Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Sheryl Crow’s barnstorming second album, a collection of restless pop-rock anthems with something to prove.

Sheryl Crow

Sheryl Crow’s self-produced second album begins with a woman scanning the sky for extraterrestrial life. “I swear they’re out there,” she sings, barreling down the highway in hot pursuit. It ends, 12 songs later, with a woman sneaking out of bed before the man beside her wakes up. “I’m just an ordinary woman/Slipping away,” she sings in her upper register, like she’s belting out a gospel standard.
The word “ordinary” is important here. Plenty of records follow a trajectory from the daily grind toward transcendence. Sheryl Crow traces a path from the stars down to earth. In its character-driven mosaic storytelling, we perceive a fractured country where kids buy guns at Walmart and women are murdered outside abortion clinics. Almost every character is alone. Even the happy ones are mysteriously, naggingly sad. The days stretch on, like open roads. If there’s a feel-good ending to “Ordinary Morning,” it’s that she got out at all, freed from anyone’s expectations, her future intact.
It takes a particular type of artist to make this all go down so easy and feel so light—so ordinary, as she might say. A multi-instrumentalist who often begins the writing process on bass guitar, Crow almost always situates her melodies around chiming major chords, bright tones she conjures with intuitive turns like a revving engine. You get the sense she heard “Start Me Up” at a formative age and aspired to live inside its opening riff, before the snare snaps in, for eternity.
Her voice, too, is a texture made for any weather, a type of denim that looked vintage from day one. No matter the existential angst or the extremes to which she pushes herself—those soulful howls in “Ordinary Morning,” or the shredded screech three-and-a-half minutes into “Love Is a Good Thing”—she never sounds less than completely comfortable. It feels good to sing her songs—and to sing them loud. It remains as true for drunken karaoke goers as it was for icons like Johnny Cash, Prince, and Bruce Springsteen, all of whom made songs from this album their own.
There is something elemental about the way Crow sees the world, and Sheryl Crow is her most timeless encapsulation of her vantage point. The song titles read like self-help books that have remained in print for decades: A Change Would Do You Good. Everyday Is a Winding Road. Love Is a Good Thing. Even if you aren’t one of the millions of people who bought this album on CD—it has never been issued on vinyl—you may know the songs just as well from endless radio play, car commercials, or the muffled speakers at department stores.
This is partially by design. Like the characters she sings about, Crow is woven into the everyday. Born in Kennett, Missouri in 1962, she grew up on the Beatles, the Stones, and Fleetwood Mac: “The punk scene never made it out to the Midwest,” she joked during a 1996 interview with NME. At a time of newfound industry focus on regional scenes and independent artists, Crow reached for the masses. When Kurt Cobain gets namechecked early on the album, alongside a band of male rock stars who all died before their time, he’s as distant a myth as Elvis and John Lennon, or the UFOs she’s chasing in the preceding verses. “All I’ve seen just terrifies me,” she sings with a tinge of paranoia. “But I believe they’re coming back for me.” She rejected the romance of the tortured, fame-averse artist. She wanted to reach people, shamelessly, to hear her song reverberate through the world.
The first record she made never saw the light of day. After a decade of high-profile session work and a major role on Michael Jackson’s Bad Tour, she signed to a major label in the early ’90s and wound up with a glossy, trendy product that she begged the label not to release. The next album she made was named after the Tuesday Night Music Club, a Pasadena-based community of male musicians with whom Crow gathered to jam and co-write eventual hits like “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Strong Enough,” and “All I Wanna Do.” The fruits of those exercises—according to the liner notes, fueled by the simple desire “to experiment (musically, that is) and create”—went on to successfully launch Crow’s career, win a bunch of Grammys, and lose her nearly every friend she’d made. Producer Bill Bottrell told her, “If you only sold 10,000 copies, they’d love you.”
Tuesday Night Music Club sold millions. In the wake of its success, there were claims Crow had failed to properly credit her co-writers. There was tremendous backlash both in and outside her camp, talk of betrayal, dangerous amounts of drinking. Meanwhile the deceptively upbeat single “All I Wanna Do” reached a point of commercial ubiquity that began to haunt Crow, misconstruing her as a happy-go-lucky Los Angeles socialite. As bridges burned around her, she felt an increasing urgency to release something new and regain control of her life.
She and Bottrell got to work on some new songs in Pasadena, then decamped to New Orleans. It only took a day of recording for them to get into an argument and for Bottrell to abandon her. This is how Crow decided to produce the record herself. She continued working at Kingsway Studios in the French Quarter, where she had formed a close and lasting connection with engineer Trina Shoemaker. Together, they began working on a new set of songs she hoped would offer a clearer picture of who she was—songs that nobody else could take credit for.
Her ambition, as she told Billboard in 1996, was to make “a rural-sounding record—sort of Bobbie Gentry in the ’90s.” In an interview with Vivien Goldman for The Daily Telegraph, she elaborated that second part—“dragged into the ’90s.” It’s an apt word choice. You can almost hear the songs gathering dirt as they move along, catching fragments of the eras in between, resisting the flow of time as they move stubbornly forward. One of the first sounds on the record is a shovel being used for percussion; the last thing you hear is a noisy, tugging electric guitar solo that fades right on the verge of descending into chaos.
The whole record plays like a glitching patchwork quilt, flickering and fading as it unfolds. It’s self-titled, but it could just as easily be called The Sheryl Crow Songbook: an attempt to craft her own 13 entries in the American music lexicon. With the possible exception of “The Book,” whose chorus is more of a narrative Easter egg than something designed for road trip singalongs, nearly every song has an indelible hook. You get the sense, after the disputes of creative ownership that followed her debut, she would settle for nothing less: “My last record was heavily influenced by my writing from the standpoint of a woman with four guys around all the time,” she told the Telegraph. “I don’t feel like the same person anymore.”
She expressed this change through songs that refused to be misunderstood—an impulse that led to her first attempts at protest songs. On her previous album, there was “The Na-Na Song,” a “Loser”-style slacker rap that culminates in a jokey allusion to her experience of sexual harassment at the hands of Michael Jackson’s manager. “Frank DiLeo’s dong/Maybe if I’d let him I’d have a hit song,” she chants before the final iteration of the wordless chorus.
Now she trafficked in the type of songwriting that gets your record banned by big-box stores: Walmart, a dominant retailer during the height of the CD boom, refused to sell Sheryl Crow due to a lyric about gun violence in “Love Is a Good Thing.” The decision became so divisive that local radio stations banded together to sell the album themselves, in Walmart parking lots. (“Boo for Walmart or boo for me?” Crow once asked an audience after introducing it in concert as “The Walmart Song.”)
And then there was “Redemption Day,” a folk song inspired by Crow’s experience in Bosnia and her expanding perspective on the motives behind American intervention abroad. You can hear her ambition in her word choice—“Come leaders, come you men of great,” she sings, adopting early ’60s Dylan cadence—but it’s also in her performance. When she sings “freedom” in the closing line she repeats it a few times, allowing the word to be a conduit for contemplation and catharsis.
She brings this type of nuance to each song, and the ones centered on matters of the heart feel just as urgent and impassioned. There’s a reason why “If It Makes You Happy” is the track from the album that’s actually become a standard. Even Crow, who co-wrote the song with Jeff Trott, was overwhelmed by how many different ways she could find to accompany its lyrics: haunted and Lynchian, funk or punk, country or rock. What they landed on is maybe her defining performance: steady and simple, at 95 BPM, grinding through each verse before exploding in the chorus. “I’m not the kind of girl you take home,” Crow sings, and the song never quite comes to rest either. The wheels are always rolling.
No matter the highs and lows that followed, Crow had situated herself in the greater consciousness. This is how she fought the establishment and, in turn, became the establishment. As the album went multi-platinum and elevated her star far above the one-hit wonder or cautionary tale she’d feared becoming, she swiftly began remodeling herself as a legacy artist: a self-possessed, old-school singer-songwriter, already disillusioned with the industry and uninterested in catering to pop trends. Next up was the theme song for a James Bond movie; then a dark, triumphant follow-up that featured, among her own material, a brand new, unreleased Dylan composition; then a live album recorded in Central Park, where she welcomed childhood heroes Stevie Nicks, Keith Richards, and Chrissie Hynde onstage beside her.
And the decade wasn’t even over yet. Where could she possibly go next? In a ’97 interview with Charlie Rose, after discussing her brief dalliance with acting, the two have a jokey conversation that goes like this:

Rose: Let’s figure out something for you to do. We need an obsession.
Crow: Bridge? Knitting, perhaps?
Rose: How about your own label?
Crow: Actually, I’m thinking about doing that. I’ve talked about it with my manager.

They go on for a bit, suggesting names: “Cranky Old Lady Music,” Crow offers, and then: “Do It Yourself Records.” Rose changes the subject—“Is there anything you desperately, desperately want? Children?”—but there is something interesting about Crow aligning herself with DIY culture: a burgeoning scene at the time that ran directly against all her usual metrics of success. Her seeming commercial indestructibility, combined with her proudly boomer taste and earnestly optimistic political outlook, made her a perfect contrast to gendered, Gen X notions of cool and authenticity, a dissonance she increasingly noticed when she confronted the press. After an exhausting interview for Q in 1998—“Did you hear the rumor that you are a heroin addict?” “Do you think you are attractive?” “Can you be a ruthless bitch?”—the interview concludes thusly:

Q: Do you have anything to declare?
A: I’m sick of being a woman. That’s what I want to declare.

