Where Dead & Company emphasize the Grateful Dead’s psychedelic spectacle, Bob Weir’s rootsy trio offers a more intimate reimagining of his former group’s historic countercultural songbook.

Bob Weir: Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros: Live in Colorado

“There’s nothing like a Grateful Dead concert” is a timeworn Deadheadism that’s been plastered to countless bumpers over the past half century. The phrase is shrouded in the kind of language that can make the world of the Dead feel impenetrable to outsiders, but behind the cliché hides a secret to the longevity of the culture the band birthed. The Grateful Dead live experience exists as a continuum of traditions and disruptions, where new forms and frameworks are birthed in bursts of improvisatory fervor before being codified and incorporated into the band’s extended mythology. There’s nothing like a Grateful Dead concert because a Grateful Dead concert is a moving target—a porous, multi-celled organism squirming and multiplying as it steadily evolves. This is as true now, nearly 30 years after the death of Jerry Garcia and the subsequent splintering of the band, as it was in 1968, 1977, or 1990.
Garcia’s death obviously threw a wrench into the whole enterprise. Dynastic power struggles ensued, and rather than see the disappearance of the Dead’s center of gravity as a creative opportunity to rally around, the band scattered into shifting factions before reuniting one last time in 2015, in Santa Clara and Chicago. Bob Weir, the band’s rhythm guitarist and Earth-bound foil to Garcia’s more cosmic inclinations, emerged as the fulcrum among the surviving members. These days he splits his time between Dead & Company, the massively lucrative touring act in which he shares the spotlight with John Mayer (the most temperamentally Weir-like Garcia proxy that’s come along), and Wolf Bros, a stripped-down group with bassist-producer Don Was and drummer Jay Lane. With both bands, Weir is dialing in different elements of what a Grateful Dead show can be—on the one hand a grandiose, psychedelic spectacle, and on the other an intimate reimagining of a historic countercultural songbook.
There are moments when Wolf Bros sound like a bar band taking wild stabs at the rootsy side of Grateful Dead’s Janus-faced repertoire (which they speckle with cuts from Weir’s sporadic solo outings), but just as often they emerge as one of the most elegant solutions to the post-Garcia conundrum. There is no lead guitarist in Wolf Bros, and when Weir does expand the group’s lineup, he brings in keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, pedal steel player Greg Leisz, and a rotating cast of horn players, dubbed the Wolfpack, to add color. Weir takes center stage and stays put, often wearing a cowboy hat, perfecting his role as a grizzled road dog. There have been previous stints where Weir assumed center stage, rather than looking for someone to fill the space left by Garcia, but Wolf Bros have lasted long enough to establish its own rugged and spacious approach to the music. It feels like a tacit acknowledgement of the need to move on, implying that if Weir is to fully embody the legacy he helped build, part of that is finding other ways to live inside it.
Weir is not a natural bandleader, but on the new Wolf Bros collection Live in Colorado he does a convincing imitation of one. The album, his first official release since the 2016 studio LP Blue Mountain, collects recordings from his first public performances of the pandemic era, in June 2021. Weir sounds energized and thankful to be playing for an audience after a year and a half off the road. His words often tumble out of his mouth like they’re anxious to miss a deadline, gruff and braying but loaded with raw enthusiasm. At the same time, the band plays at a snail’s pace, which can either feel like a leaden plod or transform a simple tune into a majestic ballad—sometimes within the course of a single song. The album is full of strange incongruities that highlight both Weir’s fallibility and the humanizing charm of a musician with nothing left to prove trying to prove something anyway.
The songs on Live in Colorado are all rooted in American folk traditions, and all but two were played extensively by the Grateful Dead. Opener “New Speedway Boogie” translates best as Weir’s scratchy, knotted chords and boisterous growl move to the foreground, settling into a slow-motion boogie that’s played with a heavy hand and benefits from that vigor and intensity. Likewise, Weir embodies the sleaziness of “West L.A. Fadeaway” better than Garcia ever could, even if his guitar solo maxes out at a few fumbled stabs at a blues lick. The magic of a Bob Weir gig isn’t in the notes that are played onstage, but rather in the camaraderie felt by an audience singing along to lyrics that have shaped their worldviews and given life meaning over the course of many accumulated years. Listening to the crowd holler, “Spent a little time on the mountain,” or “Taught that weeping willow how to cry, cry, cry,” reveals the bigger picture better than dissecting the Lenny Pickett-esque horn arrangements ever could.
Weir picks up an acoustic guitar for a version of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” a cover that reveals as much about where he is now as it does his intimate history with Dylan’s music. Dylan has been a key inspiration for Weir since before he joined the Grateful Dead at 16, and now, at 74, Weir is mirroring Dylan’s refusal to give in or give up, as well as his determination to turn what could be a phoned-in victory lap into something much weirder and more exploratory. “I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains/I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways” goes the first verse of “A Hard Rain,” and that imagery of a weary traveler echoes throughout Live in Colorado. Weir’s “Lost Sailor” has spent too long at sea; on “Only a River” he returns once again to the mythical Shenandoah of his youth; on “Big River” he travels up and down the Mississippi searching for a woman he never finds. But perhaps it’s the closing “Saint of Circumstance” that best embodies Weir’s current trajectory: “Sure don’t know what I’m going for, but I’m going to go for it for sure.”

Buy: Rough Trade


A year on from the breakout YouTube single "Gucci Gucci", Kreayshawn returns with her major label debut. It would be difficult to argue that Somethin' Bout Kreay is a waste of Kreayshawn's talent, because talent has been something of a non-factor in her story.

Somethin 'Bout Kreay

Natassia Zolot, the 22-year-old Oakland rapper known as Kreayshawn, rose to popularity in exceedingly modern fashion, but we've known how to describe her career since before she was born. She's a quintessential one-hit wonder for the digital age-- a girl who accidentally recorded a near-perfect pop-rap hit and followed it with a hollow thud of a record. If her breakout YouTube single, "Gucci Gucci", tore a hole in the conventions of pop and hip-hop, Somethin' Bout Kreay is the awkward seam that sticks out once someone has tried to sew it back up with some expensive twine.
Somethin' Bout Kreay would elicit the embarrassment of, say, walking in on a younger sibling dancing awkwardly in front of her bedroom mirror, were its shrill clatter not so forcefully distracting. These are dance songs so strident that no one could ever hope to move to them, pop songs so thin that no one could choose lines worth singing along to, rap verses so fumbly that practically anyone could rewrite them and make them better. Excepting "Gucci Gucci"-- which shoots out of the mess like a geyser of glitter-- each track can be appreciated primarily for the relief it offers from the previous clunker. To put things into perspective, Lil Debbie, Kreayshawn's mannequin twin of a sidekick, is currently making music miles catchier than Somethin' Bout Kreay, while Gucci Mane and Kreayshawn associate V-Nasty's BAYTL, lyrically speaking, might as well be Watch the Throne in comparison. Imagine watching the "Gucci Gucci" video for the first time and knowing that in the near future-- just about a year later-- you'd be nostalgic for how traditional, how authentic, it felt. Time can move in strange, unsettling ways.
While she's always been discussed in a hip-hop context, Kreayshawn doesn't so much rap here as half-sing or speak. She sounds as though she's been called on in class to read aloud, sometimes short of breath, often painfully off-key and off-beat ("beat" here usually meaning a fizzy, atonal thump). The closest she comes to rapping is on the female-revenge anthem "Left Ey3", where her presence is almost offensively performative. "I should key your car/ But I'd rather slap your mom/ Only a bitch could give birth to such a fuckin' dog," she shouts. Later in the song, during a rare moment of 2 Chainz-like hilarity, she raps: "I'm Lorena Bobbitt chillin' in your bed/ I'm Britney Spears off hella drugs/ And I just shaved my head."
Elsewhere she's a deer in the headlights, lost and meandering through half-assed boasts about how much gold she's got, dismissing her haters and forcing out unmemorable lines that make zero sense. "Them white girls keep on mobbin'/ Yeah we do, your chance is over/ But not to be my lover/ All them haters ask me what I'm doing/ I just simply tell them, 'Kreaysonic,'" she says on "K234YSONIXZ", a song that is unlistenable in spite of a beat reminiscent of Salt-n-Pepa's classic "Push It" and a hook pulled from J. J. Fad's "Supersonic". At some point, on tepid New Orleans bounce homage "Twerkin'", we even run into Diplo, a fish out of water, trying to rap: "And we slow it down/ Slappin' on the bass/ Baby drop your booty down/ Til your booty's lower case," he mutters.
It would be difficult to argue that Somethin' Bout Kreay is a waste of Kreayshawn's talent, because talent has been something of a non-factor in her story. If anything, "Gucci Gucci" helped usher in an era of artists for whom "talent" is beside the point, artists who've triumphantly remapped a hierarchy of values so that charm, branding savvy, and novelty rule supreme. Kreayshawn is one of the first of these artists forced to reconcile her own wiles with tradition in the form of a full-length album on a major label. And the final product finds her allure and charisma entirely lost in translation.
Which is a shame, because in spite of all the dismayed chatter that has enveloped her since she arrived, Kreayshawn's charisma is a special force. Take, for instance, this joyful montage of home videos shot during her childhood and uploaded this summer, where she's pictured belting the lyrics to Nas' "Oochie Wally" alongside one of her girlfriends, pointing the camera toward a mirror, showing off her pets and her Playstation. It should feel familiar, hypnotizing even, to anyone (girls in particular) for whom youth included a lot of boredom, Top 40 radio, bulky camcorders, and a dial-up internet connection. A decade later, her antennae are still tuned to the same channels, her sensibilities still perfectly translating the whimsical stoned-kid-in-a-candy-store experiences of sitting on the internet, choosing outfits with your friends, and blasting the music that makes you happiest. That's the joy we couldn't take our eyes away from when we first learned who Kreayshawn was, and a joy that is entirely absent on her album. She may never get an opportunity to relocate it-- Somethin' Bout Kreay could very well be her first and last.


Many albums by electronic producer and composer Tim Hecker have had specific focus—on a theme, or a working method, or a mood. But the two pieces collected here—the 2007 live CD Norberg and the 2010 7-inch Apondalifa—are more like simple displays of creative strength.

