The Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album channeled their grimy New York roots and love of ’70s kung fu into an instant hip-hop classic, launching a sprawling and influential culture empire.

Wu-Tang Clan: Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

On August 11, 1973, at a back-to-school party in the Bronx, a local DJ named Kool Herc used two copies of a James Brown LP to create a blockbuster dance number from the breakbeat of “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” that shook the party to its core. Just over a week later, Enter the Dragon—the story of martial artists Lee (played by an ascendent Bruce Lee), Roper (John Saxon), and Williams (Jim Kelly) infiltrating a fighting tournament—hit movie theaters. The film capitalized on the emerging kung fu craze, but Lee, Saxon, and Kelly kicking ass together had a stronger impact: the sight of a Chinese, white, and Black actor coming together to fight a common enemy was a sign of racial unity that also happened to appeal to as many ticket buyers as possible.
These converging movements—hip-hop, kung fu, and the unabashed culture mixing—would come to define the life and life’s work of Robert Diggs, who turned 4 years old in 1973. Diggs spent much of his early years traveling across the United States, but when he first heard rap music at a block party, his life found a new purpose. By 11, he was cutting up in rap battles across the East Coast, and whenever he was in New York, crashing with his family in the Stapleton Houses projects on Staten Island, he’d kill time seeing kung fu films with his cousin Russell Jones at the scuzzy Times Square theaters. The duo quickly adopted a regular weekend habit: They’d go to the movies, leave, fight each other with the moves they learned, hop the train back home, fight some more, run into other MCs, fight them, and then get into rap battles with said MCs.
But it was Enter the Dragon in particular—and another movie by director Lau Kar-leung, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin—that changed Diggs’ life. “It was through these films that I was able to see and feel from a non-Western point of view,” he explained. He also took the implicit message of the multicultural trio to heart, as he later told Andscape: “[Lee, Saxon, and Kelly] were all working together against the oppressor who was poisoning the people. If you add in a few other elements, that’s our country, bro!” The dual philosophies of martial arts films and the Five-Percenter Muslim teachings of his native New York were what pushed Diggs, in 1984, to corral Jones and fellow cousin Gary Grice to form their own rap group Force of the Imperial Master, which was changed to the less distinct All in Together Now less than a year later. At the same time, Diggs formed another group, D.M.D. Posse, with friends he’d made in his Park Hill neighborhood of Staten Island: Clifford Smith Jr., Lamont Hawkins, Jason Hunter, and Corey Woods. During a brief solo stint at Tommy Boy Records that involved a chintzy single titled “Ooh I Love You Rakeem,” Diggs relocated to Steubenville, Ohio, to live with his mother for a brief period.
It didn’t take long before Diggs was swept up in petty crime, leading to an altercation where he was arrested for allegedly shooting someone in the leg. Had Diggs been convicted, the eight-year prison sentence he was staring down might’ve squashed his rap ambitions before they ever truly began. With a second chance in hand, he was ready to turn his and his friends’ lives around for the better. While in Ohio, Diggs became friendly with producer Selwyn Bougard, later known as 4th Disciple. Before long, Bougard and Diggs were talking music and began recording demos in Bougard’s grandmother’s basement with a visiting Jones and Dennis Coles, a friend and roommate of Diggs’ who had bonded over Five-Percent Nation’s teachings and comic books together. Dingy setup aside—the mic was hung from a wire hanger with a sock as a pop filter—the group’s chaotic yet productive energy further inflated Diggs’ sense of purpose.
Once they all got back to New York in 1991, Diggs was ready to unite his friends under all things hip-hop, kung fu, and nerdy: He became the RZA; Jones was christened Ol’ Dirty Bastard; Grice transformed into the GZA; Smith dubbed himself Method Man; Hawkins took on the name U-God; Hunter emerged as Inspectah Deck; Woods took the mantle of Raekwon the Chef; Coles was reborn as the Ghostface Killah. Jamel Irief, a friend and mentee of GZA’s, joined shortly after and dubbed himself Masta Killa. RZA’s Avengers had been assembled, a cabal of microphone warriors who each brought their own piece of New York to the table. With a group name nicked from one of RZA and O.D.B.’s favorite movies—1983’s Shaolin and Wu Tang—Staten Island would become their Shaolin, the first to bear witness to the Wu-Tang Clan.
Wu-Tang entered a rap world far removed from the grimy atmosphere they were looking to conjure; jazz rap on the East Coast and G-funk on the West Coast took up most of the mainstream real estate, and it was hard for anything else to get a word in edgewise. But RZA’s approach was murky, rain-damaged, and hard as a roundhouse kick to the chest. He created many of the beats for Wu-Tang’s early music with a banged-up Ensoniq keyboard sampler he got from a trade with producer RNS of the Staten Island group the U.M.C.’s, a hand-me-down that reflected the DIY nature of his early music. RZA manifested a dark, warm, and playful energy for everyone to tap into, like they were standing around a bonfire in a junkyard.
The Wu-Tang Clan began recording at Firehouse Studios, a cheap spot in Brooklyn ill-equipped to handle one vocalist, never mind nine. Their first session cost $300, which they largely paid for in quarters; the recording booth was a walk-in closet connected to a living room that had to house the entire collective as they jammed in, taking turns recording verses with the little time they had. After they were done attempting the first song, an unsatisfied RZA completely remade the beat and gathered the group for another session where he rearranged the verses. Inspectah Deck’s verse, which was originally second, started the song off with a straight shot: “I smoke on the mic like ‘Smokin’ Joe’ Frazier.” The new beat throbbed with bass plinks, faint horns, and a kettle whistle similar to the one from Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause.” But where Public Enemy’s song sounded like a bubbling pot about to boil over, “Protect Ya Neck” seethed and rumbled like liquified concrete.
Every member of the Wu—save for Masta Killa, who had yet to formally join—fought for space and came out with swords swinging. It was the first example of their group chemistry on full display: Inspectah Deck’s guillotine-sharp brashness scraping against Raekwon and Method Man’s swagger; U-God’s smooth psychotics folding into O.D.B.’s controlled chaos; Ghostface’s howling precision playing against the stoic headbutts of RZA and GZA. “Protect Ya Neck” isn’t a song about anything more than proving your worth on the mic, eight passionate and talented rappers commiserating around years of joy, pain, and sacrifice filtered through a distorted sample of James Brown’s band the J.B.’s. Sampling soul records wasn’t unheard of at the time, but RZA had taken the early teachings of Kool Herc and DJ Premier and made them uglier and sadder, a novel reflection of the dusty metropolis they called home. It was a warning that New York rap was about to get a whole lot darker.
Wu-Tang released “Protect Ya Neck” as a single through their label Wu-Tang Records in December of ’92, where it quickly gathered steam in the underground. Every record sold came with the RZA’s phone number, in case any bigger fish wanted a piece. Eventually, he parlayed that hype into a group deal with Loud Records, which kicked off the creation of their debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), in earnest. This modest windfall didn’t improve conditions much. Even though several members were selling drugs at this point, recording at Firehouse was still all they could afford. On the days they couldn’t pay for chicken wings to feed the members and engineers, Ghostface, clad in a long and oversized coat, would make grocery store runs and steal as many canned goods as he could fit in his pockets.
The cramped space and shoddy equipment meant that RZA and company had to get creative with recording. Much of the dusty atmosphere associated with 36 Chambers came from the studio’s outdated technology, and transitions between songs were harsh—“C.R.E.A.M.” begins with the sound of a new tape being added to the reel in the studio, less a creative choice and more an unerasable leftover. RZA’s grand vision involved melding samples of the soul, funk, and jazz records he loved with samples from his beloved kung fu flicks, a synthesis that gave every beat some cinematic heft without losing the dank and dingy lo-fi charm. On “Bring da Ruckus,” sampled pianos from the Dramatics’ “In the Rain” sit next to a makeshift snare RZA created by placing the mic in a paint bucket and slapping it repeatedly. The theme song from popular cartoon Underdog was slowed down and placed over drums from Joe Tex and Biz Markie cuts to create the rolling thunder of “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta F’ Wit.”
Seven of the album’s 13 tracks have at least one sampled bit of film dialogue on them, usually at the very beginning or hovering in the background of a hook. Of those seven, dialogue from Shaolin and Wu Tang appears on six of them, sometimes by itself, sometimes doubled up with others like Five Deadly Venoms (“Da Mystery of Chessboxin’”) or Ten Tigers From Kwangtung (“Bring da Ruckus”.) The first words uttered on opening track “Bring da Ruckus” are from Shaolin, used to explain the function of RZA’s beats and the Wu’s raps, respectively: “Shaolin shadowboxing and the Wu-Tang sword style… Do you think your Wu-Tang sword can defeat me?” Over the next four minutes, Ghost, Rae, Deck, and GZA use biography, current events and pop culture reference to eviscerate each other on the mic: styles are tricky like Richard Nixon, rugged as the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and ripped hardcore like porno-flick bitches. Each verse feels like the introduction of a new challenger, amplifying the filmic qualities brought about by the Shaolin samples.
And with nearly a dozen different voices populating these songs—many of whom had never recorded music beforehand—everyone’s personality and backstory is somehow given time to blossom. As the architect, RZA affords himself a bit of the spotlight, but his greatest achievement on 36 Chambers was trusting his instincts to fit these wily and charismatic rappers onto just the right weird and wonderful beats. O.D.B.’s wail was made for the creaky mandolin sample on “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’,” just as Method Man’s hazy proclamation that “cash rules everything around me” wouldn’t make sense outside of the dreamy piano keys on “C.R.E.A.M.” Each piece of the album, no matter how incongruous, feeds back into a whole like the shattered fragments of an ancient medallion.
Every member gets at least one standout moment, but most have several. U-God’s four-bar appearance at the opening of “Chessboxin’” would still be a concise powerhouse even if he didn’t record it days before being convicted for firearm and drug possession. On “Can It All Be So Simple,” the undeniable chemistry that would later power Ghostface and Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… manifests as stories of innocence lost, as dreams of lamping on expensive yachts are interrupted by calls from friends in upstate prison over a ghostly Gladys Knight & The Pips sample. Method Man spits rhymes about peanut butter, Dick Van Dyke, Looney Tunes characters, and croons about White Owl blunts while chewing all available scenery across a vicious three-and-a-half-minute verse on his own self-titled track. Each element of 36 Chambers—its swirl of rhyme styles and reference points, its musical blemishes and unfixable production quirks—coalesces into a bulletproof melancholy whole through RZA’s and his newfound brothers’ sheer force of will. It proved that they were as strong apart as they were together.
36 Chambers, an insular and weird album by design, arrived not a moment too soon in a decade where insular and weird music found unexpected traction in the mainstream. It made an impact when it was released on November 9, 1993, peaking at No. 41 on the Billboard 200 and selling 30,000 units in its first week. But as the album sold and the singles spread, the Cult of Wu began to grow: The album went platinum by 1995, minting the collective and slashing a buck fifty across the face of anyone who would dare oppose New York hip-hop. It set the stage for the barrage of solo albums—Cuban Linx, GZA’s Liquid Swords, Method Man’s Tical, and Ghostface’s Ironman—that would further cement the Wu legacy by the end of the ’90s. Before long, RZA was legitimately scoring movies, beginning with 1999’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai; a fighting video game was conceived and eventually abandoned, though it would live on as a novelty about the time they made a fighting video game about the Wu-Tang Clan; the group’s West-meets-East ethos would become crystallized in books and Chappelle’s Show skits.
36 Chambers directly paved the way for harder-edged New York rap from Nas, Mobb Deep, and the Notorious B.I.G., and provided a hardcore hip-hop blueprint that’s been followed by rap purists and collectives for nearly three decades. It began the Tao of Wu, bonding nine Staten Island dreamers by philosophies of the mind and the scents of the fried food wafting past Brooklyn’s Palmetto Playground. But more than anything, it’s a testament to pop culture’s power to create and forge brotherhood. In 2004’s Wu-Tang Manual, just over 10 years after the album’s release, RZA broke down the significance of its title as only he could: “You have the thirty-six chambers, and there’s nine members of the Wu-Tang Clan. Each member of Wu-Tang has four chambers of the heart. And what’s nine times four?”


