Across five breezy, feel-good songs, the rising Afropop star continues to explore the overlap between the sounds of Ghana and those of his native Nigeria.

Something Else EP

Mr Eazi knows good beats. Whether it’s a 14-song compilation or, in this case, a five-track appetizer, chances are high that he will deliver something listeners will want to blast on speakers during an outdoor summer party in Lagos (now socially distanced, of course). Since his 2013 debut mixtape, About to Blow, Mr Eazi has consistently explored the space between the musical innovations of Ghana and those of his native Nigeria, pulling rhythms that underline the musical kinship between the two West African giants.
Something Else is a fast-moving but intriguing return after a year spent expanding his label/culture center emPawa Africa, an incubator for African artists to develop, discover, and share new ways of creating music. Coming in at just a little over 12 minutes, it is more experimental than previous releases, detailing old truths and new exploits over classical melodies, while still loyal to its banku/Afropop roots. “E Be Mad,” “Love for You,” and “Cherry” are familiar offerings from the artist who gave us the über-chill “Pour Me Water” and the more vocally agile “Skintight.” Mr Eazi doesn’t wander too far from home as he reminds listeners why they’ve continued to show up for Eazi hits. They make you feel good and, for the music history buffs, they reliably present a new understanding of contemporary interpretations of both highlife and banku. On “Cherry,” his voice moves from a saccharine hook to thinly veiled declarations of sexual pleasure. Kenyan-born Xenia Manasseh adds a pleasant R&B flow to the track in the vein of Tinashe or Summer Walker. Their voices bounce easily off each other, and lend balance to the desires of both sexes.
Eazi is at his boldest and most brazen on fiery opener “The Don,” whose sleek, finely tuned beats lean into dancehall. Channeling the work ethic and finesse of Francis Ford Coppola’s first Don, Vito Corleone, Eazi is brash and ambitious, retelling the twists and turns that come with maneuvering through fame’s glare while working to leave a legacy that’s about more than just music. It’s an electric beginning, enough to make you forget the hollow “Saudi Arabia,” which invokes stereotypes of Middle Eastern opulence to explain how he plans to pamper his lover. Beyond its empty invocation of Arabian Nights-type fantasies, the song lands with a discomfiting thud when you think about the insidious and rampant anti-Blackness in Saudi Arabia, where North African immigrant workers suffer in “hellish” conditions. Geopolitical realities are tough to squeeze into a two-minute song, but it’s hard to think of anything else when the song’s central metaphor invokes a place that is unwelcome to so many.
Something Else has room for the past and future. Mr. Eazi is prescient in his mission to innovate local melodies and tones. While Western influences such as R&B and hip-hop continue to dominate global sounds, he continues to advocate for African rhythms as equal conduits of expression with the range to emote, guide, narrate, and build. Refusing to allow banku and highlife to be fossilized, he reimagines them as vehicles for transformative potential: the old ways paving a path to the new age.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the calm before the storm, a long-out-of-print album from Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks before they joined Fleetwood Mac.

Buckingham Nicks

There they are on the cover, in a black-and-white photograph: young and naked and impossibly beautiful, two people whose early work, in the popular imagination, was viewed almost exclusively through the prism of their mutual desire. We came to know Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks through music that, we were told, cataloged their conflict and heartbreak; here, on this sleeve, they are one, practically a single being.
By the time that Buckingham Nicks came out in September 1973, Lindsey and Stevie had been making music in bands and as a duo for five years, and had known each other for longer. They first sang together in 1966, when they both attended Menlo-Atherton High School in Palo Alto, at a church function for aspiring musicians. He banged out the chords to “California Dreaming” on piano, a current hit by the Mamas and the Papas, and she joined him on harmony. Two years later, Lindsey invited Stevie to join a band called Fritz with two of his boyhood friends. She was fronting the group by the summer of 1968.
Nicks was 19, and her heroes included Janis Joplin and Grace Slick; Buckingham was 18, a Beatles nut who also had an ear for folk music, particularly the Kingston Trio. Fritz was a catch-all of the various styles in the Bay Area at the time—some organ-backed garage rock, a bit of psychedelia that bled into cosmic blues.
You can listen to some of their music online, including a cover of “Born to Be Wild” and a studio session of one of the group’s original songs, “Take Advantage of Me.” Even this early, Nicks has one of the most immediately identifiable voices in rock, low and deep, like it’s bubbling up from her unconscious. She can sound vulnerable but rarely fragile, and when she’s singing something upbeat, as she does here, she sounds commanding.
Fritz scored some big opening gigs—Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana—and they had enough buzz by 1971 that Keith Olsen, a young record producer from Los Angeles who worked out of a dumpy studio called Sound City, flew up to see them. Olsen wasn’t particularly impressed with the band, but he liked Lindsey and Stevie and offered to work with them as a duo. That was the end of Fritz, and the start of Buckingham Nicks.
The pair spent the first few months working on their own, making demos on a four-track reel-to-reel in a spare room at the coffee plant in Daly City owned by Buckingham’s father. Every night, after the workers left, the two would gather with their instruments to write and record. Buckingham became obsessed with the possibilities of recording, experimenting with how sounds were layered and mixed. Nicks had a feel for the shape of melodies and an ear for words that drew from her interest in mysticism but also seemed applicable to everyday life. By the time they made their way down to Los Angeles to work with Olsen in 1972, they had a seven-song demo.
Olsen dubbed the tape and circulated it, but there were no takers, so they continued to hone their material, often at Sound City, where Olsen gave them free studio time. Nicks was the breadwinner—she cleaned Olsen’s house, waited tables at the Copper Penny, and hostessed at Big Boy while Buckingham smoked enormous amounts of hash in their apartment, working through musical ideas. They fought, and Lindsey could be verbally abusive, but they stayed focused. After about a year of this, Olsen finally secured them a deal, and Buckingham Nicks made its way into the world.
James Taylor and Carole King were stars, Joni Mitchell was a critic’s favorite, and Buckingham adored Cat Stevens: This was the context in which Buckingham Nicks operated. Loosely, it was folk-rock, but they brought a primal energy to it that would inform their later work. Listening now, you get the uncanny feeling you’re hearing vintage Fleetwood Mac hits that you just somehow forgot about. Nicks’ “Crying in the Night,” about a woman in a relationship who has a wandering eye, stands alongside her best Fleetwood Mac contributions. Her “Long Distance Winner” is also Mac-like, while Buckingham renders finger-picked guitar as if it were three-chord garage rock.
Buckingham’s finest songs point to his later triumphs. His voice strains in its higher register on the chorus of “Without a Leg to Stand On,” while the tune itself feels effortless, as if built by machine. This tension between methodical craft and drunk-on-music abandon would become his signature. To that end, “Don’t Let Me Down Again” sounds like a dry run of Rumours’ opener “Second Hand News.”
This pair was famous for writing angry music about each other, but Lindsey titled “Stephanie” after Stevie’s birth name, and said everything he wanted to say through his guitar. The delicate piece glimmers like a rose window and offers a microcosm of Buckingham’s painstaking approach to composition. In the last decade, Buckingham has taken to playing it in concert.
The gentle ballad “Crystal,” written by Stevie but sung by Lindsey, would get another life when it was carried over to Fleetwood Mac, and remains a moving example of how their voices blended together. Their harmonies embodied multiplicity: one voice conveying acceptance, the other wondering about what else might be out there. Each could play either role. Lindsey is the steadying force on “Crystal,” outlining the shape of Nicks’ song as she colors outside of it. Christine McVie’s keyboards would give it an extra twist of feeling on the more famous version, but everything the song needs is found here.
There was a lot of competition in the singer-songwriter field in 1973, and Buckingham Nicks wasn’t the best of the lot, but it’s excellent, and it’s still puzzling how swiftly it vanished. It’s packed with top-flight session musicians—Waddy Wachtel on guitar, Jim Keltner on drums—and was recorded by Olsen, a producer with dozens of gold and platinum records ahead of him, but it was a complete failure. Promotion was light, the few reviews were mostly bad, and Polydor dropped the duo a few months after the album came out. After a five-year build-up, the moment was over as quickly as it started.
But Stevie and Lindsey were writing for their next album even before this one was finished. Lindsey had penned “Monday Morning,” and Nicks, inspired by a passage in a book about a Welsh witch, had a stunning new song called “Rhiannon.” There was another ballad called “Landslide.” They weren’t ready to give up on Buckingham Nicks, which made the next decision difficult.
In December 1974, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac received news that his guitarist, Bob Welch, was quitting the band. Line-up changes were nothing new—in their seven-year history, they’d already been through several—but Fleetwood’s band was due back in the studio soon. He’d heard Lindsey play once, and Keith Olsen, with whom he was friendly, mentioned his name. It didn’t take long before he offered Buckingham the job. Lindsey was reticent, afraid of giving up what he and Stevie had built together. He said that Nicks would have to be part of the deal. After having dinner with the members of Fleetwood Mac in January 1975, they both agreed to join.
After this, things would get both easier and harder. Everything about Fleetwood Mac would be soap operatic—grand pianos carted into luxury suites while on tour, a road manager with onstage cocaine at the ready, intra-band couplings and breakups that kept the group on the edge of dissolution, even while they were selling millions of records. But here it was just the two of them, years deep into their dream of a life in music, writing songs that mattered to them and that they dared to hope might matter to someone else.


The expressive voice of Natasha Khan struggles to elevate this Brighton band's dramatic and goth-tinged debut above Ren Faire silliness.

