Another album of shattering breakbeats and post-Aphex Twin poetics from Aaron Funk.

Venetian Snares: Rossz Csillag Alatt Született

Rossz Csillag Alatt Született

Composer Reszo Seress is blamed for at least 17 suicides, as urban legend has it. His 1933 ballad, "Öngyilkos Vasárnap" or "Gloomy Sunday"-- written after he made up with an ex-fiancée, but before she poisoned herself--- had been banned in the United States and his native Hungary. "The Hungarian Suicide Song", it was later called. Suicide notes allegedly hint to the tune's lyrics, and one tale says a delivery boy jumped off a bridge after overhearing a man whistling the song's melody.
Billie Holiday, an angel who lost her wings with $750 strapped to her leg and heroin found in her apartment, later recorded an English version of Seress's song. "Little white flowers will never awaken you/Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you/ Angels have no thought of ever returning you/ Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?/ Gloomy Sunday," she sang to a moon cloaked under bleary streetlight. Cynics can call that melodramatic, but the way the horns moan along with her to punctuate the end of her verses, her treatment sounds utterly convincing.
Aaron Funk (Venetian Snares) appropriately covered Seress and sampled Holiday's dread on Rossz Csillag Alatt Született, his 223rd album of shattering breakbeats and post-Aphex Twin poetics in the past five years. It's also his sharpest left turn to date, although Funk's juxtaposition of drill'n'bass beats with chamber orchestral sounds has been done by others for more than a decade, most notably on Aphex Twin's I Care Because You Do. But to his credit, Funk takes a chipped, charcoal pencil and illustrates a forest of leafless trees filled with the pigeons that he daydreamt of while watching the birds at Budapest's Royal Palace. Even better, his beats work with the orchestration instead of pulverizing it for an ironic counterpoint. Funk's baroque strings fittingly strike the air, while just about every melody is played with grinded teeth and bloodshot eyes.
The album title (translated "Born Under a Bad Star"), and its songs have Hungarian titles. "Sikertelenség" has Funk opening a body bag to show a disbelieving piano its deceased lover. "Szerencsétlen" walks a rickety plank with stacco violin stabs and a grinding "Amen" jungle breakbeat. "Második Galamb" indulges in more breakcore delirium and nearly sacrifices the visceral impact of the melodies struggling to pull through. The brooding string piece "Felbomlasztott Mentökocsi" and the chase-sequence dramatics of "Hajnal" are deftest songs that Funk ever recorded.
While Funk's percussive palate could have ventured beyond the standard-issued "Amen" breakbeats, Rossz's totality still possesses nerves that can cast shadows that never dissipate away from the mind in hours both sleeping and waking.


After first gaining attention for representational acoustic beauties, the guitarist digs deeper into abstraction, until the physical trappings of her instrument largely melt away.

Sarah Louise: Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars

Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars

The Georgia-born, North Carolina-based musician Sarah Louise Henson is often associated with the American primitive style of guitar, and for good reason. Her fingerstyle playing, frequently on 12-string, runs through Appalachian folk music and John Fahey to the grassroots minimalism of Henry Flynt and Terry Riley. She plays regional folk music in the duo House and Land and remains in the Appalachian Mountains, living in a rural area an hour outside of North Carolina’s western hub, Asheville. The main recreational activities, she has said, include hiking, foraging, and gardening; she only got internet access within the past five years.
Henson displays the careful attention to craft typical of any great student of deeply rooted traditions, albeit tempered by an unconventional streak. She typically utilizes tunings of her own invention, and she is a synthesist of disparate worlds. Henson has gradually moved past the live-to-tape naturalism of her earlier recordings to explore the magic of studio artifice. “The 12-string is so orchestral that it felt like a natural leap to multi-track,” she explained of the decisions that led to last year’s Deeper Woods, in which her own layered vocals soared over acoustic and electric guitars, electric bass, drums, electric piano, and the occasional synthesizer.
Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars, her second album for Thrill Jockey, marks an even greater leap, even if it looks like a step backward on paper. Composed primarily with six-string electric guitar in standard tuning, these songs are multi-tracked and electronically manipulated, fleshed out with the judicious use of voice, synthesizer, or a processed 12-string. But it is instead her most experimental album yet, a meditative foray into swirling loops and pure drone. The physical trappings of her primary instrument largely melt away.
Henson ranges widely here, testing new techniques with every song. “R Mountain,” where guitars of varying timbres are overdubbed in parallel, cuts a sneaky path between major and minor moods. The cool, wide-open harmonies suggest something of an Appalachian take on the Durutti Column’s clean-toned meditations. In “Ancient Intelligence,” a bright, unnervingly electronic pinging chirps like insects, or a hail of tinkling glass, before strummed or fingerpicked phrases take the lead, searching and melodic. Echoing 12-string tones are stretched into a seamless, shimmering drone during “Rime,” electronic delay lapping like choppy water.
The album builds toward its spiritual peak with a closing trio of raga-like pieces, all held aloft by wordless singing and peals of feedback; their almost devotional intensity (the title “Late Night Healing Choir” seems literal) is the mirror image of the album’s opener, which borrows lyrics from the Appalachian traditional “Bright Morning Stars” to turn a standard into something more like an invocation.
That opener, “Daybreak,” is accompanied by a field recording of birds—spring peepers and wood thrush, it turns out. As always in Henson’s work, nature isn’t merely window-dressing; she has something more essential in mind. The liner notes explain that wood thrush “have a double voice box called a syrinx which allows them to voice more than one note at a time”—a pertinent metaphor, perhaps, for Henson’s own explorations in overdubbing. Even at her most technologically experimental, the natural world remains her primary inspiration, and the results are as deeply felt as they are deeply moving.


The trio’s latest album proposes a distinctly South African brand of sophistipop, folding elements of amapiano, mbaqanga, and house into a breezy, wistful blend.

Beatenberg: The Great Fire of Beatenberg

The Great Fire of Beatenberg

There was an admission implicit in the title of the South African trio Beatenberg’s 2022 EP On the way to Beatenberg: The group had yet to arrive at a sound. Over 19 minutes, they experimented with baroque guitar and Auto-Tune; they flirted with EDM uplift and Balearic haze. But Beatenberg’s core remained indie pop, refracted through guitarist and lead singer Matthew Field’s lifelong love of maskandi and mbaqanga. Their serene rumbas can make the group’s music feel out of time, not just in America (where a dusty mental shelf might hold them alongside Dirty Projectors, Paul Simon, and Vampire Weekend) but also at home, where amapiano and its many varieties are the hot pop export. When Beatenberg dabble in dance, it’s generally to add Zulu folk flavor to someone else’s production. A decade ago, they collaborated with fellow countryman DJ Clock on the tropical-house smash “Pluto (I Remember You).” In 2021, Beatenburg popped up on RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE—the continent-spanning collaboration between producers Scorpion Kings and Tresor—to get pensive on the Afropiano song “Dust in the Wind.”
“Dust in the Wind” appears, in reworked form and now titled “Worth More,” on The Great Fire of Beatenberg. Field’s guitars are pushed to the fore; the bass follows the chord changes instead of dictating them. It’s less a capeside DJ set than an afternoon party in a walled garden. The details are exquisitely rendered; the conversation is intimate but ends abruptly; outside noise wafts in but never threatens the proceedings. The result is a distinctly South African sophistipop, a guitar-centric companion piece to Nostalgia, the 2019 bubblegum-revival album from Tresor, the Congolese-born producer—and erstwhile Drake collaborator—who’s also an old friend of Field’s. (“Aphrodite,” Beatenberg’s Nostalgia contribution, is a typically cool affair, all electric piano slink and lilting devotion.)
At the moment, the way to Beatenberg cuts through Field, whose playing is more central than ever. On the restless “Chorus of May,” he’s skipping between staves, chasing wholeness with blithe resignation. His diagonal solo powers down like a dying robot. On “Eau de Toilette,” he effortlessly interlocks with Beatenberg’s rhythm section—first bassist Ross Dorkin, then drummer Robin Brink—like a bike chain jumping between sprockets. “You sweat the right kind of sweat/Mixed with your eau de toilette/Impossible to forget,” he pants before unfurling a solo that sounds like a baying dog. Field’s timbral exercises prove infectious: The peacocking “Wheelbarrow” sways and bumps like its titular vehicle, as the band deploys percussive clangs and trapdoor echo. If Beatenberg doesn’t match the exuberance of prime mbaqanga here, they at least nail its strut.
Like any good hosts, Beatenberg are at their liveliest around their friends. “Wheelbarrow,” “Eau De Toilette,” and “Worth More” are all Tresor co-writes, and the opening “Branches on a Tree” gets a Balearic backdrop from the versatile house producer Sun-El Musician, who submerges Dorkin’s bass until the modest uplift of the chorus. It’s a lovely slice of yearning dance pop, even if the text (“Dancing in a hurricane/’Til we break free”) gets a bit Real World at times. But that’s the drawback to Beatenberg’s brand of pop: If you’re not careful, the ebullient picking and deft rhythms can turn idle musings into sentimentality.
If there truly is a great fire here, it’s held in deep reserve. “The deeper I dig, the less that I find,” Field sings on the despairing waltz “Gold Mine.” On “Night Bus,” he’s overcaffeinated and underfed, perpetually deciding whether to leave town. A light application of Auto-Tune lends an Afrobeats feel to his sighs. The album closes with the paddling melancholia of “Green Bird,” which depicts depression as a monkish pursuit: Field’s acoustic guitar peals like a belltower; his wordless tenor gazes reverently skyward; Brink seems to be tapping a tabla. “Try again tomorrow,” Field advises a would-be visitor, “try again today,” holding the last syllable like a dangling promise. Having cleared their pandemic-era song queue with the On the way EP, Beatenberg enter their second era as a guitar-pop act that’s somehow both warm and hermetic, offering a tender goodbye before the garden gate closes.


The Australian songwriter’s intermittently funny and mournful folk-pop confronts the improbable task of commercial success and decides that art is worth making anyway.

