Big Thief’s ambitious yet unburdened fifth album is a 20-song epic of kaleidoscopic invention, striking beauty, and wigged-out humor, rambling far beyond the bounds of their previous work.

Big Thief: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You

“What should we do now?” someone asks off-mic at the end of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. “Blue Lightning,” the last song, has just ended, its homey folk-rock atmosphere made briefly uncanny by the entrance of cheap synthetic brass in the final minute, punching out a two-note fanfare that an ordinary band would have assigned to an actual horn section. The speaker—presumably one of the three men in Big Thief who orbit singer-guitarist Adrianne Lenker—sounds dazed but satisfied. Clearly, they have nailed the take. So what next?
As punctuation for Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, an album as gleefully overstuffed as its title, this moment of studio chatter feels deliberate despite its offhandedness. In 20 songs, Big Thief have rambled far beyond the bounds of their previous catalog. There is trip-hop that flickers like busted neon and a couple of country tunes so saturated with fiddle and close harmony that they seem at first like jokes. You might check the liner notes to divine the source of the strangely expressive clicking you hear in the background of a particular instrumental passage and find that someone has been credited with playing icicles.
Lenker’s subject matter, stated as briefly as possible, is everything: internet signals and falling leaves, vape pens and wild hairdos, the wounds we inflict on the planet and each other, the Book of Genesis, the mystery of consciousness, and yes, the humble potato. Dragon is as heavy in its lyrical concerns as any previous Big Thief record, and more ambitious in its musical ideas than all of them. But it also sounds unburdened, animated by a newfound sense of childlike exploration and play. Twenty times, it asks “What should we do now?”, and twenty times it finds a new answer.
By design, Dragon lacks the near-perfect holism of U.F.O.F. and Two Hands, Big Thief’s twin 2019 achievements, records with compact tracklists and particular aims, one eerie and diffuse, the other gritty and earthbound. Recorded in four locations across the U.S. over the course of several months, it feels more like Big Thief’s Tusk, or White Album, or Wowee Zowee: a sprawling statement with little concern for outward cohesion, offering some combination of kaleidoscopic invention, striking beauty, and wigged-out humor at any given moment, but not a particularly clear path from one song to the next. Like those albums, it seems destined to become the favorite for a cult of hardcore fans, while inspiring others to wonder how someone could ride so hard for stuff like “Piggies.”
Or, in this case, stuff like “Spud Infinity,” a song that arrives early to unfurl Big Thief’s freak flag once and for all. Complementing the aforementioned fiddle and down-home harmony vocals—from Twain’s Mat Davidson, who appears on several songs—is the unmistakable boing of a jaw harp, boinging jubilantly and relentlessly, blissfully and diabolically, on every last beat. The cumulative effect is something like a full-band version of the goofy southern accent Mick Jagger puts on when he sings country songs, which seems, for him, like a way of putting genre in quotation marks, signaling his awareness of his own inauthenticity by amplifying the hokiest parts of the put-on. Though Big Thief have taken many approaches to their music over the years, this sort of winking magpie postmodernism has not been one of them, so it’s strange to hear them leaning into a schtick.
But the longer you sit with “Spud Infinity,” and “Red Moon,” its closest counterpart, the less their hillbilly trappings come across like winks. The settings seem to have a liberating effect on Lenker’s relationship to language, giving her access to a conversational new register where quotidian details reflect the big picture in miniature, and silliness is a route to profundity. In the third verse of “Spud Infinity,” she rhymes “finish” with “knish” and laments human inability to kiss our own elbows, joints that spend their time “rubbing up against the edges of experience.” The song’s good-natured stroll from the dirt to the cosmos recalls John Prine or Michael Hurley, songwriters whose breezy humor has never previously worked its way into Big Thief’s music.
Even when the band is hamming it up, their ensemble playing is quietly spectacular, with drummer James Krivchenia rising and falling to meet Lenker’s turns of phrase, and guitarist Buck Meek and bassist Max Oleartchik scribbling countermelodies at the edges of her strumming. Though they seem determined to find a different way to organize themselves as a band with nearly every song, this conversational weaving of their instruments holds the album together at an intuitive level across its wild leaps.
“Flower of Blood,” with pirouettes of feedback from Lenker and Meek’s guitars, and a lyric that blurs violence and intimacy in classic Big Thief fashion, might have fit in on Two Hands if not for its production, with drums filtered to sound like sampled breakbeats playing over a massive PA. There’s an intoxicating dissonance between the song’s internal heat and the sound’s steely distance, one that Big Thief might have successfully nurtured across the length of an entire album rather than this single track. “Heavy Bend” and “Blurred View,” its neighbors on the tracklist, take its gestures at electronic music even further. The former, setting a harplike arpeggiated figure from Lenker’s nylon-string guitar to patiently looping shakers and snare, reminds me of Four Tet’s meditative beat music. The latter, claustrophobic and menacing, initially resembles Portishead but soon finds its own wavelength. “One step closer and I’m real/Tell me everything you feel/And I will sing for you,” Lenker intones near a whisper; the harmonies ascend for a moment, then plummet back into darkness.
The hoedown of “Red Moon” is next, and if you’re listening digitally, the transition comes with comical quickness: It’s hard to imagine how a pair of songs by the same band could be more divergent than these two. Dragon seems particularly well-suited to the double-LP format, which necessitates a break between them, with “Blurred View” closing the first disc and “Red Moon” opening the second. The individual sides can be plenty scatterbrained on their own, but there is an obscure order to the tracklist’s organization. The bittersweet simplicity of “Change,” which opens the album, is reflected in “12,000 Lines,” which opens its final side. The sweeping stillness of the title track, at the end of side one, signals a close to the beatific opening stretch, and the side-two opener “Sparrow,” a baleful retelling of the Adam and Eve story, hints at darkness to come.
Lenker spoke in a recent interview with Pitchfork about learning to be “more fearless” in her writing: “more confident in myself and less worried about…how people will receive something.” Her heightened willingness to follow her impulses is evident throughout Dragon. At one point in “Sparrow,” she ends four successive lines with “apple,” an audacious disruption of her own rhyme scheme, unsettling your expectations and building tension toward a climax in which Adam rolls Eve under the bus: “She has the poison inside her/She talks to snakes and they guide her.” Her bailiwick as a writer has extended in two directions, reaching toward cosmic-religious significance on one side and unadorned observation on the other. “Sit on the phone/Watch TV/Romance, action, mystery,” she sings on “Certainty,” making the experience of unfocused screen time sound as timeless and universal as a sunset.
If Lenker has a central preoccupation on Dragon, it is the way these high and low poles of experience coexist and inform each other: the way an unassuming bunch of weeds can give you a flickering glimpse of the interconnectivity of all things, or a moment of heartbreak might be inexplicably magnified by the sudden apprehension of houseflies on the ceiling. Which is another way of saying that her great subject, as always, is love. What could be more profound, or more ordinary? “Change,” for its first two thirds, is concerned with elemental things: wind and water, life and death. Then something hard and tactile interrupts its litany of abysses: “Death/Like space/The deep sea/A suitcase.” A suitcase? From this germ grows a story about a departing lover, until Lenker is no longer asking about dying, but questions that may be even more painful: “Could I feel happy for you/When I hear you talk with her like we used to?/Could I set everything free/When I watch you holding her the way you once held me?”
“The Only Place,” the album’s penultimate song, is among the most beautiful in Big Thief’s discography. Lenker is alone at the acoustic guitar, fingerpicking with such astonishing dexterity that the weight of her words might escape you at first. After an album that has probed at loss and acceptance from every available angle, here is her vision of the apocalypse, presented as plainly as possible. “When all material scatters/And ashes amplify,” she sings, sounding unperturbed by her impending doom. “The only place that matters/Is by your side.”

Buy: Rough Trade


The Knife's first album in seven years is the Swedish duo's most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal, a musical manifesto advocating for a better, fairer, weirder world.

