The Detroit rapper's second mixtape of the year is like a compilation of leftovers, with enough meticulously told tales to justify the experience.

Hardwood Classic

A typical Baby Smoove song sounds like he’s having an early-morning, hungover phone conversation and struggling to recap what he did the day before. The Detroit rapper’s vignettes are a never-ending cycle of trips to shopping malls, pit stops at corner stores, sitting in traffic, and weed smoke-filled strolls through his neighborhood. The most exciting moments are when he shows up at Saks Fifth Avenue or gets a package from the Dior store in the mail—which, if you take Smoove’s word for it, occurs at least once a day.
But Baby Smoove’s music comes to life in mixtape form, where each track feels like a chapter in the story he’s trying to tell in the backseat of a long car ride. Though this lethargic style has a low margin of error, all it takes is a lackluster beat or an anecdote short on details and it quickly becomes painfully boring. It’s no coincidence Smoove’s best mixtapes—the piano-driven Purple Heart and the G-Funk synth obsessed Baby—are the two with the most consistently vivid production. He flourishes on vibe and feel, and without that, loses his appeal.
Baby Smoove’s second full-length mixtape of the year, Hardwood Classic is like a compilation of leftovers. On his strongest projects, the raps and production are complementary, but here they don’t have the same color or flash. Normally when Smoove uses the flow, which sounds like he’s in the recording booth wrapped in a blanket and neck pillow, the energy is made up for by uptempo and lush instrumentals. On “DX,” both Smoove and the brooding beat are lifeless—not even his lines about freely scuffing his Diors or referencing Shawn Michaels and Triple H’s old friendly catchphrase is enough to make it memorable.
In Detroit, rappers like Babyface Ray, G.T., Veeze, and the World Tour Mafia crew have made the lane of laidback lifestyle rap highly competitive. Why put up with formulaic production and mailed-in punchlines when there are so many other options? Smoove’s few funny lines about money counters and internet beef on “Swing the Wood” don’t make the routine Michigan-style beat any less forgettable. Similarly, the “Sleepwalking Pt. 3” instrumental is so sluggish it’s hard to even laugh at his guest Veeze calling someone a “jabroni” (“Jabroni” is in between “bozo” and “doofus” on the list of underused rap insults).
But even though Hardwood Classic is nowhere near the top of Baby Smoove’s fast-growing catalog, there’s still enough meticulously told tales to justify the experience. On “Load Management,” he raps about going to the store in a $6,000 outfit for absolutely no reason over a pulsing Enrgy beat; on “Prada Me,” he’s annoyed a girl, who is spending the night, keeps getting phone calls from her boyfriend; on “Floyd May,” he counts the number of Amiri Jeans he owns over breezy Mexikodro production. Baby Smoove can make his days of nothing sound as thrilling as Rio Da Yung OG’s borderline action movie set pieces, but only when it’s all clicking.

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Electronic producer Natasha Kmeto has spoken frankly about her coming out experience, a development in her sexual identity that has found its way into her music. Her awareness developed in large part on the dance floor—Inevitable brings this catharsis to her listeners.

Inevitable

Electronic producer Natasha Kmeto has described her new album Inevitable not as a conceptual project, but as a reflection of herself. Within the past year, she's spoken frankly about her coming out experience, a development in her sexual identity that has found its way into her music. Her awareness developed in large part on the dance floor, manifesting in a colossal yet loving environment that also served as a space for personal catharsis. Inevitable brings this catharsis to her listeners.
Kmeto's vocals have always been a tool in the production of her past works, but they ring out with clear and present force on Inevitable. Her singing is forthright but also verging on breaking, as if she was struck by a sudden wave of vulnerability. From the record’s first seconds, she telegraphs how different the stakes are for her: On opener and title track "Inevitable" she pleads "When you coming back, baby? When you coming back?/ I will love you down, baby, when you’re coming back." The unadorned sound and raw sentiment send a powerful message: Take me for who I am.
Inevitable sounds sharper and smoother than Crisis, but it still feels raw, like the sort of music that is ripped in desperation out of the heart and guts—the truly messy parts—of its creator. There is an unfinished charm to her music; the components of the tracks sound like they don’t (or shouldn’t) mesh together. Kmeto’s voice shimmers on "Inevitable" while the slow, rumbling and minimalist instrumentation dies just short of a climactic peak. It seems incomplete, but Kmeto saves it with the vividness of her lyrics and the quiver of her voice.
Kmeto has been compared to Grimes and Maya Jane Coles, but those comparisons feel flimsy at best. Kmeto is better understood next to the criminally underrated Cooly G. Both make music lyrically fueled by desire, exploring the possibilities of unspoken meaning found in mood, in space and silence, and in carefully considered lyricism. The music builds as the stakes do as well.
On "I Thought You Had a Boyfriend", one of the strongest tracks on the record, Kmeto sings about a confusing romantic connection. "Your eyes, lingered on me as you said goodbye," she sings at the outset. "And our hands held a little bit longer than what would seem polite." Kmeto sounds at once frustrated and open, and as the song progresses, the synths build and build to an overwhelming wall of sound. Is it the rising bite to Kmeto’s words as she sings on the chorus that makes the song so unsettling? "I thought you had a boyfriend/ I thought you had a man," she says. "I thought it wasn’t like that/ I thought you had a plan." After two verses, the synths wash over the listener like a tidal wave of emotions as she repeats the chorus again and again. Kmeto doesn’t ask a question, but she does demand an answer.
Other strong songs on the record fit this same structure. "Closer Comes My Love" at first sounds like a sensual slow jam, but peaks in cacophony. "Peak", more of a traditional dance track, has straightforward lyrics that pair seamlessly with the slight dubstep flourishes found in the track's final minutes.
Unlike her young peers also creating soulful jams (Tinashe, Jhené Aiko), Kmeto’s music refuses to slink into the background. On Inevitable, Kmeto’s personal awakening blooms into her music, both lyrically and structurally. As queer identity gets shoved aside with the mainstreaming of electronic music, as if the queer community didn't fuel the genre's formation, it's more vital than ever to have voices like Kmeto's bringing it to the forefront. This, without question, is a record of discovery and confusion as much as it is about the power of confidence in understanding and loving oneself. Inevitable is a collection of slowly ripping cords, the underlying tension manifesting on tracks as if Kmeto must manage simmering emotions and can’t, or maybe won’t.


On the first posthumous album from the famed singer-songwriter, his renowned talent often feels lost in the glut of over-the-top arrangements, flashy production, and cheesy songwriting.

Losst and Founnd

One night in 1974, Harry Nilsson saw blood on his microphone. He was recording his exuberant album Pussycats—produced by friend and fellow hellraiser John Lennon—and the two artists launched into a screaming match to determine who could produce the most ragged, self-destructive wail. Nilsson won, at a price: His once-pristine, three-octave tenor was tarnished for good, never to regain its shining high end before he died in 1994.
Losst and Founnd, Nilsson’s first posthumous album, is a constant reminder of that fateful night. His voice is deep, frayed, and faded—qualities that marked his work in the last half of the ’70s, but never masked his rare gifts as a songwriter. However, on this new collection of songs—assembled by Nilsson’s longtime friend, producer Mark Hudson—Nilsson’s renowned talent often feels lost in the glut of over-the-top arrangements, flashy production, and cheesy songwriting.
Early in his career, Nilsson was prolific. Following his 1966 debut Spotlight on Nilsson, he released at least one record per year for over a decade. But Lennon’s death in 1980 had a crippling impact on him. Earlier that year, he’d released Flash Harry; in the wake of Lennon’s murder, it became the last album Nilsson made in his lifetime. For years after, Hudson attempted to coax Nilsson out of early retirement, and Nilsson eventually played Hudson demos of songs he’d been working on. Those recordings have become Losst and Founnd, but the final product is a mixed bag: wry ballads reminiscent of Nilsson’s heyday as a pop prodigy, tributes to the Beatles and Nirvana, and an unfortunate anthem for the L.A. Dodgers. It’s a lot to sift through, and its jumble can feel disorienting.
Losst and Founnd features some of Nilsson’s closest friends and family—his son Kiefo plays bass on several tracks, Hudson produces, and composer/instrumentalist Van Dyke Parks and drummer Jim Keltner contribute—but even in their hands, the source material simply isn’t Nilsson’s best. Sometimes, the arrangement and production disappoint as well. Take “Lullaby,” a sweet bedtime nocturne that could have been written for classics like Nilsson Schmilsson or The Point—except Harry’s vocals are slathered in reverb, and the track is tainted by corny electric guitar riffs. “Woman Oh Woman” suffers similarly by processing Nilsson’s voice through what sounds like a tin can. On these particular tracks, however, the songwriting is strong enough to withstand the studio gimmicks. “Woman Oh Woman” opens with Nilsson’s trademark cynicism: “If you knew true devotion,” he sings, “You’d jump into the ocean and drown/Goin’ down/Thinkin’ of me.” Parks’ accordion bobs beneath like the sea itself.
Producing Losst and Founnd was an emotional task for Hudson, who told Final Sessions podcast host Joe Levy that he often “felt Harry in the room.” During the album’s best moments, I felt him, too. “U.C.L.A.,” for instance, sounds like a dispatch from the old Harry—a lolling melody that seems so effortless, it’s as though it floated in on a seaside breeze. It’s the most pared-back offering on Losst and Founnd, and easily its best song. Sure, there are drums and dobro and B3 and then some, but the component parts complement Nilsson’s dry vocals instead of overwhelming them. I almost feel alone with Nilsson as he laments the loss of friends, New York, and the Beatles. Throughout the song, musical homages to the Fab Four abound: Paul’s bass slide from “Come Together,” a trumpet doodle from “Penny Lane,” a string segment from “Yesterday.” It’s a masterful composition up to snuff with Nilsson’s previous body of work.
Unfortunately, most of Losst and Founnd forgoes subtle interpolation for late ’80s decadence—and it’s just too much. The title track opens with slashes of electric guitar, then piles on horns, stabbing synths, and something called a bowljo. The effect is “We Are the World” without the charity. “High Heel Sneakers/Rescue Boy Medley” pumps the brakes a little but reeks of dad-rock with its peppy brass section and faux-gospel backing vocals. That said, it’s still worlds better than the penultimate track, “Yo Dodger Blue,” a Jock Jam that spares no bell or whistle. It stuffs in handclaps, wailing guitar, skronking sax, and audience participation, all led by Nilsson’s rallying shout: “Yo Dodger blue, L.A. loves you!” It makes “Who Let the Dogs Out” sound like “Hallelujah.” Nilsson has always had a knack for writing melodies that are difficult to forget, and this is unfortunately the case with his one song about baseball.
At one point in the studio, Hudson says he sought Nilsson’s council on whether to enlist Kiefo for Losst and Founnd. “Harry, should I do this?” he asked—and he heard an answer. Despite its defects, Losst and Founnd is an honest document of Harry Nilsson’s creative process in his final years, and our first glimpse at his last wishes. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s easy to understand the need to release it. At best, Losst and Founnd is a way to feel closer to Nilsson, no matter how long it’s been since he left us.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bear sounds increasingly comfortable as a lead vocalist and personality on his most personal album to date, as a still-funky but more ambient side of his writing emerges.