Norberg/Apondalifa

You can debate exactly when Tim Hecker became a master of his chosen musical form, but there's little doubt that he did at some point—at least as early as 2006's Harmony in Ultraviolet —and hasn't let go since. The variances between his works may seem incremental, but line them all up and the amount of raw material he's turned to gold is remarkable. This kind of mastery means there are no minor releases in his discography, at least in terms of quality. Even the two records collected here—the 2007 live CD Norberg and the 2010 7-inch Apondalifa, both made in limited quantities to coincide with Australian tours—reach levels of interest and intensity below which Hecker seems incapable of falling.
How exactly Norberg/Apondalifa fits in his stellar discography is a trickier question. Most reviews of Hecker's records compare them to their predecessors, with good reason; his oeuvre forms an internal dialogue wherein individual albums reflect, react to, and play off of each other. But even though "Norberg" and "Apondalifa" reflect the headspace Hecker was in when Hecker made, they feel isolated, meant to stand alone. And where many Hecker albums have had specific focus—on a theme, or a working method, or a mood—these two pieces are more like simple displays of creative strength.
Of the pair, "Norberg" is more comprehensive, a seamless 20-minute piece in which Hecker surfs around the sonic map without deviating far from his initial path. At times he flirts with aggressive noise; in other places he gets so beatific it's like he's meditating. But for most of "Norberg", Hecker skates in the tantalizing space between those poles, hinting at both without dropping off into either. When the piece ends in applause from the crowd, it's almost shocking, because—as in much of Hecker's work—you feel like you've spent the last 20 minutes inside of his head.
Perhaps because it's shorter, the 9-minute "Apondalifa" is more single-minded, hewing to one discernible range of mood. But Hecker can blow up even the tiniest dots into widening vistas, a feat he accomplishes here by varying textures rather than his tones. So even as the track feels relentless, it also spreads out into phasing guitar chords, low-end rumbles, and slow waves of drone that circle a solid core. As important as those details are, in a way they're also irrelevant, because Hecker's touch and control are so deft they could transform any coal into diamonds. That's the ultimate value of Norberg/Apondalifa, a sharp reminder that Tim Hecker has had it all figured out for a while now.


On their third album, Mount Moriah no longer sound like an indie band playing country music; they sound like a country band, full stop. It’s the band’s fullest, peppiest album yet, with punchier tempos, flashier accompaniments, and a little more of a fighting spirit.

How to Dance

You could be forgiven for assuming that Heather McEntire was moonlighting on Mount Moriah’s first album. Before her foray into country music, the singer had led the Chapel Hill band Bellafea through two distinct iterations, first as a quiet/loud indie duo then as a snarling punk trio, and Mount Moriah seemed like the latest pit stop for a restless songwriter who hadn’t fully settled on a vision yet. That the band paired her with guitarist Jenks Miller, of the form-breaking metal project Horseback, only furthered the impression that this was a side project. Despite their obvious reverence for traditional American song styles, there was a whiff of dress-up about their act. They sounded less like a country band than an indie band playing country music.
Two albums on, they’ve shed the last of those lingering indie trappings. The trio is now so fluent in roots music that it passes as their native tongue, and McEntire wears the sublime twang in her voice so naturally that it’s easy to forget it wasn’t there on Bellafea’s albums. Equal parts honey and brimstone, that voice was the star attraction on Mount Moriah’s first albums, and it is on their third effort, How to Dance, too. But where the band’s previous records were sometimes overly careful not to crowd her, How to Dance gives her some welcome competition. It’s the band’s fullest, peppiest album yet, building on the wider instrumental palette that 2013’s Miracle Temple introduced with punchier tempos, flashier accompaniments, and a little more of a fighting spirit.
How to Dance is most invigorating when it sweeps the band’s easy-rolling tunes off of the front porch and drops them at the roadhouse. Miller’s guitar packs "Precita" tight with one plucky honk-tonk lick after another, keeping the energy up for Angel Olsen, who shadows McEntire on vocals. His terse, blustery riffs drive "Cardinal Cross," but generally he resists showboating, preferring to play off of his collaborators. On "Fox in the City," his guitar gradually recedes to clear room for a waltzing violin, while on opener "Calvander" his brief, tuneful riffs are complemented by woozy Memphis horns, which McEntire’s voice weaves around with the limber grace of a young Van Morrison.
Freed by the extra instruments, McEntire delivers some of her loosest, most soulful performances, even as her lyrics remain consumed by lofty matters of faith. Early on "Calvander," she drops to her knees and prays "to something for some kind, any kind of light," and whatever or whoever she prayed to must have been listening, because she finds it all over these 10 songs. On "Chiron (God in the Brier)," she discovers God underneath a water tower near Fishdam Road. On "Higher Mind" she meets him at the North Carolina fishing resort Oceanana Pier. She peppers her lyrics with the names of unassuming places where these kinds of revelations could conceivably occur: Grizzly Peak, Baker Beach, Okefenokee, Davis Square, Crooked River, Honey Lake, Newport River, and so on. You could lose an afternoon researching all the landmarks she mentions, getting lost in the surprisingly fascinating minutia of main streets and highway rest areas you’d never heard of before (Oceanana Pier really does look like a lovely vacation spot).
There’s some irony in a band named for one of the bible’s most holy sites setting an album about magnificent religious awakenings almost exclusively in small-town locales of no biblical significance, but the everyday backdrops are in keeping with McEntire’s inclusive view of spirituality. On Mount Moriah’s first albums, McEntire reconciled her identities as a Christian Southerner, despite being far from the textbook representation of either community, so it makes sense that she doesn’t draw all that much distinction between the fabled Jerusalem mountain where God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his second son and a beach motel whose annual fishing contest pays out $150 in cash prizes. In How to Dance's worldview, celestial enlightenment can occur to anyone, anywhere.


The Swedish psych-rock pioneers’ songs are usually like odysseys, but their first full-length studio album in seven years is more of a pleasure cruise.

Dungen: En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog

En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog

Over two decades, Swedish psych-rock pioneers Dungen have carved their own niche, spanning ’70s psych rock homage to free jazz freakouts. From 2004’s excellent Ta Det Lugnt to 2016’s witchy Häxan, the band’s M.O. has been consistent: records that feel like epics, gilded with flute solos and fuzz. En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog, their first full-length studio album in seven years, marks a pivot. Here, they exchange dark hallucinations for the sunny gloss of AM radio, trading offbeat textures for more commercial territory.
Like a phantasmagoric acid trip, Dungen makes songs so freewheeling and exploratory that they teeter on the brink of chaos. Every record scratch or woodwind melody suggests a certain feeling, from eeriness to effervescent joy, and asks the listener to embrace it. That level of immersive, microcosmic attention shows up here on tracks like opener “Skövde,” as it did on Häxan’s “Aladdin ach lampan, del 2,” where the flute sometimes sounds like it’s wafting in from another room. The mix balances a swirl of instrumentation and layered harmonies, a driving drum beat building heat until the melody simmers. Attention to detail and production trained for texture make sense—Dungen began recording this album gradually in 2017, and the meticulousness in the intervening years led to tight, propulsive tracks, nary a cymbal fill out of place.
In keeping with tradition, the band is most compelling when their songs are at the tip of some extreme—a slightly spooky piano ballad, or a deranged fusion of keening guitar and skittering beats. The former, “Om Natten,” closes the album with unadorned chords and a haunting metronome. It moves unpredictably between hopefulness and melancholy, one part radio ballad and one part mourning rite. The latter, “Var Har Du Varit?” is a different sort of chimera entirely, though equally charming, like a Chemical Brothers song pulled back in time by some wizard on LSD.
“Om Det Finns Något Som Du Vill Fråga Mig” is light and sweet, but a little insubstantial too, like a Necco wafer—the sort of step-touch pop song that might’ve been sung by a sibling duo in matching jumpsuits. “Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus” is the reverberant, wilder sibling of Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy,” a winsome melody laced with distortion, where the wheels might come off at any second. The organ chords on “Möbler” evoke the Steve Miller Band, all bombast and build. And while these references are beloved for a reason—who doesn’t want to fly like an eagle?—Dungen’s iterations of these sounds can feel weak, especially compared to the depth and audaciousness of their earlier work. The expectation is an odyssey, but you wind up on a pleasure cruise. It doesn’t sate your wanderlust, even if it’s not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
It’s possible that these songs were a conscious attempt to move even closer to Tame Impala and the War On Drugs’ festival-headlining sound, the irony being that Dungen came first (and informed them both). Mostly, En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog offers driving, instantly catchy songs that would sound excellent blaring from beneath a laser show, some ferris wheel spinning in the background. The destination is almost too familiar; before, Dungen often led listeners down a thornier, less trodden path. The preferable voyage will depend on who’s listening.


With sparse acoustic arrangements and cryptic lyrics, the songwriter’s fifth solo album feels like a series of intimate dispatches from a personal purgatory.

