Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Anita Baker’s timeless 1986 album, a slow-burning and symphonic piece of quiet storm R&B that floods every sense.

Rapture

Quiet storm, a Black radio format that developed in the late-’70s around pebble-smooth R&B balladry, is one of the rare subgenre names that suggests the ideal context for itself. Play “Choosey Lover” by the Isley Brothers or even Smokey Robinson’s original “Quiet Storm.” Notice how the skies in those songs are bruised with dark purple clouds, thunder brewing inside them. Indoors, sealed away from the weather, someone sheds their coat and it forms a soft vortex on a bare wood floor. There is a haze of steam in the air, the sound of bathwater running in another room. This is the lifestyle of comfort and intimacy that the genre implicitly sold to its listeners, soul music one could sink into after a long day of work, like a couch or a bath or a steady long-term relationship. The format particularly excelled at simulating the slow-motion atmosphere of romance, a physical and mental connection so strong it could make the molecules in the air around it lag. So even if you didn’t own a nice couch or a large bathtub, you could turn on the radio and settle into the swoon of the music itself, and find yourself drawn into a desire deep enough to seem closer to unconscious dreaming than physical reality.
In the mid-’80s, when Anita Baker was shopping for songs for her second album, she kept asking the publishing houses for “fireside love songs with jazz overtones”—in other words, quiet storm songs, songs that have fireplaces flickering inside of them. Baker wanted a whole album in this mode so the mood wouldn’t be disturbed by the more aggressive and mechanical pop-R&B productions that were in vogue at the time. She returned with five compositions, adding three more she either co-wrote or wrote herself, all of which ended up forming a kind of album-length suite of affirmation. The songs bore titles like “You Bring Me Joy” and “Same Ole Love (365 Days a Year),” tributes to the endurance of love and happiness, to the comfort of repetition when the things being repeated are shared warmth and tenderness. She named the album Rapture, and true to the title, the music is always floating a few inches above the ground, as if being spirited away by the depth of the devotion it feels.
Baker’s taste at the time was like a crosshatching of the music she grew up with as a young girl in Detroit. She learned to sing in church; her first memory of herself as a singer, in fact, takes place in one, standing at a podium, singing a gospel song that a family member taught her so she wouldn’t fall asleep during the service. As Baker grew older, though, her love of gospel would merge with a deepening interest in jazz, her attention lingering on singers whose voices twisted like corkscrews, like her idol, Sarah Vaughan. In the early ’80s, Baker sang for a local Detroit disco/funk group called Chapter 8, who made one record before their label dropped them. Disillusioned, she drifted away from the music industry, waiting tables and briefly working as a receptionist for a law firm. She only returned to singing when she was courted by a new label called Beverly Glen, with whom she released her debut solo album, The Songstress, in 1983.
The Songstress was a mild success on the R&B charts, with one single, an ethereal jazz-inflected slow jam called “Angel,” reaching the Top 5. Baker, seeking more control over her next project, signed with Elektra Records and named herself the executive producer of Rapture, the implication being that even if she didn’t personally write every song on Rapture, there was something personal in her selection of material, in the more seamless environment she was designing for the listener. As the record starts, Baker’s voice—a rich, deep contralto that sounds much older than her 27 years of age—wavers upward through clouds of chords and drums to deliver, with utmost conviction and precision, a line that sets the record’s intentions: “With all my heart/I love you baby.” This is how the first track on Rapture, “Sweet Love,” begins, and it’s enveloping as a symphony, the kind of music that floods every sense. Baker seems affected by it herself throughout the record, sometimes slipping into vocalese as the songs advance, words melting into vowels, phrases going liquid then solid again. The sort-of title track “Caught Up in the Rapture” starts off in this wordless delirium—”ba ba baya ba ba ba bah,” Baker sings before each verse starts, as if the lyrics have to form out of the unshaped clay of the feeling.
Rapture didn’t align with the electro-R&B that was de rigueur in 1986 pop or the increasingly mechanistic and sexually-unbridled explorations of the genre’s most prominent svengalis, Prince and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. On its arrival, the album was dubbed retronuevo by the writer and critic Nelson George, who was trying to emphasize the older Black musical forms that Baker’s songs were rooted in. On the one hand, the emotions that rocketed through them felt enormous and electric enough to be gospel—hear the immensity with which Baker sings “myyyy joy” in “You Bring Me Joy.” But their expression was so controlled and stylized, painted in instrument by instrument, that it just as easily brought to mind the jazz, fusion, and soft R&B that preceded it.
Despite these traces of retro in the music, very little of Rapture sounded old by the standards of 1986. Its production is state of the art; if it were a sculpture it would be the kind where you couldn’t tell if hands had ever touched it. Each note touches down as an isolated unit of clarity, though the instruments are also steeped in enough reverb to sound like they recently walked out of a lake, their footfalls wrapped in wet echoes. The piano’s presence is so simultaneously thick and diffuse in the mix that hearing it feels like being embraced by a cloud of an ex-lover’s perfume. Every other instrument, whether percussion, bass, or guitar, acts as a texture, another beat in the riverlike rhythm, as on “Same Ole Love,” where the effect makes for a little perpetual motion machine of a love song. And though Baker expressed her own antipathy toward synthesizers around the time of Rapture’s release (“The sound is so thin,” she said), there are synths all over the album, and when they mix with the acoustic pianos they encase their tones in a layer of crystal.
Which is one of the reasons why Rapture as an R&B album doesn’t feel like an argument for nostalgia or authenticity as much as it does for continuity. It is not necessarily trying to emulate old soul music, even though it is certainly music with an old soul. Instead, styles from the past—soul music’s bottled feeling, funk’s unhurried step, disco and post-disco’s lush grooves, gospel’s power, jazz’s curiosity—are brought into the present and combined in such a way that one’s sense of time outside of the songs ceases to matter, creating a dream space where all of these displaced musical forms can blossom simultaneously and entangle with each other. Rapture is like a home Baker built, a hearth, a warm safe place where both the mystery of love and the history of Black music can be both explored and preserved.
Rapture’s agnosticism toward the contemporaneous intrigues of pop production made it oddly flexible across different formats and charts; it’s quiet storm trembled onto Adult Contemporary stations like a weather pattern itself, and the record eventually lodged itself in the Billboard Top 40. The presence of Baker’s voice in my childhood home was so constant as to verge on ambient, another piece of furniture in the house, or, in the period before I knew what furniture was, another murky voice cooing in the air above me. Thirty years later, I saw Anita Baker perform at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, one of the stops on her farewell tour in 2018. Her stage presence was surprisingly exuberant, more so than the narcotic pull of her voice would necessarily suggest. She swung her arms around, grasping handfuls of air or strumming it as if she were able to touch her own music as it streamed by. But when she opened her mouth to sing, time collapsed, and I was the same age I was the moment I first regarded Baker’s voice with awe, thinking she was like a magician pulling silk scarves from her mouth.

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The long-awaited debut LP from Frenchman Pascal Arbez includes three-fourths of the seismic electro/techno Poney EP, which sits beautifully alongside his less dancefloor-friendly, album-oriented material.

OK Cowboy

With the possible exception of a certain French house duo whose name we won't bring up quite just yet, it's difficult to think of another dance act whose career ascent has been as storybook as Pascal Arbez's. After toiling for years in relative obscurity under the aliases Dima (as good as the name suggests) and Hustler Pornstar (uh, ditto), the Frenchman didn't just draw blood with Vitalic's 2001 Poney EP, he lopped a few arteries. Seriously, it's hard to overstate the response to Poney; of its four tracks, three became high-tide dancefloor staples. Along with the dark, yawning electro of "Poney Part 1" and "Poney Part 2", there was the centerpiece "La Rock 01", still the reigning champion of songs that sound like paper shredders orgying in a wind tunnel.
While everyone from 2 Many DJs to Aphex Twin to Sven Väth was busy corking their sets with one (or two, or three...) tracks from Poney, Arbez was studiously lifting a few PR moves from his contemporaries, first by playing up his anonymity and later by concocting an elaborate backstory that involved a Ukrainian upbringing, animal fur trading, male prostitution, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Despite being offered enough shows to keep him busy until the fall of the Wailing Wall, Arbez chose his live engagements carefully. He applied a similar selectivity to his output, issuing only a few 12"'s and a handful of choice remixes over the next few years.
That lull didn't do much to temper the weighty expectations placed on his full-length debut-- Lord knows, the Human After All-shaped hole in a lot of people's springtime playlists probably didn't help either. Happily, I can't imagine anyone who cared for Vitalic's earlier material being disappointed with OK Cowboy. Part of that is because Poney is built into this record's DNA-- rather than feeling like cursory inclusions, the EP's big three tracks sit beautifully alongside Arbez's less dancefloor-friendly, album-oriented material. The result is a much more complete and crafted record than you'd expect from an artist renowned for his killer singles.
Not unlike LCD Soundsystem's best maximalist moments, the bulk of OK Cowboy's action happens in the mid and high registers. In the same way that most indie bands look to guitars to do the bulk of their storytelling, Arbez leans pretty compulsively on his synths-- that probably explains why so many have glommed onto words like "metallic" and "rock" to describe Vitalic's sound.
The big new single here is "My Friend Dario", a jackhammering quiet-loud-quiet-loud guitar workout thing whose biggest fault is that it doesn't sound all that unlike Primal Scream's turn of the decade guitar techno coke freakout schtick. While it's a worthy enough addition as Vitalic burnburners go, it's hardly a patch on "No Fun" and "Newman", both of which boast synth lines that start out as pneumatic wheezes and turn into floor-swallowing squelches.
But we already knew Arbez could do acid for the end of the world. What's more surprising are his slower songs, the plaintive bits and bobs that comprise the album's glue. Equal parts jerky organ workouts ("Wooo"), spacey Baroquisms ("The Past"), and funhouse melodies ("Polkamatic"), these tracks sketch out the other side of a polarity (sweet, charming Gallicisms on one side, four-alarm fires on the other) that, when its all said and done, has us thinking about that one French duo again. Not because Vitalic is a second generation imitation (Daft Punk has always had more grease in their wheels), but because he's made a record that's in the same league as Homework or Discovery.


Allow me to start by making a rather dorky connect-the-dots between two landmark cultural institutions of our key demographic: Weezer ...

