Countering the isolation of the past year, the UK house producer draws upon classic club sounds in an EP guided by the life-giving virtues of community.

Watch Out! EP

India Jordan’s warmly inventive retro house debut, For You, garnered the kind of breathless acclaim that, for many a musician, might prompt the dumping of a day job. Jordan, an equality, diversity, and inclusion consultant at King’s College, London, not only kept theirs; their follow-up sounds almost like an ode to office gigs, finding in nightlife the inspiration required to get through the day shift. If For You was a love letter to queer club kids, Watch Out! is one for working people, compressing the space from commute to clock-out into five pulse-quickening takes on classic club sounds.
It’s a bold move, coming at a time when both dancing and commuting present grave threats to human health. But Jordan is wary of submitting permanently to the sedentary lifestyle necessitated, for the moment, by COVID. They warn that the virus has imposed “the ideal lifestyle the Tories want us to have”: a world with plenty of solitary labor and no collective pleasure. Jordan instead believes in the emancipatory potential in partying, seeing it as a space for building solidarity between people pushed to the margins.
The EP opens with the alarm-clock jolt of “Only Said Enough,” an homage to vintage breakbeat rave. Over dawn-colored synths and junkyard drums, and against a looping melisma reminiscent of an old-school house diva, a voice urges, “Come on! Let’s start it!” It’s a rousing beginning, one that makes it impossible to do anything but rub the sleep from your eyes and slide into your shoes. Fittingly, the hardcore “Watch Out!,” which follows, suggests rush-hour traffic on a crowded city street. Its looped air horn evokes the wail of an emergency vehicle; its vocal sample probably isn’t a barking dog dodging into traffic, but sure sounds like it. The song moves through airy, dulcet passages of lush, layered synths and into rapid drum-and-siren melees, the sound of all hell breaking loose.
“You Can’t Expect the Cars to Stop If You Haven’t Pressed the Button” is the EP’s most stripped-down track, but also its most inventive. A relentlessly percussive, found-sound techno odyssey, it rides on a gleeful, ingenious sample of a Dublin traffic signal that has been looped into a rattling, bit-crushed drum pattern. Jordan preserves the hollow, percussive pop, which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever checked their watch at a crosswalk. But they string the sounds together, too, accordioning them out ’til they’re nearly unrecognizable. The result is thrillingly tense, like a timer on a TV game show punctuated with pew-pews from a Star Wars gun.
The audible crosswalk signals Jordan samples were developed to make life easier for visually impaired pedestrians. But they benefit everyone, adding clarity, joy, and a little music to busy urban journeys. (Recently, while I was waiting at an intersection, a mechanical voice pronounced “Wait”; I turned to my boyfriend and sang, “They don’t love you like I love you.”) There is something lovely about Jordan’s insistence that accessible pedestrian signals are “the best sound in the world!” It’s a testament to their improvisational instincts that they saw the potential for bracing music in sidewalk mundanity.
From the crush of the lunch-break sidewalk, Jordan ferries listeners on to “Feierabend”—a German word for the end of the workday. Clocking nearly 150 beats per minute, it’s the EP’s fastest track by a considerable margin, yet it floats instead of banging. The synths sound hollow, like world-weary moans, before giving way to fast, clattering cymbals and footwork toms—a disco nap, and then a party. The record finally settles into “And Groove,” a closing track that, despite the insistent drum machine, feels for all the world like the sleepy end of the night in a coffee bar, the piano plinking jazzily, a distant voice crooning dreamily. This finale is as slow and quiet as “Only Said Enough” was fast and loud. There is a fully realized concept in these five brief songs, a story told simply and well: wake, work, dance into unconsciousness; repeat.
On the cover of Jordan’s first EP, they posed for a portrait in a bathroom at East London’s Dalston Superstore, a favorite queer club. It had been a space where they felt permitted to be themself, to hook up away from prying, judgmental eyes. Now, with the Superstore and similar clubs shuttered by this virus, it’s harder than ever for queer people to find community. How comforting to think that a closeted young person—forced, at the end of their bedroom workday, to sit and sup with homophobic family—might cue up this irresistible EP and indulge in an after-hours party for one.

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After a romantic and musical breakup, Corrina Repp stashed her guitar in a closet and spent a year away from music to collect herself. The songs on The Pattern of Electricity ring out, despite her cooling off period. She sings song after song with the wounded determination of somebody who understands on a rational level they’ll be all right, even if her gut doesn’t fully believe it yet.

Corrina Repp: The Pattern of Electricity

The Pattern of Electricity

Of all the words that could have been used to describe Corrina Repp at the start of her career—singer, songwriter, folkie—"performer" wasn’t the first that came to mind. Especially on her first albums for Hush Records, which seemed to take the label’s name literally, with Repp singing as if in a library, cushioned by stray guitar strums and murmured electronic tones. The Pattern of Electricity is Repp’s first solo release since 2006’s deeply lonesome The Absent and the Distant, and despite the nine-year gap, her slow, subdued music hasn’t changed all that much. What has changed, however, is her voice. Far from a whisper, it now rings out. She’s performing.
Credit her time in Tu Fawning for that enhanced presence. During her solo hiatus Repp dedicated herself to that Portland band, which began as a freewheeling outlet for whatever whim captured the fancy of her and co-lead Joe Haege, be it droning psychedelia or freakish jazz. By 2012’s A Monument the group had discovered some discipline, playing in line with the percussive thrust and theatrical bombast of bands like the Black Keys and Florence and the Machine. It was a solid record, and so conveniently in sync with popular tastes that the group must have had high hopes it. In live footage of the group from around that time, Repp almost seems to be practicing for bigger stages. The band never made it that far, though. They dissolved soon after, along with Repp’s romantic relationship with Haege.

The Pattern of Electricity is a breakup album, albeit one a bit removed from the initial sting of the split. After Tu Fawning unraveled, Repp stashed her guitar in a closet and spent a year away from music to collect herself. These songs reflect that cooling off period, capturing the early healing stages of heartbreak, when resentment and grief begin to give way to thoughts about picking up the pieces. "Woman, shed yourself again," she commands herself on opener "The Beast Lives in the Same Place", as if recovery is something to be willed. She sings song after song with the wounded determination of somebody who understands on a rational level they’ll be all right, even if her gut doesn’t fully believe it yet.
That same hard-fought resolve carries through even the album’s most sorrowful moments, like the hymnal-esque "Woods" and the organ-washed "Long Shadow (with Pb)", but Electricity resists wallowing in the darkness just for the sake of it. Repp smuggles some genuine dazzle into the album’s showiest number, "Pattern the Cuts / Calm Ass Mofo". From its minimalist opening pulses, that seven-minute song blossoms into a dapper orchestral pop suite with shades of Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest. "I haven't been this calm before," she sings, "and now I know I want more." Like much of the album, it’s a song about trying to channel heartache into something productive, a search for a silver lining. These songs may grieve, sometimes toughly, but they never mope.


On her sparse and riveting second album, the singer-songwriter examines the personal cost of embracing difficult emotional truths.

Our Two Skins

Sophie Payten needed a break. In 2017, while still deep in medical exams, she released her debut album Reservoir under the stage name Gordi and fell for another woman virtually at once, right as Australia was landing on a verdict for same-sex marriage. A tumultuous year like that can induce burnout and numbness as easily as it can energize. Payten camped out in her home of Canowindra with two engineers from the first album’s sessions (Bon Iver co-producers Zach Hanson and Chris Messina) for a month of recording. The focus on intimacy makes Our Two Skins a stronger record than her first, with a clearer voice.
Payten and her co-producers recorded with only a handful of instruments, and compared to Reservoir, the results are much cleaner. Opener “Aeroplane Bathroom” is a piano ballad stark enough to hold its own against modern classics “Liability” and “Cellophane,” with raw emotion in place of Lorde’s wordplay or FKA twigs’ ethereality. Written in 20 minutes, Payten literally situated in the 24-inch confines of a plane lavatory, “Bathroom” is a different kind of panic attack than the usual heaving-through-a-paper-bag depiction—more a shutdown from sensory overload. The rest of the album is similarly intimate, and while “Unready” and “Sandwiches” have brighter alternate mixes (John Congleton helms a version of “Unready” with the crunch of modern alt-pop), even those feel more organic than the several sample packs’ worth of layering that characterized Reservoir’s production.
The lyrics prove the most thrilling development, using earthy imagery to convey human emotions (“a flooding rain and endless wave/and the warmth of our two skins,” an early single titled “Volcanic,” “harvesting the sorrow of this land”). These songs depict feelings too vast for lyrics to convey, to the point where not even nature can contain them. The careful arrangements set Payten further apart: Influence Justin Vernon would put dozens of saxophones over the piano accelerando that closes “Volcanic,” but this song tops out at a brushed drum kit and a handful of sound effects. “Free Association” even closes with a slide guitar solo that hints at a move into alt-country.
Payten’s writing is strong enough that she pulls off worthwhile takes on familiar themes. A straightforward love song like “Extraordinary Life” could be cloying on its own, but the whimsical verses are just the right amount of verbose, sounding smart instead of smug (“A wave refracted a divergence underneath/Toward directions that took gravity away from me”). “Life,” which works as a contrast to the more insular songs on the album, feels especially resonant now, nearly tragic—at some point in the future, her partner will get the life she deserves, but an extraordinary life is just not accessible right now. Any song that alludes to loneliness could feel accidentally prescient during a pandemic, but being queer can already feel so isolating that the theme resonates no matter what is going on in the outside world.
Her lyrics only falter when Payten sounds aware of her audience, becoming self-consciously clever: “My irrationality is like a nationality” threatens to kill “Hate the World” as soon as it starts. The neat rhymes and simplistic couplets often create a fascinating tension with the more complex subjects (that’s how “Aeroplane Bathroom” gets away with a “stranger/danger” rhyme), but a line like “There is something/There’s not nothing” on “Look Like You” undersells rather than understates an examination of queer representation.
Our Two Skins is not quite an outright celebration of authenticity and discovering yourself—if that was intended, the anxiety of “Aeroplane Bathroom” wouldn’t loom so heavily over the record. Is living “authentically,” as the phrase goes, worth the daily indignities that come with being different? There is no calm in that storm, and nothing worth romanticizing. Skins doesn’t try: Payten finds beauty anyway, never ignoring her fears, but remembering why the fear is worth braving at all.

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The lo-fi bedroom pop that defined Indiana singer-songwriter Amy Oelsner’s early career grows much larger on her latest album. She uses new instrumentation to express old feelings of anger, longing, and fear.

