The Canadian producer laces glow-worm synths and house beats with vocal snippets culled from indie-folk gems and Billboard hits.

Sd-2

Toronto-based producer Loukeman’s winsome dance tracks are an elevated take on the cheeky DJ edits and remixes that litter the annals of his longstanding SoundCloud account. He plucks vocal earworms out of folk, pop, and R&B songs, bending them into familiar yet malformed shapes that titter mysteriously at the margins of his booming house beats. As in the work of Todd Edwards, it’s not so much what Loukeman’s unwitting guest stars say as it is how they say it: the timbre of an errant syllable, the percussive musicality of a phrase repeated until it fractalizes. Since his 2021 debut, Sd-1, he’s earned cosigns from Vegyn and Jacques Greene. His latest album, Sd-2—the second of a planned trilogy—is more of an expansion pack than a sequel, a fresh suite of wistful trinkets that slot seamlessly alongside their predecessors.
Loukeman’s identifiable samples offer an answer key to his inspirations. He regularly pulls from intimate, romantic performances, using their pleading registers to lend even his highest-energy tracks a bittersweet edge. Sd-1’s “Shadowww” is instructive in this regard, flipping the weary strums of Lomelda’s “Hannah Sun” into an easygoing, uptempo groove that belies torrents of feeling. Sd-2 is quick to draw from this same emotional playbook: Album opener “Baby You’re a Star” complements folkish acoustic riffs with the sonorous vocal runs of Mario’s “Let Me Love You,” chopping and stretching his libidinal cries into abstract warbles. “Winzzz” uses the distinctly robotic, chattering artifacts of stem separation to great effect as it strips PARTYNEXTDOOR’s “The News” down to a single echoing chorus—Do you deserve me? No way—illuminated by a glowing bassline.
Part of Sd-2’s charm is the plasticity Loukeman wrings from his fairly defined style. While he clearly knows what he likes, he’s not afraid to introduce new, off-kilter elements, throwing well-adjusted ears into disarray. “Ride”’s strobing synth lines are supplemented with furious drum breaks and bed squeaks that override the track’s chipmunk vocal squeals with manic, indulgent irreverence. The same anything-goes spirit creeps into Loukeman’s erratic DJ sets, where you’ll catch him mixing synthwave instrumentals into Chief Keef or playing the Shins’ “New Slang” atop a thundering techno beat. When “Real Life Man” whirls together acid-house toplines, chalky guitars, and the plaintive lead of Bryson Tiller’s “Exchange,” the cocktail is both patently ridiculous and effortlessly cool.
If Sd-2 has a fault, it’s that its general breeziness feeds into a subtle but pervasive reticence. Songs plateau rather than peak, lounging in moody states that conclude with little fanfare. Not every piece needs a defined rise and arc, especially in a dance context; Loukeman plays to this angle by emphasizing his production chops, embroidering subtle background details and stutters that jump out on repeat listens. But the unfocused compositions become a problem as the album slips into a comfortable, anodyne lull in its back half, splitting time between interludes and longer tracks that both invoke atmosphere without resolution. On a better-paced project, a small song like “Won’t U” might have a real purpose as a breather between set pieces; instead, its operatic, thrumming synthwave swells ebb into filler. Though the case for Loukeman’s raw talent is airtight, Sd-2 doesn’t quite transcend his worst habits. Even so, it remains a compelling, if occasionally insubstantial, document of an emerging artist with undeniable presence.


Newly reissued and remastered, the Gallagher brothers’ 1998 B-sides collection remains a smartly curated, thoughtfully sequenced set that stands among their finest work.

Oasis: The Masterplan (Remastered Edition)

The Masterplan (Remastered Edition)

The Masterplan poses one of the great “what if?” scenarios in rock history. What if Noel Gallagher had saved all the A-side-worthy B-sides he was cranking out between 1994 and 1997 for a proper Oasis album? What if they had released that batch of songs as their third full-length instead of the overblown and underwhelming Be Here Now? What if, instead of sounding Britpop’s death knell, Oasis’ third album kept the party going into the new millennium, thereby negating the need for dejected fans to take solace in Travis and Coldplay? Who knows, maybe Oasis still would’ve traveled up their own arse en route to “All Around the World” anyway, but at least that indulgence would’ve felt a little more earned.
Be Here Now didn’t exactly derail Oasis’ career—we should all be so lucky to flop at 8 million copies sold—but the album effectively fast-tracked the band’s transition from zeitgeist-shaping force to heritage act. (The stats don’t lie—15 years into their career, Oasis were still pulling two-thirds of the setlist from the Definitely Maybe/Morning Glory era.) So when B-sides compilation The Masterplan arrived a year after Be Here Now’s big boom and bust, it effectively dumped salt onto a still-fresh wound. And to this day, it stands as a taunting totem to what Oasis’ third album could’ve been. “The Masterplan should have been Be Here Now, and Be Here Now should have been a bunch of B-sides,” Noel admitted in a 2019 interview. “Somebody should have been fucking bright enough to stand up and say: ‘You can't fucking put these out as B-sides, you’re fucking mental’… The one major regret I have in my professional life is I wasn’t aware enough.”
As such, UK fans could be forgiven for thinking The Masterplan was just a cash grab, a hastily assembled collection of B-sides that were already widely available on CD singles, some barely a year old. But in North America, The Masterplan was a crucial act of fan service. In the ’90s, the stateside singles market had been all but snuffed out by a music industry that had conditioned consumers to pay $23.99 for a full album to get the one or two songs they liked. By contrast, fans in the UK were receiving a steady stream of singles every few months, accompanied by B-sides that formed an entire parallel shadow discography to the popular favorites. But The Masterplan had no designs on being a comprehensive collection of Oasis castaways. Rather, it’s a smartly curated, thoughtfully sequenced set that can stand proudly on the shoulders of the band’s unimpeachable first two albums. (The fact that this reissue/remaster contains no additional tracks or alterations suggests an undying respect for its original form.)
The Masterplan instantly validates its existence by promoting the band’s most beloved B-side into the momentous album opener it deserved to be. Originally appearing on the stopgap “Some Might Say” single released between Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory, “Acquiesce” is the ultimate Oasis song: a sibling rivalry in musical form, a dramatic title-fight showdown between Liam’s swagger and Noel’s sweetness that sees the brothers trading verses and choruses instead of insults and fisticuffs. After Noel had ceded all lead vocals to Liam on Definitely Maybe, “Acquiesce” was the first real sign that the elder Gallagher wasn’t just the silent tunesmith communicating via his brother’s megaphone wail: He was an equally vital voice within the songs as well.
Given that Noel was the one entrusted with writing all the B-sides, often when no other bandmates were around, it’s no surprise that The Masterplan features a higher ratio of Noel-sung tunes than any other Oasis album. And since Noel knew he could never out-snarl his brother, he carved out a lane as the humble counterpoint to Liam’s cocksure charisma. His Masterplan turns are by the far most tender tunes here, and in the greater Oasis discography for that matter: “Half the World Away” (reportedly Paul Weller’s favorite Oasis choon) and “Going Nowhere” exude a Bacharach-esque elegance that’s defiantly at odds with this band’s lager-lout reputation, while the string-swept solemnity of “The Masterplan” manages to expand Oasis’ musical and emotional vocabulary without tipping the scales into Be Here Now-level bombast.
There are several other fine B-sides in this vein that were excluded from The Masterplan, probably because, at a certain point, an Oasis record with too many ballads and acoustic serenades wouldn’t really feel like a proper Oasis record anymore. The Masterplan’s sensitive turns are balanced by corkers like “Headshrinker,” which sounds like Oasis pummeling the Faces’ “Stay With Me” until it resembles Raw Power. That said, they could’ve easily swapped the bloozy “Swamp Song”—an elongated version of Morning Glory’s mid-album interstitial—and their droning distension of the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” for snappier selections, like the joyous brassy “Round Are Way” or the early rave-up “Alive,” the closest this band ever got to shoegaze. But if The Masterplan’s murky midsection reminds us that aimless jamming was never this band’s strongest suit, the album is ultimately a testament to Noel’s fine-tuning skills. Just as T. Rex could rewrite “Bang a Gong” as “Telegram Sam,” and the Kinks could clone “You Really Got Me” into “All Day and All of the Night,” Noel was a master at refreshing his winning formulas: Surely, there’s a parallel universe where “Talk Tonight” is a karaoke anthem on par with “Wonderwall” (right down to the similar “you saved me” sentiment), and if you’re sick of hearing “Supersonic” for the millionth time, soundalike sibling “Listen Up” is there for you the next time you want to do it with a doctor on a helicopter.
But even when the songs sound the same, their perspectives tend to shift: If Definitely Maybe’s iconic opening track, “Rock and Roll Star,” was like Oasis’ version of The Secret—a self-fulfilling prophecy of imminent success—then “Fade Away” is its equally energized but spiritually dejected flipside, a vision of an alternate timeline where the Gallaghers’ arena-conquering aspirations gave way to day jobs. “While we’re living, the dreams we had as children fade away,” Liam cautioned, back at a time when Oasis’ destiny had yet to be written. But if that song was born of a hardscrabble past they’d never have to revisit, by 1998, it spoke to a different kind of lost idealism. At the time of The Masterplan’s release, all of Oasis’ dreams were made—even after the critical drubbing they took for Be Here Now, they were still the biggest band in Britain. As the subsequent decade of diminishing returns would show, even if Oasis’ rock-star dreams never faded, the hunger and passion that fuelled those fantasies—and, by extension, these songs—certainly did.


Fronted by the Irish troubadeur Conor O'Brien, Villagers start with humble folk and build outward with daunting orchestral arrangements and subtle electronics. The band's second album is filled with big ideas and sentiments.

