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 Buffy Sainte-Marie’s cosmic, groundbreaking 1969 album, an ecstatic invocation of pain, pleasure, and divinity.\

Illuminations

In 1977, on an episode of Sesame Street, Buffy Sainte-Marie became the first person to breastfeed on national broadcast television (“Lots of mothers feed their babies this way,” she explained to a very curious Big Bird.) She was the first person to record a song by a then-unknown songwriter named Joni Mitchell (“The Circle Game,” on Sainte-Marie’s 1967 album Fire & Fleet & Candlelight, released almost a year before Mitchell’s own debut). When she decided she’d rather record her 1992 album Coincidence and Likely Stories at home in serene Hawaii than travel to her producer’s studio in chaotic London, Sainte-Marie became the first person ever to make an album by sending files across what was then still being earnestly called “the World Wide Web.”
Being one of the mainstream’s most visible indigenous entertainers in the 1960s and beyond, Buffy Sainte-Marie was the first Native woman to do quite a few things, among them win a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. She is presumably the only person to have written songs that have been covered by the unholy trinity of Elvis, Morrissey, and Courtney Love. And in 1969, when she unleashed her astounding, trailblazing sixth LP Illuminations, she became the first musician not only to release an album with vocals processed through a Buchla 100 synthesizer (the very same unit that the electronic music legend Morton Subotnik had used to compose his landmark 1967 album Silver Apples of the Moon), but the first person ever to make an album recorded using quadraphonic technology, an early precursor to surround-sound.
Here is a brief pause, to let your brain try to catch up with Buffy Sainte-Marie.
And yet, Sainte-Marie has always been suspicious of “firsts”—something about the word itself connotes a narrow-sighted narrative of conquest. She still dismisses hierarchies and what she derisively calls “pecking orders” as rigidly Euro-centric, reeking of colonial absurdity and woefully lacking in imagination. Over and over, she has learned that being ahead of one’s time can be a liability when one does not look the way a vanguard is “supposed to,” which is usually like a white man. “I was real early with electronics, and I just got used to this typical music-biz resistance,” she recalls in Andrea Warner’s 2018 book Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography. “Most of these boys—whether musicians or record company guys—did not want to seem old-fashioned or out of the loop. They didn’t want somebody else—a girl like me—to be ahead of them.”
But she was. Illuminations is a potent artifact from those early days when the synthesizer conjured audible awe and limitless possibility. (Even Giorgio Moroder’s first Moog-driven hit, “Son of My Father,” was not released until 1972.) Illuminations would have been a tough sell in 1969 regardless, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that Sainte-Marie learned another factor in its commercial failure: Because of her activism with the recently formed American Indian Movement (AIM) and her outspoken Vietnam-era pacifism, the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations had both led campaigns to blacklist her music from American radio stations and record stores. “Buffy thought that the decline of her record sales was just part of legitimate changes in American public taste,” her biographer Blair Stonechild wrote in 2012’s Buffy Sainte-Marie: It’s My Way. But years after the release of Illuminations, when an American radio DJ was interviewing Sainte-Marie, he shocked her by apologizing for abiding by a government mandate to stop spinning her tunes. She recalled, “He had a letter on White House stationery commending him for suppressing this music, which deserved to be suppressed.”
As the years went by, Illuminations developed something of a cult following; in 1998, the experimental music magazine The Wire put it on a list of “100 Records That Set the World on Fire When Nobody Was Listening.” (“If Dylan going electric in 1965 would have turned folk purists into baying hyenas,” they wrote, “Buffy Sainte-Marie going electronic would have turned them into kill-hungry wolves.”) But, like Sainte-Marie herself, the bewitching, utterly transporting Illuminations has still not gotten a fraction of its due. It is a record overripe for reevaluation—for reasons not limited to but certainly including pissing off the ghost of Richard Nixon.
From the Greenwich Village coffeehouses of the early 1960s up through her Polaris Prize-winning 2015 album Power in the Blood, Sainte-Marie has always moved through the world as though she can peer into a fourth dimension. In the 1960s, she drew equal inspiration from some of the world’s oldest instruments—one of her signature tools was the mouth bow, made from the bark of a chokecherry tree—and some of the most cutting-edge recording technology. Her early version of that Joni Mitchell song was a fitting personal anthem: Where others see straight lines, Buffy has always seen circles; connections instead of divisions. At the end of her book, Warner recalls a telling suggestion Sainte-Marie had made on an early draft of her manuscript: She’d crossed out the phrase “tearing down” and written in its place “creating—in spite of and beyond.”
In the early years of her life, Sainte-Marie experienced much to work in spite of, much to travel beyond. She was born on a Cree reservation in Saskatchewan, though she’s not sure when, or under what circumstances she ended up in an adoption agency. She knows, at least, that she was born sometime in the early 1940s, and that the traumatic practice of ripping indigenous babies from their homes would continue to be common practice in Canada for decades; the phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the “Sixties Scoop.” She was adopted by a white family in Wakefield, Massachusetts and given the name Beverley Sainte-Marie.
Buffy had a creative and encouraging mother, but through the Sainte-Marie family she also came in contact with several male relatives, including her adoptive brother, who inflicted upon her years of sexual and emotional abuse. Her internal life became a place of refuge. “I wasn’t only some traumatized, scared little kid hiding under the bed—which I was—but I was also this other person who had an inner world that was really, really good,” she told Warner. She recalled her daily after-school routine, during the long Massachusetts winters: “I’d drop my books at home, grab my skates, go down the hill to the lake, and skate until dark, Tchaikovsky in my head… as well as Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee, LaVern Baker, and Chuck Berry. I don’t know if anybody else was skating to ‘Maybelline’ in their heads, but I was.”
Soon enough her own songs began to flood her head; “inner media,” she called them. She taught herself how to translate the melodies onto the piano; she twirled knobs and invented wild tunings on her guitar. She “[sang] her guts out,” like her cross-cultural heroines Édith Piaf and the flamenco artist Carmen Amaya, skeptics be damned (“If I’d been a flamenco performer or a chanteuse in Paris, maybe everybody would have understood. But it was quite unusual to sing with that kind of passion in the USA.”) She didn’t feel bold enough to play her compositions for other people until she went away to college, but at UMass Amherst in the early 1960s, she found a like-minded crew of young folkies. The future blues musician Taj Mahal liked to jam with her in the echoing stairwells, where they could play as loudly as they wanted, reveling in natural reverb.
Her first album in 1964, It’s My Way!, remains one of the most revelatory debut albums of the 1960s, a decade with no shortage of them. It’s stark, clarion: Just a banshee voice and brutally strummed guitar emerging from some dark ether. Her sturdily crafted songs told tales of injustices that were years away from mainstream attention: The escalating conflict in Vietnam (“Universal Soldier”), the agony of opiate addiction (“Cod’ine”), the native lands and populations that were being displaced by corporate greed (“Now That the Buffalo’s Gone”). Her arrangements were relatively traditional, but in her subject matter, Buffy already seemed to possess a glowing portal into the future. The liner notes called her “an Indian Cassandra.”
For much of the 1960s, she was indiscriminately lumped in with the luminaries of the folk scene—Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Bob Dylan—but even within the burgeoning counterculture, Sainte-Marie still felt like an outsider. Always had: Back in college she turned down every opportunity to join a sorority, and in Wakefield, she somehow “flunked” Girl Scouts. As a recording artist, though, the creatively restless Sainte-Marie was cutting her own way—through the mystical devotions of 1966’s Little Wheel, Spin and Spin to the playful country-western drag of 1968’s I’m Gonna Be A Country Girl Again. But by 1969, her “inner media” was crying out for stranger manifestations.
In the late 1960s, what would eventually come to be known as “electronic music” was still, to most casual music listeners, a vaguely threatening abstraction. “The anxiety around automation became attached to the synthesizer in the mid-20th century,” Roshanak Kheshti writes in her recent 33 1/3 book on Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach, an album that was enjoying unexpected chart success the same year that Buffy Sainte-Marie released Illuminations. “The Twilight Zone of a post-nuclear world seemed to be descending in the form of the synthesizer, an electrical instrument with the power to shift shape.” The old guard didn’t trust this impersonal, space-age version of the electricity in Elvis’ hips.
Switched-On Bach was comprised of 12 well-known Bach pieces performed by Carlos on a Moog synthesizer—a playful yet meticulously executed meeting of past and future. The familiar respectability of Bach offered a plush welcome mat for those curious about this “Twilight Zone”-esque new instrument, and Switched-On Bach became a surprise hit, garnering three Grammys and breaking into the Top 10 on the Billboard album chart. As with any sudden commercial success, novelty copycats soon followed: Switched-On Rock; Switched on Nashville; Moog Plays the Beatles. Because it had the familiar feature of a black-and-white keyboard, the Moog was the most popular and musician-friendly of the early synthesizers. The Buchla, which would become Sainte-Marie’s instrument, was another beast entirely.
“It wasn’t even as though there was an electric keyboard, it was too early,” she recalled. “We just called it a matrix, a bunch of possibilities you could connect in various ways to modify sound waves.” Subotnik and Don Buchla, who developed the Buchla 100 together in the mid-1960s, were less interested in futurizing recognizable instruments like the piano than they were giving people a blank slate to create new forms. “My basic thought was to be creative with this new instrument,” Subotnik said in a 2017 interview, “to show people how, without black and white keyboards, you could create a new kind of music.” Sainte-Marie—an artist who’d always seen beyond simple binaries—was enamored of this strange new machine.
The Buchla announces its stirring presence in the opening seconds of Illuminations: Sainte-Marie’s voice is patched through and manipulated in such a way that it sounds like a reflection rippling in water. “God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot” takes all its lyrics from Leonard Cohen’s hallucinatory 1966 novel Beautiful Losers, and it unfurls like an increasingly impassioned rebuttal to Nietzsche’s most notorious claim. “Magic is alive,” Sainte-Marie sings with trembling resolve. “Though his death was pardoned, round and round the world, the heart would not believe.” It is a timeless parable of resilience and the necessity of wonder, placed within a modern frame: It’s easy to hear the connection between “magic” and the otherworldly electronic sounds itching at the foundation of this song.
For an ostensibly forward-marching record, there’s quite a bit of ancient Biblical imagery on Illuminations: Song titles include “Adam,” “Mary,” and “Suffer the Little Children.” (The Smiths would, of course, write their own track bearing a similar title 15 years later, and Morrissey also covered a song from Illuminations on his most recent album, 2019’s California Son.) But this is one of those records that collapses the distance between seeming opposites. The mesmerizing aurora borealis of “The Vampire” and the shooting stars that streak across the coda of psych-rocker “Better to Find Out For Yourself” both depict the cosmos as something enduring and eternal, rather than just a lazy space-age motif. Where were the Magi looking for the Star of Bethlehem, if not on the astral plane? Again, Sainte-Marie is attuned to the interconnectedness of all things: Though they toggle from the Old Testament to New Weird America, the stellar sounds of Illuminations suggest that all these songs take place beneath the same sky.
The pain depicted on this record, though, coexists peacefully with Sainte-Marie’s open-hearted pursuit of pleasure. Illuminations contains a few of the most assertively sensual songs she’s ever recorded, like the rollicking “With You, Honey” (“It’s about your potty mouth, and the way you stand”) and the blazing groove “He’s a Keeper of the Fire,” which ends with Sainte-Marie so overcome that she begins howling at the moon. Her music always has a fierce independent streak—her debut album, after all, was called It’s My Way!—but within it there is also the ever-present possibility of surrendering to love, to tenderness, or maybe just to fleeting satisfaction.
Though it’s rare to find a Buffy Sainte-Marie song on which she’s not singing with wild abandon, Illuminations features some of the most moving vocal performances in her entire catalog. “The Dream Tree”—one of the few songs that does not seem to feature any sounds processed through the Buchla—is a kind of domestic sequel to “Universal Soldier,” an emotionally vivid portrait of wives left lonely and widowed by war. Beneath it all, a nervously finger-picked arpeggio moves like anxious hands knitting to keep themselves busy. The track on Illuminations that most frequently moves me to tears, though, is “The Angel.” The song is, quite literally, an ascension, with Sainte-Marie’s gravity-defying voice mimicking a soul’s heavenward release from its body. “Give up your treasured wounds, let go the temping memory of the pain,” she sings. “And you will live, and you will learn to fly again.”
Like many albums lightyears ahead of their time, Illuminations was a commercial disaster when it was first released. “People were more in love with the Pocahontas-with-a-guitar image,” she once said when asked why she thought Illuminations failed to find a contemporary audience. She’d later learn about the American blacklist, the government suppression, and the reason why she continued to be better-known in other countries started to make sense. “They only have to hold you under water for about four minutes and you’re dead for a long time, when it comes to radio airplay,” she has said. “Things changed. But they didn’t change internally for me. I continued to record better and better songs, production-wise, I think. You just didn’t hear them in the States.”
The ability to harness new technology, of course, is a mighty power. That Buffy Sainte-Marie was using synthesizers and quadraphonic sound to upend conventional narratives about North American colonialism only made her more terrifying to the status quo. Perhaps that is why she has continued to make her life’s work bringing computers and digital technology to indigenous communities, as she has done with her Cradleboard Teaching Project or her 1999 manifesto “Cyberskins.” Emerging technology, she writes, can “counterbalance past misinterpretations with positive realities, and past exploitations with future opportunities. The reality of the situation is that [indigenous people] are not all dead and stuffed in some museum with the dinosaurs: we are here in this digital age.”
Fifty years ago, Illuminations was a declaration of that same life-affirming truth, and so it remains. It’s a portal to another world, as full of possibilities and alternative realities as that telephone-switchboard-like matrix into which Sainte-Marie plugged cord after cord. Lay down your cool cynicism, your rationality, your linear Western thinking, Illuminations instructs, before leaning close to whisper its secret: “Magic is alive.”


