The Detroit rapper pays tribute to Van Gogh’s most infamous moment, extending his own recent prolific streak with a chaotic, creative album that switches styles like outfits.

Van Gogh’s Left Ear

On December 23, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh, deep in the throes of psychosis, cut off his left ear and gifted it to a woman working at a nearby brothel. His friend, the artist Paul Gauguin, who had spent the previous nine weeks living and quarreling with him, painting and debating the nature of art, had seen enough, and left the yellow house in Arles, France they had shared. Within two years, Van Gogh would be dead by his own hand. This is the man—and the moment—around which Detroit MC ZelooperZ’s latest album is built.
But Van Gogh’s Left Ear captures more than just a tribute from a young artist to the Dutch master (ZelooperZ painted the cover’s homage to two of Van Gogh’s most famous works). During the 63 days Van Gogh and Gauguin spent together in the yellow house, the former created some of his most vivid and introspective works, while the latter witnessed his friend’s descent into madness. The historical events offer a spiritual precedent for the chaotic creative energy that permeates Van Gogh’s Left Ear, as ZelooperZ flits from track to track with boundless verve, exploring the limits of his own abilities.
Truly fearless rappers often embrace multiple styles, adopting the flow du jour just to prove that they can—think of Jay Electronica’s nimble triplets on the “We Made It” remix at the height of Migos-mania, or the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Notorious Thugs.” ZelooperZ draws from slightly different influences; throughout the LP you can hear echos of Young Thug’s warped falsetto (“Hostile”), Polo G’s emotive croon (“Bluez”), or even Flint’s funniest postman Bfb Da Packman (“VanGogh’sLeftEar”). And it’s plain to see on “Bash Bandicoon” just how well he vibes with Danny Brown’s goofball gangster energy; as absurd as the Crash Bandicoot-sampling beat is, it’s clear they’re having fun.
The production on Van Gogh’s Left Ear is just as varied and hectic; the tracklist shifts from Detroit gutter bop (“Battery”) to Japanese video game (“Bash Bandicoon”) to Buffalo mafioso movie (“BadMan”) with minimal transition. But ZelooperZ manages to tie it all together, his oddball charisma shining through no matter what the beat sounds like. It’s a rare rapper who can make myriad styles and sounds feel definitively their own.
Even in his earliest work, which seemed somewhat derivative of Brown’s style, ZelooperZ’s hyperactive, unpredictable personality stood out. And while he—along with the rest of the Bruiser Brigade—spent much of the early ’10s in their leader’s shadow, ZelooperZ has been on a prolific run lately. He released two LPs in 2019, Wild Card and Dyn-o-Mite, and in 2020, he released three: Gremlin, Moszel Offline, and Valley of Life, each better than the last. Though it would be a stretch to call Van Gogh’s Left Ear cohesive, it’s likely his strongest album to date. With each release he’s barreled forward full force, an artist possessed by the energy that drives him to create in the first place.

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On the third album since his Justin Vernon-assisted 2018 comeback, the mischievous singer heaps on the Auto-Tune, but his songwriting has more in common with his Southern-fried soul of the 1970s.

Swamp Dogg: I Need A Job...So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune

Swamp Dogg was born after Jerry Williams Jr.’s first LSD trip. The Virginia native had come up on the 1960s soul circuit, writing songs and working as an in-house producer at New York’s Musicor label. But the psychedelics, combined with a newfound love of Frank Zappa, birthed Total Destruction to Your Mind, his wild 1970 debut under the new alias, where cranial expansions battle with dives into the gutter. Swamp Dogg got weirder as the ’70s rolled on. On the cover of Rat On! he’s depicted riding a rat as if it was bronco, an absurd image countered by the pointed protest “God Bless America for What.” He didn’t hesitate to title an album Gag a Maggott, where the lone love song was called “I Couldn’t Pay for What I Got Last Night.” In this trickster guise, he both celebrated and satirized soul music’s conventions—and America itself.
These records weren’t hits, but they were underground sensations, building a cult that sustained itself until 2018, when Joyful Noise released Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune, an album whose indie-rock pedigree (Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon plays throughout and sings on “I’ll Pretend”) and novel use of the pitch-correction software helped kick off a late-career comeback; he followed up with 2020’s Sorry You Couldn’t Make It, a country-soul excursion produced by Ryan Olson of Poliça, who also played on Love, Loss and Auto-Tune. I Need a Job...So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune is clearly meant to evoke his 2018 breakthrough, and it’s duly slathered with the titular effect. Yet rather than venturing further out, Williams retreats to familiar territory, playing the kind of Southern-fried soul he’s sung since he created his alter ego.
He dedicates the album to the Flamingos’ Tommy Hunt, a longtime friend who once fronted him money to release Swamp Dogg’s 1989 album I Called for a Rope and They Threw Me a Rock, and the music likewise pays tribute to the R&B circuit they called home back in the ’60s and ’70s. The album is filled with fellow soul survivors, with Willie Clayton cheerfully duetting with the Dogg on “Cheating in the Daylight” and Guitar Shorty playing on the slow-burning “Soul to Blessed Soul.” Larry “Moogstar” Clemons, who has played in incarnations of the Zapp Band and Cameo (and produced a fair share of Love, Loss), and Norman Whitfield Jr., the son of the Motown legend of the same name, are behind the boards alongside Williams, creating a clean sheen for their tight, immaculate grooves. Strip away the vocals and I Need a Job slots squarely within the modern retro-soul wheelhouse, all traces of grit sanded away.
Vocals are the selling point—they’re referenced in the album title, after all—and Auto-Tune provides the distinctive, potent ingredient in the stew. Who knows why Swamp Dogg is drawn to the vocal pitch correction software. Maybe he likes the manipulated sound; maybe he realizes he has a bankable gimmick; maybe the computer helps disguise the wear on his aging voice. Whatever the reason, he loves Auto-Tune. He cranks the dial ’til his voice undulates like rubber, accentuates key phrases with hiccupping glitches, uses the extra-smooth textures to help sell his slow jams.
But where Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune could be audacious, I Need a Job is often conventional. Despite the prevalence of the effect, I Need a Job largely adheres to the rules of traditional R&B; in fact, it’s one of the straightest sets of songs Swamp Dogg has released. Having dampened his perversity, he offers few twists on genre tropes and winds up with a set of cheating and sex songs that feel merely reassuring in their familiarity. No wonder Willie Clayton and Guitar Shorty seem right at home; this is the kind of music they make.
A Swamp Dogg album that travels the straight and narrow still provides pleasures here and there; Dogg’s evident glee in playing with Auto-Tune does give the record a kick. Plus, it culminates with a freakazoid cover of Joe Tex’s classic 1967 “Show Me” that’s all frenzied rhythm, canned horn stabs, and unhinged altered vocals; it’s the one number here that ties together the past and present with flair. It’s hard not to wish the rest of I Need a Job...So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune was that imaginative. Even so, delivering a good old-fashioned soul record to a new audience of Bon Iver fans can’t help but feel like a good ol’ Swamp Dogg prank.


The singer-songwriter and pianist writes quietly epic songs about heartbreak, determination, and loneliness.

Islands

There is precious little information available about Erin Durant. She was raised in New Orleans, and now lives in Brooklyn. Complementing those anodyne facts is a beguiling flash of insanity: She refuses to perform on a keyboard, and instead carts her 232-pound stand-up piano to shows around New York City, a Sisyphean folly that earned her a New York Times story in 2015. The tyrannical determination of the image is softened by Durant’s tender connection to her instrument, which is evident from her second album, Islands. Her 2016 debut, Blueberry Mountain, was recorded in her bedroom, a DIY setup that muted that vivid symbiosis. With TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone on production, Islands polishes Durant’s sound to a resonant and gently rollicking gleam, brightened by dulcimer, guitar, brass, and woodwind.
Durant’s songwriting is fine-boned and small-scale, and her lyrics are quietly epic. On “Highway Blue,” she stands in a room where she once danced with a beau, her imagery as beautiful as their vanished love: “Now it’s just an empty room/Like cigarette smoke left as an evening dew,” she sings, marveling that “electricity still plays our records”  even though their spirit is long out the window.
Durant lets these moments come and go without stretching them out, and this everyday quality points to her strengths as a writer. She starts “Rising Sun” full of certainty about how “making mistakes” and “costing the game” is “the only way, I think.” But as the song goes on, she crumples in real time, admitting she’s “so tired and a little drunk” and begging to be held, her confident front falling like a dropped beach towel. In the near-seven-minute epic “Good Ol’ Night,” she tells the story of her abandonment with a gimlet eye for details: one minute the “crystal chandelier is turned up bright,” the next, she’s “intensely lonely, sleeping in the car.” The picaresque narrative earns the boozy mariachi band that sways in halfway through.
The careful detail of her writing is sometimes obscured by the blinding brightness of the music, and weakened by the songs’ relative structural similarities. “Take a Load Off” is a gorgeous invitation to trust in friends that could do with less pedal steel and fewer syllables. The devastation of “Islands”—in which Durant takes advice to go on vacation, only to find the suggestion was an excuse for the advice giver to disappear from her life—doesn’t register easily amidst the sweetly swaying arrangement and Durant’s cooing voice.
As Bill Callahan once sang, Durant finds that “all this leaving is never ending.” As people, places, and time all slip away, you begin to see why Durant might lug a piano around as an anchor. On the final song, the lulling desert drone of “Another Town,” she rues those who “whisper in the wind/Thinking it’ll come back again,” and promises to seize any second chances that may come her way with hand-waving, love-pledging impetuousness. More of that spirit in her future songwriting will be the making of her.


The Compton MC Boogie has a slyly giggling voice: His lyrics are plainspoken, funny, and sometimes poignant, and listening to him expound on his life is why you tune in. His new mixtape, The Reach, is a little darker, and a little more outwardly emotional, than last year's The Thirst 48, which kept the energy casual.