Elastic

Bloomington, Ind. singer-songwriter Amy Oelsner describes her new album Elastic as “either her second or her ninth, depending on how you count.” She has been making and independently and releasing albums as Amy O since 2004, but put out her label debut with last year’s Arrow. Elastic finds her in flux; she is developing a fuller sound and recording at a professional studio for the first time, while still drawing from the lo-fi bedroom pop that defined Arrow and the releases before it. Oelsner says Elastic is the result of learning to take up space as a female musician, noting, “I always had an aversion to being a girl onstage with a guitar singing quiet songs. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, but I always knew I wanted to do something with a bit more volume, a bit more anger.”
Opener “Lavender Night” is undoubtedly loud and angry. The song was written after a trip to the doctor to have a lump examined, the anxiety of reckoning with one’s own mortality propels the song forward. Though there was doubt and sorrow throughout Arrow—many of the songs were “inspired by the death of a close friend”—the best moments on Elastic intensify those emotions, weaving them through feverish instrumentals and clearer, foregrounded vocals. When she sang, “You’re gonna be okay” on Arrow’s ”Deep Throat,” the song felt restorative, assurance that she is healing. But on “Lavender Night,” when she concedes, “Another bullet dodged for now,” there is foreboding in her voice as she grapples with the reality that comfort is fleeting, often sandwiched between moments of crushing doubt.
Still, Amy O hasn’t abandoned her starry-eyed wonder. Arrow is marked by rendezvous at the arcade, city lights that look like fireflies, drinking coffee dark, and music videos filmed in grassy fields. “David,” a song that comes towards the end of Elastic, abandons distortion for plucky, clean guitar that allows Oelsner’s falsetto space to croon a lullaby of advice: “Under the water nothing is real/When you are older, you’ll know the deal.” Open flowers sigh and summer is a wonder on “Cherry Blossom,” and “Sunday Meal” leaves Oelsner feeling, “like a bug in a field/Silver shimmering.” Imagery is often repeated on the album. Of the twelve songs on Elastic, for example, five reference dreaming, a motif that can certainly be evocative if properly substantiated, but that loses meaning when used so casually and so often. When Oelsner pastes tired motifs into her lyrics without building upon or contextualizing them, she asks the listener to do the work of identifying with hollow shells of grandiose concepts.
The harmonization found in Arrow takes center stage on Elastic, adding complexity and vigor to the sound while preserving the yearning in her voice. On “Spill,” an album highlight, she layers her vocals, singing, “I’ve gotta find myself a way out of here,” creating moments of dissonance followed by a delicious resolution. “Sunday Meal”, a song written in the wake of her grandmother’s death, decoupages backing vocals with a chorus that gets faster upon repetition, a dizzying rumination how quickly the feeling of home can slip away. Sometimes Oelsner’s enthusiastic layering paired with such abstract lyrics becomes disorienting. The harmonization on “Untouchable Heart” feels overcrowded, and the distortion and synths on “Spacey Feeling” are noisy, easily overpowering a chorus comprised largely of the word “moon.”
The moments that work best are when the instrumentation and vocals distill singular, cohesive emotions. Her most literal lyrics are often the strongest—a request to look in the fridge for food, the pressing need to escape, a freak out in the car ameliorated by stopping to get lime La Croix. Oelsner uses new instrumentation to express old anger, longing, and fear. Though she occasionally missteps, the transliteration process is a captivating one to witness.


Released in conjunction with an animated Netflix film, Kid Cudi’s latest is a pleasant surprise—a minor project that features some of his most purely enjoyable music in a decade.

Entergalactic

Kid Cudi doesn’t plan to rap forever. In recent interviews, the 38-year-old has doubted the likelihood of performing beyond his forties (“Like, my name is Kid Cudi,” he told Esquire). Although he wouldn’t be the first rapper to tease retirement without following through, Cudi has spent the last few years like an artist plotting an exit strategy, diversifying his portfolio with a spate of acting, writing, and directing projects. He’s finding some success. Earlier this year he gave a charismatic supporting turn in Ti West’s horror hit X, which along with its prequel Pearl was produced by Cudi’s production company Mad Solar.
Cudi’s latest record, Entergalactic, is a product of those same ambitions to conquer film and television, a visual album released in conjunction with an animated Netflix film of the same name. A low-key romantic comedy, the movie casts Cudi as an aspiring cartoonist opposite best friend Timothée Chalamet and love interest Jessica Williams, and the album shares the feature’s low stakes and blissful, lovelorn vibe. It’s ironic that a project born of Cudi’s desire to leave recording behind contains some of his most purely enjoyable music in a decade.
Entergalactic comes on the heels of his most backward-looking album yet, 2020’s Man on the Moon III: The Chosen, the latest sequel to the 2009 debut he’s cast his entire career as a celebration of. Like so many Cudi records before it, Man on the Moon III was listless to the point of misery, beholden to muses he’d already exhausted the first time around. With its depthless depressive musings and cosmic ponderings, it was another empty statement from a rapper who wears the mantle of a great artist without making great art.
One of the most pleasant surprises about Entergalactic, then, beyond its unshowy but absolutely sumptuous production, is that Cudi is finally writing outside himself. By singing from the perspective of his rom-com alter ego, he frees himself to let a little light into his dreary world. On “New Mode,” he telegraphs the new direction: “Finally got my head right, it's a new me.” On “Angel” and “Ignite the Love” he sounds convincingly smitten. One of two R&B-slickened Ty Dolla $ign collaborations, “Can’t Shake Her” has the soft touch of 6LACK’s most unforced work.
Cudi remains a clumsy lyricist, and only his most devoted rap forum evangelists could mistake his raw prose for profundity. “This life goes on and on, yeah/Living my truth is all I know,” he raps on “Livin’ My Truth,” a song that affirms his gift for saying nothing. But if nothing else, he’s becoming a more economical writer, and when he gets out of the way of his own music, the results can be gorgeous. Beautifully scored with the understated strings of a Luther Vandross ballad, “Maybe So” might be the most elegant composition he’s ever recorded.
If you take all the indulgence and excess out of a Kid Cudi record, is it even a Kid Cudi record? Entergalactic is an unusual addition to Cudi’s discography, a small statement from a rapper who prides himself on big, aimless ones. It doesn’t wallow. It doesn’t rage. It just sort of lingers pleasantly. It’s the easy hang that Cudi usually works so hard to deny himself.


Working in isolation, the Paramore leader extends the healing narrative of last year’s Petals for Armor with a sparse, unadorned album that casts a mournful glance to the past.

Hayley Williams: FLOWERS for VASES / descansos

FLOWERS for VASES / descansos

For a career built on fiery catharsis, Hayley Williams’ 2020 album Petals for Armor was an anticlimactic solo turn. For Williams, who lives alone in Nashville, the pandemic-enforced seclusion that followed its release led to an agonizing period of stasis and self-reflection. Petals for Armor was meant to be her big breakup record, her ecstatic rebirth as a vibrant and vivacious force for self-liberation; instead, she had to put off tour plans and sit with her final product, realizing discomfitingly that her pain didn’t evaporate with the album’s release. “You just don’t write a song and then you’re through it,” she said later in an interview. Her 10-year relationship with New Found Glory’s Chad Gilbert—which ended in divorce—apparently could not be processed through 15 bright hooks.
In fits and starts, she started combing through songs she had written over the years—some dating back as far as Paramore’s 2017 release After Laughter—piecing together recordings that continued the healing narrative. The resulting collection, FLOWERS for VASES / descansos, paints a more modest picture of heartbreak. If Petals for Armor danced on the graves of her failed romances, FLOWERS for VASES revisits their tombstones with a mournful glance at what had been.
FLOWERS for VASES is essentially Williams’ first true solo endeavor. In spirit and execution, Petals for Armor felt like an extension of her work with her band: Paramore guitarist Taylor York helped compose almost all of the songs on the album, while its uptempo melodies picked up where After Laughter left off. By contrast, Williams wrote and performed FLOWERS for VASES entirely alone. Her choices here reveal a songwriter more indebted to the arpeggiated guitar of a ’70s folk singer like Sibylle Baier than the power chords of mall punk. The acoustic finger picking on “Wait On” and “HYD” feels immediately familiar, as if pulled from a book of folk standards. Her melodies, both on the guitar and on her maudlin, muted piano, are unpretentious and unadorned, their minimal flourishes reflective of her isolated environment. Williams doesn’t innovate on the basics, but for a singer who has long hidden anger behind blown-out reverb and larger-than-life synths, her pared-back instrumentation feels like a modest yet purposeful reset.
Williams’ voice is undoubtedly the standout feature of her band, both husky and gentle, dangerous yet warm. On Petals for Armor it was chopped to bits, used as syncopated rhythm rather than as a central force within the album’s bubbly melodies. But with only an acoustic guitar and piano to hide behind, here her voice sounds refreshed. The extended vowels on “First Thing to Go” glide as if she just sighed them into being. She rarely reaches for the sharp, emotive peaks of her multi-octave range, but instead approaches songs softly. On “Over Those Hills,” her low register sounds gravely and almost weary, but it fits the relaxed nostalgia of the song, like an old friend recalling an ex-lover over a morning cigarette. The album’s minimal production suits her reflective demeanor—her humming shakes beneath her wary guitar strumming; her falsetto hints at her full-throated capabilities, but keeps the album grounded in the spirit of solitude. There are no obvious singles or earworms, but more so than Petals for Armor, FLOWERS for VASES takes a step closer to healing.
The album’s shortcomings also reflect the work of a lead singer who’s just starting to find her own voice. Without a band to grow ideas from seedlings into full-fledged songs, lyrical motifs fall flat. Williams makes admirable attempts to paint the difficult dissolution of love with nuance—“Inordinary” draws a striking connection between her marriage and her troubled childhood with equal parts sadness and strength. But she more often turns to platitudes, which the album’s sparse instrumentation places on full display. She has a knack for winking metaphors—a rabbit gnawing on a shotgun, an amputation without a tourniquet—but sometimes gets lost in her own cleverness, repeating phrases until they lose their potency. Her words get in the way of the texture of her voice, mixed so prominently that clumsy writing becomes impossible to ignore. The album’s penultimate song proves that rule by exception: With only a field recording and a piano, “Descansos” strikes a plaintive, contemplative note that suggests Williams might have even more to say as a composer and producer than solely as a lyricist.
FLOWERS for VASES’ second title, descansos, refers to markings placed at the side of the road in memoriam. It’s a fitting framework for Williams’ second solo record, which reflects on the death of her marriage without the ceremonial embellishment of a proper burial. It’s also the first album that feels entirely hers, one that only works outside of the framework of Paramore. “I can barely remember what it feels like to belong to myself,” she recalled thinking while writing the album. On the final track, she approaches the closest thing to a personal mantra: “No more music for the masses.” These aren’t songs for a crowd, but Williams seems finally ready to play for an audience of one.