Fur & Gold

Think "bat" as in both the flirty verb and the gothy noun. Fur & Gold is often a dark and atmospheric record, but it remains playful and self-aware enough to pull back every time it inches towards self-parody. Largely structured around the vocals of the Pakistani-born Brit Natasha Khan, Fur & Gold shows a band quite good at giving their songs room to breathe and evolve, allowing the songs to expand out before snapping back into focus on Khan's expressive voice.
Opener "Horse and I" skirts Renaissance Faire silliness, but proves musically intriguing enough to push past any hokey aesthetic choices. Yes, Khan can come off as a bit dramatic, but her best songs fit the part. "Trophy" is perhaps the album's finest track, plodding along elegantly like a darker and slicker Lavender Diamond. "Tahiti" is the sonic standout, but suffers from some jarringly awkward phrasing in its chorus. "Sad Eyes" never quite fulfills the emotional potential generated by Khan's voice and some sparse piano chords, and it also illustrates a wider point: Uncomplicated and vaguely mystical lyrics generally make sense here, but Khan occasionally sings like she's not really sure what she's saying. An unexpected "Come and spend the night" halfway through "Sad Eyes" might as well be "I'd like a burrito."
Many of the album's biggest disappointments come simply because the band's potential is so palpable, especially during more restrained and focused moments. But as strong as Fur & Gold's individual tracks can be, the record as a whole is frustratingly dilute. While Khan has a real talent for edging towards emotional extremes, she seems to get lost in atmosphere. And ultimately, Fur & Gold sounds a little bit too comfortable for its own good. Khan is a great singer, and her band is undoubtedly competent and capable, but the record sounds like it wants to be more than it is. Khan stops just short of the boldness that can make this kind of record great-- imagine Björk wearing a fur coat rather than a dead swan or Siouxsie Sioux wearing a peasant dress rather than a Nazi uniform. Bat For Lashes dip their feet in some difficult waters, but often seem too preoccupied with their reflection to jump in.


In the ’80s underground, the Pacific Northwest artist Kerry Leimer never fit into any one category or scene. His soundtrack for the 1982 documentary Land of Look Behind could be called ambient reggae.

Land of Look Behind

Three years ago, RVNG Intl.’s loving survey of Pacific Northwest musician Kerry Leimer revealed a contemplative player in the American late 70s/early 1980s underground who didn’t quite slot into any one category or scene. He wasn’t really a punk, though he took a decidedly unlearned approach to music-making. And despite delving into synthesizers and ambient soundscapes, Leimer didn’t really turn himself into a new age cottage industry. He even made twitchy, drum-heavy tracks as Savant, but he wouldn’t quite be considered a dance music producer either. In retrospect, Leimer seemed mostly like a one-man iteration of American kosmische music.
A sense of detachment from genres and scenes comes up again on this reissue of Leimer’s long out-of-print soundtrack for Alan Greenberg’s 1982 documentary, Land of Look Behind. Not readily available on streaming sites, the film is one to track down. It remains one of the most fascinating looks at the Rastafarian culture that begat Jamaican music, its eye trained on both the dense, tangled “bad land” of Cockpit Country as well as Kingston in the wake of Bob Marley’s funeral. And while plenty of Jamaican music fills the film, Leimer’s contribution to the score expertly hovers between the island’s ritualistic nyabinghi drumming and futuristic analog synthesizers. It’s a soundtrack for a film that at times seems like a vague remembrance of a film itself, disassociating certain elements from the celluloid and imagining them in strange new ways.
Call it ambient reggae—even if it’s too fidgety to fully settle into either of those sounds. When the nyabinghi drums crop up, they’re often background sounds rather than immediate thunder, adding just a subtle pulse to the sublime shimmer of “The Outpost.” And when the drum circles move to the fore—as on centerpiece “The Cockpit”—Leimer makes the ambient washes more ethereal, recalling some of Steve Roach’s work with percussionists from the ’80s. On “Confusion in Belief,” sunburst synths entwine with tribal drums from the film, mixing with Leimer’s keys and a battery of percussionists: Steve Fisk, Kevin Hodges, David and James Keller. At times, the sound anticipates Boards of Canada, with chunky drums, drifting chords, and voices swirling about, just at the verge intelligibility.
It’s rare to have vocals emerge in Leimer’s work, so his way with looping, tweaking, and layering voices from the film into rhythmic counterpoint fascinates. Chant, casual chatter, an overheard conversation—they all get minced into sound. A location recording of a crowd clamors in the distance on the post-punk landscape of “Gun Court.” Leimer then samples a Jamaican voice discussing the bush and contorts it into all sorts of patterns on “Testimony and Honor.” He chops up that distinct patois and adds an array of handclaps, bird sounds, tapped hi-hats, and rewound tape atop it.
Three bonus tracks are tacked onto this reissue, though Leimer didn’t finish them until many years later. Outside of an extended version of “The Cockpit,” they don’t grapple with the coarse elements of Jamaica; Leimer instead emphasizes the piano and other acoustic sounds in his studio. In a decade that would see numerous artists engage in ethnic music and modern composition, from the likes of Jon Hassell to the Made to Measure series, the eight tracks of the original soundtrack remain unmatched in the decade. By turns raw and elegant, rhythmic and unearthly, Leimer’s music evokes and retains the mystery of Jamaica itself.


The Berlin-based artist pays tribute to her native Lima, Peru in bittersweet house music that wears its spiritual yearning on its sleeve.

Fresia Magdalena EP

Sometimes, particularly these days, those in search of grace find they must create it themselves. In the Callao district of Lima, Peru, for instance, crowds of outcasts including transgender individuals and people surviving homelessness and poverty gather to worship a DIY saint at a concrete-block shrine. Sarita Colonia was a devout domestic in the 1930s who cared tirelessly for her troubled family and then died at 26, her body tossed in an anonymous mass grave. Since then, Colonia has become a cult figure for people in Lima who deserve the mercy their Catholic church denies them, just as it denies Colonia a sanctioned sainthood. Miracles persist: A drag queen told the L.A. Times that Colonia saved him from murderous homophobes, bending the bullets around him Matrix-style. Over the decades, the shrine has become a party, a kind of rave for the faithful who can’t get past the Catholic church’s velvet ropes.
Colonia has appeared on the cover of each release by Lima-born, Berlin-based Sofia Kourtesis; her visage hovers in the clouds or emerges through thick coats of paint on the producer’s two excellent 2019 EPs for Stockholm’s reliable bliss experts Studio Barnhus, as if 12" sleeves could be Shrouds of Turin for a new kind of savior. Kourtesis titled the first one after herself and the second for the should-be-saint. She’s there on the cover of Kourtesis’s new EP, whose design by Sofia Lucarelli joins illustrations of plants and photos of the Callao cemetery as if to emphasize the nature of life and death. The music within throws its hands in the air as prayers to house deities like Moodymann, whose powers of anticipation and release are echoed in Kourtesis’ extended sighs; DJ Koze, the Loki of post-Balearic tricky disco, whose style is here rendered a bit more low-key and beatific; and fellow bell-ringer evangelicals Pantha du Prince and Four Tet, schooled in the holy trinity of crown, sound bow, and clapper. But Kourtesis has a sound of her own: unfailingly warm, thoughtful in form, risking a certain conservatism for the sake of welcome comfort. Like the shrines to Colonia, Kourtesis’ beats reward belief.
“Fresia Magdalena” expands the pantheon of those Kourtesis finds venerable, including her mother, Fresia, and the people of Magdalena del Mar, the district of Lima where, as a teenager, she surfed the waves and got banished from convent school. Opener “La Perla” puts its faith in ripples of synths and briny percussion, breaking around foamy bits of field recordings and her own vocals; it’s an aching tribute to afternoons spent staring at the sea and trying to make peace with her father’s death. His voice intermingles with samples of disco diva riffing and other, younger voices on “Nicolas,” which takes the pleasure principles of French-touch house à la Roulé and builds a casa de playa beneath an ocean of stars. “By Your Side” is a bit more ooh-la-la, decked out in samples of snazzy horn sections and someone tickling ivories that will tickle the fancy of party people whenever the parties resume.
“Juntos” swings like prime-era Herbert, but its vibe is more morning-after than afterparty, closer to her current Berlin than the Peru of her past. A melancholy violin cuts through the gloom, a crisp beat fidgets, a bit of melody jumps an octave, variously an earworm and alarm. The track embodies doubt but won’t mope; it peers into the vastness of what’s just below sadness and turns away, both clear-eyed and teary. And then arrives “Dakotas,” shimmering and dawn-y, tranced like Octo Octa and Eris Drew have been lately but with shakers and open hi-hats serving as the Amen. Pads, deep and wide in the mix, offer softness. Voices form choruses; some say “hi.” (Or, ahem, “high.”) It’s a modest kind of heartfelt anthem. If you need it, it’s a miracle.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Necks’ 20th album is as laser-focused on repetition as ever. But for the first time, the trio indulges its rock’n’roll instincts, resulting in one of the most powerful albums in the band’s catalog.

