Quan’s official debut is a triumph of willpower and talent, a detail-oriented collection with immaculate production that rightfully reestablishes his place in rap.

Rich as in Spirit

Breaking his promise, Rich Homie Quan actually did stop going in. After the stunning success of 2014’s Rich Gang: Tha Tour Part 1 with Young Thug and Birdman, he released three tapes that ranged from pedestrian to decent in 2015, had a somewhat public falling out with Thug, and was embroiled in a rape-lyric controversy. He vanished from the public eye until, in 2016, he flubbed Biggie lyrics at the “VH1 Hip Hop Honors,” prompting outrage and overreaction. After a streak of missteps, it seemed as though Quan had been written off by most as a rising star gone bust.
But the Atlanta rapper’s 2017 mixtape, Back to the Basics, hit the reset button and zeroed in on that triumphant but never quite comfortable voice that made him so captivating in the first place. Now with his official debut album, Rich as in Spirit, he’s trying to reassess his whole story. As the title suggests, Quan reasons that true triumph stems from character and willpower, and that same indomitable spirit has sustained him through tough times. His honeyed voice and tortured soul recalls the crossroads moments when he decided he wouldn’t accept mediocrity, recognizing the mistakes he’s made and finding some answers of his own in the process.
Many lyrics juxtapose hardships from a troubled upbringing with his celebrity life. On “34,” which traces the sources of his desires: “Might buy that Maybach, I grew up without no curtains/And when I get it, I’ma keep my windows rolled up on purpose.” Even after all he’s achieved and overcome, though, he realizes there’s no way for him to really fill the void. “I done bought everything that I ever wanted, but it’s still empty spaces,” he raps on “Think About It.” These songs are so open, nearly transparent, as Quan shares memories from all the instances that nearly broke him and chronicles how he keeps managing to put himself back together again.
As on Back to the Basics, Quan returns to the natural inclinations that made him an emerging rap star and continue to make him special: gut-wrenching, detail-oriented storytelling, slippery flows, and glossy melodies. He’s just a tad sharper here; his presentation is crisper. Whether he’s recounting how watching his mom work two jobs led him to robbery or reliving the double life he led in high school, he is constantly leading the listener into the moment with careful scene-setting. Just as keen as his retentive narration is his knack for catchy tunes. “Reflecting” is pleasantly bouncy, and “Achieving” shows off some of Quan’s most polished and soothing vocals to date. Throughout the album, he lays earworms into an incredibly sensuous collection of beats.
The unsung heroes of Rich as in Spirit are Nard & B, the production duo behind Migos’ “T-Shirt” and several of Future’s greatest mixtape deep cuts. Their beats strobe as if just out of focus, woozy and disorienting. On “Understood,” the synths whirr as if approaching from a distance, oscillating like beams from a lighthouse. The ringing chimes on “No No No” echo into programmed beeps before the whole thing dissolves into one washed-out tone. As Quan writes about being a writer on “The Author,” his raps ripple across the surface of aqua synths, each note spreading along the edges of a throbbing 808 bass. Each song brings out his best.
Alongside 30 Roc and Cassius Jay, Nard & B help set the mood for one of rap’s most impassioned crooners. Quan’s tottering and at times strained vocals seep into the grooves of each production. He is an important link in an Auto-Tune rap lineage that continues to produce stars but he’s often left out of the conversation, a fact he acknowledges often on Rich as in Spirit. The album, in part, is an attempt to claim his place in that legacy. “I put a lot these niggas on and I still ain’t got my credit/But I ain’t mad though, ’cause I could’ve been mad broke,” he raps. As he reexamines the turbulent history that led him here, he reestablishes his place in rap.


The third record from the UK trio wrangles their elastic, post-punk spirit into an urgency that feels bonded to the present. It makes for songs that are as mesmerizing as they are exhilarating.

The Official Body

Shopping’s whole thing could not be more antithetical to their name. And yet, since their formation in 2012, the English post-punk trio have adamantly refuted claims that their music intentionally broadcasts a political dogma. Any commentary, they insisted, was simply a reflection of what was on their minds, not an attempt at proselytizing. “We are slaves to the system, so we have to write our frustrations down when we make this music,” drummer Andrew Milk explained to Stereogum in 2015. “[It] was never the intention to be political; we explicitly just wanted to make people dance.”
But three years later, the stakes are higher, and Shopping have wrangled their elastic spirit into an urgency that feels bonded to our present, catastrophic atmosphere. On their third record, The Official Body, they dig deeper into the identity politics, power complexes, and content criticism that defined 2013’s Consumer Complaints and 2015’s Why Choose. But like their subtle politicism, Shopping continue to resist evangelizing screeds. Instead, their critical messages occur as blunt, brief repetitions woven into the greater musical texture. On opener “The Hype,” guitarist Rachel Aggs and Milk engage in a bellowed round-robin dialogue about subliminal media brainwashing over a jagged guitar riff. “Don’t believe! Ask questions,” bassist Billy Easter chimes in. Without ever skirting close to what New York Magazine’s Molly Fischer recently coined as “entertainment-as-think-piece,” “The Hype” accomplishes its appeal for autonomy by gently nudging rather than aggressively prodding.
Whereas Shopping have previously relied on a strict three-piece arsenal—along with the production work of Orange Juice’s Edwyn Collins—the band have fleshed out their interwoven rhythms with synth bass and drum pads. The geologic levels of synth and bass in tracks like “Wild Child” and “Discover” make Shopping’s previous efforts sound downright minimalist in comparison. While not being as light-footed as one of Aggs’ other projects, the indie-pop duo Sacred Paws, The Official Body creates upbeat, transformative moments that strike a balance between a call to action and the thrill of a humid mosh pit.
Shopping excel when their music sweeps the listener away into a tangle of tempos. Milk’s driving drumbeats, Easter’s swaying bass, and Aggs’ tap-dancing guitar form a tighter sound than ever, a mesmerizing spider web that collapses when a sharp lyric pierces through: “This is such a simple thing/You don’t like me/I don’t look like you,” Aggs poses on “My Dad’s a Dancer” before emitting an unexpectedly joyous, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,” à la the Julie Ruin. Rather than underselling or distracting from Aggs’ sincere quandary, the outburst intensifies how often she has considered her role as the other. It’s a heartbreaking moment conveyed with inspiring levity.
Aggs’ guitar often acts as a pressure valve, inflating the sonic bubble until it's about to burst. On “Asking for a Friend,” her needling sounds so tight it could shatter. “Where will I go to find some peace,” she pleads as her fingers run a marathon on the frets. “Suddenly Gone,” a meditation on being a queer artist of color, finds its strength in interplay between its subtle lyrics and acute instrumental punctuations. On “Shave Your Head,” Milk wanders through a world consumed by Groupthink, identical haircuts, and interchangeable faces. “I can’t I can’t I can’t tell you apart,” Milk babbles as Aggs swings in to urge independence. “Break through/Feel frustrated,” she exclaims while playing an appropriately tricky melody. “Overtime,” a track about a personal crossroads and indecision, breaks into a jittery fever dream at its conclusion. “I think I finally found a way out,” Aggs proclaims, kicking through the turmoil with hope and wonder.
Shopping are not reinventing the wheel and they do not need to—the halls of post-punk are already too full of guitars that are angular. The trio is so refreshing and exhilarating because of the space they elbow-out for themselves and the vibrant spirit they pump into the exhausted genre, proving that simply adding some cavernous echo to a track isn’t enough. There’s no proper formula of funky riffs + danceability + fearless ethos that makes a hit. Shopping know that to invert tradition, you’ve gotta have some fun too.


Laurel Sprengelmeyer's Cult Following is a flowing record with guests including Sufjan Stevens, Sharon Van Etten, the National’s Dessner brothers, and TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone.

Cult Following

The first single from Little Scream’s second album recasts Laurel Sprengelmeyer as a Bee Gees-indebted art-popper on the grind. The Iowa-born, Montreal-dwelling artist sings in a high, breathy register about fooled hearts and the gift of dance, the flirtatious atmosphere stoked by cheeky guitar and a synth that stutters and slides like a broken zipper. Her 2011 debut, The Golden Record, featured a fair range of guitar-oriented styles—choral post-punk, desert ballads, Horses-indebted spirituals—but nothing as pure pop as this.
Rather than a reinvention, though, “Love As a Weapon” is another string to Sprengelmeyer’s considerable bow, and on Cult Following, the wealth of styles—tarnished guitar, midnight-hued synths, Eno-indebted balladry—are all pointed in the same direction. To make clear that the record is offering up an alternate reality, the opening interlude is called “Welcome to the Brain,” a spooky riff on the drone of an ensemble tuning up. One song flows into the next, and there are three more interludes across the album’s dozen tracks. Sprengelmeyer brings a similar sense of destination to her individual songs, which rarely end where they started.
On The Golden Record, she tilted towards great booming crescendos. Here, she makes agile and surprising shifts between joy, chaos, and vulnerability in the space of a single track. The centerpiece is “Evan,” a song bookended with its own interludes—an ebullient introduction and a haunted outro—which in turn encompasses all her strengths. It starts out as a gentle lullaby, her voice shoring up the melody until it accrues enough chutzpah to turn into a kind of gospel country song. Then thunder strikes, piercing strings swirl, and her vocal refrain takes on a frenzied intensity. Better still is its dark aftermath, “The Kissing,” where Sprengelmeyer’s soft guitar finds its stakes in clangs of staticky fury, a yowling, borderline-prog solo, followed by a choir’s medicated coos, which linger like fallout.
Cult Following is beautifully orchestrated, and one of the rare records where the lavish arrangements feel fully in service of the songs, rather than like stage decoration. (You could sell the record on its guests—Sufjan Stevens, Sharon Van Etten, the National’s Dessner brothers, TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone, cult Canadian singer Mary Margaret O’Hara—except you can hardly pick them out; they lend their skills rather than personalities.) Sprengelmeyer co-produced with Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, and they make subtle use of panning and scale to swirl the listener right into the world they’ve created, which hits hard without sacrificing on elegance.
In one of the record’s most moving moments, Sprengelmeyer adopts a girlish, scared voice to countenance the possibility of redemption, and of reconciling hurt: “If there are memories I wanna burn/What happens to the ones that I like to keep?” she sings, evoking Bat for Lashes at her most forlorn. “What if my best memories are dreams? Do I get to keep these? Please?” She ends the charade on “Silent Moon,” an eerie, tremulous lament, like Morricone or Angelo Badalamenti arranging for Karen Dalton: “What I loved in you was just projection/A kind rendering of imperfection,” Sprengelmeyer admits, sadly. “Once I saw what was true/There was not much left of you/I’m afraid.”
The record is fluid, but front-loaded. After “The Kissing,” an eerie, dreamy mood sets in, and the intensity wavers. But while Sprengelmeyer sacrifices the impact of her second record by stacking uncompromising pop songs at the front and dreamier musings towards the back, her story is tantalizingly non-linear and elliptical. Cult Following is a captivating enquiry into the unrelatability of desire, but the conclusiveness of the hurt it can wreak. When it hits, there’s nothing like it.