The composer, singer and keyboardist Julia Holter's latest album, Have You In My Wilderness, is her sunniest and most accessible. The music has shifted, gaining warmth and weight while remaining essentially mysterious. Instead of unpacking weighty overarching concepts, Holter is telling stories, brief and foggy ones that are often plagued by ambiguities.

Have You In My Wilderness

The composer, keyboardist and singer Julia Holter has pursued her strange, dreamlike visions across three albums of experimental pop, all released in the last three years. In that time, she's also worked with electro-pop act Nite Jewel and psych-folk cult favorite Linda Perhacs, and in all of this activity, you hear her restlessly pinpointing and subsuming new, piquant sounds. Those sounds range widely, from French impressionist classical music and 17th-century madrigals to Talk Talk's jazz-infused post-rock, from the avant music-drama of Robert Ashley and Meredith Monk, to the pop songwriting that evolved in the hills of her Los Angeles hometown in the 1970s. But though these names remain on the tip of your tongue as you listen to her music, none of them describe Holter; they are only points on a broader and more inscrutable map.
Her latest album, Have You In My Wilderness, is by some measure her sunniest and most accessible. There is no overarching concept uniting the music, no references to Euripides or '50s MGM musicals. As Holter told Stereogum, she "[made] up stories for every song" for Have You, but this being Holter, our glimpses of each "story" are brief and foggy, and the vignettes themselves are often plagued by ambiguities ("I hear small words from the shore/No recognized pattern")  and moments of overpowering grief or wonder. More questions are asked than answers given in her often-unrhymed prose poems, and statements fold into themselves dizzyingly: "Figures pass so quickly that I realize my eyes know very well/It's impossible to see who I'm waiting for in my raincoat" ("Feel You"). Like a good student of the art music world, Holter clearly hopes that listeners will nurse their own impressions.
The music has also shifted, gaining warmth and weight while remaining enigmatic. Lo**ud City Song was a mess of stylistic dissonances working in the service of one discrete story (borrowing mostly from the 1958 film for the musical Gigi), but Have You… is tied together by music so airy it feels in danger of floating right past you. Despite the heavy cloak of reverb,  the record has the clear sound of a small rock band playing the studio, highlighting the inventive but uninvasive upright bass and percussion of Devin Hoff, Corey Fogel and Kenny Gilmore. The haze is also dialed back on Holter’s vocals, making them crystal clear at crucial moments.
Despite the breezy, poppy feeling of  the singles "Feel You" and "Sea Calls Me Home", the choruses are not as immediate as those on the earworm-heavy Ekstasis or Loud City Song. But in looser, through-composed songs like the sensual torch ballad "Night Song" and jazz-fusion-inflected "Vasquez," Holter find other, deeper ways to hold our attention. In "Betsy on the Roof" –  an inspired reworking of a song Holter previously recorded on 2010’s Live Recordings – she drifts in and out of muted speaksong, sliding from pealing, Newsom-like tones into throaty speech. The chorus ("’Uh oh,’ she said/What of this cloud?"), though, is belted and raw-sounding, and in the wordless coda her gossamer crooning recalls either Christine McVie or Judy Collins.
But what ultimately makes Have You in My Wilderness transcendent – and unique in Holter’s catalogue – is its intimacy. The atmosphere is often light-hearted or even parodic: In the  giddy ‘70s singer/songwriter melismas of "Sea Calls Me Home," the husky, Marlene Dietrich-like delivery of "How Long?" or the jokey, clap-trap country shuffle of "Everytime Boots," you hear Holter trying on sounds like costumes, sometimes for only a bar or two. Ironically, the more she shapeshifts, the more we seem to get to know her. For an artist who could sometimes seem forbidding or remote, Have You In My Wilderness feels humane,  and with each new release, it seems like a bit more of the personal is teased out of Holter's stately, high-concept approach. Have You In My Wilderness embraces the specific, rather than the eternal, and in her narrowed focus you can sense a palpable self-confidence and a hard-won precision.


The musician and activist’s new album speaks truth to streaming giants, trans exclusionists, and extremely online leftists, but hits its stride at its sweetest and most nostalgic.

Spotify Is Surveillance

Evan Greer’s latest album is a cry against the past year’s numbness. Recorded at the artist’s home in Boston not long after lockdowns began funneling more and more of life into flattening digital channels, Spotify Is Surveillance looks simultaneously to the past and future for motivation and reassurance—anywhere but the deadening now. Greer’s folk-punk songs oscillate between the nostalgic and the propulsive, between grasping at the charge of teenage emotions and envisioning a livable future outside the grip of platform capitalism.
Greer is a digital rights activist as well as a musician, and the title of her new record refers, in part, to a patent Spotify recently secured for technology that would allow it to make music recommendations based on algorithmic voice recognition that could detect attributes like gender, age, and mood. But the title is also a condemnation of how tech companies accumulate data on their users even when they’re not explicitly listening in. A platform like Spotify doesn’t need to hear your voice to surveil you; it starts logging your tastes the second you first hit “play.” Social networks like Twitter and Facebook follow similar logic: They’re only free because users pay for them in taste profiles built from “likes,” making ready targets for advertisers. That’s the bargain Greer rallies against on the song “Surveillance Capitalism,” where she laments the addictive nature of digital connection while collaging together sound bites from radical thinkers like Ursula K. Le Guin (reading her famous “divine right of kings” quote) and Malkia Cyril.
Greer is rightly suspicious of how social media can play host to shallow, showy activism. On the rancorous “Emma Goldman Would Have Beat Your Ass,” she rails against overly online leftists and Cuomosexual liberals alike, putting out an open call for physical bravery over digital posturing. She also takes note of how easily false narratives and bad information can become ammunition in political battles. “The Tyranny of Either/Or,” with its pearly guitar lines and spurring backbeat, touches on the intensifying fight against trans people’s physical and social autonomy, gesturing toward the frame trans-exclusionists typically adopt in their rhetoric. In a weary voice, Greer addresses the enemy directly: “You play the victim/Our existence is a threat/But we are not the ones who declared war.”
More richly layered and crisply produced than Greer’s prior album, 2019’s she/her/they/them, Spotify Is Surveillance hits its stride in its sweeter notes, the songs that prompt longing for physical touch and the now-alien magic of sharing rooms with throngs of other bodies. On “Back Row,” against slow rolls of distortion, she calls on memories of DIY shows, asking gingerly, “Do you remember when/Basements felt like stadiums?” Over a waltzing 3/4 beat, the airy “Willing to Wait” describes a romance on hold during the pandemic, now that physical touch has become a rare and precious commodity. It’s in these melancholy sketches of longing and loss that Greer’s voice assumes its full warmth. As much as she’s practiced in the art of the protest song, the enraged gallop towards the better world, Greer’s knack for storytelling shines most vividly when she’s ruminating on what’s been deferred, forgotten, or lost.
Reckoning with injustice doesn’t only drum up anger. Fear, exhaustion, and sorrow also shade the striving. In her protest songs and her love songs, and in the way they mingle together in the same current, Greer captures the full spectrum of her optimism. It's not just a feeling she sustains in moments of agitation or victory. It’s with her in the lulls, too, the days that feel hollow or wasted, when the present seems unendurable: that pinprick aperture onto the days that are still to come.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Reworking a trove of cassettes filled with decades-old songs from Kabul, the Arizona native explores his Afghan heritage by collaging traditional melodies, entrancing loops, and psychedelic noise.

