Theo Parrish might have gotten screwed over at the vinyl-pressing plant, but as a result, we got two volumes of this very-bluntly-named collection of moving, diffuse, spare, soul-deep jams.

Various Artists: Sound Signature Presents: These Songs That Should've Been Out on Wax By Now

In a feature about the adversities facing the vinyl resurgence back in 2014, Joel Oliphint wrote: “Everyone is competing with everyone to get their records made and, at this rate, there won’t be enough presses to meet demand for some time, if ever.” Even with the good news that vinyl sales are at a 28-year high for 2016 and Third Man’s new pressing plant in Detroit, anyone who is not a major label is still feeling the squeeze at the presses. And if you’re a small, African-American-owned dance label out of Detroit doing runs in the hundreds like Theo Parrish’s Sound Signature, you might be screwed entirely.
Enter Sound Signature Presents: These songs should've been on wax by now. Due to back up at pressing plants we bring them to you in a somewhat inferior format that at least exists in a physical world! enjoy! Inferior format sure (these are CD-Rs), but since it’s almost impossible to keep up with the label and its scattershot 12”s, their pressing plant woes are to our benefit, as the two compilations provide a handy overview of Theo’s soundworld as well as that of his friends and neighbors. Not that it’s too easy, as these 18 tracks are bereft of artist credits. Instead, there’s just a list of people who appear: Afrobeat legend Tony Allen, Detroit session man Amp Fiddler, underground house forces like Marcellus Pittman, Kyle Hall, and Kai Alce, as well as Parrish himself. Guess them all, the CD case says, and you might win “even a new car even!”
Despite the wide range of artists, the music most closely reflects Parrish’s own sensibilities, as moving, diffuse, spare, soul-deep and withholding of payoffs as the man’s own productions. A mysterious female singer purrs over a piano vamp “Somewhere Inbetween” but the beat never comes. An incessant hi-hat and flurry of electric piano might be the only elements of “Whachawannado (Instrumental),” but the track never loses steam. Jazz fusion licks power “Hanna’s Waltz” while “Arrivals” and “Faucet” have the heady, heavy kick of Theo’s best tracks.
“Wayshimoovs rx” sounds like it’s from the same sessions that brought together Theo and Tony Allen. This easeful neo-soul track features the latter’s skittering shuffle beat paired to Theo’s spare keys and Andrew Ashong’s D’Angelo-esque purr. The two discs offer similar rewards, but the slowed-to-a-crawl “Greazy Spoonwalk” bogs down the first disc (and makes you wish for a vinyl version so as to pitch it up +8) and most of the heavier beats reside on the second volume.
Volume 1 ends with a remembrance of old Detroit, a bit of dialogue talking about seeing the old Motown revue for $2 as a horn plays in the background. Not much happens on the track, but it nevertheless informs all of the music. While all the tracks are new, they carry within them the history of the Motor City. Even if they don’t have the same star wattage, the voices on “Digital Love” and “Whachawannado” hearken back to the heyday of Motown soul singers like Marvin Gaye and Mary Wells. “Caddylack Steam Theme” delivers ‘70s funk with Blaxploitation swag, right down to the horns and rippling guitar licks. With its undeniable bass, stomping kick, cresting organ, vocal hums and crisp claps, “Ooohbass” is one of the set’s highlights, showing just how a producer like Parrish (or Pittman, Hall, etc.) draws on their hometown’s heritage for their own tracks. Sound Signature showcases Detroit house music at its dustiest, undeniable best, showing that even in the 21st century, dance music is at its most evocative when it’s the perfect triangulation of gospel, soul and funk.


The debut album from the neo-soul singer-songwriter is driven by warm funk and soul and has the healing familiarity of hanging out on the couch commiserating with a best friend.

Shea Butter Baby

That sweet, warm, slightly nutty scent of shea butter; its aroma inseparable from memories of self-preservation, softness, and the kind of intimacy needed to recognize both. The effortlessly soothing Ari Lennox and her debut full-length Shea Butter Baby live up to the rich evocations of the title. The 12-song collection, driven by warm funk and soul, is at once wrenchingly intimate and sweetly playful. From slinky tracks about endless longing to hip-popping bops about unabashed desire, the album is a balm, elevating Lennox to the upper echelon of today’s neo-R&B and soul wave.
Shea Butter Baby comes nearly three years after Lennox signed with J. Cole’s label Dreamville and released her 2016 EP Pho. Including songs written across those first three years, the album presents lush, gogo-infused instrumentation as the backdrop to Lennox’s chronicles of life and love. Lyrical references points include buying cough drops at CVS, wearing Target (pronounced “Targét”) lingerie, and having bad luck on Tinder. “I just got a new apartment/I’m gon’ leave the floor wet/Walk around this bitch naked/And nobody can tell me shit,” she sings on “New Apartment,” a strutting tribute to domestic autonomy. Over a fat funk bass line and bouncy horns, she revels in the power to leave her hair in the shower or cartwheel inside her yet-to-be-furnished living room.
It gives way to one of the spoken interludes peppered throughout Shea Butter Baby, where Lennox’s voice is pitched up to a mousiness that, in Vine and YouTube fashion, pokes light fun at her words. Meanwhile, on “I Been” Lennox sings about smoking weed to forget a past lover, bringing an exhilarating quality to the velvety R&B track with playful vocals melodies that jump from high, heady notes to low ones from the chest and back again.
These moments of levity make the album’s intense sincerity that much more powerful, as on airy R&B song “Whipped Cream,” whose lyrics quickly slide from light distraction to something deeper: “I’ve been eating whipped cream/Having vivid dreams/Of your face and through people on TV screens/You’ve been everywhere/And I wish I didn’t care.” There’s a cool ease to Shea Butter Baby that stems from Lennox finding abundance in quotidian details. That clear-eyed look at millennial life makes the emotional heart of each song—whether it’s frustration, lust, or unrepentant joy—feel as tangible as the comforting clutter on your bedside table.
Though the album doesn’t really step outside of neo-soul conventions, it is nevertheless as stirring and lifting as a memory-triggering scent. Like the image Lennox conjures of shea butter staining a pillowcase, Shea Butter Baby grounds the spiritual sultriness of neo-soul and R&B in irreverent frankness, subverting the idea that the modern self-assured woman must maintain a divine facade. There’s power, she suggests, in celebrating the imperfect and slightly messy, rather than chunks of reality polished smooth. In that way, Lennox’s brand of neo-soul has the healing familiarity of hanging out on the couch commiserating with a best friend. Sometimes you don’t need an untouchable guide out of everyday angst and annoyances. Sometimes you just need someone in there with you.


There's only one question that really needs to be asked of 69 Love Songs: is it a brilliant masterpiece ...

69 Love Songs

There's only one question that really needs to be asked of 69 Love Songs: is it a brilliant masterpiece or merely very, very good? The title alone is enough to send music geeks the world over into a foamy-mouthed, epileptic frenzy. 69 songs equals 3 CDs equals nearly three solid hours of new Magnetic Fields material-- think of it! That's more than some notable bands released in their entire existence. Add that to the fact that the Magnetic Fields actually followed through with their concept without turning it into the indie-pop equivalent of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.
You see, I have this theory that music critics are suckers for novelty, and there isn't much in this world that's more novel than 69 Love Songs. It borders on being a prop in a Mark Leyner story-- it's hyperreal and excessive, yet perfectly plausible when you consider how weird reality is. Because of this, the album never feels like a ponderous, pretentious artistic statement (unlike most multi-CD releases). Stephin Merritt and company sound like they approached this ridiculously ambitious project with the most casual of airs, idly plucking melody after divine melody out of the air like low-hanging fruit from a tree. It's how pop music should sound, really: so natural and feather-light that you never notice the amount of effort that went into it.
Therein lies the paradox of 69 Love Songs-- it's such a basic style of music that it's easy to dismiss it as "just pop music." Of course, that's what it is, so should it really deserve such high praise? Should it rank among the best albums of the 1990s? Or is it too bizarre to be considered culturally important? I mean, Abbey Road is a pretty weird album, too. Then again, Abbey Road isn't three hours long.
Regardless, Stephin Merritt has proven himself as an exceptional songwriter, making quantum leaps in quality as well as quantity on 69 Love Songs. This incarnation of the band doesn't feature much of the densely layered, burbling electro-pop that they're best known for; in its stead are sparser, more acoustic songs that sound as if they're being played on actual instruments by a group of actual musicians (as opposed to Merritt himself playing mad scientist with effects racks and overdubs). It may initially seem like this stylistic decision came due to budget restrictions-- if you're recording that many songs, you can't blow too much money on any one track. But it's probably more likely that Merritt finally realized the limits of tinny synths and drum machines.
On the Fields' previous outing, Get Lost, you can hear Merritt beginning to lean toward simpler, more elegant arrangements; 69 Love Songs could easily be seen as a continuation of that trend. Merritt also ensures that the listener will never get bored with any one sound, trading off vocal duties with four other singers and deploying a mind-boggling array of instruments: ukulele, banjo, accordion, cello, mandolin, piano, flute, guitars of all shapes and sizes, a dumpster full of percussion toys, and the usual setup of synths and effects. Among other things.
And the songs themselves? Well, I could write a thesis dissecting each and every song on this album, but that would take months. As a prism refracts light into a spectrum of colors, 69 Love Songs not only refracts love into a spectrum of emotions, but also refracts the love song itself into a spectrum of musical forms. There's a duet between a dysfunctional Sonny and Cher ("Yeah! Oh Yeah!"), a country-gospel tune confusing religious and secular love ("Kiss Me Like You Mean It"), and an amusingly light-hearted tale of a soldier's drunken tryst ("The Night You Can't Remember").
There's giddy lust ("Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits"), romantic longing ("Come Back from San Francisco"), sleazy leering ("Underwear"), and resignation and despair ("No One Will Ever Love You"). There are genre exercises such as faux-beatnik jazz ("Love is Like Jazz"), Paul Simon-ish world music ("World Love"), Gilbert and Sullivan-style mincing harpsichord ("For We are the King of the Boudoir"), Merritt's cartoony, day-glo interpretation of punk rock ("Punk Love"), Scottish folk ("Wi' Nae Wee Bairn Ye'll Me Beget"), and a brief Philip Glass tribute ("Experimental Music Love"). There are also plenty of archetypal Magnetic Fields songs, with those trademark deadpan drama-queen vocals, casually depressive lyrics, and clever rhymes. But Merritt also shows he can pen some surprisingly sincere, moving ballads ("Busby Berkeley Dreams," "The Book of Love"), too.
So, back to the original debate. You know that old saying about the whole being more than the sum of its parts? The sum of the parts of 69 Love Songs adds up exactly to its whole. No more, no less. Each song contains its own small epiphany, but they never quite add up to the one big sweeping epiphany that you'd hope for. That's because it's impossible to reconcile the concept of 69 Love Songs with its execution; it's simply too big. That might sound like a cop-out, but this is truly an album you can get lost in. The individual songs will inevitably distract you from a big-picture interpretation of the album. Of course, the Magnetic Fields don't concern themselves with such matters; they promised us 69 love songs, and that's what they delivered. That it's actually worth the exorbitant $35 price tag is a bonus.


