The composer and cellist’s score for Charlotte Wells’ film is full of suggestion and shadows, wringing emotion from the lightest touches.

Oliver Coates: Aftersun (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

In filmmaker Charlotte Wells’ feature debut Aftersun, memory is elusive. In the “emotionally autobiographical” drama, a woman named Sophie (played as a child by Frankie Corio and as an adult by Celia Rowlson-Hall) remembers a vacation she took to Turkey with her father Calum (Paul Mescal) when she was a kid. Through gauzy flashbacks—and even gauzier camcorder home movies—the film paints a poignant and idyllic picture of the vacation. Even through the warm nostalgia, Sophie seems to grapple with feelings of grief, as she reconciles her positive memories with her father’s emotional turmoil. It’s a moving depiction of how the people we love can remain inaccessible to us—all we know about them is what they let us know.
Wells assembles these vignettes into a film that feels heavy, dreamy, and touching, feelings magnified by composer and cellist Oliver Coates’ score. Drawing on a love of the minimal yet phenomenological work of Éliane Radigue—whose compositions Wells used as a temporary score while the film was in progress, per an interview with CRACK—Coates made slow, still tracks that nevertheless feel suffused with meaning and experience. Through elliptical string arrangements, tranquil synth pads, and hallucinatory found sounds, the Aftersun score communicates a sense of wistfulness and yearning amid the otherworldly sounds.
In a statement accompanying the score, Coates writes that he sought music that could reflect “the vivid glow of memory”—a thought process illustrated by “One Without,” a key cue used in the film’s final scene and credits. Built around a repeating string figure, overlapping with shimmering reverb trails and little else, it’s spare but flickers with warmth and light. Echoing and repeating for a little over four minutes, it feels like a meditation on constancy and loss, highlighting what stays the same and what subtly changes as memories flit through your head, again and again.
Coates is known for his playfully abstract approach to electronic composition—even indulging a love for jittery Aphexian dance tracks on 2018’s Shelley’s on Zenn-La—but his work for Aftersun is decidedly more minimal. Some tracks are formally complex, while others, like “Tai Chi,” are constructed around simple string drones. Still, he wrings a lot of emotion and texture out of the lightest touches. This depth is due in part to some technological treatment. Coates credits sound designer Johan Nilsson for “tricking” the algorithm of an audio software into “extracting percussion or bass or vocals where there is none.” Even the simplest tracks feel haunted—shimmering with unexpected life in a way that feels reminiscent of the wriggling ambient pieces collected on PAN’s influential Mono No Aware compilation. As a result, these pieces carry emotional weight even outside of the context of the film: It’s ambient music full of suggestions and shadows, allowing curious listeners to approach it and fill in the gaps with meditations of their own.


On his second solo LP, the Detroit MC Chris Orrick, aka Red Pill, raps about alcoholism and depression. Instinctive Drowning is largely devoted to the persistence of a tormented mind.

Instinctive Drowning

Red Pill has studied his depression. He knows how it works and where it comes from, but the 28-year old Michigan rapper rarely seems to crawl towards relief. Pill, whose real name is Chris Orrick, has frequently come off as an endearing and relatable deadbeat in his raps, but his second solo album inches away from light-hearted self-deprecation in favor of darker introspection.
On Instinctive Drowning,* *the Detroit MC raps about his hand-me-down alcoholism and depression, contextualizing his illnesses as both personal and genetic. Caught in his own mind, the Mello Music Group artist—who is also one-third of the proudly blue-collar underground hip-hop group Ugly Heroes—is a fervent over-analyzer. This tendency sometimes spins his raps into histrionic narration. “I’ve been heartsick/So consider this catharsis,” he sputters triumphantly on the album’s first track, a clumsily obvious recap for such a patently emotional song. This awkward self-referencing falls flat at times, but Red Pill is sincere and his pain never feels like a put-on.
Noticeably, *Instinctive Drowning *carries some of the best and most tailored production that Orrick has enjoyed yet as a solo rapper, driven by a single-producer approach. In this case, San Diego producer/rapper Ill Poetic has upgraded Pill’s previous stable of jazzy boom-bap for a more eclectic and ambitiously moody palette. While some tracks stick to Red Pill’s initial wheelhouse of snappy drums, Ill Poetic is also as apt to construct a new groove as he is to rotely loop up an old one. “Jeffrey Star” freewheels loosely with a Sun Ra-inspired gait to start; “When the Devil Knocks” sounds like boom-bap-inspired crime funk. Many of the songs meander into musical bridges and soulful change-ups, but sometimes the effect is squandered. On “Four Part Cure,” the distorted guitar-driven switch-up sounds forced into place instead of urgently called for.
This new album also contains Red Pill’s strongest rapping to date. The painfully clever album name is crystallized when Orrick recounts his mother’s early death in gripping detail on the title track. “Just shy of the age when her liver failed/Most of my money been spent on liquor sales,” he raps, reluctantly lining himself up for the same fate. Red Pill is almost never upbeat, but there’s a charm to his soul-searching.
As a lyricist Red Pill isn’t flashy as much as casually confident. But sometimes Orrick’s delivery hobbles awkwardly. His hooks are often chanted monotonously in a rarely intoned but variously syncopated flow, an artifact of his general reluctance toward singing. Here and there it works, but an album full of these choruses gums up the momentum. Elsewhere, Pill collapses into a weirdly contrived voice on “Club Privilege,” his almost tongue-in-cheek stab at a self-assured party track that doesn’t quite hit the mark as a lucid P.S.A. about white privilege. (And yet the self-awareness is productive if not clunky.)
Along with the title track, the best songs on *Instinctive Drowning *are sandwiched in the middle. “Fuck Your Ambition” carries the record’s lone listed feature in the form of a charged-up P.O.S. verse. Both Orrick and Ill Poetic make the Minneapolis punk MC sound at home: the producer provides an ambient beat with tweaking, mechanical drum programming, while Red Pill borrows some of P.O.S.’ shouty, disjointed cadence. On “Gin & Tonic,” one of album’s lead singles and one of the artist’s best songs to date, Orrick shares a wistfully cautious optimism about his relationship, drinking, and pervasive sadness. It’s a telling highlight. The rapper both wallows in and stirs from his depression throughout Instinctive Drowning, which is an album largely devoted to the inevitability and persistence of a tormented mind. Red Pill never seems to find solace as much as endurance.


Azniv Korkejian’s folk music boasts a surreal calm and a lived-in glow that masks turmoil just outside the frame.

Bird Songs of a Killjoy

The folk music Azniv Korkejian makes as Bedouine has a beckoning quality, a distance that masks the emotion brewing just beneath the surface. Her lyrics are circular and understated; on her second album, Birdsongs of a Killjoy, it often takes a few listens for the wistfulness of lines like, “I love you/You love how much I love you” to sink in. Her music is largely free from temporality—it could have just as easily been made in the 1970s as today.
Like the surreal calm under a bridge during a rainstorm, the album’s quiet sadness feels surrounded by turmoil unfolding just outside the frame. Much of that anguish comes from unrequited love. On Birdsongs of a Killjoy, birds symbolize restless lovers that Korkejian is afraid of holding back. “Am I to you some sort of chain/Are you a bird, am I your cage?” she asks on “One More Time.” On “Bird Gone Wild,” she imagines herself “beating ’round a cage like a/Bird gone wild.” Though there is captivating beauty in a bird’s song, the bird can never truly belong to you.
Korkejian has grown in leaps since her debut. Her lyrics are subtler and more shaded; the guitar, strings, and horn are more plentiful and detailed. Finger-picked guitars and strings swirl around her rich voice, which is weathered and warm as the back of your grandmother’s hand. On paper, there’s nothing novel about the lyrics “One more time, honey/One more time/I’m gonna set you free,” but on “One More Time,” she croons with such hushed mourning that she sends them skyward. Over the sparse guitar of “Sunshine Sometimes,” she fills the word “wildflower” with a drowsy, lived-in glow.
Vivid images dot her lyrics: “Drag my finger ’round the rim/Drag around a phantom limb/When you’re gone,” she murmurs on “When You’re Gone.” Other lines, like “I kept the bottle we drank from together/I don’t know, is that insane?” (from “Bird”) achieve a certain group-chat candor. But the lyrics occasionally verge on maxims, and the space between gems can feel like filler. It’s not always evocative to describe someone as “wild as a storm,” or to compare loneliness to being on an island. When Korkejian alludes to the thrilling unpredictability and turbulence of nature without any comparable rush or sense of awe in the music, those grandiose references feel unearned. At times, it feels like Korkejian is holding back, and the album could benefit from a few more moments as raw as “Bird.” As it is, Bird Songs makes for lovely twilight listening, the kind of reflective and soothing album you play when nestled into a blanket on a porch with the people you love.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A new EP of songs originally recorded for 2011’s Hello Sadness illustrate just how well the band’s simultaneously twee- and emo-adjacent indie rock holds up.

Whole Damn Body EP

The title of the fourth album by Los Campesinos! was so cloyingly on-the-nose that you had to assume the irony was intentional. Hello Sadness, released in 2011, was pegged as the Welsh band’s “darkest album yet,” trading in their whimsical noise-pop for sweeping rock with heavier themes to match. But Los Campesinos! went into the album sessions with a mission: make a concise, focused record to follow up 2010’s admittedly overstuffed Romance Is Boring. Now, seven tracks that didn’t make the cut get their first official release as Whole Damn Body, an EP timed to coincide with Hello Sadness’ 10th anniversary. Filled with the band’s sticky hooks and guttural vocals, this collection of “new” old music is less a throwback than it is proof of consistency—and of the way the band’s simultaneously twee- and emo-adjacent indie rock alienated them from trends even as it cemented their oft-overlooked legacy.
Most of the songs on Whole Damn Body deal with lovelorn woes, a theme in line with the Hello Sadness origin story: Vocalist/lyricist Gareth Campesinos! had left a long-term relationship just before taking off to Spain for album writing sessions (he once likened the record’s subject matter to that of Take Care). As with all good things Los Campesinos!, Whole Damn Body doesn’t hesitate to get hyper-specific: “You asked if you could see me before I went to Spain,” Gareth sings in “Tiptoe Through the True Bits.”
Lyrically, Whole Damn Body is classic LC!: drunken gags, salty insults, and soccer references. “Allez Les Blues” flips the French team slogan into a sneer about the other type of blues: “We’re singing, ‘Allez les blues’/’Cause they hold me closer than you would ever do.” Perhaps one of the band’s angriest songs, “Dumb Luck” explores a stage of post-breakup grief hardly heard on Hello Sadness: “When the Third World War comes, it will not be fought on race,” Gareth taunts an ex. “We will line up here in two rows: betrayers versus betrayed.” The whip-smart wordplay of “She Crows” tracks his own ascent to minor indie fame, sizing up the relative prestige of “writing sleeper hits for all these weeping dipshits” and being adored by “finger-sucking, singer-fucking girls”—after all, who in this industry decides what success really is?
Even as their sound shifted from scrappy indie pop towards a more polished aesthetic, Los Campesinos! prioritized songwriting quality over fads or marketability. The band’s catalog has aged remarkably well over the years; even the decade-old tracks on Whole Damn Body feel fresh. The EP’s highlights, like the rollicking drums of “She Crows (Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #4)” or the group vocals on “Dumb Luck,” feel just as likely to rile up a midsized crowd in 2021 as in 2011. The uncharacteristically mellow “Four Seasons” is weak by comparison, but on the whole, this collection of leftovers is remarkably appetizing.
Until now, all but one of the Whole Damn Body tracks were available only through Heat Rash, the 7"-and-zine subscription series the band ran around the time of Hello Sadness’ release. Ten years later, the choice feels right in line with the Los Campesinos! ethos: Never quite on time and never too concerned with making it big, they proudly owed their success to the community that backed them. Whole Damn Body tracks what we knew about Los Campesinos! all along: Authenticity goes a long way.

