By 1995’s The Great Annihilator, Swans weren’t imitating pop music so much as swallowing its features to create something monstrous. This deluxe reissue also includes Michael Gira’s solo LP Drainland.

Swans / Michael Gira: The Great Annihilator / Drainland

The Great Annihilator / Drainland

Michael Gira was just two years away from pulling the plug on his band Swans when it released The Great Annihilator in 1995. Well before then, by the late 1980s in fact, it was clear that the shape-shifting experimental outfit had morphed into something quite far removed from the brutishly loud, grinding repetition of its early efforts. The difference was most glaring on its surprisingly faithful covers of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home.” From there, though, Gira and company re-calibrated their ability to bastardize pop music for a sound that was anything but conventional, even when they opted for seemingly traditional song structures and arrangements.
The Great Annihilator documents a configuration of Swans that wore pop, country, and lounge stylings in a way that no longer clashed with the malevolence of the group’s spirit. By this point, Swans weren’t imitating pop music so much as swallowing its features to create something monstrous. And although the album suggests that Swans were still far cry from the orchestral ensemble Gira assembled when he relaunched the band in 2010, that was only the case on record. Swans Are Dead, a live album that covers The Great Annihilator era, shows that Swans circa ’95 had grown much closer to their present-day state than one might expect.
On its own, The Great Annihilator doesn’t offer a complete picture of what Swans were truly capable of at the time. For fans who got onboard early in the band’s career, the album might lack abrasion; on the other hand, compared to the oceanic aural depth of the latter-day albums, *The Great Annihilator *is relatively thin. Nevertheless, the album does offer crucial perspective on a band whose versatility has basically known no bounds. Doug Henderson’s remastering for this deluxe edition gives Martin Bisi’s mix room to breathe where it had been flattened before, and the inclusion of Gira’s solo album Drainland sheds additional light.
After a brief instrumental opener laced with mystical overtones, airy chants, and the sounds of laughing children, The Great Annihilator gets underway in earnest with “I Am the Sun.” Even the uninitiated will get the irony as Gira and frontwoman Jarboe sing the refrain “I love everyone”—an irony further highlighted by the band’s leaden live rendition and Jarboe’s horrifying 2012 solo remake. But The Great Annihilator actually benefits when the band dials-back the heaviness. Jarboe, whose full range extends from jazz elegance to sugary pop to demonic growling akin to Diamada Galás, brings a sense of playfulness to the original “I Am the Sun.” At the end of the song, her voice is multi-tracked with handclaps to sound like children on a playground.
Gira too restrains himself from laying it on thick. These days, Gira tends to sing nakedly from the heart. On much of The Great Annihilator, he leers as if doing a self-consciously evil take on Johnny Cash. On “I Am the Sun,” with his straight delivery of the lines “when the light goes out/I kill another child,” he proves that his imagery requires no affectation in order to sting. On the contrary, the song’s vocal styles, bright harmonic makeup and manic drive all make for a rather fertile study in contrast against the words. Song titles like “Killing for Company,” and “My Buried Child,” now paired with Drainland’s “Why I Ate My Wife” and “Low Life Form,” suggest that Gira’s preoccupations hadn’t changed all that much.
But the opening sequence on Drainland—a recording of Gira demanding that Jarboe support him while she protests his excessive drinking and drug abuse—throws his words into relief that no longer feels comfortably distant as theater. More droning and abstract than The Great Annihilator, Drainland imports Jarboe and multi-instrumentalist/drummer Bill Rieflin from Swans, suggesting that if it isn’t a Swans album in name, it shares the same disposition. Again, Gira and company play up contrasts by using acoustic guitar, found sounds, and wide-open space as vehicles for immersive negativity.
Ironically enough, in some ways Drainland makes a more powerful impact with a comparatively gentle attack, especially without the artificial-sounding gated snare that dates The Great Annihilator. The two albums are conjoined by songs that share the same lyrics, “Where Does a Body End?” and “Where Does Your Body Begin?”—which suggests an internal call-and-response between Swans and Gira’s other creative pursuits. He would go on to make just one more Swans album—the far more experimental Soundtracks for the Blind—before putting the band on ice for over a decade. For all The Great Annihilator is missing, it is nevertheless pivotal as Swans’ final pop-leaning release. It also leaves no doubt about Gira’s lifelong dedication to breaking the mold.


The founder of the influential Hotflush label here crafts a satisfying mix that finds him moving seamlessly between bass music and techno proper, carving out a middle ground that feels oddly fresh.

DJ-Kicks

There's been no shortage of dialogue around how dubstep has exploded and splintered into countless fragments-- disparate but still interlinked shards reflecting shades of techno, house, garage, drum'n'bass and everything else under the sun. English-born Paul Rose has historically been one of the earliest agents of this dubstep disintegration, making the move to techno haven Berlin early and establishing an interest in the genre that soon became commonplace among many of his genre contemporaries. Founding what would become one of the leading institutions in the techno/dubstep fusion with his Hotflush Recordings label and unprecedentedly landing a residency at the world's most infamous techno club, Berghain, Rose-- better known as Scuba, SCB, or Spectr-- has been a leading light in dissolving the boundaries between different worlds of dance music.
But no matter how experimental or cross-boundary this particular sphere of music gets, there's always a line drawn between all these iterations of "bass music" and what might be considered "proper" techno and house. It's the reason why Rose splits his time between Scuba (bass music) and SCB (straight-up techno), why his memorable RA podcast was a "versus" between his alter egos, and why his SUB:STANCE club night happens on Fridays at Berghain and not Saturdays. It's the reason why his only previous commercial mix CD as Scuba focused almost exclusively on dubstep-centric sounds with none of SCB trickling in. But all bets are off with Rose's contribution to the long-running DJ-Kicks series, where that border fence between "bass" and techno is finally demolished. Mixing genres isn't anything out of the ordinary anymore (in fact, it's pretty much expected), but rarely do we see this kind of flitting between extremes in such a small and confined space.
I'm tempted to say that the overarching theme here is techno, but it's a weird sort of techno. Even when we get big names like Surgeon and Marcel Dettmann, we're not given chunky workouts or sleek, streamlined bangers, but the militarist thrust of "The Power of Doubt" and the jerky IDM of "Captivate". Rose prefers these album cuts over easily more functional single material from either producer, which says a lot about his outside-the-box approach here. Forgoing both the instant-gratification quick mixing of bass music DJs and the lengthy blends of Berlin techno jocks, the tracks feel like they're melting in and out of each other, which means their generic signifiers melt away as well. Rose's style is a fastidious ebb and flow of microscopic beat-stitching. Structurally, Scuba's DJ-Kicks throws another curveball: It doesn't build toward any particular climax, nor is it centered around the "drop" structure inherent to most bass music. The closest we get are the bits of warm melody that seep in with tracks like Braille's jazzy "Breakup" or Mr. Beatnick's elegant G-funk epic "Don't Walk Away From My Love".
Lately Rose's own productions have been moving into house territory, slowing below even the accepted median "bass" tempo of 130 beats per minute (as theorized by Pitchfork's own Martin Clark). What this means is that his mix plays the aural illusion of actually slowing down over the course of its duration: where most DJs would gradually ratchet up the tempo, Rose drags it down from a healthy 132 BPM to a leisurely 125, right where his newest tracks sit. The descent is deceptive, because the mix comes closer to anthemic as it slows: The CD-exclusive "M.A.R.S" is an uncharacteristically happy-go-lucky banger, and it's followed by a rousing selection of house producers like Recondite, Jichael Mackson, and Rivet, previously unassociated with either Scuba or SCB.
No late-2011 Scuba mix would be complete without his controversial "Adrenalin", and DJ-Kicks finally delivers it. The track is given a five-minute spotlight, a gratuitous move for an equally gratuitous track touching on the untouchable: The pariah genres of prog house and trance are fastened with the most decadent breakdown you've heard since you used to listen to Sasha. Leaving "Adrenalin" to the end of the mix is perhaps the only predictable moment on Paul Rose's DJ-Kicks, a disc that's otherwise determined in its mission to keep you on your toes, knitting complex percussive webs and blending genres at a reckless rate that feels like a new gold standard for an already bled-through music world. It might be just a mix CD, but Scuba's DJ-Kicks is a landmark both personal and scene-wide. It shouldn't come as a surprise though, because Paul Rose is just leading the pack like he's always done.


Grapefruit

Kiran Leonard is just 20 years old, but if you were looking to paint him as a wide-eyed ingénue, you've already missed the boat: Such is his experience and tireless work ethic he's already coming to resemble a veteran. A rangy young man from Oldham, Greater Manchester, Leonard picked up the mandolin aged five, and wrote his breakout 2013 song "Dear Lincoln" – a manic piece of psychedelic pop, like Van Dyke Parks reincarnated in the body of a hyperactive English schoolboy – when he was 14 years old. Currently ensconced at Oxford University's Wadham College, where he's studying Spanish and Portuguese, Leonard is an intellectual sponge drinking up an ocean of knowledge. His frame of reference encompasses playwright Samuel Beckett and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the mangled productions of Death Grips and the brainbox pop of Elephant 6, while "Pink Fruit" – the second song on this, his second LP – is a sprawling song suite with more twists and turns in its 16 minutes than Slint's Spiderland. The crux of its peculiar lyric? An erotic encounter between a woman and a squid.
It's a lot, right? Right. Grapefruit is by turns astounding, accomplished and difficult to digest, an album shouldering ambitions so big that you fear that at any point it might give way at the knees. Undoubtedly, Leonard is an autodidact of amazing talent and energy. At times his idiosyncratic performance style resembles Dirty Projectors' Dave Longstreth – see "Don't Make Friends With Good People," with those wandering, pointillist guitar lines, that voice that leaps boldly across octaves, as if participating in some tipsy parkour. Elsewhere, he recalls a fellow British outsider, Richard Dawson, whose take on the narrative folk tradition is both wild-eyed and whimsical. The lolloping, rusty groove of "Öndör Gongor" is a fractured song-story sketched in enigmatic strokes – a strapping maritime fantasy set "in the night of the shotgun," in which sharks lurk as "a clatter of shins hit the dock" and a mysterious orb named Ethel waits, hungrily. The song ends with staccato blasts of guitar and a chanted shanty-like coda, although how all this relates to the subject of the song's title – a giant who lived in early-20th century Mongolia – is left unaddressed.
Grapefruit is a gnarlier-sounding record than its predecessor, its lurching guitars and skittering, free percussion recalling math-rock luminaries such as Don Caballero or Storm & Stress. It is at its most digestible, however, when Leonard plays it orchestral. "Caiaphas in Fetters" is a beautiful confection of strings and fluttering guitar that finds him posing questions to a lover: "Ask yourself/Do you feel as I feel?" "Half Ruined Already," meanwhile, is a fingerpicked love song in which two participants – one legless, one armless – come together in one romantic whole. It was inspired by a Werner Herzog short about a couple who met in a leper's colony, but succeeds in taking such grim subject matter and alchemizing it into warm sentiment. At the other end of the scale is the somewhat opaque "Exeter Services," which flips between quizzical improv and skidding emo, all flail and gasp and rickety cathedrals of language built to collapse: "I'm in the Catskills! Total duality! All of Ophelia! Absolute anarchy!"
Grapefruit is 57 minutes long and feels packed to the rafters, as if Leonard is a hoarder of ideas and song fragments, unwilling or unable to let anything go. Take "Pink Fruit." In its 16 minutes, it flits between noisy spazz-rock, folk shambling, woodwind interludes, short-wave radio tinkering and free percussion. I'd stop short of calling it confused – even when it's getting wild, there's enough recurring lyrical cues to suggest its maker is working to a detailed map. But he can be rather an impatient guide, and while the ground it covers is startling and often picturesque, Grapefruit is an album you feel led through, rather than being left to explore or inhabit. Perhaps in this regard, at least, Kiran Leonard still has things to learn.