Atlanta rapper Rome Fortune is an independent artist who has paid his dues on the mixtape circuit. His new album offers a look behind the veil of moderate Internet-based fame.

Jerome Raheem Fortune

Atlanta rapper Rome Fortune is a working-class MC, an independent artist who has paid his dues on the mixtape circuit, even if he’s still not a member of rap’s functional middle class. In an age of viral rap stars thriving on the Instagram snippet economy, Fortune has taken a more methodical approach, building a cult following over several years with his two-part Beautiful Pimp mixtape series and a host of collaborative projects, among them YEP with rapper OG Maco and EPs/tapes with local producers Dun Deal, Childish Major, and CeeJ (from the rap collective Two-9). You can hear the labor in his method, in the mechanics of how he puts his words together.
It’s fitting, then, that the self-titled Jerome Raheem Fortune focuses on his toils, from living in a motel with his single mother to paying back loans to missing the birthdays of loved ones due to the punishing schedule of life as an aspiring rapper. Fortune seeks to humanize and not deify, and this is the most personal he has ever been in his writing, with lyrics that are closer to journal entries than rap verses. The songs are at times almost uncomfortably autobiographical, a look behind the veil of moderate Internet-based fame: Fortune talks openly about family dynamics, being broke, and his entire life outside rap, everything from how he ended up with two baby mamas to how he plans to pay for his kids’ pull-ups. On "Still I Fight On," he establishes his priorities, summarizing with "Fuck an album placement/ I fought for survival." For him, rap is a means to an end; he believes himself to be a dynamic artist, yes, but he’s constantly got his eye on the bottom line.
This desire for financial stability and proud DIY mentality fuels everything Fortune does, and here he attempts to earn his keep narrating his life. Jerome Raheem Fortune builds on the sound of 2013’s Beautiful Pimp—quick-splitting, electronic-leaning productions with snug verses that lean heavily on charismatic vocal performances, songs actively seeking to buck Atlanta trap trends—but he’s never gone this far out. The dark, coke-powered "Heavy as Feathers," which whirrs like a UFO desperately trying to stay afloat, clicking and clanging and breaking apart, is the centerpiece for his sound-warping escapades. When the experimentation works, there are songs like "Past Future," a collapsing multi-tone palace that pairs his best writing ("The writing on the wall was a movie script") with his most captivating rapping.
Rome Fortune’s strongest attribute is his comfort with virtually any production, and that serves him well on the constantly-shifting Jerome Raheem Fortune. There are lush, blooming tracks scattered thought ("Alone Tonight" builds slowly and woozily before switching dramatically into a strutting riff; "Find My Way" false starts into trickling synths), and he’s good at finding the open space despite all the continuous movement, sliding in and out of the grooves with intimate admissions. But while Fortune bares his soul, he isn’t a particularly gifted wordsmith and some of the storytelling gets muddled a bit because of it. Still, he’s an exceptional performer and overcomes his limitations with sheer energy. Jerome Raheem Fortune is the work of an artist who is still figuring it all out, a flawed but ambitious art piece that’s the culmination of several years of growth.


A new installment in Parlophone’s ongoing reissue series revisits an oft-bootlegged 1969 session with fellow folkie John Hutchinson: literal bedroom tapes, but still revelatory.

The ‘Mercury’ Demos

In the spring of 1969, David Bowie had been in exile from pop music for over a year. After splitting with his label, Deram, as they kept rejecting prospective singles, he’d formed a folk trio with his girlfriend, Hermione Farthingale, and John Hutchinson, a guitarist from his former band. Bowie auditioned for plays, crafted a cabaret act, joined a UFO spotting group, performed mime, got bit parts in films and commercials—a typical late-1960s creative experience. But his primary goal was another record deal, and he was running out of options. Philips/Mercury was one of his last shots—most other major UK labels of the ’60s had already released music by him, with no chart success. Befriending a Mercury A&R rep, Bowie had an inside connection, so he and Hutchinson auditioned via a Revox reel-to-reel.
The ‘Mercury’ Demos are simply that: 10 demos for Mercury by the folk duo of Bowie and Hutch (Bowie and Farthingale had broken up some months before). Bootlegged for decades, they finally get an official release as part of Parlophone’s ongoing reissue series. Happily, it’s a single LP here and not a cumbersome box set of 7" singles, as with the Clareville Grove Demos and Spying Through a Keyhole. Unhappily, it’s a single LP of demos whose retail price is more in line with that of a multiple-CD reissue set.
The packaging mimics a promo kit from 1969: photo contact sheets and headshots of Bowie and Hutch, a few stapled pages of “typewritten” liner notes. But as with the other Bowie demo sets, it can’t shake looking like a cynical bid for the fan wallet. Perhaps the final touch will be a “master” box set collecting all previous box sets. (Unlike Keyhole, at least, it didn’t wait months to appear on streaming services.)
Still, The ‘Mercury’ Demos are of historical interest and, if you’ve not heard the bootlegs, revelatory. There’s a solid upgrade in sound quality, as many bootlegs were based off a tape that appears to have been slightly sped up. The interplay of Hutchinson and Bowie’s guitars and their vocal harmonies are far better distinguished; there are also exchanges and jokes not heard on the most widely circulating boots.
Though these were literal bedroom recordings, complete with microphone clunks, quickly tuned strings, noise from another room, and an audible cigarette break, the tapes are the start of David Bowie as he’s generally remembered. His career retrospective Sound + Vision opened with the Mercury demo of “Space Oddity,” included in this set—Bowie marking off where he believed his performing self began and reducing the rest of his ’60s work to juvenilia.
Songs fall in a few categories. There are two covers, with prominent Hutchinson vocals: “Life Is a Circus,” written by Roger Bunn, and Lesley Duncan’s “Love Song,” which paid far more dividends for Duncan (a Bowie intimate and fellow UFO enthusiast) when Elton John covered it on Tumbleweed Connection. “She’s very underrated,” Bowie notes before the take.
Of greater interest are songs Bowie wrote after his breakup with Farthingale, which he’d record for his 1969 album Space Oddity: “Letter to Hermione” (here under its original title, “I’m Not Quite”) and “An Occasional Dream.” Gorgeous heartbreak mementos, they’re charming and sweet in their bedsit demo forms. The Mercury “An Occasional Dream” (an earlier demo of it appears on Clareville Grove) is preferable to its uptempo crushed-velvet version on 1969’s Space Oddity, with its jaunty recorder arrangement.
The Mercury set shows how swiftly Bowie was developing as a songwriter in 1969: Only “Ching-a-Ling,” Donovan-esque hippie flotsam, and the wonderfully odd “When I’m Five” hail from the year before. Freshly minted songs include “Conversation Piece,” destined to be a B-side (introduced as “a new one,” with Bowie prompting Hutchinson with its opening chords) and “Janine,” whose Space Oddity take (unsurprisingly) lacks the “Hey Jude” homage heard on the demo. Then there’s “Lover to the Dawn,” a Bowie/Hutchinson harmonized song about a “bitter girl” that Bowie soon worked into “Cygnet Committee,” an anti-counterculture rant/prophesy/freak-out track.
But its centerpiece is “Space Oddity.”. Bowie had honed the song for months, cutting multiple demos, and a full-band take for a promo film. It was Bowie as a shameless magpie, scanning the radio dial and grabbing what he could. A guitar break from Fifth Dimension’s “Carpet Man.” A vocal arrangement in the line of another folk duo: Hutchinson as Ground Control Simon to Bowie’s Major Tom Garfunkel. And a lyric whose scenario isn’t far from the Bee Gees’ death-bubblegum hits “New York Mining Disaster 1941” and “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.” The Mercury demo shows how tightly Bowie had constructed the song—it’s the blueprint for its single recording in June 1969.
Mercury signed Bowie, and “Space Oddity” hit No. 5 in the UK in late 1969, but he soon sputtered out commercially and didn’t become a star until landing with RCA two years later. Perhaps we’ll hear the groundwork for that record deal soon enough.


Working with producer Dave Sitek, Nathan Williams returns with another mixed bag of combative rock songs that are straightforward to a fault.

Hideaway

It’s been a long time since indie rock produced a lightning rod like Nathan Williams. Although the Wavves frontman has mellowed out since his breakout year in 2009, when the music press eagerly documented every canceled show, on-stage meltdown, and verbal or physical altercation, he remains a uniquely contentious figure, whether he’s baiting Trump supporters or burning bridges with Warner after a stint on the label that was almost preordained to end poorly. Most recently he outed himself as a landlord, giving his detractors a new tag to taunt him with. A story about a musician leasing apartments might have bounced off most artists. Williams, however, has always had a gift for making bad press stick.
Williams’ combative tendencies carry through his music. Wavves’ eighth album Hideaway opens with three consecutive rippers about cutting toxic presences out of your life—most specifically, toxic people. “I don’t want your dark cloud around me,” he sneers on the title track. On “Thru Hell” he decries the “hideous people” pointing fingers at him. “I gotta get away from the things that bring me pain,” he vows on “Help Is on the Way.” It’s a declaration of self-care, but there’s some axe-grinding there, too.
After a couple of major label albums and a self-released 2017 LP, Hideaway marks Wavves’ return to Fat Possum, the label that released the two records Williams will be remembered for: 2009’s scuzzy Wavvves and 2010’s pop-punk reinvention King of the Beach, the high-water mark that all of its successors are measured against. Hideaway abides by the same rules as every Wavves record: When it’s generous with volume and tempo, as on its brisk opening run, it’s a kick. When it slows down, it drags. This band’s songs always fare best with a running start; the depressive doo-wop of “Honeycomb” and the twinkling ballad “Caviar” don’t get one.
Producer Dave Sitek, of TV on the Radio, assumed a fairly hands-on role, co-writing several songs and contributing guitar or synth to others. He adds density and texture to these tracks, most of it welcome. “The Blame” in particular pops with period detail, playing like a jaunty country exercise right out of a Monkees record. If anything, Hideaway could have benefited from a little more studio interference: Williams’ songwriting is so economical it leaves a lot of room for color around the margins. “Planting a Garden” conjures the chime-and-churn of the Posies’ grungiest records, but it begs for a little more alt-rock punch—the guitars never bite as viciously as Williams’ lyrics.
Of course, nobody comes to a Wavves record for the production. This band lives or dies by its hooks, and in truth most of Hideaway’s are only OK. They’re straightforward to a fault, and short on those small, sometimes barely even perceptible deviations from expectation that distinguish a sublime hook from a routine one. Williams’ greatest strength and weakness as a songwriter is that he always follows the path of least resistance. But a decade into his career, that approach has created a trap: Try too hard and it sounds forced; recycle the same tricks and there’s nothing new to see.

