The accomplished debut from the DIY UK post-punk trio is simmering with possibility and pure conviction.

Sistahs

Big Joanie singer-guitarist Steph Phillips and drummer Chardine Taylor-Stone first met at a black feminist consciousness-raising meeting in their adopted home of London. Taylor-Stone noticed Phillips’ Raincoats tote bag and a friendship bloomed, rooted in a mutual love for feminist punk rock and their hope for a more inclusive underground music scene. In 2013, they formed their minimal indie-punk trio—which now includes bassist Estella Adeyeri—with a deliberate intention of diversifying London DIY. They played their inaugural set of originals and covers (Nirvana, Pixies, TLC) at First Timers, a festival centered on marginalized voices and new bands. They chose the name Big Joanie to evoke strong women and nod to Phillips’ Jamaican roots.
The debut Big Joanie LP, Sistahs, is an impressively woven tapestry of affirmational lyrics, girl-group chants, and deep, slashing guitars that would have sounded very at home on Kill Rock Stars in the 2000s. Big Joanie’s barebones rock songs always sound like they’re simmering with possibility, with pure conviction, something that the best DIY bands communicate almost telepathically. They’re the kind of punks who sing lyrics proclaiming, “I’m the nicest girl you know,” and about a desire to “drown my sorrows in herbal tea.”
In its themes and compositions, Sistahs evokes the collectivity from which Big Joanie was born. Lead single and highlight “Fall Asleep” is an ode to community, a sing-song solidarity anthem that could recall All Hands on the Bad One-era Sleater-Kinney. It circles around the fear of falling asleep: “If I ever fall asleep/Now would you wake me from the dream/That’s kept me crying now for weeks.” The work can be wearying, this song seems to say, but friends lift you up. Sistahs is best, though, on diffuse tracks like “Way Out” and especially “Eyes,” which bears a classic kitchen-sink post-punk style and even features an inspired recorder solo. This adventurousness returns on the minute-long “Down Down,” an oblique, ominous experiment that knows two words (“down down”) can sometimes be enough.
The songs of Sistahs tackle tough emotional terrain: the fraying edges of relationships, platonic and romantic, that must end; the intersection of boredom and lust; the feeling of being tokenized as a person of color. The gummy “Used to Be Friends” has a brilliant refrain—“I’d like to be friends with you but I only feel hatred”—and that uninhibited rawness gives it an edge. When the backup vocal clicks into Phillips on “feel hatred,” it’s like cool assurance. Phillips one-ups herself on the Shangri-Las-like “How Could You Love Me,” tear-stained and sinister: “He thinks I’m a joke/Well he can go choke.” There’s a bravery in gravitating towards these difficult places. Sistahs knows that punk, really, is a willingness to move towards the messier edges of life, to actualize oneself within them.
In a limited-edition zine that accompanies Sistahs, Phillips writes about the sepia-toned and seemingly innocuous photo on the record’s cover: her aunt and mother, Joan Phillips, on holiday in England as teenagers. Phillips goes on to describe the racism her mother experienced on that vacation, of how she was almost conned out of accommodations she’d paid for and had to stand up for herself and demand them. On Sistahs, Phillips hoped to channel a similar spirit of resilience, of fortitude and resolve, of taking what is yours. This rings resoundingly from the record’s first song. “Don’t tell me to wait,” the band harmonizes on its clear-headed “New Year,” a song of self-respect and fearlessness in the face of life’s great blank canvas. Their DIY spirit is manifest in those five words, refusing the waiting room and fighting for who they want to be.


Ciara touches on just about every facet of the R&B singer's style to date. While she’s a more versatile, accomplished singer than when she started, her appeal, especially on ballads, remains essentially unchanged.

Ciara

Ciara’s 2004 debut Goodies arrived at the tail-end of the last R&B boom. Its best moments used the churn and snap of “crunk’n’b” as a vehicle to re-imagine and repackage the frothy, light-hearted dancefloor charm of early Janet Jackson or Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam, only replacing girlish energy with insouciance and reserve. She wanted you to drip the sweat she never perspires. And while this mix of qualities made Ciara seem more distinctive and unique than a more solidly traditional R&B diva might, it’s always seemed like Ciara gets R&B at its core, that she’s invested in exploring all the ways the music can move you. Perhaps consequently, the mixed qualitative and commercial fortunes of her career since have mirrored the fortunes of the genre itself. It’s easy to think that if Ciara could put out an album that consistently captured the best of her talents, that record alone might be enough to help R&B reassume the throne of commercial dominance.
I suspect Ciara is not that album, but it roughly matches the quality of 2010’s Basic Instinct, probably her most consistent album up to that point. Which should be good enough to keep the dream alive a little longer. Ciara also touches on just about every facet of her style to date, and while she’s a more versatile, accomplished singer than when she started, her appeal remains essentially unchanged. At her best, Ciara comes on less as a full-blooded personality or even an object of desire and more as a glamorous big sister, the one you want to be when you grow up, who knows all the right moves on the dancefloor and in life. Complexity and personal drama ain’t in it: Ciara holds out the dazzling promise of somehow transcending all of that.
So it’s not surprising that Ciara feels slightly (though only slightly) weaker when she swims against the current of her own charm and tries for “raw.” “I’ve just been through a break up” she announces flatly on the blaring, Nicki Minaj-assisted opener “I’m Out”, and while she’s probably aiming for some mixture of bold personal statement and casual don’t-give-a-fuck swag, all you can hear is the deliberateness. Rihanna, a more limited singer than Ciara, can sound convincingly dead on tunes like “Pour It Up”, but Ciara’s stabs at a similar vibe can have a dress-ups quality, like she’s practicing her enervated monotone recitals in front of the mirror, singing into her lipstick. Ciara has done “hard” plenty of times, but on past tunes like “Oh” or “Ride” she effectively floated above the fray, untouched by the violence even as she endorsed it. “I’m Out” and Ciara’s Nicki-aping rap on (the otherwise excellent) “Super Turnt Up” are enough to confirm aggression is not her strong suit.
Conversely, the delectable, “My Boo”-referencing slow jam single “Body Party” finds the singer in top form, its billowing Mike Will Made It synth chords and crashing snares the perfect setting for Ciara’s light as a feather performance. The key line is “I’m having so much fun with you”, delivered with startled exuberance: even sex, in Ciara’s world, resembles the more innocent sensual pleasure of dancing. Likewise the double entendre-filled cunnilingus ode “Read My Lips”, perky electro-pop delivered with such frothy, wide-eyed innocence that it’s hard even to notice the subject matter. This same sense of uncomplicated exhilaration raises the straightforward, 2013 carbon dated club-pop of “Livin’ It Up” and “Overdose” from throwaway to highlight status, their obviousness transformed into a virtue through the singer’s palpable enjoyment.
The marvelous closing remix of “Body Party” (with features from Future and B.o.B.) underscores this (and the “My Boo” resemblance) by adding a popping bass beat, further submerging Ciara’s come-ons within easy dancefloor camaraderie. It’s a bewitching vision of life without any room for doubts or sadness-- except, perhaps, for the bittersweet realization that contemporary pop doesn’t sound just like this nearly enough.


One of the decade's true originals follows The Magic Position with his most populist record to date. Tilda Swinton guests as the voice of hope. Seriously.

The Bachelor

Regardless of his mythmaking and tireless efforts to project an otherworldly persona, Patrick Wolf still tends to write what he knows. One of the first of many bold proclamations on The Bachelor goes "in these hard times, we'll work harder," and whether you see him as an impish genius or a guy who'd be better off without an internet connection, you can't fault his commitment to craft-- all three of his previous records were meticulously imagined; all three sounded like the work of one man but rarely sounded like each other.
The Bachelor ups the ambition ante even higher, but it's just as as notable for displaying Wolf at his most interdependent, fitting in guest shots from Alec Empire and Tilda Swinton. Wolf's changes have been gradual: After the origin story of Lycanthropy, 2005's Wind in the Wires longed for pastoral escape but sounded like it was recorded in a remote hidey hole, all of which made the gushing, Cure-styled romance of The Magic Position a bona fide breakthrough. After that record's major keys and genuine human connections, The Bachelor isn't a hangover album so much as one on which Wolf picks up the morning paper and, without really breaching any specific topic, realizes that we're all in this world of shit together.
The Bachelor was initially conceived as a politically minded double-album entitled Battle, but Wolf's loves and depressions got the better of the initial plan-- either that, or he just realized that a politically minded double-album is a phenomenally bad idea. Nonetheless, the opening salvo of "Hard Times" and "Oblivion" are remnants of the aggressiveness Wolf set out for, the former recalling "The Libertine" in how it's prodded by a serrated, hooky string riff and the latter barreling forth with Wolf's most footloose electro-rhythms.
Most of The Bachelor's strengths sound borne out of arrangements rather than visceral or melodic thrills. For better or worse, that's likely been preventing any sort of real crossover for Wolf despite his acclaim-- while "Blackdown" culminates with a lovely Celtic hoedown, it takes about four minutes of tear-stained ivory tinkling to get there, and "The Sun Is Often Out" follows up with diminishing returns, struggling for a tune until a coda of choirboy chanting tries to make the preceding events sound like they were building towards something cathartic.
Even with all the momentum-sapping balladry, The Bachelor could still be considered Wolf's most physical album. Musical vigor backing worldly attempts at lyricism, however, is better left to Green Day (wait, no, that's not right)-- and here Wolf too often overstates things in search of some sort of populist truth. More worrying is that, despite all of the instrumental bric-a-brac dotting The Bachelor, Wolf leans on a choral mass during all the big moments-- a choir hopes for revolution towards the end of "Hard Times", exalts the listener to "rise up" during the coda of the otherwise understated "Damaris", repeats the title of the seriously Bono-fide arena raiser "Who Will?", and that's covering about half of it.
Wolf's always had an unsteady hand at hard rock, going down the supermassive black hole of fight music on "Battle" is at least a bizarre novelty that's kinda funny. As far as other bizarre novelties, unsurprisingly, "Tilda Swinton as 'The Voice of Hope'" is as ridiculous to hear as it is to type, triggering unfortunate flashbacks to horribly dated Age of Virtual Reality relics like Billy Idol's Cyberpunk and Kirstie Alley styling on the interludes to Prince's Symbol.
Strangely enough, Wolf's unclassifiable work to this point has managed to place him in a god-honest class of similarly minded Kate Bush acolytes-- but like St. Vincent and Bat For Lashes, there's the problem where stressing one's inner control freak can come at the expense of other freakiness. Or at least it can make any semblance of eccentricity feel micromanaged and forced, and Wolf lacks the former's humor or the latter's sultry songcraft to counterbalance it. Which admittedly sucks, because The Bachelor is still admirable in so many theoretical ways-- it's recorded almost flawlessly, and it appeals to the idea that an album is supposed to be an album of considered choices. Which is great, except that for all of the talk of Wolf being a chameleonic drama queen, oddball, or genius, The Bachelor most damningly lacks the charm attendant with any of those character descriptions, continuing Wolf's ability to please one's inner music critic, but too often ignoring any sort of pleasure principle.


