This sumptuously packaged, limited-edition box set contains the complete works of the UK post-punk band, along with a disc of live recordings and an informative booklet where the surviving members dissect their discography.

Out of Cold Storage

This Heat were born in the years immediately preceding punk rock. Severe young men Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward were making things go pish-ding-whoosh on London’s free-improvising circuit and had links to the waning days of Canterbury’s whimsical and conceptual prog rock scene. So though punk riled them up-- as it riled up many under-30s lurking in the corners of London in the summer of 1976-- it’s unsurprising that what they produced in response sounds little like the Clash. They hooked up with “non-musician” Gareth Williams and took up in an abandoned meat locker dubbed Cold Storage. Like Can in their castle or Faust in their farmhouse, This Heat recorded endlessly at Cold Storage, editing the results down into (semi-) coherent chunks.
What This Heat produced there is a remarkable body of work, even in the context of creative abundance that was British post-punk. Hayward sang in a keening voice with audible debts to Robert Wyatt, but without the former Soft Machine leader's warmth and sentimentality. This Heat’s astringent combination of tape loops, coruscating sheet metal guitar, Krautrock-inspired groove, improvised noise, and Reagan/Thatcher-era political despair felt frigid to the touch. Listening today you can almost hear Cold Storage’s rusted pipes and crackled, mottled porcelain as captured in this new box set’s black-and-white photographs.
Out of Cold Storage contains the complete works of This Heat, along with a disc of live recordings and an informative booklet where the surviving members (Williams passed away in 2001) dissect their discography. It’s a sumptuously packaged, limited-edition, mail-order release, and since most of the material has long been available only as bootlegs or on mp3, the sound quality of these remasters is an obvious improvement.
Here are some much-hated rock critic words that are impossible to avoid when talking about This Heat: angular, spiky, jagged, shards, atonal. The brittle, scrabbling, squawking, scraping qualities of This Heat’s music come partially out of the band’s background in free improvisation. At the same time, the reversed voices and tea kettle ambience of a track like Deceit’s “Shrinkwrap” find kin in the rusty, industrial Ohio dada of Pere Ubu tracks like “The Book is on the Table”-- crude sound art with the implied violence of rock music.
And This Heat did rock. They were rarely funky, and Cold Storage feels as far from the Mississippi delta as Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne. But “SPRQ” is as triumphant a rock song as any post-punk band ever wrote-- just two awkward chords ringing out stadium-sized. And live-- evidenced on the slightly murky sounding Live 80/81 but especially on Made Available, the disc of sessions they recorded for John Peel’s radio show-- they were a snarling, metallic machine.
Recorded from 1976 to 1978 and released the following year, This Heat is the sound of three avant-gardeners getting to grips with the mud and clay of rock. The album opens and closes with radio interference; Williams’ organ sounds like he’s playing it with his elbows. Much of it eschews songform entirely, drifting freely and unmoored. When it doesn’t-- as on “Not Waving”-- Hayward’s voice emerges from the mist of organs on like headlamps in fog with only a tidal clang to anchor the music. But then there’s a track like “Horizontal Hold”, thrashing like a prog rock power trio of cavemen.
“24 Track Loop” feeds a chunk of Hayward’s drumming into a harmonizer and what it spits out sounds, as many have pointed out, strangely like the pitchshifted drums of jungle nearly two decades later. It also sounds more than a bit like Miles Davis’ On the Corner. Indeed, the whole album twitches with the same urban dread as OTC, a creeping turn-of-the-decade horror-- the Cold War on the brink of nuclear meltdown, economic breakdown, conservatism (or outright fascism) on the rise, consumer complacency-- that found its most harrowing expression in This Heat’s second album.
Twenty-five years after its release Deceit feels more relevant than ever-- and not just because our national policy makers are currently playing chicken with Iran and its nuclear capabilities. More of a song suite than its predecessor, the album opens with “Sleep”, a nursery rhyme set to undulating reversed tape loops that envisions a society “cocooned in a routine of food” and hypnotized by television. “Cenotaph” twists a Civil War era standard, lamenting that “a kiss won’t mean goodbye/ When Johnny comes marching home.” When I first heard the album, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the song felt almost unbearably poignant. Now that more than 2,500 American soldiers and uncountable Middle Easterners have died in the current Iraq war, it has only grown sadder.
This Heat’s most expressly political record, Deceit contains references to Triumph of the Will, conflates Nazi rallies with the Roman Empire, and includes a song where the lyrics are simply a recitation of the American Declaration of Independence. It is a bleak, black record, and unlike other efforts of the time by PiL or Joy Division, there’s little redemption to be found in the run out grooves, very little light at the end of the tunnel. Its final track is called “Hi Baku Shyo”; its subtitle is “Suffer Bomb Disease”. And while we’re not dancing on the post-nuclear cinder just yet, one can’t help but feel that Deceit was re-released at precisely the right time.
Health and Efficiency is This Heat’s masterpiece. The title track is, in a complete turn of events for these doommongers, a hymn to the restorative powers of sunshine, and their most traditionally rocking song, at least until it veers off into an extended instrumental slalom with some of Hayward’s most intricate (and violent) drumming. “It seemed to be a quite radical idea to be healthy, happy, acknowledging the sun,” Hayward says in the liner notes. “We’ve all got the same bodies; it’s international.” The B-side, “Graphic/Varispeed”, is an extended experiment in tape loops and studio manipulation, as you might have guessed from the title.
The title track of Repeat is an extended take on the sound of “24 Track Loop”, re-edited in 1992. It’s 20 minutes of rhythm, a cycle of drums, handclaps, buzzing drones, and sharp jumpcuts that may be the band’s most Can and Miles-like moment. “Metal” is 23 minutes of murky metallic percussion, like a field recording of a drunken Asian drum troupe or a blacksmith’s shop, and “Graphic/Varispeed” makes a return appearance. Anyone who hears it will probably toss that new Liars album. There’s also Made Available, the aforementioned Peel Sessions disc, which contains versions of This Heat-era tracks that best their album versions. Live 80/81 is the most inessential disc here, like most live recordings for fans only.
A few months ago, I griped in a Pitchfork review of A Certain Ratio that the renewed interest in post-punk had sent labels scraping the barrel for “lost masterpieces.” I’d be fibbing, to say nothing of backsliding, if I claimed that the average listener needs every disc in Welcome to Cold Storage at the low, low asking price of nearly 100 of your hard-earned dollars. (This Heat is currently available as a standalone disc, with the others apparently to follow.) But anyone with the slightest interest in post-punk should shelve those plans to invest in the Konk reissue or the Definitive Medium Medium, fork over the seemingly high asking price, and wait the interminable length for ReR to mail it to you.


The disco-funk duo’s grown and sexy album sounds like a glossy recreation of an established style—minus some of the idiosyncrasy and fun.

Adult Contemporary

Late-stage capitalism has many downsides, but hearing about them from Chromeo is a new one. On Adult Contemporary, billed as a grown-up survey of “what it means to be funky in your 30s and 40s,” David “Dave 1” Macklovitch and Patrick “P-Thugg” Gemayel offer mea culpas for situationship snafus, pine for the ex who could change their ways, and, on the Italo-inspired disco of “BTS,” lament the libido-sapping ills of burnout culture. “I need to confess,” Dave 1 concludes, “Sometimes rest can be better than sex.” He’s got a point, but coming from bloghouse’s class clowns it’s kind of a bummer.
On their albums Fancy Footwork and White Women, the Montreal disco-funk duo split the difference between roguish dirtbaggery and suited-and-booted sophistication. If their schtick ever felt overdone, then the duo were rolling their eyes harder. “Guys are all schmucks,” Dave 1 once said. “It would be funnier to embrace it.” Mixed by the New York DJ and Jessy Lanza collaborator Morgan Geist, the new album aims to correct the big-budget bloat and ill-fitting features of 2018’s Head Over Heels, and features La Roux as its sole guest. While a few songs here could be Chromeo canon, Adult Contemporary too often feels like a glossy recreation of their earlier sound that’s missing the idiosyncrasy and baked-in humor.
The album is at its best when the new outlook prompts a change-up of Chromeo’s sound. The yacht rock-inspired “Friendsnlovers” is a wistful sigh that you can imagine soundtracking the bittersweet ending of a Netflix romcom, and “Words With You” is a deadpan boogie through ’80s disco-rock punctuated with a rubbery bass groove and celebratory horns. But at other times, the album sags under an overly liberal lacquering. The introspective ballad “A Cut Above” dissolves into its pillowy synth pads, and the pensive “Waiting for a Star to Fall” soundalike “Lonesome Nights” simply makes you want to revisit Mylo’s (better) flip of it.
As much as the duo idolizes Bootsy Collins et al., Adult Contemporary feels like a well-made 2010s pastiche of disco-funk destined for a sponsored dance tent. (It’s as if the future-funk experiments of Thundercat and Steve Lacy—not to mention the pandemic-era disco explosion in pop—never happened.) The wry “Personal Effects” could be the title for a comedy of manners Noël Coward never wrote, but its retro flavor extends to its central figure of the “leave something behind” girl who sneakily “forgets” her phone charger at the narrator’s place. “Coda” feels like it primarily exists to showcase a punchline about “coda” sounding like “codependent,” trading in the lusty seductions of Chromeo’s funk forebearers for a buzzword cribbed from TikTok. Despite flashes of Adult Contemporary’s described maturity, the album generally prioritizes living large to the extent that, on the hi-NRG referencing “Ballad of the Insomniacs,” a maudlin insomniac wonders, “Where’s the party at?”
But Jagged Edge they are not. Over 52 minutes, Chromeo’s exhortations to vibe begin to feel as repetitive as their album art, which this time features the suited duo alongside a woman whose clothes have fallen off. (They’re not Roxy Music either.) As with Solange’s divine cameo on White Women, the highlight of Adult Contemporary comes when a guest takes center stage. La Roux’s appearance on “Replacements” feels like a parting of velvet curtains, as if everything before were a warm-up. “Tried so hard to get you out of my head,” she sings, before a sly, very funny plot twist. “Oh, I wish you had a sister instead.” In 30 seconds, she nails the precise balance of pathos, warmth, and humor that Chromeo spend the record chasing.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a lost downtempo classic from 1993, a dreamy, fascinating chimera of styles and moods produced by the legendary Andrew Weatherall.