This split release sees Amps for Christ's Henry Barnes in as messy a mood as ever, with his taste for roughness rubbing off on Woods' rustic offerings.

Amps for Christ / Woods: Woods / Amps for Christ

Woods / Amps for Christ

Woods' 2011 album Sun and Shade came and went so quietly that it felt like it was largely forgotten when it came time to compile the year-end shakedowns. The lack of fanfare that heralds the band's releases, of which there are many, mirrors the quiet, introspective nature of the group members themselves. Records from Woods come often, rarely dropping below the impressively high bar they've set for themselves despite their tap never being fully turned off. It seems likely the band members are too hard at work on their next project(s) to care too much for the conversation surrounding their current release. So here we are with another Woods record, this time a self-titled split LP with folk-noise experimentalist Henry Barnes, better known for his highly erratic output under the name Amps for Christ.
The work is carved up neatly over this album, with four Amps for Christ tracks, four from Woods, and one collaborative effort. Barnes' recordings, made up of three instrumentals and one vocal composition, are all over the map, as anyone who has paid close attention to his output has come to expect. "When" manages to pull a kind of sickly lo-fi sweetness from his jarring and occasionally sloppy playing. It's recorded to make him feel like he's right there in the room with you, fluffing chords and tripping over the rush of ideas pulsating through his brain. Barnes' work has a childlike wonder to it, ranging from endearing, naif-like approaches (the ramshackle "Roto Koto in C Major") to grating, sub-par noise aberrations (the aimless electronics of "Native Chantz"). On "Lord Bateman (Child #53)", he demonstrates his superior skills as a craftsman of jolly folk songs juxtaposed with quietly screaming guitars-- a move that immaculately paves the way for Woods' similarly minded pieces.
There's little mistaking these as Woods songs once Jeremy Earl's caterwauled falsetto sinks in, although this is a stripped-back version of the band. Mostly they forgo electric guitars altogether, instead settling on a roughly hewn form of acoustic bonhomie. There's plenty of space in these recordings, making it sound like you're sitting on Earl's porch, listening to his group cobble together songs with little or no finesse. You can practically smell the marshmallows getting toasted over a crackling campfire in the background. The only exception is "Wind Was the Wine", a vigilantly assembled Woodsian take on pop that would effortlessly fit alongside "Pushing Onlys" and "Death Rattles" should this band ever assemble something like a greatest hits album. Elsewhere it's much more opened-ended, with the music leading them down knotty, freeform paths ("September Saturn") and encroaching on the kind of crackpot takes on rootsy Americana Will Oldham often attempts ("Brothers").
So this feels less like an "album" in the traditional sense and more like a loose string of unconnected ideas, pieced together with little thought for direction. As such, it just about works, with the lack of production values helping convey the spirit of adventure in which it was no doubt conceived. That feeling is typified by the collaboration between the two artists, "From Oatmeal to Buttermilk", which is dominated by what sounds like a warily plucked sitar (or perhaps one of Barnes' homemade instruments). It's constantly teetering on the brink of implosion, nearly sticking to its shabby meter, with all the players sounding like they're barely in control of what they're doing. But in many respects that's what a project like this is for, to suss out potential directions, to push forward into new areas. John Peel always said he was disappointed if a band recorded a Peel Session and just stuck to what they were already good at. Sometimes you've got to take the machine apart and figure out a new way to put it back together.


Cold Beat is a new band fronted by Grass Widow's Hannah Lew. Away from that groups thicker production and layered harmonies, Lew takes a more minimal approach, foregrounding her voice and her sometimes harrowing songs.

Over Me

Late last year, Grass Widow's Hannah Lew released Worms/Year 5772, the first EP from her band Cold Beat, on her own label, Crime on the Moon. That shrewd collection channeled loss into captivating songs, which Lew wrote over four years while grappling with both the weight of her fathers’ death and her own insomnia. Cold Beat’s new album, Over Me, is an extension of that melancholia, a space where Lew confronts grief through punchy post-punk.
Lew’s songwriting shifts between separate but related states—life and death, shadow and sun, together and apart, here and there. There’s a pained goodbye to a familiar place on “Abandon”, where her space in San Francisco is described as “Like a heroine in an old story disappears when fingers turn the page.” She’s restless, turning towards an unfamiliar oblivion in the record’s poppiest number, “Out of Time”. The infectious “Collapse” takes place within a cataclysm as it’s happening, with violins plucking at the tension of displacement. But there’s a sense of acceptance there too, although less pronounced. On the stomping “Tinted Glass,” she croons: “Unknown location/ No heart attached.”
Grass Widow specialize in girl-group vocal acrobatics; Lew’s meaty basslines take instrumental precedence in their saltwater-scuffed garage songs, but her voice is harder to pick out amongst the band’s three-part harmonies. Over Me finds her writing and recording on her own minimalist terms; even the vocal arrangements are sparse—it’s virtually all Lew, and she has a lovely voice, expressive and breathy. Her voice is mixed a bit too low, making it hard to hear the lyrics, but that fits Over Me's broader theme of wrestling with and confronting identity. “Can’t see anything / Looking at my face / There’s nothing at all,” Lew confides to the listener in the pop-punk squalor of “Mirror”.
Lew has a remarkable talent for portraying scenes in the starkest terms. “Face of the clock is never kind,” she muses in the exuberant “Fatal Bond”, which could be mistaken as a B-side from Parallel Lines. She describes time as the ultimate “paralyzing fatal bond,” winding us in its gears. Violent symbols are everywhere. “Give your sharp knife,” she commands in the rollicking “UV,” while she dares her oppressor to chain her down in “OSOTW”. The symbols are survival mechanisms: weapons, mirrors, and blindfolds are all over the record, becoming instruments of simultaneous self-improvement and self-destruction. Over Me is Hannah Lew standing before the mirror, unsure of what she sees within herself, her future, her music. But she’s looking.


The Tokyo guitarist and pianist channels jazz, fusion, and Japanese environmental music as he deepens the emotional resonance of his music while maintaining its soothing atmosphere.

Next Door

Leo Takami finds joy in simple melodies played in a straightforward manner. Though his compositions often lead somewhere unexpected, the jazz guitarist and pianist keeps his tunes as rounded and safe as kindergarten toys. Like Joe Hisaishi, the Studio Ghibli composer who is one of his clearest predecessors, Takami has forged an aesthetic that’s clear and chipper when it’s happy, curious and grounded when it’s not. His willingness to plainly state his emotional intentions without pandering or infantilizing is refreshing, as if he’s giving the listener permission to explore the complexities of feelings that once seemed easy to understand: You have no idea how interesting happiness can be. This quality made 2020’s Felis Catus and Silence a charming testimony of good cheer, and on Next Door, he deepens the emotional resonance of his music without setting it on edge.
The mood on Next Door is blue, but Takami’s indefatigable optimism makes it more of an airy azure than the deep cobalt of, say, Miles Davis. Like Pat Metheny, his guitar lines have a plainspoken eloquence and patience that makes the music feel airy and open, even at its most contemplative. He chooses his notes carefully, more concerned with sustaining or expanding emotional tone than musical possibilities. On the lengthy lead he plots through “Winter Day,” he plays like he’s reading out loud from Dickens—he’s steady, precise, letting the notes themselves convey the meaning rather than the way he’s voicing them. He shakes loose a few needles from his guitar in “Road With Cypress and Star,” but he primarily saves the big, bursting runs for his piano and organ, both of which he tends to keep farther back in the mix, as if their relative feistiness might trouble the songs. If the textural clarity of the recording makes it feel like the music you’d hear in a department store stereo demonstration, that may be on purpose: Takami seems to want to fish his audience from the relentless flow of everyday life in order to experience the simple pleasure of listening.
While Takami’s playing can be straightforward, it’s supported by subtly complex production that both supports and reframes the simplicity of the lead instruments. Like Felis Catus, the album draws equally from ECM jazz, classical minimalism, and Japanese environmental music without sounding much like any of them. Behind the opalescent drops and desert blues of “Beyond” are pulses that spread like moss in a deep forest. In “Family Tree,” a loop of faded found sound crackles behind a guitar swelling with regret. The interplay and the distance in fidelity between the elements makes the song’s sense of time feel three-dimensional, as if we’re hearing the present considering and being shaped by the past. Takami plays every instrument on the record, and he produced it himself; absent a band, these production touches are a form of interplay, and at times you can hear his leads responding to and being reshaped by the gentle urgings of their accompaniment.
In the proper opener and standout “As If Listening,” Takami’s guitar greets you with a smile, but it emerges in the wake of the Erik Satie-like piano intro “Letter.” The sadness of that brief track lingers throughout “As If Listening,” sighing in the strings and implicit in the distant shuffle of shaker and pulse of marimba. Takami draws the guitar toward the background, its bliss eventually turning into a contemplative trance. When the song stops to catch its breath in the final moments, its momentum follows the gaze of the strings skyward. The slow twinkle of piano and hum of electronics make it feel like looking up at the sky in awe. Over and over again on Next Door, Leo Takami recontextualizes the familiar, returning us to truths whose universality made them cliches in the first place. The stars don’t shine any brighter here; you’re just seeing them through clearer air.


