Recorded along the Amazon River, the four-song EP features just Avey Tare and Geologist in a return to the hazy, patiently paced, and largely improvised records of their early days.

Animal Collective: Meeting of the Waters EP

Meeting of the Waters EP

Animal Collective are an institution founded on instability, exemplified by fluid membership, soluble song structures, and abrupt album-to-album aesthetic breaks. But throughout their metamorphic history, their best music has always immersed you in the time and place in which it was created. Campfire Songs from 2003 is the most obvious example (even though, technically, it was an album of porch songs). But ambience also plays a crucial “fifth Beatle” role on Sung Tongs (whose hermetic home-recordings are enhanced by field recordings collected at Avey Tare’s local deli) and even Strawberry Jam (whose dry, chiseled sonics reflect its arid Arizona recording locale). If anything has changed for Animal Collective, it’s that their more manic recent records sound less like the product of their source environment and more like they’re adapting to the band’s current one—the large concert halls and festival stages they now call home.
On the one hand, Meeting of the Waters represents another tangential detour on Animal Collective’s career path. It’s their first record to feature only Avey Tare and Geologist, and the absence of AC perennial Panda Bear may explain why it was initially issued as a Record Store Day exclusive before quietly appearing on streaming services last week. But this four-song mini-album also represents a full-circle move for the group, a return to making the sort of hazy, patiently paced, and largely improvised records where the background setting plays a starring role.
In essence, Meeting of the Waters takes Campfire Songs’ off-the-cuff, on-the-spot ethos and exports it to a Brazilian rainforest: Avey and Geologist recorded it along the Amazon River as part of a Viceland documentary series, Earth Works, that explores the environmental degradation in the region. More than just provide Geologist with a hissing, humming backdrop off which he can bounce his dubbed-out sonics, the secluded tropical setting encourages Avey to embrace an unadorned, plainspoken delivery that contrasts sharply with his usual spastic, pitch-shifting hollers. As such, Meeting of the Waters doesn’t yield any of the ecstatic highs we’ve come to expect from an Animal Collective record; rather, Avey calmly dispenses his words as if he’s taking great care not to upset the natural order of his surroundings. On the record’s miasmic 13-minute opener, “Blue Noses,” he’s practically singing in 16 rpm, as he extols the virtues of sunlight, fresh air, and wild magnolias atop slow-motion acoustic strums that threaten to dissolve into the song’s aqueous ether. The state of zen reverie is interrupted only by the frequent pitter-patter of footsteps.
But if “Blue Noses” is precisely sort of blissed-out psych-folk meditation you’d expect a couple of Deadheads to come up with after they’re dropped in the jungle without any plan or pressures, other songs bear the more introspective effects of isolating yourself in a remote place far from home. “Man of Oil”—the only track here you could imagine the current iteration of Animal Collective fleshing out into a more robust pop song—threads its acoustic melody with vocal snippets of a woman speaking in an indeterminate language, like the indecipherable conversation happening in a dream you can’t quite recall in the morning. But more than just a random detail, her enigmatic voice brings a hazy melancholy to intimate lines like “I find it so hard to tell you/ I’m afraid to forget the smell of you.”
In moments like these, Meeting of the Waters makes for a nice complement to part-time AC participant Deakin’s 2016 release Sleep Cycle, another record that fused field-recording scenery with sobering self-reflection. And that pensive quality is most pronounced on “Selection of a Place (Rio Negro Version),” a lo-fi love song that treats a romantic embrace as a security-blanket against a world that overburdens us with work, stress, and smartphone addiction. (“I’m right beside you,” Avey sings, “not thinking about … little letters on my phone.”) Avey and Geologist may have gone down to the Amazon to help spread awareness of rainforest depletion, but the songs on Meeting of the Waters assert that humanity’s fate is equally dependent on our own psychic preservation. The album’s primitive presentation serves to remind us just how fragile our existence truly is: As Avey’s last strums cede to an encroaching thundercloud of white noise, we’re subjected to the unsettling sound of paradise lost.


This version of Sgt Pepper’s treats the Beatles' originals like colorful clothes worn by today’s most electrifying jazz musicians, who give these old chestnuts a new body and vitality.

Various Artists: A Day In The Life: Impressions Of Pepper

Your heroes have covered the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band since they first heard it. Just days after its release in the spring of 1967, Jimi Hendrix shocked a London crowd with the album’s opening theme with half of the Fab Four in attendance. Joe Cocker turned its affable second track, “With a Little Help from My Friends,” into soul-baring treacle a year later, while Elton John shouted out its lysergic third beauty, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” in the mid-1970s with John Lennon’s help. And so it goes down the tracklist and across generations and genres. At this point, it’s daunting to name an idea more passé than covering these songs, as omnipresent as oxygen or as eternal as Paul McCartney’s avuncular charm.
It’s a good thing, then, that A Day in the Life: Impressions of Pepper is not actually a Beatles cover album. Sure, its 13 tracks sync with the sequence of Sgt. Pepper’s, and you can hear traces of that totemic record in every piece here. But A Day in the Life is instead a full-length interpretation of Sgt. Pepper’s, rendered by some of the most captivating young musicians in the modern jazz orbit. Rather than offering obvious renditions of these standards, the likes of Makaya McCraven, Mary Halvorson, Shabaka Hutchings, and Sullivan Fortner reimagine them in the grandest jazz tradition—as fodder and grist, inspiration for making something else entirely. From sweeping solo piano vamps to cinematic takes bordering on post-rock, these versions treat the originals like colorful clothes worn by today’s most electrifying jazz musicians, who give these old chestnuts a new body and vitality.
Halvorson exemplifies the idea early “With a Little Help from My Friends.” She often plays the guitar in rhythmic and melodic tangles, so that a simply stated theme begins to fold onto itself until it shapes a dense thicket. As she mimics Ringo Starr’s voice with her inimitable tone, the phrases split and tumble until she seems to lose the line. Each time it happens, though, drummer Tomas Fujiwara rushes in to reaffirm the shape. Likewise, harpist Brandee Younger passes on the obvious, harp-laced “She’s Leaving Home” for a complex, intimate arrangement of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” Using the original only as a suggestive framework, Younger turns her harp into the lace between darting flutes and skittering drums. Her take ferries mystery.
Surrounded by a lissome mix of vibraphone, electric guitar, and keyboard, McCraven powers through “Lucy” like he’s trying to find the peak for one of his fabled jam sessions, his kit an escape vehicle for his band’s collective transcendence. For his dazzling spin through “When I’m Sixty Four,” Fortner harnesses the same mix of erudition and élan heard on his tremendous work with Cécile McLorin Salvant. Recognizing that tabla and sitar are dated signifiers for rock bands hoping to convey a worldly sense of exotica, New York’s Onyx Collective reimagines the hovering drone of “Within You Without You” as a patchwork of astral synthesizers and distorted bass. Saxophonist Isaiah Barr toys with George Harrison’s vocal line, slowing it down and examining its contours in search of more than novelty. It is hypnotic, beautiful, and—you wish—infinite.
The interpretive nature of A Day in the Life eclipses mere musical form, too, with some of the best pieces here working as emotional transformations—a risky but thrilling proposition for pieces so deeply lodged in our culture. After half a century, “Getting Better” has grown bathetic from the cheery ubiquity of television commercials and grocery-aisle soundtracks, the equivalent of a Lifetime movie playing on a loop in another room. So the savvy London trio Wildflower furrows its brow at McCartney’s wide-eyed grin, the muscle-bound rhythm section and Idris Rahman’s exasperated saxophone tone asking when, exactly, it all gets better. They turn the song inside out, looking for an answer that has yet to appear. And every time the melody of “Fixing a Hole” begins to flicker too brightly, pianist Cameron Graves stomps out the flame either with a pounding left hand that lands like heavy boots on concrete or discursive right-hand fantasies that spin like a ceiling fan. He wordlessly emphasizes the lyrics’ torment—the hell of other people, “the silly people [that] run around”—that is largely cloaked by the mirth of a harpsichord and Ringo’s swing.
It’s tempting to uphold A Day in the Life as some sort of yearbook or capstone achievement for this tremendously creative moment in jazz, a genre that’s been pronounced dead and then resurrected so many times it could be a major world religion. And in a sense, sure, it is: As with McCraven’s own Universal Beings, A Day in the Life does put many of the people that have made this loose movement so exciting in one breathless sequence. You could even imagine them all pasted onto the cover—Felix Pastorius in the place of Albert Einstein, Ravi Coltrane lording over it all like Edgar Allen Poe. Instead, this album is a wonderful expression of possibility. They take ownership of these standards—not as grails deserving fealty, but instead as another piece of the musical vernacular, motifs absorbed and repurposed inside an idiom they’ve helped invigorate.


After two EPs, Low's Alan Sparhawk and his fellow Choir members finally release their debut LP. Mark Kozelek produces but he no longer is a featured player.

Retribution Gospel Choir: Retribution Gospel Choir

Retribution Gospel Choir

Who knew it would be such a pleasure to hear Alan Sparhawk-- master of minimalist pop-- rock out with his cock out? Sure, the last two Low albums had downright loud moments, and there's that bluesy side project the Black Eyed Snakes that Sparhawk had a few years back. But on the Retribution Gospel Choir album, the dude channels his inner Crazy Horse with dark dirge-y anthems. He even curses and stuff!
It's taken Retribution a few years to make a full-length; the group's been around since 2005 and have released two tour EPs. Eric Pollard plays drums and new guy (in this band as well as Low) Matt Livingston plays bass, while Sparhawk plays guitar and sings, and he wrote the songs, too. Three aspects of the group's live shows and EPs are missing on their debut. First and foremost, there's singer-songwriter Mark Kozelek, who did produce the record, and it's on his label. But Kozelek was once a member of the band, and his guitar playing is missed (as are a few songs they played with him, notably the great "Hatchet").
Not missed so much are the group's penchant for cool covers (though two songs-- "Breaker" and "Take Your Time"-- could be called self-covers, as they have already appeared on the last Low record). Sure their live take on "Sandinista" is great, but the covers felt like concert or B-side material, so it's good that they realized that. Finally, the group's experimental and dubby aspects are relegated to subtle sound effect elements. That's made the album more cohesive but less diverse than their music is live.
Sparhawk knows how to wring emotional depth out of the most tired lyrical clichés, and he's clearly dissected rock dynamics to the point that when he does them "straight" it's either boring (as on "They Knew You Well") or something to behold ("Easy Prey", "Somebody's Someone"). Songs like "Holes in Our Heads" and "Take Your Time" are dynamic in a loud/louder/soft/loudest way that works well in service of decent songs and melodies. (By now, Mogwai and Sigur Rós devotees have copied those tricks to death-- contemporary math rock is so simple it may as well be called subtraction rock.)
Entire swaths of the Retribution Gospel Choir album are reminiscent of the slash-and-burn imitation classic rock found on the Bush League All Stars' 1995 Pop Narcotic album Old Numbers (albeit with odder tunings). At the time, that fine album sank like a stone in the indie music scene; RGC arrives after a decade's worth of stoner metal has convinced kids it's OK to enjoy back-to-basics riff-heavy rock'n'roll-- even without the irony that was so heavily drizzled atop 80s and 90s revisionings of 70s conventions. To address the album on 70s turf, Retribution Gospel Choir may not be as great as a Neil Young with Crazy Horse album, but it's better than any of the albums Crazy Horse made on their own.