On his latest mixtape, the divisive Atlanta rapper sounds best when chasing fresher, weirder, spacier styles instead of trying to live up to hip-hop’s storied traditions.

Summer Songs 2

“Seven years later and I got the same friends,” Lil Yachty croaks on “All In,” an enjoyable posse cut near the end of Summer Songs 2. Seven years ago I was 20, two years older than Yachty is now, and I remain friends with only about 25 percent of my social circle from back then—where does the time go? While Yachty is rapping about coming up to the top with his team intact, the line invites personal interpretation: What were you doing seven years ago? What was your life like at 18?
Age plays a huge part in enjoying (or not enjoying) Yachty’s music. He shouts “We are the youth!” on the mixtape’s very first track; he calls himself the “king of the teens” on another song that sounds like superhero theme music. The Atlanta rapper has made some uncomfortable appearances on New York radio shows like “The Breakfast Club” and “Ebro in the Morning,” where he was prodded and treated with a whiff of condescension—the weird kid in class with red dreads who embodies a new movement that strikes fear in older people. It all seems like an unfair burden put upon a teenager who doesn’t really deserve such high-strung generational introspection and skepticism. While Summer Songs 2 is better than Lil Boat, his breakthrough release from earlier this year, the music is still too flimsy to garner such “what is wrong with these kids?” hand-wringing.
That said, of his current burgeoning peers—guys like Lil Uzi Vert, Playboi Carti, 21 Savage, and Kodak Black—Yachty is looking like the one most poised for crossover success. His dominant feature on the D.R.A.M. song “Broccoli” sits at #34 on the Billboard Hot 100, and his light-hearted persona often shines on songs that are loose and feature less rapping. Which is fine. He gets in trouble, though, when gunning for some kind of respectability in traditional hip-hop circles.
“For Hot 97” mostly falls flat, because Yachty simply can’t keep up with the beat. He doesn’t command a verse as strongly as most of the guests on the tape, like Chicago’s G Herbo, who flattens “Up Next 3,” and Offset, who offers a silky verse on the woozy banger “DipSet.” In contrast, Yachty frequently falls off-tempo—it can be unpleasant to listen to. His high-pitched voice works in his favor on slower cuts but doesn’t blend well when he’s shouting and lagging behind the track. It’s a bit discomfiting—you want to root for the kid, but it’s frustrating to hear him undermining his strengths so frequently.
Summer Songs 2 clicks into focus on spacey, weirder songs like the slow-blooming “IDK,” where Yachty grapples with sudden fame, and the despondent breakup jam “Yeah Yeah,” which features the oddly memorable passage: “Dick so good turn that ho to George/That mean she get curious.” Yachty cops to being a student of Soulja Boy and Lil B (see the #based philosophy of “Life Goes On”) but he’s also got a Tyler, the Creator sense of humor, from his irreverent videos to opening the album by impersonating his “uncle,” Darnell Boat, who sounds like a character from the “Loiter Squad” cutting-room floor. And something about the tape’s late run of songs, when things slow down and the beats wilt, reminds me of chillwave’s idyllic vision of the West Coast, all beaches and girls and sun-soaked afternoons—potent, dreamy stuff that appeals directly to the sensibilities of teens and college loafers. Yachty is delivering an aesthetic, which is catnip to some (mostly those 25 and under) and repellent to others. But if you’re locked in, Summer Songs 2 can be a lot of fun.
On closer “So Many People,” after playing a series of wide-eyed, wistful testimonials to his music, Yachty lowers his voice to a near whisper while a simple, forceful drum pattern kicks—a startling moment of vulnerability, even when he boasts, “I just put both of my feet in the door/I did it two times faster than these other niggas.” It’s the kind of pathos you get from young adults—the confidence is there, but the insecurity and uncertainty of teenagedom still looms. If Summer Songs 2 buckles under the weight of an Apple Music imprimatur and deafening hype, try to think about being 18 again, when you only wanted to listen to yourself.


Let's Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time is Luke Wyatt's second album as Torn Hawk this year. He's still playing with the emotional resonance of his own specific memories, and nostalgia is still a primary factor, but it's tempered by a breathy, new age smoothness.

Torn Hawk: Let's Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time

What are we actually talking about when we talk about nostalgia? Taylor Swift’s Polaroid album cover for 1989? Ghostbusters? The Beatles? Nirvana? Limp Bizkit? Illmatic? Nostalgia is fascinating and infuriating because of how specific it is: my nostalgia is not your nostalgia. But when it’s used correctly and on the right person, it’s an emotional weapon, able to warp hazy memories into strong feelings.
Let's Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time is Luke Wyatt's second album as Torn Hawk this year, and stylistically, it builds directly on the previous release, Through Force of Will. Wyatt’s still playing with the emotional resonance of his own specific memories, and nostalgia is still a primary factor, but it's tempered by a breathy, new age smoothness that rounds out the jagged edges of his older material.
It’s not quite spa-ready easy listening though. The drums on "Lessons From the Edge" lurch and shuffle under layers of digital murk, like a low-res jpg blown up way too big. Wyatt still loves layering and twisting triumphant guitar lines that are bound to remind you of whatever your favorite movie featuring an underdog coming out on top is, or failing that, a surf magazine from 1989.
But it’s not all triumph. Wyatt skews dark on occasion: "Because of M.A.S.K." is a neon-lit journey through a dystopian present, and "Return to the Pec Deck" sounds like two different Torn Hawk songs playing at once. It’s unsettling and weirdly funny. Yet it still feels like Wyatt is holding back. Each record he releases brings him closer to facing nostalgia head on: both the nostalgia inherent in the sound of his music, and the nostalgia people that write about his music saddle him with. But how deep does he want to go? Pushups, as dense as it is, is a breezy listen. Easy to play on repeat, and easy to find moments of crystalline beauty that don’t have to mean anything more than what they are.
Let's Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time is often beautiful, and that’s all it really needs to be, but Wyatt’s been plugging away at this sound for long enough that it feels like he’s making a larger point about the way we engage with our own memories of pop culture—or at least questioning them. It’s impossible to tell if he’ll ever come to any conclusion. If he even wants to come to any conclusion, but there are a couple things that are certain: Wyatt’s managed to take something as idiosyncratic as the way pop culture tangles up with our memories of the past and make a universal sound out of it. Ultimately, Wyatt has made a sadly triumphant album that questions how our minds remember what they remember. What will happen when he stops asking and starts answering?


The London-born Adrian Sherwood is an adventurous, refined musical talent whose singular sound helped generate momentum for a slew of edgy, iconic bands, including the Fall, the Slits, the Pop Group, and more.

Various Artists: Sherwood at the Controls, Vol. 1: 1979-1984

Now in his mid-50s, the London-born producer Adrian Sherwood is a sort of bass-music activist, fighting to keep the "dub" in dubstep with solo albums like 2012's Survival and Resistance and lecturing on studio-recording history and technique at Red Bull Music Academy. But Sherwood made his deepest mark 30-some years ago, working in the slipstream between post-punk, industrial and Jamaican music that ran between London and New York. Once you start picking at the threads of his CV, you'll discover an adventurous, refined musical talent whose singular sound helped generate momentum for a slew of edgy, iconic bands and ensured his own placement in the producers' pantheon.
To stimulate the inevitable reassessment, Sherwood is releasing music from his back catalog on his On-U Sound label, which he originally founded in 1979 as a repository for the work he was doing with Jamaican musicians. Sherwood at the Controls, Vol. I: 1979-1984 explores a thrilling period in music history and makes a compelling point of entry for appreciating Sherwood's influence. Among its 14 selections, dub is a persistent thread. In the London music scene of the late '70s, the sonic touchstones of Jamaican music—oceanic bass, cavernous reverb, spacious syncopation, an overarching sense of studio-applied patience and distance—appeared in surprising places, applied to far-flung genres.
By that stage in his career, young Sherwood had cultivated a reputation beyond his early association with Jamaican expats in London's reggae scene. He was known as a production auteur with a serious ear and bands like the Fall, the Slits and the Pop Group, all represented here in various incarnations, sought his signature touch. On the Fall's "Middle Mass", they sound like a more minimalist version of themselves, demonstrating both Sherwood's collaborative subtlety and Mark E. Smith's predilection for bubbling bass. The Pop Group frontman Mark Stewart's "Learning to Cope with Cowardice" is one of the more contemporary-sounding jams here, the kind of crunchy digi-dub that we associate from modern purveyors like Glasgow's Scotch Bonnet Records or Leipzig's Jahtari.
Stewart wasn't the only Pop Group member to enlist Sherwood after the band's breakup: Guitarist John Waddington recorded with him as part of a group called Maximum Joy. "Let It Take You There" is one of the comp's highlights, six minutes of spaced-out and infectiously upbeat post-punk funk à la ESG. It follows album opener "Hungry, So Angry" by Medium Medium—another fantastic, dancefloor-oriented, sax-driven number, this one leaning toward Talking Heads-like jitter-pop. Several songs later, Sherwood and Shriekback—which consisted of Barry Andrews of XTC and Dave Allen of Gang of Four—push the limits of a LinnDrum machine on the proto-industrial "Mistah Linn He Head".
If you sense a theme, that's not an accident: These songs and artists form a nexus of references for a slew of more recognizable early '80s bands. Sherwood was a physical link between the Jamaican underground to the white avant-garde, and collectively, over the course of years, they pushed unconventional musical ideas into the mainstream, where the likes of David Byrne and the Police made them popular.
But Sherwood—and Sherwood at the Controls—remains unpopulist. The second half of the compilation is especially and deliciously weird. Here we meet Jamaican music luminaries like producer Prince Far I, whose Linton Kwesi Johnson-sampling "Nuclear Weapon" flows at a lava-like pace, and vocalist Bim Sherman, who performs "Reaching the Bad Man" as part of Sherwood's studio ensemble Singers and Players, unspooling an eight-minute foray into deep, skeletal dub. To this day, African Head Charge is one of On-U's flagship bands; their 1982 cut "In a Trap" sizzles with Nyabinghi-style percussion, rubbery bass and faraway guitar.
The depth and breadth of Sherwood at the Controls stuns. These songs aren't just curious footnotes in one man's extensive discography—a bunch of them legitimately bang, and the ones that don't go full-bore into left field. Taken together, they give a sense of the indelible mark Sherwood has left, and hopefully there is more on the way to round out the picture.