Body

Spoiler alerts do not apply to the Necks. For nearly three decades, the instrumental Australian trio has often followed a deceptively simple formula, both in the studio and on stage: Begin in miniature, with discrete thoughts stated patiently with grand piano, upright bass, and spare drums. Over the course of an hour or so, ratchet up the intensity and density of those phrases, expanding and interlocking them until they suggest much more than those primitive elements—perhaps a symphony, sustaining a crescendo as if holding a collective breath, or a large free-jazz ensemble, locked inside an unexpected moment of improvisational communion. There are, of course, exceptions. Sometimes they update their palette, adding a guitar here, an organ there; sometimes they invert the mold, so a monolithic sound breaks down rather than building up. But listening to the best of the Necks’ 20 albums can feel like watching a favorite movie for the 10th time; you get the plot and have even memorized some of its tricks, but changes in your own perspective let you see it anew, to discover a new thread inside a pattern you thought you knew.
That said, spoiler alert: Almost halfway into Body, the trio’s engrossing and overwhelming 20th album, the Necks shoot from a slumber of pensive bass and piano into a clanging post-rock eruption, where walloped drums swing hard and heavy beneath pounded keys and shrieking electric guitar that washes everything in vivid neon streaks. The first time you hear it, you may jolt upright with surprise, as if a boogeyman has suddenly appeared from around a corner in that movie you thought you knew so well. But this is not a blip. For a quarter-hour, the Necks grind away at this theme, rending a basic rock’n’roll riff and rhythm into utter dust.
Tony Buck, who tortures his drums and tames the electric guitar here, is the anchor and the aggressor. But it’s Chris Abrahams, ducking behind the cover of Buck and bassist Lloyd Swanton, who dances inside the din with boogie-woogie piano lines. Like funhouse mirrors, his harmonies reflect and reshape foundational rock chords, offering flickers of light from inside the storm. The unexpected stretch matches the delirious heights of the reborn version of Swans, when Michael Gira’s big band would lash out at a melody for half an hour, or the dizzying swirl of Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio, where one chord played over and over against a swinging beat somehow produces a trance. This is ecstatic music, as engrossing and powerful as anything the Necks have ever made.
The middle of Body is so jarring and thrilling it runs the risk of overshadowing the rest of the album. Divided into four unequal movements, though, these 57 minutes include some of the Necks’ most delicate and considered playing this decade, and especially since their 2013 opus, Open. The first section is a classic Necks incantation—infinite piano glissandi scaling the sides of kinetic percussion and bulbous bass thuds. It conveys a restless and anxious feeling, the equivalent of watching a lab rat scurry inside some booby-trapped labyrinth. At one point, Buck divides the beat by shuffling brushes or perhaps a chain over his snare drum, evoking a snake’s threatening hiss.
In the brief second section, the Necks linger inside a quiet world of organ whirrs, repetitive piano chords and bass tones, and sweeps of acoustic guitar. It is ominously still, setting up the sense that something cataclysmic is going to happen, that something has got to give. The eruption that follows—those 15 minutes when the Necks become a glorious post-rock band—is an escape valve for pressure that has nowhere else to go. It cannot last, either. The Necks allow it to collapse into a reverie of bowed bass, chiming bells, granulated piano, and crackling electronics. The drums occasionally flare up into aftershocks, but the end is mostly about surveying the damage, like waking up after a party or emerging after a tornado and deciding what’s next. As it fades into a distended hum, Body offers no clues or answers—only a little light for you to see what remains.
The Necks’ iterative framework has always allowed for individual interpretation. Decorated only with minimalist art or august landscapes, their records have been like expressionist paintings, meticulously constructed but emotionally conducive to the user’s own narrative and meaning. That applies to Body, sure, but something feels different here—ominous, urgent, melancholy. All this action builds only to fall apart, leaving us in a void of silence. For a trio that has reveled in building its own little worlds for three decades, Body feels newly reflective of our space and time, a stark and jarring statement about the precipice of modern life. This is as high as the Necks have ever taken us and, as such, as low as they’ve ever left us. This time, it’s hard to listen to the Necks and hear anything but our world, sounded back.


The long-awaited debut from the Los Angeles rapper cashes in on its promise. It’s the most gripping record in his catalog.

Victory Lap

It’s taken Los Angeles MC Nipsey Hussle longer than most to create his moment. The seasoned mixtape veteran has been on the indie-rap circuit for almost a decade and was once touted as a future star. When fame didn’t come, he made his own seat at the table, infamously selling copies of his Crenshaw tape for $100 each and getting JAY-Z to endorse him and buy 100 of them. He parlayed his rap successes into local business ventures—including a hair shop and a “smart store” for his clothing line—and became a hometown hero who turned his talent into a small merchandising empire. Victory Lap, his first album on a multi-project deal with Atlantic Records, is more than six years in the making. It is formally his “debut album” but functionally his big cash in. Bridging several generations of West Coast rap, Victory Lap uses his cache of war stories to power the most gripping entry in his catalog, recouping an investment.
His raps are still riddled with flashbacks to gangland survivalism, but he’s focused on his pivot to legitimacy, how he flipped Cripping on Crenshaw into a lucrative indie-rap career and then flipped that into an entrepreneurial enterprise. Black capitalism is foremost on his mind these days; he wants to build up his community and get others to follow, advocating for the grooming of more strong black men. But Nipsey’s ambitions can be more problematic than they seem on the surface: He has used his enthusiasm can to fuel homophobia, denigrating many of the men he claims to want to empower. There are nuggets to take aways from his lectures, but the primary lesson to be learned here is just how ingrained “toughness” is in representations of manhood.
As statements go, Victory Lap is more of a remembrance than a celebration. From digging up $100,000 his brother buried in his mother’s backyard for safekeeping only to discover half the money had molded to fighting off surprise challengers trying to steal jewelry from his entourage in Vegas, the album painstakingly documents the life of a reformed bruiser turned hood economist. Self-taught and self-funded, Nipsey fought to escape the cycle of an existence measured only in summers—time spent as “the man” on the block or serving sentences in the pen. He has been chasing sustainability since he was a teenager, and now that he has it, he’s appreciative, relieved even. He doesn’t just bask in his moment, though, he challenges others to pursue the same goals, as on “Million While You Young,” which equates money with salvation (“I can tell you niggas how I came up/Similar to climbin’ out the grave, huh”).
His flow is effortless, letting off stream-of-consciousness musings on death and loss that carry anxiety and paranoia within: “All my partners steady passin’, tryna wiggle through this madness/Tryna fight this gravity at times and I swear I could feel it pull me backwards/Puttin’ thousands on they caskets, tryna pick the right reactions/I appreciate the process, but I’m so conflicted about the status,” he raps on “Status Symbol 3.” Ghosts of lost friends and loved ones haunt his raps, the echoes of shots fired long ago still ring in his ears, and his verses are full of close calls. There are subtle tensions within even his most gaudy tales, as no win has come without consequence or sacrifice. But his raps aren’t just a mark of persistence, they are a push to improve—both his state of mind and quality of life.
Nipsey’s rhymes are designed to string out little observations until they form a big idea. They aren’t instantly quotable, but they slowly unspool to reveal kernels of fortune-cookie wisdom. “This ain’t entertainment, it’s for niggas on the slave ship/These songs just the spirituals I swam against them waves with,” he raps on “Dedication.” The remarks don’t always connect or make sense in sequence but they can create powerful impressions. He stays on-message almost the entire record, promoting the expansion of black wealth. On “Last Time That I Checc’d,” which is in part an homage to Jeezy, he salutes hustlers in the streets trying to feed their kids and single moms struggling to make ends meet. But he calls for more “black owners” and presents himself as the template.
Debuts are usually albums of firsts, but Victory Lap is full of sequels and standards. When it isn’t heavily indebted to his West Coast forebears Snoop Dogg, Ice-T, and Dj Quik, or literally adding a follow-up in a song series—“Blue Laces 2,” “Keyz 2 the City 2”—it is returning to Nipsey’s well for hard-nosed bully rap. The hour-long album honors all the work he’s put in and looks back at all he’s achieved, but it also looks forward to all he has yet to build and all those he can still inspire. His tactics can be tone-deaf and without nuance, but he knows exactly who he’s speaking to and for.


The debut solo album from the Big Thief guitarist has a quiet and mischevious spirit, with a focus put on his nimble playing and Texas twang.

Buck Meek

Buck Meek may not be a household name, but as a guitarist for Big Thief, he’s been a chief architect of several dazzling songs. His instrumental skills lie not in writing instant earworms or arena-rattling riffs; rather, his playing galvanizes the emotional impact of Big Thief frontwoman Adrianne Lenker’s words.
On his self-titled solo debut, however, Meek delivers limber, springy songs that prioritize his songwriting and a more laid-back approach to the guitar. Before Big Thief got off the ground, he and Lenker worked together on sparse, guitar-driven tunes that they released under their own names. Meek’s new material hews closer to those proto-Big Thief songs—they share the same loose-limbed affability and a gentle spirit that evades frailty.
But at its core, Buck Meek feels like a country record, and not just because Meek’s native Texan twang stands at the forefront of every tune. The album has a mischievous spirit like the celebrated self-titled LP from cult-hit country star Willis Alan Ramsey. With its lightly teasing chorus and Meek’s goading delivery, “Ruby” in particular feels like the grandchild of Ramsey’s saucy “Northeast Texas Women.” “Joe by the Book” is a straightforward appreciation of an honest mechanic, while closing number “Fool Me” is a woozy whirl that feels tailor-made for last-call, abetted by wobbly honky-tonk piano and touches of pedal steel reverberating in the background. The song reels like a liquor-fueled lament, with Meek singing, “Every time and time again/I’m the loser in the end.” Employing a favored narrative tool of country balladeers, Meek wryly twists the song as it ends: “Fool me with your tears any time,” he sings in its final moments.
Meek’s songs are at their strongest when just amble from beginning to end. His prickly guitar riffs on “Sue” make it sound as though he could barely be bothered to finish bringing them to fruition. But he’s too good of a guitarist for such a move to be actual laziness; rather, these tricks merely bolster the record’s generally easygoing mood. When he occasionally edges into darker areas, he never dwells there for long. “Flight 9525” feels cold and lonely across its two minutes with its refrain of “If I could find a way back home, I’d go.” Later in the record, “Best Friend” outlines an unnamed betrayal that seems to be from the perspective of a dog. Meek sketches out recurring characters and situations, but leaves listeners to their own devices on filling in the blanks. He never tips his hand as to who Suzy is or why Maybelle is sighing wistfully at her costume jewelry, but sometimes these mysteries add unexpected flutters of humor: “It’s hard to know what time the roast went in/’Cause I locked myself outside again” he concludes on “Exit 7 Roses.”
With only two of his ten songs extending past three minutes, Meek leaves little time for a listener to sink into each one. As a result, the album feels like a modest sampler of light refreshments rather than a radical statement of self, and the weightlessness that makes many of the record’s components so charming also prevents them from making a substantial impact. Buck Meek may evaporate quickly, but it sublimates into songs that are hard to leave behind.


Chicago band that includes members of the Ponys and Boas brings its jagged rock mix from Touch and Go to Kranky.