Citing influences from DJ Screw to James Baldwin, Kevin Barnes’ latest is a maximalist dance party about our simulated realities.

Of Montreal: White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood

White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood

Did you hear the one about how reality is an illusion and what we think of as “human life” and “the universe” are just lines of code in some superior being’s cosmic computer simulation? Although it has the ring of stoner mysticism, simulated reality is an actual theory that scientists and philosophers have seriously entertained. At a debate on the subject a couple of years ago, moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson confessed, “It is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.” The theory gained currency, for obvious reasons, after Brexit, the 2016 election, and the odd best picture mix-up at last year’s Oscars.
It also made quite the impression on Of Montreal mastermind Kevin Barnes, who cites months of Trump-related “simulated reality paranoid” as a chief influence on his new album, White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood. On the chorus of the best track, “Plateau Phase/No Careerism No Corruption,” he suggests that what we think of as reality is so fragile and fluid that, “If we put our ear to the ceiling, we can hear the multiverse seeding, we can hear the simulation wheezing.”
Not that Barnes—a maximalist in all things, from songwriting to character creation to performance style—could ever confine himself to a single inspiration. For more than a decade, he’s been documenting his emotional crises on Of Montreal albums that double as catalogs of his recent obsessions. Along with referencing Germaine Greer, James Salter, and classic European art films like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Barnes increasingly conceives each LP as a genre study. False Priest, from 2010, was his Prince-inspired foray into plastic funk. His most recent album, 2016’s Innocence Reaches, filtered contemporary EDM sounds and internet/social justice jargon through vintage synthesizers. Now, each almost-yearly release plays like a new season of an ongoing Kevin Barnes anthology series; the styles, characters, and themes change, but the auteurist creator and his intellectual voracity remain the same.
With White Is Relic, Danceteria season approaches. Barnes includes a list of influences that features ’80s-era extended club mixes, the late chopped-and-screwed pioneer DJ Screw, and the colorful gender fuckery of films by Pedro Almodóvar. On a personal level, Barnes says he’s finally forgiven himself for the failure of his well-documented marriage to former bandmate Nina Aimee Grøttland and fallen in love again. But it’s simulated reality that makes these apparently unrelated sounds and ideas hang together, in one of the most cohesive Of Montreal albums since their 2007 masterpiece, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
It’s to Barnes’ credit that, despite his experimentation, every song he records has his stamp—those churning melodies, the faintly androgynous vocals, the comically vast lyrical vocabulary. Still, White Is Relic goes a step beyond even his recent genre studies, stretching the typical four-minute Of Montreal single so that only six tracks fill its 41-minute runtime. Punctuated by fluttery horns and synths that recall zippers on nylon, the long instrumental passages really do give the impression that Barnes has remixed his own compositions.
Cribbing from DJ Screw, Barnes often slows down just one element of a song, creating the spooky sensation that it’s playing in two different dimensions at once. In the outro to “Paranoiac Intervals/Body Dysmorphia,” his vocals are pulled thin like taffy over increasingly arpeggiated drum beats. “Body dysmorphia, I know how it feels,” he chants, as the music translates that perceptual distortion into aural terms. The overall impression is of some outside force—perhaps an alien species with next-level programming skills and a sick sense of humor—adjusting each track as it plays. In fact, Barnes did compose the album as a sort of disembodied intelligence, incorporating the contributions of remote collaborators instead of gathering a band in the studio.
If Kevin Barnes the songwriter is playing god, then Kevin Barnes the singer is all too human, a digital ant like everyone else desperate to stay sane in this darkest computer-simulated timeline. Love is one source of transcendence. It gives us a glimpse of the dirty-minded, late-’00s Of Montreal on “Sophie Calle Private Game/Every Person Is a Pussy, Every Pussy Is a Star!,” a mid-tempo sex jam that name-drops Sappho and recounts all-night Almodóvar binges, alongside erotically asphyxiated saxophones.
Like so many of us fragile aesthetes, Barnes has spent the past two years looking to political art for inspiration to resist America’s new dystopian regime. That’s where he channels the work of Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin, as well as the words “white is relic,” for better and worse. On the ghostly “Writing the Circles/Orgone Tropics,” the compulsively self-dramatizing singer seems to be chiding himself with the observation, “This acute loneliness that you feel has nothing to do with other people.” But even if your tolerance for white artists discovering racism two decades into their career is high, it’s sure to be tested by some of Barnes’ more self-indulgent lyrics. The dreamy opening track “Soft Music/Juno Portraits of the Jovian Sky” finds him complaining, “Soft music drains the oxygen from besieged Bushwick streets reflexively retching Anglo influx” and resolving that “there will be no gentrificating our graffitied warship of summer love.”
It’s easy to miss the album’s sonic and conceptual ingenuity amid the lyrical bloat. The thing is, even Barnes’ worst clunkers serve a purpose. When they give way to one of the devastatingly plainspoken lines he’s also capable of writing—“It’s good for us depressives to keep someone else alive” on “Sophie Calle,” for example—it’s like he’s lifting a curtain to reveal a shaft of midday sunlight. Whether that blackout shade is Kevin Barnes’ tortured psyche, America in 2018, or our entire, allegedly simulated universe, everything is briefly, brilliantly illuminated when White Is Relic pulls it back.


Veteran producer, DJ, and remixer finally issed his debut LP this year, and it features collaborations with Jake Shears and Soulwax as well as covers of Public Enemy and Nine Inch Nails.

Sexor

Forget chestnuts and nog. The close of the calendar year is a time for rifling through the past twelve months and catching up on all the records you either didn't pay enough attention to or slept on entirely. Released with a whimper in February, Tiga Sontag's Sexor probably falls under that banner for a lot of people. While the Montreal DJ has long enjoyed renown among clubgoers as a top-tier supplier of slithery, trashy electro (check his 2002 DJ-Kicks mix for proof), this marks the first original outing of his career.
Released on Canada's Last Gang Records-- best known for breaking the likes of Death From Above 1979, Metric, and MSTRKRFT-- Sexor finds Tiga atoning for the silence with a series of bangers, skits, and-- in keeping with a longstanding tradition that's seen him try his hand at everything from Nelly's "Hot in Herre" to fellow Montrealer Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night"-- a fresh handful of cover treatments. The bad news is that Sexor feels a bit forced, a bit sellotaped together. Where Sontag's singles and remixes are generally pretty immaculate, you can sense his anxiety over the long-form format here. Everything from the album's loosely-conceived conceptual overlay (Sexor is apparently a planet where "imagination rules the nation" and "sexy lightning always strikes twice") to its light smattering of voicemail excerpts and telephone conversations points to his willingness to kowtow to long-player conventions. While it's clear from the tracks' compact running times that he's trying to keep things concise and poppy, he might have been better served by instead letting some of these songs unfurl and build.
Nonetheless, with co-production courtesy of Soulwax and Jesper Dahlback, there's also lots to like here. With a bassline containing trace amounts of "Material Girl" and an insidious little chorus, "Far From Home" proves Sontag fluent in effervescent, 80s-tinged synthpop. Elsewhere, Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears tags along for the snaking, sweaty electro of "You Gonna Want Me", "Brothers" conquers a silly lyric with a convincing New Order impression, and "Good As Gold" finds Tiga and producers Soulwax channeling their inner James Murphys to deliver the album's only real epic. Even the covers yield decent returns. Despite being originally released in 2004, Tiga's drastically retooled version of Public Enemy's "Louder Than a Bomb" makes strange sense here; perhaps even more surprising is that he also manages to wring genuine atmosphere out of a slowed-to-a-crawl take on Nine Inch Nails' "Down in It".
Ultimately though, too much of Sexor feels suspiciously like the middle of the road. If it doesn't bump enough, slink enough, or sing enough, what good is it? Tiga's capable of better than this, and his discography bears that fact out; the good news is that he's reportedly working with Soulwax on a followup. That he's not waiting another five years for the next album has to bode well.


On their first sustained collaboration since the Squirrel Nut Zippers disbanded, Bird and Mathus draw from a range of old styles, primarily gospel, with the ease of old friends getting together for coffee.