The Reach

Boogie is from Compton, with a slyly giggling voice that makes him a spiritual cousin, of sorts, to Devin the Dude. He has Devin’s gift for observational humor, for singing his own choruses, and for making songs that seem light but can cut deeper than you expect. His voice is light and unassuming and his flow gathers in clumps around the beat, like he is punching it affectionately in the arm rather than riding it. He has a lisp he does nothing to disguise on record, which adds up to a certain image: This is a guy who doesn’t really care about how he appears, someone comfortable with his own thoughts, with being himself. On last year's Thirst 48, that guy—shrugging, diffident, wry, full of little jokey insults like "Man I swear Twitter turned lying to a talent”—seemed like someone to watch.
His follow-up, The Reach, is a little darker, and a little more outwardly emotional, than Thirst 48, which kept the energy casual. The beats were quiet, tinged with some subdued horns and a general vibe of electric relaxation. The Reach opens with an expansive and melodramatic sample from Route 94’s "My Love", with Jess Glynne’s already-deep voice pitched down. It’s a wider-reaching sound than anything on Thirst 48, and Boogie sounds like he’s amping himself up a bit, trying to raise the stakes on his music. His lyrics are uniquely clear and instantly legible—on your first listen through one of his mixtapes, you generally come away having absorbed every word he’s said.
This might seem like a strange or minor point to focus on, but it feels like part of Boogie’s appeal: His lyrics are plainspoken, funny, and sometimes poignant, and listening to him expound on his life is why you tune in. "Further" is a meditation on the effects of cyclical violence, and he sounds musing, hurt, and confused in turns. On the interlude "God’s Work", he remembers his mother’s eviction, sneaking back in to sleep in the apartment, eating dry cereal. "Even when I’m quiet I be turnt/ And I ain’t trying to cause no riot with my verse," he raps, in what feels like a Boogie Manifesto.
The production gleams with lots of warm horns, drums that sound like dripping faucets, and ribbons of vocal samples. It’s rap that sounds like it’s peeking out the window at the world, which is a feeling Boogie reinforces sometimes in his lyrics, which bristle with protective fear for his six-year-old son. On "Make Me Over", he is an aggrieved single dad, fretting about an environment that feels studded with threats large and small.
There are moments where Boogie sounds silly, getting excited about girls on Instagram, annoying retweets, and people who buy followers on Twitter. If his ear for rapped hooks sharpened, he might land something like a calling-card song: "Bitter Raps", a  loose stream of insults and half-hearted gripes from Thirst 48, is the closest he has. Like his first tape, The Reach feels like a lovingly small-scale project, something to keep you good company in the privacy of your earbuds rather than at a party or in open spaces.


Playful, maximalist, and flirtatious to the core, Isabella Lovestory’s debut album is a defiant celebration of sexual agency.

Amor Hardcore

Isabella Lovestory doesn’t care for subtlety. She moans all over “Golosa,” her electrifying 2020 single about fucking. Amid talk of leather and expensive fragrances, she throws in a line about her butterfly tattoo. Her lover’s into it, she sings, but what may seem like a tossed-off lyric becomes fully realized in “Mariposa,” a hypnotic reggaeton track where she demands a guy spread his legs like the titular insect. The Honduran-born, Montreal-based artist has always been this coy, knowing how to wield reggaeton’s swerving grooves as pure sex appeal. She’s likened the genre to a mating call, and on her debut album, Amor Hardcore, she domineers every track to deliver 30 minutes of seductive excess.
Such hedonistic indulgence is prismatic in Lovestory’s hands. That’s been obvious even in her short career, which includes the trance-y hyperpop romp “Tranki,” a kaleidoscopic reggaeton track on Mura Masa’s last album, and songwriting credits for K-pop girl group LE SSERAFIM. Lovestory opts for stylistic cohesion on Amor Hardcore, wasting no time delivering heightened feelings. “Cherry Bomb,” for example, is a cunninlingus anthem that’s all whirring synths and booming dembow riddims. “Fashion Freak” is more runway ready, and its glossy synth melodies capture the unimpeachable thrill of looking glamorous. “It’s fun to make a character out of yourself and exaggerate your obsessions,” she told The FADER two years ago. The sinister laugh that appears mid-track is a wink and an invitation.
Sex-focused lyrics have always been central to reggaeton, but Lovestory cranks up the drama. Take “Exibisionista,” where she repeatedly declares her exhibisionist kinks over blaring synths. As she whispers and taunts, the track’s murky atmosphere becomes intoxicating, like a delirious night spent entertaining one’s vices. She lives out her fantasies on “Colocho,” too, where she sings about being eaten out by a curly-haired cowboy. Album closer “Keratina,” which is an ode to both keratin hair treatments and ketamine, has gunshots and a swaggering hip-hop beat that conclude the album with a consummate thesis: “La vida es más divertida si eres pervertida” (“Life is more fun if you’re perverted”).
These playful, maximalist caricatures of sex are half the fun here, and one of the major reasons Lovestory stands out among her peers in neoperreo, the club-minded underground reggaeton subgenre that has become a haven for queers and femmes of all genders. “Gateo,” which features one of the scene’s foundational artists, Ms Nina, is perhaps the album’s best expression of the movement. The two don’t simply exchange verses—they hype each other up, flaunting their assets and asserting their excellence atop a thrashing beat. More than anything, the collaboration serves as a reminder that despite the genre’s male-centered narratives, women have always been present in this movement, and will continue to thrive.
The eclectic influences that inform Lovestory’s music make her right at home in the expanding world of reggaeton. She grew up listening to Y2K pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, but also loved the Cure, Crystal Castles, and iconic reggaeton duo Plan B. In her love for brash 2000s pop is a trace of electroclash artists like Maria Daniela y Su Sonido Lasser, but then a track like “Sexo Amor Dinero” arrives and has its eyes set on the future. Co-produced by her boyfriend, the Chilean experimentalist Kamixlo, it features chugging metal guitars and pounding industrial beats. Even when she invites others to play, like on the posse cut “Tacón” or the tempo-shifting highlight “Hit,” Lovestory remains the star. It’s not just the candor of her lyrics that makes her unforgettable, but the magnetic fearlessness. Amor Hardcore is a testament to the power in knowing what you want.


Zach Condon reunites with his old Farfisa on his fifth album, but otherwise he remains cozily ensconced in his twee wheelhouse.

Gallipoli

Beirut’s Zach Condon came up in the tender landscape of mid-aughts indie rock and has been chilling there ever since. After nearly four years freewheeling throughout both New York and Europe, he is back with Gallipoli, which is neither named after the World War I battle nor a reference to the terrible Mel Gibson movie (also about the World War I battle). On Gallipoli, Condon is still doing the same exact thing he’s been doing the past 13 years—creating roomy, Elephant 6-indebted indie pop that sounds more or less like a readymade soundtrack for a young film student trying to front as an auteur. Those who can’t get on board with Condon’s penchant for twee won’t change their minds with this album, either. However, for listeners who appreciate indie pop at its most wide-eyed, this record does just that. Gallipoli doesn’t really break any new ground, but consistency works in Condon’s favor here. Beirut’s fifth album goes down about as smoothly as vanilla soft-serve in the middle of summer. It’s perhaps a bit light on content and about 10 minutes too long, but Gallipoli ultimately is well-produced and sweet to boot.
Gallipoli can be best summed up as the Beirut album where the organ is king. The record’s backstory is extremely in line with Condon’s ethos: Basically, he had this Farfisa sitting in his parents’ house in Santa Fe. He decided he needed said organ back in his life. He obtained the organ. Around that time he started sketching out Gallipoli. What ends up bubbling to the surface is an album loaded with starry 1970s affect. These 12 songs are warm to the touch, bathed in an FM-radio glow, and stuffed to the rim with elements of indie rock at its most naive. The record feels like backwards time travel both to the heyday of Laurel Canyon psych folk and to the alt-rock days of yore where you could put a ukulele in a song and not have people roast you incessantly. These feelings converge on the album’s indulgent eponymous lead single. Its plunky organ and clear-cut horn section have the overstated elegance of the Mandarin Duck fluttering its wings in a pond. Then Condon begins waxing poetic about being “spared from the sorrow,” and “southern winds scattered clouds from the cove,” letting you know with a wink and a raised eyebrow that he is indeed a learned man.
The album’s atmospheric tracks work best. These are not terribly memorable lyrics (and Condon has even said so much himself). This is particularly apparent in “Family Curse,” which is vaguely about family dynamics but in such a way that is pretty much inconsequential. What is really interesting is embedded in the track’s texture: The seed of a vintage-sounding drum-machine loop slowly blossoms into a full-flowered orchestra. The ambient track “Corfu” is a surprising highlight. It is tinged with Balearic rhythms and includes one of Gallipoli’s most compelling uses of organ stoking. One of the shortest songs on the album, it sounds like the kind of sun-kissed psych that would be paired nicely with an activity like drinking a tallboy while someone rubs sunscreen on your back.
Sometimes Condon’s penchant for meandering dreaminess really drags. Gallipoli is largely an album of background music, and its wallpaper qualities can invoke eye rolls and boredom.  On “I Giardini,” Condon sings so far in the back of his throat he sounds Muppet-like, and texturally, things are equally unsatisfying. The resonant piano and plodding percussion feel especially drawn out, far beyond the song’s pretty standard four-minute runtime. Then there’s “Landslide,” which is overwhelming in its perkiness. Pretty much entirely in a major key, the track has an essence that can be described as “hey-ho indie pop man of the highlands meets The Sound of Music,” which is a bit of a head-scratcher.
Beirut’s music will always remain rooted in the 2006 that birthed his first album. No matter what Condon releases, his discography will forever be associated with nostalgia for a more innocent era of indie rock. There’s nothing wrong with continuing to make music that pines for a cultural moment that has already passed. Condon’s constant obsession with anachronism occasionally yields lovely, even compelling results. Other times, listening to his music feels like talking to friends from high school you’ve lost touch with. There’s good stuff here, but ultimately, it’s hard to be excited about something that feels so seriously entrenched in the past.


The Los Angeles rap collective espouses an all-caps message of self-love on a debut album split between effortless cool and empty platitudes.

