The Besnard Lakes have committed themselves to the “studio as an instrument” mentality of Brian Wilson on each of their sweeping, meticulously crafted albums, but their fifth effort draws from natural surroundings, fixating on the skies, the elements, and animals, both real and imagined.

The Besnard Lakes: A Coliseum Complex Museum

A Coliseum Complex Museum

The Besnard Lakes are named for a real lake, but they’ve always been more closely associated with a studio. During the great Canadian indie rock boom of the mid-'00s, singer/guitarist Jace Lasek’s Breakglass Studios hosted bands like Wolf Parade, the Unicorns, Stars, and Land of Talk, capturing the imagination of music writers eager to pinpoint a connective thread behind Montreal’s music scene. Few of the acts that passed through Breakglass’s doors, however, put the studio to use quite like Besnard Lakes, who committed themselves to the "studio as an instrument" mentality of Lasek’s idol Brian Wilson on each of their sweeping, meticulously crafted albums. They’re the type of records that could have only been made by a band with a producer in its ranks.
The studio’s influence remains as strong as ever on the Besnards’ fifth album, A Coliseum Complex Museum, but this time the band’s namesake lake also makes its presence felt. For the first time, Lasek and bassist/co-lead Olga Goreas began demoing songs at the remote lake in Saskatchewan, where the couple had often discussed music but as a rule had previously resisted recording it. "It’s a great place for contemplation," Lasek explained in an interview last year. "There’s nobody up there, it’s really hard to get to and you could spend a whole day not seeing anybody, just standing on a beach surrounded by trees and water." Coliseum’s lyrics draw from those natural surroundings, fixating on the skies, the elements, and animals, both real and imagined (the album opens with "The Bray Road Beast" and "Golden Lion," each about a fantastical creature).
So A Coliseum Complex Museum is the band’s nature album, but mostly it’s another Besnard Lakes album, and more or less a mirror of 2013’s Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO, right down to its refrigerator magnet poetry title, glimmering guitars, and Floydian ambitions. "The Bray Road Beast" wastes no time channeling Dark Side of the Moon, with a star-gazing guitar line traced from "Eclipse," while "Pressure of Our Plans" and "Towers Sent Her to Sheets of Sound" each culminate in a thicket of swirling psychedelia. These songs run a bit shorter than those on Until in Excess, but they’re every bit as dense.
The album lightens somewhat in its second half, as Goreas takes on a greater role vocally. Her game spotlight turn on the slick, unusually groove-oriented "The Plain Moon" is the closest Coliseum comes to matching the hooky rush of Until in Excess’ standout "People of the Sticks." The Low-esque "Necronomicon" is even dreamier, a respite from some of the album’s busier tracks that shows how good this band can sound when they dial things back. As if to make up for that relative restraint, though, the album closes on a note of excess with "Tungsten 4: The Refugee," six minutes of heaving classic rock that signs off with a purge of blustery guitar solos.
Coliseum stacks everything in the right place, and it’s all executed with the usual precision, so why doesn’t the album dazzle quite like the last few? Like the four albums before it, the Besnards self-recorded and self-produced this one at Breakglass, and more than its predecessors, it begs for an outside collaborator, somebody to shake up the band’s routine and perhaps lend some new tricks to their shrinking playbook. The joy of a great space-rock album, after all, comes not just from the sense of vastness, but also from the potential for surprise, the possibility that a thrilling reveal could be hiding behind every turn. After five albums, the Besnard Lakes don’t have many of those big surprises left in them. They still have galaxy-sized ambitions, but the galaxy they’re constructing is beginning to feel like a very small, overly familiar place.


Fool is a playfully left-field electronic-jazz hybrid from Dutch artist Mitchel Van Dinther. It bursts at the seams with ideas, and at its best recalls the free spirit of late '90s electronic music.

Fool

In experimental music, a lack of formal training is usually less a liability than a badge of honor. Not knowing exactly what you're doing, or claiming you don't, opens up new worlds of possibility, whether you are John Cage studiously applying thumbtacks to piano strings or George Crumb dipping cymbals in water. Dutch artist Jameszoo, aka Mitchel Van Dinther, calls his debut album Fool a collection of “naive, computer jazz," but while he may be untrained as a performer of jazz, he’s no naif as an artist, establishing himself clearly in the tradition of creative, mischievous tinkerers who sometimes hide behind the tag of “naive” as a means of avoiding heavier scrutiny.
Fool is the latest release by Brainfeeder, the label founded in 2008 by Warp’s experimental savant Flying Lotus, whose stated goal for the label was to “do the leftfield stuff no one else wants to do in the beat-driven world.” Since then, Brainfeeder has been home to a great number of warm, wonderful and weird records, some of which has been awesome and inspiring and others which were not. It’s clear from first listen that Fool too is without doubt an “out there” disc, both in the most literal and clichéd ideas of the term. Not only does the record burst at the seams with ideas, but nearly each song does so, with each of the free-flowing tracks careening internally from moments of austere beauty to jazzy breakdowns, to burbling bleeps and blaps and even Pierre Boulez-style musique concrete. It’s a lot of ideas and sounds to cram into a 43 minute record in general, made only a little bit easier to digest by the fact that there are hardly discernible pauses between most of the eleven tracks.
Despite the clutter, there are a number of moments on Fool where everything clicks, in particular the album’s bookends. Opener “Flake” begins with traditional IDM electronic/synth tones that belie the rest of the record’s feel, before falling away to a startling hybrid of G-Funk and chiptune. The beautiful noise here hearkens back to some of the more effervescent and fun experimental electronic music of the late '90s and early 2000 (Plone and early Jamie Lidell in particular come to mind). Closer “Teeth” starts slowly from a lovely interplay of reverbed organ and bass underneath some creaking metal sounds and a soaring violin, before building to a sort of tiny toy orgasm, similar to (but shorter and humbler than) the climax of Daft Punk’s “Contact” from Random Access Memories*—*and all in two-and-a-half minutes. It's the most focused track on the record, and perhaps not coincidentally the shortest.
There are other great moments on Fool as well, though Van Dinther’s haphazard compositional style  means the record seesaws frequently from the sublime to the mundane, and vice versa. “Lose” follows the killer “Flake” intro but loses its momentum with what sounds like a synthetic orchestra tuning up. However after two-and-a-half minutes of dithering, the noise suddenly builds and breaks way to a gorgeous and alluring melody. The synths continue bleating but the melodic underpinnings take what were tedious sounds and turn it all into something worth remembering. Penultimate number “Toots” is structured similarly, with a warm church organ penetrating 3 minutes in, turning unfocused chirps into something powerful and direct.
Two other tracks of note on Fool feature noteworthy albeit obscure guests: “The Zoo,” featuring undersung '70s jazzbo Steve Kuhn and “Flu” featuring Brazilian bossa nova player Arthur Verocai. The former is a bit of a Take 2 on Kuhn’s original “Pearlie’s Swine” from his 1971 self-titled record, featuring a similar musical approach and with Kuhn repeating some of the spoke-sung lyrics from that song. Despite a nice and very Arthur Russell-esque electric cello intro, “The Zoo” is one of Fool’s most straight-forward jazz tracks, with some lovely vibraphones and mellifluous bass from Brainfeeder staple artist Thundercat. But for this reason it’s also less experimental, and comes off as a lesser version of the jazz which it apes. And unlike “Zoo,” which channels Kuhn directly, “Flu” seems like another Jameszoo fusion except two brief and pretty 20 second bursts of Verocai’s samba guitar in the middle of the song. But after each of the 20 second parts, the guitar disappears and the fusion returns, making Verocai’s contributions seem to be swallowed up by the earth.
Jameszoo's work is strongest when he tones down the overt jazz and instead parses the genre for specific sounds and ideas to embellish his electronic experimentations. It’s easy to imagine how a creative, introspective artist like Van Dinther might be able to harness his ample curiosity and ability in the future, but for now, a lack of focus keeps him grounded. Hopefully next time he gets there.


The legendary filmmaker and soundtrack composer John Carpenter began releasing standalone albums last year with Lost Themes. The followup is a reminder that the man was not known for sequels.

Lost Themes II

The only direct sequel John Carpenter directed in his career was Escape from LA, and the critical reaction to his follow up to anti-hero Snake Plissken's New York adventures in the post apocalyptic millennial hellscape of urban America was a mixed bag. In 1996 for the New York Times Stephen Holden wrote that the movie barely kept afloat amidst its conceit of "hopelessly choppy adventure spoof." In his over forty-year film career Carpenter has cultivated a reputation that rests on a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to camp glory. Either it touches your or it doesn't. The oodles of corn syrup blood, saccharine thrills, and canned dialogue to some is secretly self aware and to others confoundingly corny.
His career as a musician is about as long as his film career, having scored almost all of his movies on his own with an admirably spare set up of minimal synths, and he's been widely praised for the sound design of his films. One could make an argument that his ability to foreground scenes with haunting sonics saved otherwise-faltering cinematics. He used repetitive synth notes as dramatic puppet strings, yoking reactions and scary moments for all their worth. He hasn't produced a score that has lived up to this billing since his early- and mid-career work in Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, or The Thing (when he went toe-to-toe with Ennio Morricone, no less). Lest we forget, he split music duties for one of his last scores with Anthrax. But that doesn't discount the fact that film scoring is irrevocably different because of what Carpenter did, and if anything his easily imitable minimalist style is in vogue again. Disasterpeace's luxuriant soundtrack/Carpenter love letter It Follows, or Mica Levi's spare soundscapes for Under the Skin, are living examples of Carpenter's enduring legacy. And outside of film, you can hear the whispers of Carpenter in the work of an artist like Oneohtrix Point Never.
Emerging from the renewed interest, he's begun a late-career revival as a solo musician, and last year released his debut studio album Lost Themes. It was the first time Carpenter made music not directly tied to any visual accompaniment. He said that the process was freeing, and the album was quite good, extracting the best sides of his scores over the years. All that being said, Carpenter is not a man known for his sequels. And his follow up to Lost Themes, the aptly named, Lost Themes II, goes to show that some ideas, some sounds, and some themes have legible and reasonable expiration dates.
Listening to the opening minutes of the album's introduction "Distant Dream" you miss the quieter and more restrained aspects of his music making. Brow-beating synth walls and a breathy chorus open the song at backbreaking pace, and then right in the middle you're treated with a drum solo so bombastic that it sounds copy-and-pasted from a Neil Peart practice sessions. And the album never slows down from this opening salvo. The second track "White Pulse" starts on a lighter note, and features a chord progressions that would have sounded fantastic in any of Carpenter's films, but quickly descends into a confusing midsong tempo change, filled with fat drum beats, belching pulses, and more choruses. Tracks like "Dark Blues" feature frolicking hair metal-style guitar solos. And others like "Angel's Asylum" or "Hofner Dawn" made me think of light shows at a local planetarium.
Songs in the album's back half, especially the penultimate track "Utopian Facade" make the experience worth it. Listening to it, even on a long, mundane bus ride, can make you feel the hero of your own movie. It's the perfect closing credits for the journey of a normal day. But these moments are few and far between. It pops up again in brief snippets of "Persia Rising" and "Last Sunrise," but it's not enough to detract from an overwhelmingly cheesy experience. You get the feeling as you listen to the entirety of Lost Themes II that someone let their finger linger far too long on the butter button at the movie theater concession stand.