Boo Boo

Every Toro Y Moi album promises to be vastly different than what came before it, and Boo Boo is no different. “My baby got fed up with my ego/Wasn’t even thinkin’ we were goin’ worldwide/Thinking it was better than the Southern life,” Chaz Bear sings on “No Show,” a line Drake somehow didn't get to first. Though Bear (fka Chaz Bundick) has always tried to keep a low profile both on and off record, Boo Boo is his first album that dares to feed a narrative: in a recent interview, he copped to the dissolution of a relationship he likened to “an acid trip,” becoming more outspoken about his mixed race heritage, and getting freaked out by indie rock fame that only appears modest. In reality, he’s out here realistically emulating grandiose Pink Floyd concert films and celebrating Chaz Bundick Day in a city (Berkeley) where he’s lived for less than five years. Save the Underneath the Pine album cover, Toro Y Moi has never given us anything as juicy as the backstory of Boo Boo; and yet, it’s a record where Bear’s sonic inspiration can feel dry.
Boo Boo was teased by the bubbly roller-rink pop of “Girl Like You,” and it leads off with an impressive Prince homage, “Mirage,” complete with pitch-perfect spoken asides. In this mode, Boo Boo plays towards Bear’s increasing comfort as a lead vocalist and a lead personality, something hard to imagine when he was submerged into the aqueous Dilla homages on Causers of This. But that kind of funk doesn’t mesh with the other kind of funk more indicative of Bear’s mindset during Boo Boo’s creation. The airlocked ambience of “No Show” captures the overarching spirit—an inert, beatless drone interrupted by erratic blurts of synth-bass, a snapshot from the Uncanny Valley Sim-worlds created on Oneohtrix Point Never’s R Plus Seven.
Though the waterlogged sampledelia of Causers of This has little stylistic resemblance to the surprising turn to trad-indie rock on 2015’s What For?, Bear’s aesthetic has been unified by its humidity. It has allowed Toro Y Moi albums to blend into the situations where one might expect to hear them: BBQs, rooftop dance parties, 4 p.m. slots at summer festivals. Given the circumstances, the sunlight of the spirit has understandably dimmed on Boo Boo, an indoors album where the dominant tactile sensation is air conditioning, a harsh, artificial chill. While Toro Y Moi has slowly expanded to a live sextet, much of their fifth record is given to the inorganic sounds of lonely computing. No matter how often the production tactics of 1980s pop continue to be repurposed, you may not hear an indie record in 2017 more reliant on synthesized toms than Boo Boo.
But the momentum generated by “Mirage” and the equally limber funk workouts that bookend Boo Boo end up compensating for the tedious midsection of neither-here-nor-there experimentation. The songs are too overstuffed to make good on Bear’s ambient leanings, too hookless to merit the patience of repetition. “Got me starin’ out my window,” he sings rather appropriately through Auto-Tune, and Boo Boo will join you in a rut if you’re on that level. If not, the repurposed weird science can just as easily feel like sitting in a particularly avant-garde dentist’s office. Centerpiece “Don’t Try” finds Toro Y Moi as a circa-1982 connector between Prince’s plasticine pop experiments and the ashy dirges of the Cure on Faith and Pornography. It’s a pretty good trick, though it’s not enough to support the record’s weakest, most insistently pushed melody, with which Bear snitches on himself: “Give me no ideas I just waste them.”
This moment of self-pity doesn’t totally ring true; Bear’s ideas aren’t entirely in vain on Boo Boo. Since What For?, Bear has been more productive than ever, but his workaholic instincts caught him at a vulnerable yet uninspired state here. The silver lining for breakups, of course, is that they can put songwriters in touch with emotions that might be inaccessible in more stable times—unchecked spite, utter devastation, vengeful hope. Then again, breakups can also just suck really hard in a boring way—of barely wanting to leave the house—and there’s nothing you can do to romanticize it. On that level, the art of Boo Boo imitates life.


A decade ago, Ariel Pink crept out of his rented room in an ashram off Crenshaw with reels of spindly, self-destructing love songs. On his new album, the CalArts alumnus remains the stylistic next-of-kin to Frank Zappa: satirical, divisive, and more interested in terraforming genres than neatly deconstructing them.

Pom Pom

Before Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian assumed fame as a feudal right, Angelyne cruised Los Angeles in her flamingo pink Corvette. License plate: ANGELNN. If her teased platinum wig or volleyball breasts led you to mistake her for a pornographic Dolly Parton, her true identity could be confirmed by the ubiquitous advertisements for herself that she purchased on billboards and bus shelters. Even though practically no one could tell you what she did or had done, she became an '80s Southern California fixture as iconic and purely ornamental as the palm trees—the sunshine daydream to Elvira’s ghoulish noir.  The tragedy is that she peaked before Bravo. Without a reality show to channel the day-to-day eccentricities of Angelyne and her candy-dyed Maltese, the O.G. avatar of "famous for being famous" had to settle for a bit part in Earth Girls Are Easy, a brief gubernatorial run, and a self-released album on her Pink Kitten imprint.
In a city where Mr. Incredible brawls with Batgirl while Chewbacca and Freddy Krueger vainly break it up, Angelyne naturally still finds work in the meet-n-greet racket. Her most recent appearance was yesterday at Origami Records in Echo Park, as part of Ariel Pink’s "Tantalising [sic] Tinsel-Town Take Over." Should you have missed the mass email, the promotional docket for Ariel Pink’s latest schlock-opus Pom Pom included "Delicious Donuts and Delectable Ditties"; "Pretty in Pink. Permanently" (where "L.A.’s top manicure artists" did nails in only pink); and the "Luxuriously 'L.A.' Limo Listening Luau". The latter offered a "ride in style" to "enjoy L.A.'s finest sites" in a "pink stretch job." RSVP did not guarantee entrance.
It’s usually over-simplistic to extrapolate from a marketing scheme, but in Ariel Pink as with Angelyne, the medium is the message. The campy flair, smirking irony, and deliberately "retrolicious" alliteration matches the scarecrow-genius of his new album, Pom Pom. By wheeling out the inflatable mummy of Angelyne, the former Ariel Rosenberg wryly casts himself as her timeless prom date in the Hollywood Babylon of conniving prophets, sexualized excess, and sterling self-mythologizers.
A decade ago, Pink crept out of his rented room in an ashram off Crenshaw with reels of spindly, self-destructing love songs. Issued on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks imprint, The Doldrums (and later Worn Copy) inspired chillwave and a lo-fi revival, as well as altering the perception of L.A. as an indie-rock backwater. Pink was the sunshine and noir dialect rolled into one, writing gorgeous heat-warped AM pop made to soundtrack driving off of a cliff on Mulholland or save an animal from drowning in a shimmering David Hockney swimming pool.
The intervening years have seen him transform from wraith to wolf. The romantic cult hero fantasies have given way to headlines that he’s the "most hated man in indie rock." The analog necessity of his early work has been replaced by studio sheen, alienating those inclined towards the cassette hiss and rawness of his first wave. Pink’s compared social media vilification to the Rwandan genocide, dated porn stars, called Grimes "stupid and retarded" and scored a werewolf film—inevitably empathizing with the antagonist.
If you hate Ariel Pink, nothing in this review can possibly alter your opinion. You’ll scour the record for misogyny, say it’s too long, and roll your eyes at the helium disco-grooves about getting white freckles at the tanning salon and the amphetamine jingles for Jell-O. You think he’s funny or you don’t. If you do, the best engagement is one of suspended disbelief. After all, the CalArts alumnus remains the stylistic next-of-kin to Frank Zappa: satirical, divisive, and more interested in terraforming genres than neatly deconstructing them.
But for all the arch humor and affectation, Pink writes some of most wistful and peculiarly moving songs in contemporary music. "Put Your Number in My Phone" feels like David Crosby covering 2Pac’s "What’z Ya Phone #". Despite the '60s Sunset Strip jangle, the terrain shifts to the Eastside, a Silver Lake taco truck where Pink sweetly begs for the chance to get to know a girl better, before promptly blowing her off—which we hear in uncomfortably Drake-ian Voicemail detail. It’s the paradox at the heart of the collection and what ultimately makes it so compelling. Beyond catchy melodies, there’s a constant agitation between Pink’s moonlit dreams and everyday pessimism. He wants to be the romantic lover of fiction, but turns out to be just another undependable disappointment—but at least he admits it.
There’s "Sexual Athletics", where the sleazoid of the first half makes preposterous pull-your-dick-out boasts about being the "Sex King on a velvet swing/ Waiting for my Alice in Wonderland." The coda descends into lo-fi clatter and a tender, Four Seasons-falsetto about his life-long desire for a girlfriend. The ironic shell is always there, lest you get too close to treating the songs like journal entries, but the emotions remain conflicted and unconcealed.
If 2012’s Mature Themes found him recovering from a break-up by concocting Kinski Assassin Who Shagged Me daydreams during hungover wanderings to the Highland Park Wienerschnitzel, Pom Pom is Pink on the prowl—with its attendant sexploits and screwups. Sometimes, the tales are in villainous character. "Four Shadows" recasts Station to Station-era David Bowie as a comically morbid goth. "Black Ballerina" chronicles the night that "One-Eyed Willie" took "Shotgun Billy" to L.A.’s finest strip club for his first (short-lived) exotic dance experience. "Lipstick" concerns a predatory pick-up artist flashing his teeth and threatening to suck a girl into his darkness. There are new wave synthesizers, demands to be showered in blood, and Pink’s best "Hey Little Girl" baritone. It might be the finest Cure song since "Friday I’m in Love".
Other times, there’s no need for subterfuge. The album’s finale, "Dayzed Inn Daydreams", refurbishes an old track from Odditties Sodomies Vol. 1 with unnatural poignancy. The goofy voices and bipolar shifts are jettisoned for a straightforward psych-pop song in the vein of Love’s Forever Changes. It’s difficult not to read as a veiled statement of purpose: an anachronism to when his greatest fear was dying young and anonymous, a musical John Kennedy Toole, with hundreds of unheard songs his only hope for posthumous recognition.
The rest of the songs comprise crooked detours through Pink’s hometown. Fellow passengers include: Kim Fowley, the immemorial L.A. gadfly who played "hypophone" on Freak Out!, co-wrote with Warren Zevon, and managed the Runaways; Don Bolles, the drummer from the Germs; novelist Alex Kazemi ("Not Enough Violence"), and producer/writer Justin Raisen (Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira).
But the zigzags and bizarre pit stops are clearly at Pink’s behest. Opening track "Plastic Raincoats in the Pig Parade" finds him hallucinating cocaine banks, Tokyo nights, and Arkansas moons over what sounds like psychedelic Ringling Bros. polka. "Dinosaur Carebears" riffs on Syrian wedding music, shifts to a Tweedledum and Tweedledee melody, and then finds Pink role-calling random L.A. neighborhoods: Tarzana, Reseda, the City of Industry, Beverly Hiiiiiiilllls. Finally, the groove switches to a cosmic space dub.
This is no haven for conventional logic or normative restraint. "Negativ Ed" is pure Zappa homage, a gym class anthem for delinquent rebels in an '80s B-movie. It’s ridiculous and superfluous, but also endearingly whimsical. The same goes for "Nude Beach a Go-Go", a time warp to the Malibu surf rock of the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello era. But unlike the beach blanket bingo wholesomeness of the censored past, Pink reimagines it as the nude mating ritual it probably was.
One of Pink’s strongest gifts is making the absurd seem real and the real seem absurd. If this album has a closest predecessor in his catalog, it might be Worn Copy, with its weary refrain that "life in L.A. is so lonely." His coping strategy remains a rich fantasy life, of which he’s occasionally the star and sometimes the sardonic observer. You can see it on "Picture Me Gone", a haunting meditation about how digital technology will erase all physical evidence of our pasts. Set in the near future, the narrator’s age keeps changing. Even at his most sincere, there is something protean and shifty. Or as Pink seemingly indicts himself on "One Summer Night": "Fantasies and fallacies/ All fairy tales and lies/ Time is running out yeah/ Better write these lines." Or maybe you prefer "Exile on Frog Street", in which Pink does his best karaoke of Jim Morrison circa "Celebration of the Lizard". The song concerns an "enchanted frog... waiting for his Princess Charming to come and kiss him on his frog lips." When the kiss finally comes, the toad turns into Ariel Pink. You hear the fairy tale magic twinkle of a Disney soundtrack. Then you hear a frog’s ribbit.
You can interpret this as another surreal metaphor in his search for enchanted love or chalk it up to a teenaged fixation with the Doors. Maybe a little of both. He can be the frog prince, Shotgun Billy, or ride shotgun in a pink corvette. He can be a rock'n'roller named Ariel from Beverly Hills, complete with his own billboards. And in a place where delusion, self-reinvention, and wish fulfillment have long been the principal cash crop, who are we to tell him otherwise?