These 13

The makers of These 13 met at a pivotal moment in their lives. Back in 1994, Jimbo Mathus’ band the Squirrel Nut Zippers were just starting to put their stamp on a host of pre-rock musical styles, from jazz and swing to klezmer. They ran into Andrew Bird at the Black Mountain Music Festival, where he was playing fiddle, and eventually invited him to play on 1996’s Hot, which went multi-platinum off the unlikely popularity of the single “Hell,” a song that describes eternal damnation in gruesome detail. Although never a core member, Bird recorded and occasionally toured with the Zippers throughout the ‘90s, when they were misfiled under swing revival alongside groups with Daddy in their names. While Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy borrowed willy-nilly from big band influences, the Zippers were more specific and knowledgeable—they freely commingled hot jazz with jump blues, irreverent string-band folk and Depression-era pop.
These 13 is not Bird and Mathus’ first time playing together since then. In fact, Bird played on “Train on Fire,” from last year’s Lost Songs of Doc Souchon. But it is their first close and sustained collaboration, with the duo recording these songs mostly live around a single mic and no other musicians intruding. Somber, spare, and amiable, these 13 songs draw from a range of old styles, primarily gospel. The gap between the Zippers’ heyday and this reunion only reveals how they’ve grown as artists, each taking the band’s anything-goes lessons in opposite directions. Bird’s music is based on flights of fancy, running folk through his looping pedal and whistling like a theremin on top of it. Mathus, on the other hand, has plumbed old-school country and rural blues. Bird can sound too clever, Mathus not clever enough. But These 13 allows each to compensate for the shortcomings of the other while playing up what makes them distinctive. Their voices and instruments combine effortlessly, like old friends getting together for coffee.
Still, there is also something oddly old-fashioned about this music and the sentiments they’re putting across. “Poor Lost Souls” surveys the homeless situation in Los Angeles and sees wasted potential in the men and women who are “just a lump of coal” when they “could have been a diamond.” It plays more like a cover of an old song than a new original, like something the Louvin Brothers might have sung on Satan Is Real, yet this odd ventriloquism can be weirdly distancing, especially for a song about crushing poverty. The downcast “Red Velvet Rope” heads toward the opposite end of the class spectrum, dreaming up a celebrity romance where a lover competes with a legion of fans for affection. Disconnected from any current celebrity culture, it sounds unexpectedly stuffy, as though they’ve unearthed an outtake from a Gold Diggers musical from the ‘30s.
Even if they do get lost in the past, both Mathus and Bird remain attuned to the morality of folk music, whether urban or rural. They seem to understand that it enables empathy and compassion in the performer as well as in the listener, which plays into the hymn-like quality of the music. In fact, the best moments on These 13 sit you down in a hard wooden pew in a little church somewhere far from any city. On “Stonewall (1863),” Mathus sings like he’s leading a congregation in fellowship, speaking each line before singing it. It’s an old technique used in churches without access to hymn books—a means of making sure that everyone can experience the fellowship and community that comes with simply singing along.
The chorus of that song, however, is darker than such a description implies. “Let us now cross over the river,” Mathus and Bird sing together, “and rest ‘neath the shade of the trees.” Death looms over these songs, although the duo describe heaven without the baggage of culture-war Christianity. Mathus revels in the Book of Revelations imagery of closer “Three White Horses & a Golden Chain,” which describes an unusual funeral parade. “You’re gonna need somebody when you come to die,” they sing as the album draws to its close, and these two lifelong friends sound like they’ve got each other covered.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On It’s Good To Be Differ-Ent, Detroit's Differ-Ent (aka DJ Bone) doubles down on his hometown’s techno legacy, delivering a triple LP that acts as a sort of manifesto.

It's Good to Be Differ-Ent

Eric Dulan, aka DJ Bone aka Differ-Ent, has spent the past two decades as a loyal soldier in the trenches of Detroit techno. Though often overlooked (his bio defensively asserts “Think of Detroit Techno and DJ Bone might not be high on your list of luminaries because he is 100% independent and does things on his terms and on his terms only”), he has developed a small-but-rabid following for his flashy, technical and decidedly old-school approach to DJing. His productions—often self-released on his Subject Detroit label—adhere faithfully to the fundamental principles set forth by Underground Resistance and Jeff Mills, with tough, driving drum programming laying a solid foundation for either wide-eyed celestial synth work or teeth-gritting severity, designed to drive dancers into a frenzy. If this suggests a kind of bunker mentality, it’s not without good reason: For many, Detroit’s original strain of techno remains the most potent, with transatlantic exports rarely making good on the Motor City’s exhilarating mix of meditative depth and rushing energy.
On It’s Good To Be Differ-Ent, his debut album as Differ-Ent, Dulan doubles down on his hometown’s legacy, delivering a triple LP that acts as a sort of manifesto, career encapsulation and litmus test for fans. As with many dance music albums, the format itself runs counter to the nature of the music. Simply put, listening to a long stretch of DJ tools can be a tiring affair, with extended intros and outros begging to be blended with something else. It’s an issue that every producer who ventures outside the comfort zone of 12” EPs has to contend with, and Dulan does so in his signature style, by putting his head down and powering through.
The slightly-overwhelming eighty minutes of It’s Good… are meant strictly for DJs and heads, with plenty of bangers and little else. To be fair, this record was likely never meant to be listened to front-to-back. Each side has two songs on it, allowing you to digest each of the three 12”s as a standalone EP. Approached this way, the album clicks, with each third offering a slightly different side of the producer’s work.
Opener “Inhabit Tense” dives right in with some thick pads and pummeling, machine funk toms. This first run of songs blasts out of the gate, with Dulan’s extrovert side in full effect. Exciting as it is, he can lapse into a predictable deference to his elders, particularly Mike Banks. The fidgety lead and blasting strings on “Marvel Less” scratch the Detroit itch well enough, but by same token feel a bit rote. No doubt in the right hands they will come alive on a dance floor, but elsewhere on the album Dulan delivers the goods with more personal aplomb.
The middle of the album offers some of the strangest and strongest work attributed to the Differ-Ent alias so far. “We Have U Surrounded” pares back the sound palette, using a single liquid note and tight percussion to cast a graceful spell. “Motive Hate Shun” chokes out all the air in the room with miasmic subbass and menacing flanger—it’s one of the album’s highlights. Perhaps meant as a counterpoint, “Fasten 8 Shun” returns to Dulan’s beloved string sounds, but here his melodies ambitiously reach beyond the clouds rather than cruise coldly into the abyss. Finally, E-side opener shows “Gem In Eyes” shows Dulan’s emotional side, reminiscent of Hieroglyphic Being’s “So Much Noise 2 Be Heard” if it was recorded in a real studio.
The album’s closing stretch feels a little throwaway, with the obligatory chill-out of “A Calm Bliss.” It’s cool enough, but once it’s over it doesn’t particularly resonate, and “Lazer Eyes” swerves right back to the dense paranoia rather than maintain the mood. “I M Different” closes the album in a more electro style. He may not actually be that different from his Detroit forebears, but It’s Good To Be Differ-Ernt does stand apart from much modern techno. Orthodox but accomplished, it’s an album that exists outside time, sidestepping fashionable tropes staying true to it’s roots. However, it may be more rewarding for the casual fan to catch Bone in one of his virtuosic DJ sets than here.


On their ninth album, the twins revisit their roots, re-recording demos they wrote as teenagers and polishing them into poignant synth-pop gems.

Hey, I’m Just Like You

In 1998, Tegan and Sara caused a small stir when they won a Calgary, Alberta talent contest called Garage Warz. The identical twins appeared on a local news segment to talk excitedly about their win, draped in capacious clothing and distinguishable by Sara’s long hair and Tegan’s lip piercing. “The thing that I like the best,” said Sara, “is that, I don’t think that [the judges] think, ‘Wow, they’re perfect, they [need] no improvement’... I think they just see maybe a sparkle of something, that can get to be something bigger.”
Even in her wide-eyed hopefulness, Sara probably didn’t imagine that the duo would go on to have a storied 20-year career: first as Canadian grunge-folk darlings, then pop-punk rebels embraced by the White Stripes and Paramore, and later as synth-pop troubadours joining Taylor Swift onstage. On Tegan and Sara’s ninth studio album, Hey, I'm Just Like You—and the simultaneously released High School, a co-written memoir about their time dropping acid and moshing to Green Day in the ’90s—they revisit their roots, re-recording demos they wrote as teenagers. This time, they’re both the open-hearted teenage songwriters and the wiser industry professionals who can spot, and expand on, their spark.
It’s a smart move for a band whose fan base has both aged with them, and continually refreshed itself with younger members. At a Tegan and Sara show, you’re as likely to meet women in their 30s or 40s who have been die-hard fans of the trailblazing LGBTQ icons since the opening guitar strums of “You Wouldn’t Like Me” in 2004 as you are to meet younger listeners who caught the wave with their 2016 breakthrough pop hit “Boyfriend.” On Hey, I’m Just Like You, the band seem to acknowledge and speak to each of these audiences at once. Listening to the title track in its plaintive, unvarnished demo form, it’s clear that it was written by the same two girls who, as described in their memoir, once built a shrine to Kurt Cobain. On the album, the song opens with sharp claps, and builds to a synth-spangled chorus that cushions the jagged melancholy of the original in a pop cocoon.
As well as reconciling their different sounds, the album is a fierce reminder of the twins’ ability to write an irresistible chorus. Particularly memorable ones here include the stadium-sized exhalation of “I Don’t Owe You Anything,” the bratty moshpit-lite chorus of “Hold My Breath Until I Die,” and the angst-ridden, fist-pumping “I Know I’m Not the Only One.”  On “Don’t Believe the Things They Tell You (They Lie),” a clunky title becomes a surprisingly great refrain when the song breaks open, halfway through, into a widescreen anthemic surge.
“Don’t Believe…” is not the album’s only clunky phrasing. Glancing through the track list is like flicking through a teen’s journal, with its powerful “get off my case, Mom” energy. The album’s general embrace of Tegan and Sara’s teenage earnestness is mostly its strength, but there are moments that grate: the “hello, hello, hello” hook on “Hello, I’m Right Here” carries strange hints of the “British whine” that Sara recalls their teenage voices carrying in High School. On the electronic bounce of “You Go Away and I Don’t Mind,” the stripped-back production gives the juvenile, baffling opening lyrics (“I’m complicated, I was raised by icons”) nowhere to hide.
On “Don’t Believe…,” however, they strike the right balance between the clumsy originality of the song that Sara says she wrote in 1995, at age 15, and the polished pros they are now. The melodrama of the chorus (“I belong”) is muted, filtering the pain of teenagerhood through refined adult tastes. There’s a radical kind of self-acceptance to honoring your goofy and heartbreaking teenage sentiments with such seriousness. Sara recently told the Guardian that she has a lot of “self-hatred” and “internalized homophobia” stemming from her difficult high school years, but that revisiting the music and memories of the time—rather than embarrassing her as much as she expected—helped her to love herself. “I’m so amazed at what that person accomplished, knowing that inside they were really, really damaged.”
The fact that these songs have been interpreted by their writers 20 years later creates a layer of knowing poignancy, such as when Tegan sings, “I wonder if someday, we'll just be a memory?” on “I Know I’m Not...,” or when Sara sings “What if I become all of the horrible things that I said I would never be?” on the delicate “Please Help Me.” The sting of their adolescent fears is softened both by the heightened shimmer of the production, and by the very fact that we know how this story ends. Compare the gentle, winking nature of the line “Right now, I wish I was older” on “Hello, I’m Right Here,” to the brute force of Billie Eilish—still in the thick of all-encompassing young turmoil—singing about wishing she could be someone else. Memories of the very real pain and passion we felt as teenagers become cool enough to touch when we’re older. In Tegan and Sara’s hands, they become mantras, glimmering and hopeful and full of sparkle.