The German producer Florian Kupfer comes from the lo-fi end of the techno spectrum. His music, which has industrial leanings, is unvarnished and thick with distortion, and this new EP is probably the heaviest, most brain-bending thing he's done yet.

Explora EP

The German producer Florian Kupfer comes from the lo-fi end of the techno spectrum. His music is unvarnished and thick with distortion; most tracks feature a single drum machine and a synthesizer or two, and they swim in line noise and tape compression. But that gritty affect is a means, not an end. He can be bruising, as on the recent "Discotag", where he flips vintage rap samples and petulant bass buzz into a contemporary take on hip-house, and tender, as on last year's "Feelin", with its melancholy hook, "I can't stop this feeling." He can be eerie: "Bridge", from a recent WT Records release, pairs wind chimes with a thudding kick drum in a way that suggests a record left skipping its run-out groove long after all the people have gone home. And he can be unrelenting: On last year's "Head", the steady rattle of a fire-alarm bell rings for minutes at a time—mixed, to deliriously dissonant effect, with the whine of rubbed wineglass rims.
Until now, Kupfer has recorded mostly for labels like L.I.E.S., Rush Hour's No 'Label' offshoot, and Willie Burns' WT Records—a small circle of likeminded peers who share his suspicion of the shinier, happier aspects of mainstream dance music. His Explora EP appears on Technicolour, the house- and techno-oriented singles label under electronic heavyweight Ninja Tune, but he keeps his cards as close to his chest as ever. In fact, it's probably the heaviest, most brain-bending thing he's done yet.
"Explora (Slave)" sets the record's abject tone with an invitation that quickly turns menacing. "Explore your fantasy," coos a sensual voice, but it dissolves into a cyborg's growl; tri-tone synth stabs drip like the stalactites of a sex dungeon. It's slow to get going: two-and-a-half minutes pass before the beat drops in earnest, and once it does, all that introductory tension is channeled into shuddering machine rhythms and scissor-handed hi-hats. Flecked with acid and analog to the bone, it's reminiscent of Bam Bam's "Where's Your Child", Phuture's "Your Only Friend", and other '80s Chicago house cuts where pitched-down voices and bad vibes ruled the dancefloor. But its sleazy, sinister energies are a walk in the park compared to the beaten-down resignation of the next track, "Headpiece". This one shuffles along at a dirge-like 57 beats per minute, and its listless drum track might as well be a screen door swinging on its hinges in heavy weather. The opening notes, bulbous and blown out, sound a little bit like the electric bass melody of Swans' "In My Garden"—surely a coincidence, but the comparison feels appropriate, if only because industrial music's blasted affect plays such a key role in Kupfer's music; he's as much a student of Wax Trax as he is of Trax. The real magic is in the way it builds over the course of its long, exhausted haul, distortion and dub delay and the EQs all flickering unsteadily, soaking up the unmistakable energy of the live-in-one-take jam.
"Brute Force" is the slightest of the EP's four tracks, to the extent that it sounds a little bit tossed off; it's a monotone eighth-note synth chug set against muted kicks and a ragged open hi-hat. (It does sound a little bit like Barnt's ultra-stripped-back jams, but it lacks their gonzo energy, having neither dynamics nor development.) But he makes up for it with "Shpel", the EP's final cut. It's the record's most bare-bones track, but also its most engrossing. Here's where he really gives into his industrial leanings, wreathing sumptuous wooden thumps in pitched-down shrieks and gravelly voices slowed to the point of unintelligibility. This one goes on for nearly 12 minutes, and while nothing ever really happens, it doesn't need to; for fans of atmospheric dread, its whiff of freezer burn is plenty exquisite. This one isn't even obviously analog in nature; any number of techniques might be responsible for its resonant central tone. But the track takes away an important lesson from Kupfer's lo-fi studies: sometimes, learning to do without is the best way to find your focus.


On the soundtrack to an imagistic new film project, the darkwave duo’s limited palette verges on claustrophobia. Their winning formula hasn’t changed, but the music lacks drive.

Boy Harsher: The Runner (Original Soundtrack)

The Runner (Original Soundtrack)

Within contemporary post-punk’s revival of dark, austere synth, Boy Harsher stood out with a distinctly modern take on the genre. During the late 2010s, the North Hampton-based duo distilled its stripped-down brand of hypnotic darkwave across releases like Pain and Careful. Over the pandemic, the pair, who met while studying film at the Savannah College of Art and Design, directed a short film and wrote its soundtrack, both titled The Runner. But the neon-drenched project can’t quite make up its mind about being a music video, a meta-commentary, or a horror story; even if the music remains technically competent, there isn’t nearly enough material in either medium to stay afloat.
Boy Harsher has typically confined itself to a limited palette, often to striking effect. But the danger of that intense focus tilting into claustrophobia has never been more apparent than on The Runner. Whether diegetic or in isolation, the songs feel sterile and flat. Tracks like “The Ride Home” and “Escape” are frustratingly sedate and seemingly engineered to slip out of your attention, and the generic monotony of its lyrics doesn’t help: “Baby, we can escape,” “Maybe we can escape,” etc. Although infused with more energy, the single “Machina,” a freestyle-tinged collaboration with BOAN’s Mariana Saldaña, doesn’t prove its worth beyond a closely traced ’80s emulation. Still, there are moments that shine in their simplicity: The group’s collaboration with bedroom pop artist Lucy on “Autonomy” feels fresh and riveting, tinged with morning light as it rolls over the film’s credits. Opener “Tower” builds the mythos of its protagonist in a series of cool threats ( “Don’t you say my name/You don’t want to know about me”) before exploding into a grotesque, splenetic column of horror synth.
In sequences dressed up in the colors and set design of Julia Ducournau and David Cronenberg, the film’s titular protagonist, played by King Woman’s Kristina Esfandiari, alternately seduces and murders an odd series of characters on her path of destruction. The aspects of psychological horror play as scènes à faire, and the Runner’s sexual and violent diversions become more expected than transgressive. The film, however, does achieve some frisson when zeroing in on individual scenes of choreography. “Give Me a Reason,” for example, plays somewhat tame in isolation, but it erupts into life as a score: Hostile and hypnotic, it tensely saturates the movement of a love triangle in a carmine-drenched bar. Though these slower, more deliberate moments are rare, the interaction between robotic choreography and the mechanical score shines far brighter than an otherwise muted plane of background synth.
The duo began working on the project in the wake of vocalist Jae Matthews’ diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. Describing the cathartic experience of writing for the lead character, Matthews explained, “[She] needs to flee all these disastrous situations she herself has created; she’s the ultimate self-saboteur.” That desire for freedom is epitomized in both The Runner’s film and soundtrack. The soundtrack succeeds with taut moments of electronic beauty, but it just as quickly slips into a frustrating, self-defeating insularity. While the precise formula of Boy Harsher’s music hasn’t faltered, The Runner’s soundtrack lacks drive, or a deeper expansion of their sound: It feels more like the musical equivalent of an engine idling.

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milo is a sharp-tongued rapper whose wordplay rewards close listening. On his third and best LP, the Maine emcee carries the flag for the underground rap scene that birthed him.

who told you to think??!!?!?!?!

It’s easy to appreciate why the term “underground hip-hop” doesn’t get tossed around so much these days. Taking an oppositional stance toward the mainstream, the so-called underground artists of the 1990s and 2000s defined themselves by the qualities they found lacking in popular rap: independence, experimentation, political awareness, artistry over marketability. Today, that same ethos permeates hip-hop at even the highest levels of the pop charts. Kanye dabbles in industrial noise, Chance doesn’t need a label, and Beyoncé’s videos double as political statements. You could say that the underground won the battle, but that’s not how Portland, Maine, rapper milo sees it. “Why’s your favorite rapper always babbling about his brand again?” he asks on his third full-length, who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, adding, “This the last call for those real MCs/Your voice is needed.”
Bars like these might scan as little more than the grousing of a salty traditionalist, but milo is hardly an armchair scholar. On who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, he crafts richly layered rap songs using outmoded tools like sample-based beats, dense wordplay, and unapologetically nerdy references. He’s as earnest as his most confessional forbears—alt-rap sadboys like Atmosphere’s Slug and WHY?’s Yoni Wolf—though far less prone to navel-gazing. Where other rappers might bemoan their status as smart outsiders, milo flexes. “Spit it like Zadie Smith with a Jay-Z lisp/Or like J.Z. Smith, you could take your pick/The point is, my vocabulary pays my rent,” he raps on the aptly-titled “the young man has a point (nurture).”
Throughout who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, milo remains blissfully unconcerned with current rap trends, aiming instead for a sound that recalls underground rap’s high-water marks without feeling dated. He produced the bulk of the record himself under his Scallops Hotel alter ego, and the results demonstrate that he’s become nearly as good at beatmaking as he is at rapping. Tracks like “paging mr. bill nunn,” “rapper,” and “pablum // CELESKINGIII” crackle with the lived-in charm of classic Madlib instrumentals. “note to mrs” is a tone poem bathed in the gentle glow of morning light. “magician (suture)” evokes the loose, jazzy feel of the Roots, a touchstone (in fact, the title’s punctuation is meant as a nod to that band’s Do You Want More?!!!??!).
The rapping on the album is even more impressive. milo displays his mastery of a variety of flows, furiously stacking syllables one minute and lagging lazily behind the beat the next. Like many DOOM acolytes, he’s long employed a scattershot referentiality and here, he kicks it into overdrive; nods to Aristotle and Nabokov sit alongside references to Insane Clown Posse and Dungeons & Dragons. Almost every guest meets the high bar set by their host. Brooklyn’s ELUCID offers up plainspoken profundity (“I love wild things wildly/I love quiet things quietly”), underground stalwart Busdriver plays an unhinged foil to an exacting milo, and Milwaukee upstart Lorde Fredd33 steals the show on posse cut “yet another.”
With who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, milo both asserts his place within the lineage of underground hip-hop and argues for its continued relevance. He’s hardly alone in this endeavor: His Hellfyre Club compatriots (Open Mike Eagle, Busdriver, and Nocando) and kindred spirits like Chester Watson and Earl Sweatshirt have been making stuff like this for years. What sets his record apart is how forcefully milo makes his argument and how high he makes the stakes feel. He opens the album with a recording of James Baldwin discussing the poet’s role in society (“I want to suggest that the poets are, finally, the only people, who know the truth about us”) and claims that mantle for himself without even a hint of reservation. But he’s not just advocating on his own behalf: Like so many underground rappers of the past, milo sees himself as a part of a larger cultural movement: “Shocking moment as the pupil thought/Me and my niggas is a school of thought.”
CORRECTION: The original version of this story incorrectly quoted a lyric in “the young man has a point (nurture).”


