In the early and mid 1990s, the British trio Disco Inferno wrote two albums and five EPs that comprised some of the most forward-thinking rock of the era. The Five EPs is a record that should be heard by anyone with an interest in those rare times when rock attempts brashly to chart new sonic territory.

The 5 EPs

People talk a lot about how it's easier to be an "experimental" band in the 21st-century. Like most rhetoric about the way the web changed music, that's not quite so true for everyone all the time. But the story of British avant-rock band Disco Inferno certainly proves how hard it could be to try something new in the days before the internet allowed you to get your music out to a worldwide audience without the cost, financial and otherwise, of widespread touring, album production, and distribution-- all that supposedly 20th-century baggage.
Between roughly 1991 and 1996, Disco Inferno wrote two albums and five EPs that comprised some of the most forward-thinking rock of an era when rock bands were constantly trying to one-up each other in pushing the music into the future. Yet it wasn't until the 21st century that DI finally found the devoted audience they deserved. In a very real way, we can thank message-board word-of-mouth, blog bootlegging, and the work of a few evangelical fans for The Five EPs, a long-rumored legal collection of the cream of DI's output.
It seems hard to argue now, given how widely loved they are, that DI's music is too out-there, too much to process, too difficult to reach a large listenership. Perhaps the grind-- press indifference, label mismanagement, trying to build a fanbase one low-paying and sparsely attended gig at a time-- proved to be too much. Whatever the reason for DI's dissolving, their 21st-century rescue from obscurity is cause for celebration, and so is The Five EPs, a record that should be heard by anyone with an interest in those rare times when rock attempts brashly to chart new sonic territory.
So what was so experimental, so forward-thinking about DI? Well, they were a rock band who used digital samplers, inspired by the hip-hop and rave wizards making jigsaw-puzzle pop with Akais and bottom-shelf PCs at the turn of the 90s. "Rock plus samples" might have been a novel hook at the time, but not quite unheard of. (Certain industrial acts beat DI to the punch there, for one thing.) And it probably seems so common as to be unremarkable now, when almost every band packs a laptop when going on tour. What made DI so exciting is what they did with those samplers, which sounds as singular now as it did then.
Singular, but not wholly alien. True, The Five EPs can occasionally get pretty abstract. Easily the album's most difficult but oddly inspired nine minutes, "From the Devil to the Deep Blue Sea" takes samples of breaking glass and fashions them into something halfway between a Steve Reich-like percussion piece and someone "improvising" with a window and a hammer. But for the most part, these 15 tracks aren't "soundscapes." DI were still very much a songwriter's band, even after switching allegiance from power chords to 1s and 0s.
The rhythm section of Rob Whatley and Paul Wilmott, the band's perpetually underrated foundational element, could still lay down a driving groove learned from years of listening to Joy Division records. Frontman Ian Crause could unfurl sparkling melodies, gleaned from masters like Vini Reilly, that actually seemed to issue from a guitar you could pick up at your local music shop. And Crause's lyrics (more about these in a bit) were among the most impassioned but clear-eyed of the 90s. But after accelerating their standard-issue, garage-band gear with the latest in musical tech, DI replaced riffs with children's jumprope chants or old-time radio show chatter or trilling birdsong, and drums with fireworks popping in mid-air or splashing water or the crunch of hard-packed snow.
Sometimes DI's use of samples feels like thrilling punctuation to what might otherwise be sparkling indie pop or moody post-punk songs, using natural sounds or the noise of urban life the way other bands might throw in a James Brown drum fill or a quote from an old movie. But more often they stripped away everything but a suggestive bass pulse or ripple of guitar. Then they built whole tracks, layer by layer, from those sampled sounds, textures, and noises that seemed like they couldn't be coming from a guitar, bass, or drums. Yet they were. That tension between tradition and future shock means there are moments here that may remind you of something you've heard before. But there are many, many more when you'll wonder why more bands didn't follow DI's lead and make "guitar" music that could actually, truly sound like gale-force winds, or a multi-car crash, or a trip to the dark side of the moon.
At their best, DI rendered a familiar template-- the kind of rock songs once released by Factory Records or Rough Trade-- once again unpredictable and vital. It's probably no accident that they drew the attention of Rough Trade itself toward the end of their career, as torchbearers for the label's visionary spirit. They didn't trash the idea of rock songs in favor of the new genres blooming all around them at the time. They kept rock songs alive by proving you could still write them even after you stripped away just about every familiar element.
That rebuilt-from-unfamiliar-bits approach had the potential to leave accessibility far behind, but DI's music could also have a playfulness about the possibility of alienating people. "D.I. Go Pop", from the third of the EPs, plays like a tape of a three-chord punk pisstake that's being sped up and slowed down by a band that's sick to death of punk rock, until the whole track becomes a see-sawing smear of digital distortion. Unlike the 1994 album of the same name, which is undeniably DI's most willfully chaotic and deeply sad record, "D.I. Goes Pop" has some of the same cheek of the Beta Band, who crafted a much smoother rock-meets-DJ-cut-up aesthetic a few years later, with the same pull between making you laugh and tweaking your nose.
They also had a knack for couching discomforting sentiments in even their most boisterous and agreeable tunes. "It's a Kid's World", which infamously swipes the drums from Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life", imagines what the Children's Television Workshop or the producers of Pee-wee's Playhouse might have done with the materials of glam rock. That booming big beat gets swarmed by ray-gun noises and slidewhistle silliness until it builds a whimsical wall of noise, like a kiddie MBV. Yet it opens with some of the most withering lines in Crause's none-too-sunny catalog: "Mediocrity surrounds you/ People pressing down around you/ There's nowhere else to go but down and out." Things don't get much lighter from there on out, and I don't just mean in this particular ditty.
It's almost too easy to discuss DI as if they were some sort of left-field DJ project. Everyone focuses on the mind-boggling musical invention, and they're not necessarily wrong to do so. But one of the most exciting things about DI's music is the way all-too-human feeling is woven into the futuristic collage through Crause's lyrics. Crause again and again takes a long, hard, unblinking look at his country, his time, but most of all himself, and alternating currents of disillusionment and hope, uncertainty, and possibility run through The Five EPs.
The Five EPs describes a world where an oasis of happiness is a rare thing, the best lack all conviction, experimental indie bands are thwarted by indifferent landlords, the free market's left the working poor up shit creek, people who hope to change things have no idea where to start, and immigrants get beaten on the streets while everyone else politely averts their eyes. "Summer's Last Sound" takes the comforting vocabulary of new-age music-- rushing water, birdsong-- and darkens it with mentions of "mass graves" and "broken windows" and "foreigners [getting] hushed-up trials," all while the bulk of Englanders go on about their late-summer fun, oblivious. It's as beautiful and immersive as anything to come out of shoegaze or the ambient house that was being made at the same time, but it also suggests that chilling out is a luxury for those who are lucky enough to be able to avoid the headlines.
I don't want to give the impression that this is a wholly bleak record, though a lot of it can be emotionally hard-going. It's not as if a pervasive unease and sorrow hangs over The Five EPs. There are moments of guarded-if-not-great joy, too. If DI's sound suggests three men endlessly thrilled by the way digital technology could extend and reshape rock, emotionally as much as sonically, then that sense of possibility has to leak into the lyrics and the mood occasionally. "There's so much pessimism in the world it's frightening," Crause sing-songs on "The Atheist's Burden", one of several songs that suggests the past is a country suffocated by mistakes but the future might still have a place for realists, if not cynics.
If the band was wholly without hope, why would they have bothered to push themselves so hard on these records? If disillusionment finally won out, the band is ultimately entitled to its personal reasons for packing it in. Because at least they gave us the records, and The Five EPs, along with DI's last two albums, remain as light and dense, as dizzying and inspiring, as when they were recorded. And hopefully now they'll be heard by many more than they were at the time.


The Norwegian producer continues to refine his highly appealing blend of dub, cosmic disco, house, and Balearic sounds.

Kokning

Kokning, the title of Bjørn Torske's fourth full-length LP, is a Nordic word that sounds ineffably lewd to American ears. It has no English equivalent, unless there's an obscure English word that means "putting potatoes on to boil, going fishing, and then preparing the fish with the potatoes." The uniquely Scandinavian concept suits the uniquely Scandinavian music. Torske's blend of playful austerity and wistful wonderment can also be found in his Smalltown Supersound compatriots, from diskJokke to Lindstrøm to Kim Hiorthøy. The title also evokes the relaxed, patiently simmering quality of the album, which boils down Torske's long-running fixations upon dub, cosmic disco, house, and Balearic sounds into a highly refined personal style. Sophisticatedly minimal, Kokning improves upon 2007's excellent Feil Knapp by retaining yet streamlining Torske's idiosyncrasies.
To create the album, Torske recorded instrumental parts in various places and then edited them together with rhythm tracks. His sensitivity as a producer makes the album, for all the styles it lightly flits through, an organic room-tone odyssey at heart: alive with inventive sounds and warm with feeling. It opens with three wonderful, ultra-mellow cuts that slide you into Torske's sound-world with zero friction. On the title track, liquidly hypnotic phrases for clean electric guitar weave through shining ambiance, with just a couple of alternating plucks coolly marking time. "Bryggesjau" is a clip-clopping set piece for acid-bright guitar riffs in taut counterpoint, and "Gullfjellet" features rich nylon strings and watery synths, rooted by the calm thump of a kick drum. Besides their appealing sound palettes, the great thing about these tracks is how deliberately they take on definition. By the time the dancier middle run of songs come around, you're deeply immersed.
This middle run is marked by lots of intricate hand percussion, funk progressions, and proggy keyboard swirls, though it retains the light [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| touch and hint of critical distance that characterize the opening tracks. "Slitte Sko" is the sort of casual, chiming beat workout that Arthur Russell liked to cook up, and "Bergensere" calls Prins Thomas to mind with its arch yet passionate funk. As the album progresses, Torske gets more unleashed, slathering "Nitten Nitti" with a goofy-fun vocal synth arpeggio and framing stylized dub reggae with monster-party samples on "Versjon Wolfenstein". After the more focused songs preceding it, the 12-minute closing epic "Furu" is a bit long-winded for my tastes, but at least it feels earned. It also makes me feel Torske is naturally inclined to stretching out-- even his short pieces here have a sense of endless range-- which makes his restraint elsewhere all the more admirable. His shorter tracks have a diorama-like sense of compact but vivid detail, and the merest gestures make big impacts. Unflashy and muted, Torske gets less props than some of his peers. With any justice, Kokning will correct this slight.


