Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit ODB’s debut classic, a masterclass in winging it.

Ol’ Dirty Bastard: Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version

Ol’ Dirty Bastard was meant for the stage. In 1993, he was the only fiend audacious enough to sideline Biggie at his own birthday show, taking over the set and turning one of the greatest rappers ever into a hype man. In 1998, he interrupted Shawn Colvin’s Grammy acceptance speech to protest Puff Daddy’s win for Best Rap Album before a national audience of 25 million people. In 2000, he escaped from a rehab facility in Los Angeles, went on the lam for a month, and popped up as a fugitive to perform at a Wu-Tang Clan release party in New York City. “I can’t stay on stage too long tonight, the cops is after me,” he told the elated and astounded crowd at Hammerstein Ballroom, after performing “Shame On a Nigga.” For Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the line between mania and lucidity was always razor-thin, a slapstick high-wire act that was as exhilarating as it was dangerous.
ODB’s debut album, Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, is a masterclass in winging it. The spontaneity of his live stunts extended to his raps: You never knew what he was going to do or say next, and maybe he didn’t either. In The Wu-Tang Manual, RZA, the Wu’s producer, chief creative mastermind, and self-appointed abbot, dubbed him a “freelance rhyme terrorist.” Two forces are at war with each other on Return to the 36 Chambers: RZA’s diligence and ODB’s inconsistency. It’s an oxymoron, a work of orchestrated negligence, a makeshift classic. But beyond its place in the ODB mythology or in Wu-Tang lore, The Dirty Version is above all a brash indictment of American classism and respectability politics. Unapologetic and raw, he turned to Uncle Sam and hollered, this is the savage you created, and did it with a Cheshire grin.
Wu-Tang’s 1993 debut Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) was like a rift in the space-time continuum. Long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, RZA designed an epic franchise with a cast of outsized characters crossing over from one project to the next, and a rich cross-cultural history: Five-Percenter raps from cross-town New Yorkers drawing from ’70s and ’80s martial arts cinema, which itself drew on the mythology of ancient dynasties. (The Wu universe would come to include a comic series, an origin story TV show, and a one-of-a-kind million-dollar rap artifact purchased by the world’s most loathed pharmaceutical executive.) The Dirty Version kicked off a world-conquering year for the Wu, which included two other solo classics: Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and GZA’s Liquid Swords. In 1995, the Wu-Tang Clan were forging their legend, and ODB was the crew’s madcap mascot.
Wu-Tang’s world of Wuxia iconography, lifted from overdubbed kung fu flicks, was the result of an obsession RZA and ODB nourished with regular trips to watch triple features on 42nd Street. ODB took his name from the 1979 film Ol’ Dirty Kung Fu, which was given the title Ol’ Dirty & the Bastard in U.S. syndication. At the center of the plot is a drunken eccentric whose aberrant behavior never compromises his mastery of martial arts, and even seems inherent to his form. ODB was drawn to the character and others like him, often taking the moniker the Drunken Master, after the 1978 Jackie Chan movie that spawned the archetype. Method Man once proclaimed that there was no father to ODB’s style: Without musical precedents, he leaned into aberration, just like his namesake.
RZA’s plan to divide and conquer the rap world began before Wu-Tang’s studio debut was even released. They’d amassed a buzz around town, the self-released single “Protect Ya Neck” brought suitors, and the most valuable Wu assets were divvied up quickly: Meth signed to Def Jam, ODB to Elektra, Raekwon to Loud, GZA to Geffen, and Ghostface to Epic. After Enter the Wu-Tang was released, ODB was supposed to be the first soloist, but he couldn’t finish his album. He spent a chunk of the money from his advance on a jalopy in North Carolina and would go AWOL for long stretches of time, taking impromptu drives and writing on the road. He would bail out of songs mid-recording, vanish for days at a time, and then pop up drunk, destructive, and unpredictable. He once took an LL Cool J plaque off the wall at Chung King Studios and pissed on it, ending up in a standoff with LL’s manager Chris Lighty. The album took nearly two years to make because of this fitful approach. ODB was surrounded by a small team doing its damndest to keep him recording, but he could not be collected and he would not be rushed.
He couldn’t have been further from Method Man’s 1994 debut Tical, an undeniably solid album from the crew’s most consistent rapper, which broke the seal on individual Wu-Tang releases thanks to ODB’s delay. RZA’s grand design spelled out the differences between Meth and Dirty: Meth would sign to Def Jam because he had crossover appeal; at Elektra, ODB would join fellow iconoclasts like KMD and Busta Rhymes. Tical, which went platinum in less than a year and spawned a Grammy-winning Hot 100 hit, was the perfect springboard for an ODB belly flop.
Years before linking with Pras and Mya, Dirty became the ghetto superstar. On The Dirty Version, he subscribed to the age-old Rakim proverb that MC meant “move the crowd”; star-power meant garnering fans, and garnering fans meant rallying people. He wanted to luxuriate in the rap-star lifestyle, to conjure the euphoria of karaoke. His verses were as irresistible as they were startling. It isn’t a coincidence “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” has been sampled and interpolated 92 times, and as recently as this year. It is fun to mimic. Method Man joked that the album’s repeated verses were the result of ODB’s absentmindedness during a long recording process, but, intentionally or not, that repetition turned his verses into hooks. “Brooklyn Zoo II (Tiger Crane)” has verse fragments from three other songs on the album, like a reprise in a musical. His raps wormed their way into the brain in unusual ways, the product of his unusual methods.
Those methods required several measures to wring an entire album out of Dirty. RZA was the hands-off architect. Buddha Monk was the handler, body man, and engineer, tasked with getting ODB prepped and into the studio, and making sure his vocals sounded right. Mastering engineer Tom Coyne was dubbed “the referee” in the liner notes for breaking up fights. Elektra A&R Dante Ross had the demanding task of shepherding the album to completion amid chaos. “I knew I had to get it to the finish line because there are times in life when you know you only have that moment in time, and you gotta get there,” Ross said of the Dirty Version sessions. “I had to get there, ’cause I strongly suspected that would not happen again.”
ODB’s volatility created only a small window for capturing his output. He was anti-prolific, so inefficient in his recording style that it made The Dirty Version even more of a marvel—not just catching lightning in a bottle but harnessing its electricity to power a generator. It’s impossible to overstate how much his jolting vocals jump out and strike you. On “Don’t U Know,” he lurches along, his singing barely adhering to melody and meter. On “Hippa to da Hoppa,” he punctuates every bar with a grunt, then becomes conversational, then does some straight-up showerhead crooning. Across chest-thumpers like “Brooklyn Zoo” and “Cuttin’ Headz,” he becomes a caricature, a monster of pure id born of New York City’s sordid underbelly.
Whether deliberately performative or not, Dirty’s persona embraced what the rest of the world saw as undesirable. Chris Rock, in his 1999 HBO special Bigger and Blacker, used ODB to characterize the politicized distance between “black” and “nigger,” a distinction between the respectable and the disreputable, as noted by the writer and African-American studies professor Richard Iton. To Rock, as to many, ODB was a depiction of a kind of blackness that was obscene: ignorant, dependant, deviant, unkempt, unruly, and, worst of all, uncontrollable. He was a character that has persisted in the cultural lexicon decades later: the crazy black homeless man as personified in novels like Same Kind of Different as Me or the shabby, mentally ill virtuoso of films like The Soloist. Only ODB didn’t seek redemption. He was proud.
ODB made the low life into the hallmark of his celebrity appeal. In the “Intro,” he crowns himself the greatest performer since James Brown before digressing into a story about how he got burned by gonorrhea twice. On “Brooklyn Zoo,” he raps that he was “In the G-Building, taking all types of medicines,” referencing a local Brooklyn psychiatric ward. He often rapped as if on hallucinogens. “Drunk Game (Sweet Sugar Pie)” has a sort of degenerate charm, a singsong diatribe that’s the closest this pick-up artist comes to a ballad. It wasn’t that he couldn’t sing, it was if the concept of singing was entirely alien. On “Baby C’mon,” amid ravings about Wu (and personal) supremacy, he blurts out, “When it come to the money, yo it ain’t funny/It’s what you gotta do, what you got to do.”
He was never embarrassed by being poor, but ODB was very clear about wanting to get paid. Those two truths were at the core of his biggest scandal: In 1995, as promotion for the album, an MTV crew filmed ODB taking his family to cash a $375 welfare check in a limo. The image of a rap star claiming food stamps reeked of abuse of power to the public: To middle-class black Americans, he was taking food out of someone else’s mouth; to white America, he was proof of a community looking for handouts. In a sense, it was profiteering. But more so, it was a display of government incompetence. How could a member of rap’s biggest group, who’d pocketed $45,000 as an advance, get away with this? It wasn’t so much pulling a fast one as it was highlighting a design flaw. In retrospect, it played like a comedy bit, something Eric Andre might pull. ODB had already warned them on “Raw Hide.” He was the product of a broken system, and if he saw any opportunity to make that system’s failures work for him, he would take it.
On “Snakes,” he ups the ante: “Fuck my name, who I be?/Fuck the game, it’s all about the moneyyyy!” It is obvious to anyone paying attention: ODB felt America owed him, and he planned to recoup by any means necessary. He saw slavery as time served and wanted back pay. “Why wouldn’t you want to get free money?” he told the MTV camera crew. “You owe me 40 acres and a mule anyway.” (ODB was about wealth redistribution, too: he gave his money away in the streets.) There aren’t many job prospects for a lecherous, cock-eyed knucklehead in body armor, and so he was going to take every opportunity available to him to cash in. He’d achieved implausible fame. He was high enough to stun an elephant. He felt indestructible.
The no-fucks-given debauchery of the Ol’ Dirty Bastard persona, which Ta-Nehisi Coates once dubbed “misanthropic lunacy,” made him an easy punching bag. But ODB wasn’t just in on the joke. He was delivering the punchline. His songs wholeheartedly played into the characterization. It was in the foul way he described his own talent in them: “funky like a stink bomb,” “old like toe fungus mold,” “style is evil like a wicked witch”; in the banter on “Don’t U Know,” where two women argue whether he’s bummy or charming; in his choice to make his welfare card his album cover, and in the mockery of his very name. “See this ain’t somethin’ new that’s just gonna come out of nowhere,” he says on “Raw Hide.” “No! This is somethin’ old! And dirtayyy!” He was revolutionary in his embrace of all things broken-down and deteriorating. His music assembled the secondhand (interpolated lines from Jim Croce, salvaged battle raps), the second-rate (a straining singing voice), and the shoddy (ramble raps recorded with antiquated technology) into a freak’s manifesto on escaping squalor but staying funky.
Being poor is often met with shame. Being crazy is often met with fear. ODB was defiantly unable to feel shame or fear, and so this poor, crazy bastard rebuked public disgust the only way he knew how: By doubling down on everything the civilized world hated about him. His songs harnessed the inexhaustible power of his fuckery. He stumbles around in them, on cuts like “Baby C’mon” and “Raw Hide,” as much ranting and he is rapping. Hearing ODB spit rhymes was like watching a delirious man wander into a busy intersection and, through sheer luck or divine intervention, avoid getting hit by oncoming traffic. With each daring escape, each narrow staving of catastrophe, it becomes harder and harder to dismiss his nimble maneuvers as chance.
Before RZA, GZA, and ODB were in the Wu-Tang Clan, the cousins were in a trio called Force of the Imperial Master (later All in Together Now), and would travel around New York trading material and facing off with other rappers. ODB spent enough time going toe-to-toe with guys around town for respect to understand what would galvanize an audience. The rapper with the bigger energy, the more immediate and resounding material, and the more confrontational demeanor could command the corner, or the crowd, or the colosseum. He fought dirty. Every single verse on his debut activates the muscle memory of that sparring, as he rediscovers old battle-tested chemistry while shadowboxing with his earliest partners. ODB and GZA basically finish each other’s sentences on “Damage,” playing hard into the dichotomy of the genius and the fool. The closer, “Cuttin’ Headz,” is call-and-response melee, with RZA seemingly channeling Dirty: “Once I go berzerk, mad brothers got hurt.” It’s a great song to go out on—casual play fighting and banter between family—but RZA was far from done flexing.
His beats have long been hailed for their texture and impact—gritty, murky, and audacious—and they are all of those things. But they are also carefully arrayed and suited to their performers, especially in the early days, and specifically on The Dirty Version. The production plays up the hostility and comedy of ODB’s performances. “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” and “Brooklyn Zoo” are among RZA’s best creations, and perfect for Dirty; alongside the slightly blemished but tightly wound loops, he seems emboldened to splatter them further, like a prankster graffiting the walls.
It has become commonplace in modern hip-hop to declare someone a “weirdo rapper,” and Ol’ Dirty Bastard is the weirdo rap exemplar. He was more unbalanced than Danny Brown, as unrestrainable as Young Thug, and as antagonistic as JPEGMAFIA. In a thought experiment in 2018, writer Julian Kimble imagined how ODB would emerge as a contemporary star. But such a framework ignores his unique place in hip-hop lineage. It’s like removing a domino from the middle of a lineup and expecting the rest to still fall accordingly. The Dirty Version set the stage for all the weirdos that followed. With considerable help, ODB turned his weirdness into a kind of sorcery and conjured rap’s unlikeliest satire.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The longtime Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist swaps the acid-house influences of his Trickfinger project for a loving tribute to ’90s jungle and drill’n’bass.