Engine of Hell

Emma Ruth Rundle lives on a gloomy planet. Drop a needle on one of her records and imagine her shuffling down an otherwise sunny street beneath her own personal raincloud, shivering in an oversized trench coat. The clouds gather as you listen, and before long, darkness has fallen. Follow her voice through the night into a sprawling cemetery where a new monster lurks behind each tombstone: a black dog here, a medusa there, a nightmarish whisper-scream further down the row.
Engine of Hell’s setting is no less bleak, but now Rundle stands alone among the mausoleums, digging up skeletons buried deep in her psychogeography. Stripped of drums and effects, the album is emphatically intimate. It’s unsettling to hear her peel back the defense mechanisms she’s often placed between herself and the trauma embedded in her source material, but it’s hard to look away.
Rundle’s power has grown with each new solo album. On 2014’s Some Heavy Ocean, she peeked out from the melancholic morass that characterized her contributions to the downcast post-rock of Marriages and Red Sparowes. She reincorporated her beloved reverb and death-march drum lines into 2016’s Marked for Death and 2018’s On Dark Horses, but these churning undercurrents were no match for her vocals. Collaborating with southern Louisiana sludge band Thou on 2020’s May Our Chambers Be Full, Rundle held her own. Her rich, smoky alto simmered in moments of bitter reflection and warped into a sneering falsetto when the pain flowed freely.
If that album’s brilliance was at times dimmed by sonic excess, Engine of Hell is crystallized by its austerity. It was recorded live, its instrumentation entirely acoustic. Rundle accompanies herself, alternating between piano and guitar. Her arrangements are sparse and simple, though her skill on the guitar is evident even when she’s merely strumming a few minor chords. Her relationship with the piano is more complicated: She played the instrument growing up but abandoned it in her 20s when she decided it didn’t fit her music. She’s a competent player, but her attack often feels tentative, and her voicings are uncharacteristically open and airy.
“Body” begins like an anonymous Lite FM ballad, but the melodramatic intro accentuates the grit in Rundle’s vocal delivery. Over childlike chords, she sings about the grandmother who bought her first piano and cared for her as a teenager until the older woman’s death. The consoling mantra of the chorus—“You know my arms are always around you”—echoes in her head as she watches her grandmother’s body being wheeled away. “We’re moving the body now,” she sings, as collaborator Troy Zeigler rasps the album’s only backing vocal, many octaves beneath her. In a different, earlier Rundle song, “moving the body” might have been the prelude to something more gothic and horrible, but here it’s an act of mourning and letting go.
Elsewhere on Engine of Hell, she cuts biblical allegories down to quotidian size. In “Blooms of Oblivion,” where she allows herself a modicum of lushness in the form of Jo Quail’s cello, Judas is a heroin addict waiting in line for methadone. And in “Razor’s Edge,” Lazarus is the traveling companion of a self-destructive twentysomething who’s “spending all my money as the petty cash of youth runs out.” Cryptic realism is Rundle’s strongest mode; the lyrics are less effective when they tend towards simple abstraction. “Citadel,” a baroque song-poem, feels detached without a more lifelike stand-in for the “fortress in my heart” or the “destroyer in my blood.”
If the first seven songs on Engine of Hell offer glimpses into Rundle’s worst moments, then the final track is where she casts her gaze toward eternity. “Taken to task in some engine of Hell/I lacked the toll to cross the river there,” she begins. Discussing the record with Stereogum, Rundle described the titular metaphor as “this mechanism through which you’re forced to rewatch and relive memories over and over again.” The raincloud hung heavy over her past four records; on Engine of Hell, it breaks open. The personal tragedies that come pouring out are scarier than any of the grisly apparitions she used to conjure.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On her fourth album, the Canadian pop star is doing what she does best, calibrating lovesick or lovelorn synthpop that’s neither too hot nor too cold—and sometimes, regrettably, only lukewarm.

Dedicated

Carly Rae Jepsen ties up bright, ribbony pop songs with the magnetism of a person who’s a little too modest to be a pop star. She goes for the big feelings, and as a result, inspires near-rapturous devotion. Jepsen’s most ardent fans feel called to defend her, to arm her with a sword, to catalyze the moment that will reveal her magic beyond doubt. With 2015’s E•MO•TION, they nearly had it; I’ll go one further and say that its follow-up, the overflow collection E•MO•TION Side B, is the better listen. Dedicated, Jepsen’s fourth full-length album, returns to her signature combination of self-aware innocence and mature restraint, though its greater purpose is not always quite clear. She’s doing what she does best, calibrating lovesick or lovelorn synthpop that’s neither too hot nor too cold—and sometimes, regrettably, only lukewarm.
Dedicated takes a more relaxed approach to Jepsen’s well-established penchant for ’80s pop. By her own description, the album began under the working title of “Music to Clean Your House To,” a characteristically unassuming goal. The windshield-wiper synths that open “Julien” or the casual autopilot of “Automatically in Love” point to Jepsen’s other guiding aesthetic: “chill disco,” a mood that vaunts sparkling melodies over writing that can feel short on intrigue. Each of these upbeat yet tasteful jams is sturdy enough to spur you through another load of laundry, and light on the kind of indulgent flourishes that spawned “Run Away With Me” saxophone memes. The total effect is glossy, but the individual moments shine a little less; few lines here have the breathless potency of, “Late night watching television/But how’d we get in this position?”
Everything in Jepsen’s world always comes back to love, and in the past, the feeling was usually unrequited. That’s changed now; on Dedicated, love is more assured of itself, and for the first time, distinctly sexy. Rarely has her singing sounded so breathy and astonished. “No Drug Like Me” describes the intoxication of new love as a dry-mouthed truth serum; “The Sound” can play like a plea for spoken commitment, or something altogether more carnal. “Like pressure points my love can ease him in my hands,” Jepsen sings on “Everything He Needs,” an unlikely and lightly risqué flip of “He Needs Me,” the Harry Nilsson-written song performed by Shelley Duvall’s Olive Oyl in the 1980 film Popeye. “Want You in My Room,” a scene-stealing Jack Antonoff production, wields its pitch-shifted hook like a conspiratorial voice disguise. “I’m like a lighthouse/I’m a reminder of where you’re goin’,” Jepsen sings, the kind of clever line that’s often missing here. She’s also used it before, on E•MO•TION’s “All That,” so she must really mean it.
Though an album of coy disco romance is a good thing, at times Dedicated strains in other directions. The pastel EDM-pop bounce of “Now That I Found You” comes closest to the reckless joy of Jepsen’s single “Cut to the Feeling,” a song impossible to improve on. “Happy Not Knowing” takes a more classically CRJ approach to romance with its “please don’t tell me” appeal to a crush, but perhaps the territory is too familiar. “I’ll only go so far/I don’t have the energy/To risk a broken heart/When you’re already killing me,” Jepsen sings, because she’s loved and lost, and she mostly just sounds bummed about it. These should be some of the album’s best songs, but they feel wiped clean of the messy ambiguities that fog up real emotions.
As with E•MO•TION, Jepsen wrote a lot of songs for this album—more than 100—and ultimately a few too many made the cut. Some of the weakest tracks are swallowed up in their expertly interlocked sequences of pre-chorus and chorus; the verses to “Right Words Wrong Time” feel like afterthoughts. The extra distractions hide potential sleeper hits like the funk-lite of “Feels Right” and the balmy, vulnerable “Real Love,” which deserves to be a standout. But by the time the album ends with last November’s single “Party for One,” it’s been displaced, lost in the shuffle of a transitional album with its heart set but its mind not yet quite made up.


With Wolf Parade on indefinite hiatus, Dan Boeckner gives his full attention to Handsome Furs, and they craft their best album yet.

Sound Kapital

Up to this point, it's been somewhat difficult to listen to the broke-down electro-pop of Handsome Furs without imagining what Dan Boeckner's more established band, Wolf Parade, might do to elaborate on it. Though the projects sound very different, his songs for both bands rely heavily on his bleary-eyed lyricism and jagged guitar chug. But as Boeckner could tell you, there's an easy way to get people to stop comparing your side project to your main gig: just break up the latter.
But it's not just Wolf Parade's recently announced "indefinite hiatus" that casts Sound Kaptial as Handsome Furs' most passionate, committed album to date. Rather, by taking the emphasis off of Boeckner's guitars and giving greater shine to wife Alexei Perry's neon-bright keyboard lines and woofer-busting beats, Handsome Furs present themselves as a genuine, ready-for-the-floor synth-pop band rather than a frazzled rock act that happens to use synthesizers. With new wave confections like "Memories of the Future" and "What About Us", Sound Kapital effectively conjures an alternate 1980s where Bruce Springsteen didn't just tinker around with synths and drum machines on occasion, but actually tried to make a full-on Depeche Mode record.
However, Sound Kapital isn't so much an 80s throwback in sound as in its spirit of sincerity. A handful of songs on the record were inspired by the Furs' 2010 visit to Burma, where they performed alongside bands who were quite literally underground, forced to perform out of sight of the oppressive local authorities, with minimal access to electricity, let alone recording technology. Given that Boeckner's always been drawn to the struggle of the underdog, the experience of being around people who routinely risked incarceration just to play their music naturally had a profound effect on his songwriting; the opening song is built around a click-tracked chant-- "When I get back home/ I won't be the same no more"-- that effectively serves as a promise to put aside petty, material-world concerns.
And rather than deal in general, impressionistic images of hearts on fire and shining lights, the album's centerpiece song, "Serve the People", pays tribute to the Burmese band Side Effect with street-level scenes of "kids... making noise with their generators on till the cops say, 'move along.'" It's the sort of arm-swaying anthem you could easily imagine the Furs' Montreal mates Arcade Fire turning into a Coachella-rocking showstopper. But the humbly lo-tech take-- all shuffling drum-machine breaks and squelching frequencies-- feels very true to the environment that inspired it, where music is exchanged via pirate radio and the power can be suddenly cut at any moment. The more frenzied companion track "Cheap Music" reframes the same scene, but downplays the overarching themes of valor and perseverance to convey the illicit, punk-rock thrill of hearing "a thousand lonely kids making noise in the basement."
Therein lies Sound Kapital's greatest success: Handsome Furs no longer feel like a stripped-down antidote to Wolf Parade, but more like a band that's able to execute progressively grander, emotionally resonant ideas while staying within their limited means. And nowhere is that more evident than on Sound Kapital's urgent, feedback-swathed closer "No Feelings", which, despite its seven-minute sprawl, counts as Boeckner's most immediately affecting performance since Wolf Parade's "Shine a Light". The song sees Boeckner returning to familiar concerns (emotional ennui, self-doubt) but as it reemerges from a My Bloody Valentine-like miasma for a final sprint to the finish, Boeckner's repeated claims that he's "got no feeling" provide Sound Kapital with a rare moment of irony: Everything about this song-- and this entire album, for that matter-- suggests this heart's still got a lot left to burn.


The Brooklyn band returns with a Europe-only grab-bag collection of new songs, EP highlights, and remixes.

Volume On

Even though Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm of Tanlines do plenty to honor the spirit of their name (and yes, that is a MiniDisc on the cover), don't be so quick to lump them in with every other nostalgia junkie cluttering Brooklyn. It's actually fitting that the 2xCD Volume On is a European-only release, since Tanlines' blindingly bright synth-pop has more in common with jetsetters like Tough Alliance, Delorean, and Studio-- acts that are influenced by the sounds of the tropics rather than just the idea of them.
You won't get much of an idea of what Tanlines actually sounds like from Cohen and Emm's backgrounds (Professor Murder and Don Caballero, respectively). But what has been carried forward from earlier projects is a lab-rat work ethic that makes Volume On more than a bunch of obvious signifiers. Sure, the kick drum insistently hits on every beat and the percussion tempts Miami Sound Machine jokes, but the songs here are always playful and never pushy. It's dance music if you want it to be, maintaining a Balearic vibe without being wholly tied to it.
It's hard to say if Tanlines' real strength is production or songwriting, but Volume On has its share of highlights where they do both. "Real Life", the song that has become Tanlines' signature track, is a regular presence here. In addition to its original version, there three remixes of the song on the second disc, including a smeared-lens rendering by Memory Tapes. The song endures even in the dead of winter in large part because it's the best showcase of Emm's odd melodic charm as a vocalist, and "You might think I'm still that way... It was a past-life thing" stands up as a strangely affecting mea culpa.
More prominent here than on this year's Settings EP, Emm's vocals are a strange, sonorous thing that occasionally morph into something Sting-like but also have the go-for-it spirit of the Rapture's Luke Jenner (who appears here on new song "O Seizing The Day O"). By the same token, his voice doesn't work particularly well in isolation. Like on the acoustic version of "Real Life", which is startling any way you slice it. It's a complete sonic anomaly within the confines of Volume On, but Emm's vocal delivery isn't altered one bit and turns out to be entirely at odds with the arrangement.
Volume On isn't officially Tanlines' first album, but it doesn't sound like a hastily cobbled-together bid for year-end lists either. In fact, it holds together almost too well. They work within a pretty narrow range of BPM's and the textural sleekness can have a dazing cumulative effect over the span of Volume On's hour-plus runtime. Nonetheless, the promise is there. Tanlines obviously know how to properly book an island getaway, but it could really be something special if they can learn to diversify the itinerary.