One track that didn’t make the cut for Sheryl Crow is a killer B-side called “Free Man.” Structured like a country song but bashed out like a scrappy garage band, it tells a story of a woman who hitches her wagon to a free-thinking, self-styled anarchist. She’s momentarily entranced until her casual observations start to form a larger picture. His friends seem a little off; he’s teaching her how to shoot a gun. Soon, she’s cooking for him, mothering him, sitting shotgun while he goes off on a racist rant. It all concludes with a punchline as she files for divorce: “I’d appreciate a little bit of government!”
Crow never ended up starting her own label, but she did start operating her own recording studio out of her Nashville home, where, among others, Kacey Musgraves booked some time to work on 2018’s Golden Hour. For someone who had spent a rollercoaster decade playing by the industry’s rules and wrestling, over and over again, with its ugly power dynamics, the splendid, isolated comfort of a recording studio seems a better fit, anyway.
On Sheryl Crow, you can hear her settle into this eventual legacy behind the boards, searching until she finds just the right sound. In the liner notes, Crow, who worked as a music teacher before she left Missouri for California, is credited with playing acoustic, electric, and bass guitar, along with Moog bass, harmonium, keyboards, Hammond organ, Wurlitzer, a Penny-Owsley piano, and loops. Deep within the buzz and clatter of these masterfully written songs, you can hear an even more elusive quality that makes them stick: an artist having fun. “There was a huge spectrum of emotions that went along with that record,” Crow recalled to Rolling Stone last year. “One of being burned out, two of being misunderstood… and very underestimated. But also euphoric: The euphoria of feeling like, ‘Well, nobody believes I can do anything anyway. So I’m going to do what I want to do.”
Later in the Charlie Rose interview, Crow performs “Home,” the best song on Sheryl Crow and one of three on the tracklist without a co-writer. She tells Rose it was the only one that arrived to her “on the mic,” claiming the whole thing came together in just 10 minutes. (“That’s probably why I still have a certain affinity for that song,” she says, cracking a smile.) The recording backs up her memory of this impromptu bolt of inspiration. It fades in and out, as if we are receiving a transmission of just the most crucial bit of a long, ongoing investigation.
At first blush, it might sound like a love song. “I woke up this morning and now I understand/What it means to give your life to just one man,” Crow begins. “This is home,” goes the chorus. Every detail, however, tugs at the sense of certainty in those words. The music sways and swells, in a cosmic country kind of way, as she traces a path from her teen years to the present day, her fantasies of wandering the world to the suffocating rooms where she now looks into the eyes of someone she used to love. Meanwhile, she measures the distance between their two breaking hearts: “Mine,” she observes, “is full of questions.” This may be where the relationship ends, she acknowledges. But it’s also the precise moment where any good story begins.


It's been a long time since Springsteen has been hip, if he ever was. His coolness was in question ...

Bruce Springsteen: The Essential Bruce Springsteen

The Essential Bruce Springsteen

It's been a long time since Springsteen has been hip, if he ever was. His coolness was in question even back in the '70s, despite the grudging thumbs-up ("Springsteen is all right") Lou Reed gave him on the live album Take No Prisoners. The aging population that loves "real rock 'n' roll" are his biggest supporters, from rock critic turned producer/manager Jon Landau through biographer Dave Marsh and on down. If Springsteen partied with Warhol, the photos are rarely anthologized.
Springsteen is neither glamorous nor mysterious, but as this three-disc compilation demonstrates, he is an extremely talented and important artist. Assembled as part of Columbia's Essential repackaging of its signature artists, The Essential Bruce Springsteen is a fine introduction to his work and it atones for the shoddy 1995 compilation Greatest Hits (12 tracks are common to both). The previous Hits collection was both too brief, and poorly selected. The Essential stretches 30 of Springsteen's best-known songs over two discs and then adds a third of odds-and-ends.
Springsteen's career has been a series of attacks and retreats. He stormed out of the gate in 1973 on Greetings from Asbury Park as a word-drunk boho who spent as much time in Manhattan as he did on the Jersey shore. Manfred Mann and Greg Kihn made "Blinded by the Light" and "For You" into hits by omitting words, smoothing out Springsteen's chaotic phrasing and tightening the rhythm. The original versions here are loose and elastic as they come, with rubbery drumming by early E Streeter Vinnie Lopez that was the polar opposite of Max Weinberg's robotic thud. The race for the rock 'n' roll prize picked up steam later that year with The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, but here, Springsteen traded some of the goofy Dylanesque wordplay of his debut for detailed, romantic character studies that borrowed from Van Morrison. When Tom Waits described Springsteen's songs from this period as "little black and white films," he was talking about material like "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)". And there has never been a bar band rave-up quite like "Rosalita", which is structured like a suite without losing any of its whiteboy R&B; energy.
The final phase of Springsteen's early charge was the 1975 album Born to Run, where he openly stated that he was trying to make the greatest rock album of all time (later he clarified that what he was shooting for was Phil Spector producing Roy Orbison with words by Dylan). Songs like "Born to Run" and "Jungleland" are overblown to a degree that some find comical (here is the structural template for Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell). It's true, these songs swirl and build and jump from one discrete section to the next, and who now would try and get away with the line, "I wanna die with you, Wendy, on the street tonight in an everlasting kiss"? (Andrew WK, maybe.) This is rock mythology as gospel music, and there is no possible way to appreciate it other than to give yourself over to it completely.
Darkness on the Edge of Town from 1978 was the first retreat. Springsteen's lyrical focus darkened as his sound became leaner. This was the record in which Springsteen saw economy as a storytelling virtue, perhaps in emulation of fiction writers he admired like Flannery O'Connor. Unfortunately, Darkness is probably the album served most poorly by Essential. The omission of "Racing in the Street" is puzzling, considering that it's one of Springsteen's best ballads and also manages to turn the mythology of "Born to Run" completely on its head. "Candy's Room" is one of his best rock songs and should have replaced "Promised Land".
The two-disc album The River is difficult to pull from for an anthology. It was something of a summary of what Springsteen had done to that point, its upbeat frat-rock cuts alternating with country weepers. The Essential chooses "Hungry Heart" and "The River", one great song from each end of the spectrum. Obvious choices, certainly, but sensible. "Hungry Heart" was Springsteen's first Top 10 single and he followed that popularity by drawing inward and recording the solo acoustic Nebraska, the album that has certainly become the indie rock favorite in Springsteen's catalog. He was at home with the four-track years before it became an indie cliché, and he was writing stark, superbly focused songs that people have been covering ever since. "Nebraska" and "Atlantic City" are the two represented here, again completely obvious choices but ones that make the most sense for a Springsteen newcomer.
The second disc of The Essential picks up with "Born in the USA". At some point after Nebraska, Springsteen decided to kick his career back into high gear. His sound got huge, he became versed in the ways of MTV (though his videos were awful), and he basically lived in stadiums for a couple years. Born in the USA has little to recommend to an indie purist but listen to "Dancing in the Dark" and it's easy to hear why it was so popular: Springsteen's melodic gift was at its peak. The Essential adds "Glory Days", which I never liked (I would have swapped it for "I'm on Fire", the album's subtlest moment), and the title track, about which little remains to be said. It was ironic but the patriots loved (and love) it.
After the deluge of Born in the USA, Springsteen laid low for a good ten years to make quieter music and eventually raise a family. Tunnel of Love from 1987, recorded largely alone at his home studio, is Springsteen's most underrated album and certainly his last great one. The title track has the booming synth-pop sound of the preceding record, but Springsteen is painting with a finer brush and dealing with emotion in the abstract. "Brilliant Disguise" is perhaps Springsteen's finest lyric, a sharply observed mediation on vulnerability and self-doubt. The two albums Springsteen released in 1992 were the weakest of his career, and Essential rescues the titles cuts and "Living Proof" from the heap (though only "Human Touch" approaches the best of Tunnel of Love).
Springsteen peaked melodically in the early 80s, but he's compensated for his weaker tunes since by becoming a more skilled storyteller. The Ghost of Tom Joad has the stark sound and detail of some Nebraska songs, but the title track, represented here, lacks a tune that sounds like it has always existed. The events of 9/11 energized Springsteen, calling him back to the spotlight for his first record with the E Street band since Born in the USA. I like the melody of "The Rising", but it sounds an awful lot like Steve Miller's "Jet Airliner", and "Mary's Place" doesn't have nearly enough of a hook for a song about a party. As demonstrated on these songs and the live tribute to Amadou Diallo, "American Skin (41 Shots)", Springsteen addresses big contemporary topics with nuance, but it's tough to listen to songs repeatedly when you know they're connected with a single real-life event.
The bonus rarities disc is spotty but has awesome highs. It's great to finally have Springsteen's dynamic live cover of Jimmy Cliff's "Trapped" on CD, which was previously released only on the USA for Africa album (it was a radio staple in 1985). The slow, gentle "Lift Me Up", which Springsteen recorded for a John Sayles film, has an ungodly beautiful falsetto and perhaps Springsteen's best melody of the 90s. I could do without the cover of "Viva Las Vegas", however, and "Code of Silence" is a Springsteen rocker on autopilot. But that's why they're a bonus. The meat of this collection is enough to chew on for a lifetime. The two discs get the Springsteen story as right as is possible in 150 minutes, and if they don't work, then Springsteen is definitely not for you.


The northern England crew specializes in dance music at its most juiced and jacked up. Like the best nights out, their new album passes by in a blur.

Bad Boy Chiller Crew: Full Wack No Brakes

Full Wack No Brakes

You get about 15 seconds to do some deep breathing exercises (or huff a thick line) before Full Wack No Brakes launches into full force. Opener “450 - 2020 Mix” is a high-octane ode to dirtbikes, petty robberies, and living large, and it sets the tone for what’s to come: a blistering dose of big grins, bassline, and organ house. It’s dance music at its most juiced and jacked up. And it’s amazing.
BBCC comprises MCs Kane, Clive, and GK, along with a loose raft of regular collaborators that includes S-Dog, PC Bill Bacon, and the group’s manager Dr. Google. They hail from Bradford, a city in the north of England, and have risen to hyper-local fame off the back of viral videos that include chaotic comedy sketches and downing inhuman amounts of booze through traffic cones. They’ve soundtracked ads for diners and car washes. Promo for the second single from Full Wack No Brakes, a thumping club anthem titled “Guns Up,” involved seeing which of the crew could endure the most pops from a paintball gun. Earlier this month, they caught the ear of the UK’s original pop-star bad boy, Robbie Williams. Dr. Google says he’s lining up a collab.
The crew exist on the fringes of an overlooked bassline scene that, since emerging from northern hotspots in Sheffield, Leeds, Huddersfield, and Bradford in the early ’00s, has wobbled along on its own steady path. While celebrating occasional forays into the charts—T2’s “Heartbroken” in 2007, or DJ Q’s “You Wot!” the following year—the sound has largely been left to develop alone. Bills stacked with acts like Notion, Deadbeat, Skepsis, Holy Goof, Bassboy, and Mr V would, pre-COVID, regularly pack out raves under the nose of the UK’s music media. BBCC’s first mixtape, titled Git Up Mush, was sold direct to fans and stocked in vape shops and convenience stores.
But while bassline’s most recent iterations have been typified by an aggressive, crunchy mid-range sound that’s closer to jump-up dubstep and drum ‘n’ bass, BBCC’s up-tempo blend of rumbling low-end and silky, pitched-up female vocals has more in common with the canonical MC-led sounds that once incubated in Sheffield’s Niche nightclub or Sheridan’s in Dewsbury. The beats here are lean and precision-engineered, like the Ducatis and Husqvarnas that pepper the lyrics. The group’s comic edge and old-school styling have brought comparisons to People Just Do Nothing’s hapless Kurupt FM crew. But the likeness is a shallow one. While Kurupt FM score laughs skewering the characters that typify aging underground scenes in the UK, BBCC are no parody act. As ambassadors for their own northern working-class culture, they’re strikingly authentic.
They make bangers, too. “Active” is bouncy xylophone 2-step; “New Machine” goes four-to-the-floor with a fairground ride riff; “Loco” is a purist organ house pumper. They switch flows and wrap syllables around the catchiest choruses this side of the pop charts. It’s a tonic to the po-faced tendencies of Business Techno, or the chin-stroke posturing of artsy metropolitan club scenes. A reminder that raving is, ultimately, about getting loaded and letting loose. Like the best nights out, Full Wack No Brakes passes by in a blur. The next day you piece it together from hazy recollections and suspect video clips—before pulling out the traffic cone and cracking a fresh six-pack, ready to go again.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The charmingly low-key Many Moons from the lead singer of Real Estate is an act of humility and, beyond that, quiet grace. Once heard quasi-chanting about suburban suds, Courtney is now the lawnchair-Zen dad.

