Detroit rapper and producer Black Milk is a paradoxical artist defined by both wild reinvention and stasis. The production on If There's a Hell Below carries the album, coming over as one big wistful wash of sound, unified, but full of idiosyncrasies.

If There's a Hell Below

Black Milk is a paradoxical artist, one defined by both wild reinvention and stasis. To this point, every other Black Milk album is a corrective, somehow a refutation of the album that came before it. He keeps pressing reset and then playing the game the same: Tronic was his vaunted abandonment of vinyl fetishism for synthesizers; Album of the Year his embrace of live-band instrumentation; No Poison, No Paradise his nightmare-filled stab at creating a '70s soul epic. But put them on shuffle and the delineations disappear—they all sound like Black Milk tracks. On If There's a Hell Below, for the first time, he consciously takes a sonic mulligan, trading in the same murky Castlevania synth-lines, wrecking-ball drums and dark-night-of-the-soul wails as its predecessor.
So, why does it sound better than that album? Because it's a new Black Milk record, which always sound incrementally closer to some Ideal Black Milk Album that may or may not ever exist. This makes him a difficult artist to love, but an easy one to like. He’s constantly halving the distance to his target, getting closer but not quite getting there. But those infinitesimal improvements on Hell Below—indeed, the very places where it remains static—show, in some ways, what that Ideal Album might look like.
Most importantly, he’s acknowledging where his talents lie. The old line on him is: great producer, shitty rapper. If the dude could quit spitting double-time platitudes about getting faded backstage, the thinking goes, he’d release a great record. On No Poison, No Paradise, though, he dialed back his eagerness on the mic and let the beats breathe. This trend continues on Hell Below, particularly on "Story and Her", a sprightly, smooth-jazz Tribe throwback that evokes Q-Tip more than Dilla. Over soft vibes, Black Milk drops sing-song come-ons that tumble organically into a low-key verse. The lyrics are as trite and sanctimonious as can be (think Dizzee Rascal’s "Jezebel"), but as the beat morphs, halfway in, to a keening, insistent guitar lick, Milk follows suit, with a wide-open flow painted in blank space. The crooning intro melts into an almost spoken-word outro, with a rhyme scheme that snaps into place as if only to tug the verse onward.
He sounds, in other words, good on the track—a first for the emcee. He repeats the feat on the nearly 3-minute conclusion "Up & Out", which is just a drum loop, some scratches, and a delirious, stuttering mic performance. In both instances, he raps in reverence of the beat, letting his glorious drums hit without shouting punchlines over them. Elsewhere, he resolutely does not screw up highlights like the proggy "All Mighty", the dense, clattering "Quarter Water", or "What It’s Worth", which recalls early Kendrick Lamar, of all people, in its tuneful sense of melancholy. He’s always seemed to want to be Black Thought, but he comes across more like T.I. on the best parts of Hell Below, saying very little but saying it well.
The focus, then, stays on the production, which is, as usual, an absolute feast. He’s grown fond of the mid-track left-field switch-up, sometimes just for a bar or two ("Hell Below", "Scum"), and of the short, dusty outro loop (pretty much every track). While this might sound scattered, in practice it’s just the opposite: He’s settled down a bit, flicking between beats with Madlib’s ease. A lot of his earlier stylistic about-faces were because of an anxiety, a tension between analog and digital production methods, which a recent LP and EP (tellingly called Synth or Soul and Glitches in the Break) seem to have eased. He found the ghost in the machine, and so he’s agitating less over realness—over fidelity to the "old school". The music on Hell Below is one big wistful wash of sound, unified, but full of idiosyncrasies. (Bun B, for example, raps atop a bed of trilling flutes.)
We often talk about listening to Black Milk rap as the cost of entry for listening to Black Milk produce. That's cold, but valid: his relatively flat collaborative work suggests that he saves his best beats for himself. But perhaps it’s also a mis-framing of the argument, in light of Hell Below’s success. In an interview with Complex last year, he referred to an incongruous blast of free jazz on No Poison, No Paradise as "a Spike Lee movie … written via a rap song." A more skillful emcee would recreate Lee’s sense of place and character with words, but Black Milk needs the music to do the talking. On If There’s a Hell Below, he lets it.


The indie pop group’s second album is filled with longing for vanished times and spaces. It explores what happens when daydreaming becomes both playground and prison.

Somewhere

The songs on Sun June’s second album, Somewhere, are full of elsewheres. Lead vocalist Laura Colwell namedrops Manhattan, Los Angeles, and New Orleans—everywhere but the indie pop group’s home base of Austin—as memories and fantasies, but as she admits on first single “Everything I Had,” she’s still in an apartment just three doors down from her old one. In “Karen O,” a young man in an expensive suit impersonates Bob Dylan in a Brooklyn basement, and in the opening track "Bad With Time,” Colwell promises to be Jackie O, Patti Smith, and Stevie Nicks, all to convince a lover not to move to L.A. Her songs might be full of pretending, but no one is ever fooled, least of all the pretenders themselves.
But isn’t it nice to pretend? More pressingly, once you give up on pretending, what are you left with? Sun June finds comfort in these delusions, which are couched in appropriately soft, cloudy pop. Colwell sings almost everything at the top of her range, so that every word sounds barely constricted with emotion, barely squeaked out. In the penultimate track, Colwell finally exhales, repeating a call-and-response refrain: “Are you the real thing?” The chords resolve and she arrives: “I’m the real thing. I’ll be all right.”
At various points on Somewhere, Sun June adopt country-western tropes, maybe to play up the themes of dislocation. Like a costume put together with what they already had at home, it serves them well enough to get their point across: reverb consoles allow guitar chords to sound like they’re gliding through open windows and fading out slow, and Colwell trills with Patsy Cline-ish melodrama. No matter how often you may dream about being other places or people, you’re never quite where, or who, you want to be.
These affectations represent the biggest risks taken on Somewhere. These textures–solemn, guitars, barely-there synth pads–may read as pat, even self-indulgent, but for better or worse, this isn’t an album interested in exploring fresh territory. Sun June are interested in daydreams as both playground and prison, and about observing what happens when you collide with the borders of your own interiority. But even in this cloudy, circumscribed world of echoing instruments, where faking and fiction are not only indulged, but necessary, Sun June’s sincerity shines through. “Everything I Had,” for its part, might be the first successful transmutation of quarantined loneliness into an anthem: “Everything I had, I want it back.” Tell me about it. The song’s chorus is ultimately an expression of futility and regret; the past is gone for good. Sun June yield to these fantasies, letting imagination shroud reality for a spell, but its face always shows through eventually.

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The experimental composer’s accompaniment for Richard Mosse’s film installation transforms the natural sounds of the Amazon rainforest into a harrowing score to environmental disaster.

Broken Spectre

Richard Mosse’s photographs turn the natural world alien. Milky white rivers wind through garish rust-red forests, basins leak neon pink into branching waterways, and washes of blueberry purple stain the shores. Scale, too, is upset: Aerial shots of the Amazon rainforest look like single-cell organisms while close-ups of moss and lichen appear as planets and constellations. Mosse created these pictures for his recent video installation, Broken Spectre, using multi-spectral sensors that capture bandwidths of light invisible to the eye. Australian musician and composer Ben Frost has worked with Mosse and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten on projects about war in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and the refugee crisis in North Africa, complementing their visuals with bracing sound design. His audio for Broken Spectre deploys ultrasonic microphones to record bats, birds, and insects outside the range of human hearing. More sci-fi soundtrack than tranquil field recording, the record transforms the natural sounds of the Amazon into a harrowing score to match the film’s disconcerting visuals.
Broken Spectre chronicles the destruction of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest that occurred after Jair Bolsonaro came to power in 2019. Under his watch, cattle farms, soybean fields, gold mines, and aluminum refineries burned large swathes of forest and polluted the ever-scarcer water. Mosse, Frost, and Tweeten traveled across this blasted landscape for weeks at a time. “During that period I witnessed fires so vast they blacked out the sun,” writes Frost. “I watched illegal loggers fell 700-year-old trees, and heard the unnerving silence of the forest that followed.” Whereas field recordings of the Amazon like Lawrence English’s A Mirror Holds the Sky or Francisco López’s Wilderness Studio are typically loud and lively, Frost’s recordings portray an eerily desolate ecosystem of drones and hums where wildlife is a distant echo.
Despite its source material, Broken Spectre fits neatly into Frost’s repertoire of brutal, pummeling electronic work. The harsh tones on “The Index” or “Passport to Eternity” obscure their natural origins, sounding more like synths run through blown-out amps than insects or birds. The effect is no less unsettling when the sounds can be identified. On “The Burning World,” buzzing chainsaw pulses alternate with cries from a forlorn animal, as if a single mourning inhabitant were presiding over the leveling of the forest. Then, sharp pops and cracks announce the encroaching fire that will reduce the area to farmland. The most remarkable recording here is “The Intensive Care Unit,” on which an anesthetized jaguar breathes directly into the microphone. It is a chilling, visceral sound made horrific by the knowledge that the animal is being treated for third-degree burns.
Paradoxically, the more Broken Spectre pleases aesthetically, the more it fails in its message. The few moments of tranquility on the record elide the horrors of its subject matter. On “Cry Hope, Cry Fury,” a hovering angelic hum plays over gentle insect chirps, while “The Killing Ground” is a lovely ambient piece better suited to sound-bath relaxation. On a studio album, these tracks would be a welcome respite from an oppressively tense atmosphere. Here, divorced from Mosse’s startling images, they risk becoming merely pretty.
In a sense, attempts to represent ecological catastrophes in art can never totally succeed. Frost knows this: “This album is ultimately a document of failure,” he writes. It registers political dereliction and environmental collapse, but also his “own failure to communicate through sound the vast scale of the Amazon and the ongoing damage inflicted upon it.” Still, he has achieved a smaller success in capturing these strangely compelling traces of the forest as it is destroyed. Technically brilliant but even more emotionally affecting, Frost’s soundtrack stands on its own within the multimedia world of Broken Spectre as a testament to lost life and beauty.


Bibio's collage and pastiche-based music is hard to pin down, but his latest beams with a relaxed joyfulness that is refreshing after a spate of more laborious records.

