Rilo Kiley return, now on a major label and boasting a sound polished like so many discotheque mirrors. It's all in good fun until you delve into the lyrics and discover that fun may be in bad faith.

Under the Blacklight

It's the prerogative and privilege of any pop act to change direction. It's one of the things that makes pop music so exciting. But change always carries a degree of risk, and in the case of Rilo Kiley's fourth album Under the Blacklight, it manifests a wonderful sense of irony: Under the Blacklight is Rilo Kiley's riskiest album because it's their album that takes the least risks.
Finding the band's music polished to an almost blinding sheen, Blacklight is not a commercial album so much as Rilo Kiley's conception (or misconception) of what a commercial album is. It's their "Project Mersh", an alternate-universe sell-out move. But beneath that surface-- and Under the Blacklight is at first listen almost overwhelmingly surface-- Rilo Kiley must know they're full of shit. Either they're utterly serious about their flirtation with the mainstream or they're taking the piss with a wink. In both cases, the songs suffer a smothering slow death by context.
At the same time, the fun-- or maybe "fun"-- disc stresses how humorless and full of shit Rilo Kiley's former indie brethren remain, scared stiff of the prospect of unabashed pop in the true please-the-masses sense. But it's still an audacious, fascinating exploration of banality, almost to a patronizing point. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the big, straight down the middle-sounding first single is called "The Moneymaker".
From note one, the album's musical allusions and the references come fast and furious, and are often strikingly specific. The mock swagger of "Moneymaker", for instance, sounds like Heart doing Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero", and the rest of the disc revels in similar oddball but specific collisions. The title track sounds like Aimee Mann writing a song for Mandy Moore. "Dejalo" is Rilo Kiley's take on Miami Sound Machine. "Dreamworld" is *Mirage-*era Fleetwood Mac. "Smoke Detector" is Blondie by way of the Beatles. "15" does blue-eyed soul like Dusty Springfield. And so on.
The saving grace for something so shallow is, as usual, Jenny Lewis, a strikingly direct singer and an even better lyricist. Especially following the verbose More Adventurous, she's almost ruthlessly efficient with her words here, making the most of a few choice lines. "Smoke Detector" demonstrates nearly as many derivations and variations in meaning of the word "smoke" as there are of the word "fuck," including "to fuck." "I took a man back to my room," she coos. "I was smoking him in bed/ Yeah, I was smoking in bed."
In "Close Call" Lewis wryly observes "funny thing about money for sex/ You might get rich but you'll die by it," while the title track features the withering pun of an aphorism "even dead men lie in their coffins." "15" tracks the seduction of a wounded and vulnerable young woman, ripe like a peach and "down for almost anything."
Many of Lewis's other character-study lyrics plum the sexual, too, not like a cop-out coy pop princess (even though someone like, say, Hilary Duff could do a fine job with the obvious cell phone metaphor of "Breakin' Up") but in a grown up sort of way. Or at least a distorted, corrupted, grown-up-in-L.A. sort of way.
Ah, L.A., where there's a thrift shop on every corner, the breakfast spots bustle well into the night, the lines at clubland bathroom stalls snake to early 1980s lengths, acts get signed at karaoke bars, and the plastic surgeons know just the thing to do with all those rough edges. Forget that Rilo Kiley's songs namedrop Brighton, New York, and Laredo: Under the Blacklight adds up to the familiar headline "California Band Makes California Album." Were all the AOR indulgences at least tied together into a concept they might have been more easily forgiven. And were any of those lyrics a little more pointed and less generalized, like they were in the anomalously galvanizing anti-Bush protest "It's a Hit", they'd add up to more than just a 40-minute short story collection on tape (with incidental music).
For the relative few who really, really care, debates may rage over whether Under the Blacklight marks some sort of progress, though what's just as likely is that Rilo Kiley's earlier output was artificially regressive in a bid for some sort of cred. But leave that stuff to the conspiracy theorists. To be fair, most everyone would be well served giving in and enjoying Rilo Kiley's pop for pop's sake, smart, dumb and especially smug in equal measure. Song by song it goes down awfully easy, but be warned. The band sure cleans up well, but there's a fair amount of guilty washing and hand-scrubbing to be done afterwards.


The California-based producer crew and indie rap icon’s first full-length collaboration isn’t revelatory, but it does show off their gifts as classicists.

Bad News

In the early 2010s, Los Angeles rapper-producer Blu went from a scrappy, true-blue hip-hop devotee with a Warner Records deal to California beat scene and underground hermit. He seemed determined to play against type, cranking out projects under different names and even scuffling with other rappers on Twitter. But in the years since 2015’s Bad Neighbor, his collaborative album with Madlib and M.E.D., he started embracing his gifts as a world-weary and lyrically agile everyman. On Bad News, his first full-length link-up with Real Bad Man, he channels his best work by kicking jaunty battle raps and probing everyday anecdotes.
Real Bad Man, a streetwear brand and label spearheaded by ex-Stüssy art director Adam Weissman, has been releasing compilations since 2020, when they dropped the first two volumes of their no-frills boom-bap series On High Alert. The collective’s production is workmanlike and occasionally zany, recalling the tongue-in-cheek qualities of Deltron 3030-era Dan the Automator, or perhaps the more colorful corners of the Alchemist’s early 2000s beat tapes. Both RBM and Blu are prolific classicists, but they are still occasionally adaptable. On Bad News, these strengths make them a compelling pair.
Few rappers are as intricately introspective as Blu is. As a writer, he’s confident and brash, bending rhyme schemes and meters into pretzels. Take the second verse of “Aladdin,” a latticework of phonetics and slant rhymes which features Cali-specific boasts and bars about winning someone’s shoes in what’s implied to be a basketball game. His skills pop just as much when he’s steering through rain clouds, like on the standout “The Hurt,” where he contemplates whether to hang up the mic and go back to school. Rapping about retirement and your struggle to own a home isn’t exactly sexy, but Blu’s lively way with words confirms he was born to spit.
RBM’s beats—which are built on everything from maudlin violin strings to creaking pianos and wandering bass arpeggios—provide Blu with sturdy ground to kick his shit. They’re all handsome and complement Blu’s flows well, but they shine more when RBM is willing to get a little kooky. This mostly comes when RBM punctuates certain clichés with knowing, on-the-nose samples. On “The Golden Rule,” an errant bell ring from a boxing match chimes in before Blu and C.L. Smooth mention a boxing championship bout. “Aladdin” takes this approach further: Whirring sci-fi synths fit for an episode of Hello Tomorrow! and nose-twitching tinkles from Bewitched preface Blu’s claim that he “grants wishes like a genie.” It’s a restrained type of self-awareness, a light wink and nudge that doesn’t feel too overbearing.
No matter what demons he may be wrestling with, Blu always finds solace in rapping. He sounds rejuvenated trading bars alongside longtime collaborators Cashus King and Donel Smokes on “Fall of Rome,” and on “Hebrews,” he sketches his relationship to faith by connecting dots between religious parables. He’s come a long way from waiting for the bus in the rain, having carved out a niche for himself within the fickle world of indie rap. While Bad News isn’t revelatory for either Blu or Real Bad Man, it proves they’re both still able to generate sparks even when they’re just having fun.


An Indian film-music superstar raised on rap and indie, the 33-year-old singer taps Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and producer Ryan Olson in the attempt to reconcile his transnational influences.

Sidharth

The first thing you need to know about Sid Sriram is that the guy can really sing. He’s got a lush, honeyed baritone with just a hint of smoldering melancholy, at once sensual and brooding. A lifetime spent in the rigorous discipline of Carnatic music—a South Indian sub-genre of Indian classical that he started practicing when he was three—allows him to deploy this voice with great tonal precision and flexibility, switching effortlessly between sultry croon, warbling falsetto, and the meditative melismas of traditional ragas. It’s what has made him so successful in South Indian film music, where he’s spent the past decade delivering hit after hit, weaving his vocal magic over everything from Ilaiyaraaja’s traditional raga-inspired compositions to A.R. Rahman’s more contemporary pop and rap-influenced creations.
Before he was a superstar playback singer in India, Sriram was just another musically inclined kid growing up in Fremont, California. He was steeped in his mother’s Carnatic music tradition, but there was also R&B and gospel, West Coast hip-hop and peak blog-era indie rock. While studying music production and engineering at the Berklee School of Music, he had his first brush of viral fame with a genuinely heartbreaking cover of Frank Ocean’s We All Try, hinting at the directions he was looking to explore in his own songwriting. If not for a chance interaction with Rahman, who gave Sriram his first break in Tamil film music, what sort of songs would the pop-obsessed twenty-something have written? Where would his talents have taken him?
On Sidharth, his ambitious, boundary-pushing new album, Sriram offers one potential answer to that question. Written over an intense week at producer Ryan Olson’s Minneapolis studio—with a small team of collaborators that includes Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon—the album is a nostalgic romp through the diverse traditions that Sriram calls his own, an attempt to reconcile the totality of his transnational musical inheritance. Its 13 tracks veer from Carnatic-inflected gospel to jittery, alt-electro love ballads and expansive, orchestral R&B, all tied together by his distinctive voice.
Lead single “The Hard Way” features crisp Auto-Tuned romantic exhortations over caffeinated beats and chopped-up electronics, a classic love song draped in retro-futuristic finery. Over the pensive keys and languid rhythm of “Do the Dance,” Sriram sings about searching for a home he cannot name or define, his longing embodied in visions of a green-eyed girl. His voice drips with multi-tracked yearning when not being pitch-shifted into an otherworldly yowl. On the Afrobeat-adjacent, Vernon-featuring “Quiet Storm,” a song about letting go and giving in to divinity, gospel harmonies transform into Carnatic-tinged vibrato as Sriram’s powerful voice threads the needle between two very different devotional traditions.
Many of the album’s highlights come from Sriram and Olson’s experiments in serendipitous juxtaposition—the Tamil folk chorus soaring over stabs of industrial synth and breakneck tabla percussion on the breakup cut “Friendly Fire,” the uplifting pop vocals floating above stuttering, blown-out percussion on “Stance.” It doesn’t always work. The discordant synths and slow-burn vocals of “Blue Spaces” never quite build to a convincing crescendo, no matter how many vocal runs Sriram throws in. The house-y lounge pop of “Shoulda Been There” falls flat, like a badly mixed mashup of two incongruent songs.
At times, Sriram’s obvious Bon Iver worship leads him astray. His lyrical approach mimics Vernon’s impressionistic songwriting, but his lyrical conceits can be unconvincing, as on Do the Dance” (“Bring back the street fights I brawled at for you”). “Dear Sahana” sacrifices raw emotion for stylistic perfection, rendering its love-lorn lyrics in a mellifluous but emotionally inert baritone—a torch song with the flame turned way too low.
Still, these stumbles fade in the afterglow of Sriram’s agile voice and earnest sincerity. Sidharth remains a bold, risk-taking record about coming to terms with the many contradictions of a transnational identity and the existential crises that come from a life lived across two continents. The key, he suggests, is to focus on love in all its myriad forms: romantic, divine, and—most elusive of all—for oneself. As he proclaims on the quietly transcendental “The Hard Way,” “Love’s at the center of it all.”


