Cameron Mesirow’s intimate new project builds her production around conversations about formative sexual experiences, which run the gamut from humorous to disturbing, and are often both at once.

Sextape

The intricate, often tempestuous songs that populate Glasser’s first two albums, 2010’s Ring and 2013’s Interiors, tend to bloom outward from Cameron Mesirow’s voice. Her singing is not necessarily the most complex or arresting element of a given track—that would be the multifaceted beat-work she lays beneath it, made up of synthesizers, drum machines, and snippets of breathy, nonverbal vocalizations—but it is the most prominent. Glasser’s first new release in five years, a single, 17-minute track called Sextape, similarly centers the human voice, although there’s hardly any singing to be found on it. Instead, Mesirow builds her production around recorded conversations with friends about formative sexual experiences, which run the gamut from humorous to disturbing, and are often both at once.
Sextape’s production takes cues directly from the rhythm of the voices Mesirow recorded; it doesn’t merely weave its spoken word components into an established musical template, but begins with a single voice speaking about an awkward, coercive sexual experience at a gay bar. Almost immediately, lacunae appear in conversations: “He reached around and grabbed my—” a voice says in the first minute, the object of that particular reach left on the cutting room floor. Mesirow homes in on the phrase “and then,” repeating the two words percussively until they form a rhythm, then introduces Sextape’s first beat: a pounding, dancefloor throb evocative of the clubs and bars where some of these encounters took place.
Dance music and queer sex intertwine at the root; there is no house music without Frankie Knuckles’ Warehouse, no techno without the Music Institute in Detroit. Yet few contemporary dance artists engage directly with the thorniness of queer intimacy, the complications that arise when queer people seek each other out to dance, to flirt, and to fuck each other. The current discourse on sexual abuse has focused almost exclusively on violence committed against straight women by straight men, leaving queer people to their own, quieter discussions on what consent looks like and how best to avoid harming others. Sextape broaches that conversation without ever slipping into the didactic mode. It’s an intimate piece, not a political one. Rather than write lyrics about complex sexuality, Mesirow simply lets people speak, and finds the music in the conversation instead of forcing the conversation into the music.
An uncanny exhilaration infects the voices on Sextape, even as they describe sexual experiences in which consent was blurred or non-existent. It’s as if Mesirow’s interview subjects were animating their past selves for the first time in years, tapping into the long-buried thrill of discovering sexuality for the first time, only to feel that thrill sour in hindsight. One interviewee recalls repeated sexual encounters with a gay high school teacher, and in his voice lies a deep sympathy for the “fearless” and naive teen he used to used to be. You get the sense that there is a strange catharsis in excavating these memories, in holding the bewildered, excitable young person against the adult who better grasps dynamics of power and consent.
It can be uncomfortable, even painful, to bear witness to these conversations, but Glasser isn’t interested in brutalizing listeners. Sextape doesn’t concern the immediacy of sexual trauma so much as it considers the way those murky early encounters can shape a person’s relationship to sexuality over time. Mesirow counters the weight of the piece’s conversations with often playful instrumental gestures: a bouncing, detuned synth riff, a pounding club beat that interpolates a voice saying “gay dot com” over and over again. It’s some of the most compelling production she’s written as Glasser, and it spirals beautifully out from the voices of friends sharing intimate secrets. With Sextape, Mesirow relieves some of the weight these conversations are often asked to bear and lets them breathe, gently and compassionately, in the open.


Songwriter M.C. Taylor—who records as Hiss Golden Messenger—wrote Bad Debt in 2009, months after his son was born, and recorded it in his North Carolina kitchen. Destroyed in a warehouse fire and just now seeing wider re-release, Bad Debt is an album deeply concerned with the nature of faith and man’s relationship with his Maker.

Bad Debt

The story of how Bad Debt was destroyed has eclipsed the story of how it was created. M.C. Taylor wrote these songs in the months following the birth of his son in 2009, then he recorded them in the dead of the North Carolina winter on a cassette recorder at his kitchen table, playing softly so as not to wake the household. Taylor was all set to release those recordings as Bad Debt, his first wide release as Hiss Golden Messenger, but the CD stock was destroyed during the London riots of 2010, when his distributor’s warehouse was burned. The opening chords of “No Lord Is Free” sound all the more resolute for cutting so gingerly through the ambient hiss of Taylor’s kitchen.
It’s almost impossible to imagine the magnitude of such a setback for any artist, but especially for one trying to launch a new venture. That story has attached itself like a tall tale to the album, at least for those intrigued listeners who have dug deeper into Taylor’s catalog following the subsequent release of Poor Moon in 2011 and the mighty Haw in 2013. Yet neither story affects how we hear these modest and deeply moving songs three years later, when Bad Debt is finally getting a proper release—with three new tracks—via the Tar Heel State indie Paradise of Bachelors. There are two reasons this tale of tribulation persists: First, it exposes the consequences of that fire and makes very real the sense of monetary and professional loss. Second—and much, much more crucial—that fire seems almost biblical in nature, as though God Himself reached down and smote Taylor. It is a tribulation worthy of Job.
“Are you with me now”? Taylor sing-whispers at the very start of the album. He delivers the line in a hush, even before the guitar enters, and that question resonates as both a gentle invitation to the listener and an invocation of a heavenly host. Bad Debt is an album deeply concerned with the nature of faith and man’s relationship with his Maker. That title pretty much sums up the spiritual dynamic, although who owes what to whom remains mysterious and unresolved. The homespun quality of these recordings is crucial: They are raw and rough, humble and private.
He makes good use of that room. Listening to these dozen songs, you can almost measure its dimensions. That space and the lo-fi recording technology create a rustic reverb, as his strums and singing reverberate quietly against the walls. To that simple palette—which recalls the Tallest Man on Earth at his most reserved or M. Ward at his most forceful—Taylor adds what sounds like a foot tapping against the floor to “Straw Man Red Sun River Gold” and “The Serpent Is Kind (Compared to Man)”. On “Call Him Daylight” his vocals echo slightly, suggesting a conflicted soul. These are subtle flourishes, yet they add urgency and depth to these songs and reinforce the sense of a live performance or a late-night rumination.
That field-recording aesthetic is the musical equivalent of sackcloth, especially compared to the lusher Appalachian folk-rock arrangements on his subsequent albums*.* Heard in the skewed chronology of the growing Hiss Golden Messenger catalog, Bad Debt may strike some listeners as mere demos, yet there is nothing missing from these performances, no sense of potential left untapped. These songs sound full and finished even in their austerity. Even so, a deep sense of uncertainty pervades every syllable and every strum, as though no question can ever be answer satisfactorily, and it is precisely that spiritual disaffection that separates Taylor from the artists for whom God’s existence and benevolence are givens. Rather than cynical or despairing, however, Bad Debt sounds hopeful, exuding a sense of hushed celebration. These are, after all, songs sung by a new dad.


Syd, the charismatic songwriter and performer at the center of R&B group the Internet, sounds more comfortable and focused than ever on her slinky, confident solo debut.

Fin

For being such a breezy new voice, Syd—the charismatic songwriter and performer at the center of R&B group the Internet—is unleashing her debut solo album with a curiously resolute title: Fin. The artist, born Sydney Bennett in Los Angeles, is just 24, part of a loose kinship of musicians, like Frank Ocean and her brother Taco, who rode into public consciousness with Odd Future and Tyler, the Creator (much of Odd Future’s early work was produced in Syd’s home studio, at her parent’s house). Though she and the Internet have released three albums together, it was the 2015 Ego Death that provided a breakthrough, gaining them a Grammy nomination and a certified smash in the Kaytranada-produced single “Girl.” Now she’s trying it out on her own, with an album of twelve slick hits that are the best proof yet of what she is capable of as an artist. Aren’t things just beginning?
Fin is, indeed, a fresh start. Stepping away momentarily from the Internet finds her as comfortable and focused as she’s ever sounded. “This is my descent into the depth I want the band to get to,” she told the FADER last year. “For me, this is like an in-between thing—maybe get a song on the radio, maybe make some money, have some new shit to perform.” Working with a variety of superstar producers, like MeLo-X and Hit-Boy, she leans on her different influences—boastful hip-hop, hippie neo-soul, sensual R&B—without ever losing the thread that ties them together: her inventive songwriting and magnetic personality, which leaps from the speakers every time she opens her mouth. Syd has perfected a pose, a slouching shrug and studied distance that makes her appealing, if a little remote. On Fin, it’s better defined than it ever has been.
She uses this bemused vantage point to reinvigorate some R&B archetypes, inhabiting them and winking slightly at the same time. The opening number, “Shake Em Off,” is all dirt-off-your-shoulders bravado: “Young star in the making/Swear they sleeping on me” she sings casually. Track two is called “Know,” and it is an Aaliyah bop, with Syd singing—in the airiest part of her vocal register and over a sputtering beat—about keeping a hook-up hidden away from the public. “Got Her Own” is a playful gay flip on the theme of loving a girl for her independence and ambition. On a quick sensual interlude called “Drown in It,” Syd sounds as proudly nasty as Ty Dolla $ign when she promises to “Swim in it/Dive in it/Drown in it/Hide in it, babe.” And there is “Body,” a minimalist moment that’s sole aim seems to be uncomplicated sensuality; as she told Zane Lowe in a recent interview, she just wanted it to be the “baby-making anthem of 2017.” This is a demonstrably cool album, but it’s hot when it needs to be, and gay listeners (like myself) will be psyched to have songs that are romantic and sexy but do not belabor the fact that they are sung from one woman to another, manifested by an artist who sounds entirely comfortable with her persona and talent.
On the final track, the revealingly titled “Insecurities,” she shows that there is, in fact, another side to her beneath the relaxed exterior: a woman who may sound self-assured, but who gets stuck in the same toxic bullshit that so many of us do, in this case a girl she loves with all her heart who can’t return the favor. Here, she sounds a little beleaguered and hesitant, singing, at first, about packed suitcases but an inability to leave. “You can thank my insecurities,” she sings. “They’re the reason I was down so long.” It’s a welcome omen that there’s deeper psychological anxieties for her to explore on the next album, and I’d love to hear more about that more vulnerable Syd. But by the end of the track, we’re back to where we started, and the song ends with a stiff upper lip and a casual middle finger, melting into a pool of psychedelia. On Fin, what Syd seems to want to portray most of all is an admirable, inspirational confidence, a young woman singing and rapping while totally at ease with the beats that please her most.


On their eighth album in 16 years, the veteran British art rockers smooth out some of their eccentricities but lose some of their swagger in the process.