The Kansas-bred, New York-based DJ has been stripping techno to its essentials. Yet Emma Olson’s latest contains so much to admire, each track is a glimpse into something much larger.

Symbolic Use of Light

A strange discipline rules UMFANG’s work. Her spartan take on techno recorded live in single takes often feels like a riddle with no clues. The Kansas-bred, New York-based DJ and electronic musician has been honing her approach for a few years now: A 2015 self-titled cassette for London’s Videogamemusic label trafficked in spare, chilly studies for drum machine and analog squiggles, driven by an ultra-minimalist impulse reminiscent of Agnes Martin’s grids. The same year’s OK, for 1080p, was more colorful, indulging in deep house organs and chopped-and-looped rave vocals. (UMFANG, aka Emma Olson, has subsequently called it “silly” and “crowd-pleasing.”) But it remained, at heart, deeply weird and frequently forbidding, swirling a cappella diva shrieks into a disorienting ambient morass, and looping the word “OK” ad delirium over an unrelenting 909 groove. It wasn’t all so confrontational: The gorgeous, nearly beatless album opener “Shant” recalled Vainqueur’s weightless dub techno while still putting its own spin on the form. But Olson cut her teeth in underground spaces and DIY communities—she is a co-founder of Discwoman, a collective and DJ agency for female-identifying and genderqueer electronic musicians—and her music proudly foregrounds its uncompromising streak.
She took a major step forward with last year’s Riffs EP: Stripped to little more than a single synth and one or two lumpy drum sounds, the EP’s tracks were sketch-like in form, but they didn’t feel incomplete or unfinished—more like terraforming experiments turned arid and airless. Symbolic Use of Light builds upon those developments, offering a more complete statement than anything she’s done before this—but, crucially, without having added one iota of extra sound.
It’s ironic that the album is bookended by tracks called “Full 1” and “Full 2,” because emptiness is the key metric here—or if not emptiness, precisely, then exactitude. She’s like the world's most unforgiving fire chief: If these tracks were public spaces, their legal capacity would lie somewhere in the single digits. Most of them make do with just a handful of sounds, and some even fewer than that. “Full 1” opens the album with plucked synthesizer tones swimming in thick reverb, a kind of futuristic harpsichord music at once tentative and unsentimental; “Weight” is moodier and, despite a quick-stepping kick-and-rimshot pattern, hardly much more forthcoming. Minor-key organ loops spin until dizziness sets in, and she works the filter as though toying with the controls on an airlock, seeing just how much oxygen she can suck out of the room without reaching a point of no return.
Quite a few tracks are purely ambient: The no-def “Path” sounds like Actress run through the looping tapes of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, with a burbling synth arpeggio smoothed into a faint, glassy ripple, while “Sweep” broods over dissonant bleeps and white noise. (While writing this review, the steady beeping of a construction vehicle backing up outside my house and the arrhythmic sine bursts of “Sweep” meshed together as perfectly as the interlocking components of a DJ mix.) Other cuts, like “Where Is She” and “Wingless Victory,” offer the purest, most unrelenting kind of techno, with beefy kick drums bathed in hangar-sized reverb and needle-nosed arpeggios reminiscent of Robert Hood. Most of her dancefloor cuts hit their plateaus quickly: She’s less interested in building drama than in creating seemingly static environments that take a while to sink in.
The rest of the album focuses on stripping techno down to pure electrical pulses: “Symbolic Use of Light” wrong-foots a Pan Sonic-like drone with a whipcrack snare right when you least expect it, and “Pop” is so unflinchingly minimalist that it features no percussion other than a flat, dry kick drum. Instead, it focuses all its energies on the unpredictable interplay between two bleepy arpeggios of slightly different lengths. A less confident producer might have filled up the track with more drums, more sounds, more effects, but by concentrating on the subtle modulations and dizzying interplay of just those two elements, her fine-gauged pings assume larger-than-life proportions.
Like much of her work throughout her career, each of these tracks feels like a glimpse of something larger. You won’t get the full picture from any single track, but let the whole album sink in, and you begin hearing the implicit connections that link them all. Olson's alias came to her out of the blue, but it just so happens that “Umfang” is also a German word denoting scope, circumference, breadth, etc. It’s a fitting term for her work, given the way she treats the space of each track like a problem to be solved—a search for the missing variable that will turn three dimensions into four.


The Walkmen recently went on a “pretty extreme hiatus”, and the first batch of its members’ inevitable solo albums are now starting to appear; for his solo bow, Black Hours, frontman Hamilton Leithauser doesn’t veer far from their established sound, and continues their exploration of old popular music, this time with an emphasis on what was on the pop charts two generations ago.

Black Hours

In 2004, the Walkmen released one of the best rock songs of the decade, “The Rat,” a relentless, spiteful, venom-spewing anthem cleverly designed to sound like it was tearing itself apart while it was in the process of being played. Afterwards, instead of trying to match or exceed its vitriolic brilliance,  the band angled sideways instead, embarking on a series of subdued, smart experiments—trading instruments, recording a faithful recreation of an under-loved Harry Nilsson record, and so on. The band recently went on a “pretty extreme hiatus”, and the first batch of its members’ inevitable solo albums are now starting to appear; for his solo bow, Black Hours, frontman Hamilton Leithauser doesn’t veer far from their established sound, and continues their exploration of old popular music, this time with an emphasis on what was on the pop charts two generations ago.
One of the Walkmen’s key strengths were their ability to conjure up an air of non-specific old-timiness, cobbled together from bits of old folk, country, garage rock, oddball '60s pop (which was itself an intentional throwback to the days before rock & roll), and the American songbook. It was an inspired tactic that earned the band a fervent audience among people who cherish vintageness, and the Walkmen were savvy enough to veer far enough from tribute-act territory. For Black Hours, Leithauser dials up the influence of jazzy post-war vocal pop; he recently posted to his Tumblr a playlist of influences that guided its creation, including Frank Sinatra, Cole Porter, Randy Newman, and Bob Dylan, whose retro-revivalist spirit has hovered over most of Leithauser’s career.
But the playlist seems superfluous when hearing the album’s opening track, “5 AM”, which puts the aforementioned influences front and center with pensive piano, lachrymose strings, and a theatrical vocal performance that accurately replicates Sinatra's signature blend of heartache and bravado. Leithauser’s reedy-yet-supple voice has always been one of the Walkmen’s strengths, and after years of constant practice he’s become a far more proficient singer than you’d expect for someone working in the indie rock milieu. He wouldn’t have been able to compete directly with Sinatra back in the day, but he could have made a decent opening act.
Largely, Black Hours' first few tracks hew closely to the Walkmen's sound, with a few neat tweaks: “The Silent Orchestra” mixes strings, marimba, and a jaunty rhythm guitar playing on the upstroke that suggests "Mad Men"-era cocktail party music matched with punk raggedness; “11 O'Clock Friday Night” also features marimba, embellished with assorted percussion, jangly guitar, and the kind of casually anthemic vocal part that Leithauser specializes in. The album’s best song, “Alexandra”, is also one of the finest moments in Leithauser’s career, as a deceptively simple melody is paired with acoustic guitar, exuberant handclaps, a gleefully wailing harmonica that smacks of Paul Simon’s '70s bubblegum-folk sound.
Black Hours shares some of its strengths with Leithauser’s work with the Walkmen, and same goes with its weaknesses—namely, an occasional lapse in focus. “St. Mary’s County” takes a step too far in the direction of Sinatra-style torchiness, while the last couple tracks never quite cohere, resembling sketches of the album's stronger material. But the swooning “Self Pity” and “I Retired,” which puts a cabaret-style slant on ramshackle, mid-period Dylan folk rock, hold things together. At the end, Black Hours is a tribute to a diverse range of musical progenitors. But more deeply, it’s a testament to Leithauser’s inexhaustible stylistic ambition, and his ability to conquer expectations by throwing one curveball after another.


Lily Allen possesses a terrific flair for irony, but there's a fine line between using irony to make a cutting point and using it as a protective coating to hide the fact that you're not sure exactly what you're trying to say. She was once a master of the former, but her new album, Sheezus, is another story.