Maladroit

Allow me to start by making a rather dorky connect-the-dots between two landmark cultural institutions of our key demographic: Weezer and Star Wars. Check it out: Weezer's self-titled return from hibernation (colloquially known as The Green Album) was The Phantom Menace of indie rock. Both sci-fi epic and alt-rock record were long-awaited events that had even the most jaded hipster hopping around like a small child with a full bladder. However, reactions to Star Wars: Episode One and Weezer: Episode Three were predominantly (and in some cases, absurdly) negative, despite small pockets of supporters slinging the old "just turn your brain off and have fun" argument.
To be fair, the analogy isn't completely fail-safe. After all, The Phantom Menace didn't break the Star Wars hiatus with a skimpy 28 minutes of new material, and The Green Album didn't have some of the worst acting-- human or computerized-- in the history of film. Furthermore, by my standards, Weezer's second eponymous release was nowhere near the memory-raping experience Episode I entailed, nor was it as terrible as judged by this site and elsewhere. Freed from the skyscraper-high expectations surrounding its release, The Green Album on return visits has shown to carry a fair amount of damn fine singalong tunes, while rewatching The Phantom Menace induces more wincing than a Jackie Chan blooper reel.
Now, convenient for my journalistic maneuvering, both franchises have produced their next efforts to get in your wallet-- Attack of the Clones and Maladroit. Regardless of what you might have thought about The Phantom Menace or The Green Album, it's undeniable that the rollouts of their respective followups are not garnering the same kind of delirious Second Coming-level hype. Not surprisingly, the response to Attack of the Clones has fallen along more traditional critics-vs.-the-public lines, with film writers generally turning up their nose at the flick's wooden dialog while normal people celebrate the picture as quality escapism. Maladroit, by continuing in the vein of The Green Album, promises a similar division of opinion, meaning a responsible critic (like myself) should probably submit it to the Mindless Fun Litmus Test.
The MFLT is appropriate because, yeah, Maladroit is definitely not a return to the sound of the band's mid-90s artistic peak. But to give them the benefit of the doubt, it's pretty apparent what the Weez are shooting for with the new record-- a further distillation of their power-pop specialties into short, catchy, big-riff-centered nuggets. Many writers will probably try to lump this incarnation of the band in with Andrew W.K. and the White Stripes for a 'Return of the Rawk!' style feature, but what's truly apparent is Weezer's now-complete focus upon the concert experience rather than studio twiddling. The flying-V guitars and large light-up =W= of their stage act no longer carry the wink that they used to, and these songs are tailored specifically to provoke mosh pits and elicit rampant flashing of devil-horns.
With Maladroit, Weezer has finally given the full punt to the nerd-rock label they sorta invented and always shunned, settling instead for being our generation's version of Cheap Trick. Rockford, Illinois' finest is just one of the classic guitar-worship pop bands invoked by the majority of the songs here, many of which seem like slight musical and thematic variations upon "I Want You to Want Me," and all of which make room for a fingers-flying solo. Things are harder-edged musically than the sunny Green Album tunes, with guitarists Rivers Cuomo and Brian Bell laying on as much distortion as possible over the crunchy riffs that hold up "American Gigolo" and "Take Control" and, well, pretty much the entire affair. But lyrically, things are still anchored in your usual white-man pleading-voice girl courtship, as song titles like "Love Explosion," "Possibilities," and "Slave" clearly indicate.
When this full-bodied attitude accompanies typically gooey Cuomo melodies, it makes for a handful of some of the best in-car rockout material of recent years. "Keep Fishin'" has boisterous call-and-response vocals and at least three different sections catchy enough to serve as choruses, while "Fall Together" is grunge-pop worthy of the late St. Kurt himself. Many songs on Maladroit come off as near-cover version love letters to Cuomo's rock heroes, most noticeably when "December" grafts a replica of the Who's "Love Reign O'er Me" to a souped-up 50s prom theme arrangement.
On the other hand, the Kiss emulation and guitar-god posturing is a pretty thin disguise for a band that's pretty obviously a mere shadow of its former self. Weezer's first two albums were almost unanimously loved, hyper-influential, near-masterpiece collections of quirky, personal, addictive power-pop. Stripping down to the basics is one thing, but removing almost every element and characteristic that separated the band from the other million quartets-with-guitars is a sad, sad sight to see. There's a thin line between homage and unoriginality, and it's hard not to notice that, in their effort to emulate their guitar-rock heroes, Weezer has to some extent become a fairly straightforward, above-average bar band.
Don't come looking for any of the eccentric flourishes of "Undone" or "El Scorcho," as Maladroit is predominantly a one-note, homogenous affair. Deviations from the hard-rock mean are whiffs: "Death and Destruction" slows things down for some nazel-gaving, but can't come close to the emotional weight of a "Say It Ain't So," for example. "Burndt Jamb" revisits the tropical flair of "Island in the Sun"-- and is only a keyboard and a Laetitia away from being Stereolab-- but can't resist falling back on steel-toed overdrive theatrics in the middle. Meanwhile, Cuomo continues to move away from the intensely specific lyrical content of earlier work (I've always wondered if that half-Japanese cellist got a cut of Pinkerton's profits), preferring instead to drop angstful Everyman phrases like, "Get yourself a wife/ Get yourself a job/ You're living a dream/ Don't you be a slob."
Right, so now's the part where I'm accused of underestimating Maladroit's youthful relevancy, missing the possibility that this album might mean as much to today's disenfranchised high school crowd as The Blue Album or Pinkerton meant to me in more innocent times. Maybe so, but it should be noted that I was a late-blooming Weezer fan, having written them off back in their first heyday and only cultivating a true appreciation for them over the last couple years. Given that fact, I have no qualms about taking a stand and pegging Maladroit as the slightest effort yet from the Weez, marking a continuation of their distressing downward trajectory and a perpetuation of their post-comeback complacence. It may have a handful of premium-grade headbangers, but in the mindless fun department, it sure ain't Yoda battling Christopher Lee.


After the heavy-hearted indie folk of her debut, the Bristol singer-songwriter returns with a scruffier, more far-ranging record about developing a self in your twenties.

BREACH

There comes a time in a disenchanted young man’s life when, unbearably stifled by the bourgeois-ness of his bourgeois surroundings—the competitive schools, supportive parents, constant supply of refrigerated whole milk—he pours himself into the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Ask him to pass the salt, and instead you’ll receive a long-winded sermon on morality and eternal recurrence. “I get sick on second best/You get off to God is dead,” the Bristol singer Fenne Lily sings softly to one such sage on “I, Nietzsche,” nailing the dynamic of so many grim exchanges immortalized on the Instagram account Beam Me Up Softboi. Forget sex; the boy just wants to read.
Lily’s 2018 debut, On Hold, was a breakup album that she hesitated to label a breakup album, lest the narrative be reduced to “girl sad about boy.” It was predisposed toward trembling, somber indie folk in the vein of Daughter, music for wordlessly watching rain collect on a windowsill. Like so many young artists whose work is interchangeably praised as “intimate,” “raw,” and “vulnerable”—elevated under the belief that catharsis equals profundity—Lily wrote pretty, sincere songs lacking specificity and verve. Nearly as cliché as philosophy bros are songwriters with hushed vocals and spare guitar inspired by For Emma, Forever Ago.
BREACH, Lily’s first album for Dead Oceans, is a scruffier, more far-ranging record about developing a self in your twenties. Its version of early adulthood fits within the liberal-arts ethos of a show like High Maintenance: Subjects include self-medicating with weed (“Alapathy”), worrying about social media’s impact on your self-perception (“Solipsism”), and reaching new self-understandings in Western Europe (“Berlin”). Lily wrote “Berlin” after rereading Patti Smith’s Just Kids and embarking on a lone odyssey to the nightclub Berghain, that infamous colosseum of sin and techno. The result is a lulling slowcore ballad that resembles an old Taylor Swift gem and features Lucy Dacus on backing vocals. At its center is a tentative assertion of self-sufficiency: “It’s not hard to be alone anymore.”
For Lily, writing this record meant learning to distinguish between being lonely and being alone. In the absence of a relationship, you cannot flee yourself; you detect unresolved insecurities as if they’re stray hairs on the sofa. The jangling wind chimes at the opening of “Elliot” hint at a new beginning; the innocent baby babbles on “98” offer perspective on just how much she’s grown. There are a few recollections about relationships, too. “Laundry and Jet Lag” deploys a predictable metaphor that compares leaving an ex to quitting cigarettes (“I’m left with the scars/Of you”), although its muted strings are lovely. A song like “Birthday” is wiser. Sprinkled with wry, macabre imagery—“You sent me a head on my birthday/You said it was made with love”—it reveals the retrospective humor to a wobbly relationship, the strangeness of contorting yourself for someone else.
Little on BREACH compares to “I Used to Hate My Body But Now I Just Hate You,” a slow burner that sketches a shitty relationship with impressive economy. “I read all of the books you recommended/I listen to your friend’s band all the time,” Lily recalls, painting crushing as a sad combination of masochism and striving. Each verse is like a work of flash fiction. She fell for this person quickly; they performed intimacy as if for an elevator of strangers; and he moved on before she could play it cool. By the end, the person is long gone, sequestered at his parents’ home. But we still assign meanings to relics. The closer—“I still see you as some kind of reassurance that someday I’ll be understood”—discloses how our identity forms in the push and pull with others. People come and go, and each time, they leave us with a different version of ourselves than before.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their underrated commercial-flop debut album, the Fugees searched energetically for the voice they would find on The Score.

