Chasing hits and fighting against his own strengths prevent Trippie Redd’s debut album from having a seismic impact.

Life’s a Trip

A year ago, Trippie Redd stood in the iconic Coney Island theme park  staring at the screaming roller coaster riders and berating the crowd for faintly booing his performance. Besides a few Supreme shoulder-bag wearing SoundCloud heads, the audience had no clue who he was despite his track “Love Scars” tearing up the internet. He said that they will know him in a month—and he was right. Even in the hyperspeed world of SoundCloud, Trippie’s rise was accelerated. It’s why his debut album Life’s a Trip shouldn’t be disappointing but is because despite the numbers, high-profile beefs, a permanent spot on DJ Akademiks’ Instagram, and a voice like no other, Trippie wasn’t ready for his big moment.
Trippie’s debut mixtape, 2017’s A Love Letter to You, was a beautiful mess. The tape created a world where Trippie sang, introduced everyone to his signature moans and screeches, and even dove into some boom-bap. He was versatile, he could hold a melody well enough to perform a pop-punk ballad and rap like someone who listened to too much Little Brother. And that was cool, but what made Trippie a breakout star were the times when he took full control of his voice and embraced the incessant shrieking on production that was both dark and airy.
On Life’s a Trip, Trippie—who begins his album 10 feet from the mic yelling, “I’m a rockstar,”—fights his own strengths. One thing the artists born on Soundcloud who seamlessly transitioned into rap stars have done is emphasize their sound, even if it was initially polarizing. Lil Pump doubled down on the minute-and-a-half speaker-blaring ad-lib marathons and Playboi Carti transformed his ethereal sound into a lush vibe. Trippie doesn’t seem as sure of himself and the weight of a debut album leads to some head-scratching decisions.
At his best, Trippie’s music is slightly maniacal and haunting, but still catchy and relaxed enough to have pop appeal. Life’s a Trip hardly ever reciprocates that feeling; instead, Trippie falls into the misconception that melancholy guitars are the best way to convey something serious. The intro track, “Together,” is a slow-moving ballad that restricts his voice while he halfheartedly sings about confronting his inner demons. “How You Feel” incorporates Chris Daughtry-esque strumming that ruins the moment when his voice reaches its pop-punk peak. Trippie then wallows in despair on “Underwater Flyzone” a six-minute downbeat moan-fest absent of drums, and by this point, you’d rather read a timeline of his beef with 6ix9ine than hear another guitar.
But where Trippie really goes wrong is the blatant hit-chasing, which feels unnecessary given the strength of his music until now. He ignores the blueprint laid out by songs like “Gucci Gang” and “XO Tour Lif3,”—which took significant elements of each of those artists and turned it up a notch—and on “Taking a Walk,” he desperately reaches to meme hell for a bright sounding Scott Storch revival that hardly maintains any of Trippie’s previous identity. He saves the song with some cleverness (“Ooh, so they think I wanna die, yeah/Cause my doors are suicide, yeah”) but it still sounds so forced. He then gives the Diplo-produced “Wish” its second album placement—after blaming Diplo for ruining it on his own album—and gets in touch with his rockstar dreams, stepping into his voice: “Might just blow my brain, I’d be Kurt Cobain.” But all of Diplo’s additions to the track are so irritatingly unaware of Trippie’s appeal mashing his voice with an unsubtle harmonica and using these flat drums that sound like they were programmed before Trippie was even born.
When Trippie strays away from the guitars and hit-chasing, we get to see glimpses of his potential. Atlanta hit-maker Honorable C. N.O.T.E. blesses Trippie with a beat that mixes a dark melody with 2010 Lex Luger on the Travis Scott-assisted “Dark Knight Dummo.” It’s also one of the few instances where Trippie lets his voice run wild, even belting on the ad-libs. Producer OZ sets Trippie up with hard-hitters on both “Bang” and “Uka Uka,” two songs that pace his vocal explosions perfectly. And Young Thug rolls through on “Forever Ever” to briefly steal the show and pass the polarizing songbird baton to Trippie.
Life’s a Trip is stuffed with forced production choices that impair Trippie’s over-the-top voice from hitting all of its quirks. It’s clear Trippie needs more time to develop his sound and iron out a direction that doesn’t feel like a detour. A great Trippie Redd album is possible, but first he needs to destroy all of the guitars in his vicinity, block Diplo’s cell, and use his voice and Soundcloud rooted style that got him here in the first place.


On his fourth album, Kevin Parker takes a breath and eases into a smoother psychedelic sound. Even without the adrenaline-filled highs, the compositions are as rich and thoughtful as ever.

The Slow Rush

For Kevin Parker, perfectionism is a lonely thing. The fastidious Tame Impala mastermind often copes with his self-isolation and doubt through stonerisms, highly portable mantras like “let it happen” and “yes I’m changing” and “gotta be above it” (said three times fast to ward off bad vibes). Their inverse is the negativity Parker’s trying to keep at bay in his head: “It feels like we only go backwards,” “But you’ll make the same old mistakes,” “You will never come close to how I feel.” It is easy to get lost in all the layers of groovy, time-traveling technicolor surround sound, particularly because Parker isn’t really trying to be clever or literary, but the internal tug of war within the Australian musician’s lyrics—between trying to better yourself and stay present, or succumbing to your own worst thoughts—is part of what keeps fans faithfully returning to Tame’s three albums, perhaps subconsciously. The repetition of phrases pairs well with the dubby, trance-like aspects of the music. Think of it as psychedelia for people with meditation apps and vape pens: Instead of opening your mind, you’re just trying to silence it.
On Tame Impala’s fourth album, Parker addresses the eternal enemy of perfectionists everywhere: time. He struggled with it himself, considering The Slow Rush arrives five years after Currents, the album that made his one-man band more famous than he could’ve imagined. Parker has toured arenas, headlined mega-festivals, worked with Travis Scott and Kanye West, more or less ditched the skinny scarves, and had the rare honor of being covered by Rihanna (and making her dance like this). He intended to release The Slow Rush just before headlining Coachella last April, but he didn’t feel like it was ready yet. You could sense that flux in the album rollout: First single “Patience” hinted at a yacht-rock direction but ultimately didn’t make the cut; second single “Borderline” was trimmed and beefed up for the LP; and the whole thing was remastered following a November 2019 listening party, where he couldn’t stop noticing things he wanted to tweak. Given time, Parker will tinker.
Clearly, all the tinkering paid off. The Slow Rush is an extraordinarily detailed opus whose influences reach into specific corners of the past six decades, from Philly soul and early prog to acid house, adult-contemporary R&B, and Late Registration. I have to marvel that all this sound and history comes from Parker alone, picking every string and twisting every knob. He’s always used strong melodies and riffs to anchor his more unconventional structures, but there seems to have been a slight shift in perspective: Working with hip-hop producers got him thinking more about samples—how they unite music of different eras and genres under one roof.
But Parker, with his vast knowledge of tools and techniques, doesn’t need to sample—he creates the kind of music that other people like to sample. He can make his own instrumental loops that sound like Daryl Hall (the bittersweet keyboard in “On Track”), or Jimmy Page (the riff throughout the first part of “Posthumous Forgiveness”), or Quincy Jones (the “Ironside”-esque siren that lends panic in “It Might Be Time,” an ode to feeling washed). You might think you recognize the acoustic riff circling early-’70s soul-cruiser “Tomorrow’s Dust,” or the ascendant piano line in the ’90s-via-the-’70s R&B jam “Breathe Deeper,” but what you are most likely hearing is Parker’s gift for crafting classic parts.
This “sampled but not” sensibility, along with Parker’s constant use of boom-bap-style drums, is one of the ways that Tame Impala makes rock music that feels in conversation with hip-hop. And while Parker employs more acoustic instrumentation here than on Currents, The Slow Rush is also shot through with the effortless pulse of house music—the kind of grooves that dare you not to dance. On the kinetic opener “One More Year,” the record’s initial beat sneaks up from behind a robot chorus with a tremolo effect and doesn’t let up until everyone’s had a chance to strut and pose through the bass and conga breakdowns, and Parker’s made his little coach’s speech (“We got a whole year! 52 weeks! Seven days each...”).
This is a decidedly more upbeat Parker. There’s another person firmly in the frame with him now, an implied “we” as the newly wed Parker sees the next 50-ish years spread out in front of him—imagining kids, coming to terms with the choices he’s made, the whole bit. The Slow Rush seems to work from the present forward, maintaining the “fuck it, let’s do this” energy of “One More Year” with “Instant Destiny,” a swirling start-stop of a victory lap where he threatens to do something crazy, like buy a house in Miami. Almost immediately he regrets his impulses: “Gone a little far,” starts “Borderline,” with its mournful keyboards. Later, on a sentimental semi-ballad about keeping pace (“On Track”), he seems to wonder if that purchase is such a good idea: “Babe, can we afford this?” Parker toggles between positive and negative thoughts as usual, but at least he sounds like he’s genuinely having some fun.
The worst you can say for The Slow Rush is that when you offer multipart epics on multipart epics, you’re bound to have some sections that feel less crucial by comparison. “Posthumous Forgiveness” and “Tomorrow’s Dust” both go on a passage or two longer than they should. The falsetto-led melody that opens early-album victory lap, “Instant Destiny,” feels incessant and cloistered until the song opens up a bit, thanks in part to a luxe xylophone break. “Lost in Yesterday” tries to edge up an aggressively beachy vibe with Daft Punk vocals and dub effects, and ends up feeling a little dated; then again, I could see it killing at all those big festivals the band will headline over the next few years.
Parker may want to be a Max Martin type in another facet of his career, but in his own band, he’s still a sonic-maximalist introvert searching for inner peace. He seems to locate it in the quietest moments of the album’s show-stopping seven-minute closer, “One More Hour.” “As long as I can, as long as I can spend some time alone,” he sings atop steady piano chords, the barest he’s sounded all record (and still drowning in echo). Suddenly there are tense, fluttering strings and an apocalyptic, heavily phased guitar, then another gnarly riff, crashing drums, and Moog synths firing in all directions. The effect is something like multiple YouTube videos accidentally playing at once, a restless mind making gorgeous chaos—the work of a true perfectionist.


On Beauty Behind the Madness, Abel Tesfaye sheds the fat from his disappointing major label debut, Kiss Land. The album plays like a victory lap, with Tesfaye revisiting past glories and embellishing them, and when he harnesses his gift, the results are impossible to argue with.