The second LP from this Savannah, Ga., metal quartet finds producer John Congleton coaxing more sound out of the band than they've ever allowed.

Blue Record

Blue Record, the second LP from Savannah, Ga., hero-metal quartet Baroness, feels like it spins for either 30 or 90 minutes, but never the 44 minutes the tracklist advertises. Full of stops and starts, dynamic swells and swan dives, razor-sharp guitar leads, and dense full-band bludgeons, these 12 tracks swell with parts and counterparts, condensing epics into tightly arranged, executed, and edited two-minute stretches. Within most any given track, Baroness twist between feelings of triumph and trouble, elation and depletion, playing all with unequal parts grace and grit. When those extremes and the sonic care that goes into creating them win over, the Blue Record feels like a marathon where everyone wins. That description, however, runs the risk of making Baroness' triumphant follow-up to 2007's Red Album seem like a laborious listen. It's not: Via expert pacing and meticulous sequencing, those peaks and valleys arise precisely where they should, creating an experience that feels more like a sunny ride in a sports car than anything resembling hard work.
No, Baroness, along with producer and mixer John Congleton, have done all of the heavy lifting for you. Congleton-- more familiar to the indie rock world than the metal set thanks to his work with bands like Black Mountain, Explosions in the Sky, and, more recently, St. Vincent on the texturally astounding Actor-- coaxes more sound out of this four-piece than they've ever allowed. Still using only bass, drums, guitars, John Baizley's full-throated roar, and a touch of piano, Baroness and Congleton render a surprisingly rich palette of sound that's well-suited for atmospheric lulls and electrified roars. Guitarist Pete Adams, new to the band after the departure of Brian Blickle late last year, flanks Baizley now. They make quite the sympathetic pair, lifting from the mid-level, mid-tempo chug that shapes the band's core into the sort of high-flying, skydiving riffs that decorate it effortlessly.
But Baroness are more than the sum of their guitar glories. Drummer Allen Blickle tweaks time habitually. On "A Horse Called Golgotha", he crams stacks of beats into tiny fills, adding exclamation marks to a tune that doesn't even need them. And on "The Gnashing", he steadily builds from a simple, bar-band plod into the sort of triumphant rumble that sends grown men into mosh pits. Congleton treats all of the pieces like interconnected games of seesaw, constantly cloaking one in the mix to highlight another, keeping it all in motion. For this, "Jake Leg" becomes more than the album's bruiser. In the verses, Congleton pulls back the marching drums back to push Baizley's bark to the fore. In the breaks, he pushes everything together, creating a mess of guitars and drums that rolls like a boulder into the next line. Think Torche with greater control and finesse. That is, the song's anthemic quality doesn't get in the way of its million moving parts. One just augments the other.
You're only going to notice details like that when you listen, rewind, and listen again. Blue Record is simply much too fun and kinetic to analyze in real time. With Baroness, one part is always changing while another prepares to do the same, everything working in concert to pull the listener along, too. These songs are invitations that are easy to accept. You'll be excused while digging for your lighter and singing along during "Steel That Sleeps the Eye", fingerpicking an air guitar during the serpentine intro to "O'Er Hell and Hide" or pumping a fist and shouting, "Flesh is weak!" and "My lip needs a meal," during the relentless "Jake Leg". Even "Ogeechee Hymnal", a slow-burning instrumental ostensibly intended as the mid-album respite, magnetizes with its gorgeous sheets of guitar and bass. When it bleeds into "A Horse Called Golgotha", any inkling you might've had to think gets crushed by sheer power. It feels as good as Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'", but it's as accomplished as the best of a masturbatory metal dude like Marc Rizzo.
Baroness makes this all seam so seamless, casual, and spirited, as if four Southern badasses simply walked into a room one afternoon and ripped through this album in a jam. Every song bleeds into the other, and its flow is impeccable. But the whole production-- the peerless sound, the acoustic interludes, the interwoven lyrics-- betray careful, deliberate construction. Still, Blue Record never feels overthought or overworked. These guys are having too much fun for that. Complex enough to reward repetitive listening and compact enough to encourage it, Blue Record is one of the year's most generous hours. Or half-hours. Or, hell, however long the thing is.


The crown princess of Bronx drill arrives with a down-to-earth attitude and a diabolical knack for hooks. Assume her naïveté at your own peril.

Like..? EP

Ask anyone to impersonate a teenage girl and they might roll their eyes to the point of retinal detachment and, in the voice of a catatonic zombie, say, “OMG, like, totally.” Once dubbed one of the UK’s “most annoying filler words,” “like” is the bane of the existence of snooty grammarians and Daily Mail editors: Its association with frivolous, vapid femininity makes it an easy target. For Ice Spice, “like” is less of a filler and more of a mouth gag. Like, shut up when she’s speaking. Aptly titling her debut EP Like..?, the Bronx rapper has the air of a girl who comes to class with nothing but a tube of lip gloss yet makes the dean’s list every year. A velour tracksuit in a subgenre of Nike Techs, she’s the drill Elle Woods.
At a time when everyone is clamoring for the titles of queen and king of rap, a young, often queer, and chronically online community hungry for ’90s cultural nostalgia has dubbed Ice Spice “this generation’s Princess Diana.” At first, her tracks’ unexpected samples and random digs (“We both from the Bronx/So I know that you dirty”) made her the latest scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with hip-hop today. But with her signature emotes, screengrab single covers, and Cabbage Patch doll mane, Ice Spice knows how to capitalize on outrage cycles and internet thirst. The 23-year-old’s goofy antics and down-to-earth attitude work well in the era of memes and snippets. Truly for the people and with the people, she funded the recording of her debut with pandemic-era stimulus checks.
Bringing “smoochie,” “maddie,” and “baddie friend” into our cultural canon, she graduated from the Scorsese school of world-building and is currently studying for her master’s at the Azealia Banks school of linguistics. In the 2012 article “They’re, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve,” journalist Douglas Quenqua noted that “young women serve as incubators of vocal trends.” Ice Spice’s rise provides a case study: For many men, “Munch” now carries the weight of a slur. Her knack for crafting hooks is so diabolical you’ll find yourself not only muttering along but imitating her signature dances to lines like “big boobs and the butt stay plump,” knowing you’re a 28AA cup. Listen past the familiar snippets and she rewards you with clever wordplay: “You was my stitch but it’s not what it seam.”
Sometimes the songs on Like..? are just that: snippets. The area between the exhilarating two bars that populated TikTok For You pages feels like waiting in line for a five-second rollercoaster ride. In an interview with Rap Caviar, Spice revealed that she records tracks spontaneously to avoid self-censorship. Each line can feel like an intrusive thought untethered to a central theme, like when she quickly follows up “How can I lose if I’m already chose?” with “If the party not lit then I’d rather not go.” Halfway through “Bikini Bottom,” she succumbs to a delayed-cue-card delivery that dilutes the track. RiotUSA, who’s produced most of Spice’s music since her 2021 debut, saves the lethargic midpoints with skittering tracks that sound like true collaborations as opposed to premade beats. In just six songs, the duo experiments with the past, present, and future of drill. Even on cartoony instrumentals that at first seem unserious, he maintains the drill ethos with sharp snares, blown-out 808s, and militaristic hi-hats, updating them with Digimon basslines (“Princess Diana”), club beats, and a squiggly Puffy sample (“Gangsta Boo”).
Repping a city of larger-than-life characters like Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, JAY-Z, and Lil’ Kim, a borough of loyal and street-savvy Bronxites, and a rap subgenre known for its gritty ominousness, Spice’s chilled and cutesy demeanor stands out. There’s no question her lighter skin expedited and sustained her virality within TikTok’s biased algorithm and the colorism that plagues hip-hop. Her often rudimentary lyrics reflect the brief time she’s had to develop her craft, but as the daughter of an underground rapper, she’s well-versed in hip-hop and specifically drill history. Citing Sheff G as an early influence, crediting Chief Keef as a pioneer, and adopting the late Pop Smoke’s gruff tone in “Acting a Smoochie,” she honors her predecessors but doesn’t parrot. Assume her naïveté at your own peril. She’ll give you a nickname that’ll require decades of therapy.


Using mainly her resilient voice and some electronic effects, the latest record from the Japanese underground legend draws parallels to the punk impulse with her extended, avant-garde vocal excursions.