Maya

On paper, the on-again, off-again, on-again guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers writing a tribute to the UK’s mid-’90s hardcore rave and jungle scenes might seem like an odd proposition, but John Frusciante has plenty of experience in this domain. Along with more than a dozen strummed-and-sung albums under his own name, he’s released electronic music with his Trickfinger alias at a steady clip since debuting the acid-house-inspired project in 2015. In fact, this isn’t even the first electronic album he’s put out this year: An EP and third album as Trickfinger arrived in March and June, respectively. Maya, though, marks the first time he’ll release an instrumental electronic album as John Frusciante.
The album arrives via Planet Mu offshoot Timesig, established by breakcore mainstay Venetian Snares—with whom Frusciante made one of his earliest electronic excursions, collaborating as Speed Dealer Moms in 2010. It’s named after and dedicated to Frusciante’s cat, who was until her death a steadfast studio companion. Frusciante gives this intimate dedication as the reason for releasing the record under his own name; however, his own personal affinity for the rave sounds he emulates and extrapolates here surely has had some influence too. He’s said previously that while playing guitar with the Chili Peppers he yearned to be making electronic music. In the early 2000s he would frequent jungle raves in L.A., attempting to get a taste of a scene he felt had passed him by in the ’90s as he was writing multi-platinum funk rock with Keidis and co. This album certainly carries the sweat of those formative nightclub experiences. Where his Trickfinger productions are defined by an almost clinical cleanliness (despite the considerable array of sounds they clump together), he roughs the edges on Maya.
The album decays as it progresses, from gently undulating breakbeats and a luxe acid bassline on opener “Brand E” to elastic breakcore on “Zillion” and the disintegrating synths and squall of shattered drum kits of closer “Anja Motherless.” Frusciante’s beloved Roland TB-303—the squelchy synthesizer synonymous with acid house and rave, and a linchpin of those Trickfinger records—plays a supporting role while he throws himself into florid sampling and dramatic exchanges of control and release. “Reach Out” drenches a ’00s R&B staple in a hailstorm of breaks that shift between half-time lulls and double-dropped adrenaline shots. “Amethblowl”—the album’s lead single and a cinematic standout—encapsulates the fractious tension at the heart of the record, drawing out two minutes of glitchy snares and an imposing, repetitive bassline, before a mangled cry for relief sends the whole thing crashing down under a thunderous rolling breakbeat and cavernous bass.
Having honed electronic music’s fiddlier, more technical aspects over the past half decade, here Frusciante relishes a new expressive freedom. Melodic flourishes—like the hypnotic scrambled scales of “Usbrup Pensul”, or the playful melee of basslines on “Blind Aim”—give the album an unblemished glee that propels it forward with infectious abandon. Perhaps more importantly, these touches also move Maya beyond the realm of admiring pastiche and into more rewarding territory. The album has all the hallmarks of the era that Frusciante apes, but offers thoughtful, intriguing embellishments at every turn: A sudden retreat from the dancefloor to the chillout room halfway through “Flying”; the mutation of g-funk and sci-fi soundtracks on “Pleasure Explanation.” As tributes go, this is as fine an homage as any feline companion could hope for. The UK’s rose-tinted ravers should be honored too.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their second album, the abrasive New York band Couch Slut draw on hardcore, grindcore, and metal while offering unflinching lyrics about violence and terror.

Contempt

If only every band that went out of its way to be shocking took notes from Couch Slut. The world would be a more disturbed place, mind you, but it would be all the better for it, too. Heavily steeped in the late-1980s/early-1990s work of pioneering noise abrasionists like Swans, the Jesus Lizard, and Today Is the Day, Couch Slut show a like-minded, almost compulsory drive to provoke. As if to broadcast the message “we don’t pull punches,” the cover of the band’s first album, 2014’s My Life as a Woman, was graced by an illustration of an erect penis ejaculating onto a woman’s face, her tongue extended for added effect.
In Couch Slut’s case, though, there’s much more going on than just provocation. Even frontwoman Megan Osztrosits’ description of her own lyrical content—which the band sums up as “anger, depression, terror, drug abuse, mental illness, violence, the surreal, longing, and loss”—doesn’t quite capture the hair-raising impact that she and her bandmates make. Contempt, the follow-up to My Life as a Woman, kicks off with a kind of duel between a snaking electric guitar line and a baritone sax, as if guest saxophonist Davindar Singh were trying to silence guitarist Kevin Wunderlich rather than play along with him.
Their contest doesn’t last long. When Osztrosits comes in with her paint-peeling howl, she swallows all the other sounds, even as the band lurches into a hardcore riff marked by the sort of guttural crunch you hear in the earliest, crust punk-nourished efforts by Napalm Death. “Dressed like that at a funeral,” Osztrosits shrieks, “You’re gonna give someone the wrong idea[...]/Get your face down in the dirt/I will fuck you/Now you’re dirt.”
Titled “Funeral Dyke,” this opening song initially gives the impression of a band that’s content to just hammer away at the borders between hardcore, grindcore, and black metal while Osztrosits’ words remain only half-intelligible at best. But in a stunning example of musical bait and switch, both Osztrosits and the band stretch things way out from there, touching on myriad forms of noise and experimental rock along the way. When “Funeral Dyke” slows down for a middle section that approaches the pomp and drama of symphonic metal, you start to get the sense that Couch Slut have a lot more up their sleeve than speed, repetition, and screaming.
Wunderlich, bassist Kevin Hall, and drummer Theo Nobel unveil their range gradually, meandering through their songs as if strolling through a stylistic labyrinth they have no interest in getting out of. Contempt’s production style immediately anchors the music in the boxy aesthetic of ’90s underground labels like Amphetamine Reptile—a decision that, unfortunately, marginalizes guest instruments like the bari, tuba, viola, and accordion. But if the production partially conceals the band’s agility, it also helps unify the material.
Couch Slut chew through the various underground movements that influenced them with an apparent relish, but the sound they arrive at is startlingly unique and contemporary in spite of its production trappings. It’s also unremittingly ugly. On the Melvins-meets-Failure sludge/space rock hybrid “Summer Smiles,” Osztrosits half-whimpers, half wretches the words: “He took me down with a knife to my throat/He said, ‘Don’t you say a fuckin’ word.’/So I stared at the floor and tried to relax/The whole thing was quieter than I expected[...]/I can feel it pressed against my throat/When I close my eyes/I liked it.”
That passage becomes all the more difficult to stomach when someone starts cackling maliciously in the background, casting the image into a deeper, more horrifying kind of realism. Still, the visceral approach of Couch Slut remains powerfully unresolved; consider the dissonance between the band’s use of noir, graphic novel-esque artwork and the imagery in Osztrosits’ lyrics. But it's how these images bounce off each other that gets you thinking differently about a subject area that few bands have dared to tread so unflinchingly. The fact that they offer no comfort by way of easy answers—or even clear interpretation—makes their art all the more necessary.


Disclosure's debut is not only 2013's best dance record so far, it's also one of the most assured and confident debuts from any genre in recent memory. Dance music's long had a fickle relationship with the album format, but Settle's impeccable sequencing leads to a record that begs to be heard in its entirety.