Shaking the Habitual

In the seven years since Silent Shout, the Knife's mythology has grown to the point where the Swedish duo seem like something other than a band. "Band” implies people banging on things widely agreed upon as instruments and making things that most people would recognize as "music"-- this feels like an inadequately pedestrian way to describe what Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer are. Perhaps even more so in their absence, the Knife have come to seem like a vibe, an ethic, a dark, not-entirely-scientifically-understood phenomena; other bands are to the Knife what matter is to anti-matter. When new artists say they’ve been influenced by the Knife-- and it’s a claim countless have made in the past few years-- they are at this point referencing not just a specific sound but an entire way of being in our information-glutted world: a desire to retain a tightly controlled, precisely evocative sense of mystery and mastery over their image. Even in the wake of such pollutants as international success, ubiquitous acclaim, and frequent imitation, the Knife have found a way to keep their name meaning something remarkably unique and pure.
This has something to do with the fact that Andersson and Dreijer have gone to great lengths to come off like they are something other than human. On stage, they were silhouettes glowing behind a translucent screen. They gave interviews and accepted awards in disguise (moving through a terrifying cycle of bird masks, Dystopian Blue Man Group masks, primate-inspired facepaint, and of course who could forget Andersson's infamous melting flesh mask?). And on the steely, electro-nightmare Silent Shout-- their first great record-- they found new ways to viscerally integrate these ideas into their sound, warping and pitch-shifting Andersson’s vocals until they grew androgynous and post-human. Somewhere in the past seven years, the Knife reached that Lynchian status where everything they do is their own, adjectivally specific kind of creepy. The early press photos for their new album, Shaking the Habitual, made an activity as innocent as swinging on playground swings feel forebodingly sinister.
But buying "post-human" mythology wholesale has always sold the Knife a little short. After all, what was their breakthrough hit "Heartbeats" if not a heavy-breathing declaration of vulnerability? Even Silent Shout cut through the abstraction and found a pulse-- whether it was the strobe-lit dancefloor rhythms of “We Share Our Mothers’ Health” and “Neverland” or the palpitating storytelling of a song like “Forest Families”. The driving force of their music is the interplay between the uncanny and the familiar, though in all the theatricality it's easy to forget the latter. But the early information that trickled out about Shaking the Habitual served as a reminder. We’re so used to experiencing the Knife at a cool, veiled distance that the most shocking things about their return were the ones that seemed uncharacteristically personable: their faces (on full display in the anarchic video for “Full of Fire”), their fingernails, their smiles (were they actually smiling in that photo?). For all their sinister, shadowy abstraction, the Knife are at their most disarming and affecting when you’re briefly reminded-- and you often are, over the course of their sprawling, magnificent fourth album Shaking the Habitual-- that Andersson and Dreijer are human after all.
Boundary-busting in content and in form, the 2xCD Shaking the Habitual challenges plenty of perceived notions-- about extreme wealth, the patriarchy, the monarchy, environmental degradation, decreasing attention spans (“It's nice to play with people's time these days,” Andersson says in explanation of the record's marathon length), and not the least of which the Knife's own identity as a band. The winding, unbridled song structures and industrial-tinged, organic sounds are such a departure from the rest of their output that they’ve said they initially considered releasing it under a different name. Shaking certainly pulls from a wider aesthetic palette than any of their previous records: found sound drones (they crafted the 19-minute “Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized” from editing hours of electronic feedback they'd recorded in a boiler room), zithers, an instrument they apparently made out of “an old bedspring” and “a microphone”-- all employed in the name of breaking their own habits. “We went temporarily acoustic,” they declared in the madcap manifesto that served as Shaking's press bio. “Electronic is just one place in the body.”
In plenty of ways, Shaking seems to have “inaccessible” etched into every fiber of its DNA. It is 98 minutes long (about double the length of the already-epic-seeming Silent Shout). Six of its thirteen songs exceed eight minutes. The official statements released with its music videos (“'A Tooth For An Eye' deconstructs images of maleness, power and leadership. Who are the people we trust as our leaders and why? What do we have to learn from those we consider inferior?”) read like museum placards. There are two long, dissonant drone pieces-- and one of them has the feel-good title “Fracking Fluid Injection”. But once you surrender to these facts and descend into Shaking the Habitual, its atmosphere is strangely, surprisingly inhabitable. Moving fluidly between potent bursts of electro-aggression (“A Tooth for an Eye”), seductively uncoiling, meditative grooves (“Raging Lung”) and ambient stretches, Shaking the Habitual-- like Swans’ recent and similarly mammoth The Seer-- doesn’t demand the same kind of attention the whole time. Many of the things that might seem off-putting in theory are what make it hang together so well as a front-to-back listen-- the drone pieces are sequenced such that they act as intermissions, though the kind where the air conditioner's at an uncomfortable full blast and the house lights remain, evocatively, dark. Put it on in a room and it snakes in and out of your consciousness, but on some level it’ll still have you in its chilling, atmospheric vice grip.
Following Andersson and Dreijer down such a labyrinthine rabbit hole would be difficult if they didn’t hook you from the start, but luckily the first three songs are among the most immediately arresting 25 minutes of music the Knife has ever made. “A Tooth for an Eye” almost feels like a belated, revisionist do-over of the band’s relatively unremarkable early work. While 2003's Deep Cuts sometimes struggled to find common ground between punk aggression and bright, calypso-tinged synths, “Tooth” ties these competing impulses together seamlessly as it also deftly weaves in a political message. The song’s refrain comes from the experimental British writer Jeanette Winterson’s book The Passion (the interstitials "Oryx" and "Crake" also reference a Margaret Atwood novel), but Andersson brings a physicality to her delivery that muscles the line right off the page: “I’m telling you stories,” she seethes, until you can almost see the vein bulging in her neck, “Trust meeeee.”
The polyrhythmic, polymorphously perverse industrial throb “Full of Fire” feeds off the heat kindled by the opening track and rides it for a magnificently maniacal nine minutes, while the creaking, evocative “A Cherry on Top” has got to be one most deliciously creepy Knife songs yet-- of course, that’s saying a lot. (At times it sounds like Animal Collective's “The Bees”, but makes that haunting track sound like a lullaby in comparison.) Built around the bone-curdling sound of a zither warping in and out of tune, Andersson sings of riches-- “Strawberry, melon, cherry on top…The Haga Castle evening cream”-- in a heavy, manipulated voice so overripe it basically wafts decay. She's clearly having fun inhabiting the role of the fat-with-power monarch here, but her roleplaying is also an act of resistance (the band has recently cited as an influence the gender theorist Judith Butler, who pioneered the notion of thinking about gender as performance), of cutting the omnipotent down to size and suggesting that the institution's expiration date has passed. As the instrument warbles in and out of tune, the castle walls-- and the confines of pop structure as we know it-- seem to be crumbling at her and Dreijer's feet.
Nothing else quite matches this opening run, but the second disc has its highlights: The frenetic, gargling instrumental “Networking” recalls the best of Dreijer's techno work as Oni Ayhun and proves he can still scramble the conventions of electronic music with an effortlessness that puts him miles ahead of the Knife's many imitators. Then there's “Raging Lung”, a dank, serpentine 10-minute groove that lifts its refrain ("what a difference a little difference would make") from Fugazi's classic 1990 debut Repeater. Tipping its hat to the ideologies of punk rock, gender outlaws, enviro-anarchists, and outsiders of any stripe, Shaking feels at time like a guided, international tour through the last quarter century of political resistance and radical thought-- or maybe an epic, authority-fucking mural painted in the part of town where all the squatters and crust punks have migrated. The most difficult part of making a record so ambitious and conceptual is, of course, bridging the gap between thinking and feeling-- a divide that even Shaking cannot always conquer. But all things considered, it's remarkable how seldom the Knife actually sound like they're guiding these songs with their brains rather than their hips or fists. Even at its most cerebreal, this record is palpably, poundingly alive.
Though not as challenging as their collaborative opera score Tomorrow in a Year, Shaking still knowingly, brazenly risks turning less adventurous listeners off-- and maybe those who dismiss the record for not trying to recreate the populist magic of "Heartbeats" or "We Share Our Mother's Health" have a point. The Knife would clearly like to use their music to incite the listener to rethink concepts taken for granted and challenge authority, but would a more effective method of shaking the habitual be, say, smuggling a subversive message into the greatest (and at press time, only) four-minute dancefloor anthem ever written about fracking? Regardless of the answer, that's a question the Knife are no longer interested in exploring. "The most commercial way would have been to stick with a formula," Andersson observed in a recent Pitchfork interview, but then dismissed that option entirely, saying she and her brother had now moved on to questioning conventions "on a structural level rather than a psychological level." And in the end, though, Shaking's unruly structure-- a perfect union of form and content-- feels like a noble choice. In interviews, they've spoken about "the importance of making your privileges transparent in order to say something political." And the great privilege of being the Knife in 2013 is having a platform-- they've earned a devoted audience ready to approach their wildest, most challenging and passionate vision with eager ears and an open mind.
Shaking the Habitual is, inarguably, an achievement. It is the Knife's most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal: It provides a glimpse into the desires, intellectual enthusiasms and (unsurprisingly dense) reading list guiding one of music's most shadowy duos. At its most mesmerizing, its conceptual rigor and occasional inscrutability are overpowered by a disarming earnestness: It is a musical manifesto advocating for a better, fairer, weirder world. Shaking the Habitual feels not post-human but profoundly humanist, fueled by an unfashionable but profoundly refreshing faith in music's ability to hypnotize, to agitate, and to liberate-- to become, in Winterson's words, "the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid."


Following last year's astounding debut, ƒIN, the Barcelona producer John Talabot offers an album-length stitchwork of euphoric moments and rich textures in his 75-minute DJ-Kicks isntallment. Amid his sharp selection of glistening melodic dance music, Talabot himself steals the show, including three new cuts he had a hand in.

DJ-Kicks

It's not easy to establish a distinctive voice in the realm of house music, but since John Talabot's arrived on the scene, he's done just that. The Barcelona producer's spent the last four years crafting and refining his own prismatic take on the dance sub-genre, fusing psychedelic sprawl with a sense of pop-like pacing in a way that has established his position as a crossover artist in an area of music that is typically a niche concern. Interestingly, his headier work has gained just as much, if not more, attention than his more streamlined material: "Families", his 2011 single with Los Angeles electro-pop auteur and Glasser mastermind Cameron Mesirow, may be Talabot's most pop-refined cut to date, but it's "Sunshine", the hypnotizing 2009 single that served as his breakout moment, that still stands as one of his most widely beloved tracks.
Anchored around a sample of impassioned chanting that crests beautifully as tinkling bells swirl and lope around it, "Sunshine" bears resemblance to minimal techno legend Ricardo Villalobos' masterful 2008 single "Enfants (Chants)"—but that comparison could prove potentially misleading. What Talabot does isn't minimal, nor does he skew in the other, more boisterous direction; he's all about control, knowing when to let his vat of sounds gorgeously overflow and when to bring the pot down to a tight, focused simmer. Last year's astounding debut LP ƒIN, then, was a demonstration of his steady hand and mind, a jade-textured record that alternately—and sometimes, simultaneously—shimmered and pulsated with iridescent light.
Mixes don't always explicitly reflect a producer's artistic flair, but Talabot's entry in !K7's long-running DJ-Kicks series is different. An album-length stitchwork of euphoric moments and rich textures, the 75-minute mix proves that everything this guy touches can't help but turn mossy, earthy, groovy. Considering how much of this mix is other people's work reflected in Talabot's own visage, the overall continuation here of the sounds found on ƒIN is impressive and, for the impatient, quite handy. As Philip Sherburne noted in our review of that record, ƒIN was the result of Talabot undergoing a nearly decade-long transformation as an artist, so who knows when we'll get the follow-up to that record—dance artists typically work in the singles format, so long-players typically are not a priority—which makes this DJ-Kicks mix a capable, reflective stopgap release.
In terms of selection, the mix is not too surprising taste-wise, a balanced breakfast of deep-house pulsers and percolating techno jams that keep the mood nice and steady. One track in particular, though, is worth highlighting for its revelatory nature: Mancunian dub-techno crawler Andy Stott's uneasy remix of British shoegaze outfit Maps' "I Heard Them Say", the first arguable peak that appears early in this DJ-Kicks installment. When I first heard this remix upon initial release, I was unimpressed—possibly because endless replays of Stott's commanding 2012 LP Luxury Problems has raised expectations for Stott-branded material a little too highly—but Talabot breathes new life into the track here, as it slithers and leaves a trail of glowing slime that sticks to the mix's opening third. The remix's inclusion also draws a previously unseen analogue between Stott and Talabot, two artists working with distinctly different approaches that nonetheless share a love for dipping their own contractions in layers of drowsy, clattery haze.
Artists from Talabot's Hivern label make appearances throughout, providing seemingly unreleased cuts and showcasing the collective's ear for glistening melodic dance music: Danish producer Round's "Glass" provides a particular moment of bliss with a classic structure and a slight sweep of tones, while Franc Sayol's Mistakes Are Okay project offers up the moody "Night Watcher" to serve as a darkly shaded interstitial cut. In the end, though, Talabot himself steals the show, bounding past DJ-Kicks' tradition of the compiling artist offering up an exclusive track by putting forth three new cuts he had a hand in.
There's "Anagrama", the tropical, woozy track from his and Genius of Time member Alexander Berg's Tempel Rytmik project, and the slyly anthemic "Sideral", a result of Talabot's team-up with Swedish producer Axel Boman (as Talaboman). The true stunner of the three, though—as well as possibly the big highlight on the mix—is Talabot's own "Without You", a big-room jam that wraps layers of shiny, winsome synth work around a muted vocal line like a barbershop pole. The track's yet another pristine example of Talabot's sense of pacing, as he dampens the beat midway through before bringing it back again to reinforce "Without You"'s strong melodic backbone.
John Talabot's DJ-Kicks entry isn't the flashiest mix you'll encounter this year, and there's plenty of room for debate as to whether it ranks in the upper echelon of the series' many installments. Similar to ƒIN, though, it's an immersive experience that grows richer with every listen, as new details emerge from the throbbing green slurry that binds the tracks together. Talabot's ear for songs that walk the balance between trippiness and accessibility is his greatest gift, but this DJ-Kicks mix proves that his hidden strength is a keen sense of structure. The constant chug, a push-and-pull that gives as good as it gets, is not unlike pumping blood—and if you're in the right mindset, a deep listen to this solid collection will give you life, too.