The 20th LP from OCS—better known as Thee Oh Sees—is a softer and slower strand of psychedelia than the San Francisco garage-rock institution has come to be known for.

Memory of a Cut Off Head

When OCS originated in 1997, it was the music of a goblin. That’s what John Dwyer recently likened his younger self to on Marc Maron’s “WTF?” podcast, explaining how all the recreational drugs he took alongside his singing-saw-playing friend Patrick Mullins—with the curious goal of creating “the quietest songs we could”—would render him constantly breathing through his mouth. Yes, the writhing, bug-eyed garage-rock band known most frequently as Thee Oh Sees was for many early years a whispering freak-folk expedition. Plenty of other things have since changed for Dwyer. His track record at that time told a story of several diverse endeavors rather than the one of an exhaustingly prolific primary project, for which he’s now known. And, as the 43-year-old will tell you today, he’s dialed back his drugs.
For the project’s 20th LP in 20 years (and the 100th album for Dwyer’s own Castle Face Records), he returns to both its original name stylization and restrained aura for the first time in over a decade. Memory of a Cut Off Head essentially leaves the amps at home. Instead, it reverses hard into baroque, acoustic, and otherwise more delicate songs of a softer, slower psychedelic vein. The intensity, much like the spelling, is reduced by 70%.
If Memory is another new page for OCS, it is the special-thanks page. Coming amid a fast-as-ever recording clip—that’s four Dwyer LPs in 16 months, a merciless pace even for him—Memory honors the project’s history. It acknowledges strains of folk music that are less obviously fundamental to shaping the wilder iterations of Thee Oh Sees, and it honors some of the people who helped shape their store. There are horn arrangements by his friend and pupil Mikal Cronin. Memory also marks the returns of Mullins on singing saw and singer/keyboardist Brigid Dawson, the closest complementing presence Dwyer has ever had in the band. The album is as much hers as it is his, and she takes the reins on its superior second half.
Dwyer’s own songs run into a predictable problem. His signature restlessness tends to enhance the Oh Sees’ concussion-inducing material; for the past 10+ years, it’s sometimes seemed like the faster Thee Oh Sees produce, the harder they hit. The approach doesn’t work such wonders here. Memory’s concept demands patience, which is not exactly Dwyer’s natural element for writing. While Memory gives him the opportunity to drop his guitar and pick up the electric bagpipes and flute, its songs either come up short of compelling, or he stops them short. In the moments when he and Dawson harmonize together again, like on “On and On Corridor” or the opening title track, textures and voices come close to clicking into place. But the only songs that sound natural from this eerily hushed world are by Dawson alone, like her ghostly “The Fool” and its lonely woodwind backdrop.
Such an abrupt, massive tonal swing between efforts is not an unfamiliar move for Dwyer. One of the reasons he conceived OCS as an ultra-quiet project in the first place was because his prior band, Coachwhips, devoured noise. But as he recounted in the “WTF?” interview, “It incorporated over time more and more members, and the music changed, and now we’re at this rock’n’roll show.” All of those past and present members are now the spine of a 20-year-old San Francisco institution. On Memory of a Cut Off Head, Dawson once again proves to be its best friend.


A decade after minimal wave seemed to reach its peak, the Massachusetts duo proves the style’s continued vitality.

Careful

A few weeks ago, at a bar in Brooklyn known for its metal and goth affiliations, a DJ in the back room was running through a playlist thick with synths. The old standbys—Bauhaus, Joy Division, Soft Cell, Siouxsie and the Banshees—made their appearances, as did a younger generation of artists like New York’s Xeno & Oaklander, Montreal duo Essaie Pas, and the Northampton, Massachusetts, group Boy Harsher. Among the more recent crop, one song stood out: Boy Harsher’s “Motion.” It was, like other songs played that night, dark and driving, powered by stark, acrid synthesis and barreling drums. But something about it felt unusually immediate.
Producer Augustus Muller’s synth chords moved with angry purpose while his jagged little basslines gave the song its groove, and Jae Matthews’ husky, smudged-out vocals conveyed a ghostly feeling of longing. There are a few jolting moments like this on the band’s new record, Careful—like “Come Closer,” where the synth bounces like a pinball caught between two flashing bumpers while the drum machine thumps with reckless abandon. Or there’s the bracing “Tears,” where spiraling keyboard and percussion build and build into a menacing cyclone of dark pop. It’s easy to imagine these tracks playing well to the goth clubs of the world, but it’s chiseled and streamlined in a way that suggests it might also slip into the cracks of a techno set. That in-betweenness is what makes Boy Harsher’s work, and that of their peers, so interesting.
In the late 2000s, when the DJ Veronica Vasicka popularized the term “minimal wave” to describe the barbed-wire sound of decades-old DIY electronic music, minimal electronic music was in fashion. You could hear it throughout New York nightlife at club series like Wierd, and it seemed, as Louis Pattison notes, that this old-new aesthetic was at its peak. But as bands like Boy Harsher or Essaie Pas have made clear, the reign of minimal synth continues unabated into the second decade of the 21st century, and the style’s variety and versatility continue to grow.
While the palette of sounds Boy Harsher plays with on Careful can seem limited—brisk drum machine loops, oscillating synths, and Matthews’ haunting incantations—the group finds ways to make each song sound distinct. From the morose slow burn of “LA” to the frenzied bounce of “The Look You Gave (Jerry),” the duo shows how far it can stretch a unified sound. Apart from some less-successful forays into soundtrack-like textures and atmospheric ambience, like the John Carpenter-lite of “Crush,” the record is mostly geared towards movement and heat and sweat. That Boy Harsher will soon play Berghain, Berlin’s temple of techno, speaks to the music’s contemporary vitality. Scrappy and spirited, minimal synth music lives on.


Jaime Fennelly assembles a full-band and a grand vision for his sixth album as Mind Over Mirrors, a complex and beautiful synth-and-drone time warp.

Bellowing Sun

Mind Over Mirrors did not always sound so bold. At the start of the decade, the name was simply a solo shield for Jaime Fennelly, a nomadic experimental musician who had begun to big deeper into a world of ascendant drone with synthesizers and Indian harmonium. For years, he had played in Peeesseye, a tempestuous and unclassifiable guitar-and-drum Brooklyn trio, and collaborated on several immersive pieces with celebrated choreographer Miguel Gutierrez.
But Mind Over Mirrors represented a sort of musical and geographic escape, allowing Fennelly to immerse himself in arching strands of tone as he fled the city to write. He penned the great 2017 album, Undying Color, during an extended furlough in Wisconsin’s gorgeous Driftless region, where he improvised and edited under the impressive influence of nature before recruiting an ad hoc band to help fulfill his vision. All of those elements—the retreat, the environment, the rendezvous, the drone, and the unclassifiable nature of it all—culminate at last in the brilliant Bellowing Sun, Mind Over Mirrors’ transfixing sixth album, its first as a commanding full band, and its debut large-scale multimedia art production. For Mind Over Mirrors, it is an arrival.
Three years ago, Fennelly first referenced an audacious project that would involve a full band, an album, and a live stage show. As he has often done, Fennelly decamped to a rural location and began writing, inspired by the setting and the work of essential American naturalist Henry Beston. Sketches in hand, he re-assembled a top-tier cast of Midwestern collaborators who had, in recent years, sometimes acted as his ensemble: Califone violinist Jim Becker, Freakwater singer Janet Beveridge Bean, and Death Blues and Volcano Choir drummer Jon Mueller. Together, they built what is essentially a sci-fi symphony—a seventy-three-minute suite of twelve seamless pieces, often interconnected by recurring motifs and cast from elements as far-flung as bluegrass and harsh noise. Commissioned in part by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Bellowing Sun is not only an album but also a mobile art installation. The quartet performs beneath a gigantic rotating zoetrope, an internally illuminated cylinder that spins overhead, casting a series of images and colors around a room. The space becomes an invitation to get lost in this magnificent sound.
Bellowing Sun warps space, time, scope, and scale. While the record officially clocks in at 73 minutes, it somehow feels shorter and longer, as if expanding or contracting as it plays. Restless swirls of melodies and drum patterns maintain a sense of motion so that 10-minute track times seem to pass with the briskness of a pop hit. For instance, “Zeitgebers,” in which the entire band spends nearly six minutes rising into one miraculous chord change before letting it smear into silence, feels like it lasts for only an instant. The quartet pulls the tension so tight that all you remember is its sudden release. On the other hand, some of these moments feel like they have lasted and will last forever, suspending you in permanent states of being. During “Lanterns on the Beach,” Bean repeatedly intones “Light” against sparkling rays of guitar noise and nested keyboard melodies that bounce endlessly among a few notes; it is a hymn for that time just after the sun has set, when the world glows orange and pink and seems as if it may always be that way. Mueller’s solo gong-and-tom exploration, “Acrophasing,” holds you permanently at the lip of an abyss and dares you to flinch, to slip forever from this side of safety.
What’s more is Mind Over Mirrors’ ability to move from the macrocosm to the microcosm and back, from music that truly occupies the astral shorthand kosmische to sounds that seem to score activity on the cellular level. With serial synthesizer lines that phase in and out of one another, “Feeding on the Flats” recalls middle-school science class, with the dropper of pond water placed beneath a rudimentary microscope. But it flows directly into “Matchstick Grip,” which soon aims for the heavens. Bean sings of the sun. Mueller and Fennelly lock synthesizer to bass, the melody and meter synchronized in dizzying propulsion. In the distance, Becker adds extended fiddle tones, like the solar wind rushing by as the band gathers speed. “Halfway to the Zenith” seems as vast as the widest horizon, its wordless vocals and neon arpeggios rising together toward the sky.
Again, it empties instantly into “Oculate Beings,” a fiddle-and-drum hoedown that pairs the Southern gusto of Othar Turner and the Teutonic strength of Faust and actually manages to intensify both; grounded and gritty, it is a return to earth. Bellowing Sun thrives on these oscilations—between electronics and acoustics, between the stars and the soil, between infinity and this instant. From the fulcrum, it unfurls as a stream of constant surprise and intrigue.
Bellowing Sun feels delightfully out of time with the rest of the world. Its length and complex structure dare our shrinking attention spans to fight the pull of Twitter timelines and breaking news, to lean into the present. Its power forces the issue. And its interdisciplinary approach to genre and form push firmly against our propensity for silos, finding unexpected connections in unlikely places. This is ecstatic hillbilly krautrock raga drone—with celestial vocals and a drummer who loves to rattle the room—built to be played in a modern art museum beneath a spinning phosphorescent orb. Despite all that, or maybe because of it, this is one of the decade’s true experimental wonders.