Blunted on Reality

Pras Michel first came to Wyclef Jean at his dad’s church in New Jersey looking to join a band, not a rap group. Wyclef was already something of a local celebrity in the mid ’80s, writing raps in a session produced by Kurtis Blow for a group called Exact Change (on a single recording that was never released), and picking up the nickname the Rap Translator. Pras sought out Clef to play trumpet in the church band. As Wyclef tells it, Pras was a dreadful trumpet player, but he introduced Wyclef to two young musicians from his Newark high school: the mononymously known “Marcy” and a choir singer named Lauryn Hill. Even then, Hill was preternaturally talented, with a deep-rooted knowledge of R&B and Motown soul. Pras was an instrumentalist who was privy to rap as a kid but blocked from listening to it, instead spending long afternoons scanning the dials of his family radio for hard and soft rock. And he sought out Wyclef, who was already adapting the music of the Caribbean to fit his own, to add more reggae flavor into the mix. When Marcy abandoned the group after a few sessions, the trio adopted the name Tranzlator Crew, then later, Fugees.
The Fugees, as many have come to know them, appeared fully formed in 1996 on “Fu-Gee-La,” the lead single from the trio’s ground-breaking, major label opus, The Score. But “Fu-Gee-La” predated the polished, finished project, starting as a raw loosie produced on the fringes of a session for a “Vocab” remix. It was created in the early-mid ’90s when the group was still experimenting, on a beat Salaam Remi originally made for Fat Joe. In those moments, before The Score was even conceived, the Fugees were slowly coalescing into a unit. Under the direction of Kool & the Gang co-founder Khalis Bayyan (then Ronald Bell), they were working on their debut album called Blunted on Reality.
Each member had a unique musical history, leading to a sonic information trade of sorts—capitalizing on Lauryn’s internal soul music archive, Pras’ hard- and soft-rock reference points, and Wyclef’s reggae reworks. The smorgasbord of sound registered as rap but only when stripping several layers of context away; the Fugees packed reggae-flecked, raucous romps and remixes into 18 tracks, and attempted to package it as traditionalist hip-hop. The result was a commercial flop, selling (literally) 12 copies, and sending the group back to the drawing board.
For all its eclecticism, Blunted on Reality is still a relic of its era—heavily indebted to rap’s elite samplers and sound-bending maestros De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Main Source, and even Digable Planets—and it's a bit raw and rough around the edges, a mostly croon-free ragga rap opus that’s far less explicit with its social and political ideals than The Score but twice as enthusiastic. The album scans as a style sampler of early ’90s alt hip-hop. But with the benefit of hindsight, it’s a fun, low-stakes gambit straddling the margins of boom bap, jazz rap, and reggae fusion without pause, and it’s a transformative experience for its MCs.
The trio have said in the past that they let producers wrestle away creative control of the record, creating a product they didn't recognize, and they carefully distanced themselves from it during the press junket for The Score. But Blunted on Reality is essential to the myth of the Fugees and to the sonics of their seminal album. Without this commercial misfire, there is no colossal comeback story, no extra push to silence naysayers who wrote the album off as a failure, and they couldn’t have made something as refined as The Score without making this record first.
Despite its status as the underwhelming precursor to a classic, Blunted on Reality is a marvel of pure energy and noise that musters up rage and exuberance in equal measure. It’s clearly a response to racial injustice, xenophobia, and inner-city violence, but the album never wages war with any of these topics directly. Instead, there are one-off references to shootings, to the Klan and black oppression, and to intolerance, amid a party pack. Its zeal is sadly as timely as ever. “Hide nigga hide, flee nigga flee, run nigga run/For I’ve got my hood, my cross, my tree, my gun/My rope, and it’s a long one,” Lauryn recites in the intro. Seconds later, Wyclef puts it even more plainly: “You maintain to put a negro in pain.”
Blunted on Reality sits squarely at the intersection of New York City and Croix-des-Bouquets, mixing big-city swagger with an outsider’s mentality (ideas best articulated by interludes “Harlem Chit Chat” and “Da Kid From Haiti”). The reggae influence lines the seams of songs like “Temple” and “Refugees on the Mic,” which forgo heavy boom-bap for more leisurely, island-friendly tempos. The accents disappear on the shout-rap tracks, but sneak out for the hooks on “Recharge” and “Boof Baf” and in the opening moments of “Giggles.” It’s a triumph of black American immigrants, constantly mixing cultural cues. The breakbeat on the roughneck rousing “How Hard Is It?” is almost New Jack Swing-like, while “Nappy Heads” makes an escapist anthem out of an Earth, Wind, and Fire ballad.
Slowly but surely, the Fugees find their voices on Blunted on Reality, taking turns with bludgeoning verses that do most of their damage with sheer force. Lauryn often sounds MC Lyte-ish in her inflections, less assured and measured in her pronunciations than she would become on later albums, but she is still clearly the group’s X factor, with raps that burst at the seams and a standout solo cut (“Some Seek Stardom”). When the dust had settled, the trio had three hit singles and a platinum album to their name, and Blunted on Reality had been reduced to an asterisk in the Fugee story, Lauryn would later tell Ebony in November ’96 that “kids need to know there’s more to life than a five-block radius,” that the Fugees spoke for the disenfranchised. The Score delivered that in its messages, but before that, Blunted on Reality proved it with an uncompromising sound.


For 15 or so years Brian Eno was the Zelig of Western music, popping up wherever new ground was being broken. He was more than just "around," of course; he was also making history on his pioneering pop albums and the records on which he invented ambient music. But Eno seemed to be on hand for a sharp observation even when he wasn't directly involved. From his instant recognition of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" as a watershed moment in pop, his tireless championing of German bands that would later be canonized, to his role as the curator the *No

Cluster / Brian Eno / Dieter Moebius / Roedelius / Conny Plank: Cluster & Eno / After the Heat / Begegnungen / Begegnungen II

For 15 or so years Brian Eno was the Zelig of Western music, popping up wherever new ground was being broken. He was more than just "around," of course; he was also making history on his pioneering pop albums and the records on which he invented ambient music. But Eno seemed to be on hand for a sharp observation even when he wasn't directly involved. From his instant recognition of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" as a watershed moment in pop, his tireless championing of German bands that would later be canonized, to his role as the curator the No New York album, Eno was always understood to have exceptional taste. Perhaps that's why he saw such success as a producer, a job that requires above all that one be a good listener.
In the mid-1970s, Eno was particularly enamored with the synthesized music Dieter Moebius and Hans Joachim Roedelius were making as Cluster. He traveled to the town of Forst, Germany, where Cluster lived and worked in their home studio, and began a collaboration that would result in two classic albums.
The first recorded material to emerge from this meeting was Cluster & Eno, which was recorded in June 1977 at Conny Plank's studio, and suggested that the collaboration was completely organic. Eno's relentless sound experimentation helped Cluster get the most out of their synthesizers; the record is filled with textures that must have seemed otherworldly in 1977, but still manage to hold up today. The vibrato quiver of the Moog in "Schone Hande", for example, overflows with tension and mystery, soundtracking perhaps a hesitant exploration of a potentially hostile alien planet. Piano is in the foreground on "Wehrmut" and "Mit Simaen"; at that time, a few notes on a baby grand with the sustain pedal to the metal brought to mind the furniture music of Satie and sounded terrific surrounded by wispy synths. On tracks like the warmly percolating "Ho Renomo", Cluster contributed a heightened ear for melody and an interest in repetition that pointed directly to where electronic music would eventually go. Cluster & Eno demonstrates that the parties had developed along parallel paths but discovered something new and fresh by working together.
When they convened again a number of months later, the trio dropped the Cluster name and turned its focus in the general direction of song. After the Heat differs sharply from its predecessor in tone, as well as its English language titles and the occasional vocal presence of Eno. "Most of the day we were at the machinery," he sings on "The Belldog", alluding perhaps to the creative ferment happening in Plank's studio. With evocative synths bubbling underneath, "The Belldog" sounds like a more technically sophisticated update of Another Green World, like the three had happened upon a new sort of music that would one day grow noisier and be called dreampop. For "Tzima N'arki", Moebius and Roedelius constructed an anxious simulation of a modern string quartet while Can's Holgar Czukay adds a dubby bass; Eno's vocals are played backward and somehow don't sound appreciably weirder than they normally do. "If God had listened to me/ None of this would ever had occurred," is what he's actually singing; had they recorded this song in the late 1990s, I'd think he was talking about alternative rock. Eno does his talk/rap thing on "Broken Head", a menacing slab of slowburn funk with an unchanging bass and drums groove and strange noises spinning off in all directions. A few piano-centered instrumentals hint at the sound of the earlier record, but After the Heat exists in a fantastic sphere of its own.
They'd made brilliant records before hooking up with Eno, but Moebius and Roedelius have never shied from acknowledging the impact the association had on their approach to sound. The two compilations bearing the title Begegnungen (German for "encounter") give an idea of the different ways those initial seeds sprouted. Adding Plank to the name of the project, both Begegnungen volumes compile tracks from the sessions with Eno along with contemporaneous solo and Cluster material in a similar vein. "Johanneslust" is a gorgeous solo Roedelius track from 1978, where he combines a simple acoustic guitar pattern with synths in a manner that reinforces the bucolic "back to nature" possibility of electronics. "Nervös" and "Pitch Control", both from 1983, bring the earlier experiments into the realm of 80s electro-pop. The former is solo Moebius with a grim layer of industrial soot, while the latter finds Cluster working with Guru Guru drummer Mani Neumeier to reclaim the stiff funk of Herbie Hancock's Future Shock for the European continent.
In Moebius and Roedelius' favor, they never seemed bound by orthodoxy-- genre experiment came naturally to them, as evidenced by the title of their 1981 album Rastakraut Pasta. "Conditionierer" from Begegnungen II actually moves into the realm of hyper-minimal country & western, with a perky guitar groove and bottleneck slide. And then Roedelius' 1978 piece "Mr. Livingstone" gorgeously combines gamelan-style gongs with indeterminate far Eastern scales. Despite a dull patch or two, both volumes of Begegnungen are constantly engaging and full of surprises.
The late 1970s and early 1980s were a fantastically exciting time to be making electronic music, as technology changed almost daily and possibilities expanded exponentially. In such a chaotic and unfixed environment, it took smart people with a strong musical sense to make the most of it. These guys fit the bill.


The Radiohead drummer returns with a solo album whose beautiful, dramatic arrangements clash with the bland songwriting.