The Muncie Girls frontwoman’s solo debut is part self-interrogation and part community offering, serving up tiny bursts of joy and doubt as refuge for anyone navigating a similar path.

Going to Hell

Sometimes the hardest person to be honest with is yourself. On “Whiskey,” Bristol-based singer-songwriter Lande Hekt runs through a list of questions that imply something in her life is amiss, each item in the interrogation shouldering more weight than the last. The true meaning of this DIY-punk-goes-alt-pop anthem is scrawled in invisible ink: To Hekt, the song represents the moment she realized she couldn’t keep pretending that she wasn’t gay. As the opener of her solo debut, Going to Hell, “Whiskey” epitomizes the highs and lows of Hekt’s first independent foray. After a decade as the singer and bassist of the punk-rock band Muncie Girls, she’s got hooks to spare. But as she reevaluates her life as a queer woman in solitude, Hekt occasionally stumbles into lyrical pitfalls that oversimplify the very messages these songs aim to prop up.
Written during Hekt’s coming-out period, Going to Hell captures what it’s like when queer pride in the local punk scene takes on newly personal meaning. Jolts of disbelief and self-doubt weave through “December” and “Hannover” as Hekt wrestles with her heart. “What if it’s you that makes me happy for once? What if I tell you that and I get no response?” she sings, her panic bolstered by a slosh of lo-fi pop-rock akin to P.S. Eliot. Realizing you’ve outgrown hetero culture in adulthood can feel surreal, like watching a model in a glossy ad being reverse-Photoshopped at hyperspeed. If Hekt experienced a similar revelation, it’s not directly discussed in these songs. Instead, she recalls the cold shoulders thrown her way—“Your friends from home start acting strange/When you try to be yourself for a change,” goes the title track—a very real, albeit fractional, part of a larger whole.
As welcome as it is to hear Hekt reflect on her burgeoning identity, the most commanding songs on Going to Hell explore personal feelings in service to a community. Atop Japanese Breakfast-style guitar pop on “Undone” or Sharon Van Etten-inspired finger-picking on “Winter Coat,” she sings about indulging self-pity and the restorative power of hiding away for some peace and quiet. It’s how Hekt copes when she gets inside her own head, and these vignettes—the feeling of sun on her skin while driving down the Autobahn, or the way she tries to recall why she started smoking cigarettes and can’t—give Going to Hell an aura of comfort. In these tiny bursts of joy and doubt, Hekt offers refuge for strangers navigating similar paths.
Although Hekt typically writes with clarity and poise, Going to Hell sometimes embraces cliché. Take the album closer “In the Darkness,” a straightforward acoustic ballad with an earnest motivational refrain: “I’m more powerful than you’ll ever know/’Cause I’ve got democracy and I’ll never let it go.” She originally wrote the song for Rebellious Sounds—an archive of feminist activism organized by the British charitable organization Dreadnought South West—after hearing a woman discuss her experience in the Czech Republic during the Velvet Revolution. Hekt’s song aims to transform that story into a broader call for women’s participation in community politics and organizing, but without any clue to the historical inspiration in the lyrics, the recycled platitudes feel flavorless and out of place. Intent alone doesn’t make great music, but it can lend an otherwise hackneyed sentiment the confidence required to resonate authentically. The trick, of course, is in saying what you really mean the first time.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Irish shoegaze band plunges into darkness on its brilliantly textured second album, led by the eerie vocals of Katie Ball.

Heart Under

On their 2018 debut, Wednesday, Just Mustard rode a wave of noise to the front of the shoegaze pack, breaking from the distorted yearning of the genre’s softer acolytes. Their pseudo-electronic blend of whirring guitars and trip-hop backbeats was its own strain of revivalism—the sound of Beat-era Bowery Electric’s industrial lullabies bleeding into traces of A.R. Kane’s prismatic sludge. But even among these giants of existential dread, the Irish quintet sounded uniquely tormented, winding around singer Katie Ball’s siren-call vocals and dialing into the split-second where anxiety collapses into desperation. Coming from a friend, bleak observations such as “I’m in fear of life/Had it on my mind/Said it all the time/’Cause the dead don't mind,” from “Boo,” would be cause for concern. Slathered in reverb and sent hurtling through a dizzying maze of guitar effects, Just Mustard document succumbing to the inertia of a panic attack with a biting urgency.
Ratcheting up the gloom, Heart Under sharpens the somnambulant dream-pop of their debut to pierce through the mirage of a light at the end of the tunnel. From the fog-horn drone of opener “23” to the wailing feedback freakout that closes “Rivers,” it’s clear that Just Mustard haven’t lightened up a bit during the past four years. United behind Ball’s eerie lead vocals, a role she previously split with guitarist David Noonan, the band takes the plunge into an even more entrancing darkness.
Lead single “I Am You” is a delicate high-wire act, an anthem for ego-death set against pounding drums and howling static. Grinding the creeping dread of Slint’s “Good Morning, Captain” down to a lockstep march, six-string noise piles up slowly as Ball’s plea for transformation (“Can you change my head?”) ascends until it becomes a command, parting the sea of feedback. Even during the less arresting cuts, such as “In Shade,” she goes far beyond shoegaze’s “voice-as-instrument” conceit. Building her voice from a sigh into a full-throated cry in the second chorus, she explodes from behind a wall of ice, shouting into the night. Whether she’s watching the world slip past her reflection (“Mirrors”), processing the regret of inaction (“Rivers”), or disappearing into a mournful daydream (“Early”), the thickest slabs of reverb can’t hide her talent.
Noonan and co-guitarist Mete Kalyon favor the types of effects that send legions of gear-obsessed fans running to the front of the stage to catch a glimpse of their pedals; if their ear for groaning melodies holds up, you can expect dozens of tutorial videos dissecting their haunting tones in the not-too-distant future. The blurred rumble of their interplay seamlessly alternates between atmospheric yawns and melodic jabs. Often, they take entire choruses for themselves, trading fours of manipulated feedback on the stomping highlight “Still” and dragging shards of noise across “Mirrors”’s tambourine-led groove-out. These moments of atonal abandon are immersive and bewildering, turning every song into a funhouse mirror.
Playing out like a series of snapshots from a dawnless night, Heart Under dodges catharsis or release, lingering in staggering volumes and frustrated desires. As the record comes to a close on “River,” Ball contemplates how she could have held on tighter to someone who’s slipped into the past forever, stranded on the shore of a distant memory. “Could I have changed a thing?” she muses, only to be met by a screeching tide. There is no moment of transcendence, of towering above the desolation and meeting a stronger version of yourself. It’s an anti-climax that affirms the deeply personal reality of pain. Rather than holding up a torch, Heart Under adjusts your eyes to the pitch black.


The self-titled G.O.O.D. Music debut from HXLT (F.K.A. rapper Hollywood Holt) aims to revisit a time when Debbie Harry and Grandmaster Flash rubbed elbows at New York’s Danceteria, but ends up feeling like getting invited to a friend's art show—you’re rooting for the guy, but man, some of this stuff is brutal.

HXLT

No two genres are as similar in spirit as punk rock and rap. Both were created by poor young people as a way to express disdain with the status quo and provide some insight into the minds and hearts of people who usually don’t get a seat at the table. Both encourage a spirit of self-reliance that allows for a kid in Small Town X to create something that can stand confidently next to an icon. Both have been co-opted by the mainstream at large when they proved to be financially beneficial. Both have been sneered at by lames for not requiring much musical "skill" to execute.
Given all this, you'd think more punk and rap collaborations would turn out better. But usually, the people interested in uniting the genres go the laziest, most obvious route imaginable, and for every Death Grips you get someting like the self-titled G.O.O.D. Music debut from Nigel "HXLT" Holt's (F.K.A. rapper Hollywood Holt). The album aims to revisit a time when Debbie Harry and Grandmaster Flash rubbed elbows at New York’s Danceteria—creating a culture in the process— but ultimately ends up feeling like being invited to a friend's art show—you’re rooting for the guy but man, some of this stuff is brutal.
The album's sound is uncomplicated. He could have gone overboard with screeching guitars, but HXLT keeps things spare, closer to post-punk than punk. "Why" is a decent dark wave homage, taking dashes of the sound (choppy rhythm guitar, disinterested vocal stylings) and forcing the synths to get along with a drum machine doing yeoman's work. There’s elements of social awareness, too. On "Guitar," the Mano-produced standout, HXLT laments that he’d like to be famous solely to bring attention to real issues (the chorus: "I wish I could play guitar/ And write all the songs to make me rich/ Use it all to save the kids"). No complaints there.
The lyrics are another story; there are a ton of eyeroll moments here. While no one expects this guy to be Lou Reed, there’s gotta be something out there better than "Rock N Roll"’s "I wanna get into a fight in front of you and knock his lights out/ I wanna ride a motorbike, make you jump on it and we ride out." It’s a damn shame, too, because HXLT is an undeniable live performer, full of charisma: Put him on a stage right now anywhere and he's walking out with five new fans. Somewhere in him he might have a real punk anthem, but none of the songs on the record accurately bottle that energy. Other than "Sick," a song about the frustration of loving someone you honestly can’t stand half the time, the whole thing kind of ambles. Even the Kathleen Hanna-guested "Together" doesn’t gnash its teeth as much as you’d like it to. (Sidebar: Getting Kathleen Hanna on your first album has to be the punk equivalent of getting a Jay Z feature on your debut, right?)
A lot of the narrative surrounding this record has been about Holt finally embracing the influences traditional rap heads considered too weird, or "too white." Clap for him for sticking to his convictions but speaking frankly, a lot of people wouldn’t be giving this the time of day were it not presented via the Kanye West/G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam co-sign. The missed opportunity is the most frustrating part. What could have been a real shift in culture ends up feeling like moving into a new apartment: There’s some potential, but things are still all over the place.


