After three safe and predictable records, the Weezer leader goes the opposite route, collecting demos of all sorts of goofy and indulgent ideas, and reminding us why we fell for dorks with horn-rimmed glasses and flying-V guitars in the first place.

Rivers Cuomo: Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo

Somewhere along the way, someone told Rivers Cuomo that he needed to rein it in. To the world's dismay, he listened, and made three records of faceless, predictable approximations of what the public supposedly wanted his band Weezer to be. Demo collection Alone does the opposite, collecting all sorts of goofy and indulgent ideas-- robot voices, barbershop-quartet harmonies, over-emoting, an Ice Cube cover-- reminding us why we fell for dorks with horn-rimmed glasses and flying-V guitars in the first place.
Casual fans and/or haters might wonder what, after three records that were stagnant at best, could be possibly left in the vaults; the superfans know exactly what he's holding back. The inside cover shows off a crammed collection of cassette tapes, their spines promising untold treasures-- Songs From the Black Hole is there, as well as previously unheard of titles and bandnames-waiting-to-happen like Psoriasis Babies and Angst Muffins. As far as basement tapes go, Alone ranges wildly in fidelity and style while still hanging together as a surprisingly cohesive whole. Its liner notes have detailed histories and inspirations for each song-- with lyrics, even-- and photos that exhibit a disconcerting lack of shame. (Bearded Basoon-playing Rivers, Despondent Glam Rivers, collect 'em all!) Best of all: More than two-thirds of the material here was recorded before 1996. As for the rest... we'll get to that.
A lost Weezer record it isn't, even if fans have been waiting on one. Songs From the Black Hole was reportedly a full concept album meant to follow the "Blue Album" that was scrapped completely before recording what would become Pinkerton. Its story arc follows a five-person (plus one mechanoid) crew of a spaceship on an important mission, our noble protagonist Jonas (hmm...) is given a meaty role while crewmates Wuan and Dondo (seriously, it's in the liners) are one-dimensional avatars for womanizing and partying. That only sort of matters in "Blast Off!", the collection's crown jewel and such a fleeting rush of distortion-driven joy that the edges of the supposed dialogue are entirely blurred, and are hardly essential to enjoy it.
Not so when it segues directly into "Who You Callin' Bitch?", the lament of the unfairly maligned female spaceship cook, whom Cuomo brings to life with some fairly operatic solo vocal moments. More narrative confusion and dick references follow in the cheery a cappella "Dude, We're Finally Landing" and the twee-cranked-to-11 of "Superfriend", which is at least on par with Pinkerton's stellar B-sides (many of which would have made up this "lost" album). If it sounds silly on paper, go over the lyrics to your favorite Weezer song in your mind for a moment, and then take into account that these were written with the help of painkillers as Cuomo healed from leg surgery. These hopelessly corny, irrepressibly infectious songs are the stuff that Weezer freaks are forged in.
The rest of the songs come from more familiar territory. "Lemonade" borrows its paunchy low-end straight from the Blue Album, while more introspective tracks like the would-be teen-flick soundtrack cut "Wanda (You're My Only Love)" and piano ballad "Longtime Sunshine" will satisfy the Pinkerton lover on your Christmas list. There's only one previously released Weezer song in the bunch, however. While its plodding tempo nearly turns it into a dirge, "Buddy Holly" still sounds pretty great in any incarnation, but doesn't reveal much in demo form besides some silly keyboard presets; it's not as if a Weezer song has ever been ruined by over-production. It does show that Cuomo has his compositions nearly finalized before they get to the band, right down to the falsetto harmonies and lightning-quick licks tucked into the verses.
There are more unexpected pleasures as well, like hearing Cuomo moonlighting as frontman for the band Sloan on a strutting cover of oldie "Little Diane". Even the compilation's rough spots reveal something: The choked angst of "The World We Love So Much" is intimate enough to cause embarrassment by proxy, but it's worth noting that it's a Gregg Alexander cover (yes, the guy from the New Radicals). It divulges an unexpectedly modern influence, and from a relative peer of Cuomo's at that; either could have switched career trajectories if the cards had fallen just a bit differently. And yet, the biggest surprise is that Weezer's latest material is not the bottom of the barrel, and that crossover smash "Beverly Hills" only hinted at the depths Cuomo has yet to plumb. Recorded in 2007, "This Is the Way" is a stab at MOR urban pop, with what are likely his least inspired lyrics yet. He rhymes "love" with "heaven above" over a track that, even for a demo, makes old Jon Secada look like old Timbaland, finally indulging in the supposed funk influence he once so studiously avoided. The chorus: "This is the way a man loves his lady." It's as if "Beverly Hills" was a black hole, and this was the extra-dimensional hell on the other end.
But more than being adrift in an unfamiliar genre, "This Is the Way" is crippled by the same thing that drags down "I Was Made for You", a 2004 demo that closes the compilation. The mostly chronological track list of Alone exposes the same drawbacks of Weezer's later records by the end: By chasing down broad notions of universality in his lyrics and melodies, Cuomo's songs have become increasingly impersonal and vacuous, even when they're as pretty as "I Was Made For You". There's nothing about angst-ridden singer-songwriters, forgotten power-poppers, or rappers that we can't all relate to; nor do songs that draw inspirations from science fiction or Madame Butterfly necessarily appeal to a niche audience. It's frustrating that Cuomo has sidelined these weirder, often endearing influences. If nothing else, Alone reminds us that a lot of those over-ambitious, silly-on-paper ideas often blossomed in Cuomo's hands, and there was more to Weezer in their early days than just crisp power-pop and cute videos.


Splitting the difference between War on Drugs and Death Cab for Cutie, the latest from the Brooklyn band offers indie rock at its most familiar and instantly gratifying.

A Billion Little Lights

Wild Pink’s A Billion Little Lights was born from the seeds of a more sprawling project, a double album about the American West that frontman John Ross eventually dialed back. Even in its abridged final form, though, the sense of sweep remains. Everything about the album’s synth-heightened heartland rock is wired for maximum impact, from the production, which frames Ross’ songs like aerial shots of the Grand Canyon, to keyboards that sparkle and glisten as if queued to a light show that for now exists only in Ross’ head. A bid for the big time from a band that has so far largely fallen under the radar, A Billion Little Lights is indie rock at its most instantly gratifying and undemanding.
Ross had been teasing that he had an album like this in him for a while. Splitting the difference between War on Drugs’ pastoral Americana and Death Cab for Cutie’s sensitive guitar rock, Wild Pink's first two albums were so stacked with warm arrangements and amiable melodies that seemingly every critic who heard them wondered why the band hadn’t found a wider audience. But neither of those albums conjure the scale of A Billion Little Lights. Recorded with producer David Greenbaum, who engineered Beck's glossiest projects (Morning Phase, Colors, Hyperspace) the album builds out the American dioramas of its predecessors into full Hollywood sets. “The Shining But Tropical” is majestically maximalist, filtering the rousing synths of Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. anthems though the delirious, fog-machine haze of M83’s Saturdays = Youth.
Ross' greatest limitation remains his voice, which could charitably be called soft-spoken. Mostly he finds ways to make it work for him. Ratboys singer Julia Steiner accompanies him on much of the album, and her vocals brighten the songs even as they usually scan a shade sadder than Ross’. His modest vocals help keep the focus on those rippling arrangements, although occasionally, when his songs brush against Tom Petty’s working-class country rock, the effect is like a Super Bowl pickup truck commercial voiced over by a “This American Life” contributor. Ross’ small, sweet voice also disguises how barbed his lyrics can be. On paper, the chorus of the peppy “You Can Have It Back” basically amounts to “take your love and shove it,” but his voice is so polite it sounds like he’s wishing his ex well. His amiable delivery similarly tempers the album’s sharpest dig on “Oversharers Anonymous,” where he sings “You’re a fucking baby but your pain is valid, too.”
Ross frequently turns to daydreaming, and many songs contain elements of fantasy; he spends an entire verse of “Oversharers Anonymous” imagining buffalo hunters in the Old West. Yet much as it longs for an earlier era of America, A Billion Little Lights’ greatest nostalgia is for a more recent past, the indie-rock boom years of the late ’00s and early ’10s, when the genre looked as if it could still be a big tent. “Track Mud” opens with images of the Pacific Coast and the Rockies, but mostly it sounds like a postcard from Bon Iver’s Bon Iver. Elsewhere there are shades of the comforting hush of Iron & Wine and the hand-crocheted folk of Sufjan Stevens, alongside the expected generous pinches of War on Drugs. None of these sounds are past their expiration date, of course, and at their best Wild Pink demonstrate how inspired they can still be. But if A Billion Little Lights doesn't always awe quite like it should, given its considerable zeal and craftsmanship, it's because of that familiarity. The album has a big heart and big ambitions to match. The only thing missing is the very thing these songs long for the most: the thrill of discovery.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A Fleetwood Mac album in all but name, the two esteemed songwriters bring their signature tics and genius songwriting, though the rush wears thin as the album progresses.

Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie: Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie

Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie

A good chorus can put a whole lot of questions to bed—about a song, about a band, about a reason to get up in the morning, you name it. Fleetwood Mac, whose catalog is so festooned with world-bestriding hits that they can do a best-of reunion tour and leave “Sara” and “Hold Me” off the setlist, know this better than just about any other band. Their colossal pop collaborations kept them together through years of intense interpersonal turmoil and full decades of cordial détente. Like, in the grand scheme of things, is it really that big a deal if you left your bass-player husband for the light guy if the result is “You Make Loving Fun”?
Which brings us to the curious case of Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, a Fleetwood Mac album in all but name—and the conspicuous absence of the third member of the band’s songwriting trinity. Ending what seemed like a permanent departure from the band, keyboardist and vocalist McVie returned to the fold in 2014 for a massive tour. After it wrapped, she and guitarist/vocalist/production whiz Buckingham headed back to the studio together for the first time in well over a decade, with drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie joining them. As for Stevie Nicks, well: “What we do is go on the road, do a ton of shows and make lots of money. We have a lot of fun. Making a record isn’t all that much fun.”
Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie feels like a retort to Nicks’ statement. For McVie, the return to the band has been creatively invigorating as well as financially lucrative (Nicks herself gets that, facetiously describing McVie’s only other alternative to heading back to the studio: “‘Now I’m just gonna go back to London and sit in my castle for two years?’ She wanted to keep working”); Buckingham’s a born striver who kills time between tours by adding guitar texture to Nine Inch Nails records. Going on the road and making money is “what we do”? The pair’s collaboration feels like a “speak for yourself” in album form. To paraphrase a Rumours classic, they’ll make recording fun!
Their self-titled album is front-loaded with jams, with the kind of choruses that dissolve doubt on first listen. “Sleeping Around the Corner,” the album’s opener, sees Buckingham all but race through the first verse, just a couple of lines sung in an affected rasp, before unleashing a big and bouncy bass-driven chorus that springs into being like an inflatable castle at a kid’s birthday party. “Lord, I don’t wanna bring you down/No, I never meant to give you a frown” he and his multi-tracked army croon. Does it matter that he could have just sang “make you frown,” which is something that people actually say, instead of “give you a frown,” which is awkward and goofy and almost childlike? Yes, but only in the sense that it’s better this way. Keep in mind, this is a dude who kicked off his band’s bestselling record with a song that invited its subject to “lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff.” His line, “We made sweet love over and over,” is refined to the point of esotericism by comparison.
McVie takes point on the following song, “Feel About You.” No songwriter in rock does infatuation better than McVie—“Feel” may not join that august company of her immortally swoony “Everywhere,” but it’s love-struck smiley fun nonetheless. Its crunchy beat and marimba hook that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Haim album, and its almost doo-woppy chorus is just a “tell me more, tell me more” away from *Grease-*level crowd-pleasing territory.
After the strong, finger-picked Buckingham solo feature of “In My World,” however, the rush of hearing these two pop-rock titans team up starts to wear off. You hate to play armchair-psychiatrist with a group dynamic as complex as this, but it’s hard to resist the suspicion that the easy-going, Nicks-free composition and recording process left ideas unsharpened or undeveloped. McVie’s piano ballad “Game of Pretend” opens with a gorgeous melody that evokes Roxy Music’s “Sunset,” but its lush build-up leads to a verbose chorus that lacks the economic punch and power of her own “Songbird.” Buckingham’s “On With the Show,” an ostensible paean to “stand[ing] with my band,” closes with the phrase “let’s get it on” repeated approximately 36 times in a minute and a half, making you wonder why you wouldn’t just sit back down. And Mick’s big drums on “Too Far Gone” can’t disguise the pro forma nature of its boogie-woogie rock-by-numbers. “Goin’ underground,” McVie sings in the chorus—to what, the wine cellar?
Granted, successful moments are sprinkled throughout the whole album. As writers and performers, Buckingham and McVie are simply too talented, too engaging, too endearing for it to be any other way. To be a Fleetwood Mac fan is to feel like you’ve received teary text messages from its vocalists, like estranged friends turning to you in their hour of need. The ache in McVie’s voice when she opens the mid-tempo mid-album “Red Sun” with, “I wonder where you are as I fall upon my bed” is as tangible as a late-night mattress. Buckingham concludes “Love Is Here to Stay” with a melodic cascade that’ll have you skipping down the nearest mountainside at your earliest convenience. Just hearing their vocal tics—the way McVie pronounces “night” as “nigh-eeet,” or the catlike meow vowel twist Buckingham adds everytime he sings the word “down”—is enough to delight. Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie really does make listening fun—just not fundamental.


Even given the tongue-in-cheek hyperbole of the title, this six-track live EP fails to live up the former Talking Heads frontman’s former heights.

David Byrne: “…The Best Live Show of All Time” — NME EP

Viva Brother, Terris, Mansun, the Twang, Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong—all decidedly non-legacy acts that the NME has historically (and hysterically) hyperbolized during its nearly seven decade run. So leave it to the ever-clever David Byrne to grab a Niagara-Falls-of-a-gusher pull-quote from an NME live review and emblazon it on his new EP, complete with attribution. Byrne’s long legacy means he’s already responsible for one of the great live albums of the punk era as well as one of the best concert films of all time, and even the concert bootlegs are rightly revered. But Byrne is that rare legacy artist careful not to cash in on his longevity, avoiding all talk of Talking Heads reunions and constantly challenging himself with collaborations—be it St. Vincent or Fatboy Slim—while continuing to chase passions both old and new down unlikely rabbit holes.
Last year’s American Utopia, his first solo album in 14 years, might not have been his most formidable work, but it gave him impetus to stage his most lavish touring production since the era of Stop Making Sense. A dervish of 12 performers and percussionists, this tour drew from Byrne’s formidable songbook along with his most recent effort, accentuating his at times oddly optimistic outlook at our current predicament. As yet another NME post put it, the show “captured 2018’s zeitgeist of inclusivity, diversity, positivity, alienation and paranoia... redefin[ing] the concept of a live musical performance.” No doubt Byrne’s love of color-guard performances rubbed off on his own live presentation. This particular recording gathers six selections from a show at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn.
If only there were a way for “...The Best Live Show of All Time” —NME to properly capture that zesty event. There’s no doubt that any experience of the ecstatic Dada garble of Talking Heads’ funk bomb “I Zimbra” is awesome. But without the barefoot synchronized moves and matching silver suits that accompanied this presentation, the song’s manic energy isn’t quite captured on tape. The twitchy, mid-1980s minor hit “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”—part country, part township jive—fares better here, its lilt kept intact.
While on the surface they display the same rhythmic buoyancy as the classic material, Byrne’s more recent songs suffer in comparison. The zouk-y, dancehall-lite of Utopia’s “Every Day Is a Miracle” bears the kind of aslant yet catchy chorus of latter-day Heads, while the lyrics (“The brain of a chicken/And the dick of a donkey/A pig in a blanket/And that’s why you want me”) remain cringeworthy. At a time when doubt, disillusionment, climate catastrophe, and the pall of nuclear annihilation can consume our every waking day, it’s worth remembering that few lyricists captured the dystopian dread and cognitive dissonance of the Cold War ’80s better than Byrne on Remain in Light. But in 2018 Byrne’s song involving the president and a state “where reality is fiction” instead finds him waxing about “doggy dancers doing doody” instead. Much like that NME tag itself, it feels ludicrously ahistorical.


The Seattle band U-Men released only one full-length during their eight-year run in the 1980s, but their legend loomed large over a generation. A new Sub Pop reissue collects their crucial catalog.

U-Men

If Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt had had their way, this would not be the first U-Men release on Sub Pop Records. According to U-Men drummer and co-founder Charlie Ryan, the label did nothing less than beg his group to join their roster. “They’d say, ‘You guys gotta get on our label!” Ryan recalls in the 2011 grunge oral history Everybody Loves Our Town. “And we’d say, “No, I don’t think so.’ Because they wanted it so bad, it was just more fun saying no.”
Such was the reverence that the U-Men cultivated during their eight-year run in the 1980s, and the reason for all the buzz surrounding this 2xCD retrospective, which gathers together everything the band recorded. The quartet was, at the time, considered the first best hope to put Seattle’s punk and underground rock scene on the national map. Their legend has only grown since with Ryan, vocalist John Bigley, guitarist Tom Price, and bassist Jim Tillman representing a crucial link between the untethered garage assault of Seattle’s early rock scene (the Sonics, the Wailers) and the commercial explosion that happened there in the early 1990s.
In any case, the hype was and is warranted. The music compiled on this set is taken from the group’s sole full-length—1988’s Step on a Bug—and a handful of EPs, singles, and compilation appearances. It is brash and serpentine, a quick burning conflagration fueled by the group’s collective love of adversarial punk and post-punk (they named themselves after the title of a Pere Ubu bootleg), and a tendency toward self-sabotage. There isn’t much growth to be found within the U-Men’s discography. The band that recorded a viscous four-song EP for Pavitt’s short-lived record label Bomb Shelter in 1984 sounds pretty much the same as one that hit the studio four years later for a 7” released on Amphetamine Reptile. But then again, there doesn’t need to be. Once the classic U-Men lineup was in place, the four hit on a perfect formula that allowed them to set things to a boil or a steady simmer as needed.
Within U-Men’s chosen framework, the band found plenty of variation and ways to rip at their own seams. Price, especially, proved to be the molten core of the band. The guitarist could sound just as sinister jangling through a slow dance number like “Green Trumpet” or hitting the clean, tolling chords of “A Three Year Old Could Do That” as he did slashing through “Last Lunch” or adding a gushing discordance to “Whistlin’ Pete.” The influence of players like Poison Ivy of the Cramps and Pere Ubu’s Tom Herman is evident, but he bends their ideas to his will rather than simply aping them.
What truly helped fuel the U-Men’s infamy was the presence of its vocalist, Bigley. The band were often compared to the equally unhinged and blazing Birthday Party and much of that was due to his vocal performances. Like Nick Cave, Bigley could slip into an almost soothing croon, but that was often just a splash of color added to his Pollock-like canvas. He preferred to howl, spit, stutter, and wail like a feral animal finally let loose from its cage. Even a song as comparatively straightforward as the stop-start noise-rock grind of “Dig It a Hole”—released on a 1987 single by Black Label, another Pavitt-helmed imprint run out of Seattle shop Fallout Records—is given an even more confrontational edge via Bigley’s growling vocal attack.
For as large as their shadow looms among a generation of musicians in Seattle, there’s not much in the U-Men’s sound that feels too connected to the grunge aesthetic. Outside of the crunch and gush of Price’s guitar, there was far too much swing in their rhythms that more metal-inspired groups like Nirvana and Soundgarden would dare. What the U-Men and their contemporaries like Green River and Skin Yard did was offer a promise beyond the simple three-chord attack of punk.
They also proved a somewhat cautionary tale about how to survive as independent musicians. Though the U-Men’s live shows within Seattle were memorable—like the infamous appearance at the Bumbershoot Arts Festival in 1985 where they set fire to a small moat in front of their stage using lighter fluid—their few tours outside the Northwest were hampered by multiple canceled dates and a lot of drink and drugs. If you were going to make it as a band, you’d better have your shit together even just a little bit more than these guys did.
There’s no denying, though, how foundational the U-Men were. Their music stands now as both a crucial piece in the roiling Seattle scene and as part of a noise-rock continuum that includes like-minded outfits such as Scratch Acid and Butthole Surfers. Some of U-Men’s members did carry on after the band split in 1989, with Price starting the more rockabilly/garage-influenced Gas Huffer and Tillman playing bass with psych rockers Love Battery. But their work in the U-Men, as this essential document bears out, was a spark that helped their hometown emerge into a landmark on the international music atlas.


The debut album from the UK's unique Wild Beasts is essentially a morality play as cabaret show as rollicking indie rock record.