Portishead's Geoff Barrow assembles a 40-plus-person cast ranging from hip-hop vets to obscure MCs for an indie rap recording that's engaging in spite of its heavily fractured structure.

Quakers

Quakers features 41 tracks in 69 1/2 minutes. Now there's a fair amount of background detail to roll out when it comes to the latest Stones Throw release-- an indie rap committee project assembled by Portishead's Geoff Barrow, abetted by co-producers 7-Stu-7 and Katalyst, and given over to everyone from abstract-rap vets to obscure, googleproofed MySpace MCs. But above everything else, those numbers still jump out more than anything. Again: 41 tracks, 69 1/2 minutes. Oh, yeah-- and 30-plus different names listed after the "ft."s. That's a whole lot of one-verse wonders, interstitial skits, hidden segues, thematic 180s, abrupt mood swings, and beat-the-clock lyrical scrambling. How do you keep an over-the-top battle royale like this from falling apart completely? The glib answer would be to crack wise about most tracks ending before any flaws show up to tear them apart, but that'd be shortchanging an album that's actually got some engaging weight behind it.
As the most recognizable name, it might be tempting to see Barrow as the creative driving force behind this record, and if heads remember how much "Elysium" sounded like the best beat the RZA never made, they might adjust their expectations accordingly. But the three-man production team doesn't shine the spotlight on any particular member, so it's best to think of the beat-crafting braintrust of Quakers as some sort of hivemind hydra, siphoning the weirder corners of underground hip-hop source material into an unpredictably heavy-hitting body of work. Everything from Radiohead-via-marching-band ("Fitta Happier") to Rachmaninoff-via-soul ("Oh Goodness") gets incorporated into a repertoire that occasionally skews toward the smart-ass eclectic. (The over-the-top Moog prog of "Russia With Love" and the Moroderized synthpop grandeur of "Dark City Lights" also make for attention-getting diversions.) And if that down-for-whatever approach keeps things from feeling entirely cohesive, the team does find paydirt when they approach a common denominator-- the musty-basement vibe of Nixon-era soundtracks and soul-jazz curios turned feral, another valiant entry in the race to find out just how much contemporary pull you can get from a vintage-minded production arsenal.
There's some real inspired filthiness here, too. The Drummers of Burundi around which Joni Mitchell built "The Jungle Line" get refitted to give Phat Kat and Guilty Simpson something to barrel through, and it's one of those drum breaks that has a real supple liquidity even as it knocks, like a torrent of running water that leaves bruises. (The tendon-severing clavinet is a bonus.) The more acidic side of early 1970s R&B is done justice by the slinky fuzz guitar on Dead Prez feature "Soul Power", the elephant-bell jumpsuit strut of "Smoke" covers the rubber-band funk of the decade's second half, and the all-exclamation-point Memphis horns of "What Chew Want" would be all sorts of 1995 even without the ODB singalong. Hell, even the interstitials bump. A skeptic could question why tracks like the seething boom-clap Drive-gone-g-funk "The Lo" or the two-ton analog-synth lurch of "Kreem" were left as segues, rather than getting fleshed out into full-length beats that would make even the most sluggishly zoned-out MC sound diabolical. But listening to the album in sequence, as attention-dividing as it might be, at least makes these sub-minute interludes feel integral.
It would've been easy for a high-profile all-star project like this to just call up a handful of already-established MCs, throw in one unexpected up-and-comer for tastemaker cred, and take that to the bank. But it wouldn't have the bewildering but endearing clusterfuck personality that makes it engagingly weird. A few of Stones Throw's usual suspects show up with their A-game-- that "National Anthem"-via-"Tusk" beat on "Fitter Happier" is absolutely annihilated by Guilty Simpson in peak shit-talk mode, M.E.D. holds his own on the subsequent verse, and Aloe Blacc's turn on "Sign Language" is the coolly self-assured reminder we need that the man who gave us the retro-soul Good Things can rap his ass off when he feels like it. Organized Konfusion's Prince Po ("Rock My Soul"), the Pharcyde's Booty Brown ("TV Dreaming"), and the aforementioned dead prez round out a reliable set of verses that feel like welcome extensions of the retrofitted KRS and Audio Two drops scattered throughout the record-- reverent toward veterans, but still willing to integrate them into a project with a lot of new blood.
All those unknown (or at least under-known) quantities can take some getting used to, however. Not that they're not ready for prime time or anything-- it's just that some of them either have difficulties establishing a unique spark with the limited time they're given, or inversely make such an odd impression that they feel like weird outliers. As much as the whole lyrical-lyricist battler style has struggled with cliché, there's nothing flagrantly corny dropped by the likes of Synato Watts ("Big Cat"), Quite Nyce ("Jobless"), or Buff 1 ("Sidewinder") – just some solid-enough verbiage that gets lost in the shuffle amidst a cast of dozens. And the stuff that jumps out does so to an almost disruptive extent. Emilio Rojas's Oscar Grant-invoking anti-police-brutality verse on "Belly of the Beast" takes up maybe 80 seconds, but its righteous-fury venom is enough to erase any impression that the previous few tracks might have made. "What Chew Want" features a Brooklynite named Tone Tank whose casual ethnic jokes and self-aware faux-stoopidity feel like he's aiming for white-dude Das Racist, while recent Stones Throw signee Dave Dub carries over that ODB energy and grafts it with Biz Markie and Aesop Rock on the woozy "My Mantra". Katalyst collaborator Coin Locker Kid shows up on three different tracks, and the impression the Fayetteville MC makes-- bundle-of-nerves crazy in 7/8 over "Russia With Love", arrogant velvet on "The Beginning", Mos Def-as-Bobcat Goldthwait on "Get Live"-- shows mere hints of what feels like a limitless reserve of strangeness.
Quakers is kind of a mess, and odds are that a not-insignificant number of people are going to find the beats more consistently entertaining than the verses. (The CD version of the album includes a full instrumental version as a bonus disc, so no worries there, at least.) But ambitious messes are the best kind, and riding out the less-interesting moments is worth it in the long run. It's a sprawling, overstuffed deluge that feels longer than it is, but can't really be pared down or scrapped for parts. Best to just let it go start-to-finish and have its constant changes of scenery dart past until you can find something to linger on.


The Baton Rouge-based rapper Boosie Badazz was released from prison in 2014 after beating drug smuggling and murder charges. After a triumphant return to rap, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer, and his brief new album In My Feelings reckons with the fallout.

Boosie Badazz: In My Feelings (Going' Thru It)

In My Feelings (Going' Thru It)

In the past handful of years, Torrence Hatch has been known by various names: Lil Boosie, the moniker he rode to cult hero status in his native Baton Rouge; Boosie Badazz, the name he switched to when he got sick of grown men calling him "little"; and inmate #560699, when he was locked away in Angola, the country's largest maximum-security prison. Rap fans, particularly those throughout the American south, know him as one of the genre's most distinct voices—literally, for his cartoon-villain-on-helium drawl, and more broadly for a writing perspective that marries grim reportage to an unshakeable, immutable sense of joy.
In March of 2014, Boosie was released from that (barely) repurposed plantation in Louisiana after beating a drug smuggling case and first-degree murder charge. He seemed, finally, free—a pair of freestyles recorded on the ride home had him singing about seeing his kids and figuring out when he could squeeze in a haircut. He quickly went scorched-Earth with a series of guest features and loose singles that saw him very near, or perhaps at his creative peak. (A remake of "Lifestyle" was so good it justified its existence.)
His return to retail shelves, last spring's Touch Down 2 Cause Hell, played like a blues record. There was the snarling intro, the grizzled wisdom on "Mr. Miyagi," the unadulterated happiness of "All I Know." Save for a four-song stretch on the back half, the preceding mixtape Life After Deathrow was even better, and ranks alongside Boosie's best work. For an artist who had spent the ages that account for many rappers' creative primes behind bars, there were remarkably few cobwebs to shake out. It seemed, for 18 months, that Boosie had beaten every odd and would go down as one of the greatest feel-good stories of his era.
Until this Thanksgiving. That's when Boosie posted to his Instagram—then hastily deleted—a notice that he had been diagnosed with kidney cancer. A few weeks later, in mid-December, he reportedly underwent surgery to have half of one of his kidneys removed, and announced that it went well, and that he's now cancer-free. It was a relief to his legions of fans, but the very public process had been disorienting: how is one person so chronically, powerfully unfortunate?
That question is the catalyst for In My Feelings (Goin' Thru It), Boosie's brief new album. As always, he has the ability to explore in-depth and with great precision the extent of his unhappiness, without ever sounding self-indulgent or as if he's wallowing. "Cancer," the record's centerpiece, is plaintive even by his standards: "Told my bitch, she cried/ Told my niggas, they cried/ Mama tried to downplay it to the family—she lied/ I'm thinking, 'Damn, how'd I get cancer?'" There and at Feelings' other high points ("The Rain," the beautiful closer "I Know They Gone Miss Me"), Boosie is who you wish you'd be in his situation, resolute and concerned with others before himself. It's like watching your most positive friend try to speak it into existence one last time.
And yet, while you'd be forgiven for being morbidly curious about 10 tracks of Boosie at his lowest, the album's construction is its Achilles heel. Not only are there no emotional highs like a "Top to the Bottom" or a "Finger Fucking," but the prevailing mood here is weariness. That's probably an honest reflection of where Boosie's at in life, but it can make for a grim listen. Consider "Call of Duty," where he raps about sending a duffel bag full of money to someone's house, then cross-reference his vocal take with how you imagine Boosie would rap about that situation at any other point in his life. It's easy to imagine him crushed under the weight of obligation, but there are a handful of would-be set pieces that end up feeling frustratingly anonymous.
Boosie is still Boosie, and through the din of doctors and ungrateful hangers-on, you can still hear the pen that will keep him in rotation at LSU for generations to come. The hook on "Bad Guy" alone is more carefully crafted than many songs that will hit Top 40 this year. But In My Feelings often feels as if its about to collapse under its own weight, which is doubly frustrating when you consider it clocks in at a slight 34 minutes. Still, it's hard to be too somber when you remember that Torrence Hatch is free, cancer-free, and isn't going anywhere.


