Wale's third official album is his most sonically daring yet, pushing a classic soul and gospel sound inspired by the likes of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. What he doesn't have, however, is their knack for writing lyrics to rattle anyone's whole worldview.

The Gifted

Wale’s third official album, The Gifted, had the bad luck to come out a week after Kanye’s Yeezus. It’s terrible timing for any pop album; for the former backpack rapper who found unexpected mainstream pop success who went into the studio to attempt a singular, definitive artistic statement, it's bound to set up some unfair comparisons. There’s also a vaguely beefy line in “Heaven’s Afternoon” about how Wale wears Givenchy but doesn’t wear kilts that doesn’t help the situation.
That said, the fact that Wale’s decided to release such a left-field pop rap record at this point in his career is respectably daring. In fact, it’s probably the most daring thing about The Gifted. For all its differences from Wale's closest chart competitors, the music here (at least on the first half of the record) follows a path that was cleared as far back as the 90s: using the warm and lushly organic sound of peak-era Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder to reconnect hip-hop with a soulful revolutionary legacy that it turned away from when MCs started going in over 808 beats. It's not original, but it's a good path to follow. (Chicago rapper Tree recently used a similar approach on his mixtape, Sunday School II: When Church Lets Out, probably one of the best rap records that’ll be released this year.)
The music on The Gifted sounds fantastic, with intricately arranged keys and strings, stacks of soul and gospel-inspired backup vocals, and deep, rubbery bass lines. The problem is that Wale and his team made a really decent soul rap album without a rapper soulful enough to carry it. He’s a capable, sometimes personable MC, but he’s not an especially compelling one. His approach to the album’s more explicitly soul-oriented tracks is to intersperse his library of 2013 rap cliches about his personal struggle to success with the occasional line about social injustice. The combination is a jumbled, awkward mess, capped by a wasted guest appearance by Jerry Seinfeld on an excruciatingly unfunny dialogue with Wale on The Gifted's outro. He’s attempting to tap into the magic that Marvin and Stevie created back then, but his understanding of what they did is bafflingly shallow. Wale seems to think that those records succeeded by their string arrangements and keyboard tones, and with accurate enough reproductions of those at his fingertips, he breezes past the part about writing lyrics that resonate with an audience enough to rattle their whole worldview. After days of listening to The Gifted on nearly constant rotation I can’t remember a single line from it.
In the cruelest of ironies, the album only really starts to come together when Wale abandons the high concept conscious stuff and goes straight for the pop jugular. “Clappers”, the strongest track here, is a big, club-shaking bass anthem about girls with big butts. It’s absolutely ignorant as fuck, but at least it’s fun and, more vital, straight to the point. Wale may not be a great thinker, but he’s an accomplished entertainer who seems to have inherited some of the unabashed “anything to please the crowd” attitude from go-go groups in his hometown of Washington, D.C. When he hits his stride here you can almost see him on stage, gleefully controlling a packed audience.
What seems to be the main purpose of the record is to elevate Wale beyond the level of Rick Ross’ reliable second-stringer, a guy who’s capable of dropping the occasional strip club anthem in between a steady string of unremarkable features on pop songs. “Clappers” proves that when he embraces that job he’s actually really good at it. But if he wants to be taken as a serious artist like the ones he spends most of the record emulating, he’s going to have to start taking some real chances and get real far out of the box, out to place where people are known to wear kilts.


The New York psych-folk band makes a welcome return to form with a dreamy, unsettling, Mellotron-filled album that feels especially appropriate right now.

Strange to Explain

Dread has been an important ingredient in Jeremy Earl’s best music. Earl, the bandleader of Woods, has a dreamy falsetto that’s offset beautifully by unsettling songs, the type that appeared all over 2009’s Songs of Shame and 2010’s At Echo Lake. Those two albums were Woods’ best, with Earl’s darker reveries nurtured by the band’s remarkably coherent music: warm, comforting psychedelic folk tinged with sadness, confusion, and mystery. Woods’ newest album, Strange to Explain, arrives almost exactly a decade after At Echo Lake and, happily, sounds very much like it, evoking a familiar Woods feeling: that of a blazing campfire surrounded by darkness. The record represents a roaring comeback for the band at a moment to which their sound is particularly well-suited.
Earl was set back on his heels after the 2016 presidential election and the band’s rushed response, 2017’s Love Is Love, was insipid and gooey. At times, its saccharine lyrics could feel like parody, something written by conservatives imagining the taste of liberal tears: “How can we love if this won’t go away? How can we love with this kind of hate?” Strange to Explain doesn’t gesture helplessly in the direction of bad feeling, but leans right into it. And in acknowledging the ubiquity of pain, the album offers to help banish it.
Even the lesser tracks here are not what they seem. The two-minute instrumental “The Void” opens like a standard guitar jam (with some vibraphone mixed in) and arrives at a melodic hook within 30 seconds. But the song remains in motion, running from one neighborhood to the next, with new melodies coming into view every 30 seconds or so until its climax is revealed: not that initial hook but a brass refrain that undergirds the entire thing. It’s fully realized and then it’s gone, a feeling as wistful and complex as arriving at the edge of a waterfront.
If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that many of the strongest songs here sound as if they could have come out years ago. But album highlight “Can’t Get Out,” an anthemic song that combines garage-rock rumble with Dire Straits Americana (courtesy of the Mellotron that’s all over the album), sounds wholly new and remarkably cathartic. It’s a full-throated jam that describes the feeling of suffocation even as it rejects it. The sound is muddier than Woods’ usual, and Earl is belting: “Can’t get back/Can’t get out/Can’t take a breath/Leave me be.”
Woods’ lyrics have always been impressionistic, but even as the quality of the songs here ranges, certain motifs recur: night, void, dreams, immersive experiences that make sense only in the light of day, if they ever do. The spooky title track has the most interesting lyrics, with Earl asserting that “you can reinvent yourself so you don’t slip away,” suggesting, basically, that the way to avoid death is to continually kill off versions of yourself. Yet the ghosts of past selves pile up, resulting in a déjà vu that gives the song, and the record, its name. Naturally, because the subject matter is so unsettling, it’s one of the prettiest tracks on the record.
It’s tempting to hear this album as an elegy for David Berman, for whom Woods served as a backing band in the months leading up to his suicide. But Strange to Explain was written and recorded before that collaboration came to full fruition. Berman’s demons may have informed Earl’s, as a recent New York Times profile about their collaboration suggested, but Woods are perfectly capable of turning their own nightmares into compelling music. Late in the album, on “Light of Day,” Earl turns his attention outward. As with “The Void,” the song takes its time revealing itself, with a bridge that feels like a hook preceding the actual chorus. The lyrics are angry, as Earl sings, “You can fill your void with an empty cup/It might tear you apart, almost every night.” His voice couldn’t sound any sweeter.

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Newly remastered by Jimmy Page, the three-disc set featuring recordings from ’69-’71 captures a vibrant and liminal phase of the band's career that shows who they once were and who they would become.

The Complete BBC Sessions

Maybe you’re the person who hasn’t quite made up their mind up about Led Zeppelin. That’s fine but fair warning, the band is the apotheosis of overstuffed arena rock, from private jets to strong-arming managers to personal excess in every musical, sexual, and philosophical front. Lester Bangs wanted to chuck pies at them in defense of Truth and/or Iggy Pop. Hammer of the Gods depicted them as decadent goons and tried to make that seem admirable. Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube” video, without even needing to name them, reduced their lyrical and aesthetic sensibilities to an interest in “where the hobbits dwell.” If you’re a young music head who shuns rockism, appropriation, and womanizing as loathsome retrograde traits to be avoided, being into Zep means your faves don’t come more problematic.
Still, rock dorks were tangling with this issue long before any of us, and in the context of reckoning with Led Zeppelin—especially as an oft-bootlegged yet still elusive live-band document—the official two-disc release of *BBC Sessions *in 1997 felt like a moment of clarity. Rhino’s 2016 reissue of the *BBC Sessions *is also a big important musical-legacy package deal, and justifiably so: Jimmy Page supervised a new remaster in the spirit of the studio album reissues that commenced two years ago, there’s an additional third disc that includes an unearthed performance that hadn’t been heard since its original 1969 broadcast, Dave Lewis’ contextual liner notes are informative and revelatory, and if you just love black-and-white photos of arcane recording gear and empty performance halls, you’re in luck. But above all that, it’s an exhaustive look at the lengths Led Zeppelin would go to for a chance to make it big through sheer force of music, and it’s borne out by witnessing the band in the process their own self-creation.
Aside from Jimi Hendrix, a few jazzy UK prog bands, and the artists in the orbit of Miles Davis’ electric period, nobody working at deconstructing rock‘n’roll took such advantage of the possibilities of improvisation. To know Zeppelin as musicians puts that into focus: Jimmy Page flourished as an ex-session guitarist who still wanted to try any style as his own. John Bonham was so in the pocket even the fractions between the one and the two sounded deep. John Paul Jones strode with purpose along the border between groove’s backbone and a nomadic soloist whether on bass or keys. And Robert Plant’s voice could wring a Valhallan catharsis out of reading the cooking instructions on a box of macaroni. In isolation they were great; as an ensemble they were supernatural. It’s not that they were merely shredding or otherwise showing off: Led Zeppelin wanted to find out where those sounds they built, borrowed, and stole could really go.
The first disc of *BBC Sessions *covers a stretch from early March to early August of 1969, a couple months after the release of their self-titled debut and a few before they dropped Led Zeppelin II. It seems wrong to call such a short stretch of time between first and second albums a “transitional period,” but that's what these sessions capture. The churning, riff-splintering heavy blues-rock of their debut is already shoving against the confines of what they’d already put to tape. They do their damnedest to wring new vistas from old Willie Dixon numbers on “You Shook Me” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” and there are moments where everything converges in waves of virtuosity that hint at picking up where the soon-to-disband Cream left off in the blues-rock supergroup sweepstakes. It’s when they stretch their legs on “Dazed and Confused”—still roughly album-length thanks to time constraints, and not yet the leviathan 20-minute concert centerpiece it was growing into—that their signature interplay starts to set them apart as their own entity, impossible to reproduce because they couldn’t stop moving.
The in-progress nature of their 1969 material brings out some unpredictable sides. Hearing them hammer through live-set favorite “Somethin’ Else” in rockabilly mode is borderline surreal, especially with Plant rampaging through a vocal diametrically opposed to Eddie Cochran’s. And the third disc’s unearthing of a three-song session once feared lost is a fine addition—as well as the first time anyone born after 1969 can hear the piano-driven, harmonica-blasting “Sunshine Woman,” a B.B./Albert/Freddie King-simpatico cut which is perhaps their shortest line to electric blues as contemporary style rather than a mythical predecessor. (The sound is not great here. After the masters were erased, these cuts had to be sourced from a recording off of AM radio, but they’re an exception on a collection with otherwise pristine fidelity.)
The most crucial detail of their ’69 sets is how nearly every BBC performance at the time included some variation of “Communication Breakdown.” You’d think it was their signature hit, or at least a cut that’d give them more critical affinity to the MC5 than Uriah Heep. It’s always the springboard for something new, from a revelation of how many ways Page could either slice or bulldoze his way through his solo to a hint at their engagement with funk that wouldn’t be heard so clearly again until The Song Remains the Same four years later.
If the 1969 sessions were Zeppelin figuring out who they were, the 1971 sessions were Led Zeppelin figuring out who they weren’t. Broadcast on BBC Radio One’s “In Concert” on April 4, 1971, and famously featuring the first-ever version of “Stairway to Heaven” eight months before the release of Led Zeppelin IV, the second disc features the band stepping into the vast musical expanse they had laid before themselves. III was released the previous October and was their first shot at pushing beyond their “blooze” rep to more vivid folk influences. There’s still a medley that builds off “Whole Lotta Love” to skulk through foundational classics by John Lee Hooker (“Boogie Chillun”), Bukka White (“Fixin’ to Die Blues”), Arthur Crudup (“That’s Alright Mama”), and Elvis Presley (“A Mess of Blues”), but this chops-fest belies how hard the press mocked them for coming from a place the band would rather live in than visit as tourists__.__ And the peak-blues “Since I’ve Been Loving You” is where they finally figured out how to use their explosive power sparingly. Page’s solo and Plant’s wails pierce so deeply because they emerge from one of their most contemplative arrangements.
But their confidence and their chafing at being pigeonholed made for a creatively lucrative combination and the period between the releases of *III *and *IV *was the best time to capture that. So we get the heavy metal equivalent of a chromed-god Jack Kirby *Thor *drawing in “Immigrant Song,” the careening time signature of a power-trio version of “Black Dog,” and the acoustic Joni Mitchell-fueled heartbreak of “Going to California.” Of course there’s “Dazed and Confused” snatched from its blues-rock cradle and transformed into the Kubrick *2001 *psychedelic stargate sequence of their live set, bowed guitar and everything. And if overexposure hasn’t dulled your senses to “Stairway to Heaven,” you can hear it as it first sounded before it was played approximately two billion times on the radio—even if the last Page solo hadn’t yet found its footing.
From a present-day perspective, where big-time arena-filling rock has settled on Muse, Foo Fighters, and 5 Seconds of Summer, diving headlong into the ’69/’71 timeframe of the band that most necessitated the obnoxious yet fitting phrase “Rock Gods” might otherwise feel like history homework. But *BBC Sessions *captures an actual excitement, a document of a moment in an oft-told story of a band that isn’t excessively beholden to it. No *Song Remains the Same *audio-visual stoner-movie overkill, no excess studio futzing, no sense that their peak was either already there or just in the rearview. It’s just a meticulous document of a band whose hedonism kept them from restraining their absurd level of mastery. So here: have Zep as they both wanted to be and eventually were.