Trent Reznor’s third EP-length NIN release in the last two years is the best of the lot, with a raw and rough sound that feels both unfinished and alive.

Bad Witch

Most Nine Inch Nails albums play like documents of sharp, turbulent mood swings. Bursts of rage give way to creeping anxiety; momentary ambience begets nihilism and noise. It’s a routine so familiar by now that fans should be able to predict Trent Reznor’s shifting temperaments like weather patterns. So when he recently announced plans to release his new music in a series of interconnected EPs, there was hope that he might, in this condensed format, locate his best angles, find a few new ones, and leave us wanting more.
Depending on who you ask, the refreshingly cohesive Bad Witch is either the final EP in that trilogy or his first full-length in five years. Even Reznor himself seems slightly bewildered by it: “It wasn’t necessarily what we thought it was going to be when we started,” he explained coyly about the project. While the six-song, 31-minute record is easily the shortest thing to ever pass for a NIN album, it’s hard to deny that it does feel distinct. Its preceding releases, 2016’s Not the Actual Events and last year’s Add Violence, were concise and sporadically thrilling surveys of Reznor’s oeuvre, but Bad Witch stands on its own. Like his greatest albums, it works best as a whole, played loudly on headphones in a dark room. Like his celebrated film scores with bandmate Atticus Ross, it successfully creates an atmosphere and invites us to explore every inch of it.
Coming from one of the ’90s most notorious perfectionists, this music has a startling roughness. Breakbeats enter and cut abruptly. Rattles and buzzes predominate. Melodic motifs recur like the whole thing’s being hammered out as the tape rolls. Reznor, who recently turned 53, sounds like he’s driven by new energy, taking pleasure in embracing unfamiliar or long-abandoned textures. Both the brevity and raggedness work in his favor, evoking in spirit if not sound the recent political records by PJ Harvey. If her artistic ideal involved allowing listeners to literally gaze upon her creative process, Bad Witch attempts to provide a similar portrait of the artist. It feels proudly like a work in progress.
Reznor plays saxophone throughout the record—he’d previously buried the instrument in the mix or relegated it to one-off soundtrack work (namely “Driver Down” from David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway, an obscure gem of a song that feels like a signpost for his new direction). In the opening “Shit Mirror,” he layers his sax blasts in mournful counterpoint to the thrashing, lo-fi electric guitars. In “Play the Goddamned Part,” one of two instrumental tracks, he uses the horn for hypnotic, dissonant effect. His treatment of the instrument is a reminder of a dormant tendency for subversion—the same skill that, many years ago, allowed him to twist the components of dance music into goth anthems that could win over rock radio and mud-soaked Woodstock stages.
“God Break Down the Door” is one of a few songs where the ghost of David Bowie looms large. In that single and the extraordinary closer “Over and Out,” Reznor approximates his hero’s haunted croon from Blackstar to convey a similarly cryptic omniscience. “You won’t find the answers here,” he sings, and his warning rings true. While the album title recalls the president’s favorite metaphor, Reznor’s lyrics rarely address current events beyond a general weariness and disgust. The vicious “Ahead of Ourselves” finds him cursing humanity and debating the existence of God: Just a few songs later, he introduces a divine presence for the sole purpose of fucking us all up.
As usual, he doesn’t let himself off the hook in this envisioned apocalypse. No matter the constant, accusatory use of second-person throughout his songbook, Reznor has always been the primary target of his own antagonism. At its most beautiful and most violent, his music suggests a desire for forgiveness blocked out by crushing static of his own design. “Can this world really be as sad as it seems,” he asked in a Charles Manson-echoing early lyric. That adjective choice—not frightening or cruel, but sad—seems crucial to his outlook. In the sprawling and genuinely unsettling instrumental track “I’m Not From This World,” it’s hard to say whether the title conveys a feeling of escape or total alienation. If the catharsis of NIN albums once came from exorcising all your demons in a row, this music suspends you in discomfort.
A sense of cosmic ambiguity permeates Bad Witch. These are neither his most inviting new songs nor his most immediate, but they rank among his most urgent. While he’s not the only artist from his generation to test out the potential of abbreviated releases (Pixies precede him in this trend; My Bloody Valentine and Smashing Pumpkins are set to follow), Reznor might be the first to land somewhere unexpected through the process. “Time is running out/I don’t know what I’m waiting for,” he sings in “Over and Out,” after a long, atmospheric build-up. History weighs heavily on his mind, but for the first time in a long time, Reznor sounds like he’s got his eye on the future.


The Field's Axel Willner is among electronic music's most doggedly consistent musicians.  Virtually all of his songs are built atop techno's steady pulse, but they share ambient music's domestic utility: If Satie's "furniture music" was meant to decorate rooms, the Field's music is the room.

The Follower

The Field's Axel Willner is among electronic music's most doggedly consistent musicians. This consistency, and his awareness of it, is right there in his unshowy and uniform album covers, the design of which has remained entirely unchanged since the beginning of his career, save for a switch from beige to black two albums back. That steadfastness is entirely suited to the work itself: Repetition, extreme repetition, is its modus operandi, its bread and butter, its raison d'être. All of his songs follow same method: to isolate a single, suggestive loop within a piece of recorded music and to spin that thread out into a gauzy cocoon, warm and protective. Virtually all of his songs are built atop techno's steady pulse, but they share ambient music's domestic utility: If Satie's "furniture music" was meant to decorate rooms, the Field's music is the room.
At the base of his songs, he typically favors loops that are richly, sensuously textured—a typical snippet might consist of a millisecond-long mishmash of guitar, voice, and the merest sliver of hi-hat, to give it bite—but the source isn't important; on previous albums, he's used Kate Bush's "Under Ice," the Cocteau Twins' "Lorelei," Fleetwood Mac's "Everywhere," the Flamingos' 1959 recording of "I Only Have Eyes for You," and, perhaps most famously, Lionel Richie's "Hello," which reveals itself only at the end of 2007's "A Paw in My Face" after five minutes of anonymous shimmer, a startling kind of reverse sleight-of-hand. He's also created his own band and carried out the same techniques on them, for 2011's Looping State of Mind—the closest thing to a departure from the norm in his entire catalog. But on 2013's Cupid's Head, he abandoned his flirtation with song structures and delved back into sample-heavy web-weaving, resulting in what was then his most darkly enveloping album to date. The Follower follows its lead: It is, if anything, even denser, more dimly lit, more seamlessly contoured.
"The Follower" worms its way nervously between major and minor keys, torn between a burly bass loop and gossamer choral pads. "Pink Sun" teases stuttering whispers and pealing guitar tones over a synthetic background that shimmers like Kevlar; the reverberant voices that give shape to "Soft Streams" suggest the echoing interior of a vast cathedral. But while his details are as wispy as ever, Willner also occasionally flexes more muscle here than we're accustomed to hearing from him. The bulbous low end and hard snare thwacks of "The Follower" recall Kompakt's classic brand of techno at its most potent and no-nonsense; the yearning "Monte Verità," the album's emotional peak, distracts you with gauzy, wordless vocals and then knocks you senseless with bruising, overdriven drums.
One of the reasons that Willner's devotion to his chosen method has proven so productive is that repetition is such a powerful device. Loops can do funny things to your perception; especially when layered, they can conjure sounds that may or may not actually be present in the music—the ghostly byproducts of colliding frequencies. And with an average track length of nearly 10-and-a-half minutes, such extreme duration plays tricks upon the attention span. Take "Reflecting Lights," the hypnotic, 14-minute closer: Sculpting a ringing loop of guitar, tabla, and delay into a hypnotic moiré pattern, it's so unchanging and ruthlessly reduced that it can be difficult to orient yourself within it. It's the techno equivalent of whiteout conditions. (Perhaps that's why my computer's Shazam app had a temporary meltdown during the song, spitting out a half-dozen erroneous matches—shiny digital reggae, Italian singer-songwriter pop, minimal techno—that didn't sound anything like it. Given recent advances in artificial intelligence, it seems heartening, somehow, that Willner's heavily abstracted electronic music is apparently so human that the algorithms can't quite wrap their heads around it.)
The loop is also the perfect vehicle to experiment with tension and release, and that's where Willner really excels. His arrangements favor long, monotonous stretches precisely in order to set up the emotional payoff that comes when a chord pivots and hangs, briefly, vibrating intensely, before coming to rest where it began. The feeling is akin to two small magnets held in reverse, so that they strain each other with a seemingly impossible force, before being flipped and snapping back together again. These tensions contribute to the overwhelming physicality of his music, so viscous that it feels like running underwater fully clothed. Perhaps it's because of their sampled provenance, but his sounds have an unusual sense of material weight, of drag—you can feel the stylus carving its way through the groove, shaving off a few microns' worth of wax, with every pass of the loop.
Even on an album premised on plateaus, there are peaks and troughs; the queasy buzz of "Pink Sun" is not as immediately satisfying as the pitched desire of "Monte Verità" or the rosy glow of "Raise the Dead." And it's worth asking whether "Soft Streams" really needs to be 11 minutes long, instead of, say, nine, or even seven. Still, for these pieces to work their magic, they need to pull you in, to blot out the world outside. And just as those moments of tension need something to pull against, highlights like "Monte Verità" require a muted background against which to shine. The Field's very first album set a high bar with its title, From Here We Go Sublime, and the truth is that he got there a long time ago. But even if, at this point, he's just rearranging the furniture in God's own living room, it's still an environment unlike any other.


The final album from the punk trio captures everything that was bratty, tender, and unforgettable about its leading force, Kim Shattuck, who passed away earlier this year.

