The UK quintet has a blast playing old-school stoner metal, balancing the riffs with sharp songwriting and a touch of camp.

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs: Land of Sleeper

Land of Sleeper

The heroes of doom metal seem to hold little regard for anything besides distortion and the devil. After all, subtlety can be difficult to convey with a Gibson SG, cartilage-cleaving vocals, and a cityscape of amplifier cabinets. But perhaps the legion of albums sired in the fumes of Black Sabbath, Electric Wizard, and Sleep may have overlooked the true spirit of these legendary groups, drawing from their more superficial traits and landing on repetition without the intensity, volume without the vigour. On Land of Sleeper, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs do many things but they also embody the theatre, camp, and sheer fun of all the best heavy music.
Of course, Land of Sleeper is still loud and punishing. They lead with these qualities in “Ultimate Hammer,” where guitars, bass, and drums carom and ricochet in unison before thundering into a mammoth galloping chug. It’s the first time on the record that you hear the full force of the band’s power, and it is glorious. But also raises an involuntary chuckle: It’s almost too heavy. This time around, the arrangements seem particularly hypertrophied, and the churning riffs seem genetically modified for maximum effect. Pigs’ songwriting has been on a journey of ever-increasing concentration ever since 2017’s Feed the Rats debuted with just three tracks (15, 4, and 17 minutes long, respectively). Continuing the trend of 2018’s King of Cowards and 2020’s Viscerals, Land of Sleeper feels a shade crisper than what came before. Whereas they once prioritised the churn and burn, now their songs are leaner and tighter.
Across the album, the tempo shifts jump further and the rhythm switch-ups are starker, so songs like “Pipe Down!” and “Big Rig” mutate with frenetic speeding passages, low-slung breakdowns, and melodies that spill out of the traditional four or eight bar repository. Pigs clearly revel in the extreme heaviness of those brays of distortion in “Terror’s Pillow” or the glacial speed of the middle section in “Pipe Down!” These tactics can occasionally make the album disjointed, which is perhaps why the relatively straightforward “Mr Medicine” feels like a strutting, urgent highlight.
On Land of Sleeper, Pigs also have a smidgen more belief in the power of dynamics. Between all the mayhem, you will also hear subtle pianos, synths, choirs, and sanguine, wide-eyed lyrics about “routine watering and the magic of the sun.” These details play off the finely drawn production that divorces Pigs from the need to faithfully recreate the sound of their raucous live show. The fuzzed-out guitars are well-marbled and thick, like quality guanciale—would it be a stretch to say they recall some of the gnarlier bass tones on Sly Stone records? Matt Baty’s roars and howls are often applied with an oscillating echo that evokes his voice ringing “deep in the abyss” down the “godforsaken English towns,” before the “storm coming” as described in the lyrics.
“When you’re making intentionally heavy music, a degree of levity is important,” guitarist Adam Ian Sykes told Vice in 2020. Throughout Land of Sleeper, Pigs embrace the camp of doom and stoner metal, but they also sound invested in the genre’s history, its roots in acid rock and psych. They often embed their songs with the kind of efficiency you hear in the best pop music: Gaps between vocal lines are filled with mini-riffs, melodic hooks overlap to save space, and the immaculate production submerges nothing. This is an H. R. Giger painting of an album: all muscular, misshapen forms that look all the more strange—and perhaps even a little beautiful—the closer you look.


A long-forgotten gem of experimental jazz gets a welcome reissue 45 years after it was recorded in a Philadelphia basement; deep, adventurous, and soulful, it is a joy to discover.

The Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble: Drum Dance to the Motherland

Drum Dance to the Motherland

The miasma of free jazz, cosmic jazz, new thing, fire music, and improv that poured forth in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s is one of the great treasure troves of 20th-century music. Led in America by John and Alice Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and others, a generation of players was inspired to jettison the rapidly ossifying mannerisms of post-bop for an explosive new language that pushed the boundaries of music while addressing political realities, social concerns, and spirituality in fresh, strikingly confrontational ways.
It also left a trail of flotsam that would go largely ignored for decades, a collector’s dream of uncompromising almost-classics, forgotten sessions, private-press rarities, and live bootlegs just begging to be hunted down. Sometimes the lore outshone the music, with the genre’s visceral yen for abstraction making highly sought LPs into rorschach tests. But at the turn of the millenium, a wave of reissues initiated a welcome historical corrective, bringing to light powerful work barely known in its own era. Suddenly available and affordable, this music could now be heard on its own terms. Alongside Get Back’s Jazzactuel, Atavistic’s Unheard Music Series, and others, in 2006 Eremite Records revived from obscurity one of the most long-lost of LPs from a sea of neglected recordings: Drum Dance to the Motherland, recorded in 1972 by the Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble. Presented at that time with hokey crayon-illustration cover art, it is being re-released in more tasteful packaging but otherwise untouched, a marvelously trippy journey through the spacier, smokier corners of jazz psychedelia.
The first thing you notice on Drum Dance is the tape echo. It’s right there at the start of the aptly titled “Cosmic Echoes,” smeared all over the fevered drum intro. Provided courtesy of Mario Falana (credited with “sound effects”), it immediately makes you wonder why so few acts incorporated studio electronics. Though Miles Davis had begun using a wah-wah pedal on his trumpet around the end of the ’60s, it is rare to find such bold uses of echo, reverb, or tape loops in jazz’s more “free” corners. The effect is thunderous, evoking the same moody dread that King Tubby was developing concurrently in Jamaica. Throughout the record it continues to surge in and out, sending the ensemble swimming in ethereal waves.
The second thing you notice is the interplay, loose but focused and wonderfully spacious. Drum Dance was recorded live in a small coffee shop in Philadelphia, and the fidelity reflects this modest setting—it’s more “Louie Louie” mud than Blue Note precision. Apparently the ensemble was largely made up of childhood friends, and you can sense the comfort and ease between the players. You always know where you are in the music; its development is natural and connecting threads are easy to follow. Although the group takes more than a few cues from Sun Ra’s heliocentric excursions, it remains accessible, right down to the uncluttered arrangements.
The entire LP is strong, but the two longer pieces at its center are the real showstoppers. “Drum Dance” is a white-hot ride through scorched, microtonal clarinet whines and tumbling percussion that eventually gives way to a more playful marimba solo from Jamal. Harsh though its front-end may be, “Drum Dance” exudes joy throughout its 12-plus-minute runtime. In its opening moments you can hear a member of the band clapping enthusiastically and encouraging the audience to join along.
“Inner Peace,” meanwhile, goes in a more bluesey direction. Monnette Sudler’s guitar is especially effective, mimicking the sultry, seductive tone of a Fender Rhodes piano and adding a welcome sense of understatement. For almost 16 minutes the piece floats effortlessly, orbiting a dusky, modal center but wandering freely into stranger, warmer climes. Starting off with an elegantly loping bassline, the type hip-hop producers scoured for throughout the ’90s, “Inner Peace” emerges from a mist of delay and bells, slowly coming into focus as if heard from a great distance and then suddenly up close. Just shy of the two-minute mark, Sudler begins to tease out a laid-back solo that counterbalances the fogged-out cries from Dwight James’ reeds—there’s no rush here, and the group locks into the simmering vibe, cooling down from the A-side’s more full on attack.
“Breath of Life” closes with some of the most outré moments, blending passages of subtle beauty with aggressive processing from Falana’s electronics. The drums get the full treatment, crashing all over themselves. At some point, a radio voice juts in (accidentally?), directly prefiguring countless ambient collages. The vibes and guitar go against the grain, providing more cooling textures not so far off from Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way. It’s a wonderful closer, its final minutes marked by fluttering drum accents and a sense of genuine tenderness.
The rhetoric surrounding Drum Dance’s first reissue would have you believe it’s an avant-jazz holy grail, going farther out with more vision, class, and force than its more canonized contemporaries. Though the enthusiasm is understandable, this kind of breathless hype doesn’t necessarily do Jamal’s work justice. It’s a lovely record: deep, adventurous, and soulful. Taken at face value, Drum Dance is a precious stone, a joy to discover, and a worthy addition to the catalogue. The open, unhurried dynamic and expressive atmosphere remain as rich and communicative as it was when it was recorded, over four decades ago. It doesn’t need to be anything more.


Less than a year after the Can co-founder’s death, this generous box set lights a path through his sprawling catalog and confirms both his genius and his prescience.