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Sun Ra manifested an ecstatic vision of jazz that is still being unpacked and realized a half-century on. A pair of new reissues highlight two defining albums in his oeuvre.

Sun Ra and His Arkestra: The Magic City / My Brother the Wind Vol. 1

In a roughly 10-year period after the post-Civil War era, the small Alabama town of Birmingham exploded from a population of 100 to over a quarter-million, a growth that earned the Southern town the title of “The Magic City.” But for Birmingham-born Herman “Sonny” Blount, as a young man, the segregated city had no discernible “magical” qualities. During WWII, he was a pacifist imprisoned for six weeks as a conscientious objector to the draft, a fate worse than death for the young musician. Soon after his release, he left Birmingham for Chicago, rechristened himself Sun Ra, and struck out on a lifelong mission against a society dedicated to war, creating a body of music that ecstatically celebrated “a universal existence… common to all the living.”
Sun Ra manifested a vision of jazz that is still being unpacked and realized a half-century on by the likes of Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus, and Hieroglyphic Being, to name a few of his followers. His discography is extensive and labyrinthian, with entire books dedicated to piecing it all together. Recently a new imprint, Cosmic Myth Records, was established to remaster and reissue select albums from the man’s long career, the first two releases being 1966’s The Magic City and 1970’s My Brother the Wind Vol. 1, two defining albums in his oeuvre.
For the remainder of his terrestrial years, Sun Ra resided in Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia, never returning to Birmingham until the end of his life. (In 1993 he went to see his sister, contracted pneumonia, and died in his hometown.) The Magic City looms large over jazz much like Ulysses—James Joyce’s ode to his abandoned home of Dublin—does in modern literature.
After years spent in Chicago, Sun Ra and his Arkestra landed in New York City’s East Village in the early 1960s, living communally and rehearsing daily. While Sun Ra and band had made a reputation for themselves in the Windy City, being at the epicenter of jazz expanded the band’s dimensions, the big band swing and exotica of their early albums giving way to more avant-garde sounds. In 1965, there was no shortage of groundbreaking jazz emanating from New York City (John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity, Archie Shepp’s Fire Music, and New York Art Quartet’s debut to name a few), but despite such company, Sun Ra’s opus remains audacious in almost every sense of scale. Sun Ra himself released five albums that year (Fate in a Pleasant Mood, Secrets of the Sun, Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow, and Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra Vol. 1), but The Magic City and its title track tower over them all.
On The Magic City, a 13-member Arkestra unfurls across a 26-minute title track unlike much jazz from that era: there’s no clearly stated theme, no head and section for solos, but also no sense that it’s a free-blowing jam either. There’s a structure to be gleaned, but it more closely resembles Martian architecture than anything to be found in the jazz idiom. It moves like a city story, full of interactions: between the reeds of Arkestra mainstays Marshall Allen, Pat Patrick, and John Gilmore grappling with Walter Miller’s trumpet and Ali Hassan’s trombone; the bowed bass of Ronnie Boykins against a battery of percussionists; the piano and horror movie Clavioline of Sun Ra dictating the pace and directions throughout. A cluster of flutes and piccolo flutter in the high registers over a minute and a half in, like birds around a park bench. Other horns jostle and trade lines like overhead street chatter, then a riot of shrieks explode later on.
And unlike almost any other jazz up until that point, there’s cognition of the recording process itself. Tommy “Bugs” Hunter, a longtime ally of Sun Ra, is credited with reverb on the composition. While the likes of Rudy Van Gelder and Bob Thiele were capturing jazz performances as naturally and unobtrusively as possible, Sun Ra was liable to suddenly plunge a listener into the depths of space, swaddling horns, hand drums, and his electric piano in cavernous reverb. Any number of modern jazz icons from the era could create the bustle of the street, but only Sun Ra could vertiginously shoot you up over the skyscrapers with such effects.
Sun Ra was also an early adaptor of another novel effect, that of the Moog synthesizer created by Robert Moog. By the end of the 1960s, the Moog had begun to enter the pop world, adding odd new effects to songs from the Byrds and the Beatles and even bringing Bach into the modern world. As Sun Ra told Down Beat magazine: “[The Moog Synthesizer] most certainly is worthy of a place in music. There are many effects on it which at present are not upon any other instrument.” He was not alone in utilizing the synth in jazz, as Paul Bley and Annette Peacock were also experimenting with its tones, but Sun Ra’s initial encounter with the instrument—which would become part of his sonic arsenal the rest of his life—is documented on his 1970 album My Brother the Wind Vol. 1 (not to be confused with Vol. II, a charming album of space chants featuring Arkestra vocalist June Tyson).
While an album like The Magic City reveals Sun Ra’s own strain of logic when it comes to writing for his group, My Brother the Wind sounds more exploratory, seeking just where the outlandish effects of the Moog mingle with breath-based reeds. “Wind” is a perfect descriptor for the kind of tone Ra unleashes from the Moog’s keys on the opening title track, sounding more like a whistling winter gale than actual notes. On the gurgling “To Nature’s God,” the mellowest piece here, Sun Ra hits upon alien gamelan-like tones that glimmer. The reissue also unearths the wobbly “The Perfect Man,” one of the funkiest (hence, strangest) entries in the man’s catalog, an electronic groover with Moog flatulence fluttering atop the steady rhythm.
But as Sun Ra noodles around, his stripped-down ensemble does its best to follow him outward. The 17-minute long “The Code of Interdependence” wanders far and wide, cohering at points but mostly just venturing to the furthest extremes of the Moog for signs of life. For those looking for the most cosmic part of Sun Ra’s sound, the 18-minute “Space Probe” is near legendary. It’s Sun Ra operating solo, exploring the wooliest voids of space with the Moog as his craft, tuning into the most alien of frequencies and making them heel to his command. Making the mysterious sounds of space reverberate on Earth remains one of Sun Ra’s greatest feats of magic.


On their fourth album, the indie-folk band still possess their signature warmth, but the charm of their heartfelt confessionals has dimmed.

Marigold

Pinegrove arrived on a promise of deep personal connection. One of the band’s early songs, “New Friends,” begins with singer-songwriter Evan Stephens Hall scanning the room for anyone he knows. When he can’t find a familiar face, it’s as if he welcomes members of the audience as fresh confidantes. In a twangy voice that can rise from a bookish murmur to a raspy yawp, he belts, “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Organized around the core duo of Hall and drummer Zack Levine, two friends who grew up together in a leafy New Jersey township, Pinegrove kept spreading that sense of intimacy through their creaky indie-folk. Their breakout record, 2016’s Cardinal, opens with “Old Friends,” a shuffling, spoken-sung romp with a diaristic homecoming narrative that carries a twinge of mortality. “Should tell my friends when I love them,” Hall sings. Bigger and bigger audiences were soon singing along; their fans became known as Pinenuts; Kristen Stewart got a Pinegrove tattoo. They raised more than $21,000 for Planned Parenthood while delivering communal anthems as impassioned as they were vulnerable.
A follow-up to Cardinal was just about ready to go when, in November 2017, Hall announced—via a long Facebook post—that he’d “been accused of sexual coercion” by an unnamed person. (According to a recent Pinegrove profile in The New Yorker, the accuser was “a member of the band’s crew” who had a romantic relationship with Hall that she views as “implicitly manipulative.”) After a year-long hiatus at, Hall told Pitchfork, the request of the accuser, the band released Skylight, a spare album that refined the band’s open-hearted alt-Americana. Pinegrove’s new album Marigold contains some of their signature warmth but lacks the luster that made their initial run of albums exceptional.
Self-produced by Hall and Pinegrove multi-instrumentalist Sam Skinner, Marigold is endearingly rumpled, but the mood is more melancholy, more dreary. These songs find the forever-unguarded Hall in dark, sleepless nights and awestruck mornings. The most transcendent moment comes in the chorus of the opening track, “Dotted Line,” when Hall sings, joined by weeping steel guitars and the powerhouse backing vocals of former member Nandi Rose (aka Half Waif), “I don’t know how/But I’m thinking it’ll all work out.” Another balm is “The Alarmist,” where a rootsy shimmer somewhere between Nick Drake and Big Thief cushions a naked plea for reassurance.
The sullen, hangdog mood can start to feel drab. Hall always seems to be singing about either waking up or falling asleep; more than one song hinges on an encounter with an animal in the road. These banal motifs make it feel like you’re shut in with someone who doesn’t get out much and, in contrast to such famous recluses as Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, doesn’t have much imagination about the world outside, either.
There’s no blueprint for how—or even whether—a band should return after complicated sexual misconduct allegations. Though Skylight was released after the allegations, it was recorded before and shelved soon after. That album’s seeming return to basics was more like a fluke of time than a statement. Following a string of sold-out shows last year, Marigold is the first album written in the wake of Hall’s experience, one that perhaps colors the feelings of seclusion and doubt so earnestly deployed here. Whether he’s writing through it or writing around it, Hall presents as an open book.
Unfortunately, this openness leaves something to be desired artistically. Some lyrics have a grating, Victorian quality: “You do upend my island,” Hall sings on one song, like a lovesick character from a Decemberists deep cut. “Let’s build us a new house for to live,” he sings on another. The charm of his confessions has dimmed considerably and the six-minute title track, a droning electro-acoustic instrumental, is simply superfluous. Even on “The Alarmist,” the songwriter who once used “solipsistic” as a lyric now pushes back at solipsism by demonstrating the discovery of object permanence: the awareness, which typically occurs during infancy, that people and objects still exist even when they’re out of sight. “When you walk away, you still exist,” Hall sings. It feels of a piece with why Pinegrove’s once bottomless well of sincerity now feels low and lukewarm. The simple has turned complicated, the signal has some static, but they still play as if they just want to find a new confidante in the crowd.

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In Kenny Mason’s world, puppies are royalty and contemporary Southern rap and rock go hand-in-hand.