A Mineral Love

Bibio has been doing the same thing for a long time—a little bit of everything. Stephen Wilkinson's restlessness over the last decade makes it hard to pin him down, but it also makes it easy to keep listening to the diverse pop pastiches that have developed out of his more uniform sound-collage origins. A Mineral Love might be just another turn of the kaleidoscope, but it grows on you, with a relaxed joyfulness that is refreshing after a spate of more laborious records.
There are consistent things about Bibio, and even though they are general ones, he has refined his way with them to make them his. There are carefully detuned guitars that lend an alien sonority to familiar chords. There are analog electronic imperfections texturing the music with streaks and bubbles, like some obsolete, richly colored film stock. And there is his voice, soft and threadbare as a childhood blanket, to cling to during his wildest rides.
It's just that these steadfast traits happen to be set loose in a slightly insane maze of genres, often time-stamped in maddeningly specific but elusive ways. IDM, British folk, pop funk, indie rock, easy listening, hip-hop, nature sounds, ad jingles, relaxation tapes, church-social Casio jams, and more reform like a lava lamp's globules. It wasn't always this way: Bibio's early work basically mashed up Boards of Canada, Brian Eno, and Bert Jansch, until his genre gene pool seemed to explode all at once.
Each album since then has managed to wrest a distinct character from the welter of registers: Ambivalence Avenue was dominated by crunchy glitch-hop; Mind Bokeh was a woolly headphones odyssey; Silver Wilkinson was gloomy and internal. A Mineral Love bursts with cheerful, candy-colored falsetto funk, not unlike Ambivalence, while leaving out the crunch and glitch, letting the instruments breathe. The guitars flirt with African pop, blending with the overall brightness, while the bass conveys the tactile, mobile sense of fretwork. There are fleeting mechanical hitches, but mostly, low-key tape tricks color straightforward musicianship, its springy fillips more evocative of the bounce in your step on a sunny day than night, sweat, or sex.
There is a bit of the pitchy dream-folk that always serves as an accessible entryway into Bibio's records, like "Petals" and "Wren Tails," a pastoral instrumental warbling on a melted record. But most songs play like breakbeats from late-twentieth-century audio and VHS cassettes that never were. "Raxeira" sounds like theme music for an unfilmed Welcome Back, Kotter spinoff. You wouldn't be shocked to hear Jim Croce singing on the fluty confection "Town & Country." We also get Peter Gabriel-like progressive pop on "The Way You Talk," where Gotye's voice meditatively pools in itself, and Princely R&B on Olivier Daysoul feature "Why So Serious?," which wouldn't go amiss on a Blood Orange album. "Feeling" is Bibio and the Sunshine Band. Et cetera. It should feel like a music museum, but it doesn't.
What holds it all together and brings it to life is Bibio himself, who offers some revealing self-reflections in a note circulating with A Mineral Love, where he seems to anticipate criticisms of randomness and anachronism that he must have encountered before. "This is not a purist record," he warns, describing how he approaches different musical eras through their remnants in his memory, however misshapen they may be. "I think that's why it all sounds like me."A Mineral Love is a period piece, but the period is now.


The second album from the musician formerly known as Chet Faker is at once overstuffed and underwhelming.

Run Fast Sleep Naked

Nick Murphy was once the bedroom musician Chet Faker. In 2011, his sullen, downtempo cover of Blackstreet’s classic ’90s R&B jam “No Diggity” rocketed to the top of the Hype Machine chart, the peak of virality in the age of MP3 blogs. His instantaneous ascent portended bigger genre trends in the coming half-decade: In the early 2010s, “chill” indie electronica was emerging as a form of resistance against the hyper-manic EDM boom. Brooding auteurs like How to Dress Well and Rhye bubbled up with ambient, trip-hoppy alternative R&B. Chet Faker was an Australian dude with a beard who belonged to both the burgeoning worlds of Majestic Casual-core and white dudes singing soul music. He could make an EP with Flume, then turn around and record stripped-down covers of Burial on the Rhodes.
But Murphy thought the Faker vibe was unsustainable. Two years after releasing his only album under the moniker, 2014’s Built on Glass, Murphy solemnly announced that he was retiring it. “There's an evolution happening and I wanted to let you know where it's going,” he wrote on Facebook, promising that his next album would be released as Nick Murphy. In the time leading up to his real, not-fake debut, he set out on a quest to figure out himself and the next chapter of his musical career. He began working in studios instead of in his bedroom. He teamed up with Darkside guitar wizard Dave Harrington. He read Joseph Campbell’s theories of the artist as a modern shaman. On some Jack Kerouac shit, he traveled the world with a microphone, recording vocal takes when he felt like it. But after all of that soul-searching, the resulting album, Run Fast Sleep Naked, gives no indication that Nick Murphy knows who Nick Murphy actually is.
Run Fast Sleep Naked is at once overstuffed and underwhelming. The instrumental choices on “Sanity” are wildly unfocused, as Justice-style power synths and gospel background vocals compete with the clunky blues piano and bongo drumming of an already cluttered song. The grating, distorted strings of “Harry Takes Drugs on the Weekend” seem to purposefully resemble two pieces of sheet metal rubbed together, as if feigning innovation through unconventional sound design. The album aims for the punky orchestral spirit of Mitski’s Puberty 2, but ends up sounding like Jack White’s Boarding House Reach: a rock-adjacent Christian-blues slog that won’t live its best life until it’s cut down to a 15-second snippet in a Subaru commercial.
Ambitious production can’t quite cover the fact that none of the songs on Run Fast Sleep Naked have a conceptual core. On “Novacaine and Coca Cola,” Murphy borrows buzzwords that Frank Ocean and Lana Del Rey played with almost a decade ago, but never quite builds a cohesive storyline around the hedonistic signifers. Much of the album finds him chanting empty phrases like, “Guess I’m losing my mind,” and “Not night in the light, in the light, in the light.” You get that Murphy is confused, searching for some form of clarity. But because he never pinpoints the source of his internal battle or the details of his journey, the result is a swamp of abstraction.
Speaking on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 radio show recently, Murphy explained that the process of creating the record wasn’t necessarily about the music itself. “I kept doing my work as an artist to grab the music when it was falling out. The work for me was really working on my life and myself,” he said. “You travel around the world at 22, you’re a kid. It’s awesome, but you miss all the time to figure out the real stuff, the spiritual stuff.” Considering the massive incoherence of Run Fast Sleep Naked, it’s hard to say what “real stuff” Murphy has figured out. Maybe he should have put a little more work into the music.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the haunting and beautiful 2001 solo album from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ John Frusciante.