Merging academic underpinnings with thoroughly listenable rap music, Wild Water Kingdom is the most substantial solo project full-length to be associated with Das Racist to date.

Wild Water Kingdom

The Fader has a regular feature called "The Things I Carry" in which artists share what's in their pockets. A recent subject was Himanshu Suri, better known as Heems of Das Racist, the divisive, allusive, and pop culture savvy rap trio. Heems, along with the usual pocket regulars (keys, wallet) and an elephant totem from his girlfriend, was carrying a $30,000 check from Kmart, given to him in exchange for the rights to the Das Racist song "Girl" for use in a layaway commercial.
When I saw that check, I was annoyed. But while complaints about materialism in rap are common, it's easy to forget that rappers are character-creators, to whom flashiness is a way to promote an artistic brand. If I'm OK with other rappers' excess, why wasn't I willing to understand Heems from within the same context? Because of the way he looks, or where he went to school? At its best, Heems' music raises these sorts of questions, challenging the assumptions and double standards of rap fan groupthink. The question that has to be asked now that he's been playing these tricks for a couple years is simple: Can this philosophy make for compelling music?
In short, yes. His new mixtape Wild Water Kingdom is the most substantial solo project full-length associated with Das Racist to date, because it merges the academic underpinnings of Heems' ideas with thoroughly listenable rap music. Though he's still not the best rapper (his refusal to abide by traditional rhyme schemes will be frustrating to purists) he's made great strides here and is helped along by a NYC underground producer showcase.
Those beats, unfortunately, are forced to sustain the album's first quarter. Heems comes out swinging on "Cowabunga Gnarly", a banger from producer-of-the-year candidate Harry Fraud, but quickly loses steam, and resorts to his lazy reference overdrive, a trick which lost its novelty a couple years ago. Claiming, right after you declare your appreciation Junot Diaz, that you're "as smart as three SAT's," is fine, I guess, but the facts are unrelated. And the Crookers-produced "Third Thing" has a great singalong hook, but there's way too much nonsense in the amateurish verses.
Luckily, things do take a turn for the better. Around the halfway point of the title track, another Harry Fraud production (this one replete with gorgeous sitar strings), Heems decides to turns it on. "Freedom, put the heat up, who scheming for cheese/ believe in them please/ they need us to reach/ a piece with the place/ that's filled with the trees." These lines are rapped more fiercely and quickly than anything before, and they refer back to the family that Heems reps throughout the song, and the tape. And for the fans of the old Das Racist shtick, there's still an absurd Princess Diana line nestled a couple of bars later.
It used to be hard to tell if Heems wanted to be a rapper or if he wanted to make people who love rap angry. That's mostly gone now. This guy wants it, and his earnestness occasionally boils over, to the point of sappiness. Not sure if anyone realized that collaborator Safe sounds a lot like Dave Matthews, but the resemblance, and the resulting campfire vibe is enough to kill the otherwise tolerable "Medium Green Eyes".
More often, this newfound ability to speak plainly is a huge advantage for Heems. "Deepak Choppa", one of the best offerings here, is politically aware and seems truly angry, rather than bitter or sarcastic. "You know that we could send you back/ at any given time/ it ain't like money that you stack/ money for a lawyer/ that's the money that you lack," he raps from the perspective of an immigration agent, before transitioning into a different flow. On the second half of the song, he takes on race, repping his New York roots and his family and asking that you test his credentials: "I ain't black/ I ain't white/ I can't rap/ I can't write/ I ain't strapped/ I could fight." This isn't a sneer, it's a challenge.
In rap purist communities, the inability of some blog rappers to rap well is a well-documented gripe. Hearing a song like "Tell Me", in which two of the most disparaged targets wile out out over a huge beat from Earth 2's version of Just Blaze (producer Mike Finito), is some kind of head turner. Haters are still going to hate lines like Gambino's "Rush Limballin while I'm listening to tUne-yarDs" or Heems' spitting "Chamomile tea that we pour with splash." But those listeners will have to ask themselves-- would they hate these lines if they were coming from sources like Dipset, Roc Marciano, or Action Bronson?
Of course, those are the kinds of questions Heems has always provoked. Now that he's rapping well, that purpose is free to slide into focus. On Wild Water Kingdom, it's hard to argue with the beats. For the most part, it's hard to argue with the raps. You're going to have to ask yourself, if this guy is still bothering you, what exactly is it that you don't like? Because if it's the way he looks, or the references he's making, congratulations: you're now that guy who's too conservative to listen to rap music.


L.A. rapper Schoolboy Q specializes in hairpin turns from cautionary street tales and remorseful reflection into wanton bacchanal. His Interscope debut Oxymoron is essentially a volleyball match between his warring proclivities.

Oxymoron

Two years into Black Hippy’s mainstream rap takeover the efficacy of TDE’s hit factory is still a marvel to watch. As a group, pensive Compton good guy Kendrick Lamar, gang-affiliated L.A. street rap classicist Jay Rock, suburban psychotropic-loving conspiracy theorist Ab-Soul and drug dealing party animal Schoolboy Q unite to offer a panoramic view of Southern Californian inner city rot. In-house production teams Digi+Phonics and THC buoy the rhymes in excitingly quirky sonics, while gifted recording engineer Mixed By Ali keeps it all sounding winningly crisp and plush. The team has crafted over half a dozen albums together in just four years, and at this juncture, you can almost tell ahead of time what you’re going to get coming into a new TDE project. Although Kendrick’s good kid, m.A.A.d city revealed a Dickensian eye for storytelling and a knack for radio-savvy singles that didn’t wander too far off the plot—and sold a million copies in the process—the mechanics of his sound didn’t change much. You could easily slide “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” somewhere into Q’s Habits and Contradictions or Soul’s Control System without a bumpy transition. Consistency breeds familiarity, but as Schoolboy Q releases his Interscope debut Oxymoron, the precarious followup to his brother-in-arms’ mainstream windfall, the axiom sometimes proves a liability.
Schoolboy Q specializes in hairpin turns from cautionary street tales and remorseful reflection into wanton bacchanal, and Oxymoron is essentially a volleyball match between his warring proclivities. Opener “Gangsta” kicks off with Q coldly admonishing a street worker for thinking pneumonia gets her the day off, but after the raucous set-repping “Los Awesome”, “Collard Greens” drags us to the club for elite liver putrefaction. Then it’s back to the block for a few until “Studio” pops up pining for affection after a stressful day of recording. Oxymoron punctuates its seriousness of purpose with stress-free jingles, like a rap game The Who Sell Out, but it skirts falling apart because Q has cut a figure that seems equally at home throwing back shots and bagging up rocks. His skill set is varied enough to sell a terse, hypnotic vamp like “Collard Greens” off of personality alone, effect a snarling menace bouncing crack dealer bromides off 2 Chainz on “What They Want”, and then methodically juggle cadences and syllables relating the story of an uncle’s drug-addled downfall on “Hoover Street”. Q’s wildman delivery does most of the heavy lifting on the slighter material here, but you see the true depth of his songwriting talents in detail obsessed verses on “Break the Bank”, where he lets slip where the pills were stashed back when he sold, and “Prescription/Oxymoron” where Q, holed up at home munching prescription pills, catalogs all the calls he ignores as he hurtles toward an overdose (“My phone rang, rang and rang and rang/ If you ain’t sellin’ drugs, then I don’t hear a thing”). Thing is, these crack storytelling twists are occasionally drowned in formalist gangsta rap boilerplate.
Oxymoron is painfully aware of its place in the pantheon of hardcore West Coast rap, from the guest list, which calls in vets like slick-tongued Oakland pimp Suga Free and Dogg Pound wordsmith Kurupt alongside Odd Future magnate Tyler, the Creator, New York mafioso rap architect Raekwon and Atlanta trap court jester 2 Chainz to accentuate the commonalities between two generations of drug trafficking goon rap, to its struggle to imbue druggy levity and horned-up bedroom dispatches with a hardened, streetwise edge. Q is never less than engaging in this juggling act (though the brattier numbers can grate, like “Los Awesome”, which sounds like mid-2000s T.I. getting his hands on some quality speed), but he can come off sounding more interested in ticking off his wiseguy bona fides than introducing the person underneath. His 2012 independent album Habits and Contradictions made a much better go of it, from “My Homie”’s wounded story of a friend who turned out to be an embedded undercover cop to “My Hatin’ Joint”, which pulled off the song-for-the-ladies trope with a comically petty air of vindictiveness, to “Oxy Music”, which blueprints Oxymoron’s drug using drug dealer conceit with much more gripping imagery. Oxymoron is gruff and goofy in all the right places, and enticingly lush as one could expect from a TDE project (for instance: the pogoing drums and plinking keys of “Collard Greens”, the perpetually melting synth Tyler suspends over Q and Kurupt on “The Purge”, Pharrell’s keys on “Los Awesome”, equal parts EDM debauchery and arcade overdrive). But a whiff of formula makes for an experience that coolly whisks along on rails where it should be bounding off them.
Q shines the most when he’s able to reconcile his hustler past with his rap star present rather than mining each separately. “Hell of a Night” showcases a trap-house hybrid from DJ Dahi, fresh off Drake’s “Worst Behaviour”, and Q cuts loose, partying hard because he’s lived hard enough to deserve it (“I ain’t minding if the world stops/ We been living up in hell’s shop”). “Break the Bank” and the Chromatics-sampling “Man of the Year” follow suit in affixing the happy ending to Oxymoron’s war stories while serving up the album’s most memorable hooks. The quality that sold the gangsta rap classics Q clearly studied in the process of making this album was an ability to tease triumph out of the mouth of adversity, and Oxymoron really takes off when the streak of songs that close the album proper stumbles onto the equation. Small wonder that the majority of its singles are culled from there.
Oxymoron is a victory in that Q’s sound has made the jump to the majors fully intact in an era where major label debuts often take a chop shop approach to assembly. Interscope’s trust in TDE saves the album from the awkward test tube collaborations that bog down many of its peers, but Oxymoron’s doubling down on a reliable formula makes for a relatively risk-averse listen. We don’t find out much about Q’s character or capabilities that we didn’t already know coming in, and a few of the tried and true song tropes here deliver diminishing returns. There isn’t a bad song in the bunch, but you get the sense that three albums in, Q’s readymade sense of what a Schoolboy Q album should sound like is as much a safety net prohibiting outright failure as it is a hindrance to true progression.