RUFFS

Genre-blending is standard in rap today, but Kenny Mason’s mix is more fluid than most. From a young age, the Atlanta rapper was drawn to music across genres—from Lil Wayne and Kendrick Lamar to Deftones and Slipknot. At 27, he’s an exactingly technical writer who underlines his slice-of-life anecdotes with double entendres and balloons them with grand, moody beats. It isn’t like Baby Keem releasing an album of mostly rap songs with one acoustic rock ballad; Mason is just as likely to rap-croon over a crunchy guitar riff as he is to flow breathlessly across stuttering 808s. Every sound in his music folds back into rap, the soup stock supporting the diverse ingredients that give his work its texture.
Mason has been calibrating this bombastic combo since his 2020 debut, Angelic Hoodrat, a fast-paced mix of alternative rock, trap, and R&B. As he’s matured, his ambitious musical hybrids detract less from the raw yet clinical writing style that’s made believers out of Denzel Curry and Freddie Gibbs. On his loosely canine-themed new album, RUFFS, Mason’s genre agnosticism becomes virtually seamless, disinclined to draw your attention to the fact that any fusion is occurring at all. He’s not exactly charting unexplored terrain like quinn or Redveil, but his wanderlust has coagulated into something more singular: A world where puppies are royalty and contemporary Southern rap and rock go hand-in-hand.
As a rapper, Mason has an unnerving sense of control, and his deadpan voice makes it all the more impressive when he pulls the ripcord and effortlessly demolishes bars. He blazes through the reverb’d frenzy of opening track “Zoomies” and mid-album highlight “Nosedive” without so much as an exhale, yet manages enough switches not to get stale. “Halloween” and “RX” span staccato sing-raps and stadium-sized croons, which are different from the sturdy flows over samples and hi-hats on “Halos” and “Shell,” which are different from the bouncy raps and melodic touches that dot later tracks like “Spin N Flip” and “Givenchy.” RUFFS never goes too deep into one sound; its colorful musical footnotes melt and pool like wax around a candle.
It’s thrilling to hear Mason rattle off schemes, but his raps aren’t technical just for the sake of it. Clever images and wordplay litter every song—he pulls a gun clip back with his thumb like the secret handshake from Hey Arnold! on “Zoomies” and, on “Shell,” remembers growing up “too broke to know what a break meant, but not enough to do a break-in.” There’s plenty of young-adult angst to go around, but it never feels juvenile. As he confides in love interests and homies and mourns innocence lost to early exposure to Glocks, Mason’s writing cracks the door to his personal life just wide enough to foster connection without giving away all the details.
A special relationship with dogs helps to flesh out his emotions. “Zoomies” compares his tendency to “run through this shit” to an overexcited pet’s burst of energy. On “333 / Atom,” he makes the connection more spiritual: “I pray to puppies ’cause I think they listen/They brought me pussy and paper and pistols.” As much an evolution of the bridge between rock and hip-hop established by groups like Korn as it is of the moody funhouses of Young Nudy or Lucki, Mason’s music shares the attentive ear and sharp focus of the animals he loves. “[Dogs] survive on loyalty. It’s for real death over dishonor,” he said in an interview last year. In Mason’s case, loyalty doesn’t mean fidelity to a single style so much as it means trusting that your skill and passion will carry your ambitions home. On RUFFS, his loyalty to his vision pays off.


The London jazz musician’s latest stakes out a middle ground between spiritual fire and smooth jazz.

Wu Hen

Powered by drummer Yussef Dayes and keyboardist Henry “Kamaal” Williams, 2016’s Black Focus —the duo’s lone release as Yussef Kamaal—neatly mirrored the renaissance of jazz out on the West Coast helmed by Kamasi Washington. Uncluttered yet rhythmically deep, Black Focus also revealed the true range of UK jazz; its ready assimilation of hip-hop, R&B, Afrobeat, dubstep, and broken beat set the stage for the likes of Shabaka Hutchings, Kokoroko, and Ezra Collective to rise up in its wake. But Dayes and Williams soon splintered, never building on that keystone.
Yet, with each passing year, Black Focus grows in importance and resonance. It continues to inform Williams’ subsequent releases, from his house music-indebted productions as Henry Wu to the group he helms now; he’s even adopted Black Focus as his label name. Following from 2018’s The Return, Wu Hen forges further into jazz-funk territory, staking out a middle ground between the spiritual fire and the glossy textures of smooth jazz, a terrain that keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith himself mapped back in the 1970s.
The songs themselves seem aware of that disparity, with neighboring tunes serving as subtle variations on a shared theme. The needling synths and vocal ad-libs that jolt “One More Time” impart a craggy feel, but Rick Leon James’ supple bass throbs even it out, while Williams’ shimmering keyboard accompaniments find more space as we suddenly slip into “1989.” A decidedly more mellow take on the same groove, Quinn Mason’s buttery saxophone mixes eloquently into swells of scored strings, which come courtesy of guest Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, the L.A.-based multi-instrumentalist and arranger.
“Toulouse” and the subsequent “Pigalle” evolve in similar fashion. Williams puts away the keyboards and reverts to piano to state the lovely theme, when he’s joined by Mason’s breathy sax and pizzicato strings. As Williams’ comping turns choppy and James’ acoustic bass runs quicken, the piece opens up into “Pigalle,” which moves the sound into Maiden Voyage-era Herbie Hancock territory, flowing like a tributary into an open sea. For all of Williams’ penchant for blending together the electronic textures of different eras, the in-the-studio feel of this post-bop jazz throwback stands out, feeling spontaneous rather than carefully deliberated. Even Mason’s otherwise unobtrusive horn pushes to its harsher register, giving the song a harder edge. A similar trick occurs between the pliant balladry of “Big Rick” and the disco groove of “Save Me.” Drummer Greg Paul flips to double-time and Williams gets within shouting distance of the off-kilter dance tracks he makes as Henry Wu. As he toys with the filters on his synths, the song evolves yet again into “Mr. Wu,” leading to the kind of infectious jazz-funk that could slot into a Theo Parrish set.
Atwood-Ferguson’s arrangements to the set are the clear stand-outs, adding yet another era of musical tradition for Williams to draw upon (in this instance, the opulent charts crafted by the likes of David Axelrod and Gil Evans) and new textures for his group to react to. Yet the gorgeous opener “Street Dreams,” which foregrounds Atwood-Ferguson’s work, feels interrupted. The use of harp and orchestrations hearken back to the likes of Alice Coltrane (a touchstone for the Angeleno), but just when the piece seems like it’s about to achieve lift-off to a higher plane, it instead comes to an abrupt halt at two minutes.
Williams’ music emphasizes the malleability and evolution of sound across styles and eras, even drifting into an R&B track voiced by the up-and-coming Lauren Faith stashed away near the album’s end. But the continual stylistic shifts make stretches of Wu Hen feel fidgety, hurriedly racing off to somewhere different rather than lingering and deepening its focus.

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Chris Thile spent the early '00s as frontman and principal songwriter of the progressive bluegrass trio Nickel Creek, but he's shifted his focus to Punch Brothers, a quintet who churn out the same dexterous roots music with more oomph. The Wireless EP finds the group bridging last year's The Phosphorescent Blues with their next avant-American LP.

The Wireless EP

Few modern roots musicians have amassed the critical acclaim and international popularity enjoyed by the honey-voiced, quick-fingered mandolinist Chris Thile. As the frontman and principal songwriter of the progressive bluegrass trio Nickel Creek, the California-born musician spent the early '00s pushing an invigorating, risk-taking acoustic melange he dubbed "newgrass", imbuing an art form commonly thought of as static with modernist quirks. Since then—Nickel Creek's 2014 reunion notwithstanding—Thile has shifted focus to Punch Brothers, a quintet who churn out the same dexterous roots music with a little more *oomph. (*Meanwhile, Thile’s Nickel Creek comrades Sean and Sara Watkins issued Watkins Family Hour, an LP birthed from the siblings’ monthly residency at Los Angeles’ Largo). Along the way, he’s won a Genius Grant and released several successful solo albums. Next year, he’ll host A Prairie Home Companion.
Recorded during the same sessions that beget their last album, last year’s T-Bone Burnett-produced The Phosphorescent Blues, Punch Brothers' latest, The Wireless EP*,* combines three cuts previously included on that record's deluxe vinyl edition with two never-before-heard tracks, bridging their most recent musical statement with their next avant-American LP. The collection’s diverse blend of pensive instrumentals, rousing singsongs, and stylistic experiments—namely, a roots-y interpretation of Elliott Smith’s "Clementine"—makes it a great introduction to the Punch Brothers’ quirky, clever bluegrass, as well as a satisfying (if modest) addition to the quintet’s catalog.
Guitar, mandolin, fiddle/violin, banjo, bass, and whiskey-smooth vocals: six sounds—no more and no less—comprise the bulk of Punch Brothers’ deceptively full sound, a paradigm familiar to anyone who’s heard put on an Alison Krauss or Doc Watson LP. The biggest challenge for the group is molding this simplistic sonic recipe into a multitude of forms without falling victim to redundancy (or even worse, directionless noodling)—and Thile and company make it look like nothing. Where slow-churning opening track "In Wonder" pits soaring harmonies against a relentless, defiant fiddle, slinky instrumental "The Hops of Guldenberg" offers a country-fried take on jazz improvisation. There’s even room for existential banter: centerpiece "Sleek White Baby" stars Ed Helms of "The Office" fame as an old-timey announcer hawking the answer to all life’s problems against a serendipitous shuffle.
If Punch Brothers' barbershop-quartet harmonies and old-school instruments are the roots tethering the group to bluegrass convention, then their covers are the shoots reaching onwards and upwards, transgressive in origin but puzzlingly traditional-sounding in practice. Thile and company regularly toss tunes fashioned outside of their rusted wheelhouse onto their setlists, as well as on their studio releases; past interpretations include spindly, creaky takes on Radiohead's "Kid A" and "Packt Like Sardines In a Crush’d Tin Box", as well as a prickly spin on "Icarus Smicarus", from post-hardcore heroes Mclusky. Like the rest of the band’s covers, "Clementine" is not so much a playful dalliance as it is another 20th century addition to the Punch Brothers’ envelope-pushing interpretation of the bluegrass canon. What’s more, by seamlessly integrating Smith’s booze-soaked hymn into the Appalachian-indebted mix, Thile and company don't just solidify the song’s latent transcendency: they propose a challenge to modern conceptions of bluegrass.