Flat White Moon

Field Music have a thing for the most lavish proclivities of 1980s pop. At their best—like Commontime and Open Here—the Sunderland band’s art rock invokes second-wave British invasion acts like Duran Duran, Phil Collins, and the Human League, along with the swagger of Was (Not Was). They’ve never received their due—not even in a country as hungry for guitar heroes as the UK, where rock magazines have been forced to make stars of Royal Blood—but their music has always been ambitious. Field Music produce the kind of songs that, if sold under Brandon Flowers’ name, would be heralded as progessive stadium anthems. So it’s strange that Flat White Moon feels like the answer to a question nobody asked: What would happen if the band ditched its eccentricities?
On their eighth album in 16 years, brothers Peter and David Brewis move away from the overtly political writing on their last two records—Open Here featured astute Brexit-era observations; Making a New World was an unlikely concept piece about the aftermath of the First World War—for more personal songwriting. But where those albums were radiant and quirky, Flat White Moon is blunt and crepuscular. Field Music are a great singles band, and not in the cruel sense that their albums aren’t very good. Here that swaggering touch has deserted them. The math-rock drums and hard-edged guitars that balance the band’s pop instincts have been mostly smoothed out; the blaring brass of some of their most anthemic songs is no more. At their best, Field Music take risks. Flat White Moon is a record that too often plays it safe.
So you get a song like “Do Me a Favour,” which according to press notes was written about David Brewis’ young daughter, yet sounds not personal but simply generic. “When you are out there/With no one to hold on to/You'll be strong enough,” he sings, matching bland platitudes with a mid-tempo AM radio rock arrangement that goes nowhere.
Other moments are just confusing. Field Music have always enjoyed a dash of Paul McCartney’s gentlemanly English whimsy, but “When You Last Heard From Linda” sounds like any of hundreds of forgotten bands that tried to ape the Beatles in the late 1960s. “Invisible Days” is something a young band that learned about Smile three years ago might attempt. Most disappointingly, the ability to craft a chorus seems to have deserted them—the hook to “I’m the One Who Wants to Be With You” slowly deflates like a burst soccer ball—and the songs that do attempt to introduce those trademark irregular drum patterns, such as “Meant to Be,” are strangely jerky.
There are some superb moments. “No Pressure” is one of the few tracks to deliver the band’s familiar sense of levity, as the brothers take turns on lead vocals. Bringing politics back into their writing, the song takes aim at Britain’s ruling class, encapsulating the sentiment of the scattered Northern England strongholds—communities “crushed in the ruins”—that continue to resist the Tory Party’s rule, now in its second decade. Featuring a delicate drum machine, “The Curtained Room” is one of the band’s better quiet songs, introducing a more whispering, almost David Gilmour-style vocal and melody. These moments leave open the possibility that Flat White Moon is simply a stagger in the wrong direction, and not evidence of a band hitting veteran status but now running on fumes.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Adam Bainbridge’s production is always tasteful and seldom bad, but is only great when heightened by its guests.

Something Like a War

Though Adam Bainbridge, the British producer who records as Kindness, hasn’t released a record in five years, they remain quietly influential. Their credits aren’t extensive, but they are consistent, and Bainbridge’s handiwork is on some of the decade’s most gorgeous songs: Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky,” several tracks on Blood Orange’s Cupid Deluxe and Freetown Sound, and Robyn’s simmering nostalgia reverie “Send to Robin Immediately.” In 2012, the brushed-chrome polish of their arrangements set World, You Need a Change of Mind a little off the popular pulse; now the sound is everywhere.
Like all of Kindness’s work, Something Like a War is produced with deceptively invisible skill. Contributors and session musicians include Arthur Russell collaborator Mustafa Ahmed, a cadre of rising jazz stars, and several guest artists, many of whom appeared on Bainbridge’s monthly RBMA radio show. While the album is named for a documentary about India’s population control program, and begins with a fairly explicit statement of political themes—an Underground Resistance sample leads into the slogan, “build your people, make them equal”—more often it’s a record of personal as political, subtle as pointed, softness as weapon.
Bainbridge’s production is always tasteful and seldom bad, but is only great when heightened by its guests. On Something like a War, those guests are generally pretty good; sometimes they are very good. Bainbridge lends Gambian Swedish singer Seinabo Sey an arrangement as sumptuous as her voice, something her solo album didn’t always do. They bring Jazmine Sullivan out of hiatus for funk standout “Hard to Believe,” and she shocks the track alive. Several songs feature Robyn.
The downside is that when Bainbridge’s guests recede into the background, sometimes the songs do as well. “Who You Give Your Heart To” and “Dreams Fall” aim for intimate and wind up sleepy. “No New Lies” is a nocturnal brooder made for late-night sets and half-lit streets; it’s also a little lost amid its surroundings. The mood becomes so muted that when ’90s Philadelphia rapper Bahamadia appears on the title track, a verse full of overearnest psychspeak (“mood switched up to the gaslighting stuff … the narcissist in ’em I couldn’t tame”) nevertheless provides a jolt of tempo that makes the feature sound better than it is.
This effect, a stylish melting into the background, is maybe best seen on the Robyn tracks. Kindness is more interested in mood-setting than big moments, which means that “Cry Everything,” a song about the heavens bursting open, doesn’t work; there’s no moment of catharsis, and somehow, a Robyn song about sobbing becomes a letdown. She’s better deployed on “The Warning,” a ballad that meanders but soon finds its way to a chorus—the almost a cappella plaint “will you tell me, did you ever care?”—that plays so directly to her strengths it’s almost funny. And “Softness as a Weapon” brings out the best in both artist and producer: Robyn’s warmth matches the slow-growing, horn-flecked instrumental, production perfectly matched to theme. Like Bainbridge’s highlights of the decade, it kindles tension, rather than slackening it—building a mood, rather than assuming one.

Buy: Rough Trade
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R.E.M.'s first album since 2001's effects-heavy Reveal doesn't totally strip away their recent fondness for digital production, but manages to return them to a more natural sound. Guests include Scott McCaughey (Young Fresh Fellows), Ken Stringfellow (Posies), and Q-Tip (A Tribe Called Quest).

Around the Sun

After the surprise departure of drummer Bill Berry, the remaining members of R.E.M. found themselves unmoored and adrift both professionally and musically. They had always presented R.E.M. as a cohesive, democratic whole, with all four members receiving equal songwriting credit. Despite their one-time vow not to move forward as anything but a quartet, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe stuck it out after Berry left. Some fans considered this to be an unfortunate decision, but the remaining members seemed to view it as an opportunity to redefine their sound. R.E.M.'s first post-Berry album, 1998's Up, picked up not where its predecessor, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, left off, but where Radiohead's OK Computer did, with the trio taking a touristic trip into synths, programmed beats, and sound effects, and quoting Pet Sounds almost verbatim on "At My Most Beautiful". It sounded like a transitional record, but then so did the follow-up, Reveal.
On their third post-Berry album, Around the Sun, Buck, Mills, and Stipe have settled on an uneasy mixture of textureless production and tentative stabs at past glory. On lead track and first single, "Leaving New York", Stipe harmonizes with himself in a low voice that could have been sampled from Reckoning. "Final Straw" borrows its whirling organ from Out of Time's "Low", and Q-Tip's cameo on "The Outsider" recalls KRS-One's appearance on "Radio Song". Around the Sun sounds more straightforward than its two predecessors, however none of the instruments-- including Stipe's voice-- sound live or organic. Instead, they have a sparkling sheen, which has never been the best trait for either Stipe's vocals or Buck's usually piercing guitar.
Concurrent with the band's move away from its rootsy jangle was a trend in Stipe's songwriting toward the blandly declarative, which began with "Everybody Hurts". Each subsequent album has contained more and more full-sentence song titles-- "You're in the Air", "I've Been High", "She Just Wants to Be", "I'll Take the Rain", etc. This tendency seems foreign and unexpected coming from a songwriter who in the past sounded unwilling to settle for easy answers, and who even parsed the difference between asking and telling on "Fall on Me".
Perhaps it's impending middle age, perhaps it's the empty drum stool, or perhaps it's Stipe's role as the pop culture attache for the American political left, but his lyrics have become lazily explanatory: No longer content to question the world, Stipe seems intent on simply describing it, often in the most anodyne terms. "It's harder to leave than to be left behind," he sings on "Leaving New York". Elsewhere, he says, "Open up your eyes/ You're so alive" ("Aftermath"), "There's love at the end of the line" ("High Speed Train"), and, "Some things don't hold up over the course of a lifetime" ("Worst Joke Ever"). Too often Stipe sounds like a parent passing on received wisdom to children. At worst, this tendency is grossly arrogant; at best, it's merely complacent, as if success has excused R.E.M. from searching beyond platitudes.
But Around the Sun manages to overcome at least some of its shortcomings thanks to Stipe's new role as shunned lover. Having once promised he would never write a love song-- or lip-sync in a video, or carry on past 1999, or play as a trio-- he sounds very new to the form, and songs like "Make It All OK" and "High Speed Train" even sound endearingly awkward and vulnerable.
Elsewhere, Stipe's love songs are more cryptic. On "The Outsiders", he sings about meeting someone for dinner and getting life-changing news, but he never reveals the terrible secret. "Make It All OK"-- about recriminations between lovers-- gives Stipe his best line: He answers rejection with the taunt, "Jesus loves me fine." His tone is so self-serious that the song sounds bled of its humor, pathos approaching bathos. But Stipe's romantic confusion-- and the unprecedented hints at what may or may not be his personal life-- gives "Make It All OK" and "Aftermath" a prismatically emotional quality, their flaws so naked that they become strengths.
It's too bad the same can't be said of Around the Sun in its entirety. Its chief problem is that every word, every note, and every instrument sounds dry, sapped of most of their personality. Whereas R.E.M. were once Southern eccentrics trying to figure things out, and making lasting music in the process, lately they sound neither Southern nor eccentric and, more to the point, their music is far from memorable.


Danger Mouse and the Shins' James Mercer release a four-song EP of outtakes and B-sides from their initial sessions, an epilogue of sorts to their LP.