The British-born producer Mark Barrott played a big role in establishing the Balearic sound. Sketches from an Island 2 is the rare sequel that improves on the original.

Sketches from an Island 2

It’s easy to equate Mark Barrott’s music with the “Balearic” ideal of Ibiza. Even when the British-born producer still resided in Uruguay, his imprint International Feel released electronic music that venerated the sound of that Mediterranean isle, which Philip Sherburne described last year in assessing the Balearic revival as a “fusion of synth pop, yacht rock, acid house, faux reggae, and ambient music.” And when Barrott himself relocated to Ibiza in 2012 he aligned himself with Balearic explicitly with a series of EPs that culminated in the full-length Sketches From An Island.
While affiliating himself with Ibiza and naming his second full-length for it once more, Barrott moves into a more rarefied space on Sketches From An Island 2, an example of a sequel surpassing the original. Some moments of the album hearken back to the eclectic catalog of genres that define “Balearic”: opener “Brunch With Suki” has the stiff swing of library music and the gentle guitars of “Driving To Cap Negret” touch on island favorites like Chris Rea and Andreas Vollenweider. Yet Barrott isn’t keen to just replicate these island-friendly timbres, opting for Ableton and a few plug-ins to achieve a sound that would otherwise require an entire room of exotic instrumentation.
But as the album moves deeper, such earmarks start to fall away, and rather than think about what Ibiza means in the 21st century, SFAI2 starts to reflect the natural beauty of the surrounding landscape in its beautiful, spare melodicism. “Over at Dieter’s Place” does not reference Cluster member Dieter Moebius, but the track suggests the bucolic miniatures that the group once rendered, with Barrott weaving together small bits of pedal steel, woodwind, mbira, birdcall and the rhythms of a hand drum into a sparkling miniature.
“Distant Storms At Sea” is somber and dramatic, blurring together thumb piano, a processed horn line that brings to mind Jon Hassell, a guitar line from collaborator Jordan Humber and booming percussion that –like the actual thunderstorm on the track—looms over all without ever bursting. Throughout, the drums that Barrott adds are subliminal rather than foregrounded, making the album less of a tool for a DJ set and more for providing a fitting conclusion to a night out. The last two songs are Barrott’s most evocative to date, “Forgotten Island” a minor-key rumination that gives pause, and closer “One Slow Thought” which offers the sort of mindful cleansing that Barrott suggested in a recent interview.
The album peaks with “Cirrus & Cumulus” and “Der Stern, Der Nie Vergeht.” The former is a gentle polyrhythmic blend of birdcalls and shimmering African percussion that suggests Music for 18 Musicians, while the latter mixes talking drum, fretless bass and a plug-in that mimics an old analog synthesizer, its melody drifting higher and higher. The title translates as “the star that never fades” and seeing as four of the album’s nine tracks bear titles evoking the skies above, Sketches From An Island 2 sounds like something increasingly unmoored from Ibiza and the notion of “Balearic,” floating instead towards a more heavenly sound.


On his fourth album, Justin Vernon reassembles the familiar Bon Iver elements like a cubist collage, with his voice fearlessly front and center. The result is his most honest and forthright music ever.

i,i

Bon Iver has always been Justin Vernon’s escape route. After retreating to the woods of Wisconsin to record For Emma, Forever Ago, he drew a surrealist roadmap of the United States on Bon Iver, depicting a fantastical world where the lived, the dreamed, and desired coexisted. When this invented land felt oppressive and the anxiety of facing it too overwhelming, Vernon retreated again and burrowed within himself, pulverizing his voice with machines to create 22, A Million, a record that dramatized the fracturing of the self.
There’s no more hiding on i,i. Justin Vernon takes the Bon Iver sound and reassembles it like a cubist collage, with his voice right out front. All the familiar elements are here—impressionist swells of sound, impenetrable-yet-tender lyrics, mesmerizing studio tricks—and they are buoyed by Vernon’s supple baritone, the instrument he knows how to manipulate best. Acoustic guitar, horns, and piano return to prominence alongside the jittery electronics and synths that Vernon has lately favored. But the mood he conjures with these elements feels new. These songs don’t swallow you whole with grandeur; they look outward, leaving some room for the rest of the world.
The lyrics find Vernon locating peace within the ordinary and everyday. “I like you/And that ain’t nothing new,” he sings simply on “iMi.” Later, on “RABi,” he observes, “Well, it’s all just scared of dying.” These things don’t always merit saying out loud, but Vernon seems to be singing them to rediscover their meaning, and the music feels equally straightforward and searching. Songs like “Marion” and “Holyfields,” are uncharacteristically unadorned, even compared to the For Emma and Blood Bank era, when Vernon was at least joined by his own echoes. Here, he sounds completely exposed.
Still, there are plenty of invited guests to provide cover, or at least offer their company. James Blake, Moses Sumney, and Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, among others, pop up throughout. Even Young Thug collaborator Wheezy has composing and production credits. Vernon sampled the voices of others on 22, A Million, but in that context they felt more like dolls he’d animated than human beings. The guests on i,i, meanwhile, are allowed to breathe. Bruce Hornsby might sing only one line on the single “U (Man Like),” but his presence is enlivening. It’s less lonely to have friends nearby.
Vernon himself sings with more texture and conviction than ever before. He’s shifted fully from vessel to commander, steering the music instead of seeping into it. A song like “Naeem” is filled with production flourishes—a soft backing choir, faint samples, the sort of military drums favored on Bon Iver’s “Perth”—yet it all serves to highlight the booming sound of Vernon’s voice, bellowing in his natural range. The lyrics to “Naeem” are dizzying and, at points, indecipherable (“I fall off a bass boat/And the concrete’s very slow”), but he isn’t hiding behind them. It’s more like Vernon is suggesting that only feeling can offer truth. On “Naeem,” he sings, “Tell them I’ll be passing on/Tell them we’re young mastodons,” dragging his words in the second line until you can almost hear him choking up. Like all the best moments in his catalog, it is inexplicably touching.
i,i is often about trying to reconnect with some idea of a true self, even as you move forward. Vernon writes of scars and things lost: “You were young when you were gave it,” he sings on “We,” a line that speaks to his ability to summon powerful elegiac feelings with a few simple words. “Hey, Ma,” immediately one of the best songs in the Bon Iver catalog, is rousing and explicitly sentimental. “Full time you talk your money up/While it’s living in a coal mine,” Vernon belts, but his voice is too earthy to sound hateful. Instead, it’s like he’s offering absolution, promising that something as simple as a call to your mom is enough to make up for avarice or bluster.
At first glance, the tracklist for i,i is as bewildering as the symbol-laden 22, A Million. Upon listening, though, you realize that many of these are probably mondegreens and homonyms, cheeky nods to how hard it is to understand Bon Iver’s lyrics. “Jelmore,” for instance, is a fragment of what it sounds like when Vernon sings, “Well angel morning sivanna.” And the title for the closing “RABi” comes from the couplet, “I could prophet/I could rob I, however.” There are plenty of interpretive possibilities available in those words, but none of them are as enticing as their sheer sound. The music is also not as mysterious as the songs’ monikers suggest. There’s an overwhelming calmness and pleasantness to i,i, and “RABi” is one of the most easygoing of the bunch. “Sunlight feels good now don’t it,” Vernon sings. There’s no great symbolism in the track, no yearning, no enveloping echoes. What emerges is a solace that has eluded Vernon on past Bon Iver releases. “I don’t have a leaving plan,” he sings, maybe because there’s nowhere else he needs to go.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With 13 albums under their belt, the Norwegian experimentalists continue to haunt the dark, underexplored basements of electro-improvisational music.