John Frusciante: To Record Only Water for Ten Days

To Record Only Water for Ten Days

Before John Frusciante could afford to get high, he had to just read about it. Born in Queens, New York, to musician parents and raised in California by his mother, the guitar prodigy spent his childhood poring through books about rock stars, particularly David Bowie. Often, he went straight to the index to find the parts about cocaine. “I just thought David Bowie did his coolest stuff when he was on a lot of coke,” Frusciante explains during a haunting 1994 interview, in which he appears gaunt and ghostlike and strung out on heroin. “That feeling and that image is the whole reason I got into rock’n’roll in the first place,” explains the 24-year-old, who looks so much older.
Frusciante let this interviewer into his home to discuss Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt, his stark, impressionistic solo debut after quitting the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the height of their success. His departure seemed inevitable. He was a kid—only 18—when he was asked to join his then-favorite band, and his interests were expanding. He was learning about art. Maybe he wanted to be a painter. Hard drugs were becoming a dominant part of his life. All of this, he felt, was starting to clash with the world-famous funk-rock group he believed was becoming increasingly commercial and ridiculous. The incongruence seemed clearest when he was forced to do press alongside all-id frontman Anthony Kiedis. “If I say ‘Van Gogh, blah blah blah,’ and he says, ‘Whip out your cock and show it to my mother,’” Frusciante elaborates, “You know, it doesn’t go together.”
The discrepancy between Frusciante and the sex-crazed rock band that launched him to fame can sometimes be overstated. In most respects, he fit in well and he shaped the sound of their most iconic period. His primary influences—art rock, post-punk, prog, electronic—are defiantly at odds with the radio-friendly alternative sound RHCP built their name on. But his contributions to the band are inextricable from their very core. Anyone with a vague familiarity with the band at its peak will recognize his voice—the background “awws” and “whoas” that sound like a man attempting to approximate a foghorn, the moan that sounds like a lonely pedal steel filtered through a wah pedal.
Frusciante zeroed in on the Chili Peppers’ sadness, the void perpetuating their desperate fun. With his background vocals and deeply emotive guitar playing, he could expose these moods so that, for a certain listener, it was all you could hear. He had that same quality that let Johnny Marr elevate Morrissey’s totems of self-deprecation into something empathetic and eternal; the same skill that allows Gillian Welch and David Rawlings to find the dissonance in each other’s pastoral lullabies. He heard something in his bandmates’ playing and he knew how to amplify it. Frusciante’s most distinctive contributions—say, the riff in “Under the Bridge,” or his vocal harmonies during the second half of “Otherside”—suggest the work of a born accompanist, a voice best suited as part of a whole.
As much seemed true when he quit the band. You can hear flirtations with brilliance on his two solo records from the ’90s: Niandra Lades and 1997’s Smile From the Streets You Hold, a collage of lo-fi recordings dating back to his teenage years. At the time, he claimed he was making this music to balance out a lack of “real art” on the market (like Da Vinci, or Jimi Hendrix, or Jane’s Addiction, he explained). Years later, he would change his story, claiming he released them solely to fuel an out-of-control drug habit.
Some songs on these records do in fact feel clear-headed, even inspired, and they point a clear path toward the work to come. Yet the overwhelming atmosphere is decay. Listen casually and you will hear a voice straining and choking, melodies fumbling, ideas stretched out way too long or abandoned almost immediately. Listen closely and you will hear even harsher sounds—a body falling apart, wallpaper peeling, light dwindling.
While Frusciante will always be known as a guitar virtuoso, his best playing feels like a voice speaking to you one-on-one. If you were an adolescent who picked up a guitar around the end of the ’90s, his songs may have been the ones you learned to play. On his comeback record with the Chili Peppers, 1999’s blockbuster Californication, he found resonance in simple chord progressions and minimalist, almost fragile soloing on the highest strings—things you could try to replicate after a few hours of practice.
In 1998, when he was brought back to life by the doctors at Las Encinas Recovery Center, with a new set of teeth to replace the ones that rotted away from drug abuse and with skin implants over his abcessed arms, Frusciante approached this simple style as a guiding philosophy. “I’m not into being a guitar hero,” he said in 2001. “I like guitar players who are more clumsy and more awkward... and who are trying really hard.”
To Record Only Water for Ten Days is the first album Frusciante made after recovering from drug addiction, getting clean, and rejoining the Chili Peppers. The title of the 2001 record refers to a form of self-purification he envisioned, involving the body as a tape recorder that documents only what’s absolutely necessary. Its sound, distinguished by gauzy keyboards and the sharp plinks of a vintage drum machine, was inspired by electronic music, a growing interest he treated like a secret affair in order to stay focused on his day job with the band. “Because if I listened to electronic music and then I went to rehearsal,” he said, “Everything sounded so boring to me.” In these songs, you hear him find joy in recreating the claustrophobic atmosphere of his ’90s solo albums in a way that felt more controlled, more sustainable.
Even at their most polished, Frusciante’s solo records elicit a feeling of eavesdropping—hearing music that itself seems to be just on the verge of existence. It’s a quality they share with certain posthumous collections: I think of Elliott Smith’s New Moon or any other set whose appeal lies in the intimacy, the occasionally unsettling familiarity of its presentation. Are we supposed to be hearing this? Do they know we’re listening? He rarely performs live, so Frusciante’s legacy outside the band lives within these records—stories you can return to over and over again without cracking their code.
Like Harmony Korine’s 2007 film Mr. Lonely, another return from a nearly fatal addiction, To Record Only Water concerns itself with weighty topics but expresses them through seemingly disconnected visions so even the most blunt confessions feel as distant as a mostly-forgotten nightmare. “All paths divide,” he sings in “Invisible Movement.” “Life has a way of opening up.” Much of his writing proceeds in this way, somewhere between warnings, words of advice, and riddles. Explaining his lyrics, Frusciante claimed to write mostly from the perspective of the afterlife: “After you die, you’ll be hearing people saying stuff like the stuff I say on my record.” For now, we’ll have to take his word for it.
More than his lyrics, Frusciante’s songs find coherence in his performance. The ones collected here are among his most gripping. His low, slurring voice sometimes sounds like Cat Stevens and sometimes sounds like Michael Stipe, and, although imperfect, it’s an instrument he wields with confidence. The record begins with a scream. In “Going Inside,” he filters a primal cry to make it sound indistinguishable from his silvery guitar tone, blurring the line between his modes of communication. It introduces a record where nothing is what it seems. Familiar alt-rock conventions are compressed into a burbling rhythm cycle in “Away & Anywhere,” and softer moments like “Wind Up Space” feel bruised and off-kilter, like a discarded verse from an old pop standard looping on a locked groove.
“The First Season” stands among his finest achievements. The song’s first half, a jangling psych-folk ballad like something from Neil Young’s debut, spans less than two minutes before funneling into a persistent, climbing finale. “Be humble, take it the slow way,” he reminds himself. And when his voice breaks as he shouts “I keep holding on to myself,” you hear what he might have been attempting on those harrowed old home recordings: a document of survival that highlights the struggle over the outcome. Now he had gained the ability to reflect on it with hindsight. He sings like he’s rescuing the song from a dangerous place.
Where even the most concise Chili Peppers songs seem sanded down from jam sessions, Frusciante’s new work felt refined and disciplined, like it could be performed by nobody else in no other way. Some songs are genuinely carefree and fun (his new wave experiments like “Someone’s” and “Moments Have You”) and others are salvaged from his darkest years (“Saturation”). But the mood remains consistent, a dream of life that keeps regenerating from itself.
It’s a highlight in his catalog, but To Record Only Water is not his peak. Soon, he would sharpen his production (2004’s Shadows Collide With People), his songwriting (2005’s Curtains), and his vision (2009’s The Empyrean). He worked tirelessly, as if making up for lost time. A 2005 music video for a song called “The Past Recedes” offers the inverse experience of that troubling 1994 interview. He appears genuinely happy in a gorgeous home filled with natural light, massive CD shelves, and acoustic guitars. He calls up a friend. He hangs by the pool. He carries himself like someone who’s figured out how to be alone. Soon, after one more massive album and tour cycle, he’d quit the Red Hot Chili Peppers for good and follow his muse, away from the public eye, deeper into his own world.
John Frusciante’s career sometimes seems like a long life in rock’n’roll enacted in fast-forward. If he was drawn to make music through the paranoid mania of Bowie in the ’70s, he also got to experience all those less glamorous years—the genre exercises, the unlikely collaborators, the short-lived supergroup, the eras of wild prolificacy and those of disquieting silence. There’s a consistency to his music that can cast nearly any of his albums as your favorite. They all speak to a larger portrait, one that you can see best when you admire from a distance.
In 2015, Frusciante had to make something clear. “Obviously,” he wrote in a blog post, “I have a public audience. I am aware of them, and they know who they are.” The statement arrived in response to a recent article that quoted him denying he had a fan base anymore, a claim that understandably offended his devoted following. What he meant to say, he explained, was that he now makes music with no audience in mind. That is, he satisfies himself, caters to no one, works for the simple joy of bringing ideas to life. “Thinking this way,” he wrote, “Gives me a certain freedom and stimulates growth and change.” He signed off, “Thank you all for existing.”
Despite the irony in an artist breaking his hermitude simply to affirm to his fanbase that he knows they exist, his words ring true. Working mostly without major label backing and remaining too prolific for any one record to crossover, Frusciante established a path comparable to cult-level indie figures like Simon Joyner or Jason Molina more than the rockstars and festival headliners he came up with. It might be the modern version of the withdrawn artistic existence he once dreamed about. And if his evolution resembles a ghost story, it’s one at least with a happy ending. The introduction to his second life, To Record Only Water offers a humble kind of inspiration: Start again, get stronger, and disappear on your own terms. It’s what I learned from listening to Frusciante’s records, and what he learned by living through them.


The Brooklyn industrial act trades its signature drum machine for Guardian Alien/Liturgy drummer Greg Fox, harnessing his intensity to fuel their most unified—and most deranged—record to date.

The Long Walk

For a band that hasn’t been around for terribly long, Brooklyn industrial duo Uniform has undergone many mutations. Vocalist Michael Berdan and guitarist/programmer Ben Greenberg began as a dystopian industrial-noise outfit that only occasionally showed glimpses of both members’ punk pasts—but by their second record, Wake in Fright, they were injecting thrash fusion with Big Black-level freakouts. In that sense, Uniform were moving in the opposite direction from their recent collaborators the Body, transitioning from relatively loose textures to something resembling conventional (albeit heavily damaged) metal. On their third album, The Long Walk, Uniform expand into a trio. And the addition of drummer Greg Fox, of Guardian Alien and Liturgy, yields a sound that is both more unified and more deranged than ever.
Greenberg’s tone used to be harsh and dry, a style that complemented the bleakness of Uniform’s first record and Fright’s more focused thrash. Here, he turns up the bass and the noise, never shifting out of overdrive. This intensity makes Uniform feel more unhinged, even if their mode of assault hasn’t changed greatly; Greenberg is splattering all over Walk, not deploying tight, disciplined attacks. He dispenses with most of Fright’s crossover influence, in favor of mangled, mid-paced riffing, like Celtic Frost recorded through a series of budget amps and distortion pedals, then played at deafening volume.
There isn’t much clarity to be found here. Each riff is a block of noise, and that approach lends the album an unusually chunky feel on the whole. “Headless Eyes” and “Found” have blocky ’90s noise-rock grooves, but unlike most acts that fall into that genre, Uniform place the most emphasis on the noise half of that equation. Walk’s track sounds like a doom band led by a power-electronic musician: heavy on the Sabbath stomp, yet gloriously muddy.
Even with the addition of a formidable presence like Fox, the prospect of Uniform without their signature drum machine seemed worrisome. Much like industrial-metal pioneers Godflesh, Uniform relied on that robotic percussion to bring their music to (mechanical, coldhearted) life. Fox, who entered the studio on super-short notice, brings his own approach to drum-machine rhythms, accentuating the snare’s thudding beats, and introduces a slight imbalance into the band’s sound. This record doesn’t have any gothy, quasi-dance songs like Fright’s “The Lost”; instead, Fox incorporates that rhythmic repetition into Uniform’s blown-out chug. You don’t call in a drummer like this one for icy precision; Walk is the messiest record they’ve ever made. Fox doesn’t fully flex his muscles until the end of closer “Peaceable Kingdom,” but his presence adds a touch of wildness to each track.
Yet for all its controlled chaos, The Long Walk is Uniform’s most stylistically consistent record. One key point of divergence is “Alone in the Dark,” which revisits the band’s industrial origins, bringing new overtones of desperation. The track feels like it’s running from something, rather than simply destroying everything in its path. It’s the only song on the album that embodies the same fear it inspires, with Greenberg’s escalating riffs matching Berdan’s preternatural nervousness. “Alone” is the most uncomfortable moment on a record that feels more terrifying than anything Uniform have done before, precisely because it locates a fragile human spirit within the band’s visions of robotic terror.


Live at Carnegie Hall is drawn from Ryan Adams' recent two-night career-spanning residency. Available as a 10-song sampler or a 216-minute 6xLP, it keeps the casual Ryan Adams fan in mind in both versions. The performances themselves are flawless and the recording is as well; everything is so crisp and clear that Carnegie Hall might as well be your living room.