No Holiday

Kim Shattuck started the Muffs in the early ’90s as a reaction to the self-serious West Coast alternative music scene blowing up around her. “I was getting really bummed,” she remembered years later. “Stuff like the Red Hot Chili Peppers were happening and I was like, ‘I fucking hate them so much, I have to write the anti-Red Hot Chili Peppers songs.’” So she did, burying shards of Beatles and Kinks melodies in sneering three-chord punk ditties. Once she started, she never stopped.
The Muffs signed to Warner Bros. for their first three records, but despite Shattuck’s sticky melodies and instantly recognizable sing-scream, success on the level of California contemporaries Green Day and the Offspring eluded them. Their biggest mainstream moment remains their disaffected cover of Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America”—it plays during the opening credits of Clueless. (Shattuck hated that, too. “The lyrics are not good. Like, they talk about East California. What is that?” she told TIME in 2015.) Shattuck seemed to know her band wasn’t cut out for the big time, and was unfazed: “[Our label has] this job to break our band,” she told Rolling Stone in 1995. “And I totally feel sorry for them because it’s not going to happen.”
Instead, the Muffs attained a cult status that grew steadily over the years. By the time Shattuck briefly joined the reunited Pixies—and was subsequently kicked out, possibly for being too extroverted—there was hardly a punk songwriter alive who hadn’t been touched by her throat-shredding screams, lively melodies, and bratty, tender songwriting.
So when, two weeks before the release of their seventh album No Holiday, Shattuck’s husband of 16 years shared that Shattuck had died of ALS, the world briefly stopped. Shattuck had never publicly talked about her diagnosis, so her passing came as a devastating shock. An outpouring of grief came from her contemporaries and those she’d inspired. The forthcoming record suddenly took on new meaning: This would be the final time we’d ever get to hear Shattuck’s wail.
The songs on No Holiday were written throughout Shattuck’s career, from 1991 to 2017, so it feels like a best-of record, or a retrospective. “We wanted to create something lasting and special,” drummer Roy McDonald said of No Holiday. If a young person hadn’t heard of the Muffs, it would be a safe bet to hand them this record and say “start here.”
Shattuck’s voice feels raspier and more raw on some of the album’s 18 tracks, a little less energetic, but the musical chemistry between her, McDonald, and bassist Ronnie Barnett remains untouched by time. At the end of “Lucky Charm,” her voice twinges upward with distinctive snideness: “You should be in the mooo-vieesss, yeeeeah.” It’s good to have her back.
On a few songs, it feels as if the full band has been retrofitted onto Shattuck’s acoustic demos. That mix-and-match sound is an interesting but confusing choice: Some of those songs, like “Happier Just Being With You” and “Too Awake,” would have sounded just fine with just Shattuck’s voice and acoustic guitar. The full band makes it harder to hear her, which is—now more than ever—what listeners want most.
The most unexpected moment on No Holiday comes in its final track, “Sky.” In contrast to nearly 30 years of sneering, eye-rolling, screeching, and fighting back, on “Sky” Shattuck offers earnest lullaby over just an acoustic guitar and a church organ. “I am laying on the nice cool grass and now I’m thinking/Wondering if the birds can fly straight up and there’s no ceiling,” she sings, tenderly. “I know I can’t touch the sky/I know I’ll wonder why.”
“Sky” is a tragically perfect way to close out what is now the Muffs’ final record. Shattuck will be remembered for many things: her outsized-but-undersung contribution to the punk lexicon, her lyrics that were mean and sarcastic and sensitive and sweet, all at once. But “Sky” is a poignant reminder that she was an unforgettable songwriter and a buoyant spirit.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


Here Come the Rattling Trees is the 11th album by the baroque pop ensemble the High Llamas. Scored for a play of the same name originally presented in London, the album scales back on the sumptuous orchestral colors of their work while staying true to their classic blend of '60s pop and exotica.

The High Llamas: Here Come the Rattling Trees

Here Come the Rattling Trees

Here Come the Rattling Trees, the 11th studio album by baroque pop ensemble the High Llamas, exists as a means to an end. As the cover says, the music on this short and sweet LP was written by the group’s leader and principal songwriter Sean O’Hagan to accompany a theater production of the same name, with the brief interludes and tunes meant to be woven between monologues by the play’s six characters. Initially presented in October of 2014 at the Tristan Bates Theatre in London’s Covent Garden, the intention is to eventually take the show on a tour through Europe and the U.S. But since O’Hagan has no theatrical bona fides to speak of, the only way to make it happen is to treat it like the promotional campaign for a new record.
Revealing Rattling Trees as a soundtrack from the jump puts the Llamas at an advantage and a disadvantage. It helps to explain the structure of the album, which kicks off with an overture that touches on all the melodic themes to be heard later, followed by quick instrumental bits that precede actual songs. But without the full text of the play or a chance to see it before hearing the music, these pleasant-but-slight songs become more negligible.
It’s a shame, too, because the play happens to be quite affecting. Rattling Trees uses extended anecdotes to comment on the rapid changes happening in London, particularly in Peckham, a region in the southeastern part of the city where O’Hagan has lived for over 20 years. As the performance moves along, we hear from a plumber, a cafe worker in her sixties, a decorator, a housewife, and a health fanatic, each lamenting or appreciating the monied middle class pouring into the neighborhood and bringing with them higher rents and expensive tastes.
With just the music to go by, the lyrics lose much of their impact. The references to the "slogans splashed above the mess that they made" in "McKain James" don’t stick as deep without first hearing the decorator tell of his youthful days spray-painting anarchist jeremiads on the walls of apartments he was contracted to work on (before covering the graffiti with wallpaper or a coat of paint). So, too, does the sparkling "Livorno" need the context of the plumber marveling at the pretentious attitudes of the bourgeois couple he’s working for to really give the song some weight. Other tracks fare better: The lovely "Jackie" leavens the melancholy of the cafe worker’s rather drab day-to-day existence with a bouncy, harpsichord-driven swing and an impeccable chorus, and the title track recalls the early solo efforts of Paul McCartney with bulbous bass tones and electric piano.
During the Covent Garden run of Rattling Trees, the members of the High Llamas were set onstage in a semicircle,with actors standing in the middle delivering their lines. This meant that O’Hagan was forced to strip back the instrumentation considerably, and he really rose to the challenge: Even without those extra Van Dyke Parks-like splashes of symphonic color, the album is still instantly recognizable as a High Llamas production. Instead, the space gets filled with quick stabs of upright piano or wah-wah-ed guitar lines or, on the plucky "Mona’s Song," some tight vocal harmonies repeating a single phrase.
The play is set in front of an old leisure centre that has been bought up by a larger company and rebranded with a new name and look. As each character enters the show, they comment on this change, often wondering why the change needed to happen. Though O’Hagan surely didn’t mean it as such, that stands as a tidy metaphor for the pop music landscape that he and his Llamas enter into every few years or so. For 25 years now, the project has wondered aloud why the songwriters of the world needed to step out of the warm bath of the orchestral pop and exotica sounds of the '60s and '70s. We can admire him for staying the course all this while, but we also need to ask: Even when the music is wrapped up within the framework of a theater performance, will there be anyone listening?


On her second album proper, the Scottish producer/composer/singer-songwriter dials up her rock band’s dynamic power, creating a nervy, chaotically controlled embodiment of contemporary uncertainty.

FIBS

The clarion sounds that opened Anna Meredith’s first pop recording—a Novation synthesizer’s brass and tuba presets and a cello, on “Nautilus,” from the 2012 EP Black Prince Fury—simultaneously created her musical trademark and set her on a fresh path. The phrase is a bold, symphonic fanfare that, once the rock drums hit, announced a genre-free space while helping Meredith ascend from the contemporary classical sandbox. The song became something like the Scottish composer/producer/singer-songwriter’s sonic signature, returning on subsequent releases (her 2016 full-length debut, Varmints, as well as Bo Burnham’s 2018 film Eighth Grade, which also features her gorgeous original score); variants now reappear throughout her new album FIBS. Most importantly, it highlighted how Meredith brings musical tropes familiar to the masses—in this case, marches of cinematic elephants and stormtroopers, or textures of grime and Southern hip-hop, or the pulse of Carnival parades—into rarified arts spaces, challenging assumptions about class, meaning, and volume inherent to both concert halls and clubs, while trying to keep the fun and the seriousness in both.
These are also among the social and narrative tensions at the heart of FIBS. With her second proper album, Meredith shelves the notion of a small group making symphonic dramas and instead takes increasing advantage of the dynamic power that a synth- and guitar-driven band can generate, in the way that some downtown New York composers did during punk’s heyday. The shift also informs her music’s sentimental upheaval, giving it an increasing immediacy and wrapping it in a vaguely political air. FIBS never stoops to proclaim itself pro- or anti- any forces currently in diametric opposition (in the UK or around the world). But it is music that embodies this precarious historic juncture, mirroring the chaos and instability of the contemporary moment in its very form. In this, Meredith has written a set of pieces that better speaks to our era than her classically trained peers’ middlebrow drones and respectful sit-down music. FIBS is just too loud and nervy for that—kinda like the newsfeed.
Even before “Nautilus,” Meredith seemed predestined for this terrain, with one foot in pop and another in new classical, and choreographing those limbs to brilliant effect. Her catalog—a solo for bassoon amplified like punk guitar; a Steve-Reich-meets-Stomp “Body Percussion” orchestral piece; an IDM mash-up of a brunch classic, etc.—is recommended to anyone bored by much of what passes for contemporary repertoire. After “Nautilus,” Meredith’s pop miniatures also reflected an art-school nature. It’s in her non-traditional instrumentation and songwriting, whose complex structures and crisp lyrical narratives have precedents throughout the UK’s  post-punk, art-prog, synth-pop timeline. Varmints was a wonderful embrace of this space, full of sinewy pop songs and instrumentals that echoed the propulsion of Pixies and New Order, often heavy on the backbeat, always rightfully assured in their own greatness.
Yet from its title on down,Varmints also hinted that, while the drums and instrumental runs were intent on activating the serotonin, more diseased thoughts about the state of our institutions were also present. “Taken,” which featured Meredith amid a trio of voices and has the dark, muscular feel of synth pop on steroids, was unsparing in its take on a world that the sun once never set upon: “What seemed a good idea has fast become a fraying waste of time.” FIBS picks up the sentiment three years later, when those words not only don’t sound the slightest bit dated, they’re the foundation for the current rot. “Inhale Exhale” is FIBS’ own propulsive sequencer-and-toms prologue, but Meredith sounds like she’s singing from an island, exasperated: “You say you're dancing in the deep end/But to me, it looks like drowning/All this talk of saving, but I'm out of my depth.” Her wordless vocal ushers in the song’s primary melody, and a title-repeating chorus arrives with the kick drum and a stuttering bass synth; when the song rolls on, with all the layers working as a single mechanism, it explodes as a trebly pop runaway, at once hyper-vivid and hyper-tense. It is an expertly produced rush that foresees an imminent crash, delivered in a voice that has already lived its consequences.
That chaotic uncertainty is the reality Meredith repeatedly presents on FIBS, both emotionally and through musical structure. It is the work’s deeper raison d’être, even when the individual pieces seem digestible, pretty, or even safe. The feverish “Sawbones” is a prog-rock hallucination, fluidly Frankensteining one sonic caricature onto another, juxtaposing high-pitched staccato keys with bass-synth splurges, mutating into guitar arpeggios that interact with disco hi-hats, and so on. “Calion” could easily qualify as a beatless techno piece, its muted kick appearing beneath undulating melodic percolations; yet soon enough a dubwise low end appears like an earthquake to destabilize the whole thing, as the swirling mass tumbles all around. “Bump” brings back the signature “Nautilus” textures with an even more egregious “Imperial March” nod, as Jack Ross’ guitar drills into its structure to make this song too fall apart before reconstituting as a mammoth one-note guitar-synth riff. “Paramour” tacks that familiar brass fanfare (tuba now courtesy of Tom Kelly) onto a hyperactive, electronics-driven instrumental, pairing them with a squealing guitar in the closest thing to funk syncopation that Meredith can be accused of. All of it is intense music of supreme control and a designed anarchy, full of loud proclamations that go a long way toward embodying the album’s title.
The parts of FIBS that lie on the outskirts of these Technicolor spasms of pandemonium bring meaning and reprieve—on occasion, simultaneously. “Killjoy” musically quotes the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” while applying Meredith Monk-like vocal repetitions to wonderful verses that showcase a confrontation with modern life (“Thanking you for leaving/Do what’s best to save face…/Thanking you for stealing/What's left of the daytime”); the chorus follows these up as an assertion of personal will. “moonmoons” and “Limpet” are two of the softest and most musically straightforward instrumentals Meredith has set to record—the former a lovely duet between electronics and cello in which clouds gather and dissipate, the latter a guitar-heavy ride with a hook that features Meredith’s take on a Clearmountain pause. Those songs’ simplicity suggests the deep breath required of survival. Yet survival is not at all assured on the closing elegy “Unfurl,” where a suddenly vulnerable Meredith intones, “Something's bound to break/It better not be me.” And who could blame her?
There is, throughout FIBS—and Anna Meredith’s career—a necessary act of pretension at play. Not the act of putting on airs or simple mimicry, but of pretending, what Eno once called the “thought experiments [of finding] out what it would be like to be otherwise” for culture’s benefit. What began with Meredith turning the Novation presets up to 11 and seeing how they fit with Bonham-like drums has, rather strangely, ended up a musical expression of dancing through a world full of lies, not wanting to stop, and seeing where else it takes her. Back around “Nautilus,” Meredith said that, to her, “honesty is more interesting than originality.” Her acts of pretension have seen her wind up with a fair bit of both.