Freakout/Release

On the title track of Hot Chip’s eighth album, Alexis Taylor makes a startling confession: Music isn’t really doing it for him anymore. Against a claustrophobic backdrop of throbbing robo-disco, he frets, “Music used to be escape/Now I can’t escape it.” He runs down a litany of woes—music is ubiquitous, oppressive, ignorable—and arrives at a crisis of faith: “I’m losing my taste for this feeling/Give me a sign I can start to believe in.”
If this momentary crack in Taylor’s worldview is surprising, it’s because Hot Chip have always radiated the glow of kids eagerly biking home from the record store bearing the hottest 12" in the latest genre. Throw a dart at one of their lyric sheets, and you’re likely to hit a line about “a sound that resonates” or “the joy of repetition,” or a reference to lovers rock or Vanity 6. “Freakout/Release” is no different in that regard; the opening vocoder refrain evokes UK techno group LFO’s 2003 dancefloor bomb “Freak,” making it an easter egg for leftfield clubbers of a certain age.
Inspired in part by Hot Chip’s live cover of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” “Freakout/Release” is one of the loudest songs in the band’s catalog to date, and stylistically one of the most out of character. But it’s also the spiritual centerpiece of an album about grown-up aches wrapped in the unbridled energy of eternal youth. Treating music as something like a homeopathic remedy, Freakout/Release joins doubt with deliverance over the cleansing pulse of a disco beat.
This isn’t the first time they’ve sung about these kinds of themes; a quick skim of past reviews suggests that Hot Chip have been making their grown-up album since at least 2010’s One Life Stand. But Freakout/Release is clouded by specific pains, both societal and personal. Their last album, 2019’s A Bath Full of Ecstasy, was meant to simulate immersive bliss, but things didn’t quite work out; it was overshadowed by the death of co-producer Philippe Zdar, then a medical scare on tour; then, just nine months after the album’s release, nightlife came to a screeching halt, all that ecstatic bathwater going cold during the angst-ridden COVID-19 lockdowns.
Freakout/Release constitutes a reset. Much of the album is outwardly about pleasure: of dancing, of togetherness, of physical contact and sex. Recorded in the London studio that Al Doyle set up during the pandemic, it’s the first Hot Chip album to be written from scratch by the full band all in the same room, and its sound reflects that pooling of energies, full of exuberant dance rhythms and arrangements that burst at the seams. The opening “Down,” anchored by a roof-raising ’70s funk sample from the Universal Togetherness Band, is a life preserver tossed by a DJ into a sea of existential desperation. The rushing “Time” arrays a tick-tocking house groove in heart-in-mouth trance synths and laser zaps. Virtually every inch of tape seems to bend under the weight of all the things they throw at it. The audacious and exceptionally fun “Guilty” is a mid-tempo anthem that riffs on big-budget ’80s pop like Van Halen, Yes, and Peter Gabriel, as well as, obliquely, Tom Waits; the closing “Out of My Depth” starts out with a muted meditation on depression, but by the end it’s practically levitating, sounding like a soundclash between Spiritualized and Stereolab.
As boisterous as the grooves may get, the band’s lyrical preoccupations are overwhelmingly pensive. Taylor has said that his songwriting this time was inspired by getting older and seeing friends experiencing “the harder sides of life”—divorce, disease, suicide. Healing isn’t so much the album’s subtext as the IMAX-sized screen their ebullient sounds are projected on. “Hard to Be Funky,” which kicks off with one of the most dryly funny couplets in Taylor’s discography—“Ain’t it hard to be funky when you’re not feeling sexy/And it’s hard to feel sexy when you’re not very funky”—is part of a suite of songs, along with “Broken” and “Out of My Depth,” about the ripple effects of depression. “Miss the Bliss,” a companion piece to the title track, explicitly invokes the search for wholeness, linking dancing to solace via a gospel-fueled bridge: “You can heal if you’re wounded/You can heal anytime.”
This is hardly original terrain; for young and old alike, trauma is pop music’s lingua franca nowadays, to the extent that it’s become cliché. But Hot Chip, never ones to wallow, buoy their weightiest sentiments with provocative contrasts. “Eleanor” may be about separated families, yet their tale of “all-encompassing pain” rides a euphoric groove. Even the lyrics take a gleefully absurdist route to pathos: The chorus interpolates Edgar Allen Poe, and the bridge riffs on Samuel Beckett giving André the Giant a ride to school. Grief has rarely sounded like such a hoot.
Taylor claims that there are no ballads on the album, but he’s not quite right; “Not Alone” is one of the gentlest and most hopeful songs they’ve ever written. In the third verse, he hears a girl he “barely knew” play a cover of one of Hot Chip’s songs, “and in that moment turned my life around.” As he sings of darkness and heartache, his bandmates’ playing is hushed, reverent, luminous synths flickering in time with dreamily harmonized backing vocals. In tone and mood, “Not Alone” is the polar opposite of the title track, but it is also its companion: In “Freakout/Release,” Taylor goes looking for a sign that music still matters, and with “Not Alone,” he finds it. At its root, he suggests, a song can be a kind of spiritual beacon, the shared experience of music a form of redemption. “It holds me I—holds me I—holds me I have no choice,” he sings in elliptical electronic loops at the song’s conclusion, his voice as pure as a beam of light. “All the rest is noise.”


After decades of wandering, the former Court & Spark and Hiss Golden Messenger member follows his wanderlust West again, where he puts down new roots for his soulful folk-rock sound.

Lost Time Behind the Moon

Scott Hirsch’s long musical journey has come full circle. Back in the 1990s he and M.C. Taylor started making music together in the Southern California hardcore act Ex-Ignota, then traipsed up to San Francisco to start a band called the Court & Spark, whose change of musical style was signaled by the fact that they borrowed their name from one of Joni Mitchell’s most popular albums. Upon moving to North Carolina in the late 2000s, the duo made music as Hiss Golden Messenger, with Taylor the singer and chief songwriter and Hirsch a multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and producer. Following a brief sojourn in Brooklyn, Hirsch moved back to the West Coast in 2016, settling not too far from where he and Taylor first started making music together.
That transitory life, along with the general travails of any touring musician, provided grist for Hirsch’s solo debut, Blue Rider Songs, released in 2016. Moving about the country was his primary subject, both lyrically and musically: He wrote movingly about emotional and geographic transience, and he borrowed from an array of country and R&B sources to create an easygoing yet endlessly inventive and deeply soulful folk-rock sound. A picaresque through the American landscape, Blue Rider Songs gave in to the romantic lure of the open highway, even if it never settled on any one particular destination. By contrast, his follow-up, Lost Time Behind the Moon, is about the lure of home, equally powerful even if it’s harder to romanticize. “I’m going back to California, where the grass grows so high,” he sings on “No No,” as his makeshift band churns out a murky groove that sounds unstable and slippery, like the Golden State coastline itself. “When I get back to my baby, there’ll be no more coming down.”
Featuring contributions from William Tyler and members of Wilco, America, and Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, Lost Time Behind the Moon has a destination in mind: “Aim to the West,” goes “When You Were Old (El Dorado),” which sounds like a vintage Al Green track as it steadily makes its way to that lost city of gold. But that doesn’t mean he’s not taking backroads and scenic routes. If that song lingers outside Hi Records in Memphis, “Spirits” wanders around Big Sur, “Valley of the Moon” stargazes from somewhere in the Mojave, and “Pink Moment” might as well be on the moon for all its spacey pedal steel. Perhaps even more than on Blue Rider Songs, Hirsch manages to corral all of these disparate sounds into a coherent and compelling whole, to stake his claim to this particular musical territory. There are still the expected nods to Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and JJ Cale, all of whom have informed his music in the past, but on Lost Time Behind the Moon, they sound less like spiritual guides and more like people who gave him directions to the next town.
These songs suggest that Hirsch has reached a destination, at least with his music: that he has arrived at a place where he is able to harness these sounds and allusions to convey the particulars of his wanderlust. There’s a new confidence here, even in the way he deploys those backing vocals, a ’70s staple transformed into something like a Greek chorus on “Long Lost Time.” “If I come back, won’t you let me stay?” he asks, as a gently strummed guitar and a simple drum pattern coalesce into a stately folk-rock processional. It sounds like whenever Hirsch gets there, it’ll be the end of one journey and—fortunately for his listeners—the beginning of another.


Techno that tumbles towards ecstasy, courtesy of Matthew Dear.

Suckfish

It's hard to get out of Suckfish once it's on. You're just suddenly in it, like a silver pinball shot into the screwy Op art lock groove of its cover. The prickly microhouse rhythms he brought to 2003's Leave Luck to Heaven are still present, but as Audion Matthew Dear tops those stipples with synthesizers that growl and an attitude that says, "Come on." With this record, the only thing you're supposed to do is get off. Oscillating tones pierce the beat repeatedly on opener "Vegetables", and pretty soon there are manipulated voices in there too, mumbling alone in your mind. But that's just a preamble to the Suckfish thump of "Your Place or Mine" and "Titty Fuck". There are elements of empty space in the former-- Dear snips off the bass except for right over the drum so the synths are like pointy elbows jutting into the open space on a dancefloor, and the effect is chilly. But if their titles didn't give it away these songs are pretty randy, too-- Suckfish is techno that tumbles towards ecstasy in 4/4 time.
"Your Place or Mine" is cool, but it's "Titty Fuck" that's the real base desire provider, its slinky 22nd century disco beat flirting with a five-note melodic tickler until the whole thing swells to a hissing, gritty finale that's just unclean. Back alley sex = bad idea. But that's the feel Dear is going for with Audion, however detached and dirty it is. He wants you to envision having relations among machines, or maybe machines having relations; either way, he provides tracks like "Kisses" and "The Pong" to do it to. "Pong"'s primary tone thrusts and eases back, the inevitable give and take of a frantically dancing crowd in a dark basement room, and a howling bass line alternates with blasts of clattering rhythm and quieter moments that sound like pinging sonar.
The calculated quality of Suckfish is part of its allure. Unlike Nympho, Armand Van Helden's recent foray into sexified disco-punk obviousness, Dear has specifically categorized "Titty Fuck," the fluid, tense "Uvular", and the rest as being separate from himself. (You won't see something like the blatant "Just Fucking" on Leave Luck to Heaven's follow-up.) Releasing them under an alias allows Dear to position this material as a separate project, a grand design to get you laid. And the designer? Audion, which doesn't sound the least bit human and instead suggests a faceless superintelligent robot or hard plastic nub that will exude soothing "penetration sounds" in some Huxley sex parlor of the future. This is opposite to Van Helden's all too manmade and selfish approach, like bad cologne and worse drugs versus the sleek lines of Suckfish, the sex toy prototype.


The inimitable auteur’s latest record shows why he’s become the godfather of underground rap, and someone who’s still finding ways to tweak what he’s already perfected.