Naujawanan Baidar

N.R. Safi has never visited Afghanistan, but that country is part of his heritage—his father is of Afghan descent—and for a long time, its music has played in his head. A few years after founding Tucson, Arizona, psych band Myrrors (in which he’s known as Nik Rayne), Safi inherited a trove of his paternal grandfather’s tapes, filled with decades-old songs from Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. This spurred him to ramp up the solo project he calls Naujawanan Baidar, using his cassettes as both source material and inspiration to create new sounds.
The first two Naujawanan Baidar tapes, now compiled together as a double LP, mix traditional Afghan melodies, entrancing loops, outward-bound psychedelic jaunts, and enigmatic noise. Playing non-Western instruments such as the Afghan rubab, Indian tabla, and Persian sorna, Safi recorded directly to cassette, dubbing sounds back and forth through effects that he says “added [a] layer of barely-controlled chaos.” Recording in the American Southwest, he later edited the material in Eindhoven, Netherlands, where he currently lives. The results do indeed evoke a dusty tape unearthed in a market stall in some far-off land, but they also bear an otherworldly aura beyond any specific time or place.
Safi achieves that aura by emphasizing melody and texture in equal measure. Nearly all 15 tracks on Naujawanan Baidar involve simple hooks and rhythms from which Safi rarely wavers. But those elements aren’t just left to toil away on their own. Dense webs of crunchy distortion, brazen in-the-red mixing, and tape decay all wrap each tune in an alluring cloud of smoke. This hypnotic effect is mirrored in Safi’s repetitive song structures, which are so insistent it feels like they’re cutting new grooves into your brain as they play.
Within these loops, Safi generates lots of sonic variety. On “Khyber Sound,” a low rumble and a handclap beat ride under Safi’s fiery yelps. “Mojaherin” follows with a swaying rhythm somewhere between a march and a dance, sounding dubbed from a late-night broadcast of an old epic movie. In places, Safi’s repetitions turn abstract: The hammering “Symmetry of Knives” is seven minutes of metronomic crash and burn, while during the nuclear meltdown of closer “Panj Ruz Pesh,” it’s hard to discern Rafi’s source sounds among all the wreckage. Such hermetic sonics can induce claustrophobia, but they’re also exhilarating, a synthesis of old and new that forms its own kaleidoscopic ecosystem.
At times, Naujawanan Baidar feels like a random spin of an Afghan FM dial (it even opens with a static-filled “Radio Introduction”), not unlike some of the early compilations on Sublime Frequencies, taped straight from the receiver. Yet Safi’s work is bigger than a documentary field recording. He certainly respects the artists he’s building on—he cites Ahmad Zahir, Salma Jahani, and Beltoon and Hamidullah, among others—but his reimagining of this vital slice of Afghanistan’s musical legacy is as much about moving forward as looking back. The name Naujawanan Baidar means “enlightened youth” in Farsi; as he put it recently, “there is a big opportunity today for the children of the diaspora to look to their roots and bring some fresh new ideas to the table.” On Naujawanan Baidar, Safi advances that cause with intoxicating zeal.


The fearless Chicago rapper offers her best album yet, with terrific production and a barrage of raps that reveal Elizabeth Harris to be far more than her hilarious and absurdly raunchy one-liners.

Ephorize

Elizabeth Harris, better known as the outrageously sexual rapper CupcakKe, had not even been born yet when Lil’ Kim released her super-raunchy debut album Hard Core in 1996. Although there is a long-standing precedent for women rapping freely about sexual desire, it is still, for some reason, noteworthy when a woman expresses those needs. For CupcakKe, perhaps, it is because she is strapped with an anything-goes attitude toward the body and how she presents her own, whether it’s rubbing glazed donuts all over herself in a music video or the unhinged carnality of her lyrics and tweets. Last year she resolved to “suck 2017 dicks in 2017” and a Twitter search finds a cabal of fans, who she calls “slurpers,” curious about her progress.
While she may have a stunning ease dishing out absurdist one-liners about affectionately brushing someone’s pubic hair, it’s clear that she wants to be known for much more than just “sex and killing,” which she laments on her new album Ephorize. On the new record, she tackles self-esteem, LGBTQ issues, and the desire for genuine romance, while peppering her tracks with some of the funniest, absurdist one-liners to appear on a record since the heyday of Ghostface.
Most of the album’s production is handled by the relatively unknown Def Starz, who gives CupcakKe a varied beat palette that flirts with New Orleans bounce (standout “Duck Duck Goose”) and embraces the muted dembow pop varietal known as tropical house (“Total”); she raps over “Mask Off”-like synth flute lines on “Navel,” reggaeton percussion on “Crayons,” and carries on Chicago’s drill tradition with added gloss on “Wisdom Teeth” and “Meet and Greet.” There is no doubt that CupcakKe has incredible flexibility with beats. She doesn’t work within the same molasses-mouthed, lyrically repetitive confines of her contemporaries, endeavoring to play with her delivery and often even eschewing hooks. But her style and performance abilities are superlative when she is delivering the wackiest of sex raps.
Stop anywhere on the aforementioned “Duck Duck Goose” and you’ll strike pervert gold like, “My cakes got fatter by using cum as the batter,” or, “Coochie guaranteed to put you to sleep so damn soon/Riding on that dick I’m reading Goodnight Moon.” A description of her creative process she offered to Vice last year shines a light on why this is where she excels: “Right now I have on maroon. I think of the color red, and I just think of like, period blood. So I’ll say, ‘I made this outfit out of period blood.’”
That kind of one-step-beyond free association—and the lack of self-consciousness it takes to put it out there—is what makes CupcakKe so likable. Her lyrical tricks are unexpected and endlessly quotable (though maybe only in a private group text). On lead single “Cartoons,” she finds a way to flip children’s icons into totems for not taking shit (“If I see carats like Bugs Bunny/I’m Batman, robbin’ for the money… I’m a snack so I attract Scooby Doos/Give ’em Smurf dick, that’s balls blue”) and dedicates a whole hook to using cereal as slang for how her adversaries see her on “Cinnamon Toast Crunch.” She is still fine-tuning her mastery of metaphor and some of the more fun moments are sandwiched with some clunkiness, particularly when she is trying to get real. On uplifting opener “2 Minutes” she delivers dud similes like, “Life go up and down like a light switch” while on the effecting pro-LGBTQ anthem “Crayons,” she needs a little bit more intel on identity politics (see: referring to trans men and women as “transgenders”).
Though, writing a song in praise of the queer community is pretty much unfounded in the space outside of the underground where CupcakKe operates. It separates her from the rest of the pack, as does the distance she keeps from the sound many of her contemporaries employ. She has no dalliances with the Chief Keef-via-Soulja Boy slowed rap style dominating radio and SoundCloud, from Lil Pump to Lil Uzi Vert and beyond. Some of this has to do with how much women in rap have to create an almost fully-realized identity to stay afloat if they aren’t backed by an established male artist, but it’s also clear that CupcakKe is truly invested in the hyperbolic artistry of lyrics—she was a poet long before she sought to detail the myriad locations of where to put a dick.
Her brand is fearlessness, whether it’s being bold enough to fellate a hot dog in a music video or rapping what is actually in her heart, not in her bank account. She doesn’t talk about drinking or doing drugs on Ephorize, save a passing reference to other people smoking weed and a quick comparison of cum to rum. The world she’s building is unique, daring you to not to blush, trusting you to see her real life through it all. You can hear the potential across the album, especially on a track like “Self Interview.” She raps, “Back then we had lipgloss and some overalls, that’s the usual/Nowadays I gotta show skin and wear sew-ins to feel beautiful” to describe the external expectations put on women as they transition from childhood to adulthood. It is one of the many gauntlets she throws on the album to show that CupcakKe isn’t just an outsized character. She has a whole lot more to show us—there is just a whole slew of pussy jokes along the way.


On their latest full-length, Junior Boys find a middle ground between the tricky production of their early work and later 1980s-indebted opulence.

It's All True

Junior Boys started out making ridiculously complex music that had the intimate feel of a bedroom-based indie project. They'd mastered the intricate rhythmic syncopations of UK garage and Timbaland-style R&B, genres that had turned inventive and impossibly tricky rhythm programming into a game of pop oneupsmanship. Which is hardly the sort of thing that you'd want to hear an amateur's take on. But JBs' music was presented as if it were something fragile, homespun, made on a shoestring, full of negative space where the pop fizziness should be. It added an interesting, affecting friction to a sound that had defined glossy marquee pop around the turn of the millennium, like the difference between a love song written to please millions and one aimed at a special someone.
Pretty quickly, though, on 2006's So This Is Goodbye and especially 2009's Begone Dull Care, the JBs music started sounding like a million bucks, whatever it cost to make. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing. There had always been an element of slick soulful 1980s synth-pop in their sound, and when they jettisoned the new millennium R&B touches, it was shocking and enjoyable to find out they actually had the production chops to mimic that 1980s opulence. But what about that one-on-one intimacy that had originally made them stand out? In that sense, It's All True sounds like the album the Junior Boys have been moving toward their whole career. It's got the same low-key mixtape-from-a-lover charm as Last Exit, but sacrifices none of the appealing slickness of their last few albums.
Opener "Itchy Fingers" is actually a bit of bait-and-switch. It's the most deliriously dense tune on the album-- multiple basslines, stuttering R&B breakdowns, Art of Noise vocal stabs, zapping rave riffs, gleaming Japan/Duran-style guitar-- a master class in just how much you can squeeze into a track without its seeming cluttered. It recalls the carefully plotted textural overload of UK funky producers like Ill Blu, even if the feel is still more disco-house smooth than frantic Jamaican ragga. But "Itchy Fingers" is more or less an anomaly. It's All True mostly dials back the sonic excess in favor of more streamlined grooves. Thankfully, the album also corrects the lack-of-hooks problem that occasionally plagued Begone Dull Care. "Second Chance" is still stuffed with whirling video game noises, and some glorious creamy vocal multi-tracking, but what stands out on first listen is that naggingly catchy bassline. Plus Jeremy Greenspan gives us his best batch of choruses in quite a while, and good thing, too. While this is still headphone music par excellence, all those gleaming little sonic gewgaws and sneaky ear-worm off-beats are often pushed to the back of the mix, meaning the bright lounging-on-the-yacht electro hooks and Greenspan's voice both have to do a lot more work here.
Greenspan's singing is the best it's ever been on It's All True, proving the band's mixing desk skills aren't the only thing that's matured over the past eight years. Where he initially sounded wounded and winsome, almost hiding his voice behind the stark beats, here he displays a bouncy, strident sense of playfulness. Just check the ecstatic peak-after-peak outro on "Banana Ripple". There's also a new subtlety to his breathy just-out-of-bed tenderness that weirdly reminds me of Sam Prekop, no faint praise considering Prekop is the reigning master of this sort of thing. And speaking of subtle and tender, along with the large helpings of dancefloor joy, some of the album's most immediately arresting moments are its sparsest and most fragile. "The Reservoir" is an ultra-delicate experiment in seeing how far a rhythm can be stripped back-- something that would have fit perfectly on Last Exit, though it sounds far richer here, with Greenspan pulling off a falsetto he never would have been able to in the old days. Despite a few curveballs, like the pinpoint precise homage to Kraftwerk and the bleep techno Kraftwerk inspired on "Kick the Can", there's not much "new" here if you've been following the Junior Boys' sound over the last decade. But considering they seem to have perfected that sound here, it's hard not to feel like they should keep making albums like It's All True for a long, long time.