Cinema

It’s all there in the eyes: impish and gleaming, the gaze both cooly challenging and warmly inviting. On the cover of his debut solo LP, Movies, Holger Czukay stares us down via his own reflection in a TV screen. Dressed like a lounge lizard and sporting his signature handlebar mustache, the television shows what might be footage of a bombed-out war zone, his face reflected in chiaroscuro above a spire of billowing black smoke and ominous clouds. Critical, sorrowful, inquisitive, stoned—it’s hard to get a read, but there he is, watching us watching him while we all watch the dark skies on the screen.
Like Salvador Dalí or Andy Kaufman, Holger Czukay was an avant-garde provocateur blessed with a look to match his work. Wiry, with a wave of mad-scientist hair and a proclivity for sartorial flair, he seemed the embodiment of his music’s winking, high-low mishmash of groundbreaking electronics, pop kitsch, and nervy confrontation. Now, less than a year after his passing, the German label Grönland has released a mammoth retrospective of his work. Over five LPs, a DVD, a book, and an unusual “vinyl video” 7”, Cinema takes in Czukay’s solo and collaborative work outside of Can, the iconic avant-rock quintet he co-founded in 1968. Starting in the early 1960s and ending in 2014, the set lights a path through his sprawling, winding oeuvre and confirms Czukay’s status as one of the great weirdo geniuses of the 20th century.
And boy, does it ever sprawl—the man was not afraid to let a groove ride. A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, he brought tape manipulation and shortwave radio experiments to lanky, unspooling jams, lacing his low-key funk with disorienting humor. Tracks like “Full Circle R.P.S. (No. 7)” and “Hollywood Symphony” exceed the 10-minute mark, interweaving breezy foundations with jarring ornamentation and unexpected sonic pileups to induce an uneasy dreamstate. At first they seem mellow to a fault, but these are insidious works: They disarm you with sloppy, unhurried guitar strums and pitter-patter drums, suddenly spike into prickly aggression, and then recede. It makes for an edgy listen—what else might be lurking beneath this balmy, fuggy exterior?
Czukay works fast and loose with genres, treating them like the radio signals he began processing in Can’s later years. On Cinema, environmental sounds, music, noise, and chatter blur together into an ambient ether, waiting to be tapped into and reprocessed. There are echoes of the Beatles’ phantasmagoric childhood reimaginings circa Magical Mystery Tour, but the Fab Four never really left the pop song behind; Czukay was the opposite. You sense he’s pitched a lonely camp in a wild, untouched expanse of sound, the goofy jazz flourishes and funky bass wiggles like torn and battered snapshots of home, pinned to the inside of his tent.
Beyond the necessary inclusion of Movies in full, there are plenty of gems. “Biomutanten,” alongside Conny Plank as Les Vampyrettes, is a dank, Argento-worthy exercise in horror. Backing up the Japanese vocalist Phew on “Signal,” Czukay and friends conjure up a no-wave workout as cheese-grater sharp as Delta 5’s “Mind Your Own Business.” Over a quarter-century later, this mood is complemented with the gloopy “21st Century,” featuring Ursa Major, which revisits the dubbier expansiveness of the post-Slits diaspora. Dub is a constant presence throughout, whether on kaleidoscopic Jah Wobble/Jaki Liebezeit collabs like “How Much Are They?” and “Twilight World,” the satirical audio collage of “Der Osten Ist Rot,” or the spatial weirdness of 2008’s “Breath Taking.”
“Breath Taking” uses a rare sample of Stockhausen, and in its languid drones and drifting structure you can hear echoes of Czukay’s astonishing 1968 tape work “Boat Woman Song.” Recorded in a single night in Stockhausen’s studio, after the composer had left—“We had a second key and went in and switched everything on,” recalled Czukay; “I prepared myself at night at home, so in four hours the whole thing was done”—that piece’s haunting cruise across the airwaves blends ominous orchestra music, “unknown traditional singers from Vietnam,” and expansive drones with a hypnotic magnetism. It’s one of the strongest pieces in Czukay’s catalogue, darkened by the long shadow of World War II. You can hear Czukay wrestling with anger and despair, invoking a fevered vision of global agony. The endless downwards march of European imperialism is epitomized by a simple, elegiac descending string figure that repeats throughout, itself slowly pitching down and receding into the shadows. Spectral cries pierce the gloom; reverberant echoes suggest abandoned industrial spaces. After an extended peak in the middle, the mix collapses in on itself with tragic inevitability. The music is so enveloping it’s easy to miss its astonishing prescience, but in this early outing Czukay is making connections that musicians are still unpacking today. If this isn’t a template for modern electronic music—the remix, the DJ set, sampling, and ambient music all find precursors here, as does club music’s fascination with lost futures, re-processed voices, the layering of found sounds, loop-based minimalism, and dystopian collapse—then what is?


Love Streams marks a subtle shift in Tim Hecker's habitual style, a pivot away from his hazy trademark.

Love Streams

At last fall's Unsound festival, in Krakow, I had the unusual experience of standing in an indoor fog bank. The visibility ended just a few feet in front of your nose; the shapes of other people drifted past while the haze pulsed in deep shades of red and blue and lavender. The music was a soup of drones, and the sound, the visuals, and the space itself blended together in such a way that you felt a little like you were floating in space.
The event in question was Ephemera, a site-specific collaboration between the Canadian electronic musician Tim Hecker, German visual artist Marcel Weber, a.k.a. MFO, and Geza Schoen. While the audiovisual experience at most concerts rarely rises above the level of a laser light show, what made this performance-slash-installation so successful was not only its immersive, experiential quality; to longtime fans of Hecker's work, it was an act of transmutation, drawing out qualities that were latent in Hecker's music and bringing them to life around you, in four dimensions.
Over 15 years and multiple solo albums, Hecker has built up a formidable vocabulary of scrape and shimmer and crackle and throb. Using guitar, piano, organ, and, primarily, scads of digital processing, he treats sound as a plastic object, something physical to be molded and stretched. His work is sculptural in feel and widescreen in scope, and it is extraordinarily attentive to texture. Foremost among his concerns has been the idea of diffuseness, of dissolution. There are few hard edges, few identifiable motifs; musical events, like a shift in tone or the introduction of a new timbre, often take place under the cover of static. He prefers distant shapes with vague outlines.
Some of that fog burns off on Love Streams, an album that marks a subtle shift in Hecker's habitual style, a pivot away from his hazy trademark. "What do you do when you're known for making a certain type of work?" he recently asked, rhetorically, in an interview with The Fader. Feeling like he was beginning to repeat himself, he said, he decided that the solution "was not stacking things louder and heavier but working in a different way." That meant working with voices, for one thing—a complicated-sounding process of using software to translate medieval choral music to digital synthesis and then, working with Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, to write and record complementary new choral parts.
He treats his voices in the same way he has typically treated instruments like piano and organ—that is to say, attacking them as if with steel wool—but they're still recognizable as voices. On "Violet Monumental I," a chattering soprano sings an abstracted lamentation that feels almost liturgical, and on "Music of the Air," disconnected bursts of voice are staggered in time and spread across the stereo field, lending the impression of wandering through a choir pit while the singers warm up. 4AD turns out to be the perfect home for Hecker's new album, given the way it faintly echoes the choral fixations of '80s 4AD staples like Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, and Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares.
Hecker's palette has evolved in other ways, too. "Obsidian Counterpoint" opens the album with a blippy stream of arpeggios, an explicitly electronic sound that is unusual for his work. Throughout, his sounds seem tugged in two directions at once, as though caught between the digital and the physical. In "Music of the Air," a buzzing, droning synthesizer patch bobs in unpredictable motions like a handful of jewel-colored flies. Toward the end of "Bijie Dream," a harpsichord-like sound mutates into something resembling a steel pan, a far cry from Hecker's typically Arctic-inspired palette.
These bold, declarative sounds—which also include the bleating bass clarinet of "Violet Monumental II" and the guitar-like riffing of "Voice Crack"—cut strong shapes through the murk, but Hecker's compositional sensibilities remain opaque: He traffics not so much in melodies or song forms as in unsteady tone clusters. There's not a lot of forward motion here; motifs and timbres repeat across the record, and while many tracks flow seamlessly from one to the next, his open-ended constructions give the album a rewardingly meandering feel. Not a lot happens, except when it does: In the final minute of "Collapse Sonata," there might be more dynamic action, as tolling bells are gradually absorbed into a queasy slick of steel drum, digital distortion, and dissonant organ tones, than there is on the rest of the album put together.
It's a setup for "Black Phase," a dramatic conclusion that pairs somber choral harmonies with the gravelly guitars of Ben Frost or Sunn O))). It's as diffuse as the rest of the record, yet it feels somehow cathartic. Like Virgins, Love Streams tackles a lot of abstract concepts, like "live" sound, and synthetic sound, and rooms and space, and technology's ability to complicate all those things. But it's also about the ability to disappear into sound, to get lost in the contours of a slippery timbre, or to be made whole by a consonant harmony. At its close, those staccato vocal parts and that smoldering low end deliver a real emotional punch, the release to subtle tensions that have been building up throughout the course of the record's hazy, unpredictable run. It's a suggestion that, if you stumble around in the fog long enough, you might just find what you're looking for.


We Disappear

The Thermals are a serious band that's hard to take too seriously. Over the last decade half-decade-plus, singer Hutch Harris has waxed profoundly on religion, war, politics, mortality, the improbability of lasting love, and other fears that keep us up at night, but always in the same boyish pop-punk yelp that renders his lyrics about 40% cuter than he probably intends them to be. In another world he might have been blessed with the gritty, commanding pipes of a Joe Strummer or a Laura Jane Grace, singers who by their very nature exude authority. Instead he shares a voice with the guy from Matt & Kim.
At his best, Harris just owns it. 2006's The Body, The Blood, The Machine is still the band's most-loved album, because it's the giddiest one, pairing the band's inherent fervor with slaphappy power-pop riffs that charged ahead like a classroom of kids running for the door after a recess bell. Since then, however, it's been diminishing returns as the band has attempted ever-soberer statements, often at the expense of the uncurbed enthusiasm that made that album such a treasure. They hit their nadir with 2013's buzz-killing Desperate Ground, the closest they've come to a flat-out bad album, in part because of the good-on-paper decision to pair the band with Dinosaur Jr. producer John Agnello. His stern, muddy mix sucked much of the joy out of its songs (though it's unclear how much they had to begin with).
Thankfully that joy deficit isn't a problem on We Disappear, a reunion with producer Chris Walla, which despite its fatalistic title and fixation on failing bodies and fading relationships plays up the fun factor in a way the last few records haven't. It wouldn't be right to call it a return to form, since this band never truly breaks form, but it's got higher highs than any Thermals album since The Body, The Blood, The Machine—and really, the best way to judge a Thermals album is by its highs. “My Heart Went Cold” is an early one, a double-glazed sticky bun of a rocker, all eager bass, “oh-woah-oh!” injections, and puppy-dog pep. A protest song that's as much a celebration of the form as it is an act of defiance, “Hey You” is chased by the equally determined “If We Don't Die Today,” one of the band's most ripping ballads. It's a hell of an opening stretch.
As is usually the case, though, the band stumbles when they slow things down. “The Great Dying” lends the album its title with Harris's most vivid description yet of the vast nothing that lies in store for us all: “The sky will turn to fire, the sea will turn to salt / Our memories will burn like we were never here at all / We disappear.” But the song's dreary pace makes it a slog, and the forced bleakness isn't a great fit for Walla, whose specialty is crisp indie-pop, not cacophonous forays into existential dread.
Most people don't come to Thermals albums for that stuff. They come for the shout-alongs and fist pumps, and even in its somewhat-dialed-down second half We Disappear smuggles in generous dollops of both, with tunes like “In Every Way,” which throws down the record's tersest, most blown-out riff, and the endearing power-pop quickie “Thinking Of You.” After two albums that struggled with the growing divide between the serious band they seemingly longed to be and the bubblegum punk band listeners want them to be, The Thermals strike the right balance on We Disappear, an album that manages to satisfy both camps.


The guitar icon’s first solo album in 19 years confronts heartbreak and loss with intensely melodic, disarmingly straightforward songs that feel as loose and casual as old friends.