Meyrin Fields EP

Broken Bells members James Mercer (of the Shins) and Danger Mouse, aka Brian Burton, each made their names on twisting the sounds of the 1960s-- the former turning the Beach Boys and the Kinks into gleefully obscure indie pop and the latter remixing the Beatles' White Album into a hip-hop backing track. The music they make together, however, sounds instead like radio hits from some 1960s vision of the future: love songs from a world that will never exist. That sense of unrealizable possibilities reinforced the sense of loss on their debut, and made songs like "The High Road" and "The Ghost Inside" sound bruised and battered, but not bitter or jaded. These four new songs are outtakes and B-sides from their initial sessions, which along with that similar album cover suggests they intended Meyrin Fields as an epilogue to Broken Bells.
Yet, the EP has its own distinctive flavor, notably different from that of the LP. Burton's production is somehow both heavier and lighter: There's more going on in these songs, but the elements, such as the Jack Nitzsche-style guitar on "Heartless Empire" or the constant blips and beeps on "Windows", evoke spaceship mechanization and anti-gravity weightlessness. Gears grind and sirens wail on the title track, while a high, inhuman voice ghosts Mercer's vocals to reinforce the catchiness of the melody, like a gremlin in the works. If Broken Bells was indeed a break-up album-- and especially if it turns out to be about the break-up of the Shins-- Meyrin Fields continues that theme and plays it out a bit more, suggesting new stages of grief and acrimony. Meyrin Fields never sounds as eulogistic as Broken Bells did. It's less about loss than about the undiscovered country that comes after.
That's a lot for four songs to convey, but it comes through clearly on the EP's first half. The title track and "Windows" are both tense and ominous, with similar stabs of melody and a distressed urgency to the production. Burton treats the songs as short films to soundtrack, and every element goes toward reinforcing Mercer's dark drama. In fact, perhaps the main spark in this collaboration is how it gets both artists outside their comfort zones: Burton's beatmaking priorities draw Mercer out of his indie-pop realm and reveal the breadth of his songwriting, while Mercer's eloquent concision keeps Burton sharper and more focused. Both men show us something new, even as they struggle to break free of the gravitational pull of their other projects.
On the second half, however, that tension releases, and Meyrin Fields powers down with the loping reggae approximation of "An Easy Life" and the buoyant drift of "Heartless Empire". The arrangements are less insistent and sinister, but the melodies remain slightly chilly. "An Easy Life" was originally released as an iTunes exclusive to the album, and it sounds similarly tacked-on here. "Heartless Empire" does it one better, but throws everything-- grinding guitars, a whistled solo-- at a song that simply isn't very memorable. Still, this EP sounds like more than the sum of its parts. Maybe it's the realization that Gnarls Barkley will never top "Crazy" or that the Shins may never re-form, but there's an intriguing sense of desperation on these songs, as though both Mercer and Burton are realizing that this band could indeed be their lives.


The inscrutable indie hip-hop group returns with an uncontainable record that defies genre and expectations at nearly every turn.

Alopecia

Eyebrows raised when Why? were chosen to support the Silver Jews on a 2005 tour, but that seemingly incongruous bill made more sense when considering one of Berman's better lines: "All my favorite singers couldn't sing." Likewise on Alopecia, Yoni Wolf doesn't seem to know he isn't a diva on "Simeon's Dilemma", that he isn't a New Pornographer on "Fatalist Palmistry", or that he's not a grizzled battle-rapper on "The Fall of Mr. Fifths", and he won't let any of it get in his way. He's got too much to say to be concerned about it.
"Unclassifiable" is usually lazy shorthand for albums featuring both guitars and keyboards. Alopecia is a liquid in the sieve of genre: put it on headphones and it begs to bump; recite lyrics aloud and people will look at you with loathing usually reserved for religious leaflet canvassers and slam poets; try and decode the words in your head and you'll only hear the melodies behind them. As for his lyrics, it's wrong to call them stream-of-consciousness, since that implies Wolf is a poor self-editor; nothing about Alopecia is lazy. It's more like 5 a.m. journal entries cut up and turned to collage. Clearly, every line won't be pure gold, but they all add up to something.
Alopecia opens with the chain-gang lurch of "The Vowels Pt. 2", its slow claps and big, watery bass hits rubbing against Wolf's most insistent rap/sing delivery, and the unlikely hook of "Cheery-ay, Cheery-ee..." somehow becoming the record's most ingratiating. Funnily, the first two lines ("I'm not a ladies man, I'm a landmine, filming my own fake death...") reveal most of the record's preoccupation. No matter what he's on about on Alopecia-- although most of the time, he's pretty easy to follow, especially compared to his Anticon brethren-- sex and death are never far from Wolf's mind. The former is pretty evident on "Good Friday", a crisper revisiting of the acoustic plucking-plus-beats of Why?'s earlier work, and an uncomfortable litany of perversions Wolf "wouldn't admit to his head-shrinker" that includes forgetting Elton John lyrics in karaoke. Wolf's voice is (putting it delicately) distinctive, but his monotone murmur here is just one example of his ability to change up his delivery.
Not that he needs to-- while Wolf fearlessly splays open his head for all to see its contents, the band is the real star (the core of Yoni, brother Josiah Wolf, Doug McDiarmid, and here fleshed out by Fog's Andrew Broder and bassist Mark Erickson). They're what make "The Hollows" work as both tentative and propulsive guitar-rock under Wolf's paranoia, and make "Palmistry" cheerful and memorable pop under the sobriety of his lyrics. "These Few Presidents" is stiff indie rock, with drum-machines and the polite blurt of an organ, until the bottom drops out and cascades of clattering percussion and yawning low frequencies soundtrack the most sincere Hallmark card ever: "Even though I haven't seen you in years, yours is a funeral I'd fly to from anywhere."
"Mr. Fifths" returns to bouncy, rap-minded delivery, with tongue-twisting lines about syphilis and the sound of high heels on marble. But they've got some nerve here, making us wait until the record's last third for its best songs: "A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under" is some strange, sublime triangulation of Steve Reich, deadpan rap swagger, and blustery multi-tracked choruses you could link to Alice in Chains. But trainspotting is beside the point-- the band creates a musical landscape so vivid that every cryptic line doesn't seem inscrutable, but more like puzzles worth unlocking.
The stalker's serenade, "Simeon's Dilemma", is creepy, sure, but then Wolf busts out the falsetto like he's a supporting character in a boy band getting his big solo moment-- you can almost hear him pointing at notes on the invisible scale with his hand. Then there's the disorienting and dreamy behind-the-beat thump of "By Torpedo or Crohn's", featuring what I guess you might expect from underground white-guy rap: cryptic lyrics about throwing up behind Whole Foods, the admission that as a kid he "didn't shit his pants much," and hoping for health food in hell. It contrasts with the rest of Alopecia, but even as a portrait of a medium existence, it's still a complicated one, and its most lasting impression after the lulling sing-song of the chorus is pervasive anxiety. It's weird to think that 2008 could be a year of reaffirmation for Anticon, but along with Subtle, they just won't adhere to the boxes we've tried to stuff them into.
If there's anything that drags down Alopecia, it's that "Fatalist Palmistry" is the only real sigh of relief on a very sober record (and even that song begins and ends on thoughts of death). Even as it charted a difficult breakup, 2005's Elephant Eyelash had a few more moments of relative sunshine. Here, Wolf's exhaustively catalogued his sins and imperfections as on "Good Friday", and even the stalker in "Simeon's Dilemma" has no release or acknowledgment to look forward to; he braces for the fall, and prepares to "deny, deny, deny." Wolf seems doomed to feel too much here-- to take in everything, and take it all very, very seriously.


Dark Sky Island is Enya's first album in five years, and it's her best since 1995's The Memory of Trees. Her songs feel sharper than they have in a long time: the textures are glassier, the ballads heartbreaking.

Dark Sky Island

It can be difficult to differentiate between Enya records. Her early work still feels only slightly displaced from 4AD and ambient music; though Enya has never been comfortable identifying her music as "new age," it shares new age's fixations on geology and infinity, which also appear in the music of contemporary acts, from Oneohtrix Point Never to Mark McGuire. But as her career advanced her songwriting and the architecture of her albums solidified into a kind of extreme aesthetic discipline, and her songs began to melt inextricably into each other. Dark Sky Island is her first album in five years, since 2008's Christmas-themed collection ...And Winter Came. I can say with some confidence that it's her best record since 1995's The Memory of Trees, but I'm not certain if that means anything to anyone, including myself. Her albums generate a very specific environment, one which envelops the listener regardless of the quality of her individual songs.
Enya's music is primarily about distance: between minutes, between people, between stars. Her songs stretch accordingly, synthesizers advancing and receding within them like shadows. Sometimes her music seems to move with the velocity of a glacier. Drums are employed sparingly. Either her vocal is the rhythmic engine of the songs (as in "Orinoco Flow", or on this album, "Echoes in Rain") or the rhythm is organized into arpeggios that sound like crystal, and which are often generated from a Roland Juno 60 synthesizer. There are also sudden clusters of sampled timpani in her music, but they provide shape to her songs more than they provide any animation. The way she constructs her music out of samples gives her otherwise warm and amniotic compositions a kind of Arctic and alien dimension.
Her songs feel sharper on Dark Sky Island than they have in years. Its textures are glassier; the individual sampled string hits on "Echoes in Rain" sound like arthritic branches sprouting from a frozen earth. The ballads are heartbreaking. "I Could Never Say Goodbye" and "So I Could Find My Way" describe an incredible distance that can't be collapsed; in the case of "So I Could Find My Way", that distance is the vastness between life and death. (She wrote it about her producer Nicky Ryan's mother.) Elsewhere she (somewhat invisibly) experiments; in "Sancta Maria" a synthesizer collides gently against more classical instruments in a way that seems to clarify each. She sings several interstellar ballads in Loxian, a language her lyricist Roma Ryan invented, though the language is mainly experienced on record as a blur of vowels. (These "experiments" of course merge seamlessly with the rest of her work; they're composed of the same glossy surfaces and drift through identical rhythms.)
Her first two albums, Enya and Watermark, are much more digressive and rhythmically diverse than her later work, including Dark Sky Island; for every gentle, shapeless ballad, there would be exercises in more precise, classical forms, or a song would unfold into a more distracted rhythm. Most of her songs since have been subject to a merciless symmetry. She drifts somewhat out of her aesthetic on Dark Sky Island's "Even in the Shadows", which pulses like an artery from the double bass playing of Eddie Lee; as a result, it's one of the best songs on the record. But it matters little. Though her approach has calcified, the environments generated by her records are still singular, a gentle, untroubled, indefinite ambience that is very soothing to inhabit. It's like being embraced by the air.


Recorded at the same time as last year’s WARM, the companion album showcases Tweedy’s aged songwriting that continues to be humble and revealing.

