On his eighth solo LP, his first as Father John Misty, ex-Fleet Foxes drummer Josh Tillman has shaken his lonesome, somber tone in favor of something more gregarious, engaging, even funny.

Fear Fun

Even before he joined Fleet Foxes in 2008, Josh Tillman had established a sound that made virtues of austerity and quiet, pitching his songs at a slow pace that at best bristled with prickly intensity or at worst lulled nearly into nonexistence. His albums suffered when the melodies and arrangements were precise and exactingly purposeful, leading Paul Thompson to decry 2009's Year in the Kingdom for its "lonesome, somber tone, one Tillman-- a funny, amicable dude, if you've ever heard him clowning on himself at a Fleet Foxes gig-- would do well to shake on occasion." Whether intentionally or not, Tillman has responded to this kind of criticism with his eighth album and his first under the name Father John Misty. Perhaps freed by the new pseudonym or emboldened by his nearly four-year tenure as a Fleet Fox, Tillman varies things up on Fear Fun, reveals an adventurous palette, and makes what may be his best album to date. He's finally shaken that lonesome, somber tone, and these songs sound all the better for it: gregarious, engaging, even funny.
It can't hurt that he ditched Seattle for warmer, stranger climes. After a period of deep depression, he loaded up his van with shrooms and drove down the coast, finally settling in what he describes as a "spider-shack" in Laurel Canyon. Of course, Tillman is aware of that locale's revered place in pop history and of Greater Los Angeles' less reputable place in pop culture, and he lets them inform Fear Fun musically, lyrically, and conceptually. Even that new moniker, Father John Misty, sounds like a cult leader, keeping his flock sequestered in an old movie set up in the hills. And the lyrics suggest a Hollywood breakdown of epic proportions, loosely recounting his own walkabout with the sort of mischief and humor largely missing from his previous albums. He opens "I'm Writing a Novel" with a great first sentence: "I ran down the road, pants down to my knees, screaming,/ 'Please come help me, that Canadian shaman gave a little too much to me!'" It bodes well for his novel.
Fear Fun isn't merely a step forward lyrically; it also reveals new musical ambitions. Compared to his previous albums, it's positively kaleidoscopic: less content to be moody and pretty and more intent on getting up in your face. Tillman's warped interpretations and strange combinations of SoCal pop history seem to mirror his own narcotized state: With its billowy strings and triangle beat, "Nancy From Now On" could be Laurel Canyon disco, a mad-scientist hybrid that proves a perfect setting for his careening falsetto. "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings" is a Sunset Strip stomp slowed down to a near idle, and the countrified "Well, You Can Do It Without Me" finds Gram Parsons' headstone somewhere in Bakersfield. Every song has its own identity, and the album's slightly fractured vibe speaks volumes about the place that inspired it.
If there's a criticism to be made about the music, it's that it sounds a bit too composed and too contained to really sell the drug-fueled anarchy and municipal depravity. The arrangements entertain a rhythmic stiffness that sticks strictly to the beat, without any syncopation to suggest the messy experiences Tillman's lyrics evoke. He really only cuts loose on the rambling "I'm Writing a Novel" and the psych-absurdist "Tee Pees 1-12", which are the album's clear highlights. He's never sounded looser, weirder, or funnier than when he's recovering from a bad, pantsless trip or when he's reading Richard Brautigan to impress a woman. "If I make it out alive from Hollywood and Vine/ I'll build a cabin up in the Northwest," he sings on "Tee Pees 1-12", but hopefully it's an empty threat: By relocating to the land of Kardashians and Orange Housewives, Tillman has discovered his truest subject.


Over flickering jungle breaks and gentle electronic soul, the London singer-songwriter who broke through with Anz’s ebullient “You Could Be” turns her focus inward.

Running in Waves

It’s rare for a budding artist to use their platform to state primarily what they aren’t about. London singer-songwriter George Riley does this throughout her new record Running in Waves: She doesn’t mingle with fickle or fake people, doesn’t want to sacrifice opportunities for love, and doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. In 2021, Riley received a pop star’s introduction to the world with a standout feature on Manchester producer Anz’s cosmopolitan club smash “You Could Be,” followed shortly thereafter by her own interest rates, a tape. The self-released mixtape presented a freewheeling mish-mash of R&B, jungle, 2-step, and jazz while finding room to explore weighty ideas—Eurocentric beauty standards, the whitewashing of climate activism—that Riley, a graduate in politics and philosophy, managed to tackle without seeming trite.
Executive produced by PLZ Make It Ruins label head Vegyn, Running in Waves is more carefully honed. This time, rather than thinking about societal issues, Riley turns her focus inward. The palette has changed accordingly, favoring lean basslines, soft beds of synthesizer, and solemn strings, all calibrated to foreground Riley’s soft yet forcefully emotive voice.
On “Time,” she lets a laid-back jungle break soundtrack a fantasy of a night out—“I like good guys and nice food/Happy weed and Camper shoes”—but her hedonism hides a warning: “I’m very protective over my space/I don’t let no one in unless I’m satisfied they’re good and humble.” The restrained drum programming and sleek synths on “Running in Waves” frame a simple self-affirmation: “There’s no one else right here/I believe it’s me and me and me and me right here.” On “Sacrifice,” she resists having to give up anything for love; the premise is similar to the Weeknd’s song of the same name, but Riley’s version is more emotionally cutting, backed by humming microwave synths and withering strings that phase into a singular, aching harmony.
The most intimate tracks sound like they were recorded in Riley’s bedroom. On “Desire,” over a clean-lined electro groove and sparkling electric piano, she ventures, “I should stay here for the moment/Shouldn’t run away to be lonesome.” She works through her feelings for an ex on “Delusion,” delivering a confident kiss-off over a muted breakbeat and glowing chords. Riley’s vocals frequently have the intensity of a late-night session recorded while trying hard not to wake the neighbors, yet her lyrics are defiantly self-centered—in a good way. “I’m not denying my wants this time,” she sings on “Jealousy,” a lithe R&B jam; “I wanna see the world, or what’s left of it.”
That forthrightness is a big part of the charm of Running in Waves. Despite the softness of her voice and the undercurrent of self-doubt, Riley is determined to carve out her place, no matter whether she’s singing over jungle breaks or the gentlest soul. As she sings on “Acceptance,” “I trusted my intuition/Hasn’t failed me yet/That is the thing that keeps me winning/So I’m gonna keep on moving.”


The Philadelphia band Hop Along's energy comes from punk but their style is indebted to the romantic, middle-American indie of Bright Eyes and Rilo Kiley. Singer Francis Quinlan is a sharp writer who understands the poetry of deflection, and her songs feel like a series of false floors that open to bigger and bigger rooms.

Painted Shut

The songs on the second album by the Philadelphia band Hop Along seem to have come whirling out of a fairytale, visceral but ornate, outside reality but still scarred by it. Their energy comes from punk but their style comes from somewhere older and more obscure—a Victorian attic, maybe, or the kind of basement where the band’s singer Frances Quinlan got turned onto punk in the first place.
This was ten years ago or so. Quinlan had just graduated from high school and was touring around with a folk record influenced by playful, sharp-witted writers like Joanna Newsom and Kimya Dawson. The record, Freshman Year, felt cute and warm but took dark turns into the nightmare logic of children—one song, called "Bruno Is Orange", is sung from the perspective of a girl who fears that the government is going to put her friend in jail because the two of them kissed.
Eventually, Quinlan formed a band with her brother Mark and a bassist named Tyler Long and assumed a sound that filtered Quinlan’s storytelling through the rough, emotionally unguarded approach of bands like Rilo Kiley or Bright Eyes—bands who turned diary entries into anthems and vulnerability into a shuddering kind of power. Their first album, 2012’s Get Disowned, is a messy world where people stomp on old floorboards for percussion and saw violins like they were made of something stronger than wood. Everything is governed by Quinlan, who sings in the wild voice of someone casting out demons (or having the demon cast out of them). Its second song, "Tibetan Pop Stars", should be etched in titanium and shot into outer space for safekeeping.
Painted Shut is cleaner but just as purposeful. The album was produced by John Agnello, who has also worked with Kurt Vile, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth and the Hold Steady—bands who play full-blooded classic rock with an idiosyncratic slant. (Quinlan once ended an interview by thanking Neil Young and the nature documentarian David Attenborough, both of whom have fascinated stoners and gentlefolk alike for decades.) For as bullish and dramatic as the music seems, the songs here often escalate for several minutes before making a point you think they’ve already made, like a series of false floors that open to bigger and bigger rooms.
Quinlan is a sharp writer who understands the poetry of deflection, of putting herself to the side of the drama instead of in the middle. "Powerful Man" tells the story of a parent hitting their child from the perspective of a teenage bystander: "Your dad told you not to look at me/ Down came the fists hard upon your head," she sings, no special inflection. "I was the only other adult around/ I was the only other adult around." What might’ve been just another routine tragedy becomes an exploration of guilt and responsibility. After all, Quinlan can do something about the situation but the kid can’t.
Painted Shut is being released on Saddle Creek, a label built on the kind of romantic, middle-American indie that made Hop Along possible in the first place—music more indebted to the 1970s than the 1980s, more to the earnest mythologizing of folk than the grandstanding of rock, more to the fantasias of Edward Gorey and e.e. cummings than to the flash of the city; music for rickety houses in college towns and the lonelyhearts who collect in their corners like dust and give each other stick-and-pokes. I’d say it all seems old-fashioned but it has been this way for about 25 years and seems part of a longer continuum all the time, so who knows.
My favorite song here is a dusky, countryish ballad called “Horseshoe Crabs”. “Hey did you hear me, mom? Baby’s headed home,” Quinlan sings. “Against your wishes I went into the woods alone.” She goes on to tell us about concrete things: A pellet gun, a broken nose, a Jackson C. Frank song played for a college kid on his nylon-string guitar. Nothing seems to mean much alone but it accrues a kind of magical importance, a collection of almosts-but-not-quites. Heartbreak here isn't an abstraction but an event, one in which something falls on the ground and breaks and nobody seems to have the wherewithal to put it back together. As for the Jackson C. Frank song, Quinlan barely makes it through, but like all the failures documented on Painted Shut she still manages to sound triumphant singing about it.