Limbo, Panto

Wild Beasts' name comes from the 20th century French art movement Les Fauves (also the inspiration for Les Savy Fav), so maybe the French term "belle laide"-- a woman who is attractive but not conventionally beautiful-- best describes singer Hayden Thorpe's voice. Thorpe's voice howls and thrashes, other times it actually sings or simpers or sighs, but only when he stretches it to the ceiling does it come into its own. His voice feels close in temperament to Antony Hegarty or Baby Dee's, but its mix of pointed sexuality and ambiguous gender points back to Boy George or David Bowie.
That indeterminate quality is the central theme of Limbo, Panto. Vocally, Thorpe plays with what idealized masculinity sounds like; lyrically, the band wants to know what masculinity feels like. "Men to be men, must love and pity," Thorpe announces on opener "Vigil For a Fuddy Duddy". By Limbo, Panto's end he's cursed Aristotle, gone for "casual sex with a hard up thug," and sworn on his "own cock and balls." If there's a central character across these tracks, it's vice itself. Limbo, Panto is essentially a morality play as cabaret show as rollicking indie rock record. The Sunset Rubdown-like full-bodied pomp of "The Club of Fathomless Love" also runs down a series of rhetorical questions: "I've sheened...have I not?/ I've Brylcreemed, have I not?/ I've length of loinly manliness, have I not?" That speech oddity would sound appropriate in a camp, old-timey staging of Hamlet.
The funny thing is that Wild Beasts pull it all off with grinning, chirping enjoyment. True, lots of the tracks on Limbo, Panto use minor chords to enhance the casual depravity of its characters, but nearly all the guitars chime and sparkle. And others, like "Woebegone Wanderers", take on melodramatic halts and cabaret flourishes that render its subject matter comical. "Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants", originally recorded in 2006, still shows this. The band sound more aggressive on the re-recorded LP version: the beat more danceable, the title line shakier and more seductive. It's also Thorpe's most impressive vocal performance.
Underneath these filmy and seductive layers is not a band in limbo. This may be Wild Beasts' first album, but they've got a fully developed aesthetic, one that is thematically and vocally alien, but sonically, pop and conventional. Maybe a voice that bizarre needs something pretty to curl up on, but each song, whether a ballad or a romper (mostly the latter), generates enough turbulence to float with pockmarked elegance.


The Finnish producer continues his streak of luminous electronic releases with an ecstatic, body-moving, and curiously serene collection of techno bangers.

Resonance

Aleksi Perälä started out in the late ’90s recording ambient electronica under the names Ovuca and Astrobotnia, but the Finnish producer has hit a particularly rich seam of late, and he owes it all to Colundi. What is Colundi? Well, it’s kind of hard to say. At its simplest, its advocates explain, it’s an alternative tuning system—“the Colundi Sequence”—that rejects conventional Western tuning in favor of a number of unusual resonant frequencies. Dig through the web pages and internet groups dedicated to its existence, though, and the story rapidly becomes more tangled and unlikely, taking in numerology, mysticism, sacred geometry, and various flavors of woo.
It’s probably sensible to take the rhetoric surrounding Colundi with a big pinch of salt, but it’s undeniable that for Perälä, the idea has been galvanizing. In the last year or two, he’s released a startling brace of music through Bandcamp and on a string of friendly labels—and Resonance, his second release for Nina Kraviz’s трип, is a giddy joy. There are echoes of the music that Perälä made for his friend Aphex Twin’s Rephlex Records in the ’00s—obscure IDM releases guided by a misty sense of melody. If those early albums often had a muted or dreamy quality, though, Resonance feels bold and upfront: a journey through beatific techno modes defined by its heady propulsion.
A familiar characteristic of IDM is a certain rhythmic fussiness— intricately filleted breakbeats, head-scratching time signatures, disorienting glitches. No such tactics are on display on Resonance. On the contrary, you often get the sense that Perälä is searching for the path of least resistance, hoping to unlock some sort of ecstatic yogic flow. The bulk of the record’s 46 minutes is dominated by a thumping four-on-the-floor kick, but the unrelenting drums are a framework through which Perälä drapes dazzling electronic progressions—glimmering stargazer melodies, growling acid lines, or ringing tones that evoke the holy calm of wind chimes in a rural temple. The result is curiously multifarious: You can easily imagine these tracks dropped deep in the mix at Berghain or Tresor, but they feel equally suited to meditation or contemplation.
There are very few dull spots, although the 10 tracks feel very much of a piece, or like variations on a theme. The identikit titling—“UKMH51900039” through to “UKMH51900048”—gives the impression Perälä might have made them in a single sitting, molding them to his secret formula. In interviews, Perälä talks about Colundi as if it holds the answer to life, the universe, and everything in between. But you don’t necessarily have to swallow Colundi to appreciate what he’s doing. The best electronic dance music stirs the soul as well as the body, and Resonance—sparkling, ecstatic, slightly enigmatic—does just that.


Oakland band featuring one of Hunx's Punkettes offers its sophomore album of sonically diverse garage rock.

Sleep Talk

San Francisco's cup has long runneth over with very good garage bands, so the outpour into neighboring Oakland should have been expected. One of that city's most notable garage albums of late, Hunx and his Punx's Too Young to Be in Love, serves as a nice introduction to Shannon Shaw. She provides quite a few of the album's best moments with her brassy, impassioned alto, possessing loads of singing ability and an irresistible charisma. As one of Hunx's "Punkettes," Shaw proved a talented enough roleplayer to convince you she deserved her own band. Luckily, she's actually had one for a while now.
On Shannon and the Clams' debut, 2009's I Wanna Go Home, Shaw and co-songwriter and guitarist Cody Blanchard added a rockabilly punch to the loosey-goosey garage-punk of the Growlers and early Black Lips records. Though the album was an all-around solid exhibit of Shaw's charms as a frontwoman and her chemistry with Blanchard, Sleep Talk is a refinement, a streamlining, an improvement in every way.
That spike in quality begins with the band's heightened versatility. While I Wanna Go Home split the difference between rumbling, rousing rock tunes and sultry slow jams, Sleep Talk is impressively diverse. Shaw wails and shouts her way through the dark proto-punk of "Toxic Revenge", conjuring the leather jackets of Max's Kansas City, punctuated with a cacophony of saxophones. Album highlight "Tired of Being Bad" combines Shaw's captivating, emotive vocals with Apollo Theater soul, an unexpected but welcome match.
In addition to Shaw's ability as a singer and her infectious vocal tics-- she whoops and yelps all over "Old Man Winter", and her raspy growl on "Done With You" could strip the bark off of trees-- Sleep Talk benefits from some unique songwriting. "The Woodsman" serves as a striking R&B murder ballad, while the production on the record-- which could accurately be described as "dusky"-- will likely be mistaken as "lo-fi" when it's simply vintage, a common misconception for modern music recorded without the assistance of computers.
Elsewhere on Sleep Talk, Blanchard exists as Shaw's equal counterpart. His guitar licks sound untrained but impressive, understated and effective but eager to cede the spotlight to the band's frontwoman. As a backing vocalist, Blanchard is arguably even better, adding a classic R&B vibe to both "Tired of Being Bad" and the album's title track while bolstering "Oh Louie" with a cascading 1950s rock'n'roll baritone.
"Half Rat" tests the band's use of dynamics by switching from diaphanous to rough-hewn and back, providing a stirring crescendo and fierce climax for the album-- replete with drum rolls, a galloping chorus, and everything coming apart at the seams by the song's finish. It's a kind of overview of Sleep Talk's strengths, showing how productively Shannon and the Clams can combine grit and prettiness, how effortlessly they mix the salt with the sugar.


The steward of the almost bulletproof Hotflush label, home to nominally dubstep breakouts by Mount Kimbie and Joy Orbison, issues his excellent second LP.

Triangulation

When the numerous permutations of dubstep are discussed, Paul Rose (Scuba) is usually credited with steering the genre toward softer, more musical arrangements. Scuba has done this both through his own work and through his stewardship of the almost bulletproof Hotflush label, home to 2009's nominally dubstep breakouts by Mount Kimbie and Joy Orbison. On Triangulation, Scuba continues his label's thrilling run with a proper full-length of fluid, melodic dubstep that sounds beautiful and aggressive in equal measure.
If Scuba's name doesn't resonate quite like those of his labelmates, it's likely because through one full-length (2008's A Mutual Antipathy) and an armful of singles, Scuba has yet to stumble into one breakout track (his remix of his own "Hard Boiled", under his SCB moniker, came closest). Scuba tracks tend to fall into one of two camps: bass-heavy thumpers or slow, melodic cut-ups that often sound like dubstep's version of a ballad. Scuba's dance numbers have a tendency to lie in the weeds and lurk; where a song like "Hyph Mngo" sounds like a siren, Scuba's are the glue that hold a mix together. (See: DJ /rupture subtly weaving Scuba's "Braille Diving" into the second half of Uproot.)
This seamless construction defines Triangulation. What Scuba lacks as a dance hit-maker he makes up for with careful pacing and an ever-present tension between dark, tech-y sounds and inviting melodicism. These sorts of daring sleight-of-hand tricks are Scuba's specialty. "Before" sounds like Boards of Canada covering modern R&B, and it leads into "Tracers", a pounding, industrial-strength romp. "So You Think You're Special" plasters an echoing, hopeful loop ("Here you'll find the one/ Here in the sun") over ominous, pulsing bass. It's not a comedown so much as club music for those who never make it out of the apartment.
Had "dubstep" never entered the lexicon, it would be easy enough to label Triangulation house music, but without the implied build-ups or ecstasy. Triangulation ultimately falls into the dubstep camp because of its mood and temperament. By expertly juxtaposing the dark with the romantic, the hectic with the serene, Scuba's produced a triumphant, balanced album. It's also one that can feel too well adjusted. It's easy to hear parts of Triangulation as clay for bridging DJ sets or potent source material for remixers. But Triangulation is also worthy of attention in its own right, a cohesive record whose complications lurk just under its surface.


The fashionable UK punk-rap frontman has been made into an icon, but his second album is too often a pale and rote imitation of rebellion.