Untame the Tiger

Mary Timony always sounds like she’s in control. Even at its most exuberant—the zoned-out trills and slanted poetry of Helium’s The Magic City, the hot-rod anthems of Ex Hex—her music exudes a calm, impenetrable confidence. She delivers her vocal melodies in a conversational register, holding her highest highs and lowest lows in reserve. As a guitarist, her riffs and solos tend to turn and bend with a bemused smirk; she plays like she wants you to know she’s holding her power back. “In her songs, sadness and alienation were not embodied, they were subterranean, they were alien, transferred and transformed,” Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein once wrote.
On Untame the Tiger, Timony’s first true solo album in 19 years, sadness and alienation are present on the surface. They’re clearly legible. They’re intensely human. Timony wrote Untame the Tiger following the end of her long-term relationship, while she was caring for her elderly parents. Her father died near the beginning of recording; her mother passed near the end. The searing light of grief sometimes brings with it a fresh emotional clarity, and whether related or not, the songs here are disarmingly straightforward. “A brand-new day, it still hurts like hell,” she sings on the very first song. “What did I get for loving you?” she asks near the album’s end. You can see her eyes narrow as she mutters the answer: “Nothing but pain.”
Still, it doesn’t feel right to call Untame the Tiger a sad record. She’s made those before: Her first two solo albums, 2000’s Mountains and 2002’s The Golden Dove, couch their melancholy in fantastical imagery and occasionally dress it up in antique instrumentation. They’re also, according to Timony, “miserable records about being depressed.” That may be a bit unfair, but Untame the Tiger shows that she’s determined to avoid ever making depressing music again. Even as it confronts sadness, the album is spritely, frequently bright, as intensely melodic as Ex Hex’s triumphant Rips and more playful than a record this heartbroken probably should be. Most people run a drum kit through a flanger because it sounds badass when you’re blasting cigs with the boys, not because they’re suddenly alone in their search for fulfillment.
On Untame the Tiger, Timony draws ideas and sounds from throughout her career together: the twang and drone of odd tunings and unusual instruments mingle with fuzzed-out solos and starry-eyed pop songs like mismatched old friends doing their best to be supportive. It gives the album a looseness and curiosity that, combined with the swagger of her guitar-playing, makes even the bleakest moments feel open and warm. The clarity of opener “No Thirds”’ melody, and the obvious pleasure with which she rips her lead, give it a sense of purpose, the way having a big cry can leave you feeling more grounded—still aching, but exhaling, too. “Now I wanna feel what I’ve never never felt before,” she sings. Like sunbeams through an overcast sky, her inherent melodicism can’t help but punch its way through.
Timony seems to know this, so she tries out different ways of embodying her loneliness to compensate. In “The Guest,” it becomes human and stands at her threshold; “Am I driven to emptiness or does it just come to me?” she wonders. Elsewhere, she plainly tells a partner that their declaration of eternal love is “a lie.” She guides her band, including Fairport Convention drummer Dave Mattacks, through the pastoral desert blues of “Looking for the Sun,” but when the song seems to call for a triumphant solo, she slips back into the atmosphere, helping the group frame the now-empty space. It makes it sound as though she’s left the stage entirely.
More frequently, Timony’s brand of mourning is bound up with levity, as if she can’t consider the fullness of her pain without being conscious of its absurdity. It’s all right there in “Dominoes,” a song Timony has said is about how even the transgressive pleasure of dating someone you know isn’t right for you can lead to heartbreak. As she’s “trying to steal back my affection,” amazed at her new solitude, she’s surrounded by girl-group harmonies, blown-out acoustic guitars, fills from a department-store electronic drum kit—it’s an entire ELO production. As she does so often on Untame the Tiger, Timony exercises her strongest maximal-pop sensibilities in a song about feeling abandoned and alone. It’s fun. It’s funny. It feels like a joke at the expense of the song’s unnamed lover: You thought you’d get the upper hand on someone who can conjure up all of this?


The long-running experimental band ends the longest gap of its career with a set of urgent, direct, and celebratory songs.

Success

Oneida are one of indie rock’s most enviable and enduring institutions. When the ragtag crew assembled a quarter-century ago, they felt like New York pariahs, unwilling to participate in established industry machinations. Instead, they became a cornerstone of a scene they helped create, turning Brooklyn lofts, warehouses, and abandoned industrial complexes into creative playgrounds. They built one studio and, when condo construction took it, built another: their fabled Ocropolis. An expanded record deal that gave them their own imprint meant Oneida could use the space as a communal hub, recording bands whose music they in turn released.
But when gentrification claimed that space in 2011, too, Oneida’s feverish output slowed to the rather adult pace of a record every three or so years. Other jobs, other bands, other relationships: Oneida’s five steady members have pursued it all during the last decade, reconvening occasionally to make madcap albums for which the word “psychedelic” feels too soft. After 25 years, Oneida continue to do what they always have—that is, exactly what they want.
Success is Oneida’s first album since 2018’s sprawling Romance, capping the longest gap in their catalog. Unfussy, fun, and occasionally even funny, it is also their most purely pleasurable album in nearly two decades. Eschewing the overabundance of epics like Rated O or the massive canvases of A List of the Burning Mountains, Success squeezes seven songs into 41 minutes, with only one track breaking the double-digit mark. This relative concision doesn’t mean Oneida have forsaken their trademark eccentricity—shards of contorted guitar squeeze into punk shout-alongs, while layers of outbound synthesizers lurk beneath Kid Millions’ mighty drums. On Success, Oneida get back to the very basics of being a rock band, just buttressed by the experience and finesse of exploring some of rock’s wildest reaches since the late ’90s.
This pause and the resulting atavism stem from a now-familiar storyline—the pandemic. As lockdowns grew, Oneida scrapped a session scheduled for March 2020; the sequestered members spent the next 15 months writing a glut of new material. When they reconvened to record after a year and a half, they didn’t bother with excessive experimentation or studio chicanery. They just ripped. Remember how good it felt when you finally got to see old friends, to celebrate having lived long enough to reunite? That’s the spirit that animates these songs, as though Oneida decided not to wait around for another session that might never come.
The urgency is delightful. “Opportunities” explodes through a scrim of abrasive guitars, the band bounding forward like Superchunk begging to be punched harder; squiggling electronics chase Bobby Matador’s hook without distracting from it. “I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand”—a lurid love song for these weird times—suggests jangle-pop launched from a slingshot, sheets of feedback howling like the wind as it rushes past. Even “Paralyzed,” the album’s 11-minute escapade into oblivion, pulses with strobe-light intensity, the beat relentless as synthesizers and guitar pedals unfurl around it in a complex duet.
There is also the lingering sense that Success is an ode to a bygone New York, before fresh development and infrastructure investments curbed wildness and danger. On opener “Beat Me to the Punch,” Oneida start tugging at a New York thread that begins with the Ramones; for the next six songs, it runs through Television, No Wave bedlam, and Sonic Youth into Oneida’s own devil-may-care scene of ecstatic improvisation in Brooklyn. They pull that link until it snaps during the finale, “Solid,” an electrifying rock song about trying not to fall apart. The righteous guitar jam collapses into a sweaty mess, a festival for chaos.
None of these old-city references smack of nostalgia, though. In 2005, Onedia were already calling themselves squares; now they’re squares deep into their 40s, their hip old nexus long gone. They are simply thrilled to have once been there and now to be here, as five friends who still love to get loud together in one room, turbocharging little rock songs with an enviable and enduring camaraderie.


On his wily, restless new album as Actress, Darren Cunningham expands the canvas to make room for private jokes, stray thoughts, and cryptic musings.

LXXXVIII

The human voice does not survive for long in the vacuum of Actress’ music; it is cut up, spaghettified, dissolved into fog and smoke. Demonic pitch-shifted voices cackle, howl, and recede into the murk. Sampled divas morph into distant ambulance sirens. All the while, Darren Cunningham carries on an arch, amused, perma-blazed commentary; one imagines him as Rod Serling or Vincent Price, inviting the enterprising listener to follow him into a world where reality cannot be trusted. His catchphrases and cryptic murmurings are often the only thing connecting the listener to the human world, the only reminder that there’s actually a producer behind all of this and that you’re not just listening to an ill wind blowing from Tartarus.
Cunningham’s new album LXXXVIII was inspired by chess—the idle pastime of a steel-trap mind. There are some remarkably idle stretches on this 57-minute album, which weaves between short dance tracks and long, intractable expanses of stasis; it’s the inverse of the typical techno “artist album,” where the dance tracks are sandwiched between half-baked ambient stocking-stuffers designed to show off the producer’s compositional bona fides. Many of the dance tracks on LXXXVIII seem vestigial or underdeveloped; “Oway (f 7 )” is a stark, haunted-sounding loop that never builds to anything, and “Pluto (a 2) ” cuts off abruptly after less than three minutes. You get the sense that yawning voids like “Green Blue Amnesia Magic Haze ( d 7 )” and “Azifiziks ( d 8 )” are the real heart of the record, that if you peer into their depths for long enough you might decode some of the byzantine logic that drives this music—or maybe you’re just staring at a black hole.
LXXXVIII is the Roman numeral for 88. That was the name of a comparatively spry album Cunningham released relatively under the radar in 2020, now packaged with the 3xLP edition of the new record. It is also the number of keys on a piano, and Cunningham uses that instrument as a means to transform his music into a sort of free jazz. “M2 ( f 8 )” starts out as the kind of slight, nacreous keyboard sketch Ryuichi Sakamoto might’ve cranked out between appointments before it’s subsumed into a loping, side-chained rhythm. “Push Power ( a 1 )” kicks off the record with a deranged hyena cackle, after which an imperious voice recites robotic commands and Cunningham ruminates endlessly on a circular piano phrase. It scans as a joke on the first listen, a challenge on the second, and something really quite beautiful on the third; just wait for the voice that bubbles up at the end and seems to sing, “Cry.”
Within the Actress catalog, LXXXVIII initially most resembles Ghettoville, Cunningham’s 2014 pseudo-retirement album, whose ideas didn’t always get off the ground but which remains a singularly sinister and misanthropic presence in his catalog. Yet LXXXVIII contains a few of the most purely pleasurable, dare I say chill, pieces of music Cunningham’s ever recorded. “Memory Haze ( c 1 )” is like a second cousin of 2011’s “Marble Plexus,” generously side-chained to give the impression that it’s collapsing on itself. “Its me ( g 8 )” is a gorgeous if surprisingly straightforward soul chop that stands a chance of being played in a café. Track two, the marvelously titled “Hit That Spdiff ( b 8 )” is an astral blissout that also functions as a litmus test for anyone not entirely sure they want to listen to the rest of this thing. (The pitched-down goblin voices are hardly reassuring.)
Cunningham is capable of crafting lean full-length statements; R.I.P. and AZD are sleek and streamlined. But he’s too wily and restless to want to do that all the time, so we end up with albums like this, where he expands the canvas to make room for private jokes and stray thoughts. LXXXVIII might seem like an unsolvable puzzle at first, but the only real key to this music is imagining Cunningham at his workstation, sp(d)iff between his fingers, preparing to dive back into the twilight zone.