The reggae veteran’s new studio album doesn’t match the magic of his legacy. But when he’s not exploring grandiose thematic statements, he sounds as confident and impressive as ever.

Born for Greatness

Though released to relatively muted fanfare, Born for Greatness, the new studio album from veteran reggae star Buju Banton, still arrives with great expectations attached. Banton was already the first artist to break Bob Marley’s record for No. 1 singles in Jamaica by 1995, when he released ’Til Shiloh—arguably the greatest full-length statement of the era in which dancehall dominated the Jamaican charts. That LP represented roughly what Illmatic did for East Coast rap or Voodoo for neo-soul—an artistic peak which simultaneously signaled a sea change for an entire genre. It is also like those records in the sense that Buju has been shadowboxing with its legacy ever since, producing a deep catalog of classic compositions, but never quite achieving an album that rivaled its coherence or power.
The opening moments of Born for Greatness—strummed acoustic guitar and an eerily echoed and sped-up vocal sample, anchored by a simple knocking beat—are a departure from Buju’s last outing, Upside Down 2020. That album contained a number of compelling songs, but it was almost as if he jumped erratically between styles and decades, attempting, perhaps, to make up for the time lost during his extended incarceration in the U.S. on highly questionable drug charges. In some ways, BFG’s spare, haunting beginning marks a return to the ’90s sound of ’Til Shiloh, which is a good thing: The skeletal beat provides the perfect bed for Buju’s gruff baritone, famously the most gravelly in a genre wherein booming, bassy vocals are a form of combat. Here, the recently returned Buju measures up admirably against his younger self.
The “missing” years of Buju’s imprisonment are the grist for “Ageless Time,” the first cut on Born for Greatness. It raises themes that reverberate throughout the rest of the album: the self-examination and doubt that arise from isolation, the powerlessness felt in the face of passing time. The articulation of these feelings will resonate with many listeners’ experiences of the pandemic, though the lyrics here and on “Yard and Outta Road” ground them in Buju’s humbling fall from grace during his trial and conviction in Florida. “Ageless Time” feels like a declaration that this album will wrestle with bigger demons than other recent work, and it’s also a formidable vocal performance. Buju chants seamlessly through the rhythm, moving between both raspy exhalations and unaspirated downdrafts, like the soundclash equivalent of circular breathing. The song was co-written by Stephen Marley, a longtime ally of Buju’s, and Marley’s unmistakable touch appears in its melodic lines and delivery, which function as a natural complement to Buju’s style.
The next track, “Life Choices,” is a slow take on a classic, three-cornered dancehall beat, but reinforces the idea that the rhythms and production on Born for Greatness will, uncharacteristically for a dancehall record, take a back seat. The result emphasizes the strengths in Buju’s unique vocal approach without chasing current trends, but just when BFG appears to be hitting its stride, the title track derails its momentum with a mission statement that feels scripted and uncomfortable. Over a piano-driven instrumental best described as affirmation-fueled pop-rap—think Macklemore or Lizzo—Buju applies a double-time trap cadence to couplets about superstars, super cars, and supermodels. It feels very much like he is filling in a template cut for some other artist.
Likewise, on “Yard and Outta Road”—another examination of the trials and tribulations he experienced while living in the States—striking insights are marred by generic lines like “To shot callers who run every yard/Keep it real, 1,000, dog.” By the time he croons, “For the homies not coming home, I pray to the lawd,” Buju sounds less like a Rasta preacher and more like a gym teacher attempting to relate to his students by lacing his pep talk with the latest slang—and one who ends up missing the mark by five to 10 semesters. On the heartfelt hook, his voice jumps up a notch to a plaintive mid-tone reminiscent of his fellow reggae titan Sizzla. It’s the closest Buju may ever come to a falsetto, and it's not his most comfortable register. What should be the album’s center is instead like a cringey wrong turn, and where the first two tracks felt lean, this sounds like little more than a click track, a guide beat for an unfinished idea.
Though these are big missteps, they are, thankfully, momentary. In between them lies “Coconut Wata (Sip),” on which Buju ably wraps his voice around a slow-grind beat. “Body Touching Body,” featuring Victoria Monét, hits in the same baby-making zone, a mode that allows Buju to conduct a master class in riding a riddim, even if the subject matter is more worldly. These slow-wine tunes also feel the most of-the-moment, and would fit easily into a set with Koffee, Jorja Smith, or Tems, even if they’re stylistically distinct. Like a movie wherein the actors find chemistry between their characters even when the overall plotline falters, Born for Greatness reveals an EP’s worth of quiet, strong material in its smoldering torch songs.
The rest of the album proceeds in this one-step forward, one-step back fashion. It presents Buju as confident (and surprisingly grounded) on the most low-key and lighthearted cuts, including “Feel a Way,” which features vocals from Stephen Marley, or “Plans,” the LP’s only nod to the current JA trap or “chop” sound. Yet he inexplicably pivots away from his strengths on what should be the tentpole moments, like “We Find a Way,” the saccharine one drop of “Nuff Love for You,” or “High Life,” a perfectly good weed tune ruined almost entirely by Snoop Dogg’s nasal and weirdly arrhythmic attempt at a verse in Patois.
Born for Greatness resoundingly fails to deliver on its title’s promise. In fact, it mostly falls short where it strives for gravitas. Yet, it may, oddly, sneakily, deliver something better. On its less solemn tracks, it bears the good news that one of the greatest voices that Jamaica has gifted us is still evolving, still in champion form—at least when he allows himself to go off-message.


Producer and film composer Mica Levi’s solo debut operates in two modes: blown-out grunge and soporific dream pop, married by a thick layer of fuzz.

Ruff Dog

Mica Levi’s shuddering film scores leave no room for imperfection. The shrieking strings of the war thriller Monos breathe hesitantly, any silence a highly intentional harbinger of doom; the solemn soundtrack of the Jackie Kennedy biopic Jackie undulates with a steady rhythm, matching the slight, deliberate movements of its grieving subject. Even the calculated, self-contained shifts of Levi’s musical calling card—a slanted, sliding glissando—signal the interventions of a composer.
But as a producer, they’ve built entire rhythms on the subtle jostles of human fallibility, crafting beats that bounce with drunken bravado. The overdriven, sludged-out pop of their band Good Sad Happy Bad (fka Micachu and the Shapes) takes electroclash intensity to its logical conclusion, leaving singer Raisa Khan’s vocals barely distinguishable from dense layers of guitar. When pressed to describe their core genre for a U.S. artist’s visa, they chose “loud and noisy.” After a lifetime of classical music training and over a decade in the music industry, Levi codifies that descriptor on their debut solo record, Ruff Dog.
For those primarily familiar with Levi’s soundtracks and distinctive, dub-heavy club mixes, Ruff Dog might seem like a lark: The album opens with a canine howl before launching into an onslaught of distortion, unbridled even for a producer with a penchant for going into the red. Ruff Dog pushes their musical tendencies to the limit, at times threatening to render chord shifts and secondary melodies completely illegible. Though Levi often reaches for thin, tinny percussion, the dry snaps of “Flower Bed”—one of the only songs to feature noticeable drums—are gratingly brittle. Rhythms, as much as they exist, are overridden at will by Levi’s voice, a gravely and pinched tenor that sounds like a post-hangover cigarette personified. On “Hi Gene,” they repeat the song’s titular phrase—perhaps a cheeky gesture at how downright dirty the album sounds—as if singing in their sleep, meeting the beat only by happenstance.
At its brightest moments, Ruff Dog recalls the blurred bliss of Micachu and the Shapes, a skilled mockery of pop song structure that becomes catchy, even inspired, once you bite through the grit and grime. The album generally operates in two modes: blown-out grunge and soporific dream pop, married by a thick layer of fuzz (one might think an engineering wiz like Levi would bristle at the term “lo-fi,” but there it is, tagged on the album’s Bandcamp page). The core riff in “Pain” channels the pummeling drive of early X; the descending guitar scales of “One Tear” play out like Doolittle on morphine, Levi’s voice rising to a swooning, romantic climax, even though the lyrics are indecipherable.
On an album that more often bristles than bends, the softer elements stand up strongest: a verbosely titled track, inspired by a dream about Jimi Hendrix, opens with breezy, echoing guitar, a welcome moment of tranquility that recalls the solipsistic strangeness of early Deerhunter. “Ride Till We Die” conjures the easy plod of one of Ennio Morricone’s Spaghetti Western scores. “Right by your side, ride till we die,” Levi sings with just a hint of irony; their voice flattens in the lower registers, but perfect pitch is hardly the point. Ruff Dog sketches out the barest ideas of puppy love and adolescent angst; its mileage depends on how many blanks you care to fill with your own musical contexts.
As often as it suggests something bigger, Ruff Dog remains stubbornly modest. Its sound reflects what the press materials describe: a six-hour studio goof-around, well deserved by a producer who’s won awards for their meticulous work for the screen. But, particularly paired with mixing from the masterful Marta Salogni, the go-to for note-perfect British pop perfection, it tends to come off as an extended practical joke. When two of the brightest lights in the UK alternative scene collaborate on a record that sounds like it could have been recorded on a cell phone—in fact, is that an errant iPhone timer dinging in the background of “Chains Baggy”?—one wonders just how far the definition of pop music can stretch. But for Levi, capping these could-be brilliant melodies at their barest inklings of potential might be its own form of release.