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I actually frightened friends of mine when I declared that I was looking forward to the new Red Hot Chili ...

Californication

I actually frightened friends of mine when I declared that I was looking forward to the new Red Hot Chili Peppers record. Dan simply replied sardonically, "Dooooode." BloodSugarSexMagik was the first CD I ever purchased. Listening to a CD on headphones after a decade of cassettes was revelatory. Faint, echoing harmonies, popping bass, and crisp, finger- lickin' guitar swirled in my ears. (In retrospect, I guess technology had a lot to do with my infatuation with the album.) Now, Californication sees the same players (John Frusciante and Rick Rubin included) from the that album return. As expected, it's considerably better than the bone- stupid One Hot Minute, but not quite as funky- assed as their acclaimed 1991 effort.
But wait. Before we go any further, let's talk about Dave Navarro. Dave Navarro was a horrible fit for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Thankfully, he's off in some private velvet- paneled studio pouring hot wax on his nipples and applying mascara. Look up "wannabe rockstar" in the dictionary and you'll find a picture of Dave Navarro's pierced nipples and school- of- Depeche Mode black nail polish. So, weighing in at a stunning 85 pounds, the band's former guitarist John Frusciante and his quavering, pasty, skeletal body rejoined for the Californication sessions.
In his off time from the Chili Peppers, John Frusciante recorded a couple of drug- induced solo mishaps and had a best- selling Italian novel named after him. The man brings a rucksack of real emotions with his guitar. I'll also wager my credibility that he's the best big- time American rock guitarist going right now. His fingers can effortlessly switch from the pickin' funk of "I Like Dirt" to the sculpted feedback of "Emit Remmus" to the tender, lovely (yes, really, a tender, lovely Chili Peppers track) "Porcelain" to the clever, stadium- sized solos throughout. But best of all, he makes you forget about that crazy monkey on bass.
Eh, but let's face it, the biggest obstacle in your enjoyment of a Red Hot Chili Peppers album is horny crooner, Anthony Kiedis. If you can stomach lines like "Go-rilla cunt-illa/ Sammy D and Salmonella," "Up to my ass in alligators/ Let's get it on with the alligator haters," and "To fingerpaint is not a sin/ I put my middle finger in," you're good to go. If those lines make you wince like Pitchfork Editor Ryan Schreiber, keep in mind that I pulled those from only two of fifteen songs.
In a way, you have to be familiar with California to appreciate Kiedis' lyrics. I mean, Los Angeles is shallow, sunny, fun, and tragic. So, in this age of unfathomably horrible choruses like, "I did it all for the nookie/ The nookie/ So you can take your cookie...," "Because you did my homies," and "Bawitdaba" (a five- spot to anyone who can explain that one), we can cut the Chili Peppers some slack. Plus, the sincere, hook- laden, mellow jams of "Scar Tissue," "Otherside," and "Road Trippin'" more than make up for whatever knuckle- dragging Kiedis executes. That the Chili Peppers even gave us a single you can actually tolerate on the radio should be heralded.
Longevity in rock music is about as rare as hip-hop spellcheckers these days. The idea of albums has given way to the force- feeding of singles. Teens reposter their walls with the face- of- the- moment more frequently than undercover advertisers placard boarded- up fences and buildings in New York. Basicially, the Chili Peppers are the closest thing we have to a Led Zepplin today. If you want quality, commercial, Jeep- stereo, headphone, stadium- filling, champion Rock that you can get behind, where else are you going to turn? Not to Eminem, you ain't.


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 Lou Reed’s 1982 solo album, a strangely alluring comeback that made good on the promise of a lasting rock’n’roll icon.

The Blue Mask

The three-minute guitar duet that kicks off 1974’s Rock ’n’ Roll Animal is kind of satanic when you know what’s coming: “Sweet Jane,” one of the most beautiful and important songs of all time, written by Lou Reed for the Velvet Underground, a beautiful and important band that felt like the last piece of the puzzle to teenage rock fans who discovered them during their renaissance in the early nineties. “Sweet Jane” is the song that liberated a generation from classic rock radio. It proved that you could write something durable without resorting to the exhausting riff-mongering of Foreigner or the idiot machismo of AC/DC. To hear this landmark of art rock used as a prog noodle pot by Reed’s touring band is a profoundly disorienting experience, but the whole album is like that. They do “Heroin” as the kind of uptempo funk that would later be used to get guests on and off of late-night TV. It all sounds very not Lou Reed, but by 1973 the question of what Lou Reed was had become unsettled.
Fans who encountered Reed’s body of work in retrospect may be surprised to learn that Rock ’n’ Roll Animal was his first gold album. I urge you to listen to it—if only to understand what might have happened if he had been born an Allman Brother—at some point before you put on The Blue Mask, an album Reed would release almost a decade later, in 1982, after a series of semi-public crises including but not limited to: moving in with his parents, brakes-off methamphetamine abuse, the slow and occasionally violent end of his relationship with Rachel Humphreys, and asking David Bowie to produce his record seconds before drunkenly assaulting him.
This period of personal disintegration coincided with a six-album run of legendarily confusing studio albums. My favorite is probably Street Hassle, which peaked at No. 89 on the Billboard charts. It contains the masterpiece title track but also the charitably-interpretable-as-satire “I Wanna Be Black,” a song that rhymes “have natural rhythm” with “shoot twenty feet of jism.” All Reed’s post-Rock ’n’ Roll Animal albums feel this way: for every good song, there are three that make you think he wrote the good one by accident, or that he is somehow mad at you for continuing to like him. The peak of this seeming hostility was Metal Machine Music, which Chuck Klosterman cited to illustrate his concept of the “advanced irritant,” an artist who has produced works of genius and then backslides to music that is simply bad. Still, I would rather listen to Metal Machine Music than Growing Up in Public, whose lyrics are disfigured by therapy-speak and whose instrumental arrangements sound alarmingly like Billy Joel.
All this is to say that shortly before he turned 40, Reed had established himself as one of the saddest burnouts of all time. In the absence of artistic and commercial success, his mercurial persona and self-destructive habits made him look less like a rock star and more like an ordinary asshole: someone who had gotten what a generation of musicians dreamed of and traded it for what millions of dumb, violent addicts couldn’t escape.
And then he dropped The Blue Mask. It sounded different from anything he had done before but was unmistakably him—the quote-unquote real Lou Reed everyone recognized but no one could duplicate, a sound that was at once new and a return to form. The first time I heard it, I assumed The Blue Mask was ironic; the second time, I began to suspect that it was the least ironic album of all time. It is strange, specific, and painfully honest, ugly in places and beautiful in others: in other words, a redemption story. Whatever Reed had lost over that last decade, artistically, he got it back.
What changed? For one thing, he dramatically reduced his consumption of drugs and alcohol, although as with many addicts who get clean under their own supervision, how close he got to zero BAC is not clear. He also married Sylvia Morales, a younger painter and poet whom he met at CBGB in 1977. Mostly leaving New York City—Reed kept his rent-stabilized apartment in the Village—the two lived together in Blairstown, New Jersey, in a house in the woods near a lake.
The first track of The Blue Mask, “My House,” is, at least on a literal level, about Reed’s belief that this home in Blairstown is not only “very beautiful at night” but also haunted by the spirit of his former college professor, the poet Delmore Schwartz. This idea is astonishingly self-centered, which is how you know Reed was getting sober. Taking stock, he sings that he’s got “a lucky life/My writing, my motorcycle, and my wife/And to top it all off, a spirit of pure poetry/Is living in this stone and wood house with me.” One can only imagine how thrilled Schwartz would be knowing that he was remembered as a figure of comparable importance to Reed’s motorcycle. But as with almost every track on this album, the real subject of “My House” is not the house or its appurtenances; it is Reed’s ongoing struggle to live productively amid the furnishings of his own mind.
These furnishings are old but unfamiliar, as though Reed had awakened from a blackout and was looking at them for the first time—which, in many respects, he was. The alternately healthful and agonizing experience of seeing himself clearly is the central theme of The Blue Mask, and it is reflected in the alternately beautiful and grotesque sound of the instrumentation. These arrangements are even more expressive than the words, if only because they convey feeling unconstrained by meaning or circumstance and therefore parallel Reed’s dislocating new sobriety. The singular sound of The Blue Mask provides a counterpoint to Reed’s lyrics, nudging them over the line from kind of dumb to definitely dumb and therefore great.
Two members of Reed’s new band seem to have been responsible for this sound. The first is Robert Quine, a former guitarist for the Voidoids and documented Lou Reed superfan who bootlegged a series of Velvet Underground shows in 1969, when he was trying and failing to pass the California bar. Quine’s guitar is on the left side of the stereo mix. On the right is Reed himself, whose return to playing guitar was reportedly a condition of Quine’s appearance. Together they developed a loose but steady sound that is atmospheric on tracks like “Women” but sharp and vital on the rockers—a sound reminiscent of Sticky Fingers-era Rolling Stones but slower, the honky tonk before it opens, while it still belongs to the staff.
The second new player behind this sound was bassist Fernando Saunders, a 25-year-old hired gun whose work on The Blue Mask can be heard, in echoes, on many of the bass sounds in subsequent 1980s pop-rock albums. Playing at the front of the mix with sharp attack and the treble turned all the way up, Saunders makes the bass a midrange instrument, dropping fills from the top of the neck into the pauses in conversation between Reed’s vocals and the guitars. These bass fills are such an organizing feature of The Blue Mask that you can kind of guess when one is coming, e.g. “Seven days make a week [boing]/On two of them I sleep.” In addition to evoking the first step of a 12-step program, this moment from “Underneath the Bottle” suggests that punctuation from Saunders was what Reed’s writing needed all along.
The other element of The Blue Mask that you can’t get out of your head, once you know its context, is how raw it all is—like a dental procedure put off too long. If “Underneath the Bottle” is the honest version of the cynical “The Power of Positive Drinking” that Reed recorded two years earlier, the title track and “Waves of Fear” are the price he paid for lying. “The Blue Mask” is a noise jam about S&M, kind of like “Venus in Furs” from The Velvet Underground & Nico, but in a way that does not make kinky sex sound at all hip or fun. “Cut the stallion at his mount/And stuff it in his mouth!” Reed shouts before the whole thing collapses into a disorganized guitar solo. It is kink as pathology rather than transgression, a too-clear reflection of insecurities and half-repressed failures that ends in humiliation instead of a downtown leather scene.
“Waves of Fear” is about the psychological experience of withdrawal, the often ignored but undeniable place where your body rubs up against your mind. It is not in free time, and neither is it simply a jam; it has its own rhythm and structural logic, but that logic is awful in the biblical sense of the word. “Waves of fear/Squat on the floor/Looking for some pill/The liquor is gone/Blood drips from my nose/I can barely breathe/Waves of fear/I’m too scared to leave,” Reed sings with terrible specificity. Here, at age 39, is his penitence for two decades of songs about how drugs are cool. Here is the process of getting clean not as relief but as de-anesthetized surgery. Here, in other words, is the particularly ugly and beautiful experience of continuing to become Lou Reed.
Not every track on the album reaches that level of fusion between form and content; some are simply failed experiments or regressions to post-Animal pandering. “Average Guy” is what I can only describe as some Joe Walsh shit: a snotty novelty song about how Reed is perfectly ordinary, ha ha. “The Day John Kennedy Died,” while more winsome in tone and seeming intent, ends on the line, “I dreamed that I could somehow comprehend that someone shot him in the face.” This historical inaccuracy brings to mind John Cale’s remark, in his autobiography, that Reed could be extremely funny without knowing when he was doing it. In the context of Reed’s lifelong willingness to embarrass himself twice to produce something beautiful once, though, it is these wabi-sabi elements that perfect the album.
There is a video of the version of “The Blue Mask” that Reed and his band performed live in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 2000, in which the essentially two-note bass riff of the original has become a mastering pattern for the entire rhythm section—mostly D and then mostly G played over and over, tighter and seemingly harder each time, the cymbals just behind the beat. Reed is 58 years old. His face has settled into the William H. Macy grimace he would wear in the 21st century. When he begins to sing, he does so almost perfunctorily, in contrast to the driving energy of the arrangement, as though he had been mumbling these words to himself in elevators and on subway platforms for the last two decades. When I watch this video I think about how, at any moment, you can do or say or conceive something that will haunt you for the rest of your life. It might even be something good.
The Blue Mask is good. After I heard it for the first time, I could not stop thinking about it for months. During that initial infatuation, I recommended it to several people, but since then I have become careful not to, because most of them turned out not to like it. I have come to think of that as part of the appeal. To paraphrase Wayne Campbell, we didn’t need Lou Reed to write songs that everybody liked; we left that to the Beatles. What we needed from Reed was that singular thing only he could render, with the conviction that no experience was so terrible it could not be redeemed as art, and if that thing that made it possible went away for a while, it would come back to you. And so it did.