Settle

In recent years, dance music's growing mainstream prominence has led to a number of excellent debuts: SBTRKT and Holy Ghost!'s self-titled efforts, Classixx's Hanging Gardens, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs' Trouble, and Katy B's On a Mission, to name a few. These records gained notice for recontextualizing the sounds of dance's various sub-genres-- disco, dubstep, house, and more-- into pop-leaning structures. The latest addition to this list is Settle, the brilliant debut album by Disclosure. The Surrey duo have not only made 2013's best dance record so far-- they've also concocted one of the most assured, confident debuts from any genre in recent memory. That they've done so on a major-label record that's absolutely loaded with guest spots-- these are typically red flags when approaching any dance full-length with crossover potential-- is nothing short of a miracle.
The brothers behind Disclosure, Howard and Guy Lawrence, seem impossibly young considering their talents: Guy is 21, while younger brother Howard just turned 18 a few weeks ago. But they've actually been on the scene for three years, and their artistic growth over that period is impressive. Back in 2010, Disclosure first emerged on the blog circuit's nether regions with "Street Light Chronicle", a slice of competent, indistinct bass music that sounded like what you'd expect from a pair that have cited Burial's Untrue and Joy Orbison's "Hyph Mngo" as their gateways into club fare. With every succeeding release, however, Disclosure rapidly moved away from "Street Light Chronicle"'s weatherbeaten greys towards a smoother, brighter sound. Last year's fantastic remix of Jessie Ware's "Running" greatly increased both artists' profiles; earlier this year, Disclosure's collaboration with AlunaGeorge singer Aluna Francis, "White Noise", rocketed to #2 on the UK Singles chart two weeks after its release. Clearly, they've come a long way in a short time.
A number of tracks from Disclosure's earlier releases would be considered highlights on any debut album. Two of them, "Boiling" and "What's in Your Head", from the enjoyable 2011 EP The Face, are relegated to bonus track status on Settle's deluxe edition. That such strong material didn't make the album proper speaks to its high quality. Over its hour-long runtime, Settle features an masterful sense of pacing, from the jacking propulsion of "When a Fire Starts to Burn" to the album's sweeping closer, "Help Me Lose My Mind". Dance music's long had a fickle relationship with the album format, but Settle's impeccable sequencing leads to an album that begs to be heard in its entirety.
Settle's playful, high-energy attitude is sometimes reminiscent of Remedy, Basement Jaxx's star-making 1999 debut. The duos share divisive tendencies: Jaxx's brash and hyper-active production style rubs some the wrong way, and Disclosure have been called out for their clear debt to established UK dance styles. Specifically, Disclosure have been charged with riding the resurgence of the syncopated, R&B-infused gait of late 1990s/early 2000s 2-step and UK Garage touchstones like MJ Cole's "Sincere" and Hardrive's "Deep Inside"; last month, they released an answer-song remix of 2-step kings Artful Dodger's "Please Don't Turn Me On"-- and this after after UKG veteran El-B offered his own dusty take on "Boiling" late last year, making the inspiration explicit.
The skepticism is understandable, to a point. UK dance culture has long prided itself on pushing things forward, and Disclosure's arrival on the scene-- not to mention bass music's current retro-fixated house excursions-- marks the first time in many years that the freshest dance sounds from across the pond sound a little second-hand. Ultimately though, complaining about young artists reviving sounds that they weren't around to experience the first time around is futile. We're a few years into an era where talented musicians are discovering influences new and old not through direct interaction with scenes but through their computers. And when the execution is this accomplished, it's hard to get too hung up on the source material. Some of Settle's giddiest highlights are clear UKG callbacks-- "Voices" and "You & Me", especially-- but Disclosure refuse to stick to any single genre. They effortlessly spin through romantic house ("Defeated No More", "F For You"), pitch-screwed bass music ("Second Chance"), and raunchy grime-inflected motifs ("Confess to Me"); nothing is off limits, and Settle is all the better for it.
For all its dance trappings, Settle is a pop record first and foremost, one that feels remarkably inclusive. The handful of male-led vocal cuts range from solid (Friendly Fires vocalist Ed MacFarlane's sultry take on "Defeated No More", Jamie Woon's emotive pleading on "January") to showstopping (the indelible, effusive "Latch", Howard Lawrence's surprisingly effective turn on "F for You"), but Settle's array of female voices are the record's nucleus. While a few notable names are used in surprising fashion-- folk-pop singer Lianne La Havas' effusive, bleated samples on "Stimulation", Jessie Ware's muted moves on "Confess to Me"-- the biggest star turns come from up-and-comers like Sasha Keable and London Grammar's Hannah Reid, who shares a co-writing credit on "Help Me Lose My Mind". While listening to Settle, James Blake's 2011 quote about U.S. dubstep's "frat-boy market" came to mind; in 2013, it could be argued that such aggressively chauvinistic attitudes pervade many areas of big-tent dance culture, and it's hard not to hear Settle's wide-reaching accessibility as a potential antidote to the trend.
Skirting dance's more bass-heavy strands, Disclosure take a spare approach to sampling throughout Settle. They lift a few stray sounds from Kelis and Slum Village and, most curiously, motivational speaker and self-proclaimed "hip-hop preacher" Eric Thomas, whose impassioned delivery is featured on the album's intro as well as "When a Fire Starts to Burn". The video for the latter brings the sample to life visually and it turns out to be a strange reflection of its source material. As was recently noted, dance music's history contains frequent intersections, ideological and otherwise, with religion. Much like when dance-pop alchemists Hot Chip released their own devotional to the dancefloor in the form of last year's stellar In Our Heads, Settle's appeal ultimately owes something to its spiritual tinge. Disclosure's unabashed pop sensibilities speak to the notion that music, as with a system of beliefs, can bring a diverse array of people-- the dance nerds and the poptimists, the club denizens and the festival obsessives, the perpetually stylish and the utterly clueless-- together as one. Settle is an album-length articulation of this idea, and it's hard not to believe in that.


On Justin Timberlake's first album in seven years, the pop superstar reunites with longtime producer/collaborator Timbaland for an album that seamlessly conflates the last 40 years of pop, soul, and R&B into a series of ambitious, long songs.

The 20/20 Experience

Consider 'N Sync's 2001 hit "Pop", a defensive track co-written by Justin Timberlake that takes aim at boy-band haters. "All that matters is that you recognize that it's just about respect," he sings. The song was on 'N Sync's final album, Celebrity, which sold nearly two million copies in the U.S. in its first week-- and by that point the group had gone platinum about 30 times over. Even back then, this desire for meaningful admiration was nagging at Timberlake. "Pop" is slyly referenced on "Strawberry Bubblegum", a love-as-sugar-rush space-soul trifle from the singer's third LP, The 20/20 Experience. "I'm gonna love you 'til I make it pop," he goes, emphasizing the last word with the exact same sense of joy as he did 12 years ago. But now there's no irked aftertaste. Justin Timberlake is respected, and he's using that cred to make an eight-minute love song with the word "bubblegum" in its title that astutely references Barry White, Drake-style ambient R&B, and Sly Stone. He's walking the walk and chewing gum at the same time.
The same can be said for the rest of The 20/20 Experience, which has Timberlake seamlessly conflating the last 40 years of pop, soul, and R&B into a series of warping seven-minute songs that shamelessly extol the joys of music and marriage. More ambitious and judicious than his first album, Justified, and more consistent than 2006's FutureSex/LoveSounds, the record mixes up not only genres and traditional song structures, but entire critical value systems. The poptimists who rode Timberlake's wave to post-guilty-pleasure virtuousness may decry its lack of three-and-a-half minute hits; old-schoolers may dismiss its simplistic themes. But by combining the direct warmth of a picture-perfect wedding with music that is complex and expansive, he's harkening back to an era when the biggest-selling album could begin with a six-minute, multi-part, groove-based epic called "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" and another extended, expertly arranged, gloriously campy touchstone called "Thriller".
Within his own discography, Timberlake's current path can be traced back to one song, the Timbaland-produced "Cry Me a River". More than any other, that track-- which sounds as odd and gothic and heady today as it did in 2002-- made way for his current role as first-class pop vanguard. FutureSex, spearheaded sonically by Timbaland once again, developed the syncopated formula further, lengthening beats, adding scene-setting interludes, and generally approaching pop with the sort of rule-crushing abandon that is often desired but rarely achieved. But then Timberlake went into movieland, and Timbaland, along with many of his peers, went into Euro-schlock-land, and "SexyBack" became an ever-foggier memory, made more poignant because it marked a time and a collaboration that seemed completely over. Which is yet another reason why The 20/20 Experience is such a welcome comeback. It's not only about the return of a human being who can hold an entire stadium rapt for hours, but a producer who had seriously lost his way.
20/20 has Timbaland, along with protege Jerome "J-Roc" Harmon, returning to the sounds that flipped so many ears at the beginning of this century: the Bhaṅgṛā rhythms that drive "Don't Hold the Wall", the squealing vocal samples of "Spaceship Coupe", the sinister synths of "Tunnel Vision". And the new twist is also a blast from the past: many songs here are augmented with live instrumentation and vocal harmonies that go back to Motown, Stax, and Trojan. The stunning soul strut "That Girl" samples reggae great King Sporty's "Self Destruct", with Timbaland and Timberlake essentially approaching retro-pop with a hip-hop mentality. It's then, it's now, it's the type of song that'll be around for a long while.
"That Girl" also sums up the album's overall message: "I'm in love with that girl, and she told me that she's in love with me," sings Timberlake, cleanly and sweetly. The rest of the record unspools that contented emotion-- presumably inspired by Timberlake's 2012 nuptials with actress Jessica Biel-- in various ways. He's high off of love on "Pusher Love Girl", he's enjoying a five-star reception with his head-turning date on "Suit & Tie", he's exploring the cosmos in a two-person vehicle on "Spaceship Coupe", where he sings, "Everybody's looking for the flyest thing to say/ But I just wanna fly away with you." The lines double as a love-dumb self-critique; though Timberlake cites Bob Dylan as an idol, he's no bard. This pop star is at his best when leaving intricacies to the music, like the voyeuristic, slightly creepy feeling of all-encompassing infatuation that imbues the swarming "Tunnel Vision", or on "Mirrors", which conveys both the arena-flattening power and pillowtalk intimacy of finding solace in another person across its eight minutes.
20/20 is akin to another recent album that successfully teased-out excitement from satisfaction, Beyoncé's 4. And like Beyoncé, Timberlake is looking to put himself above the fray of those pushing boom-boom beats to quick, repetitive, and oftentimes-numbing hits. It's a sensible strategy. Admittedly, pop culture wasn't built on sensible; instead, it rewards youth and conflict-- there's a reason why Rihanna has more #1 solo singles than JT and Beyoncé combined. Happy marriages, as a rule, do not sell records. But they could. And Timberlake is in a particularly opportunistic position to indulge in such aspirations. As a star who grew up in the money-printing CD era, he's got enough notoriety and loyalty to be able to challenge his audience without alienating them. So he's giving hopeless romantics just a little hope, one clattering seven-minute ode at a time.