For All We Know

Since penning her first song in 2013, Nao has come close to mastering a particular strand of funky, high-gloss R&B. Her A.K. Paul-featuring debut single, “So Good,” arrived within months of that first songwriting attempt, creating her template for emotionally precise pop that gives away little about its creator. Her empire has expanded—after the single, she formed Little Tokyo Recordings to release a handful of EPs—as has her songwriting. Recent single “Fool to Love,” which appears on her debut album For All We Know, opens at the flash point of a doomed relationship, then takes us back through the “mindless games” and slain insecurities that helped forge her escape. The details are vague—it’s possible the tormentor is her own self-doubt—but the sense of an inspired, forcible overcoming is unmistakeable.
In the absence of lyrical biography, Nao’s hook is her voice—she sings like a giddy angel sent to live out a dream of pop stardom—which puts her out of step with recent R&B permutations cultivated in England. Where others have found transcendence by rejecting slinky, summertime beats—FKA twigs’ alien ambiguity, Grace Acladna’s lucid soul nightmares, Night Slugs’ scatty dream-grime production for Kelela—Nao, while raised on grime and garage, owes little to any discernible London lineage. Her view of modern love, delivered in a tone that oscillates between euphoria and self-examination, feels like a rebuff to digital-era romance, where the possibilities of perma-communication (the mute, the de-friend, the ghosting) have fostered a banal revolution in breakup politics. Instead, her music inhabits the arena of high-stakes R&B, where women’s voices are dominant, acrobatic, and impossible for unsympathetic listeners to tune out.
On For All We Know, Nao autopsies various relationships—with friends, lovers, outgrown versions of herself—and, having decided what went wrong, calmly takes down the perpetrators. She sings with the weight of lessons learned: “I’m wise and I’m older,” a line from “Fool to Love,” is a rare instance of personal exposition, but the sentiment was already implied. On “In the Morning,” she acts the part of a lover too polite to say it’s over. “Buried all my feelings, I’m withholding,” she sings, fretfully. “I tried to leave him signs ... Are they hard to recognize?” Following track “Trophy,” a new A.K. Paul collaboration, reboots the theme of romantic redemption, firing out a feminist takedown in the dialect of funk expressionism.
Nao’s beseeching tones imbue every line with romantic defiance, even when, as on breakout single “Bad Blood,” the lost love under her microscope is platonic. On that song’s chorus, she accompanies an armada of synth blasts with heaving sighs, as if to hack up the offending memories—“a past that couldn’t last”—from her lungs, as well as her mind. These aren’t the shallow resolutions of a woman destined to repeat her mistakes.
There are few surprises in the music, but its crisp bombast complements the vocals, playing abrasive beats against silky seduction. Nao is unafraid to fall back on shmoozy late-’90s R&B melodies, allowing snarling, maximalist synths to drag the songs into 2016. “Get to Know Ya,” produced by Jungle, opens the record with elastic funk guitars and imploring, melismatic melodies, before the GRADES-produced “Inhale Exhale” bounces it up a notch with a raunchy bass strut that melts away as melodies zipwire across octaves. The music speaks in wonky Soulquarian grooves, playing into Nao’s jazz-vocal schooling: Album highlight “Feels Like (Perfume),” a Royce Wood Junior-produced ballad, ventilates D’Angelo’s polluted soul with sultry boudoir vibes and an improbably perfect George Harrison-style chorus.
At 54 minutes, the 18-track record begins to feel a little baggy, its uncharismatic drums and textural familiarity giving Nao’s paragliding voice one job too many. Even when overlong, though, the songs can impress with their breadth: “Blue Wine,” a moment of cosmic relief, winds down to slow-jam tempo, but blossoms into something exquisitely languid and sprawling, a distant cousin to Janelle Monáe’s elaborations on R&B balladry. Again, on “Blue Wine,” the music feels emotionally descriptive without the need for disclosure—“broken emotions” are the narrator’s ailment, we’re told. But when vagueness is a catalyst, rather than a stand-in for passion, its evasive profundity teaches you to look for what’s missing.


Phil Elverum recently took an extended break from touring to record two albums in a studio he built in a deconsecrated church. The first of these albums makes a vast, cool sanctuary of itself and quietly beckons you into it.

Clear Moon

Phil Elverum, the force behind the Microphones and Mount Eerie, lives in Anacortes, Wash., a small town of just under 20,000 people about 64 miles outside of Seattle. As he told Brandon Stosuy in last week's Pitchfork interview, he recently took an extended break from touring to record two albums there, and he speaks of it as a calming, recentering time: "The songs and the ideas came from a more slowed-down attention to this particular place, this town, walking from my house to the studio and back every day," Elverum told him. The second album of the pair, to be called Ocean Roar, will be out later this year; Elverum calls it "more challenging and weird and darker and heavier." For now, however, he has given us Clear Moon, an album that makes a vast, cool sanctuary of itself and quietly beckons you in. Inscrutable and transfixing, plainspoken and unknowable, it feels like a collection of secrets Elverum has cupped in his palm to pour directly, and privately, into your ear alone, a rich meditation on the many meanings of the word "home."
"I go on describing this place/ And the way it feels to live and die" is how Elverum summarizes his task on Clear Moon in the album's opening song, "Through the Trees, Pt. 2". The line also neatly serves as any great writer's ultimate mission statement: Your backyard is a gateway to the universe, if you look hard enough. Note the song title's tricky numerology: We seem to be joining Elverum in the middle of an ongoing, possibly endless cataloging task. (Elverum, of course, has a documented fondness for "Pt. 2's".) The song names all have the quality of bullet points in some strange thesis: "The Place Lives", the second song, is followed by "The Place I Live", and it feels like Elverum is using these phrases to draw some obscure distinctions that are very important to him. "If I look/ Or if I don't look/ Clouds are always passing over," he sings on "The Place I Live". It's a statement that can read as perversely comforting or profoundly depressing-- the universe doesn't disappear when I blink, on the one hand, and the universe wouldn't blink if I disappeared, on the other. Elverum's sighed inflection cradles both of these meanings with equal gentleness.
The album's sound, meanwhile has the misty-but-tactile feeling of a sense memory. Every sound echoes from side to side of the mix, and the effect isn't so much "panning" as it is a shimmering omnipresence. Acoustic guitars, light keyboards, muted but persistent drums-- the sounds on Clear Moon feel like anxious, living beings that are trying to whisper something to you that you don't want to know. "Lone Bell" is the moment where Elverum's existential quandaries suddenly sprout fangs and grow frightening: Sharp horn blats and insistently hammering guitars evoke fight-or-flight dread, danger, encroaching panic. The bassline keeps crawling up a modal minor scale in the center of the song, posing the same uneasy question, over and over.
What that question is remains deliciously out of verbal range, but Clear Moon's brought a sharp memory into relief for me: It reminded me of standing outside of my house as a child, on a cold night. From the street, the house, broadcasting its fragile comfort out to me, looked a little unreal: Elverum calls a song on the album "House Shape". You know you will be allowed back in, but you stand for a prolonged moment, looking into the lit windows, and tasting something uneasy in your mouth. Clear Moon summons, inhabits, and distends this moment for 42 consecutive minutes.


The Finnish duo’s deconstructed club music grapples with life in the Anthropocene, drawing from nu-metal and hardcore in songs that feel burned out and overwhelmed.

Tearless

With a pandemic raging and the planet warming, it can feel like “we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we're writing together,” suggests Kim Stanley Robinson, a man who knows a thing or two about speculative fiction. In a widely shared New Yorker article from May, the writer confronted the possibility that our present-day scenario is every bit as strange as one of his Martian stories. The boundary between reality and fantasy has been breached. Finnish electronic duo Amnesia Scanner have been monitoring the situation for some time, and on their second LP, they sound less optimistic than ever.
Before their debut album came out in 2018, Amnesia Scanner were anonymous. The project left behind a breadcrumb trail of cryptic music videos and mixtapes, starting with 2014’s AS LIVE [][][][][], and helped sketch out the idea of “deconstructed club music”: harsh, angsty, and heavily compressed, with scraps of pop, techno, and dembow knotted into fractured melodies and nu-metal squall. With the release of Another Life, their air of mystery evaporated, but Amnesia Scanner have continued to be apocalyptic, above all else. Tearless, according to Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala, the Berlin-based musicians behind the project, is their “breakup album with the planet.” Along with recent work from Oneohtrix Point Never, ANOHNI, and Grimes, the record grapples with life in the Anthropocene era and the awareness of humanity’s irreversible impact on its only home.
Amnesia Scanner aren’t the kind of guys you’d find wearing “End Is Nigh” sandwich boards and shouting into megaphones about solar flares; until now, they could even have been accused of taking a perverse pleasure in watching the world burn, choosing to rave through chaos rather than fight to put out the flames. Now, though, the mood has soured. Where Another Life felt bright and alert, shimmying towards oblivion like lemmings in a conga line, Tearless is burned out and overwhelmed. This is ugly music, even at its most melodic. The shadow of nu-metal and hardcore hangs over tracks like “Flat,” a collaboration with metalcore act Code Orange, where busted electronic drums and shredded guitars recall Deftones and Nine Inch Nails. On “AS Tearless” a chant-along punk riff is torn to pieces by distortion. There’s no air, no light. A brief interlude, “Call of the Center,” informs us in crackling robotic tones that we’re “approaching the center of the labyrinth.”
Voices, including those of Brazilian DJ and producer Lyzza and Peruvian artist Lalita, are processed to sound steely and serrated, slicing through the mix like a logger’s chainsaw. These artists appear at the album’s poppiest peaks: Lalita bluffs her way through heartbreak on the operatic “AS Acá” (“I feel like the pain of losing you doesn’t affect me,” she sings in Spanish), and Lyzza’s voice is shattered into iron filings on “AS Going.” (Lyrically, there’s nothing more than hints at the end-of-days theme.) Aside from those sharply focused highlights, and a brief climax of power chords and blast beats on “AS Labyrinth,” the atmosphere is claggy and subdued. Tearless ends as it began, in slow, exhausted strides. “You will be fine if we can help you lose your mind,” sings a distorted, uncredited voice on the final track, a lighters-in-the-air lament for the party at the end of the world. What could be darker, and more euphoric?
With clubs and festivals on hold in the wake of the pandemic, Tearless will not be presented as the live audiovisual extravaganza that Amnesia Scanner had planned for it. That’s a shame, because their music is designed to be heard at a deafening volume, offloaded in huge slabs to trigger a seismic event on the dancefloor. But as a quiet killer scythes through populations, and as a dozen more undiscovered species disappear from the Earth forever, such an anticlimax is fitting. Kim Stanley Robinson might agree. His second novel, The Memory of Whiteness, promises a fantastical instrument which allows music to flow directly from a master player’s thoughts into reality, thereby cracking open the secrets of the universe. The novel is set in 3229. There’s something to look forward to.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Atlanta art-punks Warehouse build a tightly controlled chaos, relying on improvised collaboration to forge gems from dischord.