Lux

Disappears is made up of some Chicago scene veterans-- Brian Case of garage-rock favorites the Ponys as well as several members of the defunct post-rock band Boas. Their music combines elements of both groups, but it nearly became a casualty of the industry's current financial mess. Disappears were the very last act signed to Touch and Go before the label shut down, and as a result, their debut, Lux, was almost lost in the shuffle. Luckily they were eventually scooped up by Kranky, and though their style differs considerably from the experimental and ambient that label is known for, it seems a good fit for Disappears' dense and foreboding sound.
Disappears' sound is a pared-down, drone-heavy mixture of Velvet Underground scuzz, garage-rock energy, and krautrock propulsion. It may not feel like the most unique approach, but, importantly, the band seems aware of that. Part of Disappears' appeal is that they've chosen to work within a set of stylistic and sonic limitations, where vocals and instrumentation are stripped back to their most essential. It's more about minimalism and mastering the basics than making something brand-new.
It works because Disappears keep things tight; even though there's heaviness and repetition in these tracks, usually they're about three minutes long. "Gone Completely" is a killer opener, a rush of fuzz-laden guitars and simple, severe drumming. On this track and throughout the album, frontman Case's vocals are buried in the mix just right-- his delivery is kind of a Britt Daniel-meets-Iggy Pop sing-speak-- and clouded in the feedback his words sound more powerful, like they're trying to escape. The band mostly finds a comfortable zone and rides it, but each track tweaks the formula just so, and the mood stays jet-black dark throughout.
Things do start to feel a bit same-y toward the end of the record. On "Little Ghost" and "New Cross", it sounds like the band is revisiting ideas they touched on earlier. But when a group is working in such tight confines, some overlap is natural. That the goal here is intentionally limited ultimately works for and against Disappears-- they achieve the sound they want, and it does sound good, but it's hard to think of Lux as much more than that, because the components are so familiar. Still, that they're able to make these well-worn rock tropes feel quite so menacing after all this time is an achievement in its own right.


This self-released compilation from Yves Tumor is more atmospheric than last year’s excellent Serpent Music. Its 12 sketches account for some of the prettiest songs Tumor has made.

Yves Tumor: Experiencing the Deposit of Faith

In his music and performances, Yves Tumor shows equal reverence for light and dark, his best compositions threaded through with shocks of blistering or even ugly sound. His last solo release, 2016’s excellent Serpent Music, was heavy and seductive, but with the self-released compilation Experiencing the Deposit of Faith—whose release coincides with the announcement of his signing to Warp—Tumor gives us a set of off-the-cuff songs that deal in the airier side of things.
The 12 tracks that make up Experiencing the Deposit of Faith seem culled from somewhere in-between. They trade Serpent Music’s definition—both its rounded grooves and harsh décor—for atmospherics and ambivalent loops. I’m reminded of the scratchy anthems Tumor made as Teams in the early 2010s, though here, those pileups of fuzz are dialed back, and we’re more easily able to locate the seams of his constructions. On “E. Eternal,” a tranquil classical guitar phrase is cut with what sounds like a crowd cheering for a sports match and then rich, droning male vocals. And the canned shimmer and dry, clattering percussion of “Paigon Hunting” are bluntly layered such that you’re aware of the tones’ vague mismatching.
One might call this an ambient release, but thinking along the lines of genre does little to open up Tumor’s work—these songs are more like collages or sketches. Something as brief as the two, two-and-a-half-minute “AfricaAshes” or “Anya’s Loop” nonetheless contains multiple surfaces, samples refracting as they reiterate: a soul loop lends dusty warmth and a nod to tradition, while halting structures link more to avant-leaning futurists like Actress. And something like the spark of fireworks against a mournful sax solo at the close of “Prosperity Awareness” is singular, a cinematic take on the field recording. If not in shape, the spirit of these compositions rests in pop music, a desire to give the listener something beautiful to hang onto.
Even with their repetitive structures and rough edges, these are some of the prettiest songs Tumor has made. The nonchalance of the compilation form allows an incidental delicateness to take the center. Where Serpent Music found itself in the more apocalyptic dimensions of the spiritual—with song titles like “Perdition” and “Dajjal,” a term in Islam for a false messiah or antichrist—Experiencing the Deposit of Faith, as its title suggests, evokes relaxed experiences of everyday reflection and transcendence. These revelations are simple: there’s something like morning sunlight in the way gauzy vocal harmonies enter above a William Basinski-like piano loop midway through “Ayxita, Wake Up.”
And such a spirituality wouldn’t carry weight if it weren’t a bit vulnerable, a bit sad. Closer “Love is the Law” moves slowly through a humid woodwind melody grounded by bass, a day’s-end piece of melancholia. It cultivates a quick intimacy, and a sense that one needn’t reach far from one’s surroundings to feel interwoven with something a little bigger.


The adventurous musician and composer takes a step back toward a simpler, sparer sound.

All Encores

The German pianist Nils Frahm likes to think big. He is the founder of Piano Day, an annual holiday dedicated to the instrument, and for a time he was the owner of the world’s largest upright, a Klavins M450i, standing a mammoth 14 feet, nine inches tall. (Since the release earlier this year of the M470i, eight inches taller, his model has, alas, been relegated to proverbial second fiddle.) Stages sag under the weight of his live rig, which can consist of Yamaha grand piano, Fender Rhodes, vintage Mellotron, three Roland Juno-60 synths, at least three drum machines, five Roland RE-501 Chorus Echoes, and racks upon racks of sundry effects, mixers, amps, and still more keyboards; darting from station to station, Frahm concocts a throbbing sort of chamber techno, a many-layered mixture of electronic pulses and acoustic timbres. Still, on record, his music often tends toward the opposite extreme: a kind of contemplative, cloistered intimacy.
Where last year’s All Melody, Frahm’s most ambitious album statement to date, attempted to bring together those two opposing poles—fashioning choir, strings, horns, gongs, pipe organ, and his usual welter of acoustic and electronic elements into a whole at once vast and hushed—All Encores takes a step backward, toward a simpler, sparer sound. In essence, it represents a set of rough drafts, avenues abandoned as All Melody assumed its final form. All 12 tracks here were originally released on a trilogy of EPs, remnants of a proposed triple album that never came to completion, exploring distinct corners of Frahm’s musical practice.
The first four tracks focus on Frahm’s solo piano, with the addition of a brief trumpet soliloquy that opens the second song, “Ringing,” on a particularly mournful note. This is terrain Frahm has explored, in slightly different form, on 2012’s Screws and 2015’s Solo; the pleasure here is in the virtually unplugged proprieties of the recordings—no bells or whistles, just Frahm’s sentimental melodies swimming in the natural ambiance of the Berlin Funkhaus studios, where he recorded. Like All Melody’s unadorned highlights “My Friend the Forest” and “Forever Changeless,” All Encores’ opener, “The Roughest Trade,” is recorded in a way that emphasizes the piano’s mechanics—the clack of the keys as they rise and fall; the soft shuffle of the striking hammers. It amounts to a kind of X-ray of melody in motion, the piano’s wood-and-metal skeleton illuminated beneath Frahm’s pale balladry. None of the other three piano songs have quite the same emotional pull—their melodies are simpler, or simply more forgettable—though the gently swaying “The Dane,” a staple of his live shows, comes close.
After “Harmonium in the Well,” an 11-minute study for reed organ and natural reverb (presumably, given the title, the one he fashioned out of a stone well in Mallorca), All Encores returns to the hybrid textures of All Melody, albeit in scaled-back form. “Sweet Little Lie” sets a drowsy piano lullaby against whispering static; “A Walking Embrace,” for piano and swelling synth pads, verges on the maudlin, as delicate—and as dated—as a collection of glass animals. Only “Spells” attempts the climatic scale of All Melody’s most elaborate pieces—a welcome shot of adrenaline just when the album is in danger of expiring from sheer politeness.
It’s a shame that “Artificially Intelligent” is less than two minutes long, because its hiccuping spray of pipe organ and wordless voice is by far the album’s most original moment, translating Frahm’s acoustic palette into a form somewhere between Morse code, abstract expressionism, and the markings on seismograph scrolls. But the final two songs are worth waiting for: The hypnotic “All Armed” is a sidewinding cross between Shackleton and Jon Hassell, while “Amirador” layers rich, deep, organ-like synthesizer tones into a shifting ambient etude of filmic proportions. It suggests a new direction for Frahm’s music, albeit one that it doesn’t seem like he’s quite figured out yet. Nearly four minutes of the 14-minute piece are virtually silent—as though, finding himself at a crossroads, Frahm were holding his breath, waiting for fresh inspiration to strike.

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Aggressive mechanical drum patterns, gnarly electro synths, oddball samples, rubbery vocal cadences, pop-cultural punch lines, honor-roll puns: All of these comprise the broad strokes of Rollie Pemberton's musical identity, and now, on Afterparty Babies, they feel like the fixed elements of a mature style.