Voice Hardcore

After Phew made her first solo single in 1980—an analog synth oddity called “Finale,” produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto—the Japanese underground legend humbly wondered if she could “draw a picture by voice.” When Phew dubbed her vocals, she said, “a completely different world emerged that cannot be described in the context of melody, harmony, [or] rhythm.” She wished to go there.
This sounds like a statement you might expect from a Downtown vocal iconoclast at the end of the 1970s: Meredith Monk, perhaps, or Joan La Barbara. But Phew came from more lawless territory still. Her aesthetically anarchic Osaka post-punk band Aunt Sally was inspired by the Sex Pistols, but took little of ’77 punk’s supposed sonic dogma—they took only the question marks that punk used to replace any concrete understandings of what is acceptable in art and life. And so for Phew, that “completely different world” encompassed screams, flutters, grunts, laughs, and coolly flat singing. Phew’s work underscores how similar the punk impulse was to the avant-garde’s simultaneous extended vocals excursions, which all seemed to ask: Where can things move? What have we not seen? What part of the mind has not yet been reached?
These are questions Phew never stopped answering, especially on her recent collections of minimal, inquisitive noise music, 2015’s A New World and last year’s Light Sleep. Of course, Japanoise has a rich history, but among its best-known artists—the skull-drilling onslaught of Merzbow, or the noise-rock pummel of Boredoms—Phew’s subtler approach is anomalous. For her latest, Voice Hardcore, Phew used no instruments beyond her resilient voice and some electronic effects. Recorded in eight hours over three days in her Tokyo bedroom, it was, Phew said, “an attempt to make new reverberations that I have never heard before using only my body.”
Phew creates droning environments thick with texture and stillness; they can feel ecological, overcast or humid, as if dew is forming on notes. Her hyper-present voice cuts in from any side of a track. Phew’s speak-sing is alternately distorted or pure, spoken or shrieked, guttural or graceful or sometimes both. She beams in from somewhere other. Whether somber or bewitchingly cackled, passionate or dry, Phew’s vocals humanize her experiments, making Voice Hardcore sound like an ensemble of herself.
The more space Phew allows—the more explicit her canvas—the more distinctive she gets. There is a rumble beneath “Just a Familiar Face,” but the openness is what reaches out to you. Phew sounds like she is enacting a cast of characters, with balletic shrieks, robotic spoken word, and screams that seem to come from a floor above. Many of her lyrics (all in Japanese) are about the quotidian and the mundane—a common interaction with a stranger, a stain on the ceiling, an annoying cafe—and with that, the music shows how heavy everyday life can feel.
“Scat” is the heart of Voice Hardcore, and it is simple: just Phew’s wordless voice, sensitively layered. It seems choral, but it is disarmingly melodic, like a punk version of Gregorian chant. This spartan approach suits the record’s title, and its feeling of total autonomy recalls her punk roots in Aunt Sally. Hardcore, in Phew’s world, might be synonymous with extremity, or vulnerability, or discovery—by way of challenges to logic. “Scat” has no noise, but it feels like Voice Hardcore’s greatest risk and deepest expression.
Phew is often considered in the context of her better-know collaborators. In 1981, she bridged the worlds of Japanese punk and German motorik by recording her essential eponymous debut with members of Can at Conny Plank’s studio. She has worked with members of Boredoms, Bill Laswell, and Jim O’Rourke (somehow never with Sonic Youth). And yet, on the radically self-contained Voice Hardcore, it is inspiring to hear Phew alone. Last year, Phew noted how, despite her experimental pedigree and breadth of experience, she has resisted honing skills for the sake of them. “I am not an athlete,” Phew wrote, “I’m a musician.” She welcomed the freedom of limitation. “It also made me ask: ‘What is music?’ There is no correct answer.” It is, as ever, a blank space to be filled, a question mark to linger.


I think it's safe to say that the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne is a genius, equal parts Thomas Edison ...

The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots

Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots

I think it's safe to say that the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne is a genius, equal parts Thomas Edison and P.T. Barnum. Like Edison, Coyne is a relentless tinkerer, a visionary experimenteur with a sci-fi fetish and a soft spot for odd technologies. And like Barnum, Coyne is a consummate showman-- the hand puppets, the boombox orchestras, the oddball short films, the radio-controlled headphones. In 1984, Coyne was just another Oklahoma dreamer with an amateurish psych-rock garage band and a duffel bag stuffed with thrift-store effects pedals; 18 years later, Coyne finds himself in the position of following up one of the most universally regarded albums since Pet Sounds.
So let's just come right out and say it: after the one-two punch of Zaireeka and The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots is a bold and inventive work, brimming with ideas and sublime moments of brilliance. But it's also unfocused and top-heavy, a concept album about robots and karate that, somewhere along the line, strays into languorous, contemplative songs about mortality and death. Nor does Yoshimi always put the Lips' best foot forward-- though Dave Fridmann's production dazzles, the overdriven drums and orchestral swoons that characterized The Soft Bulletin are often lost in a busy mesh of programmed beats and lazy synthstrings.
The album gets off to a rollicking start with the winning "Fight Test," a glossy rumination on the call to duty-- whether that's standing up to a playground bully or, as the Lips would have it, an army of rebellious androids bent on world domination. "If it's not now, then tell me when would be the time that you would stand up and be a man?" Coyne sings over a thick buzz of keyboards, bass and an almost hip-hop rhythm, offsetting his resolve in the refrain: "I don't know how a man decides what's right for his own life/ It's all a mystery." It's a stunning pop song-- easily this album's "Waitin' for a Superman"-- with an intensely memorable melody and the conflict of Coyne's internal dialogue resonating positively on many levels.
Yoshimi takes its first left turn with "One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21," a slippery detour into glitch augmented with falsetto choruses, reverberating vocals and haywire surges of digital clickery. "Unit 3000-21 is warming/ Makes a humming sound when its circuits duplicate emotions," Coyne sings over a simple bass figure and ambient tones before the song explodes in a burst of overdriven clockwork. It's a dizzying, disorienting sound-- but once the novelty wears off, you've gotta admit it sounds a bit like Steely Dan.
"Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (Part 1)" rides a simple melody and ridiculously infectious butt-beat as it sets the stage for the album's short-lived 'concept'-- some entertaining nonsense about an army of Japanese girls training to take on the salmon-hued robots at a kung-fu compound right out of Enter the Dragon. In the chorus, Coyne plays call-and-response with a malevolent synth burble that sounds like a malevolent R2-D2. Its rollercoaster companion, "Yoshimi (Part 2)," scales a slinky, ascending wall of farty synth and distant Japanese babble before the bottom falls out, rocketing into chaotic instrumental breakdowns each a shade more intense than the last. It's the closest the Lips have come to writing straight videogame music, complete with crowd noises and bloodcurdling screams (courtesy of the Boredoms' Yoshimi Yokota).
And this is where Yoshimi makes its first misstep, on the sleepy "In the Morning of Magicians." Though punctuated with bursts of instrumental energy, the arrangement quickly devolves into a thick lite-FM syrup. "What is love and what is hate, and why does it matter?" Coyne wonders over a flitty symphony of Muzak strings. Again, the production is flawless-- I especially dig the wavering tape-speed fluctuations on the background vocals-- but the song throws the album into a downbeat, overly philosophical malaise from which it never fully recovers. What happened to Yoshimi again? Pink robots... what pink robots?
Yoshimi shines again with the superior "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell," which pits more existential lyrics over a far more satisfying collage of sounds (vocal samples, snippets of mellotron, a lumbering bass). "I was waiting on a moment, but the moment never came," croons Coyne, echoing the issues of readiness and bravery "Fight Test" raised, but also betraying Yoshimi's greatest weakness: the moment never comes.
The closest the Lips do come is on the divine "Are You a Hypnotist?," if only for the brief return of some actual drums (brilliantly tracked to create some glitchy, idiosyncratic fills impossible to play in real life). Coyne indulges in wordplay such as, "I have forgiven you for tricking me again/ But I have been tricked again/ Into forgiving you," as the song builds to a distorted swell of fuzzy static and some otherworldly choir.
"Do You Realize" buzzes and clangs with overproduction, as Coyne breezes through a list of trite observations like, "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" and, "Let them know you realize that life goes fast/ It's hard to make the good things last." Its parallels with Mike + The Mechanics' "The Living Years" are uncanny, and believe me, it hurts me more to say that about a Flaming Lips song than it does you to read it. The already unsubtle onslaught of church bells, woozy background harmonies, and strings ascends into supreme levels of cheese with not one, but two key changes midway through, becoming a near-parody of the genuine emotional weight that carried The Soft Bulletin. And the minor-key Beatleisms of "It's Summertime (Throbbing Orange Pallbearers)" are wasted on more childlike philosophizing: "Look outside/ I know that you'll recognize it's summertime." After the grandiose, symphonic universalisms of The Soft Bulletin, could it be this record's deepest message is "stop and smell the roses"?
Apparently so, as the self-explanatory "All We Have Is Now" retreads these themes for a third time, albeit with an uncharacteristically fragile beauty. All of this might have some ironic poignancy if, god forbid, Coyne were to be diagnosed with some terminal illness tomorrow (and indeed, the latter half of Yoshimi was reportedly inspired by the death of a Japanese fan). But in the context of this album, Yoshimi simply runs out of emotional punch, having expended its boldest moves and most resonant sentiments in the first five songs.
Bafflingly, Yoshimi ends with "Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)," an anticlimactic instrumental punctuated with distant vocal warbling, laser-beam bursts, and sudden fanfares of trumpet. It didn't have to be this way, judging from the wealth of stronger material widely traded online by net-savvy Lips fans. The evocative "The Switch That Turns Off the Universe" (previewed in a 1999 BBC session) would seem to be a perfect fit with Yoshimi's cautionary tales of techno-doom. Or better yet, the Yoshimi outtake "If I Go Mad/Funeral In My Head" (now set to appear as a single b-side), an instant Lips classic in which Coyne seemingly conjures rainstorms, orchestras, and deafening applause on command.
Despite this album's disappointing brevity (45 minutes, padded with two instrumentals), its dense production and well-crafted melodies offer long-term replayability. Moments like the Coyne-as-robot "I'll get you, Yoshimi" barely audible in the title track, or the interchangeable "I must have been drifting"/"I must have been tripping" background vocals in "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell" seem tailor-made for bull sessions around the alien-head bong. Though Yoshimi could be considered guilty of adhering too strictly to a tried-and-true formula (fast beats, slow melodies), it's really the more disparate elements that keep this album from building emotionally into a classic. And so, like a double feature of Drunken Master and Terms of Endearment, or a surprise party where the surprise is that your best friend has cancer, ultimately Yoshimi is kind of a bummer.


The debut LP from Montreal producer Lunice (one-half of TNGHT) is intended as the score for a speculative theater piece, but the music alone comes off garish and retrograde.