Amateurs

The cover of Laura Jean’s Amateurs features a portrait of the songwriter. It doesn’t stand out for any particular sense of style or grace; it’s a decent likeness, and that’s it—a painting that aspires to greatness but lands closer to alright-ness. On Amateurs, Jean seeks to understand why certain artists are deemed masters and others, such as the characters she sings about—cast members in small-town musicals and girls performing Crowded House covers at outdoor markets—amateurs. The painting on the cover captures every question Jean asks on the record: If the painter was paid for that portrait, does that make it good? Would it still be good if its artist was paid in nothing but the spiritual thrill of creation?
Jean has been releasing music under her own name for nearly 20 years but, for the most part, hasn’t found footing outside of her home country of Australia. Many of her albums are revered in music circles—in particular 2011’s swaggering, discordant folk-rock record A fool who’ll and the 2018 synth-pop turn Devotion—and she’s been nominated for a handful of regional awards. Lorde gushed about the Devotion single “Touchstone” on Twitter; Jenny Hval sang on Jean’s 2014 self-titled album and Jean returned the favor on The Practice of Love. Conceptually, Amateurs resides on a similar plane as Hval’s Menneskekollektivit, another record that inquires into the nature of art as a devotional practice.
But indie-rock stardom is notoriously illusory in Australia; there is no workhorse touring circuit to speak of, just small, wonderful, self-sustaining scenes held together by day jobs, government grants, and duct tape. Acclaim rarely reaches enough people to translate into record sales. Touring overseas is prohibitively expensive. So an artist like Jean, who has plaudits to spare, is stuck in a strange middle ground—established but still pursuing a second career (she's studying to be a lawyer), well-known but not well-paid, working in the shadow of an ideal of success that’s further out of reach even than it is to her most ambitious U.S.- or UK-based peers.
Amateurs attempts to contend with this cowed legacy of artmaking in Australia: the idea that anyone engaged in serious art may be doomed to do it for love alone. Musically, Jean is returning to folk—not exactly the spare, quiet kind on Laura Jean or the drunken howl of A fool who’ll, but a style that suggests the blushing, diaristic songs of Devotion redone with more organic materials. Amateurs is unwieldy but graceful and often quite formally challenging, even as it foregrounds open-mic night staples like upright piano and heavily strummed acoustic.
The album has a crisp, airy atmosphere—in part because of Erkki Veltheim’s rich string arrangements, which receive as much space as Jean’s own voice, as well as lush backing vocals by Aldous Harding and Marlon Williams—but it’s one of Jean’s densest records, almost totally eschewing traditional song structure. Throughout the record, she writes in lengthy, unspooling verses filled with run-on sentences and sharp line breaks. On the lyrics sheet, an entire verse of “Pauly” appears in parentheses; many tracks veer between plainspoken and poetic in a way that evokes a more informal Joanna Newsom. On a song like “Rock’n’Roll Holiday,” about a youthful relationship with someone far wealthier, it feels as if Jean is trying to cram words into invisible confinements (“I love your pointed nose and your sad blue eyes”). “Something to Look Forward to Forever” is casual but painfully revealing, its lyrics reading like secrets spilled to a stranger after last call: “Just before I was Laura Jean/I’d do sit ups in my room/Trying to look good for the lead singer.”
Much of Amateurs feels like a set of short stories unified by the common theme of art’s relationship with commerce. “Rock’n’Roll Holiday” seems to be about the sometimes funny, sometimes sad class tensions between its two central characters until, in the final verse, Jean zooms out to critique the idea of legacy as something only the rich can afford. “Folk Festival” is a paean to the regional, community-minded music festivals that are so common in Australia, and which often represent young people’s first serious engagement with non-pop music. On the album’s saddest song, “Market on the Sand,” Jean turns a well-meaning loved one’s offhand remark—“That thing you do darling, for fun/Why don’t you turn it into a second income?”—into something painful and elegiac. It feels as if she is mourning the idea of art for art’s sake, lamenting the expectation that she strive for commercial success knowing the chances aren’t very high.
These ideas coalesce on “Something to Look Forward to Forever,” the album’s final track. Over spacious, chilly keys, Jean reveals the thing that keeps her making music even as all signs suggest she should quit: “I want something to look forward to forever/That’s what magic is/Something to look forward to forever/And never ever getting it.” She’s not singing about money or fame, necessarily. She means to say there’s something spiritually fulfilling about making art outside the usual constraints of commerce and competition—that all that striving is as good a reason as any to live.


The debut album from New York producer Mark Hurst, aka A Pleasure, takes the names of some of his favorite producers and groups and numerically transposes the spelling of their names into drum patterns. That might sound dry or overly complex, but Jream House doesn't let its big ideas get in the way of immediate dancefloor gratification.

Jream House

The debut album by New York producer Mark Hurst, aka A Pleasure, was made using "a process of numerical transposition" to turn the names of some of his favorite composers and groups into drum patterns. This may sound like the sort of high-concept postmodern hook that only a brainiac seeking to liberate dance music from the oppression of the dance floor would employ. But Jream House doesn't sound like that at all; it turns out to be a euphoric trip that doesn’t shy away from more direct types of gratification.
The name of the opener, "Durutti Gottsching," suggests that the beat was possibly generated from the names of the British post-punk band the Durutti Column and Ash Ra Tempel leader Manuel Göttsching. It follows the conventions of Detroit techno, down to the cavernous reverb on the handclaps, except for the way that the hi hat, synthesizer arpeggios, and bassline abandon its straight 4/4 time signature in favor of interlocking complex rhythms. This might sound overcomplicated, but it's kept grounded by an extremely funky bassline—a busy, warm-toned lead that nods at the more organic-sounding end of the krautrock spectrum.
J**ream House shifts from "Durutti Gottsching"’s jubilant funk to the otherworldly house of "Arthur Russel" (another track that does justice to its namesake), to the densely composed, deeply blissed-out flurry of noise on "The Order of Things," a track that might make you wonder why "Balearic shoegaze" isn’t a genre already. "Grace" uses cascading, jazzlike breakbeats to ride "The Order of Things"’s energy close to the edge of sensory overload.
After that cacophonous peak, Hurst lets the album drift gently back to Earth, through clouds of Balearic mood. ("Slow Channel" sounds like it was made to watch the sun rise to, with waves of atonal metallic sound washing over it.) By the time "Am Me Evol Eye" drifts off into ambience, the album’s energy has returned to the same near-resting state that the intro to "Durutti Gottsching" opens it with, giving Jream House an elegant overall symmetry, not to mention a subtle but powerful hypnotic effect. For someone so interested in playing conceptual name games, Hurst’s choice of pseudonyms, like the most gratifying aspects of Jream House, is surprisingly straightforward.


The third album from the impressionistic New Zealand singer-songwriter eludes easy classification, which makes her delicately built and beautifully rendered songs all the more alluring.

Designer

With Aldous Harding, there are no easy answers. Since releasing her self-titled debut in 2014, the New Zealand singer-songwriter has dodged those who would try to put a finger on her elusive appeal. Critics tend to describe her work as “gothic folk”—a label that misses the idiosyncrasies of her ambitious, largely acoustic songs, muting their pockets of color. Harding’s many voices, cycling through octaves and timbres, add another layer of mystique. And then there’s her abiding lack of interest in discussing the meaning behind her music. “We’re expected to be able to explain ourselves,” she said in an interview with NPR earlier this year, “…and have purpose in a little bag that you carry around everywhere, but I don’t necessarily have that in me.”
About the closest Harding has come to interpreting her own work is to note that her eponymous record “was very much about fear” and its follow-up, 2017’s Party, centered on “love and strength.” It could be said that her third album, Designer, operates somewhere in the intersection of all three. Close reading of Harding’s songs is, to some extent, a futile exercise; the artist has admitted that sometimes their significance escapes even her. But that very fact—paradoxically, maybe—makes the act of untangling them all the more vital. They are a bit like pages in a coloring book: Harding sketches out motifs and delineates contours, but the ultimate effect depends on whichever shades happen to be handy on your personal palette.
Loosely drawn across Designer’s nine songs are images of delight teetering on the verge of anxiety. Harding ruminates on the innocence of youth and sings of chatting with her “inner child” on long car rides, but she also entertains corollary doubts about child-rearing. On “Heaven Is Empty,” one of the album’s most surreal passages involves the appearance of an alien, baby-bearing stork; Harding’s narrator climbs onto his back and kisses his neck to dissuade him from delivering his parcel. A line from “The Barrel” suggests a similar sentiment, in less jarring terms: “When you have a child, so begins the braiding,” Harding cautions in a smooth alto, “and in that braid you stay.”
The concept of braiding is significant: It taps into a totalizing fear of making life choices that might ensnare you, as plaits tamp down flyaways. This worry surfaces repeatedly throughout the album. On “The Barrel,” it accompanies uneasy intimations of domesticity—both the mention of having kids and references to a date being set (for nuptials, perhaps). “I feel your love,” she sings, but it sounds a little like “I fear your love.” The feeling escalates on the subsequent track, where Harding sings about wearing chains that jangle when she tries to jump, and on “Weight of the Planets,” which hints at an abruptly terminated relationship. None of this is to suggest that Designer’s songs are the mere lamentations of a commitment-phobe. On the contrary, they feel exuberant, buoyed by their rigorously, and delightfully, exploratory production. So often, fear of commitment is counterbalanced by faith in life’s infinite possibilities—why stick to a single path when there is so much to see? Tracks like “The Barrel,” with its bold baritone sax blasts and chipper percussion (in the song’s video, Harding plays shakers while dancing around in her underwear), transcend their anxieties, proposing experimentation and play as the way forward.
Harding’s partner in this effort is producer John Parish, a collaborator she shares with Perfume Genius and the folk-pop singer (and fellow Kiwi) Laura Jean. With this release, the pair continue the project they began on Party, lifting sounds from outside of a traditional folk vernacular: Harding’s springily plucked acoustic guitar is, at various moments, accompanied by saxophones and drum loops, xylophones and synths. Choral backup adds texture to Harding’s already chameleonic vocals. Such unexpected flourishes can add drama or levity, or sometimes both in the space of a single song (“Weight of the Planets” is furnished with both grandiose string lilts and sampled whoop!s); they act as critical markers of tone in the moments when Harding’s lyrics bridge the gap between ambiguous and straight-up unintelligible.
Even where her imagery is cryptic, Harding’s lyrics can resonate on a purely sensory level. She manipulates details with the delicacy of someone threading a needle: “You slide like a bangle down the day’s arm,” she muses on the elegantly impressionistic closer, “Pilot.” Singing, “In the corner in blue is my name,” on “Fixture Picture,” she might as well cast herself in a Picasso painting. The best moments on this record arrive when Harding’s playful approach to words syncs up with her playful approach to sound. The logic driving the end result may remain hidden, but its allure is undeniable.


Meg Baird's third album is the closest she has come in her solo work to reclaiming the cosmic turf once occupied by her former group, Espers. Charlie Saufley, formerly of San Francisco acid rock heavyweights the Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound, joins her throughout.