On her latest collection of wise, lucid songwriting, the Nashville artist brings a sense of depth and directness to her songs.

True North

The spirit of Mary Oliver haunts True North, the fourth album by Nashville singer-songwriter Caroline Spence. Its opening track is named after the late poet, who Spence invokes at its stirring climax: “I’ve been playing at the church of Mary Oliver/Yeah, I’m trying to know myself and love all of her.” Later, on “There’s Always Room,” she quotes Oliver’s “The Summer Day”—“I know I get one wild and precious life,” she sings, resolving to persevere through grief and pain. During her lifetime, Oliver’s poetry was sometimes underappreciated for its plainspoken accessibility and inspirational nature, but since her death in 2019, more critics have come to acknowledge its elemental power. It’s a natural companion to Spence’s work, which is warm, inviting, and unfailingly human.
Spence’s initial breakthrough came in 2013, when her song “Mint Condition” took the grand prize in American Songwriter’s annual lyric contest. (She’d eventually record it as the title track to her Rounder Records debut, with guest vocals from Emmylou Harris.) Even then, at 23, Spence’s lyrics possessed a casual wisdom that could feel like getting drinks with a well-read, Zenned-out friend. On True North, she sings about embracing the present (“The Gift”), surrendering to love (“Scale These Walls”), and taking big risks (“Icarus”) with a sageness that shows the influence of her literary heroes—Oliver, Walt Whitman, the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. She sounds like someone you can trust.
Some of that credibility comes from her voice. Spence is a sturdy, unflappable singer. Her gentle, Virginia-bred drawl never strains for a note, but she’s careful to leave slivers of vulnerability around its edges. Her vocal lines are thoughtfully considered and frequently catchy, but they’re seldom flashy. In moments where many of her contemporaries in the country music world might emphasize a key line by belting it out, Spence tends to draw back, leaving room for the listener to find themselves in the lyric. “The Next Good Time” is an ode to perseverance passed down to Spence by her late grandmother, and she forwards its message to her listeners with her signature understated grace: “When trouble finds you, you can just do what I do/Grit your teeth, get through it/And wait for the next good time.”
It’s one of several instances on the album where her delivery verges on a kind of folksy sprechgesang, reinforcing the song’s relaxed, familial sentiment. The sympathetic dynamic between Spence’s words and her singing gives True North much of its power. A lovely mix by producer Jordan Lehning cedes center stage to Spence’s vocals—the layered arrangements reveal themselves on repeated listens, but Lehning knows it’s Spence’s show, and he stands aside accordingly.
The ballad “I Know You Know Me” is the best track on the record, and the most emblematic of Spence’s sensibility as a songwriter. It’s a strikingly direct song about the supernatural symbiosis between lovers, with a simple arrangement that cuts to the bone. Its directness masks a profound depth, as Spence spins canny metaphors of moons and tides, storms and candles. She duetted with the National’s Matt Berninger on an earlier version of the song, but in this rendition, she stands alone.
The fact that Berninger could step in and out so seamlessly is indicative of the way Spence moves freely about the border between country music and indie rock. (The recent back-to-basics collaborations between Berninger’s National bandmate Aaron Dessner and Taylor Swift make for a handy parallel.) Untethered to the lineage of either genre, these songs are ultimately vessels for Spence’s frank, lucid insights, with meaning buried in each syllable. “Poetry, to be understood, must be clear,” Mary Oliver said in a 2012 interview with NPR. Like few working songwriters, Spence has internalized that message.


Carsten Jost, co-founder of Hamburg's Dial Records, returns with his first proper LP in over a decade. The result is hypnotic, torn between cool remove and encroaching dread.

Perishable Tactics

Carsten Jost is a co-founder of Hamburg’s Dial Records, a label responsible for minimalist classics from Lawrence, Efdemin, and Pantha du Prince, among others. Jost (aka David Lieske) released his debut album, You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, way back in 2001, when Dial’s favored strain of moody, minimalist house was still relatively novel; the deep house revival wouldn’t happen for another decade. Since then, he’s put out very little else, even as the style he helped establish has become ubiquitous in underground dance music, from the Smallville label’s twinkly-eyed tone poems to the muted chords and buffed textures of the so-called “lo-fi house” phenomenon.
Since 2007—with three new Carsten Jost tracks that year, it was an uncharacteristically prolific period—his output has slowed to a trickle: one song on Dial’s 2010 compilation; a split single with Lawrence in 2011; another compilation cut in 2015. Lieske put out a full-length with his duo Misanthrope CA last year, but that album’s dissonant, doom-laden ambient is a long way from his ruminative and rhythmic sweet spot. Finally, however, the wind seems to have blown him back into the studio. The resulting album goes to the heart of the Dial aesthetic: wistful, hypnotic, and torn between ecstatic abandon, cool remove, and encroaching dread.
The bookending “Intro” and “Outro” are stylistic outliers. Closer in spirit to Misanthrope CA, they combine ethereal orchestral samples with drifting synthesizers and distant scrapes and drones, suggesting Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project if Voigt had been brought up on a steady diet of Ligeti and doom metal. The album’s nine remaining tracks proceed almost like a set of variations upon a theme. His grooves invariably emphasize the thud and hiss of classic Roland machines, and his crisp claps and flashing hi-hats cut through the swirling murk like searchlights. He likes his chords plaintive and his reverb trails long.
A few cuts are more melodic; the bittersweet “Atlantis II” features a bassline vaguely reminiscent of Ricardo Villalobos’ “Dexter,” and its layered string pads are unabashedly sentimental. “Love,” originally released on a split 12” in 2007, carves out a clean-lined counterpoint between Rhodes keys and a rich, tonal conga pattern. Mostly, though, he applies his layers of synthesizers like watercolors, and the blurred edges of his melodies seep outward like the outline of a stain.
Like much dance music, Perishable Tactics seldom gestures beyond its immediate environs; it’s a music of immersion, of immediacy, and also of deep isolation. Whereas most dance music is social, Lieske spins his fibers into a soft, hermetic cocoon. But the occasional crack in the façade affords a glimpse of ideas not often found in conjunction with house music, beginning with the militaristic theme that runs through titles such as “Army Green” and “Dawn Patrol,” as well as the ominous cover photo of a shirtless figure crouching beneath a Mylar space blanket, clutching some kind of heavy weaponry. The theme becomes explicit on “Platoon RLX,” in which a brief snippet of dialogue echoes in an incessant loop over mournful strings and a restless drum groove. “How’d you get the nickname?” asks a voice; “The killer?” whispers another in reply.
The clip comes from The World of Charlie Company, a 1970 documentary that the CBS News reporter John Laurence made while embedded with an American rifle company in Vietnam. It’s worth bearing in mind that the Bob Dylan lyric that’s quoted in the title of his debut album has a deeper historical significance: That line, from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” inspired the name of the Weather Underground, colloquially known as the Weathermen, the ’60s radicals who took up arms against the U.S. government. With these echoes of the civil unrest and military disasters of last century, Lieske adds even more sinister overtones to his already unsettling atmospheres. As it happens, the Weathermen have recently been back in the news: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s shadowy right-hand man, cryptically shouted out the leftist revolutionaries in a 2010 speech. If Carsten Jost is a kind of dance-music Cassandra, complicating club music with some serious end-of-the-world vibes, Lieske couldn’t have picked a more appropriate time to bring him back.