Rather than packing their recordings wall-to-wall with furious riffing and tricky time signatures, these Canadian post-punks leave space for each element to build tension.

iii EP

Blessed are content to play the long game. With a sparse string of releases and a superhuman tour schedule, the post-punk quartet from the small city of Abbotsford, British Columbia have slowly crafted a wiry, melodic sound. The songs on their third eponymous EP unfold patiently, shunning traditional structures in favor of extended runtimes and unexpected textures. For this release, the band tapped Purity Ring’s Corin Roddick, Tortoise’s John McEntire, and Holy Fuck’s Graham Walsh to mix one song apiece, making iii a sampling of supercharged variations on a theme.
iii marks Blessed’s signing to Flemish Eye, a long-running label that has positioned itself as a hub for dark art-rock from Western Canada. The B.C. band slots in perfectly beside releases from Preoccupations, N0V3L, and underrated Saskatoon group the Avulsions (whose Josh Rohs played keyboards on Blessed’s sole full-length, Salt). The spindly doubled guitars that filter through the EP point to an influence from beloved Flemish Eye signees Women, whose albums from the late aughts loom large here.
Since forming five years ago, Blessed have logged hundreds of live shows and developed into a tightly wound math-rock machine. But rather than packing their recordings wall-to-wall with furious riffing and tricky time signatures, they leave space for each element to ramp up the tension. As singer and guitarist Drew Riekman has explained, they began incorporating electronics on their second EP, “[toying] with the idea of a droning, stretched out piece of almost unflinching music, akin to Neu!” But though he occasionally settles into an endless, Klaus Dinger-esque motorik beat, Blessed drummer Jake Holmes prefers busier rhythms, like the pounding fills that overpower the sputtering synths of “Centre.”
Though it’s difficult to pinpoint what each guest mixer decided to highlight, there are audible differences. The nearly seven-minute “Sign,” mixed by Roddick, shares a fragile, weightless quality with Purity Ring’s emotionally charged electro-pop. It’s the EP’s most accessible cut, building to a sighing, wordless vocal conclusion that recalls Radiohead. Perhaps Tortoise drummer McEntire is similarly responsible for the post-rock-inspired passages of “Structure,” where spare, mournful guitars give way to cycling piano chords and a pulse-racing finish.
“Centre,” mixed by Holy Fuck’s Walsh, begins in medias res with metallic riffs that mirror the sound of electronic interference from an iPhone that’s too close to an amp. On this song, Riekman’s airy vocals trade off with bursts of shouty chants, a bouquet of barbed wire that recalls Dutch anarcho-punks the Ex. Riekman handles mixing duties himself on EP closer “Movement,” delivering yet another departure from expectations: This lo-fi lament drifts at a much slower pace than the previous three tracks, sounding closest in spirit to Women’s most heart-rending songs or the girl-group exorcisms of Pat Flegel’s solo project, Cindy Lee.
Blessed’s many local influences are a symbol of their dedication. iii was self-produced at a nearby Vancouver studio, with vocals tracked at friends’ homes back in Abbotsford; on social media, the band amplifies hometown issues for more distant fans. They’re not the first artists to put Abbotsford on the map—see You Say Party, Teen Daze, or synthy pop-punks Fun 100. But their choice to remain there, instead of moving to a musical center, reflects their humble ambitions and belief in affecting local change. “If you focus on trying to grow your communities…and have people on tour come see what you’ve done in your small town, [it’s] super positive,” Riekman has said. “A little can mean a lot to a few people.”

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The Scottish band’s first studio album in seven years considers the importance of togetherness with clear, aphoristic language and a few musical experiments.

A Bit of Previous

The core tenet of Belle and Sebastian has always been connection. The long-running Scottish indie-pop project was born out of necessity as bandleader Stuart Murdoch struggled with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which yanked him from bright twentysomething adventures into the shadows of invisible illness. When he had the energy, Murdoch would tinker on his parents’ piano and attempt to give shape to the songs forming in his head. As his health slowly improved, Murdoch began pursuing his art more seriously and eventually enlisted a group of musicians to record Belle and Sebastian’s 1996 debut, Tigermilk. Since then the project has sustained its insular core while stretching into a communal affair that features a vast cast of players, album covers that picture friends and strangers alike, and invigorating concerts in which fans are invited to dance onstage. Every avenue they’ve pursued seems to say: Anyone can channel the Belle and Sebastian spirit.
It’s appropriate, then, that Belle and Sebastian would emerge from a period of widespread isolation with a collection of songs that consider the importance of togetherness. The seven-piece band’s 10th album, A Bit of Previous, is a full-circle gesture: It’s their first full-length to be fully recorded in their native Glasgow since 1999, a move which proved fruitful on a trilogy of EPs released between 2017 and 2018, a series of exhalations harkening back to a similar run of short-form projects in the late ’90s. Even the album title, a turn of phrase used by bassist Bobby Kildea’s father to winkingly acknowledge past relationships, points toward their nostalgic impulses.
A Bit of Previous begins with “Young and Stupid,” a burst of wry sunshine that Belle and Sebastian have historically done so wonderfully. They’ve still got it: Murdoch’s droll reflections on youthful bliss are heightened by a flitting violin and a heavenly little bridge that flies high with a trumpet and Sarah Martin’s topline vocals. The song concludes with a spoken-word outro pulled from an interview Murdoch conducted with his friend Alessandra Lupo—the pair previously collaborated on an audio-visual piece during the early days of the pandemic—that lands on an existential musing: “Nothing matters.” What could sound like a declaration of nihilism is instead presented as an optimistic perspective shift. If there’s a wistfulness for youth, there’s also an urgency not to waste life trapped in a miserable bubble of one’s own making. “I lived my life so desperate to be in control/Scared of getting hurt again,” Murdoch emphatically declares on “Talk to Me, Talk to Me.” “But now I realize it’s all for nothing/All for nothing!”
The compassionate ballad “Do It for Your Country” transforms a patriotic catchphrase into a mantra urging a woman not to underestimate herself. “The world is just a game, something made of clay/But you are the great creator,” Murdoch sings. “So banish all your fears, grab it by the ears/Love and other things of beauty reign.” The band also acknowledges that this carpe diem attitude is easier preached than practiced: On the same track, Murdoch refers to himself as a “lobster in a pot/a songbird in a gilded nightmare.” Who is he to be offering advice about freedom?
If the lyrics share a tight thematic focus, the music is where Belle and Sebastian stretch their legs. Sonically, A Bit of Previous touches on a little bit of everything. The band’s last full-length, 2015’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, went heavy on the Big Pop vibes, occasionally at the expense of lyricism. Pared-down traces of that grooviness appear in the bright synth swirls of “Talk to Me, Talk to Me” and on Sarah Martin’s feminist electro anthem “Reclaim the Night.” Stevie Jackson takes the reins on the country ballad “Deathbed of My Dreams,” which is just the right amount of morose. On the soulful “If They’re Shooting at You,” Murdoch and co. are joined by a choir led by vocalist Anjolee Williams, further amplifying its message of endurance. None of these twists or turns feel abrupt—Belle and Sebastian, after all, once threw a synth-pop stunner into an album of quiet indie tunes. Even when they are experimenting, the best parts of their identity shine through.
Belle and Sebastian have never been short of wise words, but over the years, as their songs have grown less character-driven, they’ve gravitated toward clear, aphoristic language that cannot be misunderstood. Perhaps that is the result of graceful aging; perhaps it’s Murdoch’s interest in Christian and Buddhist thought. Either way, this approach feels exceptionally wholehearted on A Bit of Previous, especially in the final moments. On “Sea of Sorrow,” Murdoch admits that words—the vehicle for so much happiness, so much anxiety—are just words, and it’s up to us how we process them. And then there’s “Working Boy in New York City.” This ditty about a young person searching for their true self is delightfully on-brand for the group, from its charming title and easygoing melody to the themes of spirituality, queerness, and loneliness. “Once you are happy and you know yourself/Peace can come in your heart/You can make a new start,” Murdoch sings. It sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.


Standards is Evan Weiss’ first Into It. Over It. album since he's turned 30. Often the eleoquent spokesperson for the emo revival, on Standards he banks on subtlety—as good a way as any to distinguish yourself in a scene defined by overstatement.

Standards

Standards is Evan Weiss’s first Into It. Over It. album since he turned 30, the kind of milestone that throws some songwriters into crisis. It seems like it would be an especially hard transition for a guy whose very band name telegraphs his obsession with ephemerality, but to judge by these songs he’s doing fine, more or less. It’s everybody else around him that isn’t doing so well. For instance, "Open Casket," a eulogy to youth, begins the record with a visit to some of Weiss’s old hometown friends and finds them much worse for the wear. "They wake up still uninspired with no regrets," Weiss sings, "Hung over and divorced/ They torch their twenties like it’s kerosene."
Weiss has long been the spokesman for the emo revival, usually the most eloquent guy quoted in the "Emo’s Back" trend pieces that circulated a couple years ago. But now that the emo revival is looking less like a niche scene and more like the shape of alternative to come, Weiss is settling into a new role as the scene’s elder statesmen. He’s mellowed with age, and compared to the form-defying bands that have emerged since he first made his mark with the song-a-week project 52 Weeks in the late ’00s, he sounds downright classicist. Weiss can’t match the genre-dwarfing ambition of The World is a Beautiful Place..., the hyperventilating intensity of the Hotelier, or the youthful insouciance of Modern Baseball, and so he doesn’t try. Instead on Standards he banks on subtlety—which, really, is as good a way as any to distinguish yourself in a scene defined by overstatement.
As usual, Weiss doesn’t disguise his influences. The album’s pattering tones and corked time signatures reaffirm that this is someone who’s been in a band with Mike Kinsella and could probably identify most of Polyvinyl’s classic releases by catalogue number. The influence that looms largest this time, however, is Death Cab For Cutie, and not just because Weiss leans more than ever on Ben Gibbard’s tender vocal affectations. As the band’s tightest, most approachable album, Standards feels like Into It. Over It.’s answer to Transatlanticism, a record that, while not quite a commercial crossover, feels like a trial run for one. Standards even has a mid-album slow-burner unabashedly modeled after Transatlanticism’s title track: "Your Lasting Image," the achiest of Weiss's many ruminations about growing apart from the people he loved. When Weiss reaches the song’s climactic refrain "I have the faintest recollection of us" in concert you can almost imagine fans reflexively mouthing along "I need you so much closer now" by mistake.
After penning these songs in a cabin in Vermont, the previously Pro Tools-minded Weiss recorded Standards at analogue-enthusiast John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone Studio in San Francisco. Vanderslice’s production doesn’t have the crunch of some more modern-rock-leaning emo records, but it does have a richness and warmth that flatters Weiss’s songs. The fuzzed-out, curdled synths that send off "Who You Are Does ≠ Where You Are" deliver the record’s biggest sonic thrill, while the humming string accompaniments on "Anesthetic" make it prettiest song the band has ever recorded. Also flattering these songs: drummer Josh Sparks, a new addition to the band who already feels irreplaceable. His frolicsome drum work ties together the slow tracks together and lights up the fast ones. On the ripping "Adult Contempt" he’s essentially the lead instrument.
Sparks’ drumming is the showiest element on an album that’s mostly disinterested in showboating. What’ll be most surprising about Standards to anybody still weary of the emo tag is how tasteful it all sounds. In his many interviews on the subject, Weiss has sought not only to reclaim the term emo but also to normalize it, arguing in effect that it’s as just as respectable and ordinary as any other genre, and that for all its youthful appeal it’s the kind of music that you can grow old with, too. On Standards, a thoughtful album about bracing for the future while grieving the past, he’s leading by example.