CCCLX

CCCLX, the debut album from Montreal producer Lunice Fermin Pierre II, comes with a dramatic conceit: It is meant to be the score for a speculative theater piece. Reportedly inspired by the opera Madame Butterfly, Lunice—who is one-half of the trap duo TNGHT, with Hudson Mohawke—splits the album into four-acts, with curtain calls, costume changes, and fade outs all built into the structure. But what would this imaginary visual piece look or feel like? Perhaps like a stadium: Lunice has described his own music as “blockbuster” commercial rap, the kind of hip-hop production that would and could only sound good in a gigantic space. The aspirations of CCCLX define themselves along these lines. While a good stadium show can inspire bacchanalian reverie and awe (Kanye on the floating stage, for example), it can also feel bloated and puzzling (Cirque du Soleil as soundtracked by M83). The outsized melodrama of CCCLX puts the whole enterprise in the latter category.
This is partly due to Lunice’s distinct lack of subtlety in his production work. With TNGHT, he made trap music hooked up to an IV of Monster energy drink, and his solo work essentially painted him as Lex Luger with an Adderall prescription. Five years ago, when he started working on CCCLX, the sound of sleek, bass-heavy hip-hop was in vogue (Kanye’s Cruel Summer album with his G.O.O.D. Music crew being the apex of the sound). That sound has not aged well and is especially retrograde on CCCLX. From the persistent motif of gaudy opera vocal samples to the echoing kick drums that populate each song, there are few moments on CCCLX that avoid the temptation of chasing a sugar high.
The instrumental tracks, in particular, are where Lunice is especially prone to indulging more ham-fisted tendencies. The worst of these is “CCCLX( Intermission)” with its sour piano line and garish percussion, resembling a trap remix of The Godfather theme. Most of the album, though, is devoted to a series of vocal collaborations, which are a mixed-bag. The largely unknown Canadian MC CJ Flemings gets the most shine on CCCLX, and his generic rapping is like set-dressing on top of Lunice’s ornate instrumentals. His wooden flow and his rather uninspired lyricism (“This isn’t for the year or a decade/This is for the century,” he raps on “CCCLX (Curtain)”) can really take away from the dramatic experience Lunice is trying to create. There are a few bright spots: “Distrust,” with Denzel Curry is perfectly suited to the Florida rapper’s preference for high-powered goth-rap, and “Drop Down” with SOPHIE and LE1F is a pleasingly bawdy piece of bubblegum trap.
The one saving grace that runs throughout the album is Lunice’s devotion to high-production value: Every song here sounds expensive, and would play exquisitely on enormous sound systems. But that imbalance, between the level of production and substance, means all the SFX and sonic wizardry of CCCLX can feel a little brainless. If this is music for a blockbuster work, it’s more Michael Bay than Stanley Kubrick.


This striking release from the eclectic duo brings together 99 collaborators to create an enthralling picture of the present moment.

Matmos: The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form

Matmos’ high-concept investigations take narrow parameters to gleefully absurd extremes. For last year’s Plastic Anniversary, the duo of Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt sourced every sound from cast-off plastic objects: vinyl LPs, riot shields, even a breast implant. On Ultimate Care II, they extended a career-long quest to find art in unlikely places by using a Whirlpool washing machine as the album’s sole musical instrument. And 2013’s The Marriage of True Minds examined the pair’s long creative and romantic partnership through a paranormal lens, using experiments in telepathy and ESP to generate musical raw material. The Consuming Flame spins a seemingly arbitrary number into one of their most elaborate conceits yet. Soliciting contributions from 99 different musicians, including themselves, Matmos wove the lot—squirrely electronic beats, post-rock excursions, dub interludes, freeform noise—into a mammoth, three-hour suite meant to be experienced in a single sitting. They only required their collaborators to pace their submissions at 99 beats per minute. The collaged-together results are fascinating, often enthralling, occasionally an uphill slog, and every bit as anarchic as their genesis would suggest.
Matmos have made collaboration a key part of their practice for years, but even by their typically open-armed standards, The Consuming Flame’s guest list is staggeringly diverse. Their accomplices include longtime friends (Wobbly, J. Lesser, People Like Us), electronic veterans (Mouse on Mars), indie titans (Yo La Tengo), improvisers (David Grubbs), noise rappers (clipping.), and an array of experimental electronic musicians (Rabit, Oneohtrix Point Never, DeForrest Brown, Jr.). There are metalheads, techno producers, opera singers, and acoustic fingerpickers. Even author Douglas Rushkoff turns up—doing, as best I can tell, some kind of electronically assisted impersonation of the Muppets’ Beaker. An accompanying poster lays out a detailed timeline of who is playing when—at the music’s busiest, as many as seven artists are in the mix—but it never tells us exactly what they are doing. Part of the fun is in trying to disentangle the strands of the music’s knottiest moments—or, conversely, figuring out why what looks, on paper, like a particularly crowded stretch might yield so few clues as to its constituent parts.
For all the variety of that list, The Consuming Flame is not an eclectic listen, exactly. This is not a supermarket where individual contributions sit neatly packaged and tidily arranged; it’s more like a bulk-foods store after a hurricane, with oatmeal and wild rice, dried apricots and seaweed, carob chips and detergent all swirled together, patterns giving way to chaos and back again, depending on how and where the upturned bins have landed.
Given the album’s length and density, it resists close reading; if there is an organizing logic here, it is not readily apparent, although brushed drums and choppy vocal effects provide thematic through lines, and the occasional recurring motif lends a sense of narrative cohesion. But the music often unspools with natural ease. During one particularly engaging passage early in CD1, “A Doughnut in the Sky,” shimmering drones give way to dubby post-rock that rises into a Loaded-style jam; a fade-out leads us into a field recording of children’s voices, and then a rapid succession of highly suggestive sonic images: the bonging of a broken grandfather clock; power sanders on the fritz; the ghost of Derek Bailey. Before long, a Diwali-like clapping rhythm is paired with prepared piano; toward the end of the first section, a burst of pure, uncut jazz fusion flashes out like a glimpse of an alternate universe.
It’s not always a pleasurable listen; I haven’t found it conducive to meditative morning walks or dinners with friends. There are stretches of monotony, and the tempo they have chosen can drag, trudging along at a sullen andante. But these moments of struggle are part of the point of the endeavor. Schmidt has compared the album, in its 178-minute surfeit, to a journey by car, and lord knows that even the most scintillating road trips have their doldrums. What might be most striking about The Consuming Flame is how perfectly it suits the peculiarities of the present moment, even though the whole project was in the can before the pandemic ever reared its ugly microbial head.
The project could scarcely be more prescient: Its central mode of remote collaboration is, suddenly, one of the principal ways that people work together. Its emotional states, veering from giddiness to abject boredom, are a mirror image of these past few months’ unfamiliar clockworks, their racing weeks and creeping hours. Like most Matmos albums, The Consuming Flame is about more than just its ostensible organizing principle. The number 99 is largely arbitrary, but the animating ideas are the same ones that have been at the heart of Matmos’ work all along: community, interdependence, the radical joy of creative play. And as this long year stretches on, infection curves unspooling against the X axis—not entirely unlike the multi-colored bars stretching across the album’s list of contributors—those same ideas are proving just as important in life as in art.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Egyptian producer’s music is forceful, corrosive, unstable-sounding. His latest EP, a collection of six unrelenting club cuts, is his heaviest record yet.

All Caps EP

In a city of 23 million, Ahmed El Ghazoly sometimes had trouble finding a receptive audience for his brand of club music. “My stuff is too weird for Cairo,” he told The Wire a few years back. In fact, El Ghazoly’s output as ZULI sounds extreme just about anywhere. Drawing from hard-edged sounds like techno, trap, and drum’n’bass, his music is not just forceful, it’s fundamentally unstable; even his toughest drums seem dipped in corrosive fluid, so that they flake apart to the touch. Beneath each crumbling beat lies a potential wormhole to points unknown: a torn scrap of UK grime, a blast of static, a fleeting glimpse of crowded cityscape.
Since 2016, when he put out his Bionic Ahmed EP on Lee Gamble’s UIQ label, followed by two more records there over the next two years, ZULI has become a familiar face on adventurous international lineups, slotted among like-minded peers for whom “too weird” can be a point of pride. For the past year, of course, he hasn’t played in public anywhere, at home or abroad. You might guess that a year of enforced solitude would have pointed El Ghazoly back toward the slow tempos and queasy atmospheres of his UIQ debut. Quite the opposite: A collection of six unrelenting club cuts, All Caps is ZULI’s heaviest record yet.
El Ghazoly has good reason to sound so aggressive. Four months after putting out 2018’s Terminal, his most ambitious record to date, he had a follow-up EP ready to be mastered when he fell asleep on a French train and awoke to find that his laptop was gone. He lost the completed record and a big chunk of his sample library and music collection. “Tany” opens All Caps on an appropriately cathartic note, its overdriven Amen breaks hitting with the fury of a fist through drywall. What gives the track its manic edge is a looped vocal sample that’s been pulverized until it’s just a spray of nonsense syllables, like an auctioneer’s spiel peppered with duck calls. “Where Do You Go,” the EP’s other jungle cut, is just as exhilarating: Again, he chops up familiar breaks in fresh (and virtuosic) ways, and he drops in a verse of Arabic-language rapping, briefly giving the song an anthemic feel. Every so often, the whirlwind of kinetic energy is silenced by an eerie, violent shudder of bass, as though the track were imploding upon its hollow core.
The record’s textures are uniformly dazzling. The club cut “Keen Demag” rattles like a rock tumbler packed with agates and razor blades; the footwork-tempo “Bassous” triggers kick drums and hiccupping vocal shots like the bumpers of a pinball machine. The latter is the record’s simplest cut and also its most evil. There’s little more to it than drums and voice, but El Ghazoly stabs at his spartan palette with a sense of controlled violence.
Despite the scowling intensity and occasionally acrid mood, All Caps isn’t entirely dour. It can actually be quite funny. The lumbering trap song “Penicillin Duck” gets its title from a garbled vocal sample that does, in fact, sound remarkably like the titular phrase. And the closing “Bro! (Love It)” is structured around an actual joke, punchline and all. For the song’s first two minutes, El Ghazoly lays on the EP’s messiest, most disheveled drumming. Then, as the tempo slows and broken beats give way to North African reeds and percussion, an American-accented voice interjects: “Oh my god, this has Egyptian music all over! Love the Arabic fusion, bro!” If you were casting a voice actor and needed the Most Annoying Guy in the World, this would be him.
In interviews, El Ghazoly has criticized the Orientalist narratives that Westerners impose upon Egyptian styles like mahraganat, a working-class genre often praised, and exotified, for its noisy immediacy. Likewise, as a global citizen who spent the first 10 years of his life in London—“All my influences come from the internet and, before that, from MTV,” he says—he bristles at the idea that he should be tasked with representing some idealized Egyptian sound, even an underground one. In “Bro! (Love It),” he drives the point home.
After the Most Annoying Guy in the World exits the scene, El Ghazoly turns a dial, and the North African ensemble morphs back into a chaotic club beat. Then, another voice appears, like someone poking their head into the DJ booth: “Excuse me, excuse me, hi—What happened to the North African music you were playing earlier?” The song was inspired by a real-life DJ gig in Berlin, he says, when a listener mistook his hard-drum selections, part of a global subgenre that stretches from London to Mexico City, for traditional North African music. Here at the end of a blistering EP, his impromptu mashup feels both hilarious and scathing, a bravura display of subverting expectations and demolishing stereotypes. The producer whose music is too weird for Cairo, it turns out, is a few steps ahead of European clubbers, too.