Internationally Unknown

Long before Jordan Cardy became known as the punk-rap miscreant Rat Boy, the other kids on the playground likened the Essex native’s physical appearance to that of a rodent. His severe dyslexia, coupled with his proclivities for skateboarding and art over academia, resulted in chronic absences from school. He was fired from his job working the dreaded night shift at the Wetherspoons, a British pub chain catering mostly to chavs and suits; McDonald’s flat-out turned him down. Through it all, Cardy kept as relentless as his namesake critter, uploading his punk-flavored hip-hop tracks to SoundCloud en masse, and fearlessly pitching anyone and everyone on the platform in hopes that someone was listening.
As it turns out, people were listening: namely bassist Drew McConnell of the post-punk band Babyshambles. Intrigued, he took a then-17-year-old Cardy under his wing and introduced him to various music-industry types in the UK, including the folks at Parlophone Records, who added Rat Boy to their roster in 2015. Less than five years later, Rat Boy has grown his scumbaggery into not only a full-fledged project (sampled by Kendrick Lamar, no less) and an international streetwear line (called Scum, obviously) but a walking flashpoint for UK youth culture as a whole. This success stems mostly from Cardy’s timely, intersectional sound—a self-made mélange of hardcore punk, ’90s hip-hop, second-wave ska, and big-beat funk à la Fatboy Slim, set to familiar accounts of wasted youth and generational ennui—but also from how he’s a Supreme-sporting skate-rat who’s really fucking cool. (“[His style], that’s what got me into him,” said Liam Gallagher’s 16-year-old son Gene.”)
Rat Boy’s second full-length album, Internationally Unknown, doesn’t resemble an album so much as an AirPods-friendly, watered-down distillation of each and every soundtrack to “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.” The riffs skew crunchy and distorted, the drums airtight and boom-bap inspired, the arrangements snotty and brash, and the lyrics perfunctorily rebellious, filled with one-dimensional portraits of dithering cops, dead-end jobs, and lazy afternoons at the skatepark. The crisp, dubby production, courtesy of Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, deepens the record’s nostalgic focus even further. Their ska-lite sheen and skater-kid swagger across many songs including “No Peace No Justice”—featuring the seasoned punk on guest vocals—could easily pass for Transplants, Armstrong’s rap-leaning side project from the early aughts.
The strongest moments on Internationally Unknown come when Cardy abandons those rote Dogtown set pieces for something a little closer to home. “Don’t Hesitate,” far and away the album’s highlight, puts an endearingly goofy spin on Cornershop’s beat-heavy Britpop. “Young gun hustler made his moves/Glock against the clock, have you heard the news?” Cardy chirps, exaggeratedly mean-mugging from atop the rubbery sub-bass, wholly well-aware that he can’t play the tough guy to save his life, but giving zero fucks nonetheless. The standout “So What,” a cynical, call-and-response laundry-list of all the shit that can go wrong in a young person’s life, ranging from losing their job to being shaken down by the cops, has similar comedic merit but applies those jokes to more universal ends.
“When I was a kid, I did feel like there were not, like, people that were into the same stuff,” Cardy said of his obsession with ’90s culture in a recent New York Times profile. This boilerplate sentiment is arguably why young people find Rat Boy so appealing to begin with: Cardy holds a familiar mirror to the clusterfuck of growing up. He hopes it'll make the existential boogiemen a little more cartoonish, a little more conquerable. A little bit of retrospective absurdity goes a long way—if only the rest of Internationally Unknown wasn’t so pale and redundant.


Duster’s debut was barely a blip on the radar—and then, like a comet, they reappeared. A comprehensive box set from Numero Group revisits the spacey, unassuming band with new perspective.

Capsule Losing Contact

Until very recently, being a Duster fan felt much like listening to their records: being lost in a memory. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the San Jose, California trio crafted downcast lo-fi that lent itself to introspection. They’ve been called slowcore, the deliberately paced style pioneered by Codeine, Low, and Bedhead; space rock, a genre of psychedelic textual experimentations; and sadcore, the nebulous scene that celebrated nothing. “Experimental depressive music” is how multi-instrumentalist Clay Parton once described his band. Duster fed a sense of mystery by shying away from press and avoiding contextualizing their music with biography. When they began a hiatus in 2001, it seemed inevitable that their faint star would fade to black.
But much to their surprise, Duster’s music resurfaced. Thanks to some combination of the internet and crate-digging music culture, Duster became an unexpected cult favorite. Copies of their debut album, Stratosphere, barely a blip on the radar when it was first released in 1998, began to command as much as $200 on Discogs. Younger bands like Girlpool and Snail Mail cited Duster as an influence. Finally, in April 2018, Duster began showing signs of life. A new Instagram page teased new music, and a few months later, the band announced their first concert in 18 years. With the Duster Renaissance in full swing, Numero Group has released the retrospective Capsule Losing Contact, which compiles Duster’s two full-length releases, three EPs, various compilation tracks, and unreleased loosies into a sleepy box set.
Duster have never been self-mythologizing, and Capsule Losing Contact does little to illuminate their biography beyond presenting the band’s progression. Barring the whirly 1996 single “East Reed,” and other lost recordings, Duster’s proper output begins with 1997’s Transmission, Flux 7". Its five songs are turbulent, fuzzy 4-track experimentations that plant the thematic seeds for Duster’s fascination with the cosmos (see “Orbitron” and “My Friends Are Cosmonauts”). “Light Years,” taken from the following year’s Apex, Trance-Like 7", furthers the lunar motif, while on its companion piece “Four Hours,” Duster push through their melancholy to express an intense desire for human connection. That silently floating figure was a human all along.
On their 1998 opus Stratosphere, Duster further explored the depths of the astronaut’s melancholia. Like the atmospheric layer from which it takes its name, the band’s debut full-length is a vast expanse that encourages the mind to unravel in endless contemplation. Using simplistic, cyclical guitar melodies and thickly woven electronic textures, the songs spiral into a state of sublimity. About half of these 17 tracks are atmospheric instrumentals; when Parton or bandmate Canaan Dove Amber do manage to murmur some cryptically poetic verses about disconnect and anxiety, their voices are muffled as if by thick gauze. Only near the end of the staggering “Earth Moon Transit” does a clear emotional point emerge: “I wonder if you think about me like I do of you/At night.” Recorded largely on 4-track cassette machines with production assistance from Pacific Northwest indie rock legend Phil Ek, Stratosphere radiates intimacy even in its starkest moments. The overall effect is like that of resting beneath a weighted blanket, cocooned from the intrusions of the outside world.
From the opening track, Stratosphere establishes a tempo that waxes and wanes from droning gloom to dreamy bliss. Duster take off with “Moon Age,” a blippy synth instrumental that conveys the cosmic innocence of Major Tom, floating in that “most peculiar way.” Its detached tranquility is immediately countered by Stratosphere’s most upbeat songs, “Heading for the Door” and “Gold Dust.” On a record full of heady introspection, this is the closest Duster come to approximating what was happening elsewhere in 1998 indie rock; the latter riff sounds like the wistful earworm cooked up by Pavement a few years earlier. Slow-building standout “Echo, Bravo,” begins with a frenzy of strung-out tape distortion that bursts into a sludgy meltdown before fading into quivering drone, an effect immediately countered by the listless “Constellations.” So Stratosphere goes, undulating between soft and harsh, often within one song, climaxing with the seven-minute title track. Beginning with a haze of rippling feedback, “Stratosphere” builds layer upon layer of dissonance until the abstraction fizzles out of its own accord. It’s less momentous than other tracks, declining to arrive at any emotional destination, instead embracing the inexplicable.
Near the end of the recording of Stratosphere, Parton and Amber brought in drummer Jason Albertini (an original Queens of the Stone Age member), who ended up joining Duster full-time. In 1999, the band recorded the 1975 EP, which bridges Stratosphere’s hushed lethargy with accessibility. (In between, the three bandmates quietly worked on an even spacier side project, the short-lived Valium Aggelein, not included here). Some songs on the EP (“Memphis Sophisticate,” “And Things (Are Mostly Ghosts)”) are unexpectedly lucid, while others (“The Motion Picture,” “August Relativity”) disappear back into Stratosphere’s cloudy embrace. Closing track “Want No Light to Shine” begins with a delicate reverie of synthesizers and strings that gives way to meandering piano melody. Whispers of San Jose traffic rumble in the background, as if the door of the recording space was propped open to let in some light.
On their last full-length record, 2000’s Contemporary Movement, Duster return to earth. Though it compresses Stratosphere’s atmospheric sprawl into a tight, song-oriented package, Contemporary Movement retains its predecessor’s escapism. The tone is heavier, almost grungy at times, but the overall cadence remains slow, allowing songs to unspool patiently. While the vocals are still considerably buried beneath washes of heavy guitars and analog squall, the songwriting is given more of a spotlight—albeit a dim one. Unlike Stratosphere, which orbited so high that true contact seemed unlikely, Contemporary Movement’s longing for emotional connection feels hopeful. “Goddamn, I wish I was a little bit smarter,” goes one humoursly earnest line of “The Breakup Suite”; in that moment, Parton and Amber’s gravelly warbles echo the nasally self-deprecation of their former label-mates Modest Mouse. Early droners “Operations” and “Diamond” trudge along, all blurry guitar friction and brooding drums that never quite lift off the ground. “Cooking” picks the mood up a bit, a swirling bit of sunshine amidst the clouds. The euphoria is never as freewheeling as on Stratosphere, but here it feels firmly tethered to earth.
Though Duster went on an extended hiatus after Contemporary Movement, the bandmates never stopped collaborating. Both Amber and Parton have played on Albertini’s project Helvetia, and Parton founded a label, the Static Cult, to release Helvetia records (and his own, under the name Eiafuawn). As the bandmates moved on, their music as Duster retained its ineffable quality, one the band themselves sought to define at the time. Contemporary Movement concludes with an expression of that uncertainty: “The audience finds their feet/Clap and scream/But what does it mean?” At a Duster reunion concert in December 2018, the line felt eerily salient. It’s strange to hear such intensely private and personal music in a crowd, and at the end of each song, there was almost an awkward uncertainty: Do we clap? In the end we did, and some people screamed, but something unspeakable lingered long after the band left the stage. Capsule Losing Contact is a welcome survey of Duster’s legacy, and an opportunity to appreciate a modest band that means something different to everyone.


On Morning Phase, Beck returns to the style and form of his 2002 singer-songwriter record Sea Change. Instead of a much-needed daring comeback statement, it feels more like a pointed exhale.

