Recorded in a Brooklyn church as the first installment of a trilogy, the new age pioneer’s latest shows him returning to his first instrument—the piano.

Sun Piano

Perhaps the most famous moment of Edward Larry Gordon’s career is his meeting with Brian Eno. The story feels mythic now, like a Disney movie set in the experimental-music scene: Upon seeing him sitting cross-legged and hammering away at open-tuned zither in New York City’s Washington Square park, Eno invited Gordon to perform at a nearby studio, an act of serendipity that culminated with the release of 1980’s Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, released under Gordon’s new moniker, Laraaji.
40 years on, the story still overshadows Laraaji’s legend as a pioneer of ambient and new age music. He’s responsible for more than 50 albums by now, but his evolution as a performer and his status as an innovator are both footnoted by Eno’s long-ago role as a musical (and white) savior. Before that fateful encounter, Gordon had a small acting role in the cult 1969 media satire Putney Swope, directed by Roberty Downey Sr. Later, as a slapstick comedian working at the Apollo Theater in Harlem (where he still lives today), he shared stages with Barry White and Roberta Flack. All of this occurred before his meditative practice revealed a concept of “sound vision” to him and inspired his first album of zither-based works, Celestial Vibrations, which came out under his birth name in 1978.
Laraaji’s newest album, Sun Piano, is the first installment in a trilogy of improvised recording projects. Recorded at a church in Brooklyn, the album is another emanation of Laraaji’s distinctive connection to music—as a source of energy, as a way of being in the world, and as a personal practice. As the title hints, the album shows Laraaji returning his first instrument, the piano, which he studied at Howard University. In a recent Washington Post interview, he described his time at Howard as a period of learning less about formal composition, his specific field of study, and more about acquiring an attitude for approaching the piano. “The piano is an instrument that gives voice to how I hold space for light,” he said.
In their own way, the performances captured on Sun Piano attempt to pass this radiance on to listeners. It’s an act of transference that never fully delivers on the inner escape offered by Laraaji’s more recognizable zither and synthesizer-based performances. On the album’s centerpiece, “This Too Shall Pass,” a plucky and playful ascending progression quickly loses its charm as a theme, settling to hammer its way to a finish. The recording, which is distant and compressed, squeezes all the character out of Laraaji’s soft technique. The gentle arpeggiations of “Temple of New Light” might possess the same kind of solar power found on Day of Radiance, but its brittle sonics will leave headphone listeners feeling sun-poisoned during the louder parts.
The same dynamics nearly mar “Lifting Me,” but then the piece locks into a mantra-like rhythm, notes landing like muted mallet hits. It’s an apex of Sun Piano, offering us the feeling one might associate with a mood-altering ray of sun during a blustery day. At four minutes, though, the feeling doesn’t last.
Laraaji’s playing on Sun Piano isn’t technically ambitious; he opts for short, safe runs and open chords that rub up against some dissonant voicings as he fiddles with the mixture of notes. Harmonies, countermelodies, and complex compositional structures are avoided to better focus on the energy of a given moment. Sometimes, as with the perfect closer “Embracing Timeless,” which moves across the keyboard like a plotless morning walk, you wish Laraaji lingered for his customary 30 minutes or longer.
Sun Piano may just be a minor spark in a career that has emitted sound, and vision, in a slow, consistent burn. Our greatest living practitioner of new age music has lived a life intent on casting light into the darkened recesses of the self and of the spirit. Even if his latest offering is considerably dimmer than his most golden works, it’s still a confident assertion that, even at 77 years old, his pursuit of the sun’s life-affirming light shows no signs of wavering.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On its dauntless and electrifying eighth album, the post-metal trio recharges its familiar sound.

Gnosis

Long before the twinkling fifth track of Russian Circles’ Gnosis ends, it is easy to assume how the sixth will begin—a torrent of aggression, the inverse of its soothing predecessor. “Ó Braonáin” is sublime guitar music for the gloaming; each soft note of the 100-second lullaby feels gently warped, like the glow of a summer sun setting behind a thunderhead. The instant it fades, “Betrayal” rushes forward, a blitz of wordless black metal obliterating that sense of twilight languor. It sounds like a street fight. At least in this two-song span, Russian Circles sound like they’ve mastered the expected post-metal script: a ceaseless seesaw of quiet and loud, gorgeous and violent.
But Russian Circles’ eighth album works so well because that flipped-switch dynamic is the sole exception to what seems a new rule for the Chicago trio: The beautiful and the brutal should exist in tandem, not split into stereotypical patterns. Gnosis is a perpetual motion machine, its serrated guitars and blown-out bass forever pirouetting around or slamming into drums that make this music dramatic and restless. Russian Circles debuted nearly 20 years ago, after bands like Explosions in the Sky, Mono, Pelican, or even Isis filled in the blank that followed “post- ” with foundational records. As dauntless as it is electrifying, Gnosis is also efficient and lean, qualities that together recharge a familiar sound that’s not been in vogue for a long time. These nimble and mighty songs close that gap, at least for 40 minutes.
Two logistical hurdles of the pandemic served as surprising boons for Russian Circles. First, rather than collectively constructing songs in a rehearsal room, the members wrote full pieces in the isolation of new home studios. When at last they reconvened to record at Kurt Ballou’s God City and Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio, they mostly knew how this material moved, eliding the compromises that collaboration can introduce. And when they originally handed Gnosis over to their label, it was a double-LP, apparently loaded with the sorts of peaks and valleys epitomized by “Ó Braonáin” and “Betrayal.” Supply-chain woes meant they had to prune Gnosis to one record. In recent years, Russian Circles’ albums have sometimes felt like shaggy-dog stories, loaded with tangents as they explored new ideas; the time constraint doesn’t allow it.
At least until Gnosis reaches its solo guitar reverie, it is total momentum, each song finding a target and doggedly pursuing it. Named for an Inuit totem that was dropped into the sea to hunt down an enemy, opener “Tupilak” could score a chase scene. Guitarist Mike Sullivan and bassist Brian Cook follow the steady acceleration of drummer Dave Turncrantz, their viscous parts funneling through tight grooves like a car navigating hairpin turns. “Vlastimil” begins with magisterial doom, its grim-reaper riff cutting a path through lumbering drums. But Russian Circles alternately slingshot into black metal outbursts, droning breakdowns, and delirious thrash before fading into exhaustion. This is the sensation—compacted into seven minutes—of beating a video game, then collapsing on the floor in a puddle.
In changing their process and trimming the results, Russian Circles didn’t entirely forsake their outbound interests, the sounds that have sometimes adulterated their records. Instead, they folded them inside these tunes, with Cook in particular making striking contributions. His hyper-distorted bass during the title track adds textural frisson, like hearing a favorite song on a half-broken transistor radio. His synthesizer lines often provide a sense of wonder to the taut compositions, gorgeous streaks beneath otherwise-gnarly tones. This carefully layered approach piques interest without interrupting Gnosis’ sheer energy.
Gnosis ends with “Bloom,” the first song Russian Circles wrote for the album. A wistful shuffle with plangent guitars that stretch across an especially wide horizon, it is the lightest full-band fare here, so delicate it sidles up alongside the heavy cinematics of Explosions in the Sky. These respective bands are now surviving exemplars of post-rock and post-metal, twin terms that once suggested unfettered imagination but now mostly connote loud-quiet-loud instrumental guitar jams. Explosions have found subtle ways to creep around such binaries, while Russian Circles have spent much of the last decade pushing directly against old edges. Gnosis, however, represents a return toward the radiant center, to the idea that a power trio can make urgent and emotive music with little but the basics and a reason for revisiting them.


The Fiery Furnaces finally put their infamous live shows on record-- and as the band does onstage, the record re-arranges and shuffles songs and moments, with Matt Friedberger and bassist and mixer Jason Loewenstein splicing several gigs into seamless medleys (one per CD) that span all the band's studio albums in two hour-plus marathons.

Remember

There's nothing wrong with manipulating a live performance before you cut it to record-- it all depends on what you do with it. The Fiery Furnaces have waited this long to release an official live album, and it's no surprise that they would try to surprise us. The Furnaces' live show is infamous: Instead of just staging the songs, the band rearranges them, reshuffles the parts, and strings them together into lengthy medleys that can run the length of a whole set. And the next time they hit town, they've usually shuffled the deck again, with a new setlist and sometimes even a new band behind the Friedberger siblings, who are the only constant.
On top of all that, the ever-wacky Matt Friedberger and bassist and mixer Jason Loewenstein have added another layer of reinvention: They've taken several gigs and spliced those together into seamless medleys, one per CD, that span all the band's studio albums in two hour-plus marathons. For an added gag, the longer tracks splice tapes of completely different shows into a single performance, so the line-up keeps changing and the sound quality jumps from soundboard to bootleg and back again. It's original, and it's ear-achingly annoying, and for that matter, so is the rest of the album.
Remember's core flaw is its pacing. Disc One in particular is a marathon that's run like a sprint. Those frantic medleys are never as relentless in person as the digital fiction constructed on this record; this is anxious music that's been honed to its most keyed-up sections with no release, endlessly dry-humping your ear. A rare half-minute of downtime during "Don't Dance Her Down" is stomped by a synth blitzkrieg while Eleanor's vocals-- whose scraps of lyrics have become arbitrary and meaningless-- sound ever-more hectoring. And then comes "Single Again", again.
The disc fares better in small chunks. The Blueberry Boat tracks include ferocious bootlegs and classic rock guitarwork, yet the album's long epics fall victim to the most aggressive editing: "Chief Inspector Blancheflower" roars up to what could've been the album's best moment before it cuts abruptly to a deathly quiet recording of the Friedbergers having a sibling moment. "Chris Michaels", opening Disc Two, is the only track to get through unscathed. The Bitter Tea section with added percussionist Michael Goodman comes across with the best flow and the fewest distractions, and the brisker, grandmother-free Rehearsing My Choir material stays just on the right side of manic. But by the end, Widow City is cut to a taster that whizzes by in the last few minutes-- which is ironic, since the that tour has featured straightforward, song-by-song setlists.
Remember disappoints because it cheats us out of the chance to hear a near-miracle. The Friedbergers always go into the studio with erratic ideas and indulgent conceits-- Inuit lyrics, quirk-prog fables, tongue-in-cheek chance compositions, and of course, the underappreciated tale of Olga Sarantos. Yet they always take these disparate ideas and pull them together with a solid conceit, consistent themes, and deliberately naïve bravado. It's something else to see them pull off the same trick on tour, where the stakes are so much higher. The joy of watching them not fly off the rails made even the weaker shows worth hearing. But in turning that experience into a scrapbook, Remember kills the magic.
Put simply, it's strange for such a great album band to make a live record that fails as an album. But give it credit for one thing: It captures the live experience, warts and all. Why else would they include Eleanor flubbing a line right on track two, after they went to such pains making all the other edits? Feel free to invent your own meta-message about the unpredictability of touring, the chaos of tackling ever-trickier setlists for stubborn hipster crowds, and the spirit of taking risks in the moment that could haunt you to the rest of your days. Take it with a sense of humor. Or just trust the sleevenotes, which warn, "Please do not attempt to listen to all at once."