There are glimpses of Vitalic's old energy on Voyager, but he's dialed back on the maximalist energy that made his dancefloor anthems radiate.

Voyager

Pascal Arbez-Nicolas has spent years trying to wriggle free of Vitalic’s 2001 breakthrough debut Poney EP. It still casts a long shadow; the chain-driven turbo-fluttering hiss of “La Rock 01” and the horror/euphoria grind of “Poney Part 1” were the early alley-oops to the monster jams of Ed Banger’s mid-’00s heyday. But after OK Cowboy fleshed out his geeked-out aggro electro-house and Flashmob let it grow even wilder, Rave Age revealed the limits of his overblown attack: sooner or later, like any powerful drug, all you get from ramping up the dosage is a baseline feel of familiar getting-by normality.
Voyager comes more than a decade after OK Cowboy amplified Vitalic’s thrilling role in the French Touch scene, and it feels like it. There are glimpses of the old feverish energy on the record—Arbez can still bring the no-fucking-around 4/4 with big stompy kicks—but to what end, it’s never entirely clear. The one thing you could definitely expect from a Vitalic record, good or bad, was abrasion. But Voyager power-washes all the distortion away, leaving a shiny surface that feels anonymous in its spotlessness.
Without that leviathan hum, a lot of Voyager’s cuts stall out at “mildly exciting.” Most of the music’s your standard uptempo placeholder dance, detached from fleeting trends but also uninterested in finding a new niche. It’s not like Vitalic-Goes-Synthwave would be a guaranteed improvement over the water-treading stasis of tracks like “Levitation” or “Use It or Lose It,” but it’d at least hint at something besides an effort to carry a torch for blog house when everyone else has moved to different platforms.
The ostensible anthems on Voyager range from meaningless sincerity (the downtempo loneliness-cliche checklist “Don’t Leave Me Now”) to meaningless goofiness (“Sweet Cigarette” is more or less what would happen if “Warm Leatherette” was about Christopher Buckley’s “Thank You for Smoking” instead of JG Ballard’s “Crash”). And the closest things get to an engagingly scuzzy headfirst dive into the weirder corners Vitalic used to skulk around in is “Hans Is Driving,” another downtempo navelgazer that sounds like a cruel parody of Drive-chic and features Miss Kittin evoking Euro-club aimlessness. It’s the kind of stuff that really works when there’s no shame and no half-measures, but Voyager’s attempts to pay homage to disco ancestors while paring his maximalism way back make it all feel like a dance night in an unfurnished room, all speakers and no lighting.


The French electronic titans’ fourth album is sleekly aerodynamic, expensively appointed, and stacked with bold-name guests like Tame Impala and Thundercat. If only there were some real drama.

Hyperdrama

For a brief spell on Hyperdrama, Justice’s fourth studio album, it’s 1991 all over again and the rave gods are raining down lightning bolts from on high. Justice have always been time travelers, and on “Generator,” the album’s second track, they zap us back to the past with a serrated synth that tears across the stereo field like the Jaws of Life ripping through a crumpled Delorean. The sound is a reference to Joey Beltram’s oft-sampled “Mentasm,” a cornerstone of early-’90s hardcore techno and everything loud and rude—jungle, gabber, breakcore, and, however tenuously, Ed Banger itself—that followed. It might be the heaviest thing the French duo has ever set to tape; given their history (hard-rock riffs, Marshall stacks, a song called “Heavy Metal”), that’s saying something. But that very heaviness also makes the song an outlier on the album, because Justice have never sounded more polished.
Magpies in leather jackets, with cigarettes forever dangling from their lips, Justice used to make a point of being provocative. Their records were awash in jagged sawtooths, clashing frequencies, and bit-crushed drums. They brought playground swagger to hits like “D.A.N.C.E.” and winkingly channeled stadium-rock dinosaurs on prog behemoths like “New Lands.” But on Hyperdrama, their first album in eight years, they sound professional, meticulous, and surprisingly grown up. This time, rather than the ersatz hard rock of their debut, the ostentatious prog of Audio, Video, Disco., or even the disco AOR of Woman, they channel the cocktail of dance and ’80s pop developed in the 1990s by their French touch forebears, particularly Alan Braxe, whose “Music Sounds Better With You” (made with Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and the singer Benjamin Diamond, as the trio Stardust) set the gold standard for Gallic dance pop.
It’s a slick sound, sleekly aerodynamic and expensively appointed, and buffed to an ultra-vivid sheen. On the opening “Neverender,” Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker floats atop a sumptuous bed of pulsing keys; the claps and cymbals are so crystalline that they might be jewels in a vitrine. The choral pads, car-chase arpeggios, and starry-eyed crescendo of “Dear Alan”—surely a tribute to Braxe himself—are as sumptuous as the wriggly disco-funk bassline is spry. Track after track is bathed in a hyperreal glow that’s a world away from the duo’s scuzz-encrusted early work. At some point, Justice apparently traded their cigarettes for vapes, and something of that transition feels palpable in the toned-down sound of Hyperdrama: the discreet tug instead of the defiant drag, the blue LED in place of the burning ember.
Incongruous mash-ups, like the disco vamps and grueling techno of their 2007 single “Stress,” have been part and parcel of Justice’s music from the beginning, but on Hyperdrama, digital/analog hybrids—like Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, or, indeed, a gleaming, futuristic vape pen—assume subtler forms. In “Generator,” the duo offsets the apocalyptic “Mentasm” stabs and pumping piano-house chords with sprightly disco bass, as though flickering between Fantazia and Studio 54. It’s a novel juxtaposition, and skillfully executed, though something about its “Hey! You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” setup feels slightly too clever, better suited for a creative director’s mood board than the messiness of an actual dancefloor.
“Afterimage” performs a similar bait-and-switch, balancing doomy techno synths with the breathy rapture of guest singer Rimon’s ecstatic sighs, but the contrast isn’t quite provocative enough to save the song’s expression of bliss from sounding generic. It doesn’t help that most of the guest singers Justice employ here—Parker, Rimon, Miguel, Thundercat, and Manchester electro-pop duo the Flints—opt for a similar falsetto range, making them all sound interchangeable. The clash of the totems is more interesting on “Moonlight Rendez-Vous,” a two-minute sketch that poses an unusual thought experiment: What if Wham!’s “Careless Whisper” had been recorded in the style of Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack?
The album’s best tracks are the most audacious: the unbridled joy of “Dear Alan,” a veritable fireworks display of pinwheeling arps and halo effects; the over-the-top prog-disco fusion of “Incognito,” which builds to a distorted climax reminiscent of Justice’s rebellious early hijinks, now rendered in state-of-the-art hi-def. But too much of it is simply too smooth—ploddingly mid-tempo, curiously risk averse. Nine songs into a 13-track run, “Explorer” bogs down in a morass of Phantom of the Opera synths; “Muscle Memory,” which follows, could have been a chance to show off their analog chops, but instead it feels like a Stranger Things retread—a synthwave set piece that’s been done many times before.
Justice don’t call their guest performers features; instead, the singers are credited with “starring” roles. A minor detail, perhaps, but one that speaks to the duo’s aims. Like Daft Punk, they’ve always understood the power of a strong visual, and those “starring” credits suggest they’re thinking of Hyperdrama in terms of spectacle—if not a movie, then a headlining festival slot. At Coachella this month, the duo stood stock still and let their light show do most of the work, while the disembodied voice of Kevin Parker looped into a crescendoing approximation of the kind of techno that’s only fleetingly audible within Hyperdrama’s carefully tended grounds.
It’s hard to escape the sensation that, beneath the album’s pristine surface, there are two dynamics at war: the insouciant energy of “Incognito” versus predictable, frictionless, strangely inoffensive anthems like “Neverender.” The eccentric versus the consummate professional; the maverick versus the safe bet. Yet for an album called Hyperdrama, actual tension—the kind of friction that once made Justice’s music feel so vital—is otherwise frustratingly hard to find.