Morning Dove White

The press, in the early ’90s, used a lot of conflicting, if creative, words to describe the music of One Dove. The Scottish band’s 1993 debut album, produced by the DJ and musician Andrew Weatherall, delighted many, disappointed some, and confounded others. Project X magazine, an American publication catering to ravers (which included infamous party monster Michael Alig on staff), put the band’s singer Dot Allison on the cover in a scuba diving suit and declared them to make “some of the most emotion-filled electronic music since the techno-revolution began.” The New York Times called their album “a juxtaposition of eerie, languorous electronics, bleary borderline dance music and quietly torchy pop songs.” The NME, though loquacious, was not convinced. They appreciated that while the band had a “vision of blasting mainstream pop sky high with clubland’s mighty beats and sun-drenched vibes,” ultimately Morning Dove White was “likely to lull you into a light coma.”
Were One Dove here to humanize the mechanical sound of acid house then taking over clubs? Or were their dreamy guitar solos meant to help future-proof the suddenly staid sound of British rock? Was singer Dot Allison a star or a snooze? Was everybody even listening to the same band? To that last point, based on the extensive amount of remixes they released, as well as early album leaks with alternate mixes, it’s possible that, no, they were not.
Regardless, in the 31 years since their sole LP Morning Dove White was released, not too many people have listened to any version of the album. It has been out of print for nearly 25 years, and, until recently, not on streaming services. To add insult to injury, the version available on streaming services now mistakenly repeats track six, “My Friend,” as track seven, “Transient Truth.” “Listen now,” sings Allison on that song, which, if you don’t have a physical copy, you’ll have to head to YouTube to hear, “If you take my words as promises, well then you can keep them.” At least they never felt like they owed anyone anything.
Undoubtedly some of the hype surrounding the album isn’t even of their own making: The band had persuaded Weatherall—renowned for his sledgehammering of genre barriers—to produce their debut. This was immediately after he’d worked with Primal Scream on their groundbreaking album, Screamadelica, which was released to great fanfare during the recording of Morning Dove White. That album’s massive swell, its groundbreaking blend of ecstatic rock guitar work and buoyant house music drum work, became Weatherall’s signature sound. He’d bring some of that in a more subdued form to Morning Dove White. That’s undeniable. Whether he also brought unmeetable expectations is up for debate.
Morning Dove White begins with “Fallen,” their breakout single. Legend has it, when One Dove—the trio of Allison, guitarist Jim McKinven, and keyboardist Ian Carmichel—was pursuing Weatherall, they met him at one of his DJ sets in Italy. They slipped him a copy of the “Fallen” single, which Weatherall played on the spot to warm reception. The next day, he played them Screamadelica demos on the beach before agreeing to collaborate. Fact or fantasy, a Mediterranean origin story is befitting. It often sounds like the music’s been bleached by the sun.
Weatherall has a cosmic sleight of hand that takes a song’s naked bombast and cools it with a lithe touch. He doesn’t reduce its power, just softens its edges. When Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie quietly coos that he’s “higher than the sun,” it has a churchlike echo that feels like a bad boy’s manipulation of holiness. On a more practical level, Weatherall really likes drums you play with your hands—congas, bongos, djembes. Both Screamadelica and Morning Dove White are dripping in Weatherallisms. But those expecting a repeat of Screamadelica misread the direction of his creativity. It moves in all directions at once, not linearly. If he made One Dove sound more like anyone, it’s themselves.
“Fallen” was written without Weatherall, though he did rework it for the album. But hearing the original (at least, one of the original of the three pre-Weatherall mixes) proves they didn’t need him to craft an ebullient slice of weirdness on their own. Playing the two versions, pre-Weatherall and post, back to back, you hear some subtle tweaks, but it’s more like Weatherall took the track and recommended cleansing it with incense. It’s still the same song, only tender. The original version included a spoken intro making clear the lyrical reference to “angel from this dream I have” is a nod to The Catcher in the Rye. On the version that opens the album, it’s been cut, as though he encouraged them to keep their cards just a little closer to their chest. A little mystery never hurt anyone.
To that point, the primary vocals on the song are whispers. Allison mostly doesn’t sing, and when she does, it’s buried in reverb. She talks hushedly about secrets. You can hear a tinge of her Scottish accent. “Don’t know why I’m telling you any of this,” she says as the song begins. It’s like she’s pulling you close for a tête-à-tête: listen up, this is important. “One thing is, don’t ever tell anyone I told you this.” Is she talking about One Dove itself? After a couple decades in relative obscurity, it feels like it.
Like most of the songs on Morning Dove White, “Fallen” is a dance track from a rock band, not the other way around. Never the other way around. You can always sense their roots in regular old guitar music as part of a song’s structure—there’s often a hint of reggae in the guitars and drums—but it’s not what thrills about a track. That’s in the discovery of everything else they can do to accent it. Listening to the album could be a portal to rave culture, soul, dub, trip-hop, even the radio pop of the era. The music vibrates with so much excitement that you get the feeling, for the members of the band, still so young, making Morning Dove White was as much about discovery as it was about declaration. “We each bring a lot of ingredients,” Allison told Spin in 1993, “but together we bake a new cake.”
With so much going on, it’s a miracle the album never manages to trip over its own feet. The songs, long and sprawling, move in and out of genres with little regard for consistency. But they all congeal. Track two, “White Love - Guitar Paradise Mix” opens with a lurching guitar solo, a minute and 45 seconds of something that sounds lifted from Metal Machine Music. Then hip-hop drums break out and trippy keys turn the whole thing into Deee-Lite worship. Track three, “Breakdown - Cellophane Boat Mix” (what is a cellophane boat?), opens with more hip-hop drums accented by a lovely piano run. Dubby bass enters, then the sound of a record scratching before the whole thing turns on a dime at what sounds like the ding of the oven announcing it’s been preheated. Allison saunters in gently. “Breakdown and cry,” she croons over the returned piano chords and the whoosh of an egg shaker. The chorus ends and the oven dings once again. Then a man intones what sounds like a Laurence Fishburne line in The Matrix, a movie still several years in the future. “Against the black-blue sky, the shadow of the dove. The gentle wind’s diversion. An open mind’s excursion.” Allison finishes things up with a breakup lament and a shout-out to the moon. “Sirens” makes room for two solos, one on a bluesy organ solo and the other on an accordion. It wraps things up with a twangy guitar strut. What even is this music?
Allison has referenced the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds as a touchstone for Morning Dove White; McKinven the music of dub originator King Tubby. Those are two vastly different source materials, though what they share is a love of resonance and reverb, creation of a vastness as funneled through the mixing board. Weatherall is a producer in the lineage of Brian Wilson and King Tubby, futzing around with the knobs so that a song swoops and whorls. The Beach Boys deployed this experimentation in small doses, accent pieces in their perfect pop songs, whereas King Tubby and Weatherall built songs around the echoes themselves. Neither met a song they couldn’t extend. Single-digit running time? Amateur hour. Weatherall could always squeeze more out of any tune.
Most of the songs on Morning Dove White are 10 minutes or above—plenty of room for them to not only delight but to mesmerize. “My Friend,” the closest the band gets to actually making a techno track, rides along at a mid-pace, bolstered by gauzy vocals from Allison, a snare roll echoed to infinity. Everything builds and builds, while you breathlessly await an explosion. It never comes. “There Goes the Cure” wafts out the gates at a leisurely clip, with Allison’s voice doubled, maybe tripled, with a small choir behind her. She even literally sings about echo while being echoed: “Losing a shadow/Losing another soul/So many echoes/And oh/No more.” The congenial piano riff repeats while the sound of digital crickets breaks, briefly, into the sound of screams. A string section builds, fades. “He’s gone,” Allison repeats for several minutes. Again, no explosion. Climax was never the point.
I’ve been trying to figure out why Morning Dove White disappeared from public view for so long. The band recorded some of a second album, but broke up before it was finished; those songs were never released. Surely a continued lack of presence did not help keep up their profile, but they did tour behind Morning Dove White and, after the band’s breakup, Allison released several solo albums. One in ten people I ask about the band gush about how much they love them and how unfairly ignored they have been. The other nine don’t know who I’m talking about. Was it the sepia-toned album cover, a dour brown so unbefitting of such a bright piece of music? Was Weatherall’s presence, ostensibly so crucial, actually an albatross around their necks, a high-profile co-conspirator whose adjacent work eclipsed their one moment, dooming them to never have another? Or did One Dove, so eager to work with disparate sonics, aim for the future and miss?
There’s some weight to that argument, as, with the ease of technological collage, so much of music continues to ignore genre in favor of cannibalization. But as I report live from the future, I can confidently say Morning Dove White is not the sound of our modern dystopia. Even with its lyrical hints of tough breakups and pining sadness, it’s simply too sweet a record for our sour times. It’s fresh, alive, searching. Eternal qualities. Morning Dove White isn’t a record of any certain time; it’s a classic.


Following the lead of Villalobos and Omar S, Shackleton uses his Fabric entry to mix his own work-- including plenty of new material.

Fabric 55

Sam Shackleton approaches dance music cautiously. He does this both personally (shuttering his dubstep-affiliated Skull Disco label, moving to Berlin) and artistically (his intricate, pattering rhythms can take months to program). Fabric 55 is one step further into the dance world, expanding on the stolid gray sonics of 2009's Three EP's for a nightclub/label at the center of the techno community. But Fabric 55-- a studio-reproduced mix of Shackleton's set at the club featuring plenty of new material-- doesn't see Shackleton cast his hat into the ring of prominent DJs so much as affirm his status as an inspired squatter of whatever scene he inhabits.
In his review of the first Skull Disco compilation, Tim Finney said "Shackleton's production can seem like statues... waiting for someone to enliven and animate them." On Fabric 55, Shackleton plays the animator himself, carefully stitching together his own already careful work. Like Fabric DJs Omar S and Ricardo Villalobos before him, Shackleton mixes exclusively his own material. He doesn't necessarily shed new light on his work, but the shorter, more transitory nature of the tracks here releases them-- Shackelton himself enlivens and animates his own productions.
Shackleton all but abandons his Skull Disco tracks, cutting his already tenuous ties to dubstep. Instead he focuses on bizarro earworms ("Negative Thoughts") and still more Middle Eastern vocal samples. Strung together they reveal an alien noir, one whose sound-world is complete enough to divorce you from the feeling of listening to techno. In a home-listening context, it's often easier to file him alongside Coil and your Edward Gorey prints as Michael Mayer or Skream. If Shackleton's rhythms previously served primarily to hollow your mind in order to better contemplate Deep Dark Thoughts (see: "Death Is Not Final", "I Am Animal", etc.), they now highlight his idiosyncrasies, the tilted drum timbres and haunting vocal melodies he seems completely subservient to.
Shackleton's craftsmanship lends his work a resilient delicacy. His idea of a big build-and-release DJ moment appears to be to ratchet the tension up one half-notch and then sneakily ratchet it back down, before anyone gets too excited. The two-part "Man on a String" suite features furious, jazzy hand drums and a tip-toeing synth line in what amounts to an explosion of activity. Shackleton has always been kin to minimal techno producers, but Fabric 55 isn't spare so much as careful and modest.
Fabric 55 is world music in the most literal sense: It is a Londoner living in Berlin composing dance music with African rhythms, reggae melodies, and Far Eastern vocals. Shackleton does this using a computer, and he does it not to educate or out of deep respect for these cultures and traditions; he does it because these are some sounds he's heard and he likes them better than other sounds. I think this augurs well for Shackleton's future, even if Fabric 55 sounds like a weird purgatory between the vitality of his early singles and his next true breakthrough or change-up. This mix lingers and waits; it stirs and then settles again. Rather than a career retrospective or a greatest hits package, Fabric 55 is a thoughtful moment in a singular producer's trajectory.