13

Supersilent's music exists beyond any normal human activity, any comprehensible emotion. It's hard to imagine partying, housecleaning, or commuting with it, as its screeches, melted horn riffs, and creep-show keyboards bombard the edge of reason. Its rhythms hint at continuity and then peel off in whatever direction, perversely arbitrary, shunting the flow. Imagine straining to hear a rustling through the keyhole of a door that might burst open to unleash a terrible racket at any moment—that's 13. When you listen to it, you can't really do anything but listen to it. That's an advantage if you consider it as a sign of vividness, but perhaps a limitation if you think about how often you sit by yourself and do nothing but listen intently to music.
The precise numbering of Supersilent's recordings almost humorously belies their spontaneous nature—every album is improvised. On 13, the trio moves from Rune Grammofon to Oslo's other leading electronic jazz label, Smalltown Supersound, but the sequence and the style are unbroken. The group's distant roots are in free jazz, which they still stitch into abstract patchworks of ambient music and arrhythmic noise. Roughly, Arve Henriksen coaxes strange tones from trumpets and woodwinds; Ståle Storløkken pounds vintage keyboards; and Helge Sten, who also makes dark ambient music as Deathprod, at once encases and engages the improvisations with rich electro-acoustic atmospheres. 13 was performed over a PA system in a shared space, and it benefits from a sense of presence even at its most daunting.
Though Supersilent has gone without a drummer since 2009, they remain a highly percussive outfit because of the pops and crackles of the electronics and the extended techniques used by the players. 13's opening track is described as "Indonesian ritual music heard from a Scandinavian mountaintop," but you couldn't be blamed for imagining a rhythm section falling down the stairs into a basement full of broken computers instead. "13.1" lands on just the right side of the line between exploring and getting lost. Not every track does. These improvisers are good enough to bend something as unruly as "13.3" into an arc, but it's still a gruelingly disjunctive go at it. And on the bumptious "13.5," we remember, as we wholly forget during the most captivating passages, that this is essentially just some dudes getting together and jamming.
Luckily, "13.5" is followed by one those velvety, far-off, lyrical trumpet solos familiar from Henriksen's wonderful solo albums, and there are other songs like it here—smaller, shorter, and more subtle. Not a one is unwelcome. Aptly for such extreme music, 13 is most potent when Supersilent either goes inward, as on "13.6," or goes all out, staying well clear of the noncommittal region in between. "13.7" might take this dictum a tad far; a screaming fireball that takes six minutes to strike spends six more wreaking almost unlistenable havoc. "13.9" is just as big and twice as perfect, rewarding anyone who's made it to the end with a cool-toned, hard-won, and not at all unnecessary refresher course on what music is and why people like it. That's the fascination and the frustration of Supersilent: it's like they keep destroying the lineaments of form just for the pleasure of vouchsafing them to us again.


It\x92s rough times for these bluesy guy-girl garage duos, I tell ya. I mean, sure, if you're the ...

Keep On Your Mean Side

It's rough times for these bluesy guy-girl garage duos, I tell ya. I mean, sure, if you're the least bit talented you've got a massive hype machine working for you-- which isn't a bad thing-- but you'll never shake those comparisons to the band that built the boat you're sailing. I promise not to mention of the W\x97S\x97 , maybe as a favor to The Kills, but mostly because the two bands sound nothing alike.
Regardless, the Kills won't need to fish for complimentary comparisons; suckers are jumping out of the water. I'll be damned if vocalist VV (nee Alison Mosshart) doesn't have a picture of PJ Harvey at her bedside, and the same goes double for instrumentalist Hotel (Londoner Jamie Hince) re: Neil Hagerty. These influences aren't as disparate as they seem: while Harvey and the Royal Trux worked on different sides of the fidelity line, they were both attempting expansive, ambitious modern updates of the blues. The Kills' aim is just about the opposite; despite the stylistic similarities, they're trying to return the pillaged form to its simpler roots.
Though their minimalism might sometimes sound like straight distillation, the tunes still hit, and hurt. On the second track, \x93Cat's Claw\x94, the raised hackles of V.V.'s voice roughly brush up against Hotel's descending string of power chords, and the \x93Got it, I want it\x94 chorus sinks its rusty sing-along hooks into your lips with stoned rapacity. On this song-- and as a rule-- The Kills offer strictly verse/chorus stuff, with a few careening bars of guitar skree passing for a bridge. Oddly, this is what makes the song great, just as the Jesus and Mary Chain distortion of the record's opener lines a wordlessly yowled chorus like lace on an exquisite corpse's casket, pulling the song beyond the confines of a boxy garage, out into the dark streets.
The band knows when-- and more importantly how-- to augment their simplicity, but it's a shame they don't use this gift more often. It's not that any of these songs fail, at least in the rock and roll or blues departments, but there's a point where minimalism can easily turn hollow. The lockstep lyric and riff repetition of \x93Black Rooster\x94 wears itself out quickly, begging for variation about three minutes in, but the band keeps pushing straight ahead. And no matter how much enthusiasm the band pours into it, the titular mantra of \x93Fuck the People\x94 still sounds like nothing more than a predicate pose. Like their pseudonyms, the band's shove-it adherence to a few glib phrases and riffs is going stale; it's still good, but once in a while, you catch a whiff of lazy, empty self-mythologizing.
But even a hollow brick can knock you out cold: there's enough hypnotic arm-wrestling in the slippery back-and-forth rhythm of \x93Hitched\x94 to drop a cruiserweight critic, and-- despite the minimalist posture-- there's enough thematic variation to make things interesting. \x93Kissy Kissy\x94, for instance, starts with a ringing guitar figure that almost sounds more at home in the Ganges Delta than the Mississippi, before following its thudding drums into doomsville. Though few and far between, the numbers where the band slows down and eases back on the attitude are things of beauty; \x93Wait\x94, the album's longest and most repetitive track, makes perfect use of the yearning core of V.V.'s tough, stripped voice, stretching seductive curiosity into two-chord cosmic foreplay. The final track, \x93Gypsy Death and You\x94, is in a similar vein, V.V. and Hotel using only voice, acoustic guitar, and insistent, reverbed drum hits to sketch their own halfway-to-sober version of ramshackle folk.
If they should break through to the mainstream, The Kills probably deserve it more than most. Their poses are balanced with enough genuine emotion to approach the sum of their influences; they play with more style and flair than almost any band in a scene where the former is usually all that matters. Still, it's a bitter reality: they'd never be getting this kind of attention if it weren't for the White Stri-- fuck!


The New York psych-pop quartet returns with an album that finds compelling new ways to make mini-dramas of the mundane.

AMAMA

Midway through Crumb’s new album, there’s a transitory, 49-second track called “Nightly News.” It’s groggy-sounding, a hazy sampler of cable-news synths and this-just-in swells; you get the sense that you’ve just woken up on the couch, and the TV is taunting you with whatever happened this time. Millions of cockroaches accidentally released from nearby research facility? Serial slasher last seen purchasing potato chips at local mini-mart? Nothing, it turns out: The song ends before revealing what the news actually is. It feels particularly apt for the New York band, who’ve spent the past near-decade churning out hypnotic epics with a sinister edge. In 2019, frontwoman Lila Ramani told Pitchfork that she wouldn’t “chill” to her group’s output. Dreamy as it is, their music is a wake-up call.
Crumb aren’t the types to get eight hours of sleep. Their first two albums, 2019’s Jinx and 2021’s Ice Melt, seemed to revel in the space between 2 a.m. and daylight—not only because of their shared sound, a slightly unnerving take on psychedelia, but also the ideas that informed that sound, the sorts of things you have to dream up. If you asked them about Ice Melt’s underwater-y vocal mixes, they wouldn’t tell you about Ableton effects or post-session knob adjustments; they’d tell you how they put condoms on microphones and dunked them in buckets of water. Ramani sang of transient thoughts, fleeting curiosities about strawberry seeds (“BNR”) or dates with dark spirits (“Jinx”). AMAMA, the band’s third album, gets more playful and candid than ever, without sacrificing their signature red-eyed experimentation. It’s a sleeker, riskier, and more rewarding iteration of Crumb’s approach: proof that as their footprint has expanded, their palette has, too.
Crumb take a microscope to foggy memories, gathering the ephemera of years spent staring through windows. They have roots in the New York scene—Ramani is an alum of Brooklyn ensemble Standing on the Corner; bassist Jesse Brotter appears on early tracks by MIKE—but their inventive jazz-psych invokes a wider set of peers, including Toronto’s BADBADNOTGOOD and Melbourne’s Hiatus Kaiyote. On “The Bug,” a hypnotic paean to caught flies and caught feelings, Ramani’s poetry is undergirded by a winding rhythm section that crawls like an insect. “Side by Side,” like the best Crumb songs, melds romance with vague mourning; when Ramani sings of “trying to run away” and the descending chord progression gives way to a feverish instrumental break, you get the sense that you’re running, too, but toward something—a seismic, supernatural encounter. Crumb’s music supplies a cinematic score for Ramani’s off-kilter scripts, slow-burn psychological thrillers that make you look over your shoulder, then at the world around you.
When Crumb are in the director’s chair, humdrum reality is a spectacle that co-stars everybody. Ramani has a knack for ending songs on unfinished sentences, a quirk that presents serpentine tracks as verbal ouroboroi. In “AMAMA”’s enchanting denouement, damning repetitions of “But you coulda never known my name” dissolve into a less-damning “But you coulda,” the “coulda” hanging like an open hand. On “Crushxd,” the band pays tribute to a turtle flattened by its tour van—“Forgive me for this sin, killing a living thing, you were as small as a pin”—and outdoes the typical funeral dirge with circular, foot-tapping bass-keyboard interplay. In the final minute, swirling pitch shifts carry the track into a trance and “I’ll never see you here again” melts into a naked “Never see you”: both a farewell and a release of guilt.
Crumb was conceived, in the mid-2010s, as a means of fully realizing songs Ramani had written years prior. They’ve come a long way since. The music doesn’t sound like an appendage or a backdrop anymore: It meanders where it used to lounge, screams where it used to whisper. Midway through “(Alone in) Brussels,” where the narrative is as winding as the instrumentation, a trip-hop break bathes Ramani’s high-pitched singsong in reverb and flanging, an amorphous deluge of liquid vowels, streaky keys, and bass notes that stagger like size-18 shoes. As a guitarist, Ramani rarely solos loudly; she’s more content using the strings as stilts, surveying the song with gangly, spiderish strides. At several moments, as on “Genie,” the words stop, and the guitar emerges as another voice, speaking a strange tongue synonymous with whatever she was saying before.
AMAMA was produced by Johnscott Sanford and Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado (the latter also oversaw the recording of Ice Melt). If Crumb’s first two full-lengths squeezed worlds into safety-sized containers, this record is as authoritative as they’ve ever sounded. It sprawls in the vein of psych-pop genre-benders King Krule and Toro y Moi, but also manages to feel singular, a standalone statement of their ever-evolving identity. Like the best experimentalists, Crumb are their most potent when disparate elements interlock: a lucid dream you remember scene by scene, fragment by fragment.