On this new EP, the British electronic duo and Ninja Tune label founders reckon with the disorientation of our media moment. Their approach is unfortunately vague.

Only Heaven

“Deejays predate the internet, in a way,” Coldcut’s Jonathan More told the Chicago Tribune in 1997. “We’re filters who select information from different sources and give it a context for people to grab on to.” That probably made a certain amount of sense then, right on the cusp of the dot-com boom, but compared to everything that happened next—MP3 downloads, P2P networks, YouTube, Spotify—the idea of a DJ as a crucial node in a global information network sounds as antiquated as a tin-can-and-string toy telephone. And so, in its own quaint way, does Coldcut’s debut single, “Say Kids What Time Is It?,” which will celebrate its 30th anniversary in February. A cut-and-paste hip-hop jam inspired by Steinski’s turntable collages, the tune sampled a mess of funk and disco breaks along with snippets of The Jungle Book and the theme to the 1950s television show “Howdy Doody”—a show that, when Coldcut recorded the song, was roughly as distant in time as their debut single is from us today.
Coldcut have always had a McCluhan-esque fascination with the collision of form and content. That was the driving impulse behind those early experiments in turntablism and sampling, which mimicked the distracted zapping encouraged by cable television and remote controls. But as the flow of information has sped up, Coldcut have struggled to articulate a compelling framework for their own productions, even as their label, Ninja Tune, has asserted itself as a leading force in beat-oriented electronic music. Their last album, 2006’s Sound Mirrors, brought together dancehall beats and acid house with spoken word from Saul Williams, snippets of the poet Amiri Baraka’s voice, and tag-team sloganeering from Jon Spencer and Mike Ladd—an eclectic assemblage that couldn’t quite decide where it wanted to go or what it wanted to be.
This new EP, their first release in a decade, looks at first like an attempt to engage with our own critical media moment, in which “message” is smothered by a deluge of disinformation. The record cover strikingly juggles elements of mid-20th-century Polish poster design, the staticky “snow” of a dead television screen, and the scrambled logo of the Daily Mail, a right-wing populist tabloid in the UK; press materials present the record as “an exercise in ‘dissentertainment’.” But nothing in the EP’s five tracks measures up to that rhetoric. Mostly, it serves as a vehicle for the London rapper Roots Manuva and the singer Roses Gabor, although their contributions sound like they were meant for two entirely different records.
On lead track “Only Heaven,” Roots Manuva rattles off stream-of-consciousness assonant rhymes (“Molotov quality/Causing controversy/Oh, it’s so odd to see/Oh, it’s so novelty”) that sound great—he’s such a personable vocalist, he could make the phone book sound catchy—but don’t add up to much. On the chorus, a sighing Roses Gabor offers platitudes: “Only heaven can ever save me/Feels like hell out on these streets/I need you more than you need me.” Like worn Velcro, the two halves fail to stick together, and the backing track, a twinkling approximation of early Portishead, doesn’t make up for what’s missing lyrically; the same goes for the closing “Quality Control,” a woozy dub version of the title cut.
The languid “Dreamboats” is more interesting musically, particularly in a narcotic breakdown that loops Gabor’s voice against clanking chains and ethereal coos. But again, Roots Manuva’s third-eye mindstates and Gabor’s vaguely erotic hook  fail to complement each other in any meaningful way. “Creative,” meanwhile, might as well be Coldcut’s homage to Disclosure’s brand of garage-influenced house—which is ironic, given the song’s anti-biter vocal hook, which they’ve sampled from a 1989 single by the South London rapper Black Radical MKII. More charitably, you could compare its swirls of layered synths to Four Tet, but that’s not enough to make it sound particularly vital.
Musically, the most interesting thing here is “Donald’s Wig,” a rolling drum’n’bass tune featuring Gabor solo. Unfortunately, it flies the furthest from the mark they’ve set for themselves with the “dissentertainment” tag. Perhaps the topic seemed like a good idea at the time, when they went into the studio; from afar—across the Atlantic, and, crucially, months before the U.S. presidential election of November 2016—a tongue-in-cheek song about Donald Trump must have appeared a fairly low-stakes affair. It is precisely the kind of absurdist, media-savvy, vaguely political thing that Coldcut have always delighted in. But the song fails to engage with its subject matter in any meaningful way beyond the title, even though the press release explicitly references the then-candidate, now president-elect. The hook—“Don’t give up your race/Days are going to wait”—was presumably meant in the context of the electoral race, but as the specter of white nationalism looms ever larger over Trump’s cabinet and rabid fan base, the line comes to seem unfortunately vague at best.
Post-election and, for the UK, post-Brexit, we’re well aware of all the ways the media has failed us. Rather than providing a superficial media critique, Coldcut would be better off taking a page from their own book and returning to the righteous anger that fueled their 2002 remix with Saul Williams, “Not in My Name.”


This ecstatic third installment of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi's annual live meeting features ear-filling noise-rock that conjures metal, psych, and stoner rock.

Oren Ambarchi | Keiji Haino | Jim O'Rourke: Imikuzushi

Imikuzushi

The first two albums by the trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi were a bit mysterious. On 2010's Tima Formosa, the instrumentation was unexpected-- particularly O'Rourke's piano-- and the music often got so cloudy and formless it was hard to tell who was playing what. Things became a little clearer when Ambarchi moved to drums and O'Rourke to bass for 2011's In a flash everything comes together as one there is no need for a subject. Still, Haino's array of noise-making tools made it feel more like a ritual ceremony than a musical performance.
Mystery gets blown out the window on Imikuzushi, the third installment of this group's annual live meeting. From the very first second, our heroes' intentions are clear: They came to bang out ear-filling power-trio noise-rock. And they do that with obliterating abandon on an opener whose rambling title, "still unable to throw off that teaching a heart left abandoned unable to get inside that empty space nerves freezing that unconcealed sadness…", seems logical compared to its sonic insanity. The track's blood is boiled by Haino's inhuman guitar, which starts in overdrive and gets progressively more violent. At his peaks, he sounds like Jimi Hendrix if he actually played his flaming guitar instead of just waving at it.
It's tempting to say those peaks are the album's high points, since the trio doesn't spend all of Imikuzushi in fifth gear. But even during its most mellow stretches, the music crackles with tension, charged by the possibility that chaos could erupt-- and it often does. That edge-of-oblivion feeling naturally comes from Haino's high-wire acts, but it's also due to Ambarchi and O'Rourke's rhythm work, which is both weighty and nimble. The pair alternates between depth-charge beats and clicking, jazzy clips, along the way conjuring metal, psych, and sky-shooting stoner rock.
Unsurprisingly, they also evoke the bluesy blasts of Haino's legendary avant-rock outfit Fushitsusha. But there's something different about this trio's approach to sonic obliteration. Even when everything's clanging and exploding, and Haino's voice is dive-bombing through all the clamor, the band never sounds rushed or at risk of tripping over itself. Perhaps this move to noise-rock actually calmed their nerves and loosened their musical muscles. Whatever the explanation, Imikuzushi feels like the work of artists looking down from a mountain rather than laboring to climb it.
That vision reaches furthest on track three, which has another sprawling title: "invited in practically drawn in by something facing the exit of this hiding place who is it? that went in…" Here, many sonic parts fit together magically, like levers and pulleys in a Rube Goldberg machine. There's O'Rourke's swaying, two-note bassline as things pick up steam; Ambarchi's monstrous fills when Haino's guitar detonates; and Haino's chilling chants over O'Rourke's rumbling fuzz. The excitement feels endless, but knowing how restless these three can be, this might be the last time they work in this ecstatic mode. Luckily, Imikuzushi captures that moment in a way that sounds timeless.


Composer Sofie Birch’s lush ambient creations and experimental singer Antonina Nowacka’s indelible vocal melodies meet on a record that ebbs and flows as naturally as breathing.

Sofie Birch / Antonina Nowacka: Languoria

Languoria

On a crisp autumn morning last year, in a 19th-century synagogue in Krakow, Danish electronic musician Sofie Birch and Polish vocalist Antonina Nowacka coaxed a heavenly sound out of the ether. Birch played a compact setup of hardware synthesizers, wires tumbling from the outputs, while Nowacka held herself still behind the mic, her eyes closed as she sang, hands half-clasped and tracing small circles in front of her, as though she were sewing invisible thread. Their gauzy white frocks only accentuated the ritual atmosphere.
For the few dozen people in attendance, it was a magical event; some wept. Langouria, the duo’s recorded debut together, translates the otherworldly power of their Unsound festival performance to the studio.
The album represents a meeting of the minds. As a solo musician, Birch has spent the past few years developing a unique style of lush, welcoming ambient music steeped in new-age tones. Nowacka’s work has ranged from abstract vocalizations alongside stark electronics—imagine Joan La Barbara fronting Wolf Eyes—to solo improvisations in Oaxacan churches and Javan caves, probing the outer limits of natural reverb. If Birch’s music is a brightly colored expanse of coral, or a sashaying field of kelp, Nowacka’s voice is a lone organism carving a languid path through it—perhaps a translucent jellyfish, lithe yet severe in the exactitude of its movements.
Birch pares back her playing to make way for the slim contours of Nowacka’s instrument. Rather than unleashing her usual billowing plumes of synthesizer, she for the most part restrains herself to just a few sounds and the merest melodic shapes, while faint field recordings—birdsong, the rustle of footsteps—root the music in the lived world. “Lilieae” opens the album with liquid pads and plucked sounds with the incidental rhythm of a soft rain on a tin roof. The two-part “Morning Room” makes do with tentative strokes of vibraphone. “Sudany,” one of the album’s most rapturously beautiful tracks, is a misty constellation of chimes, mysterious as the night sky.
In concert, Nowacka stayed silent for long stretches—eyes closed, fingers performing invisible handiwork—as though waiting for some cue that only she could hear. Here, she is similarly sparing in her contributions, and a few short instrumental sketches—like the pulsing flute synths of “Behind the Hill”—help to draw out the abiding feeling of patience. When she sings, though, it’s everything. Her tone is soft, hushed, often no louder than the hiss of breath, yet the scope of it is vast. There are no words, just sighs, coos, and drawn-out vowels—air given shape and tint. Yet her careful, sure-footed melodies, subtly multi-tracked in places, are indelible as any singalong. What’s most remarkable about her delivery is her tight, quick vibrato, which quivers in a steady, rapid-fire stream, like a magnetic field. There’s something eerie about it; in places, I’m reminded of the sopranos on scratchy old 78s, when phonograph records still carried the lingering aura of a spirit medium.
The abiding feeling of Langouria is its sense of ease. Its songs ebb and flow as naturally as breathing. There are no sharp edges, no moments of dissonance; there’s just enough darkness—in the fogged chords of “The Journey” or the wistful chirps of “Me of Ocean”—to balance its ecstatic calm. Much like Nowacka’s a cappella recordings in caves and churches, it feels like a portal to another world. Building upon that intimate, spellbinding morning last fall, Birch and Nowacka give us an enduring snapshot of the most ephemeral kind of beauty.