Morning Phase

“I won’t be long,” sang Beck last year, over and over, on a song he quietly self-released. Lyrically, the track was clouded by some of the songwriter’s favorite themes: apocalypse, disconnection, death. But musically, “I Won’t Be Long” couldn’t be more alive. Across 15 minutes, it casually segued between alien synth oscillations, atmospheric funk, queasy reverb rock, and squished punk, effectively updating the post-modern glories of his 18-year-old Odelay. It was a fine piece of evidence showing that Beck was back—that the previous six years of producing excellent albums for Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stephen Malkmus, covering the likes of INXS and Yanni with playful abandon, and tossing out stunning one-offs like his 20-minute Philip Glass remix revived him after a string of less-than-great albums. But “I Won’t Be Long” was a red herring. While he’s apparently working on another genre-jumping LP, his new album, Morning Phase, is not that record. Instead of a much-needed daring comeback statement, it’s more like a pointed exhale. It feels safe.
Beck’s music didn’t used to be comfortable. Early on, if he wasn’t putting a modern twist on the blues tradition, he was splicing styles that had never met before, or paying tribute to his R&B heroes with unabashed glee. His entire ethos involved challenges: to history, to authenticity, to cliche. So when 2002’s Sea Change came along with its heartbroken callbacks to Serge Gainsbourg, Nick Drake, and Gordon Lightfoot, it was surprising because it was so straightforward—and emotive. It had the poster boy of irony looking straight into the camera and confessing his bitterness and desolation following a breakup. Morning Phase marks the first time since then that Beck has returned to this more forthright style, partly due to the fact that a batch of tapes containing Sea Change–style demos were tragically lost in the years following that album. But while the new record is unequivocally related to its forebear—it features most of the same players and a strikingly similar sonic palette—there are differences that set it apart, and bring it down.
Rather than focusing on a resigned anger or ambiguous darkness, Morning Phase is plagued by a frustrating in-between-ness that can also come off as flat and neutral. Many of the lyrics read like vague zen koans that perilously walk a tightrope above meaninglessness: wheels turn, hearts beat, skies fall. Without many concrete details to anchor the songs, they can become too ethereal for their own good. Part of the idea behind Morning Phase involves renewal and maturation: If you live to be a married 43-year-old father of two, Beck may be saying, the peaks and valleys of youth eventually even out. The sense of loss on the album is more internalized and indirect, which is interesting in theory, but in practice it can dull things into oblivion. “Say Goodbye” strings together breakup scenes with Beck as the narrator who’s seen it all before but can only muster sidelined commentary. “These are the words we use to say goodbye,” he shrugs. You get an overall sense of wisdom from the lines on this album, though that wisdom too rarely coalesces into something truly affecting.
All of which is even more vexing due to the fact that most of Morning Phase sounds stunning; as the producer of the album, Beck matches Sea Change studio guru Nigel Godrich tweak for tweak. But that raises another issue: While Beck’s technical chops have grown impressively, Morning Phase only proves that he can tackle Sea Change–style production, like he’s trying to redraw a masterpiece. Even so, his singing has never felt stronger, adding to the voice-of-god vibe (which plays through to his practically disembodied head on the album’s cover). And every guitar pluck and string swipe is rendered with a warmth that backs up Beck’s analog evangelicalism; on the gorgeous proper opener “Morning,” you can practically see the rays of California sun peek through the blinds before the light comes through full-force on the hook. “Unforgiven,” another highlight, very well may be Beck’s finest technical vocal performance as he milks every syllable while his composer father David Campbell provides a swirling symphony behind him. The similarly epic “Wave,” however, falls into melodrama and ends up sounding like a lesser version of Radiohead’s Godrich-produced “Pyramid Song.” So while Morning Phase is remarkably easy to listen to, the distinction isn’t completely praiseworthy.
Recalling his 1990s emergence in a Pitchfork interview from 2011, Beck said, “Back then I had a feeling that we weren’t quite measuring up to the music that had come before, or it just wasn’t as important somehow.” Of course, for a generation of adventurous music fans who sang along with “The New Pollution” in the backseat, artists like Beck and Pavement and Sonic Youth were indeed more important than the classic rockers who came before them, even if it didn’t seem so at the time. And the way that those artists dismantled the known canon and morphed new shapes from it made them exciting. Based on some of his recent work—a 30-minute track here, a songbook album there—Beck does not seem through with trying to rearrange our musical synapses, which is why Morning Phase ultimately is a disappointment. Not only does it uphold the myths of baby boomer greats like the Byrds, Neil Young, and Simon & Garfunkel with a staid type of reverence, but it also piggybacks on the legacy of one of Beck’s best records. It’s the sound of a rule-breaker dutifully coloring inside the lines.


On her solo debut, the L.A.-based singer and songwriter taps members of the War on Drugs and Warpaint for winning songs about finding delight in despair.

Distance

Jess Cornelius prefers to remain in motion. Born and raised in New Zealand, the singer decamped to Australia in her late teens, launching the promising Melbourne rock band Teeth & Tongue several years later. Across four albums, Teeth & Tongue pivoted constantly, from snarling Bad Seeds blues to the velvet-gloved rock of Feist to synth-pop so cloying it seemed like a last cynical bid on careerism. After a decade stuck at the precipice of a breakthrough, Cornelius stepped away from Teeth & Tongue in 2017 to record five solo songs, all spare electric strums and soaring vibrato. That EP, Nothing Is Lost, felt at last like Cornelius’ real breakthrough—arching psalms of sadness and disappointment, rendered with the quiver and clarity of Angel Olsen. Her debut LP, the arresting Distance, suggests it was not another phase.
Cornelius left Australia in 2018 for Los Angeles, where she began recording Distance in a series of studios with session bands that included members of the War on Drugs, Warpaint, and Woods. She brought her restlessness with her, and it animates these 10 songs, from the way she treats musical inspirations and reference points like quick trysts to her lyrical disinterest in monogamy or the mores of adulthood. In recent years, the tension between being a footloose touring musician and the social pressure to grow up compelled Cornelius to grapple with age and expectation. On Distance, she details difficult situations—miscarriages, breakups, affairs, pep talks for one—with tragicomic candor, looking less for sympathy than a way to work through the mess. “You’re lonely,” she sings at one point. “Oh, but ain’t you livin’?”
Slipping in and out of musical guises with preternatural ease, Cornelius remains a chameleonic bandleader, as she was with Teeth & Tongue. She jabs back at some selfish prick with the punchy garage-rock of “Banging My Head” and floats through a languid R&B haze for “Easy for No One,” an ode to not finding some great meaning or purpose in growing up. The muted doo-wop of “Palm Trees” moves on a similar California breeze as Best Coast, a mode tailormade for Cornelius’ questions about what a new state of residence may do for her state of mind.
Much of Distance hinges on some version of a rock band—even “Love and Low Self Esteem,” a barbed codependence critique that served as the centerpiece of Cornelius’ EP, gets fitted with walloping drums and howling organs. But Distance’s quiet, spare outlier is one of its most stunning moments. A duet for her wistful nylon-stringed guitar and Mary Lattimore’s pensive harp, “Born Again” conjures the candlelit majesty of Marissa Nadler or even Sandy Denny. Cornelius’ bracing voice suddenly sounds ancient and fading, rendering snapshots of her youth against a backdrop of feeling tired and worn by time. “One of these days, I’m going to be born again,” she briefly taunts, as though ready to maraud in search of lost youth.
For the most part, though, Cornelius handles heaviness with an enviable lightness, finding new resiliency in every rebound. She’s funny, self-effacing, and honest, wry enough to half-apologize for any trouble she’s caused by having an affair while also hoping it resumes soon. Even “Body Memory,” where she mentions a miscarriage and surveys the damage it did to her relationship and sense of self, somehow feels ebullient. Harmonies lift her above each hurdle. Cornelius’ credo during all this is the brilliant “No Difference,” an anthem for finding happiness on whatever terms and in whatever way you deem reasonable. It’s the kind of song you might sing to yourself after any hard day.
A curious thing happened to Cornelius in California before she could finish Distance: She met someone and, in late June, had a baby, Tui, exactly a month before releasing the record. She sighs at the very thought of having children during “Easy for No One,” as if it’s a possibility that’s simply passed her by. But in the jubilant music video for “Kitchen Floor,” a song about bailing on another one-night stand, she dances across the stars on Hollywood Boulevard in last night’s leopard-print dress while also very pregnant. That’s the delight of remaining in motion: You never know exactly what you’re going to find.

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The classic 1971 LP, a landmark for Gaye and pop music at large, is reissued in a deluxe package including an early mix and demos.

Marvin Gaye: What's Going On [40th Anniversary Edition]