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On their second album Not to Disappear, the indie folk trio Daughter have wisely ditched the notion that seriousness plus reverb equals profound art. The music is expansive and spangly, like staring down a deep well to glimpse a ripple of light on the water.

Not to Disappear

The English indie folk trio Daughter nestled into the void on 2013’s If You Leave, but on Not to Disappear, their second and better record, they fashion their own lifeline back out again. The debut was spacious and crystalline yet suffocating, somehow; the music, epic in its melancholy, made claims of a vast emotional experience that exceeded the scope of the lyrics. It didn’t help that Elena Tonra, a hushed singer in thrall to Jeff Buckley and Ian Curtis, was writing in an idiom of frozen hearts, heavy winters, and home-wrecking floods, metaphors as dead as her idols.
In the last three years, Tonra and the band have wisely ditched the notion that seriousness plus reverb equals profound art. You can hear the transformation on "Numbers," Not to Disappear’s lead track. Tonra opens with a deadpan jibe at a mystery antagonist–"Take the worst situations/ Make a worse situation"–then, after a pregnant pause, gets down to an unsympathetic commentary on hookup culture and its grubby allure. "I’ll wash my mouth but still taste you," she sighs, letting her implications linger, before serenely chanting, "I feel numb in this kingdom."
Recorded with Nicolas Vernhes, the esteemed Brooklyn producer, the music is expansive and spangly, like staring down a deep well to glimpse a ripple of light on the water. There’s a mix of nocturnal indie-pop, gothic post-punk, doomy shoegaze, chest-beating post-rock, and resplendent dream-pop, which all comes off as a great, stellar mush. Igor Haefeli’s guitars are devoutly atmospheric, while Remi Aguilella tends to drum like the National’s Bryan Devendorf, surging forth at the first opportunity, as if to race beyond the desolate soundscape’s frame.
The only sonic outlier is "No Care," a surprising nod to Arab Strap, speak-sung by an antsy narrator whose agency shrinks as she mollifies a manipulative partner. On a record dense with allusions to imminent motherhood, it bodes ill that every relationship is ruptured by insecurity ("To Belong"), undermined by emotional distance ("Alone / With You"), or both of the above, as on "No Care": "Oh, there has only been one time where we fucked, and I felt like a bad memory," Tonra sings. "How I wanted you to promise we would only ever make love/ But my mouth felt like I was choking, broken glass, so I just slept it off."
For all Not to Disappear’s forward strides, something remains of the debut’s pallor, and with it a niggling suspicion that, despite their commercial inferiority to the xx, Florence and the Machine, and even Foals, Daughter have no spicy condiments for those groups’ bread and butter. But if their five-year-plan isn’t to play catch-up with festival-bait big-leaguers, a song like "Doing the Right Thing," about the plight of an Alzheimer’s sufferer, suggests they have the legs to go somewhere else entirely. The song is earthy yet spectral, like an emboldened Hundred Waters, sung from the unique viewpoint of a dementia victim fully aware of her lapsing state. She drowns in lost memories–"I'll call out in the night for my mother/ But she isn't coming back for me"–yet remains privy to the big picture: "But you will not tell me that/ Cause you know it hurts me every time you say it." Concluding the song from in front of a television set, she sings that while "everyone’s in love, I just sit in silence."
If she’d been attuned to Not to Disappear, the narrator would know the appearance of love is often a veneer. It’s an instructive double-standard: Daughter’s music spans that gap between the very real drudgery of everyday life, and the more potent stories we tell ourselves when times are bleak.


On its charmingly homespun debut, the Montreal band plays slap-happy rock music that’s more about feeling the spirit than stressing over perfection.

Migration Magic

Since the early 1990s, the small town of Sackville, New Brunswick has been a hub of lo-fi, home-recorded indie rock. It was here that Julie Doiron launched the DIY label Sappy Records, spotlighting members of her band Eric’s Trip and their surrounding community before expanding into the annual SappyFest music festival. Sackville is also where Feeling Figures’ co-vocalists Zakary Slax and Kay Moon first crossed paths. For several years, they self-released songs on cassette under the name Dead Beat Poet Society, and the debut album from their new moniker has a charming homespun sensibility that sounds out of time.
The Olympia, Washington-based indie-rock institution K Records is a fitting home for Feeling Figures. Upon moving to Montreal, Slax met drummer Thomas Molander in a French language class and recruited bassist Joe Chamandy (Theee Retail Simps, Celluloid Lunch Records) to firm up the rhythm section. After scrapping the album’s initial sessions, Feeling Figures decamped to their rehearsal space and recorded Migration Magic live in one go. Revisiting older tunes from their Dead Beat Poet Society days and tossing in two covers, the group pulled together a slap-happy album that’s more about feeling the spirit than stressing over perfection.
The heavier songs written and sung by Slax sound strikingly different from the tender twee-pop tunes where Moon takes the lead. “Seek and Hide” slows down Feeling Figures’ feverish pace with clicking rim shots, before Moon’s solo acoustic number “You Were Young” strips things back even further. “I Should Tell You” foregoes guitars altogether, as Moon echoes the song’s winsome melodies on piano. When she admits “I’ve wasted a life/Trying not to pick up all the pieces/And spill them like Reese’s,” her sheepish delivery stands out like Moe Tucker’s songs for the Velvet Underground.
The songs written by Slax blur the line between indie-pop and garage-rock as they tumble toward his wigged-out guitar solos. When he shout-sings in unison with Moon on album closer “Remains,” the doubled power of their voices ups the hair-raising intensity. Slax switches up his delivery on “Sink,” with spoken-word vocals that pick up in the choruses like Ben Hozie from Bodega. On Migration Magic’s catchiest song, “Movement,” the verses sound like a lower-fi take on the Strokes, before gang vocals hit in the choruses. “I mystify myself,” they enunciate, asking an existential question: “Does my struggle speak to anyone else?”
The album’s two covers dip into disparate genres while preserving the band’s bedroom-pop intimacy. Harmonium’s “Pour Un Instant” is a rollicking homage that communicates a sense of mutual affection not often present in pastoral French prog. “Don’t Ever Let Me Know” is propelled by drum rolls around the kit, bringing the Bobby Fuller Four’s original into ’90s indie-rock territory. This broad appreciation of musical history proves they know the rules and how to break them. In the final moments of Migration Magic, Slax and Moon pose a simple plea: “If I can just be a stain on your memory/I will be complete.” With every listen, their slacker punk smudge continues to grow.


Created in a period of grieving, Danish electronic composer Villads Klint’s second album mimics the messiness of feelings in flux, pairing everyday sounds with hints of trance and Baroque.

Quiet Bloom

The structure of Quiet Bloom has more in common with a ballet or an opera than with pop music. On his second album as Minais B, Copenhagen composer Villads Klint values the unpredictability of emotion over neat stylistic resolution. Within a single track there might be several transitions, each one bouncing off the other in a frenetic call-and-response. There are clear leads—organ music, a pixelated take on trance, a devotional choir—but the storytelling is a law unto itself.
The music of Minais B’s 2017 debut album, Deep Care, skewed closer to “distroid,” a name that musicologist Adam Harper gave to a strain of post-internet music he described as “brutal and cybernetic.” Quiet Bloom is a very different kettle of fish. Following the death of a loved one, Klint created the album away from the city, on the coast of a Danish island. “It was my first time being totally alone for two weeks, and in the cold winter of Scandinavia,” he writes in the album notes. “It was a period of extreme moods for me, but the music came out.”
What that sounds like is sometimes a digital growl, a sharp inhalation, and a cloying harpsichord that’s gradually phased to the point of haziness (“Ceremony”). Two interludes, “Intermezzo 1” and “Intermezzo 2,” ground the album in a semblance of everyday life. The first features room hiss and mechanical rumbling and clicking, while the latter includes what could be the slam of a car door and the sweep of a brush on concrete. Against this pedestrian backdrop—the sound of life seemingly carrying on as normal—the album’s more mercurial moments take on greater meaning. On “Little Sun,” for example, a plucked synthetic string and resonant organ eke out some breathing space in a skeletal Baroque form before being momentarily drowned out by a demented trance arpeggio.
Trance music has become a popular source material for electronic artists concerned with reexamining and recontextualizing the dance-music languages of the late 20th century. For many of today’s young European producers, it’s the music of their childhood or the scene they just missed out on. While Lorenzo Senni’s approach to trance forfeits release, in thrall to endless ascent, Minais B zooms in so close that he cracks the lens. What’s refracted on “Where We Meet” is a crosshatch interpretation of a build complete with choral underpinnings, its surface ecstasy revealed to be a mishmash of desire and alienation. The reflex of Quiet Bloom is to simultaneously reach toward and away from itself; the kind of dance that dealing with loss demands.
Where the album really shines is when its ambiguous motion is given the space to run wild. The two longest tracks, ”Weaver” and “Magnolia,” unfold in a balletic display of potent gestures and dramatic twists and turns. Organs provide familiar sentimentality on both tracks, yet are spliced in such a way that they emancipate rather than overpower. Quiet Bloom does not deliver a tidy narrative about the processing of grief. What makes it such a riveting listen is that it allows each fluctuating feeling some time in the sun.


In the second volume in a series of free-flowing, ambient-tinged mini-albums, the composer—daughter of the late sitar virtuoso Pandit Ravi Shankar—seeks out a new vocabulary for her instrument.