Sheezus

A few weeks ago, Lily Allen released a single called "Sheezus", from her new album of the same name. She begins the song in a weary murmur, announcing that, after five years away, she's ready to step back into the spotlight and endure all the "embarrassing" comparisons she will receive to other female pop stars. Then, in the chorus, she all but invites these comparisons by name-checking some artists she seems to perceive as her contemporaries: "Riri isn't scared of Katy Perry's Roaring/ Queen B's gone back to the drawing/ Lorde smells blood, yeah she's about to slay you/ Kid ain't one to fuck with when she's only on her debut."
"Sheezus" is a maddeningly catchy, deeply puzzling song. Is she paying homage to these women? Is she making fun of them? Maybe a little bit of both? (And while we're asking the unanswerable: Why is she dressed like a Na'vi from Avatar in the song's video?) Maybe Allen wants "Sheezus" to be read as a critique of the ruthlessly combative, Who-Wore-It-Better? pageant that our culture creates for female celebrities—though at the same time, she admits that part of her desires that rigged game's flashy prize. "Give me the crown, bitch," she snaps a little too convincingly at the end of the chorus, "I wanna be Sheezus."
All things considered, the Lorde reference is particularly loaded. Nearly a decade ago, Allen was the promising and precociously literate pop insurgent who was "only on her debut." That record was 2006's enduringly charming *Alright, Still—*a personable blast of witty, hip-hop-informed pop that featured lively character sketches of famous family members, eccentric London townies, and shitty ex-boyfriends. It sold millions and made her a star, particularly in her home country. Allen became a fixture on the London club scene and an acid-tongued presence in the British media; she took a brief and well-publicized break from drinking after telling Elton John to "fuck off" on national TV.
Her second record, It's Not Me, It's You, was as shimmery and sharp as a shattered mirror, critiquing the vapidity of fame ("The Fear") and the ways in which the deck is stacked against outspoken women who dare to outlive their ingénue phase ("22", a song about the Rock-Forever-21-But-Just-Turned-30 set, now feels like a bleak sequel to Taylor Swift's hit of the same name). Though the tabloids charted Allen's every affair, her most passionate love/hate relationship seemed to be with her own notoriety. (A telling detail that almost every profile of her dutifully noted: After she was arrested in 2007 for attacking a photographer, she blew up a copy of the police citation and hung it in her foyer.)
Clearly, Allen possesses a terrific flair for irony. But there's a fine line between using irony to make a cutting point and using it as a protective coating to hide the fact that you're not sure exactly what you're trying to say. Allen was once a master of the former, but Sheezus too often finds her drifting perilously in the latter territory. Even before she was disowning her underperforming singles as "docile pop rubbish" on Twitter a few weeks ago, we got a taste of this back-pedaling and double-speak on the album’s lead-off single "Hard Out Here", which fashioned itself a critique of music industry sexism but, to some listeners, sent an unfortunate mixed message. "I don't have to shake my ass for you, cuz I've got a brain," Allen sang, as though the two were mutually exclusive; behind her, a group of black women shook their asses at the camera. When the video was accused of being racist, Allen clarified, "If I could dance like the ladies can, it would have been my arse on your screens." All of this confusion only muddled her original point, and made you wonder if the song had as much brain power as Allen advertised.
Allen was one of the first high-profile artists to cultivate a fanbase via the internet; she posted demos on Myspace in advance of Alright, Still, and later became known for writing confessional posts on her blog. But the controversy that "Hard Out Here" generated seemed like a barometer of how much the internet has changed in a few short years—especially when it comes to talking (or making music) about feminism. As the writer Michelle Goldberg described in a recent cover story for The Nation, it can sometimes feel on Twitter like there is a radical SWAT team that would rather jump on anyone who Does Feminism Wrong (see also: the "Is Beyoncé A Feminist?" Thinkpiece Fatigue of 2014) than allow people to express "well intentioned" but "imperfect" opinions. Because she is making some valid points about double standards in the music industry, some might find it tempting to consider Allen a victim of this kind of hand-wringing. But in the end, Sheezus fails on much less ambiguous grounds.
There's nothing particularly wrong with the way the album sounds: It's a sleek and bubbly, if somewhat indistinct, pop record. It's not easy to write songs that are as catchy as they are verbose, but Allen and her frequent collaborator, producer Greg Kurstin, have not lost the light, agile touch they showcased on the best of It's Not Me. "L8 CMMR" is cheeky summertime pop, and the Sugababes-sweet "Air Balloon" is infectious enough that I can almost forgive Allen, lyrically, for making the same joke as that stupid Bavaria Radler commercial with Elvis and Kurt Cobain. (Almost.) The record's most satisfyingly on-point moment, though, is "URL Badman", a satirical send-up of spiteful internet commenters. Allen sings it in the voice of a parents'-basement-dwelling "London white boy repping ATL" who says things like, "I don't troll, I make statements." Even though he spends his days spouting Wordpress vitriol at famous women who will never fuck him, he wants us to know that deep down he's really just a sensitive guy, "like Drake."
If only this record could put its money where its delightfully dirty mouth is. But too often, there's a tone of scolding, mean-spirited superiority about Sheezus that, after a few spins, makes you wonder why Allen thinks she’s so different from that blogosphere hater. The feather-light R&B number "Insincerely Yours" is bogged down by cheap shots and Twitter-beef petulance: "I don't give a fuck about the Delevingne, that Rita girl, about Jourdan Dunn… I don't give a fuck about your Instagram, about your lovely house or your ugly kids." Allen's venomous tongue was previously effective when it spewed at unidentified love interests or impersonal cultural institutions like "society" or The Sun and The Mirror, but, as on “Sheezus”, she runs into trouble as soon as she starts naming names. Not only will “Insincerely Yours” age about as well as the Fred Durst diss in "The Real Slim Shady", but less forgivably, it contradicts the record’s overall message. How can Allen not see that she's playing into the very catfight narrative that, four songs previous, she was supposedly trying to end?
Even as Allen takes both serious and “ironic” jabs at her contemporaries, she seems plenty interested in borrowing from their sounds and sensibilities. “Our Time” is her obligatory stab at a YOLO-anthem, a “We Can’t Stop” in everything but name and cutting-edge production. There’s also a particularly noxious song called "Silver Spoon", the main argument of which scans as, “Fuck off, I grew up slightly less rich than you think I did.” Although it aims for empathy across class lines, it just comes off as defensive. Furthermore, although Allen’s records have always been stylistic hodgepodges, Sheezus doesn’t flow as fluidly as her last two. When things get a little weary after the mandatory ballad about not wanting to be famous anymore, cue "As Long As I Got You", which is...a zydeco song?
“The game is changing,” Allen sings on “Sheezus”. “Can’t just come back, jump on the mic and do the same thing.” There is something poignant and disarmingly honest about this song—very few artists pull back the curtain on the kind of fears and anxieties she’s acknowledging here. And while Allen’s right—the game is changing—there are plenty of reasons to feel more hopeful about the future than she does. Katy Perry’s “Roar” wasn’t a catty snipe at anybody’s Instagram, but instead a primal battle cry of female self-empowerment. Yes, Beyoncé did go back to the drawing board—and she returned to completely reinvent the album as a relevant format in 2014 and prove that brains and ass-shaking can coexist and the world shall continue to turn. And in the short amount of time she’s been on the scene, Lorde has not only spoken out against the music industry’s sexism but also cultivated a powerful sense of solidarity with other young female pop stars. Even in the context of a joke, the word “diva” feels applicable to her least of all. She is not the girl who wants to “slay” her “rivals”, but befriend and root for them instead.
So “Sheezus” is based on a false conceit. Nobody’s vying for the title of Top Diva in 2014 because—and this is the great and exciting thing about women in pop music right now—there’s enough room at the table for all different kinds of femininities, sexualities, races, body types, and sounds. (It ain’t perfect, of course, but progress is being made.) Sheezus has a few good points and some admirable intentions, but too often it misses the point. In the end, Allen only fans the flames she says she wants to extinguish.


Like drawing a perfect circle, making a good power-pop record is an elusive task. Portland's Mo Troper come closer than many have in awhile, with snot-nosed charm.

Beloved

Like drawing a perfect circle, making a good power-pop record is a task that seems easy but becomes nearly impossible when put into practice. So many have aimed for simple and landed on trite; aimed for timeless and landed on toothless; aimed for sweet and landed on creepy. This is precisely why most power-pop albums are not necessarily graded for breaking new ground, but rather, for how competently they fit within the genre’s pre-established formula. Beloved, the debut album from Portland, OR songwriter Mo Troper, indeed recalls some important figures from the past. Over the course of its thirteen tracks, you will find the blushing-schoolboy narratives from the first two Big Star records, the denim-clad rock bravado of Teenage Fanclub, and the lo-fi spontaneity of '90s Robert Pollard. And while these reference points might account for some of the album’s initial thrill, *Beloved *seeks to do more than just impress you with its immaculate Works Cited page.
In fact, it’s almost impressive how much Troper is able to wring not only out of his genre’s limitations but also his stunted lyrical inspiration. Nearly all his songs are planted firmly within either accusatory pop-punk juvenilia (“You’re just another human being/But you’re the only one who’s cool enough to be a casualty/Of everything”) or starry-eyed high school fantasy (“Do you want to kiss me?/Do you ever say my name out loud?”). The latter lyric—from “After the Movies,” the album’s obvious highpoint—is a lot more successful territory for Troper, whose voice is significantly more attractive beneath that song’s cozy distortion than amid the awkward open-mic dryness of “Somebody Special.” On an album that, at its best, sounds like an unearthed live bootleg from an obscure Titan Records band, moments like these can’t help but feel like the local openers coming back to play one more song: you can practically hear the audience hightailing it to the bathroom within the first fifteen seconds. Same goes for eight-minute slow burner “The Biggest” and its acoustic coda, “Teeth,” both of which seem to exist solely for the purpose of pushing the album’s runtime past the thirty-minute mark.
As spotty as the album is, Troper’s gifts are undeniable. “Judy Garland” employs a lyrical conceit not unlike Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” before breaking into a similarly infectious “Ooh ooh ooh” refrain, ensuring the song takes a permanent place in your head. On “Star Wars,” Troper plays up his loner persona (“All my friends want to get drunk again/I just want to stay home and stare at my phone”) before admitting squarely, “All my friends are total fucking bros.” It’s one of the album’s funnier moments, not to mention one that plants his material firmly in the present, as opposed to the unremembered golden age his melodies and production occasionally recall. Plus, it’s nice for once to hear him slightly implicate himself in his trademark, snot-nosed pwnage.
It’s hard to say just how long Troper’s keen melodic sensibility can counterbalance his lyrics’ occasionally mean-spirited adolescent tone; it will be interesting to see whether or not he will be able to pass the ultimate test for power-pop artists—the dreaded sophomore album. Still, in a genre often criticized for its timidity, Troper gets points for confidence. Not to mention, it’s easy to ignore what he’s actually saying in songs like “After the Movies” and “Paint,” in which nearly every couplet feels effortlessly like a hook. While Troper is not the first person to do what he’s doing, he is the first in a long time who can convince you—for the length of a few perfect moments—that no one’s ever done it better. If he’s half as interested in taking advice as he is in giving it, he’s well on his way to earning the authority that these songs seem obsessed with obtaining.


Recorded live at Stockholm’s Studio Rymden in late 2018, the trio showcases a carefully stripped-down, psych-jazz sound where the groove reigns supreme.

Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin: Ghosted

Ghosted

Multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi, bassist Johan Berthling, and drummer Andreas Werliin are well acquainted with the pleasures of letting go. Veteran improvisers and experimental musicians, all three have been playing together in various configurations for two decades, exploring what happens when sound spills out of its frame. Among their recent collaborations, Berthling and Ambarchi’s 2015 album Tongue Tied united a mutual interest in drone with their shared instinct for bone-quaking pulses; then, Ambarchi brought both musicians on board for the 2019 performances that yielded last year’s Live Hubris, an astonishing album pairing Glenn Branca-grade guitar clang with rhythms inspired by Can’s Jaki Liebezeit. But Ghosted is different; it trades their propensity for cutting loose with a newfound interest in dialing back and zooming in. These tracks are plenty muscular, but there’s no bulge, no bloat. They’re as sculpted as the six-pack on a plastic superhero costume.
On Ghosted, the groove reigns supreme. Recorded live at Stockholm’s Studio Rymden in late 2018, the album showcases a carefully stripped-down sound. Berthling plays acoustic double bass on all but the second track, where he opts for electric. Werliin favors a palette of shakers, toms, and glancing snares, sketching out the contours of the beat by tracing its crags and cavities. And while the timbre of Ambarchi’s guitar couldn’t be mistaken for any other instrument, he typically avoids strummed chords or picked melodic lines in favor of a wash of tone run through a Leslie cabinet. The three players fill this wide-open sound with ephemeral shapes that hint at a possible meaning behind the album’s title: The music swims with darting shapes, flickering traces of energy, that feel almost supernatural in origin.
Ghosted consists of just four tracks: three long, extended vamps and one atmospheric coda. The trio is joined on the first, “I,” by Christer Bothén, a Swedish multi-instrumentalist who collaborated with Don Cherry in the 1970s. Here, as on recordings like Cherry’s 1974 album Eternal Now, he plays donso n’goni, a lute-like West African instrument that pairs with Berthling’s bright plucking to create a sound that’s warm and luminous. It’s the most joyful and easygoing of the album’s four tracks, with a shuffling, circular groove and a loping two-note bassline that evoke the feel of a desert road arrowing endlessly toward the horizon. In tone and mood alike, it’s faintly reminiscent of Joshua Abrams and his group Natural Information Society, where the guimbri—a North African descendent of the n’goni—plays a similarly hypnotic role.
On “II,” Berthling swaps his acoustic bass for an electric, on which he plays a single repeated riff for all nine and a half minutes of the song’s running time, tapping out the sort of harmonics that were Jaco Pastorius’ signature. But where Pastorius, on songs like “Portrait of Tracy,” used the effect to hint at the ineffable, as though grasping at moods his instrument wasn't otherwise meant to capture, Berthling keeps his head down and his control all but mechanical. His playing is so steady, it’s easy to wonder if he used a looping pedal—but everything on the record was played in real time, Ambarchi says. Berthling has overdubbed a low-end bassline to add some dubby punch; Ambarchi’s processed guitar sounds almost like a bowed violin. The whole thing moves so naturally, it might take you multiple listens to realize that it’s in 7/8 time; credit Werliin’s locked-in yet fluid drumming, which draws from the same deep well as Can’s “Future Days.”
On “III,” the players tackle an even trickier time signature, but once again, they make it feel as intuitive as breathing. Where the preceding songs are sprightly and vivid, the nearly 16-minute “III” goes long on atmosphere. Berthling again lays down the unchanging groove, his instrument’s tone as smooth as driftwood, while Werliin’s deep, booming toms offer the faintest suggestion of a melodic counterpoint. Propelled by the Leslie cabinet’s quickening-and-slowing rotations, Ambarchi’s guitar is all shimmer, dancing like the Northern lights above the craggy shapes sketched out by his bandmates.
It’s an example of jam-based minimalism at its most transcendent: endlessly repetitive, yet born anew with every bar. The band probably could have drawn this meditative, trance-like track out to an entire album’s length. Instead, they let us down gently with “IV,” a dirge-like song in the same key that spreads out like an oil stain. It makes for a satisfying finish: After the clockwork mechanics of the first three tracks, “IV” feels like they’re letting go again, giving into entropy as the coiled grooves relax into ambient ooze.


The second release from the British producer finds him adding global textures and delving further into dance music proper. Where his last album, Lucky Shiner, had a bright, nostalgic glow, Half of Where You Live is distinctly darker and, at points, clubbier than its predecessor.

Half of Where You Live

We still don't know his name, but Gold Panda has made it easy for us to know him. The British producer's debut, 2010's Lucky Shiner, was an emotive tapestry of personal history, with textures that evoked imagery with a distinct personal glow. On his second album and first substantial release in three years, Half of Where You Live, Gold Panda shifts the focus from who he is to where he's been.
This shift makes sense. The success he's enjoyed has sent him far from the suburban Essex enclave he once called home. Lucky Shiner cuts like "India Lately" and "Same Dream China" swirled the culturally distinctive sounds of plucked strings and tangled sitar detritus into their respective mixes. 2009's Miyamae EP took its name from a ward of the Japanese city of Kawasaki; its bookended cuts were named, respectively, "Back Home" and "Long Vacation". Clearly, the act of leaving is far more intriguing to him than returning.
A quick scan of Half of Where You Live's tracklist uncovers more name-checked locales-- Brazil, Hong Kong, the Japanese island of Enoshima, the British town of Flinton-- but above all else, Gold Panda's current residence of Berlin looms large. Whereas Lucky Shiner had a bright, nostalgic glow, Half of Where You Live is distinctly darker and, at points, clubbier than its predecessor. The glimmering synths and hazy, chiming techno featured on James Holden's Border Community label are reference points here, alongside shimmering vignettes that call back to the pretty-sounding IDM that German imprint Morr Music was known for in the early 2000s.
Half of Where You Live doesn't mark the first time Gold Panda's flirted with more distinctly dancey fare, but it's he's never been this successful with it. For all its winsome elegance, there were moments on Lucky Shiner that, for better or worse, sounded truly handmade to the point that you could practically hear Gold Panda's fingers mashing hia Akai MPC. The MPC is still present here-- the gurgling "S950" takes its name from a specific model of the sampling equipment-- but these tracks sound smoother and more refined, a logical progression from the staticky amniotic techno that made up this year's brief stopgap EP, Trust.
Gold Panda's long been someone who works very well in miniature form; his talent for pushing repetition to the brink of its greatest, most pleasurable effect is documented by the attention-grabbing success of early singles "Quitter's Raga" and "You". But his ability to expand his vision to fit longer forms is his secret weapon. The nearly psychedelic sprawl of "India Lately" already suggested as much, and on Half of Where You Live, Gold Panda delivers his most potent side-stretcher in the form of "Brazil". The six-minute track is the closest thing this album comes to in terms of anthems, as a hollow bassline and a male voice repeating the titular city's name build the backbone. A mess of chimes come crashing in, the beat drops, and then picks up again with a tangy, winding synth line that makes for a seismic, satisfying addition.
"Brazil" is Half of Where You Live's big highlight, and the subtlety of its charms extend to the record as a whole. The winsome, direct melodies that marked Lucky Shiner's high points are largely absent here, which may cause some to consider the album a slight disappointment. That's understandable, but ultimately the success of Half of Where You Live lies not in Gold Panda repeating old tricks, but in how he's expanded his repertoire to include new sounds, and his aesthetic proves sturdy enough to accomdate them.


Former street performer continues her unusual, late-life transition into accomplished professional artist with her best LP yet. Andrew WK produces.

Regifted Light

Baby Dee is what you might call a late bloomer. When she released her first LP, Little Window, she was already in her late forties, and her biography read like a Tom Waits song. According to a story she told NPR, she fell in love with the harp at age four after discovering the one inside an upright piano during a neighborhood piano-smashing party. Later, she often played harp in Central Park while wearing a bear costume. She had stints as a church organist and a Coney Island sideshow. Her music is an equally paradoxical blend of spiritual uplift and tin-megaphone banter.
The transition from street artist to professional has been gradual. By 2008's Safe Inside the Day, she'd learned how to make a commercial album, and her signature harp and accordion gave way to grand piano-- a more typical and versatile foundation. With her remarkable life experience now paired with recording practice, Baby Dee has made her best album yet just a couple of years shy of her 60th birthday. Idiosyncratic but ruggedly classic, Regifted Light is old-fashioned art music with a sheen of downtown grit. Dee caresses and pounds producer Andrew WK's Steinway D to life with the lyrical bluster of Gershwin and the nimble thematic development of Sondheim. It's a welcome change of pace from the post-minimalism that's rampant in indie piano music.
Opening instrumental "Cowboys With Cowboy Hat Hair" establishes the album's harmonic environment, making this more of a song cycle than a collection of individual pieces. Over martial snares, Dee works a theme from the C Minor scale-- light on the sharps as to lean it toward bright C Major-- up and down the keyboard. The theme rolls back and forth on itself and fractures across different octaves in odd places so that lone high notes ring out ornamentally. Regifted Light never strays too far from this tonal vicinity, which creates a unified wistfulness that Dee articulates in every shade from happy to sad. The diversity arises from Dee's inspired handling of the shallow pool of intervals-- you never know which way the themes will veer next, into upper-register dances or lower-register thunder-- and is abetted by conversational accompaniment for bassoon, cello, and glockenspiel.
Dee has an incredible voice that has drawn unavoidable comparisons to Antony Hegarty's. In fact, it is more unusual than Antony's, and more inclined toward musical theater. A little of it goes a long way, which is why it works so well appearing on just four of the 12 songs here. The scarcity gives it an outsized, mythic quality. Dee suddenly appears, utters wisdom or metaphysical fables, and vanishes into the music again. Within a single line, her voice flickers through not just different emotions, but personalities.
"The moon is my redeemer/ The moon is my befriending Jesus," Dee drawls on the title track, merging pagan and monotheistic traditions into a sense of human tenderness that overarches eons. The notion that with each "regifting" of the light, its "gentleness increases" could sound forced and trite in a different context, but in Dee's hands it feels at-ease and hard-won. "Brother Slug and Sister Snail" is a Joanna Newsom-like animal allegory where Jesus sings from the cross, "I am a worm and not... a... MAN!" But nobody hears him. The narrative topology is strange, but not for strangeness' sake: The elegant music bends it toward profundity.
Baby Dee tends to get written about with words like "flamboyant" and "campy," and "The Pie Song" demonstrates why: Dee bashes out mad-composer chords while demanding pie with the indefinable undercurrent of menace minted by the Frogs. While "The Pie Song" is not representative of Regifted Light, those who want to hear the album as camp will do so, despite the fact that Dee's theatrics have been scaled back, and at any rate are not campy but piercingly sincere. The camp pigeonhole is always difficult for transgender artists to avoid in the mainstream. But Dee is simply a musician making very earnest art about a very unusual life. Regifted Light doesn't seem built to shock or cajole, but to connect with all sorts of people, and to last.


On his fifth album, Aaron Maine is having more fun, writing more playfully, staying out of his own head. It’s some of his most succinct and enjoyable songwriting to date.

All Day Gentle Hold !

