue about Boldy’s tortured relationship to his mother inspired by a single line from Biggie’s “Suicidal Thoughts” (“I know my mother wish she got a fucking abortion”). The album’s darkest and most despairing cut is sequenced to effortlessly flow into its most triumphant; “Birth of Bold (the christening)” rises up in glory from Boldy’s painful origins, a joyful declaration of perseverance.
In a podcast interview sampled on “Mommy Dearest,” Boldy credits his newly personal vision to the encouragement of producer Sterling Toles, a longstanding presence in Detroit’s underground scene but not a known quantity among rap heads like the Alchemist. Alc’s beats are seamless and refined, a perfect vessel for Boldy’s casual charisma, but they remain a little predictable, in the way all classic hip-hop beats are the product of a specific formula. Sterling’s productions, on the other hand, feel like full-fledged compositions, knotted and jazzy and complicated, capable of existing without Boldy’s voice but better because of it.
Toles’ work contains the familiar soul samples, segments of sermons, organ swells, and scratches, but his beats go beyond jazz-rap into something closer to true jazz. Flutes, alto sax, and live percussion linger on the edges of “Welcome to 76,” and a mournful cello drones throughout the record.” Sterling’s beats aren’t consistent digital patterns but living things, fluttering and freeform, backed often by live drums. His confident bass playing provides as much a backbone to the record as Boldy’s charismatic voice. Sometimes the drums are late to kick in, letting Boldy’s flow function as the beat (“Detroit River Rock”); sometimes there are no drums at all, just bass, bold flows, and noodling synth lines (“Requiem”).
Sterling’s compositions float in the neutral zone between hip-hop, jazz, and electronic. “Birth of Bold (a christening)” is a Vocoder-inflected G-funk jam until around 45 seconds from the end, when a galloping bassline kicks in and the whole thing transforms into a cosmic Flying Lotus-type beat. On “BB Butcher,” the high-BPM breakbeat approaches the hurried intensity of drum ‘n’ bass. As instrumental tracks, Sterling’s contributions often seek to unsettle, reflecting the anxiety Boldy describes in his lyrics, but it’s his ensemble of bells, xylophones, and glittering keys that provide the album’s few points of uplift.
In his full-length collaborations with single producers, Boldy James lets himself be pushed creatively in a way few rappers ever do, ceding a certain amount of control to the direction of a single creative voice. Sterling Toles isn’t afraid to make complicated beats, and Boldy isn’t afraid of them, and the resulting fusion is unrestrained and inventive in a way few rap records are.

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Anna Meredith has already been composer in residence at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and currently occupies the same position at the Royal Philharmonic Society. Black Prince Fury is her first solo EP; a visceral, rhythmic set that recalls Moondog's cross-genre miniatures.

Black Prince Fury

After a performance of early 20th-century English composer William Walton's first symphony during a recital in Liverpool earlier this year, the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain stood up, set their instruments on their chairs, and, for about 10 minutes, proceeded to act like synchronized cavemen. They hissed, they clapped, they drummed on their bellies, and moved in ways that you generally don't see in concert halls. The piece was called "HandsFree"; the composer was Anna Meredith, a Scottish woman in her mid-30s. You don't need to know who Walton was or what his first symphony sounds like to understand how a bunch of teenagers yelling after it might prove refreshing.
Black Prince Fury, Meredith's first EP as a solo musician, is playful, spirited, visceral, and smart. Aside from the pummeling brass section of "Nautilus" and an AOR rock sample in "Never Wonder" that is too good to spoil, the EP sounds like it was made entirely with drum machines and synthesizers all cut to sound flat, bright, tough and tiny-- the aural equivalent of plastic toys. It's easy to grab a hold of due to how much emphasis Meredith puts on rhythm. They aren't hummable, but they are drummable, snappable, and other impact-related forms of participation. Half the time it sounds like the real joy here for her was creating situations where she could play Tetris with her own polyrhtythms-- once brainy, always brainy.
In her track review of "Nautilus", Laura Snapes compared Meredith's music to that of Björk, Planningtorock, and These New Puritans, for whom Meredith has opened on tour. To my ears, Meredith's real ancestor is Moondog, a New York street musician who also made tough, puzzling miniatures that drew as freely from the pop and jazz of his time as they did from what might have been more readily identified as "classical music." (Meredith has already been the composer-in-residence at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and currently occupies the same position at the Royal Philharmonic Society.) Like Moondog, the character of Meredith's music is triumphant and warlike, but the scale of it is cartoonishly small-- most of the time it only sounds like the work of a few people working in a living room.
And like Moondog (or like the electronic producer Max Tundra, or James Blake's first EPs) Meredith's music feels dense, busy and isolated, but essentially fun, as though it was designed first and foremost to amuse the people making it. At 18 minutes, Black Prince Fury is just a toe or two in the water; whether she'll make more is unclear, but considering how deadeningly self-serious the worlds of classical and electronic music can be, a few more teenagers drumming on their bellies would be a nice thing.


Things Fall Apart was a turning point for the Roots, the record where they figured out what kind of band they could be. Both its themes and its eclectic mix of sounds resonate in the current moment.