The stunning, open-hearted new album from indie rock singer-songwriter Hannah Read renders personal crises with a deft and delicate touch.

Hannah

Just over halfway through Hannah, the stunning, open-hearted new album from Lomelda, there’s a crucial moment of affirmation. Nothing is working—singer-songwriter Hannah Read’s body refuses to cooperate; her hands aren’t opening, her limbs are weakening.  A security guard finds her splayed out on all fours. Singing about the moment over somber piano, Read’s voice cracks: “She asked me what’s your name/Are you ok?” The magic of Lomelda’s music is in that exchange, an infusion of strength and care from one person to another, no matter how small or ordinary. It has anchored Read’s songwriting from the beginning, and it is threaded throughout Hannah, which is warm and enveloping, like a hug.
More than ever, Read’s writing grapples with identity—how we see ourselves, how we’re seen—and the songs on Hannah render personal crises with a deft and delicate touch. “So confused who I have been, who I haven’t” sings Read on “Reach,” before looking outward: “How’d you know?” She’s never alone, even at her most desperately isolated; friends are always orbiting, in person and in memory, and they always seem to know best. The wistful and meticulous “Hannah Happiest” reflects a similar uncertainty. “Asked you if you knew/Who/I was,” Read admits. “You said Hannah.”
These aren’t just casual observations. The album oscillates between emotional registers, balancing profound quiet with strummy, emphatic pleas about how we might better comport ourselves in the world; there’s a sense that even at their most gentle, these songs are transmitting something deeply earnest and hard-won. This is as true of Read’s lyrics as of her arrangements, which are newly rich and rewarding. The noisy riffs of “Wonder” channel Alex G at his scrappiest, while “It’s Infinite” conjures a meditative sensibility with plush, finger-picked guitar. “Give it your all,” Read sings on the former track, nearly hollering, as if willing herself to take her own advice. On the latter, wrangling the family dog becomes a poignant metaphor for Read’s own dream-chasing. Though they’re stylistically distinct, the songs share a commitment to perseverance as a guiding ethos; they’re about resolving to press on, in spite of it all. Together, they suggest that the work of self-discovery is bound up in connection.
It makes sense, then, that the saddest moments on Hannah have to do with disconnection, and the breakdown of communication—half-heard conversations (“Hannah Happiest”), a reckoning with a painful memory (“Polyurethane”), the drop to all fours (“Stranger Sat By Me”). “Hannah Sun” is quintessential late-summer music, a travelogue steeped in regret: “Glad you held her/Glad you held him/Glad you held me, too/Though I didn’t know how to/Be closer to you.” She wavers before building herself back up, but she gets there: “Shadowed by a blue/Am I shining? / I am trying to shine.” It’s an image that captures how feelings can intensify even as they lose shape, leaving a lingering ”blue” in place of something more specific; even in sadness, Read finds a glow.
Read’s music has come to be associated with Silsbee, Texas, where she grew up, and Hannah was recorded in the studio her brother built there. But she’s been based in Los Angeles for the past few years (she cites the sunshine as a major factor in her decision to relocate), and it’s lent the music a more universal feel. The long drives of 2017’s Thx are less prominent here, but Read is still engaged in a kind of mapmaking, charting more explicitly psychological territory. The result is a cosmic “I’ve got you,” a link between worlds, bridging the individual and the communal. By the end, you’ll start to wonder about that distinction—where the boundary lies, or whether it’s there at all.

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In the much-missed Monotonix, guitarist Yonatan Gat was the anchor, but his music since is clearly the product of a frenzied, restless spirit. Here, Gat and company touch on everything from bossa nova to soukous, Tortoise-style jazz-rock to the head-swimming spazz-outs of Ponytail.

Director

In the much-missed Monotonix, guitarist Yonatan Gat was the anchor, the guy gamely riffing away while his bandmates hoisted themselves aloft in garbage pails or stuffed microphones into their pants. But being the straight man in a band like Monotonix still makes you the wildest guy in most any other room, and Gat's post-Monotonix music is clearly the product of a frenzied, restless spirit. Director, the second record from Gat's eponymous trio, was recorded over three marathon 12-hour sessions with engineer Chris Woodhouse, best known for his work with one-take wonders Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall. A series of freewheeling jams were eventually whittled down to a lean 29 minutes and change, then mingled with field recordings the well-traveled Gat collected over the years. The results are all over the place in every sense of the phrase, a frequently dazzling display of the trio's impressively far-flung influences.
To listen to Director is to feel yourself barreling forward; riffs don't so much unfurl as fly by and songs seem to vanish almost as soon as they appear. Director's constant motion makes it a particularly tough record to pin down for more than a few seconds at a time; in less than half an hour, Gat and company touch on everything from bossa nova to soukous, Tortoise-style jazz-rock to the head-swimming spazz-outs of Ponytail. Director is conversant not just in many styles, but many languages; centerpiece "North to South", for instance, features lyrics in Hebrew, Portuguese, and English. The Israeli-born Gat and Gal Lazer and the Brazilian Sergio Sayeg bring a remarkably vast number of styles to the table here, gleefully recombining them as they go. And you need not know how to suss out a Phyrgian scale or tell your son from your samba to dig into Director; this is a world party, respectful of tradition but unafraid to throw everything in a blender and gulp.
Gat has technical prowess to spare, but he's less concerned about getting things exactly right; there's a seat-of-their-pants feel to the whole of Director, the occasional near-flub a product of their refusal to slow down for any length of time. While Sayeg stays deep in the pocket, Lazer's drums—with cues from Gene Krupa, John Bonham and Tony Allen—and Gat's guitar either tussle like dogs and crackle like flint. Vocals, used sparingly, are often sunk low in the mix. This, combined with Gat's conversational field recordings, gives Director the feel of driving past a bustling street scene with the windows down; you can feel the radiance in the air, even if you're moving just a little too quickly to quite put your finger on it. Despite its sitcom-length runtime, Director manages to feel maybe 10 minutes shorter, so rarely does it pause to fully soak in the scenery.
For all its energy, Director ends not with a bang, but with a floorward collapse. The brief, diffuse "Underwater Prelude" seems designed to provide a respite from the calamity that precedes it, but it only ends up sapping the built-up momentum. The skronky "L'Atlantis" sounds like the intro to a Sonic Youth song that never fully gets itself off the ground. And closer "Tanto Que Nem Tem", with a lovely, mournful vocal turn from Sayeg, is punctuated by bursts of noise that distract where they're meant to disorient. Still, the wildness of the ride Director takes you on more than makes up for this rocky landing.


Setting aside the retro R&B vamping of his group the Night Sweats, the Denver singer-songwriter returns to the sad-sack folk of his roots.