Afterparty Babies

On Cadence Weapon's pair of 2005 releases, the mixtape Cadence Weapon Is the Black Hand and the album Breaking Kayfabe, it was thrilling to watch (former Pitchfork writer) Rollie Pemberton assemble his hip-hop bricolage in plain view. The sparse Canadian rap canon afforded him plenty of room to maneuver, and he used it to execute acrobatic feats of self-invention. As the son of Teddy Pemberton, the radio DJ for the seminal Canadian hip-hop program "The Black Experience in Sound", the junior Pemberton must have been acutely aware of his tacit responsibility not just to make hip-hop, but to create a strain of it from the ground up.
Aggressive mechanical drum patterns, gnarly electro synths, oddball samples, rubbery vocal cadences, pop-cultural punch lines, honor-roll puns: All of these comprised the broad strokes of Pemberton's musical identity, and now, on Afterparty Babies, they feel like the fixed elements of a mature style. But at the time, hedged in by leftfield excursions, they felt tenuous, as if Pemberton were testing a variety of directions before choosing one. Skewed instrumentals like "Those Sliders", hallucinatory mash-ups like "The Anthem (Cadence Weapon National Remix)", and bizarre Reichian beats like the one on "Fathom" made Pemberton's style sound marvelously curious and questing.
If the satisfying Afterparty Babies doesn't have the same thunderclap impact of its predecessors, it's because that element of adventure is subdued. This record has a clearer idea of what it wants to be, with seams neatly tucked away under a monolithic style. Pemberton's knack for massaging startling sounds into hyperkinetic dance tracks flares up periodically: "Do I Miss My Friends?" is built upon a Hanson-baiting a capella "mmm-bop." More often, he sticks to a reliable blend of techno and vintage electro. But if Afterparty Babies solidifies the musical nature of the Cadence Weapon project, Pemberton's identity seems as fluid and unresolved as ever
Pemberton himself is not quite a hipster rapper, although he does have lots to say about Friendster, emoticons, and Heiro-logo tattoos. He's not quite a nerd rapper, although he does drizzle juicy 8-bit blips and molten, neon synths over "Limited Edition of OJ Slammer" while rapping about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. He's not quite an undie messiah, although he takes a few potshots at what he perceives as a vacuous mainstream, especially on the stabby neo-disco track "Real Estate", where "rappers on the radio don't talk about shit" and choruses are fast-food jingles. He's not quite an old-skool preservationist, although Afterparty Babies is awash in scratching and sturdily linear sample beds, and he's not quite a party-and-bullshit MC, although he's fond of house beats and clubland send-ups like "Unsuccessful Club Nights". Instead, Cadence Weapon is a panoramic, everything-but-the-gangster portrait of modern hip-hop offshoots.
"The New Face of Fashion", a nasty electro banger with funk accents, is a screed against trendy couture. On the album's back cover, Pemberton appears in a red hoodie and a peppermint-striped tee with abstract lightning bolt patterns. "Limited Edition OJ Slammer", a diatribe against celebrity-obsession that finds Pemberton "wiping the fame off [his] mouth," seems rather ironic on a record characterized by lyrics like "Say you spray the nina when you're fey like Tina" (on "Your Hair's Not Clothes!", amid fluttering bat-wing synths and deep tone umlauts). At their core, most of the songs here are critiques of the same fast, slick youth culture in which Pemberton is an avid participant, and this paradox is what gives Afterparty Babies its self-contradicting aura. The cover sums it up: In a yearbook-style photo, Pemberton sits on a stool in front of a gallery of standard-issue indie-hipsters (and one Kid Rock clone), included yet apart.
This sort of self-contradiction is really just honesty. Internally consistent points of view are rare, and Pemberton makes no attempt to construct a false one. A thin seam of personal archaeology lends another layer of biographical complexity to the statements and contexts that negate each other. "Do I Miss My Friends?" is dedicated to "all the accidents out there;" the afterparty babies for which the record is titled. A skit at the end of "In Search of the Youth Crew" finds a relative reminiscing about young Rollie's desires to play with dolls. When Pemberton says, "Allegory I label a true story," he's talking about girls again. But he's also talking about Afterparty Babies, which finds him attempting to reconcile his beliefs, lifestyle, and origins, yet finding no place where they neatly align.


The second collaboration between M.E.D., Madlib, and Blu is a lighthearted jaunt, with the rappers leaping from topic to topic, as if passing a blunt between verses. Don’t expect anything profound here. At its core, B**ad Neighbor is about three dudes and their friends, spitting verses over great beats without sweating structure.

Bad Neighbor

Madlib’s calling card is his ability to spin obscure funk into woozy rap instrumentals. With the lack of precision and attention to mood, they feel out of time and slightly off-kilter, and they fit perfectly with artists like Erykah Badu and Georgia Anne Muldrow. Recently though, it seems the Cali composer has reined himself in a bit: 2014’s Piñata had all the grit you'd expect from Madlib, but it was crisper and recessive, allowing more space for Freddie Gibbs' menacing, in-the-pocket flows. He further restrains his sound on Bad Neighbor, a collaborative LP with rappers M.E.D. and Blu. This is a light-hearted jaunt, with the rappers leaping from topic to topic, as if passing a blunt between verses. Don’t expect anything profound here. At its core, B**ad Neighbor is about three dudes and their friends, spitting verses over great beats without sweating structure.
The producer fits well into this free-flowing group. He also feeds off seemingly random ideas, connecting dots between misplaced vocal clips and Afro-rock samples, and despite his talents he can be easy to take for granted. M.E.D. had a nice showing on 2004’s Madvillainy, the revered outing from MF DOOM and Madlib, but his output has been sparse from there. Blu has been incredibly prolific, but many of his releases are marred with improper mixing and unfocused rhymes, with as many standouts (Below the Heavens, Her Favorite Colo(u)r) as bricks, like Jesus. and the short-lived ucla. On their own, all of these guys are good but sometimes get overlooked.
Bad Neighbor is their second release. In 2013, the trio put out The Burgundy EP, powered by the fluid single "Burgundy Whip". That song re-emerges near the end of Bad Neighbor, but it feels like an afterthought compared with the stronger, more vivid material around it. "Peroxide", featuring Dâm-Funk and DJ Rome, resembles "Planet Rock"-era electro-funk, and the MCs bounce nimbly atop its darting synthetics. "The Stroll" flashes a bright, disorienting synth like a flood light, the beat so full of little noises it's like an event itself.
Anderson .Paak, the grit-voiced singer/rapper who featured prominently on Dr. Dre's Compton and who recently dropped his own noteworthy EP, appears almost out of nowhere on Bad Neighbor track "The Strip", lending his strained voice to the proceedings. There are a few appearances like that, and they feel purposefully casual, allowing everyone to thrive on their own terms. On "Finer Things", Foreign Exchange frontman Phonte Coleman sings the hook and raps about adult romance. MF DOOM shows up on "Knock Knock" to offer his signature disconnected one-liners. Bad Neighbor whizzes by in a blunted haze, which might be an insult to another project, but it works well here, when the stakes are low and the mood is most important.


The second album from the historically inoffensive singer is another genreless collection of safe choices for a pop star in the making.

Free Spirit

At a middle school dance somewhere in America, hundreds of students are getting rowdy to “Thotiana” while the chaperone tells the DJ to spin something else, something less vulgar, something inoffensive. Something like Khalid. He mainly sings about love, never too deep or personal, like he got inspiration from a Netflix original movie starring Noah Centineo. The 21-year-old is maturing—he can drink now and smokes a little more weed than he did before—and his second album, Free Spirit, comes at a time in which Khalid is both a Billboard Hot 100 mainstay and figuring out if he should be the same teenager that first found success with “Location” or if his music should age with him.
Like so many emerging pop stars trying to be the voice of the next generation (See: Billie Eilish or Dominic Fike), a selling point of Khalid’s music is that it’s genreless. Free Spirit is definitely the first album that can claim both Murda Beatz and Father John Misty in the credits. Khalid’s melodies fit over any instrumental they touch, whether that be an acoustic guitar-heavy ballad like “Saturday Nights” or a Disclosure-produced dance track like “Talk.” Yet, no matter how diverse Free Spirit is in sound and guests, the output is always the same harmless, generic Khalid.
Khalid has no edge, so his attempts at darker songwriting come off like “Riverdale” fanfiction. “Is this heaven or armageddon?/I’ll be gettin’ high with you to watch the ending,” he sings plainly on “Free Spirit.” It’s fitting that one of the top YouTube comments praising his collaboration with country heartthrob Kane Brown on “Saturday Nights (Remix)” is, “No naked scenes, no alcohol, no drugs, no cars around but only soft and smooth voices.” Khalid, unlike an actual teenager, is afraid to cross any line—everything that leaves his mouth is bland. His relationship stories are frustrating, “Can you feel the tension? You’ve got my attention/I know we’re just friends, but I’d rather be together instead,” which he says on the John Mayer-featuring “Outta My Head” that belongs in an Old Navy commercial.
The saving grace of Free Spirit is that none of Khalid’s dull lyrics and euphemisms can take away from the high-budget production showcase. Take “Talk,” where Disclosure gifts Khalid a bubbly dance instrumental. It works, despite Khalid sounding like an R&B singer without the sex and a pop singer without the fun. Hit-Boy recently brought new life to the emo-rap gloom of Juice WRLD and on “Self,” the producer tries that same kick-drum magic with Khalid. That goes well when he opens up about his anxiety, but not when he’s wondering, “Does my raw emotion make me less of a man?” And of course, when record labels need to make a pop singer engaging, they call up folk-trap mainstay Charlie Handsome who uses his talents on “Bluffin’” to squeeze exactly one ounce of soul from Khalid’s monotony.
Khalid is simultaneously a pop star of the past and the future. Like so many pop stars before him, his albums only amplify weaknesses that are difficult to detect when he’s only releasing a single every couple of weeks or months. But Khalid feels perfect for an era where some of the most popular music is popular because it fits onto Spotify playlists meant solely to be used as background noise. Free Spirit isn’t the coming of age album Khalid intended it to be, though in his nascent adulthood he has mastered something. Unfortunately, it’s the art of being innocuous.


For his Jagjaguwar debut, the acclaimed 68-year-old sculptor offers a harrowing portrait of the United States and its systems for suffering. Then, he dances.