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On her first album in six years, Santigold reimagines the type of music that can comfort people in times of grief and stagnation.

Spirituals

Santigold has always had her ear towards the future, pioneering genrelessness before the era of streaming and social media collapsed its borders. On Spirituals, her most introspective and existential body of work to date, Santigold concocts her own version of African-American gospel music that sustained enslaved peoples through horrifying conditions. Using modern sounds of celestial pop, punk-rap, funk, electronica-reggae, and a smidge of hyperpop, she reimagines the type of music that can comfort people in times of grief and stagnation. It’s an experiment with transcendence as a vehicle for catharsis that, at times, gets muddled with attempts to ground its commentary within the music.
Ever since she embarked on her solo career, Santigold has functioned as a sort of griot bearing witness to racial and socioeconomic injustice. Dating back to her days as the frontwoman of the punk-rock band Stiffed, she was met with industry dismissal: “Black, female, punk artists would just never happen.” The usually mellow Santi White people saw in interviews channeled her frustrations into a confrontational punk persona. Whether it’s the insidiousness of the music industry on her breakthrough Santogold or consumerism on her third album 99¢, her lyrics speak truth to power and archive corruption. Her time spent as a child listening to artists like Fela Kuti, Burning Spear, Nina Simone, and Marvin Gaye shows up in “Ain’t Ready” and the Afro-Caribbean-influenced “No Paradise,” where Santigold the freedom fighter takes center stage. In the video for “Ain’t Ready,” she goes mad in an interrogation room as she returns the security camera’s invasive gaze. The siren-like intro serves as both a warning to adversaries and a wake-up call to comrades and herself.
To control the gaze is powerful; to constantly be on the lookout is exhausting. “My job as an artist is to feel and to absorb, you know, and it’s a lot. And it’s heavy,” she explains in a recent interview. On songs like the opening track “My Horror,” where she laments her dissociative daze through unsettlingly ethereal vocals, Santigold is haunted by her disposability as a Black woman in American society. She lingers in a moment of ego-death having recently couched her commentary in infectious pop beats and satire: On “Nothing,” she sings: “Am I free proving I’m better just so I’m not less … Don’t keep telling me I’m nothing/Say I mean something.”
With “Shake,” Santigold taps into a galvanizing cadence characteristic of the civil rights movement-era music. She fills the song with positive affirmations over a plucky bass instrumental—“I won’t buckle under pressure/I’m ’a be alright”—and body-stirring commands to pay homage to those who used music as a communal ritual to make it through “un-get-throughable” times. She just wants you to escape your body. And on the Boys Noize-produced “High Priestess,” Santigold is at her most Afrofuturistic: “Bow down, don’t freak out/In the presence of a queen/I guard the gates here/Guard the secrets while you wonder. ” She slips in and out of sing-rap, reminiscent of childhood playground chants, over metallic synths and punchy drum beats. In the tarot, the High Priestess card is associated with intuition, mystical knowledge, and the occult.
Santigold certainly acts as a spiritual guide here, steering us from angst toward a collective out-of-body release. As is the case when someone is pioneering an innovative soundscape, the journey sometimes faces some obstacles—Spirituals is peppered with clunky, too-literal lyrics that disrupt the spell cast by the music’s emotion. But by the end, we get a glimpse of the next phase of Santigold’s artistry—a project not bound by genre, form, physicality, or language.


The Long Island emo band’s adventurous new album is a document of abstract experiments and stoned afternoons, stranger than their previous work while still buzzing with the pursuit of bliss.

Sore Thumb

The liturgy of Oso Oso is built from finding the perfect view, feeling sand between your toes, and watching the sun rise. You know the motto: Life Is Good. Though frontman Jade Lilitri culls his sound from the malcontent and often misogynistic legacy of Long Island emo, his lyrics fawn more than they fight, staring doe-eyed at the universe. In his native Long Beach, New York, it’s easy to find the Biblical in the everyday—the vastness of the Atlantic is never more than a mile away, and the town was devastated by Hurricane Sandy only a decade ago. The sea is a running motif in his work, and on Oso Oso’s fourth record, Sore Thumb, it’s a fatal mission: “Captain of my own Titanic,” he sings on opener “Computer Exploder,” trapped in a fated battle against his own worst impulses. If emo had its Herman Melville, Lilitri could be the strongest candidate.
Sore Thumb wasn’t supposed to be the band's next record—or at least, not quite in this form. In early 2021, Lilitri and Oso Oso guitarist Tavish Maloney spent a month with longtime collaborator Billy Mannino at his studio, writing and recording early ideas for a follow-up to 2019’s leap into anthemic pop, Basking in the Glow. But the would-be demos took on new weight soon after they wrapped when, less than a month later, Maloney suddenly passed away. These dozen songs, written between LSD trips and video games, became an unwitting memorial to a late bandmate, cousin, and best friend. Aside from mastering and mixing, the album has been essentially untouched since they recorded. It’s a document of abstract experiments and stoned afternoons, stranger than any Oso Oso record while still buzzing with his pursuit of bliss.
The album’s intimate origins—days on end spent in the studio during a pandemic winter—are reflected in its exploratory flourishes and madcap experiments. For the first time on an Oso Oso record, there’s plinking piano, whistled melodies, warm synths. It’s telling that one of the last things Lilitri shared before the album was a cover of the Beatles’ “I’m Only Sleeping.” Sore Thumb is the closest thing to his Revolver, a drug-fueled, freewheeling expansion of their sound: slanted Britpop (“Pensacola”), jangling folk (“Because I Want To”), and reggae accented with a vibraslap for good measure (“Father Tracy”). There are still weightless falsettos, restless guitar solos, and refrains that crash like tidal waves—Oso Oso never sacrifices a perfect pop hook for the sake of eccentricity—but they’re now flecked with auxiliary percussion, pitch-shifted vocals, and backmasking as a counterbalance to their power chord sugar high.
Where Oso Oso’s previous efforts shared thematic ties—a fictional town, the quest for contentment—the closest thing to a unifying concept for Sore Thumb is the creation of the album itself. The record is filled with glances behind the music—count-offs, studio banter, a dusty room tone. Oso Oso have often felt like a band created in a lab for the O.C. soundtrack, layering Beach Boys harmonies over a perfected emo formula of drop-tuned guitars and stadium-sized choruses. There’s still plenty of that here—“Nothing to Do” sounds like a power-pop fever dream—but it’s even more moving to hear the songs that feel rushed, private, incomplete. It’s the same quiet vulnerability that made Basking in the Glow’s “One Sick Plan” such a standout, packing the same emotional weight as their larger than life songs with a more humble setup.
Knowing that these songs were likely meant to be reworked before their release makes the record seem contoured by imperfections: The drums, played by Lilitri, are loose, and his voice occasionally cracks on the high notes. But these flaws underscore the band’s irrepressible radiance, as if they can’t help but stumble into hooks and harmonies. Sore Thumb is Oso Oso when no one’s watching, still casually sincere and effortlessly earnest. It seems intentional that “All Love,” a bleary-eyed acoustic soliloquy about an LSD trip, is followed immediately by the muscular wallop of “Fly on the Wall”—it’s impossible to separate their adrenaline highs from their soft, stoned introversion.
Oso Oso’s outlook is, generally speaking, bro with a heart of gold, and the more adventurous lyrics flesh out that universe. The winding verses of “Pensacola” find our protagonist staring down a gin and soda in Florida’s panhandle. There’s the alcoholic priest on “Father Tracy,” preaching salvation between sips from his flask; there’s the drug dealer on “Computer Exploder,” who Lilitri addresses with the highest possible title of dude-endearment: “My friend.” Some moments feel like inside jokes, like the jingle-ready exuberance of “Nothing Says Love Like Hydration.” Others feel like sparse outlines for love letters—facile rhymes (“bad”, “mad”, “dad”) on ”Because I Want To” might have been reworked in a second round of edits—but even those songs feel inspired in their simplicity. Lilitri doesn’t embellish his words, he builds towering epics in his own vocabulary: “Some days this year, man, they feel never-ender,” he sings on “Pensacola,” a moment of bong-hit wisdom that’s hard to shake.
A de facto farewell to Maloney, “Tav World” is both the goofy vinyl-only closer about smoking weed and a strange kind of hymn. It might seem exaggerated to find transcendence in a record of ostensible demos, but it’s fitting for a band who professes love with a lyric as conversational as “I mean if you want, we can just stay here,” from 2017’s The Yunahon Mixtape. Oso Oso venerates friendship, and on Sore Thumb, they lighten up and dig deeper, waxing existential about the vital importance of hanging out. As a pseudo-music documentary, this is the story of two unassuming guys in their 20s, hashing out complicated feelings about the world, and it’s both intense and familiar. After all, isn’t one of the lessons of Peter Jackson’s Get Back that the Beatles were just homies? When Maloney died, Lilitri shared a long and heartfelt tribute to his late creative partner. “I wish I could go back to the times where I felt depressed and lonely and asked you to chill and you drove for hours to chill for days no questions asked,” he wrote. In the church of Oso Oso, chilling with your friends is a sacrament.


The mischievous electronic producer teams up with the photographer on an album where the latter’s voice becomes the source material for unsettling tracks full of silence and space.