The debut album from the co-founder of NON is a noisy and unrelenting ride through the hell of this world, full of label associates who help define its gruesome electronic sound.

PARADISO

We live in such times where shadowy forces have distorted our democracies, science is increasingly viewed with suspicion, and verifiable information is dismissed as “alternative facts.” If death becomes the only truth we can all agree upon, what are we all doing to prepare? The first full-length album by Chino Amobi addresses these existential anxieties and mortal fears in epic, violent terms. Running to over an hour in length, PARADISO is a gutsy, gruesome inversion of its sweet title—but there’s a crucial ambivalence at its heart. Should we run for our lives? Or is this chaos a satisfyingly sadistic end to the entire, ill-conceived project?
The Richmond, Va. artist, formerly known as Diamond Black Hearted Boy, is the co-founder of NON, the family of experimental artists with African roots whose stated mission is a rejection of mass culture and existing political conditions. True to his collaborative principles, Amobi brings in a dizzying number of guest artists to flesh out the savage world of PARADISO. Fellow NON artists Nkisi and FAKA, rapper Haleek Maul, trans model Aurel Haize Odogbo and singer Benja SL are all brought in to chant desperate mantras as the city crumbles. Elysia Crampton appears several times with her dark, cryptic poems, setting the gothic mood on the opening track with an amended version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The City in the Sea,” which she recites over crashing waves and bolts of thunder; pathetic fallacy blown up to widescreen proportions. Dutch E Germ, aka Tim DeWit, formerly of psych collective Gang Gang Dance, co-produces five tracks including the album’s hallucinatory climax, “Paradiso,” while Rabit appears on the bone-crunchingly belligerent “Negative Fire, III.”
The hour-long album hurtles forwards, zig-zagging from blasted noise collages to lilting Latin rhythms, noisy ’80s industrial to thrashing surf rock, and even sun-kissed pop on “The Floating World Pt 1,” a dazzling break in the clouds provided by Benja SL. But the sounds of our already-existing hellscape are a constant intrusion. Amobi pummels us with the sonic detritus of urban life: demonic radio jingles, malfunctioning gadgets, and fried car alarms. Are we circling the inferno, or is this real life? Can we speed our way through purgatory?
These clashing styles and genres rarely settle into music as such, leaving Amobi’s enticing grooves straining to be heard under the cacophony. Noise obscures our perception, the flow is constantly interrupted, and chaos reigns. The sensory overload speaks to Amobi’s rejection of “the passive experience of listening,” as he described it to Okayafrica. “I try to use sounds that are active, to wake the listener up and to bring them into the moment.” The sound of breaking glass, for instance—now almost parodic through over-use in the “deconstructed” club tracks sometimes found adjacent to NON’s experimental electronics—is twisted into knowingly ridiculous shapes, hammered out repeatedly in grotesque, pitch-bent variations.
The relentless disorder feels like dipping out of consciousness, as fantastical as a happy dream or as grueling as a nightmare. Sometimes the horror aesthetic is plainly signposted, tongue firmly in cheek, as with the creepy fairground organs of “White Maetal” and the barked radio idents: “You are listening to NON Worldwide Radio with Chino Amobi!” Like any horror movie buff, he knows that choosing to be frightened is also a way of reclaiming your fear.
Amobi has said he wants to express “an optimism in the face of dire circumstances,” explaining that his music is “making a point of showing care or empathy in a space that can seem like a void. Empathy through the matrix.” PARADISO is his battering ram, a weapon that places the listener constantly in the now. You can’t comprehend it as a whole; you merely exist in it from one moment to the next. If hell is already here on earth, well, so are we, and as long as we can hear each other’s screams, we must still exist. Not just death, but the fact that we are alive becomes another truth we can all agree on. Scream back, and send your empathy into the void.


The Complete Prestige 10-Inch LP Collection finds Miles Davis on a search for self, a search for a sound, a search for an aesthetic, a search for like minds.

Miles Davis: The Complete Prestige 10-Inch LP Collection

When you talk about Miles Davis, you’re really talking about something like eight musicians: a sideman to Bird during the bebop revolution; catalyst of cool jazz; hard bop and modal pioneer; enabler of John Coltrane and leader of the “first great quintet”; nurturer of the younger “second great quintet” in the mid-'60s; collaborator in large ensembles with his musical soul mate, Gil Evans; initiator of an uncompromising jazz-rock-funk fusion; and elder statesmen of a more polished, though still-distinct, fusion in the 1980s.
Even within those periods there are fascinating mini-chapters, like his work from the early 1950s. Now, on the occasion of what would’ve been Miles Davis’ 90th birthday this month, comes The Complete Prestige 10-Inch LP Collection, a sometimes-disorienting, ultimately sumptuous set of eleven vinyl records from 1951–54, nine of which feature Miles as the sole leader.
The bulk of Miles Davis’ canonical output is on Columbia Records, which he left in 1986 for Warner Brothers in his final years. His pre-Columbia work from 1951–56 was, for the most part, on Prestige Records, a small, fledgling indie label in Hell’s Kitchen launched by Bob Weinstock in 1949. This set is not a comprehensive examination of his stay at Prestige—that is available on the 8-CD Miles Davis Chronicle: The Complete Prestige Recordings, 1951–1956—nor is there any new material here, but the recordings are in the exact format of their release, the forgotten 10-inch vinyl record, something new at the time that could accommodate more minutes than 78 rpm discs, which were the common format for popular recordings. “I was excited about the freedom this new technology would give me,” Miles wrote in his autobiography. “I had gotten tired of that three-minute lockstep that the 78s had put musicians in.”
If you’re not familiar with the 10-inch format, you’ll have to stay on your toes, as sides rarely go beyond 12 or 13 minutes (and sometimes run for as little as 8 minutes.) The set is in chronological order, more or less, to show how his work progressed, and features the original cover art, complete with typographical errors. (A 7–by–10 replica of one of Miles Davis’ paintings is also included.)
The music, too, will keep you on your toes, and enthralled. In many ways, this is one of his most rollicking periods. It’s post-Bird, post-birth-of-cool (released by Capitol Records), yet pre-great quintet with John Coltrane, which coalesced at Prestige in 1955 (not included in this set) and progressed into super-stardom at Columbia. Miles is still very much trying to find himself, musically and personally. A few of the musicians he organized for what several years later was called Birth of The Cool—white musicians, it should be said— took it to the West Coast and ran with it. Meanwhile, he was battling heroin addiction. “Heroin,” he wrote in his autobiography, “was my girlfriend.”
The Complete Prestige 10-Inch LP Collection is a document then of a search, an exhilarating one: a search for self, a search for a sound, a search for an aesthetic, a search for like minds. His various band mates on these dates include: Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Jackie McLean, Charles Mingus, John Lewis, Max Roach, Lucky Thompson, Roy Haynes, Horace Silver, Milt Jackson, Thelonious Monk, and Zoot Sims, whom, according to Miles’ autobiography, he did heroin with right before they recorded Miles Davis Plays the Compositions of Al Cohn in January 1953, on LP 4. It is—maybe because of the drugs, maybe because it wasn’t Miles’ idea to play Cohn’s music—one of the rare uninspired records here. So is the first, Modern Jazz Trumpets, of which Miles is only one of four leaders, along with Fats Navarro, Dizzy Gillespie, and the forever under-appreciated Kenny Dorham, highlighted on the cover as “Kinny.” (Remember, typos preserved.)
The rest—before H and after H—is nearly always stirring. Of that first recording, even Miles admitted he wasn’t up to par: “I didn’t play well,” Davis wrote of that January 1951 session, “but I think everyone else played well—especially Sonny [Rollins].” Indeed, Miles and Sonny had something special, and they have three dates together on this set across four of the LPs. As exceptional as some of the talent Miles assembled is, it didn’t always produce memorable partnerships. Charles Mingus, who plays piano on one tune—and he was a good piano player, just listen to Mingus Plays Piano—was never a going to be good fit with Miles. They both had huge personalities. And although he and Thelonious Monk did mesh well together, and played beautifully on four of these LPs, they clashed personally.
By around 1954, Miles wrote that he’d hoped to form a steady touring band with Rollins, Horace Silver on piano, Kenny Clarke on drums, and Percy Heath on bass. It wasn’t meant to be: Rollins had to deal with his own drug issues; Silver joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers; and Clarke went to the Modern Jazz Quartet. That great-quartet-that-never-was did have one session, on the LP Miles Davis with Sonny Rollins from June 29, 1954. The results hover around perfection as they play the Rollins originals “Oleo,” “Airegin,” “Doxy,” and the Gershwin standard “But Not for Me.”
Miles kicked his heroin habit by 1954 and had a great year, all of which is included in this set, and almost all of his sessions were now recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s across the river in New Jersey (though in his Hackensack living room, before he built his fabled studio in Englewood Cliffs). The following year, he did settle on a band, but with another tenor, John Coltrane, a 20-year-old bassist named Paul Chambers, Red Garland on piano, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. Not so bad. That quintet would go on to have recording dates for Prestige in 1955 and '56, which became the four albums Cookin’, Steamin’, Relaxin’, and Workin’, though now on 12-inch vinyl as the industry transitioned yet again by the mid-'50s.
The Complete Prestige 10-Inch LP Collection can, however, be a little puzzling. If you have a collection of Miles Davis records and want to know if you already own some of this material, it might not be immediately clear. Many fans might own a previous version of, say, Walkin’, which on the cover says “Miles Davis All Stars.” But here, “Walkin’ ” appears not as an LP but merely as a tune—a phenomenal 13-minute version with the superlative tenorist Lucky Thompson—from the April 29, 1954 LP Miles Davis All Star Sextet. Nor is it spelled out that Walkin’ (the 12-inch version, released by Prestige in 1957) is a compilation of two of the 10-inch LPs—Miles Davis Quintet in addition to Miles Davis All Star Sextet—plus one song not on this set. It all gets a little eye-crossing. You can figure most of this out, eventually, flipping back-and-forth from the 12-inch or CD you own (if you do) and the enclosed booklet. It is either maddening or a little fun, depending on your disposition—the fan as archivist.
The Complete Prestige 10-Inch LP Collection even rewards when you least expect it, like in 1951’s Lee Konitz Featuring Miles Davis, one of the few times, besides with Bird, where Miles was a sideman. (Cannonball Adderley’s 1958 Blue Note album Somethin’ Else was another, a record so luminous Uniqlo made a T-shirt out of it.) They were colleagues from Birth of the Cool, and Miles liked his playing, even defended him when he was criticized by other black musicians for hiring a white saxophonist. Konitz, the proto avant-gardist who was the first musician to record for Prestige in '49, worked hard—like Miles—to never sound like anyone else, and the two are almost otherworldly here, drifting inquisitively around each other, then as one, as if it were the birth of the free-cool. The daring hints at what would come, for Konitz (still underrated and still playing challenging music at age 88), and for Miles, always prepared to risk, always willing to move beyond his comfort zone. To hear Miles Davis develop—as a person, as a musician, and as a bandleader, in the midst of technological changes—makes this series of recordings on Prestige specialized, yes, but also quite special.