The Philadelphia punk band couches its revolutionary anthems in winking medieval imagery, flirting with camp as they sharpen the guillotine’s blade.

Härvest

Rage and oppression are historical constants. Poison Ruïn’s Härvest marries feudal revolt with contemporary punk wrath, holding up a medieval mirror to the genre’s familiar symbols of disenfranchisement. The Philadelphia band trades the defiant cityscape of Bad Brains’ “Banned in D.C.” or the technological hellscape of the Germs’ “Media Blitz” for fields, labyrinths, and tombs, yeeting contemporary sounds like a Molotov cocktail through centuries past.
The record is bracing and incendiary; it’s also an escape. It promises transport, whether to a bygone time or a different emotional plane. Opener “Pinnacle of Ecstasy” enters as if on a fog, epic synth ceding to driving power chords as vocalist Mac Kennedy growls, “Rot, face down in the gutter/Covered in flies.” Before long, the guitars grow frenzied, the riffs dizzying, and the song’s protagonist, slithering in the shadows, has found ecstasy in their lowly station.
“Härvest,” the album’s highlight, follows a similar path. Building from its slow-burn cinematic keyboard opener, it segues into a propulsive punk anthem, part Legend of Zelda and part Ramones. Making an open call to revolt, Kennedy chants, “You sowed your seed/Despite the salt/Some glutton’s greed/You played your part,” adding ominously, “You play your part until we give the signal.”
Despite otherworldly embellishments, from Neverending Story-style interlude “Resurrection I” to the sword-sharpening sounds that open “Bastards Dance,” the album never crosses fully into the territory of camp. Poison Ruïn flirt knowingly with this line, winking occasionally from their seat next to the guillotine, but this record forgoes the cheese of adjacent knight- or wizard-core acts like Iced Earth or Grave Digger. Instead, Poison Ruïn employ symbols that point to contemporary parallels, real and meaningful disparities in wealth and class that only exist because we permit them. “Isn’t this our harvest?” Kennedy asks on the titular song. “Isn’t this our feast to share?/Wiser ones are asking themselves,/‘Who’s swinging the scythe?’”
At its most powerful, Härvest foments, whether the fruit of their harvest is class rage or despair. From the thinly veiled remove of a fantasy, the listener is impelled to reconsider their relationship to labor and agency, whether swinging a scythe or working hourly at a grocery store. The momentum slows on “Augur Die,” a serviceably breakneck song that could be the work of any hardcore band, but by “Bastards Dance,” we’re either wheeling around the pit with reckless abandon or hopping into the saddle with a lit torch.
The most effective protest songs juxtapose the extant with the possible, the unacceptable with the hopeful. Like a horseman’s boot to the face, Poison Ruïn’s album is a reminder of the violence we withstand and the violence we can mete out in service of something greater. Whether revolution starts in a rehearsal space or a pasture, Härvest attests that it’s delirious and hot-blooded, a wellspring of power rising from the gutter.


In the face of label woes, a gentrifying hometown, and Donald Trump, Philadelphia’s other Springsteen acolytes thrive inside the tension between hug-and-chug uplift and political fatigue.

LP5000

When it’s time to retell the stories of the late 2010s and our multiplying sociopolitical problems, Philadelphia’s Restorations will not be our generation’s Creedence Clearwater Revival, the music filmmakers use now as countercultural shorthand. But LP5000, the sardonically titled follow-up to 2014’s LP3, does warrant a role in those inevitable scenes where people are doing what you are right now—looking at a music website on your phone and realizing anew there is no way to escape your waking news nightmare, only different ways to engage. “No, I don’t wanna hear that name again,” Jon Loudon sighs during “Melt,” as the dreamiest but bleariest Restorations song yet recreates the feeling of breaking a promise to yourself not to check Twitter the moment you wake up.
That name does go unsaid during LP5000, not that it makes much difference. “Glance at your phone and you mumble, ‘I hope he dies’/Yeah, I hope he dies, too,’” he sings at one point, a couple reaffirming their devotion to one another in a way that hopefully will feel dated at some point. This paralyzing weariness is the only major change since LP3, save a little more electronic chit-chat and a little less triple-guitar skywriting. Restorations still stand alongside Constantines and the Menzingers on a thorny branch of the Tree of Springsteen. It doesn’t take much to pierce this armor of red flannel and Born to Run vinyl, to release repressed feelings of masculine shame and creeping obsolescence that explain why these guys sound like they have to drink themselves to sleep every night.
The peaks of LP3 were pure wish fulfillment for workingman’s dread: “Imagine that focus in real life/Imagine going outside,” Loudon roared over Telecaster feedback on “Separate Songs,” a call to throw your laptop from a moving car. “Misprint” could make anyone cooped inside a compact stuck on the interstate feel like they were cruising down some bucolic back road instead. Those moments don’t ring false in 2018, but they do seem like emotional luxuries we can no longer afford. “Threw your back out just trying to stand up straight,” Loudon sings now during opener “St.” Regardless of how hard they thrash and throttle, Restorations land on the resilience to make it through this shit, one day at a time.
As with Jeff Rosenstock’s POST- and the World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s Always Foreign, LP5000 resonates through the contrast between hug-and-chug uplift and an encroaching sense of its futility in the face of constant outrage. Those recent albums are also uniformly depressing in the way they follow their bombastic, relatively celebratory predecessors, memories that hover overhead like the cloud of a Facebook “On This Day” post made before you had to deal with all of this.
To release LP3, Restorations jumped to rejuvenated punk stronghold SideOneDummy and were soon pegged as elder ambassadors of the United States’ new indie rock capital. But the label ditched its active bands to restructure under mysterious circumstances. LP5000’s first single, “The Red Door,” anxiously observes as Philly gentrifies into the “real” new Brooklyn. And though it’s produced by a guy who worked with the National, the War on Drugs, and Mr Twin Sister, its seven songs last only 24 minutes. By its mere existence, LP5000 suffers through the emotional and fiscal downsizing of the recent past.
The greatest trick of LP5000, then, is Restorations’ ability to sound cautiously anthemic. “Got a partner for starters and a kid on the way/Can’t be doing all this dumb shit no more,” Loudon snarls on “Nonbeliever.” He’d risk sounding smug if he were actually celebrating. And if you’re the sort who agrees gentrification is an unequivocal evil that you have limited power to control, you’ll identify with “The Red Door,” named for a telltale sign of displacement. When the song sounds ready to lift off or explode, Restorations only grit their teeth and vent. Real protest music might be more viscerally satisfying and important, but LP5000 plays its essential, relatable part.
The Great Awokening has created true folk heroes and left others with Twitter brain worms. Most of us have simply subjected ourselves to a pervasive baseline of bad news, worn like “a sodden and rotting wool sweater,” a foul, itchy reminder of our fucked-up present. Is the act of trying to keep your shit together the only way to stay sane or a true guarantee of insanity? LP5000 speaks with eloquence and empathy about that predicament. No, it doesn’t remove the sweater, but it reminds us that someone else is wearing one, too.


The Brooklyn songwriter and sound artist’s second album is a kind of spiritual accounting, a swirling blend of orchestral groans and human whispers that evokes subconscious drift.