Nathaniel Rateliff: And It’s Still Alright

And It’s Still Alright

It’s a tale as old as time: When a singer-songwriter wants to plumb the depths of his soul, he needs to step away from his main gig so he can get down to what’s real. Nathaniel Rateliff adheres to this weathered cliche with And It’s Still Alright, his first album without the Night Sweats since 2015 but not his first solo album, not by a long shot. The Night Sweats was his last-gasp attempt at the big time, a neo-soul combo that helped reposition the Denver troubadour as a soul man—a transition aided by producer Richard Swift, who became a friend and a trusted collaborator.
Swift died unexpectedly in 2018, the same year Rateliff divorced his wife after a “tumultuous” relationship. The twin losses inspired the singer/songwriter to record the melancholy, meditative And It’s Still Alright, an album designed to be everything a Night Sweats record is not: intimate, confessional, bittersweet. Rateliff cut the album in part to fulfill a promise to Swift, who told the songwriter, “Keep pushing for those Harry Nilsson tunes, man”—to which Rateliff responded, “Well, we’ll see how Nilsson I can get.”
The answer is, not very Nilsson at all, not even when Rateliff takes pains to stage his own Pandemonium Shadow Show—laboring to replicate the iconic songwriter’s whimsical melodies on “All or Nothing,” or giving “Expecting to Lose” a swaying sing-song bridge. In any case, evoking the ghost of Harry Nilsson is a particularly odd move from Rateliff, since Nilsson—one of pop’s great eccentrics, who recently received a boost when his “Gotta Get Up” was featured in Natasha Lyonne’s Netflix series Russian Doll— was never exactly a paragon of sincerity. Even at his quietest moments, Nilsson favored a bit of the old razzle-dazzle: His celebrated 1970 LP Nilsson Sings Newman doubles as an interpretive masterstroke and a display of studio wizardry, where he proved his vocal virtuosity by overdubbing every harmony part. If Rateliff is anything, it’s doggedly earnest. Whether he’s grinding out old-school soul with the Night Sweats or flying solo, he’s obsessed with the idea of authenticity: the idea that a song isn’t a song unless it can be convincingly played alone on an acoustic guitar.
Ultimately, this old folkie notion of purity triumphs over Rateliff’s composerly aspirations. The lion’s share of And It’s Still Alright backslides to the gormless balladeering of his decade-old Rounder debut, In Memory of Loss—a record made when he was under the spell of M. Ward, peddling himself as “bi-curious, redneck indie-folk” and touring with Bon Iver. Set aside the Nilsson pastiche and a lingering echo of the Lumineers—most prominent on “Mavis,” which he stresses is not named after Mavis Staples, even though that’s the first Mavis that would come to most listeners’ minds—and Alright can seem like a collection of artifacts excavated from Rateliff’s early years. He strums and he mumbles, twisting in his melancholy without bothering to shape his mood into melodies. If he’s baring his soul, his revelations are buried within his slurred, mangled phrasing, a delivery that repels the close listen it’s intended to invite.
That mush mouth is supposed to be the opposite of the retro R&B bluster that Rateliff hauls out for the Night Sweats, but the two extremes are really just different expressions of the same affectation. Rateliff bends his vocal attack to suit his chosen musical style. With the Night Sweats, he’s elevated with grit and muscle, but strumming solo on And’s Still Alright, he gets bogged down in a melancholy murk.

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Olympia punk trio Naomi Punk’s third album is a 75-minute, 25-track study in repetition. They’ve become more interested in deconstructing their songs than writing them.

Yellow

The third album from Olympia punk trio Naomi Punk, Yellow, opens with a sequence of three instrumental tracks that wander and then stop cold, like dropped thoughts. With them, Yellow wastes no time weeding out listeners hoping for another quick fix of grungy rock. In every other regard, though, Yellow wastes quite a bit of time. Years in the making, it is a 75-minute, 25-track study in repetition that doesn’t readily let the listener in on whatever conclusions it draws.
Naomi Punk had hinted they might have a record like this in them. The 2014 Television Man LP periodically broke from the shiv-like rock of their debut for lengthy, arty explorations. But where Television Man was still a rock album at its core, Yellow’s driving impulse is experimentation. In the spirit of Wire, they’ve grown more interested in deconstructing their songs than writing them. And, as if in homage to that group, guitarist Travis Coster’s voice takes on shades of both Colin Newman’s punk sneer and Graham Lewis’ dehumanized croon. One of Naomi Punk’s cooler tricks is nailing the way that Lewis’ more robotic lead turns always sounded like they were being played back from a computer running out of RAM.
There are a couple of spirited 1980s nods along the way. With its synthesized bass, one of the only hints of bass on the whole album, “My Shadow” nails the whole Karate Kid-era video arcade aesthetic, while for two minutes “Matroska” conjures the barren, synthesized rumble of the Cure’s Faith. But those sonic switch-ups are few and far between. Most of the album’s main event songs, the ones that aren’t scrapped together from found sounds or studio racket, follow the same general template of crooked guitar chords, strummed so repeatedly that your own hand can’t help but vicariously cramp up, while drums thud and indeterminate noises creak and bubble around them.
It’s a template as rigid as Andy Warhol’s soup can screenprints, and like those works, Yellow’s songs keep coming long after the point has been made. Instead of paying off with new twists or revelations, the album only grows more cemented in its ways as it enters its increasingly redundant final stretch. The 11-minute gauntlet of “Yellow Cone Hat,” “Carniceria,” and “Motorcade” plays out as three very minor variations of the same mechanical riff, none of them any more eventful or memorable than the others. All that repetition makes for an album that’s as monochromatic as its title.
The central challenge of art punk is how to experiment without completely sacrificing the thrill of a sound that’s typically been synonymous with speed and brevity. Naomi Punk aren’t interested in solving that problem, though. Their concerns are largely conceptual. Between its purposefully narrow sonic template, recirculated motifs, and disjointed lyrics about art and actualization, Yellow presents itself as an intricate puzzle box, one that probably reveals even more facets on vinyl, where its songs are spread out across four sides, creating new patterns to ponder. Naomi Punk have clearly put a lot of thought into constructing it. Now if only it were more interesting to engage with.


Latest from this eccentric sing-songwriter on Michael Gira's Young God label can be wondrous and wildly inventive as well as self-indulgent.

Parplar

Over the course of several self-released albums, Larkin Grimm has carved a niche for herself among the freak-folk contingent-- as an actual freak. In most cases, that's an ill-fitting, derisive label for today's folk revivalists. But Grimm, who was born in a Memphis commune, looks like a Dolce & Gabbana model, writes lyrics so raw they'd make Peaches blush, and cultivates a pagan earth mother/witch persona, would be unlikely to argue with it. As much as her public self and acoustic guitar-based music reveal genuine eccentricity (would Michael Gira have signed her to his Young God label otherwise?), Grimm is Yale-educated, well-traveled and no feral naïf. Indeed, her reworking of folk traditions and the roles women play in them share core concerns and strategies with early academic feminists and the deconstructive fiction of Angela Carter, who famously re-injected blood/sugar/sex/magic into the fairy tales of those other, Victorian, Grimms. As with Carter's fiction, Grimm's music, particularly in her latest, Parplar, can be wondrous and wildly inventive, as well as self-indulgent and, well, kinda icky.
Parplar's lead track, "They Were Wrong", is one of those thrilling numbers, a spooky portrait of loss and mental disintegration in which Grimm's voice develops a subtle shake through its stark four-minute run. "Anger in Your Liver", one of the short tracks clustered in the album's second half, is another simple composition with an aching vocal performance reminiscent of more mainstream Americana singers like Alison Kraus or Gillian Welch. Among the more eclectically arranged songs, the title track is a charming dish of bitterness served on a plate of whimsy-- Grimm's own tenacious "damn the man" lyrics serenaded by Ganges-river horns, slide whistles, and bubbly synthesizer patterns, and queasy, pitch-shifting. "How to Catch a Lizard" is weird (in large part due to Grimm's eerie double-tracked vocals), but effective. She can interpret folk standards just fine, too-- in the case of "Fall on Your Knees", as a twangy, Cajun barn dance.
But the album makes just as many awkward, even confounding, moves, and Grimm frontloads it with her creepiest cuts. "Ride That Cyclone", with its retro Western stylings and eye-rolling double entendres, is as catchy-- and gimmicky-- as a carnival tune. "Blond and Golden Johns" poses as some kind of feminist re-appropriation of the old whore archetype and is stained by bon mots like "I've been penetrated/ So I'm welcome everywhere I go", a line one-upped only by "Dominican Rum"'s "The microscopic spoiled eggs inside my uterus/ Are sparkling and bursting with the greenest yellow pus." Elsewhere, Grimm tosses off several "Huh?" remarks about acid rain and bus exhaust-- proving, if nothing else, that her somewhat anachronistic rhetoric isn't limited to sexual politics.
Sure, there's something to be said for risk-taking. Most folkies stick with the milk-safe, hoping to get by on the sweetness of their sounds, while Grimm serves sour with courageous gusto and humor. And Parplar is a beautiful, exciting-sounding record (coproduced by Grimm and Gira), exploding with banjo, fiddle, trumpet, accordion, dulcimer, and glockenspiel, among a score of other instruments. In fact, considering much of its lyrical content, it would be far better as an instrumental album.


Here's a record by a hip-hop emcee who spends half the album hunched over a guitar, daring to slum ...