Damon Albarn and Africa Express organized this concert with 50 musicians from the Syrian National Orchestra. Featuring Julia Holter, Albarn, and others, it reaffirms that art at its best is a gesture of empathy.

The Orchestra of Syrian Musicians: Africa Express Presents... The Orchestra of Syrian Musicians & Guests

The Syrian Civil War started five years ago, following the violent response of Bashar al-Assad’s security forces to protests in the southern city of Deraa. Nationwide opposition demanded Assad’s resignation, which was met by swift and violent governmental retribution. In the years since, the violence has widened to an unimaginable scope: a multi-front conflict with numerous international and domestic players vying for control or stability of the region. In April, a UN envoy estimated that as many as 400,000 have been killed as a result of the conflict, and millions of Syrians (some estimates say 11 million) have been displaced from their homes, becoming the subject of a global refugee crisis.
In the election cycles of the past year, Syrian refugees have been used as a scapegoat by any number of demagogues to stoke fear in people that their communities and jobs will be threatened by a slow encroaching wave of “otherness.” Just two days after the British people chose to leave the European Union in a controversial referendum colloquially known as Brexit, in London at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, Damon Albarn and the music collective Africa Express organized a concert with 50 musicians from the Syrian National Orchestra. (Damon Albarn recorded with the Syrian National Orchestra for the Gorillaz’ 2010 album Plastic Beach, beginning a longstanding love affair with the region’s music.) Many of the musicians in this venerable troupe have been scattered across the globe, stranded behind miles of red tape.
The event almost didn’t happen. A week before the rehearsals for the concerts were supposed to begin, it wasn’t yet clear if the organizers were going to be able to get Schengen visas for the 50 Syrian musicians to secure flights. The Guardian mentions “dark rumors about desperate calls to British officials”; apparently Africa Express co-founder Ian Birrell chartered a Boeing 737 for the musicians.
But it did happen, and the concert is finally being offered as an album. During a year when multiculturalism and globalism enduring a severe, sustained battering, the Syrian National Orchestra help prove that beauty, and true sublimity in art can exist even in the most pernicious and divisive of atmospheres. For those who celebrate the heterogenous, open-armed, and loving embrace of a global music community, this two-hour-plus concert one June night in the Royal Festival Hall represents a kind of small victory, as well as an incredible night of music.
The musical canvas for the project is vast. There is a traditional string orchestra onstage, accompanied by players of Arabian instruments like the ney (a kind of flute), string instruments like the qanun, zither, oud, and kora. In front of this assemblage are performers like Damon Albarn, Julia Holter, Paul Wells, and more. One of the first things you notice, listening, is the gobsmacking virtuosity of the players involved. In the thirteen minute track “Al Dahleh,” stand outs like ney player Moslem Rahal and Feras Charestan on the Arabian lap harp display stunning technical prowess.  The performance is met with multiple ovations, and as an exercise in technical genius it is astounding. This group of players hadn't seen each other in years, and they cohere seamlessly.
Elsewhere, Julia Holter’s “Feel You” (a track from her resonant 2015 LP Have You in My Wilderness) is transformed by the presence of the Syrian orchestra. Here, it is more than just a piece of lush orchestral pop; it is a cross-cultural paean, proving collaborators who don’t share the same worldly experience can radically transform a piece of art, often for the better. Damon Albarn told The Guardian when organizing this event he said he was disappointed by the rhetoric surrounding the crisis as a “homogenous shadow” to be feared. What he wanted to do with this event is to show an audience the “experience to humanity” that these refugees can express in their art. Some of these musicians still live in Syria, dodging danger so they can continue to practice. Defying all bureaucracy, borders, and strife, this concert and this orchestra proves that art at its very best is a grand gesture of empathy above all.


The drowsy Atlanta rapper polishes his style and submits some of his best songs, but the same thing that makes Gunna dependable also makes him predictable.

Drip or Drown 2

After breaking through a year ago with Drip Season 3, Gunna has quickly become a certified rap star, peaking with an album alongside fellow rising local and like-minded droner Lil Baby called Drip Harder. Following a somewhat limited start, he eventually broke new ground with a near-perfect trifecta: a show-stealing spot on Travis Scott’s Astroworld (“Yosemite”), the Lil Baby tag-teamer “Drip Too Hard,” and the Metro Boomin-produced aerodynamic study “Space Cadet,” all songs that advanced his writing, his execution, or his range. Drip or Drown 2 does not further the strides taken on those songs but retreats back toward the center of his sound. And yet it is still the best Gunna solo effort to date, owed primarily to his pronounced understanding of what the average Gunna song does well and how exactly to replicate those same effects.
Gunna is what an inhibited Young Thug might sound like. A protege of the eccentric 300 rapper signed to his YSL imprint and deeply indebted to him stylistically, Gunna raps like his mentor is very tired. There’s a monotonic quality to his performances, in tune and intensity, even as his flows twist and turn. If Thug’s method is astral projection, one impulsive out-of-body experience after another, Gunna’s is closer to lucid dreaming. His sequences seem to have no beginnings or ends, no entry points, with hooks segueing into verses and vice versa, a string of perpetual non sequiturs (“I lied at the precinct/I didn’t sign a 360”) that can range from the completely random (buying pants for Young Thug in Japan that cost more than he made at his show) to the personal (riding in a plushed-out Benz feeling like the world was in his hands). He never seems to punch in. He is amid an endless transition.
Their complementary styles overlap on “3 Headed Snake,” where the pair is constantly switching places over Wheezy production, with Gunna naturally following Thug’s lead. But there are moments when Thug pops out of the mix—“Jeepers creepers, the gators got measles, shit!/I fucked up the bank, bought a rose gold shank,” he yowls at one point—demonstrating a very obvious distance between them. The same predisposition that makes Gunna dependable makes him predictable, and it is holding him back.
Gunna has a very clear and obvious wheelhouse he’s reluctant to stray from, perhaps because it has led him directly to a Top 5 first sales week and a platinum single. In lieu of outward travel, then, he has opted to go deeper. These cuts take standard Gunna formats and reinforce them, reimagining several of his best songs in the process. “Richard Millie Plain” nearly transposes “Sold Out Dates,” but these flows lurch forth. “On a Mountain” flips “Oh Okay,” his whack-a-mole routine with Thug and Baby, and stretches out the melodies. Across the entire album, he is polishing his well-established Gunna maneuvers.
His bars vary from the goofy (“She made me bust a nut, that’s a starburst”) to the confusingly profound (“Time is poured on me when I ride that Maybach”), but it’s his ability to apply his signature inflection to just about any rhythm he conjures up that can make Drip or Drown 2 nearly hypnotizing. Be it the closed-loop chants of “Wit It” and “Same Yung Nigga” or the clipped chirps of “Speed It Up,” Gunna has an uncanny feel for settling his mellowed croons into the thick of any beat; here produced primarily by Wheezy and Turbo, that means bending in and out of shape with washed-out guitar riffs (“Yao Ming”), flickering synths (“Derrick Fisher”), and guzheng plucks (“Who You Foolin”). Occasionally, things all come together for Gunna, when the tune-fueled run-on sentences generate sudden, seeming out-of-the-ether observations that flatter him, as on “IDK Why”: “I don’t work for free/The salesmen that know me in Barney’s say I smell like Biscotti mixed with Creed,” he raps, slipping in an arbitrary but memorable detail that shows some personality. There are just enough of these moments on Drip or Drown 2 to distract from the fact Gunna has yet to take a real, meaningful risk.


The collaborative audio-visual project layers Maxwell Sterling’s double bass and Martha Skye Murphy’s limber soprano with a variety of subtle tones and textures that lure the mind to journey where the body cannot.