Wolfgang Tillmans / Powell: Spoken By the Other EP

Spoken By the Other EP

Wolfgang Tillmans’ work is a reminder that no freedom is a given. The German-born photographer started out in the 1980s capturing his young peers, a generation removed from the nation’s post-war privations, growing up and living freely in ways that none of their forebears did, or could: taking ecstasy in clubs, getting naked in parks, finding comfort in their true selves.
His newest project, a six-track collaborative EP with the electronic producer Oscar Powell, applies his ethos to sound—which remains a little-explored medium for him, at least relative to his sprawling body of visual art. After playing around with music in his teens, he took a 30-year break from it, returning in 2016 with a focus-free EP and a full-spotlight appearance on Frank Ocean’s Endless. When he and Powell first began work on Spoken By the Other, it was originally envisioned as a showcase of Tillmans’ singing over Powell’s dance beats. Unsatisfied with the predictable direction materializing, they ditched the songs and pushed outward. Ultimately, Tillmans’ voice became the source material for these six tracks: Powell toys with it one short phrase at a time, manipulating textures and exploiting glitches without succumbing to an obvious pulse. There’s rhythm here, technically speaking, but these aren’t exactly songs. These sometimes unsettling tracks are full of space and silence, and not necessarily made for the same audience who enjoyed the twisted club throb of Powell’s 2016 statement album, Sport. Spoken By the Other contains no dance music, and only a few moments that could be charitably described as danceable music.
“Feel the Night” starts the EP the same way that some great live sets end: with the synthesizers making a climactic final crescendo, falling apart, and melting into an ambient wash while the spotlights flash. Powell’s strobe-like synth quivers as Tillmans bellows, “Feel the night/Lose your pride.” As a singer, Tillmans doesn’t exactly shine, but his willingness to belt away feeds the album’s free-will energy. He plunges rudely into the final third of “Tone Me,” aggressively snapping the titular command—meant as a sendup of gym culture—after nearly four minutes of Powell’s dread-filled, arachnoid creep-up. On “Speak Out (Version),” he gratingly groans a generic call to arms, which Powell then spins into an inhuman, whirlwind drone, as if reaffirming their freedom to do whatever they want with a melody. “Rebuilding the Future” is a side step into humor, where Tillmans sounds like a water-damaged sales robot clamoring, “Rebuilding the future/Rebuilding the now!”—which sounds a little like something a text generator might write after analyzing transcripts from Apple’s product reveals.
Of Tillmans’ photographic work, the project that’s closest in spirit to Spoken By the Other might be “Sendeschluss/End of Broadcast,” his 2014 series of photograph of television static. The images appeared to be nothing more than the black-and-white chaos of a screen with no signal, but they also revealed swaths of color hiding in plain sight. On “Doucement,” especially, Tillman’s voice sounds subsumed by granular sound, which Powell seems to drop around him indiscriminately—two humans wandering freely through noise without a signal, just for the joy of it. For a fun, unencumbered, first-time collaboration, Spoken By the Other similarly harbors its fair share of color.


With his gorgeous, cocksure flow and odd ear for beats, the Memphis rapper asserts his position as a singular rising star.

Son of a Gun

Memphis rapper Key Glock’s music exists in a world where extreme is normal. There’s no artificial binary between realism and mythos—everything feels right on the edge. On his new tape, Son of a Gun, which comes on the heels of February’s Yellow Tape, he offers more autobiographical flashes that span childhood to present day and veer from heartfelt to troubling. While the themes rarely expand beyond growing up, hustling, getting money, and buying ostentatious extravagances, the air-tight focus of his narratives and the richness of his language reveals a writer capable of detailed world building.
“Cream” parrots the Wu-Tang Clan’s song of almost the same name. Many have paid tribute to the Clan’s classic, but Glock brings his own self-assurance. Depicting a day in the life of a hustler, the 22-year-old describes rising out of bed, saying his prayers, and immediately counting his money. A declaration like, “Came up out the dirt, now I got diamonds around me” might feel overly worn but Glock balances it with funny wordplay: “And ever since I was ten, my best friend name was Ben/Franklin, nigga, what you thinkin’?” He rarely wanders beyond his narrow field of vision—there’s no room for guest rappers—but Glock’s delivery is confident enough to reinvigorate even the hoariest street-rap cliches.
Helping color in Glock’s universe is his unusual taste in beats. Son of a Gun is distinguished by a set of tightly wound instrumentals featuring booming drums, strange samples, and a level of murk that brings a noir atmosphere and high-art sheen to the proceedings. The classical-music sample of “Son of a Gun” and repetitive acoustic riff of “Money Talk” (both served up by frequent collaborator Bandplay) are among the most daring pieces of music Glock has ever spit over, but his flow—identifiably Memphis in its swagger—stays eternally loose, multidimensional, and dripping in a natural confidence that forces every beat to bend to his will.
Glock’s most potent showcase yet might well be “Rich Blessed N Savage.” He flows with a natural sense of melody that makes every bar gorgeous to the ear: “Bitch, I ball, it’s necessary/I’m cool as Ben & Jerry/If you don’t like me, blame my parents/Sit down if you can’t stand me.” The next step for this talented young spitter is to add some new colors to his palette, even if just in the form of mild updates to his current formula. Still, by staying fully attentive to the next dollar to be made, the current watch on his wrist, and the impending threat to his well being, Key Glock doubles down on his strengths on Son of a Gun, asserting his position as a singular rising star.


A boisterous, spirit-raising throwdown on which the Boss tackles the tangle of war, strife, poverty, and unrest without sacrificing joy or release.

Bruce Springsteen: We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions

On paper, The Seeger Sessions seems like a terrible idea: traditional American folksongs paid hyper-reverent homage by one of rock'n'roll's most earnest performers, an attempt to transform campfire songs into sermons and anoint sweet, old, cord-cutting Pete Seeger high priest of Americana. Instead, this collection-- consisting of songs Seeger has sung, but none he's written-- is a boisterous, spirit-raising throwdown, conjured by a 12-man band (guitar, harmonica, tuba, violin, B3 organ, upright bass, banjo, piano, drums, accordion, trombone, saxophone, trumpet, and more) and a pack of grinning backup singers. Perhaps ironically, Bruce Springsteen-- one of America's most-adored songsmiths-- is soaring high on a record full of tracks other people wrote.
On The Seeger Sessions, Springsteen growls, warbles, groans, and gags, sounding often like Tom Waits (check the scratchy, ominous vocals on "Erie Canal") or later Bob Dylan. It's a stark contrast to Seeger's crisp, clear pipes, and it reinvigorates a handful of ancient American tracks. Like any good folk record, The Seeger Sessions tackles the tangle of war, strife, poverty, and unrest, but does so without sacrificing joy or release (really, the very reasons people began singing in the first place). The resulting collection happily drowns out echoes of Springsteen's underwhelming recent efforts, and just might be the very best and most inspiring album Bruce has produced in more than a decade*.*
Embracing early E Street shuffle and ditching the solemnity of 2005's Devils and Dust, The Seeger Sessions culls from a century of rich, gritty Americana tradition, from bluegrass to country to rhythm and blues to gospel, rock'n'roll, Zydeco, Dixieland, and more. Springsteen is an obvious descendent of folk tradition, but, as he writes in the record's liner notes, this is "street corner music, parlor music, tavern music, wilderness music, circus music, church music, gutter music." Or: The Seeger Sessions is a party record.
Clawing through Seeger's considerable catalogue, Springsteen ultimately selected a smart, varied, and cohesive smattering of songs, proving he retains a deep and nuanced understanding of folk tradition. In a recent New Yorker profile of Seeger, Springsteen talks about folk songs as tools with potential to become "righteous implements when connected to historical consciousness," and claims to have chosen this particular repertoire because, "Everything I wanted, I found there." Appropriately, Spingsteen's voice seems custom-made for tracks like "We Shall Overcome", where his signature gravity spreads shivers, destined to silence even the most jaded listeners with its convincing optimism. Written in 1905, "Erie Canal" (sealed comfortably in the consciousness of any kid born or raised in western New York), is ominous and hypnotizing, with banjo picks punctuated by organs, strings, and an unexpected Dixieland breakdown midway through-- it's not hard to imagine whole arenas shouting, "Low bridge, everybody down!"
The gorgeously explosive "O Mary Don't You Weep" cracks open with teasing fiddles, before horns and drums kick up and Springsteen's throaty shouts are rounded out by a bevy of backing singers, organs sliding in and out, a gloriously sloppy mélange of sound, as indebted to New Orleans as it is to Newport. Springteen's voice is gravelly and real, happily divorced from the overproduction and studio tweaking that plagues his recent work, and perfectly in sync with his band's raucous, gleeful pounding. Everyone here is loose and intoxicated, and nowhere else is the record's quasi-live conceit (the record was made in three day-long sessions, preceded by no rehearsals) as gloriously palpable.
Springsteen has a habit of folding current events into his songs without ever being specific enough to limit a verse to a single time and place. Unsurprisingly, that timelessness syncs up perfectly with the centuries-old songs on The Seeger Sessions, and, if nothing else, confirms that Bruce Springsteen was the right (and maybe only) person for this particular gig. Less an exhumation than a celebration, The Seeger Sessions is the best proof we've got that America's folksongs are also our finest artifacts. It's all here: recipes, prayers, promises, fears, hopes, and hollers.


Mike Silver follows his underrated debut LP of mostly instrumental electro-pop and a scattershot remix EP with this more contemporary-feeling release.

The River EP

Mike Silver has left the bedroom and is now running up that South American hill. After an underrated 2009 debut LP of mostly instrumental electro-pop, Continent, followed by last year's slightly more scattershot Drifts remix EP, the Montreal producer known as CFCF takes inspiration for his latest from Fitzcarraldo, a 1982 Werner Herzog film about an Irish rubber baron who wants to build an opera in the Peruvian jungle-- but first must haul a riverboat up a small mountain. In keeping with its source, The River EP is cinematic, slow-paced, and more organic-sounding than previous CFCF releases, almost a mini-soundtrack in its own right.
There are still moments of remarkable beauty here, but you have to wade a little bit deeper to find them. The River is at its best when its productions feel most contemporary. See "Frozen Forest", with its Fever Ray-frosty synths, José González-hued acoustic guitar, and R&B slow-jam breakbeats. Another standout is the six-and-half-minute title track, all panpipe-like synths and urgent tribal pounding until a sudden, exhilarating crescendo that might evoke the image of Fitzcarraldo's vessel finally cresting-- and tumbling-- over the hillside. Elsewhere, the EP's more directly nostalgic tracks, whether the krautrock chorale of "Upon the Hill" (which distinctly recalls Popol Vuh's soundtrack for Herzog's film) or the opening and closing ambient synth pieces, are no less elegant and foreboding, though they do tend to drag. For whatever it's worth, you won't find any of the movie's signature Caruso arias.
Like Fitzcarraldo itself, The River EP isn't a perfect, unified statement. The digital bonus version (included with vinyl purchases) swells to more than 50 minutes-- longer than many albums-- and includes two epic "Frozen Forest" remixes. Luckily, both Brooklyn producer/DJ Jacques Renault's no-guitars house rework and UK Balearic duo Coyote's elastic scrawl are rewarding enough in isolation. A catchy, concise remix of hypnotic ambient trip "It Was Never Meant to Be This Way" by Games, the duo of Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin and Tiger City's Joel Ford, similarly amps up the dancefloor potential. On the other hand, a big part of Fitzcarraldo's appeal is that its director was as mad as its protagonist, filming his story on location and without special effects. "It's a land which God, if he exists, has created in anger," Herzog would later say. CFCF has wrought a fine and auspicious record about that land, but something is missing; you can't hear the place itself. In more ways than one, The River EP seems like a transitional effort.


Solar Motel Band leader Chris Forsyth strikes a near-perfect balance between ’70s rock tradition and present-day experimentation with his signature guitar tone.