Many Moons

Leave it to Martin Courtney to turn a solo album into a gesture of self-effacement. The singer/guitarist's New Jersey band Real Estate have spent the last six years elevating effortless indie pop into a deeply moving art form, and his fellow group members have routinely worked in side projects—bassist Alex Bleeker with his woolly'n'rootsy Freaks outfit, and guitarist Matt Mondanile with the watery dreamscapes of Ducktails. But Courtney's debut solo outing arrives with his own name pushed to the fore. And yet, Many Moons is hardly the work of a narcissistic singer/songwriter. ("I just couldn't come up with a band name," he recently shrugged.) Instead, the charmingly low-key album is an act of humility and, beyond that, quiet grace.
Courtney's voice, like his name, is front and center here, markedly stripped of Real Estate's signature reverb. And rather than relying on his familiar turn-of-the-millennium indie rock touchstones, the singer inhabits winsome, lightly orchestrated '60s psych pop and '70s power pop (documented in a nicely complementary playlist). The album gains shape thanks to an enviably accomplished band that includes Real Estate keyboardist Matt Kallman, like-minded Jerseyite Julian Lynch, and Woods' Jarvis Taveniere, who produced. Plus, for a set that casually began as a stress-relief outlet ahead of Real Estate's 2014 album Atlas, Many Moons works as a remarkably cohesive album, meandering its way across themes of past and present to a state of aching clarity that's modest, but no less genuine for it. Once heard quasi-chanting about suburban suds, Courtney is now the lawnchair-Zen dad.
The album’s title phrase occurs first amid a hodgepodge of images on the lushly jangling "Vestiges": "Many moons for it to grow/ Phases they will come and they will go." These are the musings of an artist often associated with nostalgia accepting the truism that what we really have left from yesterday is the same ol' never-ending flux. It's a concept he darts around on the equally fine "Foto", which finds Courtney reflecting on an old passport photo: "The past is just a dream." While a line like that could seem nursery-rhyme commonplace on its own, it builds force nestled amid tracks like "Awake", a gentle apology for strumming next door that offers its own ruminations on the past, and "Asleep", a backwards-effects reverie that's somewhere between an "Oh Yoko!" dream and "I'm Only Sleeping". The terrain may be narrow, but Courtney finds subtleties to explore in his quest for a wisdom that will keep growing in meaning as months and trend cycles pass.
Many Moons isn’t all painstaking philosophy on the inevitability of change. A more immediate highlight is "Northern Highway", which cruises along, suitably upbeat, as it balances existential questions ("Do you feel just like a stranger?") with the narrator's avowal that he could never retire to a place without seasons—all via a chiming arrangement befitting the Left Banke. Or "Little Blue", a windows-down listen about windows-down listens that’s named after Courtney’s old car. By contrast, on "Focus", when Courtney implores, as if giving Magic Eye advice, "The trick really is not to try," it's a bit too on the nose; besides, he already put it better on Real Estate's 2011 sophomore LP, Days, singing, "Our careless lifestyle, it was not so unwise." The trick is not to reveal it's a trick.
The simple complexities of Many Moons all come together on the 10th and final song, "Airport Bar". It's about, yes, airport bars—places that stay the same while the people who pass through them speed around the globe. The music here is the album's most hypnotic; the lyrics are its most observant. Courtney's raconteur has been asleep, dreaming, before he finally realizes what’s real: "Please don't go forgetting about me," he repeats, understanding full well that Timehop, Facebook's "On This Day" feature, or even ripped-jeans-pocket Polaroids are no substitute for "just being here." It's all unassuming enough that it almost breezes past, and, if Courtney didn't know better, he might even say that's the point.


One of the most unfuckwithable records of the 20th century gets another pair of reissue releases, the better of the two being this Legacy Edition.

Miles Davis: Bitches Brew [Legacy Edition]

Bitches Brew [Legacy Edition]

There's a passage in Miles Davis' notorious 1990 autobiography where he's talking about how much quality music he recorded in the mid-to-late 1960s with his current quintet-- the group featuring Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. "I made six studio dates with this group in four years," he says. "And there were some live recordings that I guess Columbia will release when they think they can make the most money-- probably after I'm dead." I can remember chuckling at that line when reading the book the year of its publication, but it would have been difficult to imagine just how extensive and sustained the Miles Davis reissue program would actually be after his death in 1991. The anniversary sets; the complete studio sessions boxes; the boxes collecting the boxes. It goes on and on and every new gift season brings another new offering.
And now here's the latest, from a couple of years after the period Davis mentioned: two re-releases of the legendary 1970 2xLP set Bitches Brew. One is a 40th Anniversary Collector's Edition gathering together the original album on one and a quarter CDs, along with studio outtakes, another CD containing a previously unissued set recorded at Tanglewood, in Lenox, Mass., in August 1970, and a DVD containing a previously unissued concert in Copenhagen from November 1969. The other version of the album is part of Columbia's Legacy Edition and contains the first two CDs from the 40th Anniversary set along with the Copenhagen DVD.
There's a reason Bitches Brew is getting this kind of treatment, even after the release of the 4xCD Complete Bitches Brew box set 12 years ago. It is, after all, one of the three or four most important albums of Miles Davis' career. And coming nine months after In a Silent Way, it is also one of founding texts of jazz fusion. It's a Big Deal Jazz album that's been tapped as being an essential part of any collection. Which unfortunately is something that tends to obscure the actual music. Putting on Bitches Brew and then straining to [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| hear why it mattered so much is a pretty lousy way to go about enjoying this music. Which is not to say there isn't a lot here to puzzle over and listen for-- the music on Bitches Brew is so variable and hard to pin down it rewards any amount of close listening. But Bitches Brew is also pretty accessible as electric Miles goes, and it's something you can put on and let wash over you for now, figuring out what it means and what everyone was doing later.
The first thing that Bitches Brew made clear is that Miles was keenly interested in expanding the idea of what his music could be, and was starting to stretch it way out. The title track runs 26 minutes, which then and now is at the extreme end of what a side of vinyl on an LP can hold; the opening "Pharaoh's Dance" also breaks 20 minutes. And these pieces weren't lengthy compositions or single jams, but were assembled by Miles and producer Teo Macero through editing-- unrelated tracks could become one piece through the miracle of the razor blade and magnetic tape. For an improvisatory art form that was founded on the idea collective expression in the present moment, the idea of stitching together pieces into a new whole was radical enough on its own. But Miles was changing his approach in several ways simultaneously as the 1960s came to a close. He was processing his trumpet with echo, working with electric keyboards and electric guitar, adding new percussion colors, experimenting with rock rhythms, doing away with chord changes, and building long tracks from riffs and vamps. And, as the liner notes from Greg Tate included with these sets illustrate, he was hanging out with Betty Davis, who was introducing him to new music, and along the way he had become a fan of Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, and James Brown.
All of these elements swirled together into a record of brilliant and fascinating contradictions. The psychedelic cover art and long electric jams on the one hand anchor the music in Age of Aquarius, but the connections to earlier jazz tradition and unmoored, floating quality of music also lend it a timeless feel. It sounds very much like a bunch of dudes jamming in the room, but some of the abrupt edits serve as a reminder that it owes a lot to technology. It finds Miles distancing himself from his musical past, but it sounds equally far from the dense abstraction his music would take on a couple of years later, especially in a live setting. It was long and hard to get a handle on, but it was also a huge commercial success. Ultimately, Bitches Brew seems mostly like a single beautiful frame from a jarring film filled with jump-cuts. The amount that Miles Davis' music changed from the early 60s to the early 70s is astonishing. His sound was constantly on the move, and this is what it sounded like on those August days in the studio.
The bonus material illustrates just how quickly Davis' music was changing, and how much his music could vary given the context. Three months after Bitches Brew was recorded (but before it was released), he performed in Copenhagen with a five-piece band that included Wayne Shorter. Chick Corea's electric piano aside, the music is acoustic, though several tunes from Bitches Brew are included (the video is exceptional in quality in terms of both sound and image). In this setting, Davis' music sounds like what most people would identify as "jazz," and is less challenging than the cerebral and harmonically complex music he'd made just a few years earlier with his quintet. But by the August 1970 set included with the 40th Anniversary edition, the raging funk maelstrom that would epitomize his live shows in the next four years was on the rails. What a difference nine months made for Miles Davis as 1969 turned into 1970.
The two sets sit at opposite ends of the value scale. Listing at about $19, the Legacy Edition seems to me a very good buy-- the original album is a 2xCD set, the outtakes are reasonably interesting, and the Copenhagen DVD is a vital addition to the Davis canon. Also included on the second disc are four tracks edited down for release as 7" singles, and they are interesting curios good for one play but not much more-- three-minute edits are the opposite of what this music is about. The 40th Anniversary Set, on the other hand, goes for over $100 and is obviously geared toward Davis completists-- for them, it actually delivers pretty well as these sets go, since the 1970 live set is excellent, there are some extra visual goodies, and it's not padded out with a promotional film masquerading as a documentary (it also comes with two 180 gram vinyl discs-- I'll never quite get why someone wants both CD and LP sets.) How much is left in the vault? We'll see, maybe when the album turns 50.