Pushing beyond his playlist origins, the New Zealand producer’s debut album revels in eccentric details while adhering to traditional pop structures.

Adolescence

Like so many electronic artists in the mid-’10s, New Zealand’s BAYNK (Jock Nowell-Usticke) got his start making chill, pop-adjacent songs that seemed primed for placement in mood-based playlists. His early attempts at surf-bro EDM sounded like what Kygo and LeMarquis were putting out on SoundCloud at the time; he used his voice sparingly, mainly as material to be sampled. In the years since, though, he has refined his palette. On 2017’s Someone’s EP I and 2019’s Someone’s EP II, his percussion took on the rhythmic impulse of Four Tet, and his rubbery basslines and glossy experimentalism were reminiscent of early Cashmere Cat and Flume. Using his Auto-Tuned falsetto to further texturize his songs, BAYNK’s fusion of house, R&B, and pop soon set him apart from the many similar acts scattered throughout the scene.
Adolescence is BAYNK’s most meticulous work to date. It revels in eccentric, distinctive details while adhering to traditional pop structures. Most arrangements consist of grainy synth loops, plucky subs, and house-inspired drums; his digital sounds are drenched in reverb and slapped with sidechain. On the Cosmo’s Midnight-assisted “How Does it Feel?” languid synth pulses and a funky bassline give way to some of the sharpest vocal melodies on the album. “Remember,” which features Rainsford, exhibits BAYNK’s talent for peeling a heavily layered song back to its component parts before climaxing into an ecstatic yet graceful drop. This is dance music for headphones, club music for late-night walks.
The best songs on Adolescence bend toward straightforward pop formulas and, tellingly, include non-electronic instruments. “Mine” is led by quiet piano and spacey guitar, while standout “Naked” blends acoustic elements and electric bass with shimmering synths. BAYNK gives his best vocal performances here: “Get caught up on trying to pin you down/Your fingers ’round my neck, they’re feeling soft now," he coos on “Naked,” evoking the warm upper register of Whitney’s Julien Ehrlich. He’s not a great singer, as Tinashe makes plain when she steals the show on “Esther”; he scrubs clean his imperfections with layers of automation, delay, and reverb. Still, BAYNK has a keen ear for melody and knows his limits, wisely ceding the mic to guests while he works the boards.
The album is nominally a concept record about the immediacy of youth and romantic first experiences. “I went through this period of not being able to write anything,” BAYNK told Apple Music. Being in a “stable and happy relationship” wasn’t conducive to inspiration, so to get around his writer’s block, he returned to the creative cocoon of “first love.” Lyrically, the album is imagistic and vague, depicting half-baked scenes of lying in the sun, holding hands in a car, and walking through fields. The narrative never coalesces into anything meaningful, and its emotional pull wanes quickly. First love invigorates but rarely sustains; it’s BAYNK’s elastic and original production that propels the album forward, the pulse of the beat begging us to feel something beyond recognition.
Correction: An earlier version of this review misattributed a lyric on the record. The quote has since been changed to reflect one that BAYNK sings.


Sufjan returns with a welcome change-up, as he moves away from bookish detail, experiments with electronics, and writes from a more personal perspective.

The Age of Adz

With his sixth proper album, Sufjan Stevens does battle with what we've come to expect from a proper Sufjan Stevens album. This time, instead of painstakingly humanizing the locations, historical inhabitants, and trivia of a certain slab of America, he's more concerned with his own state of mind. Banjos are out; moody electronics, deep bass, and drums that burst like geysers are in. The lengthiest song title on his last LP, 2005's Illinois, was 53 words long; here, that same superlative goes to a tune called "I Want to Be Well". He's whispering less, hollering more. And at the climax of The Age of Adz, the devout Christian and poster boy for mannered indie-dude sensitivity shouts, "I'm not fuckin' around!" no less than 16 times. Believe him.
Yet, there is no mistaking this as a work by the Detroit-born, Brooklyn-dwelling overachiever. Trilling flutes, meticulously arranged choirs, and an overarching sense of hugeness are still apparent. The record's last track, "Impossible Soul", is a five-part suite that lasts more than 25 minutes and boasts harps, horns, blips, Auto-Tuned vocals, a twee-dance breakdown, some cheerleader call-and-response, and even a little trad-folk guitar picking, you know, for kicks. That single track bulges with more engaging ideas than most artists could muster in a career, and there's no one else on earth that could've come up with it. Even the record's glitched backdrop isn't entirely unprecedented; Stevens' pre-breakout 2001 instrumental album Enjoy Your Rabbit could be looked back on as a sketchbook for what would become The Age of Adz. So as Stevens' current restlessness fights it out with his past accomplishments, the listener ends up winning.
Once again there's a concept tying everything together, though it's not quite as educational-- or virtuous-- as before. The Age of Adz is a reference to Louisiana artist and self-proclaimed prophet Royal Robertson, whose work appears on the album's cover and liner notes. A paranoid schizophrenic, Robertson translated his anguish through apocalyptic sci-fi posters after his wife left him following nearly 20 years of marriage. His comic-book style pieces-- which have been shown at the Smithsonian, among other museums-- are colorful, vengeful, and crazed. They feature B-movie style robot monsters who spout cartoon captions like, [sic] "I'll distroy much town's of adultress !!WHORE'S!!" Robertson's work is a long way from the cutesy cover of Illinois, and the fact that Stevens chose such an eccentric and hate-prone avatar for inspiration this time is telling.
Because The Age of Adz is a relatively dark affair, with the 35-year-old songwriter sometimes forgoing his child-like naïveté for something more oblique and adult. Considering the triumph of style that was Illinois (and the legions of lesser lights that subsequently turned it into some sort of over-the-top Disney on Ice parody), the change of perspective is welcomed.
The record is book-ended by two quaint, characteristic acoustic passages that find Stevens reconnecting with a past love. "It's been a long long time since I've memorized your face," he starts. This is the Sufjan we know. But, in between that short intro and outro, the album tells the story of a relationship with fantastical zeal. The tale is sordid and a little absurd, filled with betrayal, selfishness, frustration, suicidal thoughts, a raging volcano, and a space ship. "I've lost the will to fight/ I was not made for life," he confesses on the title track, as robo-noises and churchly backups translate Robertson's futuristic drawings into sound.
Across the album, he relives the more harrowing aspects of a deep personal bond, pinging from bitterness ("At least I deserve the respect of a kiss goodbye," he sings over gloriously spare electro-pop on "I Walked"), to confusion ("I thought I was so in love/ Some say it wasn't true," he head-scratches on the hymn-like "Now That I'm Older", a masterclass in modern vocal arrangement), to, um, melodramatic transmogrification (referring to himself in the third person, he inhabits the Pompeii-burning volcano of "Vesuvius", singing, "Sufjan, the panic inside, the murdering ghost that you cannot ignore"). Surrounding himself with music that expertly balances between over-orchestrated and chaotic, Stevens elevates his pedestrian travails about love and lust into legendary myths in which he's rarely the hero.
Right before The Age of Adz's back-to-earth finale, Sufjan finally overcomes his emotional stupor as a host of voices join him for the singalong, "Boy! We can do much more together!/ It's not so impossible!" And then he shakes out of the grandeur, goes back to the finger picking, and sighs the album's more realistic final line: "Boy! We made such a mess together." It's an ambiguous conclusion that, like the rest of the album, was seemingly in jeopardy of not happening at all. In a Signal to Noise interview last year, Stevens said, "I definitely feel like the album no longer has any real bearing anymore. The physical format itself is obsolete; the CD is obsolete and the LP is kinda nostalgic. I'm wondering, 'What's the value of my work once these forms are obsolete and everyone's just downloading music?'" It's a valid question. But instead of succumbing to trends, Stevens barrels through with another long-form work that requires-- and rewards-- time and devotion. As important questions about music's worth in the age of free continue to swirl around him, Sufjan's still combating instant-gratification culture the best way he knows how.


Adult Mom, the guitar rock project helmed by songwriter Steph Knipe, scrawls gentle notes to self all over their music. Their debut LP, Momentary Lapse of Happily, externalizes many of the same queer anxieties that manifest in Xiu Xiu’s work, but in a lighter, warmer cadence.

Momentary Lapse of Happily

Adult Mom’s debut LP begins with a song called "Be Your Own 3am", a title that obliquely recalls Xiu Xiu’s 2006 song "Hello from Eau Claire". On that track, Caralee McElroy made a rare vocal appearance to sing, "I can weep through my own midnights" and "I know it’s stupid to dream/ That you might think of me as a man." Like Xiu Xiu in their softer, more reflective moments, Adult Mom, the Purchase, N.Y. guitar rock project helmed by songwriter Steph Knipe, scrawls gentle notes to self all over their music. Momentary Lapse of Happily externalizes many of the same queer anxieties that manifest in Xiu Xiu’s work, but in a lighter, warmer cadence more reminiscent of Knipe’s contemporaries in Eskimeaux, Girlpool, or Elvis Depressedly.
Knipe writes and sings with a dose of humor that balances lyrics like "one day I’ll set fire to your car" (from "2012"). The violence in their words isn’t a joke, but humor helps temper the incendiary impulse behind it. Sometimes you have to choose whether to laugh or scream, and only one kind of outburst is considered socially acceptable. But with Adult Mom’s anger comes a fierce yearning for growth. On "Survival", Knipe sings, "I survive because I have died," as if shedding identities like old snakeskins were the only way to keep moving forward unhunted. Often there’s a bitterness ringing the words, but also an ember of hope for the future at their core.
Though much of Momentary Lapse plays like the residue of deeply private self-soothing ("I hold my own hands in crowds," Knipe sings on "Be Your Own 3am"), Adult Mom nods to friendship and communal healing throughout. Band banter breaks up some tracks, while Knipe references their friends by name in certain lyrics. Adult Mom teeters on the line of needing companionship and also fearing it, of needing to externalize feelings while remaining unsure of whether those feelings can be understood or even heard. Momentary Lapse is an anxious record, and at times a tentative one, as though Knipe felt stifled in the process of articulating just how stifled they feel. "It is okay to feel doubt/ But just know you’re gonna find a way out," they sing on "Told Ya So" between cheery strikes of keyboard. It’s one of many songs on the album that feels like a love letter to a younger self, something that can never actually be sent to its intended recipient, but can be reframed for a stranger out there who needs to hear it.