Four decades in, Jad Fair retains his innocent abandon on Half Japanese’s sixteenth studio album Hear the Lions Roar.

Hear the Lions Roar

For over four decades now, Half Japanese have been one of indie rock’s most reliable sources of positivity. Jad and David Fair started the band in the mid ’70s as a giddy experiment in the limits of guitar pop songwriting. They didn’t tune their instruments properly and they chose not to play chords, embracing the infinite possibilities that the electric guitar can offer if you approach it without regard for the patterns and scales most players find themselves locked into. Freed from the shackles of traditional pop songwriting, the Fair brothers embraced something a little shaggier, using their freedom as the basis for ebullient songs about love and monsters, as David once put it, each as unrepentantly gleeful as the gap-toothed grin of a young child. Their 2014 album was, appropriately, called Overjoyed.
All of that innocent abandon is still at the heart of the band on their sixteenth studio album Hear the Lions Roar. Within the first 30 seconds of the album opener “Wherever We Are Led,” over brillo-scoured guitar work, Jad begins wailing, “Refuse to bend, refuse to break, only good we will take.” It scans as an unwitting mission statement for the record—a promise to follow their their muse and tell the good news through posi-pop sloganeering and slapstick surrealism. There’s little on the record in the way of anxiety or fear, unless you count the sci-fi Southern rock of “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” which recounts a bungled science classroom prank that results in the unwitting creation of bloodthirsty worms several stories tall—all soundtracked by the gentle wheeze of a distant slide guitar. It’s somewhere between genius and moronic, which is pretty much where the band have always set up camp.
As the years have gone by, they’ve become more proficient as musicians, transforming their early instrumental scribbles into legible riffs, at least if you squint at them right. Jad even admitted in a recent interview that even tunes his guitar sometimes. This goes a step further on Hear the Lions Roar, on which Jad is only credited with vocals, and the rest of the current lineup—John Sluggett, Gilles-Vincent Rieder, Jason Willett, and Mick Hobbs, all on multiple instruments—beef up the vibrant playing that’s come to define the last couple decades of Half Japanese releases into more standard indie rock.
The taut shuffle of “On the Right Track” or the gentle lilt of “Do It Now,” in particular, feel compact, tight, and forceful in a way that their material often hasn’t. But because they built their name on idiosyncrasy and spontaneity, that straightforwardness of *Hear the Lions Roar *can cut both ways. Some of Fair’s bug-eyed mantras feel even more impactful when the music can swell in tandem, but there’s also the threat of just sounding like a very good rock band than like the joyful mess that they can be.
But whatever the result of the newfound muscle, they never really slip into mundanity, solely on the strength of Fair’s voice and songwriting. After all these years, his wiry voice is still hits every song with a shock that’s equal parts joy buzzer and defibrillator, each barely in-key bleat alternating between laughable and life-affirming. That’s a big part part of what makes Fair’s music worth following, both with Half Japanese and on his own. He’s always succeeding in spite of his limitations—even when they’re self-imposed. As with all of their records, the worst you’ll come away with is a smile, and most days that’s enough.


The Chicago-based indie rocker beefs up her sound on her third LP. Foregrounding her confident voice and formidable guitar skills, it’s a compact, muscular record guided by a single-minded intensity.

Tomorrow’s Fire

For the past few years, Ella Williams has been relentless. The Massachusetts-born, Chicago-based songwriter released her debut album as Squirrel Flower in 2020 and then, after contracting COVID and recovering, recorded and released a follow-up in 2021. Last year, she gathered enough material for a self-produced EP. For a young musician—Williams is 27, and started recording music when she was 18—such a sustained level of output could be exhausting, in many senses of the word: It might lead to burnout, or empty the reserves of what she has to say. But on Williams’ new record, Tomorrow’s Fire, all that effort has only intensified her ambition. It’s a beautiful, searing record in which Williams channels listlessness and desperation into sweltering, explosive rock songs.
When she first began releasing music on Bandcamp, Williams winkingly tagged Squirrel Flower’s output, recorded when she was a student at Iowa’s Grinnell College, as “cornfield-folk,” “prairie-pop” and “post-Monsanto.” That early songwriting and her debut album, I Was Born Swimming, were promising if somewhat fragmentary folk-tinged indie-rock, and her music became bolder and more brooding on her sophomore record, Planet (i). But Williams’ true strengths have long been her fierce guitar skills and powerful, confident voice, and on Tomorrow’s Fire, she and producer Alex Farrar (known for his work with artists like Wednesday, Indigo De Souza, and Snail Mail) push both to the fore. The resulting album—made with a sharp studio band, including MJ Lenderman, storied Asheville collaborator Seth Kauffman, and members of Bon Iver and the War On Drugs—is compact and muscular; Williams refines her singular voice as a songwriter, bringing a focused, single-minded intensity to her songs without giving the impression that she’s ever repeating herself.
Throughout Tomorrow’s Fire, Williams combines graceful vocal harmonies and big, reverb-laden guitars in a way that makes her songs feel cavernous, as at the cathartic end of “Almost Pulled Away,” or on the fuzzy, blistering “Canyon.” “When a Plant Is Dying,” a slow-burning ode to perseverance under grueling conditions, features a full minute of guitar solos that burn bright with indignation and pent-up frustration. But Williams knows her way around a hook, too: “Intheskatepark” is buoyant and sunny, verging on indie pop, and “Alley Light” has a catchy heartland-rock sensibility. Tomorrow’s Fire’s opener is actually a reworking of one of Williams’ earliest songs. Here, what was originally spare and lonely becomes hypnotic and lush, washing Williams’ voice in a cascade of harmonies—a testament to her creativity in the studio and increasing command of her sound.
These songs feel ambitious but not unbridled—Williams’ vision has depth and purpose, and her lyrics tell of a willingness to confront the forces standing in her way. “You hate when I do that,” she cries in “Stick,” before fighting back: “But I hate when I change/So I won’t be changing.” “When a Plant Is Dying” and “Full Time Job” both tackle the exhaustions of working as an artist: “There must be more to life/Than being on time,” she sings on the former. On several songs, she resists domestic boredom with aplomb: “Never wanted to be someone’s wife/Give up my whole life,” she sings on “Full Time Job” as the band thrashes beneath her; on the aptly titled “i don’t use a trash can,” she warns, “I’m not gonna change my sheets/I’m not gonna clean the floor.”
The album’s title comes from a novel written by Williams’ great-grandfather, who named it after a line by the Medieval French poet Rutebeuf: “Tomorrow’s hopes provide my dinner/Tomorrow’s fire must warm tonight.” That aching tenacity is reflected across the record. In “What Kind of Dream Is This,” Williams sings longingly of the moment when “the night’s so dark it’s almost light again.” “When a Plant Is Dying” takes as its central metaphor the wind picking up fresh seeds released by moribund vegetation: Struggle or suffering, the song offers, can create the possibilities for new growth. The problems around and within us may be relentless, but Williams’ fire leaves her emboldened, rather than exhausted, by the process of pushing back against the things that seek to hem her in.


Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress is the first album of truly new material Godspeed You! Black Emperor have released since reforming after their long hiatus. The album is Godspeed to its core, moving from thin drones to Wagnerian pomp and circumstance and back again over long, patient stretches.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress

Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress

When Godspeed You! Black Emperor returned to record after a long hiatus with Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! they weren’t quite releasing new music. The album consisted of pieces the Montreal collective had composed during the early 2000s, back when they were at their most prolific, and the album was simply a matter of getting long-performed work down in the studio. Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress contains music of a more recent vintage, which is potentially significant because following Godspeed has always meant grappling with a basic question: When you have one of the most distinctive sonic profiles in music—that trademark quiet/loud mix of soaring guitars, epic strings, and field recordings—how important is it to branch out beyond it? Do we want a Godspeed album that sounds like anything but Godspeed?
Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, conceived a decade after their initial run, when they defined everything this band is and should be, does not offer a new wrinkle. There is nothing about this album—from the particulars of the recording to the riffs to the arrangements—that would have sounded out of place if they had released it in 2002. Change is not Godspeed’s way, but the other side of that coin is that, despite many imitators, there’s also nothing else out there that sounds quite like them. The shifts on this record involve pivots more than actual movement: At points, guitars are unusually prominent and the music feels a bit heavier. It’s also their shortest album. But beyond a few such tweaks, the album is Godspeed to its core, moving from thin drones to Wagnerian pomp and circumstance and back again over long, patient stretches.
As much as any record they’ve made, the music here is meant to work as one, and sequencing and flow is everything. They’ve been working out this material live for some time now, and fans have taken to calling the whole "Behemoth", an appropriate descriptor given its heaviness. Though there are four tracks, the album really happens in three movements. The first and third contain the slowly building refrains and crashing climaxes, and the middle two tracks are more of a single 16-minute piece consisting of drones, gushes of guitar feedback, and fragments of strings. On the vinyl version of the album, the A-side cleverly ends with a locked groove to suggest a sense of continuity, but the CD version finds the two middle pieces flowing one into the next.
Sandwiching the drone section between the two crashing fanfares makes good sense, allowing the album to breathe and suggesting more variety than it might otherwise. Opening track "Peasantry or ‘Light! Inside of Light!’" is the album’s highlight, and ranks with Godspeed’s best work. The guitar riff has serious weight and crunch to it, and the piece unfolds with a modal sweep. But the transformation the main line gradually undergoes, where a dramatically beautiful desert vista becomes a setting for a melody that suggests a drunken holiday singalong, shows that there’s still a lot they can do with their basic ingredients.
"Peasantry" and the closing "Piss Crowns Are Trebled" are so intense and grandiose they skirt self-parody, always a risk with this band. But it's possible to give Godspeed the benefit of the doubt, in part because of how they’ve conducted themselves throughout their career. In 2015, music like this is usually used to sell things, whether it’s a product or a television show. There’s so much feeling in it, huge washes of sound that could easily be regarded as manipulative, and capitalism inevitably strives to pair these kinds of sounds with product. As a listener, to give yourself over to this kind of soaring music, allowing yourself to be carried away, implies a certain amount of trust. Godspeed You! Black Emperor record and play instrumental pieces that exist to move you, using only the force of music, and in a space where sound is the primary context. It's a different kind of transaction. You have to let your guard down, and Godspeed have to transform feelings into compelling records. They're still on track.


The third album from studied Brooklyn chamber-pop ensemble San Fermin benefits from a sharper focus. But its lyrics signify depth and meaning without quite delivering.