SATURATION

The first thing that BROCKHAMPTON would like you to know about them is that they are an All-American Boy Band. The patriotic first half of the phrase speaks to their diversity: They include both black and white, queer and straight members. The second half speaks to their lineup. Instead of “the shy one” or “the bad boy,” the L.A.-based collective comprises rappers, producers, singers, directors, designers, and creators. And in place of standard-bearing coolness, BROCKHAMPTON maintain an attractive aesthetic of self-expression. They confidently wear bright outfits, and even all-over blue body paint, in videos. In interviews, they speak often of self-belief. The group attempts to imbue its music with the same reckless, all-caps self-love, yet on their debut album, SATURATION, BROCKHAMPTON are unable to determine the best way to communicate that sentiment. Songs waver in sound and substance: from trap to acoustic, from unfettered declarations of individuality to self-help ballads. On SATURATION, insistence often outweighs execution.
BROCKHAMPTON’s stylishness is their greatest asset. The album’s second track, “GOLD,” isn't about much, yet it is easily the project’s most appealing and assertive outing. It features nearly all of the collective’s vocalists, showcasing them one by one over a futuristic boogie of a beat. Founder Kevin Abstract delivers the hook, in which flaunting a gold chain is akin to godliness. Rappers Matt Champion, Ameer Vann, Merlyn Wood, and Dom McLennon follow suit, each one delivering his strongest flow on the album. “GOLD” is the exemplar of BROCKHAMPTON’s message of self-confidence, where effortless cool is a default setting.
Were they not so insistent about it, it might not be obvious that BROCKHAMPTON are attempting to up-end hip-hop. “I’m just super into redefining things,” Kevin Abstract once told director Spike Jonze. “I want to make people confused, like, ‘Damn, I’ve not heard anybody like this in a rap song—like, ever before,” Wood declared in 2016. The group’s most subversive moments on record, however, come from their production, which is handled entirely in-house, literally; all of BROCKHAMPTON lives together in South Los Angeles. On another standout, “BOYS,” Champion, Vann, and McLennon deadpan over a swirling beat, creating an inviting contrast between the production and their delivery. But as far as what they have to say, Champion’s “Y’all say y’all got bitches/But y’all bitches make my dick soft” does not exactly “change what it means to be a man,” as Abstract said in that same 2016 interview.
Still, on “BOYS” and other beat-driven standouts like “FAKE,” “FACE,” and the horrorcore-adjacent opener “HEAT,” BROCKHAMPTON’s disruption is convincing. They scatter moments of self-deprecation and fear amid the platitudes. “HEAT,” in particular, with its blown-out bass and frantic vocals, explodes with id—a moment of catharsis for both the rappers and the listener. McLennon’s “I hate the way I think, I hate the way it looms” sounds more proud than afraid.
When they shed their aggressiveness, however, SATURATION becomes sappy and the collective’s lyrical weakness reveals itself. Slower tracks like “TRIP,” “MILK,” and “SWIM” closely resemble the naivety of Kevin Abstract’s American Boyfriend. Lamenting the perils of suburban life on “TRIP,” Abstract sings, “Today Imma be whoever I wanna be”; Ameer Vann echoes, “Trapped in the suburbs/We suffocatin’.” On “MILK,” Abstract switches to an uplifting message—“I gotta get better at being me”—but it comes off more like a motivational GIF on Instagram. Throughout, BROCKHAMPTON often mistake honesty for ability, and confession on its own is not necessarily artful.
SATURATION is best when BROCKHAMPTON live the life they preach. No member is a particularly good rapper, but they make up for their weakness when they ride the pristine beats with exuberance. “FACE,” for example, is so clean that a clunker like Champion’s “New times are coming just like a virgin” easily skates by unnoticed amid Vann and McLennon’s superior verses and JOBA’s gentle hook. But when they veer toward more indistinct territory—whether that means vague self-affirmation or songs that sound like Blonde karaoke—their ambitions sound too much like pipe dreams.


After two albums of cheerily frivolous indie pop, Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward return with an album of Christmas tunes.

A Very She & Him Christmas

Look away, all those who would claim to loathe Zooey Deschanel, for her cultural saturation point is nigh. Even now the fates have begun chiseling her porcelain visage onto the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Mount Rushmore (preferably capturing the bewildered look she gave Billy Crudup at the end of Almost Famous), honoring her decade-long career as Twee Personified. Starlet of successful indie flicks and failed blockbusters (Hitchhiker's Guide is underrated), elegant shiller of cotton, remarkably infuriating Top Chef cameo veteran, and faithful companion to what passes in 2011 for a rock star, she now brings us The New Girl, a ludicrous Fox sitcom that is, at the very least, less wantonly shat upon than Whitney. (Still, though, if you ever have the opportunity to train a pit bull to rip someone's throat out merely by your uttering a "code word," do make that code word "adorkable.") Ah yes, and there's She & Him, her Instagram-folk outfit with the quietly excellent M. Ward, proud parents of two cheerily frivolous full-length records many people took remarkably seriously, and why not. And now, a Christmas album. Various deluxe editions come packaged with a hat and/or mittens.
If any or all of this enrages you (including her perfectly competent, bizarrely derided delivery of the National Anthem at a World Series game the other day), you oughta find other stuff to get enraged about. (Seriously, no worse than B- for vocal, and, okay, D+ for the dress.) Even if you don't buy into her It Girl/sex-symbol campaign, let us admit that Zooey's dainty, bright, appealingly low-swooping voice is Good for an Actress, and that's only, like, 15% pejorative. But A Very She & Him Christmas actually isn't hateable enough. Whether you come to praise or bury it, you're looking for something ultra-campy, overloaded with rampant corniness and gratuitous special guests, the holiday equivalent of Jenny Lewis' cover of "Handle With Care". Nah though. No Ben Gibbard, no Will Ferrell, no Mark Wahlberg, nobody. Lots of guitar-and-vocal skeletal sparseness, reaching for transcendent Charlie Brown melancholia but arriving instead at something merely dour. She sings, "They know that Santa's on his way," as though "Santa" were actually a plague of locusts. She should've recorded this while drunk.
Oh, now, though, these songs are fine, fine. "I'll Be Home for Christmas" has a nearly erotic rockabilly sashay, and M. Ward solos with economical dexterity throughout, and improves the record exponentially when his grumbly vocals first kick in on the shuffling "Christmas Wish"; their voices are lovely when intertwined, and at least offer a whiff of transcendent melancholia. Your crucial jam here is ordinarily immensely problematic yuletide sexual-predator anthem "Baby, It's Cold Outside", America's first taste of her vocal talents via Elf, the gender roles now swapped so Zooey bars the door and M. wonders what's in this drink; she blows through her lines in a zippy Eleanor Friedberger jumble, finally loosening up.
Most of the rest is just retightened Don't Fuck It Up competence, alas-- nothing you could call sacrilege, especially given that any Christmas-themed song that does not explicitly praise the birth of Jesus is technically sacrilege. Her "Blue Christmas" is alright but can't touch Porky Pig's; her "Little Saint Nick" is alright but can't touch John Denver and the Muppets'. They add an extra beat to "Sleigh Bells" so as to feel all musical. They attempt to redeem the irredeemable "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" and nearly succeed; they attempt to add gratuitous gravitas to a solo-Zooey "Silver Bells" and fail. (Step away from the ukulele, first of all, and it's hard to sell the line, "And above all this bustle you hear," when there ain't no bustle.) "The Christmas Song" closes us out similarly too prim and grim, but it'll nonetheless ably soundtrack quite a few Xmas-morning marriage proposals amongst happy couples who also knitted each other sweaters to complement their reindeer-besieged wool pajama pants. (Cotton, make that cotton.)
It'd be nice to make even more cheap children's librarian jokes, but they played this one too safe. For a record whose immediate cultural precedent is Pomplamoose's Hyundai ads, this should have been way more polarizing. Savage the Kinks' "Father Christmas", excavate Paul McCartney's mega-twee "Wonderful Christmastime", give Vince Guaraldi's grave a few spins, something. No, for schadenfreude proceed directly to Scott Weiland's A Methadone Christmas or whatever it's called; A Very She & Him stands guilty not of being oppressively adorkable, but of being not nearly adorkable enough.


Led by 19-year-old Jana Bahrich, the fiery emo duo tackle big existential questions and turbulent emotions in four short songs that throw off promising sparks of brilliance.

Wading EP

On their meditative new EP, Wading, Francis of Delirium confronts grief, acceptance, isolation, identity, change, failure, and self actualization—all within the confines of four short songs. Frontwoman Jana Bahrich and drummer Chris Hewett cast an equally wide net last June on their first EP, All Change, but it felt more like a pilot run. Not everything landed, but they generated sparks of brilliance that catch fire on their more ambitious and cohesive follow-up.
Growing up the child of parents that taught overseas, the now-19-year-old Bahrich shuffled around as she grew up, living in Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland before anchoring in the verdant and frankly magical-looking country of Luxembourg. Its capital, Luxembourg City, is supposedly one of the top 20 “highest quality of life” places to live, so it’s comforting to know that even in a place so idyllic, the human condition remains the same.
Wading feels like a rage room, where Bahrich bounces between guitar freakouts and poised harmonies in a quiet-loud-quiet-loud formula. We get a glimpse of her internal monologue as she approaches post-adolescence. Her delivery ricochets over long-winded verses as she works herself to the point of exhaustion. Whispering, screaming, speak-singing, her voice is perpetually sparring with itself as she spins pain into anthemic and invariably catchy “sad angry” music. Whenever Bahrich isn’t center stage, Hewett delivers punchy rhythms much like The National’s Bryan Devendorf. The resulting sound is raw and effective.
Bahrich gives these songs everything, but whenever she leaves herself too unguarded, her safeguards trigger in the form of a scream or sudden change of pitch. On the standout track, “Let It All Go,” a linear story about being at a party with her partner at the relationship’s tipping point, her words begin to race, her voice hurtling towards Wading’s powerful apex. What follows is a fleeting moment of acceptance and clarity; “Let it all go, I’ll let it all go,” she echoes in a devastating refrain. The good ol’ Freudian id punches back protectively with the plaintive howl of her next line: “But aren’t you tired of being alone?”
All of the tracks deal with some sort of contemplation, whether it’s working through the end of a relationship (“Let It All Go”), wrestling with different versions of oneself (“Cause every second is a moment I’m fighting within every part of me” on “Red”) or self-gaslighting (“What if I should be losing everything? What if I’m to blame?” on “I Think I’m Losing”). As a lot of us have started to realize this past year, when you’re abruptly plucked out of your environment, it’s easy to lose sight of your own identity, overthinking how much of it was tied to friends, partners, and acquaintances to begin with. Who are we once those interactions disappear, or shift into new ones? Wading may not hold all of the answers, but it starts by asking the right questions. Running just over 14 minutes, the EP is short enough to digest during a walk around the block, but it feels like the blueprint for something grand.

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R.E.M.’s long misunderstood 1994 album isn’t clarified by the bonus material on this new reissue, but the original songs remain strangely oblique, full of glam rock poses and sly subterfuge.