The Chicago footwork producer dials into a captivating, stripped-back style that sets tightly wound rhythms against ominous open space.

Hypnotized

Of all the footwork stalwarts to grace the roster of Chicago’s legendary Teklife label, DJ Manny might be the most enigmatic. While his most prominent tracks flip R&B samples and gentle chords into wistful delirium, a glance at his Bandcamp page reveals that he can’t be so easily pinned down. Booming riffs on regional club styles, house, and acid techno sit comfortably next to dozens of footwork EPs and compilations that run from swaggering, battle-ready cuts to moody patchwork swirls. It’s all released at a pace that implies a maniacal efficiency. Hypnotized, his newest album on Planet Mu, is a skeletal, tensile construction that casts its splintering energy conduits in jagged relief.
DJ Manny called 2021’s Signals in My Head an “R&B love type of album,” a blushing, infatuated romp inspired by his relationship with fellow DJ and producer SUCIA!. Hypnotized doesn’t have such an overt theme, asserting its bleak, anxious interiority through stripped-back composition. Manny has never shied away from minimalism—his beats might rattle just one or two drum samples around the traditional syncopated bassline. Hypnotized refines that approach into something approaching outright menace. Tracks linger on gaps and empty spaces, emphasizing silence. “I Can Luv U” opens with the dead ring of MIDI keys, fading into cold, frictionless air, before ramping into an assault of jittery woodblock tones doubled by a buzzing synth lead. “Overnight Flight”’s frosty pad enters and cuts away without warning, weaving through thick, distorted kicks that engulf skittering hi-hats and hurried arpeggiations in their muddy wake. If Signals, flush with feeling and excitement, represented the honeymoon phase, then Hypnotized represents everything after: the chaotic, indifferent highs and lows.
In the album’s most intoxicating moments, DJ Manny abandons the standard footwork playbook to explore new permutations of his core sound. “Lost in Da Jungle” is a breezy atmospheric jungle track that wouldn’t feel out of place in an LTJ Bukem set, splattering detuned halogen chords against a curtain of gently chopped breakbeats. This shift in style is played so straight that it’s almost agonizing, inviting listeners to consider the points of contact and divergence between the genres. “Opera,” while more standard in structure, might be even stranger, setting the haunting, messianic wails of an opera diva beside percussion and spiraling melodies that ascend without resolution.
The conversation around DJ Manny has long focused on youth, prodigiousness, and extraordinary talent. This is an artist who’s been contributing to the scene since he was in middle school, first as a dancer, then as a producer after he picked up a copy of Fruity Loops at 14. Footwork pioneer DJ Rashad, one of Manny’s mentors, once said that “as far as our crew goes, Manny is the future for us.” Hypnotized proves Rashad’s forecast: This isn’t merely a glimpse of the future, but a toolkit for its assembly.


On the first Dedication mixtape installment in four years, Lil Wayne and DJ Drama show some of their former spark, but the tape does little to course-correct Wayne’s spiraling career trajectory.

Dedication 6

The earliest installments in the Dedication mixtape series have a special place in internet mixtape mythology. The first was a prototype, the second is among the greatest mixtapes of all time, and each one since has helped to cement Wayne’s legacy as an imaginative and unstoppable rap force. Few rappers have made mixtapes more essential to their reputations and discographies, and these not only defined an era but helped to rewrite the rulebook on how to become a superstar in a digital age. (No wonder Chance the Rapper often cites the New Orleans legend as his “biggest inspiration.”)
The tapes revealed a prolific artist at the peak of his powers paired with a DJ that knew how to edit him. “Weezy and Dram’—We are the Mixtape Blueprint,” Drama shouts in the opening seconds of Dedication 6, reminding listeners of their pedigree. Dedication mixtapes are always constructed in the same way: furious, back-to-back one-liners rapped over the beats of the moment—in this case Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO Tour Llif3,” 21 Savage’s “Bank Account,” JAY-Z’s “The Story of O.J.,” Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA.,” and more—a rap gauntlet designed to challenge him and measure his raps against those of his most popular peers. In his prime, Lil Wayne would completely reclaim a beat as his own and there was a sense of ease to the process, like elaborate thoughts were just pouring out of him as though he could go on forever.
The first installment in four years, Dedication 6 is a calculated return to a recognizable brand during the most tumultuous period in Wayne’s storied, two-decade career, both artistically and financially. In this time of turmoil, he returns to the well, mostly rapping about Wraiths, jump-offs, and codeine as a numbing agent. The process seems less like it could go on forever and more like it’s merely running on a loop. Wayne got a lot of mileage out of his raps and isn’t all out of tricks just yet, but he’s slowing. “I been walkin’ on this fuckin’ water for a long time,” he raps on the highlight “XO Tour Life,” pointing to a decade of otherworldly performances. Even he seems to recognize the pace is unsustainable. This is a different Wayne than the one who seemed to unspool endless, enchanting yarns, who had a panoramic understanding of both pop culture and street culture. This Dedication does little to course-correct Lil Wayne’s spiraling career trajectory.
Wayne’s promising run of 2016 features—from Solange’s “Mad” to Chance’s “No Problem”—showed he was still capable. His rapping was less intuitive and his non sequiturs could be grating, but he still has the same instincts. Sometimes muscle memory kicks in and he delivers a devastating string of bars, something as vivid as, “This is that codeine overkill/My mud colder than Soldier Field,” or a new angle like, “You never been in jail, I never been in a Corolla/Then I roll a blunt ‘bout as thick as a Samoan.” But for every punch as delightfully unorthodox as “Boyz 2 Menace”’s “Kush loud as Fred screamin’ ‘Wilma!’ nigga,” there are a handful that are too easy to anticipate or that just don’t connect.
Spontaneity used to be a driving force in Wayne’s world, but the punchlines on Dedication 6 are mechanical and the ideas within are rudimentary or sometimes incomplete. He uncorks some of the most eyebrow-raising conceits on nearly the entire first verse of “Fly Away”—performed over Kendrick’s “DNA.”—as a play on acronyms and letters, fumbling basic premises: Easy (Eazy) like NWA, treating beef like USDA, beating foes up like MMA or getting felt up like TSA. The set-up telegraphs the punch. There are many couplets as stale and stupid as “I got two keys of that Bieber/Call ‘em Justin and Justina.” The only real surprise is that his embarrassing raps can still find new, unexplored levels of embarrassment.
Wayne was once the master of the “so clever it’s hard to believe no one has rapped it before” bar, and there are still some of those mixed in (“Bullet showers lead to bloodbaths,” or, “Treatin’ medication scrips like some Revelation scripts”). But there’s a thin line between the eureka moment of perfectly articulating a concise turn of phrase and just artlessly heaving jokes against a wall. Wayne gets in trouble attempting to connect every idea that pops into his head in this way; when every bar has to be a clever quip, you’re bound to mass-produce clunkers. He ends up with reaches like, “I rob his ass like Robin Givens,” and corny parallels like, “My trashiest hoes clean as fuck.” No song is without several of these bloopers, most songs are inundated by them, and while the tape is more or less a Christmas Day gift for fans, these sequences shouldn’t constantly derail the momentum, especially when the Wayne mixtape blueprint has always been about fluidity and his breathtaking, death-defying stream-of-consciousness.
The raps themselves are hit or miss, but Lil Wayne is still rapping like a man seeking freedom on Dedication 6, fighting to reestablish a dialogue with listeners and to escape from label purgatory. (The mixtape was released exclusively on DatPiff and withheld from streaming, likely because of Wayne’s ongoing battle with Cash Money over his right to make money off his music without the label.) Given all he’s been through and all he’s done, it’s hard not to root for him, and the verses do track better here than on recent projects. He’s locked in on “New Freezer,” “My Dawgs” and “Blackin Out,” where whiny flows either explode into shrieks or dissolve into mumbles. The main problem is simply this: He’s run out of interesting ways to say he’s drugged up and horny. The same patented mixtape formula that made him a star and luminary exposes the limitations of a now one-dimensional method that's wearing thin.


The Vancouver punk band's fast, threatening 19-minute sophomore record is compulsively listenable due in no small part to vocalist Mish Way's melodic but intimidating approach.

Sorry

If you're familiar with the Vancouver four-piece White Lung, it's fair to assume you're a punk in the traditional sense. And that's because over the past six years White Lung have functioned in a distinctly underground and subversive mode. They've trekked Canada and the States on DIY tours through venues so small I inadvertently knocked into a mic stand when I saw them last month, in the stage-less, graffiti-strewn backroom of a dingy Brooklyn tavern. And their fast and frightening 19-minute sophomore record, Sorry, was out earlier this year on the small, hardcore-oriented Canadian label Deranged, which also released some of the first material from a similarly pummeling group, Fucked Up.
But despite White Lung's threatening devotion to the more venomous corners of rapid-fire punk, Sorry is compulsively listenable due in no small part to singer Mish Way's successful pinning of a sweet spot between snarled yells, curled syllables, and melodic but equally intimidating, tobacco-tattered verse. The band's template recalls the earliest recordings by Hole, Babes in Toyland, or L7-- Way is not shy about her affinity for Courtney Love-- but compressed and sped-up to mimic the motions of classic 1980s hardcore. The latter is rooted mostly in the thoroughly relentless, rocket-speed drumming of Anne-Marie Vassiliou through the record's every track, which seems to know only one method of shifting tempo ("faster"). If those aforementioned riot grrrl references sound superficial, consider Way's own description of her band's sound: "like the feeling you get when you pee on the prego stick and it shows you a plus sign."
Way's most compelling moments on Sorry are those in which she's particularly hellish, strong, and lyrically bold. "Wipe that look from your face/ I'll drop you back from where you came," she screams within the first 40 seconds of opener "Take the Mirror", over guitarist Kenneth Williams' subtle but noise-laden post-punk riffage. That fury returns on the hooky "Glue", where Way declares "You're a dead horse riding/ I'm out for you." These moments seem designed for thrashing pit-level shout-alongs, as does the cautionary chorus on "Bag". Elsewhere Way muses bloody and visceral lines that hone on the body, like "Bunny", where she ferociously sings "I'll scrub your liver clean until I die," or "Bad Way", in which she melodically describes a collapsing face and snapping veins over some of the record's most scratched, anxious fretwork.
Sorry has hardly got a distracted moment, but "Thick Lip" stands out as the band's most abrasive, collective assault. It functions like a sonic declaration of war, one that comes into focus as Way's lyrics acknowledge "a pretty young girl" in the back of your mind: "We don't have real heads/ Instead we got legs," she shouts, setting off a tirade of lines that seem to hint at topical criticisms of backwards beauty standards. "I know your big secret/ It's caked on your face," Way wages, and then the killer: "I know that you're better/ Than most of this world/ But your thick dumb lips/ Tell a real dumb truth." Interpret that one as you wish. Way pierces the song with a clear, perpetual shriek-- "WHAT DID HE SAY?"-- that feels like one of her definitive moments. Not every girl is a riot grrrl, but here Way quite undeniably carries a torch for feminist punk heroes of decades past while sounding entirely present.
And so add White Lung to the ever-widening pool of contemporary bands drawing from punk and hardcore but staking their own territory: Iceage, the Men, and Cloud Nothings, for example*.* They might work off old reference points, but White Lung are architects of a raw sound that feels novel and ideal in 2012: inventive, precise guitar textures, palatable pop hooks, and terrifying speed. Recently, Way, who is also a writer, mused on her place in the underground punk scene: "The common understanding [is] that being in a band is not a viable career option," she wrote. "We'll celebrate breaking even after every [self-booked] tour... and that's totally okay with me." Time will tell if that will remain the case for White Lung. For now Sorry is their loudest statement yet.