Burial's latest EP has a wispy, vaporous quality, evoking a liminal space between events, a present moment all about suggestion.

Young Death / Nightmarket

In the years following the 2007 release of the most recent Burial album, Untrue, we barely heard from the London producer born William Bevan. There was a 12” a couple of years later that found him collaborating with Four Tet, but nothing in terms of solo material until the 2011 EP Street Halo. With that release, what seemed at first to be a diversion until the next full-length came along turned out to be something more significant: Burial was shaping his music to fit a new format and finding inspiration in its limitations.
The 12” vinyl EP, with a total playing time in the range of 20 to 30 minutes, proved to be the ideal canvas for new Burial creations. When no longer charged with sustaining a mood for LP length, he was able to pack more sounds and ideas into smaller spaces, incorporating rhythms from across the dance music spectrum and becoming more deft in his use of voices along the way. As important as Untrue may be to the recent history of electronic music, his EPs contain some of his finest work.
The 12”s became annual “event” records that seemed all-too-happy to slip back into the ether; the last two, 2013’s Rival Dealer and 2012’s Truant/Rough Sleeper, came out in during the sleepy release month of December, after the year-end lists had been compiled, and when a new year of music was just around the corner. December ’14 and ’15 brought precious little Burial music, but then Black Friday brought a surprise in the form of a new Hyperdub 12”, “Young Death” b/w “Nightmarket.”
It’s not quite fair to compare this record to the last four EPs, if only because this release is considerably shorter at 13 minutes. But the record feels comparatively minor in other ways. Each of the last few records introduced a new twist to the project, whether production density or a 4/4 house thump or an extra-musical idea, like the touching statement that Rival Dealer was designed as a balm for people subjected to bullying. As they arrived in succession, it was uncanny how much more Bevan could squeeze out of the narrow parameters of his style. But this 12” finds the project in a lull; it sounds like Burial (ghostly voices, clattering metal, vinyl crackle, funeral keyboard lines, all present and accounted for), which means it reaches a certain threshold for dark atmospheric beauty, but there’s very little to distinguish it otherwise.
Beats for the two tracks are almost non-existent, which might suggest that the intention is something closer to ambient music, but the songs don’t stick around long enough to be immersive. “Young Death” features a lovely repeating vocal bit featuring the phrase “I will always be there for you,” underscoring the fact that warmth and empathy were always at the heart of the Burial project, but the voice floats freely, never connecting to its surroundings. “Nightmarket” is a touch more engaging and adds some jittery John Carpenter-style keyboard textures, but it too feels like it’s gathering itself for something that never arrives. Both tracks feel like small pieces of a larger piece we don’t get to hear; there’s a wispy, vaporous, interlude quality to each, like we’re in a place where something just happened or something is about to happen but the present moment is all suggestion.


The R&B legend returns with a soulful, deeply personal album that luxuriates in the classic sounds of wronged-woman blues, featuring guest spots from Kanye West, DJ Khaled, and Kaytranada.

Strength of a Woman

Some artists reject equating their personal lives with their artistic ones. In the tradition of the most magnificent women in soul, Mary J. Blige has always invited it, freely discussing her travails and liberally exploring them within her songs, no matter how cutting. Yet on Strength of a Woman, ardent followers might find it jarring that the R&B diva should once again find a reason to look within for affirmation, at age 46 as she does on her 13th album’s luminous, boom-bap opening track “Love Yourself.” After a career peppered with songs detailing her abusive relationships and substance addiction, she appeared to find a plateau, a lane where she finally uncovered the happiness she deserved. My Life II...The Journey Continues (Act 1) (2011), closed the chapter on those tumultuous years, untethering her enough that she could—on part of 2014’s acclaimed The London Sessions—finally manifest as the classic house diva she deserved to be—free and exultant, unburdened by BPMs.
Wounds reopen, though. Blige is currently embroiled in an acrimonious split from her longtime manager/husband Kendu Isaacs—the source, fans presumed, of much of that early happiness—and so Strength of a Woman finds its power in going back to basics. As a whole experience, it luxuriates within the magisterial hip-hop-soul queendom she formulated in the ’90s and the attendant themes that trace back to wronged-woman blues. The bulk of the arrangements, by DJ Camper, hover in the realm of classic soul with slow-jam sensibilities, leaving space for her warm, inimitable relatable voice to speak her truth.
Strength of a Woman’s classicism is, in some ways, a relief despite the success of The London Sessions’ more modern tracks; in an era of young R&B acts that bury their vocals in hazy, gossamer production to the detriment of cohesion, it’s refreshing to hear Blige sticking with what she knows. Mary will never not be Mary, and through the deep-dive into self-empowerment and, as ever, self-discovery, that is this album, she understands her voice is her most effective tool—and her emotion its understudy. “I’ve been broken for a long time, now I’m standing in the sunshine” she intones radiantly over a simple piano accompaniment on “Smile.” The magic in Blige’s music has always been in her ability to transform straightforward, would-be schmaltzy sentiment into universal truths, and here she does that magically, perhaps more fully invested in actualization than she’s ever been. While newer R&B fans might not be drawn to the stoicism Blige embraces, particularly those who gravitated towards her via Disclosure, it’s inarguable that she’s set the template younger faves want to emulate; in an era of musical confessionalism, Blige’s instinct has always been the most confessional of all.
That said, Blige is never far from the culture at its most current. Just like rappers will sing, so too will Blige rap; on hyper-dense verses in triple-time cadences, her antipathy lives in the rhythm. Aside from “Telling the Truth,” a typically clanging club track produced by Kaytranada, she is at her most indulgent and delicious on the “Glow Up” featuring Quavo and Missy Elliott, a gleaming revenge track in which she declares herself petty in a Migos flow—“I’ma glow up! Throw it in ya face like yeahhhh”—and vows to stunt on a spurned lover; Kendu, we presume.
On Strength, Blige’s soon-to-be ex-husband (or his avatar) is the equivalent of a cartoon villain, both centered as the antagonist in Blige’s betrayed dirges and merely serving as a plot point in the ones that chat chart her own growth through the break-up; to that point this is precisely what a Mary J. Blige album has always been, a document of a woman facing and subsequently never succumbing to her obstacles, all combatted with gritty trills and not-quite-perfect vibrato that mirrors her not-quite-perfect truth. She has never been the most precise singer and thus she is the exact right person to deliver such apparently intimate missives from the soul. Vocally, there’s nary a chirp, even in her soprano—just a conjuring deep in the diaphragm. It manifests as she is, what you hear is what you get.


On their first new album in six years, the longrunning emo outfit take ownership of their sound. Even the quietest moments sit with jagged nerves and lingering tension.

The Appleseed Cast: The Fleeting Light of Impermanence

The Fleeting Light of Impermanence

Though years of sustained, steady success allowed the Appleseed Cast’s Chris Crisci to table the prospect of day jobs and fatherhood, it drained the band of the kind of mystique that powers rapturous reunions. Second-wave peers in Pedro the Lion, Braid, the Get Up Kids, the Jazz June, and American Football returned after long hiatuses with considerate, measured takes on maturity and familial obligation; when Crisci reckoned with “fear and irrelevance and not wanting to become an adult” on 2013’s Illumination Ritual, it was simply one new Appleseed Cast album among many. Crisci admits that it was an insecure work, timid in its viewpoint and execution. An album titled The Fleeting Light of Impermanence is no less aware of humanity’s cosmic insignificance, but the band has come to accept the freedom within: We’re here and then we’re gone, so why not make as much noise as possible?
The Fleeting Light of Impermanence does nothing you haven’t heard them do before—all of those things are just done more emphatically. Throughout two decades, the common quality of the Appleseed Cast has been “oceanic”: the misty spray of reverb across their debut The End of the Ring Wars, the midnight-zone submersion of Low Level Owl, an album called Mare Vitalis, and a symphonic post-emo swell that seemed to echo from Sunny Day Real Estate’s The Rising Tide. This time, the opener is called “Chaotic Waves” because the hyperbolic drums push against familiar, stately guitars and Crisci’s stoic bellow, recasting the band’s tidal dynamics as a cruel battle of man and nature—a ship caught in a hurricane, fighting to a satisfying standstill.
Crisci usually favors evocative and evasive wordplay that aims just outside the heart or the gut, at times neutralizing the visceral effect of his band. This time, he follows the lead of their most forceful music by saying exactly what he means: “When they try to defeat you/Just clench your fist tight/Stand up and fight,” or “We've got one day to give/One day to work and live and hold the world.” If they have any fear of their own obsolescence, the Appleseed Cast shout it down with more carpe diem slogans and fire imagery than a Japandroids record.
It’s the first time in years that the band have legitimately rocked, something that’s never really been their M.O. despite working in punk-based subgenres. But even their atmospheric tendencies benefit from sheer volume. There’s no drift, no ambience for ambience’s sake; even the quietest moments sit with jagged nerves and lingering tension. Crisci junked his original plan for a “pure synth record,” keeping only those that sound most like guitars. In the past, that would’ve left the Appleseed Cast in a post-Radiohead rut, but the brutalist textures of “Time the Destroyer” and “The Journey” push them towards the bleak krautrock of Portishead’s Third instead. Crisci’s guitar leads are more memorable than his pop choruses, and so “Collision” and “Chaotic Waves” use the guitar as the chorus, successfully situating them within the everyman transcendentalism of Explosions in the Sky and Built to Spill. Much like the latest American Football, The Fleeting Light of Impermanence is the sound of a band taking ownership of their sound after years of being emulated or even ripped off by younger arrivals.
Still, the album’s uplift wouldn’t feel nearly as well-earned if it weren’t grounded in finality, just as inspiration strikes when the finish line is in sight. As with “Chaotic Waves,” the closer on The Fleeting Light of Impermanence makes no illusions about its intent: On “Last Words and Final Celebrations,” the Appleseed Cast circle back to the youthful stargazing of The End of the Ring Wars. If this is the last song the band ever makes, Crisci seems at peace with it. For the past decade, he’s fretted over the end. The Fleeting Light of Impermanence summons strength to face whatever comes next.