In the wake of the tragic Ghost Ship fire, 100% Silk has released Sensate Silk, a well-curated compilation that doubles as a rallying cry for dance music's underground.

Sensate Silk

Britt and Amanda Brown never could have imagined that their record label would one day make national news, or that it would happen under the worst possible circumstances. Founded in 2011, 100% Silk began as a home for scrappy electronic artists from various musical backgrounds. Their predominant sound, a lo-fi approach that became known as “outsider house” or “hipster house,” was decidedly niche—dance music by and for experimental, DIY music communities. But last year, on December 2, 100% Silk became widely mentioned outside of their usual circles. A fire broke out that Friday in an Oakland warehouse known as the Ghost Ship, where an event featuring some of the label's artists was underway, and it claimed 36 lives. Amanda wrote on Facebook the next day: “What happened in Oakland is an unbelievable tragedy, a nightmare scenario. Britt and I are beside ourselves, utterly devastated.”
The Ghost Ship fire was more than tragic national news; it sent a resounding shockwave through underground music communities around the world. As the names, photos, and stories of the deceased began to surface, a common response from musicians and fans was that it all “hit so close to home.” Many saw themselves in the faces and lives of the lost; there were those who were meant to attend the party that night but didn't, those who would have been there if they'd been in town, and of course there were those who lost their dear friends and family. Among the numerous young, talented people killed in the fire were 100% Silk artists Johnny Igaz, aka Nackt, and Chelsea Faith Dolan, aka Cherushii. Nearly two months later, relief events continue providing a place to honor and mourn these vibrant lives that feel all too familiar.
In his article about the Oakland DIY scene in the fire's aftermath, Sam Lefebvre underlined the necessity of places like the Ghost Ship with a quote invoking the words of MLK: “People need places to gather in Beloved Community.” More than just a concert or a dance party, the 100% Silk showcase was a gathering for locals and likeminded visitors, a space to explore and develop their culture. It was an event not unlike countless others that happen every night around the world, many of which have since come under scrutiny or been shut down by law enforcement. The Ghost Ship tragedy has brought about a renewed focus on safety in DIY venues, but it has also put them at greater risk. In the midst of this, 100% Silk has released Sensate Silk, a well-curated compilation that doubles as a rallying cry for dance music's underground.
Sensate Silk was conceived as the label’s 100th release well before December 2, but it has come to represent more than a milestone in their catalog. For some it’s a memorial, featuring one of the last tracks written by Nackt, the patient, cheerful acid of “Rising Tide.” Or it’s an embodiment of intertwined global scenes, with beautiful deep house from Japanese artists Keita Sano and Inoue Shirabe alongside a bass-loaded banger by LA’s Sage Caswell and meditative melodies from UK producer Helios Mode. The compilation is also an important show of perseverance from a label and community still reeling from disaster. In a Facebook post at the end of 2016, Britt Brown wrote, “This has been a negative year for plenty of other reasons. But music brought us together. And music will keep us together.” The sentiment seems to pulse through every synth and drum machine on Sensate Silk.
From the soulful atmosphere this kind of house music exudes, Sensate Silk fosters a sense of healing as well. “Roses” is a groovy, intricate standout by Donny, an alias of Golden Donna, who survived the Ghost Ship fire. Its energy is split between contemplative chords, distant vocal abstractions, and a lively bounce, like a dancer whose memories follow them into the club. PARC’s 11-minute “Silk Road” rises from burbling electronics into a cosmic dancefloor embrace, while the sax Cromie weaves through the plush “She Knew” resonates with quiet heartache. These songs weren’t necessarily written as balm for listeners, but their thoughtfulness and delicate natures will graciously soothe those who need it.
At the end of Sensate Silk is a song by unknown Berlin artist Westcoast Goddess. “Untitled Soul ‘98” is the compilation's brightest highlight, and not just because it has an uncommon way with tension and euphoria. Its buoyant slow build sounds lovingly handmade, with hi-hats clattering slightly too loud and a central synth loop that shifts and swells like a DJ mixing on the fly. Seven bubbly minutes in, it culminates in a brilliant lead line that could coax hands into the air as soon as bring a tear to the eye. Closing a compilation that’s heavy with meaning for many people, “Untitled Soul ’98” is a welcome burst of joy after months of grief. It’s only fitting that those who are still here should remember those who are gone in celebration of the music they lived to support and create.


On her sophomore album, the London-born, Berlin-based singer lives in subdued reveries. She strikes a dynamic balance of harmony and discord, of aspirational pop and visceral experimentation.

All of This

The “Elsewhere” in Sasha Perera’s stage name should be taken literally. Her music sounds as if it exists in different locations around the globe, in different times and dimensions. But beyond its physicality, it’s also a space for refuge and meditation. On her second album, All of This, Perera Elsewhere captures uncertainty, filters out all that isn’t beautiful and casts it to the universe.
The London-born, Berlin-based singer, who also self-produces her albums, builds on the foundation of her debut Everlast. She spent three years watering those seeds from Turkey to Mumbai and back to Berlin, forcing herself to develop fully-formed songs that wear their international influences boldly. Where experimental music allows room for interpretation, venturing into pop is methodical. Here, there’s definitive structure that still feels spontaneous, traditional instruments—gongs and sitars—tangling themselves in otherworldly noises.
Perera’s gamble on herself pays off, as she strikes a dynamic balance of harmony and discord, of aspirational pop and visceral experimentation. It peaks on “Karam,” a reimagining of 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop” as a brooding nocturne where the candy shop is in the basement of a funeral home. “Karam” maintains aspects of its original seductive overtones but feels desolate and detached without the cynical irony that genre-bending covers can be given to. Such an inclusion is a warm welcome for listeners new to Perera’s music and an Easter egg of sorts for those already familiar with her remixes.
All of This is marked by a similar darkness throughout, but Perera lets in light through some cracks. “Tomorrow South,” a largely instrumental track driven by shakers and animated vocalizations, is rose-colored, while the sitar and trumpet melodies on “Runaway” conjure pictures of a sunset overlooking the Arabian Sea. They’re brief glimmers of hope despite their surroundings, moments achieved only when Perera lets her instrumentation and programming do most of the talking. Lyrics aren’t necessarily the focal point in general, but her words, though minimal, are also wrought with emotion and intent.
Album opener and lead single “Something’s Up” features buoyant synth arpeggios but fails to lighten the warning of “Your plans are losing weight/The crows are circling/They know something’s up.” Later, the industrial “Shoes” is equally as dour. Accented with white noise and wilting horns, she sings, “I can’t walk in these shoes/Can’t speak, I can’t move...can’t read all the signs/So deep in this mind fuck.” But even at her most morose, the backdrops become sanctuaries for her confessionals—beauty and burden wrapped in one, as they often are.
Some music requires boundaries and begs for definition, but Perera revels in her own shapeshifting. Her ability to blend sounds that feel ancient and familiar with electro-futurism embodies what it means to experience music and not just hear it. Percussion makes for a compelling bridge—as on “Happened”—but it’s what she does with very little that binds the album together. On the standout title track, she lightens her usually smoldering voice into a whisp; the vocal layers are dense but the production just hovers, swirling and swelling, barely there at all. Like a subdued reverie, *All of This *sparkles as it creeps along, careful not to disturb but arresting nonetheless.


After years of enjoying tangential connections to fellow Canadian indie rock stars Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, and the Unicorns (RIP), this Jagjaguwar group is finally ready for its close-up.

Are the Dark Horse

As the title of their second album makes plain, the Besnard Lakes are indeed the dark horses of a Montreal indie rock community that has consumed so many column inches in the music press over the past three years, a band that's often stood on the periphery of greatness-- they opened the Unicorns' 2004 North American tour, while singer/guitarist Jace Lasek's Break Glass Studio produced Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary and Sunset Rubdown's Shut Up I Am Dreaming-- but never tasted it themselves. Though it's not as if the Besnard Lakes were unfairly denied their due, having released a gauzy 2003 debut that was heavy on languorous shoegazer jangle/drone, but low on personality and vigor.
The Dark Horse shares that album's deliberate sense of pacing, precious attention to detail and hermetic sound-world atmosphere; the difference here is that almost every song builds to a crucial moment where the Besnards bravely step out of the shadows, and in the process, transform from being a merely good band to a great one. And just as the individual tracks ascend to their own internal peaks, so too does the eight-song sequence as a whole, which means patience is certainly a virtue here: Opener "Disaster" begins as a swell of forlorn falsettos and weepy strings (courtesy of in-house arranger Nicole Lizee and moonlighting Godspeed violinist Sophie Trudeau) that yields to a slumberous chorus of Brian Wilson harmonies; "For Agent 13" is all slow-dissolving, ladies-and-gentleman-we-are-floating-in-Spiritualized tremolos and mournful coos that sound like they're coming from a castrated Sigur Rós.
It's not until the third track, "And You Lied to Me", that The Dark Horse really achieves lift-off, and not without some great effort: the song seems to be deliberately working against its itself with its Floydian glide, oddly timed drum rolls at the chorus and frequent pauses filled in with strange, indecipherable murmurs. But finally, at the 4:56, we hit pay dirt: after a brief stop, the drums kick in and guitarist Steve Raegele and guest Jonathan Cummins (ex of the Doughboys, currently of Bionic) blast into a glorious two-way duel worthy of its own planetarium laser show. And then instead of coming down, the Besnards turn it up another notch thanks to bassist/Lacek's belle Olga Goreas' star turn on "Devastations", a hellacious, fuck-the-man screen delivered in 70s-smooth girly harmonies that provide an uncanny contrast to song's monstrous psych-metal groove and-- oh yes-- climactic three-way drum solo.
Together, these two songs form the front half of The Dark Horse's awesome middle stretch, but their playful bombast is effectively counterbalanced by the two songs that follow: "Because Tonight" is the album's most moving performance, a swaying space-rock ballad that intensifies into a beautifully bawling chorus; "Ride the Rails" is its most foreboding, with a circular bass riff and ominous violin inflections that lend it an ominous allure. It's also the song that best exemplifies Lacek's recurring lyrical strategy of trading off between World War II-era imagery and the present tense, with verses told through the eyes of a desperate drifter ("Gotta find a better to go on") and a chorus ("my father rides the rails") that shifts the perspective to a contemporary third-person telling. So it figures that the one song with an identifiably modern setting-- Brooklyn set piece "On Bedford and Grand"-- is the one that ultimately breaks The Dark Horse's dreamlike spell, an amiable but uneventful fuzz-pop exercise on which the Besnards come off as just another band of shoegaze revivalists.
But as sprightly Beach Boys pastiche "Cedric's War" gallops triumphantly to the finish line, you realize what's really remarkable about The Dark Horse: that for all its epic intimations and interstellar overdriving, the album still clocks in at a lean 45 minutes. Clearly, the Besnard Lakes are the product of a generation that remembers when their favorite albums used to fit perfectly on one side of a C90. But they've retrofitted classic-rock grandeur to indie-rock dimensions and forged their own special niche-- space-rock that's down to Earth.