Anoushka Shankar: Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn EP

For almost two decades, Anoushka Shankar has been on a mission to liberate the sitar from both the rigid strictures of the Indian classical tradition and the Orientalist cliches of hippie spirituality that the instrument often invokes in the West. She’s no iconoclast; Shankar continues to perform Hindustani classical music, including compositions by her father, the late Pandit Ravi Shankar. But for the London-born musician, who grew up between the UK, Delhi, and Los Angeles, that tradition represents just one of the many possibilities presented by the medieval stringed instrument.
Since her third studio album, 2005’s Rise, Shankar has explored ways to slip the sitar into new contexts. She has used the instrument to address contemporary social issues—the Syrian refugee crisis, or violence against women in India—and make grand arguments about the interconnectedness of different musical traditions. Last year, she embarked on a new project, one less focused on the outer world than the inner life of the mind: a trilogy of mini-albums, each recorded in a different space with different collaborators, interlinked yet capable of standing on their own. She set one condition for herself: to enter the studio with a blank slate, open to wherever the moment might take her. The series’ first installment, Chapter I: Forever, for Now, emerged from a single memory, an afternoon with her kids in the garden of her London home.
Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn picks up where its predecessor left off, moving from the warm, cozy intimacy of the late afternoon to the more ambiguous emotional landscape of the deepest night. In Shankar’s conception, the night is a sanctuary, a retreat from the indignities and psychic wounds of the day—a time for healing and contemplation. But with its shadows and all-encompassing darkness, the night also belongs to nightmares, bogeymen, and all sorts of things that go bump in the dark.
Largely written and recorded over a few days at composer and producer Peter Raeburn’s studio in California, the six tracks on Chapter II chart a journey through the night’s many iterations, leading up to the first gleam of daybreak. Best known for his award-winning film scores, Raeburn brings a strong cinematic sensibility to the production and arrangement. While Chapter I—produced by Arooj Aftab—was airy and minimalist, with each note blown up to cosmic proportions, the new record is more ambient and atmospheric, the sitar pulsing bright through layers of drones and electronics.
The dreamy synths and gently propulsive piano of “Pacifica” conjure a limitless horizon, over which Shankar’s sitar traces delicate, twilight-hued patterns. On “Offering,” reverb-drenched sitar notes unfurl and mutate. Three minutes in, a melody finally emerges, at first muted but slowly swelling in intensity and brightness, like consciousness emerging from meditation, carrying with it the memory of a connection to something greater.
“In the End”—a rework of a song Shankar and pianist Danny Keane first wrote for her 2017 score to the 1928 silent film Shiraz: A Romance in India—is suffused with the bone-deep melancholy that often strikes in the wee hours, the faint dysphoria of existence. On “Below the Surface,” melancholy transmutes into something more disquieting. Shankar’s effects-laden sitar buzzes ominously, like a swarm of locusts, or the swell of anxiety that precedes a panic attack.
Throughout, Shankar appears determined to write a new musical grammar for her instrument. She repurposes the sitar’s deep drone—an instantly recognisable signifier of Indian mysticism across the world—to create tense, atmospheric textures that recall the post-industrial unease of dark ambient. She subtly bends its notes into darkly sinuous shapes, shading its microtones in unfamiliar emotional color. On the found-sound-sampling “What Dreams Are Made Of,” her sitar is accented with the twang of desi-tinged Americana. On “Offering,” the instrument gleams and swirls like a perpetually modulating synth.
Her re-interpretation of the sitar is most evident in the climactic “New Dawn.” The song starts off slow and hypnotic, Shankar improvising on a single phrase over tender piano. Halfway through, another piano chimes in with accelerating ostinatos, raising the tempo. Raeburn and Shankar keep adding layers of sitar to the mix, riffs and motifs piling up with each bar. The track builds to a rousing crescendo of mythic proportions, a Glenn Branca-esque symphony of shimmer. Notes billow outwards, chasing the darkness like the sun’s first rays over the horizon. For Shankar, the passage from night to morning is more than just a metaphorical emotional journey; Chapter II also represents the dawning of a new day for the sitar.


Swedish electronic musician and singer Hannes Norrvide's dark post-punk minimal wave has the obsessive feel of something banged out in one demented trance. His debut, Growing Seeds, hits the same nagging sweet spot as the most hypnotically driving 8-bit music.

Growing Seeds

Lust for Youth feels neither lustful nor particularly youthful: The work of one Swedish guy holding down two or three notes on a Casio and declaiming tonelessly, like he's straining to make himself heard over a supermarket PA system, it feels about as sensual as a tomb. If it evokes any lust at all, it's the vampiric sort, as if Gary Oldman, in all his blade-licking, scenery-chewing, Frau Helga-wig sporting Bram Stoker's Dracula glory, had composed a minimal wave album for his beloved instead of crossing oceans of time. Its stylistic antecedents are pretty clear-- New Order, the Normal, and the earliest and most inchoate 1970s synth-pop experiments. But it feels very much like a keyhole peek at one man's private torment.
His name is Hannes Norrvide, and Growing Seeds has the obsessive feel of something banged out in one demented trance. The sound is corroded and thin, and some of the songs are so defaced by fuzz that they're barely legible. If you were scanning a car radio and landed on a station that sounded like "We Planted A Seed", you would grit your teeth and wait it out, seeing if the signal improved being plowing forward. It sounds uninviting on paper, but there's frustrating murk and there's haunting murk, and Growing Seeds is the second kind.
The limited palette works to the album's advantage. Listening to it, you feel pushed beneath the surface of something: It helps that Norrvide's fingers somehow always land on an instantly memorable four-note synth riff. The carpal-tunnel drive of "Champagne", in which two rudimentary earworms bounce off each other for four minutes, hits the same nagging sweet spot as the most hypnotically driving 8-bit music. The same goes for "Cover Their Faces", which manages to summon "Plainsong" grandeur with a tiny octave riff and tinny drum fill. The more time you spend in this flattened landscape, the more individual peaks rise up from it. Songs like "Neon Lights Appear" and "It's You" are synth bangers on a cellular level.
Over this digital blizzard, Norrvide drifts like the rumor of a lead singer. He's subdued, but it's the subdued of an emotional meltdown faintly overheard through three or four apartment walls. Behind the otherwise wordless blank space of "We Got Lust", you can faintly make out a woman's screams and sobs, an upsetting and affecting addition. Picking through the album to discern moments like this, like when Norrvide repeatedly gasps "Now...dream of you..." ("Modern Life"), makes them feel more precious for being hard-won. Whether or not this chilly despair is intentional or just a byproduct of the methods used to make it isn't clear; Norrvide told FACT Magazine that Growing Seeds is "about getting out of a depressive period and meeting new love." Which is a little mind-bending given the album's tone. But it's the atmosphere that keeps pulling me back to it, hoping to extract another clue this time around.


Led by singer/guitarist Lydia Lunch, the short-lived, NYC-based Teenage Jesus and the Jerks cultivated a visceral severity that redeemed its dearth of material. Compiling recordings from six shows — five in NYC and one in Toronto — Live 1977-1979 presents a convincing argument that stage Jerks might have been superior to studio Jerks.

Teenage Jesus & The Jerks: Live 1977-1979

Live 1977-1979

In the 94 minutes it takes to watch Blank City, director Celine Danhier’s 2009 No Wave documentary, one could convulse through the entirety of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks’ studio discography multiple times. Led by singer/guitarist Lydia Lunch, the short-lived, NYC-based Jerks cultivated a visceral severity that redeemed its dearth of material. Lunch's caterwaul sounded dangerous and vulnerable, and she sang as though choking words free — wounded, defiant, and quaking with a restrained sense of vengeance made all the more impressive by Lunch’s youth during this period. The band, meanwhile, was the rock’n’roll equivalent of an active blender full of gravel.
Compiling recordings from six shows — five in NYC and one in Toronto — Live 1977-1979 presents a convincing argument that stage Jerks might have been superior to studio Jerks. For these sets, Lunch and drummer Bradly Field were the linchpins in a lineup that at times included James Chance of the Contortions on saxophone and future Sonic Youth drummer Jim Sclavunos on bass. On Live, they traded in the intimate miserablism of their singles for something even uglier: a volley of abrupt, interrogative blurts. In the face of audience indifference—crowd chatterers at the January 17, 1979 Max’s Kansas City and November 4, 1978 CBGB’s gigs deserve footnote credit alongside Live mastering engineer Weasel Walter —the Jerks went for broke, urgent, persistent, and stridently staccato. “Orphans” surfaces here twice in virulent form, with Lunch’s serrated guitars kiting and spiralling around Field’s brute thwomp. The band doubled down on the already confrontational fury of “The Closet” by lurching forth in a glowering lockstep, every spat syllable hitting like a fist on a locked door.
Within and beyond the context of “The Closet,” “the size of this room feels like jail” stands as a revelatory lyric. With songs often clocking in at around 75 seconds and its non-chronological tracklist, Live can feel like a veritable blizzard of Jerks, as insular as the scene surrounding the band. Concurrently, Lunch was playing with Beirut Slump as the Jerks approached a late 1979 implosion; solo, collaborative, theater, and literary projects exploded in myriad directions shortly thereafter. The beast that incubated Lunch’s burgeoning voice could never hope to contain it.


The British-Nigerian rapper’s second album is as ambitious, technical, and deeply felt as his first. It is sure to keep his star on the rise.