All Day Gentle Hold !, the fifth album by Porches, goes down with all the acrid sweetness of late summer’s most distinctive pleasures. It evokes the unique jouissance of, say, a cheap cigarette that’s a little too tarry or the first sip of a Slurpee cut with a little too much vodka—sensations that define the phrase “too much of a good thing,” the kinds of sensory overload experiences that trigger intense, indelible memories. Running a scant 25 minutes and featuring some of Aaron Maine’s most succinct and enjoyable songwriting, it distances him from the too-cool chilliness of 2020’s Ricky Music, instead embracing the effusive, heart-on-sleeve tone that made early records like 2013’s Slow Dance in the Cosmos so remarkable.
For all its romantic exclamations, of which there are many, All Day Gentle Hold ! is not an about-face or a retread of a past iteration of Porches. The progression is simple but significant: In contrast to the angsty remove of Ricky Music and 2018’s The House, Maine sounds totally at ease. After a few years working out the knots in his music—not to mention a year of forced isolation—he emerges cheekier and more flamboyant. (The lyric sheet, peppered with “u” in place of “you” and an abundance of exclamation marks, captures the new exuberance.) Rather than create a binary where electronic means alienated and rock means engaged, All Day Gentle Hold ! finds a comfortable middle ground: the vocal manipulations feel warmer and the rhythmic backbone carries the energy of a live rock band. At the end of “Lately,” Maine announces himself to the world like he’s standing on the Pyramid Stage: “Crying out! How’s everybody holding up out there??!!/I miss you so much...”
Cosplaying as the frontman of a festival band is just one of Maine’s techniques for conveying the bombastic rush of the Best Summer Ever. He is “sucking on a watermelon slush,” “sipping on another Camel Blue”; he smells “blood everywhere” and likes it. He’s touching and being touched—“Baby has got the keys/Can u stick them into me/Wanna take me for a ride”—and watching a friend sleep in the grass. And, of course, he’s listening, not just to the eddy of guitars and synths that comprise All Day Gentle Hold ! but also to a song that “really slapped, brought me back to life,” and to Sonic Youth, whose “Bull in the Heather” he interpolates on “Swimming Big.” When Maine upcycles that song’s “10, 20, 30, 40” chant, the phrase feels like it’s slipped into his own vernacular, in the same way you might find yourself incorporating the language of a beloved pop song in day-to-day life. It’s less interpolation than diegetic moment. All Day Gentle Hold ! is pleasantly unwieldy in this way, heaving with ideas that are odd in isolation but seem totally normal when used so fluently.
All Day Gentle Hold ! brings its own “10, 20, 30, 40” chant in the form of “I Miss That,” whose hook is one of the most joyfully replicable phrases to come out of indie rock this year. Atop a jolting beat and synths that sound like they’re melting in the sun, Maine’s words take on the redolence of a mantra or a schoolyard chant: “I like that/I like that/I like that/I miss that/I miss that/I miss that.” It’s a perfect hook to sing aimlessly and ambiently, with its own built-in percussive qualities: the sibilance in “miss” cut off by the hardness of “that,” mirroring the hiss of hi-hats and thwack of a snare. It’s one of Maine’s best songs, and all the better for its simplicity. Despite the nostalgizing of its title, “I Miss That” is in the moment.
Those small, important differences make All Day Gentle Hold ! stand out in the Porches catalog. Maine is having more fun, writing more playfully, staying out of his own head, keeping things simple. “Grab the Phone,” a stomping, straightforward rocker, returns to the dynamic vocal performances of his best early work, a reminder of just how much is lost when he deadpans or shrouds his voice in Auto-Tune; his lyrics take the point of view of a fish (“Don’t bite the hook, I just let it slide through my teeth/Pull me up, wanna show u some of my teeth”) but his sing-song lilt imbues the surreal words with mirth and feeling. That All Day Gentle Hold ! is one of Maine’s least ambitious records is part of its puckish appeal. These are some of Maine’s most generous and indelible songs, so much so that the album’s 25 minutes feel too brief. Like the best summers, it’s done in an instant—but the feeling lasts long after it’s over.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we examine the monumental final album by a singularly talented guitarist with a conflicted relationship to his instrument and an ecstatic vision for his music.