super low

Between Atlanta and Athens, Northern Georgia historically has a knack for churning out some truly freaky, funky acts that can create and innovate outside the claustrophobic East Coast hype bubble. Atlanta quintet Warehouse have existed in this world since first meeting in part at elementary school and then in full years later at Georgia State University. Less than a year after forming, they were receiving recognition from notable local Bradford Cox, who told Pitchfork that one of his best moments of 2013 was “Seeing the band Warehouse play live: They are a new cool young art-punk group from Atlanta. They evoke Pylon but are very much doing their own thing.” Those outside of Atlanta were able to hear what he meant once Warehouse quietly self-released their first album, Tesseract, in 2014. Tesseract’s complex-but-pleasing harmonies  quickly caught the eye of blooming Brooklyn label Bayonet and in 2015 it was re-released as a cassette for the masses to consume.
super low is Warehouse’s sophomore effort, taking the strengths of its predecessor and building on them like the Robert Rauschenberg works they mention as inspiration. Like Rauschenberg’s thick collages, Warehouse’s reliance on improvised collaboration results in gems buried amongst their dischord. Ben Jackson and Alex Bailey are responsible for laying each track’s foundation with twisting, jangly guitars, then bassist Josh Hughes and drummer Doug Bleichner add subtle, but strong, flourishes. Finally, there’s the voice of Elaine Edenfield, which stretches and snaps like a rubber band, scratches like Janis Joplin’s howl, and, occasionally, sinks to a mournful murmur. It’s Edenfield’s voice that elevates Warehouse beyond that vague, empty label of “art-punk” and fills them with accessible emotion.
super low opener “Oscillator” kicks things off with a groovy reverie. Immediately after “Oscillator” ends, Edenfield rips into “Exit Only,” her voice seesawing between a commanding rasp and a disheartened mutter. All the while, the instruments are marathoning behind her, remaining in tight conversation that manages to sound effortless. “Audrey Horne,” a clear reference to the sassy “Twin Peaks” character, jumps back and forth between opposites, both in terms of the contrasting tight shredding and loose breaks and lyrically: “Like the prefix and the suffix/There is a before and an after/And it is not here nor there.” Penultimate track “Modifier Analog” chugs along in a similarly composed fashion as the rest of super low but its concluding Broadcast-like swirling breakdown destroys any feelings of monotony before the album gets too comfortable.
super low’s biggest banger is “Simultaneous Contrasts,” a growling track about disparities that surfs down the guitar neck to ride a quick riff. “You and I/We come from separate worlds,” Edenfield groans before hiccuping “The fevered eyes/They’re ruining my life.” The so-called “fevered eyes” float through super low like ghosts in addition to images of purgatory and fading away. The undercurrent of super low is that of loss, a supreme feeling of heartache. The title track reaches a place of resolution, “I can’t destroy the things/They keep me alive/And I can’t destroy the things/That lead to where you lie.” Shortly after, “Reservoir” continues to search for control in a relationship amidst tragedy. Originally intended to be a simple love song a la Belle and Sebastian, “Reservoir” instead results in a difficult embrace of reality—in its own way, it’s more romantic than any traditional ballad. Edenfield chokes through reassurances like “And when all your smoke and veils fall/I am with you/And never leaving” and “I can tell we’re heading towards the apex/Or the end/And either way/It will be fine.”
Warehouse surpass any art-punk labeling through careful, deliberate construction and vulnerability. While some might feel that their complex melodies become a little repetitive, I urge you to listen closer and find the devil in the details. They have planted many careful embellishments just below the surface, and if you find them, it will make glorious sense out of their chaos.


Having evolved from his early days as art rap’s cocky philosopher in chief, milo displays a newfound confidence alongside Elucid, a grittier and more seasoned lyricist.

Nostrum Grocers

Rory Ferreira, who records as milo, is at his best when his songs tilt and wobble between confident and cocky. milo has evolved from his early days as art rap’s philosopher in chief (the cocky), more recently sharpening his gaze on fatherhood and blackness in America (the confident). He’s saving the Schopenhauer bars for another day.
Last year’s who told you to think??!!?!?!?! oscillated between both ends of the spectrum, including both love letters written to rap and knotty digressions on metaphysics. At times, it’s too easy to see the gears of milo’s didactic rap style turning. This is why his work as Scallops Hotel has been more readily approachable than the milo discography. It’s free-associative, touching on and pulling from whatever avenues Ferreira feels like strolling down. In this informal setting, his greatest strength as a rapper—his wit—shines through. Freed from the self-imposed brilliance attached to the milo project, the pressure seems to disappear. This makes his new LP, Nostrum Grocers, with New York-based rapper Elucid, all the more exciting: With another rapper around to do some of the heavy lifting, milo’s able to slip in some of his smartest, brightest ideas without ever crumbling under the weight of his own intelligence.
Elucid and milo first linked up in 2014 as guests on the same online radio show and immediately began brainstorming ideas for an album together. It wasn’t until three years later, a month after the release of who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, that the rappers got together in Brooklyn to begin working on the album. Recorded mostly over two days, Nostrum Grocers is the sort of loose-but-serious gold both rappers have banked their careers on.
Elucid, about 10 years older than milo, is the guiding light for Nostrum Grocers’ thematic scope. Elucid’s stark depictions present him as a vessel into a broken world, one able to conjure up stories of poverty and institutional racism like a ghost of housing projects past, internalizing these ills and illuminating them so the rest of us can see. He often deploys a low growl, giving his delivery an air of desperation. On Nostrum Grocers, Elucid’s jab-jab-cross of a voice helps give the record its precise and rumbling aggression.
The LP is at its best when the electricity between milo and Elucid takes precedence over individual bars that sometimes flirt with excessive cleverness. On “circumcision is the first betrayal,” the two feed off each other’s verses over a hard-hitting drum groove and free-floating sirens pushed to the distance. Elucid raps, “I’m no fatalist/Real black/Like save the bacon grease,” before milo asks, “Would it be fitting to sing a requiem as the trap door closes/Redundant like Black Moses/Abomunist newscast/I’m watching wide-eyed eating a gallon on Moose Tracks.” It’s fascinating to watch these two stylists peel back the layers of each other’s words in executing their respective visions.
Elucid’s intuitive knack for blending dense lyricism with melody rubs off on milo, whose solo records have occasionally featured uniform flows that can veer toward stasis. Here, milo’s brought a sharpening stone for his weapon. On “’98 gewehr” his voice has a sardonic energy, and his effortlessly scathing delivery gives his lines a deadly menace. He goes after rappers past with a hunger and confidence he’s never displayed on other milo-related releases, shaping his previously laid-back flow into sharpened darts: “Greatness is to act with no security/Your whole span was a blur to me/Y’all rap with no urgency,” he snarls, and it’s easy to believe him.
Produced entirely by the two emcees, Nostrum Grocers is a collaboration between two rappers who occupy near-opposite ends of the art-rap spectrum. As each moves towards the middle, the happy medium becomes less a compromise than the best possible result—an impressive feat of interiority projected back out onto the world.


On an album-length EP, Kurt Vile finds darker shades to his gold-hued worldview.