Things Fall Apart

In 1999, the Roots were in limbo. The Philadelphia hip-hop band had released three critically acclaimed albums but were still considered something of a novelty act, featuring a big guy with a big Afro on drums (?uestlove), a sharp but unshowy MC (Black Thought), two beatboxers (Rahzel and Scratch), and a stellar live show—all anomalies in the gilded age of Puff Daddy and the million-dollar sample clearance. The Roots had by this time amassed a faithful cult following, but none of it translated to mainstream success. They were selling more records and slowly moving beyond their dedicated base of jazz and traditional rap purists, but their career wasn’t headed anywhere in particular.
Reflecting these tensions, the Roots opened their fourth studio album, Things Fall Apart, with dialogue from a scene from Spike Lee’s 1990 film, Mo’ Better Blues, in which characters Bleek Gilliam and Shadow Henderson—played by Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes, respectively—debate the state of jazz music. Gilliam doesn’t want to sacrifice his creative vision to pander to crowds, and he thinks black people should come to his shows simply because he’s making black art. “That’s bullshit,” Henderson quips. “The people don’t come because you grandiose motherfuckers don’t play shit that they like.” The clip seemed to acknowledge the Roots’ reputation: They were too smart for their own good, too self-aware, and they were getting in their own way. It was as if, from the very beginning, the band sought to be misunderstood, to find somewhere to hide from the mainstream.
As unique as the Roots were—they were a hip-hop band, after all—their music still had traces of what was popular at the time. Their 1995 album Do You Want More?!!!??! featured the sort of laid-back jazz feel that Digable Planets had perfected the year before on Blowout Comb. The Roots’ follow-up, 1996’s I**lladelph Halflife, was more aggressive and confrontational, taking lyrical and sonic cues from the Wu-Tang Clan. But the group was searching for something different. Before the release of Things Fall Apart, they had positioned themselves as a sort of remedy for the excesses of Bad Boy’s empire, which in those days became an all-too-easy target for the backpacker set. In their satirical 1996 video for “What They Do,” the Roots mocked the sort of rap video stereotypes popularized by director Hype Williams, thumbing their collective nose at champagne bottles and mansion parties. Acts like the Roots wanted to give listeners the “real shit,” but while they and others criticized Bad Boy’s gravitational pull, their art-rap aesthetic was its own form of marketing. They just hadn’t figured out what they were selling. While the Roots thought of themselves as the anti-establishment alongside acts like OutKast and the Fugees, those groups sold millions of records when the Roots were struggling to go gold.
By 1997, before the sessions for Things Fall Apart began, drummer and bandleader ?uestlove was exploring new opportunities beyond the Roots. He was more concerned with recording D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Common’s Like Water for Chocolate than he was with his own group. It wasn’t that he wanted to leave the Roots, but still, his outside projects created resentment amongst band members who questioned his focus. “In my head at that time, the notion of a Roots album was a distant third,” ?uest wrote in his 2013 memoir, Mo’ Meta Blues. He was spending time with Voodoo engineer Russell Elevado, learning new ways to manipulate sound to give his own music a more granular, less studied feel. He wanted to be a heralded producer like DJ Premier and J Dilla, but his band’s work felt remarkably clean—even sterile__—__in comparison. The best rap of that era had to feel at least a little gritty: Though the Notorious B.I.G. was signed to Bad Boy, his 1997 album Life After Death had plenty of dark, violent narratives. The Wu’s massive double album, Wu-Tang Forever, was full of woozy street bangers, courtesy of the group’s production team, with the RZA at the helm. Realizing he needed to improve as a producer, ?uest learned how to play drums “dirty,” taking Dilla’s lead and dragging his percussion just a bit to make the beat seem off-kilter.
The genesis of Things Fall Apart can be traced back to a hangout ?uest had with Premier, Dilla, and D’Angelo, where he played them a rough version of a Roots song called “Double Trouble” and got disinterested head-nods in return. Determined to bolster the track, ?uest recorded drums to two-inch tape, looped it back through the soundboard, and tweaked the EQ to give it a feeling of distance. “It was a turning point in my understanding of my own career,” ?uest wrote in his memoir. “I knew that the other guys respected me as a drummer… but I also wanted them to respect me as a producer and a songwriter.” In its finished form, “Double Trouble” is arguably the centerpiece of Things Fall Apart; rapper Black Thought finally had a hard-charging instrumental to match his verbal dexterity, and guest Mos Def matched him bar-for-bar.
Things Fall Apart is where the Roots figured out who they were—it wasn’t “just another Roots record,” and if the group was going to fail, they were going out their own way. “Table of Contents (Part 1)” illustrates their new willingness to take risks: The breakbeat is messy and the mix is intentionally pinched and lopsided, but the track’s feeling of chaos is an ideal table-setter, opening the record on a tense and uncertain note. On “Step Into the Realm,” the drum loop fades in and out, but the rhythmic instability makes the rappers’ audibly distorted vocals sound even more urgent. If the Roots’ first three albums mastered the meeting point between jazz and rap, this was the first time the band went psychedelic, opening up new possibilities sonically and lyrically.
D’Angelo’s 1995 album Brown Sugar and Erykah Badu’s Baduizm from 1997 were the blueprint for new-school soul music, and Things Fall Apart applied those ideas to hip-hop proper. In this aesthetic space, artists with different approaches could find new ways to be creative together, and a new movement was being born. “You Got Me,” the lead single from Things Fall Apart, found a crooning Badu next to rapper Eve from the Ruff Ryders over a lilting guitar figure and strings. The classic arrangement and eclectic mix of voices, paired with ?uestlove’s typically propulsive and cutting backbeat, sounded both old and new, looking backwards and forwards simultaneously. The Roots were pushing the limits of their sound, establishing a lane for D’Angelo, Common, and Badu to do the same. By building a musical community and mastering the art of collaboration, they figured out how to cross over and keep their soul intact.
Things Fall Apart was the Roots’ most successful record, and after years in the shadows, they were finally getting radio airplay and touring as headliners. The album went gold two months after its release and hit platinum in 2013. In addition to its commercial success, it served as a launching pad for new voices, like Roc-A-Fella rapper Beanie Sigel, who debuted as a guest artist on “Adrenaline!,” and Eve, whose “You Got Me” appearance was her most prominent feature at the time. The relatively unknown Jill Scott wrote the chorus for “You Got Me” and was slated to sing on the track until MCA Records pushed for a bigger name (Badu) to appear in her place; soon, Eve and Scott would release their own platinum-selling albums.
Despite being a breakthrough for their band and their scene, the Roots didn’t immediately build on Things Fall Apart’s success. Powered by D’Angelo’s sultry “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” video, Voodoo became a phenomenon, and ?uest spent most of 2000 on tour as the singer’s drummer. By the time the Roots re-grouped, ?uest’s closest peers were pushing their sounds to new places. D wanted to learn guitar; Common and Dilla wanted to experiment with electronic textures. The Roots responded by moving away from the movement they helped create; their follow-up record, Phrenology, was essentially the anti-Roots album, with a heavy emphasis on rock. And while it alienated the Roots’ core fanbase, Phrenology performed well, pushing the group further into crossover territory. The Roots became a more regular presence on TV and radio. Soon after, Rahzel and Malik B. left the group for good. In 2006, Dilla died at age 32 from complications of lupus, and the Roots’ album of that year, Game Theory, kicked off a series of releases with a darker tone, including 2008’s Rising Down, 2010’s How I Got Over, and 2011’s undun. Having secured a gig as Jimmy Fallon’s backing band—first on “Late Night,” then on “The Tonight Show”—the Roots finally and completely entered the mainstream. But they used the freedom to experiment and make the music they wanted.
Things go in cycles, and the approach the Roots pioneered came back around. In 2015, the “next movement” the Roots mentioned on Things Fall Apart seemed to arrive. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly—a densely lyrical and allegorical exploration of Blackness and struggle, set to a live-jazz soundtrack featuring dozens of collaborators—is hard to imagine without this album in its rearview. Artists like Robert Glasper, Thundercat, Terrace Martin, and Kamasi Washington channel the same creativity as the Roots, D’Angelo, and company, banding together to push rap, jazz, soul, and more into atmospheric new places. The spirit of Things Fall Apart is in the air.
Looking back on it now, this record feels like both a love letter and a fond farewell to the Roots’ early days, acknowledging that they needed to evolve to stay relevant. And some of the album’s continued relevance is painful. Its closing poem, “The Return to Innocence Lost,” details the fate of a young man seemingly doomed to fail since birth. He dies tragically, leaving nothing but thoughts of a life that could’ve been. Nowadays, black men are dying at the hands of police with alarming frequency, and we’re left to mourn the dead in hashtags and shared articles, wondering what’s next—or who’s next—in this seemingly endless war. Things Fall Apart imparts a similar tone, even if the band didn’t address those issues directly. The black and white cover art, taken in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn in 1965, depicts a young black woman running from a waiting police officer, her face twisted in fear. The scene is sadly familiar 50 years later. As the Roots teetered between fame and purgatory, virtue and failure, Things Fall Apart captured the intensity of a group with everything to lose and the world to gain.


The Velvet Underground’s six-disc deluxe edition, including long-sought-after live material from 1969, offers a complete portrait of a period when the Velvets’ populist ambitions were being matched by their exceedingly prolific output.

The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground – 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition

Many recording artists release a self-titled debut album, while some opt to release a self-titled album later in their career, and others even go on to release multiple self-titled albums. But the Velvet Underground are the only band to have released multiple self-titled debuts.
Technically, their first album was 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico, a bracing collision of Brill Building pop classicism and avant-garde noise terrorism that, by the time White Light/White Heat was released in 1968, had progressed to all-out warfare. The tension at the heart of these two records has often been attributed to the oppositional approaches of its principal songwriters—professional popsmith Lou Reed and viola-scraping iconoclast John Cale—though this reading has always been reductive. After all, Cale delivered one of White Light/White Heat’s few moments of serenity ("Lady Godiva’s Operation"), while Reed unleashed the album’s most brutalizing shock 53 seconds into "I Heard Her Call My Name". But for Reed, the only logical response to White Light/White Heat’s anti-pop extremism was to ricochet back in the other direction, a move that would force Cale out of the Velvets and present Reed with the opportunity to lead a different kind of band.
The romantic myth about the Velvets—the commercially ignored, ahead-of-their-time proto-punk innovators proudly out of step with the peace'n'lovey-dovey pop of the day—often overlooks a crucial quality about the band: they actually wanted to be popular. And in light of disappointing sales for their first two albums on niche jazz imprint Verve, they traded up to parent company MGM in 1969 with the intention of being a proper rock band that makes records for big labels in Hollywood and stays at the Chateau Marmont.
From the very first second of The Velvet Underground, everything about the group had changed from where they left off with the epochal squall of White Light/White Heat’s "Sister Ray". Reed and Sterling Morrison’s amp settings were dialed down from 11 to 1; Maureen "Moe" Tucker’s thundering thump was softened into a breezy brushed-snare sway; and Reed’s ding-dong-sucking snarl was replaced by the melancholic whisper of Cale’s successor Doug Yule. It’s like returning from a holiday only to find your rat-infested apartment building had burned down and been replaced with a white-picket-fenced bungalow. And even though the song Yule was crooning, "Candy Says", marked Reed’s first explicit character reference to the Warhol Factory scene that birthed his band, it ultimately underscored the Velvets’ increasing remove from its hazy decadence: A devastatingly intimate portrait of then-transitioning Factory regular Candy Darling, "Candy Says" is the sobering soundtrack for that inevitable moment when all tomorrow’s parties turn to morning-after, makeup-smeared, self-loathing introspection. (The album cover reinforces the reflective mood: though shot at the Factory, the Velvets look more like they’re hosting a small gathering friends in their living room, their '67-era striped tees and fuck-you wraparound shades replaced by comfortable sweaters and sensible collared shirts.)
If The Velvet Undergrounddialled down the aggression and abrasion of its predecessors, it undercuts the mellow approach with some of the rawest songwriting of Reed’s career, and a plainspoken candor as startling as his past meditations on smack and S&M. His blunt language drives a spike into the album’s gentle jangle to unleash a maelstrom of emotions, where ecstatic moments of spiritual reawakening ("Beginning to See the Light") are answered by cruel reality checks ("I’m set free/ To find a new illusion"), where the love of his life becomes someone else's ("Pale Blue Eyes"), where a Jewish guy feels so fucked up, he starts praying to Jesus. Even the seemingly easy-going choogle of "What Goes On" is routinely upset by Reed’s admissions of anxiety ("One minute born/ One minute doomed"). By that token, the simultaneous-poetry experiment "The Murder Mystery" feels less like an anomalous WTF throwback to the Velvets’ avant-garde roots than the sound of the album’s slow-stewing inner turmoil coming to a boil.
This interiority complex was crucial to Reed, to the point of him taking the original recordings engineered by MGM house producer Val Valentin and remixing the entire album to bring the already unguarded vocals to the fore. This so-called "Closet Mix"—featuring an entirely different, more cerebral take on the blues soliloquy "Some Kinda Love"— initially appeared only on the album’s first U.S. run; it would later resurface on the 1995 career-spanning box set Peel Slowly and See. This 45th-anniversary package not only revives Reed’s Closet Mix alongside a new crystalline mix by Valentin, but also a third mono version that could very well be dubbed the Armoire Mix, thus making the transition out of White Light/White Heat feel a little less abrupt. (For one, the once-blissful fade-out organ drone on "What Goes On" now sounds like a ray-gun burrowing into your skull.) Which mix you prefer depends on just how cozy you want to get with the Velvets: would you rather they engage you in a private, face-to-face conversation (Valentin’s mix), whisper in your ear (Closet Mix), or take up residency inside your brain (the mono mix)?
But The Velvet Underground’s six-disc deluxe edition has a purpose beyond just encouraging audiophiles to A/B different versions of the same songs. Rather, it’s a complete portrait of a period when the Velvets’ populist ambitions were being matched by their exceedingly prolific output, and the notion of what we now consider to be the archetypal Lou Reed song—be it a tough, streetwise rocker or tender, empathetic ballad—was being more clearly defined. Shortly after The Velvet Underground’s March 1969 release, the band had recorded enough new material at New York’s Record Plant for a fourth album; souring relations with MGM, however, resulted in those sessions being shelved. This material has, of course, surfaced in various iterations over the years (be it on mid-'80s compilations VU and Another View, the Peel Slowly and See box, or in revised form on various Reed solo albums), and has proven as canonical as the band’s officially released work. But this set is the first to present it as a proper, logically sequenced, stand-alone album, kicking off with the locomotive charge of "Foggy Notion" and ending with an instrumental version of "Ride Into the Sun" that, here, feels less like an unfinished demo than a strategically placed closing-credits theme.
It’s no coincidence that these songs count as the most upbeat and playful the Velvets produced; as Yule observes in David Fricke’s liner notes, "There was a type of song that Lou wrote that was not thematically important to him, but was fun to put together, that had a lot of rhythm—a good tune when you needed something to open up an audience." The last two discs of this set—pulled from two November '69 shows at San Francisco club The Matrix—present a glorious opportunity to experience this engagement process in action. This period of the band’s onstage evolution has been documented on the 1974 double-album 1969: The Velvet Underground Live and the no-fi bootleg comp The Quine Tapes, but never with such cohesion and clarity. (The Matrix—owned by Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin—boasted a professional four-track console at its mixing desk.)
While San Francisco’s hippie haven may have seemed like enemy turf for the Velvets, the city was essentially the band’s home away from home for much of '69, The Matrix their Factory West. And the rollicking performances betray their desire to out-jam the jam bands, and expose the rock ‘n’ roll heart beating through even the Velvets’ most transgressive songs. The cornerstone is a "Sister Ray" to end all "Sister Ray"s, though its 37(!)-minute roller coaster journey from a molasses-slow blues to heart-racing rave-up is hitched to a relaxed West Coast groove that ventures far away from the original’s distortion holocaust. And the Velvets take such liberties in stretching out and reshaping their most concise songs ("Waiting for the Man", "Lisa Says", "There She Goes Again"), that the faithful rendition of first-album freak-out "Heroin" practically sounds formalist in comparison. (That said, even when in crowd-pleasing mode, Reed was already plotting future provocations: Prior to kicking into a distended early version of "Rock & Roll", Reed strums a droning warm-up chord, and marvels, "imagine a hundred guitars doing that at once!")
Alas, the obvious joy with which the band whip through the Matrix setlist obscures the sad truth about The Velvet Underground: that the Velvets’ concerted "pop" album turned out to be the biggest commercial flop of their career up to that point, not even able to scrape the bottom reaches of the Billboard 200, as its two more caustic predecessors barely managed to do. When the band sing in unison, "How does it feel to be loved?" at the end of the Matrix take on "Beginning to See the Light", Lou ad libs, "somebody tell me, PLEASE!" with an amplified sense of desperation that indicates he never thought he’d know the answer. But just as The Velvet Underground’s hushed tones and tempered tempos demanded a greater sense of patience from listeners, its acceptance proved to be a protracted, gradual process that took decades.
The band’s first two albums prefigured punk, goth, and contemporary noise, but The Velvet Underground anticipated the sound of popular indie rock from the late-'80s onward, through the barb-wired chime of Galaxie 500, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, and countless others; the entire Stereolab discography can be heard in the outro of "What Goes On" alone, while even the Moe Tucker-sung confection "After Hours" (and its '69-session counterpart "I’m Sticking With You") single-handedly spawned all things twee. Brian Eno famously quipped that everyone who bought The Velvet Underground & Nico started a band, but The Velvet Underground's stunning simplicity and unflinching honesty presented an even more accessible model of DIY aspiration, free of Warholian conceptualism and Cale’s classically schooled chaos. The album remains both an open invitation and a dare—to face Reed’s hard truths or, better yet, to reveal your own.


On Eels’ 12th album, Mark Everett trots out his reflexive self-loathing and elementary rhyme schemes one more time, with no clear reason why.