WARMER

Pity the companion album, the quick follow-up record that an artist swears is just as good as the predecessor it was simultaneously recorded with, despite giving it a fraction of the promotional push. And so it is with WARMER, the surprise sequel to Jeff Tweedy’s gracious 2018 acoustic record WARM. “WARMER means as much to me as WARM and might just as easily have been released as the first record of the pair,” Tweedy insists in a statement, even though the album’s very title suggests a secondary position in a sequence.
Adding to the impression that WARMER is something less than Tweedy’s most cherished material is its unceremonious physical release on Record Store Day. But then again, the joy of Tweedy’s recent releases is that they don’t demand ceremony—if anything, they thrive on its absence. After two decades of carrying the mantle of an important indie artist, Tweedy has retreated to his own Chicago studio, where he’s freed himself from expectations with a series of recordings that blur the distance between cutting-room scraps and some of his career-best songs. WARM was a revelation precisely because it wasn’t fishing for prestige. Instead of striving to be a major work, it settled for simply documenting a songwriter in his element.
Recorded entirely alone save for drums from his son Spencer, WARMER doesn’t quite wow like WARM, nor does it offer that initial thrill of hearing an artist reclaim what made them great after a relative drought. It’s a touch more subdued and a little more one-note, seemingly born more of a pleasant itch than a pressing need to create. But the humble magic of WARM carries through, and these songs are as revealing and beguiling as the first batch.
Tweedy’s usually most enjoyable when he’s enjoying himself, and he’s in an especially affable mood for much of the record’s opening half. An acoustic nod to T. Rex, “Family Ghost” is a glammy, hooky pleasure, while the waltzing “Ten Sentences,” with its slide guitar, is a zippy exercise in western swing. The grumpy contingent of Wilco fans who still think that 1999’s Summerteeth was overblown should find these recordings a happy compromise: They’ve got the same open-armed pop sensibilities, but considerably more studio restraint.
Tweedy’s songs are often a good deal more sorrowful than his performances let on. On “Orphan,” he longs for his parents and absolves them in death (“Bring them back to me/I will forgive them, let them love me again,” he begs.) He ponders his own demise on “Empty Head,” and on “Landscape” he describes the creative process in trying terms: “Pushing words onto the page/Patching where the heart is frayed.”
And yet, despite his grief, he’s steadfast in his refusal to romanticize suffering. One of the most powerful takeaways from Tweedy’s 2018 memoir titled Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) was his dismantling of the myth of the tortured artist. “I think that artists create in spite of suffering, not because of suffering,” he wrote. He mirrors that messaging on “Ultra Orange Room,” where he shakes the belief that “there is no mother like pain.” “When I was young, I wanted a masterpiece,” he sings, “Every thought I’d come across never would belong to me.” Throughout WARMER he downplays lyrics that a lesser songwriter would have mined for misery, but these songs are no less moving for that understatement. Sometimes it’s the heaviest sentiments that call for the lightest touch.


Teyana Taylor and her tremendous voice are so deft at performing modernist soul with the genre’s forebears as her backdrop, and her album features some of the best Old Kanye beats heard this year.

K.T.S.E.

For Teyana Taylor, music has been a waiting game. She started her career at Pharrell’s Star Trak label over a decade ago, but it wasn’t until 2014 that the singer released her first full-length studio album, VII. It was a smooth and adventurous pop record that only made a small splash due in part to the lax promotion behind it. Since then, her star has risen mainly for music-adjacent accolades, such as dancing sweat-slicked and ripped in the video for Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo track “Fade” and the emergency birth of her daughter Junie, who she delivered straight into the hands of her husband, NBA champ Iman Shumpert, with whom she shares an eponymous reality show. It’s finally time for her enormous voice to retake the spotlight.
Taylor’s latest, K.T.S.E. (short for Keep That Same Energy), is long overdue, but the album remains too small a platform for her tremendous vocal talent. It is the final of the five G.O.O.D. Music albums produced by Kanye in Wyoming, the least controversial—save for its delayed release—and, perhaps, the most in touch with the Old Kanye. Soul samples abound throughout, from the Delfonics to GQ to the Stylistics’ “Because I Love You, Girl” on the New York native’s personal empowerment anthem “Rose in Harlem.” The minimalist guitar noodling often found in the blues makes the flirty “Hurry” even more playful. These songs aren’t just Kanye catnip, but a marker of Taylor’s flexibility. She is deft at performing modernist soul with the genre’s forebears as her backdrop. Her singing sounds luxurious but effortless; even when she adopts a Migos-type flow on opener “No Manners,” it’s sticky and seductive.
Album closer “WTP” is one of the most compelling songs on the album—but it is a lot to untangle. Taylor floats over a pseudo-vogue beat, singing only a sultry cabaret-style hook as rapper Mykki Blanco tries on the role of ballroom commentator. The song’s mantric backbone of “work this pussy” straddles the line between a hypnotic siren call and a runway maxim for feeling like you have the best tuck at the ball. The song is de rigueur fun at a time when Vanessa Hudgens can guest on “RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars” and passively say, “I’m really into voguing right now.” Ballroom continues to face mainstreaming beyond the short reaches of Paris Is Burning and vogue house’s canonical text Masters at Work’s “The Ha Dance” making its way into all types of global club music. It feels perfect for Taylor, but it’s also dishonest and off-putting as produced by MAGA-era Kanye who has no business pilfering from anyone’s liberation sound when he likes the way it sounds when Trump talks.
Kanye’s fetid touch could sideline Taylor yet again, even though she belongs among a cadre of R&B singers, like Kehlani and SZA, whose hefty talents and distinct points of view are often relegated to supporting roles on albums and tours. This absence was probed last August by Mosi Reeves for NPR in a piece called, “Kehlani, and R&B’s Women of Color, Struggle to Be Heard in Pop Market” as Demi Lovato’s Kehlani-like “Sorry Not Sorry” went to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 while Kehlani has yet to score a Top 20 single. Even SZA—whose extraordinary, voice-of-a-generation album Ctrl earned her five Grammy nominations (she won none of them) and debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200—spent 2018 as an opener on the TDE Championship Tour instead of taking a victory lap with top billing on her own stadium outing. K.T.S.E.’s length—22 minutes, even shorter than the pint-sized ye—makes it feel like a blip on the bloated timeline of Kanye West’s 2018 when it should really be Taylor’s turn at musical stardom. But within this brief album are all the small secrets of Teyana Taylor just waiting to be delivered on a massive stage.


On Greta Kline’s third official album, pure love, self-loathing, and taxidermied dogs all find their way into her dazzling world of perennially inspired indie pop.

Vessel

Towards the end of her third studio album, Vessel, Greta Kline articulates the philosophy of her current self in 13 words: “I wasn’t built for this world/I had sex once, now I’m dead.” Kline has always written with an inspiring economy of language—such as on the 2012 collection much ado about fucking and the many elegies for her deceased dog, JoJo—which seems to honor the Yeats maxim that “sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.” But she bests herself here, on the deceptively sunny “Cafeteria.” And brutal as Kline’s epiphany may be, it contains the promise of accruing years and experience: knowing oneself. It’s a moment of pure self-possession among all the distressing frayed edges that make up your early 20s.
The 24-year-old Kline has become known as no less than a savior of indie pop and the poet laureate of New York City DIY. With wry minimalism and a voice both cherubic and droll, Kline shows that we feel the depths of the city in a granular way—like in the small defeat of swiping an empty MetroCard, or the tiny victory of ascending a platform just as the train arrives. Since the turn of the decade, Kline has taken this idea and shaped it into hundreds of cleverly-arranged pop miniatures, strummed into Garageband and posted to Bandcamp like an infinite diary. She made the twee stylings of her K Records forebears feel like a folk form. And within this humble framework, she conveyed humor, anguish, desire, sensitivity, grace, and not a tinge of eccentricity. (“Be normal, Frankie/Be normal,” goes one of her greats.) Her self-reflexive web of recurring characters, like JoJo, made the world of Frankie Cosmos feel much bigger than any one album.
Vessel edits the script a bit. If there was a reportorial flair to Frankie Cosmos songs before—a bus that splashes her with rain, a perfect day lingering on the books outside The Strand—then on Vessel, her discoveries are more insular. The album is less about the epic poem of New York than about how the brain and the heart are connected by nerves and blood—less about Kline’s place in the world, than her place within herself. Her New York optimism, in fact, feels despairingly absent; adding to the sense that things have changed is a macabre image of her beloved dog in a taxidermy museum. And while Frankie Cosmos has always been punk in spirit (here, there are 18 tracks in 33 minutes), Vessel’s unvarnished indie rock is a hair closer to punk in sound. A couple of songs do exceed three minutes—which is like “Desolation Row” by Kline’s wise standard of brevity.
No matter the setting, it is hard to imagine Kline ever being starved for inspiration. You could picture her left at a beach penning witty odes to ex-lovers based on every seashell. Kline makes things as banal as a dying phone feel profound. Her language remains a singular mix of pure love and self-loathing, like a romantic e.e. cummings bot amid a stream of raw protected tweets. One moment, on the retro daydream “Duet,” Kline is “making a list of people to kiss/The list is a million Yous long.” Later, on the charmingly faltering piano ballad “Ur Up,” she is succumbing to a modern nagging concern (u up?), but adding her own vernacular and political twists: “I wonder if ur up/I’m America/Thinkin’ of you for no reason.” It’s funny and it shakes you all the same. As ever, Kline’s words are alive on the page as much as in song. “I want in on the other side/Of your eyelids where you hide”—from “Caramelize”—is one of the loveliest lines I’ve ever heard, or read, about connection among the painfully shy. Our inner lives are confusing, this all seems to say, but Kline’s melodies are like magnets that pull us through the maze.
When Kline sings about heavy things—like the emptiness of the world, the meaninglessness of a crush, crying, death—she does so in a way that makes her subject feel bearable upon arrival. Her softness is like a coping mechanism in the face of harsh reality, which is never clearer than on the twee thrasher “Being Alive.” Each of Kline’s bandmates takes a turn singing the quintessentially Frankie chorus, as if it were too weighty to carry alone: “Being alive/Matters quite a bit/Even when you/Feel like shit/Being alive.” It all brilliantly conveys a kind of muted resignation to feeling transcendentally alive, but its sense of togetherness also testifies to the power of friendship as a way of getting there.
There is often a hard-edged realism to Vessel that Kline hasn’t exhibited before. She shows the personal is political, with blunt appeals to “be less accommodating” of others before herself. But more than ever, her writing feels straight-up despondent, with a twinge of “Daria”-like jade—there are songs titled “Apathy” and “I’m Fried”—which makes Vessel recall one of Kline’s noted influences: the lost 1950s folk outsider Connie Converse, who also expertly tied her dejection to wit. Kline sees shallowness in others and the weaknesses in herself. She feels a general disconnect: “I won’t get married,” she sings, “Not at the party.” But through it, she sends a message that someone like Converse couldn’t in her time: That young women are allowed to be dour.
Vessel is not the first album I would suggest to an uninitiated Frankie Cosmos fan. Still, as with any great book or television series, you want to continue following along, even if the best place to start is at the beginning. With her lengthy tracklists, Kline has found a way to evoke the endlessness of her unruly Bandcamp experience even as she puts out formal records—and if this lends Vessel a feeling of being slightly unformed, it’s fitting. Kline’s songs, after all, are so much about how humans are rarely fully-formed, and the universal process of growing up that also—spoiler—never quite ends.


The album-length collaboration between the pop star of the North and the rap star of the South seems like a good match, but it turns into a drastically uneven project in almost every way.