Dusting off practice-room staples and writing more new songs to go with them, the hyper-prolific Aussie rockers scrap their conceptual inclinations in favor of shredding for the sheer pleasure of it.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Omnium Gatherum

Omnium Gatherum

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s reputation as a vinyl pressing plant in human form is an endless source of both intrigue and fatigue. But the Melbourne psych-rock ensemble’s latest record forces us to consider a prospect even more unfathomable than releasing 20 albums in 10 years (five of them in the past 18 months alone): This hyper-prolific group is also sitting on a ton of unreleased material. Where many records in King Gizzard’s discography center on some grand idea—be it an exploration of specific guitar tunings or a thrash-powered song cycle about our planet’s looming self-destruction—Omnium Gatherum is a double LP whose great concept is that there’s no great concept. (That fearsome title, emblazoned in a demonic font on the cover, is actually just Latin for “a collection of miscellaneous things.”) But while the album was originally an excuse for the band to fine-tune tracks that didn’t previously make the cut, it sparked yet another songwriting surge, yielding a bunch of new songs to complement those leftovers. Even when King Gizzard are trying to retrace their steps, they can’t help but barrel forward.
Case in point: The album’s lead track, “The Dripping Tap,” is a quintessentially Gizzardian Neu!-metal rave-up that had been kicking around since 2018, but it didn’t yield a definitive version until the band dusted it off last June at its first post-lockdown jam, after working remotely throughout the pandemic. The recording they captured that day is absolutely buzzing with all that pent-up communal energy: The track runs for a staggering 18 minutes but feels like it blazes by in a quarter of that time, its blitzkrieg momentum pushing the group to new heights of majestic shredding that suggest Thin Lizzy gone prog. But if you’re wondering whether you really need another high-octane King Gizzard blowout about the ravages of fossil-fuel dependency, “The Dripping Tap” instantly distinguishes itself by teeing up bandleader Stu Mackenzie’s machine-gunned, broken-record chants with a surprisingly soulful chorus hook from multi-instrumentalist Ambrose Kenny-Smith that sounds like it was cut in some early-’70s Gamble and Huff session. As a result, “The Dripping Tap” undercuts its musical madness with a genuine sense of sadness—over the precarious state of the world, the suits who stand to profit from its decline, and the willful, widespread ignorance that breeds inaction.
“The Dripping Tap” serves a strategic purpose beyond merely documenting King Gizzard’s return to peak horsepower. By devoting Omnium Gatherum’s entire first side to a signature warp-speed workout, the band gives itself free rein to do anything but that over the record’s remaining three acts. As such, Omnium Gatherum lacks the satisfying fluidity and holistic interconnectivity of King Gizzard’s definitive statements; splendorous synth-pop reveries like “Magenta Mountain” (which feels like it was spun out of the same cocoon as last year’s blissful Butterfly 3000) rub up against tracks that revert to the doomsday-metal battle plan of 2019’s Infest the Rats’ Nest (“Gaia,” “Predator X”). And where the band’s best records tend to build toward some cataclysmic climax, Omnium Gatherum peaces out with a serene but slight lounge-pop mini-suite (“Candles”/“The Funeral”) that feels like the musical equivalent of discreetly ghosting your own house party.
That said, the benefit of traveling without a roadmap is that you can wind up in some delightfully unexpected places. After teasing his flow on Butterfly 3000’s “Killer Year 2.02,” Kenny-Smith steps out as the band’s resident MC on two hip-hop-rooted cuts, “Sadie Sorceress” and “The Grim Reaper.” And the transition into King Gizzy & the Leezy Weezy proves surprisingly smooth: The band finds its natural funky footing in the sort of weed-hazed sampledelic grooves favored by early-’90s Beastie Boys, Avalanches, and Edan, while Kenny-Smith’s breathless brat-rap treatises about witches and grim reapers (complemented by vocal snippets of his 97-year-old grandmother) fit squarely within the group’s established parameters of apocalyptic prophecy and brain-scrambling absurdity.
If Omnium Gatherum is a crazy quilt by design, it’s ultimately threaded together by some of the Gizzard’s most sumptuous songcraft to date—not to mention the band’s ever-colorful ways of telling us that the Earth is fucked. The piano-twinkled soul-jazz of “Kepler-22b” provides the lustrous backdrop to Mackenzie’s stargazing fantasy of moving to the namesake planet to get away from this one, while guitarist Joey Walker’s dreamy quiet-storm bass-slapper “Ambergris” speaks of oceanic waste from the perspective of a whale who’d rather be harpooned than live its life swimming through the murk. (That said, no poetic license was required for “Evilest Man,” a giddy swirl of jaunty sunshine-soul, Kraftwerkian synth clusters, and interstellar guitar noise wherein Mackenzie cheerfully assails the most insidious Australia-bred pollutant on our planet—i.e., Rupert Murdoch.)
If the sheer abundance of songs, styles, and lyrical concepts on Omnium Gatherum is indicative of a band that never takes a break, the album also shows that the least these dudes can do is take a break from being themselves. And for around four minutes, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard ease off the doomscrolling psychedelia and subversive soft rock to deliver “Persistence,” a joyous folk-funk shuffle that proves Kevin Parker hasn’t cornered the Aussie market on breezy, beach-bound jams. It may seem odd that an album that begins with an epic 18-minute assault on oil addiction also yields a car-fetishizing pop song where Mackenzie celebrates his (ahem) stamina by comparing his performance to “a Ford motor piston.” But as Mackenzie assures us, he’s got “no want for gas/I run on love”—a line that applies as much to his endurance in his band as in his bed. After all, you can’t make 20 albums in a decade without a lot of love for what you do, and—in lieu of any other unifying principle—Omnium Gatherum proves King Gizzard still have a whole lot of it left in the tank.


Alternating between loud, sumptuously produced rock and softer, Tin Pan Alley-inspired songs, the British singer-songwriter delivers a brooding set of songs about time’s ceaseless march.

Hey Clockface

Whoever said that rock’n’roll is a young person’s game was waiting to be proven wrong. Few know this better than Elvis Costello. Since he was a twenty-something in black-rimmed glasses, Costello’s talent for arrangement and pastiche pointed toward fruitful twilight years, particularly as he strayed from meat-and-potatoes rock and began to dabble in musical styles less invested in the cult of youth. Now 66, the British icon has only continued to diversify his interests over the decades, collaborating with the Roots and writing for the London Symphony Orchestra. Yet he’s shown himself to be at his best in two modes: making driving, surprisingly ageless rock and exploring the conventions of the American Songbook, as he did on his sublime 1998 Burt Bacharach collaboration, Painted From Memory. Costello’s latest, Hey Clockface, merges these potentially divergent sensibilities in an adventurous set of songs about time’s ceaseless march.
Costello no longer sounds quite so ageless. On the Fats Waller-quoting “Hey Clockface / How Can You Face Me,” Costello’s voice strains against gravelly limitations, complementing his elegiac lyricism. Always a wide-ranging writer, he’s managed to preserve his breadth while allowing a sense of mournful retrospection to give the record structure and focus. Affairs are related almost uniformly in the past tense, appearing far enough in the rearview mirror that Costello often substitutes wistful affection for his customary bitterness. Even sex seems more like a memory than a present reality; his “magic powers have drained,” he tells us on one song, quoting a lover who left him. He muses on his reflection throughout, wondering how others bear to look at him: Sure, faces age, but the thought that they might be windows to the soul is frightening in Costello’s world, where everyone’s past is checkered.
Musically, the album alternates between loud, sumptuously produced rock’n’roll and softer, Tin Pan Alley-inspired tracks, reflecting two disparate recording sessions. In Helsnki’s Suomenlinnan Studio, Costello played all the instruments, from the Fender Jazzmaster to the Rhythm Ace, buffing his pop-rock songwriting with a maximalist studio sheen that sounds more like St. Vincent than the Imposters. Costello even beatboxes on the curveball “Hetty O’Hara Confidential,” about a once-towering gossip columnist whose work has become outdated in an age when “everyone has a megaphone.” In Paris, Costello linked up with jazz players, including a cellist and a brass section, who improvised much of their performance. The Paris sessions yielded the record’s most powerful songs, such as “They’re Not Laughing at Me Now,” with its poignant flügelhorn trills, and “What Is It That I Need That I Don’t Already Have?,” a masterfully evocative exploration of the 32-bar form. The dueling approaches of the two recording sessions enrich each other, providing Hey Clockface with its yin and yang. Alone, either style might have seemed like predictable genre play for Costello at this stage in its career, but together, they make for an album that’s energetic and consistently surprising.
America’s rich musical history and ubiquitous cultural sway have long factored heavily into Costello’s work. Accordingly, to finish Hey Clockface he turned to a group of New York musicians who contributed their parts remotely. Bill Frisell, one of Americana’s great experimenters, layered guitar loops, as did versatile improviser Nels Cline. The present state of the country is all over the record, like a wraith haunting the American Songbook. After the fractured warmth of the Paris-recorded “I Do (Zula’s Song)” we get the sumptuous “We Are All Cowards Now,” its lyrics dipping into the voice of someone who’s scared of a government taking away their guns, while “No Flag” plays like a national anthem entangling nihilism and narrow-mindedness. “No sign for the dark place that I live/No God for the damn that I don’t give,” Costello sings; “We want everything and we don’t want to share/Outer space for the faces we fear.”
Hey Clockface’s Tin Pan Alley-bred schmaltz is self-conscious and even gleefully deliberate, yet there are moments when it can be overpowering. The speech that begins “Radio Is Everything” employs a dizzying series of internal rhymes (“screams,” “regimes,” “seems”; “that trivial, sniveling rosary, that ring-a-ding rosemary”) that are distracting in their florid excess. Yet by combining such mannered lyrical tropes with music that sounds alternately nostalgic and dystopian, Costello’s noirish atmospheres suggest another populist American tradition: the pulp mystery. His killer, of course, is time. On an album that has him narrating the decline of so many characters, Costello finally seems aware that the clock has it in for him, too.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Oracular Spectacular