Fusing club music’s dynamism with ambient’s tenderness, West Coast producer Tomu DJ’s sophomore album calls to mind classic electronic full-lengths while offering something fresh in the process.

Half Moon Bay

For the past few years, Tomu DJ has been dabbling in alchemy. A devotee of DJ Rashad’s pioneering footwork crew Teklife, the Bay Area producer drew attention to herself with a raft of nimble, amusingly titled heaters that winked at solipsistic playgrounds for the chronically online. It quickly became apparent she was equally skilled at writing gossamer synth melodies that suffuse the air like fragrance and betray no hint of screen glare. Could overlap exist between two forms that are, on paper, miles apart? Half Moon Bay, one of 2022’s most affecting electronic records, offers a resounding yes.
The road connecting juke to new age is rarely trodden, and “ambient footwork”—ludicrously paradoxical, given the Chicago dance style’s invocation to get your ass up and werk—scans like the kind of thing a random microgenre generator spits out. Tested blind, you might never guess that the same pair of hands behind the celestial two-chord sigh of “Sunsets,” a Half Moon Bay teaser released this spring, had also bashed out the hyperactive arcade strains of “banana” some two years prior.
Tomu DJ’s attempts to fuse these two approaches didn’t always gel, though last year’s debut full-length, FEMINISTA, was a fine statement of intent. On her sophomore LP, she cracks the code. Featuring input from footworkers DJ Manny and SUCIA!, as well as regular collaborator kimdollars1 and Tomu DJ’s own partner blessingsnore, Half Moon Bay strikes all the right notes, recalling well-loved contemporary records that manage to be hypnotic, curative, and a touch disquieting all in the same breath.
If you’re curious to hear those early experiments, unfortunately you’re too late. Tomu DJ recently scrubbed her socials and deleted swaths of her catalog off Bandcamp and streaming services—an eyebrow-raising move for a relative newcomer. Half Moon Bay, which she says she revised at least four times over the course of several years, is a purposeful hard reset. A near-fatal car accident in 2019 forced her to reckon with the aftershocks on FEMINISTA, and here she plumbs further depths, working through longstanding, deleterious mental-health issues.
Though the protective barrier of piss-taking is gone—songs named after mispronunciations of Dua Lipa have been replaced by ones that are fairly unambiguous in their quest for creative and spiritual rebirth—Half Moon Bay is far from a drudge, and not even particularly dark. Tomu DJ instead opts to confront roiling trauma with a spear of soft euphoria; pain commuted through snappy drums and bright synths, mixed loud and still raw.
Typically, producer-DJs absconding from the dancefloor will strip out the low end entirely, as if to prove they don’t rely on kick drums as a crutch. The separator on Half Moon Bay is how much Tomu DJ retains. The album’s opening two tracks hover around 130-145 bpm, respectively—very pacy indeed for ostensibly mellow music. Even when tempos decelerate, her downtempo has an uptempo gait. Chatty hi-hats, beat switches, and snare rolls float around like club music’s afterimage, injecting unusual insistency into a field that can sometimes struggle to justify its stasis.
Sour, tensile keys and skittering percussion on “Optimistic” evoke the stampede of a crowd fleeing hail, while the cresting dembow rhythm on “Lost Feeling” is like a flashlight scything through the claggy, toxic air that follows a wildfire. “Spring of Life” plays a cute trick, drifting tones massaging your brain for long enough that you start daydreaming about fronds of giant kelp twisting romantically in turquoise waters, before the pulse quickens as a submerged kick punches in. Although the tempo only leaps to 120 bpm—about par for ambient house—the impact, after being lulled into a false sense of serenity, is arresting.
The heartrending crown jewel is “Half Moon.” As the track is ushered in by a faint click, one hand begins to glide over a Prophet-5, the only non-VST instrument employed across the LP, with a weight and hesitancy that suggests this was a scratch demo deemed richer than the overthought final_final_final version. Initially the mix feels off, notes a little too high and sharp, before a run of crystalline trills washes the song clean, and you realize just how closely you’ve been drawn in. In mood if not sound, it brings to mind Huerco S.’ “Promises of Fertility” and DJ Sprinkles’ “House Music Is a Controllable Desire You Can Own,” respective highlights on exceptional albums that tug insistently at resonant sensations falling just out of language’s grasp.
Half Moon Bay hits like being flash-banged by an emotion grenade. At first the album can seem pretty gutting, the sort of abundantly tender music that makes you want to hop a 3 a.m. Greyhound to nowhere, just to develop a deeper kinship with the sense of ravagement and isolation. But the residual effect is purifying. Half Moon Bay is a kind of quiet force, grace wrested from tumult, yet something greater still: Tomu DJ sounds like she’s happy to be here, and that’s half the battle won.


The Chicago-based songwriter sees singing about personal experiences as an act of violence, but her debut LP translates that dark view into 34 minutes of surprisingly serene, perceptive storytelling.

There’s Always Glimmer

Gia Margaret makes folk music hand-stitched with subtle electronic embellishments, preserving emotional ordeals like depression and transition within cushioned vocal melodies. In a recent interview, the Chicago-based musician discussed her fear of hurting others with lyrics drawn from life, likening songs to weapons hurled out into the world. But on her debut album, There’s Always Glimmer, Margaret’s violent view of songwriting translates to 34 minutes of serene and perceptive storytelling.
“Groceries” opens the album on a vulnerable note, pairing her confessions with a somber, humming synth that resembles a droning growl. Margaret recounts how she tried writing about her woes but ultimately found comfort in a companion. “You took me in your arms and said, ‘Though it’s not easy to see, there’s always glimmer,” she sings, revealing the album’s title. “You bought the groceries/And you let the light in.” Even in the midst of a terrible year, the song suggests, the mundane experience of having someone else buy you groceries can be enough to sustain hope.
Margaret calls her music “sleep rock,” a term that captures the lullaby atmosphere of the album’s 12 songs. Combining elements of folk, ambient music, and shoegaze, her songs sometimes evoke the hushed melodies of the Postal Service or Nick Drake; images of moonlight spilling in through windows and fresh black coffee pouring into a cup have the detail of an Ansel Adams photograph. Even at times when the setting is vague, every scene is freighted with enough honest sentiment to create a vivid picture.
A classically trained pianist, Margaret awakens the instrument’s rawest and most graceful potential. Second single “Smoke” opens with a breathtaking prelude; her fingers glide across the keys like figure skaters. “For Flora” invents a new kind of lullaby, layering a piano composition over faded voicemails from her mother. High and low notes waltz together as her mom’s voice peeks out from between the keys: “Just wanted to make sure you don’t forget about me.”
Glimmer radiates nostalgia, but not longing. Despite the voyeuristic tone of her reminiscences, Margaret seems to understand that she can’t go back in time. On “Figures,” she sings of haunting shadows that remind her of an old lover: “The lights are on in the buildings downtown/And a figure inside moves like you.” But the illusion passes.
It’s uncertainty about the future that suffuses There’s Always Glimmer. These worries have Margaret walking alone, “searching for signs, like stones sinking into water” amid the trotting beat of “Exist,” a track that shares its drifting atmosphere with an Iron & Wine ballad. On the closer, “West,” she frets about her hyperawareness of the passage of time. Margaret’s ultimately futile battle with time is well fought: Her lullabies are hypnotic enough to delay the transitions she dreads—to stop the ticking clock—for half an hour, at least.


The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter's powerful third album, produced by the National's Aaron Dessner, features guest spots from Beirut's Zach Condon, Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner, Julianna Barwick, and Dessner's brother Bryce, among others.