{Awayland}

Conor O'Brien earned comparisons to the likes of Conor Oberst, Damien Rice, and Glen Hansard on Villagers' 2010 debut Becoming a Jackal, and they were deserved on a musical level: as with Bright Eyes, the Frames, and Rice's solo work, Villagers start with humble folk and build outwards with daunting orchestral arrangements and subtle electronics. Implicit in those comparisons is the assumption of O'Brien as a similarly young old-soul, a world-weary troubadour who lives to fight an eternal struggle: How does one convey the truth to the listener without sounding like a pedant, or worse, a fool? Success is typically achieved in a way that parallels the expansive demeanor of the music: starting with the knowledge that everyone is at the very least an expert on their own experience, and using your own truth to project outwards towards larger ideas. That's where O'Brien breaks rank, as Villagers take the opposite approach on the occasionally charming but mostly frustrating {Awayland}, an album which too often has big ideas and little proof of how he arrived at them.
The charms are there, though. O'Brien's voice is expressive and controlled, hitting every quiver and quaver just right and there's an astringent, citric quality that allows the smallest amount to pierce through. His tone rarely rises above a conversation, yet it always manages to forefront itself no matter how grand the arrangements get behind him. And they certainly are grand, or at least the sound that Mercury Prize nominations were made for, folk-rock earthy and glossy as a gemstone, but grounded in an earnest presentation that counters any temptation to call it "slick." He's claimed the influence of film composers such as Lalo Schifrin, which mostly manifests in strings pulling all sorts of dips and derring-do over tense, tight minor chord progressions. (My guess is O'Brien would be disappointed if the two-minute instrumental that bisects {Awayland} was described as anything other than "cinematic.")
{Awayland} demonstrates admirable range in more traditional formats: "The Waves" is genuinely surprising, evolving from Morse code blips to a satisfying, frothy climax of distorted guitars, while "Nothing Arrived" situates a pat lyrical resolution ("I waited for something/ and something died/ so I waited for nothing/ and nothing arrived") amidst easygoing pianos and acoustics like a wordy rendering of Travis ca. 12 Memories. O'Brien does have a knack for melodies that hit squarely, but too much of {Awayland} prides itself in lyrical misdirection that renders his tunefulness an afterthought.
The misappropriated ambition is charming in an undergrad sort of way, and believe me, it will find an audience as long as college kids rubber-stamp indie-folk with poetic pretensions and the authenticity assumed from an Irish accent. O'Brien prefers giving his songs titles and choruses that are declarative ("Judgment Call", "Earthly Pleasure", "In a Newfoundland You Are Free") and images that suggest permanence-- trees, waves, and guns as loaded metaphors. And they often come across as trenchant out of context, such as "The Waves", which claims "one man's innocence is another's chance" in a way that overstates its profundity. Likewise, any one of these fragments from the unconvincingly sinister "Passing a Message" could evolve towards an insightful conclusion, but O'Brien structures his stories like Jenga puzzles, a lattice of solid pieces that feel intentionally and ultimately fated to crumble once shared: "I was carving my name out of a giant sequoia tree/ I was blind to its beauty now it's all I can see/ I learned how to listen to the folks on TV/ They are passing a message that means nothing to me."
"The Bell" is paradoxically the most overt demonstration of the strangely smug tone, an inverse "Bigmouth Strikes Again" that tries to find humor out of having nothing new to say. It is also a song about the futility of communication that is five minutes long and features lyrics like "there is a passenger in every useless word/ can never be twisted or sold/ senator of my skin/ a body of discipline/ must be a million years old." An extremely kind reading of it would be required to believe lines like the aforementioned are supposed to be self-deprecating, an intentionally purple exaggeration. Especially in light of a confession like "there's a sleeping dog under this dialog/ obedient only to rhyme/ but if I could beckon her/ if I could find the words/ all they would be is lies," which comes off like more of a boast than apology. To its credit, {Awayland} rarely comes across as false, but O’Brien's affinity for cleverness over clarity ensures it rarely comes across in any real way.


After brushes with extroversion, the final installment of their EP series finds singers Sarah Martin and Stuart Murdoch turning inward with songs that take you inside its characters’ private lives.

Belle and Sebastian: How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 3

How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 3

On the first two editions of their EP trilogy, How to Solve Our Human Problems, Belle and Sebastian catalogued all manner of psychological stressors, from the fear of aging into irrelevance (“Sweet Dew Lee”) to parental pressures (“I’ll Be Your Pilot”) to soul-crushing despair over the state of the world (“The Girl Doesn’t Get It”). But on the final song on this final installment, they explore the root—and remedy—of all these maladies. Amid the ’60s girl-group throwback track “Best Friend,” singers Stuart Murdoch and guest Carla Easton momentarily defuse the song’s cheeky exuberance with a sobering admission: “It’s only human not to want to be alone.” As the band’s principal songwriter, Murdoch has always waded into a maelstrom of unrequited desire and emotional isolation. And in light of the political unrest that has gradually seeped into Belle and Sebastian’s intimate, sepia-toned universe, that need for interpersonal connection has become less a matter of happiness than survival.
But as Murdoch admitted in a recent interview, his dalliances with more topical songwriting are on the wane: “I’m no Billy Bragg, that’s for sure,” he quipped. Fittingly, How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 3 feels insular—it’s more interested in taking you inside its characters’ private lives than exposing them to the outside world. The musical extroversion of recent Belle and Sebastian remains: as “Poor Boy” tries to mend its protagonist’s broken heart with a shoulder-rubbing Tom Tom Club bounce, Sarah Martin wields her gilded disco-diva hook like a dagger. (“Poor boy, I could never live up to your imagination/Poor boy, I was a crush that killed.”) But while Belle and Sebastian have been spending more time on the dancefloor of late, they inevitably retreat to the bedroom. The folksy acoustic serenade “There Is an Everlasting Song” is the sort of rainy-day rumination that would be right at home on If You’re Feeling Sinister, as it twists optimistic affirmations into ominous threats: “There is an everlasting sadness all around/It’s bigger than the news, from this you cannot run/A woman’s magazine, a column in the Mail can’t help you now.”
On early Belle and Sebastian records, Murdoch-sung lullabies like “There Is an Everlasting Song” dominated. Here, it’s a rare moment when his vocals aren’t intertwined with Martin’s, who’s gradually outgrown her auxiliary-singer status to become a defining feature of the band’s sound. At this point, she’s come to represent more than just Murdoch’s foil, but his conscience as well. The first volume of How to Solve Our Human Problems closed with the slackadasical group sing-along “Everything Is Now”—and if it felt like little more than the backing track for an unfinished song, well, that’s because it was. On Pt. 3, we get the vastly superior sequel “Everything Is Now (Part Two),” which uses the original’s gently swaying rhythm as the springboard into an increasingly dramatic orchestro-pop showdown between Murdoch and Martin where they seem to interrogate the very idea of writing about love through a male gaze. “Melody, my greatest friend, be comforted to know I need you more,” Murdoch sings wistfully, to which Martin bluntly retorts: “I am not an idea, I’m not a melody.”
When the How to Solve Our Human Problems series was first announced last fall, Murdoch expressed his desire to shake up Belle and Sebastian’s usual recording and release strategies. But with the band successfully upgrading “Everything Is Now” from its most frivolous song to one of its more probing, you have wonder if they ultimately would’ve been better off whittling down the EPs’ 15 tracks into a tight 10-song album. Like each of the previous installments, Pt. 3 is a hodgepodge of stunning standouts that boldly push the band into new territory, quality comfort-food callbacks to their late-’90s classics, and middling turns that could’ve been easily excised (in this case, “Too Many Tears,” which oversells the ironic distance between its lovelorn lyrics and jubilant jangle-soul arrangement and winds up running in circles). Belle and Sebastian have a history of eagerly welcoming fans into their creative processes, so it only feels right to honor that tradition: We may be no closer to alleviating the collective anxieties chronicled on these EPs, but at least some problems are easier to solve than others.


M.C. Taylor’s fourth full-length as His Golden Messenger mixes regional folk and country traditions with strains of rock and R&B, striking a tone of convivial toil. William Tyler and members of Megafaun and Mountain Man contribute.