This Seattle neo-soul duo lent forcible female vocals to Shabazz Palaces' 2011 LP Black Up. Following a handful of self-released mixtapes, awE naturalE marks their proper debut.

awE naturalE

Amid all the dense and amorphous elements found on Shabazz Palaces 2011 album Black Up, there was one you felt like you could reach out and touch. On a handful of tracks, a pair of forcible female vocalists cut through the seductive murk, anchoring the songs and lodging their voices in your brain. "Play it then, let my soul unwind," one sang on "Swerve... the reeping of all that is worthwhile (Noir not withstanding)". At the very end of the track, the other rapped with patient conviction: "So still it morphed, this shit is way too advanced." The voices were those of Catherine Harris-White and Stasia Irons, respectively, the duo behind Seattle neo-soul/avant-rap duo THEESatisfaction.
Following a handful of self-released Bandcamp mixtapes, awE naturalE marks THEESatisfaction's proper debut, and their post-Black Up introduction to the world through Sub Pop. The album stands on its own as a fresh take on dense neo-soul, jazz, and rap fusion, but it also functions as a component of a larger piece. It's solid proof that they weren't merely vocalists auditioned for a part by Palaceer Lazaro, but part of a symbiotic relationship that must have much deeper roots. As Irons and Harris-White's were on Black Up, Lazaro's fingerprints are all over this record, including guest verses over the minimal-jazz of "God" and the alien-like, wobble-warped "Enchantruss". On a more understated level, unconventional song structures-- there are few hooks or choruses or neatly measured verses here-- subtly reveal themselves the way they did on Black Up. Perhaps it's the result of a close artistic partnership, or a reflection of the contemporary music scene in Seattle, but the music of Lazaro and THEESatisfaction sounds as though it's working toward the same goal, even when released as separate entities.
What is that common goal? Like Lazaro has done in the last couple of years, THEESatisfaction find a way to draw from the early-1990s backpack era and break new (and sometimes strange) ground while staying on the right side of the line between groovy and granola. Songs meander through psychedelic loops built around jazz or funk instrumentation, starting punchily in one place and ending abruptly somewhere altogether different. Most clock in well under three minutes. That sort of free-flowing structural approach lends itself well to Irons and Harris-White's stream-of-consciousness lyrical mode, a smooth rapping/singing tag-team effort.
The content here is cryptic but almost always obliquely political, brushing on the experiences that come along with being black lesbians in America. "My melanin is relevant/ It's something to be had," they chant on "Deeper". "I said, 'Ow! I am the bitch on the side,'" the two sing together on "Bitch", narrating an inner monologue of friendship and romantic struggle. At a time when politically conscious rap is viewed with skepticism, that sort of territory becomes tricky to navigate, but Irons and Harris-White pull it off. They come over as ultra-positive Queens of the Stoned Age who prioritize uninhibited genre exploration and good vibe-seeking above all.
At some point in 2009, the duo uploaded a goofy video they'd filmed of themselves talking at the webcam, grinning and telling their fans what a good month they'd had. The music in the background was Digable Planets' "Black Ego", which points explicitly to the tradition they're helping to carry on along with Lazaro. awE naturalE, like Black Up, is a pleasantly surprising resurrection of the Pacific Northwest-via-Brooklyn hippie-hop that we never might have anticipated a few years ago. Much of the music from that era doesn't hold up, but THEESatisfaction have an ear for what was worth saving, and the mantra on uptempo album highlight "QueenS"-- "Whatever you do, don't funk with my groove"-- still has legs.


Sleigh Bells' fourth record is a hodgepodge of clashing sounds and concepts that’s united only by its indiscriminate maximalism.

Jessica Rabbit

Having watched the shelf life for buzz bands grow ever shorter during the late ’00s, Sleigh Bells seemed to understand the need to make the most of their moment. In the wake of their breakthrough debut Treats they worked fast, firing off a couple more LPs within a year of each other, as if trying to refuse the world the chance to forget about them. Though it suffered the inevitable diminishing returns expected from a band that got everything right the first time around, 2012’s Reign of Terror nearly matched the blunt force of their debut, while distinguishing itself just enough with its arena-rock lean. But by their third effort 2013’s Bitter Rivals, the sugar rush had become a headache. The album was genuinely obnoxious in a way its predecessors had only pretended to be, and almost as troubling for a band whose power stemmed from their laser focus—their resolve to drive a single idea, brick on the gas pedal, head first through any obstacle in its path—it was strangely noncommittal.
For their fourth album, Sleigh Bells did something inherently risky for a band so of-the-moment: They took their time, piecing together Jessica Rabbit in stops and starts over three years, and it sounds like it. Recorded in part with Mike Elizondo, the seasoned Los Angeles producer best known for glossing up records for Eminem and his Shady/Aftermath cohorts, it’s a hodgepodge of clashing sounds and concepts that’s united only by its indiscriminate maximalism. Anybody holding out hope for another great, singular inspiration to strike the band again the way it did on their distortion-addled debut probably won’t find it even worth a cursory stream. What the album lacks in vision, though, it attempts to compensate for through sheer exertion. If nothing else, the duo has never seemed to be trying harder than they are here, so although Jessica Rabbit is even more scattershot than Bitter Rivals was, it at least has a sense of showmanship that album didn’t.
The album also smartly runs with the one thing that Bitter Rivals did right: giving more control to singer Alexis Krauss. Krauss had always been the face of Sleigh Bells, their head cheerleader and fun ambassador. Her past as a member of a teen-pop band was central to the group’s mythos, their link to the very music they were subverting. But as integral as she was to the band’s image, Treats didn’t give her all that much to do. Derek Miller’s compressed guitars were so loud, so blown out, that often all Krauss could do was play against them, injecting her airy voice here and there, and even then mostly to make the guitars feel that much heavier in comparison.
On subsequent efforts, Krauss has dialed up the ferocity to the point where she’s no longer juxtaposed against the fray—she is the fray. And as she takes on increased songwriting responsibilities on Jessica Rabbit, she’s also seized the chance to show off her full vocal range. On “Rule Number One,” her voice climbs from a Kesha sneer to a robust Xtina wail as she belts “POP ROCKS AND COKE MAKE YOUR HEAD EXPLODE!” over Miller’s hair-metal riffage. Somehow, she’s even louder than the guitars.
While Krauss relishes the opportunity to play the pop star she never got an actual chance to be, Miller succumbs to a reduced role. His spliced guitars propel “Crucible,” an admirably spirited mashup of circa-’87 Whitney Houston and Licensed to Ill-era Beastie Boys, but it’s hard to even guess what hand he might have had on the Elizondo co-production “I Can Only Stare,” a guitar-free, high-drama pop number closer to something you’d find on a Leona Lewis record than anything on Treats. Similarly, the brooding, EDM-tinged “Unlimited Dark Paths,” as with far too many Elizondo productions, sounds like it was somehow conceived with Skylar Grey in mind.
Even when Jessica Rabbit treads into generic territory, Krauss manages to leave a personal stamp on the material. “I was dreaming of a dead end street that we used to run down,” she sings on “Lightning Turns Sawdust Gold,” over a slinky, lighter-waving groove more than a little inspired by Santigold’s “Disparate Youth.” Elsewhere she calls out a partner who wastes a Friday night getting high and watching The Lion King, the kind of specific, seemingly autobiographic detail that rarely made its way into the first couple Sleigh Bells records. She takes ownership of these songs in a way she never did before.
So Jessica Rabbit is Krauss’s show, and she’s a show worth watching. The problem is it’s just not very catchy. On their first two albums, Sleigh Bells always had a granite hook to balance out the volume. But too many of these songs are just bluster in search of a purpose. Casualties of the duo’s noncommittal approach, they fall into a thankless gray area, too tinkered-over to function as punk, yet too haphazard to be great pop.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 1971 live double LP from the Allman Brothers Band, a snapshot of a pure and joyous moment in rock’n’roll.