Martha Skye Murphy / Maxwell Sterling: Distance on Ground

Distance on Ground

When Brian Eno recorded Ambient 1: Music for Airports in the late 1970s, he was intent on reshaping our experience with flying. Eno was put off by the stock muzak piped through most major airports at the time, and he felt that its upbeat nature was intrinsically deceitful. Saccharine elevator tunes screamed “you’re not going to die! There’s not going to be an accident!” as Eno put it years ago. With Music for Airports, the composer offered an alternative reality: “If you die, it doesn’t really matter.” The project was never about denying death, but accepting it as a possibility while strapped inside of a jet at 30,000 feet. The work itself, spare and luminous, kindles a meditative state. Safe in our soothed minds, fears of engine failure and spontaneous combustion would be, hopefully, quelled.
In the past two years, our relationship with traveling has changed significantly. The fears Eno addressed in Music for Airports still exist, but they are buried in a heap of other concerns. “If I fly, will I get sick? If I leave the country, will I get stuck abroad? Will I ever travel again?” In their new ambient audiovisual project Distance on Ground, Martha Skye Murphy and Maxwell Sterling approach travel from a place of longing. The 20-minute record is split into two pieces, “86 km” and “93.3 km,” both of which echo the momentum of forward motion. The wordless compositions grew from improvised sessions between Murphy and Sterling, who collaged the results together after recording stints at London’s Super Symmetry Studios. The album layers Sterling’s double bass and Murphy’s limber soprano with a variety of subtle tones and textures that lure the mind to journey where the body cannot.
The songs comprising Distance on Ground are inherently transportative; “86 km” floats along a calming drone, brightened by Murphy’s glowing, circular chants. Incessant chirps sound like squeaky shopping cart wheels or a flock of seagulls, both of which suggest a sense of motion and destination, no matter how insignificant. At one point, you can hear something, perhaps a piece of luggage, being snapped and zipped shut. It feels like a distinct marker between voyages. If “86 km” is an introspective morning drive, “93.3 km” is a late-night stalk through the bad part of town. Sterling’s bowed bass lets out long belches that combat a storm of shrill frequencies. But midway through, the creeping low end falls away and the song is washed with gliding, legato synthesizer. The braiding of Murphy’s processed voice over plasticky, plucked strings restore a sense of calm and even revelation—like when the instruction to “walk it off” actually improves your mood.
By its very nature, Distance on Ground invites you to experience this music in different settings. The album is accompanied by an interactive website where visitors “can voyage in real time to and with the music in their chosen environment,” as stated on its main page. Listeners are encouraged to play the album and toggle between “rural” and “urban” landscapes, i.e. video footage shot on foot, from car windows, and airplanes. One loop depicts a drive through the muddy countryside, where several boats are marooned on wet grass like toys scattered on an unkempt floor. Another takes the POV of a hiker passing people on a dry California trail. If you score this footage with “86 km,” the effect is contemplative. Set to the tone of “93.3 km,” the placid woodlands seems ripe for a murder plot—and every passing hiker is a suspect.
What’s most interesting about these images is that despite which song is playing, visual perspective is the most potent variable. Video shot from the driver’s seat of a car is overly active and frantic. It asks you to navigate city traffic, to find a parking spot. But the view of a jeweled cityscape or a quilt of grasslands shot from cruising altitude offers remove, calm. You know that you’re in motion, but the miles feel incalculable.

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Recorded in the Tuareg guitarist’s home country over the past five years, these live and alternate takes offer the chance to hear his music in the cultural context in which he forged it.

Mdou Moctar: Niger EP Vol. 1 / Niger EP Vol. 2

Niger EP Vol. 1 / Niger EP Vol. 2

Mdou Moctar’s Niger EP Vol. 1 begins, somewhat incongruously, with the star Tuareg guitarist shredding along to a single tinny drum-machine loop for 13 minutes straight. Moctar is one of the world’s most exciting players, and his improvising on “Imouhar (Drum Machine Version)” is mostly spectacular, diving and pirouetting through a low-slung groove so similar to Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” that you practically expect him to start singing about chopping down mountains with the edge of his hand. Still, 13 minutes is a long time for any soloist to sustain musical interest on their own, especially when the accompaniment has all the rhythmic spark of a karaoke backing track. At times, Moctar seems to be coasting, or casting about for his next move, which he probably is, given that this sounds more like a rehearsal tape than a recording intended for wide release.
As an opening gambit—and followed by another seven minutes of drum-machine jamming on the second track—it gives the false sense that the EP and its companion volume are the sort of releases that will only appeal to the already converted, for whom even the artist’s stray thoughts are worthy of deep investigation. That’s unfortunate, because the two Niger EPs, filled with live and alternate versions of songs from across Moctar’s catalog, recorded in his home country at various dates between 2017 and the present, are otherwise joyous, communal, and inviting, with much more to offer than solitary noodling.
Before touring the world and eventually signing to Matador, Moctar made his living performing at weddings, like many other Tuareg guitarists. Many of the tracks on the EPs were recorded at such celebrations, and the atmosphere of the party seeps in around the edges of the music: a whoop from the assembled crowd, polyrhythmic handclaps keeping time, a nearby vehicle revving up and driving off as a song winds down. For listeners who may never attend a Nigerien wedding, it’s a chance to hear Moctar’s music in the context in which he forged it.
“Iblis Amghar,” which opens Niger EP Vol. 2, is more representative of the records as a whole than the Vol. 1 opener. It strips away the rock drum kit that propels the version Moctar recorded for 2015’s Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai, replacing it with sparse hand percussion and claps. Despite the languid arrangement, or because of it, this rendition of “Iblis Amghar” is even more arresting than the studio version. By adorning relatively slow and simple melodies with quick grace notes, Moctar turns his electric guitar into something flickering and unstable, with pitches that seem to warp in and out of each other, changing for slivers of moments before snapping back into their familiar previous shapes.
Some part of the EPs’ magic comes from the recording fidelity itself, which varies significantly from track to track, creating a distinct sonic world for each. “Ibitilan” is scorched with distortion and flecked with raucous crowd noise, giving its pummeling full-band groove a distinctly punk-rock edge. “Chimoumounin” seems to glide on the breeze, its vaporous mix of guitar treble and crash-cymbal shimmer a serendipitous match for its weightlessly ascending chords. As with a particularly musty Grateful Dead bootleg, it’s tough to tell how much of the recording’s uncanny aspect is a deliberate effect of the band versus an accident of the tape. For a listener at home, it doesn’t particularly matter.
Nearly all of the recordings on the two EPs are previously unreleased. Two exceptions are the live versions of “Nakanegh Dich” and “Asditke Akal,” both of which appeared on the deluxe edition of last year’s Afrique Victime. The “Nakanegh Dich” presented here is identical to that earlier version, while “Asditke Akal” gets an additional 30 seconds or so of instrumental introduction that was evidently cut from the tape on the previous release. Given that both the Afrique deluxe edition and the Niger EPs are pitched at completist fans, some of whom will surely buy both, it’s a mild disappointment that those two tracks appear again here. Had Matador focused exclusively on the previously unreleased recordings, which are uniformly excellent, and perhaps cut one or both of the two long drum machine workouts, Niger could have fit snugly onto a single disc.
Though Moctar is thoroughly rooted in traditional Tuareg music, he presents himself to the world as a rock artist—the kind of guy who made a movie inspired by Prince and cites Eddie Van Halen as a major influence. It would be a mistake to hear the raw renditions of the Niger EPs as being somehow truer to the spirit of his music than the auteurist visions on his proper albums, rather than simply presenting another side of his artistry. Take “Layla,” a beautiful song rendered as simply as possible on Niger Vol. 1, with little more than Moctar’s voice and acoustic guitar. The arrangement on Afrique Victime is only marginally more elaborate, but the extra touches matter: swells of noise during the chorus, subtle electric leads, the acoustic guitar recorded closely enough to capture its sparkling, tactile essence. As the Niger EPs demonstrate, a field recorder pointed in the general direction of a band in the middle of a wild party can capture a lot of life. But for some things, you have to head into the studio.


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 the cosmic country rockers’ 1969 debut, a strange, short-lived truce in the long battle between hippies and squares.