On the first song on their debut record, MGMT let us know how they got here. The rock song-as-origin myth is nothing new-- from "Who Do You Love" through "Immigrant Song", to "We Share Our Mother's Health" and Kanye West's "Big Brother"-- and "Time to Pretend" situates itself in that canon. Emerging initially from a viscous electronic fluid, the song quickly takes shape as a bombastic electro-glam number about rock star dreams. Accordingly, it's cheesy and clichéd, but also thick with sarcasm: Before the first chorus, MGMT sing nostalgically about having models for wives, moving to Paris, and shooting heroin. The kicker, though, is in the title itself. Knowing that the Almost Famous notion of stardom doesn't exist anymore (if it ever did), the duo of Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser  realize they're "fated to pretend." It's a charming idea-- making a career out of fantasizing-- and on Oracular Spectacular, they not only accept their playacting destiny, they demonstrate that, just maybe, it's a path more people should take.
MGMT find kindred spirits in Muse and Mew by dressing their melodies in the fanciful trappings of 1970s British prog, but unlike their contemporaries the duo also weaves in lessons from disco, new-wave synth-pop, and early 90s Britpop. The understanding that youthful innocence is a potent force-- a theme first established in "Time to Pretend"-- continues throughout the record. Instead of the "Knights of Cydonia", though, MGMT fights "Weekend Wars", ostensibly an ode to the fictionalized childhood battles that treat backyards as independent colonies in need of conquering. The gentle, chiming melody and effete vocals of "The Youth" recall Sparks or Queen at their most restrained moments, and "Kids" comes across as an inspirational dance anthem for playgrounders.
Most impressive on Spectacular is Vanwyngarden and Goldwasser's ability to dabble, with the shared understanding that whatever they do is Big. "Pieces of What" is an unexpected acoustic guitar piece, but it's delivered like an outtake from Suede's Dog Man Star. "4th Dimensional Transition" augments its cavernous psychedelic vocals with a jacked-up BPM count, and on "Electric Feel", MGMT pull off lithe, falsetto electro-funk surprisingly well. There's not much to the song aside from a Barry Gibb vocal and limber bassline, but within the context of the rest of Spectacular, it makes perfect sense. In fact, so does the duo's current tour pairing, as the openers for Of Montreal. Kevin Barnes' emergence as an icon of theatricalized electro-glam seems the ideal toward which the duo should strive. They're still young, of course; they've got plenty of time to figure that out.


Over the course of his Hurry Up and Die and Cocaine Riot mixtape series, the Coke Boys-affiliated Queens rapper Chinx pieced together a gruff, promising sound. Then, he was killed after shots were fired at his car. As a result, Welcome to JFK is a different kind of hip-hop debut. Instead of pointing the rapper toward the places he could go, JFK hints at places he might’ve gotten.

Welcome to JFK

Over the course of his Hurry Up and Die and Cocaine Riot mixtape series, the Queens rapper Chinx pieced together a gruff, promising sound. Versed in the foreboding thump of Atlanta trap but very much New York in spirit and form, Chinx at his best (the mischievously weird "I'm a Coke Boy", from Cocaine Riot 2), suggested that Coke Boys could be more than just French Montana's goon squad. Then one May morning the unthinkable happened: Chinx was killed as shots were fired at his car outside of a venue he’d just performed. He was only 31, married with three children and a fourth on the way.
As a method of coping with the loss, his manager and close collaborators gathered to honor their friend the only way they knew how: workshopping the sessions he’d left behind. As a result, Welcome to JFK is a different kind of hip-hop debut. Instead of pointing the rapper toward the places he could go, JFK hint at places he might’ve gotten. From the dejected Auto-Tuned opener "Experimental", in which Chinx sings "I swear I want this to last us a lifetime", to the foreboding closer "Die Young", the specter of mortality haunts the proceedings.
Despite all of this, it's a testament to Chinx's still-growing pop smarts that Welcome to JFK is sometimes a lot of fun. "Experimental"’s mournful opener is quickly offset by a stream of upbeat shots at radio play. "Thug Love" and "The Other Side" spring for help from outside singers, the former calling Jeremih for the chorus and the latter tapping Ty Dolla $ign in full goon regalia. The real gem of the batch is "Yay", a bratty bit of spiteful money counting that is concise and catchy without sacrificing Chinx’s dopeboy veneer.
For the stretch of songs from the wistful pep talk "How to Get Rich" through the closing Coke Boys posse cut "Die Young", Welcome to JFK tenses up and eases off the good times. Chinx walks his audience behind the triumph of "Go Get It" and "Yay" to illuminate the hard decisions and paranoia that accompant success on the streets. "Pray" pairs him up with Chicago Coke Boys affiliate Lil Durk as each ponders mortality and their legacy. In the latter, Chinx raps chillingly about a nightmare in which he gets shot in the head, only to dive into a chorus essentially eulogizing himself. Welcome to JFK doesn’t allow much comfort. The album is by turns a succession of punchlines so snarky it’s upsetting Chinx won’t be around to write more of them and an unnerving trip into a mind coming to terms with the ever-present reality of sudden death.


Despite being based on a ’70s vampire film, the rap trio’s album is somehow their most bloodless project to date.

clipping.: There Existed an Addiction to Blood

There Existed an Addiction to Blood

Rap trio clipping. take pride in their commitment to ego death. When they formed they adopted two foundational rules—strict avoidance of first-person perspectives and the word nigga—just to make explicit that their music is not about them. Using found sounds, foley tricks, and imagined characters, rapper Daveed Diggs and producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes fabricated entire worlds. Following the space opera of 2016’s Splendor & Misery, which was actually nominated for a Hugo Award following a fan campaign, and the abstract improvisation of 2018’s Face EP, they channel horrorcore.
Their third album is named after a lyric from the soundtrack of ’70s horror film Ganja & Hess, a surreal love story in which a vampiric black couple wrestles with their appetite for blood. The movie is lurid, mysterious, and tender, a combination that completely eludes clipping. Somehow, despite the gory source material, There Existed an Addiction to Blood is their most bloodless project to date.
Their vision of horror is high-octane, high-concept, and fussy. Technically, there is a lot happening in their meticulous, densely referential songs. Across There Existed an Addiction to Blood there are shootouts, a ScHoolboy Q interpolation (Diggs uses Q’s flow from “What They Want” on “Nothing is Safe”)and a resurrected Bobby Hutton on “Blood of the Fang”—but every detail feels exhaustingly mechanical.
As a vocalist, Diggs has the charisma of a metronome and the expressive range of a sock puppet. Performing in a stiff monotone, he exclusively raps fast or faster, enunciating words with crisp diction but never relishing them or giving them life. “And there may even be some meaning gleaming in the streets that they built/On top of dead bodies in the olden days when the pen was a quill,” he raps on “Intro.” “The best menage is a death menage, agree?/ Chest massage with electric rods for three,” he says on “The Show.” You can appreciate the internal rhymes and inversions, but his flow is so robotic it rarely feels like he appreciates them
Snipes and Hutson are just as perfunctory. Their production style is informed by film scores and a range of genres, but their beats are dry and lifeless. “He Dead” is a dirge that dissolves into bland ambience. “Club Down,” presumably an ode to shut-the-party-down Memphis crunk, is built around an arid, prickly drone that wanes in and out of focus. Drumless and peppered with EFX, the beat is as vast and empty as an airlocked bunker. The sole outlier is “Blood of the Fang,” which works elements from Ganja & Hess into a throbbing romp that Diggs navigates nimbly. It's one of the rare moments where his flows feel loose and natural.
In theory, the pulp and theater of horrorcore should fit clipping.'s skill set. Snipes has done extensive work as a composer for TV and film; Hutson has a background in experimental music, and Diggs is an actor and slam poet. Attention to atmosphere and cadence is essential to all their disciplines, and horrorcore has often drawn from the TV and movie horror canon. What sinks the record is its enduring sense of cosplay. Horrorcore is about terror as a mood and as a state of mind. When RZA mocks suicide, Tyler defiles corpses, or Lord Infamous summons demons, there’s a sense of alienation behind the provocation. The point of horrorcore is to both piss off church moms and find a language and vehicle for rage and misery. But there is no aching, tortured self at the center of clipping., just three fanboys’ overworked hearts palpitating into the abyss. While you can’t deny the imagination, you also can’t fathom the point.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Mature Themes is Ariel Pink's grittier, gristlier, and funnier follow-up, an album that clarifies that Before Today was not a sign of things to come but rather just a signpost along his strange journey.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: Mature Themes