Ask the Ages

Sonny Sharrock never wanted to play guitar. He disliked the instrument when he first tried it out, as a 20-year-old in 1960, and he remained stubbornly committed to that attitude even after he’d radically expanded its expressive possibilities, remade it to suit his vision, established himself as one of the greatest ever to play it. Or so he claimed, to almost anyone who ever got him on the record, until just about the day he died. In 1970: “I hate the guitar, man.” In 1989: “I don’t like guitar, I don’t like it at all.” In 1991, two months after the release of his last and greatest album: “I don’t like it.” In 1992: “I despise the sound of the guitar.” In 1993, less than a year before his death: “I didn’t like the instrument very much.”
Sharrock had asthma as a teenager, which didn’t stop him from singing doo wop, or dabbling in any street-level mischief that was available to a ’50s kid in his hometown of Ossining, New York. But it did rule out the tenor saxophone he coveted after an encounter with Kind of Blue converted him to the church of John Coltrane. An acquaintance had a guitar on hand, so he picked that up instead. The decision, he would later be sure, had saved his life from “whatever young men die of in the street.” Still, he went on resenting the guitar, which he believed was not suited to the outbursts of ecstatic humanity he heard in Coltrane or the other tenor players he came to love, like free jazz pioneers Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler, Coltrane associates who took their music even further toward an oblivion outside Western ideas about melody and rhythm. The guitar, to Sonny Sharrock, always sounded the same, no matter who was playing it. It had no feeling.
Just about every musician Sharrock admired had worked on bandstands, or at least begun seriously honing their craft, while they were still teenagers. As a young man, he felt he was arriving to jazz late in life, too late to learn the music by the usual methods: studying other players, absorbing their licks, eventually developing your own. So he decided to simply express himself as purely as he could within the bounds of his ability at the time, on an instrument he didn’t care for. Had he gone searching for guitar idols, he wouldn’t have found any, because no one before Sonny Sharrock played guitar like him.
Only Jimi Hendrix did as much as Sharrock, as early, to push the electric guitar to its limits and explore what sounds were there. Hendrix’s wildest music, like 1970’s “Machine Gun,” involved extreme volume and the ensuing feedback and distortion, spontaneous outer energy that he harnessed and redirected; if he put the guitar down in the middle of a solo, it might go on roaring without him. Sharrock, who liked to keep the volume on his amp at 4 out of 10, was more like a horn player, animating an object that would otherwise lie mute. Everything that came out—as his slide shot past the end of the fretboard, as his pick struck muted strings, as he strummed chords so quickly and ferociously that they began to resemble approaching tornadoes—came from kinetic effort. The energy was inside him.
Sharrock always considered himself a saxophonist who happened to play the wrong instrument. His closest kindred spirit may be Ayler, whose approach to the tenor was as uncompromising as Sharrock’s to the guitar. Both men favored melodies so bright and clear a child could have composed them, then turned them inside out. They might begin with a folk tune and end with music you couldn’t represent on a staff any more than you could notate shattering glass. The sound itself was the thing. A single instant of noise could be as expressive as an entire melody; there was hardly any difference between the two. They were Black visionaries who rejected the strictures of the white European thought that sought to govern all musical expression. But their music wasn’t only, or even primarily, about negation. It was about freedom, transcendence, a joyous embrace of whatever lay beyond.
Even in the revolutionary world of free jazz in mid-1960s New York City, where Sharrock moved not long after dropping out of Berklee College of Music, his music was a difficult proposition. Before he arrived, “jazz guitar” meant the elegantly melodic soloing of Wes Montgomery or Charlie Christian. Most free groups didn’t have a place for the instrument, which seemed stuck inside the buttoned-up tonality of an earlier era in jazz, and was fast becoming an emblem of the current day’s white pop music. On top of that, there was Sharrock’s fondness for sing-song simplicity, not otherwise particularly fashionable among the avant-garde.
No one quite knew what to do with this strange and singular talent. His first few years on the scene produced one masterwork under his own name—1969’s Black Woman, a collaboration with his then-wife, the equally radical vocalist Linda Sharrock—and a series of electrifying but brief appearances on records by other players. They tended to use him like a scene-stealing character actor, letting him dazzle the audience for a moment and then ushering him out of the frame. As a result, being a Sonny Sharrock fan can feel like being on a long scavenger hunt. Have you heard that crazy R&B album he plays on? Do you know about the uncredited cameo with Miles? It’s a lot of sitting through Herbie Mann records, waiting for him to cut the tasteful flute stuff for a minute and let Sonny rip.
And then there is Ask the Ages. In a catalog that is otherwise unruly and difficult to navigate, Sharrock’s final album is clearly the mountaintop. When it was released in 1991, he was 50 years old, five years into an unlikely creative resurgence after a decade in which he hardly worked at all. He was in the best form of his life, playing with impossible tenderness on one tune and unbearable force on the next. For the first time since Black Woman, he was leading an ensemble of peers and equals—players who could match his intensity, but also exerted a certain solemn gravity, befitting his status as a master, that his last few albums had missed: Pharoah Sanders, the fire-breathing saxophonist who had given Sharrock his first gigs back in the ’60s; Elvin Jones, the John Coltrane Quartet drummer whose torrential cymbal work was a key early influence on the guitarist’s guitar-averse approach; and Charnett Moffett, a virtuosic 24-year-old double bassist who understood when to carve space for himself among these elders and when to sit back.
Three years after Ask the Ages, Sharrock died of a heart attack. Viewed from one angle, the album looks divinely inspired: the culmination of Sharrock’s artistry, reuniting him with towering figures from his past and offering a chance to express the sound inside him once and for all, in a dignified final stand against the instrument he treated like a sparring partner—the instrument that saved his life—before he put it down and moved on to the next one.
From another angle, it looks kind of like a fluke. Sharrock and producer Bill Laswell conceived of the album, down to its title, in a single conversation at a bar in Berlin. They intended to make music that would put the guitarist in touch with his own history. “I want to reconnect with the music of John Coltrane,” Sharrock said, in Laswell’s recollection. “That energy, that possession, that power. I want to get back to that level, that quality again. Make something serious.” The guitarist’s primary focus in those years was the Sonny Sharrock Band, his touring group, a burly rock-oriented outfit with two hard-hitting drummers. Their music is as delirious and uplifting as a carnival ride. It does not sound very much like John Coltrane, nor would you necessarily reach for “serious” as an adjective to describe it.
Sharrock was obviously thrilled with Ask the Ages, but the players weren’t making long-term plans; he seemed to see the album as an enlightening diversion from his main gig. When an interviewer asked him about what would come next, he enthused about Sonny Sharrock Band records he planned to make, which would possibly be influenced by hip-hop. The last bit of music he released before dying was the soundtrack to Cartoon Network’s cult-classic talk show parody Space Ghost Coast to Coast, reflecting a deep playful streak that the imposing Ask the Ages doesn’t always convey on its own. (“I think a cat like Al Di Meola would play better if he smiled a little bit,” he told an interviewer in 1989. “The shit ain't that serious.”) Sharrock’s death makes it easy to apprehend Ask the Ages as his magnum opus, but he might have resisted that idea himself. In life, he rarely traveled by such straight lines.
Laswell and Sharrock had been close collaborators ever since the producer helped the guitarist come back from an involuntary early retirement. Herbie Mann, a mainstream-friendly pop-jazz fusionist, had been Sharrock’s most reliable employer in the late 1960s and early ’70s, despite their considerable musical differences. After they parted ways, Sharrock made another album with Linda—1975’s surreal funk experiment Paradise—and his career soon hit the skids. He began supporting himself with gigs as a chauffeur and at a school for children with mental illness, spending years woodshedding and writing but rarely performing and never recording.
Things started to change when Laswell invited him to play on Memory Serves, a 1981 album by his art-punk-dance band Material. Laswell, who plays bass but is perhaps most important for the myriad connections he’s facilitated between experimental musicians across genres, began bringing Sharrock in on more projects after that. Chiefly, there was Last Exit, a band whose ruthlessly discordant music, improvised from scratch every night, favored pummeling punk rhythms over the swing that underpinned even the furthest-out free jazz, sounding more like what was coming to be known as noise rock.
After washing up on the shores of jazz, Sharrock was suddenly celebrated as a visionary progenitor to a new generation of adventurous rock musicians and listeners. Thurston Moore bought a pile of Herbie Mann records and isolated all Sharrock’s solos, dubbing them onto a single cassette. “It was one of the best things I had ever seen and heard,” he said of a Sonny Sharrock Band performance he attended at the Knitting Factory. “It was enlightening. It kind of informed me further, as far as what I wanted to do with the guitar.” The world of experimental electric guitar playing, where white artists often win the most acclaim today, would not exist as we know it without Sharrock.
Ask the Ages brings the intensity of Sharrock and Laswell’s previous collaborations into a format more easily recognizable as jazz. Sharrock, who composed the material himself, channeled his taste for simple and direct melodies into the opening tune of each piece. In these sections, he frequently overdubbed multiple interlocking guitar lines, which massed together with Sanders’ tenor into something liquidy and metallic, a mutant horn section. Most tracks, for the first minute or so, are swinging and approachable, maybe even a little old-fashioned. Then comes the fire.
On “As We Used to Sing,” a stately minor theme ascends to a breaking point, and Sharrock’s solo takes over: first furious and serpentine, then jaunty and staccato, then out somewhere past the horizon. (Despite his stated preference for plugging straight into his Marshall amplifier at moderate volume, it’s hard to believe he’s not getting some more juice from the amp or a pedal.) Even as he departs from the melody and begins summoning waves of pure sound, there is a distinct emotional trajectory. He valued feeling above all else in his playing, and professed disinterest in noise for its own sake. At the passage’s peak, rather than winding down, Sharrock abruptly stops, and the resulting negative space is as striking as the previous cacophony. When Sanders steps in and offers a series of birdlike calls on his horn, it’s like witnessing the first signs of new life after a disaster that wiped the earth clean.
Sharrock spoke in his later years of a sense that he was paring down any extraneous elements in his playing in an effort to get closer to the heart of a given melody. This effort is audible throughout Ask the Ages, and most clearly in “Who Does She Hope to Be?,” the shortest and sweetest tune. Jones and Sanders recede to the margins, hardly playing anything at all. Sharrock’s phrases are spacious and melancholy. He isn’t doing anything fancy, just letting the melody speak. Your attention moves to Moffett, whose fluid self-possession on the bass turns the arrangement on its head. For an album so concerned with legacy, Ask the Ages never gives the sense that this music is anything other than a living thing. “Who Does She Hope to Be?” underscores this attitude powerfully: The young sideman, for a moment, has become the leader.
The album reaches its astonishing apex with “Many Mansions,” the track that most recalls Sharrock’s sojourns in avant-rock. Its pentatonic theme has the elemental quality of A Love Supreme’s “Acknowledgement” section, but as it repeats across nine minutes, it also begins to resemble a Black Sabbath riff. Sanders takes the lead before Sharrock, with a solo that reaches a climax before it even gets going, beginning with an ecstatic fit and growing only more frenzied from there. With the cry of a single sustained note, or a babbling trill between two, he conveys lifetimes. Elvin Jones, in his mid-60s, seems even more potent than he was as a young man, urging the soloists to ever-greater heights. Thanks in part to advances in recording fidelity over the previous several decades, his kit has become a visceral entity, almost multisensory; each bass drum hit is a wallop to the chest, the shimmer of ride cymbals is nearly visible in front of you. According to Sharrock, there is an audible mistake in his guitar solo, a flicker of lost composure brought on by Jones’ rhythmic onslaught. “I flashed back to Birdland when I used to see him with Coltrane,” he said. “And I lost it. For a second you can hear this bump, because I was gone.” Good luck finding it.
Articulating the beauty of Ask the Ages is difficult, because it seeks something that can’t be described. Sharrock was unsparing in his dismissals of music that sidelined feeling—indulging in artifice and imitation, or betraying a desire to impress the listener—including his own less satisfying efforts. “That's not making music; that’s putting together puzzles,” he told an interviewer about a year before his death. “Music should flow from you, and it should be a force. It should be feeling, all feeling.”
“The whole thing,” he said in the same interview, was “just to get this thing in me, get it out, you know? Make it real. Because it’s in you and it’s fine, but it isn’t real yet until you make it music.” Near the end of his life, Sharrock seemed to feel that he was closer than ever to finding that thing. He continued to profess hatred for the instrument he was stuck with, but the love in his late music is unmistakable. Like his hero John Coltrane, he died in the middle of a visionary period, leaving behind work that suggests further revelations to come. “I don’t even think about age,” he told another interviewer. “I’m just so happy to be playing good that I don’t care...I’ve got a long way to go. I’ve just discovered myself, you know? It’s just now started to happen for me musically. I now am able to play the things that I hear.”
Sharrock once said that he was only religious insofar as he believed that Coltrane is God. Still, his quest for truth of expression in his playing was not unlike Coltrane’s more explicitly spiritual yearning. Coltrane wanted a higher power; Sharrock just wanted feeling. Listening to him and the band speaking in tongues across Ask the Ages, you might wonder whether those are two names for the same thing.

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A key album from the great bassist/composer/bandleader's canon is given an expanded 2xCD reissue that includes the complete album Mingus Dynasty.

Charles Mingus: Mingus Ah Um: Legacy Edition

Mingus Ah Um: Legacy Edition

Chuckle a pitying chuckle over Allaboutjazz.com's guide "1959: The Most Creative Year in Jazz." Miles Davis's Kind of Blue: "the quintessential jazz album"; Coltrane's Giant Steps: "a major landmark in jazz history"; Brubeck's "Take Five": "one of the most popular tunes in jazz"; Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come: "the essential free jazz album." Mingus Ah Um? "Essential to Mingus fans and jazz aficionados" (emphasis mine).
Poor big-bellied, cigar-loving, temperamental, insecure, misogynistic Charles Mingus. While routinely placed on best-of-genre lists and talked about as one of the preeminent bassists and bandleaders in jazz, his best albums never clump comfortably with anyone else's, or with any particular subset of casual jazz listeners. They're too spirited for cocktail hour, too rough and moody for listeners who revel in crafstmanship, and not radical enough for daredevils.
Then again, Mingus' music never seemed comfortable outside its own world, either. At the dawn of both modal and free jazz, he kept solos short and music composed (even if, as with 1959's Atlantic recording Blues and Roots, the players didn't see the charts before the studio date). In an era where big bands were left behind for small combos or reimagined entirely (as with, say, John Coltrane's late albums), Mingus was a Duke Ellington acolyte who approached his pieces with the formality of an orchestral composer.
"Better Git It in Your Soul"-- if Mingus had his own sound, Mingus Ah Um's opener was it: a warm, striding, Sunday-morning tune carried on moaning horns; a friendly, convivial atmosphere punctuated by hollers Mingus didn't bother suppressing in the studio. Mingus, born to a black father and Chinese-American mother who allowed only church music in the house, embraced blues and gospel in the complex way one embraces a friend they've fallen out of touch with, or their hometown-- cautiously; with a burdened and deep-buried love. The song never struck me as primitive or rootsy, but a comic-book version of primitive, rootsy music-- a form reduced to its most basic shapes and traits; a form almost abstracted.
The album rolls from there. And while "Better Git" is as good a definition of Mingus there is, the album is remarkably diverse: Set pieces like "Fables of Faubus" or "Jelly Roll" (which are a jazz analog to the Beatles's warped, fruity variations on early British pop, like "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite") play alongside factory-pressed bop- and swing-style songs like "Boogie Stop Shuffle" and the mournful, reverent balladry of "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat". Harmonies invoke modern classical music almost as often as blues, and his chosen instrumentalists spend as much effort adding color to the ensemble as personality to their brief solos.
Regarding the product at hand: a 2xCD 50th anniversary "Legacy Edition" with a list price of $25. The remaster is the same one performed by Mark Wilder in the late 1990s and still in print. Along with a couple of alternate takes, the second disc contains Mingus Dynasty, an uneven and far less interesting album recorded later in 1959 and issued early in 1960. The liner notes are slim and strangely conceived (do I need to read that a song on this album is a "grand slam home run" even though I clearly have already purchased it?). The bonus material on the second disc, in PDF format, should've been in the booklet if they're charging $25 for a package that probably didn't demand a lot of work to re-release. That's that.
I'm sure I'm not versed enough in jazz to assess what it is that makes Mingus Mingus, but listening to Ah Um again-- an album I plucked from my dad's collection at age 15-- I remember sitting in my family's basement thinking that I had no idea jazz could be funny. (I hadn't yet heard Thelonious Monk.) I thought jazz was all elegance and poise. I remember reading transcriptions of Charlie Parker solos and wondering if my intellectual awe would translate to a real, visceral love of the music. It didn't-- I felt detached. Mingus was slurring and gestural. His compositions that looked prim on paper sounded rusted and sun-bleached in performance. The fiery ones sounded a little tight-assed and penned-in-- you could almost hear the band bucking with discomfort at the form they found themselves playing in. The music had character; it beamed. Still does.