Chris Forsyth and the Solar Motel Band: The Rarity of Experience

The Rarity of Experience

Ten years ago, Chris Forsyth was a very different type of guitar player. As a member of the Brooklyn trio PSI (later Peeesseye), he traded in scratches and scrapes — abstract and confrontational tones that punctuated the group's eerie improvisations. Their shows involved a certain amount of shock and awe, particularly when murmurs turned to shrieks and moody drones gave way to shrill distortion. I recall one band member walking out of a set to antagonize patrons in an adjoining bar while wearing a kind of percussive poncho that clattered as he walked. Some of those people might have cast an ear towards Forsyth's alien-sounding techniques and wondered if the guitarist had any "real" riffs.
He does. Forsyth's work in Solar Motel Band leaves no doubt that he is a shredder of the highest order. The Philadelphia-based quartet, which the guitarist has led since 2013, draws its core inspiration from the more transcendent guitar music of the 1970s. Their largely instrumental music sounds at once meticulously composed and entirely spontaneous, the product of some miracle jam session with no bum notes or wasted moments.
The Rarity of Experience is Solar Motel Band's richest set of compositions to date. The record is laid out — perhaps not unintentionally — like a stellar Grateful Dead bootleg, beginning with concise songs and moving toward long-form, improvisatory drift. At times, like on album centerpiece "High Castle Rock," the band is urgent and energetic. For ten minutes, Forsyth and guitarist Nick Mellevoi are in sustained ascent, modulating through a seemingly endless supply of melodies and patiently pushing towards an extended solo-driven climax. Majestic and intense, the song is an appropriate spiritual sequel to Television's epic "Marquee Moon." On "Harmonious Dance," the band is serene and vibey, couching jammy ambience with swooning chords. "The First Ten Minutes of Cocksucker Blues" channels Neil Young & Crazy Horse, but between its beefed-up percussion and increasingly unhinged brass, there's a bit of Agharta/Pangaea-era Miles Davis in there, too.
Solar Motel's ability to drift and improvise is an important part of what distinguishes the band from other contemporary guitar-oriented instrumental groups. Go-to post-rock bands like Mogwai or Explosions in the Sky tend to eschew individual identity. Their compositions are about accumulation – the gradual build-up of voices, tones, and volume in an effort to generate a monolithic emotional peak. Solar Motel Band's music is more concerned with nuance and interplay, a dialogue between the players. On The Rarity of Experience, a certain amount of noodling is permitted. The destination is often a crescendo, but not always.
In a first for Solar Motel Band, Forsyth provides vocals for a handful of songs on The Rarity of Experience. These are beneficial in that they offer a change of scenery amid large stretches of guitar chatter. As a singer, though, he sounds only half-committed and more than a little self-conscious. On the band's cover of Richard Thompson's "Calvary Cross," Forsyth's delivery is muted. The lines are dutifully muttered in order to set up the good part, the solos — which do not disappoint. As a guitarist, Forsyth has a clear and immediately identifiable voice. His tones and melodies are familiar yet fresh, at once embodying grace and freakiness, tradition and experimentation, the past and the present.


After the death of guitarist Thomas Fekete last year, Surfer Blood return with an album shadowed by grief. Paradoxically, it’s their sunniest and loosest record in years.

Snowdonia

Surfer Blood’s fourth album Snowdonia arrives with something the band hasn’t experienced in a long time: good will. After frontman John Paul Pitts’ 2012 arrest for domestic battery instantly transformed the band from potential indie-rock mainstays into permanently damaged goods, he at times seemed to carry on the group out of sheer spite. Their 2013 album Pythons opened with him eating literal sour grapes and only got nastier from there; listeners understandably steered clear of it. Even the fans who jumped off the band’s surf board long ago, however, had to feel for the group last year when they lost guitarist Thomas Fekete to stomach cancer. He was only 27 years old.  Snowdonia may be the closest Surfer Blood gets to a second chance, and it poses a test for Pitts: Can he really be the kind of frontman that listeners empathize with, and maybe even care for, again?
He certainly puts his best face forward. There’s no trace of opportunism on Snowdonia—no bitterness, no self-pity, no overstatement of grief. Instead, Pitts uses the terrible circumstances as a chance for reinvention. With a shuffled lineup that includes new guitarist Michael McCleary and bassist Lindsey Mills, whose harmony vocals lend welcome warmth to the record, he recasts Surfer Blood as the kinder, gentler guitar-pop band they might have been better off trying to be a couple album cycles ago. It’s their calmest record, a relaxed, sunny outing pitched at the same volume as The Feelies’ casual late ’80s LPs.
This is not the same Pitts who blasted through walls, sledgehammers swinging, on “Swim,” nor is he the same bitter soul who played the victim so passive-aggressively on Pythons. He sounds about 90 anger management sessions removed from that guy, and the lyrics are peppered with promises that he’s a changed man. “Thought I had a corroded heart/Oxidizing, torn apart/Now you’re starting it up yet again,” he sings, brimming with hope on the Inverted World-esque “Dino Jay.” And rather than reaching for that bowl of sour grapes again, “Matter of Time” opens the album with an assurance that Pitts’ aim is true this time: “In a world so full of murky intentions, we’ll make ourselves a home.” He’s really trying to make the best of things, he insists.
Given the circumstances, Snowdonia is a surprisingly light album. With its paisley guitars and Sunday drive tempos, many listeners would be hard pressed to even locate the grief on first listen. It’s a nifty trick that the song that most directly touches on Fekete’s death is also the album’s most mirthful: “Six Flags in F or G” builds from a “Rock Lobster” tempo to a confetti burst of Mamas and the Papas-style sunshine pop before signing off with some Wowee Zowee guitar scribbles. Instead of making a big display of their bereavement, they pay tribute to their friend with some sounds he always enjoyed. A similarly sweet pragmatism carries through closer “Carrier Pigeon,” a heartbreaker he wrote after his mother’s breast cancer diagnosis. He responds not by cursing the cruel hand, but constructively, with an appreciation for the woman who always looked out for him and his sister: “I know you swam upstream for most of your life, dodging the grizzlies.” He’s never sounded closer to the songwriter we were promised on Astro Coast.
So does Snowdonia mark a redemption for a once toxic band? As with all issues surrounding the art/artist divide, it’s not so clear cut. One tactful album can’t buy a musician forgiveness any more than it can erase the pain of losing a loved one. And in truth, Snowdonia probably isn't a flashy enough album to re-spark significant interest in the band anyway. At their early peak, this group had a serious wow factor; now they're mostly setting out for modest pleasures. For the first time in five years, though, this band has a reason to exist, and possibly even a path forward. It’s Surfer Blood’s first album since their debut that doesn’t invite you to think about what could have been. It simply makes the most of what is.


On the Detroit rapper’s newest tape, lean and mean stories from the drug game take shape against ominous beats and inspired references.

War on Drugs 2

With his husky voice and murky selection of beats that sound best when the sky is gray, Los brings hard-boiled chronicles of Detroit’s underworld to life. In the west side-bred rapper’s tales of the drug game, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Lexington are regular pit stops; American-made SUVs and minivans are the preferred mode of transportation; and the grind never stops. His distinctly suffocating world-building has ear-to-the-street rappers in cities like Rochester (Rx Papi), D.C. (Paco Panama), and Tallahassee (Wizz Havinn) trying to capture their own regionally specific renderings.
Each mixtape Los drops, whether solo or with brother Nutty, further fleshes out this ominous milieu. On his newest project, War on Drugs 2, the sounds of television news clips and encroaching police sirens make the urgent mood clear. Los has enough stories to fill a coffee table book, but they’re almost always delivered in loose, bite-sized vignettes. “Lying 2 You” is a compact collage of sequences: the demise of a short-lived romance, the seedy alleyways where Los and his crew hang out for business purposes, the Ohio State frat houses where they move their product. The Blaxploitation-era funk of “Hip Hop Shit” is a slight step outside his comfort zone, but it gives Los’ descriptions of neighborhood turmoil the type of vivid montage treatment that characterizes so many of the dark and unforgiving flicks of that era, like Across 110th Street and Truck Turner.
A handful of other tracks on War on Drugs 2 expand what a Los song can sound like without feeling out of character. On “Priceless,” his weathered anecdotes of sleepless nights and 5 a.m. phone calls are a bit routine but don’t lose any steam thanks to Dat Boi Will’s G-funk synths. On “Cant Stop,” he rips a freestyle over a time capsule of a beat from Philly group the Young Gunz’s 2003 single, and though he leans on punchlines, those punchlines are pretty damn good: “Getting off pounds, welcome to my weight journey.” From the Young Gunz freestyle to a clever Boosie reference on the hard-hitting “Back 2 Ballin” to a Beanie Sigel namedrop on the breezy Topside-produced “Kick Game,” the tape nods to some of Los’ musical touchpoints, beyond the obvious: 2000s Atlanta trap, late-’90s New Orleans, Doughboyz Cashout-era Detroit.
The next step for Los is to thread together the vignettes into a full story. On “I 75,” a reference to the interstate highway that connects Michigan with Miami, he starts off hot, like he’s about to take off on one of those tense drives across state lines that he sometimes hints at—much like his brother Nutty’s “The Ride.” But after a few seconds, Los drops the thought and moves on to typical shit talk. You can see the potential for more ambitious storytelling, for narratives that last beyond a couplet or two. Still, within these tight frames, he is one of rap’s most economical storytellers right now. “I’m the type to put the marble floors in the vacant,” he barks on “Renovated,” and that’s all you need to picture a man trying to patch up his crooked past now that he’s finally got a little bread: pages of exposition in just one bar.


The Bronx-born DJ melds genres at breakneck speed on a disconsolate and deeply personal breakup record.