The Catastrophist, the post-rock quintet Tortoise's first album in nearly seven years, shows a point of departure for the venerated band—for one thing, it is the group's first-ever work with prominent vocals.

The Catastrophist

Tortoise, the Chicago-based instrumental post-rock quintet, have spent the past 25 years and seven albums fusing dub, jazz, prog, and indie into an instantly recognizable and much-loved trademark sound. The Catastrophist is their first studio album in nearly seven years, and in their time away, Tortoise were commissioned by their hometown to create several suites of music inspired by its storied jazz and improvisational music scenes. Based on this new record, the experience must have been a pivotal one, as The Catastrophist bears a subtle yet marked style change for the band—from sprawling and loose to something more cohesive, but nonetheless experimental enough so as to not alienate their core fans. The enjoyability of The Catastrophist is in this leap of faith, the idea that no mold is beautiful enough to remain unbroken, even if its new shape may be foreign and strange. In this case, the risk pays off.
You cannot listen to this record as someone who is familiar with Tortoise's output and not be somewhat taken aback by at least one facet: vocals. The Catastrophist is Tortoise's first album ever to prominently feature guest vocalists, and they chose wisely. Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo provides vocals to the distorted, laid-back soul ballad "Yonder Blue" which makes exquisite use of her soft, choirboy voice. A cover of British singer-songwriter David Essex's 1973 hit single "Rock On," which is a fairly weird classic rock oddity to begin with, enlists Todd Rittman, guitarist for fellow Chicagoans U.S. Maple, and his distorted, echo-y vocals make Tortoise's version sound even more languid and surreal than the original, like a Satanic call for teenagers to experience the forbidden pleasures of rock'n'roll. When Rittman curls his tongue around "Still looking for that blue jean, baby queen/ Prettiest girl I ever seen," it definitely sounds more like a concrete threat than the plea of a disenchanted lover. The original song's staccato strings are replaced here by heavy synthesizers, and the result is a track that sounds both new and steeped in '70s and '80s gearhead synth-rock. It's clever and arresting, and illustrates perfectly what could be a very new direction in Tortoise's cannon.
That being said, some of their more conventional tracks may pale a little in comparison to their newer aesthetics, if only because their evolution has been so slow and protracted. The album's first single, "Gesceap," beings with dueling synthesizers that are then joined by the vast array of Tortoise's instrumental arsenal, until all that's left is a tornado of texture and sound. There's a lack of the slightly more rock-oriented, guitar-driven pieces the band became popular for (the urgency of their 1998 record TNT, for example, is absent), but it has been replaced by almost tongue-in-cheek flourishes in some places: "Gopher Island" clocks in at just over a minute and might seem like mid-album fodder, but multiple listens reveals it to be a weirdo bubble of retro experimental electronica, the sort of thing Throbbing Gristle or Fad Gadget would have knocked around the studio while feeding each other magic mushrooms. The Catastrophist's namesake and opener is a song that begins with a synth line unironically reminiscent of a 1970s cultural television jingle, before sliding into Tortoise's hallmark atmospheric, plucked electric guitars and splashy cymbals. There's a playfulness there that, once again, belies a watershed moment for the band. As Todd Rittman howls on "Rock On": "Where do we go from here?"


With the shock release of Black Messiah, soul singer and multi-instrumentalist D'Angelo returns with his first album of new material in 14 years. Black Messiah is a study in controlled chaos, and D'Angelo is the rare classicist able to filter the attributes of the greats in the canon into a sound distinctly his own.

Black Messiah

With this week’s shock release of Black Messiah, soul singer and multi-instrumentalist D'Angelo, the man music critic Robert Christgau once earnestly dubbed "R&B Jesus," returns with his first album of new material in 14 years. It was not, as many have suggested, 14 years of silence. The last D'Angelo album, 2000’s Voodoo, was a near perfect communion of buttery soul, Crisco-fried funk, and hip-hop thump, but the video for its calling card ,"Untitled (How Does It Feel?)", a lingering, sensual glance over the singer’s face and chest, turned him into an unwitting sex symbol. Live shows soon descended into catcalling, and D, convinced his music had become an accessory to his looks, slipped slowly out of sight. Dispatches grew scarce and worrisome. There were arrests. There was a car accident. For a while, D'Angelo appeared to follow talented but troubled forbears Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone into the dark.
Even in darkness there was still music. D'Angelo guested on albums by J Dilla, Q-Tip, Snoop Dogg, and more. He taught himself to play guitar. There were perennial promises of a new album. D'Angelo returned to the stage in 2012 peppering sets of old favorites with carefully chosen covers and unreleased new material. Black Messiah isn’t a sneak attack; it’s a slow-simmering gumbo finally boiled over. We tasted its fearless ambivalence to genre boundaries in 2007 when Roots maestro Questlove snuck an early version of the stately Joe Pass homage of "Really Love" to Australia’s Triple J Radio, in 2010 when the punk-hop scorcher "1000 Deaths" briefly slipped onto YouTube and in 2012 when D'Angelo returned to television to unveil the big band funk smartbomb "Sugah Daddy" on the BET Awards. Still, it’s a wonder to hear his mutant groove unblemished by the passage of time and stretched around this gobstopping cosmic slop of country funk, psych and new wave.
Black Messiah is a study in controlled chaos. The nightmarish chorus of "1000 Deaths" arrives late and fierce, as though the band unfurled its crunchy, lumbering vamp just long enough to violently snatch it out from under us. "The Charade"'s Minneapolis sound funk rock follows, every bit as bright as the previous track was menacing until you zero in on the threadbare heart-sickness of D and P-Funk affiliate Kendra Foster’s lyrics. Black Messiah pulls together disparate threads few predecessors have had the smarts or audacity to unite. One song might channel Funkadelic, another, the Revolution, but the shiftless mad doctor experimentation and the mannered messiness at the root of it all is unmistakably the Vanguard. Black Messiah is a dictionary of soul, but D'Angelo is the rare classicist able to filter the attributes of the greats in the canon into a sound distinctly his own. It’s at once familiar and oddly unprecedented, a peculiar trick to pull on an album recorded over the span of a decade.
The timeliness of Black Messiah’s message is doubly astounding. The album was pieced together over painstaking years and originally pegged for launch next year, but D, affected by national unrest around unprosecuted police officer involved shootings in Ferguson, MO and New York City, nudged the release date up to speak to the times. Black Messiah plays out most like Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On in its penetrating sense of disorder. Where Voodoo concerned itself chiefly with the ups and downs of cohabitation, the new music steps outside to see what’s going on, and it ain’t good news. "1000 Deaths" folds the old adage about cowards and soldiers into a word about guns, fear and desperation. "The Charade" calls bullshit on a knotty history of systemic racism. ("All we wanted was a chance to talk/ ‘Stead we've only got outlined in chalk.") "Prayer" looks for strength from on high, opening on a choppy Lord’s Prayer whose signal keeps cutting out.
Alongside this wartime pith even the sunnier songs come across darkly. The bipartite nostalgia romp "Back to the Future" looks for solace in memories ostensibly because the present is discouraging. The love songs run a little morbid. The titular pledge of "Betray My Heart" doesn’t speak fealty so much as candor, and the album’s barn burner of a closer "Another Life" is a song of devotion in the vein of the Stylistics’ "You Are Everything"—except that the couple never really meets. Black Messiah is about finding something to hang onto in dire times, soldiering through the infuriating insanity of oppression with a support system in tow. "It’s about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen," D'Angelo writes in the liner notes. "Black Messiah is not one man. It’s a feeling that, collectively, we are all that leader." He may have taken well over a decade to show face again, but it turns out D'Angelo is right on time.


The rising country star from Oklahoma works with a traditionalist’s appreciation for songwriting and the intense, earnest emotion of heartland rock.