The fourth album from Austin, Tx.’s A Giant Dog fuses the gaudy delivery of 1970s rock and the pillars of modern punk. Its songs offer lyrics about sex without typical depictions of love.

Toy

Drama kids can confirm: The secret to a successful theater production is amplifying everything. From makeup to body movements, all elements must be exaggerated so that the last row sees every detail. In the world of hushed indie rock and disjointed pop, A Giant Dog of Austin, Tx. push themselves to expand upon that rule until they’re faulted for going too hard, too fast, too often. With Toy, their anthemic fourth album, A Giant Dog once again rob the 1970s of its garish delivery and refashions it within the pillars of modern punk, stretching farther than they ever have before.
While last year’s Pile dirtied itself in death themes, Toy tackles sex, and it jumps into the language of softcore porn after a well-timed countdown preps anticipation in “Get Away.” A Giant Dog aren’t concerned with typical depictions of love or relationships: Their gaudy, self-aware songs contain mounds of horny phrases so racy that frontwoman Sabrina Ellis was originally too embarrassed to read them out loud after penning them. “My vagina made of glass/But if you talk sweet/I’ll let you stick it in my past” is less about shock value for raunchinesses sake than it is punk (which itself began as an essentially asexual form) meant to normalize sexual desires. With an updated cover of Sparks’ “Angst in My Pants” or a line in “Bendover” like "I'm not a lover/I am a fight," A Giant Dog aim to dismantle the misogyny of rock’n’roll sex tropes. They reclaim S&M as a way to embrace the vulnerability that comes with power transferral, even if the lyrics could scan as reworked idioms dressed in makeup thanks to Ellis’ voice. There’s an earnesty to her brand of camp, and that juxtaposition turns her into a kind of Iggy Pop figure.
It’d be unfair to say A Giant Dog prioritize lyrics above all else. Musically, Toy is their most experimental and varied album. “Hero for the Weekend” segues from heavy ’70s guitar to a prog breakdown. The organ burning slowly in the background of “Roller Coaster” is miles away from the taut, power pop guitar on “Making Movies.” Even “Lucky Ponderosa,” a Western-tinged rock song that crashes down on the drums with every downbeat, sneaks orchestral strings into the mix. A Giant Dog teem with palpable energy—the benefit of recording live—which gives their music its legs. It’s the propelling speed of “Photograph” and joint harmonies, not just the words, that make an audience want to sing blunt lines (say, “I wanna make you cum/If you can make me laugh”) back at the band. A Giant Dog talk the talk and walk an equally impressive walk.
Yet for all of the fun they offer on Toy, A Giant Dog aren’t oblivious to the wear of life. Joy sounds like it is a part of their survival. That’s clear in their flashy performances and videos, but they go twice as hard in their music in hopes that listeners will pocket an ounce of it for themselves. They leave jokes unexplained—song titles like “Fake Plastic Trees” and last year’s “Creep” are best left as unacknowledged Radiohead nods—and swap innuendos for straightforward slang. After all, when you own it, gaudy details and theatrical crassness become a welcome overindulgence. (Just look at the ribald eroticism of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.) This allows Toy’s concluding song, a quiet number about suicide ideation and cheating partners, to hit hard. It’s as if, after all of this, they need to remind listeners one last time: no matter how low life swings, there’s always pleasure worth relishing in.


This 2xCD rarities set covers Sam Beam's career from solo acoustic stuff to full-band songs; unlike most odds'n'sods collections, it isn't for fans only.

Around the Well

To this point in his career, Sam Beam has made progressively fuller, more musically complex, and, in this writer's opinion, better albums each time out. 2007's T**he Shepherd's Dog was a complete realization of the full-band sound he'd been building up to in his live shows, his collaboration with Calexico, and to a lesser degree on his recordings; as such, it felt like a milestone. So it seems like a good time to pause and look back at the old county road that runs parallel to the highway of Beam's albums and compile some rarities for the fans. "For the fans" doesn't necessarily mean hardcore types-- if you've liked any of Iron & Wine's albums so far, you'll almost certainly like this, but it's also probably not the first thing to buy.
The 2xCD set covers his career to date, from his earliest solo acoustic material to his later, blown-out productions with Brian Deck, who has a knack for appropriately housing the kind of hushed, ramshackle tunes Beam writes. The chosen tracks range from B-sides and compilation cuts to previously unreleased sessions, and all are out of print. Beam's quiet home recordings are housed on Disc One, while his studio creations are on Disc Two. Your favorite Iron & Wine album will likely determine which disc you spend more time with, but for me, Disc Two is where the greatest treasures lie.
Beam's more sonically adventurous period is well-documented on that disc, which features four outstanding tracks recorded for the film In Good Company. "Communion Cups & Someone's Coat" sports beautifully layered vocals, while "Belated Promise Ring" holds even with nearly any Iron & Wine album track with its softly ingratiating melody. They're appetizers for the nine-minute opus "The Trapeze Swinger", though, which is one of those songs that, in spite of all its finery-- the layered backing vocals, the steady, stomping rhythm, the memorable melody-- reminds you how simply powerful a well-chosen chord progression will be. Beam's casual conception of the graffiti on the gates of heaven-- "We'll Meet Again", "Fuck the Man", and "Tell My Mother Not to Worry"-- are the kind of rich lyrics that reward close listening.
Outside the tracks for that film, there's still plenty more to love. "Kingdom of the Animals" is a wonderful slow country number, with a two-step rhythm and vivid imagery: "Jenny was gone and the moon blooms all shining/ As we dragged our panic up and down the riverbed/ Sweating wild and weird in our Sunday clothes." The banjo-driven "Serpent Charmer" kicks up a dusty racket, while the vocals on "Carried Home" are so stretched out and lush that the song practically qualifies as ambient music. On his solo acoustic version of New Order's "Love Vigilantes", he actually captures the melody more powerfully than Bernard Sumner himself did.
Over on Disc One, there are three additional covers, as Beam takes on the Flaming Lips' "Waiting for a Superman", Stereolab's "Peng! 33", and the Postal Service's "Such Great Heights"-- alas, his most beloved song-- though none is particularly revelatory. His similarly styled cover of the Four Tops' "The Same Old Song" isn't included for some reason, but it's a better example of a cover that reveals something unexpected about the original. His originals fare quite a bit better. "Dearest Forsaken" has his trademark whisper falsetto with a bit of overdubbed slide guitar and banjo to heighten the atmosphere. One of Beam's earliest originals, "Sacred Vision", reveals him as a writer whose talent developed quickly. The simple melody and guitar picking are basic enough but create an intimate setting for lines like, "There's no way to grow that don't hurt."
Around the Well is a great retrospective that heps fans to a lot of difficult-to-locate material from one of this decade's finest songwriters. While there is some fairly flat stuff on the first disc, it really gives the listener the sweep of his development as a writer, musician, and arranger. It also works as a nice palate cleanser for wherever Beam takes his muse next. He's such a prolific writer and recorder that it seems likely he's already begun producing things for his next odds'n'sods comp. Hopefully it will be as good as this one.


The Chicago headbangers’ fifth LP is a confident nod to early grunge. It’s an unusually succinct statement for them, with leaner songwriting and more pointed barbs.

We Cater to Cowards

To borrow a colloquialism from one of their songs, Oozing Wound are living embodiments of the hippie speedball: headbangers both frenetic and spaced out, as if constantly slurping black coffee and ripping bongs. No matter which particular strain of heavy music they’re leaning into at any given moment, they’ve delivered with extreme consistency over four albums and 10-plus years, which makes it all the more ironic that they often inject their work with self-burns for being slackers, sellouts, posers. But do Oozing Wound, in fact, pander to the fearful? They’ve had to try once or twice: Last we heard from them, near the end of 2019’s High Anxiety, they sampled a voicemail delivering the news of an insurance company rejecting them for coverage because “Oozing Wound is too heavy metal.”
If there’s one thing that Oozing Wound excel at evoking, it’s the feeling of being stuck in life, of having a dearth of places to direct a surplus of energy. With their self-deprecating M.O. intact, they find a new outlet on their fifth LP, We Cater to Cowards, a confident nod to early grunge. It’s a more succinct statement for them: leaner, with fewer chord changes and more intelligible lyrics. This newfound efficiency serves their discontent as well as it does their humor, and the band mines it for some marginally more straight-shooting songs. “Remember the good times?” singer and guitarist Zach Weil baits on “The Good Times (I Don’t Miss ’Em),” a fist-shaking ripper with a double-time breakdown and warp-speed guitar solo, before the easy-to-guess switch: “Don’t miss ’em at all!”
Behind a thin shield of wisecracks lies the image of an outsider band wrestling with the despair of attempting to survive in a hostile environment. They see reminders of this everywhere they turn, whether in their own bank statements—on opener and highlight “Bank Account Anxiety,” Weil simply shrieks out the three titular words and everything that they make him feel—or in the faces of those who flinch at the sight of a death-metal T-shirt, like the aforementioned insurance company. “I’m not a violent man,” Weil seethes on “Midlife Crisis Actor.” “But that’s what they’ll all say!” It’s another standout, though this one unfurls in the tried-and-true fashion of taking one solid motif and jackhammering it until vocal cords, fingertips, and frustrations are shredded. The song spends most of its time on one looping measure, and Weil, bassist Kevin Cribbin, and drummer Kyle Reynolds ramp up its intensity from somewhere around vein-popping to full-on nosebleed. The song that follows, “Old Sludge,” takes a similarly cyclical approach one notch higher, riding out their tank-emptying attack on a fittingly convulsive sax solo as Weil pleads for oblivion.
Oozing Wound have always been spitting and restless—at times bravely so, and at times with the smirking, cynical mania of an especially unhinged Tim Robinson character. That much hasn’t changed, but what makes We Cater to Cowards a refreshing move is its reduced approach: They take an idea that feels right, find an easy way to say it, and then obliterate it. For bands that have long known their strengths and identity, growth is often thought of in terms of material additions or dramatic pivots. Oozing Wound aren’t the types to fall for that. They don’t have to stray too far from their zone to prove their flexibility. On We Cater to Cowards, Oozing Wound have downsized to a smaller ride, but they’ve filled the tank with rocket fuel, and they’ve never sounded more comfortable behind the wheel.