Hiss Golden Messenger: Lateness of Dancers

Lateness of Dancers

M.C. Taylor is working for the weekend. “When Satuday comes, I’m gonna rock my soul,” he promises on Lateness of Dancers, his fourth full-length as Hiss Golden Messenger. “I might get a little crazy, I’m gonna drink some whiskey.” As the piano pounds out an insistent bundle of chords and the guitars carouse and stumble against one another, Taylor draws out that last word, savoring the syllables as though they’re the only thing getting him through the week. The song is less about raising hell and more about chucking your woes aside, unburdening yourself of your trouble and finding precious freedom in merriment.
Harvest is the general theme of Lateness of Dancers, not only marking one season’s labor to ensure survival through the next but also celebrating that work with a bit of whiskey and soul-rocking. Mixing regional folk and country traditions with strains of rock and R&B, these songs strike a tone of convivial toil. Taylor has been working in the music business for nearly twenty years: first in the hardcore band Ex-Ignota, later with the San Francisco outfit the Court & Spark, and most recently and most productively as Hiss Golden Messenger.
Lateness of Dancers, named for a Eudora Welty short story, marks a transition commercially, if not creatively: Taylor’s first three albums were issued by North Carolina upstart Paradise of Bachelors, but this new one is his first for Merge. Taylor may have recorded these songs well before he signed that contract, but compared to previous albums, the arrangements on Lateness are airier, the tempos bouncier, the playing brisker. Largely absent from Lateness of Dancers, however, is the uncertainty that frayed the homespun Bad Debt (recorded at Taylor’s kitchen table), the prodigal rambling that mapped out Poor Moon, and the spiritual inquisition that made Haw one of the hardiest country records of the decade. These songs are more about the reward that a Saturday provides.
At times Lateness of Dancers may sound too light, but after so many albums made during and about crises of faith, that tone is not unappealing. Taylor invited some of his North Carolina neighbors to back him on these songs, including guitarist William Tyler, brothers Phil and Brad Cook from Megafaun, Mountain Man’s Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, and occasional Messenger member Scott Hirsch. They give the lightness of Dancers a real-stakes feel. On the would-be AM radio hit "Lucia" and the holler epic "Day O Day (A Love So Free)", the rhythm section in particular instills these songs with a not-quite-carefree spryness that sounds more like Memphis than North Carolina—but generally, they sound charmingly unrehearsed, as though they’ve simply gathered on someone’s back porch for the evening. There’s even a chorus of crickets in the interlude between the title track and “I’m a Raven (Shake Children)”.
Even when things turn dark, the music sounds unbowed. “The misery of love is a funny thing,” goes “Mahogany Dread”. “The more it hurts, the more you think you can stand a little pain.” Yet Taylor’s delivery is not anguished—more curious than rueful about the travails of romance—and when Hirsch’s organ and Tyler’s Stratocaster take over on the coda, that little pain actually sounds inviting, perhaps even a reward in itself. For some listeners, especially those who might discover Hiss Golden Messenger through this Merge debut, this persistently breezy tone may render the songs inconsequential, and certainly Lateness lacks the gravity of its predecessors.
But that just means this album sounds best in the context of the Hiss Golden Messenger catalog—as a comment on and a celebration of the spiritual and creative toil on the previous albums. It's a much less private record than what came before; in fact, Taylor relishes the company of his fellow Tarheel musicians. “I beat my drum, everybody to come running,” he sings on closer “Drum”, a new recording of a song that he first set to tape years ago. On Bad Debt, it sounded like a quiet folk manifesto, as though he was laying out plans for a new chapter in his career. On Lateness, the song has the feel of fellowship, although not merely because the band elaborate on his sentiments with fiddle, tambourine, and banjo. Taylor sounds like a country preacher greeting parishioners as they leave the sermon some bright Sunday morning, bidding each of them to “take the good news, spirit it away.” He no longer carries the burden alone; we all shoulder it together.


Two early documents from Modest Mouse are reissued on Isaac Brock's Glacial Pace imprint, offering a portrait of a very young band with a lot of promise.

Modest Mouse: Sad Sappy Sucker / The Fruit That Ate Itself EP

Isaac Brock and his friends were teenagers when they wrote the songs on Sad Sappy Sucker. Think about the shitty poems you wrote when you were young (I have one that plagiarizes Green Day's "Longview"!) and then listen to the splintered and elusive songs collected on this Modest Mouse release. Clearly, Brock had a head start on seeing things differently from the rest of us.
That is one of the more profound takeaways from the so-called Great Lost Modest Mouse album, a 24-track collection of occasionally brilliant odds and ends that was spared the fate of being the band's introduction to the world. Delays forced them to move on and record This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About before Sad Sappy Sucker could be released. From a historical vantage point, they lucked out-- Sucker has its moments, but they would take a quantum leap from here to This Is a Long Drive.
Nonetheless, a few facets of Modest Mouse's unmistakable sound glint through on these songs, recorded with Calvin Johnson for K Records. There are those eerily pinging bent guitar harmonics, for one, a noise that sounded entirely alien at the time, as well as the way the guitar and bass circled warily around each other without locking, two halves of an endlessly spiraling argument. Jeremiah Green was already an astoundingly talented drummer, one who could fill every inch of available space without overwhelming Brock's harmonically simple songs.
And Brock-- well, first of all, he sounds astoundingly young. His lisp, which would grow a little less noticeable over time, is almost painfully pronounced on Sad Sappy Sucker-- "Mice Eat Cheese"'s title is rendered "mithe eat cheethe." His singing is frail and nervous, and the words are often obscured by mumbling. The lyrics that do surface are like little placeholders for all of Brock's future lyrical obsessions-- "you can see that birds and worms don't get along," in "Worms Vs. Birds"; "Looks like accounting's not accountable for anything or anyone at all/ Jonny took the fall," he yelps in "Race Car Grin You Ain't No Landmark". The ringing opening guitar figure for "It Always Rains on a Picnic" would pop up almost unchanged on *Long Drive'*s "Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset"-- in fact, the former song sounds like a dry run for the latter. It's absorbing listening, but hardly consequential.
When Sad Sappy Sucker first saw release in 2001, on the heels of the monumental The Moon & Antarctica, it felt more like a yellowing sketchbook of curiosities bequeathed to diehard fans than a proper album. Nine years later, now on Brock's Glacial Pace label, it still feels that way. It's being reissued at the same time as the 1997 EP The Fruit That Ate Itself, and taken together, you get a pleasantly bracing aerial view of a young band's gradual development. The Fruit That Ate Itself has some of the band's most abrasive moments-- the title track, in particular, is harrowing, just a descending bassline and Brock's screaming his unhinged napkin poetry ("Take a drive in the wrong hand lane/ Got bad breath talking about fresh rain") until he's hoarse. But it also had the first hints of the band's fascination with sound effects and overdubs-- the skirling backwards guitars that show up repeatedly point to the frozen-tundra ambience of their later works.
Brock and his bandmates didn't alter a thing for these reissues; there are no bonus tracks, no new songs. Neither of them is an essential Modest Mouse release, but if they provide anything new to us in 2010, it's a useful window back into the pre-Internet era of indie rock. The songs on Sad Sappy Sucker dribbled their way out into the world on 7"s and compilations-- 500 or 1,000 people bought them, and that was exactly the right audience for the music. Modest Mouse then moved on to the next project, honing their voice. In the Internet hothouse, improving your way into a larger audience is a more fitful, lurching affair, one that often happens in combustible bursts. For a young, unsteady group like Modest Mouse, being able to kick around the Pacific Northwest while working on their songwriting feels crucial to their development-- they had a long way to go from Sad Sappy Sucker to The Lonesome Crowded West and The Moon & Antarctica, and it's hard to imagine they would have gotten there the same way today. Obscurity smarts, but sometimes it can be a useful cocoon.


Halifax punks kick out the jams with plenty of distortion on their exhilaratingly rowdy second full-length.

Weekend Rocker

It’s nearly impossible to decipher what Booji Boys singer Alex Mitchell is screaming most of the time. According to the five-piece Halifax band, their songs deal with “fun in the sun, the class war, and shameful fantasies.” Really, though, that’s beside the point. Lyrics aren’t necessarily a top priority when making a great punk album. What’s important is the energy, the barely-controlled noise, the sheer thrill of hearing someone validate your pent-up friction—and in this, Booji Boys excel. On Weekend Rocker, their second full-length, they continue to make music that burns as wildly as an overflowing ashtray at an erupting basement party.
The band, whose cited influences span ’70s punk and classic rock acts from Dead Boys to Creedence Clearwater Revival, have been grouped by some into a mostly Midwestern mini-genre dubbed Devo-core. That’s fair enough, given that their band name references an iconic character from Devo’s satirical new-wave mythology. In fact, though, the group’s origins in the tight-knit Halifax DIY scene among peers like Grump and Alienation have given them a sound that’s closer to brash hardcore with a catchy twist. “Most of the other bands we’ve been in have been straight-up hardcore or d-beat bands, so Booji Boys was our attempt at making pop songs, I guess,” ringleader Cody Googoo said of his initial bond with guitarist Steve Earle. Booji Boys’ self-titled debut, released in February 2017 on the UK punk label Drunken Sailor, had a lo-fi, distortion-drunk urgency, and their follow-up takes that intoxicating fuzz to another level.
Weekend Rocker opens with the title track, the album’s fastest and shortest. It’s not much of a song, but it’s a good preamble for the pure mania that’s about to go down. Only 18 minutes later do Booji Boys crash headfirst into their seven-minute closer, “Oh Yeah.” The song begins with a somber marching beat, then jumps off its hind legs. Earle’s riffs are lucid and tightly coiled, while the vocals sound alien, like Mitchell is drifting away on a cloud of nuclear fuzz. Where the previous 11 tracks stick with a single, gnarled mood, “Oh Yeah” is long enough to encompass at least four distinct feelings: depleted, rowdy, bacchanalian, and resolute.
At times, the fierce pop melodies of Weekend Rocker resemble the late garage icon Jay Reatard, though their sound is less crisp and piercing than his—the dense distortion that Booji Boys favor feels like suffocating in a humid mosh pit, rather than taking a kick to the head in one. Even so, Weekend Rocker’s upbeat spunk is one of its most appealing qualities. “Crowe’s Kitchen” is a propulsive two minutes of reverb-soaked psychedelia; “Locked Up in the City” is crusty ’80s rock verging on the Buzzcocks. “Sister” is a riff-heavy diamond in the rough, as is the curiously titled “Mr. Nazi’s on the Beat” (perhaps a warning about the predatory and corrupt powers of authority).
Although Booji Boys don’t sound much like the music that Devo made, they do mirror those Ohio weirdos’ strange, infectious energy. It’s a different strangeness than, say, performing in a crib alongside Neil Young, but the spirit remains more or less the same. Back in 1982, Mark Mothersbaugh whined the words “rock ‘n’ roll can never die” from behind an unsettling latex mask. It remains an apt unspoken motto for these unendingly loud Canadians.


In a genre known for singles, Kingston’s Jamar McNaughton offers a complete collection of hits, a confident mix of conscious reggae, pop, hip-hop, and lovers rock.