Don't Weigh Down the Light

Meg Baird's career has seldom lacked for action or variety; she co-founded the highly esteemed Philly psych-folk group Espers, has performed with her sister Laura as the Baird Sisters, played drums with noisy punk combo Watery Love, and sung alongside the likes of Kurt Vile, Will Oldham, and Sharon Van Etten. If she so chose, she surely has the skills and connections to make an expansive, cross-genre album studded with guest appearances, but she hasn't seemed interested in that. She has always kept her solo albums streamlined and direct, focusing her songs almost exclusively on her finger-picked guitar and radiant voice. Likewise, her thematic approach has never been panoramic; instead her albums tend to feel like private journals, wherein a particular mood is set and then sustained and refined.
The same holds true, with a few subtle but important variations, for Baird's third solo album, Don't Weigh Down the Light. Her past albums have featured several interpretations of traditional folk standards and well-wrought covers of such obscurities as House of Love's "Beatles and the Stones". In fact her style is so steeped in British and Appalachian folk forms that at times even her original songs have sounded as if they had been written in a previous century. On Don't Weigh Down the Light, however, all of the tracks are Baird originals, and are less reliant on traditional folk idioms.
Where her previous album, 2011's Seasons on Earth, was ornamented with pedal steel and other subtle country touches, Baird is here joined throughout by Charlie Saufley, formerly of SF acid rock heavyweights the Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound. On several tracks here the duo of Baird and Saufley masquerade as a full band, with each playing multiple instruments and filling the songs' ample open spaces with gentle ripples of organ, 12-string guitar, and percussion. As a result Don't Weigh Down the Light is the closest Baird has come in her solo work to reclaiming the cosmic turf once occupied by Espers.
In the time since the release of Seasons on Earth, Baird moved from her longtime base of Philadelphia to San Francisco, and it doesn't feel too outlandish to suggest that Baird's move has had a substantial influence on Don't Weigh Down the Light. There is a general feel of transition and displacement permeating such tracks as "Past Houses" or "Even the Walls Don't Want You to Go". Midway through the album is a short track simply entitled "Leaving Song", featuring nothing but Baird's multi-tracked vocals, wordlessly cascading down in a manner that can sound alternately melancholic or prayer-like, depending on the listener's current frame of mind.
Brief though the track is, its placement seems noteworthy, almost as though it is the hinge upon which the rest of the album is meant to pivot. Curiously, the vocal melody of "Leaving Song" returns a few songs later as a background track on "Even the Walls Don't Want You to Go". This echoing, especially when coupled with the following reprise of the song "Past Houses", gives the album a circular feel, as though Baird's songs are doubling back upon themselves in a continuous loop of departures and arrivals.
Baird's voice sounds as potent and icy-clear as ever. As evidenced by her work with Espers and the Baird Sisters, her voice is well-suited to close-harmony singing, and here she makes frequent use of vocal multi-tracking, adding whispery harmonies at what sounds like the upper limits of her register. In combination with the casual jammy vibe on some of the instrumental passages, these airy harmonies recall some of the folkier aspects of Popol Vuh. In recent months Baird and Saufley have joined forces with Comets on Fire's Ethan Miller to form the West Coast psych outfit Heron Oblivion, and if their work together on Don't Weigh Down the Light is any indication, that might herald even further fruitful departures.


The Pink Floyd frontman teamed with producer Nigel Godrich for his new album. They don’t take many risks, but Roger Waters presents some of his most focused songs since the mid-’70s.

Roger Waters: Is This the Life We Really Want?

Is This the Life We Really Want?

It’s been abundantly well documented that by the time Pink Floyd set out to record their sprawling 1979 double album The Wall, internal friction over bassist/frontman Roger Waters’ push for creative control had reached a breaking point. In a sense, The Wall crushed the classic lineup of Pink Floyd, but it’s been Waters who’s had the hardest time getting out from under its weight. For much of his solo career—1987’s Radio K.A.O.S. and 1992’s Amused to Death in particular—he has more or less repeated The Wall’s musical style and conceptual grandiosity, at times appearing both stuck and ungrounded without his former bandmates. Waters has even staged his own productions of The Wall and released two different live recordings of it.
On paper, his decision to work with famed producer Nigel Godrich for Is This the Life We Really Want? looks like a much-needed injection of new blood. After all, Godrich’s signature sound has been a cornerstone in the legacies of Radiohead and Beck. His touch is immediately apparent from the outset, as Is This the Life opens with a ticking clock, bass played in the pulse of a heartbeat, and muffled voices—like Radiohead’s OK Computer interlude “Fitter Happier” meets the iconic intro to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon cut “Time.” Before you can make out what the voices are saying, their cadence and tones suggest a broadcast of some kind—a motif that runs through both Radio K.A.O.S. and Amused to Death.
As the voices come into focus, you realize you’re hearing multiple tracks of Waters himself. At first, the words come tumbling down in a heap of unrelated gibberish. “Where are you now?” asks one of the voices. Then, after a slight pause: “Don’t answer that.” Another: “I’m still ugly; you’re still fat.” Eventually, a train of thought begins to form: “Our parents made us who we are. Or was it God? Who gives a fuck; it’s never really over.” Now craggy and deep, Waters’ speaking voice could probably give the late Orson Welles a run for his money. Without question, he would excel at doing radio theatre. And though Waters’ singing voice was already sounding nicely age-worn in ’92, here he switches with great agility between his usual confidence and a newfound frailty that recalls Johnny Cash’s final output.
Is This the Life leaves little doubt that Waters has seasoned in the 25 years since Amused to Death. But aside from his 2005 opera Ça Ira, he’s still hung up on the same themes. Depending on your perspective, this will either strike you as reassuringly familiar or maddeningly one-track minded—maybe even both. To be fair, Waters was ahead of the curve in lamenting our attachment to media saturation on *Amused to Death—*modern life has basically become what that album anticipated. So it makes sense that Is This the Life answers back with a plea for sanity. And to his credit, much of it comes across as both sincere and necessary—albeit draped in Waters’ habit of being preachy and pedantic. (Two years ago, he described the new material as his way of sending humanity a mediocre report card.)
Yes, the radio-style announcements at the top of “The Last Refugee” would indicate that Waters hasn’t stretched much beyond his now-predictable arsenal of sound effects. The same goes for its languid drumbeat. The album even calls Godrich into question—tunes like “The Last Refugee” and “Is This the Life We Really Want?” are sometimes hard to tell apart from Sea Change-era Beck. Godrich and Waters didn’t push each other to break new ground as much as one might have hoped. But “The Last Refugee,” with its images of lovers lying “Under lemon tree skies” and “Dreams/Up to our knees/In warm ocean swells,” also shows that Waters has grown into an evocative poet—that is, when he isn’t spelling out his message on songs like “Picture That.” “Picture your kid with his hand on the trigger,” he sings, “Picture prosthetics in Afghanistan.” Then again, it’s hard to argue with a verse like “Picture a shithouse, with no fucking drains/Picture a leader, with no fucking brains.”
Waters’ predictability doesn’t diminish his effortless songwriting, and Is This the Life We Really Want? presents his tightest, most focused songs since the mid-’70s. “Wish You Were Here in Guantanamo Bay,” he sings on “Picture That.” The first letters of the phrase are capitalized in the lyric sheet, a sly nod to both the popular tourist postcard and, of course, to the Pink Floyd song and album of the same name. Even casual fans will spot Waters’ hint of the old melody right away. Is This the Life’s myriad sonic references to his work with Pink Floyd suggest that Waters is comfortable with his past. The more you accept how much his past reflects in his present, the more receptive you’ll be to this album’s charms.


Romantic “mood music” isn’t what most listeners expect from Nels Cline, but on his Blue Note debut, the Wilco guitarist delivers a chamber-orchestra set that visits some American songbook standards.

Lovers

Fans of Nels Cline are accustomed to his adaptability. After starting his career in jazz’s progressive currents—and playing alongside saxophonist Julius Hemphill—the guitarist later became a member of Wilco, starting with Sky Blue Sky. He’s also maintained a feverish schedule as a solo artist: participating in improv-noise summits with Thurston Moore and recording an album with the fusionists in Medeski, Martin & Wood.
Still, ardent followers of this guitarist may be unprepared for his latest reinvention. Romantic “mood music” isn’t what most listeners expect from him—even if refined, soft-touch playing has long been one aspect of his overall sound. On his 2xCD debut for the Blue Note label, Cline has delivered a chamber-orchestra set that’s notable for relying on some “Great American Songbook” standards by the likes of Jerome Kern and Rodgers & Hammerstein.
This isn’t a setup for some punkish deconstruction, either. The album starts off with a quarter-hour that sounds surprisingly straight-ahead. (Even the adventurous touches in the early going can be traced back to Gil Evans, Miles Davis’ sometime big-band arranger). Cline and his talented supporting musicians play “Glad to Be Unhappy” without any hint of camp—instead endeavoring to treat familiar themes with tenderness. Outside of those performances, the album offers some pensive Cline originals, as well as covers that wouldn’t normally be assigned to a “standards” group.
It’s this final batch of songs that gives Lovers an edge. The inclusion of pieces by experimentalist Arto Lindsay and Third Stream saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre honors Cline’s diverse fascinations, yet what's more interesting is the way that Cline makes these compositions seem like natural extensions of a program that also includes music by Henry Mancini. After Cline and his band have moved on from Tin Pan Alley in order to visit No Wave New York, the “for lovers only” feel is maintained. The orchestra’s performances may briefly include rougher attacks, though not to such a degree that the album’s conceit is ever risked.
Much credit for this unusual achievement is due to conductor and arranger Michael Leonhart—as well as to the cast of contemporary-music ringers that Cline has assembled for his backing ensemble. Harpist Zeena Parkins, cellist Erik Friedlander, and keyboardist Yuka Honda are all familiar to frequenters of America’s experimental music venues, though you’ve rarely heard them as restrained as they are on Lovers.
Initially, this can feel like a waste of good avant power. But over the course of the album, the benefits become clear. Leonhart’s arrangement of the melody to Sonic Youth’s “Snare, Girl,” goes well with the mournful lyricism of Rodgers’s “I Have Dreamed.” And a droning, exploratory version of Hungarian guitarist Gabor Szabo’s “Lady Gabor” winds up sharing a sound-world with Lindsay’s Ambitious Lovers track “It Only Has To Happen Once.”
Cline’s guitar playing delights in this parade of upset expectations, too—sounding dirtier in Kern’s “Why Was I Born?” than during the various resettings of modernist rock. He plays lap steel during “Dreamed,” and swings amiably on other vintage cuts like “Beautiful Love” and “Secret Love.” The only task he doesn’t quite pull off is the composition of original themes that stand with the classics he’s selected. Almost half of the first CD is made up of Cline originals, and these pale a bit in comparison with the surrounding material. Though thanks to its sly and measured embrace of the experimental, Lovers still has all the originality it needs to endear.


The Mancunian saxophonist and poet’s warm and wise album is a balm of spoken word and spiritual jazz, both strangely uncomfortable and strangely comforting.