Live at Carnegie Hall

After Ryan Adams finishes "Come Pick Me Up", his definitive song and the one which ends both performances captured on Live at Carnegie Hall, he leans into the mic and screams: "THAT’S IT! YOU’RE SAD NOW!!! NOW YOU’RE SAD!!! EVERYBODY’S SAD NOW! YEAAAAHHH!!!!" The thunderous applause lets you know that everyone in attendance on this first night is in on the joke: Adams is big enough to play Carnegie Hall now, because thousands of people have discovered that listening to Ryan Adams alone is akin to giving your sadness a spa day. But "Come Pick Me Up" actually transforms into something uplifting in a live setting these days. For both the performer and the audience, “Rescue Blues” and “Why Do They Leave” and “Amy” are bittersweet, nostalgic and a platform for wisecracks and anecdotes. The audience arrives with their dates and laugh at Ryan Adams, who gets to laugh at himself. The original ache is gone and everyone can just admit to each other, "man, weren't those days something?"
Live at Carnegie Hall makes Adams’ impromptu comedy the main draw: somewhere within this three-and-a-half-hour package is one of the funniest standup records you’ll hear in 2015. And the subject of nearly all of Ryan Adams’ jokes is Ryan Adams. This is a career-spanning project, so "Ryan Adams" becomes a very, very broad topic. Adams offers countless punchlines about the prevalence of tears and rain in his music as well as his penchant for using this reputation to his advantage—"Probably like 86% of you are on Paxil, so you understand about depression. So... you're at a fucking Ryan Adams show," he cracks at one point.
The most cutting material aims at Adams' most self-serious phase, also known as his "New York" phase. On records like Gold and Love Is Hell, Adams relied on New York City to grant his music instant gravitas and urbane legitimacy. It was literally personified on his biggest single ("New York, New York"), and his residence in the East Village felt like method acting. At one point on Carnegie Hall, he claims Love Is Hell highlight "Please Do Not Let Me Go" as one of his proudest moments and a song he wrote out on a pizza box while stoned as fuck and ruminating on the purpose of shoes.
Live at Carnegie Hall is available as a 10-song sampler and a 216-minute 6xLP, though both versions have the casual Ryan Adams fan in mind. This isn’t for the hardcore Ryan Adams fan, the kind who will claim to have bootlegged B-side comps and shelved records that bests anything he’ll ever publicly release. This isn’t Ryan Adams’ Greatest Hits or the Definitive Ryan Adams either, something that will appeal to Whiskeytown and Heartbreaker fans who’ve begrudgingly stuck with him when he presumably lost his damn mind in 2003 and his edge on Easy Tiger. The setlists are thorough, but disappointingly conservative, writing out nearly all of his divisive records—nothing from Rock N Roll or 29, just a handful of B-sides and only the Love Is Hell tracks long-established as fan favorites.
All of his selections here work beautifully with just an acoustic guitar as accompaniment, and it all manages to cast his recent work in a positive light. Since they’re all subject to the same arrangements and production, "Am I Safe" or "Gimme Something Good" can be judged on the same scale as "Oh My Sweet Carolina" and "My Winding Wheel". The performances themselves are flawless and the recording is as well; everything is so crisp and clear that Carnegie Hall might as well be your living room. But the later songs remain what they were on record: tuneful, workmanlike numbers that can’t possibly generate the emotional payload of Heartbreaker but aren’t really trying to. Ryan Adams' music often gets called "effortless," which cuts both ways—it can sound elemental and eternal and also like something he dashed off in five minutes. He’s very much aware of this reputation as well—Adams ad libs a presumably impromptu funk number on piano based on a hypothetical text message exchange between Billy Ocean and Michael McDonald.
It all highlights the various odd turns Ryan Adams' persona has taken over the past 20 years. After his blatant crossover bid Gold, Adams released two records in two months—one was too "rock", the other was too "sad" and both were considered career-killers. He rebounded in 2005 with three albums that were vastly superior but no more compromising—in half a year, he was a honky-tonk traditionalist, a Deadhead and Jeff Buckley. More recently, oddball vanity projects Orion and 1984 give glimmers of hope that they may one day not be the exception to the rule set by Ashes & Fire and Ryan Adams. But Live at Carnegie Hall is the Ryan Adams Ryan Adams, the one who redefined himself at 40 years old as three things no one thought he’d ever be: reliable, consistent and a consummate people pleaser.


Listening to the Philadelphia-based artist’s music can be an intense, discomforting experience, but their sparse sounds and diaristic text-to-speech vocals reveal a world of conflicting emotions.

Welfare / Practice

It’s been just over a decade since James Ferraro first baffled the underground music world with his eerily prophetic opus Far Side Virtual. With its stock-music melodies and iPhone-menu textures, the album captured the empty convenience of modern life in all its absurdity and horror. Of all Ferraro’s outlandish ideas, one musical concept still stands out: the jarring text-to-speech voice that guides listeners through the record like a dead-eyed robotic servant. Since Ferraro, few have dared to attempt utilizing text-to-speech in their music (perhaps because it just sounds so unmusical). Yet the technology itself has only become more entwined in our daily lives. It’s not just our corporate overlords using it; just open TikTok to see ordinary people using text-to-speech as a medium for storytelling—reciting memes, recounting daily minutiae, and expressing our most hidden anxieties, one tortured syllable at a time.
For Philadelphia-based sound artist Lucy Liyou, this tension between the technology as a soulless automation and a vehicle for our innermost thoughts is everything. “The idea that a text-to-speech generator attempts to sound as perfectly human as possible is ironic,” the Korean-American artist told Tone Glow in 2020. “The way it fails to capture certain sentiments feels like a vessel that contains my voice, as twisted as that sounds.” In Liyou’s hands, the tool’s detached enunciation becomes a conduit for deep, anguished explorations into trauma both personal and generational. Sometimes it reads like a gutting AI transcript of family therapy sessions, becoming yet another contorted outgrowth of Liyou’s short-circuiting sound design. Other times, Liyou’s gentle piano playing makes the voice feel almost innocent as it unfolds like a yearning diary entry, expressing affections too private to say out loud. Listening to Liyou’s music can be an intense, discomforting experience—but devote your full attention to it, and their sparse assortment of sounds reveals a world of conflicting emotions, gliding between visceral heartache, simmering resentments, and quiet gratitude.
Collecting Liyou’s first two releases, this double-disc reissue from American Dreams demonstrates the 24-year-old artist’s unique, disorienting vision. Of the two, their 2020 debut, Welfare, is the bolder statement. Originally released via like-minded laptop experimentalist Klein’s personal imprint after the two met through an Instagram Q&A, Welfare dives headfirst into a sprawling song cycle of familial struggle, weaving together extended dioramas of sound poetry that are as fascinating as they are terrifying. It would be an ambitious project even for an artist who wasn’t 21 at the time; at the same time, its confusion and frustrated sense of release feel like they only could have come from a young voice still fighting to express itself, like a caged bird thrashing to be freed.
Liyou conceptualized Welfare as a take on Korean p’ansori, a minimalist style of folk opera built entirely around simple drum rhythms and expressive, winding vocalizations. In p’ansori, because there are almost no other instruments, the performer drives the song using the cadence of their voice, with each inflection helping to tell a little bit more of the story. Likewise, Welfare casts Liyou’s text-to-speech bot as the album’s unnerving narrator, using small wrinkles in its delivery to uncover peculiar new emotional textures. On “I’m Going to Therapy,” after a nervous intro in which Liyou admits that they haven’t told their mother they’re seeing a therapist, the automated voice appears against total silence, recounting a painful memory of Liyou’s mother: “You told me when I was six years old, ‘What kind of fucking boy cries because of X, Y, and Z?’” Even coming from an A.I. voice, that “fucking” conveys so much awful pathos and bitterness. Shortly after, over a bed of what sounds like warped church organ floating in negative space, a human voice representing Liyou’s father enters the picture coated in booming distortion, uttering, “You need to get him in check.” All these moments play like dramatizations transcribed directly from Liyou’s life, presented here through the rawest, most primitive music software available.
Each passage of Welfare subverts and expands on the last. After the hauntingly gorgeous piano ballad “Unnie”—where, in a trembling whisper, Liyou uses their actual voice to wrestle with defining themselves against Korean gender stereotypes—“Who You Feed” arrives like an unholy demon birth, briefly switching the album’s POV to Liyou’s parents and casting Liyou themself as the real monster. “I’m getting bigger,” a childlike digital voice announces over a disturbing collage of wet, breathing mouth noises. “And bigger,” it repeats, getting deeper each time. Just when it seems like the mood can’t get any more unsettling, the voice gutturally proclaims, “I’m getting tired of you”; in an instant, Liyou takes a magnifying glass to the horrors of parenthood, looking at their own parents’ hardships with raising a child and treating them with the same sense of bizarre dread. By the time the album reaches its ending with “Some Form of Kindness,” it feels like Liyou has learned how to negotiate this complex familial love, accepting its embrace and recognizing its limits in the same humbled breath.
After such a dense, pointedly profound work, Practice sounds more diffuse. Where Welfare plays like a four-part miniature theater piece, Practice’s sketches are all over the place, like Polaroids capturing ordinary day-to-day moments. Recorded over several weeks while Liyou was visiting family in Seattle and their grandmother was simultaneously suffering from a serious illness, Practice feels less like a grandiose statement of intent and more like the work of an artist piecing together their grief in the moment, turning over brief conversations and flashes of memory to uncover hidden meanings.
Musically, Practice goes down smoother than Welfare, placing the onus on softly glowing ambient passages and twinkling neoclassicalism. Swapping out the MIDI pianos they used on their debut, Liyou recorded Practice on acoustic piano at home. You can feel the difference: “You Are Every Memory” opens the album on a glistening note, as Liyou’s piano dances around pitched-up recollections of family members’ reactions to their grandmother’s sickness, each voice laid on top of one another like a racing inner monologue. On “Hail Mary,” Liyou makes the contrast between tension and release even more direct: After a text-to-speech intro in which Liyou apologizes to their mother (a mechanical voice just barely managing to eke out, “You’re right Mom, I don’t know everything about you”), a gorgeous field of drones appears, swelling with voices and angelic bells, like some peaceful clearing materializing in the wake of a great storm. Even the uncanniness of the instruments can’t stop the moment from feeling like some kind of necessary absolution.
Like Welfare, Practice thrives when Liyou shows us these intimate conversations and conflicts laid bare. Their music is surreal enough on its own that the ambiguous, unclear dialogue in scenes like “Uncle” and “How to Build an Automaton” leaves less of an impression, even if the sounds are compelling. But when Liyou confronts these complicated family dynamics directly—as on the noisy, barbed exchange of “At the Dinner Table,” or in the loving message Liyou leaves to their grandmother on “September 5”—everything abstract about their work becomes secondary to the universal nature of the feelings they describe. As much as Liyou’s struggles are rooted in personal circumstances, the ideas they wrestle with could apply to anybody. It’s as if Liyou has tapped into a strange new language for communicating difficult truths that each of us already knows, translating them through a bare, puppet-like voice. If the artificial voices seem uncomfortable, it’s only because what they’re saying is all too real.


Two decades after the Minneapolis alt-rock also-rans called it quits, lead singer Ryan Olcott resurrects the project, reworking abandoned demos into contemporary bedroom pop with a vintage cast.