Fashioned from an archival recording of an aeolian harp in the Alaskan wilds, the environmental composer’s shimmering, wind-driven drones telegraph both majesty and dread.

Houses of the Wind

Living in Los Angeles in the 1970s, John Luther Adams liked to walk around and listen to the birds, making recordings of the squawks and chirps he found the loveliest. The acclaimed environmental activist and composer had just finished studying music composition at CalArts, but those walks were as influential as his formal education. “The birds became my teacher after James Tenney,” he told an interviewer in 2014. He would write the birds’ calls into his music, but instead of meticulously attempting perfect notations of their songs, he wanted to find “what gets lost in translation.”
Adams later moved to Alaska, where he continued to search for music across the state’s vast tundras, forests, and mountains; the expanse of the Arctic still inspires much of his work. His Pulitzer Prize-winning orchestral piece Become Ocean is an abstract rendition of Alaska’s roiling ocean that captures the immensity of the wide-open seas with surging melodies. Like his early bird-call explorations, the music is an interpretation, an attempt to offer an impression of how nature sounds and makes us feel.
Adams frequently works with orchestra, chamber ensemble, or percussion, but on Houses of the Wind, he turns to field recordings. The album is based on a 10-and-a-half-minute recording of an aeolian harp—a string instrument that’s played by the wind—that Adams made in Alaska in 1989. He’s explored the sound of the instrument before on pieces like The Wind in High Places, in which a string quartet emulates the air-driven device. But here, Adam works with the ethereal instrument itself, creating pieces that teeter between serenity, mourning, and hope.
The aeolian harp’s gentle hum is a vehicle for nostalgia; the way the wind streams through its strings creates a feathery sound that carries with it a feeling of wistfulness. Much of the wafting music on Houses of the Wind grows from the distance into full view, like climbing a mountain and reaching its apex. Opener “Catabatic Wind” defines this structure by starting with a distant, high-pitched twinkle. Gradually, deeper and more resonant tones take over, turning the atmosphere from wondrous to ominous. Other tracks, like “Mountain Wind,” start with sonorous, sinister rumbles that blossom into a radiant spectrum of pitches.
Just as the gossamer, shapeshifting hum of the aeolian harp is driven by the ways that wind interacts with the instrument, Adams follows that organic motion in sculpting his compositions. Closer “Anabatic Wind” makes the most compelling use of the natural ebb and flow of the air through the harp’s strings, sounding like a mellowed-out windchime. Different pitches glow and fade, climbing and falling with ease. It’s vibrant and pulsing, venturing from dark tones into a final shimmer of hope.
While the same field recording is the source for each of these pieces, the end results vary considerably. Subtle contradictions connect them: They’re in constant motion yet feel suspended in mid-air, tranquil yet uneasy, warm yet icy. Sometimes, these differences coexist and suggest a feeling of serenity, while at other points, the music feels wispy and slightly unsettling. But that unease often dissipates, once again finding balance between moments of optimism and despair, richness and translucence.
Adams has often mused about the ways music and activism relate to each other. To him, they’re inseparable—writing music is his way of advocating for the Earth. Given its direct link to the elements, Houses of the Wind feels like an overt statement about the relationship between music and the environment. Yet as in all his work, the result is impressionistic, not didactic. Amorphous as they are, these renderings are a powerful reminder that the planet is alive around us.


Frankie Cosmos is the low-key indie pop project of Greta Kline. Her greatest talent is her ability to transform short songs into experiences that resemble hours of impressionistic conversation.

Next Thing

Most of the time, lyric sheets to albums are utilitarian; you turn to them to make sure what you're hearing is right. But the lyric sheet to Frankie Cosmos' Next Thing reads like book of poems on its own. It runs seven pages long, comprising 15 stanzas (1 for each of its songs) and it totals 1570 words, all of which are slyly idiosyncratic, bordering on perfectly arranged. As I listened, I felt compelled to print them out, staple the pages together, and read along, fearful I would miss something important. As I did, I became thoroughly convinced that Greta Kline is quietly writing herself into a vaunted place, one where she will eventually deserve mention alongside poets like Lydia Davis, Wayne Koestenbaum, or Maggie Nelson—anyone who can puncture your heart in the span of a sentence.
The sound on her sophomore album is mature, fully-fleshed, but never loses the unique immediacy of her Bandcamp work. Like those albums, the music on Next Thing is mostly built on unvarnished synths and sweet, understated guitars. The difference is in the clarity of her vision: Two years ago when Lindsay Zoladz named Zentropy the year's number one pop album in New York Magazine, she concluded that Kline penned a "melodic reminder that the wisest, wittiest person in the room is rarely the loudest one but instead that unassuming girl in the corner, grinning contentedly at her untied shoes." In Next Thing, she's looked up from her laces, meeting your eyes and delivering observations that are by turns strange, self-possessed, and dizzyingly multitudinous.
On these songs, those observational powers are at their height. Her greatest talent remains her ability to transform minute-long songs into experiences that resemble hours of intimate and impressionistic conversation. In the first minute of album opener "Floated In," Kline sings: "Now it would be bedtime if/I could close off my mind/It just flops onto you/Wet and soppy glue...You know I'd love to/Rummage through your silky pink space cap." It's an uncanny description of two drowsy minds splattering thoughts on each other, hoping something sticks, but the words gently pass by before you've even internalized how weird and salient they are. Even when she paints scenes that ostensibly are filled with private meaning, something universal resonates. In "Fool" for example, when she sings "Your name is a triangle, your heart is a square," the funky cubist formulation gets closer to the uncomfortable feeling of naming the one you love than straight description ever would.
As a singer, she's perfected an inimitable vocal delivery that is willfully off-center, out-of-focus, and matter-of-fact. She uses enjambment in her writing and in the long pauses of her singing so well that it reminds me of an idea from Maggie Nelson, that some people who tend bonsai trees plant them askew or aslant to leave space for God. The gaps in Sappho's poetry have been called "a free space of imaginal adventure," and it is an apt description for Kline's music: In the momentary disjunctions of Kline's singing, the hiccup between words, a whole life passes by. On "Outside with the Cuties," she savors the nanoseconds that come between words, asking ordinary-seeming questions ("I haven't written this part yet/will you help me write it?") that invite radical participation from a listener. Even though the song may end after two and a half minutes, it never really ends.
Her work has a continuity to it that invites deep diving, as if she is formulating and reformulating the same few thoughts, waiting for their perfect expressions. Many of the songs ("Embody," "On the Lips," "Too Dark" and "Sleep Song") on the album have appeared in acoustic permutations in past work, and they make the leap seamlessly. Each are marvelously well-wrought trains of thought, cramming existential questions into the banality of everyday moments and finding something beatific even in the plainest of things. "Embody" finds Kline singing about a day where friendship is everything holy in the world, "It's Sunday night/and my friends are friends with my friends/it shows me they embody all the grace and lightness." It's a feeling that helps her move past her self-perceived inability to access this feeling herself ("someday in bravery/I'll embody all the grace and lightness). In Catholicism, past the fog of guilt, there's an incredible idea that light, love, and all that's holy can be transferable from one person to the next. It usually happens in ritual, the eating of a wafer of bread and a sip of wine. In Greta Kline's pocket universe, all you need to get closer to heaven is a night with friends.


Houston rap icon Z-Ro's gorgeous, languid baritone frequently lapses into singing. His latest album paints with just a few colors, but he continually finds new ways to blend them.

Drankin’ & Drivin’

In a recent interview with Rap Radar’s Brian Miller and Elliot Wilson, Houston rap icon Z-Ro copped to having seven unreleased albums on his phone. There’s Legendary, designed to make you feel legendary. There’s Ghetto Gospel, designed to make you feel like you’re at church on the street corner. (I wonder how previous albums Angel Dust, Cocaine, and Meth were supposed to make you feel.) And, now, there’s Drankin’ & Drivin’, an album you’re supposed to put on when you’re lost in the sauce, stuck in the mud, slowed down by any mixture of lean, alcohol, or some other vice, caught in your feelings.
Z-Ro, legally known as Joseph McVey, sometimes calls himself “Rother Vandross,” and it’s more than a pun: Ro’s gorgeous, languid baritone frequently lapses into singing, and his best music has featured a hard-hitting hook sung by the man himself. My favorite version of Ro has been the guy who turned “I hate you bitch” into a gentle, reflective, melodic lyric.
This is Drankin’ & Drivin’s strongest suit—Ro delivers a few knockout hooks, addresses his haters, and it’s onto the next song. It would be tempting to suggest Ro’s material mostly sticks to a few topics to his detriment—haters, baby-mama drama, disloyal members of his crew (sometimes these people overlap)—but what has separated Ro’s music from more traditional street rap, even among fellow introspective Houston contemporaries like Trae tha Truth and Scarface, has been his uncanny knack for taking just about any phrase and building a sweeping hook with it. He embellishes the feeling, less the storytelling.
Lead single “Women Men” (which cops a beat from 50 Cent’s “Many Men [Wish Death]”) hits all the best Z-Ro targets: He talks shit, he sings, and the mood floats between celebratory and menacing, without one eclipsing the other. This is another great little strength of Ro’s—while he paints with just a few colors, he continually finds new ways to blend them. He admits his albums are more mood rings than song-cycles; they’re something you put on when you want to feel a certain way. Considering the sound most associated with Houston rap was created literally as an accessory to taking drugs, the laconic Drankin’ & Drivin’ feels all too appropriate.
A self-professed fan of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, the only guest Z-Ro invites into his insular world is Krayzie Bone, who appears on “Since We Lost Y’all.” Bone Thugs’ rhythmic, supple mix of rapping and singing is another key to understanding Z-Ro. He often sounds comfortable, but never complacent: for every song like “Baby Momma Blues,” elsewhere he hits subtle notes like comparing himself to Isiah Carey, a local news anchor (“I tell it like it is/Not the way it might be”) and touches on political/cultural touchstones that resonate heavily in Texas (on “He Hoes” he says, “Representing for Sandra Bland/My attitude is fuck the law”). Z-Ro sounds like what Houston feels like—hot, inviting, intimidating if you take a wrong turn, but redemptive if you stick around long enough.
He connects with local producers Beanz & Kornbread, who craft a soulful sex jam with “Hostage” that has more in common with the song of the same name on Maxwell’s recent blackSUMMERS’night than whatever comes to mind when you think of Ro. Another great Houston-based producer, June James, creates a lush, stirring beat on the album’s penultimate statement, “Successful,” solemn when the rest of the album can be thorny. Z-Ro accomplished his goal, then—the album is like hearing the innermost thoughts from someone who’s had a little bit to drink, but not too much—the kind of buzz that convinces someone they’re OK behind the wheel, until, of course, they crash.