After six years, the Swedish singer-songwriter returns with another soothing album of sweet indie-folk murmurs. Spare electronic beats bring a new pulse to his sound, but the voice remains the same.

Local Valley

José González never sounds like he’s in a hurry. He takes his sweet time both in song and in life: The gap between the Swedish songwriter’s third solo album, 2015’s Vestiges & Claws, and fourth, Local Valley, was long enough to encompass the entirety of Trump’s presidency, several Lorde rebrands, and some 13 King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard albums. Empires rise and fall; celebrity marriages come and go. Yet the basic elements of González’s sound have been more or less preserved in amber since 2003’s Veneer: sparse arrangements, intricate acoustic fingerpicking, gently philosophical lyrics, and a plaintive voice that’s halfway between a murmur and a croon. Never freaky enough for the freak-folk movement nor chronically chill enough for the Jack Johnson dudes, González carved out his own niche, imbuing his music with a sense of timelessness that’s impervious to trends but also susceptible to a sameness that can be stifling.
Recorded at González’s bucolic home studio near the Swedish coast, Local Valley brings no grand reinventions, but does gently tweak the songwriter’s approach and inject a little rhythmic bounce into his songwriting, making for a livelier, more playful album than Vestiges & Claws. The record opens on a sleepy note, with home-recorded birdsong ornamenting the new-age reveries of “Visions” and guitars rustling like a delicate forest in the hymn-like “Horizons.” None of the first four songs rise above a pleasant murmur. But somewhere around “Head On”—a standout track that’s as close as González gets to a protest song, with stomping handclaps egging on his jabs at “corrupt oligarchs” and “power snatchers”—Local Valley picks up the pace.
An English-speaking songwriter born in Sweden to Argentinian parents, González has always been a cross-cultural talent. In interviews, he has emphasized the fact that Local Valley is his first album to contain songs in each of his three languages. First single “El Invento” combines Spanish lyrics with one of his trademark open tunings, while both “Tjomme” and the album’s sole cover, “En Stund På Jorden,” a song by the Iranian-Swedish pop singer Laleh that he has pared down to its barest essence, are sung in Swedish. Covers are a longtime González tradition, but for an American listener unfamiliar with Laleh, the latter song could easily be mistaken as one of his own.
Yet the album’s most surprising element lies in the uptempo rhythms and electronic pulses that spice up the album’s back half. González spent some time tinkering with a DM1 drum-machine app on his iPad, which livens up the tempos and brings a welcome bounce to mantra-like grooves like “Lasso In.” “Lilla G,” written for González’s young daughter, is a dreamy folktronica reverie buoyed by lovely, soft-focus harmonies and well-deployed whistling. And “Swing” is the biggest departure for the songwriter, owing both to its goofy lyrics (“Swing your belly, baby,” he exhorts over and over) and its prominent reggaetón beat.
González has said the song’s Caribbean style reflects the music he likes to listen to at home. But his foray into beat-making—particularly on “Swing” and “Tjomme”—feels perfunctory at best. He has dabbled in electronic textures before; “Cello Song,” his 2009 Dark Was the Night collaboration with the Books (covering Nick Drake’s song of the same name), was excellent. These new songs are energizing for González, but they lack that sense of genuine discovery, of a songwriter being lifted away from his usual comforts. Instead of letting the drum machine reshape his songwriting, he mostly uses it as a metronome.
Local Valley returns to pastoral quietude in its final moments, with the tranquil “Honey Honey” essentially serving as a duet between González and more chirping birds. It’s a lovely little sendoff, even if the main emotion it provokes is a desire to visit the Swedish countryside. For González, I imagine, it sounds like home.

Buy: Rough Trade
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13th Floor Elevators / Roky Erickson: The Psychedelic Sounds of... / I Have Always Been Here Before

The tragic irony behind Roger Kynard "Roky" Erickson's vaunted legacy as the father of psychedelic rock is that the very things that make him so important to so many fans and that keep him prominent in so many listeners' memories also ensured him a hard life spent in sanitariums and studios. Granted, for many that hard life is an integral part of his cachet: Arrested in 1969 and charged with possession, Erickson pleaded insanity rather than face jail time, and was committed to Rusk State Hospital. As legend has it, his mind was so devastated by the shock therapies and medications that he spent the rest of his life battling serious mental illness that left him easy prey for unscrupulous record promoters (who had him sign away his royalties for numerous reissues) and sabotaged almost every attempt at a comeback.
There are, of course, scores of 1960s cautionary tales, but the music Erickson helped to make and the lifestyle he promoted with the 13th Floor Elevators explicitly advocated drug use as mind expansion, as true spiritual freedom-- a bunk idea he shared with Jim Morrison, although even at his most obtuse, Erickson never descended to the empty-headed blathering and lounge-act crooning that were the hallmarks of the celebrated Lizard King. Erickson's psychedelia was not passive aural wallpapers-- all pretty shapes and colors to listen to while tripping-- but an active force of social, musical, and psychological change. Aside from the infamous album starter "You're Gonna Miss Me", which Erickson wrote for his previous band the Spades before rerecording with the 13th Floor Elevators, The Psychedelic Sounds is awash in narcotic philosophy. And in case you miss it, Tommy Hall explains it all in his original liner notes.
However, what makes The Psychedelic Sounds powerful 40 years later isn't its questionable philosophy but, as the title makes clear, its psychedelic sound. The 13th Floor Elevators were a remarkable band: Erickson's wild-man vocals create an atmosphere where unfettered mayhem reigns. Stacy Sutherland's piercing guitar puts a dark mood on "Roller Coaster" and "Reverberation (Doubt)", while drummer John Ike Walton ties it all together. It's a dynamic that's even more pronounced on the eight live tracks on this UK reissue, which were recorded in San Francisco following the album's release. Their covers of Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", the Beatles' "The Word", and even their take on that '60s live staple "Gloria", are anything but placid drugs trips or by-the-numbers re-creation; instead, the songs get the full psychedelic treatment as the Elevators play them like they're handling snakes.
As with any historical legacy, however, Erickson's reputation as the father of psychedelia is largely oversimplified. He was a late addition to the 13th Floor Elevators, which was the brainchild of Tommy Hall. Hall's acid poetry informs every song on The Psychedelic Sounds (aside from "You're Gonna Miss Me", Erickson's lone contribution). And, perhaps most important, it was Hall who plugged in his jug and provided the psychedelic sound that evokes the chemical weightlessness of a trip. It's the wiggedly-wiggedly of a dream sequence, the sound of your hands melting or of a dimensional door squeaking open. That the 13th Floor Elevators could translate that concept into an aural sensation is perhaps the root of their reputation and would have been impossible without Hall.
Erickson, however, undoubtedly was a creative force in the band, as a vocalist on Psychedelic Sounds and also as a songwriter on the follow-up, Easter Everywhere. Selections from those two albums, as well as from subsequent aborted comebacks, are collected on the two-disk I Have Always Been Here: The Roky Erickson Story, which is, unbelievably, the first overview of his long, strange career. Erickson's is a long career to capture on only two disks, but Shout! Factory makes judicious use of the space not only to provide a chronology of Erickson's development over four decades, but also to paint him as a sort of outsider artist rather than as a victim.
Emphasizing Erickson's solo output over his reputation-making Elevators material, the collection includes only a handful of tracks from The Psychedelic Sounds and Easter Everywhere. "Slip Inside This House" is a masterpiece of psychedelic inventiveness, a spacey blues jam that circles back on itself and eats its tail. On "I Had to Tell You" and the heartbreaking same-session outtake "Right Track Now", Erickson foregoes his usual hysterical vocals for a much more direct, reflective approach.
But I Have Always Been Here is more interested in Erickson's less-explored post-Elevators period, roughly from the mid-70s to the present. Whether solo or with the Aliens, he churned out potent and patently weird Texas blues rock similar to Stevie Ray Vaughn or early ZZ Top and often mimicked the vocal hiccups of fellow Texan Buddy Holly. In the 1970s, Erickson became fascinated with science fiction, re-creating B-movies with songs like "Creature With the Atom Brain" and "Stand for the Fire Demon". What makes these songs so kick-ass is that it's the sound of someone going right off the page of the rock script-- like so many B-movie auteurs of the '60s (Ray Dennis Steckler and Hal Warren, ill-fated director of Manos: The Hands of Fate, come to mind), he's doing whatever he wants with no one to tell him that's not how it's done.
As a result, very few of the songs on I Have Always Been Here Before depend for their impact on the listener's knowledge of Erickson's mental health at the time. This is perhaps the singer's true achievement, which this compilation generously spotlights: even when he was suffering, his strange music sounds wholly idiosyncratic and spiritually curious, the sound of a man who won't let the world's ugliness diminish his enjoyment of life or hinder his search for something solid and secure.


Adopting a new alias, UK electronic musician Loraine James swaps out jagged beats for ambient textures and sketch-like improvisations mapped to different lines on the thermometer.

Whatever the Weather: Whatever the Weather

Whatever the Weather

Emerging from the restrictive winter cold into the unpredictability of spring, it can be tempting to read a weather forecast like a horoscope. A brief glance at a row of temperatures and precipitation odds can send your mind running wild, soaring with hope at the suggestion of a sunny weekend day or plunging into despair at the thought of digging out that down jacket yet again. When you’re still emotionally digging your way out of the snow in March and the screen says it’s the bad number outside, your heart stops.