Marciology

On September 3, 2021, Montreal producer Nicholas Craven set a specific corner of Rap Twitter on fire. Drake had released Certified Lover Boy that day, a mostly forgettable collection save for its opener, “Champagne Poetry.” Instead of the tinny, trap-adjacent drums he typically favored, an unadorned, syncopated upright bass provided the rhythmic backbone of the track’s first half. It switched to a soul loop in the second, the low end slightly enhanced to keep the pulse intact. The lyrics were typical Drake fare, but he was in his technician bag, flirting with complex rhyme schemes. He’d carry them for several bars at a time, only to pull them apart carefully, as if curious how they fit together in the first place. This all sounded very familiar to a certain subsection of rap fans, including Craven, who tweeted, “Roc Marciano is the direct reason ‘Champagne Poetry’ exists.”
If you scan through Reddit threads, YouTube comments, and tenth-anniversary retrospectives, you’ll find loose consensus that Marcberg, Marci’s 2010 solo debut, laid the groundwork for much of today’s rap underground. By the late aughts, focus had shifted away from the gritty Golden Era New York sound in favor of animated Atlanta trap and humid Texas funk. Contrary to the zeitgeist, Marcberg traded in frayed, ashen sonics, referencing and updating the bleak winter menace of East Coast classics like Mobb Deep’s Hell on Earth and Big L’s Lifestylez ov da Poor & Dangerous.
The Long Island rapper-producer’s dusty, claustrophobic sound owed a lot to ’90s forebears like the RZA and 4th Disciple, but it felt more thoughtfully modern than hollow throwback. Marci slowed tempos to a crawl and stripped his samples of anything superfluous—sometimes forgoing drums altogether—and rapped in gravelly, menacing monotone. Arguably, groups like Griselda and the Umbrella Collective, or scenes like the Lynn, Massachusetts universe surrounding Estee Nack and al.divino, wouldn’t exist without the diligent study of his catalog. To hear Marci’s minimalism mimicked by the biggest rapper in the world, a man known for echoing innovations by those levels below, meant Marci had transcended. His latest album, Marciology, is the most overt recognition of his living legend status. The title casts it as a text to pour over: This is Roc Marciano the inimitable auteur, still finding ways to tweak what he’s already perfected.
As a producer, Marci wields minor-key loops like a hypnotist’s pocket watch, intensifying the trancelike groove with each repetition. Marciology features some of his outright trippiest work, sounding ripped from the soundtracks of obscure European heist films. Marci’s clearly inspired by the opulent spaciousness The Alchemist supplied for their 2022 collaboration, The Elephant Man’s Bones, but intent on deepening the mushroomy experimentation of 2020’s Mt. Marci. He helms ten of the album’s 14 tracks, crafting an unsettling psychedelic atmosphere; everything feels as off-kilter as a salvia breakthrough, recognizably part of Marci’s palette, but decisively weirder.
“Floxxx” has the tension of a Sergio Leone standoff, its jittery hi-hats and keyboards churning through a two-chord vamp, kick and snare holding solid as eye contact. On “Went Diamond,” droning strings anxiously slide through splashy ride cymbals, while the drums on “Gold Crossbow” tumble drunkenly around the staccato piano notes. Strangely enough, the cuts that sound the most like previous Marci records come from the guest producers. The Alchemist provides two luxurious, nearly percussion-free tracks (“Bad JuJu” and “Higher Self”), while Animoss’s contributions (“Goyard God” and “Tapeworm”) tap into the smoggy Blaxploitation vibe that colors much of Marci’s earlier work. They blend perfectly, however, taking cues from Marci’s tightly controlled, spartan worldbuilding.
It’s astonishing what he can do with so little. Marci keeps ample daylight between the instruments in his beats, leaving plenty of elbow room for his incredibly dense writing. He’s in top form here, spinning superhuman mafioso tales from impenetrable thickets of rhymes that contract and expand like gasses changing form. On “True Love,” which pins a sparse vocal sample between shuffling drums and a dubby bassline, Marci unspools dizzying stanza after dizzying stanza: “Lord, would you please have mercy on us/For the turf, he was warring/My fatigues was dirty when I wore ‘em.” His knack for disquieting detail remains sharp as well. “Motherfuckers got the gall to call my phone/Talking bout the bullet holes in your daughter room,” he says on “Gold Crossbow.” “That’s the warning when you ignore the rules.” The combination of his dry, raspy voice and cool delivery hides these grim moments in plain sight, reaching their full skin-crawling potential on repeated listens.
Marci’s flow, which often sits just off center, caroming over the ends of bars or bursting apart mid-thought, is just as influential as his production chops or lyrical abilities; you can hear it in verses from artists like Willie the Kid, Knowledge the Pirate, and CRIMEAPPLE, all rappers Marci’s worked with extensively, two of whom show up on Marciology. CRIMEAPPLE’s homage-paying appearance on “Killin Spree” is especially potent, namechecking Marci’s first two albums as formative to his style. They sound great together, master and student fully occupying a shared, singular world. But Marci’s not one to rest on his laurels; 12 records in, he’s pushing himself in new directions, nailing cascading triplet patterns on “BeBe’s Kids” and rapping with a slight L.A. slink on “Higher Self.” He still sounds hungry, eager to discover new wrinkles in his approach.
About a third of the way through the title track—the first song on the album—Marci bluntly asserts “I done created a lane,” perhaps his most concise, straightforward statement to the depth of his legacy. It’s a fittingly mind-bending opener, with pinging sample-and-hold bleeps and an atonal bassline weaving through steady drums as Marci assembles a complicated mosaic of syllables. The song bears a striking resemblance to Three 6 Mafia’s “Playa Hataz,” an early-’90s classic with a similarly trudging tempo and detuned synth notes. Both Roc Marciano and Three 6 Mafia are now institutions, powerhouses who’ve left an indelible mark on rap music. Their influence has only strengthened over the past 30 years as more people discover their immense catalogs. Marci knows his music's impact, offering Marciology as the decoder ring for an entire generation of hip-hop. It’s a universal key that works even as Marci himself changes the locks.

Pimpire International / Marci Enterprises


The Norwegian producer rediscovers the simple joy in his space-disco sound on his most cohesive LP in years.

Ambitions

At some point over the course of five solo albums, Prins Thomas’ space-disco sound slipped into autopilot. His perky beats and basslines were pure ear candy, but on his recent solo albums—2016’s Principe del Norte, 2017’s Prins Thomas 5—the really interesting stuff happened when he powered down his drum machines and let his tracks spiral out into synth-soaked minimalism. On Ambitions, the Norwegian producer born Thomas Moen Hermansen ducks back inside his groove-fueled wheelhouse, but this time he seems to be reveling in it.
Some of that freshness may stem from the fact that Ambitions’ tracks weren’t originally intended as pieces of an album; they’re based on stray ideas sketched out on his laptop, or even hummed directly into a handheld recorder, while traveling and gigging around the world, and then fleshed out in Hermansen’s’ studio in Asker, an Oslo suburb. That shotgun genesis might help account for the range of the album, which takes in woozy soul, polyrhythmic drum studies, slow-motion dream techno, and even a couple of songs that might be mistaken for Moon Safari outtakes.
The mood is cohesive throughout, but Prins Thomas never sounds like he’s repeating himself. Each song is a unique piece of the puzzle. If there’s a unifying theme, it’s warmth: sunny, wistful, as suggestive of spring. The chirping birds of opener “Foreplay” make way for the laid-back disco of “XSB,” which is whipped as frothy as a sugary meringue. Toward the end, melancholy strings rise in the mix, triggering memories of Massive Attack.
For fans of Prins Thomas at his headiest, two long songs at the center of the album should do the trick: The dazzlingly polyrhythmic “Ambitions”  morphs, over 12 minutes, from 6/8 drum circle to a four-to-the-floor funk stomp. (In a note accompanying the album, along with shout-outs to Haruomi Hosono, Daniel Lanois, Shinichi Atobe, and Ricardo Villalobos, Hermansen thanks the late Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit, and Liebezeit’s example rings loud and clear.) Where “Ambitions” is knotty, “Fra Miami til Chicago,” is smooth and pleasingly predictable, teasing out a chiming guitar melody over a clean 4/4 beat and rosy bass synth; it’s the closest the album comes to the blissful soundscaping of his last album, and it’s enough to make you wish he’d dedicate an entire album to this style.
But the album’s penultimate and most far-reaching song, “Urmannen,” offers the best of both worlds: It’s a progged-out disco bubbler with all the nuance of Talk Talk in their blacked-out studio, delicate tendrils of sound disappearing into the loamy darkness. It’s the rare occasion that Hermansen’s ambient interests align so neatly with his disco instincts—a small step, perhaps, toward a new era in his exploration.


After a 20-year hiatus, this concise new Chavez EP arrives with little fanfare, drawing in a trancelike sound and Eastern-inspired melodies.

Cockfighters EP

Normally, the arrival of new recordings by a beloved rock band after a 20-year hiatus is accompanied by all manner of fanfare. No so with Chavez. Everything surrounding the return of this beloved indie group has run counter to the norm.
Cockfighters, the quartet’s first studio effort since 1996, is a mere three songs, done and dusted in less than 10 minutes. And while their longtime label Matador did their best to coordinate a splashy premiere from “The Bully Boys,” the EP’s snaky closing track, the band sent their publicists scrambling by dropping it a few days early on their Facebook page. There has been no talk of extensive touring or TV appearances or even a full-length album on the horizon. Like it or not, it seems this is all we’re getting. Abbreviated as it may be, though, Cockfighters burns hot and bright, recapitulating the strengths of the group while emphasizing how they’ve grown as musicians over the past two decades.
Drummer James Lo exhibits this more than anyone here. On previous Chavez albums (1995’s Gone Glimmering and Ride the Fader from a year later), he locked in with steady force behind the spinning guitar duets of Clay Tarver and Matt Sweeney. These new recordings, particularly on “Bully” and the slowly engulfing “Blank in the Blaze,” turn Lo into a caustic element, sparking and rumbling through each jazzy breakbeat and double-time stomp.
The rest of the band—Tarver, Sweeney, and bassist Scott Marshall—opt for a more minimal sound. There are minor flare ups, such as the guitar solo that streaks through the middle of “The Singer Lied” like a small lightning storm, and the closing minutes of “Blank,” where Sweeney and Tarver ooze their individual hues together to create dazzling new colors. But everywhere else, the emphasis is on creating something hypnotic and trancelike with the incessant repetition of Eastern-inspired melodies.
Cockfighters doesn’t strike any bold new paths for the group, but Chavez have matured as artists and songwriters, and this EP slots into their catalog well. They’ve all got day jobs now; they can return on their own terms. (Tarver is a staff writer and co-executive producer on HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” and Sweeney is a well-regarded session player who has lent his talents to Billy Corgan’s supergroup Zwan, Cat Power, and Kid Rock.) It has to help, too, knowing that their previous work has only grown in stature in the years since the first two albums were released. They’ve garnered enough respect for their work to warrant a three disc CD/DVD retrospective in 2006 and vinyl reissues of their LPs in 2015. While most groups live and die by the flame bursts of hype they can conjure online, the men of Chavez are happy to toss another log on the fire and let it slowly smolder.