Strange Dance

In Radiohead’s best music, songs and arrangements have a holistic and nearly inextricable bond. The free-jazz freakout in the middle of “The National Anthem” is just as crucial as the lyrics or vocal melody; “Pyramid Song” wouldn’t be “Pyramid Song” without its drunkenly stumbling percussion. The third solo album from Philip Selway, the man behind that indelible drum part, sometimes comes impressively close to the work of his main band in terms of the ambition and inventiveness of its musical settings. They tend to draw from a similar well of influence: the dissonance and rhythmic pulsation of contemporary classical music, or the forward thrust of krautrock, with various electronics beeping and buzzing at the edges.
But these arrangements don’t stick to the bones of the songs with the same force that they do in Selway’s main band. Swap one song’s power-ballad orchestration with another’s mellow mallet percussion and they might sound just as natural as they did in their original forms. The songs themselves are part of the problem: Slow and somber, with little lyrical specificity or melodic surprise, they give the sense of Strange Dance as a set of beautiful musical accouterments in search of worthy compositions to adorn.
As one might expect from a drummer, Selway fares best as a songwriter when the music is rhythmically active. Strange Dance’s best track by a significant margin is also its most upbeat: “Picking Up Pieces,” which charges ahead in a series of interlocking syncopations, with guitars and bowed strings all acting like percussion instruments, making their brief contributions to the precisely arranged tapestry and then backing away until it’s time to strike again. The title track also foregrounds Selway’s idiosyncratic approach to rhythm, setting his voice against drums that clatter and echo like a digital-age update to Tom Waits’ junkyard blues, with little other accompaniment. (Interestingly, Selway chose not to play his primary instrument on Strange Dance, handing drum duties over to Valentina Magaletti of Vanishing Twin.) In these moments and others—like “What Keeps You Awake at Night,” which begins with percolating vibraphones and dissolves in a flurry of pizzicato strings—it’s possible to glimpse an alternate vision of Selway’s music, which focuses on his and his collaborators’ ears for unusual grooves and striking combinations of sounds, treating these as the main event rather than set dressing.
Strange Dance more often presents itself as a traditional singer-songwriter album, albeit one with some killer sound design. Most of the lyrics seem to describe a breakup of some sort, though the details are fuzzy. As a writer, Selways works in broad, bland strokes: “I couldn’t be alone tonight/I need you here by my side/I’m lost without you now,” goes one representative passage from “Check for Signs of Life.” There are plenty of great pop songs built on platitudes, but Selway has neither the tunefulness as a composer nor the expressiveness as a singer to sell this stuff. “The Other Side” strikes a particularly sour note, addressing a partner at the brink of a relationship’s end. “I’ve seen you in all your faults and doubts/I can’t unsee it now,” Selway sings, his almost cartoonishly mannered delivery and a prim orchestral arrangement reinforcing the notion that the narrator couldn’t possibly bear any blame himself. A breakup song as bitter as “The Other Side” should come with a little piss and vinegar. This one just sounds smug.
Familial, Selway’s 2010 solo debut, was self-consciously low-key, built mostly on voice, acoustic guitar, and occasional electronics. Given Selway’s membership in the biggest and best art-rock band of our era, it’s no surprise that he might eventually aim higher. But as appealing as the arrangements and production of Strange Dance are on a sonic level, they end up harming the songs as often as they help. The dramatic crescendos and ostensibly cathartic payoffs of “Little Things” and “The Heart of It All” suggest profundity but mostly draw attention to its absence. Strip away the bombast and these are humble little songs. Humble treatment might suit them.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit David Crosby’s solo debut, a foggy dream of psychedelic folk-rock.

David Crosby: If I Could Only Remember My Name

If I Could Only Remember My Name

The ’60s were over and David Crosby was living on a boat. Aside from the recording studio, his 59-foot schooner, named The Mayan, was the only place where things made sense. When Crosby was 11, his parents decided to enroll their son in sailing classes. The wild-eyed, giggling California kid had an anti-authoritarian streak that was starting to get him in trouble, and some time on the docks, they imagined, might give him some discipline, or at least a place to spend his summers. Sailing came naturally, like he had captained many vessels in a previous life. It was an uncanny feeling, comforting and strange. As the decade came to a close, Crosby wrote the title track of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s blockbuster album Déjà Vu about this very sensation.
Around the same time, he experienced his first major loss. In 1969, on her way to take the cats to the vet, Crosby’s girlfriend Christine Hinton swerved her van and crashed into a school bus. She died instantly. Grief-stricken and depressed, Crosby stood at the start of a long spiral that would consume his next two decades. “I watched a part of David die that day,” his bandmate Graham Nash wrote. “He wondered aloud what the universe was doing to him.” He turned to hard drugs. Fifteen years later, he was in prison, almost unrecognizable, the creative spark that had defined him all but dissipated. Crosby seemed to exist only in the past tense.
In the beautiful tragic comedy that is classic rock radio, David Crosby is almost never the protagonist. He’s more like the stoned sidekick—colorful, lovable, always just kind of around. Once in a while, he takes the lead, but his voice remains most recognizable as the one somewhere in the middle—first in the Byrds, next in CSN, and then in CSNY. Much has been said of his ego—and much of it by Crosby himself—but few artists have been so content to have a legacy defined by the people around them. Surrounded by friends, he was happy. “I had never seen anybody who had that much interest and joy and spontaneous reaction,” Grace Slick said of her first encounter with Crosby in the ’60s. “You could just look at his face and be delighted because there was a human being getting that childlike excitement out of stuff.”
Like sailing, music came naturally to young Crosby. His awakening arrived at age four, when his mother took him to see a symphony orchestra in the park. He was transfixed by everything, save for the compositions themselves. He sat in awe of the chaotic murmurs as the musicians tuned their instruments; the syncopated dance of their elbows when they kicked into action; how a vast body of voices could unite, suddenly, in harmony. He noticed the way that none of these sounds would be nearly as powerful on their own. “It just broke over me like a wave,” he reflected. It’s a thread he followed throughout his career.
While 1971’s If I Could Only Remember My Name is the first release credited to Crosby as a solo artist—and for a long time, the only release—it’s an album defined by harmony, community, and togetherness. The backing band is composed of members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, with notable appearances from Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Graham Nash. At the time of its release, these were some of the most popular names in music, nearly all of them coming off respective career-bests and commercial peaks. And yet together, they sound gloriously abstract. The music feels the way a dream sounds when you try to retell it in the morning: foggy, only loosely coherent, dissolving in real time.
This is David Crosby’s fingerprint. Look back at his earliest songs and you can hear an artist fighting against the confines of popular music. He played guitar in strange ways, opting for odd tunings that carried his songs and lyrics to unexpected places. His first great song, the Byrds’ “Everybody’s Been Burned,” sounds a little like a standard, except for the bass soloing through the entire thing. Later, in a cut called “What’s Happening?!?!,” he sang through what sounds like barely contained laughter, like someone exasperated with how much they have to say, realizing how words fail our deepest visions. The band can barely keep up with him.
The story goes, Crosby was kicked out of the Byrds for a few reasons. One, he was a pain to work with. Two, he had taken to indulging in long rants on stage, veering toward conspiracy theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Third, he had written this troublesome little song about a threesome. Continuing his nonmonogamous streak, he had also accepted a role playing with Stephen Stills in Buffalo Springfield at the Monterey Pop Festival. His bandmates took it as a sign of disloyalty—or maybe just an excuse to abandon him. Soon after his dismissal from the Byrds, Crosby and Stills began working with the Hollies’ Graham Nash on a new project focused on tight songwriting and three-part harmony. With Nash, Crosby found his most natural and consistent partner: someone who laughed at his jokes, provided comfort and wisdom when he needed it, and joined him on The Mayan for long treks down the California coast.
Near the end of If I Could Only Remember My Name, Nash and Crosby duet on a gorgeous, wordless piece of music, scatting along to one of the best melodies Crosby ever wrote. “I called it ‘A Song With No Words,’” he announces proudly at a show in 1970, gesturing toward Nash at his side. “He called it ‘A Tree With No Leaves.’ That shows you where he’s at.” The audience laughs. On the sleeve of the record, the song has both titles, Nash’s in parentheses, a symbolic compromise that speaks to the group mentality of the record. Alone with his music, Crosby heard sketches. With his friends around, they became forces of nature.
The creation of the album involved Crosby spending idle time alone in the studio, leaning against a wall or collapsing into tears, before his collaborators arrived to elevate the mood and enliven the music. Jerry Garcia’s pedal steel and Joni Mitchell’s harmony vocals turn “Laughing,” the most conventional song on the record, into the psych-folk ideal: a lazy sunset that gains resonance as it subdues. The kaleidoscopic opener  “Music Is Love” was just a plaintive guitar riff before the choir turned it into a commune. “Everybody’s saying that music is love,” they all sing, one after the other, creating a world where it’s true.
Crosby was adamant not to let his pain define the record. “I got no more understanding than an ant does when you pull off his legs,” he told Rolling Stone about his grief. He spoke about his desire to keep the sadness to himself—“It was the most horrible trip of my life and nobody needs to go on it”—so that his music could remain an escape. The album ends up somewhere in the middle. It’s a peaceful but broken sound.
The only song with a narrative arc is “Cowboy Movie.” It tells the thinly veiled story of CSNY dissipating, less interesting for its hippy-comedown mythology than its depiction of a narrator finding himself more desperate and alone with each passing minute. The story is in the music too: a gnarled, paranoid skeleton of Young’s 1969 song “Down by the River” that crackles and fades like a dying campfire. Crosby’s voice is more ragged than usual. “Now I’m dying here in Albuquerque,” he sings at the end. “I might be the sorriest sight you ever saw.”
The record closes with two songs that Crosby recorded by himself. Both are mostly a cappella, his voice layered to sound angelic and vast. “I was sitting there, kind of goofing around,” he said of the experiments, “And then all of a sudden I wasn’t goofing around.” Titled “I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here,” the closing song has since been identified as Crosby’s elegy for Christine. On a record that includes some of his most pointed writing about politics (“What Are Their Names”) and loss (“Traction in the Rain”), this was his clearest statement. He sounds helpless, haunted.
Throughout the ’70s, Crosby slowly fell out of focus. He and Nash made a few strong records as a duo and CSN had several more hits while they drifted apart. Nash knew the band was done when he saw Crosby abandoning a jam after his crack pipe fell from an amp. Things only got worse. At one point, Crosby boarded The Mayan in an attempt to flee from the cops before eventually turning himself in to the FBI. He left prison a year later with his hair cut short and his iconic mustache shaved off. Newly sober, his health began to deteriorate. He nearly died of liver failure in the ’90s, and, when he recovered, diabetes and heart disease followed.
Along the way, If I Could Only Remember My Name garnered a bigger reputation. Unlike anything else in Crosby’s catalog and misunderstood by its generation of critics, it was rediscovered by folk artists in the 2000s among similarly cosmic works by Judee Sill and Vashti Bunyan. Its most notable student, however, is Crosby himself. His last five years have found him returning to the record’s quiet, hypnotic headspace to work with a newfound urgency. On the best of his recent records, 2018’s Here If You Listen, he and his young collaborators return to some of the demos he made during the ’60s and ’70s, finishing the thoughts he abandoned. “If you don’t like the story you’re in,” he sings, “Pick up your pen and then write it again.”
It’s an inspiring new phase of his career, though it also highlights everything that’s been lost: collaborators, friends, time. In 2014, David Crosby sold The Mayan to a California billionaire named Beau Vrolyk. Crosby needed the money and figured this guy could take better care of it anyway. He hasn’t sailed since. The boat, however, has never been better. On a blog dedicated to its maintenance, Vrolyk writes passionately about the Mayan’s second life. He’s since made the boat more habitable for future generations. He got in touch with the grandson of the original builders to learn about its history. He even entered it in some races. “Old boats need love,” he writes. Some find it.