Zach Bryan

Four songs into his very ambitious, very serious self-titled album, Zach Bryan anticipates some criticism. “Do you ever get tired of singin’ songs/Like all your pain is just another fuckin’ singalong?” he asks in “East Side of Sorrow,” one of the record’s many full-throated singalongs about a painful subject. By this point in the record, the 27-year-old songwriter has already recited a poem about the nature of fear and included a brief electric guitar interpolation of “The Star-Spangled Banner”; he’s shared a stark reflection on a road trip with a sick loved one and delved into his past as a Navy vet, rhyming “fight a war” with “don’t even know what you’re fighting for.”
It sounds heavy—and it is heavy. So why does Zach Bryan feel like a breath of fresh air? For all his high-stakes musings on life and love and death, sung in a gruff, boyish howl that makes even just the word “child” sound like a stifled sob, Bryan has a lot of fight in him. A growing force on both the country and rock charts, he is a reluctant celebrity whose reluctance only makes him seem more like a celebrity, all while maintaining a focus on songwriting as a pure, unfiltered outlet for telling his story. “I’m too writing-driven to be a big star,” he told The New York Times last year. “I’m not meant for it.” And while he was being interviewed about American Heartbreak, his platinum-selling, star-making, 34-song major-label debut, he does have a point. Self-produced and written almost entirely without co-writers, his follow-up, Zach Bryan, lives proudly in its own world, for better or worse.
Listening to Bryan’s songs, it’s clear why he’s thriving on country radio. Even with his stripped-back arrangements, he’s got a knack for memorable, meaty hooks that take you down the backroads beside him with the radio blasting. This gift is especially evident in “Hey Driver,” whose chorus about small towns and fine women is so big and fun that guest vocalist Michael Trotter Jr. of the War and Treaty can’t seem to stop belting the harmony part, getting louder and more soulful with each repetition. By the end of the song, Bryan has muted his own delivery to an uncharacteristic speak-sing, seemingly distracted by the effect his melodies have on the people around him. You can picture him closing his eyes tightly, imagining how it will feel when the whole crowd joins in.
In moments like these, Bryan sounds like a pop star, but he still works firmly in the lineage of old-school country songwriting. Just the opening verse of “I Remember Everything,” a winning ballad featuring Kacey Musgraves, alludes to rotgut whiskey and an ’88 Ford, daddy and mama, and the inherited wisdom that “grown men don’t cry.” Raised in Oologah, Oklahoma, Bryan never tires of surveying the emotional landscape of his childhood and the effect it’s had on his young adulthood. From his time in the Navy to his unlikely ascent on the charts to the death of his mother in 2016, he has become a master at casting the facts of his life as hard-won pep talks: The proper opener, “Overtime,” is a rousing and self-aware underdog anthem, incorporating the closest thing this album has to a joke with a sample from a recent Barstool Sports fan interview. And yet occasionally Bryan stumbles when placing himself in a larger narrative about old souls in a modern world: “I wish I was a tradesman,” he tries late in the album, “learning from some beat-down old layman.”
For all his traditionalism, Bryan is equally outspoken about what he doesn’t like about country music. He was one of the genre’s only major figures to criticize Morgan Wallen for being racist in the immediate aftermath, and compared to the slick sound of his contemporaries, he prefers the tender setting of live takes and four-track demos. He’s fond of the way his voice sounds clipping in the mic, how the strings of his guitar resonate after the other instruments die out, and how studio banter can give the effect of an impromptu jam session. The wistful closing tracks, “Smaller Acts” and “Oklahoman Son,” could be hits, but the recordings are too lo-fi to find a home on mainstream radio, opting for a scratchy setting to suit his tone of tearful remembrance. From the cozy tape hiss to the muted trumpets throughout, you get the sense that Bryan holds a copy of For Emma, Forever Ago very close to his heart.
This earnest intensity is Bryan’s default setting—a quality that puts him closer to angsty young heartland rockers like Sam Fender rather than fellow country chart-toppers like Luke Combs. As he expands his sound beyond genre confines, he can sell a multi-part epic like “Jake’s Piano - Long Island” and a complexly orchestrated slow-burner like “Ticking.” But he doesn’t yet have the same range in his writing, lyrically or melodically. In one song he rails against acts who compose “songs about nothing” and others fueled by “backdoor deals and therapy,” and Bryan’s obsession with raw, unprocessed emotion sometimes boxes him into a dour, one-dimensional sound. The overall effect of his records can be like binging an entire season of a network drama: one dramatic gesture after another, all delivered with the same minor-to-major gravitas, all gunning for the same emotional response. When he sings a chorus of “I ain’t spotless/Neither is you,” accompanied by the Lumineers, the sentiment feels so meaningless that it might as well come from the same Nashville assembly line that Bryan stands so proudly against.
In the place of these swings toward grand, everyman resonance, I sometimes long for any hint of the renegade spirit of Bryan’s stance against unfair ticket prices, or the irreverent righteousness of calling his first live album All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster. This is why it’s such a relief midway through the record when he enlists his band for “Fear and Friday’s.” They settle on a lighter, looser mood to navigate the album’s themes of desperate nights and broken promises—more The River than Nebraska. “I’ve got a fear, dear, that it’s gonna end,” Bryan sings in the chorus. “Won’t you get angry at me/Say you love me again?” In Bryan’s songs, these big emotions—love and anger, hope and fear—are all tangled up, and getting crushed by their waves is always preferable to feeling nothing at all. If Zach Bryan brings this approach near a breaking point, the fierce determination also ends up being his saving grace. Whatever effect his songs have on you, there’s never any doubt they’re coming from the heart.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Carole King’s Tapestry, the second act that turned a master songwriter into a music legend.