Chronology

In the fall of 2011, live music bubbled up in small places around Kingston, Jamaica. From Veggie Meals on Wheels at Regal Plaza, Crossroads to the backyard of a now-shuttered vegan restaurant a little further uptown, a group of young people would get together about once a week to play some tunes—often accompanied by little more than an acoustic guitar. Artists like Kabaka Pyramid, Jah9, the Gideon, Selah, Kelissa, Hempress Sativa, Pentateuch, Infinite, and Micah Shemaiah would make up the “reggae revival” (a term coined in 2011 by writer Dutty Bookman). One of these nights, Chronixx sang “Warrior,” “Start A Fyah,” and “Capitalist.” The next day, I couldn’t get the melodies that this 19-year-old named Jamar McNaughton sang out of my head. He had a knack not only for hooks and lyrics, but the ability to channel it through a vocal performance that belied enthusiasm and an encyclopedic knowledge of star quality. His voice never wavered, his confidence was preternatural.
It’s been more than a half-decade wait for Chronology, but in a genre known for singles, Chronixx has produced a complete, solid album. In the lead up to this point, he’s produced modern conscious reggae hits like the anti-colonial “Captureland” and the anthemic “Here Comes Trouble.” But there’s also been a demonstrated desire to push the envelope through “Like a Whistle”—not straight reggae but a poppy earworm. Chronology features a couple of these previously released tracks: it’s tough to think of a tune that can brighten up a room like “Smile Jamaica,” produced in 2013 by Germans Silly Walks Discotheque, and the recent single “Majesty,” which demonstrates an ability to craft R&B/lovers’ rock confection. Chronixx’s penchant for blending a range of styles with born-in-Jamaica genres is sure to irk reggae purists, but this mix couldn’t be more true to his roots.
It seems obvious to say that Jamaica has influenced and been influenced by a wide range of music, but Chronology is an object lesson. Yes, “Loneliness” is a clear R&B single with its soft bass, sweet vocals, and guitar flourishes; there’s an uplifting pop ditty in “Legend” and Chronixx demonstrates his hip-hop prowess in “Ghetto Paradise.”  But there are examples of Jamaican genres from the sway-worthy one drop of “Skankin’ Sweet” (begging for a dub remix) to the Cordel “Scatta” Burrell-influenced dancehall tune “Likes” (it has a touch of the Martial Arts riddim).
And the record as a whole kicks off with “Spanish Town Rockin’,” a track that shows off Chronixx’s range as singer and deejay. It has a bouncy, biographical hook combined with ’80s-style conscious chatting on the verses. This is followed by the bass- and horn-driven “Big Bad Sound,” a catchy combination tune featuring Chronicle—Chronixx’s father and namesake. It is obvious right from the start both from where Chronixx hails and his commitment to foundational sounds. Name-checks throughout shed light on not only luminaries of all genres of Jamaican music (“Likes” places focus on a range of Jamaican artists and producers, underlining that “nuh Drake a control dancehall”) but also the Kingston musical community—from I Nation, whose book table is a fixture at reggae-oriented events, to Mikey Bennett of Grafton Studio.
Some of the most inspiring lyrics come from conscious reggae—if you want upliftment, look no further than the words of Garnett, Dennis and Bob—and Chronixx wields this power. “I Can” uses what could be platitudinous tropes, but his Rastafari grounding (the track’s epigraph is a blessing from Peter Tosh) and plaintive, honest vocal fry makes this surpass pop motivation, allowing the accompanying balearic bass to fuel a unique and addictive sound. EDM production duo the Picard Brothers (no surprise: they’ve worked with Diplo) is behind the slow-build backup voices and hand claps here. It’s impossible not to wheel and come again with this one. This style might have been a risky move, but it’s as if Chronixx is laughing at the whole brouhaha about Justin Bieber, Drake, and everyone’s du jour use of “tropical house.” “I close my eyes and smile,” Chronixx sings, like a little wink at the audience: Here’s “tropical house” by a Jamaican. The best reggae (and, arguably, the best pop) always comes straight from yard.


The latest record from the So So Glos is driven by the tension between the band’s perennially youthful sound and their ever-more-jaded worldview.

Kamikaze

The So So Glos have always tied their identity to their native Brooklyn in a way few of their neighbors have. The band filled their 2013 breakout album Blowout with sketches of their borough’s streets, subways, skylines, and bodegas, guarding each reference with an insistence that in order to truly appreciate these things you had to have grown up there (as singer Alex Levine sees it, the city’s way of life is under constant threat from outsiders). More tangibly, the group’s members also co-founded two of Brooklyn’s big all-ages venues, Market Hotel and Shea Stadium. That’s the kind of legacy contribution to their music scene than few acts can claim.
Yet in the scheme of the city as a whole, the So So Glos are just a tiny blip. It’s one thing to nurture a music scene, but when condos and dog bakeries are pricing the people you grew up with out of your neighborhood, there’s not much you can do—one punk band alone can’t turn the tide of gentrification. On the group’s latest album, Kamikaze, they’re feeling the weight of that reality.
“The new New York that we’re living in now is almost unrecognizable to the gritty grime and crime-ridden streets that we grew up on as kids,” Levine lamented to Billboard. “It seems like we’re moving in a direction where the movements and art which sprung out of 1960s through 1990s NYC are being celebrated, but there’s very little respect for the environment that harbored the culture. It’s harder than ever to be a working artist in the city and the disparity between rich and poor is becoming greater and greater. People want to see graffiti in an art gallery but not in the streets; they want to see the CBGB toilet behind glass at the Met, rather than sit on it at an actual dive.”
On Kamikaze, Levine often comes across like The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Lillian Kaushtupper, a protector of the neighborhood’s endangered Biggie murals and policer of newcomers who look like potential Arcade Fire members. It’s a horrible thing, feeling like a member of a dying breed while you’re still in your 20s, and these songs convey a creeping sense that the band is waging a losing battle—not only against gentrification, but also against technology, the passage of time, and possibly even the shelf life on their own ideals.
Recorded with Rocket From the Crypt’s John Reis and mixed by Saddle Creek mainstay Mike Mogis, Kamikaze has a slightly slicker, glammier edge than its predecessors, as well as some unobtrusive strings on a couple of tracks, but the peppy backbeats, gang-shouted choruses, and fist-pumping enthusiasm remain. The tension between the band’s perennially youthful sound and their ever-more-jaded worldview that drives the record. Even when Levine rails against technology on “A.D.D. Life,” the sort of meat-and-potatoes, Undertones-styled anthem that John Peel would have loved, he does so with the keen awareness that he’s far from the first punk singer to touch on this stuff. “I’m a too-much-information-generation cliché,” he sneers.
That’s not the only time he makes himself a target. A Titus Andronicus-styled mini-epic set to an elbow-jabbing Op Ivy tempo, “Kings Country II: Ballad of a So So Glo” tells of the downfall of two selfie-snapping, phone-addled narcissists. In a final twist, though, Levine stops admonishing the strawmen he’s created and fesses up to his own hypocrisy. “I’m standing in some parking lot staring into my phone,” he huffs. “I guess I am a lot more like those two than I’d like to admit.” It’s easy to write a song condemning technology; it’s a lot harder to lead by example.
Kamikaze is filled with moments like these, tiny cracks in the seams of the band’s value system. The album’s title conveys not only a willingness to die for the cause, yet also a sense of predetermined defeat. So is it worth falling on the sword for something that no longer exists? And aren’t some changes for the better? Blowout opened with memories of rooting for the truly terrible New York Mets of Levine’s youth. The team has since rebounded—they’re defending National League champions now—yet to hear Levine tell it, he preferred them as underdogs. “I never cared too much for winning, so kiss my ass goodbye,” Levine sings defiantly on “Going Out Swingin’.” If he’s wrong, so be it. He’s chosen his hill.


The storied career of the glammy singer-songwriter continues with a jangly, fuzzy, noisy album of bummer jams that sound like hugs from a pal who’s bummed out about boys.

Seth Bogart: Men on the Verge of Nothing

Men on the Verge of Nothing

In 1987, the sexologist and psychiatrist Richard Green published The Sissy Boy Syndrome, a sympathetic but, you know, problematic document of his search to find links between adult homosexuality and, as The New York Times then described it, “extreme cases of boyhood effeminacy.” Leaving aside the why of homosexuality—why not?—the twinned notions that gender-nonconforming boys are more likely to grow up gay and in need of medical help is retro in an ugly way.
Seth Bogart has been offering extreme cases of boyish effeminacy since his days in the fabulous mess that was Gravy Train!!!!, the electroclash outfit also featuring current Younger Lovers honcho and literary darling Brontez Purnell. As the Hunx in Hunx and His Punx, Bogart made retro, horned-up garage rock in such a beautiful way. Bogart’s world went Day-Glo for a slicked-up, self-titled solo album in 2016; since then, he’s launched a clothing line, the influential Wacky Wacko, staged art shows at NYC’s Participant Inc. and MoCA and MOCAD, and lately offered ceramic reproductions of queer classics like Cookie Mueller’s Garden of Ashes.
Men on the Verge of Nothing arrives at a time when much of California is in ashes and the rest of the world feels like it’s on the verge of collapse. But like many of us, Bogart has put his trust in the community of women, both real and imagined, assembling a band of sisters including Bikini Kill’s Tobi Vail and Kathleen Hanna, Kate Nash, ex-Punx Erin Emslie and Alana Amram (who also plays in the terrific psych-rock band Habibi)—and, most prominently, Roxanne Clifford of Patience and the shoulda-been-huge Veronica Falls. Men takes a note from Veronica Falls’ fuzz-pop, and another from the sound of the late Patrick Doyle, the much-missed Veronica Falls drummer who made his own kind of queer noise-pop as Basic Plumbing.
Seth and friends have made an album of bummer jams that sound like hugs from a pal who’s bummed out about boys. It’s got jangle, two tons of reverb, and that Sunday-morning-stroll-through-a-cemetery-with-coffee pep. “Professionals” deconstructs the current use of “queerness” as currency among straight men in academia and the art world. “They love to breed us,” Bogart sings, both winking and rolling his eye. “You smell like an amateur.” Experienced allies of all sorts get a look over in “Brainwashers,” a spry little ode to how the political left eats itself alive. “Everybody wants to tell you/what you already know…I’m desperate, I’m a dog/Who’s the attention hog?”
Queer guys don’t get off much easier. “Lavender Heights” minces like vintage Magnetic Fields, and Bogart’s voice is closer to Stephen Merritt’s dolorous Eeyore than his usual bratty self, but his reminiscences of mushrooms and merriment in San Francisco’s gay enclave sour with the realization of how privileged they all were. “Sunday Boy” is similarly distrustful of losing yourself in the comfort of a lover: “We used to talk almost every day/You had so much to say/But now you feel like a waste of time…Every Sunday you hang with your Sunday Guy.”
As it happens, a friend of Bogart’s was sent as a boy for “treatment” from Richard Green. “Boys Who Don’t Want to Be Boys” is an ode to him, a surf-rock beast which drips with scorn for those who seek to strip the sissiness out of young men and replace it with—what? The clenched menace of Mike Pence? The forces that make men warp them. “Mr. Know-It-All is always right/And I think the only way out of this, is somehow they lose all their power,” Bogart sneers before sing-songing the title of the title track along with Clifford and an insouciant tambourine.
One reason there aren’t a lot of grown men to look up to is that so many died in the AIDS pandemic. “Sometimes I wonder where are all the older guys,” Bogart murmurs in “The Other Siders.” “I find it hard to imagine a world where they are still alive.” One could say, join SAGE; look to what that generation achieved rather than swoon at their absence; fight for your life to extend past what theirs could. Unless we throw the category of men right out the window, we need to envision male possibilities.
Until then, like Pedro Almodóvar, the director whose masterwork Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown Bogart almost-inverts as his own, we’ll just have to follow the lead of women. Men’s tracks venerate a certain kind of gay guy’s icons: X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene, whose classic “Oh Bondage! Up Yours” becomes, in Bogart’s hands, less enraged than engorged. And “Dawn’s Lips” doubles-up on the hero-worship, transposing the Vaselines’ perennial “Molly’s Lips” into a love letter to Welcome to the Dollhouse’s Dawn Wiener. Let the boys sissy out and shimmy like Dawn danced to her garage rock crush. The alternative is sick.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Tyler, the Creator goes green.