Oaklandazulasylum

Here's a record by a hip-hop emcee who spends half the album hunched over a guitar, daring to slum it as a bedroom songwriter. As a member of Anticon-- the hip-hop collective that bleeds at will into other genres-- it's no surprise for Why? (born Jonathan Wolf) to mix in live instruments or write straight-up songs; he already matched guitar with beats on Miss Ohio's Nameless, and you could call his half of Split EP a kind of song cycle.
And yet every time I throw on Oaklandazulasylum it still sounds like the damnedest thing: surprising, confusing, and so wrong it's right. Ever since Why?, Odd Nosdam and Doseone cut their cLOUDDEAD full-length-- still their biggest claim to fame outside the hip-hop world-- they've been under the gun to cut records that are not only as fucked up as their breakthrough, but as fully-realized, albums where the artists drown you in their desparately individual voices, instead of just passing by in a flash of cleverness. For Why?, Oaklandazulasylum is the first disc since cLOUDDEAD that pulls it off.
Producers Odd Nosdam and Jel make guest appearances, but for most of the disc it's Why? who chops up song structure and shuffles arrangements from track to track, fine-tuning the music from every angle. And from the first song it sounds rich and original, with the guitar, simple percussion and blatting horns that start "Ferris Wheel" before it segues to beats and blippy electronics. Why? straddles both camps with total ease. The closest comparison I can make is to The Books' Thought for Food and its similarly organic (and gorgeously captured) mix of sample-based and acoustic music. Plenty of songwriters back their strumming with drum machines, but Why?'s not diddling with digital perfection: these are heavy, multi-layered beats, some lo-fi and crunchy and others high, bright and almost piercing.
On that note, there is a very slight downer, which is that Why?'s vocals may be hard for some to take, a nasal drawl that hits somewhere between Soul Coughing's M. Doughty and They Might Be Giants' John Linnell. I'm not a big fan of Doughty or Linnell myself; fortunately, Why?'s tone isn't nearly as extreme (and certainly not as quirky) as either, and was never enough to distract me from his most impressive performances, or this record's remarkable uniqueness.
Why? switches from rhythmic delivery to naked singing, sometimes on a dime. The slight nasal quality of his voice sounds so awkward that he can't help but play it up-- "Dream on Costelyou" sounds so unmelodic you can't even believe they let this guy sing-- but witness the brilliantly jerked-out delivery on "Early Whitney", where he treats the syllables like a set of steps to jog over. The almost grotesque, overdubbed harmonies at the end of "Weak Moon" sound so warped that they bend your eardrum, but they're perfectly on pitch, and when he turns to a genuinely tuneful voice later on, it doesn't come as a total surprise.
On technical terms this may be Why?'s best-realized recording, not to mention the most startling album Anticon has dropped this year. But the biggest surprise is how engaging it is-- and how much more you connect with Why? after hearing it. All of the cut-up collages and lo-fi tapes in his prior work were incredibly scattershot, full of distractions that kept his ideas from sticking around. I can think of more classic Why? lines than full Why? songs, let alone albums. But this record fleshes out the seemingly non-sequitor lyrics, and makes them resonate.
I've ribbed the Anticon artists for their habitual memoir-writing, which, coupled with their surreal left turns can become a non-stop emotional reveal-and-feint. This time, instead of just dropping clever lines about his dad, he writes "Afterschool America", a song so tuneful and lyrically rich it's difficult to imagine how he fit in everything in a minute and a half. Why?'s geeky personality becomes human, and when he states, "I'm not myself without my Challenger commemorative button on my brown down vest," I can picture the dorky kid who would obsess about a piece of clothing-- hell, I was that dork, too. When he spits out lines like, "Kissing me is a waste of your saliva," I can empathize with him for the first time ever.
The last few songs grow murky, and don't introduce much that we haven't already heard, and the second side definitely lacks the locked-together flow of the first, but Oaklandazulasylum succeeds where it counts. It's as major a step as you'd expect-- really, as you'd demand-- from someone like Why?, not only for its sheer inventiveness, but the continuity that turns these lyrical snapshots into moving portraits, of urban neighborhoods, half-understood women, and most of all, Why? himself, as a kid, a misfit, and an artist.


On her subdued debut album, the Tallahassee singer-songwriter constructs an eerie, beguiling world imbued with a supernatural charge.

Attachment Figure

When the physical world is stifling, the internet beckons. It’s a sinister trap, one Sarah Morrison knows all too well. On “This Sorry Day,” the second track off the Tallahassee singer-songwriter’s subdued debut album, Attachment Figure, she soundtracks a draining day online with—what else?—smooth jazz. “While you were out I caved to my kitty instinct/Turned my computer on,” she sings with tired resignation over a dampened piano. Soon, her boredom shifts to the kinds of manic thoughts that follow spending hours viewing people through a screen: “Makes me want to laugh at me/Makes me want to look at me/Makes me want to touch me,” she chants, her whispered soprano turned dark and dissonant. But then, without warning, a velvet cyclone of a sax solo lifts the song aloft and carries it through its raging climax.
Morrison has built an eerie, beguiling world in Attachment Figure, one where Southern fields, soft embraces, and bridal statues carry an air of unease, earthly treasures partly situated in an otherworldly plane. Album opener “Via Negativa” hints at this over sparse, dissonant chords, instructing us to recognize the divine through negation. “Could I get closer by knowing what love is not?” Morrison wonders quietly, before the track resolves its choral dissonance into major chords of religious bliss. On the indie-pop graveyard romp “Gray Apples,” the blurring divide between life and death becomes clearer as she walks with a light step among the graves of strangers, bounding synths tagging her spiritual questions: “What’s there to learn from those who’ve known the end?”
Whether singing a tricky lyric in patient time or turning out fluttering melismatic phrases, Morrison’s wispy, warbling voice remains soft and bare, even in the album’s heated moments, of which there are a welcome few. Through the repetitive pounding keys on album highlight “To Kill a Buzzard,” she shudders in anger at the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, killed in 2020 in South Georgia, a few hundred miles away from her home. The song’s frenetic pace slows into a taunting country bridge: “Do you sleep better little gunner/Like with a fake dreamcatcher above your headboard?” she sneers, the ironic twang of a pedal steel echoing her disgust. On “Mango,” Morrison similarly dips into disturbed affect after receiving a hateful message wishing her childless for one thousand years. “Thanks for looking out for me,” she chirps, adding that the letter has only emboldened an act of imagined revenge, “conceiving made-up children to replace and defeat you with such sweet revelating gladness,” her quivering hush giving way to cathartic shouts and clattering, disturbed guitar licks.
I wish Morrison leaned more into her capacity to spark these dark emotions, particularly after looking at the album’s credits; her producing partners, Ross Brand and Clayton Rychlik, played with her in Christina Schneider’s quirky synth-pop project Locate S,1, which Morrison has cited as an inspiration for her jazzier song structures. Likewise, while much of the album came from her interest in horror films and their corresponding soundtracks, some songs don’t fully pull off their intended haunting effect. The elegiac title track sounds more tired than fear-invoking and lacks a sense of urgency, padded with synths that fail to take off near the song’s end.
But not every contact with the dead needs to be terrifying, and Morrison excels at threading the ethereal plane with patient curiosity. On “La Pascualita,” she sings from the perspective of a Mexican folk legend, a shop mannequin so lifelike that some believe her to be an embalmed corpse. Speaking as the 90-year-old mummified woman, she implores her onlookers to recognize that beauty has a life cycle, just as all living things do: “People say if it dies then it wasn’t beautiful in the first place/But I was, oh, it was/Oh, I was,” she murmurs, sparsely backed by a carefully treading bassline. At the song’s end, Morrison’s voice glides and bends into quiet, spectred yelps. Summoning ghosts comes easiest to her at this moment, after having made contact with a tangible reality.


The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s debut album is an ambitious, bilingual record that hops between influences, echoing the liminal state of a 26-year-old immigrant in America.

Everlasting

Andrea Silva used to sing at funerals. Something about that bittersweet spectacle—as both a celebration of life and a gathering of grief—has never quite left her music. But that was years ago, when Silva was still a child growing up in Bogotá, Colombia, long before she moved to Los Angeles to escape the slut-shaming she endured in high school. Now, she makes music under the alias Loyal Lobos. She’s traded funeral hymns for synth-pop arrangements. And she’s found a way to marry the tough blow of a life left behind with the freedom that starting over allows.
On Everlasting, this freedom isn’t wasted. Silva refuses to fit into the sometimes narrow mold of singer-songwriters in the U.S., where a handful of women dominate a scene Silva once called, aptly, “very American and very white.” She tinkered with their sparse folk-rock on her 2018 EP The Fall before abandoning the limits of that genre for something else entirely: an ambitious, bilingual record that hops between influences, echoing the liminal state that comes with being a 26-year-old immigrant in America. Everlasting slips into this uncertain space and manages to thrive not in spite of it, but because of it.
Doing so meant letting go of some of Americana’s starry-eyed trappings. Some can still be heard on the album’s first single, “Criminals,” which balances the sad nostalgia of a time before meeting your platonic half with the addictive promise of their newfound love. When Silva’s voice swarms to the heavens, singing, “I’d kill for you,” it invokes a teenaged lust to evade the world’s rules together, her fingerpicked riff scoring the getaway. But on the rest of Everlasting, it sounds like Silva’s done running away from reality. Nearly a year after the longing “Criminals” was released, she’s leaning into herself more and opting for fun as an antidote to trauma. It’s a new kind of safeguard, heard in the whimsy of the album’s percussive pop elements—a surprise that only begins to make sense upon hearing that Silva landed Shawn Mendes’ hitmaker, Teddy Geiger, as her executive producer.
Traces of Silva’s upbringing in Colombia often illuminate these playful moments. Grand telenovela soundtracks, the dreamy haze of the countryside, and the machista culture that drove her away in the first place are all hinted at in experiments in shoegaze and reggaeton-reminiscent rhythms. It takes frisky songs like “Si Te Portas Mal (Be Bad)” and the Auto-Tuned “Papel” to break up the haze of Silva’s double-tracked vocals—a sonic shift that also seems to give way to more pointed language in her mother tongue. On “Si Te Portas Mal (Be Bad),” Silva reminds the guys that she’s a “perra, pero el alma baby/Entera,” or a slut whose soul is whole. This makes the lawless, cinematic slant of 2019’s “Criminals” feel schmaltzy in comparison.
That isn’t to say that the simpler balladry on Everlasting is without substance. When Silva quips on the record’s title track, “The stars are now aligned/L.A. people seem to care/Never got to see them/City lights over shine outer space,” you get a sense of a place back home where people can actually see the stars instead of just imagining them.
Yet this nimble songwriting is sometimes obscured—and not only purposefully, like it is by the sizzling feedback on “Whatever It Is” or the taffeta reverb of “You Were Bored.” Silva’s words have a tendency to coast loosely into each other, blurring entire sentences into one breathless slip. Hers is nothing like the crisp deadpan we get from L.A.’s Phoebe Bridgers, who Silva often gets compared to. That difference isn’t without its redeeming qualities, however. There is something powerful in this remnant of where she came from—an insular delivery in which the Spanish-language lilt of her motherland always makes itself known.

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Waxwork Records goes all out with its deluxe vinyl reissue of Ennio Morricone’s minimal score to John Carpenter’s The Thing—a 1982 box-office stiff that has only this century become a horror classic.