The Chicago-bred, now Brooklyn-based beatmaker DJ Rude One's ONEderful is a grubby set of blood-in-your-mouth street raps, featuring Roc Marciano, Your Old Droog, Mr Muthafuckin eXquire, and more.

ONEderful

As one-half of Single Minded Pros alongside Doc West, the Chicago-bred, now Brooklyn-based beatmaker DJ Rude One compiled a Rolodex of ’90s rap gods with his production work. The intro to new solo effort *ONEderful *lays out his credentials by assembling shout-outs from guys like Kool G Rap, DJ Premier, even DOOM (via a static-heavy audio message, as though recorded in his hidden underground lair). But on the record, Rude chooses not to call in old favors. Instead, he assembles a new list of contacts, all dedicated to the hard-boiled ethics—atmosphere heavy, hooks optional, Wu-Tang reigning over all—of NY orthodoxy. The lean, 10-track ONEderful is a grubby set of blood-in-your-mouth street raps, dusty record scratches and musty, subterranean beats.
On “Mr. Goodbar,” Brooklyn-by-way-of-the-Ukraine emcee Your Old Droog flows with the blunted thump of the Kool Genius. Conway the Machine calls out all studio gangsters on the concrete-cold piano keys and tough drum loop of “Andre Drummond.” Elsewhere, “Street Scenes,” featuring Chicago’s Jeremiah Jae, is built on clinking piano keys that recall the Wu’s “C.R.E.A.M.” Roc Marciano gets two tracks—“Murder Paragraphs” and “Triple Black Benz”—because his rasping voice is suited for Rude One’s gritty sound. Almost everything here is sonically consistent, with rapper and producer perfectly in sync; no small thing when it comes to producer compilations that shuffle through guest spots this quickly.
The best beat, though, is actually out of step with the rest of the tape. The Mr. Muthafuckin eXquire-featuring “Tyrannosaurs eX” is all swarming ’80s synths and Moroder-style pyrotechnics, hinting at a different direction. The only unequivocal disappointment is “Supreme Trunks.” Conway’s Griselda Gang sibling Westside Gunn has recently established himself as one of NYC’s real emerging talents, but he’s hampered here by a grating keyboard stab that’s impossible to navigate, even with his energetic flow.
DJ Rude One succeeds, though, by keeping his focus narrow and his lens firmly fixed. ONEderful is short, snappy and completely disinterested with any kind of traditional song structure. It moves with beat-tape momentum, and has no concerns other than letting its rappers do whatever the hell they want. A low-key release, maybe, but if you just want to just listen to some stalwart rhymes over brass-knuckle beats, Rude One proves an excellent foil.


On her second album, the Austin singer-songwriter strengthens her voice and broadens her perspective, turning her gaze from romance to a more nuanced view of her own anxieties.

First Flower

“Any woman that is singing a ballad is my favorite thing,” the Austin singer-songwriter Molly Burch recently confessed when asked about her influences, listing off everyone from Billie Holiday to Dusty Springfield to Britney Spears. Fittingly, on her second album, First Flower, Burch’s voice takes center stage.
On her debut, last year’s Please Be Mine, Burch focused on the tribulations of romantic love. The songs were polished and luxurious, buoyed by jazzy instrumentals and her characteristically smoky vocals. On First Flower, it is clear that her range and control have improved. She deftly pivots from a husky smolder to billowing vibrato to the airiness of tulle blowing in the wind. The subjects of her songs have diversified, too: While she still writes about romance, she also turns inward, exploring what she desires from relationships and how her anxieties affect her interactions with other people.
Burch’s voice is so versatile that she can sing the same phrase over and over, each time giving it new meaning. On “First Flower,” her joy in a blossoming relationship is palpable as she repeats, “You are my man,” over dreamy guitar and angelic backing vocals. On album closer “Every Little Thing,” she begins on a slower and more somber note, garnering assurance and momentum every time she sings, “I’ve worn my body down,” over sparse keys and glittering harp. The way her delivery evolves, ultimately injecting every word with blazing electricity, is both a document of her exhaustion and proof of her determination.
The album’s emotional weight doesn’t come solely from Burch’s vocal delivery; her struggles with anxiety yield nuggets of lyrical wisdom too. When she ruminates, “I hope I learn from my mistakes/I hope I forgive myself one day,” on “Dangerous Places,” she imbues deceptively sunny surf-rock guitars and lackadaisical drums with introspection and self-awareness. And on album highlight “To the Boys,” she articulates a central tenet of third-wave feminism: Women need not emulate masculinity to be powerful. “I don’t need to scream to get my point across/I don’t need to yell to know that I’m the boss,” she sings, revealing the power in quietly but firmly asserting your value in spaces that historically deemed you unworthy of respect. Though the subject is soft-spokenness, her vocals ring crystal clear, demanding that people listen.
But, as with Please Be Mine, the lyrics on First Flower are sometimes too broad to feel poignant. Burch uses grandiose language to describe her relationships but never shows us the details of why those interactions are so meaningful, so her emotional revelations border on platitudes. Phrases like “I never knew love before you, my baby,” from “True Love,” don’t resonate emotionally so much as leave the listener wondering what, exactly, that grand love was like. “I just I want to do everything with you,” from “Next to Me,” is no more evocative, and before going into more detail, the song is off in another direction as Burch laments that her partner needs space.
The songs on First Flower are vibrant and warm—fine dinner party music, if not gripping enough to stop the conversation in its tracks. Still, Burch’s emotional openness and introspection are promising, and her technical skill is undeniable. Her highly versatile vocals add texture, nuance, and depth to everything she sings.


The Iceland-based composer’s score for the Arctic crime drama shivers with ominous uncertainty that’s better appreciated in its original context.

Ben Frost: Catastrophic Deliquescence (Music From Fortitude 2015-2018)

A choir can produce a heavenly aura as easily as it can evoke the jaws of hell clamping down on sinners. On “Mammoth Suite,” Australian composer and experimentalist Ben Frost demonstrates such a shift in the space of 15 seconds: A hair-raising commotion subsides into whispers and groans, which bleed into the strings presumably sent to serenade the forsaken. It’s a tense moment in what transpires to be almost an hour and a half of tense moments on Catastrophic Deliquescence (Music From Fortitude 2015-2018). The album collects 31 compositions Frost wrote for the British television series Fortitude, a psychological thriller shaped by the forces of climate change and capitalism.
Fortitude is a fictional town in the Norwegian Arctic, but for those who favor the strain of crime drama sometimes called Nordic noir, it will feel highly familiar. Though it’s a UK production, Fortitude shares Nordic noir’s population of families torn apart by secrets, pervasive sense of isolation, and looming existential threat. Partially filmed in Iceland, the series does an impressive job of making a character of the landscape, and this is where Frost, who lives in Iceland, sensibly grounds his score. There’s howling wind, effects that mimic the way snow muffles sound, the squawk of a gull. Whether leaning into classical motifs or pushing electronics to the point of distortion, the music shivers with ominous uncertainty: In this realm, it always feels like something bad is about to happen, even when it already has.
On “Permafrost,” the foreboding is briefly tempered by curiosity. Beneath layers of static and bass, the central melody has the pattern of a bird call, perky and persuasive. For every playful interlude like this on the compilation, however, there are a handful of tracks intent on coming off as more mysterious than the last. The plainly named “Dan” and “Elena” use swathes of synth reverb and choral offcuts to very standard effect. Like anything, mysterious tropes lose their impact with overuse. The real drama on Catastrophic Deliquescence lies in the moments when Frost breaks with genre conformity. The fractal drums and negative space on “Tupilaq (A Shower Scene)” provide a much-needed shot of energy. In the second half of the record, some truly beautiful brass feels warm enough to scoop you up and carry you through the storm. “Snow Like Smoke,” in particular, recalls the heavy heart of Alan Silvestri’s “Theme From The Bodyguard,” from Whitney Houston’s peerless 1992 blockbuster.
But do TV soundtracks need to exist separate from their shows? There is a world of difference between the kind of score required for a film, which has a fixed runtime and a distinct narrative arc, and a TV series, which is deemed successful only if its story is strung out over several seasons. The psychological thriller, in particular, is the perfect template for the streaming age: Just as page-turners worship at the altar of the cliffhanger, binge-watch TV lives or dies by its ability to march you into the next episode. But when taken in aggregate, 31 tracks designed to keep you at the edge of your seat can be exhausting—and 23 of them are under the three-minute mark. It’s not that short scene-length tracks are bad; it’s that the overall emotional tone winds up feeling repetitive.
I’m not convinced that Catastrophic Deliquescence works as a standalone release. That’s a shame, because it’s an accomplished score when experienced as originally intended—within a TV show. Fortitude’s elongated tensions and creeping dread wouldn’t land the way they do without Frost’s musical guidance. Perhaps that’s what he’s hinting at with the title. Deliquescence is a chemical process by which a substance absorbs so much moisture from the atmosphere that it dissolves in the accumulated water. TV shows absorb so much emotional weight from their soundtracks that they cannot properly exist without them. But just because the music can be extracted doesn’t mean something isn’t lost along the way.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The San Jose emo band’s debut sounds like various states of alarm, a big statement that leans on the raw impulses of singer and songwriter Shannon Taylor.

awakebutstillinbed: what people call low self-esteem is really just seeing yourself the way that other people see you