Tyler, the Creator: Music Inspired by Illumination & Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch EP

Tyler, the Creator has a somewhat weird relationship with Christmas. He released his debut mixtape, Bastard, on Christmas Day in 2009. He was arrested at Odd Future’s Christmas show for destroying equipment in 2011. It would be inaccurate to say he was ever Christmas averse (they were, ultimately, having Christmas shows), but he did write a song called “Fuck Santa.” Odds were likely against a rapper who once snarled, “If you’re the gift from God then I’m the Christmas wrap from Satan,” on a song called “Fuck This Christmas,” soundtracking an animated Grinch movie.
And yet, Music Inspired by Illumination & Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch, a 10-minute, six-track EP, finds him getting even deeper into the holiday spirit, after contributing two new songs for the film’s official soundtrack. The Grinch, the second feature-length film adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ 1957 book How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (following Jim Carrey’s live-action movie of the same name from 2000), follows a crotchety creature with a heart “two sizes too small” living on the outskirts of a town called Whoville during their holiday season. He subsequently—you guessed it—steals the town’s Christmas but is later moved by the locals’ displays of affection for one another without gifts.
After the soul-wrenching reveals of his 2017 album Flower Boy, it’s easy to understand why Tyler would resonate with a character like the Grinch. A one-time hellraiser who released a song called “Mr. Lonely,” Tyler undoubtedly must have a soft-spot for an outcast terrorizing a community out of frustration from not being seen. Which is probably why, in addition to collaborating with composer Danny Elfman on a reworked “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” Tyler wrote a new song: “I Am the Grinch,” a first-person performance of the character’s cantankerous nature that at times blurs the lines between truth and fiction. (When on that song Fletcher Jones sings, “You’re so problematic,” Tyler responds, “Yeah, yeah.”) It’s less roleplaying than it is self-awareness.
Tyler is a Pharrell acolyte who has followed his mentor at many turns, so his pivot to 3D-generated feel-good cinema shouldn’t surprise anyone. (Both the Despicable Me franchise and The Grinch are produced by the animation studio Illumination. Pharrell soundtracked the former and narrates the latter.) This excursion into family-friendly content thankfully doesn’t produce whatever Tyler’s “Happy” might sound like; Tyler’s Grinch songs still sound like his, and not annoying, smoothed-down versions.
The songs on Music Inspired by The Grinch often scan as Flower Boy b-sides or updates on old designs, music from his traditional catalog given a moderately (if noticeably) festive twist. Tyler recently tweeted that his goal with the Grinch EP was to make Christmas music that wasn’t “too xmasy” and that he was keeping seven-year-olds and their parents in mind. Both “seven-year-olds” and “parents” are new audiences for Tyler (the latter being an audience he once actively raged against), and “Christmas music” is a template he’s never seriously explored.
In navigating that gap, some of the songs fall short of their intended effect. Tyler has always done what he thought best for the expansion of his sound (sometimes to his detriment), but here, perhaps for the first time, it sounds like he’s trying to rejigger some of his rudimentary practices to accommodate what he thinks this new audience wants to hear. “Big Bag,” the EP’s only real rap song, is almost patronizingly elementary in its lyrics (“Don’t make noise, my feet thin/I’m looking for the paper, same color my green skin”). Most tracks are sketches of songs, ideas stoked by his work on the movie but not necessarily seen to completion. He doesn’t quite have Pharrell’s ability to crossover just yet.
Setting aside Tyler’s wonky first forays into all-ages entertainment, which show modest growing pains for a musician hoping to branch out and reach a wider demographic, these snippets carry in them many of the hallmarks of Tyler’s most satisfying music. With Christmas as his backdrop, he gets to really unleash the chords without consequence. He tinkers with sounds in this low-stakes arena with all the excitement of a kid tearing through wrapping paper Christmas morning. Little songs like the subtly symphonic “Whoville” and the kazooing “Cindy Lou’s Wish” give him leeway to futz with arrangements and progressions, in service of an audience he’d never thought of before. Using the Grinch as his guide, Tyler finds inspiration in the unlikeliest place.


Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe are skilled harmonists and sought-after collaborators. Their latest album searches for its own identity in the neon haze of the dancefloor.

Second Nature

Second Nature is the first album by the Brooklyn indie-pop group Lucius since their 2018 acoustic collection, Nudes. You’ve heard them more recently, though: Frontwomen Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe have lent their vocals to bands like the War on Drugs, the Killers, and Black Pumas. The success of the shimmering title track of I Don’t Live Here Anymore, and of “My God,” a standout from Imploding the Mirage, owes a lot to Laessig and Wolfe’s silky harmonies. (They sang on Harry Styles’ “Treat People With Kindness,” too, though he declined to grant the pair a feature credit.) After nearly a decade buoying the work of better-established artists, the prospect of their own music, with those vocals front and center, is an intriguing one.
Produced by decorated Nashville stalwarts Brandi Carlile and Dave Cobb, Second Nature is frustratingly short on the heartland revivalism of which all parties are proven maestros. Outside of the excellent “Promises,” a bona fide country weeper, the album deals primarily in the sort of sultry, Studio 54-styled pastiche perfected by Jessie Ware and Róisín Murphy. Lucius don’t rise to the level of those artists, but they offer their own serviceable spin on the genre.
Lead single “Next to Normal” is the record’s most successful song, rife with sticky electric riffs and a molten bass groove. Wolfe and Laessig pepper the no-holds-barred dance track with playful whoops and staccato laughs. When they sing, “I feel immortal/I’m high without the paranoia,” you believe them. They cut even looser on party anthem “Dance Around It,” assisted by Carlile and Sheryl Crow in a real embarrassment of vocal riches. The verses, choruses, and bridges don’t quite flow into one another, which hobbles this song but lends a richly dangerous quality to “Tears in Reverse,” a kitchen sink of sonic elements that makes a meal of its disparate dance-pop pieces. Skip around in its four-minute runtime and you’ll hear four or five different songs, each a banger.
Lucius love a midtempo moment, too. The aforementioned “Promises” is a bouncy acoustic highlight; drop the synths, and it’d be right at home on the next Highwomen album. “The Man I’ll Never Find,” another ballad, is home to one of the album’s best choruses, one for the divorcée to belt from her midlife-crisis Mercedes Benz. (Wolfe’s own ex-husband is a member of the band.) These songs are great showcases for the group’s range. Though they seem to have settled squarely in the neon haze of the dancefloor, they’re more truly in their wheelhouse in these mellower moments.
Sequencing, though, is a problem. Too often, the record plummets from a sugary adrenaline high to a last-call ballad. “24,” a fine piece of gothic chamber pop, is ruined by its placement on the heels of the joyful, excessive “Next to Normal.” The bones of Robyn’s best work are here, buried deep; the song would hit harder had it been engineered for crying in the club. “LSD” suffers from the same problem, slowing down after a stellar pre-chorus when it should be slamming the gas pedal.
It’s clear why so many other artists are drawn to Lucius for collaborations: Laessig and Wolfe have mastered harmony. They can make themselves at home in any era, at any tempo, and sound utterly authentic. They’re still searching for an identity as solo artists, though. They cast about on this record, veering from the Bee Gees to Bruce. It’s in that heartland pop space where they carve their mark deepest. Leave the glitter and the vodka sodas to somebody else, maybe; embrace Jack Daniels and dust.


The sound of trio Palberta evokes the post-punk era’s great experimentalists, with overloaded glee and delirious energy. The 20-song *Bye Bye Berta *is their first attempt at doing so longform.