The Deconstruction

Eels diehards can sit this next one out. Not The Deconstruction, because this album is very much for you—but the following question: At some point in the 22 years between “Novocaine for the Soul” and Eels’ twelfth album, Mark Everett lost you, so what could he do to bring you back? Explore topics other than his reflexive self-loathing and the women he tasks with pulling him out of it? Defy his maniacal dedication to the kind of elementary rhyme schemes that would get laughed out of a battle rap in 1983? Evolve beyond the cynicism and clutter that I’ll forever associate with the countless Beck clones I heard while working at the Gap in 1998?
The thing is, if any of that came to pass, the result would be virtually unrecognizable as an Eels album. The Deconstruction is extremely an Eels album. It opens with a listless melody that’s stuck between classic rock stations (“Space Oddity” and Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage”), as Everett huffs, “The deconstruction has begun/Time for me to fall apart.” The why, the how, and the what of this mission statement go unsaid, but it leaves little to the imagination for anyone who’s followed Eels to this point.
Everett has described the album as a reaction to a “world [that’s] going nuts,” and so his typically misanthropic leanings have been juxtaposed against childlike flits of whimsy or coffee-black observations of varying degrees of wit. The Deconstruction spans his recovery from heartache and becoming a new man—not a new musician, mind you, but a new man. He’s got a woman, and on “There I Said It” and “Sweet Scorched Earth,” she gives him the power and perspective to overlook all the negativity in the world. No one would begrudge him the happiness couched in “Today Is the Day,” but the song is a contrivance of burbling synths, plastic beats, and E’s own dead-eyed growl. The remainder of the record refuses to delve into any emotion more complex than pity or self-doubt (save for “Be Hurt,” the only moment where Everett takes a break from blaming himself and musters the courage to embrace pain), until we arrive at “You Are the Shining Light,” which really requires no further explanation.
Only the most astute Eels historians will notice that the previous paragraph is almost entirely made of reconstituted sentences from Pitchfork’s reviews of two other recent Eels albums, with the appropriate songs from The Deconstruction swapped in. Having saved myself the effort, I guess I can see the appeal of Everett’s ruthlessly economical songwriting process, but what good does it do the listener?
In the style of 2000’s “Mr. E.’s Beautiful Blues” and 2001’s “Fresh Feeling,” this album’s single “Today Is the Day” is meant as a deployment of Everett’s secret weapon, suggesting yet again that the snark is just a cover for his true self, a romantic who can be won over with a pop melody and a bumper-sticker cliché. As with Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” and the Cure songs that still get played on the radio, there can be real pleasure in hearing a mean-mugging miserablist express legitimate joy. But Everett is either unwilling or unable to modulate his vocals, and so he has to rely on outdated signifiers of “happy music” (joy-buzzer synths, cloying power-pop guitars and handclaps) to differentiate “Today Is the Day” from the rest of The Deconstruction. The effect is not even remotely believable.
It’s enough to make you reassess the entire existence of this project, particularly in relation to its one towering peak, 1998’s Electro-Shock Blues. Not that singing about death makes that album more inherently worthy of esteem, but that’s what it took to get Everett out of his own head, to provide his otherwise interchangeable musings with an urgency greater than filling out 45 minutes of an album. If the stakes are any lower, we end up with the hopelessly vague likes of “The Epiphany” and “Today Is the Day”—interstitial music for the sitcom of his own life.
And yet, somehow he’s still at it. He’s managed to transcend the Beck comparisons to a mythic status of his own in Los Angeles, somewhere in the galaxy of Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Daniel Clowes, and Marc Maron: an uncompromising eccentric, patron saint of junkyard dogs, a curmudgeon softened by his pop craftsmanship. In part this is a testament to just how much mileage Everett has gotten out of the mid-’90s archetype where a beard and ironic detachment are equivalent to intelligence. When given the slightest bit of scrutiny, The Deconstruction produces no eccentricity, pop smarts, orchestral creativity, or emotional revelation. This album comes off like a hustle rather than a noble failure, and that’s what makes it more pernicious than the likes of Boarding House Reach, Man of the Woods, and Virtue: Unlike at least some of those guys, Everett knows exactly what he’s doing.


Mono No Aware collects new ambient music that reflects our present moment. Each piece of the 80-minute compilation has its own unique identity, yet together it feels like the work of one mind.

Mono No Aware

Ambient music is always there, but the ways in which it intersects with culture is always shifting. In the 1970s, when the term first emerged thanks to Brian Eno, ambient existed as a corollary to space rock and psychedelia— solitary “head music” for the golden age of post-Dark Side of the Moon headphone listening. In the ’80s, as baby-boomers got older and busier, some of it became new age, a lucrative albeit niche market where the music was as crystalline as the rainbow reflected from the underside of a compact disc. In the ’90s, thanks to the rave-era chillout space, ambient returned to its druggy roots as collective listening, a sonic environment that facilitated shared consciousness expansion. And as that decade progressed and the millennium turned, ambient music came to be seen as a direct expression of technology’s state of the art, showcasing the ability of the newly fast computer to create sounds the likes of which no one had ever heard. Along these paths, ambient music is given meaning by what is happening around it—it’s a function of how the sound exists in the always-changing now.
Years on from its home hi-fi beginnings, ambient is now most likely to circulate on cassette, CD-R, or via streams on YouTube or Bandcamp. The communities that have grown up around it and nurtured it exist online, so creators and listeners are likely to draw inspiration, create, share, and discuss the music in the digital space. Mono No Aware, a new compilation assembled by the Berlin-based experimental label Pan, situates ambient music in this present moment. The set, assembled by Pan label head Bill Kouligas, is an invigorating survey of what’s going on in some of ambient’s obscure corners. Mixing selections from artists who come from all over but are mostly little-known outside of experimental music circles, Mono No Aware manages to be simultaneously an introduction to new voices and a deeply satisfying 80-minute mix that hangs together as an album.
Where ambient music was once dominated by auteurs—Eno, Richard D. James, GAS, Stars of the Lid—it’s now increasingly becoming the province of low-key producers working in relative anonymity who let the work speak for itself. Each track on *Mono No Aware *is distinctive enough to represent a personal approach, but there are clear connections between them that make the mix feel like a unified whole. A rustling noise lends a given track a kind of “floor,” an earthy grounding absent when purely digital tones hang in a silent space. Small scrapes, tape hiss, and hushed knocks and clangs wind through the album, offering a tactile sense of hearing music in a room. In “Exasthrus (Pane)” by M.E.S.H. (Berlin-based artist James Whipple), clouds of synths are mixed with the sound of feet moving across the floor and rain beating against glass, creating an enveloping nocturnal scene with an undercurrent of tension. “Eliminator” by Helm (London’s Luke Younger) sounds like music enclosed by a copper pipe, the drones echoing in the distance and escaping in a cloud of mist. Kouligas himself contributes “VXOMEG,” which starts with a blast of noise and then transforms into a kind of rusted-out wind chime, the sound of industry meeting the natural world. A strong feeling of space pervades, as tracks function like individual rooms in a sprawling building waiting to be explored.
The human voice is another thread winding through the set; we hear bits of conversation in different languages, snippets of song, whispers that hint at secrets but never quite give them away. “Held,” from the French producer Malibu, shifts between glowing drones, crunching footsteps, and a voice, soft and even, that sounds like it’s coming from someone under hypnosis. Yves Tumor’s “Limerence” combines a synth pulse and voices that move from joking and playful to pleading and desperate, evoking an early Harmony Korine film with its vérité power. The voices make Mono No Aware terrestrial, rather than abstract or alien; this isn’t music for imaginary worlds, but what surrounds us as we live in the here and now. While the environments are clear and evocative, they always seem populated by the living, and human emotion is never far outside the frame.
The music on Mono No Aware tends to amplify the subliminal, rather than evoking easily nameable states like “sadness” or “joy.” A given piece might have a tint of low-level anxiety, a sprinkling of menace, hints of relaxation or peace. But the music's subtlety, the record is ultimately a vehicle for exploring feeling, rather than just something nice for the background. The tracks feel like little mysteries to puzzle through, an invitation for active mood engagement. And the fact that so many different artists are brought here to participate in a singular expression of an ever-evolving genre makes it extra rewarding. Earlier this year Pitchfork interviewed Yves Tumor, and he was cagey about the details of his life, including his name and place of residence. “A lot of people are confused about my actual whereabouts, but that’s OK,” he said. For the duration of Mono No Aware, all that matters is that he found himself here, and he’s saying something.


Gathering vintage compositions from 27 tape reels, this expansive new collection highlights the brief but fertile period, more than 50 years ago, when avant-garde electronic music took root in India.