We’re All Alone in This Together

Throughout the 1990s, genocidal conflict tore through the former Yugoslavia. People in the region fled for safety; many arrived on UK shores. At least one study found that those resettled in Britain suffered more trauma than those who had remained in the Balkans. In 1948, a passenger liner called the Empire Windrush arrived in London from the Caribbean. The ship’s name became synonymous with a generation of immigrants ushered over to Britain by its former colonial governors to plug labor shortages resulting from the Second World War. Seventy years later, in one of the biggest British political scandals in recent memory, it was revealed that the UK government had wrongly deported scores of Windrush migrants, stripping them of their homes and identities. They await their reparations.
These are not subjects that warrant light treatment. The British-Nigerian rapper Dave studies all three simultaneously, threading narratives with gravitas and filmic flair in a shade over five-and-a-half minutes on “Three Rivers”—a highlight on his towering second album, We’re All Alone in This Together—managing to comb in discussion of domestic violence, depression, and an oblique confrontation of the current UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, who last year admitted that her own immigration policies might have prevented her parents from moving to the UK in the 1960s. It is a feat of technical prowess, historical acuity, musical derring-do, and one that Dave makes look easy. No wonder millions hang on his words.
Since releasing his debut album Psychodrama in 2019, Dave’s star has barely faltered. He’s bagged pretty much every major musical accolade the UK has to offer, almost overshadowed Stormzy’s headline slot at Glastonbury 2019 after inviting a young fan on stage to trade bars with him, and called the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, a racist on live TV during a spine-tingling performance of “Black” at the Brit Awards (one Labour Party politician called it the “best political speech” they’d seen in a decade). His activity outside of music has only propelled him further and higher. He took a role in Netflix’s Drake-assisted reboot of Top Boy, the gritty UK series depicting austerity, power struggles, and drug wars in a fictional East London. He was with Daniel Kaluuya when the actor picked up his Oscar this April (Kaluuya crops up offering words of advice across the album). He was there, lurking quietly, when Kaluuya, along with Giggs, Damson Idris, and others generated a semi-viral moment by debuting as the “DSS” or “Dark Skinned Society”—doing nothing more than hanging out in the West Coast sunshine. In short, his feet have barely touched the ground. So the challenge he faces with We’re All Alone in This Together—maintaining his position as a freshly-installed spokesperson for his generation—has only swollen. Dave confronts it head on.
We’re All Alone in This Together begins with the pips of a film reel cue mark and follows a cinematic three-act structure. The opening action sequences—rap flexing churned with rage-fuelled tirades on social inequalities—slide into scene-setting Afrobeats and alté boogie assisted by fellow Nigerians WizKid and Boj, before winding up with elongated stretches of searching inner monologues that reach for some closure. Opener “We’re All Alone” offers a microcosm of this arc. A gut-wrenching switch midway through—punchy drums evaporate to solo piano as Dave says, “I got a message from a kid on Sunday morning/Said he don’t know what to do and that he’s thinking of killing himself”—comes after the rapper is done swaggering through his favorite worldly foods, holiday destinations, and car brands. The shift might seem crass if it wasn’t for Dave’s willingness to open up in return: “Me and him got more in common than he thinks.” This moment introduces the path he will tread across the album’s 12-track, hour-long narrative, diluting braggadocio with heavy doses of reality. On “Survivor’s Guilt,” the album’s final song, he flips a UK rap cliché of the drug-dealing motorway trip into a moment of extreme vulnerability, as his crippling anxiety leaves him “crying in the driver’s seat.”
There are a few constants throughout the album’s broad arc. Dave’s wordplay is, by this point, unrivaled. Whether running through his watch collection or picking apart immigration policy, nearly every line packs multiple meanings. He doubles and triples up on entendres. The other recurring element is Dave’s piano which, again, twinkles under boasts just as reliably as emotional breakdowns. With such grand ambitions for an album, these spinal elements—just as Psychodrama was structured around a fictional therapy session—are more than necessary.
At moments, the record sags under its own weight, especially in the final third, from the James Blake-conducted and ShaSimone-featuring “Both Sides of a Smile” to the forensic, 10-minute self-examination of “Heart Attack.” Both tracks could support essays of their own. Their weighty presence might be aided, as in all great cinema, by moments of levity. The snippets of conversation lifted from studio sessions—reflecting the type of reasoning that takes place in Black barbershops throughout London and beyond—offer a binding agent. But there’s a lot to hold in here. Dave’s mother’s tearful exhortations at the end of “Heart Attack” are as close to a pressure release as the album’s closing sequences get.
This heaviness isn’t strictly reserved for international politicking. Dave frequently trains his pen on issues closer to home. He has a unique ability to explain and contextualize the concerns of the young and marginalized, without preaching or patronizing. Two years since his last album, many of the struggles he addresses are the same. London is on course for its worst year of teenage killings since 2008, and on “Heart Attack” Dave tussles with his powerlessness to affect change, along with the guilt and pressures he feels as a second-generation immigrant (“I think back to my youth and I was so ungrateful/How many of our parents had dreams they abandoned/So they could put food on the table?”). The best communicators show, rather than tell. Dave is on his way to mastering this subtle distinction.
For being just 23, Dave raps as if he’s lived several lifetimes—perhaps because, like so many of the immigrant kids he writes for and about, he’s had to grow up faster than most. That’s not to suggest that younger artists aren’t capable of insight or potency, but rather that Dave still has so much to show the world. The choral posse cut “In The Fire” brings together multiple generations of the UK’s still-blossoming and belatedly-appreciated rap scene, and crowns him as its new ringleader. We’re All Alone in This Together isn’t Dave’s magnum opus. But the best thing is, he’s just getting started. We’re barely past the opening credits.

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Under the name Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Owen Ashworth spent over a decade giving voice to the anxieties of young misfits with battery-powered keyboards serving as his primary accompaniment. He rebranded himself as Advance Base in 2011, and the best moments on his newest album find melancholy taking a backseat to lucid, unguarded sincerity.

Nephew in the Wild

Growing up isn't easy. Just ask Owen Ashworth. Under the name Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Ashworth spent over a decade giving voice to the anxieties of young misfits with battery-powered keyboards serving as his primary accompaniment. His best songs during these years were miniature bildungsromans, richly detailed portraits of characters fighting to achieve adulthood despite personal failings, everyday struggles, and diminished horizons. By the end of his run as CFTPA, this tension between immaturity and responsibility had reached its logical apex: parenthood. The songs on CFTPA's 2009 swan song*,* Vs. Children, read like cautionary tales*—*it's an album populated by absent fathers, abandoned mothers, and the children hanging in the balance.
Having all but exhausted the artistic possibilities built into the Casiotone name, Ashworth rebranded himself as Advance Base in 2011 and set to work de-modernizing his sound. He's now more likely to reach for a Fender Rhodes over a Casio SK-1 and has been studying time-tested pop songcraft, as his recent covers of classic rock and gospel artists attest. His debut as Advance Base, 2012's A Shut-In's Prayer, felt like a natural extension of his previous work, 10 short vignettes soundtracked by charmingly homespun downer-pop.
Nephew in the Wild continues along this same path, employing the warm sonics of vintage gear in service of Ashworth's storytelling. Many of the longstanding hallmarks of his sound can be found here*—twinkling melodies, sustained minor chords—*though everything feels a bit looser this time around. Ashworth leans on electric piano for most of the lead parts, with guitar, autoharp, synthesized mellotron, and the occasional analog drum machine filling things out. The most striking change, however, is Ashworth's vocals. After years of singing with a flat intonation that gave his voice the tenor of a resigned sigh, on many of Nephew in Wild's songs, Ashworth pushes himself to be more expressive, with results that are more tuneful, if still every bit as charmingly gruff.
Musically, Nephew in the Wild feels like a logical progression from Ashworth's past work; lyrically, however, it isn't always as clear of a step forward. Most of the album's narratives focus on flinty Midwesterners coping with decidedly adult problems: addiction, jealousy, dead-end jobs. These characters feel slightly out of reach for Ashworth and their stories often lack the depth and novelistic detail for which he's known. The post-collegiate malaise of CFTPA characters felt real*—*you could imagine them pulling up a barstool next to you and unburdening themselves of their troubles. By way of comparison, the characters on Nephew in the Wild never quite come into focus.
But then there's "Kitty Winn", the album's final and best song. Over a simple, lullaby-like melody, Ashworth details the joys of married life and parenthood as he looks back on the recklessness of his youth. The song is a clear outlier in Ashworth's catalog; here melancholy takes a backseat to lucid, unguarded sincerity. Summing up the difference between then and now, Ashworth gingerly sings, "I'm not out looking for something/ I haven't found/ You won't see me around/ I've got a family now." He sounds like a man who's managed to navigate life's pitfalls, arriving at the contentment that so often eludes his characters. On "Kitty Winn" it feels like Ashworth finds his footing as Advance Base, delivering a song that's as affecting as his best work even if there's little that's "painfully alone" about it. Growing up might not be easy but it seems like Owen Ashworth is getting the hang of it.


On his collaboration with Kenny Beats, the Miami rapper pays tribute to unbridled rap personas like DMX and ODB.

Unlocked

Rappers love Kenny Beats. They can pull up to his L.A. studio, find a comfy spot in the room to roll up a little weed, and wait for the producer to make a beat perfectly tailored to their taste. In minutes, the Connecticut-born beatmaker will have their fantasies cooked up—maybe they’ll even get a comical social media post or their own episode of his YouTube series The Cave. After leaving the touring EDM duo LOUDPVCK, he immersed himself in hip-hop, and now his range is nearly limitless. Kenny can make hyphy Bay Area anthems for ALLBLACK; he can capture the headbanging punk-inspired rage of Rico Nasty; Sada Baby can hit his best gyrating two-step to one of his funky Detroit instrumentals; his West Coast beats are breezy enough for 03 Greedo’s hair to sway in the Cali wind. Kenny Beats can do it all.
For Denzel Curry, blurring regional lines is the norm. As a teenager he was a member of Raider Klan, a South Florida-based rap clique obsessed with Memphis crunk and Houston screw. But even as he ventured outside of his area code, the throughline of his music has always been his Miami home. In 2019, Curry released ZUU, which used his city’s rich musical history as a foundation: beat breakdowns ready for an Uncle Luke night at a strip club, grimy Trick Daddy-influenced verses, and a guest spot from Rick Ross, rapping about cocaine. Unlocked is a curveball; for the first time he completely upends his roots, with the help of Kenny Beats.
Unlocked sounds like a descendant of outer-borough New York City rap sometime between Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and EL-P’s Fantastic Damage. Over the course of the brief eight-track album, Curry’s appreciation for the era comes across as genuine. He retrofits his manic and messy Miami Gardens-bred rapping style into cadences that pay homage to unhinged hip-hop personalities like DMX and Ol’ Dirty Bastard. On “So.Incredible.pkg,” maybe the album’s best, he says, “It’s the man of the hour/Super confident and my clothes yell it louder,” not quite reaching the drunken chaos of the beloved ODB, but coming close.
Curry’s energy is unpredictable enough to prevent the homage from feeling stale. Similar to early DMX, Curry’s gifted at causing mayhem while remaining fully in control. “Lay_Up.m4a” gradually builds to the disarray, delivered over a Kenny standout that’s grim enough for an after hours bus ride to the deepest corner of Queens. “Take_It_Back_v2” blends his slowed vocals with chipmunk-high ones, a refreshingly cartoonish track that fits alongside the short animated film released with the album.
But for the most part, Denzel Curry and Kenny Beats are on different wavelengths. Where Curry is chaotic, Kenny is too neat. The producer approaches the intro to the project like he’s following a step-by-step guide titled “How to make a RZA beat”—the video clip sample is placed too cleanly and the beat drop is glossier than anything that would ever leave RZA’s mid-’90s basement studio.“‘Cosmic’.m4a” wants to capture the grime of New York’s former underground, but it’s smooth around the edges instead of sounding like it was made in the sewer. “So.Incredible.pkg” features sharp rapping by Curry, but the production is like an early Pro Era record without the feeling of teenage sincerity and discovery.
Any excuse to hear Denzel rapping right now is a good one. But Unlocked feels like it was made out of convenience—like going to Chipotle instead of the corner Mexican spot because it’ll save you 20 minutes. It’s good, sure. Curry is rapping his ass off. But Kenny Beats’ production isn’t anything new. There are no imperfections, no colors outside of the lines, and with that, it misses some of the heart that makes regional rap special.


The loops and layers of the Berlin-based cellist’s solo album evoke resonant emotions that could afford to linger.