Lorde returns with a self-aware, scaled-back album. Its holistic beauty and revelations about the natural world are often lost in the drab music.

Solar Power

You have to act so dumb to be happy, nowadays. You can’t read the news and you can’t check social media; don’t look at the death toll, don’t look at the wildfire, don’t look at the weather. How do you separate yourself from the world without succumbing to denial? Maybe you could go away for a while—take some time to recharge. New Zealand sounds nice. I think the air is cleaner.
Lorde is there, and she’s chilling. After she wrapped the world tour for her second album, 2017’s Melodrama, she went home to Auckland and was hardly seen in public. She undertook a tech detox, giving up social media and setting her phone screen to grayscale, to make it less enticing. When she wanted to gain perspective on the climate crisis, she traveled to Antarctica. She made Solar Power, a self-aware, scaled-back album that asks you to “breathe out and tune in,” like a strange little paperbound spiritual text at a hippie bookshop. It’s part newfound realization of social and environmental consciousness, part self-help guide: her rationale for choosing the quiet life and reconnecting with nature, a diagram for threading the needle of joy when you might also live to see the end of Earth. Her message is—literally—light.
Once, a Lorde album was a monument years in the making, but here she asks us to be satisfied with everyday beauty, unassuming arrangements of guitar, keys, percussion, and voice. Produced once again with the ubiquitous Jack Antonoff, Solar Power sounds more interesting when it bottles the jasmine air of Laurel Canyon folk, less interesting when it emulates that sound’s descendants in early-2000s soft rock (Sheryl Crow, Jewel) without any of the hooks or energy of radio pop. These songs don’t move like the songs on Melodrama: no startling change-ups, no fireworks, just a spoken interlude by Robyn and a few distracting foley effects. On the title track and on the closer, Lorde communes directly with nature, and in between, she smuggles in love songs, dreams, doubts, a memorial for her late dog, Pearl, and, for the first time, close vocal harmonies with other singers, including Clairo and Phoebe Bridgers. It is the first Lorde album that doesn’t try to tug on your sleeve, or stare directly into your eyes. It feels like doing less.
Lorde didn’t log off entirely; people who live under rocks aren’t nearly so well-versed in Antonoff discourse. Did you see her putting away Hot Ones like they’re chicken nuggets? She’s been reading about the Sacklers (“Born in the year of OxyContin”) and watching Tarantino (“Once upon a time in Hollywood…”). She’s subscribing to trendy newsletters and checking her finsta, which maybe helps explain the album’s bent towards Y2K vibes and wellness fads. Solar Power is a little bit out-of-time, but now and then it taps into the kind of paralyzing quarter-life celebrity crisis found recently on albums by Billie Eilish and Clairo. “Teen millionaire having nightmares from the camera flash,” Lorde says on opener “The Path,” explaining what she’s escaped. She begins the gorgeous “California” with Carole King announcing her Grammy win for her hit single “Royals” in 2014 and writes a breakup song personifying Los Angeles as a “golden body” with a “cool hand around my neck.” She’s grateful to be away from it all, until she isn’t, and on the next song, “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” she wonders what might happen if she changed her mind and reclaimed her place among the glitterati.
More than ever, Lorde’s writing is the best part of her music, if only because the music is a little disappointing. “You felled me clean as a pine,” she sings to her lover on “The Man With the Axe,” and describes the dark concavity of a concert arena that’s shiny as a manicure and transient as the tide: “Fingernail worlds, like favorite seashells/They fill up my nights and then they float away.” The words are elegant, compact, enormous, rich in a kind of organic imagery that distinguishes Solar Power from Lorde’s past work. But while Melodrama purportedly unfolded within the confines of a house party, the concept came so naturally you didn’t have to think about it; it just felt like you were there. Solar Power tries to be bigger and smaller at the same time, spanning scenes of domestic bliss and apocalyptic flight without the conceptual architecture to unite them.
Trying for everything makes it all sound a little incoherent. On “Dominoes,” we watch an abuser skate free by reinventing himself as a new-age guy. There’s a kernel of a great idea in the way Lorde taps her voice across the syllables of the chorus, but the slack, demo-style recording won’t let it develop; city sirens ring in the distance as Antonoff’s guitar playing transports us to the grooviest coffeehouse on the beach. Three songs later, on “Mood Ring,” Lorde steps into a phony woo-woo persona herself, as if she too can buy the cure at a crystal shop. “Mood Ring,” as the artist was immediately at pains to say, is a satire of contemporary emotional detachment, a joke about a phone with a color screen—yet it’s too sweet to be biting, not sufficiently exaggerated to be funny, certainly not funny enough to pull off the squiggle of synth that enters beneath the line, “Let’s fly somewhere Eastern.” The shallowness comes to a head on “Secrets From a Girl (Who’s Seen It All),” where the secret wisdom is occasionally heartbreaking (“’Member what you thought was grief before you got the call?”) and more often platitudinal (“You gotta want it for yourself”).
It’s worth making art that promises a way out, art that can approach climate anxiety with clear eyes and purpose instead of dissonance and dread. But most of Solar Power doesn’t solicit strong emotion in either direction. Shouldn’t an album about climate grief and puppy grief and social grief by one of the best pop songwriters of her generation make you feel something? The music cycles through chipper acoustic chords, mournful six-string lines, and drummer Matt Chamberlain’s effortless shuffle, never locking into the bittersweet angst of Natalie Imbruglia, the cerebral intricacy of Jewel, the mutual conviction of a TLC ballad. It’s soft and loose and textureless. The sharpest pain comes in a moan at the end of “Fallen Fruit,” one of two incantatory interludes inspired, if we can call it that, by pending environmental collapse: “How can I love what I know I am gonna lose?/Don’t make me choose.”
“Fallen Fruit” and its sister “Leader of a New Regime” are weird songs, but Solar Power leaves so much room to be weirder, wilder, more joyful. I’m thinking of something Lorde said to the newsletter Blackbird Spyplane about why she went to Antarctica and what she learned there: “To go someplace where all you’re thinking about all day is the climate and environment was clarifying, and also kind of mystifying.” Clarifying and mystifying: Is there any other way to feel in the thrall of our only planet? But there’s just one moment on Solar Power that does. It’s at the very end, “Oceanic Feeling,” after Lorde rambles around for a while, visiting a favorite ocean bluff, reflecting on the lives of her family members and future daughter, on her past self. The beat drops away, the music falls to a murmur, and in a fluttering voice, she calls up a beachside bonfire and ponders metaphoric self-immolation. The implication is that Lorde does not want to do this, not like this, forever; that true happiness will always be out there in front of you, the deep blue shadow over the water.

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

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The new EP from Portland duo the Body captures a rawer, more immediate side of the band. It documents their increasingly blurred boundaries between electronic noise and metal.

A Home on Earth EP

Portland duo the Body have a never-ending well of misery and contempt for the world at large. The need to get out all of that hatred must account, to some degree, for why they’re so prolific. On the heels of Ascending a Mountain of Light, their second collaboration with grindcore band Full of Hell, comes A Home on Earth. The EP was recorded at Rhode Island studio/gallery Machines With Magnets while the band also recorded an album to be released in the future through Thrill Jockey. Like their other limited releases, the EP captures a rawer, more immediate side of the Body, documenting their increasingly blurred boundaries between noise and metal.
The Body are becoming less of a metal band—not just in form, but also in appearance. In live shows this year supporting Alcest, drummer Lee Buford and guitarist/vocalist Chip King toured only with pedals and assorted electronics, eschewing a traditional guitar-drum setup altogether. The influence of power electronics is much more prevalent here than before. King places more emphasis on texture than discernible riffing, conjuring blocks of noise often immovable. There’s rhythm there, but it’s constantly crumbling or bursting. It’s an extension of his devolution from last year’s No One Deserves Happiness, where Buford commented that King “hates the guitar, even though he plays the guitar, so he’s trying to make his guitar just sound like utter noise.” King’s shrill yell blends in with the feedback, adding to Earth’s monolithic character despite its short length.
While the rawness recalls the band’s self-released EPs of the past, Earth does something different. Those previous Body EPs were more like basement doom metal—you could make something out of all the thick, unprocessed bass. Here, there’s not much in the way of form, and the waves of noise feel even more obtrusive. Closer “Vile Despair” is the closest to anything conventionally punk or metal, with some urgency crying out over all the noise. There isn’t much electronic percussion here, though “Plague” resembles material from I Shall Die Here, their 2014 collaboration with the Haxan Cloak, with its echoed drums over King’s noise squalls.
Earth feels off the cuff in a way that many of their past releases haven’t; there isn’t much in the way of layering or outside collaborators. No choirs, no samples of speaking in tongues, no spoken word renditions of Édouard Levé. The Body has always combined loads of disparate influences—their one way of celebrating humanity—with anger. Earth leans far towards the latter. Whether it’s a sign of things to come or a pit-stop before their next album remains to be seen. It’s proof, though, that the Body haven’t forgotten how to really go for it, and that will hopefully always be a part of their DNA, even if it’s as bare as it is on Earth.


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 a pivotal album in the history of Atlanta and rap itself.