On her solo debut, Nai Palm abandons her band Hiatus Kaiyote’s expansive future-soul aesthetic in favor of acoustic intimacy; it is, above all, a testament to the power of the voice.

Needle Paw

Naomi Saalfield first came to the world’s attention in 2012 as Nai Palm, the frontwoman of Australia’s Hiatus Kaiyote and a wildling rock star with soul-music chops and a steampunk aesthetic. Their 2012 debut album, Tawk Tomahawk, would position Hiatus Kaiyote as key purveyors of future soul—a sound that marries the spacious production values of EDM and jazz with the lush harmonies and boom-bap rhythms of neo-soul. Following their debut’s follow-up, the 2015 epic Choose Your Weapon, Saalfield retreated to the Australian desert, where she recorded Needle Paw, a whisper-close collection of songs that connect the dots between Hiatus Kaiyote’s music and her own inspirations.
Pulling together a smattering of originals, a number of acoustic arrangements of songs from Hiatus Kaiyote’s repertoire, and a few daring covers, it is an unusual proposition for a solo debut—a calculated risk for a two-time Grammy-nominated artist presumably nowhere the end of her career, nor severing ties with her bandmates. But it’s a risk she can afford to take after being cosigned by Erykah Badu, accompanied by Q-Tip, and sampled by Drake, Kendrick Lamar, and Anderson .Paak within the past year.
With Needle Paw, Saalfield turns inward to pull from herself what Hiatus Kaiyote’s massive arrangements could not. She is alone at the wheel in the unenviable but courageous position of bearing sole responsibility for an album featuring songs that people have heard before. Some are fodder for nostalgia, others the stuff of legend. They are songs that would surely haunt her if she got it wrong. Thankfully, she does not. Instead, her performance as vocalist, producer, arranger, and musical director confirms her talents—and, in her interpretive care, reaffirms listening as an act of love.
Needle Paw is a minimalist’s dream. The raw, stripped-down performances are antithetical to Hiatus Kaiyote’s lush, swollen sound. The album breaks down the complex mechanisms driving the average Hiatus record in a catabolic process that isolates the ingredient most essential to Nai Palm: the human voice. Her byzantine harmonies are less important to the final mix than the primal timbre of the voice, whether isolated or in concert with others.  There are no concessions to trend or enormous features. Needle Paw is a reliquary for Saalfield’s travels and influences, from Bulgarian choral music and the songs of Saharan nomads to rock and 1990s R&B. There is even a nod to a shape-shifting character from Cartoon Network’s “Adventure Time” series on “Mobius,” where she sings of the “ancient psychic tandem war elephant,” whose power is a healing telepathy.
Saalfield’s conversations with the natural and metaphysical world continue across Needle Paw, from indigenous Yolngu singer Jason Guwanbal Gurruwiwi’s “Wititj (Lightning Snake),” which opens and closes the album, to the whip-poor-will ad-libs that jut from a soothing chant in “Atari.” Leaving it all on the tape, Saalfield closes the track with a sigh of relief—evidence of the physical toll that her passion for song takes.
The album’s greatest flaw is one shared by Hiatus’ recordings. The band’s tendency to vamp on their intoxicating melodies until the ear loses itself in the mix makes it easy to miss where one song ends and another begins. Likewise, the consistency of this album's palette allows its songs to blur together, except upon close listening. What keeps Needle Paw from sinking in sand are the Easter eggs that Saalfield hides in the mix. She sings shoulder to shoulder with her backing vocalists on an enveloping cover of Choose Your Weapon standout “Molasses,” and their rendition of the smoldering Jimi Hendrix ballad “Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)” is even better. The rework is a lighthouse of a midpoint, with harmonies that burst into muddy blues phrases and runs that border on ecstatic glossolalia. Saalfield’s performance conjures the ghosts of grunge—there’s something in the production that faintly recalls Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun”—and places her comfortably in an elite class of soul-music disciples led by D’Angelo and Raphael Saadiq. She doubles down on “Crossfire/So Into You,” pulling a sweet take on a song from Tamia’s self-titled 1998 debut out of the spine of her own tough-as-nails folk.
Saalfield’s evident respect for each composition and voice transforms Needle Paw into an accidental group recording that finds her both singing to heroes and singing with her friends; it’s a utopian environment where equity is the order of the day and each element of the track is central to its success. Though her vocal acrobatics and pop-culture recall are impressive, Saalfield’s reverence for the authors of the material she covers is no less notable. That passion rescued her version of David Bowie’s “Blackstar” from the cutting-room floor. Reluctant to allow any repurposing of Bowie’s work following his death, his estate initially denied Saalfield’s request to reinterpret the song. Devastated, she wrote a letter thanking the family for his work. That letter miraculously convinced them to clear the late icon’s song for the climactic “Blackstar/Pyramid Song/Breathing Underwater,” a medley that also includes a Radiohead staple and features kora player Amadou Suso.
Needle Paw isn’t necessarily the album you might have expected from Saalfield at this point in her career, but it is clearly the album she needed to make. It is a reclamation of self for a singer who has experienced at least two life-altering shocks—orphaned at 11, she left the city for rural Australia; plucked from relative obscurity, in 2012, she and her bandmates found themselves suddenly famous. What has remained constant is her voice. With Needle Paw, Saalfield returns to the sounds, songs, and voices—particularly those from historically marginalized communities, which often go unheard—that helped her to define her own. Needle Paw is, in part, a way of correcting that silencing. Singing in tribute to the voices that are most important to her, she is at her best.


On their debut LP, the eager duo fumbles that which makes indie pop so meaningful. It becomes a lively collection of empty gestures.

Swear I’m Good at This

The origin story of Diet Cig centers around an interaction in which guitarist Alex Luciano interrupted drummer Noah Bowman during a show to ask for a lighter. This anecdote is an odd way to introduce your band. It suggests a double standard that it’s okay for women to interrupt men while they’re playing but you know if the tables were turned Twitter would be all up in arms. Nevertheless, the pair hit it off and began making music together in their then-hometown of New Paltz, NY. This led to 2015’s Over Easy EP, five jangly tracks about young adult anxieties and scene politics. It was an inoffensive introduction that spawned relentless touring, a bubbly social media presence, and Luciano’s trademark high kick off the bass drum.
Diet Cig’s debut record Swear I’m Good at This suggests that little growth has occurred in the time since. As its title implies, the album acknowledges the desire to defend oneself against presumed inadequacies. But there is little here to convince listeners that Diet Cig are actually worth your time. They make music that could be called punk-informed indie pop because it is quick, loud, and simple while asserting the DIY attitude that anyone can play music. It’s not that they sound bad: Bowman is an experienced, tight drummer and Luciano’s bouncy guitar playing makes the duo sound like a four-piece. The larger problem is that over these 12 songs, Diet Cig are the heavy-handed musical equivalent of the pussy hat: a well-meaning feminist gesture that lacks all nuance.
Swear I’m Good at This fumbles that which makes indie pop so meaningful. A melding of thoughtful intimacy, roaring hooks, and arena-level energy delivered in a basement can provide transformative salvation for the underdogs. The strongest songwriters provide a snow globe-sized glimpse into their world. The subject matter can be as simple as a rainy day spent inside building a diorama or as complex as an existential crisis, but for these stories to communicate any value they need to be vivid, deliberate, and fleshed-out by perspective. Simply weaving together a catalogue of small, observational details means nothing if there’s no emotion ascribed to them.
Additionally, there’s a fine line between being honest or diaristic and just sounding self-absorbed. Unfortunately, Diet Cig are stuck in the latter category. They give the most trivially vanilla lyrics the highest stakes, as if anything can be an anthem. On “Barf Day” Luciano exalts to the rafters, “I just wanna have ice cream on my birthday/Blow the candles out and wish all of my pain away.” The cute hook flails in the air, powerful in execution but powerless in its result. The acoustic number “Apricots” offers an anecdote about feeling homesick and besotted, which leads to a trip to the supermarket to take comfort in buying the fruit. The apricots could represent Luciano’s fears of rotting away, but this object lays flat on the surface of the song instead of being woven into its moving parts. This is a running theme across the record.
Luciano and Bowman check off the indie pop boxes on rollicking songs like “Bite Back” and “Blob Zombie,” and though these songs are likable little pop succulents, they lack anything to identify them from the many other indie pop songs who helped bear Diet Cig into existence. Luciano and Bowman sell their music as empowering, rebellious, vulnerable, and life-affirming, but their songs read like hollow, vampiric feminist messages. One of the worst offenders arrives on the closing track “Tummy Ache,” in which Luciano declares, “It’s hard to be a punk while wearing a skirt.” Clearly, this line is meant to acknowledge that those who identify with femininity have always faced adversity. Without negating the sentiment, the line comes off as an uninformed dismissal of the battles femmes have fought and won for decades.
It’s difficult to criticize a band for saying things that are by all means correct and likable on the surface. Yes, you should own everything you are. Sure, you can sell felt Black Lives Matter patches on Etsy. And the line on “Maid of the Mist” that goes, “I am bigger than the outside shell of my body and if you touch it without asking then you’ll be sorry” is absolutely correct. Diet Cig’s audience should find the message in the music liberating, but Diet Cig’s debut is almost entirely made of other people’s gestures hastily collected and cheaply executed. Hand it to Luciano and Bowman, they pull off a caper with impressive energy and confidence.


The abundance of elder tunesmiths keeping it real is enough to make a youngster want to move to an assisted-living ...