Led by Alex Menne, the Seattle band comes out with a solid debut of anxious bubblegum grunge, though its many charms also become its few flaws.

Plastic Cough

Alex Menne knows her enemies: entitled dudes, boring bands, boring dudes, keeping up the social contract, public transportation...more boring dudes. And also, zombies. All of them are put on notice throughout Great Grandpa’s debut album Plastic Cough, which probably isn’t aware of what itself is up against. Familial band name with twee sensibilities, quippy grievance airing over fizzy alt-pop: thanks to the revolution started in Great Grandpa’s hometown of Seattle, this sound provided quite a few Buzz Bin hits and resultant entries in used CD bins in 1997 and has somehow become the sound of indie rock in 2017. If nothing other than a testament to the cyclical nature of trends, Plastic Cough is actually kinda zeitgeist-y in 2017, the root of both its charm and its flaws.
Great Grandpa hardly strikes one as being opportunistic: the core members of the group met over a love for math rock. But whatever their affinity for that subgenre’s instrumental precision, steely demeanor, and complicated structures, it’s clear from Plastic Cough that Great Grandpa themselves suck at geometry. One can only imagine how the piercing vocal leap on the hook from “Teen Challenge” or the full collapse during the bridge of “Favorite Show” would look transcribed in proper music tablature. Just about every second of Plastic Cough is in 4/4, there is nothing that signifies “sick chops,” and just about every song has a point where it sounds like all four members are playing at slightly different tempos. But this is something they use to great advantage—what might otherwise be enjoyable, if somewhat commonplace, bubble-grunge lunges out with an instability that becomes its own kind of studied musicality.
It all has to be a conscious decision, given how Plastic Cough doubles up on Menne’s lyrics, most of which run on a constant agitation—a particularly modern dialect lashing out at friends, partners, and anyone else who’s failed to measure up, but reserving some indignation for one’s self. “Don’t say that I’m selfish, too/When I tell you/Everything I’ve wanted/Laughing at myself again” just about sums it up, though any sound drawing from the late-’90s era wouldn’t come fully equipped without judicious sarcasm. “Ooo, always killin’ it”, the band coos during “Teen Challenge”, whereas “NO” makes their love of sickly sweet brattiness more apparent: “Wahoo do do do do do/I don’t want to talk to you.”
Despite the strong introductory run of Plastic Cough, “All Things Must Behave / Eternal Friend” brings it to a peak by playing it straight—hushed, straightforward acoustic strum and static-laced back-up vocals that recall Jimmy Eat World’s “A Sunday” with a deeper, bluer hurt (“All my friends are almost dead”). The stately calm of “All Things...” is even more jarring than the moment-to-moment outbursts that came before, though it’s a signal Plastic Cough was thoughtfully sequenced, perhaps comedown that radiates a quiet dignity to what surrounds it, or  a mood reset to prevent anxious exhaustion.
Instead, it just becomes a marker for the point where Plastic Cough suffers from diminishing returns: The whoops and contortions of “Expert Eraser” and “Pardon My Speech” recall what came before but without the same hooky payoff or wild abandon. Meanwhile, “Faithful” indicates that there isn’t room for two ballads yet on Great Grandpa albums. The promise of Plastic Cough is also the source of its frustration, recalling similarly-indebted debuts who couldn’t quite sustain the caffeinated, carbonated buzz of the first half into Side B. But if the closing “28 J’S L8R” isn’t Great Grandpa’s best song, it might be the one that points a direction worth following. In perhaps an homage to current tourmates Rozwell Kid, Menne watches “The Simpsons” season 3, and this is where the zombies come in and she’s too stoned to leave the bedroom. It’s the one time on Plastic Cough where Menne unsuccessfully stands up for herself, and one of hopefully many more where Great Grandpa successfully stand out.


The Australian folk artist’s second album is glossier and broader than its predecessor, but the most stunning moments are still ones of hushed reverence.

Hysteria

If Indigo Sparke’s 2021 debut, Echo, felt like a whisper in your ear, her follow-up feels like a howl from a mountaintop. On Hysteria, the Australian folk singer-songwriter opens up her world, a change that’s also reflected in personnel. Where Echo, with its goosebump vocals and fingers brushing guitar strings, was produced with Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, Hysteria is the result of a collaboration with Aaron Dessner, the National multi-instrumentalist who has also worked with Taylor Swift. With support from Dessner, Sparke sings defiantly over full-bodied instrumentation. But the newfound spaciousness isn’t only expressed in the music: her songwriting, too, stretches further, running as far as the eye can see.
Sparke wrote the majority of this album during the early months of 2020, when she was struggling under the weight of a collapsing relationship at the same time that society seemed to be falling apart, too. “The grief opened a doorway to the past I thought I had made peace with,” she explained in a press release. “But there were days where I just couldn’t get off the floor. It felt like everything was falling through this hole in my chest.” The emotions of Hysteria are elemental forces: a red moon sinking (“Time Gets Eaten”) or a cypress tree growing from your abdomen (“Infinity Honey”). They refuse to stay put inside the individual body: Instead, they reach outward through generations, society, and the earth itself.
The album is bracketed by two of its best songs, which both use a sweeping, montage-style approach to storytelling. On the opening “Blue,” the layering of Sparke’s vocal creates a forlorn and restless choir, as she repeats the same melodic motif over insistent, driving guitar strums. The song moves relentlessly while Sparke offers glimpses at emergency after emergency: domestic abuse, relationship breakdowns, desperate phone calls in the dead of night. The details are spare yet searing; it’s both a deeply personal catharsis and something seen distantly. “Burn,” the closing track, sways loosely, Sparke’s voice gliding over jangling acoustic chords as she delves into cobwebbed childhood nightmares and the long shadow of familial trauma. The lineage Sparke evokes in these songs is a specifically female-coded one: Hysteria, after all, takes its root from the Greek “hystera,” meaning “uterus,” and it’s a word loaded with patriarchal history. Sparke reclaims it on this album, using imagery of tides, moons, and wombs to depict heavy emotions with solemnity.
Hysteria showcases Sparke’s ability to glide between minimalism and more forceful storms. While the surface of this album is glossier and broader than its predecessor, the most stunning moments are still ones of hushed reverence: “Real” is an earthy ballad with Sparke singing alone over fingerpicking as she evokes a feeling of ghostly hunger. This quiet moment feels more poignant placed near the rousing, ember-stoking drama of “Set Your Fire on Me.” On the lustrous highlight “God Is a Woman’s Name,” Sparke blends both extremes of her sound, with soft blush verses and strident choruses that focus on her pleading ritualistic chant: “Pray, pray, pray.”
At 14 tracks, Hysteria is a longer album than Echo, and it doesn’t always maintain its intensity. The push and pull between ballads and bolder songs sometimes sacrifices the momentum. But the wider lens, which allows Sparke to dial up both her indie-rock sound and sweeping songwriting, is still impressive. During the bluesy swoon of “Time Gets Eaten,” she shines in her upper register, half-rhyming “love is a lie” with “love is still alive,” leaving an unresolved tension between the two as she sighs, “Love is.” It’s as though the song is a Rorschach test, checking how hopeful you’re feeling that day. Despite the darkly personal themes, Sparke’s sprawling horizons always create space for you inside.


The exceptional avant-pop group combines with the Ghost Box records founder for a mini-LP that highlights their differences as much as their shared vision.

Broadcast and the Focus Group: Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age

Broadcast and the Focus Group form a likely pair: Both groups make warped psychedelic music rooted in jazz, Euro-pop, and 1960s BBC interludes instead of rock or blues; both conjure a bookshelf's worth of cultural blasts from the nocturnal side of the world-- Satanic texts, Czech horror films, pulpy science fiction lit; both are-- as if there were any doubt after hearing their records-- acutely British. Julian House-- the man behind the Focus Group and the co-founder of Ghost Box records-- has designed Broadcast's album sleeves for years (in addition to work for Primal Scream, Stereolab, and others). The specificity of their aesthetic projects-- and yes, these are bands with "aesthetic projects"-- is so pronounced that calling them kindred spirits implies too much accident: they're more like co-conspirators.
So Witch Cults of the Radio Age is predictable-- actually, it's surprising that they didn't decide to record something like it earlier. But for all their similarities, Broadcast and the Focus Group approach their peaks in very different ways. Broadcast's music is sensual and chic; it has poise, groove, and sex; it's black eyeliner. Nitsuh Abebe, writing on this site about the band's outtakes collection The Future Crayon, pointed out that they'd become almost expert in mapping weird onto what were ostensibly pop songs. I'd agree, but almost to their discredit. Broadcast wear their idiosyncrasies like bangles-- even when I like their music, it feels like it could change shape at any time. By contrast, the Focus Group's native tongue is the stutter; the music's imbalance is in its DNA. Rarely does it ever coalesce into something intelligible, and when it does, there's usually something smeared overtop to throw it off-course.
Though the album is a collaboration, it's obvious which side anchors which tracks: "The Be Colony", sung by Broadcast's Trish Keenan, plays like a nursery rhyme trapped in amber; "Mr. Beard, You Chatterbox" is 80 seconds of disjointed harpsichord and flute that flares out into static and echo. Broadcast's contributions are intoxicating and lovely; the Focus Group's sound like a three-legged kitten knocking over teacups. It's refreshing to hear two seemingly similar bands highlight each others' differences, but it's also why their collaboration isn't as impacting as the albums the bands make alone. Witch Cults is like the sound of Broadcast and the Focus Group trying to cast their spells at the same time: Some of the record is great, plenty of it is cross-chatter.
"For me, the paranormal is most powerful when it's unassuming," Trish from Broadcast recently told The Wire-- "not obviously spooky or dark." She went on to talk about how when she and Broadcast bassist James Cargill moved houses, familiar names and places took on new forms-- for example, their new downstairs neighbor looked exactly like their former roommate's girlfriend. "Even my mom was replaced by an old toothless poodle." It's a benign sense of horror and disorientation-- compare it, for example, to Animal Collective's professed interest in slasher movies and all the gross, visceral sounds they integrate into their songs (squish, guts, screams). Europe breeds romantic monsters like Dracula; America breeds disturbed children who grow up to disembody teenagers with mass-market appliances, like Leatherface or Michael Myers. Broadcast and the Focus Group -- together and apart-- offer something a little more prim than the image of someone getting a wooden spike through their eye, but I think the intent is roughly the same: To create a space where, for a second, there's no sense to be made.