Tramp

Sharon Van Etten's first proper album, Because I Was in Love, was nudged out into the world in 2009 despite the best efforts of a college boyfriend in Tennessee who had told her she was shit, hid her guitar, and shoved her back home to New Jersey. That album's tracks, and those of the home recordings she also released that year, were sparse, Van Etten's voice sometimes barely above a murmur, as if she were trying to figure out how to make music at the lowest functional volume. Her next record, 2010's Epic, was almost more of an EP-- just seven songs-- but it was a leap forward in sound and spirit. Epic pulled in little bits of kickdrum and pedal steel and electric guitar, and ended with "Love More", on which she proclaimed, over a doubled harmonium and wavering synth, "You chained me like a dog in our room/ …It made me love, it made me love, it made me love more."
Van Etten first recorded "Love More" for WXPN and Weathervane Music's Shaking Through web series, which captured the session on video. It was one of her first in-earnest collaborations with other musicians, and can almost see new synapses firing behind her eyes: this is what music can be, this is what I can be. It's fitting that the same song grabbed the attention of the National's Aaron Dessner, who wound up producing Tramp, her first album for Jagjaguwar. The new tracks come from a year and a half of sessions wedged in whenever Dessner and Van Etten were both off tour. It includes appearances by Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner, Julianna Barwick, Dessner's brother/bandmate Bryce, and other friends of the sort that apparently tend to "just drop by" when you're a celebrated musician/producer with a studio in your Brooklyn garage. That Van Etten has been given the time and space and resources to feel out her path, unhurried by the tyrannous buzz cycle, is both a total luxury, and totally vital.
It's the default assumption that a female songwriter, performing under her own name, is "confessional," that she's serving up some dark part of her soul for the world's consumption. And maybe one day Van Etten will slip into the voices of strangers just as easily as she inhabits her own. But for now, confession is still very much the thing. "It's self-therapy," Van Etten has said to nearly every interviewer who has asked, and more and more that seems to refer to both the writing and the production of her songs; that she can draw out the words, bring them into a room with other human beings, and together with them lay something beautiful on tape is both transformative and redemptive.
Matters of mistrust, isolation, and uncomfortable togetherness dominate Tramp, rolling through every track like a sick, creeping fog. Maybe Van Etten is still nursing the psychic wounds carved into her by that one Tennessee boyfriend, or maybe it's something else; either way, she sounds, at last, good and angry and ready to put up a fight. First comes the dark jangle of "Warsaw", then the calculated frankness of "Give Out" ("You're the reason why I'll move to the city/ Or why I'll need to leave”). On "Serpents", the album's lead single, she scoffs, "I had a thought you would take me seriously." As guitars strain at their tethers and Walkmen drummer Matt Barrick pounds out marching orders, the plea she issued three years ago on "Much More Than That"-- "please don’t take me lightly"-- quavers, crumples, turns to ash.
After the torching comes the slow, steady burn. "Kevin's" sounds like an Epic latecomer welcomed into Tramp's fold, Van Etten’s voice, falling somewhere between Cass Elliot's range and Cat Power's emotional register, turns darker and resigned, the whole song one long smoky exhale. "Leonard" is a dreamy, abashed waltz; tickled by ukuleles and kicked along by a big bass drum; it reveals the album's lone confession that seems to stem from anything close to guilt. It's an admission that takes three go-rounds of the chorus to make itself fully known, Van Etten shuffling around the hard truth: "I am bad"-- "I am bad at loving"-- "I am bad at loving you."
The album's brightest spot comes with the steady, strummy "We Are Fine", in which Van Etten talks through a panic attack with a friend ("Take my hand and help me not to shake/ Say I'm all right, I'm all right"). Beirut's Zach Condon sings harmonies and a verse of his own, the song written with him in mind, Van Etten says, not just because she first plucked it out on a ukulele, but because they both do battle with the gnarly beast of social anxiety. There's often no clear balm for Van Etten's laments, but "We Are Fine" is both the means and the end, the sickness and the cure in one.
Tramp is maybe best thought of in terms of having a Side A and a Side B; otherwise, the middle section falls into a weird mid-album slough that doesn't quite jibe with Van Etten and Dessner's generally excellent sense of timing and space. Imagine a click, a pause and a careful flip between the fractured, meandering "In Line" and "All I Can", which starts with a mewling organ hum and gradually wills itself into blistering hugeness. That song might have worked, too, as a big closer; the seething "Joke or a Lie" serves better as a feint than a final attack. As it is, the album doesn't end so much as infinitely loop on itself (serpents, indeed), the last track's final scrape threading back into "Warsaw"'s opening thump and clank.
"I want my scars to help and heal," Van Etten sings on "All I Can". That healing comes, in part, from the making of the music-- that act of physically locating the pain in some way that can be accessed and then shelved as life tumbles on. But it comes, too, from being pushed out into the world, to people who now say, "Yes, we are here, and we are listening."


Equal parts manifesto and critique, the pair’s third musical collaboration pays homage to the sound and radical spirit of their West Coast home.

Georgia Anne Muldrow / Dudley Perkins: Black Love & War

Black Love & War

To be black in America is to live a divided existence, straddling a glorious yet fractured past, the unfulfilled promise of the future, and a present that has never truly belonged to us. But the philosophy of Afrofuturism has given countless black artists and thinkers the ability to “time travel,” exploring the intersectionality of race, politics, science, and technology across genres in as yet impossible ways. Coined by writer Mark Dery in a 1993 essay, Afrofuturism empowered black artists not only to reimagine the world in which they lived—one predicated on racism—but to reclaim identity by controlling our narrative. In Afrofuturist tradition, Georgia Anne Muldrow and Dudley Perkins use their third collaboration, Black Love & War (released under the moniker “G&D”), to collide past and future in an alternate universe.
Equal parts manifesto and critique, Black Love & War implores listeners to rage against the machine—namely, an administration that brands a predominantly black city as “rat infested.” From the echoing refrain of retribution that seeks “death to all oppressors” on “187” to the proclamation of love in the face of a dystopian society on “P.A.L,” Muldrow and Perkins root their work in the present by paying homage to the sound and radical spirit of their West Coast home.
As parents themselves, Muldrow and Perkins have no hesitation about serving as mentors for younger generations. Certain tracks feel as though they were created especially for their children: “Hold on tight to your dreams and don’t you ever let them go,” Muldrow counsels on “The Power of Your Brain.” On “Peace Peace,” Perkins delivers a prophetic freestyle, warning his newborn son of rampant police brutality. He exploits the entendre—“peace” and “piece”—from the very first lines: “Welcome to the world son, now run/Police gotta a gun.”
Like their forebears in the ’70s funk group Parliament Funkadelic, Muldrow and Perkins relish the absurd, using sketches like “English Breakfast” to fuse music and theatrical narrative to cast a surreal light on injustice. On “Slave Revolt Soundtrack,” the slave characters murder the plantation owner and return “home,” speaking once again in their native African tongues. Inversely, lead single “Where I’m From” allow Muldrow and Perkins to proclaim their Africanness while living in modern-day America. Taking their cue from the Mothership Connection, they look to the past with reverence, navigating an uncertain future while remaining unapologetically themselves.
The album’s second half shifts from strife to affection, a jump so immense that, on first listen, one might almost overlook the “love” side of Black Love & War. Highlights include “Fruitful” and “Big Mel,” where Muldrow’s sublimely minimalist production allow her powerful words to rise above the mix. Closing with these two songs instills hope that love is real—and more importantly, that in spite of our past struggles, black people are entitled to experience the full gamut of their humanity, right here in the actual present.


Sam Beam teams with the Southwest's Calexico on a seven-track mini-album that ranks with anything either act has done on its own.

In the Reins EP

Why didn’t somebody think of this sooner? It’s not a fair question, but it’s an easy one to ask once you’ve heard the seven-track In the Reins, the first in what, if we’re all very lucky, will be a series of collaborations between Iron & Wine and Calexico.
Iron & Wine’s Beam and Calexico’s Joey Burns sound heavenly harmonizing with each other, especially when guest vocalist Natalie Wyants joins them. Neither is an exceptional vocalist on his own, both occasionally lapsing to a whisper, but those hushed, gently melodic cords singing in unison make magic. Beam is the principle songwriter and vocalist on the album, and he’s written some A material for the record, admirably putting his all into it instead of offering up some throwaway stuff and hoping Calexico can do something with it.
What ultimately ends up happening is Calexico’s sense of cinematic grandeur and eclecticism imbues Beam’s melodies and lyrics with an expansiveness that his humid Floridian folk doesn’t usually have. Shades of jazz and country creep in, and they even tackle straightahead California pop on “History of Lovers”. The only ingredients from Calexico’s usual recipe that are absent are dub and mariachi, but they employ their arsenal so sympathetically to Beam’s vision that an unschooled listener might never guess that this wasn’t a proper, working band.
Calexico are no strangers to backing other singers—Burns and drummer John Convertino began playing together as Howe Gelb’s rhythm section in Giant Sand, and they’ve contributed to dozens of LPs by other artists over the years. The core duo of Calexico brings along most of the collective of Southwestern musicians that enlivens their own albums—Paul Niehaus’s lap steel, in particular, helps to shape the sound of the album. “Prison on Route 41” and “16, Maybe Less” both traffic in hushed country’n’western tones, but are arranged in such a way that vocals give way to instrumental passages so smoothly that the solos don’t feel at all like showcases.
There isn’t a disappointing song on the EP (mini-album might actually be a better word for it), but it’s worth noting a couple of stand-outs. Opener “He Lays in the Reins” is a subtle waltz stuffed with flourishes of acoustic guitar and brushed drums that almost two minutes in introduces the operatic Spanish vocals of Salvador Duran, a complete leftfield move that proves as inspired on subsequent listens as it does jarring on the first listen. But the real highlight is also the biggest shock: “History of Lovers” is what Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours might have sounded like if it had been recorded in Memphis, complete with steel guitar trim and a great horn arrangement to go with some stunning harmonies and an unbelievable vocal melody.
Whether or not Iron & Wine and Calexico ever choose to follow this up with another collaboration (fingers crossed), it’s clear that both acts are stronger for having worked with the other. It’ll be interesting to see what comes next for Iron & Wine and Calexico and how this affects their work apart from each other. In the meantime, we can hope that this isn’t a one-time-only engagement.


Exploring personal subject matter and wider musical terrain, the Bristol band’s fourth album plays like the dark origin story for how Idles became the preeminent life coaches of modern post-punk.