Beauty Behind the Madness

"My cousin said I made it big and it's unusual/ She tried to take a selfie at my Grandma's funeral," Abel Tesfaye sings on "Tell Your Friends", a revealing highlight from his second major label album. For anyone following the Weeknd since House of Balloons materialized from the ether in 2011, watching him walk on stage at the VMAs to perform "Can't Feel My Face"—his first number one hit—certainly felt unusual. Not that the song's success was unpredictable. Co-written by Max Martin, "Can't Feel My Face" replaced direct references to Tesfaye's favorite things (cocaine and sex) with PG-13 allusions—a Weeknd song that's fun for the whole family.  It was also the catchiest song of his entire career.
Tesfaye's pivot from cult lothario to pop star began last year with a guest verse on Ariana Grande's "Love Me Harder". Tesfaye scrapped what writers provided him with and tried his hand at something radio-friendly, and the result was his most likeable verse since the hallowed days of the Trilogy. Then there was "Earned It", the theme song for 50 Shades of Grey which introduced him to a whole new audience and put his angelic voice over orchestral pomp—a formula that proved hard to resist, even if the song was kind of icky.
With that momentum behind him, Beauty Behind the Madness sees Tesfaye hell-bent on stardom, shedding the fat from his disappointing major label debut, Kiss Land. But instead of going the "Can't Feel My Face" route, opening up his sound and softening its edges, he returns to what made him great in the first place. Everything we know about the Weeknd is here: the dark, mysterious production where contemporary R&B rubs elbows with post-punk and shoegaze (Tesfaye's OG producer, Illangelo, is everywhere on it); the lascivious lyrics that swing between menacing and laughable; and, most of all, Tesfaye's sinuous vocal melodies. Developed from a childhood spent listening to Ethiopian music, his labyrinthine hooks and ad-libs are more indelible than ever.
The album plays like a victory lap, with Tesfaye revisiting past glories and embellishing them. "The Hills", with its disaffected croak and horror-movie screams, sounds like a song from the Thursday mixtape on a Hollywood budget. "Tell Your Friends" is like "The Morning" produced by Kanye West. "Shameless" is "Wicked Games" from a more knowing perspective, while "Angel" wraps the Weeknd's most epic moments—think "Heaven or Las Vegas"—in a glossy adult-contemporary framework that could house a Celine Dion song (and written with one of her collaborators, Stephen Moccio). And then there's "In the Night", a MJ-esque disco stomper and guaranteed hit single that sounds like nothing he's done before.
In moments like this, when Tesfaye harnesses his gift, the results are impossible to argue with. But he's still a victim of his own flawed persona. Tesfaye repeats the tired tropes he's been squeezing the life out of since the beginning (take a shot for every time he offers a variation on "love is pointless"). "Acquainted" and the mind-numbingly boring Ed Sheeran collaboration "Dark Times" feel like they were written with Mad Libs, and elsewhere, Tesfaye's cruelly misogynist perspective remains jarring and uncomfortable. Sometimes he's underhanded, like on "As You Are", which is one long neg disguised as a tender love song, and other times it's skin-crawlingly direct. Thankfully, he has toned it down somewhat —we're miles away from that time he killed a woman in a music video and let the camera pan over her bloodied body.
In the end, enjoying the Weeknd requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and that remains true on Beauty Behind the Madness. You really have to buy into his bad-guy persona, and after four years of this stuff, you might roll your eyes at a chorus like "I only call you when it's half past five"—we get it. But for newcomers, there's a whole world to explore, and on Beauty Behind the Madness it's richer and smarter than ever.
It helps that the self-awareness he's flashed in his interviews has begun creeping slowly into his music. Tesfaye has made a career singing nasty things in a sweet voice, but there are moments on Beauty, like "Prisoner",  his soul-searching duet with Lana Del Rey, where he finally sounds like he's engaging with this persona critically, making his audience question themselves for singing along so easily this whole time. "Tell Your Friends" reflects on Tesfaye's rise over six crystalline minutes that rank among the best in his career.  The themes are familiar, but his voice carries a new authority, and when he sings "I'm that nigga with the hair/ Singing 'bout popping pills, fucking bitches, living life so trill," at the end of the chorus, there is an audible smile on his face.
That song restates Tesfaye's defining duality, reveling in the bacchanalian excess of his lifestyle while keeping a hold on its emptiness. When he wrote songs like "High for This" or "The Morning", Tesfaye was homeless and barely 20, crashing on couches around Toronto and working at American Apparel. On "Tell Your Friends", he's a touring pop star with a number one hit under his belt. He's cruising in the West End in his new Benz, hearing his songs stream out of the Queen Street haunts he used to frequent. He uses "Tell Your Friends" to look back, reminding us that he's still the same old guy in the face of all the fame, though some things have changed: back then, in 2011, Cali was his mission. Now, it's the whole world.


In 1987, the Beatles' albums appeared on compact disc for the first time. Considering how much music had already found its way to CD, the Beatles were very late, so the digital rollout was a big deal. The new issues came out in batches and the excitement steadily built, peaking when *Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band* came out on June 1, 1987, the 20th anniversary of its original release ("It was 20 years ago today..." was perhaps the greatest record marketing hook of all time.) In the 22 years since, plenty of bands have had their catalogues reissued a

Stereo Box / In Mono

In 1987, the Beatles' albums appeared on compact disc for the first time. Considering how much music had already found its way to CD, the Beatles were very late, so the digital rollout was a big deal. The new issues came out in batches and the excitement steadily built, peaking when Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band came out on June 1, 1987, the 20th anniversary of its original release ("It was 20 years ago today..." was perhaps the greatest record marketing hook of all time.) In the 22 years since, plenty of bands have had their catalogues reissued a few times over (some with ridiculous frequency-- looking at you, Bowie and Costello), either to take advantage of improvements in technology or to repackage the records to sell them again to existing fans. But those 1987 CD versions have been it as far as the original Beatles albums. They've done some special projects-- Let It Be...Naked, two volumes of The Capitol Albums, collecting American versions of their records, the remix album Love-- but if, two months ago, you wanted to buy a copy of A Hard Day's Night, you'd be getting the 1987 remaster, done with 1987 technology, complete with a flimsy, bare-bones CD insert in a jewel case.
This week, Capitol/EMI rectifies the situation. The entire Beatles catalogue has been remastered and the CDs are coming out in new editions. It is perhaps ironic that this is happening as interest in the compact disc format is on the wane, but once again Beatles fans are excited. Are they worth buying again? Over the next three days, we're going to be reviewing all of the Beatles reissues, including the Beatles Rock Band game also coming out this week. But in addition to discussing the music and the records, we wanted to take a moment here to lay out some general thoughts on the sets, with further details relegated to the proper reviews.
First, the configurations. All 12 original albums, from Please Please Me to Let It Be, have been remastered and are being issued in stereo (these are the same tracklistings as have been on CD since the 80s, including the American version of Magical Mystery Tour). In addition, the two Past Masters CDs, which collect singles and tracks that didn't appear on the original albums, have been combined into one 2xCD set. The first four albums are appearing in stereo on CD for the first time. The packaging for all stereo CDs includes the original artwork and liner notes, along with new recording notes and a historical essay. Rather than jewel boxes, the stereo CDs are packaged in sharp-looking and durable foldout cardboard packaging. Each CD contains a short documentary in QuickTime format on the making of the album (these are said to be limited to this initial reissue).
The packaging in general is very well done; the albums feel like they were put together with care and great attention to detail. You hold one in your hand, and it feels important. I've never been a fan of the plastic jewel box, and it's wonderful that they've done away with them here. CDs slide into a little pocket, so there are no spindles to break. The liner notes are succinct and informative, they favor the factual over the hyperbolic, and they cover what should be covered. The documentaries are well done but about what you would expect: four minutes long or so, narrated with interviews with the Beatles and George Martin culled from the Anthology project, with archival photos and film footage. They're certainly nothing revelatory, but a nice intro to the world of the album for anyone unfamiliar with the details. All in all, they did the packages right.
In addition to the individual CDs, the reissues are available in two box set configurations. The Stereo Box collects the stereo versions of all the albums and adds a DVD gathering all the short documentaries in one place. In Mono-- limited, but it's not exactly clear yet how limited-- is more of a specialty item. It presents mono mixes of albums (which are available only in the box set, not for sale individually) from P**lease Please Me up through The Beatles (aka the White Album). Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road, and Let It Be were never mixed for mono, and are not included, but the set does include a 2xCD set called The Mono Masters with mono mixes of most of the singles included on Past Masters (a few of the later ones were never mixed for mono). Each record included with In Mono appears in a mini-LP replica package, accurate all the way down to the original printing on the inner sleeves (yep, you can slide the CDs in them if you want). Two discs, Help! and Rubber Soul, also contain the original stereo mixes on the same disc as the mono mixes (the 1987 CD issues were newly remixed for stereo). The original inserts included with the LPs-- the individual portraits in The Beatles, the cut-outs in Sgt. Pepper's-- are included as well. There are no CD booklets in In Mono; rather, the set contains a separate booklet of liner notes, covering the Mono Masters set in detail, and explaining the differences between the stereo and mono mixes of the proper albums. There are also no mini-documentaries.
Why mono? Two reasons. First, pop music in stereo was still a novelty through most of the 60s. Radio was dominated by single-channel AM, and the young people who bought LPs were far more likely to have a mono record player as a sound source. Given their audience and the technology of the time, for much of the Beatles' run, the band themselves considered the mono mix as the "real" version of the record and devoted more of their attention to it. Mono mixes were prepared first with the involvement of the band, and in some cases, George Martin and EMI engineers completed stereo remixes of the albums later, after the group had left the studio. So mono, first off, presumably hews closer to the intentions of the Beatles themselves. It's what the Beatles had in mind, their vision of the records.
Secondly, since the mono and stereo mixing sessions happened at different times, there are differences between the two versions, not just in the balance of the sound but also in the actual content. Different takes were sometimes used for punching in overdubs, or an alternate vocal take might make its way into the mix. Sometimes tracks were edited differently, and would be shorter or longer, and in some cases the tape ran at a slightly different speed, changing the pitch slightly. Some of the differences are subtle, and some are not. The mono version of "Helter Skelter", to take one example, is a minute shorter, as the "false" ending fadeout is presented as the track's true ending (and it thus omits the closing scream of "I got blisters on my fingers!") The significance of these differences will depend on the level of one's Beatles fandom; of course, those shelling out for the In Mono box will likely enjoy poring over the details.
Comparing stereo and mono versions also offers an opportunity to think about changes in the technology of music listening. In the 60s, far fewer people listened to music on headphones. Music was meant to be heard through the air-- over the radio, in a car, on a jukebox, in a living room. And mono mixes were not designed with headphone listening in mind. It's been pointed out that mono records heard through headphones can sound like they are coming from a single point in the middle of your head, which can feel strange. I find that as the decade wore on and stereo mixes became more sophisticated, the Beatles' albums become less interesting on headphones when they are in mono-- the swirling pans of psychedelic material like "I Am the Walrus" or "Revolution 9" moving around are missed. From roughly Revolver forward, if I'm listening on headphones, I generally prefer the stereo mixes. Over a sound system, though, the mono mixes throughout the catalogue sound absolutely wonderful. The first four albums, however, with their extreme stereo separation, sound much better in mono in my opinion, regardless of the playback source.
In any case, the sound of these remasters, mono or stereo, is exceptional. I've always felt that the sound quality of the original 1987 remasters was slightly underrated. The CD issues were well received at the time and were considered state of the art, but as the years wore on and the label never did anything to improve them, resentment set in and people began to focus on their flaws. Fair enough. But whatever you think of the 1987 remasters, these new versions are a marked improvement. In terms of clarity and detail, they are consistently impressive. But they're also successful for showing restraint.
In the last few years, there's been a lot of talk about the "loudness war"-- the tendency to over-compress and master albums too "hot," so that dynamic range is squashed and peak-level sounds are pushed to the point of clipping. Fortunately, that has not happened here. These CD versions are definitely louder across the board, but there's still plenty of breathing room, so that the dynamic sound-- and these records were nothing if not dynamic-- hits the way they should. Interestingly, the mono mixes are uniformly a bit quieter than the stereo mixes, tending to fall somewhere between the original stereo master and the new one. To get geeky here for a moment, a few diagrams, so that you can see the increases in volume with the new set. The key when looking at waveforms is to take note of whether the peak sounds (which come closest to the volume ceiling inherent in digital audio) maintain the same relationship to the quieter sounds. I'm not an engineer, but the loudest sounds:quietest sounds ratio looks to me to be intact.
"Tomorrow Never Knows" [1987 Remaster]
"Tomorrow Never Knows" [2009 Remaster]
"Tomorrow Never Knows" [Mono]