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On Transatlanticism, Chris Walla was expanding his scope and ambition as a producer, intersecting with Ben Gibbard, who was doing the same as a writer. A decade after its release, Death Cab For Cutie's fourth and finest album is being reissued on limited vinyl (and MP3) with demo versions of all 11 tracks.

Transatlanticism

The term “transatlanticism” was coined by Ben Gibbard to define the incomprehensible emotional gap between two lovers separated by comprehensible distances—the continental United States, an entire ocean, or, most likely, just a couple floors in your freshman dorm. In the 10 years since Death Cab For Cutie released their finest record, the title has taken on an unintended resonance in regards to their career. On one side of their fourth of seven studio albums, there are three modestly performed and admirably successful LPs released on Seattle indie label Barsuk. On the other, three exquisite-sounding and wildly successful LPs released on New York City major...Atlantic. Death Cab’s aesthetic hadn’t really changed all that much, and yet how do you span the distance between the uber-#feelings video for “A Movie Script Ending” and two #1 albums (Codes and Keys hit #3), Grammy nominations, platinum sales when they meant something, huge festival slots, and Zooey Deschanel? Look, it’s nigh impossible to extricate Death Cab’s ascendance from The O.C., so how’s this: from the moment the skyrocket guitars go off in “The New Year”, Death Cab are taking a leap of faith like Seth Cohen up on that kissing booth, risking embarrassment to tell as many people as possible that they may be dorks, but they’re not going to be anyone’s secret anymore.
Up until 2001's The Photo Album, Death Cab created often excellent songs that did a limited number of things—they didn’t rock (nor did they really try), they didn’t groove, their blood didn’t run particularly hot either, even when Gibbard sang about abusive parents, any number of lost loves, or hatred for his future hometown of Los Angeles. On Transatlanticism, well, not much really changed. But Walla in particular found countless ways to work around it. We all know Summer Roberts’ “it’s like one guitar and a whole lot of complaining” wisecrack helped Death Cab far more than it ever hurt them, but what always bothered me was the idea that they ever sounded like one guy. Death Cab songs are nearly impossible to accurately recreate in a solo performance and if the rinky-dink demos (hear “We Looked Like Giants” and the title track with 8-bit drums!) included in the reissue prove anything, it’s that.
Walla takes advantage of all the band’s moving parts, ensuring each one has its own distinct sonic character and turning Transatlanticism into a downright indulgent listen, a grand buffet of texture and tone. On the whole, the band creates perfectly detailed sonic dioramas—from the piano punctuating the pregnant quietude of “Passenger Seat”, you feel a frozen forest night in the middle of winter. “The New Year” captures explosions off in the distance and the ambivalence of wondering why you can’t relate to them. Within these ornate arrangements, a clever addition sneaks in towards the end and steals the song—the xylophone that rearranges the melody of “Title and Registration”, the combination of handclaps and slashing guitars on “The Sound of Settling”, and especially the percussion, whether those of new drummer Jason McGerr or the mechanistic electronics (beyond its profile boost, the concurrent musical influence of Gibbard’s work in the Postal Service tends to be overstated).
It reveals much of their work leading up to Transatlanticism as test runs—the simple Death Cab + drum machine format of “Coney Island” or the Stability EP are upgraded to complex, mixed-meter rhythms on “Lightness” and “Death of an Interior Decorator”. On “Bend to Squares”, “Title Track”, “Styrofoam Plates” (and later, “Marching Bands of Manhattan” and “Bixby Canyon Bridge”), Death Cab developed a trick where they’d build and build and build without ever exploding into pure catharsis. The consuming title track unapologetically goes over-the-top, giving you a safe and sound drop on the most sincere, intense FaceTime conversation ever: those glistening guitars and the endless, upward ramp of the drums convey enough infinite sadness as is, and then a church choir comes in to goad the listener: will these two EVER just make out already?
Walla was expanding his scope and ambition, intersecting with Gibbard, who was doing the same as a writer. It didn’t initially seem that way: though this record gained Death Cab many, many new fans, it lost some older ones as well, and in our original review of Transatlanticism, William Morris echoed their sentiments, taking issue with the increased generality of Gibbard’s lyrics. And there’s truth to that, as Transatlanticism is full of compact ways to express the same ideas that Death Cab songs would earlier obfuscate with bigger words or dense metaphor: “So this is the new year/ and I don’t feel any different,” “I need you so much closer,” and of course, “She is beautiful, but she don’t mean a thing to me.” That said, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone else capable of pulling off Gibbard’s more typically elliptical concepts. A disastrous wedding “felt just like falling in love again” to the lonely empty nester on “Death of an Interior Decorator”. “Title and Registration” begins with a silly joke and it’s revealed as a defense mechanism as Gibbard recalls how the dumbest thing (like, “searching for some legal documents”) can unearth a wellspring of repressed feelings. It’s a phenomenon that can cause you to lose hours at a time, and “Title” sums it up perfectly in four minutes.
As a result of pulling all those heartstrings, short of the Decemberists, no band has become an easier target for people who want to assert their “I ain’t with that indie bullshit” masculinity. Granted, Death Cab For Cutie’s music never sounds sexual, and you can’t really call it “rock music” as something derived from “rhythm and blues”—hell, they’ve always been an awkward fit into “emo” as a musical ideal, since that entails some basis in punk and Death Cab clearly have nothing of the sort. And that’s fine, as Gibbard sought to create the definitive songs about the span of a romantic coupling rather than a sonic approximation of it. Whereas the previous albums dealt with mundane, household affairs—reading the unemployment pages, sharing cigarettes, “We Laugh Indoors”—a lot more’s at stake this time out, emotionally and physically. Death Cab thrashes desperately throughout “We Looked Like Giants” while Gibbard recalls both the thrall of hormonal, visceral lust and the painful recollection of the liminal moments spent around jukeboxes and magazines. Wavering sonar beeps cloak low-key amorousness on “Lightness”. And, oh man…"Tiny Vessels.”
A common criticism of Death Cab (and really, its fanbase) is that wimpiness served as a cover for passive-aggressiveness or a safe haven from actually acting on emotions or impulses and risking rejection—if not outright misogyny. “Tiny Vessels” doesn’t exactly negate that criticism, it just forces the issue by putting it right out there. Though he'd reconfigure the “I spent two weeks in Silver Lake” line after his divorce from Zooey Deschanel, that's an exception, as one of Gibbard’s strengths is that his lyrics can be rich with personalized detail without sounding personal. That said, his vocals always lead you to believe that the narrator at least kinda looks like him and it's startling to hear Gibbard detail the kind of callous sexual conquest people think they're escaping by getting into the indie crowd.
The entire band is in peak form on "Tiny Vessels"—a glancing, sour note in the introductory guitar harmony precedes the unsympathetic admission that you're no different than the narrator, that "you'll tell her that you love her but you don't." Time-elapse layering of shockingly distorted guitars raise the drama during the bridge as he “wanted to believe in all the words that I was speaking/ As we moved together in the dark.” That gets most of the attention, though it’s the spellbinding third verse where all of it clears out, leaving plangent, echoing drums that house the monstrous, hollowed-out sentiment of Gibbard’s lyric—that of a total jerk who’s very aware of the thoughts and feelings of the other person, but chooses not to stop himself. It’s understandable that many people either can’t or choose not to acknowledge both sides of “Tiny Vessels”, and every time a Death Cab live crowd turns it to a singalong (and it’s usually one of the loudest), it becomes one of the most biting indictment of “nice guy syndrome” ever written.
We’ve gotten this far, so let’s just do away with it: judging Death Cab, and Transatlanticism in particular, from a completely objective standpoint feels kinda insincere and wholly inaccurate (and everybody knows it). From a lot of the descriptors above, “indulgent,” “consuming,” etc.—you can assume that, yeah, I was completely obsessed with Transatlanticism back in 2003. It was in a way that should be embarrassing in retrospect, but why judge your younger self like that? If the “little brother/sister music” tag often applied to Death Cab is going to stick, at least remember the times when your world was that small where new love (or a broken heart) filled its entirety and thensome. Or maybe that a new love shrinks your world to the point where there isn’t room for anything else. Note the central simile in “We Looked Like Giants”, two people “in the back of [a] gray subcompact/ fumbling to make contact” don’t have a lot of space to consider politics, socioeconomic struggle, whatever you consider to be “important” matters for art to discern.
I mean, I can bust out a map and point out the mountain passes of Virginia’s I-64 that I’d brave after skipping early classes or talk about the resonance of “Title and Registration” in relation to the November day in 2003 I spent getting my automotive legal documents in order or how I first heard the title track on the way to a college reunion, for crying out loud. Serendipity, for sure—but few records open themselves up to forge those kind of moments, to be a formative emotional and listening experience, pushing you to feel what you’re thinking (to flip a line from “Lightness”), daring to be universal enough to allow you to see yourself in it. If you love this album, or will, you’ll have some a personal history of your own and that’s why Transatlanticism stands out over Death Cab’s impressive catalog—they were always great at telling you stories, but here, they proved even better at helping you understand your own.


The recent success of Matt Pike’s rebooted Sleep sounds like it’s rubbing off on his long-running High on Fire, whose 8th album leans on the heavier half of their habitual doom-meets-thrash mixture.