Various Artists: The NID Tapes: Electronic Music From India 1969-1972

One night in 1969, 20,000 people gathered at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, in the Indian state of Gujarat, to witness a vision of the future: the Moog synthesizer. An audiovisual spectacle called Soundscape was taking place across campus, and students and faculty members played the instrument while those in attendance marveled at the cutting-edge technology. American composer David Tudor had arrived in India earlier that year; during his three-month residency, he installed the synthesizer, which had been shipped from New York in wooden crates, along with a Dual Ring Modulator, a Bode Frequency Shifter, and tape machines, and led workshops on the instrument. Like the European electronic music studios established in the 1950s, the NID’s space would become a hub for exploration, hosting students of various stripes to experiment with its tools’ endless capabilities.
The first overview of this short-lived but groundbreaking period comes in the form of a tremendous new compilation, The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969-1972. The artist Paul Purgas discovered, reassembled, and digitized its 19 tracks from 27 tape reels, and the results are thrillingly varied. Across tape collages and soundtracks, improvisations and field recordings, the overarching feeling is one of restless curiosity. Gita Sarabhai’s two pieces—both simply titled “Gitaben’s Composition”—are emblematic of these studio investigations. Her first contribution features playful, cartoonish warbles reverberating in the ether. The latter takes us straight into the void, casting lambent, oscillating tones into a monolithic drone.
Sarabhai was a musicologist and revered musician who came from an influential family that pushed for modernist changes in the country. The pedagogical philosophies they favored infused the principles of Maria Montessori and the Bauhaus with ideas of holistic training via Mahatma Gandhi. It was Sarabhai who oversaw Tudor’s residency, and even prior to this international exchange, she would play records from her personal collection—Western composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Indian musicians like Ravi Shankar and Kesarbai Kerkar—over the PA system during the NID’s lunch hours. This stylistic mélange animates Atul Desai’s “Compositions,” whose commingling of percussion and effervescent bleeps channel his desire to seek naad—the ever-vibrating “essence of sound.” This isn’t so much a transition from past to present as an expression of music’s liberatory potential: Given the rigors and hierarchies inherent in learning the sitar or sarod, for example, the Moog symbolized a more egalitarian avenue for ecstatic stimulation of the mind, body, and spirit.
On an All India Radio broadcast from 1970, Desai, a Hindustani classical vocalist and composer, and the filmmaker I.S. Mathur extolled the avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse; their reverence for the early-20th-century experimentalist is evident in Mathur’s own pieces. The desire to blend environmental sounds with electronics is the central premise behind the impish “My Birds,” while “Soundtrack of Shadow Play” is an invigorating slab of musique concrète in the lineage of Varèse’s Poème électronique. Without the actual theatrical performance to view, its recordings of balmy Indian percussion transform into acousmatic abstractions amid a sea of calming electronic tones. Elsewhere, Mathur’s “Once I Played a Tanpura” captures a scorching solo on the titular instrument. And for those wanting to feel stressed beyond belief, “Shadows of the Show” intermittently recalls the hypnotic illusion of a Shepard tone, continually rising in pitch and intensity as if continually on the verge of exploding.
The NID Tapes directly challenges Western conceptions of Indian culture. Three years after the Beatles drew from Indian classical music for Revolver, an architecture student named Jinraj Joshipura looked not to old musical forms but to the next century, composing science-fiction pieces inspired by James Bond flicks and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. His two “Space Liner 2001” tracks aim to capture previously unheard sounds, and their unadorned electronic thrumming embodies the empty expanse of the cosmos. The second of his compositions is like a foley artist’s work for an imaginary film—with patience and quietude, he captures the minimalist noises that would accompany an astronaut’s trek through outer space.
The tracks unearthed on The NID Tapes are often sparse in this way, and all the more striking for it. Take S.C. Sharma’s “After the War,” whose synths waver at various tempos to create textural and rhythmic complexity. Expertly mixed to take advantage of stereo imaging, its layered blips and clangs echo the full-body immersion associated with raga. Most mind-blowing are his “Dance Music” compositions. They loop in dizzying fashion, carrying a sinister undercurrent far removed from the cheeseball charm of Moog pioneers like Perrey & Kingsley or Dick Hyman. “Dance Music II” and “III” do have a subtle air of whimsy, placing them as a precursor to Charanjit Singh’s 1982 LP of acid-tinged disco. “Dance Music I,” especially, is an all-timer: Taking shape from winding, low-pitched pulses, it feels like the primordial ooze from which dub techno evolved.
Alongside these works by Indian artists is one by Tudor himself. His 1969 piece “Tape Feedback With Moog” is representative of the elemental power that defines this compilation. For three minutes, he explores gnarly cacophony, weaving a more immediate and economical tapestry of noise than what he made with Anima Pepsi and Pepsibird in the following year. If there is a track that captures the world-building of Tudor’s more characteristic work, it is Desai’s “Recordings for Osaka Expo 70,” whose tape-processed sounds form a kaleidoscopic survey of traditional Indian music. “This music must reach the masses,” Desai said more than 50 years ago about these innovative electronic investigations. “And the listeners must be made to realize the vast potential of this sound world.” His demanding tone feels warranted: The NID Tapes is eye-opening and rich, its discoveries too revolutionary to ignore.


The Maryland rapper’s latest album soars on a sense of melancholic triumph, ordaining a new star to watch in the process.

Learn 2 Swim

As a rapper-producer, redveil didn’t just hit the ground running—he jumped in the deep end of the pool with no life jacket. At 11 years old, the Maryland native began making beats on Fruity Loops after hearing the Internet and Tyler, the Creator’s “Palace/Curse” for the first time. Those beat-making sessions eventually led to piano lessons, which clashed with the gospel, funk, and old-school hip-hop his parents would play around the house. As his rap palette expanded, so did his musical voice. A sense of wide-eyed adventure cushions the anxiety of his early song flips and projects like 2019’s bittersweet cry. Drums and warped samples pop across expansive synth backdrops while redveil—very much a teenager—attempts to piece himself together in the maelstrom. That initial tinkerer’s spirit would become more refined on 2020’s Niagra, where his writing grew as meticulous and thoughtful as his beats. Niagra was the moment where his appreciation for artists like Tyler, Earl Sweatshirt, and Logic evolved past homage into a solid vision, familiar and fresh as a pair of retro Air Jordans.
To see a 16-year-old artist with such control and focus is impressive on its own. That Learn 2 Swim feels like a quantum leap in both quality and vision is remarkable. For starters, the stakes are much higher than before. redveil’s rapidly expanding fanbase—he has more than a million monthly Spotify listeners—stands in contrast to a world-weariness brought on by teenage ennui and a strong sense of family values. “Fuck the acclaim/I just want my people never touching the pain again,” he bellows on opener “together.” His wants are earnest without being naive, a genuine effort to push through a murky past on the way to a brighter future. Lyrically and musically, Learn 2 Swim soars on this sense of melancholic triumph, ordaining a new rap star to watch in the process.
redveil is a child of Earl Sweatshirt in the way he jams as much meaning as possible into the fewest words. But his writing is more playful and less cryptic, his syllable counts waxing and waning on a dime. Notice how he changes speeds throughout the winding verse of lead single “diving board” or his stagger-stepped cadence across the harrowing first verse of “mars.” Here, and on songs like “automatic,” his acuity for closing the gap between positive and negative memories is on full display: “Getting lessons and accepting them the only way you grow/Remember days I wanted to cock a Smith and Wesson, let it blow/And nonetheless so far I’m a testament of staying afloat.” These intimate thoughts are blown up to macro-scale often, the scars just as important to him as the victories they denote.
Newfound success has redveil reflecting on his upbringing in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and the choppy waters he weathered to end up here. Some of his friends, like the ones mentioned near the beginning of “pg baby,” are fellow grinders working to “never see another autumn.” Others, like the nameless person at the start of the second verse of “shoulder,” are brief vessels of regret that color memories of Motorola phone screens. These experiences enrich his personal stories, lessons from each of them pushing him further toward his goal.
That clarity is complemented by a lush suite of beats. Learn 2 Swim is entirely self-produced, and redveil’s production chops have expanded to match the occasion. Samples, synths, and piano are still his musical bread and butter, but the sense of scale to each of these beats is massive. Both “new info” and “morphine (da ways)” start with loops and steady drum programming before breaking open to reveal booming 808s in their last seconds, fleshing out the experience without overwhelming it. The love for melody and chord progressions he inherited from Tyler manifests in gossamer piano keys that dot nearly every song. Those chords are the lifeblood of tracks like “diving board” and “better,” descending like a sunshower against a pink horizon line at dusk.
It’s even more impressive when he combines these sounds, like the piano keys simmering below sampled cymbals on “better” or the latticework of synths, drums, and vocal samples that make up the second half of “automatic.” redveil seamlessly weaves different types of rap production together, channeling the orchestral pomp of live-band hip-hop, the gooey sample loops of the modern underground, and the synthetic flair of the mainstream into something fresh. By challenging perceptions of what rap can be, he’s created audio dioramas that blend and melt into each other in stunning fashion.
The duality of redveil’s production style dovetails with the redemptions and new beginnings at the heart of his stories across Learn 2 Swim. If you listen closely, you can hear the same sincerity that informed the music of his early influences. But redveil is no copycat. He has Tyler and Earl’s respective confidence in Black self-expression without the hard personality and musical edges that defined their early work; he shares Logic’s passion for the craft and history of rap minus the try-hard True Schoolisms that sap energy from his persona. Learn 2 Swim is luminous and forward-thinking, using the embers of redveil’s personal and musical past to fuel his trip to greater heights.