"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" [1987 Remaster]
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" [2009 Remaster]
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" [Mono]

"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" [1987 Remaster]
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" [2009 Remaster]
Listening to the new masters, the differences in sound quality generally manifest in three ways: songs have more "punch," with Paul McCartney's bass (an absolute wonder throughout) and Ringo's drums hitting with more force; the separation is better, so that instruments and (especially) layered vocals have more definition-- when the Beatles are harmonizing, you can more easily pick out the different vocalists, and the voices have more presence; and finally, the sound in general seems just a touch brighter, with various sound effects, cymbals taps, and so on, ringing with more clarity. The differences to my ears are not quite night and day, but they are certainly there, and they are noticeable. And it's satisfying to have these albums, absolutely some of the best-engineered records in the history of pop music, sounding as good as they can.
And now, onto the music. Note that, rather than doing so for individual records, we're designating the Beatles sets as a whole as "Best New Reissues".
Please Please Me
With the Beatles
A Hard Day's Night
Beatles for Sale
Help!
Rubber Soul
Revolver
*Sgt. Pepper'*s Lonely Hearts Club Band
*Magical Mystery Tour
*
The Beatles Rock Band
The Beatles
Yellow Submarine
Abbey Road
Let It Be
*Past Masters
*


After the release of 2009's DIA, Damon McMahon returned to America from China and formed a band, resulting in a fuller sound on his latest. He's still making muffled, eerie pop akin to the private visions of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence but its 14 songs are sharper and fuller, with quicker access to your brain's pleasure center.

Through Donkey Jaw

Most of what I said about Damon McMahon's last album as Amen Dunes, 2009's DIA, can be said about his newest, Through Donkey Jaw. He's still making muffled, eerie pop akin to the private visions of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence and the homemade pop of New Zealand artisans Alastair Galbraith and Graeme Jefferies. His voice is still central, filled with downbeat subtlety, and his songs still mix classic melody and fuzzy obscurity in a way that's both focused and loosely inspired.
There's something different about Through Donkey Jaw, though. Its 14 songs are sharper and fuller, with quicker access to your brain's pleasure center. The simple explanation would be that McMahon formed a band upon moving back to America from China after the release of DIA, which would iikely make his songs sound bigger. But my guess is his improvement comes from something even simpler-- just by keeping at it, McMahon naturally got better at what he already did well.
Whatever the reason, Through Donkey Jaw's forward steps are apparent immediately on hypnotic opener "Baba Yaga". Over a trembling guitar line and primitive drumming, McMahon moves gradually from a solemn moan to a possessed croon. "You know that I, I lie," he howls, as if he's not so much admitting this to someone as figuring it out himself. Similar introspection recurs throughout the record. "I don't knock on no doors/ I'm quietly shared/ I'm for people who know," he chants on "Christopher", over a wash of beat and reverb that's like a tangent to the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows".
A classic group that Through Donkey Jaw evokes even more often is the Velvet Underground. (The album ends with a 10-minute song actually called "Tomorrow Never Knows", but its wordless noise is more like a VU jam than the Beatles' original). There are a few specific instances to point to-- "Gem Head" sounds like a bedroom-recorded version of "Run Run Run"-- but where McMahon most connects with the VU is in using repetitive rhythms and raw edges to turn hooks into mantras. Take "Jill", a shimmering jam that's somehow catchy, even when he closes with the desperate chant, "I don't want to give in." Again, introspection is key; McMahon catches your brain by inspecting his own. Think of Through Donkey Jaw as an out sound from deep within.


On one of the best rapper/producer collaborations of the year, the Atlanta MC remains a perfect fit for Pi’erre Bourne’s weird and heavy beats.

Sli’merre

Sli’merre, the first co-billed project from finesse rapper Young Nudy and producer extraordinaire Pi’erre Bourne, is a bit like the iconic photo of Dwyane Wade’s no-look celebration of his alley-oop to LeBron James during the crest of the Miami Heat basketball dynasty. Wade, arms outstretched and expectant, already awaiting praise for a thrilling tag-team move only half complete, is like Bourne, whose beats are usually so dynamic and perfectly executed all that’s left is to not fuck up the finish. The tape, like the photo, is a signature moment encapsulating years of collaboration. It is teammates getting the best out of each other after developing a sixth sense for one another.
Atlanta rapper Young Nudy is perhaps best known as the target of the sting operation that led to his cousin 21 Savage being apprehended by ICE during the Super Bowl. He is a two-dimensional character best when placed in the middle of the action, which allows him to react instead of think and run through a myriad of rap deliveries on instinct. Pi’erre Bourne is one of the more distinguished producers behind the SoundCloud vanguard—Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, Trippie Redd, Lil Yachty—but moments meant to be his two biggest breaks never quite panned out: a placement on a Drake album that has yet to materialize and a ghost credit on the worst Kanye West album to date.
Since “Magnolia,” Pi’erre has become one of the most interesting contemporary rap producers with his own signature sound, but he has yet to attain the sort of outsized influence of a Metro Boomin or Tay Keith in his run. He hasn’t worked closer with anyone during that span than he has with Nudy, producing huge chunks of the first two SlimeBall tapes and 2017’s Nudy Land. After only producing one song on Slimeball 3, the duo return as co-headliners on Sli’merre, their blockbuster, a collaboration near its apex.
After a sound engineering gig at Epic fell through for Pi’erre, Nudy was the first rapper to gravitate toward his beats, and they’ve developed a strong chemistry since. They were nearly in sync on Nudy Land, with Pi’erre turning Nudy’s villainous nightlife escapades into carnival attractions, but here they really find balance. On “Mister,” Nudy raps, “All my life, I’ve been a hustler/Dope boy, cap peeler, street young nigga,” and most of his raps are just him plainly living out those roles. There is plenty of robbing, even more shooting, and enough firearms to make a gun nut blush. It’s Nudy’s job to simply rob and shoot his way through Pi’erre’s wacky noise parade.
Like Playboi Carti, Nudy is a premium space filler. Neither will ever be considered great rappers but both have the capacity to perfectly integrate themselves. Where Carti is animated, Nudy is subdued, often carried leisurely forth by the current of Bourne’s productions. He is not as good at making his presence felt, but that comes with its own rewards: on songs like “Sunflower Seeds” and “Dispatch,” his voice retreats back into the belly of the beat and becomes a complementary instrument furthering Bourne’s palette.
Nudy, to his credit, has an ear for the weirdest, most pronounced Pi’erre Bourne beats. While the production on Die Lit is all minor variations of a similar form, Sli’merre is constantly mutating into something new and weird. And these are easily Bourne’s strangest and most thrilling designs. They can feel equal parts absurd and scintillating, like plugging a jailbroken Super Nintendo into a particle accelerator or rigging an augmented reality headset to convert the pixels of cartoon gifs into sounds.
Nudy is mostly just the guest at an amusement park of Bourne’s creation. Understanding where to fit in is a skill in itself, and he slips in and out of the openings with varying degrees of intensity, always matching the requisite force. His whiny Auto-Tune melodies deflate into the humming synth work on “Gas Station.” As slashing strings, piano stabs, and tremorous bass reconstitute around him on “Extendo,” he’s just shimmying through it. He seems to know he only has to do but so much. Nudy on his own is relatively ordinary and working in a limited space, but shuffling through Pi’erre Bourne beats transports him to a world unknown.


The London band’s full-length debut is an audacious experiment: 52 short snippets of rippling pianos and synthesized symphonics that can be shuffled in any order to create one continuous song.