Marvin Gaye submitted a version of the most important single of his career, "What's Going On", to Motown Records in the summer of 1970. Over the previous seven years, the relationship between the singer and his label was contentious yet fruitful; gritty uptempo songs like "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" and "Hitch Hike" were hits, but they undermined Gaye's dream to be a balladeer in the mold of Nat King Cole. Those lusty trifles also roused the internal conflict between the artist's gospel upbringing and his endless desire for carnal pleasure. And while Gaye aspired to be more than just a singer within Motown's assembly-line chug, his boss, brother-in-law, and fellow hard-headed egoist Berry Gordy Jr. wasn't so crazy about the idea. So when Gordy heard that original "What's Going On" mix-- which is included in this box set for the first time-- he rejected the song, reportedly calling it "the worst thing I've ever heard in my life."
Instead of releasing "What's Going On" that fall, Motown put out the Gaye compilation Super Hits, which depicts its clean-shaven star as a cartoon superhero flying through the air and fixing a radio tower as a buxom damsel perilously hangs from his shoulder. But Gaye wanted nothing more than to blow up that gleaming image of himself-- now in his early 30s, he would accept nothing but complete control over his art. And if Motown wasn't going to release his first self-produced song, he wasn't going to make music for Motown. Gaye sat idle for months until his label, desperate to put out something-- anything-- from its biggest solo star, finally eked the single out under Gordy's nose on January 21, 1971. It was an instant success, hitting No. 2 on the pop charts and, perhaps more importantly for Gaye, giving him a win in his constant battle with Gordy, who couldn't deny a smash. Five months later, Marvin Gaye released his full-grown symphony to God, What's Going On, with little resistance.
Forty years of ubiquity have made the title track commonplace, so it's easy to forget that the song was the "most avant-garde hit Motown ever had," according to Ben Edmonds' thorough album history What's Going On: Marvin Gaye and the Last Days of the Motown Sound. With this album, Gaye wished to sidestep the sound that made him and others famous during Motown's untouchable 60s run, trading in that trademark big, bright beat for laid-back grooves inspired by Duke Ellington, Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, and Santana. And not only was the album a coming-out party for Gaye as a producer and songwriter, he found his signature voice-- soft, floating, airy-- on What's Going On, too. "I felt like I'd finally learned to sing," he told biographer David Ritz. "I'd been studying the microphone for a dozen years, and I suddenly saw what I'd been doing wrong. I'd been singing too loud." The record and its creative revelations led to his stunning 70s auteur period, which birthed three more classics: 1973's Let's Get It On, 1976's I Want You, and 1978's Here, My Dear. Yet What's Going On still stands tallest, making this 40th anniversary, 2CD/LP edition more of a welcome reminder than just another eulogy to baby-boomer culture.
Much has been made of What's Going On's political bent, and it's true that the music was partially inspired by Marvin's brother Frankie, who had come back from a three-year tour of Vietnam, along with troublingly violent episodes like the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kent State shootings that saw four students killed by national guardsmen. Songs like peace-espousing title track and "What's Happening Brother", which finds Gaye expressing a war veteran's helplessness upon returning home, show Marvin's dismay toward his country and government. But this album isn't just a protest time capsule. Far from it. Gaye's disappointment isn't just societal, it's personal as well. During this period, the singer had lost his duet partner and dear friend, Tammi Terrell, and his marriage to Gordy's sister Anna was violently breaking down, and he was being tailed by the IRS for unpaid back taxes. His resulting depression is evident throughout; What's Going On isn't a fiery album filled with timely sloganeering. Part of its long-lasting appeal involves an element of true-to-life resignation. "Who's willing to try to save a world/ That's destined to die," he sings on "Save the Children", pinpointing an American melancholia-- a mix of world-saving power and funereal inevitability-- that endures today.
But the album doesn't wallow, either. It hums and glides on the effortless, multi-tracked Marvins that swoop through the stereo spectrum like ghosts. Gaye's signature vocal ad libs started here and have endured through R&B and hip-hop ever since. His marijuana-soaked delivery, along with the album's mutating, percussion-fueled rhythms, majestic strings, and jazzy horns, give the affair levity. Perhaps this smooth front also has to do with the fact that Gaye was "hardly an activist in the traditional sense," according to Edmonds. While his Vietnam-battered brother was an emotional catalyst, Gaye had neglected to send him one letter during his army stint. And though he was certainly aware of the Detroit race riot that left 43 people dead in 1967, he viewed the sad display on TV from his cushy home on the outskirts of town. Not to say Gaye didn't wholeheartedly believe in the progressive observations found on What's Going On, but his relative distance from his subjects allows him to fly over top of them, providing a healing pulse to the disarray below.
For an album as timeless as this one, reissue bonus material can provide worthy footnotes to the main article. Probably thanks to the last decade's vinyl resurgence, this 40th anniversary edition immediately sets itself apart from 2001's 30th anniversary release by presenting its iconic cover in a glorious 12"x12" square. The package's lone LP features the more straightforward, early Detroit mix of the album, while the final, L.A. mix is relegated to a CD. For die-hards, the most alluring part of the package may be the second compact disc, which features 18 mostly instrumental demos recorded in Gaye's post-What's Going On honeymoon period, when his vast artistic ambitions and abilities were being embraced by the greater public. These somewhat experimental demos-- deep, in-the-pocket funk in the vein of Sly Stone, George Clinton, and Jimi Hendrix-- clearly laid the groundwork for much of his subsequent 70s material. Though he doesn't sing on most of these tracks, it's exciting to hear him get loose as keyboardist and band leader.
Just as What's Going On marked the emergence of Marvin Gaye as an all-in-one talent, it also signaled the decline of Motown's reign. It's tempting to simply side with Gaye in his battles with the label that raised him and play into the auteur myth. But it's more complicated than that. Without his tutelage at Motown, first as a session player then as a singer, Gaye wouldn't have been able to conceive a work like this. The help of Motown backing band the Funk Brothers-- credited in the What's Going On liner notes after years of anonymity-- was also essential. Before he was shot and killed by his own father at age 44 in 1984, Gaye was afforded the schooling of America's finest pop academy and then the freedom to flourish and act on his own whims afterward. His 70s brilliance is unfathomable without his 60s pop triumphs. And What's Going On is the turning point, the moment when he was able to bypass his selfishness and self-destructiveness in the name of God, peace, love. It's a nice dream. One that he knew was too good to last. "Mercy, mercy me," he pleaded calmly, desperately.


On her supposedly final mixtape before she issues her full-length debut, the “urban jazz” rapper and singer adds intrigue with bits of her backstory and elliptical flourishes.

Swervvvvv.5

The Manchester rapper and singer IAMDDB began earning attention in 2016 thanks to a sequence of mixtapes that hinged as much on her brash, stoned personality as their jazzy perspective on hip-hop and R&B hybrids. Swinging from honeyed pop-soul to menacing trap, the freewheeling mixtapes secured IAMDDB an opening spot on Lauryn Hill’s British comeback tour, a choice co-sign ahead of the final part of IAMDDB’s mixtape series, Swervvvvv.5. A hazy, laid-back set of jazz-trap that lets her talk her shit while tinkering with structures suitable for an imminent full-length, it is easily her best effort yet.
Clouded by weed smoke and rattled by punch-drunk production from London’s Drae Da Skimask, Swervvvvv.5 is cheerful and reckless, dripping with unruffled charisma. On the glitchy “Urban Jazz,” named for the tag she’s given her sound, she scoffs “Paradise is what I am/But I gotta have a spliff before” with a nonchalant flow over background vocals that seem to echo through smoke. Such harmonies take on a crucial role across Swervvvvv.5, reaching high points on the velvety, introspective R&B cut “Give Me Something” and the neo-soul-indebted “Diary Entries.” Adding atmosphere, they reveal an experimental touch beneath IAMDDB’s warm, mellifluous vocal tics and production choices—a suggestion of what may be to come.
Toward the middle, Swervvvvv.5 turns to the club with “Asss$,” a sloshed version of pop-trap with a rote, Cardi B-lite chorus that feels like a hangover headache by the third time around. The song lingers in the shadow of “Sweg,” the bloodshot, grimily superior kiss-off that precedes it. Under a thick blanket of deep bass and ominous keys, IAMDDB cuts men down to size: “You broke niggas make me sick/Sloppy toppy for the kid,” she spits with an audible sneer. “Miss your magnificent dick/No more talking, straight licks/Lower that shit, never miss.”
For the first time in this mixtape series, IAMDDB splits the sequence with an intro, outro, and two interludes, some of which call to mind the flat, navel-gazing intermissions on Ella Mai’s debut. But IAMDDB’s waggish personality is more engaging. She’s funny and unbothered throughout, sounding like Jorja Smith on a peppy sativa as she runs through an endearing laundry list of thank-yous during “Introlude” or inexplicably bickers with an automaton on the futurist-minded “Space Break Interlude.”
The freeform, smoky vibe and percussive thrust of Swervvvvv.5 owe in part to a six-month period when IAMDDB studied jazz in Angola alongside her touring musician father, an influence she touts with pride. She references her Angolan-Portuguese ancestry on “Space Break Interlude” and raps in fluent Portuguese during “Urban Jazz” and the balmy “I’m Home.” These surprises dot the mixtape with dynamic new displays of her personality and past. The move makes her assurance on the outro—that she’s now in album mode—even more enticing. Based on the woozily accomplished Swervvvvv.5, IAMDDB is only getting sharper.


A louder, thicker album from New Zealand-based outfit known for combining live instruments and samples in a swirl of psychedelic color.

Fight Softly

Pop music success requires good timing-- no local or unsigned band will debate this-- and the Ruby Suns have shitty timing. Their breakthrough album, Sea Lion, dropped in the early spring of 2008; it was a fun, loose take on Panda Bear's seaside psychedelia. Last summer, many indie fans fell hard for a smattering of artists-- Washed Out, Neon Indian-- that echoed the same big-wave aesthetic as the Suns. Justice would see head Sun Ryan McPhun return to claim a spot at the picnic table, but Fight Softly mostly abandons the gentle soufulness and playful strums of Sea Lion in favor of stale electronics and busy loops.
The departure from Sea Lion is apparent immediately: Twinkling ambience and dollops of synthesizer open Fight Softly. The rhythms remain bouncy and ebullient, but simple, slapping drum machines weigh them down. The Suns used to sneak in bits of odd percussion and puns on world music ("Kenya Dig It?"), but McPhun's sound design is unable to harness that kind of nuance and adventure. The resulting compositions seem full of color but lacking in depth or space: drum thwacks and buzzing keyboards caulk every track.
McPhun has taken to singing with melisma, twisting simple lyrics into meandering phrasings. He takes almost 30 seconds to sing the album's first line: "It's my turn in the front seat" (many of his lyrics address this sort of innocence and alienation). At his best, like on "Closet Astrologer", he recalls Arthur Russell's awkward, thrilling navigation, but McPhun often lacks Russell's coy balance.
McPhun's voice seems incongruous with his songwriting. He seems languid and relaxed over "Cinco"'s aggressive shifts. On album closer "Olympics on Pot", he idles over sweet, furtive drumming. (For those of you who cried foul about Animal Collective lyrics like those in "My Girls": sharpen your knives.) "How Kids Fail" is almost oppressively anthemic, its huge keyboard stabs weighing down one of the album's better verses. "Cranberry" inexplicably shifts from a charging, abstract march to a plodding pop song to a rummy party jam. Fight Softly constantly jars and pivots, but with little purpose.
Animal Collective remain the obvious sonic touchstone for the Ruby Suns-- damn if "Dusty Fruit" doesn't sound like a diet version of "Brother Sport"-- but McPhun's best work exhibits a surprisingly formalist synth-pop streak. "Haunted House"'s bouncing pads and treated vocal samples sound like a pillowy Cut Copy. The penultimate "Two Humans" is a delicate love ballad-- "When are you leaving?/ And will you stay the night"-- that sounds like the Junior Boys on vacation. "Closet Astrologer" is a paean to introverts that tries to parse young adulthood ("I'll find time to do what I want/ Whatever that is").
These moments aren't indicative of Fight Softly's general tenor, though. The album sits heavily, uneasily, even when its mood is light. It's a true departure in sound and method; this is not a lazy or complacent record. McPhun, though, never settles into these new sounds, and Fight Softly retains very little of the ease and abandon that, to date, had marked the Ruby Suns.


Kate Bush's second album of original material in the last 17 years is haunting and gorgeous. Like so much of her best music, it's filled with deep story-songs that have the effect of putting one in the kind of treasured, child-like space-- not so much innocent as open to imagination-- that never gets old.