Back to Moon Beach EP

Kurt Vile’s time is slippery. Mondays melt unnoticed into Saturdays. The sun rises, sets again, then it all flows bassackwards. His lengthy records give the impression of a series of sunlit days, half-remembered in a haze. But if listening to Vile’s music can make one acutely aware of the transience of all things, the man at the center of these songs does not always seem conscious of this truth. He lives from moment to moment—often the moment of his songs’ creation, which he likes to narrate out loud, describing his writing process and shouting out his influences. He’s deeply self-aware, and if his new album-length EP, Back to Moon Beach, at first seems like a continuation of this thematic and sonic mindset, he has a ready-made response to anyone hoping for a mid-career switcheroo: “These recycled riffs ain’t goin’ anywhere anytime soon,” he sings on the title track.
Back to Moon Beach consists largely of gold-hued guitar jams with simple chord progressions and generous runtimes. One of the first lyrics on opener “Another good year for the roses” is “These days I do whatever I want,” and Moon Beach at first seems like a commitment to this credo. The songs are filled with slacker hedges like “man” and “whatever.” Sometimes he won’t bother to write any words if a “woo” suffices. The title track suggests that “Moon Beach” is the mental landscape he escapes to while making music, and its distance from the daily grind seems aligned with idioms like “head in the clouds.”
And yet the Vile character seems less content, less satisfied, less serene on these songs than on any he’s written since 2011’s Smoke Ring For My Halo. Some kind of dissatisfaction has set in, and it’s not so easy to just play it away. “Cup runneth over with lifeblood/Then it sprung a leak,” he sings on “Touched something (caught a virus),” before complaining about a migraine. “Like a wounded bird trying to fly” centers on a simile apparently written by his daughter Awilda. “Always did I love that line/But never did I apply it to myself ’til just then,” he sings. On “Blues come for some,” the sumptuous layers of guitar fall away, and we hear Vile alone at a piano, confessing: “Blues came to me in my dreams/And it stayed.” The cause of Vile’s blues is often ambiguous, though “Tom Petty’s gone (but tell him i asked for him)” suggests one answer. Vile wonders aloud what he might have said to his friend David Berman, or Tom Petty had he known him, before concluding that he might not have found anything to say: Bob Dylan is still alive, after all, and if Vile met him in person, he’d “melt down like a nuclear reactor.”
Much of this material was recorded in 2019 at Panoramic House in Marin County, the affluent expanse north of San Francisco whose almost Celtic landscapes have long attracted newly moneyed rock stars and inspired some of their most beautiful music. These sessions would be Vile’s last with multi-instrumentalist Rob Laakso, a member of his Violators since 2013, who passed away earlier this year from a rare form of cancer. Though Laakso was not diagnosed until the songs had been written and the sessions wrapped up, “Tom Petty’s gone” becomes even more gutting in this context, especially given how fantastic his contributions sound throughout the record. Laakso’s arrival in the band coincided with a shift toward a more expansive and texturally rich approach, and rarely has Vile’s music sounded more transportive than in Moon Beach’s best moments: the ragged fuzz-wah at the end of “Another good year for the roses,” or the phased-out guitars on the title track that sound like waves lapping against the shore.
At 52 minutes in most versions, Moon Beach is longer than some of Vile’s albums; label Verve admits this is an “EP by no one’s definition” but his. (And maybe Sufjan’s.) The six-track single-LP edition runs a respectable 39 minutes and gains something by ending with “Tom Petty’s gone” and fading into poignant silence. Yet the bonus tracks are delightful. While “Must Be Santa” is best-known through Bob Dylan’s raucous drinking-song interpretation, Vile’s is touchingly domestic, featuring his two daughters on backing vocals and the constant, reassuring twinkle of a windchime. There’s also a cover of “Passenger Side,” a tragicomic early Wilco song told from the perspective of a drunk driver who’s had his license revoked and now throws back beers in the passenger seat. The only song that feels like an afterthought is a marginally shorter single edit of “Cool Water” from last year’s (watch my moves). It’s hard to tell if Moon Beach is meant as a continuation of Vile’s past work or the start of something new, but that uncertainty is also what makes it feel so exciting.
Correction: A previous version of this review implied that Kurt Vile did not know David Berman. It has since been updated to reflect that they were friends.


Grinderman's final release is a collection of remixes by Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, Factory Floor, QOTSA's Josh Homme, UNKLE, and Robert Fripp, among others.

2 RMX

The idea of Nick Cave as a remix-appropriate diva is such an excellent one that you might wonder why his hideous shrieks and cadaverous croon haven't been pillaged by DJs a hundred times over. House music, at least, has always had a taste for mixing religious ecstasy into worldly grooves, even if house producers have tended to draw more from the uplifting end of the gospel spectrum. But there's also been a side of house that's reveled in sampling hellfire condemnations and apocalyptic oratory from folks who probably wouldn't set foot in the secular houses of sin where dance music lives. With his pulpit-rocking cadences and brimstone tone, Nick Cave would fit perfectly in this tradition, even if no one's had the sense (or lack thereof) to take him to that particular river just yet.
One look at the tracklist for Grinderman's 2 RMX, eleven tweaks on the band's second (and supposedly final) album, 2010's Grinderman 2, should tell you that this isn't that kind of a remix project. The dream of Nick Cave as hectoring house music queen will have to wait a little while longer. Grinderman was Cave's noisiest and most truculent project in years, but also his wittiest and most sensual. Especially on Grinderman 2, the band had perfected a sound that was equal parts dirty-minded groove, ear-scourging feedback, and mordant-past-all-normal-measure wordplay. If much of Cave's love of blues had focused on the genre's vein-opening confessional side, Grinderman found him returning to its other roots, as a soundtrack for drunken house parties and semi-legal gatherings in sweaty speakeasies. It was a glorious (if often brutal) and physical sound, real body-moving stuff, as well as a cerebral one.
And so while this swan-song compilation is unsurprisingly helmed by peers young and old, from the noisier and more aggressive end of rock music with a few beat-minded ringers thrown in, the assembled musicians don't often seem to get what made Grinderman great (or simply don't care). These are not, for the most part, radical reconstructions, but the best are often the most simple. Or the most sympathetic, however far afield they get from Grinderman's world. Robert Fripp's "Super Heathen Child" is exactly what the name implies, not doing much to the original except cranking it a few notches, including (naturally) the guitars, with the blues raunch being eaten away at by Frippertronics excess. It's one of the few tracks on 2 RMX that I'd listen to over one of Grinderman's non-remixed songs. Not only because it makes the original "Heathen Child" bigger and badder and more swaggering, but because it does so without getting in the way of that too-hot groove.
The individual entries on Grinderman 2 are all over the map quality-wise, from inert and utterly ignorable (Factory Floor's mush-headed clichés when they take on "spooky" industrial ambiance) to half-brilliant reframings of pretty singular material (UNKLE slamming acid house silliness into chunky surf-rock pastiche until they come up with the perverse idea of Grinderman-goes-big-beat). But these remixes are undeniably at their weakest when they dull the band's get-down-get-dirty instincts, defang their attack, and/or smother Cave's self-lacerating humor under a ton of "atmospheric" murk. And even the like-minded remixers occasionally fall short. Queens of the Stone Age aren't musically a million miles from what Grinderman were attempting to do during their too-short career, but Josh Homme's tepid "Mickey Bloody Mouse" is a damn shame when you consider the kind of motorik monster he could have pulled off.
Still, occasionally someone strays from the Grinderman template and actually scores. For a glimpse at what a wholly beautiful Grinderman might have sounded like, look to Barry Adamson, who tarts up the already pretty swoony "Palaces of Montezuma" with his usual Bacharach-gone-badass bells and whistles. And while I've never been much taken by A Place to Bury Strangers' empty cacophony, maybe all they needed all along was a great singer: There's no sex in their rhythm, another JAMC-in-a-tsunami attack that's been bleached of all blues, but it's definitely a groove, however manic and relentlessly forward-charging. Plus Cave's voice adds an urgency and human grit that's almost always been missing from the band's original material. It's a shame that more acts here, given the platform, didn't choose to exercise Adamson's craft or APTBS' intensity. As a farewell-cum-summation, 2 RMX could have been worse. It's hardly as cynical or cover-your-ears bad as most rock remix albums. If nothing else, it proves how singular Grinderman were, and reinforces how much they'll be missed.


A year after their onstage debut, the atmospheric black-metal artist WIFE and grime experimentalist Mumdance join again to fuse pummeling beats with sheets of noise into a kind of transcendent fury.

Bliss Signal

At a moment when every midsize market seems to have at least one middling music festival, the most enduring events understand that mere stand-and-deliver sets from known quantities aren’t enough to jumpstart intrigue, let alone maintain it. If the question is how to stand out, the available answers are manifold: full-album performances, audacious premieres, unforeseen reunions, one-off collaborations, art installations in spectacular settings. During the last 15 years, Unsound—an especially adventurous experimental festival rooted in Poland but now with branches worldwide—has tried it all. For recent editions, they have helped propel a touring ballet and album by footwork disruptor Jlin and British choreographer Wayne McGregor and staged a Matmos performance of a Robert Ashley opera; in 2014, they even launched a line of perfumes created in concert with Tim Hecker, Ben Frost, and Kode9, and designed to accompany their music. In a landscape that is formulaic by industry design, Unsound epitomizes the idea that festivals can be about more than combining beers and bands to make money.
Bliss Signal are not the most shocking or unexpected project to stem from Unsound’s hallowed history, but the project’s 2017 Krakow debut did represent a reach across the aisles of distinct British niches. James Kelly emerged a decade ago as Altar of Plagues, an intoxicating atmospheric black-metal band that gave its complex song structures a slick electronic skin; Kelly soon inverted the idea as WIFE, a hard-edged electronic pop project built around a heavy-metal heart. As Mumdance, British producer Jack Adams has been a similarly brazen synthesist, grappling with harsh noise and hip-hop power above a stiffened electronic spine. His sense of repetitive propulsion and lurking melody has long suggested a spiritual kinship with heavy metal’s sweaty ecstasy. In retrospect, Kelly and Adams are nearby pieces of the same postmodern musical puzzle—fitting partners given the right circumstances, like an invitation and a stage at one of the world’s best festivals.
Their eight-track, full-length debut arrives almost exactly a year after that onstage premiere and systematically checks each of the duo’s requisite boxes: For “Floodlight,” a hangman riff frames a concussive beat before they merge into a racing industrial wallop. For “Surge,” pummeling techno becomes a blast-beat surrogate, the pulse furious beneath a sheer black-metal façade. There is a pensive intro that drops a sonar signal into subaqueous hum, an interlude of soft drone and whirring static, and an expansive outro that feels like a deep breath exhaled with eyes closed and chin skyward.
The best moments on Bliss Signal—when Adams’ circuits flip Kelly’s riff upside down during “Tranq,” or every time the beat recoils and releases during the title track—hinge more on force than finesse. In fact, these 30 minutes feel like a blaze of glory for one spin, maybe two, overwhelming you the way Salem’s King Night might have. But as with that largely forgotten crew, repeated listens don’t yield the depth of peers like, say, Tim Hecker, Andy Stott, or Maja Ratkje. Bliss Signal doesn’t produce the lasting despair of labelmate and clear predecessor Prurient (it does seem at times like his Cocaine Death, reimagined as a maze of locked grooves), the ascendant beauty of the Hafler Trio, or the transcendent motion of M83. You can hear traces of all that throughout Bliss Signal, and they are entirely tantalizing. But they never coalesce into a cohesive sound, never rising past fury into a singular identity.
Aside from the occasional deluge of gray-shaded deliverance, what’s best about Bliss Signal might be its keen sense of promise—the potential that remains in ideas left unfulfilled and detours left untaken. At less than five minutes, “Endless Rush” doesn’t pursue the implied infinity of its name. A fluorescent glow slowly rises, with Kelly and Adams pulling a steadily escalating beat taut beneath it. Listening feels like watching the pages of some massive flipbook fly by, knowingly waiting for an end you hope never comes. The song fades away too soon, the sad whimper at the end of an exciting life cut short. I want to hear them shape a piece like this over the course of an hour, teasing out its every nuance much like the Necks. And only for the exquisite finale, “Ambi Drift,” do Bliss Signal add vocals. They use Kelly’s arced falsetto as a sort of curved steel beam, the anchor around which they hang spiderwebbed distortion and noise that crackles like the embers of an eternal campfire. It recasts Sigur Rós, suddenly aiming for hell rather than heaven. The song lingers at album’s end like an alluring ellipsis, suggesting there’s more but not guaranteeing it. Here’s hoping there is.