Skim the tracklist of Loraine James’ Whatever the Weather and you might feel a similar reaction. In place of words or phrases, James has used only temperatures as titles. Such precise values might feel alien to ambient’s delicate dreaminess—it’s easy to project a series of highs and lows onto the journey before it’s had a chance to settle around your eardrums. But across these 11 tracks, James savors every opportunity to subvert the forecast, supercharging a balmy “17℃” with frenetic drumming, conjuring up a counterintuitively glacial synthesizer march for a beatless “36℃,” and letting the frigid “0℃” stand in for the record’s most danceable groove.
Such misdirection is hardly surprising for James, a genre-busting musician whose excellent 2021 album Reflection tore holes in the dancefloor large enough for the entire ’90s IDM scene to crawl through. Built from sessions that ran parallel to that album’s blisteringly funky experimentalism, along with lingering ideas unearthed from five-year-old project files, Whatever the Weather lightly tethers itself to ambient’s cool stylings, but the 26-year old also gracefully covers new ground; her experiments with improvisation lend this side project a lively, unpredictable edge. At every temperature, James finds a fresh inflection point, bending into the still-widening array of sonic identities at her disposal and shaking expectations loose.
Standout track “14℃” probes gently into this murky space. James pushes forward with a soulful piano melody, letting you feel the alternating drags and rushes in her playing as she explores its contours; she resists the impulse to explode it entirely, keeping the focus on searching vulnerability as glitched remnants of the keys linger and distort in the surrounding air. A few degrees below, on “10℃,” she turns up the aggression. Building from a single burbling electric-piano run into a whirling flurry of dissonance, James toys with space jazz, accompanying her own jagged reverb trails in a duet that bristles with frantic energy. For a producer whose records have tended toward tightly coordinated assaults on the senses, this looser posture suits her beautifully. Not quite demos but maintaining a similar sketch-like quality, these tracks feel like a rare chance to watch the gears of her mind turn in slow motion, uncovering the right notes in real time.
The skeletal quality of these improvisational stretches helps foreground the handful of moments in which James calls her well-honed instincts for dance rhythms into service. “17℃” comes close to rehashing Reflections’ grimy atmosphere, propelled by fluttering drums that smear against stuttered vocal cuts, but be prepared to wave a long goodbye when James cuts hard into a misty sample: The beats here mostly exist to shuttle you between Whatever the Weather’s ethereal scenes with a dash of low-end grit. The ghostly R&B of “0℃” grinds around clattering drums and a chirping synth hook, content to bump along in reflective bliss, while “4℃”’s submerged breaks never quite come up for air, preferring to lurk beneath a dense soup of fuzzy synths and pitched-up vocals. The dark nightclub ambience never quite dissolves—it’s still bumping through the walls—but here James soundtracks the haven of a chillout room.
In unpacking her guiding influences, James often mentions the impact of math rock and Midwestern emo bands—particularly American Football, who she cites as a direct reference for Whatever the Weather’s vocal performances. While the album is light on 13/8 time signatures, it fully embraces their meditative navel-gazing in spirit and tone on “30℃,” where James’ vocals stretch into a Kinsella-like whine as trickling keys dance around a sprightly beat. Rumbling drums guide you away, but the lingering effect is clarifying and unnerving all at once, like waking from a dream with unexpected tears still drying on your face. Moments of jarring emotional displacement like these stretch across James’ brief but mesmerizing career, but Whatever the Weather dazzles by pulling you towards them with the gentle confidence of an outstretched hand.


Long known for his dusty, slow-motion take on UK bass, the London producer makes a surprising turn toward pop on his debut album, without stifling any of his experimental instincts.

Soaked in Indigo Moonlight

Of all the ways that Parris could have described his long-awaited debut LP, it’s unlikely that “This is an album built on Pop” is what anyone expected. In recent years, pop tropes have become commonplace even in electronic music’s most experimental corners, but for a producer who’s spent years building his name with dusty, slow-motion beats and bass-infused hybrids, to cite artists like Charli XCX, Lana Del Rey, and Frank Ocean seemed like a surprise left turn.
A native Londoner, Parris has long spoken about club culture and its profound impact on his musical vision. As a child, he was wowed by an uncle who moonlighted as a DJ, along with his massive record collection. Once he was old enough to experience nightlife for himself, Parris dove right in, becoming a regular at foundational dubstep weekly FWD>> when he was only 19. His discography contains releases on vaunted UK labels like The Trilogy Tapes, Hemlock, Idle Hands, and Wisdom Teeth; Soaked in Indigo Moonlight arrives via Can You Feel the Sun, an imprint he’s been running alongside Call Super since 2019. Those reference points might not mean much to mainstream pop fans, but among a certain contingent of dance music’s critical vanguard—think trainsotters who worship Ben UFO and wax poetic about the hardcore continuum—Parris’ resume represents a sort of artistic ideal.
In truth, only the most rigid members of that crowd are likely to be frightened away by Soaked in Indigo Moonlight. The album includes only one blatantly pop turn: first single “Skater’s World.” It’s a bright and bouncy tune that’s more PC Music than Hessle Audio. The off-kilter beat does recall some of UK funky’s more playful moments, but thanks to Eden Samara’s vocals, the sugary song takes on a hyperpop bent, ultimately sounding like vintage Janet Jackson cutting something for the Powerpuff Girls soundtrack. Inspired by a shared love of skateboarding—and the days the two spent running around London with friends and “being hooligans” once lockdown began to lift earlier this year—the track exudes a carefree sense of joy that’s often absent in the heads-down world of UK dance music.
Casting off aesthetic constraints seems to be Soaked in Indigo Moonlight’s core mission. Although the remainder of the album never quite matches the candy-coated energy of “Skater’s World,” Parris does largely steer clear of London’s usual grayscale tones and drab textures, even during more subdued moments. (The only conventionally moody tune is the heavy-lidded “Sleepless Comfort,” whose lush pads and restless skitter are perfect for late-night bouts of existential pondering.) “Movements,” a collaboration with Norwegian/Mexican artist Carmen Villain, is typical of what the album has to offer. Atop a relaxed beat that falls somewhere between house and hip-hop, its airy pads and floaty woodwinds set a mood that’s closer to the flotation tank than the dancefloor, but Parris’ liberal usage of familiar video-game sounds—pretty much everyone recognizes the sound of Mario collecting coins—adds a sense of childlike glee to the proceedings.
If Soaked in Indigo Moonlight was built on pop, that largely manifests in the music’s whimsical nature and Parris’ general refusal to adhere to genre orthodoxy. The wiggly “Contorted Rubber” won’t ever make the Top 40, but its elastic basslines and zipping melodies merrily live up to the song’s title, while the wonky gait of “Laufen in Birkencrocs” evokes images of a sauced birthday clown showing up to a kid’s party with a buzz on. Dubstep and bassweight play a role, but they’re ultimately just two of the colors in Parris’ expansive palette, and once Call Super enters the fray on “Poison Pudding,” the two Brits spend nearly six minutes frantically connecting the dots between ’90s digital dancehall, ravey techno, and the most vibrant strains of IDM. “Crimson Kano” takes a similarly eclectic route, feverishly cycling through assorted drum patterns (and tempos) before collapsing in a heap of satisfied exhaustion.
Like any bout of hyperactivity, Soaked in Indigo Moonlight has a comedown, and the spacious “Frozen Hailstones Underwater” patiently explores a sort of reverb-soaked ambient grime. Even more soothing is LP closer “falling in the waves,” which loops, stretches, and manipulates James K’s vocals into delicate clouds of ethereal bliss. It’s not exactly a pop song, but it is a tender one, and it’s indicative of Parris’ willingness to toss expectations aside and simply follow his own creative impulses, wherever they may lead. The work of artists like Vince Staples, Lil Peep, and Denzel Curry (who were also namechecked in the LP announcement) helped inspire Soaked in Indigo Moonlight, but the album itself—whose title is a reference to the old adage that “only moonlight shows your true reflection”—can only be understood as a window into Parris’ own head (and heart). If taking cues from pop simply means setting pretension aside and doing what you love, perhaps more of Parris’ peers would be wise to follow suit.

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As his solo career gains momentum, the second-most famous member of Bon Iver spends his latest LP meditating on the simple life.

Hundred Acres

Taylor Swift listens to him. Sufjan Stevens had him play on Carrie & Lowell. The song he co-wrote with country star Dierks Bentley generated Oscar buzz, and Will Arnett commissioned him to write a weeper for the Netflix series “Flaked.” Nearly a decade into his solo career, it seems longtime Bon Iver drummer and backing vocalist Sean Carey is finally edging past Justin Vernon’s very long shadow.
For all they have in common—their shared Wisconsin roots, the pastoral feeling of much of their work—it’s always been lazy to conflate Carey and Vernon’s styles. Where Vernon relishes poetic extravagance, layering his band’s music with numerology and a pine-scented sense of lore, Carey’s appeals to the heart are far less adorned. In his songs, wife and kids are the keys to deepest life, the natural world holds deepest truth, and John Muir was right about everything. His aperture on the world is tight and Whitman-esque.  He mellows on hearth and home while his more famous friend chases dragons.
Carey’s latest record, Hundred Acres, is the purest distillation yet of this vision. It’s concerned with “trying to live a simpler life and doing the things you want with the people you love,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. This statement squares with the fly-fishing victories Carey shares on Instagram and the sound of Hundred Acres: The tunes are full of big-hearted open chords, sweetly bowed strings, restorative synths, and stories about perseverance, love, and hiding in coves with lovers. The music heaves like foam on lake shores.
This is a shift. On 2014’s intricate Range of Light, Carey’s jazz and percussion training bore abundant fruit, inviting a tension between free-floating beauty and thrilling rhythmic counterpoints. The best parts of that album felt like miniature Jonny Greenwood scores, equally unsettled and blissed. Hundred Acres is often gorgeous, and the songs “True North” and “Meadow Song” rank among Carey’s finest, but the LP’s pared-down palette leaves it with less verve. The change in sound is clearly intentional, and Carey’s choice to evolve is admirable. The problem is one can only hear so many nebulous couplets about rivers and waves over languid instrumentation before this gentle snow turns to mush.
It’s possible that Carey is reaching for a wider audience. Perusing his photos, listening to these tunes, watching him blend seamlessly with someone like Bentley, it’s not difficult to imagine a new future for Carey: Not topping charts, perhaps, but becoming a more marketable Glen Hansard or Damien Rice type. Stripped of production embellishments, Hundred Acres can even echo early Coldplay. That isn’t meant as an insult, but it’s worth considering the implications: One reason many listeners just can’t with Coldplay is that Chris Martin’s lyrics feel too broad to be sincere. Similarly, one begins to sense after a few listens to Hundred Acres that Carey isn’t expressing something deep in his marrow.
We know from songs like “Alpenglow,” from Range of Light, that he’s able to express real emotional grit in his songs. Carey gets there occasionally on this album, as when he restates his marital vows on “True North.” Too often, though, Hundred Acres is content to be pleasant.