Her Loss

There are tracks on Her Loss, Drake’s new quasi-collaboration album with 21 Savage, that seem like the natural evolutions of those on 2009’s So Far Gone. “Hours in Silence,” to take one, is built around a much livelier Memphis rap song that sounds as if it’s being replayed underwater; Drake half-croons through his web of gossip and self-mythology, where cryptic comments on exes’ finstas and villains ripped from mob movies weigh equally on his mind. Like he once did with Lil Wayne, he cedes a little time to a considerably more magnetic rapper from the South before singing, over and over, that things are “my fault,” the lines begging for the “of course not” counterweight from a former lover which would absolve him, but never comes.
That song’s brief turn from 21 finds the Atlanta rapper affecting something just short of a Drake impression, the danger posed by armed enemies made to sound nearly romantic (“They looking for myyyy faaaaace”). But much to its detriment, Her Loss relegates 21 to a supporting role, neutering the textural and thematic contrast that sold “Jimmy Cooks,” the beloved “Bound 2”-style hedge tacked onto the end of Honestly, Nevermind, Drake’s otherwise dance-focused album from earlier this year. There are moments of considered writing and bursts of Drake at or near his mischievous best, but in its middle, the record becomes inert, making the bits of self-conscious misanthropy scan as strained rather than gleeful, as if the id could be focus-grouped.
At its beginning, Her Loss hints at a looser, more natural interplay. After a brief intro from Atlanta’s Young Nudy—whose roving inner-monologue style would have been a welcome destabilizing force on this album—Drake opens “Rich Flex” with the kind of rapping-to-one-another hook (“21, can you do somethin’ for me?”) that blows past So Far Gone to recall groups from the 1980s and early ‘90s. And throughout, he and 21 are most effective when they either imitate one another, as 21 does on “Hours in Silence” and Drake does on “Major Distribution,” or when they retreat to their opposite stylistic poles: Drake bounding across “BackOutsideBoyz” like the only man to ever be sad in a nightclub, 21 rapping on “More M’s” that “I been in them rooms/I never did no contemplating,” his trademark economy of language unsettling as ever.
It’s the muddy, Drake-dominated middle ground that mostly doesn’t work. As the album’s title seems to promise, Her Loss is littered with bitter, very online barbs for women who have betrayed Drake and 21, wronged them in other, indeterminate ways, or simply drifted into the digital expanse. Both artists, but especially Drake, have staked songs on this going back years; what drags down Her Loss is not so much a moral failing as a creative one, the sense that Drake is turning a big dial labeled MISOGYNY while looking to an imagined audience for approval. This is occasionally colorful (from “On BS”: “I blow a half a million on you hoes, I'm a feminist”), but more often, it’s tiresome, even sort of depressing. Quips about group chats sound as if they’ve been sourced from Twitter, and punchlines like the already infamous one that trades on rumors Megan Thee Stallion was lying about being shot by Tory Lanez cast Drake as desperate to provoke, rather than in his ideal mode: someone tortured by the competing impulses to withhold and to overshare.
This tension between the acutely memorable and the vaguely forgettable is embodied by the production. The submarine Juicy J and DJ Paul flip from “Hours in Silence” is joined by reworks of Ginuwine (“Treacherous Twins”), B.G.O.T.I. (“Spin Bout U”), and the same Isley Brothers song that previously became JAY-Z and Too $hort’s “A Week Ago” (“Privileged Rappers), all of which play on a late-2000s production style—now effective bait for nostalgists— that treated samples as found sounds to be warped into an alien texture. This suits both Drake and 21’s voices: The former’s ecstatic vocals on “Treacherous Twins” alone make Her Loss worth the streaming bandwidth. But the original compositions for the album are less effective, hampered by mixes that make each element of each beat seem oddly isolated; it makes the music sound cheaper than it surely is. (There is a different kind of cheapness at intermittent play: The hammily stupid Daft Punk flip on “Circo Loco” and the O’Jays sample that pops up halfway through “Middle of the Ocean” only to invite unflattering comparisons to AZ and Nas and Dipset.) Still, tucked between the sameness are pockets of strangeness—like the drawn-out instrumental ending to “Jumbotron Shit Poppin,” at once triumphant and melancholy.
Things never quite coalesce. On the intriguingly atonal first half of “Broke Boys”—a beat odder and heavier than anything Drake has rapped over in ages—he sleepwalks through a passage that aims to tout his decades-long commercial dominance but communicates, instead, just how flat his output has become, a project that now privileges year-over-year incrementalism over fits of excitement. “Nothing had changed,” he raps, “I’m just harder to please.” He then notes that Ferrari has begun to produce SUVs, and that he and his friends have already ordered several. “We ain’t got a choice,” he says. You imagine him pointing to a conveyor belt.


On their second album, this unruly British trio make the rare garage rock-informed record that aims for the upper reaches of Royal Albert Hall.

Pursuit of Momentary Happiness

There are bands who spend their entire careers hustling to make the right connections... and then there’s Yak. Though they’ve been a group for barely half a decade, the British trio have already amassed a coterie of mentors, collaborators, and famous fans strong enough to fill the headlining ranks of an entire edition of Desert Daze. Their 2015 EP, No, was released through Jack White’s Third Man Records; their 2016 full-length debut, Alas Salvation, was recorded with Pulp’s Steve Mackey and earned tour invites from the Last Shadow Puppets, the side band of Arctic Monkeys singer Alex Turner. For their second Third Man release, the new Pursuit of Momentary Happiness, Yak singer and guitarist Oli Burslem hooked up with his pal Jay Watson (of Tame Impala and Pond) in Perth to record at Kevin Parker’s own studio. That plan fell apart, however, when they spent more time drinking than working; still, a cameo from Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce isn’t a bad consolation cosign.
When you hear Pursuit of Momentary Happiness, you’ll understand why some of the most notable names in alt-rock are drawn into Burslem’s orbit: They recognize a true kindred eccentric. But despite his boldface buddies, Burslem found himself broke and living in his van between his attempt to write the album during a month-long sojourn in Japan, his fruitless trek to Australia, the actual sessions in London’s RAK Studios, and a mixing stint in New York. So while these songs sport the scuzz and lava-lamp patina of an obscure 1970s psych record salvaged from the dollar bin, Pursuit of Momentary Happiness ultimately maps the soul-crushing struggle to survive in the here and now. Yak match raucous, restless energy with uncommon gravitas, making this the rare garage rock-informed record that aims for the upper reaches of Royal Albert Hall.
Burslem doesn’t so much sing these songs as inhabit them, making you feel—emotionally and physically—exactly what he’s feeling. Amid a flurry of prog flutes, “Bellyache” marches in on a tough wah-wah groove reminiscent of John Lennon at his rawest, with the singer taunting some greedy fat cats reeling from their own gluttony. “White Male Carnivore” is even less subtle. Unleashing a torrent of verbal barbs like a guitar-charged Sleaford Mods, Burslem presents a savage caricature of thin-skinned toxic masculinity, with a blitzkrieged quote of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” providing the final unflattering brushstroke.
Even when Pursuit of Momentary Happiness threatens to veer toward rote early-2000s garage revivalism, Burslem’s diseased drawl adds a peculiar, unnerving edge. “Blinded by the Lies” seems like a fish-in-a-barrel attack on desperate fame-seekers until Burslem starts screaming “Kick ’em in the face!” This is the sadistic glee of someone who clearly isn’t satisfied with mere intra-song shaming.
While Pursuit of Momentary Happiness draws from a bottomless well of piss and vinegar, it counterbalances those urges with irreverence and grace. Burslem’s charms are most amplified when the band simmers down for his introspective turns, giving him the space to sashay through the brass-pumped doo-wop of “Words Fail Me” and the narcotic gospel of “This House Has No Living Room” as if he were starring in a glam-rock musical about his own life.
The latter song achieves liftoff thanks to Pierce’s slide-guitar sweeps and a climactic guest vocal routed through his familiar “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” effects. But it’s the title track that hews closest to Spiritualized’s signature prescription of self-care via hypnotic psychedelia. “I just wanna... feel good,” Burslem sings, boiling down the album’s agitated essence into a single plea. The soothing space-rock surge that accompanies those words suggests that his pursuit of happiness has been fulfilled, if only for a moment.


The first mixtape from Rakim Mayers sidesteps the usual pitfalls of the heavily anticipated debut. Piloted by sweat-free cool and stellar production choices, LIVELOVEA$AP is a triumph of immaculate taste.