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The Chicago three-piece hasn’t changed a thing about its streamlined indie rock, evoking youthful abandon and the ache of distantly-recalled bliss.

Blue Skies

Dehd made the perfect road-trip album for 2020, the year no one left their living rooms. Amid the general malaise, the 13 rock songs on Flower of Devotion hit like intravenously delivered exclamation points, the sound fragile but the spirit indomitable. Their vision of youthful abandon enticed precisely because of its implied distance; Jason Balla’s simple guitars, Eric McGrady’s even simpler drums, and Emily Kempf’s hairbrush-microphone shout arrived trailing echoes, already receding. The album still summons that initial rush whenever you play it, a small but meaningful salvo in the losing battle against anhedonia.
The trouble is, now they have to do it again. Narrow perfections like Dehd’s tend to blunt themselves on repetition, and it can take a peculiar kind of nerve to stay the course. But on Blue Skies, they made the best choice, which is the only choice: Change nothing. Not one thing. Thread together Flowers of Devotion and Blue Skies onto one playlist, hit shuffle, and boom: the ache of distantly-recalled bliss, now double the runtime.
Kempf remains their life force. Like Julian Casablancas or Sheer Mag’s Tina Halladay, Kempf’s voice is basically a series of rock-star poses transubstantiated into sound-wave form. Watching her live, you can nearly see all these poses—the raised-fist howl, the heartbroken bleat, the giddy yip—leap from her throat like a procession of CGI unicorns. Her voice is the single element that sparks these tinder-dry rock songs into fire. McGrady adds a few fills this time, but otherwise he still plays like someone testing a drum kit rather than playing one. Balla’s wispy guitar tone isn’t far removed from the one employed on the Shaggs’ “My Pal Foot Foot.” Their reserve feels disciplined: They know they are the night highway, so they let Kempf be the yellow stripes, her words strafing past in flashes of color and motion.
Road-trip rock albums are tallied and graded on their supply of fun, catchy lyrics to yell along to, and Blue Skies boasts a profusion. Every song features at least one exclamation point, and most feature more—“Empty in my mind!”; “Over kissing strangers, I want to kiss a friend!”; “Where we’re going I don’t know/Makes no difference anymore!” “This is all we get!” They don’t need to resort to singing “doo-doo-doo-bop”—as they do on a song called “Bop”—because their actual lyrics are catchier. On the single and standout “Bad Love,” Kempf howls, “I was a bad love/Now I can get some/I got a heart full of, I got a heart full of/Re-re-redemption.” What does it mean to be a bad love? Take it and run with it. Mouth the words to your reflective surface of choice and try out different angles: despairing, confessional, swaggering.
When either Balla or McGrady supply lead vocals, they sound like an entirely different band. “Hold,” sung by McGrady, could be the work of a Flying Nun tribute act, one with songs about allergies and Auden. On opener “Control,” Balla sounds a bit like Nathan from Wavves if he were doing a dodgy James Mason impression. These songs are pleasant, but the charisma gap separating the others from Kempf is Liam-Noel level, and they need each other. Kempf’s voice might grate on its own, a flawless karaoke performance that goes on just a bit too long. When they sing together, some chemical reaction occurs: Three simple and effective instruments alchemize into one perfect one. Trading the line “How come I’m always last to know/What I want!” on “Dream On,” they seem less like alternating vocalists than lights strobing through fog.


Interpol's 2002 full-length debut is given a stellar 10th Anniversary reissue complete with demos and B-sides. All told, it makes it unequivocally clear that Turn on the Bright Lights is the sum of its players, not its influences.

Interpol: Turn on the Bright Lights: The Tenth Anniversary Edition

On the surface, the story of Interpol's 2002 full-length debut Turn on the Bright Lights is almost annoyingly of its place and time: four guys meet in New York, start a band, make tightly-wound indie rock jams that sound great at your favorite mid-gentrification Williamsburg bar, sign to a renowned independent label, and the rest is history. But the early-aughts New York of Turn on the Bright Lights is not the young, vibrant, and impossibly cool place of cultural myth. It is a darker and more complicated place, fraught with disappointment and disconnection. It is a crushingly real place, rendered in such vivid emotional detail that it rings true even to those who have never set foot in the city. This stellar 10th Anniversary reissue documents the process by which a handful of pretty-good songs became a truly great album, making it painfully and unequivocally clear that Turn on the Bright Lights is the sum of its players, not its influences.
In retrospect, 2002 may have been the very year that we stopped talking about how music sounds, and started talking about what other music it sounds like. "Interpol sounds like Joy Division" was one of the first critical observations to turn into a full-fledged meme. In the intervening years, other bands have sounded a whole lot more like Joy Division, and the comparison now feels like just that: a comparison. While Joy Division could channel enormous amounts of energy through Ian Curtis's intense delivery, Interpol pulled off a real magic trick by constructing a framework complex and dynamic enough to bring singer Paul Banks' inscrutable deadpan to life. Banks's words can be downright laughable on paper, and are often sung as if WRITTEN OUT IN ALL CAPS WITH NO PUNCTUATION. But from this insistent, exaggerated blankness, the band coaxed a genuinely unnerving sense of alienation and melancholy. These songs are packed with a staggering amount of rhythmic and melodic tension, sometimes amplifying minuscule expressive nuances in Banks's voice, and sometimes drawing attention to their disconcerting absence.
Each individual member of the band has his own role in piecing this puzzle together. Drummer Sam Fogarino is the perfect anchor for Carlos Dengler's busy, melodic bass lines, keeping the rhythm section forceful and grounded. Guitarist Daniel Kessler is the album's unsung hero, expanding the band's dynamic range by oscillating between wide, monolithic chords and narrow, winding leads. The album's second single "NYC" achieves two unlikely successes pioneered by Matador labelmates Chavez: structuring a ballad around loud, steady drums and withholding all bass guitar until the chorus. "The New" slips a disco bass line under a morass of swirling, detuned guitars. There are a lot of things about Turn on the Bright Lights that should not work, and would not work were they not so carefully thought through and artfully implemented.
Three batches of demo recordings are far and away the most interesting bonus materials on this extensive reissue, as they show just how close the album came to not working. The first three-song demo, recorded in 1998 and featuring album cuts "PDA" and "Roland", comes off as an unremarkable practice tape by a band with lots of good ideas but insufficient energy and chemistry to pull them all together. The second three-song demo, recorded at Brooklyn's Rare Book Room in 1999, is more worked over with decidedly mixed results; there are some jarringly tacky too-loud keyboards here, and a sing-spoken interlude that can't help but bring to mind Crazy Town's "Butterfly". Somewhat ironically, it is only the third and final four-song demo, recorded at the band's practice space, where Interpol stops sounding like four guys in a practice space tentatively running through busy rock songs. Much of this can be credited to Fogarino, who joined the band between their second and third tapes and brought with him a rhythmic confidence and swagger that provided the crucial missing piece of Interpol's singular sound.
This progression of demo recordings documents not only the evolution of the band's playing, but also their increasing attention to texture and ambiance. As the group grew more confident, the gritty sonics of their demos became less incidental to the songs they were making, and more a part of the songs themselves. Producer Peter Katis did an amazing job of preserving and amplifying this rawness, and the band themselves crucially revisited many elements of their demos to better suit their evolving capabilities. The slight changes that Fogarino made to the kick pattern at the beginning of "PDA" completely make the song's signature introduction, taking it from "oh, there's a drumbeat" to "OH, there's THAT drumbeat." Banks gave his lyrics a thorough tune-up before the recording the album, excising his most rhythmically formless lines and shoring up the critical interplay between his voice and the rest of the band.
The extensive liner notes here are as much about the city in which Interpol operated as the band itself. It's certainly interesting, especially for those who are up on their New York City indie rock landmarks. And while the photographs included here do a good job of documenting the physical locations where this album was born, the album itself conveys the setting in a deeper way. Suggesting that this album is simply a product of its time and place is no less naive than suggesting that anyone who has ever been in love could easily write, arrange and record an amazing love song. There were a lot of good bands in New York in 2002, but only one band made this record.


The latest solo album from the leader of Chromatics is a full-scale concept album about inclement weather.