R.E.M.: Monster (25th Anniversary Edition)

Monster (25th Anniversary Edition)

At the time of its release in 1994, Monster was too strange and sinuous to grasp. The once-underground band had recently garnered huge mainstream success with accessible, drowsily sad songs like “Everybody Hurts” and tightly-strung mood dioramas like “Losing My Religion.” But now every time a guitar tone rippled through an R.E.M. song it threatened to consume it entirely. Michael Stipe’s voice, when intelligible, sang in low, burred tones about sex, marketing, possessive crushes, and the constant reinvention of the self to appear more appealing to the subject of one’s possessive crush. Just as often his voice would echo off of itself or dart between radioactive blooms of guitar. For new fans of R.E.M., Monster didn’t sound like anything on the radio, and it certainly didn’t sound like 1992’s Automatic for the People. It sounded like something that had to be put back where it came from.
Despite debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard album charts, Monster is primarily known as a used record. The blurred bear illustration on the front cover became a recognizable orange swell in every used record store’s dollar bin. Why did fans and non-fans alike quietly reject Monster? For one, Monster was a fatal attempt to return to the band’s roots—to the taut, sparkling rock they made in the '80s. By the time they recorded Automatic, the band had traveled far afield musically, into pastoral realms where the strum of a mandolin guided processionals about death and suffering. They hadn’t toured in five years and they worried these quieter, more introverted songs would result in them playing slow, gloomy sets sitting atop stools. They needed a dramatic shift. “We smashed [the acoustic guitars] against the wall and told the string players to go home,” Stipe said at the time. Peter Buck had recently switched to playing Les Paul guitars, and the sounds he pulled out of them made his amps buzz like beehives. They were going to write an album full of punk songs that would be fun to play live. It was supposed to rock.
Some of Monster indisputably rocks. A lot of it wobbles sideways like an amoeba, including the two songs that blossom from near-identical tremolo riffs, “Crush with Eyeliner” and “I Took Your Name.” One song, “Tongue,” sounds beamed in from a piano lounge on the moon. (During the 1995 show included with the 25th-anniversary reissue of the record, Stipe introduces “Tongue” by saying it has “a little bit of a ‘Luscious Jackson, roller derby’ vibe to it,” which nails it.) Another, “Let Me In,” written after the suicide of Stipe’s friend Kurt Cobain, is more funereal than almost anything on Automatic, a storm of overcompressed electric guitar chords that resembles the sound of the ocean when you close your eyes. Another, “King of Comedy,” is driven by an unusually harsh and rickety rhythm track, sounding like a machine barely held together by screws and breathing large plumes of exhaust.
It’s hard to determine how Monster got this way and the demos included with this reissue aren’t edifying. The band declined to throw in any embryonic versions of songs that actually appear on the record; we’ll never know if or how “King of Comedy” was assembled piece-by-glitching-piece. Most of what is included isn’t even as heat-damaged as “Crush with Eyeliner” or “Circus Envy.” Instead, the demos here tend to be lost instrumentals and riffs for which Stipe never ended up writing lyrics. Some of them sound like instrumental sketches for an actual return-to-our-roots R.E.M. record—the comfortable jangle of the demo “Uptempo Ricky,” its bassline like a searchlight playing over introspective minor chords, could have resembled one of phantoms looming out of the mist on their debut album Murmur had it been completed and recorded by early-R.E.M. producers Don Dixon and Mitch Easter.
But the 1994 Monster as-released tends to outright reject R.E.M.’s past. It reaches beyond their own history, into darker, more seductive forms of rock’n’roll. They moved away from the punk and classic rock tropes that formed the gnarled sound of their younger grunge contemporaries, foraging for a more flexible style and manner of performance practiced by figures such as Marc Bolan, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop: glam rock. Glam would allow R.E.M. to be loud and crude but in such a theatrically exaggerated way that the crudeness had double and triple meanings trailing like shadows behind it. It emphasized the primacy of image as well as its inherent artificiality, using empty-headed rock’n’roll as a vehicle for poetry and subversion. If R.E.M. had to be a popular rock band again, if they had to commit their ideas and performances directly to tape with minimal overdubs, they would also find a way to undercut the idea of a “popular rock band” at every turn of Monster, creating a record that has a simultaneously playful and hostile relationship to its own image.
Consider the music video for “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”, the first single from Monster. Stipe was popular enough at the time to be recognized on the street, but for the entire first verse of “Kenneth,” the band is filmed from the chin-down and anonymized. Even when we finally glimpse Stipe, debuting his newly-shaved head and wearing a green T-shirt with a small red star on it, the camera loses focus and lingers at senseless angles that fail to contain the band’s performance. It feels like we see more of the garage and the varicolored lighting they’re playing in than we ever see them. Just like the record, it’s very ridiculous and kind of pointless and all about its own ridiculousness and pointlessness, something “cool” that also deliberately indicates the quotation marks hovering around “cool.”
Buck described Monster in an interview as “the first record where we dare to be really dumb.” Stipe would also end up classifying Monster as obvious and silly, likely because, a few exceptions aside (“Stand,” “Shiny Happy People”), R.E.M. were used to making music that was oblique and shrouded in fog as a forest edge. Monster was far less guarded about what it was. Stipe came out as queer during the promotional roll-out for the record, and there’s a queerness to his presence throughout the record, an impish unreadability that morphs through different perspectives, as if coming out of the closet made him realize there were whole new sequences of closets to tumble through.
As he tried to fit words to the increasingly bent and echoey sounds coming out of Buck’s amp, Stipe began to write in character. The characters that populate Monster are like funhouse mirror warpings of the self, appearing at times larger than life—the narrator of “I Took Your Name” is Satan—and at others frail and distended as an insect, as on “Tongue,” where Stipe sings in falsetto to convey the perspective of a woman who knows she’s being used for sex. “King of Comedy” unreels like the mission statement of a particularly un-self-aware advertising executive, exploiting everything imaginable for whatever money can be harvested from it. “Make it charged with controversy,” Stipe sings, underlining the constant flow of sex and capital with something like a smirk, “I’m straight I’m queer I’m bi.”
That lyric, incidentally, is almost inaudible in the original mix of the record. For the reissue, producer Scott Litt, always dissatisfied with his initial mix, decided to clear away the woolen guitar overdubs that clotted over Stipe’s voice and raise its volume across the record. Stipe’s voice is uncannily clear at this altitude, shrugging off all of its old echoes like loose clothing. “Star 69” reveals itself as a song about some kind of telephonic extortion revolving around burning down a warehouse for the insurance money, though arguably the original mix better reflects the song’s plot by having Stipe’s voice quadrupled so it resembles a network of conspiratorial echoes.
The instrumental shifts in Litt’s remix are, at best, pointlessly diverting, like the little Polynesian auroras of guitar he places underneath the chords of “Crush with Eyeliner,” making it the closest R.E.M. have approached surf rock. But at worst, Litt’s remix can be clueless and distracting—and it’s often both. Removing the shimmer of tremolo from the chorus of “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” erases one of the band’s most compelling hooks. “King of Comedy”’s remix reveals that it was only a coherent song by the grace and economy of Litt’s original mix; the new version sounds like it’s been sunk underwater and is short-circuiting. And the overwhelming guitar distortion that papered “Let Me In” like wet leaves, Litt mutes and decompresses, giving a song that once seemed like it was drowning in the rain of its own grief the naked and unfinished quality of a demo.
What Litt misunderstands about Monster is that the inescapable excess of Buck’s guitar tone as well as the slipperiness of Stipe’s vocals are what make the record special; when you invert these effects, it starts to be indistinguishable from any other R.E.M. record. Monster is supposed to be brazenly proud of how alien and strange it is, the kind of record that would find it hilarious and Warholian that it was resold so many times to record stores that it became a near-worthless object. It can’t be defined, down to the album’s title, slippery as a shadow lurking in the background of a horror movie, elusive, gone as soon as it’s recognized. It’s like a Cheshire cat as a rock record, always shapeshifting around a fixed and somewhat sinister grin, saying true things with an ironic uncertainty and saying ironic things as if they were absolutely true. It’s just like Stipe sings in “King of Comedy”: “You can lie as long as you mean it.”

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Following his bandmates Syd, Matt Martians, and Steve Lacy, the bassist of L.A.’s the internet steps up with his solo debut. He’s not yet a natural leader, but his musicianship is self-evident.

Patrick Paige II: Letters of Irrelevance

Letters of Irrelevance

Letters of Irrelevance, the debut project from Patrick Paige II, the bassist of the L.A. collective the Internet, arrives at the end of a strong string of solo releases from his fellow band members Syd, Matt Martians, and Steve Lacy, along with the promise of a new record from the group. Unlike his bandmates, whose individual stars rose following their respective solo releases, Paige’s debut—a muted, soulful, profoundly introverted record that focuses more on loneliness and neuroses than the Southern California good life—isn’t going to do much to make him a household name.
Closer to an intimate, handwritten diary of demos than a true solo album (“Writing is the only place I feel safe enough to be vulnerable/This is basically straight from the journals” Paige raps on “The Best Policy”) Letters of Irrelevance captures Paige’s accomplished musicality and expert bass ability but does little to reach outward to its listener. This is bedroom soul, but not like Keith Sweat or Jodeci—instead, it’s music made at three in the morning in your childhood bedroom as your mom sleeps two doors down; lyrics written while dusting off old yearbooks and pondering the whereabouts of lost friends; bass licks honed during long nights alone in a dorm room. The album’s slightly self-deprecating title, Letters of Irrelevance, exemplifies its interiority: This project is for no one but Paige himself, a form of therapy for a sad and overactive mind that finds solace not in people but in the thump and hum of the electric bass.
Like much of the Internet’s work, Letters of Irrelevance is a musician’s album. It lingers over slow grooves, jazzy chord modulations, dusty soul samples, and layered harmonies that take from fellow L.A. bass virtuoso Thundercat. After an all-instrumental SoundCloud project, Prelude, released in 2016, Paige finally steps behind the mic and proves himself to be a competent and self-aware, if still developing, rapper and singer. He perfectly nails D’Angelo’s halting, breathless delivery on the groovy “Voodoo,” an album highlight and clear homage to the neo-soul pioneer (and his bassist, the legendary Pino Palladino), and raps with detailed imagery and palpable feeling on the Syd and Kari Faux-featuring single “On My Mind / Charge It to the Game,” as if he were reading a letter (“Decided to write a verse because I don’t know how to communicate/I hope you’re doing good in school and keep up your grades”).
It’s clear how important Paige’s bass playing is to the Internet, and how vital, in turn, the band is to him. Paige handles his bass with a guitarist’s dexterity and a hip-hop producer’s ear for rhythm, yet his music lacks the dynamism and depth of his work with the group. He brings some much-needed funk and fun to the ForteBowie-featuring “Do My Dance” and the Sareal and G Perico-assisted groove “Get It With My Niggas,” but songs like “The Best Policy,” “Red Knife,” and “Ode to Inebriation” are almost indistinguishable in their boilerplate instrumental soul and rushed, revealing rambles of verses. They feel like what they are: shy, probing attempts by an artist usually relegated to the background to command a song for the first time.
Over solemn keys, boom-bap drums, and intricate, alternating bass and guitar plucks, Paige talks to his dead mother on the heartfelt album closer “The Last Letter,” letting his grief flow with uncommon, deeply felt candor: “Surprised that I could even write this, with dry eyes/I could’ve ended California’s drought alone with my eyes.” Instead of tackling a third verse, Paige steps away from the mic and rips an emotional and piercing guitar solo, letting his sadness and loss ripple out for over a minute. It’s the logical way to end an album by a skilled performer still learning to utilize his voice the way he does his instruments. After all, words, in Patrick Paige II’s melancholy, carefully constructed world, only go so far.


I wouldn't say she was a lost cause, but my girlfriend needed a music doctor\n\ like I needed ...