LIVELOVEA$AP

A$AP Rocky violated rule number one of the 10 Crack Commandments: Never let no one know how much dough you hold. The cheddar bred $3,000,000 worth of jealousy after the 23-year old New York rapper disclosed the value of his deal with Sony/RCA last month. The offer was tendered largely off the strength of his first two videos, "Purple Swag" and "Peso", a pair of codeine fever dreams that recast Harlem World as a slick-talking color-corrected suburb of Houston.
To cool-hunting 360-wielding record executives, the videos might as well have been advertisements for the A$AP lifestyle: Colt 45, purple weed and purple drank, dice games, bike riding, brandishing Berettas, clothing designers ostensibly known only to Kanye, and a pretty blonde girl in a grill mouthing the phrase: "this is for my niggas getting high on the regular." Picture an episode of "Gossip Girl" where Blake Lively watches Traffic and subsequently opts to explore the Danger Zone of 125th and Lennox.
Unavoidable in the conversation is the enduring absence of a New York commercial force under 30. Since the emergence of Dipset and G-Unit in the first half of the last decade, NYC rap aspirants have largely fallen into four categories: ringtone wunderkinds ("This Is Why I'm Hot", "Chicken Noodle Soup"), technically skilled personality voids (Papoose, Saigon), artful traditionalists (Action Bronson, Roc Marciano, Ka), and Maino.
By contrast, Rocky was telegenic and chanting swag. His lead singles poured syrup-slow Houston ride music atop the malt liquor melodies of Harlem's Max B. What Rocky lacked in lyricism, he made up for in narcotic charisma. Seeking street-cred, Drake announced plans to take Rocky on tour. Seeking swag-cred, Lloyd Banks and Jim Jones hopped on tracks with him. Hype metastasizes fastest in New York, and it's easy to conflate the need for a standard bearer with the desire for a savior. Rocky was the chosen one. Hence, $3,000,000.
Commence the hating. Odd Future's Hodgy Beats called him "A$AP Copy." Old heads looked askance at his appropriation of styles alien to the five boroughs. Blogs painted it as the worst New York investment since the Yankees gave Brien Taylor $1.55 million. Rocky didn't help matters when he allegedly punched out a soundman at the Fader Fort and announced that he and his whole crew had adopted vegetarianism. Thus, every mention of his debut mixtape, LIVELOVEA$AP has pondered whether it justifies the price tag of a Bugatti and several dozen ivory backscratchers. Good isn't enough. People expect Rakim Mayers to be the second coming of his namesake.
Of course, the odds are slanted in your favor when you're a rapper named Rakim. You can't exactly sell life insurance. And throughout LIVELOVEA$AP, Rocky embodies the sweat-free cool of someone who has stolen the test and memorized the answers ahead of time. It sidesteps the usual pitfalls of the heavily anticipated debut; there are no ill-fitting famous rapper cameos or last-cup leftovers from $10,000-a-beat producers. Rocky makes no cornball radio plays, nor any awkward attempts to prove his depth. Even on "Demons", the record's most emotionally raw track, Rocky is preternaturally self-assured. He's got stomach pains but dreams with the inevitable triumphalism of someone who can convince RCA/Polo Grounds to hand over their Pitbull blood money. After about a minute of complaining, he's back to "fucking the chick you're next to." By rough estimate, Rocky fucks about 13 or 14 different girlfriends in the course of the album's 56 minutes. There are two different mentions of Naughty by Nature's "O.P.P.". He is nothing if not efficient.
That's the thing. It's pretty easy to point out the pitfalls of LIVELOVEA$AP. Thematic and lyrical concerns are basically limited to Rocky being a pretty motherfucker, repping Harlem, doing drugs, and getting more women than James Worthy in Houston. Rocky raps effortlessly, switching back and forth between Midwestern double-time to something that resembles Wiz Khalifa auditioning for Byrd Gang. The dark, drugged visions of Memphis rap also creep in throughout. But to his credit, he doesn't waste much time persecuting haters, preemptively striking only once on "Leaf": "They say I sound like André/ Mixed with Kanye/ A little bit of Max/ A little bit of Wiz/ A little bit of that/ A little bit of this/ Get off my dick."
It's more difficult to point out where exactly Rocky excels. He's a good rapper, but he's not Kendrick Lamar. He's melodic, but he's not a walking hook like 50 Cent. His voice is strong but not completely singular. Instead, Rocky has great instincts: the moment when he abruptly switches to his Bone Thugs-N-Harmony flow for a few bars in "Trilla", the bizarre song structure of "Bass", where he just repeats "Bass" in lieu of a hook; the last minute and a half of "Demons", where his scrambled lo-fi refrain fades into the chlorine fog of the Clams Casino beat.
If anything LIVELOVEA$AP is a triumph of immaculate taste. Rocky's ear for beats is worthy of Rick Ross or early Game. Courtesy of Clams Casino, Burn One, Beautiful Lou, A$AP Ty Beats, and SpaceGhostpurrp, the stellar production makes this something like a swag-rap generation The Documentary. He cherry-picks from the best of internet micro-trends-- taking celestial based weirdness, the funk of country rap, the stoned pace of screw, and the tape-warp of Memphis. But at the core is the French-braided, gold-toothed kid from money-making Manhattan, inflecting his songs with hints of third-generation Spanish Harlem and West Indian patois. For someone who brags, "the only thing bigger than my ego is my mirror," Rocky wisely cedes the spotlight to well-chosen guests, including Oakland's Main Attrakionz, Houstoner Fat Tony, and the larcenous intensity of L.A.'s Schoolboy Q. Meanwhile his A$AP crew shows few signs of being there for reasons of nepotism or weed carrying.
"Houston Old Head" might be the best sign that Rocky can deliver on his seven-figure potential. It's not necessarily the most memorable song, but it's his most surprising-- a swaggering lean-sipping version of Neil Young's "Old Man", with it's chorus, "If you listen when your old head talk/ You'll be straight." It's basically the opposite of Odd Future's youth worship-- the admission that occasionally your elders can put you up on game. It shows he's willing to listen and soak up different styles and sounds-- crucial elements for evolution. Even if the fusion initially seems unorthodox, LIVELOVEA$AP is exactly the sort of record you'd expect to hear in 2011 from a New Yorker who was 13 when "Big Pimpin'" came out. Rocky did what should've been expected of him; he made a very good record. Now we wait to see if he'll get clientele.


The Montclair, NJ-based rapper follows his breakout debut with an expansive, funk-embroidered recollection of his childhood, complete with an accompanying 35-minute film.

Topaz Jones: Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma

Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma

On his 2016 debut, Arcade, Topaz Jones offered a bright-if-brief introduction to his quick-witted personality. His biggest hit was the pop-rap single “Tropicana,” whose lopsided hook showcased his slippery songwriting and love of funk. Despite that, Jones bristled at the track’s success (“I was petrified of being labeled as the ‘Tropicana’ guy,” he explained). In the five years afterward, the artist dug deep into his roots in Montclair, New Jersey, and drafted a screenplay for an audiovisual project about his upbringing there. On the expansive result, Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma, Jones builds on his reflective, funk-embroidered hip-hop to chronicle his formative years with confidence and hard-hitting storytelling.
In the album’s accompanying 35-minute film, co-directed by Jones and creative team rubberband., he crafts a semiotics lesson in Black cultural history, spliced together with dreamlike staged sequences, clips from home movies, and interviews with family members, teachers, activists, and artists including Black Thought and Ivy Sole. The short, which won a Sundance Jury Award earlier this year, updates the Black ABCs, an educational program started in the 1970s by Chicago teachers and the Society for Visual Education to educate Black youth through illustrated flash cards. Jones’s version—“C” is for code-switching, “I” is for intellectual property, and so on—is a concise framing device for his coming-of-age tales and musings on education, family, and music, aided by beautifully filmed depictions of Black identity and culture from all along the East Coast to flesh out the album’s more introspective themes.
The album itself evokes Jones’s youth through spoken-word segments from family members and lively, well-defined details in sound and lyrics. During a family gathering that takes place in “Herringbone,” reminiscences of cookouts past are lit up by rhythmic bass guitar, synths, and pattering drums. The soulful instrumentation avoids pastiche even as Jones mines influences like Sly and the Family Stone and Funkadelic, with his voice pitched up on the chorus and a gimlet-eyed ending to his reverie: “You know we just imitate what the parents show/The bad habits, the trust issues, the marriage woes/We inherit those.”
That brooding, introspective side gives the album tension even in its brighter moments. Jones goes back to high school on the sunny “D.I.A.L.,” landing on different pockets of rhythm against horns, a shuffling beat, and washes of electric guitar. While recounting his hard-nosed adolescence missing class and getting into fights, a moment of clarity arrives. “I’m cycling through memories/Hindsight is 20/20 clean,” he admits. “Now you got me backpedaling/Psychiatrist not helping me/Your childhood not so heavenly.” It’s the kind of brisk analysis that typifies the album, open-hearted even as he tackles self-doubt.
Jones’s stories are amplified by the warm, easygoing backdrops. The relaxed pace lets Jones zoom in and out of conflicts, whether calling out overbearing performances of masculinity and the way he’s conformed to them himself on “D.I.A.L.” and the lustful “Black Tame,” or later leaning into a free-wheeling, surreal self-portrait on the standout, freestyle-like “Buggin’.” Over a scuffed beat, Jones raps with veering flow switch-ups about seeing a spider on the wall and imagining a day in its life, all to land on a universal truth no matter who or what you are: “If you not light on your feet, you might get crushed next.”
Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma only errs when Jones runs into the occasionally clunky punchline (“Counting every second like they sang for Rent,” “Everybody want the plug, I’d rather be the adapter”). Still, Jones is clearly operating at a more thoughtful and focused level here than on Arcade. “I think I’m finally finding me/My whole life it’s been hide and seek,” he confesses on the cinematic “Mirror.” All across this album, Jones makes that self-discovery evident with light-footed ease.

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The singer-songwriter’s intimate 14th studio album strips down to spare acoustic guitar, lingering on the moments when the buzzing world around all but fades away.

In the Shape of a Storm

For his 14th studio album, veteran singer-songwriter Damien Jurado strips away the roaring drums and vintage production of his recent works for a softly lit, spare stage of intimate acoustic guitar and voice. His lyrics alternate between dark and light, forming sharp contrasts and soft grey areas. On this spartan stage, he paints a world where love is both thrilling and unrequited, where friendships thrive and fade, and literal and metaphorical storms rattle foundations.
In the past, Jurado has invested in high concepts—he’s sang of aliens and the cosmos and killers. But here he sings from his life, of concrete moments where place often sets the scene. The words are so close it feels like a conversation, breath steaming windows or cooling coffee. “There is nothing to hide,” he proclaims in album opener “Lincoln,” a sentiment that speaks to the album writ large. In The Shape of a Storm lingers on the bare moments, when the buzzing world around all but fades away.
Love fuels much of the album’s narrative. “Newspaper Gown” and “Where You Want Me To Be”  deal with secret longing, while “Oh Weather” and “Throw Me Now Your Arms” brim with romance. “Anchors,” “Hands on the Table,” and “In the Shape of a Storm,” are journey ballads, the first two brutally tethered to love, the third in search of solace. They fold into each other like scenes from a romantic montage, from meet cute to devastation and a reckoning of what’s lost and gained between.
On an airy pizzicato waltz on album highlight “South,” Jurado recalls pondering the future with a childhood friend: “Tom and I out on the hillside / Waving at planes and pulling our wrists,” he sings. They speak of relationships and cities, and who’ll come out ahead. By contrast, the whistle solo that concludes the track recalls a lone cowboy crossing a canyon, evoking the freedom and loneliness that accompanies the coming-of-age kids inevitably crave. In seeking the future we miss what’s in front of us, he seems to say.
It’s impossible to listen to In the Shape of a Storm without also thinking of the late Richard Swift, Jurado’s longtime producer and friend, who died in July 2018. The record’s intimacy feels like a candle held in Swift’s honor, a testament to their bond. Last December, Jurado participated in a collaborative tribute performance of Richard Swift’s final album The Hex; he was the only performer to break down in audible sobs, alone onstage with just his acoustic guitar. In the Shape of a Storm is an album’s worth of that feeling. In grief many cloak themselves in distractions, or hide away entirely: Jurado treats it as an invitation to look closer, feel deeper. “Time does not heal,” he sings resolutely on “Silver Ball.” It reads like a lament, but Jurado sings it like a promise.  Recounting his highs and lows with stark clarity, Jurado has never been more resonant.


On their second album, the Boston slowcore trio’s pensive, downtempo rock has grown tighter, clearer, and at times brighter.