Released just before eventual U.S. gamechanger "I Want to Hold Your Hand", this quickie sequel doesn't match its predecessor but doesn't cheat fans either.

With the Beatles

Would that today's PRs had the honesty of Beatles pressman Tony Barrow. On the original sleevenotes for With the Beatles he cheerfully admits that the group were following the formula of Please Please Me, going so far as to make several track-by-track comparisons. "[Paul McCartney] recalls the numerous Cavern Club occasions when this item ['Money'] brought forth the same type of overwhelming response given to 'Twist and Shout'."
Barrow's notes are direct and descriptive-- crediting each R&B find, noting which tracks were live favorites and who played what. They're an intriguing glimpse of how the band related to its audience in this first shock of pop success: as curious, educated listeners, not the blind screamers of Beatlemania legend. By this point, though, the Beatles were kings of Britain with the world about to follow. Their success was already game-changing: The band who would go on to invent the concept album invented the boy band first. The cheek, the gang mentality, the picking favorites-- all this would be formularized by later svengalis but emerged initially out of Beatle fandom.
So With the Beatles is simultaneously a quickly turned-around cash-in and a record of real generosity and integrity. And if the structure of the album is pretty similar to Please Please Me, the extra studio time is already starting to tell. On McCartney's romantic spotlight, showtune "Till There Was You", producer George Martin builds a wholly convincing soft-focus soundworld around Ringo Starr's bongos. The group harmonies on tracks like their rumbustious "Please Mr. Postman" are even more gorgeously thick. The way the drums rumble in on "Roll Over Beethoven" is a moment of simple joy.
And those are just the covers. With the Beatles starts with aggressive confidence, "It Won't Be Long" taking the "yeah yeah" chants that were the group's early calling card and turning them into missiles. We're back, it says, and it's one of their most thrilling songs. On "All My Loving" the guitars bubble and tumble and the band finds a new way to marry prettiness and drive. "I Wanna Be Your Man"-- Ringo's best early vocal-- has a wolfish, hustling urgency. Not everything the band tries, as writers or interpreters, comes off: draggy girl group revival "Devil in Her Heart" is an obscurity too far, and George Harrison wins a first songwriting credit for the Shadows-esque "Don't Bother Me", but it doesn't get much spark until the guitar solo.
As for "Money", well, there simply is no second "Twist and Shout" in the catalogue, but neither was there any shame in the Beatles trying. And it has its own thrills to offer: Less demonic and frenetic than that previous album-closer but by some way the heaviest thing they'd yet recorded, a quality the remaster brings fully out. Ringo's booming drums, John Lennon's sneer, and the others' banshee backing vocals all create an air of menace, repressed violence: the black leather and Bierkeller vibe of the band's 1961 proving grounds.
It's a superb way to end an album that doesn't quite flow as well as Please Please Me, but never cheats the fans either. A week after its release the band would drop "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and rewrite the entertainment pecking order: For now they were living up to high expectations.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


With their dusky, languid jazz-rap, the Norwegian duo stakes its own territory in hip-hop’s ever-expanding diaspora.

Dialogue.

During the SP-1200’s heyday, jazz samples reigned supreme. Introduced in 1987, the drum machine’s capacity to loop extended, high-fidelity instrumental samples sparked a revolution among hip-hop composers, its burly drums and warm basslines defining an era in rap production. When U.S. copyright law caught up—making the dense layering of Reachin’ and Mecca and the Soul Brother a pricy, if not legally dubious, method—the free-flowing jazz-rap style found a home overseas, where producers continued to mine record crates for horn solos and score their own interpolations. The French rapper MC Solaar, a veteran of Guru’s Jazzmatazz series, found international stardom with an acid-fusion sound; to the envy of their Stateside contemporaries, the British production team Us3 was given run of the Blue Note catalog for 1993’s Hand on the Torch and 1997’s Broadway & 52nd.
To a jaundiced eye, much of hip-hop history can be distilled to these cycles of technological innovation stymied by punitive enforcement: the sampling wars, the file-sharing wars, the streaming wars, the hip-hop police. As European acts eagerly seized the jazz-rap baton, they were often frustrated by the self-referential intricacies of a medium blended from two deeply American traditions. Late-’00s entries by Dela, Funky DL, and Jazz Liberatorz wistfully evoked early-’90s sounds but whiffed on key details, their digitized percussion lacking the SP’s smoky flavor, their earnest rhymes begging for a dose of Guru or C.L. Smooth’s hard-nosed pragmatism. While the Norwegian duo Vuyo and Ol’ Burger Beats occupies the same lineage, mining dusty jazz breaks for their source material, their stylistic initiative and subject matter ensure that their music isn’t entirely backward-looking. Their new full-length Dialogue. stakes its own territory among hip-hop’s ever-expanding diaspora.
Dialogue.’s singularity owes largely to Vuyo himself, a Zimbabwe-born rapper who rhymes in a bemused purr. His relaxed delivery is emphasized by Burger Beats’ shrewd engineering: the vocal delay lends the effect of a staticky landline connection. The instrumentals also have a lo-fi affect, with a cozy vinyl sizzle evident across most of the samples. Rather than overlaying synthetic or filtered basslines, Burger Beats loops stand-up bass chords, rimshots and cymbals left intact, and punches in horns for the choruses. “Dusty Grooves” and “88 Keys” are built around hypnotic guitar blends, Vuyo shifting seamlessly between a discursive drawl, double-time delivery, and languid hooks. A trumpet solo punctuates the first instrumental break on “Schengen Visa”; during the second verse, a flute pipes in with the same grace-noted melody. The songs flow into one another, each nestled within a viscous 40 bpm range.
The whole affair feels like an equatorial vacation, which is to say that Dialogue might have gotten by on ambiance alone—but Vuyo’s inquisitive writing style rewards engaged listening. His couplets eschew narrative structure, but his rich allusions convey autobiographical snatches and diasporic portraits. On “Summer of George,” Vuyo warily scrutinizes identity politics and woke corporatism: “I’m down with the cause brother, Wakanda forever/Put hot sauce on all courses, they makin’ them better/I’ve seen all of Fresh Prince, I’ve listened to rap/I understood early that cheddar means stacks.”
A Jay-Z-quoting pop-culture junkie with intimate knowledge of colonial legacies, he brings a flippant perspective to the culture wars du jour, approaching hip-hop as an outsider without any compulsion to ingratiate himself. The album’s nominal theme is tied together by a series of recorded voicemails from Vuyo’s sister, who offers advice on repairing a rift with their father, a former South African revolutionary. What goes unsaid in the one-sided exchange is the generational gap between Vuyo and his father: What could a biracial, Seinfeld-obsessed, smartphone-tethered millennial possibly have in common with an anti-apartheid activist?
The answer is more than you might expect. Vuyo spent parts of his childhood in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, and Norway, and at its best, Dialogue.’s diasporic elements make for a hazy, secret-history insularity reminiscent of a Mach-Hommy tape. (The chorus of “Mahershala Ali” threads together scratched vocals from Nas and Big L, which sound like transmissions from another planet.) But his distinctive slang and inflection frame more universal commentary. On “Conflict,” the most overtly political track, Vuyo recalls, “I told my ma, I don’t wanna go back/ ‘Cause when the bomb go off, they assume that he’s black.” That these scenes arrive without context doesn’t really matter; they might as easily be set in Los Angeles as in Lusaka. At times, the duo’s eccentricity feels almost aloof to the wider world, unabashed as they are in their idealism and quirky nostalgia. But in the sense that all hip-hop exists in conversation with ugly American history, Dialogue. is more than up to the task.

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Former Prof Murder and Don Cab guys continue to impress with tropical synth-pop that sounds more like Tough Alliance and AnCo than their former acts.