10,000 Hz Legend

I wouldn't say she was a lost cause, but my girlfriend needed a music doctor like I needed, well, a girlfriend. That is, desperately. Call it a perfect match. She'd spent too many years clubbing to have more than a passing knowledge of non-techno music, and I'd spent too many years shucking to have more than a passing knowledge of monogamous sex. The results have been fast, effective, and largely painless. She's taken to the Pixies, and I've taken to, um, lots of sex.
Air's debut, 1998's Moon Safari, is not only a pop classic of retro-futurism; it also provides a damn fine soundtrack to the otherworldly act of sex. Needless to say, we became well acquainted with the album, which both of us were already fond of to begin with. Their soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's directorial debut, 2000's The Virgin Suicides, was a similarly fluid pour of analog synths, but the album was a less pop-oriented, more minor-key affair. And if you've seen the movie, you can understand why I wouldn't want to do "the beast with two backs" while listening to its irrevocably-linked score.
So would Air's official follow-up to Moon Safari be a return to coital form? I'll let my girlfriend do the talking:
"Weird."
That would be the opener, "Electronic Performers." She wasn't necessarily turned off by the deep bass thumps that rip into electronic handclaps. Or the occasional heavy rapping, like the landlord at your door a day after the rent's due. And it definitely wasn't the radar beeps or the fluctuating machinations of the keyboard. I think it was the vocals. Accompanied by a natural piano, a distorted voice sings, "We are the synchronizers/ Send messages through time code." And it is weird, like something Dean and Gene Ween would come up with. But with lines such as, "We need to use envelope filters/ To say how we feel," the track is also an oddly beautiful lament.
"The Radiohead voice!"
Yes, a whispery version of the fitter, happier Macintalk voice makes an appearance on the love song, "How Does It Make You Feel?" But a real voice-- resident keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr.-- sings the ELO-inspired chorus. The beat, meanwhile, is cut from the exact same mold as The Virgin Suicides-- from the dark, ambling pace all the way down to the angelic voices coalescing in the background. But whereas that album-- and "the Radiohead voice," for that matter-- remain serious to the end, this song concludes with a funny moment. After listing off his feelings, the male computerized voice receives an abrupt retort from a female computerized voice: "Well, I really think you should quit smoking."
"It's like rock-n-roll."
"The Vagabond" makes you wish for a full-length Beck/Air collaboration. But at first, it's all Beck: a harmonica solo, folky acoustic strumming, Beck's distinctive, marble-mouthed vocals, and tolls ringing in the background. You'd think he donated a b-side from Mutations. That's when Air's laser-gun atmospherics shoot forth. The drums that kick in midway are also decidedly more similar to Air's previous work. Beck even ends the number with his trademark falsetto and a cackling laugh a la "Hollywood Freaks," so yes, she's right: this is rock-n-roll. But then again, a moment later she said, "Honey, isn't rock-n-roll a weird name?"
"Is this the same album?"
By the halfway mark, "Lucky and Unhappy," the poor girl had been thrown for more than one loop-- not to mention "Radian," Air's most overwrought Bacharach-inspired track to date. And now here was this untraceable throbbing, this eerie computerized whirring, voices of different distortions, and an acoustic guitar to ground it all; then a skittering beat and a swirling orchestra; and even later, static popping and off-key keyboards.
Songs from the album's second half provided little relief. "Sex Born Poison" pairs a vocoderized voice with the Japanese vocals of Buffalo Daughter; then, for good measure, adds what sounds like digital Ping-Pong-- or maybe the noises "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!" makes while Little Mac is popping King Hippo in the gut and mouth. After opening with a thick electro-pulse and digi-congos, the chantey "People in the City" reaches a simple acoustic epiphany-- think the Beta Band's "Dry the Rain"-- before descending into muddled feedback and heavy electronic gurgling. And the final number, "Caramel Prisoner," is an ambient come-down-- kind of like a rollercoaster coming to rest with a bloody, broken-nosed Fabio aboard.
"I like it, but it's kind of all over the place."
I'm a little scared to admit it, but we're on the same page here. The barely cohesive 10,000 Hz Legend is both a concern and a relief. There's only one truly catchy song-- the Low-era Bowie-esque "Radio #1"-- but it doesn't have quite the same bounce (not to mention single potential) as "Sexy Boy." So you probably won't hear any of these songs on the radio, and I can say with absolute certainty that this won't be Details' album of the year, as Moon Safari was. I don't say this because it matters, but rather to indicate that Nicolas Godin and Jean-Beno\xEEt Dunckel have steadfastly refused to be pigeonholed. For better or worse, this is not Moon Safari Redux.
The obvious comparison that my girlfriend should have made is to the Chemical Brothers, who took a similar stylistic leap on their last album, 1999's Surrender, even though staying the big-beat course would have been the easier and more profitable thing to do. But for some reason Spike Lee's work also comes to mind: there are plenty of hits and misses, but the experience is worth it for the invigorating knowledge that this critically established artist isn't afraid to take his art in new directions. Plus, my girlfriend and I love that Spike always slips a hot sex scene into his films.


The latest album from Wiz is a bloated and expensive version of the rap he’s always made but without that signature effortlessness.

Rolling Papers 2

There was a time when a loosely buttoned, snapback-wearing Wiz Khalifa was making undeniably fascinating rap music. Eight years ago, when Wiz released Kush & Orange Juice, he did more than just stroll into the studio late at night, ask for a beat with some cowbell, and recap his day with a few weed puns thrown in. The appeal was the creamy flow, the ear for the smoked-out production that perfectly backed his exotic imagery, and a legitimate charisma that made him feel like an approachable star. Shit that should’ve been corny wasn’t, and instead, you wanted to experience his seemingly problem-free life for yourself. Within the last couple of years Wiz has got comfortable, enjoying his life as a father and rap superstar with a loyal fanbase. On his latest studio album, Rolling Papers 2, that comfort strips the album of all ambition—a bloated and expensive version of the rap he’s always made but without that signature effortlessness.
Sometimes the most fun music has low stakes. Playboi Carti’s recent Die Lit refreshingly didn’t set out to be a groundbreaking genre-changer but it’s impact rivaled all the self-serious major-label releases that screamed classic from the rooftops. The issue with Rolling Papers 2 is that, over the course of its absurd 25 tracks and 90 minutes,  it feels like there are no stakes at all. Wiz is going through the motions aware he’s existing relatively pressure-free—similar to his mentor Snoop Dogg, who pops in on “Penthouse” to spit the same lethargic verse he’s been spitting since 2005. No matter what, as long as Wiz is still talking weed his fanbase will still scream for him and he’ll remain a star: the downside of depending so heavily on fans who don’t want you to change.
He falls back on old ideas, hardly taking any swings. “Ocean” nearly sounds like it was recorded in 2010, with longtime producer Cardo that’s reminiscent of Kush and Orange Juice’s “Mezmorized,” but it’s wasted on Wiz lifelessly making his way through what should’ve been an album standout. He also reconnects with Curren$y on “Mr. Williams/Where Is the Love,” but the chemistry the two had on their 2009 collaboration How Fly seems all but gone; and Curren$y’s once unparalleled descriptive ability to make the most basic picture become vivid is replaced with a half-assed, bitter verse about a woman who went to Dr. Miami (“She got a million dollar mouth/She was born with it/She went to Dr. Miami for the rest of the shit.”)
When Wiz isn’t rehashing old ideas, he’s forcing new ones. On “Real Rich,” Wiz gets an unusually weak Tay Keith beat that doesn’t have the bounce that catapulted Memphis’ BlocBoy JB into becoming rap’s Shoot-dancing superstar. His formerly calm and collected flow like he just faced a blunt solo in one sitting is instead drowsy leading you to wonder what happened to the artist whose presence magically transformed “We Dem Boyz” into an immortal club anthem. Then, Wiz falls further away from his comfort zone, creating the clumsy and downbeat “B Ok” a love ode nearing the bleakness of Drake’s “March 14th.”
Wiz feels most significant on Rolling Papers 2 when he takes advantage of the album’s length and endless funds to put some shine on unsung artists he genuinely appreciates. He calls on the late Pittsburgh rapper Jimmy Wopo to spread his contagious energy on “Blue Hunnids” and is eager to display his latest discovery, a California-based twin brother R&B duo named the MXXNLIGHT—who are given three songs here. As a booster and mentor to younger artists he’s excited about, Wiz tells us more about him than any track based on ideas from his 22-year old self ever could.
In some ways, an unexpected outlier of an album (for instance, Wiz singing Lil Tracy-esque country songs) would have been preferable to Wiz ambling along, hands in pocket, blunt behind ear through Rolling Papers 2. If anything, the album elevates the case for how difficult it was to make Wiz’s older music, where a slight tonal change could throw the whole thing off kilter. But really, Wiz should know better, all of his peers from that late ’00s boom (Drake, Kid Cudi, J. Cole, etc.) try things, have interests, have goals, even if they don’t come close to meeting them. But Wiz is just there, emotionless, still asking for some damn cowbell.


The Newcastle band’s oddball indie pop makes a pitch to those unsure whether to fret over civilizational decline or their own minor burdens: Why not both!

Free Humans

In one sense, Hen Ogledd’s third album is just what you’d expect from a low-key clan of indie-pop darlings: It has shabby guitars, crafty hooks, and sing-songy campfire melodies, all warmly interwoven like a winter cardigan. Should you wish, you could listen to Free Humans on those terms alone, filing it among the dainty troves of labels like K Records.
But in another sense—the one in which Free Humans is not only a catalog of heartbreak and minutiae, but also a sci-fi odyssey warning of political isolationism and climate apocalypse—it starts to feel quite unorthodox. Hidden in its lullabies are bouts of galactic anxiety and wry jabs at spacejet-setting one-percenters. A song called “Space Golf” berates the elites as they blast off to gentrify Jupiter; “Time Party” rallies us to “Bomb the banks! Shrink the economy!” Free Humans makes a pitch to those unsure whether to fret over civilizational decline or their own minor burdens, and the advice is emphatic: Why not both!
The record’s multitudes should surprise nobody familiar with the ever unpredictable Richard Dawson. Before Hen Ogledd, the Newcastle bard was known for mythic solo masterworks that his devotees could chew over for years. By contrast, the band he assembled with outré harpist Rhodri Davies, multi-instrumentalist Sally Pilkington, and art curator Dawn Bothwell has now released two bite-size albums in as many years, while Dawson’s homegrown project with Pilkington, Bulbis, spawned some 49 ambient and kosmische EPs in lockdown.
Despite sometimes having the air of a kitschy sideshow, Hen Ogledd is now its own thriving community: Each member illustrates some corner of Free Humans’ doomed dystopia before passing along the mic, like class nerds presenting a meticulous school project. The loose end-of-days theme gives rise to interstellar dance soirees (“Time Party”), ancient rumblings of extinction (“Feral”), and—in an improbably romantic finale of pumping drum machines and prog-folk fireworks—a mass exodus into a “very big ball of light” (“Skinny Dippers”).
Nothing about this silly-serious concept is as wonderful as the band’s delight in it. Take a simple couplet from “Space Golf,” which envisages the lives of the rich after they steal away from Earth for good: “Infinity pool on Ganymede/You took so much more than you need.” You can practically see the lightbulb flashing as that ludicrous rhyme pops into Pilkington’s head, presumably while she peruses a list of Jupiter’s moons. Likewise, from “Crimson Star”:

Those were the best days of my life
I was a singer in a band
Aboard the first of the big cruise ships
Touring the seven planets and their moons
Circling TRAPPIST-1

This is Dawson leaning precariously into his Douglas Adams caper, synths swooping beneath him like a magic carpet. As with much else here, it’s a perilous leap of faith performed in a tone of utter humility, in this case while channelling the textures and emotional beats of lavish ’80s sophistipop.
The band’s kids-in-a-candy-store approach to modulators and electronics leads to some questionable indulgence (the gear credits read like components of a Flaming Lips song-title generator: Bassman, Orbit, the Depths, Bubbletron, Randy’s Revenge...), but in good twee-pop fashion, the unit shambles along with a camaraderie that brings us in on the antics. Songs like “Farewell” are the backbone, crammed with dense and rousing songcraft; other highlights, such as “Bwganod” and “Skinny Dippers,” are more like gas giants, vast and nebulous enough for funk, offbeat synthpop, and sweary Scotch poetry to swarm around their rocky core.
For all its knotty themes and interludes, Free Humans is guided by a childlike innocence: the betrayal of a planet condemned and abandoned by its rich, and the unexpected relief of its liberation. Our intuition of a climate catastrophe has fuelled many such visions of a beautiful apocalypse, as the culture writer Al Horner notes; they can manifest in everything from stories of post-pandemic biodiversity to verdant video games like The Last of Us. It’s easy to see why these apocalyptic fantasies might appeal to an anarchic bunch like Hen Ogledd (not least Dawson, who loves both gaming and UFO conspiracies), but at its heart, Free Humans is a passionate rebuke to both fatalism and futurism. It’s the sound of four cosmic souls resolutely staying put—not wanderers but wonderers, still in love with their own bizarre planet, and baffled by the senselessness of leaving it behind.

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On their first collaborative album, Seattle producer L’Orange and North Carolina rapper Solemn Brigham craft spirited, old-school rap that owes a hefty debt to Madvillain.

Marlowe

L’Orange is a rare specimen of one of hip-hop’s most endangered species: the loop digger. Over the last five years, the Seattle producer’s dusty, sample-based beats have caught the ears of classically minded MCs from all over the country, but he tends to avoid selling them piecemeal, preferring to engage in album-length collaborations with rappers like Kool Keith, Mr. Lif, and Jeremiah Jae. For his latest such release, L’Orange has teamed up with the largely unknown North Carolina rapper Solemn Brigham under the name Marlowe. True to the producer’s form, it’s an album of austere rap that evokes the turn-of-the-millennium underground: There are no synths, no hooks, just bars, bars, bars over a collage of vinyl chops.
For a new duo, the pair ignites an impressive number of sparks during the first half of the self-titled album. “Demonstration” sounds like a drugged-out after school special about the dangers of wack MCs (“I don’t change the clothes, DB minus the old,” Brigham boasts). A sumptuous soul flip forms the foundation of “Tales From the East,” over which Brigham lays down the kind of breathless, jam-packed lines that encourage rewinds (“Me, loose chain on the door off the hinge, don’t peek”). “Palm Readers” plunges into rap’s psychedelic deep end, with layers of tremolo-soaked guitar and heavy panning. Standing on this shifting ground, Brigham issues mission statements like, “Just to dig crates for the brakes, tryna move thangs.”
As thrilling as these high points can be, Marlowe lacks the consistency of the classics it seeks to emulate. While the album barrels forward with remarkable momentum in its first half, the duo starts to flag just past the midway point. L’Orange’s production is solid throughout, but the kitschy snippets of dialogue he wedges in between songs begin to feel on-the-nose, homages to Madlib that devolve into mere mimicry. And Brigham doesn’t quite possess the versatility or magnetism to carry all 17 of the record’s tracks. While he’s a reasonably adept rapper, his wordplay and lyricism are lacking; despite hinting at other topics, he has little to offer beyond braggadocio. Listening to Marlowe, it’s difficult not to wonder what Earl Sweatshirt’s technique, milo’s personality, or Chester Watson’s energy would sound like over these beats.
Most contemporary hip-hop producers operate in mercenary fashion, selling their creations à la carte to the highest bidders, though the pendulum has begun to swing back in recent years. Some of the best-known producers in popular rap, including Metro Boomin, Zaytoven, and Noah “40” Shebib, have become sought after for their ability to architect full albums. L’Orange might eventually achieve a similar status within the traditionalist set, if he ever finds a foil capable of doing his instrumentals justice.
While both halves of Marlowe approach their collaboration with plenty of enthusiasm, Brigham doesn’t seem to be that MC. Still, for a certain type of listener, their nostalgic album will scratch an itch that few other rap records in 2018 could reach. If you’ve worn out your copy of Madvillainy—as these two obviously have—you could certainly do worse than give Marlowe a spin.


The Canadian R&B singer’s sleepy, erratically experimental third album proves that good old-fashioned love songs and heartbreak ballads are still his strong suit.

Never Enough

Life after Graduation humbled Kanye West. Struggling with invasive tabloid coverage amid the death of his mother and a broken engagement, he mused, “Do I still got time to grow?/Things ain’t always set in stone.” Daniel Caesar would later cover “Street Lights” on one of his early EPs, 2015’s Pilgrim’s Paradise. Though he was barely 20 when he recorded it, Caesar’s version (retitled “Streetcar”) captured angst beyond his years. He ditched the electro-R&B but retained the emo confessionalism, backing his falsetto with piano, drums, and guitar. It was a preview of the minimal, ethereal tone of his full-length debut, 2017’s Freudian. The music that followed wasn’t as polished or poetic. “I wanted to free myself from replicating Freudian,” Caesar told interviewer Tom Power in 2020. His new album, Never Enough, poses the question: What if ChatGPT wrote half of 808s & Heartbreak?
Traveling far afield from the gospel arrangements and acoustic ballads that defined his debut, Caesar has collaborated with Justin Bieber, T-Pain, and Free Nationals, picking up pieces of their sounds along the way. He’s erratically experimental on Never Enough—Auto-Tune, pitched-down vocals, random rap verses, Frank Ocean-like ad-libs. “Shot My Baby,” a bluesy tale of infidelity turned manslaughter, is the most intriguing departure from his typical autofiction. He’d been working on “a country-bluegrass type album,” he’s said, but switched directions when longtime producers Jordan Evans and Matthew Burnett weren’t sure what to do with the music. Instead, he lands on woozy psych-R&B that sounds like sleepy karaoke, or else the kind of music you hear in the background of ABC crime-drama trailers.
The album is, in a word, sedated. Many songs open with about 20 seconds of eerily muted or distorted synth. The Slowed + Reverbed midsection of “Ocho Rios” accentuates Caesar’s melancholy and lyrics about prescription pills. “Toronto 2014” romanticizes life before the money and the Grammys. Yet no matter how hoarse or comatose he sounds—“You’re my saving grace… grace… grace”—propulsive drums, divine strings, and gossamer harmonies help to camouflage the weaknesses.
Never Enough leans into the superficially cerebral subject matter of 2019’s Case Study 01, which sampled a theoretical physicist and dedicated a song to a brain lobe. That album was about as pseudo-academic as it gets. But if you’ve ever taken a scenic late-night drive, put on Channel Orange, and were unlucky enough to be accompanied by a suitor hoping to seduce you with Maslow hierarchies and Jordan Peterson quotes, Never Enough will give you flashbacks. “Do I titillate your mind?” Caesar asks on “Do You Like Me?” (Would you believe me if I told you it was co-written by Raphael Saadiq?) Lyrical absurdity peaks on “Vince Van Gogh”: “Used to be ugly, now I’m a handsome Charlie Manson/Wrapped in a Snuggie.” And lest we forget this completely original red-pill observation: “We’re stuck in the Matrix.”
Three standouts, “Always,” “Let Me Go,” and “Valentina,” prove that good old-fashioned love songs and heartbreak ballads remain Caesar’s strong suit. The back half of Never Enough taps into the bedroom R&B of 2018’s “Who Hurt You?” But in a departure from Caesar’s previous duets with women, all of the features on the main tracklist—Mustafa, Omar Apollo, serpentwithfeet, Ty Dolla $ign—are men. “Homiesexual,” an ode to male toxicity, is the most harmonious. “I never meant to make you cry, my girl,” Ty Dolla professes to a lover who’s already moved on. Since he monopolized the Auto-Tune, Caesar balances the track with lustful vocals: “I-I-I know you like it nasty.” When he’s not over-intellectualizing his emotions, Caesar can be disarmingly raw. If only he didn’t write like a cyborg the rest of the time.


San Francisco’s Patrick Cowley produced left-of-center disco classics for Sylvester and others and pioneered the uptempo disco variant hi-NRG. He also composed all-synth soundtracks for gay porn films, which are collected here. Even with their primitive, glitchy programming, these synth pieces are supremely sultry, reveling in freedoms long denied.