On their first studio album in almost a decade, the Detroit veterans sound as calm, cool, and horny as always. With a batch of fresh ideas in tow, they avoid retreading old territory.

F.U.N.

From the jump, Slum Village have always been centered around three things: ill beats, boastful raps, and love songs more horny and cavalier than an army of porn bots. The tuneful intricacies of producer and founding member J Dilla’s music had such a gravitational pull at the Detroit group’s peak, they often overshadowed just how erotic the music could be. On Fan-Tas-Tic Vol. 1’s “The Look of Love, Pt. 1,” pattering drums and serene guitar strums cushion rappers and co-founders Baatin and T3’s thirst (“Your fragrance got me losing consciousness/Your stance got me unbuckling my fucking pants”). T3’s verse on the 2015 cut “Love Is” gets even more direct; it opens with a bluster about being inspired to write after getting some good head. Even after several lineup changes and the deaths of Dilla in 2006 and Baatin in 2009, the SV ethos never faltered. With T3 still at the helm, the group remains committed to the groove: They continue to be occasionally thoughtful, often rock-the-mic competitive, and always willing to bet on a piece of strange.
F.U.N., SV’s tenth studio album and their first since 2015’s Yes!, stays true to that bold player spirit while still being something of a pivot for the group, now a duo made up of T3 and the rapper-producer Young RJ. It started out as a more “traditional” SV album with sample-based beats, but in a press release, RJ said the pair “felt like that was boring.” Instead, RJ—who has production credits on every song—leaned toward disco and funk, incorporating live instruments and presets to create a sound that pays tribute to their past, mixing the lush exuberance of the Gap Band with the dirty swing of Synth or Soul-era Black Milk. That sounds like a moonshot on paper, but SV keeps things as loose as they always have, while bringing new voices and ideas into the fold. The group transitioned from young bachelors on the prowl to frisky, sauced uncles in silk shirts and slides at the kickback some time ago, but F.U.N. slathers a funky coat of paint onto their aesthetic.
Groove is an essential part of the SV sound, and while they’ve always been versatile with gritty and soulful music, F.U.N. pops with a colorful energy that didn’t exist even back in their scrappier days. “All Live” gives their patented club-hopping a new context, with vibrant horns and luscious bass and synths flashing like tri-color flood lights. T3 and RJ are energetic, even peppy, as they drop references to Mase and Rubi Rose over the satin production. “All Live Pt. 2.” brings in harder drums and piano stabs for longtime collaborator Phat Kat to warn rappers that he’ll abort them like Roe v. Wade. This two-song suite, like the rest of the album, reframes the spit-kicking and dirty-macking sides of SV without making them look like bland revivalists or clueless trend chasers.
Not much has changed lyrically, but the fullness of RJ’s beats reanimates the group here. There’s an even mix of homages to disco and funk and the vintage head knockers they made their name on, but it’s so well-curated that it can be easy not to notice. Take the way that “To the Disco” and “Request,” both featuring contributions from British band Abstract Orchestra, flow directly into each other without harshing the transition into the jittery, Karriem Riggins-assisted “Yeah Yeah.” Or consider how the title track and “Keep Dreaming” maintain an early 2000s boom-bap aura without devolving into boring retreads. They’ve found a slightly different lane, and they seem grateful to be cruising in it.
Part of that newfound zeal also stems from the album’s features, which venture outside of their usual suspects in ways we haven’t seen since 2004’s Detroit Deli (A Taste of Detroit). Some of the guest features make sense on first glance, like Bruiser Brigade member Fat Ray barreling through “Keep Dreaming,” or genre-hopping rap emissaries like Eric Roberson (“Factor”) and Robert Glasper (“Since 92”). But many of the album’s best moments are blindsiding. Chicago rapper Brittney Carter sets the tone for the whole LP on “Welcome,” arriving with the kind of fiery verse that only comes from being summoned by industry veterans. Sango brings his breezy sensibilities to Phat Kat’s spirited verse on “All Live Pt. 2,” while Larry June offers his chill, Bay Area elegance to the dancefloor chic of “Just Like You.” SV have done their homework, recruiting the right voices to freshen up the vibes; even a so-so verse from puppy-dog rap star Cordae on “So Superb” doesn’t drag things down.
It’s been almost a decade since the last proper Slum Village album, so the fact that F.U.N. works as well as it does is a relief. Seasoned MCs take time off and often come back bitter and/or rusty, especially in rap. But while F.U.N. isn’t a genre-rocking comeback effort in the vein of A Tribe Called Quest’s We got it from Here…Thank You 4 Your service or Little Brother’s May the Lord Watch, it’s still fun to see everyone’s favorite Detroit players find their place in the present moment. Lascivious lovers like Brent Faiyaz and Cash Cobain have the hot hand in the streets and on the charts, so it’s only right that the OGs step back in the ring to remind everyone how it’s done.


On his first solo album, the Sleep and High on Fire frontman hits the garage for a comfortable blend of his signature heavy metal sounds.

Pike vs the Automaton: Pike vs the Automaton

Pike vs the Automaton

Matt Pike is a man stuck out of time. The 49-year-old guitarist in Sleep and High on Fire makes music that’s rooted in the elemental proto-metal of the early 1970s, but his sensibility dates back even farther than that. Pike feels most at home in the untamed forests of Oregon. He reflexively distrusts modernity and technology, and he’s outspoken in his disdain for anything with the faintest whiff of authority. (A recent interview in The Quietus revealed Pike’s eyebrow-raising takes on the pandemic and David Icke, but his brand of conspiracy theorist is more drunk uncle hunting for Bigfoot than Alex Jones-style disinformation artist.) Even his defiant, perpetually shirtless stage look suggests a return to the primeval, or the prenatal. His first-ever solo album, Pike vs the Automaton, embodies his caveman ethos with gusto. It’s an intoxicating draught of pure, unfiltered Pike.
Pike vs the Automaton feels instinctive and easygoing, like the guitarist fired up his amp while he was having his morning coffee, and these were the songs that spilled out. Some of those songs, naturally, sound a lot like his other bands. “Abusive” opens the album right in Pike’s sweet spot, with a stomping, Sabbath-on-speed riff and roaring vocals that give way to a frantic yet tuneful guitar solo. Pike can write songs like “Abusive” with his eyes closed, and for much of the album, he barely seems to break a sweat. He’s too good at what he does for that to be disappointing: “Trapped in a Midcave” is halfway between the seismic doom of Sleep and High on Fire’s careening gallop. And while it’s a comforting blend of the best qualities of both bands, it’s not as satisfying as the best material by either of them.
More thrilling are the moments when Pike uncovers a new way to express his musical id. Prior to Pike vs the Automaton, the closest he’d come to writing a country song was “The Cave,” a smoldering stoner metal epic from High on Fire’s Luminiferous. In comparison, the deep-in-the-pocket “Land” sounds like last call at the honkytonk. Pike trades bluesy solos with Brent Hinds of Mastodon, and Steve McPeeks anchors the song with a sturdy, stand-up bassline. “Land” is a tribute to the two-step country music Pike’s mom would dance to when he was growing up, and it highlights the influence of the women in his life. “Acid Test Zone” is an equally adventurous song at the opposite end of the stylistic spectrum, featuring throat-shredding guest vocals from Pike’s wife, Alyssa Maucere-Pike. Her pissed-off delivery is the perfect accompaniment to the first proper hardcore song in Pike’s songbook.
Collaboration, somewhat ironically, is a crucial part of Pike’s maiden solo outing. The genesis of the album came early in the pandemic, when he invited his friend (and dog-sitter) Jon Reid to come jam in the garage. With Reid on drums and Pike on guitar, the rough shape of the songs started to come together. Billy Anderson, who engineered earlier landmarks like Sleep’s Holy Mountain and High on Fire’s Surrounded by Thieves, came on board to produce, and a rotating cast of guest musicians popped by to add splashes of color. It’s a friends-and-family affair, with all the looseness that implies.
Sometimes that looseness crosses into shaggy self-indulgence. Pike vs the Automaton clocks in at a bloated 63 minutes, and some of its less distinctive songs sound like exactly what they are—a couple of bored, middle-aged dudes woodshedding in the garage. Still, its animating energy is admirable. Pike is biologically driven to write and play bodacious heavy metal riffs. In a rare moment when both Sleep and High on Fire were on hold, he did what he’s always done. He picked up his guitar.


Up-and-coming Queens rapper releases a rock-solid, ridiculously fun album that recalls the past glories of New York rap without feeling derivative.