Settings EP

Usually when experienced musicians get together to start a new group, traces of their past work can't help but creep back into their songs. But that's not the case with Tanlines, the duo of Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm, who arrive at their new project with pretty diverse backgrounds. Cohen comes from the dance-y post-punk act Professor Murder while Emm spent time in dissonant math-rock bands Don Caballero and Storm & Stress, and interestingly Tanlines don't really sound like any of those groups. What they make now is tropical synth-pop that's more indebted to the Tough Alliance and, to some degree, MPP-era Animal Collective.
Tanlines are more production team than proper band and, not unlike Barcelona electro-poppers Delorean, their style is inspired as much by club music as indie rock. Straddling the line between dance and pop but hewing more towards the latter, Tanlines put together African percussion, swirling guitars, and dancefloor elements inside catchy, effervescent tracks. Their Settings EP comes on the heels of some early singles and remixes for groups such as Telepathe and finds the duo honing in on a fuller, more developed sound.
The record is split evenly between instrumental cuts and vocal tracks, and Tanlines do well with both. The appeal of these songs is primarily sonic (rich, surging arrangements and big clean hooks), so they don't all need words, but when Cohen and Emm do weave in lyrical content, it adds intrigue. The best example is standout "Real Life", where Emm gets wistful over knocking percussion and heaving, squeaky synths. "You might think I'm still that way, it's only natural/ It was a past-life thing, it wasn't anything at all," he laments. If you've ever bumped into an ex who dumped you for doing something stupid, you know exactly what he's talking about.
Tanlines have a strong pop sensibility and a good working knowledge of global club sounds, and it's this balance that makes Settings an enjoyable listen. They're said to have an affinity for Depeche Mode (not so subtly hinted at here on "Policy of Trust"), and while that may seem strange with music this sunny, you can hear pretty clearly in Tanlines' tracks their appreciation for hook-heavy dance-pop of all kinds. Not everything on the EP works as well as "Real Life" (they lose me a bit on the calypso and hip-hop informed "Bees"), but mostly Settings functions as a punchy introduction to what these guys do well.


Besides being a killer garage rock album*, Nonagon Infinity *is constructed as an infinite loop, meaning its final notes connect perfectly with the album’s opening.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Nonagon Infinity

Nonagon Infinity

Since the advent of digital music, all media players have been outfitted with the Repeat function—whether it’s a button on a traditional CD player, or those circular lines you click on in your iTunes app. I’m willing to bet no one has ever activated this feature on purpose, yet it always seems to mysteriously switch itself on. The effect is always jarring, the contemplative post-listen pause rudely interrupted by an abrupt jump back to the opening track. It’s the ultimate useless proof-of-concept innovation, something that exists simply because it can. But as it turns out, whichever technicians invented this functionality were onto something—because they were effectively preparing us for the advent of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s Nonagon Infinity.
Over the course of eight wildly divergent albums, the Melbourne psych-rock septet have fed the past 50 years of rock history through a paper shredder and seamlessly taped the strands back together in intriguing new patterns, even leaving in the parts (bluesy harmonica slobber, flute solos, jazz odysseys) that more cool-conscious retro-rock revivalists would excise. And through experimenting with myriad sounds, they’ve also started experimenting with album formats. Last year’s Quarters! presented four prog-pop suites each clocking at exactly 10 minutes and 10 seconds. But Nonagon Infinity ups the high-concept ante to absurd extremes. While pieced together from discretely recorded, separately titled songs, the record is mixed to feel like a continuous 41-minute live performance, complete with recurring musical and lyrical passages. And it’s the first album in history to give you a legitimate, practical reason to hit that Repeat button—*Nonagon Infinity *is constructed as an infinite loop, meaning its final notes connect perfectly with the album’s opening.
But independent of that gambit, *Nonagon Infinity *is the Gizzard’s most ballistic, berserker album to date, a merciless, atomic-bomb erasure of the pastoral terrain traversed by its flower-powered predecessor, Paper Mâché Dream Balloon. In their most hot-wired moments (see 2014’s I’m in Your Mind Fuzz), King Gizzard have earned copious comparisons to their former label patrons Thee Oh Sees, and here frontman Stu Mackenzie punctuates almost every chord change with an echo-drenched, John Dwyer-esque “wooo” like a dancehall selector pushing the air-horn button. But on Nonagon Infinity, they assume a more mechanistic precision and sinister, metallic force—all the better to reinforce the lyrics’ '70s sci-fi cartoon-show universe of robots, monsters, and hidden dimensions. Ironically, for an album that functions as a shrine to record-collector rock, *Nonagon Infinity *operates on the same principles as a club DJ set, weaving in and out of different melodic motifs while remaining locked (for the most part) into a propulsive, breakneck rhythm that sounds like Devo riffing on Hawkwind’s “Motorhead.”
When it’s running at peak velocity—which is like, 90 per cent of the time—*Nonagon Infinity *yields some of the most outrageous, exhilarating rock ‘n’ roll in recent memory, on par with modern psych-punk touchstones like Comets on Fire’s Blue Cathedral, Thee Oh Sees’ Carrion Crawler/The Dream and Ty Segall’s Slaughterhouse. It’s a preview of what our not-too-distant future of hyperloop travel will feel like—this is a record that requires protective seat belts, induces G-force ripples in your cheeks and drives fingernails into armrest upholstery. But the band’s gonzo attack never overpowers Mackenzie’s psych-pop accessibility, as he spits out a stream of fragmented hooks like a combusting jukebox of British Invasion singles going on the fritz. If anything, his melodic change-ups provide crucial orientation markers on this endless Autobahn of a record. The band also possess an innate sense of knowing just the right moment to switch things up, like with the loose Krautrock boogie that introduces “Mr. Beat," or the twinned Allman Brothers leads dropped into the “TV Eye”-style surge of "Evil Death Roll," or the Yes-worthy contoro-riffs that overtake “Invisible Face”. (That said, the incense-scented Santana jam that breaks out partway through the latter piece constitutes the record’s only forced detour.)
Ultimately, the question of how the band will reconcile the chugging, roadhouse-razing closer “Road Train” with the album’s motorik opening proves moot—in Nonagon Infinity’s final minute, the Gizzard effectively bring the former to a dead stop and then just quickly work themselves back up into the album’s familiar high-octane groove. At first, it feels like a bit of a cheat—a switcheroo the band could’ve conceivably dropped at any point in this piece, rather than a natural climax they’re working toward. But the instant Nonagon Infinity resets back to its blitzkrieged beginning, the gimmick’s greater purpose is revealed: this is the first album whose intro actually doubles as its crescendo. And *Nonagon Infinity *is overstuffed with so many stomach-tossing thrills that you’ll actually be jonesing to ride the roller-coaster all over again.


A solid serving of meat-and-potatoes rap, the duo’s first joint project thrives on a sense of comfort and familiarity more often than not.

Blacklight

Apollo Brown is nothing if not a hip-hop romantic. His fidelity for the grime and grit of rap’s second Golden Age is well-documented, but it goes beyond simply trying to recreate DJ Premier beats. Flourishes across his instrumental projects and over a dozen collaborative albums unearth the passion he puts into his art. Most of them begin and end with the sound of vinyl crackle, a simple but effective way of telegraphing the Detroit producer’s love for the warmth of analog. He recycles drums frequently and creates music using software that’s outdated but reliable. There’s a steady formula at work, but he’s teased interesting ideas from his pet sound for over a decade.
Brown’s work with Brooklyn rappers Skyzoo (2016’s The Easy Truth) and Joell Ortiz (2018’s Mona Lisa) slopes to the soulful bombast of late-20th-century New York hip-hop. On 2013’s The Brown Tape, he infamously retrofitted his drums and samples onto the acapellas from Ghostface Killah’s 2013 album Twelve Reasons to Die. Anchovies, his 2017 effort with Fresno spitter Planet Asia, indulges in the drumless loops popularized by Roc Marciano in the early 2010s. Just this year, he soundtracked an R&B album for the first time, Lovesick, with D.C. singer Raheem DeVaughn. Brown is a stalwart who’s developed a following by not overthinking the straightforward nature of his music, which makes Blacklight, his first full-length with Ohio rapper Stalley, a natural progression for both artists.
As a former Maybach Music Group signee who went independent in 2017 in search of greener pastures, Stalley understands the value of sticking to your guns. He embodies the kind of clever but restrained lifestyle raps that have fueled work by Curren$y and Dom Kennedy since the blog era, and he fits snugly within Brown’s velour atmosphere. “Left Maybach and got a Maybach with them curtains, fam,” he says with reserved pride on the title track. Stalley’s unfazed flows and Brown’s mid-tempo marches gel well musically, and their respective journeys through rap obscurity put them at the same eye level. Their convictions and dedication to craft give Blacklight its sharp perspective and amplify its position as a solid serving of meat-and-potatoes rap.
Meat-and-potatoes rap has enjoyed an extended moment in the sun with the rise of acts like Griselda and albums like Tyler, the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost. Brown and Stalley have favored these types of projects for years—no bells and whistles, just beats and rhymes—but Blacklight’s concept of illuminating things otherwise hidden slots neatly into an era of excess and introspection. Though a handful of bars skirt the line between thought-provoking and dad-joke corniness, Stalley’s earnestness and variety make the stumbles easy to ignore. He strides between legacy-building (“I used to stand at Western Union, now I’m signing checks”), coordinating designer outfits with his partner, and deconstructing street politics in the face of loss with dizzying ease. “Humble Wins” and “Lost Angels” are among the strongest examples of the duo’s chemistry, the strut of Brown’s handsome beats pushing Stalley to lay his thoughts bare.
A pair of guest verses from Skyzoo (“Love Me, Love Me Not”) and Joell Ortiz (“Bobby Bonilla”) offer a shift in perspective, but Brown and Stalley largely hold the project down by themselves. Their confidence gives Blacklight’s best songs a sense of weight that wanes a tad near the project’s end. The songs are too well-crafted and sincere to scan as failures, but there are fewer standouts as it moves past its first half. That’s an unfortunate drawback of being a workmanlike artist: every song is nothing less than good on its own, but missing the sweet spot on album length can make lesser songs like “Broad Spectrum” and “Stay Low” blend together. This isn’t a dealbreaker, but it’s worth noting the difference between a good 15-track album and a great 12-13 track album.
More often than not, Blacklight thrives on this sense of comfort and familiarity. Brown’s beats soothe as much as they shake and rattle, anchored by familiar sample choices and boosted by Stalley’s game-for-anything presence. Their commitment to fine-tuning hip-hop fundamentals has earned them each a loyal fanbase, including Power actor Omari Hardwick, who spits a mesmerizing poem on closing track “Omari’s Lament.” Blacklight isn’t an experiment like Brown’s Anchovies or a glossy fast-paced effort like Stalley’s Tell the Truth Shame the Devil series, but the duo plays to their strengths by meeting each other in the middle.

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From Indian Lakes’ fourth LP is mood music for the hopeless romantic, overwhelmed by the desire to connect but pining for the confidence to make the first move.