Indie aesthetics have changed considerably in the past two decades, but the UK group is still throwing block parties for a utopia where time and genre collapse.

Get Up Sequences Part One

Midway through a podcast interview late last year, the Go! Team mastermind Ian Parton raised a tantalizing counterfactual. What if the groundswell around the collage-pop project’s brilliant debut album, 2004’s Thunder, Lightning, Strike, had been a bit less deafening? “It happened too quickly,” Parton said of the Go! Team’s initial flush of success. Noting that there will be a “a certain contingent” for whom the UK six-piece will always be associated with the era of mp3 blogs and Iraq War protests, he added, “I prefer to be a slow-burn band.”
Hell, I’ll admit it: It’s not easy for me to separate the Go! Team from fond memories of listening to their debut as a newbie critic for this website (thankfully, my Muppet-themed review wasn’t the one we ran), or from tales of neighborhood kids joining the band onstage during the 2005 incarnation of what is now Pitchfork Music Festival. But Parton may have belatedly gotten his wish, as the Go! Team’s next several solid-to-great albums generally received more muted praise, leaving room for listeners to find the group at their own pace. Whether crossing paths with Public Enemy or Best Coast, hunkering down as a solo act or getting the band back together, the Go! Team demonstrated a remarkably consistent vision. Their sixth album, Get Up Sequences Part One, completed as Parton was battling the debilitating auditory effects of Ménière’s disease, is another intermittently thrilling block party from a utopia where time and genre collapse.
The Go! Team’s signature admixture of old-school raps, car-chase horns, noise-rock guitar, Motown hooks, Sesame Street positivity, and relentless drum barrages may no longer be novel, but it can still be pretty damn charming. London rapper Ninja (real name: Nkechi Ka Egenamba) has long been the energetic focal point of the Go! Team’s live performances, and her main showcase here, “Pow,” is a sunshine-funk romp that earns its lyrical nods to James Brown. Opener “Let the Seasons” serves as a fine reintroduction to a universe where shoegaze, electro, and ’80s TV action themes coexist with a spirit of twee-pop whimsy.
In fact, the farther Parton ranges in search of new elements, the more it all ends up sounding like the same old Go! Team. The Detroit Youth Choir lent a giddy irrepressibility to 2018’s Semicircle, and the choir’s former member Indigo Yaj shouts out “the DYC” here on “Cookie Scene,” but the song’s flute-centric jauntiness would’ve made just as much sense back when blogs were discovering the Boy Least Likely To and Architecture in Helsinki. Along those same lines, “A Bee Without Its Sting” has a subtle protest message and endearing vocals by two more Detroit teenagers, Jessie Miller and Rian Woods, but its peppy Northern soul, with a theremin-like wobble, wouldn’t have been out of place in an iPod commercial.
Reminding a geriatric-millennial music journalist of favorite recordings from their misspent early twenties is No Bad Thing, of course, and it’s exciting how much potential best-of material the Go! Team have surreptitiously built up over the years. Finale “World Remember Me Now,” which features members of the Kansas City Girls Choir and extends Semicircle’s love affair with calypso, is a celebration of everyday life that elevates pouring orange juice and popping toast into a transcendent ideal. Another calypso-tinged track, “We Do It But Never Know Why,” with vocal duties shared between Indigo Yaj and the Go! Team singer-guitarist Niadzi Muzira, sounds like instant mixtape fodder (“Say the word and we’ll never be lonely,” Muzira lilts).
One small but perceptible step backward is in the wordless tracks. Thunder, Lighting, Strike instrumental “Junior Kickstart” was a self-contained journey that still sounds like nothing much else: Think Deerhoof reinventing the theme from Hawaii Five-0, maybe? On Get Up Sequences Part One, the dreamy harmonica of “A Memo for Maceo” or queasy organ of “Freedom Now” mostly leave me wondering why an album of only 10 songs needs three lyric-free interludes.
As much as Parton may want the Go! Team to be judged apart from historical context, the project’s style arose out of a very specific cultural moment. As discussed in the podcast interview last year, Parton honed his “channel hopping” approach at a time when mix-and-match production was yielding sample-based touchstones like De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, and the Avalanches’ Since I Left You—and right before mash-up artists like 2ManyDJs and Girl Talk knocked down the walls between musical styles for good. But the notion of genre has diminished potency today. And plenty of mysterious magpies have followed in the Go! Team’s footsteps. It turns out that being a savvy curator of sounds, by itself, typically falls short. What’s really needed is enough sense of purpose to give these disparate sounds meaning, to make us feel them. Like “A Bee Without Its Sting,” Get Up Sequences Part One is often sweet, but it only rarely breaks the skin.

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Fourteen years since their last full-length, The Sebadoh, Lou Barlow and Jason Loewenstein return with a new album. It's home-recorded and far less slick than its 1999 predecessor and shows how much has changed for the band since their 90s heyday.

Defend Yourself

Lou Barlow's best work comes after break-ups, or when he's yearning for something he doesn't have. III, the classic record he released in 1991 after being dismissed from Dinosaur Jr., remains his band's most intriguing balance of heartache, anger, gentleness, and noise. That's partly because longtime co-pilot Jason Loewenstein had just joined the group and charismatic founding drummer Eric Gaffney was still in the fold, but also because Barlow was fuming at J Mascis ("The Freed Pig") and nurturing a brand new love with Kathleen Billus ("Perverted World," "Kath"). "Kath" in particular is one of Barlow's true classics, and shows how heartache can inspire him. It's a fragile, tense, warped lo-fi love ballad for his then girlfriend, whom he went on to marry.
That marriage has since ended, and Barlow's been living with a new girlfriend for almost a year. Perhaps the new relationship has something to do with the general calm and upbeat happiness of the self-recorded/self-produced Defend Yourself, the first Sebadoh full-length in 14 years and, outside of the five-song Secret EP released earlier in 2013, the follow-up to the overproduced The Sebadoh. In the years since that record, Barlow's been active with post-reunion Dinosaur Jr.'s awesome run, but Sebadoh has always been his place to shine and sulk. For Defend Yourself, he's joined again by Loewenstein and ex-Fiery Furnaces drummer Bob D'Amico, who came on board in 2012, replacing replacement drummer Russ Pollard.
As on past Sebadoh records, Barlow's material remains the real focus, though he seems oddly distant. Even when he's singing about subject matter as intimate as the fear and pain of watching kids grow up and say goodbye on the catchy "State of Mine", there's not much of a spark beyond the bounce of the backing music. Something he was great at during the band's stellar 90s run was wearing emotion in his vocal tone: you could feel the pain or elation in his voice, even if you weren't paying attention to the words. On III's "Renaissance Man", he sang, "Violence is cool/ One of two things real," and you could tell he meant it. Here, there are no jarring moments-- the collection lacks fight. Across the board, the vocal lines are mostly forgettable, and the singing's flat.
Barlow once had a knack for tossing off instant indie rock classics, like Bubble & Scrape's "Soul and Fire" and "Cliché", Bakesale's "Magnet's Coil", "Not a Friend", and "Skull", or Harmacy's "On Fire". On first listen, you knew these were special, even when they were understated. Loewenstein, on the other hand, though he's lodged memorable songs over the years, has never been as consistent a songwriter. His primary contribution, similar to Barlow on the Dinosaur records, has been to serve as a dynamic and textural contrast. But on Defend Yourself, outside of the ballads, Barlow and Loewenstein's work tends to bleed together with little to distinguish them, which makes the record feel longer than it is. Loewenstein's songs like the angular, plodding "Beat" and "Defend Yr Self" are bland 90s college rock at best; his countrified rockers ("Final Days", "Inquiries") come off like neutered Drive-By Truckers.
Barlow manages a few strong moments, like opener "I Will", a song that feels like it could last. It resonates in part because of its directness; this time it's Barlow who's leaving, and he's proud of finally taking charge: "Someone else/ Has found her way into my soul/ Things have changed/ No longer need to be with you." The fear of leaving he's shown on past Sebadoh (and Dinosaur) albums is replaced with resolve; it's kind of like seeing Hamlet finally take action, and it's a satisfying, bloody moment. But it's also an exception. On the whole, Barlow's songs on Defend Yourself sound self-satisfied, with an almost embarrassing "I'm doing this for me" gloat to them.
When I saw Sebadoh live in 1991 at Maxwell's, in support of III, Barlow was in rare form, playing taped gags on a boombox between songs: bits that made fun of Dinosaur, J Mascis, indie rock, Sebadoh themselves. It felt like therapy and catharsis. It felt punk. Most importantly, it felt necessary. Naturally, Sebadoh grew up and calmed down a little during their Sub Pop years, but that progression made sense (especially after Gaffney left in 1994), and they were rarely boring. The best that can be said of Defend Yourself is that it isn't embarrassing; they didn't lose the plot like the Pixies, and it's better than The Sebadoh simply because they got out of that L.A. studio and back to their roots. But it also doesn't add anything to the story or feel like it needs to exist, which is just about the worst thing you can say about this band.


Frightened Rabbit's third studio LP finds them with a bigger, more sophisticated sound to match their newly-expanded band and a slightly sunnier outlook.