MITH

Lonnie Holley starts MITH, his third album, with a simple, striking statement: “I’m a suspect in America,” he sings over a prismatic keyboard line, stretching the last syllable until he runs out of breath. As a black man who has lived in the cities of the South for much of his life, Holley has endured that reality for 68 years, watching as white suspicion of black bodies has evolved but never receded. “Here I stand accused/My life has been so misused/Through blood, sweat, and tears/I’m a suspect,” he continues, as overdubbed vocals, synthesizers, and woozy trombone bloom around his words. He ultimately reasons that all of us—yes, even the suspects—become dust specks, anyhow. The song drifts into silence.
Holley’s life has been dotted by death and hardship. But in the late 1970s, he began assembling everyday detritus into found-art sculptures that balance the pedestrian with the surreal, a practice that has earned him high-profile spots at The Met and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He made music all the while, sharing it among friends on cassette, but he didn’t issue his first real record until 2012’s Just Before Music, at the age of 62. That record and its follow-up, 2013’s Keeping a Record of It, felt like gentle trips through outer space, as if it were possible to float the Milky Way. But on MITH, Holley does with music what he’s done with visual art for decades: He collects our ugliest obscured objects and transforms them into singular reflections on our troubled world.
For MITH’s 18-minute centerpiece, “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship,” Holley methodically imagines the process and pain of enslavement, beginning by watching his own capture from a distance while chains and hand drums rattle behind him. He uses this narrative conceit to trace intertwined histories of labor and oppression—sneaking off one slave ship only to end up on another, with chattel slavery transformed into industrial wage slavery—well into the future, where the cycle will ostensibly continue. Holley sees dripping blood, drowning bodies, and exploding bombs, his voice rising from familiar astral soul into gnarled screams. “I Woke Up in a Fucked-Up America” follows, made harrowing by horns that herald end times. People have been waking up in a fucked-up America long before the United States existed, but Holley grounds the feeling in our time with references to “overdatafying,” “arguing, fussing, and fighting,” and “the miscount of voting around the world.” Swooping brass and calamitous percussion swell behind him. “Let me out of this dream,” Holley sings of what is actually a nightmare, requesting relief before a final blast of horns seals his fate.
Animated by expanded instrumentation, this unease ripples throughout MITH. Holley’s supporting cast here includes avant-garde instrumentalists like Dave Nelson and Shahzad Ismaily, plus harmonies from folk duo Anna & Elizabeth. Drums from late producer Richard Swift lend “Copying the Rock” a soft sense of chaos. On “Coming Back (From the Distance Between the Spaces of Time),” cymbal splashes and snare rolls add a sense of looming anxiety; Holley sings about a human returning from outer space, warning of the solidarity it will take for us to survive what is to come.
But MITH isn’t entirely mirthless. Holley again maps the skies on “How Far Is Spaced-Out?” and conjures a jazz-adjacent flow during “There Was Always Water,” which features fellow mystic improviser Laraaji. But the finale, “Sometimes I Wanna Dance,” unfolds with such contrasting gaiety that it almost feels accidental. As Laraaji bounds around an upbeat piano line, Holley urges his listeners to “Shake it around, up or down, in or out,” his vocals crisscrossing like dancers across the floor of a high-school gym. A free activity and an act of freedom, dancing requires no special skills or circumstances; you can dance at home or work, for 15 seconds or until your body falls to the floor. No whiplash ending, this is a survivor’s reminder to look beyond pervasive doom and gloom and summon the spirit needed for another day. If we can’t take the time to express the joy of our own creation and our shared humanity, what’s the point of any of this?


On their third full-length, Pennsylvania rock band the Districts dives headfirst into the earnest indie rock of the mid-2000s, displaying a new emotional depth.

Popular Manipulations

The Districts was formed by four childhood friends in 2009, while they were still in high school, and the Lititz, Pa. band has since grown up in the public eye, having signed to Fat Possum in 2013. Their catalog traces the Districts’ evolution from indistinct blues rock to an infatuation with the early 2000s NYC scene. Along the way, they replaced founding guitarist Mark Larson with Pat Cassidy and worked with John Congleton (producer of records by St. Vincent and Cloud Nothings, among others), who recorded their 2015 sophomore LP A Flourish and a Spoil. On their third full-length, Popular Manipulations, the group dive headfirst into the earnest indie rock of the mid-2000s, particularly Spencer Krug’s least esoteric contributions to Wolf Parade. Congleton is back in the booth for four songs, but the band makes a big leap by producing the rest of the collection themselves. Like all of their work, it’s capable and tuneful and reveals a young band of skilled songwriters that put all their faith in their guitars, even if it’s often hard to pinpoint where their own vision begins and their taste ends.
On their 2015 album, the Districts rightfully focused on songwriting over style. Even when singer Rob Grote used his best Casablancas croon to sell his band’s dollar-slice-eating, bar-room appeal, there was never a sense that they were skimping on hooks. If anything, the Districts understood the youthful, carefree appeal of the bands they were aping, and were able to distill the highlights into something palatable. Popular Manipulations finds similar low barometers for successes and failures, but with a new sound that employs studio sheen and a heartfelt vocal delivery. Sure, there are times when Grote drones along zombie-like—the monotonous Liars-sounding opening of “If Before I Wake,” the return of Paul Banks’ robotic vocal influence on “Airplane”—but these outlying moments only highlight Grote’s strength when he bellows with tense desperation across the rest of the album. In fact, “If Before I Wake” juxtaposes the old and new Grote delivery in the same song, displaying an emotional depth never present in the Districts’ previous work.
Lead single “Ordinary Day” is fragile and thin when Grote opens the song by himself, but by the time the band piles on towering guitars, crashing cymbals, and manic vocal layers, its grandeur punctuates the singer’s bland question: “Will it hit you when the feeling’s right?” On “Capable,” Grote’s lyrics sidestep all ambiguity, speaking directly about divorce with both detail and insight, musing on the “mirage of permanence” and an inability to love. More than ever, there’s a sense that the audience is getting to know both Grote and the Districts through their music beyond just a show of influences. It matters less that “If Before I Wake” pulses with the same vocal delivery as Brandon Flowers used in the Hot Fuss-era, but that the song employs the familiar to forge a more rugged path.
Still, Popular Manipulations struggles to reach these heights consistently. “The point is beside the point now,” Grote sings on “Point,” offering the sort of logic that makes most sense through the bottom of a pint glass. There’s a handful of leftfield choices that sour some of the goodwill the record inspires, including the strained falsetto on “Why Would I Wanna Be,” which attempts to distinguish an otherwise innocuous cut. And the record’s closing moments on “Will You Please Be Quiet Please” fall short of a climax through sheer messiness. These stumbles further separate the Districts from their heroes, even if Popular Manipulations resonates more than their previous albums. Channeling and interpreting the appeal of beloved music isn’t an easy task, but for once, the Districts are on the cusp of turning it into something they can call their own.


On her third album, the Queens experimental musician explores the way women’s voices can challenge the norms of taste and decorum and push past the boundaries of accepted musical language.

IRISIRI

Alexandra Drewchin’s music as Eartheater deals in opposing forces. Her songs interlace acoustic instruments, like guitar and violin, with harsh electronic drums and eerie synthesizer figures; she tends to juxtapose startling beauty with cutting ugliness. Her third album, IRISIRI, exacerbates the contrasts she set up across her first two records. Where her previous albums, Metalepsis and RIP Chrysalis (both released in 2015), were often hypnotic and ambient, IRISIRI demands a new kind of attention. It’s the sort of record that lulls listeners into a trance only to snap them out of it with a blast of noise or an incongruous shriek.
From crackling vinyl samples to electric guitar loops, IRISIRI boasts a wide variety of clashing textures. Certain moments, like the stuttering “MTTM,” find kinship with Nicolas Jaar’s searching grooves, while “C.L.I.T.” has enough of a rock edge that it could be an EMA track run through a centrifuge. Drewchin delights in scrambling genre signifiers, but it’s her vocal work on this album that breaks the most rules. She knows that a scream is not in itself an act of defiance, and that there are other sounds a voice can produce—especially a woman’s voice—that jut past the boundaries of accepted musical language.
Drewchin sings throughout IRISIRI, often in ways that prove her technical ability. She can hit high notes and she can evoke the timbre of sacred music, as she does against discordant electronics on “Trespasses.” She also screeches, simpers, and whines throughout the album, all vocal techniques that run the risk of being called “annoying”—a far more dismissive adjective to apply to a woman singing than “abrasive,” “harsh,” or “angry.” But she finds life in that confrontational space. When, on “Inclined,” she cracks her voice on the outer edges of her range, she calls into question why women’s voices are heard the way they are. A violin loops in the background, crowding Drewchin’s delivery with the suggestion of decorum, all while she’s cramping her voice, starving it of oxygen, and rubbing it the “wrong” way. It’s as though a man once told her she sang obnoxiously and, rather than clean up her tone, she decided to double down on all the elements that might irritate the patriarchal ear.
Eartheater hints at the threat femininity poses to the male world order across a number of tracks, most notably “Inhale Baby,” which features vocals from the L.A.-based experimental duo Odwalla1221. “Inhale baby pink/Exhale red,” Chloe Maratta repeats, as if urging her collaborators to alchemize their compulsive docility into fiery rage. Later, an element of body horror appears in the duo’s spoken-word contribution: “There’s so much stuff coming out of my skirt,” says Flannery Silva, stretching out her consonants as if pronouncing a threat. The album’s other feature, by the Philadelphia experimentalist Moor Mother, on the frantic “MMXXX,” complements Drewchin’s vaulting melodies with a steadily defiant verse. As the two vocalists sing and rap over aggressive beats, sirens, and sounds of breaking glass, the contrast between them produces the record’s high point. There is hardly any melody to speak of, yet “MMXXX” ranks among the most addictive song Eartheater has put to tape. It has so much energy it doesn’t need a hook.
“I rejected that culture,” Drewchin wails over raging guitars on “C.L.I.T.,” an advance single whose name stands for “curiosity liberates infinite truth.” The impulse to cast off cultural standards dictating how music should sound dominates IRISIRI, which seems most interested in articulating femininity outside the constraints of patriarchal expectations. In Eartheater’s burgeoning musical world, women don’t need to fold their voices in service of beauty. They are free to make a ruckus, to sound monstrous, to gnash their teeth at anyone who would pen them in.


Following his long-delayed return to rock with last year’s Big Mess—and this year’s much-memed Coachella performance—the Oingo Boingo frontman delivers a characteristically chaotic set of remixes.

Bigger. Messier.