Fatigue

On her piercing self-titled 2017 debut as L’Rain, Brooklyn artist Taja Cheek sifted through the aftermath of her mother’s death with roaming sensitivity. Intimate field recordings, tape loops, and fragmented harmonies resembled loose sketches, yet L’Rain’s scattered structure framed an astounding, up-close document of grief. Fatigue, Cheek’s second album, once again looks inward, but this time allows more light into the corners. It’s a graceful record whose wearied landscapes of synth, air horn, strings, and saxophone distill a suite of low moods—depression, regret, and fear—into resilience and hope.
“What have you done to change?” demands Buffalo alt-rock artist Quinton Brock on Fatigue’s blaring opener, “Fly, Die,” a question that weighed heavily as Cheek put this music together. The album’s nonlinear framework replicates the elliptical way the mind works through intense emotions, twisting in different formations until it fractures into a breakthrough. Some of these diffuse songs evolved out of voice memos Cheek made for herself or in collaboration with others, but while her music can be intentionally illegible, it’s never unapproachable. Fatigue’s swirling blend of orchestral groans and human whispers evoke a state of subconscious drift where self-growth is nurtured in real time. It’s a way of taking stock of the bruises of life.
Cheek and co-producer Andrew Lappin’s work is painterly and methodical, daubing vocal loops over clattering percussion, sweeping strings, and resonant synths to create a shapeshifting strain of experimental pop. On the shattering standout “Blame Me,” she sings in a nimble voice over fingerpicked guitar: “You were wasting away, my god/I’m making my way down south.” Jon Bap and Anna Wise’s background vocals form an armature of strength as Cheek’s words grow more woeful: “Fought my demons until you were old—maybe ’cause you love me/Thinking ’bout it lately: future poison-blooded little babies.” Wherever Cheek goes on Fatigue, the ghosts of regret and trauma follow closely behind, an emotional state that colors the album in foreboding shades even as she creates space to recover and improve.
Like L’Rain, Fatigue is marbled with personal recordings: Dishes being washed in the sink beneath a piano melody on “Need Be,” a voicemail from her mother buried in “Blame Me.” The clips imbue the music with fleeting traces of closeness and familiarity. Cheek approaches them from a distance, recontextualizing some of the most heartfelt or difficult moments of her life in song. The mercurial, six-minute highlight “Find It” begins downcast, with a metronomic synth loop and the repeated mantra, “Make a way out of no way.” Screams echo through the sluggish beat as coming through a wall; the dust settles on an organist and singer performing the gospel song “I Won’t Complain,” recorded at the funeral of a family friend. Cheek intones over it until the song crests in a rapturous, overwhelming finale, with no less than 13 musicians contributing to the commotion. It’s easily the most poignant song she has ever made, a deeply felt, Biblically minded portrait of forging a path out of darkness. Yet the journey has room for lightness and humor, too, like the “oops” that slips into the end of “Walk Through” or the wacky vocal affect of a former roommate on “Love Her.” On the brief “Black Clap” and the rhythmic, low-lit “Suck Teeth,” Cheek incorporates the percussive sounds of a handclap game she made up with multi-instrumentalist Ben Chapoteau-Katz, a way to pay tribute to the joyful sound of childhood hand games played by Black girls.
Cheek upends expectations in more direct pop and dance traditions, too. On “Two Face,” a roving piano line and stuttering samples melt into a soulful, psychedelic throb as she ruminates on a failed friendship. “I can’t build no new nothing no new life no new nothing for me,” she trills in a singsong cadence, the words bouncing over oscillated coos. The lyrics on the tense “Kill Self” are even more unforgiving: “Did you see me chew myself out?” she asks, voice rippling in a cascade over shuffling percussion. “Hear the gnawing?” At once the album’s darkest and most propulsive moment, “Kill Self” eventually assumes a seething dancefloor pulse, bending skillfully toward structure without abandoning Cheek’s wandering impulses.
Fatigue ends with the beatific “Take Two,” a spare reconfiguration of “Bat” from L’Rain. She repurposes the song in a similar way to her field recordings, as raw material to mold into an unfamiliar shape. Stripped bare of percussion and transformed into an airy, droning spiritual, Cheek’s voice unfurls in billowy, Auto-Tuned tones as she repeats the words, “I am not prepared for what is going to happen to me.” In her skyward voice, the sentiment is more life-affirming than terrifying, suggestive of infinite possibilities. There is no fixed road toward healing, Fatigue reassures us; there is only the way forward.

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After 30 years fronting the Roots, Black Thought has finally put out his first solo EP. It is rigorous but rarely hermetic, a small testament to his sustained excellence.

Black Thought : Streams of Thought, Vol. 1

Streams of Thought, Vol. 1

Black Thought’s still-titanic 10-minute Funkmaster Flex freestyle from last December was both astonishing and affirming. It showed that the 46-year-old rapper is somehow still improving decades after his peers’ primes, which in hip-hop sounds almost as crazy as a professional athlete doing the same. Black Thought may seem divorced from the sense of desperation that manifests into these kinds of revelatory performances—he fronts the Roots, the house band of the “The Tonight Show,” and acts in an HBO prestige drama. On the other hand, he doesn’t need to be putting out freestyles to appease an audience he’s already won over in his 30-plus years of rhyming, proving that he’s still “got it.” It’s simply a highlight reel of Black Thought doing what he does.
Streams of Thought, Vol. 1 carries that freestyle’s impressionistic spirit with that knowing audience in mind. Though this is Black Thought’s first solo project (previous would-be debuts Masterpiece Theatre and Danger Mouse collab Dangerous Thoughts were shelved), the EP avoids any Herculean this-is-my-time statements in favor of weaponizing the quiet self-assuredness he’s earned in his decades as the Roots’ vocalist. Co-headliner and producer 9th Wonder mainly strings together a collection of soul loops and falls back, allowing Black Thought to throw down technically wrought, hookless verses. Rigorous but rarely hermetic, the album is a small testament to his sustained excellence.
At 17 minutes—including the two-year-old “Making a Murderer” with the Lox’s Styles P—Streams of Thought, Vol. 1 is a SparkNotes distillation of Black Thought’s abilities. His verses don’t give up easy mantras in the way some of his Philadelphian peers do; he thrills with internal rhymes and flow swaps that manage to fold years of experience and culture references into crisp narratives. You could argue that Things Fall Apart’s creative breakthrough was thanks to how the Roots finally matched the spontaneity of Black Thought’s prose.
No matter, Streams of Thought’s opener “Twofifteen” features this marginless narration in full force. The way he moves through flipping an idiom off his late grandfather’s wisdom when “burning man was blacks in Birmingham,” and a reference to Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls... carries a one-shot fluidity, like Alejandro Iñárritu remaking Do the Right Thing. Black Thought’s taste for classic literature reappears on “Dostoyevsky,” which takes his wanderlust to another extreme. He declares himself “Dostoyevsky meets Joe Pesci” before connecting the line to that “machete from the Serengeti, already,” then bending together the other syllables throughout the verse.
Perhaps Streams of Thought would’ve been better if it was just Black Thought rapping; although they acquit themselves well, Styles P and Rapsody feel like intermissions. Still, there’s an elder statesman ease trailing his voice that feels familial, and the two fellow rhymers indulge the low-stakes exercise. Black Thought leaves Rapsody enough breathing room on “Dostoyevsky” to throw in an adroit verse and the line “I ain't turn star boy in a weekend,” while on “Making a Murderer,” Styles P works himself out of the “We all got fucked but no pornos” clunker with a verse that carries the verve of someone willing to write until the pen runs dry. They both come across as game as an NBA player in a blacktop pickup match.
Streams of Thought’s closer “Thank You” suggests that all of Black Thought’s rhyming clinics are not just works of hunger, but also acts of gratitude. His continued relevance in a fickle industry, not to mention Tariq Trotter’s escape from the physical dangers of Philadelphia, is both a testament to his work ethic and divine favor. Over a sample of D’Angelo’s “The Charade,” he soulfully gives praise for his wife’s mercy, links lynched bodies to fleeing from cops (“Images of strange fruits hangin' from the trees/Laces on my gym shoes, skatin' from police”), and memorializes the “barbershop that used to be at 6th and Emily.” After Black Thought utters his last thank you, the project abruptly ends.


Recorded in a mountain village, the Russian ambient musician’s debut album molds field recordings and hushed vocals into a form that’s richly textured and occasionally unsettling.

Perila: How Much Time It Is Between You and Me?

How Much Time It Is Between You and Me?

Ambient music has a reputation for being soothing. That only intensified during the pandemic, as many artists and listeners turned to the genre as a coping mechanism, using the music to ward off a looming sense of darkness and despair. Perila, however, has always reveled in darkness, and her debut album, How Much Time It Is Between You and Me?, is more unsettling than comforting.
A native of St. Petersburg, Russia, Perila (aka Aleksandra Zakharenko) relocated to Berlin six years ago, and she’s found a spiritual home in the community surrounding Huerco S.’ West Mineral Ltd., though she has yet to record for the label itself. Alongside like-minded artists such as Ulla, Exael and Special Guest DJ—all of whom she’s collaborated with—Perila has carved out a unique strain of ambient that’s miles away from the astral grooves of ’90s chillout rooms or the woozy stylings of today’s Balearic and new-age revivalists. Richly textured, uniquely visceral, and mildly unnerving, her work—which includes numerous self-released EPs, along with previous album-length efforts for labels like Sferic, Motion Ward, and Boomkat Editions—is streaked with a feeling that peril lurks around every corner. (Full disclosure: Perila has previously released a cassette on Paralaxe Editions, a label run by my wife, Dania Shihab.)
It’s not that Perila’s music is overtly scary. She’s not creating new-school horror soundtracks (or imitating the classic ones), but she does tap into a primal sense of danger. Like many of her releases, How Much Time has ties to nature—it was recorded last year in a mountain village in France—and though there are moments when the record captures the majesty of the outdoors, it also communicates the fear that can accompany being alone in the untamed wilderness. On album closer “Fallin Into Space,” she bathes in soft static, her gentle vocals and lulling melodies creating a picture of quiet serenity—an effect that’s amplified by quick flashes of birdsong—but the track is also punctuated by the intermittent creak of old wood, a sound that can seem absolutely sinister in a remote cabin in the middle of the night.
“Untilted” also has a creepy underbelly, and though its warbling brawn makes it one of the LP’s sturdier offerings, its incidental crackling and rustling evoke unseen vermin scuttling their way through darkness. These tendrils of dread and solitude are all over How Much Time, yet the album remains a distinctly intimate listen that often lavishes attention on the tiniest of details. “Time Date” is essentially a distortion-laced spoken-word piece accentuated with jittery bass notes, while the spacious “Vaxxine” contains little more than Zakharenko’s heavily reverbed voice, every tiny click and pop in her throat ringing out across the song’s soupy ether.
Perila does occasionally go a bit bigger. The blustering tones of “Air Like Velvet” build in intensity, suggesting a tear in the fabric of space-time opening up in the corner of your bedroom, while “You Disappear You Find Yourself Again” offsets its wispy tranquility with thick waves of droning bass. The immersive “Blanket” and “Cradle” have a definite floatation-tank vibe, but as Zakharenko fills them with fluttering, almost tactile bits of digital decay and sonic detritus, it once again becomes clear that conveying a sense of relaxation isn’t high on her list of priorities.
For those acquainted with Perila’s previous work, all of this will likely ring familiar. Despite being released by Smalltown Supersound—a larger label than any of those behind her other recordings, and one not necessarily known for ambient music—How Much Time is more of a continuation than a departure. Zakharenko’s musical vision remains intricate, ethereal, and just a little haunted. There’s beauty and bliss to be found, but anyone looking to nurse a fractured psyche ought to proceed with caution, as How Much Time probably won’t heal the soul—it’s likelier to gnaw at it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Brand New's The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me blew up teen angst to literally biblical proportions, resonating like no emo band before or since to outcasts in Sunday school *and *high school.