If We Stayed Alive

Like so many other rock acts snapped up by the majors during the back half of the ’90s, 12 Rods’ contract was supposed to accelerate their already heady velocity. Less than three years after their initial demo recordings, they were the first American band signed to Richard Branson’s new label, V2. They’d spent the intervening time raising a ruckus in their adopted hometown of Minneapolis: topping City Pages polls, landing on radio playlists, scoring an endorsement deal with an eyewear company. An ambitious local fanzine awarded their 1996 EP gay? its first-ever perfect score.
But V2 couldn’t translate that buzz for a mass audience. To the misfortune of everyone involved, 12 Rods were a prog-pop act in alt-rock duds, pairing knotty arrangements and inspired chording with the earnestness of first-wave emo. They were acolytes of XTC—another Branson-signed act—and after the tepid commercial reaction to 1998’s self-produced Split Personalities, 12 Rods followed their heroes’ playbook, hiring Todd Rundgren to produce their next full-length, 2000’s Separation Anxieties, in Hawaii. The album was no Skylarking, but it was a lesson in major-label economics. In James Francis Flynn’s 2017 band documentary Accidents Waiting to Happen, 12 Rods describe paying a third of a million dollars to a laissez-faire producer who spent sessions cracking cans of Foster’s and doing crosswords.
Separation Anxieties was a fine effort despite the circumstances, but the rock pendulum had swung to post-grunge, and soon afterward V2 dropped the band. 12 Rods recorded and released 2002’s Lost Time themselves, then split. The new album If We Stayed Alive does not reunite the Rods—in a Rundgrenesque move, its seven tracks were recorded entirely by multi-instrumentalist Ryan Olcott, the group’s lead singer and lone songwriter—but it posits them as a band better suited for a bedroom-pop age. Everything here is drawn from demos that Olcott rediscovered a couple years ago, and his production pointedly preserves that vibe. The keys and synths were programmed on a digital audio workstation from 1999; the drums were recorded to cassettes on a Yamaha 8-track from the early ’90s. He even worked to shape his vocals into the breathy yelp he wielded decades ago. The result is an atmospheric treatment of a sound—crisply off-kilter, assured but nervy—that the Rods shared with contemporaries like the Swirlies, the Wicked Farleys, and the Dismemberment Plan.
It’s informed by the music Olcott’s been making over the last 20 years: the full-band indietronica of Mystery Palace, the scrambled chillwave funk he’s made as c.Kostra. The live chestnut “Private Spies” is a power-pop ode to Minneapolis scene gossip, with a ’90s sitcom theme for a chorus and a head-cold guitar solo to close. The solo on the languid R&B cut “The Beating” is vintage AOR: a retro feint that heightens the vibe, instead of derailing it. The lyric pivots from what I think is a DJ describing his open relationship (“You can look at me while I'm working/Don't mind if you do/You can touch somebody out there/Looks like you want to”) to a gently chanted tribute to Mill City nightlife.
Even the thorny subject matter is given a similarly shimmering cast. “Comfortable Situation” has a typically sneery Olcott text (“Rock repeats the story/Every time we’re boring”) but keeps cracking its grouchy nu-rock riff open like a geode, revealing a sparkling, pensive guitar figure. Opener “All I Can Think About” starts like a dispatch from the first wave of school shootings—a glum acoustic riff, images of cops counting kids and scouring the gym for guns—before Olcott turns abruptly inward. “Where was I in junior high,” he sighs, ”Then I realized: I could solve any crime/It's all I can think about.” It’s audacious, but it doesn’t play as solipsism, just dream logic. “Hide Without Delay” is all about crime and retribution, flashing the shifting time signatures and stylistic switchbacks of classic Rods before dipping into a hypnagogic state. “Shame on you,” Olcott murmurs over ambient dissipation reminiscent of Separation Anxieties’ “Rock N’ Roll Band.” “Don't you wanna tell me something?” He could be drifting off. He could be dying.
The 12 Rods project, however, is not. Accidents Waiting to Happen interlaced its band history with performances from a triumphant 2015 reunion show involving every former band member. But none of those members—not Ryan’s brother and second guitarist Ev, not drummer Dave King of the Bad Plus—will be rejoining. Olcott has cast an all-new 12 Rods lineup with what the press materials call “new, more relevant musicians from the Twin Cities.” If We Stayed Alive, then, is more than pandemic-motivated housecleaning: It’s a proper comeback. And it’s a stirring achievement for an act that had come so far so fast, only to find itself out of place, and out of time.


More powerful and focused than any of their recent records, the 11th Superchunk album is finally the one that feels genuinely urgent, both of a particular moment and built to outlast it.

What a Time to Be Alive

The arguments for Superchunk’s place in music’s pantheon sound like backhanded compliments: They are heralded for their longevity and consistency, their indie-label trailblazing and standard-bearing, and their general amiability, while their unfuckwithable batting average for delivering perfectly coiled guitar anthems is somehow an afterthought. At the peak of their initial run, they were routinely overshadowed by bands who thought they were successfully navigating the post-Nevermind boom only to wind up with a fraction of the cultural footprint. Thirty years and 11 albums in, Superchunk have now backed their way into the zeitgeist, honoring and advancing the punk rock that shaped them by railing against the banal evil of old white men.
Their albums since returning from nine years of self-exile in 2010 have felt increasingly purpose-driven: Majesty Shredding was an unexpected victory lap, thrilling and joyful, the sound of rediscovering the fun of being in a band without the pressure or baggage of careerism; 2013’s I Hate Music had a heavy shadow of mortality hanging over it and was a moody reaffirmation of what it means to love something even if it plays an inconvenient role in your life. But those were just prelude to the first Superchunk album that feels genuinely urgent and of a particular moment and built to outlast it.
Calling What a Time to Be Alive a political album, or a protest album, risks sounding too withering when anyone can be a hashtag away from thinking they’re storming the gates. But the 11 tracks add up to a fitful, cohesive statement, aiming squarely at the world’s most obvious target without ever sounding obvious. Save for a Chelsea Manning reference, no names are named; timelessness isn’t sacrificed for timeliness. The result feels like a definitive document of the Trump era despite being less about him than the attendant ugliness that the past year has dragged into the light. The villains aren’t new but their brazenness is, and the raw nerves throughout the record follow suit.
On each of the previous post-hiatus albums, Superchunk threw a couple full-throttle punk songs into the generally mid-tempo power-pop mix, as if to prove they still could. What a Time as a whole is faster and feistier than any Superchunk album in 25 years but the band acts its age. The furiousness sounds earned and in context, and if any of the racket reminds you of listening to 1991’s No Pocky for Kitty in college, that’s great, it’s just beside the point. At first blush, the album appears less personal and introspective than I Hate Music or 1994’s breakup cringe-classic Foolish, but the fact that a lifetime of thinking about punk music and the people who make it can lead to a crisis response as focused and heartfelt and spittle-flecked as this itself feels like an act of introspection. “Our empathy weaponized,” Mac McCaughan sings in “Erasure,” like he’s writing his own sticker blurb.
The album’s most meta moment, “Reagan Youth,” is about being molded by firebrand punk during depressing conservative regimes. In the process of paying tribute to a tragic ’80s NYHC icon, it argues that identifying with angry music—“To tell the truth/There was more than one Reagan Youth”—at a formative age builds more than character or taste. Orneriness and skepticism of authority turn out to be pretty useful life skills during times of national despair and it’s not a huge leap to suggest that running your own successful independent record label for nearly 30 years might give you a particular and valuable perspective on ossified, unfair institutions. Not that the album concerns itself with practical solutions—we are still in the exorcism phase.
Stewing in a relatively liberal enclave within red-state North Carolina has made Mac McCaughan’s lyrics more pointed while managing to avoid trite sloganeering. Yes, “The Simpsons”-indebted title itself is by now a cliche (and isn’t even the first album in recent memory to adopt the phrase), but plays here like a call to arms rather than the resigned or befuddled sigh it usually connotes. As peppy opening-track choruses go, “The scum, the shame, the fucking lies/Oh what a time to be alive” isn’t looking for a pat answer; making the best of a dire situation, it’s trying to be fun, not funny. And none of this vitriol comes at the expense of hooks; the Katie Crutchfield and Stephen Merritt-assisted “Erasure” and “Bad Choices,” a herky-jerky plea to racist, close-minded neighbors, are as catchy as anything the band has ever done and don’t get overwhelmed by their messages.
On “I Got Cut,” first released as a single last summer, McCaughan seethes, “All these old men won’t die too soon,” but he also knows he’s closer in age to some of his targets than he is to the generation that will ultimately have to clean this mess up. A couple tracks later, on the breakneck “Cloud of Hate,” “I hope you die scared of all the kids that know the truth” is what passes for hope and a way forward, and you can feel McCaughan’s chest puffed out as he belts it out. Superchunk have never been anyone’s idea of angry but their most beloved song resonated as a snotty rebuke to the mistaking of youthful DIY energy for rudderlessness, and paying that forward now feels like nothing less than a means to survive. What a Time to Be Alive’s rage feels visceral because of age and experience and exhaustion, not despite it.


The songs on the L.A.-via-Boston grunge-popper's first full-length are brazenly simple, but they have a shrugging, take-me-as-I-am charm that makes them feel like celebrations of their own limitations, recalling Beat Happening, the Ramones, and Blink-182 before they briefly grew up.