Belong

The basic conceit behind San Fermin, the Brooklyn chamber-pop ensemble led by songwriter and producer Ellis Ludwig-Leone, has an obvious if not unlimited appeal. Like Sufjan Stevens circa Illinois, they bring classical flourishes to indie and folk conventions, bolstered with soaring choruses and spirited performances. This studied approach lost some of its charm on 2015’s bombastically scattershot Jackrabbit—and with over five decades of baroque-pop history, from the Beach Boys to Rostam, they could be drawing from a much deeper well of influences. But San Fermin are still an unusual act. They’re an eight-piece in a music economy long removed from the heyday of huge collectives. And though he guides the group, Ludwig-Leone—who is music director and resident composer for a ballet company, and also had a premiere at the New York City Ballet in 2015—doesn’t sing. Lead vocal duties are rather shared between the capable two-pronged attack of Charlene Kaye and Allen Tate.
Their third album, Belong, benefits from a sharper focus, though San Fermin’s setup continues to distinguish them more than their songs. Belong’s lush instrumental passages are the most consistently pleasant aspect of the record. Where on Jackrabbit those tended to be broken off into minute-long interludes, here the bustling breaks are neatly interwoven into the songs. Along with guitars, synths, and drums, the band has violin, trumpet, and saxophone, and it’s when the full array unfurls, especially on the expansive opus “Palisades/Storm,” that San Fermin sound most engaged. Of course, these ingredients can also bring to mind the most famous rock group with an in-house saxophonist and violinist, the Dave Matthews Band, as on the honking bridge of “Dead,” but on the festival circuit that may be a feature, not a bug.
Ludwig-Leone’s songwriting is billed as more personal this time around, which works in Belong’s favor. The album feels more direct and pop-minded than its predecessors, and the shift is best represented in the catchily surging “No Promises,” which uses cooing vocal loops. The daintily chiming “Bride” is sung from the viewpoint of an anxiety-suffering bride at a wedding who has a dissociative experience. The fluttering opener, straightforwardly titled “Open,” is sung from the perspective of “a ghost at the controls.” The words to these songs can appear cryptic or stilted, and the conflicts that arise in them pale beside the problems found in a spare minute of social-media catch-up, but as emotional entry points, they get the job done.
The downside of Belong’s greater tilt toward pop and feelings is an occasional lurch into treacle. “Bones,” ostensibly a soulful ballad, is too vanilla to really have an impact—less Marvin Gaye than “Marvin Gaye”—and the lyrics, despite references to the physical, have a similarly antiseptic effect. “If I could take you home/Bodies tell the rest of the story/Maybe we’d resolve ourselves,” Kaye and Tate intone in sweet harmony, as if sex were as clinical as a server error. Old-timey son-of-Mumford stomper “Cairo” and the off-puttingly romantic title track (if someone ever sighs to you, “I miss you even when you’re here,” run as soon as you stop gagging) are similar missteps. A more intriguing clunker is ornate finale “Happiness Will Ruin This Place,” a story-song that pulls together some of the album’s lyrical motifs, and includes deft touches such as circus-like oompahs when the narrator visits the zoo, but ultimately seems to signify depth and meaning without quite delivering either.
If I haven’t said much about Kaye and Tate, the two lead singers, that probably makes sense, too. Both give fine performances, both noticeably improved in some ways—Kaye pushing past her typical politesse for a less restrained vocal on “Dead,” Tate edging a tiny bit away from his dead-ringer the National impression for a folksier tinge on “Oceanica.” But, perhaps because of the band’s very construction, neither comes across as the star of the show. For her part, Kaye has been compared to ex-Dirty Projectors singer Amber Coffman so many times you almost root for her own ambitious solo album. (She does have an EP, 2016’s Honey, as Kaye.)
With Belong, Ludwig-Leone has said he wanted “to write music you could smell,” and arguably he succeeds; already, it has been compared to “a wall of flowers blooming at once.” This is an album with a lot going on—“bones,” “bodies,” a “little blonde ghost,” and a homey habit of calling people “honey” recur in a way that hints at a greater significance. But maybe Belong is best enjoyed like a passing fragrance, a scent you vaguely recognize but can’t quite place, a whiff of a particular ’00s Brooklyn varietal of an orchestral-pop tradition that neither began nor likely ended there.


This hours-long, 199-song compilation of mostly instrumental work is a canny product of our current streaming era. But at its best, it offers a glimpse into Mac DeMarco’s unique and evolving process.

One Wayne G

Given his reputation as a thought leader in the dirtbag space, it’s ironic that Mac DeMarco’s most recent projects are essentially lo-fi jams to study to. This year’s Five Easy Hot Dogs only represented a trickle of his instrumental work. Now, the unfathomably long One Wayne G unleashes the full torrent: At 199 tracks and over nine hours, the massive archival dump is like an indie rock version of Lil B’s 05 Fuck Em. It is a work that almost dares you not to pay attention to it, stretching out to a duration that inevitably necessitates background listening, which, in many respects, also makes it feel resistant to conventional music criticism. The proposition of reviewing One Wayne G even feels like a throwback to an earlier era of stunt journalism, that post-Klosterman style of culture writing where the author subjects themselves to 50 hours of non-stop Lil B songs or spends an entire day at a TGI Friday’s.
On one hand, DeMarco’s instrumental turn, along with the listless shuffle-ability of One Wayne G, seems like a play for the ambient gold rush, supplying casual listeners with a limitless horizon of vibey busy-work soundtracks. But DeMarco’s compilation thumbs its nose at the very market it taps into. While One Wayne G might look like a disposable afterthought, all unfinished drafts and near-identical file names, it’s hardly arbitrary or accidental. Where so much instrumental or ambient music that baits the streaming algorithm is anonymous to the point of feeling machine-generated, Mac’s giant box of loosies confronts you at every turn with the personality of its maker, for better or worse.
Taken in chronological order, One Wayne G offers a glimpse into DeMarco’s evolving process from 2018 and January of this year, as we see him adopt and abandon certain whims and trends. Early cuts like “20191215” feature little more than acoustic fingerpicking, but by 2022, he’s picked up a harmonica and started toying with woodwinds. There’s an ever-so-light jazziness to the organ riffs on “20221217” that resembles the French exotica you’d hear in a Jacques Tati film; many of Mac’s demos on One Wayne G feel more uniquely suited to soundtrack placement than even his previous instrumental work.
Just when you think you’ve forgotten the author, Mac chimes in to remind you what his voice sounds like, whether that’s filling the space with nonsensical riffing that sounds like Simlish, or the few times he actually sings proper words. (These tracks are thankfully easier to differentiate thanks to more legible song titles like “20200819 She Get the Gold Star” and “20210215 Ball for the Coach.”) On songs like “20200816 She Want the Sandwich” or the would-be Toyotathon anthem “20200817 Proud True Toyota,” Mac’s whimsical and occasionally pitch-shifted vocals recall the lo-fi cartoonishness of Ween more than the Japanese composers like Haruomi Hosono or Shigeo Sekitō he normally credits. Unlike the demos he’s released as companions to every studio album, One Wayne G is a collection not so much of songs-in-progress but strays and spare parts, which function more like Adult Swim bumpers or public radio interstitial music than rough drafts.
The 22-minute long “20190826” lands somewhere between James Ferraro and Art of Noise, with cresting synth tones shattered by the occasional triggering of a heavy drum kick. These sparse, deliberately avant-garde compositions account for the collection’s most compelling material and suggest new directions, with the lurching percussion and distorted strings of “20190826” echoing the structuralism of Ryuichi Sakamoto. Sometimes, One Wayne G feels like an unexpected tribute to Sakamoto, its method of labeling songs reminiscent of the timestamped titles on Sakamoto’s final album, 12. And like Sakamoto’s later work, which left his heavy breathing intact to confront you with the musician’s living presence, you can hear DeMarco sniffling on tracks like “202201.” Sakamoto’s music moves like the air through his lungs; it’s only fitting that DeMarco’s music moves like the phlegm lodged in his throat or the snot stuck in his nose.
A few years ago, this type of long-form project, filled with unfinished sketches and off-the-cuff musings, would have been a deluxe-edition download or splashy anthology box set for only the most hardcore fans. Today, One Wayne G deliberately courts a casual listener, accustomed to never-ending, mood-dictating playlists. More than anything he’s made, it’s a product distinctly of its time. Part of why leftfield Japanese pop and soft rock of yesteryear has found a new audience in the streaming era is precisely because of its smoothness, which makes it ideal for algorithmic shuffling, much like the American AOR it was influenced by was suited for FM radio play. Even if there’s a playful disposability to One Wayne G when contrasted with the work of Hosono or Sakamoto, DeMarco attempts to navigate a similar line, finding room to push at the edges of sound—and remind us of the artist’s existence—even if he’s only in the background of your consciousness.


Propulsive and winding, this collaborative album is a hypnotic exercise in reimagining the past and future of a Ugandan tradition.