Brand New: The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me

The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me

At the turn of the century, emo had finally gone pop, but hadn’t felt like music for popular kids. On Clear Channel playlists, “The Middle” and “Screaming Infidelities” were boyish, bashful contrast to the goateed bullies of nu-grunge and rap-metal and the New Rock Revival’s trouser-stuffing sexuality. But while Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional were extensions of the church basement and DIY house scenes that fostered Christie Front Drive, the Get Up Kids, and the Promise Ring, they would soon be overtaken by the likes of Brand New, Taking Back Sunday, and plenty of bands who were basically jocks in ringer T’s: they were loud, rude, and thought about little other than sex. The Long Island band’s 2001 debut Your Favorite Weapon helped establish the sound and the gender politics for a time when emo would draw in more fans of both sexes than ever before, but often cleared the room of people who expected punk rock to be a welcoming or progressive environment. To this day, “Emo Night” most likely means drunken 20-somethings yelling along with “Jude Law and a Semester Abroad.”
After the potent but obnoxious venting of Your Favorite Weapon, Brand New’s ambitions started to emerge two years later on Deja Entendu—they hired a guy who engineered Pixies records to produce it, wrote the acoustic weeper “The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot” to prove they’d heard the Smiths, and added a guitar solo on “Good to Know That if I Ever Need Attention All I Have to Do is Die” that veered so close to “Hotel California” it proved they’d probably never heard the Eagles. But frontman Jesse Lacey still inhabited a stunted, vindictive emotional viewpoint—even as he spent considerable time staring at an empty bottle, ruefully recounting the failure of copious sex and substances to provide him with any lasting happiness, he was just as quick to boast about a lifestyle that let him basically fuck and drink however much he wanted: “I wouldn’t stop if I could/Oh it hurts to be this good,” he admitted on “Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don’t.” His flexing and his self-loathing were both forms of the same narcissism: In this way, he was almost proto-Drake.
Brand New jumped from Triple Crown to Interscope after Deja Entendu, and no one would’ve been surprised if major-label money and expectations would’ve caused Lacey to go even deeper into his vices. But based on the ensuing Fight Off Your Demons demos, Lacey was at least willing to make an effort to be the better man. “Brother’s Song” and “1996” were worldly and warm, allowing someone else’s story to be told for once. But this embryonic version of Brand New’s third album was leaked by overzealous fans (and sold back to them a decade later), causing a disillusioned and emotionally violated Lacey to retreat inward again. By the time The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me was completed, he may have realized that the world didn’t revolve around him—but he was now the dark center of the universe, a howling spiritual void.
Theology had always played an under-appreciated role in emo’s development. In fact, the golden era of emo was often praise music: witness the effect of Jeremy Enigk’s born-again Christianity on How It Feels to Be Something On, the exaltation of Mineral’s “Gloria,” or the existence of overtly denominational labels like Tooth & Nail. Even skeptics like David Bazan and Aaron Weiss could still quote scripture through their struggles. Besides, the mid-2000’s was a time when rock music of many stripes reasserted its faith: 2004 alone gave us Pedro the Lion’s Achilles Heel and mewithoutYou’s Catch for Us the Foxes, as well as the proudly Mormon Brandon Flowers, “Jesus Walks,” and Seven Swans. But while emo had previously been defined by passionate vocalists, desperately pleading to the heavens for salvation, Lacey was telling Jesus Christ not to bother— “I’m scared I’ll get scared and I swear I’ll try to nail you back up.”
It’s teen angst blown up to literally biblical proportions, resonating like no emo band before or since to outcasts in Sunday school and high school. But as sure as Brand New is an emo band, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me is not an emo record. It might actually be post-emo: “Was losing all my friends, was losing them to drinking and to driving,” Lacey mutters with unsettling resignation on the album’s first lyric. He sounds no more relieved to say in the next line, “Was losing all my friends, but I got ‘em back.” Whereas Lacey once took great pride in his ability to turn even the smallest slights into voluble LiveJournal status updates (“my tongue’s the only muscle in my body that works harder than my heart”), The Devil and God is often a dispassionate eulogy for that version of himself and his silly little feelings: “I used to be such a burning example,” “I used to care I was being careful,” “goodbye to love.”
To some degree, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me can be classified as soulless—albeit “soulless” as an aesthetically powerful narrative choice. Positive reviews of The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me likened Brand New to Radiohead and Modest Mouse—“Limousine (MS Rebridge)” is loosely modeled after “Exit Music (For a Film),” but Radiohead comparisons often serve as generic shorthand for “ambitious, brooding alternative rock.” The latter reference presumably referred to the band’s newfound affinity for whammy-bar harmonics and The Moon & Antarctica’s permafrost ambience, particularly on “Jesus.” In fact, the band had originally started working with Dennis Herring, who produced Modest Mouse’s Good News For People Who Love Bad News, an unexpected commercial success that put them in a position to share a co-headlining bill with Brand New this past year.
But Lacey is soulless in a way that recalls Thom Yorke on Kid A and Isaac Brock on The Moon & Antarctica—these are narrators who have lost something substantial, who have been separated from their physical being and seem to be staring down at a Sim-version of themselves. “I’m not here, this isn’t happening,” Yorke moaned, while Brock asked, “Does anybody know a way for a body to get away?” A seriously unnerving performance of “Jesus” on “Late Night with David Letterman” presents Lacey as a spiritual husk, and there are Easter egg references to the cover art of Deja Entendu as an avatar for his former self: “this bedwetting cosmonaut,” “space cadet, pull out.”
The Devil and God even sounds soulless. Despite being on Interscope’s dime, the band ran out of time and money while working with Herring and switched to “fifth member” Mike Sapone, responsible for the functional, nondescript mainstreamo sound of Your Favorite Weapon. And yet the same cold, clinical production is responsible for The Devil and God’s unusual and appropriate atmosphere. At no point does Lacey sound suicidal—in fact, he sounds resigned to living (“Do you feel condemned just being there?”).
While The Devil and God touches on Nirvana, Joy Division, and Elliott Smith, it doesn’t attempt to conjure those artists’ specific psychosomatic distresses, whether through dyspeptic churn, epileptic terror, or catatonic depression. Lacey begs for divine retribution, and some of the most bludgeoning dynamics you’ll hear on a modern rock record deliver it. The added percussion on “Millstone” conveys metal-on-bone trauma, while instrumental “Welcome to Bangkok” could pass for an interstitial from The Seer.
But The Devil and God is defined by its crippling “drops”—the chorus on “Sowing Season (Yeah)” plays on textbook Pixies-style explosiveness, but the full-band crashes on “Limousine,” “You Won’t Know,” and especially “Luca” are completely unexpected, the kind that cause convulsions at your desk or a swerve off the road. There isn’t a single warm or welcoming texture, just expanses of dulled existence and the brutal punishment Lacey so vehemently feels he deserves.
But what exactly has he done? On Deja Entendu’s shockingly callous “Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis” (Brand New’s own “Marvins Room”), Lacey coldly copped to his “desperate desires and unadmirable plans” but gave himself an out by presenting it all as a hypothetical (“if you let me have my way, I swear I’d tear you apart”). He wasn't the only guy in this realm passing off non-apologetic psychosexual reckoning as introspection at the time. This mode of songwriting often made for compelling gossip, but limited Brand New’s scope to things that actually happened to Jesse Lacey.
Freed from the constraints of autobiography, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me allows Brand New to inhabit far more frightening mindsets, both real and fictional; similar to Sufjan Stevens’ “John Wayne Gacy Jr.,” a murderer’s heinous actions become a philosophical exercise, daring the listener to really consider whether they can empathize and see their own worst impulses made real. “Luca” takes its name from Vito Corleone’s most barbaric consigliere, one who impregnated an Irish prostitute, murdered her, and then strongarmed the midwife into burning a child in a furnace. On “Limousine (MS Rebridge)” and “You Won’t Know,” Lacey invokes the appalling death of 7-year old Katie Flynn, killed by a man driving the wrong way down Meadowbrook Parkway in Long Island with a .28 BAC, hours after being a flower girl at her aunt’s wedding.
As alluded to in “Sowing Season,” too many of Lacey’s friends, and perhaps himself included, could have been Martin Heidgen, the man behind the wheel, and The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me hinges on the conclusion that the willingness to sin is equal to actual sin if you’re subject to judgment from an omnipotent being. Lacey’s verse from the perspective of Heidgen ends as a half-assed plea for mercy from an unsalvageable human being who knows exactly what he is: “I saw our sad messiah/He was bored and tired of my laments/Said, ‘I’d die for you one time but never again’,” Lacey sings, drawing the parallel between Heidgen’s earthly verdict and the one Lacey expects when he meets his maker.
The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me rarely admits to much, diametrically opposed to melodramatic oversharing and tabloid exploits of Fall Out Boy, Panic! At the Disco, and My Chemical Romance that defined emo in the MySpace era. This was all very risky in 2006, especially for a band making its major label debut. Though critically acclaimed, the less enthusiastic reviews balked at the portentous epics and wished for more of the scorched-sugar rush of Deja Entendu. It’s not unwarranted; underwritten lyrics occasionally cut against the sober sonics (“Life is a test and I get bad marks”), and there’s just enough radio-friendly spite to remind the listener of the sound Brand New had grown out of. “Not the Sun” strains to extrapolate sexual denial into hellish spiritual immolation, while the broadly political and triumphant “The Archers Bows Have Broken” is an awkward fit within the otherwise insular and defeatist The Devil and God, especially as it leads into the nihilistic despondence of closer “Handcuffs.”
Neither of those immediately accessible tracks were released as singles. Preliminary interviews were scarce and often with obscure, non-American publications (“in the States, you get misrepresented...the headline would end up being something stupid like ‘We hate My Chemical Romance,’” Lacey complained). Given a late-November release date unusual for non-marquee acts, The Devil and God peaked at #31 on Billboard, neither a flop nor a resounding success.
Ten years ago today, Brand New were supporting The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me on the road with Dashboard Confessional. Starting next week, they’ll be playing 15,000-cap arenas in the UK. The explanation isn’t simply, “they made The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me.” Its effect on Brand New itself feels difficult to quantify and certainly not immediate: while 2009’s Daisy debuted in the top ten, it fell out after six weeks with little impact, its reception amongst critics and Brand New fans decidedly mixed. Though it’s not Brand New’s worst album, it’s certainly the one the least number of Brand New fans would say is their best.
But their status as one of the most popular cult bands is more attributable to what they didn’t do after Daisy. Some of the presumed trolling behind Brand New’s current mythology might just be due to administrative errors or a desire to tie up loose ends before their maybe, maybe-not 2018 breakup: the liner notes for The Devil and God contained no lyrics, but an invitation to send one dollar for a booklet. Nine years later, fans were finally receiving them. And while their peers became overexposed or uninspired, Brand New’s continued insistence to let their fans speak for them created one of the loudest echo chambers going—“The Complete Guide to Brand New’s Comeback Album,” “Tunnelling Down the Brand New Wormhole,” “Brand New Came Up With a New Way to Mess With You Today,” “Brand New Just F*cking With Us at This Point,” this is all substantial Brand New LP5 reportage. By leaving his words and intentions open to interpretation, Lacey unwittingly shifted from a minor celebrity to a generational voice.
For the most part, Brand New played the role of a principled, popular rock act that felt very uncomfortable with their position as spokespeople. There hasn’t been one like this in a very, very long time. The marginalization of rock music in the 21st century actually benefits a band like Brand New, as it pushes together potentially incompatible subsets of listeners. These days, Brand New have enough clout to play shows with their heroes in Built to Spill and Modest Mouse, but in 2006, most of their attempts to place themselves within a counterculture lineage somehow went unnoticed: the cover art for the “Jesus” single is a blatant homage to Jesus Lizard’s Goat, the title of The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me is an obscure reference to Daniel Johnston. And when Brand New really tried to make their own answer to In Utero with Daisy, Lacey was namedropping Fugazi, Polvo and Archers of Loaf as formative influences.
But Vinnie Accardi, the guitarist who co-wrote most of Daisy, mentioned Stone Temple Pilots’ Core and Alice in Chains’ Jar of Flies as his touchstones. And Brand New’s ability to hit the cheap seats—the first two choruses on Devil and God are “yeah” and “whoa”—make their discomfort and recalcitrance with their heralded status compelling rather than a matter of fact. At a point where most rock acts are going out of their way to ingratiate themselves with their audience and reach across aisles, Lacey screams  “I am not your friend, I’m not your lover, I’m not your family,” and it’s weirdly comforting to affirm him, with a blood-curdling YEAH. Brand New died for emo one time, but never again.