Sock it to Me

There are, roughly, two kinds of musicians in this world: the ones who make grand gestures that suggest the universe’s infinite depth, complexity and wonder, and the ones who execute their ideas with such perfect simplicity that they make you believe-- often for 3 minutes at a time-- that the world might actually be flat after all. L.A.-via-Boston DIY grunge-popper Colleen Green stands resolutely in the second group. Her scrappy brand of minimalism follows in the tradition of Beat Happening, the Ramones, and Blink-182 (she’s cited the band’s 1993—1999 run as a crucial influence; in other words, nothing after the fart-and-boner-joke auteurs’ short-lived “mature phase”) and is based in a faith that most things worth saying can be expressed with just a deadpan drum machine, an uncomplicated couplet, and three torpedoed power chords. Green’s persona is a logical extension of her music, too. When an interviewer asked her last year to elaborate on the lyrics to her song “Green One” (what did green signify, he wanted to know—nature? her family name? weed?) her response to this question was as laconic, goofy, and no-frills as one of her best songs: “I dunno, it’s like, green is just what I AM, you know?” To ask Colleen Green what does it all mean, man? is sort of like asking Joey Ramone to elaborate on the pedagogical philosophy of the teaching methods at Rock & Roll High School.
The songs on Green’s Hardly Art debut Sock it to Me are brazenly simple, but they have a shrugging, take-me-as-I-am charm that makes them feel like celebrations of their own limitations. All of her songs begin with a nearly identical beat made by a drum machine that sounds like a model discontinued about 20 years ago. When asked why she uses a drum machine, she’s said it’s because she doesn’t know how to play the drums; I doubt she will ever learn. Her music is anti-striving: why push past your limits, it seems to ask, when you can just get stoned (her Twitter handle, it must be said, is “@colleengreen420”) and then write some pretty solid songs with the chords you already know?
Sock it to Me mines the melodic sensibility and lyrical themes of 60s girl groups-- good boyfriends (“When He Tells Me”), bad boyfriends (“Darkest Eyes”) and mean girls at school (“Every Boy Wants a Normal Girl”). But while the first wave of girl group music was a profession of collectivity and shared wisdom, Green’s music is proudly solo, the product of one singular, isolated person. Not that it bothers her. About a minute-and-a-half into the album, on the infectious, wound “Only One”, she engages in a multi-tracked call-and-response chant with herself. “Oh yeah/ Uh-huh/ Oh god/ I really love my boyfriend,” she sings, and then plays her own backing singer: “She really loves her boyfriend.” In Green’s solitary bedroom-pop universe, loneliness isn’t a source of sadness so much as aesthetic choice and, occasionally, a well-executed punch line.
Sock it to Me comes on the heels of a couple solid cassette releases-- Green One, Cujo, and the awesomely titled Descendents-wink Milo Goes To Compton-- and tightens her established formula without cleaning it up too much. When Green’s on (which, on this 10-song album, is a little more than half the time), her melodic sensibility is almost Merritt-esque; in fact, the delightful “Taxi Driver” sounds like a long-lost Claudia Gonson-sung track off the Magnetic Fields’ Distortion and has a silly, curmudgeonly conceit to match (“I wanna be a taxi driver/ I wouldn’t have to talk to anybody”). The sun-scorched “Time in the World” also ranks among her best, its distorted synthesizer riff adding the perfect amount of blown-out, overexposed atmosphere to its beach-pop hook. Green’s strongest songs are almost always her upbeat ones, though. She hasn’t quite figured out a way to translate her music’s charms into the slower material, and so after getting off to a strong start, Sock it to Me moves from a sugar rush to a diabetic coma about halfway through, no thanks to the somnolent title track. But the B-side picks up beginning with “Darkest Eyes”, which combines grumbling power chords with some of the record’s most poignant lyrics: “I tell him every day he’s the only one I wanna see/ And his eyes look right through me.”
Green’s songs are like single-panel stickfigure comics. Some people will dismiss them as amateurishly two-dimensional, while plenty of others will find their personable, unpretentious ethos crucial to their appeal. But at its most sly, Green’s music seems to be mocking the very idea that an artist needs to grasp for depth or profundity as she evolves. The darkest song on the predominantly sunny Sock it to Me addresses some kind of unnamed anxiety-- it’s called “Heavy Shit” and its most revealing lyric goes, “Heavy shit on my mind.” Still, like most of Sock it to Me, maybe it’s sharper and more cathartic than it seems. After all, turning bad feelings into flat, darkly funny cartoons is one surefire way to defang them.


The 18-year-old rapper continues to polish his frenetic breed of pop-trap while maintaining a fundamental weirdness that’s neither too loud nor too discreet.

better luck next time. EP

About 30 seconds into “riddle,” the lead single off midwxst’s new EP, better luck next time., a sunny guitar riff is swallowed by a distorted 808, metallic snares swap places with rock drums, and midwxst’s mannered emo rapping warps into a wail. “Don’t say you ever knew me, ’cause you don’t know my pain,” he sings with roiling intensity, his voice scratching against the bass like sandpaper. The pyrotechnics don’t last, though; the guitar and campfire claps soon return, and we’re once again folded into the arms of a pop song. midwxst relishes in maximalist beat drops and Juice WRLD-meets-digicore cocktails, but on better luck next time., he polishes his frenetic breed of pop-trap into a more digestible package without relinquishing his disruptive energy.
The Indiana-raised rapper’s most recent project, last year’s Back in Action EP, was largely a rage rap record. Inspired by Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert, midwxst cast off his sad-boy posture with exuberant punchline flows atop euphoric synths and thundering bass stabs. I can do this too, he seemed to snarl throughout the EP, and I can do it better than you. In a post-Whole Lotta Red world, where much of the rage rap has been, well, bad, Back in Action sounded like an artist expanding upon the Carti template. Successful as the project was, it was clearly not midwxst’s preferred mode of musical expression, which is why better luck next time. feels like a return to form, a more authentic application of his melodic gifts.
The EP depicts a teenage breakup in suspended animation, a space where rationality dissolves and pain rips through the body like a switchblade. Each song addresses an amorphous ex, one who spews lies, sends spiteful texts, and hurts our protagonist for the thrill of it. On the pop-punk-inspired “car seats,” midwxst inhales a whiff of his ex’s perfume and is reminded how she emotionally broke him; on “misery,” he hurls insults at an ex who won’t stop blowing up his phone. He’s a magnetic vocalist, singing these scenes with animating anguish, his nasally timbre dipping in and out of different cadences. And although the tormented romance gets exhausting—nearly every song recycles tropes about “running away” and feeling “sick and tired”—the thematic and emotional consistency works to solidify the narrative while the beats constantly bend into new shapes.
The production adds essential anxiety and urgency. “switching sides” sounds like a Drake song on LSD, an exhilarating emo-trap banger with bass so huge it threatens to obliterate midwxst’s wonderfully catchy hook. On the brakence-assisted “okay,” a smattering of live drums and glitchy trap snares collide with beeps, squelches, and electric guitar to form a dizzying maelstrom of technical and textual incongruities. Unlike other ascendant hyperpop acts, such as glaive and ericdoa, whose sounds have hewed closer to center as their spotlights have widened, midwxst’s music maintains a fundamental weirdness that’s neither too loud nor too discreet.
better luck next time. closes with “on my mind,” a melodramatic yet heart-wrenching emo pop ballad. Even when the writing falls into affectless bromides—he’s still running away—the song is saved by midwxst’s commitment to the performance; the pain he expresses is located in a place beyond language, and it feels visceral, even intoxicating. In a streaming economy with no shortage of drab, genreless songs, it’s exciting to hear an artist leap so adeptly across styles, from Uzi-styled flex raps to pure pop. His dexterity makes midwxst stand out in the ever-evolving world of hyperpop.


Turning his ear for imperfection toward dub techno, versatile producer Paul Dickow turns out six tracks that conceal worlds of activity under their grimy patina.

Graffiti in Space

Paul Dickow, best known as the Portland, Oregon, electronic musician Strategy, once sent a demo to a European dance-music imprint, and the Europeans liked it—they just wanted it a little cleaner, tighter, more professional sounding. Problem was, Dickow liked to record on a ragtag setup of borrowed or busted gear, jamming live straight to two-track stereo. He didn’t have a high-end audio interface; it would have been impossible to edit the muck out of his tracks even if he’d wanted to. But eventually he realized that dance music—even the most crowd-pleasing, floor-filling dance music—needs to have something a little bit wrong with it. “That’s what’s great about well-done yucky music,” he told Resident Advisor. “You’re like, ‘Fuck! It sounds so fucked up and I keep listening to it, I can’t tune it out.’” Science bore this out, he reasoned: The ear is attuned to imperfection. “We map sound by what’s wrong,” he said. “If it’s fucked up and it has a hook, then you have this delicious problem, and that’s where I think I live.”
For more than 20 years, Dickow has been exploring different shades of wrongness in his music, finding delicious problems in loose-limbed house jams, intransigent rave anthems, and ambient nodders that sound like they’ve been stewing in battery acid. On Graffiti in Space, Dickow turns his ear for imperfection toward dub techno. It’s an audacious proposition, if only because dub techno is so often treated as a color-by-numbers exercise; it’s among dance music’s most formulaic styles. Berlin duo Basic Channel perfected the form almost as soon as they had pioneered it, and three decades later, it’s less a living genre than a museum piece. But where most latter-day dub techno is vaporous, billowing, and virtually friction-free, Dickow digs gleefully into the gunk.
The opening “Remote Dub” has all the hallmarks of the style: pulsing minor chords, plunging dub bassline, metronomic beat. Filters yawn open and closed around a hazy ostinato wash. The mood is somewhere between gently narcotic and pleasantly narcoleptic. But the texture is classic Strategy—soft and sticky as a bag of candy on the dashboard. All six tracks on the 41-minute album have a similarly damaged patina. Dickow is fond of building his own effects units—compressor pedals, spring reverb—and it sounds like it; you can practically smell the globs of solder sizzling between the notes. “Fountain of Youth” opens with metallic wisps twisting over a loud electrical hum, and the atmosphere is periodically punctuated by laser-zapping feedback squeals. The elements sound like they’re competing for space on the tape: Every time that shrill siren comes through, it seems to suck up all the air in the room. But it’s also a viscerally powerful track, with a cascading dub bassline that threatens to flood the mix.
“Message From Ouroboros” is even heavier, with a pounding, butcher-block beat and a lithe modal bassline that bares sharp teeth every time the filters pull back. The sounds are in constant flux and the groove moves with a playful strut. It’s the polar opposite of contemporary dub techno’s tasteful efficiency: sweaty, rough, and ungainly, and you can tell that Dickow likes it that way. But elsewhere on the album, the drums are little more than phantasms, and some of the finest tracks are all but ambient. “Daydream Space Graffiti” sends burbling chords floating over a pastel-colored churn, like a syrupy riposte to Pole, and the closing “Surface Worlds” is similarly buoyant, a pointillistic field of shifting colors. But even at his most bucolic, Dickow refuses to let complacency dictate his choices. As calm as a track like “Surface Worlds” might appear, beneath the surface there’s a world of activity: a soft riot of competing frequencies and haphazard counterpoints colliding and drifting apart again. A firm believer in the power of accident, Dickow harnesses all these imperfections into music that moves with unmistakable grace.


On his major-label debut, SoundCloud rap architect Ronny J showcases his talents as a producer, songwriter, and rapper, with assists from Denzel Curry, Smokepurpp, and XXXTentacion.