Dr. Lecter

In any discussion about the new-on-the-scene Queens rapper Action Bronson, two things inevitably come up: (1) He sounds a whole hell of a lot like Ghostface Killah, and (2) he loves rapping about food. Both of these things are entirely true. Like Ghost, he's got a pinched, high-pitched, urgent delivery, rendering his boasts in a dense, inventive New York slur that moves from one idea to the next with necksnap immediacy. He's not a rip-off artist; he's got none of Ghost's emotional streak and little of his vividly violent storytelling impulse. But the mere grain of his voice is similar enough to provoke the momentary sensation every time a new verse starts that you're actually hearing Ghostface.
Similarly, the food fixation is no invention. In a recent web interview, Bronson claims he hopes his rap career can bankroll his culinary studies in Tuscany. And even "Ronnie Coleman", the song where he laments his weight and lack of impulse control, has enough impassioned food descriptions to make you seriously hungry: "An hour later, eat the burger with my drug dealer/ Then add the butter to the fudge to make the fudge realer." Bronson raps about food with the same loving linguistic dizziness that Pusha T raps with about cocaine, or that Lil Wayne raps with about blowjobs.
But even though both the Ghostface and the food talking points hold true, they don't really get to the bottom of what makes Dr. Lecter, Bronson's debut album, such a breath of fresh air. Simply put, Dr. Lecter is a rock-solid, ridiculously fun New York rap album, one that recalls the city's past glories without ever feeling like an act of stylistic exhumation. All the tracks on the LP come from one producer, the heretofore unknown Tommy Mas, whose style would've fit the late-80s classics of Marley Marl and the Juice Crew but maintains a crispness and energy that we rarely hear in retro-rap. Mas chops up breakbeats and soul samples, all the while keeping his sound simple, sparse, and funkier than any recent hip-hop. And Bronson attacks every one of his tracks, delivering quick bursts of streetcorner shit-talk, having too much fun to take himself seriously. Bronson's lyrics can be ignorant as fuck ("Take a dyke on a date/ She let me pipe cuz I'm an ape"), but he doesn't have the nihilistic edge of an Odd Future affiliate. He's just kicking silly bullshit, and it's tough to imagine anyone seriously getting offended.
Maybe the greatest thing about Dr. Lecter is how the album never announces itself as some triumphant return of New York rap. Bronson never claims to be the savior of anything; he just belts out his punchlines and then disappears. Songs typically don't have choruses, and the album's 15 tracks end in less than 45 minutes. Bronson names songs after relatively marginal figures: perennial WWF jobber Barry Horowitz, 90s NBA journeyman Chuck Person, 60s/70s football great Larry Csonka. A few guests show up, but none of them are big names. And though the two rappers' styles are radically different, Dr. Lecter calls up memories of Marcberg, the great and underrated 2010 album from fellow New York shit-talker Roc Marciano. Like that LP, Dr. Lecter doesn't try to break any ground; it just does a long-established style very, very well.


The incarcerated rapper, awaiting trial for murder, releases an album of second-rate material and third-rate Young Thug–isms.

Melly vs. Melvin

YNW Melly isn’t the first rapper to release an album while in jail awaiting trial for murder, but he may be the first accused of killing his own crewmates. Last October, Florida prosecutors allege, Melly and rapper YNW Bortlen shot and killed two fellow YNW rappers then staged the crime scene to make it appear like a drive-by. Melly, who surrendered himself to police in February and faces life in prison or the death penalty, has maintained his innocence and continues to carry on his rap career as best he can. But judging by the relative silence that’s greeted his debut album, Melly vs. Melvin, his commercial prospects may be almost dire as his legal ones.
Melly vs. Melvin has a difficult public-relations needle to thread, presenting a portrait of a teenager who definitely didn’t do what the prosecutors have accused him of but also, you know, totally could have. “I’m a slimeball and I’ll admit it,” he raps on the opener “Two Face,” pinning his transgressions on an alternate personality. The record’s cover quite literally depicts those two faces, one sweetly boyish and looking no older than his 20 years, the other considerably more hardened. It’s a powerful concept, evoking the dueling images that the media often uses to depict young black men and suggesting how easily their portrayals can be spun. It’s a shame the idea is wasted on an album as superficial as Melly vs. Melvin, which pads Melly’s precious few original ideas with second-rate material and third-rate Young Thug–isms.
Since Melly’s been behind bars for most of the year, it’s unclear when this material was recorded. The murder allegations are never specifically mentioned, yet several songs vaguely create the illusion that he’s addressing them. “Can you hear me, father? Can you please send me some signs?/I’ve been going through some things, there’s been a lot on my mind,” he pleads on “Waitin on You,” along with a pledge to keep praying.
Melly’s contrition isn’t especially convincing, however, nor is he effective at engendering sympathy. It doesn’t help that his default persona is downright sour. He directs “Suicidal” to the “stupid bitch” who “took my heart and made it bleed.” On “Stay Up” he offers this peevish retort: “Bitch, I ain’t mentally challenged.” Twice he berates women in his life for having had, or having considered, an abortion.
On his previous projects, including January’s considerably more enjoyable We All Shine, Melly distinguished himself from his many SoundCloud variants with a ’90s R&B influence that he employed on his most sumptuous songs. But aside from a few outliers like “Bang Bang,” which samples the Nelly/Akon/Ashanti track “Body on Me,” and “Nobody’s Around,” which slows things down with a bit of an R&B bump, there isn’t much of that spirit here. Melly began the year as a rising star sharing a video with Kanye West, but even morbid curiosity and the sordid details of his case haven’t done much to sustain the public’s interest in him, and assuming that Melvin is the best music he had left in the vault, that doesn’t bode well for his prospects either.


Reissues of the L.A. band’s mid-’90s albums capture how they brought girl-group yearning, three-part harmonies, and virtuoso violin lines to the era of Sassy mag and 120 Minutes.

that dog.: Totally Crushed Out! / Retreat From the Sun

Totally Crushed Out / Retreat From the Sun

In 1992, Los Angeles’ that dog. formed in the teen bedrooms of singer-guitarist Anna Waronker and bassist Rachel Haden, bringing all the ache and nerve and doom of girlhood to their lovesick vision of alt rock. Theirs was a musical world where astrology, crushes, lip gloss, and punk-rock garage shows all convened in an artful, off-kilter push toward possibility. Barely out of high school, Waronker played her older brother Joey’s left-handed guitar upside down. When Rachel’s sister Petra walked by, she didn’t want to be left out, and dusted off her violin to join. Together, with pitch-perfect three-part harmonies, virtuosic orchestrations, and crashing chords, the original iteration of that dog. made three albums—1994’s that dog., 1995’s Totally Crushed Out!, 1997’s Retreat From the Sun—in a baroque bubblegum pop-rock style all their own.
Waronker’s songwriting was thrilling: Her lyrics captured the raw essence of how overwhelming and transforming infatuation can be, singing in the witty, conversational style of a long-lost best friend. She brought girl-group yearning and ’70s singer-songwriter chops to the era of Sassy mag and 120 Minutes. Waronker originally wanted to be a music supervisor, having briefly studied filmmaking at USC, and she had a flair for the colorful details that spike the personality of a song—dialogue, tension, a sense of place. In her endearing deadpan, that dog. songs could feel like scene-setting film treatments for hypothetical teen movies. (Waronker would go on to compose music for Josie and the Pussycats, Clueless, and last year’s Shrill.) The band’s angelic harmonies tended toward a surreal California grandeur, and Petra’s classically trained violin playing was lucid and pretty, rather than noisy like John Cale’s, which made that dog. weirder still. Often compared to contemporaries like the Breeders or Veruca Salt, that dog. sounded more like folk-rock trio the Roches gone art-punk, slyly sophisticated.
But these were never the most discussed lines in that dog.’s biography. The Haden sisters were two of the triplet daughters of the legendary jazz bassist Charlie Haden, an original member of the Ornette Coleman Quartet on such towering classics as The Shape of Jazz to Come. Harmonic prowess surrounded them. Waronker, meanwhile, was the daughter of the Warner Brothers record exec Lenny Waronker—which meant she grew up in the orbit of icons like Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman, and was particularly fond of the latter’s plainspoken piano-pop symphonies. Completing that dog.’s lineup was boy drummer Tony Maxwell, best friend of Waronker’s older brother, a member of Beck’s band. They all attended Santa Monica’s Crossroads High School, where they also met future Girls co-producer Jenni Konner, who helped write some early that dog. lyrics.
And so that dog. embodied a strange in-between. They could not have been classified as indie; they signed to David Geffen’s DGC label within a year of forming. On the other hand, their music was too unusual for mass appeal. Future collaborators like Beck and Weezer originally opened for them in the L.A. underground, but that dog.’s rapid ascent meant the group of 19- and 20-year-olds was quickly met with skepticism—headlines in The Washington Post and L.A. Weekly read “Well Connected Dog” and “That Dad”—and sometimes written off as a gimmick. Yet it was their idiosyncratic experiences that helped make that dog.’s songwriting so audacious and their arrangements so richly textured. The Hadens spoke of favoring Bach and Arvo Pärt over anything on the radio. As Maxwell put it in 1997: “We never pretended to be anything other than what we were.”
When Waronker first began writing songs, her self-imposed rule was “no love songs, no guitar solos.” But as that dog. progressed, she gave herself a new challenge: only love songs and guitar solos. “I had five broken hearts at one time,” she admitted then, “all broken in five different places.” Her own sensitivity horrified her. Totally Crushed Out! started as her attempt at “a Beatles parody love song” collection, like a teen romance novel recast as clever, grungy power pop, but as it charted the mess and magnitude of emotional ennui, the cheeky art concept became catharsis.
After the irony-suffused experiments of their self-titled debut, Totally Crushed Out! was that dog.’s first cohesive record—a sugar-rushing testament to the emotional confusions of youth. The buzz-sawed Shangri-Las pop of “He’s Kissing Christian” delineates the experience of dating someone as he realizes that he would rather be kissing boys—a possible riff on the plot of that year’s Clueless—while the self-sabotage-y opener “Ms. Wrong” (a Konner co-write) is about not feeling a relationship because you don’t feel yourself. On the thrasher “Lip Gloss,” Waronker applies lip gloss in front of a guy and waits for him to kiss her, but, tragically, he never does. “Lily white/Cherry raspberry/Lip lover/Rachel Perry-eee-eee-eee!” the band chants in unison, like Devo-schooled Martians out of a truly alternative dimension of girl-punk kissability. From the Sweet Valley High-evoking album cover to the ill-fated prom dance on “One Summer Night,” the performance of femininity across Totally Crushed Out! is befitting of a gender studies thesis.
The starker moments of Totally Crushed Out! are stirring, evoking the band’s acoustic bedroom beginnings while also foreshadowing the impending greatness of Waronker’s writing. The loud/quiet whispers of “Silently” describe being pissed off and enamored by someone (later confirmed to be Beck Hansen) at the same time. The dour minimalism of “Side Part” knows all too well that the only way out of heartbreak, often, is through. Other mellow Crushed Out! ballads explore breaches of confidence, the despairing haze of being alone on “Holidays,” and the erudition of the MTV-era fangirl. Waronker’s songs cut to the marrow of young womanhood, validating how longing and obsession are all tied up in the process of becoming.
By the time of the sleek, polished Retreat From the Sun, Waronker was 24; she’d been in that dog. since she was 19. The songs were deeper, more finely wrought—initially, she thought they might comprise her first solo album. Retreat was recorded with Brad Wood, who’d produced Liz Phair’s seismic Exile in Guyville around the time that dog. formed, and it shared much with Phair’s intelligence, ambition, and sexuality. It was Wood who pushed that dog. to go “as new wave as possible” on Retreat’s laser-beam single, “Never Say Never”—a glossy video would find its way into MTV rotation—which not only evoked the Go-Go’s but featured their keyboardist Charlotte Caffey on synth. Beyond the single, Retreat From the Sun carefully placed Waronker’s sensitive balladeering—often as irreducible as teardrop country tunes—alongside throttling pop-punk gems containing timeless aphorisms: “By definition a crush must hurt/And they do, and they do/Just like the one I have on you.”
Waronker was inspired by the pop leanings of her then-boyfriend (and future husband) Steve McDonald, of L.A. glam punks Redd Kross, who lent her a piano, near which she displayed a photo of her family friend Randy Newman. She reflected on her deepening relationship with McDonald in many of Retreat’s songs. Waronker told Much Music, “I’m entering into more of a Carole King phase…. It’s pop, but it’s more, like, frizzy-haired. I’m gonna have frizzy hair and a baby and a flowered skirt.” (There are at least two explicit mom-rock tunes on Retreat From the Sun.)
Perhaps to temper all of that normative monogamy, Waronker and McDonald wrote a song together: “Gagged and Tied.” “I don’t care if you don’t treat me like a lady,” Waronker sings with delightful touches of evil. “I don’t care, just sit there, and don’t disobey me.” In this straight-faced BDSM scene—“Put on ‘Venus in Furs’/And you can go home afterwards”—Waronker’s singing is still unassuming and innocent, recalling how Liz Phair once said, “The point of some of [my] songs was to say things that shouldn’t come out of the voice that was saying it.” In the end, Waronker can’t help making even a dominatrix fantasy sound disarmingly sweet. “It’s not your style/I can see/You crack a smile,” she sings, a whole layered plot twist in less than a dozen words.
You could call Waronker a master of pop-punk literary compression. The breezy “Minneapolis” alludes to how she met McDonald one night at a beloved L.A. club. “I was at the Jabberjaw/Cutest boy I ever saw,” she sings, and in four minutes, the song captures the stomach-twisting spark of a crush—a rush of uncertainty, euphoria, nerves, embarrassment, caught glances, and timid conversation: “He said, ‘I’m leaving on Wednesday/Come see me when Low plays.’” There’s a beguilingly unvarnished feel to Waronker’s singing that makes these dimensional details sound much more casual than they are.
“Minneapolis” is one of three Retreat tracks named for specific places, and they’re the best songs Waronker ever wrote. Like “Minneapolis,” the dizzied “Long Island” rips through infatuation, location, and subtext: “You’re pretty dreamy for a boy from Long Island.” What could be less conventionally cool than pining for a guy from the suburbs? But Waronker’s daydream doesn’t waver:

I want to set a place for you at my table
We can sit forever watching reruns on cable
Take you driving in my brother’s beat-up car
Sharing a cigarette, we’ll wish upon a star together

In its compacted abandon, “Long Island” was a reminder that that dog. toured with fellow ’90s romantics Jawbreaker. So was “Hawthorne,” the sparest and sharpest song in that dog.’s catalog, in which Waronker soberly narrates a visit to her boyfriend’s hometown. “Hawthorne” is immediately visual: “Driving/Looking for your parents’ house/Striving/To find a piece of you,” Waronker sings. It’s a small, ephemeral moment, but a telling one, seeming to gesture at what those devastating crushes were after, mixing mundanity and depth. Both songs are evidence of the particular electricity of intimacy that can exist inside of cars, the sense that you are totally aligned with another person if only for a moment.
It’s that precise type of person-to-person connection that that dog.’s vulnerable records have fostered with new generations of fans, spreading by word of mouth and influencing bands like Paramore, Vivian Girls, Swearin’, and so many others. Though they imploded shortly after Retreat From the Sun, that dog. offer proof that honesty endures, that what makes something continue to resonate, usually, is simple—you could miss it, if you don’t listen close. “And I saw a punk rock show/In a car garage/And I saw you as a child,” Waronker sings on “Hawthorne,” wide-eyed and coasting; “I saw you/My dream come true.” How to make that feeling last is a mystery of life. But the songs did.

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The finale of the New York jazz ensemble’s Lower East Suite trilogy marks a shift in tone and finds the band newly focused.

Onyx Collective : Lower East Suite Part Three

Lower East Suite Part Three

Over the last couple of years, Onyx Collective have been playing a game of connect-the-dots across New York. The amorphous jazz ensemble is led primarily by the twentysomething saxophonist Isaiah Barr and drummer Austin Williamson, and in varying lineups they play DIY shows, rap concerts, jazz showcases, and funk jams. Throughout it all, they’ve become known for their itching curiosity, radical eagerness, and unconventional methods.
Last year, Onyx Collective released a pair of EPs captured on an iPhone at gigs and practice spaces around Manhattan. The recordings’ immediacy was evocative, even though both the compositions and sound quality were rough around the edges. Still, the tactic captured a band excitingly on the move. On Lower East Suite Part One they jammed dense hard bop and salsa on the same tracklist. The series finale, Lower East Suite Part Three, is a determined change of pace and length, and the band sounds suddenly contained and focused.
On the prequel EPs the band engaged with New York in documentary fashion, capsulizing their roaming performances with song titles like “172 Forsyth St.” and “Market St.” This time they begin fleshing out the narrative with commentary: “Battle of the Bowery,” “There Goes the Neighborhood,” “Eviction Notice.” Onyx Collective are still closely tuned to the buzz of the Lower East Side, but they’re conjuring and considering it abstractly instead of plugging directly into its hum. “The record is born out of the challenges of being in New York,” Barr has said. In many ways Lower East Suite Part Three is the sound of the musicians digging their heels in to pivot.
For one thing, Part Three sounds much better. The songs are more linear and of a piece: dank bop compositions that often gnarl up in the middle and leave no room for extended solos. The pace and form of their songs no longer springs from jams, and there’s new tension and spacing to show for it. On “Rumble in Chatham Square” Barr’s tenor sax and Walter Stinson’s bass tiptoe along in cinematic staccato, Williamson tumbling behind them with flourishes and splashing accents. About halfway in, Barr staggers one way and Stinson the other, abruptly falling out of unison in a syncopated gait, as if to convey the namesake square in Chinatown, where a bunch of large streets jut into each other awkwardly and then resolve the intersection.
“There Goes the Neighborhood” is a sleazy detective soundtrack. Barr’s sax swoops around in long, drunken strides, Stinson’s bass holding tight to stretch things back and together. There’s a playfulness to Barr’s horn throughout, but the album is foreboding and dense as a whole. “Magic Gallery” sounds a little cautious and precarious, but it’s one of the few places on the record where the band opens up space for Barr to swing gracefully instead of getting cornered.
One of the highlights of Lower East Suite Part Three is the appearance of saxophonist Roy Nathanson, who, in his sixties, could be an Onyx Collective dad. Just a few years ago, Nathanson, an accomplished bandleader, composer, and session player himself, was Barr’s high-school teacher and an early musical mentor. On “Eviction Notice” you can hear him play the part of the tenant, trading blows with his apprentice—screaming frantic, squiggly squeals on his way out the door while Barr bellows out landlord-like groans underneath. It’s the most obvious set piece on the record, a passionate shouting match and existential crisis that ends with dramatic, raucous discord.
A little over a decade ago, an interviewer asked Nathanson, a Brooklynite who in the early 1980s wrote a song called “Spirits of Flatbush,” if he could have found his  artistic voice anywhere else in the United States. “No,” he said, noting how deeply the era’s East Village scene was grounded in a sense of place. “It wasn’t like I just visited New York, my roots were so Brooklyn.” On a song like “Eviction Notice” you can hear how much things have changed, as Onyx Collective grapple with how to belong to a city they’re from, but won’t get to inherit.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that this was a studio recording; the album was recorded at a gallery.


On their fifth album Nucleus, Witchcraft continue to carry the torch of '70s hard rock/proto-metal bands like Pentagram, St. Vitus, and Candlemass, while striving torward a broader sound. Witchcraft's music—however indebted to the past—skews progressive, a cumulative approach to riff-building beget by several decades' worth of influences.

Nucleus

Sweden's Witchcraft are key figures in the so-called hard rock revival: Originally conceived at the start of the century by singer Magnus Pelander as a tribute to the pioneering doom outfit Pentagram, the group has since expanded those paradigms to encompass Palm Desert stoner rock, Jethro Tull-style blues, and the heady psych of the '60s. Compared to the rudimentary sounds of peers like Graveyard, Kadavar, and Truckfighters, Witchcraft's music—however indebted to the past—skews progressive, a cumulative approach to riff-building beget by several decades' worth of influences.
On their fifth album Nucleus, Witchcraft continue to carry the torch of '70s hard rock/proto-metal bands while striving torward a broader sound. Pelander has put down his axe to focus entirely on singing, as well as production; unsurprisingly, the mix that he and producers Philip Gabriel Saxin and Anton Sundell decided upon gives him all the space he needs to croon to heart’s content. Apart from that, the album sounds downright gargantuan. From the airtight, string-inflected boogie of "The Outcast" to the grizzled march of the title track, each cut optimizes volume over vulnerability, a torrent of liquid lead rushing into the ears. Folk, and maybe even a little bit of jazz, sveltely sneak their way into the mix in the form of of flutes and strings—but by and large, Nucleus is an album that refuses to stay quiet, roaring and clawing forth for over an hour before coming to a shuddering halt.
Like so many of the groups before them, Witchcraft draw inspiration from high fantasy, an aesthetic that manifests itself with the ren-faire woodwind and string arrangements and in the epic tales of wanderlust, misplaced faith, and heroic striving in the lyrics. Thankfully, the fanciful mood never gets mired in Blind Guardian-style goofiness, gesturing more generally to the haggard adventurer in us all: "The Outcast" focuses not on some wayward brigadier, but rather on the growing alienation of a global population becoming more resigned and hopeless by the second. The universality makes the record more approachable, but the lyrics can’t rise to accommodate it, as evidenced by the aformentioned track’s head-scratching, grammatically-tenuous refrain: "Save a nation from a bad economy/ Is like sailing away on an endless sea." Pelander’s stilted cadence compounds the problem; if he’s not squeezing an extra syllable out of a word like "indecision," he’s attempting to rhyme "loving parents" with "discontent"—and botching the emphasis on both.
It’s up to Rage Widerberg on drums and Tobias Anger on bass to convey what Pelander’s words can’t, and they deserve a considerable amount of credit for channeling all the rage and confusion coursing through tracks like "Malstroem" and "The Obsessed"'s percolating, crowd-pleasing doom riffs. Unfortunately, the glacial pacing of Nucleus’ slow burn frequently snuffs its own flame. Following "Maelstrom"’s opening inertia, the album sinks into a figurative tar pit: a seemingly endless progression of the smoky, wail-ridden jams Blue Cheer could write in their sleep. Even by doom’s slow standards, the record’s second half is plodding and woefully self-indulgent, relying more on Pelander’s killer pipes than on developed songcraft. Of course, it goes without saying that Nucleus rocks: its nine tracks (two of which extend past the 14-minute mark) pack in enough solemn solos, furied backbeats, and majestic stoner breakdowns to hold fans over until next time. But how good is pure volume when it's lacking a furious heart to match?