In 1982, Kate Bush’s daring and dense fourth album marked her transformation into a fearless experimental artist who was legibly, audibly very queer, and very obviously in love with pop music.

The Dreaming

In 1978, Kate Bush first hit the UK pop charts with “Wuthering Heights” off her romantic, ambitious progressive pop debut The Kick Inside. That same year, her more confident, somewhat disappointing follow-up Lionheart and 1980’s Never for Ever had a grip of charting singles that further grew her UK success without achieving mega-stardom—she barely cracked into American college rock. What is truly amazing between the first chapter of her career and the new one that began with 1982’s The Dreaming is how consistently Bush avoided the musical world around her, preferring to hone and blend her literary, film, and musical inspirations (Elton John, David Bowie, and Pink Floyd) into the idiosyncratic perfection that was 1985’s Hounds of Love. The Dreaming is the artist statement that cleared the way.
The Dreaming was a turning point from Kate Bush, pop star to Kate Bush, artist: a fan favorite for the same reason it was a commercial failure. Part of the Athena myth around Bush is that she arrived to EMI at 16 with a huge archive of songs, and from this quiver came most of the material for the first four albums. The Dreaming was her first album of newly composed work and for it, her first real chance to rethink her songwriting praxis and to produce the songs on her own. Using mainly a Linn drum machine and the Fairlight CMI—an early digital synth she came to master in real time—she cut and pasted layers of timbres and segments of sound rather than recording mixing lines of instruments, a method that would later be commonplace among the producer-musician. At the time, it was still considered odd, especially for a first-time producer, and especially for a young woman prone to fabulous leotards.
The result was an internal unity, a more well-paced album than anything she’d done prior. The songs are full of rhythmic drive, moody synth atmospheres, and layered vocals free of the radio-friendly hooks on earlier albums. The sounds that kept her tethered to rock—such as guitar and rock drum cymbals—are mostly absent, as are the strings that sweetened her prior work. The fretless bass—often the masculine sparring partner to her voice—is still omnipresent. The instrument that connects this all, as always, is the piano, that plodding Victorian ringmaster of Bush’s weird carnival. Considering that the same new-wave combo of drum machines, synth leads, and girlie soprano drove fellow Brits Bananarama to the top of the charts in the same year, it’s easy to hear how far Bush went to tune out the zeitgeist. Accordingly, critics didn’t quite understand it, radio mostly ignored it, and the label hated it. But the album gave Bush the space to build her dream world, and once she figured out what sounds and character should be there, she could make pop again, her way.
The Dreaming really is more a product of the 1970s—which actually sort of began in the late ’60s and extended through most of the ’80s—when prog rock musicians sold millions, had huge radio hits, and established fan bases still rabid today. But the album also came out in 1982, and it only cemented the sense of Bush as a spirited, contrarian of Baroque excess in a musical moment defined largely in reaction to prog’s excess. It’s exactly that audacity to be weird against the prevailing trends that made Kate Bush a great feminist icon who expanded the sonic (and business) possibilities for subsequent visionary singer-songwriters. While name-checking Emerson, Lake & Palmer or Yes is relatively unheard of in today’s hip hop, indie, or pop landscapes, Kate Bush’s name was and is still said with respect. Perhaps it’s because unlike all those prog dudes of yore, she’s legibly, audibly very queer, and very obviously loves pop music, kind of like her patron saint, David Bowie.
On The Dreaming, Bush’s self-proclaimed “mad” album, her mind works itself out through her mouth. Her cacophony of vocal sounds—at least four on each track—pushed boundaries of how white pop women could sing. Everything about it went against proper, pleasing femininity. Her voice was too high: a purposeful shrilling of the unthreatening girlish head voice; too many: voices doubled, layered, calling and responding to themselves, with the choruses full of creepy doubles, all of them her; too unruly: pitch-shifted, leaping in unexpected intervals, slipping registers until the idea of femme and masculine are clearly performances of the same sounding person; too ugly: more in the way cabaret singers inhabit darkness without bouncing back to beauty by the chorus in the way that female pop singers often must.
All this excess is her sound: a strongly held belief that unites all of the The Dreaming. Nearly half of the album is devoted to spiritual quests for knowledge and the strength to quell self-doubt. Frenetic opener “Sat in Your Lap” was the first song written for the album. Inspired by hearing Stevie Wonder live, it serves as meta-commentary of her step back from the banality of pop ascendancy that mocks shortcuts to knowledge. A similar track, “Suspended in Gaffa,” laments falling short of enlightenment through the metaphor of light bondage in black cloth stagehand tape. It is a pretty queer-femme way of thinking through the very prog-rock problem of being a real artist in a commercial theater form, which is probably why it’s a fan favorite.
“Leave It Open” is a declaration of artistic independence hinging on the semantic ambiguity of its pronouns (what is “it” and who are “we”?). Here’s the one solid rock groove of the album, and it crescendos throughout while a breathy, heavily phased alto Bush calls and high-pitched Bush responds in increasingly frantic phrases. “All the Love” is the stunning aria of The Dreaming—a long snake moan on regret. Here she duets with a choirboy, a technique she’d echo with her son on 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. The lament trails off with a skipping cascade of goodbyes lifted from Bush’s broken answering machine, a pure playback memento mori.
The other half of the album showcases Bush’s talent for writing narratives about historical and imagined characters placed in unbearable moral predicaments. This is often called her “literary” or “cinematic” side, but it is also her connection to character within the Victorian-era British music hall tradition, a bawdy and comic form of working-class theatre that borrowed from American vaudeville traditions and became the dominant 19th- and early 20th-century commercial British pop art. As much as she’s in prog rock’s pantheon, she’s also part of this very-pre rock‘n’roll archive of cheeky musical entertainment.
When it works, her narrative portraits render precise individuals in richly drawn scenes—the empathy radiates out. In “Houdini” she fully inhabits the gothic romance of lost love, conjuring the panic, grief, and hope of Harry Houdini’s wife Bess. Bush was taken by Houdini’s belief in the afterlife and Bess’s loyal attempts reach him through séances. Bush conjured the horrified sounds of witnessing a lover die by devouring chocolate and milk to temporarily ruin her voice. Bess was said to pass a key to unlock his bonds through a kiss, the inspiration for the cover art and a larger metaphor for the depth of trust Bush wants in love. We must need what’s in her mouth to survive, and we must get it through a passionate exchange among willing bodies.
In her borrowing further afield, her characters are less accurately rendered. This has been an unabashedly true part of Bush’s artistic imagination since The Kick Inside’s cover art, vaguely to downright problematic in its attempts to inhabit the worlds of Others. On “Pull Out the Pin” she uses the silver bullet as a totem of one’s protection against an enemy of supernatural evil. In this case, the hero is a Viet Cong fighter pausing before blowing up American soldiers who have no moral logic for their service. She’d watched a documentary that mentioned fighters put a silver Buddha into their mouths as they detonated a grenade, and in that she saw a dark mirror to key on the album cover. While the humanizing of such warriors in pop narrative is a brave act, it’s also possible to hear her thin arpeggiated synth percussion and outro cricket sounds as a part of an aural Orientalism that undermines that very attempt.
Then there’s “The Dreaming,” a parable of a real, historical, and contemporary group of Aboriginal people as timeless, noble savages in a tragically ruined Eden that lectures the center of empire about their (our) political and environmental violence. Bush narrates in a grotesquely exaggerated Australian accent over a thicket of exotic animal sounds, both holdovers from music hall and vaudeville’s racist “ethnic humor” tradition, a kind of distancing that suggests that settler Australians are somehow less civilized and thus more responsible for their white supremacist beliefs than the Empire that shipped them there in the first place. In telling this story in this way—without accurate depictions of people, and without credit, understanding, monetary remuneration, proper cultural context, or employment of indigenous musicians—she unfairly extracts cultural (and economic) value from Aboriginal suffering just as the characters in the song mine their land. As a rich text to meditate on colonial, racial, and sexual violence, it is actually quite useful—but not in the way Bush intended.
The closer “Get Out of My House” was inspired by two different maternal and isolation-madness horror texts: The Shining and Alien. In all three stories, a malevolent spirit wants to control a vessel. Bush does not let the spirit in, shouts “Get out!” and when it violates her demand, she becomes animal. Such shapeshifting is a master trope in Kate Bush’s songbook, an enduring way for her music and performance to blend elements of non-Western spirituality and European myth, turning mundane moments into Gothic horror. It’s also, unfortunately, the way that women without power can imagine escape. The mule who brays through the track’s end is a kind of female Houdini—a sorceress who can will her way out of violence not with language, but with real magic. At least it works in the world of her songs, a kingdom where queerly feminine excess is not policed, but nurtured into excellence.