Tapestry

Carole King was a 15-year-old pianist in a poodle skirt when she first took the elevator up to the Manhattan office of a record label with her stack of sheet music and her Big Apple tenacity, and asked to audition her songs. It was 1957. As a Brooklyn teenager, the daughter of a piano teacher and firefighter who separated when she was young, King had a front-row seat to the genesis of rock’n’roll. She wondered if she could be a part of it.
Too smart to then be considered cool, too determined to care, King would sign her first contract with ABC-Paramount that same year. She was a married mother of two by the age of 20, living in suburban New Jersey with her husband and lyricist, Gerry Goffin, a brooding intellectual who she met at Queens College and ushered into music. As they co-wrote singles for stars to sing into the stratosphere—Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion,” the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” and Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” among them—King’s own life was a source of perspective. She and Goffin worked in a cubicle with an upright piano and an overflowing ashtray at the publishing company Aldon Music, a veritable pop factory across from the Brill Building. King spiked their A.M. mini-masterpieces with the R&B melodies of her youth and brightened them with the grandeur of her beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein. Many were composed in single nights while her children were asleep.
If that’s all she ever did, she would still have been a legend. It was those pop standards that led John Lennon to remark that, when he and Paul McCartney first got together, they wanted to be “the Goffin-King of England.” It was those songs that were given to Randy Newman in demo form as examples of perfect writing (he has called King his hero), and that made James Taylor too nervous to speak to her on the night they met. But it was only a first act.
Tapestry was King’s second album as a bandleader, primary songwriter, unvarnished singer, and tentative recording artist—an American master of melody whose introspection became a phenomenon. At 29, she had been in the music industry for over a decade, outlasting the sea change away from bubblegum music and towards the singer-songwriter. She was skeptical of stardom. (“I didn’t think of myself as a singer,” King has said, and having written for Aretha, who could blame her?) She had also divorced her lyricist. Gathering her daughters, Louise and Sherry, and her cat, Telemachus, King moved cross-country to the Hollywood Hills, where she undertook the time-honored pop-music tradition of self-reinvention by way of self-discovery. In time, she grew spiritual, becoming a follower of the artistically beloved Swami Satchidananda. Crucially, she finally began to write her own lyrics in earnest, penning more than half the songs, and all of the peaks, of Tapestry alone.
King’s lyrics are a testament to the potential of the simplest phrases when heightened by an uncluttered arrangement and an unfettered truth, the definition of classic. “You’re beautiful,” “you’ve got a friend,” “you’re so far away”—her words are conversational, economic, and nearly telepathic, as if reading our collective mind. In songs that mix girl-group longing, Broadway balladeering, blues, soul, and wonder, Tapestry used the room itself as an instrument. The producer, King’s longtime publisher Lou Adler, wanted it to sound like the understated and sought-after demos she recorded when writing for other artists, with the tactile intimacy of a woman at the piano singing straight to you. The result was precise but not overly manicured. Owing to her newfound spirituality, there is a sweet serenity to Tapestry. Here was a ’50s rock’n’roller from Brooklyn having journeyed through the ’60s to become a ’70s lady of the Canyon, making music that seemed to elude time completely.
Among an ever-present array of incense and candles, King recorded Tapestry at A&M Studios in Hollywood, in Studio B. The Carpenters were in Studio A—they would record King’s “It’s Going to Take Some Time” the following year—and in Studio C, Joni Mitchell was working on her confessional masterpiece, Blue. King’s band would sneak into Mitchell’s studio when she wasn’t around (better piano in there), and Mitchell would come by to sing backing vocals, alongside James Taylor, on the Tapestry recordings of “You’ve Got a Friend” and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” According to Sheila Weller’s chronicle of the era, Girls Like Us, Mitchell had been known to call “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” her favorite song of all time.
The songs of Tapestry are like companions for navigating the doubts and disappointments of everyday life with dignity. Having composed hundreds of singles for others, King knew what they needed: raw feeling, careful phrasings, a little sparkle. She lets her voice break to show that it’s alive. The soulful “It’s Too Late”—co-written with Toni Stern, a then-unknown lyricist who King called “a quintessential California girl”—feels like a grown-up girl-group anthem, wherein the best part of breaking up is, it turns out, clarity. The gospel-tinged backing vocals of “Way Over Yonder,” sung by Merry Clayton, charge its calm with resilience, dreaming of “true peace of mind” and “a garden of wisdom.” By 1971, King was not only practicing yoga but teaching it at the Integral Yoga Institute, and an attendant sense of collectedness carries Tapestry. The Broadway-ready “Beautiful,” which came to King while riding the subway, is a loving-kindness meditation banged out to a Gershwin-like orchestra of piano chords: an appeal to the world to choose a positive outlook, to put forth what you’d like to receive.
As King applied her Brill Building-era chops to newfound bohemianism, perhaps it was a harder East Coast mentality that kept her lyrics concrete and her sound percussive. The jaunty Tapestry opener “I Feel the Earth Move” is both a testament to King’s groundedness and her emotional attunement. Inspired in part by the Ernest Hemingway novel For Whom the Bell Tolls—the characters make love in a forest and feel “the earth move out and away from under them”—she wrote the song early in ’71. On her birthday, February 9, the catastrophic San Fernando earthquake occurred. “I feel the earth move under my feet/I feel the sky tumblin’ down,” King sings with bluesy swagger, channeling the tectonic power of infatuation.
Before Tapestry, King formed a folk-rock band called the City in her Laurel Canyon living room with two fellow New York transplants, Danny Kortchmar and Charles Larkey (who would become her second husband). They released one fantastic album, 1968’s Now That Everything’s Been Said; the title track, co-written with Stern, is an exquisite gem of a kiss-off. Somewhat astonishingly, Kortchmar and Larkey were former members of the Fugs: the East Village beat-punk antagonists whose anti-professionalism was more or less a total inversion of what you might think of when you think of Carole King. But in her memoir, King writes that her new collaborators pushed each other to “sing beyond what they believed was the edge of their ability.” You can hear that in how King often maxes out her limited alto range, reaching for something just beyond her. She called her own music “soft rock,” but the brink of her singing sounds deliberately loud. Through the lovely melody of “Home Again,” King’s lyric captures the precise feeling of trying to be present when it’s impossible: “Snow is cold/Rain is wet/Chills my soul to the marrow/I won’t be happy till I see you alone again.” King’s voice presses against the lyric—“marrow”—with evermore volume, vigor, and makes it ecstatically real: the furthest place the note can go.
King so often wrote songs for others. At the time, she was touring in James Taylor’s band; she’d played piano on the sensitive, illuminated ballads of 1970’s Sweet Baby James. And though Tapestry’s peaks—“So Far Away” and “You’ve Got a Friend”—weren’t technically written for Taylor, she said she penned them with his sunstruck sound in mind. “So Far Away” came to her on the road while missing her then-husband, ex-Fug Charles Larkey. It is the record’s sparest song, a marvel that seems composed to make your heart race: the feelings of loneliness, transience, and long-distance yearning (life on tour, that is) are present in every cascading chord. “So far away/Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” King sings, each syllable a surface of inquiry. The borderlessness of King’s composition makes this liminal state feel infinite—as if bittersweet were itself a key.
There are few promises in the history of pop music as generous or exalted as “You’ve Got a Friend.” “Ain’t it good to know that you’ve got a friend/When people can be so cold?” King sings, giving gravity to every note, as if to ask: What could matter more? It’s a song that seems to stare at you, no matter who you are, and affirm pop’s most profound capacity: to simply be reached. “You’ve Got a Friend” became a No. 1 hit for Taylor when he recorded his more genial version for his own 1971 record, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, on which King played. (She often said she felt they were recording one continuous album, sharing many musicians.) Taylor had long been inspired by King, and later, it was he who encouraged King to sing her own songs. It makes “You’ve Got a Friend” an exquisite ode to friendship, interconnectedness, and mutual inspiration. King’s superior take amplifies its hope almost to a shout.
King also recorded two of her and Goffin’s standards for Tapestry—“Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” and “Natural Woman”—and while you couldn’t quite call her versions definitive, they carry the bespoke power of a woman reckoning with her history in song. For one, they were the bookends to her musical-marital partnership. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” was her and Goffin’s first hit, for the Shirelles, the tune that made them full-time writers after Goffin finally quit his day job as a chemist. “Natural Woman” was their last before divorcing. In musical second acts, many artists attempt to split with their former selves entirely. But King had a past she could own.
She was 19 when “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” first came out; she wrote the music, arranged the strings using a book on orchestration borrowed from the public library, and played piano on the recording. The lyric was a kind of response to the Shirelles’ previous hit, “Tonight’s the Night,” but turned “sideways and upside down,” King has said. For 1960, it was rather radical: the voice of a clear-eyed young woman accepting the possibility of a one-night stand—“Can I believe the magic in your sighs?”—despite her longing for true love, resigned but not fooled. It became the first No. 1 hit of the girl group era. King and Goffin were so proud of the song that they engineered the doorbell of their home in suburban New Jersey to play its lovelorn hook every time a visitor arrived. But perhaps it was a cautionary tale for their own doomed marriage. On Tapestry, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” was a raw emblem of King’s own complex teenage years, and she sang it in careful measures, as if savoring the memory in each note.
King and Goffin wrote their monumental Aretha single after Atlantic exec Jerry Wexler pulled up to them while walking on Broadway, rolled down the window of his limo, and asked them to craft a hit for her with the title “Natural Woman.” They drove home to New Jersey, listened to R&B and gospel on the Black-programmed WNJR, and poured out a piece of history: “When my soul was in the lost and found/You came along to claim it.” Of course King’s “Natural Woman” does not summon the heavens with the same earth-shattering force as the Queen of Soul’s version, released in 1967. When King performed it live on tour with Taylor three years later, she would ask the audience to please imagine it as it once was—a demo for Aretha, and part of her life story. But the grasping of King’s “you make me”s and the fluttering of her “feel”s are charged with the force of a person attempting to turn herself inside out. In the voice of Aretha, “Natural Woman” is glory. In the voice of King, it is, like all of Tapestry, an act of pure conviction.
Though barely promoted by King herself, Tapestry spent 15 weeks as the No. 1 album in the U.S. upon its release, and stayed on the charts for five years. King won four Grammys for Tapestry in 1972, more than anyone had ever received at once, and it was the first time that the New York award ceremony was broadcast live on television. But King didn’t attend to collect the awards herself. She chose to remain in California with her newborn third child, Molly, instead.
It’s telling: There’s an unmistakable maternal energy to Tapestry. Throughout King’s career, she has recalled moments when her responsibilities merged, in which she’d have her baby in the playpen at the studio or be breastfeeding in between takes. Toni Stern has said that, while writing for Tapestry, King would be “playing the bass with her left hand and diapering a baby with her right.” King herself said that having kids kept her “grounded in reality,” which is audible in every loosely calibrated note of Tapestry. Her next artistic achievement was a collection of children’s music, 1975’s Really Rosie, in collaboration with author Maurice Sendak. A reworking of “Where You Lead”—rewritten, King has said, to sound less submissive—became the theme song to the mother-daughter sitcom “Gilmore Girls,” sung by King and her daughter Louise.
I was a teenager myself when my own mom—noticing my tendency to remain locked in my bedroom with Mitchell and Bob Dylan on an endless loop—gave me her CD copy of Tapestry. I have to admit, at 17, I didn’t get it. Maybe “I Feel the Earth Move” sounded too conventional to my angsty and emotionally blown-out high school tastes, which is too bad. I’d love to imagine an alternate universe where Tapestry lifted my ever-solemn adolescent moods, King’s voice saying you’re beautiful and you’ve got a friend in no uncertain terms. But with records there are always second chances. It is still possible to play Tapestry and feel that someone is looking out for you.
Unlike Dylan or Mitchell, King’s lyrics don’t immediately scan as political or poetic, and when Tapestry came out, the record was criticized by some as “lightweight.” In the wake of the civil rights movement and in the midst of women’s liberation, 1971 was the year that Marvin Gaye sang “What’s Going On” and Helen Reddy proclaimed “I am woman/Hear me roar.”
But there was nothing light about a woman who came of age in the ’50s controlling her destiny, constructing and reconstructing her existence at will, choosing a life of both home and adventure, of heart and mind, and narrating her multitudes, the tapestry of her experience, with popular song. If it feels light, that is a feat; if it feels comforting, that is a gift. For all the teen-dreaming of those early Goffin-King tunes, there’s little fantasy on Tapestry: It’s real life.

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Perhaps their reunion is already doomed, but for the first time in almost two decades, this haywire tandem goes wild with their singularly subversive rock’n’roll.

White Stuff

On the first line of their first album together in 19 years, Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty reintroduce Royal Trux with a joint affirmation: “This is the way it’s supposed to be.” You will find no habitat more natural for these longtime friends and foils than the title track of White Stuff. Cycling through shape-shifting riffs as if trying to outfox the cops, the duo sings in perfect disharmony about playing in a rock band, touring the nation, making duty-free pit stops, and, yes, using that white stuff. The song so effortlessly resituates Herrema and Hagerty in their element, it seems auto-generated by an algorithm that’s learned all Royal Trux’s old tricks. But as Herrema and Hagerty’s turbulent track record has shown, nothing here is ever the way it truly appears.
Late BBC DJ John Peel quipped that his favorite band, the Fall, were “always different, always the same.” Throughout the 1990s, Royal Trux sounded like they were always together but always unraveling, too. Creative and romantic partners at the time, Herrema and Hagerty belonged to no particular city or scene beyond their own self-contained upside-down universe, where sleazy rock was rendered avant-garde and vice versa. Shortly after releasing their most congenial, conventional album, 2000’s Pound for Pound, the partnership collapsed, spurred in part by tough-love interventions for a relapsing Herrema.
Given the messy nature of their breakup, Royal Trux’s reunion for White Stuff has been surprising and, in the end, predictably dysfunctional. A winter North American tour was reportedly canceled on account of Herrema’s priors (but rescheduled for the spring, it seems), while a recent MOJO interview and a series of cryptic Tweets from Hagerty suggest a lingering discord. But if the tenuous truce should only last long enough to yield White Stuff, the brief reconciliation was not in vain.
Royal Trux’s ’90s catalog embraced the outsized mythology and sinister allure of classic rock when their indie peers sought to dismantle it; they reemerge on White Stuff at a moment when guitar-based rock has been pushed to the margins in the mainstream and underground alike. Rather than lament this state of affairs, Royal Trux again revel in it. Throughout White Stuff, Herrema and Hagerty treat the hallowed building blocks of classic rock—chunky riffs, rippin’ guitar solos, cowbell-clankin’ grooves—like discarded parts salvaged from the landfill. They upcycle them into the 1979 fairground fantasia of their dreams, a place where you might score the Royal Trux-branded coke mirror on the cover by winning a carnival game. Atop the arpeggio-slathered chug of “Year of the Dog,” they ask, “Can you hear rock’n’roll, in the year of the dog?” Assuming the answer is no, the duo deviously triggers their trusty phasing effects and sends the song careening like a Tilt-a-Whirl with busted controls.
Forsaking the earthier vibe of later Trux records like Veterans of Disorder and Pound for Pound, White Stuff feels like an extension of Herrema’s work with Black Bananas, thriving on the tension between old-school authenticity and modernist manipulations. Tracks like “Purple Audacity #2” and “Under Ice” start out as deceptively anthemic sing-alongs, though the swaggering grooves, lysergic riffs, and synth smears eventually meld into hallucinatory swirls. “Sic Em Slow” is a tough boogie birthed from a flurry of tropical electronics. Kool Keith, meanwhile, turns up to rap about pizza on the boombox electro jam “Get Used to This,” the great Judgment Night deep cut that never was.
Herrema and Hagerty wrote these songs via emailed file swaps, and Hagerty reportedly bailed on recording sessions before the album was completed. Still, the duo’s piss-and-vinegar vocal dynamic feels as broken-in as an old baseball mitt. In the past, Herrema and Hagerty often took solo lead turns; here, there’s rarely a moment when their voices aren’t overlapping. The ravaged tandem can be surprisingly poignant, too. “Suburban Junkie Lady” is a slow-motion psych-funk reverie about empathizing with a homeless woman trucking her life’s belongings in a shopping cart, as passersby blithely toss her food from their cars. Herrema’s a fashion stylist and designer in L.A. now, Hagerty a Denver-based dad—this song, though, serves as a blood-pact reminder of their hardscrabble past.
But Royal Trux never sound more pure and fully realized than when practicing the fine art of falling apart. On White Stuff’s most disorienting track, “Purple Audacity #1,” Herrema and Hagerty sing competing melodies as if waging a custody battle over the track’s prog-reggae rhythm. An atonal guitar solo blares continuously, like a broken television in the next room. Hagerty somehow twists a nonsensical mantra—“Southern California drivers are the 19th wonder of the world!”—into a catchy hook. For all the admirers and imitators Royal Trux have amassed in absentia, no one else can make music like this. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.