Heliopause

Since she started recording in 2007, Anne Müller has accrued a solemn, emotionally resonant discography. Trained at Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and busy as a symphonic cellist for the early part of her career, Müller has pivoted in recent years towards the modern classical/ambient axis. You can hear her adept string work across a series of collaborations with Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, pianist Lubomyr Melnyk, and singer-songwriter Agnes Obel. Heavy-hearted, soundtrack-ready, and dramatic as those albums can be, Müller’s debut solo effort Heliopause reveals a subtle sense of humor: How else to introduce a solo album than with a piece titled “Being Anne”?
Müller is deeply invested in this music: She wrote, arranged, recorded, and produced Heliopause. So what does “Being Anne” sound like? If it’s a snapshot of her interior state, it’s a tricky place to be. Her main instrument remains at center, augmented by drums and a broken piano turned into a percussion instrument. A threshing churn of strings, tingling pizzicatos, thunderous low end, a tock like a doomsday clock: The many layers and loops evoke dread, hope, anticipation, and hurry. Müller’s skill is to keep them as the jumble they are, each sensation visceral but fleeting and increasingly hard to differentiate.
“Solo? Repeat!” returns her to the more familiar territory of solo cello, with solemn opening notes that recall the iconic cello suites of Bach. But much as one may enjoy “Suite No. 1 in G Major”—as well as Müller’s ability to impart such history in 21st-century collaborations—the looped bass throb winds up feeling like a remix. As it plays out, it nudges the piece into luxury car commercial territory.
With “Nummer 2,” Müller again looks to the history of her instrument and offers up her own variation, this time on the cello’s role in a minimal composition like Steve Reich’s “Violin Phase.” It’s not a rigorous tribute, but the slowly accruing layers convey that effect, adding a steady thwack to give it an underlying pulse. As it resolves, one only wishes she had given it a little more room to breathe.
Heliopause takes its name from the region where the sun’s wind ceases to reach, the absolute fringe of our solar system that leads into interstellar space. For an artist who has spent most of her musical life in collaboration with either large groups or one other musician, it’s a fitting metaphor for solo explorations. The title track is the most resonant of the set, conveying the disembodying feel of zero gravity with slow cello and shimmering electronics. At just over five minutes, one longs for more space to drift and luxuriate in its beauty. Once you’ve reached the edge of the solar system, why rush back to Earth?

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Ryley Walker is one of the leading young stylists in a crowded instrumental guitar scene, and on his debut, he aims to create a record that joins his folk-rock heroes: Van Morrison, Pentangle, Mike Cooper, and more.

Primrose Green

In his quarter-century, Ryley Walker seems to have made definitive decisions about what qualifies as a worthy influence: Van Morrison records made between 1968 and 1974, Jackson C. Frank, Pentangle, and the recently reissued early works of Mike Cooper are all among the examples. On Primrose Green, he embraces those inspirations without wrestling with them. He lugs their aged weight around as signs of good taste and his self-proclaimed place in a historical lineage. Though Walker comes from a mid-sized city in Illinois, he sings as if he bounced between the British Isles as a kid. Alongside his shoplifted accent, he apes Morrison’s trademark grunts and melismas.
Make no mistake: Walker is a prodigious talent. He’s one of the leading young stylists in a crowded instrumental guitar scene. He possesses the light touch of Bert Jansch, the unbottled energy of Peter Walker, and the musical erudition of John Fahey. And he has a Miles Davis-like capability to surround himself with astounding musicians, from early collaborator Daniel Bachman to the band of Chicago jazz firecrackers who not only support him on Primrose Green but also supply many of its best moments. Walker is versatile, too, with a chameleonic quality that allows him to slip into ragged electric blues and bucolic acoustic reveries with equal ease. Of all the songwriters trying their hand at this revivalist approach during the last decade, including Steve Gunn, Hiss Golden Messenger, and Sharon Van Etten, Walker is the most natural and enviable.
The band he built for Primrose Green is a stirring, captivating ensemble, too, the kind of group that could jam for an uninterrupted hour and never lose an audience’s attention or its own freewheeling focus. During the extended introduction of "Love Can Be Cruel", for instance, they delight in the space between folk-rock form and jazz-band freedom. Heavy acoustic strumming, sharp electric guitar and twinkling keyboards dart around a deep rhythm, working into a frenzy until the song approaches the ecstasy of a raga. "On the Banks of the Old Kishwaukee" depends upon another stunning groove built by drummer Frank Rosaly and bassist Anton Hatwitch. Walker wires a moaning blues theme into the beat, suggesting the wonderful roots-rock patience of American Beauty-era Grateful Dead. The band sizzles during "Sweet Satisfaction", dips and dives during "Same Minds", and charges into vibraphone-and-bass bedlam during "Summer Dress".
But the trouble comes with Walker—the songwriter and singer, not the instrumentalist. For someone so obsessed with classic troubadours, he has a damning disregard for his own songs. He over-sings almost every part of this record, trying to match his heroes with an inadequate instrument. The screamed lover-boy exhortations of "Summer Dress" are counterproductive at best, copycatting at worst. He treats every written syllable of "Sweet Satisfaction" like a chance to slur a half-dozen of them, stretching words until it’s easier to ignore them. Walker’s lyrics read like a set of unfinished end-rhyme exercises by a college student who has just discovered the Beats. Smoking grass at night makes him feel "alright"; leaving his love, however cruel, would make him into a "fool."
For a point of contrast, see "Griffiths Buck Blues", the one instrumental number on Primrose Green. Over a harmonium drone, Walker musters pure energy and expression with only his guitar. As he starts and stops, slows and sprints, he communicates dread and unease with the conviction his voice lacks.
The extensive biography that accompanies Primrose Green positions it as "an album of a sort we haven’t seen since the 1970s"—a bit of description perhaps too on the nose, as these 10 songs are acts of pure creative anachronism and affectation. The shape of Walker’s voice and the twists and turns of his band reanimate a specific aesthetic without adding much more than the tools of modern production. While Primrose Green is a great statement for a '70s freak-folk cosplayer, I just hope it’s not a career-defining one for Walker.


The mid-'90s Memphis band Grifters wrote songs that sounded like smart conversations you wished you could contribute to, inside jokes you wanted to be let it on. This was their most bracing statement.

Crappin’ You Negative

Ever since Jeff Buckley was claimed by the Mississippi River in 1997, an entire cottage industry has cropped up to give us greater insight into his enigmatic talent, which left behind one perfect, timeless full-length album and much speculation about what could’ve been. But now that the vaults have been thoroughly scraped for every last improvised Smiths cover, a recent online initiative invites us to get to know Buckley at the most intimate level. Over at jeffbuckleycollection.com, you can virtually thumb through his personal vinyl archive as if you were hanging out on his living-room rug with a glass of lilac wine. However, in the jump from Philip Glass to Guided by Voices, a favorite band is missing, one that Buckley praised in the pages of Rolling Stone and eagerly pitched to the radio-station programmers he encountered on the Grace* *promo circuit. Perhaps the absence has to do with the fact the group in question rose up in the early ’90s, and Buckley only owned their music on CD. In any event, the oversight is all too appropriate—after all, the Grifters are used to being left out of canons.
The Grifters were the sort of group your record-store clerk would recommend if they saw you walking up to the register with a copy of Slanted and Enchanted or Bee Thousand—a band for braver souls willing to dig deeper into the dirt. They were, in many respects, a typical ’90s indie-rock act. Their sound was a Memphis-brewed melange of overlapping aesthetics: the fuzz-blasted melodicism of Guided by Voices, the crooked hooks of Pavement, the hoot ‘n’ holler hysterics of Jon Spencer, the dirty-needle boogie of Royal Trux. But at the center of that Venn diagram, the Grifters staked their own uncharted turf: a post-modernist, pulp-fictional universe populated by cool jerks, mambo kings, dragon ladies, and other mysteries. Even at their most ferocious, the Grifters carried themselves with an air of Rat Pack sophistication—their cryptic songs sounded like smart conversations you wished you could contribute to and inside jokes you wanted to be let it on. This is a band whose idea of an opening line is “Well, I swear, I never meant to leave you tied up to a train”—and their peculiar personality is perfectly encapsulated by that discomfiting mix of callousness and concern.
The Grifters weren’t exactly obscure in their day—beyond Buckley’s vocal endorsements, their records were reviewed in all the major music mags (leading to a two-album run on Sub Pop), and their association with Memphis’ Easley McCain Recording studio helped make it an Abbey Road-esque destination for A-list indie-rockers in the ’90s. But they never crossed over to the realm of Leno appearances, 120 Minutes rotation, and Calvin Klein ads like those aforementioned peers. As such, the Grifters don’t really have a legacy today, probably because their music is too scrambled and combustible to easily imitate. Their impact is felt most acutely close to home: In Memphis outsider-rock lore, the Grifters are the spiritual link between Big Star and Goner Records. Tellingly, their recent, sporadic spate of reunion dates was prompted by their participation in the 2013 documentary Meanwhile in Memphis: Sound of a Revolution. And, in keeping with that regional focus, some of the band’s pre-Sub Pop catalogue is now being brought back to market via Mississippi’s Fat Possum Records.
While 1993’s One Sock Missing thrust the Grifters to the topsoil of America’s lo-fi underground (complete with self-explanatory anthems like “She Blows Blasts of Static”), the band would carve out their own unique groove on 1994’s Crappin’ You Negative, where the battery of bassist Tripp Lamkins and drummer Stan Gallimore busted through the scuzzy surface with Zeppelin-esque might. Like Buckley, the Grifters had an unabashed affinity for the blues—a sound that had been all but vanquished from indie rock during the post-hardcore ’80s. Where Buckley channeled the blues’ eternal sadness, The Grifters adopted its slide-riff sleaziness and feral heat. But the Grifters were no blues-rock band—they were too compulsive to let their feet get stuck in that quicksand foundation.
Thanks to David Shouse and Scott Taylor’s good-cop/bad-cop dynamic, their songs had a consistently unsettled quality, marked by duelling melodies, out-of-sync harmonies and jarring aesthetic juxtapositions. Crappin’ standouts like “Maps of the Sun,” “Get Outta That Spaceship & Fight Like a Man,” and “Holmes” may come slathered in juke-joint grease, but Shouse’s arch, Bryan Ferry-esque vocals redirect them toward the cosmos. And while Taylor sings with a more typical Midwestern twang, his manic energy steers revved-up rockers like “Black Fuel Incinerator” into fiery, at times frightening chaos.
But Crappin’ You Negative’s explosive outbursts are tempered by serene lo-fi interstitials, and a pair of balladic set-pieces—the distortion-caked despair of “Felt-Tipped Over” and desolate desert twang of “Junkie Blood”—that preview the more refined songcraft Shouse would showcase in his post-Grifters band Those Bastard Souls. And as if to reward us for indulging their every whim, the Grifters’ send us off with the adrenalized, straight-ahead power-pop of “Cinnamon”, though, naturally, even this shot of sweetness is laced with poison: “fee-fee-fi-fi-fo-fum/I smell the blood of an Englishman.”
The Grifters would go on to write more structurally sound pop songs on 1996’s Sub Pop debut Ain’t My Lookout, but Crappin’ You Negative remains the best, most bracing showcase of what made the band so strange and special: the sudden pendulum swings between class and crass, between somber, tape-hissed meditations and outrageous lounge-act theatrics, between skronky Beefheartian disintegration and arena-ready rock-outs. As the early-’90s lo-fi revolution proved, any band of Tascam amateurs can make a racket. But in its violent vacillations between rock ‘n’ roll tradition and treason, Crappin’ You Negative is a reminder that one must first know the rules of rock ‘n’ roll before you can properly break them.