Digital Rain

Like a film noir director shooting lamp-lit city streets at midnight drenched in rain, Johnny Jewel is enamored of the look and sound and feel of water. Dried out in Los Angeles, the Chromatics mastermind has been thinking about the hail in his native Houston and the snow in Montreal, Gulf Coast floods, and downpours in Portland, the city where he crystallized his twilit sound. “After living a few years in a desert climate, I realized I was nostalgic for the constant presence of precipitation from every city I once called home,” he recently wrote. Digital Rain is his response to that torrid absence.
Jewel’s music—whether on his own, or as a composer for television and film, or with his bands Glass Candy, Desire, and Chromatics—has always captured less a style or sound than a mood. His work around the production of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (most of which went unused in the finished film) was so intensely expressive of a menacing, neon-lit Los Angeles that it all but coined a genre. His collaboration last year with David Lynch on the soundtrack to “Twin Peaks: The Return,” provided some of the show’s defining aesthetic pleasures, in particular his moody theme for Kyle MacLachlan’s Dougie Jones (“Windswept,” the title track from Jewel’s last solo album) and his otherworldly performances on stage at the Roadhouse with Chromatics and Julee Cruise. His talent is for atmosphere. He’s at his strongest when he’s encouraged to indulge it.
Digital Rain does indeed sound wet. Composed without drums, vocals, or guitars, it’s a synth-streaked cloudburst, an electronic squall. A minute-long interlude called “Monsoon” churns and seethes. “La Ville De Neige” quivers with an expansive, frosty calm. The thunderstorms of “Magma” fizzle out into a gentle drizzle, while delicate slabs of ambience hang like mist on “What If?.” You get it. All these moody invocations of raindrops drumming on the windshield of a car as it glides down the highway at night seem carefully calibrated to resonate in precisely such a literal way. Digital Rain doesn’t merely bring to mind precipitation. It’s a full-scale concept album about inclement weather.
The album is another of Jewel’s complete recreations of an aura. With austere means, he summons an often exquisite vision of a world of ice and water, snow and rain. And while its 41 minutes are largely tranquil, flowing smoothly with the aplomb of electronic artists Loscil or Keith Fullerton Whitman, the record sometimes erupts into sudden showers and storms. On “Air Museum,” one can feel the water coming down violently, a flourish of heavy synths pouring out in torrents, while on “Ship of Theseus” little electronic swirls crest and break like waves all around. It is a document not just of nostalgia for these conditions but affection as well: Jewel admires the downpour and the blizzard. They suit his temperament. One can well imagine him in the throes of making this album—fixed in a reverie in the arid heat of L.A., stirring up for us so effectively and poignantly his fondest memories of the much-missed sleet and rain.


The Eagles of Death Metal may be the most misleading bandname since 10,000 Maniacs: On their debut album,\n ...

Eagles of Death Metal: Peace Love Death Metal

Peace Love Death Metal

The Eagles of Death Metal may be the most misleading bandname since 10,000 Maniacs: On their debut album, Peace Love Death Metal, the band sound like neither The Eagles (a relief) nor death metal. Instead, the record's churning guitars and hook-driven choruses suggest a bizarro-world version of Queens of the Stone Age, specifically the Nuggets-inflected "Another Love Song" from Songs for the Deaf or their cover of "Who'll Be the Next in Line?" from the Kinks tribute This Is Where I Belong. Which makes sense: Queens frontman Josh Homme is listed as producer on Peace Love Death Metal.
But who are the Eagles of Death Metal? The liner notes credit J. Devil Huge on guitar/vocals and Carlo Von Sexron (nickname: Baby Duck) on drums/backing vocals. Huge is apparently the stage name for J. Everett Hughes, a friend of Homme's from Palm Desert, CA, while Von Sexron is an alias for both Josh Homme and (as the nickname's initials hint) Distillers frontwoman Brody Dalle. While the connection between Hughes and Homme goes way back, the band's fraudulent nomenclature and misleading identities-- along with the general one-off vibe of the album-- suggest that Peace Love Death Metal is really the sonic manifestation of an elaborate inside joke, in this case possibly fueled by either "nicotinevaliumvicadanmarijuannaecstasyalcoholc-c-c-cocaine" or just an appreciation of cartoonish rock clichés.
Adopting a bluesy loverman persona that at times, intentionally or not, recalls Jon Spencer, Hughes sings most of the songs in a jokey falsetto that would be unbearable if he didn't occasionally dip into a Elvis-channeling low-end grumble. On the lead-off track, "I Only Want You", he lays out his dishonorable intentions: "I'm not really interested in what's in your heart/ I don't want you to fall in love with me so don't start." Elsewhere, Hughes promises that his good lovin' will leave you babbling in religious ecstasy on "Speaking in Tongues", and even offers an articulate demonstration as he sings, "Muh-muh-muh-muh-oooh-da-galing-ling-ling-ling-da-da" over the bridge.
Backing up this self-conscious braggadocio are bundles of bandsaw riffs that add enough edgy swagger to skirt outright garage-rock parody. The stripped-down instrumentation and live-in-the-studio recording occasionally sound thin, as if you could turn the volume all the way up to 11 and it still wouldn't be loud enough. The trade-off, however, is a spontaneity and resourcefulness that adds honky-tonk piano to "Wastin' My Time", beat-keeping finger snaps to "San Berdoo Sunburn", and four false starts to "English Girl".
Peace Love Death Metal is at its best when the inside joke is buried deep in the music, but whenever the deathtongue is planted squarely in the deathcheek, the songs turn not just silly, but lumbering and self-indulgent, overburdened by the overriding concept. "Kiss the Devil" and "Midnight Creeper" are nudge-nudge exercises in rock Satanism, and "Whorehoppin'" seems to exist solely for its over-the-top chorus of, "Shit! Goddamn! I'm a man!" Similarly, the cover of Steelers Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle with You" doesn't add anything to the original that Reservoir Dogs didn't at least suggest; most likely, it's only here to provide the easy pun of retitling the song "Stuck in the Metal". Nothing rocks like a bad pun.
In another post-Songs for the Deaf death metal side project, some-time QOTSA drummer Dave Grohl recreated real head-banging metal with a revolving line-up of singers and no trace of irony. Eagles of Death Metal, on the other hand, try so hard not to sound like death metal that sometimes all you get is irony. They're not resurrecting a fallen-from-grace genre or even attempting to subvert any of the rock clichés they indulge in; their only agenda is to have a good time, dude. Still, while it sounds disingenuous compared to Probot, and the whole concept wears thin over 15 tracks, it's hard not to get caught up in the jovial fuck-all spirit of Peace Love Death Metal's best cuts. It may be an inside joke, but Homme and his cohorts, whoever the hell they are, seem to want us all to get it.


Drawing on the music of his youth, Buenos Aires-born songwriter Juan Zaballa’s second album cleverly illuminates Latin America’s rich musical heritage.

Atlantico

Tall Juan is as tall (about 6 feet 3 inches) as he is named Juan, and in his brief career, he has lovingly commanded the art of pastiche. On his 2017 debut Olden Goldies, Juan Zaballa introduced himself in 15 short songs as a rockabilly crooner raised on the Ramones—Iggy Pop doing an Elvis bit, maybe vice versa. The Buenos Aires-born singer made his way to Far Rockaway, Queens, where he honed his goofy brand of punk alongside former roommate Mac DeMarco and songwriter Juan Wauters (from whom “tall” distinguishes Zaballa).
When Zaballa released a modest two-song EP called Tall Juan Plays Cumbia in December, the usual adjectives no longer applied. Here, he reached for a recent past: Buenos Aires in the 1990s and its working-class neighborhoods that cultivated cumbia villera, a synth-washed genre of social protest. It was the first glimpse at his new album Atlantico, a paean to Latin America, the continent’s musical roots in Africa, and the fraught body of water in between.
If that sounds like a lengthy project, it is. “It all started when I realized that tango music was created by Africans,” Zaballa said in a recent interview. He names the music of Soweto in Johannesburg as a vector through which he came to better understand that of Latin America, and cites French no wave artist Lizzy Mercier Descloux’s 1984 anti-apartheid album Zulu Rock as his introduction to African musical traditions.
Yet at a brisk 22 minutes, Atlantico is a compact exploration of the sounds that form the cultural fabric of Zaballa’s youth in Argentina. The album opens with “Rocio,” a lilting ballad that immediately belies the influence of Zulu Rock’s experiments with Shangaan disco, Soweto jive, and mbaqanga music. Soon after, Zaballa’s whining croon enters, having lost some of its snarl as he rhymes “la isla de pascuas” (literally Easter Island, or an island on holiday) and “ayahuasca” with characteristic nonchalance.
On Atlantico’s cover songs, Zaballa uses simple tricks to illuminate the richness of Latin America’s genre dialogues. “Don’t Come,” a jauntier take on Argentine post-punk band Sumo’s “No Acabes,” infuses the song’s reggae foundation with jazz saxophone and rhythm-and-blues guitar. “Think I go to Africa, maybe Ethiopia,” Sumo mused blithely, and Zaballa echoes that desire with naive earnestness, even personalizing one lyric with his own experience as a transplant in Queens: “Living in Far Rockaway, it’s so difficult/I really don’t know what to do.” On “Irene,” the tropicália lick of Caetano Veloso’s 1969 original lends itself easily to the driving acoustic post-punk riff Zaballa adds behind it. And “Los Chicos,” while not a cover, is a sweeping, “All the Young Dudes”-esque zeitgeist ballad: “Los chicos afuera quieren divertirse/Y desde mi cuarto yo los veo tristes/Porque hoy, hoy yo no voy a salir.” (“The kids outside want to have fun/And from my room they seem sad/Because today I’m not going out.”)
Throughout the record, Zaballa asks that the music be allowed to speak for itself, just as he has sought to listen more closely. He states that mission in the slow reggae march of “El Mar”: “Desenterrando los sentimientos que hacen/Que en la canción se escuchen las notas caer/Y en las notas se escuchará esta música” (“Unearthing the feelings that allow/You to hear the notes fall in the song/And in the notes you will hear this music”). He subsequently admits he’s not always sure those feelings come through.
Atlantico lacks a deeper look at colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, or the violence that is inextricable to the history of adopting and reframing African musical traditions in Latin America. Short instrumentals like the dreamy “White Castle” (a very Tall Juan equivalence of medieval romance and fast food) and “Rocio Piano,” the fleeting piano flourish that closes the record, give it an open-ended, unfinished quality. The album might feel more incomplete in these respects had Zaballa framed Atlantico as an outward ethnomusicological study rather than a personal one. Instead, it is an ongoing lesson in better understanding one’s own geography.


The debut from the Chicago trio tempers grandiose experiments with a keen drive for melody and structure, pushing the further reaches of psychedelia without ever losing its footing.