Like so much electronic music, Thug Entrancer's Arcology plays with heady futurist themes on the surface. Beneath that, however, it is a satisfying collection of variations on footwork and techno, seen through the eyes of a producer with his own skewed vision.

Arcology

Like so much electronic music to have come before it, Thug Entrancer's Arcology has futurist themes encoded deep within its DNA. It takes its title from a term coined by the architect Paolo Soleri, best known for Arizona's Arcosanti community, meant to describe architecture in balance with ecology. But the album's press release speaks of alien colonies and world-building, while its cover art features a cybernetic figure wearing what look like VR goggles; a cable extrudes from the back of his skull, Matrix-style. (Zoom in far enough, and you may also notice a peeing-Calvin decal adorning his jack—the influence, perhaps, of Daniel Lopatin, whose Software label put out the record, and whose last album as Oneohtrix Point Never similarly grappled with science-fiction themes through the twin lenses of adolescence and trash-culture kitsch.)
But, as is the case with so much electronic music to have come before it, the sci-fi conceit also feels like a red herring. Thug Entrancer is Ryan McRyhew, a Denver-based musician who came up playing punky electronic music in the DIY scene around the city's Rhinoceropolis space before moving for a time to Chicago, where he discovered local staples like juke, footwork, and acid. His debut album, 2014's Death After Life, was a snapshot of his infatuation with those sounds as he acquainted himself with the mechanics of 160-BPM drum patterns and squirrelly 303 lines. Of Arcology, McRyhew says, "The album title stems from the idea of a structure or object that is entirely self-sufficient and life-generating with little to no outside influence." But that's precisely the opposite of how the album actually functions. Arcology, like its predecessor, is a genre study first and foremost, rearranging familiar elements according to McRyhew's own idiosyncratic vision.
Those elements haven't changed much since Death After Life; he's still preoccupied with frenetic drum-machine workouts and lyrical bass melodies, and he's still using classic pieces of kit like the Roland TR-808 and TB-303 (or, perhaps, plug-in simulators). But where his debut album was split mostly between flickering footwork tunes and, less successfully, sluggish slow-motion sketches, he's expanded the tempo range here, and in doing so he's opened up to a wealth of new ideas and moods. The early standouts "Ghostless M.S." and "Arrakis" boast gnarled, overdriven acid lines that really sing, along with hectic-yet-nimble drum programming.
McRyhew shows off his considerable sound-design chops on a handful of ambient cuts, like "ROM" and "Low-Life" and "VR-Urge," that come closer to the otherworldly ideas supposedly underpinning the album. The finest thing here, "Arcology," also functions like an ambient track, even though it ripples away at 150 beats per minute: Its keening synth melody recalls early Autechre, back when they still wore their hearts on their sleeves, but it's not directly derivative of anything or anyone. Its pinging, rustling background noises, meanwhile, sound like electronic imitations of running water. Formally, it is a picture of perfect balance, all its moving pieces in perfect synchronization with each other. Within the context of the album, it operates as a kind of clearing, an oasis, where the known universe falls away. If McRyhew really is interested in world-building, it is an excellent first stab at terraforming.


The Philadelphia quartet’s first album for Merge is a communal attempt to make magic out of the mundane.

Love the Stranger

Human beings are not designed to seize the day and make every second count. At least that’s what I’ve learned from the music that compels us to live that way—celebration rock, festival indie, empowerment pop, all of it performed with an unsustainable urgency that concedes just how much effort it takes to go against our resting state. Take songwriter Dan Wriggins at his own words, and Friendship should be playing in any one of those styles, yet the Philadelphia quartet has carved a comfy niche making the bold argument to slow down and let the day seize you instead. “Meant to write down/What I was feeling in the moment/Thinking, ‘Man, you better get it just like it was/Or else you’re gonna forget it,’” Wriggins warbles early into Friendship’s fourth album, taking about 30 seconds to complete his thought.
That’s a long moment, and not much happens in it. Wriggins dreams of getting away, not necessarily out of town. He hears that a local cathedral is being destroyed and imagines how it’ll affect the person he’s singing to. All of the real action takes place in the past and future. Depending on your identification with Friendship’s slow-and-low lifestyle, it’s also the moment that epitomizes the appeal and frustration of Love the Stranger, an album that sees a higher calling in taking it all in—especially if it’s the boring stuff.
As their debut on indie institution Merge, the mere existence of Love the Stranger is a stress test on Friendship’s ethos, a 45-minute Big Moment. If Friendship’s previous album, Dreamin’, was meant to reflect the rejuvenating power of that one beer in the fridge after a long day of work, Love the Stranger is Wriggins splitting a six pack of the good shit for a celebratory toast. Each of the four core members of Friendship has their own widely varying solo projects, most notably, 2nd Grade, a band whose compact power-pop is an inverse of Friendship. Similar to Florist’s recent self-titled album, Love the Stranger is counter-programming to the pandemic’s ongoing challenge to communal artistry, rebranding a once insular project as a potluck. Each member plays at least four instruments and contributes production, while the album is split into proper songs and improvisatory interludes. The best moments blur the distinction—a sputtering, almost atonal keyboard serves as the instrumental backdrop for the intense heart-to-heart of “Alive Twice,” whereas the robust alt-country of “Hank” ends with a pawn shop guitar’s circuitry giving out, a fitting coda for a tribute to making the most out of our faulty tools.
It’s a subject that Wriggins knows well. His history as a manual laborer—Maine lobster fisherman, groundskeeper—often serves as inspiration for Friendship’s lyrics, delivered in a low warble to which an aura of Real Talk is often projected. Wriggins acknowledges how starved people can be for a straight answer in a time when indie rock has absorbed and misconstrued concepts of therapeutic empathy. “I was in a bad place but you set me straight with your on-the-nose-advice,” he recalls on “Alive Twice,” later appreciating a friend who refused to play “volunteer bodyguard” in “Mr. Chill” (“I can tell you stuff I can’t tell anyone else/Because you don’t threaten to help”).
Even if Friendship weren’t so enmeshed in a Philly indie scene where rawer, scrappier acts typically aspire towards rustic authenticity as they age, their pivot to outlaw country was inevitable; Wriggins’ recent Utah Phillips cover EP suggested a deeper relation to the philosophical underpinnings of the canon, and the mere mention of earbuds on “What’s the Move” negates any whiff of Lucinda Williams cosplay. Likewise, the brief interludes elaborate on Wriggins’ charming, yet unsentimental Americana: “UDF,” “Quickchek,” and “Kum & Go” mostly serve as prompts to recognize the vast stretches of the nation that can only be told apart by the incremental distinction between regional convenience stores.
Friendship do not engage in world-building, instead calling greater attention to the world in which we’re all just passing through. While always endearing, over the course of Love the Stranger, they can just as often feel constrained by a documentarian approach. A pair of white Vans or a Jager nip or a truck stop T-shirt can take on a symbolic heft in Wriggins’ lyrics; other times, “apathy joins me in the booth,” and an unwashed dish of grape jelly requires a significant reach to be a metaphor for a lingering grudge. “Heading out to the bountiful fields and coming back empty-handed,” Wriggins laments on “Mr. Chill"; for all of the rewards, Wriggins can't help but admit that trying to make magic out of the mundane can be just as exhausting as living every day like it’s your last.


The New Jersey band’s seventh album is a hero’s journey powered by indomitable lifeforce and spirited, classic rock-inspired songwriting. It’s a rollicking good time and their best record in years.

The Will to Live

The Will to Live, the seventh album by New Jersey rock group Titus Andronicus, is now the second Titus Andronicus record you’ll play to get your friends into Titus Andronicus. It’s about time. ’Til now, neophytes had nowhere to go but The Monitor, the band’s 2010 masterpiece, a rock opera about the Civil War as rewarding as it is challenging. (Press play on opener “A More Perfect Union,” and you’ll hear nearly a full minute of Abraham Lincoln before you hear a guitar or a drum.) The band has since veered from excess—2015’s 29-track-long The Most Lamentable Tragedy—to economy—2019’s An Obelisk, which didn’t clear 40 minutes. The Will to Live manages a balance between these poles. It is an easy, thoroughly enjoyable sell, abounding in the band’s signature blend of grit and gratitude.
Opening track “My Mother Is Going to Kill Me” welcomes listeners new and old with a sound collage: the peaceful noises of nighttime give way to wailing cats, then sirens, and then ringing riffs, galloping drums. It’s a nourishing slab of hard-rock beef. Stickles says he was shooting for Lou Reed; his friends hear Alice Cooper. A little later, Stickles introduces his cast: “Single mother/Deadbeat dad/Bastard baby/Boy gone bad.” The album’s narrator, he stresses, is not himself. Repeated references to a “mother”—as in Nature—and “father”—as in “God”—ground the record’s weighty existential themes in nuclear family relationships. Lead single “(I’m) Screwed” lands like a lightning bolt, speeding through the language of war, famine, and pestilence before landing on a more mundane adolescent sneer—“Dad… Are you gonna turn the screws on me?”—at the chorus.
These choruses, by the way, are the best Stickles has ever written. “All Through the Night” is a spirited call-and-response cri de coeur for a lads’ night out; “Baby Crazy” pairs mile-a-minute verses with an irresistible hook (“Blame it on the mama/Blame it on the papa”) that sounds like the Stones at their danciest. Straightforward pop structure has never been a Titus Andronicus hallmark. By and large, the band’s calling card is sprawl. (There are exceptions: the gorgeous Pogues tribute “Come On, Siobhán”; the E Street Band swagger of “Fatal Flaw.”) By embracing the traditional verse-chorus limitations of classic rock, Stickles distills this album’s weighty subject matter into hit after potent hit. A record deeply concerned with death becomes a rollicking good time.
Two songs, “An Anomaly” and “Bridge and Tunnel,” hit the seven-minute mark and weave through thickets of Biblical imagery and moral philosophy. The latter is a duet with Josée Caron, of the Canadian indie duo Partner, in the role of gloomy Celtic maiden. On these longer tracks, Titus Andronicus confront the destruction of nature and the responsibility of humanity to slow or stop this ruination. The anomaly of “An Anomaly” turns out to be man himself—hardly the first animal to kill and eat, but the only one with the devil in him, and the only one with the capacity to boil the seas and punch holes in the atmosphere. “If you wanna reach the promised land,” sings Stickles, “you’re gonna have to drop your contraband”—but who wants to give up luxury, privilege, comfort? “Goddamn!” he howls, miserable, furious. Caron enters on the electric guitar, parting the song with a searing solo.
During the making of this record, Stickles’ cousin, close friend, and occasional bandmate Matt “Money” Miller died suddenly. “He was my best buddy the whole time he was alive,” said Stickles, in a recent interview, “a really important guy to me, a part of me.” The two had known one another all their lives; that’s Miller and Stickles as kids on the cover of A Productive Cough. Stickles wrote several songs on The Will to Live in the wake of Miller’s death, including “Give Me Grief,” the record’s strongest moment. It’s a little like the “more life” monologue from Angels in America, if set to song: a rejection of suicide in favor of life, more life. But where Prior Walter spoke of life’s ugliness, Stickles’ narrator enumerates small pleasures: “A caring family, sympathy/Groceries for the whole week.” Friends, he sings, “to get me clean” and God, no longer a wholly malevolent presence, “to give me grief.” It’s a sweetly powerful statement, and a fitting tribute.
By the record’s end, the torment of the first and second acts gives way fully to hard-won serenity. Closer “69 Stones” first appeared on 2016’s live album S+@dium Rock; it receives new context and strength here, on the heels of the narrator’s arduous journey. The loping country sensibility has been pared back—there’s still harmonica, but less of it—and Stickles’ vocal is more contemplative, restrained. “It makes its blessed home,” he sings, as his bandmates enter, harmonize, “wherever teeth rip flesh from bone.” A destructive force, yes, but a vital one.