Mature Themes

Ariel Pink's music began its strange journey early in the last decade, as a CD-R lying on the floor of Animal Collective's tour van. Before then, he'd been heard by almost no one, despite that he'd recorded hundreds of songs, by himself, in what sounded like a windowless dungeon. The quality of those early recordings was poor, but something shone from the murk: Pink became the first artist signed to the band's Paw Tracks label, which reissued his album The Doldrums in 2004. The path of his career since then has been wayward and strange, culminating in the highly professional Before Today in 2010. But there are through-lines. Whether you tuned into his world during the Paw Tracks era or after Before Today's "Round and Round" became an indie anthem, you probably sensed an intriguing off-note lurking in the L.A. home-recording savant's music.
In Pink's hands, the boundless sunshine of 1970s AM pop grows queasy, even malevolent, splitting the difference between a grimace, a smirk, and a smile. Even at its loveliest, his music radiates a mesmerizing sense of bad faith: Pink often incorporates humor into his songs, but it's hard to be sure if you're in on the joke. He may express seemingly sincere sentiments in one moment while mocking them in the next. In his most compelling material, these impulses curl around each other until his "fuck you's" sound like "I love you", and vice versa.
Before Today was Ariel Pink's breakout record, a leap to a new stage from his cult beginnings that made his skill as a songwriter and craftsman clear. Free of the lo-fi grit that characterized his Paw Tracks material, you could suddenly hear his uncanny knack for fusing together unlikely parts with no visible seams. Mature Themes, Pink's grittier, gristlier, and funnier follow-up, clarifies that Before Today was not a sign of things to come but rather just a signpost along his unknowable path. The production has hardened, as if Pink has found a midpoint between the warped, warbly sound of his tape releases and what he can now afford. The songs themselves, while still catchy, are often opaque, antisocial, and confounding. The mood of the record veers closer to the melted emotional nowhere of The Doldrums' "Good Kids Make Bad Grown Ups" or the arch piss-take of Worn Copy's "Artifact".
As a result, some have pegged Mature Themes as an alienating move meant to prune Pink's flock back down to the diehards. But the album is too rich for that straightforward reading. Here, even his puerile sentiments remain generously melodic and lovingly wrought. "I'm not real and I won't call you," he croons on the title track, over a melody that climbs upward so gracefully it sounds like he's vandalizing a Shaker hymn. It might be one of the truest lines he's ever sung. But the Elvis Costello-like rising-action of the chorus, which takes the phrase "I wanted to be good" up the scale, is an expression of love, pure and simple.
"Only in My Dreams" is another example of his singular songwriting mind: Listen casually and it's a Byrdsian pop tune, but sit down at a piano to map out it's details, and you'll lean back, baffled. If taken apart, no one but Pink would be able to reassemble it. It's this talent that links Pink to past practicioners of outsider music-- R. Stevie Moore, Frank Zappa, Ween. Like those artists, Pink looked at the puzzle pieces of a pop song and figured out jarring new ways they fit together, mingling affection with ironic commentary and intellectual distance. "Kinski Assassin" opens with Pink singing nonsense in a stentorian voice not far from a 1930s radio drama: "Suicide dumplings dropping testicle bombs." Then, he chimes in with something silky and romantic: "We'll always have Paris." The lyrics don't make any more sense together than the music behind them does, but they glide smoothly into each other, conveying a strong sense of internal coherence. It's the kind of bewitching almost-logic that drives people to endlessly re-watch David Lynch's Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire.
But don't look to Pink's lyrics for clues, because they offer few ways to emotionally engage. "The bad breath of a cross-eyed goat/ Eating children for a Monday morning," go the opening lines of "Driftwood", intoned with the seriousness of a Druid. On "Symphony of the Nymph", he speak-sings the song's title in an exaggerated scientist voice straight out of Thomas Dolby's catalogue over a backing track located somewhere between "Monster Mash" and "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah". On "Farewell American Primitive", the sentiment that comes through most clearly is, "Fuck it." It's moments like these that forcefully remind you: There's nothing operatic at stake in Pink's music. It's a Chinese finger trap.
When The Village Voice interviewed Pink in 2010, he suggested that he'd lost the ability to make music the way he did in his earlier, more prolific days. But Mature Themes is as vital as anything he's ever recorded: Even the throwaway "Schnitzel Boogie" fails at being one-dimensional, playing instead like something McCartney might have worked on for the fifth side of the White Album. This seesaw between sincerity and insincerity is the fuel that drives Pink's music. It's the riddle that creates his cult, and it's the reason everyone will continue to pay attention to him, no matter how many faces he pulls.


Jones’ all-star pop-soul adventure prefigured Thriller and highlighted his ear for new grooves.

The Dude

One day while the rapper and producer MF Doom was sequestered away from the world writing his 1999 solo debut, Operation: Doomsday, the sound of Quincy Jones’ “One Hundred Ways” came on the radio. Doom became smitten with an instrumental section of the track that includes Greg Phillinganes’ electric synth solo. He’d later chop up the sample and use it as the basis for his own kooky “Rhymes Like Dimes,” adding another crate-digging reference to an album that sampled heartily from the similarly warming sounds of ’80s R&B artists like the S.O.S. Band, Atlantic Starr, and the Deele.
“One Hundred Ways” originally appeared on Jones’ 1981 album The Dude, which has now been given the Super Audio CD reissue treatment. The voice you hear when Doom lets the sample spill over belongs to James Ingram, who was making his debut on the LP. And while the moment conjures up the entertaining image of Doom in a metal mask casually rapping along to the radio, it also raises the deeper suggestion that the music of bandleaders like Jones—along with James Brown, Roy Ayers, and Isaac Hayes—has proved to be so fertile for hip-hop producers because it’s made with the spirit of collaboration in mind. Records like these sketch out funky templates and trust guest musicians to stamp the tune with their own identity, much in the manner of a producer repurposing a sample into something fresh but also evocative of its original source.
The cast list involved across The Dude’s nine songs underscores this point. Along with Ingram, there are contributions from Michael Jackson, Patti Austin, Herbie Hancock, and Stevie Wonder. English R&B keyboardist and craftsman Rod Temperton, who would go on to pen “Thriller” and George Benson’s “Give Me the Night,” notches four songwriting credits, while Chas Jankel, from funked-up punk outfit Ian Dury and the Blockheads, scores a co-writing credit by virtue of Jones covering “Ai No Corrida,” which originally appeared a year earlier on Jankel’s debut album. The Dude is a Quincy Jones solo project in name, but this post-disco pop-soul cornucopia of groove resonates as a testament to his ear for anticipating new sounds.
The album struts into life with the aforementioned “Ai No Corrida,” an ebullient, Latin-infused dance track with a rhythm section that pumps and shuffles along with four-to-the-floor swagger before the sugary chorus worms its way into your memory. Jones smoothes out Jankel’s original vision while introducing perky and infectious handclaps to the song. Next comes the slap-bass pomp of the title track, a Blaxploitation vignette that stars a character whose main attribute is simply being cool. It’s narrated by Ingram, includes backing vocals from Jackson, and at one point nods to the nascent hip-hop scene by breaking into a braggadocio rap that even by early-’80s standards sounds like it was recited by someone’s grandpa: “I graduated from the college of the streets/I got a Ph.D in how to make ends meet.”
The vibe switches dramatically as Ingram steers the session into quiet storm territory with the sentimental “Just Once,” before Stevie’s synth wizardry and Austin’s vocals amp up the moody funk of “Betcha’ Wouldn’t Hurt Me.” Elsewhere, “Razzamatazz” is a pulsing dancefloor outing spiked with rousing horns, and “Velas” brings the album into a gentler, jazz-influenced zone complete with Toots Thielemans’ harmonica lines.
The Dude’s eclectic mix of styles and sometimes bumpy song sequencing risk making it an uneven listen‚ albeit under Jones’ savvy stewardship, everything is seamlessly blended together. The music has an almost electronic slickness, as if Jones is signposting a way to turn a traditional jazz and soul grounding in a more radio-friendly direction.
A year after the release of The Dude, Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson would achieve pop perfection with Thriller. The shadow of that power move leaves The Dude as an open sketchbook of sorts, with Jones showcasing styles, introducing personnel, and prompting other musicians to take his template and run with it to commercial success. A wave of smooth R&B artists would readily take up the offer, and Herbie Hancock would build on Jones’ nod to hip-hop through the electro shock of “Rockit” in 1983. The musicians that Jones’ vision influenced would in turn inspire artists like MF Doom to repurpose Jones’ grooves all over again, proving The Dude’s prescient vision and enduring cool.


The Barcelona singer sticks to her synth-heavy, sticky-sweet sound on an album that’s meant to signal her arrival as a global force.

Worldwide Angel

Spain’s main musical exports, at least from an English-language audience’s perspective—artists such as Mourn, Hinds, Delorean, and John Talabot—tend to line up with Anglo-American trends in indie rock and leftfield dance music. But don’t let the rosters of Primavera Sound or Sónar fool you: What young Spaniards listen to has very little to do with any of that. On the streets, in city parks, and in underage dance clubs, not to mention on Spotify streaming charts, trap and reggaeton dominate.
Bad Gyal occupies a kind of middle ground. The music of the 20-year-old singer Alba Farelo, who hails from a bedroom community of Barcelona, is largely influenced by reggaeton and dancehall, but she is signed to Editorial Canada, a local indie label. And many of her collaborators on her latest mixtape are drawn from a who’s who of hot club producers from around the world. Night Slugs’ Jam City; Colombia-via-Manchester’s DJ Florentino, of the Swing Ting crew; the Los Angeles-based Popcaan producer Dubbel Dutch; and WEDIDIT producer/guitarist D33J are the sorts of names more likely to turn up on Boomkat’s front page than on a teenagers’s boombox at a botellón.
Worldwide Angel isn’t her debut; that was 2016’s Slow Wine mixtape, a collection of chilly trap and neon-kissed dancehall that yielded one of her biggest (and best) early hits, “Mercadona.” But the new album is clearly meant to signal Bad Gyal’s arrival as a global force, following her rapid rise over the past two years. Since releasing her breakout song, a Catalan-language riff on Rihanna’s “Work” called “Pai,” she has racked up over 24 million plays on YouTube and played everywhere from the Red Bull Music Academy Festival in Los Angeles to Iceland and Japan, not to mention her hometown’s Sónar. FACT even named the Dubbel Dutch-produced “Jacaranda” their No. 1 song of 2017.
Despite the expanded guest list, Worldwide Angel largely sticks to the template established on previous Bad Gyal songs: synth-heavy, sticky-sweet dembow grooves tinged with airy melancholy. On “Tra,” Dubbel Dutch wraps a ribbon-like G-funk lead around a snapping digital-dancehall beat. DJ Florentino’s “Blink” brings Elysia Crampton’s style of FM-radio excess to a beat bristling with airhorns, breaking glass, and insistent, syncopated claps. The textures are deliciously synthetic—as crinkly and richly hued as pastel-colored cellophane. Farelo sings mostly in Spanish peppered with the occasional English word (“Buena vida, mucho work”), though “Yo Sigo Iual,” a protestation that fame hasn’t changed her, is sung mostly in Catalan. Farelo, who veils her voice in layers of Auto-Tune, doesn’t pretend to be a strong singer. Instead, she has traditionally leaned on attitude, both in her lyrics and, especially, her self-presentation: the scowls and outfits that have helped her rack up all those views so quickly.
But “Mercadona” and “Jacaranda” also benefited from truly catchy hooks, and here, her melodies are often about as emphatic as a shrug. It seems inauspicious that the two-note chorus of the Jam City and Dubbel Dutch-produced “Internationally,” the mixtape’s catchiest cut, mimics the up-and-down cadence of the Chainsmokers’ “Closer.” On “Blink,” too, she sounds hemmed in: Her melody is a desultory shuffle from note to note, when what the song could really use is a bold line of flight up and away from its steady pedal tone. Her lyrics also seem hesitant to stray far from themes she’s already explored. “Internationally” and “Candela” revel in her success and her pleasure in spending its fruits; “Tra” and “Blink” are love songs aimed at the dancefloor; “Realize” is a kiss-off to the doubters and haters.
She has her moments. Her Auto-Tuned harmonies on the latter song have a bittersweet tinge, and on “Yo Sigo Iual,” she’s convincingly sorrowful as she pleads with her lover, her voice dripping like teardrops in a cup of melted sorbet. But on “Trust,” a duet with the singer/producer Faberoa, she’s nearly upstaged by his sensual, smoky whisper. Farelo has spoken of Bad Gyal as an invented character or an avatar, an exaggeration of her own personality, but where Worldwide Angel stumbles is that it doesn’t sound nearly outsized enough.