Touch the Sound

The maximalist mentality that prevails throughout Touch the Sound, the debut album from the Chicago trio Spun Out, might come as a surprise to those familiar with the band’s history. Vocalist and guitarist Mikey Wells, bassist James Weir, and drummer Alex Otake first came to prominence in the punk quartet NE-HI, who were known for their taut, rubbery guitar sound and sweaty, livewire performances. Though NE-HI became more nuanced in the studio before disbanding in 2019, their defining textures remained sparse and wiry. NE-HI vocalist Jason Balla took that to one extreme with the joyful twang of Dehd, and now the rest of the band is fully committed to a new, grandiose direction.
Small studio flourishes decorate each song on Touch the Sound. From the chimes and synths that open “Dark Room” to the guiro accents on “Off the Vine,” every instrument finds space in the mix. Most songs use the keyboard as their point of departure; they are as warm as Stevie Wonder’s clavichord. Shrouded under a thick electronic blanket, more eclectic choices, like the addition of an errant cowbell and tambourine on “Pretender,” feel familiar. With help from producer Josh Wells, who aided in developing the carefully layered synths of Destroyer’s ken, Spun Out evoke the spark of a jam session within the smoothed, controlled environment of the studio.
The record’s internal transitions—key changes or shifting movements within a single song—feel spontaneous and easy, a mark of the half-decade of camaraderie and chemistry the band’s members have banked. That cohesion also allows for cross-genre experimentations that fit into the patchwork of Spun Out’s overall sound. The buoyant synth-pop jingle “Such Are the Lonely” feels a generation removed from the earnest, piano-driven rhythms of “Don’t Act Down,” but the snap of Otake’s drums, the wistful echo of Weir’s bass, and Wells’ croon carry them into the same universe. From that base palette, the band is freer to experiment with a rotating ensemble of studio musicians, adding a saxophone or an eerie vocal line straight out of Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing” without running off the map entirely.
Though the beat-driven psychedelia is far removed from the threadbare punk of their origins, what remains is a shared sense of trust. That faith in their collaborative process comes through in their experimentation—what could otherwise become ’80s pastiche instead feels warmly rendered. As a group joins Wells for an emphatic final coda on “Don’t Act Now,” there’s the sense that they could easily go on for another 20 minutes, or more frankly, that time doesn’t factor in much at all; that they restrain themselves to just over 40 minutes across the album seems like a knowing courtesy to their audience. If their previous band trafficked in intense minimalism, Touch the Sound is intimacy borne from abundance.

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Ratchet, from Las Vegas singer-songwriter Shamir Bailey, feels like a study in the best dance-pop of the past decade. It's an honest, earnest pop record, as Shamir elaborates on the gutsy melodies of his early demos and singles.

Ratchet

"Growing up in Vegas and being the weird one out, you kind of have to put on a tough face," Shamir Bailey tells those tuned into his Ratchet Radio playlist on Spotify. There’s both weirdness and toughness in droves on his debut album-cum-deliverance, Ratchet. Less than two years after sending a demo cross-country to Brooklyn's Godmode imprint, Shamir signed to XL Recordings—a label known for pop outliers like Dizzee Rascal, M.I.A., and FKA twigs—and got his face on a Times Square billboard. On Ratchet, an honest, earnest pop record, Shamir elaborates on the gutsy melodies of those early demos and singles and makes good on the hype.
Produced entirely by Godmode label head Nick Sylvester (a former Pitchfork contributor), Ratchet feels like a study in the best dance-pop of the past decade, from the dank basslines of the Ed Banger collective to the melodic, moody prance of Hot Chip, the flamboyance of the Scissor Sisters to the technical, four-on-the-floor finesse of Azari & III. This powers a record that’s about the sine wave of adolescent emotions; Shamir, a cherub-faced fashion kid with a voice like Crystal Waters, flips easily between confidence and vulnerability. The piano house/diva vocal-influenced R&B track "I Know It’s a Good Thing", from last year’s Northtown EP, merely hinted at how dance-indebted this record is. Acid basslines chug and squelch on "Call It Off" and "Hot Mess", and "Make a Scene" and "Head in the Clouds" both ascend to frenzied, laser synth peaks.
House, particularly within the context of its early black, gay roots, has been described as liberating. There’s a freedom narrative at play on Ratchet too, as Shamir excises those childhood demons while calling upon the showy, campy glamor of his hometown. "Vegas, we’re sinners all right, at least at night," Shamir warbles on the lounge-y intro track, named after the city. Shamir's voice is the most immediately unusual element; whether singing or rapping, he moves from comely to coy to cocky, depending on what the song calls for. Like on "Youth", a nu-disco lament with a soulful breakdown, where he pours his tinsel voice over a double-time rattle and a Morse-quick buzz synth. Each word trickles out slowly and precise at first, and then it’s like he backs away from the mic to sing from the gut, trilling and ad-libbing to a rapturous breakdown.
Squint past his vocal brass and the dazzle of the production and there’s that weirdness and toughness. "On the Regular", a gleaming, dance-rap contagion, is the kitschy lure into the album, more subdued than Azealia Banks’ "212" but sharing a spiritual bounce and temerity. "Don’t try me, I’m not a free sample...Haters get the bird, more like the eagle," he alternates between a regal, almost sensual moan and breathless rapping, which dilutes the crassness of alluding to dropping down and thrusting his crotch in someone’s face. And on the wry ballad "Demon", about a life-altering relationship, "If I'm a demon, baby, you're the beast that made me." It’s a beautiful, delicate melody that’s slightly blue, and brings Shamir as close as he’ll get to straight up vulnerability on a pulsing, in-your-face record. Perhaps most indicative of Ratchet’s pseudo-redemptive, leaving-Las-Vegas arc is "In for the Kill", an orchestral freak-out that finds Shamir looking back to say, "I’ll be back someday, and when I do I promise you, I won’t make the same mistake." The adult Shamir has reconstituted his precious voice as armor.
He might resemble past baby-faced rap and R&B stars like IMx or TBTBT or B2K, minus the hyper-alpha masculinity, but Shamir fits in with today’s genre-bending pop stars. Ratchet is as melodically and thematically confident as Rihanna and Willow Smith, but his aesthetic—a Vegas pixie, a black man making poetic and flagrantly rococo dance pop—is a challenge and a reclamation, not just of "ratchet," but the queer, racialized roots of house music and the unabashedly flamboyant history of black pop music.
We revere Prince and are fascinated by Young Thug, both unapologetically outre musicians walking the line of black masculinity, but they qualify that with reams of virile, hetero fuck-anthems. Frank Ocean came out and said it. Shamir, on the other hand, conveys a more ambiguous sensuality that presents a challenge to pop—his lane, for sure—especially given his soft, high-pitched, luminous voice. He doesn’t tell us anything about his sexuality, but we all know how people can treat artistic, effete boys. What Ratchet’s 10 songs of self-discovery say without saying at all is that there’s liberation on the dancefloor.


On the follow-up to their 2013 debut LP, the beer-swilling, self-described former “party band” grows up without slowing down.

Rot

When they began in 2009, Australia’s Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys immediately lived up to their name. Though their music was never a joke, the band could come off as a stumbling, drunken wreck. By the time of their debut album, in 2013, they decided to grow up a bit, which is why they called it Ready for Boredom. “It seemed to indicate this exit from us being a party band,” said singer and bassist Nic Warnock. “Life is becoming more apparent, I guess. I worry about shit more.”
So how has growing up gone so far? It’s not a great sign that the quartet decided to call their follow-up album Rot, but its songs tell a more hopeful story. Many of them are about finding the maturity and patience to take life as it comes. Guitarist Joe Sukit opens the record singing about the need “to relent control,” and the rest of the way—in songs with names like “Expanding Horizons” and “Turn the Page”—the band returns to themes of acceptance and gratitude. “Well, it’s a long and lonely life,” Warnock hums on “Stunned.” “But for me that’ll do alright/Until something comes along.”
Luckily, lyrical maturation doesn’t mean turning soft musically. None of Rot’s 11 songs are a mess—the rhythms are tight and the riffs are on target—but the album is still pretty raucous. Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys remain unafraid to scrawl outside the lines and spill into the red. When Sukit strains to sing, “Try to change your life, but life changes you,” during “Device,” the rough density of the guitars makes his struggle palpable. This combination of energy and wisdom aligns Rot with their soulful Aussie brethren Royal Headache (Sukit is a former member; Warnock’s label RIP Society released that group’s first album). But Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys attack their songs with an industrious devotion that sets Rot apart.
Rot’s nose-to-the-grindstone feel fits its grown-up themes. It also risks blurring songs together; at times, the simple melodies fly by nicely enough without making much of an impression. But more often than not, Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys hit on hooks with plenty of earworm power. “Plastic Tears,” one of the album’s rare biting tunes, boasts an insta-classic guitar line, while “Work Again” turns muscular chords into a head-nodding workout. At their best, they can be both catchy and epic, as in the seven-minute closer, “Turn the Page.” “Things that happen may be strange/But I’m gonna embrace that change,” sings Warnock in what could be the band’s theme song. “Wanna deal with life's big mysteries/Trying not to sweat the small things.”
On the page, such blunt self-therapy may sound a bit on the nose. But the band sell their introspection by marrying it to convincingly urgent music. It’s also a lot of fun; all the flying guitar chords and thumping beats inevitably quicken pulses. Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys may no longer be pissing their sheets, but Rot shows they didn’t have to slow down to grow up. Or as Warnock put it back in 2013, “You can be a piece of shit but still do something awesome.”


The Seattle indie rock band’s final record is a great parting gift, one with generous portions of wit, melancholy, and even one long guitar solo.

Horse Blanket

If dreary Seattle indie rock had poet laureates, Posse would handily claim the title. Since 2010, across two previous albums, the trio chronicled the banality and disappointments of life in their Northwest city with wit and sadness and hilarity. The sound they crafted to accompany their stories of bad dates at terrible Seattle rap shows (“A bald white guy/With a mumu onstage” one lyric went) and workplace frustration was beautifully spartan; just two guitars and a drum chugging along in a haze. Horse Blanket is the band’s final record, an EP of six songs about the things they know best: “boredom and loss, miscommunication and regret.”
On opener “Dream Sequence,” vocalist Sacha Maxim gently shoves a listener into Posse’s disaffected, overcast world: “I was sick/I was tired/I was standing in the rain” she sings with a frown. The lyric is without frills or metaphor. Instead, Posse find poetry in blunt and dead-simple observations. This reflects in their arrangements, which are without ornamentation or glitz, just Maxim and Paul Wittmann-Todd’s depressive guitar strums accompanied by Jon Salzman’s quiet drumming.
While their sound could almost be described as rudimentary, it’s never boring. The deliberate nature of their music, the almost shuffling sleepwalking stupor of their voices and each instrument trudging forward, create a sense of pace and place that is so real it can be hallucinatory. Like on “Shiver” when Wittmann-Todd slurs, “I feel cold/Or maybe something like that,” the frigid trickle of guitar notes perfectly mimics the loneliness of his line. Something the band does so amazingly well, especially on songs like “Shiver,” is recreate an entire universe of subtle, painful interactions, “funny little rituals,” and personal landmarks. On “Shiver“ Wittmann-Todd takes you through a detailed tour of a break-up that travels between cold beaches and the interiors of shitty Volvos. The pain is self-lacerating: “I told myself I’d differ, but I never really change,” he sings.
That is not to say the band operates on the same mopey note. On “Keep Me Awake,” they have some fun, briefly donning the costume of a honky-tonk band. The grooviness of Sacha Maxim’s bass and the rattlesnake twang of Whittman-Todd’s guitar, for a moment, reinvent them as the coolest country rock act in the Pacific Northwest. And there is, of course, some fireworks to celebrate the end of things on the 12-minute title-track. It is the best song the band has ever written, a colossal, slacker-rock epic. In a 2014 interview, Wittmann-Todd said he once saw Carrie Brownstein rip a 40-minute guitar solo, and wished he could once do the same. On “Horse Blanket” he pretty much does that, letting loose a distorted, headbanging shredder.
But the song is a lot more than a rare show of pyrotechnics—it’s a duet between Maxim and Wittmann-Todd, with some their most gorgeous writing—spare and cutting and surreal. At one point Paul sings of “rolling out of bed” and Maxim answers, dreamily that this waking world is littered by “all the garbage floating through your mind.” They call it quits lazily and gracefully. The final track, “Trapped,” is an artful, slow-moving song about feeling unrooted and unsure. It ends with an honest couplet: “Have I given something away/And I just don’t know it?” It’s hard to tally the tangible output of any band, but Posse leaves us with this final thought—they may not know what exactly they gave, but it stays with us.