Follow-up to 2004's She's in Control again finds the electro-pop duo successfully mining the 80s for inspiration, incorporating talk boxes, 808s, canned percussion, and Prince-style atmospherics.

Fancy Footwork

Chromeo's Dave 1 keeps his cool, even in the middle of a domestic scrap. "Let's keep the screaming and the fighting and the crying to a minimum," he says on "My Girl is Calling Me (A Liar)", "and if the kitchen don't work we can fight in the living room," biting off that last syllable sharply enough to force the rhyme. Before the household battles, presumably, comes the pick-up, and he's good at that too: "Let me tell you that I saw your boyfriend, walking down the street," goes "Bonafied Lovin' (Tough Guys)". "He was standing all shaky, hands all sweaty, and he could hardly speak/ I might as well take a minute or two to put you on to some game: You got a boy like him, a man like me, and that's just not the same."
Best friends Dave 1 (aka David Macklovitch, A-Trak's older brother) and P-Thugg, who give one another common sense advice as part of their tracks, don't self-edit much. "Just take her to movies and you're bound to work it out," interjects P-Thugg, via telephone, on "My Girl Is Calling Me". The band's self-consciously limited palette-- an electrofunk-by-numbers mélange of talk boxes, 808s, canned percussion, and Prince-style atmospherics-- is just another manifestation of their inability to tell a lie. If a song's called "Fancy Footwork", it's going to be about fancy footwork.
Cocksmen they may be, but it's a thing they've got to talk themselves into. Faux-ballad "Momma's Boy" is a mashed-out keyboard confessional about a romance between a girl in love with her dad and a boy equally in love with his mom. A novelty song with a happy ending, the two of them figure something out: The girl looks like his mom, and he looks like her dad, so they're all set. On the 1980s throwback "Opening Up (Ce Soir On Danse)", Macklovitch is in the middle of baring his soul to a new girlfriend when he loses her number. He's got to ask her, "Tell me what numbers to dial, 'cause I've been strung out for a while."
Going over the top here is just part of the package. The skin flick sax on "100%", the ripping, non sequitur guitar solo on "Momma's Boy", the straight "1999"-rip that is "Outta Sight": These are the consequences of getting in the mood. Better that than the cynical grab at pop star detachment that is "Tenderoni", Fancy Footwork's first single and far and away worst song. Built around a bad bit of slang that fell out of favor years ago, Macklovitch utters platitudes like "You and I/ Baby we go side by side" before rapping about getting in those pants over some slap bass. All you need to save songs like these is to not blink in the face of the irony, the shtick, whatever-- just don't break the frame, right?
More lovable is their "Intro", where over some tinnily epic synths the two Chromeos get a girl to chant their name, over and over, the three syllables ascending like stadium entrance music. This is surely what they come out to when they play live. And though it may hype a crowd it's obvious it's there for them too. Nerdy guys in sunglasses, they've got to convince themselves of their cool before they go to work on us.


The duo of guitarist Courtney Garvin and drummer Connor Mayer make deranged twee psych-pop, anxious and sometimes goofy songs fit for isolation in unfamiliar surroundings.

Somewhere

Somewhere, the debut record from the slightly deranged twee psych-pop duo Gum Country, is the product of a move from Vancouver to Los Angeles and the uncertainty and anxiety that comes with living in a new place. The brainchild of guitarist Courtney Garvin of the Courtneys and drummer Connor Mayer, Somewhere embraces lo-fi aesthetics and wry lyrics about visualization exercises, vegging out, and feeling on the verge of falling asleep behind the wheel of life. The record is as ironic as it is fun, where goofiness is the answer to anxiety in the face of isolation and new beginnings.
Gum Country’s music lies in the sweet spot between Stereolab’s loopy grooves and the snarky yet sweet songs of the Magnetic Fields. With its impeccable bass groove and warm, vintage organs, the opener and title track is the kind of lo-fi punk you can dance to like a Peanuts character. Its lyrics describe the simultaneous fear and excitement of acquainting oneself with a new place: “Haven’t felt this way in a while/I can’t think straight, can’t find my style/I guess this is my life for a while,” Garvin sings with a chilled-out, cartoonish attitude. Finding your footing in the great big world is a nauseating exercise, she suggests, but worth it in the end. The sentiment is enshrouded by layers of distortion and delay, requiring time to parse out her words. More often than not, it’s worth it.
Gum Country engage directly with the things we do when we’re alone, an experience that can be wildly monotonous to the point of insanity. On “Brain Song,” Garvin unselfconsciously calls out a few influences: “Sunset on my back/Kate Bush/Fleetwood Mac,” goes one line, as casual as a grocery list. On “Talking to My Plants,” Garvin sings about the anxiety of isolation with a bone-dry sense of humor. “I’m talking to my plants/Or are they talking to me?” she asks. Then a plant speaks: “I am a plant/Please give me water/And lots of sunlight.” It’s an exchange plucked from a hot summer afternoon by yourself, when you start to anthropomorphize the only other living thing in the room.
At times, Somewhere hits a lull. The record stretches out too long and flirts with monotony in its own right. Some songs inch toward the directly personal, but never quite goes all the way. Lyrics tend to be fragmented, and Garvin’s aesthetic choices often distort her vocals until you can’t quite make out what she’s saying. The choices fit the record’s scrappy ethos, but it would be interesting to see Garvin be more direct. Somewhere is as its best when Garvin bares her teeth and uses her sense of humor to talk about what is haunting her, be it spending far too much time alone, or trying to find your place on new ground.

Kingfisher Bluez / Dinosaur City / Waterslide


On a collaborative release, the grindcore and shoegaze bands team up for the rare metal album whose greatest virtue is its delicacy.

Full of Hell / Nothing: When No Birds Sang

When No Birds Sang

There are two Full of Hells. There’s the Full of Hell known for making tightly wound and carefully plotted grindcore on the albums they release under their own name. And there’s the Full of Hell known for their ability to alter their signature sound to the specifications of another band’s music. On their previous collaborative albums, you can hear them scraping and squeezing the aluminum waves of Merzbow, the freeform sludge of the Body, and the doom metal of Primitive Man. The prettiness of Nothing’s dirtbag shoegaze—its haziness, the defeatist riffing, the way the songs move with the oblivious sway of Audrey Horne—isn’t an obvious stylistic match. But on their collaborative album, When No Birds Sang, Nothing’s strolling pace forces Full of Hell to choose their steps carefully, while Full of Hell’s ferocity and ear for detail corrode some of Nothing’s natural beauty. Like all great collaborations, it comes across as the work of a single band and it’s impossible to imagine either group making this record on their own.
If Full of Hell and Nothing sound like they see eye to eye on When No Birds Sang, it could be because they were actually looking at one another. The full ensemble—Full of Hell’s Dylan Walker, Spencer Hazard, Dave Bland, and Sam DiGristine and Nothing’s Domenic Palermo and Doyle Martin—set up shop in Ocean City, Maryland, and wrote together in person, rather than sending demos back and forth. The method gives the album a sense of focus, even as it ventures into new territory for both acts, and their shared commitment to vulnerability tenderizes even the hardest blows.
When No Birds Sang highlights the depression that’s always lurking within both bands’ heaviness. Opener “Rose Tinted World” is structured around a thousand-foot-tall Black Sabbath riff from which Walker launches his scream; he’s consistently one of extreme music’s most inventive and compelling vocalists, and when words fail him mid-line, he transitions into a foaming snarl. It’s a brutal opening, with feedback whipping around its edges and a rhythm that could turn granite to powder. But when cheery samples of daytime TV begin to filter in, spilling over one another in their eagerness to insist on the bright happiness of the day—“Miles and miles of sunshine,” gushes one anchor—their chipper attitude recasts the song’s viciousness. Rather than a show of strength, the huge darkness feels dwarfed by the relentlessly empty face of false optimism.
Palermo takes the lead on “Like Stars in the Firmament.” It’s a gauzy slowcore prayer, the ensemble doing just enough to give Palermo the support he needs. “I don’t wanna die,” he sings, his voice soft with tragedy. Rather than throw a cloak of compression over the song to mimic intimacy, producer Will Putney gives the instruments space, allowing DiGristine’s fretless bass to gulp with Palermo as he sings about the flames of hell licking the gates of heaven. Later, in “Spend the Grace,” a scrape of guitar and sigh of feedback cycle around Palermo’s vocal in a sketchy loop, moaning in and out of dissonance and disrupting the angelic tone. It’s the kind of detail Full of Hell would normally gouge into the body of a song; here, their etching deepens the shadows in an already stately sculpture.
When No Birds Sang is the rare metal album whose greatest virtue is its delicacy. Peer into the distance of “Wild Blue”’s icy grace and see the malfunctioning electronics crackling away. Or listen to the sing-songy chords of “Rose Tinted World”’s coda mimicking the breathiness of a typical Nothing vocal, and how the cascading morning-show samples embody the noise and anger of Walker’s delivery. Functionally, it’s a duet between two of the most distinctive vocalists in metal in which neither opens their mouth: a fitting high point on an album that shows Full of Hell and Nothing pushing one another into new ways of using their voices.