The San Jose band awakebutstillinbed have succeeded at being so emo that they necessitated a new Bandcamp genre tag. Behold the dawn of “extremo.” Where some bands will preempt the emo label with a kind of self-reflexive joke about it, nothing about the young band’s debut album is played for laughs. You can’t call awakebutstillinbed “melodramatic” because that would imply overstatement or exaggeration, or that drama itself can’t be a resting state. Both “awake but still in bed” and “what people call low self-esteem is really just seeing yourself the way other people see you” are lyrics verbatim from the album and there’s no particular emphasis on either of those lines when they arrive. On average, they’re slightly less acute than anything else that comes from vocalist Shannon Taylor as a coo, a yell, or whatever you want to call the irreplicable moments where it sounds like she’s trying to remove a ball of steel shavings from her throat with a rusty fork. While some albums use a spectrum or rainbow for their emotional palette, low self-esteem needs a fire code: Every moment sounds an alarm, they’re only differentiated by its state of emergency.
This isn’t cinematic music as the term is usually understood, i.e., “lots of strings” or “eight-minute songs.” Rather, it’s a unification of sound and vision, a vivid rendering of a life spent standing on a precipice, where the weight of guilt is somehow the only thing keeping you from jumping. It demands an immediate comparison to the last time a previously unheralded emo band did it this well; “Opener” follows nearly the exact trajectory of the Hotelier’s ”An Introduction to the Album” and low self-esteem shares many of Home, Like NoPlace Is There’s qualities: certainly some of its suburban scenery and themes, but also its brazenly screamed hooks, fitful dynamics, and meticulous sequencing.
But at no point does awakebutstillinbed sound unduly derivative of any band, even if “Safe” and “Saved” are more classic Rainer Maria than the last Rainer Maria album; they’re just drawing from a similar wellspring of emotion. If Taylor’s going to break down at a funeral where she feels somehow responsible, of course it would sound as searching and devastating as “Saved.” Of course a song about freeing oneself from the bondage of patriarchal inheritance would be as feverishly driven as “Fathers.” The full-band plummet of “Opener” hits with seismic impact because what else is supposed to happen when a person just cannot take their depression being invalidated for one more second?
Taylor’s vocals pull most of the focus here, and even when she takes on a more amenable tone, her ability to go nuclear ensures no moment of low self-esteem is passive listening. But she knows when to smash the button, which she does on “Life” before the very first line. Even if it’s couched in one those streaking post-punk arrangements that connect early U2 with Makthaverskan, Taylor’s hook, “I couldn’t get my life back/I couldn’t save myself,” would be notated on sheet music by jamming a pencil straight through the paper.
It’s easy to think of this all as a result of being purely impulsive or serendipitous. That tends to happen in this realm, where even the masterpieces are seen as happening despite themselves: singers who can’t sing hitting the wrong notes just right, guitars chiming in unintuitive yet beautiful harmonies, bands who keep it together for just long enough to create a legacy before they implode six months later. Yet awakebutstillinbed are just freakishly adept at making this creative impulse work for them, especially when these are the first songs they’ve ever released. As the cliche goes, the debut album takes a lifetime to write and the most toxic, profound, and impactful moments were the only ones Taylor saw fit to document. Is it all too much? awakebutstillinbed have a better question: Why would you want anything less?


On his new three-song EP, the Baltimore artist uses his sinuous, stunning voice to navigate a dark night of the soul.

Apparition EP

As serpentwithfeet, Josiah Wise wields his powerful, choir-trained voice to reach for the sublime. His elastic vibrato adds urgency to lyrics about the hazards and highs of queer love, occasionally multiplying into a sweeping chorus to deepen the sense of grandeur. On Apparition, the Baltimore artist’s new three-song EP, he invites listeners into his dark night of the soul. Where soil largely lamented the pitfalls of romance, Apparition takes a more introspective approach, as Wise rids himself of emotional baggage. His outlook remains generous and full of light, and the songs brim with the strength necessary to make it to tomorrow.
Apparition opens with a dancing piano figure on “A Comma,” like a sequence from an étude. It contradicts the weariness to come, in which Wise strains to break free from expectations over heavy, rolling bass and drums. “Someone else’s beasts are riding me/I know this pain isn’t mine,” he sings ruefully, “Yet I feel it all the time.” His  vocal delivery is tremulous, the background filled with ghostly, wordless vocalizations and fraught silences. He wants to be an “open book,” to have agency and move the way he pleases, but the churning music beneath him suggests that it lingers out of reach. It’s a mental rut that Apparition’s beguiling eight minutes seek to remedy.
All three songs on the EP were produced by Wynne Bennett, who lent a similarly delicate touch to Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer highlight “Pynk.” Bennett’s understated production is a good fit for Wise, who continues to use his voice to land emotional haymakers. On “This Hill,” he is accented by airy, tinkling piano and clicking programmed drums as he explores a selfish melancholy, angry at the earth for “asking him to live this long” in misery. Wise finds a moment of epiphany halfway through, his voice careening to the fore. The repeated insistence that he’s “better now” feels unshakable, the layers of swooning harmonies giving biblical weight to overcoming self-doubt.
“This Hill” radiates a warmth that Wise maintains on “Psychic,” where his playful sense of humor comes to light. Here, he opens up to romance, cooing seductively to a “debonair soothsayer.” Wise chews into his spiritualist romantic object with unabated pleasure: “Shame on those who dread prophecy,” he sighs, “They must not know how hot it can be.” Bounding over echoing drums and a metronomic piano, “Psychic” recalls soil’s friskier songs like “slow syrup” and “fragrant,” where bawdy humor snuck into his poetic verses like glimpses of skin through fabric. Apparition proves that Wise moves in whatever sensuous direction he pleases, reckoning with himself head-on in order to break free and experience true connection.


Joined by players including percussionist Mauro Refosco and guitarist Dave Harrington, the New York bassist takes atmospheric cues from classic ECM productions while evoking relaxed, low-key vibes.

Sunday Painter

On his first two albums, Spencer Zahn was alone with a synthesizer. For his latest, he got together some friends. Sunday Painter, the bassist’s first album as a bandleader, features contributions from a range of artists, including Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refosco (David Byrne, Dirty Projectors, Atoms for Peace) and guitarist Dave Harrington (Darkside). Taking inspiration from the luminary ECM Records, Zahn’s explicit goal was to put together an ensemble nimble enough to turn the recording space itself into a collaborator. But where the whitewashed gallery walls of classic ECM spotlit individual players’ poise and precision, Sunday Painter has the exhausted living-room energy of a group of college buds determined to stay up ’til sunrise: It’s a little sleepy, a little on edge, but more than anything content simply to be in the same place as good people.
As a bandleader, Zahn is far from pushy. Like fellow bassist Sam Wilkes, he seems to take the concept of the rhythm section seriously: His role here is to create stable environments for his collaborators to play around with. This is something they frequently elect not to do, instead working to augment these settings further; there aren’t solos so much as shifts of emphasis. When this works, it can be breathtaking. “Key Biscayne” is as humid as its South Florida namesake, with raindrops of piano tapping away at a looping pattern as distant thunderclaps from Refosco dot the landscape. Everything takes its time decaying. Cymbal crashes, hoarse notes from Spencer Ludwig’s trumpet, casually offered asides from a piano—it all hangs in the room for so long that even the simplest phrases start to carry the weight of maxims.
But the emphasis on world-building, as opposed to soloing or more melodic pursuits, can keep the stakes low in a way that occasionally makes these songs feel stale. “The Mist” is spiked with a splash of organ that comes off like Miles Davis’ “Shhh/Peaceful” moving at a speed-walk pace as the group feels its way along a rocky coastline with only Refosco’s wayfinding bells to guide them. Once the scene is established, Ludwig and Harrington both step into the spotlight, but neither has much to say; with the band having assembled the mood so expertly, their leads both feel like they’re simply reiterating a point that’s already been made.
Throughout, Zahn’s bass resembles a lightning rod, the one tall and sturdy thing that’s always standing, even when the rest of the band bends as low to the ground as they can. His playing is accomplished—he’s toured as a sideman with Empress Of, Twin Shadow, and Half Waif, in addition to Harrington—but never showy, and it’s always in service of the song. He allows himself a bit of indulgence in “Empathy Duet,” where his solo is shrouded in threadbare electronics, and he provides the emotional backing to “Roya,” a song that blooms from a dusky strut into a slow-motion heartbreaker that wouldn’t sound out of place on Broken Social Scene’s self-titled record.
With an emphasis on intimacy, interplay, and enclosed space, this group excels at low-slung love songs, the kind of thing you’d put on to laze away the afternoon with your beloved. On “To the One You Love,” Zahn’s bass takes big gulps of air while the band brews up a pillowy ether. It’s one of Sunday Painter’s most effective tracks, moving from sweet charm to internal dissonance to mature intimacy—a nice mirror of love’s evolution, all unfolding at a gauzy crawl. Even “Promises,” Ludwig’s brief duet with saxophonist Michael McGarril, is little more than a dance between the two horns, each tracing lines around the other.
If Zahn’s goal was to make a record that takes on the characteristics of its environment, he’s succeeded. Sunday Painter never stops feeling like exactly what it is, which is the sound of a group of supremely talented musicians just happy to be in a room together. Zahn has a compelling vision as an arranger and composer, and he’s assembled a group that’s more than capable of carrying it out. Still, the collective playing here can be so entrancing you can’t help but wonder where they might have gone if they’d ventured outside.

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Nearly a decade after helping revolutionize the sound of UK bass, the veteran Night Slugs producer struggles to maintain the radicalism of his early music on his debut album.