50 Words for Snow

On "Wild Man", the first single from Kate Bush's winterized 10th album, the singer tells of an expedition searching for the elusive Abominable Snowman. "They want to know you," she coos, "They will hunt you down, then they will kill you/ Run away, run away, run away." Of course, when it comes to modern popular figures-- who often court fame and adulation with an obsessiveness that can be fascinating or just plain sad-- Bush herself is something of a mythical beast. 50 Words for Snow is only her second album of original material in the last 17 years, and she hasn't performed a full concert since her groundbreaking and theatrical Tour of Life wrapped up its six-week run in 1979. So it's no surprise that she readily sympathizes with the misunderstood monster at the center of "Wild Man": "Lying in my tent, I can hear your cry echoing round the mountainside/ You sound lonely."
50 Words for Snow is teeming with classic Bush-ian characterizations and stories-- fantasies, personifications, ghosts, mysteries, angels, immortals. As quoted in Graeme Thomson's thorough, thoughtful recent biography Under the Ivy, she explained her attraction to such songwriting: "[Songs] are just like a little story: you are in a situation, you are this character. This is what happens. End. That's what human beings want desperately. We all love being read stories, and none of us get it anymore." She's onto something; in our postmodern era, the idea of a tale can seem quaint and simple.
But Bush continues to infuse her narratives with a beguiling complexity while retaining some old-school directness. Because while most of this album's songs can be easily summarized-- "Snowflake" chronicles the journey of a piece of snow falling to the ground; "Lake Tahoe" tells of a watery spirit searching for her dog; "Misty" is the one about the woman who sleeps with a lusty snowman (!)-- they contain wondrous multitudes thanks to the singer's still-expressive voice and knack for uncanny arrangements. And mood. There's an appealing creepiness that runs through this album, one that recalls the atmospheric and conceptual back half of her 1985 masterpiece Hounds of Love. Indeed, when considering this singular artist in 2011, it's difficult to think of worthy points of reference aside from Bush herself; her onetime art-rock compatriots David Bowie and Peter Gabriel are currently MIA and in rehash mode, respectively. And while current acts including Florence and the Machine are heavily inspired by Bush's early career and spiritual preoccupations, none are quite able to match their idol's particular brand of heart-on-sleeve mysticism. In an interview earlier this year, the 53-year-old Bush told me she doesn't listen to much new music, and after listening to the stunningly subtle and understated sounds on Snow, it's easy to believe her.
The album's shortest song, the gorgeous closing piano ballad "Among Angels", clocks in at almost seven minutes. "Misty" rolls out its brilliant, funny, and bizarrely touching tale across nearly a quarter of an hour. It's not one second too long. During the 12-year gap between 1993's The Red Shoes and 2005's Aerial when she was raising her son Bertie, Bush gained a new level of compositional patience. She's now allowing her songs to breathe more than ever-- a fact reinforced by this year's Director's Cut, which found her classing-up and often stretching out songs from 1989's The Sensual World and The Red Shoes via re-recordings. So while "Misty" is an eyebrow-raiser about getting very intimate with a cold and white being with a "crooked mouth full of dead leaves," it hardly calls attention to its own eccentricities. Propelled by Bush's languid piano and the jazzy, pitter-pattering drums of veteran stick man (but relatively new Bush recruit) Steve Gadd, the song is about as appealingly grown-up as a song about having sex with a snowman can possibly be. In her early career, Bush sometimes let her zaniness get the better of her, highlighting her tales of sexual taboo and bizarre yarns with look-at-me musical accompaniment and videos. Those days are long gone. And her heightened sophistication works wonders here. So when the song's titular being is nowhere to be found the following morning-- "the sheets are soaking," she sings-- there is nothing gimmicky about her desperation: "Oh please, can you help me?/ He must be somewhere."
The ending of that song brings up another common thread through Snow, aside from its blizzard-y climate. This is an album about trying, oftentimes futilely, to find connections-- between Bush and her characters, reality and surreality, love and death. "Snowflake" is a duet with her 13-year-old son, where he plays the small fleck of white falling down from the sky, his high-pitched, choir-boy voice hitting the kind of notes his mom was originally famous for. On the track, Bush encourages her son-- "The world is so loud/ Keep falling/ I'll find you"-- and yet the plaintive piano that steers things is seemingly aware that, once the flake arrives, it'll either melt or disappear among millions of other icy bits. Similarly, while the lake-bound ghost of "Lake Tahoe" is overjoyed to find her long-lost dog-- coincidentally named Snowflake-- at the end of the song, the reunion comes with its own specter of bittersweet afterlife. The same sort of disconnect defines "Snowed in at Wheeler Street", an eerie duet with Bush's teenage idol Elton John about a star-crossed pair who have "been in love forever"-- literally. The time-traveling track finds its leads going from ancient Rome to World War II to 9/11, always losing each other along the way. It acts as something of a sequel to Bush's "Running Up that Hill", another tale of pained co-dependence. There's no happy ending. "When we got to the top of the hill/ We saw Rome burning," sings Elton.
While much of 50 Words for Snow conjures a whited-out, dream-like state of disbelief, it's important to note that Bush does everything in her power to make all the shadowy phantoms here feel real. Her best music, this album included, has the effect of putting one in the kind of treasured, child-like space-- not so much innocent as open to imagination-- that never gets old. "I have a theory that there are parts of our mental worlds that are still based around the age between five and eight, and we just kind of pretend to be grown-up," she recently told The Independent. "Our essence is there in a much more powerful way when we're children, and if you're lucky enough to... hang onto who you are, you do have that at your core for the rest of your life." Snow isn't a blissful retreat to simpler times, though. It's fraught with endings, loss, quiet-- adult things. This is more than pure fantasy. When faced with her unlikely guest on "Misty", Bush pinches herself: "Should be a dream, but I'm not sleepy."


Known for housing a famous Beastie Boys sample, the reissue of this 1975 funk and fusion classic brings peerless Polish and American players together for a groovy, eccentric journey.

Funk Factory

For Polish jazz great Michael Urbaniak, pinpointing a phase in his career as “noteworthy” is basically an act of omission. Hone in on his work as a composer, and it overlooks his genre-bending work as a player, particularly a violinist. Play up his time as a bandleader, and you understate his work as a sideman piercing through the gloss of Miles Davis’ electro-dub *Tutu *oddity “Don’t Lose Your Mind.” Emphasize his ’70s-and-onward contributions to fusion, and you downplay his role in helping give European jazz its own distinct style, including his time spent in the early ’60s playing saxophone for Krzysztof Komeda’s Quintet. But hailing Urbaniak would also be impossible without mentioning his collaborator and wife Urszula Dudziak, whose voice could go from the most velvety thing you’ve ever heard to a vocal run more warped than any analog synthesizer could make.
Urbaniak and Dudziak’s stretch of albums in the ’70s and early ’80s, especially once they moved from Poland to New York in 1973, remain favorites among the more adventurous jazz heads and beat-diggers haunting the vinyl depths. (Urbaniak’s 1974 *Fusion *and Dudziak’s 1979 *Future Talk *are good places for the uninitiated to start.) But it was an album cut from a one-off LP that captured a particular corner of the music-geek imagination for more than 40 years: “Rien Ne Va Plus,” from the self-titled 1975 album by a sextet Urbaniak called Funk Factory, had its reckoning with the canon when the Dust Brothers sampled major chunks of it for Beastie Boys’ “Car Thief.” Even separated from that hip-hop context, where it clicked seamlessly with a guitar loop from the Jackson 5’s version of Funkadelic’s “I’ll Bet You,” “Rien Ne Va Plus” is a banger, all post-Head Hunters springy synth-bass and Dudziak lending her range to a sweet and untethered performance.
As for the rest of the album, the Soul Jazz label tries to make a case for its place in the Urbaniak/Dudziak discography. “As Sampled By...” can make a record popular, but the rest of the album is far more eccentric than its most notorious cut could hint at. There’s a certain push-pull between the fusion of Urbaniak and his Poland-sourced players—including Bernard Kafka of the Komeda-contemporary vocal ensemble Novi Singers, along with synth player Wlodek Gulgowski—and the rotating American session-player rhythm section. Calling that latter contingent a who’s who of studio workhorses is an understatement: Anthony Jackson was at that point best known for the bassline to the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money,” Steve Gadd’s other notable circa-1975 gigs include the rhythms for Van McCoy’s “The Hustle” and Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” Gerry Brown would be the drummer on Stanley Clarke’s electric jazz-bass-redefining School Days, and Tony Levin would Chapman-Stick his way into prominent roles in Peter Gabriel’s band and the early ’80s post-hiatus King Crimson.
But while the rhythm section holds it down—unobtrusively on ballads like the slightly-too-saccharine “The Music in Me,” or with flare on the uptempo “Horsing Around” and “Sinkin’ Low”—it’s the compositional flourishes of the Polish contingent that both mess with and build on fusion’s more upbeat side. The melodies push songs close to the fusion equivalent of sunshine pop, especially on cuts like “Watusi Dance” and “Next Please” where Dudziak and Kafka trade mostly-wordless voices, at which point they’re subsumed into Urbaniak’s electric violin and Gulgowski’s synths to create some spectacular mutant harmonies.
*Funk Factory *can stray pretty far into the cheerier excesses of prog-jazz, but in a year where Thundercat can find sincere beauty in Fisher-Price Steely Dan, it’s hardly a dealbreaker. It emphasizes the alluring strangeness of its more experimental moments, like the hallucinogenic haunted-house tour of “Lilliput” or the banshee James Brown vocal riffs on “Horsing Around.” “Rien Ne Va Plus” remains the top highlight, every bit the equal as the best cut on any contemporaneous LaBelle album. But Funk Factory is more than just a notch in the belt of Paul’s Boutique—it’s proof that a core of musicians schooled in jazz but culturally steeped in the folk and classical traditions of Eastern Europe could, at least once, put out something that fit well with the crossover sound of the times while being unafraid to dive into freeform weirdness.


The former Smith Westerns member’s second album represents a return to his core strengths: crystalline, cosmically ornate melodies and wryly clear-eyed lyrics.