Bye Bye Berta

Palberta take joy in confusion. Formed in New York’s Hudson Valley at Bard College, the trio of Lily Konigsberg, Anina Ivry-Block, and Nina Ryser has spent the last few years baffling audiences in the Northeast DIY scene with brief blasts of broken rounds, abstract nursery rhymes, and jittery haphazard rhythms that speed to cartoonish extremes or slow down to a crawl seemingly on a whim. Despite the anti-hero virtuosity that they each demonstrate on guitar, bass, and drums, Ivry-Block has said in interviews that she’s “never really learned how to play songs on the guitar or really any of the instruments.” Consequently, their sound is largely in line with the post-punk era’s great experimentalists—This Heat’s rattlesnake coils of toxic rhythmic interplay, Sun City Girls’ prankish melodies—but they approach these sounds with a sort of overloaded glee, crashing and careening through styles and sounds for little more than a couple minutes at a time. Then, they’ll awkwardly trade instruments before barreling through another sub-two-minute track.
They’ve released a couple of tapes and splits—most notably 2013’s My Pal Berta and 2014’s Shitheads in the Ditch—that attempted to bottle their delirious energy, but at 20-songs long, Bye Bye Berta is their first real attempt at doing so longform. The effect, even through just the first couple of bite-sized pieces, is jarring and deliberately so. Within five minutes, Konigsberg, Ivry-Block, and Ryser tunnel through dazed chorales (“Why Didn’t I?”), discordant speed blues (“Acoustic Rollup”), bracing noise rock (“Jaws”), and narcotized concréte (“Bells Pt. B”). The stylistic hopscotch is unsettling, but playful, something like attempting to hop onto a speeding carousel. Even as you start to feel sickly, you can’t help but hang on tight.
Compared to some of the more outré experiments they’ve slipped onto singles and splits since Shitheads, the sounds that make up Bye Bye Berta feel especially well-considered. It’s a strange thing to say about a record that has an intentionally misremembered—and largely off-key—rendition of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin Alive,” but it’s clear that Palberta are giving real thought to the diverse textures they can wring out of their instruments. “She Feels That Way,” for example, is presented first as a sparse, unplugged ballad. It’s then followed by a noisy, rumbling version of the same track—the original’s toy piano plinks are scoured by the brillo-tough, barely-in-tune guitar lines. These two versions of the same loose, spectral melody show it plainly, but Palberta never really repeat a specific sound between songs, even with their limited instrumental palette. It only adds to the euphoric disjunct of the record as a whole.
It’s happened elsewhere in Palberta’s catalog, but on Bye Bye Berta’s eighth track, “Trick Ya,” they finally break. As their atonal skronk and single line of lyrics—“Don’t trick me! I’m gonna trick ya”—accelerates toward a brick wall, the trio can’t keep up with the pace and then they one by one break down in laughter. The track descends into unplugged slow bass plucks, the wreckage of an effort toward ambitious playing. Amid all the intentionally awkward and off-putting melodies squeaked and squeezed from guitar, bass, and drums, that moment is the first outward indication that this isn’t a stone-faced attempt at some lofty goal, like pushing the boundaries of guitar music or something. Instead, they pause and laugh, letting listeners who aren’t already familiar with their occasionally goofy live shows know that their compositional efforts are as much a form of amusement for themselves as they are anything else. It’s hard not to chuckle along with them.


Former Ultravox/Buggles keyboardist and current Hollywood film bigshot Hans Zimmer gets the call to score the Simpsons Movie. Meanwhile, Alf Clausen-- longtime composer of all original music for "The Simpsons"-- has probably fired his agent.

Hans Zimmer: The Simpsons Movie: The Music

The Simpsons Movie: The Music

Alf Clausen, you will be avenged! Clausen, the longtime composer of all original music for "The Simpsons", has long had to suffer the indignity of being responsible for all tunes Groening except for the theme, which Danny Elfman receives exactly one giant money bag per day for. That theme is almost universally known and loved, but Clausen's work is in a way much more impressive; given the far-flung range of satire "The Simpsons" has reached in its 20 years, Clausen has had to be as versatile as any television/movie composer in the industry. Plus, he had absolutely nothing to do with The Simpsons Sing the Blues, which is definitely worth some points.
And yet, producers of The Simpsons Movie (you may have seen a commercial or two for it) chose to snub Clausen and go with former Ultravox/Buggles keyboardist Hans Zimmer. Well, okay, Zimmer's also done Oscar-nominated scores for stuff like The Lion King and Gladiator, but c'mon, who saw those? Clearly the idea was to give the movie a more cinematic feel via the score, an understandable priority for creators faced with making (as the opening sequence points out) a film version of a TV show you can watch for free 12 times a day. But as far as Simpsons loyalists are concerned, Zimmer could be one of the German guys who took over the Springfield Power Plant in "Burns Verkaufen Der Kraftwerk", inspiring Homer's fantasy about the Land of Chocolate (music by A. Clausen).
The thing is, scoring the music for a Simpsons story, be it episode or feature, is no easy task. Thick with one-liners, subtle sight gags, and (in the case of the movie) flashy animation tricks, the music has to fight for limited space. Even after seeing the flick, the only pieces I recognize on replay are the surf-guitar spy-theme of "Release the Hounds" and the Elfmanish choral treatment of trailer gag "Spider Pig". The rest of the soundtrack is filled with stock orchestral scoring that befits the film's extra-wide aspect ratio without being intrusive, the only thing marking it as particularly Simpsons being the repeated appearance of variations on the central theme.
Granted, it's unfair to compare this collection with Clausen's magnum opus Go Simpsonic With the Simpsons, given the several dozen episodes that disc pulls from. Perhaps a better comparison is another TV-to-film conversion, 1999's South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut, wherein Hollywood vet Marc Shaiman (from such classics as Sister Act and Hot Shots!) gleefully skewered the conventions of cartoon musicals with the show's creators. Miraculously and thankfully, The Simpsons Movie is not a musical (it's even less musical than several recent seasons), but the chance to add a level of orchestral parody to the joke-filled mix is flubbed.
But, then again, The Simpsons Movie isn't as good as the South Park movie either-- though it was surprisingly satisfying. More than any comedic failings (is the techno version of the theme, "Recklessly Impulsive", supposed to be a joke?), Zimmer's score is a snooze just because it's so bland and generic, with the only memorable bits coming from the 11-note theme that was already written for him. Who knows if Clausen would've done much better, but it's worth speculating that keeping things in-house, and using someone experienced at keeping up with the show's frenetic joke pace, would've run truer to the Simpsons spirit, or at least been more fun to listen to at home.


Three and a half decades on, Diamanda Galás still talks about her singing as an act of violence. She shreds the American songbook on two new records, with a restrained version of her deadly approach.

Diamanda Galás: All the Way/At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem

Three and a half decades after Diamanda Galás’ first recordings as a solo vocalist, she still talks about her singing as an act of violence. Musing to Rolling Stone about her performance of the folk standard “O Death”—versions of which are included on both of her new records, All the Way and At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem—she describes it as a cycle of destruction. “You keep breaking it and breaking it and breaking it and desiccating it and putting it back together until it becomes a new life form,” she says. “And then you rip it apart again.” It’s an accurate description of that solo piano piece—which traffics in the California-born composer’s longheld affinities for bebop, blues, and stately morbidity—but it’s also a handy summation of the harrowing work Galás has made for her whole career.
Whether she’s offering abstract expressionism on her original compositions or shredding the American songbook—as she does on this pair of releases—the uniting factor is a sense of attack. Galás’ singing is most often clipped, multisyllabic, microtonal. Her bracing classicist techniques are employed with an executioner’s heavy hand. Galás’ bellow has added ever-darker textures to grim records about the specter of AIDS and the horrors of genocide. She has made more than one record with a titular nod to Satan. Darkness is kind of her thing.
By these standards—and even compared to her other efforts interpreting jazz and blues classics, like 1992’s The Singer or 2003’s La Serpenta Canta—her two new records are relatively muted. It’s a direction she’s been moving in for the last couple of decades. But in the nine years since her last album, the live document Guilty Guilty Guilty, Galás has finally perfected this restrained version of her deadly approach.
All the Way’s rendition of Lew Brown & Ray Henderson's “The Thrill is Gone” starts here with piano lines that feel as prim as gently struck wine glasses. Her sustained vocal tones mostly mirror the warm, slow simmer of the original, even when she pushes the melody to more frigid territory. Then suddenly, she strikes. Her soprano voice turns to sandpaper, scrubbing away at your eardrums with the limber microtonal bursts that have become her weapons of choice over the years. Galás’ sense of dynamics is all the more moving when you sort of know how the song’s supposed to go.
This structure is affecting, but perhaps even more so on At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem. Galás has made a number of live albums over the years (and even parts of All the Way were recorded at shows in Europe), and they’ve typically been highlights. They’re reminders that her streaking and arcing vocal feats are actually emitting from a real human. All the Way occasionally dabbles in vocal effects processing—like the dizzy delay that shades the title track—but At Saint Thomas feels drier. The virtuosically unspooling vocal runs of “Die Stunde Kommt” feel particularly embodied, like you’re watching her vocal cords come unraveled there in person. The violence feels even more harrowing when you can sense Galás at the center of it, as author and subject.
As through most of her career, it’s striking to hear Galás’ splintered take on compositions that aren’t her own. There’s a cliché about covers pulling songs apart at the seams, but over the years Galás has become adept at outright dismemberment—irrevocably altering the silhouette of iconic moments in popular music. She makes familiar sounds feel unsettled and unfamiliar. Once conventions are shirked, a whole host of terrifying possibilities opens up, especially with the knowledge that Galás probably won’t show any mercy. Listening to these records is like catching a glimpse of an elongated shadow at the other end of a dark alley, not knowing what inhuman form awaits, but knowing there’s no escape.
Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified the original version of “The Thrill is Gone.”


The Montreal band’s fifth album finds them in musical and lyrical stasis. The pale, joyless songs don’t transcend their social critique, they succumb to it.