OMGRONNY

In a recent interview, Miami producer Ronny J noted that the Clipse’s Lord Willin’ was the first album he ever bought. He referred to it, tellingly, as “the Clipse album with ‘Grindin’’ on it,” adding, “That beat was just so amazing.” “Grindin’” is the kind of song that’s felt as much as it’s heard, its kick drums landing with a cartoonish thud that dominates the mix. It’s easy to imagine how that 2002 hit might have shaped Ronny’s understanding of what a rap beat should sound like. At the age of 25, he’s emerged as an elder statesman in the raucous subculture of SoundCloud rap. His early work with Denzel Curry more or less created the template for an entire generation of South Florida artists: overdriven, in-the-red songs built for tinny speakers and irresponsible volumes.
Ronny’s sound cuts a contrast against the gleaming production that rules much of today’s rap radio, but it is not without precedent. The Southeast has long offered a counternarrative to mainstream fidelity, one which runs from the gothic murk of Three 6 Mafia to the scuzzy aesthetic of early Raider Klan to the blown-out chaos of Waka Flocka Flame mixtapes. Ronny’s innovation was embracing not only the texture of distortion but the willfully amateur spirit that goes with it, arriving at a sound that has as much in common with lo-fi punk as it does rap. He didn’t have to travel far to find rappers willing to tackle his beats, whether with dead-eyed stoicism (Smokepurpp) or unhinged intensity (Lil Pump).
OMGRONNY, Ronny J’s debut collection for a major label, showcases some new collaborations, as well as the producer’s first forays into rapping. The guests featured here—Denzel Curry, Smokepurpp, XXXTentacion, Wifisfuneral—are, for better and for worse, the most recognizable faces of South Florida rap in 2018. With the notable exception of Curry, none of these artists are objectively great rappers per se; the success of their songs hinges on atmosphere and attitude. “Snakes,” which features Wifisfuneral’s heavy-lidded rapping, sounds like a PlayStation plugged into a thrift store TV while a car blasting rap radio idles outside. On “Glacier,” Curry barks his bars like a hardcore singer, surrounded by synths that reverberate like steel drums played underwater. “Costa Rica” is the closest thing here to a mainstream rap song: chiming synths that recall Metro Boomin’s lustrous style are coated in a thick layer of grime, while Ski Mask the Slump God does his best approximation of Travis Scott’s Auto-Tuned yelp.
The most surprising thing about OMGRONNY is how strong Ronny’s own songs are. He displays a better sense of melody than any of his guests, and his persona—successful artist with an air of understated confidence—feels like a breath of fresh air in a subgenre where the usual rap machismo is often paired with emo’s self-pity. On “824,” the music is melancholic, anchored by a lurching beat and reverb-soaked minor keys, but Ronny details a life where flexing is incidental. “Everybody knows that I got it/Ride around the city in exotics,” he sings in a tone that veers from slippery to earnest. Lead single “Banded Up” mines similar territory with even more refined production: the primary beat rattles loudly while a secondary rhythm patters softly atop the track’s synths. The song’s chorus revolves around Ronny refusing sex, making clear that he’s the pursued, not the pursuer. (Drake wishes he could strike such an unconcerned pose.) Unfortunately, SoundCloud rap’s most reprehensible heel, XXXTentacion, drops in for a guest verse that’s both unnecessary and jarring. When he raps “She got lockjaw, I put my dick all in her face, ha ha” in an adolescent squeak, it breaks the song’s spell.
As the South Florida scene continues its journey from regional curiosity to focal point in the national rap landscape, the primary question its artists face is one of compromise. Will promising rappers file off their hard edges in search of wider acceptance, or continue to make music that’s both sonically and thematically confrontational? On his own tracks, Ronny J finds an intriguing middle ground between these approaches, pairing the undiluted sound of his scene with a less abrasive persona. At his best, he sounds like he’s already outgrowing the subculture he helped create.


The 22-year-old classically trained composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone's chamber pop debut was inspired by working closely with Nico Muhly, his time at Yale and the Banff Centre, and the sounds of Sufjan Stevens and Dirty Projectors. It’s a loose concept album that dives into the complexities of young love.

San Fermin

After graduating with a degree in music from Yale, Ellis Ludwig-Leone stole away to the Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies to write his self-titled debut LP under the moniker San Fermin. For six weeks at this artist space on the border between Alberta and British Columbia, the composer filled pages with arrangements, took afternoon walks up the mountain, and came down to blacken the pages some more.
In that isolated environment, with years of classical training, inspiration from working with Nico Muhly, and a playlist that included the avant pop of Sufjan Stevens and Dirty Projectors, Ludwig-Leone's ideas started to only fit on grand scales. The final score for his debut required over 20 players, including a string quartet, a brass quartet, a vibraphone, and operatic sopranos. Coupled with inspiration from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (Ludwig-Leone grabbed the name "San Fermin" from the famous Pamplona festival where they hold the Running of the Bulls), William Henry Hudson romance novels, and the self-imposed profundity that comes with being an anxious love-lorn 22-year-old college graduate, San Fermin arrives as an ambitious chamber pop debut. It’s a loose concept album that grazes, and sometimes dives into the complexities of young love, and slips in and out of dreams that often are just as absurd as the idea of a relationship actually working out.
Ludwig-Leone wrote lyrics for the baritone voice of Allen Tate, as well as the breathy sopranos of Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig of the band Lucius. The three interweave parts across the album, trading off leads, and joining back together for ornate duets. Some initial thoughts may run to how much Tate sounds like the National's Matt Berninger, not just in register, but in cadence, inflection, and sometimes lyrics. Or how Wolfe and Laessig’s whispery, hyper-accurate voices recall the women in Dirty Projectors' tight harmonies as well as the kind of choirs used on* Illinois.* The mosaic of sounds on San Fermin align with much of what has often been done before in chamber pop and indie, and on a song-by-song basis there’s plenty of side-eyeing. But the album works best as a cycle, as a series of movements rather than individual songs.
In that regard, Ludwig-Leone’s world, imbued with a fanciful style that balances the pop and the obtuse, is very much his own. The two “characters” Leone created are representations of ideologies, with Tate’s low voice handling the maudlin pleas and Wolfe and Laessig working together as his dry, world-weary counterweight. “I will tie to my body some roses/ I will fly till I get you alive” Tate sings on “Methuselah” an early-morning acoustic ballad in the first half of the album. It’s a bit much, but soon enough the female character undercuts the purple prose: She’s introduced with the line “I wouldn’t worry/ Your melodramas are embarrassing” on the aptly named “Crueler Kind”.
The conversation between the two places San Fermin directly in the current of high-stakes love. At its most turbulent, Ludwig-Leone writes palms-up climaxes deftly executed at three tentpoles on the album: the early highlight “Sonsick”, the finale “Deadalus (What We Have)”, and the beating heart of the album, “Bar”. Of all the exalting pleas for emotional catharsis, “Bar” is by far the most successful. On the track, the thrill between the two is like "a drug in the arm/ makes you weak when you’re young," a line that's sung in a thick blanket of harmonies between the singers. It’s one of those perfect 21st Century indie arena songs, the kind you play through your iPhone with a crush, the ear buds split between the two of you while you watch fireworks go off in the distance. That said, when you hear Tate sing “Dead of the night/ I’m alone with the tigers” you might have a difficult time not also hearing “It’s a terrible love/ and I’m walking with spiders.”
Hiding around the three peaks are several interludes, and it's in these mini neoclassical compositions that Ludwig-Leone really shines. The pieces offer a rest from the broad-spectrum emotions found in the proper songs, also texturing the album with more curious sounds like spitting cellos, a xylophone under dissonant string drones, and a surprise crackling of a faulty synth patch. They manage to cut down some of the weight of the sung pieces, casting them in a more unique light, while giving San Fermin much needed tension and even a bit of violence.
The menagerie of baroque sounds on the album can be a bit more decorative than purposeful, but under the brambles, it's really just a story of two people wrestling with the love that exists between them. There’s a recurring phrase peppered throughout San Fermin, something about falling asleep in someone’s arms. It’s hard to say exactly what happens to these two people in the end, as the album closes with a ghostly Gustav Mahler-type epilogue that leaves both the music and the story unresolved, but San Fermin is less about a narrative plot and more about abstract ideas and those lucid dreams that happen just before sleep.


Kieran Hebden’s latest album of club-ready barnstormers and downbeat daydreams feels like a companion to 2017’s New Energy.

Sixteen Oceans

For two decades, Four Tet has stayed remarkably consistent. It’s hard to think of another electronic musician whose work feels so tactile: Sampling acoustic instruments from folk and jazz recordings, his music revels in the physicality of sound—the way a plucked string quivers in the air or a drum brush tickles a snare head. His touch is unmistakable, and while Sixteen Oceans is frequently gorgeous and sometimes gripping, there are signs he’s starting to repeat himself.
Until now, Kieran Hebden has kept his music fresh by subtly tweaking his formula. Ten years ago, with There Is Love in You, he began channeling the energy of clubs like London’s Plastic People, a basement joint where dubstep and house were spawning mutant forms. With Pink and Beautiful Rewind, he pushed deeper into the dance floor, teasing the balance between his own vision and dance music’s collective spirit. Morning/Evening’s pair of hypnotic, 20-minute tracks took an extended detour into Indian devotional music and film soundtracks, and 2017’s New Energy synthesized all of his interests, looping back to the slow-motion bliss of his early work on songs like “Two Thousand and Seventeen” and reasserting his peak-time bona fides on floor-fillers like “SW9 9SL.”
In sound and spirit, Sixteen Oceans feels like a companion to New Energy, a mix of club-ready barnstormers and downbeat daydreams, held together by field-recorded miniatures and ambient etudes. Four Tet shares a palette of muffled rimshots and flashing hi-hats with his occasional collaborator Burial, and his more forceful beats remain charged with the snap and swing of 2-step. Slower tracks, like “Teenage Birdsong” and “Romantics,” fall back on spaced-out hip-hop grooves. Regardless of tempo, they all share the same basic elements: acoustic instruments (harp, flute, bells, and harpsichord) interwoven with dreamy synthesizers that curl like wisps of colored smoke. The predominance of birdsong gives the album the feel of a stroll through an aviary; when there are voices, they are invariably wordless, pitch-shifted, and just this side of melancholy. Everything feels calibrated for a certain Goldilocks zone of wistful reverie—not too heavy, not too light, neither forlorn nor jubilant.
Sixteen Oceans is best when Hebden disturbs the placid surface. “Insect Near Piha Beach” bumps along atop the sort of choppy drum groove that Hebden can write in his sleep, but its cascading pentatonic scales pile up in a way that sounds new, pouring down accelerating and decelerating runs in a way that threatens to overwhelm the rhythmic grid. “Love Salad” is virtually the platonic ideal of a Four Tet song, but as it gathers force, it begins to spill over into exciting dissonance. But “School” and “Something in the Sadness,” which are virtually identical—same key, instrumentation, same tempo, practically the same beat—somehow never manage to spark the same sort of rapture. They tap out at “beautiful” rather than tipping over into the ecstatic.
Sixteen Oceans is 16 tracks long, yet five of them are basically interludes—minute-or-two-long sketches made of watery synth pads, tape hiss, or rudimentary beats. Strangely, most of them fall toward the end of the album. In fact, after “Something in the Sadness,” the record’s driving climax, the album’s final six tracks all zigzag between marginally differentiated pastel dream states. From titles like “1993 Band Practice,” “Bubbles at Overlook 25th March 2019,” and “Mama Teaches Sanskrit,” one gets the sense that many of these pieces have personal meaning for Hebden, but these blurry snapshots don’t impart much more than a feeling of bittersweet serenity. Were they threaded more evenly through the album, they might serve as a kind of mood-stabilizing connective tissue between the more upfront songs; as it is, they feel mostly like an extended denouement, a slow drift into the doldrums. The same could be said for Sixteen Oceans as a whole: The view’s lovely, but for the moment, it feels like Hebden is sailing in circles.