Alabaster DePlume: Gold - Go Forward in the Courage of Your Love

Alabaster DePlume is a lot of things—a saxophonist, a poet, an arranger, a social node in London’s jazz scene—but above all, he’s a person who wants you to treat yourself with more kindness, gentleness, and self-respect. On GOLD, his second album for International Anthem, he applies self-love like an exfoliant, scraping off the old skin of cynicism and exposing the clean and vulnerable surface below. He is, as he says multiple times on this record, “brazen, like a baby,” and while that means the Mancunian musician born Gus Fairbairn is often agog at the fresh beauty of the world, it also means he’s uniquely attuned to its difficulties. Even when it’s comforting, GOLD is not comfortable.
GOLD follows 2020’s To Cy and Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1, an astounding collection of songs DePlume developed from melodies he made up with the titular pair, two men with learning disabilities he met while working for a Manchester non-profit. The same mutual care is at work throughout GOLD. The album was recorded over a couple of weeks in long, improvised sessions DePlume later stitched together into songs. None of the players were given the music beforehand, and no one was allowed to listen to playback. The entire ensemble was forced to feel their way through the sessions, an extramusical effect that could be maddeningly twee if the results weren’t so consistently breathtaking.
Despite its evangelical spirit and its benedictory subtitle, Go Forward in the Courage of Your Love, GOLD is aimed primarily at its creator. In “Don’t Forget You’re Precious,” DePlume turns the song toward himself, running through the trivial things he calls to mind more easily than his self-worth: PINs, old email addresses, Instagram. As a saxophonist, he plays in series of short phrases that ripple with the soft wind of a bedsheet being fluffed, but his vocals carry a hint of decadence, and he takes an evident pleasure in the feeling of the words, especially when he makes his way to an emotional punchline. “I remember my shame,” he finally sings in “Precious,” exhaling the song’s key like it’s the final winning phrase of an incantation.
In “I’m Good at Not Crying,” he rolls through all the ways he makes his personality disappear—he’s “not needing,” “not demanding,” “not making a scene”—in a soft deadpan. Girl-group harmonies swirl around him, their phrases going in and out of legibility, while a guitar pinches its way to the top of a melody and slackens back down again. The mix dips DePlume into a slow-moving spree, its lack of center mirroring the evasiveness of the lyrics. “I don’t know, you know?” he warily repeats as a drumbeat tries to shake him out of it. In the ensuing song, “Now (Stars Are Lit),” he wails freely on his sax, finally letting out the frustrations he couldn’t work his way toward in the prior song.
DePlume’s guiding idea on GOLD is to alchemize fear into courage and love. It’s difficult work—there’s a soft patience to this music that suggests he knows he could be burned at any moment. That caution tempers the exuberance of a song like “Fucking Let Them,” in which a spoken-word manifesto gives way to a waxy jam from the ensemble. There’s a tacit acknowledgment of pain in nearly every track here, a subtle reminder that people don’t tend to search for peace unless they’re experiencing its opposite. Part of the album’s genius comes from its construction—because the structure was applied after the fact, and because the individual players were so attuned to one another, the songs are rich with possibility. Plenty of quiet music feels this way, of course, but the ensemble never seems to be straining toward the next movement; their stillness wouldn’t rattle crepe paper.
You can hear it in the deliberate pace of the opener “A Gente Acaba (Vento Em Rosa),” how even as it builds to a rolling climax, DePlume never overblows his sax. The band, too, stays together, despite the song urging them to burst apart in ecstasy. It’s as if they recognize the music’s role as a grounding rod and are wary of knocking it over. Restraint, patience, trust: time and again they make GOLD sound like an incredibly wise record.
It comes in handy later in the album, when the ambiguity DePlume has cultivated nearly overtakes him. On “Visitors YT15 - Krupp Steel Condition Pivot,” pips of wordless vocals surround him on every side. His sax slowly finds its way among the voices, like he’s testing the acoustics in a series of smaller and smaller rooms to see how well they reflect the sound back to him. On the penultimate song “Broken Like,” he returns to the words of the manifesto he laid out in “Fucking Let Them,” his voice nearly shot and his manner worn thin; he can’t even bring himself to say the word “love” as he repeats the album’s subtitle.
And yet, we know it’s there. As closer “Now (Pink Triangle, Blue Valley)” stumbles mournfully back through the sympathetic chords of “A Gente Acaba,” with sax and slide guitar trading whimpers and a piano winding its way toward indignation, DePlume’s exhausted, depleted singing in “Broken Like” lingers in the atmosphere. The mood has changed. The work has become difficult, nearly too much to bear. But the message remains the same.


Marco del Rio’s songs are full of riffs that become more nauseating the longer you listen. It all sounds wrong, in the most menacing possible way.

Raspberry Bulbs: Before the Age of Mirrors

Before the Age of Mirrors

Even after a long career making creeping heavy music in projects like Bone Awl and He Who Crushes Teeth, the music that Marco del Rio has made over the past decade as Raspberry Bulbs is uniquely unsettling. First on his own and then with a shifting cast of collaborators, he’s mined the most curdled corners of punk and metal to make both tortured no-fi efforts and more recent full-band recordings that feel cosmically off-balance. His songs are full of riffs that become more nauseating the longer you listen to them. At their best, the songs are autostereograms in reverse: They start out looking like something you’ve encountered before, then dissolve into unparsable, overwhelming noise.
Before the Age of Mirrors is the first Raspberry Bulbs full-length since 2014, but it picks up these threads right where the last, Privacy, left off. Across eight proper tracks and four shorter interludes, del Rio and his band—guitarist Nick Forte and drummer Jim Ning Nong—lead listeners to a world of sharp edges, sudden pitfalls, and hidden dangers. As devotees of raw punk and deathrock, they sometimes channel those familiar shuddering sounds, but there’s something even more sinister in pieces like “They’re After Me,” a burst of paranoid desperation scoured by feedback. As ever, del Rio tops the track with his distinctive vocals—which, scraped by distortion and noise, are the sort of sounds you might hear echoing from behind a dumpster in a David Lynch film. It all sounds wrong, in the most menacing possible way.
Because of del Rio’s caustic bark and the general haze of Raspberry Bulbs’ self-engineered recordings, their lyrics have traditionally been tough to decipher. The specifics still sometimes get garbled in the fuzz, but on Before the Age of Mirrors, you can make out a little more about the otherworldly spaces these songs explore. Del Rio’s characters are overwhelmed and at the brink, doing whatever they can to outrun the mysterious forces clawing at their heels. “Doggerel” blurs together military commands and the violence of the natural world, meditating on the grim image of a dog torn to shreds by a wild boar. Elsewhere del Rio’s characters contemplate eternity, confront old gods, and strain in pursuit of truth that’s always just out of reach. He occasionally comes off as a harried street preacher, offering small wisdoms and impressionistic proverbs, like the one that closes “Reclaimed Church”: “The man who appears as a dog/Has the blood of a dog.”
If you don’t know exactly what he’s going on about, that’s probably the point. Del Rio has often spoken about his music’s adherence to the ideals of the speculative, surreal genre of prose called “weird fiction.” That term is a broad umbrella, linking literature across eras and continents, but its most famous practitioners create worlds both monstrous and mysterious, full of shadowy corners and distressing symbology. Writing in The Atlantic about an anthology of the genre that he co-edited a few years ago, the author Jeff VanderMeer theorized that its appeal stems from the way the real world often feels just as upsetting and unknowable as the ones in the stories. Weird fiction, he wrote, has a way of “showing us as we truly are. Unruly. Unruled. Superstitious. Absurd.” Before the Age of Mirrors does the same. Unhinged as it is, it’s a cathartic expression of the way the world is: messy, ugly, and real.

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The restless avant-folk songwriter Ben Chasny returns with a record that distills his obessions into a coherent whole.

Six Organs of Admittance: Asleep on the Floodplain

Asleep on the Floodplain

As selfish as it seems, I sometimes wish that Ben Chasny-- for more than a decade now, the architect of one of America's best-ever psychedelic syndicates, Six Organs of Admittance-- would sit still. Across more than a dozen albums and even more collaborations, Chasny has proven the restless sort who bounces between sounds, structures, and ideas with the curiosity of a precocious teenager. Scrappy meditations for acoustic guitar, epic drone escapades for ensembles, breezy folk-rock ruminations for a full band: Chasny has played it all, sometimes on the same album and oftentimes with mixed results. Some of his most riveting work brushes against some of his most rote, with some of his most inspired pieces settling alongside his most insipid. The discography of the unquestionably talented Chasny, then, has been a fascinating if frustrating listen, where the attempt has always seemed more important than the execution.
Asleep on the Floodplain, Chasny's fifth for Drag City since 2005, again finds the Six Organs mastermind eager to roam. "S/word and Leviathan", for instance, builds for 10 minutes through layers of dulcimer melodies, electronic rumbles, and harmonium sustains before arriving, in its final three minutes, at a mantra inspired by theology pioneer Catherine Keller. The tunes around it, though, don't even cross the three-minute mark. "Poppies" is a kinetic 61-second adventure for acoustic guitar, built on a theme that lends itself to repetition and long variations that come to a sudden stop. The marathon's other bookend, "A New Name on an Old Cement Bridge", is another instrumental, but this one's a concentric beauty, where the acoustic melody moves with graceful deliberation over a harmonium drone.
Three more tracks on Asleep are instrumentals-- the cresting opener "Above A Desert I've Never Seen" the glowing "Brilliant Blue Sea Between Us", and the curling "Saint of Fishermen". But Chasny turns in one of his best pop songs to date, too, "Light of the Light," a hummable little hymn to impermanence. As on 2009's Luminous Night, Asleep on the Floodplain again attempts to corral Chasny's range; this time, it actually works, gathering all of his impulses into one of his more accessible, endearing albums to date. On "Brilliant Blue Sea Between Us", electric guitar chords drift through another harmonium haze. Chasny's winding acoustic improvisations eventually goad its slow roll forward. Majestic and lumbering, the tune suggests drone wizard Tom Carter collaborating with young British guitarist James Blackshaw. Mostly, though, it feels like a strong synthesis of Chasny's interests: Despite its variability, Asleep on the Floodplain is like a cohesive record not because Chasny favors any one style over another (he doesn't) but because he feels confident and comfortable with each look. It's as though he's roved enough that he finally knows how to finesse each of his interests into something seamles.
About six years ago, Six Organs of Admittance was something like a buzz band, swept into the rising tide of what was called freak-folk or New Weird America. Devendra Banhart placed Chasny alongside Joanna Newsom, Iron & Wine, Jack Rose, Antony and more than a dozen others for Arthur Magazine's compilation, The Golden Apples of the Sun, he got a Drag City deal, and his rock band, Comets on Fire, was signed to Sub Pop. But as freak-folk as a fad has faded, Chasny's star has suffered due less to a lack of musical quality and more to a lack of stylistic consistency. He's been difficult to label. Has it been folk rock or freak folk, free folk or just plain folk? Asleep on the Floodplain triumphantly answers back none of those. Rather, Chasny has distilled all of his impulses and obsessions-- slow drones and brisk picking, solemn mumbles and cheery riffs, ponderous lyrics, and ruminative instrumentals-- into 43 muted, marvelous minutes. It's the sort of record that finds the workmanlike Chasny doing what he does better than most, all at once but never too quickly.