Everything Now

Arcade Fire became a new band for their 2013 album Reflektor, a prismatic, 75-minute carnival of genres about creating meaningful connections in a diffuse technological age. Before the album came out, they billed themselves as the Reflektors, with a fake website, a fake album, a bunch of secret shows, and some top-heavy papier-mâché masks. As this new band, they were reborn on the dance floor. No longer just po-faced helmet bangers and nostalgia merchants using Google Maps to make people cry, now they had synths and beats and a silver sparkle with James Murphy and Haitian kompa and rara music all celebrating with joie de vivre under the mirror ball.
Who Arcade Fire became on their new album Everything Now—a tangled, joyless record of Banksy disco and bloodless new wave that examines fear, love, and suicide in our modern media landscape—is anyone’s guess. Before its release, they created a fake “global media and e-commerce platform” called Everything Now, a brand play that spawned Creature Comfort cereal, engaged with KFC’s Twitter account, and published “fake news” websites, one of which was a satirical review of the record in question. The aim of their online theatre, apparently, was to bolster some of the record’s themes of infinite consumerism in media, the overwhelming anxiety of the moment, the recursive loop of technology—sex, drugs, and Marshall McLuhan.
It would be one thing if the tiresome rollout ran contrary to its music—a bit of cosmic brain Twitter irony to temper another earnest Arcade Fire album. But Everything Now attempts to capture life within and without the content loop—the paranoia, narcissism, and “creature comforts” within; the love and fear without. It’s a worthy undertaking because this kind of acute despair feels more pervasive than ever. Things have changed since OK Computer asked and answered a lot of these questions. Now it’s not a dread that looms large, it’s a pronounced daily trauma, one self-inflicted by simply logging on and making yourself available as a marketing target.
But on Everything Now, Arcade Fire aren’t lifeboats for our ennui, they’re scolds. Their self-reflexive mood and half-baked critiques have landed all over the record’s grooves. The “society, man” songs are riddled with cliche, and the love songs are a bore. If ever you faulted Arcade Fire for their unmoored passion, their art-school busking aesthetic, their words lousy with import and meaning, you have to admit at least they sounded like they gave a shit. The charmless air of Everything Now captured by Arcade Fire’s six-person lineup—with the aid of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, Beak>’s Geoff Barrow, and Pulp bassist Steve Mackey, among others—creates an atmosphere of self-loathing and dim romance, housing two separate songs whose lyrics are “Infinite content/Infinite content/We’re infinitely content.” For a band who discovered themselves in sincerity, they are thoroughly lost when they bet it all on cynicism.
Never mind that Win Butler—who once burst forth from the mix to holler from his heart, singing hallelujah—now just intones his words in this dry, accusatory tone. Never mind that he asks you if you “want to get messed up,” preaches at the pulpit about boys and girls who hate themselves, and then just raps all seven days of the week at one point. Never mind that the record falls off a cliff with the painful dub-synth disaster “Peter Pan,” a song so starchy and grooveless it seems impossible they could write anything worse. Never mind that they do write something worse with “Chemistry,” the sound of Billy Squier pouring warm milk over the concept of reggae.
These are all just bad omens on the way to realizing Everything Now is trapped in lyrical and musical stasis. Conceptually, the songs don’t transcend their social critique, they succumb to it. Musically, they don’t have momentum, they simply fight inertia. The warmer back half of the record is at war with itself, trying to pull real feelings up from arrangements that are topographically dull and looped out much longer than they need to be. “Put Your Money on Me” pulls off a neat melodic shift halfway through (cribbed from the chorus of “Dancing Queen”) but then runs out of ideas, relying instead on a tired synth bassline. It’s whiplash to go from the scrappy, orchestrated new wave-pop of “We Exist” to something this anemic, as if the only lesson they took from dance music is that songs should, above all, alternate between two chords.
Arcade Fire used to be goobers whose bombast and sanctimony were forgiven because their music was so dazzling. They made a simple blues progression seem like an ocean on “Keep the Car Running.” And live, I mean, to watch Richard Reed Parry go to war with a concert bass drum, or to watch Régine Chassagne stare transfixed as she sings of Haiti or to watch the entire band rev up a dance pit with “Here Comes the Night Time” is to see why they became iconoclasts 13 years ago, simply by giving so much space to people who didn’t care about being cool. Like U2 and Bruce Springsteen before them, Arcade Fire songs aren’t measured by their length or chart placement, they’re measured by their area, and how many people they gather to emote within it.
But here in the claustrophobic space of Everything Now, the warts of Arcade Fire are impossible to miss. Map the vocal melody on “No Cars Go” or “Sprawl II” with your finger in the air and you’ll arc it up and down in peaks and valleys. Do the same thing with the turgid and thoughtless “Creature Comfort” or “Peter Pan” or “Signs of Life” and your finger will barely move. Butler’s commitment to the detached frontman where singing occurs barely or not at all robs songs of their emotional largesse, that basic thing we licensed to Arcade Fire and upon which their entire identity relies.
What saving grace there is on Everything Now is scattered throughout its mercifully short 47 minutes. The title track, one last reverie before the darkness, shines much like its counterpart on Reflektor. Those unison strings and piano, that four-on-the-floor beat, the exalting choir behind the band, Patrick Bebey’s pygmy flute performance: it’s a treasure. Sure, the chorus is Win Butler getting wistful and bitter about how he, too, is allowed everything all of the time, but it’s upheld by the life of the music around it. Butler manages to fight through all his doubt on the touching finale “We Don’t Deserve Love,” a woozy, protracted sunrise, a full-band capitulation to feeling at end of a bleak, anti-celebratory album. These and the filigrees of Chassagne’s voice on the standout “Electric Blue”—specifically when it helixes up into the stratosphere near the end—are to be clung to and cherished as deeply human moments on a record desperately in need of them.
Which is to say that Everything Now succeeds in concept alone: It is an album about a once and possibly future great band trapped in its own feedback loop (the digital download is indeed sequenced for infinite content: the final track “Everything Now (Continued)” connects seamlessly with the intro “Everything_Now (Continued)”). But it belies to such a great degree what we’ve come to love about Arcade Fire in the first place. On “Creature Comfort,” Butler sings about someone attempting suicide while listening to Funeral. In the world of Everything Now, it works as this shocking, bemused moment of interconnectivity. The way he sings it—almost in passing—fits with the dazed and dead tone Butler conveys through his lyrics. But in the world outside the record, it’s callous and obnoxious, unpacked without grace or taste by a band who are historically committed to helping out those in need. Is this who they fear they’ll become, or is this who they have become? It’s a question the album fails to answer.


On the crushing and glorious HOPELESSNESS, Anohni collaborates with Hudson Mohawke and OPN to create something new: the electronic dance anthem as visceral protest song.