Muscle Up

Like Arthur Russell, another cult hero whose status rose years after he died of AIDS, San Francisco’s Patrick Cowley was known during his short lifetime for left-of-center disco; with songs like "Menergy" and "Megatron Man", he was the prime architect of the uptempo electronic disco variant Hi-NRG, later popularized by hits like Dead or Alive’s "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)". Also like Russell, Cowley’s roots were avant-garde; where Russell's lineage came from experimental classical composers like Christian Wolff, Cowley drew inspiration from early Moog masters Tomita, Wendy Carlos, and Tangerine Dream. Unlike Russell, however, some of Cowley's work reached the mainstream: What Giorgio Moroder was to Donna Summer, Cowley was to LGBT pioneer Sylvester—the mustachioed background figure who contemporized a disco diva’s hot soul with cool technology.
Yet unbeknownst to even most of his disco fans, Cowley also created synth compositions in the even-more-underground medium of gay porn. Muscle Up is the second of two releases compiling this work, spanning time spent as a student at the City College of San Francisco to the period shortly before his death in 1982, when he scored his final smashes with Sylvester, Paul Parker, Loverde, and other Bay Area acts. As with 2013's School Daze, it takes its name from a real 1980 porn film, released by L.A.'s Fox Studio, that Cowley soundtracked. The music here documents an important cultural shift: As Super 8 gave way to VHS, DVD, and digital, much of gay and straight porn music alike would be synth-centric.
Like porn itself, electronic music references reality while signaling a fantastical break from it. For gay men born in the '50s like Cowley, synths suggested a refuge from repression, an escape hatch from a world where police entrapped, beat, and jailed them; where they lost their jobs or unwillingly severed family ties. This is one of the reasons why synth-disco milestones like Summer's "I Feel Love"—a track Cowley further intensified in his legendary 15+ minute remix—resonated so strongly with gay dancers of its era: Synth music was dream/sci-fi music, and it competed with R&B at the bathhouses where its suspension of time and space heightened the otherworldliness of unlimited sexual expression central to pre-AIDS gay experience, as if every man-on-man encounter after Stonewall and before Plague was a trip to the moon.
Appropriately, the first track of Muscle Up, "Cat's Eye", begins with a whooshing interplanetary-wind sound, and the ominous processional tom-toms that follow lets us know that sex is about to happen in the furtive way animals anticipate an earthquake. Cowley's keys ape ceremonial trumpets much like the pseudo-horn fanfare that opens Devo's Duty Now for the Future. That was 1979; this piece was allegedly recorded in '75. The recording is crude and there's a moment of cacophony when two martial drum patterns crossfade and collide, but even this accidental frisson suggests porn's glitchy, clandestine low-budget production values.
As a former drummer who switched to synths (but plays everything here besides didgeridoo and a bit of bass), Cowley comprehended both discipline and exploration. There's little on Muscle Up that sounds robotic; "5oz of Funk" echoes the syncopated beat and bass from Patti Jo's "Make Me Believe in You". Only once do machines keep time, on a 1975 instrumental demo version of "Somebody to Love Tonight", a song that Cowley revisited four years later with Sylvester, yielding understated but profoundly aching results. Even at this stage, it's supremely sultry, simmering with desires then considered utterly vile beyond the San Francisco bubble.
Today, the city's technology occupies a different kind of frontier, one often driven by motives not entirely artistic. And so it's instructive to hear what one guy then just blocks away from where Twitter now resides created with far cruder but perhaps more sensitive, pre-digital tools some 40 years ago. Rather than clean precision, he gets dirty invention, overheated homage. Instead of considered silences between notes, there's the strong suggestion of one man's impulsive sweat and spunk and stink. Cowley's interplanetary sex music is paradoxically earthy for the same reason his parallel cosmic club grooves were so righteous; because it reveled in freedoms long denied.


After two stellar EPs, this post-dubstep duo again turns club and R&B influences into something, like Boards of Canada or James Blake, best enjoyed alone.

Crooks & Lovers

Mount Kimbie are two friends who met in college, didn't exactly have the same taste in music, made some field recordings, dumped them into Fruity Loops, and started working. Their first two EPs, Sketch on Glass and Maybes, came out on the British dubstep label Hotflush, but didn't sound like much like their peers-- and that's one of the reasons they were so good. No pomp, no anxiety, no apocalyptic drops, no airhorns. In a recent video interview, Dom Maker-- one half of the group-- talked about his appreciation for TV on the Radio and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which is probably not the way to impress dance-music purists, but it is a way to prove you're creative enough to ignore genre purity. It's why Crooks & Lovers is highly anticipated by such a small community of listeners-- and also why it has such a good chance of being appreciated by a larger one.
If they have forebears, it's a group like Boards of Canada, who used machines to make music more convincingly pastoral than most folk bands. The funk on Crooks is too intimate to be whored out to clubs. It's beat music for hearth and home. Beat music for your cycling commute, or for gardening. The snare on "Before I Move Off" is the cluck of someone's tongue against the roof of their mouth. When "Carbonated" climaxes, the sound of rain comes into the mix-- and a sprinkle, not a downpour. Even the titles are humble: "Mayor" (and not "President" or "Dictator" or "King"); "Ode to Bear"; "Field". And in the rare moment when the music gets agitated-- like on "Blind Night Errand"-- they still avoid being grandiose. Dubstep's signature bass wobble turns into the burp of plumbing. A big synthesizer sweep sounds like the air conditioner turning on. The surprise-- to me, at least-- is that despite the politeness of the overall sound, it's still detailed enough to sound even better loud than on headphones.
Nothing on Crooks stands out the way "Maybes" or "Sketch on Glass" did, and though it may be a generous fan's rationalization, I'd just say this just makes it an album rather than a single or an EP. Recording a full-length at all is a rare gesture in a genre where a producer-- like Joy Orbison, for example-- can release 10 or 15 minutes of music and still be considered one of the best of the year. Dubstep-- and dance music in general-- is a musical hemisphere whose "great albums" often don't seem to have any self-awareness of how an album can work, but Crooks, for what it's worth, does-- it rises, it falls, it rises again, and it ends. Thirty-five minutes, frequent sparkling, no fuss.
When an interviewer from The Fader said he'd tried to search for Mount Kimbie on Google Maps but couldn't find anything, Kai Campos-- the other half of the group-- explained, "It's a place inside all of us where buses arrive on time." Not a cloud-scraping peak where the sunsets burn pink and white for miles, not a metaphor for the grandeur of creation, just a small town with reliable public transportation-- a beautiful, small, and clever answer for a beautiful, small, and clever album.


On his new mixtape, the Buffalo rapper Conway spits clearly enunciated, precisely worded bars, but it often feels like he’s holding something back.

Conway the Machine / DJ Green Lantern: Reject on Steroids

Reject on Steroids

Midway through his new mixtape, Reject on Steroids, the rapper Conway snarls, “They want me on Freshman cover/But I’m a seasoned vet,” and he’s got the truth on his side—XXL asked him to apply. Aside from the occasional shout-out on Dipset epics, Buffalo, N.Y., was a complete non-factor in hip-hop before Conway and the MC Westside Gunn parlayed years of mixtape hustle into a recent deal with Eminem’s Shady Records. XXL might’ve leaked its Class of 2017 to Conway; on “The Vision,” he makes very specific complaints about rappers with painted nails and dyed, beaded dreads getting New York airplay, “like that shit’s normal.” He then threatens to solve this problem by emptying very large guns in their direction. Reject on Steroids—a quasi-sequel to Gunn’s Hitler on Steroids and preview of their Griselda on Steroids tour—is muscled-up new hip-hop for people who don’t find a lot to like about hip-hop’s new wave.
If you recognize the first proper track as an instrumental from Black Rob and the Lox’s 1999 track “Can I Live,” Reject on Steroids will be right up your alley. Conway doesn’t have a whole lot of concern for “real hip-hop” moralizing; he probably doesn’t care about Playboi Carti or XXXTentacion’s dedication to craft. He’s just pissed that Hot 97 would rather play them or Ed fucking Sheeran, when the commercially viable, local goon rap that once defined it still exists. The appearance of Prodigy, Raekwon, Jadakiss, and Styles P at the Griselda on Steroids stop in NYC is a reminder that those guys went platinum, so why not Conway?
Conway brags that he’s been called a combination of Biggie, Sean Price, and Beanie Sigel, but there’s far more of the latter two given his disinterest in pop hooks. Given Green Lantern’s involvement, Reject on Steroids something of a 2005 throwback, evoking aspects of Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101, The B. Coming, and We Got It 4 Cheap—intimidating, adrenaline-pumping projects that seemed like they existed in separate lanes. They converge in Conway, a street-level hustler who’s “come a long way from that fork and pot,” but not above stunting in a Tesla X and $4,000 shoes. He takes great pride in his rapping, but not in doing so for the sake of riddlin’; he speaks to Blogspot-era nostalgists who still check for guys who make entire tracks out of NBA punchlines (“Spurs”), mock Murder Inc. weed carriers, and reference “The Wire.”
Whatever your definition of “mumble rap” might be, Conway is the exact opposite, spitting clearly enunciated, precisely worded bars with just the right amount of satisfaction in their cleverness. Half of his face is actually paralyzed; Conway was shot in the back of his head in 2012, which caused him to develop Bell’s Palsy. He simultaneously glorifies and downplays this tragedy by saying it only “twisted my jaw,” though it now seems to give him an accent and sneer that could not be more suited for his self-impressed style.
But while Conway’s actual voice makes an impression, his voice as a writer doesn’t stand out as much. He’s not as distinctive as a lyrical stylist as Ka or Roc Marciano, though Reject on Steroids fits alongside their recent work as the New Sound of Old New York. The haunting, nearly beatless “Priest” is all but a Rosebudd’s Revenge B-side. But those seasoned vets are well into their late thirties and beyond, and Conway has major label backing. Judging from the work he and Westside Gunn have dropped since the Shady signing, it’s hard to imagine them being coerced into making compromises. The appearance of guys like Benny and an astoundingly corny Royce da 5'9" verse (“Lyin’ until you got a 12-inch nose, now you got three feet”) do serve as stark reminders that Conway could have easily landed in endless developmental limbo or, worse, marketed for syllable-counting Slaughterhouse fans.
We get occasional glimpses of how “The City of Good Neighbors” followed the path of so many other blue-collar, industrial cities into an unexpectedly blighted urban war zone. But “Through It All” doesn’t offer much of his come-up beyond the usual moral failings of frontrunners and gold diggers who weren’t there from the start. Perhaps it’s the nature of the project, but it often seems like Conway’s holding something back, just in case he has to tell the story all over again for the first time on his Shady debut. For the time being, Reject on Steroids feels more like a light workout than an Olympic victory lap.


The rainbow-colored pups of Rebecca Stern’s documentary are in concert with the Dan Deacon’s score, which teases out the heart underneath the ostensibly garish world of creative dog grooming.

Dan Deacon: Well Groomed (Original Score)

Well Groomed (Original Score)

If you were making a documentary about people who dye their dogs neon hues and trim their fur into the shape of the Cheshire Cat, Dan Deacon would be the first person you’d call for the score. Since his arrival with 2007’s Spiderman of the Rings, the Baltimore producer has wielded candy-coated synthesizers and jewel-toned vibraphones with radiant joy, combining conservatory-honed classical minimalism with the all-night-rager energy of a Jersey Shore DJ. His music is bright, pastel-colored, pumped full of the boundless energy of a puppy who’s just been let off its leash—and, increasingly, it’s got a lot of heart. Frankly, it’s hard to believe it took him this long to do something with dogs.
The score Deacon composed for Well Groomed, Rebecca Stern’s documentary about creative dog grooming, manages to be both masterfully restrained and shot through with glee. While the action on screen is indisputably strange—it’s hard to get over seeing a dog whose tail has been turned into E.T.’s glowing finger—the tenderness of the music humanizes the women who cut, style, and dye their way to the Groom Expo in Hershey, Pennsylvania, instantly giving them a sense of dignity without so much as a whiff of patronization. The approach makes Well Groomed perhaps the most emotionally direct album he’s ever released.
Deacon largely works with the same textures he’s been using for much of his career: pulsing vibraphone à la Steve Reich, whirring arpeggios via Philip Glass, big breezy chord progressions from Michael Rother. But where his previous impulse was to pile on layers until his songs collapsed and turned inside out, here he leaves plenty of space for the individual instruments to speak for themselves. He recorded the members of his ensemble individually, giving them abstract vocal instruction rather than written scores. His touch is remarkably gentle. Where a song like “Super Zoo” might have burst into a thousand ecstatic pieces on one of his earlier records, here, he pushes the elements together slowly, allowing the song to emerge rather than explode.
Film scoring is an inherently complementary art, so it always risks feeling incomplete as standalone music. With some minor exceptions, Well Groomed does not have this problem. Perhaps because Deacon’s music is built from constant motion, very little here feels static or incomplete; even the more complex tracks, like “Scissors Down,” manage to develop from stillness to dead sprint with incredible efficiency. He responds to the turns of Stern’s film in kind: “Jurassic Bark” bounces between chords with a touch of impatience, anxious for the party it seems to sense coming, while M.C. Schmidt’s doubled-up piano runs in “When They’re in Color” sound like Bach stumbling through Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Rooms. You don’t need to see the luscious close-ups of Muppet-colored fur being trimmed to laugh at the scissor sounds in “Snip Snip,” just as you don’t need to know who is “Overwhelmed” to be moved by the delicacy of the piano, which Deacon refracts like a memory through sharp layers of echo and Steve Strohmeir’s lacy guitar work.
From the outside, the world of creative dog grooming seems garish, cartoony, and of dubious taste; it’s not an art that lends itself to instant appreciation. Stern’s film shows that it also requires incredible attention to detail, a seriousness of purpose, and an imagination strong enough to look at a dog and see a rooster. It’s as if the music here recognizes something of itself in the dogs on screen and reacts accordingly. And by trimming away some of his own quadruple-dyed layers, Deacon gives us a clear glimpse of the good boy underneath.