Frightened Rabbit: The Winter of Mixed Drinks

The Winter of Mixed Drinks

Though it has only been two years since Frightened Rabbit released their breakout sophomore album, Midnight Organ Fight, a lot has changed. The Scottish group began as a trio featuring brothers Scott and Grant Hutchison and their friend Billy Kennedy, but they blossomed into a quartet during their last tour and are now a five-piece with the addition of Make Model's Gordon Skene. The band's sound has also expanded. Having made a name for themselves with raw, confessional folk-rock driven by urgent guitar interplay and brutal percussion, Frightened Rabbit have left behind their folky beginnings and given in to their loudest, most blustery impulses for their third full-length.
The Winter of Mixed Drinks is definitely more sophisticated than its predecessors. From the reverberating electronic buzz that swathes album opener "Things" to the spoken-word samples that lie underneath the droning "Man/Bag of Sand", Frightened Rabbit have muddled their simple melodies with arty effects, washes of shoegaze guitars, and baroque orchestrations. Tunes meander instead of galloping ahead toward a climactic chorus. Many songs are obsessed with oceanic motifs-- starting with the escapist maritime metaphors of the shuffling single "Swim Until You Can't See Land" and continuing through the sailing and floating imagery of the stomping "Living in Colour"-- and the album is likewise murky and vast. The Hutchison brothers still write rousing anthems, but the slickness of their production or the tarting-up of their simple setup makes them sound a little more like other bombastic bands from the British Isles (like Muse) and a little less like the band that made those first two albums.
One of the collection's best tracks, "Not Miserable", does manage to capture the dramatic crescendos of Midnight Organ Fight, but perhaps its title is a clue to Mixed Drinks' new sound. Frontman Scott Hutchison is, as he sings, not miserable anymore. Midnight Organ Fight was an account of his own terrible breakup, and though he doesn't necessarily sound happy throughout Mixed Drinks, he is definitely more optimistic and less heartbroken. "I am not put-upon, I am free from disease, no grays, no liver spots, most of the misery's gone," he sings of his newly earned glass-is-half-full outlook. But it was more viscerally affecting to hear Scott's hangdog tales of how it's OK with him if you call out the wrong name during sex or how it takes more than fucking someone to keep warm than it is to hear him detail the frustration, purpose, or assurance of moving on and growing up. Midnight Organ Fight announced with its title that its underlying concern was sex (not getting it, not getting it from who you want, being unfulfilled by it), and the songs on this new album, though more lyrically complex, seem neutered by comparison.
"Majestic," "grand," and "arena-worthy" are all words that could be used to describe this record. And when Frightened Rabbit play to their strengths and a song's chorus is sailing or Grant is pounding out stomping rhythms, it's hard to resist getting swept up in their pop fantasia. But the band's sound was always big, and their songs were always bursting with oversized emotion. The difference is that Midnight Organ Fight, recorded in two weeks, seemed spontaneous, and with its devastated post-breakup themes, it earned its aural space with its outsized emotional content. The glossy production of The Winter of Mixed Drinks coupled with its less personal/more universal storytelling, makes its songs seem bigger musically than their content deserves.


The latest in the band’s series of expanded editions focuses on their second major-label record, the moment in which Paul Westerberg’s punk impulses, pop instincts, and poetic soul came into focus as never before.

The Replacements: Pleased to Meet Me (Deluxe Edition)

Pleased to Meet Me (Deluxe Edition)

Following a decade of epic reissues, a fraught-but-celebrated reunion tour, and even a planned biopic based on Bob Mehr’s monumentally entertaining and deeply depressing 2016 band history Trouble Boys, the robust lore around the Replacements has, at long last, finally threatened to overwhelm the music itself. Rock’s most melodramatic American act never failed to devalue their achievements with enough bad behavior and shenanigans to all but guarantee that the massive success which should have been theirs would never materialize. More than four decades after their formation, the mythology keeps on expanding, with an ever-growing cottage industry surrounding it.
The latest in the band’s series of expanded and repackaged editions comes in the form of the group's 1987 fifth LP, Pleased To Meet Me, the moment in which Paul Westerberg’s punk impulses, pop instincts, and poetic soul came into focus as never before. Every Replacements record is extraordinary in its way, but none exemplifies their garbage-to-grandeur alchemy like Pleased To Meet Me, which rocks like early Kinks, swaggers like T. Rex, and pays tribute to their spiritual godfather Alex Chilton. Recorded by hard-scrabble music lifer Jim Dickinson at Ardent Studios in Memphis, the album was a conscious attempt to attach the band’s legacy to the wellspring city that lay 800 miles down the Mississippi River from their hometown of Minneapolis. As with Dusty Springfield before them, the pilgrimage was an act of communion with the music that had shaped their identity.
By 1986, the group’s quixotic determination to both ironically comment upon and simultaneously up the ante on every rock-star-excess cliché had created its first victims. Founding member and lead guitarist Bob Stinson—a musical wildcard with debilitating psychological and addiction issues—was summarily fired from a group that included his younger brother Tommy on bass. This followed the dismissal of longtime manager Peter Jesperson, who carefully nurtured a young Westerberg’s evolving gifts. Such were the emotional contours for the Replacements’ second major-label record, and the one that Warner Brothers badly hoped would break them into the mainstream the way that the band’s friends R.E.M. had done in the previous year. The great, Faces-set-on-fire opener “I.O.U.” simmers with sublimated guilt and explicit anger: “Want it in writing/I owe you nothing.”
A lyrical and engaging player long drowned out by Bob Stinson, Paul Westerberg handles the majority of the guitars on Pleased To Meet Me. He offers a killer Johnny Thunders-style solo on the powertrash-classic “Red Red Wine” (decidedly not the Neil Diamond song), chimes away like Roger McGuinn on “Never Mind,”. Some fans lamented the absence of Stinson’s anarchic playing, and future Replacements releases would indeed suffer from a lack of spontaneity. But on Pleased To Meet Me the cleaner playing does nothing to derail the manic energy.
Dickinson turned out to be a perfect choice as a producer—unmoved by their antics, perceptive of their strengths, and imbued with vision and patience. Having helmed the hectic sessions for Big Star’s Third and played tack piano on the Stones’ “Wild Horses,” he knew a thing or two about wringing the best out of self-destructive geniuses. After an episode in which Westerberg’s vomit supposedly hit the wall, Dickinson kept the tapes rolling. There was no fresh hell that they could show him, although they certainly tried. The net result of his stewardship is a best-practices onslaught of hooks and aphorisms which arrived in time to inspire Nirvana and Green Day but too soon to capitalize on the mainstream’s growing appetite for aggressive, melodic rock.
Highlights abound: “I Don’t Know,” abetted by Steve Douglas’ honking baritone sax, evokes the degenerate strut of Iggy Pop’s The Idiot while hitting upon the unofficial band mantra: “One foot in the door/The other foot in the gutter.” Mood pieces like the endearingly self-effacing barfly vignette “Nightclub Jitters” and the ominous teen-suicide narrative “The Ledge” demonstrate Westerberg pushing himself out of his comfort zone to excellent effect. Meanwhile the album’s two explicit Big Star tributes—the beautifully self-explanatory power-pop confection “Alex Chilton” and the stunning twelve-string ballad “Skyway”—both rank amongst his greatest songs.
The expanded edition provides further evidence of the kind of songwriting roll that Westerberg was on in the mid-1980s, a hot streak to rival Bob Dylan in the ’60s or Joni Mitchell in the ’70s. The Replacements’ two previous LPs—1984’s Let It Be and 1985’s Tim—were tour-de-forces that would leave many an artist’s creative coffers barren. The new Pleased To Meet Me set makes it evident that the band arrived in Memphis with inspiration to spare.
The unused outtakes are a riot. There are horny burlesque gems like “Lift Your Skirt” and “‘Til We’re Nude,” Slade-style party anthems with names like “Beer for Breakfast” and “Trouble on the Way,” and a polka tune called “All He Wants To Do Is Fish.” On the quieter side, the closely drawn character study “Birthday Gal” and the ruminative “Run for the Country” are Westerberg at his most compellingly tranquil and sentimental. He even conjures the Smiths on the haltingly gorgeous “Learn How To Fail.” Best of all might be the early Tommy Stinson original “Hey Shadow,” on which Westerberg’s understudy lays bare the rock-star-in-his-own-right talents that would later emerge on his solo records.
The album’s irresistible closer and coulda-shoulda-been hit single “Can’t Hardly Wait” is a lonely hotel letter sent to a desperately desired lover, set to an ebullient riff which missed the charts at the time but has aged into something like a bona-fide standard. But in 1987, no one had the key to unlocking commercial viability. No less an industry titan than longtime blockbuster producer Jimmy Iovine took a stab at remixing the tune. It was a letter never sent. Everyone at Sire tried. The band added crackerjack guitarist Bob “Slim” Dunlap and toured relentlessly, a weird comet-sighting for everyone who witnessed it, but not enough did. None of the four singles released gained meaningful traction.
Pleased To Meet Me sold roughly 300,000 copies, well short of expectations. Warner Brothers didn’t have the platinum hit they had hoped for. But they did have an instant classic. And maybe, in their Russian Roulette way, the Replacements were always playing the long game. As any number of their more commercially successful peers slide ever more into the gaping maw of cultural obsolescence, now it’s all Replacements all the time. Against all odds, they’ve got both feet in the door.

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The singer-songwriter’s pillowy guitar pop comforts on the surface but pulses with nightmarish visions beneath.

Only the Blues

Dylan Moon is a dreamer. On his debut Only the Blues, he sings that “sleepwalking days have found [him] now,” an explicit acknowledgement that he’s got his head in the clouds. But even if he hadn’t outright said so, you’d guess it soon enough from the pillowy arrangements, from the way his voice rises from silky baritone to his whispery upper register, from the sparkle in his voice when he sings about reaching “Xanadu’s shore” or when he pleads to Jerry Garcia for guidance. This is not music concerned with the mundane; Moon is floating somewhere above the everyday.
Moon certainly isn’t the first to apply a turn-off-your-mind-and-float-downstream approach to guitar pop, nor is he ignorant of his forebears. In an interview with Aquarium Drunkard, he explicitly cites “’60s psych, shoegaze, and ’90s indie” as well younger songwriters like Emily Yacina as reference points for his music. Tracks like “Lines” recall the work of Felt, while others evoke the grayscale ambience of '80s 4AD. The overall mood—creeping, misty, and kinda sad—recalls a fair amount of slowcore bands. Texturally at least, it’s  pleasant stuff.
But Moon's songwriting is stranger than those influences suggest. His music moves with the fragmented imagery and broken logic of dreams and memory; melodies and sections bleed and blur into one another until it’s hard to remember where one part starts and another ends. There are no anthemic choruses or even especially repetitive melodies—Moon moves fast, picking out a memorable riff then immediately twisting it into gnarled new shapes. This makes the music feel slippery and unsettling, in spite of the comforting arrangements.
Moon sings of fantasy worlds and deep trips, but an undercurrent of anxiety and loss pulses underneath. On “Mind Troubles,” he lays out his concerns most explicitly, grappling with “the fight against a constant mind.” But elsewhere his worries communicate themselves in oblique whispers and clipped moans. He sings things like “Wish me away, blank hollow husk,” and even if you aren't sure exactly what he means, his desperation and despair are palpable.
There are moments of fleeting whimsy; he gestures at the existence of characters named Midnight the Cat and Wednesday the Rat on “Analog,” and a few old Hanna-Barbera cartoons get shoutouts on “Mind Troubles.” It's unclear exactly what they're doing here, but that's how dreams work, isn't it? You can't control what ominous figures or childhood memories might haunt you, what unpredictable twists and turns your mind takes. You can only turn yourself over to it, then surrender your waking hours to unpacking the mysteries.