Megabear

Not since the Flaming Lips spread Zaireeka across four discs has an album required instructions as badly as ME REX’s Megabear. Rather than draft another batch of the punchy, immediate songs that made the London quartet’s 2020 Triceratops and Stegosaurus EPs such a kick, the group’s debut full-length is an audacious experiment: 52 short song snippets, all of them in a similar key and time signature so they can be shuffled in any order to create one continuous song with no beginning or end. It’s a true Choose Your Own Adventure experience; Sufjan Stevens could never.
So how do you even listen to this thing? The band has created a website that will do the shuffling for you, guaranteeing a different song order every time. The album is also available on streaming services with a fixed tracklist that frontman Myles McCabe insists is arbitrary, and as a vinyl record sold with an optional deck of 52 cards, each representing a song, that can be drawn at random to determine a track order.
Like a board game with too many pieces, you have to spend a little bit of time to get the hang of it, but with few exceptions, these song segments really do blend seamlessly into each other. Pieced together from rippling pianos and synthesized symphonics with occasional surprise beats and choral accents, they’re rousing and varied, teasing huge ideas within quick, 32-second packages. When it works and the songs feed into each other just right, it’s exhilarating.
But, of course, it doesn’t always work. Depending on luck of the draw, the experience can also be frustrating and disjointed, and sometimes gratingly repetitive. McCabe’s biggest miscalculation was repeating several lyrical refrains—sometimes you can’t get through more than a few tracks without him singing “the party’s never over” or “I want a river to run through me.” Between that and the constant stop-and-start of hearing a new song every half minute or so, Megabear burns fast. The more you listen to it, the quicker the magic wears off.
McCabe is a graduate of the Los Campesinos! school of verbose, trenchant turns of phrase that land like blows to the gut. That prose shined on ME REX’s 2020 EPs, but here it takes a backseat to the concept. Megabear’s best ideas beg to breathe, to be built and expanded on, to graduate into completed songs. But most of these tracks are saplings that never get the chance to grow. It’s not for nothing that the record’s best track, “Lead,” with its vivid depiction of environmental and mental infirmity, is also one of the record’s longest at 66 seconds: It’s the closest to being a standalone piece.
There’s another way to engage with Megabear: You can make your own songs by sliding a few standout tracks into a playlist and shuffling them around until they make sense. Here’s what I came up with: “Lead,” followed by the album’s other great song about compromised nature, “Ancient Ash,” chased with the aching “God of Rain” and closed out dramatically by “Reclaimed From the Water.” It’s a rare album that invites that level of participation. Yet I still wish the work had been done for me; there’s an optimal sequence for this music, and the album denies it to us. Megabear is a unique and innovative concept piece that suggests lofty questions about intentionality and artists’ agency. But a regular 12-song album with a beginning, middle, and end probably would have been more satisfying.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A collection of catchy, lo-fi 7"s on Athens’ Chunklet shows off the Philadelphia musician Jason Henn’s bedroom-pop prowess and surreal, often funny songwriting.

Honey Radar: Sing the Snow Away: The Chunklet Years

Sing the Snow Away: The Chunklet Years

Jason Henn makes hooks. In the 14 years since he started Honey Radar, the group’s only constant—besides Henn himself—has been catchy tunes. He has a seemingly unlimited ability to spin an ear-worming riff, add a simple beat, and sing some clever phrases along with it. Those kinds of skills should make Honey Radar work best as a singles act: Grab any two tracks from their catalog and you’ve got a ready-made 45 that would sound great in any diner’s jukebox.
But Honey Radar albums and EPs sound pretty great too. Like prolific songwriters Billy Childish and Robert Pollard, Henn is so creative that his tunes grab you no matter how many you hear, or in what order. Sing the Snow Away, a sparkling compilation of the 7" records Honey Radar made for Athens, Georgia, label Chunklet, is as cohesive and addictive as any of the group’s three full-length LPs. It might even be better: Henn has given Chunklet some of his most memorable material, and hearing all of it together adds extra adrenaline.
What makes the songs on Sing the Snow Away memorable is Henn’s knack for creating a classic, where-have-I-heard-this-before aura while adding idiosyncratic accents. He’s well versed in rock history: He got his first record, a Monkees album, when he was five, and his parents steered him strongly toward the Beatles (in order to keep him away from the Rolling Stones). All of those groups echo in Henn’s curved guitar lines—one of the album’s best cuts, “Telephone Betty’s Aneurysm,” sounds torn straight from Revolver—as do contemporaries such as Sic Alps and Ty Segall. Henn isn’t afraid of his influences: He covers the Monkees on Sing the Snow Away, and his peculiar choice—an obscure tune heard only on a 1969 TV special—shows the depth of his fandom.
But who you hear in Honey Radar is less important than how Henn tweaks that legacy. Much of his musical character comes out in lo-fi production values: crinkly, distorted sounds born of cheap mics and tape hiss. This anti-polish gives each track a charmingly casual, sketch-like feel, as if Henn worked out his ideas immediately after hitting the record button. But that’s deceptive: Play anything from Sing the Snow Away on repeat and you’ll soon hear how sharply structured and fully formed it actually is.
That’s especially clear when you focus on Henn’s words. Sung in a stoic, fading voice that contrasts the music’s rough energy, his lyrics can at first sound like footnotes. But eventually his twists of phrase reveal themselves to be surprisingly funny and surreal. During “Kangaroo’s Court,” over loping acoustic and electric guitars, he whispers, “Butlers hemming a navy coat/A patchwork of dull kazoos/Laughing and tapping an oily mark/A jungle gym of fragrant tattoos.” Sometimes his wordplay evokes nursery rhymes: In “Fan the Earthworm,” Henn depicts a worm whose laughs blow smoke, while “United Fox” introduces a mythical fox who “gave us the greatest sounds around.” And some of his mysterious images hint at bigger ideas. On “Medium Mary Todd,” Henn’s protagonist seems to embody the mercurial nature of creativity: “The songbird missed his prom/Look as he strolls by everything/He’s off and he is on.”
None of these intriguing verses would have the same impact without Henn’s ample supply of musical hooks. Melodies are his creative currency, and on Sing the Snow Away he spares no expense when it comes to doling out memorable themes. In lesser hands, such reliance on riffs might pound the material into a thin, dull roar. Instead, the deftness of Henn’s writing makes Honey Radar’s music grow more nuanced with every listen.

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On their second album, these metallurgists again find an awesome intersection of black metal pummel and shoegaze luster—then remain there, in its thrall.

Astronoid

The self-titled second album from Boston’s Astronoid begins, boldly, with a song called “A New Color.” But if you have heard Deafheaven’s Sunbather and Boris’ Pink or even simply seen their covers, this a familiar hue, where black metal and neon shoegaze converge in a brilliant Belt of Venus. As the double kick drums shudder beneath comet trails of processed guitars, certain expectations emerge for the vocals—something harsh and demonic, signifying the atrocity inside the eerie mist. But Brett Boland is actually the exact opposite, his choirboy keen providing the unearthly glow of a Mew or Sigur Rós record. Hearing Boland in the context of Astronoid’s laser-lit blackgaze is unsettling but awesome, like witnessing a hailstorm in daylight. But this excellent first impression is the only one Astronoid really make.
That same wow factor propelled Astronoid’s 2016 debut, Air, too, putting the band squarely on the softer, more approachable side of Deafheaven, Vattnet Viskar, and Alcest. If there were a nagging sense that Air didn’t convey much beyond the awestruck innocence gleaned from hearing any one minute of their music, it didn’t matter—Astronoid had already presented familiar elements in a completely new way, and things like “craft” and “nuance” are reserved as talking points for second albums, anyway.
But Astronoid pull the same tricks over and over again for these 47 minutes, too. It’s a curious case of expansive-sounding metal best suited for 30-second streaming previews. Catch anything here at the right moment—the old-school guitar heroism of “A New Color,” or Boland howling “I’ll be fine” ahead of a blast-beat torrent on the chorus of “I Dream in Lines”—and it likely scans as transcendent. If Astronoid lopped a minute or two from these five- or six-minute songs, they might land as a posi-vibes pop-metal band. If they added a minute or two here or there by digging a bit more deeply into their occasional prog-metal overtures or sludge redirections, Astronoid could be a formidable psych-metal act fit for, say, Desert Daze, their overdriven guitars and generous harmonics practically radiant.
As it stands, Astronoid is a weirdly static, even tedious affair. The moments of triumph appear without any resistance, leaving “I Dream in Lines” and “A New Color” as satisfying as playing a beautifully rendered video game at the lowest difficulty level. Boland’s vocals are unlike much else in metal right now but also too much like himself, without much motion or versatility. The band applies the same blinding sheen to Bolan’s vocals and every single instrument for every single song and every single second. And while cycling among stock images of falling through dark skies or considering faded pictures like Robert Smith at his most Mad-Libbed, Boland sings almost exclusively in stock rhyme schemes—“Victim of another year/I don’t know who shed a tear/I remember dear,” goes one emblematic sequence. Occasionally, the Eurovision gloss on Boland’s vocals underscores the bizarre Babel Fish syntax: “I want the fun afar/I’m not a friend/I’ll say again.” These songs resemble a jelly donut—break the fragile crust, only to find an even more cloying, airy sweetness inside.
Astronoid operate with a total lack of cynicism, so their spirit and candor make them harder to dismiss than a mere genre novelty. But this is an intended crossover album that glimmers like fool’s gold. The final words of Astronoid unwittingly become its most stinging critique: “The joke’s on us/We’re unaware/We’re all caught up/With nothing there.” At least it shimmers from a distance.


Re-recorded in meticulous detail, along with a dozen songs cut from the 2012 original, Taylor Swift’s most pivotal album has still more to say about growing up and moving forward.