On his first of two solo albums planned for this year, Jack White earns his eccentricity. An illogical fusion of blues-rock and carnival prog, this music is genuinely, imaginatively weird.

Fear of the Dawn

Even when Jack White is the only credited musician on Fear of the Dawn, it sounds like there are six of him. Aside from the absence of Meg White, nothing has separated White’s solo projects from his work with the White Stripes more than his embrace of overdubs, which has ballooned his once streamlined garage-rock into ever bulkier, more cartoonish iterations of itself. Excess has become White’s driving muse, and he’s never piled it on thicker than he does on Fear of the Dawn, a chaotic, illogical fusion of blues-rock and carnival prog that contains some of the most outlandish stylistic experiments of his career.
White has already made an album as indulgent as this, and it was awful. Inspired in part by the skronkiest corners of Prince and Sly and the Family Stone’s discographies, 2018’s Boarding House Reach was far and away his worst record because it neglected everything that made his best music so immediate–the brute-force riffs, the effortless ditties he materialized as if pulling them from some forgotten public domain. Every Jack White album sounds like he’s winging it to some degree, but Boarding House Reach was the first that felt like he was writing around a total absence of songs.
The first of two LPs White has planned for 2022, Fear of the Dawn doesn’t completely correct that problem. Too often, White still sounds more interested in vamping than in writing something catchy to vamp over. But his first solo record in four years distinguishes itself through sheer commitment to the bit, as well as White’s most unrepentantly heavy set of songs since 2007’s Icky Thump. The raging opener “Taking Me Back” debuted last fall alongside a trailer for a new Call of Duty game, White’s fuck-shit-up guitars an apt soundtrack to the game’s numbing montage of bullet spray, flamethrowers, and explosions. It’s pure meathead music, and White matches its spite with some fittingly nasty lyrics, the latest in his long line of bracing songs about divorce and pipe dreams of reconciliation. “Are you taking me back?” he sneers when an ex drops off some mail, as if trying to force the very answer he doesn’t want to hear.
At times, Fear of the Dawn conjures nu-metal, with all the peculiarities that tag can carry. With its thrashing guitars and go-go shimmy, “The White Raven” imagines Rob Zombie scoring a remake of a Gidget beach party movie. Elsewhere, White shout-raps his way through the brusque rocker “What’s the Trick,” one of several songs where he slashes at his guitar like it’s a set of turntables, almost Tom Morello-esque, even as he disregards Rage Against the Machine’s famous mantra of “no samples, keyboards, or synthesizers.” All three are slathered over the record, often to surrealist effect.
“Hi-De-Ho” samples Cab Calloway’s “Hi-De-Ho Man,” stretching and looping Calloway’s famed chant until it almost becomes a bizarro parallel of Megan Thee Stallion’s “ody-ody-ody” “Body” hook. The song is all tic. Its only verse is a Q-Tip feature where he free-associates about Stevie Wonder and Mariah Carey and jokes about only half-remembering A Tribe Called Quest’s time on Jive (is there anything more on-brand to rap about on a Jack White album than record labels?). Gaudy as it is, that track is downright tasteful compared to the cosmic schlock of “Into the Twilight,” which samples not one but two Manhattan Transfer songs. Like the dubby “Eosophobia,” which plays like a mashup of Augustus Pablo and Jefferson Starship, the song feels born from the headspace of a musician who’s spent entirely too much time digging for inspiration in dollar bins.
Late on Fear of the Dawn, there’s a song that stands out simply for how conventional it is. “Morning, Noon and Night” is little more than a fuzz riff and groove pulled from Zombies/Animals-era classic-rock, but after so much shtick, it’s a relief to hear White go to town over something so low-concept. And yet, shtick is Fear of the Dawn’s animating purpose, and as braying as the album’s stylistic experiments can be, the record is better for them: It has an audacity and entertainment factor that White’s last few were sorely missing. The gambits are more preposterous but also more intentional and more elaborate in their ridiculousness.
Listening to Fear of the Dawn, it’s hard not to marvel at the disconnect between White’s public image as a traditionalist scold—the blues purist yelling at everybody to put away their cell phones from the top of his personal vinyl pressing plant—and the absolutely unmoored, borderline absurdist record he just made. When an artist tries as hard as White to be eccentric, the last thing anybody wants to do is give them the satisfaction of acknowledging it, but here he’s earned it. Fear of the Dawn is fucking weird: not obligatorily weird or try-hard weird, but genuinely, imaginatively weird.


Performing with her jazz ensemble, the New York guitarist makes music that hangs in the balance between composition and improvisation, structure and dissolution.

Cloudward

Mary Halvorson’s guitar tone contains within it a microcosm of her entire practice as a composer and bandleader. She gives the impression, through her ingenious use of a particular delay pedal, that her instrument is inhabiting two states of matter at once, or making an imperceptibly slow transit between them: now dry and unadorned, definitively guitarlike, almost uncanny in its naturalism; now liquidy and unstable, with digital processing freeing every static pitch from whatever invisible forces are holding it in place. Sometimes, you get one state or the other, but mostly you get both. Each note takes on the character of an ice cube left out a little too long, glistening solidly in the material of its own dissolution.
Cloudward, the MacArthur-winning New York jazz musician’s latest album, is also like a document of edges melting away. Halvorson composed the music for Amaryllis, the ensemble she first assembled for her 2022 album of the same name: Patricia Brennan on vibraphone, Nick Dunston on bass, Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Jacob Garchik on trombone, and Adam O’Farrill on trumpet. (Laurie Anderson also appears for a scraped-violin cameo on the clamorous “Incarnadine.”) In “The Tower,” dramatic chord changes give way to atonal free improvisation so gradually as to obscure the differences between the two modes. And from pools of amorphous improv arise moments of surprising order: Two instruments might converge suddenly in a shared melodic line, or slyly imitate each other’s articulation, then nonchalantly diverge again. Of course, nearly all jazz carries some tension between compositional rigor and expressive freedom. But Halvorson is unusually attuned to the porousness of these putative borders. Though I can’t help but wonder whether certain fragments of structure were outlined in advance or created spontaneously by the players, such questions of category may be the wrong ones to ask of music so preoccupied with the liminal moment of becoming.
Halvorson puts her idiosyncratic instrumentation to good use on Cloudward. Brennan’s vibraphone and Garchick’s trombone are particularly well suited to the album’s dissolving sensibility: the former with its pointed percussive attack and flickering sustained resonance; the latter with its sliding articulations of each note. For a jazz guitar album, it contains few guitar solos, a dynamic that only serves to emphasize the holism of Halvorson’s playing and composing. The sonorities of her collaborators’ entwined voices so thoroughly reflect her own that she can recede to the background for extended stretches without compromising the music’s identity.
One notable exception is “Desiderata,” the album’s most rock-oriented piece, across whose middle section Halvorson explodes with a solo that begins like a buzzsaw and ends like a supercomputer going haywire. On a record whose every moment is so delicately balanced, it is a rare and exhilarating passage in which wild abandon decidedly wins out over careful control. Likewise, “Unscrolling” reaches its climax with an arco bass solo that nearly abandons pitch entirely in favor of the tactile sound of bow on strings. Dunston’s playing is powerful, but the solo’s impact owes as much to Halvorson’s instinct for the deliberate arrangement of passages that other out-jazz bandleaders might leave to the intuition of the moment. Just as Dunston is reaching a peak of feverish intensity, rather than rise to meet him as many improvisers would, the accompanists abruptly drop out, leaving him to howl alone.
There is something curiously absolute about Cloudward, whose eight pieces seem chiefly to express their own elegant systems of order and disorder, rather than reaching outside themselves to convey particular emotions or images. At their best, they find real beauty in stillness, continuous change, and the occasional sudden rupture. But that self-contained and inward quality—prizing the solid purity of a good idea over the intoxication of a sensuous surface, and avoiding gushy sentimentality like the plague—can make their beauty difficult to articulate. The deeper you dig into your bag of figurative language, the further you may stray from faithfully describing what the music is putting across. I could say that the twisty guitar and vibraphone lines that envelop “Ultramarine” are like vines growing unpredictably over the song’s rigid scaffolding, or try a more literal approach, examining the way their increasingly dense chromaticism inflects and complicates the otherwise simple underlying harmonic structure. The poetic license of the first risks obscuring the music’s hard reality; the clinical distance of the second risks reducing it to bare formula. The truth, as ever with this beguiling album, is somewhere in between.