John Carpenter / Ennio Morricone: The Thing OST

The Thing OST

“The quintessential moron movie of the ’80s… too phony looking to be disgusting.” “About as impersonal as a movie can be.” “A great barf-bag movie.” “It qualifies only as instant junk.” Such was the critical consensus surrounding John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing, about a shape-shifting alien coated in “creamed corn, Jell-O, mayonnaise, microwaved bubblegum, and five-gallon pails of K-Y Jelly.” Opening the same weekend the world met a more benevolent beer-gut alien in E.T., The Thing was a box-office stiff at the time. Only in this century has pop culture thawed to its Antarctic plot. The Thing is now perceived as a classic of the paranoid Reagan era, and since bombing in theaters, the movie has led to a comic book, amusement park ride, action figures, prequel, video game, and Hugo-nominated short story.
After years of operating on shoestring horror movie budgets, The Thing gave Carpenter approximately $15 million for its gory effects and blustery locations. It also meant that—for the first time in a feature—Carpenter didn’t need to whip up his own score at the last minute. Unable to handle composing duties in addition to everything else The Thing required, Carpenter outsourced the music to the Maestro, Ennio Morricone.
Following decades of success in Europe and his iconic scores for spaghetti westerns, Morricone was only just making inroads into Hollywood. Despite having hundreds of credits to his name, Morricone’s scores remain instantly recognizable, be they the yips of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the stinging surf guitars of Danger Diabolik, or the romantic orchestral swells of The Mission. Watching the film when it screened at BAM a few years ago, it was startling when Morricone’s name emerged on the credits for The Thing—so minimal, restrained, and atmospheric is his score.
Waxwork goes all out with this deluxe vinyl reissue of The Thing, an exquisite package, right down to a breakaway “ice” slipcase. But those hoping to hear the telltale bum-bum that thuds throughout the film and chills the blood might be perplexed at first—those were instances where Carpenter and his frequent collaborator Alan Howarth added extra cues, and don’t emerge until late in the soundtrack. Instead, this reissue opens with Morricone’s “Humanity (Part 1),” a gossamer motif on violin and harp that appears nearly 20 minutes in, which then edges into a more foreboding low-end. It’s a stark piece, one as compositionally cold as the Antarctic landscape itself.
Revisit the film, and it’s the extra patina of electronics that remains most foreboding—the slow drones that make the skin prickle. (Cue the Thing’s arachnid emergence in the dog kennel and tossing a flare onto the tentacular Bennings, for instance.) At times, though, Morricone’s themes sound like the alien himself attempting to recreate Carpenter’s iconic analog synths. The relatively unmemorable “Shape,” with its bowed cello and brass, doesn’t bring to mind a particular scene from the film—nor does the frantic pizzicato of “Contamination.” And the bombastic lurches of “Bestiality” feel too pompous in the context of the minimalist film. Given that Morricone composed suites while only looking at an early rough cut of the film, it makes sense that his cues (some of which went unused) seem out of sync with the film’s frigid aesthetic. Separated from Carpenter’s Antarctic imagery, Morricone’s cues sound unfamiliar; one would be hard-pressed to recall their corresponding sequences.
Midway through, Morricone’s themes strike a balance between acoustic, human sounds and cold electronics. The strings of “Solitude” oscillate between anxious and vertiginous. Keys twinkle like melting icicles on the electronic-tinged “Eternity,” soon joined by a church organ line that seems to be perpetually in descent, ratcheting up the tension and creating a sense of the inevitable. A meandering synth piece, “Sterilization,” shows Morricone not altogether comfortable mixing these two distinct palettes together.
Only on “Humanity (Part 2)” do those forlorn electronic throbs emerge, paired with a desolate theme across woodwinds. It’s on this motif that the film’s frost-tipped dread is most closely felt—so it’s a shame that, after four minutes, it suddenly lurches back into an overstated organ theme. In emphasizing the seething electronics and excising all but crucial bits of Morricone’s original score, Carpenter proved that his vision for the film remained intact. History has bore that out and, unlike this original soundtrack, such barf bag junk has now attained its rightful place as a frightful horror classic.


Rapsody’s third record is a triumph. The North Carolina MC unlocks her full skillset and brings her creativity and ingenuity to the fore.

Eve

It was Nina Simone who said that “there’s no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.” North Carolina MC and budding star Rapsody has taken that lesson to heart. Her astounding third album, Eve, is a “love letter to all black women,” with 16 songs named specifically for her heroes, from Simone and Oprah Winfrey to Sojourner Truth and Afeni Shakur. As Rapsody asserts her black womanhood and places it within a broader historical context, she unlocks her full skillset and brings her creativity and ingenuity to the fore. This is the record where her top-tier status becomes undeniable.
Rapsody crashed through rap’s glass ceiling when her second album, 2017’s Laila’s Wisdom, was nominated for Best Rap Album at the Grammys. She lost to her friend Kendrick Lamar, but she helped kick open a door that had been closed to women since 1997. (Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy won the following year.) The case could be made that Laila, Rapsody’s grandmother, was simply the first woman in the rapper’s exhibition of strong women role models, one that also hinges on Ms. Lauryn Hill. “I didn’t know who Nina Simone was until I got into Lauryn Hill,” she told NPR. “In that sense, there would be no Lauryn Hill without Nina Simone, and without Lauryn there would be no me.” Rapsody carefully traces this heritage while making a clear-cut case for her place in it.
From Beyoncé’s Homecoming, which couched its ideas in conversation with Nina Simone, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Clark Sisters, Big Freedia, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison, to Jamila Woods’ LEGACY! LEGACY!, which honored forebears like Betty Davis, Zora Neal Hurston, Nikki Giovanni, Eartha Kitt, and Octavia Butler, to recent exhibitions like “Black Women: Power and Grace” and “Posing Modernity,” which consider the erasure of black women from art canon, it’s clear there is an uprising occurring: Black women have been demanding ownership of their outsized impact on culture. When holding these works on top of each other you can see the overlaps; a formative syllabus comes into shape. Eve name-checks Simone and Angelou in its tracklist. A song for Eartha Kitt simply didn’t make the cut. It expands the model to include athletes Serena Williams and Ibtihaj Muhammad, Michelle Obama and civil rights activist Myrlie Evers-Williams, models Tyra and Iman. Spoken-word homages from poet Reyna Biddy pull these icons into orbit around Rapsody, as she delivers the loosest, most captivating performances of her career.
Across Eve, she sounds more relaxed, surer of herself. On songs like “Whoopi” and “Iman,” she loosens her flow without losing her sharpness. A self-professed rapper’s rapper, Rapsody has been taut and inflexible in the past, almost as if having to force her immense talent to overcome a deck stacked against her. It sounds like she’s in a home-run trot on Eve. “Y’all banked on the wrong ones, wasted your energy/Lost more interest, got me laughin’ at my enemies/Every door you close, every back you turn/Can’t keep me away from the life I earned,” she snaps on “Cleo.” She sounds unstoppable and liberated, like no one can deny her what’s hers anymore.
Rapsody wields the namesakes on Eve not as reference materials but as stepping off points for considerations on colorist beauty standards, black capitalism, activism, and drive. She raps about being counted out, singled out, and fed up. “This ain’t E.T. news, I done went sci-fi/I’m closer to God, I done went sky high/Been alienated so much that I must be fly,” she gloats on “Aaliyah.” She’s locked in, he wordplay as clever as ever, but she also doesn’t feel beholden to past versions of herself. The updated model is multifaceted with catchier hooks, nimbler rhyme schemes, and a willingness to ad-lib.
They say you can’t teach an old super-producer new tricks, that a sample head will always remain stuck in the dusty soul loops he conjures, but 9th Wonder evolves with Rapsody here, perhaps out of necessity, as her raps continue to expand in force and scope. Alongside Eric G, Nottz, and Khrysis, the other in-house producers at his label, Wonder assists her in reaching new places. There is nothing faded about these beats, which are modern, rich in tone and texture. As an Uncle Luke sample ushers Rapsody forward on “Serena,” she uncorks syncopated cadences and brings out the work ethic she speaks of. “Nina” reclaims “Strange Fruit” from Kanye and “Afeni” channels Tupac’s “Keep Your Head Up,” as if unifying the Shakur family in its admiration of black women’s strength. Throughout the hour, Rapsody is striking this perfect balance between paying tribute and spreading her wings.
She is as comfortable trading bars with Leikeli47 on “Oprah” as she is Queen Latifah on “Hatshepsut,” both of whom make formidable sparring partners. But the message is one of inclusivity, of banding together to receive the respect that is long overdue. And it isn’t just about being acknowledged; it’s about taking a rightful place in the hierarchy. For Rapsody, specifically, that means being as respected as her male peers often spoken of as successors. She proves to be as much an inheritor of the Roc Nation legacy as J. Cole on “Sojourner,” as much of a student of Shakur doctrine as Kendrick on “Afeni.” As Rapsody salutes the heroes that are and were on Eve, her own reputation grows.


This contemporary classical pianist’s music proves more unsettling the more you disturb its placid surface.

Black Sarabande

Depending on what release you discovered first, you might have believed there were two different Robert Haighs operating in the UK during the 1980s and ’90s. There was the pianist and composer who worked with Nurse With Wound and released elegant modern classical albums like 1987’s Valentine Out of Season. But what to make of the Robert Haigh behind the neck-whipping jungle breakbeats of the Omni Trio, a force throughout the drum ’n’ bass era in the UK? As that project drew to a close in the early 2000s, the more contemplative side of Haigh reemerged with a string of contemporary classical albums. They made for a perfect fit for New York’s Unseen Worlds label; his 2017 album Creatures of the Deep slotted well alongside pianists new and old, ranging from “Blue” Gene Tyranny to Lubomyr Melnyk to Leo Svirsky.
Haigh’s Black Sarabande explores terrain similar to Deep, mixing gorgeous piano melodies with a patina of electronics. But where that previous album evoked the properties of water, Sarabande feels grounded. It draws on Haigh’s childhood memories of UK coal country and the hardscrabble “pit village” of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire where he was raised. There’s a heavy atmosphere to these 11 tracks, never wholly enveloped in blackness but always threatened to tip over into it.
The opening title track is hushed, provoking comparisons to Harold Budd or Erik Satie. Yet as Haigh’s struck keys hover in space, they turn slightly discordant, like a chill settling into the skin. “Stranger on the Lake” strikes a balance between piano and electronics to luminous effect, its melody shadowed by ghostly overtones. Midway through, the ambient haze swells, and when it finally recedes, the piece is suffused with harp plucks and electronics, making you feel like you’ve left one piece behind and emerged in another one entirely.
Black Sarabande’s calm surface proves illusory the more listens you give it. Struck piano wires startle the surface of the otherwise-placid “Wire Horses”; a gush of strings arrives and just as quickly disappears into the woozy, fluttering ambience of “Painted Serpent.” There are moments when Haigh’s playing verges on silence, so that if you’re listening on earbuds, you might hear your own footsteps through the snow more loudly than the music. The gorgeous and brief “Air Madeleine” sounds as if you’re walking around a frozen pond in the countryside and seated next to Haigh on the creaky piano bench all at once, as imaginary a landscape (and interior) as anything Brian Eno could have conceived.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Brooklyn producer’s debut album is filled with immersive, inventive reimaginings of dance music, flickering between ecstasy and decay.