Once at the vanguard of the American new-wave scene, Danny Elfman deliberately turned his back on rock music after Boingo, the 1994 farewell by his weirdo Los Angeles collective Oingo Boingo. By that point, Elfman’s work as a film composer had greatly eclipsed his initial new wave fame and while he retained a cult—one big enough to keep Oingo Boingo’s albums in the lower reaches of Billboard’s Top 200 during the heyday of grunge—the soundtrack work was too fulfilling and too lucrative to turn down. Elfman happily busied himself with film, serving as the go-to composer for both Tim Burton and Gus Van Sant and writing notable scores like Silver Linings Playbook and Justice League. Then COVID-19 hit.
Elfman already was plotting a return to rock via an appearance at the 2020 Coachella festival, where he planned to unveil two new songs as part of a live retrospective. Once the pandemic forced organizers to cancel the festival, Elfman simply kept working on new songs, amassing enough for a double album—his first new rock record in nearly 30 years and first solo album since 1984’s So-Lo. Released last summer and knowingly titled Big Mess, the album felt as if it had been conceived and birthed in isolation. Dark and cloistered, superficially industrial, and gothic without being goth, Big Mess is an overheated Grand Guignol of an experience, 70 minutes of detours, jokes, and pointed social commentary: “Serious Ground” contained a sample of President Donald J. Trump, while another song explored “Love in the Time of Covid.”
Big Mess is the kind of record die-hard devotees crave: a dense listen that alienates all but the dedicated. That’s a good strategy for tending an audience but not necessarily for a re-introduction to a rock world that’s largely forgotten your existence. Enter Bigger. Messier., an album of remixes and reinventions from a variety of modern artists chosen to snare curious new listeners. As the title suggests, Bigger. Messier. is indeed unwieldy and unkempt, running a full 21 tracks to Big Mess’s 18, even though only 12 of that album’s songs get the remix treatment. Such details don’t really matter, not when the four variations of “Happy” range from skittish cacophony of the 33EMYBW Remix to the nocturnal new-wave bounce of Boy Harsher’s remix.
All four versions dispense with the tightly controlled melodrama of Elfman’s original, which is par for the course for Bigger. Messier. The original recordings aren’t treated as a blueprint so much as a suggestion, with melodic and lyrical phrases coming into focus and then fading away in a flurry of drum’n’bass and synthetic clatter. Some artists opt to introduce elements of light and shade to their renditions, while additional vocalists add some extra dimensions. Witness “Kick Me,” a barbed and silly satire of celebrity, respectively featuring both Fever 333 and Iggy Pop. Fever 333’s metallic rendition is a bit rote, but Iggy’s hamminess amplifies Elfman’s cartoonishness in an appealing way; he’s playing with the audience, not to it. The flip of these exaggerated gestures is Trent Reznor’s interpretations of “Native Intelligence” and “True,” which both turn the overt dark hysteria of the originals into simmering dioramas of tension.
Such mastery of tone is hardly common on Bigger. Messier. The album winds all over the place, alternating between washes of gilded electronics, glitchy paranoia, and cathartic release, a combination that is simultaneously more incoherent and more inviting than its parent album. Adding more voices to the mix turns the monolithic Big Mess inside out. What was once a foreboding haunted mansion is now a carnivalesque fun house; not a place to linger or live but rather a wild ride that’s worth one spin—but maybe not a second.


Like her 2014 comeback record, the new album from psych-folk artist Linda Perhacs features collaborations with Julia Holter and electronic touches, expanding the borders of her sound.

I’m a Harmony

“I’m a harmony/And extra-cellularly/I’m singing this to you/Through your laptop,” Linda Perhacs sings on the title track of I’m a Harmony. After releasing her 1970 debut Parallelograms—which for decades was her only album—Perhacs became a sort of vanished flower child for the folk/psych collector set. I’m a Harmony is her first record in three years, and her third in all, and its title reads like a koan. But it’s also a boast, as Perhacs delivers her meditative folk with typical aplomb. Released from the burden of following up a cult classic, and supported by familiar collaborators, Perhacs is free to stretch out and have a little fun.
Lyrically, I’m a Harmony continues where 2014’s The Soul of All Natural Things left off: plainspoken contemplations of the physical realm, relationships, and the ways in which the two collide. Like Natural Things’ titular first cut, I’m a Harmony’s opener “Winds of the Sky” locates the divine in the meteorological. Perhacs’ stately melody drifts over bass-led downtempo passages; Wilco guitarist Nels Cline closes the song with an awestruck solo reminiscent of Robert Fripp’s work with the Roches. On “Eclipse of All Love,” a waltz-time duet with the Autumn Defense’s Pat Sansone, Perhacs tracks an incoming storm, then connects it to personal matters: “Ain’t it a shame/If we are to blame/For this serious game/On the physical plane.”
Perhacs plots these nexuses of the earthly and emotional all over the album. To devotees of new age music, the approach is familiar. Those hoping for a return to the vibes of her debut may be disappointed, however. Though Parallelograms was produced by Oscar-winning composer Leonard Rosenman and released on an MCA imprint, it’s sometimes categorized as “loner folk,” a catchall genre for idiosyncratic, hermetic records with psychedelic dusting. (It’s also called “acid folk,” though Perhacs was drug-free.) When Perhacs first entered the studio decades ago, she was a dental hygienist—she met Rosenman at work, in fact—with a homemade demo. But while recording she had the good sense to tailor her talent to the skills of the assembled studio vets.
Similarly, I’m a Harmony finds her drawing on the strengths of her current collaborators—several of whom she worked with on The Soul of All Natural Things, or on their own projects—to push her sound outward. Returning player Julia Holter is featured on four cuts, two of which are Perhacs’ longest compositions to date. Holter offers a second lead vocal on “I’m a Harmony,” and her deft keyboard work helps navigate the song from playful airiness to a jammy gallop and back again. The solemn “Visions” opens with Holter and Perhacs intoning wordlessly, coolly looping around each other like contrails; they do the same at the song’s midpoint, adding dubby percussion and slide guitar. In the liner notes, this section is labeled (visual music sculpture).
In a 2014 interview, Perhacs acknowledged how she clashed with her co-producers (Fernando Perdomo and Chris Price, who also worked on Emitt Rhodes’ 2016 comeback Rainbow Ends) over these kinds of non-organic touches. “If you hear a synth [on The Soul of All Natural Things],” she said, “it’s because I put my foot down.” The discussions paid off, and while Perdomo and Price rejoined Perhacs for this new record, her electronic visions carry the day. The contemplative textures and freeform passages lend an existential heft to songs that could otherwise come across as willfully earnest. And the more straightforward compositions—like the tender birthday song “One Full Circle Around the Sun” and the pendulant reverie “Beautiful Play”—benefit from the contrast. On The Soul of All Natural Things, Perhacs joined the distinguished club of artists following up decades-old recordings. With I’m a Harmony, she slips free from the comeback narrative, expanding the borders of her particular cosmology: lovers and friends, bound by the wind, linked by laptops.


After the finger-waggling of the divisive The Minstrel Show, Little Brother's third official full-length-- and first without 9th Wonder-- represents an attempt at figuring out just why the duo are rapping, and for whom.

Getback

In 2005, North Carolina-based hip-hop group Little Brother released The Minstrel Show, a record brazen both in title and tenor that sought to castigate the culture of materialistic, anti-intellectual bojangling that had besieged and benumbed the black community in the form of commercial rap music and mainstream TV programming. Unsurprisingly, this played exceptionally well on indie-rap message boards, in coffee shops, and college campuses coast to coast. But outside the Ivy, where people eat, laugh, fuck, and don't spend a hell of a lot of time thinking about whether their culture is eroding, it didn't make a dent.
It's easy for the (over)educated among us to get hip to the underground and then snicker at the poor deluded masses filling their heads and ears with trash, but what happens when we have to step outside our theory-addled cocoons and explain looking down our noses at our neighbors and kin? Confronted with his aging, still-hustling "niggas on the corner," Phonte illuminates this dilemma in a single line-- "they ask me if The Minstrel Show means I'm ashamed of them"-- but in truth the whole of Little Brother's third full-length, Getback, represents a brass-tacks attempt at figuring out just why he and Pooh are rapping, and for whom.
The project's essentialist nature is evident not only in the brevity of its composition (11 songs in under 50 minutes) but also its cast, one man short with the departure of the group's producer and biggest name 9th Wonder (who does make a cameo return to handle "Breakin' My Heart"). That leaves the sonics in the stead of a motley collection of beatmakers, most notably Talib Kweli collaborator Hi-Tek (who helms the languid, gently whirring "Step It Up") and A-lister Nottz (the soulful, celebratory "Two Step Blues"). The man with the most credits (four), however, is relative unknown Illmind, who submits a mixed bag between the too-busy "Sirens" and the smoothly reflective "That Ain't Love", ultimately failing to make anyone forget even the modest legacy of 9th's work with the group.
Still, this is undoubtedly Phonte and Pooh's party, and all the fascination and frustration of Getback lies in listening to two MCs struggle to decide where they belong. Red-herring opener "Sirens" may be politically charged, but the record's real headspace is set with the succeeding track, "Can't Win For Losing", in which Phonte rejects fans, family and scenes as sufficient motivations for enduring the hip-hop grind before embracing friend and mentor Jazzy Jeff's trenchant advice of "fuck 'em, 'Te, do it for you."
Belief in self is great, of course, but as the poignant refrain of one song puts it, "dreams don't keep the lights on," and the remainder of Getback is preoccupied with how to juggle ideals and financial realities, individual dreams and the reciprocity of relationships, even the aesthetic choice between whether to crack jokes or talk tough. The uproarious "Good Clothes" and "Step It Up" attest that the duo (particularly Phonte) is capable of crafting highly clever hip-hop ("a nigga can't attract Cristal with a Boone's Farm mindstate"), but the flashes of quick wit are regrettably few and far between. Instead, untrustworthy friends ("That Ain't Love") and demanding females keep marring Pooh and Phonte's good moods, bringing out grumpily regressive sides of their personalities that don't suit the typically easy charm of either MC (sure, no one gets skeeted on, but "a woman's life is love/ A man's love is life" is a subtly offensive maxim).
It's telling that Little Brother sounds happiest on "Two Step Blues", an ode to the simple joys of shaking off the 9-to-5 and cutting a rug at the VFW with old family and friends. With all the acclaim they've earned and controversy they've courted, however, this unglamorous, down-home utopia might actually be the toughest for Phonte and Pooh to bring to life.