On his first proper solo album in 30 years, the Spacemen 3 cofounder ruminates on mortality and transcendence over a glowing bed of analog synths.

All Things Being Equal

Pete Kember has been playing more or less the same song for almost 40 years. It’s built on blues swagger, but slowed down until it sways. It’s informed both lyrically and melodically by minimalism, insisting on simplicity. And though it throbs like techno, it’s directed at the head, not the feet or anywhere in between. It’s both solipsistic and psychedelic, urging listeners to travel into their own depths and welcome the joy and despair they might find there.
All Things Being Equal is Kember’s first album as Sonic Boom since 1990’s Spectrum, a sort of solo record made with his bandmates in Spacemen 3 as that legendary psych combo broke up. He followed up Spectrum with a new band called Spectrum, before heading into the noise lab with Kevin Shields and others for Experimental Audio Research and branching out through collaborations with Stereolab, Delia Derbyshire, and Beach House. In each case, the personnel was less the focal point than the sound and the equipment making it: vintage ’60s and ’70s analog synthesizers, the odd guitar, and racks and racks of gizmos to oscillate and phase and flange. All Things has all of these—some 11 machines are listed in the liner notes, including two vocoders and a toy called Thumbs Up Music—and they perform Kember’s pop songs but also become them, as veins both determine a leaf’s survival and define its shape.
“Just imagine you’re a tree,” he suggests in the dewy opener, which tells the apparently true story of a boy who believed he cured his own cancer by picturing himself as a storm, able to rain sickness out. “Just imagine that you’re a cloud/Just imagine, don’t say it out loud…just imagine the cloud wasn’t grey.” Hopefully, it’s not so much anti-science as simply pro-healing, however you can get it. In “Just a Little Piece of Me,” Kember transforms into a tree not in life but death. “Bury me beneath a tree/Let its root grow into me,” he sings in the shade of harmonies from longtime collaborator Panda Bear. “Let it grow and then you’ll see/Just a little piece of me.”
Mortality is natural, but not always peaceful. In “Spinning Coins and Wishing on Clovers,” Kember ruminates on his imagined deathbed while noise thrashes around him and electronics twinkle like pangs of regret. “My Echo, My Shadow and Me” might be bleaker. “I am the ocean that you’ll never cross/I am the night where hope is not lost,” Kember intones, his voice bloodied yet disembodied: “I am the journey that you never planned/I am the wave that’ll never see land.”
Mostly, though, Kember is seeing the land, and the beauty pushing through it. “Tawkin Techno” carries on Kraftwerk’s early Schubert-meets-the-Beach-Boys good vibes, but swaps out their industrial kitsch for an ode to the titular plant, better known as the Golden Club. “On a Summer’s Day,” he’s dumbstruck by the view from his window. “I just don’t know what to say,” he sighs, lost among keyboards, chirping and aglow. In the stroboscopic “I Can See Light Bend,” a freakout as hallucinatory as any in catalog defined by them, Kember’s senses overload and fail in a thicket of white noise and faux-Theremin. Or perhaps not fail but succeed. They merge: Seeing is believing. Halfway through its prickly ecstasy, he testifies: “Alter the light source/Build up my life force.”

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The electronic musician and veteran soundtrack composer turns his interpretive abilities to a single episode of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian Netflix series, to subtle yet compelling effect.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Black Mirror: Smithereens

Black Mirror: Smithereens

“Smithereens,” the second episode in the fifth season of “Black Mirror,” opens with a rideshare driver meditating in his car, assisted by an app, outside the towering headquarters of a tech giant. It’s a beautifully concise haiku of our historical moment. Observe as the worker, isolated and at the mercy of opaque algorithmic tweaks, hustles his way through the gig economy, using the same technology that has wreaked havoc on job security to steady his mind. He cannot afford to panic, is in fact desperate to stay in the moment. But how much are these attempts at serenity mere flailings against capitalism and the inescapability of the internet?
That the episode (in fact the whole season) explores such issues with the milquetoast characterizations and shallow twists of an M. Night Shyamalan film is a disappointment to all who thrilled to “Black Mirror”’s pre-Netflix incarnation. But at least it’s got a classy soundtrack. Ryuichi Sakamoto—composer, electro-pop pioneer, buddy to David Bowie, and synthesizer legend—was brought on to score “Smithereens.” His work since the late 1970s has taken him from the top of the charts to the monastic depths of the avant garde, but regardless of context, Sakamoto’s music has consistently exuded a profound empathy. Whether leading Yellow Magic Orchestra’s cheeky pop, collaborating with cranial ambient artists, or, more recently, confronting his own mortality, Sakamoto’s music expresses in a few elegant gestures the haunting richness of life.
“Meditation App” is the first piece on the soundtrack, and, at over five minutes, the only one that truly works as standalone music. Airy and soothing, it floats with a single-minded aspirational splendor. In the episode, the meditation is guided with gentle directions to remain open and non-judgemental to whatever thoughts come up. This profoundly difficult prompt is delivered with a grating, faux-enlightened calm that sidesteps the harrowing depths of the psyche, and “Meditation App” perfectly embodies this flowy, insubstantial bid at inner peace. Its dulcet timbres suggest the immanence of a world without conflict, without pain or paradox, loss or grief. Perhaps we nurse private fantasies of a return to such an Edenic womb, but the music’s effect has a killing-with-kindness quality. Sakamoto plays it straight, never introducing even a drop of skepticism into the mix, and in doing so allows the show to weaponize the language of wellness. “Meditation App” could be looped in the lobby of a high-end spa, and no one would care to ask who composed it. This means Sakamoto did his job.
The rest of Black Mirror: Smithereens is filled with the type of dark, pulsating synthesizers that have found equal favor in techno clubs and modern, edgy thrillers. It isn’t surprising that the mood is one of rising tension, with rhythms that suggest a predator on the hunt (there’s even a piece called “Prey”) and thick, gelatinous drones that suck the air out of the room. Sakamoto effectively conveys a looming state of emergency with the bare minimum. Here a bass riff groans and then spasms to life, there a flicker of white noise recalls a nervous tic. “Closing In” lightly clutters its background with distant sirens, then fades into an uneasy clearing. “Flashback” keeps its sentimentalism at bay, cloaking its melody with dissonance and water-droplet sounds before quietly blooming for a moment of pure ache. Isn’t this how memories work, slowly rising from the depths before coming into sharp, agonizing focus?
These minor details are easy to ignore while caught up in the drama of Black Mirror: Smithereens. Even listening casually at home, they remain steadfastly integrated in a moody, fluid whole. The 44 seconds of “Gun Is Real” hardly register as music, though they are powerful in context. This isn’t a problem, but it does suggest the score for Black Mirror: Smithereens will be loved by two groups only: those with an abiding hunger for all things “Black Mirror” and those with the same hunger for Sakamoto. Soundtracks are difficult to comment on unless they are either exceptional or awful. The best walk a fine line, enhancing each moment of action while not quite stealing the show. Describing Halloween, actor Nancy Loomis said: “The first time I saw the movie, it was a rough cut without the music, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is so forgettable.’ Then I went to a screening when the score was finished, and I was floored by how terrifying the movie was.” While Sakamoto here offers no iconic melodies, the sentiment holds. “Smithereens” may falter as an episode, but it would be dead in the water without his contributions.


The Goon Sax are a teenage indie-pop group from Brisbane. The best moments on their debut are as clever as they are sad, a dynamic frontman Louis Forster perhaps inherited from his father Robert Forster, one-half of the songwriting duo behind The Go-Betweens.

Up to Anything

In American English, saying you're "up for anything" usually means you're open, adventurous, maybe a little indecisive. The Brisbane teen trio the Goon Sax have titled their debut album Up to Anything, which might be the dark flipside of that sentiment: "I'm not feeling up to anything/I'm nothing, nowhere, all over again/I can't walk/I can't walk this sadness out," bellows frontman Louis Forster on the first and title track. In this mind state, you aren't just open, you're rudderless and confused, and will go along with whatever life presents you. It's a place of self-defeating vulnerability that anyone young has experienced, and the Goon Sax have made a jangly pop record that reflects it.
The Goon Sax began in 2013 when Forster and guitarist James Harrison were in high school (they're still of school age, the band averaging 17.) Drummer Riley Jones joined in 2014 after a month of lessons on the instrument. That inexperience is something of a theme within the band, even within their name: a goon sack in Australia is the silver plastic bag of booze within a wine box, something of a symbol of youth—it's inexpensive alcohol. For American ears, imagine it similar to someone naming their band Franzia or 4Loko.
The best moments on Up to Anything are as clever as they are sad, a dynamic Forster perhaps inherited from his father Robert Forster, one-half of the songwriting duo behind the Go-Betweens. "Sometimes Accidentally" could sit closely to "Cattle and Cane," perhaps just with modern, youthful vigor: Harrison takes over (his voice is a sweet alternative to Louis' deep, apathetic tone) and sings, "Sometimes I think about things and sometimes I accidentally think about you." The line echoes Courtney Barnett, and is performed in a similar speak-sing.  In "Telephone," the band villainizes the antiquated technological development of talking on the phone, as if it's to blame for a conversation gone awry. In "Target," the shopping center becomes a reflection of the joy they don't feel: "Couldn't work at Target / The only color shirt I wear is blue." "Home Haircuts" depicts the indignity of trying (and failing) to get a rock-star hairstyle, at home or at the local salon: "I show them a picture of Roger McGuinn / Edwyn Collins / John Lennon / David Byrne / It seems I just can't win."
For a band so intimately linked to one of Australia's greatest pop acts, the namedropping is fitting. Their music is entirely '80s in feel, channeling the Pastels at this turn and classic Flying Nun at that—the video for the song "Boyfriend," in which Louis longs for a man to call his own while systematically threatening to make him miserable, was inspired by Top of the Pops, a classic music program everyone in the band is too young to have seen firsthand. This music is a distinctly Australian blend of honesty and unpretentiousness. Like the Go-Betweens, they are as confident in their songcraft as they are uncertain in life. Each song is well-structured and wise beyond its years  while the messages are confused, delicate and very, very teenage. This is the sound of growing up smart.


Full of vivid detail and imagination, this defining 1968 album from Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood gets its first official reissue.