On her third LP, Seattle’s Shenandoah Davis turns breakups into pitch-perfect chamber pop, propelled by wise lyrics and her striking, classically-trained voice.

Souvenirs

Most love songs are about one of two stages in the life of a relationship: the beginning or the end. Either you’re meeting someone’s eyes across a crowded dance floor, or you’re watching them pack their stuff into cardboard boxes before closing your apartment door behind them. On the surface, Souvenirs, the third album by Seattle-based singer-songwriter Shenandoah Davis, is all about breakups—certainly, the love affairs chronicled on these 10 chamber pop songs are behind her. But Souvenirs doesn’t dwell on the bitterness, remorse, or even sadness conveyed by the typical breakup album. Instead, it focuses on the moments in relationships that are often overshadowed by the more dramatic episodes—the daily minutiae, the memories that fall between the cracks until they are retrieved, years later, like coins between the cushions of a beat-up couch. Davis seeks to serve those memories justice, and demonstrate that even when everything goes wrong, there can still be beauty that may alleviate the heartache, if only for the duration of a song.
Beyond its emotional dexterity, the sound of Souvenirs is astoundingly well-rounded, as Davis’ wise-beyond-her-years lyrics mesh seamlessly with lush orchestral instrumentation and a strikingly high-pitched, classically-trained voice that lies somewhere between Joanna Newsom, Joni Mitchell, and some shivering lovelorn aria (Davis graduated from the University of Northern Colorado with a degree in operatic performance). From the opening windswept strings of “The Wings,” Davis imprints every note of Souvenirs with a sense of deep purpose.
Her lyrics evoke detailed tableaus, stories within stories, and when she sings lines like “Sleep under the piano in your grandfather’s house/On the braided rug and lay his best suit out,” you can almost feel the carpet scratch against your cheek. Despite the violins, violas, oboes, horns, pianos, and multitudes of other instruments on these tracks, they don’t come off as heavy-handed, or trying to fill the songs with false importance. In their grandiose narrative songwriting, these could be songs by Petula Clark, or Ronnie Spector, or Françoise Hardy, and their pitch-perfect nod to the symphonic pop artists of the mid-20th century adds yet another meaty dimension to the album.
But the moments of romantic introspection end up taking center stage. On the highlight “East-Facing Window,” Davis visits a lover in New York City, unsure of how the trip will end or where she stands in the relationship. “Let’s hang up our artwork/In a borrowed apartment,” she suggests, “I mean all our friends have done it/And it’s not like they’re geniuses or anything.” Meanwhile, the person across from her has a simple question: “What did you come here for?” “East-Facing Window” begins with a simple arpeggiated piano melody, but as the song continues and Davis becomes more and more wrapped up in doubt and confusion, the music becomes stormier, the piano becoming faster and faster as violins whirl around. It’s a great example of how Davis can take one day out of her life and create a sonic narrative that transports you to its exact place and time.
There are other magical moments on Souvenirs: the piano ballad “Gold Coast,” which evokes the simple melodies and self-deprecating humor of Randy Newman; “Orbit,” which begins like a 1960s girl group waltz; and the lead single “Supernatural Powers,” which is perhaps the only song on Souvenirs that depicts the explosive passion of the beginning of a relationship. Each song on the album features some kind of window into Davis’ past, and each lyrical flourish, or well-placed baroque instrument, is a key to that remembrance. The record’s title serves it well: If life amounts to a collection of memories, the majority sitting idle on a shelf in our minds, Davis’ talent is in taking hers down, dusting them off, and presenting them to us as universal experiences. She learns from them, and so can we.


One of the greatest rock albums ever is reissued again, this time in two versions; both useful but less than ideal or definitive.

Iggy and the Stooges: Raw Power [Legacy Edition] / Raw Power [Deluxe Edition]

When Iggy Pop commanded a generation of glam-rock kids and biker-bar burnouts to "dance to the beat of the living dead" on Raw Power's totemic title track, he wasn't just talking B-movie nonsense-- he was heralding his band's back-from-the-grave resurrection. Because the Stooges heard on Raw Power were not the same band that produced 1969's self-titled debut or 1970's Funhouse, but rather some mutant, zombie version. With the Stooges dropped from Elektra, Iggy exploited a solo-artist deal with David Bowie's management to reassemble his band around new guitarist James Williamson, pushing Ron Asheton to bass and re-branding the Stooges as "Iggy & the Stooges". And in accordance with those changes, Bowie's infamously treble-heavy Raw Power mix thrust Iggy's vocals and Williamson's searing solos miles out in front of the rhythm section, to the point of practically writing Ron and drummer/brother Scott Asheton out of the set.
All of which has made Raw Power the most contentious release in the Stooges catalog, a fact that Iggy himself effectively owned up to in 1997 when he issued an exponentially louder and beefier new mix that took the album's title to literal extremes (and, in the process, horrified audiophiles with a distaste for digital distortion). It speaks volumes about the songs' pure immediacy and charisma that, even in its original mix, Raw Power became the album most responsible for giving the Stooges a life after death. Where the primordial caveman blues of The Stooges and the proto-metallic grind of Funhouse made them touchstones for future grunge, stoner-rock, and noise artists, Raw Power provided a mainline for first-generation punks and the 80s hard-rockers that followed in their wake. (Case in point: When J Mascis and Mike Watt hooked up with Ron Asheton for some 2001 dates, they only performed songs from the first two Stooges albums; when Guns N' Roses and the Red Hot Chili Peppers covered the Stooges, they did songs from Raw Power.)
There's no denying that the Raw Power era was the band's most prolific: the album's eight songs account for just a fraction of the music Iggy & the Stooges produced between their 1972 reformation and their unceremonious 1974 dissolution. Over the past three decades, the number of bootlegs that have attempted to collect all the unreleased material from this period-- from the Rough Power comp of de-Bowie-fied mixes to the notorious last-gig document Metallic K.O.-- have amounted to a mini-cottage industry that's been as vital to sustaining the band's legend as their four official releases.
So, for an album that runs a mere 33 minutes, Raw Power should provide ample fodder for deluxe-reissue treatment and an opportunity to streamline all that bootlegged ephemera into an official storehouse of all the songs the Stooges produced between 1972-74. However, this reissue-- available in a 2xCD, budget-priced Legacy Edtion set and as a more elaborate $60 4xCD Deluxe Edition-- doesn't attempt anything quite so ambitious. Instead, the main impetus is bringing a remastered version of the original Bowie mix back to market. This is understandable from an historical-preservation perspective, but then why not also include the '97 mix and allow fans to compare and contrast?
The new remaster certainly enhances the ambient details in the mix-- like the tense acoustic underpinning of "Gimme Danger", or the echoing beat in "I Need Somebody" that illustrates Bowie's intention of making Scott Asheton's drums sound like a lumberjack chopping wood. But, personally, after spending the past 13 years having my ears ravaged by the '97 Iggy mix, I find it difficult readjusting to the leaner, original version-- even with the remastering, the '97 version far outstrips it in fidelity and sheer brute force, and remains a better entry point for younger listeners seeking to understand the album's impact.
Still, even if you've already bought this album twice, the Legacy Edition's second disc offers a compelling reason to shell out again: an immensely entertaining, well-preserved 1973 Atlanta club set that was intended for a radio broadcast but later aborted. Recorded months after Raw Power had been released, ignored, and consigned to cut-out bins, the set sees the Stooges in another transitory state, further asserting *Raw Power'*s 50s-rock roots with the addition of jaunty pianist Scott Thurston, but also patiently stretching out new songs like "Head On" and "Heavy Liquid" into loose, exploratory, Who-style workouts. It also unintentionally redresses Raw Power's initial imbalance by smothering Williamson's leads in the Ashetons' thick low-end. Naturally, the combination of Iggy and a crowd of southerners results in some colorful exchanges ("You wanna get your little fucking face punched out, little cracker boy?"), and it's fun to revisit a moment when the Stooges' audience was sparse enough to make out individual conversations (says one spectator: "I don't think he likes us!"). But more than a document of Iggy in his audience-baiting element, the set serves as a great tribute to the late Ron Asheton, whose bass-playing is finally revealed to be every bit as fierce and inventive as his guitar-playing.
The live disc is appended with two Raw Power outtakes-- a more compact, studio version of "Head On" and the silly rumble-in-the-jungle jam "Doojiman"-- but anyone hoping for more vault-clearing revelations on the expanded 4xCD Deluxe Edition (available exclusively through www.iggyandthestoogesmusic.com) will be disappointed. The "Rarities, Outtakes and Alternates" disc seems especially ill-conceived, padding out its few genuine finds (an amusing, embryonic version of "Penetration" dubbed "I'm Hungry", and the Velvets-via-Hendrix goof "Hey Peter") with a random assemblage of alternate mixes (including a pair of 1997 representatives) and an incomplete sampling of the era's well-known outtakes ("I Got a Right" and "I'm Sick of You" are accounted for, so where the hell's "Gimme Some Skin"?).
Easy Action's 2005 bootleg box-set, Heavy Liquid, did a far more thorough job of compiling the Raw Power-era castaways, so Stooges completists investing in this Deluxe Edition will need to be satiated by the non-musical extras: a replica Japanese "Search and Destroy" b/w "Raw Power" seven-inch, 48-page book (filled with celebrity testimonials and Mick Rock's iconic period photography), five 5x7" photographic prints, and, most valuably, a DVD documentary about the album's creation by Morgan Neville. Comprising recent interviews with the surviving Stooges and famous fans like Johnny Marr, Chrissie Hynde, and Henry Rollins, the doc covers all the main album talking points and offers a memorable moment of candor when Iggy admits to feeling vindicated that the Stooges still have such vitality and relevance today. There was certainly no lack of irony and cheek when Iggy first sung "we're going down in history" on Raw Power's kamikaze closer "Death Trip", but watching the closing shots of Iggy & the Stooges performing for a Brazilian festival crowd last year, with Mike Watt inheriting Ron Asheton's mantle, those words now sound more assuredly prophetic than ever.


Rjd2 is in the very enviable position of being the hottest new artist on Def Jux, which is quickly establishing ...