The Allman Brothers Band: At Fillmore East

At Fillmore East

The Allman Brothers Band didn’t give a good goddamn about a photograph. It was early spring in 1971 in Macon, the comfortable little mid-Georgia city they’d recently adopted as their hometown because that’s where their upstart Southern label, Capricorn, lived. The sextet—two guitars, two drummers, bass, organ—had been a band for only two years. They’d passed most of that time on tour, playing 300 shows in 1970 and barely surviving on an unsteady diet of booze and blow, heroin and pot.
But after a spate of mid-Atlantic shows in April, they were home for just three days before another sprint through the even deeper South, including Alabama and Mississippi. There were kids, wives, and girlfriends to visit, a rare respite for a band that had suddenly exploded in popularity. And then, there was this stupid photo. Three weeks earlier, they’d played three (and recorded two) nights of marathon concerts at Manhattan’s Fillmore East, intending to compile the performances into an album that at last bottled the ecstasy and improvisation of their electrified blues-rock. The pictures they had taken in New York were a bust, so Jim Marshall—already a high-profile music photographer, having snapped Cash at Folsom and Coltrane and Miles in repose—had followed them home to Macon.
They should have been flattered, hosting this icon in their sleepy city. But they were tired, and much like the Grateful Dead, their pals and cross-country rivals as the best live band in the country, they never cared much for promotion, anyway. What’s more, Marshall was bossy. “A real son of a bitch,” drummer Butch Trucks remembered decades later, “who was lucky he didn’t get his ass kicked.” They scowled for Marshall’s first shots, a gaggle of roughnecks with matching mushroom tattoos, flexing their Southern roughness for the camera.
Just then, Duane Allman—the band’s founder, fixer, linchpin, and unparalleled guitar dynamo—spotted his local cocaine connection and sprinted down the alley. He returned to his spot, clutching an 8 ball in his hand and brandishing a Cheshire grin. The rest of the band howled, so Marshall took his picture and got his album cover, everyone locked in a laugh. He caught the band in their most natural setting: reveling in the joy and possibility of the present, the exact same way they sound on what is arguably rock music’s quintessential live album, At Fillmore East.
The Allman Brothers never intended to make their first live album, per se; they simply wanted to make their third overall album, and they recognized they were better onstage than in a controlled studio environment. Their self-titled 1969 debut, recorded five months after their first show, felt chastened, its straitlaced production and relatively short songs drawing the reins fast on a spirited young racehorse. Their second album, Idlewild South, worked to showcase a softer and more commercially viable side. Sure, it sounded good, but it also sounded dated upon arrival, a folk-rock reverie from a band that was best when it was wide-awake, very high, and very loud. “We get kind of frustrated doing the records,” Duane admitted at the start of the ’70s, noting that the stage was where they found their “natural fire.”
On the West Coast, the Grateful Dead had come of age—and shown their first flashes of greatness—by playing free shows in area parks, a tradition that early inchoate versions of the Allman Brothers pursued in their native Florida. (The Dead first met The Allman Brothers in an Atlanta park in 1969, the start of their enduring partnership.) And after three deeply uncomfortable studio albums, the Dead had also figured out they needed to record themselves live if they ever wanted wider audiences to understand how they actually sounded.
Early in 1969, the Dead opened a new frontier in rock production when their crew lugged a mammoth prototype of an Ampex 16-track tape machine up the stairs of San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom. The technology afforded them the sort of control over recordings that would yield their first live albums and the early best-sellers of their career. The Allman Brothers again followed the Dead’s lead.
But the Allmans wanted to up the ante, too. The Dead’s live debut had been a patchwork from several shows in different rooms; they were not above adding studio overdubs, either, as they would soon do on 1971’s actually pretty decent Skull Fuck. For the Allmans, though, the ability to fix anything neared heresy—live, they reckoned, ought to mean live. They wanted no part of the running music-industry joke, guitarist Dickey Betts later said, that the only live part of most “live” albums was the cheering. They wanted to play in one room for several days, record themselves and the crowd, and create a snapshot of an actual moment that was both compelling and real. The Allman Brothers wanted to revel in—and preserve—the present.
And they knew exactly where they had to do it: Bill Graham’s Fillmore East, at 105 Second Avenue in the East Village. In San Francisco, the ambitious and inventive Graham had gone from managing a mime troupe to establishing a new paradigm for live music. At Fillmore West, he had ignored genre striation, pairing the Dead with Miles Davis and the Who with blues harpist James Cotton.
He recognized the same crossover zeal in five white hippies and a dauntless Black R&B percussionist from the South, who were setting new fire to old blues. Graham and his staff loved the Allmans the moment they opened for Blood, Sweat, & Tears in New York in 1969. Within weeks, they became a staple of both Fillmore East and Fillmore West, long before the rest of the music industry could figure out what to do with the band.
Their sets at Fillmore East offer a roadmap of their rapid progress. Opening for the Dead there in February 1970, they sounded fast and anxious, intimidated by the auspicious setting. But the Dead dosed the Allmans (and everyone else around) with Owsley Stanley’s acid, and something in the Southerners shifted. As Graham later put it, “the Allman Brothers were never the same again.” They were suddenly more aggressive, more open. By the Summer of 1971, when the band played their spectacular last-ever set at Fillmore East, Graham, not given to empty flattery, introduced them as “the finest contemporary music… the best of them all.”
The band shared that admiration, not only for Graham—“the fairest person,” Gregg Allman called him—but also for his New York room, a former Yiddish theater that became a hub for exploratory rock as soon as it opened in 1968. The productions were professional, the lights sharp, the crew familial and attentive, the sound crisp. “The acoustics were nearly perfect in there,” Gregg told Rolling Stone 45 years later. “I don’t think we even discussed another venue.”
They booked three nights, the first a mere warmup for the real “sessions”—four sets total, split over Friday and Saturday. Just as the Dead would do a year later in Europe, the Allmans parked a rented cargo truck equipped with a 16-channel machine in the rear, cables carrying the signal from the stage. The legendary Tom Dowd, a tech whiz who had recorded Idlewild South and Duane’s (superior) parts on Clapton’s Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, helmed the equipment.
Dowd had the band’s trust. He threw a fit, for instance, when an unrehearsed horn section appeared during the first night; by night two, they were gone. After each set, they’d grab booze and food and head to Atlantic Records to listen back and decide what to play next. There were no overdubs—only the moment, minus a few snips.
More than half a century later, the seven-track sequence that Dowd and the band culled from the 28 songs they recorded that weekend still feels like a revelation. Rock’n’roll has mutated into infinite shapes in the decades since, of course, but these pieces—sitting at thresholds of blues-rock and prog-rock, of pure soul and flashy technicality—still sound breathless, riveting, and wildly imaginative.
At Fillmore East is a condensed representation of an actual show, following much the same energetic arc as an early Allman Brothers set. (Remember, this is a band that had debuted less than two years earlier.) After Graham introduces them, they spring into “Statesboro Blues,” the Blind Willie McTell standard that inspired Duane to play slide guitar after he saw Taj Mahal and Jesse Ed Davis perform it in Los Angeles. Compact and charged, the song still gives the band space to showcase its dual guitar masters—Duane, whose slide leads sparkle with such melody that his younger brother’s singing feels like an afterthought, and Dickey Betts, whose comparatively understated playing restores the song’s sense of gravity.
“Done Somebody Wrong,” meanwhile, throbs like a crowded juke joint. The beautifully brooding “Stormy Monday” is a showcase for Gregg’s deepening techniques as a soul singer, his voice wafting above the band like a cigarette’s plume of smoke. This opening triptych is the Allman Brothers’ reference check, an offering of fundamental blues bona fides while nodding to the Black predecessors that made their music possible.
For a spell, “You Don’t Love Me,” an R&B hit for Willie Cobbs a decade earlier, feels that way, too, the band and harmonica pal Thom “The Ace” Doucette passing around the melody like a tightly wrapped joint. After everyone else falls away, Duane fiddles with the theme alone, trying to make a new shape from a familiar source. The band rejoins and follows his lead. Butch Trucks goes one way on his drums, while Jai “Jaimoe” Johanson goes another, as if Elvin Jones were trying to catch Charlie Watts at the other side of a maze. There are snippets of “Sitting on Top of the World,” a stunning bit of “Joy to the World,” and the prevailing sense that this band could do practically anything.
And then, well, it does: The second half of At Fillmore East is as vivid and exhilarating as recorded rock has ever been, especially at this relatively early but especially fertile point in its history. Anchored by Gregg’s stuttering organ and Berry Oakley’s lyrical bass, “Hot ’Lanta” feels like a game of instrumental hide-and-seek, each player seeing just what they can do with the theme before disappearing back into the safety of the band.
Written by Betts after an alleged tryst in the very Macon graveyard where half the band is now buried, “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” offers a keen testimonial to how much attention these Southern blues dudes were paying to emerging sounds and scenes far beyond rock. The textural interplay resembles Miles Davis’ then-new electric bands, organ and guitar oozing into one another like melting butter and chocolate.
The rhythm section ferries a righteous bit of funk, but the two-drummer setup allows Johanson and Trucks to work around the groove with a bebop sense of subtlety and softness. (Before joining the Allman Brothers, Johanson was on the cusp of moving to New York to play jazz, or “starve to death … playing what I love.”) Tilt your head one way, and “Elizabeth Reed” is a strutting, sexual rock instrumental; tilt it the other way, and it’s a deep improvisational hang, populated by players forever in search of some unimagined rhythmic intricacy.
No song makes it clearer that the Allman Brothers had never recorded a proper-for-them album than the finale, “Whipping Post.” Sure, they’d cut it as the farewell for their debut LP, when it was a dumb and fun five-minute rock song about being put out and misused by a woman you love—same old blues, different tune. Fifty years later, that version can still sit squarely between the Doors and Led Zeppelin in an afternoon FM rock block of songs by jilted androgenic bros.
But this 23-minute version is gloriously affirming, a diorama about being hurt badly and somehow persevering to work toward personal redemption. They first play the song straight through, Gregg screaming out his struggles at an elevated tempo that suggests he’s simply looking forward to hearing what comes next. The guitars soon take over, crisscrossing over the pounding rhythm section in a series of urgent solos, each a wrestling match with despair.
Duane and Betts quarrel until they collapse, the band going nearly silent while the guitarists sulk in a sort of cosmic instrumental grumble. But they pick each other up, rushing back headlong back into the song. When Gregg returns to the chorus after the long instrumental break, he sounds not like the victim but instead the victor, his struggles beaten back by the help of this ad hoc brotherhood. It is absolutely transcendent, based in the blues but rising above them.
The Allman Brothers finished playing the version of “Whipping Post” heard on At Fillmore East sometime around 5 a.m. It was the final set of their final night, and it had been delayed by a bomb threat that forced everyone from the building for hours. They rolled straight into “Mountain Jam” for 35 minutes, then responded to relentless calls for an encore with one more song.
“That’s all for tonight, thank you,” Duane said when it was over, despite the crowd’s cries for more. “Hey, it’s six o’clock, y’all. Look here: We recorded all this. It’s going to be our third album. You’re all on it.” (You can hear this proclamation on the 2014 edition, which includes every set.) Through his good-natured fatigue, you get some sense of what everyone in the room, crowd included, had accomplished—they’d made not only the Allman Brothers’ lone masterpiece, but they’d created and captured a crowning achievement of live rock’n’roll.
That moment and its glory would not last. Disenchanted with the music industry and financially saddled by sizable venues on separate coasts, Graham would close both Fillmore East and West by early July, 1971. Days later, the Allman Brothers released At Fillmore East, which would sell 500,000 copies in just three months, something their first two records did only when they were later repackaged as a pair. They beat their mentors and predecessors, the Dead, to that benchmark by three weeks—At Fillmore East, after all, was better than the overdub-laced Skull Fuck, preserving a moment of sheer power and finesse with perfect clarity.
But on October 29, four days after At Fillmore East was certified Gold, Duane Allman—home in Macon for another brief break from tour, leaving a birthday party sober—clipped a truck hauling a crane with his motorcycle, which landed on top of him. He died that evening from internal bleeding. He was 24. In the six months since taping At Fillmore East, the Allman Brothers had grown both sharper and more expansive, with Duane even talking about building a “big band.” It’s bittersweet, even shocking, to imagine just how far and hard he might have pushed their sound.
Under Gregg’s sudden leadership, the Allman Brothers Band returned to the stage less than a month after they played Duane’s funeral, convinced that’s what their visionary would have demanded. The extra material they’d recorded at Fillmore East became the backbone of their next album—the fabled resurrection of 1972’s half-live Eat a Peach. A few hiatuses excepted, they stayed on stage (even after the brilliant Oakley also died on a motorcycle a year later) until retiring in 2014.
The Allman Brothers Band were occasionally great during those subsequent 40 years, rotating some of Duane’s best electric disciples (including an extended family member, Derek Trucks) into the lineup. Still, they were forever after an aging band chasing the kind of joyous moment and youthful magic that At Fillmore East epitomizes. You can always find good spare parts, you know? It’s harder to find the guy who makes everyone grin in an uncomfortable situation by running down the street to score.
For all the perpetually obvious reasons, speaking about Southern pride feels fraught. Sure, many of our problems are not endemic to this place, but they are often brandished with particular relish or malice here, whether by Confederate flag or voting-rights restrictions. “Duane Allman was in the vanguard of the New South,” Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau once said. I think that applies to the whole band, which Duane liked to call his “enlightened rogues,” a pointed rejoinder to the stereotype of ignorant rebels. They weren’t perfect in this regard, of course—there are stars-and-bars (including a shirt designed for them by the extended family of the Dead) and questionable images in their closet, too. But by and large, the Allman Brothers provided an early model for young Southerners attempting to overcome their bigotry, bullshit, and fear to do something great, together. They still do.
When Duane returned to Florida with Johanson in 1969 to start the band in earnest, for instance, the pair moved into Trucks’ home. The white drummer was so scared of his new Black houseguest he assumed he was there to rob or kill him—at least until they started talking, at which point they became instant friends. By year’s end, they were one of rock’s great drumming tandems; by March 1971, they could swing, shuffle, and push harder than most anyone else in rock’n’roll.
What’s more, the Allman Brothers tacitly recognized the exploitative history of authorship here—from hush puppies on down to banjo music, whites have continually co-opted the work of their Black contemporaries. The Allmans accepted that they were borrowing from Black predecessors, from the songs themselves to Gregg’s soul mimesis, and they aggressively admitted it. They take so much care to acknowledge authorship during At Fillmore East that Duane corrects himself when he calls “Stormy Monday” a Bobby Bland tune. “Actually, it’s a T-Bone Walker song,” he says.
A white Southerner name-checking two Black musicians from stage doesn’t sound like a lot, but Bob Dylan still struggles to do half as much 50 years later. At least in that instant, the Allman Brothers were doing what they felt they could. And that ability—to make now better, however best you can—is the true animating spirit of At Fillmore East, from its beaming cover to its implicit politics. It is a tragedy that these seven songs captured one of the final moments the actual Allman Brothers Band would revel in together. But good god damn, at least we still get to relive it.