Tunji Ige, a 20-year-old Philadelphian son of Nigerian parents, makes appealingly low-stakes rap that accomplishes a lot with a little.

Missed Calls

Tunji Ige is a very current sounding rapper. "Sometimes I’m like… Oh my god, this sounds too much like [Kid] Cudi," the then-sophomore in college jokingly worried in an interview with Fader around the time he released his first project in 2014. A couple years later, on Ige’s new EP, Missed Calls, the comparison holds, and he more obviously channels Kanye West and Drake throughout, trying on their flows and crafting quiet homages out of beats. On one song he brags: "This is post-backpack, post-swag rap, the end of trap, and it’s not wack." It’s kind of a corny line, and Ige is actually at his best melding these hip-hop sub-movements he’s hoping to push past, but it’s also an emotionally honest survey of the land for an in-between generation.
Missed Calls is the product of a collaboration between Ige, a 20-year-old Philadelphian son of Nigerian parents, and Noah Breakfast, an increasingly important behind-the-scenes force in the same city. Breakfast previously made up the production half of the college hip-hop duo Chiddy Bang under the name Xaphoon Jones and has more recently clocked work for acts like Jeremih, Rome Fortune, and Baauer. Ige is an inventive, minimalist producer on his own, and Breakfast’s touch articulates his ideas, sculpting rough drafts into finely-tuned productions. The result is a noticeably well-mixed record, and while Ige has an undeniable imitative propensity, Missed Calls also sounds contained and consistent, like it belongs entirely to him alone.
Generally, the EP leans warmly electronic with sounds that swell instead of crackle. Album opener "Change That" splays ambient synths on top of snappy drums while Ige waxes about his come-up. Ige isn’t a flashy lyricist and some of his raps are overly predictable, but his restraint and smart approach to song structure are his best skills, assets that make him more valuable as a hopeful hitmaker than as a cypher cameo. More importantly, he’s got an ear for catchiness and is a capable enough singer to carry his own hooks.
On "War," the only song produced solely by Breakfast, Ige delivers a mumbling and monotonous sing-song, but it works for the sparse, subdued vibe. On "22," a dramatic, self-serious reflection on being an ascendant 20 year-old rapper, Ige is at his most intimate, but remains a vague and low-stakes writer. "The only road I see is by your side / And know I really could be that guy," he sings affectionately. The song sandwiches a 32-bar verse between strategic bridges and a chanting hook. Like the rest of Missed Calls, you might not double back on a single verse or particular turn of phrase, but Ige’s talent is in pushing a song forward and fleshing it out completely.
The best songs on the album are in the middle and in succession. "On My Grind," the EP’s spacey trap lead single, is rightfully Ige’s biggest hit to date and packages his most accomplished burst of rapping into a pair of verses, the first of which bundles a succession of oddball but obvious similes ("She Bollywood dance like Punjabi / Slum Dog nigga eating Mahi," he raps). The minimalist production interlocks entirely, leaving no open space until a breaking point liberates the hook. "Bring Yo Friends" is an earworm with a simple, bassy foundation and ad-libs—a persistent "Yeah!" tacked onto the end of each line—that nod affectionately to Juvenile’s late-’90s bounce smash "Back That Azz Up." "You should bring your friends yeah, bring your friends yeah!" Ige chants. It’s carefree and simple, inspirational and party-worthy. There’s no narrative ambitions to bog things down, it’s just an obvious hit about having fun. It’s Ige at his best, accomplishing a lot with a little.


On his first solo album in 10 years, Lindsey Buckingham’s insistent, almost irritating knack for melody suggests a resurgent talent for making his insularity accessible.

Lindsey Buckingham

In the blissful exile of the recording studio, Lindsey Buckingham dreams of a dozen music boxes tinkling beautifully in various keys without cease. His melodies yield to other singers with extreme reluctance; they and he need coaxing out of their often truculent self-reliance. Yet for three decades fans could count on Buckingham donating tunes to Fleetwood Mac from a mysterious solo album he was tinkering with on the side, or to release this album himself, confident he’d gotten the bug out of his system.
Not this time. Buckingham quit Fleetwood Mac in 1987, then came back a decade later to film The Dance and play in its subsequent world tour. In 2018, band manager Irving Azoff informed him that, according to Buckingham, Stevie Nicks had fired him (Nicks disagrees). It took Crowded House’s Neil Finn and no less than Mike Campbell to replace him in the band’s lineup; meanwhile, Buckingham returned to an album he’d completed before that year’s tour. He’s settled on an eponymous title for his first post-Mac album—a declaration of independence and defiance. Yet Lindsey Buckingham manages to be his best solo effort since 1992’s Out of the Cradle. No dilution of his composing or his production sorcery here: Buckingham, all by his lonesome, has recorded an album whose insistent, almost irritating knack for melody suggests a resurgent talent for making his insularity accessible.
Where once his furiously strummed guitars, multi-tracked harmonies, and plickety-plockety programmed rhythms toughened the one-dimensional plaints, the lyrics and music of Lindsey Buckingham are in congruence, terms settled like a prenup agreement. Nicks and Christine McVie’s contributions to his Mac material added impassioned and rueful complements, respectively; now he coughs up the ambiguities on his own. “If you’re playing a part/I’ve got to understand,” he coos on “Blind Love.” Lest there be a doubt, he offers the following on “Power Down”: “Lies, lies are the only thing that keeps us alive.” On “Santa Rosa,” he repeats “if you go” not as a request so much as a conditional, singing of a “you” who wants to “leave it behind” as his guitar summons the essence of Sonoma County with a couple dulcet tones. The Buckingham of Law and Order (1981) and Go Insane (1984) would’ve kept howling and shredding, but here the prettiness of the tune suggests he’s made peace with the separation.
Reliant on a tension between his need to confess a sense of hurt through psychobabble and the way his tunes eddy in place before surging forward, Buckingham has often come off as a producer stuck with the unforgiving mode of the pop song, instead of a singer-songwriter meeting his audience: The surly punk-influenced tunelets on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk (1979), the undulant electronic suite on Go Insane, and the hermetic, forbidding grace of Gift of Screws (2011) use verbal tags as excuses for sonic experiments. But on the new album, Buckingham sharpens the familiar modes; its sheen is its own attraction. “I Don’t Mind,” with its touch-activated pitch experiments he mastered on Tango in the Night’s “Big Love,” is second nature to him. Because he’s Lindsey Buckingham, he includes a foil: the spare “Dancing,” in which he breathes the title cushioned by his own oohs, as delectable as a similarly arranged cover of the Rolling Stones’ “I Am Waiting” from 2006’s Seeds We Sow.
To weave exquisite aural curtains protecting his private life has been Buckingham’s métier since the late ’70s; he has presented himself as an artist who shuns the world and its messes. For too long, veneration of his studio mastery resulted in underrating, if not condescending to, McVie and Nicks—longtime Mac fans grew up reading accounts of Buckingham saving their material. So besotted as a culture do we remain with the Solitary Male Genius that we breeze past credible accusations of abuse. Fans endure defensive psychobabble. The reward? In its poise, Lindsey Buckingham is an offensive gesture: nothing seemingly at stake, no fleshed-out objects of desire to trouble daylong studio sessions. It is an austere, beautiful, cruel album, a polished sword.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The breakout star of the regional subgenre known as Jersey club harnesses its familiar driving grooves and libidinal energy while pushing the style forward with new sounds and moods.

Heartbeats

On the opening track of Heartbeats, Cherise Gary snarls, “I just want to fuck.” It’s exactly the sort of direct statement you’d expect from Jersey club, the “X-rated” dance music that Gary, aka UNIIQU3, first heard as a teenager in Newark, the city that birthed the genre. More than a decade later, she’s now the Jersey Club Queen, a title befitting an artist whose studio releases, DJ mixes, and live shows have cemented her as its most electrifying practitioner today.
While data suggest that women make up the majority of Jersey club’s audience, those behind the boards and mics have historically been male. Artists like UNIIQU3 and Cookie Kawaii are changing that. Case in point: That “I just want to fuck” line doesn’t solely exhibit the insatiably horny mentality—exhilarating as it is—that defines much of Jersey club, a genre whose recognizable kick pattern originates from a Baltimore club track called “Dikkontrol” and belongs to a lineage of other libidinal, male-dominated club music like ghetto house and ghettotech. Instead, it’s just a single element in “Shame on Me”’s overarching story, one involving the disappointment UNIIQU3 feels after a guy tries to “run games” on her. Read a different way, “I just want to fuck” could be sung from the perspective of the same man: cold, shameless, unfeeling.
UNIIQU3 has a penchant for maintaining the immediacy and exhilaration of top-shelf Jersey club while weaving in clear micro-narratives. On the melancholy “Unavailable,” squelching synths and vocal samples overlap with talk of an unrequited love, and the propulsive beat feels both lovelorn and determined to push through the heartbreak. She utilizes the dial tone and disconnected-phone message as witty and affecting elaborations on her mood, but she doesn’t rely on them—more evidence of her refusal to leave songs one-dimensional. Rather, disorientation is primarily felt in a textured swirl of varied sounds: pulsating synths, the classic Jersey club beat, her own exasperated vocals.
Despite the sorrow that defines a couple of Heartbeats’ tracks, UNIIQU3 still leaves room for the unbridled pursuit of pleasure. These songs are the EP’s most fun and funny, with “Drown” employing a regal horn overture to announce a “pussy so wet you’ll drown in it.” There’s confidence exuded in the trap beat, and an expansive atmosphere that amusingly embodies the lyrics. When a familiar sample of Trillville’s “Some Cut” is heard—originally a rocking chair, but understood by everyone to be a bed spring—its sudden rapid-speed edit channels a cartoonish, eyes-popping-out-of-sockets, “hummina hummina awooga!!!” silliness. More deliciously outrageous is “Touch,” whose flirty lyrics about waists and thighs are accompanied by such deep bass rumbles that the song feels like a literal assquake.
Heartbeats is UNIIQU3’s Double Cup moment: a release that pushes its respective genre forward and could only come from an artist who’s peerless in their field. Where her BITCHES IS OUTSIDE VOL 1 EP, from earlier this year, was Jersey club distilled to its purest elements and energies, Heartbeats is a gripping evolution where every second is perfectly manicured. It’s less raw in presentation, but don’t mistake it as selling out; this sanding down of edges is both refined and full-body invigorating. Sometimes this progress comes from looking to the past, as with the runway-ready hip-house scorcher “Microdosing.” Sometimes it arrives as a marriage of different ideas, with “What Chu Waiting For?” exemplifying this neatly. It’s an R&B song with Future-like coos, its growling low end matched by cocksure vocals. The pounding beat, the bed squeak, the kinetic drive—as with the rest of Heartbeats, it’s undeniably Jersey club, but something else altogether.