In her abraded experimental club music, Berlin producer Ziúr favors a skeletal sound that still confidently occupies a maximal amount of space. It suggests that agitation can produce beauty.

U Feel Anything?

The Berlin-based producer Ziúr seems committed to a specific brand of abraded experimental club music, with each of her releases imbued by shifting degree of relentlessness. U Feel Anything?, her debut full-length, is built from unapologetically serrated sounds, but it is measured and even delicate in its construction. A study in contrasts, U Feel Anything? is never pummeling for pummeling’s sake.
Beneath and through its harsher tendencies, Ziúr’s music is notably expressive. The breathing room afforded by an album-length release seems to nurture that, as the 12 tracks here explore relatively varied terrain. It opens with “Human Life Is Not a Commodity,” a beatless intro whose gently elongated tones and multilingual chorus of whispering voices feel dislocated from the club altogether. From there, the drill blasts and percussion—off-kilter yet tightly controlled—resume apace; still, the likes of “U Feel Anything?” or “Don’t Buy It” deploy these sounds with acute attention to negative space. Ziúr rarely relies on the cushion of static, favoring a sound that’s skeletal while still confidently occupying a maximal amount of sonic space.
These tracks frequently bend out in multiple emotional directions. While something like “Don’t Buy It” is all defiant clatter, the liquid melody of interlude “Moonlight” offers room for contemplation, and “Body of Light”—a slow, lovely piece featuring Aïsha Devi—explores a mood at once vulnerable and galvanizing. “Soaked,” which oscillates between an ecstatic build and percussive plateaus, has an almost psychedelic quality. It imagines somewhere else, and it invites listeners to develop a bodily relationship to that place through its bassy physicality.
The album’s two collaborations are among its fleshiest offerings: the pairing with Devi on “Body of Light,” and the climactic epic “Laughing and Crying Are the Same Thing,” with vocals from Swedish pop singer Zhala. With thunder production, the latter seizes and warps the boundaries of what constitutes a pop song, the piece crescendoing with a series of exuberantly grotesque whoops and grunts.
Like the best of her peers—especially Janus-affiliated producers like Lotic and DJ Hvad—Ziúr makes smart use of a kind of sand-in-the-oyster sense that agitation can produce beauty. Given its challenging palette, U Feel Anything? also benefits from its precision, the producer once more underscoring her talent when it comes to sound design. The choppy realm of “post-” or “deconstructed” club music has several times over seemed to have reached its limit, but Ziúr has carved a strong path out of these sounds.


DFA introduces Andrew Butler, a compelling new voice in American dance music. His debut album is a self-contained, self-assured set that runs vintage styles through a restless compositional imagination to create something joyfully, startlingly unique. Guest include Antony Hegarty, who provides vocals on multiple tracks, and !!!'s Tyler Pope.

Hercules and Love Affair: Hercules and Love Affair

Hercules and Love Affair

Forget disco for a second. The most significant thing about the debut album from New York's Hercules and Love Affair has less to do with revival than arrival-- that of a compelling new voice in American dance music. Not Antony Hegarty's, of Antony and the Johnsons, even though his pipes are an integral part of Hercules' aesthetic, but Andrew Butler, a twentysomething resident of New York who has made one of 2008's great albums, and one of the best longplayers from DFA. (DFA's Tim Goldsworthy surely deserves some of the credit as well, as the album's co-producer and the programmer behind most of the record's beats.) Butler got his start writing music for art projects in college-- "like a remake of Gino Soccio's 'Runaway' done in the style of Kraftwerk," he told Fact magazine-- but Hercules and Love Affair's music doesn't require Fischerspooner-type theatrics. This debut album is a self-contained, self-assured, 10-song set that runs vintage styles through a restless compositional imagination to create something joyfully, startlingly unique.
Of course, you can't entirely forget about disco; the record owes a debt to the dance-music of the 1970s and 80s, from Gamble & Huff-style strings to the camp sensibilities of Sylvester or Patrick Cowley. Butler has clearly studied Arthur Russell: His dancefloor jams have the same energy that drives uptempo Russell numbers like "Go Bang" and "Is It All Over My Face?", and his arrangements-- as when he nestles Kim Ann Foxman's voice in a bed of spongy keys and bass on "Athene", like an Easter egg in plastic grass-- recall Russell's facility for space and timbre.
There are plenty of signposts for disco, the genre: octave-toggling bass lines (played by Automato's Andrew Raposo and !!!'s Tyler Pope), rattling congas, bouncing 4/4 kicks, and insistent open hi-hats. There are references to house, as well, as would be expected from a record whose lead single features a Frankie Knuckles remix. But they point less to the 90s version of house as a distinct genre, whether sleek and lush or raw and machinic, than to house music in its origins, when it was simply disco music that was played at the Warehouse. Only "You Belong", with its taut, spiky drum machine programming and pistoning chords, engages the formalism of early Chicago house.
And it engages it brilliantly. What is often forgotten when talking about music so steeped in tradition is how it actually sounds-- how it works, how it conjures. It would be a shame if Hercules and Love Affair's music were to be reduced to the sum of its references, even in shorthand, because Butler's music is too complex, too lovingly stuffed with ideas. That Hercules and Love Affair is as unwieldy as its name-- and also just as passionate, camp, and muscular-- is one of its great pleasures. "You Belong" begins as a faithful exercise in acid-house revivalism, from the syncopated cowbell patterns to a looped vocal sample recalling the classic house invocations to "Jack, motherfucker." (It doesn't matter that the indistinct sample says something different; its cadence triggers something like an unconscious memory of acid house's vocal tropes.) It's the way that Butler and his collaborators mold formalist fidelity into something stranger that makes the track really sing, beginning with keyboards that seem to float on a cushion of air, and extending to the way that the singer Nomi's lead vocals are mimicked by a multitracked backing refrain from Antony that sounds as though it's been run through a prism. For its minor-key structure, the song's augmented chords give it the quality of an exploding rainbow.
Not everything here is designed as "dance music." The opening "Time Will", one of the album's highlights, mutates a standard disco framework into a weird and gelatinous torch song. "Iris", likewise, slows house music's pitter-patter dramatically, leaving the rhythm a framing device for the interplay between horns, synthesizers, and Foxman's sentimental lead vocals. And "Easy", the album's most understated song, sounds so different from the rest of the record that it suggests an alternate trajectory Hercules and Love Affair could presumably pursue-- a dusky noir somewhere between the Knife and Shriekback.
But while more than half of the album's tracks would easily work on forward-thinking dance floors-- "Hercules' Theme", "You Belong", "Athene", "Blind", "This Is My Love", "Raise Me Up", and "True False, Fake Real" all cruise comfortably between 110 and 120 bpm-- what really shines is the songwriting. The album brims with hooks, choruses, bridges, strange twists, and turns. It's hardly maximalist-- every song feels like it could be played by a four-or-five piece band with a few overdubs-- and yet the record expands and contracts, pressing tones together before zooming outward to present each element in stark, shining relief. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the rollicking "Hercules' Theme", which opens with a spare loop of percussion, Rhodes, and electric bass and gradually balloons into a soaring mess of horns, string vamps, and vocal harmonies. Few producers can pull off excess as well as Butler and Goldsworthy; that they balance their outré tendencies with moments of careful restraint only confirms their finesse.
If the record has a flaw, it might be its overall pacing. "Time Will" and "Hercules' Theme" feel like they're vying for the opening slot, a sense confirmed by the fact that they're in the same key. And the flow of the record's latter half feels off, with the subdued "Iris" and "Easy" followed by another muted disco number ("This Is My Love") before jumping back into the jaunty "Raise Me Up" and "True False, "Fake Real". But these are quibbles. Hercules and Love Affair is a phenomenal album, one destined to save disco not from its detractors but rather from those fans and revivalists who would calcify the music as a set as a set of tropes and reference points. Lush, melancholic, gregarious, generous, both precise and a little bit unhinged-- this is the most original American dance album in a long while.


The seventh album from the Boston noise-rock band revels in a heightened level of studio ambition without losing its snarling ferocity.