Song Feel

At the dawn of this decade, a new electronic bass mutation emerged from South London, nurtured by the same anarchic spirit that fed jungle in the 1990s and dubstep a decade later. Led by low-end explorers Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990, Night Slugs grew out of a club night; the label collective’s output blended grime’s ominous rumblings with rattling dirty South snares, and pitched-up vocals with sweet, sticky trance synths. In 2010, foundational member Phil Gamble (aka Girl Unit) dropped “Wut,” an absolute monster of a track that became emblematic of post-dubstep’s possibilities but also proved to be the UK producer’s albatross, a sound he’d spend the rest of his career trying to outmatch.
Following the rise of similarly minded producers like Glaswegians Rustie and Hudson Mohawke along with Lunice and the organizers of Montréal’s Turbocrunk parties, Girl Unit answered “Wut” by wisely going in the opposite direction. Gamble deconstructed 1980s funk and freestyle for the minimalist, 808-driven instrumentals on 2012’s six-track EP Club Rez. A handful of DJ mixes, singles, and remixes followed in the years since—along with production work on Kelela’s genre- and club-smashing Cut 4 Me mixtape in 2013 and Hallucinogen EP in 2015—but it wasn’t until earlier this month that the London producer finally released his long-awaited debut full-length, Song Feel.
Gamble has pivoted once again: He said in an interview that he wanted to write structured songs with singers, rather than simple bangers, and Song Feel features a roster of vocalists including Kelela, Nigerian-Lebanese-Jamaican singer Taliwhoah, and Lionel Richie-approved songwriter Rush Davis, with a couple of instrumentals thrown in for good measure. Though the vibe is luxuriously produced and steeped in low-lit R&B and slow, soulful funk, the album lacks the radical instincts that once made Girl Unit one to watch. His music is now nearly indistinguishable from the pop and contemporary club that Gamble cites as an influence.
Atlanta MC Thast’s spicy verses ignite “Pull Up” even though the beat sounds ripped from a Sonny Digital type beats YouTube channel, and on “Sucker Free” Brooklyn MC Ms. Boogie slays over an ominously icy beat that sounds like it was rescued from the cutting-room floor. Gamble’s guests are Song Feel’s saving grace: Kelela sings and emotes flawlessly on album lead “WYWD” as a muted shuffle ticks and snaps in the background, and Davis’ songwriting chops elevate “Evidence” beyond your average Uber-referencing torch song. The album also serves as a showcase for North London’s Brook Baili, who shines on the gospel-tinged “24 Hours.”
When left to his own devices—as on the chopped-and-screwed “Roll” and the Jersey club-indebted “Pure Gold”—Girl Unit rests on formerly niche sounds that have been adopted by more mainstream-facing artists. The tropical sway on “Stuck” has become established on the charts since Popcaan linked up with Drake, and “Head” is an unremarkable take on LA neo-funk, its pillowy percussion and yearning vocal little more than a blank canvas that has yet to be filled out. Instead of rewriting the book, Gamble now seems to be playing by the same rules as everyone else.


The Oakland rapper known for his standout scam records sinks into a more reflective mood on his latest LP. The cost of this pensive turn is a loss of personality.

1176

In the fall of 2019, Guapdad 4000’s family lost the West Oakland home where he was raised. The timing was crushing. At the top of the year, he’d emerged as one of the standout voices on Dreamville’s Revenge of the Dreamers III compilation, and through the spring and summer, he’d become the colorful face of scam rap. When he got the news, he was just days away from releasing his debut album Dior Deposits. The lost home is depicted as endangered on the cover of 1176: as Guapdad and a woman look at the smoke-tinted sky, fireballs rain down and an inferno looms behind the house. 1176, titled after the home’s address, is ostensibly a chronicle of lost innocence, but it rarely taps into this backstory or pushes Guapdad in new directions.

Executive-produced by !llmind, who helmed most of the songs, the album is something of a reintroduction for Guapdad 4000. Released by Paradise Rising, an imprint of 88Rising that focuses on Filipino artists (!llmind is Filipino, and Guapdad is Black and Filipino), the record is clearly meant to depart from the seedy hijinks of Guapdad’s previous music. Instead of sordid scams and cheeky references to sex and anime over glossy production, the mood is reflective and dreamy.

Brief album opener “10finity” hints at dark thoughts and inner turmoil. “I talk to God at night, I pray/For golden tidal waves/Wash me ashore to another place,” Guapdad sings over a hushed bed of soft keys and warped vocals. “How Many,” which stretches Alice DJ’s springy dance hit “Better Off Alone” into a gloomy haze, is just as introspective, the chorus a series of questions. There’s plenty of his signature alliteration and wit on 1176, but on the whole, Guapdad brings fewer jokes and bars, focusing on his roots.
The cost of this pensive turn is a loss of personality. Guapdad’s scam raps stood out because he balanced shit-talking with curiosity. Where Teejayx6 and Kasher Quon offered scam tutorials and City Girls pitched mantras and capers, Guapdad emphasized play. His scam tales were less about guaranteed scores and more about improvisation and risk, an approach that filtered into his music. From the indie rock of “Choppa Talk”  to the steely pimp strut of “Iced Out Cold Chain” to his outre The Little Engine That Could interpolation on “Little Scammer That Could,” he was constantly venturing out. 1176 lacks that sense of adventure.

The record isn’t inert despite feeling nerfed. There are flashes of Guapdad’s wandering spirit in songs like “Muhammad” and “Uncle Ricky.” The former is a fleet rush of wordplay and storytelling, Guapdad blending flexes with autobiography: “Only niggas I fuck with is blue like the Watchmen/Whole body covered in water, but I ain’t washin’,” he raps. !llmind’s RZA-inspired production on “Uncle Ricky” puts Guapdad into storytelling mode. He turns a day with his erratic, street-running uncle into a tense ride-along, honors his relative, and subtly relays his own origin story. The track, which traces Guapdad’s later run-ins with crime to his hectic upbringing, is less about a single, dramatic event that changed his life and more a dive into the anxiety of navigating an unpredictable environment.
“Chicken Adobo,” named after a beloved Filipino dish, is the album’s highlight. Over a breezy acoustic guitar melody and dollops of bouncy bass, Guapdad revisits the summer of 2010, where budding love coexisted with personal trials. His melodies are catchy, his writing is sharp and scenic, and the narrative is heartwarming—qualities that only appear in flashes across 1176. The album rarely sustains the focus of “Chicken Adobo” or builds his recollections into episodes. But when it does, you can smell the peppercorns and bay leaves, can see the world through Guapdad 4000’s eyes.

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Released 12 years after Digital Shades, Vol. 1, M83’s new collection of instrumentals doubles as a playful tribute to classic video-game soundtracks.

DSVII

Though it’s rarely singled out for praise, 2007’s Digital Shades, Vol. 1 is a Rosetta stone for the two classic M83 albums that followed: Saturdays=Youth and Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. Anthony Gonzalez’s love of ambient and shoegaze ran throughout the serene collection of minimal soundscapes like digital waves washing up against a pixelating shoreline. The emotional ebb and flow of Vol. 1 was more patient than anything the French musician had attempted before, and those experiments would inform anthems like “We Own the Sky” and “Midnight City” in the decade to come. Twelve years, three LPs, and three soundtrack albums later, M83 return to the Digital Shades series with DSVII, a worthy sequel that demonstrates Gonzalez’s growth as a composer over the past decade.
Where much of Vol. 1 focused on moody pad swells and filter sweeps, DSVII is ornate and loosely concept oriented. The tracklisting suggests that it might be the soundtrack to a high-fantasy video game, in which M83 follows in the footsteps of greats like Yasunori Mitsuda and Koji Kondo. When he first announced the album, Gonzalez admitted that replaying old games from his childhood had been a major inspiration for the record. “There is something so naive and touching about them,” he said of the games. “It’s simple and imperfect.”
Like the best film scores, great video-game music refuses to be relegated to the background. Instead, it aspires to be inextricable from the experience. Because Gonzalez is untethered from the restrictions of an actual game, he’s free to design the universe of DSVII as he sees fit, and the album’s eclectic nature reflects that. The song titles may allude to some larger universe—there are vague references to colonies and temples—but their open-ended nature allows listeners to fill in whatever narrative they wish.
M83 have long been synonymous with neon-drenched nostalgia and a sound indebted to the 1980s, but DSVII feels most captivating when Gonzalez harks back even further, to the earnest 1970s. Acoustic guitars meet proggy arpeggios, expanding upon the dramatic playbook established by Daft Punk’s retro-fetishist masterpiece Random Access Memories: Do what you’re good at, but play it all using analog gear, so it feels real.
There are stunning, plaintive meditations (“Goodbye Captain Lee” sounds like a sci-fi update of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s iconic “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”) and even ambient in the vein of Vol. 1 (“Mirage”), but some moments feel overblown by comparison. Gratuitous drums threaten to topple an already delicate balance of exaggerated chord changes on “Feelings” and album closer “Temple of Sorrow.” The flute solos and Randy Newman-esque balladry on “A Word of Wisdom” might evoke a character wandering into the home of a humble village shopkeep who can give them that elusive quest item. And whether or not you have role-playing games on the brain, you may wonder what on earth an accordion is doing on a M83 record.
Digital Shades began as an outlet for B-sides and ambient music that didn’t fit into the strictures of M83’s proper studio albums. With DSVII, the series evolves into a space for tinkering, where Gonzalez can embrace different influences. With neither someone else’s vision nor any cohesive album statement to fulfill, he reverts to maximalism, melding his two musical identities—synth-pop showman, serious composer for other mediums—to become the director of his own electronic daydreams.


Taken from a three-night stint in L.A. and recorded by Steve Albini, this live album disavows almost all the rules of the form.