HOPELESSNESS

What has been the price of my protection? This spring at New York's Whitney Museum, the artist Laura Poitras—best known for her 2014 film about the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Citizenfour—offered a harrowing answer. Within her multimedia exhibition Astro Noise was a piece called Bed Down Location. It invited viewers to lay on a platform in the dark, assuming what in yoga is referred to as "corpse pose." The installation lulled you with doomy static and dispassionate male voices. The night skies of Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen were projected at the ceiling like a planetarium. The idea was to stare at them—the celestial expanses of countries in which the U.S. has launched drone warfare—and think. To imagine human lives reduced to coordinates on a grid, as if flesh and blood were part of an exercise in a math textbook. To imagine balls of fire falling onto us. To imagine death. A New Yorker might be struck by just how many stars those skies contained. Struck by how they look like sheets of glitter. By the beauty of an ornamented mustard-yellow building under our big Moon. By how nature could look like an oil painting. By how you want to be there. The emotion of Poitras' work did not just show the cost of our sense of protection—irrevocably, the cost was felt.
I thought of Anohni's *HOPELESSNESS *there. Both Anohni and Poitras have constructed monumental works this year dealing in the atrocity of post-9/11 America—drone warfare, mass surveillance, violent masculinity. These are the depths into which HOPELESSNESS demands that you swim or drown. HOPELESSNESS is a record where the American dream is a hallucination, where Big Brother lustfully becomes "daddy/ohhh," where we are all called out. It is the sonic equivalent of a burning Shepard Fairey painting and all its embers.
As leader of the chamber pop ensemble Antony and the Johnsons for two decades, the musician formerly known as Antony Hegarty has always been in dialogue with the present.  But now, with co-producers Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never, there are many more layers of rigor to that conversation. Anohni has undergone a musical metamorphosis, crafting another outlet for her vision: the electronic dance anthem as visceral protest song. So much has unfolded in the six years since Anohni's last studio album with the Johnsons—Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the trial of Chelsea Manning, the Black Lives Matter movement. Anohni—ecofeminist soul warrior, dramatist, a person who Lou Reed called an "angel"—it would be hard to find a more capable figure to lead us into a woke pop polemic.
Poignant political realities have always grounded Anohni's work, but now they are at the forefront, articulated with an incisiveness that stares you in the eye. You have never heard words like "chemotherapy," "child molesters," and "mass graves" crooned so gorgeously. HOPELESSNESS places Anohni alongside radical pop provocateurs like M.I.A., artists who propose difficult questions that mainstream America does not want to ask because it would not know what to do with the answers. But Anohni insists that we raise our stakes. "A lot of the music scene is just a wanking, self-congratulatory boys club," she said in 2012. "It's just so fucking boring and not useful. It's such a waste of our time... another reflection of how astray we are as a civilization."
*HOPELESSNESS *disrupts that. Anohni, HudMo, and OPN meet on an astral plane and construct a sleek salon there, where we can reflect on the current moment and perhaps be spurred to action. The elegant bombast of these tracks propels the issues forward with a clarity that is exacting and exhilarating. Anohni has worked with both of these electro sophisticates before (in June of 2011 OPN tweeted: "antony doesn't use the internet anymore") but HOPELESSNESS represents a new level of collaboration. The subject matter is daunting, but this is some of the most accessible and pristinely infectious music that any of these people have made. With that, HOPELESSNESS simultaneously broadens Anohni's appeal and brings that appeal into focus.
"Drone Bomb Me" is sung from the perspective of a seven-year-old girl whose family falls victim to a targeted killing. "Blow my head off/Explode my crystal guts," Anohni sings, describing toxic reality with a honeyed cadence, and as this body-music gets under your skin, its subject—which in life is too often abstracted—makes an appeal to the heart. In her singing I am reminded of what we mean by "soul" music: empathy, pain, sincerity, dignity, the truth of life. I am also reminded that Anohni covered Beyoncé years ago, that her voice crushes you like Adele's. This isn't the first time Anohni has overlapped with dance music—she collaborated with Hercules and Love Affair, and in 2013, the DJ Avicii included an electro house remix of "Hope There's Someone" on his album True. (Perhaps Anohni heard its hyper-masculine drops and thought: ummmm…..)
Production-wise, the HOPELESSNESS team did not take the obvious route, which would have been doomy post-Arca metal scraps from Yeezus' industrial wasteland. If HOPELESSNESS recalls any Arca song, it's the xen philosophy of 2014's unsettlingly beatific "Sisters." (That Mohawke, a producer on Yeezus, Pablo, and "All Day," should serve as a connective between Anohni and Kanye—who've both worked to infiltrate and subvert—makes a lot of sense.) The sinister rumble of "Violent Men" and the ominous "Obama" monologue makes them outliers here, texturing HOPELESSNESS with darker, episodic pieces. The maximalist slam-dunk beats of HudMo's TNGHT project are absent, but the burnt-rubber bounce that opens "Obama" hints at it. There's an impulse to place "Obama" in the tradition of scathing presidential take-downs—like Stevie Wonder's "You Haven't Done Nothin'" or Neil Young's "Let's Impeach the President"—but the way Anohni turns liberal subterfuge into a literal hex feels more complicated. "Obama" recounts how the world cried for joy when the President was elected and how furiously disappointing recent years have been, "all the hope drained from your face." These are menacing lyrics you would still more readily expect to be railed by a contemporary punk band like Downtown Boys or Priests ("Barack Obama killed something in me," Katie Greer succinctly put it in 2014, "And I'm gonna get him for it!") than any pop star.
"Violent Men"—an ambient, pitch-shifted meditation on the need to "never again give birth to violent men"—underscores the essential theme of these songs, which is the violence of patriarchy as the core of all oppression. And this leads to another tenet of HOPELESSNESS: ecofeminism. On the 2012 Johnsons live album Cut the World there was a poetic speech called "Future Feminism," which situated Anohni unmistakably into this context—the basic idea that feminism must extend its liberationist ethos from gender, race, class, and physical abilities into nature. Ecofeminism defines the stunning "4 Degrees," alluding to the impending global temperature-increase that will factually topple our ecosystem. "I want to see this world/I want to see it boil," Anohni sings, belting out a striking catalog of the dogs, lemurs, rhinos, and other creatures who are going to perish because of our selfishness and greed. The mood is heavy, urgent, dire—a fully-issued wake-up call bearing reportorial weight, an ultralight beam parting a cloud.
Anohni's vast environmental songs are like modern rewrites of Kate Bush's "The Big Sky," where the once-innocent vaults of heaven are more foreboding, sites of hidden remote-control murder, invisible all-watching eyes, gas emissions. And yet underlying these songs is a plea for a kind of love that implicates all life. As Anohni sings of our current apocalypse, her voice and these beats have some semblance of utopia in them. It is music about death and destruction that sounds deep-down infatuated by the forces that keep us alive.
The bracing "Why Did You Separate Me From the Earth?" is another ecofeminist epic, the no-future punk tradition born anew: "I don't want your future/I'll never return/I'll be born into the past." HOPELESSNESS makes the lethal clashes of capitalism and nature, of the industrial and the organic, impossible to ignore. Crucially, ecofeminism posits that a masculine sense-of-self considers itself separate of the world, whereas a feminine sense-of-self sees itself as fundamentally interconnected, with responsibilities. All violence and ecological crises, then, come from failing to make connections. Anohni poses a most pressing question of late-capitalism: "Why did you separate me from the Earth?"
"Watch Me," meanwhile, is possibly the most sensual piece of musical surveillance art ever. Crisp, cavernous beats boom over ambient noise, and our nightmarish culture of intercepted metadata floats into eerie seduction—there's a degree of absurdity to that, befitting the absurdity of our world. In "Watch Me" Anohni is being spied on in her hotel room: "Watch me watching pornography/Watch me talking to my friends and my family," she sings, gliding gracefully, "I know you love me/‘Cause you're always watching me/Protecting me from evil/Protecting me from terrorism/Protecting me from child molesters." With bone-chilling intimacy, Anohni reveals so much about how surveillance culture cuts out the potential of choice. "Watch Me" is the HOPELESSNESS song that is most likely to lodge itself into your skull with its euphoric melody, but plot-twist: you can't really sing it in public. Astonishingly, then, "Watch Me" is song about surveillance that might make you surveil yourself—an act of sousveillance.
One is reminded of Anohni's connection to former Johnsons member William Basinski. HOPELESSNESS should fall alongside his ambient classic The Disintegration Loops in the canon of music that responds to post-9/11 America. The songs constantly underscore Anohni's complicity—from a pained utterance that "I'm partly to blame" to how she cries through the ecstatic apology of "Crisis"—but HOPELESSNESS also comes with an embodied promise of change. The message is encoded into every note: If Anohni's music can manifest into something new, then perhaps we can. There is risk involved with moving from a timeless sound towards one that attempts to capture a moment, but without risk art is worthless.
Earlier this year, news broke that Anohni would not appear at the Oscars. She was the first transgender performer to ever be nominated—on the successes of a song she wrote about ecocide for a movie literally called Racing Extinction—but the honor was diminished when she was not invited to perform at the ceremony. In response, Anohni wrote an essay about the decision that is itself a remarkable document. "They are going to try to convince us that they have our best interests at heart by waving flags for identity politics and fake moral issues," she wrote. "But don't forget that many of these celebrities are the trophies of billionaire corporations whose only intention is to manipulate you into giving them your consent and the last of your money. They have been paid to do a little tap dance to occupy you while Rome burns."
*HOPELESSNESS *is not afraid to sway within the flames, to draw you towards the heat. The fact is that Anohni's dramas cannot exist in a world of Hollywood endings. They are too real for a silver lining. HOPELESSNESS communicates the horror of seeing that in so many ways we have been profoundly fooled by the fantasy of the American experiment. By how the stars are not just stars. By how they contain lies. By how the truest protagonist of HOPELESSNESS is us.


The National’s second album of 2023 extends its predecessor’s subdued mood and reclusive purview.

Laugh Track

R.E.M. had been a band for 24 years when they released their worst album, 2004’s Around the Sun, a record that magnified that aging act’s growing weaknesses and succumbed to sheer tedium. The National, perhaps not coincidentally, were also marking 24 years together when they released First Two Pages of Frankenstein in April this year. While not as disastrously dull as Around the Sun, that record dragged in similar ways. Both albums over-relied on programmed drums, and both gambled on the misguided hope that studio refinement might prove a fair substitute for live energy. It’s hard to imagine many Taylor Swift fans introduced to the National through her feature on Frankenstein became converts.
R.E.M. responded to their misfire by taking a few years to recalibrate and returning with a rock record. The National have taken the opposite approach. Just five months after Frankenstein, they’ve released a companion album, Laugh Track, featuring material written alongside its predecessor. True to its mirrored cover art, Laugh Track plays largely like The Next Two Pages of Frankenstein, continuing its predecessor’s subdued mood and reclusive purview, with singer Matt Berninger further chronicling depressive withdrawal and deteriorating relationships (“Friendships are melting/Nothing is helping,” he despairs). That may disappoint fans hoping that the muted reception to Frankenstein might inspire the band to shake things up, but Laugh Track does fine-tune its predecessor’s approach, albeit subtly. The band recorded most of it after Frankenstein, using their tour behind that album to road test and refine the stray ideas from its writing sessions, so the execution is slightly tweaked, less rigid, more freeform.
Most noticeably, drummer Bryan Devendorf returns to a real kit after Frankenstein primarily relegated him to machines. That’s a huge upgrade: Devendorf’s drumming has long been the 5-Hour Energy shot that keeps this band from drifting into slumber. Even though he’s rarely granted much volume to play with, he packs drama into even some of the record’s slowest songs; you can hear where the applause is supposed to go. His fidgety, racing percussion introduces intrigue to the otherwise staid “Turn Off the House,” and he propels “Space Invader” toward the kind of cathartic outro this band used to throw down all the time but now reserves only for the rare nights when the sitters are free and nobody has work the next morning.
As has become the norm on National albums, there are some guests. Phoebe Bridgers returns on the title track, a sweet little song about looking on the extremely relative bright side, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon shadows Berninger on “Weird Goodbyes,” the string-kissed 2022 single conspicuously left off of Frankenstein. Big names, both, but they’re basically accompanists; their voices may be on these songs but their fingerprints are not. That’s not the case with Rosanne Cash, who plays Lady Gaga to Berninger’s Bradley Cooper on the late-album standout “Crumble.” It’s the rare late-period National song you can imagine somebody other than Berninger crushing at karaoke.
Laugh Track could use more changeups like this, because even when it locks into a blissful, easy groove that Frankenstein struggled to sustain, it can’t shake the sense of sameness that’s haunted the National’s last few releases. Did we really need this many more sullen piano ballads? Or another song about being no good at parties? The group’s last nine records have already so exhaustively excavated Berninger’s psyche that there’s not much left to reveal.
The album saves its biggest departure for last: “Smoke Detector,” a Velvet Underground–style jam where Berninger spits incensed, abstractionist poetry over gnarly guitars for nearly eight minutes: “Make a list of your loved ones in order of height/Laugh at the blackbirds in the knack of the night,” he seethes. Hastily written at a soundcheck just months ago, it was the last song completed for Laugh Track, and it feels like it came from a completely different album. After so much composed beauty, its rawness is a corrective, pointing toward a way forward now that they’ve purged the last of Frankenstein’s material from their system. This band still has a fierce rock record in them. Maybe next time they’ll make it.