Wolf Eyes/Stare Case member Nate Young's eerie, dark solo LP-- a sequel to 2009's Regression featuring members of Wolf Eyes past and present-- might be his most minimal work to date.

Nate Young: Stay Asleep (Regression Vol. 2)

Stay Asleep (Regression Vol. 2)

Nate Young might not have meant the title of his 2009 LP Regression as a description of his musical direction. But the album's stark, slow tones are a sonic reduction compared to his work with John Olson in Stare Case, a project that itself trims back the noise the pair make as a part of Wolf Eyes. Young's path hasn't been completely linear-- Wolf Eyes often sound stark, too, and Regression included a few noisy moments.But his sequel to Regression, Stay Asleep, might be his most minimal work ever.
Each of the album's five songs is built from two basic elements-- a loop of low notes and a metronomic beat. Synths and other electronics add small accents, but often the bass and rhythm march forward unadorned. With this small arsenal of sounds, Young makes music that gets tenser without actually changing much. It's tough to put a finger on how his repetitive notes can feel like a stair-climb instead of a still-life. Every track is pretty clean-- there are no hazy sonics or cloaking distortion. Yet when I listen, I'm less aware of what's happening musically than the mood the music creates.
That mood is almost always eerie and dark. Young's sparse approach gives Stay Asleep tons of negative sonic space, making it as creepy as an unlit basement. The horror-movie feel is similar to that of Prurient's last record, Bermuda Drain. But where Dominick Fernow openly mimics the tropes of 1970s slasher soundtracks, Young's songs are more like analogues to onscreen suspense. In his tick-tock tones, time seems to creep unstoppably toward potential doom.
For Young, though, Stay Asleep isn't so much a countdown to danger as a guard against it, "a hex sign... that can protect against the 'evil eye.'" As he explained to Tiny Mix Tapes, "I like the idea of distracting negative energy with art and holding it at bay." Closer "Collapse" succeeds at that goal, with piano chords that suggest rising optimism in the face of gloom. But it's also the album's weirdest track, with Olson's horns and (ex-Wolf Eye) Aaron Dilloway's tape effects adding a warpy insanity. Ending with such a surreal tone suggests that the title Stay Asleep is an actual command. Maybe this isn't a horror movie but simply a dream, and the only real danger is waking up from its entrancing sounds.


This vinyl-only set contains the influential German band's three original albums plus some rarities, including sessions from an aborted 1986 reunion.

Neu! Box Set

There are not many great bands whose canon is as neatly formed as Neu!'s once was. Between 1972 and 1975, the duo of drummer/singer/guitarist Klaus Dinger and guitarist Michael Rother, both of whom had previously played in a short-lived lineup of Kraftwerk, made three albums together. (They were effectively a three-member duo: the contributions of the late producer Conny Plank probably meant as much as Dinger's or Rother's.) They were a new kind of rock band: they stripped away the idea of song and riff, and made texture everything. The first, self-titled Neu! album is as visionary a record as has ever been made. Its opening track "Hallogallo" was their manifesto: a single hovering chord, a single beat, rolling forward for 10 minutes that might as well be forever, with tiny variations. Some people called their signature rhythm "motorik"; Dinger later called it the "long line."
Neu! were named after the sort of "new" that appeared on grocery-store boxes containing a different version of the same old thing, and 1973's Neu! 2 is a visionary stopgap product. "Für Immer", which occupies half of the first side, is a souped-up remake of "Hallogallo"; the second side, generated in a hurry when Dinger and Rother ran out of studio time, is both sides of a single they'd released a bit earlier, plus the same material played at 16 RPM, at 78 RPM, and on a broken tape deck. Neu! 75 sounded like the band was on the verge of shaking apart, which it was. (The scalding, Dinger-driven second side, with its two extra drummers, became a touchstone for early punk rock; the floating meditations of the first side weren't too far from the ambient music that Rother's occasional collaborator Brian Eno was devising around the same time.) Rother and Dinger's remarkable musical chemistry was matched by what appears to have been a near-total inability to agree on anything, and after 75, they split.
But the break wasn't as clean as it might have been, which is why this vinyl boxed set contains five records instead of three. There's also a Neu! stencil (should you feel like spray-painting their logo on any public buildings), a nice big booklet, and a code that gets you a T-shirt and digital downloads of all the music. The bonus records, though, are the real bait here, and they're not so much missing chapters from the band's history as they are Rother's version of Dinger's cash-ins. In the mid-90s, Dinger released two more albums' worth of his Rother collaborations without Rother's consent. Dinger died in 2008, and now Rother has returned to that material to put his own stamp on it.
Neu! '72 is a maxi-single with three live-in-the-practice-space jams, edited by Rother from the much longer, murky rehearsal tape that Dinger released as '72 Live. If you've ever wondered if there's any document of the post-first-album lineup that included guitarist Eberhard Kranemann, the answer is "Yes, there exists such a document." That's all that can be said for it.
And Neu '86-- that's a tricky one. Rother and Dinger reunited (without Conny Plank) in the mid-80s to see if the old magic was still there, and most of it wasn't. They abandoned the sessions before they finished an album; the digital drums and synth pads they used sound much more dated than anything they'd done a decade-plus earlier. Dinger called his 1995 version of it Neu! 4-- it's been out of print for a good long while and hasn't really been missed. This significantly shorter version has been reworked and "finished" by Rother. It sounds like an undercooked, mostly instrumental mid-80s synth-pop album with a mild but pleasant Neu! influence among its Flock of Seagulls-isms.
The booklet that comes with the set is a loose assemblage of photographs, quotations, testimonials, a history of the band, and a bit of critical writing-- a real boon for fans. What it unavoidably presents, though, along with '72 and '86, is the Rother perspective on Neu!, in which Dinger was a crucial contributor but alternately an impediment and a loose cannon, and Rother was the one steadfastly working to preserve the glory of their collaboration. As with Dinger's versions of the two discs that deform the band's body of work, this set seems like one side of an argument in which neither side is actually in the right.


The Spanish artist’s debut cuts and pastes from R&B, hip-hop, reggaeton, and flamenco. It’s bizarre and incongruous—but oddly satisfying.

Supernova

On his debut album, Ralphie Choo, a former chemical engineering student, toys with genres with radical abandon, manipulating sounds like reagents and catalysts in a lab. Across 14 tracks, fluttering flutes, dembow riddims, and flamenco palmas bubble up in a frothy but precisely measured concoction. Ad-libs punctuate the beats like exclamation points. Vocals arrive through aggressive, jagged filters. Everything is glitchy and meandering, gesturing toward familiar genres but never fully surrendering to them. Choo’s music champions fragmented pop maximalism, illustrating what’s possible when you catapult centuries-old traditions into a globalized present. Within the landscape of Spanish-language pop, currently oversaturated with cookie-cutter reggaeton, this freaky confluence of past and present is a welcome respite.
His music may bring to mind other contemporary Spanish pop conceptualists, like fellow madrileño C. Tangana and Rosalía, who slide folk styles like copla and flamenco alongside synth stabs and 808 kicks. Choo’s approach is similarly exploratory and deranged, perhaps even more interested in shredding ancestral practices to pieces. His friends are influences too: Alongside rusowsky, mori, Tristán, and Drummie, Choo is part of the Madrid-based label and collective rusia idk. Their plush R&B and slanted club concoctions exemplify the experimental sounds coming out of the Spanish capital—and Choo is one of the crew’s most gifted international delegates.
Choo is first and foremost a producer, and a masterful worldbuilder. “Juan Salvador Gaviota” threads a bossa nova groove into “NHF,” an aspirated, shimmering R&B tune that stutters into a jungle breakdown. “Total90sNostalgia” radiates a wistful pink glow, like a climactic scene in a coming-of-age film. The piano interlude “Bò” is lissome and pure, even as a cartoonish, helium-infused voice mumbles unintelligibly in the background. These songs melt into a blissful and immersive fog, as if suspended between states of consciousness. It’s just one example of the border-soft magic that Choo conjures in his songs.
Supernova soars when it strips flamenco down to its percussive core, like on “Tangos de Una Moto Trucada,” which is grounded in a palo built out of wooden spoons, knives, and salt shakers and punctured by jarring piano notes. Revving engines and palmas, the hand claps of flamenco, form the foundation of “Bulerías de un Caballo Malo,” but Choo adds cherubic harp plucking, like a banger designed for the kingdom of heaven. The Mura Masa collaboration “Máquina Culona,” which collages brain-scrambling static punches, digital accordions, and clacking palmas, feels like a sudden bout of air turbulence, an exhilarating jolt on an otherwise smooth flight. In the video, a shirtless man cooks a slab of raw meat with a clothing iron, another lights a cigarette in a lobster’s claw, and a third slurps up a bowl of soup wearing a toilet seat around his neck like jewelry. This onslaught of bizarre, incongruous images is oddly satisfying—much like Supernova itself.
Maybe because he was a producer first, the 24-year-old Spanish artist’s strengths lie in texture over narrative; lyrics are secondary. Often, they’re simply onomatopoeic: Choo blows raspberries, coos like an infant, and emits guttural noises, as if he’s just been punched in the stomach. Sometimes, the lyrics aren’t even immediately comprehensible. In their idiosyncrasy, Choo’s personality emerges as cheeky and romantic, like a medieval jester with the impulses of a court poet.
At times, Supernova ventures too deeply into the creative directions developed by Frank Ocean on Blonde. Like that album, Supernova is capricious and loose, arranging instruments in ways that are sprawling and unpredictable. Yet in some instances, Choo’s R&B melodies hew too close to specific moments on Blonde; the end of “Total90sNostalgia” is nearly identical to Ocean’s high-pitched “woo” on “Solo.” “Whipcream,” featuring Los Angeles rap duo Paris Texas, feels mimetic too, although not of Ocean: Both Choo and his guests channel the reckless energy and slurred ad-libs of Playboi Carti and Travis Scott in a way that feels uninspired.
Supernova raises inevitable questions about the recontextualization of genre, especially regarding once-marginalized styles like flamenco and reggaeton. Choo doesn’t seem interested in that kind of intellectual battleground; in 2021, he told a Spanish magazine that claims of cultural appropriation “worry him a bit, but don’t condition him.” Instead, he presents a view of pop music at its most porous, freed from category, history, and geography. Like a mischievous cat shoving a glass off a table, Choo is invested in the thrill of infinite play.