Red (Taylor’s Version)

Just beyond the bounds of normal human awareness lies a realm governed by a benevolent blonde whose songs are sacred texts. In wormholes on Tumblr and TikTok, you’ll discover a new language of signs and symbols, and a bounty of messages waiting to be decoded. Nail polish colors hold secret meanings. Halloween costumes are harbingers. Lost scarves are mythologized like lost arks.
This is the Swiftiverse. Is Red (Taylor’s Version) really trying to exist anywhere else? The second of six albums that Swift is remaking from scratch to regain financial and legal control of her catalog, it’s built on the well-founded belief that her fandom will consume anything spun by her hands—even lightly retouched versions of songs that came out less than a decade ago, plus a fistful of contemporaneous unreleased tracks for good measure. Leave it to Taylor to turn a business maneuver into a sweeping mid-career retrospective; leave it to Swifties to receive the songs, the merch, and the short film as gifts, glimpses into their idol’s secret history handed down as rewards for their devotion.
Originally released in 2012, Red was the clear nexus between where Swift’s career started and where it was heading. After a three-album progression away from country, she revealed the extent of her pop ambition, calling in producers Max Martin and Shellback—Swedish heavy-hitters who had sent Britney Spears and P!nk up the charts—to cue the synths and drop the bass. (“Message in a Bottle,” the first song Swift wrote with the pair, is among Red (Taylor’s Version)’s new offerings; its abundant polish nearly makes up for its dearth of personality.) Red was also where she began to seek source material beyond her own biography; the character studies (of Ethel Kennedy on the lightly ditzy “Starlight”; of a Joni Mitchell–esque elder on “The Lucky One”; of a mother who loses her young son to cancer on vault track “Ronan”) point in the direction of Folklore, where, years later, the gulf between Swift and her narrators would widen.
Like Fearless (Taylor’s Version), the first of Swift’s re-recordings to be released, Red (Taylor’s Version) stays true to the original. Hunting for subtle differences between the old and the new feels like a game of Where’s Waldo?, and sometimes just a test of headphone fidelity. Various instruments are slightly louder or quieter in the mix; a note or two might have been tweaked in the melody of “Sad Beautiful Tragic”; the “wee-ees” on “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” are even more cloying than before. A notable exception to this trend of sameness is the bonus track “Girl at Home,” formerly a prim, strummy ode to girl code, freshly remade with producer Elvira Anderfjärd (a Max Martin signee) as a burbling, bottom-heavy synth-pop joint.
If you haven’t listened to Red, recently or ever, it’s well worth your time; in its ecstatic, expressive vocals, tart humor, vivid imagery, and tender attention to the nuances of love and loss, you’ll find everything that makes Taylor Swift great. But the real draw for her main audience, who already know Red like the back of their hands, is the new material. Some of it is new only in the sense of being newly attached to this album or newly reclaimed by Taylor: “Ronan” was a one-off charity single in 2012; Little Big Town recorded “Better Man,” a stolen rearview glance on the drive away from toxic love, in 2016; and the venom-laced air kiss “Babe” was released by the country duo Sugarland in 2018. Most anticipated is an extended cut of a classic: “All Too Well,” a Red track with an outsize presence in Swift lore.
A slow-burn account of sunsetting love, long since codified as an exemplar of Swiftian storytelling, the original version of “All Too Well” was the product of Swift and co-writer Liz Rose’s extensive edits to a 10-minute demo. Now, Swift has dug up the lost verses. Not all of them are additive; Swift’s beyond-her-years analysis in the final verse feels disconnected from the in-process pain of the version that we know, and when she opens up the song for its subject’s input (“Did the love affair maim you too?”), she undermines the definitiveness of her own account. The extra bulk dilutes the original’s walloping crescendo, making it harder to locate the emotional climax. Still, it’s surreal to see the stuff of lesser writers’ dreams—“You kept me like a secret/But I kept you like an oath”—abandoned, until now, on the cutting room floor.
Some of the vault tracks feel like they were left off of Red because they weren’t up to snuff; see the garish cheer of “The Very First Night,” the too-obvious hook of “Run” (“like you’d run from the law”). Much more compelling is “Nothing New,” a somber acoustic ballad squarely in the wheelhouse of guest star Phoebe Bridgers, which grapples with the music business’ famously fickle relationship to young women. These same anxieties—about being chewed up, spit out, and replaced—surfaced on “The Lucky One,” but here, instead of projecting them onto another character, Swift inhabits them in her own voice. “Nothing New” was written by Swift in her early twenties, a time when she was deeply scared of alienating her audience. I wonder if she withheld it out of fear that it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy—that by exposing her disillusionment, she’d dull her own shine.
Swift has an unfortunate habit of relegating female guests on her songs to the background; just ask Haim, Imogen Heap, the Chicks, or Colbie Caillat. Bridgers, meanwhile, makes off with a full verse and chorus to herself. In light of the song’s subject, this feels significant: By inviting a popular younger artist who has studied her textbook to share her stage, Swift suggests that there’s ample room for them both. But things get eerie on the bridge, when she begins waxing prophetic about the young woman who will eventually take her crown. Trading lines with Bridgers, she sings:

I know someday I’m gonna meet her, it’s a fever dream
The kind of radiance you only have at 17
She’ll know the way and then she’ll say she got the map from me
I’ll say I’m happy for her, then I’ll cry myself to sleep

Just this year, a 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo released her breakout smash, then borrowed liberally enough from Swift to grant her two writing credits—one of them retroactive—on her debut. Swift is too smart not to know that some of her listeners will make this connection. Whatever; she owns it. Ownership is, after all, this project’s raison d’être—ownership of master recordings, but also of personal and artistic history. You have to admire Swift’s pluck in standing so resolutely behind hers. Red, often lauded as Swift’s best album, is not perfect; it contains some of her great masterpieces (“Holy Ground,” “22,” “All Too Well”), but also some duds (while reviewing this record, I got through “Starlight” for maybe the first time since 2012). Red (Taylor’s Version) may be a commercial endeavor first, but that doesn’t mean it lacks an underlying artistic statement: that sometimes we must revisit our past, both the flattering and the less flattering bits, in order to get to our future. Swift won’t have any trouble finding companions for the road.


Conor Oberst has been a musician in the public eye for nearly half of his life, and over the past decade, he’d be most accurately described as a folk artist. Upside Down Mountain is Oberst’s latest documentation of his obsessions with escape, death, the passing of time, and the potential of finding serenity in an assumed identity.

Upside Down Mountain

Conor Oberst is a 34-year old married man. He’s been a musician in the public eye for nearly half of his life, and over the past decade, he’d be most accurately described as a folk artist. His latest album Upside Down Mountain is being released on Nonesuch, a label whose release slate includes the Black Keys, Natalie Merchant, and Nickel Creek. The cover art is designed by one of the guys in the Felice Brothers, and he’ll be trekking around the country with Dawes. The moment you hear Oberst sing, though, you will forget every single one of these facts and remember every positive and negative association you have with Bright Eyes instead*—*there’s just no mistaking him for anyone else at this point, and it’s unclear how he feels about that. While claiming “this is a return to an earlier way I wrote", Upside Down Mountain is Oberst’s latest documentation of his obsessions with escape, death, the passing of time, and the potential of finding serenity in an assumed identity.
That said, Upside Down M**ountain isn't a Bright Eyes album, so Oberst’s not driven by the same incessant need for romantic and artistic validation that kept him going until Lifted, nor will circumstances ever align the way they did for his protracted 2005 critical breakthrough. On the plus side of the ledger, you can understand what the hell Oberst is talking about most of the time on Upside Down Mountain, which makes it an immediate improvement over Cassadaga and The People’s Key, two albums that somehow managed to be cryptic and pedantic at the same time.
Besides possessing one of the strongest melodies Oberst has ever penned (and there are plenty here), “Time Forgot” is a welcome reintroduction to the guy who never had trouble getting his point across. Here, he longs to grow a beard, to be left alone, to let the wind scatter thoughts, to just listen. This puts him in a similar mindset as he was on his self-titled record from 2008, the last truly great thing he’s put his name on. But there’s been an unmistakable change of perspective*—*on Conor Oberst cuts like “I Don’t Want to Die (In the Hospital)”, death was impending because he was Conor Oberst, the wildly talented and self-destructive rock singer. Here, he’s not chasing death, but death will catch up with him because he’s Conor Oberst, human being.
The most resonant moments of Upside Down Mountain follow suit in deconstructing Oberst’s myth of himself*—during the otherwise chintzy, rhinestone cowboy pop of “Hundreds of Ways”, “I hope I am forgotten when I die” is the most poisonously enunciated line on the LP. Meanwhile, on the mesmerizing minor-key whisper of “Artifact #1”, Oberst just wants to be forgotten while he’s alive__—*__“I don’t want a second chance to be an object of desire/ if that means slipping through your hands.” Sometimes he even has a sense of humor about it all; though “Kick” is addressed to a luckless Kennedy, it’s not a “Diane Young”-style philosophical treatise, but rather one fuck-up relating to another. And when he admonishes a self-absorbed drunk during “Enola Gay”’s rummy strut, it might just be himself. The evocation of solitude in a crowded club links it back to his atomic self-pitying from Digital Ash in a Digital Urn's “Hit the Switch”, but anyone can learn from its hook: “The world’s mean, getting meaner too/ So why do you have to make it all about you?”
But elsewhere on Upside Down Mountain, he wields populist observation like a politician, trying to utilize his homespun wisdom from an elevated plane. Over a decade ago, he claimed “There is no truth, there is only you/ And what you make the truth”, and that sounds more convincing than his attempts to convey his own version of the truth as the genuine article. During “Time Forgot”, he muses, “They say everyone has a choice to make/ To be loved or to be free”, but, really, who says that?  He’s got a lot of big ideas about love throughout*—*“True love hides like city stars”, “Love was the message...full stop”, “Freedom is the opposite of love”, “Our love is a protective poison”, “There is no dignity in love.” It's easy to think of him like Don Draper, hacking out emotionally manipulative and impeccably worded pitches on a Coronet until something sticks.
His facility with pat truths is most evident in “You Are Your Mother’s Child”, a song that bears an instant resemblance to I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning's* *homemade valentine “First Day of My Life” in its unadorned simplicity. It’s open-ended enough to be adopted by anyone who wants it to be about their child, but after a striking, writerly first verse, an adolescent’s all-American upbringing feels less like an actual person’s experience than it does a songwriting exercise. It could’ve been written about anyone, but it also could’ve been written by anyone.
But it couldn’t have been sung that way, and the saving grace of Upside Down Mountain is that it makes the case for Oberst as a truly unique and remarkable vocalist.  Earlier in his career, his tremble, quaver and vibrato were seen as affectations of an amateur, but here they're all confidently and carefully utilized like a mastered instrument. For the most part, it gives character to gauzy C&W like “Double Life” and the chugga-chugga festival-folk of “Zigzagging Toward The Light”, but he still has a way of throwing in awkward phrases that stick in your craw like popcorn kernels*—*“Snickers bar”, “Japanese arcade”, “Klonopin eyes”, and the pronunciation of “parlour trick” to sound like “politrick.”
One line in particular stands out*—*“I stole all the rhinestones from Carolina/ And sold them out in Bakersfield for cash.” Maybe it’s playing to and against type as the rambling folk artist, since Carolina and Bakersfield are as real as it gets, even if they’re being used as placeholders. It's the kind of line Ryan Adams would unspool—a fitting association since Upside Down Mountain is essentially Oberst’s Ashes & Fire. It's gorgeous to the point of near gaudiness, a “return to form” after a strange decade evolving from wildly prolific, heartbreak soundtracking, Winona Ryder-dating enfant terrible into a domesticated Americana bard no longer interested in why to be young is to be sad. Hopefully, Oberst will find a way to make "older and wiser" just as revelatory.