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Variously lively and listless, the latest entry in Mach-Hommy and Tha God Fahim’s Dollar Menu series highlights the flaws in the formula even as it celebrates their bond.

Dollar Menu 4

Each cover of Mach-Hommy and Tha God Fahim’s Dollar Menu series features the head of a famous basketball player and a pile of money. The unapologetically Photoshopped images evoke Who Framed Roger Rabbit in their mix of cartoon physics and real bodies, a blend reflected in the pair’s whimsical yet grimy wealth raps. The irony of the titles reveals itself quickly. More Michelin star dinner than Travis Scott meal, this music toasts to inaccessibility and distinction, Fahim and Mach celebrating exotic foods and winning investments. Variously lively and listless, Dollar Menu 4 highlights the flaws in the formula and in Mach and Fahim’s long-running partnership even as it celebrates their bond.
Though it’s credited to Mach, Dollar Menu 4 is functionally a continuation of the first three Dollar Menu tapes released in 2017, as well as other collaborations like 2018’s Duck CZN: Chinese Algebra and many features on each other’s songs. Fahim and Mach both work in the lineage of gritty mafioso rap refined by Raekwon and AZ in the 1990s, deconstructed and mutated by Roc Marciano and the Alchemist in the 2000s, and polished by Griselda Records (with which they both were once closely affiliated) in the 2010s. Nothing particularly special happens when Fahim and Mach rap together, but they approach the woozy soul loops and textures of their niche from oblique angles.

Their constant proximity and frequent collaboration have produced a casual compatibility that’s on display as their verses on songs like “Shukran Don” and “Macabre (A5)” wind around each other like DNA strands. “X10ded” is deliciously easygoing and skillful, their symmetrical flows tracing a fuzzy funk loop peppered with faint drums. “We having fun,” Mach declares in the opening seconds.
That jovial mood only manifests in the music in flashes though. The more they rap together, the more Fahim and Mach’s music reveals its workmanlike qualities. Unlike Clipse, Ghost and Rae, Prodigy and Havoc, Vince and Earl, or Armand Hammer, there’s rarely tension or contrast in their exchanges, their songs never building into noteworthy images or turns of phrase, or generating a shared mission or mythology.

Under the microscope, many of Fahim’s verses are bland filler about rapping (“Most of these rappers suck like sipping through a straw”) or making money independently (“Gotta a few main incomes with hustles on the side”). His flow can be unpredictable, drifting out of meter or abruptly ending and then suddenly locking into place, but he always trails Mach, who lands standout lines with both ease and force. His opening lines on “Macabre (A5)” don’t just wander away from the percussion; they rage against it, his imagery delightfully hallucinogenic and colorful: “Blowing cephalopods out the ride with the macabre/No Decepticons so its best to silence the crowd with the barrage/So I leprechaun my neck and cloud up the iris of his eye.”

Sadhugold and Fortes’ smoky production, which resembles the kinds of beats Tha God Fahim likes to dump on Bandcamp, helps right this unbalance. The drumless loop on “Food Grade” sways like leaves in wind, matching Mach, Fahim, and Your Old Droog’s wistful verses. And the triumphant horns and crisp percussion on “Maras DonDurmas (Rosewater)” buoy the gilded boasts. But overall these songs underscore how deeply intertwined style, form, and purpose are. Without a driving theme, Fahim and Mach sound aimless and mechanical even when they’re dishing out intricate rhymes left and right.


The 18-year-old viral rapper’s mediocre new album doubles as an endorsement for New York collective Surf Gang’s excellent production work.

OXygen

The main thing Matt Ox has going for him is that he has never treated rap like a stepping stone. For a white rapper who went viral at age 12—mostly because he looked like Tom Hanks’ son in Sleepless in Seattle went to middle school and got really into Finally Rich—that’s a miracle. The bar is in the dirt, I admit, but in an era where artists get drunk on viral fame and spend eternity trying to recapture that feeling, Matt Ox seemingly has no ambition other than making fun rap music. The Philly native, now 18, has been extremely fortunate, though. His breakout single “Overwhelming” and his debut OX were enjoyable enough, though these releases often felt more like showcases for Working on Dying, the impactful beatmaking clique who shaped contemporary landmarks like Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red and Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake. The same pattern holds on OXygen, Matt Ox’s new collaborative mixtape with the producers of the New York-based collective Surf Gang.
For years now, Surf Gang have been a constant in New York’s underground rap scene. I’d argue Polo Perks’ Punk Goes Drill, produced mostly by crew affiliates, is the apex of sample-drill beats; the lush soundscapes they’ve made for out-of-towners like BabyxSosa and RealYungPhil are noteworthy too, and their local live shows and DJ sets are consistently a good time. Like Working on Dying, Surf Gang use Matt Ox’s elastic, somewhat anonymous voice as a steady base from which to wrangle a bunch of cloudy and absorbing beats. Take the Evil Giane-produced “WTW”: The staticky instrumental sounds like it’s short-circuiting, and the sporadic Stone Cold Steve Austin-style glass shatter FX up the disarray. Harrison and Eera’s instrumental on “Fast” is an intoxicating blend of frosty synths that recalls Gud’s production on RX Papi’s Foreign Exchange and dreamy Goth Money-like mayhem (especially the gunshots). The tape is loaded with mesmerizing production touches like Evil Giane’s throbbing club rhythm for “Real Rage” and Harrison’s drum patterns on “Pack It Up,” which fire at the pace of a difficult Dance Dance Revolution routine.
As for Matt Ox, he doesn’t do much to distract from the beats. The closest he comes to stealing the spotlight is on “Pack It Up,” where his frequent pitch alterations and vocal switch-ups come off strained and unnatural—you can feel that you’re supposed to think he’s being eccentric. But while he’s obviously fluent in the language of Playboi Carti, the Atlanta rapper he feels most aligned with is Key!, especially in the way Matt attempts to swing drastically between moods by raising and lowering his volume. But Key!’s yo-yo vocal fluctuations were always intended to convey how emotionally volatile his songs are: angry and loving and joyful and paranoid, all at once. Meanwhile, even when Matt Ox alternates between scratchy shouts and stoned murmurs on “Duff,” it’s numb. Not even his scattered roars on “Wormhole” have any genuine rage to them. It’s like when a toddler starts yelling curse words they’ve heard from their parents.
The idea to mesh a chaotic rapping style with Surf Gang’s hazy sound is a good one: Their beats are an open range where a gifted rapper can roam and find their weirdest self. Matt Ox just isn’t that person. I wish these beats were in the hands of someone who could take advantage of the freedom to come up with something like Hook’s explosive, improvisatory flows or Bktherula’s impulsive yet nimble emotional shifts. Instead, OXygen is much like OX: a glorified audition tape for producers who one day will help a better rapper to realize their vision.


GLAQJO XAACSSO is a fittingly obtuse name for London producer Patten's debut EP. The record-- full of scrambled sounds you know from elsewhere-- feels like it could exist in a parallel universe. Nothing feels too holy for Patten to throw into the blender.

GLAQJO XAACSSO

GLAQJO XAACSSO is a fittingly obtuse name for London producer Patten's debut EP. The record-- full of scrambled sounds you recognize from elsewhere-- feels like it could exist in a parallel universe. The sensation of this music, which does have a peculiar thrill to it, can also be a frustrating riddle: At times, you'll want to dive into the waveforms and pull the fragments back into a right order and find some sense.
The collection's probably more engaging a concept or idea than straight-up listen, but there is fun to be had in the way the beats spin your head. Less concerned with the relentless drive into the future than some of his peers, Patten's forging a sound off the beaten path, cherry-picking past sounds and twisting them.
Much of the record finds Patten looking toward 1990s Warp acts. "Blush Mosaic" takes Boards of Canada's icy synths and softly pushes fast-forward, revving something glacial into something manic-- the aural equivalent of a stop-motion nature video. Vocals drift in and out as rhythms weave around each other. It's one of the record's strongest statements, and a track where Patten's sometimes unfocused energy comes together to make something engaging, trippy, and destroyed.
On "Fire Dream" there are shades of Plaid and Autechre, especially in the pale analog synths. Patten matches that patchwork with powdery hi-hats and head-knocking beats. It's not only piecemeal scraps of Warp influence in the music, though-- there's a general influence in attitude and approach. Even the baiting LP title seems like the kind of brick wall Richard D. James or Chris Morris would erect. That approach carries over to the source material: Nothing feels too holy for Patten to throw into the blender.
On the strongest moments, like "Blush Mosaic" and "Fire Dream", the bent circuitry is visceral and engaging, but there are instances where those loose rhythmic threads don't knot together so well. Take the motion-sick "Out the Coast", where the beats collapse into each other and don't quite blend with the rest of the action. It feels like there's something good buried within, but the effect is jarring and disorientating (not pleasantly so).
A problem with his whirlwind approach is that each idea's so quickly processed it can leave the results feeling too breathless or rushed. A nice moment passes so quickly that it immediately becomes a dot on the horizon. There also isn't a great deal of contrast on the record. And not a lot of warmth. It's here Patten strikes the biggest contrast with the artists he might be referencing or reminding you of: A great deal of music on that IDM spectrum that Patten picks apart has heart to it. On his Come to Daddy EP, for instance, Aphex Twin closes the record with the gorgeous "IZ-US". Likewise, Squarepusher, at his busiest on "Port Rhombus", pulls away the rhythmic carpet to reveal a lilting, lush guitar. There are no moments like this for Patten, and for all its movement, GLAQJO XAACSSO feels a little frozen.