Alice/Blood Money

The abundance of elder tunesmiths keeping it real is enough to make a youngster want to move to an assisted-living community in Florida, get his hobble on, and stand behind a screen door in a cardigan yelling, "It's my soccer ball now!" Let's check the oldometer's current readings:

Badass: Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Elvis Costello

Still Kind of Mildly Half-Cool, In a Way: David Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Neil Young, Robert Pollard, Jagger/Richards

Why, Why Did You Duet with Rob Thomas and Kid Rock?: Willie Nelson

Hack/Dork: Paul McCartney

McCartney almost single-handedly stinks up the whole batch. If only Tom Waits had been given a seat and a microphone beside all those painkiller-and-vitamin-goofy ex-jock anchors at the Super Bowl halftime show, Waits could have responded to McCartney's "Wouldn't it be great if, in these patriotic times, the Patriots won?" blather by howling-- as he does on one of his two new albums-- "Who gives a good goddamn?!" In fact, Waits' new platters offer three rejoinders to "Freedom," McCartney's banal attempt at a post-millennial moment-defining anthem: "Misery Is the River of the World," "Everything Goes to Hell," and "We're All Mad Here."
Tom Waits has been milking the concept of the ramshackle apocalyptic carnival for twenty years now, flaunting a keen otherworldly nostalgia and a preoccupation with freaks that transcends the hell out of Harmony Korine's. In the 80s-- when everything was measured in 'oodles' and forecasts didn't include a 30% chance of terrorism-- Waits rescued himself from his role as a clever lounge slouch by going real weird right about the time he hitched himself to Kathleen Brennan, whose influence has grown with each release (she co-wrote and co-produced both new albums). Back then, fans of the old Waits cried "Yoko!" but let's face it: that barroom-sage thing was getting pretty half-hearted. It's difficult not to hear the new song "Coney Island Baby" as an ode to Brennan, the psycho-circus muse: "Every night she comes/ To take me out to Dreamland."
Both of Waits' new discs are their own concept albums, and both are collections of sick Germanic showtunes resulting from overseas theatrical collaborations with Robert Wilson (the man infamous for staging Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach, and with whom Waits made The Black Rider). Both albums' subjects are headline-fodder: Alice deals with (ahem) (cough) intergenerational desire (reportedly based on Lewis Carroll and the famous little girl whose hand he would squeeze during their walks), while Blood Money (written to accompany the play Woycek) hazards the realm of psychopharmacology via its tale of old-world medical mind-tampering. Waits makes his woebegone statements about the muck of modern life artfully and metaphorically, avoiding the overt outrage that leisure-class sophistos would label tedious.
These albums function in Waits' discography the way the film The Man Who Wasn't There fits into the Coen oeuvre: they are self-homages, full of superceding revisitations, that hone rather than advance. The exotica of Swordfishtrombones, the arch storytelling of Rain Dogs, and the better elements of the hit-and-miss Mule Variations are fully realized here, sustained for 91 cohesively transportative minutes of convoluted waltzes and marches. At one point, Waits even plinks the piano bit from "Innocent When You Dream" with a winking brio that whispers, "Ain't I fun?" Blood Money's clomp-and-stomp and Alice's musty ether represent the osteoporosis of Bone Machine and the senile dementia of The Black Rider, allowed to blossom into terminal malaise.
Both albums are further testament that Waits' inner cryptkeeper is getting sharper, combining disparate instruments with calamitous precision and conjuring worlds in which celebrities are born without bodies and razors 'find' throats. The music is so expressive and confident in its spook-ass vibe that it's flat-out cinematic. The instrumentals serve as aural Rorsharchs (the gorgeous violin of "Fawn" made me see bugs mating-- now you try!) and Waits' voice is warmly recorded on each of the pump-organ-and-stand-up-bass dirges, some of which seem to channel the balcony-leaping spirit of a heroin-shriveled Chet Baker.
The guitar of "Starving in the Belly of a Whale" sounds like an animatronic parasite prancing on your spine. "Lost in the Harbour" captures the creaky havoc of metal bending to the sea. "Lullaby" is a perfect nugget of twilight insecurity, and the nightmare cartoon of "Kommienezuspadt" begs for a club mix. Every syllable of "God's Away on Business" is a seizure, with the Ben-Hur slaveship-rowing coach pumping the tempo to ramming speed. Those of you who first heard Tom Waits, as I did-- that is, over lasagna at the house of a junior-high teacher with a skin disease who was trying to seduce you-- will relish the albums' creepy love songs. They shine a morbid light on how most love-pop reduces the world to a consuming need for one magical person, and how often it's a bum swap: the Alice of Alice brings its protagonist an ounce of redemption and a ton of ruin.
Okay, so you might find the voices silly (there's Ancient-Mariner-on-a-bender, post-pubescent Grover, Golem-in-a-tux, and Gungan Boss Hogg). Okay, so this is the first group of Waits songs where the ingredients seem so familiar that listeners feel empowered enough to try to guess the recipe and write their very own Tom Waits Song (I'm talking to you, Joe Henry). Okay, so a moratorium should be imposed on the kiss/bliss rhyme. Okay, so some of the recombinatory stunts of The Man Who Wasn't There felt autopiloted and didn't satisfy as much as the first time you encountered them. Okay, so Anti's copy editor should have to rescue rabbits from cosmetics testing labs to atone for how badly they transcribed and jumbled the lyrics in the booklet. (What gives? I bet Epitaph has a brigade of undergrad interns that sort out each apostrophe in Bad Religion liner notes.)
Still, you should be ashamed you bought that Cursive, or Pedro the Lion, or Ladytron CD, and get these. Synth-pooh and guitar-flarney doesn't have jack on calliopes, marimbas, chamberlains, cellos, and tubas, all of it in classily surreal packaging that screams "Fuck the Grammys." While the rest of pop culture infantilizes itself with cussing puppets and manufactured bands who willfully dangle like marionettes, Waits is serving up vintage brittle fusion and somehow breaking the law of diminishing returns. Something wicked this way hams, and it ain't afraid to be misanthropic and admit that humans are just monkeys trained to parallel park. Come on, you Disney puds, it's time to let Waits and David Lynch do Kafka's Metamorphosis as a musical.


"It really doesn't matter at all
Life's a gas
I hope it's gonna last"
--Marc Bolan, "Life ...

Electric Warrior

"It really doesn't matter at all
Life's a gas
I hope it's gonna last"
--Marc Bolan, "Life's a Gas"
Just before Marc Bolan was killed in a car crash in 1977, he seemed on the cusp of an artistic and commercial resurgence. His death marked one more lost opportunity in a career studded with them. He was the decade's first superstar in Britain, but he never hit it off with America, due in part to a stateside inability to comprehend camp, and in part to Bolan's own carelessness. Just as the support of his native audience was wavering, his ego burst from the pressures of fame and increasing drug abuse. He had missed his chance, and never got another. His few Yankee fans worried that the man unfairly derided as bubblegum by prog-leaning audiences and DJs would have his vital contributions reduced to his lone U.S. hit, filed next to Wild Cherry in the stacks. And with the exception of a devoted cult, that's exactly how the States still see him.
Leave it to the saints at Rhino Records to preserve yet another precious slice of our musical heritage. They've now reissued T.Rex's Electric Warrior, the first and best of a trio of brilliant albums. Its two successors-- The Slider (1972) and Tanx (1973)-- have nearly vanished from music shops, and with a comprehensive best-of collection now available, Electric Warrior seemed destined to follow them into the void. Thankfully, this catastrophe has been averted: Bolan may have been known for his singles, but his albums-- and this one in particular-- deserve to be heard in their entirety.
For those hunting down the singles, Electric Warrior does contain the immortal "Bang a Gong (Get it On)", but that's neither the only nor the best reason to pick it up. What makes this record so enduring is its almost accidental emotional depth: When T.Rex is kicking out the jams, they sound like they're having the most gleeful, absurd good time ever committed to wax. There's nothing so glorious in rock and roll as hearing Bolan croon, "Just like a car, you're pleasing to behold/ I'll call you Jaguar if I may be so bold," over his namesake boogie.
The most significant aspect of Electric Warrior isn't its arena rock confidence; it's that Bolan allows his grinning mask to slip. With the incomparable aid of producer Tony Visconti, Bolan sketches a vast, empty room, where, after the party's over, he resides alone, wide-eyed and desperate. On ballads like "Cosmic Dancer", "Monolith" and "Girl", he speaks in the same gibberish as elsewhere, but he's clearly haunted-- by what we can't say. But the gaping, searing question mark that comes at the conclusion of the album-- guitar feedback paired with a string section, holding a shivering and very ambivalent cluster of notes-- is just one of many clues that there's more to Electric Warrior than its surface lets on. This is not simply a man who plays party songs because he wants to: This is a man who plays party songs to fend off darkness.
For this reissue, Rhino remastered the original tapes and added seven bonus tracks (six songs and an interview). The updated sound is a modest improvement over the first-generation CD, but no news is good news, recalling those hotly contested Iggy Pop and Velvet Underground remasters. Though the sound could've been polished more, it's most important that the production hasn't been inflated. Electric Warrior wouldn't be the same album with the meaty tone of The Slider, with all its shadows and doubt chased away or ignored.
The bonus tracks range from decent to very good: "Raw Ramp" stands out for the lurid line, "Woman, I love your chests/ Baby, I'm crazy 'bout your breasts," but none of them are as revealing as the interview, during which a thoughtful Bolan reveals that the album was a self-conscious attempt to win the attention of America. And because he had precious little time to accomplish everything he wanted to, there was a sense of urgency, that if he was ever going to take over the States, he had to do it immediately.
It's a devastating interview, considering how his ambitions deteriorated into addiction soon after, but it offers keen insight into Bolan's mindset at that moment when he seemed poised to finally conquer the entire world. In fact, what makes Rhino's reissue wonderful is that it reminds us of that excitement with its every detail, presenting Electric Warrior to U.S. shores with the love and fanfare it always deserved but never received. It's bittersweet adulation for a tragically lost hero, but as the saying goes, better late than never.


This baroque pop record is pleasant and roomy, but peer inside to find a fragmented portrait of heartbreak shared by the band’s cofounders.