Nancy Sinatra / Lee Hazlewood: Nancy & Lee

Nancy & Lee

Nancy & Lee is one of the quintessential artifacts of the 1960s, a document of how counterculture collided with the pop mainstream at the height of the psychedelic era. Neither Nancy Sinatra nor Lee Hazlewood could accurately be characterized as part of the counterculture. As the daughter of Frank Sinatra, Nancy was showbiz royalty, while Hazlewood was a Phoenix-based producer who made his reputation with a series of cinematic instrumentals he recorded with the rumbling guitarist Duane Eddy. Like several other hustlers of his time, Hazlewood had a gift for recognizing and exploiting fads, a talent that found its full fruition in his collaborations with Sinatra.
Nancy & Lee is now being commemorated with a deluxe package from Light in the Attic featuring two bonus tracks and a handsome book, marking its first official reissue since its release in 1968. If that seems like a long wait, that’s because Rhino’s 1989 compilation Fairy Tales & Fantasies: The Best of Nancy & Lee has served as a placeholder for Nancy & Lee, containing every one of the album’s songs in order, along with several highlights from 1972's Nancy & Lee Again. Such record company machinations suit Nancy & Lee, as it was a proper LP of its time, collecting previously released singles, covers, and album cuts designed to boost a songwriter’s publishing—in this case, Hazlewood himself.
Nancy & Lee picks up the Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood story at its midpoint. Nancy had been a recording artist on her father’s Reprise label since 1961, putting out single after single of effervescent, sticky-sweet pop that made no impact on the pop charts whatsoever. By 1965, Frank got fed up, so he tapped Hazlewood to kickstart Nancy’s career, which he did with “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” a sexy strut designed to sound right at home in the go-go clubs cluttering the Sunset Strip.
“These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” climbed to No. 1 early in 1966, so Nancy and Lee began churning out rapid sequels to their hit, reaching the Top 10 twice with “How Does That Grab You, Darlin’?” and “Sugar Town.” Somewhere during the course of 1966, the pair began duetting together in the studio. By that point, Hazlewood had several albums to his credit—including a pair of LPs released on Reprise—and had attempted to forge a duet partnership with Suzi Jane Hokom, a vocalist who ultimately decided she didn’t want a part in the spotlight. Nancy Sinatra already was comfortable on the center stage, and furthermore, she had a peculiar alchemy with Hazlewood. A singer so sweet she could seem curiously placid, she contrasted sharply with Hazlewood’s oily baritone, which recalled Johnny Cash retooled as a lounge lizard. Together, the chemistry was palpable: Nancy offered a hopeful tonic to Lee’s booming dread, Hazlewood pulling Sinatra back into the muck and grime whenever she threatened to drift away.
Sinatra and Hazlewood first discovered this dynamic tension on “Summer Wine,” a slice of western melodrama released as a B-side at the end of 1966, just about a year after “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” Achieving altitude on the wings of swirling strings, “Summer Wine” contains every splashy studio trick Hazlewood could muster: fathomless echo on the voices, an orchestra of percussion and twang, all accentuated by stabs of brass. It’s as if a CinemaScope film has been funneled into a four-minute 45, a vivid representation of Hollywood in the mid 1960s. Fittingly, their next single roped in their other major influence, the glitz and schmaltz of Nashville. Nancy and Lee’s version of Johnny Cash and June Carter’s recent smash “Jackson” wrapped up country corn in a shiny package, the pair trading knowing jibes as steel guitars and harmonica dance around their shtick.
Hazlewood figured out how to channel his cowboy fascination into high lonesome psychedelia, casting himself as the wandering, wounded stranger to Sinatra’s redemptive angel. In “Sand,” his outlaw character comes upon an innocent woman who offers a warm home—a deliverance over a bed of harpsichords and a maze of backward guitars. “Sand” found a counterpart in “Some Velvet Morning,” where Hazlewood reckons with a heavy hangover and the memory of a departed love. The verses are Lee’s wrecked ruminations, sadly and insistently galloping into the sunset, while Nancy provides an ethereal release on the waltzing chorus.
“Some Velvet Morning,” “Sand,” and “Summer Wine” cut such an indelible impression that they can give the illusion the rest of Nancy & Lee is as trippy as this triptych. While the opening “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” unfolds at a lysergic crawl, most of the album pivots off “Jackson,” with snazzy, country-inflected pop that seems as if it was tailored to play on televised variety shows or perhaps a drive-in movie where the good girl gets seduced by a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. Hazlewood’s remaining originals—the dusty, doomed romance of “Sundown, Sundown,” the sprightly “Lady Bird,” and wryly self-deprecating “I’ve Been Down So Long (It Looks Like Up to Me)”—fall into the latter category, while the covers are pure Hollywood hokum. Nancy and Lee clown their way through “Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman,” elbowing each other in the ribs as they deliver Tom T. Hall’s bon mots, then they wallow in the sticky sentiments of “Storybooky Children” and “My Elusive Dreams,” the latter a No. 1 country hit for David Houston and Tammy Wynette in 1967.
Far from diminishing the impact of Nancy & Lee, these moments of overblown silliness accentuate the genuine, layered weirdness of “Some Velvet Morning” and “Sand,” as they provide a baseline for what Southern Californian pop sounded like at the time. Also, Hazlewood’s vivid, widescreen arrangements on the schmaltizer material are evocative in their own right thanks to his masterly use of the studio. Such artistry isn’t necessarily evident on other Hazlewood-produced Sinatra albums of the period—he helmed nearly all of them from 1965 to 1967—nor is it on the pair of bonus tracks that round out the Light in the Attic reissue: a whispery cover of the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You” and a go-go version of the Mickey & Sylvia oldie “Love is Strange.” Pleasant enough, they’re slight sketches, clearly relics from the late 1960s; Nancy even utters “sock it to me,” the catchphrase from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In, the biggest TV show in the USA in 1968, during “Love is Strange.” Nancy & Lee may be redolent of its era but in its vivid detail and imagination, the album is so thoroughly of its time that it can sound otherworldly.


If you'd told me a few weeks back that I'd be lusting after some chick\n\ named Goldfrapp ...

Felt Mountain

If you'd told me a few weeks back that I'd be lusting after some chick named Goldfrapp, I'd have told you to pack your bags for an all-expenses-paid trip to my fist. But writing this review, all I can think of is Goldfrapp. Sweet, sweet Goldfrapp. Mmm... Goldfrapp.
Before I get accused of any level of chauvinism here, I feel I should defend myself. I am, after all, only a male variant of the human species. And what sane, sexually functional guy could resist a woman who whispers in a throaty voice, "No time to fuck/ But you like the rush?" Not me! What's more, she's English! English from England! And she hangs out with Orbital! C'mon, now!
Taking cues from apparent influences ranging from Marlena Dietrich to Siouxsie Sioux to Björk, Alison Goldfrapp has constructed an album that's simultaneously smarmy and seductive, yet elegant and graceful. Describing the sound of Felt Mountain comes easy not because it's a simple album, but because the devices used throughout are so ingrained in our musical vernacular.
If Austin Powers had been a film noir flick, its soundtrack would probably sound something like Felt Mountain. The hushed vocals, the crying analog synthesizers, and the sustained seven chords all evoke amazingly strong images of things past. Still, the album manages not to sound dated, kept fresh by occasional journeys into more experimental electronics and Goldfrapp's always-engaging vocals.
Felt Mountain opens with "Lovely Head," a track that juxtaposes a shuffling drum beat and whistling that sounds like it could be 50 years old with futuristic analog beeps. Goldfrapp's voice, with all its warmth and expressiveness, sounds instantly familiar. And it retains this familiarity over the course of the album, excepting a throaty, Siouxsie-esque yelp or two in "Human," and a bizarre passage at the end of "Deer Stop," in which her voice is made to sound eerily childlike. Creepy, especially considering the sexual undertones present.
All this taken into account, Felt Mountain's greatest strength lies in its overall elegance as a record. While certainly not "poppy," it never has a truly weak moment. And while the songs aren't all that different from one another, the flow from track to track makes perfect sense.
To summarize, Felt Mountain is a really swell record, and I am madly in love with Alison Goldfrapp. I'd have her name tattooed on my arm, but... you know. There just isn't room in this world for a man with "Goldfrapp" inscribed in his flesh. Luckily, there's always room in the world for a damned fine record.


The Cleveland electronic musician has refined his minimalist techno to a frictionless peak. The keyboard patches on his latest are so physical that you can imagine holding them in your hand.

Strands

You don’t come to one of Steve Hauschildt’s records expecting, or even hoping, to be surprised. The Cleveland electronic musician's consistency is one of his great strengths: His synthesizers ripple like a mountain stream at peak snowmelt, and his frictionless pulses represent only the finest qualities of electricity itself. They feel like dreams of a coal- and hydraulic-free future, when mammoth wind turbines and sparkling solar arrays offer the promise of a guilt-free grid.
That’s not to say Hauschildt’s sounds or techniques are necessarily very original; he makes no attempt to disguise his debt to artists like Klaus Schulze, Edgar Froese, and Manuel Göttsching. But, much as his former band Emeralds did, he has succeeded in taking those influences and spinning them into a fusion that is his alone. Over the course of several albums for Kranky and a handful of CDR and cassette releases, he has channeled those spinning arpeggios into an unmistakable signature.
Throughout his solo career, Hauschildt has signaled his disinterest in strictly repeating himself—thus the Vocoder and new wave experiments of Sequitur, and the occasional detour into ambient techno on Where All Is Fled. But it’s worth bearing in mind that Emeralds’ breakup, whatever its ultimate causes, was presaged by the radical shift in sound they took with their final album, 2012’s Just to Feel Anything. And what keeps many listeners coming back to Hauschildt’s records is precisely the promise that each album will sound practically interchangeable with the one that came before—just, perhaps, marginally better.
On both of those counts, Strands succeeds, yet it also marks a shift in tone: At just eight tracks and 43 minutes long, it is noticeably more restrained. A few songs could have come from any of his earlier albums: “Same River Twice,” whose title goes to the heart of Hauschildt’s approach, unleashes a dizzying moiré of overlapping pulses—eighth notes, 16th notes, 32nd notes, all spinning like pinwheels whose tips are fixed with tinier pinwheels ad infinitum. But five tracks feature no arpeggios at all, which, given Hauschildt’s previous work, is a little like imagining a Four Tet record with no samples, or an Aphex Twin record with no drum machines.
“Transience of Earthly Joys,” in which piano and pipe organ transmute into feedback-ripped synth squalls, has a quiet, blurry calm that's reminiscent of the most ambient moments on Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd’s The Moon and the Melodies. The rich, augmented chords and faintly detuned oscillator voices of “A False Seeming” and the slow, string-like passages of “Time We Have” also recall the The Moon and the Melodies, along with another 4AD album of a similar vintage: Michael Brook and Pieter Nooten’s 1987 album Sleeps With the Fishes, which framed melancholy pop melodies in velvety synthesizers and echoing guitar. In its slowest moments, Hauschildt’s album exudes the same sort of narcotic bliss. At points, it barely resists tipping into the maudlin, but that resistance, that willingness to inch right up to the edge of bathos without falling into it, is part of what makes it so captivating.
It’s a bold move, slowing down like he has here. But by taking the emphasis off of rhythm, he allows us to focus instead on the texture of the sounds themselves. His patches are so physical—rasping, buzzing, peeling off like metal shavings—that you can imagine holding them in your hand. They feel like direct extensions of the silicon in the machines that produced them, like the transfiguration of sand into sound.