We Could Stay

The music that opens M Wagner’s We Could Stay doesn’t fade-up as much as it lumbers into view. It carries a crackling sense of inevitability, as if you’re watching a shelf cloud advance on a city skyline. Suddenly, it’s upon you: An enormous four-chord vamp mangled by distortion and haunted vocal echoes, the song’s shimmering chimes playing around the edges. There’s a seductive elegance to the track’s destruction, like spending your final moments caught in a tornado, marveling at its power. In its last quarter, the noisy layers of “Release Yrself” fall away, leaving the softly glowing embers of a lullaby-like melody. Right when it feels light enough to drift off on the breeze, Wagner brings in a startling, stabbing trance synth, caking it with the blistering overdrive of a tape deck eating itself.
We Could Stay, the Brooklyn electronic musician’s staggering debut, artfully oscillates between moments of hypnotic bliss and jarring violence. Wagner keeps his programmed percussion as uncomplicated as possible, stripping house, garage, and techno down to the studs. His work isn’t at all minimal, though; the utilitarian grooves leave plenty of space, which Wagner fills with interlocking loops, infinitely repeating micro samples, and droning synths that shudder and spiral when agitated. There are shades of GAS and the Field here—Wagner’s an avid fan of ambient techno pioneers like Wolfgang Voigt and Biosphere—but rather than stretching towards an ever-distant horizon, his work operates in a much tighter radius. Some of the dreamier textures he employs could be traced back to Silver Liz, the psych-pop band he founded with his wife Carrie in 2016—he even samples Carrie’s vocals from Silver Liz’s “Terrapin” on We Could Stay’s title track. And despite economical run times, each track is a full journey, Wagner gleefully bending dance music tropes into unpredictable shapes. Inspect his wall of sound a little closer, and you’ll discover the thunderous roar cleverly hiding a pop sensibility.
One of the key aspects of Wagner’s compositional style is the gradual, almost imperceptible introduction of new elements. He often brings in a sample or instrument through a slow fade, so that by the time it’s prominent in the mix, you’ve forgotten what the song sounded like without it. “Marcy Av” starts with a solitary bass drum, and slowly evolves into a simple, swinging UK garage pattern—more DJ transition tool than album cut. As it shuffles along, a sine wave sequence flickers to life, metallic glitches form a melody, and a splashy breakbeat emerges—all funneling into the final detuned, richly harmonic chord.
The ghostly vocal samples on “Never Gone” bubble up so gently, it’s hard to tell if they’re actually there or if your brain’s working to make sense of the song’s cacophonous, shoegazing frequencies. Halfway through “Rome Generator,” you’ll suddenly become aware of the syncopated kicks, but rewind a little, and you’ll discover they’d initially appeared a full minute before, buried beneath a strobing keyboard. Throughout We Could Stay, Wagner pairs these subtle transitions with more traditional, gridlike techno structures, maintaining an alluring dichotomy between the celestial and the grounded. The record loses itself a little near the end, coming down from the neon-streaked jungle climax of “Thanks for Listening” with two ambient pieces that, while gorgeous, tread somewhat similar ground. But for the better part of its 41-minute runtime, We Could Stay is breathlessly thrilling—bruised, beautiful, and completely engulfing.


The New York experimental musician takes his own stutter as the starting point for an album that is both a theoretical investigation of speech dysfluency and a piece of resistance art.

The Clearing

JJJJJerome Ellis says, “For me, the stutter is a wild animal, and it is my ongoing practice to follow it where it wants to go.” The multi-instrumentalist, writer, and composer frequently lists “stutterer” among his disciplines, referring to his glottal block, an involuntary speech dysfluency that manifests in pauses while talking or reading. For Ellis, his stutter is simply a facet of his person—it only becomes an issue when faced with others’ expectations. But rather than try to suppress it, Ellis makes ample space for dysfluency in his life. He stylizes his first name as “JJJJJerome” because it’s the word he blocks on most often, and on The Clearing he brings speech directly into his art so that the stutter might make itself at home.
“I speak with a stutter, I am Black, and I am a musician,” Ellis begins on “Jede Krankheit ist ein musikalisches Problem,” laying out three intersecting elements of his identity. The Clearing began as an essay Ellis wrote for the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies titled The clearing: Music, dysfluency, Blackness and time. While writing about the use of Black music as a means of resistance against hegemonically white notions of time and fluency, he became curious about pairing the piece with an audible component. Against a backdrop of hip-hop, house, ambient, and jazz-inspired sounds—all musical forms with a strong Black identity—Ellis experimented with reading his words and sharing his experiences, taking full advantage of the aural medium. Any instance of a stutter became part of the work. “My thesis is that Blackness, dysfluency, and music are forces that open time,” he says in the opening “Loops of Retreat,” and the way the strings swell beneath his long pause between “Blackness” and “dysfluency” do just that, cracking open conventional notions of linearity. The Clearing is both a theoretical investigation and a piece of resistance art in itself, pushing back against societal expectations of performative fluency.
Ellis recorded himself speaking in a variety of situations to show how his glottal block can vary. He’s more likely to stutter while reading in silence and less likely when reading over music, due to a phenomenon known as masked auditory feedback, so passages of the essay are recited both ways. On a pair of tracks called “The Bookseller,” he records two calls he makes to Barnes & Noble. The first time, the words get stuck in his throat before getting out the title of the book he’s looking for, and the employee assumes the call has been dropped. They hang up. The second time, he prefaces the conversation by warning the clerk about his stutter, and he’s given the time to speak at his own pace. Later, on “Milta,” Ellis has a candid phone conversation with his mentor—someone that already knows about his stutter—and reads back to her a letter that she wrote to him. He still stammers, but sounds relaxed and unrushed, comfortable knowing he’s free of any expectation to speak quickly or smoothly.
Because of the unpredictable nature of his stutter, Ellis doesn’t consider The Clearing a finished work, simply one possibility among many. The likelihood of stuttering on different words lends the piece an infinitely indeterminate quality. During a live performance celebrating the album’s release, Ellis underscored that idea by reading a list of acknowledgements in the middle of the set. In a Q&A following the show he stressed that it was a deliberate choice to make that part of an ever-evolving composition, explaining that he stutters “more fully and more frequently when saying names, because there are no synonyms for names.” In other words, he can’t fall back on the ability to substitute a word he anticipates tripping up on.
There aren’t many representations of Black people that stutter in popular media. Ellis’ decision to end the album with “Punch Line,” presenting a joke by the late comedian Bernie Mac about his nephew with a stutter, is acknowledgement of a rare example of dysfluency being discussed in Black culture—but also an expression of the conflicting feelings it brings. The joke is not a flattering portrayal of stuttering. “I feel anger, I feel sadness, I feel ‘I don’t care,’” Ellis muses, while acknowledging his reverence for the comedy legend and admitting that he can’t help finding the joke a little funny. But The Clearing is an opportunity to amend the record and put something empowering out into the world. “As in all my work,” he says, “in this project I’m seeking healing.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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This groundbreaking and newly-reissued 1972 album is an excellent introduction to Mulatu Astatke, the inventor and sole exemplar of Ethio-jazz.

Mulatu Of Ethiopia

Just about a decade ago, amid the faded 1960s grandeur of Addis Ababa’s Ghion Hotel—Mulatu Astatke’s favorite spot for coffee—the man himself leaned over and asked, “What exactly is the Red Bull Music Academy?” This was after a wide-ranging interview about his career as composer and musician, traveling from the UK to the U.S. to Ethiopia and in between. Mulatu had been tapped to give a lecture in Canada, but he didn’t understand exactly why he was being asked to talk about his music—the bulk of which was recorded between 1966 and 1974—for a bunch of young people.
Originally released in 1972 and newly-reissued, the groundbreaking Mulatu of Ethiopia easily answers that question in under 30 minutes of adventurous, head-nod-inducing music that still sounds new today. These seven melodic tracks take the listener down moody rhythmic paths, all the while accompanied by organ, flute, horns, and Mulatu’s trademark vibraphone.
Born in western Ethiopia, Mulatu planned to study engineering. But upon moving to Wales, and later London, his field changed to music. He became the first student from Africa at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, focusing on percussion as well as vibraphone. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Mulatu recorded on trips to New York, working with a range of session musicians, many schooled in Latin rhythms; playing alongside Cubans and Venezuelans, he observed their experimentation. It sparked his desire to invent his own style, which he called “Ethio-jazz.” “I used the Ethiopian structures to create melodies, but instead of using cultural instruments, I used western instruments like the piano and the contrabass,” he once said. “I somehow created ways to use the Ethiopian modes, being very careful not to lose the feeling.”
Mulatu’s style—he really is the originator and sole exemplar of “Ethio-jazz”—is unmistakable. First, unlike most Ethiopian music of various traditional and contemporary genres, Mulatu doesn’t use vocals. He’s unique in his instrumentality, and his mix of styles was crucial. There is a clear ’70s funk influence at play—with the wah wah on “Munaye,” the driving tempo paired with rolling saxophone on “Chifara,” the floating flute on “Mascaram Setaba.” Afro-Cuban rhythms also appear on “Mulatu” and “Kasalefkut-Hulu.” And those familiar with the Ethiopian washint (flute) will recognize the different wind sounds on “Kulumanqueleshi.” It all joins the melancholic minor rhythm and handclaps, which are reminiscent of traditional Ethiopian Orthodox church music. The melodies, too, use the five-note-scale pentatonic mode common to Ethiopian music.
Though crate diggers developed an enthusiasm for Mulatu’s music in the early 1990s, wider acclaim occurred initially in Europe through the 1998 release of the fourth in the Francis Falceto-curated Éthiopiques series, entitled Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969–1974. A number of tracks from the compilation were then used in the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers (those paying attention will identify that the cinematic “Mascaram Setaba” appeared first on this record). But Mulatu of Ethiopia showcases perhaps the widest range of Mulatu’s talents—including jazz, funk, and what sounds like atmospheric soundtracking—and acts as an excellent initial entry into his catalog.
What is perhaps most significant about this reissue—and for this one needs to purchase the 3xLP set—is how it illustrates the process that went into the creation of Mulatu of Ethiopia. The CD and LP versions include the original stereo release and the pre-mix mono master, but the 3xLP gatefold set adds a whole other LP dedicated to the outtakes of four songs: three of “Mascaram Setaba,” three of “Kulunmanqueleshi,” two of “Kasalefkut-Hulu,” and an extra “Munaye.” These glimpses into the studio provide insight into the explorations that led to the final versions. Some outtakes place the wind instruments out front, others focus on the percussion. These are looser attempts that play with motifs and melodies.
Mulatu, however, is audibly the bandleader. Before laying out the rhythm and counting the band in on “Mascaram Setaba,” you can hear him arguing with the musicians: “No, no, no,” he says, telling the bassist exactly what he wants to hear. After a minute or so, he stops the music again: “Watch me for the chords, ok?,” he instructs. From this three minutes of tape, it’s quite clear that Mulatu knew exactly what he wanted in order to fulfill his concept of Ethio-jazz.
Since Mulatu’s 2007 lecture in Toronto, more and more people have become acquainted with the funky, atmospheric stylings of his Ethio-jazz. This has spurred Mulatu’s recent work, born of connections with London’s Heliocentrics and Boston’s Either/Orchestra. There has also between a rash of recordings sampling Mulatu, and for good reason. Nas, Damian Marley, K’naan, the Gaslamp Killer, Four Tet: all have added in bits and pieces of Mulatu’s music. If there’s one way to invigorate a style, it’s by drawing from the unique cadences of Mulatu Astatke’s inventive sounds, showcased on this 45-year-old classic.