With the help of Phoebe Bridgers, Conor Oberst, and others, this career collaborator steps into the spotlight with a stunningly empathetic study of human frailties.

Beginners

We’ll begin with the strangest song on the record: “Get the Old Band Back Together,” a jocular sing-a-long, replete with harmonica and hand claps, on a record otherwise composed of finger-picked dirges. “Let’s get the old band back together again!” Hutson sings, fronting a gleeful chorus. “Let’s get in the room and let the magic happen!” Though something very special does happen on this album, credit is due not to magic, but to Hutson’s extraordinarily talented ensemble. That’s Conor Oberst you hear on that harmonica, and Lucy Dacus and Meg Duffy in the mix, and Phoebe Bridgers at the boards. With friends like these, who needs sorcery?
Christian Lee Hutson is presently best known for his collaborations with Bridgers, having co-written songs on both boygenius and Better Oblivion Community Center. Traces of his career prior to their link-up are scarce. He recorded two solo albums in the early 2010s, neither of which appears to be currently available on streaming services. In the absence of any earlier trajectory to trace, a few key questions—who this guy is, where the hell he came from, how he got so goddamn good at this—will have to go unanswered. Hutson does not seek to reinvent the wheel on “Beginners.” He offers nothing you’ve not heard before. Even his voice sounds familiar on first listen, a dead ringer in many places for the delicate timbre of Paul Simon. But Hutson’s particular variation on finger-picked folk is as refined and masterfully crafted as you’ll find anywhere.
What distinguishes Beginners from any number of other, lesser albums are Hutson’s unflinching probes into human fallibility. On opener “Atheist,” Hutson shrugs at a Sunday School hymn: “It went like, ‘Angels watching over us, all our little lives’/I don’t know if I buy it, but it does sound kinda nice.” This moment sets the stage for a record which turns away from grand metaphysical questions and toward mundane manmade struggle. Whether he’s singing about outpatient rehabilitation (“Seven Lakes”), a hostile high school (“Northsiders”), or the deterioration of an intimate relationship (every other track, just about), Hutson’s focus remains the ways in which human beings can’t help but hurt one another.
He’s even brave enough to cast himself as the scoundrel on a few tracks. On “Unforgivable,” when he dismisses a partner with, “I just can’t fucking do it anymore,” he slows and stresses the cruelest word, earning it like a television writer allotted only one per season. His delivery of the downright-malevolent “Keep You Down” is just as indelible. When he winces on the chorus’ high harmonies, it’s as though he feels the very pain his narrator inflicts. There is something refreshing in seeing a songwriter so mindful of his capacity for betrayal, and so effortfully working to fix the damage he’s done. “Lose This Number” is especially moving, the haughty fuck-off of its title phrase becoming a yearning plea for connection as he fondly reminisces with someone he once loved. “You don’t have to forgive me,” he sings. “Hell, you probably shouldn’t.”
Hutson is at his very best when he’s not showing off. He occasionally rivals Hemingway for the amount of sheer devastation he can pack into six words. On “Talk,” taking a neglectful parent to task, he sings, “I was raised over the phone”—a damning indictment, no pretty poetry necessary. He stumbles only when he doesn’t give these moments room to breathe, as with the shocking climax of “Northsiders,” a gut-punch too quickly swallowed up by the song’s breezy schoolyard rhyme scheme. Some of his darlings, too, would be better off killed. “It’s like I was born on the back of a bullet/With your name written on it” is a lovely lyric, but out of place in the intimate late-night conversation of “Lose This Number.” This sort of adornment only distracts from the great strength of his simple language and imagery.
Hutson’s musical style finds a perfect complement in Bridgers’ subtle production. She carefully seasons Hutson’s acoustic finger-picking with other instrumental layers—a tart keyboard line on “Twin Soul,” a crisp cymbal on “Lose This Number,” and buttery strings throughout—to bring out the flavor of his playing, but never overwhelm its delicacy. Another collaborator, Nathaniel Walcott of Bright Eyes, is responsible for the marvel of Beginners’ string arrangements. This record was made with friends in the room, and those friends were invariably extraordinarily talented. The starry group of back-up singers from “Get the Old Band Back Together” make a welcome return on the final number, “Single for the Summer.” There, they all repeat a single line—“It’s gonna happen any day now”—with an air of rebellious optimism and so much conviction you can’t help but believe them. We may not be guarded by angels, but human beings can make for a pretty fine choir in a pinch.

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The London singer-songwriter’s debut LP frames big themes—the heaviness of life and death, the duality in ecstasy and pain—in skeletal, atmospheric indie rock.

Living

mark william lewis often seems to be lost in thought. Over the past couple of years, the London singer-songwriter has established himself as one of the most pensive and probing artists in the constellation of experimenters loosely orbiting Dean Blunt and his World Music Group label. Like some of the elusive artists in that foggy scene, lewis hasn’t shared much biographical information publicly. Still, his songs reveal enough: a fixation on the heaviness of life and death, the intertwined nature of intimacy and disconnect, and the duality of ecstasy and pain. In a low, creaky voice that feels like it was made to carry the weight of these heavy thematic concerns, he mulls and meanders, finding joy, most often, in the searching.
Living, lewis’ first full-length, begins deep within one of these meditations. Opener “Coming” joins echoey, yearning guitar lines with floating double bass and lewis’ rumbling whisper, which offers a series of foreboding thoughts that culminate in a grim proclamation: “There’s so much violence/So much fucking stress.” The exact source of his turmoil is never made entirely clear; nor does he ever sound too bent out of shape about it.
This mood—downcast but not defeated—continues throughout. On “Enough,” lewis considers the toll of interpersonal turmoil, describing emotional suffering over a trudging, languid arrangement. Elsewhere, on the sparse, dreamy “The Heat,” he mutters about natural forces in a way that feels opaque and threatening. Still, no matter how ominous his subject matter, he trudges onward, with a sigh, because what else is there to do? His voice sounds burdened at points, but he mostly seems at ease—describing the weight of the world while knowing he has little choice but to keep shouldering it.
Across the record, the production holds a mirror to his muddled headspace in a way that feels moving and vulnerable. On previous projects, lewis traded in tightly wound percussion and desperate, distressed guitars that recalled tense indie-rock acts like Duster or Alex G, but on Living, he spaces out a bit more. On the dreary, wordless “Romantic Horror,” he begins with mangled arpeggios that coalesce into an elliptical instrumental that’s heavy on repetition and suggestion. Guitars are clouded in stuttering delay, basslines feel like they’ll drift off, unmoored, into the ether. Melodies relapse and recur, in a way that evokes Bark Psychosis’ hazy post-rock refractions or Vini Reilly’s celestial guitar explorations. These moments make the times that lewis sings his gruff-voiced koans all the more affecting—they paint him as a figure emerging suddenly from the mist, carrying wisdom deeper than even he knows.
As much as lewis reveals where his head’s at, he never really fully offers any answers to the biggest questions he asks, and the ambiguity invites listeners to obsess alongside him. That quality is exhibited most clearly on the closing title track, where he fixates on a person he can’t get out of his mind before pausing briefly to offer a stray question: “How good can it get?” Judging from the title, he’s talking about life itself. But it’s not entirely clear whether he’s asking from a place of abundance or dissatisfaction—whether he thinks that things can and will improve, or if he’ll be stuck feeling the way he’s feeling forever. The thought repeats throughout the song, never getting any clearer. And yet he still perseveres—the only way to find out the answers, he seems to suggest, is to just keep on living.


With the second album from his Slaughter Beach, Dog project, Jake Ewald of Modern Baseball has found his voice as a musician, though he’s still searching as a writer.

Birdie

Modern Baseball were a band of the people: total transparency was a major factor in their success and perhaps the biggest in their recent decision to take a break. On 2016’s Holy Ghost and in its making-of documentary, Brendan Lukens and Jake Ewald were as upfront about their struggles with substance abuse, mental illness, and exhaustion as they were about the nuances of social media and high school heartbreak. But unlike before, airing it out on stage every night was a problem, not a solution. And so in September of 2016—with the first album from his project Slaughter Beach, Dog—Ewald began distancing himself from Modern Baseball by writing about someone other than himself. While he constructed the fictional “Slaughter Beach” to combat writer’s block within his main gig, with MoBo now on hiatus, Ewald allows himself to play the lead role again.
If Ewald isn’t the narrator on Birdie, these guys sure have a lot in common with him. Ewald returns to reality in familiar settings—bonding over gin in apartments, nodding off while traveling to and from Philadelphia, Maryland, and Delaware (vis a vis a lyrical homage to the Promise Ring). “I love looking at your pictures, but I still wish that I’d brought more,” Ewald sings on “Bad Beer,” a tour diary and presumptive companion track to Holy Ghost’s long-distance love letter “Mass.” Compared to his past work, Ewald’s sonic and emotional palette are rendered in cooler shades, mostly amber and sepia. Birdie is a point on a familiar trajectory, literal post-punk in the manner of John K. Samson’s solo projects or Tim Kasher’s the Good Life. It’s a means for verbose songwriters to transition towards a more sustainable format, maintaining a sardonic edge to what might otherwise threaten to become cloying indie-folk.
In that regard, the chipper backup vocals and beaming geniality of “Pretty O.K.” test Ewald’s boundaries—yet it’s the shrugging sentiment of the chorus itself that becomes the most substantial, if unintended indictment of Birdie. The spare arrangements and easy tempos ensure that Ewald’s storytelling remains the focal point. But there’s a disappointing lack of conflict, or stakes, or sense that outcomes aren’t predestined to be pretty OK.
Ewald remains adept at cutting dialogue and creating characters with dimension: at the outset of “Pretty O.K.,” a formative friend named Luis is given a familiar outline (“his darkened room all full of porn and ICP CDs”), before Ewald gets to the core of his blasé outlook on life outside his father’s double-wide (“he had no middle name and no desire to go to college”). Meanwhile, in “Phoenix,” Ewald imagines a partner’s “strung-out” mother “making all the world her ashtray,” calling out modeling commands while taking photos—a powerful image that only serves as a digression, a character actor given an underwritten role. Without these cameos, Birdie’s midsection breezes by, both as pleasant and memorable as small talk with a friend.
Ewald seems quite capable of one day making a real statement as Slaughter Beach, Dog, and Birdie makes a case for the staying power of the project. He sounds just as comfortable in scratchy, one-take, four-track folk (“Phoenix”) as he does in easy country rock or spare slowcore. He’s found his voice as a musician, but he’s still searching as a writer, trying to find the sweet spot between autobiographer and novelist. It’s no slight to say that Ewald is still best at his most transparent, singing to the person right in front of him. Birdie is framed by “Acolyte” and “Gold and Green,” love songs that see Ewald accessing both a world-weary wisdom and earned serenity that was out of reach even two years ago. “Man, it cuts like a dull knife/When you’re young and you’re told/‘It makes sense when you’re older’/Darling let’s get old,” he sings towards the end of “Acolyte,” welcoming maturity in a most transparent way.