The Brooklyn-based DIY punk band's new full-length is clever without being cheeky, sincere without being preachy, self-aware but never too in on their own joke.

Blowout

Most rock'n'roll records can be traced back to some specific place and time, but very few provide evidence of their exact origin. "I guess he doesn't have a gun," a tiny voice chirps giddily on what sounds like a cassette player recording. "Do you think he has a gun? Yes! He shot himself! We're listening to Nirvana and, as you know, Kurt Cobain... POW!" The voice belongs to Alex Levine, bassist for New York punk omnivores the So So Glos, kicking off their heart-racingly enjoyable new album Blowout. The snippet was recorded when Levine was seven, at the start of an abrupt and confusing changing of the guard in rock. In the wake of Cobain's suicide, alternative music started looking much different than it had before, as punk got poppier and alt-rock proper got angrier. For twentysomethings making music today, this once maligned schism now feels whole, with likeminded bands like Wavves and the Titus Andronicus subtly paying their dues to the Hollands, Hoppuses, and Armstrongs (Tim and Billie Joe) of their youths. The So So Glos are also a proud result of this divide, where disaffection still lingers but never interferes with having fun.
The So So Glos have zero interest in being sedated. On "Xanax", with its festive sha-la-las, sleigh bells, and cowpunk flourishes, frontman Alex Levine warns that "they just wanna dumb you down like I did." (Rounding the band out are Alex and Ryan's step-brother Zach Staggers on drums and childhood friend Matt Elkin on guitar.) The So So Glos are clever without being cheeky, sincere without being preachy, self-aware but never too in on their own joke. Still, their most endearing trait is a simple one: They make murderously catchy, endorphin-boosting, shout-along guitar music with vigor and zeal, breaking in their Doc Martens with a mid-song skank on the title track and goofing with Strokes-y cool on "Speakeasy". Thanks to their DIY background, the 12 songs on Blowout foster an immediate sense of community, with love and enthusiasm pumping fiercely at the heart of these songs. If you've spent any time over the past few years at NYC venues like Shea Stadium or the Market Hotel (both of which the band helped co-found), there's a good chance you've not only caught a So So Glos set, but felt that same energy.
Blowout isn't trying to break any molds, but distinguishes itself with thoughtful genre cherry-picking and a more inclusive spin on their contemporaries' established efforts. You can find hat-tips to forebears like the Gun Club and the Replacements (and note the Joe Strummer vocal inflections on the bittersweet "Island Ridin'") as well as bands that most pre-pubescent punks would have idolized when the Glos were coming up ("Wrecking Ball" sounds like Rancid all juiced up on the Beastie Boys). But as far as the current landscape is concerned, the So So Glos have a broader focus. Poking fun at American privilege is pretty standard for a band in their sphere ("Son of an American"), but the Glos come off less fussy and indignant than their friends Titus Andronicus (they even do a spot-on TA imitation with "All of the Time"). Parquet Courts feel like spiritual cousins, though SSGs are considerably less stoned and way more caffeinated. Almost every song has some sort of Japandroids-styled oh-oh-oh! chant-along, often more pop-conscious but equally as satisfying.
Full of great hooks, anthemic energy and personality to spare, the Glos are able to etch out their own space thanks to these adventurous songs (the one-two gut-punch of the melancholy-laced "Lost Weekend" and "Xanax" are both easy highlights). "I’ll be a buzz bin fly just living to die," Alex Levine sings on the aptly titled "Everything Revival", "and I don't wanna be the guy to sat whatever, never mind." So the So Glos know where they came from, but have the confidence to continue to do things their own way. Turns out it's been a nearly lifelong way of thinking for the band: Hang around after the record's over for a hidden track called "Let's Rock 'Til We Die", written and performed by the same seven-year olds we met earlier trying to unpack "Come As You Are". The song is loud, it's to the point, and it's charming as all hell. Not a lot has changed.


It took more than a decade to follow up In the Reins, but its successor reveals musicians who’ve learned to corral swarms of instruments and styles into a newly complex sound.

Years to Burn

When Calexico and Iron & Wine released In the Reins, their first collaboration together, back in 2005, both bands were in a state of flux. Sam Beam had just released the Woman King EP, which added a few new musical twists to his disarmingly intimate acoustic songs, and he was two years away from releasing The Shepherd’s Dog, which would redirect the next decade of his music into ever more elaborate jazz-folk compositions. Meanwhile, Joey Burns and John Convertino were incorporating Latin American styles such as samba and cumbia, not to mention more vocalists and musicians, into an increasingly orchestral and cinematic sound. An indie-rock eon later, it’s easy to forget how new In the Reins sounded at the time, how it represented tentative steps forward by acts who would become tenacious music lifers.
That 2005 mini-album becomes a useful point against which to measure both bands’ growth. If it sometimes felt like a great backing band and a great frontman working in parallel lanes, its successor Years to Burn mixes those roles up to reveal musicians who’ve learned to corral swarms of instruments and styles into a newly complex sound. Nowhere is that more apparent than on “The Bitter Suite,” which is not a Marillion cover but a musical triptych showcasing the various voices in this collaboration. It opens with Calexico trumpeter Jacob Valenzuela singing a Spanish-language overture, based on Beam’s lyrics about “exploring dreams wild enough to pass the time”—one of those Iron & Wine phrases that sounds straightforward but demands some unpacking. Fluidly the song morphs: first into a lowdown desert groove, its rhythms fraying at the edges, and then into a quiet finale, Beam and his deftly picked guitar commenting on what’s come before. The sections complement each other nicely but not too perfectly, creating just enough friction between them to catch a spark. Despite that hacky title, “The Bitter Suite” is certainly the most compositionally ambitious song either entity has released in years.
Nothing else on Years to Burn complicates the equation quite so radically, although there are compelling flourishes and fresh twists on familiar tropes. Calexico invest “Father Mountain” with a kind of pop stomp, a performance that reinforces the catchiness of Beam’s hooks. Tracing the lifelong arc of a beleaguered relationship, opener “What Heaven’s Left” ratchets emotional tumult to a dusty country-soul arrangement that culminates in a coda where trumpets dance around each other, offering more hope and reconciliation than the lyrics extend.
These two groups always intended to record a follow-up to In the Reins, and they’ve guested on each other’s subsequent albums. But it took them more than a decade to align their schedules, and Years to Burn might be better for that lifetime in between. Fittingly, it’s a record that’s all about time and how we measure it: against our own memories, against other people, again previous albums. “We only want a life that’s well worth living,” Beam sings on closer “In Your Own Time,” “and sleeping ain’t no kind of life at all.” Such a line might come across as too obvious if it didn’t sound so hard-learned, if the music surrounding it weren’t so imaginative. Comparing the two releases, it’s clear that Calexico and Iron & Wine have found a way over the years to leave a little more mystery in the words and let the music provide more of the clues.


The final installment of Young Thug's Slime Season trilogy is a lean, 8-track offering without filler that moves rather seamlessly. It also feels like the end of a holding pattern, hopefully leading to Thug's long-rumored official debut.

Slime Season 3

Slime Season 3 is the last in a series of hard-drive dumps following a massive security breach that scattered hundreds of Young Thug songs across the Internet. After Lyor Cohen cryptically announced plans to "bury" the mixtape, Thug literally held a funeral procession at SXSW and eulogized it later by saying, "All good things must come to an end. This is the birth of something new…HY!£UN35," alluding to his oft-rumored debut album. The full eulogy suggested what we've known all along: each Slime Season was cobbled together from stray files in the archives, compiled and released in an attempt to thwart the data leak, which has prolonged the introduction of the Next Gen Young Thug, the one, undoubtedly, with something new in store.
That isn't to say that Thug has been anything short of breathtaking during this run, or that he's grown trite. Some of his best songs have been remastered and released in response to the hack. The projects in this series are all good, but they are arranged without purpose and pushed out hastily in large, uneven packages with botched promotions. The final Slime Season is forged in the image of its predecessors, with Thug turning in charismatic performances over pulsating productions from frequent collaborators London on da Track, Mike WiLL Made It, Allen Ritter, Ricky Racks, and Isaac Flame. But it's a lean, 8-track offering without filler that moves rather seamlessly. The beats vibrate, hum, and strobe and Thug navigates them like a bat using sonar. The prime example of this is the opener, "With Them," which he debuted at Kanye West's The Life of Pablo listening party at Madison Square Garden, where the reverb from his tumbling cadences lingers into pockets of empty space.
The Slime Season series has found Young Thug settling into a particular set of vocal tics. He sometimes defers to specific tendencies, like leaning on ad-libs as structural pillars. Inside the darker, more open beats, he packs syllables together like putty then gently pulls at them. This is as close to autopilot as he gets. Luckily, it is nearly impossible for Young Thug to recycle his sound because there are so many different variables at play; he manipulates flows as well as any of his colleagues and his vocabulary of squawks and yips continue to expand even as his quirks grow more familiar. Something like "Memo," with its mesmerizing melodies, might recall other moments from the recent Thug canon. But then there's a song like "Drippin," which is a devastating display of timing and pacing that even turns his voice into a pure percussion instrument, ripping words off in micro-bursts.
The tape plays like a final installment, going out with a bang and saving some of the series' best for last. The posse cut "Slime Shit," which features longtime Thug associates Yak Gotti, Duke, and PeeWee Roscoe, is something of a theme song. On "With Them," he rattles off simple but effective punches through a nasally mumble. Then there's the standout "Digits," which wraps the YOLO philosophy inside a 'get money' cliche, moving at warp speed before settling into a strutting pace. "I been gettin money before the music, fuck Pandora/ I can do this shit when I get bored," he says, casually. It's a fitting gauge of his talent and a peek into his current outlook, and the tape is a fitting end to the Slime Season trilogy.