On the follow up to her debut EP, Laurel Halo ditches conventional melody for dark, propulsive rhythms and lets her beats run wild.

Hour Logic EP

Last spring, Brooklyn electronic artist Laurel Halo's King Felix gained significant notice among fans of murky electronic pop. The EP secured official release by the end of the year through Hippos in Tanks, and the increased attention Halo was drawing made sense. King Felix prominently featured Halo's expansive vocal range (also exercised on Ford & Lopatin's Games-era cut "Strawberry Skies") doing curly-cues and loop-de-loops above beds of tickled, arpeggiated synths; the results recalled Dirty Projectors' disjointed acrobatics as much as the cosmic analog odysseys of Brooklyn pal Daniel Lopatin's Oneohtrix Point Never. As the electrifying cover art of the Hippos in Tanks re-release suggested, the music possessed a strange, swarming quality, originating at a central point and covering everything in its path.
King Felix sounded like a blueprint for something larger and more sweeping, a hint at greater potential not quite realized. But on Halo's latest EP, Hour Logic, she takes a sharp left turn, largely ditching anything that resembles conventional melody for dark, propulsive rhythms where her beats run wild. As heard here, Halo's version of dance music comes over as sterile and inert-- the beats are there, but they never coalesce into anything in particular. When they're not static (as they are on the constant drip of "Aquifer") they wind up lost in the clutter. She moves through some intriguing ideas-- the acid squiggles that surface near the end of the title track, "Speed of Rain"'s dewy beat-broken opening-- but there's a lack of momentum and the tedium disrupts Hour Logic's flow.
For all its relative experimentation, the EP's most impressive moment takes place during "Constant Index", which finds Halo's distant cries submerged in synth washes and long stretches of delay. It's no coincidence that Halo is at her best when returning to-- and refining-- the ideas presented on King Felix. So Hour Logic ultimately seems like an intermittently interesting misstep, a bold experiment that doesn't quite come off.


In a monumental one-two punch, Metallica set the blueprint for thrash metal and then gave the genre its worldview with its first two records—reissued in deluxe sets that feature alternate mixes, demos, and live shows.

Metallica: Kill 'Em All/Ride the Lightning

Kill 'Em All/Ride the Lightning

Without belaboring the point, some albums change the course of music so profoundly that it's hard to imagine what the world was like before their arrival. Metallica's 1983 debut Kill 'Em All more or less singlehandedly launched thrash metal and established the template for every other speed- or extremity-oriented metal band on earth that's been active since. You can split hairs about the key role played by fellow ground-floor pioneers Slayer and Exodus, and point out that Anthrax and Voivod had also already formed by the time Kill 'Em All was released. You could even argue that other bands were bound to reach the same threshold of tempo and attack because the early-'80s metal underground was collectively headed in the same direction anyway—i.e: getting faster and heavier and building on the work of Motörhead, Venom, Mercyful Fate, and others.
But the fact is, several key participants in thrash metal's first wave freely admit that Kill 'Em All gave them a framework for the sound they had all been searching for. In other words, once Metallica stepped up the pace, everyone else followed suit. Listening back through modern ears, it's almost like revisiting those first three Ramones records—you know this music shaped the world you live in, but since so many artists have added extra levels of intensity since then, there's no way to re-create the sensation of how revolutionary the music was during its time. Today, the sequencing sounds a little more abrupt, and a surprising share of the riffs fall closer to traditional Maiden/Priest-level heavy than outright thrash. But of course, there are moments—the crunching chugga-chugga riffs that propel songs like "Whiplash," "Metal Militia," for instance—where Metallica's sense of purpose crystallized, and it's easy to see why the band became known as such a genre-defining force right out of the gate.
That said, the question here is whether there's any justification for re-releasing a title that, for metalheads, is as much a "required listening" staple as Led Zeppelin's first album is for fans of classic rock. It's not like the original pressing of Kill 'Em All suffered from a muddy mix or anything—dated, maybe, but not anything that could be significantly improved upon via remastering. So if you already own this music, don't expect an improvement in sound quality. And if you don't own it, you may be asking yourself: do I need to pay top dollar to get the album plus several hours' worth of previously unreleased extras? For neophytes and—unfortunately, even for dedicated fans—the answer is: probably not. At first, all the extras look tempting—several complete live shows, demos and rough mixes, the "Jump in the Fire" and "Whiplash" singles (both of which come with the same two live b-sides, which was unnecessary), and an hour-plus long interview with drummer and lead mouthpiece Lars Ulrich. If the infamous band biopic Some Kind of Monster makes you cringe at the thought of spending upwards of an hour with Ulrich talking in your ear, his Q&A actually sheds a good deal of light on the early days of the band.
And, though the rough mixes vary in quality, the more fully-developed songs provide a startling new perspective on the material. Classics like "Motorbreath" and "Hit the Lights" actually sound fuller, meatier, and more vital. In this more organic form, the music breathes more. Apparently, the conventional wisdom of the time dictated that this sound was too crude for public consumption. But today, bands put a lot of effort into getting this kind of loose, raw sound on purpose. Now, we finally get to see that perhaps the final Kill 'Em All mix that the public got was too constricted, which makes sense given this music demanded a new approach to production values that hadn't been invented yet. But the new mastering job doesn't serve the main mix especially well. If anything, it only exposes the clenched and unnatural quality of the reverb that's applied to pretty much every instrument. Any time a vocal or snare hit rings out (like when frontman James Hetfield screams "PESTILENCE" on "The Four Horsemen"), the echo tail abruptly closes shut. If you were used to listening to this album on a shitty cassette or in a car or a noisy work environment, you probably never noticed. Here, the clunky gated reverb becomes the music's most noticeable feature.
As for the live material, it would be charitable to call it "bootleg quality." Not to mention that multiple rounds of pretty much the same songs get old pretty quick. The one thing that fans might hone in on is the historical value of early performances of material from the band's next album, 1984's Ride the Lightning. A January '84 performance of "Fight Fire with Fire" even includes a few bars of the song's delicate, classical guitar/Randy Rhoads-influenced intro played for real. (Later live shows featured the de-rigueur prerecorded version.) It must've been exciting to be in the room—as the band played on gear loaned by Anthrax after a Boston robbery, Hetfield explains with good humor to the crowd—but listening back is more an act of archaeology than enjoyment. Sure, it's funny and you can practically picture the acne when Hetfield shouts "Come on, I want you to scream louder than the fuckin' PA!" to the crowd. But unfortunately, it's difficult to discern the rhythm-guitar interplay between Hetfield and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett. For a more useful document of the band's original two-guitar dynamic, you're better off going to the seminal demo No Life 'Til Leather, which features fellow thrash architect/future Megadeth leader Dave Mustaine. (Hammett only played leads on Metallica's first five albums.)
The thuggish lyrics on Kill 'Em All updated Motörhead's roaming-pirate vibe for a younger generation of brash American kids, as reflected in lines like "The show is through, the metal's gone / It's time to hit the road / Another town, another gig / Again we will explode" from the headbanging anthem "Whiplash." Fueled by hatred for L.A. hair metal and a pop mainstream that the band never could have dreamed would embrace it eight years later, Kill 'Em All raised a middle finger in the air while sounding a trumpet of unity for metalheads everywhere with its us-against-the-world mentality. Now, of course, its youthful persecution complex seems silly and sophomoric.
But in fact, that attitude seemed silly even by 1984, when Metallica released Ride the Lightning and pretty much left its youthful naivete behind for good. Yes, Hammett and late bassist Cliff Burton's fascination with comic books and Dungeons and Dragons-style fantasy rears its head on "The Call of Ktulu," but on Ride the Lightning the band no longer comes across like a street gang but like a group of frightened young men using their hellacious sound as a shield against life's unsettling realities.
Ride the Lightning addresses capital punishment, death, suicide, and nuclear annihilation—basically, the array of concerns that would become metal's standard lexicon. Musically, the album represents the moment where thrash intersected with prog, thus raising the bar on technicality, structure, chops, and ambition. Its combination of broadened perspective and elevated musicianship arguably mark it as the point where metal as a whole graduated from goofy adolescent expression to an artform that could speak to thinking adults and nourish listeners long after they grew out of its primary demographic age group. In short, Ride the Lightning is the moment where metal developed a worldview. After Ride the Lightning, thrash turned into an arms race of ever-increasing technical proficiency.
Again, though, did an album of such iconic stature that has gone multiplatinum even warrant a deluxe repackaging? This new expanded edition out-does the Kill 'Em All reissue with more live shows (including a 1985 Castle Donington appearance), the whole album's worth of demos and rough mixes and even more audio interviews, this time featuring Burton and Hammett. Again, though, the quality of the live recordings is spotty at best. The band trainwrecks right from note one, for example, on a March '85 rendition of "Fight Fire with Fire." There's a fine line between warts-and-all charm and embarrassing fiasco that should stay in the vault, and this collection all too often leans more toward the latter. Even in cases where Metallica's formidable live chops come across, the sound quality leaves a lot to be desired. You have to think that if better-quality recordings existed from this time period, the band would have gotten its hands on them and released those instead.
There's no denying the incalculable impact of either of these albums, and it certainly doesn't hurt to have an excuse to pull them off the shelf again. And sure, obsessive completist/collector types will find a lot to sink their teeth into here. But for pretty much anyone else, other than the demos and rough mixes, these sets offer quantity over quality. Not to mention that it's irritating and confusing to navigate the difference in content between the vinyl, cd, and ultra-deluxe sets. Even the fairly dedicated fans who'd enjoy tracing Metallica's development as a live act during these two key stages will likely be disappointed here and are advised to steer clear and try YouTube instead.