This set from the Palestinian techno DJ and producer is sleek and rolling, fueled by driving rhythms and punctuated by moments of emotional release.

Sama’ Abdulhadi: Fabric Presents Sama’ Abdulhadi

Fabric Presents Sama’ Abdulhadi

When Sama’ Abdulhadi performs, a range of expressions plays across her face in quick succession: concentration, euphoria, mischief, grace, determination—and sometimes, fleetingly, something like a deep-seated weariness. If dance music is often regarded as a form of liberatory escapism—from drudgery, oppression, trauma—then Abdulhadi might be a spokesperson for escape itself. As the world’s foremost Palestinian techno DJ, a fixture in some of the world’s biggest nightclubs and festivals, she is proof that you can make it out of a system that wants to crush you.
Born in Jordan to a family of Palestinian exiles forced out by Israeli authorities who objected to her grandmother’s political activities, Abdulhadi returned to Ramallah as a child and first soaked up local hip-hop (and played for the national soccer team). She then moved to Beirut, where she discovered techno, and then Cairo to study sound design, work as a sound engineer, and DJ throughout the region. Her global breakthrough came in 2018, performing a Boiler Room set from the heart of Ramallah—part of an extensive lineup drawn from the Palestinian underground, including the experimental DJ and producer Muqata’a and the Haifa-based Jazar Crew—that has been viewed more than 12 million times to date. Abdulhadi plays a thoroughly international style of big-room techno, and as a globe-trotting DJ she enjoys a freedom of movement denied to many of her compatriots. (Even on her home turf, however, Abdulhadi has encountered obstacles: In 2020, her performance at a Palestinian mosque triggered a conservative backlash that led her to spend more than a week in jail.) Still, she has always taken pains to center her identity as a Palestinian woman. “It’s a lot of pressure, because I want to represent Palestine perfectly,” she told The Guardian in 2023.
Abdulhadi’s fabric presents mix showcases a hard-charging style behind the decks: 73 relentless minutes of throbbing ostinato basslines, sharply carved drums, and glinting synths. The mood is coiled and tense, evoking grinding teeth and clenched fists. She typically mixes in key, layering complementary synths and basslines in call-and-response-like counterpoints, and using syncopated patterns to break up endlessly tumbling four-on-the-floor grooves. Her single “Well Fee,” featuring Palestinian singer Walaa Sbeit, offers a potent distillation of her style: lumbering drums, rattling rhythmic accents, and hypnotic vocals. It’s a glowering, strutting, mean-mugging track that oozes intensity.
Melodies rarely extend beyond sullen two-note sequences, and the similarity of Abdulhadi’s selections, combined with her layered style of mixing, means that there are few standout moments. Viennese psytrance producers Psycrain & C.A.T provide a brief moment of contrast with “Goosebombs,” in which the beat drops away to reveal pensive piano and saxophone; it’s a welcome respite from the rhythmic juggernaut. Palestinian-born, Berlin-based producer YA Z AN’s “NADA-R” is another highlight, thanks to its eerie, glistening high end, though it’s overshadowed by the ravier, more synth-heavy tracks that bookend it.
The setlist draws from all over: Syria, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Panama, Italy, France, Switzerland, and Germany. Those passport stamps paint a picture of techno’s globalized nature in the 21st century. Abdulhadi’s only explicit nod to the SWANA region comes at the end of the set, in a track by a duo called Acid Arab that pairs mournful Arabic-language vocals with strident reeds and a thundering electronic groove. It’s a multicultural affair: Acid Arab are a group of white Frenchmen; the featured singer, Radia Menel, is Algerian; Ammar 808, the track’s remixer, is Tunisian and based in Denmark. “[We] want to build a bridge between the East and the West,” Acid Arab have said. Their own experience shows how fraught that process can be. They have been accused of cultural appropriation, but they’ve also collaborated with artists from across the region, and in 2017 pledged to boycott Israeli venues other than those run by Palestinians and Israeli Arabs—a move that provoked criticism from anti-BDS listeners.
The timing of Abdulhadi’s fabric presents mix is bittersweet: It came out in late November 2023, in the wake of the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, which killed roughly 1,200 people, including some 700 civilians, and in the midst of Israel’s ongoing reprisals against Gaza—which are estimated to have killed more than 22,000 people, the majority of them women and children—and increased settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. The release of the mix should have been a celebratory affair, the next step in a DJ career that proves anything is possible for Palestinians. Perhaps the aura of optimism around her Boiler Room set was illusory. Even last January, when she spoke to The Guardian, Abdulhadi said, “There was a point when people from Germany were buying tickets and flying into Palestine for parties. But now, no one comes. Nobody’s in the mood to do a party. Nobody’s even thinking of organising their birthday.” Yet even in a relic of false optimism lies an idea of hope, and perhaps therein lies its power. Before he was killed by Israeli missiles, the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer wrote a poem equating his death to a kite flown over Gaza, as a symbol of hope to the children orphaned below. “If I must die,” he concluded, “Let it bring hope/Let it be a tale.”


The L.A. rap deconstructionist trio, which features Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs, has released their highest-concept work yet: a hip-hop space opera.

Splendor & Misery

If there’s an animating principle that runs through all of clipping.’s work to date, it’s a willingness to challenge expectations at every turn. To recap, in the past, the L.A. rap trio have swapped out low-end—a traditional pillar of hip-hop’s sound—for high-pitched noise. They once created a drum track entirely from recordings of gunshots. They’ve forced themselves to jump through conceptual hoops—their previous full-length completely eschewed use of the pronoun “I.” And they’ve built a rap song around a power electronics sample from Whitehouse. All of this headiness makes a bit more sense when you consider the band members’ recent outside pursuits: William Hutson finished a Ph.D. dissertation on experimental music, Jonathan Snipes composed film scores, and Daveed Diggs won both a Grammy and a Tony for his performance in the runaway hit musical, Hamilton.
clipping.’s latest full-length, Splendor & Misery, might just be their most challenging release yet. It’s a hip-hop space opera of sorts, one that, according to the band, “follows the sole survivor of a slave uprising on an interstellar cargo ship, and the onboard computer that falls in love with him.” Calling the album high-concept feels like an understatement. This is the rare rap release that draws inspiration in equal parts from prog-rock and P-funk.
Certainly, it’s difficult to question the quality of the raw materials used here. Founding members Snipes and Hutson skillfully evoke the hum of the ship’s machinery with their bleeps, bloops, and shuddering waves of static. Though it should come as no surprise, Diggs’ rapping is technically impressive, if a bit clinical, throughout Splendor & Misery. On “The Breach,” for example, the rapper dexterously spits tongue-twisting lines for 40 straight seconds. His rapid-fire delivery brings to mind Busdriver and André 3000.
Splendor & Misery’s best songs manage to succeed on their own terms, independent of the overarching narrative. “All Black” sets up the storyline in third-person: “So the danger, clear and present/Is presented as the gift of freedom/Wrapped in days of rapping to himself/Up until his vocal chords collapse.” It nods toward the familiar with turns of phrase (the “all black everything” vacuum of space) and playful anachronisms. “Air ’Em Out” is a trap anthem in zero-gravity, its gleaming synths and skittering drums floating skyward with no bassline to hold them down. Diggs allows his tightly-wound delivery to go slack here, imbuing the track with a looseness and personality that’s sorely missing from much of the album.
As with much of clipping.’s work, the ambition is admirable: using a rap album for an Afrofuturist take on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unfortunately, most of Splendor & Misery’s songs rely on the narrative to propel them forward, not the other way around. Many of these tracks lack an identifiable rhythm section and feel more like spoken-word. It’s possible to create compelling hip-hop instrumentals from shards of noise—just look at Food for Animals and Death Grips or clipping.’s previous work—but on Splendor & Misery, clipping. often prize well-placed sound effects over songcraft. In its drive for conceptual rigor, the album neglects to engage the listener musically. That puts a lot of weight on the story, which tends toward the abstract. Perhaps Splendor & Misery’s plot would be better-suited to another medium—the hip-hop musical is, after all, enjoying something of a moment on Broadway.


Using piano, strings, a wind ensemble, and light percussion, Brion’s score subtly and deftly mirrors the existential ambling of Greta Gerwig’s outstanding coming-of-age film.