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After a pair of impossibly huge, overpowering records, M83's Anthony Gonzalez changes up his sound, ditching maximalism for beauty and drama. His new album is dense with 1980s new wave tropes and teenage memories, reflecting the soft-focused mythology of eternal summers and young love.

Saturdays=Youth

Saturdays=Youth-- the new album from French musician M83 (aka Anthony Gonzalez)-- opens with a stately piano phrase. Synths gradually overtake the piano and Gonzalez sings concise lyrics in falsetto-- "It's your face/ Where are we?/ Save me"-- amid billowing harmonies. It's the sort of big, beatless slow-burn he often uses to dramatize an impending pivot, a moment when the percussion gallops in and the song takes off for the stratosphere. But on this track, "You, Appearing", that pivot never arrives. Instead, the music tapers off into the booming overture of "Kim & Jessie".
Saturdays=Youth is still huge music, with three players in addition to Gonzalez-- but it has a different kind of heft from previous M83 records. On Before the Dawn Heals Us, M83 was all about the vertical push-- layer after layer of synths and drums piled up in a vertiginous tower. But these new songs disperse in all directions: Producers Ewan Pearson and Ken Thomas spread the melodies and beats into a sound world of uncommon vibrancy and pristine clarity, mounted on a massive yet now more proportionate scale.
Not only does the music move differently, it offers a different take on M83's favorite decade, the 1980s. Where previous albums saluted the doomed grandeur of the Cure and the retro-futurism of Blade Runner, Saturdays=Youth pays homage to Cocteau Twins (whom Thomas has also produced) and the teen dramas of filmmaker John Hughes. It's dense with new wave tropes: the chrome-plated guitars and aqueous keyboards on "Kim & Jessie", the decadent synthetic toms on the otherwise cloudy "Skin of the Night", the funk guitars and shivering cymbals of the masterful "Couleurs". Many modern bands have appropriated these iconic touchstones with a wink, a revision, or both. M83's reverent take is less common, bringing to mind Lansing-Dreiden's underappreciated 80s throwback The Dividing Island.
The album has the same nostalgic sparkle as Hughes' films, a soft-focused mythology of eternal summers and young love. In the liner notes, Gonzalez dedicates it to "all the friends, music, movies, joints, and crazy teachers that made my teenage years so great!" At 26, Gonzalez is just the right age to look back on this era with rose-tinted glasses, forgetting the alienation and anxiety, remembering only the sweetness. Whenever the darker side of teenhood rears its head, it's heroically battled back: On the shoegaze-thick "Dark Moves of Love", "everything is wrecked and grey," but the song ends on a poignant note: "I will fight the time and bring you back!" On the album's cover, heartbreakingly radiant youths (one of them a dead ringer for Molly Ringwald) strike poses in a gold and russet pasture-- the same kind of beautiful misfits that Hughes arranged in after-school detention. In lyrics filled with lusty eruptions ("They are Gods! They are lightning!"), archetypal teens invent themselves with innocent fervor: A love-struck young couple in "Kim & Jessie"; a goth with a crown of black roses and a heart of bubblegum in "Graveyard Girl".
In the context of teen drama, how perfect is it that Gonzalez met Morgan Kibby, whose dovelike vocals enrich "Skin of the Night" and "Up!", on MySpace? In the context of a band whose music is both literally and metaphorically cinematic, how perfect is it that Kibby has done voiceover work on the trailers for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water? These symmetries make Saturdays=Youth feel like an unaccountably alive, complete album. While some fans might be disappointed by the lack of a "Don't Save Us From the Flames"-style anthem, the change in M83's sound arrives just as Gonzalez has pushed the maximal thing to its limits and risks diminishing returns. On its first two studio albums, M83 did one thing very, very well: create compact doses of tension and adrenaline. Saturdays=Youth meaningfully diversifies M83's catalog while retaining Gonzalez's indelible fingerprint. Like his recent ambient foray, Digital Shades Vol. 1, it finds a guy who's known for painting gigantic horizons figuring out how to broaden them even more.


On her fifth and best full-length album, the Ohio singer-songwriter follows the rangy contours of her electric guitar playing with heartbreak stories and searching questions.

Daughter

Ambition sharpens Lydia Loveless’s songwriting. When she boasts, “I am on the verge of brilliance,” on “Don’t Bother Mountain,” she follows it with, “or on the verge of death.” On her fifth and best full-length album, Daughter, the Ohio singer-songwriter masters a music that follows the contours of her electric guitar playing: rangy and gnarled. It’s tempting to think of Jason Isbell and Patty Loveless (no relation) as confreres, but the scrappy rock’n’roll of her earlier albums and the absence of self-pity moves her closer to Scarecrow-era John Mellencamp or mid-period Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Falling out of love with jerks, hitting the bottle hoping it doesn’t hit back, Loveless positions herself not as a survivor but a fighter. She expects tough times and no breaks, not even from herself.
Loveless’s instrumental commitment makes the difference on Daughter, urging the material onward with her piano and synth. She also plays bass on a few tracks, filling in for Ben Lamb, whom she divorced around the time she released 2016’s Real. She and guitarist Todd May merge into the kind of unit whose filigrees tickle and surprise. The jangle of “Love Is Not Enough” complements a lyric about accepting romantic devastation; she pulls one way and the cheerful arrangement goes another. Even better is “Wringer,” an exercise in finding delightful rhymes for the title that seems to take a cue from Loveless and May’s call-and-response riffing. Switching to bass, May and drummer George Hondroulis work up a lissome groove for “Never,” home of the bumper sticker manifesto, “I’m not a liberated woman/Just a country bumpkin dilettante.” Had a country singer tackled “Never,” the wink would be seen from here to Appalachia. Loveless, though, rarely kids.
Blessed with a high, seared, unpretty voice that suggests hard living, Loveless inhabits these characters free of the affect that, say, Lucinda Williams leans on for her truth. If Daughter is her best album, then the title track is her best song. With Hondroulis punching each verse, Loveless asks her lover, “If I gave you a daughter, would you open up?” And: “Why can’t I show you another side of me?” They’re trenchant questions, not because she doesn’t know the answer, but because she knows too well and prefers interrogation to admissions.
Connecting self-worth to the health of a relationship, and to success as a mother, is a phenomenon no less grim than when Loretta Lynn described an exhausted Kansas housewife in “One’s on the Way” almost 50 years ago. Perhaps grimmer—songwriting, like therapy, has its limits. Loveless understands. With a sober approach to its less-than-sober characters, Daughter takes life one song at a time. She can’t do more but prepare to accept less.

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Third studio album from the ambitious brit-rock band is more of the same: big choruses, slightly off-kilter sonics, and gruff vocals.

Some Cities

Doves' frontman Jimi Goodwin can't sing. His voice, often derided for its slovenliness and liberality with pitch, lends the Manchester trio's songs a coarseness for which they're left to compensate, or not, with more adventurous instrumentals. The band's previous albums, Lost Souls and The Last Broadcast, generally managed to cover the difference, but at times sounded like Doves were trying too hard to be something they're not: Both albums featured their share of anthemic hooks, but it seemed as if the band were struggling to turn in something as aseptically beatific-- and as popular-- as fellow Brit-rock bands such as Coldplay and Travis.
In the three years since Last Broadcast, Doves have cultivated a better understanding of their strengths and limitations, and Some Cities beams with a revivified looseness. Like its predecessors, the album arrives just in time for Spring and comes bearing more than a few certifiable vernal jams. Last Broadcast's "There Goes the Fear", one of the bouncin-est seven-minute verse/chorus/verse brit-rock epics with a jungle-percussive outro Radio 1 has ever spun, finds its match in "Black and White Town", this album's lead single, which channels Joe Jackson's "Steppin' Out" with a plump four-on-the-floor beat and steady-struttin' piano line. But as tender and prissy as they can be, strands of angst and pessimism course through Doves' music, and Some Cities hones this aesthetic push-and-pull, featuring some of the band's darkest and prettiest music to date. Furthermore, those two stylistic extremes aren't always mutually exclusive.
The record's first four tracks are downright impregnable. Opener "Some Cities" is urgent and yearning. The song is surprisingly tactful in forging a composite order, wedding Bruce Springsteen's arena boot-stomp to the Velvet Underground's driveling, soot-caked guitar yowls. "Almost Forgot Myself" is more classic Motown than its rippling atmospherics and surf-echo guitar let on, laying down a rubbery bass line and sturdy boom-chick drumming. It's difficult to tell if "Snowden"'s deeply cooed, wordless chorus is the work of voice or oscillated guitar or both, but it's sure as hell beautiful.
Rounding out the chart-eyeing material is "One of These Days", which pegs the platinum-selling populism that has eluded the band. The guitar melody is Some Cities' most chipper, but the song is beefy with details-- a tangential doppler-synth intro and a tasteful effects-laden trim, among them. Again, the drum/bass interplay suggests a Motown affinity-- a dauntingly generic yet fickle ingredient that Doves incorporate pleasantly and organically.
It's frustrating when an album feels like it consciously has to embark on some kind of journey-- for instance, the descent from energetic, single-worthy material to slow introspective ballads that's so often just a cover for frontloading. Some Cities traces a similar arc, but Doves aren't pulling the wool over our eyes; the album's second half is nearly as well-executed as its first, if lacking the same galvanizing momentum. "Shadows of Salford" is a muffled, herb-slowed piano dirge that sends Magical Mystery Tour its regards. From there, the album acquiesces, staking one last bopper ("Sky Starts Falling") before bowing out gracefully with the huge, sweeping "Ambition", a dignified snares-off dirge. Like many great brit-rock records, Some Cities is plucky and resilient-- it wants badly to show you its hurt but wouldn't dare spill its guts straight; that would be impudent. Doves know better: They hold their breath to the end, until, wheezing and transparent, their hearts shine clear.