Mystery Hour

At first blush, Mystery Hour seems like a nice sophomore effort from Pavo Pavo, a five-piece with a tight, winsome, and dewy approach to psych-pop. It’s not hard to fall for their baroque synthesizer flourishes or the occasional dramatic trill of strings. Cofounder Eliza Bagg, who sings in prestigious new music circles, has consummate control over her soprano; her counterpart, the accomplished string arranger Oliver Hill, isn’t afraid to get weird with his harmonies. The music can sound plucked from some fever dream scenario where She & Him front Spiritualized. When Pavo Pavo were recording Mystery Hour, they were inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou and Breathless, and these songs certainly sport the put-on chic sensibility of the French New Wave.
But what separates Mystery Hour from simply being “pretty” stems from its backstory—the lyrics to be explored, the tension they impart. Mystery Hour documents the breakup of Bagg and Hill, who started Pavo Pavo while students at Yale. So how do you write and sing about how your heart hurts when the cause is in the room? For Pavo Pavo, now based both in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, the songwriting duties were, well, split up. There are Bagg songs and Hill songs—with the exception of the opening title track, the last tune written for this album. “Mystery Hour” hinges on the idea of feeling listlessly unhappy in a relationship to the point of recoiling: “Mon chéri, I’m designed to be unsatisfied,” goes the hook. This unrest pushes against the song’s aura, which radiates warmth through multiple guitars drenched in fuzz. Bagg and Hill effortlessly harmonize while the noise builds around them, glowing like the golden hour in the desert.
Pavo Pavo’s exploration of a relationship’s dissolution is most potent near the record’s midpoint. This constellation of songs finds Bagg and Hill doing their most intimate writing, examining the paint chips of their relationship through poetics and airy composition. This intimacy is never explicit, always lingering on the horizon. Take “Check the Weather,” a song that is fussy in its baroque pop prowess. Bagg follows Hill’s lead here, complementing his narration with a series of misty oohs and ahs. Synths burble like a water fountain, the twin guitars arpeggiated into oblivion. “I’m stuck in your indecision/Pass the bread,” they sing together, a gut-punching line that is so quotidian and delivered so nonchalantly it stings. For “Close to Your Ego,” largely about longing and feeling fed up, Pavo Pavo decide that, when the going gets tough, you ought to offer the sexiest guitar break you’ve got. A polychromatic riff starts out rigid then tumbles through a wormhole of reverb, becoming shaggier as time wrings itself out.
Pavo Pavo’s interest in getting psychedelic can occasionally inch toward kitsch. “Statue Is a Man Inside,” for instance, sounds like it belongs in the opening credits of an arthouse B-movie, streamed after sparking a bowl. The song pulls in elements of astral Pink Floyd and bloated psych atmospheres. “Bleached in the sun/Amid the sandstars/I’ll be fine/Statue is a man inside,” goes one emblematically wacky line. But for the most part, Mystery Hour is a quietly poetic record that explores the stuff of life, love, and loss with a clear head.
There are no explicitly messy endings on this album: No furniture is moved. No plates are shattered. No one leaves the apartment at two in the morning in tears. Mystery Hour instead makes the difficult and deliberate decision to conceal a fair amount of the split, like ABBA’s The Visitors. These 11 songs have the overstuffed quality of roomy indie pop that can easily play in the background of an iPad commercial or happy hour at a hip bar. But peek inside: Beneath all the niceties, there’s an orb of heartbreak deep enough to pump blood into your blues.


More than 30 years into their career, the Australian experimental trio can still make the mundane feel miraculous.

Three

The Australian trio The Necks has spent over 30 years perfecting a strange sense of locomotion. Drawing on the intersecting traditions of jazz, improvisation, and ambient music, they’ve crafted an ultra-minimal music so obsessed with repetition it can feel like it’s standing still. Bassist Lloyd Swanton prefers a road-trip metaphor: Moving at high speed through a vast, unchanging landscape, it’s hard to notice the moment-to-moment differences in your surroundings. “But then you concentrate on something else for half an hour,” Swanton explains, “And when you look up you realize things have changed completely.” Their music makes the case for the virtues of patience and stillness as a listener. You can’t know exactly when or where the moments of novelty will come from, but there is a pleasure in knowing that they will eventually, and learning to love your surroundings until then.
Three—a triptych of 20-plus minute tracks—does nothing to alter their approach. It is slow, winding, and meditative, composed almost entirely of piano, bass, and drums, and builds outwards from minimal meanderings to overgrown thickets of instrumentation. Though there are instrumental flourishes here and there—a bit of feedback, a synthesizer, and an organ or two—relative to the mutant-rock squalls of 2018’s Body, this is more familiar territory for the band.
The closing track “Further” is in a lot of ways the prototypical Necks piece. It’s luxuriantly arranged, built around Chris Abrahams’ weightless piano lines that increase in density and intensity as the track goes on. There’s no post-rock catharsis or free-jazz climax, just a slow journey through parts unknown. It unfolds so gradually and delicately that you hardly notice that they eventually abandon the piano for the celestial hum of an organ, and then slowly phase both ideas together, into an arrangement more vibrant than you would have thought possible at the track’s plodding outset. Swanton has said that this track was a self-conscious attempt at evoking the band’s earlier albums, but each added layer and slow change still feels like an accident of physics more than any conscious choice.
The record’s other two pieces, though different in tone, are united in approach. “Bloom” is more active, tense with snowballing momentum and potential energy. “Lovelock,” by contrast, is more sparse and distant, suffused with grief for the band’s friend Damien Lovelock of the band the Celibate Rifles, who died in 2019. Each is a slight variation on the themes that the band has explored over the course of their career, and it’s easy to look down on such single-mindedness. But when you get 15 minutes deep into one of these pieces and realize that a few aimless-feeling piano lines have suddenly coalesced into an impossibly lush environment, you can see why they’ve spent so long pursuing the same ideas. They’ve developed the ability to make the mundane feel miraculous.

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Recorded in the space of a few months, the electronic pop duo’s latest album takes a diffuse, improvisational approach that rarely sharpens into anything concrete.

No Rules Sandy

In the past, you could turn over a Sylvan Esso song in your mind and uncover something new: a wobble of bass buried in the beat, a cutting line—“Now don’t you look good sucking American dick?”—tucked into the rhythm. Their new project, No Rules Sandy, is more diffuse. They announced the album by playing it in its entirety at this year’s Newport Folk Festival, an apt moment for a duo that’s long sought to fuse electronic pop with its folk roots (singer Amelia Meath is also one third of Mountain Man). On the group’s last album, 2020’s Free Love, the combination occasionally fused into something sublime: “Numb” felt like an inadvertent anthem for pandemic doldrums, with nervously skittering beats and Meath’s repeated entreaties to move the body in any way at all, so long as it “let me feel something.”
Meath and producer Nick Sanborn have described No Rules Sandy as a work of improvisation and experiment, recorded primarily in three weeks at a rented studio in east Los Angeles earlier this year. It is their most discordant album yet, spanning dance tracks, several brief interludes, and an acoustic ballad. Perhaps it could all work if each song had more sticking power; instead, the common denominator is a curated sense of dissociation. Hazy beats accompany Meath’s smeared vocals on “How Did You Know” as she seems to observe herself from outside: “When did I learn to raise myself?…Who was she to carry me?” The questioning continues on “Your Reality,” a track about fumbling at normalcy: “Let me remember how to live my life,” Meath sings over pattering synth and stabs of violin. “Were there rules originally/Or are we learning how to be/Surreal but free?” The hiccups in her voice open staccato blips of empty space, as if the syllables have snagged on something.
Even when Sylvan Esso aim for specificity, No Rules Sandy feels like it’s in the process of dissolving. The shortest of the album’s four interludes is less than 10 seconds, just muffled footsteps, buzzing cicadas, and Meath’s birdlike greeting call: “Yoo-hoo!” As if to underscore the immediacy of its creation, it’s titled “(Betty’s, May 4, 2022)”—a reference to Sylvan Esso’s North Carolina recording studio. Nestled between the swirling flutes of “How Did You Know” and prickly synth chords of “Didn’t Care,” the effect is less a sense of atmosphere than that of momentary displacement. Another interlude, “(Bad Fills),” is twice the length, a patchwork of vocals and vague studio chatter (“Good fills or bad fills?”) that pitches up and accelerates with the cartoonish feel of a video game.
Chaos and free play are the point—a theory that animates some of the best electronic music, but feels limp here. No Rules Sandy includes some of Sylvan Esso’s sleekest, and in some ways, most sterile, production: Songs like “Didn’t Care,” “Sunburn,” and “Alarm” seem to announce their quirks as a defense mechanism. The catchiest track, “Echo Party,” combines Meath’s signature hiccup, a baby-voiced echo, and a popcorning synth into a propulsive dance anthem. But remove the warble of distortion after the chorus, or the minute-long interval that Meath spends repeating the word “by,” and it’s a generic club track. “There’s a lot of people dancing downtown/Yeah, we all fall down,” she sings.
Despite the burst of creativity that inspired it, No Rules Sandy lacks urgency. The songs that do sharpen into concrete images evaporate rather than carry their metaphors forward. On “Sunburn,” Meath lists aspects of the beach—the tide, the air, the blisters that swell on sun-baked skin—over a shimmery, shuffling beat. “Alarm” unfolds like a free association about the concept of alarms in general (ringing, false) while guitar and synth chatter in the background. This is music to float along to, fodder for Park Hang playlists. There’s only one moment when a sense of danger creeps in, a rare emotional anchor for all this experimentation. “Death is near/Cram the night with feelings,” Meath lilts on “Moving,” over glitchy, shifting beats. Any feeling will do, any pulse of emotion—none of it, Sylvan Esso seem to say, means very much.


The Memphis alt-country lifers return with an endearing and impassioned album about drinking and the many reasons we do it.