This limited six-disc set of the 1967 classic includes remasters, alternate versions and mixes, practice sessions recorded at Andy Warhol's Factory, a live recording, and a remaster of Nico's Chelsea Girl, on which the Velvets performed.

The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground & Nico

The Velvet Underground & Nico

Forty-five years after its release, everything that was supposed to have made The Velvet Underground & Nico special has been nearly eradicated by its own legend. The most dangerous record of 1967 has been absorbed into the establishment rock canon; the paradoxical fame it earned from its hilariously terrible sales figures in its early years has been negated by reissue after deluxe-edition reissue; and its transgressive kinky-druggy menace has been smothered by the embrace of millions of overly precious Wes Anderson acolytes. Is a limited-edition "super deluxe" six-disc box set really going to help restore any of the ineffable outsider cool that it's lost over the years? Actually, yeah, it is.
The new super deluxe edition of TVU&N consists of a new stereo remaster of the album, a new mono remaster (both taken from the original tapes), a disc of alternate versions and mixes of the songs, a disc of practice sessions recorded at Andy Warhol's Factory, a live recording from around the time the album was recorded (spread across two discs), and a remaster of Nico's solo debut, Chelsea Girl, which the Velvets performed on. So aside from the 45 minutes of Chelsea Girl, you've got five hours of essentially the same 11 songs presented over and over in various levels of audio fidelity. On paper it may seem indulgent, but listening through the entire massive collection of material results in a sharper-edged portrait of the group than there's ever been, with all of the danger filled back in.
First there's the album proper. The remastering process was handled by Bill Levenson, who's been working on Velvets material since the mid-80s rarities collections VU and Another VU, and who oversaw the 1995 Peel Slowly and See box set that collected all of the group's studio recordings. Levenson knows the material well enough to keep from making it sound too clean. The amp hiss, tape saturation, and overall grit that made TVU&N leap out from the scores of mannered psychedelic rock albums released around the same time is still firmly in place; it's just that the grit sounds better.
The stereo mix breathes in a way that the album never has before. As incredible as it sounds, though, the mono version on the second disc provides the set's first moment of serious revelation: It doesn't breathe at all. In fact, with every throbbing bassline and squalling viola set dead center, the mix is suffocating. The transformative effect it has on the songs is unreal. Lou-fronted rockers like "I'm Waiting for the Man" and "Run, Run, Run" leap out from the speakers with an aggression that other versions lack. "All Tomorrow's Parties", "Venus in Furs", and "The Black Angel's Death Song" are oppressively noisy, but pleasurably so. It's a sensual sensory overload that underlines just how successful the group was at the music-as-S&M game it was playing with listeners.
Disc four is even rawer, and removes the last bit of remaining studio refinement to expose the Velvets' primal proto-punk heart. The first half is a reproduction of the one-of-a-kind acetate discovered by a record collector in a New York City street sale in 2002-- and sold on eBay a few years later for over $25,000-- that contained the first version of the album that the band delivered to Columbia Records (and which the label rejected). Some of the tracks would end up on the version of album that Verve issued after taming them down during another round of mixing; others were re-recorded entirely. Compared to the familiar finished version the material sounds unhinged. Moe Tucker's rudimentary drumming on an alternate version of "Heroin" is primitive to the extreme, while the original mix of "Femme Fatale" place a bizarre falsetto backing vocal from one of the male members high enough in the mix to put a listener on edge. And since the audio's taken straight from a beat-up acetate the whole fantastic mess is covered in crackles and hiss.
The rest of disc four is pulled from a taped rehearsal at the Factory a few months before the Scepter sessions, previously available in bootleg form. Parts of it are more interesting than listenable, like the band dicking around while Lou Reed patiently attempts to explain the lyrics to "Venus in Furs" to Nico. Other parts are jaw-dropping, like a version of "Run, Run, Run" that quickly turns itself inside out and transforms into a frenetic, semi-improvised Bo Diddley impression that's denser and heavier than almost anything else in the Velvets' catalog and can demand repeat plays back to back.
What makes moments like this, and the set in general, so compelling is that you get a picture of the group as a living, breathing band, separate from the performances that would be frozen in time and started on a long march to iconhood a little over a year later. For a minute-- or sometimes for 12-- you get a sense of what they really were, which is just another garage outfit hopped up on pills and playing rock'n'roll music so hard that it starts flinging off parts. The difference is that their garage was the Factory, and that they were willing to ride it far closer to fully falling apart than anyone else.
That's the image that sustains the final two discs, which together comprise a bootlegged live set from Columbus, Ohio's Valleydale Ballroom in November, 1966, four months or so before TVU&N was released. While someone-- maybe a devoted fan of the Factory scene-- yells out Nico's name when she introduces "All Tomorrow's Parties", you get the very clear idea that very few people in the crowd know who the Velvet Underground are, or like what they're playing. You can hear maybe two or three members of the audience clap after the opener "Melody Laughter", a 28-minute jam that's mostly noisy drone with a brief pop coda at the end. After a feedback-filled scorched-earth rendition of "Black Angel's Death Song", Lou Reed snarls at the audience, "If it's too loud for you, you move back."
A few months later, right after the release of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the group would convene to record parts of Nico's Chelsea Girl, which is a fine baroque folk-pop album, but nothing approaching that first record. The three other LPs the group recorded before Reed left the band almost four years after that show were great in their own rights, but paled in comparison to TVU&N. Listening to the live recording and hearing the silences between the songs, though, it's easy to imagine a roomful of people being pummeled by this strange, intimidating noise, and seeking safety in the back of the room, completely unaware that the band they're being assaulted by was at that moment (and for not much longer), the best in the world.


The Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner teams with Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett, Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford, and Miles Kane, of 1960s-tinged English rockers the Little Flames and the Rascals, to create a remarkably vivid 1960s symphonic-pop pastiche.

The Last Shadow Puppets: The Age of the Understatement

The Age of the Understatement

Alex Turner has spent most of his short career trying to prove he's not whatever people say he is. Or else, trying to prove he can live up to it. At the height of Arctic Monkeys mania in late 2005, the Sheffield, England quartet followed their first UK No. 1-- post-punk dervish "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor"-- with one of Turner's most vivid character sketches to date, red-light vignette "When the Sun Goes Down". Which also went to No. 1. More importantly, it hinted that all the hype, most of it from the excitable British press (Terris? Gay Dad? Razorlight?...Coldplay?), wasn't all hype. The next single's B-sides included a cover of 1965 r&b oldie "Baby, I'm Yours". When it came time to pick a lead single for fine 2007 sophomore effort Favourite Worst Nightmare, the Arctics went with the one that didn't have a chorus.
In between singing, playing guitar, and writing songs for one of the UK's biggest bands, Turner listened to some records. Old ones: Favourite Worst Nightmare finale "505" sampled Ennio Morricone, and in an interview at the time with The Onion's A/V Club, Turner touted everything from doo-wop and girl groups to late-1960s David Bowie rarity "In the Heat of the Morning". In retrospect, that's where Turner's latest project, the Last Shadow Puppets, begins. The other half of the duo, Miles Kane, played guitar on "505". The Bowie song, which the Last Shadow Puppets have since covered as a B-side, could easily have been their aesthetic template.
Kane, formerly of 1960s-tinged English rockers the Little Flames and now with a new group dubbed the Rascals, is actually Turner's least well-known collaborator on the Last Shadow Puppets' full-length debut. Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett, who has arranged strings for the Arcade Fire, does so here with the 22-piece London Metropolitan Orchestra. Simian Mobile Disco half James Ford, who produced Favourite Worst Nightmare and the Klaxons' debut album, produces again and serves double-duty on drums. Together, they've helped create Turner's most impressive album-length statement yet, one that strives, musically and lyrically, for the epic grandeur of an era before GarageBand or MySpace, and avoids lapsing into pretentiousness by dint of its own headlong enthusiasm. As Turner's granddad might say, "You've overdoon it." Again.
Ford may be better known for his work in unfortunately nicknamed subgenres like blog house and nu-rave, but on The Age of the Understatement, he oversees a remarkably vivid 1960s symphonic-pop pastiche. The title track and first single opens the record at a gallop, stretching the baroque-pop of early Scott Walker-- the Jacques Brel-translating, Ingmar Bergman-feting crooner, not the avant-gardist from Tilt and The Drift-- to the dramatic mariachi brass of Love's Forever Changes, or one of Morricone's Sergio Leone scores. Or Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich's "The Legend of Xanadu". "About as subtle as an earthquake, I know," Turner concedes on "My Mistakes Were Made for You", which settles into a regal symphonic-funk groove befitting David Axelrod (the producer for Cannonball Adderley and the Electric Prunes, not the adviser to Barack Obama). Pallett's contributions range from the jittery waltz fanfares of "Calm Like You" and whip-cracking horse race of "Separate and Ever Deadly" to the downy romance of "The Meeting Place", which could've fit on an album by the Arctics' fellow Sheffield son Richard Hawley.
So obviously the biggest difference between the Last Shadow Puppets and Turner's main gig is in the lyrics. Though less immediately noticeable than the majestic production, the change in the scale of Turner's songwriting is ultimately more profound. The video for "The Age of the Understatement" is set in Russia, and compared to the Arctics' insider-ish dispatches about Life Among the Chavs or Life As the Biggest New Band Since Oasis, these songs are Tolstoy in their bird's-eye omniscience. "Burglary and fireworks, the skies they were alight," Turner sings on "Calm Like You", describing a once-exciting city and the bitter romance that took place there. Brisk, timpani-rumbling "Standing Next to Me" is just conventional love-triangle stuff, but it finds Turner moving from his anthropologically detailed Arctics brushstrokes to bold, cinematic gestures: "You want to have her/ Two years have gone now/ But I can't relate." And on stinging recrimination "Black Plant": "He's got papercuts from the love letters you never gave him."
Turner wisely decides not to compete in the crooner sweepstakes, letting his voice retain its usual charming grittiness. Kane, from near Liverpool, sings in a voice that blends in as naturally as if they were brothers. So if you hear only the caustic vocals and lavish arrangements of faster-paced tracks like "Only the Truth", the Last Shadow Puppets are exactly what you'd expect Arctics-with-strings to sound like. This single-mindedness hampers songs like "The Chamber" or "I Don't Like You Any More", which work fine on their own but offer little to distinguish themselves when following The Age of the Understatement's stirring first half. As on both Arctics albums, though, Turner keeps a tender surprise up his sleeve. The first minute of finale "The Time Has Come Again" strips away all but neatly picked acoustic guitar and a 22-year-old's panging nostalgia for a few years earlier. "Don't go too soon/ She went too soon," Turner and Kane harmonize, as strings rise up to meet them, whatever people say they are, and everything else.