Crafted at home in a period of unusual focus, the Italian synthesist’s latest album feels like a reflection of a world gone haywire: one part prayer, one part screaming at the void.

Spirit Exit

Holiness has a way of creeping into unexpected spaces. Caterina Barbieri’s Spirit Exit, her first foray on light-years, the label she founded after 2017’s lauded Patterns of Consciousness, is proof that the same spirit that takes hold of you in a basement club can also reach inside the walls of a locked apartment while a virus ravages the city outside. In Barbieri’s case, the space was Milan, the time 2020, and the synth virtuoso’s latest project is an aptly named portal between chaos and transcendence.
Uncertainty lets the light in, and the Italian composer’s music, created on a custom modular synth that she thinks of “more like a mechanical fortune teller,” is incandescent with discovery. The songs are an unexpected but faithful reflection of a world gone haywire: one part prayer, one part screaming at the void. Layer by layer, Spirit Exit unfolds odd-couple pairings of electronica with elements inspired by minimalism, classical guitar, and machine learning. Her influences are as bracing as the songs themselves: St. Teresa d’Avila’s 16th-century mysticism, post-humanist philosophy, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Listening to these sprawling, ecstatic compositions feels like pulling back an endless series of curtains—particularly on standout “Canticle of Cryo,” a seven-and-a-half-minute odyssey of high, plaintive vocals and arpeggios stabbed with rumbling bass notes.
As on previous compositions (like 2017’s excellent “TCCTF”), Spirit Exit is rich in slow builds and intense, polyphonic soundscapes that feel intimate despite their eeriness. But here, Barbieri trades length for depth, crafting eight arresting tracks that are more pointed and purposeful than in the past. “Broken Melody” is the shortest, at 4:26, and proves a visceral, fanged testament to how quickly these compositions can seduce. At its center is a melody that might’ve been borrowed from a medieval canticle, but it’s the texture she drapes over this foundation that imbues the song with its uncanny power—layers of fuzz and Auto-Tuned harmonies, mechanical notes pinging in the background. “Even if you’re gone, I will hold you,” she opens, high and reverberating, like a voice emanating from a cave.
Spirit Exit reflects subtle but important changes to Barbieri’s songwriting process, which she amended to fit the constraints of the pandemic. Where previous tracks took shape in concert halls and across tours, iterated and refined in community, she created this record in her home studio over a two-month period. The resulting album is taut and heightened, as captivating as her previous work but more condensed. The songs are an engaging intellectual puzzle, but they’re also incantatory and beautiful in their simplicity.
Barbieri’s dualities—holy and profane, ancient and newfangled, ecstatic and doomed—give Spirit Exit its potency. In pinging arpeggios and harpsichord-like tones, she finds a middle ground between a hymnal and a Wendy Carlos song, and in her eerily processed vocals, she nestles newfound emotional resonance inside electronic pulses. For music that evokes empty clubs and shuttered churches, built on patterns dictated by a “mechanical fortune teller,” its humanity is its most haunting quality.


The Indian composer and vocalist blends Hindustani classical music with new age synth on her dreamy, meditative debut.

Under the Lilac Sky

Poets and artists have long looked at the dusk sky and seen glimpses of the ineffable. Composer and vocalist Arushi Jain channels this rich tradition on her debut, Under the Lilac Sky, a suite of floating synths and Indian classical melodies that evokes the moods and emotions of the evening hours. The diverse strands that come together in this dreamy, experimental sound reflect Jain’s own diasporic journey. There’s the Hindustani classical tradition that she grew up with in New Delhi, the modular synthesis and DIY spirit that she picked up while studying engineering and coding at Stanford, and the third-culture genre bending that brings to mind fellow South Asian diaspora artists like Sunny Jain, Arooj Aftab, Priya Darshini, and Brooklyn Raga Massive.
Largely composed for a sunset performance at the opulent Alsisar Mahal palace in Rajasthan, the six tracks on Under the Lilac Sky are all rooted in Hindustani classical ragas. The building blocks of Indian classical music, ragas are melodic structures that incorporate a limited number of notes but allow for almost infinite improvisations and interpretations within that framework. Individual ragas are traditionally associated with specific moods and times of day. The four that Jain calls on for this record—des, khamaj, kafi, and durga—are evening ragas, meant to be performed between the hours of sunset and midnight and intended to evoke calm, melancholy, and contemplation.
While there is precedent for blending synths and ragas—Charanjit Singh’s Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat seems like a precursor—Jain takes a more experimental approach. Where Singh chose faithful reconstruction, Jain prefers deconstruction and recontextualization. She takes centuries-old Hindustani classical melodies and lovingly transforms them—altering the rhythm, stretching out the vocals—and bringing them in conversation with the new age synth tradition of Terry Riley and Suzanne Ciani, whom Jain has opened for. The result is an impressionist landscape of brooding drones and richly hued synth lines, anchored by Jain’s hypnotic vocals. (Not coincidentally, raga is literally translated as “coloring” or “dyeing.”)
Distant drones grumble and jitter on opener “Richer Than Blood,” a grey mechanical canvas transmuted into color by Jain’s gently rising vocals. Melodies evoking a sitar twinkle like prematurely visible stars, as Jain paints broad auburn brush strokes with sweeping, washed-out synths. More shades appear on the nine-minute “Look How Far We Have Come”—the subtle gradients of Jain’s partially submerged vocals, the glistening cascades of brightly colored synths, the modulated pulse of the bass drone. Like the other tracks, “Look How Far We Have Come” has no percussion, driven instead by the momentum of Jain’s repeated, mutating synth patterns. And yet the performance never seems to meander or lose momentum; it reels you into a calm, meditative world.
The sun has all but disappeared by the foreboding “My People Have Deep Roots,” with its throbbing bass and inky swirls of clouds. This is the pre-Edison night reconfigured as sound, an all-encompassing presence snuffing out all shape and color. The only light comes from Jain’s voice, dripping with loss and melancholy, a lonely candle trying to keep the darkness—and the demons that lurk in it—at bay. The bright keys and exuberant synth melodies return on “Cultivating Self Love” and the sprawling closer “Under the Lilac Sky.” The latter track, in particular, mimics the manic energy of night in urban India, its playful synth lines and chopped-up arpeggios rubbing against each other like roving bands of midnight revelers on a New Delhi street. The monsters of the dark—both internal and external—have been vanquished, replaced by a heady intoxication that slowly gives way to cozy bliss, at least until the next sunset.

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The Danish trio’s daring album takes a fluid approach to arrangement and song structure, balancing their industrial, noisier tendencies by engaging with the broader realm of pop music.

The Water We Drink

Nikolaj Vonsild is best known as the frontman of electropop group When Saints Go Machine, whose second album Konkylie made a splash in their native Denmark on its release back in 2011. His new trio Khalil retains some of his main group’s hallmarks. This is bright, synthetic music drawn in digital textures, with Vonsild’s yearning falsetto pushed right to the fore. Yet Khalil feels harder to categorize than his parent band. Released on the underground Danish imprint Posh Isolation, their debut album The Water We Drink takes a fluid approach to arrangement and song structure, its electronic washes and hyper-processed vocals right at the verge of dissolving into abstraction.
In places, The Water We Drink recalls the so-called “bubblegum industrial” music of label co-founder Loke Rahbek’s Croatian Amor, for instance. Khalil, though, balance their experimental tendencies by engaging with the broader realm of pop music. Production comes courtesy Vonsild, Villads Klint, and Simon Formann the latter of whom played in the Copenhagen post-punk group Lower, and whose current solo project Yen Towers prefigures Khalil’s tensile club rhythms and skittery sound design. But all that stands secondary to Vonsild’s voice. His vocal is placed front and center, drenched in Auto-Tune, lending it an alien vibrato or freezing it into unnatural leaps and pirouettes. The first time you hear it you think of Drake or the Kanye of 808s & Heartbreak, and what at first feels like an impulsive comparison slowly gains weight as the album unfolds. “Rest My Head Against a Wall of Water” and “Sculpture No Solid” are possessed of that distinctly Drakeian confection of preening vanity, romantic angst, and sad-boy rapture.
This sense of permeable boundaries is a hallmark of the project. On the cover, a plastic water bottle drains its contents into a pair of cupped hands—a juxtaposition of the natural and the man-made that feels heavy with meaning. The branding of bottled water implies cleanliness and purity, but the reality is heaving landfills and oceans choked with plastic, environmental apocalypse smuggled in under the benign corporate language of hygiene, health, and well-being.
This conflicted spirit finds its way into the very fabric of The Water We Drink; even as its artificial textures convey an effervescent euphoria, something darker and more damaged drifts just beneath the surface. “Submit So Deep” and “Estate Straight Line” recall the mutant bass experiments of Rabit, or the more eerie recesses of vaporwave; on the latter, shuddering sub bass and glitching vocal samples coalesce into a disorientating sonic fog. Elsewhere, Khalil reach for moments of febrile intensity. On the closing “The White Hoodie I Wear Because I Love You,” the electronics recede into the background and Vonsild’s voice is left to spin and whirl madly, as if being eaten up by the intensity of its own emotion. Here, in particular, I’m reminded of the glossy trauma of ANOHNI’s HOPELESSNESS, another album on which beauty and horror are closely entwined.
A few years back, Posh Isolation’s stock in trade was dour post-punk and arty power electronics. The idea of the label releasing a record drawing on contemporary hip-hop modes would have been, to put it mildly, unlikely. But The Water We Drink is a porous record for an increasingly porous age, one in which lines of influence or provenance mean little, so long as you’ve got engaging sounds and smart concepts to tie everything together. Khalil certainly bring both to the table on a record that feels like soul music for our times.


An old Zen koan comes to mind; delivered through the lesser hands of seekers and compilers, beats and\n\ Deadheads ...