Should’ve Learned by Now

Lucero’s dozenth album opens with drummer Roy Berry banging away on a cowbell, as though this Memphis band is about to launch into a sped-up “Honkytonk Women” or maybe a slowed-down “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” Even before Ben Nichols starts singing about a chatty drunk ruining his whiskey neat, you know exactly where you are: You’re back at the bar. It’s the band’s natural environment, and at a moment when bar bands are an endangered species, it’s nice to find them holding down a stool on opener “One More F.U.” Inverting the sentimentality of Tom Waits’ teary barfly laments from the early ’70s, Lucero sound punchy, itching for a fight: “It wasn’t like I came here thinking, ‘Man, this bar is great to drink in’,” Nichols declares before telling himself, “It’s one more ‘fuck you,’ that’s it and I’m gone.” It’s one of his snappiest lyrics, but he knows he’s kidding himself. He’ll be hanging out for a few more rounds, a few more F.U.’s, and nine more songs.
After a handful of albums that prioritized southern gothic atmosphere over southern rock riffs, Lucero are back where they started. They’ve been playing barstool blues and ballads for 25 years now, cutting their teeth in the very joints they sing about and surviving even when most bars have replaced rock bands with jukeboxes or, worse, DJs. While Nichols still insists on referring to the women in his songs as “little girl,” there’s something impressive, even endearing about their longevity. Like the Hold Steady and the Drive-By Truckers—two other unkillable bands associated with the bar-rock trend of the 2000s—Lucero are still making solid albums that expand their catalogs in unexpected ways. Road dogs can learn new tricks, as the Moogs and moodiness of 2018’s Among the Ghosts and 2021’s When You Found Me proved.
Despite the suggestion of self-reckoning in its title, Should’ve Learned by Now is nothing so dramatic as a comeback or a return to form. Instead, they’re continuing to sharpen old ideas and update familiar themes. This is an album about drinking and the many reasons you do it: celebrating and commiserating, numbing yourself or finding perspective, getting your heart broken or breaking someone else’s. Lucero will even raise a glass to bad weather: The frantic “Macon If We Make It” is about waiting out a hurricane in some Florida watering hole while hoping you can get far enough inland before the worst of it hits. “At the Show,” on the other hand, captures the relatively innocent excitement of playing your first gigs at a venue you’re barely old enough to patronize. It’s simply sweet rather than bittersweet, as Nichols sings about catching the eye of a young woman in the crowd and the band conveys the thrill of youthful self-expression.
During their quarter-century together, Lucero have kept essentially the same lineup, beginning as a vocals-guitar-bass-drums quartet before adding multi-instrumentalist Rick Steff. Berry, still one of the most inventive drummers around, allows the band to be slippery, shifting tempo on a dime but never making a big deal of it (they’re a bar band, after all). Steff adds flourishes of E Street piano and Hi Rhythm organ, injecting these songs with a wryness that bounces off Nichols’ lyrics. On “Nothing’s Alright,” a breakup song that plays up the ambiguity of the title phrase, Lucero build tension and drama in small lurches from the rhythm section and sideways glances from Brian Venable’s guitar. There’s no rising action, no traditional crescendo; instead, you just find yourself in the midst of some emotional turmoil, the way a bad memory can come out of nowhere to sour your day.
Lucero have never been known for cracking jokes, but what really distinguishes Should’ve Learned by Now from their previous barroom musings is the humor in these songs. Nichols and the band are alive to the little ironies and indignities that anyone faces while searching for the bottom of a bottle. “Half of what runs through my head is bullshit I sell to myself,” Nichols explains on the title track. “And the other half ain’t well thought out.” And Steff plays his accordion solo on closer “Time to Go Home” with what sounds like an arched eyebrow and a shake of the head, as though he’s asked for Nichols’ keys too many times. They’re always the butt of their own jokes, which makes them good company for a late night but also makes these songs hit a little harder the next morning.


The Toronto noise-pop duo specialize in harsh music and heavy topics. Their latest record can be lighthearted, but the resentment at its heart feels more outwardly pointed than ever.

Forget Your Own Face

As Black Dresses, Ada Rook and Devi McCallion took an unfortunately typical trajectory for trans women online: Rising out of the Bandcamp trenches to cult success and media attention, they broke up under an onslaught of harassment and misinterpretation from fans. But they kept releasing music anyway, continuing their streak of nuanced, heartfelt, and brutally inaccessible industrial noise-pop. “U_u2,” the opener of their new album Forget Your Own Face, feels more disorienting than usual, trading their increasingly effective hooks for brutal screaming and disses like, “You got this record deal but you’re so ugly!” It’s a lighter, less introspective affair from a duo that came to prominence with songs about surviving childhood abuse and living with transphobia. Forget Your Own Face is both their slightest album to date, and maybe the most essential to understanding why Black Dresses keep making music.
There’s distortion as always, but the production feels cleaner, with less emphasis on speaker-destroying bass. It leaves more room to hear the camaraderie between the two members, particularly when McCallion’s tender vocal fry and Rook’s screams go head-to-head on “Let’s Be.” “No Normal” is another standout in this regard, with call-and-response vocals and frantic drums that make good on the group’s stated Linkin Park influence—it’s like “Faint” combined with the stimulant of your choice. Songs like “No Normal” and “Money Makes You Stupid” prove Black Dresses can do nostalgia and goofiness as well as anyone, but they incorporate it seamlessly into their own aggressively blown-out sound.
For a band that often writes about internalized shame and self-loathing, the resentment at the heart of this record feels more outwardly pointed. The delivery is as furious as ever, preoccupied with the frustration of not being properly seen, and the futility of being recognized in a world rife with backlash against trans people. “Try to hope/Try to bear your soul/No choice but degenerate faggot mode,” Rook barks on “Let’s Be”; “T-shirt slogan/I’m a T-shirt slogan/I’m a meme, I know it,” McCallion cries on “No Normal.” On top of online stress, there’s the lingering trauma they’ve spent their time as Black Dresses dissecting. McCallion sounds exhausted when, at the close of “u_u2,” she admits she fails to see a future where she isn’t “fucked up by the past.”
The album’s second half puts that anger to good use. On “Money Makes You Stupid” and “Gay Ugly and Hard to Understand,” Black Dresses take aim at the pandering attitude and self-conscious zaniness of so much current pop culture. On “Hard to Understand,” McCallion makes a deadpan dedication to “New York City drag balls in the ’90s before RuPaul made being gay uncool,” then launches into a diatribe that imagines her early punk demos landing her a Roadrunner Records contract, complete with a Travis Barker feature. The petty antagonism towards Barker-endorsed modern pop-punk is based in a genuine fear: that the same commodification that defanged punk rock will come for hyperpop, while the genre’s actual progenitors get bullied offline. Yet it’s ultimately not the fame or credit Black Dresses want, just the support and comfort: “I want the gentleness that only you were offered/I want a peaceful life.”
Closing track “Nightwish” explores this desire more fully, returning to the softer pop sound heard on “Creep U” and “Bloom” as Rook laments that “people never see the side of you you want to be.” Together, Black Dresses discuss what to do with this project of theirs and decide to carry on creating for its own sake: “Let’s meet back here again/We can do a little show/We can sing a couple songs/We can fight over how the songs go.” “Let’s just have—,” McCallion begins, and then, as if remembering the countless trolls and TikTok kids watching, she corrects herself: “Let’s just still try to have fun.” With the distortion stripped away, the heart of the group is laid bare: just two trans women trading verses and finding solace in one another when it feels like there’s no escape, online or off.


At 21, the London rapper Little Simz raps with a shapeshifting hardness and ragged sense of spiritual burden that brings to mind Lauryn Hill and Kendrick Lamar. Both Lamar and J. Cole have cosigned her, and her debut is a tense, terse concept album wrestling with her sense of destiny.

Little Simz: A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons

A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons

Little Simz, the rapper from North London born Simbi Ajikawo, is starlike in many ways, including a strict one: having dropped eight mixtapes since 2013, she burns off energy at a colossal, dangerous rate. A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons is Little Simz’s first full-length album, and it marks a change from the catholic, unfurling experiments in her mixtapes. This is a tense, terse concept album: The tracks roll forward in one dark, uniform palette, each providing a different answer to a single line of questioning, as laid out by Simz in the opening track. Technically, she’s phenomenal: She revs up almost off-handedly, like she’s jumping rope, and she seamlessly shifts in and out of her singing voice like Drake. Twinning her meter almost classically, she spits: "They told her women cannot call themselves kings/ They told her fame isn’t made for everyone."
The album that follows is, in effect, a snarling refutation. She might not be a king, but she is certainly a prince, with cosigns from Kendrick Lamar, A$AP Rocky, and J. Cole, among others. She’s got fame in her crosshairs, and likely the other way around, too, but the defining note of Trials + Persons is one of ambivalence. Simz seems engaged with the naysayers—"This the type of music that ain’t never gonna sell/ Well, you should’ve never ever told me that," she repeats, in two separate songs—but her real fight is within herself. At 21, she raps with a shapeshifting hardness and ragged sense of spiritual burden that brings to mind Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick too.
Trials + Persons was recorded for free in the London Red Bull studio, and released on Simz' own label, Age 101, a corporate liberation that allowed her to make this 35-minute debut essentially hit one reverberating note. With the bigger producers and broader hooks a label might’ve asked for—even a single bright major chord, just once—Simz, an explosively skilled rapper, could’ve landed straight in the center. But instead, she’s keeping her talent under her own strict control, which means, by one calculus, curbing it. Instead of an album spiked with a big banging single, she offers a looping, obsessively focused experience, with her words providing structure and the pulsing orchestral instrumentation coming second. With a few exceptions, like the unprocessed drums and whining electric guitar on "Full or Empty", the album is a fugue state, unbroken and undifferentiated. It’s dark, but not impenetrable; Simz’s charisma keeps it lit in here, like headlights barreling around the corners of a dark room.
As a writer, though, Simz is less virtuosic. The album’s language is intelligent but wholly straightforward, rarely witty and almost device-less; Simz always says exactly what she means. She’s an original in stance, then, rather than substance or specifics, turning over her central dilemma from different angles, switching between personas from song to song. In "Gratitude", she imagines herself stuck at home with children; in "Tainted" (her "Backseat Freestyle"), she introduces her character and then jumps into a voice of a stone-cold, dead-eyed, alpha bitch. "God Bless Mary" is dedicated to her aggrieved neighbor (though it carries that "Zion"-esque double reading), and it takes palpable effort for Simz to step outside herself; she can conjecture nothing about Mary’s life except the woman’s reaction to this record.
In a way, the album feels radically personal: Simz is her own primary subject, and as a result is necessarily exposed. But the soul of the album is abstracted. Other people are totally figural, practically hypothetical. There are almost no specific objects, no physical places, no set decoration whatsoever. It’s just curtains pulling back on a spotlight and Simz wrestling with her ambitions like Jacob with the angel, reaching no conclusions but activating something deep.


The Hamburg DJ applies the energy of her spine-tingling DJ sets to a suggestively lo-fi set of acid-soaked electro-techno jams.