The Books member returns to familiar terrain, but his drifting electronic mood pieces are too often riddled with diaristic scribblings and nihilistic asides that keep the listener at arm’s length.

You Fucken Sucker

As one half of the the Books, Paul de Jong was responsible for some of the early aughts’ coziest, stoniest reveries. On albums like Thought for Food and The Lemon of Pink, the folktronica duo attracted a cult following with warm audio collages that stitched together left-field hip-hop, melancholic minimalism, spoken word, and emo’s self-seriousness into an expansive mishmash. Their sound was tailor-made for college students: a wide-eyed, world un-weary affirmation of every late-night dorm debate and weedy epiphany. It expressed a nostalgia for the present moment, a sense of trembling fragility and poignancy that can seem indelibly real yet rarely lasts once one joins the workforce.
On his new solo record, You Fucken Sucker, de Jong returns to this familiar terrain of proggy flourishes, fingerpicked guitar, and unhurried jam sessions woven into intricate electronic mosaics and drifting mood pieces. This should be manna from heaven for Books devotees. But the album suffers from a solipsistic haziness, struggling to maintain that youthful magic. If his duo soundtracked a time of heady self-discovery, Sucker is trapped, years later, in the dull roar of a hangover.
Starting with its title, Sucker fixates on futility, immobility and the grinding frustrations of making it through the day. The album is framed as navigating “personal tragedy and emotional fatigue,” but it does little to transmute that pain into something meaningful for the audience. Instead, it freely dumps diaristic scribblings and nihilistic asides and asks the listener to sift for meaning.
Take opener “Embowelment,” which rolls out with energized percussion and impressively swerving melodic interplay. Less than 90 seconds in, it unleashes an unearned primal-scream session. Unceremoniously plopped into the mix and delivered with a minimum of skill or precision, it neatly illustrates one of the album’s central rubs. For every nuanced compositional zig, there’s a sloppy, half-baked zag waiting around the bend.
Action and inaction are recurring themes. “Doings” critiques self-help slogans—“Keep in mind that whatever you’re doing, it’s part of your doing”—then gradually sinks into hopelessness: “When you’re dead, you’re done.” It segues right into “Dimples,” which continues the same theme: “I don’t enjoy what I’m doing/It has all been done before.” Even the winding melody is intoned in monosyllabic tones of do-do-do. On “Doomed,” we get “I can’t do anything” before an overeager chorus of “Fuck you up your ass” and clipped dog barks. This kind of despondency can be fertile artistic ground, but de Jong doesn’t, well, do that much with it, preferring to wallow in the mire. From time to time he’ll jump into action and bring in some movement with high-speed scalar runs or a deft turnaround, but these accents and asides feel like the spasms of energy that punctuate an otherwise crushing depression.
The two tracks that most overtly succumb to those blank, closed-circuit comforts of despondence are respectively the strongest and weakest on the album. “Pipe Dream” offers four and a half minutes of low-key synthesizer bells that drift without melody, momentum, or apparent development; it’s the only time where de Jong lays back and lets the music do the talking. As unambitious as a day spent hiding in bed, it nonetheless engages in a way nothing else on Sucker does. But at the close of the LP, “Breaking Up” attempts a cringeworthy confrontation. A woman screams snippets of dialogue atop some inconsequential noodling. “There’s a girl in a bed,” and “You’re disgusting” give way to “Mad, mad, mad, mad… sad or glad” and “Good better best.” Hardly harrowing, these feel less like catharsis than a drunken tantrum from next door, or a sub-par student theater group. Suddenly we’re back in college, but de Jong is no longer the super-smart, shroomy Derrida fan across the hall. Looking at the title again, one wonders who he thinks the “sucker” is? Is it de Jong, the victim of some unnamed and devastating deception, or is it others who are able to see hope where he sees only despair? Either way, having brought us into the heart of his darkness, we’re left with precious little to guide us back into the light.


This new release from Italian producer Lory D compiles and digitizes five recent EPs, previously only available on vinyl. It’s a behemoth document of organic, shapeshifting techno.

Strange Days

“Where’s your bassline? Do you know?” asks a robotic, feminine voice on Lory D’s “Bass Bam.” For a techno artist obsessed with the squiggly, brain-melting potential of the Roland TB-303 Bassline synthesizer, the question is rhetorical; acidic basslines are at the core of the veteran Italian producer’s repertoire, along with booming 4/4 kick drums and a deceptively minimal approach to composition. For over two decades, Lory D (aka Lorenzo D’Angelo) has carved his own space as an unsung hero of club music, releasing destructive dancefloor tracks that have quietly slipped under the radar of the techno mainstream. But since 2011, D’Angelo has found a home on the Glasgow label Numbers, releasing a series of five EPs titled Strange Days Vol. 1-5. They’ve now been compiled and digitized for a wider release: a snapshot of organic, shapeshifting techno that still sounds furiously futuristic.
D’Angelo’s productions reflect an immediacy and grittiness that belie the precisely tuned instruments in his arsenal. While many of his tracks loop repeatedly, or eschew a traditional sense of melody, D’Angelo’s capacity to wring out unexpected rhythms and slippery mutations from his drum machines and synthesizers is consistently surprising. He’s as much a peak-time performer as he is a machine-manipulator, with subtle flourishes of DJ-style pullbacks and stuttering, lurching effects—but it never obscures the human touch behind his tracks. With every break in sequence and groove, the steely, overdriven machines offer a glimpse past the circuitry, into the mind of a techno wizard.
While Strange Days offers expertly executed club music, not every turn is smooth. The filter sweeps on the mangled “Acidattak,” for example, retain some clicky high frequencies, twitching in the background while the kick drum keeps the track moving with pummeling force. It’s imperfect yet honest, and only bolsters the off-the-cuff raw style that D’Angelo owns so well. The following track, “Ostia Girl,” shows a more particular approach to the use of effects, even if it means settling on a completely disorienting and nearly undanceable take. Atop a simple 808 beat, D’Angelo stutters his drums and slices a vocal sample, mutating and scorching it.
While other tracks like “Acix9999” or the trance-leaning “Sq11” feel bombastic and densely packed, D’Angelo’s acid maintains a laser-sharp focus, offering little more than minute changes to the mix and scrupulously adjusted parameters. The stepping, subterranean bass on “Deep Acoustic” leaves barely anything there above the weighty throb save a tight hi-hat, fleshy clap, and whispery atmosphere. D’Angelo lets the beat coast for almost eight minutes without change, and it’s one of the strongest, most haptic tracks in his catalog. The same goes for “grn-HF,” a slice of techy dub that is both punchy and wistful, as its simple string motif softens the hard-edges of his booming drums.
Operating with the mindset of a live performer, and boasting decades of experience in production, Lory D makes music that is highly functional in the hands of a DJ; his tracks are tailor made for club play. Just under two hours long, Strange Days is a behemoth document and doesn’t go down easily in one single take. But for DJs and fans of warped and wacky acid techno, Lory D unequivocally operates at the apex of the style. Heavy, precise, and exhilarating, the beauty of Strange Days is defined by its own dark and twisted terms.


"The Best Show on WFMU" is a cult phenomenon, but nothing about The Best of the Best Show feels closed off or for-fans-only, even given an overstuffed deluxe-package treatment that feels aimed directly at the diehards.