Backed by Lex Luger's visceral production, Gucci Mane's protege strips street rap to its essential characteristics and distills the genre into its purest form.

Flockaveli

Flockaveli is for people who find M.O.P. too polite, Silkk the Shocker too relaxed, and Blaq Poet too introspective. Waka Flocka Flame is an unrepentant street-rap hardhead-- as much a descendant of New York aggro-thugs like DMX or Screwball as early 2000s southern club rappers. Producer Lex Luger provides most of Flockaveli's thunderous accompaniment, while a parade of no-name/street-fame character-rappers (plus, inexplicably, Wale) give the album the chaotic tone of a street brawl. But at the record's violent core, Waka Flocka Flame stands as a gangsta rap giant whose lack of range is more than made up for by his grizzled bark.
For 17 straight tracks, Flockaveli is a furious torrent of gangsta rap id. There are zero attempts at crossover, no R&B choruses (unless you count Roscoe Dash's rasp over Drumma Boy's ominous marching horn anthem "No Hands"). Certain songs jump out immediately-- especially rap-anthem-of-the-year contender "Hard in Da Paint". "Grove St. Party" subverts the record's adrenaline into a cocktail of intoxicated cockiness and tense creepiness-- a dark, twisted party jam. "For My Dawgs" turns the record's energy into a survivalist street anthem: "One lousy-ass bullet can't fuckin' stop me." Waka's reckless fatalism-- that sense of him teetering on a knife's edge-- is the part of his persona that best fits with the approach of the album's Makaveli namesake.
But it's the sound of the album that sticks out the most at first, a sonic barrage of uncontained hood aggression. The beats are confrontational, shredding up the template of early-2000s Atlanta and turning the remains into an overwhelmingly dense assault of hi-hats and gothic string pads. Along with gunfire effects and Waka's constant ad libs, these elements create a non-stop gut punch of aural adrenaline. Luger's production isn't far removed from the post-Jeezy trap sound of fellow Atlantans Shawty Redd and Drumma Boy-- in fact, he's a little less dexterous than the latter-- but it works perfectly with Waka's sledgehammer-subtle approach. His beats alternate between unrelentling repetition ("Bang") and unexpected, lurching drop-outs ("Hard in Da Paint").
But for all the credit given to Luger-- who, in fairness, has upped the bar for rap producers competing with the post-Tunnel nightclub gangster aesthetic-- it's Waka who gives this record its frenetic intensity. In gangsta rap's race to produce the hardest possible tracks, Waka seems intent on topping everyone, stripping street rap to its essential characteristics and distilling the genre into its purest form. But he's no traditionalist, either, avoiding the New York roughneck's reliance on older production styles. There are few attempts to integrate nuance or complexities, gray-scale morality, or introspection. Each track gives a new perspective on the same basic archetype, reducing gangsta rap to its building blocks: hypermasculine children of the drug trade, reckless fatalism, intensity, and physicality.
Anyone coming to this record expecting wordplay, or criticizing it for its lack thereof, is missing the point completely: Flockaveli thrives on Waka's fresh approach to the same generation gap-widening narrative that's driven street rap since before N.W.A. That doesn't mean he can't rap; instead, Waka sells on the way his personality bleeds through his vocals and phrasing, the way his voice rolls, "I'ma die for this, shawty, I swwweartogod," on "Hard in Da Paint", imprinting his vocals in the most memorable possible way: "Mizz-ayy management, shit, that my motherrr."
Which leads to the line that explains the entire record: "When my little brother died, I said, 'Fuck school.'" This one lyric summarizes the attitude of a record utterly unconcerned with authority and anyone else who gets in the way. It points to the unspoken undercurrent in gangsta rap that's usually mischaracterized as undirected underclass rage: Waka's aggression is the survivalist reaction of the powerless, directed toward the threats of the immediate environment. He knows his strengths and he plays to them, exactingly.


The Atlanta rapper’s first solo record in 11 years preserves his seismic bars, but its sanctimonious undercurrent can make it hard to stomach.

Michael

In Sam Greenlee’s 1969 novel The Spook Who Sat By the Door, protagonist Dan Freeman is a Black revolutionary moonlighting as a CIA agent, hellbent on protecting himself and his people from a world on fire. The author described the book as part Civil Rights Era satire and part “training manual for guerrilla warfare,” and its portrayal of revolution as salvation is as relevant now as it was 54 years ago. With it, Greenlee aimed to inspire Black readers to take action, “rather than always reacting as victims of a racist society.”
These kinds of well-intentioned but flawed sentiments, which place more blame on the individual than the system built to keep them down, have been connecting deeply with Killer Mike these days. The Atlanta rapper’s resurgence as one-half of Run the Jewels alongside El-P in the early 2010s amplified his already potent sociopolitical consciousness to superhuman levels. Those records were equally fun and confrontational: loose but always focused on raging against the racial and economic injustices of the world and forging a path ahead.
During Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, Mike’s spirited battle cries captured so much of the country’s discontent. On “Thieves! (Screamed the Ghost),” from Run the Jewels 3, he rapped, “You can burn the system and start again.” A few songs later, he emphasized the importance of redistributing wealth to sex workers. At the same time, he was taking that radical spirit into the real world, building community-minded businesses and organizing food drives, among other initiatives. RTJ albums, especially the third and fourth ones, didn’t just foreground the kind of revolutionary anger and civil disobedience found in Spook—they gave it a modern urgency and a sense of direction.
But in the years since, Mike’s fiery raps have gradually taken a backseat to some less-than-ideal optics. He went from endorsing Bernie Sanders for president to taking an interview with NRA TV to having an inopportune meeting with Georgia’s Republican governor. Like the protagonist of Greenlee’s novel, Mike sees himself as a leader offering his people tools in a world stacked against them. But from another angle, it appears as though he’s doubling back, more content to work within the system than rail against it. It’s a familiar arc for so many who spend their lifetimes fighting for social change. When the landscape shifts and you start to lose touch, it’s easy to dig your heels in.
His latest album Michael—his first solo record since 2012’s R.A.P. Music—centers these conflicts and closes the gap between Killer Mike the rapper and Michael Render the husband, father, son, and born-again child of God. At its heart, Michael is an origin story that works best when it examines how worshiping at the altars of sex, money, and Jesus created the man we know today. But when he petulantly doubles down on critiques of his public persona and status as a Black multi-millionaire, the album is harder to stomach.
Rap music exists in a complex web of capitalistic deification and stacking bands as a survival tactic, but Mike’s worst takeaways often contradict one another without a thematic payoff. It’s unfortunate to hear him rap about his days living off drug and minimum wage money on “EXIT 9” on the same album where he calls others in similar positions lazy (“Too many y’all niggas laid up/And that’s why y’all niggas laid off” on “SPACESHIP VIEWS”). Occasionally, nuance gets cast aside for snide finger-wagging. “You still talkin’ New Jack City, that’s why you niggas poor,” he says pointedly on “NRICH,” making lengthy arguments about investing in real estate and his own Greenwood banking platform. Three songs later, he’s bragging about using tour money to buy a new Benz. Generating income for your family and community is a wonderful thing, but there’s a difference between aspirational hustler music and judgmental pocket-watching. Not only does this dissonance feel very “old rap man yells at cloud,” by indulging his preachier side, it often sabotages the balance Michael is so keen on maintaining. Mike wants us to see him as both a human being and a superstar, but the further the album strays from genuine self-reflection into sour disapproval, the worse it gets.
In a recent video posted to Twitter, Mike mentions a friend who told him that the album chronicles “the average working-class Black man’s story with dignity.” That’s true when the songs reminisce on Mike’s childhood and unpack his family history. On “SLUMMER,” he relives a whirlwind teenage romance that was blindsided by a surprise pregnancy. The girlfriend has an abortion and Mike reflects on paying for the procedure while unpacking his conflicted feelings. For all its awkward wordplay (“They call it adolescence ‘cause we learnin’ adult lessons”), his sincerity carries the song to the finish line. The same can be said for “SOMETHING FOR JUNKIES,” an account of his heart-to-hearts with his crack-addicted aunt, or “MOTHERLESS,” in which Mike works through the grief he feels after losing his mother and grandmother. Pain and pride course through every word as he considers his place in a complicated lineage: “Is this a blessing or a curse, or just some other shit?” he asks on the latter, exasperated. “No matter what, I’m numb as fuck ‘cause I’m still motherless.”
On a technical level, at least, Mike’s raps are seismic. That deep baritone and Atlanta drawl has long rendered his voice one of the most distinct in hip-hop; it’s inspired by the enveloping rumbles of Ice Cube and Erick Sermon as much as it is by Bun B or Big Boi. But what really makes it hit is its malleability. On “SCIENTISTS & ENGINEERS,” a breathtaking Dungeon Family reunion with Future and André 3000, he catches a blistering flow that bubbles and snaps without ever boiling over. With his booming voice, he praises the virtues of Gucci and the work of pan-Africanist scholar John Henrik Clark on opener “DOWN BY LAW,” while “SHED TEARS” and “MOTHERLESS” keep its fullness, but scale down the fire and brimstone for an understated intimacy. He’s hungry and ready to experiment, invigorated by his first batch of (mostly) non-El-P beats in years.
The producers he’s assembled here, which include Tennessee legend DJ Paul, Atlanta mainstay Honorable C.N.O.T.E., and executive producer No I.D., give Michael a lush, stately feel—a stark difference from the madcap sampledelia of Run the Jewels. Choirs, organs, and church bells drive home the pious theme and blend well with booming 808s, cascading synths, and Southern-fried bass licks. The trunk-rattling grooves split the difference between the classic and contemporary South, and it’s refreshing to hear Mike back in his musical comfort zone. “TWO DAYS,” with its wailing guitar sirens and fiery bass fretting, feels like a juiced-up version of Goodie Mob’s “Sesame Street.”
Sadly, that comfort begets some fuckshit. Older solo tracks, like “Don’t Die,” “American Dream,” and “That’s Life,” worked exceptionally well because they spoke with empathy and offered level-headed criticisms of the establishment as much as they fleshed out Mike’s story. Michael still has love for the people, but now it clashes with bars flexing about being a landlord, or homophobic (and dated) Brokeback Mountain jokes. For the first time, he’s punching down, and this bitter disposition gives the album a sanctimonious feel, one that’s usually reserved for his prickliest interviews. When he says “My brother’s in the fire and to save him’s my desire” on closing track “HIGH AND HOLY,” it’s unclear how he decides who’s worth saving. It’s unfortunate to see him trudge further down this path, because at its best, Michael is a funky refresh that often finds clarity in its own backyard.