Helena Hauff: Have You Been There, Have You Seen It EP

Helena Hauff is drawn to a very specific set of sounds. The Hamburg-based DJ and producer is obsessed with the subaquatic experimentations of James Stinson and Drexciya, and she is equally enthralled by Kurt Cobain’s misanthropic grit. “I’m looking for the perfect sound,” Hauff said in an interview last summer: something “grainy and rough and a bit fucked up. But the sound isn’t my first priority; my first priority is the energy of a track.” Hauff’s energy in her acclaimed DJ sets knows no bounds, and it has resonated. In the past two years, her profile has risen considerably, particularly considering her origins with the Golden Pudel, the deeply underground, decidedly bohemian Hamburg club where she cut her teeth: She earned a coveted residency on BBC Radio 1 and delivered a knockout Essential Mix for the same platform earlier this year, not to mention her blistering closing set at this year’s Dekmantel festival and a proper reissue of her 2015 scorched-beat cassette A Tape.
Hauff’s productions overlap with her artistry in the DJ booth, but Helena Hauff the DJ and Helena Hauff the producer are distinct in intent and execution. While Hauff’s DJ persona lights up clubs with wall-shaking, laser-like beats, breakneck tempos, and gnarly acid lines, as a  producer she is a noisy lo-fi expressionist. On her latest EP, Have You Been There, Have You Seen It, Hauff captures the ironclad force she delivers in her DJ sets while further carving out her own space in the electro landscape, shedding the Detroit techno influence of her debut album, Discreet Desires, and offering four arresting and varied tracks in her dark and unforgiving style.
The opening “Nothing Is What I Know” is a booming, spine-tingling 808 workout, suffused in whispers, that slowly unfolds over seven and a half minutes. Her meandering synth melody feels improvised but fully cooked as both the voice and drums drift in and out of focus. “Do You Really Think Like That?” is far more direct and gritty, grooving through controlled chaos with a clenched-fist bassline. Today, hardware-based techno producers are a dime a dozen, but Hauff’s rugged beats and stylish non-conformity give her a unique voice. Using vintage gear within the rhythmic template of 1990s electro-techno, Hauff admits, “I don’t think I bring anything new to the music. Nothing whatsoever actually...But I don’t see that as a problem.” Rather than being explicitly nostalgic, Hauff uses her self-imposed analog limitations as a mechanism to push herself in the studio, shaping noise and distortion into expressive energy.
“Continuez Mon Enfant Vous Serez Traité en Conséquence” is a bristly and vicious slice of low-slung techno. Here, Hauff’s TR-808 is in overdrive, the distinctive drums sizzling with a fluttery crunch, and the acid bass rumbles with distortion. The slow-mo groove only emphasizes the lo-fi wreckage within. “Continuez” is an excellent example of Hauff pushing her machines to their breaking point, their overloaded circuits screaming under the strain. The closing “Gift” is the highlight of the EP. It’s one of Hauff’s cleanest tracks, where lean, snaking arpeggios provide a delicate counterpoint to the steely, chugging beat. It’s a strong turn for Hauff towards a more refined and straightforward sound that still makes no compromises—and still leaves listeners devastated in its wake.


Looping and manipulating voices into strange, lumbering beatbox fugues, Inga Copeland undercuts expectation at every turn.

Who is experimental music?

“Who is experimental music?” is not an obvious question; the syntax doesn’t quite scan. But then, Inga Copeland (formerly one half of lo-fi weirdo-pop duo Hype Williams, alongside Dean Blunt) has never been much interested in taking the obvious route. And her self-released album Who is experimental music? is as opaque as we have come to expect from the UK musician—even if it does seem to come embedded with elementary questions that might guide its reception. I’m thinking in particular of the second track, “Good or bad,” which attaches that binary value judgment to a dry swirl of manipulated voice that stops and starts, gallops and stutters, in an off-kilter rhythm whose structure is largely elusive. Copeland has previously shown that she knows her way around a song. The Lolina project, though, has always had more to do with the song’s dissolution: bare-bones, stretched-out synth-and-vocal drafts that bear half-cooked traces of club tropes.
On Who is experimental music, the song dissolves altogether. Instead, we’re presented with a succession of vocal exercises—or, rather, manipulations of recorded voice that dance at the fringes of music, or of the voice’s capacity for human connectivity. It doesn’t always take up much space on her recordings, but Lolina’s voice is one of the coolest and most distinctive in this particular corner of experimental electronic music; she half-sings in low tones, often sounding a little passive, like her melodies have been simplified to conserve energy. Her vocals have provided a way to feel close to her music, which is otherwise reasonably abrasive. It’s funny, then, that this set of recordings is, as far as I can tell, a cappella—pure voice—yet for the most part abstracted to the point of unrecognizability: converted into pure, if ramshackle, rhythm.
First, though, there’s space. “Let Go” begins with Copeland intoning that phrase in increasingly echoey iterations separated, at first, by over 10 seconds of silence. The quiet is filled by a looped track of frenetic beatboxing; the sung vocals come unspooled, dissolving into a trail of digital refuse while the rhythm layers and splits in growing chaos. A two-note hint of bass and a lightly melodic “mm-mm-mm” drift the track somewhere a bit clubby, but in its final minutes it rockets back out into less comprehensible territory.
A trio of tracks—“Skipping,” “Glitching,” “Strobing”—plays with their titular effects, warping that beatbox-like vocal line so that it falters and folds in on itself. There are skeletons of beats, with tempos that slow and pick up at will. The title track scrambles a man’s voice over an unidentifiable groove, creating a bouncing tinny soundscape painted over with masculine vocals that glitch to point of sounding like scat singing. It stops mid-scramble, as if someone’s pulled the plug on the entire project.
Questioning what exactly Lolina means by all of this is, by now, well-trodden territory—simply put, she has weird impulses when it comes to sound, and she doesn’t force upon her listeners the conceptual mechanisms that might motivate her choices. If there’s a formal framework here, it’s inelegantly processing the voice until it’s stripped of its affective and authorial capacities, and that loss begets discomfort for the listener. The good/bad binary winked at on the second track doesn’t do us much good. What’s exciting about Lolina’s approach to experimental music is its casualness, not to mention its sense of humor—its blithe indifference to creating value.


The London producer and label boss’ third album responds to a year of uncertainty with a mixture of club-friendly styles and melancholic touches for the lonely wee hours.

Lazy

When he’s not writing music as Mr. Mitch, Miles Mitchell runs a record label (Gobstopper), raises his growing family in southeast London (they welcomed a daughter last April), and holds down a full-time job. When venues are open, he’s one-quarter of the team behind Boxed, one of the most quietly influential club nights that London has produced in the past decade. In 2020, he released two new EPs, including a collaboration with his two young sons (proceeds went towards their video gaming gear), as well as two Bandcamp collections of older, mostly unheard material. All the while, he continued work on Lazy, his third album.
It should be clear that Mr. Mitch is not lazy. But that doesn’t stop a cascade of self-help books, hustlers’ highlight reels, and “carpe diem” Instagram personalities from making him feel like he’s not doing enough. It’s a feeling most people on social media will recognize, one exacerbated by the extra time many of us spent at home and online over the past year. Mr. Mitch writes his music in stolen midnight hours, while the rest of us are doomscrolling until our eyelids give in; when life delivers a new challenge, he writes through it. So it is with Lazy.
On his previous album, 2017’s Devout, Mitchell explored his feelings around fatherhood; 2018’s Primary Progressive EP was his way of working through his own dad’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. Where both of these albums addressed relatively concrete subject matter, Lazy is evasive, flitting about in a sort of mental ecstasy of indecision and unknowns. Musically, the result is a broad scatter of sounds and moods, most of which have a foot firmly planted in clubland: “Black Majik” is a lumbering, acid-dipped Jersey club plod; “Moving Up” offers a lo-fi take on disco. He duets with R&B samples over shining synths on “Proud,” then drops pummelling techno dancehall on “What They Want.” It sounds like the best kind of club set—when the DJ captures the faith of the crowd and then rewards them by darting to newly imagined places.
“Did We Say Goodbye?” is Mr. Mitch’s love letter to shuttered clubs. An evocative music video layers clips from tour life with tweets about what people miss about going out, but the track itself avoids the emotional clichés in favor of a more personal recollection. The drama of the song’s title belies the hopeful lilt in the lead guitar sample; boxy drums and a winding synth line that drifts in near the end conjure memories of indistinct snippets heard through bathroom cubicles. These are small, melancholic touches, and they land delicately. On the title track, veteran grime MC Manga Saint Hilare offers a pep talk—“Just because I love myself a lot, what, now you think that you hate me?”—that’s intimate in its scrappiness.
Dogged by uncertainty last spring, Mitchell thought about abandoning the album. It didn’t feel right. His unease leaks through on the distorted synths of “Sleep” and in the stomach-churning kicks of “Make Time” (where anxious bleeps and high-strung synths hint at the track’s origins in the Primary Progressive era). Mostly, though, Mr. Mitch finds succor in music. When he released “Daydream of Me” (then titled “Daydream of You”) early last June, the song was accompanied by an epigraph: “When the world feels like it’s collapsing around you, sometimes you just need three minutes to realign yourself. I daydream of you.” It doubles as a mantra for Lazy, an understated tonic to the overwhelming everyday.

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The rapper Jimi Tents seems quietly apart from New York City’s hip-hop scene. His debut EP is solid, streamlined, and thoughtful, an introverted and introspective release from a rapper discovering a powerful voice.