Trap Muzik

Before Atlanta’s Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway was named after an attorney from the Civil Rights era, its namesake was Alabama Senator John H. Bankhead, “Father of Good Roads.” Bankhead Highway, as it was then known, snaked from Memphis to Tupelo, to Birmingham, to Atlanta. It was functionally an interstate, but Atlantans took a special liking to the name.
For a nearly seven-mile stretch from the west bank of the Chattahoochee River to the edge of Atlanta’s city center, Bankhead Highway was more than a thoroughfare. Bankhead, as the corridor is unofficially and affectionately known (even after the renaming of its main street), comprises churches and seafood markets, salons and package stores. Abstract graffiti and homely murals coat the sides of crumbling buildings, demolished projects sit in frustrating stasis, poverty and prosperity live in startling proximity, and outsiders rarely mention the area fondly—but Bankhead is a community. Sprawling yet connected, industrial yet residential, hobbled but bouncing along, Bankhead is a neighborhood by virtue of collective imagination, pride, and struggle.
Drug dealing and hustling took a young T.I. down Bankhead and across it, over fences and between jobs, away from poverty but closer to peril. Trap Muzik is a record of those sprawling experiences and their compression into one life, one man. During a recent tour of Morehouse College with his college-age son, T.I. stumbled upon a strange revelation. “The trap house was my Morehouse. It was a group of brothers, and we showed up, challenged each other’s ideas, and supported one another,” he declared.
The origin of trap music has recently been disputed, as “trap” has become a muddled omni-label that describes 808s and hi-hats alone. T.I. has sought to end the discussion. Just as he believes he singularly elevated Atlanta’s streets, T.I. claims he invented trap music with this album. “August 19th, 2003 Birth of Trap Muzik & Only fools dispute facts,” he wrote on Instagram in response to Gucci Mane’s claim as the father of trap. T.I. certainly predates Gucci, but Atlanta at the turn of the millennium and before had too many drug dealers turned rappers and producers to take this claim seriously. And that’s fine. Just as John Bankhead didn’t invent Bankhead, T.I. didn’t invent trap music. But in his open embrace of the trap’s spirit on Trap Muzik, and living of its ethos, and bearing of its scars, he made it vivid and relatable. It’s only right that he’s taken a special liking to it.
In the late ’90s, T.I. (born Clifford Harris) was a barber and dope boy brimming with Bankhead pride. Rap had been a part of his life since he was a kid, but so had hustling, and it took years of losses and setbacks before music became his focus. He had a father figure in Uncle Quint, who received a 10-year sentence on drug charges. Then, P$C (Pimp $quad Clique), a group of neighborhood friends, experienced the death of one member alongside the murder conviction of another; they ended up shelving their finished album. T.I. remained active in the streets, but his trajectory was clear. “Why all my partners gotta be dead or in the feds for?” he’d rap a few years later, hinting at his own grim odds.
His pivot to rap did eventually lead him out of the trenches, but it was a bittersweet victory. His first album, I’m Serious, released in 2001, was a critical and commercial non-factor. T.I. blamed the poor performance on a lack of support from his label Arista. Labelhead L.A. Reid, a lauded R&B producer turned label exec, was perplexed by T.I.’s frequent mention of the trap. “L.A. didn’t get it,” recalled producer DJ Toomp. “[He] was like, ‘What the hell is a trap?’” Concentrating Arista’s efforts on larger acts like OutKast and P!nk, Reid refused to shoot a video for sleeper hit “Dope Boyz,” among other slights. T.I. speaks bitterly about his experience at Arista to this day, but I’m Serious also was a weak showing artistically. His zippy flows and generic pimp raps obscured his charisma and crowded out his storytelling and swagger. He embodied Bankhead but didn’t evoke it. He didn’t make that mistake again.
Soured by Arista’s neglect, T.I. terminated his contract and went independent, cranking out mixtapes on his homespun Grand Hustle label he started with his manager Jason Geter. Hawking original and repackaged songs with a reformed P$C as the mixtape series In Da Streets, Grand Hustle promoted its artists directly to the streets. The circumstances of this independence and the underground success of “Dope Boyz” emboldened T.I. to turn the trap into his cause célèbre. As Jermaine Dupri welcomed the world to Atlanta’s parties, In Da Streets took listeners beyond the city’s storied strip clubs and swank lounges. On “In Da A” T.I. makes the contrast explicit: “I know ya heard a lot/And probably seen a little/It’s more to the A than what you hear from JD and them.”
T.I. recorded most of Trap Muzik in a studio housed in the back of a hair salon, removed from the machinations of the music industry and embedded in the community. He saw the South as his kingdom, but nothing meant more to him than winning over Atlanta, his province. “Our main intention with this album was to make sure we represented the walks of life, the generation, the region, the circle, the society,” he recalled a decade later. “I felt like I had a responsibility to step out and show cats from the Northeast that there’s other people down here, other lifestyles, other stories besides Organized Noize and So So Def...I felt like we were being underserved.”
His perception was skewed given the vast range of artists and skills housed under both Atlanta camps and across the South. From Lil Jon’s rowdy crunk revitalizing Memphis buck, to Ludacris’ dirtbag sex raps channeling Miami bass, to OutKast’s ubiquitous stank, the city and the region were thriving. But in that yearning to wrest the spotlight from the city’s headliners, to put Bankhead on the map, T.I. found his voice. Street in its swagger yet personal in its spirit, Trap Muzik turned T.I.’s need to represent into an anthemic portrait of surviving poverty. Trap Muzik presents the trap as not just a setting or a sound or a state of mind, but as a portal into the self.
Trapping taught T.I. that he was both cunning and in over his head, and he spends the album detailing his dicey odds. The title track parachutes the listener right into the middle of a dope spot, where T.I. and fellow P$C member Mac Boney post up defiantly despite a trickle of customers and lurking feds. Then T.I. quickly flips the script. “12!” he shouts as cops appear and a brief skit of a foot chase plays over a beat shift. By the time he’s hopped a fence, the bounce is gone, and a cloud of bells and minor keys drifts in over slowed percussion. “Shawty still in the trap,” T.I. scoffs, irked but undeterred.
That ambivalence proves to be one of T.I.’s greatest strengths. He often establishes a mood then undercuts it, within both songs and song sequences. “Be Easy” uses a disarming calm to seek peace; it’s followed by the fiery “No More Talk,” which welcomes conflict. On “Doin’ My Job,” T.I. touts his entire stock of narcotics then makes an impassioned defense of drug dealers’ work ethic. “We got lives, we wanna live nice too/We got moms, dads, wives, kids, just like you,” he protests to the residents of the neighborhood where he works. By “Let’s Get Away,” he’s so burned out from trapping he needs a dope boy’s vacation—“a room on the other side of town” with a lover. These pivots create a panorama of experiences. T.I. doesn’t just set the scene, he world-builds, depicting the trap as three-dimensional and dynamic, a shifting space of stress, surveillance, action, and reflection. “This whole album is filled with music dealing with all aspects of that lifestyle. Whether you in the trap, trying to get out the trap, or just living around the trap. Whether you want inspiration or information, I got you,” he told an interviewer in 2003.
Within all this flux, T.I. takes immense pride in his obsession with his craft. He raps in full embrace of his Southern drawl, rounding his vowels, slowing his flows, and using his lilt to glide through syllables with grace. On “Be Easy” he raps “I’m so fly, no lie/Don’t deny it, ya felt/So inspired by my style, decided to try it ya self,” stringing the rhymes together by riding the rhythm of his accent. The pace and ease of his delivery nearly obscure the penmanship; he sounds like he’s talking.
Turning on the charm for “Let Me Tell You Something,” he constructs another slick sequence: “But anyway/When I see yo face/I’m thinking three or fo’ days in Montego Bay.” These moments often go unnoticed, but their frequency belied T.I.’s twin goals of being respected and being distinct. He sought to best East Coast purists and to bewitch them, and was willing to adopt their conventions even as he broke with them. “Y’all ain’t never seen a dope boy rap and play the piano at the same time,” he taunts on “Be Easy.”
His collaborators leveled-up alongside him. Graduating from their undermixed contributions to the In Da Streets mixtapes on Trap Muzik, producers San (Chez) Holmes and DJ Toomp inject their productions with flair and husk. Percussive but buoyant, their compositions wobble as much as they knock, the sounds hitting then rolling, like a bowling ball dropped in water. Toomp’s skittering drum patterns on “24’s” dance around a muscular modulated string melody, creating pockets of counter-rhythm that complement T.I.’s drawl. As T.I. stretches and elongates his words, a downbeat is there to catch and propel his subtle pauses. When working with Toomp, T.I. doesn’t have to rap about cornbread or yams to prove he’s a Southerner because the beats are made to fit a Southern cadence.
Chez’s productions rely on swing rather than bounce. Arranging his percussion more conventionally than Toomp, his hi-hats and snares tick like a metronome, but his bass riffs and streaks of organ and guitar generate a breezy sway. T.I. can turn introspective on Chez tracks, and that spacious, slow-winding production is key. “Kingofdasouth” is nominally an extended boast, but you can feel T.I.’s ego swell as his mythos becomes his creed. “I’m the king ‘cause I said it and I mean that shit,” he raps with gusto.
David Banner, Kanye West, Nick Fury, and Jazze Pha round out the production, and T.I.’s compatibility with their varying styles is key to his vision of the trap. “Even if you were participating in felonious activities,” he explained in an interview, “there were still other things you needed to deal with: You’re not just drug dealing but also dealing with a relationship with your parents, your girlfriend, having a child too young and being looked down on by society as one thing, when you’re actually much more than that definition. You might have had a homeboy who just died, but he wasn’t even in the streets like that!” The sprawl was the point.
Toomp’s drum patterns and 808 kicks would later be dissected and riffed on by later generations of Southern producers like Shawty Redd, Zaytoven, and Drumma Boy. They would become shorthand for the trap aesthetic, despite nearly all of Trap Muzik’s producers using those same elements (as well as contemporary producers in Atlanta and New Orleans, like Mannie Fresh and OutKast, drawing from the same well). But T.I. was the centerpiece of the sound and the concept. He was not the first Southern rapper to find his voice and his audience in the streets and clubs. But his innovation was to insist that the dangers and glories of those streets and clubs were indivisible. His 24-inch rims and rubber-band banks were badges and scars. T.I. lived for Bankhead and in spite of it—it broke him, shaped him, and set him free.


Armed with arpeggiated synths, electro-disco drum machines, and some light heresy, the German electronic musician sets her sights on dancefloor provocation, but too often, she’s preaching to the choir.