TEARS IN MY HENNESSY

Bronx-born Joey LaBeija is a homegrown New York DJ, with diverse taste reflecting his city’s disparate communities. He’s a known quantity on the queer nightlife circuit—he previously co-hosted the defunct Techno Cumbia party, which put on shows by Bbymutha and LSDXOXO—and in his punkish, winking vision of club music, there is equal space for dembow, ballroom, rave, and techno. His first LP, 2016’s moody Shattered Dreams, slowed down the tempo to ruminate on themes of loss and death, rendering much of the music nondescript in the process. Luckily, LaBeija’s club bona fides are more discernible on TEARS IN MY HENNESSY, a breakup record on which he vacillates between sinewy club workouts and synth ballads to seek deliverance from a deteriorating relationship.
As its melodramatic title suggests, TEARS finds LaBeija in a miserable headspace, self-medicating with alcohol and sex so as to not face the end of a crumbling romance with his boyfriend. LaBeija translates this heartache best when he writes in vivid, blunt terms; there’s brutal clarity to a line like “the way you fuck me feels like charity,” as he vents on the queasy, psychosexual synth centerpiece “charity.” Capped off by an extended garage breakdown, the song is an example of LaBeija firing on all cylinders, melding genres at breakneck speed à la his DJ sets while still carving out space for his own deeply personal revelations and experiences.
That tendency, however, doesn’t extend to all of TEARS. “dial up affection” chugs over stuttering programmed beats, with LaBeija’s voice pitched up demonically high as he compares personal issues to computer errors. (Even with a Vocoder, no one can convincingly sell the stilted technobabble that is “Gateway timeout/Bandwidth limit exceeded/Time to force quit/All our pages are freezing.”) He one-ups it instantly with “simulated love,” which similarly pitch-shifts his voice for a paranoid club song that zeroes in on a simpler lyrical conceit: “Why do you wanna play with my emotions?/Simulated love just going through the motions.” Blown up in size with airhorn synths and twitchy beats, the song reshapes his frantic, increasing paranoia to better effect.
TEARS succeeds elsewhere as well: The sawing industrial morass that envelops “wait” resembles Yves Tumor’s seething experimentation. He even recruits mid-’00s twin sister duo Nina Sky for the hook on R&B cut “dry your eyes,” amid skyward synth lines and pulsing 808s. And on the comparatively upbeat closer “animosity,” he seems to finally find a way out, offering up a bittersweet sense of altruism: “There is no animosity/Over your curiosity/You gotta do what’s best for you/So baby I’ma set you free.” It’s a generous outlook that sees him finally at peace, and the off-balance, rubbery synths and club-ready drums behind him reflect the changing mood. LaBeija may have lingering scars to carry, but on TEARS he wears them like armor: durable and, in their own way, life-saving.


Collecting the hits alongside parts of Queen’s rapturous 1985 Live Aid set, this soundtrack mirrors its movie in reflecting the band’s inability to move on.

Bohemian Rhapsody OST

Queen have now existed longer as a band without Freddie Mercury than with him. Mercury died on November 24, 1991, 20 years after he joined guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor. May and Taylor have kept the Queen brand alive for more than the quarter-century since, even shedding bassist John Deacon in 1997, or after it became clear that the reunion inspired by recording to the sounds of Mercury’s unused vocal tracks for 1995’s Made in Heaven was not a passing phase. Queen have toured with Mercury replacements, from former Free and Bad Company vocalist Paul Rodgers (essentially, Mercury’s antithesis) to able Mercury emulator and “American Idol” runner-up Adam Lambert. Absent another studio album, they have instead churned out archival releases, attempting to celebrate Mercury’s music while continuing without him. During his lifetime, Mercury saw the release of just two Queen compilations; there have since been at least a dozen. Here’s another one—the essentially extraneous soundtrack to Bohemian Rhapsody.
Queen’s tension between the ever-present past and the actual present provides the key to the problems around the making of the new Bohemian Rhapsody, positioned as a fictionalized film about Queen’s history but largely understood as a Mercury biopic. After being cast as Mercury, Sacha Baron Cohen pulled out of the project following three years of development. He claimed that the surviving Queen members wished to sanitize an often-lurid story and that the plan called for the singer to die mid-movie, so the film would become a portrait of a band that “carries on from strength to strength.”
Queen denied Cohen’s contention, but the anecdote crystallizes the inherent problem with the band after Mercury, anyway: They’re still trading on the glories they achieved with the late singer, forever living in his shadow. Whenever punters stepped up for a performance, they were paying tribute to the dearly departed with the fellow faithful. Whenever fans bought a live album (six between 2004 and 2016 alone), the recordings functioned as a substitute for never being able to see Mercury in concert. Whenever the faithful purchased a box set (again, five since 1992, plus four volumes of the Singles Collection), they were reviving memories of the first time they fell in love with an actual Queen LP. For decades, being a current Queen fan has meant accepting that the group’s glory days effectively ended with Mercury’s death.
As both a film and a soundtrack, Bohemian Rhapsody reveals that even Queen have abandoned the notion that they exist outside of Mercury’s gravitational pull. The pivot becomes clear through the decision to end the film’s narrative when Queen achieved their last international triumph—when they stole the show at Live Aid in 1985. By ending on this emotional beat, the film avoids the messiness of depicting a bunch of survivors carrying on year after year, achieving a perfectly honorable but dramatically dull balance. This means the soundtrack also contains portions of that stellar Live Aid performance, the one noteworthy Queen set to not previously make it to disc. Their power at that moment owed, in no small part, to the fact that they were playing to a captivated crowd in their hometown of London and not the States, where they were considered passé by 1985.
Since Bohemian Rhapsody is a soundtrack targeted at a wide audience, not an archival release suited for collectors, not all of the Live Aid performance is here; “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “We Will Rock You” are missing. The omissions underscore how superfluous Bohemian Rhapsody is. This isn’t a slight against the source material, which balances standards like “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Under Pressure” with a few more unreleased live cuts and a handful of tracks assembled for the film. But only one of those surprises: “Doing All Right” is resurrected from Smile, May and Taylor’s band before they linked with Mercury. Original Smile singer Tim Staffell leads this re-recording, a mini-suite that revives the spacy 1970s, complete with hippie harmonies and a pastoral midsection that culminates in headbanging. It’s early Zeppelin in miniature.
The familiar favorites get some cinematic contours in this sequence. The album opens with a cheeky take on the “20th Century Fox Fanfare” with signature May fuzz and ends on the dual rallying calls of “Don’t Stop Me Now” and “The Show Must Go On.” But after a quarter-century spent recycling a catalog again and again, such attempts at flair deliver no actual pizzazz. At a certain point, everything that could be said about Queen has been said. Maybe that point is now. Not even a splashy movie can change that stone cold fact.


A low-pressure psych-rock jam session between Canadian artists Yves Jarvis and Romy Lightman produces a few happy accidents and a lot of aimless experimentation.

Banned

When Romy Lightman and Yves Jarvis’ voices fall into harmony on “Olamim”—the opening track on Banned, their first album as the duo Lightman Jarvis Ecstatic Band—they sound at ease, like they’re on familiar ground. Which makes sense: Banned was recorded at the Tree Museum, an outdoor, installation-style gallery spanning 200 acres in Ontario, and neither Jarvis nor Lightman is a stranger to the property. Jarvis’ last solo record, Sundry Rock Song Stock, was made there; Lightman’s aunt co-founded the museum. Plus, as romantic partners, nor are the pair strangers to each other.
Lightman is half of the Toronto folk duo Tasseomancy, and Jarvis is the stage name of Montreal’s one-man psych-pop outfit Jean-Sébastien Yves Audet. Recorded over two weeks—Lightman plays synthesizer, Jarvis plays guitar, both sing—Banned is an experimental, largely improvised attempt to blend the two’s musical impulses. The results are closer to Jarvis’ more far-flung reference points: acid-rock, sound collage, surrealist folk. Lightman once described the couple’s approach to the collaboration as a “non-approach,” and Jarvis has called the album a “waste product” of sessions that were primarily a means for them to connect with each other. Naturally, Banned is a bit of a hodgepodge, a collection of wayward sounds and textures built by happenstance rather than intention.
Sometimes their experiments pay off: “Red Champa” pairs a distorted vocal sample with a rhythmic steel drum loop to charming effect, while the percussion in “Elastic Band” pitter-patters satisfyingly over itself. Tracks tend to pick up in their latter halves, as though after some trial and error the elements finally click into place. But just as often, Banned is a free-associative exercise that seems to demand little commitment from the artists. Meandering instrumentals often dissolve into shapelessness—for instance, “Ein Sof,” built from a staccato bass loop and randomly strummed acoustic guitar, wears out its welcome long before its three minutes are up. Elsewhere, cut-and-paste lyrics just evoke scrawled bathroom-wall graffiti. Phrases like “toxic masculinity,” “a sacred BPM of 69,” and “cums” are tossed out at random to little more than gimmicky effect. Not helping matters is the fact that Jarvis sings with an academic indifference, as though he were reading from a dictionary. It can seem like the duo is trying both too hard and not hard enough.
Banned is stronger when the pair sound more invested, when the songs feel more composed and can unspool without as many distractions. In “Recurring Theme,” Jarvis pleads, against a low and ominous cello, “I am fighting/I don’t wanna fight,” with a quivering desperation while Lightman intones limberly along. And after four minutes of splattered words and chaotic drum hits, it’s a relief when “Stomach Pit” breaks into a lovely singalong chorus: “Old ways broken and in front of me/I feel the beauty of love/Deep in the pit of my stomach.”
The record’s most compelling tracks are the ones that put Lightman and Jarvis’ hearts a little more on display, when they exploit the tension in their own relationship. In “Elastic Band,” they enact a lover’s quarrel alongside a jaunty bassline, while in standout track “Nymphea,” they sing to each other over gentle acoustic strums and a wash of synths: “Yes there’s always surprises, my love/To sustain excitement in love.” And in these moments, it almost doesn’t matter that we are on the outside, hopelessly peering in.

Buy: Rough Trade
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CCFX is the filmic dream pop collaboration of Mary Jane Dunphe (Vexx, CC Dust) and members of Olympia band Trans FX. Their EP for DFA Records is brought to life by Dunphe’s visceral, magnetic vocals.