The Chicago band's third LP features Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley as full-time drummer, and it's their most concise, commercial music to date.

Pre Language

When Disappears took shelter in the 15-minute long "Revisiting" at the end of last year's Guider, it felt like they were on the cusp of pushing their music into an audacious new space. There were certainly plenty of associations that could be drawn between that song and other artists-- it fed off an unholy amalgam of the Stooges' grit, the blissful repetition of Can, the planet-sized riffing of Loop. But there was poise to it, a sense of all those elements running off one another to create a glorious noise, mapped out in a place you could retreat to and get lost in for days at a time. The touring undertaken to promote Guider brought Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley into the Chicago-based band's fold-- a natural fit for the eternally cyclical guitar lines singer Brian Case and Jonathan Van Herik were obsessing over at the time. Shelley returns on Pre Language, now a fully paid-up member of the band, on the most concise account of Disappears' music to date.
Instead of acting as a jumping-off point to something new, "Revisiting" has been treated as a dead end, a place where the group's fixation on repetition was shoved out to its natural brink. It's not altogether surprising to find Disappears acting this way. There was a strong shift in style between their 2010 debut, Lux, and Guider, from sweet-toothed guitar pop to the nihilistic Detroit 1969 abandon of tracks like "Halo". Pre Language is a further modification, with Case clearly keen to show off his Anglophile tendencies by channeling the Fall's Mark E. Smith on a number of songs ("Replicate", "Fear of Darkness"). Strangely, considering Shelley's involvement, there's also a whiff of 1990s alt-rock also-rans, the kind of acts that trailed in Sonic Youth's wake. "All Gone White" could be a track by long-forgotten St. Johnny, one of the many eyebrow-raising recipients of a major deal (at DGC) during the storied post-grunge feeding frenzy.
That same fate isn't likely to befall Disappears any time soon, but on Pre Language they are producing their most commercial work to date. When it peaks, on the forceful "Hibernation Sickness" and through the shivery guitars of "Brother Joliene", there's a natural buoyancy at work, with the band's psych impulses, pop flair, and scratchy guitar passages all working in tandem. But too often it slides into unremarkable sludge, making it feel like the blown-open sound and ambition of Guider isn't being capitalized on. "Minor Patterns" resembles an inconsequential Dandy Warhols album track when the chorus rolls in, wandering aimlessly in a haze of shoegazery fuzz. Even tracks that lean back into Disappears' trusted framework of repetition don't find the same kind of purpose as before, with "Love Drug" trudging aimlessly in place for much of its duration.
The fundamental difference between Pre Language and its predecessor is a sense of identity, that ability to turn obvious touchstones inside-out to land in a place easily defined as Disappears' own territory. This album feels more like a series of genre exercises, a place in which they occasionally work up a palpable tension, but never enough to make this more than an adequate diversion from the resources they're obviously sourcing. It's possible that "Revisiting" was so monolithic in size that it became something from which Disappears needed to make a hasty retreat, fearing such an exercise couldn't be equaled. There would certainly be no point in repeating something like that again. But there's heightened aspiration there, a sense of loosening the band's tightly wound sound to see where it would take them, bringing them to a place Pre Language doesn't arrive at often enough.


On their second album this year, the Netherlands-based Anatolian psych rockers push deeper into electronic pop, infusing traditional Turkish melodies with the spirit of disco.

Âlem

Perhaps there was no timestamped tipping point, but in the past few years, we leaned into the gossamer of 1970s and ’80s Europop imports, or off-continent paeans to its bombast and shine. The Mamma Mia! sequel reinvigorated the thirst for ABBA; the Bee Gees got their own HBO documentary. And while Anatolian psych-rockers Altin Gün made their name playing sprawling Turkish rock, their new album Âlem inches towards disco decadence, a melange of influences that makes a heady argument for joy.
Hailing from Turkey, Indonesia, and the Netherlands, the members of Altin Gün build something novel from a barrage of composite parts. Still, the facets bear identifying: In slow burner “Çarşambay Sel Aldı,” you could tease out Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” pedal steel, and the plaintive wail of a tanbur. The mix is smooth as a drag of Gauloise, syrupy and unselfconsciously cool. That’s the general assessment of every track on Âlem, no matter how far-flung or ambitious. Album opener “Yali Yali,” a traditional song famously recorded by Neşe Karaböcek, could have fit onto the soundtrack to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, brooding and propulsive in spite (or because of) its aerobic ’80s synth. With few exceptions, Âlem sustains an atmosphere as fantastic as it is decadent. During certain bridges and ecstatic builds, it is a rebuke of ennui, a soundtrack for the main character in the movie of your life.
The album’s most winsome moments happen at the intersection of raw and refined. You can imagine the acrobatic vocals on “Malatya” or “Oğlan” sounding arresting even when unadorned, but the 808s and embellishments take what’s beautiful and render it prismatic. Where a track could be driving or lovely, it’s both; every earworm comes with a side of ambition. The band has pledged album revenue to the ecological charity Earth Today, and in combination, these sounds and their context evoke a global consciousness. Among the many translations of Âlem: “realm,” “universe,” and “orgy.”
A few imperfections dull the high shine. “Üzüm Üzüme Baka Baka,” a collaboration with Belgian duo Asa Moto, has its brighter moments but sometimes feels more like an extended jam session. The reggae-lite “Kisasa Kisas” pauses for breath just when it’s getting good, decelerating before the raucous “Badi Sabah Olmadan” races back uphill.
Is Âlem a record for the club or the planet? Is it more revealing to think of Altin Gün’s songwriting process as a form of scholarly exploration, a deep dive in the archives, or is it something more instinctual—a ode to the relevance and possibilities of Anatolian rock, Europop, synth rock, disco, and beyond? Studied or off the cuff, on the dancefloor or in the world at large, the result is the same: adventurous bangers without borders.

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In a collection of unreleased and rarely heard recordings, the French electronic music pioneer displays his mastery of an early proto-synthesizer.

Jean-Jacques Perrey: Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline

Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline

In 1951, two years before Elvis Presley first entered a recording studio, a youthful Jean-Jacques Perrey made his recording debut on Charles Trenet’s “L'âme des Poètes.” He played a proto-synthesizer called the Ondioline that was known for its ability to mimic other instruments, as well as for its naturalistic vibrato, a result of the instrument being suspended on springs.
Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline, the first release on a new label from Gotye that is dedicated to uncovering lost works by pioneering musicians, rounds up Perrey’s work on the instrument, featuring unreleased tracks from his personal archives and selections from private-press releases. Given the role that Perrey, who died in 2016, would go on to play in popular music—inspiring the Beastie Boys and being sampled by Dr. Dre and Gang Starr, among others—it’s easy to make a case for this collection’s historical importance.
Important, though, doesn’t always equate with entertaining, and the latter half of this record, an extended demonstration of the Ondioline’s ability to recreate the sound of everything from the French horn to the banjo, feels more informative than it does engaging—particularly given that Perrey exhibited the Ondioline’s capabilities to far more amusing effect on a 1960 episode of the American TV show “I’ve Got a Secret.” By happy contrast, the opening 11 songs of this anthology are a riot: a collection of funkily weird, weirdly funky, and remarkably elegant Ondioline tracks that take in genres as disparate as chanson (“L'âme des Poètes”), galactic ambience (“Visa to the Stars”) and what we can only call barnyard funk (“Chicken on the Rocks,” based on the folk song “Chicken Reel”).
The Ondioline was, as the producers of “I’ve Got a Secret” clearly realized, a novelty. But the key to Perrey’s work, with the Ondioline and later with the Moog, was that he never treated it as such. Perrey was not interested in innovation for innovation’s sake; he used the Ondioline as a tool to help him create music that is sumptuous, extravagant, and soulful. It helps that Perrey was such a master of the instrument, known for his finesse in playing its keyboard with one hand while manipulating the filters with the other. You can hear the effect this produces on the semi-comic lament “Danielle of Amsterdam,” composed, arranged, and produced by long-time collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, where the changing tone of the Ondioline—from comical squawk to cosmic banjo via fairground organ—subtly alters the mood of the piece, nudging the song forward in a suitably dramatic fashion.
Elsewhere, Perrey uses the Ondioline to masterfully mimic a violin on “L'âme des Poètes”; impersonates the effect of falling stars on the beautifully far-out “Mars Reflector”; and teases the sound of pigs, ducks, and donkeys on the cartoonish “Barnyard in Orbit,” a song that gives ridiculousness a good name. By any standard, the Ondioline is an impressive machine, its slider switches and spring suspension capable of producing a dazzling array of velvety sounds. But Perrey is the one who makes it sing with sonorous electronic soul.
Along with these wonderful sounds are songs with a more cinematic feel, a few of which were actually used in films and commercials. “La Vache et le Prisonnier Main Theme (Excerpt)” is taken from the soundtrack to the French film of the same name, the haunting tones of the Ondioline lending pathos to the tale of a prisoner of war who escapes a German farm accompanied by a cow. “Danielle of Amsterdam” was adapted for the 1970s cop film Law and Disorder, where the song helped to bridge the movie’s mixture of comedy and drama. Similarly, “Cigale,” one of the few pieces of music written by the Ondioline’s inventor, Georges Jenny, may not have interested record labels at the time—it was unreleased until now—but you could easily imagine it soundtracking a doomed romantic encounter in a 1960s Parisian café, thanks to a sweeping, wonderfully morose Ondioline melody and a gorgeous change of key that sees Jenny’s compositional skills briefly steal the limelight back from the instrument he invented.
You could treat Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline as a history lesson, if you liked, with its rare and unreleased recordings cementing the instrument’s place in the annals of electronic music. Far better, though, to sit back, relax, and enjoy the enduring beauty of this record, whose sheer melodic delights eclipse its merely important qualities, much like Perrey’s Moog Indigo before it. Rather than a scratchy historical document, Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline is deceptively experimental music in the lineage of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or Tomita: lush musical soundscapes that still come alive to modern ears, more than a half-century after they were recorded.