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This companion to Bruce Springsteen’s memoir traces his development as a songwriter and a person. Most notable is the inclusion of five previously unreleased songs from before he signed with Columbia.

Chapter and Verse

Bruce Springsteen was a young man for the span of two albums. His twin releases from 1973, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, were populated by teenage tramps who skipped school, acted cool, stayed out all night, and, generally, felt all right. By the time Born to Run was released in the summer of 1975, Springsteen was starting to put his childish things away. “Maybe we ain’t that young anymore,” he sang on the opener “Thunder Road,” and he acted accordingly. From that point forward, Springsteen’s music was filled with more hardened characters: men with death in their eyes, women who were hated for just being born. Everything about his records, from his increasingly gruff vocals to his toughening physical appearance, seemed to signal a push toward maturity. “I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man,” he sang on 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, as if the authoritative chug of his band and his mean, clean-shaven mug on the cover didn’t say as much already.
The most immediate selling point of Chapter and Verse, a new compilation accompanying Springsteen’s memoir, Born to Run, is that it extends Bruce’s on-record adolescence by five songs. In addition to the 13 album tracks he selected to represent his growth as a songwriter, the set also features, for the first time on an officially sanctioned Springsteen release, music predating his tenure on Columbia Records. For the most part, it’s clear why these tracks have never been a part of the larger Springsteen story, why he never felt the urge to pull a Mudcrutch. They mostly find Springsteen trying on different personas, looking for a sound that fits. The set opens with “Baby I,” a primitive cut from 1966 by his teenage crew the Castiles, and then we get the Townshend-worship garage rock of the following year’s “You Can’t Judge a Book By Its Cover,” while 1970’s “He’s Guilty (The Judge Song),” by his early band Steel Mill, is a simple, Southern fried sing-a-long.
While none of these cuts will knock “Sad Eyes” out of your top 300, 1972’s “Ballad of Jesse James” is the set’s biggest revelation. Boasting a Levon Helm-worthy chorus (“Don’t you wanna be an outlaw, children?”) and introducing many of the musicians who remain a benchmark of Springsteen’s sound today, “Jesse James” showcases Springsteen’s already-arena-sized ambition at a time when he didn’t necessarily have anything important to say. It also feels like the first moment on the album where a recognizable Bruce emerges. The guitar solo forecasts the heavier work he’d do on Darkness, while the caterwaul at the end sounds a good deal like the one that would eventually close out “Backstreets.” Even the outlaw narrative is something Springsteen would return to again. Of the five new songs collected here, this is the one you might want to start preparing a sign for when the next E Street tour rolls around.
After that initial run, we’re left with a tidy run-through of Springsteen’s discography. The tie-in with the memoir means that we’re focusing largely on his more personal work. Gone from the set are the more character-based tracks that appeared on 2003’s comprehensive The Essential Bruce Springsteen and 1995’s chart-focussed Greatest Hits. In other words, no “Hungry Heart,” no “Atlantic City,” no “Glory Days.” He does, however, make room for 1995’s literally-based-on-a-fictional-character “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and 2002’s fireman’s lament “The Rising.” But these tracks speak to a crucial aspect of Springsteen’s work: Despite the long monologues he’s been known to deliver at shows, his music has never been all that autobiographical. A telling anecdote about Bruce involves his right-hand-man Steve Van Zandt berating him at the inclusion of the confessional “Ain’t Got You” on 1987’s Tunnel of Love. “Nobody gives a shit about your life,” the guitarist told him, “They need you for their lives. That’s your thing.” (We’ll see how Van Zandt responds when the sales reports for Bruce’s memoir come in.)
Whether Springsteen’s songs tell his story or our story, the tale is one for the ages. Much of Springsteen’s catalog was designed specifically to grow old with him (“If you wrote them well, they sustain,” Springsteen told a journalist this year when asked about touring 35-year-old songs.) Chapter and Verse arranges his work in a way that rings true to his journey. Following the opening string of songs, “Born to Run,” sounds here like the revelation that it was: a perfect distillation of the music he loved and a culmination of the work he had already done. Same goes for 1987’s “Brilliant Disguise,” a ballad sung with the urgency of an artist finally finding the words to express exactly what’s been on his mind. Other cuts like “Badlands” and “Born in the U.S.A.” help move his story along, illustrating the new vocabulary and sounds that defined the albums each track introduced.
The more recent selections are equally powerful. “Living Proof” from 1992 is a should-be classic that captures the rush of emotions accompanying new fatherhood. “Long Time Comin’,” a song penned in the ’90s but not released on a record until the mid 2000s, is another gem. During early performances of it, Springsteen introduced it as one of his rare “happy songs,” but its joyful tone got buried by the more morose material on Devils & Dust; here it feels utterly euphoric. “Wrecking Ball,” a divisive song about a sports complex penned in 2009 to commemorate the closing of Giants Stadium, also speaks to a lot more in this context. In six minutes, it refits “Born to Run”’s momentum to a less glamorous narrative, refining the heart of Springsteen’s muse into seven short words: “Hard times come, and hard times go.” That message is also reflected by the album’s flow, spanning from “Baby I”’s prepubescent power-pop through the ghostly “My Father’s House” and finally landing on a place of acceptance.
“I always picture it as a car,” Springsteen said of his career in a recent Vanity Fair interview. “All your selves are in it. And a new self can get in, but the old selves can’t ever get out. The important thing is, who’s got their hands on the wheel at any given moment?” The last few years have seen an uncharacteristic turn toward nostalgia for Springsteen that’s led from 2014’s Album Collection Vol. 1 to this year’s River Tour and the upcoming memoir. With the opening five songs, more than 60% of Chapter and Verse is pre-Born in the U.S.A., giving a heavy skew toward his early days.  It’s clear that this wasn’t designed as a greatest hits set, or even a Springsteen-for-beginners mixtape. Hopefully, it proves to be an excuse to move forward and a way to leave the past behind. You can imagine any number of similarly structured compilations (maybe one of his love songs that opens with “For You” and peaks with “If I Should Fall Behind,” or a politically-charged one that draws a line from “Lost in the Flood” to “Matamoros Banks”). Chapter and Verse takes a relatively safe route, but it’s a beautiful ride: one where everyone in the car feels united and hellbent on making it out alive.


Compared to 1979’s major punk releases, it’s not hard to see why Press Color didn’t make much of a dent in the U.S., UK, or even France. It’s a vivid curio and cool personality splatter rather than a cultural landmark.