Jesus Was an Alien

The world of electronic music loves extravagant concepts, and Perel may have taken this year’s prize for outlandish thinking. On Jesus Was an Alien, her follow-up to 2018’s Hermetica, on DFA, the German electronic musician and DJ asks a question worthy of late-night cable programming—Was Jesus actually an extra-terrestrial?—while ostensibly fostering “a social debate about what is and implies religion today,” weighty themes that make dance music’s shopworn tales of getting down and occasionally dirty pale in comparison. Add to this a mischievous sense of humor—the album’s cover depicts Perel suckling a baby alien to her breast—and you have what should be one of most entertaining dance music releases of the year.
Sadly, Jesus Was an Alien falls short in its ambition. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect divine revelation from an album of synth-heavy techno pop on one of Germany’s more reliably industrious labels. But despite its grand setup, Jesus Was an Alien comes across as shallow and rather innocuous. Perel’s production is undoubtedly bright and punchy, but the basic combination of arpeggiated synth riffs and electro-disco drum machines has been around since “I Feel Love,” and there are no new tangles or grit to distinguish the album from the work of thousands of tech-house journeymen. The lyrical themes, too, are rather gray: The tedious “Religion” simply repeats the phrase “Schau mich an!” (“Look at me!” in German)—perhaps potent stuff back in 1517, when Martin Luther was nailing his “Ninety-five Theses” to Wittenberg church doors, but unlikely to blow many minds in an era grappling with simulation hypothesis, string theory, and AI. The lyrics of “The Principle of Vibration” add basically nothing to an intriguing song title; and does anyone really need another song about The Matrix, three sequels down?
This wouldn’t matter if the music on Jesus Was an Alien was more spirited, but the album’s production rarely ventures beyond the competent. Perel claims to feel “emotions and colors piling up inside me” as a result of her synesthesia, but the color scheme on Jesus Was an Alien suggests a utilitarian whitewash with the occasional hint of blue. This is a slight album, musically, that operates in predictable straight lines: Synths trundle along like cruise-control electroclash, drum machines tick by, and a piano makes its innocuous voice known on “The Matrix,” a vaguely old-school house song that resembles Joe Smooth’s “Promised Land” with all the passion blue-pilled out of it.
Other club conceptualists, like Drexciya or Jeff Mills, have paired weighty subject matter with a sense of gravitas, but Perel's perfectly functional music, when stripped of its lyrics, could be about anything, really, and it steadfastly refuses to catch fire. “Kill the System” is so measured in its arpeggiated stroll that it makes me want to re-evaluate my homeowner’s insurance rather than storm the barricades.
To make things worse, Perel enlists one of the few artists today to nail the blend of subversion, humor, and intelligence that Jesus Was an Alien is striving for: Montreal mischief-maker Marie Davidson. It is a decision akin to asking Van Gogh to finish off your sunflowers, and Davidson entirely outshines her host on the album’s title track. Davidson’s lyrics enlighten and intrigue where Perel’s land with a thud; her delivery vibrates with a guileful control to Perel’s often weary trudge; and she provides the album’s best vocal melody by quite a long chalk. It would be one thing if Perel had failed ambitiously; instead, she simply underwhelms. As it stands, Jesus Was an Alien’s artwork outshines the music in both impact and audacity; Perel’s theological provocation is unlikely to win many converts.


The defining record of 1985 sophisto-pop, now remastered and reissued with an extra disc of new acoustic renditions by the band's singer and songwriter Paddy McAloon.

Prefab Sprout: Steve McQueen [Legacy Edition]

Steve McQueen [Legacy Edition]

In another time, in another place, Paddy McAloon might have been happily productive somewhere between the Algonquin and Broadway in 1930s New York ("I want to be," he once crooned, hopefully, "the Fred Astaire of words.") Or beavering away in an office in the Brill Building in the 50s. Or maybe some place on that off-kilter middle of the road between Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb in the 60s. Almost anywhere, you might have thought, other than Britain in the mid-80s.
Some hard-hearted professors of pop would have it that 1985 was the absolute nadir of British music: all the fizz of new pop gone flat, the independent scene a twee shambles. Yet in records such as the Blue Nile's A Walk Across The Rooftops, the Pet Shop Boys' Please, Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, Scritti's Cupid and Psyche 85, and especially in Prefab Sprout's Steve McQueen, you have some of the most beautiful, enduring British pop music ever made. For a year or two, just before Live Aid and Q magazine, the challenge of making new pop for grown-ups without being dowdy, smug, or jaded was met, quite superbly. It's this guile and grace that bands like Stars and Junior Boys still yearn for.
The Sprout-- it's ironic that a writer so fleet-footed lumbered himself with such a clunking band name-- had debuted in 1984 with Swoon, a record that suggested they were post-graduates of the Glasgow School, taking the Postcard label template to new levels of cryptic wit and elliptical jangle. But as McAloon made plain, his ambitions were far grander. He aspired to the standards of Stephen Foster, Gershwin, Sondheim, Quincy Jones, McCartney; saw himself as a contemporary of Prince rather than Lloyd Cole. He had a grand sense of pop music, and in 1985, that kind of grandeur seemed to be available via producers like Thomas Dolby.
McAloon has said that Steve McQueen is Dolby's record-- he presented the producer with a vast archive of songs and asked him to choose his favorites. Yet [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| this is true most obviously in the profoundly 80s sonic palette. Rather wonderfully and typically, it seems that Dolby even chose to play the banjo on the opening track, the country pastiche "Faron Young", via a Fairlight sampler. And the presence on this new reissue of an additional disc of acoustic versions of the songs-- which took longer to record than the original-- suggests that McAloon now feels embarrassed, as though the production has dated or even damaged his songs.
I think he needn't be so bashful; one of the defining qualities of the record is its pop ambition, its willingness to engage with its times, precisely by not being a sullen singer-songwriter would-be timeless classic. Imagine if Sinatra had decided that Nelson Riddle's arrangements tied his albums to closely to the early 50s. According to this additional disc, Steve McQueen might have been some perfectly prim and pleasant Go-Betweeny acoustic curio, rather than how it ended up: the kind of record you imagine Elvis Costello might have made had he been signed to ZTT and been ensconced in a studio with Trevor Horn.
One thing the new versions do highlight is the astonishing maturity of the songs. Coincidentally, almost all of Dolby choices dated from 1979, when Paddy was 22. Yet they sound all the more appropriate sung by a man of 50. "Life's not complete, 'til your heart's missed a beat," he sighed on "Goodbye Lucille #1", but now when he sings "and you'll never get it back," his voice breaks with the wisdom of another two decades.
Ironically, considering the producer's name, it's a record in so many ways about infidelity. Or let's say about the consequences of romanticism. Take that cover: Paddy, looking like a dreamy young D.H. Lawrence, astride the kind of Triumph that would have carried the record's namesake to freedom. But the whole album rails against easy escapism: "Appetite", sung from the perspective of a girl left to bring up the baby of some young firebrand; "Desire As" seeing no escape from a lifetime of new flames; the rueful regrets of "Bonny".
And maybe I'm too much a child of those times myself, but it still sounds great to me: the glittering guitar that opens "Goodbye Lucille", the 10cc/ZTT moments of "When Love Breaks Down". Even Wendy Smith's gaseous backing vocals, haunting the record like the ghost of Hayley Mills.
In fact it seems to me that instead of stripping back the songs from their 80s incarnations, the additional disc could have more profitably commissioned some original covers. McAloon was, after all, the original Stephin Merritt, so there's no reason why he shouldn't have his own Sixths. You can imagine these songs performed by, oh, Marianne Faithfull, Bryan Ferry, Will Young, Kylie Minogue, Rufus Wainwright, or Antony Hegarty. A handful of these songs have the quality of standards: there's no reason why their real after-life shouldn't begin now.


Mixing viral videos with synths and the unsettling screams of lead singer Kate Mahony, the London punk quartet delivers an unusual record that’s as funny as it is unhinged.

Snake Chain

Punk vocalists long ago mastered anger and its many variants: rage, disdain, bratty irritation. For the London quartet Shake Chain, fear and vulnerability are equally interesting trenches of the human mind. On their debut album, Snake Chain, lead singer Kate Mahony gives madcap readings of both—sobbing, screaming, whining, and squealing her way through banal little snapshots of modern life. Her bandmates—guitarist Robert Eyres, bassist Chris Hopkins, and drummer Joe Fergey—clot their harsh arrangements with synth textures and samples of well-known videos. The blare only maximizes Mahony’s cantata of discomfort; it makes for an unusual punk record that’s as funny as it is unhinged.
Without a lyric sheet on hand, you can still enjoy the pure animality of Mahony’s voice. You’ll only catch an actual word here and there, but her psychodramatic tantrums—imagine Miss Piggy going apeshit on Maury—are a delight in and of themselves. On the surf-tinged “Mike,” Mahony recreates the paranoid shrieks of a woman whose meltdown went viral. “Miiiiiiiikkkke! He’s running me over!” she shouts over heat-warped guitar and splattered cymbals. On “Stace,” Shake Chain pluck a snippet from EastEnders, the schlocky, long-running British soap opera. They distort melodramatic dialogue into the stuff of snuff films; cries of mourning sound like teens fleeing Leatherface’s bone room.
Shake Chain are keen on perverting ubiquitous content until it’s barely recognizable, twisting the mundane into a waking nightmare. But you get the sense that they find the source material hellish as it is. As Mahony wails on “Internet”: “Don’t put that on the internet!/Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... It’s out of context!” Shake Chain are endlessly interested in everyday objects, events, and conversations—chiefly, how horrific they are. Mahony fills “Birthday” with appliances and furniture, casting them in surreal shafts of light. “Do we think that chairs are implied?” she asks, before rattling off a kinked string of small talk: “Have you got a light?/What is the time?/When you look in the oven/Does it look back at you?”
On the chugging, guitar-scuzzed “RU,” she compares security to “another anchor,” suggesting its potential to sink as much as moor. The song is structured like tortured water-cooler chat; Mahony teases out her questions, tweaking their meaning  word by word. “Are you/Are you still/Are you still living?... Are you still living in that flat?” It’s a common discussion, but the delivery—like a dying alley cat—subverts the familiar. Snake Chain is littered with moments like this. On the minimal “Architecture,” Mahony spoofs upward mobility, linking it to a bourgeois appreciation of structures. A flat, robotic synth pattern nudges along underneath, as she muses on her passion: “Trying to design a deck chair/For the rest of my life,” she sings. You can almost see her flipping through a towering stack of Dwell magazines, searching for satisfaction in other people’s 3 million dollar manors.
As if slipping into the opposite role, Mahony plays a wealthy dame in “Second Home,” a companion piece to “Architecture.” It’s the most straightforward punk track on Snake Chain, fueled by fast’n’dirty guitar, bass, and drums. It may also be the closest Mahony gets to actually singing. She clutches her pearls, describing the yearly garden party she hosts at her country estate. It is posh, naturally, and the house is decked out in “Farrow & Ball”—an English paint brand so expensive that it was once parodied on Saturday Night Live. But things take a dark, nationalistic turn. “It’s such a relief to get out of the city,” Mahony growls in the song’s final moments. “Making Britain better again/The best of British for people who belong.” While most of Shake Chain’s critiques require a stretch in perspective, the last verse of “Second Home” is their most blatant. But no matter the magnitude of their satire, or the tax bracket of their targets, normalcy is the lurking foe of Snake Chain. And it’s coming for all of us.