So Divine

Minutes into Horse Jumper of Love’s second record, So Divine, it’s obvious why the Boston trio opened for slowcore legends Duster on their 2018 reunion tour. Both bands have an affinity for allowing the space between thoughts to germinate, until a molehill-sized musing becomes an impenetrable, towering glacier. But Horse Jumper of Love are not copying their predecessors as much as making similar ideas their own.
Three years after their self-titled debut, the band’s pensive, downtempo rock has grown tighter, clearer, and at times—dare I say—brighter. Opening tracks “Airport” and “Volcano” begin where Horse Jumper of Love left off, crawling forward with unhurried momentum and quietly seething until their layers of heavy rhythms become unbearable. “Everything is freaking me out,” Dimitri Giannopoulos grouses on “Volcano” with an almost humorous nonchalance.
Giannopoulos’ lyrics are impressionistic and threadbare fragments: plants splattered with yogurt, Dixie cups of rainwater, fingers stained by cherry pulp. Like another musician who found inspiration in gallery visitors, the standout “Poison” compiles observations from Giannopoulos’ time as a museum security guard into a surreal domestic drama (“I opened my legs so you can crawl through,” he sings, channeling a very patient father). Giannopoulos maintains that there’s no single objective meaning behind his lyrics, which makes the unambiguous couplet that comprises the subsequent “Cops” somewhat startling: “All the cops burst into tears of joy/When it’s announced we’re in a police state.” It’s an unexpected moment of candor from a band more comfortable with opacity, and as the song’s heavy instrumental outro gives way to the otherworldly wooziness of “Aliens,” its bluntness feels out of place.
These songs rely on sedate, hypnotic repetition, and to succeed they require a tether, something to keep them from dissolving completely. While “Airport” and “Volcano” sustain themselves with incremental progression, songs like “Aliens” and “John Song” never fully emerge from the lo-fi haze. So Divine is at its strongest when moving forward, as on the standout “Ur Real Life,” which seesaws between distortion and restraint. “I feel OK/Under your real life,” Giannopoulos bashfully profeses, before the trio surge once more.
“Nature,” the penultimate track, is a welcome departure from So Divine’s slow burn. Lush, twangy, and a tad bluesy, the song detonates into a sudden fray of noise and concludes with an understated profundity: “It was too visceral/I don’t know/If you’ll ever see it clearly.” Many slowcore bands’ minimalist lyrics walk a fine line between the heavy-handed and the abstract. Though Horse Jumper of Love occasionally brush against both extremes, they trudge on in search of balance.

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The prolific rapper continues to push himself to vocal extremes, but his new album seldom coalesces his virtuosity into something that surpasses his signature work.

Colors

Over the past half-decade, despite a gauntlet of legal obstacles—some his own creation, others reportedly the government’s—YoungBoy Never Broke Again has become, by some metrics, one of the most popular artists on the planet. The Baton Rouge rapper, still only 22, began his career as an adolescent imitating rappers on the genre’s leading-edge, circa 2014 (Young Thug, hometown hero Kevin Gates), and has continued to search for new variations, deeper grooves within that style, even as his contemporaries have moved on to sharper, less melodic ones. Like Gates and another Baton Rouge breakout star, Boosie, YoungBoy’s songs—even the ostensible hits—are shot through with immense psychic, and sometimes physical pain. The pace and volume of his output has not sapped his willingness to mine the past for grisly vignettes; even when he sounds like he’s on autopilot, his songs have shocking revelations and incredible stakes.
When YoungBoy is at his best, he raps as if each thought is occurring at the moment he says it, leaving no time for them to be sanded down to neat syllable counts or a familiar syntax. There are times he uses this idiosyncrasy of writing to complicate more conventional pop frameworks; other times, he injects bits of singing into an otherwise stoic verse like fits of irrepressible emotion. On Colors, his sixth solo record since the beginning of 2020, YoungBoy continues to push himself to vocal extremes—in addition to that familiar growl and effusive harmonizing, there is a passage he literally whispers, and several with staccato chirps that recall Playboi Carti. But these runs of virtuosity seldom coalesce into something that approaches his signature work.
Colors is broken into distinct sections—some more effective than others—and the arrangement makes for a strange, slightly dulled listen when taken in full. It opens with a predictably furious suite (“Long Live,” “Bring It On,” “No Switch”) that culminates with closing ad-libs on song three: “I’m from the bottom of the motherfucking United States,” YoungBoy says, bitterly. The production’s tone softens on the next song before giving way to a pair of tracks—“2Hoo” and “DC Marvel”—that deliver on the album title and cover’s promise with synthy, pastel romps about sex. As quickly as this comes, it’s abandoned for a few thinner campfire cuts; then a block of Gothic street rap; and finally, the closing, five-song run of emo tracks, which could have been issued as a separate EP. The breaks, especially into that last, softest movement, are jarring, and not in a way that enhances the experience.
What does stitch Colors together is YoungBoy’s willingness to lay bare the most tortured parts of his psyche. The threatening “Know Like I Know” functions mostly as a diss toward Memphis rapper NLE Choppa, but its asides—“My mama know I’m a demon seed”—are bone-chilling, as are the flashbacks to “suicidal missions” on “Expensive Taste,” or even the hook on “Gangsta,” where YoungBoy raps, “Industry don’t like me ’cause I’m thuggin’ and I’m dangerous.” That last sentiment isn’t a rote, filler boast; with YoungBoy, it rings true.
While Colors does not meaningfully synthesize (or even thoughtfully arrange) its disparate parts, a generous listener might find the volatility of YoungBoy’s emotions from one song to the next an interesting thread on its own. “Bring the Hook,” a diss song aimed at O-Block and the late Chicago rapper King Von, is staggering in its brazenness; four tracks later, on “Snow Bunny,” he’s dedicating verse after tender verse to a white woman from Florida who sent him naked photos while he was locked up and whose phone number he lost. If there is a constant presence on the album, it’s government agents: Throughout Colors, Feds watch as pallbearers—for YoungBoy and his enemies—move around Baton Rouge like pawns on a chessboard.


Grief clarifies the air in Sleater-Kinney’s taut 11th album, which processes loss and societal turmoil and finds strength in chosen family.

Little Rope

In the process of digging oneself out, a little rope could help. By the fall of 2022, Carrie Brownstein required it. Sleater-Kinney had just begun recording their taut and cathartic 11th album, Little Rope, when Corin Tucker—her co-creator, 30 years ago now, of the genius post-riot grrrl band—received a phone call from the U.S. embassy in Italy attempting to notify Brownstein that her mother and stepfather had been killed in a car accident. Death clarified the air in the room of Little Rope, intensified its tenor, and distilled its priorities. All of the nascent songs—which amount to Sleater-Kinney’s sturdiest, catchiest rock record since 2015’s hiatus-breaking No Cities to Love and their most somber since 1999’s The Hot Rock—were immediately “dragged into the hellscape” of grief, Brownstein said in an interview, adding, “I needed to hear Corin’s voice.”
Sleater-Kinney are synonymous with determinedly clawing out a sense of self and ripping up patriarchal models to restructure the rock’n’roll order. But their Great Feminist Songbook has always included mortality, sorrow, and dying: the guttural punk standard “Good Things,” the hospital-room plea “The Size of Our Love,” the picture of a Golden Gate suicide on “Jumpers,” the dread-laced drama of comeback single “Bury Our Friends.” Even so, Sleater-Kinney have rarely plumbed such autobiographical reservoirs of sadness as they do on Little Rope, responding not only to loss but also self-doubt, societal despair, and depression. Brownstein said, “Finishing this record was basically my way of praying every day,” and her brutally vulnerable lyrics evoke spectral communion. “I forgive you, I wish I told you so,” she sings on the anthemic “Hunt You Down.” “I send your ashes my love.”
Little Rope is the fourth album of Sleater-Kinney’s second act, their second since drummer Janet Weiss left and subtracted an irreplaceable frequency. In the 1990s and 2000s, Sleater-Kinney seemed to contain their own secret language in the legendary criss-crossing interplay of Tucker and Brownstein’s dueling down-tuned guitars and counterpointed screams. “Living in Olympia, we had lost perspective on what a traditional group looked or sounded like,” Brownstein wrote of the origins of their entanglement in her 2015 memoir. “My entire style of playing was built around somebody else playing guitar with me, a story that on its own sounds unfinished, a sonic to-be-continued, designed to be completed by someone else.” Today that mysterious lexicon feels more transparent. The coordinates where Tucker and Brownstein once met—friction, unprettiness, imposing stakes, the shared consciousness of their work’s insurmountable consequence—have no doubt shifted. But still they meet. Togetherness remains Sleater-Kinney’s essence.
Tucker’s titanic vibrato and ferocious conviction are the anchors of Little Rope. She has audibly risen to the occasion, in every note, to support her friend. Little Rope often recalls the ’80s pop-rock stars of the two musicians’ childhoods and The Woods-era classic rock touchstones more than the raw spark of punk, even as the exploration and ecstasy of ’70s post-punk animates some its most thrilling songs. Tucker instantly matches the force of the monster riff crashing open “Untidy Creature,” the album’s liberationist wrecking ball of a closer, a reminder of that Black Sabbath poster on Dig Me Out’s cover.
Opener “Hell” quakes, an infernal picture of parenthood in the mass-shooting horrorshow of the United States, where “Hell is desperation/And a young man with a gun,” where, without gun control, life is merely theoretical. As Tucker screams, “You ask why like there’s no tomorrow,” the why breaks the roof off the song, and the doom becomes a demand to not look away from a world in crisis. The desolate cityscape “Six Mistakes” sprints after the tom-heavy minimalist swoop of drummer Angie Boylan (who has toured with Sleater-Kinney since 2019 and drums on the entirety of Little Rope); about two minutes in, Tucker’s hooks and Brownstein’s guitars ignite.
A lightly blown-out killjoy anthem, Brownstein’s terse, nervy “Needlessly Wild” documents those times in adulthood when repressing a restless punk ethos is not quite an option: “I’m aggressively fun/Death of the party/A lecture for one.” She bites deep into the word “hate” to express how little of it she possesses, turns “I’m totally tired” into an irreverent Fall send-up. Brownstein gives voice to her eternally maladjusted soul, too, on the self-steeling pep talk “Dress Yourself.” Though it was written before her mother’s death, it feels like a brooding maternal reprimand: “Get up girl and dress yourself/In clothes you love for a world you hate.” But the song’s unsparing depiction of depression builds as if stepping into light. As the band falls back, Brownstein’s yearning for “a new word/For that old pain inside of me” becomes an epic, clarion piano ballad, a way out through illumination.
“If you could talk, what would you say?” Tucker sang in 1997 on “One More Hour,” the immortal document of her and Brownstein’s own romantic fissure. There’s no question mark on Little Rope’s most stadium-sized song: “Say it like you mean it,” Tucker hollers boldly in a bittersweet rallying cry, reaching for a higher register with each windswept chorus, conducting all the triumph of a synth-streaked power ballad. Whether Tucker sings out to a friend, a partner, a child, culture at large—her desire is forthright. Perhaps to assuage the overwhelming uncertainty of their present circumstances, perhaps due to the confidence that accrues with age, “Say It Like You Mean It” is a beacon of solidity.
Audre Lorde once wrote that poetry is the “skeleton architecture of our lives,” offering keys to embody and unlock reality, to catalyze change. Her coinage applies easily to Sleater-Kinney songs. “Dig me out,” “Anger makes me a modern girl,” “Culture is what we make it” remain survival maxims. On Little Rope, Brownstein and Tucker craft a few more for Sleater-Kinney 2.0. “The thing you fear the most will hunt you down,” Brownstein sings, a colossal hook on the four-on-the-floor centerpiece “Hunt You Down,” drilling into her psyche as if to remember that facing the unknown brings relief. Like a Jenny Holzer slogan composed in iambic pentameter, the line is borrowed from poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch; it is a fact, as this band has always attested, more bearable with camaraderie. The lyric is a mantra when Brownstein sings it alone. When she and Tucker sing together, it becomes a monument.