The folk supergroup subtly recasts centuries of standards for our fractious and uncertain present.

Bonny Light Horseman: Bonny Light Horseman

Bonny Light Horseman

Bonny Light Horseman formed casually, like a front-porch jam. Fruit Bats singer Eric D. Johnson heard that his friends—veteran multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman and singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell—were getting together to revisit ancient folk songs. He asked to sit in on the experiment, and the chemistry was instant. On their self-titled debut, the trio reimagines centuries of standards for our fractious political climate, making old chestnuts feel new.
On first listen, these 10 performances may sound traditional, even staid, three dovetailing voices floating above bright acoustic guitars and ringing pianos. There are references to bygone wars and the bounty of a father’s garden, to the Biblical parable of prisoners Paul and Silas and the folk heroism of John Henry. If you’ve listened at all to English, Irish, or Appalachian folk music or any of their many revivals, you’ll spot familiar archetypes and icons. But Bonny Light Horseman gently cut these songs free from aging roots, transplanting them to the present.
The trio has more reverence for the flexibility of the oral tradition than the songs it has produced. They splice together bits of old numbers into new ones, drop or add verses, and relocate antediluvian sagas into Stateside settings. The tune that gave the trio their name, for instance, is a lover’s lament for a dead soldier, killed during the Napoleonic Wars. Mitchell spent years recontextualizing folk tropes before her myth-plundering Hadestown became a Broadway hit, and here, she sings a version that lambastes Napoleon by name but scrubs other historic details. This version excoriates all-powerful leaders who dispatch the powerless to their death; as strongmen worldwide foment new nationalism, her rendition feels as much like a warning as a plea.
“Mountain Rain” exquisitely recasts the ballad of John Henry—a steel driver who battled his mechanized rival to victory and death—as the unionized lament of his coworkers. “West Virginians, hammer in the morning/Hammer in the mountain rain,” Johnson sings, giving voice to workers who didn’t want to die just to prove their worth. You can imagine artificial intelligence and the threat of automation, coming around the Great Bend into a new millennium.
The settings meet these lyrical revisions halfway. Bonny Light Horseman reimagine the gospel song “Children, Go Where I Send Thee” under the name “Jane Jane,” making the tedious structure of the “counting song” feel miraculously breezy. Cock your head just right, and the layered acoustic and electric guitars even sparkle like Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint for Pat Metheny. At the surface, “Magpie’s Nest” is a pastoral beauty, Johnson crooning of idealized love over graceful guitars. But listen to the furtive cymbals, brooding saxophones, and moaning organ—they infuse the song with the same
sophisticated blues that drifts through Johnson's yearning voice.
This revisionism peaks during the timely “Black Waterside.” For decades, “Down by Blackwaterside” has been the currency of British folk, passed, for instance, from Anne Briggs to Bert Jansch to Led Zeppelin. In the classic version, a young maiden sleeps with a deceitful man who woos her through empty promises of marriage. Bonny Light Horseman turn it into a duet, with Mitchell nailing the role of the naif and Johnson serving as an omniscient narrator. They linger on a frequently omitted last line—“’Tis then he’ll marry me,” sending it up like a wail from the edge of madness. If the standard “Blackwaterside” is pitiful, this one quietly seethes, cloaking a hint of vengeance behind a pretty voice.
Mitchell, Kaufman, and Johnson have rarely sounded better than they do together, locked inside these scenes with the intimacy of siblings. Late in the album, though, a new voice arrives—Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who co-owns the festival and label where Bonny Light Horseman made their live and recorded debuts. Over dusky piano, the temporary quartet trades the lines of “Bright Morning Stars,” a wondrous Appalachian spiritual about the heartbreak and hopefulness of mortality that’s undergone a late renaissance. Their call-and-response interplay is gorgeous, but it feels like a well-meaning intrusion during someone else’s deep conversation. Mitchell and Johnson rejoin one another for the finale “10,000 Miles,” a ballad about longing for a lover during some Odyssean journey. Their voices fit together so perfectly it’s possible at last to believe in such a star-crossed fantasy.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Following the departure of Jason Isbell, Drive-By Truckers' remaining primary songwriters, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, offer a brilliant study in duality, as-- seemingly in conversation with one another-- they weigh the respective pulls of decadence and dependability.

Drive-By Truckers: Brighter Than Creation's Dark

Brighter Than Creation's Dark

As guys wrestle with the encroaching responsibilities of work and family, they still often romanticize or cling to their shit-kicking youth; the Drive-By Truckers' principal songwriters, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, represent each side of this coin. Using the broadest strokes imaginable, gravelly and grizzly Hood is the endlessly vigilant, fiercely protective papa bear, while laconic slick-talker Cooley the hell-raising, yarn-spinning fuck-up.
There's always been plenty of wiggle room on either side, of course (Cooley's tensely domestic "Loaded Gun in the Closet", Hood's ball-busting "Aftermath USA"), but with the departure of talented third songwriter Jason Isbell, DBT's two founding members solidify their positions within the group on its seventh studio album, Brighter Than Creation's Dark. What at first blush might sound like unhealthy entrenchment turns out to be a brilliant study in duality, as Cooley and Hood-- seemingly in conversation with one another-- weigh the respective pulls of decadence and dependability.
The more conventional, traditional Cooley may not win as many critical plaudits as the idiosyncratic Hood, but he's outclassed his comrade over the group's last two, uneven records, contributing gems like "Where the Devil Don't Stay" and "Space City" while Hood was busy handing out self-help bromides. A tougher, smarter, funnier version of the prototypical alt-country gunslinger, Cooley's in rare wise-cracking form this time around, unspooling quick-witted, sin-soaked vignettes of colorful loners and losers that hearken back to DBT's pre-Southern Rock Opera incarnation as supreme underground redneck jokesters. "Bob" and "Lisa's Birthday" are both superbly funny character sketches (sorry, no Leon Kompowski cameo on the latter), while "Self Destructive Zones" offers a head-spinning, sardonically knowing tour of the past 20 years of angst-rock. But Cooley's most welcome contribution might be the blistering "3 Dimes Down", a loose-limbed groover from a story-centric band that's too often a lumbering musical beast.
While brother-in-arms Cooley tosses off seemingly effortless odes to fast cars and booze-fueled loving, Hood is still busy being the Tony Soprano of southern rock, an imposing man's man who nonetheless opens up his rawest emotional wounds for inspection. Bathos may have burdened much of his songwriting post-SRO, but Hood sounds reborn here thanks to a newly crystallized focus-- fatherhood. In a less emotionally seasoned songwriter's hands such frequent invocations of dads and kids might seem like a gimmick, but Hood has long been amused, compelled, and inspired by the family, going back to "Zoloft", "Sink Hole", and the immortal "The Southern Thing". Here though, Hood's hearth-honed eye is specifically trained on children, the ones we try to support and protect ("The Righteous Path", "Goode's Field Road"), and the ones we sometimes tragically leave behind. Such is the self-excoriating scenario that drives the war-themed "That Man I Shot", wherein our protagonist kills an enemy combatant and can't help wondering about the little ones he may have rendered fatherless. That emotional crescendo is followed closely by the similarly pained "The Home Front", which tautly conveys the worry of a wife and mother waiting for her man to come back from battle.
It's a mostly harrowing cycle that Hood has woven in the midst of Cooley's debauched ditties (with first-time frontwoman Shonna Tucker striking an equitable balance with her three appropriately gritty but generically sung contributions), but it's not all fatherly hand-wringing, thanks at least to the succinctly-phrased ode to decompression, "Daddy Needs a Drink". Irresponsible rabble-rouser or put-upon parent, that's a sentiment every grown-ass man can appreciate.


Buffalo producer Daringer’s austere music spotlights Meyhem Lauren’s phonetic idiosyncrasies. For the first time in years, the Queens rapper is an unequivocal headliner.

Meyhem Lauren / Daringer: Black Vladimir

Black Vladimir

As New York City enters its fourth decade of real estate speculation and cultural diffusion, the term “New York original” connotes anachronism as much as innovation. A New York original is a throwback to the days of accents and attitude, when the city was defined by characters and vice versa. For Queens rapper Meyhem Lauren, the designation fits. A larger-than-life street rhymer with a penchant for luxury brands, he pokes fun at rap tropes while maintaining reverence for hip-hop canon; his inflection is so non-rhotic, he sounds almost British. He embodies Biggie’s kingpin persona and linguistic alacrity with none of the finesse, bulldozing through couplets preposterous enough to make Paul Barman blush. Lauren is Barry Manilow to Roc Marciano’s Rod Stewart, his showmanship bordering on absurdism.
Embellishment is the order of the day on Black Vladimir, a full-length outing with Buffalo producer Daringer. As ever, Lauren sticks to the four Fs: food, fashion, flights, and fornication. “Black Pinot” alights on ancient Greece: “People fuck up, they say you changin’ if you don’t forgive ’em/I just forget ’em ’cause we movin’ at a different rhythm/Absorbin’ wisdom from the Socrates Prison/As I breeze through the Acropolis, my life is never profitlеss.” Daringer’s piano loop is almost simplistic in its austerity, but it foregrounds Lauren’s unmistakable locution—you can picture the mangled vowels escaping from his mouth.
In less inspired moments, Lauren gets by on his gruff voice—but Black Vladimir ranks among his more accomplished technical offerings. On “Red Pesto,” his alliterative multis render Conway’s guest bars modest by comparison; the emphatic syllable placement of “Chicken Chinese” breaks the pace of the album’s first half. A consummate shit-talker, Lauren writes in a way that’s governed by phonetics more than any narrative concern. “Lavish Vision” is a grab bag of free-associative spontaneity (“My closet’s like a down payment on a duplex/Anytime I’m headed outside, I’m gettin’ new sex”) interspersed with enigmatic disjointedness (“I’m outside, my flesh lookin’ radiant/I’m okay, my life is a gradient”). He hits for power as opposed to average, but even his groaners (“I’m eatin’ broccoli rabe, you get robbed for your broccoli”) are good for laughs.
In spite of their flinty source material, Black Vladimir’s instrumentals assume an ambient quality. An architect of Griselda’s early triumphs, Daringer loops one- and two-bar samples with minimal deviation, a departure from Harry Fraud and DJ Muggs’s ornate production on Lauren’s most recent projects. He conjures a grainy noirscape on “Conflict Resolution,” stretching oboe and horns across an understated bassline. Although the drums on “Nigerian Vegetables” are barely perceptible, the organ takes on a percussive quality when paired with Lauren’s quixotic bars (“Internal Revenue Services is my only obstacle/Grew up out Jamaica Hospital, now life is tropical”). There aren’t any show-stoppers to speak of, but the unobtrusive music spotlights Lauren’s idiosyncrasies—for the first time in years, he’s an unequivocal headliner.
This is a golden age for forty-something tri-state loudmouths, and Lauren fits better in today’s scene than the soupy, navel-gazey blog-rap era in which he first arrived. On Black Vladimir, he’s exactly who he’s always been: a colorful if one-dimensional B-lister with a deep Rolodex. If the novelty eventually wears thin, Lauren and his stable of Queens County mavericks—Action Bronson, Hologram, Big Body Bes—have refined their craft, and the blunt Griselda sound suits them as well as any. Meyhem is still more stylist than trailblazer, but that’s all modern-day New York asks.