Sumac, Aaron Turner's post-Isis trio, succeed at making minimalist doom metal because they recall what fans of Isis loved without resembling Turner's past work in the slightest.

What One Becomes

Sumac, Aaron Turner’s new trio, succeeds at making minimalist doom metal because they recall what fans of Isis loved without resembling his past work in the slightest. Sludgy heaviness and melody meet as before, but they clash instead of meld, and their fraught coexistence is drawn out. Turner attempted this with Split Cranium, a collaboration with Finnish experimental/metal linchpin Jussi Lehtisalo, but the space he affords himself in Sumac goes a long way. What One Becomes, Sumac’s follow-up to their debut The Deal, feels both more whole and more deconstructed, and that it arrived a little over a year after shows how focused they are on adapting as a unit.
They demand more patience of you here, leaning harder on slowness until it starts to feel like claustrophobia. There are fewer faster metal freakouts here than on Deal, which make them all the more jarring when they shatter the peace. Sumac unleash most of their fury on leadoff song “Image on Control,” filled with skronky guitar scrapes, blastbeats and doomy stomps. The closest that One gets to any melodic pleasantries is in “Clutch of Oblivion,” where Turner lets a melody flicker for four minutes, a carrot for those demanding a Panopticon revival, before blasting it into oblivion. He then takes one last stab at the hardcore prevalent in Split Cranium, meditating on a crunchy buildup before unleashing. Even if it’s more recognizable, Turner knows how to ride a riff out, boiling it down to its most base hypnosis.
Throughout One, the sound is so wide-open that it threatens to come apart, but drummer Nick Yacychyn, also of Vancouver hardcore group Baptists, keeps a solid grounding. His playing is the group's secret weapon, and his sensibility makes One sound like Khanate with groove on the brain. (Turner’s guitar tone also approaches the metallic drear that Stephen O’Malley channeled in that group.) His flexibility makes the 17-minute “Blackout” an exercise in indulgence that doesn’t exactly feel like one. His steady tom work carries the piece through plundering depths, ambient segues, and a halfway mark that’s equal parts speed metal and modern classical.
One feels more improvisatory than most of any of the members’ prior works (especially bassist Brian Cook, better known for his work in modern prog-metal heroes Russian Circles), and that makes it alien to most metal. Sumac are pushing metal in a direction so uncomfortable it may cease to be metal, into an openness that isn't about saying “FUCK YOU!” the loudest. The result is some of his most exciting work since Isis disbanded.


The resident DJ at the UK-based Freerotation festival releases a dreamy, bucolic ambient LP, full of lush textures and birdsong.

Loom Dream

Baskerville Hall, a country hotel built in 1839 in the Welsh village of Clyro, is known for a few things. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Hound of the Baskervilles, was a frequent guest at the inn. Paranormal enthusiasts believe the place is haunted. And every summer, it hosts Freerotation, a beloved, members-only affair where the hippie ethos of the 1990s free-party rave scene meets cutting-edge electronic music. Resident Advisor’s Will Lynch called it “600 friends knocking around a weird old hotel for three days—it feels more like a massive sleepover than a festival.” Leif Knowles has been playing Freerotation for years now, and his DJ sets there have become legendary for their range, their risk-taking, and their bucolic scene-setting, providing a fitting counterpart to the rolling green hills and rural idyll. With Loom Dream, he captures that spirit on vinyl.
Leif, as he is known, has been putting out records since the early 2000s, his style gradually evolving from pert minimal house to freaky, futuristic bass music. Loom Dream is his third album, but it is his first ambient full-length—never mind that Whities, the label putting it out, is itself better known for forward-looking bass mutations. Just 34 minutes long, Loom Dream is the kind of mini-LP that is particularly suited to a certain, evocative strain of ambient music: not too short, not too long, but a Goldilocks-like, just-right length for catnapping and coming back up for air.
Loom Dream’s tracklisting comprises six songs, but really the record plays out as a single suite of music, the tracks seamlessly joined by chirping birds, footfalls, and creamy swirls of reverb. Leif’s choice of sounds is faithful to the chill out room aesthetic that artists like Mixmaster Morris and the Orb pioneered in the late 1980s: Synthesizers waft through gentle delay chains while field recordings suggest a sense of place and submerged rhythms generate the subtlest forward motion. The record follows a loose botanical theme—its six tracks take their titles from plants and herbs like yarrow, borago, and myrtle—and between the omnipresent birdsong and lush textures, it’s easy to imagine that Loom Dream would make a lovely soundtrack to a supine half-hour in a sun-warmed glade.
But Loom Dream can also be surprisingly (and impressively) intense. Leif’s pastel atmospheres frequently give way to deep, chest-quaking drums: layer upon layer of thrumming hand percussion, sub-bass rumble, and sampled kit. “Myrtus” is driven by quick, trilling marimba melodies, and in “Rosa,” faintly distorted thumb piano takes the lead. In “Borago,” pummeling floor toms accompany echoing blasts of choral voices, creating a mood that’s both stormy and majestic.
Leif’s rhythmic instincts don’t just keep the music moving, they keep the vibe in constant flux, as time signatures shift and tempos vary. This dynamism helps set Loom Dream apart from its ambient contemporaries. Much like Brian Eno envisioned of ambient music, it is an emotional blank slate—the mood he evokes may be blissful, wistful, or simply serene, depending upon the listener’s headspace—but the constantly shifting grooves keep the record’s limited palette from getting stale. At the record’s end, he switches things up one more time: Over gossamer new-age chords, a steady drumbeat kicks up little clouds of dust that gradually swell into piercing dub-delay feedback; by the end, the sound is a strobing shriek, almost like a car alarm. It’s a suggestion, maybe, that rural idyll can’t last forever. Or maybe it’s just an appearance from one of Baskerville Hall’s ghosts.


A half-century after the release of Bobbie Gentry’s imaginative second album, the art-rock band revisits it as if in a daze but with the help of over a dozen brilliant singers.

Mercury Rev: Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited

Bobbie Gentry had unqualified freedom to record her second album, and she wasn’t going to waste it. Her 1967 smash, “Ode to Billie Joe,” not only introduced the breakout pop star but also gave listeners one of the era’s enduring mysteries: What exactly had she and Billie Joe McAllister thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge? For her follow-up to that hit and its best-selling album, she envisioned something unique and highly ambitious: an avant-garde country-pop record full of technicolor arrangements, oddball collages, and playful sexual innuendos. Mixing originals with Southern standards made famous by J.D. Loudermilk, Doug Kershaw, and Mose Allison, The Delta Sweete depicts the Deep South as a fantastical place: not how it was in the late 1960s, but how Gentry remembers it from her idyllic Mississippi childhood.
That feeling is one of the few things Mercury Rev get right on their full-album tribute to The Delta Sweete, which features a different singer from various generations and genres on each song. From the first notes of opener “Okolona River Bottom Band,” you get the sense of a place that exists outside of time and space. In this tale about a small town holding tryouts for the local band, the humid shimmer of the droning strings and sequencers, not to mention Norah Jones’ languid vocals, depict Okolona—a very real place in Gentry’s native Chickasaw County—as though it were Brigadoon. Gentry achieved a similar effect with a low, reverberating strum and some insinuating horns. The way Gentry sings those opening la la la’s and the leering male voice at the end give the original a strong sexual undercurrent, but that goes missing here. Without the subtext, Gentry’s wordplay falls flat, the cover becoming like a classified ad that reads “MUSICIANS WANTED.”
Mercury Rev remove these songs from their original settings, taking them out of the South and resituating them who knows where. That’s most apparent on “Reunion,” sung by Rachel Goswell of Slowdive. The original is one of the strangest and most impressive songs in Gentry’s catalog. Against a Bo Diddley guitar strum and some finger snaps, Gentry layered numerous samples into a quilt that captures the freneticism of a family reunion. It’s a remarkable piece of music, especially for 1968, and it’s practically impossible to cover. Mercury Rev seem flummoxed by the endeavor, reconstructing a more conventional tune out of all those voices and highlighting one aside about Billie Joe McAllister as a cheap bit of sensationalism. It’s a dull mess.
What’s more, Mercury Rev blanche these songs of their rhythmic complexities and musical quirks, slowing everything to a crawl and removing almost all of the blues, rockabilly, swamp rock, Southern soul, and country-funk touchstones. Hope Sandoval sings “Big Boss Man” so languorously you might think she’s passing out from heat stroke. Carice Van Houten, from “Game of Thrones,” delivers “Parchman Farm” without Gentry’s knowing wink, without that sense that the narrator is complicit in the crime that sends her man away. Margo Price tries to capture the ecstasy and energy of a lively church service on “Sermon,” but she’s burdened by another blandly lush arrangement. Mercury Rev end not with “Courtyard,” Gentry’s closer covered here by Beth Orton, but with a predictable bonus track. Lucinda Williams singing “Ode to Billie Joe” ought to be an event, but her interpretive strategy is to infuse the song with resentment, as though bitter about having to pass the biscuits please.
At least Chameleonic Norwegian singer/songwriter Susanne Sundfør gives the best and fiercest performance here with “Tobacco Road,” and Mercury Rev return the favor with one of their best re-imaginings. They turn the song into a march toward destruction, full of stomping percussion and menacing pomp. When Sundfør sings about bombing that shabby community of rusty shacks, you can almost hear her lighting the fuses on the stolen dynamite.
Still, Revisited is a noble undertaking. The Delta Sweete was a commercial flop that nearly derailed Gentry’s career, and only recently has she been reconsidered as a singular artist and as an influence on subsequent generations, including Kacey Musgraves, Neko Case, and ostensibly everyone on this tribute. Last year’s excellent box set The Girl from Chickasaw County collected all seven of the albums she recorded from 1967 through 1971, after which she relocated to Las Vegas and eventually excused herself from public life. For those unfamiliar with Gentry and her catalog, that’s a much better point of entry than this affectionate but misguided tribute that’s nowhere close to satisfying.