Tony Conrad / Faust: Outside the Dream Syndicate

Outside the Dream Syndicate

An old Zen koan comes to mind; delivered through the lesser hands of seekers and compilers, beats and Deadheads, the New Age-- but surely, I imagine, of wise and noble provenance somewhere back. A flag flapping in the gale sparks an argument between two monks on the nature of things. The first declares that the flag is surely moving. The flag is still, counters the other, it is the wind that is moving. Sure enough, where an insoluble paradox appears, the wandering master is not far behind. Which is it, ask the monks, is the flag moving or is the wind moving? Neither, replies the master; mind is moving.
Fair enough. Take it, like any wisdom, with a grain of salt, but it springs to mind. Not because Tony Conrad sees still air and a flapping flag, or because Faust occupy a world of volatile weather, but just because, for a moment in Outside the Dream Syndicate, one forgets what exactly is moving and what is standing still.
Here's what we know: in October 1972, at a hippie commune in Wümme in southwestern Hamburg, a German art-rock collective bred on the stringent drone and skag-pop of the Velvet Underground hooked up with the young composer who gave that band its name-- or rather, who handed Lou Reed the sadomasochism exposé whence the band derived its name. Tony Conrad and the members of Faust collaborated for three days on an album that would be released the following year in England and would tank immediately thereafter. The musicians did not communicate or collaborate throughout the following two decades.
Minimalism is unquestionably the wrong word; I prefer asceticism. Anyone familiar with the Zappa-like hysteria of Faust's first album or the searing kosmische of IV must imagine the sheer force of self-denial at work in implementing Conrad's vision: to have a deep base note tuned to the tonic on Conrad's violin and to have the drummer "tuned" to a rhythm that corresponded to the vibrations. Minimal in design, I suppose, but catastrophically huge in execution.
"From the Side of Man and Womankind" opens in dead motorik, the usually nimble percussive battery of bass guitarist Jean-Hervé Peron and drummer "Zappi" Diermaier, stalled out to a hollow thud-- like the heartbeat of a machine. Conrad's violin bleats mournfully, endlessly; rising, breathing, sighing, screaming, but without ceasing: relentless. Faust resisted. Peron's second bass note, inserted against Conrad's wishes, adds a spring and thrust to the proceedings. Zappi's odd cymbal crash shatters like punctuation in a prayer. Faust producer Uwe Nettelbeck dulled the serrated violence of Conrad's violin, somehow rendering slow murder into long caresses. "The Side of Man and Womankind" runs like a conveyor belt through fog: going without moving, advancing, standing still.
"From the Side of the Machine" is oddly less mechanical than its counterpart. A half-hour in length, like "Man and Womankind", the "Machine" side ruminates with muted psychedelia: serpentine bass, ceremonial percussion, the purr and roar of Rudolf Sosna's humming synthesizer, Conrad's violin passing high above like an electrical storm in the upper air. There is a predatory quality to the "Side of the Machine": an encircling peril, a certain restlessness above and behind. Mind moves, as if hunted.
The Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of Outside the Dream Syndicate adds a second disc of material. Two brief tracks-- both named with the young death of former Dream Syndicate comrade Angus Maclise in mind-- offer the remaining fragments of those three days at the abandoned schoolhouse studio at Wümme. Both the slow burning "The Pyre of Angus was in Kathmandu" and the tremulous "The Death of the Composer Was in 1962" reveal a looser agenda in the sessions. In the latter piece, Conrad abandons the impassive drone of the first disc for an almost celebratory psych-rock. The second disc is rounded out by an alternate production of "From the Side of Man and Womankind", lacking the overdubbed violin lines of the album version.
So perhaps a little Zen, perhaps a little cataclysm. After all, as Lou Reed said, "It's the beginning of the New Age." And a few decades before that, a poet ended his long flirtation with Buddhism by joining the Church of England. In his conversion poem, however, he continued to pray with eastern paradoxes. "Teach us to care and not to care," T.S. Eliot intoned, "teach us to sit still." And this album finally begins to show us how.


Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse team for a loose, off-the-cuff record about madness, depression, monsters, visionaries, and being yourself.

St. Elsewhere

After the sound of a film projector whirring to life and a little hip-hop fanfare, this album starts with "Go Go Gadget Gospel" glee: soul horns kicking, hand-clapping breakbeats with the speed and stutter of jungle, and Cee-Lo Green shouting, "I'm free" like he's up in church. It's the most exciting thing I've heard this year. At the tail end of the disc, there's "The Last Time", where the beat splits the difference between disco-era funk and roller-skating jam, and Cee-Lo sings like he borrowed some time-traveling platform shoes from the Delfonics' closet and wound up on mid-1970s Soul Train. You shouldn't fixate on those details-- I may be exaggerating-- but the main thing about those two tracks are that they sound awfully fresh. Play this when people are over and they'll almost certainly ask the question: "So who is this, anyway?"
I don't mean to spin any big theories on you-- this isn't that kind of record-- but let's stop for a second and notice the context. Now that hip-hop has nearly three decades under its belt, every major genre of American pop music is more or less "mature." You know how rock geeks, after nine or 10 years immersed in the genre, start looking elsewhere for surprises-- hip-hop, dance, bluegrass, anything they haven't already figured out? Well, these days we can read Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee telling Tape Op that rap is all repetitive big business now, and claiming that alternative rock is where the innovation is-- in other words, sounding not unlike an old rock guy wondering why bands still sound like the Velvet Underground. This kind of uneasiness isn't new, of course, but it's interesting: It seems like there's a big itch out there right now, everyone looking for ways to make the music feel as new and free as it did when they first came across it.
Two guys interested in scratching that itch, hip-hop-wise, are both associates in Atlanta's Dungeon Family. Andre 3000, of Outkast: It might seem like he's just trying to be weird, but the guy has spent the last decade visibly searching for some new way to be-- not just new music, but a whole new model of identity for the black male musician. (Avenues he's tried include futurism, mysticism, Baduism, sincerity, dandified couture, genre-less chart hits, and close study of Aphex Twin.) The same goes for Cee-Lo, one half of the Gnarls Barkley duo-- a Goodie Mob rapper turned funk freak and soul-shouting faux preacherman.
Who does Gnarls Barkley pair him with, the two of them dressed up like Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange droogs, or Wayne and Garth? DJ Danger Mouse, a guy known by undie-rap geeks for his own beats but read-about-in-Entertainment Weekly for mashing up Jay-Z and the Beatles. The two of them: They're trying something new here, you know. Even the lyrical themes of this album-- madness, depression, monsters, visionaries, being yourself-- seem like conscious attempts to be arty. And that's before you get to the tossed-off Violent Femmes cover. Which is only track four.
Don't get me wrong: This is not some grand genre-busting mission statement. For the most part, it sounds like two guys playing around and having fun, sometimes more fun than the listener. DM's production aesthetic-- "if it's enjoyable for more than 2 minutes and 10 seconds, then that's the song to me"-- means the beats come out like candies in a box, a line of little treats and mini-ideas. (Pick some samples, make them bump a little, move on.) Cee-Lo sounds like he's writing in the vocal booth, just hopping in and singing his takes until something good develops. But as scattershot and weirdly limp as parts of this are-- two guys just knocking things together, seeing what happens-- well, it feels better to hear someone trying.
And the treats are real treats. The single, "Crazy", has been found atop UK charts (and on U.S. television dramas), for all the same reasons that Outkast's "Hey Ya" hit big-- it's a big, brash pop song that sounds retro and modern at the same time. "Transformer" is a tweaked-out jumble with the pace and clatter of English grime, plus flutes. There's traditional r&b; bump, "cinematic" darkness for the monster stories, DM's dusty-sample boom-bap. "Just a Thought" has Cee-Lo experiencing crisis over classical guitar and bursts of overdriven drums: "I've tried/ Everything but suicide/ And it's crossed my mind/ But I'm fine."
Imagine: Two guys fooling around with whatever sticks, musically, and yet here's Cee-Lo, sounding as convincing as possible in his best reverend soul-voice, writing serious and sincere about life. It's a joy, and in this context, where unselfconscious freshness can feel strangely hard to come by, it'll charm the hell out of a whole lot of people-- whether or not it'll really stand up to more than a season's listening.


This collection of dance tracks produced by Caribou's Dan Snaith under his Daphni alias is the excitable product of an artist who could no longer watch a scene from the sidelines. A sense of abandon and exploration keeps Jiaolong from sounding like the work of a dilettante.

Jiaolong

If you listen to enough dance music, you'll come to treasure concrete ideas. You know them when you hear them, because dance music at its most rote and workaday is often more about execution, about DJs having conversations with other DJs, about having enough material to fill a marathon set and yet another podcast. Dan Snaith has been dipping his toes in these waters. He plays long sets at clubs around Europe when his main vehicle, Caribou, isn't opening for Radiohead. He releases tough-to-snag 12"s of material he admittedly remixed solely for the purpose of DJing. Sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes: The most invigorating thing about Jiaolong, a collection of dance tracks produced by Snaith under his Daphni alias, is that it's packed with ideas. It's the excitable product of an artist who could no longer watch a scene from the sidelines, who had to jump in before his brain, or his MPC's memory card, burst from abundance.
More than anything, it's this sense of abandon and exploration that keeps Jiaolong from sounding like the work of a dilettante. It's easy to draw parallels between Snaith's work and that of his longtime friend Four Tet-- who himself released a collection of dance tracks this year after a decade of varied, homebody psychedelia-- but Snaith's work, for better and worse, is looser and more varied, not as indebted to the flourishing UK bass scene both veterans became enamored with. Snaith chases steepled, peak-time anthems before diving into bustling, jazzy house, and fearless techno melancholia.
Jiaolong's first track, "Yes, I Know", shares space with the grimy edits of Theo Parrish and the all-smiles filter disco of Tiger & Woods, reminding us that the hoarse refrains of 1970s R&B and the corroded drum machines of the 1980s make great bedfellows. Snaith, though, isn't satisfied with a killer loop and an ass-shaking beat: As the track progresses, he papers it with peals of noisy synths and burly, strongman bass. It's busy but not excessive, from an artist used to having a lot of balls in the air on any given track.
Jiaolong is front-loaded. Snaith follows "Yes, I Know" with a remix of an absurdly rare African 7" (it couldn't be licensed; the musicians couldn't be found) and "Ye Ye", the pulsing, earworm techno banger that shared a side with Four Tet's "Pinnacles". After these three tracks you'll be convinced that you're watching security footage of a kid in a candy shop, reaching and grasping for anything he can get his hands on, everyone a little guilty and a little geeked. The remainder of Jiaolong, though, is far more scattered, as Snaith moves from frantic sequencer battlegrounds ("Springs", "Light") to chin-stroking beat science ("Ahora") and back again. The porous, call-and-response refrain of "Pairs" and the acid-soaked improvisations of "Jiao" come closest to matching the sheer giddiness of the opening tracks.
In the interview above, Snaith admitted that the Daphni project-- which purportedly includes still-unreleased material earmarked for Snaith's DJ appearances-- has freed him from the constraints of Caribou, which at this point is closer to a standard rock democracy. Caribou is a band used to juggling multiple melodic ideas, a band that has to place a premium on organization and concision. Daphni's less focused moments sound like Snaith taking a toy off the shelf, Slinky-style, bending and prodding it at his leisure. That image doesn't do justice to Snaith's best moments, though. The point is not Snaith's juvenilia, or inexperience; it is that Snaith's fascination shines, taking him places that po-faced peers are blind to.