Numero Group’s deluxe 5xLP box set looks back on a cult band that forged an unconventional blend of math rock and post-hardcore in the early 2000s.

We Blame Chicago

Career retrospectives tend to coincide with a period in which their subjects have become newly influential or relevant, or a moment when shifting tastes have made them ripe for rediscovery. That’s not the case with 90 Day Men, the Chicago art rockers whose three albums drew from turn-of-the-century underground rock’s most obscure corners, and sound even more arcane two decades later. Nothing in the air suggests the time is right for a 90 Day Men reappraisal; you’d be hard pressed to find a contemporary band that cites them as an inspiration. Perhaps the best argument for Numero Group releasing a career box set now is that there might never be a right time.
Numero’s 5xLP set We Blame Chicago compiles all the group’s studio albums, along with singles, EPs, and unreleased material, chronicling 90 Day Men’s evolution from a math-rock band straining for originality into a jazzier, more cryptic outfit that eventually found it. For all its promise, their 2000 debut album (Is (It) Is) Critical Band couldn’t quite crack the puzzle of finding coherent common ground between math rock, modernist post-hardcore, and jagged post-punk. The band’s most avant hallmarks were there from the beginning—long, digressive songs; whiplash turns; almost free-form instrumental interplay—but the presentation was off. An air of artifice hangs over the record, especially the performances of singer Brian Case, who sang mostly in either a hectoring torrent of exclamations (“This is from one primadonna to another!”) or in droll spoken monologues.

Even by the standards of music that never cared much about likability, he could be a gratingly confrontational frontman, either so overbearing he was barely tolerable or so checked out he was barely there. It didn’t help, either, that the album’s central pairing of sardonic post-punk a la Gang of Four and the Fall and stern, serious Louisville-style math rock clashed on a conceptual level. Even on a song that grappled with the dichotomies of seeking and knowing, faith and uncertainty, “Exploration vs. Solution, Baby,” the glibness is right there in the title, like a shrug emoji saying, “Take this seriously, or don’t.” You’d imagine Slint’s Spiderland would lose something, too, if that album broke its unflinching intensity every couple of minutes to tell you it was just pulling your leg.
To 90 Day Men’s credit, they course-corrected quickly. By their 2002 follow-up, To Everybody, their first album written entirely after their relocation from St. Louis to Chicago, they’d landed on a far richer, much more singular muse. The instrumental “We Blame Chicago” nods to the influence of their new home city on their sound, with the kind of mosaic of post-rock, jazz, and dub most commonly found on a Tortoise record. Meanwhile, keyboardist Andy Lansangan, a late addition to the group, had stepped up as a creative engine, and his stately pianos emerged as a go-to lead instrument for the group. With those pianos easing some of the demands on their frontman to command attention, Case relaxed into himself, and his vocals grew more assured, more subdued, more vulnerable.

Other circumstances conspired to lend a crucial element of fragility to their sound. The group recorded in the days immediately after 9/11, when rescue crews were still scouring the wreckage for survivors, and horror and confusion remained thick in the air. In the extensive oral history that accompanies the box set, producer John Congelton recalls, “That strange nihilism everyone was feeling at the time made us like, ‘Fuck it. Let’s make a strange record.’” Congleton’s twitchy fingerprints are all over the album, most prominently in the crude, percussive tape manipulations of “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life,” the mesh of pianos and electronics that most exemplifies the album’s mournful, haunted air. It’s fascinating how a band with no apparent debt to Radiohead independently arrived at so many of the same moods and ideas as Amnesiac.

The group’s final album, 2004’s Panda Park, was even more of a showcase for Congleton’s adventurous production—outside of Congleton’s own records with the Paper Chase, none of his other work from the era showcases his use of the studio quite as fearlessly. Some of the confidence and grace of To Everybody carries over, especially in the wintery ivories and beautiful despair of single “Too Late or Too Dead,” but to the extent the record isn’t as successful as its predecessor, it’s because it tries to do so much more. It’s a brief record, just 35 minutes, but with its vast busyness it feels longer. Closer “Night Birds” throws down eight and a half disorienting minutes of prog and skronk, never settling on a throughline to make its many moving parts cohere.

The box set’s rare material underscores just how far this band had to climb to find its voice. A bonus cassette of the group’s earliest recordings plays like the kind of demo Dischord must have received in the mail all the time, a spirited but very raw stab at the arty post-hardcore that proliferated on the label in the late ’90s. By a 2001 John Peel session, they’d switched from an inherited language to one they seemed to be inventing on the fly, opening up their songs to breathe and highlighting the intricate dialogue between their instruments over any driving component. It’s a glimpse at what an exceptional live band they must have been at their peak. By a few years later, they were burned out. The warm reception to Panda Park opened up bigger touring opportunities, but the pressures of trying to make ends meet on the road took a toll. In the oral history, Case recalls thinking, “The only way we can live is if we’re in this fucking van all the time?”

Revisiting 90 Day Men’s records with the benefit of hindsight, you can hear long-shot opportunities for them to grow their audience, if they’d wanted to compromise a bit. They could have easily leaned more into dance punk, for instance, and owned some of the Rapture/Liars market. With a little restraint and polish they could have positioned themselves as a better Cold War Kids. They also would have made an absolutely killer jam band. But in truth they never had the instincts of a group that was destined for big things. 90 Day Men were one of those bittersweet cases where their most fulfilling path was always the one with the lowest ceiling.\


Kelela’s debut album is technically stunning and emotionally realized. It lives in a new, outré, rhythmic pop galaxy that honors but outpaces its peers.

Take Me Apart

Kelela is an intellectual in search of the body high. During the bountiful era of her early 30s, she has become exceptionally aware of the way club tracks work best when tuned to the head and the heart. Her 2013 mixtape, Cut 4 Me, remains a hallmark of the genre, a moment when the next-level producers of Night Slugs and Fade to Mind found a unified center within Kelela’s sinewy vocals. On 2015’s Hallucinogen EP, she further proved herself as an extraordinary ear and songwriter, guiding her producer-collaborators to push further into uncharted, futuristic territory. And on Take Me Apart, her first studio album, she takes the cerebral, corporeal world she’s built into the domain where it can historically live best: a new, outré, rhythmic pop galaxy that honors but outpaces its peers.
Take Me Apart is a document of the emotional mechanics of a break-up and the freeing nature of new love. Kelela luxuriates in this radical openness between the two. On the title track, a sex jam produced by Al Shux and Jam City that hovers in the silky realm between drum ’n’ bass and rhythm & quad. Kelela demands a partner explore her entirely before getting all mushy about it—“Don’t say you’re in love, baby,” she coos, “until you learn to take me apart.” She advocates the exploration of her bod in the context of practicality—the need to unite the purely physical with one’s own damn brain.
The song is as much a statement about her music as it is about lusty night sweats, a theme that underpins Take Me Apart with an earned confidence. Her voice is clearer than ever, and she’s mastered its lower reaches and its breathy, Janet-invoking croons; on “Blue Light,” another song in which she asserts her desire to put it down with a new lover, she explores her vocal range with awesome muscularity. “I’m on my way right now, promise I won’t be long,” she sings, “Baby, keep the blue light on.” A pulsing, grime-adjacent synth by Dubbel Dutch acts as her pep squad, and the whole affair ends up feeling appropriately backlit, a bit illicit, and totally determined. You wanna dance and fuck to it.
Like Björk did in her early solo days, Take Me Apart provides a template for how to innovate pop, incorporating a melange of influences—writing collaborators include the xx’s Romy Madley Croft, Brazilian Girls’ Sabina Sciubba, and Nguzunguzu’s Asma Maroof—while remaining divorced from the endless industry zeitgeist of big-name algorithm producers. What makes Take Me Apart so stunning is its meticulous attention to detail, with new layers revealing themselves on the third or 37th  listen. Its sonorous breadth is mesmerizing. “Frontline,” which premiered on an episode of “Insecure” and seamlessly blended into the show’s estimation of break-ups in millennial Los Angeles, is a cinematic document in and of itself. As she avails herself of a shitty relationship (“Cry and talk about it baby but it ain’t no use/I ain’t gonna sit here with your blues”), a joint crackles, keys jingle, a car alarm beeps off, an engine revs. It’s completely transportive, and the most visual example of an album that seeks to create a world of her own.
Of course, there are pop-history touchstones—a strategically placed “ay” on “Waitin” invokes the glory days of crunk & b; songs like “Enough” and “Onanon,” both Arca joints, are like if Windy & Carl were fully psyched on modern DIY raves. But as Kelela canvasses the vagaries of her relationships, spreading her wings high atop the peaks of her soprano voice, she builds this outbound world to reflect the richness of her prodigious interior. Within this space, she flourishes as a songwriter, precise without hemming herself in.
Because of this, on an album full of jeep-jouncing bangers, it’s perhaps the most minimal tracks that land the hardest. On “Bluff,” her breezy vibrato chills on a slow piano melody, and she sings as though she’s telling a secret. “There you go, holding onto something. I’m gonna prove you wrong. Here we go, jumping in the deep end. I’m gonna prove you wrong.” It’s just over a minute long, but it’s evidence her heart is true: the song reverberates with tenderness, a prevailing theme for an album that documents falling in and out of love. She might be singing about different partners, but it’s the value and dignity she gives to her feelings that provides the true backdrop on Take Me Apart. In the process of setting out to solidify her own sound, Kelela has finally fallen for herself.