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On Imani, Vol. 1, their first album in a decade, Blackalicious reunites triumphantly. Gif of Gab, one of the most underrated technicians of his time, can still trade bars with the best of them, but what makes Vol. 1 particularly powerful—and what separates it from the duo’s work outside of Blackalicious titles—is its warm energy and its infectious groove.

Imani, Vol. 1

For better or worse, the tag "alternative rap" comes with many connotations: this rap subverts mainstream politics; this rap has a message; this rap is different; this is #RealHipHop. It’s often a distinction used by rap elitists and purists to separate rap with a supposed intellectual bent from the rap they consider low brow or obtuse. It can be an ugly, divisive term, one that stands at the center of rap’s greatest schism; it has been a defining label in many rap class wars.
But sometimes the term categorizes rap acts that truly exist on the fringes of the genre, acts that stretch the boundaries of how rap can sound with progressive and daring compositions. Producer Chief Xcel and emcee Gift of Gab have been one such creative force as Blackalicious, a Sacramento-based project pushing a positive, often Afrocentric message that’s more prudent than preachy over dynamic production. From 2000 to 2005, the tag-team released a trio of strong LPs—Nia, Blazing Arrow, and The Craft—but parted soon after to pursue individual interests. On Imani, Vol. 1, their first album in a decade, Blackalicious reunites triumphantly.
With Blazing Arrow—the duo’s seminal work—Blackalicious offered up one of the greatest alternative rap records of the last decade, a complex opus that felt seamless and simple with Gil Scott-Heron’s barreling profundity, Questlove’s drums, a DJ Shadow interlude, Zack de la Rocha’s anarchist shouts, and rapid-fire rapping all arranged carefully on a funky sonic canvas. The pair’s last album, 2005’s The Craft, lived up to its title with a yeoman's approach to lyricism and a tinkerer’s mentality toward innovation, but in its quest to be an experimental marvel, it over-thought its thesis, occasionally doing too much, sonically and technically. The first of a projected trilogy, Imani, Vol. 1 takes important lessons from both, tempering its big ambitions with subtler arrangements and careful pacing.
Blackalicious is most effective when Gift of Gab’s knotty multisyllabic schemes unspool without decryption and nestle neatly in the nooks and crannies of Xcel’s soulful romps, and on songs like "Ashes to Ashes" and "I Like the Way You Talk", they lock in. Gab, one of the most underrated technicians of his time, can still trade bars with the best of them, but what makes Imani, Vol. 1 particularly powerful—and what separates it from the duo’s work outside of Blackalicious titles—is its warm energy and its infectious groove.
Imani is the Swahili word for "faith" and on the opener of the same name Amde of the Watts Prophets spells out the album’s mission statement: "Never let life’s troubles block your flow/ Have faith and get where you’re trying to go." Blackalicious has always promoted positivity, but here it seems less like a cultural critique and more like general life-coaching. Throughout, Imani, Vol. 1 is driven by an underlying spirituality and palpable chemistry. It’s often about connection. The duo has joined forces once more in an effort to overcome personal trials, and Imani is no different: Gab suffered kidney failure just as the duo started preparing to make the record in 2012, and a "borrowed time" narrative punctuates many of Vol. 1’s loose ideas, particularly on "The Hour Glass" and "Escape". Time is a central theme on the album, especially with nostalgic glimpses into the past, like on rare missteps "That Night" and "Inspired By". But there’s also a watchful eye on the future, too ("Love’s Gonna Save the Day").
Xcel productions are often rooted in the sounds of rap yesteryear, but they hedge toward the modern. On Imani, Vol. 1, he again bridges the then and now, lining crisp boom bap drums with splitting guitar chords, protruding basslines, and prickling piano riffs. He samples less often than he has in the past, but he still finds time to chop up Lee Perry (on "Blacka") and scratch in a vocal fragment here and there ("On Fire Tonight"). His beats aren't game-changers, but he finds new and interesting ways to follow the patented Blackalicious formula.
When Chief Xcel and Gift of Gab are both producing at max output, there are few rap duos more capable, and on Imani, Vol. 1 they flex their muscle, showing little sign of rust after the long layoff. What Vol. 1 lacks in memorable hooks, it makes up for with ferocious lyricism. That the album was even made feels like a victory, especially considering it took a PledgeMusic campaign to fund it, but Imani, Vol. 1 doesn’t feel crowd-sourced: It is an intimate piece of work, an inspiring take on conquering personal struggle and coming out whole on the other side. On "The Sun", Vol. 1's brightest moment, Gab spins metaphors on the darkness-vanquishing power of light, jubilantly basking in its rays, shining once again.


Morrissey and some (barely audible) high-profile guests rework 12 of his favorite ’60s and ’70s songs by American artists to mixed results.

California Son

Like all misfits, the Smiths never seemed entirely comfortable in their own timeline. They clung to old relics: the photographs of niche idols and faded stars on their artwork, the lyrical hat-tips to Oscar Wilde and Shelagh Delaney, the music-hall notes and rockabilly riffs, even a name that was symbolic of an old-fashioned sturdiness. But the nostalgia was always undercut by the sense that though they dreamt of the past, they knew they could never bring it back. “It just wasn’t like the old days anymore,” sighed Morrissey on “Still Ill,” his lips sore from trying to reawaken some distant, dormant magic.
How times change. There’s no bittersweet beauty to be found in the reactionarism of today’s Morrissey, who just performed on “Jimmy Fallon” while wearing the badge of far-right political party For Britain. It’s the latest regrettable act in the charmless offensive he’s been escalating since 2017’s patchy, snarky Low in High School, as he continues to cheerlead for risible politicians, trot out his own inflammatory rhetoric, and dismiss dissenting voices as the product of myopic political correctness.
At this point, then, it’s hard to trust even an album as supposedly innocent as California Son. Its premise is pure fan service: Morrissey and some (barely audible) high-profile guests rework 12 of his favorite ’60s and ’70s songs by North American artists, some of which flirt with ideas of social justice. The inclusion of those tracks feels pointed. Maybe they’re meant as proof that he’s still on the side of the underdogs, or as a sly suggestion that this is what real progressive politics sounds like. Maybe, as his manager said, there’s no agenda and it’s just supposed to be fun. If he’s right, it’s only to a point. It is more enjoyable to hear Morrissey in thrall to his passions than his peeves, but the toxicity of his public persona still poisons the well.
To be clear, a mawkish take on Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” about the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and the racist killer manipulated into pulling the trigger, would be a bad choice for anyone: However generous your thoughts about the nuances of Dylan’s original or Morrissey’s intentions in covering it, framing racists as victims and excusing their hate crimes seems ill-judged at best and downright reckless at worst in 2019, when the president gladly goes to bat for white nationalists. But it feels particularly disingenuous for Morrissey to bemoan fear-mongering politicians who whip up prejudice, considering some of the unsavory public figures he’s fond of.
It’s a shame, because the best bits of California Son are as strong as anything Morrissey’s done in years, thanks to him and producer Joe Chiccarelli ditching Low in High School’s waspish spirit but keeping its zest for new sounds. The strongest songs pull out some inner strangeness from the originals you’d never really heard before. Buffy-Sainte Marie’s “Suffer the Little Children” is recast as a devilish, ramshackle stomp with bluesy keys and a hammily spooky vocal turn: “He keeps his nails clean/Did you think he was a boogeyman?” Morrissey adds a dark surrealism to Carly Simon’s “When You Close Your Eyes,” too, crooning over its twinkling electronics and lush harps like an eerie figure from a children’s fairytale. He and Chiccarelli turn the sci-fi fantasy of Jobriath’s “Morning Starship” into a space odyssey, filling its glimmering score with futuristic squiggles and crunching cosmic guitars, so it’s like being serenaded by the house band on an intergalactic cruiser.
When they play it safer, like on their workmanlike strum through Joni Mitchell’s “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” or the easy-listening wistfulness of their take on Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over,” the results are less remarkable. And while it’s a relief to be spared Morrissey’s bitterness, sometimes California Son feels too frothy, and he sounds like he doesn’t have any skin in the game at all. He and Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong aim for playfulness with Laura Nyro’s “Wedding Bell Blues” and land on cloyingly kitsch instead. Producer Stephen Street once marveled at how Morrissey would build himself up for studio takes like a dramatic actor; here, he’s taking his work about as seriously as a goofy “SNL” sketch.
The choice between listening to a misanthropic relative telling you old stories they love or hearing them grouch at the news is a no-brainer, but that doesn’t make some of the sugariness easier to swallow: As hard as Morrissey tries, it’s difficult to enjoy a celebratory gambol with him down memory lane when it’s full of potholes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the gloomiest moments that come closest to winning you over, like when he turns Tim Hardin’s “Lenny’s Tune” into an exquisite elegy at a doomy cabaret bar, or when he makes Melanie’s “Some Say (I Got Devil)” sound like the darkly dramatic last stand of a vengeful titan. When you hear them, you could almost pretend it was the old days again, even though you know it can never be the same.