The Canadian DJ, producer, and marine biologist bridges worlds on her debut album, weaving orcas’ songs and conservationist messages into deep-diving tracks aimed at inclusive dancefloors.

Significant Changes

Jayda Guy’s academic work and musical output have a common goal: Both are designed to make people to think about how they interact with their environments. The Canadian musician presented her master’s thesis about the effects of certain chemicals on an endangered West Coast orca species last year, and she recently started a talk series featuring young scientists. As Jayda G, she’s been responsible for some of the most rapturous disco house to come out of the “Canadian Riviera” scene, and she has captivated crowds worldwide with her uninhibited DJ style. Let other selectors squabble about sharing track IDs and unwarranted wheel-ups—she’d rather concentrate on providing the soundtrack for cathartic, electronic device-free boogieing.
Following a string of excellent EPs and singles on labels including 1080p, Geography Records, and her own JMG Recordings, Significant Changes is the Berlin-based producer’s debut album. Like much of Guy’s previous work, the nine tracks here draw on influences including Chicago house, soul, disco, and 1990s R&B, but her references to the natural world this time around are more overt. Recorded while she was finishing her studies, its bookending intro (“Unifying the Center (Abstract)”) and outro (“Conclusion”) read like parts of a scientific paper; it’s not surprising that there’s a sense of ecological urgency underpinning many of these songs.
In interviews, Guy has frequently expressed her desire to bridge her two passions, and one way she achieves this is by turning field recordings into unexpectedly poignant melodies. The instrumental centerpiece “Orca’s Reprise” is built around the marine mammals’ cries, but the producer smartly avoids new-age chintziness. “Missy Knows What’s Up” takes the concept one step further, sampling the ominous words of Canadian biologist Misty MacDuffee (“Why are these whales threatened and what are we going to do about it?”), and setting them to a thumping backbone.
It’s not all doom and gloom, however, and Guy expertly balances the record’s more somber offerings with a handful of four-on-the-floor, heat-seeking anthems. If you’ve seen her play at a festival or listened to one of her decade-hopping radio mixes, then you know that, as a DJ, she prioritizes songs that exude a certain timelessness, rather than trying to score cool points for obscurity. From War’s 1971 funk hit “Slippin’ Into Darkness” to TLC’s “Creep,” she’s constantly thinking about what will elicit the biggest head-bobbing, limb-pumping responses from her audiences. Frequent collaborator Alexa Dash appears on two euphoric tracks, “Sunshine in the Valley” and “Leave Room 2 Breathe,” and her soulful, husky croon perfectly complements Guy’s shuffling grooves, vintage drum-machine sounds, and, on the latter, roller-rink cowbell.
Yet on an album that’s full of human and animal voices alike, the most prominent one is her own. Guy’s arresting spoken-word vocals take center stage on “Stanley’s Get Down (No Parking on the DF)” and “Move to the Front (Disco Mix),” both of which address dancefloor etiquette over propulsive basslines and warm strings. “I see you with your phone looking at Instagram,” she playfully admonishes on the former, while the latter is a rousing call to arms to ladies “all the way in the back,” which sees the producer doing her best Body Break host impression. As if to remind listeners that it’s not so serious, she punctuates these instructions with gleeful whoops.
According to Guy, the album’s title has a twofold meaning. Not only was it the most-used phrase in her thesis, but it also refers to the personal and artistic changes she’s experienced in recent years, as she’s moved halfway across the world and played shows even further afield. Her ever-growing platform to reach people, she says, brings certain responsibilities, whether it’s reducing her carbon footprint or helping create more diverse and inclusive learning and dancing spaces. Like all the best teachers, she’s leading by example.


With its two-tone album cover, terse songwriting, and Albini-style, hands-off recording, *Ha, Ha, He. is Mourn's *period piece, conjuring the grave austerity of mid-'90s post-punk.

Ha, Ha, He.

Try as they might, Mourn couldn’t help but show their age on their 2015 debut—prompted by classroom boredom, disdain for specific classmates and disdain for high school’s general social schematic, *Mourn *was clearly from the perspective of teenagers who really wish they weren’t.  “They listen to music that doesn’t make you think about anything,” Carla Pérez Vas said of her peers, while she and Jazz Rodríguez Bueno gravitated to Sleater-Kinney, Sunny Day Real Estate, and PJ Harvey, thoughtful, strident acts who were in their prime before the duo were even born. Less than a year and a half later, Mourn’s age is a non-issue: they just sound like an indie rock band in 2016 that wishes it wasn’t.
The sonics are familiar, as is the trajectory. *Ha, Ha, He joins the recent ranks of Yuck’s Glow & Behold *and Eagulls’ Ullages**, sophomore albums from similarly promising indie rock bands that didn’t build on their canonical indie rock influences or look towards other genres for inspiration. They simply dug a little bit deeper in the crates and made slight peripheral shifts. Mourn has claimed Throwing Muses as a major touchstone here, and there’s an unspoken affinity for some of the more ungainly anti-heroes of the alt-rock gold rush: Shudder to Think, Chavez, the second Sunny Day Real Estate album. Compared to its more jangly, plug-and-play predecessor, *Ha, Ha, He. *is all jagged physicality, throwing sharpened elbows and quick jabs.
Mourn are adept intimidators: the pummeling opening instrumental “Flee” suggests that Janet Weiss is the focus of their Sleater-Kinney hero worship, while “Evil Dead” nimbly shifts from stuttering riffs to an unsettling chorus of wraithlike chants. They sound confident here, not necessarily trying to adapt to their status as a band that can play festivals so much as exhibit their growth as pure musicians. The songwriting has become just as terse and flinty and it’s effective when Mourn engage with challenging subject matter—“I Am a Chicken” reads like a victim of assault rationalizing after the fact (“Drag me to your cave, grab my feet, I won’t complain...sorry to disappoint you”) while “Irrational Friend” and “Gertrudis, Get Through This!” cynically view love as transactional, a lopsided negotiation at best. It’s all brutal stuff, more so because they’re delivered no differently than anything else than what surrounds it—all of this is just part of the human condition to Mourn.
But for the most part, the unrelenting, grim inscrutability provides little beyond surface tension. Its two-tone album cover, P.J. Harvey-evoking title and Albini-style, hands-off recording establishes *Ha, Ha, He. *as a period piece—conjuring the grave austerity of mid-'90s post-punk but none of the invention. Just about anything that’s novel—jazz chording, serrated yells, tart harmonies—fails to truly flourish within the drab, flat production. Despite the jagged riffs and soberly intoned lyrics, there are few hooks; “Nobody is exempt from the unexpected,” “Little brother, sleeping in a puddle/intricate puzzle surrounds you” are typical of the lyrics that get reiterated enough to assume sort kind of portentous meaning, but exactly what is unclear.
On their debut, Mourn sang in English rather than their native tongue, with the valid belief that they would taken more seriously outside of Spain. While they were saddled by clumsy lyrics, it felt necessary to grade early songs like “Your Brain Is Made of Candy” and “Boys Are Cunts” on a curve: even if they were juvenile, they felt personal, inspired by an teenage vindictiveness that feels timeless and relatable. “Storyteller” and “President Bullshit” make the same points about the overly self-conscious, and thus fraudulent, nature of personal interactions, but their generality seems to be more a result of Mourn’s purposeful withholding rather than any kind of language limitation.
It’s possible to view *Ha, Ha, He *more kindly as a reflection of its already troubled history—though it was finished in 2015, Mourn claimed it was being “held hostage” by their Spanish label that also doubled as their managers (unfortunately, teenagers getting taken advantage of by their labels is also timeless). Maybe all of this explains the dour, dutiful nature of *Ha, Ha, He, *but that's what Mourn was probably going for anyways. They never wanted to be too young to feel this damn old.