Saccades

Consider Saccades a fruitful experiment. It began in 2018, when Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes invited British producer Rian Treanor to hold a residency in Kampala. After hearing a recording from local fiddle master Ocen James, he knew they should collaborate. Though James has no previous recorded releases, he’s been a fixture in Northern Uganda for years, accompanying artists like Leo PaLayeng and Otim Alpha in their development of acholitronix, a 21st century take on the traditional music of the Acholi people. While albums from Nyege Nyege have documented this work before, Saccades takes a different tack, bringing together two artists from distinct musical backgrounds to find common, uncharted ground. The result is a collection of novel, fully-formed tracks that reveal how collaboration uniquely reconfigures Treanor’s labyrinthine productions.
Treanor wanted his work with James to feel like an even split between their individual inclinations, and that sentiment is clear from the jump. Opener “Bunga Bule” is all clattering percussion, and its embrace of unprocessed timbres strays from Treanor’s typical electronic textures. It’s even-keeled compared to his 2020 album File Under UK Metaplasm, a project inspired by the breakneck speeds of Tanzanian singeli. Understanding the roots of Acholi music is key here: Historically, it’s been defined by hemiola rhythms, and the instrument that James plays—the rigi rigi—is typically used in larakaraka ceremonies, which are social gatherings related to weddings or for imparting wisdom to children. These songs feature large ensembles with calabashes, drums, whistles, horns, and flutes. It’s the fiddle’s tense, winding melodies that help guide and hold everything together.
You can hear the rigi rigi’s commanding presence on “Agoya.” Its thunderous, machine-gun kicks pound over and over, until James’ fiddle arrives with playful squawks. These melodies would sound right at home in the hypnotic reverie of a Berlin nightclub, and the same holds true for a more traditional song like “Rigi Rigi.” Its syncopated beat tumbles forward with endless propulsive energy, delivering the album’s most masterful showcase of James’ trademark instrument. Every subtle shift in tone and pitch is palpable and its unpredictable raspiness is a delight. It’s rare to hear a recording that places the titular instrument so forward in the mix, making this an illuminating opportunity to experience the rigi rigi in all its glory.
There are moments across Saccades that skew towards avant-garde antecedents; take the noisy clatter in “As It Happens,” which resembles the work of cellist Okkyung Lee. Despite the unwieldy free-improv leanings of this track, there is a bridge connecting the two worlds. When the song climaxes with an extraordinary rumble—dramatic enough to sound like revving engines—the drum’s sheer force is undeniable; it recalls the authoritative role of the min bul (“master drum”) in Acholi music.
Even the most conceptual tracks on Saccades’ contain small production details worthy of admiration. On “Casascade,” James plays over moody synth pads, their swells befitting the ambient comedown of a long rave. While it’s among the album’s simplest assemblage of ideas, the fiddle is still thrilling. More complex is “The Dead Center,” whose brooding synths and cryptic chimes distill and transform larakaraka into a queasy, dystopian nightmare. “Naasaccade” forgoes the fiddle entirely, but is still exhilarating for how it remains true to Acholi music’s spirit—its polyrhythms sound like calabashes, drums, and gara (small bells attached to dancers’ legs) that have been reconfigured into one of percussionist Eli Keszler’s jam sessions.
Saccades closes with “Remo Rom,” an extraordinary remix that shouldn’t be mistaken for a bonus track. The song doesn’t otherwise appear on the album, but the Viennese electronic music group Farmers Manual tackles it here. There’s a fascinating sprawl of ideas in these two minutes: We have the “laptop music” pioneers of yesteryear reworking the album’s only track with vocals—an alarming fact given the importance of voice in larakaraka. “Remo Rom” is simultaneously embedded in generations of musical history while blazing ahead into a dizzying, unknown future. Saccades is a consistent marvel in this way: It’s reverential to its forebears, but in constant search of innovation.


No longer content to deconstruct the droning sounds of his former band, the Emeralds alum gives Kompakt-style minimal techno a try.

Dissolvi

Steve Hauschildt has spent the last decade deconstructing the sound his former band, Emeralds, reveled in. Rather than reliving their past glories, he has isolated distinct elements embedded in the drone mavens’ works—gossamer kosmische, fuzzily tactile swaths of noise, the cool glow of early electronic music, the rhythmic hum of synth-driven post-rock in the Trans Am mold—while pushing those styles to a pretty, fully-realized zenith. In a review of 2016’s Strands, Philip Sherburne noted the Cleveland artist’s remarkable consistency, and how that had brought a sense of familiarity to his latest works. Thus far, you’ve generally known what you were going to get from Hauschildt, and that has been a soothing virtue in its own right.
But his seventh studio album, Dissolvi, shakes things up a bit. He’s still spinning webs of synthetic beauty, but now they’ve taken on the more distinctly rhythmic form of minimal techno, a style Hauschildt only hinted at on Strands. The shift makes some sense: Dissolvi is his first record for Ghostly International, the Ann Arbor-born label that has mostly released a variety of rhythmically driven electronic music during an existence that has spanned nearly two decades. Ghostly’s most explicitly dance-oriented releases frequently have a distinctly Midwestern flavor, from the dirty Detroit techno-pop leanings of Motor City son Matthew Dear to Tadd Mullinix’s excursions into acid house and Dilla-esque hip-hop under various aliases.
What’s surprising is that the actual sounds on Dissolvi seem to come from somewhere else entirely—specifically, from Cologne’s Kompakt label, which popularized the album’s brand of exacting minimal techno. The ricocheting tones that open “M Path” sound ripped from one of Kompakt’s Total compilations, while “Alienself” pulses with an eerie calm akin to sometime Orb member Thomas Fehlmann’s solo output; shivering percussive elements and just a slight touch of acid run through the track’s framework. Hauschildt tackles this new aesthetic territory with clinical aplomb, as though he’s been working within this largely dormant subgenre of dance music for years.
The new sound isn’t his only left turn on Dissolvi: For the first time this decade, Hauschildt has also called in guest vocalists. Avant-classical experimentalist GABI appears on “Syncope,” and her operatic vocals pair nicely with its insistent build, in sky-scraping elisions that soar above the track’s 4/4 bedrock and glitchy synth work. Vocal-loop stylist Julianna Barwick’s contribution to “Saccade” is another ideal marriage of a collaborator’s skills and an overarching style: Her drawn-out notes complement the day-spa tranquility conjured by soothing synths and soft rhythms.
Comparing Hauschildt’s music to the aural wallpaper at a day spa doesn’t sound like a compliment, but he has a knack for taking on aesthetics that aren’t considered relevant or cool. Emeralds’ divisive 2012 swan song, Just to Feel Anything, adopted the chilly, booming trappings of synthetic ’80s rock, one of the few styles from that decade that still hasn’t attained an air of retro chic. His foray into minimal techno, a sound that has been out of fashion for more than a decade in the dance world, is similarly representative of that apathy toward coolness. On Dissolvi, Hauschildt breathes new life into the subgenre by taking it off the dancefloor—and reveals an unexpected facet of his artistry.


Speedy Ortiz’s third album is wry, acerbic, and full of hidden hooks. The songwriting of singer-guitarist Sadie Dupuis has hit a new peak of clarity.

Twerp Verse

Sadie Dupuis has a knack for flipping the aperçu into self-fulfilling prophecy. “I’m blessed with perfect pitch/I waste it on songs that you never even heard of,” the singer-guitarist taunts on Twerp Verse. Even better is: “You hate the title, but you’re diggin’ the song,” which isn’t actually prophetic because you can praise without equivocation Speedy Ortiz’s flair for the splendid title—this is a band whose digital self-released debut sported “Kinda Blew” and “Phish Phood.” Tense, knotted, suspicious of climaxes, their third official album is the right album at the right time for them.
For one, Dupuis hits a new peak of clarity. Self-composure distinguishes her from the competition; she would rather trace the filigrees of a wryness as endemic to her as it is to forebears Robert Forster and Liz Phair than give the impression that the inarticulate and often clueless men who populate these songs bother her. As her melody line follows the sinews of the intro riff of “Can I Kiss You?,” she seems to think out the degrees of lust necessary to make her jump through hoops for the sake of a boy. On “Alone with Girls,” drummer Michael Falcone’s harmonies complement a story of abjuring the company of dumb dudes.
The virtues of Twerp Verse may present a challenge to the uninitiated. There simply aren’t many hummable moments in the conventional sense; Speedy Ortiz don’t do those, or, rather, their songs act as Trojan horses from which hooks suddenly appear. Dupuis and occasional guitarist Andy Molholt love riffs, and when they tangle in the outro of “Moving In” the result is a beautiful cacophony. “Backslidin’” depends on a distorted slide riff. Although she has occasionally colored tunes with keyboards, Twerp Verse has explicit uses for them. The synth in “You Hate the Title” nods toward Sleater-Kinney’s kind of new wave, and is all the better for it. Suspicious of hysteria, Dupuis is content to repeat the title as if it were a mantra, not a hook. “Lean in When I Suffer,” almost as memorable, lurches like a car with bad shocks; its movement is the hook.
So, while Twerp Verse offers no tune as stick-like-glue as Foil Deer’s “The Graduates” or Major Arcana’s “Plough” it offers compensatory pleasures. They’re the kind of band whose lyrics, I like to imagine, would appear as witticisms in high school yearbooks—a shared passion of Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet’s otherwise incompatible characters in Lady Bird; a band out of which cults are made. Speedy Ortiz record albums as shared secrets between themselves and fans.


RUNT EP

Kids in Northampton used to call Tyron Frampton “Slow Ty” because he’d zone out and float away into an observational bubble. He slurred his words, too. Through his music as Slowthai—a rap name that repurposes and reclaims the nickname—you get the sense he’s fed up with being seen and not heard. His verses shoot out of nowhere, bursting the seams of his beats; his voice slaps you across the face like an icy gust of wind. But he never lost that watchful eye, for better and for worse. “I’m paranoid all of the time,” he cries midway through RUNT, and by that point, he’s already shown you exactly why he has every right to be.
This five-track EP is a dazzling sampler for one of grime’s most promising young talents and a dismaying survey from inside the life of a small-time drug peddler in a British suburb. His scenes are urgent, but they’re rapped with an unnerving calm. He exists in an unblinking state of conflict through most of these songs. “They did the mannequin challenge when the feds come round/I ain’t standing there with my hands down my trousers unprepared—Let me make that clear,” he states on “Slow Down.” Syllables ricochet off one another as he reveals epiphanies earned from a life spent on edge.
The Dizzee Rascal comparison is right there for the making, but none of the rapping on Boy in da Corner was nearly as raw as this, and Dizzee could never wander into anything as pithy and powerful as the blunt force bombshell “now they’re dead like all of my dreams.” Slowthai’s writing is clever without losing any of the impact. He seeks solace even when he believes there isn’t any to be had: “Sometimes when I find myself low I look to the skies and pray/But there’s no God above me that can take my pain/And I cry out, ‘Why?’/I pray my enemies die.” The absence of God hasn’t stopped him from petitioning something greater than himself. That light at the end of the tunnel keeps him grounded, even when all seems lost.
Producer and frequent collaborator Kwes Darko lets the simple samples and arrangements breathe. Darko knows exactly what kind of sounds enable the rapper’s verses to snap right into your ear, and his productions are vivid composites that never get too busy. More than once, Slowthai hacks through between bow strokes in flittering string arrangements. Sometimes, midway through, a song will crack open to reveal a new sound that forces the listener to recalibrate and adjust to a shifted soundscape; on “Disneyland,” piano keys ripple quietly through the mix. About two minutes into “GTFOMF,” the weepy chords flip into what feels like a photo negative of the sample and he keeps stampeding through like nothing has changed. The two artists play off of each other to forge a chilling small-town mosaic.
The most gripping moment on RUNT comes at its close: “Slow Down” is Slowthai at his most perceptive and most persuasive—and grime at its best. The song is transporting and affecting, taking the listener through a joyless Christmas spent without warmth as a child, as apt a metaphor as any for the ways a lower-class existence can feel like it’s happening in isolation from the world. “Boiler broke on Christmas day/Ask Santa, ‘Why’s my life this way?’/Putting heating on my next wishlist/Fuck Santa, cuz we’re cold as shit,” he all but yells, his voice searing. Feeling profound sadness on what is the happiest day of the year for many, in a season for the jolly, is a remarkable microcosm of the Slowthai experience. He’s known joy and he’s known pain, and he’s lived enough to know that for some people those scales are dramatically imbalanced.