Electric Messiah

High on Fire are often compared to Motörhead, for many reasons: their raw speed, gravelly throats, swaggering attitude, and—lately, especially—consistency. Black Sabbath-style riffing at thrash tempos while Matt Pike sings about arcane creatures: You pretty much already know what a new High on Fire album will sound like, and that’s not to their detriment at all. For almost a decade, they bounced from producer to producer, striking gold with Steve Albini (Blessed Black Wings) and Jack Endino (Death Is This Communion) before pairing with the more commercial Greg Fidelman for with their most anthemic material, on Snakes for the Divine. In Kurt Ballou, they found someone who cut through the mud, making them sound their most extreme without squelching the dynamics. Sticking with Ballou for a third time might make it seem as though there’s nothing new on Electric Messiah, but even though High on Autopilot would still be a thrilling heavy-metal odyssey, subtle changes make all the difference.
High on Fire are by no means obscure, but they’ve tended to live in the shadow of Pike’s other band, Sleep. The former may have a broader body of work, but the latter have a mythology, something to sell beyond the music. (This is not a knock against Sleep, and The Sciences is a welcome comeback.) Sleep rebooted are the band that allowed Pike to quit his day job and get the 1978 El Camino he always dreamed of owning, something even High on Fire’s frequent touring couldn’t achieve. Electric Messiah leans more on the Sabbath side of Pike’s patented MotörSabbath blend, suggesting that Sleep’s renewal is rubbing off on him. “Steps of the Ziggurat/House of Enlil” would be a lightning-fast Sleep song; in High on Fire terms, Pike lets his riffs come to a rolling boil rather than unleash everything out the gate. “God of the Godless” incorporates some of Sleep’s boogie, which gets drowned out when Pike and company go full Slayer. On “The Witch and the Christ,” there’s even a throwback to Blessed Black Wings, where High on Fire were beginning to realize themselves as a metal metal band, even though they hadn’t yet entirely shaken off Sleep’s doomy crunch.
Still, when High on Fire rip, it’s like they’re tearing through the whole universe. Most bands would struggle to even halfway keep up with the way they bash away on “Spewn From the Earth.” The title track was born from a dream—a divine vision, if you will—Pike had where Lemmy was hazing him. Motörhead are so integral to High on Fire’s being that it was only a matter of time before Lemmy himself turned up in one of their songs. High on Fire reimagine their “messiah”—already a larger-than-life figure, but also ultimately a dude who liked women, video poker, and Jack and Cokes—by giving his band’s sheer speed a cosmic thrust. The music’s still dirty as hell, yet there’s a bigger purpose behind it all.
“Sanctioned Annihilation” is Pike’s take on a Sabbath-style epic, one that imagines Tony Iommi marrying his monolithic riffage with the longer, more melodically driven ballads of Sabbath’s Dio era. This isn’t a ballad, but the bigger scope and all-encompassing feeling are there, and this is where Electric Messiah sets itself apart. “Sanctioned Annihilation” is High on Fire’s “Sign of the Southern Cross,” moving through battle and victorious comedown, sown into the dirt yet always looking ahead and upward. Pike is lauded as a high priest of metal for his invocation of metal’s finest; “Sanctioned Annihilation” reveals that even in tribute, Pike’s reverence always comes out in his own image. It also reveals how thundering a drummer Des Kensel is—just as important as Pike, but considerably more low key. He combines Dave Lombardo’s double pass with Dale Crover’s hypnotic, hard-hitting tom bursts, and this is exactly what Pike, who swings between so many extremes, needs. “Annihilation” is cut from the same cloth as “Snakes for the Divine,” one of their most popular songs, for its interpolation of “Thunderstruck” via Master of Puppets, even though the two songs don’t example resemble each other. Both tunes capture High on Fire reaching the top of the mountain, achieving a moment of godliness for a sliver of time. And that, above all, is how Electric Messiah is the High on Fire you’ve come to expect.


Long in the making, Boards of Canada's fourth full-length is their darkest and moodiest record. Clearly inspired by film soundtracks, Tomorrow's Harvest is heavy on atmosphere and richly textured drone.

Tomorrow's Harvest

Sounds like Boards of Canada. In the early years of this century, you heard many electronic music aficionados using that phrase, usually in the context of an endorsement. The Scottish brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin didn’t invent a new sound, but they did take various strands of music floating around and pull them into one place and essentially perfect them. And their particular fusion was so distinctive that their name became shorthand. The appetite for the BoC was so voracious that the group’s actual output, which was actually fairly prolific in its first decade, wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy it. But that was a long time ago. Since 2006 we’ve heard a lot of music that seems spiritually connected to Boards of Canada, from Burial to chillwave, but we haven’t heard a note of music from the originators until the surprise announcement of Tomorrow’s Harvest.
While BoC have always seemed comfortable inside their core sound, their records are still easy to distinguish. On Music Has the Right to Children, they mixed creepy pre-erased drones with childhood nostalgia and drums that drew from hip-hop; on 2002’s Geogaddi, the beats got harder and the unease grew more intense, resulting in an album that was still playful but far darker. Campfire Headphase, from 2005, brought acoustic guitars to the table and aimed for a more pastoral feel, but it lacked the tension of what came before. And Tomorrow’s Harvest is in some ways the flipside to Campfire, the bucolic tint swapped out for moody drones and encroaching dread. It is the most internally focused of Boards of Canada’s records. Rather than working around the edges of their sound in search of new territory, Tomorrow’s Harvest finds them drawing back toward the center.
Given its hermetic feel, it makes sense BoC have indicated that soundtracks were an especially big influence. They specifically invoke the work of John Carpenter, Mark Isham, and Wendy Carlos, all of whom constructed some of their most enduring scores in the late 1970s and early 80s. That was a period where analog synthesis was reaching full maturity but digital synthesis was in its earlier stages, when the tape-driven Mellotron competed for studio space with the digital Fairlight and new timbres were being explored. If the earliest Boards of Canada music still seemed inspired by Warp’s post-techno Artificial Intelligence movement, beats on Tomorrow's Harvest are secondary. The tempos are generally slow, and there’s not much trickiness to the percussion. The tracks tend to create a groove and stick with it for the duration.
The creative energy here is directed toward building textures, which are very deep and rich indeed. The most visceral sound design in Boards of Canada’s music has tended to occur during their short interludes, but here they’ve taken some those ideas and explored them at length, filling the tracks with details that can take some time to soak in. On headphones, you can explore the tracks one motif at a time, as if each were a small landscape. “Jacquard Causeway” has a series of metallic-sounding twinkles that seems to grow out of the chords that swell underneath, and they slip in and out of phase with the underlying drums in a manner that imparts an extra measure of uneasiness. “Split Your Infinities” has bird sounds and distant noises that sound like lasers, both of which are so subtle so as to function subliminally. “Nothing Is Real” is a swirl of deep bass, stop-start drums, and a continual surging synth line that sounds like a swarm of bugs, but it also has a distant, echoing keyboard line that haunts the track like a ghost. The layering of the various sounds on a given track offers a different way in each time, so they can take on an M.C. Escher-like quality, where the tone and emotional content varies according to what you choose to pay attention to. There are sounds behind sounds and sounds underneath sounds and you can find yourself sifting through the layers, turning the pieces inside-out.
If Boards of Canada’s sound construction has reached a new plateau, they do seem to have left some appealing elements of their earlier approach behind. Returning again to Music or Geogaddi, it’s striking how tuneful those records were. Whether they’ve lost that ability or no longer choose to incorporate it, melody is not the focus on Tomorrow’s Harvest. These tracks unfurl, grow, and shrink, but they don’t exactly develop, at least not in the same way. The early playfulness, too, is no longer part of the equation. It’s easy to forget about “childlike” for Boards of Canada at one point didn’t just mean the ache of nostalgia or the fear of nightmares but actually pleasurable activities like clapping hands and laughing and saying funny words. And the lightness and humor-- the repetition of the word “Orange” in "Aquarius", say-- are something they don’t seem remotely interested in here. It’s not hard to imagine a certain kind of Boards of Canada fan missing that variety.
So that’s what is not here. What we’re left with is Boards of Canada’s moodiest record, a full-length tinted with atmosphere that unfolds slowly and is happy to allow you to come to it. Creating a new way to hear electronic music, as they did in the first half of their career, earned them that right to make a record that is absorbed through osmosis. And true to its patient nature and long gestation period, Tomorrow’s Harvest’s last third is its best. As they move from the ultra-simple, Music for Films-like “Sundown” through the soot-dusted “New Seeds”, with its quiet guitar grind and bell-like percussion, and then on through the arpeggiated Tangerine Dream-style “Come to Dust” and the the closing bass-pedals of “Semena Mertvykh”, it’s clear that they still, after all this time and all the imitators, own this world. And it’s nice to hear that they’re still inhabiting it.


As a creative package, M3LL155X is unimpeachable; a high-concept piece of work that's evocative, accessible and transgressive. It builds on FKA twigs' previous work, exploring ideas of psychic and interpersonal dominance and submission, but drills down almost completely into self.