The Flying Burrito Brothers: The Gilded Palace of Sin

The Gilded Palace of Sin

One of the first times Gram Parsons played an open-mic night at the Palomino, a dive in North Hollywood that, in the late 1960s, was patronized mostly by hippie-hating country-music fans, a bar regular approached him right after his performance. “I want you to meet my three brothers,” the man said to Parsons, who was wearing his favorite pair of satin bell-bottoms and whose chestnut hair was longer than pretty much anyone else’s in the place. “We were gonna kick your ass,” the man continued, “but you can sing real good, so we’ll buy you a beer instead.”
No response could have flattered Gram Parsons more. The grand aim of what he would come to call his “Cosmic American Music”—an aural/spiritual fusion of country, R&B, gospel, rock, and good ol’ Southern charisma—was to find subcutaneous common bonds between people who, on the surface, seemed to be at odds. And in the late 1960s, as the Vietnam War raged and the generation gap widened, that kind of unity was hard to come by. But Parsons sought to bridge divides. He wanted to convince more conservative folks that unshorn draft-dodgers couldn’t be all bad if they could appreciate, say, the bottomless pathos of a George Jones ballad or the glittery grit of Buck Owens. And on the flip side, as the writer John Einarson put in his 2008 book Hot Burritos: The True Story of the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons was also interested in “educating the hippie masses on the wealth of wonderfully authentic American music hidden right under their noses.” Parsons had lofty goals for his art. A superstar in his own mind before almost anybody knew who he was, he believed fervently that his Cosmic American Music could deliver nothing short of salvation.
“Cosmic American Music?” Chris Hillman, Parsons’ co-frontman in the first incarnation of the Flying Burrito Brothers, scoffs in Einarson’s book. “What does that mean? It’s the stupidest term I’ve ever heard. It means nothing. It didn’t make any sense then and it still doesn’t. We were just trying to be a country band with a little more backbeat.”
Throw these two perspectives together—the idealist and the pragmatist; the bullshitter visionary and the no-bullshit workhorse—toss in no small amount of drugs, as well as a pedal steel virtuoso who never quit his day job as a claymation animator on Gumby (!), and you get all the tension and late-’60s weirdness that resulted in an imperfectly near-perfect record, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ 1969 cult-favorite country-rock touchstone, The Gilded Palace of Sin.
“Among the worthy, lasting, and influential albums of the last 40 years,” David N. Meyer writes in his 2007 Parsons biography Twenty Thousand Roads, “it’s hard to find one more shoddily produced or sloppily performed than The Gilded Palace of Sin.” That’s quite a claim, to which I could easily throw at least half a dozen counter-examples if I were in the mood to argue (how about every Velvet Underground album and every Beat Happening album, just to start). And although it does have a certain ramshackle energy that suits the band quite well, I’m not here to suggest that the production on Gilded Palace is especially rich. (A&M’s house producer Larry Marks, assigned to helm the debut album of his label’s newest signees, later described his role on Gilded Palace quite humbly, as more of a “hall monitor on the job [to] make sure the album got finished and things didn’t get out of hand.” In that sense at least, mission accomplished.)
But there’s a strange vitality to this record that makes its supposed imperfections feel charming, even meaningful. Many people close to the band believed Marks never got the vocals to sound quite right. Certainly one of the strangest and most polarizing choices he made was, on the many songs that employ the Burritos’ Everly Brothers-inspired two-part harmonies, to split the frontmen’s voices into separate stereo channels: Parsons’ high lonesome drawl on the left, Hillman’s earthy croon on the right—and your impressionable skull in between. But that means listening to the record on headphones gives the intimate and uncanny feeling that you’ve got a little devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, each murmuring their conflicting advice right into your ears before joining together in the mellifluous conclusion that maybe they’ve both got some pretty good points after all.
Parsons was born, infamously, into a wealthy family that controlled one-third of the citrus crop in Florida. But in the words of a Porter Wagoner classic he’d later cover, one rich man in 10 has a satisfied mind—and not one of them seemed to be in Parsons’ family. Both parents drank prodigiously and neglected their kids’ emotional needs. Parsons’ father killed himself two days before Christmas, when Gram was 12. He left his son a generous but haunting Christmas present: A reel-to-reel tape recorder—a rare thing to own at the time—on which Gram’s father had left a recording telling his son he’d always love him. For a young Parsons, the table was set for recording and self-documentation to become a lifelong repository of unbearable pain and vulnerability.
Around the same time, across the country in San Diego County, Hillman’s idyllic middle-class childhood had become saturated with cowboy imagery and country music. He learned to play mandolin as a teenager and gigged with bluegrass bands like the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers and the Hillmen. But then Hillman’s own father died when he was 16, and unlike Parsons, that meant he had to transfer to night school and work a day job to help support the family. From that divide came the lopsided work ethic that would later define their band.
In mid-1968, though, Parsons and Hillman found themselves with quite a bit in common. They’d both just exited serious relationships and they’d both quit the same band, the Byrds. Hillman had been a Byrd since his late teens, and he’d been around for the band’s sudden success. Parsons was a late-comer. His stint in the group lasted less than a year, but he had helped steer them in a new, countrified direction on 1968’s prescient country-rock landmark Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn was never sure that was the right direction—“He turned out to be a monster in sheep’s clothing,” he notoriously said of Parsons, “And he exploded out of that sheep’s clothing. Good God! It’s George Jones in a sequin suit!”—but now in their own band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons and Hillman were finally free to be as twangy as they damn well pleased.
One of the first and finest songs they wrote together was “Sin City,” a mournful ballad that blends Biblical imagery and vivid psychedelia; a smoggy cast of late-’60s-California impending doom holds the whole thing together. “This whole town’s filled with sin, it’ll swallow you in, if you’ve got some money to burn,” the boys begin in tandem. In this song at least, “Sin City” is not the town of latter-day Elvis and roulette tables, but Los Angeles, the dreamscape that each of them had migrated to, hoping in vain to satisfy their earthly desires.
Parsons and Hillman wouldn’t always get along—but they did then. When they were writing some of the songs that would appear on Gilded Palace of Sin, Hillman described them as “two heartbroken bachelor guys sharing a house together.” They rented a three-bedroom rancher in Reseda, far enough from the Sunset Strip to stay focused on writing and relatively out of trouble. Hillman has called it the most creatively productive time of his and Parsons’ lives. “We woke up in the morning and would write as opposed to the usual being out until five in the morning,” he said. “We were writing every day on a spontaneous schedule. I’ve never peaked like that, working with other people.”
With Parsons and Hillman both playing rhythm guitar and splitting up lead vocals, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ sound had room for a lead instrument. Enter “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow, a visual effects animator who moonlit around L.A.’s country bar circuit as a well-respected pedal-steel player. He joined the Burritos shortly before they hit the studio in late 1968. (Among many, many other surprising claims to fame, Sneaky Pete wrote the original, distinctly psychedelic Gumby theme song.) Parsons and Hillman had both wanted Kleinow to join the Byrds on the Sweetheart tour, and McGuinn’s refusal was one of the many reasons they both left. Putting such emphasis on Kleinow’s instrument was certainly a gamble. To rock audiences of the time, pedal-steel was the cilantro in the soup—a single element with the dubious potential to overpower everything. Its horizontal frame and tumbleweed wail connoted country conservatism strongly enough to disrupt the delicate balance of opposites the Burritos were trying to achieve.
But, as it takes a certain unbridled mind to look at an emerald glob of clay and bring forth Gumby, “Sneaky” Pete was no ordinary pedal-steel player. He used unique, unorthodox tunings and ran his instrument through a fuzz-box as though it were an electric guitar. The 16-track console at A&M Studios allowed Sneaky to experiment with space and time more than he ever could on stage, overdubbing lacerating licks and layered textures at the forefront of songs like “Christine’s Tune” and “Hot Burrito #2.” “Country is a music of traditional forms; Sneaky Pete played a classically country instrument in an entirely new way,” Meyer notes. His distinct signature blazes through Gilded Palace of Sin like wildfire.
Mississippi-born bassist Chris Ethridge rounded out the band’s original lineup. (They had trouble finding a drummer in the beginning, and a handful of different session players contributed to Gilded Palace.) He, too, was a fruitful writing partner for Parsons: Together they composed two of the record’s most beloved songs, “Hot Burrito #1” and “Hot Burrito #2.” (“I don’t know why we called them that, as a matter of fact,” Ethridge told Einarson. “We did consider other titles.”) The Burrito suite contains Parsons’ only solo lead vocals on the album, and taken together they’re two sides of the same coin—the glinting fool’s gold of human desire.
“Hot Burrito #1” is a swooning, barroom-piano ballad that Parsons animates with a wrenching vocal performance. “I’m your toy, I’m your old boy, but I don’t want no one but you to love me,” he croons, grasping in the direction of something—someone—just out of reach. It is sad-boy canon, so much so that Elvis Costello later added it to his repertoire. Then a song later—as Ethridge’s melodic bassline kicks off “Hot Burrito #2”—he’s got the girl he wanted and now he’s restless as hell, dissatisfied with the sudden demands of domestic life. “When I come home/Carrying my shoes/I’ve been waiting/To tell you some news… And you want me home all night?!” he hollers, in passionate disbelief. It would seem that the burrito is always hotter on the other side.
For a wannabe rock star, Parsons innately understood the power of spectacle. Before the album cover shoot, he took the band to be outfitted for custom Nudie Suits, by the legendary country-spangled tailor Nudie Cohn. Each member’s outfit reflected something of his personality: Hillman looks regal, if a little stiff, in blue velvet, Ethridge plays Southern gentleman in a long floral-embroidered jacket, Sneaky Pete asked for a velvet sweatshirt with a huge pterodactyl on it, because why not. The pièce de résistance was Parsons, who, ever the purveyor of self-mythology, requested a personalized collage of all his vices: Marijuana leaves, pills, pin-up girls, and sugar cubes dotted with acid proudly besmirch the pure white sleeves of his suit.
One good thing about discovering Gilded Palace of Sin long after its 1969 release is that it was not really one of those “you had to be there and see ’em live” things. By most accounts, you did not. “I cannot recall one performance that the original band did where I wasn’t embarrassed to tears,” Sneaky Pete told an interviewer in 1999. It was difficult to replicate all those pedal-steel overdubs on stage, yes. But also quite often various band members would be… well, “high” goes without saying, but sometimes high on different drugs, which makes staying in rhythm a real adventure. (A coked-up lead singer and a bassist on downers is what we call a complicated time signature.) This original incarnation of the Burritos was generally a mess on the road, which did not do much to put them in their label’s good graces. Slashed promotional budgets followed, and though it earned some critical acclaim and coveted co-signs (“Boy, I love them,” Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone, “Their record instantly knocked me out”), Gilded Palace sold only about 40,000 copies in its first run and peaked at No. 164 on the Billboard chart.
When he co-founded the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons already had a reputation for leapfrogging unceremoniously from band to band. He left the International Submarine Band before their first album even came out to join the more successful Byrds, and an accelerating factor in his abrupt departure from the Byrds was the fact that he’d suddenly befriended members of the even-cooler Rolling Stones. When Gilded Palace flopped and it became clear that the Flying Burrito Brothers weren’t going to be his ticket to overnight stardom, he veered sharply into self-sabotage until, inevitably, Hillman kicked him out of the band. They continued releasing tighter, if less soulful, records with various revolving-door lineups; a version of the band with no original members and only vague connections to the original name is still making music. Parsons’ drug problems, on the other hand, worsened. He continued to live hard, fast, and impatiently; he died of a morphine overdose in a Joshua Tree motel room when he was just 26.
“How can you compete with a dead guy?” future Eagle Bernie Leadon, who joined the Burrito Brothers before their much lesser second album, 1970’s Burrito Deluxe, asks in Einarson’s book. “You just can’t. It’s the martyr thing. Gram fell on his sword so he’s a dead hero.” It is certainly true that there is a particular and very specifically annoying type of Gram Parsons Dude out there, who glorifies Parsons’ drug use, mythologizes his callous behavior and trust fund, probably rides an expensive motorcycle and thinks it’s really cool that some of Parsons’ friends stole his corpse and lit it on fire in the desert to let his spirit fly free of his body or something. (Admittedly, I think it is kind of cool that they did that. Fucked-up, but cool.)
Gilded Palace of Sin would not exist without Chris Hillman, and for that he deserves infinite credit. It was no small feat to keep Gram Parsons out of his own way for a few focused months in the fall of 1968; the unfortunate failures and tantalizing what-if’s that marked the rest of his recording career are a testament to that. But it’s also true that on this wonderful record Parsons is clearly able to access a current of emotion and vulnerability that still remained elusive to Hillman. “They did the same thing,” Byrds producer Jim Dickson reflects in Meyer’s biography, “but Gram was willing to put feeling into his songs and Chris never was.”
Such opposing forces were destined to fall out of balance, but frozen in time on this record, they hold each other in check. Perhaps because Gilded Palace did not become successful enough to remain forever tied to a certain cultural moment, something about it feels enduringly present-tense. Plenty has been said about this album’s influence on the country-rock of the ’70s and the alt-country boom of the late ’80s and early ’90s, but I perceive its echoes in even more recent events. In Post Malone’s penchant for unholy Nudie Suits, sure. But also in Kacey Musgraves’ embrace of psychedelia to blur the edges of country on her 2018 masterpiece Golden Hour, and even in Lil Nas X’s bold stare-down with the gatekeepers of country-music purity until they realized he wasn’t bluffing. What is “Old Town Road” if not the 21st-century embodiment of Cosmic American Music?
Parsons’ mid-’70s solo records, GP and the posthumously released Grievous Angel, have an almost talismanic power, but when listening to them it is difficult to forget that you are hearing someone who is slowly dying. Such is their cult appeal. Gilded Palace of Sin is different: Thanks to the stabilizing forces that temporarily surrounded Parsons, it is a snapshot of a more lighthearted and hopeful moment of possibility. The last track on the record, “Hippie Boy,” captures that. It is at once the least and most serious song in the Flying Burrito Brothers’ arsenal—a spoken-word imagined conversation between a long-haired youth and the sort of seemingly close-minded guy Parsons might have encountered at the Palomino bar. Hillman plays both parts, though Parsons directed him accordingly (“He has to drink a fifth of scotch before he does it to feel the whole thing,” he insisted at the time. “He can’t smoke an ounce of grass.”) “Hippie Boy” is a utopian vision of togetherness, so sincere it has to be played a bit ironically. As the song, and the record, concludes, a drunken chorus of off-key voices join together to sing a few quick lines of the old hymn “Peace in the Valley.” It’s a beautifully stirring moment, and it ends too soon. The cosmic promise of a better world streaks momentarily across the sky, and then in an instant it’s gone.