Former Bad Seeds sideman Mick Harvey revisits the songbook of Serge Gainbourg for the third time, moving past the salacious icon’s signature songs into his oddities.

Delirium Tremens

Throughout his four-decade career, Mick Harvey has served as rock’s most reliable sidekick. For much of that time, he was the set designer who built the pedestal upon which Nick Cave has pranced and prowled; currently, he’s okay with being the second-most famous Harvey onstage. Even as a solo artist, he’s been most himself when singing the songs of others. Of the six albums released under his own name to date, only one has featured original material. Compared to his long-time former foil, Harvey is a cool, calm, plainspoken singer; his true voice has always come through his sense of arrangement, and his ability to render exquisite beauty and apocalyptic clamor with the same brushstroke.
On Delirium Tremens, Harvey returns to the songbook of Serge Gainsbourg, whose balance of salaciousness and sophistication was foundational to the Bad Seeds’ sound. Delirium Tremens is the third entry in a Serge-centric series that began 21 years ago with the release of Intoxicated Man and its 1997 companion Pink Elephants (the recent reissues of which inspired this new entry). For decades now, Gainsbourg has had an outsized influence on underground Anglophone musicians unlike any other Francophone performer, and it’s no mystery why: whether engaging in flirtatious pillow talk or seditious satire, his work oozes an incomparable cool and subversive spirit that obliterates any language barrier. For a sharply dressed pop star who was a fixture on the French talk-show circuit, Gainsbourg epitomized punk long before the term had been defined. He was an inappropriate fart joke dropped in the middle of a high-society party, the unshaven sleazebag who could nonetheless sweet talk the prettiest woman in the room into going home with him.
Back in the ’90s, Harvey’s Gainbourg project served a practical function: as Gainsbourg’s influence was starting to seep into the indie-rock world through bands like Stereolab, Luna, and Belle and Sebastian, Harvey’s Anglicized interpretations of his work brought a greater clarity and dimension to music that most English listeners had initially been drawn to through vibe and mystique alone. Now that Gainsbourg has been thoroughly canonized in North America and Histoire de Melody Nelson box sets can be had at Urban Outfitters, Delirium Tremens is an opportunity for Harvey to dig even deeper into Gainsbourg’s labyrinthine catalogue. Between Pink Elephants and Intoxicated Man, Harvey had already tackled Gainsbourg’s signature songs and then some. But, fitting for a collection that opens with an amped-up, psychedelized take on the 1976 art-rock oddity “The Man With the Cabbage Head” (“L’homme à Tête De Chou”), Delirium Tremens suggests there are still more layers to unpeel.
Harvey remains mostly reverential to his sacrilegious source, but Delirium Tremens is much more than just Gainsbourg fed through Google Translate. Rather, it amplifies the unsettling undercurrents that always stewed beneath Gainsbourg’s impeccable arrangements: The jazzy swing of late ’50s serenade “Deadly Tedium” (“Ce Mortel Ennui”) becomes a queasy cabaret of wobbly vibraphones; the busker-folk shuffle of “The Convict Song” (“Chanson de Forçat”) is horsewhipped into a cowpunk charge that proves, while Harvey is no longer a Bad Seed, he still has a firm grasp of their reins. But naturally, the most outrageous reinterpretation is reserved for a track from Gainsbourg’s madcap Nazi-themed send-up Rock Around the Bunker: not only does Harvey’s translation of “Est-ce Est-ce Si Bon” magnify its titular pun into “SS C’est Bon,” he delivers the song in faux-Germanic patter atop a grinding, sludge-metal goose-step. “I Envisage,” meanwhile, takes equal liberties with a song Gainsbourg originally penned for French rocker Alain Baschung, transforming its combustible post-punk rockabilly into an engrossing, cigarette-smoky set piece infused with a suffocating drone and dread.
Delirium Tremens’ second act is given over to a cluster of songs originally featured in the 1967 Anna Karina musical comedy, Anna, their thematic rumination on desire forming almost a separate album within an album. Most of these contrast Harvey with the beautifully dazed vocals of fellow Australian Xanthe Waite (of the Total Control offshoot act Terry), and their duet dynamic encourages more typical orchestral-pop and trad-rock renditions compared to the more eccentric interpretations that comprise the album’s first half. But then, such extremes are crucial to capturing Gainsbourg’s essence. As Harvey sings on “A Violent Poison (That’s What Love Is),” life is but a journey “from desire to disgust, and from disgust back to desire.” And Delirium Tremens carries out those marching orders with aplomb.


Love him or hate him, the divisive NOLA rapper's latest mixtape-- a sprawling 29-track, 100-plus minute behemoth-- ups the ante of last year's DJ Drama-produced Dedication 2 in every way possible.

Da Drought 3

"Everybody in this fuckin' game got the game fucked up. Work, man, work. I feel you, Nas, the new rappers today, they act like R&B singers. Man, what is you done?! Go into the studio with clips-- ammo: positive subjects, bitches, niggas, fake niggas, club song, ho's that shake their... Who am I shootin' at? I got bullets for days." -- Lil Wayne rant on YouTube
It's no secret: Nowadays, most mainstream rappers aren’t rappers. The majority just throw a few bars together around Christmastime before getting back to their real hustle, whether it be acting, designing clothes, or thinking about how to make Rick Ross the next Biggie Smalls while sitting behind a desk in a sharp suit. So when Lil Wayne calls himself the "best rapper alive," the claim isn't that controversial-- it increasingly seems like he's one of the only rappers alive. And he's pissed (see above).
With Hip-Hop Is Dead, Nas tried to resuscitate the culture with a hit-and-miss jumble of grumpy nostalgia and over-the-hill soul-searching; it was a far cry from indie-rap's nagging grandmother pose, but the album didn't hold much hope or promise for the future. With its free-associative, intangible, postmodern pull, Da Drought 3, by contrast, sounds a lot like the future. Released on the internet for free, the 29-track, 100-plus minute, DJ-less behemoth finds Lil Wayne sidestepping the music industry-- and the mixtape industry-- while delivering similes, jokes, and flows by the ton. After last year's stunning Dedication 2 tape with DJ Drama, Da Drought 3 ups the ante in almost every way possible.
To use a distinctly Wayne-ian analogy-- that is, part '80s baby trivia, part ridiculous, all true-- the New Orleans native is akin to one-time "American Gladiators" champion Wesley "Two Scoops" Berry. Like Berry, Wayne goes headlong into an inherently absurd competitive atmosphere (i.e. modern hip-hop) and dominates. He scoots around giants, making the most of his nimble, versatile patter. No longer satisfied with being a southern rap ambassador, Wayne emphasizes his range with a cross-country, cross-generational, cross-genre beat selection here, from the Southern R&B of Ciara's "Promise" to the neo-soul of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" to the moody New York bap of Jay-Z's "Dead Presidents II." It's effortlessly encompassing. Then there's the quicksilver flow and morphing subject matter, from the West Coast gangsta-isms of "I'm Blooded" to the off-the-wall Cam'ron-esque abstractions of "Live from 504" to the MF Doom-style kitchen talk. No assembly required-- everything to everybody.
It's fitting, then, for the MC to start the album off rhyming over a snap music smash ("This Is Why I'm Hot") originally made by a New York rapper (MIMS) trying to pander to a nationwide audience. As if to underline his alien mystique ("I am just a Martian, ain't nobody else on this planet"), Wayne goes international on the track, working a Jamaican flow simply because he can. Later, while introducing his revamp of T.I.'s "Top Back", Wayne clarifies, "T.I. is the king-- don’t get that shit twisted/ And me? I am the best rapper alive." The difference-- divine right vs. tireless politicking-- is spelled out through Wayne's regional-poaching as high-art stumping. Work, man, work.
At one point, Wayne poses the question, "I'm crazy for bein' Wayne or is Wayne just crazy?" And while that chicken/egg query may be unanswerable, there's no doubt Wayne makes several insane decisions on Da Drought 3-- choices no other rapper would ever consider. Take "My Daddy", Wayne's spirited defense of his close relationship with surrogate father Brian "Baby" Williams over Danjahandz's untouchable "We Takin' Over" beat. Instead of just ignoring the hubbub, Wayne calls attention to it with one of the set's most jaw-dropping tracks. When he says, "Damn right, I kissed my daddy," it's not a confession as much as a chest-pumping pronouncement, i.e. why don't you kiss your daddy? Then, the heartfelt justification: "Who was there when no one wasn’t? Just my daddy." Finally, Wayne goes into light-speed, forgoing typical syntax for a trail of breathless keywords: "Beef, yes, chest, feet, tag, bag, blood, sheets, yikes, yeeks, great, Scott, Storch, can I borrow your yacht?" And just like that, a winning defense turns into a staggering offense.
More zaniness as Wayne gets all MySpace stalker over Ciara's "Promise" with a love letter to the Atlanta R&B singer that's at once nebbish, cartoony, hilarious, and sweet. "I know that this is pretty awkward for me," he mumbles, his typical playboy routine neutered by a celebrity crush. Even after countless, detailed blowjob verses and rhymes about slipping women pills to get them into bed, the rapper's crazy-in-love yammering ("Nasty as I wanna be or nasty as you like me to be/ I hope you like me too now you know I like you too") somehow still comes off as earnest. It's a rare moment when Wayne comes down from his interplanetary star-search and joins every other guy who's fallen for Ciara's "Promise" video. "That chair or stool move was cool," he gushes. Yeah, it was.
Along with its bounty of blog-worthy one-liners (Wayne can be heard imitating Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bernie Mac and Bobcat Goldthwait across the record) and its fascinating internal weed/food cycle (which you can read about in Julianne Shepherd's recent column), this latest opus from Lil Wayne is marked with a beguiling sense of infatuation. The rapper is in love with language, left-field references to Gremlins and Harry and the Hendersons, the man who helped raise him, his hometown, Ciara and-- even after more than 10 years of professional experience-- hip-hop itself: "I just love music, I love to rap, I love what I do," he says. That much is clear.