M3LL155X

In "Papi Pacify", the video that introduced FKA twigs to the wider world, the British pop star stares into the camera as a man (a lover, it should be said) pries his fingers into her gaping mouth. The hook is a moan: "Mmm, papi pacify." The lyrics are about the tension of desire, but the mise en scene is power. On the cover of her third EP M3LL155X, twigs echoes this gesture, staring at us as her own hand merges into her face. Once again, her gaze is discomfiting and impossible not to return. A glassy-voiced singer refracting melody through diffuse electronic beats, twigs takes the familiar R&B star as her avatar, but her presentation is more complex: her ideas mar beauty and mine power, and exalt sex without exotifying.
She develops these ideas further on M3LL155X, a five-song EP accompanied by a 16-minute music video/film that dropped last week, just over a year after the release of twigs' high profile debut, LP1. As a creative package the EP is unimpeachable; a high-concept, intellectually curious project that's evocative, accessible and transgressive enough to satisfy the competing demands of a newly broadened fanbase and her existing audience of Tumblr-educated aesthetes. M3LL155X (pronounced 'Melissa') builds on her previous work, exploring ideas of dominance and submission and drilling down almost completely into the self.
Instead of obfuscating her soft voice with layers of effects or singing in that cartoonishly frail and breathy falsetto, twigs prowls confidently over M3LL155X.  The opening track "Figure 8" rumbles, shudders, whirrs and clicks like most of LP1, but her voice is clearer than ever. Over modular synth patches and a fluid wheeze of artificial strings on "In Time", she tests her brawniest delivery yet: "Every day, every day, you be testing my sane, you've got a goddamned nerve." When there are vocal effects, they're sinister instead of sweet, as if she's haunted by her own thoughts.  That's the rub behind a seemingly submissive song like "I'm Your Doll", an angsty love song written by her pre-woke teenage self that twigs repurposes for adulthood."I just want [for] you to love you," she implores, as a reminder, on the garage-meets-gagging dancefloor missive "Glass & Patron." M3LL155X — like Sasha Fierce or Zadie Smith — isn't interested in vulnerability.
In the video for "Figure 8", a song about life and birth, twigs uses a prosthesis to appear pregnant, stepping and spinning while clutching her belly. The title of the track, produced with Beyonce's Beyoncé ace Boots, is derived from the detailed handwork voguers use to frame their faces as they dance, as twigs explained  in an interview with Complex. Voguing, like the ballroom culture that birthed the dance style, has been a way for gay men and queer people of colour to aggressively reclaim their bodies, cycling back into twigs' ideas about rebirth.
What lyrics might not make explicit, her videos and movement do: illuminating the multifarious ways in which a woman — a black woman — understands and owns her body, sexuality and creativity. The film accompanying M3LL155X opens on the wrinkled, smiling face of restaurateur and creative icon Michèle Lamy, who is tattooed, older and unbothered, and the muse and partner to fashion designer Rick Owens. Later, twigs moves through vignettes that show her as a sex doll, seductress, pregnant, in the club with her girls, being watched by a man as she dances solo to trembling down a runway with a crew of voguers. The mood flips between the skin-crawling sci-fi of Jonathan Glazer's succubus film Under The Skin and the bubblegum spunk of early '00s girl groups like 3LW and Cleopatra.
What twigs is interested in, above all, is mastery. Her idea of mastery involves ownership of her craft, but is mindfully tempered with the knowledge that she is one of many voices. twigs appears to understand that mainstream culture pins her as artist zero for voguing (and baby hairs) and she counters cultural myopia by continually naming her teachers and collaborators: Wet Wipez, Benjamin Milan, Derek Prodigy. She maintains co-producer credits on her tracks (although, as MIA, Bjork and Missy Elliott have noted of their work, credit often goes to the men who produce with her, like Tic and Arca). For some, it matters profoundly that twigs centers black men in her videos. We increasingly see twigs behind the camera as director as well (in additionto many of her recent videos, she developed that crazy piece for Google Glass as well).
All of which is to say that the EP takes the ur-feminist mantra of "the personal is political" as a starting point. Indeed, after the tiresome reams of "is she or isn't she?" thinkpieces dissecting Beyoncé, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Taylor Swift and other figures that commodify feminist rhetoric, twigs makes the strongest case for the feminist pop star proper, standing up (for now) to the checklist scrutiny of "ur fav is problematic" culture. Role models aren't universal, but if we need a feminist pop star, then twigs is it.


As they shed their masks and streamline their sound, the UK psych-pop duo sound like they’ve found their voice but not yet something significant to say.

Hyper Romance

We’ve met Jadu Heart before, but in a sense, their second album is a chance to meet them anew. On their 2016 EP Wanderflower and 2019 debut Melt Away, the duo of Diva Jeffrey and Alex Headford wore 3D-printed masks, adopted elaborate mythologised characters named Dina and Faro, and couched their electronic pop experiments in a fantastical backstory. Like their identities, their sound was polymorphous, shifting between ukelele folk and choppy electronics in the vein of Maggie Rogers or Mura Masa (with whom they share a manager). One year on, follow-up Hyper Romance feels like a re-introduction to the band, who have ditched the masks and settled into a steadier groove. The newfound simplicity suits them.
Jeffrey and Headford made Hyper Romance after moving away from the bustle of London to the port city of Bristol. Holed up in a basement studio, they used distortion pedals and cheap amps to create the layer of atmospheric grunge that hangs over the record (which was later co-produced by Guy Sigsworth, noted for his work with Björk and Madonna). “Suddenly I Know Who You Are” is built around a swaggering Britpop riff, while the ghost of Tame Impala appears in the faintly psychedelic rush of “Metal Violets,” and the blurred edges of “Dead, Again” feel an homage to The Bends-era Radiohead. On each of these songs, Jeffrey and Headford’s vocals intertwine seamlessly, the contours of their voices fitting into one another so well that it’s sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
It’s these more spectral and sensitive moments, the ones hiding behind the crunching guitars, that are the record’s most powerful. The dusky ballad “Caroline” is tailor-made for the montage that comes three-quarters of the way through an indie rom-com, when the protagonist’s life has fallen apart. Nothing on the album quite tops “Burning Hour,” a smoky blend of live drums, tentative falsetto vocals, guitar shimmers, and—piercing through the haze, before things get too comfortable—samples of screams. It’s a refinement of the laid-back yet eerie electronic sound that flickered through the more disjointed Melt Away, with a pining chorus that sticks.
On Hyper Romance, Jadu Heart sound like they’ve found their voice—if not yet something significant to say. The points of reference for their songwriting shine so brightly that at times it threatens to overwhelm them, as with the Thom Yorke moment at the end of “Day by Day,” and their lyrics exhibit the same problems as on their first LP, which often relied heavily on rhyme and cliché. Despite the occasional striking line or memorable hook—like the disarming honesty of “I heard your friend call me a pig” on the prickly romantic duet “Walk the Line”—many images in these songs are ones you’ve seen before. Take this uninspiring couplet from “Caroline”: “A rolling stone, whose moss has grown and grown/A broken home, no love lives here no more.”
Towards the end of the record, on the title track, the band sample Streetwise, the 1984 documentary about homeless youth living in Seattle. While the emotive snippets work well within the whorl of warm synth notes and metallic found sound, the overall effect is one of nostalgia for its own sake. The film is a familiar sample, used by bands including the Avalanches and How to Dress Well in the past, and the question of how its tragic mutterings pertain to this record from a Bristol-based psych-pop duo goes unanswered. Though they’ve removed their literal masks, there’s still a sense that Jadu Heart are trying on different costumes, trying to figure out which one captures who they really are.

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Originally conceived as a performance for 2011's Øya festival in Oslo, the recording of Elements of Light is an impressive example of how versatile the lowly bell can be, and offers familiar beats and bass swells from Hendrik Weber's world shot through with giddy-making surprises.

Pantha du Prince / The Bell Laboratory: Elements of Light

Elements of Light

The lowly bell might not figure much in the history of minimal techno-- or, indeed, much contemporary music at all-- but it's a percussive instrument that holds much attraction for German producer Hendrik Weber, aka Pantha du Prince. Strip the bells out of "Lay in a Shimmer" from the high-benchmark Pantha release Black Noise and it simultaneously loses its twinkly elegance and errs a little too close to humdrum genre fare. Back in 2011 Weber appeared at the Øya Festival in Oslo where he took his obsession up a notch by collaborating with a collection of musicians on a series of bell-oriented tracks under the name Pantha du Prince and the Bell Laboratory. The name neatly tied into Weber's fascination with the instrument and electronic music's past; the original Bell Laboratories were where Max Mathews developed one of the first computer programs to play music back in the 1950s. At Øya the group played a piece titled Elements of Light, the name given to this studio recording of their efforts. There's a lightness to it that belies the literal heaviness at the center of the album-- an instrument named the bell carillon, made up of 50 bronze bells, bearing a combined weight of three tonnes.
This isn't such a great departure for Weber, instead coming across as the logical extension of an idea he's been chasing for a while. There are elements of classic minimalism worked in, as well as a healthy dose of the all-surface moves that were typical of Tortoise's transitionary work on the TNT album. On that record it felt like Tortoise were bridging between the airless electronics they leaned on during Millions Now Living Will Never Die and a space where you could sense them loosening up a little more. It's a feeling this album also taps into. The playing is incredibly tight, but there's a sense of adventure to the whole undertaking, with all the players locked into a common goal. It's an instrumental album with a tinge of narrative, particularly when they venture into mazy 10-minute-plus pieces like "Particle" and "Spectral Split". Ventures like this often end up feeling like a display of chops, a demonstration of proficiency, an exercise in technical prowess. Elements of Light is mostly the opposite; it feels like those involved were as invested in the transformative power of the music as they were in flexing their not inconsiderable talents.
"Particle" is a particularly impressive example of how versatile the bell can be as an instrument, especially when it juxtaposes ominous, church-like clangs with lighter tones that skip and twist across its surface. It's positively giddy at times, never quite ending up where you expect, bringing in familiar beats and swells of bass that anchor it in Weber's world, then constantly pulling rugs out from underneath the listener. To give away too much would spoil the surprises that are crucial to making this album work, but a small glimpse of its magic can be found in the turn into Tom Waits-style pots-and-pans percussion that is unexpectedly teased out during a section of "Particle". Moments like that, rendered here as a brief snatch of creative flash, but surely the basis for an entire track in lesser hands, are the points where this album really excels. Occasionally it meanders into cyclical drifting, particularly in shorter tracks like "Photon", where the ideas run a little dry. But even that just about works as a contemplative prelude to "Spectral Split", serving as a necessary foot-off-the-gas moment before something meatier.
It's in "Spectral Split" that Elements of Light flashes through all its tones, from washed out ambience to a momentum borrowed lightly from Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, to the interlinking of classical and electronic textures that Weber so clearly obsesses over. It also demonstrates his astute understanding of how important anticipation is in dance music, with almost half the 17-minute runtime devoted to a slow build that explodes into color when all its spaghetti-like parts are interwoven. That sense of release surfaces sporadically throughout the album and is fundamental to making it work, but it's always delivered with a great degree of control and patience. Sometimes a stiffness emerges in the playing and it feels too mechanical, like a computer trying to figure out the meaning of joy, but even those little moments tie in perfectly with the historic wink in the name of the Bell Laboratory. It's possible that their collected devotion to precision would loosen up more in a live setting, of which more plans are afoot. Here, there's a sense of picking at a strand of inspiration and seeing how it flows toward a form of endgame, albeit one that still prickles with possibility.