5 O'Clock Shadow

Jimi Tents seems like a subdued 19 year old. "I'm depressed and faded," he confesses early on his debut project, a short EP called 5 O'Clock Shadow. That self-medicated crossroads isn't so unique for his age, after all, but the debut's sustained gloom stands out. The release is Tents' lone calling card, and at times he's rightfully fussed with how to frame the project. A couple months after releasing the original 7-track EP the Brooklyn rapper expanded the effort into a full LP of the same name. It seemed like he was testing the waters, and while the album fleshes out a more formal introduction, the streamlined original still carries the best work.
Tents has a breathless baritone that allows him to stretch out long phrases and carry a hook. The production on 5 O'Clock Shadow, overseen by the Vamp, is warm with embedded instrumentation, a brand of soulful easy-listening that begs for the punctuation of a singer. As a rapper Tents sculpts his verses out carefully, sometimes to the unfortunate point of leaning on familiar tropes. Still, he has an obvious sense for structure, and while the EP has several guests they're usually added voices instead of featured characters. On the opener, "The Way," Tents is overly cautious about the prospect of his music career and it's immediately apparent how much pressure he's placed on this outing. It's the Tunji Ige-assisted hook that pulls you in though, a ghostly chant about taking over that hits its mark.
Tents seems quietly apart from New York City's hip-hop scene: geographically he's from way out in East New York, Brooklyn, and figuratively he's adjoined to a crew called SLEEPERcamp, a burgeoning collective taking calculated steps to establish a brand in small doses. (Tents and crewmember Jay Bel were briefly managed by behind-the-scenes TDE coordinator Anthony "Moosa" Tiffith Jr.) The track "All of It" brings in KeithCharles Spacebar of Atlanta's in-the-moment Awful Records, who joins Tents for an uncharacteristic-to-the-project trap sound. It seems like Tents is saying, "I can fit in this lane too," before burrowing back into his own character-building.
"Landslide" is the lone upbeat number here, a cheerful standout that both the EP and Tents use to stay afloat. "Elmer Fudd," Tents' original debut single released almost a year ago, bears out his somberly-executed charms: a knack for melody and precise delivery. "If a body drop in the hood, and no one around, does it make noise?" he asks. The whole debut carries that straight-forward polish; repeated listens won't necessarily bear out lyrical revelations, but the foundation is sound. In that way 5 O'Clock Shadow pulls off a professional introduction like a firm handshake and practiced party chatter, an accomplished first impression more than a winding conversation.


The second album from the singer/producer duo aims for laid-back but stalls out at sleepy.

Cosmic Wind

Cosmic Wind, the sometimes-engaging, often-listless second album from Lion Babe (aka singer Jillian Hervey and producer Lucas Goodman) seems crafted with a fantasy in mind: warm summer night, rooftop overlooking the city, Christmas lights, friends laughing, drinks flowing. The focus is vibe and mood, on allowing yourself to—as Hervey sings on “Never Before”—“Sip slow with my eyes closed/I can feel more when I let it flow.”
Free from their major-label deal, Lion Babe returns to the genial blend of R&B, funk, and mellow electronica of their 2016 debut, Begin. To their credit, Lion Babe don’t seem to be chasing hits anymore, and there are moments on this album—like the Pet Shop Boys-sampling, Raekwon-featuring summer jam “Western World”—that feel truly freed from the constraints of their past work.
The album starts off strong with opener “Cosmic Wind.” Hervey sinks into a warm, bass-heavy groove, her Badu-indebted vocals imploring her subject to tell what’s on his or her mind. She even slips into a throaty rap, proving herself more than capable; when she deploys her rapping on Cosmic Wind, like on the minimalist “Reminisce,” it’s a counterweight to her singing, which sometimes feels on the verge of drifting into sleepy weightlessness.
The album is at its best when the pace picks up, effectively canceling out the duo’s desire to set a mood. Standout “Into Me” is a bouncy and effortless electro-bop that finds Hervey operating like a siren: “Intimacy / sexually / emotionally / financially / spiritually / get into me,” she purrs. On the smoldering “Sexy Please,” Goodman deploys muted double-time drums that call back to voguing balls, and with a pulse beneath her, Hervey allows herself flashes of cheeky personality that are otherwise missing throughout the album.
Many of the tracks on Cosmic Wind, however, are undercut by a lack of energy or a distinct identity. They could have been made by a grab bag of alt-R&B artists over the past decade; they meld warbly bass, predictable chord changes, layered vocal effects and nonsensical lyrics to create enjoyable yet inconsequential experiences. In trying to sound laid-back, Lion Babe wind up sounding nearly anonymous.
Single “Hit the Ceiling” is a prime example. “All night, gotta stay up / And I just can’t get enough / Going out, I’ll see you around / Downtown in the scene,” Hervey sings. Much of the album follows this tendency, gesturing at an idea rather than filling it in. Hervey’s lyrics desperately need a dose of vulnerability or color; she’s about as convincing on the subject of love as Flava Flav. Goodman, for his part, frequently almost gets there with his production—slow jam “Different Planet” features a fat bass line that steer the song toward Timbaland territory but gets stranded in Ginuwine-lite.
It’s all passable, but when compared to the charisma and innovation of peers like Nao and VanJess, both of whom released stellar R&B-indebted, genre-bending projects last year, Lion Babe’s attempts to create a vibe that simply isn’t there come off as hollow. Toeing the line between artful restraint and playing it safe can be difficult, and despite the moments where Lion Babe gets it right, they have a long way to go to set the mood they’re so intent on finding.


This is the second entry in Rufus Wainwright's Want series, which pairs his dreamy voice and droll lyrics to audaciously over-the-top orchestration.

Want Two

Of the four albums Rufus Wainwright has released over the past six years, two of them have been part of the Want series, which pairs his dreamy voice and droll lyrics to audaciously over-the-top orchestration. But Wainwright's inspiration has never quite matched his devotion to the project, and this baroque setting is not entirely suitable for his considerable talents. He has a distinctive voice that imbued his first two albums with an instantly recognizable personality; yet, although he seems suited to show tunes and post-SoCal pop, his voice is lost among the flourishes of harp and harpsichord in the Want series. Even Wainwright's songwriting seems to suffer: his usually sparkling wit seems deadened by the weight of the music; his melodies lag, burdened by the profundity of their mission.
The songs on last year's Want One sounded leaden under their overlush arrangements, and Want Two doesn't improve on that formula. If anything, it is a darker, more meditative sequel, less lively but more fragile and sensitive to the cruelties of a vicious world-- tragedy to its precursor's comedy. The album opens unpromisingly-- almost hostilely-- with the nearly six-minute "Agnus Dei", an overture full of gently pulsating strings and Latin lyrics. The song isn't just singularly dull, but it reveals the weaknesses of these sessions. Wainwright's gauzy vocals aren't particularly suited for this style of melodramatic music and often come across as disaffected or, worse, disengaged. Furthermore, the obsessiveness of his artistic vision often threatens to alienate his listeners through overlong songs and esoteric production.
Fortunately, "The One You Love" quickly corrects the album's course, harking back to Wainwright's first two albums. It blends gently swaying pop with an angelic choir and the dulcimer-like guitar on the chorus, and shows off his gifts for introspective lyrics full of biting wit and for arrangements that are all the more dramatic for being understated. Songs like "This Love Affair", "Gay Messiah", and "Crumb by Crumb"-- which could have come from either of his previous albums-- only reinforce this impression.
However, the Want sensibility-- music as theatrical stage setting-- resurfaces throughout the album: in the recorder melody on "Hometown Waltz", in the chamber strings on "Little Sister", in the eddying instrumentation of the Jeff Buckley eulogy "Memphis Skyline". These songs seem uniformly static. Only the live recording of "The Art Teacher" manages to break form: Over a Philip Glass prism of piano chords, a plaintive horn, and a slightly sped-up tempo, Wainwright tells of a woman remembering her first love, the instructor of the title who turned her on to Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner.
In a sense, the Want project sounds perfectly suited to Wainwright's ability to confront his problems through lyrical witticisms and to intensify all emotions-- especially romantic longings-- to an operatic level. But His tragedies remain exclusively personal; they rarely, if ever, extend to any community, gay or otherwise, and the songs derive some power from their insistently individual scope. On "Waiting for a Dream", Wainwright sings in the first verse: "You are not my lover, and you never will be/ Cause you've never done anything to hurt me." The "Gay Messiah" mixes gay and Christian iconography, but the Savior-- who is "reborn from 1970s porn"-- is Wainwright's own personal Jesus; he even proclaims himself "Rufus the Baptist" and turns the refrain "The gay messiah is coming" into frank wordplay.
Wainwright's obsession and self-destructive tendencies extend to his music as well, sabotaging the Want project but making both albums fascinating, even moving, in a peculiar way. Watching such an undeniably talented artist blindly follow such an errant muse can be endlessly compelling, and the failure of these two albums to capture his visions and ambitions with any adequacy possesses the pull of true tragedy. This doesn't necessarily elevate the music, but it does present Wainwright as both the fated tragic hero and the sexually ambiguous victim of the two album covers and it does recast the project as a small triumph within an extended train wreck.


On a warm and crisp new album, the Texas indie-pop duo takes up the mantle of adulthood while remaining preoccupied with the nature of memory and longing.

True Love

There’s an unnamable edge to memory, an agitating pleasure in reviving the thorniest parts of our past. To remember what’s painful, or banal, is to protect against the slog of the present, the mundanity of growing up. It’s within this blurry psychological terrain that indie-pop duo Hovvdy thrive. Will Taylor and Charlie Martin sing longingly of what’s lost and what remains, of the small moments that can epitomize a life: driving alongside your significant other in silence, watching YouTube videos in bed, playing catch with your friends in the front yard. This may sound like typical indie-rock adolescent fetishizing, but the candid reflexivity in Hovvdy’s songwriting and instrumentation guards against oversentimentality. They’re not stuck in the past; they’re moving forward, craning their necks back to see what’s been left behind.
On their fourth album, True Love, Taylor and Martin tame the tremors of youth by embracing their adult commitments. “Even though it’s hard to/I will surely move along,” goes a line on the album’s opener, “Sometimes,” summoning a mantra I’ve likely employed a dozen times over the last year. On “One Bottle,” Taylor laments the distance he feels from his partner while he’s on the road: “If it rings you know it’s me/Talking, words can’t tell you how I miss you.” Even when Hovvdy root into the present, the memory of easier times infects their experience, staining the songs with sanguine ambience. True Love doesn’t so much shirk nostalgia as recontextualize it, transfiguring well-worn memories from longings into lessons, a soil from which to potentially grow.
In a quasi-departure from the lo-fi minimalism of 2016’s Taster and 2018’s Cranberry, True Love flaunts a more dappled and spirited production, an enthusiastic verve also heard sporadically on 2019’s Heavy Lifter. Co-produced and engineered by Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Bon Iver), True Love is full of joyful piano and bright acoustic guitars, a soundscape as crisp and lush as a beer on a late summer’s night. Often, Hovvdy use these warm backdrops as canvases to explore personal growth. “Hue,” an ode to Taylor’s newborn daughter, revels in the insecurity of parenthood: “Am I strong enough for two?/Can I love me like I love you?” On “I Never Wanna Make You Sad,” Martin tries to “lift up” his partner from the depths of his own low. In Hovvdy’s world, vulnerability is cherished and honesty is paramount, though a refrain of “we’ll be alright” or “I love you so much” usually resolves any lingering tension.
This relentless optimism can get distracting. A captivating discomfort lingers on the periphery of Hovvdy’s best work—a knack for locating obscure, difficult feelings, like the placid disillusionment of Heavy Lifter’s “Ruin (my ride)” or the blistering self-pity on Cranberry’s “Brave.” On True Love, generalization occasionally replaces emotional acuity; sing-along hooks substitute for more daring forays into sound or subject. And while Taylor and Martin’s earworm melodies and vocal charisma are satisfying, the record’s resolutory definitiveness sacrifices the delightful ambiguity found throughout their catalog.
One of the album’s strongest moments arrives near the end, on “Junior Day League.” Driving through the country, Taylor shakes off his reticence and finds nostalgia in the present, making meaning out of what’s right in front him: “How you move so patiently, feel your light fade into me/Turn into a memory.” Hovvdy are still craning their necks back to the past, but on True Love they cruise the open road, porous and wide-eyed in the face of new beginnings.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Capping off the Ho trilogy, Flo Milli flexes and shines on some of her best songs yet, even if the album is a little uneven.