Crawler

Whether you considered Idles’ 2020 album Ultra Mono to be a voice of righteous rage and reason in the age of Trump and Brexit, or just more haughty, hectored hashtag activism for people who smugly share Occupy Democrats memes on Facebook, there’s one thing we can all agree on: Its album cover was perfect. The image of some poor bloke getting smushed by a hot-pink blob was both an accurate depiction of this band’s blunt posi-punk force and a fitting metaphor for lyrics that are often so on-the-nose, they’re liable to crush your face. After all, this is a band whose lead singer doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve—he tattooed it into one.
Ultra Mono’s No. 1 debut on the UK charts thrust Idles to the premium crowdsurfer position atop the overflowing circle pit that is the current British post-post-post-punk scene, but the Bristol band truly belong to a more storied lineage. Idles are to 2020s DIY-core what the Clash were to punk, what U2 were to ‘80s post-punk, and what Pearl Jam were to grunge—the earnest, ambitious idealists whose credentials are constantly being called into question. And in true Strummer/Bono/Vedder fashion, frontman Joe Talbot is liable to stick his neck out further than Idles’ more cryptically cantankerous peers, even at the risk of landing in a guillotine. However, unlike those spiritual forebears, Idles can be burdened by a self-awareness that verges on self-defeating. On Ultra Mono, Talbot devoted a fair amount of lyrical real estate to baiting his haters: “How do you like them clichés,” he snorted on “Mr. Motivator,” after spouting off a series of over-the-top lines about his limitless, system-smashing bravado. Answering accusations of “sloganeering” with yet more sloganeering, however ironic, proved to be less of a defense strategy than a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If Ultra Mono felt like the work of someone who’d spent a little too much time reading their own press, Crawler, the band’s fourth album, sounds like they’re genuinely heeding it. The pot shots frequently aimed at Idles in the past—that their politics feel performative; that their hoarse-throated throttle is too, well, ultra-mono—aren’t so easily leveled here. The band’s motorik engine is still in fine working order, but Crawler uses it to explore a wider musical terrain, while Talbot eases off the broad-stroked bromides, forsaking class warfare for psychological drama. In essence, Crawler is like the dark origin story to a crowd-pleasing blockbuster franchise, providing greater context to the transformative events—namely, his battle with addiction and the near-fatal car accident signifying its nadir—that ultimately turned Talbot into modern post-punk’s most voracious life coach.
Idles are no strangers to getting personal, but even their most sensitive and introspective moments have traditionally been delivered with the same bull-in-a-china-shop aggression and lack of subtlety as their protest-placard rockers. Crawler, on the other hand, immediately presents itself as a different beast with “MTT 420 RR,” where Talbot calmly recites the grisly details of the aforementioned vehicular crash as if reliving the moment of impact in slow motion. The air of impending catastrophe is compounded by an eerie, synth-buzzed atmosphere that recalls the Bad Seeds’ recent turn towards ultraviolet ambient soundscapes, with the spare rhythm provided by a jingling sound that suggests someone drunkenly fumbling for their car keys. Of course, when Talbot grimly intones “Are you ready for the storm?,” he’s both bracing for the story’s violent conclusion and teeing up Idles’ inevitable shift back to familiar turbo-punk turf. Even when they come out swinging with “The Wheel,” however, they sound like a changed band: The raised-fist catharsis of old has been replaced by a more ominous, desperate energy that imbues the song’s grim account of intergenerational alcoholism, as bassist Adam Devonshire punctuates each chorus with a droning chord that sounds like the bell tolling on a doomsday clock.
Crawler continues Idles’ unlikely alliance with rap producer Kenny Beats, who contributed drum programming to Ultra Mono but this time assumes a more central role behind the boards with guitarist Mark Bowen. Together, they arrive at a sound that’s more brutally minimalist yet more evocative. Splitting the difference between grimy dub and dubby grime, “Car Crash” returns to the scene of the album’s opener but rewinds the tape to put us in the detuned-radio mind of Talbot as he gets behind the wheel, drunk on his own delusional omnipotence as much as any substance. And while Talbot has famously declared that Idles are “not a fucking punk band,” Crawler finally provides him with some evidence to justify the claim: Where this band once covered a Solomon Burke song and made it sound like the Birthday Party, on “The Beachland Ballroom,” named for the Cleveland concert hall, the band sincerely embraces the role of early ’60s prom-night entertainers, delivering a soulful slow-dance where Talbot channels the self-flagellating romanticism of another Ohio institution, Greg Dulli. But even that sharp left turn seems minor compared to “Progress,” a fever-dreamed industrial folk song seemingly broadcast from Talbot’s darkest hours of addiction, uncomfortably numbed to the point where he no longer senses the difference between bliss and bleakness.
For all these experimental impulses, Crawler ultimately proves to be more a transitional album than a wholesale reinvention, and it’s not entirely clear if Idles have it in them to go full Kid A: The revelatory “Progress” is immediately answered by the 30-second hardcore piledriver “Wizz,” which is less a song than a gag reflex. A good portion of Crawler remains beholden to Idles’ patented hypno-punk propulsion, a formula that can still yield some thrilling, festival-ready rave-ups (“The New Sensation”). However, by the time we reach the vigorous yet hookless “King Snake,” it feels like they’re running on autopilot. So it’s something of a relief to hear the wheels fall off on the closing grunge grunt “The End,” which sounds like Idles tumbling down a never-ending spiral staircase. As ever, Talbot sees the silver lining in a world of shit: “In spite of it all,” he howls, “life is beautiful.” It’s precisely the sort of simplistic, feel-good platitude that Talbot just can’t resist indulging, the post-punk equivalent of a “Live, Laugh, Love” poster.  In effect, Talbot is still asking, “How do you like them clichés?” But this time, he’s not so much saying it for his amusement as his rehabilitation: Coming at the end of a record that documents his journey from trauma to triumph, the moment reminds us that clichés are clichés because they’re true.

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Five decades since co-founding the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the pioneering saxophonist offers innovative fusions of composition and improvisation on a rare album for large ensemble.

Discussions

During the 1965 founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, members agreed on an ambitious goal for their concert presentations: original compositions, every time out. Nor were those all-original gigs meant to stick to one genre. Jazz-influenced forms could collide with pop rhythms and avant-garde textures from the classical sphere. This concept had staying power. In the decades since, work by the association’s members has made a profound and lasting contribution to American music.
Saxophonist and composer Roscoe Mitchell was an original member of the AACM, and he has never abandoned the organization’s principles. Fifty years after starting the pathbreaking group that came to be known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago, he is still developing new approaches to writing and improvisation. When responding to a recent wave of invitations to collaborate with European symphonic groups, Mitchell hit on a new idea for generating material. Because he has long considered the art of improvisation to be “composition in real time,” he says it made sense to take some of his favorite spontaneous licks and put them down on paper.
Mitchell selected tracks from two improv albums, released back in 2014, and commissioned notated transcriptions and re-orchestrations from trusted collaborators, including several of his students from Mills College. Four of these new orchestral arrangements of past improvisations show up on Discussions, in takes that involve 19 different instrumentalists (plus conductor Steed Cowart). The arrangers’ various transformations are significant and imaginative, though aspects of the underlying improvisations are usually recognizable.
The doleful opening that Mitchell and pianist Craig Taborn improvised in their earlier duo performance of “I’ll See You Out There” is given to woodwinds and strings on this new orchestral version. The motifs are familiar, but the new range of instrumental color in Christopher Stover’s arrangement gives the music a wider variety of moods to cycle through. A passage of cautious, vulnerable melody can open quickly into a harmony that suggests hope and eagerness. The gradual addition of percussion even guarantees that—in a surprising twist—the orchestral version has a more propulsive middle section than the earlier take, recorded in a free-jazz context.
The remaining four tracks on Discussions are new, collective improvisations. Two are duo cuts, in which Mitchell’s sopranino saxophone weaves wild harmonics and piping high notes around riffs from Wilfrido Terrazas’ flute. The two other improvisations—“Discussions I” and “Discussions II”—reveal the album’s vision of free-orchestra playing. These selections include some of the most exciting moments on the album. They often sound dizzyingly active without feeling cluttered. It seems as though this new orchestra, having learned from the transcriptions of Mitchell’s past improvisations, has acquired an intuitive ability to create new music together. You can hear Mitchell’s own excitement over this development as he contributes ferocious soloing on both performances.
Still, the album doesn’t rise or fall on the strength of Mitchell’s iconic instrumental voice. Throughout, he frequently exercises the option to sit back and supervise, as strings, woodwinds, brass, and multiple percussionists realize new versions of his past improvisations. (There are even some electronics thrown into the bargain, during the lengthy finale “Who Dat,” thanks to frequent Mitchell colleague James Fei.)
Over its 66 minutes, the set manages to succinctly channel several of the concepts that have fascinated this artist for half a century. You can hear his compositional risk-taking and his instrumental prowess, as well as his pedagogical interest in helping other musicians reach new heights. The album feels like a legitimate event in Mitchell’s career, since it is one of the relatively rare releases devoted to his large ensemble music. Coming hot on the heels of this summer’s masterful live album, Discussions manages to throw light on yet another side of this visionary’s output.


Much like the UK composer’s score for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, Monos uses just a smattering of sounds to craft a world of deepening dread.

Mica Levi: Monos (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

By most quantitative measures, Jonathan Glazer’s 2014 film Under the Skin was a bomb. Whereas some Scarlett Johansson vehicles can break a billion dollars at the box office, Under the Skin is nowhere near making back its original budget. Reviews called the abstract body-horror film “torpid and silly” and “without dramatic, emotional or psychological substance”; Glazer hasn’t made another film since. But thanks to the bracing, skin-prickling score from Mica Levi (her debut as a soundtrack composer after years fronting Micachu and the Shapes), Under the Skin and its soundtrack continue to exert an eerie gravitational pull five years on. Indie musicians like Geoff Barrow, Colin Stetson, and the Haxan Cloak’s Bobby Krlic now make similarly visceral and atonal sounds for the screen, and the experimental imprint PAN has even created its own cinematic sublabel.
Levi’s score for Brazilian writer/director Alejandro Landes’ Monos is similar to her work for Under the Skin: It utilizes only a smattering of sounds to craft a world of deepening dread. The story follows a group of teenagers-turned-soldiers in a mountain retreat tending to a political prisoner and a milk cow named Shakira; the film’s quick erasure of the line between innocence and heartlessness brings to mind Apocalypse Now (while a pig’s head on a stick pays clear homage to The Lord of the Flies). But while characters named Wolf, Dog, and Smurf shed their last vestiges of civility and turn feral, Levi’s score keeps a firm grasp throughout, growing unhinged yet never quite losing control. If there’s an onscreen character that best represents Levi, it’s Sofia Buenaventura’s Rambo, who somehow keeps her humanity intact through the tribulations.
For the first part of the film, the child soldiers occupy a mountain fort, and Levi’s cues expertly match the spare setting. Hushed as the mists that enshroud the characters (many shots show them on lookout with the clouds gathering below them), small sounds suggest deeper forces at work. With the distant rumble of tympanum on “Funeral” and “A La Selva,” Levi heightens the tension on screen and hints at the interior struggle as each character slowly, unnoticeably shakes free from the constraints of society.
The soundtrack’s main theme is a four-note whistle, which sounds throughout the film. At some moments, with the kids silhouetted with guns in hand, it brings to mind the iconic whistle theme of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It’s deceptively simple and devastatingly effective, an elemental childlike sound made from just cupping your hands together and blowing. But as it continues to sound, a sense of exhaustion becomes audible, the fourth note raspy like a last gasp. As digital effects burst in and drums rumble closer, the whistle turns forlorn and increasingly isolated. On “Helicóptero,” Levi digitally manipulates and elongates its tone into a flickering, dreamlike drone.
Even a playful cue like “Honguitos,” wherein the kids nosh on some magic mushrooms sprouting from cow dung and have their environment flipped from garrison to playground, the effect is short-lived. A whimsical air rendered on flute floats by, then gets dragged down by a nose-diving synth line. It’s as if a huge EDM drop lay just around the bend. More flickering synth themes swell on “Castigo” and at other intervals in the film, making for a provocative suggestion: In another time or place, rather than carrying machine guns in bloodied hands, these mud-caked kids might simply be going primal on a saucer-eyed weekend at a countryside rave.