With this zippy, condensed, six-song EP, the rap jester seems to have once again found his creative spark. This is the best 2 Chainz has been in a long time and the most self-aware.

Felt Like Cappin

Much of Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz's appeal comes from the specific, witty economy of his language, his ability to string together zippy comic punchlines and elaborate boasts in quick succession. He is most effective making phrasing and imagery work for him in tandem (think quips like "Might valet park a Brinks truck" or "Got a pocket full of dead prez/ Attached to your girl like a .jpeg"). His recent releases have struggled to duplicate the formula, and he has fallen by the wayside as a result, all while a new crop of artists from his city pop up. Just as it seemed 2 Chainz might be swallowed up by the current, he returns to form with a surprise release, Felt Like Cappin, which is essentially a singles bundle.
At just about 20 minutes, Felt Like Cappin is a natural progression from 2014’s underrated FreeBase EP*,* with last year’s Trap-A-Velli Tre mixtape serving as more of a stopgap. Trap-A-Velli Tre had its moments, but it was way too drawn out and scattershot,with a few songs that were as weird as they were unnecessary. 2 Chainz cuts out the filler here, and is better for it: His trifle-heavy rap style works better in condensed space, and at six tracks that’s exactly what we've got. The brevity allows him to be the entertainer who captivated audiences with jokey, absurd runs of guest verses again. "I don't care about the tats on your faces/ Them bitches cost $15/ I don't care about the pills that you're taking/ Them bitches cost $15!" he raps on the title track, hamming it up with phrase-punctuating tonal shifts.
Too much 2 Chainz can be a bit like eating icing directly from a pastry bag: fun at first, then nauseating. This go around, his raps aren’t only funny, they’re balanced, and he peppers them in over a wide-ranging assortment of sounds from producers Cardo, Mike WiLL Made-It, Zaytoven, FKi, and Timbaland. On "This Me, Fuck It" (which also appeared on Timbaland’s King Stays King mixtape), he raps in compact bursts over one of Timbo’s signature, slithering flute loops, slinging zingers together. The TM88-produced "Not Invited" finds him wading through wailing synthesizers and organ flecks, reveling in his exclusivity. "I don’t have to front/ I park in the front with the trunk in the front," he raps, and it’s hard not to revel in his flair and flamboyance.
He tags on two clean versions of the likely singles at the end, as if to remove any doubt what demo he's appealing to: These are for radio rotation, for packing dancefloors. On "Back on the Bullshyt," he packs raps into a spiraling, woozy synth progression, and Wayne turns in one of his stronger performances of late. The one curveball is "Mindin My Business," a staggered, minimalist cut that showcases some of his most clear-eyed writing ("Resident Evil around these parts/ Peanut got killed in his front yard"). It teases at an ability to stray from his formula without drifting too far out of his lane. This is the best he's been in a long time and the most self-aware. For a while, it seemed like 2 Chainz’s hit making days were over. If nothing else, Felt Like Cappin proves he is still quite capable.


In 1992, R.E.M. were the biggest, most important rock band in America. This reissue of their multi-platinum smash, 25 years later, highlights a brooding, transitional album that still resonates.

Automatic for the People

Over the course of the promo cycle for R.E.M.’s eighth album, Automatic for the People, Michael Stipe came out as a balding man. Not that anyone was surprised—as of 1991’s Out of Time, the singer’s famous cloak of curls had given way to a tidy short cut, and the videos for Automatic for the People’s singles had effectively become showcases for Stipe’s hat collection. By the time the clip for the album’s bittersweet final single, “Find the River,” surfaced in the fall of 1993, Stipe’s backwards baseball cap could no longer conceal his failing follicles.
While hair loss is common among men over 30, you don’t often see it happen to the lead singer of a major rock band at the height of its popularity. It must’ve been especially trying for Stipe, who not only used his long locks as a security blanket (“The hair helped a lot to hide who I was,” he would tell The Guardian in 2007), but also had to contend with spurious rumors that suggested his changing visage was a function of declining health. Yet for all the stress it may have caused him at the time, Stipe’s fading hairline was an effective advertisement for an austere but nakedly emotional album consumed by the anxiety of aging, the inevitability of death, the loss of innocence, and the impossibility of holding on to the past.
With the release of Automatic for the People, R.E.M. firmly entered their elder-statesmen phase, just as the next wave of alternative rock was cresting. R.E.M.’s career up to that point had represented the platonic ideal of a left-of-center rock band infiltrating the mainstream—a step-by-step process that saw the band turn bolder and its audience get bigger with each album, culminating in the multi-platinum, MTV-saturating success of Out of Time. Ironically, Automatic for the People arrived in a post-Nevermind world where all that careful groundwork was being razed by overzealous major labels desperately seeking the next Nirvana. At the same time, the amped-up, aggressive nature of grunge threatened to make R.E.M.’s increasingly refined, mandolin-plucked pop seem, well, out of time.
The knee-jerk response would’ve been to let Peter Buck pounce on the distortion pedal and reassert the band’s post-punk bona fides (a back-to-basics strategy they hinted at during the Out of Time press cycle), but R.E.M. wisely opted to step aside and let the flannel-clad kids have their moment. Rather than attempt to compete in a world where teen angst was all the rage, R.E.M. set about crafting a rueful response to the onset of middle age—and remind us that life goes on even after your slam-dancing days are over. (If Kurt Cobain had survived into middle age, he probably would’ve wound up making a record that sounded like this.) The video for the album’s haunting acoustic opener, “Drive,” gamely adopts Seattle-scene aesthetics—a never-ending mosh pit rendered in flickering black-and-white—like a Charles Peterson photograph come to life. But when Stipe crowd-surfs atop a sea of hands belonging to fans several years his junior, he’s not trying to ride a trend, but starkly illustrate just far from the alt-rock zeitgeist R.E.M. had drifted in the Year of Grunge. When he sings, “Hey kids, where are you?/Nobody tells you what to do,” it’s with a combination of awe and envy.
“Drive” doesn’t just establish Automatic for the People’s patient pace and nocturnal atmosphere (spun off from Out of Time’s hazy highlight “Country Feedback”); it sets its emotional tenor as well. This is an album fixated on the past, but its nostalgia is stripped of all sentimentality. “Drive” quotes both Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” and David Essex’s glam-era hit “Rock On,” but Stipe’s stern, menacing delivery seems to mock their calls for carefree kicks in a time of national turmoil. Automatic for the People came out a month before Bill Clinton won his first presidency, but it bears the weight and scars of what came before it: namely, 12 years of Republican neglect concerning AIDS, poverty, and the environment.
Automatic for the People contains only one explicitly political song—the Crazy Horse-cranked “Ignoreland,” the most seething, spiteful track R.E.M. ever produced. But the whole album feels as though it’s in recovery from, or preparing for, some great trauma: “Sweetness Follows” renders its funereal scene of family dysfunction with church-organ sounds clashing against dissonant drones; the gentle sea-shanty sway of “Try Not to Breathe” frames an ailing elderly person’s desperate pleas for a quick death. Even the album’s karaoke-ready sing-alongs cast dark shadows: The traffic-stopping soul ballad “Everybody Hurts” is either the most depressing song ever about trying to stay optimistic or the most sanguine song about coping with depression. And the luminous country-rock reverie “Man on the Moon” centers on a subtly subversive chorus line—“If you believe they put a man on the moon”—that effectively presents conspiracy theory as fact and truth as a matter of opinion, an unwittingly ominous harbinger of the info wars that would eventually be waged in U.S. politics.
“Man on the Moon” has since become the official theme song for the Andy Kaufman enigma-cultivation industry, but the late comedian is just one participant in a parade of icons that includes Mott the Hoople and 1960s wrestling star “Classy” Freddie Blassie; elsewhere on the record, we hear an elegy for 1950s screen heartthrob Montgomery Clift cross-wired with allusions to “Let’s Make a Deal” host Monty Hall (“Monty Got a Raw Deal”), and Dr. Seuss turns up in a spin on “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (i.e., “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight,” a tune that threatens to join “Stand” and “Shiny Happy People” in the R.E.M. silly-song sweepstakes, but manages to stay on just the right side of the charming/cloying divide). They’re the sort of references that, back in 1992, seemed as adorably antiquated as a “Dragon’s Lair” scene does on “Stranger Things” today—but rather than simply deploy old pop-cultural artifacts as a means to activate our pleasure centers, Stipe uses them as decayed, dust-covered totems to gauge the distance between an idealized idea of America and the turbulent reality that colored the album’s creation. That critical sensibility bleeds right into the cover art. The phrase “automatic for the people” is the satisfaction-guaranteed slogan posted at a popular diner in the band’s native Athens; it also speaks to the pressures of a band that had just sold 10 million albums and needed to serve up more hits. And that striking cover photo is actually a close-up of a star ornament found on an old motel in Miami, but, rendered in brutalist grey, it appears as fierce and fearsome as a medieval cudgel. The image bluntly reinforces the notion that while Automatic for the People isn’t a loud album, it’s certainly a heavy one.
Automatic for the People arrived a mere 18 months after Out of Time—a swift turnaround time for a sequel to a blockbuster album that still seemed ubiquitous well into 1992. But then the early 1990s were to R.E.M. what the late ‘60s were to the Beatles—a period where the band took a break from touring to immerse itself in the possibilities of the studio, breaking down traditional instrumental roles in the process. The star-lit lullaby “Nightswimming”—essentially a demo embellished by John Paul Jones’ wondrous string arrangements—features Stipe accompanied only by bassist Mike Mills on piano; “Everybody Hurts,” a song largely without traditional percussion, was crafted by drummer Bill Berry. Even as Stipe’s celebrity skyrocketed in the wake of “Losing My Religion” getting played nonstop on MTV, R.E.M. remained an intensely democratic unit, a quality that’s emphasized in the outtakes on this 25th-anniversary reissue. Many of them reveal that Stipe’s melodies and lyrics were often the final pieces of the puzzle to be set into place, as he hems and hums his way through otherwise structurally sound versions of “Find the River” (once known as “10K Minimal”) and “Ignoreland” (née “Howler Monkey”). They also reveal that the sessions for R.E.M.’s darkest album did yield moments of playful release, like the self-explanatory “Mike Pop’s Song” (which could’ve been the sunny flipside to Mills’ Out of Time standout “Texarkana”) and “Devil Rides Backwards” (a would-be companion to “Man on the Moon,” had Stipe ever finished writing its lyrics), not to mention an early draft of “Sweetness Follows” bearing the Gulf War-aftershocked title, “Cello Scud.”
But if the demos collection presents the fables of R.E.M.’s deconstruction, its concert-disc complement—capturing the only show they performed in support of Automatic for the People—is an essential document of their onstage chemistry. Recorded live at the 40 Watt Club mere days after Clinton’s victory, the band sounds eager to extend the celebratory mood by favoring Automatic’s more rousing songs (including a tough, hard-rockin’ twist on “Drive”), cool covers (the Troggs’ “Love Is All Around,” Iggy Pop’s “Funtime”), and beloved back-catalog standards (“Fall on Me,” “Radio Free Europe”). Top it off with choice stage banter about the indignities of using capos and humorous exchanges with Israelis, and you’ve got a pristine portrait of the original four-piece formation at its absolute prime, before the onset of middling reviews, health issues, and line-up changes. But if the 40 Watt Club set is a frozen-in-amber monument of peak-era R.E.M., it’s one that bears out the wearing effects of today’s political climate. At one point, Stipe informs the crowd that the show is being recorded for a Greenpeace benefit record—by a solar-powered mobile-truck studio. And in lieu of his normally deadpan speaking voice, you can hear an audible excitement over the prospect that America was on the brink of a major paradigm shift. Alas, that cautious optimism has curdled once again into despair a quarter-century later, when presidential elections are still being fought and won on coal-industry pandering and climate-change denial. The exchange provides a stark reminder of the chasm that exists between the world R.E.M. dreamed we’d inherit and the one we’re living in now.
For a band once so omnipotent and omnipresent that they inspired parody songs and comedian rants, R.E.M. occupy a peculiar place in 2017. Even before their official split in 2011, they had long ceased to be the headline-generating juggernaut that their benevolent rivals in U2 clearly relished becoming, yet they haven’t retained the outsider cachet that their one-time peers in the Smiths and the Cure still hold, and their vintage T-shirts have yet to become staples of student attire. But if Automatic for the People is the ultimate emblem of a distant era when R.E.M. were the biggest, most important rock band in America, it’s an album that—in surveying a fraught political landscape, the fragility of our mental health, and the fate of our planet—still speaks emphatically to our current condition. It’s just that the dark clouds it saw creeping in on the horizon have since erupted into a violent storm.