Fine Ho, Stay

Who knows what this album would’ve sounded like if Flo Milli hadn’t posted that TikTok last September, fanning out a stack of bills in a sparsely appointed condo, grills glinting as she rapped: “He speed in the Wraith while his hand on my coochie/He touching Emilio Pucci.”
Flo had already released one single, “Fruit Loop,” with another, “Chocolate Rain,” set to drop that week. Those two songs, along with the October single “BGC,” were produced by the up-and-coming Young Fyre, who had previously co-produced Flo’s vindictively bratty bop “Conceited.” According to an interview with Rolling Stone last year, Fyre produced at least 10 tracks for Flo’s “vulnerable” follow-up to 2022’s You Still Here, Ho?
None of those songs appear on Fine Ho, Stay. It’s easy to imagine how the viral success of “Never Lose Me” might have upended the Alabama rapper’s rollout—picture a mid-level label manager breathlessly recounting the metrics to her team, previously closed budgets suddenly reopening. Fine Ho, Stay is accordingly expensive, laced with beats by established hitmakers like Bangladesh, ATL Jacob, and Lex Luger, and offers some of Flo’s best songs yet. It’s a worthy closer to the trilogy set off by 2020’s Ho, why is you here ?, but it’s hard to shake the sensation that Flo Milli can make a better album than this.
That’s mostly thanks to Flo Milli herself, whose nimble flows curl anodyne ideas into pleasingly irregular shapes. On “Edible,” a particularly gifted lover doesn’t make Flo feel perfect or flawless, but “impeccable”; the strobing start-stop of “Tell Me What You Want” will likely leave you muttering “Men like to talk and I hate it” for weeks. Her syncopated flows handspring and pitter-patter towards vivid phrases and sticky earworms, as on the double-dutch trap anthem “Got the Juice,” where Flo alternates hot and cold: “I’m so confusing, he can’t tell if I’m in love or if I’m using/I just lost my eater damn, let’s get to recruiting.”
Speaking of eaters, Fine Ho, Stay is almost exclusively focused on sexual competition. Milli still flexes the karats in her watch and a minor caravan of luxury vehicles, but she’s more concerned with her harem, in particular the assets they offer—cash, comfort, cunnilingus. On “Neva,” Flo makes “a rich nigga go broke”; on “New Me,” she sizes up the guy’s whole friend group to make sure she fucks the hottest one. The hoes bear few to no distinguishing traits, a cast of NPCs who exist solely to confirm the intensity of Milli’s sex appeal.
These nondescript liaisons begin to blur together as the album wears on. Flo has described her raps as “playful nursery rhymes,” but the immediacy of her straightforward approach loses its charm in repetition, particularly compared to her contemporaries. Where Glorilla might “stomp a lil pussy ho with some shell toes” and Sexyy Red flexes the “thong all up in my bootyhole,” Flo Milli’s threats and sexcapades feel perfunctory. Although musically she’s closer to Megan Thee Stallion, Flo’s frisky phrasing recalls the radio-friendly sex talk of Ariana Grande on “positions.”
You can also see hints of Grande in the album’s hedonistic approach to gender relations. Milli doesn’t need these men (except when she’s lonely) and she’s 100 percent for the girls (until she wants your man). These mild hypocrisies mark plenty of rap albums—Playboi Carti and Drake both bounce between a tough exterior and the occasional admission of weakness—but Flo Milli comes off more muddled than multifaceted. As good as the minor-key shuffle of “Neva” gets, Milli undercuts her hook (“Never in my life will I change the way I am”) before the end of the first verse, rapping, “Back then I was hungry but I changed when the mils came.” And this hook about never switching up comes just two songs after “New Me,” where an ex-flame “say he fucked the old bitch this a new me.”
These incongruities might be tolerable if it weren’t for the album’s syrupy lovergirl moments. Harmonious “Can’t Stay Mad” makes for well-executed Sweetener karaoke, but it’s not as fun as hearing Milli smirk, “Know I’m conceited/I had to block a nigga for a reason” on plugg-y standout “Toast” a track earlier. Worst of all is the saccharine “Lay Up,” which funnels 2014-era Nicki Minaj balladry through a bed of whirring synths. “This the real me,” Flo intones at the start. Cool, but who have we been listening to for the last eight songs?
Flo Milli clearly has her own experiences to draw from, even if she prefers not to bare her soul. “Life Hack” strikes a balance between genuine tenderness and pragmatic stoicism—you believe that Flo genuinely regrets leaving this man and that she won’t let him play in her face. Closing track “Not Sorry” is less forlorn, but still packs an emotional wallop thanks to Flo’s fastidious detailing of a floundering relationship. Dating in your early 20s is chaotic and contradictory, but the idiosyncrasies of these songs feel more lived-in than either “Lay Up” or “Can’t Stay Mad.”
The untidiness of Fine Ho, Stay suggests a fundamental uncertainty about the leading lady at its center. Actually, it’s worse than that. Fine Ho, Stay suggests that even a hyper-charismatic star with an established fanbase and a bona fide smash isn’t immune to label meddling. Naturally, the nucleus of the album is “Never Lose Me,” refreshed with a pair of excellent verses by SZA and Cardi B. Both are in rare form, SZA mirroring the construction of Flo’s hook and Cardi rattling off hilarious one-liners (“I got a round ass, I don’t think the Earth flat”). Too bad Flo Milli’s practically nowhere to be found: Her viral verses are truncated to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it four bars. It’s an egregious misstep that betrays an inexplicable lack of faith in the artist who made the song in the first place—a coronation with no heir in sight.


The Swedish violinist’s first album-length recording as a solo artist confirms both her uncompromisingly experimental instincts and substantial musical gifts.

Flock

For a classical music recitalist, focusing almost exclusively on contemporary, experimental material requires multiple forms of courage. Most obvious among the challenges is the fact that new works are rarely as crowd-pleasing as the vintage hits. And there are additional dangers to be navigated: When presenting cutting-edge works that might seek to subvert the audience’s understanding of an instrument, a soloist risks allowing listeners to come away thinking that the playing isn’t all that impressive.
Violinist Karin Hellqvist doesn’t just brave these roiling waters. She seems to enjoy being submerged in them. She’s secure in her art, and doesn’t need an audience to be constantly thinking about her virtuosity. On Flock, her first album-length recording as a solo artist, Hellqvist takes her time before showing off her chops. But when the fast, arpeggiated patterns of composer Henrik Strindberg’s “Femte strängen” (“The Fifth String”) finally appear, as the third track on this daring, engaging record, they merely confirm a fact that close listeners will have already identified—namely, that Hellqvist is a player of substantial gifts.
One of those gifts is a subtle feel for bow pressure. During “Femte strängen”—a piece that has some of the profound, minimalist calm of Arvo Pärt’s music—Hellqvist resists the temptation to join fast-flowing riffs with more dramatically forceful sound production. The result is a kind of airy, pensive calm, even during the more animated passages. By showing this kind of restraint, the violinist makes sure that when a composition gear-shifts into a new level of dynamic intensity, the change really smacks you in the face.
That ability to make even minute variations in intensity register as big events underlies the first two tracks on Flock. Both Carola Bauckholt’s “Doppelbelichtung” (“Double Exposure”) and Jan Martin Smørda’s “flock foam fume” are texture-first compositions. This is electroacoustic music heavily influenced by early musique concrete, using field recordings of birds (in the first case) and layers of pre-recorded sound (in the second) to create delicate forms of drama. Some of the scraping textures might tempt you to ask, “Is this even violin playing?”
The short answer is, sure—though this isn’t contemporary classical music you can put on while cooking. You probably shouldn’t even try to listen on earbuds; any ambient sound from your environment that intrudes into these pieces has the power to cover up some fine detail. Yet despite the hothouse-flower delicacy of these soundscapes, they reward close attention, thanks in part to Hellqvist’s sensitivity as a player.
The track that closes the album—“Sagittarius A*,” by Natasha Barrett—is decidedly the highlight. Barrett is an international star in the niche contemporary-music circuit of “spatialized sound.” (Think surround sound, squared, with dozens of channels of sound refracted in high-density speaker arrays, around an audience.) While she’s a specialist when it comes to using newfangled programs to disperse and spin sound in ultra-high-tech environments, she’s also just a flat-out interesting composer—a trait that comes across well in a two-channel stereo recording of this extended work.
Over its 29-minute span, the piece has something like a three-act structure. Seemingly beginning in the middle of things, with a pleasing ambiguity regarding which parts are live violin and which pre-recorded, the first third of the work rests in a simmering state of near-quiet that Hellqvist clearly enjoys. But there are stark shifts to be relished throughout, as Barrett’s electronic designs put on a master class of their own: harmonizing with Hellqvist, contributing bell-like chimes, and playing with spatial perception. Though the causes of all these sonic fluctuations are sometimes hard to parse, the pace and intensity are not difficult to understand at all, with emotional effects not unlike those found in other relentless styles of music. That it can all transpire in a relatively hushed environment is merely a testament to the skills of both Barrett and Hellqvist.
Around the 10-minute mark, we start to hear intimations of rising conflict—particularly when a droning background pattern of electronically adapted violin suddenly flowers into white noise. The last third of the work represents a relaxing or unwinding. But for all that broadly understandable structure, “Sagittarius A*” eludes pat understandings. It’s an experience worth taking, multiple times, without trying to conscript it into association with other things you’ve heard before. Who knows—in a few decades, it could even be a crowd favorite.