Jon Brion: Lady Bird (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Jon Brion has probably never been a 17-year-old girl, and yet there’s something to the loose, swinging compositions he’s put together for Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut Lady Bird that indicates a grasp of what it’s like to be young, seething, and entirely dissatisfied with your surroundings. Gerwig’s heroine, whose name is Christine but who goes by Lady Bird as a bid for an identity beyond the material conditions of her lower-middle-class family in Sacramento, Calif., introduces herself within the first minutes of the film by flinging herself out of a moving car during an argument with her mother about why she must go to college on the East Coast. You see her mom scream and then there’s a cut to a pink cast with the words “FUCK YOU MOM” firmly scrawled on it. It’s quite an entrance, and a movie with a heavier hand might have thrown something punk-rebellious in the soundtrack, or at the very least something with a snare-driven backbeat and an electric guitar. Not Lady Bird. Christine’s not punk; she's just exasperated and understimulated, searching tirelessly for a way out of the cage she sees around her life.
In the past decade or so, movies about quirky high schoolers have thankfully aged out of their twee phase. Lady Bird has far more in common with Kenneth Lonergan’s 2011 stunner Margaret than it does with Juno; it has gravitas, and it assigns more meaning to the looking than the finding, the neat endings, the easy answers. With a piano, string, wind ensemble, and light percussion, Brion’s score deftly mirrors Lady Bird’s existential ambling. His notes barely glance off the piano keys, and there always seems to be a spring in the music’s step, leaving just enough room for the film’s actors to carry the real weight. This isn’t the kind of soundtrack that tells you exactly how to feel; Lady Bird isn’t that kind of movie. Its magic happens in the space between the characters, the tensions and betrayals and bruises they inflict on each other and how they propel each other forward. There’s an arc to the film—it doesn’t just throw its characters in a spin-cycle of increasing absurdity, like the Brion-scored I Heart Huckabees—but it’s a subtle, emotional one. Lady Bird’s big quest is just to fly across the country to college in New York without destroying every meaningful relationship she’s ever had along the way.
Lady Bird is one of Brion’s more unassuming scores (you wouldn’t necessarily be able to place its theme instantaneously if you heard it out in the wild), but it’s also one of his least cynical. Even the gut-mangling Charlie Kaufman movie Synecdoche, New York had its sneering moments with wildly sarcastic Brion themes to accompany them. Lady Bird’s score stays in a consistent mode, never pushing beyond a light touch, which is fitting enough for a film set in Sacramento, a place whose anodyne pleasantness threatens to swallow its heroine alive. And still in all the sunniness lurks the sense that something is happening. Something is pushing Christine toward a precipice that she’s both terrified and eager to scale. A bass drum pounds insistently on “Maybe”; piano keys strike up through the woodwinds like mountains through fog on “Leaving”; there’s a track called “Hope” and a track called “More Hope” and one “Hope Against Hope” and then, finally, the minor key conclusion, “Hope?”
Set in the early 2000s, right around the time Jon Brion started composing for directors like Paul Thomas Anderson who prefer to see the world askew, Lady Bird easily could have aimed for millennial nostalgia with its music cues. Rather than have Christine listen to the American Analog Set or early Sufjan Stevens, though, Gerwig pivots her emotional growth around a ubiquitous Dave Matthews Band single. Brion follows her lead. The way he colors the film’s world leaves it wide open, with room enough for gentle movement and subtle triumphs. His light, playful motifs buoy the narrative without crowding it, and help paint a rich, fulfilling portrait of a girl on the edge, ready to fly.


Pink Floyd: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn [40th Anniversary Edition]

They say legendry lysergic prophet Timothy Leary used to dose the drinks at parties with LSD, but it might not have been necessary. By the tail end of the 1960s, something was already in the air (and water) marking a radical cultural shift; recreational drugs were just one part of the anti-establishment equation. By 1967, year of the Summer of Love, the counterculture made a valiant bid to supplant the dominant culture, and in retrospect a strong case can be made that the counter-culture won.
At the forefront of this battle, in Britain, were acts like Pink Floyd, fixtures of the nascent underground psychedelic scene. Granted, they were fixtures of the infamous UFO Club and the toast of no less than Paul McCartney (allegedly a recent convert to the powers of psychotropic drugs), but the band never claimed to be spokespersons for the revolution. They weren't leaders but fellow travelers-- at least until their epochal debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Piper was recorded at Abbey Road at the same time the Beatles were there recording Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but the results couldn't have been more at odds with one another. Where the Beatles exerted complete control over the tools of the studio, Pink Floyd used the studio to lose control. It didn't hurt that the band's primary songwriter and visionary Syd Barrett was on the verge of permanently losing control himself. Less than a year after the release of Piper, in 1967, Barrett was out of the band, one of the most prominent and tragic casualties of the rock era. Of course, while Barrett lived out the remainder of his life as one of the psychedelic age's walking wounded, Pink Floyd went on to much bigger (if not necessarily) better things. Their catalog remains an AOR goldmine, the gift that keeps on giving for the band's principals, who, all said and done, released relatively few records during their heyday, but who have benefited a thousand fold from their efforts.
The 40th anniversary edition of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn-- overseen by producer James Guthrie, who engineered and co-produced The Wall and who first cleaned up Piper for its 1994 reissue-- is now available as either a 2xCD or 3xCD set, but don't get your hopes up for a bounty of rarities or other goodies. The former includes both the stereo version of the album as well as the mono version (which many Floyd fanatics find superior). The 3xCD edition includes an extra disc covering the group's classic 1967 singles "Arnold Layne" and "Apples and Oranges", their respective B-sides "Candy and a Currant Bun" and "Paintbox", an alternate take of "Matilda Mother", two alternate versions of "Interstellar Overdrive", and a stereo version of "Apples and Oranges". Only "Matilda Mother" and one take on "Interstellar Overdrive" are previously unreleased.
A special edition of Piper was inevitable, but so was the failure of any reissue as incomprehensive as this one: This new edition underscores the reality that EMI and/or the surviving members of Pink Floyd-- especially since they shifted from band to de facto corporation-- have been either downright stingy with their unreleased archives or hopelessly coy about what may lie in there, leaving fans to settle for second-hand scraps like those on A Treeful of Secrets, a 17xCD fan-made rarities compilation. From a fan's perspective, Pink Floyd, Inc. has been either indifferent at best (or hostile at worst) to the notion of managing its legacy-- especially its formative years-- and has only reluctantly taken up caretaking duties as part and parcel of cordoning it off.
Few would criticize the merits of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn itself (as reflected in the rating above)-- it's an essential album. While so many other products of the Summer of Love were positive and unifying, Piper was fractured and scary. Songs like "Astronomy Domine" and "Interstellar Overdrive" captured the sustained improvisational freakouts of the band's live shows, but did so in more concise form. Other songs, like "Lucifer Sam," "Bike", and "The Gnome", split the difference between quirky pop songs and explorations of the nightmarish found-sound fringe, setting a twisted template for countless acts to come. By 1980's The Wall, Pink Floyd had become sterile and solipsistic. At this auspicious start, Pink Floyd were thrilling. Anything was possible.
Those aforementioned singles, "Arnold Layne" (produced by early Floyd booster Joe Boyd) and "See Emily Play", probably remain the best distillations of early Pink Floyd, and in particular the pop genius of Syd Barrett. They set the stage not only for the more sustained vision of Piper, but also Barrett's all-too-brief subsequent solo output, before he receded into the background. In fact, it's the presence of Barrett (who wrote all but one song on Piper) that accounts for the album's influence as more than just a psychedelic relic. As a lyricist, his stream-of-conscious nonsense verses are every bit the match of Lewis Carroll. As a vocalist, often singing with keyboardist Rick Wright, his languid delivery lends the album a dreamy quality at odds with its menace. You can catch glimpses of Barrett's subconscious in a 12-page reproduction of one of his notebooks, hanging as bait for ardent fans to shell out for the deluxe 3xCD version (selling for around $40), but at least the tactile document is something you can't get anywhere else.
That's not the case for the rest of this anniversary set. Even taking into account the remastering, the long-available stereo edition of Piper can now be discounted as little more than a novelty. Yet you can only buy the mono version on its own through iTunes. Double-dipping is one thing; compelling fans to double-dip is another, and the unavailability of the mono version as a stand-alone CD purchase is the kind of move that all but goads downloaders to do exactly what their gut tells them to do. Maybe Pink Floyd can't be bothered to troll through the BBC archives for live material, footage or lost tapes, or bake old masters to their sonic satisfaction, but certainly they can hire someone to do it for them. The appetite is there, which makes such a banal celebration of this psychedelic masterwork so disappointing.


Side by Side shows Natalie Prass' playful side, comprising two live cuts of songs from her self-titled solo debut, as well as covers of Grimes, Anita Baker, and Simon & Garfunkel.

Side by Side EP

Let me be the first to formally apologize for accidentally contributing to the execrable proliferation of analyses that Natalie Prass sounds like "a Disney princess." This writer was in attendance for a show where she took a moment to defend herself from the claim, which was followed by a not-sober fellow yelling out an unprintable word and the name of this website, a moment that made at least one person in the vicinity feel very uncomfortable. You can understand how she would take it as a backhanded compliment: There's something unavoidably infantilizing about the suggestion that your voice resembles a fictional cartoon monarch's, even if Snow White could really sing.
It makes her sound so… formal, too, and while Prass makes music inspired by classic artists like Dusty Springfield and Dionne Warwick, she's no traditionalist. Covers of modern musicians like Janet Jackson and Ryan Adams have snuck their way into her sets, and she even popped up on the AV Club last month to turn the gory chug of Slayer's "Raining Blood" into an inside-voice delight. Side by Side shows that playful side, comprising two live cuts of songs from her self-titled solo debut, as well as covers of Grimes, Anita Baker, and Simon & Garfunkel, artists whose only obvious connection is "singers that Natalie Prass decided to cover on her new EP."
Her take on Baker's "Caught Up in the Rapture" does away with those awesomely '80s gated drums and sparkling filter sweeps, instead pushing the tempo and adding guitar for something a little more lively. On the original, Baker welcomes the listener with open arms through some magical doorway, where the evening of a lifetime awaits. Prass sings from a more present place, like she's three beers into a muggy summer night at a Nashville bar. She makes the gentle folk-rock of "Sound of Silence" a little more lively, nailing those melodies with her graceful, nimble voice. "REALiTi" is done as a straight up ragtime jaunt, and if her press release commentary on the cover ("[Grimes is] probably going to say 'what is this jazz shit' and hate it") is maybe a little too accurately self-deprecating, she at least commits.
The live versions of "My Baby Don't Understand Me" and "Christy" strip away the dense orchestral instrumentation and let a Wurlitzer piano do the driving. The arrangements are cleaner, and show her mastery over negative space. One knock on the self-titled record was that Prass sometimes sounded secondary to the orchestra, but here the same can't be said. My favorite moment on the original LP was at the end of "My Baby Don't Understand Me", where the repeated refrain of "our love is a long goodbye" built to a grand climax. On the live take, she lets the groove ride a few seconds longer, transforming the swelling romance into something steamier.
Similarly, the nighttime vibe of the unadorned "Christy" precludes all future Disney princess comparisons, as she lets the lonesomeness of the lyrics ("Why does it have to be that she can take the hand of anyone she meets?/ Still, the only one she sees belongs to me") really sink in. In this, Side by Side does what a good EP should—it reminds us of what she's skilled at, while showing off some other strengths. There's even something like a mission statement to her music in the title, and the song it's taken from: "When I feel the magic of you/ The feeling's always new." It's an old sentiment, and the lyric belongs to another artist, but Prass makes it hers.