Ty Segall / Freedom Band: Deforming Lobes

Deforming Lobes

On his 2018 tour de force, Freedom’s Goblin, Ty Segall provided us with a double-album highlight reel of every aesthetic the restless garage rocker has explored in his first decade as a solo artist, from light-speed hardcore to idyllic psychedelic-folk balladry to 12-minute fretboard-snapping jams. But in an interview conducted on the eve of the album’s release, Segall suggested the album represented the closing of a chapter. “I feel like I’ve barely even tapped anything,” he said, before revealing a desire to experiment with electronic production and make a hip-hop album. It remains to be seen whether Ty actually follows through on the transformation into MC Lil T. But if Segall is indeed laying his rocker id to rest for a while, Deforming Lobes is the blaze of glory in which it’s going out.
Deforming Lobes was recorded live by Steve Albini during Segall’s three-night stint at Los Angeles’ Teragram Ballroom in January 2018, but it disavows the rules of the typical live album. It has no ambition to document the concerts as they happened—the crowd noise has been largely sucked out of Albini’s mixes, to the point where it sometimes feels like you’re listening in on a private rehearsal rather than a performance before a crowd of several hundred people. Its eight selections have been cherry-picked from what were much more sprawling and eclectic set lists and radically resequenced. And with few exceptions, these are not Segall’s signature songs, so it’s not like Deforming Lobes is meant to serve as some sort of de facto greatest-hits overview. There aren’t even any Freedom’s Goblin tracks here to frame this particular moment in Segall’s career.
But there is one crucial quality that connects Deforming Lobes’ random assortment of deep cuts, covers, and early nuggets. And that’s the pulverizing power of the Freedom Band, the four-piece unit—bassist Mikal Cronin, guitarist Emmett Kelly, keyboardist Ben Boye, and drummer Charlie Moothart—that has backed Segall onstage since 2016, and has pushed him to new levels of heaviness and face-melting gnarliness in concert, even as his songwriting on record has become more refined. As such, Deforming Lobes’ closest antecedent would be The Who’s original, equally compact Live at Leeds, where the purpose is less about highlighting the set-list staples than showcasing the band in their most primal, exploratory state.
You can feel the Freedom Band’s imposing presence from the very first note—as an announcer introduces the band, the opening chord of “Warm Hands” comes rudely crashing in like a safe dropped from a high rise before he can even finish uttering Segall’s name. Taken from Segall’s self-titled 2017 release, the nine-minute prog-punk suite serves as Deforming Lobes’ fearsome point-of-no-return gateway, an electric-fence barrier erected to ward off casual fans who prefer Segall’s more playful, melodic side. And where the original eventually dissolves into a tranquil pool of noodly Santana solos, the Freedom Band redirect it toward a turbulent, shredding climax.
That combination of ferocity and fluidity makes Deforming Lobes distinct from anything in Segall’s bottomless catalog. The Freedom Band’s adrenalizing properties are most deeply felt on the songs taken from 2016’s Emotional Mugger, Segall’s demented detour into alien glam-rock. Here, the Morse-code fuzz, tinfoil-chewing guitar frequencies, and stiff robotic rhythms of “Squealer” and “Breakfast Eggs” give way to pure punk-metal muscle, while Segall invests their whimsical vocals with a throat-ravaging theatricality. But some Deforming Lobes revisions simply exist to give Segall’s trashy-sounding early recordings a welcome bottom-end boost—he deviously stretches out the quiet intro to the 2009-era standard “Finger,” presumably to maximize the shock-and-awe factor when the band finally kicks into a psych-sludge groove several tons heavier than the original.
At all three of his Teragram shows, Segall encored with a rendition of the Groundhogs’ 1971 asphalt-ripping classic “Cherry Red,” a song he first covered for a 2011 single. Where Segall tends to corrupt his classic-rock covers with his manic energy—often paring them down and rearranging them as he sees fit—the “Cherry Red” featured here is almost too reverential by his standards, with Segall dutifully mimicking Tony McPhee’s high-pitched melody lines while the band seems extra-careful not to upset the song’s steady hypno-chug groove. But Deforming Lobes smartly repositions “Cherry Red” as a penultimate reprieve that lets you catch your breath before the album’s glorious finale: a version of “Love Fuzz” that stretches out the three-minute Twins thrasher into Segall’s very own “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” complete with a dramatic oscillating-organ breakdown that tees up one last blitzkrieg blast. Over his career, Segall has come up with different ways to wave goodbye and say goodnight, but none as emphatic as this.


Though fun and at times politically salient, even Metro Boomin cannot rescue Big Sean from his habit of writing the absolute corniest lyrics imaginable.

Big Sean / Metro Boomin: Double or Nothing

Double or Nothing

Big Sean is the Nickelback of rap. His music is earnest but predictable; he is critically reviled but puts up No. 1 albums. There are as many people who hail his appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s Mean Tweets sketch as there are who think he’s got real bars. Earlier this year, Sean released I Decided., the follow-up to his 2015 album Dark Sky Paradise. Both albums suggested he has a bit more to offer than syntactically tangled lyrics and Dark Sky not only had hits that appealed to his detractors—the Drake-featuring “Blessings” and epic kiss-off “I Don’t Fuck With You”—but suggested that, with a little bit of growing up, he could perhaps start to chip away at his long-held place as a bottom-rung rapper. His new collaborative project with Metro Boomin, Double or Nothing, undoes all that good with lyrics so absurd it’s difficult to imagine they were written in this reality.
Why isn’t there anyone in the recording studio telling Big Sean that his lyrics are not good? He opens the album with a track called “Go Legend” where he declares his brother to be like John Legend. On “Who’s Stopping Me,” he offers us this: “I had a dream I rode with Rosa Parks in back of the ’Bach/And we was blowing a blunt and she was packing a strap/Like damn, it do feel good to be black in the back.” While it’s worth noting that Sean’s vocal cadence succeeds where his wordplay fails—he emphasizes the “do” to imply that it now feels good to be black and sitting in the back because being chauffeured is a sign of wealth—his thug fantasia about a civil rights icon is neither trenchant nor funny—just very corny.
There are more failed attempts at woke lyrical tricks throughout the album, particularly on “Savage Time” where he raps, “Beat a white supremacist black/’Till that motherfucker hate his face,” shouts out former San Francisco 49ers quarterback and leader of the “National Anthem” protest movement in the NFL Colin Kaepernick, and asserts that he’s going to take water from Flint, Michigan to Washington D.C. where he knows Donald Trump won’t drink it. These are all great things to rap about! Sean is from Detroit and the ongoing, appalling Flint water crisis is something he should be passionate out; with such a big platform, he has the ability to highlight it for pop audiences who may not be informed about the dark reality that the residents of that town have not had clean water for over three years.
His feeble attempts at political commentary are, however, less unfortunate than his characteristically gross sex raps of which there are plenty. The most vacuous are on “So Good”: “Pussy so good, I never fuck you in the ass/Got a long dick, that shit barely fit/Like O.J. glove, you must acquit”; “I be damned if I didn’t 69/I can hit this shit until I’m 69.” It is, at least, a good reminder that no matter how ironic your “nice” joke is, there has probably never been an actually funny 69 joke ever in history.
Although these gaffes are his own, the person who probably suffers the most from Double or Nothing is Metro Boomin. The 24-year-old producer has had immense success with these kinds of projects before, garnering critical acclaim for Savage Mode with 21 Savage and Droptopwop with Gucci Mane. But the difference is that 21 and Young Thug both know how to make their work with Metro more symbiotic: his production is usually a palette for a vocalist to go bold or unhinged, like Thug on “Hercules,” Future’s “I Serve the Base,” or Tinashe’s “Ride of Your Life,” among many, many others. From the quality of the production, it seems that Metro knows he wasn’t going to get a progressive performance from Sean. Most of the beats on the album are standard fare with a few gems like “Reason,” which recalls Metro’s What a Time to Be Alive production “Jumpman,” and “Who’s Stopping Me” which samples from Brazilian artist Nazaré Pereira’s “Clarão De Lua,” something a little bit different from Metro’s typically modern approach. Sean adds his approval by saying, “This shit sound like ‘Narcos’” before he starts rapping. The television series “Narcos,” of course, takes place in Colombia where they speak Spanish; “Clarão De Lua” is in Portuguese, Brazil’s native tongue. Like most of Double or Nothing, it is just another thing he gets wrong.


For the most part, Near to the Wild Heart of Life sticks to the Japandroids M.O., but the end results are less enticing.

Japandroids: Near to the Wild Heart of Life

Near to the Wild Heart of Life

Listening to Japandroids makes me think about Jenga. You have the most basic elements (guitar, drums, and vocals, in this case) delicately stacked on top of each other. The raw materials are so simple, but the more it builds in increments, the higher the stakes become; each move ratchets up the tension partly because you know the whole thing is constantly in danger of buckling under itself at any time.
Likewise, the best Japandroids songs are always threatening to topple over; singer/guitarist Brian King struggles to reach his highest notes, and drummer David Prowse pounds the drums frantically, like they might be running away from him. They teeter forever on a precipice separating transcendence from pure cheese—one of their best songs turns on the cathartic refrain “I just wanna worry about those sunshine girls”—but it’s sold with life-changing intensity. As a lyricist, King takes you to that precipice, invites you to look over, even gives you the smallest nudge—and then he catches you.
Which is why the advance single to their latest record “Near to the Wild Heart of Life” is so disappointing. “Near to the Wild Heart of Life” is too perfect. The grit on King’s voice is gone; the guitar is too cleanly mixed; the drums don’t hit as hard. This is a band whose second album is literally titled Celebration Rock, but this song’s version of a lyrical clincher—“I used to be good but now I’m bad”—clunks off the ear like a tennis ball against a wall.
For the most part, Near to the Wild Heart of Life sticks to the Japandroids M.O. King still writes about drinking, about girls, about the love-hate relationship between himself and the idea of a hometown. King claims Vancouver, although things have gotten slightly more complicated as the band has tacked between Toronto, New Orleans, and Mexico City, taking a three-year hiatus of touring beginning in 2013. This much is reflected in the rollicking autobiographical travelogue “North East South West,” which is one of King’s sharpest songs on the album lyrically. But the mix is too pristine, the acoustic guitar too loud, and it lacks the bite of their best songs.
More disheartening is the sapping of King’s sense of humor. He was often funny in a straightforward way, like Jonathan Richman if he weren’t a teetotaler: “Don’t we have anything to live for?/Well of course we do/But ‘til they come true/We’re drinking,” went a highlight from “The Nights of Wine and Roses.” On “Wet Hair” he gave us the magnificent “Must get to France so we can French kiss some French girls.” There are no similar laugh lines on Near to the Wild Heart of Life, which relies heavily on cliches and platitudes minus the wink or the grin.
Take “Arc of Bar,” a seven-minute story song that is the centerpiece of the record and defiantly unlike anything else in the band’s catalog. But it doesn’t build to a hearty climax, a hallmark of the band. It just lumbers around, as King places hoary cliché on top of hoary cliché about “hustlers, whores” and “the jokers doing the dealing” and “a mistress, to some a muse…for her love, I would help the devil.” For a band that lives by its ability to slam-dunk a moment of catharsis, this song is the ultimate heat-check.
The spruced up modern-rock sound of a song like “True Love and a Free Life of Free Will” has the hollow appeal of “real” rock and roll bands like Foo Fighters or the Black Keys. (King sounds awfully like Dave Grohl on “Midnight to Morning.”) The band that playfully riffed on Thin Lizzy or sustained one riff for five minutes while proclaiming “after her/I quit girls,” now sounds like MOR. It’s a testament to King’s inherent likability and the band’s still-effortless knack for memorable melodies that this album isn’t as big a disappointment as it may seem. They still have the discipline to keep things at eight songs only, and they can still reel off a sparkler like “No Known Drink or Drug,” an incandescent song that flares with the ending “…could ever hold a candle to your love.”
King and Prowse have sustained critical and fan love for eight years now. Both seem to be comfortable in their roles as rock veterans, with a loyal fanbase, a label that allows them years between records. Who am I to begrudge artists who’ve matured? Perhaps it’s age, experience, a new record label, the inevitable artistic instinct to want to switch things up a little, but whatever the reason, Near to the Wild Heart of Life ultimately lacks the urgency of the band’s best music. The tower hasn’t collapsed, but it’s starting to wobble.