Scharpling & Wurster: The Best of the Best Show

The Best of the Best Show

Newbridge, the fictional New Jersey suburb invented by Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster, is a town run on hubris and populated by people who either don't know or refuse to believe that they're deluded failures. That blend of reliable comedy tropes can drive inspiration for a long time, and when Tom Scharpling announced in 2013 that "The Best Show on WFMU" was coming to an end, the general consensus was that it was going out on top. Scharpling's alternately cranky and enthusiastic rapport with his callers and the inspired regular-Joe insight of the monologues woven in with them demonstrated his mastery of the radio comedy format, while the extended bits Scharpling did with Superchunk drummer and top-flight weirdo Jon Wurster made it the stuff of legend. This was the kind of phenomenon that sustained a more-or-less-weekly show over 12-plus years, which means their "greatest hits" collection is a sixteen-disc, 20-plus hour box set—with a bonus USB stick that includes another 4 ¾-hours' worth of material—that still could be described as "scraping the surface."
That's a lot of mileage to get out of just two people, though the trick is that these people actually represent multitudes. Wurster's weirdly sympathetic call-in characters, co-created and co-written with Scharpling, are exercises in gradual-reveal lunacy that ramp up a conversation until both Scharpling and the listener are left repeating Wurster's ludicrous claims ("you are two inches tall") and malaprops ("laser beans") with a bewildered disbelief. Over the course of a call that can stretch past the 20- or 30-minute mark, a friendly conversation mutates into a series of escalating threats, an arrogant display of untouchability that eventually crumbles to reveal the hapless loser beneath, or, as the origin-point "Rock, Rot & Rule" perfectly revealed, a self-proclaimed expert revealing just how arbitrary and flimsy his knowledge really is. It's comedy that breaks down just how funny it can be to hear somebody with way too much self-confidence obliviously dig his own grave.
It's a cult phenomenon, but nothing about The Best of the Best Show feels closed off or for-fans-only, even given an overstuffed deluxe-package treatment that feels aimed directly at the diehards. The diehards might even find an excuse or two to gripe about omissions (where's "The Chippert Report" and its daring exposé of Davenport, Iowa's "toilet rock" scene?), but what's included is definitive and varied enough to draw in both entry-level listeners and longtime fans who snapped up all their previous collections on Stereolaffs.
Of course there are usual suspects and recurring characters. New Jersey-defaming hoagie enthusiast Philly Boy Roy details his family's felonious Memorial Day exploits, battles post-Eagles playoff loss depression, and gets his wife to call in to reveal just how obsessed he is with Scharpling. The aimless, low-energy Pudge gets a few laughs as the call-in regular who has literally nothing to say short of "I'unno." And even with his central conceit basically being "hippie Deadhead who takes bong rips mid-call," Wurster's giggly, wheezy-falsetto performances as Bryce and his rapport with the aggravated-yet patient Scharpling elevate a concept that other comedy acts would make into a one-dimensional caricature.
Couple these regulars with a few of the show's most notorious calls, including the first appearance by Fonzie inspiration/violent elderly sociopath Roland "The Gorch" Gorchnik and the introduction of splatter-flick auteur Trent L. Strauss (famed for The Tool Belt Killer, The Hacksawist, and Art School Arson), and you've got a strong cross-section of what makes the "Best Show" canon so beloved. When Wurster gathers more than a dozen of his most popular characters together in an hour-and-a-half panel discussion for Newbridge's highest office during 2008's "Mayubinatorial Debate", hearing him inhabit all these different characters in close quarters—Roy, Pudge, monstrously obese barbershop singer Zachary Brimstead, legendary drummer/erotic fiction author Marky Ramone—is pretty astounding. It's worldbuilding of a kind you don't often get from two people in any medium—and they did it pretty much pro bono.
A lot of Scharpling and Wurster's appeal rides on a certain sort of deep-knowledge obsession with the absurd minutiae of popular music and the people that take it extra-seriously. "Rock, Rot & Rule" came in the middle of one of Scharpling's pre-"Best Show" airings and provoked angry fans to call in to object to the rankings of Wurster's know-it-some musicologist Ronald Thomas Clontle. Wannabe rock stars who have unrealistic dreams of making it ("Count Rockula", whose own box-set vision is trashed by notable music website shovel.com) share space with rock stars who have unrealistic ideas of what "making it" entitles them to (Wurster's version of Gene Simmons has a grand old time arrogantly auditioning the actual, in-studio Ted Leo and Carl Newman to be replacement members of KISS). The "Best Show" fandom in indie rock is well-documented, and has roped in everyone from Michael Azerrad (briefly interrogated by Wurster on the air as to why Wire Train weren't included in Our Band Could Be Your Life) to Damian Abraham (who became an evangelical enthusiast of the show and broke the ice on tour with Kurt Vile by swapping Philly Boy Roy anecdotes).
You get a ridiculous amount of stuff with this box set, sure: all that audio content, plus a book featuring some great essays by the aforementioned Abraham, comedian Julie Klausner, and call screener A.P. Mike, an extensive interview on the show's origins and developments with Jake Fogelnest, photos of archival material (including crib sheets Wurster used for some of the calls); and illustrations by longtime show-associated cartoonists Neil Numberman and Casey Burns. But what you're really buying, whether you're new to the world of Scharpling and Wurster or a Friend of Tom from back in the day, is an acknowledgement of a hard-won, rightly-earned cult. It's an in-group that always has more room for anyone willing to forge a deep connection with the town that's comin' to get ya. And it can't be stopped—even Scharpling's 2013 farewell turned out to be a hiatus instead, and "The Best Show" continues to this day as an Internet show delving deep into the one of the biggest, strangest, best worlds in comedy. There's more—way more—where this box set came from, and this collection is a prime reminder of why we're lucky that it's not slowing down anytime soon.


Kansas City producer Iggy Romeu’s strange, evocative second album for West Mineral feels so divorced from musical convention, there’s the thrilling sense that anything could happen.

Significant Soil

Mister Water Wet took his triumphant place among the community he helped create when he debuted on West Mineral Ltd. in 2019. As a DJ and promoter in Kansas City, Andrés Ignacio “Iggy” Romeu brought together many artists that would define the label’s signature foggy, clubwise strain of ambient music. Romeu’s work was removed from this sound for most of the decade—he seemed more interested in making music that popped off in the club rather than delving into layers of ghostly static and white noise—but his West Mineral debut, Bought the Farm, revealed an imagination for grayscale, ’90s-style ambient no less vivid than that of associates like Huerco S., Ulla, or Pontiac Streator. His follow-up, Significant Soil, is even stranger and more evocative.
This is not music intended to soothe. If Romeu’s mentee Huerco S. leans toward the romantic gestures of Wolfgang Voigt or Basic Channel, Significant Soil is more akin to ramshackle Y2K-era records like Nobukazu Takemura’s Scope or Mika Vainio’s Olento, which feel so divorced from musical convention there’s the thrilling sense that anything could happen. On Significant Soil, one damned thing after another happens. “I Saw the Green Flash” alone throws us sawing synth strings, B-movie UFO whistles, tactile field recordings, and what sounds like a robot attempting to sing doo-wop with a mouthful of bees. “When Kennybrook Burned to the Ground” opens with a masticating sample not unlike something you’d find on Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica before a doleful, martial horn starts duetting with a chintzy reggae organ and a wet rustle of static.
Romeu’s music feels so thrown together that sounds that might not necessarily “work” contribute to the overall effect of witnessing something assembled by the proverbial tornado blowing through a scrapyard. It’s the same failsafe effect that let Phil Elverum get away with shredding on the pencil sharpener in the middle of his most ambitious rock opera. The Shinichi Atobe-like “Good Apple” sets a piano loop against a crude-sounding drum machine, and neither seems to acknowledge the other is in the room, as if they ended up together purely by chance. “Bory” opens the album by repeating a serrated synth lead for six minutes. It makes as little sense as anything else, which means it’s a great scene-setter.
Significant Soil can feel disruptive and even disturbing at first, but once you come to anticipate its twists and turns, it takes on a holistic quality independent of the spare parts it seems to be made of. Everything is in service of the atmosphere, which is mysterious, wintry, and often beautiful, especially when an “Isthmus” of hand drums and cut-up vocals connects the rest of the album to the long, bittersweet, sighing ambient closer “Losing Blood.” Most good music makes the listener ask: Who is this? Better yet is music that makes the listener ask: What is this? Significant Soil is thrilling because on top of those queries, it makes the listener ask: Why? Romeu’s answer: Why not?


Inspired by poet Alda Merini, the Italian violinist and vocalist composes a nuanced investigation of the divine feminine, illuminating complex emotional specifics of motherhood and life.

Mi specchio e rifletto

For those less inclined toward astrology, celebrity birthdays can be a shortcut to understanding one’s arrival on the cosmic scene. It’s an amusing, low-stakes thought exercise: What traits do you share with a more minor kind of star? The free-improvising violinist Silvia Tarozzi found such a kinship with a fellow Italian, celebrated Milanese poet Alda Merini, who shares a March 21 birthday with the Bologna musician. Over the course of a decade, Tarozzi used the natural rhythms of Merini’s poetry as scaffolding for her works-in-progress, and those pieces became her new album, Mi specchio e rifletto (I mirror and reflect). Her careful assemblage is a nuanced investigation of the divine feminine, refracting the quotidian weight of womanhood through an improvisor’s prism.
The album’s coruscating title track builds a clever infinite-mirror illusion, scalloping Tarozzi’s voice as she names the facial features in her reflection. Her overlapping vocal rounds deliver the upside-down feeling of trying to square one’s own self-perception with that of the outside world. And in vocalizing what she sees in the mirror, Tarozzi makes herself more visible. The theme carries throughout the record as she shifts between diaphanous contemporary-classical flutters and murky synth gnarls, illuminating the complex emotional specifics of motherhood and life as a working musician.
Tarozzi deploys familiar gestures of femininity and gradually peels them apart to reveal internal tumult. Though she counts Deep Listening oracle Pauline Oliveros as one of her most influential mentors, her own approach prioritizes a busier array of textures applied across shorter, self-contained compositions. She begins the album with “Al cancello,” a brisk instrumental that she leads with cheerful violin as flute and piccolo sparkle around slow, curving cello parts. On “La forza del canto,” a plucked violin over downcast strings introduces a sense of anxiety, and “La sostanza dell’affetto” dives in deeper, sliding away on a tail of elastic guitars that melt over one another like popsicles in summer heat. “Domina” introduces more tension, building friction between multiple layers of synths and processed vocals as Tarozzi repeatedly warns, “Smettila di ascoltarli/Ti sfrutteranno”: “Stop listening to them/They will exploit you.”
Nodding to their shared birthday, “La forza del canto” is Tarozzi’s most direct tribute to Merini, and she presses her voice upward on the song’s wide-open refrain. It’s wind in sails; it sounds like trying, a daring tribute to women who choose a public life. Merini, who died in 2009, was lauded in her home country for her insight on love, religion, heartbreak, eroticism, and suffering. She spent much of her adult life institutionalized and separated from her children, an experience she detailed in her 1989 memoir A Rage of Love. The sweeping romantic ache of her work—little of which has received English translation—echoes out of the chasm between her full, deep sense of self and others’ refusal to acknowledge it.
Tarozzi built her compositions around the rhythmic structure of Merini’s verse, but copyright issues meant that she eventually had to complete the pieces with her own lyrics. Her words explore specific minutiae that bring her fulfillment: a gentle light splashing over violets, a spider’s taut silk, the generous sense of wonder in the eyes of a loved one. On 2015’s Apocalypse, girl, Jenny Hval asked, “What is it to take care of yourself? What are we taking care of?” With Mi specchio e rifletto, Tarozzi addresses the subtleties of those questions. She writes in her liner notes that her compositions were influenced by “the psychedelic experience of pregnancy,” which manifests in the offset saxophone flares of “Sembra neve” and the synthetic mechanical fizz of “...e non volevi le ali.” Joni Mitchell once said she used suspended chords to express unresolved questions about the outcome of her own life, and Tarozzi’s wavering loose ends on “Domina” and “Hai nella bocca un silenzio” relay a similar overwhelmed uncertainty.
With the album’s closing number, “xxx Anna,” Tarozzi offers a touching, if unorthodox, love note to her grandmother. By resurrecting and collaging fragments from earlier in the album, she seeks to approximate the internal state of her grandmother’s mind as she grappled with dementia. After familiar excerpts meet a chaotic crescendo, the piece concludes with a warm sense of calm. Like “Al balcone,” which nods to a tradition of elderly Italians holding court on their balconies, “xxx Anna” is an empathetic appreciation of her foremothers. By connecting her own ancestry with Merini’s influence, Tarozzi speaks to a larger, often invisible web of women and the shared experiences of their private lives.
The date that first bound Tarozzi to Merini traditionally falls around the vernal equinox, the annual starting pistol for renewed growth and abundance. Though the women were separated by time, Mi specchio e rifletto is the bountiful garden of their meeting. Like Merini and so many others, Silvia Tarozzi wants to be seen as her full self. She paints private worlds, illustrating labyrinthine feelings in new colors. And by rendering her own reflection more brilliant, Tarozzi makes it easier for others to see themselves, too.

Buy: Rough Trade
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