"Community" star Donald Glover's fourth hip-hop collection-- the first with a commercial release-- is preposterously self-obsessed, but not the least bit self-aware.

Camp

If you buy only one hip-hop album this year, I'm guessing it'll be Camp. The album maintains some of the overweening humor of Donald Glover's sitcom "Community", but Glover's exaggerated, cartoonish flow and overblown pop-rap production are enough to make Camp one of the most uniquely unlikable rap records of this year (and most others). What's worse is how he uses heavy topics like race, masculinity, relationships, street cred, and "real hip-hop" as props to construct a false outsider persona. On record, he paints himself as a misunderstood victim of cultural preconceptions who is obviously smarter and funnier than his primetime material suggests. Unfortunately, it's a position that holds up to absolutely no scrutiny whatsoever.
Glover's not doing himself any favors with a rap handle taken from the Wu-Tang Name Generator, but that'd be easy to overlook if Camp functioned as anything more than a series of similar one-note gags. On a song-by-song basis, he scripts a slightly off-brand, fictional version of Kanye West being played for laughs. We could talk about Glover's bloodlines all day, but Childish Gambino's paternity test traces straight back to "All Falls Down". "You See Me" reimagines "Niggas in Paris" as a meme cemetery, with Glover painfully leaning into herniated punchlines like, "She's an overachiever/ All she does is suck seed." (Or maybe "Asian girls everywhere... UCLA!" will eventually end up on a T-shirt.) The bottle-service electro of "Heartbeat" could have been the 10th-funniest song on 808s & Heartbreak-- somewhere between "The Coldest Winter" and "Love Lockdown"-- and it's actually trying for laughs. A few of Camp's tracks focus on more inspirational topics than "making up for the fucks I missed in high school," but they usually emulate "Jesus Walks", or when trying to be slightly more humble,"Get By". And any shred of relatability Glover establishes by reminiscing about sinkbaths with his cousin, or trying to fit into the white school his parents busted their asses to send him to, are cancelled out by R&B hooks so garish and impersonal they make Lupe Fiasco's Lasers sound dignified.
Supporters may rush to praise Glover as a "multi-talent" due to Camp's self-production, but his cratedigging begins with The College Dropout and ends with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, all of it Blingee'd up with assistance from "Community" composer Ludwig Goransson. Yes, that's a lot of Yeezy talk, but the most insidious aspect of Camp is how Glover operates from a *pre-*Kanye inferiority complex where he senses that any dismissal of his music stems from gangsta rap still being the predominant aesthetic version of hip-hop (never mind that the most commercially relevant guy who can be feasibly be called "gangsta rap" right now is Rick Ross, and even he's widely beloved on account of being an acknowledged pathological liar). This much is obvious from the tone-deaf "All of the Shine," and especially "Backpackers", a preemptive strike at his always-male, usually educated haters. Note how its title co-opts the one epithet more outdated than "hipster" in rap music circa 2011.
Glover isn't strictly a comedy rapper, but he flows like a comic actor: When he's trying to be playful, his voice hitches in a pubescent squeak, and when he "goes in," he's still delivering one room-clearing punchline after another with the earnestness of the most confused Rhymesayers guy ever. At the very least, Camp can serve as hashtag rap's tombstone, and I'll just present some choice quotes without comment so you can decide for yourself: "I made the beat and murdered it, Casey Anthony," "You can kiss my ass, Human Centipede," "I got a girl on my arm, dude show respect/ Something crazy and Asian, Virginia Tech."
Every attempt Glover makes to present himself as an inside operative confounding stereotypes about mainstream rap rings totally false. In "Fire Fly", he brags about the ease of scoring college gigs and college girls (while rhyming "LSU" with "molest you") and then complains: "No live shows because I can't find sponsors/ For the only black guy at a Sufjan concert." Bullshit. OK, look: I realize that there's a chance some kid will hear that line and feel validated, and you know, the last thing we need is an armchair cracker like myself relating contrary anecdotal evidence about the demographics at Sufjan Stevens' last concert. So let's just look at the facts: Jay-Z and Beyoncé could be seen at Grizzly Bear shows in 2009, Justin Vernon has a free pass to jump on any track he chooses, and producers spent the year sampling Beach House, the xx, and Tame Impala. How does Glover explain Drake? Is he "crazy or hood," or just a half-Jewish, former child actor from Toronto who's already sold 600,000 copies of Take Care while signed to Lil Wayne's record label? I mean, sub-major hip-hop isn't a post-cred, post-racial utopia by any means, but I can't think of another time when there were more options for listeners of just about any race or background seeking to identify with rappers on a non-allegorical level. I just have to assume Glover has completely ignored the success of Lil B, Main Attrakionz, Curren$y, Kendrick Lamar, Odd Future, Danny Brown, and especially Das Racist when he meekly moans, "Is there room in the game for a lame that rhymes/ And wears short shorts and tells jokes sometimes?" It's the perfect summation of Camp: preposterously self-obsessed, but not the least bit self-aware. Tell me that ain't insecure.


Portland-via-Providence duo the Body push the boundaries of metal in both the intensity of their live experience and their penchant for collaboration. They've worked with the Haxan Cloak, the Assembly of Light Choir, and many others, and on their latest team up with USBM stalwarts Krieg.

The Body & Krieg

Portland-via-Providence duo the Body advance metal in two vital, if not obviously complementary, ways. On their studio albums, they are rare arbiters of outside collaboration: They've brought in the likes of the Haxan Cloak, the Assembly of Light Choir, Robert Lowe of Lichens and Om, Braveyoung, and Thou to expand metal’s capacity for exploring terror and inflicting self-prescribed misery. As a live band, the Body forego experimentation and focus on how far amplification can raise them and test you. Chip King sands you down with both multiplying walls of low end and his voice, a hybrid of Xasthur's Scott Conner's ghostly wails and the bleeding highs of Silencer's Nattramn; drummer Lee Buford is the only drummer with enough force to give aim to King’s projectiles. Choirs, religious speaking in tongues samples, and other details get smothered in the pursuit of absolutely demolishing the audience.
The Body's latest collaboration is with USBM stalwarts Krieg, specifically their mastermind and sole consistent member Neill Jameson. For the Body, it's the closest meeting of their two sides. It's still not quite close to the heaviness of their live shows—when a medium that can capture that emerges, it'll be huge news—but it’s still a convincing document about how both groups see rawness beyond a production style or anti-aesthetic.
Jameson's main contribution to the project is his vocals, which complement and counter King's shrill howl. Where King’s voice can seep into the music like a poisoned wind, Jameson comes through assertively, providing a hardcore edge that is usually more apparent in the Body's live show. He also coaxes rawer work out of them, acting as a pivotal spiritual influence. "Fracture" is a house with some of King’s densest noise walls; the suffocation that comes with them playing a narrow dive bar-cum-morgue or DIY house with feeble breakers has never been so effectively bottled. King and Jameson act as an interrogation unit, switching off each other.
Like I Shall Die Here, the Body, along with Jameson, explore the relationship between metal and dark electronic music. Their cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Terrible Lie" on You, Whom I Have Always Hated has become one of their more heralded tracks, and here, they take on more perverted interpretations of the great electronic and metal clash of the '90s. They warp goth-metal on "Never Worth Your Name", taking what would be a gorgeous synth backbone for Anathema or Type O Negative and strips any and all lust. There’s some form of longing left, the only thing left to trace it back to its source material. There's also a deceptive warmth, something also present on their cover of Sinéad O'Connor's "Boys in Black Mopeds" from the Body’s 2008 tour CD-R. The closest thing to the Haxan Cloak’s touch on Die Here is "Carved Out and Caved In", where distant bells work to loosen the guitar into a noise morass. While this collaboration lacks some of the unity of D**ie Here, it still has enthralling experiments with electronics rarely seen in metal. And for both groups, there’s always the drive for unorthodox aggression.