From Indian Lakes: Everything Feels Better Now

Everything Feels Better Now

Sometimes you just gotta go straight to the elevator pitch: what if the xx came up on American Football instead of Aaliyah? Though his post-production methods put him within the scope of downtempo, monastic R&B, Joey Vannucchi uses the compositional tools of twinkly, technical emo—clean guitar figures criss-crossed in askew time signatures, hopscotching drum rhythms, hushed vocals piecing together desires for someone always out of the frame. It’s hard to tell where the meticulous mood-setting of one format begins and the other ends, but you’ve got 68 minutes on From Indian Lakes’ fourth LP to figure it out: this is Vannucchi’s sound and he doesn’t deviate much from it.
While “the first math rock make-out album” is certainly a novel concept, it’s no gimmick; the singular aesthetic here has been in development for the better part of a decade. The first biographical nugget often told of Vannucchi is that he grew up in isolation and without electricity on a 40-acre parcel of land near Yosemite National Park. There wasn’t much to do besides obsess over music and play drums in a church basement, so it makes sense that his first two self-recorded and self-released albums drew from formative listening staples like Radiohead, but also Death Cab for Cutie and quasi-Christian alternative acts like Copeland, As Tall as Lions, and Lydia that once filled the midsection on Bamboozle festival posters.
Vannucchi’s upbringing makes for a nice story, though From Indian Lakes’ trajectory should be quite familiar to rock fans this point: band from far outside a major media center, too introspective and ambitious to be pigeonholed in pop-punk, finds an audience alienated by both the juvenilia of Warped Tour and painful curation of cool that defined mainstream indie. This is basically how the emo revival happened, and by 2014’s Absent Sounds, From Indian Lakes had signed to Triple Crown, now the home of Into It. Over It., You Blew It!, Sorority Noise, and Foxing, bands representative of the current day’s more thoughtful and enlightened popular emo.
This trajectory has coincided with Vannucchi shearing off every conceivable marker of his alt-rock beginnings until there’s nothing left but the pretty stuff. The blushing fauna gracing the album cover has become a familiar sight in emo’s ongoing progressive, pastoral phase, but nothing has truly embodied humidified, aural verdancy like *Everything Feels Better Now. *Though Vannucchi’s arrangements are intricately crafted, every sound gets subjected to a unifying greenhouse effect, distorted guitars, vibraphones, panning effects and tremolo shudders all becoming soft, yielding textures drooping into each other.
If it’s dream-pop, the emphasis is exceedingly towards the former; though Vannucchi’s bashful, beatific hooks bring “Blank Tapes” and “Happy Machines” to tidal crests, nothing really peaks or crashes. The reverie is only broken up when Vannucchi tries to deliver a *message *and falls back on stock metaphors for the impotence of nostalgia (“Blank Tapes”), indignity of public performance (“It’s my soul you want and a cage for me”), inner demons (“The Monster”) and American dreams (“American Dreams”).
But if Vannucchi’s guileless lyricism can occasionally lapse into diaristic angst, it’s also responsible for the simple, lovelorn ache that defines Everything Feels Better Now and distances it from the burlier entrants in the scene’s soft parade, as well as the Bed, Bath and Body Works of Washed Out or Rhye which it superficially resembles at times. Vannucchi is unquestionably a mash note writer—“when you need to feel someone lying next to you, I can be the one” is a typical sentiment and one that would be cloying if the music didn’t back it up with such welcoming, plush ambience. “I think I’m ready to lose myself in your love,” Vannucchi coos. Fittingly, it takes him until the eleventh track to get to that point. It’s mood music for the hopeless romantic, overwhelmed by the desire to connect but pining for the confidence to make the first move.


It's been ten years since Death From Above 1979 released their debut You're a Woman I'm a Machine, but this post-reunion second album sounds like it could've been recorded in the same year as that breakthrough debut.  With The Physical World, Grainger and Keeler haven’t entirely scratched the itch they instigated a decade ago, but they’ve learned to live with the burn, and that’s the next best thing.

Death From Above 1979: The Physical World

The Physical World

Desperately trying to scratch an itch you just can’t fucking get at: Ten years later, that’s still the overwhelming sensation that permeates You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine, the 2004 debut by Toronto’s Death From Above 1979. That lack of intimate connection and tactile resolution is echoed in the failed interface hinted at in the album’s title. DFA 1979 just couldn’t get no satisfaction—and when the band blew up in the mid '00s, they promptly imploded, only adding to that nagging tingle. Here was a duo gathering the shrapnel of so many scenes that exploded earlier in the decade—garage rock, stoner metal, dance punk—squeezing them into a tightly wound mass of fuzz and force, only to let it all slip through their fingers.
DFA 1979’s two halves, vocalist/drummer Sebastien Grainger and bassist/keyboardist Jesse F. Keeler, parted ways in 2006. Grainger kept sporadically busy as a singer/songwriter; Keeler moved his electro-slanted side-project MSTRKRFT to the front burner. Now, after an initial onstage reunion in 2011 that marked the mending of broken fences, they’ve delivered The Physical World. So much has changed since You’re a Woman, and so little, too: Julian Casablancas, Karen O, and Interpol are still around, and coincidentally, each of them has even made noise this very week. (It’s enough to make you wonder if they all secretly synced up with each other to enhance their retro-'00s brand synergy.) But it’s been a decade since Grainger and Keeler showed up to that particular party with 12-packs in hand, and they were a little late, arriving just as it was beginning to simmer down. Granted, they helped send it off with a bang; a last spurt of debauchery before everyone either hooks up or passes out, You’re a Woman raged like there was no tomorrow.
The Physical World—wiser and more wary than its predecessor—is that tomorrow, the one that was never supposed to come.  It doesn't so much sound like You’re a Woman was 10 years ago as it does 10 months: “It’s the same old song, just a different tune,” Grainger rasps on “Right On, Frankenstein!”, an efficient yet spirited dance-punk procedural that wouldn’t have sounded out of place amid You’re a Woman rockers like “Turn It Out” and “Cold War”. The Physical World is built out of pieces of the band’s own past, but it hangs together beautifully, all sleek musculature and acrobatic riffs. There’s not as much scraping, lunging, or dive-bombing on the album as compared to You’re a Woman, although that doesn’t keep The Physical World’s title track from glitching and spazzing in a fugue of pseudo-metallic collapse: “Go bridge won/ Has strung out/ Build up/ Tear it down,” Grainger wails, resembling a cyborg caught in a robotic purgatory. “Oh no, not again/ I get the feeling this is never gonna end.” The song dissolves in a haze of wheezing keyboard, like some creaking, rickety, steampunk version of itself.
Solipsism and self-recycling aside, Grainger branches out into new territory, at least for DFA 1979: a conceptual arc, if not a narratively coherent one. "Virgins" and "White Is Red" hinge together like a great, two-part TV episode, full of lurid melodrama and teen-angst iconography; summer school, skating in pools, and innocence left in the backseat of a car all pop up in "Virgins", which pounds and writhes with Ted Nugent-meets-Josh Homme swagger. And while the similarly highway-themed "White Is Red" seems like a sequel of sorts—"Frankie was a heartbreaker, I didn’t know it at the start/ She was only 16 when she went and broke my heart," Grainger croons with all the grit of a natural-born balladeer, or at least Brandon Flowers with a better grasp of the Boss— it doesn’t overtax the link. These are loose associations, motifs that float around and occasionally complete each other, the type of subtlety that the Grainger of You’re a Woman wasn’t concerned with. Balling and brooding were his two settings, and he toggled them frantically, never seeming to find what he was looking for, so he's clearly spent the last 10 years doing some growing up.
In a recent interview Keeler did for Stereogum, he talks about his and Grainger's metamorphosis from hormone-pumping post-adolescents to grownups with families and, of all the crazy things, lives. “Back then we didn’t have any kind of life outside of the band,” he says, speaking of the DFA 1979's pre-breakup years. “The band was everything; it was literally all we had. Now we both have lives of our own outside of the music we make together. And that’s really important. Everyone needs to have a life.” Calling The Physical World a work of maturity would be selling the album, and maturity, short: “Cheap Talk” and “Government Trash” zoom like rockets and stomp like dinosaurs, full of snotty, boyish abandon, while “Trainwreck 1979” dabbles in mirror-gazing and mythologizing. The album is, above all, pragmatic—a more judicious application of the band’s mixed-use energy—but it doesn’t do so at the expense of soul.
The Physical World’s most gripping song, “Always On”, paints a dystopian scenario drawn from DFA 1979’s own experience as the objects of expectation as well as the downward spiral of music-industry boom-and-bust. Grainger sneers, “If we brought Kurt back to life/ There’s no way he would survive,” and he’s not only talking about the vicissitudes of the pop world that Kurt Cobain loved and hated, but also of the social-media membrane we’ve all become cocooned in. “Show me something new/ Something I can like,” he begs in singsong horror as he hops across a bed of sharpened hooks, unable to reconcile, consummate, or otherwise bridge the schism between what exists online and what can only be touched by skin. With The Physical World, Grainger and Keeler haven’t entirely scratched the itch they instigated a decade ago. But they’ve learned to live with the burn, and that’s the next best thing.


Cymbals Eat Guitars' third record is a sprawling, complex, and fascinating document of American indie rock. Marked by loss and indebted to New Jersey heroes the Wrens' own approach, LOSE fixates on small moments of startling lucidity and figures out where they fit into the bigger picture.