Green and Gray

Midway through Pile’s new album comes one of the best and most unusual protest songs of the Trump era. Its title, “The Soft Hands of Stephen Miller,” resembles an ironic in-joke. Except Pile’s singer Rick Maguire is not at all joking. Over a serrated guitar riff that sounds like a Jesus Lizard record-skip—relentlessly repeating even when every other instrument strives to sabotage it—Maguire lays into the president’s xenophobic policy advisor. It’s part diagnosis, part roast: The words “stiff pale shell,” alleged impotence, and a dig at Miller’s refugee great-grandmother all come into play. Yet there is also a nauseous glimmer of recognition. “That dude is the same age as me,” Maguire said in a recent interview, “and it’s like, what happened to you?” When the singer repeats the word “How?” in a throat-wrecking yelp, it mostly sounds like he is crying “Help!”
It’s as close to an anthem as Pile has written, though it remains staunchly unhummable. Even this band’s protest tunes are circuitous tangles of aggression and flailing limbs. Pile, the noise-rock darlings of the Boston DIY scene, achieved their cult-like measure of indie fame by touring mercilessly and doing nothing the easy way: The band has never written fist-pumping platitudes, never optioned a song for a major television show, never covered Toto. Picking up where 2017’s A Hairshirt of Purpose left off, Green and Gray employs a heightened level of studio ambition without losing its ferocious might. It is the band’s most satisfying and varied album yet.
Green and Gray reflects changes in both geography (the band moved to Nashville) and personnel (two members quit, replaced by guitarist Chappy Hull and bassist Alex Molini). Yet Kris Kuss’ pummelling work on the drums remains central to Pile’s sound, undergirding high-velocity prog-ish songs like “On a Bigger Screen” and “A Bug on its Back.” And, perhaps to match the stench of sociopolitical revulsion, Maguire summons some utterly sickening riffs: “Lord of Calendars” cracks and shakes in an odd meter and  “On a Bigger Screen” sounds like a sputtering car engine trying to tell you something is horribly wrong. Both are ferocious.
There is a mournful edge to this record, too, and an increasing willingness to treat the studio as more than an aural document of Pile’s live prowess. The recording process took two weeks, and say what you will, but this is actually a long time for Pile. The resulting album incorporates considerably more atmospheric depth, including orchestral and keyboard overdubs. Pile are not growing soft, but they are growing: “Firewood,” this album’s disarming opener, finds Maguire brooding about his spent youth and gray hairs as a whining cello jostles for space in the mix. It’s lovely in the way that late-career Polvo songs can be lovely, with just the right amount of tenderness before the climax comes crashing in. “Hair” keeps its existential panic similarly subdued—the drummer even acquires brushes for the occasion.
Not every experiment lands.“Your Performance,” in particular, with its heavily treated vocals and vague allusions to a “neon cartoon” (guess who), feels limp, its crescendo somehow unearned. But everything here is caked in the blood, passion, and untamed weirdness that drew Pile’s obsessives into the cult in the first place. Maguire is very much the poster boy of the punk dude over 30, keenly aware of what it means to tour in a van when you’re old enough to seek the presidency. He does seem preoccupied with the specter of aging and the usual anxieties that accompany it. “I’m aware of my age/My impermanence and so forth,” he murmurs on “My Employer,” a callback to the album’s opening line: “No longer burdened by youth.” “My Employer” is affecting but cryptic. The song’s title alludes to music, Maguire’s profession and the apparent salve to his fear of dying: “I found fire when I was 12/It’s lasted over 20 years,” he sings. What follows, the righteous seven-minute climax “Hiding Places,” shows that the fire is still burning. Now somebody send Stephen Miller a download code.


Electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani and composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith come together for two lengthy slices of ambient bliss as part the RVNG label's *FRKWYS *series.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith / Suzanne Ciani: Sunergy

Sunergy

“Ladies and gentleman, this woman standing next to me is an electronic wizard,” declared a bemused and gleeful David Letterman on his show in 1980. He sounded like a wide-eyed child standing beside a chipper alien, one with braids in her hair, giving network-television watchers a portal into her new expanding universe. Letterman listed off her credentials: composing commercial soundtracks for the likes of Coca-Cola, reproducing electronic effects for “the disco version of Star Wars,” and winning many awards. “This is Suzanne Ciani,” Letterman goes, as she slathered the befuddled host’s voice in quizzical delay. Laughter persisted. “Tell ‘em what we got here,” Letterman asked, and Ciani pointed out her Prophet-5 synthesizer, a vocoder, a frequency follower, an Eventide harmonizer—“That means nothing to anybody but you!” the host interjects. “Do the one where it sounds like the whole studio’s gonna explode!” Ciani offered a pitched-shifted affirmation: “Don't be afraiiid...”
In 1980, the pioneering Ciani—who would go on to earn several Grammy nominations in the New Age category—was a decade into her experiments with the modular Buchla synthesizers, which she used to create dramatic seconds-long effects for the likes of the Xenon pinball game, PBS, and Atari. And Ciani had also just begun work on her own debut masterpiece, the elegantly spare Seven Waves, released in Japan in 1982 and the U.S. two years later*. *“In order to see something, you have to have a concept of it,” Ciani, now 70, told The Quietus in 2012. “People had no concept of electronic music back then. So even if they were sitting in front of a machine and sound was coming out of it, they still didn’t get it.”
Even as electricity has become the preeminent building-block of our musical lexicon, the Buchla—with its wires spilling over a landscape of knobs, its tactile sense of exploration, of conversing subtly with the machine—is still extremely rare. But fate has its way of bringing outsiders together. That Ciani would encounter a fellow Buchla synthesist, the 30-year-old Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, while sitting on the floor at a dinner party in the isolated California coastal town of Bolinas, where they both happen to live, is fantastic serendipity.
Ciani herself had abandoned the Buchla for decades, making her name as a classical pianist. It wasn’t until a 2012 reissue of her work, Lixiviation, by the Finders Keepers label, that she became “reincarnated as a Buchla person,” and a reissue of her groundbreaking 1975 Buchla concerts followed. Before a European tour spurred on by Lixiviation, Ciani hired Smith as a studio assistant. New York’s RVNG label ultimately asked them to collaborate for the 13th installment of its FRKWYS series, which brings together musicians of different generations in an improvisatory setting, always with the care of a gallery piece. In a film produced by RVNG during the making of the album—at Ciani’s home near a cliff with exquisite views of the Pacific—the elder artist is seen with her Buchla 200 E, a wooden box propped open with wires all flowing about, a full display of the machine and its sound’s infinity. Smith uses the slightly more contained Buchla Music Easel, which appears like a mysterious pad.
The resulting *Sunergy *is 54 minutes of generative music in three pieces, “A New Day,” “Closed Circuit,” and the bonus track “Retrograde” (absent from the vinyl pressing). Their energy exchange is potent. Sunergy is far from the lovely analog melodies and white noise that Ciani released on *Seven Waves—*it more so shares the thick, dewy feel of Smith’s 2016 *EARS**—*but as they cross-pollinate, those titular crests are all over. Sunergy is made of crashing waves and the glittering sun on water, meditations from the Terry Riley school of minimalism, as if Laurie Spiegel had composed for the tides rather than the cosmos. Ciani said she had a “long-standing desire to orchestrate the sunrise... [and] there was this synergy between us, and also the energy of the sun and the energy of the ocean... I think that’s where Sunergy came from.”
“A New Day” opens with an ominous, tectonic rumble that engulfs you like a circling Tibetan singing bowl. Sounds cut in from all angles, with static juxtaposing sparkling bleeps and textures that pop like candy. There are sounds of epic winds and rippling water, and its hypnosis seems to say something about journeying through time, about nature mixing with the artificial, about the promise and threat of the future. “Closed Circuit” comprises simpler synth figures, before swimming far out into a dark sea, a picture of the unknown. “Retrograde” takes on harsher, denser noise, but its menacing scrape is tempered with light.
All along, Sunergy makes for an inquisitive space to inhabit. The headier and grander it grows, the more its heavy drones swarm, the more undeniable the duo’s alchemy proves to be. “I was in love with it,” Ciani once said of her introduction to the Buchla, “It took my whole life… It was my boyfriend! I thought there was something wrong with me, because I was in love with a machine.” But her devotion was prescient. It is moving to hear Ciani and Smith—in some sense, creative soulmates—commune so deeply. Because people like Ciani don’t come down to Earth to join the world. They recruit comrades to enter their own.


The last release from Sufjan Stevens, Son Lux, and Serengeti's Sisyphus project was a scattered lark that featured an abundance of Auto-Tune; for their self-titled debut LP, they've ditched the Auto-Tune and improved on their ability to create fractured-sounding music together—even if the results prove a little frustrating.

Sisyphus

On paper, Sisyphus appear incongruent. Anticon rapper Serengeti functions as the deadpan narrator, Sufjan as the whisper-drive balladeer, and Ryan Lott under his Son Lux guise as the anxious, industrial beatsmith. These three distinct talents are, in a sense, insoluble, but their electro-focused sound works when their synapses fire off of each other and the ideas dovetail and blend together. Their first release, 2012's Beak & Claw EP, was a scattered lark that featured an abundance of Auto-Tune; on their self-titled debut LP, that element's been scrubbed from the group's formula, and the three of them have improved on their ability to create fractured-sounding music together—even if the results prove a little frustrating.
Inspired by Jim Hodges’ art installation “Untitled”, as well as the artist's body of work, Sisyphus was co-commissioned by Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s SPCO’s Liquid Music series. There's high-minded artistic ambitions at work here, then, as Sisyphus can be classified as something executed with the aim of being displayed and sold in a museum. To wit: the record's most simplistically fun moment is a six-and-a-half minute, multi-section song called “Calm It Down”, featuring positive-thinking musings from Serengeti and the type of balladry that Stevens executed so well on 2010's Age of Adz.  Other engaging moments are located in the slow-building noise of album closer “Alcohol”, as well as the vocoder'd pomp of “Rhythm of Devotion”, which finds ‘Geti aping Kanye West’s "New Slaves" cadence throughout.
Sometimes, though, the trio's cleverness can get the best of them. Serengeti occasionally values sticking to a rhyme scheme over telling a narrative ("Booty Call"), while Lott can't focus on honing one good idea (the shapeshifting "Flying Ace"), and Stevens issues one too many utterances of the word “booty”. Then there's the untangleable mess of "My Oh My", which unwisely merges skittery trap synths, ill-fitting sitcom references ("Drink a lot of milk like my name was Ted Cleaver"), and Stevens' now-trademark flute runs on the song's chorus.
However, much of Sisyphus is bogged down in malaise. In an interview about the album, Stevens stated the group's artistic intent: “We wanted to make ear candy—catchy raps, pop songs, and sad ballads. But if you inspect some of the content, you’ll uncover some bleak events.” You don't have to dig deep, though, to find the bleakness: witness Stevens singing in his teary-eyed voice "I'm prepared for death/ I will tear clothes” on the dirge-like "I Won't Be Afraid." On the sparse "Dishes in the Sink", Serengeti raps from the perspective of a blue-collar, acerbic character whose sardonic attitude is reflected in the rapper's delivery: "I was happy once when I went to a real brunch/ It was special." These dour elements are tied together by Son Lux’s production, whose classical-electro beats are so spiny and unsteady they inspire more squinting than head-nodding.
More often than not, Sisyphus misses its mark, but the album's dense, melancholy back half represents its strongest moments. On "Lion's Share", Serengeti tells a ripped-from-the-headlines story about a Chicago jail break in a straight-forward chilled out '80s throwback rap, while “Dishes in the Sink” and its companion ballad “Hardly Hanging On” tell a genuinely affecting story of squalor and depression. Despite these peaks, Sisyphus is more fun to ponder than it is to listen to.