More consistent and of higher quality than much of Ryan Adams' recent output-- 2002's Demolition, 2003 twofer Rock N Roll and Love Is Hell, and 2005's 29-- the prolific singer/songwriter's latest has a sonic landscape that makes any room feel oh so tastefully arranged, like an overpriced bar a few punks still go to anyway.

Easy Tiger

This was not the Ryan Adams album I was expecting. I ended up downloading the leak like a hardened criminal because these days labels send out the kind of CDs that don't play on computers (otherwise, albums might leak). Squinting at my iPod, I misread the title of one of the songs as "Ryan Adams Rip Off", and I suddenly hoped this was going to be his self-referential comedy album. You know, the follow-up to recent stunts like Adams' online-only 2006 hip-hop debut "Welcome to Ryan Adams Dot Com Motherfucka (Aw Shit)". That there's a track called "Halloween Head" only furthered my suspicions. A couple of days later I realized all the songs on my MP3 rip had Ryan Adams' name in the title; there's just a tagging error I'd somehow only noticed on one.
As it turns out, the singer-songwriter's ninth studio album since Whiskeytown is more consistent-- if more predictable and less spectacular-- than pretty much any other record in his exhaustive catalog. If 2001's Gold was a bid for the "multi-platinum ring," as Pitchfork's Chris Schiel put it, the music on Easy Tiger suggests Adams is vying for a spot on the Starbucks CD rack*. * This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in contrast to Gold, or his inspired 2000 solo pinnacle Heartbreaker, the move feels like a forced attempt to grub some crossover dollars and prime retail exposure.
Hell, it just might work, even if there's no "New York, New York" here, or "Come Pick Me Up", or whichever your favorite Adams song might be. Because even while Easy Tiger consists mostly of second-tier Adams songs, it remains blessedly free of the third-tier compositions that marred 2002's Demolition, 2003 two-fer Rock N Roll and Love Is Hell, and the last of Adams' 2005 triptych, 29. These new songs don't always offer enough to cling to after repeat plays the way his best songs do, but producer Jamie Candiloro-- who has also worked with R.E.M., Luscious Jackson, and Luna-- helps put together a sonic landscape that makes any room feel oh so tastefully arranged.
Adams has used several of his albums to stake out new (old) stylistic territory the way other bands switch wardrobes. Easy Tiger, however, is practically a compilation of his past seven years, minus Rock N Roll's new wave bent. The Cardinals, who played backup on the three 2005 LPs, return here to the loose, dueling-guitar jams of Cold Roses on opener "Goodnight Rose", and to the steel-twang country of Jacksonville City Nights on "Tears of Gold". They even leave Adams alone for Heartbreaker-style finger-picking on the lonely-boy lament "These Girls" (a cast-off from 2000's unreleased Destroyer). Despite harmonica that recalls "Come Pick Me Up", the wistful finale "I Taught Myself How to Grow" might just as easily belong on sad-bastard Anglophile outing Love Is Hell. So could another crashing piano ballad, "Off Broadway", about being lost in your own city.
For a change, let's talk about Adams' voice-- how he shapes phrases and sentences, and occasionally slides them around the edges of the beat during "Goodnight Rose" and the mellow acoustic rocker "Everybody Knows" (with its heartbreaking refrain, "You and I together, but only one of us in love"). A gifted chameleon, Adams' voice transforms from a fragile After the Gold Rush whine on "Off Broadway" and the album's finale, to a huskier, low-register rasp on dull mid-tempo rocker "Two Hearts" and the folky "Oh My God, Whatever, Etc." He goes husky to a fault on the contrived "The Sun Also Sets"-- a stark contrast to his stoic country croon on the down-home "Pearls on a String". Fittingly, the free-wheeling opener and its anachronistic vernacular ("the whole she-bang") take Adams back to the Jerry Garcia tones of Cold Roses, stretched rolling-paper-thin. If what Adams is singing often veers toward vague maxims ("Don't live your life in such a hurry/ Life goes by us all too fast"), at least he's got the delivery down.
I wasn't entirely off-base about Easy Tiger's good humor, either. "Rip Off" is just a moseying country-rock exercise that packs some brutal honesty ("It's a little too late for goodbyes," Adams opines), but chugging rocker "Halloween Head" is so much funnier than its title suggests: "Here comes that same old shit again/ I've got a Halloween head," it begins. When there's a guitar solo, Adams shouts, "Guitar solo!" And when the song ends, we hear piped-in thundershowers, straight out of the Doors' "Riders on the Storm". Just as another larger-than-life figure, R. Kelly, went from "Bump N' Grind" to "Ignition (Remix)" to the comic stylings of "Sex Planet", Adams has gone from "My Winding Wheel" to "Wonderwall" to this. Man, I really wish he'd made a whole album's worth.
The full-court press push behind Easy Tiger suggests that the AOR consistency of its music is the result of Adams' newfound sobriety. (Then again, the guy has self-mythologized so long we should assign ratings to his news clippings.) But "Two", the album's first single and a duet with Sheryl Crow, encapsulates Easy Tiger's best and worst-- a tight band, spare yet evocative vocals, but also undercooked lyrics and a twangy, light-rock approach that verges on total snooze. According to The New York Times, Adams scrawled a caricature of himself singing lyrics that spoof the song's chorus: "Blah, blah, blah, whine, whine, whine/ It takes two when it used to take one." See? Comedy Gold.


Though my hopes were briefly raised by a frazzled Christopher Lloyd in 1985, it's painfully obvious now that time ...

A Rush of Blood to the Head

Though my hopes were briefly raised by a frazzled Christopher Lloyd in 1985, it's painfully obvious now that time travel doesn't exist as a human technological capability. This being overwhelmingly the case, I will try my best to transport with words, and paint a picture of another time-- a time ever so slightly more innocent, when terrorism wasn't being used as an excuse to crush civil liberties and drop bombs on mustachioed megalomaniacs. So, drag that bottle of Orbitz out of the back of the closet, put X-Files on the VHS, and journey back with me to the year 2000.
It was a wondrous time-- we were still fascinated by the three zeros that had signified the birth of the new millennium, and many were relieved to have escaped judgment from an infinite, intangible being. Then, toward the end of the year, we began to hear rumblings from the many-headed hydra of UK rock journalism that some amazing new music had come to usher us into the New World. This music was deemed fascinating, uncompromising and utterly prizeworthy by our English brethren, who spoke in hushed tones of how it was to be the coming of "the next Radiohead," or perhaps more tellingly, "the next Travis."
This new music was produced by a band of four affable blue-collar lads from Europe's island neighbor who called themselves Coldplay, and before you knew it, there was no escaping their lead-off single, "Yellow", as it burned itself into the national consciousness via extensive radio exposure and ABC promotional spots. I, myself, was never too taken with that single, though I openly admit to enjoying the album it was culled from, Parachutes. It was innocuous, to be sure, but it was also honestly rendered, and the opening three songs, effortless and hummable as they were, were hard to deny.
Two years and a veritable avalanche of press later, A Rush of Blood to the Head has Coldplay taking a second shot at it, and to be perfectly honest, what they throw at the wall doesn't stick quite as well. I will credit them where it's due: they've admirably eschewed cloning their debut album, a path that would have been all too easy to take given that record's critical and commercial success. But while the sound of this album is more expansive, the influences a bit less obvious, and the approach more varied, the guys forgot to tote along their initial strength: the songs.
Atmospherically, a couple of these tracks are remarkable-- particularly "Daylight", with its swooping guitar and synth lines. Even its strings, which echo melodies from Suede's last album, lend a sense of drama to a song that otherwise wouldn't hold much. Midtempo non-rockers "Green Eyes" and "Warning Sign" stretch the most obvious thread back to Parachutes with their lovelorn lyrics and slightly more developed melodies. And there are also a couple of "memo to listener: we can rock, too!" moments, specifically "A Whisper" and the lite-apocalypse of opener "Politik". The latter essentially takes the blueprint of "Yellow"-- namely, the slamming, repetitive strumming of clean electric guitar-- and builds a more spacious song from it, one with more rattle and hum, but less melodic substance. Martin's double-tracked vocals hover curiously low in the mix and the band thrashes earnestly, but all the listener really comes away with is a nebular dustcloud and the sense that Coldplay want to break out of their box.
Part of the blame for moments like these rests on producer Ken Nelson, who doesn't seem to know what to do with the band's expanded sound this time out. He alternately dries up the quietest passages and drenches the louder sections with Martin Hannett-sized reverb tides. It takes a lot of discretion to handle that sound, and the folly of Nelson and the band (who co-produced) often comes at the expense of the vocals, which frequently get lost in the haze.
And that's a shame because vocalist Chris Martin has improved since the band's not-so-humble beginnings-- his voice is dramatically fuller than in the past, and he falters less on the higher notes. But, of course, he's still far from foolproof: at times, his attempts to broaden his palette don't pan out, such as during the regrettable midsection of "Clocks", where he barely bothers to add a melody to the central lyric "nothing else compares." To his credit, he does manage a pretty good verse melody here, but then he oddly shies away from what should be the hook at the end, tentatively trailing off as though he's not sure it's good enough.
That could very well be the case, too, as it's been widely posited that Coldplay nearly didn't make this album at all, fearing that they didn't have the depth to provide an adequate follow-up to their debut. I'll avoid the obvious cheap shot there and instead offer that they indeed still might. Parachutes proved that Coldplay have at least a nascent songwriting capability, and A Rush of Blood to the Head shows them testing themselves musically, so it seems logical that if their third album were to combine those strengths they might finally start to sound like the band the UK press is always going on about.
After over a half-dozen listens, I still haven't taken anything away from A Rush of Blood to the Head (by contrast, I recognized Parachutes' "Don't Panic" for the relatively tight song it is after hearing it once), and my girl, who was much more a fan of Parachutes than I was, sums it up as "boring." She's pretty much got it right. Coldplay may claw their way back from this, but it'll be a pretty steep climb.