LOSE

“New Jersey ain’t the whole world.” These are clearly the words of someone who never called it "home". It may not be the whole world, but for many of its artists, it’s a universe, one where you can spend an entire career creating rewarding art. Real Estate, Titus Andronicus, and Lifetime are all considered quintessentially “suburban,” and they are nothing alike—and the same goes for Garden State and the movies of Todd Solondz. Bruce Springsteen and “The Sopranos” are revered for their realistic works of fiction, Bon Jovi and "Jersey Shore" less so for their fictional works of "reality"; a fine line exists between archetype and stereotype. Its economy and geography is every bit as contradictory and complex—New Jersey’s wealthiest pockets are stuffed with families fleeing New York City and Philadelphia, while its own metropolises are some of America’s most notoriously blighted. It’s named the Garden State for good reason, while its beaches are a punchline for pollution. The state represents American sprawl and dichotomy crammed into a manageable space—the perfect map for Cymbals Eat Guitars to project LOSE, a sprawling, complex, and fascinating document of American indie rock.
It’s a fitting occurrence, though still surprising. Most bands rep Jersey from the start; in 2009, Cymbals Eat Guitars briefly identified as an NYC band, though their music existed on MySpace and encompassed the Pacific Northwest, drawing heavily on Built to Spill and Modest Mouse. By 2011’s Lenses Alien, they settled in the pop culture void of Staten Island, while the album seemed to take place entirely within Joseph D’Agostino’s head. An often compelling record, D’Agostino has since admitted that it makes more sense if you’re high, but also that its unwieldy songs are almost impossible to play if you’ve had more than two beers.
So LOSE is a homecoming in multiple ways—D’Agostino looks back on his upbringing and New Jersey’s vast catalog of pop culture folklore while the band makes the occasional anthemic moments that elevated Why There Are Mountains the primary purpose of each song. The near-replication of its length and chord progression casts “Jackson” and a sequel to Mountains’ massive opener “...And the Hazy Sea.” However, where the latter exploded on impact and played only on the vertiginous disparity between its volcanic eruptions and minutes of calm, “Jackson” evenly and expertly delivers its peaks in a variety of ways —D’Agostino patiently works towards an arcing chorus worthy of its Elliott Smith influence, while a triumphant guitar solo emerges from the kind of post-rock blur that would typically signal the closure of a Cymbals Eat Guitars song. The riff from “Warning” adds a couple of sour, flatted notes to the jangly progression from “Shore Points,” which soundtracked a leisurely drive down the coast on Lenses Alien. In a thrilling sprint towards a brash chorus, “Warning” recklessly slams on the gas without checking the brakes.
Cymbals Eat Guitars aren’t the same band that made Why There Are Mountains. In fact, they’re an actual band now, rather than a cast of supporting players beholden to D'Agostino's ideas. The Lenses Alien lineup returns with a new drummer (Andrew Dole) and a new rhythmic drive; producer John Agnello lends presence and texture, rendering these topographic songs 3D, while the rhythm section acts as D’Agostino’s OnStar—he’s still free to wander wherever, yet there’s a framework and a destination. When he hits on a tangent, he’s given direction an ultimate resolution, so Cymbals Eat Guitars have the confidence to strike out to stranger territories. “Laramie” manages to span the lonesome crowded west and Muscle Shoals soul before levitating to an astral, pedal-stomping freakout. “Chambers” and “Lifenet” are slices of Staten Island living delivered as slick, heartland radio rock. It's all presented with unity rather than erratic dilettantism; "indie rock" is Cymbals Eat Guitars' domain and they cover its entirety.
And yet, the music is once again outdone by D’Agostino’s lyrics, deeply personal and relatable, referential without being academic, prone to poetic flight and realistic grounding. Lyric writing in rock music—or, really, any genre—rarely possesses the substance and depth displayed on LOSE. During an aborted drug deal in “Chambers”, Wu-Tang Clan get an offhand shout, and Shaolin’s finest would envy the spiced-out, scene-setting vividness given to “Warning”—“Pennants stiffen on the strip/ Wind is whipping through the tinsel fixed to the dealership/And you're looking mighty ghostly just like Bowie on Soul Train/ Wrapped in your sable.”
RZA would also approve of D’Agostino’s writing regimen, which uses a cornucopia of pharmaceuticals as a muse and meditation as a mental exercise. As a result, LOSE fixates on small moments of startling lucidity and figures out where they fit into the bigger picture. During bookends “Jackson” and “2 Hip Soul (Floyd’s Tomb)”, New Jersey’s more obscure, shameful race relations come to the fore—the former evokes a possibly apocryphal band of Native American outlaws during a meditation on the afterlife, while “2 Hip Soul” lends a redneck’s comeuppance a mythical quality high school rumors tend to acquire. A classmate falls face-first into a firepit at a kegger, returning with a load of pills and a compression sleeve under his John Deere hat and Carhartts, potentially karmic retribution for his hobby of carving swastikas into trees and clubbing ostriches with PVC piping at the local zoo.
During “Chambers”, D’Agostino recalls his parents buying him a dog, the subsequent passing of which served in a retrospect as a way “To learn about loss/ The slow education.” His insight captures a different and devastating lesson about death on the stunning power ballad “Child Bride”. D’Agostino’s tender acoustic fingerpicking only serves to make his confessional memories all the more shocking—“You were my best friend/ Until your dad slapped the living shit out of you.” Its title serves as cruel foreshadowing for someone whose path was set as a youth by circumstances beyond his control; an alcoholic mother instigates a sudden relocation, the friend sells off all his possessions, moves south and catches D’Agostino at a show in Orlando with a new girlfriend and a crack addiction. He offers a hit and D’Agostino refuses, because “My heart would explode,” either from the drugs or just from the stark realization of how he and his friend ended up in the same place. The final chorus soars, while D’Agostino lies crushed, realizing he’s been given nothing but opportunity and support—and here he is, wasting his 20s getting high in less unflattering ways.
Yet, D’Agostino thoroughly understands how he and countless others get to this point, and it’s explored in its entirety during LOSE’s thesis statement, “XR”. It’s the song that most explicitly references the death of Benjamin High, D’Agostino’s closest friend and musical collaborator, and the inspiration for the newly introspective and self-disclosing lyrics.  The awful coincidence of his last name is used as a sobering double entendre during a beer-raising coda—“High is just a tingling behind my eyes/ Got no serotonin left.” Before he gets to that point, “XR” wraps up an entire adolescence of escape into drugs and rock ‘n roll within 2:30 of rabble-rousing, harmonica-huffing cow-punk. D’Agostino barks through a distorted microphone, “Here I am again at Ben’s MySpace grave,” and traces back to how, at first, drugs are used to accompany incredible, fleeting moments of youth. Then, they become a means of trying to get that feeling back, as a trip to the record store results in buying CDs for “ripping rails, not listening to.” And finally, it becomes a way to push through the numbness of being unable to generate a substitute—“Wanna wake up wanting to listen to records/ But those old feelings elude me.”
Those feelings are most closely associated with the Wrens throughout *LOSE—*D’Agostino and High take a road trip to Philly for a house show and their van-ride duet of “I Guess We’re Done” (“I’ll do the Kev and you can do the Charles”) is recalled on “Laramie”. Cymbals Eat Guitars owe a lot to that band—they described them as “our Beatles”, and Charles Bissell produced Why There Are Mountains. In some ways, Cymbals Eat Guitars got to live the experience the Wrens related on “This Boy is Exhausted” and “Boys, You Won’t”—playing to empty rooms with a complete lack of buzz, taking up deadening day jobs after having blown their college years. They also learned that if you make a record at the level of The Meadowlands, you can foster a fanbase willing to wait over a decade for new music. So even if D’Agostino’s lyrics are rife with death, depression and doubt, LOSE exudes earned resilience, of getting through shit and getting your shit together. Since it's more clear than ever that the Wrens—and Built to Spill and Modest Mouse—aren't currently going to provide those feelings that currently elude listeners, Cymbals Eat Guitars have realized the challenge facing them all along; the result makes the distinction between protege and peer nearly indistinguishable.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore Scarface’s deathly personal 1994 solo album.

The Diary

There is the fact of rivers—how when water falls, they can only hold so much of their kin close to their bodies before they open their arms and let the waters run free into somewhere, anywhere. The San Jacinto River in Houston is no different. On October 15th, 1994, a series of unique meteorological events joined hands before heading towards Houston, causing the largest rain event in the city’s history. On the west and east banks of the San Jacinto, the waters rose and spilled over. The city of Houston got almost a foot of water, which was mild compared to surrounding areas. Upper Cypress Creek, Spring Creek, and Lake Creek were all subject to endless rainfall, with the flood claiming 17 lives and shutting down Houston and surrounding cities for days. More rivers and creeks swelled, forcing people from their homes, or to the tops of buildings. Children went missing and others drowned.
For anyone who has been through a vicious cycle of weather, it is known that there is a calm directly after the storm, too. To talk about the calm which comes after a turbulent moment makes for a less romantic cliche. The calm after the storm is the one that is eerie. There is ruin, and a cloud of silence—more about a confirmation of what has happened than a signaling of what is coming. It’s the difference between someone might not survive this and there are people to be buried now.
On October 18th, as the rains persisted but weakened, Scarface released his third album, The Diary, into a world where no one in his home city could safely get to the store and hold it in their hands.
If you are going to be a writer who writes about death, I only ask that you honor the fullness of loss and the space left by loss. Rather, that you cut through the mess and define death not only by the person but by the people who perhaps loved that person and by the people who sit in that person’s old room, dressed in their old clothes. Scarface is a writer who writes about death, and by 1994, the rapper born Brad Jordan was figuring out the type of solo artist he could be for years to come. His first two solo albums outside of his success with the underground Houston rap group Geto Boys—1991’s Mr. Scarface Is Back and 1993’s The World Is Yours—were both critical and commercial hits, casting him slightly outside of his group and making him a viable solo star.
By 1994, Scarface was in a position to capitalize off of his momentum while also asking his existing audience to grow with him. His work with the Geto Boys was often steeped in a dark vulnerability. Scarface battled with depression his whole life, even attempting suicide in his youth. While his first two solo efforts had glimpses of this, both albums felt more like a collection of the best songs he could make at the time, without any thought of single narrative structure. The Diary set out to be different.
First, the sonic landscape changed. Though The Diary was only made a year out from his last album, the sound of rap was shifting rapidly in the early ’90s. Sample laws had come into play, cracking down on the uses of other people’s music in rap songs, and forcing producers to figure out new tactics after skating on lax rules through the late ’80s and the first two years of the ’90s. Additionally, Dr. Dre and Death Row Records had cemented their sound with the releases of The Chronic and Doggystyle, introducing a more laid back instrumentation, crafted with live, in-studio musicians re-creating sounds that might have otherwise been lifted from soul and funk samples, like James Brown or Motown records. The first two Scarface albums were frantic, sample-heavy, and brilliant, but a shift in tone was needed. At only 24, Scarface was building towards the rapper he wanted to be for an entire career. His anger, paranoia, and obsession with unraveling a life lost is a common thread throughout his work, but on The Diary, he made the themes palpable and heavy.
I imagine it’s difficult to write about death as something you endure and something you are willing to deliver to others in equal measure. What makes The Diary fascinating is that Scarface raps comfortably about killing with what appears to be little or no remorse, but the difficulty appears in the nuances. On the album’s proper opening track, “The White Sheet,” Scarface outlines visions of gunning down his enemies, in great detail. Still, it must be said that in all music, there is the difference between glorifying murder and using the tools and imagery of murder as a way to present your fearlessness. It’s all a means of survival of wherever it is you come from.
Scarface dragged a razor blade across his wrists when he was 14 years old because he wanted to die, or at least wanted to escape a darkness which felt endless. The thing about surviving an attempt to take your own life is that it is often framed as a failure, on the other side of which is your responsibility to continue to endure living. I am mostly saying that Scarface has his own relationship with death. Yes, he grew up poor and black and among violence. Yes, he knew what it was to kill as a survival tactic, but he also nearly couldn’t find his way to surviving himself. When Scarface raps about killing, it is with a fine lens, with nuance and haunting detail. On “The White Sheet,” he raps about visualizing the mother of someone he’s killed, crying in a hospital waiting room. It is a small detail—one he drops in before quickly jumping to the next image—but it is lasting and haunting. Even in violence, his scope is on the impact it leaves.
The Diary has its tropes, of course: The song about a sexual encounter (“One”), the song about misconceptions of rap in the mainstream media, which ticked up as rap began to seem like less and less of a passing fad (“Hand of the Dead Body”). But its two most interesting tracks are “Mind Playin’ Tricks ’94” and “I Seen A Man Die.”
The former is a retread of the Geto Boys song of the same name from just three years earlier. But with Scarface alone on it, he stretches out the idea of his failures, flaws, and the survival of both. What ties all of this together is Scarface’s voice. It, like him, walks a multi-layered line. His voice is a fashioned brass instrument, a horn played by a rusty but enthusiastic student. He bellows like a hustler turned preacher, or a preacher turned hustler, or anyone familiar with the corner and the pulpit in equal measure. He has a voice that commands attention, which allows him to unfurl his narratives patiently, with the full ears of any listener. His voice particularly hums at a good rhythm on this album, blending in under the bass lines and the waves of drums. It becomes a function of the album’s movements and darkness, in concert with the music itself:

Sometimes I want to end it but I don’t though
They tell me see my pastor but I don’t go

Sometimes being alive is not, alone, worth celebrating. That sounds harsh, but depression is real and worth the weight it rests on the body. I have always appreciated Scarface most in these moments: how he comes to terms with still being alive, despite not wanting to. It’s raw and unfiltered. I’m here, but you can’t make me be excited about it some days, although I’m trying.
“I Seen a Man Die,” the album’s centerpiece, consists of a narrative arc which involves Scarface detailing a person’s failed rehab stint. First, Scarface takes on the role as a storyteller, guiding the listener through a man’s final days. And then, he almost hovers above the song, a ghost himself, shepherding the dead to whatever waits beyond. He goes from the interior of the man’s life, to narrating the end by honing in on all of the small parts of life exiting the body.

I hear you breathin’ but your heart no longer sounds strong
But you kinda scared of dying so you hold on
And you keep on blacking out and your pulse is low
Stop trying to fight the reaper, just relax and let it go

The subtlety in this is the shift of view: in the first verse, Scarface is using the “he” to address the man’s life, as an entry point. By the time the last verse pops up, Scarface has become more intimate, shortening the emotional distance by addressing the man directly with “you,” understanding that the “you” could be anyone we know, or love, or could us. It is a small move, something that only a writer would pull off. Taking a listener from a specific experience to a universal pain that they, themselves, could be a part of.
There is much to be made of how Scarface rendered himself more emotionally vulnerable than people gave him credit for being, despite his open-book approach to writing rhymes. The song is the one on the album where the stakes are raised. There is a defined character, and one must grapple with his leaving.
Scarface has said about The Diary that he wanted to make an album for the people he grew up with in Houston, and I think that this is one of the ultimate goals of a creator who is from a place where a lot of people don’t make it out with an ability to create. You want to make something legible, or touchable for your people, and their people, and the people who didn’t survive. So much of Scarface’s work, particularly after The Diary, feels like it exists so that he, himself, can stay alive a little bit longer, or at least so that he can archive a life that wasn’t always promised. J Prince, the head of Rap-A-Lot Records, told Scarface that there was a ghetto in every city, and therefore, he had to make an album that would resonate in the ghettos of every city. At that point, Houston wasn’t an unknown commodity in rap, but it wasn’t New York or Los Angeles. People had to listen to the lyrics and envision the sprawl, skyscrapers and hot open roads inside of it, and see themselves in it.
This is why The Diary trades so richly on pain and despair with no light at the end of it. I appreciate an honesty which doesn’t offer light at the end of the tunnel, and so it is refreshing to hear a meditation on ideas about darkness and the promise of more, particularly if it is all you have ever known. Every ghetto isn’t the same, but Scarface seemed to know that the missing link in all of these ghettos was conversations about the frightening nature of how to survive them. What was being offered on The Diary was a mental escape route. Someone reaching out two hands and telling you they are ready to catch you if you jump, even if they can’t save you from the large cloud of despair, they can pull you closer to them so that you’re not alone in your ruin.
There was water again in Houston in 2017. Hurricane Harvey tore through the city in mid-late August and early September. The damage was focused on Houston this time. There were 88 deaths directly associated with the hurricane, and 125 billion dollars in damage. When the hurricane hit, Scarface was in his home, just outside of the city. He’d decided to ride out the storm, despite warnings for residents to leave if they could. His home lost power, but was largely unharmed.
The calm after the storm exists, but it’s mostly to shine a light on what has been lost. To call attention to those who didn’t survive, and to push those who did survive to rebuild, even if they don’t feel like they want to go on. Some people sent money from afar and watched the city try to build itself back up before the news cycle zoomed away from it. Some people went to put feet on the ground. Houston is a resilient city, one that has survived more than one drowning. Though it shouldn’t have to wear that resilience as a badge of honor, of course, it does.
Scarface has built a life and career off of resilience. He has not wanted to be alive and then has lived. He has made and remade a career off of an honesty which isn’t necessarily optimistic but remains inviting nonetheless. And so, it makes sense that he is one of Houston’s most notable rappers, the one who is still proud to be there, who still makes music for his people as if he is building a place for them to survive and survive again. The Diary reflects the promise of an imperfect place, and the perils of living inside of it and wanting to stay, despite. A place not necessarily better, but needed, nonetheless.


Delia Derbyshire was an unsung early pioneer in electronic music, and her score for the 1972 film Circle of Light is the longest single piece of recorded music of hers to see release yet.

Delia Derbyshire / Elsa Stansfield: Circle of Light

Circle of Light

This past March, Liz Harris (aka Grouper) performed a live set of her signature choral drone at MoMA PS1, written specifically to accompany a sequence of 16mm films by the experimental filmmaker Paul Clipson. The pairing of Harris’ compositions—deeply human-sounding works built from tape loops and her layered and manipulated voice—with Clipson’s noisy projections of flickering, dreamy images of things like women in water and moonlit trees conjured a very modern yearning for sensory authenticity, something you’d find in an increasingly inaccessible natural world.
This performance came to mind the first time I watched Circle of Light, a half-hour-long 1972 film that compiles a slideshow-like succession of photographs on glass transparency by British photographer Pamela Bone, set to an abstract soundtrack by Delia Derbyshire. The setup for the two projects is similar, each reproducing an emotional reaction to nature, but their messages are quite different: While Harris and Clipson’s collaboration, emphasizing retrograde analog techniques, comes across as somewhat fearful of technology, Derbyshire and Bone seem fascinated by its potential.
An early pioneer in electronic music, Derbyshire, who passed away in 2001, is something of a cult figure. During a decade-plus stint at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop beginning in 1962, she produced scores and effects for television, including, famously, the original theme for “Dr. Who.” Her laborious and mathematical approach to composition there predated the use of synthesizers and even multi-track recording technology; her output, which at the Radiophonic Workshop went largely uncredited, is an eerie and dense musique concrete that, suffice to say, has stood the test of time much better than the rest of the special effects used on the shows she scored.
Derbyshire also composed under her own name and with David Vorhaus and Brian Hodgson as White Noise, and her soundtrack for *Circle of Light *(made with Elsa Stansfield), just now seeing its first proper release, is the longest single piece of recorded music that’s been recovered from her oeuvre. Bone originally wanted the film to be soundtracked by a reading of her own poetry, but director Anthony Roland pushed in the direction of a non-narrative audio score, introducing Derbyshire. Bone’s color images are of the natural world, but manipulated and layered to emphasize pattern and form. At the surface of Derbyshire’s score are also fragments from nature. Among the collage of sounds she applies are a number of field recordings, including, in the first minute, one of an owl hooting. A whorling texture underneath approximates an insistent wind or a soft tide; a synthesized chirp is reminiscent of a field of crickets on a summer day.
Alongside such recognizable sounds, Derbyshire’s sonic palette includes droning, alien, sometimes-tonal elements. These are fastidiously arranged such that the work, restrained as it is, takes on a remarkable spatial quality. (Among the effects here is a gorgeous stretched and filtered recording of a metal lampshade rung with a hammer, which she famously used in her work on “Dr. Who”). And while you could go on about the various purring and pulsing sounds throughout the release, her subtle pacing is just as key. The work, with its pockets of energy dissolving into washes of texture, creates a world rather than describing an existing one. Her output is often described in terms of its many innovations, but this recording underscores that Derbyshire was an artist skilled at constructing an evocative whole out of pioneering details, one that can be experienced on both technical and emotional registers.
The work is introduced with a brief description by Roland of Bone’s practice, and a brief artist statement by the photographer. “Inspired by nature, and being more responsive to feeling than to thought,” as Roland says, Bone notes that with her work she has set out “to overcome the limitations that photography would impose;” such a thesis could surely be extended to Derbyshire, whose work opens the possibility of sound far beyond imitating life. In a moment when artists like Harris and Clipson use vintage analog media to bring us closer to a ‘real’ that might not have existed in the first place, Derbyshire and Bone’s collaboration is a rich reminder of the mysterious and unnerving potential of both their respective technological mediums and nature itself.