Deadringer

Rjd2 is in the very enviable position of being the hottest new artist on Def Jux, which is quickly establishing itself as the epicenter of post-millennial hip hop. After Rjd2 dropped the superb I Really Like Your Def Jux Baby Tee earlier this year, a steady buzz began to build that Deadringer would be the next step in instrumental, sample-based hip-hop. Def Jux guru El-P even declared that this record will "change the motherfuckin' world." Heads began to salivate with expectations of a terse, discordant soundscape that mingled the cinematic glory of DJ Shadow with the decidedly subterranean grime of the other Def Jux releases. It seemed to be a marriage made in heaven, albeit a particularly dark and confusing corner of God's kingdom.
Perhaps you should brace yourself before sliding this particular slab of vinyl onto the decks. While the Shadow influence is evident throughout the album, Deadringer sounds absolutely nothing like anything else on Def Jux. It's funky, soulful and seems to draw more from The Beatles than it does Skinny Puppy. That's not to say that there aren't dark moments on Deadringer, but that Rjd2 maintains a stylistic consistency while oscillating emotions and moods at the drop of a hat, and that its ability to capture the various hues that comprise life's mosaic is a rare thing to find in today's music.
Opener "The Horror" kicks off with a jolting chorus of horns before quickly fading into a grandiose, cheeky sci-fi sample that sounds more playful than menacing. A flanged voice declares, "It's time, time, time to understand the horror... It's time, time, time to understand the monster." These light, almost teasing moments, which are liberally sprinkled throughout the album, keep Rjd2's soundscapes from veering too closely into Shadow territory and help this album overcome the generally monotony of most music being labeled 'cinematic.'
But if you think you've got this record's number already, think again: "Smoke and Mirrors" totally flips the script. It's bluesy, eerily reminiscent of the cold psychedelia laid out by early Pink Floyd. After a raucous intro, a throaty voice pops in and sings, "Who knows what tomorrow will bring, maybe sunshine, maybe rain... maybe it'll bring my love to me." And while the track initially comes across as simplistic and retro, the subtleties of its execution are complex, transcending the genres that inform it.
Other strains of psychedelia can be heard throughout this album. "Ghostwriter," with its light, shimmering guitar work, alternating samples of 'mmms' and 'ahhs,' and chorus of triumphant horns, recalls the joyful loopiness that defined the best psych-pop of the mid-60s. The song's final joyful burst is so sublime that it alone justifies purchasing this album.
"Final Frontier" and "F.F.H." prove that Rjd2, who got his start doing the production work for the MHZ crew, can still back up an emcee. Unlike other producer wunderkinds, Rjd2 never allows the production to overwhelm the vocalist, and as a result, both tracks are highly effective. But the symbiotic dynamic between producer and emcee is most evident in the incredible "June." The production seems understated and almost ordinary as Copywrite spits his verse, but in the long break between the first and second verses the hypnotic brilliance of the track crystallizes. The interplay between the flamenco guitar, ringing synth, and shuffling breakbeat is transporting. And how the music drops before Copywrite comes with his second verse is a minor but brilliant touch.
But Deadringer's real jewel comes after the album is officially over. While hidden tracks tend to be gimmicky clunkers, this is a diaphanous slab of soul. The brief, simple sample that anchors the track is both melancholic and resilient. A smoky yet smooth vocal sample declares, "You are gone, I'm so all alone... as I stare at the ceiling." It's a rare display of emotional transparency in hip-hop, although it would be a bit unfair to classify Deadringer as strictly hip-hop.
There are a few missteps. While Rjd2 inarguably brings the heat with "The Chicken Bone Circuit," the track's breakbeats-on-steroids drums and haunting, minimalist piano sample too closely approximate DJ Shadow. "The Proxy" might serve as a standout track for those who enjoyed Bundy K Brown and Jim O'Rourke's remixes on The Sea & Cake's Two Gentlemen EP, but it's a bit too lite for my tastes. Still, for every instance that the disc threatens to blatantly parody Shadow or descend into the impish, commercialized world of Moby, Rjd2 tweaks a sample and drops a beat that makes your heart palpitate. While it's doubtful that this album will "change the motherfucking world," or even the landscape of hip-hop, Rjd2 has managed to perfect his certain brand of sampling, making Deadringer an essential purchase for any fan of instrumental hip-hop.


Person Pitch and Sung Tongs producer Rusty Santos teams with members of Gang Gang Dance and White Magic to create a pair of art-rock records.

The Present: World I See / The Way We Are

World I See / The Way We Are

As a producer, Rusty Santos has placed his hand in many, many jars. In addition to his work on game-changers like Animal Collective's Sung Tongs and Panda Bear's Person Pitch, Santos has also helped shaped sounds on record for Gang Gang Dance, fellow Paw Track clan member Dent May, as well as last year's much slept-upon Born Ruffians long-player Red Yellow & Blue. Trying to pick up on threads that run constant throughout a résumé that varied would make for some headphone headaches. Fortunately, Santos formed a band of his own.
The Present is Santos' recent collaboration with Japanese musician Mina and Jesse Lee of Gang Gang Dance and White Magic, a project in which Santos further experiments with fusing together much of the same gossamer textures and elements that galvanized the walls of sound he helped erect as a producer. In October of last year, the trio released World I See, a remarkably arranged spirit journey that, according to Santos, was written and recorded stream of consciousness, using just guitar, keys, and drums. But it never sounds that simple nor familiar-- the line between organic and synthetic remains ever blurred. In fact, the sharp divide between the Present's output and their straight-ahead setup is a gap still very much a part of what also makes the band's latest audiomosaic, The Way We Are, just as fascinating.
Opener "Heavens on Ice" spans 13 minutes of astral transmissions and vocal warp zones. Couched somewhere in all the synthetic chaos sits a short-lived stretch of breathtaking guitar melody and tribal rhythms totally unblemished. It's worth the mining, pretty yet inaccessible. Interlude "Love Melody" is equally beautiful, a chunk of magnetic oasis that sits between even more shards of manipulated sound, all of which clatter and skitter and morph into duo "Symbols on High" and "Africanized Beatniks". For better or worse, The Way We Are is more easily digested than its predecessor. Though the synth palette is less abrasive and the song lengths infinitely less intimidating (only "Saltwater Trails" comes close to flirting with the 10-minute mark), it's still very closely related in purpose. "Shapeshifter" sandwiches a grind of harsh screens and lunar-laundromat noise between cascades of keys. To close: "Press Play", a staunchly industrial jam that lets only a few slivers of light through before calling it a day. This is a difficult listening experience for certain, but check those album titles: Santos seems to be trying to transcend the idea of listening experience in particular. He's taken to finding a spectrum of sound that mirrors more than just a moment.


Silver Wilkinson junks the plasticine electro-pop that marred Mind Bokeh and returns to the warm splendor of 2009’s Ambivalence Avenue, the record which began Stephen Wilkinson's second, more rewarding phase as Bibio, investigating what it meant to be a producer with vision.

Silver Wilkinson

There’s a new Boards of Canada album coming out in a few weeks and Stephen Wilkinson is likely as excited as you are; after all, he's never turned down the chance to express his intense fandom of the band. Even better news for him is that his seventh album as Bibio, Silver Wilkinson, will not be rendered redundant by Tomorrow’s Harvest. That wasn’t the case last time BoC released new material; the two would namedrop each other in interviews, and when The Campfire Headphase finally allowed six-strings into the mix, they were modeled after the kind of gelatinous, wobbly guitars that defined Bibio’s early work on Mush. The presumptive show of mutual respect was the biggest thing Wilkinson had going for him at the time, but now, he shares not only a label with his heroes, but a similar quandary: after creating such a definitive document of his sound, he faces the redundancy that comes with competing with his own work.
He actively courts this problem on Silver Wilkinson, which junks the plasticine electro-pop that marred Mind Bokeh and returns to the warm splendor of 2009’s Ambivalence Avenue, the record which began his second, more rewarding phase. It was only then that he fully explored what it meant to be a producer with vision; he dabbled in songwriting, beatmaking, crate-digging and acoustic strumming, sometimes all at once, unifying it with an aesthetic that established an equilibrium between the pastoral and the digital (and proved perfect for selling Kindles). It’s a an all-inclusive, welcoming sound that puts a wide range of potential conflicts of interests-- wafting British folk, Dilla-fied hip-hop instrumentals, psychedelic light funk-- into the same frame, consistently providing pleasant surprises and never making a huge deal about how diverse it was.
In short, Bibio relies on an accumulative effect more than the strength of any individual songs. But when the ratios get thrown off even in the slightest, the results come off as alternately distracted or monotonous. The first four songs on Silver Wilkinson contain no sound you haven’t already heard from him: aqueous atmosphere, washed-out acoustics, Wilkinson’s haunted vocals. They’re just allotted in less satisfying proportions; instrumentals “The First Daffodils” and “Wulf” are too short to offer immersion, too long to qualify as interludes while “Dye the Water Green” and “Mirroring All” are humble folk songs burdened with too much found sound and drift to justify their five-minute lengths. Immediately after, "À tout à l'heure" establishes some kind of momentum with a nimble acoustic riff and a spirited, stomping rhythm, but by the time you get there, Silver Wilkinson has exhausted nearly one third of its run time.
And that gets to the mundane issue at the center of Silver Wilkinson, which is that it’s a layering of holding patterns. It either idles too long in genial background, or gets to relatively exciting productions which specifically recall his previous work. The combination of light, bumping funk and analog nerd synths on “Look At Orion!” is a canny move on Bibio’s part, establishing himself as the missing link between labelmates Boards of Canada and Flying Lotus, but it barely builds on that idea. “You” is sequenced as the literal centerpiece of Silver Wilkinson and the figurative one-- the hiccupping samples and percussive jump cuts remind you that his whole aesthetic is more hip-hop than anything. There’s something underhanded about it, though; it’s meant to be a gaudy display of Wilkinson’s range surrounded by the overt naturalism of “Sycamore Silhouetting” and “Raincoat”, when really it’s just a minor variation on Ambivalence Avenue’s “Fire Ant”.
None of the above makes Silver Wilkinson a bad album, far from it. It just questions what Bibio’s true strengths are; the melodies and arrangements are nice, but does he have a go-to skill besides curation? If it’s your first experience with Bibio, there’s a lot to like here and thankfully, Silver Wilkinson renders Mind Bokeh’s “Take Off Your Shirt” as distant and out of character as an embarrassing Spring Break memory. And yet, it can make someone who’s followed Bibio since the beginning nostalgic for the willingness to take that kind of risk. The problem is that while Ambivalence Avenue was a pleasant surprise in all forms, an astounding leap from an unexpected source that constantly offered new sounds, Silver Wilkinson provides the same thing without the surprises. And all that’s left is the pleasant part.