The Diet

Cullen Omori figured his shit out quickly. The difference between those first two Smith Westerns albums—the no-fi garage-pop slop of 2009’s self-titled effort versus with the widescreen glam of 2011’s Dye It Blonde—felt like more than a just a typical case of a young band making a dramatic leap to avoid the sophomore slump. It was more a like a detuned TV suddenly being kicked into sharp focus: The surface fuzz fell away, revealing the craft and confidence that was always there.
On Dye It Blonde, we caught our first glimpse of Omori in his natural habitat: a never-ending summer of ’73 soundtracked by Marc Bolan’s saddest songs and George Harrison’s sweetest licks. And as we’ve seen in everything he’s released since, it’s a place he’s never wanted to leave. Sure, the Smith Westerns’ 2013 swan song, Soft Will, upped the prog factor, while Omori’s 2016 solo debut, New Misery, added some modernist pop touches, but he’s remained comfortably floating at the same cruising altitude.
These days, Omori is seemingly drawn to albums like All Things Must Pass and The Slider for more than just their magical melodies and tasty guitar tones. In the early 1970s, those records formed the collective soundtrack to the post-hippie hangover, their dreamily strung-out quality reflecting the mindset of a new generation that felt like it had missed the party and was left to clean up the mess. It’s a deeply disillusioned feeling to which Omori could no doubt relate in the wake of the Smith Westerns’ unceremonious demise: In interviews, the singer-guitarist has been more candid than most about the indignities of being a former indie-rock darling forced to return to day-job drudgery.
But he’s also been able to make the most of his mundane circumstances—he claims New Misery was inspired by the Top 40 pop music he heard piped into the hospital where he spent his days cleaning medical supplies. Hospitals also factor into The Diet’s origin story, in which Omori found himself seeking medical attention—for getting clean, if not for the subsequent existential crisis. “I was sitting in a hospital detox center facing out on Lake Michigan in Chicago,” he recounts, “and literally just a few miles south, Lollapalooza, an event I’ve played twice and had many peers at, was happening without me.” The Diet isn’t the sort of world-beating, over-the-top comeback effort that’s going to transform Omori into the king of Grant Park (especially at a time when even Jack White is struggling to justify his headliner status). But it’s the most consistently satisfying front-to-back record Omori’s been a part of since Dye It Blonde, a reset that realigns him with his core strengths—namely, his flair for crafting songs that are cosmically ornate yet humbly down-to-earth.
You can hear the rebirth process kick in during the opening seconds of “Four Years,” where the song’s melancholic guitar chime bubbles up from an oceanic swirl to face the bright rays of the sun, as if Omori were emerging from some sort of soul-cleansing ritual. It also feels like an effort to shake off the glossy embellishments that proved to be distractions on New Misery. Under the guidance of LA-based producer Taylor Locke, “Four Years,” and the 11 songs that follow, place the focus where it should be: on the tension between Omori’s crystalline, clear-eyed melodies and his stinging, self-effacing lyricism. As it coasts to its swooning chorus, “Four Years” reveals itself to be an ebullient declaration of devotion from someone easily driven to distraction: “You do so many things, and I love you for it,” Omori sings in helium harmony with himself, before adding: “but I usually forget.”
Ten years into the game, Omori has essentially graduated from the garage to the kitchen, playing fly-on-the-wall to domestic lives, or dreaming of the one he could’ve had: “All by Yourself” is a wistful acoustic requiem for the one who got away—and the new baby in her life that all but extinguishes any possibility of future rekindling. But even the album’s purest expressions of contentment are laced with a sardonic aftertaste—“Happiness Reigns” might be the most joyful, carefree pop song in the Omori canon since Dye It Blonde’s “Weekend,” but it’s still one where the giddy kids he imagines for himself and his partner frolic among “flowers of uranium.”
The Diet would benefit from more breezily subversive sing-alongs like that—as the album rolls on, Omori’s predilection for mid-tempo, mid-period Oasis starts to take over, and a certain uniformity of style, scale, and seriousness sets in. (One great exception is “Millennial Geishas,” which finds the half-Japanese Omori cheekily riffing on Asian stereotypes—“I want to enter your dragon/Want to jump on your bandwagon”—en route to a disarming, stargazing chorus.) But on the closing “A Real You,” Omori liberates himself from any obvious idolatry to fashion a winsome baroque-folk lullaby that achieves liftoff without shooting for the cheap seats. Fittingly, it’s a love song about not needing all that much to get by: “I choose the simple things with you, both of us only use cable or pay-per-view,” Omori sings, making The Diet a rallying point for analog romantics in a Netflix ‘n’ chill kinda world.


Amplifying the scope of his rave-nostalgia project, Paul Woolford expands his ambitions but loses sight of the spontaneity that made the music so thrilling in the first place.

Belief System

Four years ago, Paul Woolford painted himself into a corner. Under one of his many aliases, Special Request, the British producer released a striking debut album that captured the golden age of UK pirate radio and rave culture as though preserving it in amber. Soul Music pilfered the drum breaks, bass weight, and manic energy of jungle wholesale, folding each component into new yet strangely familiar shapes. As much an homage as a high-definition update, Soul Music helped revitalize that beloved music for contemporary dancefloors. And in doing so, it defined the sound of Special Request in no uncertain terms.
The years after Soul Music saw its influence proliferate, but Woolford became more interested in poking at the walls of the box he had built around the project. On 2015’s Modern Warfare EP trilogy, outsized piano house began to color the music’s edges. Those tracks still centered on booming low end and half-remembered ecstasy peaks, but something about Soul Music’s single-mindedness had felt more genuine, purer. The dilution only continued. Earlier this year, the Stairfoot Lane Bunker EP shifted Special Request’s agenda, aligning it with classic electro and experimental ambient alongside the usual rave sounds. More recently, the Curtain Twitcher 12” saw Woolford’s encroaching acid tendencies steal the spotlight in lieu of jungle references.
Belief System, Special Request’s second studio album, completes the process that began not long after the release of Soul Music. It’s a record crammed full of contrasting ideas and mish-mashed nostalgia; it’s also absurdly long, with 23 tracks clocking over 100 minutes. If Soul Music and Modern Warfare were quaint in the way they got straight to the point and then relentlessly hammered it home, Belief System’s prolonged, shapeshifting arc could be taken as another tweak to the project’s formula. But the the individual tracks often don’t measure up to the album’s inflated ambitions.
Three distinct movements comprise Belief System, and if you blur your eyes a bit, they take on a conceptual slant. In its first third, the album digs into acid house, breakbeat, techno, and IDM, seamlessly interconnecting each style. The midsection is Special Request at its rudest, rowdiest best: a tear of jungle permutations on par with Soul Music’s strongest tunes. The final stretch, which takes up nearly half the album's length, is full of garish incidental music and beatless sound manipulation. Taking the album’s title into consideration, these three parts seem to represent a sort of holy trinity for the UK hardcore continuum—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Sure enough, the latter manifestation is the least substantial. “Carex Vesicaria” is undoubtedly an affecting elegy for the death of rave, as is the angelic euphoria of “Witness.” But tracks like “Transmission” and “Reckoning” are bombastic and painfully linear, better for a summer blockbuster trailer than any album of throwback dance music.
In addition to their unflattering bloat, the last nine tracks are a symptom of a larger issue: pacing. The warning signs come early with “Chrysalis,” a needless, sentimental intro that foreshadows the lack of editing to come. Woolford stays in warm-up mode until the seventh track, when the Aphex-inspired “Curtain Twitcher” launches an excellent run of 130-plus BPM bangers. The bin-busting “Scrambled in LS1” stands among Belief System’s best, though it’s practically unrecognizable as Special Request, sounding more in line with the menacing electro of Gesloten Cirkel’s Submit X. When “Make It Real” kicks the rave into high gear with a cheeky backspin and some of Special Request’s signature MC chat, the record finally reveals its beating heart. The Vangelis-like emotional climax of “Light in the Darkest Hour” feels like the record’s natural end. That it takes over an hour to get to this point, and that it’s followed by 30 minutes of aimless (albeit well-crafted) sound design, is emblematic of Belief System’s shortcomings.
In March, Woolford released his first commercial mix as Special Request. Fabriclive 91 was a skillful and stylistic tour de force spread across 30 tracks spanning from Drexciyan mainstay DJ Stingray and Richard D. James’ Polygon Window alias to drum ’n’ bass legend Dillinja and classic junglists the Rood Project. Six new Special Request tracks were peppered across the mix, linking the project’s expanding aims to the intertwined old-school threads. The approach made for a mix that felt equally cumulative and cohesive. Belief System attempts something similar with its slick blend of genres, seamless transitions, and gradual escalation, but it overshoots the mark. Part of what made Fabriclive 91 such an engrossing listen was its agility and streamlined energy. By drawing out the minutiae of Belief System’s rigid conceptual framework, Woolford loses the spontaneity and audacity that made this music so thrilling in the first place.


The Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist improvised alongside his partner while she illustrated on paper; together, they’ve created an audiovisual album bursting with bold lines and vivid colors.

Sam Gendel / Marcella Cytrynowicz: AUDIOBOOK

AUDIOBOOK

Sam Gendel seems determined never to walk the same path twice. In little over a year’s time, the Los Angeles-based composer and multi-instrumentalist has released a sprawling collection of hybrid jazz and hip-hop experiments, an assemblage of plaintive Japanese-inspired fusion, and a cover album of molecularly disassembled R&B classics. In his quest to aggressively remake himself, Gendel has also become a prolific collaborator with musicians running the gamut from accomplished record producers to his partner’s 11-year-old sister. When Gendel works with others, it’s typically his creative vision that guides the project’s shape, but on his latest album, he’s surrendered to the imagination of his partner, visual artist and filmmaker Marcella Cytrynowicz.
AUDIOBOOK was devised as an audiovisual collaboration: Cytrynowicz drew the project’s illustrations while Gendel improvised alongside her in real time on a Suzuki Waraku III, a decades-old electronic koto instrument. Cytrynowicz’s art acts as a graphical score for his spontaneous compositions, lending them a scattered quality as Gendel’s eyes follow along the images’ labyrinthine contours. The basic building blocks of each piece are textural rather than musical. On the opening “AB,” a percussive puff skitters erratically over a swell of synthesizer, as if repeatedly slamming into a wall and rerouting its path. As it transitions into “CD,” the outline retains its shape but slowly expands as bite-sized blasts cut in. Each track is titled alphabetically in pairs from A to Z, and they flow as smoothly from one to the next as a memorized run through your ABC’s.
Cytrynowicz’s drawings, which have been compiled in a book accompanying the vinyl release, as well as a downloadable PDF and online multimedia presentation, make use of bold colors and tight curves, and Gendel leans into the elemental energies they evoke. You can almost feel the heat of his breath on “KL” as streams of air blown across his reed weave into the fabric of the track. “GH,” in contrast, is draped in muffled echo, as if the sound waves were traveling along the ocean floor. On “EF,” twinkling synth tones glint like beams of light hitting stalactites in an icy cavern. Plucky percussion and a noise like flowing liquid punctuate “QR,” bringing to mind a rushing white river. Gendel adds an additional dimension to his partner’s imaginary landscapes, lending them a powerful sense of place.
Some moments feel more underdeveloped. There are interesting wrinkles in the wobbly synth and washboard percussion of “WX,” but it never quite coalesces into the evocative imagery found elsewhere. “IJ,” a cover of saxophone virtuoso Wayne Shorter’s “Deluge,” strips the piece down to its essentials and leaves it barely recognizable. Gendel’s at his strongest when layering up melodic phrases and letting them play off one another, as on standout “UV.” He plays as if he’s trying to charm a snake, nimbly running up and down scales while a cavernous, shuffling beat keeps time. He paints expressive strokes with his synthesizer, matching the lively peaks and valleys of the artworks that Cytrynowicz was creating by his side. Gendel has long displayed a restlessness that can’t be contained within the constraints of conventional musical formats; led by Cytrynowicz, on AUDIOBOOK he extends his playing into new realms.