CCFX EP

Despite their aesthetic overlaps, CCFX is formed around an odd couple of sorts. On the one hand, you have Chris McDonnell of Olympia band Trans FX—an artist methodically studied in writing romantic noir at its most evocative. In the three-part film that accompanied Trans FX’s 2016 album The Clearing, there are shots of goths dancing through tall grass, a kid in a Thrasher shirt smiling shyly in a backseat, silhouettes lounging languidly under a tree while the sky glows an apocalyptic pink. McDonnell is clearly well-versed in sex and death and cigarette poetry, but the ooze of it can feel almost too smooth, until Mary Jane Dunphe arrives to trouble it.
Dunphe—of driving punk outfit Vexx, and minimal wave pop duo CC Dust—is a visceral, magnetic artist, known for her lurching vocals and hyper-embodied performance style. From Iggy Pop to Priests’ Katie Alice Greer, punk’s most memorable front-people affect a sort of sinister simper, inviting the audience’s gaze only to shatter it. In Vexx’s live videos, Dunphe snarls, flails, shakes, taunts, and preens her way into this legacy, while leaving room to actually dance, to let a song move her as a participant, not just an architect. Accordingly, whether she’s riding out the storm of a Vexx show or dancing life into an oft-bloodless new wave tradition in CC Dust, her voice absolutely writhes.
Dunphe and McDonnell have collaborated elsewhere, like on the Lucinda Williams-styled country group the County Liners, but, as the name suggests, CCFX is a true marriage of their projects, rounded out by David Jaques and Mirče Popovic. McDonnell’s cinematic compositions create an atmosphere of lush, nostalgic melancholia while Dunphe explores more subdued vocal styles. Their first collaborations, “Ode” and “2Tru,” appear here as B-sides. On “Ode,” the most narrative moment on the EP, Dunphe and McDonnell’s voices intertwine in an elegy for female isolation under late capitalism. Dunphe moves from the abstract (“Locked up and closeted/No time to heal/Its solitude that shines a light but isolation kills”) to the howling personal (“I want to go to work/I want to live my life”) with a clarity framed by crisp beats held over from its inception as a CC Dust track. Conversely, in “2Tru,” written by Popovic (also of Trans FX), Dunphe’s hushed fragments are carried away on waves of thick shoegaze, becoming another instrument in a mix of droning guitar and textured helicopter synths. It’s deceptively simple, but it has a way of staying with you: Who here hasn’t wanted to fight the ocean?
The first half of the EP is more integrated. “Venetian Screens,” anchored by a swaying, swaggering bassline, nods to the best of gothic dream pop. Dunphe turns down to a melodic croon, the line “I never said a word that’s real/In my head/Like a melody” set as a near-direct analogue to Annie Lennox’s “Here comes the rain again/Falling on my head like a memory.” The second half dissolves gushing into a too-brief fully-Cocteau Twins coda, vox cascading in feathered layers.
The true standout is opener “The One to Wait,” a circular track that captures the iridescent limbo between leaving and staying—an abyss that tends to open quietly in small insular towns such as CCFX’s Olympia, dislodging people from their scenes and pulling them into the sky, or at least to New York or L.A. or a land project in rural anywhere. Dunphe’s vocals gulp air, sometimes breathy, sometimes breathless. “The choice was made for me/Now I don’t know when I should leave,” she sings, drawing out the last note, letting it dip grotesquely, until it catches in her throat like the choice itself. As Dunphe hashes out the moral value of transience versus permanence (“Is it right to stay? Is home a trap and growth a phase?”), McDonnell strings together melody after melody on airy, jangling guitar and warm, nostalgic synths straight out of a John Hughes soundtrack. It’s a track that begs for a hazy party scene, the main character moving slowly through a crowded house or dark club, fashion goths swaying to the steady padded breakbeats, lights fading in and out with the synths—bright but always a little sad.
McDonnell is elusive when it comes to press; Dunphe, even more so. With that, the circumstances around the CCFX EP remain undefined. But with all its thematic mourning and yearning for truth, it feels born out of a moment of change. That change is present in how the EP’s ebbs feel as poignant as its swells, in Dunphe’s triumph as she sings “and you know that I will miss you/but I’m selling everything,” and all the mundanity and ecstasy of such a choice.


Jazz piano shredder Craig Taborn is a compositional force on his new quartet album. From the LP’s grand design to its smallest quirks, Taborn and his bandmates make the music gently rage.

Daylight Ghosts

If invitations to jam can give any hint of a musician’s reputation, then Craig Taborn has to be one of the most admired jazz pianists in the world. He’s released a handful of albums under his own name, beginning with a hard-to-find 1994 debut on the DIW label. But Taborn has been featured in a sideman role on a stunning array of sessions. Of late, he has delivered vigorous free-improv work alongside Art Ensemble of Chicago co-founder Roscoe Mitchell. And he has also played some of John Zorn’s most lyrical pieces in a trio that included the fiercely swinging bassist Christian McBride.
Central to Taborn’s wide appeal is the way he can thread “free jazz” style playing inside more conventional structures. A knowledge of funk and electronic music informs his ability to create catchy, short vamps, in the midst of otherwise frenetic solos. In his original compositions, Taborn’s playing has an exquisite rightness—even during the most out-there passages. If he starts playing motifs in different meters, in each hand, it’s not because he’s in a particular hurry to show off his chops. When a rush of tricky rhythm hits, it’s clear that the tune has been building toward that density. The fact that Taborn can shift into this experimental high gear so casually helps keep his music feeling poised and approachable.
Since signing to ECM earlier this decade, Taborn’s output as a leader has ticked up in pace a bit. A 2011 solo piano album, both impressionistic and intense in character, served as his label debut. A trio record of subtle heat followed in 2013. The peaks of bash that Taborn produces elsewhere were mostly absent on those outings. (It’s not a complete surprise, given ECM’s focus on serene aesthetics.) The trend continues on Taborn’s new quartet album, Daylight Ghosts, but on this occasion, he sets a quixotic challenge for himself. The pianist and his bandmates find ways to make the music sound raging despite the moderate dynamic levels.
Opening track “The Shining One” creates drama through jagged switches. To start, drummer Dave King—most famous for his work in the Bad Plus—teases listeners with a brief solo groove. Then he’s gone, leaving Taborn and tenor saxophonist Chris Speed to voice the piece’s winding, long-lined theme together. When the rhythm section comes back in, the beat is free. Taborn dives with precision over the keyboard during his solo, while Speed rephrases portions of the main hook, rooting the performance.
The contrasts here—between fixed and free rhythms, between melody and cacophony—are wild. Still, the group’s collective touch remains gentle, sublime. As they eventually converge on a beat that recalls King’s opening, there’s a sense that the music is fulfilling an inevitable destiny. This all happens in three and a half minutes: an economy of duration that is rare in exploratory modern jazz.
Nothing else on Daylight Ghosts repeats this pattern, though several other tracks manage to be equally surprising. On “Ancient,” an introductory solo from bassist Chris Lightcap has a solemn spirituality. The rest of the ensemble enters gingerly—yet by the end of the tune, they’re all engaged in an ecstatic group dance. The title track’s initial chorus and solos sound bummed out beyond belief; soon, the cloistered vibe gives way to a minimalist theme that suggests rising spirits. “Abandoned Reminder” is driven by noir sonics before a Taborn riff puts the tempo into urgent overdrive. On “The Great Silence,” Speed switches to clarinet—and Taborn’s arrangement responds to the reed player’s lustrous tone with an electronic percussion part.
In between those unpredictable statements, Taborn provides a few palette-cleansers that are more direct. “Jamaican Farewell,” his cover of a Roscoe Mitchell ballad, is handled gorgeously, as the bandleader oversees a slight electronic sheen. And “New Glory” doesn’t shroud its intentions at all. It’s simply an uptempo shot of Taborn’s gift for joyous, funk-inspired riffing—as well as a look at his ability to ornament a catchy melody for as long as he wants.
The final cut, “Phantom Ratio,” is a fitting capstone for an album with this much range. The lengthy track features droning tones that would fit in well in a concert of contemporary-classical chamber music, but it’s also driven by an electronic keyboard loop. This is the sort of fractured, almost-danceable motif that Taborn has occasionally toyed with since his influential 2004 fusion album Junk Magic. Here, the stylistic distance from vintage IDM trends is greater. A brief electronic percussion pulse rounds out the performance—and the album—much as a brief hit of King’s acoustic drumming started things off. From its grand design down to its smallest quirks, Daylight Ghosts shows that Taborn is much more than an elite jazz piano shredder. He’s a compositional force, as well.


The Wilco drummer returns with an album of pieces influenced by classical minimalism, including a work writen for the Kronos Quartet. Where his previous albums foregrounded himself as a virtuoso performer, Adventureland is about Kotche as a composer first and foremost.

Adventureland

Glenn Kotche is best known as the drummer of Wilco 2.0, the rebel whose junk metal thwacks and snaking marimba lines on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” heralded the beginning of the band’s most creatively fertile period. He also once played the Four Tops on faucets in a Delta commercial. But even before his tenure with Tweedy in Wilco and Loose Fur, Kotche wrote and performed contemporary classical music. His previous albums of original works foregrounded himself as a virtuoso performer, but on Adventureland, a new collection of pieces for chamber ensembles, he’s a composer first and foremost.
As a percussionist writing music based around the obsessive repetition of small, pulsating melodic cells, Kotche automatically puts himself in the shadow of Steve Reich, even quoting the elder composer on “Clapping Music Variations” and “Individual Trains” from 2006’s Mobile. But though he constructs his work from similar building blocks to Reich’s, the pivot points in Kotche’s pieces are more frequent and jarring. He roughens minimalism around the edges and speeds up its action, forcing the listener to adapt quickly to constant metrical changes.
“The Haunted Suite”, the better of the two large works that make up the bulk of Adventureland, is full of these unexpected turns of phrase. Kotche works in his area of greatest expertise, writing for a horde of pitched and unpitched percussion instruments and two pianos. Each movement in “The Haunted Suite” focuses on a different eerie, real-life location, and the shifting scenery inspires radical musical contrasts. The acerbic “The Haunted Furnace” evokes the ruins of a steel mill in Alabama, and takes a page out of the book of the early 20th-century American composer Henry Cowell’s uncanny, tone-cluster-ridden piano music. Similarly herky-jerky rhythms and dissonances arise in the lively “The Haunted Dance”, but the piece is much more restrained dynamically, channeling Indonesian gamelan music. The “Haunted Hive” moment is a percussion-only piece which, unlike the other sections, deals entirely in ambient, sometimes onomatopoeic sound.
In “Anomaly”, a larger-scale work originally written for and performed by the Kronos Quartet, Kotche adopts a less diverse approach. His liner notes mention that some of the piece’s sections were composed on drum kit; it makes sense, then, that the metrical patterns are its most interesting elements. Unfortunately, the actual pitched material often feels like an afterthought, and it's certainly a bit too familiar, coming across like movie-soundtrack-ready pseudo-minimalism with a pop harmonic sensibility. It’s also too bad that Kotche doesn’t further embrace the possibilities of his chosen instruments, considering he has the world’s premier avant-garde string quartet at his disposal. Unusual string timbres arise only briefly, elsewhere on the album, in the muted middle section of the collage piece “Triple Fantasy”.
So the most compelling section of “Anomaly” is the first, one that Kotche realized electronically instead of with the quartet. The dizzying melodic counterpoint is rendered on what sounds like a water-damaged version of Thom Yorke’s Rhodes on “Everything in its Right Place”, and fractured increasingly by electronic manipulation. This treatment provides the piece with the textural interest that its other sections lack; it’s the one moment where Kotche embraces the noise, grit and incidental sounds which amplify his best work, from his free improvisational recordings to “Ashes of American Flags”.