The London producer’s new three-track EP adds texture and personality to her music without quite innovating on her original, already much-imitated pop formula.

Take Me Home EP

Even if she had packed it in at the end of 2021, PinkPantheress would have been safe in the knowledge that she had remade a good swathe of pop’s underground in her own image. With just a few viral singles and one great mixtape, to hell with it, the 21-year-old Londoner supercharged TikTok’s drum’n’bass revival, spawned a legion of imitators, and reintroduced the influence of UK dance music to the U.S. charts. Her sweet, Lily-Allen-at-the-rave vocals were inescapable throughout last year’s summer festival season, with everyone from Four Tet to Floating Points dropping PinkPantheress edits in their sets.
All that buzz means that PinkPantheress, more than most viral stars, faces a treacherous path towards longevity and legitimacy. The hits on to hell with it followed a strong but easily replicable formula that other artists are already beating to death: Last year’s best PinkPantheress song wasn’t even a PinkPantheress song but “e-motions” by Mura Masa and Erika de Casier, which hit on just the right mix of 2-step beats, gentle harp plucks, familiar interpolations (in this case, Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me”), and brokenhearted lyricism. PinkPantheress’ two standalone singles in 2022, meanwhile—April’s Willow duet “Where you are” and a Sam Gellaitry collab, “Picture in my mind,” from August—felt a little too similar to to hell with it and a little too anonymous, respectively, to make much of a dent. As with so many overnight sensations before her, year two has proven to be a test of PinkPantheress’s mettle.
But if things felt a little touch-and-go there for a second, Take me home—a zippy three-tracker released in the final weeks of 2022—confidently sets the record straight. If it doesn’t quite innovate on PinkPantheress’ initial formula, it still finds new angles on the artist herself. to hell with it dealt with boilerplate heartbreak; Take me home personalizes PinkPantheress’ music a little bit, adding shade and texture to what we know about the still largely anonymous producer.
Much of that work happens on the EP’s title track. Although she’s been heralded as a voice of Zoomer pop, “Take me home” is the first time that PinkPantheress has brought generational anxieties to the fore in the music itself. Over a brisk double-time beat, she sings about the malaise of getting older without really feeling like an adult—learning how to pay bills, trying to avoid social faux pas, and preparing “to be so young til the end of time.” It’s a deft analysis of Gen Z’s prospects: locked out of long-term financial security and staring down climate catastrophe, but required to participate in a broken world all the same. It’s the most vulnerable that PinkPantheress has ever sounded, but, musically, it’s also one of her weakest tracks: The generic 2010s dance-pop beat bears little of the lived-in warmth of her earlier music, and a dreary 40-second trap outro reveals why so many songs on to hell with it came in under two minutes. It lands without the grace of past hits, even as it signals artistic growth.
The other two songs on the EP fare better. On the sprightly dance-pop chimera “Boy’s a liar,” producer Mura Masa tacks a Jersey club beat onto Gorillaz-y chiptune. It’s one of PinkPantheress’ strongest tracks, and one of the first where she steps fully into the pop star role that she’s been trying on over the past year. It can sometimes feel as if PinkPantheress is absentmindedly singing over a song playing in the background, but on “Boy’s a liar,” she’s more active—as if she’s behind the wheel, rather than dissociating in the backseat. The same goes for “Do you miss me?,” a collaboration with Kaytranada that’s lightweight but nonetheless intriguing. Over the Canadian producer’s lush amapiano beat, PinkPantheress sings about discovering she’s the other woman and, eventually, making her peace: “I can be discreet/If you don’t want her seeing you/With me on your arm.” It’s a disarming narrative twist, and a welcome complication on an EP that sometimes feels emotionally thin.
All three songs on Take me home show flashes of brilliance, but only “Boy’s a liar” really holds its own against PinkPantheress’ most indelible hits. As a whole, though, the EP serves its purpose: Even if she spent much of 2022 seemingly unmoored from her debut style and without a specific new sound to pursue, Take me home confirms that PinkPantheress is striving not to retread old material—and that she’s still a cut above your run-of-the-mill viral star.


On their bleak new album, the Brighton band abandons all hints of jangle-pop and dives into extraterrestrial synths, ominously bowed bass, and guitars distorted beyond recognition.

Fall Forever

Well, nobody will be calling Fear of Men twee anymore. On the Brighton band’s debut album Loom, Jessica Weiss voiced some seriously dark, at times even-morbid sentiments, but they were undercut by disarming jangle-pop guitars and sprightly rhythms that made it difficult to take her at her word. Thirty years of conditioning have taught us to associate these sounds with levity—after all, if Morrissey was mostly just being dramatic, surely Weiss was, too? On their follow-up Fall Forever, though, the band eliminates the disconnect between Weiss’ bleak prose and their delivery system. Any element with even the slightest whiff of Camera Obscura has been replaced by extraterrestrial synths, ominously bowed bass, and guitars distorted beyond recognition. It’s fitting the trio recorded it in a repurposed slaughterhouse, because Fall Forever is the work of a band gutting its sound and watching it bleed out.
“Vesta” introduces the album with a jolt of warped, digitally manipulated noise, a throat clearing of sorts meant to announce the new direction. Like many of the album’s highlights, it’s thrillingly modern. Fear of Men could have easily pulled a lateral when making the shift from guitars to synthesizers, modeling the record after ’80s synth-pop roughly contemporaneous to the indie-pop of their debut, but instead they set their sights forward. In spirit, “Erase (Aubade)” has the clear, glassy directness of the best Sundays or Cranberries singles, but the song’s arrangement is glitchy, austere, and modern. The track runs just two minutes, leaving the sense that something crucial has been cropped; it denies the closure of a traditional pop song. The seemingly sweet “Until You” is thrown off course midway through its run by an outbreak of retching electronics, a detour from which it never returns.
Even the album’s most straightforward dream-pop tunes are battered by sharp, militaristic snares. They create a sense of flagellation that’s driven home by Weiss’ relentless lyrical focus on how much pain and punishment she can withstand, and her repeated assertions that she doesn’t need the intimacy that’s withheld from her. “I’m like an island,” she sings, “I don’t need to feel your arms around me.” Nonetheless, she internalizes the rejection. It manifests itself in a resentment of her own “vile body,” which she describes variously as made of wax and stone, or feeble bones and useless flesh. “I burn my body on the fire/...Breathing deeper now I am free from the crowd/I’m as clean as the shame will allow,” she sings on “Trauma.” Perversely, it’s the album’s poppiest number.
Weiss fills Fall Forever with lyrics like that, fantasies about shedding her skin, becoming one with the elements, leaving the physical world behind and transcending morality. That tight thematic focus means that the songs sometimes bleed together—many feel like minor rewrites of the one that came directly before it—yet the repetition feels deliberate, like part of a calculated do-over. “Without a body, I am free to dissolve,” she sang on Loom. She wasn’t heard the first time around, so it’s as if she’s vowed to repeat herself until the words sink in. This time they do.


songs from wonder.land is a theatrical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland set in an MMORPG, and the score is written by Damon Albarn.

songs from wonder.land

wonder.land, a musical by playwright Moira Buffini and Blur’s Damon Albarn that just finished its London run, has a plot that’d make a quite serviceable Christmas panto, if perhaps not a fully-formed production. Like most teens, protagonist Aly has a heart that’s outgrown her sense of identity. Really like most teens, she spends all her time online – specifically, on the titular online MMORPG, which doesn’t have all that many discernible MMORPG elements but is at least populated by the usual wacky sorts, only a few of which are obviously inspired by Tim Burton’s versions of themselves in 2010. In the role of Boomer sneering at millennials and their screens we have Aly’s technophobic Miss Hannigan of a headmaster, though she’s not exasperated enough that she can’t steal Aly’s avatar and turn herself into the Red Queen, the resident wonder.land shitposter.
There are, right from the outset, a number of ways this could go wrong. There is no genre or medium in existence in which a version, straight or tweaked, of Alice in Wonderland is not clichéd. (Last down the rabbit hole in the theater world was Jekyll and Hyde director Frank Wildhorn, whose 2011 Alice adaptation flopped mightily.) And a lightly tweaked musical take on fairy tales in general is a Broadway standby—see Sondheim’s Into the Woods, whose high-profile film adaptation would bring it first to mind even if its Broadway revival and canonical status didn’t. Making one’s fairytale world a MMORPG was dated somewhere around the heyday of Second Life, if not the Ultima Online or BBS eras; equating that digital world with Wonderland was dated when The Matrix did it; and titles like “wonder.land” became hilariously dated somewhere around 2000, the year of “www.nevergetoveryou.” And Albarn, though not new to theater scores—2012’s Dr. Dee is pleasantly complex and holds up remarkably well as a standalone work – is a curious choice for this one, being neither a fan of modern musicals (which “lack identity musically”) nor, perhaps digital culture (Everyday Robots in particular betrays some Luddite tendencies). Could the man whose last solo single lamented the rise of “everyday robots on [their] phones” really bring this digital wonderland to life?
As it turns out Albarn’s wonder.land score is perfectly fine, which is the entire problem. Buffini described her vision for the score as a blend of electronic music and music hall, but the electronic elements are minimal (this is no PC Music, nor even Owl City) and the vaudeville elements are unsurprising; a better description might be “a middling Amanda Palmer side project.” The score dutifully shuffles from pop ballads to vaguely creepy variety show numbers without much consistency or identity musically. The individual songs aren’t even consistent about how good they are. “Me” would be a perfectly serviceable loopy-soprano character piece with a few just-off-enough lyrics (“like a toenail all ingrown”) were it not backed by the sort of breezy ukulele soft-rock that’s the bane of anyone's existence who has watched a commercial in the past 10 years.
“I’m Right” is supposed to be the kind of villainous patter song that, with the right performer, steals shows, but both arrangement and lyric are clunky and over-practiced; it’s as if the headmaster who performs it rapped her cane to silence the cast every time she suspected things might be getting fun. (The character songs are particularly weak, which for a work like Alice in Wonderland is death; Tweedledee, Tweedledum, the Dormouse, and the Mock Turtle are shuffled through in one not-particularly-memorable song, which may be intended as a quick-cut take on the megapopulation of online spaces but comes off more as songwriting-by-checklist.) There is fun in the title track, a bit of female-fronted power-pop that’s among the more failure-proof styles out there – that is, unless it loses all its energy from stage to recording and, more damningly, punctuates every other riff with the worst-aging part of the book, namely: DOUBLE-YOU-DOUBLE-YOU-DOUBLE-YOU-DOT-WONDER-DOT-LAND! This is supposed to get silly with repetition. It just maybe wasn’t supposed to sound so silly from go.
The biggest downfall of wonder.land, ultimately, isn’t anything in particular it does, but everything it doesn’t. An early draft of the musical was set in North Korea, which is a horrible idea, but at least an interesting horrible idea. Very little in wonder.land is interesting, and what is comes mostly from the book and the concept. (The theatrical production’s gotten middling reviews, but unlike, say, Hamilton, even the positive reviews rarely praise the score.) Perhaps they wrung some originality out of the material after all; Alice has been done for children, for teens, for adults, squeaky-clean to drugged-out, lighthearted to dark and darker and darkest, but seldom has it been done so bland.


Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltzie presents a collection of drone compositions that he considered too aggressive for his parent band-- which means they range somewhere between a whisper and a shout.

The Dead Texan

I once asked a middle-aged composer I'd come to know-- one who writes fairly "difficult" art-music-- what she'd been listening to lately. Based on the complex theories behind her work, I figured she could introduce me to some crazy stuff. But she looked at me as though the question held little interest and said, "I don't know... Bach, mostly. And a lot of folk music. Some Pink Floyd." I was pretty surprised that, given the amount of mental effort her work asked of its listeners, she herself kept to music with such direct emotional power.
Still, it's an understandable inconsistency-- "cutting-edge" music isn't always synonymous with "inviting." No matter how much I dig Milton Babbitt, I'm more likely to put on Iron & Wine when I get home. The IDM/ambient sphere of artists and listeners has always had an underlying interest in marrying these extremes. (For example, Aphex Twin works at both the most abrasive and warm ends of the spectrum.) Many artists on the Kranky label are concerned with creating a synthesis of music that has "artistic" merit and that which remains inviting, and The Dead Texan is an album that achieves such a goal. It's a refined, original sound, but one that gives a listener more than it takes.
The Dead Texan is Adam Wiltzie, one half of Stars of the Lid, a band that has produced some of the best guitar-based ambient/drone music of the past 10 years. Rather than take the Fennesz or Keith Fullerton Whitman approach of mutating and splicing guitar tones, SOTL create reverberant drones through the expert manipulation of attack and decay. Wiltzie recorded the material for The Dead Texan while in Belgium and deemed it too "aggressive" for SOTL. And it is, though "aggressive" is a relative term when applied to music that sits upon the brink of consciousness.
Wiltzie doesn't depart dramatically from SOTL's most recent full-length, The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid; he employs similar two-chord repetitions, swells of stacked-fifths, and utilizes many of the same timbres-- swirling string-quartet drones and effects-laden piano. But as The Dead Texan, Wiltzie's music takes on a more composed quality. It cycles through complete chord progressions, allows steady rhythmic pulses, lets loose just a little bit of dissonance, and occasionally overlays vocals or an instrumental melody. His drones are accented with acoustic and slide guitars, as well as occasional samples and sine waves. While by no means traditional songs, the pieces of The Dead Texan thus feel at least like miniatures-- more manageable than SOTL's wide-open scapes, which can be devoid of reference points.
It's a wildly overused trope to describe dramatic instrumental music as "the soundtrack to ________" (e.g.: a rainy day, a lonely drive, an acid trip, a bear attack)-- the phrase is used to connote a sense of detachment engendered by such music, one that allows us to view our lives as a movie. But in this case, discussing the record's cinematic leanings is justified. Wiltzie has stated the influence of several film composers, and the title of his piece "La Ballade d'Alain Georges" namedrops an old French actor. More overtly, this release includes a DVD of videos for several of Wilzie's compositions-- all made by filmmaker Christina Vantzos. Her accompaniment for "Aegina Airlines" combines beautifully simple animation with abstract hues, representing the clarity of various musical elements through a literal "clarity" of imagistic presentation. Wiltzie shows himself increasingly drawn toward the world of film compositions-- a safe haven for modern composers who don't necessarily want to engage in "modern composition."
The vocal additions to "Glen's Goo" and "The Struggle" lend the songs a shoegaze tinge, recalling the hushed moments of Slowdive. In these spots, The Dead Texan's sense of cathedral-like reverence is balanced with extreme intimacy. Throughout, the attention to sound-quality and design is nearly as impressive as the music itself. Wiltzie has come quite far from his four-track recording days; The Dead Texan is an entirely enveloping album from a skilled craftsperson. Currently, he's working with Brian McBride on a new Stars of the Lid release, and with The Dead Texan as an indication, we should be very excited-- in a laid-back, barely conscious sort of way.


The final installment in a trilogy of albums by Chicago experimentalist Whitney Johnson gets its motifs from nature and its emotional immediacy from the musician’s recent medical emergency.

Sacracorpa

Whitney Johnson’s music shoots straight for the subconscious. Recording as Matchess, she makes songs out of dense atmospheres, ghostly singing, and submerged beats that sound like the pulse inside your head. Her work seems designed to slip past your frontal lobes, massaging and stimulating your brain’s murkiest regions. “I try to push the abstract, the hidden aspects of the surface meaning,” she once explained, “where you are seeking one thing and another comes out—something unexpected.”
If you know Matchess’ discography, her latest release won’t strike you as too unexpected. Sacracorpa’s six tracks extend the thread of deep, affecting ambience that has run through Johnson’s work from the start—a dimension of her music that she has expanded and improved with each release. And the album is the final part of a trilogy that includes 2013’s Seraphastra and 2015’s Somnaphoria. Each installment builds on sounds and ideas that came before it, and Sacracorpa ties those strands together to form Johnson’s most cohesive statement.
Though it has always had a strong emotional core, Matchess’ music possesses a new immediacy on Sacracorpa. Perhaps that’s because the album grew out of Johnson’s own experiences: A recent emergency, which she has described as “a medical condition from birth [that] came back,” rekindled her appreciation for life and intensified her commitment to finishing her trilogy. Using voice, viola, organ, drum machine, and field recordings, she recorded in her home city of Chicago, but also in a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania and an Earthship in northern New Mexico. The results sometimes spotlight nature—you can hear water ripple and dogs bark—making the music feel personal and unmediated, akin to a sonic diary. Johnson freely transforms feelings into music, and vice versa.
Though she still favors intricate, multi-layered sonic constructions, Johnson is unafraid to lead with her emotions. Sacracorpa can be as sweeping and effusive as the most melodramatic new age compositions: On “Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes,” multi-tracked vocals and soaring strings radiate positivity, anchored by an insistent drum pulse. A clicking rhythm drives “Ossify Them,” whose organ waves evoke the chill of outer space and the warmth of pleasant dreams. This commingling of tones, beats, and voice ties together every track on the album, as though the songs were all variations on a theme. But each one goes deeper than the last, too; when Johnson knits viola and singing at the end of closer “Of Freedom,” her music seems to enter a fourth dimension.
That expansion on Sacracorpa is partially a product of Johnson’s everyday environment. Ensconced in the Chicago underground, she’s played in psych band Verma and avant-folk outfit Circuit Des Yeux. Her sonic vibe feels particularly close to that of her frequent tourmate, Natalie Chami of TALSounds, whose music uses similarly expressive vocals and layered tones to evoke emotions. But even though Johnson’s cohort informs her sound, her singularly introspective approach to songwriting has always suggested that Matchess is a self-contained project more than a cog in the wheels of a scene. In completing this thoughtful trilogy, she proves it.


The 23-year-old singer-producer’s arena-sized pop-rock opens up a world of sensory pleasure on his second EP.

Everything Perfect EP

James Ivy is trying to remember the world as it once was: listening to FM radio, rocking a pair of back-of-neck headphones, falling in love with someone in real life instead of online. The 23-year-old Korean-American singer and producer longs to return to a bygone era before social media, where entertainment could be as simple as riding the train until you lost track of time. So on his latest project, Everything Perfect, Ivy transports back to the ’90s, his sunny, mid-tempo pop-rock songs urging you away from your bedroom into a world of visceral, tactile pleasure.
Ivy has flirted with fuzzy guitar pop and shoegaze since his teenage years. As his style began to cohere—think the 1975 crossed with Third Eye Blind—he sometimes struggled with how to best execute his vision, leaning on the superficial pleasures of whiny rap-sung hooks and cloying doot-doot-doot refrains. Everything Perfect, his second official EP, marks Ivy’s promising and confident arrival: It surges with warm guitar riffs, turntable scratches, spaced-out keys, and sticky singalong hooks, cementing him within the next generation of left-of-center pop stars.
Across the project, Ivy surveys various ’90s and early aughts rock archetypes while following his own affinity for emo-tinged cadences and breakbeats. Opener “L-Trip” is a frenzy of distorted guitar and hiccupping drums, like if Oasis collaborated with Ashlee Simpson. “What’s your biggest regret?/Is it meeting me?,” Ivy sings, begging an indecisive crush to be cruelly honest with him. On the shoegaze frolic “Involved,” a wall of electric guitar feedback and muddy breaks cascade into an understated, swooning chorus. These sorts of arena-sized songs look good on Ivy, his fusions of Britpop and R&B, new-wave and trip-hop offering a satisfying soundtrack to post-adolescent anguish.
Ivy spends the bulk of the EP detailing the confusions of coming-of-age in a world frayed with uncertainty. He hasn’t washed the dishes in days and often can’t remember the last time he ate. He falls helplessly in love—but no, wait, that’s not love, only the weak simulacrum of it. “Want you dead in a weird way,” he sings on the title song, which reflects his own self-loathing more than ire toward a love interest. His lyrics can be vague and clunky—“I want to chain you to the right side of my wide eye,” he belts on “The Last Place You’d Ever Look”—and not every song fully lands, especially considering the crowded landscape of ’90s-inspired pop-rock. But it’s impossible to walk away from Everything Perfect without one of its massive hooks sloshing around your head, and there’s something charming about Ivy’s work-in-progress vulnerability: He’s fumbling for metaphors and tripping over sentences, rambling until he gets at the core of something real.