The composer, improviser, and trumpet player Jon Hassell, now 77, created Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics in 1980 in collaboration with producer Brian Eno. Melding minimalism, jazz, and ambient sounds, it is eerie, dreamlike, and otherworldly music.

Brian Eno / Jon Hassell: Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics

Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics

The title Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics has a brainy and academic ring to it, but according to Jon Hassell, the record is at least 50% body music. "The basic metaphor is that of the north and south of a person is a projection of the north and south of the globe," the composer, improviser, and trumpet player, now 77, explained in an interview earlier this year. "A mind formatted by language and located in the head, compared with the area of wildness and sensuality below the waist where dance and music and procreation reigns."
However, the first time through, Possible Musics—which Hassell created in 1980 in collaboration with producer Brian Eno—you might find that "wildness" and "sensuality" are not the first adjectives that come to mind. It is eerie, dreamlike, and otherworldly music.
Throughout the record, Hassell’s trumpet is processed using a harmonizer effect, producing alien tonalities that seem to slide between the notes of a traditional Western scale. Often, his melody lines sound more like a human voice than a brass instrument. The rhythm tracks—made up of hand percussion and electric bass—are highly repetitive, but also wobbly and destabilized. The result is a sound that melds minimalism, jazz, and ambient sounds, but doesn’t fit comfortably into any of those genres.
Though his name is not invoked as frequently as Eno’s, the last few decades have proven Hassell—who was born in Memphis, Tennessee—to be an influential presence in electronic music and modern composition. Active since the mid-'60s, his background is hard to duplicate. He studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen, played on the first recording of Terry Riley’s "In C", and has performed session work for Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel. His solo work has provided the sonic blueprint for a number of contemporary musicians, as well, including Aphex Twin (See Selected Ambient Works Vol. II) and Oneohtrix Point Never (Returnal) to name a few.
Possible Musics was, in a lot of ways, the first full realization of Hassell's Fourth World concept. Many of the sounds—the freaky trumpet tones, the drifting ambient structures—were already in place on his 1977 debut LP, Vernal Equinox, but while that album is as meditative and mesmerizing as anything he has released, it is clearly identifiable as a jazz fusion record.
On Possible Musics, synthesizers and electronic treatments help to nudge things into less recognizable territory. The music is informed by minimalism, but Hassell's take is very different than the works of Philip Glass or Steve Reich that are linked to that style. For those composers, minimalism often involved rigorous structure and clockwork execution, whereas Possible Musics is conceptually dialed in, but loose and improvisational in its execution. Harmonic motion is limited and all attention is centered around the embellishment of a single melodic line. Hassell is playing lead on these songs, but his performances often blur seamlessly into the backing tracks.
Like Eno’s ambient records, Possible Music is all about mood. However, where Music For Airports sought to reflect a highly impersonal environment, Hassell’s work is intentionally exotic. No specific nation or people is being quoted here, though. Hassell's landscape is an invented one—an imagined culture, where high technology and mysticism are blended together. "John’s experiment was to imagine a 'coffee coloured' world," explains Eno in an essay first published in the Guardian and excerpted for the reissue's liner notes. "A globalized world constantly integrating and hybridizing, where differences were celebrated and dignified—and realize it into music."
In this sense, Possible Musics is an exercise in science fiction. Like the William Gibson book Neuromancer, the record offered an imperfect, but prescient glimpse toward the near future.  The subsequent decades have not produced much music like Hassell’s, but the concepts that informed Possible Musics have proven predictive of the way that technology would come to mesh with music-making in other cultures—whether that’s Konono N°1's amplified thumb pianos, Group Doueh’s electric guitars, or any number of global electronic and pop sounds that have been produced using a laptop computer.
And once you acclimate to the weird and warbly tones, there is a certain sensuality to Possible Musics. In Hassell’s desire to crossbreed cultures there’s an implicit act of intercourse going on—a desire for personal renewal and transformation via an "other", be it a nation, culture, or another human being.


After switching things up with this year's ambitious LP Underneath the Pine, Chaz Bundick  turns toward sweetly catchy and more explicitly funky 80s-tinged dancefloor jams.

Freaking Out EP

Now that there's little choice but to treat chillwave as an actual genre, it's at risk of the same kind of restrictive codification that's strangled so many of its predecessors. The word has come to mean a specific style-- glowing electronic pop that calls to mind faded photographs. But what initially drew comparisons between such groups as Washed Out, Neon Indian, and Memory Tapes wasn't such an easily identifiable set of musical signifiers. As with most category names that stick, chillwave was a feeling.
There's no better example of the genre's catholic origins than Toro Y Moi mastermind Chaz Bundick. Last year's Causers of This established Toro Y Moi as one of the mini-scene's leading figures, with the post-crash economic reality of lead single "Blessa" ("I found a job, I do it fine/ Not what I want, but still I try") aligning the album with Neon Indian's "Deadbeat Summer" and Washed Out's High Times-- and Bundick's full-length debut had a warmly nostalgic electro-R&B aesthetic, to boot. But by then he had already released 2009's Body Angles tape, which, yeah, presaged Causers with synthy closer "Timed Pleasure", but mostly emphasized scuzzy guitars. And Bundick has said he actually recorded this year's garage-pop "Leave Everywhere" single in 2006. In the meantime, he's given us straight-up dance (his Les Sins project) and an album that expands on the atmospheric funk of Causers using a lusher, more organic instrumental palette (this year's Underneath the Pine).
The definition of chillwave may have to expand yet again. Memory Tapes' solid if disappointing follow-up to 2009's zeitgeist-capturing Seek Magic had more in common than with the sound of this Internet-born subset, but Bundick, along with Neon Indian and Washed Out, continues to embody its spirit, which was always more body-oriented than detractors would care to admit. With the Freaking Out EP, Bundick moves from vaguely funky 1980s-tinged makeout jams to more explicitly funky 80s-tinged dancefloor jams-- think Chromeo. The change isn't as successful as his best work, but it still makes for a plenty rewarding between-albums EP.
Advance mp3 "Saturday Love"-- a cover of a 1985 Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis production for R&B singers Cherrelle and Alexander O'Neal-- is the highlight here, with its sweetly catchy days-of-the-week hook, tinkling two-finger piano, and thwacking neo-new jack swing drum programming. Yearning, bass-limber opener "All Alone" and finger-snapping dance finale "I Can Get Love" even share the strobe-like keyboards present on much of Causers-- the last song has that post-Dilla crackle, too. And "Sweet" applies the chopped up vocals and hazy incandescence of that album to further 80s-style R&B. "Take it easy," Bundick soothes on the title track, another uptempo floor-filler. "Don't worry anymore... Calm down." I mean, how much more chillwave can you get, right?


After a few false starts, Solange Knowles comes into her own with songwriting and production assistance from Devonté Hynes. True marks the sound of a singer hitting a graceful stride, in her own time and on her own terms.

True

When we heard from Solange Knowles four years ago, she was a major-label signee trying to find her footing on a conceptual and vintage-sounding album called SoL-Angel and the Hadley Street Dreams. Then she split with Interscope and resurfaced on the indie circuit, carting Jay-Z and her sister Beyoncé to Grizzly Bear concerts on the Williamsburg waterfront and offering up a cover of Dirty Projectors' "Stillness Is the Move". At cynical first glance, it seemed like Knowles was simply backtracking and rebranding, hoping to claim some available indie turf. But this fall, she released "Losing You", a gleaming and spirited new song that transcended the labels she'd been assigned. Released via Terrible, the label co-owned by Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear, the sly single hinted at the possibilities open to an artist who eschews a traditional model of pop stardom. True, the EP that follows, delivers on the fresh promise of "Losing You" and marks the sound of a singer hitting a graceful stride, in her own time and on her own terms.
Producers and songwriters in the pop world sometimes lurk in the background, leaving the vocalist to be the face of the project. But Solange upends that model by presenting Devonté Hynes, her co-songwriter and True’s main producer, as a full-fledged partner. His name is credited prominently and he appears hand-in-hand with Solange at listening parties and in press photos. And True, a thematically consistent whole, sounds like the product of a lovingly forged artistic bond. The EP shares DNA with Hynes' solo outlet Blood Orange. Like the best bits of his 2011 album Coastal Grooves, it feeds on humble but compulsively listenable tunes that reference the silken grooves of late-80s pop. But Hynes thrives in a supporting role. "If there's a better voice [than mine] suited to a song-- I usually have a female voice in my head, anyway-- then I would rather her sing it," he told me during an interview earlier this year. "It makes me happier."
Hynes has met an ideal female vocal muse in Solange, who executes each cut with simple grace and yearning naïveté. These songs often reconcile girlish optimism with worldly wisdom as though the two are one and the same. "Maybe I lost you, but I was not done having my fun/ Played around with your heart, now I'm playing around in the dark," she apologizes on "Lovers in the Parking Lot". And on “Bad Girls”, she captures the uneasiness of waking up in last night's smeared makeup and feeling unmoored: "I look down on you, so deep down I know that we're the same/ It's stupid thinking that you would want to come play my game," she sings, ending the EP over a twinkle worthy of a closing scene in an early John Hughes film.
Like much of True, it's the sound of a complicated slow dance during a night's dwindling last minutes, fueled by pounding hearts and racing minds. The record never builds to a huge chorus; instead, its hooks bubble up quietly and quickly, then dissipate as the songs return to their downbeat simmer. Hynes tinkers with non-traditional structures, letting the tunes meander in and out of grooves, but while this occasionally causes True to fall slack ("Look Good With Trouble"), it’s a largely effective approach.
True also benefits from its unorthodox length: At seven songs, it's fuller than most EPs, yet too short to be considered an album-album. Somehow, it works. Why add filler just to call it an album? It's another example of Knowles and Hynes forgoing conventional wisdom and doing things their own way. Seven songs can be the perfect length; a collection of accessible and authentic pop can come out on an indie label; you can reshape the typical producer/songwriter/pop star model; you can create unassuming music that still sounds like a big deal. And ultimately, for Solange, you can retrace your steps and find yourself somewhere entirely new.