This 32-track collection combines remastered rarities and unreleased oddities. More than a collectors’ compendium, though, it offers a welcome collage of a restless, empathic spirit.

Joe Strummer 001

Timing never was Joe Strummer’s strong suit. Not more than a year after the Clash cracked the stateside Top 10 in 1982, with “Rock the Casbah” peaking at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, Strummer fired his partner, Mick Jones. Instead of pulling the plug on the “The Only Band That Matters,” he kicked around for a few years, sticking with the Clash long enough to alienate even his hardcore fans with 1985’s incoherent Cut the Crap. Strummer released a solo album in 1989, when neither UK nor U.S. audiences were much interested in his earthy passion. When punk did have a commercial resurgence in the mid-1990s, his attempt to reunite the Clash fell apart. He couldn’t round up another proper gang until he formed the Mescaleros near decade’s end. Just as they began to hit their stride, Strummer died of a heart attack on December 22, 2002. He was only 50.
Released nearly 16 years after his death, Joe Strummer 001—a 32-track compilation of remastered rarities and previously unreleased material—continues this streak of bad timing, appearing at a moment when the Clash’s memory mostly surfaces for Greatest Albums Of All Time lists. Yet Strummer’s absence from mainstream discourse works in favor of Joe Strummer 001. It arrives to almost no expectations, save for those diehards who scrambled to collect these scraps over the years and long harbored hopes that Strummer’s recordings for obscure indie films such as Sara Driver’s 1993 When Pigs Fly would be released.
Joe Strummer 001 meets those collectors’ needs, but it’s much more than some utilitarian compendium. Eschewing chronology for collage, Joe Strummer 001 paints a vivid and complex portrait of Strummer as he existed outside of the Clash. Each CD opens with a version of “Letsgetabitarockin,” a nifty little Chuck Berry lift he wrote for his first band, the pub rockers the 101’ers. It’s an appropriate opening salvo. No matter how far Strummer roamed in life and music—singing Bob Marley with Johnny Cash, dabbling in African rhythms, and interpolating New Orleans R&B during extended sojourns in Spain and California—he was always rooted in rock’n’roll.
While Strummer started his professional career singing retro rock, he was consumed by understanding other cultures, which Joe Strummer 001 makes clear. Shuffling between elastic reggae, Irish folk, cinematic country, boombox hip-hop, and pseudo-jazz, the compilation showcases a singer/songwriter restless for new experiences, a hunger abetted by the Clash's collapse. Without a band, he was free to join directors Alex Cox and Jim Jarmusch on exotic film sets, contributing a few songs and even popping up on screen.
In Redemption Song: The Ballad Of Joe Strummer, biographer Chris Salewicz argues Strummer suffered from depression during this period. Still, this music is vibrant and never listless, gaining life from its ragged edges and brittle recordings. The cheapness suggests vitality, as if Strummer just needed to get these thoughts down as quickly as possible. For that reason, chunks of this material can seem tentative, even incomplete. Certain songs are revisited, and melodies are reappropriated. That circularity feels integral to Strummer’s creativity. He always worked his way back to the basics, writing rocking rave-ups and diving into spiritual dub when other ideas fell short.
A compilation with such rough edges typically remains the province of the converted, but Joe Strummer 001 explains the rocker’s sensibility in a way that is instructive and even inspiring for neophytes. The Clash were omnivorous and passionate, but their familiarity can sometimes mute their sense of adventure and emotion. That’s not the case here. Strummer embraced other cultures, formed the short-lived Latino Rockabilly War for 1988’s Permanent Record soundtrack, recorded with the Pogues under the Astro-Physicians disguise, and reunited with old bandmate Mick Jones to make hip-hop that didn’t sound like the Clash. His insatiable curiosity and endless empathy give this rough-hewn music a powerful core. Strummer’s career was a testament for open borders and open hearts. While such compassion may have fallen out of fashion, Strummer’s messy, impassioned music now sounds even more urgent and necessary.


With a collection of gentle duets inspired by great-to-iffy movies, the veteran songwriter and protégé uncover mythic resonances and ugly truths.

Sufjan Stevens / Angelo De Augustine: A Beginner’s Mind

A Beginner’s Mind

There’s a minor subgenre of pop concept albums inspired by movies—not soundtrack albums, but records that explicitly take vivid cinematic imagery as lyrical inspiration. On one side is, say, JAY-Z’s American Gangster, sparked by Jay’s obsession with a single movie. On the other end is something more self-consciously abstract, like the U2 and Brian Eno collaboration Original Soundtracks 1, a compilation of themes to imaginary movies created by jamming in the studio over film clips.
A Beginner’s Mind, the new collaboration from Sufjan Stevens and songwriter Angelo De Augustine, takes a substantively different approach: There’s no unifying concept beyond the pair’s omnivorous channel-surfing, and they don’t attempt an overtly cinematic musical style. Instead, they view film almost through the lens of the original Surrealists, who would go to the theater not to watch a complete film, but to catch bits and pieces of multiple movies, absorbing an out-of-context stream of images rather than a coherent plot.
Several songs draw from certified Criterion classics like Wings of Desire (“Reach Out”) and All About Eve (“Lady Macbeth in Chains”), but Sufjan notes in an interview that the duo were specifically drawn to titles that are in some way “problematic,” whether maligned sequels like Bring It On Again (“Fictional California”), discarded genre movies like Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (“The Pillar of Souls”) or films that have become a magnet for criticism like The Silence of the Lambs (“Cimmerian Shade”). Not every title cited finds its way into the lyrics directly; some serve more as guiding stars. Like the bromantic surfers Johnny Utah and Bodhi in Point Break, the film that sparked the title track, Sufjan and Angelo are riders on the storm, circling each other in search of a unified wave.
Thanks to their gently intertwined voices, most name-drops or direct references, like the shout-out to stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen on “Olympus,” don’t feel forced. The chorus of “It’s Your Own Body and Mind” nods to Spike Lee’s debut She’s Gotta Have It, but could just as easily be a generic turn of phrase. The lyrical imagery is often more mythic than narrative or visual, in line with Sufjan’s well-documented religious and spiritual concerns. “The Pillar of Souls” casts the gory quest of Clive Barker’s Cenobites to find pleasure within the desecration of flesh as a rapturous, twinkling hymn.
Moments of gentle guitar plucking and arcing falsetto give the impression of classic Sufjan, and the loosely conceptual nature of the record is a thread running throughout his discography. But left-field experimentation is as inherent to his work as careful lyricism, and an album inspired by film offers a showcase for Sufjan and Angelo’s talents for sound design as much as songwriting. The soft strums and twinkling percussion of “Lady Macbeth in Chains” give way to a drum machine breakdown, while “Back to Oz” is built on a defined backbeat and psychedelic guitar solo, lending it a more hook-oriented jangle-pop sensibility than the piano-driven solace found in other moments of the album. As much as there is a sense of stillness and a meditative hush, there's also a grand sweep—Sufjan and Angelo form a choir of two, their eerily similar voices turning harmony into a kind of natural reverb. It’s often difficult to tell which vocalist is which, complicating the vantage point of an album so invested in perspective and individual identity.
A Beginner’s Mind strays furthest into “problematic” territory with “Cimmerian Shade,” a prayer delivered from the perspective of Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs. But even more than a fictional character with a deeply complicated relationship to trans audiences, what stands out most is the song’s use of the word “autogynephilia,” a debunked but still damaging pseudoscientific theory, propagated by anti-trans bigots, which essentially dismisses transness as a sexual fetish instead of a valid identity. As a trans woman, it’s almost impossible for me to approach the character of Buffalo Bill or a concept like autogynephilia in a vacuum—when I came out as trans on Twitter, one of the few outwardly hateful comments I received was from a stranger who responded to my very vulnerable post with a mocking photo of Buffalo Bill. For me and many other trans people, Buffalo Bill is not a character so much as a specter that haunts us, a symbol of both direct harassment and structural oppression.
Sufjan has long been fascinated with serial killers, and A Beginner’s Mind makes the unseemly, misunderstood antagonists of horror movies into something of a motif: the tormented souls of Hellraiser III on “The Pillars of Soul,” the zombies of George Romero on “You Give Death a Bad Name.” It can be empowering to reclaim cinematic villains, especially when so many are historically queer-coded, but Buffalo Bill isn’t just any old horror-movie monster—they signify real and material forms of hate. That A Beginner’s Mind casts a character representative of so much trauma in a lineup of many different stories reveals the overlapping realities inhabited by trans and cis populations. For cis people, Silence of the Lambs is just another movie, and “autogynephilia” just another fake Greek word in an outdated psychiatric encyclopedia; for trans people, they’re cultural weapons.
Though the end result walks a tricky line, a song like “Cimmerian Shade” at the very least seems to come from a place of good intentions. Like Bodhisattva, the dreamboat Zen poet warrior played by Patrick Swayze in Point Break, Sufjan and Angelo find unorthodox influence in Buddhist teachings, interpreting spiritual principles in their own way. The Zen concept of the “beginner’s mind” is that dewy newness found in a green and enthusiastic pupil, a person who’s open to everything because they know nothing. It’s a concept that’s particularly resonant on a collaborative album between a younger songwriter and a prolific veteran. Through reinterpretation and re-examination, Sufjan and Angelo strive not just to understand others, but to better understand themselves. As Sufjan sings on the John Carpenter-indebted “(This Is) The Thing,” “This is the thing about people/You never really know what’s inside/Somewhere in the soul there’s a secret.” Music allows for the possibility of stepping outside your own sense of self to better understand another’s identity. When they sing in harmony, converging together to the point where one becomes almost indistinguishable from the other, Sufjan and Angelo become a duet of pure voice without the hindrance of material flesh or form.

Buy: Rough Trade
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