The band’s dense and ornate fourth album sacrifices intimacy and warmth in favor of the most technically proficient and hard-hitting music of their career.

The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Illusory Walls

Illusory Walls

The past few years have been enough to turn the widest-eyed dreamer into a staunchly cynical realist. For The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, the next step is salvaging the wreckage and reconstructing it as a brutalist sculpture. The band—whose five members are split between Philadelphia and rural Connecticut—is best known for bringing a hyper-specific authenticity and uplifting collectivism to the wistful guitar plucks and squeaky singing of the early 2010s emo revival. Their fourth album, Illusory Walls, sounds like a grim reincarnation of the band they once were. Written and recorded remotely during the pandemic, it is the band’s first album to prominently employ an outside co-producer (Greg Thomas), and the first to feature just one main guitarist (down from three). It is the most technically proficient and hard-hitting music in their discography, albeit at the cost of their unique intimacy and warmth.
If 2017’s Always Foreign smartly retrofitted TWIABP’s sprawling indie rock with clear-eyed vocals and concise song structures, Illusory Walls redraws the blueprints again. Think of songs like Always Foreign’s contemptuous “Fuzz Minor,” or the atmospheric churn of “We Need More Skulls” from 2015’s Harmlessness, now with dropped tuning, ornate production, lots more riffing, and a bigger axe to grind. Illusory Walls fumes with resentment for the ruthless greed and self-interest fueling societal collapse, even as it hunts for moments of beauty in the destruction. Thematically, the record is among the band’s most irrefutable and effective. At the tail end of 20-minute closer “Fewer Afraid,” guest vocalist Sarah Cowell sums up the album’s driving forces: “I think the world’s fucked up and brutal. Senseless violence with no guiding light. I can’t live like this, but I’m not ready to die.” It’s dirty, dark, angry, conflicted, anxious, mournful, and still somehow resilient.
The conflict is between old habits and new ideas. Even with a band roster in the double digits, past TWIABP albums never felt at odds with themselves; their clarity came from simple arrangements that left the music’s emotional message unmuddied. On Illusory Walls, simplicity is in short supply. The soft guitar and synth notes that begin opener “Afraid to Die” would’ve felt at home on previous albums, but they soon explode into an early climax of multi-tracked riffs, anthemic strings, punchy drums, and David Bello’s charming but limited voice. “Invading the World of the Guilty as a Spirit of Vengeance” is so busy and over-complicated that the emotional presence of the vocals has no choice but to take a back seat. It robs the song’s conclusion—where Bello sings out casket dimensions over growling guitars—of any weight.
Illusory Walls sets itself apart in the TWIABP catalog through its focus on intricate guitar work—the difference between a guitar album and a guitarist’s album. Chris Teti, TWIABP’s producer and current sole guitarist, has spoken at length about the influence of Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, as well as highly technical post-hardcore bands like Cave In and Glassjaw. The references bear out in the music. Whether it’s the brooding palm-muted chugs in “Your Brain Is a Rubbermaid” or the interwoven leads in “Trouble,” Teti’s deft playing often takes center stage. But when the riffs step back to share the spotlight, they become a more potent tool. “We Saw Birds Through the Hole in the Ceiling” takes its time to ratchet up the tension, giving Bello space to wade around in the melody. When the song hits its peak, the screaming background vocals and fiery guitar tones feel earned.
Thankfully, there are breaks in the angst. A pair of interludes, “Blank // Drone” and “Blank // Worker,” provide necessary breathing room and the album’s clear emotional core. Guitars lilt and quiver in a cyclical melody as Bello softly voices some of the album’s most evocative lyrics: “Ohio river stomachache, pray DuPont, our water is safe/If we don’t die out here on the grass, we might one day be middle class.” They’re as much a lament for a fading American Dream as a lullaby for the working class, and go a long way in showing how the band’s simplest images paint the most richly detailed portraits of everyday life.
Yet the indulgence that colors so much of Illusory Walls is also responsible for its two best songs. “Infinite Josh” and “Fewer Afraid” feel like TWIABP catalog classics, intensely personal and universally resonant in their post-rock grandeur. Complete with intimate, conversational lyrics and a vocal melody readymade for audience singalongs, the penultimate, 15-minute “Infinite Josh” shows the band at the height of its powers. It strikes the same impossible balance as “Goodbye Sky Harbor” from Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity, luxuriating in the long, slow build of repetition while delivering hook after indelible hook. “But everyone says, ‘You can’t go home again,’” goes the refrain, even as it feels like that’s exactly what the band is doing.
Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the vocalist featured on “Fewer Afraid.” She is Sarah Cowell, not Katie Dvorak.

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At this point, SMD aren’t exactly underrated—their 2012 LP Unpatterns was a just-okay collision of their techno and electro tendencies—but their longevity has perhaps gone underappreciated. Their latest is light on bangers and more focused on texture.

Whorl

James Ford and Jas Shaw of  Simian Mobile Disco have spent the last decade cresting waves and skirting irrelevance to arrive at where they are today. After splintering from rock quartet Simian in 2005, Ford and Shaw turned toward the type of high-energy, melodically palatable electro that came to be known for a mercifully brief spell as “blog-house,” releasing one of the genre’s most colorful and striking full-lengths in the form of the 2007 debut Attack Decay Sustain Release.
The title of SMD’s 2009 follow-up, Temporary Pleasure, suggested the London duo’s dance-pop might be getting stale, so the following year saw them take a successful left turn into hard techno territory, launching the Delicatessen label and releasing an enjoyable batch of roilers in the form of that year’s singles collection Delicacies. At this point, SMD aren’t exactly underrated—their 2012 LP Unpatterns was a just-okay collision of their techno and electro tendencies—but their longevity has perhaps gone underappreciated, as recent collaborations with techno heavy-hitters like Irish duo Bicep and German veteran Roman Flügel have spoken to the duo’s adventurousness and steady sense of industry.
SMD's new album Whorl plays like an expected follow-up to the pleasantly forgettable Unpatterns rather than a confirmation of SMD’s still-revered live show. Much of the 64-minute set emphasizes texture over dynamics, content to exist as background music. This, in and of itself, is not the worst thing that could happen: Ford and Shaw are experts at the nuts and bolts of sound—the former is also an in-demand studio producer and songwriter—so the drifting ambience and analog burbles of Whorl are, like ice sculptures, glimmering in their plainness. The swirling, beatless one-two kiss of “Redshift” and “Dandelion Spheres” take on pleasing, meditative shapes, but the downtempo fare presented elsewhere—the frizzy, disjointed atmospherics of “Z Space”, “Nazard”’s questionable flirtations with chillout—simply dissipates upon contact.
As ever, SMD are most engaging when creating body-moving, uptempo fare: “Calyx” percolates and whines to a pleasing climax, with piping tones dancing on its surface, while “Tangents” builds to an anthemic swirl of synth lines anchored by a steady, hissing 4/4. Most notably, “Jam Side Up” rides a cascading melody for nearly six minutes, building and breaking a beat around it with a sense of patience that makes for an impressive mid-tune peak. These three tracks are clustered in the middle section of Whorl, possibly to mimic the structural build of a live performance, but the shiftless sounds that come before are more likely to trigger a click on "pause" rather than create anticipation for what’s to follow.
Just last year, SMD released Live, an untouchable document of their onstage capabilities that stands as their most pleasurable recorded statement. On Live they distilled their two primary modes—their harder, abstract side and their more explicitly pop-leaning past—into something cohesive and enjoyable, but the set also highlighted the duo’s Achilles heel: they’re more of a singles outfit (as many dance acts are) and when they’re constrained to the album format, tedium creeps in. That’s been the case since Temporary Pleasure, and it’s the case for Whorl, too, a record that finds SMD operating at half-speed when the accelerator is pedal is close within their reach.


The hardcore quartet’s 13-minute debut skewers abuses of power, unchecked male privilege, and capitalist complacency at tornado speed.

Soakie

Soakie make breakneck rippers. The hardcore quartet, with members stretched between Australia and New York City, confront abuses of power, unchecked male privilege, and capitalist complacency at tornado speed. The band formed in 2018 when drummer Austin and vocalist Summer befriended guitarist Chumz and bassist Nellie in Melbourne. With visas dangerously close to expiration, the band held their first practice, played their first show, and recorded a demo all under two weeks. Subsequent songs were played hard and loud, with an urgency that suggested that the ground beneath the band was being swallowed by lava. Two years later, Soakie’s searing self-titled debut maintains that anarchic defiance.
Opener “Nuke the Frats” is a blast of thick reverb, shredding, and unrestrained spite. Summer, whose caustic, deep-fried snarl evokes punk greats like Vi Subversa and Kathleen Hanna at her most feral, uses her voice as a tool to mimic and ridicule convention. On the fiery “Or You Or You,” she snaps from childish innocence to a gnarly, face-melting howl while breathlessly yelping a curt dismissal: “I don’t want to talk to you!” “Power Tool” is as jagged and incisive as a chainsaw. Built off a gloriously sneering chorus—“Football, red meat, power tools!”—it is a compelling demand to open up this fucking pit.
A good chunk of these tracks are sharpened and beefed-up versions of songs that first appeared on the 2018 demo. Though the band continues to skewer and satirize the mainstream, Soakie’s new screeds signal an increasingly nuanced writing approach with an explicitly political focus. “Ditch the Rich” is a rallying cry that demands “all the rich get in a ditch,” while quietly pointing out the dismal reality of wealth inequality: “I don’t see any dream, all I see is Mickey D’s.” “I’m sick of fascist politics,” Summer screams on closer “Don’t Talk Back” over her bandmates’ thrashing. “What’s Your Gender” questions the value of binaries and social conventions atop a wall of crashing cymbals and dense riffing. While it ends on a doggedly resilient note (“I am happy, love myself/And you can all just go to hell”), the song emphasizes that this hopefulness is a hard-won in a world hellbent on self-destruction.
Soakie’s greatest moment laments a headache as old as time: “There are too many fucking boys on stage!” “Boys on Stage,” a furious indictment of gender inequality in music scenes large and small, is a crucial anthem on a sadly evergreen topic. Summer mocks badges of masculinity and scene cred like emo lyrics and studded leather jackets with oozing sarcasm: “I see you man, you’re real hardcore!” she cheers, eyes rolling out of her head.
“Boys on Stage” concludes with an exuberant declaration: “It’s not just only boys!/There’s girls here now!” It’s a vision of inclusion, a symbol of why listening to Soakie feels so exhilarating. Frustration and anger can leave you listless; these seven songs transform the feeling into pogoing, throat-ripping liberation.

Buy: Rough Trade
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