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100% Juice opens with the clearest mission statement possible: "There’s too much stupid-ass shit happening right now, it’s time to turn up." From there, it’s business as usual: Despite being almost 40, Juicy J never sounds tired, never phones it in. He’s the consummate pro.

100% Juice

We’re often told rap is a young person’s game, but one of the year’s most noteworthy rap albums was helmed by a fifty-year-old. Jay Z is comfortably in his forties; Kanye will be forty in two years. And somehow Juicy J is forty but he seems particularly ageless—there’s When the Smoke Clears-era Three 6 Mafia, there’s Juicy J accepting an Oscar and appearing on his own show on MTV, then there’s 2011 Juicy J, attached to Wiz Khalifa’s Taylor Gang troupe, rapping with Kreayshawn, spawning catchphrases ("you say no to drugs—Juicy J can’t!"), and releasing free music at a furious clip, keeping up with the Lil B's of the world and rappers half his age.
Juicy J didn’t have to come back, but he did, and his career reached a logical conclusion with his third solo record, 2013’s Stay Trippy, which was surprisingly great then, and holds up now. At the time, it wasn’t hard to see some cynicism in Juicy J’s late-career moves—he appeared to be angling for the blog-space that spent so much time covering guys who directly bit his original style (somewhere SpaceGhostPurrp is sighing). But Juicy J is from blue-collar Memphis, all he does is work.
On the heels of the largely forgettable Blue Dream & Lean 2, 100% Juice drops all pretense and opens with the clearest mission statement possible: "There’s too much stupid-ass shit happening right now, it’s time to turn up." From there, it’s business as usual: dense, booming dark beats, hooks that mostly consist of a phrase shouted like a salutation, cataloging of various drugs taken and sexual escapades, then an occasional guest to break it up.
While Juicy J’s re-emergence came on the heels of Lex Luger, Mike WiLL, and Young Chop beats, now he’s playing in a contemporary field consisting of 808 Mafia, Sonny Digital, and Metro Boomin. Juicy J’s greatest asset has been his ability to make his surroundings his own. The same way he ran through those 2011 Lex Luger beats, he slides right into the spacey, trap-noir of 808 Mafia—"Still" runs a piano loop sounding straight out of Halloween as Juicy J sticks the landing on a vivid line like "she got my wife-beater on as a nightgown" and the punchline "you just looking for a quick come-up, I can feel it in the air like Phil Collins." How Juicy J rattles off these lines, in a way not unlike the now-infamous Migos triplet flow, but with an ascending and descending cadence that emphasizes the right syllables, is indicative of how effortless this comes to him. He never sounds tired, never phones it in. He’s the consummate pro.
Juicy J is funnier than most rappers and capable of getting the most ludicrous hooks stuck in your head ("I drop them beans in my lean" will haunt you for days) and he’s the rare rapper who commands respect from the people around him. Boosie’s vicious, borderline-disgusting verse on the "Film" remix is impossible to not run back a dozen times, demonstrating the intensity with which artists approach a Juicy J feature. Same goes for Lil Herb, who pops on "Ain’t No Rapper"; the change of scenery breathes new, vibrant life into the Chicago emcee’s scratchy, traditional gangster tropes. 100% Juice, while not a revelation, is sturdy and solid. A great artist can endlessly remake the same sounds and make it work, and the self-contained good time of 100% Juice adds a few new wrinkles.


The concept of this album was being discussed long before anyone heard the music: Seven songs, mostly pieced together using ...

Matmos: A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure

A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure

The concept of this album was being discussed long before anyone heard the music: Seven songs, mostly pieced together using sounds recorded during medical procedures. Yes, M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel (the men of Matmos) actually donned surgical masks and brought their DATs into operating rooms to record the sounds of a liposuction, nose jobs, and so on. They then used their computers to shape and process the sounds into actual compositions.
The two made a similar stab at high-concept music-making with their second album, Quasi Objects. I owned that one for a time, but ultimately got rid of it because it seemed too reliant on novelty. On that record, the gimmick-- music based on sounds recorded around their home (e.g. whoopee cushions, etc.)-- smothered the music. The test of any conceptual record is how well it stands on its own, removed from the angle. And A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure is a first-rate work, even if you're unfamiliar with the backstory.
That said, knowing the concept behind this record adds plenty to the enjoyment. Take "For Felix (And All the Rats)", for example. The music alone, which consists of what sounds like Tony Conrad-style detuned string drones and an African thumb piano, is striking and needs no explanation. But when we discover that the track was made using sounds coaxed from an empty rat's cage (Matmos applied a violin bow to the bars to mimic the strings, and then plucked the bars for the thumb piano sound), it adds a rich layer of meaning. As a commentary on innocent life in bondage, it's just as powerful as a photograph of an eyeless monkey in restraints. Both the concept and the execution of "For Felix" are brilliant individually, and taken together, the effect is almost overpowering; it's a terribly sad and heartbreaking piece of music. None of the other tracks feature such a strong conceptual coup, but the rest vary from decent to great.
When Matmos recorded the sound of the instruments used in laser eye surgery, they were smart enough to realize that the buzzing instrumentation bore a marked resemblance to a Roland 303, and hence, we have the wired electro of "L.A.S.I.K." A speech record used to teach enunciation to the hearing-impaired serves as the basis of "Spondee", with the perfect elocution of the therapist used as rhythmic counterpoint to a devastatingly funky house rhythm. There are a few horn stabs interlaced with the clubby groove, but the more punchy accents come from a tool used to clean sinus cavities.
Which illustrates another reason A Chance to Cut is such a success: It uses a fresh sound palette. If you've spent any time listening to the post-Autechre world of IDM, you're probably aware that most programmers aren't getting everything they should out of Reaktor. All those familiar buzzes, squelches and clicks are starting to wear out their welcome; hearing Matmos work magic with material clearly recorded in the field makes me realize what I've been missing. Sounds provide feelings even when they're not playing melodies-- so much of the art in this kind of music is assembling the basic substance.
But if it's melodies you want, Matmos deliver in that department, too. "California Rhinoplasty" takes a bleep from some kind of surgical monitor and pitch-shifts it into something hummable, until the song morphs into an ethereal cloud of gentle chords and cutting machines (no doubt buzzing through some nose cartilage). As with the rest of the record, even if you didn't know the song title or the sources, it would still sound great.


Producer and composer Ryan Lee West continues his practice of turning real-life sketches into ambient techno as ever-shifting moments dip, dive, and refuse to settle.

Articulation

Producer and composer Ryan Lee West, aka Rival Consoles, makes ambient techno with a volatile soul. His recent records take the same analog approach he developed on 2016’s Night Melody, composing the album using real-life sketches to inform his writing, almost like a self-induced synesthesia. As West explains: “With a pen and paper you can compose and rethink ideas without technology getting in the way.” In this human method of re-attachment, West’s diagrams breathe life into digitized worlds, separating mechanical creation from pure design.
His latest record, Articulation, continues in this practice and rewards complete engagement as ever-shifting moments dip, dive, and refuse to settle. The shaky “Forwardism” begins almost with a dubby industrial soul, but when glimpses of strings shine through, the whole thing becomes slung out, with a marching beat carrying you to catharsis. On the operatic “Vibrations On A String,” melody lines arc in and out of the song at odd angles, and jittering LFOs are cut through by saw-toothed synths into a track that could fill every corner of a symphony hall.
Since his last few records, the production has become knottier and more entangled, layering staccato notes with glimpses of field recordings, flourishes of breakbeats, and sweeping effects. At times, Articulation’s grandiose ideas are deflated by an overwrought execution, particularly on the title track, where the stuttering synths feel out of place with one another. “Still Here” feels slightly insubstantial, revolving around a circular melody which, although pretty, feels vacant. But there are moments of hopeful clarity. The circularity of “Sudden Awareness Of Now,” in contrast, sounds like one epiphany after another; the sustained aquatic notes of “Melodica” carry the weight of Boards of Canada in The Campfire Headphase era. These little ambient gestures are small, but they burn the brightest. The magnetism of Rival Consoles lies in the chaotic warmth created through an intrepid play on rising and falling, conjuring a sense of turmoil that seems to become louder and more definite with each release.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The duo’s collaborative project feels like an interstellar jam session that doesn’t push either of them too far from their comfort zones.