Press Color

In 1976, a couple of young French dreamers finagled their way into New York’s punk scene under the auspices of their newly minted magazine, Rock News. Lizzy Mercier Descloux and boyfriend Michel Esteban took full advantage of the Lower East Side’s perpetually open door, scooping ad hoc interviews with the likes of Patti Smith and Television, and became vivid regulars (and Descloux a regular heartbreaker) on the CBGBs circuit. Across the English Channel, they met with the Sex Pistols, and brought stories of nihilists and poets back to France. (France shrugged.) Just a year later, having appeared in Amos Poe and Ivan Kral’s Blank Generation, they had the audacity to declare punk dead, and closed the magazine. Sick of their stuffy city, they moved to New York, and roomed with Smith, Descloux’s Rimbaudian comrade, in a loft propped up by white columns.
As Descloux drifted between simultaneous relationships with Richard Hell and various other artists, she and Esteban split but maintained a close personal and creative bond. She acquired a Fender Jazzmaster, and formed Rosa Yemen with Esteban’s brother, Didier, just around the time of the legendary Artists Space noise series immortalized in Brian Eno’s No New York compilation. Following unhinged gigs at the Kitchen and the Mudd Club where Descloux would scream herself silly and wrap the mic cable around her throat, the duo (named in honor of European activists like Rosa Luxembourg and the Baader-Meinhof group) consecrated their fractious musical relationship in a 12-inch, Live in N.Y.C. July 1978. It became the fifth release on the nascent ZE Records, which Esteban had founded earlier that year with the British writer Michael Zilkha.
On that 12-inch, only "Decryptated" has any significant percussion, which sounds like it was slapped out on an empty bucket. The record is a clash between two guitars, the lead needling with the intensity of a polygraph test administered by a fascist regime, the loose rhythm taking its cues from dub. It’s beginners’ stuff, very much in the vein of Rosa Yemen’s destructive no wave peers, though the atmosphere is consummately terrifying, fraught with the danger of illicit negotiations on dark street corners. "Herpes Simplex" starts with the sound of gasping and frantic footsteps, and then Descloux comes in, yelping about the STI in fractured hysterics. She shudders the word "metabolisme!" like Dracula rising from his coffin.
There are probably dozens, or maybe even hundreds of records like Rosa Yemen Live in N.Y.C.—gripping if unexceptional also-rans that may find an audience as reissue culture has to dig deeper. Light In The Attic has appended these songs to the first in their Lizzy Mercier Descloux reissue series, which focuses on Press Color, the first album under her own name, and one that warrants the marquee billing. In February 1979, as Sid Vicious was being sprinkled on Nancy Spungen’s grave, Descloux, Didier Esteban, Erik Eliasson (from Marie et les Garçons) and Jimmy Young headed into the third room of Bob Blank’s Blank Tapes studio at 37 West 20th Street for 10 days of intense recording. It was still under construction at the time, but then so was Descloux. Where Parisian studios would have scoffed at this bunch of amateurs, Blank welcomed their naïve creative impulses.
Press Color was originally intended to be a group release, but ZE decided that Descloux’s name and face was a better selling point. At the time they were pushing their "mutant disco" aesthetic on their less fully formed artists. Cristina, Zilkha’s wife, had released "Disco Clone", which sent up the interchangeability of women within the scene. Descloux was working within the label’s prescribed sound, but she emerges here as a unique, instinctive voice, abandoning the harrowed yelps of Rosa Yemen to trill and jabber with glee. Uninterested in the conventions of rock, she pursued her guitar playing just the same way.
As a New York newcomer, the failed '60s dream didn’t oppress Descloux in the same way as it did her new peers: she rose early to browse the fish market, swam in Central Park’s Lasker Pool, and scaled rooftops for the views. Her peers and boyfriends recall her as the only person who wore bright colors in a monochromatic scene. And so Press Color is full of joy and possibility rather than psychic pain and bankruptcy, opening with a shimmying cover of Arthur Brown’s "Fire" that moves at the pace of an enervated woodpecker. Descloux’s strong French accent just adds to the charm: "You’ve been so blind! You fall be’ind!" she explodes amidst the glittering whirl.
There are more covers: a skeletal take on Lalo Shifrin’s "Mission Impossible" theme and "Jim on the Move", where Descloux seems to vocalize every twitch of her tongue. A strain of no wave malevolence lingers in "Torso Corso", "Wawa" (whose tumbling bassline deserves to be fully iconic), and the dubbed-out "Aya Mood", which show off the band’s nimble, minimalist interplay. Her shuffling, splayed redux of Peggy Lee’s "Fever" as "Tumor" has an obvious morbid humor, though it’s the original "No Golden Throat" where her disposition and tastes come through most strongly.
By all accounts, Descloux wasn’t into slogging away in the studio, and resisted Michel Esteban’s attempts to get her to sing properly. "Right now I’m not at all a writer of words," she told New York Rocker in the summer of 1980. "I’m using the words completely for what they sound like, how they fit with the rhythms… What’s beautiful is that I don’t speak perfect English but I can get lost in the dictionary and just discover the words." "Golden Throat" is her protest at being asked to fit any idiom: she repeats the line "I’ll never have a golden throat" a dozen different ways, seducing it, mocking it, playing her voicebox like a plastic slide whistle. Phonetic chatter litters the relaxed reggae guitar, prefiguring the direction she would pursue later in her career as she recorded in Nassau and apartheid-era Soweto. She never met the Slits, but they shared a love of reggae and silliness. European avant-garde artists are often self-serious, or considered to be, but Descloux and Ari Up (along with Palmolive and the Raincoats' Ana da Silva) brought a welcome playful streak to what could be an austere scene.
Compared to 1979’s major punk releases, it’s not hard to see why Press Color didn’t make much of a dent in the U.S., UK, or even France. Next to the likes of Fear of Music, Entertainment!, The B-52s, Tom Verlaine, The Raincoats, This Heat, Broken English, Metal Box, London Calling, Cut, and Y, it’s a vivid curio and cool personality splatter rather than a cultural landmark. Descloux would make those later (even if their recognition remains overdue). What Press Color does is distill our collective excitement and unceasing wonder at a scene that’s almost four decades old. New York's no wave and punk’s protagonists were down in the squalor, waging a brutal, draining fight against their city, their country, the commoditization of their sound. As an outsider, Descloux was able to soak up their energy and revolution and use it to fuel the discovery of her own cultural identity and purpose. Press Color isn’t wildly original, but it’s the making of one.


A patchwork of lethargic guitar riffs, dying-bulb synth glow, and generic disco beats, the Virginia band’s newest album feels strangely emotionally detached.

Myself in the Way

With each new album, Turnover have molted skins, shifting their sound in an effort to become more present. They’ve ironed gravelly guitars into silky melodies, supplanting pop-punk with their own softer style, full of saxophone flourishes and rivers of synths. Following the moody escapism of 2015’s Peripheral Vision, 2017’s Good Nature demonstrated a hopeful mentality, excising self-isolation and bad vibes by embracing psych-rock and easygoing grooves. In Turnover’s definition, maturity means aspiring toward level-headed cool. But they might have saged the studio too hard while making Myself in the Way, a patchwork of lethargic guitar riffs, dying-bulb synth glow, and generic disco beats.
The title track offers the album’s guiding philosophy: “Can’t put myself in the way of love again,” Austin Getz proclaims. Is it self-sabotage or fear of commitment that’s standing between him and the deepening relationship he describes as a “puzzle of dreams”? Unfortunately, this earnest line of questioning is watered down further by Tame Impala-lite instrumentation and Getz’s inability to sell his narrator as either determined or even fully willing to leap his emotional barricades. “I think I can do this forever, girl, if you will,” he sings awkwardly in Auto-Tune. A guest appearance from Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, a performer who can deliver corpse-reviving vocals from a mid-air leap, surfaces in the outro almost like an afterthought.
The guest vocalists, particularly Temple of Angels’ Bre Morell’s soulful appearance in “Ain’t Love Heavy,” underline the odd sense of emotional detachment across the rest of the album. “When you’re wrapped around me in your warm embrace/How can I control myself?” Getz chirps on “Pleasures Galore,” his voice again veiled in Auto-Tune. Yet he sounds eerily controlled, like a robot processing romantic pastiche. The lifeless attempt at Nile Rodgers-style guitar and the Muppet-esque synths do not add to his conviction. Love’s rapture is on full display on the lyrics sheet, but throughout Myself in the Way, the chemistry feels lab-sterilized. Whether he’s detailing a partner’s facial expression after a quarrel or the way the floorboards shake during sex, Getz’s delivery is boring and stale.
The album’s most striking moment is also its most bizarre. “Mountains Made of Clouds” is an ode to Sebastopol, California, where Gerz lived for five years before recently moving away. Some lyrics are wistful nods to the region’s natural beauty, while others outline a loose narrative: “Moving as fast as when I was/Spending my time running/From the lawman,” Getz sings. A lava lamp’s worth of wavy synth and viscous electric guitar make the music feel weightless, and by song’s end, the Pink Floyd melancholy fades into birdsong. There’s an intimate echo around Getz’s voice as he sings over raw acoustic strums: “Now my weary eyes/Won’t stop glancing at the door/I can hear the sirens outside.” Stripping the song naked, if for only a few seconds, is the closest Turnover get to making us feel those same emotions, right in the moment with them.


Greg Fox’s second solo album is spiritually ecstatic. The once and future metal drummer finds new clarity in electronic, ambient, and even New Age sounds.

The Gradual Progression

Greg Fox's career—both as a drummer in metal and jazz groups, and as a solo artist—has been leading to this moment. Not just to this album, but to the possibilities it affords him as an artist with unparalleled skill performing on the instrument in the back of the bandstand. Though he does have contributors on his second solo album The Gradual Progression, the sound of the album is Fox's alone. He transcends the idea of the solo percussion album as a limited offering to create something teeming with life and love.
The Gradual Progression comes just a few months after the release of the debut album by Ex Eye, Fox’s proggy quartet, where he more often pummels the drums rather than finding subtle ways to redefine what they can do. Before that, he was the drummer of New York black metal band Liturgy, where he found nirvana by playing impossibly fast and precise. Take a listen to either band—or watch one of the many internet videos of Fox performing drums solo—to truly get a sense of Fox’s chops. His jaw-dropping displays of drum aptitude, especially when used in full force, thrashing out textbook blast beats at hyper-speed, have an undeniable visceral pleasure. But these displays are like watching a slam dunk contest; the moves can awe, but they’re not exactly practical.
To broaden his range and create a world unto himself on The Gradual Progression, Fox has utilized new software called Sensory Percussion, which allows for individual parts of drum heads to have different samples mapped onto them. When he hits, you hear both the drum and an array of programmed sounds. How that translates to the final product is... not totally clear. Is that him alone triggering the sci-fi tinkles on “By Virtue of Emptiness,” or one of his album’s guests? Is the soft jazz saxophone recorded in overdubs or a real life collaboration? It’s better to close your eyes and let the music wash over you than try to figure out how it works. And if you must, good luck: The album’s songs have many layers of sound happening at once, and often not in congress.
For someone with such unbelievable skill, there are few moments on The Gradual Progression where you really feel like you are in the presence of a master. So when he does preen, he makes it count. On “My House of Equalizing Predecessors,” Fox dips in and out of blistering drum rolls and blast beats appropriate for his previous work as a metal musician. But the recording is dampened, so even when he approaches serious levels of shred, the drums are backgrounded behind jabs of keyboard and a wordless bit of chanting. It’s overwhelming but beautiful, like stepping inside a waterfall.
There are only six songs which, overall, can feel interchangeable as they all draw from a similarly spiritual vibe. Sometimes the album sounds like typewriters hammering away, sometimes like a child mindlessly poking a wind chime, but it all pulses with the same energy—the kind that powers the brightest ambient music, the most ecstatic jazz, the most serene New Age. The one exception to this overall serenity is “Catching an L,” which feels like a late ’70s funk cast off with weirdly farty synths and a meandering sax. Unless you’re a slap-bass diehard spending all your time wondering what modern-day Mahavishnu Orchestra B-sides might be like, skip it.
After listening closely to the album on headphones, I finally played it on a stereo one sunny morning. Unconfined, the music bloomed and, moment by moment, my house vibrated. It felt delightful and it felt new. “What else? What new places can we explore?” this record seems to ask. That Fox answers with such grace is what makes it so special.


The Buzzcocks' newly reissued demo Time's Up is an invaluable document of punk snarls and yelps. Likewise, the more polished Spiral* Scratch* was at least as important to punk as the Sex Pistols’ rise.