Now 83, the soul singer returns with his first album of new material since 2009, and he remains as fixated on love and lust as ever.

Gasms

The first thing to know about Smokey Robinson’s Gasms is that it’s a proper album—not a live album, a Christmas album, a standards album, or a celebration of the soul legend’s songbook thronged with younger guests, but an actual record of new material. He doesn’t make these often anymore. His last real album came out in 2009, the one before that a decade prior. Robinson is 83. Even assuming his enviable run of good health continues, at this rate there’s no guarantee there will be another.
While the pace of Robinson’s new material has slowed considerably since the ’80s, the quality has rarely dipped. Few of his peers have stayed the course as admirably as Robinson. For the last 40 years, nearly all of his records have been variations on the smooth template he perfected with 1975’s A Quiet Storm—unhurried tempos, yearning vocals, laid-back licks, and velvet adornments. Where his doe-eyed Motown singles with the Miracles were the embodiment of youth, A Quiet Storm introduced the sound he’d grow old with.

Hearing Robinson’s eternal muses of love and lust animate him as thoroughly in his eighties as they did nearly a half century ago is one of the pleasures of Gasms, which at its best plays like the ultimate refinement of Robinson’s late-career output. Compared to 2009’s Time Flies When You’re Having Fun, which itself was a perfectly respectable victory lap, the songwriting on Gasms is better calibrated, the emotions more pronounced, and the production more sumptuous yet less intrusive, devoid of any tells about what year—or even decade—it might have been recorded. Like Robinson’s best work, it exists in a state of suspended timelessness.

Consider the title track fair warning for anybody uncomfortable about hearing an octogenarian work himself up about carnal pleasures: Things get heated. Nonetheless, Robinson has a tasteful way of rendering blunt expressions of lust, and he never lets his randiness get the better of him, as he sometimes can (see his 2009 single “Love Bath,” a cautionary tale of the thin line between sensual and ridiculous). Even Gasms’ thirstiest numbers are filled with grace notes: The red-lit “I Keep Calling You” smolders with nocturnal longing, while “You Fill Me Up” reimagines gospel music as sexual climax.

Robinson’s voice doesn’t do what it used to, but it still does what it needs to. He sings for the sheets, not the rafters, and what he’s lost in range he makes up for with tenderness. On the sorrowful “I Wanna Know Your Body” he mourns love he may never get to make; his wounded whisper makes the denial feel like a tragedy. A handful of songs like the peppy “Roll Around” and the lightly funky “If We Don’t Have Each Other” gesture toward his more ebullient pop with the Miracles, allowing him to get his pulse up a little without fully breaking the album’s mellow spell.
The list of notable musicians lucky enough to record into their eighties is small; the list of those with worthwhile albums to show for it is even smaller. But Robinson remains an indelible talent, and once again he’s made the kind of record only he can. What a treat it is, after so many years, to hear this pioneer remain in complete mastery of the format he created.


Originally released in 1999 as a promotional CD-R, this collection of alternate mixes and non-album tracks bridges the gap between the band’s experimental hijinks and pop instincts.

The Flaming Lips: The Soft Bulletin Companion

The Soft Bulletin Companion

Over the Flaming Lips’ four-decade career, there was no more crucial turning point than the period spanning 1996 to 1999, when the Oklahoma group narrowly escaped their imminent fate as alt-rock has-beens and transformed themselves into the megaphone-wielding pied pipers of the 21st-century festival circuit. After their underperforming 1995 album Clouds Taste Metallic failed to yield another “She Don’t Use Jelly” and guitarist Ronald Jones checked out, remaining members Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins, and Steven Drozd liberated themselves from the pressures of writing hits—and the creative limitations of being a guitar-rock band—by conducting various synchronized-tape experiments with fleets of car stereos and battalions of boomboxes. Released in 1997, Zaireeka was the play-at-home version of those site-specific events, presenting eight unwieldy songs spread over four CDs that were designed to be played simultaneously on four different players. Then, just two years later, the Lips distilled all that free-ranging exploration into the pristine orchestral rock of The Soft Bulletin.
The two records represent the polar extremes of the Lips’ canon. The dense and difficult Zaireeka was released in a limited edition (due to its bulky four-disc jewel-case packaging) and has never been made available for streaming or download. The Soft Bulletin, by contrast, was a universally praised classic that’s been feted with a symphonic live-album remount and a Pitchfork-produced documentary. But a newly unearthed compilation reminds us that these oppositional releases were actually products of the same recording sessions with producer Dave Fridmann, and proves the two records really weren’t so fundamentally different after all.
The Soft Bulletin Companion was originally a limited-run promotional CD-R that featured alternate mixes, leftover tracks, and other oddities caught on tape between ’97 and ’99. While some of these recordings have since popped up as B-sides, compilation tracks, or bootlegs, The Soft Bulletin Companion’s reappearance—initially as a Record Store Day vinyl exclusive, now as a widely streamable set—restores a crucial chapter in Lips lore. For one, this is the only place where you can find traditional stereo mixes of five Zaireeka tracks, which confirm the album wasn’t just a huge sonic leap forward for the band, but a pivotal emotional breakthrough as well. When freed of Zaireeka’s logistical demands, songs like “Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair” and “Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)” not only measure up to anything on The Soft Bulletin, their gravitas and smog-cloud atmosphere also point the way to later dystopian triumphs like Embryonic and The Terror.
Through this collection, we also get a clearer picture of all the fine-tuning that went into The Soft Bulletin’s HD vision. There’s a lovely alternate take of “The Spiderbite Song” that deemphasizes the original’s looped drum rolls for a gentle summery sway, and a dreamier version of “Buggin’” that effectively mutes Drozd’s drum track. “Buggin’” was the Soft Bulletin song that hewed closest to the “She Don’t Use Jelly” model of whimsical childlike sing-alongs (earning it an appearance on the Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me soundtrack), though it always felt a bit out of place in the middle of an otherwise weighty record. On the UK version of The Soft Bulletin, “Buggin’” was relegated to a bonus track, to make room for the equally splendorous yet less cutesy “Slow Motion,” and the latter’s inclusion here reminds us that the Brits got the better end of the deal.
Even a lighter track like “Slow Motion” underscores what made this phase of the Lips so impactful. As much as The Soft Bulletin turned Fridmann’s name into indie-rock shorthand for cinematic orchestration and heaven-sent harmonies, his production on these tracks is as raw it is radiant. If nothing else, The Soft Bulletin Companion is a golden opportunity to revisit Drozd’s past life as the John Bonham of modern psych rock before he went on to assume a more multi-tasking musical-director role within the group. His loose yet thundering style makes even the incomplete scratch track of Skip Spence’s “Little Hands” a pleasure to behold (although its intended recipient—Robert Plant—never ended up using it for his tribute-album version).
But there’s no better measure of the Lips’ late-’90s zenith than the stellar songs that never found a proper home. These include “The Captain,” arguably the most over-the-top gesture from a period of over-the-top gestures. In stark contrast to The Soft Bulletin’s serious tone, the song’s snowballing orchestration exudes an anarchic joy, like riding a rollercoaster that’s just tipped over its peak into a never-ending free-fall. And then there’s the divine “Satellite of You,” a sweeping serenade that could be the closing-credits theme of a Hollywood musical circa 1945—or a last-call standard at a karaoke bar circa 2045. It’s quintessential Lips, rife with down-home sentiments expressed in far-out imagery. However, for the Lips of the late ’90s, such space-age love songs were less the product of an overactive imagination than a simple reflection of the rarefied cruising altitude they occupied at the time. Now that billionaires are spending the equivalent of a small country’s GDP to enjoy a few minutes in suborbital space, The Soft Bulletin Companion offers a much more cost-effective and environmentally friendly way to experience that fleeting, zero-gravity sensation of floating at the top of the world.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Meant as an introduction to 40 years of a prolific noise icon, this live recording moves between grating analog and prickling digital modes with unmitigated force.

MONOAkuma

Merzbow occupies a unique place in the world of noise: He is one of the genre’s true icons and one of its real anomalies. As much as his crushing torrents of sound feel like the pure definition of noise, they also seem to exist apart from it, a constant regardless of how the larger scene evolves or shifts. Over hundreds of releases and, as of next year, four full decades, he has laboriously refined his approach. Listen briefly, and it might sound thrown together; listen deeply, and it sounds singular and meticulous. One of his most overlooked skills is his ability to warp time; during tracks that stretch beyond an hour, it becomes malleable, almost mercurial.
Witness Merzbow live, and you’ll feel the power and time-scrambling essence of his sound. There is a brutal euphoria to a Merzbow set, typically powered by a massive sound system and a frenetic light show that suggest both My Bloody Valentine and an EDM party. During performances that can feel like an instant or an eternity, he cracks white noise wide open, smearing its inner spectrum of color across the room. On the new MONOAkuma, the Australian label Room40, helmed by ambient maestro Lawrence English, offers an intended entry point to Merzbow through an especially strong live document—an introductory demonstration, as English puts it, of “the intense and complex audio world Merzbow has created.”
MONOAkuma captures a 2012 show English presented at the Institute of Modern Art Brisbane. It bridges two of Merzbow’s most distinct styles: the gravely analog recordings of his early days and the razor-sharp precision of his subsequent digital work. Those alternate analog and digital extremes juggle your brain. Its single 50-minute track assaults from the start, as sheets of noise work your eardrums like sandpaper. But this is the Merzbow-equivalent of a toe in the pool; the track begins to roil around the 10-minute mark. Over weighty industrial waves, MONOAkuma becomes a showcase for the higher end of Merzbow’s range, where pitches as sharp as needles jab like jackhammers.
Screeching tones spike and scramble, wobbling through filters that gradually trick the ears into finding rhythms and patterns, like a Magic Eye painting without an actual hidden image. That illusion makes the flickers of rhythm that do appear all the more satisfying; after half an hour, the smoke clears to reveal a single beat chugging menacingly beneath the surface. These moments may be just two percent of a Merzbow set, but they make all the difference, leaving you searching the chaos for more surprises.
MONOAkuma makes you wonder what, after 40 years, a proper entry point for Merzbow actually is. He has certainly offered more beat-oriented records. Door Open At 8 AM works wonders with jazz samples, while Merzbeat is practically a rock album. Collaborations with guitarist Richard Pinhas like the double-album Keio Line are nearly unrecognizable in their soft-focus beauty. There are introductions to Merzbow’s world that are easier on the ears than MONOAkuma, then, but this full-throttle blast still feels appropriate for newcomers. It’s an unfiltered, uncompromising dose of what he does best. And for those looking to explore that range even further, you’re in luck—he’s got a lot of records.