Zhigeist

During an interview with Blockstar DVD Magazine in the early 2000s, Elzhi claimed to have cracked the code to the perfect rhyme pattern. The formula he spends the next two-and-a-half minutes breaking down consists of slant rhymes and other technical sleights of hand, and the Detroit rapper makes bending language to his will look as simple as telling someone about your day. This quick peek under the hood illuminates the otherworldly sense of control that endeared Elzhi to J Dilla and the group Slum Village when he joined in 2004 and continues to endear him to bars-first rap fans the world over. In a modern context, he slots neatly next to younger spitters like J.I.D. and fellow Detroiter BabyTron; in their hands, complexity is as seamless as breathing.
A rapper of Elzhi’s skill usually benefits from finding a foil in a similarly minded producer. For his latest project, Zhigeist, that foil is California musician and vocalist Georgia Anne Muldrow. It may seem like a strange combo on paper, but Muldrow herself is no stranger to mixing elements of R&B, jazz, funk, and rap to create everything from full-blown soul epics to beat tapes. In reality, Elzhi and Muldrow are kindred spirits—they both consider themselves artistic aliens, and their styles are mutually fluid and expansive. Zhigeist doesn’t push the duo particularly far from their respective comfort zones, but that’s because both have proven they can thrive just about anywhere. They’re a natural pair, and the low-stakes atmosphere gives Zhigeist the feeling of an interstellar jam session.
Muldrow does an admirable job of curating this vibe. Her beats combine the tight precision of production software and the lush sounds of live instruments without falling into the dry stateliness that plagues most live-band hip-hop. The basslines and piano notes of “Amnesia” and lead single “Strangeland” are Milky Way thick, complimented by hazy synths. In fact, synths and piano echo across nearly every track, giving dimension to the clacking shaker in the background of “Nefertiti” and Muldrow’s ghostly vocals trilling throughout “Already Gone.” “Pros and Cons” starts as a mellow lounge jazz number before a beat switch brings in drums, bass, and sirens suitable for an episode of The Mandalorian. Each beat is its own universe that pops and pulses in unexpected ways, adding as much to the conversation as Elzhi’s words.
As technically formidable as he is, another of Elzhi’s greatest gifts is using those techniques to find the most stylish way to say that he’s nice. Rapping about rap stands the chance of being dull and contrived at its worst, but his vocabulary offers endless possibilities. Take this passage from “Strangeland”: “With the pen, I could turn a name into a number/Shackle you and have you escorted through the right entrance/To be put in a mental prison/So why would I sweat your bars, knowing they coming with a light sentence?” His schemes are as conceptual as they are rhyme-based—there’s as much emphasis on the setups as the punchlines. They range from profound (“They looked for dirt when they dug up my past, but unearthed these diamonds,” he raps on “Amnesia”) to long-winded and tiresome (the Real Hip-Hop screed near the end of “King Shit (Say Word)”). Still, it’s impressive just to hear them unspool, words sliding into place like cards into a deck.
Elzhi’s shit-talking is even more entertaining when he homes in on a specific concept. “Pros and Cons” is a lyrical exercise where he, respectively, crams two verses with as many words that start with “pro” and “con” as possible. “Understanding,” meanwhile, laments the conditions of inner cities and vouches for knowledge of self as the greatest weapon for moving through them. The understanding that Elzhi describes comes as much from embracing the critical race theory currently being phased out of underfunded schools as it does from accepting that sometimes, the Wendy’s 4 for $4 deal is cheaper than a healthier option. Elzhi’s lyrical prowess prospers when it’s attached to his sense of goodwill.
In the album’s description, Elzhi and Muldrow labeled Zhigeist as “a love letter to people of color.” Even when the lyrics aren’t directly addressing Blackness, that love shines through in their respective zeal for the art of creation. Zhigeist isn’t a concept record, per se, but it is propelled by a sense of adventure that feels Afrofuturistic, born from the same stardust as Octavia Butler novels and Rappin’ Max Robot. As a duo, Elzhi and Muldrow have recast themselves as astronomers, using Black musical lineage to reconfigure the cosmos themselves.


The sister duo takes influence from Fleetwood Mac on a breezy album defined by warm harmonies and easygoing pop melodies.

With Love From

Aly & AJ occupy a space on the hazy fringe of the pop mainstream. As survivors of the Radio Disney machine of the 2000s, they’re showbiz lifers, entertainers who are eager to try on new fashions and willing to do whatever they need to keep working, whether that means co-opting new sounds or changing their name in hopes of escaping a record contract. They spent a good portion of the early 2010s working as 78Violet, a gambit that didn’t generate any hits but helped them hone their craft. Their growth was evident on 2021’s A Touch of the Beat Gets You Up on Your Feet Gets You Out and Then Into the Sun, their first full-length album in 14 years. Drenched in sounds borrowed from new wave records, A Touch of the Beat showcased a duo who had matured, opting for mellow melodies over effervescent hooks and rhythms. It was deliberately a far cry from the fizzy, processed bubblegum of “Potential Breakup Song,” which gave them their only Top 40 hit in 2007, just as the teen-pop era came to a close.
With its stylized, digitized retro gleam, A Touch of the Beat sounded fresh yet not quite part of the current moment; underneath its shiny veneer, it adhered to tuneful values learned from old soft rock and oldies radio. Aly & AJ’s allegiance to classic tropes only intensifies on With Love From, a brighter, tighter, and punchier record than its predecessor. By every measure, it’s effectively a sequel to A Touch of the Beat. The duo reunites with producer Yves Rothman and several associated songwriters, retaining the mellifluous mood while sharpening the melodies and buttressing the vocal harmonies.
Superficially, these additions could be read as country or folk, particularly when paired with a sighing steel guitar as they are on the ballad “Blue Dress.” Like many Nashville pros, Aly & AJ emphasize craft over confession—there may be deep feelings at the heart of their music but they’re subdued and sculpted into multi-purpose universality—and have an affection for tunes that evoke a desert sunset. Yet these same things are what drove the sun-bleached Southern Californian soft rock of the 1970s. Fleetwood Mac is an obvious touchstone—deep in the fade out of “Baby Lay Your Head Down” is a searing guitar solo that deliberately evokes Lindsey Buckingham—although Aly & AJ convey not an ounce of Stevie Nicks’ supernatural sensuality. They’re a pair of Christine McVies, sweet and steady purveyors of warm, consoling melodies.
Over 40 minutes, With Love From cycles swiftly through pleasingly polished confections. “Open to Something and That Something Is You” surges forward on the duo’s harmonies, a sound that’s at the heart of the intricate web on “With Love From,” an expert evocation of the sparkle of Tango in the Night. Rothman takes pains to make sure Aly & AJ aren’t strict revivalists, helping give the chorus of “Love You This Way” a deep-water, dream-pop shimmer. He muddies eras and smudges styles, dressing Aly & AJ in digital tapestries while keeping the focus on their harmonies and the melodies that tug on the subconscious. Maybe in another decade, these songs could’ve sat comfortably alongside hits by Heart, Elton John, or even Wilson Phillips. But in 2023, they seem like gleaming artifacts from a bygone era.
The sense that Aly & AJ don’t quite inhabit their own era is an ironic byproduct of the professional craft they exhibit on With Love From. A life spent living within the entertainment machine gives the duo crowd-pleasing instincts and no sense of the zeitgeist; it seems purely accidental they’re drawing so heavily from Fleetwood Mac, who also serves as a touchstone for scores of younger, edgier bands today. Raised on classic rock radio and late-era MTV, Aly & AJ are constitutionally driven to deliver a piece of glossy product, the kind of record that would’ve cluttered endcaps in big box stores back in the 2000s. Despite their comfortable distance from the industry machine they came up in, Aly & AJ still gravitate toward brightly-colored, big-hearted pop: an old-fashioned stance that dulls the shine of their new direction.


With the Killers, greatness and ridiculousness go hand in hand. Their fifth album contains only a little of both.

Wonderful Wonderful

“I feel like I write a lot of solid 6s and 7s,” Brandon Flowers remarked recently. The lead singer of the Las Vegas rock band the Killers is not normally a paragon of humility and perspective, which only makes the accuracy of this recent offhand comment pierce deeper: He’s right. Despite more than a decade of striving, the Killers are inescapably a slightly above-average rock band. The numbers, pitiless as they are, pile against them: Even their Greatest Hits album from 2013 only had five great songs and thirteen other ones.
And yet, they’ve brushed greatness. It might have been an eon ago, but they still wrote “Mr. Brightside” and “All These Things That I’ve Done” and “When You Were Young.” These songs soar over their heads like diamond-encrusted jets at their shows to U2-sized crowds who treat the band like demigods, at least for three or so minutes. With successes like this to haunt you, wouldn’t you spend the rest of your life doubling down on a losing hand too?
They don’t hit their lucky number on Wonderful Wonderful, their fifth studio album. No tens here—sixes and sevens abound, for sure, a few fives, maybe an eight. Even mired among the sixes, though, you can feel the palpable yearning: Every Killers song believes its destiny is to be the festival closer, and that feeling is almost as convincing, on first blush, as encountering a song that actually fits the bill. “Don’t give up on me,” Flowers pleads on their new album, on a song called “Rut.” This is how much Flowers believes in his mission: He will attempt to wring a transcendent anthem from his inability to write them.
If there’s one thing Flowers and his band have internalized about the nature of their greatness, it’s that it requires proximity to ridiculousness. Thus, they start with “ridiculous” and hope that rest takes care of itself somehow, which explains why the first sound on Wonderful Wonderful appears to be a synthesized Ewok horn. The song it announces, the title track, is built on thundering toms and a rumbling octave bassline echoing into the big sky. The stage is appropriately set for an Achtung Baby moment, but Flowers decides, instead of a big chorus, to bleat, “Motherless child, dost thou believe/That thine afflictions have caused us to grieve?” veering right past Achtung Baby U2 straight into “stuck inside a giant malfunctioning mechanical lemon” U2.
Flowers picks himself up and dusts himself, undaunted, for the creamy-smooth falsetto harmonies and Jazzercise pump of “The Man.” The song, like other recent Killers songs, feels ersatz, a gift shop replica of a Vegas recreation of a Daft Punk cover of a Robert Palmer song. But it’s the most fun to be had on Wonderful Wonderful, complete with the sprained-ankle misstep-strut lyric “USDA certified lean,” delivered in that tremulous choirboy tenor of his. It feels, maybe, like a hit, and it’s one of the only moments on Wonderful Wonderful where Flowers bottles his particular brand of fizz before it goes flat.
As always, Flowers brings several gasp-worthy slogans even when he can’t muster classic songs. He has come to understand, deeply, the character he plays in his band and he excels at the sort of winking writing that never spoils the show. On the ballad “Life to Come,” Flowers instructs us to “Drop-kick the shame.” On “Wonderful Wonderful,” he implores us to “Clothesline the shame.” O shame, it bedevils and shrivels us all! By the time he tenderly sings “You got the faith of a child before the world gets in” on “Some Kind of Love,” it feels like the most exalted compliment you could give to someone in Flowers World, and it is only right that he follows this endearment closely with “You got the soul of a truck.” If his heart wasn’t gold, if his ear wasn’t tin, it wouldn’t be the Killers.
There are a couple of unintentionally sad moments on Wonderful Wonderful, moments where the props start to sag, the illusion of grandiosity threatened. On “Out of My Mind,” he announces his plan to “storm the gates of Graceland, to make you realize/I’m back to back with Springsteen,” before adding “You turned and rolled your eyes.” The moment feels uncomfortably like Flowers’ archnemesis, Shame, advancing on enemy territory. This is not why we have the Killers. You don’t go see Rambo to absorb the sobering realities of the military-industrial complex, and you don’t listen to the Killers to feel the sadness and hollowness underlying rock’n’roll dreams. You listen to the Killers for a cleansing blast of unwavering self-belief, to blur the line between oblivion and oblivious.
There are other troubling signs in the eternal bull market of Flowers’ imagination. The band may or may not be breaking apart, member by member. To witness the end of the Killers would be heartbreaking, like watching a foreclosure sign go up on the Magic Kingdom. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so let me break the fourth wall here, Brandon; just you and me here now. As somebody else once said somewhere, don’t stop believing. Please don’t let anything—departing members, declining sales, creeping real world irrelevance, even this middling review—deter you. If you can hold on, you gotta help us out.