Time's Up/Spiral Scratch

In 1981, with disco medleys of former pop hits like “Stars on 45” climbing the charts around the world, a cluster of British punk rockers recorded their own medley of old favorites. The Friendly Hopefuls’ Tribute to the Punks of ’76 begins with the standard looped clap track and a slick, professional-sounding chorus singing: “Hey hey/Remember that day/In 1976/When the music scene was boring/Until along came—this!” And the guitar riff from the Buzzcocks’ “Boredom” kicks in.
Spiral Scratch—the four-song debut EP on which “Boredom” appeared—was a revelation. British punk rock was brand new at that point: when Spiral Scratch was released on January 29, 1977, the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” was barely two months old, the Damned, the Vibrators, and the Stranglers had some singles out, and that was it. All those bands were signed to at-least-sort-of-legitimate record labels. Meanwhile, the Buzzcocks scraped together the funds to have 1000 copies of Spiral Scratch pressed themselves, and called their otherwise nonexistent label New Hormones.
The masterminds behind the band at that point—singer/guitarist Howard Devoto and guitarist Pete Shelley—weren’t Londoners like the earliest wave of UK punks. They were from unfashionable Manchester, a couple of hours’ train ride north. In the fall of 1975, Devoto and Shelley read about the Sex Pistols, traveled down to London to see them, and came back inspired to start a band of their own. The Buzzcocks’ first complete set was opening for the second of two legendary Pistols shows in Manchester during the summer of 1976.
Time’s Up—initially a bootleg in 1978, and officially released in 1991—is an invaluable document. It's the demo Buzzcocks recorded on October 18, 1976—all snarls, yelps, and distortion, while also sounding entirely joyful. They revel in rock bands’ newly-won right to present themselves as mean and aggressive and to say "fuck" out loud. Devoto sings as if Johnny Rotten is the only other vocalist he’s ever heard, and always seems about to break into giggles. “You tear me up, you bloody swine!” he yells with adenoidal delight. “Orgasm Addict,” which they’d re-record as a single a year later, isn’t quite fully formed yet, but Devoto’s rhymes about stained jeans, as well as his whining gasps, were genuinely transgressive for their moment.
The band is still finding its feet on Time’s Up, especially as teenage drummer John Maher slowed down the tempo every time he attempted to play a fill. Still, they worked out how to vigorously shove their songs forward. The two covers that were part of their live set at the time revealed a bit about where Buzzcocks were coming from: A sped-up version of the Troggs’ “I Can’t Control Myself” anticipates the love of popcraft that would shortly surface in their own songs and a heavily rewritten take on Captain Beefheart’s “I Love You, You Big Dummy” (which Devoto would take with him to his subsequent band Magazine) hints at the odder, artier side of their later records.
Two months after the Time’s Up demos, they re-recorded four of those songs with producer Martin Hannett as Spiral Scratch. A few more weeks of practice had done wonders for the Buzzcocks’ sound: now they were fast, strong and acrobatically tight. They powered through “Breakdown” in two minutes flat and started to sound more like themselves than like the Pistols or the Ramones. In fact, the Ramones would ape the two-note guitar solo gag in “Boredom” for their own on “I Wanna Be Sedated.”
The great joke of Devoto’s performance here is that, on the first record by a new band at the vanguard of a new musical movement, he presents himself as utterly over everything—including punk in general. “I’m already a has-been,” he sneers. “You know the scene is—very humdrum!” He wasn't kidding because less than a week after Spiral Scratch’s release, Devoto quit the Buzzcocks, and Shelley took his place as the band’s frontman.
By the time they stopped re-pressing the EP in the summer of 1977, Buzzcocks had sold 16,000 copies of it. In its way, Spiral Scratch was at least as important to punk as the Sex Pistols’ rise, because it was the first record of its kind to erase the axioms that the art and business of pop music were necessarily separate, and that a band could never be important until it signed to a “real” record label. Buzzcocks said fuck it and decided to just do it themselves.


The Toronto quartet writes lilting, throwback jangle-pop for the isolated and the underemployed.

Get Bleak EP

On their debut EP, Get Bleak, Toronto jangle-pop band Ducks Unlimited write from a particular social stratum where everyone is in their twenties and nobody’s got their shit together. The very structure of life in this sphere is temporary. Folks searching for a change of scenery pack up their belongings and move apartments in much the way one might color their hair or obtain a regrettable tattoo. Everyone’s sleeping on a stiff, cheap IKEA mattress; nobody bothers to spring for a bed frame. None of your forks and knives match. You never see your friends anymore because they’ve moved to Hamilton or Perth.
If all this sounds depressing, rest assured, it is. Thankfully, Get Bleak doesn’t wallow in the grind. Instead, Ducks Unlimited put their malaise beneath a microscope and tease out little things to laugh about. They never sound especially bleak, either. In less capable hands, the effort to bring the bouncy aesthetic of bands like the Field Mice and Blueboy into the 21st century could have been twee and derivative, but these songs manage to sound modern.
“Get Bleak,” the EP’s opening track and its strongest song, is a tale of self-inflicted millennial isolation—“You’ll spend the afternoon deleting every number in your phone/Then you’ll spend the evening wondering why you’ll spend the night alone”—related in robust iambic pentameter. Ducks Unlimited sing in complete paragraphs with complex internal rhyme and assonance, elevating the petty struggles of ghosting and FOMO into poetic subjects. The strings in the mix are a compositional trick straight out of Blueboy’s “So Catch Him,” and evoke the same kind of quiet, lasting intimacy.
“Gleaming Spires” nods to both the ’80s pop group and the high-rise condos that have colonized downtown Toronto in recent years. It’s a double-edged appeal to nostalgia, for the upbeat music of childhood and for a version of the city where the architecture wasn’t quite so hostile. Little wonder that life in the city becomes increasingly joyless as rents rise. Still, there remains something vital and irresistible between the skyscrapers. In “Annie Forever,” the singer stays the night at a girl’s place and feels “like the colors were off”; it’s because, she tells him, “there were no city lights.” The EP’s only love song can’t help but chuckle at its own boundless optimism: “Annie forever/It’s so stupid, girl.”
Closer “Anhedonia” is the record’s lead single and its gloomiest moment. Mired in a young adulthood rife with resentment and dissociation, these songwriters aren’t searching for a way out as much as they’re looking for companionship. Like another Toronto band, PUP, Ducks Unlimited understand that dancing through misery is healthier than dancing around it. Their brand of lilting, throwback jangle-pop makes that seem like the easiest thing in the world to do.


The California experimental indie pop quartet the Velvet Teen never quite fit into any trend or local scene. Featuring the urgent, kinetic, and unpredictable drumming of Casey Deitz and a refined vocal approach by Judah Nagler, their first LP in nine years finds them establishing a new identity.

All Is Illusory

Though All Is Illusory is the Velvet Teen’s first LP in nine years and is being released on a trendsetting label, I’m not sure it could be accurately called "highly anticipated." The California quartet released a few solid records of experimental, mid-aughts indie pop that were easy to overlook because they never quite fit into any sort of trend or local scene. In fact, their biggest moment since 2006 was probably accidental: they may have been momentarily confused with the German band Velveteen, who generated a brief period of notoriety in 2008 by disguising their own album as a "leaked" advance copy of Death Cab For Cutie’s Narrow Stairs (the Velvet Teen’s debut Out of the Fierce Parade was produced by former Death Cab guitarist Chris Walla). But the lack of expectations actually can benefit All Is Illusory by allowing Velvet Teen to establish a new identity. Topshelf has relaunched the careers of certified emo O.G.s Braid and the Jazz June and introduced them to younger fans drawn in by the leaders of the new school. Does this mean the Velvet Teen have been grandfathered into the genre?
All Is Illusory suggests they have, but in an unexpected way—it might be the only record to ever fit into emo based solely on its drums. The Velvet Teen became a much more interesting band with the addition of Casey Deitz in 2006 and he’s been allowed the opportunity to serve as a de facto voice in addition to Judah Nagler. Deitz applies the spectacular technique of speed metal to everything you could learn from listening to Jawbox, Braid, the Promise Ring, and American Football records just for the rhythm sections—channeling the urgent, kinetic and unpredictable physicality that distinguished these bands from the more staid and slack "college rock" of the mid-to-late '90s.
To clarify, Nagler has proven quite adept at the spirited, unhinged singing of this style, though it appears he may have taking a few vocal lessons since the Velvet Teen's quietly released 2010 EP No Star. He’s still as much of a belter as he was on Cum Laude!, only now he removes the distorted mic filters and projects into Buckley-esque ululations, dusky mutters and, on "The Manifest", a vocoder. Taken out of context, Nagler now sounds like he could’ve fronted one of those "next Radiohead" Brit-rock bands that cropped up at the turn of the century. As it turns out, his unorthodox, Yorke-ish means of enunciation and pronunciation also tends to wad up lyrics which might actually be better off being misunderstood. Lean into what Nagler’s actually saying and finicky, self-impressed bon mots cut against the plaintive narrator: "Oh, finally a taste/ Words fall from my ellipses," "If you can take my chaos, baby/  I’ll map your terrain." That said, "I was made from dust/ Call me Macgyver," makes me think he appreciates Dipset deep cuts.
But this is Dietz’s album, and the emotional status of All Is Illusory is best demonstrated by actions rather than words. Deitz underlines the instability and wanderlust evoked by "Sonreo", as tricky fills and pivots allow him to keep pace with a player piano having a nervous breakdown. Erratic bursts of double time and pounded open hi-hats express the romantic hopelessness on "Eclipses", while the impulsive "You Were the First" is power pop played like a noise duo—it could pass for Vampire Weekend being covered by Lightning Bolt or vice versa. Either way, I'm not sure I've heard anything quite like it.
Otherwise, I can say I have heard All Is Illusory before and you likely have as well if you lived through the mid-2000s and owned a record or two released on Barsuk. "Pecos" and "Sonreo" take after Menomena’s idea of pop collage, big, whirling synth loops, cut-and-paste production, and chunky percussion that focus on the band’s process rather than persona. But All Is Illusory is too reliant on Deitz’s involvement, and it slumps whenever he has to play a supporting role rather than the lead. Oddly enough, this doesn’t occur during the nearly 11 minutes taken up by "Taken Over", where the insistent, patience-testing repetition of its doleful melody is the entire point. Instead, "The Giving In" and "Church or State" are typical "atmospheric" mid-album padding, Deitz assigned to swaying waltz time and staid rattle and hum while backing pealing, gleaming Edge guitars. For all of their upgraded production, instrumental technique, and influences, All Is Illusory sounds like a record that primes the Velvet Teen to succeed around the time Cum Laude! was released—but making the best "2006 indie rock" record of 2015 makes them stand out in a way that they hadn’t managed yet.