These magnificent reissues of English art-rock innovators Talk Talk's 1991 final record Laughing Stock and their reclusive leader Mark Hollis' 1998 self-titled solo album are presented on immaculate vinyl. They sound as good as these albums have ever sounded, in any format.

Talk Talk / Mark Hollis: Laughing Stock / Mark Hollis

Laughing Stock / Mark Hollis

There are many ways for a band to follow up a hit. None of them is guaranteed to work, but some are more likely than others to flop, artistically or otherwise. This reissue of Talk Talk's final album, 1991's Laughing Stock, presented here without any distracting "bonuses" on immaculate vinyl, helps tells the story of Talk Talk's fraught, exhausting, confounding, brave, and ultimately brilliant final act. (There's also a postscript, in the form of frontman Mark Hollis' solo album, but we'll get to that.) Though you're more likely to describe Laughing Stock as lovely or otherworldly or even gentle, in its way it's as uncompromising as any apocalyptic noise record. And in a weird way it exists only because Talk Talk were at one time a hit-making pop band.
Formed in 1981, by 1986 Talk Talk were enjoying the biggest sales and best reviews of their short career, thanks to their third album, The Colour of Spring. Having started out as a moodier-than-average synth-pop act-- Duran Duran with the glitz and hedonism swapped out for nervous jitters and existential dread-- they'd transformed into the avant-garde edge of 1980s M.O.R. Even at their most acceptance-hungry, there'd always been something faintly left-of-center about Talk Talk, from Mark Hollis' haunted and word-swallowing singing to the musical hints that the band was more interested in 1970s prog than 80s dance-rock. On The Colour of Spring, the big, romantic ballads were still there, but they were strangely muted. They had an eerie jazz-like minimalism and attention to atmosphere that suggested an appreciation for Eno's ambient records.
This canny mix, stadium-friendly melodrama in an experimental but not too out-there package, paid greater commercial dividends than probably anyone would have guessed. With EMI's accounting department more than pleased, the label gave Talk Talk carte blanche to make any damned album they wished. The result was the band's fourth album, 1988's Spirit of Eden. Talk Talk took up this new freedom with a perverse relish, racking up countless hours and major dollars recording Spirit, a gorgeous but amorphous epic that proved that ruthless quiet could be just as difficult as ear-harassing volume. Talk Talk took this go-ahead from their label as their chance, possibly their last, to explore their truly envelope-pushing ideas, rather than the hints they'd offered on Spring.
By the time of Spirit, Talk Talk had fully rejected the sleek and kitschily futuristic music that first brought then to prominence. In its place, they crafted an immersive and ever-flowing style, alternately hushed and loud, lush and arid. It was a brand of unashamed art rock that was completely out of step with both the underground's unkempt roar and the manicured mainstream. Jazz became a more major component than ever, both in the overall style of playing, especially drummer Lee Harris' steady and cymbal-heavy swing, but also in the band's increasingly complex and usually improvised interaction. These improvisations were stitched together after the fact into what sound like carefully thought-out compositions that still somehow vibrate with the surprise of in-the-moment exploration. Which partly explains how "I Believe in You", Hollis' most comprehensible performance on an album where a lyric sheet is very necessary, can feel like a singer-songwriter ballad floating in and out of a swirl that evokes avant-classical at its least forbidding and electric jazz at its most beatific.
This genre-blurring fearlessness, along with the way Spirit and Laughing Stock bloom from extreme quiet to extreme loudness only to slowly recede again, is why these albums get tagged as precursors to post-rock, when no post-rock albums much resemble them in sound, construction, or especially ambition. Talk Talk use ideas from jazz and classical to build the subtlest gradations of drama. But despite the restraint, it's also not polite, musically or otherwise.
Hands were wrung on a corporate level over Spirit. Some old fans understandably balked, though new fans did gradually accumulate. An note of puzzlement could be read in the press notices, whether they offered praise or derision. The band decamped to Polydor and made an even more opaque fifth and final album, using much the same methodology as on Spirit and seeming to give even less of a shit about how it would all be received.
This is the oft-repeated and probably too-pat story that gave Talk Talk a second life as fame-spurning and journey-hardened underground icons. But it's also not hard to understand why the band broke up after Laughing Stock, or was simply broken. There's more going on in these six tracks than on Spirit, but the song structures are even stranger, built up from the tiniest musical gestures, clashing in mood from track to track, frequently more improvised-sounding than ever. The goal, assembling a coherent album from all this stuff, probably seemed quixotic to many of the contributors as it was being made. The recording process has long been described as one of the most arduous and prone to control freakitude ever. The band members were probably relieved to dissolve Talk Talk, move on to less demanding projects, or recede back into private life, once Laughing Stock was finished, despite the monumentality of what they finally made.
And it remains wholly singular, however many indie rock bands and experimental composers have genuflected toward it over the last 20 years. The half-dozen songs on Laughing Stock feel discrete, complete-unto-themselves, each one a little world that doesn't always seem to have much to do with the song that precedes or follows it. The underwater glide of "New Grass" is Talk Talk as a purely placid and lovely proposition, electric organ and lilting guitar endlessly circling around Harris' heartbeat-steady drumming, recalling the tranquility threatened with an edge of disquiet in Robert Wyatt's early solo work. "Ascension Day" remains the band's most chaotic and vicious song, like a small jazz combo being elbowed aside by a noise-rock band, with a climactic barrage of drumming that falls on your ears like an avalanche before the audible tape-splice cuts it dead. But even in this assault you can hear the monomaniacal care and craft that went into assembling and recording Laughing Stock, from the full-bodied throb of the upright bass to the little twitches and groans of horror-movie music lurking in the background on the verses. Laughing Stock was Talk Talk at their most demanding, and when listening to the spectral free jazz squeal of "Taphead", you understand why it was saddled for so many years with the "difficult" epithet.
The Laughing Stock reissue sounds amazing, as good as the album's ever sounded, in any format. Which is crucial, because on some level Talk Talk's later albums are all about sound. How startling, isolated moments of sound, or a formless wash of sound, can wring emotions out of listeners as powerfully as any conventional melody. How the ambient sound of the room in which an album was recorded can be used almost as instrument in itself, and how the studio can be used to create a sense of environment in the listener's mind that has nothing to do with recording booths and control decks. How far the sound of a rock song can be pared back and loosened up and still be "rock," or even still be "a song." And especially how sound can become all the more powerful when surrounded by silence, great gulfs of which are all over the later Talk Talk albums, especially Laughing Stock, captured here in a remarkable vinyl mastering job on Ba Da Bing's part.
Seven years after Laughing Stock, and seven years into the band's slow word-of-mouth rehabilitation from pretentious flop to shining example for independent artists, Mark Hollis returned with a completely unexpected solo album, which seemed to almost sneak out into the real world rather than be "released" with the usual promotional fanfare. Part of this feeling comes from Hollis' almost Salinger-grade rejection of celebrity, journalism, the industry, even making art for public consumption. (Talk Talk virtually disappeared as a public entity from Spirit onward, leaving the records to do most of the talking.) But it also comes from the startlingly private sound of Mark Hollis itself, like the kind of painful, personal document that's usually released only after the artist's death.
Where Laughing Stock creates multiple environments, Mark Hollis is intimate, almost shockingly so. Hollis often sings as if he's right up against your ear, at a volume designed to not wake spouses and small children. Listening, you often feel like you're eavesdropping on a musician working in the supposed seclusion of his home. Indeed, like few other records I know-- maybe Panda Bear's Young Prayer and Arthur Russell's World of Echo-- Mark Hollis creates the sensation that you're very much in the room where it was recorded.
But where those albums sounded very much like thrifty, one-man-band operations, Mark Hollis draws on a cast of musicians almost as large as Laughing Stock, and in their own self-consciously restricted way, these songs are as dramatic as anything on that album. Certainly they're as immersive, if only because you have to listen so closely, thanks to the lower-than-low-volume approach to recording and playing, in order to follow the even more classical-informed logic of their movement, whole songs carried by just an oblique dance of woodwinds or a long-decaying string melody. Over its eight minutes, "A Life (1895-1915)" plays like a novel whittled down to a haiku, tracing one WWI soldier's tragic arc from birth to early death on the battlefield, with Hollis' barely audible voice at the song's end communicating as much ache as any of his more full-throated performances. If the hermetic Laughing Stock was a scaling back of the wide-open grandeur of Spirit of Eden, then Mark Hollis is an even more radical reduction of scale.
So it's no surprise that Hollis has been publicly silent ever since, since silence always seems to be where the songs on Mark Hollis want to go, as if it took great effort to even decide to commit these particular sounds to tape. Perhaps Hollis just feels that he's said everything he had to say. Or perhaps he's still deliberating as to what, if anything, he's comfortable with releasing next. Unlike many reclusive musicians, though, you won't feel that Hollis absented himself before his overall project was completed. These albums still stand a good chance of alienating you, but if you find yourself vibrating sympathetically to them, there's enough mystery and beauty in them to sustain a lifetime's listening, whether Hollis or Talk Talk ever record another note.