The prodigious singer reunites with producer D’Mile for a collection of live-band soul and future-R&B that aspires to update the classic seduction jam with a dose of modern vulnerability.

Algorithm

As the singer of unforgettable tracks like “Over” and “Love You Too Much,” and as a songwriter on Ella Mai’s “10,000 Hours” and Beyoncé’s “Alien Superstar,” Lucky Daye’s spent at least a decade cultivating a terrarium of earworm hits. On this third album, Algorithm, Daye reunites with Dernst “D’Mile” Emile II, whose agile production can be heard on An Evening With Silk Sonic and Victoria Monet’s Jaguar series as well as Daye’s first two albums. The duo’s balance of retro-soul and future-R&B is a little left of center, freewheeling without any discernible label, and focuses on instrumental exploration and playful genre-melding.
Across Algorithm’s 14 tracks, live-band seduction pulls you out of the club shadows and into the light of a Delta dancefloor. Opener “Never Leavin’ U Lonely” is a sexy party trick, the type of song that sneaks up and surprises as it builds from its percussive backline into Daye’s falsetto vocals. It’s a high that continues onto the hip-swinging “HERicane,” the shoulder shimmying “Soft,” and the heart-pounding “Top.” The latter brings to mind the instructional foreplay of Eugene Wilde’s “Gotta Get You Home Tonight,” whose influence is felt in Daye’s plea for an itinerant lover’s time and interest: “I feel your body breathin’ but let’s not take a break…/Like sugar on my tongue till your body go numb/Then I’ma send you on your way.” Just because it’s a one-night stand doesn’t mean it’s over—Daye wants you to remember the first glance and the last climax.
At its best, the album recalls the dynamic sensual abandon of Nile Rodgers as Daye rides over the grooves and edges of a melody. He never seems to be addressing a crowd: He is seeing and singing to you. Fans of old-school R&B ballads bemoan that today’s singers don’t beg like they used to, that there’s no urgency in their pining. Daye is prostrate, submitting to desire. When he steps away from that vulnerable longing, though, the album starts to meander with the listlessness of an automated “sex songs” playlist.
“Think Different,” “Mary,” “Blame,” and the title track attempt to engage with the contemporary dating scene’s surplus of choices and dearth of intimacy, but the real problem never comes into clear focus and the songs wind up sounding like one-way romantic pontificating. “Mary” in particular feels quite archaic as Daye consults a Rolodex of women he’s met in each and every part of town. “Got a girl named Jill, stay up in the hills,” he brags, and so on, revealing nothing except the fact that there are still young women named Ruth. “Think Different” could have been a necessary dialogue between two people working to understand each other better, but it hits like a voice note from a partner who still wants to fight for the relationship but is increasingly resentful of all the work it’s taking. By contrast, British singer-songwriter RAYE takes command on “Paralyzed,” laying the stakes for a truly transformative love: “Intuition says, ‘Run for the door, save yourself’/But to leave both you and my heart in this room, I would’ve played myself.” Begging is all well and good, but relationships demand the courage to act.
Algorithm sounds tactile and magnetic: The harmonies are slick but never processed and the beats are in the pocket but never quantized. The emotional picture is less clear. Daye sounds as though he longs to sink deeper into territory that requires him to become a little more uncertain, not only about the implications of desire and love, but what it means to express them while still growing as a musician. He’s committed himself to the labor of love—distilling all its tempestuous, petty, tender, and annoying traits into music that speaks as much to us as to his continued maturation. It’s a thrill to see an artist reach for that depth of feeling. Like love, it can be elusive.


Two years after the excellent Does It Look Like I'm Here?, Emeralds have smoothed and streamlined their sound, delving into the soft shapes of new age, post-rock, and corporate music.

Just to Feel Anything

It's been two and a half years since the release of Emeralds' excellent Does It Look Like I'm Here?, and each member of the trio has stayed busy. Mark McGuire continued to spool out guitar ambience, culminating in the highlight-reel A Young Person's Guide to Mark McGuire. Steve Hauschildt crafted a solid solo record of synth patterns, and has another due soon. And John Elliott's Outer Space project put out two stellar albums this year, while his Editions Mego sub-imprint Spectrum Spools has been perhaps the most exciting underground label of 2012, supporting material by Motion Sickness of Time Travel, Drainolith, and Gary War.
Given all this activity, I expected the next proper Emeralds album to be filled with new ideas-- perhaps even overloaded with them. But Just to Feel Anything has the opposite problem. Smoothed and streamlined, it comes off as a retreat into the safety of genre. While there's nothing inherently wrong with Emeralds continuing to evoke the past, what made their earlier work so interesting was the way they tweaked and skewed influences in unpredictable ways. Hence they could breathe life into even the most hackneyed new age tropes.
Here, though, the soft shapes and cheesy tones of new age, post-rock, and even corporate music tend to subsume the band's personality. The result is well-executed and pleasant to listen to, but generally lacking edge or distinction. In places, it sounds like anyone could've made this, much the way music in TV commercials sounds crafted by a committee or an algorithm. Despite how reference-heavy their work has been, that's something I've never thought about any previous Emeralds-related release.
There are spots in the album's glossy haze where the band's originality pokes through. Generally this occurs when they eschew predictable beats. They nicely evoke the melancholy of mid-period Cure on the drifting "Through & Through", and offer dense layers in the drones of "The Loser Keeps America Clean". Strongest is eight-minute closer "Search For Me in the Wasteland", a patient guitar swirl that's like a languid, emotionally acute version of Labradford.
Variations on those compelling sounds persist in other parts of Just to Feel Anything, but they're dragged down by an odd dependence on straightforward drum machines. So opener "Before Your Eyes" starts with a tense atmosphere, but a flat rhythm transforms it into a empty take on Mogwai/Explosions in the Sky-style cinematics. The following cut, "Adrenochrome", uses a similarly vague thump, and despite some hypnotic grooves in the middle, ends with soaring guitars precariously close to corporate video territory.
Before you let that description scare you off, be advised that Just to Feel Anything is by no means a crass, calculated makeover. The sounds and styles here are ones that Emeralds have leaned toward in the past, and they're clearly committed to them aesthetically rather than as a pander to expand their audience. It's just that the smooth side of their style predominates, and isn't counterbalanced enough by more surprising elements.
Still, even the weakest moments here feel just a few moves away from something much more interesting. So rather than dismiss Just to Feel Anything as a mistake, perhaps it's better to think of it as a mixed detour, one that some of the band's followers might in fact welcome. Personally, I'm hopeful that the idiosyncrasies that marked past Emeralds efforts will make a comeback.


Beams again finds the Detroit producer fully inhabiting his ink-black, hedonistic world and extends his run of strong vocal-oriented records.

Beams

Matthew Dear is an illusionist. Each successive release under the Detroit producer's own name has seen him reveal more of himself as he simultaneously retreats deeper into the shadows. As his singing voice continues to take a front-and-center position in his slithery electronic pop productions, it's also acquired a dark and oily air of decadence. Beams, his fifth solo full-length under his own name, is said by its maker to be more "positive" in disposition than 2010's high-water mark Black City. But don't be fooled. "I laughed when they hit you with their sticks/ You cried," goes one refrain.
So the sinister hedonism continues. And while there's nothing quite as tongue-in-ear lascivious as Black City's Reznor-ian "You Put a Smell on Me", Beams' constant neon-gray chug brings to mind a party that never ends. Synths peer through the chemical murk, occasionally breaking through before getting swallowed up by clouds of grime. Basslines wobble with sickness. The song in which Dear sums up the whole vibe-- "Take a trip on something else"-- is called "Fighting Is Futile", and the title defines Beams' album-length experience: Dramamine be damned, it's tough to pull your way out of this thing.
There's been no reason to assume that Matthew Dear lives this hedonistic shit for real, but Beams feels more personal. The first-person pronoun is all over these 11 tracks. Dear wasn't always comfortable being so bold, either vocally and in terms of accessible songwriting. His 2003 debut, Leave Luck to Heaven, and the following year's Backstroke saw his voice gasping in bursts under the abstract, janky techno soundscapes that are associated with his track-oriented work as Audion. The side of Dear that most are familiar with today emerged on 2007's enjoyable Asa Breed, a watershed that lacked cohesion but made up for its disjointed faults by virtue of sheer pop playfulness. Black City brought all these elements together, but Beams actually one-ups its predecessor in terms of cohesion. The album is Dear's most consistent work yet, operating as one upward build that, save for the leaden "Shake Me" (which feels out of place even without knowing its status as a repurposed demo that dates back to 2003), moves in the same direction until its conclusion.
But consistency is a tricky thing. There are a few impressive, memorable highlights here-- the steam-column elation of album opener "Her Fantasy", the radiant confusion of "Ahead of Myself". But as a front-to-back experience, the album doesn't exactly stay with you. In one sense, it feels like a victory lap, extending some of the best ideas from his strong recent run without improving on any of them. Next year marks a decade since Matthew Dear started releasing music under his own name. And given that almost every release since then has seen him pushing his close-quarters aesthetic further into new territory, Beams' relative stasis is excusable.