The latest reissue of this fantastic and bracing artifact is a 3xCD model, augmented with the other extant YMG studio recordings (and fascinating Simon Reynolds liner notes).

Young Marble Giants: Colossal Youth and Collected Works

Colossal Youth and Collected Works

There really ought to be more bands like Young Marble Giants, which doesn't mean that there ought to be more bands that sound like Young Marble Giants. They came out of the nowheresville of Cardiff, Wales; they didn't particularly have a local scene to buoy them up, or a niche to fit into. What they had was an aesthetic that was totally theirs, a sound and style that essentially had no antecedents. Play any six seconds of any YMG song and you'll know exactly who you're listening to, and probably be thunderstruck by its unsentimental beauty of tone.
In a year when everyone was trying to make a big noise-- but isn't that every year?-- YMG switched tactics, forcing their audience to lean in to hear them. It's not simply that they were quiet, although substituting a drum machine that sounded like it had a thick quilt on top of it for a human drummer was a radical move at the time. They weren't even all that quiet-- they were just in love with negative space, and their lyrics were so much about things unsaid that the space was formally appropriate. Stuart Moxham flicks at his guitar like a card-shark snapping out an ace, amplifying the impact of his pick on the strings as much as the notes themselves; his brother Philip Moxham bangs at his bass, then lets the sound decay. Alison Statton's not an affectless singer, exactly, but her chief weapon is understatement. She knows how angry Stuart's songs are, and just barely hints at that fury, in a voice that suggests someone finding the courage to say something she's needed to say for a while and has only one chance to get right.
What's sort of shocking about their sole album, actually, is how full of rage it is, and how many ways the band manages to translate that rage into something that's not the way the rock idiom usually expresses it. Colossal Youth ticks like a not-yet-exploded bomb. In theory, "Include Me Out" is a mighty garage-rocker, something the Stones or Count Five could've played with a sneer and a great big beat; the Giants strip it of virtually all its audible violence, reducing its rhythm to a muffled thump. "Credit in the Straight World" is a vicious little song about the relationship between subculture and mass culture, and it's all tension, no release, with a riff that keeps landing a half-step above where it should resolve. (The caterwauling Hole cover of it, from Live Through This, demonstrates that you could fill in all the space in Stuart Moxham's songs and still have something impressive.)
There's another space in the center of these songs, though: a pervasive sense of lost youth, toward which most of their fury is directed. "Young" and "youth" turn up in the band name and album title (both were taken from a description of a classical statue), and Statton was only 20 when they got together. But Stuart Moxham's fixation on a moment of perfection he could feel slipping away-- "Salad Days" is another song title-- is the reason it's poetically apt that the band only made one, exquisite record.
The poetic version, of course, doesn't quite fit the facts. This latest reissue-- we also reviewed the previous one-- is a 3xCD model, augmented with the other extant YMG studio recordings (and fascinating Simon Reynolds liner notes). There's not much else in the vault-- two singles (one of them instrumental), a compilation track, a five-song BBC session and a bunch of demos and rehearsal tapes originally issued in 2000 as Salad Days. Aside from the vocal single's apocalyptic fantasy "Final Day" and cryptic lament "Cakewalking", they add almost nothing of substance to the band's legacy. Colossal Youth is such a bracing artifact, even now, that it begs for context; the other two discs demonstrate that the album is really all the band had to say, and the way they said it best.
Which isn't quite true either. Statton and the Moxhams, fortunately, didn't give up music after Young Marble Giants split up, and there are worthwhile passages in all of their later discographies. (Start by hunting down Weekend's '81 Demos EP.) The five days when Colossal Youth was recorded, though, were the moment when they were sailing painfully and angrily into maturity, staring into a darkness illuminated a flicker at a time by a fire behind them that they knew couldn't last.
NB: While this record is currently out on Domino UK, our U.S. readers can find its Domino U.S. release in shops or through digital retailers on September 11.


The lo-fi pop singer’s first label release is an EP whose careful songwriting and intriguingly flat vocals should quiet naysayers who dismissed her as a one-hit fluke.

Diary 001 EP

Claire Cottrill has been sharing her music online since she was 13. Beginning with acoustic covers of Maroon 5 and Frank Ocean, then evolving into thoughtful, probing guitar songs about the complexities of high school relationships, the 19-year-old musician’s creative coming-of-age took place entirely on the internet. But it wasn't until 2017—when she uploaded the video for “Pretty Girl,” a song originally released on a compilation album from the blog Le Sigh—that Cottrill completed her transformation into Clairo: a web-native, lo-fi pop singer with an ear for playful synth tones and an intriguingly flat vocal affect.
Comprising footage of Clairo dancing awkwardly in front of her webcam in the style of multimedia artist Molly Soda, the “Pretty Girl” video quickly racked up millions of views, catching the ears of Chance the Rapper's manager and The FADER's in-house label. Like any young woman whose music suddenly becomes popular, the Massachusetts-born singer attracted legions of naysayers who dismissed her as a one-hit fluke or an industry plant. But “Pretty Girl” and the other songs on Clairo’s new EP, diary 001, exhibit the kind of subtle charms that only arise after years of careful labor. Listen deeply enough, and you’ll realize there’s more to her overnight success than one lucky hit.
With its over-the-top keyboard tones and limping vocal melody, “Pretty Girl” taps into the same bitter irony wielded by PC Music’s Hannah Diamond and, on certain songs, Drake. Clairo sings gently about modifying herself in service of a male partner: With little emotion in her voice, she pledges to “wear a skirt for you” and “shut up if you want me to.” What scans initially as a lightweight indie-pop song in the vein of Frankie Cosmos or Steve Sobs quickly reveals its barbed underbelly. Clairo exaggerates the easygoing aspects of her sound to better lubricate her indictment of misogynist expectations. There’s power in a woman singing that she won't shut up, but the creeping numbness of Clairo’s forced docility has its own kind of pull.
Other songs on diary 001 see the singer exploring different facets of romantic entanglement in the Tinder age. “You're just one click away/From something real or fake,” she sings on opener “Hello?,” a muted duet with Irish rapper Rejjie Snow. A keyboard tone that approximates the timbre of the human voice dances around her vocals, threatening to dissolve any boundary between the fake and the real. “B.O.M.D.” (which stands for “boy of my dreams”) indulges a childlike giddiness about a new flame. “I wanna stay up forever,” Clairo sings, like a kid at a sleepover, while PC Music's Danny L. Harle saturates the backing track with computer-generated chirps, finger snaps, and whip sounds. Even when she's gushing, Clairo maintains her vocal cool; she's a skilled singer, perfectly on-key but deliberately unshowy, as though she's monitoring her own affect to ensure she doesn't give too much away.
The sound Clairo has been tracing since she swapped out her guitar for GarageBand comes into bloom on diary 001’s clear highlight, “4EVER.” Over a round funk bassline and chintzy synths, she bounces her voice across the EP’s most urgent melody. At the pre-chorus, she jams as many syllables as possible into each line: “Is it ever gonna change?/Am I gonna feel this way forever?/Are you gonna be around for me to count on, yeah?” But by the chorus, she’s stretching out the last syllable of “count on” until it fills a whole measure. The densely packed language mirrors the anxiety of the lyrics, while the shift to a single, languid word offers some reprieve. It's a smart way to cut the tension, and it lends the track an addictive sheen. Clairo may pursue a carefree, low-investment aesthetic on her first label release, but over time, her songs reveal the depth of her craft. She has worked hard to make it sound this easy.